Multiple mainstream media outlets published stories this week uncritically publicizing the claims of a climate change interest group, Climate Central (CC). According to CC, climate change has caused higher weather disaster costs in the United States this year than ever in history – or at least since 1980, which is as far as the records CC uses go back. These claims are false. While the costs of extreme weather events and wildfires were high in early 2025, there are no trends that indicate climate change is responsible. Rather, higher populations, increased development in disaster prone areas, poor water management, and human evil in the form of arson, were the cause of the abnormally high disaster costs.
The tenor of The Guardian, NBC, and other outlets covering CC’s disaster cost report was nearly universal. Climate change resulted in worse weather disasters and higher costs in early 2025 than ever before, a fact that would have been missed absent CC’s work since President Donald Trump cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program, which has previously monitored such costs.
Per The Guardian :
The first half of 2025 was the costliest on record for major disasters in the US, driven by huge wildfires in Los Angeles and storms that battered much of the rest of the country, according to a climate non-profit that has resurrected work axed by Donald Trump’s administration that tracked the biggest disasters.
In the first six months of this year, 14 separate weather-related disasters that each caused at least $1bn in damage hit the US, the Climate Central group has calculated. In total, these events cost $101bn in damages – lost homes, businesses, highways and other infrastructure – a toll higher than any other first half of a year since records on this began in 1980.
As NBC News wrote:
The first half of this year was the costliest ever recorded for weather and climate disasters in the United States, according to an analysis published Wednesday by the nonprofit organization Climate Central.
It is information that the public might never have learned: This spring, the Trump administration cut the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration program that had tracked weather events that caused at least $1 billion in damage. The researcher who led that work, Adam Smith, left NOAA over the decision.
To be clear, Climate Central is not an objective authority on the causes and consequences of climate change, or a neutral party regarding proposed solutions. Rather, it was created and exists solely to produce and promote material blaming human activities for causing climate change resulting in catastrophic consequences that threaten human life, and to promote government enforced solutions that limit fossil fuel use.
Leaving aside the motives of the organization that produced the report, the news coverage of the report was inaccurate from the start. The stories ignore the history of natural disasters in the regions that have been impacted this year, the demographic changes that have resulted in the higher costs, and, most importantly, the lack of any long-term discernable changes in weather patterns and the incidences and severity of extreme weather events for the areas affected.
Looking at where the disasters occurred in the first half of this year, from CC’s own tracking we find the weather events were tornadoes that occurred during typical tornado season stretching from Texas through the plains to the upper mid-west. This area of the country is commonly referred to as “tornado alley” because such events are so common there during the spring and early summer. So, nothing unusual there. What critically undermines the CC report and the media’s suggestion that the rising cost of tornadoes is due to climate change is the fact, as explored in Climate Realism, here, here, and here, for example, that neither the number, frequency, nor severity of tornadoes has increased as the Earth has slightly warmed.
Other events include flooding in areas of the country historically known for spring flooding as a result of snowmelt and severe spring snowstorms – many of the areas are popular riverfront towns or communities. Climate Realism has repeatedly debunked media claims that flooding is getting worse – data show it isn’t. If flooding is not becoming more frequent or severe, climate change can’t be causing higher costs related to flooding.
Finally, more than 60 percent of the $101 billion disaster costs that CC says resulted from climate change altered weather events are attributable to just a single event: the January 2025 wildfires that decimated a large swath of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles fires were horrific, of a kind not experienced there in recent history, but not unusual historically. The huge damage was a result of a combination of factors, good seasonal rainfall in recent years creating lush natural growth combined with and regular lawn and tree watering in wealthy enclaves, followed by a severe drought, creating conditions for a wildfire, and strong Santa Anna winds to drive a fire quickly across the landscape once started (once again a natural feature of the area). With these conditions, all that was needed was a spark, which a perverse arsonist provided. Once the fire started, winds drove it quickly across a tinder dry landscape and firefighters found a shortage of water in reservoirs as a result of political decisions made by the state government.
Los Angeles is not warmer than is was in the 1950s and precipitation has actually increased slightly in the region since 1895. Despite climate alarmists and advantage seeking, virtue signaling Democratic politicians attempting to blame climate change for the fire and its severity, the evidence indicates it had nothing to do with it.
If climate conditions haven’t change appreciably across the United States, in the sense that the more extreme weather patterns are emerging, the question is, why have costs related to weather disasters gone up so much in nominal dollars? Keep in mind that in inflation adjusted dollars as a percentage of GDP, the costs of natural disasters have fallen over time. (see the figure, below)
As should be obvious to any honest observer exercising the least bit of common sense, the reason for rising disaster costs is clear, the expanding bullseye effect. As Climate Realism has explored in dozens of articles previously, with more people moving into ecologically/climatically desirable locations, locations prone to natural disasters, erecting more homes, businesses, and related structures and infrastructure, property has gone up dramatically in value overtime. When a disaster like a wildfire (in this case an arson started wildfire) strikes, more people and property is impacted and related costs are higher. Climate Realism discussed this very point in articles linked, here, here, and here, to take but a few examples. Quite simply, when a hurricane hits Miami or Galveston now, there are more buildings and structures to destroy at those locations than there was 100 years ago.
