Search Engine Sleuthing

How Tightly-Controlled is Your Favourite Media Outlet?

Most of us have a favourite media outlet that we browse from time to time to get a sense of what’s going on in the world.

I’ve found it useful to use a media outlet’s own search engine to determine a) how often that news outlet suppresses important stories, and b) what kind of stories get suppressed.

Some stories are easier to search than others.

To illustrate how this is so, let’s consider four important stories from the past week that often didn’t make it into the mainstream press, and how easy or hard it would be to search for them.

Seymour Hersh accused the United States of destroying the Nordstream pipelines. ‘Seymour Hersh’ is a name that is both unusual and famous. It’s likely that his name will be in any article title - so the search engine will find it. “Nordstream” is an excellent keyword - neither too wide nor too narrow.

Tom Jefferson was the lead researcher of a Cochrane Report meta-analysis of 67 random controlled trials that found that masks were essentially useless in preventing COVID or the flu. ‘Tom Jefferson’ and ‘Cochrane Report’ are both common enough names that the search engines will find a large number of articles completely unrelated to what you want. The key word ‘masks’ may find what you’re looking for, but will likely find a great number of unrelated stories.

Moonofalabama has reported that the ‘unidentified object’ the US shot down over Alaska last Friday with a $400,000 Sidewinder missile was likely a US weather balloon. This story has two strikes against it. It appears in a blog - which mainstream media only rarely use as a source. And the keywords ‘American weather balloon’ will generate a lot of garbage if the site looks separately for ‘American’, ‘weather,’ and ‘balloon’.

A New Pre-print correlation study from lead author Denis G. Rancourt published by ResearchGate has estimated that COVID vaccines have killed 13 million (mostly old and frail) people worldwide. Denis Rancourt has an unusual name, but he’s not famous enough to appear in a title. Notice also that it’s a pre-print - In my experience, the mainstream media won’t touch a finding that controversial with a ten-foot pole before it has been peer-reviewed.

Given the above, I think it is wise to limit your search for censored stories to those stories that search engines will likely find.

I would add the further caveat that I have found the search engines for print media to be more reliable than the search engines for TV networks. A good back-up check for TV networks is to search Youtube using a good keyword and the network’s name, e.g., searching Youtube with keywords ‘Foxnews + Nordstream’ will find a story when Foxnews’ own search engine does not.

Finally, if you can’t believe your favorite news channel has censored an important story, use the advanced search features on your favourite search engine, for example, search for stories which contain all of ‘CBC’ + ‘Hersh’ + ‘Nordstream’. (The caveat on this latter approach is that I’ve found that Google in particular sometimes has trouble finding materials which might embarrass either the CDC or the Biden administration.)

To find out how many stories your favorite media censors, you’ll first need to find some frequently censored stories.

My favourite source for such stories is Moonofalabama.org. Bernard is very careful about vetting carefully any stories he selects. (Today he gave Seymour Hersh hell for using unnamed sources, even though he acknowledges that Hersh’s past track record has been remarkably good) Bernard usually only does one story a day on a wide variety of geopolitical issues, so he won’t overload your inbox.

Dr. Robert Malone is good at covering medical issues jncluding COVID, and he usually only posts once a day. (Twice a week he sends out a post of cartoons - but you can ignore them.)

Some of the sources below will overload your inbox if you subscribe, but will often have important stories suppressed by the mainstream media:

Zerohedge is technically an alternative investment site, but they are probably your single best source of stories the mainstream has censored.

Matt Taibbi at Racket News is always interesting and often covers stories that others censor.

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism covers a wide range of stories about economics and geopolitics.

Larry Johnson at sonar21.com is an American veteran who covers Ukraine and geopolitics really well.

Caitlin Johnstone has good pieces about narrative control and geopolitics, and usually only does one post a day if you want to subscribe.

The Vigilant Fox covers health and COVID stories, as do Steve Kirsch, Dr. Vinay Prasad and Stephanie Brail at Wholistic.

For suppressed Canadian stories, try Rebel News.

My suggestion is you do a quick check of all these sites and bookmark the ones you find most interesting and/or trustworthy. After that, surf your chosen sites from time to time.

Each time you find a story you think is important but didn’t see on your usual news source, use the search engine from your favorite media site to see if they did cover the story. My suggestion is you keep a list of the stories they censored - in case you decide to send them a complaint letter at some point in the future.

It’s also useful to know your particular news outlet’s strengths and weaknesses. Some websites are great on alternative medical stories but lousy on geopolitics, or vice versa.

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A second way you can use search engines is to do a survey of a wide selection of major media, either nationally or globally, and keep track of how often, and where, a major story got censored.

Let’s use the Seymour Hersh Nordstream posting as an example. Here’s a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who’s very first Substack post presents very detailed information on how the United States blew up the Nordstream pipelines. I would argue that when a journalist this esteemed makes a charge this important and this detailed, it clearly deserves media coverage, even if we can’t be sure that the charge is true.

In a way, it’s a good example to use to see how tightly a particular media outlet is controlled. If an outlet censors in only limited ways, the outlet will cover the story in a way that is highly skeptical or dismissive, perhaps describing Hersh as a ‘blogger.’ This at least lets the audience know that the story exists. A higher level of censorship is to suppress the story completely.

Looking at various media websites, you can see where, and how tightly this story has been censored by using the media websites’ own search engines. (Many media websites will often let you search their website even when they restrict site access to subscribers.)

So, if you’re wondering why more people aren’t upset about Seymour Hersh’s charges that the US blew up the Nordstream pipelines, the answer may be as simple as: THEY DON’T KNOW!

Having done a lot of search engine sleuthing, I would offer the feedback that the pattern seen in the table above is fairly typical of most controversial stories.

Countries of the former British Empire typically display a higher level of censorship than the rest of the world. (If one were to infer power relationships from censorship patterns, one could be forgiven for wondering if Canada, England, and Australia are American colonies!)

It’s also not surprising that the English language Indian websites Wion and Hindustan Times covered this story. I find that freedom of the press is an order of magnitude higher in India than it is in North America.

One important caveat on the above table is that many news outlets restrict their coverage of controversial subject to opinion columnists. About half of the news outlets above reported the Hersh story only in a single opinion column. I suspect the large majority of those audiences won’t have seen the story.

Even lousy media websites are not without value. I browse CBC News from time to time to remind myself that a good chunk of the Canadian population relies heavily on a highly-scripted and controlled news source.

Censoring the news impoverishes our map of reality. I suspect we may see some major anti-NATO protests in Europe over the next few weeks. If there’s a snap election in Germany any time soon, we can expect the anti-NATO AfD Party to do extremely well.

This will be surprising and confusing to most Americans, because most Americans will not have heard of Hersh’s charges of American covert military action against the Nordstream pipelines. The actions of Europeans would be much more comprehensible to Americans if Americans knew as much about the charges made against their Government as many Europeans do.

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PS: I suspect a lot of readers of this site may find themselves dismissed as ‘conspiracy theorists’ by their more straitlaced friends. If you have friends who refuse to believe that the CBC, or CNN, or the New York Times would ever censor an important story, forward this post to them with a challenge.

Ask them to surf some of the alternate sites listed above, looking for stories that they find shocking but credible. Have them then do the search engine test to see if their preferred media is an trustworthy as they think it is.

Who knows, they might eventually admit to you that it probably is advisable to get your news of the world from more than one source.

One final request - if you come across any errors in the table above, please let me know.

Though I am sorely tempted by the current abundance of under-reported stories, I have resolved to restrain myself from posting again before next week!