2020 Year in Review: COVID, Collapsing America and the Most Censored Stories of the Year
“Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody’s ever made before. Don’t freeze, don’t stop, don’t worry that it isn’t good enough, or it isn’t perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.
Whatever it is you’re scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever.”
– Neil Gaiman [1]
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So what was the biggest story of 2020?
I don’t think a lot of our listener audience will disagree with the view that a little coronavirus which goes by the name SARS-CoV-2 could be the star performer in the world’s ‘plaque of the year’ drama!
As it turns out, the germ which is responsible for COVID-19 is replacing all other contenders for the role of Humanity’s number one threat. Not only does this tiny menace get a daily mention in city newspaper’s death toll, we mark the number of people who tested positive.
In fact, for the first time in history, many, many cities and countries are shutting right down, masking themselves, social distancing and eagerly waiting for the magic elixir, the COVID vaccine, to come to their rescue.
Who or what can possibly top that?
The story is about more than citizens of every country getting sick. It has altered how children are educated. It deflated early on the popularity of Donald Trump. It forced nations into debt as they coped with the situation. And in a recent report, according to Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), America’s 651 billionaires combined saw their wealth collectively grow from $1 Trillion from the beginning of the outbreak to roughly $4 Trillion as of December 7, 2020!
On this week’s Global Research News Hour, we are going to take a look, not only at COVID, but how it impacts our lives in so many new ways.
Our first guest, Patrick Henningsen, takes a look at how COVID altered journalism, internet research and shut down our society, while looking ahead to where this will lead us in 2021. A little later, the Global Research News Hour reads a section of Dmitry Orlov’s latest article which assesses where the US has a chance of waging a war.
For our second half hour, Andy Lee Roth joins us for his annual review of Project Censored’s latest publication and a list of the most censored stories of 2020. Following that, the Global Research News Hour mentions a brief assessment of the horrific events on Capitol Hill on Wednesday January 6 in the context of the previous discussions.
Patrick Henningsen is an American writer and global affairs analyst and founder of independent news and analysis site 21st Century Wire, occasional co-host of UK Column and is host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show broadcast globally over the Alternate Current Radio Network (ACR). He has written for a number of international publications and has done extensive on-the-ground reporting in the Middle East including work in Syria and Iraq.
Dmitry Orlov is a Russian-American writer, blogger and geopolitical analyst based in Moscow. He has degrees in Computer Engineering and Linguistics and has worked in the fields of high energy physics, internet commerce, advertising and network security. He is the author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects and Shrinking the Technosphere: Getting a Grip on the Technologies that Limit our Autonomy, Self-sufficiency and Freedom. His blog site is cluborlov.com.
Andy Lee Roth, is the Associate Director of Project Censored, a media research program which fosters student development of media literacy and critical thinking skills as applied to news media censorship in the United States.
(Global Research News Hour Episode 301)
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Click to download the audio (MP3 format)
The Global Research News Hour airs every Friday at 1pm CT on CKUW 95.9FM out of the University of Winnipeg. The programme is also podcast at globalresearch.ca .
Notes:
- Neil Gaiman’s Journal: My New Year Wish; journal.neilgaiman.com/2011/12/my-new-year-wish.html
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