Mark Hemingway Says It’s WRONG for the Media to Lie Via Silence!
On the Suppression of the CV-19 Vax-Harm Story at The Federalist
Scruples vary and judgments get tough in 21st century politics, and so it was like getting splashed with cold water on a warm stuffy day to read Mark Hemingway, the book editor and writer for The Federalist website, acting as if it was wrong for most of major media to have suppressed the story about our President’s mental incompetency.
Sure, it was a tad Old Testament, but here’s the core of it:
The only reason anyone ever believed Biden was up to the job is that they were lied to, even though most Americans have always understood Biden has been exhibiting signs of dementia before he ever became president. At this point, it’s impossible to deny that Democrats and their media allies have betrayed and endangered America by spending the last few years lying to us about Biden’s age-related mental competency.
Yes, I know, he slipped the idea of betrayal in there also, but let’s let him continue:
…Following the debate, at least three of their [The New York Times’] op-ed columnists called for Biden to withdraw, and the paper has run an official editorial telling him to bow out. The dwindling number of people who still trust legacy media outlets such as the Times will no doubt insist their willingness to call out Joe’s problems is a sign of their integrity. However, this would only be a sign of integrity if they called for him to drop out after it became obvious Biden was senile, and that happened years ago. The about-face occurred only after they started to panic that he couldn’t win reelection.
It didn’t have to be this way. All Democrat leaders and the media had to do was not be so craven in their desire to cling to power. In fact, had they been honest about how obvious Biden’s condition was a year ago, they might have a candidate who is winning the election.
Instead, they sowed distrust with citizens, empowered enemies who are taking advantage of an enfeebled leader, and brought the country to the brink of domestic turmoil. And still, they have no intention of accepting responsibility for what they’ve done.
They’re not actually upset to have just discovered the man in charge of our nuclear weapons is senile — they’re upset they can’t continue to hide this fact from you any longer.
Well, there’s something to this. This whole pretend-Biden’s-okay tact really had become so ridiculous, even by a year ago, and we’re all just so sick of it, that this binary them-and-you and alarmist danger-to-the-country rhetoric might be what’s needed to restore proper balance.
But of course, Hemingway didn’t mean to assert that the media suppressing a major story is categorically wrong.
How could he?
For he knows that an even bigger story than our president being mentally too sickened to serve, is that about the experimental mRNA Covid-19 meds sickening millions of Americans and killing hundreds of thousands. And he knows this story has been and is being suppressed. Suppressed by himself, The Federalist, and almost all conservatives who count.
He knows that by the beginning of 2022, claims of massive harms and deaths from the new shots had become widespread in alternative media spaces, and that difficult-to-refute expert witnesses, such as that autopsy doctor in Germany, and that embalmer in Alabama, had come forward in support of them. He knows that for two-and-half-years, then, no major media have covered those and scores of similar claims, never even presenting them as something unconfirmed but needing to be investigated, and well after the point when the evidence suggested they had a duty to. (I am speaking here in the manner of Hemingway’s rhetorical stance, which pretends to understand journalistic “duty” according to schoolbook definitions.) He knows that all major conservative-branded media outlets have joined in the suppression of this story, and most minor media outlets run by conservatives also.
Indeed, were he to look back at his own writings from 2022 on, he’d see that though he’s written about 50 current-events-focused pieces for The Federalist, none made any mention of the possibility that hundreds of thousands or even millions (world-wide) were being killed by the shots. Hemingway wrote on a wide variety of topics, and thus could plausibly be held to have had a responsibility on this one. In any case, if he had been concerned by the general lack of such pieces at The Federalist, he could have pushed for them—he is the book editor, and the husband of the editor-in-chief, Mollie Hemingway.
The fact that no such acts of perfectionistic moral posturing on this issue can be attributed to him means that he must recognize what most sensible media figures, whether conservative, moderate, or liberal, do also: it is in the public’s interest that the suppression of the CV-19 vax-death story continue.
Now Hemingway is surely aware that some future historians are going to be pretty unkind about this, equating his kind of journalists’ silence on this topic with shameful ones of the past, such as that which occurred regarding the Holodomor famine, the other which occurred regarding the Holocaust itself during its first couple of years, before the allied armies actually captured the death-camps, or, in a different key of media suppression, the near-silence--and over seventy years!--about the tens of millions of lesser injustices required to maintain the American system of segregation (lesser because number of outright murders and needless deaths involved was quite low compared to Stalin’s and Hitler’s crimes against humanity). But he can take solid comfort in the fact that most of the historians and scholars who write or who recommend such moralistic books about the past are themselves silent on this millions-killed Disaster of our own time. Like Hemingway, they know what counts as career-savvy, even in those conservative scholarly circles which pronounce loyalty to “principles,” or which dwell on past capitulations to totalitarian propaganda. (Ah, the past! Even I know what a pleasure it can be in that realm to gravely tush-tush along with the likes of Solzhenitsyn, Besançon, Frankl, or Taylor & Scott.) For the historians and scholars know that it would have been irresponsible for themselves, or for their kinds of pundits, to have become interested in the CV-19 vax-harms claims in the 2021-2022 period, let alone for the pundits to have published pieces on them, given the anti-vax flavor which all the right-minded assigned to the dissident voices, that is, given the bad provenance of the harm-claims.
