Since this essay was already probably too long, I cut this text. But that's why Substack gave us the Reader Comments!
In my last essay, I presented the example of The New York Times, the undisputed leader of the “pack journalism” fraternity. By itself, The New York Times probably has the prestige to debunk every erroneous claim of the Covid experts (“experts” who have not made a claim that wasn’t a lie or at least dubious).
In other words, it wouldn’t matter if 99 percent of the mainstream media news organizations incessantly spouted the Fauci storyline. If the “paper of record” went to war with Fauci, the whole House of Lies probably would have crumbled.
This would definitely have occurred if, say, 10 percent of the top mainstream media news organizations joined with the Times and started doing their own skeptical investigations.
Officials who have never received a single skeptical question on Covid policies would have been routinely fielding such questions from reporters at 10 of the country’s best known news organizations.
Question: In such an alternative-universe world, would all of the faux Covid narratives be as accepted as gospel as they are today?
Yep. They’ve all proven over the past 3.5 years that not one of them has the moral fortitude to step forward. I’ve given up on waiting. There is absolutely no way that they don’t realize they’ve been spreading lies and propaganda.
The only solution, cause Trump wouldn't buy an MSM company, is for us, the public to pool our funds and BUY OUT one of the big ones. And the people who run it must put the alternative views on.
BUT, Cox and other carriers of cable will do what they did to Newsmax, etc. and cut them out of being carried on their lines. So a little bit of legal work to prvent this (they are after all technically OUR AIRWAVES</UNDREGROUND cables (they should lease the land from US the commons) and fix it.
I always thought one person or group of investors with "true grit" could start their own investigative journalism organization that would specialize in investigating all the taboo/off-limits scandals.
But the right person has not found my "message in a bottle" business idea. But the idea is still out there, floating around.
No not to launch it...we need a fund that will ultimately be enough (millions) to do a leveraged buyout of a major msm, which would turn everyone into a stock/share owner after the buy out. If people gave to a pray send go account, and we found a banker (fees for him and shares) that does media buyouts, you are only talking 50 million each giving a dollar, ...and you could also have differnt shares at different "donation " prices...wouldn't you give 10 bucks? for a small ownership ? that cuts it down to 5 million people only...
Interesting. There's got to be several ways you could do this. You might have to be very creative. The key is that nobody in positions of power wants this to happen. It would be an organization committed to putting them all out of business.
I saw your message idea....in 2020 I thought the alt social media should congeal to fight against the Twitters/FB/LinkedIn.
In some respects, the organic growth of Gettr, Truth, Rumble, Locals, has been alright. I suspect the 2024 election cycle year has surprises in store for all of us. (Don't forget that Molly Ball laid out the scheming that Dorsey/Zuckerberg did in Nov 2019 in her Time piece on Elections in Feb 2021. That also involved a top DOJ official Vanita Gupta)
It has been quiet on that front....which means a plan is afoot, IMHO.
“It took my breath away.” —Dr. Drew on the new study shows 50% of young men who got myocarditis after the vaccine now have permanent heart damage and he doesn’t understand why this isn’t front page news. And he recommends injured students sue any school that mandated it."
My comment: If Dr. Drew read my essay, he would understand why this isn’t "front page news" - 100 percent of the mainstream media is captured, Dr. Drew. They get to play "gatekeepers of the news," which is no trivial job. It's the scientific studies they don't write about or mention that control the narrative.
The essay is very applicable to what we went through in lockdowns especially, so I've shared it with various people. Mencken describes American journalism's "incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."
The press also blocks feedback from its readers. They did this by (largely) doing away with letters to the editor, guest op-eds authored by those with different opinions and, in many cases, either eliminating Reader Comments or moderating them and not selecting the good comments or critiques. Also, very few news organizations publish the email addresses of their journalists and editors. All of this insulates the journalists and editors from the viewpoints of the "silent minority" and their own readers.
It appears to me our society currently values comfort and convenience over almost all else, and very few are willing to even contemplate doing anything that may mess that up.
In conjunction with rampant fear porn etc, makes for a very controllable and docile populace.
Bill, you alluded to the fact that much of the mainstream media (TV, print, radio and Internet) is owned /controlled (and therefore "captured") by a handful of large media conglomerates.
But it goes another level deeper, because this also includes most of the smaller news affiliates that people watch locally. These are owned by a larger news outlet, and therefore they also spout the approved slant of the "news".
Many people trust these local news "celebrities" more than they do the national ones...BUT...they hear them spout the same party line. So the echo chamber simply reinforces the lies of the major networks, giving the lies more credibility.
