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Media censorship is directed to nearly every important issue facing society – and has been for a long, long time

BY PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA | JUNE 14, 2023

I wrote a surprisingly popular tweet about censorship a couple of weeks ago that I thought I would expand upon here. I wrote it one night after I had made the mistake of reading some newspapers on-line and watching CNN clips, (something I do for opposition research, not to discover any truth or real news – that I get from Rumble, independant journalists, TikTok, Twitter, and most importantly books).

Then I read Rav Arora’s post on his excellent Substack “The Illusion of Consensus” with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (please subscribe to their Substack as I want to support one of the few journalists whose integrity forced them to stop working for corporate controlled media).

One line of Rav’s was a particularly powerful and concise articulation of what I (and all of us) have been living through in Covid in regards to the media;

“Notably, journalism — the filter through which ordinary people living busy lives come to understand the complex matrix of power, money, and influence — has also been exposed for its bizarre servility to public health decrees and pharmaceutical companies.”

Although I was saddened to hear of the treatment and financial loss Rav suffered from not being able to publish deeply researched pieces questioning vaccine policy, I was shocked at the near identicalness (if that’s a word) and absurdity of the wording of the rejections from numerous editors he included in his post. Although servility to Pharma paymasters might partly explain their rejections, I instead felt they revealed that a “collective psychosis” had taken hold – these editors exhibited a sudden unquestioning, pervasive (and sincere!) belief in the infallibility of the health agencies and the trustworthiness of their data supporting a number of blatantly illogical health and vaccine policies.

The replies betrayed a shocking, willful ignorance of the epidemiologic data not supporting jab policies, like mandating them for healthy young people and those with natural immunity (for starters). These news editors were both drowning in and failing to question the selective and/or manipulated data supporting the jabs. And they did so with a complete ignorance of the massive amount of conflicting and contradictory data (that Rav was trying to discuss in his article). I almost laughed at the realization that these editors were victims of their own censorship! Their deeply erroneous and harmful beliefs were self-inflicted by their censoring actions.

But knowledge of the aggressive censorship around every single Covid issue is not new, nor unknown to anyone who reads my posts. What is really freaking me out now is the extent of censorship and propaganda that I am seeing on almost every single non-Covid topic (which I will go into in my 2nd post on censorship). Anyway, the night of my tweet, I was getting disturbed watching the synchronized, coordinated, repetitive media narratives around Ukraine, climate change, the Bidens, Trump and many other topics. I started to wonder, “how long and how bad has it been like this?”

Answer: a long long time.

A friend and FLCCC supporter named Gavin De Becker (of Joe Rogan podcast interview fame), sent en email to a group of us a year ago and I saved it because of how much it impacted me. He included a chapter of Upton Sinclair’s book called “The Brass Check.”

First, know that Sinclair was one of the greatest “truth-tellers” in modern history. From our “friends” at Wikipedia:

Upton Beall Sinclair Jr. (September 20, 1878 – November 25, 1968) was an American writer, muckraker, political activist and the 1934 Democratic Party nominee for governor of California who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres. Sinclair’s work was well known and popular in the first half of the 20th century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.

In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muck-raking novel, The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meatpacking industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.^[1] In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muck-raking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States. Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.^[2] Time magazine called him “a man with every gift except humor and silence”.^[3] He is also well remembered for the quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.“^[4]

Further, know that the Associated Press was formed in May 1846 by five daily newspapers in New York City to share the cost of transmitting news of the Mexican–American War.

Note from Gavin: “This is interesting because Upton Sinclair describes several newspaper barons who had invested heavily in land in Mexico, and how they dearly wanted the US to declare war on Mexico:”

By methods such as these Otis Chandler grew wealthy, and later on he purchased six hundred and fifty thousand acres of land in Northern Mexico. When the Diaz regime was overthrown, Otis had trouble in getting his cattle out, so he wanted a counter-revolution in Mexico, and for years the whole policy of his paper has been directed to bringing on intervention and conquest of that country. At one time the Federal authorities indicted Harry Chandler, son-in-law of Otis, and his successor in control of the “Times,” for conspiracy to ship arms into Mexico. Mr. Chandler was acquitted.

Mr. Hearst also owns enormous stretches of land in Mexico, and Mr. Hearst also understands that if Mexico were conquered and annexed by the United States, the value of his lands would be increased many times over. Therefore for fifteen years the Hearst newspapers have been used as a means of forcing war with Mexico. Mr. Hearst admits and is proud of the fact that it was he who made the Spanish-American war. He sent Frederick Remington to Cuba to make pictures of the war, and Remington was afraid there wasn’t going to be any war, and so cabled Mr. Hearst. Mr. Hearst answered:

“You make the pictures and I’ll make the war.”

