Op-ed by Tracy Beanz
McKay Coppins penned a piece for the Atlantic entitled, “The Billion-Dollar Disinformation Campaign to Reelect the President”. In it, you find the usual screeds found in a left leaning legacy media piece. Words like “deceptively edited video”, proclamations about how the President was guilty of the alleged offenses put forth in the impeachment hearings, and how his slick campaign team created social media pieces which misinform his base. The truth is, this is more of the same.
It is quite clear at this point that to some, truth is no longer objective, but subjective. That is, the legacy media and folks like McKay, have become so used to propagandizing Americans, they’ve actually started believing their own lies.
It’s a dangerous place for us to find ourselves. To pull a quote from an interview he gave on CNN:
"Instead of trying to reform the press, or critique its coverage, today's most influential conservatives want to destroy the mainstream media altogether”
McKay, you and your pals have done a fine job of that on your own.
I don’t need to sit here and educate our readers about the depths the formerly-known-as “mainstream” media have sunk to in their quest to retain the status quo. By now, a majority of Americans know that the media in its old form has been laid bare. They’ve been exposed for the dishonest journalists they are, and the shady propaganda operations they are running. They’ve spent almost five years now yelling falsity at the American people, and in their hubris, they have shaken us from our slumber.
The media you once knew is dying on the vine. As someone who has worked nearly 24 hours a day for the past several years to replace it with something you can count on, I am absolutely thrilled at the notion. The truth is, we are fed up with being lied to.
Somewhere along the way, journalism shifted from Woodward and Bernstein, to sitting at your desk and waiting for the government to call with a story they wanted the public to consume. Tips from third-hand sources, propaganda operations being run by a rogue intelligence community, stories being written about an administration in an election year and then passed to said administration for approval before publishing, journalists referring to themselves as “hacks” in emails meant to be kept secret; they sold out for influence, power, money, and to steer this country away from truth and into the hands of their elitist masters.
Has anyone stopped to think what the United States would look like right now if the media had *gasp* told the truth? I whisper to myself nearly every day “If only they would just tell the truth”
And that is the sad fact. The legacy media is complicit in the quest to destabilize the country, complicit in the attempts to unseat a duly elected President, and complicit in fanning the flames of division that seep through our families and our friendships. They are the reason for all of this. If only they would just tell the truth.
Guess what? We got sick of it, and we took it upon ourselves. I personally made it my life’s mission to report on the stories of our time with integrity and honesty as my mantra. I told myself that no matter what the story, whether it affected a Republican or a Democrat, the American people deserve the truth. They don’t just deserve it. They demand it. When I began, I didn’t know how it would pan out. As I pen this for my news organization, UncoverDC, I realize it is panning out just fine.
Take a look around, McKay. The people are speaking, and you aren’t listening. We see through your lies and how you try to protect those who align with you ideologically from scrutiny. We understand that you can’t be trusted because you don’t have the desire to do actual journalism. You do, however, have a lust to maintain power and influence. That is being eroded as we sit here.
Gone are the days when you could rest on your laurels and expect a story to fall into your lap, all tied nice in a bow; a story replete with the narrative that the power brokers wanted you to peddle. In return they’d give you a pat on the head and an interview to raise your status. Now you are reduced to speaking to your cohorts in a shrinking echo chamber. The echoes are loud.
The free market is speaking, and it is screaming for new media. An honest look at the ratings will tell you all you need to know. Most of my colleagues get more traction on their twitter accounts and podcasts than CNN gets in a month. I don’t need a fact check- you know its true as well as I do.
The legacy media has not learned, and its clear they will not learn. They are desperate to hold on to whatever influence they used to have, and too ignorant to realize that we are all wise to their games. The only people they fool anymore are those who may just be too far gone to see the forest for the trees, and that’s unfortunate.
So, McKay is right in some ways. We are replacing the legacy media- with something we can be proud of. We won’t stop until Americans are armed with the knowledge they need in order to make informed decisions and force accountability for those who have committed wrongdoing. The “mainstream” doesn’t do this anymore. They are a propaganda machine with ill intentions. And I will say again, the entire reason that a portion of the country hates the President, is because they have been fed lies, disinformation, and falsehoods about him for years. If they just would’ve reported truth, we’d have a citizenry that understands what is happening in the world, and a country aghast at what has occurred the past several years.
I started UncoverDC because I was tired of watching the American people receive falsehoods from the former arbiters of “truth”. I wanted to reinvent media and investigative journalism with integrity, as it should be.
We are well on the way to abdicating the old media to the dustbin of history, their influence and information streams cut off. People trust new media now. They know that we connect with each other; that we don’t view ourselves as “above” our friends, and that we care deeply about truth and this country. They know that we work as a team. This is the future, and it’s playing out in beautiful fashion.
So, to McKay and others like him, a warning you won’t heed. We see you, and more people now see us than you would care to admit. Nothing can stop an idea whose time has come. We are here, and we aren’t going anywhere.
Tracy Beanz is the Founder and Editor in Chief at UncoverDC. You can follow her on Twitter @TracyBeanz
