COVID-19 �PANdemIC media

By Lee Harding

for the Canadian Covid Care Alliance

February 28, 2024

Lee Harding

• Bachelor of Arts in Journalism, University of Regina, SK 2005
• Master of Public Policy, University of Calgary, 2016

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• Interned as a reporter in 2004 at CBC and CTV, both in Regina
• Casual reporter and cameraman for Global Regina, 2005-6
• Research Fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
• Regular contributor to Western Standard and sometimes Epoch Times

Changing landscape

• Cable TV, then internet squeezed ad revenue for local news
• Anchor: “There used to be a thick wall between sales and news. Now that wall is paper thin. We do so many corporate [favours].”
• Government, crown corps, and unions buy advertising
• Reporters chase media advisories and press releases
• News watchers tend to be older, drug companies buy ads
• Controlled by HQ. 2004 CTV news manager in Regina could not get Toronto to approve a proposed raise of my intern pay from $900 a month to $1000.

Don’t dare defy narrative

• Lawrence Solomon found that many pre-eminent scientists did not believe in aspects of the climate change narrative.
• He had a National Post column, but said in a speech I attended that it was hard to get these scientists media coverage, even though there were people in media organizations on his board.
• “They don’t want to be seen as doing the work of the devil.” This happened again with COVID coverage.

Public relations stifles dissent

“This practice of creating circumstances and of creating pictures in the minds of millions of persons is very common. Virtually no important undertaking is now carried on without it….The important thing is that it is universal and continuous; and in its sum total it is regimenting the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers,” wrote Edward Bernays in his 1928 book Propaganda.

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“So vast are the numbers of minds which can be regimented, and so tenacious are they when regimented, that a group at times offers an irresistible pressure before which legislators, editors, and teachers are helpless. The group will cling to its stereotype.”

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Edward Bernays, Propaganda 1928

“If you can influence the leaders, either with or without their conscious cooperation, you automatically influence the group which they sway…Because man is by nature gregarious he feels himself to be member of a herd…”

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“The group mind does not think…In place of thoughts it has impulses, habits and emotions. In making up its mind its first impulse is usually to follow the example of a trusted leader. This is one of the most firmly established principles of mass psychology.”

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Available at http://www.historyisaweapon.org/defcon1/bernprop.html

Gates, WHO, Abortion vaccines

• In 1972 WHO launched a Special Programme of Research, Development, and Research Training in Human Reproduction.

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• Abortive vaccines, first developed in 1976, turns the immune system of females against their own pregnancy hormone, human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG).

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• There is evidence to suggest they were introduced to women of childbearing years without informed consent in Mexico, Phillipines, and Nigeria.

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COVID-19 narrative

Emotional Levers (fear, duty)

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Authority figures to steer the herd

(doctors, journalists)

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Censorship

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PANdemIC panic

(mass mind where fear trumps thought)

Pop control without religion, politics

• May 5, 2009, Bill Gates called a meeting of billionaires in Manhattan. Gates impressed the need to curb world overpopulation with George Soros, Oprah Winfrey, David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, Ted Turner, Michael Bloomberg, and Eli and Edyth Broad, whose combined wealth was $125 billion.

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• The group “discussed joining forces to overcome political and religious obstacles to change.” An anonymous attendee told the Times Online, “They need to be independent of government agencies,” and did not want to be painted “as an alternative world government.”

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Source Lee Harding, “Gates, WHO, and Abortion Vaccines,” Frontier Centre for Public Policy, July 19, 2020

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Gates vs population growth

• The billionaires agreed to tackle population growth as a threat to industry, society, and the environment. 

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• In a 2010 Ted Talk, Gates warned that too many living people would endanger the earth due to carbon emissions. “The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15%.”

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Source Lee Harding, “Gates, WHO, and Abortion Vaccines,” FCPP, July 19, 2020

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WHO decided the COVID-19 response

• The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gives 9.8% of WHO funds, second only to the US government. The foundation is also a major donor to the GAVI Alliance, a vaccination initiative that is itself the fifth-highest donor to the WHO.

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• Politico called Bill Gates “the world’s most powerful doctor” in 2017.