One can acknowledge that CC is right, natural disasters are imposing higher costs in nominal dollars now than they did in the past, without jumping to the completely unfounded claim that climate change is the cause. Legitimate journalists and honest news outlets, as NBC News and The Guardian purport to be, should check their facts before parroting the false rantings of a climate lobbing group as the truth. Misleading, false alarm stories like these are perhaps why trust in the media is low and falling.
So the hoax is finally officially acknowledged. “Russiagate” – the mainstream narrative, that is – is now described by American intelligence chiefs as a fabrication that was concocted to overturn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.
Tulsi Gabbard, the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and CIA director John Ratcliffe have both accused former President Barack Obama of engaging in a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert the constitutional process. It’s not just Obama who is implicated in this high crime. Other former senior officials in his 2013-17 administration, including former DNI James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and head of the FBI James Comey, are also implicated. If justice is permitted, the political repercussions are truly earth-shattering.
The potential impact is not confined solely to the violation of U.S. laws and the democratic process – bad enough as that is. The Russiagate scandal that began in 2016 has had a lasting, damaging effect on U.S. and European relations with Russia. The frightfully dangerous NATO proxy war incited in Ukraine, which threatens to escalate into a full-scale world war, was fueled in large part by the hostility generated from the false claims of Russian interference in the U.S. elections.
The allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a subversion campaign against the 2016 U.S. election and colluded with Donald Trump to get him elected were always specious. The scandal was based on shoddy intel claims to purportedly explain how Trump defeated his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton. Subsequently, the scandal was hyped into a seemingly credible narrative by U.S. intelligence chiefs at the direction of then-President Barack Obama as a way to delegitimize Trump’s incoming first-term presidency.
Years before the recent intelligence disclosures, many independent journalists, including Aaron Maté, and former intelligence analysts like Ray MacGovern and William Binney, had cogently disproven the official Russiagate claims. Not only were these claims false, they were knowingly false. That is, lies and deliberate distortions. Russia did not hack emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee to discredit Clinton. Clinton’s corruption was exposed by a DNC internal leak to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks whistleblower site. That was partly why Assange was persecuted with years-long incarceration.
A large enough number of voters simply despised Clinton and her warmongering psychopathy, as well as her sell-out of working-class Americans for Wall Street largesse.
Furthermore, Moscow consistently denied any involvement in trying to influence the 2016 U.S. election or attempts to favor Trump. Putin has said more than once that Russia has no preference about who becomes U.S. president, implying that they’re all the same and controlled by deeper state forces. Laughably, too, while Washington accused Moscow of election interference, the actual record shows that the United States has habitually interfered in scores of foreign elections over many decades, including those of Russia. No other nation comes close to the U.S. – the self-declared “leader of the free world” – in sabotaging foreign elections.
In any case, it is instructive to compare the Russiagate farce with the Watergate scandal. Watergate involved spying by the White House of President Richard Nixon against a Democrat rival in the 1972 election. The political crisis that ensued led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. The U.S. nation was shocked by the dirty tricks. Several senior White House officials were later convicted and served time in jail for crimes related to the affair. Nixon was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and avoided prosecution. Nevertheless, Watergate indelibly disgraced U.S. politics and, at the time, was described as “the worst political scandal of the 20th century.”
Subsequent cases of corruption and malfeasance are often dubbed with the suffix “gate” in a nod to Watergate as a momentous political downfall. Hence, “Russiagate.”
There are hugely important differences, however. While Watergate was a scandal based on factual crimes and wrongdoing, Russiagate was always a contrived propaganda deception. The real scandal behind Russiagate was not Trump’s alleged misdeeds or those of Russia, but the criminal conspiracy by Obama and his administration to sabotage the 2016 election and subsequently to overthrow the Trump presidency and the democratic will of the American people. Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s most senior intelligence chief, has said that this amounts to “treason,” and she has called for the prosecution of Obama and other former senior aides.
Arguably, the real Russiagate scandal is far more criminal and devastating in its political implications than Watergate. The latter involved illegal spying and dirty tricks. Whereas, Russiagate involved a president and his intelligence chiefs trying to subvert the entire democratic process. Not only that, but the U.S. mainstream media are also now exposed for perpetrating a propaganda heist on the American public. All of the major U.S. media outlets amplified the politicised intelligence orchestrated by the Obama administration, claiming that Russia interfered in the election and that Trump was a “Kremlin stooge.” The hoax became an obsession in the U.S. media for years and piled up severe damage in international relations, a nefarious legacy that we are living with today.
The New York Times and Washington Post, reputedly two of the finest exponents of American journalism, jointly won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for their reporting on Russiagate, the official version, that is, which lent credibility to the hoax. In light of what we know now, these newspapers should be hanging their heads in shame for running a Goebbels-like Big Lie campaign to not only deceive the U.S. public but to subvert the democratic process and poison international relations. Their reputations are shredded, as well as those of other major media outlets, including ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.
