© York Du/The Epoch TimesSharyl Attkisson, a five-time Emmy Award winning investigative journalist and host of "Full Measure," in Leesburg, Virginia, on Jan. 14, 2022.
Five-time Emmy award-winning journalist Sharyl Attkisson said she has seen an increased effort to manipulate the public to appreciate censorship and disapprove of journalism. One of the strategies that has been employed is the use of third-party fact-checkers, she said.
"Nearly every mode of information has been co-opted, if it can be co-opted by some group, [and] fact-checkers are no different," Attkisson told
EpochTV's "American Thought Leaders.""Either they've been co-opted, in many instances,
or created for the purpose of distributing narratives and propaganda," said Attkisson. "This is all part of a very well-funded, well-organized landscape that dictates and slants the information they want us to have."
Attkisson said she first started to notice news being controlled in the early 2000s when the media company she was working for was actively trying to suppress certain stories.
"The pushback came to be more about keeping a story from airing or keeping a study from being reported on the news, not just giving the other side, not just making sure it was accurately reported," she said of pharmaceutical company stories she was covering at the time.
In 2016 Attkisson heard former President
Barack Obama say news needed to be curated, after which mainstream media outlets started to consistently use the term fake news to describe mostly conservative news stories that they deemed untrue.
"And I remember thinking that was such a strange thing to say, because there was no big movement among the public, that people needed to have their information curated, that someone needed to step in and tell us what to think, curate what was online. But ... after that, if you look at the media, day after day, there were headlines about fake news and curation of what should and shouldn't be reported."
Attkisson was referring to Obama's comment at the
White House Frontiers Conference in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in October 2016.
"It's relevant to our democracy, citizenship. We're going to have to rebuild, within this wild, wild west of information flow, some sort of curating function that people agree to," Obama said.
Because Attkisson was curious about this idea of curating news,
she researched the topic of misinformation, which led her to a non-profit called First Draft, which was funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
© J. Scott Applewhite/AP PhotoPresident Barack Obama and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton wave to delegates after Obama’s speech during the third day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, on July 27, 2016.
"And if you looked at the nonprofit's website when they said fake news, they meant entirely conservative-base fake news and their viewpoint; there was no liberal version of fake news. And then within a matter of weeks, President Obama gives the speech, the media takes off and runs with it."
Attkisson said the fake news phrase was actually started by the left but was effectively turned on its head by former President Donald Trump and now most people think he coined the phrase.
"But it's actually well documented as an invention of political activists on the left during the time period I described," Attkisson said.
For her book
"Smear" she interviewed people who work to spread misinformation and propaganda with the goal of confusing the public
. "And they explained to me that, if they do nothing more than confuse the information landscape, maybe you don't totally buy what they say, but they've done enough to make you not sure of anything."Censorship During the PandemicAttkisson criticized large news outlets for being a "mouthpiece" of the government or other special interest groups instead of challenging them or holding them accountable, particularly as it relates to the pandemic.
She said that soon after the pandemic began, she spoke to many scientists, government as well as private, about the virus and the course it was taking before she formed an opinion. She asked some of the scientists to speak out but they were afraid.
"They said they dare not speak out for fear of being controversial, and for fear of being called coronavirus deniers, because that phrase was starting to be used in the media. And secondly, they feared contradicting Dr. Fauci, who they said had been kind of lionized or canonized in the press for reasons that they couldn't understand."© Shawn Thew/Getty ImagesDr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases testifies during a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on Jan. 11, 2022.
Dr. Anthony Fauci has been the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984, which allowed him to advise seven presidents on public health issues, including COVID-19. He has been accused of misleading the public about
funding gain of function research in China.
Attkisson said the National Institutes of Health used taxpayer money to fund gain of function research in partnership with China but media reports were to the contrary.
