The anatomy of a corporate-media "fact-check"
When you Google a forbidden topic, the resulting vista is a tiered palette of disinformation efforts
On Wednesday, Project Veritas, a group of undercover journalists long known for their lowbrow tactics, released a ten-minute video showing a Pfizer executive’s half of a conversation his interlocutor, perhaps a dinner date, was secretly taping. The setting appeared palpably ethanol-powered.
The gist of the video, which you can watch here (for now, at least; the tweet is closing in on 35 million views), is that Pfizer has evidently been discussing ways to select for certain viruses, presumably coronavirus variants, as a means of knowing exactly how to manufacture vaccines that perfectly target the antigenic (immune-response-generating) proteins in these viruses. This would give Pfizer a major head start on competing vaccine- and “vaccine”-makers targeting the same virus—no miniature codes to crack—and complements the industry’s strategy of getting people hooked on opioid painkillers by the tens of millions and then prescribing all of them the useless drug Vivitrol as “therapy,” this allowing a bidirectional full-body raping of human beings as well as the U.S. Medicaid and Medicare systems.
("Guided evolution” is different from a “gain-of-function,” which results in individual viruses of a “species” achieving a different level of clinical potency, thus giving every member of the herd an identical boost. Guided evolution of viruses is akin to microscopic cattle-breeding: You can wind up with only the best specimens the herd has to offer, but no improvements are made on the abilities of the best cow—you’re just cutting the level of comparative deadweight.)
Yesterday, Project Veritas posted an updated version of the video that includes added footage at the beginning that was captured after the video recorder’s “date” with the executive, when members of Project Veritas had outed themselves and were confronting the executive about his statements. It shows the harried executive, Jordan Trishton Walker, trying to keep Project Veritas folk from leaving the room, confiscate their equipment, and otherwise scuttle the operation he understood was about to ruin his life or at least trouble his sleep. I almost want to feel bad for him; the “plot” echoes elements of In the Company of Men.
If you search for this story on Google News, you will find nothing from anything remotely resembling a major media outlet. In fact, like millions of others were obviously doing on Wednesday, I searched for information on Jordon Walker within an hour of the posting of the video and was greeted with Google’s version of “Fuck off, we’re busy removing what you’re looking for”:
When you see this, you should have roughly the same reaction as you would after typing in “What is 2 + 2?” and seeing “It may be 4, but not for sufficiently large values of 2. Try again later. Here’s a link to the CDC’s basic arithmetic page.” It is a transparent effort to keep you from finding information that until that day was innocuous and easily unearthed.
Google plays a similar game once a non-breaking bullshit narrative from on high has had a chance to take root, but real journalists have gotten around to exposing the truth. In these situations, Google will present you with row after row of “fact-checks,” none of which check facts and all of which are propaganda.
Remember: When the first batch of search results consists of these “fact-checks”—not a few scattered amid actual articles, but the first four or more—this is a one-hundred-percent reliable sign that the stories the corporate media have produced about the subject are especially riddled with falsehoods.
On Thursday, Newsweek “fact-checked” the Project Veritas video. Or pretended to.
Note that the supposed “fact” is not the revelation in the video, which is that Pfizer types apparently discuss what they always discuss—how to make more money regardless of how many people they impoverish, sicken, maim, or kill, lying all the while and paying chickenfeed fines once every ten or so years. This mayhem with covid hasn’t revealed anything new about Pfizer’s ethics; it’s merely allowed them and many other companies to weaponize them at a grisly, accelerated, and once-unimaginable scale.
What Newsweek is doing here is refuting claims made by random social-media users in response to the video. I have no doubt that some Twitter users exaggerated or simply lied about the contents of the video. But people who read news stories lie about them all the time; this says nothing about the presented material itself.
This is the main strategy corporate “fact-checkers” use to preserve diabolical narratives. First, they attack a false idea that is adjacent to the one they should be examining, but differs from the real target or claim in vital ways. “Pfizer is floating doing X” and “X is underway at Pfizer” are worlds apart. Then, they use the refutation of the irrelevant claim to stain the real, plenty-bad-on-its-own story by association, thus “refuting” it by deftly both mischaracterizing and ignoring it. Philosophers of logic would call this maneuver a red herring coupled to poisoning the well.
Example: “Did a doper win the men’s 100-meter dash at the 2017 World Championships?”
