What if you were in the middle of a
phone conversation and the line suddenly went dead because you mentioned a
topic like vaccine injury that the service provider considered to be
misinformation? You would probably have two immediate questions: “How
does a business know what’s true better than I know myself (especially if I do
my own research)?” and “What’s to keep the service from self-dealing — using
its influence to push its own agenda?”
As fake news has become a national concern
in the U.S., internet watchdogs are emerging to weed out and flag incorrect,
falsified and nonsourced stories. Most have websites that people can visit, and
one has a plugin that can be downloaded from Chrome, Safari, Firefox and
Microsoft’s desktop and mobile Edge.
Certainly,
websites with odd names and strange domains that end in “.com.co” and websites
that carry non-bylined, nonsourced stories that are found nowhere else on the
internet should raise your suspicion meter. But internet watchdogs may not be
ethical or virtuous either.
The “protection” these organizations offer sounds like a great idea since
everyone wants the news and information sites they visit to be trustworthy. The
problem is, who is checking the checkers? Who finances them?
Do they have an agenda? Are some watchdogs calling news “fake” just because it
threatens their backers’ products, as we have seen with pro-GMO and
pro-chemical voices? Sadly, the answer is often yes.
In
fact, the conflicts of interest with many internet watchdogs are so blatant it
brings to mind the joke about how a sleazy lawyer tells his client “go to hell”
— he says “trust me.”
The Rise and Fall of Snopes
One of the calling cards of a fake news site according to Forbes writer
Kalev Leetaru1 is that it appears as a “’wilderness of mirrors’ —
creating a chaotic information environment that so perfectly blends truth,
half-truth and fiction that even the best can no longer tell what’s real and
what’s not.”
So, when Britain’s Daily Mail
ran a scathing exposé on the fact-checking site Snopes in 2016,2 the
exposé itself looked like fake news. It included claims that Snopes was founded
by a husband-and-wife team, Barbara and David Mikkelson, who fabricated a
nonexistent society. After their divorce, said the Mail, the husband embezzled
$98,000 to use for prostitutes and hired his new wife, Elyssa Young, a former
escort and porn actress as website administrator.
But, writes Leetaru, after
reaching out to David Mikkelson for his comments, he discovered the Daily Mail
exposé was not fake news after all.3
“It was with incredible surprise
therefore that I received David’s one-sentence response which read in its
entirety ‘I’d be happy to speak with you, but I can only address some aspects
in general because I’m precluded by the terms of a binding settlement agreement
from discussing details of my divorce.’
This absolutely astounded me. Here was the
one of the world’s most respected fact-checking organizations, soon to be an
ultimate arbitrator of ‘truth’ on Facebook, saying that it cannot respond to a
fact-checking request because of a secrecy agreement.
In short, when someone attempted to
fact-check the fact-checker, the response was the equivalent of ‘it’s secret.’
It is impossible to understate how
antithetical this is to the fact-checking world, in which absolute openness and
transparency are necessary prerequisites for trust. How can fact-checking
organization like Snopes expect the public to place trust in them if when they
themselves are called into question, their response is that they can’t
respond.”
Do the Internet Watchdogs Have
Political Leanings?
It is bad enough that Snopes
had many secrets and nontransparencies, but it also had political leanings.
Young, Mikkelson’s new-wife-turned-Snopes-administrator, had run for Congress
in Hawaii as a Libertarian in 2004 on a “Dump Bush” platform.
Over recent years we have heard a lot
of compelling evidence that mainstream news aggregators suppress conservative
news and views. “Like handicapping a horse, Google appears to weigh down
conservative news sites,” says Alan Gray, publisher of NewsBlaze, an
alternative business and world news newspaper. “More liberal sites take all the
first page positions and conservative news is pushed back to Page 2, 3 or
nowhere at all. This makes conservative news financially unviable.”
Progressive
and alternative websites that challenge the status quo are, of course, also
sidelined and unable to achieve financial viability. “Before the war against
alternative media, OpEdNews.com came out at the top of Google search results
for progressive news,” says publisher Rob Kall.
“After Google changed its
algorithm, we along with most alternative, non-mainstream news sites, were
buried pages deep. This has had a huge effect on our traffic.” Clearly biased
news selection can be as dangerous as fake news. This is how Leetaru puts it:4
“Think about it this way — what if there was a fact-checking
organization whose fact-checkers were all drawn from the ranks of Breitbart and
Infowars? Most liberals would likely dismiss such an organization as partisan
and biased. Similarly, an organization whose fact-checkers were all drawn from
Occupy Democrats and Huffington Post might be dismissed by conservatives as
partisan and biased …
In
fact, this is one of the reasons that fact-checking organizations must be
transparent and open.
