EDITORS NOTE: With the recent firing of both Chris Cuomo and his convicted pedophile producer, the resignation of Jeff Zucker, and Brian Stelter waiting for the ax to fall, it must cause onlookers to wonder about the future of the MSM as we knew it.
Rachel Maddow on Monday announced that she will step back from her MSNBC show next month with plans to only be on air one day per week.
She told her audience that starting in May, she will only present on Mondays and will oversee a broader range of NBCUniversal projects instead, Variety reported.
“I do still have all these other irons in the fire, all these other things I’m working on that I want to bring to fruition, none of them are fast, all of them take a long time, and I’m still working on all of them,” the MSNBC anchor told her audience on Monday.
The network has not yet announced a successor for “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
After 13 years with MSNBC, Maddow ended rumors of a split with the network in August when she renewed her contract.
In the media, it is the worst of protests. For most Canadians it is, by far, the best phenomenon ever to sweep our country.
Every day, we see the media reports here (repeated by politicians and corporate-sponsored news across the globe) condemning the Canadian truckers’ Freedom Convoy as a “dangerous” and “racist” display of “far right extremism.” The “giddy inchoate rage,” (whatever that is) and chaos that must be quashed, violently by military, if necessary.
The contrast is stark between the media story and what we see with our own eyes.
Here is a Top 10 list of things the media say that differ from on-the-ground reality of Canada’s Freedom Convoy.
Media Lie No. 1: The crowds thronging to support the truckers are Canada’s ‘most aggressive citizens,” hate-spewing white misogynists and racists
The media are raging against the people taking part in the trucker Freedom Convoy, describing them as a “horde of Bubbas” and Canada’s “most aggressive citizens.” Prime example: Washington Post op-ed author David Moscrov called the protest a display of “toxic authoritarianist politics.”
Moscrov, author of “Too Dumb for Democracy” (a title that gives you an idea of his regard for the little people), described the hundreds of thousands of people in the Canadian capital on Saturday where he works as a University of Ottawa professor as “driven by a generalized rage, misplaced anger about supply chain challenges and antigovernment sentiment.”
And he played the race card: “These types of groups are typically driven by attitudes, grievances and priorities of such a nature that they pose a particular risk to racialized folks and other groups that are traditionally the target of hate and violence.”
I wonder if Moscrov is talking about people like Bernadette and Anna, two of a group of Polish Canadian women who drove from Toronto to Ottawa on Thursday to bring 1,550 Polish sausages to the truckers, along with bread and buns and hundreds of Polish donuts.
“Should they request some Polish vodka, we’re very happy to bring that too,” Bernadette said.
Why did they do it? “Because we stand behind them.”
“We come from communist country, and we came here because we didn’t want to have oppression. We wanted to live in a free country, and for the last two years we’re living like prisoners,” she said.
“We are being told to stay at home. We’re told not to go to the restaurant, not to go to the church!”
“During communism times, we were able and free to go to the church. I really can’t take it anymore,” Bernadette said, adding that they’d be coming back to Ottawa every two or three days “until it ends,” God bless them.
Moscrov said Canada’s response to these Polish immigrants should be a “doubling down” on them and a “media policy of refusing to platform, humanize, or, God forbid, glorify the convoy and its members beyond the bare necessity of speaking to their existence and outlining a program for pushing back.”
Obviously, Trudeau and the media have been following this policy from the beginning. Dehumanize and push back.
So, the tolerant left in media and politics won’t tell you that the convoy is led by a grandmother with Métis heritage.
They don’t show you the faces of the beautiful Maritime children on the highway who made ham sandwiches for the truckers. Or the Quebecois girls who sent their messages to them.
They don’t show you 76-year-old Judy from Ontario who spent the day baking 10 dozen muffins for the heroes driving for the freedom she knew as a child, that her muzzled grandchildren have lost.
Moscrov doesn’t want you to meet Guy Meister from Aylesford, Nova Scotia, whose heater in his beautiful black Mac truck broke on the two-day drive to Ottawa. David Crowell posted that Guy managed to survive without gloves in the minus-30 weather in his cab without a sleeper for the weekend, until other people discovered his trouble, fixed his truck and helped him out.
Moscrov wouldn’t want you to “humanize” Guy and see these truckers as the kindhearted working-class heroes they are. Not really the sort of people to be “pushed back.”
