Home » Posts tagged 'mainstream media' (Page 12)

Tag Archives: mainstream media

As I write this, demonstrations around the world are taking place in protest of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange’s arbitrary detention and silencing by the US-centralized power establishment that has been actively pursuing his destruction for over a decade. The demonstrations will be well-attended, but not a fraction as well-attended as they should be. They will receive international attention, but not a fraction as much attention as they should.

This is because the manipulators and smear merchants who have made their careers paving the way for oligarchic agendas have been successful in killing off sympathy for the plight of Assange. As we discussed yesterday, sympathy is key for getting narratives to take hold in public consciousness. This is why western corporate media will circulate pictures of dead children all day long when it’s in the interests of advancing longstanding imperialist agendas, but never when those children were killed by western weapons. If you can tug at someone’s heart strings while telling them a story, the story you tell them will slide right in with minimal scrutiny. And it works the other way, too: if you can prevent someone’s heart strings from being plucked while hearing about a legitimately heartbreaking story, you can prevent that story from taking hold. Kill all sympathy for a dissident journalist and you kill all belief in his side of the story.

And Assange’s side of the story is indeed devastating to the preferred narrative of the US-centralized empire. A journalist (yes, journalist, per definition) who publishes 100 percent authentic documents exposing the inner mechanics of power structures all over the world, who was forced to seek political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in order to avoid extradition by the same government which brutalized Chelsea Manning, is on its face a highly sympathetic story.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

California Lacks Real Marine Protection as Offshore Drilling Expands in State Waters

June 20, 2018

California Lacks Real Marine Protection as Offshore Drilling Expands in State Waters

One of the big news stories neglected by both the mainstream and “alternative” media is the capture of California politics and the regulatory apparatus by Big Oil and other corporate interests in recent years – and the massive expansion of offshore drilling that has occurred in state waters under the helm of Governor Jerry Brown as a consequence of this regulatory capture.

The enormous power that Big Oil exerts over California regulators was inadvertently revealed in a March 10, 2012 article in the Santa Barbara Independent that discussed a so-called “marine protected area” created under the privately funded Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) Initiative that went into effect on January 2 of that year.

The official language for the marine protected area in the Isla Vista area of Santa Barbara County, the Campus Point State Marine Conservation Area, reads, “Take of all living marine resources is prohibited, except for take pursuant to operation and maintenance of artificial structures inside the conservation area … ”

“The caveat, allowing marine resources to be taken near artificial structures, exists to allow oil production representatives the ability to maintain equipment, including pipelines, located in this area,” the article by Cat Heushul stated.

Unfortunately, the reporter failed to mention the even bigger story — that Catherine Reheis-Boyd, President of the Western States Petroleum Association, actually served as the Chair of the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative to create this “marine protected area” and others like it in Southern California.

She also served on the task forces to create “marine protected areas” on the Central Coast, North Central Coast and North Coast. If that is not a huge, glaring conflict of interest, I do not know what is.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Staying the Course: the Long March of Middle East Destruction

June 5, 2018

Staying the Course: the Long March of Middle East Destruction

When falsely convicted Andy Dufresne bored a hole through the Shawshank prison wall over the course of two decades, narrator “Red” says that Andy always liked geology, and that geology, like digging through a prison wall with a rock hammer, is just a matter of “pressure and time.” It’s much the same when it comes to American imperialism. Particularly the conquest of the Middle East, one of the longest-running projects in the U.S. pantheon. Our 16 seasons in Afghanistan counts as our longest foreign engagement to date. Even those living in a self-imposed media bubble of New York Times, CNN, and NPR are fully cognizant of this imperial project. George Bush called it the “Long War.” It can’t been disguised, even by the miserable mainstream media, where deception is an art form unknown to the deceived. Still, the causes and conditions of that project are as yet unclear to the masses. Mostly because the MSM daily reminds us that although we are on the right side of history, we are surrounded by crackpot Arabs, socialist lunatics, irrational Chinese, African bandits, and splenetic Slavs. Our borders are forever under attack. We must be eternally vigilant to ward off the thief in the night. This script was prepared in the ashes of World War Two, when our national security planners gleefully recognized that all the European nations had destroyed themselves fighting fascists, and that America had emerged comparatively intact. Our magnanimous brain trust quickly put together a plan to get its hands on Middle East oil, maintain our outsized consumption, violently snuff out any socialist movements rising from the European rubble, and scare the living daylights out of the exhausted population with demented fables of communist infiltration. It would require a garrison state, where the majority of money was dumped into the bottomless pit of defense spending. More or less everything was accomplished as planned.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The American Empire and its Media

June 3, 2018

The American Empire and its Media

Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

Established in 1921 as a private, bipartisan organization to “awaken America to its worldwide responsibilities”, the CFR and its close to 5000 elite members have for decades shaped U.S. foreign policy and public discourse about it. As a well-known Council member once explained, the goal has indeed been to establish a global Empire, albeit a “benevolent” one.

