Deception Of The Media

The boldness with which the media lies about the source of social problems caused by the government is truly shocking. The countless social ills that have arisen from public policies that are allegedly aimed at controlling coronavirus have been brazenly attributed to a virus by the media. Every single problem that lockdowns have created — widespread unemployment, mental health crises, crushing social isolation — there are too many to mention, has been dishonestly reported by the media as emanating from the Wuhan virus itself.

News articles state that these problems are from “coronavirus,” “COVID-19,” or the “pandemic” in an effort to hide the fact that they are a result of government policy. The articles may state that they are an indirect effect of coronavirus, but that is equally untrue. So few working age people have died from coronavirus, that it has not put people out of work as the media claims. Government policies which prevent people from living and working normally have put people out of work. Children are not out of school because they are sick at home with COVID. They are out of school because the government has closed all the schools. Domestic abuse and relationship problems have not skyrocketed because family members are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms. They have skyrocketed because the government has destroyed the quality of life of the family members, preventing them from going to work or enjoying their favorite pastimes.

There are too many examples to mention. The fact remains that the media almost always states that the Wuhan virus is the cause of social problems that, in reality, stem exclusively from social distancing policies. One may suppose that consumers of the news are discerning enough to understand the difference. Listening to people talk about lockdown-caused social problems, however, this does not appear to be the case. There is a tendency to passively accept what is read from trusted sources no matter how clearly it is false. This effect has been so strong that people actually advocate for lockdowns to prevent the very problems that are caused exclusively by lockdowns!

Healthcare avoidance has reached concerning levels since the lockdown began. Emergency departments all over North America have seen a major drop in admissions, including those for serious reasons such as heart attack and stroke. Doctors believe that rates have not decreased for serious medical events, but patients are simply too afraid of coronavirus to go to the hospital. Of course, the media has blamed this effect on the Wuhan virus. The reality is that healthcare avoidance is a result of fear of the virus that is well out of proportion to its risk. The media’s irresponsible coverage, of course, is the source of that irrational fear.

A falsehood that is almost universally perpetuated by the media is that lockdowns, or strict social distancing measures, are inevitable. The media frames social distancing in such a way to deter the public from opposing government distancing policies. It has been an effective strategy. Most people have accepted the false fact that their government has no choice but to shut down society to prevent a deadly plague from ripping through the country.

In reality, lockdowns are not inevitable. Some countries with coronavirus cases have not put in place social distancing laws. No government has to implement lockdowns, or any social distancing. These laws are terrible for public health and violate countless human rights laws. They also violate domestic laws and constitutions. There is no law, precedent, or social norm that compels any government to take such action.

Neither are social distancing laws a necessity to defend public health or save lives. On the contrary, these laws carry an enormous net negative effect on the health and life expectancy of society. The lockdowns-are-inevitable lie has been essential in the media’s suppression of debate on an appropriate pandemic response. People don’t even question lockdowns because the media has convinced them that they are inevitable. There is no point in opposing, or even questioning, something that is inevitable, after all.

Media reports of lockdown protests usually refer to those participating as conspiracy theorists, among other childish names. If it wasn’t such a destructive rumor to spread, it may even be humorous considering the hypocrisy: the claim that anti-lockdown activists are conspiracy theorists is itself a conspiracy theory. There is no evidence to support it. Sure, there are rumors floating around online about conspiracy theories, but there is no reason to believe that their authors attend anti-lockdown rallies.

People who protest lockdowns are human rights activists. They are simultaneously public health activists. They are not idiots or conspiracy theorists in any way. The media fails to so much as provide evidence for the claim that protests are primarily composed of people who extol conspiracy theories. One in a hundred people at a rally holding a sign about 5G or another lockdown-related conspiracy theory doesn’t say anything about the views of anyone else present. For all we know, the media or government pay people to attend rallies and pose as loopy conspiracy theorists or spread rumors about lockdowns online. Such tactics to discredit an opposing camp are not uncommon. The media’s conspiracy theory that lockdown detractors are all conspiracy theorists is an easy way to dismiss the public’s concerns about the dangers of lockdowns and avoid a discussion of the issue.

