The Highwire with Del Bigtree - FALL OF MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Episode Date: July 8, 2023

Several mainstream media outlets have been forced to make drastic staff cuts due to low ratings and fire high level employees due to misconduct. In its place has risen a vastly unique array of citizen journalists grabbing enormous market share and viewers from the defunct mainstream media apparatus . Seeing the trend, mainstream rejects such as Chris Cuomo have abandoned ship to infiltrate the ‘alternative’ space hoping the public will forget their past.Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

At the high wire, we've worked to maintain the highest standard of transparency and integrity and evidence-based investigative journalism. Something that's very hard to do in this landscape today. One of the ways we do that is we put the power of this information that we have directly from the source as we find it into the viewer's hands. They can get that every Monday when they sign up for our newsletter. They get all the sources, all the documents. And this is called the High Wire Protocol. And this is something we really pride ourselves on here. And we have lots of core values, five of them.

particularly the ones I want to focus on, again, integrity, independence, transparency, accountability. Why am I talking about this? Well, currently, we are in the middle of, I would describe this as a century defining shift in the media landscape. And it's no less than that. We brought to you just a couple weeks ago how Vice was shutting down. And I'm going to start going through what this means for the viewers. Vice Media prepares to file for bankruptcy. And that was the headline a Wall Street Journal. And from there, we keep going. LA Times. They're announcing now, Los Angeles Times announces 74 job cuts due to economic challenges. Wonder why they started making cuts. Could it be reporting that looked a little bit like this during COVID? This is mocking anti-vaxxers,

COVID deaths is ghoulish, yes, but may be necessary. Okay. You know, I don't want to revel in someone losing their job, but I mean, it's a time has come if you're going to start keeping. talking like that with all the evidence that's out there but looking at the whole industry and not just focusing on one or the other the media industry itself is losing record numbers this is the headline of axios record number of media job cuts so far in 2023 so the media industry has announced over 17 000 jobs are being cut this year wow this is making it the highest year-to-date level of cuts on record so this is what we're in the middle of right now and there's a titanic shift of really the power base here the center of gravity of of of of of of of of of or

of media, of trust, of integrity. And one of the, you know, if you could really point to looking back, maybe, you know, 10 years from now, you look back and go, what was the one symbolic defining example of where we're gonna call it legacy media, mainstream media? That would probably be CNN. CNN is kind of like the California of legacy media.

How CNN goes is how the rest of the mainstream media goes because it's, it commands such a poll, such a, you know, such a funding base. We saw the writing on the wall at the end of 20, And this is what the headlines started looking like there. And we really perk their ears up. CNN makes massive staff cuts as news industry prepares for a dark winter. Maybe that's a dark winter Biden was talking about it.

It didn't have to do with us. It had to do with the media, the mouthpiece there. And then we started seeing people drop one by one. So the really one of the head anchors there, Chris Cuomo. He was one of their lead anchors, really one of the biggest voices there at CNN during the entire pandemic response. A lot of stuff happening that he was reporting. according on inaccurately, CNN fires, anchor Chris Cuomo over role in brother ex-governor's sex scandal. That's out of Reuters.

But then it starts, you know, we talk about integrity in a newsroom. Then it starts getting kind of dark. So CNN starts going down the wrong path. So Cuomo's out. Now is producer. Chris Cuomo, CNN producer, John Griffin, charged with luring girls. And I'm going to keep going on these headlines. Tell me if you can see a pattern.

Second CNN producer, a senior staffer is under criminal investigation involving juvenile out victims. This was the producer for Jake Tapper. Another main voice at CNN there. So what they do, they brought in another producer for Jake Tapper. And lo and behold, golden boy producer for CNN, Jake Tapper, this is the new guy, fired after inappropriate relationship with staffer. And so you look at these headlines and you say, well, that's interesting because that guy must have been following the example of the former president who had to step down. And that was Jeff Zucker. And he stepped down just about a year, over a year ago. CNN President Zucker resigns after a relationship with colleague.

