Salvador Dalí Mi esposa desnuda 1945
Over the past 5 years I’ve addressed this numerous times, and it just goes on. When the MSM, WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, started to feel a real threat to their existence and survival from social media, they changed course radically. They no longer attempted to inform people, they began to shape their readers’ and watchers’ opinions. And it worked.
That change appears to bear fruit. The WaPo announced the other day they’re hiring 150 more “reporters”. Who are not really reporters, in the new setting they’re more like narrators. They’re servants to the narratives favored by editors and owners, the ones they expect -and know- to generate the most clickbaits.
Superficially, the media landscape sort of still looks the same, same logos, same slogans, but below the surface everything has changed. What’s important is no longer News, but the favored interpretation of it. It seems to work miracles for the MSM, but it’s dangerous for the nation. Because: where are you going to get your news, on the basis of which you can form your own opinion?
And if you can’t get news that doesn’t already have an inbuilt opinion, how are you supposed to have a opinion of your own? At the end of the day, you will be left with a nation that is poorly informed and has no opinions of its own. Everyone just regurgitates opinions forced upon them 24/7.
The main difference with 5 years ago is probably that social media have joined the MSM in their strategy. They now all force-shape opinions for clickbait. And nobody puts a loophole in their way:
Facebook Joins Twitter In Reverting To Pre-Election News Feed Algorithms
Facebook has reversed its election-season policy of prioritizing mainstream media stories in News Feed after a similar move from Twitter. This is as Mark Zuckerberg is sued for allegedly helping tip the vote in favor of Joe Biden. An algorithm tweak that saw Facebook users deluged with mainstream media stories following last month’s elections has been reversed, the social media behemoth told the New York Times on Wednesday, insisting that the change – which significantly boosted traffic for establishment outlets like CNN, NPR, and the Times itself while suppressing alt-media and right-wing sites – was never meant to be permanent.
Boosting the importance of “news ecosystem quality,” essentially a reputational score applied to news outlets, was “a temporary change we made to help limit the spread of inaccurate claims about the election,” Facebook spokesman Joe Osborne told the outlet. He explained that the platform was still prioritizing so-called “authoritative and informative news” on “important global topics like elections, Covid-19 and climate change.” The tech giant opted to return to pre-election policies despite the protests of some employees who preferred the “nicer news feed,” sources present at one post-vote Facebook meeting claimed, describing the prioritization of establishment sources as one of several “break glass measures” designed for the care and feeding of a desirable post-election narrative.
And that feeds through to all news:
Twitter To Remove Tweets That Spread Lies About COVID Vaccines
Twitter will remove tweets that spread harmful misinformation, starting with the Covid-19 vaccine, the company has announced – and from 2021 it will begin to label tweets that push conspiracy theories. The move sees the company follow Facebook and YouTube in tightening up policies around the coronavirus vaccination as the rollout of the jab begins across the world. “Starting next week, we will prioritise the removal of the most harmful misleading information,” the US company said in a blogpost. “And during the coming weeks, we will begin to label tweets that contain potentially misleading information about the vaccines.”
This is of course not about lies about vaccines, it’s about questions about vaccines. We are not supposed or allowed to ask questions about them, we’re supposed to take them and shut up. Emergency, don’t you know?! More on that in a minute. First, let’s step back 5 years or so.
The MSM were very quick in denouncing Trump’s candidacy for President. That then led to -much- more of the same when he was elected, by which time they realized Trump meant more clickbait than they could ever have imagined, and that in turn became the Mueller investigation. “Based” on blatant lies and propaganda, it was all reported as “news” for 3-4 years.
More such empty nonsense then led to the impeachment procedure, which the current Hunter Biden probe entirely cuts down to size: there were plenty reasons for Trump to ask Zelensky to look into Hunter’s history with Burisma. And then some. But the one half of Americans who get their “news” from the MSM will have completely missed that, just like they now miss what really goes on in Hunter world.
