 living in Vermont, who are with us tonight as well. And this is an event sponsored by the Vermont Institute of Community and International Involvement. And we are here tonight to discuss what's been called fake news. There's a lot of talk about fake news, both from the left and on the right as well. Everything seems to be in question about what the media has been presenting, both from a left point of view and from a right point of view. This tonight to discuss this very important topic is Rob Williams, a professor at Champlain College, who has done media studies for years, including, I believe he did, media studies at Burlington College when I was there as well. He is also a PhD from the University of New Mexico. He publishes also on the internet magazine called the Vermont Independence. He is an old friend of mine and a very loyal colleague. He has a lot to say about this subject, so I'm going to turn this over at this point to Professor Williams. So take it away, Rob. Well, thanks, Andy, and thanks to the GICI for having me. It's great to see so many of you on the call. Hello, hello. Fantastic. Jenna, can you give me the host helm so I can throw some slides up on the screen? I believe you've got it. Oh, I didn't see it come in. You're right. So I do love it. Thank you. Jenna, you're way ahead of me. Fantastic. A show of hands. Can everybody see those slides? Okay. Excellent. Well, let's jump right in. I was invited here tonight to talk about the propaganda model of news, which is a conceptual framework pioneered by Noam Chomsky, still with us, and Edward Herman, who left us just a couple of years ago, two of the more brilliant media scholars, I think, of the last half century here in the United States. I should say first, though, that as a Vermonter and a citizen and a proud member of the species known as hashtag team human, I'm a big fan of team human, you should know that you may hear some things tonight that you may disagree with, and that's okay. Because last time I checked, we lived in a democracy where the free and unfettered exchange of ideas and information is to be celebrated. I'm also a big proponent, you should know, of a couple of things. I don't belong to any political party. I am fairly heterodox and eclectic in my thinking, but I am a big proponent of health choice. I am a big proponent of what's called informed consent, which comes out of the Nuremberg Code of the late 1940s. I am a big fan of medical freedom, and I do believe, as I think every doctor who's ever been interviewed believes, in what's called natural immunity. So I want to lay all my cards on the table right away. So you have a bit of an understanding about where I'm coming from as we talk about the propaganda model of news. Perhaps we tease just a little bit, as we talk together here, we tease a little bit of the COVID situation, which I keep thinking is ending, but it doesn't seem to be. So we will focus on the propaganda model of news tonight with perhaps the COVID situation as a bit of a case study. I have built in some time into the flow of our conversation for Q&A at various points. So I would encourage all of you to write down any questions and good ideas that you have and we'll pause as we move through this and have a chance to talk together. And again, I'm so appreciative of Sandy and Jenna and the opportunity to have this conversation. So I did write a little book a few years back called The Post-Truth World, Fighting Fake News with a 21st Century Propaganda Model for Our Digital Age. And I'm happy to send along a free copy of that book to anybody who wants one at the end of this presentation. If what you hear tonight peaks your interest, just let me know. And what I'm talking about tonight is based on courses that I have taught here, there, and everywhere over the past several years as well, fake news and real journalism. So Mark Twain liked to say, if you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed, but if you do read the newspaper, you're misinformed. And it's always fun to ponder, is it better to be uninformed or misinformed? It's not an easy question to answer. Walter Lippmann said, misleading news is worse than none at all. And A. J. Liebling famously said, freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. So as we think about fake news and real journalism, it's important to keep those observations in mind. I'm a big fan of breathing, of breathwork. So I'm going to ask all of you just as we settle in to take your right hand, wave it in the air. Let's see everybody wave. Excellent. And then place your right hand on your belly. This is your belly. So place your right hand on your belly and place your left hand on your chest. I'm just moving my screen here. And I'd invite all of you just to close your eyes with me here just for a few breaths. And let's come into the space. It's probably been kind of a hectic day for everybody. It's Tuesday. We just had a foot of snow here in Vermont. It's kind of a strange time for team human. So just take a few nice gentle breaths. Let's begin in through the nose, feeling the belly push out on the right hand. And out through the nose, the belly comes in. And in through the nose, belly pushes out. And out through the nose, belly comes in. And last one in through the nose, three, two, one. And out through the nose, belly comes in, four, two, one. And just ride that exhale down as far as you feel like going. And when you get to the bottom, just drop your hands into your lap. Maybe loosen the shoulders a little bit. Come back to the room. If you haven't read James Nestor's beautiful book, Breath, The New Signs of a Lost Art, I can't recommend it highly enough. All right, so now that we breathe together, and we're going to admit Barb into the conversation. Hi, Barb. Welcome. Let's jump right in. So the newest book I'm working on is a book called COVIDtopia, 10 truths about viral tyranny, health, freedom, and human destiny in an age of planetary techno fascism. That's the mouthful. But I'm going to sort of reference some of the research that we've been doing, a team of us around the world, on the intersection between COVID and the news cycle, if you will. So three questions for us to think about. How do you define news, quote, unquote? How do you consume news, quote, unquote? And perhaps you have a burning question regarding news, quote, unquote. And I'm putting the word news in quotations here, of course, because the definition of news is fraught, as so many definitions are. So perhaps ponder those questions as we jump in. I should also say that I have taught and worked with an educational framework for 30 years now called critical media literacy education. And I know we have a number of people here on the zoom call who are well versed in media literacy. And if we were to define media literacy in five words with a hashtag, it would be hashtag oh, Yomi. Oh, Yomi, which is to say own your own media experience rather than letting your media experience own you. Own your own media experience. If we had to define media literacy in four action verbs, it would be teaching us how to access, analyze, evaluate, and produce media. I think this is important. Three overarching arenas, media literacy could be understood as deepening our knowledge, our skills, and our activism around media and stories. We are humans storytelling creatures. We live and die by stories, quite literally. If we had to define media literacy in two words and two concepts, it would be this idea of trade offs. Whenever we have a media experience, we're reading the New York Times, we're listening to the national public radios, we're watching Fox, whatever we may be doing. Good