Media madness
The American media’s villainy during the pandemic was impossible to ignore, but larger outlets use their influence to expand their reach even more.
The TV industry in the U.S. has territory—like the Mafia. All of the country except remote parts of Alaska is assigned to one and only one TV market. The markets do not overlap. An AP piece from 2019 discussed how rural areas in Nebraska that lost over-the-air TV reception in the digital transition had long been assigned to the Denver market—although smaller cities in Nebraska were much closer. This meant cable and most satellite TV providers had to carry Denver stations and were not allowed to carry Nebraska stations—even though Nebraska newscasts would have been much more relevant there.
These counties had been placed in the Denver market because Denver was a much bigger city to begin with, and stations there used their influence to be given more territory than they would otherwise have. During the pandemic, some Denver stations seemed to not only broadcast a lot of fearmongering but also demonized public figures who dared to go against the COVID narrative. Big corporations that owned TV stations in major cities were more likely to engage in COVID alarmism than, say, a zine printed on an old dot matrix printer or a 250-watt rural AM radio station that was still playing scratchy records. I get an image of these big city TV moguls being like R.J. Fletcher of UHF.
An online post says that because of these rules, there is a small county in Kentucky where satellite providers are not allowed to carry a station that is only a few miles away and has most of the viewers without cable or satellite.
Satellite providers in the most remote areas were allowed to show stations from outside the area’s assigned market as long as they were from even bigger markets, and a federal law provided a bailout to do so. This meant some viewers in Nebraska were watching Los Angeles stations, even though they were not officially in the Los Angeles market.
Some small cities that had a network affiliate were actually part of a market that was centered on a major city that was miles away. A station in the larger city would sometimes use its influence to force the smaller station to drop its network affiliation. The larger station would claim exclusive rights to the affiliation in the smaller city—even though its signal didn’t reach that far. In other words, the station was given a monopoly on a service it did not provide. Even when a smaller city had its own market, it still wasn’t safe, because stations in a larger city had enough influence that the smaller market could be merged into the larger market. One example is when the Hagerstown, Maryland, market was folded into the Washington, D.C., market despite a distance of 65 miles.
During the pandemic, CNN’s parent company WarnerMedia was itself owned by AT&T. WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar bragged to attendees of a tech conference that the pandemic was “really good for ratings.” This illustrates a major factor in the media keeping the pandemic alive.
It wasn’t just the sad state of American television. While the pandemic was going on, a partnership made up of the BBC, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, the AP, the CBC, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and others fought against what it deemed to be COVID “misinformation.” However noble it may seem to fight against falsehoods, this collaboration raised antitrust questions. It threatened the ability of smaller outlets to even stay in business. Furthermore, some of the outlets involved in this initiative had major credibility issues of their own on pandemic matters.
All of this is deeply relevant to COVID and “new normal” fascism. The growth of centralized content is a key example of major media imposing groupthink. Without centralized content, COVID maximalism never would have taken hold. American media outlets used to have more variety in ownership, but media ownership has become much more consolidated over time. Perhaps the biggest driver of this trend was the disastrous Telecommunications Act of 1996, which afflicted radio and TV, but print and online media have suffered too. The evidence is pretty convincing that if we had as much variety in media ownership as we once had, the facts about lockdown culture would have at least been allowed to peep through.
Instead, we get bullshit.
Just last month, WWLP-TV in Springfield, Massachusetts—owned by Nexstar Media Group, America’s biggest TV station owner—claimed that Franklin County, Massachusetts, was seeing a “high” level of COVID spread. Thus, masking (the media’s favorite cure-all) was demanded. WWLP’s claim was simply false: The CDC’s map showed the county with “low” spread.
CNN absurdly claimed last month that three-quarters of American hospital beds were occupied by COVID patients—though actually it was under three percent. CNN was off by a factor of 25.
Media propaganda has loomed large since the pandemic began. It wasn’t just the isolated lies sprinkled throughout news stories or the failure to cover multiple sides of an issue. It was entire pieces labeled as news stories that were actually editorials full of wild claims. One vignette contrasted the differing COVID approaches of the towns of Gallup and Grants in New Mexico, which are only 60 miles apart. The piece said Grants—the much more open town—saw a worse outbreak. But by January 2023, maps from Covidestim and the New York Times showed more cumulative cases and deaths per capita in the county with Gallup, which had cracked down harder. This means the media’s earlier premise was completely wrong. (A ProPublica piece described the racism suffered by Navajo people in Gallup, as the county school system severely punished students for offenses like wearing the wrong color of shirt, which was deemed “gang-related activity.”)
Here’s another example of an editorial disguised as news: In December 2020, KELO-TV in Sioux Falls, South Dakota—another Nexstar property—ran a story about a nearby town titled “Brookings mask mandate working to keep COVID-19 cases down.” Not only was this a disguised editorial, but there’s no proof its main premise was even true—despite what the piece claimed. It cited one vague statistic with no real context.
Yet another instance of combative media propagandizing: In October 2021, CNN ran a story about the University of Maine System that praised its overall totalitarianism.
WDIV-TV in Detroit actually posted a YouTube video titled “Importance of wearing masks outside during pandemic.”
A December 2020 Washington Post piece fawned about the effort of a conservative Republican city council member in Mitchell, South Dakota, to enact a mask mandate in her town.
That’s the state of the American media in the 2020s. No gumshoe work of delving into the facts. Just naked propaganda. In a fairer world, the COVID industrial complex would at least be exposed as a lump of matter that is incapable of learning a damn thing or experiencing any introspection. Instead, the media amplifies their eugenicist garbage.