So as you said, they're totally captured - and adding all the local news programs to the monotone message makes it almost impenetrable.
Two groups of professionals were positioned to protect people from the elite manipulators: investigative journalists and practicing physicians. Some in each group worked, around and resisted the great narrative but reasons for failure are abundant in both professions. I agree with you though that media failure is at the top of the list. But the medical profession is long overdue for for re- evaluation of its mission. “I don’t have time to evaluate what I prescribe and do” is not an acceptable excuse. And being owned by corporate interests is a recipe for loss of courage and thinking.
And, if it doesn't, there's always fear. Fear of being ostracized or kicked out of the herd is much more powerful motivator than I'd previously recognized.
These agencies are also in the line of protection for patients and, like doctors , have been captured by the pharmaceutical and defense industries ( the latter using tax money and metastasizing into healthcare because they have realized that an invisible enemy is an even better one for generating fear and funding than a three-dimensional, macroscopic one). But in terms of who goes first in a Nuremberg style accounting, the groups that had access to knowledge, as well as the ability to ferret it out and explain it in layman’s terms are the media and the medical practitioners. There will always be predators, especially in a materialistic, money-based society, and without a free, curious and dogged news media, the predators are free of restraints. We can see that plainly in their blatant lack of concern about pushing forward in the plan to convert all vaccines, and many drugs, to the man-made, computer-generated “RNA” platform. Drugs made by computer jocks who little know or care about interfering in the complex biologic systems where they blindly assume the results will be only what they say they will be. Drugs that can be prescribed, and now required, for everyone, even the healthy, for their entire lives.
Excellent comment, Elizabeth. It's always been a given to me that the government authorities would be either captured or that their "solutions" would end up backfiring. So I never expected them to investigate themselves. Which gets me to our shared view that the MSM is really the most culpable party (and the doctors and "scientists" who should have known better). I have the greatest contempt for the people and organizations that could have stopped all of this misery ... and didn't.
Yes, the brainwashing of vast numbers of the public is breathtaking. I stopped reading all my local newspapers, especially the Los Angeles Grimes, years ago, because they began editorializing in their so-called news articles until the bias wasn’t just nuanced, but blatant. Same goes for the local television news, which is only useful for police car chases and the weather. Nice work, Bill!
When Riech was 'introduced' to Substack in a fawning 'On Substack' article, he got throttled in the comments section. Substack moderators protected investors looking on by deleting all contrarian comments.
Ahh! Sorry I missed that.. Now comments are only allowed if you pay, so I'll never know what those 2000+ have to say. RR's continuing essays are hilarioso extremis. Presumably not his intention. Biden as the Great Humanitarian?? Only to the Mayor of Moronopolis.
Depending on the subject matter, I keep my comments open on articles for a week or two. Sometimes the subject matter is very sensitive so I close them to paid only - it is definitely not a business decision but a mental health decision on my part given that I write about democide.
People can (and do) always email me their thoughts which I welcome.
I understand why many Substackers restrict comments to paid subscribers. It would be interesting to do a survey and see if those Substack authors have a higher percentage of paid subscribers than those of us who allow everyone to make comments.
Once I saw one major substacker mention that they limit comments to paid subscriptions because otherwise the irrelevant and abusive comments got out of control. Also, trolls.
I have noticed that the stacks allowing only paid comments have a much higher quality of comment in general.
I, for one, really appreciate this. I understand why SS authors would like to have more paid subscribers, but each reader has only so much $. I read some SS authors who don’t even allow me to ‘like’ their post, much less leave a comment, unless I pay. The end result is that those with the most $ are the ones who get to comment…thus, those with less $ aren’t being heard, so I wonder if this skews the overall picture of comments. As I noted, I do get that authors need the income. A quandary, to be sure.
Agree 100%. After Trump lost the election, I was screaming for him to put together some investors and buy Fox or CNN or some other MSM....because we knew they were all corrupt...and bankrupt.
The TV MSM make their money from advertisers and fully 80 percent of it comes from Big Harma. And of course, the government gave them extensive shares of our taxes we paid to fill up the gap...govt money...and since when have we sanctioned the government propping up private corporations? Since the damn Chrysler debacle.
This is what comes of mixing the public and private purses. We the taxpayers get fleeced out of our hard earned money, and it is turned into PRIVATE PROFITS for the NIH, CDC, FDA, and MSM. (and Chrysler).
News flash: All of the "Nightly News" programs and all of the Big newspapers, are flat broke.
Neither of them makes any profit even by advertisers. The newspapers are propped up too by our taxpayer dollars - they are all technically bankrupt
and the nightly news programs are all loss leaders...they have to if they are at all profitable, make money off of their "programming"...like tv series and such.