Justin Gatlin won the event in question, upsetting the about-to-retire Usain Bolt, but probably not upsetting him as much as his current financial situation has. The underlying fact of interest is that Gatlin, who was booed almost to the point of tears after his win, had served two drug suspensions earlier in his long career. The simple answer to the question is therefore an uncomplicated “Yes.”
But imagine Google (including YouTube), Meta Platforms, Amazon, LinkedIn, Wikipedia—yes, even that—along with the entire corporate media all being secretly pressured to be pro-Gatlin all the way. A “fact-check” with the above headline might be followed by three or four paragraphs about Gatlin’s career highlights. Toward the end, it would sneak in the fact of Gatlin’s suspensions while emphasizing that these were disputed as well as naming track-and-field athletes exonerated after positive drug tests. And it would, like the Newsweek piece about the Project Veritas video, be much longer than any fact-check needs to be. When you find yourself reading a “fact-check” that is clearly a persuasive essay, you’re reading propaganda.
The reason is simple: These “fact-check” outlets, whether once-independent operations like Snopes or part of a larger media outlet, are all owned by billionaires or conglomerates of rich people. This should not be very hard to believe. Bill Gates is not the only wealthy shitlord with this general idea.
Also, look at the fourth name in this graphic. Well, look at the whole thing if you can stand it, but focus on the name James C. Smith.
Reuters, which has been under the influence of British intelligence services for years, recently ran a story it didn’t want to run at all. It only did so because someone important, maybe Sen. Ron Johnson, was making noises about it.
The story is full of subtle but, to those in the know, maddening bits of misdirection. It intentionally confuses different reporting systems and fails to account for data that is simply unavailable because the CDC and other agencies tasked with reporting these data have not been doing so. This has been happening across countries; Canada stopped making mortality data available in the fall. More affluent countries, whatever else they may have in common in recent years, are strangely hesitant to notice the world’s not just unexplained but universally unacknowledged mortality surge.
If someone offered me a million dollars a year to push a particular idea and keep the financing on the QT, my mind would get busy immediately trying to shake and wipe the idea free of any obvious moral or ethical impurities no matter how obvious these were. I wouldn’t do it, but if I had the company of everyone else doing my job, it would be a lot easier to superficially justify this obvious tumble into turpitude. I’d probably stop writing about the value of staying dry and hope that no one noticed.
Those of you following the real news are aware of yesterday’s dump about the Hamilton 68. Those of you who just went to Google News and entered that term came up with some radio stations in the wilds of Maine and the hollers of Tennessee. If you want to know about this huge-scale fraud perpetrated through every major news outlet existence for years, Matt Taibbi’s latest story is here. (At this point I give the named Twitter employees credit for calling bullshit on the whole thing, even if they continued circulating the fraud unchecked. That these people were all hard-left Democrats, giving them more incentive to cave from the start, is a credit to their resilience, however watered-down.)
If you have wondered why you often can’t find some of the sources I mention when I don’t explicitly link to them, this is why. And if you’ve assumed that Google actually ranks sources in even loose accordance with their truth value or even their reach, guess again. That’s not how it works, if it ever really did.
This week, Google became the target of an antitrust lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice. The merits are there, as they are with Meta Platforms, Apple, and Amazon for different reasons. Yet given an obviously politicized Federal Bureau of Investigation, it’s hard to discern what the DoJ’s deeper motives are. It’s possible that Google, despite obviously participating in the government’s various disinformation campaigns—the Project Veritas video was removed from YouTube for a random “violation,” and previous Twitter Files stories document the company’s enmeshment with censorious actors—has fallen into disfavor with Uncle Sam and is now being punished.
Or hell, maybe someone with clear vision actually wants to limit a company’s power to unfairly eliminate the competition. Google now controls the infrastructure of almost all online advertising, including what is pumped into daily online newspapers.
Either way, I hope this was a valuable lesson. Remember, all “fact-checks” revealed by Google searches are lies, evident in three basic characteristics: A red herring, a poisoning of the well, and long-windedness.
Wouldn’t you think The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN and The Wall Street Journal would be at least remotely interested in the footage in the video? Or at least the mini-fight it caused? Why aren’t they? Well, as one of the images above suggests, government and pharma are indistinguishable at this stage, ditto Wall Street. Not only that, but pharma coughed up 75 percent of the total dollar figure spent on television advertising in 2020. They own the narrative. All of them.
This is a fun one to ponder for a few minutes. It’s essentially an enhanced version of a January 9 Matt Taibbi article consisting of little else—it didn’t need to.
This is the information ecosystem for all of us. Lies on one side, non-reporting on the other, distractions and smears in the middle.