For more-complicated and more-varied reasons, responsible pundits like Hemingway also understood, circa 2023-2024, that even though there had been no thorough and data-focused refutations of the major claims of the dissident experts, such that the cranks turned out to be at least somewhat right (well…largely right), it was best to continue the suppression of the story. He is among those conservative pundits, after all, who want to support Trump’s prospects, and The Donald still stands by “warp speed.” But what probably most matters to Hemingway is the overall judgment, namely, that it wouldn’t have been good for the public to have learned in 2023, or now in 2024--and the same will apply going forward, year in and year out--that its experts, including its niche conservative ones, made a massively wrong call on the CV-19-vax-harm issue in 2021 and 2022.
It couldn’t have done any good, for example, for citizens to learn that someone like “Dr.” Jane Ruby, who associated with persons who had worked for Alex Jones, was nearly the only person to investigate and publicize the fact (now-established-by-hundreds-of-expert-witnesses) that embalmers were finding novel clot-structures in many of the deceased, beginning in the spring of 2021. As Hemingway knows, it is better to pretend that that never happened, and that the fact about the clots is not a fact, even though people are still dying from them, and every delay of mainstream reporting on them further hinders and delays desperately needed research.
Now, as to all of these dissident claims on the CV-19-vax-harms, there will be some awkward moments, sure, but when you can’t cast aspersions on the reputations of the dissidents and the obsessives who link to them, what you can do is say “I didn’t know about that!” And of course, if you were smart, you made it so you couldn’t have known, such that your saying that is really 70% honest, which is as high a degree of honesty as anyone has a right to expect.
And The Federalist’s editors were smarties indeed about all this. For in addition to the standard cleverness, they employed one writer, one Shawn Fleetwood, who they from time to time allowed to report niblets of the story, little factoids indicating there may have been some number of deaths and harms from the injections, but always some never specifically-estimated number, and always couched in the safe zone of reporting on an official government report, such as from the Florida surgeon general.
Thus, if the shit ever really hits the fan on this CV-19-vax thing the way it now is with Biden’s competency, they can say “Hey, we let you know about it! See our Fleetwood pieces!” Whether this CYA, which The Federalist can hold to if the Suppression collapses but which meantime keeps them in respectable conservative graces for as long as it doesn’t, was orchestrated by Mollie or Mark, or another editor, you can tell they’re pros over there!
The point is that Hemingway knows that sometimes it is necessary for the media to refuse to cover a story, to pretend, in essence, that some basic aspect of our reality isn’t.
I think he knows that what the virtue-signalers will now pronounce the “lies of omission” about Biden’s condition, lies committed by most media, were initially necessary for the management of our democracy. He knows at bottom that they constituted fair-play within our two-party system--Republican journos would have done the same had their party elected a dementia-sufferer, after all. The problem in the Biden case became the way the re-framing of reality became clung to after any plausibility for it had passed. Hemmingway’s mind is fuzzy about this key distinction of timing, however, and thus, his confusion makes his recourse to the rhetoric of categorical honesty seem all the more sincere.
That rhetoric would have us revert to the child’s lesson that whenever one “tells one lie, one winds up telling another and another,” forgetting that the essence of politics is narrative, and the essence of political prudence is knowing when to shift the story.
Thus, while it’s understandable to be refreshed by the high-ground feel of Hemingway’s editorial, readers should remember that his acting as if a mendacious suppression of a major news story is never justified is ultimately irresponsible. He’s inviting us to return to the puerile certainties of catechized children. Or more precisely, to selectively return to them. Being too much the partisan, he’s making no room for the fact that sometimes, these reality-framing operations fall apart, given the many persons involved. Being too much the rhetorician, he’s also getting caught up in his own argument, implying that what became situationally wrong in one case would always be wrong. It’s a train-wreck of reasoning, and he hasn’t taken stock of what would happen to himself, his wife, and many of the current writers and editors for The Federalist if this moralistic “logic” were applied to their own cases.
APPENDIX I: The Suppression Committed by The Federalist.
Obviously, the cynical voice of the above is not mine own, nor do I think that Hemingway is generally unethical the way the imagined writer assumes, but sadly, the claims about the Covid/Vax-Disaster, and the media suppression of those claims, are not part of the satire.
