Consider the source

Good advice that has led us all astray

Newshound rolls in snow to cool off after long hike in the woods

If you watch or listen to alternative media, you probably know why the mainstream media has become the largest purveyor of misinformation on the planet. It’s because news outlets are owned by the same people who control everything else. They want us to believe the world works a certain way. It’s in their best interests that we don’t know the truth because we might think we should have a say in our own future. There are far more of us than them, after all. And they might be meaner but we’re probably angrier at this point. Think French Revolution (though, come to think of it, that didn’t come about in the way we’ve been told either).

What these same savvy new online media consumers often don’t understand is how it works out that the truth is hidden from us despite all the ink and air time dedicated to bringing us the news. They often believe all journalists intentionally lie of their own accord, maybe because they have an agenda; that they are told to lie by higher-ups and acquiesce to keep their jobs; or that they’re trained and paid by agencies such as the CIA to infiltrate and lie.

All of those things undoubtedly happen. But in and of themselves and for the most part, they’re not how the legacy media consistently ends up telling its audiences far and wide stories about war, natural disasters, assassination attempts, immigration, pandemics, terrorist attacks, mass shootings, climate change and politics that bear little resemblance to the truth.

It all starts in journalism school, whether they receive a two-year diploma from a small community college or earn a four-year degree from a large ivy league university (where, incidentally, they are also more likely to be exposed to what we now think of as left-leaning agendas such as critical race theory and the climate change and gender ideologies. Could this be why most large, influential daily newspapers are far more likely to hire reporters with degrees than with diplomas? Hmm…)

There they are taught one of the basic tenets of good journalism, the caution to “consider the source”. It’s good advice as far as it goes. First-hand witnesses are better sources for details of a robbery than people who heard the story second-hand from a friend of a friend. Geologists are more likely to know what to make of a lump of greyish-brown rock that fell to the earth in a fiery blaze than are astrologists. And ex-wives may know their former husbands better than most, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re offering up a well-balanced character reference.

So far so good. I think most of us would agree.

But journalists also learn from day one that “reliable” sources are the conventional sources of truth that most of us are taught from birth to trust: government and its spokespeople, police and the justice system, medical professionals and public health officials and anyone with mainstream university accreditation to his or her name, especially if they work for a government- or industry-funded facility.

As many of us have discovered in the past five years, those sources are only as reliable as whoever is pulling their strings. And there’s obviously someone pulling the strings when so-called political and health “leaders” around the world all respond to a crisis such as a so-called pandemic in the exact same way. None of them, it turns out, were thinking or acting independently. They were controlled by a higher power. And it sure wasn’t THE higher power! (Nor, for that matter, were the religious “leaders” who took money from the government to close their doors and promote vaccination during Covid when their congregations needed good leadership most.) Let’s call that controlling power, The Powers That Shouldn’t Be (TPTSB), as James Corbett of The Corbett Report does. I like that because it’s true. Too few people hold too much power and that shouldn’t be.

So, mainstream media equals mainstream sources equals mainstream news. Journalists, like the rest of us, are trained to believe that outliers - anyone with facts or opinions that stray from the primary narrative - are ostracized for a reason. And the reason is that they’re crazy, misinformed, being paid by someone to say that or … fill in the blank.

In other words, outliers are not reliable sources.

But as many of us have learned in the last five years thanks to the alternative media - which has its own issues but that’s a story for another day - outliers are often the only reliable sources. And as a result of that truth, the mainstream media is the leading source of untruth. Why? Because the information is dictated by TPTSB to a few industry and political leaders and the like, who tell it to many “trusted news sources” worldwide, who via press releases and interviews parrot that information to the media, who disseminate it to the public. Anyone who doesn’t go along with the program becomes an outlier who is dismissed from the job and therefore loses trusted source status. Their on-line profile is often tampered with as well, so that they appear to be all of the things that make them someone you couldn’t possibly look to for the truth. Cancel culture’s purpose is to rob outliers of their voices.

Does this explain how every media voice everywhere said the same things about Covid-19 at the same time? Not entirely.

I noticed something was amiss, media-wise, early on in the “pandemic” while listening to the province’s daily public health press conferences. As a former community newspaper journalist and, for a short period, editor, I wondered why no one was asking the obvious questions. Why was there no one - ever - at the medical facility tents set up in the park to purportedly deal with the overflow of Covid patients from hospitals? Why were long-term care staff working at multiple facilities if they could so easily carry the plague from one to the other - especially since the rest of us were distancing and masking purportedly to save vulnerable older people? How can asymptomatic spread be a thing? How come you told us first that masks didn’t work and then that we had to wear them everywhere to stop the spread? If two weeks to flatten the curve didn’t work, why would two month or darn near two years? How come the housekeeping staff say the hospital is no busier than normal? How come no one’s dying from flu this year? If vaccination works, why are unvaccinated people a danger to anybody who’s vaccinated?