Ironically, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for its reporting on the Watergate scandal. The story was made into a best-selling book, All The President’s Men, and a hit Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing the roles of intrepid reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post were acclaimed as the finest in U.S. journalism for exposing Watergate and bringing a crooked president to book.
How shameful and absurd that an even greater assault on American democracy and international relations in the form of Russiagate is ignored and buried by “America’s finest”. That the scandal is ignored and buried should be of no surprise because to properly reveal it would shatter the foundations of the U.S. political establishment and the sinister role of the deep state and its mainstream media propaganda system.
Drug companies report their biggest concern with the incoming Trump administration is the fear that the government will try to ban direct-to-consumer drug ads, according to a new report from The Lever that examines the industry practice.
Companies said such a ban would “almost certainly” lead to a drop in drug sales, according to a recent report by industry research firm Intron Health, which claims the return on investment for drug ads is as high as 100%-500%, depending on the drug.
The U.S. and New Zealand are the only two countries that allow drug companies to advertise directly to consumers.
When President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (RFK Jr.), was running as a presidential candidate, he promised to ban the ads through an executive order on his first day in office.
When he tapped Kennedy, founder and former chairman of Children’s Health Defense, to lead HHS, Trump criticized drugmakers and Big Food companies, saying they “have engaged in deception, misinformation, and disinformation.”
The Lever predicted the chances the administration can successfully ban these ads are “slim,” but said Big Pharma’s reaction shows how dependent the industry — and the media conglomerates it supports — has become on advertising drugs to consumers.
Critics say the ads “misinform patients and underemphasize treatment risks,” in part because they don’t provide all the information a patient needs to make an informed decision.
The ads also lead to unnecessary drug prescriptions, which The Lever said raises healthcare costs for consumers and taxpayers.
Most heavily advertised drugs don’t provide meaningful therapeutic benefit
Direct-to-consumer marketing in the U.S. began in 1981, with limited success at first because the FDA required drugmakers to list all possible side effects in the ads, according to The Lever’s short history of the practice.
Under the Clinton administration in 1997, the FDA relaxed its policies, allowing drugmakers to list only “major risks” in their ads, paving the way for a new and massive wave of television advertising for prescription drugs.
Spending on ads shot up 330% between 1996 and 2005, reaching $4.2 billion by 2004, and continued to grow after that.
According to a 2021 report by the congressional watchdog Government Accountability Office, 60% of the $560 billion that Medicare and its beneficiaries spent on drugs went to the advertised drugs.
The Lever claimed there are benefits to such advertising. Citing a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, it suggested that advertising can “somewhat” educate consumers and extend drug care to “undertreated patients.”
However, the report said advertising also increases the number of patients that request an advertised medication and the likelihood their prescriber will give it to them, whether they need it or not.
The ads also lead to greater use of higher-cost drugs over generics, even when those drugs offer no greater benefit.
The Lever cites a 2023 study in JAMA Network Open that assessed the “therapeutic value” — whether a drug led to improved clinical outcomes — of the top 73 most heavily advertised drugs. The study found that only 1 in 4 advertised drugs had a high therapeutic value.
“Many consumers might assume that the drugs they see all the time on TV are for cutting-edge therapies that are groundbreaking advances over the other treatment options on the market …
“Our study suggests that assumption is usually wrong: Heavily advertised drugs often do not necessarily provide meaningful therapeutic benefits as opposed to other therapeutic options.”
Obstacles to ending direct-to-consumer ads
The Lever said it is “relatively unlikely” Kennedy will be able to ban the ads, partly because efforts to merely restrict drug advertising have been defeated in courts on First Amendment grounds.
During Trump’s first administration, a federal judge blocked an HHS rule requiring drugmakers to include prices in their TV commercials, saying it exceeded the agency’s statutory authority.
“Kennedy could continue to push for cost transparency or require FDA review of all drug ads,” The Lever noted, “but any such reform attempts would likely be slow-going and challenged by the industry.”
TV and radio broadcasters are also expected to fight a drug ad ban because Big Pharma is one of the top advertising spenders. Last year, the National Association of Broadcaster industry lobbying group spent $8.8 million lobbying on issues including direct-to-consumer advertising, according to lobbying records.
Prescription drugs accounted for 30.7% of ad minutes across evening news programs on ABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC last year through Dec. 15, according to the WSJ.
The Lever proposed less drastic measures to “mitigate” some of the negative impacts of this advertising rather than banning it altogether.
For example, the FDA could require pharmaceutical companies to include disclaimers about the effectiveness of the drugs versus other drugs already on the market. Or drug companies could offer a “Drug Facts Box” label, that would provide one-page summaries of the risks and benefits of new drugs.
The agency could also extend its requirement, instituted in 2023, that TV and radio drug ads use “consumer-friendly” and “understandable” language to disclose potential side effects, applying it to over-the-counter medicines, dietary supplements or other products, which also account for hundreds of millions of advertising dollars.
“Even if all of those drug ads filling the TV and computer screens aren’t likely to go away soon, advocates hold out hope that regulators could at least require them to be more informative and comprehensible,” The Lever reported.
