Over the last three years the mainstream media in the West has become little more than the propaganda arm of anti-human globalist and permanent state interests. The Trusted News Initiative (TNI) has played a key role in misinforming Western publics.
Today we have another clip featuring Democratic Party presidential contender RFK Jr. (hereinafter RFK). This time it is only about 5 minutes long. I hope people will take the time to listen to it. Conveniently in time for the covid pandemic, the BBC and most if not all of the handful of corporations that control Western print and broadcast media, agreed to form the Trusted News Initiative (TNI).
As RFK describes it, the legacy media business model was understood to be losing ground to internet-based information providers. The problem was that anybody could set up an internet news operation. Just a few thousand paid subscribers at say $50-$100 a year can provide a good income. That market can support a lot of specialist news providers. And specialist news sources can develop a better knowledge of their areas of interest than the much less numerous journalists in legacy media can afford to acquire. That is one reason why professional internet information is often of higher quality.
Another reason is simple competition. If an internet-based news source consistently misinforms its subscribers it lose its reputation and go out of business. In any free, unregulated setting, reputation is all important. It’s only in unfree settings, where the state purveys regulations protecting uncompetitive vested interests, that organisations like the BBC can be widely mistrusted and yet survive. Yet again, the incentives people have to cooperate honestly and effectively in the absence of state coercion inevitably tend to produce higher quality outcomes, in information provision as in everything else.
Legacy media depend on a mixture of indefensible licence ‘fees’ (taxes) and advertising revenues to fund low-value information and entertainment to undifferentiated, unmotivated, low-paying mass readerships or audiences. Advertising revenues, especially from government or government sponsored corporations such as Big Pharma, also create serious conflicts of interest. Legacy media often cannot even afford to report honestly on society’s more untrustworthy elements.
The TNI targeted the Achilles heel of internet news provision, social media. Internet-based news providers need to make themselves known to a lot of people in order to attract the minority that are potential paying customers for their offerings. The biggest marketing tools for dissident, non-approved opinion formers are Twitter and Facebook. Both of these are big companies, as are other internet operators. They are fully exposed to the attention of permanent (or ‘deep’) state and security services, and ESG-minded globalist investment managers like Blackrock.
The TNI solution was to get the state to intimidate social media firms to censor independent internet-based competitors. We know from the ‘Twitter tapes’ that the US Government, and many overseas governments, constantly passed on requests via the FBI and other channels to cancel and so harm specified individuals. People would suddenly find profitable businesses deplatformed and ruined by Youtube, or Facebook, or Twitter itself. The whole thing has been a disgraceful and damaging undertaking. From the point of view of permanent state and legacy media interests, it may well turn out ultimately to have been wholly counterproductive. In the USA it is also a clear violation of the First Amendment, which protects free speech.
TNI censorship appeared to work for a time, though the reach of internet-based news nevertheless continued to expand – Joe Rogan’s interviews with covid dissident medics being a particular milestone. But now that Elon Musk’s Twitter is essentially off the reservation, TNI has lost much of its potency. Dissident news sources are finding new audiences and their businesses are growing again.
The recovery is very marked. Tucker Carlson, Fox News’ last well-known independently-minded journalist, has had literally hundreds of millions of views for his Twitter podcasts about the Biden family corruption, Ukraine, vaccines and ‘climate change’. Cumulatively, internet sources are casting increasing doubt on legacy media narratives. Unsurprisingly, RFK expects to use social media, specifically podcasts, to get round censorship. In this he is taking a leaf out of Donald Trump’s book in 2016, before the globalist TNI took form.
RFK draws attention to a particular aspect of the logic of the TNI. For the scheme to be feasible, there had to be an agreed narrative line about every subject in order to identify the ‘bad guys’ who needed their livelihoods wrecked by Zuckerberg, Dorsey and the other (perhaps unavoidably) compliant social media moguls. The only available TNI ‘truth’ was whatever the Collective West’s governments were asserting to be the truth.
The only way forward for TNI was for Western legacy media to become state propagandists. Any other approach would break the TNI into factions supporting different versions of reality. These would bring down TNI by making incompatible deplatforming demands.
The result was the closing of the Overton Window. (Overton was an American academic who first pointed out the limited scope of permissible public debate in the media.) The media had previously served state-sponsored vested interests by restricting reporting and information to a very narrow range of views. For example, discussion of the rate of income tax was all right, but not whether there was should be an income tax. Newspapers could discuss ways of addressing ‘climate change’, but not whether it might be nonsense (‘97% of climate scientists’ don’t want to be defunded for deviating from the official line).
Thanks to TNI corporations, there could only be one version of ‘the truth’ and no more free speech. The result is a dramatic polarisation of society. Many don’t realise that the legacy media have misled them, or don’t want to admit they have been duped. It’s hard to have any civil discourse with them. Both sides are operating from completely different sets of information.
By behaving in a wholly untrustworthy way, the TNI media, and the political systems in the West who rely on their spreading pro-state narratives, have inflicted lasting damage on their credibility. It may well have backed them all into an existential struggle.
RFK may be the nemesis of Western permanent state censors and their captive mainstream media. He has first-hand experience of relentless attempts to smear and deplatform him because of his principled and (as far as I can tell) rational stance on properly testing childhood vaccinations.
He also has a fund of public goodwill from lighting up the darkness of the WHO/UN/Gates/Big Pharma coordinated lockdown and RNA injection nightmare, which was cynically fronted by never-to-be-trusted-again legacy media. Not least, he wrote ‘The Real Anthony Fauci’ showing Anthony Fauci for what he really is. He sold a million copies despite legacy silence. Nobody can deny his resolution or courage, which donor-dependent politicians in the Collective West so conspicuously lack.
Here is the video clip link:
I need hardly add that this mess, like most of societal problems, has ben caused by people’s belief in ‘government’, thus allowing themselves to be bullied and robbed with no chance of redress. Without the state, at least in its current form, we would have honest information in stable, wealthy and peaceable societies.
PS: Talking of narrative fakery, I note that current climate crisis assertions about unprecedented warming have been accompanied by a switch away from the normal reporting of air temperatures several feet off the ground. Instead ground surface temperatures, which are much warmer, are being reported.
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