The Covid pandemic has brought us a lot of information and a lot of censorship of information. Oddly enough, a lot of the information that was censored is now being reported as true. Currently the difference between a conspiracy theory and a major news story is a few months.
On Tuesday, Issues & Insights reported the following:
This disinformation business sure has gotten complicated lately.
In the past few days, a key federal agency concluded that COVID was likely the result of a Chinese lab leak. A prestigious medical journal reported that natural immunity is better than vaccines against COVID. Another that mask mandates were worthless. And President Joe Biden’s advanced age is now, according to Biden, a legitimate issue.
All of these claims had been labeled as “disinformation” by the mainstream press, by “independent” fact-checkers, by social media platforms. Anyone who espoused them was attacked as a crazy anti-vaxxer, QAnon racist, Russian stooge who deserved to be de-platformed, demonetized, and discredited.
Take the lab-leak story. The Energy Department, “citing new intelligence,” changed its view on the origins of COVID-19 and now thinks it did, in fact, escape from a lab in Wuhan, China.
The article notes how the lab leak theory was treated in the past:
A-list journalist Anne Applebaum once compared Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., to a Soviet propagandist for suggesting that COVID came from a lab. A New York Times reporter said the lab-leak theory had “racist roots.” The editor in chief of Scientific American called it a “conspiracy theory.” CNN said it was “like something out of a comic book.”
Politifact, one of the supposed independent guardians against disinformation, said that any such claim was “inaccurate and ridiculous. We rate it Pants on Fire!” Facebook banned posts mentioning the lab-leak theory.
The article concludes:
One of the articles that Google is right now targeting is our Feb. 23 editorial applauding Congress for investigating COVID vaccines (Congress To Probe COVID Vaccines — And It’s About Time).
Apparently, merely calling for a congressional investigation “promotes harmful health claims or relates to a current, major health crisis and contradicts authoritative scientific consensus,” according to Google’s thought police.
So, let’s review.
The stuff labeled as dangerous disinformation keeps turning out to be true. The supposed guardians of credible information turn out to be some of the biggest peddlers of actual disinformation. And groups that are supposedly targeting disinformation are really just out to defund conservatives.
In all this confusion, one thing is perfectly clear. If you want to know what will be labeled as disinformation tomorrow, just look at whatever is on the left’s agenda today.
The mainstream media is simply pointing out the need for Americans to find alternative sources for their news.