The betrayal of the public by mainstream media - Op-ed

The truth is being hidden

Australian Sky News presenter Rita Panahi hosted a documentary about the lies around the origin of Covid-19, examining the lies and denials in the media over the lab leak hypothesis. The documentary (above), gave a run down on how the mainstream media portrayed the possibility of a lab leak as a conspiracy theory. She exposed the role of ‘experts’ in suppressing the truth. Those who opposed the establishment narrative were labelled as ‘conspiracy theorists’ and/or deplatformed from social media.

Today mainstream media echoes and disseminates establishment narratives

Mainstream media has been developing specific narratives to influence public opinion. We can go back to ‘weapons of mass destruction’ before the US attack on Iraq. No one in the media questioned the narrative. During the Covid-19 pandemic the BBC painted ivermectin as a horse medicine. The Guardian, funded by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, used headlines like ‘You are not a horse: FDA tells Americans stop taking dewormer for Covid’.

Operation Mockingbird was a CIA operation designed to channel propaganda through the mainstream media through the cold war. The program is still in operation under different names. AP and PBS are associated with CIA and NED based organizations, which fund programs, claimed to be in-depth investigative journalism. These tie-ups and sponsorships are not clearly disclosed by the networks.

Narrative manipulation was clearly seen during the Covid-19 pandemic. Twitter was used to censor and pull out or slow down the dissemination of any material that ran counter to government agendas, even though much of the information was found out to be true.

The ‘Virality Project’ was set up by a former CIA employee and a number of academics from several universities. The organization has very clear views, where it gave briefings to Twitter to recommend that ‘true content that might promote vaccine hesitancy – such as stories of side effects and certain vaccines banned abroad – be censored’. Posts that raised concerns about vaccine mandates were viewed as  ‘anti-vax’ misinformation, while just asking questions was deemed ‘a tactic commonly used by spreaders of misinformation’, and posting about the ‘surveillance state’, should be banned, as ‘conspiracy theory’.

Mainstream media promoted the establishment agenda, rather than science based fact. It would publish articles based upon the narratives rather than evidence.

Self-appointed guardians of the truth emerged as ‘factcheckers’. This gave rise to a new industry to support the establishment narratives. They portrayed themselves as the authoritative word, even though the factcheck writers had no expertise in the subject they were often claiming to be factchecking. Most of these factcheckers were funded by big-pharma, putting a massive question mark over their ability to be objective. Factcheckers also appeared to be biased towards the ‘left’ side of politics, leaving alone statements and articles that supported their agenda.

This was not restricted to the general media, the esteemed medical journals, The Lancet and Nature Medicine published blind peer reviewed articles dismissing the Covid-19 lab leak theories very early in in 2020, when the facts were not known.

This has weakened academic research and writing immensely within the science profession.

The credibility gap of the mainstream media has given rise to independent journalism

Many of the liberal classified media companies like CNN are facing massive drops in viewer levels. This is being taken up by a rapid rise in podcast TV on platforms like Rumble and YouTube. Some of these channels get more viewers on a daily basis than the legacy media does today. In addition, journalists have left the established mainstream media and are successfully creating their own newsletter format news and opinion sites through platforms like Substack.

Many of the journalists who were involved in the Twitter files dumps are from Substack. Through OpEds in news portals like The Guardian, these journalists face ad hominin attacks over their political views, form of presentation, subjects they report on, ethics, and so on. There are usually little or no critique of the materials they actually present to the public.

The ultimate persecution is what is happening to Julian Assange. It should be a wake-up call for all journalists around the world. Assange is facing espionage charges, while not being recognised as a journalist. (That’s the current tactic now to call independent journalists ‘so-called journalists’). Assange is being persecuted for showing the truth, while those exposed for committing war crimes have not faced any investigation or charges.

Matt Taibbi - called a “so-called” journalist in the US Congress.

The mainstream media and its stable of journalist fear crossing establishment narratives.

The media has been silent on Assange, and how the authorities, with their corporate media agents are going after others, using silencing, slandering of character, and de-platforming as methods.

All journalists are shackled. Just most don’t know it or choose to be silent.

The fourth estate was a term to refer to the press and new media as playing a vital role in a democracy to expose the truth, as a check against abuse of power, criminal activities, and corruption. During the early 1970s we saw two journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein expose the Watergate break ins and hierarchy of White House executives involved, right up to the resignation of the then President Nixon. Today, we see the Hunter Biden laptop story suppressed and not reported by the media, being dismissed as a Russian hoax, which was found to be totally untrue. Journalists followed their masters’ directions.

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, two of the great investigative journalists of another era.

The media partnered with social media platforms to suppress the story, through labelling it as dis-information to sway herd opinion away from the truth. The media industry even awarded the famed Pulitzer Prize based upon a debunked story about a Russian collusion story with the Trump campaign during the 2016 election campaign.

We don’t know what we don’t know

The major issue of today’s mainstream media is that we just don’t know what we don’t know. This is the cover for government to undertake activities, the public knows nothing about. For example, no main stream media corporation is investigating where the money the US Congress is sending to Ukraine, actually ends up. They are relying upon US Treasury officers assurances for their journalism.

There is little real journalism going on today. There can be no political exposes like there was in the 1970s with Watergate, with the present ‘deep state’ like structure imbedded in the mainstream media today. Journalism today is a fantasy. Journalists have become presstitutes, selling out to their employers and holding their political lines. Rebel and you are attacked by the establishment.

The last bastion of independence is independent journalism. They are the last heroes of freedom of speech. However, it maybe too late for them to re-correct democracy.

Anyone who wants to go outside the mainstream media and research the news themselves suffers the disadvantage of search engines being skewed by algorithms, that distort reality into a picture the establishment wants to project. I know this for a fact from a senior manager at Google.

The biggest crisis today, is the crisis of truth. Without a base of truth, and the opinions and conclusions we make from it, we are skewed towards the narratives governments want us to believe in. The world’s leaders are not the conspirators, they are also the victims.

It may already be too late to push back on this.

Subscribe Below: