Jacinda Ardern refers to the use of propaganda to drum in the Covid-19 message. Media commentator Gavin Ellis uses a softer term - 'adversity journalism'.
Ellis, a former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, wrote an article in March 2020, as the pandemic took hold.
He warned, “The media need to be as alert now as they were in 1940 to detect the work of ‘fifth columnists’ or what wartime Prime Minister Peter Fraser called ‘the enemy within’. Now the subversives are not enemy agents but ordinary New Zealanders who post rumour and disinformation on social media before thinking or because they are in the grip of mindless panic.”
Whatever you call the tool used to drive the official pandemic narrative, it came with a silencing of dissent and a declining trust in news media. And this distrust increases as new information comes to hand.
The trust level now stands at only 44 per cent.
Ellis continues: “Adversity journalism will, at times, mean flying the flag and beating the drum to support national unity and purpose. That may not sit easily with some journalists but, frankly, being holier than thou won’t count for much if the death toll begins to rise.”
So as the pandemic progressed, journalists were required to redraw basic journalism principles, which are:
* Truth comes first.
* Journalists are responsible for delivering unbiased news.
* They should not work on behalf of special interests
* They should seek and give both sides of the story.
* They should own their errors.
But now, as new data emerges the public is looking at disinformation and misinformation and asking where it is coming from. There’s an uneasy feeling that it is coming from mainstream media.
Disinformation is false information that is spread deliberately to deceive while misinformation is false information that is not deliberate.
Remember Stuff told us, ‘Long-term side-effects of Covid vaccination are not a thing.’ The Whole Truth.
Things have changed. Emerging data indicates that the vaccine is indeed far more risky than we were led to believe.
A new peer reviewed paper summarises the current literature on mRNA and its effects on the molecular biology within human cells. And another new paper tells of increased emergency cardiovascular events among under-40 population in Israel during vaccine rollout and third COVID-19 wave.
New Zealand’s ACC has accepted 987 vaccine injury related claims, paying out $1.12m.
The Health Forum NZ is a data collecting site with more than 50,000 members. It has served as a meeting and information place for vaccine injured. It has received reports of more than 600 deaths proximate to vaccination. More than 300 of these have been investigated and confirmed by NZ Doctors Speaking Out on Science, a voluntary group of medical doctors.
The Bulletin stepped in to discredit these doctors in a hit piece about people at parliament occupation. New Zealand Doctors Speaking Out with Science is described as ‘a tiny minority of current and former health professionals who have joined the anti-vaccine bandwagon and promulgate misinformation.’
This group of doctors said they were concerned about the overreach of the Medical Council of New Zealand, which had, in effect, required that doctors support the Covid-19 vaccine campaign, despite what they saw as the lack of evidence supporting it.
They aren’t the only medical people to voice concerns. A group of doctors in America wrote with the ‘utmost urgency’ on behalf of physicians, whose first-hand reports of serious and fatal injuries from Covid-19 vaccines remain unaddressed.
“These doctors, like most doctors, are the last individuals that want to admit that a Covid-19 vaccine caused their patient’s or their own injuries. And they are the last to want to publicly make such an admission. Truly. But reality does not afford them these luxuries. The injuries they report are all too real.”
But here in New Zealand we were assured by Stuff’s The Whole Truth which delivered these snippets: “We already know that the vaccines are safe…side effects are usually pretty mild…when you get a vaccine, it leaves your body within hours or days - you’re just left with the antibodies your immune system has created…it’s been a year and a half since people received their shots in the Pfizer clinical trials - none of them had side effects pop up later…the evidence tells us the vaccines are safe.”
This week Stuff launched a new series, that promises to explain public health topics prone to misinformation because “social media is awash with medical misinformation”.
Produced by Stuff in partnership with Māori Television and the Pacific Media Network, The Whole Truth received funding from the Google News Initiative. The journalism is created under Stuff's code of ethics.
J R Bruning is a consultant sociologist based in New Zealand.
She writes about what she calls uncomfortable knowledge.
