CBS News’ flagship morning program, CBS This Morning with Gayle [sic] King, has been caught staging a coronavirus event at a testing clinic using “crisis actors” in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
James O’Keefe of media watchdog organization Project Veritas was contacted by a whistleblower regarding the May 1 show, who said that when CBS’s crew came to film, the hospital and the news network worked together to make the clinic, Cherry Health, appear to be significantly more busy that it actually is.
The Veritas report features candid interviews with several members of the clinic’s staff, discussing how the event was staged. Cars were lined up, and people were given fake tests. Basically, the entire CBS segment was a staged hoax.
A statement issued by CBS after they had edited the footage to remove what O’Keefe demonstrated to be a hoax reads: “CBS News did not stage anything at the Cherry Health facility. Any suggestion to the contrary is 100% false.” They then went on to blame the clinic: “These allegations are deeply disturbing. We reached out to Cherry Health to address them immediately. They informed us for the first time that one of their chief officers told at least one staffer to get in the testing line along with real patients. No one from CBS News had any knowledge of this prior to [Tuesday night]. They also said that their actions did not prevent any real patients from being tested. We take the accuracy of our reporting very seriously and we are removing the Cherry Health portion from the piece.”
The Washington Post’s Eric Wemple echoed the official statement in an op-ed on Wednesday, saying that CBS did nothing wrong and that there was no way the network could have been in on the hoax. Wemple is a prominent fake news hoax artist himself, so it is unsurprising that he felt the need to come to the defense of CBS.
All of the mainstream media that is mentioning the Veritas tape at all is taking the same line: yes, it was fake, but CBS didn’t know it was fake and this is just a fluke. The news media will circle the wagons like a criminal gang whenever they get caught staging their hoaxes.
Of course, the clinic would have had to have cooperated to stage the hoax, but the idea that CBS wouldn’t have noticed what was going on is absurd, and the responsibility for verifying events lies with the network. The clinic is not beholden to the people to inform them of what is going on, and I do not think it is possible that the clinic could have managed to stage the hoax without the news crew noticing.
Adriana Diaz, who reported the story, definitely seems like she is better at “twerking at da club” and “riding dirty on dat nigga’s dick,” as it were, than understanding what is going on around her in physical reality.
However, what was described by the witnesses in the Veritas video was a scene where the news crew arrived, and then the clinic’s management and the news people themselves began staging the line of cars waiting for testing.
The media has been repeatedly caught staging various events using this same model: they find a real life business or institution that wants to cooperate with them, then they send in a crew on filming day to line everything up, in the way a director sets the scene in a Hollywood movie, in order to portray to the public what they are trying to get people to believe against the reality of the situation.
The fluke here is not that this happened, it’s that CBS was caught. We’ve all seen the way the media is hyping up this insanity surrounding the coronavirus and the lockdown hoax, and I think it’s very safe to say that many or most of these scenes that we’ve seen from “overwhelmed” hospitals and other medical facilities have been faked.
It was also CBS that was caught claiming that video from Italy was from New York when they were attempting to claim that there was chaos at the hospitals in that city. Their explanation for that was also “whoops, sorry.”
We need to really start asking questions about how we’re supposed to be able to determine reality from fake news in this bizarre new world that we’re entering into.
It’s been bad up until now, with the fake news combined with the heavy-handed censorship, but we still had some checks and balances on these things. The mere fact that people were allowed to walk around in public created checks and balances. Beyond that, for the most part, if you weren’t talking about Jews (Andrew Anglin) or being totally bombastic and saying everything was fake (Alex Jones), you were still allowed to use social media. We also still have people like Tucker Carlson and James O’Keefe who are able to use large platforms to expose hoaxes.
Now we have YouTube and Facebook censoring any deviation from the mainstream narrative on the coronavirus situation, and I’m not confident that Carlson or O’Keefe are still going to have platforms for much longer.
I am confident that I will be able to remain online, given that I’ve been censored basically as far as someone can be censored. The government would now have to order ISPs to block access to this website. The problem is that I am just a guy with a laptop. I do not have my own news crews, so I rely on other sources of information to write my reports. I can continue to analyze what the media and the establishment are saying, but if there is no ability for on-the-ground reporting, my job becomes a whole lot more difficult.
We are entering into a world of total disinformation, where all news should be considered fake. We are already there with the coronavirus situation, where we are being given totally fake death counts which we have no ability to confirm. We can look at the data that they give us, we can compare the numbers with previous years, but ultimately, we have no idea. It is entirely possible that the CDC’s numbers are two or three times the actual death toll. We have no way of knowing, short of a whistleblower coming out and saying it.
What that means is that anything can now happen.
It’s a scary place to be.