CovOps
 Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
 |  Subject: REVIEW: A Bestseller in 1971, ‘None Dare Call It Conspiracy’ Lends Insight to the Events of Today  Thu Mar 10, 2022 11:43 pm | |
| Does anyone still believe what they read in the New York Times or watch on any major television network news broadcast? Because for millions of Americans, the credibility of those news sources is at an all-time low. The internet hive mind, even in the face of blatant censorship by search engines and social media monopolies, simply offers too many verifiable, alternative facts for establishment media to get away with the kind of lying they do, and yet they persist. Exposed and discredited, they keep on lying, betting that an exhausted populace simply will not verify every single thing they report.
Writing for the American Conservative, Arthur Bloom recently published a critique of American media with the not-so-subtle title, “They Really Are Lying to You.” His opening sentence: “The most effective kind of propaganda is by omission.”
Bloom is probably right, especially when one considers how much the media obsessed, for years, over what ultimately were nonstories – think “Russian collusion” or “Ukrainian impeachment.” And then there are the overblown stories – think “8 million COVID deaths in the United States by this time next year,” and now, “the nation is reeling under an epidemic of systemic racism” that suddenly, so very suddenly, have been urgent crises for, well, forever.
What will be next week’s crisis of the century? And what is really going on behind these blinding lunges from one overwhelming and orchestrated media fixation to the next? What events of greater consequence are being obscured, ignored, or omitted in favor of this coverage?
Media Making News
It doesn’t take a sleuth to watch ABC News anchor David Muir go through his nightly pattern – he curates the same stories, on the same themes, as every other major establishment network – to know that something’s going on. Why is there so much unity? Across the networks, the same facts? The same phrases? And it doesn’t take a numbers genius to realize that Muir and his “experts” have made stunning misuse of statistics to spread agenda-driven panic, first over COVID, and now over “systemic racism.”
America’s mass media aren’t reporting on mass panics and mass protests, they are creating them. They only secondarily “report” on them. Maybe COVID is the pandemic of the century. Or maybe not. The only thing we know for certain is that we can’t trust anything we hear about it on ABC Nightly “News.”
Arthur Bloom’s article is a well-documented exposé of how the media has lied in recent, and not so recent years. He alludes briefly to conspiracy theories, making the tantalizing suggestion that the media elites are trying to discredit conspiracy theorists by seeding conspiracy theories with information that is so fantastic as to be obviously false. He even suggests this tactic is what’s behind QAnon, which has, as he writes, “a remarkable ability to absorb all other conspiracy theories that came before it.”
But what is really behind the curtain? America’s media lies all the time, and they do it in lockstep with one another. Sometimes they lie by omission. Sometimes they manipulate statistics. And other times they distort their coverage, present quotes or report activities in an unrepresentative context, or engage in selective editing. Most often they just adopt a smug tone that lets the compliant or lazy listener absorb a clear message: this is a bad guy, this is a good guy. Why are they doing this?
Fifty years ago, a slim book, almost a pamphlet, was written and within a few years it sold more than 6 million copies. Authored by freelance journalist and conservative Gary Allen, None Dare Call it Conspiracy was first published in 1972. During that election year and for years afterward, the book was required reading for anyone who thought there were untold stories and unnamed forces driving current events. It is remarkable how relevant this book is today.
The historical narrative and players identified in None Dare Call it Conspiracy cannot be summarized briefly. Suffice to say that what Gary Allen described back then is similar fare to what you’ll get if you watch Alex Jones today, as well as many of the videos now coming from the QAnon network. And if you watch these sources today, remember this: Maybe instead of being seeded with information so fantastic as to be obviously false in order to discredit the entire body of work, the obviously ridiculous content is added in order to protect the body of work. Discard the ridiculous, but consider the rest, as absurdity protects it from the censors.
False Choices
While Allen’s discussion of specific players and events defies brief explication, he made several other points that are especially relevant today. While only conspiracy theorists may have believed Allen back in 1972, today there is nearly a consensus on some of these points. The first of these concepts is what Allen called the false choice between Left and Right, between Communism and fascism.
.https://tennesseestar.com/2020/06/29/review-1971s-none-dare-call-it-conspiracy-lends-insight-to-the-events-of-today/
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CovOps
Location : Ether-Sphere
Job/hobbies : Irrationality Exterminator
Humor : Über Serious
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