It is way worse than just blocking legitimate investigation into the origins of this virus. National media outlets in the U.S., major social media, etc. are blocking legitimate data and questions about the usefulness of masks and lockdown policies and data on vaccination programs. [/url].
Nothing new here. Even in the days before the general public got onto the Internet, newspapers, radio and TV broadcasters would not publish material from any old Tom, Dick or Harry.
If you are a quack doctor or bogus researcher, journalists and editors are going to suss you out. A good journalist and newspaper editor are not going to broadcast your dubious material. They will not let you spout your nonsense across the nation.
Freedom of expression means you can legally voice your opinion without being persecuted by the government. Freedom of expression however does not mean you have an automatic right to have your opinion broadcast across the nation by major broadcasters. If in the view of these broadcasters you are talking shite, then they will not give you any air time.
Sometimes broadcasters get it wrong, and give air time to a bogus researcher (the quack British antivaxer Dr Andrew Wakefield is an example of this: his bogus research was published in all the UK newspapers). And sometimes broadcasters or newspapers may fail to give air time to someone who's opinion is valid and important. It's the job of a good journalist to try to figure out what it legitimate, and what is bullshit. That's not an easy job.
People who have suffered from vaccination or know people who died after COVID vaccination are being instantly blocked on most major platforms.
This is not happening in the UK or Europe. The media have been following the stories about blood clots caused by the AstraZeneca vaccine quite closely.
Yesterday for example I read this story of a BBC reporter who died of a blood clot after the AstraZeneca vaccine. And this earlier story details 7 blood clot deaths after the AstraZeneca vaccine.
These stories however should be blocked on social media, because social media is not a rational discussion platform, but a place where hysterical fear and viral retweeting occurs. The masses can easily be whipped up into a frenzied state of hysterical fear by unverified hearsay. So such hearsay needs to be filtered.
Tens of thousands of doctors and researchers have been blocked from speaking on National media outlets and social media. Some have been, harassed, threatened, and even fired for raising questions about various pandemic policies or pointing out the effectiveness of out-patient treatments. Many of the researchers and doctors were previously very respected, extensively published, leaders in their fields.
They have been mostly replaced by nebulous talking-head "health professionals" who staff government bureaucracies.
This is a dangerous development.
In the US, quality journalism is suffering, because of the increasing political polarization of broadcast media and newspapers. This is happening in the UK too, but not to quite the same extent.
Broadcasters are currently less concerned with truth, and more concerned with their side winning. That's a bad state of affairs, and something desperately needs to be done about it.
A friend of mine told me that in the US, because of a change of law implemented by Reagan, TV news channels were legally allowed to become politically partisan, whereas previously there had been a law requiring TV broadcasters remain politically neutral and unbiased. Perhaps you know about this change in law, and can give me more details. I don't know much about it.
But I do know that once you let broadcasters become politically biased, truth will be the first casually.
By the way, in the medical intelligence hierarchy, doctors are at the lowest rung. So just because a doctor says something, don't think what they say is automatically legitimate and true. The highest rung is being a professor of medicine. If a professor tells you something, then it has more weight.
But if you take two professors of medicine, they may actually have different views in controversial and uncharted areas of medicine. So even a professor's views cannot always be regarded as unquestionably true, especially in unproven areas of science.
In any case, science is not conducted and disseminated via the media. Science is conducted and disseminated via scientific journals, scientific conferences, and day to day banter between scientists in their laboratories.
So what the media says does not greatly affect science, although it does greatly affect the general public.
Edited by Hip, 28 May 2021 - 01:45 PM.
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