On February 27, 2020, weeks before full disease panic hit the US, the New York Times podcast started preparing the way with an interview with its lead virus reporter Donald G. McNeil. He promoted panic and lockdowns (“This is alarmist, but I think right now, it’s justified,”), and reinforced the point in the next day’s print edition with an urge to “go Medieval” on the virus.
So far as I know, this was the first media source in the English-speaking world to take such a turn away from traditional public-health principles to push full lockdown.
And the same day as this podcast, the same paper ran a piece by Peter Dazsak, head of EcoHealth, an organization later discovered to have been the third-party conduit for US funding of the Wuhan lab.
Also on that same day, Anthony Fauci flipped on his position on lockdowns from against them to for them. He began writing influencers on Twitter to get them to warn people that lockdowns are coming.
All on February 27, 2020.
What are the chances?
[…]
…while journalists can often hound elected politicians and their appointees, from Watergate to Russiagate and every “gate” in between, they tend towards a hands-off approach to the massive administrative bureaucracies that hold the real power in modern democracies. The press and the deep state live off each other. What that means is ominous to consider: what you read in the papers and hear on TV from the industry-dominant sources is nothing more than an amplification of deep-state priorities and propaganda. The problem has been growing for well over a hundred years and now it is the source of enormous corruption on all sides.
As for any politician who is battling with the administrative apparatus of the state, look out: he or she will make themselves a target of the media. It’s predictable for a reason. These people in both Big Media and the deep state “circle the wagons” as if their careers depend on it because it is true.
What can be done? Reforming this system, much less replacing it, is going to be far more difficult than anyone realizes. In 1932, there weren’t many alternatives to the New York Times. Today there are. It is up to each of us to get smart, get moral, sniff out and reject the distortions, call for a reckoning, and find and tell the truth in other ways.
The Culpability of the New York Times: Then and Now — Brownstone Institute
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