Voting under the influence of propaganda is not voting.

While most Democrats would have no problem denigrating Fox news as largely inaccurate or misleading, it would be hard for them to believe that CNN, MSNBC, or The Washington Post could be just as bad.

Right now, an impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump is being prepared after his attempt to investigate the Biden family’s actions in Ukraine. The non-Fox legacy media bubble is currently reporting that Joe Biden is innocent of any corruption. Hunter Biden getting a position on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company when he had no experience is, on its face, very suspicious. We now have the investigative reporting of John Solomon, affirmed by ex-CIA political activist Ray McGovern, which paints a very different picture than the one on your TV. I have not seen a sufficient debunking of this reporting, but I cannot argue that it doesn’t exist, because I cannot read everything on the internet. I am left to wonder what is true.

This is one piece of a much larger puzzle. It is not a conspiracy theory to suggest that legacy media companies have agendas, or that they won’t hire journalists interested in disrupting their narratives. You can observe a network’s bias through their disproportionately positive coverage of a candidate, or how they contextualize the facts of the news. Some reporting coming out of legacy media companies represents unbiased reality, but most of it is published to benefit the people that own and advertise with it.

This would not be as much of a problem if there weren’t so many different media companies telling us so many different things. Which ones can we rely on? Which ones can we be sure are fake news? The problem is, we don’t have the answers. The public at large is left in a tizzy, unable to reconcile its numerous versions of truth.

Even if we don’t watch these networks ourselves, a majority of popular political discourse is directed by them; they host the debates, they employ the blue-checkmark Twitter journalists, and they let your acquaintances know what’s important to discuss with you.

What does it mean to be ”fighting for us?”

The days of elections being decided on the grounds of policy differences, or even personal differences, have come and gone. We are propagandized by the ruling class into joining cults of personality that are less concerned with politics than they are with exciting chants and relatable optics.

It is time to divest from legacy media, discover credible independent journalists, and spend more time doing our own research. At this point, it is dangerous to trust any individual or news organization without first analyzing their bias and weighing their evidence. The only concrete tool we have in this country to bring change is our vote, and we’re not participating in a democracy if our votes are based on faulty intelligence.

Follow me on Twitter! @WillEverman