Invisible
The Risks of Censorship
Canada’s mainstream media have become quite blatant in censoring a whole raft of stories - stories about excess deaths in Canada and around the world, stories about the long-term consequences of lockdowns, stories about vaccine side-effects, stories about Ukraine’s disappearing democracy and its gradual destruction as a nation, stories about the potential for political revolution in France or Germany rather than Russia.
One risk is that their audiences will find out about the censored stories by tuning into a different media source.
A couple of decades ago, Americans used to watch the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s The National to find out what really was going on in the United States.
Then it reversed. Suddenly, a lot of Canadians were diving into Fox News to find out what was really going on in Canada. (Before Fox News was neutered, mind you.)
The other risk of such censorship is that eventually a story will get too big to ignore. How does a media outlet announce a story that has been months in the making as if it just suddenly popped into existence?
So mainstream media outlets will sometimes cover stories they would prefer to ignore, as a kind of insurance against the possibility the story will later blow up into something huge.
Epoch Times Canada has long covered COVID stories that other Canadian newspapers won’t touch. So it wasn’t surprising they ran this story on June 23rd: EXCLUSIVE: More Than 300 Military Members Launch $500 Million Lawsuit Over COVID Vaccine Mandates.
That story reported: “Around 330 active or former members of the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) who say they were harmed by COVID-19 vaccine mandates have filed a class-action lawsuit against high-ranking members of the military, seeking some $500 million in damages. ‘The CAF shirked its own purpose and rushed an untested product onto its members, mislabeled this experimental gene therapy a ‘vaccine,’ knowingly made false statements of safety and efficacy, and facilitated its mandate with no option to refuse except for mandatory permanent removal from service,’ reads the statement of claim filed with the Federal Court on June 21.”
What was surprising was that on June 26th, the National Post ran this story by Bryan Passifiume: Hundreds of military personnel part of lawsuit over mandatory COVID vaccine policy, with the sub-head “The court action demands $1,000,000 in damages for each plaintiff, plus acknowledgement that CAF members had their rights violated.”
The article states: “Catherine Christensen of Edmonton’s Valour Legal Action Centre told the National Post the suit has less to do with COVID-19 and more about addressing concerns within Canada’s top military leadership, and acts she described as both malicious and unlawful. ‘The brief snippets of (plaintiffs’) stories are hard to read, but with the approximately 150,000 pages of evidence we have the stories get worse and the abuse of power in the chain of command is very apparent,’ she said. ‘This is not about COVID-19, this is about a corrupt chain of command that thinks they are untouchable and above the law.’”
Notice the marked difference in tone between the two articles. The National Post story leads with the central theme of soldiers unhappy with a despotic chain of command. They can’t eliminate the issue of mandatory vaccination from their story, but they do their best to downplay it.
If you look for this story using search engines, you’ll find several apparently independent Canadian newspapers carry identical or similar stories by Bryan Passifiume on this issue: the Windsor Star, the Vancouver Sun, the Vancouver Province, the Calgary Herald, the Montreal Gazette, the Grande Prairie Daily Herald Tribune, the Ottawa Citizen and even the Prince Rupert Record Gazette. Which will be less surprising if you realize that all those newspapers are part of the Postmedia empire - another part of how press freedom in Canada is rapidly disappearing. (Marc Edge’s The Postmedia Effect is on my reading list, so I may have more to say about this part of the story next week.)
I would say, based on previous COVID cases that have come before the courts, the odds are good that this case will be thrown out of court. However, a lot will depend on the particular judge who hears the case. It’s well within the realm of possibility that a sympathetic judge and jury will rule in the plaintiffs favour. In that case, the Canadian Government would suddenly be on the hook for $500 million dollars in damages - at least until the verdict is appealed. Then, all of a sudden, the story would be front-page news.
Those media outlets that suppressed the announcement of the filing of the lawsuit would have to sheepishly admit that the story had been around for months, but they had ignored it.
By running their albeit slanted story, the Postmedia newspapers have covered themselves against this contingency.
It’s sometimes hard to know whether one is dealing with media censorship, or simply search engine censorship. (Bing.com, for instance, was far more willing to find the less radical National Post story than it was to find Epoch Times’ coverage of the same issue.)
With that caveat, as far as I can tell, the CBC, CTV,and Global TV networks all have ignored this story, as did the remainder of Canada’s big newspapers. I guess they have fingers crossed that the story will die quietly.
PS: If you want a good summary of iatrogenic COVID deaths, the Vigilant Fox has this. Then there’s this story of British politician Nigel Farage being frozen out of his bank accounts for wrongthink. Betcha that story won’t make it to CBC’s The National.
nice. interesting.