Now with streaming services, I think many of these corporations are also flat broke...but they are now owned by about six giant conglomerates, and get money to exist from the other companies that have the same owner...they just shuffle it around the mega coporation.
I wrote a "message in a bottle" column where I proposed one major, bad-ass, real investigative journalism organization that investigated all of the Taboo subjects. This organization would almost have a monopoly on all the real scandals in the world ... and they'd have the manpower (journalists, freelancers, researchers and commitment) to develop and expose these stories.
... But the right person(s) hasn't found my message in a bottle yet. Still, the idea is archived on the Internet via this Substack.
Kind of - but with a much larger staff and using the tool of (real) "investigative journalism". O'Keefe focusses on undercover operations that get whistleblowers to unwittingly reveal taboo truths. We need a lot more sting operations like this.
Also, we all took note of what ultimately happened to O'Keefe ... and Tucker Carlson ... and Julian Assange ... and Edward Snowden. The Powers that Be don't sit idly by when certain figures start routinely flying over vulnerable targets.
I would note that a major and non-captured investigative journalism organization like I envision would have run many follow-stories that trumpet the work of people like O'Keefe. So such an organization would further advance the impact of O'Keefe's brand of truth-seeking.
For some odd reason, a few people like O'Keefe conduct their life's work as if they were NOT captured or controlled by larger forces. The Powers that Be are not amused by such dissidents. These people are actually acting like Cool Hand Luke did when he was in prison. For our rulers' program to continue to work, the bosses at some point have to send such mavericks a strong message. These "messages" resonate with enough would-be emulators that they decide they're not going to emulate these rebels. So they remain in their "prisons" doing everything the warden says they should do. But they have to make a few examples out of inmates like Luke.
And: The Pharma--government complex, or more concisely, though not exhaustively: Pfizer & Fauci.
75% of media advertising is Pharma & Pfizer is a big chunk of that.
Fauci had to cover up his complicity in the bio weapons and in 40+ years as a health care bureaucrat he managed to put his toadies in every relevant federal (and many if not most state) regulatory, public health & funding agencies as well as academic and clinical departments in medical schools & centers, and they cycled in and out of those positions and into big Pharma positions. You didn’t get a meaningful job in those fields if you crossed him.
They were also tied in with Billy Gates, & the captured CCP WHO parasite.
The other foundational aspects of this was 1. decades before (1990’s IIRC), Congress made direct to consumer advertising of prescription drugs legal (when by and large the cost of Rx drugs is largely covered by health insurance creating an unending gravy train to big Pharma
2. In the last 10-20 years, the independent practice of medicine disappeared for all practical purposes, meaning if a physician had an independent thought about COVID treatment not approved by the borg, s/he (and that is also I think significant, though this will probably get me in more trouble, as women tend to be more compliant with following orders) put their job, specialty certification, & even license at risk. To follow Bill’s reasoning, if 10% or more of practicing physicians were free to follow their conscience & clinical experience & word of mouth scuttle but regarding early out patient treatment, thing would have not gotten as bad as it did or would have fallen apart much quicker.
Bill Rice: I completely agree with your article here…excellent! With one exception, which I think is very important: your use of the word ‘captured’, which implies a helpless victim that has no choice whatsoever in the matter (like a beaver caught in a leg trap). The word ‘corrupted’ is more accurate. Are we really to believe that not one single media company or individual has no choice other than to publish all these lies and propaganda? From the very top executive to the lowliest reporter? Really? It makes them all sound like unfortunate victims with whom we should somehow sympathize. By using the word ‘captured’, you’re partly giving them an ‘out’, an excuse for their dishonest and unethical behavior. It’s not the ‘captured mainstream media’. It’s the Corrupted Corporate Media. Please reconsider your use of the word ‘captured’. Thanks for listening.
Point taken. I defined captured in a recent article - people who don't think they have the freedom to act in any other way. They are captives to the official narrative or the Current Thing. In most articles I use both terms "captured" and "corrupt" or "corrupted." I don't know if corrupt would fit all the people and groups I am trying to describe. Is every journalist who wrote a bogus story or refused to cover an important story "corrupt" - that implies graft or that these journalists are getting some kind of specific renumeration. Are trial lawyers who won't accept a client getting some kind of direct payback from not doing this? Are they taking orders from some Mob-like bosses? I wouldn't say so. But they work in a profession or for an organization that has effectively been captured by evil/nefarious forces. They know they can't piss off the world's real bosses or they'd suffer severe consequences. They are kind of prisoners or inmates in this corrupt system - thus it's like they are "captured."