That's out of Politico. And so what we're talking about here, really, besides integrity, is we're going deeper here. As this shift happens, and people are choosing the media that they decide to give their attention to, we need to introduce the idea of a moral compass. We need to talk about the quality of people and your organization and the effect that quality has on information. because integrity matters. And so we have a point here now where we enter Chris Lick. He's the executive producer at the late show with Stephen Colbert of a year ago. He left.

He goes into CNN to replace Zucker as the head there. And he was, he's trying to bring some sort of balance. And you kind of laugh. You know, our audience probably laughs. It says balance coming from Stephen Colbert. But that was really what he came in to do. He tried to give CNN some balance in this space because it's a really bad space they were in. And he's out.

well. This is the headlines recently. Chris Lick is out at CNN after centrist journalism, Trump Town Hall and tanked ratings. And you go into this article and he says, Lick was only in charge for one year, but he made several major and terrible decisions, including that CNN would attempt a more neutral, nonpartisan approach to news coverage. What a terrible decision. Right. I mean, I've been watching that too. And frankly, I was thinking, wow, CNN might actually move to the middle where most of America is at. And then you see he's getting fired. I mean, obviously they had some stumbles in that direction, but I mean, it just seems like we have just extremists on both sides. You know, you just got Fox and MSNBC on two different sides.

It just seems like a lot of America is sort of left in this middle space saying, you know, I'm kind of a little bit of both. Why is there no one here for me? Exactly. And this was the problem. This is the problem with censorship. The censorship we've endured over the last, especially during COVID for three years. It polarizes the conversation so far that this is. This is a problem. This is what you get. And so it's it's outlets like ours. It's long format podcast where people really can have an open debate and discussion that are trying to relink, trying to square these two ends that are, that have been pulled apart by really this the censorship that's been going on. And we go back to the article, how bad was Chris Lick? Well, it says here in the article during COVID. And this is a serious

article. Lick also believed officials may have overcounted the numbers of COVID-19 deaths. And that it is hard to have difficult conversations without being demonized or labeled. I guess that's a that's a really bad thing. Yeah. But what we're really looking at now and this is this is really the point I want to get to you for the audience. We're the mainstream, you know, whatever you want to call them, legacy media, mainstream media, they're fallen and they're beginning to infiltrate what was once called the alternative media. What was once called people that didn't have corporate backing. They're attempting to look like, you know, dare I say us, look like regular people and to kind of just forget all that whole mainstream media thing happened and the lies and the inaccurate reporting. And so we bring in now the next version of this.

So we have a group called News Nation. Now News Nation has been around for a while, but it hasn't been called News Nation. So the history, it started as a superstation out of Chicago, at the Chicago market, WGN, it changed its name to WGN America. But then Next Star Media purchased this super station out of that Chicago market for $4.1 billion in 2019. Billion with a B? 4.1 billion, correct. Wow. Okay.

Yeah. And this is, you know, this is shocking. That's it. High wires for sale. But this is, people should understand this because where I'm going to go with this is really important now. So in 2019, okay, so Next Star comes in. They're the new owners. And they also own the Hill.

This is a large conglomerate media group. And they put out, they commissioned a survey because that was a cable news organization. And they commissioned a survey to their viewers and their listeners and their watchers. And they said, what do you want to see in a news station? And they said basically the audiences were tired of biased-leaning opinion-based news programs. So what they did was they started this News Nation group. And we can see here what type of profits Next Star Media Group is pulling in. This is from their press release.

Next Star Media Group reports record first. quarter net revenue of 1.26 billion. This is a gigantic organization and they're flying under the radar. What's one of the first things they do when they start their news organization? They throw out their casting hook and they reach out and grab Chris Cuomo. Shamed X CNN host an anchor. Chris Cuomo to host a prime time show for News Nation. So now they have somebody. But apparently that didn't go too well and the people saw through that pretty quick because Chris Cuomo allegedly was complaining about his time slot because the viewership wasn't up. This is New York Post.

