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For most of the evening, corporate media ran awful stories with headlines reporting “popping noises” and a “disrupted rally” without mentioning anybody getting shot. There clearly was a coordinated media effort to downplay what happened and to avoid calling it an “assassination attempt.” My favorite was CNN’s take, reporting that Trump “fell” at the rally, as though he’d simply stumbled over a sandbag:




The articles were no better than the headlines. For example, CBS dismissively called the shootings “an incident at the rally:”

Former President Donald Trump took to Truth Social on Saturday
night to thank the law enforcement officials for their quick actions
after was "shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right
ear" during an incident at his rally in Pennsylvania earlier in the
day.

But, after the FBI formally declared it an “assassination attempt” early this morning, corporate media headlines and articles began describing the shootings more accurately. Still, most headlines downplayed ‘the incident’s’ severity, emphasizing that Trump was only grazed. For example, NPR:

Trump is fine after an assassination
attempt at his rally
Published July 14, 2024 at 5:55 AM EDT

MSM is the enemy of the people. They whip readers into mentally ill frenzies that Trump is Hitler and ending democracy, so they must do everything they can to stop it. Then they minimize the severity of this assassination attempt:

Now they tell us:

Biden's exit IS a boost for congressional Democrats' chances
Down-ballot Democrats no longer have an unpopular president running for re-election.
Their chances in November look a lot brighter now.

“An unpopular president?” Either Joe Biden suddenly became unpopular, or corporate media has been caught lying during the entire period before Joe dropped out, back when he was sharp as a tack, or even sharper. With the same approximate IQ.

I challenge you to find any articles before this month discussing how “President Unpopular” was hurting the chances of down-ballot democrats. But after dropping out, now Biden was a down-ballot lead weight.

Meanwhile, President Groundhog spent the weekend in his hidey hole. This week’s schedule has him attending Rep. Jackson Lee’s sudden and unexpected funeral, and announcing a package of “Supreme Court reforms,” by which they mean a bill to rent the Supreme Courthouse to recovering meth addicts, and put the Justices into “temporary” trailers next to a steel plant.

What Joe is not doing is campaigning for presumptive nominee Cackle. For some reason.

The Biden Affair is nothing new. So overwhelming is the influence of the press over our politics, that many have described liberal democracies as media-steered regimes, wherein politicians adopt positions and enact policies calculated above all to secure favourable coverage from journalists. Much recent German history appears to support this theory, from the nuclear phase-out of 2011 to the self-imposed migration crisis of 2015 to the lockdown and mass vaccination hysteria of 2020–21.

This is an enticing theory, but I think it actually understates the role of the media. The press do not drive politics so much as they collaborate in the formulation and implementation of policy. Many media stories are themselves political events. They serve to coordinate and direct the distributed actors of our managerial systems, and they construct an adjusted reality designed not only to confine debate, but also to limit the range of conceivable actions to those which our rulers already favour. ...

In hard authoritarian regimes, like National Socialist Germany, regime propaganda was an open, blunt instrument. Everybody who read the Völkischer Beobachter knew very well that the paper propagated the official Nazi Party line. The soft authoritarianism of the liberal West, in contrast, manages the information and opinions available to the public in a much more effective manner, namely by pretending not to. Millions of people open their newspapers every day in the belief that they contain accurate accounts of the goings-on in the world, and they form their beliefs and political preferences within this highly convincing illusion. ...

Among the forces that conspire to keep legacy media on-message is their aforementioned collaboration with the political establishment. This collaboration includes a tacit understanding that leading politicians and bureaucrats will only provide interviews and information to regime-adjacent journalists, granting them an effective monopoly on political news.