Generally speaking, though, both terms could work or be used interchangeably, I guess.
The semantics of this are probably important. For purposes of my thinking, I do continue to use "captured" to describe these organizations. To me, the Powers that Be know they don't have to worry about A, B and C organizations (or their members) because they know they have them figuratively "locked up." These shadowy forces control the people in these institutions. They know they can't cause them any harm because they've effectively "captured" them.
Only one thing is stopping members of these "captured organizations" from going rogue and doing the work their captors don't want them to do - fear. They know that if they break ranks there will be hell to pay for individuals and entire organizations. So these people make the decision to comply and do what they are told. Just like inmates in a prison, they don't do those things their captors don't want them to do.
Bill Rice - thank you for the responses. Yes, I completely understand about the fear factor. But, still…the word captured, in my opinion, still sounds like a justification/defense for all of the unethical and cowardly behavior by the media. Would it be difficult and painful for them make the choice to break out and be honest? Hell, yes. At this point, I say too goddamn bad that it’s not an easy thing to do. As our entire world, including lives and well-being of people has been at stake: no more excuses. Almost four years now! If you lie and cheat because you don’t want to miss out on $, you’re corrupted. Captured = no choice. Corrupted = there are choices. If I come upon a mouse in a trap, it’s a captured mouse; not a corrupted mouse.
I think a case could be made for both words. I'm still leaning toward "captured", whose connotation has been expanding in recent years. "Captured" implies a certain guilt on the part of the captor.
Tardigrade: I don’t agree. And I don’t see how the word ‘captured’ implies any guilt at all. I’ve said it all already in my above comments. We cannot afford to let them off the hook, even a little. And I don’t understand why we would even want to. Yet another word where ‘they’ are getting away with changing the definition. You state this yourself in your comment.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. I’ll close with a reminder that the whole point of the ‘boiling frog’ thing is that the frog is unaware he’s being boiled.
They are indeed "captured" by advertising dollars - the majority of those dollars from Big Pharma and woke companies. The bean counters ultimately control the "news/editorial" content.
Compile a list of their advertisers and post it prominently to the Web. Inform the advertisers that until their clients shape up, you won't patronize them. Granted, difficult because many have near monopolies on essential goods and services, and many of the rest sell products you're unlikely to buy even if you wanted to.
The medias actions place them in the war crimes category. I’d like to see them all in shackles, brought to Nuremberg, tried convicted and hung on the White House lawn Or better yet, Al Pacino from Scent of a Woman could show up with his flame thrower) and burn those institutions down. Rant off.
True, but only the US and New Zealand allow pharmaceutical advertising on television. Yet almost every country's media is equally captured. What gives?
They don't need the further incentives of payments (bribes) to keep reporting the authorized narratives. The extra funding helps control the media in America, which is the most important media market. It's another layer of insurance to protect the bogus narratives.
Since this essay was already probably too long, I cut this text. But that's why Substack gave us the Reader Comments!
In my last essay, I presented the example of The New York Times, the undisputed leader of the “pack journalism” fraternity. By itself, The New York Times probably has the prestige to debunk every erroneous claim of the Covid experts (“experts” who have not made a claim that wasn’t a lie or at least dubious).
In other words, it wouldn’t matter if 99 percent of the mainstream media news organizations incessantly spouted the Fauci storyline. If the “paper of record” went to war with Fauci, the whole House of Lies probably would have crumbled.
This would definitely have occurred if, say, 10 percent of the top mainstream media news organizations joined with the Times and started doing their own skeptical investigations.
Officials who have never received a single skeptical question on Covid policies would have been routinely fielding such questions from reporters at 10 of the country’s best known news organizations.
Question: In such an alternative-universe world, would all of the faux Covid narratives be as accepted as gospel as they are today?
My answer: No way.
Yep. They’ve all proven over the past 3.5 years that not one of them has the moral fortitude to step forward. I’ve given up on waiting. There is absolutely no way that they don’t realize they’ve been spreading lies and propaganda.
The only solution, cause Trump wouldn't buy an MSM company, is for us, the public to pool our funds and BUY OUT one of the big ones. And the people who run it must put the alternative views on.
BUT, Cox and other carriers of cable will do what they did to Newsmax, etc. and cut them out of being carried on their lines. So a little bit of legal work to prvent this (they are after all technically OUR AIRWAVES</UNDREGROUND cables (they should lease the land from US the commons) and fix it.
I always thought one person or group of investors with "true grit" could start their own investigative journalism organization that would specialize in investigating all the taboo/off-limits scandals.
But the right person has not found my "message in a bottle" business idea. But the idea is still out there, floating around.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/my-message-in-a-bottle
I would help fund anyone who would start this and take over an MSM company.
