STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
#UNRIG: Americans’ Trust in Media Hits Record Low, Time For the Killshot
By Ben Bartee - July 07, 2021

“The television’s put a thought inside your head
Like a Barry Manilow jingle
‘I’d like to teach the world to sing
In perfect harmony’…
A symphonic blank stare”

-The Decline

#UNRIG operates on the cyber-frontier of the information war (the last domain of free speech), building coalitions to challenge, destroy, and ultimately replace the dying corporate media – and we’re coming to a locale near you.

The dinosaur legacy media is on borrowed time:

“For the first time ever, fewer than half of all Americans have trust in traditional media, according to data from Edelman’s annual trust barometer shared exclusively with Axios. Trust in social media has hit an all-time low of 27%.”

CNN, especially, among the worst of the worst, is in a tailspin.

The cracks have formed; the pressure is mounting; the mainstream press is now in emergency triage mode, trying desperately to stem the bleeding out of their credibility.

The corporate media talking heads have relinquished their vice-grip on the narrative; lost the pulse. No longer the manufacturers of consent they once were, they have become within the past year the submissive receivers of the zeitgeist, barely treading water as they struggle, and ultimately fail, to adapt to an evolving digital media landscape.

Then vs. Now: CNN vs. Reality (What a Difference a Year Makes)

The 2020-21 COVID drama fully exposed the corporate media — embodied most fully by CNN — for what it is: a stenography service of power, the fact-free parroters of the corporate-state line.

Then (Early 2020, aka the ‘Good Old Days’):

Now (Early 2021 – aka PANIC TIME/DAMAGE CONTROL)

*Addendum: Actual scientists like heavily censored Bret Weinstein were interested from the start in uncovering the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus; the corporate media was simply not interested in that line of inquiry until the dam broke.

Can you see the emergent fear in the eyes of the pandemic’s likely engineer, NIAID Director Anthony Fauci?

If the corporate media could have kept a lid on the narrative – as they more or less successfully did when the same dynamic played out in the earlier days of the internet (as in the propagandization leading up to the Iraq War based on lies), before online journalists had the capacity to expose the media’s lies at scale – they would have.

A coalition of internet-facilitated independent media, including #UNRIG, has neutered and exposed them.

Setting vs. Reacting to the Agenda

Corporate media no longer sets the news agenda; it reacts to it.

Whereas they once, in a bygone era, enjoyed near-total hegemony over the means of information dissemination a la corporate ownership of every large paper, television network, and radio station, they no longer do.

Who owns cyberspace — as we mentioned previously, the last domain of free expression? No single entity – for now, if we can keep it anarchical.

Resurrecting True Independent Journalism: The Lost Art

Normal Americans who deride fake news do not hate the media writ large as Hillary Clinton and television news actors claim; they hate a very particular brand of dishonest, morality-free propaganda masquerading as “journalism” as practiced by the Washington Post, Newsweek, MSNCBC, et al.:

“When non-lobotomized normal Americans say that the media is the enemy of the people, they mean specifically the corporate media, not the institution of journalism itself.  What CNN, MSNBC, NBC, et al. do is not journalism, as in, the academic discipline of objective reporting.”

Journalism is an art; a discipline. Journalists (whether they deserve the title or not) are merely practitioners of that art.

corporate-state journalists =/= journalism itself

These terms are not interchangeable. In the same way:

corporate-state scientists =/= science itself

Dishonest actors hiding behind the institutions of journalism and science are tantamount to Hamas militants operating out of civilian neighborhoods, using innocents as cover.

Recently, a desperate Anthony Fauci attempted this sly but played-out rhetorical trick. Unfortunately for him, this hide-the-ball semantics game cannot withstand true scrutiny.

Sign the #UNRIG petition to investigate and prosecute Anthony Fauci for perjury before Congress.

Censorship: The Last Refuge of a Dying Corporate Media

Understanding their perilous predicament up against the free flow of information via the web, the dying media’s only recourse is – predictably, as we have seen with its attempts to control the COVID narrative – tried-and-true classical censorship:

“[Facebook] now has an exhaustive list of more than 50 specific false claims about the coronavirus it does not allow, ranging from saying the virus is manmade to posting that it’s safer to get the disease rather than the vaccine.”

According to data leaked to Project Veritas by two (now former) Facebook employees, the company created an entire framework – as we now know, in collaboration with Anthony Fauci – to censor COVID “misinformation” (defined however the Big Tech Giant pleases in any given instance).

The instances of censorship across every major media platform vis a vis COVID are too numerous and vast to explore in detail here. Suffice it to say, free speech is sacrificed at the altar of promoting the consensus narrative – facts and objective analysis be damned.

And average Americans have noticed.

Free Speech in Cyberspace: The Corporate-Media Killshot

The Wuhan leak of SARS-CoV-2, the illicit gain-of-function research that preceded it, and the ensuing pandemic were crimes against humanity, aided and abetted by the elite corporate media.

By whatever means necessary, the pro-human freedom coalition must extend Enlightenment free speech doctrine into the digital realm – a truly free society depends on the free flow of information, the essential and most basic foundational concept of Western culture.

If we can manage to lay free-speech tripwire skillfully, death to the corporate state’s media is the inevitable outcome. They can’t survive on an open field in fair competition.

To network with like-minded citizens in the information war, check out the latest #UNRIG calendar updates for the upcoming stop in your slice of the country. We’ve got more than 50 stops left to go this summer as we crisscross the landscape before the tour concludes August 28th.

Ben Bartee is a Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Via his blog, Armageddon Prose, subscribe to get his free stuff, contact him, or offer a token of financial support. Armageddon Prose on social media: Facebook Twitter Gab LinkedIn Medium

Posted in STAFF NEWS & ANALYSIS
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