Maybe professional gamblers have a nose for news (or as Sherlock Holmes might say, a curious lack of news). Maybe it takes cynicism mixed with an appreciation for what isn't said. Perhaps I draw obvious conclusions from partial information with more ease and accuracy than most Americans. Or maybe my Spidey sense tingles when I'm continually being sold a bill of goods. Then again, maybe I'm simply prescient. If that were the case, however, you'd think I'd win more than 58% of my college football bets.
My point is that followers of this blog's "Propaganda Files" have been treated to American media analyses that have been spot on. Especially during the last week, I've laid out the ways in which Americans have been manipulated and misled, as often by what U.S. institutions and media have NOT said as by what they've said.
Yesterday, the New York Times broke a story that should shake every American to his core. I'm glad the Times exposed the CDC, but I do have some major issues with the story, which I will broach in another entry. For now, I just want to spotlight how accurate these "Propaganda Files" have been in describing what's missing from American media coverage of the pandemic. The Times story provides a frame for the "why" of much that I've detailed.
The CDC Lied
The Times piece is "CDC Isn't Publishing Large Portions of the COVID-19 Data It Collects." The author is Apoorva Mandavilli, and it was published February 21. Basically, Mandavilli reports how the CDC has kept the majority of its Covid and vaccination data to itself for more than a year. Moreover, when the CDC did publicize data, it lied. It cherry-picked some data, omitted data not supporting the policy-of-the-moment, and kept its findings to itself that were not conducive to whatever narrative it wanted to spin.
I'm going to quote some of the more chilling lines verbatim tomorrow, but first I want to spell out how this expose corroborates the "Propaganda Files" themes, especially those themes of the last three entries, all published well before the Times story broke.
Spelling Out the Propaganda
My previous three entries highlighted the curious ways the CDC, the Biden administration, and U.S. mainstream media had sustained narratives without serious cross-examination. I specifically mentioned that:
1) Actual experts were rarely being made available for any kind of potentially adversarial interviews. This meant no public task force briefings, no cross-examination moments, no difficult questions. This has been the case for a year.
2) Non-expert talking heads at CNN, MSNBC, Newsweek, and so on have been serving as proxies for actual experts. It turns out that there was a reason for stand-ins rather than experts when delivering CDC information to the public. Being non-experts, they never faced adversarial interviews or challenging questions. And they suffer no consequences for being wrong or lying by omission, largely because they are "non-experts." As conduits, they assume no responsibility.
3) Whenever public figures pushed back on the prevailing institutional narratives (see my "Aaron Rodgers" pieces), the responses to them weren't written by actual experts quoting meta-studies. The responses were "opinion" hit pieces written by non-experts. So when these non-experts were revealed to be manipulating information or flat-out wrong -- again, no real consequences because they are "non-experts."
This Times piece makes clear the problem with putting actual experts on the public firing line. Presumably, the experts would know what statistical shenanigans the CDC was engaged in, and the careers of any actual experts would be on the line if they faced adversarial questions. They could lie, knowing that eventually the CDC would be exposed, and their reputations ruined. Or they could upset the narrative apple cart and tell the truth about the CDC pulling stunts with data. In the latter case, the experts' careers would also take hits.
The frame for much of what I've been discussing is that experts knew what was afoot, so they have not been in the spotlight. That's a big part of the reason there is no task force.
Tomorrow, as I said, I'll review some of the more chilling lines from Mandavilli's article. Things are quite a bit worse than I thought. The CDC is both hopelessly politicized and hopelessly compromised.
Bob Dietz
February 22, 2022