We just need about $5 million dollars to launch it ... $5 million to change the world!
No not to launch it...we need a fund that will ultimately be enough (millions) to do a leveraged buyout of a major msm, which would turn everyone into a stock/share owner after the buy out. If people gave to a pray send go account, and we found a banker (fees for him and shares) that does media buyouts, you are only talking 50 million each giving a dollar, ...and you could also have differnt shares at different "donation " prices...wouldn't you give 10 bucks? for a small ownership ? that cuts it down to 5 million people only...
Interesting. There's got to be several ways you could do this. You might have to be very creative. The key is that nobody in positions of power wants this to happen. It would be an organization committed to putting them all out of business.
ESOP employee stock ownership plan.
I saw your message idea....in 2020 I thought the alt social media should congeal to fight against the Twitters/FB/LinkedIn.
In some respects, the organic growth of Gettr, Truth, Rumble, Locals, has been alright. I suspect the 2024 election cycle year has surprises in store for all of us. (Don't forget that Molly Ball laid out the scheming that Dorsey/Zuckerberg did in Nov 2019 in her Time piece on Elections in Feb 2021. That also involved a top DOJ official Vanita Gupta)
It has been quiet on that front....which means a plan is afoot, IMHO.
Matt Taibbi's book Hate, Inc. goes a long way toward explaining what happened to corporate media.
https://twitter.com/TexasLindsay_/status/1715033782498001303
“It took my breath away.” —Dr. Drew on the new study shows 50% of young men who got myocarditis after the vaccine now have permanent heart damage and he doesn’t understand why this isn’t front page news. And he recommends injured students sue any school that mandated it."
My comment: If Dr. Drew read my essay, he would understand why this isn’t "front page news" - 100 percent of the mainstream media is captured, Dr. Drew. They get to play "gatekeepers of the news," which is no trivial job. It's the scientific studies they don't write about or mention that control the narrative.
Corrupted. Not captured.
Both.
A year ago I read a 1920 essay by H.L. Mencken called “The National Letters,” in an old book anthology of his writings. Much of the essay is online, at this link: https://www.artsandopinion.com/2022_v21_n6/mencken-nationalletters.htm
The essay is very applicable to what we went through in lockdowns especially, so I've shared it with various people. Mencken describes American journalism's "incurable fear of ideas, its constant effort to evade the discussion of fundamentals by translating all issues into a few elemental fears, its incessant reduction of all reflection to mere emotion."
Even if kills people and ruins their lives.
I don’t. I blame We the People.
The press and our elected/appointed officials are an outgrowth and consequence of what we value and fail to value.
The press also blocks feedback from its readers. They did this by (largely) doing away with letters to the editor, guest op-eds authored by those with different opinions and, in many cases, either eliminating Reader Comments or moderating them and not selecting the good comments or critiques. Also, very few news organizations publish the email addresses of their journalists and editors. All of this insulates the journalists and editors from the viewpoints of the "silent minority" and their own readers.
Good points. All of this has been blatantly obvious…and note how they don’t even care how blatant these tactics are.
It appears to me our society currently values comfort and convenience over almost all else, and very few are willing to even contemplate doing anything that may mess that up.
In conjunction with rampant fear porn etc, makes for a very controllable and docile populace.
Yeah, but that doesn't let the media off the hook.
Completely agreed, there are many tentacles enforcing and feeding the dependant mindset.
Not at all
Bill, you alluded to the fact that much of the mainstream media (TV, print, radio and Internet) is owned /controlled (and therefore "captured") by a handful of large media conglomerates.
But it goes another level deeper, because this also includes most of the smaller news affiliates that people watch locally. These are owned by a larger news outlet, and therefore they also spout the approved slant of the "news".
Many people trust these local news "celebrities" more than they do the national ones...BUT...they hear them spout the same party line. So the echo chamber simply reinforces the lies of the major networks, giving the lies more credibility.
So as you said, they're totally captured - and adding all the local news programs to the monotone message makes it almost impenetrable.
Great point. I've thought the same thing.
On-point comment about local news being owned by larger media. Please see end of article 'We Can Do This’ covid campaign. You can search for your local US news outlet. https://vicparkpetition.substack.com/p/australian-senate-rejects-and-obfuscates
Local news is the worst - they are alarmists for everything because I think it’s the only way they get viewers
Two groups of professionals were positioned to protect people from the elite manipulators: investigative journalists and practicing physicians. Some in each group worked, around and resisted the great narrative but reasons for failure are abundant in both professions. I agree with you though that media failure is at the top of the list. But the medical profession is long overdue for for re- evaluation of its mission. “I don’t have time to evaluate what I prescribe and do” is not an acceptable excuse. And being owned by corporate interests is a recipe for loss of courage and thinking.
