Media

Media articles feature analysis and commentary about mass media, entertainment, censorship, and propaganda.

All media articles at Brownstone Institute are translated into multiple languages.

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Witnessing the Media's Covid Coverage from the Inside

Witnessing the Media’s Covid Coverage from the Inside

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Covid media, like so much else in modern life, has become hopelessly fractured: the tall, left-facing trees dominate the landscape, telling the story of a deadly virus that we “did the best we could” to manage. Below the tree canopy lies the tangle of weeds that sway in the wind, whispering songs of freedom and warning against the totalitarian impulses that all too readily emerge during crises

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Panel Discussions from Brownstone's Third Annual Conference: Rebuild Freedom

Panel Discussions from Brownstone’s Third Annual Conference: Rebuild Freedom

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At Brownstone’s third annual conference and gala, aptly called ‘Rebuild Freedom’, hundreds of scholars, writers, researchers, fellows, and supporters came together in Dallas for a weekend of meals, panel discussions, and solidarity over the civilization-wide trauma we all endured ever since March, 2020.

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Emotional Contagion and Mass Hysteria

Explaining the Nocebo Effect, Emotional Contagion, and Mass Hysteria

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Even if the disease itself is not mild, a pandemic wave through a population tends to reduce local stress and anxiety and focuses people on a singular goal. This has been called the “typhoon eye effect,” reported during outbreaks of SARS, people closer to the pandemic were less anxious and more able to accurately estimate their own risks. Conversely, those on the periphery or outside the outbreaks, who received their information from media sources rather than personal experience reported increased anxiety and distress. There’s nothing more effective than having your irrational fears debunked firsthand.

Explaining the Nocebo Effect, Emotional Contagion, and Mass Hysteria Read Journal Article

Anti-Lockdown Goes Mainstream

Anti-Lockdown Goes Mainstream

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What we have with this book and article is an important step. It is just one step. Lockdowns utterly shattered the protocols of public health, settled law, and freedom itself all over the world. They wrecked myriad institutions, wrought an incredible economic and cultural crisis, demoralized the whole population, and built up a leviathan of command and control that is not only not backing down but growing ever more. Far more will be required to utterly and completely repudiate the methods and madness of our epoch. 

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Brownstone Institute - Accountability

The Very Model of a Modern Covid Authoritarian

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The struggle underneath many headlines and events in our times – and this is true of the reshuffled alliances with hot war in the Middle East – is the desperate clamor to avoid accountability for those who opened the Pandora’s box of hate, division, state power, propaganda, and violence. That appears to be evolving into a civilization-wrecking dynamic of all against all, even as the instigators cower in the shadows. 

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Brownstone Institute - trauma

The Drumbeat of Trauma-Inducing Events in Our Lives

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If left unaddressed, the top-down trauma our “leadership” class seems bent on serially inflicting upon us leads to widespread psychic numbing and a nation of people who learn to comport themselves in the fearful and overly circumspect ways of that “dog that’s been beat too much.”

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Brownstone Institute - censorship

Internet Censorship, Everywhere All at Once

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The conundrum for free and open societies has always been the same: How to protect human rights and democracy from hate speech and disinformation without destroying human rights and democracy in the process. The answer embodied in the recent coordinated enactment of global censorship laws is not encouraging for the future of free and open societies.

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Brownstone Institute - media and science

The Future of Alternative Media Is Unknown, But Critical

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The possibility of reforming the science writing profession seems very unlikely, as science writers remain locked inside their own community—constrained by partisanship, class, education, and cozy ties to their sources. Any criticism pointing this out is often either ignored or deemed to be proof that the critic is politically conservative, lacks education, or does not have the contacts in science to understand the complexities of research.

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