Did Covid Media Suppression Sabotage Business News Coverage?

The Trusted News Initiative

The first such group was formed through a long-rumored secret pact among a shady consortium of powerful global media and tech organizations. Few BSchools readers have likely ever heard of this multi-industry group, which still remains largely unknown among the general public. But by the date it was finally disclosed on December 10, 2020, this British Crown/BBC News-led outfit based in London calling itself the “Trusted News Initiative” had already signed some of the world’s biggest brands in both legacy journalism and social media. They wield huge global influence over the gathering and dissemination of news.

We were not able to obtain for this report the complete roster of this group’s membership. However, BSchools assembled a partial list by digging into court documents and other forms of open-source intelligence. The inaugural signatories included:

• Associated Press (AP)
• Agence France-Presse (AFP)
• British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)
• Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
• The European Broadcasting Union (EBU), with 115 member organizations in 56 nations; the 31 associate members include the U.S. broadcast networks NBC/MSNBC/Comcast, ViacomCBS, ABC/Disney, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (PBS, NPR, and Public Radio International) and American Public Media
• Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp
• The Financial Times
• Google, YouTube, and Google News Lab, plus Google’s First Draft News project and its affiliates like the Ford, Knight and Newmark Foundations
• The Hindu Times
• Microsoft, LinkedIn, Bing and MSN
• The New York Times
• Radio-Canada
• Reuters
• Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism
• Twitter and Twitter Blue
• The Washington Post

To understand why the TNI’s member corporations likely suppressed the Covid coverage of the Harvard Business School episode, one first needs to understand the TNI’s wide-ranging effects. According to the inaugural news release issued by the BBC’s director Tim Davie, the cabal’s purported purpose was to ensure that concerns about the Covid injections would be heard while “harmful disinformation myths” are stopped in their tracks.

But that’s not quite how things turned out. Based on their subsequent actions, such stylized corporate mission language never could have formed the actual core of the members’ agreement, because these firms have repeatedly demonstrated their real purpose: to silence dissent while promoting an extraordinarily restrictive narrative.

What probably happened is that the executives killed the “hearing concerns” language, and instead ratified an agreement that would aggressively censor any information that could reduce the sales of Covid injection products. These included the experimental genetic therapy injections distributed under emergency use authorizations in the United States by Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen Pharmaceuticals subsidiary, as well as those marketed overseas by AstraZeneca.

In December 2021, Dr. Peter McCullough—the most-published academic cardiologist in history who testified about Covid prevention and treatment twice before the United States Senate—translated that press release for one controversial broadcaster: Spotify’s Joe Rogan:

Translation, Joe? That means “suppression of anything that would promote vaccine hesitancy and early treatment,” [including] the ultimate goal of early treatment: staying out of the hospital! If people knew they had an option, they could defer the vaccine. And if they were covered and got treatment, that would lead to vaccine hesitancy.

But how about vaccine safety? How about giving a press briefing on deaths after the vaccine? Are those happening with Moderna? Pfizer? J&J? Joe, the point I’m making is that if they won’t come clean on all the vaccine safety data, we can never get to risk mitigation. We can’t get a safer program unless and until they are transparent on vaccine safety.

And this is where the authoritarian aspect of all this gets very complicated, right? Because they’ve assumed the government assumes the role of your parent: “Just listen to us! We’re going to tell YOU what to do.”

Within weeks of the BBC’s announcement, the TNI wielded a chilling effect that ripped through newsrooms of all sizes around the world. Industry leadership by the TNI’s high-profile signatories effectively dissuaded every media outlet on this planet—large as well as small—from running at least two kinds of coverage:

• Any story that portrayed the Covid injections with even the slightest negative or discouraging slant, and
• Any coverage of safe and effective early Covid treatments also useful for prevention as injection alternatives, especially the early home drug treatment options available over-the-counter and by prescription that prevent emergency room visits, hospitalization, or death.

Produced by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation’s founder and Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur Steve Kirsch—the billionaire inventor of computer pointing device laser technology who holds two degrees from MIT—this brief animated video provides a good overview of the TNI’s objectives and operations.

The TNI’s Repression “Target List”

Written by healthcare policy analyst Elizabeth Woodworth, the definitive review of the TNI’s impact first appeared on the Montreal-based strategic intelligence platform Global Research in the spring of 2021 and has since been updated several times. In this remarkable and exhaustively referenced analysis, Woodworth enumerates a list of stories and professionals consistently, swiftly, and aggressively suppressed by this corrupt cabal’s coordinated network. Her repression “target list” includes:

