Who is building the Covid doxa?

"In democracies, most social issues are the subject of more or less intense and more or less polemical public debates in which opposing views are expressed. Yet, although it monopolises commentary in the media, the “health crisis” opened up by the coronavirus epidemic at the beginning of 2020 is characterised by an unprecedented closing-off of public debate, an absence of genuine debate between opposing views, and phenomena of censorship and ostracism that are, to say the least, unusual. In France, everything is happening as if the government’s discourse could not tolerate any major contradiction, with anyone who ventures to voice such contradictions being relegated to stigmatising categories, the main one being “conspiracy theory” (1). A particularly astonishing thing: while journalists should be the primary organisers of such debates, many have instead turned out to have become a kind of thought police, hunting down alternatives in order to cast them out of the legitimate space of discussion. As for the Internet and social networks, initially supposed to represent an advance in the democracy of expression (2), they now fully accompany this movement of closure and daily illustrate new forms of censorship.
How can such a situation be understood?"

"In Manufacturing Consent. The Political Economy of the Mass Media, published in 1988, Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman explain how the main media (radio, television and the print press) now actively participate in the propaganda of the political and economic elites on which they have become very largely dependent (3). The authors’ demonstration is based mainly on an analysis of media coverage of domestic protest movements and of the wars waged by the United States during the second half of the 20th century. They show the growing dependence of journalists on government sources that make their work easier (press releases, dispatches, documentary files, etc.) and their inability to undertake genuine investigations, which are always long and costly. They also stress that the media have gradually lost their financial independence. On the one hand, many now belong to large industrial groups and/or billionaires, or only survive thanks to the advertising these groups pay them for. On the other hand, they receive substantial government subsidies. In this double dependence, the media have lost all capacity to represent a “fourth estate”. On the contrary, they are structurally under the influence of the economic and political powers whose worldview and interests they in fact relay."

"This process of concentration is such that ten companies control 90% of the print press, 55% of television audience share and 40% of radio audience share (6). On the other side, in addition to maintaining a set of public audiovisual media (Radio France and France Télévision), the State also funds press companies, which are thus dependent on it. In 2017 (latest available data), the Ministry of Culture published these amounts of direct aid to the press: 8.3 million euros for Aujourd’hui en France, between 5 and 6 million for Libération, Le Figaro and Le Monde, between 4 and 5 million for La Croix, Ouest-France and L’Humanité, and between 1 and 2 million for some ten regional daily titles as well as for Le Parisien and the Journal du Dimanche (7).”
"Finally, it should be noted that the press has been a major beneficiary of the State’s exceptional aid linked to the current crisis, with nearly half a billion euros announced in the recovery plan in August 2020 (9)."

"All these data outline a web of relationships and links of interest between
the economic world (the owners of the media), the political world (their subsidiser) and
the editorial management of the media. Many journalists have, moreover, described these links from the inside (10). But to this is now added the entry into play of the digital multinationals, in particular Google and Facebook."

"Under threat of a heavy tax reassessment in 2012, Google came up with the idea the following year of creating a “fund to support the development of the print press” in France, in order to “support quality journalism through technology and innovation”. Thus, in 2019, 21 French media outlets received subsidies amounting to 6.4 million euros. Large numbers of infographics and “big data” analyses then blossomed on the websites of the main media, as well as “fact check” sections, hunts for “fake news” and “conspiracy” sites (11). One of the best-known achievements in France is the “Decodex” of the newspaper Le Monde, which claims to establish a reliability ranking of all news websites."

"The fight against terrorist propaganda and far-right “hateful content” has been at the heart of the development of numerous censorship techniques developed by these Internet giants in collaboration with States. Then it gradually extended to other forms of censorship of more political content, to the point of exercising a veritable thought police: “the major web platforms, because of their oligopolistic position in the information market, exercise this power at three distinct levels. By making tools for speaking out available, they constrain speech at the same time as they make it possible, by imposing a format on it. Their algorithms, next, order these disparate utterances by distributing the visibility they need to reach their audience.
Finally, their moderation systems, which combine automatic detection and human supervision, perform police functions by defining what can or cannot be said, and by punishing speech (or images) that contravene the rules” (20)."

"The health crisis opened up by the Sars-CoV-2 epidemic will have been the occasion for a historically unprecedented attempt to control information on a global scale, all the more important to understand since this epidemic has received media coverage unprecedented in history (30). In this article, we have reviewed the components of this international process of editorial normalisation aimed at ensuring what Bourdieu called “the monopoly of legitimate information” (31). This control system is intended to ensure media predominance, and behind it
the consent of populations, with regard to the content of a general message that could be summarised as follows: 1) a pandemic threatens the survival of all humanity, 2) there is no therapy to cure the sick, 3) populations must be locked down, 4) deliverance will come only from a vaccine."

"For the sociodicy to work, it is therefore crucial to control information. In this article, we have argued the hypothesis that four sets of actors in fact have converging interests in organising this control and ensuring the success of the message they have chosen to convey. The first is represented by the now inseparable tandem formed by the WHO and its new major funder, the Bill Gates Foundation, whose global vaccination programme constitutes the cornerstone of health thinking. The second set is made up of most Western liberal-type governments, which have been unable to conceive of any strategy other than general lockdown, which now fear the electoral and legal consequences of their management of the health crisis and therefore want to make sure that their version of history will not be fundamentally called into question. The third set of actors is made up of the traditional media, which are increasingly faced with a major crisis of confidence among the population (35), and for whom control and, if possible, exclusivity in disseminating legitimate information about the health crisis is almost a question of survival. Finally, the fourth type of actor is the “digital giants”, which nowadays control not only social networks but also, and increasingly, the traditional media, and which are taking advantage of the health crisis to further increase their hold on digital life (36), as well as their advertising profits (37)."

Read the full article here:
https://blogs.mediapart.fr

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of BAM!

Photo source:
https://www.qwant.com