If there’s one message I impart more than any other it’s that the media is one of the most dangerous entities in the Western world. While the internet has been a curse, it’s been as much of a blessing as it’s allowed citizen journalists to rise and give people the real story as the mainstream media does its best to define our reality for us.
And rest assured, the image of reality that it paints for us is not reality at all. The media is rife with lies, half-truths, hypocrisy, and cover-ups. It even makes ads look like important news in order to sell products to you.
(READ: How the Mainstream Media Disguises Ads as Fear-Inducing Articles)
On RedState alone, there is a myriad of articles that expose this fact. They practically come out daily, so much so that we’ve likely forgotten more examples than we remember.
Reuters, a major news publication, just gave us another example.
According to Fox News, a photographer for Reuters, Evelyn Hockstein, went to the recent NRA event last week in Indianapolis. It was there that she found a child and exploited his ignorance in order to get a picture that made the people at the event seem unhinged and dangerous. She coaxed the child into picking up one of the display guns and pointing it directly at the camera:
Dan Eckart, who took his two grandsons to the meeting last Saturday, called the photo of his 6-year-old grandchild aiming the firearm toward the camera “a set-up.”
“What I noticed was [the photographer] was moving around so that whichever direction [his grandson] was, she tried to get in front of him,” Eckart told Fox News Digital in a phone interview.
The photo of Eckart’s grandson has since been used by outlets for articles highlighting how often children die by gunfire in the U.S.
According to Eckart, he originally assumed the woman worked for the NRA by the way she was chatting with his grandson. He gave the woman his grandson’s name and age assuming that he would be featured in some sort of NRA collage.
According to Fox News, other parents noticed the woman taking photos of the children without consent from the parents.
Reuters has denied their photographer did anything wrong, but Reuters did circulate the boy’s uncensored face and name before blowback caused them to censor both. Why this wasn’t done from the very beginning, given the contentiousness surrounding the NRA alone is enough to slam the news organization for being irresponsible at the very least.
But the point of the photos was to create more contention between gun and gun rights advocates and gun control authoritarians. The photos of the children were distributed and used by news organizations to great effect. Comment sections were littered with ugly comments. Eckert believes that the photos endangered his grandson and his family.
The outcome of these photos being distributed for left-leaning sites to utilize wasn’t an accident. The point of these photos was to reinforce the idea to believers of gun control that pro-2A Americans are the irresponsible and crazed people the left says they are. Moreover, it’s meant to sway people who might be on the fence about the gun control issue and make 2A advocates seem less sane.
No one should be surprised by the fact that this was all a set-up because the media is an ideologically driven business bent on getting its way through the method of persuasion. As I’ve made clear in a previous article, the media is concerned with two things and neither of them is the truth:
When your entire channel rests on attracting viewers with news, it behooves you to make sure you keep people’s attention as often as possible and for as long as possible. This means that actual reporting of the news would inevitably take a backseat to news that was sensationalistic. It needed to make you feel like if you didn’t know this news you were in grave danger, or it so infuriated you that you had to keep tuned in order to have your biases confirmed.
It was fertile ground for the rise of activist journalists, and now we no longer have the reporters of old, we have pundits posing as anchors. Activists pretending they’re reporters. It’s gotten so bad that it’s even infected our local news stations. As I previously covered last week, local CBS affiliates are being instructed to adhere more to social justice angles of stories and concern themselves less by how objective they are. They were told they’d even be judged by it.
Reuters was actively giving ammunition to leftists and gun-control advocates in the argument for banning firearms. It was giving other Americans reason to doubt.
It is actively working against your right to bear arms.
The media is not your friend. It is not a public service. It is a den of activists trying to sell ads and political ideologies.
