Few institutions draw as much fire these days as the news media, and a new essay at American Thinker argues that much of that criticism is justified—not because every story is a lie, but because deception has become woven into the fabric of modern reporting.
Writing for the conservative outlet, Mark C. Ross lays out what he calls a “culture of deception” in today’s journalism, driven partly by overt ideological agendas and partly by ingrained bias instilled by modern journalism schools. Ross doesn’t let audiences off the hook, though—he writes that it remains the public’s responsibility to judge news sources on their reliability, and that the First Amendment protects propaganda as freely as it protects genuine information.
Two methods of deception
Ross identifies two prevailing methods of deception: commission and omission. Outright lying, he writes, is easier to spot than leaving out pertinent details—which is why omission often becomes the “go-to” for deceivers. He traces that dynamic back to a high school history lesson about William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper baron who used his empire to push the United States into war with Spain, a conflict that helped launch Theodore Roosevelt’s career.
Moving to more recent history, Ross points to the COVID panic as a “fairly recent example” of omission. He notes that references were made to the 1918 “Spanish” influenza to establish a precedent for a catastrophic pandemic—but what was often left out, he says, was that the flu killed mostly young people, whereas COVID has been especially dangerous for the elderly.
Ross cites a Scientific American article that, before what he calls the magazine’s capture by a “woke mob,” explained the statistical exclusion of elderly victims and noted that the first recorded cases were at a National Guard base in Massachusetts, not Spain. The disease spread globally, the article said, after soldiers at the base were deployed to Europe. It also suggested the age disparity might stem from an earlier flu pandemic in the late nineteenth century that inoculated its survivors—who would have been the elderly by the time of World War I. A physician friend of Ross’s offered another possibility: a cytokine storm, in which young immune systems react with such intensity that victims can “literally drown in their own phlegm.”
The “mother of all modern deceptions”
Ross then turns to what he calls the “mother of all modern deceptions”: global warming, or climate change. He argues that the scheme’s success relies on the public’s “pervasive ignorance” of meteorology, climatology, and paleontology, and that it falls under the heading of omission. Fear, he notes, is a great motivator but not usually conducive to reasonable reactions.
Still, Ross suggests the climate change narrative may be losing ground as dire predictions fail to materialize. He writes that Americans are especially suspicious of demagogues who try to “enslave the masses and reduce their standard of living,” and he criticizes “strident true believers” who push to punish those who eat meat or enjoy automobiles and gas appliances.
The 2008 recession and the CRA
Ross reserves particular scorn for what he calls a “deception by commission” that led to the 2008 financial crisis. He argues that years of left-wing agitation over “redlining” as an example of minority persecution led Congress to pass the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) in 1977. The law, he writes, amounted to a legal mandate to overlook credit scores when granting mortgages to designated minorities—resulting in a wave of uncreditworthy borrowers and a mass of questionable debt.
That debt, Ross says, led to an avalanche of foreclosures and harmed ordinary sellers by depressing prices. He cites Paul Gigot of the Washington Post, who penned “The Fannie Mae Gang” to describe the damage, and Thomas Sowell, who has pointed out that prior to the CRA, the foreclosure rate among inner-city minorities was identical to the population as a whole. “Yeah, another crummy hoax,” Ross writes.
A final warning
Ross closes by emphasizing the importance of free speech now more than ever, calling open debate “crucial to the republic we cherish.”
The essay arrives amid ongoing scrutiny of news organizations and search engines—Ross notes that Google is currently attracting a lot of attention, with others likely to follow. Whether readers agree with Ross’s diagnosis or not, his piece is a reminder of the media’s enduring power to shape public perception through both what it reports and what it leaves out.
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/hoaxes-and-the-media-who-sell-them/