Why we don't trust mainstream media and governments

I really cant stand billboards adorning school frontages these days -you know, the ones that say things like We Stand for Respect, Striving, Perseverance etc. It must be what Winston Peters calls virtue signalling, as I don't believe it is advertising the school. It reminds me of the symbolic memes of trees with a trunk and a round top like an ice cream which is standard issue in schools classroom wall art. Nothing original or necessarily representative; just a meme. In the same way I am suddenly reminded of mainstream/legacy media forever trumpeting their values of fairness and balance and representing minority views, when none of them have been there in many years, especially in the last three years.

Last week the media itself was asking (me? the public?) why they aren't trusted anymore; why their position as trustworthy news sources is being eroded. https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/mediawatch/audio/2018793371/we-ve-got-trust-issues-with-news In the recent spate of articles, and in the one linked above, many answers are put forward. Much of them second guesses. Greg Treadwell and Mertja Millilahti from AUT Centre for Journalism and Democracy offered some research, and some best guesses. 

What surprises me is that nowhere does anyone ask "Well, are the media worthy of trust?" and if not, how could they become, to quote the Journalist's code of ethics, more fair and balanced and telling the other side of a story? The focus seems to be on the listeners/consumers as if they just need to see that the media is trustworthy. My answer to the question is no, they are not trustworthy. Reason? They became, wittingly or unwittingly, the hosts of viral one-sided biased information about  what are called vaccines (but aren't even vaccines, they don't work like vaccines-more sloppy journalism?). They forgot who they were, and took up a cause. Many people I know were well aware of media's bias decades before our recent Covid conflict. Jim Lyons, a Catholic priest, showed it to me in a workshop in 1986. Everyone has a 'bias'-you can't not. To suggest neutrality and objectivity is, you could say, spreading misinformation. 

But what we are talking about here is something else. I believe the (mainstream media) is purposefully biased.

I wrote to RNZ and Stuff many times over the past 2 years about their biased reporting during the pandemic lockdown and protest and they flatly denied  every complaint. Jessie Mulligan scoffed at people who chose not to get RNA injected. I was somewhat a fan. Many of us wont go back to the 'trusted' media we used to tune into.

What could be done to reinstate trust? Meet with us. Listen to the suffering  we endured for making a personal choice, a choice that was upheld by The Bill of Rights and Human Rights charter. Show and tell like you once did. Poignantly, this was not offered as a way to regain trust in the article or any of the others I could find. 

You will notice the frenzy of media activity recently about 'misinformation and disinformation'. A year ago I had to  find out what they meant and decipher the difference.  So it appears, and the Ardern government said so, that any views contrary to the government's on Covid are to be considered conspiracy theories. How did this happen? How did we get to here? Did we not learn from the constitution makers in democracies around the globe that governments are to be treated with caution, for good reason and a thousand historical precedents of wild caucuses coming up with ideologies which end up persecuting minorities and sometimes majorities? So now we have a government body set up to combat the spread of misinformation and disinformation. Whatever happened to the recognition of our ability to decide for ourselves the course and direction of our lives and the veracity or not of the information out there? It is demeaning to our own value compass and sensibility to say we cant decide for ourselves. I would like to decide for myself who I listen to, visit with, read books by, attend to talks by, and put into my body. Oh but they say, it's the people who don't possess this discernment we have to worry about; the lonely outsiders with a big grudge, Couldn't we make a government body that gathers these folks into community that they crave instead of a government body that monitors and judges everyone? That stops terrorists, not censoring every dissenting voice.

When I was growing up we knew who the town bull-shitters were, the people you couldn't trust. We even knew who the local pedos were and where they were likely to be. Which brings me to full circle; a repeat performance of Covid passports time- telling us what to do and when to do it. "Simon says Stand up!" Simon says sit down!" Beyond criminal activity (for which we have the police), there is no need to bring in a kind of Morality Police to decide on what people can be exposed to; who can speak and who can't.

One of the coolest things that came out of lockdowns was that it gave us time and space to consider and feel what we wanted and what we did not want. From what I've gathered we want a more balanced life in terms of work and family, and play and time to follow our passions and interests. We want and need human connection; touch. Autonomy and agency in plotting the course of our lives. It was as if a giant bear came out of hibernation and it was angry and hungry, lonely and scared. The bear was us- hungry for what it needed and angry that it had been in a deep sleep for so long.

