patrick.net

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.

The worm turned on the New York Times this week, right in its ‘free news’ garden, where glittery bits of regime propaganda distract naive readers while the paper’s long blades slide betwixt their ribs. The story started yesterday with the latest vermiform example published under a most unlikely headline (and the most unflattering photograph they could find), a headline that could only have appeared in this bizarre, unchartable year: “R.F.K. Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain.”

The Times’ slithery headline editors, obviously well into their third or fourth red bull and vodka, slipped in a truly astonishing sub-headline, celebrated as an impressive effort by top tabloids like the Weekly World News: “The presidential candidate has faced previously undisclosed health issues, including a parasite that he said ate part of his brain.”

My goodness. There’s so much that could be said, but let’s use this sordid story to learn more about how “real” Grey Lady journalists create fake news. We’ll apply the Coffee & Covid ‘fake news’ test to the paper’s top article. To detect fake news, we must first ask whether the article was not actually about any real news, or was it rather about some antique event that happened a long time ago?

And right away, our little bluebird of truth catches its first ‘fake news’ worm.

The Times’ parasite story eventually explained that in a 2010 deposition — fourteen years ago — Kennedy recounted a brief story about once having experienced brain fog, gotten an MRI, and been told he’d had a parasite “that ate part of my brain.” Kennedy said the unidentified parasite died, no treatment was required, and that was that.

To be clear: the New York Times is not accusing Kennedy of being sick right now, or having any present cognitive problems, which would be pretty rich if they did, considering the Times’ favored candidate thinks cannibals ate his uncle.

Our second ‘fake news’ test is whether the story was anonymously sourced. Anonymity strongly suggests fake news. Especially when the anonymous source doesn’t have any good reason for being anonymous. Applying the second yardstick, again we see the mouldering hand of fake news, if not outright deep state hijinx. Although the Times’ ostensible ‘source’ was Kennedy’s 2010 deposition transcript, that’s not the end of the inquiry.

How’d they miraculously discover the transcript? The single most important unanswered fact, AWOL from this bit of alleged “journalism” was: who gave the story to the Times? The story, written with as straight a face as the reporter could manage, desperately trying to resemble something like “news,” never disclosed who clued the paper onto the fifteen-year-old event.

Was it Team Biden? Is the Times deep-diving Kennedy? Did the Kennedy team itself leak the story for some reason? Was it the CIA? Was it Hillary? Answers to those questions would frame the story completely differently, depending where this obvious hit job originated.

Finally, we evaluate whether the story used deceptive weasel words to paint a false picture. Again, we find the answer is yes. Here’s just one example, where the reporter slyly implied questions about actual evidence of Kennedy’s good physical health:

He has gone to lengths to appear hale, skiing with a professional snowboarder and with an Olympic gold medalist who called him a “ripper” as they raced down the mountain. A camera crew was at his side while he lifted weights, shirtless, at an outdoor gym in Venice Beach.
Skiing? Weightlifting? He sounds pretty healthy. What’s the source for the Times’ assertion that Kennedy has “gone to great lengths” to deceive the public about his health, or to cover up something? Because that’s what the trash, cowardly reporter was clearly implying. Fake news reporter Susanne Craig is a yellow-bellied, lizard-lipped coward — and if she doesn’t like that, she knows where to find me.

But Susanne probably delighted in asking the Kennedy team for a brain worm comment, but the campaign handled it deftly:

Asked last week if any of Mr. Kennedy’s health issues could compromise his fitness for the presidency, Stefanie Spear, a spokeswoman for the Kennedy campaign, told The Times, “That is a hilarious suggestion, given the competition.”

Indeed. And Kennedy himself promptly wormed his way out of the potential scandal, yesterday disinfecting the unfair hit piece with humor, which after all is the best medicine for cerebral parasitism:




In one sentence, Kennedy disarmed his slimy attackers and skewered the New York Times right in its tiny worm brain. Conclusion: fake news backfire.