by Edward Ring
America has chosen a new president. But we may not know the results for days or even weeks.
While there is a chance we will see a quick and decisive Trump victory, the media has prepared us for a protracted aftermath to election day. This raises an obvious question: Was there election rigging in 2024? Did the uniparty establishment and the institutions they control, desperate to prevent a Trump victory, break the rules? Did they cheat?
Answering this question in the affirmative doesn’t have to rely on the countless alarming allegations that are dismissed as unfounded conspiracy theories, even though there are so many of them: The potential for mail-in ballot fraud, hundreds of ballots received at a single address, dozens of ballots received at a single address, questionable last-minute changes in verification procedures by the US Post Office, inaccurate voter rolls and fraudulent voter registrations, voter data leaks to partisan NGOs, vote harvesting, counterfeit ballots, destruction of legitimate ballots, ballot dumps, selectively applied “malfunctions” of voting machines in multiple states, last minute “patches” to fix voting machine software, illegal immigrants voting, and selectively applied closures of polling stations or inadequately staffed polling stations causing voter suppression.
You can claim there is no basis for concern over any one of those alleged cases of calculated, potentially widespread fraud. You can even dismiss the impact of fining and disbarring attorneys who challenged the integrity of the 2020 election and thus have deterred many attorneys from challenging this one. The election was still rigged.
Anyone who watches David Muir at ABC, Lester Holt at CBS, Norah O’Donnell at NBC, or Amna Nawaz and Geoff Bennett at PBS will know this election was rigged, thanks to a multi-year propaganda campaign of shameless lying by the news anchors and reporters at the most prestigious networks in America. If you make it your business to keep track of what these “trusted news sources” are telling voters, it is obvious how hard they’ve tried to influence the election.
ABC News, for example, pretty much every single night for the last few months, has opened their newscast with 5-10 minutes where they heap slime all over Trump and praise Harris. If you watch the source material, for example, Harris’s CNN Town Hall, then watch the excerpts highlighted on ABC, you get two completely different impressions of her competence and integrity. Precisely the same tactic is used with Trump, but to the opposite effect. Watch one of his news conferences in its entirety, then watch what is grabbed, out of context, and presented on ABC.
Critics of Trump’s often brusque persona and often unvarnished condemnation of the media must ask, if they’re going to be fair, how would anyone react? For nearly ten years, David Muir has told us, with a straight face, that “the walls are closing in on Trump.” Along with fake scandals like the Russian collusion hoax, over and over we hear gross misrepresentations of things Trump has said. He mocked a disabled reporter; no, he didn’t. He told people to inject bleach to treat COVID; no, he didn’t. He called neo-Nazis “fine people;” no, he did not. And on and on it goes.
David Muir earned particular enmity among people who just wanted fair news coverage during the debate between Trump and Harris, when, for example, Muir insisted on “fact-checking” Trump but left Harris alone. For example, Muir contradicted Trump’s assertion that crime rates had risen, and Muir was wrong. The data, as Trump attempted to explain, was missing statistics from California’s major cities. Once that data was added, Trump’s claim was proven accurate.
Just in the last few days we’ve had the big four broadcast news anchors telling us that Trump wanted to put Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad, wants reporters covering his rallies to get shot, “groped” a woman back in the 1990s, expressed “deeply troubling” admiration for Adolf Hitler, held a “Nazi rally,” and intended to use the military against “the enemy within,” along with endless distorted repetition of everything bad they’ve ever said about him. All of this “news” was either truth twisted beyond recognition or outright lies. Meanwhile, their coverage of Harris has been indistinguishable from a paid Harris campaign ad.
