She has six employees. When she was fired by NBC in 2018, she believed that it was the end of her career. She went to dark places in her mind.

But she bounced back with her own broadcasting company and has never been happier or more influential.

The same story has been told by Tucker Carlson, whose network is gigantic and whose influence is far beyond even the heights that he obtained at Fox in the old days. I have no direct knowledge of how many people work for his personal channel, but it is a reasonable guess that it is no more than a dozen.

Everyone knows about the success and reach of Joe Rogan’s show. Apart from that, there are many thousands more with influence in their own sectors of reach. The share of influence dominated by legacy seems to be falling dramatically. You can detect their influence in this election season in which candidates are working the podcast circuit.

You might chalk this up to technology: Everyone has the capacity now to make content and distribute it. Therefore, of course, people do it.

The real story, however, is more complicated.

A new poll from Gallup offers an intriguing look. The latest polls show trust in major media is at an all-time low. It’s fallen from a post-Watergate high in 1976 of 72 percent to 31 percent today. That is an enormous slide, impossible to dismiss as mere technological change. Along with that, the poll documents dramatic losses of trust in government and essentially all official institutions.

The loss of trust has hit all age groups but more profoundly affects people younger than 40 years old. These are folks who have grown up with alternatives and developed a sophisticated understanding of information flows, and are deeply suspicious of any institution that seeks control over public culture.

Gallup stated: “The news media is the least trusted group among 10 U.S. civic and political institutions involved in the democratic process. The legislative branch of the federal government, consisting of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, is rated about as poorly as the media, with 34 percent trusting it.”

In contrast, “majorities of U.S. adults express at least a fair amount of trust in their local government to handle local problems (67 percent), their state government to address state problems (55 percent), and the American people as a whole when it comes to making judgments under our democratic system about the issues facing the country (54 percent).”

It seems based on this poll that, in people’s hearts and minds, we are defaulting back to the America of Alexis de Tocqueville, a network of self-governing communities of friends and neighbors rather than a centrally managed and controlled monolith. The farther the institutions get from people’s direct experiences, the less they are trusted. That is how it should be, even aside from other considerations.

In this case, the causal factors are not only the distance and not only the technology that allows for alternatives. Legacy media has been so aggressively partisan for at least nine years that it has alienated vast swaths of the viewing audience. Top executives have known about this problem for a very long time and worked to fix it, but they face tremendous pressure from within, from reporters and technicians with Ivy educations and a dedication to woke ideology.

The New York Times after 2016 attempted to repair the damage from having so completely mishandled and miscalled the election. It hired new editors and writers, but it was only a matter of time before they were driven out in a reminder to the top brass that there was a cultural revolution afoot, and that the personal is the political and visa-versa.

The newspaper defaulted back to extreme partisanship, leaving owners and managers to figure out other paths to sustaining profitability.

As a result, it appears that an entire industry is in the process of a long meltdown with no available fixes. Huge audiences have turned away from it toward alternatives that are not necessarily partisan on the other side but simply display a dedication to telling facts and truths about which actual readers care.

A question has long mystified me: Is this loss of trust entirely because of a change in media bias, or is it that new technological options have fully revealed what might always have been there but was not widely known? I don’t have the answer to that but it is worth some reflection.

When I was a kid, there were exactly three channels on television and one local newspaper. There was never a chance to see The New York Times except perhaps at the public library. The nightly news came on at 5 p.m. or 6 p.m. It lasted for 30 minutes. It opened with international news, moved to national news, turned to sports, and then the local affiliate took over with local news and weather.

There was perhaps 10 minutes per day of national news on three separate channels, each reporting more or less the same thing. That was it. People in those days chose their station based on whether they liked the voice and personality of the broadcaster. News media was highly trusted. But was that trust based on reliable and excellent reporting, or simply a reflection of all that people did not know?

In those days, my own father was deeply distrustful of what he saw on television. Somehow, he intuited that Richard Nixon was being railroaded by the Watergate scandal. He theorized that someone was out to get him, not for bad things he had done, but for the good he had done and had planned to do. He preached this opinion constantly and it set him apart from all conventional wisdom. Indeed, as a young man I knew for sure that my father was the outlier: None of my friend’s parents agreed and none of my teachers did, either.

Since then, much has come out that seems to reinforce my father’s views.

If Watergate happened in today’s world, there would be a huge explosion of opinions in all directions, with motives of all actors pushed out on every channel, and there would be widespread competition to find the real story. We certainly would not be relying on two relatively inexperienced reporters at The Washington Post.

I happen to believe that this is a good thing, even though it has come with a loss of trust. Maybe the old trust was not nearly as merited as people thought, simply because there were so few options. As the years went on, there were even more sources, starting with PBS but moving to CNN and C-SPAN. After the web came online and social media took off, that’s when the veil was really pulled back and media wholly transformed.

People on all sides of the political spectrum today express profound regret for this change. Former presidential candidate John Kerry has said that today’s media environment makes governing impossible, and Hillary Clinton has floated the idea of criminal penalties for misinformation, a word tossed around so frequently these days but rarely defined as anything other than speech that some people do not like.

All told, the rise of alternative media has surely contributed to the decline in public trust in the mainstream media. This might not reflect a fundamental change in the bias of media sources but simply the reality that we are only now fully aware of what has always been true. In that case, we are better off seeing these trends as good news all around, provided that we have an attachment to seeing reality as it is. In any case, we all should.

Returning to the Kelly/Carlson business model: They are doing far more with fewer staff members than was ever thought possible. It’s a solid prediction that many legacy media companies will be downsizing in terms of personnel in the future. They can do more with less. And they can do it with more fairness and less bias. Economic realities will likely make it so.

The entire landscape of information and media economies is dramatically shifting. That is precisely why we are hearing ever more calls for censorship. Many elites long for the old days of canned and constructed narratives with no other options. But the well-documented loss of trust makes that little more than a pipe dream. It cannot and will not happen.

The only viable path to earning audience loyalty in our times is to write and speak with fact-based integrity. Trust has to be earned.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Republicans have called out the corporate media’s coverage of the Biden-Harris administration and for downplaying concerns about President Joe Biden’s mental health. Appearing on the “Shawn Ryan Show,” Kelly stated that the media lies about Republicans before Ryan asked if the end is near for mainstream media.

“Yes, we’re living in the end times for corporate media I guess we’ll call it? I don’t — they’re not mainstream. Is it mainstream to go out there every day and say that guys should be allowed to punch women in the face at the Olympics and pretend they’re women? That’s not mainstream,” Kelly said. “Seventy percent, more really, but 70% of the Americans polled say they don’t want it. They don’t want men in women’s sports or boys in girl sports. That’s not mainstream. You and I are the mainstream, they’re not. Is it mainstream to say open the borders and give amnesty to them all?”

WATCH:

“I hate that term because it’s a misnomer. But yes we’re living through the end times for them. Which is a glorious thing, we should be celebrating that. That’s one of the few great things we have to think about right now in public life. That and the Supreme Court are the two things I wrap myself in like a blanket when I go to bed at night,” Kelly said.

Ryan then pressed the SiriusXM host on what she believes will be the “nail in the coffin” for corporate media. Kelly responded that it would be if former President Donald Trump wins a second term this November.

“They’ll do the same thing they did the first time,” she said. “Everything will be negative, he will be the devil incarnate. They will find their oppositional media roots again, which they totally forgot during the Biden years.”

“Hello, we have a whole White House Press corp that didn’t figure out he was being visited regularly by a Parkinson’s doctor. You think they’d missed that with Trump? In fairness to them, Trump didn’t put out his logs. But my point is they had no interest in finding out anything bad about Joe Biden. So I do think they’ll just drive more people away but they’re already dying,” Kelly said.

Democratic lawmakers and pundits began to question Biden’s mental fitness after his poor debate performance against former President Donald Trump in late June, with the president struggling to finish his arguments, at once point, and froze mid-statement.

Kelly’s viewership in July soared past legacy media outlets, reaching 2.3 million subscribers and 116.8 million views, according to Semafor. In comparison, NBC News had 78 million views, CBS News 83 million views and BBC News 72 million views, the outlet reported.

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I totally understand why the mainstream media is gaslighting us.  They want us to believe that everything is fine so that we will vote a certain way in November.  They have an agenda, and they are pushing it really hard.

But what they are telling us simply does not match up with reality.

The following are 7 signs that the mainstream media is flat out lying to us about the economy…

#1 Survey after survey has shown that the economy is the number one concern for American voters during this election season.  If the economy was in good shape, we would not be getting results like this…

The economy was still the top issue for 26 percent of voters, per the poll. Threats to democracy and extremism came in second at 22 percent, and immigration was third at 13 percent.

#2 At this point, the economy is in such rough shape that even Dollar General customers seem to be running out of money…

Dollar General shares tumbled Thursday after the discount retailer slashed its sales and profit guidance for the full year, suggesting its lower-income customers are struggling in this economy.

Shares of the retailer, which caters to more rural areas, tumbled 25% after the earnings report.

#3 When the U.S. economy was actually booming, Big Lots was thriving.  Sadly, today’s economic environment has been very hard on the retail chain and it is now teetering on the brink of bankruptcy…

Discount home goods retailer Big Lots is reportedly on the brink of bankruptcy after years of falling sales.

The beleaguered chain may seek Chapter 11 protection within weeks, according to Bloomberg, if it is not able to find investors.

The Ohio-based company runs around 1,400 stores across the US, after closing hundreds of locations earlier this year.

#4 Needless to say, Big Lots is far from alone, because the number of businesses that are filing for bankruptcy has reached dizzying heights…

According to statistics released by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, annual bankruptcy filings totaled 486,613 in the year ending June 2024, compared with 418,724 cases in the previous year.

Business filings rose 40.3 percent, from 15,724 to 22,060 in the year ending June 30, 2024. Non-business bankruptcy filings rose 15.3 percent to 464,553, compared with 403,000 in the previous year.

#5 According to Zero Hedge, several regional Fed business surveys just fell even deeper into contraction territory…

‘Four more years’ is not the message being heard from the regional Fed surveys this week as the Philly, Dallas, and Richmond business surveys all slumped deeper into contraction…

#6 As I discussed yesterday, approximately two-thirds of the entire U.S. population no longer believes that the American Dream “is still alive”…

Only about a third of U.S. adults believe the American dream is still alive, a Wall Street Journal/NORC poll published Wednesday found.

A survey of 2,501 people conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute twelve years ago found more than half of respondents believed the American dream “still holds true,” but now only a third feel that way, according to a recent WSJ/NORC poll of 1,502 adults. The study also found an increasingly large gap between people’s economic goals and what they think is actually attainable — a trend that was consistent across gender and party lines, but was especially common amongst younger generations.

#7 Last, but certainly not least, total household debt in the United States has soared to a level that we have never seen before…

A quarterly report published this month by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on household credit and debt found that between the first quarter of 2021 and the second quarter of 2024, credit card debt surged 48.1% while household debt — which includes mortgages and auto loans — rose by 21.6%.

In dollar terms, credit card debt rose from $770 billion in early 2021 to $1.14 trillion in the most recent quarter, while household debt increased from $14.64 trillion to $17.8 trillion in the same period.

Yes, there is a small segment of society that is still doing really well.

Thanks to the unprecedented intervention that we have seen in the financial markets in recent years, they are still able to live the high life while most of the country suffers.

But while stock prices continue to set new all-time highs, much of the nation looks like a horror show.

For example, just consider what has happened to Pine Bluff, Arkansas…

A small Arkansas city suffering from severe population decline and economic turmoil has become so abandoned that properties are on offer for as little as $400.

Pine Bluff, a bleak metro that saw its population drop from 49,000 to 41,250 residents from 2010 to 2020, made headlines this month after being panned in a YouTube documentary from Abandoned Atlas.

In the movie, filmmaker Michael Schwartz said witnessing the city’s decay ‘shocked’ him, saying: ‘It seems like every time I turn a corner, there is another abandoned home or building left behind.’

The gap between the ultra-wealthy and the rest of us has never been larger than it is right now.

The next time you walk past an abandoned store that has been boarded up, just remember how much the mainstream media has been lying to you.

The next time you walk past someone that is sleeping in a vehicle, just remember how much the mainstream media has been lying to you.

The next time you walk past someone that is hooked on drugs because they have lost all hope, just remember how much the  mainstream media has been lying to you.

Our communities are falling apart right in front of our eyes, our economy is falling apart right in front of our eyes, and our entire society is falling apart right in front of our eyes.

So don’t let the mainstream media fool you.  The economy really is moving in the wrong direction very rapidly, and it won’t be too long before even they are forced to admit the truth.

Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.

Much of the blame for this societal dissonance lies in the unhealthy alliance of our MSM (mainstream media composed of broadcast networks and major newspapers) and the Democrat Party. Since at least the 1990s the MSM have been operating as a propaganda arm for the Democrat Party as opposed to providing “truth to power”. The MSM are gradually losing the battle for relevance in the huge flourishing of, first, cable networks and now internet-based sites, podcasts and assorted social media, but they are still powerful in their waning days. They trashed Trump merrily during his Presidency, pushed Biden over the finish line in 2020, and have carried Biden’s water since then.

