Brownstone Institute
Jeff Bezos Is Right: Legacy Media Must Self-Reflect
From the Brownstone Institute
By
I can count on one hand the times I have seen leaders of media organizations engage in anything that could be described as hard-hitting forms of self-critique in the public square.
One of those times was when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on public record, in a letter to the Republican House Judiciary Committee (dated August 26th, 2024), that he “regretted” bowing to pressure from the Biden administration to censor “certain Covid-19 content.” Another was the almost unprecedented public apology in January 2022 (here’s a report in English) by a Danish newspaper that it had towed the “official” line during the pandemic far too uncritically.
We witnessed a third moment of critical introspection from a media owner the other day, when Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post and is the largest shareholder of Amazon, suggested in an op-ed in his own newspaper that legacy media may have themselves at least partly to blame for the loss of public trust in the media.
In this context, he argued that his decision not to authorize the Washington Post to endorse a presidential candidate could be “a meaningful step” toward restoring public trust in the media, by addressing the widespread perception that media organizations are “biased” or not objective.
You don’t need to be a fan of Jeff Bezos, any more than of Mark Zuckerberg, to recognize that it is a good thing that prominent representatives of the financial and political elite of modern societies, whatever their personal flaws and contradictions, at least begin to express doubts about the conduct and values of media organizations. Some truths, no matter how obvious, will not resonate across society until prominent opinion leaders viewed as “safe” or “established,” say them out loud.
Bezos opens his Washington Post op-ed by pointing out that public trust in American media has collapsed in recent generations and is now at an all-time low (a substantial decline can be seen across many European countries as well if you compare the Reuters Digital News Report from 2015 with that of 2023 — for example, Germany sees a drop from 60% to 42% trust and the UK sees a drop from 51% to 33%).
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working…Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.
Something we are doing is clearly not working. This is the sort of candid introspection we need to see a lot more of in journalists and media owners. If someone stops trusting you, it’s easy to point the finger at someone else or blame it on “disinformation” or citizen ignorance. It’s not so easy to make yourself vulnerable and take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror to figure out how you’ve lost their trust.
The owner of the Washington Post does not offer an especially penetrating diagnosis of the problem. However, he does point out some relevant facts that may be worth pondering if we are to come to a deeper understanding of the fact that the Joe Rogan podcast, with an estimated audience of 11 million, now has nearly 20 times CNN’s prime-time audience:
The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves. (It wasn’t always this way — in the 1990s we achieved 80 percent household penetration in the DC metro area.)
More and more, we talk to ourselves. Much of the legacy media has become an ideological echo chamber, as I pointed out in an op-ed in the Irish Times a few years ago. Conversations go back and forth between journalists about things they care about, while a substantial number of ordinary citizens, whose minds are on other things, like paying their mortgage, getting a medical appointment, or worrying about the safety of their streets, switch off.
While there are some notable exceptions, the echo-chamber effect is real and may be part of the explanation for the flight of a growing number of citizens into the arms of alternative media.
The increasing disconnect between self-important legacy journalists and the man and woman on the street has been evidenced by the fact that so-called “populism” was sneered at by many journalists across Europe and North America while gathering serious momentum on the ground.
It was also evidenced by the fact that serious debates over issues like the harms of lockdowns and the problem of illegal immigration, were largely sidelined by many mainstream media across Europe while becoming a catalyst for successful political movements such as the Brothers of Italy, Le Pen’s Rassemblement National in France, Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, and the Freedom Party in Austria.
Perhaps part of the problem is that those working in well-established media organizations tend to take the moral and intellectual high ground and severely underestimate the capacity of ordinary citizens to think through issues for themselves, or to intelligently sort through competing sources of information.
Indeed, even Jeff Bezos, in his attempt to be critical of legacy media, could not resist depicting alternative media exclusively in negative terms. “Many people,” he lamented, “are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions.”
While there is undoubtedly an abundance of confusion and false and misleading information on social media, it is by no means absent from the legacy media, which has gotten major issues badly wrong. For example, many mainstream journalists and talk show hosts uncritically celebrated the idea that Covid vaccines would block viral transmission, in the absence of any solid scientific evidence for such a belief. Similarly, many journalists dismissed the Covid lab-leak theory out of hand, until it emerged that it was actually a scientifically respectable hypothesis.
We should thank Jeff Bezos for highlighting the crisis of trust in the media. But his complacency about the integrity of traditional news sources and his dismissive attitude toward “alternative sources” of news and information are themselves part of the reason why many people are losing respect for the legacy media.
Republished from the author’s Substack
Brownstone Institute
The Trump Administration Must Bring Moderna to Heel
From the Brownstone Institute
Moderna’s European filing also revealed that the company withheld trial results demonstrating that children under 12 who received the vaccine were ten times more likely than those who received the placebo to suffer “serious side effects.”
Last week, independent journalist Alex Berenson reported that a preschool-aged child died of “cardio-respiratory arrest” after taking a dose of Moderna’s Covid mRNA vaccine during its clinical trials. Despite federal requirements to report all trial information, the company withheld the truth for years as it raked in billions from its Covid shots.
