Thread by @Doc_0

The true, bloody, and brutal story of Antifa, Abolish the Police, and Black Lives Matter is following exactly the same trajectory as the Wuhan lab leak story. The truth was dismissed as a conspiracy theory and ruthlessly suppressed until it could no longer be ignored.

With both the coronavirus origin and urban unrest stories, the media ran like a witless herd, easily manipulated by small groups of bad sources with big megaphones, easily stampeded away from listening to the "icky" people who happened to be telling the truth.

This is one reason it's important not to let the media get away with a half-hearted shrug of "golly, maybe we should have taken that lab leak theory seriously after all" and a bout of furious stealth-editing for their old callous dismissals. They keep DOING THIS. It's systemic.

It's a huge problem when our entire media apparatus - a very important element of democracy - keeps getting major stories wrong due to herd-think and political bias. It's a problem when the media doesn't report the truth until it becomes impossible to ignore it.

It's an especially big problem when we're not just talking about left-wing networks and newspapers misinforming their audience. We're talking about garbage media coverage being weaponized by Big Tech so the people telling the truth are ACTIVELY SUPPRESSED, not merely ignored.

If the information regime today had been fully operational in 2004, everyone who blew holes in Dan Rather's National Guard memo scam would have been silenced by Big Tech - their tweets deleted, their Facebook accounts nuked. The truth would have been prosecuted as disinformation.

The Wuhan lab leak theory was "discredited" by a handful of deeply conflicted scientists with ties to the Wuhan lab. They influenced a media that loathed Trump and all of his officials, handing them a packaged story that became "conventional wisdom" overnight.

And that wholly false narrative was then weaponized by lefty Big Tech into a censorship doctrine that silenced people who strayed from the packaged narrative. You got banned or flagged in 2020 for discussing what the media suddenly decided was acceptable in 2021.

This keeps HAPPENING. It happened again with urban violence from Antifa/Abolish the Police/Black Lives Matter. The same factors were in play: influential sources with a narrative to peddle, political biased reporters, the people telling the truth were icky.

It's been happening for a long time. Past decades are filled with left-wing sources easily manipulating biased reporters, media flocking like geese to follow each other's junk reporting, storytelling and "narratives" favored over the truth, partisan interests controlling press.

Students of media bias have troves of favorite stories about media firestorms sparked by dubious sources who weren't questioned because their stories fit the media's biases. Tiny groups could shoot off a couple of faxes and trigger comical avalanches of headline news.

But now we have censorship loops that run from corrupt sources >> Big Media >> Big Tech. Some of those loops begin with tweets and Facebook posts, bringing it full circle: Online chatter laundered through Big Media and hammered into censorship directives by online platforms.

Among many reasons to be deeply worried about this censorship loop: the Chinese Communist Party EXCELS at presenting packaged news stories to foreign media outlets. They spent huge amounts of money and thousands of man-hours perfecting such operations.

breitbart.com/national-secur…

If our media remains as lazy, blinkered, biased, prejudiced, and gullible as what we've seen during the lab leak and urban violence debacles, it will be child's play for China and other hostile powers to use American media to further their malevolent political strategies.

The lab leak story was arguably China's first great success at doing so. The course of American politics was indisputably changed to Beijing's benefit by how the coronavirus was covered. Apologies and backpedaling from media today are WORSE than useless to the American people.

China got what it wanted from U.S. media's coverage of the coronavirus, and media is admitting the truth in a grudging and dishonest manner intended to deflect the serious criticism that could improve it. The systemic flaws remain - and our enemies know how to exploit them. /end