Only bread and the newspaper we must have

The authoritarian and unscientific Covid-19 public health campaign of the Biden administration (and many other countries such as Australia) are really beginning to drive unpleasant revelations which in the long run, hopefully, will improve decision-making and accountability.  

Just today, I have seen two reports which are pretty devastating in their criticism and reporting of the mainstream media. 

First is this damning piece,  To Protect Fauci, The Washington Post is Preparing a Hit Piece on the Group Denouncing Gruesome Dog Experimentations by Glenn Greenwald.  The revelations about the purposeless and gruesome experimentation on dogs is stomach-churning.  In equal amounts due to revulsion about the cruelty and to outrage due to the malevolent, unprofessional and near evil behavior of the journalists.  

Anger over the U.S. Government's gruesome, medically worthless experimentation on adult dogs and puppies has grown rapidly over the last two months. A truly bipartisan coalition in Congress has emerged to demand more information about these experiments and denounce the use of taxpayer funds to enable them. On October 24, twenty-four House members — nine Democrats and fifteen Republicans, led by Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) — wrote a scathing letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci expressing “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs commissioned by National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases." Similar protests came in the Senate from a group led by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).

Greenwald documents extensively that the Washington Post for the past few years has been supportive and complimentary of the White Coat Waste project.  Complimentary up until their efforts to stop animal cruelty brought Fauci into focus as a funder of such research. 

 

So The Post, like most major media outlets, has been reporting on the successes of the White Coat Waste Project fairly and favorably for years. Most people in Washington and in the media regard success in bridging divisions between the citizenry and ideological camps as a desirable and positive objective, and few groups have done that with as much success as White Coat. And thus, along with trans-ideological public support, the group has been lavished with positive media coverage — until now.

Now everything has changed. The government official who oversees the agencies conducting most of these gruesome experiments has become a liberal icon and one of the most sacred and protected figures in modern American political history: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and President Biden's Chief Medical Advisor. Many of the most horrific experiments, including the ones on dogs and puppies now in the news as a result of White Coat's activism, are conducted by agencies under Fauci's command and are funded by budgets he controls.

 

In other words, White Coat's activism, which had long generated bipartisan support and favorable media coverage, now reflects poorly on Dr. Fauci. And as a result, The Washington Post has decided to amass a team of reporters to attack the group — the same one the paper repeatedly praised prior to the COVID pandemic — in order to falsely smear it as a right-wing extremist group motivated not by a genuine concern for the welfare of animals or wasteful government spending, but rather due to a partisan desire, based in MAGA ideology, to attack Fauci.

This is just despicable.  Journalists letting their political and ideological allegiances drive their reporting.  And in this case, suddenly attacking an anti-animal cruelty group simply because the journalists' hero is funding cruel experiments.  

Read the whole piece.  Greenwald is devastating in his reporting.  

After White Coat voluntarily provided more and more detailed documentation about its finances, it became obvious what fictitious storyline The Post was attempting to manufacture: that this is a far-right group that is funded by "dark money” from big MAGA donors, motivated by a hatred of science and Dr. Fauci. But in trying to manufacture this false tale, The Post encountered a rather significant obstacle: White Coat is funded almost entirely by small donors, grass-roots citizens who use the group's website to make donations.

Once The Post was repeatedly thwarted in its efforts to concoct the lie that the group is MAGA-funded, Reinhard continued to insist that there must be hidden right-wing funding sources, and even began demanding that White Coat take some sort of bizarre vow never to accept right-wing or "pro-Trump" funding sources in the future. 

The Post is no independent journalistic enterprise anymore.  It is an opposition research outlet of the DNC.  We knew this before by induction by now the evidence is right out there in the open.  The emails are right there from Post journalists explicitly trying to create a false story for purely ideological reasons and explicitly carrying on an ideological campaign to influence other organizations actions.

For years, The Washington Post reported fairly and truthfully on this group, because none of its activities threatened any government officials whom the paper wishes to protect. Suddenly, when the work they have been doing for years began to reflect poorly on a government official vital to American liberalism, The Post launched a campaign that is not even thinly disguised but nakedly clear in its goal: to smear this group by impugning its motives and distorting its agenda so that its work is immediately and uncritically disregarded by the paper's overwhelmingly liberal audience.

In recent years, The Washington Post and most mainstream media have been free and easy with claiming groups to be right-wing extremist without little evidence that they in fact warrant that description.  It is now almost de rigueur to dismiss such claims because they are so reflexive and so little substantiated.   

But to make the claim of right-wing extremism against a bipartisan small donor supported group widely admired for years and focused solely on stopping animal cruelty?  It is hard to imagine what journalists could do to further destroy their reputation more completely.

The other article I saw this morning, equally strident in its criticism of lobotomized journalistic reporting is from IM in No, Masks Do Not Work Against The Flu - Somehow the inaccurate narrative refuses to die.  IM's exasperation is as great as Greenwald's.  Masks do not stop the spread of Covid-19 nor do they have any measurable affect on most transmission.  

We know that masks have essentially no impact on the spread of COVID. Even though, bizarrely, many refuse to acknowledge that reality, a potentially more infuriating and confusing expert and media driven narrative is that masks are the main explanation for the disappearance of the flu.

Story after story after story in recent months has (poorly) attempted to make the case for indefinite masking to combat the spread of influenza. Media outlets, desperate to justify their belief in The Experts™, have ignored mountains of conclusive pre-pandemic evidence that masks do not stop the flu, as well as incontrovertible data from the past year and a half.

[snip]

 

Any examination of masks and the flu has to cover, yet again, what randomized controlled trials, the “gold standard” of scientific evidence, claims about their efficacy.

Fortunately, in 2019, the World Health Organization collected a thorough review of the literature for their “Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza” planning document.

It bears repeating just how little evidence there was for the organization to suggest that masks would impact the flu:

1. Ten RCTs were included in the meta-analysis, and there was no evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.

Ah wait, it wasn’t that there was “little” evidence. There was no evidence. None.

Ten randomized controlled trials. Ten of them. All resulted in zero evidence that face masks are effective in reducing transmission of laboratory-confirmed influenza.

This is solid, widely disseminated, easily accessible knowledge.   And yet the mainstream media keeps reporting that masks are an effective public health policy despite all the evidence to the contrary.  This article is a massive refutation of the mask lie.  He focuses on the flu but the ineffectiveness of masks is equally applicable to Covid-19.

It doesn't have anything to do with Covid-19 but Matt Taibbi (and Matt Orfalea) have a short piece out the gross automaton behavior of journalists in repeating talking points add infinitum regardless of the merit or accuracy of those talking points.  From Tracking a Journalistic Cliché: "The Worst Attack on Our Democracy Since the Civil War".  

Once we could trust, with a somewhat jaundiced eye, our newspapers at least trying to report the news.  Now they are mere propaganda organs of ideological authoritarians.  I came across a piece recently of Oliver Wendell Holmes and his regard for newspapers.  From Bread and the Newspaper by Oliver Wendell Holmes, published in 1861.

This is the new version of the Panem et Circenses of the Roman populace. It is our ultimatum, as that was theirs. They must have something to eat, and the circus-shows to look at. We must have something to eat, and the papers to read.

Everything else we can give up. If we are rich, we can lay down our carriages, stay away from Newport or Saratoga, and adjourn the trip to Europe sine die. If we live in a small way, there are at least new dresses and bonnets and every-day luxuries which we can dispense with. . . .  We all take a pride in sharing the epidemic economy of the time. Only bread and the newspaper we must have, whatever else we do without.

 

I lament the passing of semi-reliable newspaper and magazine reporting, once so measurable a part of my reading life.