AMAC Exclusive
Most Americans understand the biases of the mainstream media that tilt nearly every major news story. But what have they downright ignored in 2021? Here are the ten big stories (and honorable mentions) the media ignored most in 2021:
10: Brexit Wasn’t the End of the World
Remember Brexit? Of course. And the Brexit vote in 2016 certainly didn’t suffer from a lack of media coverage.
But after so much downright panic, one of the biggest news stories of 2021 has been how few of the predictions of doom came true. None, in fact. Yet, the media has ignored that too.
Normally, a smooth implementation isn’t newsworthy and we wouldn’t blame the media for missing it. But in the case of Brexit, the volume of hyperbole was dialed up to a ten.
Many anti-Brexit leaders predicted economic ruin, closed borders, and a weakened nation. Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, even said that Brexit could mean the destruction of “Western political civilization in its entirety.”
The world deserved a follow-up when none of that happened. Instead, crickets.
9: The National Security State Doesn’t Get Its Man—Julian Assange
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and the activist who has leaked confidential documents like internal political party communications and allegedly broken American law by releasing top secret national security cables, faces American charges which could put him in prison for over 150 years.
After years of eluding American authorities by hiding in an Ecuadorian embassy, the United Kingdom finally captured Assange in 2019. Extradition appeared inevitable.
But on January 4, a British judge blocked extradition, ruling that “severely restrictive detention conditions designed to remove physical contact” in the United States would worsen Assange’s depression. Such a development both suggests a greatly diminished U.S. prestige on the world stage, and is an invite for other potential Assange’s to endanger American national security
When one of the United States’ closest allies won’t hand over one of our most wanted outlaws, it’s a major story. Just don’t tell the media…
8: Paris Creates a New World Order
Royal Dutch Shell is one of the most powerful institutions in the world. But in 2021, the corporation—and world—got a wake-up call, not that many noticed.
In May, Shell was ordered by a court in the Netherlands to reduce its carbon emissions by 2030 by 45 percent under the Paris climate accords, the multilateral climate change agreement the United States has rejoined under President Joe Biden after President Donald Trump withdrew.
That agreement was often billed in the United States as an aspirational but non-binding document with targets but no teeth because the Senate has not ratified it as a treaty.
The Shell decision, however, shows how much teeth these targets have around the world and how ready other governments are to enforce them despite their economic consequences in the private sector.
7: China Takes One Giant Leap Into Space
The media has ignored plenty about China over the last several years. Credible ideas about COVID-19 leaking from a Wuhan lab were dismissed as crackpot conspiracy theories. Chinese censorship of movies and sports has become widespread but goes mostly unnoticed.
But, in the meantime, China’s major advances in space have barely gotten any attention at all.
First, China became the second country in the world to land a rover on Mars, after the United States. The Chinese rover, Zhurong, had to travel the same distance between Earth and Mars as past American rovers have had to travel—about 240 million miles. But the space between American and Chinese capabilities is getting smaller and smaller.
As if that weren’t enough, China began construction on its first space station, Tiangong and two Chinese astronauts conducted a spacewalk.
The media didn’t pay much attention to the story and paid even less attention to the date: July 4. Message received, just not by the media.
6: The Media (and U.S. National Security) Blew it on “Russiagate”
The media certainly didn’t miss “Russiagate,” the allegation of Russian collusion with the 2016 Donald Trump presidential campaign. But the media has almost entirely ignored this year’s revelations. In short, we now know that the allegations of the “Steele dossier” and subsequent federal investigation were based entirely on concocted information provided by Democratic Party operatives. And we now know definitively what a sham it all was.
Moreover, it now looks as if the media were not merely unwitting victims of a Democratic misinformation campaign. Rather than being duped themselves, the media were actively engaged the duping, pushing the narrative fabricated by James Comey and Democratic operatives.
The final nail in the coffin of the Russiagate hoax should have been considered one of the greatest scandals of all time. But the media seems to have no interest in giving the story the attention it deserves, almost certainly because they were knowingly complicit from the start.
5: BidenStamps, the Biggest Expansion of Welfare since ObamaCare
As America struggles with more and more inflation and fewer and fewer workers, there have been plenty of explanations offered. Most have blamed a combination of supply-chain disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic and the federal unemployment bonus.
But that’s partly because the media has ignored a big story that’s driving both inflation and our worker shortage: BidenStamps. It’s the biggest permanent expansion of welfare since ObamaCare, but the media has let the Biden administration do it under the radar.
The new monthly benefit maximum in food stamps is now over 20 percent higher. In fact, a family of four can receive $835 per month, which is even higher than the $537 the average family of four spends on food.
These billions of additional dollars are adding fuel to the flames of inflation, particularly for groceries, and pulling even more energy out of the private sector by making welfare pay more than work.
4: Men, Women, and Science
In recent years, we have heard voices calling general neurological differences between the genders a “social construction.” We have been asked to ignore millennia of observation, admit that it’s a “myth” that brains of men and women work differently, and cast aside our “neurosexism”
What a titanic clash it would be if researchers confirmed natural, objective, and neurological differences between the genders once and for all.
It happened in 2021. And it comes on the heels of growing evidence of such differences.
At the same moment the left is promoting gender as a purely “social construction,” science—with a capital S—is disproving them.
3: Abandoned in Afghanistan
The United States’ Afghanistan withdrawal got plenty of media coverage. In fact, it was one of the few stories of the year in which the media asked some tough questions of the Biden administration. After all, it’s hard not to ask about people falling to their deaths from an American C-130.
But when the troops withdrew from the country, the media withdrew from the story. Repeatedly, most major news outlets have thoughtlessly taken the administration’s line—that there were either no more Americans left or that those who remained did so by choice—and ignored the reality.
Americans are still stuck there, whether the media covers the story or not.
2: The Manchurian App
TikTok, a relatively new social media platform especially popular with young people, reached one billion users even faster than Facebook. It is the fastest growing platform on the planet.
As it grows rapidly, it is vacuuming up almost endless reams of hundreds of millions of Americans’ personal data, including biometric data from even non-users.
Those who aren’t concerned about marketing trends or data privacy may wonder why this isn’t just mildly interesting news that belongs toward the back of the business section.
There’s one more key detail the media seems all too willing to ignore: TikTok is tightly controlled by a Chinese parent company.
A few conservatives, such as Senator Josh Hawley, have pointed out what this means: “all it takes is one knock on the door of their parent company based in China from a Communist Party official for that data to be transferred to the Chinese government’s hands whenever they need it.”
When the fastest growing tool for personal data collection in the United States has the tentacles of the Chinese Community Party wrapped around it, the media should cover it as a big, ongoing story.
It hasn’t.
1: Aliens? What, Me Worry?
We’ve all wondered: how would our media and country react if credible sightings of Unidentified Flying Objects—UFOs suddenly appeared without a strong, reassuring government response. Panic and looting in the streets? F-16s flying overhead? A massive religious reawakening?
Well, it happened in 2021. The public watched footage taken by U.S. Navy pilots of bizarre, laws-of-physics-defying objects and admitted it cannot rule out aliens.
And what did we get? A collective shrug. Even as it mirrors a spike in the number of UFO sightings across the country. We haven’t watched wall-to-wall coverage of the story on cable news. We haven’t seen reporters accosting aerospace officials at the front door of their homes demanding answers.
Maybe because it doesn’t fit into a neat political narrative. In any case, the mystery remains unsolved.
But we did solve another mystery: what does it take to keep political pundits quiet? UFOs.
These space invaders may not be so bad after all.
Here’s to 2022!
