CNN: Dastardly Right Wing ‘Freaks’ Take Advantage Of Our Bias!

Public trust in media has never been lower. Once-important newspapers have hemorrhaged subscribers and readers. Ratings for cable-TV outlets like CNN and MSNBC have cratered. And guess who’s fault it is — at least according to CNN’s assorted talking heads?

Yours. And mine too, it seems … for pointing out just how badly they do their jobs. 

How low can they go? Scott Jennings provides this clip from last night’s panel discussion, in which Jeff Jarvis refers to new media and its audiences as “freaks,” to which the rest of the panel save Jennings at least tacitly agrees. No, I am not kidding:

Posting longer clip than usual – big discussion on state of the media last night. Trust is so low but there’s a way to fix it: MAKE A BETTER PRODUCT. And I strongly defend new media sources against attacks they are “freaks.” Worth the watch from @cnn 10p last night. pic.twitter.com/Un2lXdEZ5t

— Scott Jennings (@ScottJenningsKY) April 23, 2025

If you ever wondered what the media elites truly think of its audience, you now have your answer. 

Interestingly, this discussion took place a few hours after Axios reported that the “fact check” sub-industry of the Protection Racket Media has fallen on hard times. Why? No one trusts the media to report actual facts, let alone check them without bias:

America’s obsession with countering mis- and disinformation has withered as society grows skeptical of institutions once trusted with facts.

Why it matters: Professional fact-checking went mainstream during the first Trump administration, but it’s since become politicized.

• Americans are less enthusiastic about policing information today than they were two years ago, and the trend is bipartisan, per Pew Research Center.

State of play: Institutions once seen as critical to providing facts about history and current events, such as public schools and news media, are experiencing record-low trust levels, in addition to financial challenges.

 In the first place, the “fact-check” industry “went mainstream” well before Trump took office. Mainstream media generally employed it against conservative dissent to Barack Obama, but the fact-checkers went after Obama enough to maintain some semblance of credibility. PolitiFact made Obama’s claim that “no one would lose their insurance” their Lie of the Year after ObamaCare rolled out in 2013, for instance. When Trump made his run for office in 2016 and then won, however, the fact-check sub-industry of the media made Trump their primary focus — and that continued even after serial fabulist Joe Biden took office. 

Actually, the media had multiple targets during that time. Most of them deployed fact-checkers to shut down debate and dissent over the pandemic, acting in concert with the Biden administration to suppress “misinformation.” Media consumers were fed a constant stream of effluvium from the media on the racism of suggesting the virus came from a Chinese lab, the dangers of being outside without a mask, the dire threat of having more than ten people in a church, and how the unvaccinated presented a dire threat to the populace. The media, if not the fact-checkers, made Anthony Fauci into a demigod-hero beyond questioning or contradiction. They made themselves into a part of the Biden administration’s Big Brother Social Media Censorship Complex, in large part to kill off the independent platforms that challenged their business model. 

And during that same period, the media insisted on regurgitating the claims that a senile and physically doddering president was “Sharp As A Tack!®” They gleefully informed us that Biden Was Running Rings Around Aides Half His Age while barely able to get off a stage under his own steam, and while the Easter Bunny ordered him off a rope line in April 2022. In the final weeks of the massive cover-up of Joe Biden’s senility, the mainstream media and its fact-checkers began lecturing us to beware of “cheap fake” videos showing Biden’s infirmity and flat-out incompetence, which was the elite’s version of “Who you gonna believe, us or your lyin’ eyes?”

Who exactly are the freaks in this scenario? The Protection Racket Media figures who refuse to address their failures and corruption at all, or the audiences who turn to other independent platforms to get their information? Why would anyone trust outlets that played along with the attempt to push a senile old man into another four-year presidential term ‘Because Trump’ with checking facts, let alone reporting the news honestly?

Fact-checking is dying because the media is dying. The media is dying because they are dishonest and corrupt, and all of the Now It Can Be Told books that reporters want to publish now about the Biden cover-up won’t fix it. I’m not even sure that Jennings’ prescription will cure the media patient at this point, but it would at least be a good start. 

This exemplifies why it is so important to support independent platforms. Many didn’t survive the assault on their business models that the Biden administration choreographed through the State Department and HHS with the assistance of the Protection Racket Media. Even with the GEC and its descendants finally demolished, the elites still will use every opportunity to destroy the “freaks” that hold them accountable.

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