Money and social status are huge carrots...they keep almost everyone in lock step.
Power and money get them every time
And, if it doesn't, there's always fear. Fear of being ostracized or kicked out of the herd is much more powerful motivator than I'd previously recognized.
We have a lot of federal agencies, like the FTC and the FCC not to mention the antitrust division of the DOJ which is supposed to LOOK OUT FOR US.
THESE agencies have failed miserably (from my point of view, natch) and need to be
DEFUNDED.
These agencies are also in the line of protection for patients and, like doctors , have been captured by the pharmaceutical and defense industries ( the latter using tax money and metastasizing into healthcare because they have realized that an invisible enemy is an even better one for generating fear and funding than a three-dimensional, macroscopic one). But in terms of who goes first in a Nuremberg style accounting, the groups that had access to knowledge, as well as the ability to ferret it out and explain it in layman’s terms are the media and the medical practitioners. There will always be predators, especially in a materialistic, money-based society, and without a free, curious and dogged news media, the predators are free of restraints. We can see that plainly in their blatant lack of concern about pushing forward in the plan to convert all vaccines, and many drugs, to the man-made, computer-generated “RNA” platform. Drugs made by computer jocks who little know or care about interfering in the complex biologic systems where they blindly assume the results will be only what they say they will be. Drugs that can be prescribed, and now required, for everyone, even the healthy, for their entire lives.
Excellent comment, Elizabeth. It's always been a given to me that the government authorities would be either captured or that their "solutions" would end up backfiring. So I never expected them to investigate themselves. Which gets me to our shared view that the MSM is really the most culpable party (and the doctors and "scientists" who should have known better). I have the greatest contempt for the people and organizations that could have stopped all of this misery ... and didn't.
Robert Reich Substack is a good place to see the opposition hive-mind at full throttle. World Class Proud Moron.
Today he's going on about Biden the Genius.
https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/the-last-adult-in-the-room?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=lz74w
Egads. I took a quick look-see. His latest piece has more than 2,100 "likes" and more than 110 shares. We're vastly outnumbered ... even on Substack.
Yes, the brainwashing of vast numbers of the public is breathtaking. I stopped reading all my local newspapers, especially the Los Angeles Grimes, years ago, because they began editorializing in their so-called news articles until the bias wasn’t just nuanced, but blatant. Same goes for the local television news, which is only useful for police car chases and the weather. Nice work, Bill!
Unfortunately, yes.
When Riech was 'introduced' to Substack in a fawning 'On Substack' article, he got throttled in the comments section. Substack moderators protected investors looking on by deleting all contrarian comments.
Ahh! Sorry I missed that.. Now comments are only allowed if you pay, so I'll never know what those 2000+ have to say. RR's continuing essays are hilarioso extremis. Presumably not his intention. Biden as the Great Humanitarian?? Only to the Mayor of Moronopolis.
Comments are free to everyone at "Bill Rice, Jr's Newsletter." I'm not sure if this is a good business decision or not, but I enjoy the comments!
Depending on the subject matter, I keep my comments open on articles for a week or two. Sometimes the subject matter is very sensitive so I close them to paid only - it is definitely not a business decision but a mental health decision on my part given that I write about democide.
People can (and do) always email me their thoughts which I welcome.
I understand why many Substackers restrict comments to paid subscribers. It would be interesting to do a survey and see if those Substack authors have a higher percentage of paid subscribers than those of us who allow everyone to make comments.
It always seems like the mega-stackers restrict comments. I think Substack is a money-laundering operation like book deals.
Once I saw one major substacker mention that they limit comments to paid subscriptions because otherwise the irrelevant and abusive comments got out of control. Also, trolls.
I have noticed that the stacks allowing only paid comments have a much higher quality of comment in general.
I, for one, really appreciate this. I understand why SS authors would like to have more paid subscribers, but each reader has only so much $. I read some SS authors who don’t even allow me to ‘like’ their post, much less leave a comment, unless I pay. The end result is that those with the most $ are the ones who get to comment…thus, those with less $ aren’t being heard, so I wonder if this skews the overall picture of comments. As I noted, I do get that authors need the income. A quandary, to be sure.
I agree 100%. Without the bought & paid MSM incessantly pushing the fear and coercion and terror many would have refused to take the experimental.
Agree 100%. After Trump lost the election, I was screaming for him to put together some investors and buy Fox or CNN or some other MSM....because we knew they were all corrupt...and bankrupt.