things happen and bad things happen. And to understand the trade offs, the goods and the bads is important. The other two word concept is this idea of socratic dialogue that the most important thing that we could be doing as thoughtful humans and engaged citizens is asking questions of one another. Something that hasn't happened nearly enough, I think, in this COVID situation, by the way. If we have to define media literacy in a single word, there are three. Number one, let's be skeptical rather than cynical. Skeptical rather than cynical. A cynic lies on the couch and binges on the latest Netflix reruns because he or she is convinced they cannot make a difference in the world. But a skeptic gets off the couch and asks the questions and moves out into the world to engage the world. That's the difference in my mind between a cynic and a skeptic. We're also talking about power and about choice. One of the beautiful things about being human and perhaps the tragic, one of the tragic things about being homo sapiens, being human is that we are always engaged in the process of making choices about how we live our lives individually and collectively. The choices that we make, of course, shape the power that we have or do not have over our minds, over our bodies, over our spirits, again, individually and collectively. That's a nice overview, I think, of critical media literacy education, which is what I bring to bear in studying the propaganda model of news, fake news, and real journalism. Let's begin with a definition of real news. Before we talk about fake news, whatever that may be, real news, as I understand it, is defined with six ingredients. News, first of all, is storied information. It's information that's encoded in stories. And again, we humans are powerful storytelling creatures. You may be familiar with Yuval Noah Harari, the Israeli historian, his well-acclaimed global bestseller sapiens. How many have read sapiens? Anybody? No, it's worth reading. But Professor Harari in sapiens suggests that the reason why we humans are the world's most successful species is because we have figured out how to collaborate flexibly in large groups around shared stories. So stories are central to the human condition and certainly central to understanding news information propaganda. So here's six ingredients that make up real news. And again, we can push on these a little bit, but maybe they're helpful. A real news story is a story that is recent, which is to say it's in play in the larger culture. Number two, a real news story is relevant, which is to say it's news we can use. And of course, each of us will probably have our own definition of news we can use. Some of you may be fans of the Kardashians, one of the most sort of phenomenal newsworthy families of the past 10 years. I'm not such a fan, but I know many who are. So for some, the Kardashians constitute news we can use for others. They couldn't care less, right? But news stories, real news stories are relevant to us. Number three, real news stories are reliable. Here's where it gets interesting, which is to say real news stories are sourced from varied places with multiple points of view, and they are transparently cited. So we know where the information is coming from, and we can verify it if we so choose. So reliability is an important ingredient of real news. None of this anonymous sources claimed, if you know what I mean. Number four, real news is historically grounded. There's a little bit of historical context to a real news story. History does matter. The record of human experience. Number five, as we like to say in grad school, real news is hegemonically hip, which is to say at foregrounds power relations. We humans are engaged in the business of hierarchical power sharing, and that is a complicated exercise. So any real news story ought to foreground power relations in some way. And finally, number six, as my Chinese friends like to say, in China, the favored word of the People's Republic of China is the word harmony. You perhaps have heard that if you've traveled in China or talked with citizens of the People's Republic of China. Real news stories ought to be harmoniously voiced, which is to say they contain multiple points of view. And this is a very interesting one to consider. Because we have been presented over the past two years with what we might call an official COVID narrative or a dominant COVID narrative. And the idea of sort of entertaining multiple points of view as we've navigated our way through this thing has been somewhat anathema, verboten, as the Germans like to say. And that I think has created some interesting challenges for us as team human. So before we pause and open it up for a little bit of dialogue, here's some advice I've cultivated from just talking with all kinds of smart people around the world, including my students, about how not to consume US news. Now that we have a definition of real news with six ingredients, here are five suggestions. Do not fall in love with a favorite news personality. It's really important to practice skepticism. So if you're a Tucker fan, or if you're a Rachel Maddow fan, it's best to divorce yourself from the love affair if you know what I mean. Don't fall in love with the news personality. Number two, do not trust quote unquote a single news program. Look at the word program for a moment. Do not trust a single news program. Way better to think for yourself and whenever possible go to primary sources rather than letting Tucker or Rachel serve it up for you, if you know what I mean, or the New York Times for that matter. We'll have a lot more to say about the New York Times here in a minute. Number three, do not habituate yourself to a single news channel. So many of us consume news habitually. We get in the car, NPR is on. Okay, I'll listen to NPR or WDEV for those of you Vermonters who are familiar, right? Or the New York Times falls onto our doorstep or into our computer every morning, let's say. So we very quickly habituate ourselves to a few sources of news, way better to graze, way better to graze, especially to graze in fields with which we think we are at odds with. So if you fancy yourself a progressive or a liberal, it might be good to check in with Breitbart or Tucker on Fox from time to time. And if you fancy yourself a conservative, might be good to see what Amy Goodman's up to over there at Democracy Now, from time to time. In other words, expand your understandings of what constitutes news as painful as that may be. I think it's important. Oh, Jane's here, good. Welcome, Jane. Hope you can hear us okay. Number four, do not allow a giant transnational corporation to curate your news. Really, really important, especially via an application, an app. It's amazing to me how many people now source their news from a single app on their phone owned by Apple or Google. That seems like to me like a recipe for disaster. But it happens with more and more frequency. So again, graze and don't let the app define what is newsworthy for you. And finally, my advice is do not consume news daily. In fact, distance yourself, distance yourself from the news landscape. My dear neighbor, Bill McKibbin, some of you, I'm sure, are familiar with Bill, he and I agree. We don't agree on everything. But we do agree that it might be important to maybe consume news much less frequently than we think we should. You know, maybe once a week is enough to consume news just to kind of keep an eye on things. Finger on the pulse, if you will, right? In the age of constant news and the 24-hour news cycle seven days a week, establish a little bit of distance. Breathwork helps, by the way. So