If
an organization like Snopes feels it is OK to hire partisan employees who have
run for public office on behalf of a particular political party and employ them
as fact-checkers where they have a high likelihood of being asked to weigh in
on material aligned with or contrary to their views, how can they reasonably be
expected to act as neutral arbitrators of the truth?”
Big Media Companies Have Big Conflicts of Interest
Have you ever noticed how many news
shows and news magazines are anchored by drug ads? Since direct-to-consumer
drug advertising began 20 years ago, drug ads with their dangerous side effects
famously superimposed with images of puppies and sunsets have arguably become
TV’s greatest form of ad revenue.
No wonder mainstream news
doesn’t report on the jaw bone death and esophageal cancer
associated with the bone drugs bisphonsphates. No wonder it doesn’t expose
how TNF-alpha inhibitors like Humira, Enbrel
and Remicade invite infection, cancer and even Hansen’s disease (once known as
leprosy) according to a recent report.5,6
In addition to ad revenue,
representatives of Pharma sit on the actual boards of major TV and print news outlets further
censoring reporting about drug safety and effectiveness. The New York Times has
had on its board Schering-Plough and Eli Lilly affiliates, and The Washington
Post has had Johnson & Johnson affiliates.7 Even so-called
“public” media like PBS and NPR have accepted money from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), UnitedHealthcare
and the Koch brothers.8
Medical News Is Especially at
Risk of Censorship
It should surprise no one
that news which threatens Big Food and Big Drug products is especially
censored. Paroxetine (Paxil) was a top selling SSRI
antidepressant drug for GSK. But in 2004, soon after its approval, the New York
attorney general charged that Paxil research published in the Journal of the
American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry buried the drug’s true
risks of suicide in adolescents.9
More
than 10 years later, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) published a reanalysis
that “unburied” the hidden data and amounted to a reversal of the original
study. The new research demonstrated that Paxil indeed increases risks of
suicide in young people and adolescents.
In 2015, Scientific American
magazine shockingly partnered with Johnson & Johnson and GMO Answers for a
conference at the National Press Club in Washington.10 GMO
Answers is funded by BASF, Bayer, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont, Syngenta and Monsanto.
And sites that would question
almost all other corporation machinations give Big Vax a pass. Last year,
Jezebel ran the headline: “Robert De Niro and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Call
Vaccines Dangerous, Which They Are Not.” An Atlantic 2015 article sneered, “Vaccines
Are Profitable, So What?”11 The otherwise liberal Daily Beast has gone so far as to
publish pro-vax pieces penned by Paul Offit, perhaps the nation’s most extreme
vaccine promoter.12,13
Google Is Everywhere and That
Can Be a Problem
Aside from monopolizing the internet, Google has strong presences in childhood
education, health care and even the food industry of which few are aware. It is
also engaged in social engineering pursuits, artificial intelligence, military
applications and Biomedical/Pharma ventures.
The Longevity Solution...Dr.
James DiNicolanton...Best Price: $19.01Buy New $19.01(as
of 03:00 EDT - Details)
Few, for example, know about Google Life Sciences (now
called Verily) or Google’s subsidiary Calico, focused on “health, well-being
and longevity,” according to Google founder Larry Page.14 In
2014, Calico partnered with Humira-maker AbbVie to open an R&D facility
focused on aging and age-related diseases, such as neurodegeneration and
cancer. It has since joined with other drug developers.
In a chilling demonstration of the partnerships between government,
Pharma and internet giants, in 2017 Dr. Thomas R. Insel, the
director of the National Institute of Mental Health, left government to join
Google Life Sciences (now Verily),15 which
develops technologies for early detection and treatment of health problems,
though he left soon after.16
Early detection of disease
“risks” is a primary Pharma marketing push. Such partnerships might explain why
an exposé17 on the alleged illegal marketing of Genentech/Novartis
asthma dug Xolair was virtually buried on the internet in 2016.
Google Is Training a Whole New Generation
Google’s internet monopoly, which centers around personal information
tracking and sharing, is just the beginning. The technology giant is also involved in childhood education,
developing brand loyalty and a future customer base among children through
product placements in schools.
This happens quickly because many
schools have abandoned books in favor of tablets and computers equipped with
aps like Google Classroom, Google Docs and Gmail. Just as Pharma enlists doctor
support, Google has enlisted teachers and administrators to promote Google’s
products.
