Objective journalism is dead, replaced with a one-sided political narrative controlled by Democratic politicians and power brokers focused on promoting a far left agenda.

Tom Jordan, a Michigan-based talk show host, joined Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon on Monday to share his experiences inside the biased media industry, and expose how the problem has accelerated since the pandemic.

 

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“I think it goes back to this whole issue of free speech, the First Amendment, freedom of the press, and those kinds of issues,” Jordan told The Tudor Dixon Podcast. “I think if you do not have free speech, if you suppress speech in any type of way, you’re effectively granting more power to the political elites, the ones who happen to be in power during that time.

“And I think what it ends up doing is it causes a sort of intellectual stagnation with people in this country, where critical thinking has gone out the window and you just start accepting whatever is being told to you,” he said. “Because it comes down to one single narrative that we’re seeing in the media, and that’s the accepted narrative.”

The shift is nothing new, Jordan noted, “but it really reared its ugly head in 2020.”

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Then a morning news anchor for CBS WWJ, Jordan grew frustrated with his station’s focus during the presidential race, which included ultra-critical coverage of former President Donald Trump while suppressing facts that cast President Joe Biden in a bad light, from allegations of corruption to his son’s incriminating laptop.

“I saw the inner workings of CBS News and then how it funneled down to our station in Detroit,” said Jordan, who has worked in media since 1998. “And we weren’t doing journalism.”

“A lot of information they were reporting on was from a heavily Democratic perspective. So when it came into our newsroom I would try to reframe it to be more objective,” he said. “There was so much pushback … to covering both sides in a presidential election year.”

It was a similar situation with coverage of the coronavirus, and emergency orders Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer issued in response.

“We were told specifically that we had to support, not just in our personal lives, but publicly on the air, the lockdowns that were occurring,” Jordan said, despite emerging data that suggested children were at low risk, and the elderly the most vulnerable.

“Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s policies allowed COVID patients to recover in nursing homes, and we were not allowed to talk about that,” he said.

As a result, the media largely parroted the Whitmer administration’s claim that the death toll among seniors was roughly 5,600. Earlier this year, a more thorough investigation by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff revealed the real total was more than twice that.

“The true number is more like 14,000,” LeDuff said. “That means Whitmer buried 7,000 corpses in a statistical mass grave.”

Jordan noted that reports in 2020 warned about the impact of pandemic lockdowns on youth mental health and academics, as well, but were largely ignored.

“They had this information that wasn’t allowed in the public square,” Jordan said.

When Whitmer broke her own COVID rules to join racial protests in Detroit while forcing all others inside, Jordan said abandoned the newsroom for talk radio.

“At that point, I realized we are in an industry right now that is refusing to acknowledge the truth, or to even challenge the status quo,” he said. “The journalism industry had betrayed not just me, but the entire populous of the United States, and even globally if you look at it.”

Joining WJR 760 AM in Detroit December 2021, Jordan quickly learned the bias had infected all levels of media, including presumably conservative talk radio stations.

“I was surprised when I first got there, there were certain issues we couldn’t talk about,” he said. “You could guess which issues we weren’t allowed talk about … at that point it became vaccines. They were all positive, any negative talk about vaccines was considered conspiracy theory.”

It was the same deal with allegations of election fraud, while Jordan was also dissuaded from discussing Michigan’s pending abortion ballot proposal, he said.

“My time (at WJR) was surprising to me, because there was a lot of pushback,” he said. “All this was a lie and I would call it out and it was not very much welcomed amongst the upper management at that station, which again shocked me.”

It’s only gotten worse sense, Jordan said.

“In the last few months, I was specifically told … that we’re going to change the way we do things. You’re not going to share your opinions through the majority of the broadcast,” he said.

Dixon questioned the motivation behind the change, and whether Democrats are leveraging their power to suppress coverage they don’t like.

“One of the reasons was because of the politicians, I think putting their thumbs on the scales, making phone calls, there was intimidation, not just in our outlet but in a whole slew of news outlets around the country,” Jordan said.

“Newsrooms are being called by heavy hitters within the far left progressive ideology camps, and that includes the Democratic Party, that if you do this we’re not going to come on your show, we’re not going to be as accessible to you,” he said. “So I was specifically told we want to have continuous access to these people.”

Jordan and Dixon further discussed how the issue plays into important decisions in Michigan, from billions in secretly negotiated taxpayer-funded business incentives to companies with ties to the Chinese Communist Party, to the Whitmer administration’s hypocrisy on large water withdraws, to the information presented to voters ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

“I take it all back to the media of today … there’s basically a dereliction of duty,” Jordan said. “I got into it because I loved the objectivity. I loved the various dialogue of all these consequential issues that affect everybody in this country.”

“You want to find out the truth,” he said. “And that’s what I think journalism used to be.

“Now it’s nothing of the sort. There is a bunch of activists who are being trained in these J schools … and I’ve spoken to many of them who say they want to get into journalism because they want to change the world and they want to fight back against the systemic racism that exists in the United States of America.”

“That’s not journalism,” Jordan said. “That’s activism.”

Jordan is launching a new show in September called Tom Jordan Live.