It is worth defining ‘conspiracy theorist.’ Lockdown propagandists use the term to mean people who hold theories related to the pandemic or COVID restrictions that are not logically defensible or based on evidence. ‘Conspiracy theories” are thus uncommon among people opposed to lockdowns. However, many of us are knowledgeable about the role that the Communist Party of China has played in lockdown proliferation, the hundreds of billions of dollars vaccine manufacturers are making from the pandemic, the strict social control that government gains from ‘vaccine passports,’ as well as many other methods of grand exploitation by the elite class beginning in 2020. These and other regressions of civilization are not even ‘theories.’ They are a reality that any literate person can verify.

The media continues to make coronavirus out to be very deadly, despite all the science showing that it is not. Current estimates put the fatality rate at 1 in 2,500 for those under 70 years of age and around 0.2% for the population at large. Regardless of age, it is almost always people with a pre-existing medication condition — often multiple conditions — that die from coronavirus. A study in Italy, for instance, found that 99% of COVID-19 deaths involved comorbidity.

The media employs a number of tactics to make it appear that coronavirus is far more deadly than it really is. One tactic is to over-represent passionate, even furious, people who themselves exaggerate the fatality rate of the virus. For instance, they may show a video of a teacher having an angry rant that she refuses to return to teaching in school because she would be risking her life. The media will interview, quote, or show footage of people terrified about dying from coronavirus, but seldom shows more informed viewpoints. Through consistent selection of voices exaggerating the coronavirus death rate, they make it seem like the virus is much more deadly than it is without actually telling an overt lie.

Most news agencies have exaggerated the death rate of coronavirus through daily reports of three official figures of the pandemic to date: cases of coronavirus, deaths from coronavirus, and recovered cases. By displaying and discussing these numbers on a daily basis without explaining what they mean, they are clearly trying to convince their readers or viewers that COVID-19’s fatality rate is far higher than the true figure.

As the media corporations know, people look at these three figures and form false conclusions because they do not actually know what they mean. The number of coronavirus cases to date refers to people who have tested positive for the virus. Until late summer 2020, there has not been mass testing for the virus. There still is very limited testing. But for the first few months of the outbreak, there was very little testing. In most places, you had to have severe symptoms, often requiring hospitalization, in order to be granted a COVID-19 test. This fact was closely held by the media. They opted to allow people to think that it referred to the total number of people in the area that were estimated to have been infected with the virus at all.

The media knew too well that their viewers would calculate the coronavirus death rate by themselves by dividing the number of deaths by the number of cases. This would yield a much higher percentage than the true infection fatality rate because the cases reported only represented a small percentage of the total number of people infected by the Wuhan virus — the ones with the most severe symptoms.

Reporting of the recovered cases was equally misleading. The media doesn’t explain what is meant by the number of people that they report as having recovered from COVID-19. When people see that the number of people recovered from coronavirus was only about 4%, they would understandably conclude that the other 96% still has the virus but hasn’t died from it as of yet. What the public didn’t know, and the media intentionally withheld, is that the number of people reported as having recovered from coronavirus referred only to people who had a negative result on a COVID-19 test after having tested positive earlier. Very few people who had tested positive for coronavirus ever even received a second test. In May 2020,  about 4% in the United States and 2% in the UK received a second test after a positive one and virtually all of the results were negative. Incredible how such obvious attempts at deception were so common by news agencies.

The media has only portrayed one perspective on lockdowns — that they’re great! Journalists and their interviewees nearly always give the pro-lockdown perspective, deceiving readers or viewers into thinking that lockdowns are of benefit to public health. Rarely does the media allow for any discussion on the merits of social distancing. They tell us what to believe and viciously attack anyone with a different view.

