Tag: mainstream media

MSNBC Says It’s A ‘Lizard People Conspiracy Theory’ That WEF Is Promoting Vaccines And Bug Eating

In a Thursday broadcast, MSNBC talking heads claimed that anyone questioning the intentions of the World Economic Forum as potentially nefarious is a likely a ‘conspiracy theorist’ who believes in lizard people.

The network platformed Semafor Editor-In-Chief Ben Smith, who took shots at Elon Musk for “whipping up” conspiracies about the Davos elite on Twitter, after Musk described the WEF as “an unelected world government.”

Smith mocked Musk’s assertion and claimed that Musk is with the crazy right wing “people who think that the CEOs here are gathering to make you take vaccines and to eat bugs.”

In a further video, Smith claimed “[T]here may be a conspiracy, it’s basically a conspiracy by global businesses to keep their taxes low by making the case that they’re doing good in other means than paying taxes to the government,” Smith further declared, adding “There are no lizards involved.”

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Recalling CNN’s Fraudulent “Interview” With A Seven Year-Old Syrian Girl

There’s a thread going around on Twitter by Columbia University’s Sophie Fullerton advancing the claim that I have promoted crazy conspiracy theories about child “crisis actors” in Syrian war atrocities. Fullerton has me blocked on Twitter so I can’t respond to her there, but in her thread she brings up one of the most egregious instances I’ve ever seen of US war propaganda in the mass media, so it’s worth taking some time to unpack her claims here as a public service.

Fullerton has written for The Washington Post slamming social media users who travel to Syria and dispute the official mainstream narrative about what’s been happening in that country, and has served as an expert analyst in a Daily Beast hit piece on the progressive Gravel Institute for their scrutiny of US warmongering. So it’s fair to call her a spinmeister on the side of the US empire, and it’s probably fair to predict that her young career will bring her tremendous success and mainstream elevation as a result of this.

“It takes a special kind of evil to see what happened yesterday in Dnipro and immediately start doing PR for the perpetrator,” Fullerton tweets, with a screenshot of me saying it’s deceitful for people to talk about the Russian invasion of Ukraine without also talking about the ways the US empire provoked and benefits from this war. “It should come at no surprise that this account built a following out of claiming Syrian children impacted by Assad/Russia atrocities were crisis actors,” she adds.

Fullerton’s thread has gained a lot of traction because it has been amplified by Olga Lautman, a Senior Fellow at the imperialist think tank Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) with a large following. CEPA’s donor list includes the US State Department, the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy, and the weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, BAE Systems, and General Atomics.

Fullerton uses the phrase “crisis actors” to evoke the image most people have of that term and what it means: conspiracy theories about actors pretending to have been wounded or otherwise involved in a false flag mass shooting or bombing incident, particularly Alex Jones’s infamous claims about Sandy Hook victims. Google defines “crisis actor” as “a person who takes part in a supposed conspiracy to manipulate public opinion by pretending to be a victim of an event such as a bombing, mass shooting, or natural disaster.” Imperial spinmeisters have a history of using the phrase “crisis actors” to smear skeptics of dubious claims by the US empire about what’s been happening in Syria as crazy conspiracy theorists who are the same as Sandy Hook deniers.

But for her evidence of my “crisis actors” conspiracy theorizing, Fullerton cites something very different from any such claim. She cites an article I wrote in 2018 titled “That Time CNN Staged A Fake Interview With A Syrian Child For War Propaganda“, and revealingly she includes only a screenshot of the top of the article rather than providing a link. She did this because the arguments made in the article are unassailable, and she doesn’t want people to see them.

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BBC accidentally admits COVID Vaccine is to blame for 2022 being Worst Year for Excess Deaths in Half a Century after “Journalists” choose to LIE believing nobody would “mark their Homework”

The people of the UK should now be in a state of shock.

But instead, they have been distracted by non-stop coverage of Prince Harry’s new book, so will have most likely missed the tragic and devastating information published by BBC News of all organisations.

Information that reveals the UK suffered the highest number of excess deaths throughout 2022 in over half a century.

However, the reporters, driven by ambition and a belief that they will not be held accountable, made the decision to conceal the truth behind why there were so many excess deaths last year.

They most likely thought the majority of the British public would be too lazy to “mark their homework”, so to speak.

But they didn’t count on an independent news organisation committed to reporting the facts that the mainstream refuse to fact-checking their quietly published article.

And we can reveal that the widely but most definitely unjustly trusted news source/propaganda arm of the Government known as the BBC, and its reporters, have knowingly lied about the safety of the vaccine and lied to you.

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Western Journalists Are Cowardly, Approval-Seeking Losers

Research conducted by New York University’s Center for Social Media and Politics into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead-up to the 2016 US presidential election has found “no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

Which is to say that all the years of hysterical shrieking about Russian trolls interfering in US democracy and corrupting the fragile little minds of Americans — a narrative that has been used to drum up support for internet censorship and ever-increasing US government involvement in the regulation of online speech — was false.

And to be clear, this isn’t actually news. It was established years ago that the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency could not possibly have had any meaningful impact on the 2016 election, because the scope of its operations was quite small, its posts were mostly unrelated to the election and many were posted after the election occurred, and its funding was dwarfed by orders of magnitude by domestic campaigns to influence the election outcome.

What’s different this time around, six years after Trump’s inauguration, is that this time the mass media are reporting on these findings.

The Washington Post has an article out with the brazenly misleading headline “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters“. Anyone who reads the article itself will find its author Tim Starks acknowledges that “Russian accounts had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior,” but the insertion of the word “little” means anyone who just reads the headline (the overwhelming majority of people encountering the article) will come away with the impression that Russian trolls still had some influence on 2016 voters.

