Never investigate what you don’t want to ‘confirm’

This maxim pretty much explains everything in our New Normal.

Columbo is a fictional character, but he did investigate theories he was trying to confirm. If only the world had more Columbo’s.

(Part 1 of 2)

I quickly formulated a maxim that pretty much explains why all the authorized Covid narratives took hold. This also explains why non-authorized narratives never had a chance. 

This maxim is: Never investigate that which you don’t want to “confirm.”

As far as I can tell, this narrative-control tactic works every time.  

If officials don’t want any revelations to debunk their preferred narrative, they just don’t investigate it. This way it’s almost impossible for anyone to “confirm” these trusted officials and truth-seeking scientists have been telling whoppers longer than Pinocchio.

FWIW, the intentional creation of bogus narratives satisfies the correct definitions of “disinformation” and “malinformation.”

As journalists are supposed to give examples to support our maxims, I’ve included several examples, a few which reveal my own futile efforts to learn or expose taboo truths.

False Narrative: “Covid is a threat to everyone.”

Solution to protect said False Narrative: Make sure most people don’t know that the average age of a Covid victim is a couple of years over the average life expectancy.

For example, from my research for this article, I learned that in Europe the average age of a Covid victim was around 82.4 (where average life expectancy is about 79.4). 

It’s hard to debunk/reject the all-important authorized narrative (“Covid is a threat to everyone”) if hardly any citizen reads that just about the only people dying from Covid were the elderly (almost all of whom had multiple co-morbid health conditions).  Given the parameters established by this information template, the false narrative might as well be “confirmed.”

False Narrative: “Covid is a threat to athletes.”

Narrative protection technique: Make sure no journalist ever writes a story that mentions that zero college or pro athletes ever died from Covid. 

If officials and journalists did “confirm” the fact that no college or pro athlete has died from Covid, this information wouldn’t exactly promote the official bogus narrative. 

Officials and journalists have never “confirmed” that zero athletes have died from Covid … because they never bothered to “investigate” this.  

For reporters or researchers, confirming facts entails “investigative” effort. A bonus for journalists employing this narrative-control technique is they don’t have to do any investigative work. This actually makes their jobs much easier. One could even say this feature of their job rewards laziness.

False Narrative: College students are also at risk

and so they must all be vaccinated.

Early in official Covid, I wrote a letter to the editor for al.com, showing that at the University of Alabama in the flu season of 2017-2018 - in just a few few weeks - at least 863 UA students students went to the college infirmary with flu symptoms.

From further research, I showed that at just one college in our state, five times as many college students had been “sick” from a flu outbreak that spanned approximately 40 days than had been “sick from COVID-19 in our entire state … in approximately 200 days.

I knew this because one journalist at al.com wrote a story on September 16, 2020 that provided several nuggets of eye-opening information.

For example, more than six weeks after students returned to Tuscaloosa in the summer of 2020, no UA student had been hospitalized due to Covid. 

Per this article, Dr. Ricky Friend, the dean of UA’s College of Community Health Sciences, said:  “I can also tell you very few students in quarantine and isolation are experiencing significant symptoms.”

Also from the same article (more about the real source of this info later): “Friend … said one in every four or five students tested on campus is showing symptoms. The rest are asymptomatic.This is very much in line with data and trends we are seeing across the country.”

Re-stated: 75 to 80 percent of college students who were classified as a Covid “case” at Alabama (and around the country) were “asymptomatic,” meaning they weren’t sick at all. 

In late summer 2020 at the University of Alabama (after a month of non-stop student testing), exactly zero UA students had been hospitalized from Covid, none had died, “very few” students forced to live “in isolation” were “experiencing any significant symptoms” and, 75 to 80 percent of “positive” students experienced no Covid symptoms.

In other words, the flu of two years earlier had made far more UA students sick than Covid did.

And the 863 “sick” flu students identified in the news report of a Birmingham TV station were just those who went to the UA infirmary. Many sick students might have gone to another healthcare provider, or never gone to the doctor … or these students became sick while they were home on Christmas holidays. 

Many thousands of UA students had no doubt become “sick” during this particular flu outbreak.

