Let’s talk about how to spot Media Bias, and thus avoid the derangement that is symptomatic of Media Damage.
The press use language in a particular way when they want to downplay something bad, and it’s all about tone of voice: The active voice speaks, the passive voice’s words are spoken. The active voice makes the person or thing who caused something explicit in the minds of the reader. The passive voice puts rhetorical distance between actor and action, in a way where you don’t even have to mention the actor.
This trick is occasionally very revealing. Let’s look at a recent example, coverage of violence at a rally a few days ago in America. Last year, something very bad happened in Portland, and it caused a lot of right-wing figures very concerned about free speech to want to assemble a year later to spread their message. For some reason, a certain group of people were opposed to this. Violence broke out and a local newspaper published an article on what happened.