Michael de Adder, The Washington Post’s liberal political cartoonist, tweeted a cartoon showing trucks with the word “fascism” emblazoned on the sides. I wonder if Michael might see things differently if he met Guy in a pub.
The convoy spirit is not just in Ottawa, however; it’s across the whole land and it’s infectious. The owner of a trucking company describes the reports from his truckers in the convoy who are moved to tears by the generosity and support of Canadians across the land giving free food, hotel rooms on the house, half-price fuel, welcoming the truckers with smiles and open doors and arms.
Media Lie No. 2 : It’s a “small fringe minority.”
This phrase “small fringe minority” has become an international joke. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first used it to describe one of the largest nonviolent protests in history and then the phrase was echoed by tax-funded media. The government-subsidized CBC has consistently downsized the convoys and the gathering, reporting that on Saturday, January 29, a mere 8,000 people were in Ottawa.
The size of the crowd that converged in Ottawa in the sub-zero temperatures on the weekend was, as the video shows, easily in the hundreds of thousands. It also does not include the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who stood on bridges, spilled out alongside the highways across the country, or escorted the truckers part of the way.
The main artery of the “fringe” Freedom Convoy from the west was estimated to be 75km long, smashing the world record by a multiple of 10. It could be seen from outer space. That didn’t count several other convoys, from the east, and north, feeding into the nation’s capital.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t small, or fringe. The media’s blatant lie about the world’s largest convoy and Canada’s largest-ever protest elicited laughter across the globe.
“It would appear that the so-called ‘fringe minority’ is actually the government,” Elon Musk tweeted wryly.
Canada isn’t going to take more lockdowns and COVID restrictions.
The fringe minority also broke fundraising records, drumming up more than $10 million in donations on its GoFundMe page in a little over two weeks. That’s a lot of support.
Media Lie No. 3: The Trucker Convoy is led by white supremacist males.
Even if the people are gullible, the leaders of this trucking chaos are criminal, according to the media. None of the media have shown the courage to feature the woman who sparked the convoy, its crowdfunding organizer, Saskatchewan-born Tamara Lich, a calm, Métis-blood mother and grandmother.
The media has described Lich’s affiliation with the Maverick Party in Alberta in tones as though this was akin to ISIS involvement. But the Maverick Party, which seeks “greater fairness and self-determination for western Canadians,” is popular with a broad base of prairie and mountain westerners who feel alienated from Ottawa’s high taxation and left-leaning city politics.
Listen to Lich’s words and decide for yourself whether what she says is kindling hatred of any kind.
“We are here out of love for our families, our communities, and our nation,” Lich told reporters Thursday. “These past two years of COVID-19 mandates have divided us.
“Our movement has grown in Canada and across the world because common people are tired of the mandates and restrictions in their lives that now seem to be doing more harm than good.”
Sweden, Denmark, the UK, Norway, Finland, Ireland and Switzerland have removed all COVID mandates and restrictions, Lich added, and her convoy is calling on Canada to follow suit.
Not a word of racism, or misogyny there. Just unity and a demand for the right to be free of the most draconian COVID restrictions in the world.
It’s hard to see in the convoy’s unity manifesto below or the group’s “Memorandum of Understanding” what so makes the liberal media seethe.
Media Lie No. 4: The Freedom Convoy is all anti-vaxxers
An inconvenient fact for the media is that many in the throng they hate are vaccinated. The media apply the slur “anti-vaxxer,” to wave away anyone, including doctors and scientists, who question any government or public health demand in the endless “emergency.”
No doubt, many Canadians in the protest got the shots because they thought it was right and they “trusted the science.” Others, because they were pressured to take warp-speed injections in order to work, fly on a plane, attend college or go to their kids’ game. Many ordinary Canadians chose not to.
The truth is, vaccinated and unvaccinated are standing together against the government and vaccine passports.
The zealots are the people who refuse to recognize the science. Here’s Matt Starr, a Canadian father with a heart condition. He said that his cardiologist and GP endorsed his medical exemption from the shots, which are now known to have caused thousands of cases of serious heart inflammation, myocarditis and pericarditis. Does that make him an “anti-vaxxer”?
Starr was given a QR code to participate in society, but the YMCA refused to recognize his doctor’s decision and wouldn’t let him attend his daughter’s basketball game. Just “following the science.” He might not have supported the truckers before, but Starr’s sure on board now.
