The old Top 10 lists don’t matter anymore. That’s just the Top 10 stories they want you to remember. What matters now is the stories they want you to forget. Here’s a sampling from 2020 of the stories they tried to kill. Reprinted from my weekly column at Real Clear Politics.
Top 10 Suppressed News Stories of 2020
By Frank Miele
Back in the day, when I was managing editor at the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Mont., I enjoyed the end-of-year ritual of voting in the Associated Press’s poll of the Top 10 news stories.
When I started participating in the year 2000, my list would include many of the same stories that made the final AP list, although often with differences in ranking. But by the time I retired in 2018, my view of the news had sharply diverged from the AP’s consensus view. I’d become something of a gadfly by then, questioning what seemed to be an ever more transparent left-leaning bias in mainstream reporting.
That divergence was probably magnified by the 2016 candidacy of Donald Trump and the bright light he had shined on Fake News, but my disenchantment with my profession had been growing for years, as chronicled in my book “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?”
Still, there is no way that even as recently as four years ago I would have predicted just how abysmally irresponsible the media would become by 2020. Major newspapers are winning Pulitzer Prizes for blatantly false reporting on topics such as “Russian collusion.” Meanwhile, Silicon Valley oligarchs have appointed themselves censors — warning the American people not to read or watch anything that hasn’t been “fact-checked” by their hand-picked thought police.
The situation has gotten so bad that it’s no longer worth ranking the top news stories of the year because so little that is covered is news and so much that is news is written off as a “conspiracy theory.” That’s why I’m introducing Heartland Diary USA’s first annual presentation of “Last Chance to Wake Up and Smell the News They Tried to Kill.”
So here are five of the biggest suppressed stories of 2020. Pardon me if I don’t go into great detail on them, but the closer I get to the truth, the more likely that Google, Twitter and Facebook will bury my story, too.
5) Mysterious mutating lockdown: Has anyone ever figured out why it is OK for grocery store workers to remain on the job during an international pandemic while serving the needs of the entire population with no restrictions other than wearing a mask, but it is considered dangerous for gyms to open or, most ludicrously, for anyone other than spouses of governors to take their boat for a quick spin around the lake? It seems like the lockdown can turn into whatever is convenient for politicians. The uneven effects of the lockdown on different states and different sectors have resulted in the shift of trillions of dollars of capital in ways that will reshape the economy for generations to come, yet we are not supposed to talk about it.
4) Hydroxychloroquine: If you know anything about this drug, it is probably just that some guy in Arizona died after drinking it, and that maybe President Trump was somehow responsible. Well, as they say, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. The guy in Arizona didn’t take hydroxychloroquine; he took a fish tank cleaner called chloroquine phosphate. And Trump never told anyone to take either the drug or the fish-tank cleaner. He just said hydroxychloroquine was a promising treatment against COVID-19. Of course, as soon as he said it, the radical academic leftists who control medical journals and associations warned that hydroxychloroquine had no benefit as a treatment and was potentially dangerous even though it had been safely used against malaria and various immune deficiency syndromes for decades. Fortunately, many doctors who were familiar with the drug continued to use it as a therapy in the early stages of COVID infections, and many patients around the world have been spared the most dire effects of the virus as a result. Just don’t expect to read about it in the New York Times.
3) Trump’s vaccine victory: While the president has been painted as anti-science, it was his administration’s support that led to the fastest turnaround ever from viral discovery to viral vaccine — essentially less than a year. Even as House Democrats are poised to launch investigations into Trump’s supposed crimes against humanity for being president during the COVID crisis, lives are being saved as a result of his policies. Just don’t expect to read about it in the mainstream media, which spent much of 2020 ridiculing Trump for his prescient predictions that a vaccine would be developed by the end of the year.
2) Hunter Biden’s laptop: The ability to bury the Hunter Biden story throughout the 2020 presidential campaign ranks as one of the greatest victories in the history of propaganda. Hunter is the son of former Vice President Joe Biden, and his acknowledged history as a drug addict is now considered his strong suit. The Senate Homeland Security Committee found extensive evidence that Hunter has made hundreds of millions of dollars for the Biden family by selling access to his father, so when Hunter’s laptop turned up with first-person incriminating evidence, it was pretty obvious that Joe Biden had a lot of answer for. Except that the media never made him answer for anything. It preferred to rest on the bizarre assertion from 50 former U.S. intelligence officials that clear evidence of foreign collusion on Hunter’s laptop had all the earmarks of a “Russian disinformation” campaign. This was arrant nonsense. Reporters, read the emails!