Two weeks ago, NBC News posted a long and disturbing article about “What Covid taught scientists and the public about the flu.” It’s basically as bad as you can imagine. It taught them that “Flu transmission can be stopped” and thus that “Nonpharmaceutical interventions work,” that “Flu can spread via aerosols,” that “‘Long flu’ may be a risk,” that “Asymptomatic flu infections may be underappreciated” and that “People want to test – and they’re good at it.” In short, scientists have learned that if an excess of hygiene hysteria can be stirred up over one unremarkable virus, it can be stirred up over another, and there’s every reason to hope for a new pandemic party in the near future.
A great part of the article is written around the statements of an obscure virologist named Seema Lakdawala, who specialises in influenza and is eager to see Covidian approaches applied to her field:
Before Covid, experts put limited stock in so-called nonpharmaceutical — that is, nonvaccination — strategies for preventing flu transmission. While behaviors such as hand-washing, wearing masks and air filtration were considered good ideas, they weren’t believed to move the needle significantly in stopping the spread.
“Prior to the pandemic, we were very focused on promoting vaccination as the primary way to decrease transmission of flu,” said Seema Lakdawala, an associate professor of microbiology and immunology at Emory University in Atlanta. “Now what we realize is that, yes, vaccinations are really important, but additional measures can really bring down the public health burden of influenza.”
Before 2020, she said there had been a handful of studies attempting to measure how well these interventions work, but they were inconclusive. “Coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic, we now have conclusive evidence that mitigation strategies like masking, social distancing and staying home when you are ill can drastically impact the transmission of influenza viruses,” she said.
It also features Linsey Marr, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who has spent most of the pandemic whining about airborne transmission and masks; and also recurrent plague chronicle villain Akiko Iwasaki, who is brought in to raise concerns about Long Flu:
“Covid is definitely not alone in having these long-term consequences, even after a mild infection,” she said. After the flu, it’s not unheard of to experience symptoms, especially lingering fatigue and brain fog.
According to Iwasaki, seasonal flu is less likely to cause lasting symptoms than pandemic flu strains like the 2009 H1N1 virus, but more research is needed to say for sure.
She said that for the 2009 pandemic flu and “even the 1918 flu, there are a lot of stories about people developing psychosis or neurological diseases over a long period.” …
If you start testing everyone for influenza, you’ll soon count hundreds of thousands of influenza deaths. From there, it’s a short leap to paranoia about asymptomatic transmission, followed by closures and vaccine mandates during every worse-than-average flu season. Arguments that the young and healthy should be spared these burdens, as they are little risk of dying from flu, will be shot out of the sky by vague appeals to Long Influenza.
All of this is downstream of the massive overreaction to Corona. Rather than admitting their mistake and backing down, the public health establishment spent two years progressively lowering the standards of acceptable risk to justify their ruinous measures. Perversely, this has positioned them to demand equally catastrophic containment measures in response to literally any other virus, which is precisely what they’re trying to do now. Whole careers and research programmes, after all, hang in the balance.
People like Iwasaki, the journalists who print her statements, and the politicians who pay attention to her research, all represent a grave, long-term danger to basic human well-being. This is particularly the case in countries like Italy and Germany, where older populations are far more susceptible both to media propaganda and to virus hysteria.
I don’t think the pandemicists will get their way any time soon. We’ve entered a refractory period, marked by an unacknowledged exhaustion with the virologists and their assorted snake oils, but the danger is far from over. These people will lurk underground in their institutions for years until the next opportunity presents itself. They know as well as I do that all the exotic fundraising pathogens they dine out on are no serious risk to humanity; and that, realistically, seasonal influenza is their best chance at another panic.
The official narrative on the Paul Pelosi attack purported by Democrats and the mainstream media makes zero sense. You don’t have to be a “conspiracy theorist” to recognize there were multiple contradictory accounts from the Department of Justice vs. local police and even some reports from journalists.
In fact, NBC suspended one of its own correspondents, Miguel Almaguer, after he reported that on the night of the supposed attack at the Pelosi home in San Francisco that Paul Pelosi actually opened the door when police knocked, seemingly in normal health, and then walked away from the officers to talk to the alleged assailant David Depape, when Depape attacked him. This report led many to suggest that Pelosi and Depape somehow knew each other.
A media firestorm ensued along with denials from the DOJ, which detailed a completely different version of events in which the police officers opened the door themselves and found Pelosi struggling with Depape who had injured him with a hammer. NBC dropped Almaguer after many called his report “bizarre.”
As it turns out, Miguel Almaguer was right. NBC now reports that police body cam footage has been made available to some media outlets and the footage clearly shows Paul Pelosi opening the door for police in seemingly perfect health. This contradicts the DOJ report on the attack and suggests a potential cover-up.
NBC is forced to retract their earlier assertions that the Paul Pelosi open door event was unfounded. Why? Because they have to. Eventually the police body cam footage will make it out into the public sphere for everyone to see, and NBC is front-running their own false reports. However, they do suggest that “it doesn’t really matter” who opened the door to the Pelosi home, and that Paul Pelosi’s actions don’t support the “conspiracy theories” surrounding the attack.
