Regularly I get links to Substack, but I never did more on the Substack website than following the link I was sent. Today I browsed a bit on the Substack website and this resulted in signing up. I am surprised why I am not being asked for creating a password, I will see what happens.
Based on my selected topics of interest I was presented with a few links to posts of others and I clicked on a link about funding Ukraine with more money. The writer was in favor of funding more money and also repossessing Russian money on frozen bank accounts, which - according to the writer - was around 160 billion dollars. This money could be used for rebuilding Ukraine. The only thing he would like to change for this repo program was to also using this money for more weapons and ammo to support the Ukrainian army.
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Now this is the moment where I kind of regretted to have signed up on Substack. I do support freedom of speech, but someone who is following the Biden’s administration’s narrative is not on the same page with me. Immediately after reading that this person would like to spend this money for military support as well, I became suspicious of the intentions of writing this article.
I wanted to dislike the article, but I can’t… I can only ‘like’ the article. This is for me a second reason to dislike Substack, as why should it not be possible to dislike an article ? I continued with reading some of the comments on this post and they were all written by warongers, perfectly following the mainstream and corporate media narrative, which is not any different from state controlled media in countries like Russia or China.
The reasons for the mainstream media to obediently follow the narrative of the governments is purely economic. Newspaper media is struggling, the number of newspapers being sold is still in decline, their online version of the newspaper has not enough subscribers to compensate for the declining printed version and more and more people are turning their back on the mainstream media as it cannot be trusted anymore. Alternatively people are selecting a number of independent media for their regular newsfeed on topics they are interested in. For TV media the problems are a bit less dramatic as it’s a cheaper medium to run, there is no printing involved and distribution of their broadcasts are much cheaper.
I used to trust the mainstream media, just like my father did: “It’s in the newspaper, so it must be true!” Last year I had a discussion about the degradation of the mainstream media quality with a friend. He kind of agreed with me, but he said that if something was written in a left oriented newspaper ánd in a right oriented newspaper, he was convinced that it must be true. I disagreed and said that it would be very likely that the source of both newspapers was exactly the same. More and more reporters are being laid off in order to reduce overhead, and really in deep research is becoming rare. Independent media seem to be more passionate and lack the 9-5 mentality and go the extra mile in their research.
The trend of mainstream media to lose readers and viewers to the smaller independent media is likely to continue. Don’t forget that most of the mainstream media are conglomerates of multiple newspaper and/or channels of which the ownership is being traded on the stock markets. As an example I would like to mention the New York Times, once one of the most prestigious newspapers in the world. The largest shareholder is…. Vanguard, which owns almost 10% of the shares. The second largest shareholder is ….Blackrock, owning almost 8% of the shares. And if I go down the list of shareholders, the 10th largest shareholder is State Street with around 3%. These three investment companies are basically just one company, so combined they own 21% of the shares.
Biden has given Blackrock the ‘honor’ to rebuild Ukraine, which can be extremely lucrative for Blackrock. Of course this will be done through loans with ‘conditions’ or maybe these conditions are not even necessary as the Ukrainians feel obliged to thank America and Blackrock for their support to help them get on their feet again. Maybe this ‘tactic’ came from WWII when America helped Europe with the Marshall help program; we - Europe - was so thankful that we were completely rolled over by America, by their way of living, by their culture, their movies etc.
Is it surprising that the NYT did not spend one single word on the report of Seymour Hersh’s report on who was responsible for the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines, knowing that Blackrock and it’s affiliated sister companies own 21% of the shares of the NYT. Seymour Hersh, Pulitzer Prize winner, former employee of the NYT who reported about the Watergate scandal, the misbehaviour of American soldiers in Vietnam, in Iraq and so forth. Not a single word, not even mentioning that Hersh had published a report on it. Not only the NYT did completely ignore it, as good as all mainstream and corporate media ignored this report. Oh yes, the NYT did mention it indirectly many months after the report was published, in an article about ‘eternal mysteries’, which was mainly about UFO’s. As one of the examples the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines was mentioned. How proud must the reporter who wrote this have felt to write this? Should it not always be the ultimate goal of any reporter or journalist to seek the truth?
Why do Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street invest in the NYT anyway? It’s clear that the price of the shares will not go through the roof and the dividend yield is just a lousy 0.9%. Call me a conspiracy theorist, but I would not be surprised that these three companies just keep a significant percentage of shares in the NYT just to have control over what is being published. How can the Biden administration have given the rebuild contract for Ukraine to Blackrock without a tender ? By the way: conspiracies exist, they are real and it seems that the FBI is spinning them all the time.
