Why Does the Media Lie About National Disasters?

When I was a young child I enjoyed reading comic books. It served as an easy escape from the chaos of city life in Queens, New York. Marvel comics had a series at the time that was titled “What if” where they would alter comic book history and ask questions like “what if Spiderman’s Uncle Ben had lived?” I recently read this piece by Sean Davis at the Federalist about the Washington Posts’ mis-reporting on Amtrak funding and, with the Marvel comic series in mind, thought “what if the dinosaur media told America the truth?”

To be fair, many in the traditional media do an excellent job of objectively reporting facts and data. But a number of others abuse their privilege and do not. The horrible Amtrak tragedy last week and some of the disingenuous reporting that has followed, illuminated this abuse of journalistic privilege as biased reporters jumped on the “more funding for Amtrak” bandwagon despite evidence that a deficiency in taxpayer money isn’t the problem.

What if the media told the truth about Social Security, taxes?

What if the dinosaur media told the truth about Amtrak and other important policy issues? I am 100 percent convinced that the country would be in a far different – and far better – place right now. Let’s engage in this thought exercise for a moment:

What if the media told the truth about Social Security? A recent Harvard/Dartmouth study (no bastion of conservativism), which received scant media coverage, was damning with regard to the future of Social Security. It revealed what many conservatives have been saying for years: that the program is “going bankrupt.” The government has been using your Social Security money as its personal piggy bank for decades. How is this not a major scandal worth an ounce of honesty from the dinosaur media and shouldn’t conservatives be credited, not maligned, for sounding the alarm?

What if the media told the truth about tax rates? When Kansas Governor Sam Brownback dramatically cut the tax rates in his state to spur job growth, and a SHORT TERM budget shortfall resulted, many biased media types leaped at the opportunity to declare, “tax cuts don’t work.” This outrageous premise is so easily refuted by Googling the words “Texas” and “job growth,” and “Florida” and “taxes,” that wasting space here to chop this faulty premise down would be a complete waste of time. Also, now that Kansas is becoming a regional leader for job growth and has dramatically lowered its unemployment rate, many in the dinosaur media are conveniently silent. Again, shouldn’t the facts speak for themselves?

What if the media told the truth about what’s really destroying our inner cities?

Decades of government interference in inner city economies, decades of public education monopolies, decades of government-run healthcare programs, decades of government bureaucrats and politicians pouring tax payer’s hard-earned money into these areas with little to nothing to show for, and decades of social programs that have decimated the family structure have accumulated to create the severe crisis of opportunity in our inner cities happening today. These policies have disconnected the people living in these inner cities from any sense of independence and ownership and the media’s refusal to tell the story of this man-made opportunity crisis is a genuine American tragedy.

Is the media even interested in getting to the root of the problem? 

Finally, what if the media told the truth about the artificial divisions being created in this country simply for personal political gains? Can you fathom how much more unified we would be as a country if the media had called out the hard left and President Obama on their fraudulent “war on women” meme early in the election cycle before it had the chance to artificially divide us?

What if the media dumped ideology in favor of honest reporting? With the privilege of being a voice in the media with a platform comes great responsibility. A responsibility to report the facts and all facets of the story, not editorialize based on one opinion.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image of an Amtrak train is by Michael R. Sisak | AP Photo.