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The Forgotten Media Purges of the Great Depression
The Forgotten Media Purges of the Great Depression
Republican Hoover built the federal broadcasting shield in 1927. Roosevelt fashioned it into a weapon in 1934 and Democrats have never put it down since. One might consider the elaborate FCC speech barriers: A Poll Tax on Public Debate
One of the more enduring myths accepted as reality in our modern society is that America has a relatively free press. The ruling authorities and their entrenched accomplices promote that lie as diligently as they work to ensure that it never again becomes true.
America did have a mostly free and independent press until the rise of broadcasting in the 1920s. Within a few years, a small group of Republicans, progressives and corporate interests successfully nationalized the airwaves with restrictive licensing that blocked competition, rewarded insiders and squelched dissent.
Over the next few decades, the increasingly powerful medium of radio and then television drowned out the previously broad spectrum of information and ideas—with often three or more diverse choices of daily newspapers in many U.S. cities—and turned free speech into carefully rationed federal broadcasting privileges, their anointed urban newspaper monopolies and a few approved magazines.
One of the more ironic parts of this forgotten history is that a Republican, Herbert Hoover, led the initial charge to politicize the press. When the more authoritarian FDR took the reins in 1933—holding onto power until his death in 1945—he would ultimately purge the airwaves as well as the newspaper and magazine stands of the nation’s greatest commentators, publishers, editors and writers. In their absence, only pro-war / pro-welfare state neo-liberals and neo-conservatives would survive in mainstream media for generations to come.
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5 Stories the Media Ignored While Dividing the Country With Greta Thunberg
5 Stories the Media Ignored While Dividing the Country With Greta Thunberg
The term pedophrasty is a relatively new word — not currently accepted by an official dictionary — but that has a powerful meaning in today’s political and media environment. Pedophrasty is an “argument involving children to prop up a rationalization and make the opponent look like an asshole, as people are defenseless and suspend all skepticism in front of suffering children: nobody has the heart to question the authenticity or source of the reporting. Often done with the aid of pictures.” We have seen this tactic employed by both the left and the right sides of the political spectrum and it is, unfortunately, highly effective.
If you’ve turned on your television this week, you’ve likely seen 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg. No one here at the Free Thought Project are climate scientists, so we will abstain from commenting on her agenda. However, neither is she. But I digress. The political and mainstream media machine’s exploitation of Thunberg is a perfect example of pedophrasty.
If Thunberg’s activism actually wakes people up to pollution and incites a peaceful and a voluntarily implemented environmental benefit — without ushering in a tyrannical climate change police state — we fully support her endeavors. Wanting to save the world is a noble cause and if children want to try to do that, by all means, have at it—just don’t take away anyone’s life or liberty in the process.
The subsequent sh*t storm that was sparked online by Thunberg’s coverage — entailing both support and hatred — however, is a different story. It served as a perfect distraction to things that actually matter in our lives. As videos of Thunberg meeting with Barack Obama went viral (I’ll get to that irony in just a second), extremely important events unfolded around us, which were entirely ignored by the mainstream media.
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MSM Defends CIA’s “Whistleblower”, Ignores Actual Whistleblowers
MSM Defends CIA’s “Whistleblower”, Ignores Actual Whistleblowers
The word “whistleblower” has been trending in news headlines lately, but not for the reasons that any sane person might hope for.
“Read the whistleblower complaint regarding President Trump’s communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky“, says The Washington Post. “Trump responds to hearing on whistleblower complaint“, says MSNBC. “Trump-Ukraine scandal: what did the whistleblower say and how serious is it?“, writes The Guardian. “Whistleblower complaint says White House tried to ‘lock down’ Ukraine call records” announces CBS. “Whistleblower’s complaint is a devastating report from a savvy official“, declares CNN.
So who is this “savvy official”? Who is this courageous whistleblower who boldly shone the light of truth upon the mechanisms of power in the interests of the common man? Who is this brave, selfless individual who set off an impeachment inquiry by taking a stand and revealing the fact that the US president made a phone call in July urging Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to help investigate corruption allegations against Joe Biden and his son?
Well believe it or not, according to The New York Times this brave, noble whistleblower who the mainstream media are currently championing is an officer for the Central Intelligence Agency.
The idea that the media needs to “protect” a high-level CIA officer making explosive claims about the president, which have now been used as the basis for impeachment proceedings, is such an insane perversion of journalistic ethics
“The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a CIA officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity,” The New York Times reports. “The man has since returned to the CIA, the people said. Little else is known about him.”