If that is the case, then why would the DOJ lie? Surely, they have seen the same body cam footage. If there is no conspiracy, then why is there an attempted coverup?
NBC has never had a problem editorializing news stories in the past and presenting biased opinions as evidence, yet suddenly now they pretend as if they have journalistic integrity? It is incumbent upon journalists to present what they think are the facts to the general public, but they are also required to investigate potential false accounts and false information in order to separate truth from lies. In the case of the attack on Paul Pelosi, NBC and other outlets clearly do not want to dig deeper.
Now that the midterm elections are over it would appear that the “MAGA attacker” story no longer serves any purpose. The Democrats conjured their own conspiracy theory first – The claim that right-wing “extremists” are a threat to “democracy” and that the Pelosi attack proves it. There is no evidence to support this claim. There is, though, evidence to support the theory that Pelosi was familiar with Depape and his behavior indicates familiarity.
No person under threat of being beaten with a hammer by a home intruder is going to move closer to the violent stranger instead of running towards the police. This does not happen, it’s nonsense.
What is likely to take place as this case develops? A media blackout on the story, much like we have witnessed with multiple cases in the past few years that make the political left look bad (the Waukesha massacre by BLM suppporter Darrell Brooks comes to mind). Details will probably emerge which further contradict the official narrative but they will be buried and ignored. The leftists will continue to label any suspicions as “conspiracy” as they hope and pray the general public completely forgets and moves on to other distractions.
As winter looms, NBC News has some top tips for parents who are concerned about their children catching respiratory viruses… keep them away from the dirty unvaccinated people.
In a recent segment, an infographic advised that those who want to “protect” their children should wash hands, stay home, get vaccines and “avoid physical interaction with unvaccinated individuals.”
There is no actual evidence that unvaccinated individuals are more at risk of transmitting COVID or that the vaccines prevent the spread of the virus, but never mind that inconvenient distraction.
The anchors then asked medical correspondent Dr. John Torres why more children are now so susceptible to RSV (respiratory syncytial virus), to which he responded “we don’t exactly know why.”
That is also not true, given that the CDC recently issued a report highlighting how a record number of children are now being hospitalised with common colds due to weakened immune systems.
Commenting on the findings, Dr Scott Roberts, a medical director at Yale University stated that lockdowns impacted the ability of children to build up immunity to common illnesses.
“There are two implications to this,” the doctor said, explaining “First, the gap gives time for the viruses to mutate even further to cause more severe disease.”
“And second, whatever immunity was built up to those viruses’ it will have waned making the immune response now much less potent,” Roberts added.
The doctor also noted that children, including his own son are now getting “constant infections.”
The CDC data is consistent with research by scientists at Yale who warned that it is not normal to see children with combinations of seven common viruses, including adenovirus, rhinovirus, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), human metapneumovirus, influenza and parainfluenza, as well as COVID-19.
But whatever, keeping your kids safely locked away at home and away from the unvaccinated is the smart move.
The Biden administration made direct payments to nearly all major corporate media outlets to deploy a $1 billion taxpayer-funded outreach campaign designed to push only positive coverage about COVID-19 vaccines and to censor any negative coverage.
Media outlets across the nation failed to disclose the federal government as the source of ads in news reports promoting the shots to their audiences.
According to a Freedom of Information Request filed by The Blaze, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) purchased advertising from major news outlets including ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox News, CNN and MSNBC.
HHS also ran media blitzes in major media publications including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, BuzzFeed News, Newsmax and hundreds of local TV stations and newspapers across the nation.
In addition to paying news outlets to push the vaccines, the federal government bought ads on TV, radio, in print and on social media as part of a “comprehensive media campaign,” HHS documents show.
In March 2021, Facebook announced a social media plan to “help get people vaccinated,” and worked with the Biden administration and U.S. health agencies to suppress what it called “COVID misinformation.”
BuzzFeed News advised everyone age 65 or older, people with health conditions that put them at high risk of severe illness from COVID, healthcare workers and those at high risk of exposure to the virus to get vaccine boosters, in accordance with guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Other publications, including the Los Angeles Times, featured advice from experts on how readers could convince “vaccine-hesitant people” to change their minds.
The Washington Postpresented “the pro-vaccine messages people want to hear.”
Newsmax said COVID vaccines have “been demonstrated to be safe and effective” and “encouraged citizens, especially those at risk, to get immunized.”
Yet, the latest data from the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System shows 1,151,450 reports of adverse events from all age groups following COVID vaccines, including 24,827 deaths since Dec. 14, 2020.
The media rarely covered negative news stories about COVID vaccines, and some have labeled anyone who questions the shots “science denialists” or “conspiracy theorists.”
“These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety,” The Blaze reported.
Congress appropriates $1 billion tax dollars to ‘strengthen vaccine confidence’
In March 2021, Congress appropriated $1 billion U.S. tax dollars for the Secretary of Health and Human Services to spend on activities to “strengthen vaccine confidence in the United States,” with $3 billion set aside for the CDC to fund “support and outreach efforts” in states through community-based organizations and trusted leaders.
