Thread by @caitoz

The Horrifying Rise Of Total Mass Media Blackouts On Inconvenient News Stories

"What's being communicated to whistleblowers and journalists in these blackouts is, don't bother. It won't make any difference, because no one will ever see what you reveal."
caitlinjohnstone.substack.com/p/the-horrifyi…

Two different media watchdog outlets, @MediaLens and @FAIRmediawatch, have published articles on the complete blackout in mainstream news institutions on the revelation that the US prosecution against Assange relied on false testimony.
medialens.org/2021/a-remarka…

"A search online for either 'Assange' or 'Thordarson' will elicit zero relevant articles from establishment sources, either US or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, even in tech-focused platforms like the Verge, Wired or Gizmodo."
~ @FAIRmediawatch
fair.org/home/key-assan…

As we discussed the other day, this weird, creepy media blackout has parallels with another total blackout on a different major news story which also involved WikiLeaks: the OPCW scandal.
consortiumnews.com/2021/06/29/the…

Make no mistake, this is most certainly a new phenomenon. If you don't believe me, contrast the blackout on these stories with the mass media coverage on WikiLeaks revelations a few short years earlier.

We also caught a strong whiff of this new trend in the near-total blackout on the Hunter Biden October surprise last year, which only went mainstream because it stood to benefit one of America's two mainstream political factions.

Last year @redsteeze described how the consensus formed among the mainstream press since Clinton’s 2016 loss that it is their moral duty to be uncritical of Trump’s opponent and suppress any news stories which might benefit them.
spectatorworld.com/life/hiding-bi…

Once you've accepted that journalists have not just a right but a duty to suppress news that is both factual and newsworthy in order to protect a political agenda, you're out in open water in terms of blatant propaganda manipulation.

In 2017 we saw things like Clinton insider Jennifer Palmieri melodramatically lamenting the media's fixation on WikiLeaks publications despite the Clinton campaign's desperate attempts to warn them that it was a Russian op (still zero proof of this, btw).

https://twitter.com/RawStory/status/885188825852641280?s=20

Liberal pundits like Joy Reid, Eric Boehlert and Peter Daou (prior to his leftward conversion) were constantly browbeating the press on Twitter for covering the leaks at all.

It ramped up even further when mainstream reporters like NYT's @amychozick and CNN's @JeffreyToobin stepped forward with degrading mea culpas on how badly they regret allowing the Russian government to use them as unwitting pawns to elect Donald Trump.
thehill.com/homenews/media…

It was like a cross between the confession/execution scene from Animal Farm and the walk of atonement scene from Game of Thrones.
mediamatters.org/new-york-times…

By mid-2018 we were seeing things like BBC reporter Annita McVeigh admonishing a guest for voicing skepticism about Syrian president Bashar al-Assad's culpability in the Douma incident on the grounds that "we're in an information war with Russia."

Again, this is a new phenomenon. MSM has always been propaganda, but they've relied on spin, distortion, half-truths, uneven coverage, and uncritically parroted government assertions; there weren't these complete information barricades across all outlets.

You'd see them giving important stories an inadequate amount of coverage, and some individual outlets would neglect inconvenient stories. But you'd always see someone jump at the chance to be the first to report it, if for no other reason than ratings and profit.

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, MSM will just pretend it doesn't exist.

Seriously think about what this means for a moment. This is telling whistleblowers and investigative journalists that no matter how hard they work or how much danger they put themselves in to get critical information out to the public, the public will never find out about it.

What's being communicated to whistleblowers and journalists in these blackouts is, don't bother. It won't make any difference, because no one will ever see what you reveal.

And if that's true, well.

God help us all, I guess.

The Horrifying Rise Of Total Mass Media Blackouts On Inconvenient News Stories (Audio)

"It means any time there's an inconvenient revelation, mainstream news institutions will just pretend it doesn't exist."
soundcloud.com/going_rogue/th…