There is a reason you come to Hot Air for news and especially analysis, and it’s pretty simple and obvious: the MSM lies to you and everybody else.

It lies by omission. It lies by commission. It lies consciously. And it lies because it begins with a set of assumptions that are just plain insane.

As you know by now, one of my hobby horses is The Narrative™. The Narrative is the illusion of reality that the Establishment wants you to believe, often contradicting your lying eyes.

Once you see that the MSM presents an alternate reality, it is impossible to unsee. Everywhere you look the world doesn’t appear to correspond with what we are being told by the media, our cultural elites, or the politicians. We are told that Israel is an apartheid state, despite its being the only one of its neighbors to actually be ethnically diverse. We are told that Hamas is trustworthy when it reports deaths and hospitalizations of civilians and that its reports of Israeli atrocities are unbiased.

Yesterday Ed wrote about how the New York Times still insists that its reporting on the hospital tragedy might still be true, despite its being totally debunked in every respect.

NYT Keeps Digging: We Don't Accept Israel's Evidence in Hospital Blast

So much for the New York Times’ “editors’ note,” and so much for the First Rule of Holes.https://t.co/W3CXXjTmtv

— Ed Morrissey (@EdMorrissey) October 25, 2023

Vanity Fair wrote a piece based on Slack messages between Times staffers that exposes how little trust they had in Hamas’ claims, but the editors chose to push the anti-Israel narrative, and apparently, they want to stick with it come hell or high water. Already Hamas propagandists are claiming that the Times’ new analysis has “proven” that Israel bombed the hospital. This is what the New York Times wants you to believe.

Internal messages obtained by VF reveal there was immediate concern inside The New York Times over the paper’s Gaza hospital bombing coverage.@charlottetklein reports: https://t.co/nob66Z8EYO

— VANITY FAIR (@VanityFair) October 24, 2023

It’s all about The Narrative™, and not just at the Times. It is everywhere all the time.

This is why you need alternative news and analysis outlets like Hot Air, the Townhall properties, and…yes, I admit it…lots of other sources. We don’t always get it right. I even read center-left and occasionally left-wing journalists. I trust nobody absolutely, even my own “side.”

We face a problem, though: the MSM and Big Tech HATE us and they have a lot of power to strangle our revenue streams. Generally speaking, if our analysis diverges from The Narrative™ too much our traffic gets throttled and our ability to monetize our content through advertising is strangled.

Google dominates the online ad market, and Microsoft has a nice chunk of it too. They can hold us hostage and do so regularly. Not that we negotiate with hostage-takers, but it hits us where it hurts. Ed wrote about this on Tuesday. Big tech can strangle us economically, and we won’t give in.

We get hit for publishing “misinformation,” which is an all-purpose term that means “inconvenient facts” and/or “opinions we don’t like.” Misinformation like “Hunter Biden’s laptop is real,” which earned a multi-week suspension of the country’s oldest newspaper. When we write about alphabet ideology you can assume that article was demonitized. The list goes on.

The censorship threat is very real, and while we have been able to hang on because of readers like you, we need your help to keep on keeping on. You are reading this, so you know we provide value to you. It’s time to chip in to keep us fighting.

Many of our readers have joined the fight as part of our VIP and VIP Gold membership, and they have been crucial to our operations as an independent platform and the ability to debate all of the issues honestly. We also produce some great exclusive content for our members:

• The Amiable Skeptics featuring Adam Baldwin
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• The Week in Review with Duane Patterson
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Ed said it better than I could:

We talk about this more often now because we see the coming crisis in media more clearly than ever. This week’s media performance and Big Tech suppression should convince everyone about their plans to control debate and suppress dissent. We hope we can gather as many allies as possible to keep all of these issues in the public square – and indeed to preserve the public square at all.

Join us in the fight. Become a HotAir VIP member today and use promo code CENSORSHIP to receive a 50% discount on your membership.

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