Covid-19: the media, victims of state disinformation?
"It is an affair that is shaking the German political class. An investigation by the German newspaper Die Welt reveals how the Interior Ministry used alarmist messages and figures in its Covid communication in order to frighten people and manufacture support for lockdown measures."
"What is going on across the Rhine? The German newspaper Die Welt, one of the country's three leading newspapers, revealed in last Sunday's edition how, as early as March 2020, the German Interior Ministry worked on scenarios aimed at artificially increasing the population's fear of the virus. In this way, Berlin sought to create support for drastic measures. This "state lie", on the front pages of the German press for several days and picked up by the European press, has so far been very little reported in France, except by France Soir."
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"The 200 e-mail exchanges analysed by Die Welt, obtained after several months of litigation with the Robert Koch Institute, the RKI, the government agency for disease control and prevention, in particular responsible for coordinating the fight against the virus. The techniques considered bear witness to the researchers' inventiveness. Playing with mortality rates, using images of people dying of suffocation... The political objective of these messages? To generate fear and docility among the population. "The strong sense of powerlessness must be contained. This can be done by spreading the impression of strong state intervention," explains one of the e-mails. The figures were therefore to be presented in the "least favourable" way."
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"While Die Welt's investigation is causing a scandal in Germany, at the same time in Belgium a documentary film is stirring controversy. “Ceci n’est pas un complot” by journalist Bernard Crutzen, online since early February 2021, sets out to decode how the media tell the Covid story. This documentary, instructive in many respects, contains a staggering sequence: a talk on pandemic management given in January 2019 by the Belgian virologist Marc van Ranst at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, also known as Chatham House, one of the most influential British think tanks. [...]"
"What does Dr van Ranst say in this 2019 video caught on the spot? His recipes for manipulating the media: “To attract media attention, you make a deal with them,” he explains. “You will tell them everything, and if they call you, you will pick up your phone. By doing that, you can use the first few days to achieve maximum coverage; they are not going to look for alternative voices. If you do that, it will be much easier.”"
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"These strategies of influence in the service of power, I know them well. Ever since the Chernobyl cloud in 1986 and the denial, at the highest level of the state, of the reality of radioactive contamination in France, I have never stopped fighting state lies. This time, as the investigations carried out in Germany and Belgium show us, it is no longer about being reassuring or denying the risk. Fear must be sown."
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"It is by breaking free from state lies, naively peddled and repeated all day long by the media and the rolling news channels, that we will be able to detoxify ourselves from this unanimous but excessive fear. Coming to our senses, escaping paralysing fear and the strategy of emotion are now democratic imperatives if we want to be able to take rational and reasonable decisions. The fairest decisions."
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Read the full article here:
https://blogs.mediapart.fr
The opinions expressed in this article are solely the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BAM!
Photo source:
https://www.qwant.com
Quotations from English-language sources are translated back here from the French.