It is not just the in the media that are losing our trust. It's every institution. And it is world wide apparently. Could it be that, and as I've said, this is something these examinations avoid asking, that there is good reason not to trust. ie we have been lied to or had information skewed or left out altogether? Im a cartoonist, and I remember a couple of years back sending a cartoon of the newly elected local mayor Michael Feyen and recently defeated Brendan Duffy to our local newspaper and being told that we don't publish that sort of thing. I and the friends I showed it to thought it was (sort of)funny and not offensive. Here it is:

The difference between media of my day and now is that I can now see and hear every local, every global village hater, rascist, misogynist all at once. Whereas once, pre internet, I couldn't. There are rooms full of them all shouting at once, all wanting to be seen and heard; and we can enter the rooms. In my day it was very much limited to my local geography. We all knew where Snow the Ho was likely to be.

We don't trust the media not because we are conspiracy theorists or anti-vaxxers or anti -government. True they are government funded, and got a mighty fat cheque over lockdown, that makes one suspicious. Or  its because we value truth, honesty, fairness, integrity and balance, most of which are enshrined in the journalist code of ethics. And we aren't finding those values being upheld in mainstream media.

Which brings me back to where I began, with school billboards. If you shout your values across billboards and boardrooms and staffrooms and websites and then fail to live by them, don't be surprised when people don't trust you. Media, the onus is on you buddy.

On a deeper level, we are collectively coming to the realisation that truth is not ever centrally held by one source, be it the Vatican or government. Truth is elusive and evasive. Its private and subjective. This is not a woke liberal chant but a reality. If we share a truth it may be our collective humanity, our values which differ in their importance to each person but remain a stable foundation even if their expression and priority are different. I've mentioned a few in this article. I've never been that hot on 'truth' as if its something immutable. Perhaps, when we say we want truth, we might be pointing to deeper needs such as to trust, honesty and to feel safe.

I want to trust; it is a basic human instinct that helps to bind us to one another. How else to we all get scammed and preyed apon by sales people and others? I tend to trust people at their word and if I'm taken advantage of, lose my trust in them which affects that relationship.  

Global fear pandemic

This morning I, along with the rest of my country, was rudely awakened by an alarm-the kind of sound I expect to hear before a tsunami or something truly threatening. I am feeling pretty irate. The government has invaded my cell phone server. There is no tsunami.There is no bushfire. There is the flu and, people are getting sick, yes. Some people are dying yes. A long way from my place! This is influenza, not bubonic plague. A quite virulent form from what I can make out. There was no siren or national radio broadcast when my grandmother died of complications due to influenza. My neighbour just called by and said, "where is the alarm system saying 8,500 children* (quite alot anyway, since around 9 million die yearly globally from this 'preventable' disease) died yesterday due to malnutrituion". Last year she did not receive a violent sound of an alert on her phone telling me of spreading influenza. Or smoking. Or malnutrition. Do you know how many people died of influenza last year in NZ? Around 500. Why weren't these people highlighted in the media? You and I probably had that particular virus.

People die. Sick people and old people die more easily of illness.The media are falling down on their job and escalating fear by not providing this relevant information when reciting daily death facts.On National Radio I get daily updates by class monitor Ashley Bloomfield telling us the numbers .It is relevant and important to know that someone had cancer or diabetes. Our fears would be lessened.Unless I were old or sick. or they were my loved ones. Then I would be fearful. But we have perfectly healthy people almost paralysed by fear. I know some of them

 I would really like to understand the conditions that make this global pandemic of fear possible in our communities. Why, for example, do we suspend critical questioning around our government and its lockdown practices? This baffles me. I need to understand this tendency because its potentially dangerous behaviour. You could argue that in times of political instability this same action by world governments would be called 'tyranny' or 'autocracy' or communism or something. And to question you are hassled, abused and dobbed in. Indeed you can be considered a traitor. A friend was recently writing messages in chalk on a pavement in a town near here which encouraged people to think for themselves around Covid 19. He was assaulted and verbally abused by passers by. When he told them he was simply exercising his democratic right to peacefully protest and to exercise freedom of speech, and that they didnt have to agree, they ignored this and in one case he was shoved several times by a bystander. During lockdown I did this cartoon to warn of the dangers of following without question.

My neighbour who came over this morning as I was writing this and said this pandemic behaviour is a kind of virus in itself, ie a spreadable thought pattern that we resonate with and then catch. The world is full of anxiety.I notice it in the harried faces on the street. In the interactions I observe between people and quickly run away from before they escalate. Is it around death? I wonder about our powerlessness in the face of suffering. The ultimate failure of our death defying culture is that we will die........  Are we avoiding the fact that one day we will die? How are we living in this moment? How do we connect with each other? How do we recognise others and be recognised for who we are and what we have to offer? Not by social media; reminders of our need to matter to someone, to have something to live for and by, to be able to participate. These things bring feelings of well being, ease; of peace and equilibrium and togetherness. To make it banal, but speaking in Sciencespeak,  when you have these things, nice chemicals are released in your body such as oxytocin and endocannabanoids.   However these are the values we have expended at the expense of  the Holy Grail of Independence and, Freedom.  Values which, I would argue, have brought about war, genocide and global environmental destruction. Do we fear our collective impending doom? If so, can we act with courage on those fears, instead of silo-ing them inside a virus?  

