Remember way back in 2016 when DNC documents revealing Democratic Party corruption were leaked to Wikileaks by DNC staffer Seth Rich and the establishment media claimed without evidence that the leak was the product of a Russian Hack? Here's some great audio of Seymour Hersh talking about that situation. That moment in time has been on my mind lately, because that's when mainstream media completely went off of the rails.
Initially, major news outlets colluded with the Clinton campaign to undermine Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary election. After engineering public opinion to rig the primary, the media tried to stop the Trump machine and could not. When the election was over, things didn't go back to normal. They instead got weirder and weirder, particularly after the pandemic began.
It is therefore unsurprising that half of all Americans now disbelieve the news, according to a Gallup poll cited by Associated Press. Meanwhile, real news has increasingly been relegated to the wilderness. For example, on on February 8, Seymour Hersh published a detailed accounting of how the US blew up Russia's Nord Stream pipelines. The initial response to this story was crickets from the mainstream. Now we're starting to see denials and criticism.
The establishment did slightly better with the East Palestine chemical disaster. As far as I know, only one reporter was arrested for covering the story. Is anyone asking hard questions about the disaster's lasting impacts on human health and the environment? Not that I've seen.
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail recently promised to soon release the names of previously undisclosed Epstein associates. Their timeline is months, not days. But the release of this information will be huge news if and when it happens. Huge news that probably won't get the coverage it deserves.
When I heard that a Chinese balloon as big as an apartment building was floating over Montana, I didn't pay much attention to it. Then the balloon was shot down by a fighter jet. So were a few other unidentified objects in short order. There was an object the size of a small car over Alaska. And another that may have been a cylinder over the Yukon. Then there was an octagon over Lake Huron.
The media is tossing around the term UFO to describe the objects, and even government spokespersons are being careful to avoid ruling out ETs as the origin of the objects. But these are a far cry from the UFOs reported by the military in the 1940s and 1950s, as Richard Dolan points out in his latest video.
Whether or not balloons are floating overhead collecting data, a slow catastrophe has been unfolding on the ground for some time. This catastrophe has many layers. The failure of Keynesian economics. The holocene extinction. The replacement of institutional religion with nothing at all in society. High tech suppression of the lower classes. The capture of public institutions by private interests.
These things and many more are layers of our big problem, but they're mostly in the background. Other situations are more acute. The public health crisis unfolding as a result of terrible pandemic policies. The war in Ukraine devouring tremendous amounts of money to no clear end. Deteriorated safety in urban centers making a fresh round of civil unrest this coming summer seem infinitely plausible.
The role of the media in all of this is unclear. I think most reporters are principled and all of their editors are beholden to corporate or government interests. It is chilling that an award-winning journalist like Seymour Hersh had to publish the Nord Stream story on Substack. And if half of all Americans don't believe the news anyway, that's a clear sign that the credibility of mainstream media as a whole needs to be rebuilt.
The fastest way to rebuild this credibility would be for the press to begin reporting accurately on important events as they unfold. It's sad that they can no longer be relied upon to do this. Independent media does a better job, particularly in its reporting on topics the mainstream refuses to touch. But indi media is still considered fringe by many. Hopefully that will change in the next few years.
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