There’s no end to the legacy television news media’s war on Trump. It’s not subtle, and despite their dinosaur status, they still exercise decisive influence over millions of voters. For the 2024 season-to-date, ABC Nightly News has averaged 7.7 million viewers, NBC averaged 6.4 million, and CBS averaged 4.7 million. PBS is now a big player as well, with a regular viewership of more than 5 million. That’s nearly 25 million regular viewers, with an average age of 65, nearly all of them high-propensity voters, and very few of them likely to be perusing alternative media. Cable news, for all the visibility and big audiences for the hosted talk shows on their networks, doesn’t compare. Recent estimates for primetime viewers of Fox News have averaged 359,000, versus 175,000 for CNN and 160,000 for MSNBC. Cable news audiences are dwarfed by the audiences for broadcast news content, which is overwhelmingly anti-Trump and pro-Harris. Tens of millions of Americans have been thoroughly brainwashed by these networks. But what about social media and online searches?
Back in 2015, Robert Epstein, a research psychologist with the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, published “The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections.” Continuing his research, in testimony before the U.S. Congress in 2019, Epstein claimed that biased search results on Google “impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.” Epstein’s studies are compelling reading, and very little has changed. Google still controls 90 percent of the search engine market in the United States. In 2024, Google employee political donations favored Democrats by a ratio of more than 6 to 1. Draw your own conclusions.
As for social media, much is made of Twitter’s transformation into X, with no more censorship. Twitter, or X, has 95 million users in America. That’s a lot. But in the United States, Facebook has 194 million users, Instagram has 166 million users, TikTok reaches 170 million people, LinkedIn connects 200 million, and YouTube’s regular US viewers number 246 million. As a neutral platform, X’s audience reach is exceeded by more than 10 to 1 by the other major online platforms. With the lone exception of X, every one of these platforms employs biased algorithms designed to suppress conservative content. As for print media, intervention by the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to abstain from a presidential endorsement is too little, too late. Every newspaper and magazine with national reach, with the half-hearted exception perhaps of the Wall Street Journal, have been so anti-Trump and pro-Harris it is almost comical.
Social media, search engines, and legacy news media. In every facet of information gathering, the vast majority of Americans have been continuously exposed to anti-Trump, pro-Harris messages. None of this has been happening by accident. Michael Shellenberger, formerly a progressive liberal who was once honored as a Time Magazine “Environmental Hero,” has evolved into an investigative journalist of extraordinary integrity and courage. In recent years, his work has focused on what he has dubbed “the censorship industrial complex.” In a recent substack post, commenting on America’s news media from newspapers to television to online platforms, he had this to say, “It’s not a mirror of reality. It’s not just biased. And it’s not just deferential to the state or the party. It’s a propaganda arm dishonestly representing powerful political, ideological, and financial interests.”
Shellenberger, who alleges government manipulation of information sources available to Americans, is not alone. Mike Benz, a former US State Department official, claims that the U.S. government has become increasingly concerned about the rise of populist movements in the U.S. and around the world and is actively interfering in media freedom. Another window into how this is working is documented by Ben Shapiro in a must-watch video, where he describes the network of state-supported NGOs and quasi-private sector agencies that influence who gets advertising dollars and who gets boycotted, in an ostensibly benign effort to “create a universal framework full of guidelines and ratings designed to enforce approved narratives.”
It ought to be obvious to anyone who finds both sides of the story by using alternative media that in a fair election, America’s print, video, and online media, and search engine results, could have easily delivered just as much negative coverage about Harris as they have inflicted on Trump, and they could have delivered just as much positive coverage about Trump as they’ve lavished on Harris. Maybe the only rules that were broken were supposed norms of journalistic integrity. But by an order of magnitude, America’s sources of “news” and information were massively tilted in favor of Harris and against Trump.
If for no other reason but media bias, this election was rigged. As a result, regardless of the outcome, half of all Americans have lost faith in fair elections. Even if every allegation of actual, fraudulent, widespread rigging is false, nobody who thinks so will change their minds. For them, the media sources that might help debunk any of it have no credibility. That is a crime perpetrated by the elite who control these institutions that transcends even this moment.
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Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021) and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Photo “Donald Trump and Melania Trump” by Team Trump.