let's, before we jump in here, yes, let's pause for a minute before we jump into the propaganda model of news. Any deep thoughts or questions coming to mind? And let me stop sharing the screen here. I don't see anything in the chat. Could I ask a question? Yes, please, Andy. When you say that the Chinese model is to produce harmony in the end, because that seems to me not terribly healthy and objective. I mean, harmony, I don't think should be the objective of the news, is to create the agreement to disagree as well and to disagree in peace. Yes, I love that. Yes, and I agree with you. So I use the word harmony in my ingredients definition of news to suggest we need multiple points of view on a single news source. And I confused the, I muddied the waters by referencing the Chinese government's constant use of the word harmony. Yes, to smooth over those different points of view. Yeah. So you're right. We don't want to adopt the Chinese government's version of harmony. We want harmony that presents us with multiple points of view. Well, in other words, the agreement to disagree and not beat each other up. Yes. And this has always been a hallmark of a small d democratic civilization is our capacity to hold disagreements and debates as a healthy and necessary function of democracy. Yeah, really important distinction. Thank you for that. Yeah. Other, thank you. Other questions, good ideas, thoughts? I see the wheels are turning. That's good. All right. So let's jump into the propaganda model. I'll reshare the screen here. Everybody see that? Okay. So Robin, thank you for sending to me yesterday that short video of the propaganda model. I don't love that video, I will say. It's a little bit, there's a couple of things about it that I think are a little bit off based on Chomsky and Herman's work. It's not bad. But and as I mentioned to your other question, I'm happy to share the book once we once we get going here. So some of you, I'm curious, just by show of hands or emojis, how many of you have read the 1988 Chomsky-Herman book, Manufacturing Consent, the Political Economy of the Mass Media? Oh, good. So I see Renee, I see Robin, I see Sandy. Excellent. Yeah. So it's probably the most underappreciated book ever written about news and information in the United States. And to be clear, I'm not endorsing the propaganda model. I do, however, find it a useful framework, one useful framework for making sense of why we get the news that we do and why we don't get the news that we don't get. So if you're unfamiliar, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky teamed up in the mid 1980s to conduct a multi-year case study of everybody's favorite daily newspaper, The New York Times. And after running The New York Times through their research algorithms, they were analog at the time, not digital. They put together this book, Manufacturing Consent. And I think it's probably the most sophisticated critique of the US news as an industry ever produced. It is still in print. And I was asked just a few years ago to update the propaganda model of news for the 21st century's digital age by my colleagues at the Project Censored program in California. So I work with them to do that. And then we put that, we put that in the book. So this is a copy of the second edition here, Manufacturing Consent. And to be clear, what Chomsky and Herman are up to here is what we call a structural or a content analysis of The New York Times. They took a really good hard look at how The New York Times covered stories, news stories, both domestic and foreign, and then drew some structural content driven conclusions from their research into The New York Times. This is, of course, the cover of the Times from just a couple of months ago. So we want to distinguish their structural content analysis from other approaches to making sense of the news, like looking at historical case studies. This is a brand new book just dropped, excuse me, just about two months ago, written by Ashley Rinsberg. It's called The Grey Lady Winked. And if you're not familiar, The Grey Lady, of course, is one of the many nicknames for The New York Times, The Old Grey Lady, The Grey Lady Winked. How The New York Times misreporting distortions and fabrications radically alter history. And the forward to the book is written by a dear friend of mine and colleague. He teaches at New York University, Mark Crispin Miller, who has probably forgotten more about propaganda and news than most of us will ever know. And this is a really important book and I couldn't put it down. I spent a whole weekend immersed in this book. And you should know too that Ashley Rinsberg tends towards the politically conservative end of the spectrum. So for those of you who fancy yourself, progressives and liberals, even more reason to read his book because he provides an interesting, both political, ideological, and case study analysis of The New York Times. And he actually ends the book with a chapter about the 1619 project, which has been much in the news the past couple of years. And if you're not familiar, The New York Times essentially stepped out of its objective journalistic role to take a front seat in promoting what came to be called the 1619 project. In fact, you can see here in the slide, they put the 1619 project on the cover of one of their Sunday New York Times magazines not too long ago. So the propaganda model news is a structural content analysis. Ashley's book is much more of a case study analysis and I commend it to you. So back to the propaganda models. So there we have at the bottom here, we have Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky as young men, and then we have Ed Herman, now deceased, and Noam Chomsky as much older and wiser individuals. And what Chomsky and Herman argued in manufacturing consent is what they called in this conceptual framework, the US news industry as an industry, in the same way that the automobile industry manufactures cars on an assembly line, the US news as an industry manufactures stories or public consumption news stories. And Chomsky and Herman argued that this news industry is best understood as a guided market system. So you get leaders within the government, the corporate community, top media owners and executives, etc., who all sort of agree through sort of a consensual series of processes to publish particular stories that see the light of day and avoid downplay outright sense or other news stories that maybe aren't quite as important or of interest in this guided market system. So I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of neoliberalism, which many suggest is the dominant economic system in the United States, at least for the past 50 years, characterized by six action verbs, or privatizing, digitizing, corporatizing, financializing, meaning turning into sort of fungible Wall Street products, militarizing and globalizing as many economic activities as we can. And the production of news in the United States and increasingly globally falls within the bailiwick of this economic phenomenon called neoliberalism. And this is sort of where Chomsky and Herman operate from an economic perspective. A little aside, I think it's always fun to point out that news, the word news is often paired with the word shows, news shows, or the word programming or programs. And we might think about the word shows and the word programs and the implications of those words shows being a performance programs being a way to inculcate particular values or ideological frameworks into people's minds and bodies often unknowingly programming, if you will. So what's interesting about the propaganda model of news with regard