Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

Here you go - maybe you can reconsider your priors for classifying things as baloney now? Gov and media put a lot of effort into breaking our intuitions about their trustworthiness. Your gut reaction is the one we're trained to have.

CDC changed their definition of vaccine and vaccination:

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/coronavirus/article25411126...

> Before the change, the definition for “vaccination” read, “the act of introducing a vaccine into the body to produce immunity to a specific disease.” Now, the word “immunity” has been switched to “protection.”

> The term “vaccine” also got a makeover. The CDC’s definition changed from “a product that stimulates a person’s immune system to produce immunity to a specific disease” to the current “a preparation that is used to stimulate the body’s immune response against diseases.”

Even dictionaries were edited:

https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/11/30/fact...

> Merriam-Webster revised its "vaccine" definition to replace "immunity" with "immune response."

This was done when it became clear that COVID vaccines didn't actually create any kind of immunity and thus weren't technically vaccines. Like always in public health they fixed this problem by manipulating language - now it only has to provoke some sort of response from the body. If that response turns out to be useless or actively harmful, no big deal, it's still a vaccine.

Observe that this change totally alters the meaning of being anti-vaxx. Take a substance that provokes an immune response but it's the wrong sort of response and doesn't work, diverting the immune system into wasting time whilst the virus replicates. It is 100% rational to oppose such a useless product, but by subtly manipulating the definition of vaccine they have now trained people to consider such opposition anti-vaxx and therefore automatically irrational.

Unfortunately this problem is not theoretical, bringing us to negative efficacy. It exists and is visible in many studies, but hidden by governments which use a variety of invalid statistical methodologies to alter the raw data, which is kept secret. Nonetheless, they aren't the only ones that can count cases. It's a big topic but some studies and explanations of what's going on can be found here:

https://bartram.substack.com/p/even-more-negative-vaccine-ef...

The root biological cause seems to be related to the definitional game playing. The vaccines targeted the 2019 Wuhan spike and the antibodies vaccinated people produce are meant to dock with those specific proteins. But by the time vaccination is rolling out big time we are already at Delta, the virus spike has evolved quite significantly and the antibodies aren't so effective anymore. The body doesn't seem to recognize this quickly enough and spends a lot of time producing the wrong sort of antibodies, thinking it's successfully fighting the invader. Unvaccinated people have immune systems that haven't been trained in any way, so their first real SARS-CoV-2 infection triggers the antibody learning process immediately and they develop immunity to the latest version of the virus quicker.

This problem is called imprinting and is visible in the booster and bivalent trials. They didn't help reduce COVID cases and even made them higher - actually 100% of test subjects got COVID when exposed in the bivalent trials, but the vaccines were approved anyway because under the new definition they only need to provoke an immune response of some kind, not create immunity. Public health responded to failure by conflating the means and the end.

The media never covered any of this and systematically attacked the independent bloggers and researchers who did. Which is why smart people don't trust them.

It's individual journalists that take the grants, they take the interviews with discredited people, they refuse to cover one side of the story because they were convinced by the other side that they're on the Right Side Of History, etc. If you make editors responsible for all that then what are journalists? Robots?

> Most journalists don't have the background to know whose papers replicate and whose do not

Yet volunteer bloggers regularly manage to not only read papers, they find specific problems with them.

The core problem here is that journalism as a field culturally accepts very low standards, and has no interest in raising them. Journalists are trained not to think too hard about anything and to distrust anyone who does, which is why independent journalism has such a different flavor to it. During COVID you could go to the legacy media and read a headline like "Lockdowns saved 3.1 million lives" which would quote a press release from a university. Then a few hours later you could go read some blog by some random anonymous dude and get a list of five massive and obvious methodology errors that rendered the underlying paper deceptive propaganda, problems of the sort that you didn't need any expertise to notice.

Normies see this and think maybe people who can't pull off amazing feats of investigation like reading publicly available PDFs shouldn't be journalists?

In journalistic culture not only won't they do things like this, they train their readers and each other to systematically ignore such investigations because they aren't "credible sources". But that's so wrong. They are credible sources, because they systematically prove their claims and over time that creates more credibility than whatever photocopier for academic opinions is being presented by the newspapers today.

In homeopathy, it goes from bad->less bad->good on dilution!

It is the 'fake item' that leads you to other fake items. You find the patterns and see the uncharitable takes. You see the mockingbird style reporting. It is the gateway moment I was pointing out. You start with something small and it grows. You can not un-see it. A gateway moment for them was a typo. Mine was a repeated story over and over as I traveled between cities and timezones but presented as if that particular news org had wrote it all up by themselves. When it was just mad-lib style fill in the blank.

I bring up twitter and did not claim it was 'authoritative' but to show that behind the scenes our political machine is shaping the narrative. Spiking stories and promoting others. The people who run those orgs are doing it gladly. To pretend the same thing that happened at twitter is not happening at NBC/CNN/FOX/NYT/etc would be a bold claim. Like you point out twitter is not that valuable but they made a point of it to do it. Proper suppression of people and censorship and narrative shaping. The very same people who used to say 'the internet see censorship as damage and routes around it' are the very ones building a censorship news controlling apparatus. Then gaslighting us with 'how dare you question them they are doing it for our safety!'

News is very unreliable in most forms. You can push particular opinions very easily. It is not that hard to do. Our news is basically gossip and talk shows. With news as the thin premise that they are doing.

It is good to see someone else doesn't believe that we should start moving moral goalposts just because society starts sliding into depravity.

What would all these people objecting to this do if they were in a time and place where some real shit was going down? Lynchings, genocides, etc? I guess they'd stand by and be ok with it and rationalize those things.