Hey, this is Unlimited Hangout. I'm your host, Whitney Webb. It goes without saying that COVID-19 has been a planet-altering event, similar to September 11, 2001, but on a much larger scale and timeline. Yet, as Obama's former chief of staff, once infamously noted, never let a good crisis go to waste, and COVID-19, like 9-11 and other such events, has offered

opportunists and power around the world the chance to pursue a host of agendas that would likely

be rejected by the general public under more normal circumstances. Such opportunism would not be

possible, however, without the media, which manufactures consent for these agendas and creates narratives

that link their implementation to the common good, which more often than not in the COVID era

has been the professed promotion of public health. In the COVID era, as it was with the war on terror

before, it is the media and propaganda that works to exclusively shape the public's understanding of an enemy they cannot see or touch,

but that they are told lurks around every corner and in every crevice and can only be combated by trading more and more freedom for what is more often than not the illusion of more security.

Joining me today to discuss the ins and outs of propaganda in the age of COVID and much more is

Mark Crispin Miller. Mark is a professor of media culture and communication at New York University,

as well as the author of several books on media and US politics. He has long been a prominent

voice in independent media, but many of the voices who gave Mark a regular platform to discuss

his work on election integrity and the

propaganda of imperialism have seemingly avoided giving him a similar platform to discuss his views

on the COVID-19 crisis and he is not alone in this regard. Since the onset of COVID, Mark has

been fighting censorship and enormous professional pressure merely for teaching his students in a course

on propaganda, no less, to do their own research and reach their own conclusions about relevant

issues like mask mandates, as opposed to merely taking the mainstream media consensus at face

value. As someone who is not only a scholar of propaganda, but someone who is courageously fighting

against it at great

personal and professional risk every day. There is no one I would rather talk to about the nature

and feature trajectory of propaganda in the COVID era than Mark Crispin Miller. Delighted to have

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