Things have gotten so biased in the American media that Free Enterprise Project Deputy Director Scott Shepard wrote that people today need to look at reporting in the same way people did in the old Soviet Union:

Any sensible person understands that one must treat the former American press, including the ABC propaganda outlet, the way Soviet citizens used to read Pravda: try to figure out what’s true by noticing what the stories do not mention or are clearly trying to obscure.

In particular, “ABC News has completely abandoned even the illusion of providing objective news,” Scott points out in a Townhall Finance commentary.

This, he suggests, poses a problem for its parent company – Disney – because publicly-traded companies “have legal obligations to be genuinely truthful in their statements of purported fact to the public about matters relevant to their businesses when that public includes current or potential shareholders – which is to say, always.”

As an example of this peril, Scott explains that ABC may have misreported the mechanics of Disney ad buys on social media. The left is trying to pressure Facebook right now to get in line with other social media companies in policing speech. A boycott is underway to bring the company to heel. Disney is purportedly in on the boycott.

But is it really? Maybe this is just a cover, Scott asserts, for a downturn in the company’s performance. Perhaps ABC is spinning a story that helps Disney lie to its investors. He writes that the boycott “in reality [could be] a cut in advertising in response to diminished revenues because of the shutdown.” To back up his case, Scott explains:

Twitter’s advertising has also fallen dramatically over the same period, despite Jack Dorsey being totally down with politically biased speech restrictions, and despite no faux boycott having been declared there.

And there’s also trouble at A&E, co-owned by Disney, where viewership has been cut in half after the network cancelled the “Live PD” program in the wake of George Floyd’s police-involved death.

While all this could just be coincidence, Scott nonetheless writes that it “raises a question for shareholders who are tired of the abandonment of truth and objectivity by their corporations’ ‘news’ divisions.” At some point, there is a legitimate concern that “they breach actionable legal duties.”

To read all of Scott’s Townhall commentary – “When Will ABC’s False Reporting Require Daddy Disney’s Discipline?” – click here.

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