The Global Cartel of Narrative-Friendly Big Media. By Tony Thomas.
Last November [the Australian] ABC joined the BBC’s Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a consortium of Big Media and Big Tech global players.
TNI’s gatekeeping goal concerning “misinformation” (i.e. contrary to the official line) is to flag it in real time, coordinate members internally and alert Big Tech’s enforcers to stamp it out.
Part of a global cartel
But on January 10 President John Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F Kennedy Jr, in a Texas District Court launched an anti-trust lawsuit for treble damages from TNI’s biggest news providers, namely the BBC, Washington Post, and global news syndicators Reuters and Associated Press. He wants TNI disbanded as an unlawful cartel. … His brief says “It is also an action to defend the freedom of speech and of the press.”
The ABC is the mothership of the narrative in Australia:
The ABC seems to enjoy its role as a minor Google vassal. …
Google (market cap $US1.3 trillion) found behind its executive sofa $US300 million (equal to roughly a quarter of the ABC’s annual taxpayer gravy) to set up “Google News Initiative” for massaging the media and journalists.
A BBC spokesperson, echoed by the ABC, said, “The media organisations that now make up TNI’s new Asia-Pacific network have received training, funded by the Google News Initiative, to help their journalists navigate the disinformation environment.” …
Kennedy’s lawsuit, less kindly, claims TNI’s commercial goal is to deplatform and crush the myriad of upstart online publishers who are contradicting the official lines and reducing trust in big media, along with its ad revenues. The legacy, high-cost media are smarting over competition from bloggers in the shift to digital publishing, with 85 per cent of Americans now getting their news online. …
US conservative pundit Tucker Carlson has satirised the Big Media censorship as: “We have a monopoly on telling lies. No one else can talk.” …
How’s that working out with the public?
Among 46 countries, the US media has become the least trusted (only 29 per cent trust it). …
In Australia, reporters are the second-least trusted of 30 occupations, ahead of politicians but behind delivery drivers. Only 43 per cent of Australians trust the media …
Currently Big Media and Big Tech are suppressing revelations from a US sting operation against Pfizer by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas gadfly. … As The Australian’s US correspondent Adam Creighton noted on January 30, the “jaw-dropping” story had racked up 40 million Twitter impressions but mainstream (Democrat-friendly) media in the US -– except Murdoch and his Fox News – wholly ignored it. Google and YouTube have reduced or deleted its visibility. Creighton appears unaware of media cartels, like the ABC’s TNI, coordinating suppression behind the scenes. A search of the ABC website on February 2 likewise yielded no current hits on Veritas or Pfizer, whether because of ABC’s TNI collusion pledge or its normal aversion to news that embarrasses the green-left establishment. …
Kennedy says TNI’s Big Tech members collectively have a gatekeeping power over at least 90 per cent of online news traffic. De-platforming a small news publisher typically costs at least 90 per cent of its traffic. Even well-known major online news publishers can lose up to 50 per cent of their traffic from a seemingly minor change to Google’s search algorithms. Smaller online news publishers have been destroyed completely when shadow-banned, throttled, de-monetized, or de-platformed. …
Kennedy quotes the TNI alleged cartel making admissions. Last year Jamie Angus, then the senior BBC controller of news, said:
the real rivalry now is not between for example the BBC and CNN globally, it’s actually between all trusted news providers and a tidal wave of unchecked” reporting “that’s being piped out mainly through digital platforms … That’s the real competition now in the digital media world. Of course organizations will always compete with one another for audiences.
But the existential threat I think is that overall breakdown in trust, so that trusted news organizations lose in the long term if audiences just, just abandon the idea of a relationship of trust with news organizations.
The lawsuit also references suppression by the TNI group of electoral news harmful to the Democrats and other liberal establishment players.
In particular the lawsuit cites the mainstream news blackout in the weeks before the 2020 Presidential election on the scandalous contents of Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop, which revealed allocating 10 per cent to “the big guy” — his father, Joe Biden — of Hunter’s lucrative influence peddling with America’s opponent nations. This coordinated blackout was justified by the lie — belatedly withdrawn by the Washington Post and New York Times 18 months post-election — that the laptop was Russian disinformation. Kennedy blames TNI for much of the blackout, thus the “truth controllers” propagated untruths. (The ABC originally in multiple accounts treated the laptop revelations as conspiracies or nutty, and an ABC web search finds no story yet that the laptop is genuine.)…
Climate, of course:
This TNI alliance has common elements with another consortium, Covering Climate Now (CCN), dedicated to climate news manipulation. Like TNI, this group has signed up the same AP, AFP and Reuters syndicators and the Washington Post, but also about 500 other news and opinion outlets. Its total claimed audience is two billion. CCN members pledge to hype global warming scares and suppress ”denialist” items – whether accurate or not. The ABC and SBS have not yet joined CCN, whose chief Australian members are the climate-crazed Guardian and the universities-based The Conversation.
So the future of information is really between a cartel of big media and government players that spread the narrative, and lots of little sites like this that try to find and spread the truth. Well-funded propagandists for those in power, versus the rest on a shoe-string budget.
And they claim that they are “speaking truth to power.” Fully sick.
