CBC JOURNALIST QUITS OVER BIASED COVID COVERAGE AND I GET CANCELLED (TEMPORARILY) FOR TELLING HER STORY

Why are newsrooms and Big Tech acting like nudge units? Plus an urgent call to action.

Image by Jorm S

CALL TO ACTION: While working on the story that follows, I was punished by Twitter with a 12-hour suspension for a week-old tweet promoting our podcast. The show and the tweet contain criticism of our national broadcaster from a former journalist who resigned over what she perceived as the network’s lopsided coverage of C-19 vaccines, amongst other things.

The suspension was unsettling given that the tweet was raising well-documented questions about the CBC and making no direct criticisms of the vaccine itself. I have raised many specific questions about the jab without Twitter intervention but not in this specific tweet and vaccine skeptics currently post on Twitter mostly without incident. Following a high profile lawsuit, Alex Berenson, the Grandaddy of all jab skeptics had his account restored the very day I was locked out. Censoring my tweet makes no sense and Twitter didn’t say what the offending words were. Was this a move to protect the failing vaccine or did our national broadcaster complain? What gives?

I’m guessing here, but this feels like a shot over the bow from legacy media and its protectors in Big Tech. See for yourself how non-sensational my words were.

Which part was harmful? Which part was misleading? They don’t say.

I do hope CBC isn’t trying to silence its critics under the guise of public health through its Big Tech allies. It would be a huge irony if Twitter moved against my account because I raised questions about the CBC and its jab coverage and it adds another layer of credibility to the censorious behaviour Marianne lays out in the show.

If you have an email list I would be grateful for your help getting this article and the podcast in front of as many people as you can.

Much gratitude — Trish - July 8, 2022

STORY BELOW

A few months before she agreed to what would be an explosive interview for our podcast, former CBC journalist Marianne Klowak and I had a series of long and troubling conversations. Like me, Klowak was genuinely baffled when in March of 2020 many historic norms of journalism were ditched in newsrooms around the world, including CBC. This was the start of the COVID-19 panic and the end of journalism as we knew it.

The slide had begun in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump. Truth, critical thinking and skepticism became irrelevant when reporting negative stories about a president some legacy news reporters considered a Nazi. CBC seemed less invested than American media in the Russia hoax but failed to aggressively interrogate the false claims. At one point, even the Trump-hating New York Times asked some hard questions — but not until the president was safely out of office.

In newsrooms around the world, no unsubstantiated story was too bizarre, no accusation of Russia collusion too absurd to stop a breathless barrage of fake news in a cycle of rinse, repeat. Sources who provided false information were never outed — as they should have been — and in fact, were likely used more than once. News media were caught in a psychodrama of fool me twice that rivalled Lucy, Charlie Brown and the football.

As most of you know, I am politically homeless, liberal at heart but no longer attached to the left. I was prepared to recognize that Trump had a few good ideas (anti-regime-change wars, decent jobs for the working class, dismantling government bureaucracy) but I also believe his narcissistic personality prevented follow through, wise staffing choices and the ability to resist his own pathological urge to recklessly smash his opposition. Having said that, given Trump’s obvious issues, it should have been a cinch for media to land legitimate punches without invention or becoming the comms arm of the Democrats.

Legacy media, including the CBC seem unembarrassed by these mistakes, perhaps because many reporters still see any attack on Trump, no matter how absurd, as a public service. Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald have written detailed elegies to corporate media based on how it behaved during the Trump administration. That a crude, New York builder with a sketchy business background could actually win the presidency caused a kind of pearl-clutching, cultural hysteria among media elites who made dethroning Trump and punishing his supporters Job One.

Then came COVID-19 and Round Two of legacy media committing blindly to another perceived higher cause — the government’s public health narrative.

I didn’t know Marianne Klowak then but learned later that we both watched with concern that a pontifical approach — not to be challenged — was shaping up. I was reading the worried comments of widely published physician, scientist and Stanford University professor Dr. John Ioannidis who warned in March of 2020 that failing to target public health measures on accurate risk-benefit data would be a disaster. He was prescient. I wrote my own letter to journalists with a warning based on my experience in the 1980s covering Tony Fauci during AIDS for the CBC.

A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data

March 17, 2020 - Stat News article by John Ioannidis

“One of the bottom lines is that we don’t know how long social distancing measures and lockdowns can be maintained without major consequences to the economy, society, and mental health. Unpredictable evolutions may ensue, including financial crisis, unrest, civil strife, war, and a meltdown of the social fabric. At a minimum, we need unbiased prevalence and incidence data for the evolving infectious load to guide decision-making.”