"And then the narrative is being managed another way I remember after reviewing the grants themselves to my satisfaction, because I didn't know what was true till I found the documentation and then still hearing, not just public health figures, but reporters claim as if they know the truth, that none of this had happened."
She said that another way to confuse the public about the truth is to label something a conspiracy, like the lab leak theory connected to the novel coronavirus.
"And yet when you hear people say 'conspiracy theory' that's designed to pluck this little part of your brain that says, well, that thing's not true," said Attkisson. "And I always keep an open mind and say,
that crazy thing that they say is a conspiracy theory may well have some truth in it."Attkisson believes the reason some people can be manipulated into believing the narrative put out by corporate media is that they live in "a box," meaning the Internet is their only source of information.
"And the people that want to control the information understand that if they can only control really a few basic sources — we're talking about Google and Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia —
they've got a lock on information, because we've all been funneled to those few sources." She said their goal is to make you believe you are in the minority and make you afraid to raise objections to the narrative. "You can be made to believe that if you live in the box, so I'm constantly telling people, live outside the box. Yes, you can get information there and do what you do online. But certainly, trust your cognitive dissonance. Talk to the people around you."
Hi, descendants, I have been writing to you since 2022. I am in America and things are strange. Our governments have betrayed us, our science has been kidnapped and put in a mechanical fan, and our official media are already dead.
As we are approaching two years of this madness, I want you to hear the story of how this tower of lies was built. This story is just the tip of the iceberg, but it's important to name the recent lies - and there have been so many!
In March 2020, the world went crazy, and basic things like hugging a friend or visiting your parents were declared extreme. The borders were closed. The children were kept away from school. Privacy was made a crime. Elder abuse was glorified. Going to the supermarket or just taking a walk outside suddenly required wearing a ritual mask.
It was as if the wheel had been hijacked by cruel lunatics, and they started barking at all orders that made no sense and caused tremendous pain - but the citizens were too shocked, and obeyed.
Over time, to add to the shock and awe, more madness was introduced. Ritual masks became a fixture, and some citizens lost their minds and began to feel unsafe if they didn't see the masks on everyone's faces, including children.
Then, as part of a military program, the authorities came up with a medical product that was developed so quickly (at "the speed of light," we were told) that they could not properly test it for safety - and yet, the product it was declared holier than even ritual masks, and citizens were forced to have the mysterious potion injected into their bodies if they wanted to go to work, eat in a restaurant and, in some cases, visit family.
When the government first introduced it, it said the mysterious potion was so powerful that it would stop the disease - and the madness would stop, and normal life would finally resume.
But it was soon discovered that the potion didn't work very well and was losing potency quickly - not to mention the strange side effects - so there was no return to the old normal at all: just barking, and more fear, more injections and ritual masks. , forever.
And so here we are. We are in 2022, our government has betrayed us, our science is in disarray, and our media is dead. Strange, huh? If this sounds like a bad dream to you (I hope so) - yes, it sounds absurd, and alas, this is our life. So, dear descendants, let's talk about the tower of lies they built.
Tony Fauci at the beginning of 2020
In February 2020, NIAID Director Tony Fauci published an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, stating exactly: “The overall clinical consequences of laCovid-19 may ultimately be more like those of severe seasonal flu (which has a mortality rate of about 0.1%) or a pandemic flu (similar to those of 1957 and 1968) rather than a disease similar to SARS or MERS, which have had mortality rates of 9-10% and 36%, respectively ".
The month he published that article was the last month of the old normality. After that, no one could compare Covid to the flu without being punished.
Lies, lies, lies
First, the definitions changed, some in the years leading up to Covid, and others in the last two years. "Updated" [so to speak] meanings of basic words such as "pandemic", "herd immunity", "vaccine", "vaccinated", "unvaccinated", "ICU beds available", "post-vaccine infections" (formerly known as "vaccine failure"), and many others.
Then they began to tell blatant lies. Below is an incomplete list of the lies that allowed them to keep the asylum in which we find ourselves.