Based on official membership rosters, the following illustration for the first time depicts the extensive media network of the CFR and its two main international affiliate organizations: the Bilderberg Group(covering mainly the U.S. and Europe) and the Trilateral Commission (covering North America, Europe and East Asia), both established by Council leaders to foster elite cooperation at the international level.

Click to enlarge 🔎

In a column entitled “Ruling Class Journalists”, former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood once described the Council and its members approvingly as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States”.

Harwood continued: “The membership of these journalists in the Council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it. () They are part of that establishment whether they like it or not, sharing most of its values and world views.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fine-Tuning the Surveillance State

May 31, 2018

Fine-Tuning the Surveillance State

We have been watching the shift of society and all of its components to collectivist thought and action in preparation for the step into a full-blown totalitarian state. Already the Constitution and our rights enumerated within it have been relegated to impotency and practically abrogated. The key to this has not been the use of force, but the molding of thought and behavior over the decades within the schools, within the fostered predictive programming of pop culture and television, and within the lying, Marxist, mainstream media.

Currently there are 22 states that have made a crime of what is referred to as “disturbing the school,” and this has led to thousands of arrests of students for such things as interrupting a teacher, or even belching in class. Schools have an increased police presence; however, as we have seen with the school shootings this year, they certainly aren’t there to protect the students.

Police are in schools to enforce conformity and submissive behavior: they’re managing the “troupe” of juveniles, driving the herd.

Collective, community thought is the mantra. Advertisements on the radio for high-school sports list all of the acceptable skills that sports convey: leadership, teamwork, cooperation, etc. Gone is personal development, let alone “fun,” the latter being archaic and non-utilitarian. In the past 3 to 4 decades, this collective “consciousness” has become the norm. Creative thought is discouraged unless it is directed…directed by authorities or “approved” controllers/managers. Such thought is supplemented by the actions of those authorities, mislabeled as “government” when the appropriate term is rule.

An article ran out of News 4, posted on NBC Washington on 5/17/18 entitled Potential Spy Devices Which Track Cellphones, Intercept Calls Found All Over D.C., Md., Va. It is worth reading, as it details the Stingray technology (carried in a briefcase) that capture cellular telephones by tricking them into believing the devices are cell phone towers. This means the phones are tracked, and the government is taking information on them surreptitiously.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How To Silence RT Forever

May 8, 2018

How To Silence RT Forever

Loyalists of the western empire have been growing increasingly honest about their desire to use censorship and propaganda in order to win an “information war” against Russia.

The other day we saw a Guardian article arguing for the necessity of a coordinated campaign by western governments to “combat Russian disinformation” due to Russia’s disinterest in “cooperating to reach a common understanding of the truth”, i.e. agree with unproven western accusations and capitulate to the longstanding western agendas those accusations are meant to advance.

Before that, we saw a Defense One article authored by an Atlantic Council official arguing in favor of the creation of a “NATO for Infowar” to propagandize westerners against Russian interests for their own good. The author of this article went so far as to suggest that the Kremlin-backed television channel RT ought to be forbidden to air in western nations.

It always comes back to RT. Because of the network’s relatively high profile in comparison to other Russian media, it has been made into an ideal Emmanuel Goldstein for the empire’s daily Two Minutes Hate. RT is now so completely reviled by establishment loyalists that citing it in an online debate will be taken as an instant debunk of not just the point you were trying to make but of your entire position (and often your humanity itself by getting you labeled a “Russian bot”), even if your citation is comprised entirely of independently verifiable facts.

Luckily for the screaming hysterical Big Brother devotees, there is a very easy and 100 percent guaranteed way to get RT removed from western airwaves forever. Are you ready? Here it is:

Allow leftist and antiwar perspectives to be voiced on western mainstream media.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

From the Skripals to Douma, the Globalist Pravda Network Reveals its True Face

May 4, 2018

People living in the Soviet Union had a wonderful phrase to describe the two biggest circulation state-controlled newspapers, Pravda (meaning “truth”) and Izvestia (meaning “news”). There’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia, was the oft-repeated expression. It is unfortunate that the mainstream media in the Western nations these days don’t have similar sorts of names, since it deprives us of an endless source of amusement in coming up with similarly apposite phrases about them.

It is, however, increasingly clear that on the great issues of the day, you are about as likely to find the truth in them as you would have done in Pravda, although I expect their sports and gardening sections are still relatively reliable. As for the important political and geopolitical issues of the day, I tend to imagine that on the walls next to the desks in the offices of many of these papers and broadcasters are the following instructions:

Rules for Reporting on Global Affairs

Repeat Government line unquestioningly.

If Government line is questioned, accuse those doing the questioning of being Bots, Kremlin-trolls and useful idiots.

If the persistent questioning won’t go away and the Government line is seen to be contradictory and full of holes, bury the issue completely and start posing deep questions, such as “What will Meghan wear?” or “Is there a gender pay gap in midwifery?” or “How much sugar is really bad for you?”

