Kaphamer voices his concerns about media bias

Vox Pop

On January 2, I sent a letter to the editor about how the media is extremely biased and one sided and social media is restricting/deleting information. Most of the examples I used concerned the election, since these were most recent and were being misrepresented (at best) by the major media. The reaction I received from our local papers was a bit disappointing.

I received an e-mail from the Tribune-Phonograph stating their publisher was declining to run my letter and to call if I had any questions. To their credit, we did have a good discussion in which we discussed a number of issues and did find points of agreement. But that’s the point. We had a discussion in which we were presenting BOTH sides.

While this is a local paper with local issues, we are not an island. National issues affect local people daily. (Look how past national policies on oil and world events has affected gas prices and people’s pocketbooks.) A letter to the editor is one of (very) few options for people to speak their thoughts on other than local issues. People will support local papers that support them.

That week’s issue of The Star News (as did the Tribune) criticized Sen. Ron Johnson with no opposing viewpoint. It’s interesting that they mentioned “a propaganda technique called the Big Lie where repeating a blatant lie over and over gets people to believe that it is true.” The media has been doing this for decades. They repeat a narrative over and over to make people believe it. Remember with President Bush, we heard over and over almost every day—are you better off than you were. The media had people believing their neighbors were not doing very well while they knew they were doing OK.

It seems it’s OK to restrict conservative opinions that don’t agree with the narrative the media is pushing on us. However, an editor can make things up as they please and print assumptions as the Tribune Record Gleaner editorial had about me. He also criticized my article without giving his readers the courtesy of seeing what he was talking about. However, he did acknowledge the “liberal media manipulators.”

Many liberals supported riots for months (with looting, burning buildings, and people dying) and called them “peaceful protests” now using terms like “insurrection” because it involves President Trump. (Speaker Pelosi (D) had stated “I just don’t know why there aren’t uprisings all over this country. Maybe there should be.”) When will she and others that made similar statements be “held accountable?”

Now, it’s not just people’s content being deleted from social media. Conservatives have seen their followers on social media disappearing by the thousands. Over the weekend, 10s of thousands of people got kicked off Twitter (70,000 over the weekend, but some say over 700,000 now.) Amazon also reportedly removed Parlor (a conservative social media that does not censor their members) from their servers, effectively shutting it down. Liberal censorship has entered high gear.

Social media suppression of President Trump is concerning people in other countries including leaders in Germany. Angela Merkel grew up in East Germany, where there was no freedom of speech or political expression. Germans remember how the Nazi party used censorship to implement their totalitarian dictatorship. Look at history and compare what the Democrats are doing now to what happened in Nazi Germany and Venezuela (a once prosperous country until Socialism took hold about 2 decades ago.) The media has a habit of selectively feeding us certain information and attacking people more than addressing or explaining issues. How can they be believed with all the suppression and censorship? Where is, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.” We are just expected to believe everything the media says. (Remember CBS and Dan Rather fabricating a story about President Bush.) Some Democrats have even called for “reeducation camps” for Trump supporters. Where have we heard of those before?

Congressional Democrats are now being vindictive against President Trump by impeaching him (again.) (They were calling for his impeachment even before he was inaugurated.) They are not just trying to remove him from office, as his term ends in a matter of days. They are trying to destroy him. Everybody should be very concerned with Democrats and the media and what they are going to do to regular Americans with their policies.. — Tim Kapfhamer, Colby