Federal law allows HHS, acting through the CDC and other agencies, to award contracts to public and private entities to “carry out a national, evidence-based campaign to increase awareness and knowledge of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines for the prevention and control of diseases, combat misinformation about vaccines and disseminate scientific and evidence-based vaccine-related information, with the goal of increasing rates of vaccination across all ages … to reduce and eliminate vaccine-preventable diseases.”
HHS did not immediately respond to The Blazewhen asked if the agency used taxpayer dollars to pay for people to be interviewed, or for a PR firm to place experts and celebrities in interviews with news outlets.
The Blaze also reached out to several news organizations whose editorial boards claimed “firewall policies” preventing advertisers from influencing news coverage, but which nevertheless took money from HHS for targeted ads.
“Advertisers pay for space to share their messages, as was the case here, and those ads are clearly labeled as such,” Shani George, vice president of communications for The Washington Post, said in a statement. “The newsroom is completely independent from the advertising department.”
Although The Washington Post may have several departments, they’re all under the authority of the same CEO and key executive team.
A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles Times said their “newsroom operates independently from advertising.”
Former Newsmax anchor confirms network paid to promote only positive coverage
According to Desert News, Emerald Robinson, an independent journalist who previously served as the chief White House correspondent for Newsmax and One America News, said she was contacted by a whistleblower inside Newsmax who confirmed the news organization’s executives agreed to take money from HHS under the Biden administration to push only positive coverage of COVID vaccines.
Robinson was also contacted by top Newsmax executives in 2021, and told to stop any negative coverage of the COVID shots as “it was problematic.”
Robinson said she was warned multiple times by executives and was told by PR experts who worked with Newsmax that medical experts or doctors likely to say negative things about COVID vaccines would not be booked as guests.
Newsmax CEO Chris Ruddy in an op-ed applauded Biden for his vaccine efforts.
Ruddy wrote:
“At Newsmax, we have strongly advocated for the public to be vaccinated. The many medical experts who have appeared on our network have been near-unanimous in support of the vaccine. I myself have gotten the Pfizer vaccine. There’s no question in my mind, countless lives would have been saved if the vaccine was available earlier.”
In other examples cited by The Blaze, “fear-based vaccine ads” from HHS featuring “survivor” stories from COVID patients who were hospitalized in intensive care units were covered by CNN and discussed on ABC’s “The View” last October.
HHS ads on YouTube featuring celebrities like Sir Michael Caine and Sir Elton John garnered millions of views.
As The Defender reported in September, a group of people injured by COVID vaccines reached out to the media to tell their stories, only to be told by news agencies they could not cover COVID vaccine injuries.
Kristi Dobbs, 40, was injured by Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. Dobbs spent months pleading with U.S. health agencies to research the neurological injuries she and others are experiencing in hopes of finding a treatment.
Dobbs said she and others who developed neurological injuries after getting a COVID vaccine shared their experiences with a reporter, in hope of raising awareness about their experiences.
Dobbs said she and others knew they needed to tell their stories, without causing “vaccine hesitancy,” to protect others from the same fate — so members of the group started writing and calling anyone who would listen, including reporters, news agencies and members of Congress.
Dobbs said they tried the best they could as simple Americans to reach out to those who would hear their stories. Finally, a reporter from a small media company was willing to do a story. Dobbs and others from the group participated in a 2-hour and 40-minute interview.
“The story never went anywhere,” Dobbs said. She said the reporter told them a “higher up” at Pfizer made a call to the station and pressured staff there into not covering any other stories about vaccine adverse reactions.
As previously reported by The Defender, the same investment firms with financial interests in Pfizer also hold large ownership stakes of corporate media outlets.
In addition, Pfizer has contracts with the federal government, which has spent billions of American tax dollars both buying COVID vaccines and promoting only positive coverage to the public.
Liberty Counsel founder and Chairman Mat Staver told Desert News, “People have been injured and died as a result of the most extensive propaganda campaign in U.S. history and it was paid for with our taxpayer dollars.”
COVID vaccines are not safe or effective, but the American public has been given propaganda by the Biden administration instead of truth from the news media, Staver said.
“The consequence is that many people have needlessly suffered as a result of the censorship and propaganda.”
Megan Redshaw is a freelance reporter for The Defender. She has a background in political science, a law degree and extensive training in natural health.
Google News and the corporate media are promoting claims that global warming caused the deaths of thousands of birds after a cold early autumn induced the birds to migrate south before they were ready. As common sense would suggest, the assertion that global warming causes colder early-autumn temperatures is false, contrary to climate activists’ own predictions, and ridiculous.
In early autumn, people in Nebraska, Colorado, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona reported nearly 10,000 birds – an unusually high number – to the wildlife mortality database. Scientists discovered that most were migratory birds that had died of starvation. The birds typically migrate south later in the year, but early cold weather in the Upper Midwest, Canada, and Alaska induced the birds to migrate prior to their normal migration, and prior to building up sufficient weight and strength for the migration.
“It’s really hard to attribute direct causation, but given the close correlation of the weather event with the death of these birds, we think that either the weather event forced these birds to migrate prior to being ready, or maybe impacted their access to food sources during their migration,” Jonathan Sleeman, director of the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, told the UK Guardian.
