Propaganda and the Media: Fact-Checking – Part 7
By Larry Romanoff for The Saker Blog, June 27, 2021
In our world today, who desperately needs to be “fact-checked“?
The mass media, of course. And, in today’s world, who owns, funds, and controls
the entire fact-checking infrastructure and conducts all the fact-checks? The
mass media, of course. So, the inmates are running the asylum and the foxes are
guarding the henhouse. What could possibly go wrong?
First, let’s disabuse ourselves of the foolish notion that the
fact-checking performed today actually involves any checking of facts. It does
not. The primary purpose of this industry is not a search for truth but is
instead an insidious form of censorship, one final way of tightening the string
around the sack of information to prevent the escape of inconvenient truths
and, if they do escape, to club them to death at birth. A powerful secondary
purpose of fact-checking is to bury knowledge of the crimes and atrocities
committed by our International Cabal of Gangsters (ICG) and to protect them
from public censure. The only requirement for success is a gullible and
uninformed public.
One of the more tragic results of media concentration, propaganda and
censorship is that fact-checking has been almost totally co-opted by the
propagandists. At a time when we desperately need honest fact-checking of media
claims, the media outlets themselves like Gannet Publishing, Reuters,
ABC news, have moved into the forefront of this market, effectively
checking themselves and, unsurprisingly, conclude they didn’t lie to us. Worse,
the media fact-checking departments also function as intelligence agencies,
proclaiming their chastity while attempting to ferret out and silence the
ultimate sources of contrary opinion and truth. One example from my personal
experience:
Several of my early articles on COVID-19 went viral with reader
downloads in the millions, instantly attracting the attention of the ICG.
Following this, and coincident with numerous hit pieces in the mainstream
media, I received an email from a gentleman at Gannett Publishing,
presenting himself as “a fact-checker for USA Today“, ostensibly wanting
to determine the veracity of some of my statements. It should be obvious
that ‘fact-checking’ would produce a request such as “You
made this claim. Please can you provide documented evidence of its accuracy?”
Not with Gannett, it didn’t.
The request displayed no interest in obtaining evidence of my claims,
but a demand to know my sources. The issue was that I seemed to know many
things I should not know, and they couldn’t figure out where I was getting my
information. The man was of course “reaching out” to me, but what he was
reaching for was my information sources. He didn’t want more supporting
evidence for my claims, but to know where I had obtained the evidence I’d
already presented, specifically “from where did you collect the research in
your articles?” He also wanted a list of the names of other “writers,
officials or commentators” who knew what I knew and who shared my views.
This is not fact-checking, but intelligence-gathering for the purpose of
identifying and silencing sources of dissention.
The fact-checking industry was not created to fact-check the false
claims and media support for the invasions of Iraq and Libya or today’s
imaginary “genocide” in China’s Xinjiang, but instead to silence those
attempting to reveal the truth. It was never meant to examine the process of
vaccinations (of any kind) but to silence those either expressing fears of
dangerous vaccines or exposing contaminations in those vaccines.
In this latter case, the vaccine makers (or their paid promoters) are
the primary source of the ‘facts’ distributed by the media and used by the
fact-checkers to ridicule and attempt to invalidate genuine public concerns.
All three parties steadfastly ignore the hard fact that the US government has
paid billions in compensation for injuries and deaths from dangerous and
contaminated vaccines. (1) And nowhere do they mention that nearly 100 million
Americans were infected with a potentially cancerous simian virus from a
contaminated polio vaccine. (2) Nor do they mention the CDC report that infants
receiving a full slate of childhood vaccines could potentially be exposed to
more than 300 contaminants. You can see the problem: much of the truth and
underlying evidence, though available, is being buried by the media in their
support of the ICG, while the ‘leakage‘ is dealt with by other means.
There is nothing here about checking facts. It is all about the control
of information, half of which involves the identification and silencing of
opposing views. It is in this light that all fact-checking must be
seen.
I recently wrote a heavily-documented article on the thesis (now
widely-accepted, I believe) that the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic was not
influenza but was instead a now-proven bacterial infection, the tragic result
of a misguided experiment by the Rockefeller Medical Institute of a meningitis
vaccine that began at Fort Riley in the US and spread around the world not by
the soldiers but by Rockefeller itself. (3) Reuters immediately conducted a ‘fact-check’ of
the thesis and pronounced it false. Reuter’s evidence? Non-existent, the claim
sufficing as irrefutable proof. (4) Moreover, some of Reuters’ claims were completely
false. The intent was to bury a politically-dangerous truth and prevent its
escape into the public realm.
In another case, when public concern was rapidly accelerating about the
escaping radiation from Japan’s Fukushima reactor, the media almost immediately
buried the story and replaced it with a flurry of articles about one single
salmon in Canada’s Osoyoos Lake discovered with measurable but insignificant
levels of Cesium radiation. The lake is hundreds of miles inland and irrelevant
to the radiation in the Pacific Ocean, but suddenly this was the only story.
Following on this, Snopes obediently ‘fact-checked’ the
Fukushima Pacific radiation and used this story of the single unrelated salmon
to pronounce the prior Fukushima radiation stories false. (5) Again, this is not about checking facts but about
burying the truth.
This is almost an aside but, with Osoyoos Lake containing potentially
millions of salmon, what are the odds that only one salmon would be
contaminated and that my net would find it? But in fact, the story originated
on the social media and I could find no reliable evidence of the existence of
this one radioactive fish. The few people reporting it were all referencing
each other or Snopes, which almost certainly means a contrived and
fabricated tale was used to mislead the public about the very real dangers of
Fukushima. Well-done, I thought.
Another clever ploy is to take an inflammatory and inaccurate headline
from a tabloid news source, attribute it to the person in question, then ‘fact-check’ the
statement, pronounce it false, and use that to defame the author who never said
any such thing.
The fact-checkers not only want to bury the truth, but to bury those who
reveal it. Another example from my personal experience: My heavily-documented
article about the WHO vaccination program that sterilised about 150 million
women without their knowledge or consent (6) was obtaining considerable attention worldwide, most
notably of the ICG, who called in the fact-checkers, in this case the
Poynter Institute. I will deal with them in more detail in a moment.
Poynter created a web page just for me, and this is what they wrote:
“FALSE: Larry Romanoff’s statements claiming WHO has taken part in
creating various viruses in the laboratories. The organization has spread the
new coronavirus in the world, so that the pharmaceutical companies can make
money by developing vaccines, which, for its part, will reduce the world
population.” (7)
The “false” part is that I have never written any such things. I have
never claimed the WHO ‘created viruses’, nor have I ever mentioned the WHO in
any context related to COVID-19. Their statement, slanderous as it is, is false
in its entirety. But the amazing part is to follow. Poynter didn’t stop there.
They found a news article on a Georgian news website that made brief reference
to my writing, but that contained no reference to the WHO or any of the other
claims above. They then copied this website page – and amended it – posting the
copied and amended version on one of their own websites, providing the link to
their fraudulent version – presented as the original – as ‘proof’ of my having
made false claims.
First, this is the link to the original news page (8). It is in Georgian script, so you won’t be able to
read it and most translators cannot handle Georgian, meaning no one will know
what the page actually says. The website is ge.news-front/info. Next, this is
the link to Poynter’s false web page (9).You can access it by clicking on the button: READ
THE FULL ARTICLE (FACTCHECK GEORGIA) on the Poynter website above (7) This website, controlled by Poynter, is https://factcheck.ge/ka. This is also in Georgian script, so you won’t be
able to read it either.
If this isn’t clear, Poynter attempted to confuse readers by conflating
my article about the WHO ‘anti-fertility’ vaccination programs with my other
(unrelated) articles on COVID-19, then fabricated a claim that I had accused
the WHO of creating the COVID-19 virus to profit the pharma companies while
sterilising the world. Lacking evidence of this, they copied a web page that
was in a language almost no one can read and almost no translators can handle,
amended the page and posted it on their own website, presenting it as the
original, and purporting to contain ‘proof‘ of my ‘false‘ claims
against the WHO. In America, this is known as “fact-checking“.
The Fact-Checking Industry
The fact-checking industry began with a disguised innocence and good
intentions, with websites like Snopes initially spending their
time debunking urban legends and refuting claims of Elvis being seen at the
mall. But in fact, these creations were hiding in the bushes waiting for the
right time to attack.
Fact-checking today is a huge worldwide industry conceived and created
decades ago as a powerful censorship tool, controlled by a closely-knit
incestuous group and heavily funded with countless millions of dollars
primarily by George Soros, the Gates Foundation, various media companies, and
similar. This industry was not created to fact-check the false claims and media
support for ICG crimes, but instead to silence those attempting to reveal the
truth.
Poynter are even more dangerous than the above would suggest, because they
have created for themselves a position as “the journalism institute
responsible for training writers and reporters“, countless thousands of
young people passing through this ‘institution’ very possibly forever corrupted
by their training. And Poynter’s attempts in furthering the
total media control of the ICG are not imaginary:
Poynter recently published a list of 515 news websites they deemed “unreliable”
(10), a list compiled from “fake news” databases
curated primarily by the Annenberg Public Policy Center at University
of Southern California, Merrimack University, PolitiFact and Snopes. They
not only damned these websites as providing misinformation, but their original
article asked advertisers to blacklist all sites on their list. The later
version according to Poynter executive Barrett Golding:
“Fake news is a business. Much of that business is ad-supported. Aside from
journalists, researchers and news consumers, we hope that the index will be
useful for advertisers that want to stop funding misinformation.”