Today,
more than half of U.S. primary and secondary school students, more than 30
million children, use Gmail and Google Docs and Google-powered laptops like
Chromebook. Once the children are out of school, they’re encouraged to convert
their school accounts to personal accounts — a move that allows Google to build
incredibly powerful personality and marketing profiles of each individual from
a very early age and, of course, profits.
This
is similar to the Pharma push to keep kids on ADHD drugs once they leave home
in order to not lose the market share of a captive audience. ADHD drug
marketers worry the 5 million young people they have managed to get on ADHD
meds might discontinue the drugs when they leave home.
“I
remember being the kid with ADHD. Truth is, I still have it,” said an ad from
ADHD drugmaker Shire with a photo of Adam Levine, the lead singer of Maroon 5,
in the Northwestern University student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern, a few
years ago.
The disease mongering tag line
was, “It’s Your ADHD. Own It.”18 In a conference call
about its earnings, Shire bemoaned that it loses many of its college age ADHD
customers “as they kind of fall out of the system based on the fact that they
no longer go to a pediatrician and they move on to a primary care physician.19
The Brave New World Business
Model of NewsGuard
Fat for Fuel: A Revolu...Dr.
Joseph MercolaBest Price: $5.43Buy New $8.54(as
of 12:40 EDT - Details)
Another internet watchdog entrant is NewsGuard, a plugin that promises to rate websites
on nine criteria of credibility and transparency. Once installed, the NewsGuard
rating will appear on all Google and Bing searches and on articles in your
social media news feeds. Marketing plans include getting librarians to help
patrons download the plugin on their personal computers, tablets and
cellphones.
NewsGuard assigns a color
coded “Nutrition Label” to sites that considers the publication of false
content and deceptive headlines, ownership and financing disclosures and more.20 It
has partnered with tech giant Microsoft for a Defending Democracy Program that
addresses hacking, increasing transparency and warding against political
disinformation campaigns.
As soon
as I saw this ambitious venture I wondered who funds it. I did not have to look
far. NewsGuard received much of its startup funds from Publicis Groupe, a giant
global communications group with divisions that brand imaging, design of
digital business platforms, media relations and health care.
It is so huge it has eight
advertising/public relations subsidiaries, including the well-known Saatchi
& Saatchi and Leo Burnett.21 Here is how Recode
describes NewsGuard’s business model:22
“One
thing that makes NewsGuard stand out from many other non-tech journalism
initiatives is that it’s for-profit — it has received $6 million in venture
funding from its founders and other investors — so it doesn’t need to rely on
philanthropic donations. It has also enjoyed plenty of positive press.”
As I
expected, Publicis Groupe’s health subsidiary, Publicis Health, names Lilly,
Abbot, Roche, Amgen, Genentech, Celgene, Gilead, Biogen, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi,
Bayer and other Pharma giants as clients. Does anyone imagine that news about
healthy alternatives to Pharma drugs won’t be censored?
And, as far as the transparency NewsGuard
is pledged to protect, its own transparency is murky. On NewsGuard’s United
States Securities and Exchange Commission Form D filed March 5, 2018, there is
an option for disclosing the size of its revenue, but that box was checked,
“Decline to disclose.”
In your search for the truthful health
news, always follow your own guiding light and your skepticism. Internet
watchdogs like Snopes and NewsGuard have their own agenda — and it’s not public
health.
Sources and References
- 1, 3, 4 Forbes Dec 22, 2016
- 2 Daily Mail Dec. 21, 2016
- 5 Center for Health Journalism March 15, 2018
- 6 New York Times Feb. 13, 2019
- 7 Global Research March 31, 2011
- 8 Feb 2017 The Hightower Lowdown
- 9 Counterpunch Dec 29, 2015
- 10 Undark April 22, 2016
- 11 Atlantic Feb 10, 2015
- 12 Daly Beast Jan 1, 2017
- 13 Organic Consumers Association April 24, 2017
- 14 Wikipedia, “Calico (Company)”
- 15 New York Times Sept. 15, 2015
- 16 Wired May 11, 2017
- 17 AlterNet March 3, 2016
- 18 Opednews.com March 4, 2013
- 19 Bill Moyers Oct17, 2014
- 20 Forbes Jan 16, 2019
- 21 Wikipedia,
“Publicis”
- 22 Recode.net February 13, 2019
Copyright © 2019 Dr. Joseph Mercola