Of course, Cromwell Demands new time slot at News Nation as rankings tank sources. So they don't want to see that. They bring in Elizabeth Vargas. She joined. She was a former ABC news anchor. So again, they're stacking it with these, you know, dare I say, like legacy media rejects. And they're packing them in here. And then we have another, you know, another data point here.

We'll take a break from News Nation for a second. And we have a woman named Crystal Ball, with people have seen her recently. She's in breaking points. that's her organization, but she came from MSNBC. That was her organization. And this was some of the headlines, you know, leading up to her switch to the alternative, let's say. MSNBC cancels the cycle, Abby Huntsman and Crystal Ball out.

She then went to the Hill, Crystal Ball and Sajar and Jetty depart the Hill, start independent podcast. That podcast was breaking points. I was in 2021. And notice the date and the timing on this, 2019, 2020, 2020, 2021. COVID, you know, I've said it before. COVID killed the media, the mainstream media. everyone was jumping ship here, trying to start their own thing.

And the problem is, I'm still seeing slanted coverage on some of the most important topics similar to how the mainstream covered them. And it's like the legacy media outlets like CNN handled them the same way at some of these topics as these new alternative media outlets or whatever we're going to call them now because we're in a new space. We don't really know what to call them. So what's different? Okay, they get to live stream on YouTube.

They have some Spotify channels. All right. That makes them look different to the audience. that makes them look edgy. I guess one of the good things is they can have guests on that their former employers wouldn't let them have on. So they can have conversations with guests that we've been talking to. They can jump over there and have the conversations as well.

So I think that's really, really good in that space. But now let's talk about kind of like the big ship that's moving through this whole thing. And that's Tucker Carlson, formerly a Fox. And watching Tucker Carlson, you could see his trajectory was different than like a Chris Cuomo, who, you know, just was Chris Cuomo. until he was out from CNN, found a new place to go back to Chris Cuomo. But Tucker Carlson had a trajectory, and his stories were different. They're showed kind of, you know, more of an analysis, maybe some braver news reporting for the mainstream. And so his first episode, he went to Twitter, Elon Musk,

he had a situation to deal with Elon Musk, and he started streaming his show live from Twitter, directly out on the platform itself. So no more Fox News, directly from Twitter. This was really a ground banking thing. First episode of Tucker on Twitter. That's more than 70 million views. And then what happens now, he's racking up millions and millions of views. And, you know, a lot of people will say, well, those aren't the same as the regular media accounting views. And that's true because Twitter counts them a little different. The reporting, the Nielsen reporting, and the other news rankings when they talk about Fox News and CNN, they take a snapshot of a time frame and they show how many people watch during that time frame. For Twitter, you know, arguably

it's how many people scrolled over that and saw that post. So the counting is a little higher, but nonetheless, this marks a huge deviation and a huge audience share. Eyeballs are on him. And Fox doesn't like that too much. So Fox gave him a cease and desist order. So we have really one of the first big showdowns here as the legacy media is trying to claw back some of that audience through a legal means. So that's the report. Seas and desist letter. Tucker Carlson said he's not going to stop his show. His lawyers are backing him 100 percent here. that's you know that's in a nutshell we have so many people in these spaces now obviously we have the joe rogans we have the daily wire has a lots of people as well we have obviously the high wire

here with the health-based journalism america's kind of health watchdog is what we've been throughout covid as well so this media landscape is really shifting and as far as the old the old media is concerned i'll call them the old media i'm not sure where they're going to go but it looks like a lot of their talent is seeing the writing on the wall and is jumping in to start to look like, you know, like we look, like normal people look. But it's about the messaging. You have to pay attention to information about the messaging, the integrity, the transparency, and the accountability. And that's where that high wire protocol comes in. That's why it's really important. And, you know, I'm very proud of that highware protocol, the team. We design that and we put that out there.

