Vaccine Coverage in Mainstream Media - Variations on a Theme of Propaganda

Author: José Solís, Ph.D

Pharma's Ownership of the Message, Mainstream Corporate Media's Narrative

A few months ago, I revisited a Reddit article titled, “News outlets self-censor extremely important information because ad revenue from pharmaceutical companies can be up to 70% of their income,” — seventy percent! Now, that’s a lot of influence and power to decide what will become news and how it will be reported. Cited in the article, from a presentation at the Revolution for Truth Rally and Protest, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. remarked,

"I talked to Roger Ailes [then CEO of FOX News], who I have known since I was 17 years old, he’s very sympathetic with this issue and saw the film Trace Amounts. I said to him, ‘I just want to go on one of your shows. Nobody will allow me to talk about this or debate me.’ He said to me, ‘I can’t allow you on any of them. I’d have to fire any of my hosts that allowed you on my station. Because,’ he said, ‘My news division gets up to 70% of advertising revenues during non-election years from the pharmaceutical companies’."

Pharma spends billions of dollars on T.V. advertising. Mass media conglomerates rely heavily, as stated by Kennedy, on the money pharma puts into their industry and, in particular, its news cycles for the purpose of generating more profits. This reminded me of the avalanche of scientific and legal evidence that would have anyone reading the literature raise many profound questions about the theory, policies, and practice of vaccination. More importantly for the purposes of this article, I wondered, how would the “spin” on vaccines be played? Upon what context would that spin be promoted? And, how would people be made vulnerable and thus fall prey to the unfolding propaganda campaign?

The context was the recent measles outbreak. The spin was to be engineered through the propagation of ignorance on the topic of the measles, and lies about the measles, its vaccines’ history, effectiveness, and safety, all in an attempt to deepen the already entrenched super profitable and liability-free market of the vaccine manufacturing industry. And maybe more heinously, through policies that would destroy our most basic right of informed consent and exemptions.
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