If you still believe that television news exists to look out for your best interests, you are hopelessly naive. The big networks are going to protect their customers at all costs, and you are not their customers. You are the product. CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox are all trying to get as many of us watching as possible so that they can deliver millions upon millions of ad impressions to their true customers. Of course the biggest customers of all are in the pharmaceutical industry. According to Adweek, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than 400 million dollars on national television advertising during the month of March alone…
In March, prescription pharmaceutical brands spent an estimated $403.4 million on national TV advertising, according to recently released data from iSpot.tv, the real-time TV measurement company. That’s almost twice as much as the second top-spending category for the month, automakers (est. $216.1 million), and a 16% increase from prescription pharma’s February outlay.
Big Pharma is the giant elephant in the room and nobody else is even close.
If they keep spending like they did in March, they will have spent nearly 5 billion dollars on national television advertising by the end of this year.
And “news programming” is one of the primary areas where they focus that spending…
Examining how Rx brands are prioritizing TV ad spend, news programming is a key area: Combined, the pharma industry spent nearly $15 million advertising during ABC World News Tonight With David Muir in March, generating 986.7 million TV ad impressions. NBC Nightly News With Lester Holt, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News With Norah O’Donnell, Today and CBS Mornings also were in the top ten programs by spend for the industry.
If a certain industry is showering you with millions upon millions of dollars, do you think that you will have an incentive not to do any negative stories about that industry?
Of course.
It is just human nature.
Any news executive that does not take special care to protect the network’s most important customers is not likely to have a job for long.
During the 18 months that stretched from the beginning of 2020 to the middle of 2021, the pharmaceutical industry spent more than 2 billion dollars “on ads during primetime cable news”…
Over two billion dollars ($2.2B) were spent on ads during primetime cable news (5 pm until midnight on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC) and nightly network news programming on ABC, CBS, and NBC between January 1, 2020 and June 30, 2021. Fox News earned the most in advertising ($622M) and CBS earned the least ($205M).
Please pay special attention to that last sentence.
Fox News received more money from Big Pharma during that period than anyone else.
So if any Fox News hosts were to be highly critical of the pharmaceutical industry, that would put hundreds of millions of dollars at risk. But that is precisely what Tucker Carlson did less than a week before he was fired.
He delivered a blistering monologue in which he revealed the truth about the damage that the industry is doing and the influence that it has over the big news networks…
Personally, I believe that this is one of the primary reasons why he was fired.
But executives at Fox News will never, ever admit this.
No matter how popular you are, you simply are not allowed to threaten the gravy train. There is just way too much money at stake.
And according to a study that was recently conducted at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, much of the money that is being spent is used to promote drugs “with low added benefit”…
A new study led by researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that the share of promotional spending allocated to consumer advertising was on average 14.3 percentage points higher for drugs with low added benefit compared to drugs with high added benefit.
The analysis also revealed that the majority—68 percent or 92 of the 135 drugs included in the analysis—of the top-selling prescription drugs sold in 2020 were rated as offering low added benefit. The U.S. does not currently assess prescription drugs for comparative effectiveness. The researchers based their rating categories on France and Canada’s ratings of the same prescription drugs sold in the U.S., some under different brand names.
In other words, a lot of these drugs aren’t even that beneficial. But that isn’t what matters.
What matters is getting people hooked on these drugs so that the profits keep rolling in.
If you want to get rich, the pharmaceutical industry is a great place to do it.
Just consider the CEO of Moderna. He made nearly 400 million dollars last year…
Stéphane Bancel, chief executive of Moderna, had a good year in 2022, exercising stock options that netted him nearly $393 million. The company decided his pay wasn’t good enough.
The Cambridge, Mass.-based biotech, known for its lifesaving coronavirus vaccine, raised his salary last year by 50 percent to $1.5 million and increased his target cash bonus, according to a March securities filing. Bancel, 50, says he is donating the proceeds of stock sales to charity. He owns stock worth at least $2.8 billion and, as of the end of last year, had additional stock-based compensation valued at $1.7 billion.
Whether their products are good or not, the pharmaceutical industry is always going to get favorable coverage from the big news networks because that is how the game is played.
And our politicians are always going to protect Big Pharma because they desperately want the sweet, sweet campaign donations to keep arriving. So don’t expect anything to change any time soon.
We have become a nation that is teeming with corruption from the very top to the very bottom, and we are on a collision course with national suicide. No house will be able to stand for long if the foundation is rotten to the core.
And thanks to the endless greed of those that are in positions of power, our foundation has been rotten to the core for a long time. But we aren’t supposed to talk about such things, are we? We are just supposed to pretend everything is fine as they systematically extract billions of dollars out of us.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.