Hmm. Doesn’t the above make you think of the Ukraine war today?

Anyway, know that The Brass Check was published in 1919. In one chapter he does a deep dive into the Associated Press (AP) :

About nine hundred daily newspapers in the United States, comprising the great majority of the journals of influence and circulation, receive and print the news dispatches of the Associated Press. This means that concerning any event of importance an identical dispatch is printed about fifteen million times and may be read by thirty million persons.

According to the construction and wording of that dispatch, so will be the impression these thirty million persons will receive, and the opinion they will form and pass along to others. Here is the most tremendous engine for Power that ever existed in this world. If you can conceive all that Power ever wielded by the great autocrats of history, by the Alexanders, Caesars, Tamburlaines, Kubla Khans and Napoleons, to be massed together into one vast unit of Power, even this would be less than the Power now wielded by the Associated Press.

Thought is the ultimate force in the world and here you have an engine that causes thirty million minds to have the same thought at the same moment, and nothing on earth can equal the force thus generated.

Well-informed men know that the great Controlling Interests have secured most of the Other sources and engines of Power. They own or control most of the newspapers, most of the magazines, most of the pulpits, all of the politicians and most of the public men. We are asked to believe that they do not own or control the Associated Press, by far the most desirable and potent of these engines. We are asked to believe that the character and wording of the dispatches upon which depends so much public opinion is never influenced in behalf of the Controlling Interests. We are asked to believe that Interests that have absorbed all other such agencies for their benefit have overlooked this, the most useful and valuable of all. We are even asked to believe that, although the Associated Press is a mutual concern, owned by the newspapers, and although these newspapers that own it are in turn owned by the Controlling Interests, the Controlling Interests do not own, control or influence the Associated Press, which goes its immaculate way, furnishing impartial and unbiased news to the partial and biased journals that own it.

That is to say that when you buy a house you “do not buy its foundations.”

Note from Gavin: Who controls the AP today?  Steven R. Swartz is the Chairman, and oh yeah, he’s also President and CEO of Hearst.  The AP website describes itself as “an independent, not-for-profit news cooperative, our U.S. newspaper members elect a board of directors to provide corporate direction according to AP bylaws.”

The key phrase in the above is: “our U.S. newspaper members elect a board of directors to provide corporate direction according to AP bylaws.”

Now, if the “impartiality” of the AP is to be believed, then the Board must be made up of a large cast of newspaper editors with diverse backgrounds in terms of race, sex, wealth, ethnicity, and religion right?

Dream on. Will Irwin, writing in Harper’s Weekly in 1914, described a “ring of old, Tory, forty-one vote papers in control” of the Associated Press (meaning the small subset of newspaper editors with voting control of AP policies). Note that, at the time, 700 newspapers used the AP, but a subset of only 41 held a near majority of the voting power to elect the Board of Directors.

Sinclair then recounts how each has attacked him and his truth-telling colleagues at the time:

The “Los Angeles Times” is here, and de Young’s “San Francisco Chronicle,” and the “San Francisco Bulletin,” of the itching palm, and the “San Francisco Examiner,” which sent out my Shredded Wheat story, and the “Sacramento Union,” which was sold to the Calkins syndicate. Here is the “Pueblo Chieftain,” which circulated the foul slanders about Judge Lindsey and the miners’ wives. Here is the “Baltimore News” of Munsey, the stock-gambler. Here is the “Washington Post,” which, as I shall narrate, had a typewritten copy of a speech by Albert Williams, and deliberately made up false quotations. Here is the “Chicago Tribune,” which slandered Henry Ford, and the “Chicago Daily News,” which, with the “Tribune,” robs the Chicago school-children. Here is the “Cincinnati Times-Star,” which set out to fight Boss Cox, and didn’t. Here is the “Boston Herald,” which, I shall show you, refused President Wilson’s speech as an advertisement, and the “Boston Traveller,” which lied about my magazine. Here is the “Kansas City Star,” which hounded Mrs. Stokes to jail, and the “St. Paul Dispatch,” whose misdeeds I have just listed. Here is the “Oil City Derrick” owned by Standard Oil, and the “Seattle Post-Intelligencer,” whose bonds were found in the vaults of the Great Northern Railroad. Here is the “Portland Oregonian,” which exists for large-scale capital, and the “Milwaukee Sentinel,” owned by Pfister, who owns most of Milwaukee. Here is the “New York Herald,” which suppressed my Packingtown story, and paid me damages for the Tarrytown libel. Here is the “New York Evening Post,” which failed to expose the Associated Press, and the “New York World,” which favors twenty-cent meals for department-store girls; here is the “New York Tribune,” which lied about the Socialist state legislators, and the “New York Times,” which has lied about me so many times that I can’t count them.

