I was on the front end of seeing these trends because of the type of reporting that I do. I started to pay really close attention to it in the early 2000s, and the first time I noticed it [fact-based journalism giving over to agenda-driven journalism] it was with [the] PHARMAceutical industry -- weighing in and able to successfully manipulate and shape reporting that we had done and others were doing on PHARMAceutical dangers.Again, medicine has many wonderful things that it's done for the public. There's a lot of terrific medicine [glitch] and we were all reporting on that in the early 2000s. And then, in came the PHARMAceutical industry, with its brand new partnership with the media through direct-to-consumer ads.
People may have forgotten that advertising prescription drugs on TV used to be illegal. But once the media partnered with the PHARMAceutical industry to lobby to legalize these ads that you see on TV and the media all the time, WE WERE BEHOLDEN TO THE TUNE OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS to this industry, and they were able to successfully stop reporting, and pull strings in a way I had never seen before, and controversialize those who were off the narrative or reporting the truth on certain things.
I kind of saw it go from there, that the same PR firms and global law firms that were intervening to try to stop stories for them, were then taking on other corporate clients, and bragging and advertising that they could stop or shape news stories by bullying news reporters, controversializing them, and the tactics that we see this smear industry use on a daily basis now.
...We're in a really troubled information landscape today.