Bill Maher Shreds the Legacy Media and Calls Out the Narrative

Bill Maher always has interesting things to say and is one of the few liberals who somehow still manages to be funny while still talking politics.

As our sister site Townhall observed, he had an interesting take on the campus protests and the media. He's bashed the protests in the past, but this time his focus was on how the media covered them, noting the unhinged activists were less than one percent of all college students.

You have to care about the truth because the media doesn't. It's narrative first, whole story never. pic.twitter.com/FlTQinHndI
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) May 11, 2024

Maher:

It’s time for the media to admit they blew the whole thing way out of proportion because, as always with the media these days, they don’t cover what’s most important, just what’s most fun to watch. There are 15.2 million college students in the U.S. and 2,300 have been arrested. That’s 1/67th of one percent, and half of the ones in New York weren’t even students.

True. The left would like us to think that this is a massive movement. Maher points out that on the list of important things to Harvard students this was only about 15th. Probably still too high, but for most, they care about the things most of the rest of us do -- inflation, the economy, and the things affecting their lives.

Then he goes on to talk about the media pushing narratives. That's surprising but good that he is going there -- it's something that needs to be called out more. We don't make any bones about coming from the right side of the aisle, but we report the truth. We don't make up false stories like about Russia collusion and a president injecting bleach, for example. We're not the liberal media. As I wrote earlier, Reuters, which is supposed to be objective, didn't call out Joe Biden for lying on Friday when he claimed that Trump told people to inject bleach to deal with COVID, because telling the truth wouldn't serve the narrative.

"Narrative first," Maher said when he was talking about the problem of the legacy media. He spoke about how they rushed to get out news on Columbine and then got everything right -- "except all of it." You have to care about the truth, he says. Indeed, and that's a huge part of the problem with media: they don't.

Maher spoke about the use of the word "destroys" and then had a little fun using that in the description of his own video. So I use "shreds" in my title in the same manner.

But perhaps the most intriguing part of the video was where he admitted the media had gone too far and needed to scale it back a bit. If you listened to it, as he's talking about how some people are freaking out if Trump wins, he says do not worry, the world will go on, it sounds like he's already entered the "acceptance phase of mourning" even before Trump wins -- maybe because he sees it coming. Maher said that Trump didn't blow up the world last time and he's going to live his life without hating half the country or "sh**ting his pants 24/7."

"Maybe the sky isn't really falling," he said. "Maybe it's just the door from a Boeing airplane." Yes, maybe what the media have sold you about Trump is just nonsense too, like so much of what they say, because it serves that narrative.

But we're not locked into legacy media anymore, we have the choice of all manner of options now, and that's what really upsets them -- they no longer have full control over what is consumed. And that's truly going to help get the truth out, because they just can't spin things as they might have in the past. Nowadays we can go straight to the videotape and right around legacy media.