Biased Media is Ruining the Voting Ecology

On election day I spent the whole day watching as much live election-related footage as I could. I did that without a real motive, I’m just really into politics. As I watched I started to realize I needed to document some things that bothered me, the main thing was the complete lack of journalistic integrity. I rarely watch the news when the anchors are hosting, I only like seeing the news when there are live events with little commentary, I already don’t trust people’s secondhand accounts of anything, and I don’t like edited clips either. So obviously this meant I hadn’t watched news anchors speak on CNN in ages, so I was very put off by the insanity.

I began to notice how often journalists offered or expressed their personal opinions and biases on the issues and candidates. Honestly, I know people yell about fake media and this and that but I don't think people recognize how much more detrimental it is to pass opinion as truth. It’s also hurtful it is to both sides during an election and the media's blindness could be blamed for Harris’s loss (partially).

If you are surrounded by people, in this case, all people who believe Harris will win without a doubt, you are establishing an inevitability that might lead to voter complacency. How many people didn’t vote for Harris because they assumed it was a guaranteed victory?

I learned this lesson more than a decade ago, but the circumstances were a bit different. The election was Obama's second term vs Romney. I was all in on Romney and every day on my way to work I would listen to Fox News radio. There, radio personalities like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity talked about the election, their views, and the issues. The world seemed great, my candidate seemed awesome and it seemed like everyone I listened to believed that he would win.

There wasn't a single piece of doubt in my mind that Romeny was not going to win. Mainly because I was deep in the Republican camp and there was no way to see the grass outside.

When Romeny lost I was shocked and confused. I couldn't understand how someone everyone thought was going to win, lost so hard. It didn't make sense to me.

That day I realized I wasn't seeing all of America, I was only seeing the people who had similar views to me. It was great to hear people talk about issues I cared about with opinions I shared, but I realized that was very dangerous. I didn't want to be surrounded by people who agreed with me all the time, that wasn't realistic.

My goal was to watch as much footage as I could to see how often journalists offered their personal opinions. Not that I was necessarily going to count out every time but I planned on watching in order to see if the reality was foggy for those who want to push their own agenda.

Now, it was my fault I listened to radio personalities who are known to be option-centric and took their word as fact. Those sorts of shows are infused with bias and opinions of the hosts, that’s how they are marketed. But when my mistake is a parallel to what everyone is experiencing against their will with the regular news, it’s alarming.

It's not good that people who are in charge of reporting news on a segment promising to report unbiased factual news to the citizens of our country are openly infusing their feelings and changing the reality because it’s not one they like.

News anchors used to be trusted and still have that perception associated with them as a foundation, anchors were once pillars and factual. They were held accountable with fact and truth and now they are running off the steam of those old metrics while peddling lies.

I remember on January 6th before the insurrection Mitch McConnell spoke in front of the people before the certification of the vote. I listened thoroughly to the whole speech then after the speech, which was live, Wolf Blitzer came on and then incorrectly analyzed what the speech was about.

Now that wasn't necessarily intentional but it most definitely was an incorrect analysis. The best case scenario was that he just misunderstood what he said, but the worst case would be that he summarized and changed the narrative intentionally.

So even if a regular person notices the different messages they are probably going to believe the anchor and rewrite their own memory

I am not that easily swayed and still after all of this time remember it clearly.

That was one day, one event on TV and that's why it's very important to me to watch live or uncut footage rather than news anchors.

This leaves us in an odd position because not many people are as fastidious as I am. It scares me to think that I turned on the news for one hour and saw this, what does that mean? Was it a rare occurrence that I happened to catch or was it the more probable scenario that this Is a common occurrence?

Now, a whole other issue is being openly for or against a candidate publically on a “news” show. Having a bias is unavoidable but being a news anchor on a news network and very obviously having a preference and allowing that to affect how you do your job and trying to get reality to fit what you want, is unethical. I saw news anchors being fed the news that Trump won and they tried every way they could to prevent announcing it, they made excuses, they said there was still time, and postponed the truth with the hope it would work out. After one anchor couldn’t push off the inevitable they made a speech to the audience about how they knew this was a hard time for them and it was hard to digest and that they knew people would need time to cope. Who was that for? Trump won the popular vote, and most of the people voted for him by a large margin. Also, it was extremely inappropriate to be emotional in that manner. Almost all of the anchors on CNN were emotional that night.

Now how did they end up in an echo chamber? They surrounded themselves with people who shared the same opinions as them.

Not wanting to reveal the truth about who won an election or only bringing people who are a fan of your views to chat, that's just ignorant, and it's also damaging.

On election night I saw so many democrats, holding positions in the media, start the night convinced that Harris was going to win, and then as the night went on they became slowly more and more concerned and a lot of hesitation was starting to creep up when new states were called in for Trump. You could see the people taking a beat before reading the results as though they didn't want to tell the people the truth or acknowledge the reality they have long been avoiding.

Even when they are forced to speak “Trump is projected to win…” they still chose to go into their safe bunker and rationalize a way where they were still going to win. It was amusing as hell for most people to see them finally be pulled from the false reality they created and poisoned so many people with.

I switched channels a lot that night and I would have to say that most of the anchors I saw were absolutely convinced earlier that day that Harris would win

Even when they had right-leaning guests on the show to discuss the election, they handled it poorly. One guy came on and said something they didn’t want to hear and they all stuttered and cut him off, then went to a commercial.

You can find these instances I mentioned vaguely l on YouTube pretty easily by just watching most clips of CNNs election coverage videos. It’s interesting to watch expert guests walk on eggshells because they knew their expert option went against what the anchors were pedaling as a reality. A person shouldn’t have to give a disclaimer and apologize before they suggest something like Trump winning a certain state.

When the Trump victory was cemented, a lot of anchors began to turn on everyone including minorities they claimed to support. They tried to blame everyone they could and they didn’t do this on their private social media accounts, they did this on air at their job.

Unacceptable.

Let’s just learn from this and realize that just because you don’t like something doesn’t mean it won’t happen and just because you push a narrative, that doesn’t make it true: