Mainstream Media Bias about Who — and What Color —“Regular Folks” Are and Who Are “Elites”
Mainstream media show Right Wing bias in many ways. However, their bias is more subtle than what comes out of Fox propaganda outlet. It has to be — because it is designed to fool more sophisticated people. It fools the people who call Fox viewers stupid and who consider themselves superior.
We’re all immersed in Right Wing propaganda in the U.S. today and almost all of us are falling for it.
I’ve been writing lately about different forms of Right Wing propaganda in mainstream media. Here are my two most recent articles about different Right Wing propaganda frames and memes frequently used by mainstream media.
Media Often Cause Events to Happen (like GOP Wins) Rather than Simply Reporting
(I renamed this one after I wrote it, for clarity.)
Mainstream Media Parrot Right Wing Disinformation by Ignoring Problems in the Policing System
Now, below, I am writing about mainstream media’s adoption of Right Wing frames about who — and what color — “regular folks” are and who “Elites” are.
Here is a Twitter thread describing the problem. I’ve put it into thread reader app. It’s from Thomas Zimmer, historian at Georgetown University.
In case you are unable to read the last tweet in the thread reader, it is a May 28th tweet from Mehdi Hassan of MSNBC noting that “(Ted) Cruz is a graduate of Princeton and Yale, a lawyer, a senator, the multimillionaire husband of a Goldman Sachs executive, who sends his kids to an exclusive school, but sure, let’s listen to him on ‘elites’!”
Hasan himself is clear on the distinctions between actual socio-economic elites vs. “elites” as framed by Right Wing propagandists.
However, most people writing or hosting TV shows in mainstream media use the Right Wing framing. They pretend poorly paid adjunct college faculty members are the elite and Cruz, Trump, Peter Thiel and other Right Wing wealthy people are not elites. They pretend Right Wing wealthy people are “regular people” whereas poor or working class Blacks or liberals are not “regular people.” I wonder what Right Wingers think those people are — Irregular people?
The Right Wing want to deride as greedy corrupt elitists, anyone who disagrees with them or doesn’t support their lies — e.g. college profs. They want the people who agree with them to be considered the only “regular folks.”
We can change this. Whenever we see or hear mainstream media using Right Wing frames to decide what people are “elite” and who are “regular folks”, we can call or write the media outlet and tell them to correct their error. Please join me in doing this.
Contact info for media outlets can be found by googling the name of the outlet and “contact.”
If you are on Twitter, @froomkin , @jayrosen_nyu and @brianbeutler often post examples of Right Wing framing being used in mainstream media.