The TV MSM make their money from advertisers and fully 80 percent of it comes from Big Harma. And of course, the government gave them extensive shares of our taxes we paid to fill up the gap...govt money...and since when have we sanctioned the government propping up private corporations? Since the damn Chrysler debacle.
This is what comes of mixing the public and private purses. We the taxpayers get fleeced out of our hard earned money, and it is turned into PRIVATE PROFITS for the NIH, CDC, FDA, and MSM. (and Chrysler).
News flash: All of the "Nightly News" programs and all of the Big newspapers, are flat broke.
Neither of them makes any profit even by advertisers. The newspapers are propped up too by our taxpayer dollars - they are all technically bankrupt
and the nightly news programs are all loss leaders...they have to if they are at all profitable, make money off of their "programming"...like tv series and such.
Now with streaming services, I think many of these corporations are also flat broke...but they are now owned by about six giant conglomerates, and get money to exist from the other companies that have the same owner...they just shuffle it around the mega coporation.
I wrote a "message in a bottle" column where I proposed one major, bad-ass, real investigative journalism organization that investigated all of the Taboo subjects. This organization would almost have a monopoly on all the real scandals in the world ... and they'd have the manpower (journalists, freelancers, researchers and commitment) to develop and expose these stories.
... But the right person(s) hasn't found my message in a bottle yet. Still, the idea is archived on the Internet via this Substack.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/my-message-in-a-bottle
Like what James O’Keefe is trying to do?
Kind of - but with a much larger staff and using the tool of (real) "investigative journalism". O'Keefe focusses on undercover operations that get whistleblowers to unwittingly reveal taboo truths. We need a lot more sting operations like this.
Also, we all took note of what ultimately happened to O'Keefe ... and Tucker Carlson ... and Julian Assange ... and Edward Snowden. The Powers that Be don't sit idly by when certain figures start routinely flying over vulnerable targets.
I would note that a major and non-captured investigative journalism organization like I envision would have run many follow-stories that trumpet the work of people like O'Keefe. So such an organization would further advance the impact of O'Keefe's brand of truth-seeking.
For some odd reason, a few people like O'Keefe conduct their life's work as if they were NOT captured or controlled by larger forces. The Powers that Be are not amused by such dissidents. These people are actually acting like Cool Hand Luke did when he was in prison. For our rulers' program to continue to work, the bosses at some point have to send such mavericks a strong message. These "messages" resonate with enough would-be emulators that they decide they're not going to emulate these rebels. So they remain in their "prisons" doing everything the warden says they should do. But they have to make a few examples out of inmates like Luke.
Well said and great points. Thanks!
So who did the capturing?
And: The Pharma--government complex, or more concisely, though not exhaustively: Pfizer & Fauci.
75% of media advertising is Pharma & Pfizer is a big chunk of that.
Fauci had to cover up his complicity in the bio weapons and in 40+ years as a health care bureaucrat he managed to put his toadies in every relevant federal (and many if not most state) regulatory, public health & funding agencies as well as academic and clinical departments in medical schools & centers, and they cycled in and out of those positions and into big Pharma positions. You didn’t get a meaningful job in those fields if you crossed him.
They were also tied in with Billy Gates, & the captured CCP WHO parasite.
The other foundational aspects of this was 1. decades before (1990’s IIRC), Congress made direct to consumer advertising of prescription drugs legal (when by and large the cost of Rx drugs is largely covered by health insurance creating an unending gravy train to big Pharma
2. In the last 10-20 years, the independent practice of medicine disappeared for all practical purposes, meaning if a physician had an independent thought about COVID treatment not approved by the borg, s/he (and that is also I think significant, though this will probably get me in more trouble, as women tend to be more compliant with following orders) put their job, specialty certification, & even license at risk. To follow Bill’s reasoning, if 10% or more of practicing physicians were free to follow their conscience & clinical experience & word of mouth scuttle but regarding early out patient treatment, thing would have not gotten as bad as it did or would have fallen apart much quicker.
Well said and well summed up.
Bill Rice: I completely agree with your article here…excellent! With one exception, which I think is very important: your use of the word ‘captured’, which implies a helpless victim that has no choice whatsoever in the matter (like a beaver caught in a leg trap). The word ‘corrupted’ is more accurate. Are we really to believe that not one single media company or individual has no choice other than to publish all these lies and propaganda? From the very top executive to the lowliest reporter? Really? It makes them all sound like unfortunate victims with whom we should somehow sympathize. By using the word ‘captured’, you’re partly giving them an ‘out’, an excuse for their dishonest and unethical behavior. It’s not the ‘captured mainstream media’. It’s the Corrupted Corporate Media. Please reconsider your use of the word ‘captured’. Thanks for listening.