COVID is incurable -
Many doctors disagreed, but those of them who had successfully treated thousands of patients, such as Dr Zelenko, Dr McCullough, Dr Kory, Dr Bowden, and many others, were heavily attacked. , while the medical protocols they had developed were blocked to the point that hospitalized patients were forced to hire lawyers to take "dissident" drugs prescribed by doctors for Covid, while the FDA mandated post offices to block foreign packages containing Ivermectin .(Remember the February 2020 article by Fauci? There he mentioned Chloroquine as a protective treatment for Covid. Clearly, it didn't last long).
Even tragically, in Italy Dr. Giuseppe De Donno was found dead ("suicide") after saving many lives at the beginning of the pandemic. People loved him, but he was being haunted by Big Pharma despite (or just because) he had saved lives.
PCR tests are a "gold standard" of Covid diagnostics -
The inventor of PCR, Kary Mullis, explicitly said that it was a technology not suitable for medical diagnostics, given that the test does not distinguish between a live pathogen (however it is been or has not been isolated) and debris.With cycle thresholds up to 35 or 45, the test can find anything in anything. Fauci also said that with a cycle threshold above 35, the tests weren't too reliable. But here's a 40-cycle test developed by MIT. And here is a 45-cycle test used in South Australia.
The false positive rate was very high, estimated by some to be 90% or even higher. Different cycle thresholds were used for vaccinated and unvaccinated. Laboratory contamination was a problem.
As I said in my article on this topic, “we just don't have good science on Covid. A reliable method of diagnostics is needed to call anything a pandemic, or, um, diagnose a disease. Yet the show goes on ”.
It's an unvaccinated pandemic -
Many doctors, scientists and observers disagreed
We also keep in mind that during the first two weeks post-vax, which is a window of negative efficiency where many people have “Covid-like symptoms”, vaccinated people were recorded as “unvaccinated”. And people were only considered fully vaccinated 14 days after the second or only dose. Or maybe the recall.
Children Die From Covid -
This was a complete invention. The children did not appear to be affected by Covid in any serious way, and while some children with underlying health problems sadly died with or from COVID, and any death is naturally a tragic loss to the family, these cases were extremely rare.
Vaccines aren't causing huge heart problems in kids and teens - That wasn't true. According to Steve Kirsch, “Anecdotal data from a pediatric cardiologist shows an estimated 100-fold increase in myocarditis rates. Cardiologists cannot speak without risking a sanction ”. Please also see this fantastic analysis by James Lyons-Weiler.Athletes don't have sudden collapses… nothing to see! - One of the best reports on this was done by Steve Kirsch. See for yourself.
VAERS data is garbage
A pre-Covid study in association with [the University of] Harvard concluded that less than 1% of all vaccine injuries were recorded:
Adverse drug and vaccine events are common but underreported. Although 25% of outpatients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Similarly, less than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.
Low reporting rates preclude or slow down the identification of "problematic" drugs and vaccines that endanger public health. New surveillance methods are needed for adverse effects of drugs and vaccines. Barriers to reporting include a lack of awareness of doctors, uncertainty about when and what to report, as well as reporting burdens: reporting is not part of the usual workflow of doctors, it takes time and is duplicated ".
The VAERS program is heavy. It takes no less than 30 minutes to file a report, and doctors don't get paid for it. There is intimidating legal language on every page, and doctors are often discouraged from submitting reports from their hospital systems. The number of adverse events reported to VAERS for Covid vaccines outstrips all adverse events for all vaccines for as long as the program has existed.
Medicare data showed 48,465 vaccination-related deaths and supported the notion that VAERS data needed to be taken more seriously.
We should trust Big Pharma -
Sure, right. Except that vaccine manufacturers could not be sued if this product caused harm; Pfizer had paid billions in deals and bribery tried to evade criminal charges in Nigeria; Pfizer had also asked the FDA for permission not to disclose its safety and other data for 75 years. He had also lobbied various governments to ensure total legal impunity.
