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On May 24, 2020, The New York Times published a dramatic, visually-arresting front page proclaiming U.S. DEATHS NEAR 100,000, AN INCALCULABLE LOSS and followed by names of dead Americans who were reportedly felled by a novel coronavirus.




... I revisited "An Incalculable Loss” as part of my ongoing inquiry into the New York City mass casualty event of spring 2020.1 My analysis of its key features, content, purpose, and effect follows. I highlight the

Vague and misleading headline

Imprecise terms for the virus and disease

Strategic use of war imagery and language

Endorsement of unconstitutional, unethical, and immoral policies

Unsubstantiated claims refuted or unsupported by evidence

Mystery methods for selecting obituaries ...

Since 8,000 people die each day in the United States, the list of 1,000 deaths may make for a shocking display but it is not evidence of an outbreak or pandemic. In truth, most towns and counties didn’t experience high excess death in these weeks - or even much increase in death at all.

Whatever the methods, the decedents selected for the NYT list were chosen with a purpose in mind: Persuade readers that America was experiencing a devastating disease-spread event and needed new treatments, including a shot.

Schiff, who was the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, became NPR’s guiding hand, its ever-present muse. By my count, NPR hosts interviewed Schiff 25 times about Trump and Russia. During many of those conversations, Schiff alluded to purported evidence of collusion. The Schiff talking points became the drumbeat of NPR news reports.

But when the Mueller report found no credible evidence of collusion, NPR’s coverage was notably sparse. Russiagate quietly faded from our programming.

It is one thing to swing and miss on a major story. Unfortunately, it happens. You follow the wrong leads, you get misled by sources you trusted, you’re emotionally invested in a narrative, and bits of circumstantial evidence never add up. It’s bad to blow a big story.

What’s worse is to pretend it never happened, to move on with no mea culpas, no self-reflection. Especially when you expect high standards of transparency from public figures and institutions, but don’t practice those standards yourself. That’s what shatters trust and engenders cynicism about the media.

Russiagate was not NPR’s only miscue.

In October 2020, the New York Post published the explosive report about the laptop Hunter Biden abandoned at a Delaware computer shop containing emails about his sordid business dealings. With the election only weeks away, NPR turned a blind eye. Here’s how NPR’s managing editor for news at the time explained the thinking: “We don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste the listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”

But it wasn’t a pure distraction, or a product of Russian disinformation, as dozens of former and current intelligence officials suggested. The laptop did belong to Hunter Biden. Its contents revealed his connection to the corrupt world of multimillion-dollar influence peddling and its possible implications for his father.

The laptop was newsworthy. But the timeless journalistic instinct of following a hot story lead was being squelched. During a meeting with colleagues, I listened as one of NPR’s best and most fair-minded journalists said it was good we weren’t following the laptop story because it could help Trump. ...

In this story (highlighted at Celia Farber’s Substack), readers learned the heart-wrenching details of a 17-year-old Canadian boy who died 34 days after receiving his Pfizer vaccine. From the story, we learn this young man got his Covid jab so he could continue playing hockey, which was his great passion.

By now, stories of children and healthy young adults who died suddenly after receiving their Covid “vaccines” are omnipresent in the alternative media. But these stories are impossible to find in the mainstream press. They are simply taboo. They are not allowed to “go viral.”

The verdicts of “ratings agencies” such as the GDI, within the complex machinery that serves online ads, are a little-understood mechanism for controlling the media conversation. In UnHerd’s case, the GDI verdict means that we only received between 2% and 6% of the ad revenue normally expected for an audience of our size. Meanwhile, neatly demonstrating the arbitrariness and subjectivity of these judgements, Newsguard, a rival ratings agency, gives UnHerd a 92.5% trust rating, just ahead of the New York Times at 87.5%.

So, what are these “ratings agencies” that could be the difference between life and death for a media company? How does their influence work? And who funds them? The answers are concerning and raise serious questions about the freedom of the press and the viability of a functioning democracy in the internet age.