Media Failures Fuel Fascism

On April 10, 2025 The Washington Post sent me an email with the subject line, “Staying informed has never been more important.” The Post included three article links presumably selected to convince me to pay basically $24 for a first-year subscription, and then $144 per year thereafter. Here are the headlines to the three articles:

· The 18 hours that changed Trump’s mind on trade

· Trump told people to buy. Hours later, his tariff pause sent markets soaring.

· NIH scientists have a cancer breakthrough. Layoffs are delaying it.

Let’s rewrite the headlines to reflect The Washington Post’s actual take on the current Administration:

· Trump, not very smart and quite dangerous, finally listened to reason

· Trump engaged in behavior akin to insider trading before tariff pause

· DOGE and Trump’s cleansing of NIH is killing cancer patients

Therein lies the problem with The Post, and the other so-called “legacy” or “mainstream” media today. One-sided black and white reporting does not build reader confidence, nor does it provide needed perspective on complex issues.

Graduating with a B.A. in Mass Communications in the 1980s, I had a healthy admiration for the media and its role. As a student, I even wrote an impassioned research paper about how the free press provides “checks and balances” on the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches.

I was taught in my journalism classes that one-sided reporting was sloppy, unacceptable work. When covering the news, regardless of your personal opinion, every issue requires a balanced look at both sides. If The Post were following that rule of journalism, the headlines in the above-referenced email would not exist.

“Democracy dies in darkness,” proclaims The Post’s masthead.

Do we have a free press today in the U.S.? It’s guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution, stated simply as follows:

Congress shall make no law establishing a religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of their grievances.

Those ten words, “or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press,” have protected the rights of U.S. citizens ever since they were ratified in 1791 as part of the Bill of Rights. Over the decades, “the press” grew from just the printed word, to radio, TV, cable, internet, and social media platforms. Combined, they comprise “the media.”

In theory, the media is still independent of the Government in the U.S., but in reality, the free press and freedom of speech have been severely compromised by a government that has used third party and foreign influences to covertly censor citizens. Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo) states, “The censorship-industrial complex wasn’t built overnight. It’s been festering for years. But the Biden Administration mobilized an unholy alliance of government powers, taxpayer dollars, NGOs and Big Tech companies to build it into a global censorship powerhouse.”

We know from Murthy v Missouri, that during the Covid years the Federal government censored dissident voices by pressuring social media platforms to remove content and accounts. Although the U.S. Supreme Court largely dropped the ball in terms of protecting free speech in this case, the dissenting opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito clearly outlines the unconstitutional government censorship. (Dissenting opinion starts on page 36). Justice Alito noted,

The Court…shirks that duty and thus permits the successful campaign of coercion in this case to stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think. That is regrettable. What the officials did…was blatantly unconstitutional, and the country may come to regret the Court’s failure to say so.

The majority of what passes for news these days is often little better than propaganda, parroting an official narrative provided by government or corporate interests. The fact that major media is propped up by Big Pharma dollars has a huge impact on how pharmaceutical and medical news is covered. See the following clip from Sinclair-owned news stations seven years ago, for an example of the state of “the news.” (Sinclair is the largest owner of stations that are affiliated with Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, MyNetwork TV, and The CW, among other digital and cable networks.)

This is Extremely Dangerous to Our Democracy (1:36)

An independent media that provides nuanced coverage of both sides of an issue exists in democracies, not tyrannies. Every tyrant shuts down the information he doesn’t want distributed. A state-run newspaper is not news; it’s propaganda. A free press that is unduly influenced by government and corporate interests is not much better. In fact, it might be worse because there is the presumption of objective coverage.

Today alternative news outlets are made up of podcasters, Substackers, research institutes such as Brownstone, and a few relatively small news platforms, including larger outlets such as the Daily Wire, and Epoch Times. Many of these sprang up in response to an increasingly biased mainstream press. Lacking the history and reputation of the legacy media, they are largely unknown to the average news seeker.

What does it mean when a person who wants to know both sides of an issue, and the nuances surrounding it, needs to seek out many alternative voices and cannot rely on a legacy media, because it largely speaks for the system?

It means we are in trouble. Freedom is at risk.

Are we free?

In a February 2025 interview with Freddie Sayers of Unherd, writer N.S. Lyons stated,

China and the West are not that different in their systems of government. There’s many things that are very different about them – the sort of brutality of the Chinese regime, for instance -- but the fundamental idea is both are managerial regimes. And I use regime sort of just to mean the whole system of how society is run. Both of them…trying to make rationalistic decisions through the application of their systems of technocratic knowledge and just apply it to society,…believing that that trumps the democratic will because the people are too dumb to know what is good for them. And so you really have to sort of just nudge them. In our system you nudge them firmly to do what you want to do. In the China system you just tell them what to do.

Over decades in the U.S., the Constitutional effectiveness of the “checks and balances” of the three branches of government have given way to a Leviathan administrative state that continues virtually unchecked as elected representatives of the people come and go. Covid-19 revealed the beast. All of a sudden your freedom to work, attend school, breathe freely, leave your home, walk outside, attend church, visit family and friends – all of it was determined by public health and government leaders based on “case numbers” and other vague metrics.

