"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
Sherlock Holmes, The Sign of the Four
Back when Frank Gifford, Don Meredith, and Howard Cosell brought football to America each Monday night, Steeler home games were the source of a particular phrase from the broadcast booth. Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium, Cosell would intone, stood at the confluence of the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio rivers.
Cosell always told it like it was, league preferences be damned, while rarely adhering to the broadcast mores requiring a sixth-grade-or-less vocabulary.
Today, I'm witness to another confluence, this one devoted to NOT telling it like it is. This past week, three narrative threads have come together in an unlikely confluence, a mixing and broadening of simultaneous propaganda unlike any that I've experienced in my American life.
The Rivers
In one week, the mainstream media has managed to publicize and therefore promote the usual "Ivermectin Bad" academic papers while ignoring any "Ivermectin Good" studies. The Wall Street Journal even ran a feature on a Canadian paper that has yet to be published. The study, of course, has a negative Ivermectin thrust. I've been steadfastly neutral on Ivermectin, but I recognize media bias when I see it, especially bias this blatant. Meanwhile, any "vaccine caveat" studies fail to see the mainstream news cycle light of day. And massive problems with the VAERS system are never broached, much less discussed. One-way propaganda spin has never been more obvious because cracks in vaccine efficacy and safety have now been uncovered by researchers but under-covered by the media.
The second propaganda river is obliquely related to Covid-19 reporting. This is the sudden publicizing of U.S.-funded biolabs in Ukraine, allegedly 26 in all, containing dangerous weaponizable (if not already weaponized) pathogens. One day we all woke to find out that the United States has been funding biolabs near the Russian border since 2005, ostensibly to make safe former Soviet pathogen labs. Seventeen years later, the U.S. is still at it. I discussed this topic earlier this month in both "Rubio and Nuland" entries.
Third, we have confirmation that the Hunter Biden laptop and emails were real. Not being a fan of either Trump or Joe Biden, I hadn't paid much attention to this back in 2020. My only interest now is that the story was labeled as disinformation two years ago, so it's another example of a single-minded mainstream media engaging in a muscular kind of censorship, in this case immediately before an American election.
One River to Rule Them All
Those three rivers in Pittsburgh don't just meet, they mix, and the Allegheny and Monongahela actually become the Ohio. So it is with these three evidences of propaganda. They're not really separate issues with individual provenances. They're all roiling together in media space, with propaganda canals in place so info doesn't overflow into broader public view at undesirable times.
With these three topics juxtaposed right now, they provide truly damning evidence of the institutional frameworks in place to manipulate, direct, and limit public attention. American tax dollars have helped make possible this house of mirrors. And it doesn't appear to have an exit.
"One river to rule them all,
One river to find them.
One river to bring them all and in the darkness bind them."
Bob Dietz
March 26, 2022