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The Guide To Real History
The Guide To Real History
In the last two centuries, all wars have been machinations orchestrated by bankers pursuing two very simple objectives: profit and a world domination that bears a name: the New World Order.
Education and medias are the main culprits to blame for keeping the important role of bankers in the dark shadows of history. The genuine relevance of Rothschild, Rockefeller, Warburg, Morgan and their peers is voluntarily kept hidden from public scrutiny, so that any investigator that digs in the realms of our past can easily be discredited as a «conspiracy theorist». Author Carroll Quigley once had full access to the Council on foreign relations documents and he confirmed the very real world banking conspiracy designed to dominate the world, in his book «Tragedy and hope».
Bizarrely, education and medias prefer to bring everything back to public figures and politicians like Churchill, Hitler or Stalin, but they will never tell you that these charismatic monsters had no money, nor created it. Hitler was a failed artist that built the most formidable war machine the world had seen in 6 years only, in a near-bankrupt country deprived of any oil production, so do you think he might have had some help?
The Grand Scheme
Before 1971, bank loans were based on their gold reserves, but no bank really owned the value in gold of the money it lent over the years, so the scheme wasn’t very different than today’s fractional system of money creation, in which banks have to own 1/10th of their loans. For example, if bank A has a million dollar, it can lend 10 millions to bank B, which can lend 100 millions to a country, since bank B owns 10 millions. This is basically how the world ended up owing 184 trillion dollars (184 000 000 000 000$) to private banks as of today.
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Breaking The Media Blackout on the Imprisonment of Julian Assange
Breaking The Media Blackout on the Imprisonment of Julian Assange
The same media that has spent years dragging Assange’s name through the mud is now engaging in a blackout on his treatment. If you are waiting for corporate media pundits to defend freedom of the press, you’re going to be disappointed.
The role of journalism in a democracy is publishing information that holds the powerful to account — the kind of information that empowers the public to become more engaged citizens in their communities so that we can vote in representatives that work in the interest of “we the people.”
There is perhaps no better example of watchdog journalism that holds the powerful to account and exposes their corruption than that of WikiLeaks, which exposed to the world evidence of widespread war crimes the U.S. military was committing in Iraq, including the killing of two Reuters journalists; showed that the U.S. government and large corporations were using private intelligence agencies to spy on activists and protesters; and revealed how the military hid tortured Guantanamo Bay prisoners from Red Cross inspectors.
It’s this kind of real journalism that our First Amendment was meant to protect but engaging in it has instead made WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange the target of a massive smear campaign for the last several years — including false claims that Assange is working with Vladimir Putin and the Russians and hackers, as well as open calls by corporate media pundits for him to be assassinated.
The allegations that Assange conspired with Putin to undermine the 2016 election and American democracy as a whole fell completely flat earlier this month when a U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed this case as “factually implausible,” with the judge noting that at no point does the prosecution’s “threadbare” argument show “any facts” at all, and concluding that the idea that Assange conspired with Russia against the Democratic Party or America is “entirely divorced from the facts.”
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The Humans Are Waking Up
The Humans Are Waking Up
You run into a lot of despair in this line of work. The more you learn about the mechanisms of power, the more hopeless things seem at first glance.
The political system is totally locked down, with anyone who tries to upend the status quo being aggressively sabotaged by the mass media and their own political party.
Technology, which futurists have long heralded as the deus ex machina which will liberate humanity from its self-destructive ways, is owned by plutocrats with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and is pervasively infiltrated by murderous intelligence agencies from top to bottom.
Even attempts to circulate information about the dangers of war, ecocide and oligarchy are consistently sabotaged by internet censorship, blanket de-platforming and mass media propaganda, and even imprisonment if one’s truth-telling becomes too successful.
Still, I remain unwaveringly hopeful. Not because I foresee any of those massive obstacles vanishing at any time in the near future, but because I see an escape route that none of them are blocking.
I have had a great many bizarre and utterly unanticipated experiences, some of them ongoing, which assure me beyond a shadow of a doubt that humanity is capable of far, far more than our consensus worldview about ourselves accounts for. Most of those experiences I will probably never share publicly, because, while I often venture well off the beaten path in my commentary, if I discussed those experiences people will think I’m way more insane than they already believe me to be. But I don’t mind sharing here that I know from my own experience that humans are capable of radically and permanently shifting into a much healthier and efficacious relationship with mental narrative, which happens to be the mechanism by which existing power structures keep us locked down.