Negative stories about Trump generate clickbait, and not-so-negative ones do not. That right there is your entire American media landscape today, and yes, again, it’s dangerous for the nation. It’s bad enough if people draw different conclusions from the same news, but it’s a whole other story if they have don’t have access to the news in the first place, but only to half of it, boiled and brewed in a narrative sauce.
Similarly, it took the MSM barely more than 5 minutes to declare Joe Biden the president-elect, even though they know that’s not their announcement to make. They just do it, because they trust their audience won’t notice the difference. Still, that, too, is dangerous.
Which leads us, seamlessly, into the vaccine reporting. It would appear that today is THE day to question the vaccines being rolled out by the billions, but the media tell us we’re not supposed, or allowed, to do that. Take your shot and shut your face.
But the “approved” vaccines so far, the Pfizer and Moderna ones, are based on an entirely new and untested technology, messenger RNA. Could they work, could they be a new frontline for medicine? Yes, perhaps they could. But shouldn’t their mid- and long term effects be assessed? Of course they should. mRNA is being treated like GMOs, which lobby to be declared safe as soon as someone doesn’t drop dead in the first hours. While we’re playing games across generations with our own genetic material.
And at the same time that the mRNA vaccines are being rushed through, potentially much less questionable approaches, like vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin, are said to need much more research before they can be rolled out. That looks like there’s a game being played, and the MSM are a big player in it. Nothing to do with reporting the news, but with only a part of it.
We’re getting lost in a -dark?- web of opinions disguised as news. We can not ask the questions that we know everyone should ask. The Moderna mRNA vaccine was approved in the US the other day as it was simultaneously found to offer immunity for just 2 months. And on the basis of that, vaccination passports are being prepared for all of our societies. While we might find much better protection in vitamin D, HCQ and ivermectin. Or the Russian and Chinese vaccines. But those must not be discussed.
Are lockdowns a good idea? From what I can see, only in the short term. And we’re already way past the short term. Beyond that, you start ripping apart society itself, you start tearing down what makes society function, i.e. the people in it, and their interactions. Without which those people won’t be the same people anymore.
We can pretend we still have societies without people’s contacts and interactions, but the longer it takes, the more it becomes pretense. It’s interesting to see how politicians and their scientific advisors behave, and manage to hold on to power and public trust, but if you watch the performance of the media, it’s not terribly surprising.
If you shut down any dissent before it even happens, things will appear hunky-dory for a while. Thing is, it will be short-lived. The odds of the virus vanishing from the northern hemisphere before spring sets in, just based on untested mRNA vaccines, don’t look good. Maybe we should ask the bookies, they’re good at this sort of thing.
But to me it looks like we’re betting everything on red, just because certain parties and interests like it that way. Can mRNA vaccines save us? Perhaps. But we have no way of knowing, we’re just gambling.
We should try a multi-pronged approach, look at all vaccines developed so far, Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Western. Throw in HCQ and ivermectin, get everyone on 5,000 IU of vitamin D per day, and see where we get. We’re doing this wrong, and the media tell us to do it wrong. It’s a business model they’ve perfected in the Trump era.
And we are much poorer for it. We no longer think, we let others think for us. Based on a model of unleashing an overkill cacophony of ever-repeating messages, to which very few of us have any resistance. Neither in politics nor in epidemiology is that ever a wise idea.
But first of all, we need to give everyone back their own thoughts, their own ideas, their own opinion, based on actual news reports. Because if we don’t, this thing will blow up in many more faces than we care to even imagine before spring even arrives. Be careful out there.
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I’d like to take you to the ceremony
Well, that is if I remember the way
You see Jack and Jill they’re going to join their misery
I’m afraid it’s time for everyone to pray
You can see they’ve finally taken cover
They’re willing, yeah they’re willing to obey
Their vows are difficult, they’re for each other
So let nobody put a loophole, a loophole in their way
Why Don’t You Try – Leonard Cohen