Who Are You Going to Believe?

For John, BLUF:  Someone writing in The Times (the real one, in London, not the Old Gray Lady in New York City) asks about Americans believing conspiracy theories, which leads to asking about their media.  Good questions.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Why do Americans think the media might be hiding things from them?  Let’s try asking Tony Bobulinski on Twitter.

From Samizdata, by Ms Natalie Solent (Essex), 13 January 2021.

Here is the lede plus many:

“Why does the US fall for conspiracy theories?” asks Daniel Finkelstein in the Times.

QAnon, the online conspiracy theory to which many Trump supporters subscribe, is like fan fiction, with endless riffs on Trump and increasingly bizarre plots about the skulduggery of his enemies.  The contributors to this script have the pleasure of being the heroes of it, setting out to cleanse the nation.  Like Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity, they have woken and are gradually peeling away layers of deception.  The deep state behaves as it does in every film but will prove no match for the hero.

The deep state behaves as it does in every film – As an aside, that, the endless stream of conspiracy thrillers put out by Hollywood, will do as Explanation No.1.  The scriptwriters of these movies were unable to conceive of the cabal of senior people in the US government, the CIA, the FBI, and the military as anything other than right wing, but the imagination of the American people is not so limited.

A personal best:  I have digressed even before I began.  The main point of this post is… ah, **** it, I already said it:

By censoring the Hunter Biden story the MSM has destroyed its ability to convince Americans there was no vote fraud.

By censoring the Hunter Biden story the MSM has also hampered its ability to convince Americans there is no “cabal of Satan-worshipping Democrats, Hollywood celebrities and billionaires” which “runs the world while engaging in pedophilia, human trafficking and the harvesting of a supposedly life-extending chemical from the blood of abused children.”

It has also hampered its ability to convince Americans, and not only them, that they should be vaccinated against coronavirus. Hitherto the English-speaking countries plus the Nordics have been somewhat less prone to vaccine conspiracy theories than people in most of Western or Eastern Europe.  I expect that to change, and that change will kill people.  That is what happens when the boy cries wolf too many times.

There is more to the post at the link.

Please note that Blogger Natalie Solemt is a Brit.

i think ths blog post sums up my view.  The press, by supressing the Hunter Biden story, by giving space to Russiagate, by flatly denying that there was an fraud in the 2020 Election, have forfieted the right to be accepted as honest brokers of the truth.  The actions of Social Media just add to the problem.  And Mr Jeff Bezos gets an extra penalty for both owning The Washh Post and owning Amazon, which suppressed Parler.

Regards  —  Cliff