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Former MSNBC Reporter Spills Details On Pro-Establishment Bias In Media
Former MSNBC Reporter Spills Details On Pro-Establishment Bias In Media
The ridiculous corporate media freakout over Senator Bernie Sanders’ entirely legitimate accusations of pro-establishment bias continues today, with shrill, absurd new headlines like “Sanders campaign continues attacks on journalists” and “Bernie Sanders isn’t sorry” featuring hysterical MSM drama queens rending their garments over the suggestion that plutocrat-owned media outlets could be favorable to the plutocrat-owned establishment.
In response to this cartoonish display of billionaire-sponsored performance art, The Hill‘s Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjati aired a segment on their online show Rising which is as damning an exposé on the dynamics of mass media empire propaganda as we are ever likely to witness. With startling frankness and honesty, the pair disclose their experience with the way anyone who is critical of the establishment consensus is excluded from mainstream media platforms, as well as the way access journalism, financial incentives, prestige incentives and peer pressure are used to herd mainstream reporters into toeing the establishment line once they’re in.
I strongly urge you to watch the eight-minute segment for yourself, but I’ll be transcribing parts of it as well for those who prefer reading, as well as for posterity, because it really is that historically significant. I will surely be referring back to this segment in my arguments about plutocratic media bias for years to come, because it confirms and validates everything that analysts like Noam Chomsky have been saying about mass media propaganda like nothing else I’ve ever seen. Status quo propaganda is the underlying root of all our problems, and Ball and Enjati have gifted us with an invaluable tool for understanding and attacking it.
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New Study Finds Media-Generated Fear is Driving ‘Doomsday Prepping’
New Study Finds Media-Generated Fear is Driving ‘Doomsday Prepping’
Not right wing conspiracy theories.
A new study has found that media-generated fear, not right-wing conspiracy theories, is the main driving force behind the rise of ‘doomsday prepping’.
The study, published in the Journal of American Studies, confirms that neither a backlash to the Obama presidency nor ‘extremist’ beliefs were responsible for the trend of Americans stockpiling food over the last 10 years.
Researchers interviewed preppers from 18 different U.S. states to ascertain the motivation behind their prepping.
“The results indicated that, although most did seem to be conservative and fear liberal policies, the main reason behind their motivations was the overall sense of fear currently dominating U.S. culture across a variety of media channels,” writes John Anderer. “Most Americans can’t seem to log online or turn on the television without being hit by a grim view of the future being reported or speculated on.”
The study also revealed that most ‘doomsday preppers’ don’t actually believe in imminent doomsday, but instead stockpile food because of worries over specific crises like an economic collapse, terror attack or a pandemic.
“Fear is now deeply entrenched in modern American culture and is the principal reason that so many citizens are engaging in ‘prepping’,” said lead author Dr. Michael Mills.
The Vancouver Sun’s Op-ed Denying a Climate Crisis a Symbol of Wider Journalistic Malpractice
The Vancouver Sun’s Op-ed Denying a Climate Crisis a Symbol of Wider Journalistic Malpractice
A journalist’s role is to seek truth, especially in the face of an emergency. But the media is not doing its job.
So I was disappointed when that misery coincided with the Vancouver Sun’s publication of an op-ed column by University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick claiming we only have a “vague inkling” that we “might” be in a climate emergency a “decade from now.”
That comment may surprise some readers of the Sun, which has a storied past and was the most-read newspaper in Western Canada according to the most recent report from News Media Canada. After all, many of them have already experienced that emergency as a result of the climate change-fuelled wildfires which devastated British Columbia in 2017 and 2018, cloaking the Lower Mainland in smoke. It may also surprise readers who have seen this summer’s satellite images of the Arctic on fire.
And it would almost certainly surprise the scientists who authored three major peer-reviewed studies on climate change that were published a day after McKitrick’s column. Commenting on those studies for the CBC, climatologist Gavin Schmidt said they underline the fact the global heating we are seeing is “unusual in a multi-centennial context” and that we are to blame for it.
In fact, we have much more than a “vague inkling” that there is a climate emergency given the voluminous scientific research and observable evidence supporting that conclusion.
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How To Inoculate Yourself From Establishment Bullshit
How To Inoculate Yourself From Establishment Bullshit
In a recent interview with CBS This Morning host Gayle King, former First Lady Michelle Obama contrasted her husband’s presidency with that of his successor by claiming that unlike Trump, the Obama family had had “no scandal”.