Climate activists and their media allies were quick to blame global warming for the cold early autumn that led to the bird deaths.
“The unseasonably cold weather that northern states experienced early this year also worsened the die-off, causing earlier-than-usual bird migrations,” reported NBC television station KPNX in Phoenix.
“Two experts from Arizona State University see the report as another tragedy in the multiple climate change issues the state is facing,” KPNX added.
According to the UK Guardian, the bird deaths were “made worse by unseasonably cold weather probably linked to the climate crisis, scientists have said.”
Google News is promoting the Guardian article among its top search results today under “climate change.”
Climate activists have in the past attempted to blame very cold winters on global warming, but they had not previously blamed cold autumns on global warming. Indeed, climate activists have previously claimed exactly the opposite. For example, in November 2019 Yale Climate Communications published an article titled, “How is climate change affecting autumn? As temperatures warm, the fall season has been delayed.” As another example, Climate Communications published an article titled, “Autumn Falling Back.” The theme of these and many other articles is that global warming is delaying, not accelerating, the onset of cold autumn weather.
No, Google News, global warming does not cause the early onset of cold autumn temperatures, even if the cold temperatures cause politically convenient bird deaths.
James Taylor is the President of the Heartland Institute. Taylor is also director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy.
A Columbia Journalism Review expose reveals that, to control global journalism, Bill Gates has steered over $250 million to the BBC, NPR, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, the New York Times, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, Center for Investigative Reporting, Pulitzer Center, National Press Foundation, International Center for Journalists, and a host of other groups. To conceal his influence, Gates also funneled unknown sums via subgrants for contracts to other press outlets.
His press bribes have paid off. During the pandemic, bought and brain-dead news outlets have treated Bill Gates as a public health expert—despite his lack of medical training or regulatory experience.
Gates’s media gifts, says CJR author Tim Schwab, mean that “critical reporting about the Gates Foundation is rare.” The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation declined multiple interview requests from CJR and refused to disclose how much money it has funneled to journalists.
In 2007, the LA Times published one of the only critical investigations on the Gates Foundation, exposing Gates’s holdings in companies that hurt people his foundation claims to help, like industries linked to child labor. Lead reporter Charles Piller, says, “They were unwilling to answer questions and pretty much refused to respond in any sort of way…”
The investigation showed how Gates’s global health funding has steered the world’s aid agenda toward Gates’ personal goals (vaccines and GMO crops) and away from issues such as emergency preparedness to respond to disease outbreaks, like the Ebola crisis.
“They’ve dodged our questions and sought to undermine our coverage,” says freelance journalist Alex Park after investigating the Gates Foundation’s polio vaccine efforts.
NBC runs a strange variant on the “it’s even worse than the settled science thought” climate story: “Climate change models predicted ocean currents would speed up — but not this soon”. Except they didn’t predict ocean currents would speed up, they said the opposite. For years climate change models and alarmistspredicted ocean currents would slow down. Then it sped up and that too was proof of climate change. In every other branch of science predictions are required to come before observed events, and they’re not supposed to predict the opposite of what happens. And if they do, it’s not supposed to be used as proof of the theory.
In fact there’s a lot less to this story than meets the headline, as so often. (For instance the ones howling about accelerating sea level rise of about 0.04 mm when the range of uncertainty is 5 mm.) Starting with how nobody knows what the ocean’s currents are doing. It’s not as though climate modelers go forth and measure stuff. Instead, David Whitehouse points out on the Global Warming Policy Forum, they find some proxies, fill in massive gaps with computer models, put the resulting data-like object into other computer models and go “Aha, exactly as we predicted, except for the speed, timing and direction of the change.”
Actually to be fair this study didn’t even say that much. The researchers are totally on board with man-made global warming, kicking off their introduction with “Earth has experienced rapid warming for decades, driven by increased emissions of greenhouse gases”. But when it comes to these pesky, complex ocean currents, the lead author said bluntly “So far observations haven’t shown a trend”.
So more research is needed. And, as NBC quotes a completely unbiased Environmental Defense Fund scientist not involved with this project as adding, more funding for research. For us. But the study’s model does say that in theory, if we knew a lot more than we do and accepted certain assumptions, we’d expect the currents to speed up whereas on other assumptions we’d expect the opposite unless we didn’t.
Even the NBC story eventually stumbles into the dark, admitting that “The puzzling discovery, detailed in a study published last week in the journal Science Advances, highlights that climate change could have wide-ranging effects that are unexpected or severely understudied.” And here we thought the science was “settled”.
Oh wait. It is. NBC also says “The disparity suggests that some climate models may underestimate the effects of global warming.” But none overestimate it, because it’s always worse than it is. “Warmer water will generate hurricanes and extreme weather like that, so there are definitely implications from our work,” said one of the scientists, while an outside observer said “if the ocean system changes significantly, it could directly threaten life on Earth.”
