Thread by @caitoz

The way the mass media have begun simply ignoring major news stories that are inconvenient for the powerful, across not just some but ALL major news outlets, is extremely disturbing. It means any time there's an inconvenient revelation, the MSM will just pretend it doesn't exist.

Seriously think about what this means for a moment. You want to talk about a threat to the press? Forget jailing journalists and whistleblowers, how about all news outlets of any real influence unifying to simply deny coverage to any major information which comes to light?

They just completely blacked out the Stundin report on Assange, and the OPCW leaks before that. The journalists involved in those revelations would naturally have expected these major revelations to receive mainstream coverage, but they just didn't. They were disappeared.

This is telling whistleblowers and investigative journalists that no matter how much danger they put themselves in to get critical information out to the public, the public will never find out about it, because all mainstream news outlets will unify around blacking it out.

This is about as great a threat to journalism as you could possibly imagine. I don't know by what apparatus the entire mainstream news media is being organized to black out major news stories, without a SINGLE exception, but if this is the new normal that's the end of journalism.

Yes, begun. This is NOT normal. If this had been happening a decade ago,people would never have known who Assange, Manning and Snowden are; their work would have been completely blacked out. This is a new escalation and it's unhelpful to pretend otherwise.

https://twitter.com/jackcharlt/status/1410206971920367618?s=20

This new thing where ALL mass media outlets deny ANY news coverage to a major story, AT ALL, is new. This is a *new* weapon in the imperial narrative control arsenal. Before they'd give uneven coverage, they'd distort, they'd downplay, but completely disappearing stories is new.

Getting a bunch of doofy hipster "this isn't new" responses, and they're just objectively wrong. ALL mainstream news outlets COMPLETELY blacking out major verified news stories is absolutely a new phenomenon. This too-cool "been there done that" cynicism isn't helpful.

Before, the profit motive alone would get news outlets reporting on stories; being the first major outlet to break a story was what they lived for. Now they all just stand around staring at the story, refusing to touch it. This is a major shift, and it didn't happen by itself.