And alas, neither is this fact: going back over the last year and a half of the approximately 4,958 articles The Federalist published from January 2023 through June 2024, I have learned there was not a one which tried to investigate whether the claims that harms and deaths from the CV-19 vaxxes are widespread are credible. No interviews of Steve Kirsch, Jessica Rose, John Campbell, Midwestern Doctor, Bill Rice Jr., Ryan Cole, or Jane Ruby. No review of Ed Dowd’s numbers, no double-check follow-up on the victims portrayed in Anecdotals. No attempts to frame a debate, or a ‘claim v. counter-claim’ piece, between an expert like Peter McCullough and another like Peter Hotez. No comparison of different estimates of the URF for VAERS, of different theories for the “Hirschman clots,” etc.
That is, the key factual claim, that a millions-killed unnatural Disaster has been unfolding, has not once been forthrightly discussed by The Federalist. Worse, in almost every case, the very names of the dissident experts have been screened-off from Federalist-readers’ notice. This is suppression. And at this point in the unfolding of the story, three and a-half years after the carnage began, it cannot be attributed to an “innocent ignorance” of the facts.
Now, there were three Federalist pieces over this period which while not rising to the level of attempts to analyze whether a Disaster was upon us, did feature significant paragraphs correctly claiming that evidence of widespread deaths and injuries existed, and linking to some of this evidence. These were the pieces by one-time Federalist contributor Susan D. Harris on 2/1/23, and two by a long-time contributor Georgi Boorman, on 8/18/23 and 1/5/23—see Appendix III for more on Boorman.
Also, there were three pieces, two of them by one-time contributors, which made a statement or two suggesting that there had been quite a few adverse events or deaths, but with no specific enumeration. See the pieces by Adrian Gaty, 8/8/23; Forrest Baker, 7/13/23; and Mark Rock, 2/20/23.
There have also been a handful of pieces which vaguely indicated, either in an extremely quick one-sentence way, or by means of a “this other person said it” method, that that some smart people think that the CV-19 vaxxes might be harmful. See the 7/15/23 and 6/20/23 pieces by Evita Duffy-Alfonso, the 11/30/23 one by Jordan Boyd, the 7/31/23 one by Tristan Justice, and the 3/25/24 one by Joy Pullman.
It should be said that Pullman is doing good work on the “Censorship Complex” issue, and not covering over the fact that CV-19-vax-opponents are the Complex’s top targets; it should also be noted to its credit that The Federalist did publish a piece this year about the second-most shocking aspect of the whole Covid/Vax Disaster, the near-murderous character of the mandated hospital protocols.
I have not yet systematically looked into The Federalists’ behavior during the key year of 2022, except for the cases of Boorman and Fleetwood, so for all I know, the website could have had a brief flurry of non-Boorman and non-Fleetwood stories on the topic early on, and then dropped its focus upon it. Doubtful.
I will try to do the similar counting for 2022, and hope to report my results in the comments here soon. Needless to say, it is laborious work—I check any story with the slightest inkling of a Covid-vax angle, including many that make no specific mention of the topic in the headline. Perhaps I have missed a relevant story or two, but there is likely no person in the world, I doubt even at The Federalist, who has done the kind of survey analysis of their output which I have.
So let’s sum-up. For the period in question, I have already noted that there were 11 pieces which provided at least some minimal hint that the CV-19 vaccines did not merely have efficacy issues, but might be injuring and killing significant numbers of persons. In a moment, I am going to add 9 Shawn Fleetwood pieces which at minimum do that also, giving us 20 hinting-at-a-Disaster pieces out of nearly 5,000. That amounts to about 4/10ths of a percent of their output. 00.4% percent.
My claim has long been that the CV-19 vax-harm story deserves to regarded as the Story of the Century. The dissidents like myself claim, at a minimum, that we are talking hundreds of thousands of deaths in the USA, and millions world-wide; injury numbers 3-15 times higher than that; and some damage to birth-rates also.
How could we conclude that a website almost entirely devoted to current-events punditry and reporting was not suppressing this story, when it:
--never provided a piece mapping out the larger debate and picture,
--never featured discussion of the actual numbers involved (with the partial exception of a single Boorman piece)
---when all was said and done, had only published pieces that mentioned the possibility of CV-19 vax harms, around 20 times out of 5,000!
If that doesn’t constitute suppression, what could?
Now I suppose some might say, “Look, Carl, you did find your evidence that they didn’t suppress! You’ve just given it to us in these pieces which made some mention of the harms, and 3 of them pretty thoroughly. So this platform wasn’t totally silent. Are you really going to insist that a platform rise to some percentage level of stories about the vax-harm part of the Disaster, or get accused of Suppression?”
Well, now that you mention it, that’s not a bad rubric!
Let’s say this—any mainly-news and news-punditry platform serious about its duty to report on a truly blockbuster story, will devote at least 2% of its content to this, one out of 50 pieces, and will feature mere mentions of the topic in at least 5% of its pieces.
