ATCM: 'How the Media Missed What I Saw on January 6'

An excerpt from Against the Corporate Media, coming Sept. 10 from Bombardier Books. "How the Media Missed What I Saw on January 6" by Nick Searcy:

Today, journalists are more like unscrupulous prosecuting attorneys uninterested in truth and only interested in winning their case at any cost. If the truth hurts the narrative advanced by the powerful, it must be suppressed. In the words of the late great Rush Limbaugh, today’s journalists are nothing more than “stenographers for the regime.” And rather than holding the state accountable, they are actively persecuting and vilifying private citizens whom the state targets, and they are giving the neighbors, friends, and customers of these people permission to hate, despise, and persecute them as well.

I learned this by going to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021. I went there along with somewhere between 1.5 million and 2 million other people, who had come, at their own expense, to protest an election they honestly believed had been stolen. I saw people praying, people singing the national anthem, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance with their hands over their hearts—happy, patriotic people who loved this country. I saw people of all ages, all races, all religions. I saw “Chinese-Americans for Trump,” “Blacks for Trump,” “Hindus for Trump,” “Sikhs for Trump.” I even saw a man wearing a T-shirt that read “Fags for Trump.” I saw people waving flags, a lady with a portable stereo playing Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It” on a loop that everyone sang along with. From where I stood, it looked more like a tailgate party than a riot.

You really can't hate them enough.

But when I turned on the television that night, I didn’t see any of that. All that the media showed was violence—which involved a tiny percentage of the people who were there. The narrative was set, long before the day even happened, that everyone who went there that day was a violent white supremacist terrorist racist subhuman redneck who was trying to kill everyone in Congress and “destroy democracy”—and that this was not a protest, but an insurrection. The media had launched their mission, which continues to this day, to destroy, utterly, as many of the January 6 attendees as possible. And make no mistake—the media has relentlessly backed the demagoguery coming from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the rest of the Democrat party machine, intentionally and relentless planting the idea that everyone who went to Washington that day was a criminal, an “enemy of democracy,” and must be destroyed.

These lies by the national media, the major networks, and the newspapers have been chronicled quite well by truth-tellers like Julie Kelly, Tucker Carlson, Glenn Greenwald, and others; and their lies about the coronavirus, “Russian collusion,” the Hunter Biden laptop, Joe Biden’s laughably obvious corruption, and the “mostly peaceful” Black Lives Matter riots have been revealed so often by now that it seems repetitive to bring it up. They are proven liars, and proven propagandists for the federal government, and everyone knows it.

But what struck me as being different this time was how even local reporters had turned into slavish mouthpieces for the state, as they set about utterly destroying the lives of anyone that went to Washington that day. In case after case, these people were vilified in their home papers and on their local news reports, resulting in the loss of their jobs, their homes, their businesses, and the respect of their neighbors, and even their liberty—all before any trials had taken place. For the media, these “insurrectionists” were guilty until proven innocent.

To be clear, this did not come about because of some vast, coordinated conspiracy, with higher-ups in the media giving orders to local reporters and news anchors. They are not patsies, but willing, avid participants. It is difficult to advance in the news business without being in agreement with the leftists above you and beside you in the newsroom. Heck, it’s hard to graduate from a college with a degree in journalism if you aren’t “one of them.” They do it instinctively, because that is how they have been trained throughout their personal, academic, and professional lives. Their concept of “justice” is not the one that most Americans grew up with, the blindfolded Lady Justice holding the scales. These reporters think their bias is justice, that justice is whatever serves the “progressive” narrative.

The result of the media breathlessly regurgitating whatever the government accused these people of doing, while never committing any acts of real journalism by exploring the facts—that most of these people were law-abiding citizens who had never been arrested for any crime before in their lives—was that their communities, their neighbors, their customers, all turned against them. The media gave permission to hate these people—after all, every single one of them was called a violent, racist, white supremacist insurrectionist who deserved the scorn and hatred of anyone who believed in “democracy.” America, however, is a representative republic, designed as such to protect us all from mob rule...

Pre-order here.