Media terkongkong: The betrayal of the public by mainstream media
Murray Hunter
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.
