ALMOST immediately after President Trump and his supporters began crying foul after the 2020 election, the media began calling "Trump's claims of vote rigging as "unfounded" and "baseless".
Right there you have the misuse of language by turning it into a type of political slogan or attack word. "Unfounded" and "basesless" mean exactly that. Some claim or idea that has absolutely no basis of fact or substance.
In fact, to make the claim that an allegation of vote rigging is "baseless" means you know every fact and aspect of that election across 50 states and thousands of counties. That's superhuman and beyond even the most well equipped investigators.
You simply can't say a claim is baseless unless you know the entire sum of facts. But US media and politicians repeated it on a daily basis. The talking point injected into the public discourse was repeated so often that it became "fact".
In fact Trump and his supporters found many anomalies in the results in the form of missing votes, wildly reduced vote tallies, vote switches between candidates, sudden unexplained surges in votes for Biden coming in late at night and defying the earlier trend. Trump's concerns about fraud were far from "baseless" or "unfounded".
The conservative thinktank The Heritage Foundation has produced a database of 1020 election fraud cases going back to the 1980s.
But for the media to acknowledge these things would counter their propaganda technique, especially when the main players "all agree". An accurate and honest media would say "Trump's disputed claims of election fraud".