Showing pro-lockdown content exclusively is a tactic called ‘stacking the deck’ which tricks the public into thinking that there is almost no one who opposes lockdowns. News shows only interview experts or other individuals with a pro-lockdown view. They only play footage or relay quotes of people expressing the pro-lockdown view. They only report surveys or academic papers which extol the lockdowns-save-lives myth. If someone with an anti-lockdown view is invited on a TV show, it is only to humiliate and attempt to discredit the person. Facebook posts or Youtube videos expressing intelligent, science-based views which question lockdowns are regularly deleted to keep the public in the dark.

The “experts” who champion lockdowns have credentials, but don’t provide sound arguments to back their claims. It is important to understand that there is a difference between “expert opinion” and an “expert’s opinion.” The views of someone with expert credentials are too often not based on expertise. Like everyone else, experts are prone to forming opinions based on limited information, feelings, biases, and social influence. With the risk of being defamed, fired, and blacklisted for opposing lockdowns and praise for defending them, one never knows if pro-lockdown views of an expert are genuine or made out of fear of retribution or desire to be seen as a hero.

Creating negative associations and feelings with the reader is one of the most widely used tactics the media uses to control public opinion about pandemic restrictions. The media infuses articles with words designed to instill targeted emotions in readers. For example, when discussing coronavirus contagion, words like outbreak, alarming, serious, disturbing, dire, uncontrolled, or soaring are effectively utilized to incite panic. In articles that mention anti-lockdown activism or rational pandemic response, words such as dangerous, fringe, controversial, and risky are also used to create fear. 

Negative association is perhaps the media’s most powerful technique to control public opinion regarding lockdowns. An objective, balanced discussion of the pros and cons of lockdowns is not attempted because they know the public will turn against lockdowns if they were well informed. To keep public opinion in support of lockdowns, they simply create associations between freedom and everything they think their readers will find aversive. The first step is to make readers associate freedom with the human rights activists that oppose lockdowns. In step two, they cause readers to associate the activists with everything “bad.” 

Whether or not lockdowns are good or bad has nothing to do with the characteristics of the people who are for or against them – it is exclusively determined by the effects of having vs not having lockdowns. However, a rational pandemic response is impossible to logically discredit, so the media instead discuss only the people who advocate for a rational response. Once readers associate freedom from lockdowns with the activists working to restore rights, they are then led to associate the activists with everything that they find distasteful or intimidating. News reports describe these human rights activists as right wing, racist, white supremacist, radical, neo-Nazi, controversial, conspiracy theorists… everything they know their readers do not want to associate with. 

None of it is true, of course, but readers either don’t realize that the journalists are lying, or they pretend to support lockdowns so people won’t think that they are part of these socially undesirable groups. Remember, the WHO along with public health experts and epidemiologists the world over oppose lockdowns. If you don’t believe in lockdowns, you are in very good company!

Deception and manipulation by the media is nothing new, although it has never been this pervasive in peacetime. The systemic nature of the problem prevents it from becoming widely known. How can people learn about the corruption of the media when they receive their information from the media? Would a newspaper publish an article about how it twists the truth to increase its readership, for instance? The conflict of interest in the media can make it hard for the public to learn the truth about any issue.

In 1988, Manufacturing Consent brought to light the deception by the media and their cozy relationship with the government. This book by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman uncovered the structural framework in which the media operates and the inherent bias that results from that system, which they called the propaganda model. According to this model, the media is strategic in its selection of stories to cover, and which perspective of those stories to take. A story must pass through following five filters to be fit to print:

Chomsky states that the propaganda model has stood the test of time and applies to all countries. It does not formulate a conspiracy, but explains how the environment in which the media operates influences its output. The propaganda model may be applied to lockdowns:

A destructive cycle exists in which the media instills a distorted view of reality in the public who then holds the media accountable to adhere to that false reality. Because of the propaganda campaign by governments and the media, most people have a highly skewed understanding about the pandemic and social distancing. We recommend that you write to the news agencies that you follow and ask them to practice a more objective form of journalism which discusses both sides of this (and every) issue, discontinue tactics of deception, and stop hiding the scientific evidence which discredits lockdowns.