And that's something that we really need to hang our hat on because there's really no organization that's doing that. I agree. You know, and, you know, when we think about all of this, you know, that's happening, it's amazing to think that they got terrible ratings on television, that they think they can come and do the same whitewashed, boring, you know, propaganda on the internet and somehow because they have, you know, cell phone shooting instead of real studio cameras is something that it gives them a different look. It'll be interesting to see how Tucker, you know, fares here. And he's, of course, a little different. He got fired, I think, at the top of his game. And that's why they're suing trying to stop him from taking, you know, sort of that little bit more honest messaging to the Internet.

So very, very interesting. For those of you that don't know what the High Wire Protocol is, it's just our commitment to transparency. We provide you with all the evidence. Everything you watch on this show is available to put in your hands. Of course, we only get to pull one paragraph or a sentence or a headline. So you should be asking yourself naturally, well, what do the rest of the articles say? What are the rest of that science study, peer-reviewed studies say? Well, we put the entire thing in your hands.

We want you testing us. We want you making sure that we're getting it right. And all you have to do to be a part of getting all that evidence is your hand is just go further down the page on the highwire.com here and just put your email right there in and subscribe. That lets you know everything we're up to. You'll be the first to hear about our legal wins when we win them. And you'll get, you know, something that looks just like this. Literally everything we talk about on the show this week will be in your hands by Monday. So you can say, hey, I want to look deeper into one of the subjects that we were covering.

And also, when you go and talk to your friends, you're not stuck saying, you know, Del Bingtree on the High Wire said. You can actually say, no, here's what this CDC study actually said. You should try it. It's a great party trick blows people's minds. Anyway, that's what the High Wire protocol is all about. We're demanding that every other news agency do the same. Show us your work. We all did that in high school, right?

Show us your work. Where's your information coming from? You said an expert says where's that expert's information coming from? Where's the studies? Where's the graphs? If anyone had demanded this during COVID, maybe these news agencies wouldn't have gotten away with forcing us all into hiding. All right, just amazing to see how this is all shifting. Of course, we're growing every day, and I just want to thank all of you that are out there that have shifted your addiction from the television over to the internet and joining us now on the high wire. Thank you to, for all the millions around the world that are making us such a big hit here.

Right. And you know, at the top of the show, you showed Aldi, which is the supermarket. It was a video in the UK of a person going in there. And it noticed there was digital gatekeeping at the front of the store before you can even go in. And then also when you leave the store as you go out, you have to swipe your iPhone.

That's that digital ID. And this is a part of a concerning trend that's been going on. We'd be reporting on this for a while now. We really saw it during COVID. And the WHO is at the center of this or one of the really big players in this. And they have something called the pandemic treaty. We've reported on this before, but this is some of the headlines just recently out of America.

Biden's pandemic treaty would surrender power to WHO bureaucrats, House rep warns. This is obviously one of the big issues here is they're going to say, you know, we did it wrong this time. Next time we'll do it right. And the European Union's vaccine passport network during COVID, what they rolled out, what they really did. built out, the green passes in Italy and everything. That was one of the strictest outside China in order to move around in order to even enter stores, shopping, restaurants. You had to scan

these passes and these COVID passes show you were vaccinated. And so what's happening now is we thought COVID was over. We thought, okay, the digital vaccine passport has died. We really, we won. But the WHO has just made a really concerning announcement. Take a listen. All right. While the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, is now over. Investments in digital infrastructure remain an important resource for health systems and for economies and societies at large.

