“These are outrage tools. They’re tactics to get you outraged… But if those things don’t bear out, and of course something like Covid or a war, it’s totally different."
“When they put the trackers online, on screen, that’s something that they want their audience to get mad about,” Posobiec said. “It is the ‘red flag,’ like a matador would fly in front of a bull, saying, ‘get mad at this.’ So, Covid, remember they had the tracker that went up—the Covid numbers that were up under Trump were never up under Biden… Even though more people died under Biden. They did Iraq, they did Afghanistan, that is when the tracker goes up. You know that is the media running a psyop.”
Baris, a longtime pollster and commentator, agreed, saying the tactic is not new.
“They did it for Afghanistan, Iraq, and then when Obama took over, by the way, after George W. Bush, even though those years under Obama were worse than the surge under Bush, they took those trackers down,” Baris said.
Baris explained that media outlets use these visual cues with a clear intention: to provoke emotion and drive public disapproval.
“Don’t think for a second it doesn’t influence people, especially people that watch their programs,” he said. “Maybe they go from somewhat approve to strongly disapprove because they’re seeing these trackers, if you were to poll someone who consumes that news coverage. That is explicit. They have an intention there, to get people angry and to try to turn people against, in this case, Donald Trump, but they’ve done it to others in the past.”
“These are outrage tools. They’re tactics to get you outraged… But if those things don’t bear out, and of course something like Covid or a war, it’s totally different,” Baris added. “Something like what NBC News and the others did with gas prices and shelter prices… which they tweeted daily, the egg tracker… the worst part about it is, if you were actually to watch, even during the week when eggs for instance were up, it was deeply dishonest, because they’re only going back to the beginning of Trump’s presidency.”
“If they would go back to when Donald Trump handed Joe Biden the keys to the White House the first time in January 2021, they would have actually saw—and their viewers would see—that eggs were actually down from that time.” Posobiec challenged the polling narrative around Trump’s economic record, noting a disconnect in the media’s framing.
“Let me throw this one at you, then. Because they kept saying that Trump was underwater on the economy,” he said. “They say that Trump’s under on the economy and this is the issue, because of his tariffs, because of Liberation Day, and we keep hearing this from the Gasparinos of the world and these types who bought NVIDIA high and are looking at red numbers on their phone, saying ‘people are going to get mad.’... Is that true? Because how would that track if the economy is one of his number one issues, and then also that his approvals are going up?”
Baris pointing to polling inconsistencies and what he described as unreliable survey data.
“It doesn’t track, and when you look at the polls that do that, look at other issues for instance, like, for instance, immigration,” Baris said. “The Reuters Ipsos polls, one of the worst polls not only in the country but in the world, they have Donald Trump plus two on the border. I don’t think we have ever found Donald Trump in single digits on immigration.”
“It’s absolutely ludicrous that these people would continue polling without any scrutiny whatsoever,” he continued. “If they were trying to be honest, folks, if they were honest and ethical after missing as much as they have missed in their profession—which no other profession is allowed to be that bad at, by the way—you would get your walking papers if you were as bad at doing your job.”
“But the fact they are that bad and didn’t pause and say ‘what am I doing wrong?’ They’re immediately back into the field as if they did a credible job a couple of weeks before an election. It’s unbelievable and we have to stop tolerating it.”
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