They overplayed their hand. The backlash to this was so extreme
that Poynter had to retract the list and make a public
apology, excusing themselves on “weaknesses in the methodology“. It
wasn’t embarrassment for an ethical failure but multiple threats of serious
lawsuits that caused the retraction. However, Poynter managing
editor Barbara Allen wrote “We regret that we failed to ensure that
the data was rigorous before publication, and apologize for the confusion and
agitation caused by its publication”. But then (to give readers a laugh),
she stated, “We pledge to continue to hold ourselves to the highest
standards.” One individual posted on Twitter: “Junkyard Attack Dogs
Pose as Watchdogs“. Correct in all respects.
To my best knowledge, there are no fact-checkers that are not part of
this worldwide network. Some are sponsored and operated by the media
departments of various universities, but those departments have received
funding from these same sources and therefore are subject to, and under the
control of, the same people.
These “same people” are those who already own and/or control the
entire mass media landscape, including newspapers, magazines, all TV and most
radio networks, the book publishers, the book distributors like Amazon and Indigo,
the Hollywood studios who control virtually all movies and most TV programs.
They also have the same stranglehold on the social media landscape, as well as
related entities like Google and Wikipedia.
As I have noted in other articles in this series, it is vital to
understand that it is not Poynter, or Reuters, or Gannett who
control the fact-checking industry. These statements evade the essential point
that it is individuals, real people with names, who exercise this control, and
who are working in concert with all other media individuals as lieutenants of
the ICG, all sharing the same ‘values’ and all following the same
‘agenda’. A major part of this agenda is total information control,
the fact-check portion being merely a kind of janitorial detail to sweep up and
eliminate the bits of truth that succeed in escaping this information control
net. And this net is nearly complete; information control and censorship in the
US is alarmingly nearing a 100% level, yet few seem to have noticed. The same
is true of Canada, the UK, Germany, Japan, Australia, and increasing in other
Western nations.
Once again, the mass media lie to us in whole or in part about almost
everything of real consequence in the world today, reading from the same script
as the ICG and furthering their agenda. Wikipedia, with its massive promotion
by Google, is a major misinformation site that has almost a
stranglehold on popular information, but is heavily biased and edited by these
same people, and is untrustworthy on most topics of consequence. Google is
astonishingly selective on information it permits to reach the public. Facebook and Twitter take
their marching orders from the same source and will exercise a near-total
embargo on any personal communications or posts that contradict the official
narrative approved by the ICG. With COVID-19, yesterday, lab sources were
embargoed, these social media almost vicious in their censorship of
contradictory material. Today, natural sources of the virus are
embargoed, Facebook and Twitter performing an
instant 180-degree turn and today banning – as “misinformation” – the opposite
of what they banned yesterday.
The book-publishers determine the content of all bound material that
reaches the public, most especially educational materials from kindergarten to
university level. If content does not fit the ‘agenda’, the book will almost
certainly never see the light of day and, if it is lucky enough to escape the
net, Amazon and Indigo will be “out of
stock” or will simply delist the books. The entire fact-checking industry
is marching to precisely the same tune, played by the same orchestra. This is
already so true that whenever any major media outlet claims that something has
been fact-checked, delete this information from your consciousness because it
is almost certainly false.
I am repeating myself, but it is vital to understand that all this
emanates from the same single source, a group of a few hundred people centered
mostly in Europe, who are extraordinarily wealthy and who determine and set the
agenda – again, real people with names. The determination to control all of the
world’s information, either by distribution or by censorship, originates
here. It is crucially important that you connect all these dots to the
same central source.
*
Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more
than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries,
as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a
retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive
positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international
import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan
University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA
classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of
ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the
contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).
His full archive
can be seen at
https://www.moonofshanghai.com/
http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/
He can be
contacted at: 2186604556@qq.com
*
Notes
(2) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10472327/
(3) The 1918
Rockefeller-US Army Worldwide Pandemic
http://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/politics/1319/
(4) https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-vaccines-caused-1918-influe-idUSKBN21J6X2
(5) https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/radioactive-salmon-fukushima/
(6) https://www.moonofshanghai.com/2020/05/a-cautionary-tale-about-who.html
(9) https://factcheck.ge/ka/story/38702
The original
source of this article is The Saker Blog
Copyright
© Larry Romanoff, Moon of Shanghai, Blue Moon of Shanghai, 2021
