Part 3: How Top Media Outlets Blocked My Coverage of Alex Berenson's Landmark Lawsuit Against Twitter

Pt. 3 in a series on my failed attempts to publish Covid articles in both mainstream and alternative media. This latest installment exposes the bizarrely universal editorial aversion to Alex Berenson.

Art by special artist Lensa

“We've steered clear of Berenson in general, and also — let's move on from the vaccine debate, ok?”

- Editor response to Rav Arora (Read the full exposé below)

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Read Part 1 on how major media outlets egregiously suppressed Rav’s Covid reporting:

Read Part 2 on how an editor at a self-described “pro-vaccine publication” got a serious adverse event after the Pfizer vaccine:

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Part 3: How Top Media Outlets Blocked My Coverage of Alex Berenson's Landmark Lawsuit Against Twitter

By: Rav Arora

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As a budding journalist who strangely “fell” into journalism (as Bret Weinstein facetiously described it on DarkHorse recently) after graduating high school, my animating mission from the start has been to challenge dominant orthodoxy and present new perspectives.

This view was not driven from of a conspiratorial impulse or contrarian bias, but from a deep recognition early on about the unreported truths in our discourse surrounding racial disparities and the criminal justice system — my first journalistic interest.

In the aftermath of George Floyd, when racial quotas and DEI efforts ramped up, I published my first essay on how my personal experiences with racism growing up as a first-generation Indian immigrant informed my view of the toxicity of identity politics and racial essentialism.

My race-related interests lead to my seminal reporting in City Journal and The New York Post on the explosion of violence in inner-city Minneapolis following the radical “de-fund the police” movement.

My reporting on the unimaginable trauma caused by nightly gunfire and police absence (link).

Covid, on the other hand, was never an interest of mine from the start. Viruses, immunological studies, and lab coats evoked bad memories of torturous high school biology classes (thanks Ms. Williams!). However, later on in the pandemic I became increasingly curious about the effectiveness of mainstream Covid measures such as masks, lockdowns, and eventually, vaccines. Alex Berenson — who I remember binge-watching in the back of history class giving a stellar argumentative performance in the infamous “Pot Debate” on The Joe Rogan Experience — re-appeared as a truth-teller who I initially blindly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.

The Joe Rogan Experience - “The Pot Debate” feat. Dr. Mike Hart & Alex Berenson

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Prior to beginning to question officialdom, I had implicitly taken the scientific establishment’s recommendations on cloth-masking and prolonged lockdowns as biblical truth — till I started reading Berenson’s short pamphlets explaining the complexity of the data. Stunned and persuaded by the massive divide between the purported '“science” and the actual data, I became an avid follower of Berenson’s.

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When vaccine mandates began to roll out — forcing me to choose between abject lonerism (refusing the jabs) or the ability to continue exercising at a gym, attending restaurants, large gatherings, and parties (taking the sacramental mRNA) — I started digging deep into the data on safety and efficacy with a mind wide open. Immediately, I was alarmed by the vaccine-related myocarditis signals coming from Israel, which no journalist other than Alex Berenson was reporting on as early as March of 2021. Meanwhile, the following month the CDC claimed to have found no linking evidence despite “intentionally [looking] for the signal in the over 200 million doses.”

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Alex in March 2021:

The CDC in April 2021:

Who deserves more public trust?

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As I recounted in Part 1 of my article series on how major media outlets rejected my work, the nearly universal rejection of my reporting on vaccine myocarditis forced me to join Substack and release my work independently.

My biggest stories included “The Truth About Vaccine-Induced Myocarditis: Part 2” which detailed the tragic account of a 38-year-old law enforcement who was forced to get double-vaccinated and nearly died as a result, suffering for several months from impaired physical abilities and life-deranging ramifications:

When the paramedic measured his heart rate and it said 210 beats per minute, the paramedic couldn’t believe that he was still alive. They had to then shock his heart with a defibrillator into a normal rhythm. Compounded by all the anxiety from the situation and the worsening pain in his chest, he was convinced he was about to die.

“I thought I’m never going to see my girlfriend and family again,” he said. “Scariest time of my life.”

A few hours after arriving at the hospital, his doctor said, “You’re really lucky. If you had waited any longer, you would’ve died.”

The purported basis editors shared for rejecting my stories on this topic were that it may promote anti-vaccine sentiment or run against the “pro-vaccination” stance of the publication:

I'm going to pass.