to the COVID is sort of the actions of four other players in the news landscape. We start with, of course, big media, a phrase that will be familiar to Renee and others here who have tracked the media reform conversation for many years. And then we move to the role of big tech, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, etc. I like to affectionately call these guys the lords of the cloud. So how big tech has sort of played a role in shaping our news the past many years, particularly around the COVID. The third actor here in the news landscape is the role of the pharmaceutical industry in shaping the news, again, particularly around COVID. And finally, what we might call the role of US and global public health, I'm putting that phrase in public health actors, like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, for example, and we'll come back to them in a minute. So we think about the propaganda model news, we think about this guided market system, we think about the economic framework of neoliberalism, which is seeking to privatize, digitize, financialize, and commodify all forms of human existence. I'm channeling my inner Marxist here. So let's pause here for a moment before we get into the nuts and bolts of the propaganda model. What's coming up for you at this point? I think there seems to be a question in the chat, Rob, I don't know. Oh, yes, let me share the screen and let's look at the question in the chat. Thank you, Sandy. There is also a movie, the movie was really good too. Oh, yes, Jane, are you referring to the Manufacturing Consent Movie? I'm guessing. It might be muted. She might be. Yeah, that is a really good movie. It's a documentary film featuring Noam Chomsky himself. Yeah, and there's a lot, there's a lot of really interesting moments in that film. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, really good. If there's not another question, I do have one, but I would prefer other people. Yeah, and feel free to throw your thoughts in the chat as well. Sandy, go ahead. So are you suggesting then that this big corporate media, health, big pharma have actually made agreements as to what stories get out? Or are those agreements just understandings? Yeah, that's the question. So I think it's a lot of both. And I think we're still trying to figure out exactly how these consensual relationships, let's say, play out. But we're going to touch on that in a number of different ways here as we move forward. But I love the question. So back to the filters. So the third filter that Chomsky and Herman put out there is what they call the news maker filter. In a 24 hour a day, seven day a week news cycle, you've got to constantly fill what they call the news hole. So any one or anything that will fill the news hole with attractive likable content or dislikeable content, as the case may be, wins. That could be Donald Jay Trump. That could be Grotta, right? I put them both here because I think they're both fine examples of how the news maker filter works. Grotta rearranging her sock drawer or Donald rearranging his shoe drawer may qualify for news in a 24 seven news cycle where we need news makers to show up and do something of interest all the time. Anthony Fauci, of course, Dr. Fauci, perhaps the preeminent news maker of the COVID two years. I think if you were to tally up all the hours devoted to what came out of this man's mouth, I think he would win. And I just want to put in a plug for Bobby Kennedy's book, the real Anthony Fauci, a scholarly tour de force with 2,200 footnotes on every single bestseller list, and a book that's hard to find in Vermont because apparently Vermonters don't care about such things, I'm told, from my conversations with my friends who own independent bookstores, which I find curious. But we'll come back to that. Number four news shapers, what Chomsky and Herman laid out in the propaganda model is the idea that news is shaped behind the scenes by four different players. Number one, public relations firms, PR, and as the old saying goes, the best public relations is invisible. So public relations companies are literally in the business of manufacturing public relations and then passing it into the news cycle disguised as news. And they do this quite well. And I know many people on this list are familiar. Number two, new shaping organization, think tanks of every description that are in the business of generating white papers, etc., and then converting them into newsworthy content. Number three, foundations, we just mentioned the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that has funded $320 million via 30,000 grants to US news outlets across the board. So foundations shape the news in this way. And finally, what we might call influencers, so individuals and organizations who have a certain cachet in shaping the news, Anthony Fauci comes to mind, for example, or maybe a more provocative example, Joe Rogan of the Joe Rogan show, who now has the single most popular podcast on the planet with an average of 11 million viewers and listeners per podcast, which he drops three times a week. Could I ask something? So I saw that recently that Joe Rogan was, I mean, he has a podcast, correct? Yes. Have there been attempts to censor him or take him off the air? Because his views are, I mean, that's what I've heard. And yet he continues to be the most popular podcast, whatever that is, in the world, correct? Yes. Yeah, Joe Rogan gets an yeah, he gets an average of 11 million viewers or listeners per episode. And he was smart enough, Sandy, to jump off of YouTube just before YouTube got ugly and move over to Spotify, where he has an unlimited contract and carte blanche to interview anyone he wants in any way he wishes. And there has been some noise made about censoring and policing Joe Rogan's content on Spotify amongst, shall we say, the younger and more woke of the Spotify crowd. In other words, people who listen to him or? No, employees within Spotify who are cranky with Joe Rogan for having open-ended conversations with scientists who don't adhere to the official COVID narrative. So far, the Spotify executive team has said, we're going to let Joe Rogan be Joe Rogan. And of course, that's good for Spotify business because he brings it in. Correct. Right. We'll talk about Rogan some more in a minute. But what's so interesting about Joe Rogan and others like him is they're modeling long form dialogue. I mean, Joe Rogan's the average length of a Joe Rogan show is three hours with no commercial break. Think about that. And he's getting 11 million viewers on average per episode because humans are hungry for long form uninterrupted uncensored conversation. You think so? Well, I mean, the numbers certainly bear that out. And I'm guessing that most of you are probably not regular Joe Rogan listeners here, but he is the most popular news delivering personality on the planet right now, for better or for worse. And that's fascinating. Just to put that into context, I watched Anthony Fauci a week ago on the official White House YouTube channel. And Anthony Fauci got under a thousand views. Joe Rogan is 11 million on average. And for his most popular podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone, the co-inventor of the mRNA vaccine technology, Joe Rogan is getting 40 million views. And Fauci is getting a thousand on YouTube. Think about that. So let's move on. Number five. We'll skip that. Chomsky and Herman posited the fifth filter, what they called flak or negative criticism. When news journalists or news organizations challenge the status quo or they stray from the official narrative, here's Phil Donahue, Chris Hedges, and