And since 2020 the MSM have been carrying more water for Biden than the Ganges in monsoon season. Biden’s deterioration has been evident for some years and it became an issue in the 2020 election. Brit Hume, one of journalism’s grey eminences, posed that Biden was senile based on his manner, behaviour and actions. MSM “fact-checkers” protected the precious candidate. But Biden and his handlers took notice that they had been rumbled and used the excuse of Covid from early 2020 on to hide Biden away campaigning from his basement. MSM ignored his concerning demeanor completely and supported him for President in words that would have embarrassed George Washington.

After a most unusual election came a most unusual Presidency, where the hiding away of the most powerful man in the world continued. Appearances were controlled, press conferences limited and interviews permitted only in controlled scripted environments such as with celebrities or on late night talk shows. Biden’s deteriorating physical condition, as well as his mental decline, were covered up by his handlers in a number of ways.

This year, two events began to poke serious holes in the view that Biden is just old. Last year a Special Counsel, Robert Hur, was appointed to conduct an investigation into the finding of classified documents at Biden’s residences. He reported his findings in January. The report was not kind to Biden to say the least. He stated that Biden should not be prosecuted for the documents because a jury would not find him guilty as they would be sympathetic to the fact he was a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory”. NBC News dutifully provided covering fire for this by rolling out Democrat operatives to trash both Hur and the report.

Then there were the recent international events such as D-Day and the G7 meetings, where Biden was caught on camera spacing out and wandering off. The videos were shown on Fox News and went viral. The Associated Press stepped up for the covering fire and called them “cheap fakes”, following on from the White House reaction.  A bemused Fox News said the videos “have not been cropped, they have not been sped up or slowed down or edited in any way”.

And then came the debate. Biden had slipped in the polls against Trump due to the response from voters to seeing a candidate pursue the Kafka-esque strategy of putting an opponent on trial. And so Biden and his handlers came up with a cunning plan – to challenge Trump to a debate in an environment they believed they could control. They set the rules, selected the moderators (CNN, who had earlier supplied the questions in advance to Hillary Clinton in a 2016 debate), had no audience that would cause Biden to lose focus, and banned any cross-talk to limit Trump’s quick repartee. Biden spent seven days at Camp David prepping for the debate as if there was nothing else going on that required his attention. It was a brilliant strategy and only one thing could ruin it – the senility of the candidate. It did.

The reaction was immediate from folks believing in Biden. Democrats and Never-Trumpers were gob-smacked. But it is fascinating how their surprise was akin to reading the last few pages of an Agatha Christie novel. Massive surprise at the unveiling of the murderer is followed by an “oh yeah” as folks think back on the clues that were there all along. These reactions showed up in polls taken over the last few days. A CBS News poll two days after the debate showed 72% of folks now believe Biden’s cognitive issues prohibit him from being President, and this includes 42% of Democrat voters.

The immediate reactions of the MSM were different. At 10:30 that night the panicked howls of the MSNBC political pundits and “experts” mourned the death of their favoured campaign, while CNN threw ashes on the coffin. The New York Times suffered a dark night of the soul, and as the dawn broke published an editorial claiming Biden should step down. These are the guys who in March this year were taking a victory lap comparing Biden to Beethoven, Wagner and Martin Scorsese after Biden angrily shouted his way through a teleprompter speech to Congress.

The assorted Democrat Party apparatchiks and elected representatives were even more on fire. The donors did not like seeing their investment go down the drain. Many wanted their money back. Incumbent Democrats facing election in November were all over the place, with the mood varying from total support to calls to step down. In a Presidential election year Biden is at the top of the ticket and so has the capability of dragging these guys over the finish line, as party regulars tend to vote the entire line. Or not, as the case may be.

The White House gamely tried damage control, saying Biden was ill with a cold or suffering from jet lag after two back-to-back trips to Europe two weeks before the debate. The usually obedient White House Press Corps did not buy it.

No word as yet from White House doctor Dr. Kevin O’Connor, who gave Biden his annual physical this year and claimed he was “fit for duty“.

As for the Biden campaign, its response came four days later on Monday night when he addressed the nation on TV. The Supreme Court had issued a ruling on Presidential immunity when carrying out constitutional duties that essentially destroyed the strategy to tie Trump up in court for bogus charges. All Biden had to do was give a stirring speech on TV about the evil Supreme Court as a dramatic riposte to the debate nightmare. Unfortunately, Biden stank up the joint once again. His speech was only four minutes long, delivered in the trademark Biden mumble. He read both his speech and his instructions (“end of quote”) off the teleprompter. And it did not help that Biden’s face was painted with orange make-up in a vain effort to look as vibrant as his opponent.

This story is going to take a while to play out as the Democrat Party is on the horns of a dilemma. Biden is still planning on running and if he (or those around him) want him to, he will. His delegates (over 90%) have to vote for him on a first ballot at the Democratic Convention in August, which makes him the Democrat nominee. Only pressure from Democrats, anxious about a thrashing in November if he heads the ticket, can change this. But try that with a cranky, senile, elderly man. Also, the $100 million campaign war chest he has raised so far can only be transferred to his VP, Kamala Harris. And Democrats, apart from those who want the first POC woman as President, do not want her as she is, unbelievably, more unpopular than Biden with the public. Raising that kind of money and formulating a nationwide campaign is unrealistic with just four months left. Whatever strategy is followed, one thing is clear – the MSM will support whatever path is chosen by the Democrat Party.

Left out of all this is the state of the country. The focus at the moment is on Biden the candidate, but it is Biden as President for the next six months that is far more worrying. The MSM and Democrat Party, however, cannot waste too much time on something as trivial as the state of the nation. Not when there is an election to win.

Freedom House in its “Beijing’s Global Media Influence” report released on Sept. 8 found that the Chinese regime and its proxies were using “more sophisticated, covert, and coercive tactics” to propagate pro-Beijing narratives, spread disinformation, and stamp out unfavorable news.

“Beijing is doubling down on its campaign to control how it is portrayed in the world and to bend foreign media to its will,” Michael J. Abramowitz, president of Freedom House, said in a press release.

“These efforts seek to silence criticism of the regime and convert independent media into shills for the Chinese Communist Party.”

The areas that experienced the most intense Chinese influence were: Taiwan, the United States, and the United Kingdom, with Freedom House labeling Beijing’s manipulation efforts there as “very high.”

Paying for Influence

In the United States and elsewhere, Chinese state media has paid reputable outlets to publish content portraying the regime in a positive light, the report detailed.

Online and print paid inserts from state-run media outlets China Daily or Xinhua News Agency have appeared in Time magazine, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, CNN, and Foreign Policy.

According to Department of Justice filings, China Daily has paid at least $7 million to various publications to carry its inserts from January 2019 to October 2021, the report stated.

Two radio stations in Washington and the New York City area, the report stated, have also been paid to broadcast programming from Chinese state-run China Radio International.

Social Media Campaigns

The Chinese regime has also continued to leverage social media to amplify pro-CCP talking points.

In the United States, the Chinese consulate in New York paid social media influencers to promote the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics and “any good things in U.S.-China relations,” according to a December federal filing.

The public relations push came amid growing international backlash ahead of the Games over Beijing’s repression in the Xinjiang region, which several governments and parliaments have labeled as genocide.

“Many such efforts were linked to the Chinese government’s push to undermine the credibility of documentation showing mass detentions and atrocities against Uyghurs and members of other Muslim minority groups in Xinjiang,” the report stated.

Since 2019, the CCP has drastically ramped up its disinformation campaigns on social media platforms around the world, using networks of fake accounts to spread false narratives, Freedom House found.

Over the years, thousands of fake accounts have been detected on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, and taken down for manipulating discussion on an array of topics involving China, according to the report. These include pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and U.S. relations with Taiwan.

The report noted that Chinese-linked disinformation networks also waded into debates on U.S. domestic issues, stoking confusion on hot-button topics including the government’s pandemic response, racial tensions, and political divisions during the 2020 presidential election.

The regime’s attempts to influence media channels in democratic countries have come under rising scrutiny.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken in May said the United States was “deeply concerned” about the CCP’s efforts to quash press freedoms in mainland China, while simultaneously exploiting free media in other nations to spread pro-Beijing messaging.

“We have a total imbalance, because these leaders in Beijing are using the free and open media that we ensure and are protected in democratic systems to spread propaganda, to spread misinformation,” Blinken said.

“Ultimately, that’s an unsustainable proposition.”

About the Author

Cathy He is a New York-based reporter focusing on China-related topics. She previously worked as a government lawyer in Australia. She joined the Epoch Times in February 2018. Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.

Have you noticed an all too familiar pattern in what is taking place in the nation’s socialist media? Just as they did after the Buffalo mass murder, the far-left’s propaganda arm is going hog wild in exploiting the tragedy in Uvalde, Texas. Each trying to outdo the other, but ten times worse than the previous crime.

Numerous studies on the subject have shown a high probability that with this level of wall-to-wall coverage, there will be another mass murder tragedy within 13 days. One of the more recent studies published in the Library of Medicine [PubMed.gov] entitled: Mass Shootings: The Role of the Media in Promoting Generalized Imitation concluded that while the media wasn’t directly responsible for these acts, they stated that:

In instances of mass shootings, the media appear largely responsible for providing the model to imitate. Although there are a variety of strategies that could function in tandem to alter the likelihood of a mass shooting, changing the way the media report mass shootings is one important step in preventing and reducing imitation of these acts. Furthermore, media-prompted imitation likely extends beyond mass shootings. A media effect has been shown with suicide,

It was just a day after the Buffalo attack that Reuters ran the following story with the headline: ‘Copycat’ mass shootings becoming deadlier, experts warn after New York attack:

Adam Lankford, a criminology professor at the University of Alabama, has studied trends in mass shootings over time.

…

Lankford’s study found that the “deadliest” shootings comprised 25% of mass public shootings from 1966 to 2009, but from 2010 to 2019 had increased to 50% of mass public shootings, in which there was “direct evidence that perpetrator was influenced by another specific attacker or attackers.”

Lankford said the rise in these copycat mass killings have a specific trend: the gunmen find their inspiration from the personal life details of previous mass shooters. “It’s not repeating the incident that inspires them. It’s the intimate details of their lives that promotes the influence,” he said.

We also noted this back on May 17, 2022:

We should all be aware of the phenomenon of media contagion, whereby wall-to-wall coverage, cynically exploited by the anti-liberty left for political purposes to suppress civil rights, also encourages further attacks.

Numerous other media sources have discussed this issue over the years:

• Mass Shootings and News Media: A Connection? (Newsweek)
• Here’s What We Know About The Contagion Effect Of Mass Shootings(The Huffington Post)
• How the Media Inspires Mass Shooters (Mother Jones)
• Mass Shootings May Be Affected by ‘Media Contagion’: Researchers (ABC news)
• Should media avoid naming the gunmen in mass shootings? (Associated Press)
• Mass Shootings Can Be Contagious, Research Shows (NPR)
• Mass shootings: Experts say violence is contagious, and 24/7 news cycle doesn’t help (NBC news)
• PBS’ Frontline irresponsibly ignores the “media contagion effect” and gives notoriety to school shooters (Media matters)
• How the media covers mass shootings has evolved. But is it better? (Boulder Weekly)

Suffice it to say, if several of them have made note of this phenomenon, they all should know of it. After all, they claim to be in the information business and this is a very serious topic that directly impacts their decision-making process. In short, they should have no excuse for not knowing about the issue of media contagion because it directly involves their business.

We can’t help but notice that it seems like we’re also witnessing another aspect of this perverse far-left media phenomena. Aside from generalized comments on the subject matter that refer to the Buffalo tragedy, it has been completely eclipsed by the new one.  Whether this is by accident or design is hard to discern. However, this tendency could act as an additional impetus for the next chumbucket. There has also been news of shutting down all campuses of the Donna independent school district in Texas after a credible threat was reported to the police. A search of one of the suspects homes turned up an AK-47 and a “hit list of targeted students”.

We also discovered an interesting study that indicates why the anti-liberty left moves so fast in these situations. A study shows that the emotions surrounding a mass murder tragedy last only 3-4 days, after which they drop off significantly. This means they only have a narrow window to make “bipartisan appeals that draw on the emotional responses to mass shootings”.

So, how many human-shaped ‘ticking time bombs’ are out there like the two that have already gone off? How many psychologically damaged children, worsened by the COVID lockdowns are being ‘inspired’ by the wall-to-wall media coverage to imitate others? Unfortunately, the studies show that we’re going to have to wait for about another week or so to find out. Curiously enough, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) is going to force a vote on gun control legislation after the Memorial Day recess on June 3. Long after the 4 days’ emotional response period to the current tragedy. But what would happen if another took place in a few days?