“I had to sit in [Trump’s inauguration] audience, one of a handful of people of color and then listen to that speech, and all that I had sort of held onto for eight years, watching my husband get raked over the coals, feeling like we had to do everything perfectly, you know, no scandal,” Obama said.
“Yeah,” King responded.
“No nothing,” Obama said “No nothing!”
“Yes. No scandal,” King said.
You hear this claim a lot from Democrats. There was a viral tweet with tens of thousands of shares shortly before the 2016 election which read, “8 years. No scandals. No mistresses. No impeachment hearings. Just class and grace, personified.” It’s a very common refrain which resurfaces in memes and tweets periodically, usually as criticisms of the sitting president.
8 years. No scandals. No mistresses. No impeachment hearings. Just class and grace, personified. I sure am going to miss this family.
Of course, the only reason anyone can attempt to claim that Barack Obama had “no scandals” is because in our bat shit crazy world, murdering, oppressing and exploiting large numbers of people isn’t considered scandalous.
In a sane, healthy world, a presidency like Obama’s would be looked upon with abject horror. Actually in a sane, healthy world a warmongering Wall Street crony like Obama would never have been elected in the first place, but if you were to show the members of a healthy, harmonious society the way that president used his power to do what he did to Libya and Syria, to continue and expand all of Bush’s most evil policies, to divert the push for economic justice into a neoliberal orgy for eight years, those people would recoil in absolute revulsion.
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The Real Reason Why The Fed Isn’t Cutting Interest Rates
The Real Reason Why The Fed Isn’t Cutting Interest Rates
In an article published in September 2015 titled ‘The Real Reason Why The Fed Will Raise Interest Rates’ I outlined a kind of economic war game, a predictive theory in which the Federal Reserve would hike rates into clear economic weakness in order to deliberately cause the implosion of the vast financial bubble they had created through several years of quantitative easing. At that time this theory received a lot of opposition. Nearly everyone in the mainstream and in the alternative media argued that the Fed was going to shift to NIRP (negative interest rates), in order to continue propping up the system. The idea that the Fed would actually raise rates and cause an engineered crash after propping up the system for so long was treated as outlandish.
Of course, this is exactly what happened. Within a year the Fed had started to tighten policy instead of extending stimulus measures. The denial that this was happening was so strong that many analysts claimed the Fed was simply “pretending” to tighten when they were actually still stimulating. Yet, this claim turned out to be incorrect; nearly every sector of the economy began an immediate and steep decline the moment the Fed launched interest rate hikes and cut its balance sheet. The evidence was mounting that yes, the central bank was not just pretending to tighten – it was actually strangling liquidity and the mirage of economic recovery was quickly fading.
To this day and despite all the evidence to the contrary some people still argue that the fed is either not tightening, or will reverse on tightening measures very soon.
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‘Climate Crisis’ Open Letter to Media: Who’s Responded (So Far)
‘Climate Crisis’ Open Letter to Media: Who’s Responded (So Far)
Five-point plan on Tyee finds allies in CWA union and top US journos.
Now the responses are rolling in, some from beyond Canada’s borders.
Here’s how Holman came to write the widely shared letter and what it’s helping to trigger.
As record wildfires raged out of control across B.C., spreading smoke into the Rockies and Alberta, Holman looked out the window of his Calgary home and thought about a book he’d read as a child. The World of the Future: Future Cities predicted “if drastic steps are not taken to control pollution and achieve some sort of ecological balance,” the city of the 21st century could become a “polluted pesthole.”
The book’s image of gas-mask-wearing citizens in a dystopian streetscape choked by smog “always stuck with me,” Holman said. The view of smoke turning the sun into a sickly orange dot was strikingly similar. “That was really troubling.” The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada
Even more disturbing to Holman, though, was the failure of Canadian news media to accurately report the underlying reasons for this hellscape: the greenhouse gas emissions that are warming Canada twice as fast as the rest of the world.
Holman, an investigative reporter, associate professor of journalism at Mount Royal University and an occasional Tyee contributor, found that of the 182 media pieces produced about the wildfires last summer by outlets like the Calgary Herald and Vancouver Sun, only 14 of those pieces mentioned the scientific reality that global temperature rise caused by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities contributed to the fires’ unprecedented intensity and destruction.
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Think US Media Won’t Help Lead Nation Into War With Iran Based on Flimsy or False Intelligence? Looks Like They Already Are
Think US Media Won’t Help Lead Nation Into War With Iran Based on Flimsy or False Intelligence? Looks Like They Already Are
“Do U.S. reporters, anchors, and editors really want more Middle Eastern blood on their hands? If not, they need to fix their rather credulous and increasingly hawkish coverage of Iran—and fix it fast.”
