It’s easy to forget, with our collectively dissipating attention span, the nearly unfathomable depth of duplicity and deception that the corporate media was willing to engage in on behalf of their benefactors in the biomedical state throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.
But, lest we ever return to taking the self-righteous, alleged “grownups” seriously again, check out this CNN article — outrageously titled “Lab leak Covid-19 theory is like something out of a comic book, virologist says” — that I dug out of the archives.
Via CNN, March 31, 2021:
Theories about a laboratory leak being the source of the coronavirus pandemic sound like something out of a comic book, one virologist says.
Dr. Robert Garry of Tulane University and other virologists have been publishing studies for a year that demonstrate SARS-CoV-2 originated naturally in animals and is unlikely to have been engineered in a lab.
Genetic study shows the virus carries all the messy hallmarks of nature and none of the fingerprints that would have been left behind by laboratory manipulation.
Of course, we now know that the early landmark study purported to debunk the lab leak theory, which was cynically weaponized to set the narrative in the corporate media, was in fact instigated and directed by Anthony Fauci himself. Fauci has an obvious conflict of interest in that he directed gain-of-function research money to the very Wuhan lab suspected of either accidentally or intentionally unleashing the virus on the world.
Related: CNN Boss Ordered Staff Not to Look Into COVID Lab Leak Theory Because It Was ‘Trump Talking Point’
Quoting an article in Nature Medicine, CNN lamented the “often contradictory and sometimes outright ridiculous conspiracy theories that spread faster than the virus itself: SARS-CoV-2 was the result of a laboratory accident or was intentionally engineered, and this was concealed to hide either spectacular incompetence or a complex international conspiracy involving Bill Gates, the Chinese Communist Party and 5G wireless network infrastructure with an end goal of ushering in a new world order.”
This is what Walter Lippmann originally described as “manufacturing consent,” a term used “to refer to the management of public opinion, which he felt was necessary for democracy to flourish, since he felt that public opinion was an irrational force.”
In other words, manufacturing consent is narrative control ostensibly undertaken for the public good and intended to produce certain attitudes among the general population.
Later, Noam Chomsky expanded on the concept to explore how the process serves the dominant power structure, describing the outcome of manufacturing consent as:
the acceptance of government policies by people in the USA on the basis of the partial picture of issues offered by the mass media, denying them access to alternative views which would lead them to oppose such policies… a propaganda model in which the mass media select material in relation to the values of those in power.
It continues even today, despite mounting circumstantial evidence that corporate media is shilling for big pharma, obfuscating the claims of proponents of the lab leak theory and still smearing them as “conspiracy theorists.”
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