And the list goes on.

Not one journalist asked any of the questions I would have asked. It gradually dawned on me that they weren’t all incompetent. (And I was suspicious because by the time I left the industry 20 years ago, you had to be a certain kind of person to work in mainstream media.) It was as if they were toeing some party line …

Cue the Trusted News Initiative (TNI): the party line that separates misinformation from the truth and the truth from all of us.

Wikipedia, that paragon of truth-ish-ness, says the TNI “is an international alliance of news media, social media and technology corporations which claim to be working to identify and combat purported disinformation about national elections, the Covid-19 pandemic and Covid-19 vaccines.”

Apparently it all started in June 2019, when a BBC bigwig convened a summit of the world’s largest news and social media companies to “address concerns regarding online misinformation surrounding the 2019 Indian general election.” (Everyone knows fair Indian elections are priority one.) This led to the Trusted News Charter in September of 2019, an “outline of plans to develop tools to assist industry partners in moving quickly and collectively to undermine disinformation before it can take hold."

Convenient timing, no?

The BBC then announced in March of 2020 that the TNI would “extend its efforts” to combatting Covid-19 misinformation around the world. Then that it would continue its good work for the duration of the 2020 US presidential election. (And thank God for that because everyone knows that went off without a misinformational hitch!)

Aside from what we already know about how the TNI was used to get everyone in the media on the same page during Covid, discredit outlier sources online and censor everyone, everywhere, all the time, it likely also had the effect of silencing any journalist who had questions that weren’t already being answered by the “trusted news sources”.

From where I’m sitting, it looks like the TNI has “extended its efforts” indefinitely. In fact, it’s been mainstreamed to the point that we all accept the fact that there’s certain words or topics you just can’t broach on social media anymore.

Of course, mainstream sourcing and the TNI aren’t the only reason false or partial narratives make up so much of the mainstream news. Newsroom budgets and staff were pared back to bare bones toward the end of the last century which means reporters with too much to do, don’t usually have time to do the research they should. They come to rely on fewer and fewer sources, often those who can be reliably depended upon to be waiting by their phones. Newsrooms also rely more on news organizations like Reuters and the like, which disseminate most of the international news that daily newspapers publish. That makes it easy for one narrative to dominate the airwaves.

Does any of this excuse the journalists who allowed themselves to be silenced during Covid-19? The ones with enough experience and smarts to know better?

No more than it excuses the doctors and nurses who knew masks didn’t prevent the spread of disease but stayed silent. No more than it excuses the politicians who knew lockdowns were ineffective and would put small businesses out of business. The public health practitioners who knew natural immunity was superior to vaccination in stopping the spread of disease. The scientists who knew the PCR test wasn’t meant to be used as a diagnostic tool. The lawyers and judges who knew barring unvaccinated people from restaurants, movie theatres, concerts and darn near everywhere else violated the tenets of a free society and more than one country’s constitution.

It takes a whole community of “trusted new sources” saying what they’re told to say and the rest staying silent to raise up a fake pandemic (much less a fake world narrative like the one we in the West have been living in to a greater and greater extent for at least a century.) And it takes the same kind of willful ignorance for the mainstream world to keep pretending there’s no fish despite the smell - despite the death, destruction of livelihoods and economies and the untold other miseries that resulted.

Why does the main stream of society want to keep pretending nothing untoward happened? There are many reasons. Most of us don’t like to have our entire worldview tipped on its head. And if discovering that darn near everything you learned since Kindergarten is a lie isn’t paradigm shifting, nothing is.

But I think a big part of the reason our society doesn’t want to come to terms with the Covid lies and face up to what that actually means on a grand scale, is because so many of those who’ve done exactly what was expected of them to get where they are and benefitted most from the way our society works are themselves people in trusted professions. And they participated with their silence, if not in the actual doing of their job. These are the well-educated, well-heeled, well-to-do people with the “good” jobs - the jobs that pay well enough to be worth a few sleepless nights over moral qualms if it means you can keep your social status and your summer cottage. Plus, they have a family to feed. And it must be the right thing to do or everyone else wouldn’t be doing it too. And if they quit it wouldn’t change anything anyway because someone else would just come along and do the job…

Our society has gotten to the stage where we can’t trust anything we hear, not just because the mainstream media is lying to us, but because most of us are lying to ourselves. And we’re doing it because TPTSB have made it so difficult to earn a living, (yet paradoxically so important to own the expensive things that give us status) that we’ve outsourced our morals, our thinking, our child rearing, our health, our entertainment and our leadership to “trusted professionals” … because it’s easier than taking responsibility for our own decisions, bodies, families and communities.