Pfizer is spending big money to control online media. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: Pfizer’s spending big money to control online media. Boy, they have succeeded haven’t they? Talk about this, would you.
Farron Cousins: This, this is an amazing story by this group Lever News, Andrew Perez. And, and by the way, Lever News is actually emerging as a very good anti-corporate news source here. But what they’ve.
Mike Papantonio: Tell, tell the viewers about that so they’ll have a source to go.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s levernews.com. Again, huge. David Sirota writes for it, Andrew Perez, a lot of folks, you know, we’ve talked about over the years. But what they’ve found here, they’ve been doing the digging and they’ve found that Pfizer is out here sponsoring all kinds of different online media outlets. They’ve got a event coming up this week that they’re sponsoring for The Hill. And what they’re doing is paying to have their articles in addition to, you know, the big money behind it, go out there to the public saying, oh, look at what a good company Pfizer is. As they’re, as they do every January, raising the prices on hundreds of prescription drugs in America, simply because they can. But they’ve got these articles out here that they paid for saying, we give so much money to charity. We’re on the forefront of cutting edge medical technology. It’s a sham and they’re paying for it.
Mike Papantonio: Let me tell you where it gets really weird. They write the articles.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: They do the television production. They give it to MSNBC, they give it to CNN. They give it to the corporate networks and they just run it. Why? Because Pfizer is advertising every, every nine minutes on MSNBC or CNN. So they just take this packaged crap that’s produced by Pfizer and it’s all, well, we’re, we’re a wonderful corporation. They don’t talk about the hundreds of lawsuits that have been brought against them for fraud, for creating dangerous drugs. They don’t talk about any of that. They, they say, okay, if you said it, it must be true. And oh, by the way, could you spend another $10 million with us this year advertising Pfizer?
Farron Cousins: And, and what we see now, because you know, you’re talking a lot about the, the corporate media, which they’ve been in for years. And now they’ve realized we’ve seen the success on the corporate media, on the daytime television especially, it’s bad. And now they’re moving into those online forums.
Mike Papantonio: Right.
Farron Cousins: You know, where they couldn’t get in front of people’s eyeballs the same way they do on TV. So they buy spots and, and oil industry’s bad with this too, they buy ’em on The hill, the hill.com. They buy it in Politico. Politico is horrible.
Mike Papantonio: Oh, it.
Farron Cousins: With the corporate propaganda they push out.
Mike Papantonio: Just give us money. We’ll say whatever you wanna say.
Farron Cousins: And now this new one, Semafor, which I’ve used them as a source. They’ve put out some good stuff. And, and exactly. Pfizer understands, uhoh, they’re talking about pharmaceutical stuff. We’ve gotta put a stop to it. We’ve gotta buy them off.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah. I, I wouldn’t use that as a source.
Farron Cousins: Oh, not anymore.
Mike Papantonio: I literally would not use it as a source.
Farron Cousins: Absolutely not anymore.
Mike Papantonio: I wonder about any of these other sources that are doing this because they, all they’re doing is they’re getting a package. Would you do this story? Here’s, we filmed it for you. We have the witnesses, we have whatever. Just put it up. Everything’s gonna be okay. Now, the problem as you’re talking about is it moves into social media. What ends up happening? Those stories are throttled up. Okay. Our story about this will be throttled back. When you’re watching this segment don’t be surprised if a drug company comes on right before our segment. Every time we do a story about the, NextEra, for example, the, the energy supply company. They’re right before we start hammering them. You know, so, I mean, you know, social media in another year, you’re not even gonna recognize it, man. You’re not even gonna recognize it because they’re just, they’re just being bought up the same way corporate media’s been bought up.
Farron Cousins: Right. And it’s just that the corporations are a little bit behind where they were with corporate media and now that they see the corporate media’s dying, you got people dropping satellite TV, left and right.
Mike Papantonio: Cutting cables, man.
Farron Cousins: Exactly. So they’re like, okay, we gotta move into this online. We gotta be on Twitter, we gotta be on Facebook. We’ve gotta buy the actual website coverage. And that’s what they’re doing.
Mike Papantonio: You know, Farron, I covered, I looked at one of your stories the other day. You were doing, it was, it was something to do with something Trump had done and it was a powerful story. But then off to the side of it, there were stories completely unrelated to anything you were doing. Okay.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: You know, there were supposed to be, those stories over the right of the page are supposed to be somehow connected to the topic. MSNBC comes up talking about some nonsense story probably that’s been fed to ’em by Pfizer. CNN, just look down the list. There are not independent sources. Do you, do, are you gonna see Sam Seder? You gonna see David Pakman? Are you gonna see any of these, any of these sources that are independent media anymore? Because corporate media’s coming in, they’ve destroyed corporate television. Now they’re coming in to destroy corporate, you know, corporate media.
Farron Cousins: And, and they’re making huge head, headway with it too. I mean, across the board on the, you know, progressive side of the independent media, hosts out there on YouTube are getting hammered by this. And most of it has to do with what you’re talking about. They’re no longer showing up in that suggested feed. You know, oh, because you like David Pakman, we should show you a bunch of David Pakman or similar videos, but instead we’re gonna send you to ABC.
Mike Papantonio: Yeah.
Farron Cousins: NBC, Fox, whatever it is.
Mike Papantonio: We, were, you know what people don’t understand about what this station does. We, we’ll get these things, they’ll get mad about me doing a story on something and, you know, call me a right-winger or say that you’re a crazy lefter. And so we’re unsubscribing. They don’t understand that doesn’t affect us because the way, the way that our money comes in. Has nothing to do with it. But these other, these other folks that are relying on those advertising dollars coming in, it’s a big deal.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Especially when you’ve got, when you’ve got somebody at the wheel like Twitter or Facebook that’s throttling them back to create more space for MSNBC and CNN.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: That’s the problem.