Klowak was also worried. She saw a narrative emerging early in the pandemic. In a document outlining her reasons for concern she says:

“By narrative I mean presenting one side of a complex, multi-sided issue and effectively censoring, canceling and silencing the other side. Only giving voice to the experts who control and reinforce the narrative. I had seen this happen on various issues in the past but never to this degree. For the most part, logic, common sense and critical thinking are suspended preventing deep dives on stories holding power to account. Facts may be omitted if they don’t fit into the narrow focus on the narrative. Who were we to deny the public critical information they had a right to know? Information people needed to make a decision based on informed consent about their health.”

Klowak says certain ideas she pitched never saw the light of day, which of course happens, but she noticed a pattern. She writes they (the stories) were everything from adverse vaccine reactions to concerns doctors were voicing about how those adverse reactions are recorded and reported in Canada. Many of those untold stories still haunt her.

Klowak details some on the podcast. And she states that CBC managed to effectively silence, censure and cancel credible high ranking scientists, physicians and healthcare professionals who challenged the government’s science and handling of the pandemic.

Now with waning efficacy, the multi-boosted getting multi-infections and concerning adverse reaction reports stacking up, it looks like a more skeptical approach, a traditional journalistic approach, would have been prudent. We have no long-term data and we don’t know how multiple boosters will play out but asking those questions seems off the table even even though historically, anecdotes have exposed some dangerous products.

The horrors of the anti-nausea pregnancy drug, Thalidomide were reported, by an Australian obstetrician who was seeing severe limb reduction birth defects in the babies of mothers who took it. Faulty breast implants, dangerous IUDs and a multitude of other devices and drugs have been pulled over safety issues and watchdogging the watchdog is part of the media’s role. A study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that 71 of 222 novel pharmaceuticals were reported for safety issues after approval for sale.

Findings among 222 novel therapeutics approved by the FDA from 2001 through 2010, 71 (32.0%) were affected by a post-market safety event. Post-market safety events were more frequent among biologics, therapeutics indicated for the treatment of psychiatric disease, those receiving accelerated approval, and those with near–regulatory deadline approval.

To understand how far we have fallen, watch this decades-old report by Mike Wallace correctly calling out the 1976 swine flu vaccine and presenting anecdotal reports from patients involved in a class action lawsuit. Forty six million doses were given and four thousand injuries reported in the filings. Why aren’t people who claim C-19 vaccine injuries also taken seriously? It’s unlikely all of them are correct about causation but are all of them wrong? Why the lack of journalistic and scientific curiosity, especially of a drug that’s had limited testing?

Jab-injured case histories are rarely reported by Canadian media. The climate against creating so-called vaccine hesitancy means that those claiming injuries are often discounted, silenced and ridiculed — sometimes their own doctors refuse to investigate the connection. They are dismissed as anti-vaxxers, an absurd pejorative given that they had to have taken a dose of vaccine in order to report harm. In Canada, it has become culturally inappropriate to raise vaccine concerns and this is reflected in the kind of coverage Marianne describes.

Sean Hartman who died suddenly after his second vaccine.

The mantra of safe and effective is chanted as if a magic talisman — when in fact the people it actually protects are those in Big Pharma and the elites who embraced and mandated a shot without calculating risk/benefit for the people taking it. In the beginning, it was assumed by many, given its limited safety and efficacy profile, the jab would be used judiciously, only for people at high risk of a bad C-19 outcome. But regulators keep growing the cohort which will soon include virtually every living person, no matter age or health. Why?

Why could Mike Wallace correctly demand accountability all those years ago but today legacy media stays mostly silent and rarely even examines claims being made against vaccines? And why is Big Pharma so often the arbiter of what is safe and effective when it has an obvious and monolithic conflict of interest - instead of our Health Protection Branch?

Pfizer-BioNTech say COVID-19 vaccine safe, protective in kids aged 5-11

CBC Headline 2021

Pfizer says COVID-19 vaccine safe, effective for teens

CBC Headline 2021

Laura Dodsworth who wrote A State of Fear appeared on our podcast to expose the so-called nudge unit in the UK for its crafting of a fear psyop on behalf of the government and public health. What shocked her wasn’t just that it happened but that media so easily went along — and how quickly the citizenry succumbed. Some people were so frightened by the messaging, they’ve become neurotically afraid of germs and will never get their lives back.