1) Election fraud: It turned out that everything that happened in 2020 before Nov. 3 was just prologue for the greatest deception in American history — namely the hijacking of a presidential election through means both legal and illegal. Most importantly, every state that changed its election procedures without the consent of its legislature violated the U.S. Constitution. That’s why Republicans plan to challenge the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6. Whether you like Donald Trump or not should be irrelevant. You either follow the Constitution or you don’t. The fact that Trump increased his support in almost every demographic since 2016 and yet lost the election will apparently remain a mystery because the Democratic Party, with an assist from weak Republicans, is intent on continuing the charade that Joe Biden is a beloved elder statesman even more popular than Barack Obama.
I should add a disclaimer here. My list will not be your list. This is 2020, and there is plenty of suppression to go around. You are hereby invited to submit your own contributions in the comments section below. In the meantime, rounding out my Top 10, here are some of the other major stories suppressed in 2020:
The communist links to antifa and Black Lives Matter; how the Russian hoax was exposed but left unpunished; how the policies of a certain governor in New York state led to thousands of COVID deaths in nursing homes; the successful campaign of billionaire George Soros to subvert American jurisprudence by electing pro-criminal district attorneys; and of course the suppression of news itself.
Big Tech, take a bow!
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Heartland Diary is solely operated by Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell, Montana. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will SUBSCRIBE to www.HeartlandDiaryUSA.com by leaving your email address on the home page. Also please consider purchasing one of my books. They are available through the following Amazon links. My new book is “How We Got Here: The Left’s Assault on the Constitution” and is now available in paperback and as an eBook. It is 536 pages long and chock full of research on the progressive movement and the patriotic heroes who have fought against it. My earlier books include “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” and the “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy. Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” As an Amazon Associate, I may earn referral fees for qualifying purchases through links on my website. Also please subscribe to Heartland Diary on YouTube by clicking here for News Every Conservative Can Use.
Interesting how no genuine reporter wants to make the news but how each prefers to report on it and leave every story to the public’s whim. In this case, you have done exactly that. If the public takes up the gauntlet, you will be the cause. If not, the public will be far too gone to make any decision.
Thanks, Frank. You done good!
Mr. Miele, you must have hit a nerve with the strangely illiterate previous writer! Your data about the media suppression is accurate. I don’t know how anyone could object to your presentation of the facts. What is troubling is that stories about that fool woman who wrote the fictitious 1619 propaganda are indicative of an uneducated populace. What is troubling, aside from the “cover-up” of Hunter Biden and Joe Biden making nice-nice with the United States policies with and toward China, is that the word Democrats love to use, “cover-up,” has not been used as a sound bite by republicans toward their Democrat adversaries – “not” colleagues – they are adversaries. As Pelosi, Swalwell and Schiff would answer any question asked of them about the weather or the traffic was answered with “no one is above the law,” so, too, should the stupid republicans start saying that that Biden, kammalla, and the voter fraud. It is amazing how, let’s say careless rather than stupid, the Republicans are. Thune said Trump should give it up because”we have a lot on our agendas.” Don’t you think that “careless” senator from South Dakota should make putting Trump back in office the top of his agenda? Thune and his ilk have shown their true swamp colors. They tolerated President Trump until they could go back to “D.C. Business as Usual.”
Joe Morrisco
Bedminster NJ 07921
Thanks Joe. I had to delete the previous comment due to its vile nature.
From the standpoint of a sociologist, I desperately need to know just why people say these things. If we could understand that, we could address all of the dishonesties of the recent election. The loss of President Trump is one of the greatest tragedies of the new century. Why? It is a kind of cultural suicide. Some kids take knives and carve symbols deep in their skin. Others poke out each other’s eyes. The world needs one, single, usable explanation!
First, I’m glad Mr. Miele deleted the earlier message from an uneducated oaf, but for those reading my earlier message, they may not have known my reference had “nothing” to do with a really good observer, Jack Wiegman. I’ve read Mr. Wiegman’s comments in the past and he is solid.
Second, regarding the “Unreported News of 2020,” is it possible to expose the man or woman who sponsored the revolting “give aways” in that horrible spending bill? On the one hand the politicians cannot morally sign their names to a $2000 payment to needy Americans, but they are morally okay with $700 million dollars to Sudan, $10 million for gender studies in Pakistan, and other disgusting uses of MY money that I do not choose to spend my money on. Who were the sponsors? How much money did the lobbyists receive after their pet projects were put into this Bill?
My prayers are still with President Trump’s triumph over the voter fraud deceit allowed by the liberal media by the biggest fact that they never questioned the skewed numbers. A tragedy.
Joe Morrisco
Bedminster NJ 07921
Thanks for the clarification, Joe. Good point.