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Source: Lee Harding “WHO decided the COVID-19 response,

Frontier Centre for Public Policy, May 14, 2021

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World Bank, IMF steer response

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“Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus since 1994, claimed his country was offered $940 million of “Covid Relief Aid” from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) if they agreed to impose masks, lockdowns, quarantines and curfews. Lukashenko refused.”

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Source: Lee Harding “WHO decided the COVID-19 response, Frontier Centre for Public Policy, May 14, 2021

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COVID-19 scenario predicted in 2010

In 2010, the Rockefeller Foundation and Global Business Network co-sponsored “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.” Here, the “Lock Step” scenario envisioned a worldwide pandemic that crippled tourism and supply chains.

“During the pandemic, national leaders around the world flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions, from the mandatory wearing of face masks to body-temperature checks… Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified.”

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Source: Lee Harding, “It’s high time that Canadians flew freely,” Frontier Centre, June 8, 2022

2012 London Olympics Opening Ceremonies

Note: I do not endorse all speculations in this video!

Anthony Fauci, 2017

"There is no question that there will be a challenge to the coming [Trump] administration in the arena of infectious diseases ... both chronic infectious diseases in the sense of already ongoing disease ... but also there will be a surprise outbreak.”

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https://youtu.be/DNXGAxGJgQI

EVENT 201 Anticipated COVID-19

• On October 18, 2019, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, the World Economic Forum and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation held Event 201.

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• As the event’s web page explains, “the scenario illuminated the need for cooperation among industry, national governments, key international institutions, and civil society, to avoid the catastrophic consequences that could arise from a large-scale pandemic.”

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Source: Lee Harding WHO decided the COVID-19 response, Frontier Centre: May 14, 2021

Event 201 “Flooding the zone”

• As 15 leaders played out the coronavirus outbreak scenario, they emphasized “flooding the zone” with their desired message, apparently to drown out all others.

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• “This strategy has since been employed to great effect. Science has become dogma, democracy has become dictatorship and speech has become proscribed,” I wrote.

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Source: Lee Harding WHO decided the COVID-19 response, �Frontier Centre: May 14, 2021

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2019 Trusted News Initiative

• July 2019 the Global Conference for Media Freedom was held in London, England as a joint effort of the UK and Canadian governments.

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• BBC Director-General Tony Hall announced, “Last month I convened, behind closed doors, a Trusted News Summit at the BBC, which brought together global tech platforms and publishers. The goal was to arrive at a practical set of actions we can take together, right now, to tackle the rise of misinformation and bias.”

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• On September 9, 2019, the CBC announced participation in the global “Trusted News Charter.” Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, AFP, Reuters, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, and the European Broadcasting Union also on board.

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Source Former Premier Peckford vs Pandemic Narrative: Big Tech / Media to Blame (Part 3 of 3), Frontier Centre for Public Policy, January 12, 2022 by Lee Harding.

CBC / TNI in pandemic

• March 27, 2020, the CBC announced, “Starting today, partners in the Trusted News Initiative will alert each other to disinformation about coronavirus, including ‘imposter content’ purporting to come from trusted sources. Such content will be reviewed promptly to ensure that disinformation is not republished.”

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• The “trusted sources” were usually heads of governmental medical bodies or the World Health Organization. Contrary views were stifled.

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• MintPress documented 30,000 grants worth $319 million from the Gates Foundation to media outlets. 

Source Former Premier Peckford vs Pandemic Narrative: Big Tech / Media to Blame (Part 3 of 3), Frontier Centre for Public Policy, January 12, 2022 by Lee Harding.

Federal money / influence

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• “And the other thing with the media is in Canada, they got $600 million worth of money from the federal government. When you get money from the government, you’re not going to be as objective as you would be without having that money,” Brian Peckford said.

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• Another federal media grant program was launched in 2018 through Canadian Heritage. More than 160 reporting positions across Canada are sponsored through the Local Journalism Initiative, which will receive a total of $50 million over five years.

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Source Former Premier Peckford vs Pandemic Narrative: Big Tech / Media to Blame (Part 3 of 3), Frontier Centre for Public Policy, January 12, 2022 by Lee Harding.

Source Former Premier Peckford vs Pandemic Narrative: Big Tech / Media to Blame (Part 3 of 3), Frontier Centre for Public Policy, January 12, 2022 by Lee Harding.

LJI vs “anti-vaxxer”

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• Peter Jackson, whose work for The Telegram is sponsored by the, LJI took a shot at Peckford in article reposted in the Toronto Star. 

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• In “The anti-vaxxer is a person in your neighbourhood,” Jackson wrote, “Former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford runs a blog from his home in British Columbia that’s awash in anti-scientific conspiracies and medical misinformation.”

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Source Former Premier Peckford vs Pandemic Narrative: Big Tech / Media to Blame (Part 3 of 3), Frontier Centre for Public Policy, January 12, 2022 by Lee Harding.

LJI in action

• “That’s the normal corner that they go in…They’ll attack you. They don’t want to deal with the evidence that I presented on my blog over and over again for the last year and a half, data from reputable scientists all over the world,” Peckford said.

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• “Government is actually getting so big and so in bed with Big Pharma and [Big] Tech that it’s not even funny.”

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Source Former Premier Peckford vs Pandemic Narrative: Big Tech / Media to Blame (Part 3 of 3), Frontier Centre for Public Policy, January 12, 2022 by Lee Harding.

Email exchange with Jackson

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• Peter Jackson emailed me June 28, 2022, “I notice you didn't bother to reach out to me about this. Lol”

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• I replied, “Hi Peter, yes that is so. Basically I had a long conversation with Peckford and got three articles out of it. You made your assessment and Peckford had what he had to say about it. Anything you'd like to add?”

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• He joked, “Ha! No, That’s fine. Obviously I’d just be parroting the lies of my corporate and government overlords anyway.”

Google defines credibility

• I replied, “Hi Peter, you may come to your convictions sincerely…”

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• Jackson replied, “They’re not my convictions. They’re the convictions of predominantly peer-reviewed, established science. Google ‘Ivermectin’ to discover the utter annihilation of this faux cure that has transpired since I even wrote the article. Do yourself a favour and take a few science courses or talk at length with some real experts. You made zero attempt to question Brian’s conclusions. Or bounce them off any credible sources.”

Late PCR test inventor Kary Mullis

• “The PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody,” the 1993 Nobel Prize winner once said in a public address. “If you can amplify one single molecule up to something you can really measure.…that could be thought of as a misuse of it.”

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• That’s what Canadian labs did and the media reported it.

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Source: Lee Harding, “PCR test is flimsy say inventor and courts,” Frontier Centre for Public Policy, February 27, 2021

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Late PCR test inventor Kary Mullis

• “These guys like Fauci get up and start talking and he doesn’t know anything really about anything and I would say that to his face. Nothing,” Mullis said prior to his death August 7, 2019.

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• “Those guys have got an agenda which is not what we would like them to have, being that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way. They have a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go; they change them when they want to.…Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.”

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Source: Lee Harding, “PCR test is flimsy say inventor and courts,” Frontier Centre for Public Policy, February 27, 2021

Media rolled out daily case counts based on miscalibrated PCR tests

“The CDC recommends 28 cycles if people have received the vaccine because they believe at that level of viral load people will not transmit the virus if they have been vaccinated. Their recommended level for those who have not been vaccinated is higher for reasons that I do not think make sense,” said Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya.

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Source: Lee Harding, “Dr J opposes lockdowns, teenage COVID vaccinations, misused PCR tests” Western Standard, May 23, 2021.

Canadian labs ran PCR tests too high

• In a constitutional challenge against Manitoba lockdowns, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) cross-examined Dr. Jared Bullard, Chief Microbiologist and Lab Specialist at the Cadham Provincial Laboratory in Winnipeg.

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• According to a JCCF press release, Bullard said the most accurate way to determine if a person was infectious was to try to grow a cell culture from a patient sample. If the cell culture could not grow, the person was probably not infectious.

Source: Lee Harding, “Dr J opposes lockdowns, teenage COVID vaccinations, misused PCR tests” Western Standard, May 23, 2021.