As I've said many times before, we are a pro-vaccination newspaper, and personally I just wish everyone would get vaccinated already…

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This paper has been encouraging Covid vaccination for everyone. We don’t want to promote vaccine hesitancy that will get people seriously ill and killed...

Dejected and financially in ruins — after initially earning exceptional success writing on crime and culture war issues at multiple top outlets — I later began pitching the same (and other) editors stories on Alex Berenson’s landmark lawsuit against Twitter.

Vaccines may be an untouchable third rail, but a journalist’s free speech suppressed by social media suppressed is certainly newsworthy.

Or so I thought.

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In July of last year, I pitched a story on Alex’s return to Twitter after his major settlement with Twitter following his 10-month ban. Alex’s official statement strikingly read, “The parties have come to a mutually acceptable resolution. I have been reinstated. Twitter has acknowledged that my tweets should have not led to my suspension at that time.”

Link: @alexberenson Substack article

Twitter essentially admitted the cause of his suspension — making “demonstrably false or misleading” claims that could “cause serious harm” — was unjust. I naively thought Berenson v Twitter would be an instantly viral story across mainstream media outlets, but I was fooled again. In response to my pitch to one editor, he revealed his own rejection by the higher-ups who bizarrely didn’t want to cover the most journalistically relevant story of the month (or year):

I pitched an interview with Berenson to my editors last week about this issue and they weren't interested, so I'm afraid this won't interest them.

Other editors who earnestly responded to my pitches before replied with “Sorry, I’m going to pass” or “This won’t work for us.” The unanimity of responses I received — almost appearing as a coordinated effort — was striking.

Why is no one interested in covering this?

Though I was never given a clear answer as to why, my next (and last) round of failed freelance efforts to publish my Covid work in major outlets — who, again, had platformed my heterodox pieces every month in the not-so-distant past — explicitly revealed the editorial blacklisting of Alex Berenson.

(Note: As I have done in the previous two parts of this journalistic series, I am not going to be naming any editor or publication due to my own security and sanity as a young journalist. At this early stage of my career, I rather not wage wars against multi-million-dollar corporate media giants — though this may change with time.)

In October of 2022, when Alex broke the story of Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb pressuring Twitter to censor him, I viscerally reacted with repulsion and disbelief. After swallowing this tough pill of Big Pharma minions getting in the business of cracking down journalistic dissent, I felt galvanized to spread this story widely and write about it in a major outlet.

I pitched an editor who had published a handful of pieces of mine in the past, beginning with (condensed for brevity’s sake”):

Hi xxx,

Hope you're doing well. I wanted to pitch a piece on a recent news item that was hardly covered: a leading Pfizer board member (former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, who happens to be Republican) pressed Twitter to censor Alex Berenson because of his views on vaccines.

….After Alex broke the news on his Substack, Gottlieb was asked about it on live TV the next day and he claimed his actions were necessary because Berenson apparently threatened the safety of Dr. Fauci with his comments. There is no basis for this outrageous claim.

…Would you be interested in a story on this?

His response stated the quiet part out-loud:

Hi Rav,

We've steered clear of Berenson in general, and also — let's move on from the vaccine debate, ok? There are worthier topics for us now, with inflation, the midterms, crime, culture wars, and other matters in the news.

xxx

Opinion section

The XXXX

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“Steered clear”?

To put it a bit less euphemistically, a publication editorially decided to shun a former New York Times reporter and all the relevant stories around him which expose the jaw-dropping collusion between Big Pharma, social media companies, and the White House?

Are you kidding me?

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I don’t waste any ink speculating what the exact causes of “pro-vaccine” propagandization and journalistic blackballing are (the $14.8 billion pharmaceutical companies spent on advertising in 2022 may have something to do with it) but the universal media blackout on Berenson v Biden is quite sinister. It evokes the deepest of cynicism and distrust in both legacy and alternative media outlets.

The alternate reality Alex painted in his piece “The media wants to pretend Berenson v Biden doesn't exist” of suing Trump instead of Biden highlights the egregious political bias in journalism:

Alex has had to experience what few institutionally demonized people on the planet have: vindication. On the limited efficacy of vaccines, repeated need for boosters, mandates, myocarditis, the uselessness of masks, and much more.

As Joe Rogan perfectly said in his last podcast episode with Alex,

“You are the sweet smell of vindication.”

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Recent post: Long-form Interview with the Florida Surgeon General: