The Fall Of Mainstream Media

 Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

Many of my subscribers first found me before the COVID narrative became mainstream, when I was ringing the alarm bells about the stock market in late 2019 and early 2020 and warning people that the virus was going to be a much bigger deal than people thought.

At the time, almost nobody cared about COVID. The consensus view was that it was a localized problem in China and that markets would continue marching higher as they always had. By January and February 2020, I was repeatedly warning that the market was dramatically underpricing the risk posed by the virus and that investors were ignoring what seemed to me like an obvious threat.

Looking back at my first major retrospective on COVID from 2021, what stands out isn’t that every prediction was correct. Many weren’t. What stands out is that I was willing to examine information that most investors, journalists, and policymakers either ignored or dismissed. Remember how hard it was to push back against the mainstream Covid narrative once it started? This is why I started asking critical questions about whether we were creating too much hysteria and reminding readers that Covid was over if they wanted it to be, all the way back in 2021.

Worse than the virus itself, I noted, was the continued incessant reminders and outright media propaganda to get vaccinated, two-faced mask requirements from hypocritical politicians, spurious and useless mandates and individuals and businesses who suffered personal or economic losses.

Months before COVID became the dominant story in America, I was warning that markets were dramatically underpricing the risk posed by the virus. I questioned China’s reported numbers. I argued that investors were assuming a best-case scenario despite mounting evidence that supply chains, travel, and economic activity could be severely disrupted. I openly criticized the World Health Organization’s handling of the crisis and questioned why obvious inconsistencies weren’t receiving more scrutiny.

I also raised questions that, at the time, were considered beyond the pale. When discussion emerged about a possible laboratory origin for the virus, now confirmed as the likely origin, I argued that simply asking questions should not be treated as misinformation. The idea that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated from research activity at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was widely dismissed as a conspiracy theory in early 2020. Today it seems to be the leading hypothesis.

The lesson I took away from that experience wasn’t that alternative explanations are automatically correct. It was that institutional consensus is often far less certain than it appears. That realization is largely why this blog exists.

Watching politicians impose restrictions that they themselves ignored, watching media organizations aggressively police discussion while frequently revising their own narratives, and watching legitimate questions become taboo convinced me that there was tremendous value in examining uncomfortable subjects that mainstream outlets either couldn’t or wouldn’t touch.