In 1909, it was discovered that the AP had fifteen directors. They were all publishers of large newspapers and just one was a “liberal” who died shortly after. The other fourteen were classified as “conservative or ultra-conservative” and were “huge commercial ventures, connected by advertising and in other ways with banks, trust companies, railway and city utility companies, department-stores and manufacturing enterprises. They reflect the system which supports them.”

Know that back in 1945, the US Supreme Court found that the Associated Press had been violating the Sherman anti-trust Act by prohibiting member newspapers from selling or providing news to nonmember organizations as well as making it very difficult for nonmember newspapers to join the AP.

Again from The Brass Check:

The Associated Press is probably the most iron-clad monopoly in America. It was organized originally as a corporation under the laws of Illinois, but the Illinois courts declared it a monopoly, so it moved out of Illinois, and reorganized itself as a “membership corporation,” thus evading the law. The members of the Associated Press have what is called “the right of protest”—that is, they can object to new franchises being issued; and this power they use ruthlessly to maintain their monopoly.

Like I will do in my next post, here Sinclair lists examples of other censoring actions of that time period:

When Kansas, in 1908, rejected a conservative and elected a progressive United States Senator, the general public at a distance from that state did not know the real issue involved. For more than two years, there has been a strong movement in California against the rule of that state by special and corrupt interests, but that fact, merely as news, has never reached the general public in the East. The prosecution of offenders in San Francisco has only been a part of the wider movement in California. The strong movement in New Hampshire, headed by Winston Churchill, to free that state from the grasp of the Boston and Maine Railway Company and the movement in New Jersey led by Everett Colby, which resulted in the defeat of Senator Dryden, the president of the Prudential Insurance Company, have not been given to the people adequately as matters of news. In my story of the Colorado coal-strike, I showed you the “A. P.” suppressing news, and the newspapers of the country, without one single exception, keeping silence about it. I showed you one bold managing editor promising to tell the truth, and then suddenly stricken dumb, and not carrying out his promise.

Now, I will include an excerpt from my own book where I describe what happened with the Associated Press in the immediate wake of my “viral” ivermectin testimony in Senator Ron Johnson’s historic Covid-19 Homeland Security hearing:

A day later, I received a request for an interview by the Associated Press, self-described as “the largest news gathering organization in the world.” This was huge—the global media home run we’d been waiting for!

The AP dispatched a former fashion reporter named Beatrice Dupuy to interview me. I spent twenty minutes detailing the countless data points which consistently showed massive benefits with ivermectin treatment. The interview was cordial and Beatrice appeared genuinely interested in and intrigued by the information I presented.

Shortly afterward, the AP ran their piece. This was the headline:

The article itself isn’t fit for a birdcage. Beatrice deliberately omitted all the data I provided and chose instead to share the story of an Arizona couple who’d ingested a fish tank cleaning additive (chloroquine phosphate), which is an ingredient in hydroxychloroquine.

“The woman became gravely ill and the man died,” Beatrice wrote breathlessly (I imagined).

Don Henley said it best: “It’s interesting when people die; give us dirty laundry.” 

At the bottom of surely very stylish Beatrice’s piece was this interesting disclaimer:

“This is part of The Associated Press’ ongoing effort to fact-check misinformation that is shared widely online, including work with Facebook to identify and reduce the circulation of false stories on the platform.”

The FLCCC immediately filed an ethics complaint with the AP. Thanks to an errant “reply all” on their part, we were able to see an email thread between the CEO, ethics chief, and president discussing a plan to delay their response so they could “buy some time” to figure out what to do. It’s hilarious looking back at the naivete we possessed by filing an ethics complaint against an erstwhile fashion reporter. We actually believed that a moral code existed that we could rely on to force journalistic integrity.

Two weeks later we received a letter stating that the AP had investigated the complaint and found no ethical concerns with the piece. As if they were actually going to side with us? Talk about the fox guarding the henhouse. We had a lot to learn, but our ignorance is amusing in hindsight.

To summarize it differently: within two days of my ivermectin testimony, the AP contracted a media hit job on me, the FLCCC, and ivermectin. I wonder who commissioned that one (Gilly Bates and Pfizer are at the top of my list).

