Tag: media

Contrary to What the Media is Telling You, Freedom Does Not Come from a Vaccine

“It’s science based. It’s sensible. You can hug your grandkids again. If you’ve been waiting to get a haircut, see the dentist, you can do that,” former CDC Director Tom Frieden told CNN.

The idea that people have refused to hug their children and grandchildren over the fear of contracting the COVID-19 virus is heartbreaking. But even more worrisome is the fact that the CDC thinks it can grant or revoke that “freedom” to folks based on whether or not they take the shot.

“We know that people want to get vaccinated so they can get back to doing the things they enjoy with the people they love,” said CDC Director Rochelle P. Walensky, in a statement last week. “There are some activities that fully vaccinated people can begin to resume now in the privacy of their own homes.”

Aside from the obvious problems of people thinking the government can tell them when and where they can see and hug their children and grandchildren, there is the underlying principle of freedom. Requiring a vaccine for “freedom” is exactly the opposite of “freedom.”

Whether or not you agree with an individual’s choice to vaccinate themselves is irrelevant. While there will likely be many folks cheering on the state in these situations of forced medication and the silencing of critics, how you feel personally about vaccines should never lead to a loss of freedom — for anyone. No person should be forced by government regulation or societal pressure to receive any medication or treatment, including vaccines, against his or her will. This is the very foundation of freedom.

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How Do Big Media Outlets So Often “Independently Confirm” Each Other’s Falsehoods?

There were so many false reports circulated by the dominant corporate wing of the U.S. media as part of the five-year-long Russiagate hysteria that in January, 2019, I compiled what I called “The 10 Worst, Most Embarrassing U.S. Media Failures on the Trump-Russia Story.” The only difficult part of that article was choosing which among the many dozens of retractions, corrections and still-uncorrected factual falsehoods merited inclusion in the worst-ten list. So stiff was the competition that I was forced to omit many huge media Russiagate humiliations, and thus, to be fair to those who missed the cut, had to append a large “Dishonorable Mention” category at the end (note: the Intercept’s site seems to be down for the moment, rendering that first link inoperable).

That the entire Russiagate storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated by one decisive fact that can never be memory-holed: namely, the impetus for the scandal and subsequent investigation was the conspiracy theory that the Trump campaign had secretly and criminally conspired with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election, primarily hacking into the email inboxes of the DNC and Clinton campaign chief John Podesta. And a grand total of zero Americans were accused (let alone convicted) of participating in that animating conspiracy.

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Congressional Testimony: The Leading Activists for Online Censorship Are Corporate Journalists

What is most striking is that while Silicon Valley censorship of online speech and interference in political discourse is recognized as a grave menace to a healthy democracy around the democratic world, it is often dismissed in the U.S. — especially by journalists — as some sort of trivial “culture war” question when they are not actively cheering and even demanding more of it. Even more bizarre is that opposition to oligarchical censorship and monopoly power is often depicted by the liberal-left as a right-wing cause, largely because they perceive (inaccurately) that such oligarchical discourse policing will operate in their favor.

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Congress Wants to Give the Establishment Media a Massive Handout

If there is one force in society worse than Big Tech, it’s Big Media – mainstream, establishment, and corporate media.

Yet a bill currently making its way through Congress would give a massive handout to the latter, ostensibly justified by criticism of the former.

The bill, introduced by Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), is titled the “Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2019,” and it is a particularly troublesome piece of legislation, even by Democrat standards.

The title of a bill is quite deceptive. Far from promoting “competition,” the current version would instead cement the advantage of the establishment and corporate media at the expense of its competitors.

It would give Big Media companies a special exemption from antitrust law, allowing them to form a cartel that would, under normal circumstances, be illegal to create. But why should these establishment news companies be given a special exemption from antitrust law to negotiate on their own behalf something that applies only to their select few and not to all news companies and journalists? Of course, they should not.

Furthermore, there is nothing in the bill that would prevent the bigger media companies from excluding smaller companies from the cartel. If passed, there would be nothing to stop the formation of a cartel that includes CNN, NBC, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other big companies, while excluding smaller competitors in the independent media — not to mention local newspapers. Such a cartel would secure favorable rates for the former while leaving the latter in the dust.

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