“Little influence” could mean anything shy of tremendous influence. But the study did not find that Russian trolls had “little influence” over the election; it failed to find any measurable influence at all. 

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The Russian Twitter Bots Story Is A Study In Media’s ‘Lie, Set The Narrative, Then Quietly Backtrack’ Playbook

The Washington Post admitted Monday that “Russian trolls on Twitter had little influence on 2016 voters” — years after the Post and other corporate media water-carriers pushed the false story that former President Donald Trump’s election was illegitimate, due in part to Russian interference via bots on Twitter targeting U.S. social media users. The admission cites a New York University study that found “there was no relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior.”

Media treatment of the non-story followed a predictable, three-step process that’s become the propaganda press’s MO: Spread a false claim, control the narrative while crushing dissent with bogus “fact checks,” and then admit the truth only after the news cycle has achieved its intended purpose.

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Washington Post admits years later that Russian trolls ‘had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior’

The Washington Post, whose journalists were awarded for peddling the discredited “Russia Hoax” narrative, has admitted that so-called Russian trolls “had no measurable impact in changing minds or influencing voter behavior” ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

What prompted the Post to call into question the central tenet of the narrative advanced by liberal media outlets for years was a study led by the New York University Center for Social Media and Politics.

The study

A study published on Jan. 9 in the journal Nature Communications concluded that “it would appear unlikely that the Russian foreign influence campaign on Twitter could have had much more than a relatively minor influence on individual-level attitudes and voting behavior.”

According to the study, it is unlikely that a handful of so-called Russian trolls exerted significant influence for these four reasons:

  • “exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts was concentrated among a small group of users, with only 1% of users accounting for 70% of all exposures”;
  • “exposure to Russian foreign influence tweets was overshadowed by the amount of exposure to traditional news media and US political candidates”;
  • “respondents with the highest levels of exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts were those arguably least likely to need influencing: those who identified themselves as highly partisan Republicans, who were already likely favorable to Donald Trump”; and
  • no “meaningful relationships between exposure to posts from Russian foreign influence accounts and changes in respondents’ attitudes on the issues, political polarization, or voting behavior” could be found.

In short: Few people saw the trolls’ posts; those who saw them didn’t need further convincing; the mainstream media’s narrative and candidates’ agitprop was far more pervasive; and it doesn’t seem the trolling ultimately had any meaningful effect.

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“Project Censored” List: Top 25 Most Censored News Stories Of The Year

“Published each year by Seven Stories Press, featuring dispatches from the ongoing revolution in independent journalism, each book reports the year’s top-25 independent news stories, which corporate media have ignored, misrepresented, or censored; analyzes corporate “junk food” news and “news abuse;” highlights organizations that exemplify media democracy in action; and investigates hot topics in journalism and politics.” – Source

The presentation of the Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 extends the tradition originated by Professor Carl Jensen and his Sonoma State University students in 1976, while reflecting how the expansion of the Project to include affiliate faculty and students from campuses across North America has made the Project even more diverse and robust. The Top 25 stories of 2021-2022 have been selected from several hundred candidate stories submitted by 207 student researchers from ten US college and university campuses. – Source

About Project Censored

 “Project Censored educates students and the public about the importance of a truly free press for democratic self-government. We expose and oppose news censorship and we promote independent investigative journalism, media literacy, and critical thinking. Through our website, weekly radio program, annual book, and other programs, we provide this service to the United States, Canada, UK, and the world.

2021-2022 Theme: Billionaire’s Press

Writing for the Santa Fe reporter, “Project Censored, The billionaires’ press dominates censorship beat” Paul Rosenberg explained “Since its founding in 1976, Project Censored has been focused on stories—like Watergate before the 1972 election—that aren’t censored in the authoritarian government sense, but in a broader, expanded sense reflective of what a functioning democracy should be, censorship defined as “the suppression of information, whether purposeful or not, by any method—including bias, omission, underreporting, or self-censorship—that prevents the public from fully knowing what is happening in society.” It is, after all, the reason that journalism enjoys special protection in the First Amendment: Without the free flow of vital information, government based on the consent of the governed is but an illusory dream.”

“Yet, from the very beginning, as A.J. Liebling put it, ‘Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.’”

“In their introduction to Project Censored’s annual State of the Free Press, [ ] Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth [ ] observe, “History shows that consolidated media, controlled by a handful of elite owners, seldom serves the public interest.”

“Despite the promise of boundless access to information, Silicon Valley mirrors legacy media in its consolidated ownership and privileging of elite narratives. This new class of billionaire oligarchs owns or controls the most popular media platforms, including the companies often referred to as the FAANGs—Facebook (Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet)”.

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Mainstream Media Spun These News Stories as Conspiracy Theories — But They Turned Out to Be True

In a recent episode of “The Kim Iversen Show,” political commentator Kim Iversen reviewed the top 10 stories in 2022 that she said the mainstream media spun as “conspiracy theories” — but turned out to be true after all.

Iversen said the conspiracy theorist label was usually given “simply for saying something that went against the establishment liberal orthodoxy — not because it was quackery rooted in falsehoods.”

“The reality is, so many that they [the mainstream media] claim to be ‘conspiracy theories’ are actually true,” Iversen said, adding:

“Anytime someone’s labeled as a conspiracy theorist, it might just mean it’s time to actually investigate and look a little deeper into whatever it is they’re claiming because so often nowadays conspiracy theorists are not conspiracy theorists at all. They’re truth-tellers — fact-tellers, researchers — and they’re connecting the dots and getting a lot of things right.”

“Maybe we can make a New Year’s resolution to make 2023 the year of truth,” she suggested.

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