PCR lab tests used too many cycles

• Bullard’s own studies showed that among those tested COVID-19-positive from a PCR test run at 18 cycles, only 44% could actually have a cell culture grown in a lab, leaving 56% non-infectious.

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• Not once could Bullard’s team grow a cell culture when more than 25 cycles were required to get a positive result.

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• A study published in the Journal of Clinical Virology in June 2020 found that Canadian labs used 30-45 cycles for SARS-CoV-2 (Covid-19) PCR tests. Bullard’s own lab used 36.5.

Source: Lee Harding, “Dr J opposes lockdowns, teenage COVID vaccinations, misused PCR tests” Western Standard, May 23, 2021.

Rampant COVID-19 adverse rx

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• I found a website that was compiling screenshots from social media and newspaper reports of vaccine injury cases. I read them for three hours on a live stream on YouTube and still didn’t get through them all. The video was removed by YouTube, dismissed as false information.

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• Less skewed search engines like DuckDuckGo were the only chance people had of even handed access to doctors who defied the narrative.

Opposing the vax in IG comments

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Unacceptable sources

• In March 2021, I submitted an article to on the vaccine entitled “Cause for pause.” Editors expressed concerns with the rushed and limited testing process, the experimental nature of mRNA vaccines, and early accounts of adverse reactions.

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• After a delay I asked why the article hadn’t run. I was given a list of criticisms compiled from three independent editors, some of which follow.

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Unacceptable: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“This piece has a lot of dubious references in it and is certainly not going to contribute to _________ credibility,” the editors wrote.

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“The Children's Health Defense website, childrenshealthdefense.org is an anti-vaxxer site; therefore, its supposedly scientific information can't be trusted. It features a large pic of Robert Kennedy, Jr on its home page and he is a vociferous anti-vaxxer.”

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Unacceptable: RT.com

I quoted author Malcolm Kendrick who talked about problems with the methodology of mRNA vaccines. He had a regular column in The Guardian in the UK, but a column he wrote about the vaccine could only be found in RT.com. That source wasn’t acceptable.

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Editors: “Russia Today has been spreading fake news about Covid and in general is well-known as a Kremlin propaganda and disinformation tool.”

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Unacceptable: Michael Yeadon

My article said, “Doctors Wolfgang Wodarg and Michael Yeadon filed a motion with the European Medicines Agency to halt the approval of Pfizer’s vaccine. The doctors warned that COVID-19’s spike proteins contain a homologous form of syncytin-1. This natural protein helps placenta development in all mammals, including people, so an immune response triggered against it could cause miscarriages, birth defects, and infertility. Also, polyethylene glycol in the vaccine could lessen its efficacy and cause allergic reactions or deadly adverse events.”

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Editors said, “Michael Yeadon is also an outspoken anti-vaxxer and the link to him is just a web.archive.org URL.”

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Vax Injuries: a story that can now be told

“If I were to call Global News right now, they’d take an interview, but I tried talking to them 20 months ago, and they said that even though I had all these doctors behind me, until the government said, ‘Yep,’ they all said, No, we can't talk about anything negative when it comes to [the vaccine],” said Carrie Sakamoto.

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Source: Lee Harding, “Alberta woman's COVID-19 vax injury vindicated by federal compensation,” Western Standard: March 12, 2023

Liberal MP: CBC Fear Mongering

“You have, to a certain extent, the Ottawa bubble mentality and that can be part of the problem. Same as the Washington, D.C., mentality — it’s two different worlds. I say both [are] a bubble in which reality or common sense doesn’t exist,” said Liberal MP Wayne Easter.

“We’ve done a pretty good job of creating fear on the Canadian side,” he said in May 2021, adding the goal was to keep people staying home.

“If you were ever to watch [the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation] for a 16-hour period, you’d be depressed.”