And now, from the palatial Corbett Report studios in western Japan, it’s time for The 3rd Annual REAL Fake News Awards. Which media organization will take home the most Dinos for their dishonest reporting? Who will bear the shame of the biggest fake news story of the year? Find out in this year’s exciting gala broadcast!!
h/t to kit8642 who provides more details about the suspicious sourcing of this viral video clip in the nominations for these awards on corbettreport.com
THE AWARD FOR FAKEST FALSE FLAG COVER-UP OF THE YEAR GOES TO:
THE AWARD FOR FAKEST VIDEO FOOTAGE OF THE YEAR GOES TO:
ABC News for their “dramatic coverage” of “Turkey’s” military bombing “Kurd civilians” in a “Syrian border town”:
Dishonorable mentions go to Emannuelle Macron, Leo Dicaprio, Madonna and other Twitterati who posted there own fake news about the Amazon fire (h/t manbearpig)
THE AWARD FOR FAKEST ECONOMIC STATISTICS OF THE YEAR GOES TO:
The Japanese government, for their admission that 40% of the 56 key government economic releases are in fact fake, fudged or completely made up!
AND THE AWARD FOR FAKE NEWS STORY OF THE YEAR GOES TO:
“SPECIAL REPORT: As their home melts, Greenlanders confront the fallout of climate change” shrieks NBC in a Sept. 17 email teaser (not available online) that warns that “Greenland is ‘ground zero’ for global warming, a place where the effects of rising temperatures and melting ice could have the most dire consequences. The shorter winters and longer summers have opened new waterways for fishing and tourism — but they’ve also endangered hunting, dogsledding and other traditional ways of life for the island’s 55,000 residents.” Oh really? Then why do long-term temperature records for Greenland show almost no warming in the last 60 years, or the last hundred?
There’s a famous story in Plutarch about Philip of Macedon the Great sending an ultimatum to the Spartans to surrender because “If I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city” to which the Spartans replied simply “If”. And NBC’s casual use of “As” in the phrase “As their home melts,” not even as a premise to be explored but as an assumption to be swallowed untasted, we reply that if their home is not melting, nothing you say about what happens as it does tells us anything except that you are either gullible or zealots.
The NBC story to which the teaser links of course draws on the wisdom of the ancestors about the dramatic unpleasant changes, including one elder who said a thunderstorm was scary because in the good old days “We maybe hear some thunder one time in 30 years.” NBC did not delve into the question of whether in fact Greenland gets a thunderstorm every three decades.
Instead reporter Denise Chow breathlessly recounted being stuck near a glacier when the helicopter didn’t arrive and recalling with relief that fellow scientist David Holland had brought “a shotgun – just in case he needed to fend off polar bears.” Hmmm. Not so much threatened as threatening, are they?
As it happens, the bears stayed away and Chow ended up having a lovely night camping in exotic Arctic scenery before a chopper whisked them away the next day and “I found myself missing the peace, solitude and absolute splendor of Helheim Glacier.” But it was still terrifying because the Helheim glacier is melting rapidly and “Holland’s team is trying to understand what’s driving the staggering ice melt. This summer alone, an estimated 440 billion tons of ice has been lost from Greenland’s ice sheet — and some scientists say it could be more.”
We know what’s driving the main melt. It’s called summer. It happens every year and then the ice sheet grows again in winter. As for the glacier, well, many are retreating, including in Alaska, due to the natural temperature rebound from the Little Ice Age that saw them shrink dramatically before 1900.
Perhaps these journalists are seeing what they expect to see and their editors want them to see not what is actually there. NBC also sent star anchor Lester Holt “to Alaska – where he spent part of his childhood — to get a personal perspective of a climate in crisis. Scientists are warning that rising temperatures are having a significant impact on the state – including melting glaciers – which contributes to rising sea levels and warming oceans.” And Al Roker to Greenland to study… wait for it… “its record melt and heat wave.” Which he duly found, even though the data suggest that the widespread post-Victorian temperature rebound seems largely to have passed Greenland by. As we noted in August, its ice cap is about the same size today it was in 1850, and Greenland as a whole appears to have been cooling gently since the 1920s. Awkward.
Chow also failed for some reason to camp by Greenland’s Jakobshavn glacier that has recently baffled scientists by growing instead of shrinking. Instead she had an excellent adventure and filed the usual story.
In retrospect it can be seen that the 1967 war, the Six Days War, was the turning point in the relationship between the Zionist state of Israel and the Jews of the world (the majority of Jews who prefer to live not in Israel but as citizens of many other nations). Until the 1967 war, and with the exception of a minority of who were politically active, most non-Israeli Jews did not have – how can I put it? – a great empathy with Zionism’s child. Israel was there and, in the sub-consciousness, a refuge of last resort; but the Jewish nationalism it represented had not generated the overtly enthusiastic support of the Jews of the world. The Jews of Israel were in their chosen place and the Jews of the world were in their chosen places. There was not, so to speak, a great feeling of togetherness. At a point David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father and first prime minister, was so disillusioned by the indifference of world Jewry that he went public with his criticism – not enough Jews were coming to live in Israel.
So how and why did the 1967 war transform the relationship between the Jews of the world and Israel? … continue
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