Media Lie No. 5: The Freedom Convoy put the city in disarray and disrupted the lives of locals
Well, this is sort of true. Irony of ironies, however. The media echo the views of Doug Ford, premier of Ontario, the man who has led the most harmful and least effective business-bankrupting, mental-health damaging, life-disrupting COVID lockdowns in the world.
“People have to move on,” he said. “Let the people of Ottawa live, let the businesses open up.”
Yep. That’s what this is about. All the inconvenience ends when you let the people of Canada live, when you let their businesses open up.
The inconvenient truth for media: The government has closed the businesses in Ottawa, not the truckers. The government is refusing to recognize Charter Rights and Freedoms of its citizens, not the truckers.
Besides that, not all Ottawa residents feel invaded by the convoy. Some are overjoyed. It’s a matter of perspective, as this Ottawa resident’s tweet illustrates:
Media Lie No. 6: The protesters are violent
There are endless scenes, captured on film, from Ottawa that show the peaceful nature of the protest: truckers playing hockey in the streets, truckers making pizzas, people holding hands singing “We are the World.”
Up to June of 2020, Bill Gates has ploughed no less than $250 million in foundation grants into mainstream journalism.
Have you ever watched dumbfounded Bill Gates being interviewed on some program, and the person asking him questions will often refer to Gates as either a “virology expert’, ‘health expert’, or ‘epidemiologist’?
Bill Gates is none of those things, and never will be, he has had no training at any medical or scientific school of any kind. So why does the media fawningly refer to him in that way? I will give you three tries to answer and the first two don’t count.
An explosive new report from Columbia Journalism Review lifts up the rock that people like Bill Gates live under, and exposes how he spends hundreds of millions of dollars in grants from his Gates Foundation in order to receive favorable accolades and medical and scientific titles he in no way deserves.
Bill Gates is not giving anything away, not at all. Like the evil villain Old Man Potter from ‘It’s A Wonderful Life’, Bill Gates is buying, not selling.
How Bill Gates Buys Mainstream Outlets, Journalists And ‘Fact-Checkers’ To Push New World Order Agenda
FROM 21st Century Wire: Over the last decade, a small group of billionaire philanthropists have quietly moved into to seize control of key nodes of media, government policy, and education.
They claim that they are merely trying to ‘fill in the funding gaps at struggling news organizations’ – especially in the wake of the coronavirus ‘pandemic.’ By far, the biggest player in this network is the Gates Foundation.
In short, Gates has long used his foundation’s charitable veneer to steer and shape the public discourse on global health. In the case of COVID and vaccines, it is believed that Gates is using his billions to parlay both access and favorable news coverage.
A recent investigation conducted by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) reveals a number of disturbing findings which point to a multibillion dollar network of information control and narrative management – with Bill Gates squarely at the center.
“Gates’s generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity.”
Up to June of 2020, Bill Gates has ploughed no less than $250 million in foundation grants into mainstream journalism.
Takers include BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, Financial Times, The Atlantic, Gannett News, and Le Monde – to name only a few. Many other mainstream outlets are pocketing money for ‘contracts’ they have with the Gates Foundation, including Vox.
These mainstream outlets claim there are no strings attached to this ‘free money’ from Gates, but upon closer examination, this relationship appears to be fraught with influence peddling and obvious conflicts of interest.
When one considers how intimately involved the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is with multiple global stakeholders in the much-hyped impending roll-out COVID vaccines – namely, through GAVI, and partnering with transnational pharmaceutical giants like AstraZeneca, Sanofi, Pfizer, Merck, J&J, Eli Lilly, Novartis, and others.
This is in addition to Gates funding of key ‘global health’ policy players like the Wellcome Trust, and the World Health Organization, as well as various government agencies – the likelihood of conflicts of interest is enormous.
Not least of all is the fact that many of these same pharmaceutical firms are also the top advertising buyers on all of the major mainstream media outlets globally.
It’s also been revealed how Gates is funding the supposed ‘fact checkers’ currently being used by Facebook and other social media firms – which are aggressively censoring any information on their platforms which is critical of Gates and pharmaceutical firms, particularly in relation to COVID and vaccines.
Incredibly, Gates even funded a 2016 report from the American Press Institute which was then used to develop reporting guidelines which supposedly tells newsrooms how maintain ‘editorial independence from philanthropic funders.’