The Toronto Star let the cat out of our federal government’s bag with a chirpy article on Ottawa’s nudge unit. It is an extraordinary piece of cheerleading for a government program that should be under the accountability microscope. So secret is the team, they requested anonymity from the reporter and got it.

The nudge unit: Ottawa’s behavioural-science team investigates how Canadians feel about vaccines, public health and who to trust

Feb 21, 2021 Toronto Star

Its members prefer to remain low-profile — a couple of them talked to me for this article, but on condition that they would not be named or quoted.

Substack writer, Igor Chudov studied with Richard Thaler, a major contributor to the development of nudge also known as behavioural science. In a recent piece, Chudov wrote about an experiment conducted by Solomon Asch who discovered that people would do absurd things if convinced there is a consensus.

The impetus for belief was the repetition of catch phrases by credible looking people. It was a conformance experiment, a clever way to make the subjects hold and express obviously false opinions. This pretty much describes the intention of the phrase: experts agree the vaccine is SAFE AND EFFECTIVE. And according to this story in the Toronto Star, the plan worked very well. One of the least studied pharmaceuticals in history, for a time became one of the most trusted.

New survey on trust suggests most Canadians believe COVID-19 vaccines safe, effective

Toronto Star, Feb. 2021

Chudov says:

“We lived through a worldwide Asch experiment. Every newspaper, TV station, every YouTube recommended video kept telling us how the vaccine was safe and effective and how all experts agree. We were force fed these expert opinions nonstop.”

Silencing what they call misinformation was critical. Solomon Asch discovered that any lack of consensus immediately kills compliance.

When US support for vaccines started dropping, Thaler was quoted as saying a nudge is not enough. Hate propaganda from political leaders and media against the unvaccinated coupled with mandates was the plan “B”. And that played out here, right on cue.

It was a new low for Canada when Prime Minister Trudeau stunned Quebec television viewers with a dangerous verbal attack on the unvaccinated — saying they are often racist and misogynistic extremists who are taking up space. Toronto Star weighed in with a front page that resembled an attack ad.

Those of us nervous about vaccines were made cautious by the short clinical trials time, the massive push to vaccinate even those with no risk from C-19 and the mantra-speak that overtook media, our doctors, public health and government.

The question we must ask is why people charged with telling us truth were so keen to jump on the nudge bandwagon? Did government and public health conspire with media to push this language — wrapping it in dangerous GREATER GOOD public spiritedness?

In the UK, the government’s nudge unit is now blamed for significant harms caused by the deployment of fear campaigns aimed at securing compliance.

Government used 'grossly unethical' fear tactics 'like China' to scare public into following Covid rules, psychologists say

Daily Mail Jan. 2022

MPs are set to launch a probe into the behaviour of the civil servants behind No 10's Covid messaging campaigns amid fears they employed 'grossly unethical' tactics in a manner similar to those seen in authoritarian states. 40 psychologists co-signed a letter to Parliament's Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, warning of amoral adverts that used slogans like: 'Stay home to save lives' and 'if you go out and spread it, people will die'.

At least one of the messages deemed grossly unethical in the UK and similar to those used in authoritarian states was also deployed by Canada’s nudge unit. This one remains on its webpage.

While we all struggle to figure out what the hell happened to our institutions during past two years; mass psychosis, toxic groupthink, cultish, cultural and political tribalism are good places to start. For some reason, maybe all of the above, people we trusted jumped on the nudge bandwagon of manipulation and deceit — without ever weighing the cost to us and our democracy. They lied and when they are got caught, they attacked and censored the people who weren’t fooled. Skeptics are being proven correct the longer vaccines are in use but public health, governments and media dig in, ignoring data and cheering the jab even as they, themselves become infected. Meanwhile, many in the working class, without lofty credentials got it right which is the ultimate humiliation for elites still patting themselves on the back over what is likely the biggest public health blunder in history.

I know that Marianne bears no ill will, nor do I, toward our old employer, a broadcaster we both loved. We expect pushback, something I personally experienced when I was fired in 1998 and then later during the litigation of two journalism/libel lawsuits which we lost. All of it was soul-destroying and it took me years to recover. Mike Wallace revealed that he considered suicide over a libel lawsuit filed by Vietnam War General William Westmorland. Lucky for journalism, Wallace made the right choice and fought on, winning the case.

Being on the inside of CBC can sometimes be tough. Being on the outside, when the wagons are circled against you by a like-minded tribe, is often worse. But Marianne Klowak stands not alone, because she is right and history will say so.

Stay critical.

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