Ed Schultz interviewing Bernie Sanders before he was called off by his MSNBC CEO team. God forbid you cover Bernie Sanders in 2016, the most popular Democratic candidate in the country. We certainly wouldn't want to do that. Flak is negative criticism targeting journalists or news organizations that cross lines that the guided market system does not wish to be crossed. And I know this group well enough to know that you're all familiar with Donahue and Hedges and Schultz, so I won't belabor it. So those are the five filters that Chomsky and Herman laid out. A little bit of COVID fun here. So National Public Radio was just one of dozens of U.S. news outlets to target the 12 most egregious disinformers when it comes to vaccine hoaxes, if you will. Robert F. Kennedy, who just published a tour de force on Anthony Fauci with 2200 footnotes, is on that list of vaccine hoaxes, which is a term I find endlessly interesting. And right here in Vermont, of course, our very own Chelsea Green Publishing, fronted by Margo Baldwin, I think perhaps one of the most courageous publishers in the country right now, has now published three books on the COVID situation, none of which are getting any traction in independent bookstores in Vermont and are actually getting lambasted by Vermont's mainstream press, including my dear friends at Seven Days, Paula and Pamela, for peddling coronavirus misinformation, which I find this is a great example of flak or negative criticism. How many of you have read the truth about COVID-19 published by Chelsea Green? Let's get some hands. Who's read it? No one. No one has read it. Have you? Oh, yes, twice. Renee, thank you. Yeah. It's a book with 435 footnotes, all sourced from the CDC, the World Health Organization, the New York Times, and all of our favorite news outlets. And that the Seven Days would put this on their cover and engage in a feature hatchet job of Margo Baldwin without considering a single footnote or fact in the book is egregious. And I've written Pamela and Paula to tell them that. I haven't yet got a response. So let's pause here before we get into the five filters of our digital age. What's on your mind? Well, I wanted to ask more about what happened with Seven Days. Did they, what did they do? They just criticize the book or what? Or did they call for the censorship of the book? Or that it not be sold or what was, what happened exactly with them? Well, Senator Warren called on Amazon to cease and desist selling the book, which, and Chelsea Green is now suing Senator Warren for making such a ridiculous suggestion that we shouldn't engage in the free trafficking of ideas. But what Seven Days did was in some ways even weirder. They published on the cover of their weekly newspaper, which I read religiously and generally like, a feature article purporting to be about this book. But really, if you read it, you don't even need to read it closely. It really was sort of a, an attack on the publisher, Margo Baldwin, or having the audacity to publish a book that bucked the official COVID narrative. A well researched book, by the way. That is not to say that everything in the book is something we should agree with. No, but in a democratic society, one should engage and support, I would think, the free and unfettered flow of information. So if you haven't read it, and maybe you were scared off by the Seven Days article, or maybe you're busy, it's a really good book, as is Bobby Kennedy's. Robin, please, go ahead. Robin, you're muted. Still muted. Now, is that, am I okay? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I have actually two questions. The first one is about Rachel Maddow. I started reading her book Drift, and I felt that that book drifts a bit outside of the handcuffs she's under on MSNBC that, and I'm just wondering what you think is, perhaps she's writing, she's, this is one of several books she's written that she does that to express more her, her, her thoughts than that she can't express on the station, because it was, it was very critical of the military. Yeah. Yeah, and just to answer that question, Robin, you're so right. She wrote that book Drift before she was hired by MSNBC. Oh, really? Yes. Do you remember the Air America days with Al Franken? Yes, yes. So she wrote that book when she was fronting Air America, and I have a feeling that they, MSNBC made Rachel an offer she couldn't refuse. I don't know that for sure, but she was clearly a very critical voice of US Empire, and maybe they saw an opportunity MSNBC to pull her in, pay her lots of money and get her to shut up. And again, I don't have any proof of that. But if you look at the chronology, maybe that's what happened. Okay, my second question is about an article that Sandy sent out recently by Naomi Wolfe. Yes. And so she talks about how there's so much information that women's periods are are disrupted, disrupted, put a skew and so on and so forth by taking the vaccine. And she gives us one footnote or link an article in the New York Times as justification for her position of extreme anxiety and about the situation. And of course, the New York Times article is not anywhere near really where she is. It says, okay, so a woman's period maybe put off one day or two days or whatever, you know. So the reason I bring this example, I think this is just an example of when you read footnotes or links, you sometimes end up as confused as when you started it. And I try to watch Fox News and just the avalanche of twisted information to my way of thinking about how the Democrats are really responsible for cutting voting opportunities for black people. You know, they are accusing the left of what the left is accusing them of. And you know, I don't know how our society is going to recover from these polarities. Yeah, it's a real challenge, isn't it, Robin? And I think all of us are feeling a little bit disoriented by the kind of aggressive tribalization of our media news culture at so many different levels, whether it's racial or gendered or ethnic or a class-driven or even sort of kind of generational as well. And I would argue actually, and I skipped over the slide, but that's part of the part of the game that these big media tech pharma companies are playing is how many different ways can we divide team human? And they're quite adroit. Why though? Adept at doing so. They've been doing it for decades, actually. Well, because of divided populace, Andy, divided citizenry is a weak citizenry. And if you're interested in sort of not only controlling the narrative, but kind of steering the future of civilization and the species, if you can divide the species, it gives you much more power over them vis-à-vis that particular community. But let me, if I may, just let me, because I want to lay out our five digital filters. I'll do it quickly. And then let's circle back around to these questions. But one last comment, Robin, for you. I was just traveling and working in Costa Rica last week, and I had the good pleasure of traveling with three young women, all in their 30s, who all told me it was fascinating that their own menstrual cycles had been disrupted by this COVID situation. And it was really eye-opening for me, actually, because I had heard, like you had, I've done a lot of reading about this, and I've heard what I've heard in the news. And these were three women from sort of three different parts of the country all coming together for the first time. And they all sort of confirmed their individual stories together in my presence. And it was so, so fascinating. And so, again, that's just anecdotal. But to your point, it's, you know, go to the source, I guess, is partly what I'm suggesting. So