Our hallowed social structures are clearly no longer serving us. They only ever served a small group of white people, but now the writing is on the proverbial wall. Covid 19 has highlighted what we do want and what we don't want. What we don't want-industrial schooling, economic tyranny (capitalism) and mechanistic medical worldview. What we do want? As Ive said I think we want connection, community and a sense of belonging, mattering to someone, participation including access to money and leisure and above all, to quote the psychologist and creator of Compassionate Communication, Marshall Rosenberg, to mutually contribute to one anothers' wellbeing. 

 Furthermore, mortality statistics given to us are also fueling our fears. Now, I'm no mathematician, but I can count. If you have a group of 100 people, all of whom get ill, and one of them dies of something then you have 1% mortality right? If , on the other hand, only 30 go to the doctor and the doctor says hmmm, 1 person in 30 then your mortality rate is closer to 4%. That is what we are being told right now; the rate of death against the number of people testing positive.  

I do have questions on our fear. I understand anxiety and its twin brother depression very well-ive struggled with it for a good part of my life. The global pandemic is surely a pandemic of fear. Its not facts driving it but rather the well- intentioned frothing media and their bosses in government. Otherwise, as Ive said earlier, we would break out in a sweat every year in flu season or when we get in a car.   

The last thing I want is for people to dismiss this essay as the work of a  'conspiracy theorist' or 'wacko' or 'hippy' or something. What can help you to at least listen for a minute? Before you put me in a box to further allay your escalating fears.And you don't have to agree. I'm just asking you to question assumptions and decisions made on your behalf.

The cabal who advised government were, I'm guessing, medical fundamentalists. Nowhere was a Zach Bush, or a Bruce Lipton or someone with a metaview or what used to be called wisdom. By the way look up these guys. They are not cranking up a conspiracy. Not that it matters to me but it may matter in terms of mainstream credibility - they both have a medical background.They use  evidence-based science.  Bruce Lipton is an immunologist and Zach Bush a doctor. Bruce talks about the effect of fear on immunity. It does have an effect to the extent that we may be creating the situation that we fear! 

I wont go as far as saying there is an underlying sinister force at work manipulating us for its own dark ends, eg the child eating pedophile lizard race. Anyway, the only conspiracy I see is the conspiracy of  control and what the cabal views as 'right action'. I'm not questioning our government's integrity, but we do need another type of voice. All we get is microbiologist Siouxsie Wiles who, despite her radical appearance is a medico with a conservative materialistic world view ie the world is made of stuff. and it just bumps around in the universe. This world view, which we take for granted, was developed in the eighteenth century and says that the world (and us) is simply matter. We are like a car. You get worn parts, you need new tyres; your battery is low etc They actually use that metaphor frequently! Its predictable and the forces that act on it are measurable.   In this current paradigm Germ Theory states that there are germs out there and then they come inside you and you get sick. That doesn't explain how and why some people dont get sick, or why groups of people under duress, such as colonisation get more sick and die younger than their white counterparts in the same society. But there are other stories out there-hard as it is to wade through the sheer volume of propaganda going out as 'news', and the more extreme view that wants to link this event with every other event from Princess Diana's death to 5 G networks. You aren't going to discover them on mainstream media; they have too much invested in promoting the status quo  which the government has deemed 'correct' and 'safe' and 'kind'.

Have a look at a video on Wim Hoff, the Ice Man who holds the world record for staying over 2 hours immersed in ice. He derails Germ Theory in an experiment supervised by science researchers which is recorded in the video. He and others resist the effects of bacteria directly injected into their bodies. 

The virus is helping us to challenge our very world view; that is,our current disembodied compartmentalised view of the world which is present in all our institutions and the big three religions. And implicitly its accompanying value system.. For that we can choose to be grateful. Or we can see it as a threat, and using our tools of force which we use for everything we don't want, we can try to eliminate it. I say good luck there;it ain't going to work using the current medical toolbox.  More about our current world view and the one that needs to replace it in the blog I've mentioned before by Charles Eisenstein:

Charles Eisenstein-author, writer social commentator, philosopher 

https://charleseisenstein.org/voice-recordings/the-coronation/

Bruce Lipton- epigeneticist and immunologist

https://londonreal.tv/dr-bruce-lipton-coronavirus-epigenetics-immune-system-most-dangerous-part-of-covid-19-is-fear/

Zach Bush- MD writer and speaker  

https://zachbushmd.com/video/the-highwire/

Wim Hoff-'Ice Man' and endurance athlete

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaMjhwFE1Zw

*Around 3 million children globally are estimated to die each year of hunger. Source: Unicef 2018