And the "post-marketing" data obtained via FOIA (a portion of the data they had wanted to hide from the public for 75 years) had shown recorded adverse events and deaths at an excruciating rate (1,223 deaths in three months in their own data).
And here's one of my favorites when it comes to trust. Jim (or James) Smith, [Link] president of the Thomson Reuters Foundation, is a director of Pfizer. He is also a member of the World Economic Forum's ... Partnering Against Corruption Initiative. Perfect. Speaking of media ...
Who owns the media (and everything else)?
Here is an excerpt from the article entitled "How a company called BlackRock shapes your news, your life, our future":
“Who controls the corporations that control our news? A useful index has just been compiled - not by the mainstream media, but by Harvard researchers exploring the future of the media. Scrolling through the list, I see two names again and again: BlackRock Fund Advisors and Vanguard Group.
BlackRock and Vanguard are two of the three large passive fund asset management firms (each industry clusters). The third, State Street, is owned by BlackRock. Whose largest shareholder is Vanguard. Together, BlackRock and Vanguard own:
- Eighteen percent of Fox.
Sixteen percent of CBS, and therefore also of Sixty Minutes.
Thirteen percent of Comcast, which owns NBC, MSNBC, CNBC and the Sky media group.
- Twelve percent of CNN.
Twelve percent of Disney, which owns ABC and FiveThirtyEight.
Between ten and fourteen percent of Gannett, who owns more than 250 Gannett newspapers plus USA Today.
Ten percent of the local Sinclair TV newscast, which controls seventy-two percent of US household local TV.
-A large unspecified chunk of Graham Media Group, which owns Slate and Foreign Policy. "
By the way, to see that the same trio also owns major stakes in every major company in every major industry sector, just go to Yahoo! Finance and see for yourself. Here is just one example: Pfizer [Link]
And here's a quote from a Columbia Journalism Review article [Link] called "Journalism's Gates Keepers" about Bill Gates and his Foundation's media grants:
“I recently reviewed nearly 20,000 charitable grants that the Gates Foundation gave through the end of June and found more than $ 250 million for journalism.
Beneficiaries included news companies such as the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, Financial Times, The Atlantic, Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, such as BBC Media Action and the New York Times Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for "Superman" supports Gates’s charter school agenda; news organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups that create news content or work on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an advertising agency that Gates founded to create a "news site" to promote the success of help groups.
In some cases, recipients say they have distributed some of the funding as grants to other news organizations - which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates' funding to the fourth estate." And here is an excerpt from a Mint Press News / Grayzone article titled, "Documents Show Bill Gates Gives $ 319 Million to the Media to Advance His Global Agenda," [Link] according to which, the Foundation has given over $ 319 million. dollars to the media. And while I disagree with the author about his rejection of "conspiracy theories," his analysis of Gates’s corruption is quite excellent. Below is only the award directly to the media: (.................................)
With all this corruption, is it really that shocking that our mainstream science is dying and that our mainstream media is already dead and replaced by some kind of telesales zombie? Not that shocking, I think. And we haven't even dug into the Great Reset and the 4IR! I would like to conclude this story with an anecdote about my taxi ride with the radio on.
Whatever the program was about, it was actually Covid "vaccines". “Vaccines! Vaccines! Vaccines-vaccines-vaccines! Vaccines !!! " chirped the radio. They recited their horrible lies in an ordinary and confident tone. They mocked the caricature of "antivaxers" and made science-conscious people look like slime.
The toxicity of the program was skyrocketing - yet it seemed apparently normal to the driver, much to my surprise. There was not a single factual truth in their entire account - and I wanted to scream - yet the driver was not at all bothered.
So I think propaganda works very well, and we have slipped into a dystopian world. Which, as far as I'm concerned, only means one practical thing: it's not acceptable, and the game continues.
[Link]