Source: Western Standard, Politico

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Source: https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/harding-how-i-was-fined-2-800-for-reporting-on-regina-s-freedom-rally/article_8ded0ef1-147c-505f-bcb3-0f73600d36b2.html

Rodney Palmer, former CBC journalist

• April 4, 2020, Adrienne Arsenault brought on a guest to discuss how someone should respond if someone, perhaps their father, tells them that COVID started in a Chinese lab.
• Palmer called this “propaganda, persuasive mass communication that filters and frames the issues of the day in a way that strongly favours particular interests, usually those of a government or corporation, also the intentional manipulation of public opinion through lies and half-truths and the selective retelling of history.”
• Oct. 27, 2021, Palmer wrote Paul Hambleton, CBC Head of Journalistic Standards, to ask what the network’s mandate and process was to correct “misinformation’.
• “Now, he did reply to me, but he didn’t answer any of those questions,” Palmer explained.
• He also criticized a CBC interview with an MP regarding unvaccinated MPs.

https://www.westernstandard.news/news/ex-cbc-journalist-testifies-broadcaster-did-propaganda-not-newsgathering/article_ec81c9dc-d481-11ed-ac8e-93c1d6a543ce.html

Jean-Philippe Chabot, CBC

• Worked in Radio-Canada's TOU.TV, the French equivalent of CBC Gem.
• Told NCI in June or July 2021, Radio-Canada posted on the internal employee website a statement to say that the vaccination was a personal choice, and they couldn't impose it unless a law was requiring it.
• On October 1, Chabot and other employees received a form saying they needed to disclose their vaccination status. Nearly all exemptions were refused.
• He said federal directive only applied to central admin and RCMP
• “I just asked them very simply [at CBC] which directive is that? Can you tell me where it says … that applies to our corporations? And they basically shut the door to any further discussion when I mentioned that.”

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https://www.westernstandard.news/news/ex-cbc-employee-denounces-network-s-vaccine-mandate/article_4d41e3e4-f64f-11ed-b4d7-0b60a3a2a46f.html

Marianne Klowak,

CBC Manitoba

• -Told NCI many pandemic-related story ideas turned down by editors, such as protests against vaccine mandates, concerns with adverse vaccine reactions, and problems doctors faced reporting vax injuries.
• “As a public broadcaster, you’d expect us to be telling you the truth, and we stopped doing that,” said Klowak.
• “It seemed to me as a journalist who’d been there 34 years, it’s like the rules had changed overnight. And it changed so quickly that it left me just dizzy.”
• “I had witnessed in a very short time the collapse of journalism, news gathering, investigative reporting — and the way I saw it is that we were in fact pushing propaganda.”
• “Not only had we shut down one side by silencing and discrediting anyone opposing the narrative, we elevated and designated ourselves as gatekeepers of the truth. We no longer believed our audience was capable of thinking for themselves.”

�https://www.westernstandard.news/news/ex-cbc-journalist-told-nci-network-pushed-pandemic-propaganda/article_b2fe0280-f67c-11ed-a644-33f7b3497be9.html

Anita Krishna, Global TV

• -Control room director in Burnaby, BC
• “Panic, fear, like just trying to scare everybody when … I could see that nothing was really happening yet,”
• “There were things that we were not reporting. So you can easily find these things on the internet … but for some reason our own newscast, we're neglecting to tell people,” (Wuhan lab leak)
• Krishna said she “was raising concerns left, right and centre about absolutely everything”
• “I said I thought this was a synthetic virus. In the newsroom, that did not go over well. People just ended up getting mad… And [another issue] I raised was why we were not telling people about medications that could possibly help.”
• Krishna’s cousin recovered from with COVID-19 using HCQ for a different chronic condition and believed it helped.
• “I told this to an anchor at work… And he just said, ‘Oh, she thinks she got better.’ Like, he got mad about it. But why would you get mad? Shouldn’t your answer be, … Maybe that’s something we should be doing a story on’?”

https://www.westernstandard.news/news/fired-global-news-employee-testified-covid-coverage-was-selective-and-slanted/article_a7d57594-f68d-11ed-b4b7-4b4d4849f3c1.html

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U.S. House investigation reveals security state behind pandemic censorship

https://www.westernstandard.news/international/house-investigation-reveals-security-state-behind-pandemic-censorship/50166

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More from the author

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• COVID-19 archive https://sites.google.com/view/lee-hardings-covid-19-page/home

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• Telegram: https://t.me/leehardingsk

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• Substack: https://leeharding.substack.com/

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• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leehardingwrites

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“Canada history thesis” layout courtesy of SlidesGo.