That seems reasonable. And four-tenths of a percent doesn’t even come close! Nor is not being totally silent when you’ve published 5,000 pieces much of an accomplishment.
I judge, then, that the editors and bosses of The Federalist are engaged in the suppression. Almost as much as those at Fox News are, at CNBC, etc. It is difficult to come to such a conclusion about a platform so otherwise excellent, so otherwise brave and fighting all the vital fights, but are they giving us much of a choice? And beyond what I blame the editors for, I will add that many of its regular writers are becoming more and more complicit in this quiet betrayal of elementary principles, the longer they refuse to demand an end to it.
We ought to be able to take a sincerely-meant editorial from Mark Hemingway, one with a common-sense message against media lying by means of omission, seriously.
But we cannot.
I fear that is going to become the story of much of conservatism.
APPENDIX II: the Shawn Fleetwood Exception
There is one writer and reporter at The Federalist who regularly writes stories which deal with lingering aspects of ‘Covid despotism,’ and not a few of them—nine, during the period monitored--at least touch upon the CV-19 vax-harm story. Now many of them do so in the limited ways I’ve described, just a vague sentence or two merely implying the harms are extensive, but others of them go a bit further, these ones often taking the tact of Fleetwood not speaking in his own voice, but quoting extensively from official reports from governments or official organizations. Here’s all of these from the 2023-2024 period: 1) 6/24/24 2) 6/18/24 3) 5/6/24 4) 1/3/24 5) 6/29/23 6) 4/13/23 7) 3/30/23 8) 2/9/23 9) 1/3/23. Probably the most explicit of these is 5), titled “By Refusing To Acknowledge The Jab’s Risks, Trump Helps The Covid Cult Evade Accountability.” It is hot-potatoes stuff, but even the title shows you Fleetwood isn’t going to try to provide a summary sketch of the debate about what I above call “the key factual claim, that a millions-harmed-and-killed unnatural Disaster has been unfolding.”
Fleetwood’s doggedness on all this suggests he’s deeply concerned about it. So, what accounts for the sense of restraint, and of punches-pulled, in all of these pieces? If it’s merely care to get the story right, why are there no direct quotes from the dissident experts themselves, but only from official reports or court documents?
I think we have to conclude it’s pressure on the staff writer from the editors. They’re the ones who likely laid down the rule of “no conversations with or quotations of dissidents.” I can’t read minds so I’m not sure, of course. I’d guess some questionable deference to the advice of lawyers is also involved.
As for whether we should salute Fleetwood for getting as much CV-19-vax-harm content into The Federalist as possible to with such presumably resistant editors, or urge him to quit working with them, as an act of public protest against their overall suppression, I don’t know. I leave it to him and his conscience about what he ought to do, but I fear that he is mostly serving to provide cover for the editors if the storm ever breaks. And, against the charges I’m making.
APPENDIX III: the Georgi Boorman Exception
Georgi Boorman hasn’t written for The Federalist since January, but she’s still listed on their site as a “Senior Contributor.” Whether she’s still on board or not, she’s been like Fleetwood in having written on Covid-despotism issues more than most contributors, if not as prolifically as him. She’s also unlike him in seldom appearing to pull punches.
In her August 2023 piece, “Trump Doesn’t Deserve A Second Term For How He Mismanaged Covid,” she addresses, and with quick precision, what any serious piece on the story must: the VAERS numbers, and the all-cause-mortality numbers. Fleetwood’s pieces never touch those topics, I think because doing so would lead the reader to grasp the actual scope of the story.
The same pattern is seen in the other piece of hers we counted, on a Rasmussen Reports poll in January of 2023, “Poll: 1 In 4 Americans Thinks Someone They Know May Have Died Due To Covid Shot.” If you look back at her archive, you find similarly up-to-date digestions of dissident evidence in three pieces she wrote during the fall of ’22. But you’ll notice two disturbing things: 1) she was never allowed to really reflect on, to really develop, the implications of the information she was conveying, 2) her last piece on this was nearly a year ago, and if she’s done at The Federalist, it may wind up her last piece for them on the topic.
You could say the essence of my beef is that the editors did not follow Boorman’s lead. They deserve some credit for publishing her work at the time, and continued credit for publishing Fleetwood, but their overall pattern is, for the reasons I’ve given above, one of suppression.
I agree with your analysis of the Federalist obvious shortcoming in not covering jab injuries. If the accounts WE read on substack are erroneous, the Mollie/Mark team could at least attempt to debunk or unravel them. Omission is weak. The Federalist has conservative journalistic cache which should be leveraged to expose the crap!
😉
I can send this to my friends Nathaniel and Joy Pullman if you like. Joy is the executive editor for the Federalist, and she might be able to do something about it.
https://thefederalist.com/author/joy-pullmann/