US Elections: Western Media Stopped Reporting and Began Shaping Opinion
MEDIA, 14 Nov 2016
Gefira – TRANSCEND Media Service
10 Nov 2016 – Donald Trump has won. Against the odds, against the polls, against the massive attacks from the media that have gone to great lengths during the past several months to depict him as a monster, a cannibal, a flaw in the pattern, a Putin-fan, a war-monger, a racist, an abomination, the worst candidate in all of history. Every article, well, every paragraph in an article contained a disparaging word like ‘populist’ or ‘populism’ in reference to Trump.
The mainstream mass media rather than reporting began shaping the opinion of the people. And they don’t seem to have learnt the lesson.
Let us survey the titles a day after: The US has elected its most dangerous leader. We all have plenty to fear (Guardian); President Trump: the unthinkable reality that divides America and signals a new era in world politics (Independent); Trump triumph: shocking upset as outsider harnesses voters’ discontent (The New York Times); German politicians express shock (Deutsche Welle); Donald Trump shocks the world to clinch White House (France 24).
The powers that be so desperately wanted to prevent Donald Trump from becoming the 45th president that they chose to treat people like, excuse using the word, sheeple, telling them in no uncertain terms how a “decent” citizen was supposed to vote and how he was to assess the candidates.
Which was by far not the first instance of media manipulation. Much the same could be observed in the run-up to Brexit: if you relied on the mainstream media, you ran away with the impression that only mentally retarded people could possible vote Britain out of the Union. The same story repeated itself in the case of Donald Trump.
In either case the media acted as scaremongers trying to paint the blackest possible picture should Donald Trump win are Brexit occur. That bleak future of theirs held in store collapsing stock exchanges, rampant racism and xenophobia, international isolation and attending condemnation of the respective countries, a relapse into bigotry and fanaticism.
Much though the pundits and propagandists applied themselves to the task, it did not work. The despised sheeple went their own way. Their shepherds were too pushy, and the preconditioning was overdone and hence ineffective.
The Gefira team rather than influencing the opinion of the readership did their best at reporting facts (see: Even if Trump loses the genie is out of the bottle). We watched closely the presidential candidates and the powerful players behind them. We arrived at the conclusion that despite the fact that Donald Trump threw down the gauntlet as a virtual outsider, he must have been supported by a part of the American elites who in turn must have realized that the United States had gone the wrong way and needed a political overhaul. We also found out a deep divide, a chasm that had formed and split Americans: on the one hand self-satisfied affluent, cosmopolitan elites and on the other the rapidly disappearing middle class, the America of the interior, the traditional America, the America of the disappointed masses. Some of the elites may have decided to latch onto the popular discontent.
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Gefira – Global Analysis from the European Perspective. Preparing for the world of tomorrow.
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