Indeed, Gates has certainly covered all his bases. The following investigative findings by one of America’s leading journalism review bodies should give cause for concern to news consumers all over the world. (Read More)
This Is How Bill Gates Buys Influence And Controls Social Media
There exists an interesting and intentionally obscured relationship between the Mainstream Media, rogue intelligence agencies like the CIA/MOSSAD, and exclusive elitist think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Club of Rome, The Bilderbergs, etc. A quote from the late David Rockefeller spells it out quite nicely:
As the current political information/disinformation war continues to heat up, it becomes more and more imperative for individuals to become able to exercise their own discernment. This goes for radical leftists as much as die hard Trump supporters. In the same fashion that many view the Federal Government, the mainstream media has become incompetent, conformist, and corrupt to the core. The purpose of the mass media is not to “tell it like it is” but rather to tell it how the CEO’s, board members, and shareholders want it to be told.
Relevance to Current Affairs
So what do they want us to think? Well obviously everyone is required to hate the president, and anyone who is trying to hold these out of control criminals in finance, politics and media, to account for their crimes. This will naturally include General Micheal Flynn, Attorney General William Barr, John Durham, John Huber and any other future names of individuals willing to go against the “old guard”.
On Flynn an Obama in particular, MSN put out its damage control slant piece. And like clockwork so has the rest of the interlocked corporate media. This isn’t some new thing, it has been going on in this country since it’s inception and globally since the dawn of written communication.
Narrative Control is a strategic necessity.
The CIA and the American mainstream media machine have worked hand in glove forever, (For at least one persons perspective you could check Carl Bernstein http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php though there are NUMEROUS others who approach this from less compromised positions) But I think Professor James Tracy put it best in a 2015 article of particular relevance in relation to the “fake news” campaign directed against the alternative and independent media.
“Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, if any, relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate collaboration indicates a far different story–indeed, one that media historians are reluctant to examine.
When seriously practiced, the journalistic profession involves gathering information concerning individuals, locales, events, and issues. In theory such information informs people about their world, thereby strengthening “democracy.” This is exactly the reason why news organizations and individual journalists are tapped as assets by intelligence agencies and, as the experiences of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte (entry 47 below) suggest, this practice is at least as widespread today as it was at the height of the Cold War.
Consider the coverups of election fraud in 2000 and 2004, the events of September 11, 2001, the invasions Afghanistan and Iraq, the destabilization of Syria, and the creation of “ISIS.” These are among the most significant events in recent world history, and yet they are also those much of the American public is wholly ignorant of. In an era where information and communication technologies are ubiquitous, prompting many to harbor the illusion of being well-informed, one must ask why this condition persists.
Further, why do prominent US journalists routinely fail to question other deep events that shape America’s tragic history over the past half century, such as the political assassinations of the 1960s, or the central role played by the CIA major role in international drug trafficking?
Popular and academic commentators have suggested various reasons for the almost universal failure of mainstream journalism in these areas, including newsroom sociology, advertising pressure, monopoly ownership, news organizations’ heavy reliance on “official” sources, and journalists’ simple quest for career advancement. There is also, no doubt, the influence of professional public relations maneuvers. Yet such a broad conspiracy of silence suggests another province of deception examined far too infrequently—specifically the CIA and similar intelligence agencies’ continued involvement in the news media to mold thought and opinion in ways scarcely imagined by the lay public.”
He then goes on to list historical and contemporary facts– which are by no means exhaustive– to provide a glimpse of the power such entities possess to influence if not determine popular memory and what “respectable” institutions deemed to be the historical record. A heavily recommended read:
The public was lied to for close to two years by legacy news outlets and public figures with claims there was “evidence” that the Trump administration colluded with Russia. Contrary to their claims, the Mueller report showed there was no evidence that Trump colluded with Russia. The report showed that all those rumors of evidence, all those anonymous sources, all of it was lies.
What’s important to remember is that for these outlets and public figures, facts don’t matter. What matters is how they can twist the facts to keep the public misled and distracted in order to keep their false narratives alive.
During an April 23 White House press briefing, a CNBC reporter asked whether or not Trump is “going to accept Russian help in the 2020 election?”
White House deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley responded, saying “I don’t understand the question … he’s already denounced multiple times Russian involvement.” He noted the Mueller report shows Russian attempts to interfere were known since 2014, and “Barack Obama did nothing … We now know why. He thought Hillary Clinton would, in fact, win the election.”
Maintaining False Narratives
Questions such as whether or not Trump would “accept Russian help” in the upcoming elections build on the false narrative these legacy outlets have been pushing. They perpetuate false narratives by keeping them alive in the public consciousness.
