Traditional journalism is undergoing a serious crisis of integrity, as several prominent journalists have recognised. Many media outlets have become little more than politically correct entertainers, enslaved to the values and interests of their advertisers and afraid to “rock the boat.”
Quite a few journalists working for mainstream media outlets have been forced to follow an editorial line that blindly adheres to the official government narrative. Dissenting voices are conspicuously absent from the pages of newspapers, not because they cannot be found, but because they are viewed from the highest levels as inappropriate or even offensive.
In view of this crisis, a good number of mainstream journalists are now either unwilling or unable to ask the hard questions, and educate the public about uncomfortable truths. In this context, citizens become especially vulnerable to manipulative and one-sided narratives fed to them by governments and media operators. This has been especially evident during the Covid pandemic.
If you have watched official government press conferences over the course of the pandemic, as I have, you will have noticed that in many instances, journalists seemed to be blissfully unaware that leading scientists from prestigious institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford Universities view prevailing thinking on the pandemic as deeply flawed.
A preponderance of journalists working for newspapers, radio stations, and TV stations seemed completely unwilling, or unable, to formulate critical questions, “follow the money,” or engage in serious investigation to determine whether the data government was spoon-feeding them was well grounded (death from Covid versus death with Covid, for example). Indeed, quite a few journalists have acted as though they were part of the official government PR machine.
To my knowledge, only one media organ has so far come out publicly and apologised for its lazy, biased coverage of the government’s handling of the pandemic (here is the link to the original apology in Danish; here is a report in English, with a translation of the original Danish text).
I hope more journalists and editors “man up” and admit that they have let the public down badly in exaggerating the risks of Covid-19, ignoring the scientific evidence against the efficacy of lockdowns, and enthusiastically rattling off PCR statistics handed them by public officials without bothering to investigate whether or not they were actually a reliable indicator of disease incidence.
Now, more than ever, independent journalists play a critical role in offering a public counterweight to mindless propaganda, whether from Big Government, Big Pharma, Mainstream Media, or the faceless “fact checkers” that work for Big Tech. By independent journalists, I mean both mainstream journalists with a fiercely independent, truth-seeking spirit, and journalists working on their own or for smaller media outfits that dare to dissent from the official narrative. Both play a vital role in injecting a critical spirit into public debate, and educating citizens about “the other side” of the question that is almost completely ignored or ridiculed by official propaganda.
It could be plausibly argued that any citizen who cares about the quality of public debate in their society has very good reason to go out of their way to support independent journalists, who are paddling upstream and not infrequently have to contend with political censorship, especially by Big Tech platforms (yours truly was removed from Twitter for the “misinformation crime” of reporting on the use of Ivermectin in Mexico and India). One way to do this is to simply follow or subscribe to the columns, channels and blogs of journalists who offer cogent analysis of the available evidence and are not afraid to question the dogmas of our time.
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A very valuable article David. Journalists in MSM have become reporters asking insipid questions at Press Conferences and rarely deviating from the narrative. You have my support for the work that you are doing and we will help you in whatever way we can. Liam