Stanley Colaço
Staff Writer
Luke 11:34 reads, “Your eye is the lamp of your body; when your eye is sound, your whole body is full of light; but when it is not sound, your body is full of darkness. Therefore be careful lest the light in you be darkness.”
As Catholics, the question is quite simple: what are we seeing and is it the truth?
In the documentary “The Brainwashing of My Dad,” Jen Senko tries to paint the media, particularly Fox News, as evil. She claims that talk radio made her dad racist, homophobic and bigoted. In this, Senko complains about right wing media for 90 minutes before arriving at her conclusion: conservative media is bad.
Donald Trump railed about liberal media throughout his presidency, and for good reason. An independent study from the Pew Research Center showed that Trump had as much as three times the amount of negative media with less than one eighth the amount of positive reports compared to Obama.
According to that same study, he had the record for the least amount of balanced or unbiased reports out of the presidents studied.
Outside of the news media, the story isn’t that different. Obama, and democrats in general, were praised by television, film and sports stars. Trump was threatened with bombings.
From a more Catholic perspective, the media doesn’t fare any better. In October 2020, a viral clip was spread around that featured Pope Francis discussing “gay marriage.” In the clip it appeared that the pope had expressed support for homosexuals to get “married” within the Catholic Church. In reality, the video released had been heavily edited. In fact, the clip had taken clips from all over the interview, some more than half an hour apart, and smashed them together.
Internationally, Catholics who stood by the Bible’s teaching on the subject were shamed and the media used the clip in order to push their agenda. When the truth came out and the clips were proved to have been doctored, very little was done to fix this. Why?
The media is almost never kept in check. Outside of citizen interest groups, there are little to any effective checks imposed on the media.
In 2003, Newsweek reported that Army officials at Guantanamo Bay had desecrated Qurans as a form of torture. In the aftermath, Afghanistan and Pakistan were rocked with protests, leading to the deaths of 17 people.
In other parts of the Middle East, American embassies and cultural centers were rioted and ransacked. Did Newsweek see any consequences? No, a simple retraction was issued and minor steps were taken to correct its fault.
There is a clear bias within the media but in order to understand the actions we should take, we must understand why the bias occurs. In order to understand this, we must understand who runs the media: China.
AMC, our nation’s largest movie chain, is run by China. In telecommunications, CCTV was renamed to CGTN, or China Global Television Network. Chinese drones supposedly being used to fight forest fires in California were instead rerouting information to Chinese officials. Huawei, a telecommunications equipment company, openly stole American trade secrets and sent them back to the motherland. ABC and CNN have billions of dollars in holdings scattered throughout Shanghai.
In private ownership, the truth doesn’t fare any better. Every single major news network with private ownership either publicly endorsed or privately gave money to one of the two major players in the last election.
The media also gains its funding from politically connected individuals. PBS is paid for by taxpayers, but those who decide on how much the network gets are politicians.
Disney changes their films and goes as far as rewriting them in order to please the Chinese government. Why? Because they are funded by the Chinese government. Buzzfeed bends its knees to democrats because they received funding from top DNC officials. Our media is not free because it owes many debts.
In summation, it is clear that the media cannot be trusted. It shows clear and consistent bias, doesn’t keep American interests or the truth as its priority and is not even free to make independent decisions.