let me jump ahead here and lay out very quickly the five filters of the digital age. How many of you have read this book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism? This is Shoshana Zuboff's masterwork, professor of business emeritus at Harvard University. The subtitle of the book says it all, The Fight for the Future at the New Frontier of Power. And she really takes on in this book, and it is truly a tour de force, the emergence of the algorithm with a capital A, of the power of Big Tech to not only surveil Team Human, but to steer our thoughts, our feelings, our behavior. So I recommend the book to you all. And I teach the book at UVM and now at St. Michael's College. So there are six filters that we laid out for the digital age and the propaganda model. The first is what we call the deep state disinformation filter. And I'm not getting all Alex Jones here by using the phrase deep state. I'm drawing on a body of scholarship, Peter Dale Scott, Peter Phillips, Mike Lofgren, whose book is featured here. We're talking about unelected federal bureaucracy that plays a huge role behind the scenes in shaping our news and information culture. And I know this group on the Zoom well enough to know that you're all aware of Operation Mockingbird and some of the historical examples of how the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, other unelected government bureaucracies have massaged the news over the years. And I think it's gotten much more aggressive in the digital age. The seventh filter we lay out here is the power of the algorithm, how computer codes behind the scenes determine what news and information we see and what news and information we do not see. And left-wingers will accuse the Google algorithm of right-wing bias and right-wingers will accuse the Google algorithm of left-wing bias. And the reality is it's a little, it's kind of contextual and situationally dependent, which is its own kind of conundrum and fun. The eighth filter is what we call filter bubbles. I know some of you are familiar with the work of moveon.org founder Ellie Pariser, who wrote a book after giving a famous TED talk about filter bubbles. And filter bubbles simply refer to the news ecosystem we build around ourselves, each of us through repeated returns to the same news. Somebody's got their mic on. Let's kill the mic so we're not overriding over that, maybe. So filter bubbles we do to ourselves by not grazing beyond our established happy habitual news channels. Algorithms on the other hand are done to us by the lords of the cloud who program and reprogram the computer codes that serve up news and information into our news feeds, whether it's our Apple News app, our Facebook page, our Google search results, our Twitter feed, et cetera. The ninth filter we call behavioral micro targeting. And this is on the screen here is a gentleman named Alexander Nix, who in 2016 fall right before the Trump-Clinton slugfest parachuted from London into New York City and gave what is now a very famous 12 minute talk in which he suggested that his company Cambridge Analytica, yes, could use psychographic data, 5,000 data points on every single voting American citizen to massage the 2016 presidential election by selectively tweaking and micro targeting very small groups of voters in key counties, in key states around the country. I know we're all fond of believing that the Russians hacked the 2016 election, but what I think is way more interesting is the Cambridge Analytica behavioral micro targeting scandal of 2016. And of course, this power to behaviorally micro target has only increased in intensity over the past five years. So this is a very important filter, and it's a good reason to sort of stay off of social media when engaging in political conversations that determine our collective future. That's very hard, I know, for the younger crowd, maybe not so hard for some of us here because we're perhaps a little bit older and wiser. And then finally, the last filter, maybe my favorite is the use of bots, robots, or they're sometimes often called sock puppets. These are anonymous social media accounts or semi anonymous social media accounts that are charged with attacking, defending, or disorienting social media communities with news, disinformation, misinformation. The Chinese government has a wonderful phrase for using sock puppets as armies on social media to distract, to disinform, to disorient. The People's Republic of China, their social media army calls it flooding the zone. We want to flood the zone. So if on the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square incident in Beijing, we see maybe some burbling up from the Chinese social media citizenry of a public protest to commemorate the occasion, we will deploy the bots. We'll deploy the sock puppets to distract, to divide, to disorient, to confuse. Yeah, that's how sock puppets work. And the Democratic Party in the United States runs sock puppet armies. The Republican Party in the United States runs sock puppet armies. I can't speak for the other parties, but there's a lot of more and more money being invested in manipulating the Twitter conversation, the Facebook conversation, the TikTok conversation, et cetera, through the use of these bots and sock puppets. So considering the COVID situation for just a moment, there is a troubling trend, two of them actually, but there's some encouraging news as well. We're seeing with the COVID the manufacturing of consent to use Chomsky and Hermann's phrase by censoring dissenting views in a couple of different ways. Message massage, you may have noticed if you go onto YouTube or Facebook or any social Google, any social media platform, and you search anything COVID related, you'll get a little message redirecting you to the CDC. How many of you have noticed this? Look closely, it's astonishing. It's a brand new phenomenon. And the other sort of troubling trend is through the demonization of language. So people asking questions about what's going on or have certain pejorative titles attached to them when they do that. They're on the screen. Now the encouraging news here is I think the censorship in a time of COVID is encouraging tremendous innovation in the news and information space. For example, I just put on the screen here three different new digital streaming platforms that more and more people are seeking out as YouTube owned by Google owned by Alphabet continues to censor police message massage and crack down on videos that are asking questions about what's going on out there. So I think innovation is always a good thing. It's complicated, of course, but I think we should celebrate that. So let me end with some solutions and then we can open it up for one last round of conversation. So I think there are six here as we consider the propaganda model of news, the legacy of Chomsky and Herman, the arrival of the digital age 20 years ago. And now we're entering our kind of second generation of team human in the digital age. I think first we need critical media literacy education from cradle to grave early enough and I'm going to sound like I'm going to channel my inner Bernie Sanders here right cradle to grave media literacy education from saying. Secondly, I think all of us need to expand our news and Robin I earlier giving a nod to Fox News to Tucker Carlson. I actually think and I'm not I'm not typically a viewer of Fox or Tucker. I do think though that I found a lot of a lot of interesting perspectives coming out of the mouth of Tucker Carlson over the past two years that surprise me partly because they're coming out of his mouth and partly because I'm not hearing them elsewhere. Particularly with regard to to the sovereignty shall we say of the United States and to its citizens to put on my nationalist cap for a moment. So I'll just leave that there. Third, I think that journalists and I know many of us here are practicing journalists or support journalism and news production. I think we have to adopt this real news approach. We have to be willing to embrace complexity and fight against the ideological tribalism that seems to be everywhere now. And this is very, very hard to do. But nevertheless, we must try. All of us. I think number four, we must challenge the power of empire and surveillance capitalism to use Shoshana Zuboff's brilliant phrase. We need to challenge that at every opportunity. How do we do that? Number five, Zuboff says, says quite simply, we must disrupt supply and we must disrupt demand. In other words, to disrupt supply, we need to stop feeding the beast that is the digital media universe. That means using our digital devices less. That means not cuddling with our iPhones at night in bed. It means cuddling with actual humans instead and putting our phones in airplane mode. My students like it when I tell them. It's like, go cuddle with humans, people. Come on. You can do that. By disrupting demand, it means using, relying on these news digital news sources less than we are. And then finally, I think a lot more courage and we need a lot more compassion because we are programmed for tribalization. We're being programmed. We challenge that at every opportunity. So one last time, if you want to take a picture of the screen here are the 10 filters that now comprise the 21st century propaganda model of news, Chomsky and Herman's first five, the project censored teams six through 10. And I think we end with, oh, we'll stop there. I think that's a good place to rest. So that's an overview of the propaganda model of news, a definition I hope of real, real news, real journalism. And when you define real news with those six ingredients and you look at these 10 filters, you realize how little, how little real news we're actually getting in the culture right now. And I'll end with, I think the most important thing we can do. And this is discouraged right now. But the most important thing we can do is listen to one another and to talk with each other in real face-to-face spaces and places. And we're all, we all know how hard that has been the past couple of years. I would argue perhaps by strategic design. Because when we get together and we do what we are programmed to do evolutionarily, which is to be social and in one another's company, exchanging energy, electrons, breath with one another, then we do represent a threat to the status quo. And that of course is the greatest fear of those driving this bus is that we humans will recover our senses collectively and figure out how to move forward and challenge what's going on out there. So I'll stop there and let's open it up for questions and comment. I want to be respectful of our time. Rob, will you put it on speaker view for the recording? Oh yes, of course. Thank you. Rob, there are three people in chat. Oh yes, let's go there. So Renee, do you want to go ahead and go ahead, lay out your, I love your chat stuff there. You want to, you're talking about Rogan, I think. Sure, that was a long time ago. Yeah, I don't watch your Rogan regularly, but I was really impressed when his video, it was actually censored from YouTube and deep platform from Twitter. And it was getting a lot of buzz in one of my private little chat groups. And so I turned it on and I listened to the interview with Dr. Robert Malone. It's a three hour interview in, I had to listen in three separate parts while I was working on a project. And I was just so impressed. And I would recommend it to anyone. I found the link to that. I forget what the distribution platform is. I think you posted three new ones. I'm not sure if it was, that it was any of those. Maybe it was, I don't remember. But it was embedded in an article on Robert Kennedy Jr.'s Children's Defender page. And it opened with a little critique of it. And then it gave you some time sequenced highlights. So if you wanted to just hear a few bits and pieces, you could just scroll through that time. So I was just very impressed with the authenticity of Joe Rogan's journalism. Right. Yeah, it's so nice to hear you say that, Renee. And what Joe Rogan is doing that very few others are doing, and I think it accounts for his popularity in part, is he's simply holding space for long form dialogue and discussion. And he's asking questions in a way that suggests he doesn't really, he doesn't know. He doesn't have the answers. He's simply asking questions. And he's funny. And so there's a lot that's sort of interesting about him. But these are the reasons why I think he has the number one podcast in the world right now. Because that's all he's doing. Yeah, which I find fascinating. Yeah. If you haven't listened to his conversation with Sanjay Gupta, America's doctor, who is kind of CNN's chief medical spokesman, that is a fascinating conversation. Right. So Rogan is actually, he's a comedian and a prize fighting, cage fighting commentator. But he's actually modeling for us how to do real news and journalism in some ways. It's so interesting. Jimmy Dorr is another interesting one. He's a comedian and he's left a Bernie. He's left a Bernie for those of us on the call who are left a Bernie. But Jimmy Dorr is also, he's simply asking questions. And he's really challenging the two-party status quo. The other place to look for real news is on Substack, because all of the great journalists who have been fired or eased out of their jobs at mainstream news outlets, Matt Taibbi, formerly of Rolling Stone, Christopher Hedges, formerly of the New York Times, Alex Barron. And Glenn Greenwald. Glenn Greenwald also. Yeah, there's an ever-growing list. All of these subs, all of these really brilliant journalists who are eclectic and heterodox and they're thinking are now running their own Substack pages and you can support them for pennies a month. Mark Crispin Miller, your colleague at NYU. So, and this is not to say all of these people are right all the time, but they are doing, they're doing good journalism. So the prize fighting commentators, the Substackers, yeah. And Charles Eisenstein also is on Substack. And the thing that's just so amazing, I'm so glad you brought it up, is also Christina Stikos is a Vermont musician who's on Substack. Tons of people, anybody can do it. And you get such a wide variety of voices and interests and perspectives, and it leaves each of us free like we should be in a democratic society to pick and choose what resonates with ourselves. Well, yes, and I also think to challenge our own thinking and our own feeling about this, you know, I so appreciate what Robin was saying earlier about, you know, you read Naomi Wolfe and she's citing the New York Times and you go to the New York Times link and you read the New York Times, I was like, well, that's a little different than Wolfe was saying. But, you know, this is welcome to the world of, you know, engaged citizenry. It's hard, right? It's hard. It's hard to hold the space for that. It's exhausting. But the alternative, of course, is worse, because we fall into sort of these ideological and dogmatic tribal kinds of patterns of thinking that really, I think, cut us off from the complexity of the discussion. And of course, there comes a point, right, when we have to turn it off for the day or for the week and go and commune with the flowers. But this is so central, so vital, I think, to small d democratic civilization. Yeah. So thank you for, thank you for saying all that. Yeah, so good. Nice to see you too. Yeah, likewise. Question. Yeah. Well, we just have about eight minutes. Who hasn't weighed in yet? Who's got something to say? Yes, Eric. Eric has a question. I am just a comment, you know, I've started my career as a reporter at The Voice of America. We did a lot. But even back in the days, we knew that it was a propaganda machine. That's, you know, it's clear. But, you know, our editor would tell me every day, Eric, unless you have three sources, we don't publish any news that's coming through. And like for many years, I was ashamed of being, you know, having gone there. You know, I was an immigrant. I came here. I was given the opportunity to be a reporter at The Voice of America. So I didn't ask many questions in my job. And then later on, when I started reading Noam Chomsky and other people that started to have some perspective. But recently, I've been very surprised that even the progressives, even here in Vermont, have glued on CNN that is not even, you know, like now even in comparison to The Voice of America in terms of the treatment of information, you know, like, you listen to CNN seven hours, like, you know, people are just one side of the story. And to me, the progressives, I mean, the progressives of America are responsible, like, because they're fueling that, you know, a tribalism, you know, and then, you know, like, we have to be different from the other side, where I thought that, you know, the Noam Chomsky people, the people that have been lived, you know, Washington DC, Vermont, are misleading me you know. And also, I have a question, is it a recent phenomena, or is it entrenched in our, you know, even in the, in the academy, you know, system? I remember when I came from France here, in France, well, in the ITC, and then we tried to jump between the two. Here, I was told, Eric goes straight to the point. Who's the bad guy? Who's the good guy? And when I was, you know, reporting on the war, I would always be asked, as an American, you know, a question, who's the bad guy? Who's the good guy? So the question is, is it something recent? Where we have to go straight to the point, make us not have much money? And also, you know, how can we go back to school and teach that to the kids? Wow. Yeah. Gosh, that was fun. Guy, I love listening to that. Thank you. Well, so let me just say a couple things by way of response. So you mentioned CNN. And it's important to understand that the so-called legacy corporate commercial news media companies, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, they are fighting for their lives right now. Because the Internet is passing them by. So what CNN on the left, let's say, and Fox, let's say, on the right, what they're doing is they're serving up news content that is increasingly tribalized and red meat for their audience as a survival strategy. And Matt Taibian is brilliant book, new book, Hate, Inc. Hate, Incorporated lays this out better than anybody. I highly recommend this book, Hate, Inc. Matt Taibian. So Eric, at the same time that CNN and Fox are throwing red meat to their tribalized audiences, we have the encroachment of big tech partnered with Big Pharma to try and control narratives around economic, political, and so-called public health decisions that affect us all. So it's a very complicated matrix right now, the news and media landscape. And it makes it to Robin's point and Renee's point of earlier, it makes it very challenging for a free thinking citizen, regardless of politics, to try and discern who are the good guys and bad guys. And I think we have to take each story and hold it up to the light as best we can and treat each story on its own merits, whether it's to take COVID examples, mask wearing, social distancing, lockdowns, the so-called vaccines, et cetera. And whenever we can go to the source, Renee mentioned Dr. Robert Malone. This is the guy who co-invented mRNA technology. He's a pro-vaccine enthusiast. He has been for decades, and he has some questions about these technologies, right? And we should be able to listen, to evaluate, and to discuss those questions publicly. But that's not happening, just to name one example. So there's so much in what you said there, and I hope that was helpful by way of response. Robin, yeah, please jump in. Yeah, I just wanted to make a little pitch for towardfreedom.com. Both Rob and Sandy over time, long ago, were members of the board. We still exist. We don't deal with the issues we've been discussing here. We're more international. And our board is, you know, we have to evaluate everything our editor puts up. For example, there was an article on Ethiopia. Anyone thinking about Ethiopia these days? I am. I am. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? We ran an article that is really from a Marxist perspective, and a bit complicated. And Eric liked it. But we're trying to put the news on the international level in our little organization. So I'm just inviting everyone to go there, read the articles, give feedback, and let us know what you think. And thank you for saying that, Robin. And I put that in the chat. The biggest problem, if there's one biggest problem with the COVID-topian situation, it's how it sucked the oxygen out of the room for two years now. I record freedom all the time, Robin. And it reminds me that there's life beyond COVID. And maybe that's a good ending place for tonight. It's like, gosh, we're human. We're involved in a universe of projects and opportunities and challenges and potentialities. And to the extent that news can move us out of our own prisons and help us see the world in a broader perspective, then gosh, that's certainly worth the price of admission. So yeah, Sandy, you want to wrap us up? Go ahead. I want to wrap up. Okay. Well, we have four other people in chat, but we really don't have time, unfortunately. But I do want to say I put in a pitch also for Rob Williams and for his Vermont Independence newsletter and also for Vicki itself. This is the Vermont Institute of Community and International Involvement. We have been attempting every Wednesday night through for the last two years to discuss controversial issues without censorship. That's why we asked Rob Williams to come and talk tonight because he is an expert in disassembling propaganda. And that is what every citizen's responsibility is right now, is to critically think about every issue that is confronting us and that is pushed at us from mainstream media. All of us. Yeah. And Sandy, I would say too, thank you. I would urge all of us to take part. Yeah. And thank you for Vicki's work. And the last two. Anyway, that's all I want to put in the pitch for Vicki. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you just covered the 1903 court case about vaccination and you covered Julian Assange in the last two Wednesdays. And I mean, couldn't be more timely. So thank you for all the work that you're doing. And also, but next week, next Wednesday night, we're going to kind of controversial topic of Bitcoin and how it might affect the American dollar. Ooh, is Amy Stevenson going to be on that? Please join us next week. I don't know what. Yeah, she's the she's the proponent. Oh, my God. That's going to be fantastic. The argument that Bitcoin could destroy militarism. Yeah. Oh, all right. So next complicated for me. So next Wednesday, anyway, but not for Amy. So join us. Join us next week at six. I'm sorry to leave four people in the chat. But thank you, Rob. And thank you all for participating. Thanks, everybody. Happy 2022. See you soon. Good night. Good night all.