The extent of the cover-up remains unknown, but Moderna, headed by CEO Stéphane Bancel, disregarded federal law requiring companies to report “summary results information, including adverse event information, for specified clinical trials of drug products” to clinicaltrials.gov. The company, not the government, is responsible for posting all results, and failure to report the death of a child constitutes a clear breach of US law, which threatens civil action against any party that “falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact.”
To this point, pharmaceutical companies have remained largely immune for their role in perpetrating globally-scaled deception resulting in thousands of vaccine injuries and billions in profits. They have enjoyed a liability shield courtesy of the PREP Act, which offers protections for injuries resulting from vaccines; that indemnity, however, does not extend to non-compliance with federal regulations, material misstatements or omissions of fact, or other offenses.
The death of the child only became known because of an obscure European report released last year, which revealed that Moderna has known about the death for over two years while it continues to advertize Covid shots to children as young as six months old.
Moderna’s European filing also revealed that the company withheld trial results demonstrating that children under 12 who received the vaccine were ten times more likely than those who received the placebo to suffer “serious side effects.” Without any evidence, Moderna claimed that the side effects, including the death of a child, were unrelated to the shots.
The incoming Trump administration offers a rare opportunity to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable and to investigate the depth of the cover-up.
The FDA is responsible for enforcing the reporting of vaccine trial results, but recent heads of the agency such as Scott Gottlieb and Robert Califf have been fanatical supporters of Big Pharma. Trump’s choice for FDA, Dr. Marty Makary, presents a stark contrast to his predecessors. Makary has criticized the US Government’s reluctance to acknowledge the role of natural immunity in preventing Covid infection, and he opposed the widespread vaccination of children. He testified to Congress, “In the U.S. we gave thousands of healthy kids myocarditis for no good reason, they were already immune. This was avoidable.”
President-elect Trump has tapped Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., perhaps the most well-known critic of the Covid vaccines, to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA. He has named Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an author of the Great Barrington Declaration, as his choice to head the National Institutes of Health. Further, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) told Berenson that he plans to subpoena the FDA once Republicans become the majority party in the Senate this month.
President Trump’s first term was ultimately defined by his failure to fulfill his pledge to “drain the swamp.” A corrupt bureaucracy, personified in many ways by Dr. Anthony Fauci, aided and abetted by advisors like his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, hijacked the president’s agenda. Now, the Trump administration has an unlikely yet monumental opportunity for health reform, which can start on January 20 with an investigation into Moderna’s cover-up.
The Covid response doomed Trump 1.0. Whether one regards this as a monumental error, the betrayal of a president by his advisors, an event beyond the president’s control, or a deeper and more complex plot involving everything and everyone associated with the government, both in the US and around the world, there is no question of the scale of the calamity for the public. The shots are part of that, the capstone failure of a long line of foreshadowing with lockdowns and all that was associated with pre-pharmaceutical interventions. The antidote came not as a cure but, for many, the disease itself.
There must be truth if not justice.
Brownstone Institute
The Pandemic Planners Come for Hoof and Hen…and Us Again
From the Brownstone Institute
By
“Pandemic preparedness” is a gigantic, deadly protection racket. I have described it in the past as arsonists running the fire department. That is precisely what happened with Covid, and that is what is being attempted with H5N1 Bird flu.
On December 31, 2024, the world received a year-end parting gift from the good folks at NIAID, Anthony Fauci’s old fiefdom at the National Institutes of Health. NIAID – the same unaccountable and secretive agency that Fauci used to fund the gain-of-function research of Ralph Baric at UNC Chapel Hill and the Bat Lady in Wuhan that resulted in Covid – has a new director, one Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo.
Marrazzo and another NIAID colleague, Dr. Michael G. Ison, wrote a year-end editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine that accompanies a research paper on recent H5N1 Bird flu cases in the United States, as well as a case report of a lone case of severe illness associated with Bird flu in British Columbia.
Marrazzo and Ison summarize the findings of the research paper and case report as follows:
Investigators now report in the Journal a series of human cases from the United States and Canada. The former series involves 46 case patients with generally mild, self-limited infection with [Influenza type] A(H5N1): 20 with exposure to poultry, 25 with exposure to dairy cows, and 1 with undefined exposure.…Most case patients presented with conjunctivitis, almost half with fever, and a minority with mild respiratory symptoms, and all recovered. The only hospitalization occurred in the case patient with undefined exposure, although hospitalization was not for respiratory illness.
They elaborate on the single case of serious illness:
In Canada, a 13-year-old girl with mild asthma and obesity presented with conjunctivitis and fever and had progression to respiratory failure…After treatment that included oseltamivir, amantadine, and baloxavir, she recovered.
In other words:
- Over an eight-month period, from March to October 2024, 46 cases of human bird flu occurred in the United States, a country of 336 million people.
- There were zero deaths.
- 45 out of 46 infected persons had known exposure to animals.
- The majority of the cases consisted of conjunctivitis (commonly known as “pink eye”).
- Only one US patient was hospitalized, but this was not due to pneumonia – the principal life-threatening complication of influenza – and the patient recovered.
- One severe case was identified in Canada, a country of 40 million people, in an asthmatic, morbidly obese girl. She was treated successfully with respiratory support and existing antiviral medications, and she recovered.
Does this sound to you like a public health emergency worthy of the legacy media’s recent exhumation of discredited Covid-era fear-mongers like Dr. Leana Wen and Dr. Deborah “Scarf Lady” Birx? Does it justify their hair-on-fire pronouncements on cable news shows everywhere, pushing for indiscriminate PCR testing of animals and emergency authorization of more mRNA vaccines for humans?
Does this sound to you like justification to continue to kill and destroy (pro tip: “cull” means kill and destroy) millions upon millions of farm animals, when most animals who contract Bird flu survive, recover, and develop immunity?
Does this sound to you like justification for another Emergency Use Authorization of another mRNA vaccine?
No? Me neither.
But wait, there’s more.
In their editorial, NIAID experts Marrazzo and Ison fail to mention the following:
- There have been zero cases of human-to-human transmission of this virus.
- The current circulating clade of the virus has been determined by independent researchers to very likely have originated at a US Government gain-of-function laboratory, namely the USDA Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory (SEPRL) in Athens, GA.
- Multiple bioweapons laboratories, including the Yoshihiro Kawaoka lab at the University of Wisconsin, and the Ron Fouchier lab in the Netherlands (both of which have been affiliated with NIAID and with work done at SEPRL) have been doing gain-of-function research on Bird flu for many years, including experiments so outrageously dangerous that their work prompted President Obama’s ultimately unsuccessful ban of gain-of-function research in 2014.
- In 2019, NIAID reapproved and resumed funding Kawaoka and Fouchier’s dangerous work at increasing human transmissibility of Bird flu – the very same gain-of-function research that had prompted Obama’s ban.
- According to its package insert, Audenz, the current Bird flu vaccine, was associated with death in 1 out of every 200 recipients, compared to 1 in 1,000 placebo recipients.
- According to openthebooks.com, and as reported in the New York Post, NIH scientists received royalties totaling $325 million from pharmaceutical companies and foreign entities over more than a decade.
So, what are our friends at NIAID’s recommendations?
For one, they stress the “urgent need for vigilant surveillance of emerging mutations and assessment of the threat of human-to-human transmission.”
Are they advocating for the willy-nilly testing of entire livestock herds, as promoted by Birx, which is sure to create a preponderance of false positives?
Are they calling for the continued mass killing and destruction of millions upon millions of farm animals, whenever a fraction of the animals test positive for the virus?
Instead of PCR-swabbing every cow, chicken, and farm worker on Earth, how about we stop creating new mutant variants of H5N1 in the labs, since that’s where the current problem originated? How about we stop funding such utter madness with our tax dollars, funneled through corrupt government agencies like NIAID?
After all, you don’t save Tokyo by creating Godzilla.
But Marrazzo and Ison make no mention of this common-sense, sane approach.
Instead, they also stress the need for more – you guessed it – vaccines. They write:
we must continue to pursue development and testing of medical countermeasures…Studies have shown the safety and immunogenicity of A(H5N1) vaccines…studies are ongoing to develop messenger RNA–based A(H5N1) vaccines and other novel vaccines that can provide protection against a broad range of influenza viruses, including A(H5N1).”
Aside from attesting to the “safety” of a product where 1 in 200 users die, the use of the word “countermeasures” is extremely telling. It is a military term, not a medical one. We have already seen this game played with Covid. The gain-of-function lab research is done to produce a lab-manipulated, weaponized version of a virus, a version that is transmissible among and toxic to humans – in other words, a bioweapon. The vaccine is the countermeasure to the bioweapon. The vaccine is the intellectual property of those who created the bioweapon, and it is worth a fortune once the weapon has been unleashed. It is as simple as that.
“Pandemic preparedness” is a gigantic, deadly protection racket. I have described it in the past as arsonists running the fire department. That is precisely what happened with Covid, and that is what is being attempted with H5N1 Bird flu.
Moving forward to a new administration that has expressed a commitment to rooting out corruption in the pharmaceutical/medical/public health realm, improving the health of citizens, and restoring trustworthiness in medicine, I recommend the following steps to combat the H5N1 Bird flu, and to end the “pandemic preparedness” racket that threatens to hold the world hostage again and again, as it did during Covid.
- Immediately end and outlaw all gain-of-function and other bioweapons research in and funded by the United States, and apply all possible diplomatic pressure to eradicate it from the Earth.
- Eliminate all special protections from liability for vaccines, including the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act and the PREP Act.
- Refocus Infectious Disease research on new therapeutics, rather than power-seeking and profit-driven vaccine development.
- Completely reform the National Institutes of Health, and close the incorrigibly corrupt NIAID altogether.
The fear pornographers must be discredited. We must make realistic and sensible decisions about our food supply.
We must learn the lessons of Covid, and live in knowledge rather than in fear.
We must end the protection rackets, confidence games, and shakedowns that government insiders impose on us like mafiosi.
Happy New Year!
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