Well I’ve had to reevaluate a lot of things that I didn’t consider “likely” over the years. I knew for a long time that local reporting was awful, for example, because it happened too many times that the 16 year old student in the local paper called Kevin who won a poetry competition was actually a 61 year old gran called Kelly who came runner up in a knitting contest, or some equivalent, but equally astonishingly wrong series of “facts”.
What I didn’t fully appreciate is just how wrong the main news is that we got on the TV and in our newspapers. I naively thought that it was basically right in the essentials, with a detail wrong here or there, and with a predictable and manageable amount of bias thrown in, depending on the outlet. What I didn’t appreciate is that it is often wrong in essentials and in the entirely of its reporting on many subjects.
It’s been a slow awakening over a long period of time: from the lies that got us into Iraq; the obfuscation about the causes and so-called remedies of the financial crisis in 2008; the initial blanket misinformation about the origins of Covid; who blew up the Nordstream pipeline; and most recently, and most audaciously, the lies about the extent of the depravity going on in Gaza, UK complicity from Cyprus, and what happened in Amsterdam a few weeks ago; not to mention the roots of the conflict in Ukraine, what’s going on in Syria, and on and on. The media lies about everything that’s important and it’s not an accident because the lies fall consistently in line the interests of the most powerful and wealthy, in particular weapons manufacturers.
What we appear to know about the story about the “JW missionaries” is that they attempted to move billions of dollars worth of bonds but were prevented. Given that local criminals are perfectly capable to inventing conspiracies to rob a local petrol/gas station of a few hundred dollars, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that more intricate conspiracies surround instances where billions of dollars are apparently in play. I don’t think that the detail of a JW missionary in particular is terribly likely to be invented whole-cloth by a reporter. It seems more likely that the people involved either were JWs or were pretending to be JWs. Whether this happens in other cases and is part of a more widespread phenomenon is more speculative. If it is, then, given its record on other issues, I don’t think we can rely on the media to report or reliably record such events in order for us to detect what the pattern is.