Point taken. I defined captured in a recent article - people who don't think they have the freedom to act in any other way. They are captives to the official narrative or the Current Thing. In most articles I use both terms "captured" and "corrupt" or "corrupted." I don't know if corrupt would fit all the people and groups I am trying to describe. Is every journalist who wrote a bogus story or refused to cover an important story "corrupt" - that implies graft or that these journalists are getting some kind of specific renumeration. Are trial lawyers who won't accept a client getting some kind of direct payback from not doing this? Are they taking orders from some Mob-like bosses? I wouldn't say so. But they work in a profession or for an organization that has effectively been captured by evil/nefarious forces. They know they can't piss off the world's real bosses or they'd suffer severe consequences. They are kind of prisoners or inmates in this corrupt system - thus it's like they are "captured."
Generally speaking, though, both terms could work or be used interchangeably, I guess.
The semantics of this are probably important. For purposes of my thinking, I do continue to use "captured" to describe these organizations. To me, the Powers that Be know they don't have to worry about A, B and C organizations (or their members) because they know they have them figuratively "locked up." These shadowy forces control the people in these institutions. They know they can't cause them any harm because they've effectively "captured" them.
Only one thing is stopping members of these "captured organizations" from going rogue and doing the work their captors don't want them to do - fear. They know that if they break ranks there will be hell to pay for individuals and entire organizations. So these people make the decision to comply and do what they are told. Just like inmates in a prison, they don't do those things their captors don't want them to do.
Bill Rice - thank you for the responses. Yes, I completely understand about the fear factor. But, still…the word captured, in my opinion, still sounds like a justification/defense for all of the unethical and cowardly behavior by the media. Would it be difficult and painful for them make the choice to break out and be honest? Hell, yes. At this point, I say too goddamn bad that it’s not an easy thing to do. As our entire world, including lives and well-being of people has been at stake: no more excuses. Almost four years now! If you lie and cheat because you don’t want to miss out on $, you’re corrupted. Captured = no choice. Corrupted = there are choices. If I come upon a mouse in a trap, it’s a captured mouse; not a corrupted mouse.
I think a case could be made for both words. I'm still leaning toward "captured", whose connotation has been expanding in recent years. "Captured" implies a certain guilt on the part of the captor.
Tardigrade: I don’t agree. And I don’t see how the word ‘captured’ implies any guilt at all. I’ve said it all already in my above comments. We cannot afford to let them off the hook, even a little. And I don’t understand why we would even want to. Yet another word where ‘they’ are getting away with changing the definition. You state this yourself in your comment.
I know you disagree :)
We’ll have to agree to disagree. I’ll close with a reminder that the whole point of the ‘boiling frog’ thing is that the frog is unaware he’s being boiled.
They are indeed "captured" by advertising dollars - the majority of those dollars from Big Pharma and woke companies. The bean counters ultimately control the "news/editorial" content.
No, they’re CORRUPTED by $. Not captured. They have a choice.
Important to note that ALL corporate media/government narratives are lies. Not just some. Many in our movement right now seem to have forgotten that.
Compile a list of their advertisers and post it prominently to the Web. Inform the advertisers that until their clients shape up, you won't patronize them. Granted, difficult because many have near monopolies on essential goods and services, and many of the rest sell products you're unlikely to buy even if you wanted to.
Thanks for scratching the surface Bill. Keep digging.
The medias actions place them in the war crimes category. I’d like to see them all in shackles, brought to Nuremberg, tried convicted and hung on the White House lawn Or better yet, Al Pacino from Scent of a Woman could show up with his flame thrower) and burn those institutions down. Rant off.
That would be a good start!!
MSM was captured by money.
They are bought and paid for.
By whom? DOD acting through paid- for politicians and pHarma.
True, but only the US and New Zealand allow pharmaceutical advertising on television. Yet almost every country's media is equally captured. What gives?
They don't need the further incentives of payments (bribes) to keep reporting the authorized narratives. The extra funding helps control the media in America, which is the most important media market. It's another layer of insurance to protect the bogus narratives.
WITH OUR TAXES.
WE ARE PAYING FOR THIS. Via Big Pharma (our taxpayer dollars PAID for all those free jabs)
And DIRECTLY via GRANTS from our Agencies - DOD , HHS, Homeland Security, etc.
And now we are paying to be censored by the government agencies that now police the internet.
It is MADDENING. Until people realize what they are paying taxes for, we won't get anywhere.
And fully I think 90 percent of the populace has no idea.