Which brings me to my main point: Life at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa did not stop in January 2018. No classes were cancelled; nobody was ordered to wear a mask; basketball season was not cancelled; Students didn’t have to take on-line courses from their dorm rooms or apartments. Nobody freaked out at all.

I pointed all of this out in a letter I submitted to al.com. In the letter, I reported that “far more UA students were sick a couple of years ago from the flu than have been sick since Alabama’s first “confirmed” case in March.

But, alas, al.com wouldn’t publish my essay.

I did get to argue my case with the the news organization’s op-ed editor (K. A. Turner). Ms. Turner was decent enough to call and talk to me about my piece. I’ll never forget what she told me:

“Bill, we can’t allow you to compare Covid to the flu.”

For a few moments, I was speechless.

Did I hear this news editor right? The leading news organization in our state would “not allow” me to publish a true and important statement, one backed up by quantifiable published data? 

What happened to American newspapers? 

It didn’t take me long to figure out what’d happened. People like myself - using elementary critical thinking skills - were not going to be “allowed” to debunk any authorized narrative about Covid.

The point I was seeking to “confirm” with good, old-fashioned facts …. would not be allowed.

Why did one reporter actually ask a great question?

I still think the dean’s admission that up to 80 percent of “Covid cases” at UA were asymptomatic should have been national news. 

At the time, students across the country were returning to campuses after several months of lockdowns. Every college in America was testing students; newspapers were filled with stories about “new cases” and “outbreaks” at colleges.

But one dean obviously messed up and said that no students were hospitalized, very few students had significant symptoms, nobody had died and, indeed, the overwhelming majority of “cases” were as “sick” as I am right now.

That is, the dean blew up an important, albeit false, fear-mongering narrative. 

Of course no other news organizations picked up on this accidental revelation, which was a bummer … because I was the person who’d sent several emails to the reporter asking this journalist to ask a UA official this very question.

The journalist was Michael Casagrande, who normally covers sports for al.com, but expanded his journalist duties during the first months of Covid (probably because there were no sporting events to cover).

I kept emailing Michael a reader suggestion: Ask some UA official how many of these positive cases are asymptomatic.

And damn if he didn’t do it. The info the dean revealed about no student hospitalizations and all the students in isolation being fine was unexpected bonus Covid info.

So we have a lesson here: If you keep bugging a few sports reporters, one of them might ask questions “news” reporters would never ask.

More personal stories I can share …

I’m also a journalist (although, at the time, I was a freelance journalist who could never get any of my taboo Covid stories published). 

Still, several months later, I asked the director of the University of Alabama’s Media Affairs the same questions Michael asked. I knew UA never stopped testing students so I wanted to know if the “asymptomatic” rate was STILL 80 percent.

However, the director (who used to be a journalism professor) wouldn’t answer my questions. 

Nor would she arrange an interview with the dean who’d previously answered Michael’s questions (actually my questions) several months earlier.

I also wanted to know what percentage of athletes at Alabama who were testing positive were asymptomatic. She wouldn’t answer that either.

So I asked the media affairs staffers at the SEC the same question. (Testing of all student-athletes was mandatory for many months, with most athletes having to get a swab pushed up their noses three or four times a week.)

The SEC’s media affairs director said he couldn’t answer that question. He told me maybe I could go straight to the university and get that information. I told him I had: no dice.

I didn’t stop with the SEC. I asked all the media affairs people at all the big Division I conferences (Big-10, Pac-12, ACC, etc.), the same questions:

How many student athletes who tested positive via a PCR test were asymptomatic?

How many athletes have been hospitalized with Covid?

My answers were “we can’t answer those questions” … or no “media affairs” helpers replied to the questions of this media reporter.

Do these conference officials simply not know these answers or did they know the answers and simply didn’t want the public to know?

I don’t know … Oh, who am I kidding? I didn’t fall off a turnip truck yesterday …. I know the answer.

They know the answers … they just don’t want to “confirm” them. Or they know that it’s best to NOT do any investigations that would “confirm” that Covid is and always has been a nothing burger to college students and college athletes.

They know an important part of their jobs is to protect all the authorized narratives, especially the ones that are false.

Read Part 2 here.