One of these days, someone from the Left is going to need to explain what they think democracy means. They throw the term around a lot but almost always in contexts that suggest it has something to do with the exclusive betterment of the Democratic Party in America, which it clearly doesn’t.
Take this exchange between CNN White House Correspondent Pamela Brown and anchor Brian Stelter concerning Parler, the social media platform launched in 2018. Wikipedia in its entry on Parler correctly identifies it as “an alternative to Twitter,” at least in the eyes of many of its users, and adds that it “is popular among people who have been banned from mainstream social networks or oppose their moderation policies.” The article goes off track when it states that “posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories” not so much because it doesn’t but because no parallel pejoratives appear in its entry for Twitter, which reveals Wikipedia’s own bias.
In the video, Stelter and Brown speculate about Donald Trump’s post-White House plans, which as, Axios reported yesterday, could include starting up a digital empire to rival the increasingly leftward-bound Fox News (a transcript follows).
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
Brian Stelter: There are these smaller right-wing channels like Newsmax and One America News that are further to the right than Fox News. And Trump is promoting those channels right now. Newsmax has seen an extraordinary surge in viewership. Still a lot lower than CNN or Fox, but this was a channel that had 50,000 viewers before the election, and now sometimes it has half a million viewers. There’s clearly an audience out there for a channel that is so far right that they deny Biden as the President-Elect, that they promote voter fraud innuendo all day long, and so, some Fox fans are going off to other channels instead. And it is possible after Inauguration Day that Trump may do the same, whether he wants to launch a streaming service, host a radio show or go off to a channel like Newsmax. There continues to be a lot of chatter about what his future media platform might be. Could he end up with a show on Fox News? Well, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. But there are definitely other options for this outgoing president, and that’s something to really keep an eye on. I think big picture, Pamela, here is the concerning trend line here. People are going more and more into their own echo chambers. More and more into their own bubbles, especially Trump voters. There’s this new social media app called Parler getting a lot of attention, because conservatives are leaving, saying they’re leaving Twitter and Facebook, going off to Parler because they believe Parler is a safer space for them. What we’re seeing is even more of a bunker mentality in right-wing media. And ultimately, that’s not good for the country.
Pamela Brown: No, it’s not good, it’s a threat to democracy that these people are in echo chambers and they’re getting fed a diet of lies, essentially.
Stelter: Lies. That’s what it is.
So in the view of CNN, an open forum where people can freely share their views is evil and undemocratic (lower case D) if the majority of users subscribe to an ideology different from theirs.
What is amusing here is that neither of these diehard liberal name callers seems to have a clue that they work for an echo chamber that feeds its viewer a steady diet of lies. Not long ago, CNN refused to run a Trump ad because it falsely asserted that Joe Biden would raise taxes. But there was nothing false about the assertion. Biden has said — repeatedly —that one of his first acts as president will be to revoke Trump’s middle-class tax cuts, which in essence raises taxes on the middle class.
In October the network canceled a Piers Morgan interview after he accused them, and other U.S. media, of bias. Talk about being able to dish it out but not take it!