Anyway, this is from Will Irwin, a writer from Harper’s Weekly at the time of Sinclair’s book:

“The subordinates have drifted inevitably toward the point of view held by their masters.” And again, of the average Associated Press correspondent: “A movement in stocks is to him news—big news. Wide-spread industrial misery in a mining camp is scarcely news at all.” At a conference at the University of Wisconsin, the editor of the “Madison Democrat” stated that he had been a correspondent of the Associated Press for many years, and had never been asked “to suppress news or to color news in any way whatever.”

He counters the above with a quote from Editor A. M. Simons: “I have had many reporters working under me, and every one knows that you will not have a reporter on your paper who cannot ‘catch policy‘ in 2 weeks [in modern terms, I would say an employee who has “not gotten the memo.”]

From Will Irwin: To the best of my knowledge, only two or three new franchises [to the AP ] have ever been granted over the right of protest—and those after a terrible fight. Few, indeed, have had the hardihood to apply. When such an application comes up in the annual meeting, the members shake with laughter as they shout out a unanimous “No!” Abolish the exclusive feature, throw the Association open to all, and you wipe out these values. The publishers are taking no chances with a precedent so dangerous.

Also the Associated Press, being a membership corporation or club, possesses the legal right to expel and to discipline its members. They can expel a member “for any conduct on his part, or on the part of anyone in his employ or connected with his newspaper, which in its absolute discretion it shall deem of such a character as to be prejudicial to the welfare and interest of the corporation and its members, or to justify such expulsion. The action of the members of the corporation in such regard shall be final, and there shall be no right of appeal or review of such action.”

This, you perceive, is power to destroy any newspaper overnight. Not merely may a franchise worth two hundred thousand dollars be wiped out at the whim of the little controlling oligarchy; the entire value of the newspaper may be destroyed ; for of course a big morning newspaper cannot exist without its franchise. The masters of the “A. P.” hold this whip over the head of every member.

Now, know that as of 2019, AP had more than 240 bureaus globally with 1,400 U.S. newspaper members as well as broadcasters, international subscribers, and online customers.

How about this little factoid: The AP is the only organization that collects and verifies election results in every city and county across the United States, including races for the U.S. president, the Senate and House of Representatives, governor as well as other statewide offices. Major news outlets rely on the polling data and results provided by the Associated Press before declaring a winner in major political races, particularly the presidential election. In declaring the winners, the AP has historically relied on a robust network of local reporters with first-hand knowledge of assigned territories who also have long-standing relationships with county clerks as well as other local officials. Moreover, the AP monitors and gathers data from county websites and electronic feeds provided by states. The research team further verifies the results by considering demographics, number of absentee ballots, and other political issues that may have an effect on the final results.

Whoa. Thankfully, we haven’t had any concerns with election integrity lately.

What is even more disturbing than the history, control, and destructive censoring actions of the AP, is that they then joined the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), whose members include a few minor influencers like BBC, Facebook, Google/YouTube, Twitter, Microsoft, Agence France Press, Reuters, European Broadcasting Union (EBU), Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, CBC/Radio-Canada, First Draft, and Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Although originally formed to control information around elections, in 2020, partner members of the TNI agreed, in the words of Director-General Tim Davie, “to work together to ensure legitimate concerns about future vaccinations are heard whilst harmful disinformation myths are stopped in their tracks.”

Now you know why Covid was an absolute nightmare – the globally pervasive censoring of both the efficacy of early treatments (like HCQ and IVM among many others like Vitamin D) and of the toxicity, lethality, and inefficacy of the vaccines. These actions caused millions of unnecessary deaths while adding even more millions to the ranks of the disabled. History must remember this but, more important than History… is the Future.

Censorship, in practice, is now literally a principle of major media journalism in my opinion. We no longer have a “4th Estate” to check the power of the branches of government and it’s controlling corporations. We are in a world war without an army to defend ourselves. They captured our most effective weapon, long ago, but the control they exert over it is now so complete, that army has now been turned against us. Traitors.

But here’s the hope: independant media, the internet, and books – as long as the internet is running, books can be marketed and sold, and we can be discerning, there are excellent, transparent, objective sources of information and data to help us understand the many, often complex issues our society is facing. We must flee to those. It’s our only hope.

In my next post I plan to explore and detail numerous examples of censorship being applied to nearly every non-Covid issue we face (which is a bit of a departure for Medical Musings).

June 15, 2023 Posted by aletho | Book Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | United States | Leave a comment