The axis of godless liberalism and fake news media has adopted a new tactic. Beware of the deceptive practice.

Watch any network news program or listen to any liberal politician and one thing will become immediately evident: the focus of the story or policy being discussed is subjective “feelings.”  Where reliable facts are cited at all, they are offered only to give an illusion of credibility to the predetermined emotional reaction of the audience.  Demagoguery is not a new tactic in the art of persuasion.  In fact, it’s as old as mankind.  But today, evoking feelings of sympathy, compassion, hate or disgust has become the chief strategy of America’s foremost deceivers. 

A traceable decline in journalistic integrity has occurred in America that resembles, and, one could argue, is responsible for, the decay of morality in our present culture.  Not many years ago, news anchors reported national and world events addressing the basic points of honest journalism, who, what, where, when and why within the first sentence or two.  How an audience member should feel about the story and what conclusions are to be drawn, was left to the individual.  But no more.  Today, the aim of news reporting is not simply the benign dispensation of information.  Instead, it’s intent is compliance to an ideology—a self-destructive one. 

The prevailing inferior model of journalism has evolved through a process of subtle changes over many years.  A variety of techniques has been used to accomplish the goal of advancing an atheistic liberal agenda devoid of any noble characteristic or value.  Deception was first accomplished primarily through the misuse of terms.  Incessant reference to sexual perversity as an “orientation” or “preference” was effective in overcoming the natural human aversion to such aberrant behavior.  Re-labeling evil as good is nothing new, but in news reporting it is insidious and malignant.

Widespread use of surrogates has also been effective.  In this case, a news report contains a sound-bite from a radical proponent of some highly unpopular and obtuse public policy without honest scrutiny or sensible contradictory perspective.  The scheme is still used today.  But by far, the singular focus on feelings is the most dangerous and despicable trend in public discourse because it has the potential to bypass one’s ability to form a rational conclusion from the information provided.  And that is by design. 

Consider the school shootings in Parkland, Florida and Newtown, Connecticut.  Portrayals of the grief and anger of victims and survivors were not incidental or merely obscene intrusions into the private sorrow of those communities.  In each event, they were the opening acts of a contrived leftist effort to evoke demands for onerous gun control laws.  Each tragedy was exploited by agenda-driven news agencies, for the purpose of illogically projecting blame and fomenting hate and rage toward legal gun owners and members of the National Rifle Association (NRA). 

Likewise, public reporting of the Obama-era DACA executive order and the prospect of its repeal by the Trump administration, has largely consisted of exaggerating the inconvenience to illegal aliens while ignoring and masking the impact on private citizens and taxpayers.  News coverage of the illegal invasion of the United States by foreign nationals has been arranged in the same way. 

Crimes committed by illegal aliens, or, as liberals choose to call them, “undocumented immigrants,” are generally not reported by national or local news organizations.  As a result, the public’s ability to draw rational conclusions and form reasonable responses to public policy based upon facts provided by distorted traditional news sources has been stripped away. 

The disintegration of American churches has been accomplished by the same deceptive  motives that have infected our news media.  In liberal mainline denominations today, members are taught to embrace emotionalism and phony feelings to the exclusion of biblical truth.  John Calvin warned his contemporaries of this danger five hundred years ago, saying, “The surest source of destruction to men is to obey themselves.” 

Callous indifference is passed off as “love,” and dead works have replaced gospel ministry.  The legacy of liberalism’s corrupting influence in the Church is that most major denominations are dying slow and agonizing deaths, locked on a course of steady descent into obscurity.  The reason is clear.  Lives are not being improved. 

God created animals to be driven by stimuli.  Surely, He expects more from men and women that were created in His image since He gave us more advanced faculties.  To refuse to employ them in our personal lives is shameful and tragic.  But to repudiate truth and reason in our public lives is reckless, costly and even dangerous.

Emotion is the least reliable and most unstable of human influences.  It is also the easiest way to manipulate others.  Barbarians and children are ruled by emotions; their own and those of others.  Whole, healthy and wise adults use truth, facts, logic and reason informed by emotions, to make superior decisions. 

Christians are not unaware of the deceptive schemes of Satan.  Resisting relentless appeals to blind emotionalism is a challenge that each of us must now be prepared to face on a daily basis.