Yet, by posing a question in a way that assumes something took place, it forced the press secretary to provide comments these outlets could use for new headlines.
Hillary Clinton pulled a similar move the same day, and stated on April 23 her opinion on Trump in the Mueller report that “any other person who had engaged in those acts would certainly have been indicted.”
Keep in mind, that’s the same Hillary Clinton who was let off on the investigations into her use of a private email server to handle classified information. The DOJ under Obama’s Attorney General Loretta Lynch had set an unusually high threshold for prosecuting Clinton, effectively ensuring from the outset that she would not be charged.
Meanwhile, Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who serves as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, is being accused by ranking member Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.) of misleading the public on the Mueller report by falsely claiming that the special counsel intended for Congress to decide whether Trump obstructed justice.
An open letter to Nadler points to the specific questions in the Mueller report, and notes: “The passages are not, in fact, an invitation for Congress to pick up where the Report left off. As you are certainly aware, the legislative branch writes the laws and the executive branch enforces them.”
After providing additional evidence and quotes from Nadler, it states, “Your deliberate misrepresentations to the American public threaten the fundamental separation-of-power doctrine, are dangerous, and need to stop.”
Altering Meaning
The idea is not to alter the information being released, but instead to alter the context of the information. By altering the context, it changes the conclusions people come to after seeing or reading the information being released.
It’s classic psychological warfare at play, meant to alter the way people interpret information.
The legacy news outlets, driven to maintain the warped perceptions formed by these narratives, will latch onto any incident they can find. The more controversy they can stir up, the more chaotic of a picture they can create—regardless of facts—the more agitated the public becomes, and the less likely they’ll reflect on the information rationally.
We saw this recently when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) downplayed the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks saying that “some people did something.” Trump posted a video on Twitter that showed Omar making her comments alongside footage of the 9/11 attacks. The legacy media reacted by defending Omar and by criticizing Trump of “racism” and “hate.”
Regardless of facts, incidents like these are meant to serve a purpose. The narrative is meant to control public perception and lead it to partisan conclusions, and this can’t work without double standards and half truths.
With this type of reporting, the idea is to give the public an inaccurate picture of events for the sake of “perception management.”
Crisis and Response
Another focus of these tactics is to create a crisis on the ground and in the public consciousness that public leaders can respond to with legislation.
When Michael Wolff wrote his book “Fire and Fury” that attempted to frame the Trump administration as being chaotic, he admitted in his prologue that some sources lied to him, some sources contradicted others, and he used these to settle on “a version of events I believe to be true.”
As Law & Crime noted, Wolff was “accused of including fiction in what’s presented as a non-fiction book, and he admits that not all of his sources were trustworthy, but he doesn’t specify what’s fact true and what’s false.”
Even though it was a piece of fiction, framed as nonfiction, it was used by legacy news outlets and by politicians to frame a new talking point that Trump was “mentally unfit” for office. This led to headlines such as one from The Atlantic on Jan. 12, 2018, “The Psychiatrist Telling Congress Trump Could Be Involuntarily Committed: A Yale professor says she’s telling lawmakers that the president may actually be ‘dangerous.’”
Democrat leaders used this crisis to introduce the “Stable Genius Act” to make Trump take a psychological evaluation. This served the purpose of perpetuating the illusion of chaos and instability; yet quickly backfired when Trump did take a mental evaluation that concluded he was both mentally stable and intelligent—reinforcing his “stable genius” line.
Facing the ongoing flurry of false narratives and chaos operations, overall, Trump has shown an uncanny skill in taking these narratives and turning them to his advantage.
And at the end of the day, Trump has shown a strong ability both to endure and deflect these tactics, expose lies as they occur, not fold or retreat when attacked, point out the double standards, and not hesitate to laugh at the ridiculousness of the claims.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or the Underground News Wire.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joshua Philipp is an award-winning investigative reporter and a senior editor at The Epoch Times. He is a recognized expert on unrestricted warfare, asymmetrical hybrid warfare, subversion, and historical perspectives on today’s issues. His 10-plus years of research and investigations on the Chinese Communist Party, subversion, and related topics gives him unique insight into the global threat and political landscape.
“As far as I'm concerned, it's a damned shame that a field as potentially dynamic and vital as journalism should be overrun with dullards, bums, and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy, and complacence, and generally stuck in a bog of stagnant mediocrity.” -Hunter Thompson
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