Like many countries, the European Union made significant investments in COVID-19 certificates to help people move around as safely as possible during the pandemic. The European Union's certification system was used by all 27 years. member states and more than 50 other countries. Building on the success of the EU system, WHO is proud today to launch the Global Digital Health

Certification Network. So thank you so much to European Union for the excellent certification system that you have transferred to us and we have the chance to build on it. WHO will begin operations of the network today with the existing COVID-19 certificate as a global public good. Soon after, we will expand this infrastructure by incorporating other use, such as a digitized international certificate of vaccination, routine immunization cards, and international patient summaries. God, I wish these people would just go back to trying to like,

mosquito-borne illnesses in Africa and leave the rest of us alone. I mean, I just, you know, whoever thought we would be living in a time where the WHO is starting to say what the United States of America or England or France is going to do. This is absurd. And what you've seen, you know, we've talked about. This is like Bill Gates is one of the top funders there. I'm sure he funds these, you know, vaccine passports and QR codes

that are going to let us in and out of places. Man, we are getting, we're being attacked from a, very weird position and that's a lot of what we're reporting here that's all i mean i'm just like watching this mind-blown that we're seeing ourselves in this position and that was really a landmark speech by tejuros there because he laid it all out he was basically saying look this whole infrastructure that the e-u built let's let's not just throw that away let's build upon that let's keep moving with that even though COVID's over we're still going to use that and he said it was a great success it was a great success. You know, we've reported over how bad the technology was, but not only that,

people revolted in most of those countries because of the lockdowns, because of the strict digital access because they couldn't live their lives. I don't know if that was a success. I think I have to disagree with them, but we go into the, you know, just so people really understand this, we go into the press release, the digital health landmark digital health initiative that the EU and the WHO are collaborating on here. And it says in June of 2023, WHA will take up the European Union system of digital COVID-19 certification to establish a global system that will help facilitate global mobility and protect citizens across the world from ongoing and future health threats. So we see this in the United States. People say, well, you know, that WHO pandemic treaty is just a conspiracy theory.

It's not going to do anything to the sovereignty of the United States. It's going to change nothing, really. But that's not true because behind the scenes, it's already building built out. The agreements are already being made. So we have in 2022, the Biden at the G20, signed on to this. World leaders signed declaration to adopt vaccine passports for international travel. That was Biden signing on to that as well. So we have this. And it's already starting to roll out through the corporations. A lot of times this is how we see it coming. We see, you know, something that gets very little media attention, something that was a president or a leader signs onto, and then you hear nothing about it. And all of a sudden you see these corporations come in

and start building out this infrastructure. You go, that's funny. I thought that was, you know, something that happened three or four years ago. It's not even important anymore. And so you see Apple now. Apple's TSA-approved digital ID is now live in four states, coming soon to many more. So this is TSA approved. So are you going to travel without this? Then why is this a problem?

Ultimately, there's only two ways this is going to go for the public. They're going to gate keep you on your vaccine status, or they're going to gate keep you on your social credit, or your carbon credit score or social credit score. But carbon credit, how much, you know, carbon you're giving off and through your purchases and track you with that. And that's how these things will be gate kept.

And then the vaccine piece specifically, that's been in the works as well. Tony Blair says this. This was out of one of the organizations he was talking at. Tony Blair calls for digital libraries to track vaccines. You need the data you need to know. So this is not just for you.

It's for everybody else that needs to do that. And of course we have, again, that Aldi, just give you some background on that. We see the companies building out. The video that you showed at the top of the show about all the, kind of gatekeeping at the front and back of the store. Can't go in to buy groceries, can't leave without scanning.

This is the headline. This was 2022 when they start building it out. All these shopping go brings technology to discount retailer in new checkout free store. So this is kind of a new prototype. Checkout free store. You can't go in and you can't leave without that iPhone that you talked about. So this is, you know, this is concerning. And I think it's really important.

Again, we go back to what Catherine Austin Fitz said. Cash is king. We start paying for that. We shop at the places that respect our digital freedom at this point. Yeah. Wow. It's really amazing. I mean, and this is, I guess in some ways, we're going to have to figure out a way to work with all these technologies.

But they should be benefiting humanity, not, you know, imprisoning us. And it's really going to just take all of us working together and getting the right people elected. We really need, I think, some younger people in government that, actually understand what these technologies are, what they can do, and where they're going. I think so many people just signed dotted lines out of any concept of what we're really facing here.