In her article selective science to drive high vaccination rates, she says
“Government policy processes have persistently excluded uncomfortable knowledge that suggested uncertainty or risk.”
She points out that there are many examples of institutions recognising harm long before harm was publicly recognised; such as cigarettes, asbestos, Teflon, fluoride, medical opioids, talcum powder, glyphosate and neonicotinoid insecticides.
Bruning says the Government’s Covid-19 Unite campaign failed to communicate age-stratified risk of hospitalisation and death as the pandemic evolved. And new evidence on infection fatality rates were not reported to the public:
“It appears that from late 2019, institutional interests anticipated that there would be hesitancy around vaccine safety. Yet there was no public forum. Instead, groups who sought to question the safety of the novel mRNA vaccine remained outside ‘accredited’ media, possibly due to the chilling effect of unprecedented Covid-19 funding and advertising boosts which effectively captured mainstream media.”
Bruning says it will take years to unpick the Government’s actions, when there was early evidence the vaccine was leaky and potentially harmful.
Omission of facts
Guarding our media integrity is the NZ Media Council. It is concerned with promoting media freedom, not just for publishers' sake but, more importantly, in the public interest.
Public interest is defined as involving a matter capable of affecting the people at large so that they might be legitimately interested in, or concerned about, what is going on, or what may happen to them or to others.
“An independent press plays a vital role in a democracy. The proper fulfilment of that role requires a fundamental responsibility to maintain high standards of accuracy, fairness and balance and public faith in those standards.” – NZ Media Council
The council received nine complaints about coverage of the Wellington protest. None were upheld. One complaint focused on a RadioNZ report.
Colin Decio complained the report was biased as it only quoted the police commander’s comments rather than giving a full picture.
Decio said there was no mention of “pepper spray used indiscriminately, or the police violence that caused a woman to have a fractured sternum due to being unable to protect herself against a female police officer’s elbow. Truth is there were many instances of extreme violence perpetrated by the police that day and RNZ only promoted the police commissioner’s opinion.”
The council found, while the story presented only one point of view in a situation where there are many different views, there were no factual inaccuracies established by the complainant. It ruled that there were insufficient grounds to proceed.
It is such omission of facts that is undermining trust in the media.
Remember the accredited journalists who filmed the Wellington protest from their Parliamentary balcony. Like the politicians, they declined to go down to the people.
Parliamentary reporter Barry Soper was one journalist who talked to the protesters. He wrote: "Trouble is, politicians have painted them as illegal, dangerous radicals. Having talked to many of them, I don't believe that's the case for the vast majority."
Mainstream media point to anything other than the vaccine to explain hesitancy and distrust.
A Dunedin study claims that ‘vaccine hesitancy’ can be linked to abuse, parental neglect and lack of achievement at school. Study director Richie Poulton said, "We also found the people who went on to become vaccine resistant had difficulties cognitively at times - they found it hard to process information, hard to read at school, and certainly when they hit middle age they were not very deep in their understanding of basic medical issues."
It was given space in RNZ, Stuff, NZ Herald, The Spinoff and Newshub.
There is still a deathly hush about vaccine injury.
A $55 million Public Interest Journalism Fund will support New Zealand’s media ‘to continue to produce stories that keep New Zealanders informed and engaged, and support a healthy democracy’.
The $55 million package will be made up of $10 million in 2020/21, $25 million in 2021/22 and $20 million in 2022/23.
What ethics or guiding principles, if any, are recommended with the granting of these funds?
Information on alternative news sites this week disclose that New Zealand is one of 60 countries that have signed an international declaration that commits to bolstering resilience to disinformation and misinformation.
Who decides what is misinformation and disinformation.
There is certainly little trust in current ‘fact checkers’: Censorship through fact checking.
The big question is who will watch the watchers? Remember the Dr Seuss book about Hawtch-Hawtch?
“Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there's a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch. Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see. So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn't work any harder not mawtch. So then somebody said ‘Our old bee-watching man just isn't bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!’. Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn't watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who's watching that bee.”