CNN’s presentation of video footage released by the U.S. military. (Photo: CNN/Screengrab)
If there were any lingering hopes that the corporate media learned from its role in perpetuating the lies that led to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and would never again help start a Middle East war on the basis of false or flimsy evidence, the headlines that blared across the front pages of major U.S. news websites Thursday night indicated that such hopes were badly misplaced.
The U.S. military late Thursday released blurry, black-and-white video footage that it claimed—without any underlying analysis or further details—showed an Iranian patrol boat removing an unexploded limpet mine from the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous, one of the oil tankers damaged in attacks in the Gulf of Oman.
Here’s how CNN presented the U.S. military’s video:
Iran has denied any involvement in the attacks, and Yutaka Katada—the owner of the Kokuka Courageous—contradicted the Trump administration’s account during a press conference on Friday.
“Our crew said that the ship was attacked by a flying object,” Katada said. “I do not think there was a time bomb or an object attached to the side of the ship.”
Independent critics were quick to call for extreme skepticism in the face of U.S. government claims, given the quality of the “evidence” and the warmongering track records of those presenting it.
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The Western Media is Key to Syria Deceptions
The Western Media is Key to Syria Deceptions
Image Source: TUBS – CC BY-SA 3.0
By any reckoning, the claim made this week by al-Qaeda-linked fighters that they were targeted with chemical weapons by the Syrian government in Idlib province — their final holdout in Syria — should have been treated by the western media with a high degree of scepticism.
That the US and other western governments enthusiastically picked up those claims should not have made them any more credible.
Scepticism was all the more warranted from the media given that no physical evidence has yet been produced to corroborate the jihadists’ claims. And the media should have been warier still given that the Syrian government was already poised to defeat these al-Qaeda groups without resort to chemical weapons — and without provoking the predictable ire (yet again) of the west.
But most of all scepticism was required because these latest claims arrive just as we have learnt that the last supposed major chemical attack — which took place in April 2018 and was, as ever, blamed by all western sources on Syria’s president, Bashar Assad — was very possibly staged, a false-flag operation by those very al-Qaeda groups now claiming the Syrian government has attacked them once again.
Addicted to incompetence
Most astounding in this week’s coverage of the claims made by al-Qaeda groups is the fact that the western media continues to refuse to learn any lessons, develop any critical distance from the sources it relies on, even as those sources are shown to have repeatedly deceived it.
This was true after the failure to find WMD in Iraq, and it has been confirmed after the the international community’s monitoring body on chemical weapons, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), was exposed this month as deeply dishonest.
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“Cultural Schizophrenia”: US Media No Longer Reports Facts, But Appeals to Emotions
“CULTURAL SCHIZOPHRENIA”: US MEDIA NO LONGER REPORTS FACTS, BUT APPEALS TO EMOTIONS
The mainstream media in the United States has made a shift in the past few decades. Now, they appeal to emotions as opposed to reporting the facts. This “cultural schizophrenia” is tearing the U.S. apart at the seams.
Based on the conclusions to a RAND Corporation study, the mainstream media is actively sowing discord in American society, award-winning journalist Chris Hedges tells RT. The media is focusing on making two sides hate each other instead of reporting on the facts, and the majority of the public is unaware and doesn’t care that their minds are being manipulated by their own emotional responses.
The study, which was released by RAND earlier this week, states that between 1987 and 2017, news content has shifted from event- and context-based reporting to coverage that is “more subjective, relies more heavily on argumentation and advocacy, and includes more emotional appeals.” According to RT, prime-time cable news shows and online journalism lead the way in this shift to emotional and hate-based rhetoric. It has been noticed in print journalism as well, the government-funded think tank concluded. This is contributing to what RAND termed “Truth Decay.” This is described as a shift away from facts and analysis in public discourse.
Hedges claims that the deterioration of the mainstream media is “far worse” than the RAND report suggests. And he isn’t alone in that assessment.
[American journalist Matt]Taibbi says that the result of this journalistic decay and emotional fear mongering is a public addicted to hating each other.Americans have become addicted to the news that agrees with their bias, and it was set up that way on purpose. The only thing anyone will hear when they turn on the news are stories specifically crafted to manufacture outrage, make you hate the other side, and fuel the addiction to anger. –SHTFPlan
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