A free and independent press should have been screaming at the top of their lungs that the rights of the individual, which we had come to think of as sacrosanct in Western democracies, were being violated. But they didn’t. Instead the mainstream media parroted and perpetuated the official narrative.

Lyons explains that the Covid-19 pandemic “tore the mask off the idea that we were living in liberal democracies.” Those of us living in Western democracies thought we had reasoned debate about what to do in all cases, with decisions made through democratic processes. “Instead,” said Lyons, “people found that they lived essentially in…a scientific dictatorship where an oligarchy of experts determines what you get to do based on their exclusive expert knowledge.”

During the pandemic, every human right and civil liberty we thought was guaranteed in Western democracies, was subverted and suppressed by the official response to Covid-19. It happened worldwide, leading to devastation. For example, government mandated closures that led to loss of schooling and opportunities in the U.S., were mirrored darkly by food insecurity, poverty, and an increase in child-bride marriages in poorer countries.

In the U.S. we were told to close everything and stay home for “15 days to slow the spread,” gaining various levels of compliance depending on a person’s State of residence. In China, citizens were welded into their apartments. Responses between those two extremes encompassed the countries of the world.

We were let down by our “free and independent media” then, as we are today. We now know that the whole pandemic response was not handled as a public health emergency, but as a military countermeasure, with the National Security Council heading the response in the U.S.

We were so violated and abused by our governments, with the complicity of legacy media, that most people today have not even processed what happened. Instead, if the topic comes up, we’re likely to hear propaganda such as the following:

· The authorities did they best they could with what we knew at the time

· Masks protect against the spread of respiratory diseases

· Covid-19 was the most deadly pandemic in 100 years

· The Covid vaccines saved millions of lives

· Lockdowns prevented the spread of Covid-19

· Personal freedom must bow to the public good during a pandemic

And on and on. Lyons calls these types of statements the result of the “expert planner.” Lyons notes that in managerial regimes, “the sort of expert planner is correct. In China that is literally called…scientific Marxism. That’s what they call it. It’s scientific. So the government operates through scientific law which determines what is correct. They’ll say, ‘This policy is correct’; arguing against “this policy is incorrect.’ It’s a Marxist term.”

Yes, and in the U.S. political correctness around the pandemic was justified with these three words, “Follow the science.” A ridiculous phrase, to anyone who understands the scientific method, “follow the science” was cited by The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, MSNBC, and most major news outlets as they sycophantically repeated government leaders and unelected bureaucrats, and remained silent when they should have been asking questions.

“Democratic Fascism” is what we are in danger of living under in Western democracies, if trends of the past few years are left unchecked. Fascism is a system of total government control of political, economic, cultural, religious, and social activities. Overtly, there is a dictator, and everyone knows they’re living under fascism. Democratic Fascism is a system under which citizens retain the façade of freedom as long as they do and say what a supposedly expert-staffed, powerful government finds acceptable. Bump up against your Democratic Fascist government and find your bank account frozen, your voice silenced, your job in peril, your reputation savaged, and maybe even find yourself being arrested for sharing your opinion.

Democracy does indeed die in darkness, as global elites continue to make plans for how to control all the rest of us. Meanwhile mainstream media parrots the official narrative about everything from climate change, to avian bird flu, to how the Trump Administration’s efforts to dismantle the bureaucratic state and globalism are a “threat to democracy,” and a “constitutional crisis.”

A classic example of the utter failure of the legacy media to provide a balanced view is their overwrought coverage of the shuttering of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Has there been one mainstream news article or broadcast acknowledging the corruption in USAID and the way it has been a front for years to cause indoctrination and regime change in other countries? When you slap the lipstick of rice and medical supplies on a $40 billion per year intelligence community slush fund, it’s still a big pig.

Another example of failed legacy media is the third Washington Post headline I referenced at the first of this article, “NIH scientists have a cancer breakthrough. Layoffs are delaying it.” Will the The Post examine the fact that NIH scientists put their names on the patents of products they fund for research, thus profiting from successful product sales? Will The Post report on how NIH has been granting research funds to projects that analyze climate change and woke social agendas, while rejecting funding for studies that might question official narratives?

Perhaps most importantly, will The Post’s article ask why the multibillion dollar cancer research and treatment industries have grown tremendously while cancer diagnoses increase and cancer deaths continue at more than 1,600 per day in the U.S. alone? It’s doubtful. Instead, The Post and the rest of the largely pharma-captured legacy media will continue to promulgate the idea that the Trump Administration is hurting “the Science™” by having the temerity to reduce the size of a bloated, inefficient, taxpayer funded, control mongering, often corrupted bureaucracy.

We’ve all heard the quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” For years we’ve been told to trust “the experts” while government grows more invasive with the aid of a complicit mainstream media. The Covid years revealed it all, but perhaps that was a gift in the long run. N.S. Lyons states, “Covid was very important because it helped generate a tremendous amount of the backlash we are now seeing to the managerial state.” Hopefully so.

Today the question that transcends left and right, liberal or conservative, and political party is this: Are you in the group that believes a few elites and experts should tell everyone else what to do, or in the group that believes in self determination and the rights of the individual? Those who trust compromised news sources that still center on outdated paradigms of political conflict are likely unaware of how deeply the landscape has changed, and what is really at stake.

Edited 05-08-25