• The outrageous continuing denial by legacy media and tech platforms that any early outpatient therapeutics that can prevent and treat Covid actually exist. That denial is a completely inverted, bald-faced lie. It has been known for almost two years that a variety of inexpensive therapeutics offered safe and effective results when used to prevent and treat Covid. By now the evidence supporting their use is overwhelming. For example, Dr. Brian Tyson and Dr. George Fareed treated 7,000 Covid patients successfully. Yet the legacy press and tech organizations continue to repeat this big lie—even though almost all of those who died from Covid could have been saved through these approaches.
• American frontline doctors who saved thousands of lives by applying effective Covid treatments early, yet who’ve been de-platformed by social media companies and ignored by the legacy media. These physicians include Dr. Vladimir Zelenko, who introduced the first zinc-ionophore Covid drug treatments, and Dr. Pierre Kory, who testified three times before the U.S. Senate about Covid treatment best practices; before founding the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) he served as a professor of critical care pulmonology at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine. Woodward’s list also includes another Senate witness, the critical-care pulmonology professor who early in 2020 introduced ivermectin-based Covid treatment protocols while teaching at the Eastern Virginia Medical School: the FLCCC Alliance’s Dr. Paul Marik.
• Dissenting physicians and healthcare researchers with outstanding credentials and publication histories. Besides Dr. McCullough, this group includes Dr. Michael Yeadon, the former vice president of research at Pfizer United Kingdom, and Dr. Robert Malone, the researcher who invented the mRNA technology platform underlying all the Covid injections distributed in the United States. Woodworth also includes two epidemiologists on her list: Dr. Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford University and Dr. Martin Kulldorff of Harvard University.
• The disturbing evidence supporting antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE). This effect occurs when immune systems injected with mRNA Covid biological agents engage SARS-CoV-2 or related Coronaviruses under real-world conditions, but then develop a runaway, uncontrolled inflammatory response that results in critical illness followed by death.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

The federal statutory criminal penalties for any executive convicted of conspiracy to implement a suppression or messaging campaign that kills, injures, or terrorizes Americans are so severe that they’ll end that manager’s career. In fact, a Batten Institute Fellow affiliated with the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, Dr. David Martin, has warned executives specifically about this legal exposure.

So why in the world might any sane executive at a media or tech conglomerate risk such career-destroying consequences?

The reason may be all about the Benjamins. Evidence includes the stunning disclosure in November of 2021 by Alan Macleod of Mint Press News that the ardent depopulation advocate and third-wealthiest individual in the world, Bill Gates, donated almost one-third of a billion dollars-—$319 million—to fund media projects. It is a program without precedent in the history of journalism because the Gates payoffs flowed freely to both nonprofit public media organizations and for-profit businesses as well:

Recipients of this cash include many of America’s most important news outlets, including CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS, and The Atlantic. Gates also sponsors a myriad of influential foreign organizations, including the BBC, The Guardian, The Financial Times and The Daily Telegraph in the United Kingdom; prominent European newspapers such as Le Monde (France), Der Spiegel (Germany) and El País (Spain); as well as big global broadcasters like Al-Jazeera.

The scope and breadth of these grants by Gates are staggering. They blanket the entire field of journalism around the world. The payoffs benefit media outlets, investigative journalism centers, lobby groups, industry associations like the 200-outlet National Newspaper Publishers Association, and colleges with influential journalism programs like Columbia University.

They also include specific media campaigns—and it can’t just be a coincidence that initiatives cited in the report appear to have a depopulation objective, such as grants to Population Communications International and the Population Foundation of India totaling almost $10 million.

Moreover, Gates’ payments even went so far as to covertly influence the storylines of primetime CBS-TV dramas. Also listed is a particularly suspicious $13.6 million payment to The Lancet, the now-disgraced British medical journal. Public outcry forced that journal to retract a high-profile article that smeared as unsafe an inexpensive, off-patent drug used to treat Covid—even though the study deliberately administered lethal doses of the compound that killed research subjects.

Keep in mind two essential facts about these disclosures. First, this was only the extent of the Gates payoffs that could be documented through records released under the Freedom of Information Act and court orders. The total magnitude of Gates’ payments to journalists over the past 30 years is still not yet known, and may never be entirely disclosed. Nonetheless, it’s a safe bet the eventual total will far exceed that $319 million worth of payments that Mint Press documented thus far.

Second, it may be true that these payoffs aren’t technically bribes. Nevertheless, the benefactors undoubtedly realize that if their editorial decisions fail to align with the Gates Foundation’s aggressive depopulation and pro-injection objectives, it likely won’t renew their grants.

The Campus Shutdown National Media Couldn’t Snub

Overall, the combination of the Trusted News Initiative’s repression policies along with the vast payments to journalists by the Gates Foundation appears to have resulted in the airtight suppression of coverage about safe, effective, and inexpensive off-patent therapeutics as treatments for the illness and alternatives to the experimental Covid injections. Such censorship is incompatible with public health.

Of the nearly one million Americans who died from the illness, the vast majority would have survived had the press and social media not blocked information about such therapeutics so aggressively. And especially since December 2020, in the United States virtually any news story carried by legacy mainstream media that one watches on TV, reads in newspapers or magazines, or hears on the radio carries blanket cheerleading for the Covid injections—devoid of any alternatives or exceptions.

This dangerously slanted coverage has even polluted America’s former “newspaper of record,” which made history when it broke the story of the three deaths that shut down the ill-fated Swine Flu injection campaign in 1976. It’s notable that The New York Times has not run even a single story criticizing the Covid injections during the past two years.

Something similar can be said of the Covid articles allowed on online platforms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter. By contrast, accurate and reliable sources of coverage do exist but are challenging to find.

In other words, the editors in almost all national media newsrooms are now required to routinely kill coverage of alternative Covid therapeutics and less than favorable injection-related stories as a matter of corporate policy.

This is most likely the real reason that the progressively increasing numbers of positive tests curiously disclosed among “fully-injected” HBS students received no significant media attention—not until the national business press could no longer ignore yet another unexpected campus shutdown at the world’s top MBA program.