PAYOLA PROPAGANDA: Government pays hundreds of media companies to advertise COVID vax as those same outlets provide all-positive coverage of the jabs

03/08/2022 / By JD Heyes

Capitalism is considered by many as the best economic system in the world, but morality is key to make it work for the betterment of the general public.

When there is a natural disaster, business owners should not raise prices on goods like water and food that people need most. Companies should pay their workers to the best of their abilities while still earning profits rather than exploiting them for maximum economic gain. If there are conflicts of interest arising from business arrangements, then companies should say so.

And so on.

Regarding that last point, the federal government paid hundreds of media companies to advertise the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) vaccines while at the same time they were only providing glowingly positive stories and reviews of said vaccines – never once bothering to reveal their huge financial interest in doing so, as The Blaze first reported last week:

“HHS revealed that it purchased advertising from major news networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as cable TV news stations Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, legacy media publications including the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, digital media companies like BuzzFeed News and Newsmax, and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations. These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety,” reported TheBlaze.

“Hundreds of news organizations were paid by the federal government to advertise for the vaccines as part of a ‘comprehensive media campaign,’ according to documents TheBlaze obtained from the Department of Health and Human Services. The Biden administration purchased ads on TV, radio, in print, and on social media to build vaccine confidence, timing this effort with the increasing availability of the vaccines. The government also relied on earned media featuring ‘influencers’ from ‘communities hit hard by COVID-19’ and ‘experts’ like White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and other academics to be interviewed and promote vaccination in the news.”

Mainstream media turns into propaganda machine

TheBlaze further noted that despite the fact that nearly all of those news outlets produced stories that covered and explained COVID-19 vaccines, the fact that taxpayer dollars were flowing into them was never disclosed in those reports.

That’s disturbing because it has been common practice for a century that newsrooms and editorial content production divisions operate independently of advertising departments. “News teams felt no need to make the disclosure, as some publications reached for comment explained,” TheBlaze reported.

While the vaccines were developed under then-President Donald Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed,” it was the Biden administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress that engaged in and funded the massive ad campaign to “educate the public” and push vaccines as the only way forward through the pandemic.

Specifically, Congress appropriated $1 billion in the last fiscal year (2021) for the HHS secretary to spend on measures to “strengthen vaccine confidence in the United States.” Federal law authorized the department to act through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and for other federal departments to hand out contracts to both public and private entities so they could “carry out a national, evidence-based campaign to increase awareness and knowledge of the safety and effectiveness of vaccines for the prevention and control of diseases, combat misinformation about vaccines and disseminate scientific and evidence-based vaccine-related information, with the goal of increasing rates of vaccination across all ages to reduce and eliminate vaccine-preventable diseases,” the law notes.

“Advertisers pay for space to share their messages, as was the case here, and those ads are clearly labeled as such,” explained Shani George, vice president of communications for the Washington Post, in a statement.

“The newsroom is completely independent from the advertising department,” she claimed, unbelievably.

Ditto for the Los Angeles Times.

The fact is, the WaPo, the LA Times, the New York Times and the other major left-wing news networks were all leading propagandists for the vaccines. And all of them either censored or attacked anyone who espoused differing views on the efficacy of vaccines or touted different, effective treatments.

Capitalism is the best economic system on the planet, as American-style republicanism is the best form of government. But both require moral people to work properly.