The Skripal and Douma episodes have demonstrated this perhaps more than any others. First the Government line has been dutifully parroted by the media in a relentless propaganda campaign — no questions asked. Then there have been attempts to silence or ridicule those who didn’t bow to the parrots and who were asking legitimate questions — including the appalling treatment meted out to distinguished military men.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Guardian Is Committing Journalistic Malpractice By Not Retracting This Claim

April 25, 2018

The Guardian Is Committing Journalistic Malpractice By Not Retracting This Claim

On the 19th of April, The Guardian published an article making the positive assertion that two Twitter accounts were run not by real people, but by automated bot software based in Russia. Since the article was published, the owners of both accounts have stepped forward, on video, demonstrating in no uncertain terms that they are in fact real human beings and not software programs.

As of this writing, days later, there has been neither retraction nor correction of the false claims made by The Guardian, and the article remains as published.

The article’s author, Heather Stewart, makes the following claim:

“One bot, @Ian56789, was sending 100 posts a day during a 12-day period from 7 April, and reached 23 million users, before the account was suspended. It focused on claims that the chemical weapons attack on Douma had been falsified, using the hashtag #falseflag. Another, @Partisangirl, reached 61 million users with 2,300 posts over the same 12-day period.”

Stewart explicitly asserts that the Twitter account @Ian56789 is a bot. That account’s owner appeared for an interview on Sky News, completely disproving this assertion. Stewart also names the Twitter account @Partisangirl as a bot account. The account’s owner, Maram Susli, is a well-known Syrian-Australian activist with many publicly available videos and a Wikipedia page.

This is an extremely egregious case of journalistic malpractice. A demonstrable falsehood has been published about two individuals, the information has been publicly available for days, and there has been no correction or retraction from a trusted mainstream news source. When confronted with the obvious and undeniable falsehoods in her story, Heather Stewart tweeted, “It’s not my analysis – as the piece makes quite clear – it’s the government’s.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

MSM Is Frantically Attacking Dissenting Syria Narratives, And It Looks Really Bad

April 23, 2018

MSM Is Frantically Attacking Dissenting Syria Narratives, And It Looks Really Bad

I write a lot about how, in a political environment that is saturated in disinformation and propaganda, it’s important to ignore people’s words and watch their actions instead to get a clear picture of what’s really happening. You could not ask for a better illustration of this than the recent behavior of the mass media with regard to Syria.

The always excellent Moon of Alabamaput out a piece yesterday detailing the immense deluge of attack editorials disguised as information that have been churned out recently about anyone who questions the establishment Syria narrative, including a single day in which no less than seven smear pieces were issued by prominent publications. Seven. In one day.

If you look at the words within these smear pieces, you will gather that there has been a sudden disturbing emergence of evil bloggers, tweeters and activists who are hell bent on deceiving you into falling in love with Bashar al-Assad and pledging allegiance to the Russian flag. If you look at what these outlets are actually doing, however, you see a very different picture indeed: an aggressive, spurious campaign to inoculate the English-speaking world against the influence of anyone who disagrees with yet another war against yet another Middle Eastern country.

And people are noticing. It’s getting too blatantly obvious, like a stranger coming up to you and talking about climate change while openly masturbating; what he is doing would eclipse interest in whatever he is saying. The frenetic publication of hit pieces against anyone who fails to fall in line with the establishment Syria narrative is fast becoming the real story here.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Chris Hedges: U.S. citizens are living in an inverted totalitarian country

April 8, 2018

Chris Hedges: U.S. citizens are living in an inverted totalitarian country

The mainstream media deflects attention from where power resides: corporations, not with the leaders of the free world. The arguments posed by Chris Hedges, that the U.S. is neither a democracy nor a republic but a totalitarian state that can now assassinate its citizens at will, are pertinent ones. Scary ones. Especially as consecutive governments seem equally as impotent to invoke any real change for the States. If the media won’t stand up to the marionettes who pull the strings of the conglomerates causing deep, indelible polarisation in the world abound; then so we must act. Together.

Listen to the full interview in our weekly Newsvoice Think podcast.

We were delighted to have Chris Hedges on an episode of the Newsvoice Think podcast as we seek to broadcast perspectives from all sides of the political spectrum. Right, left, red, blue and purple.

In our interview with Chris, we discussed a range of topics facing the U.S. today as the Trump administration looks back at a year in power, and forward to the November ’18 midterms where Democrats will be looking to make gains. Chris was scathing of that party describing them as a “creature of Wall Street, which is choreographed and ceased to be a proper party a long time ago.”

As a columnist with Truthdig, and a big advocate of independent media. Chris Hedges was the perfect interviewee for us to draw on the benefits of crowdsourced journalism and the challenges facing sites at the mercy of Facebook, Google and Twitter algorithms.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Degrading Newspapers’ Business Sections

April 6, 2018

Degrading Newspapers’ Business Sections

It’s alarming that there are far fewer media outlets for consumer protection news and features than there were thirty years ago. Recall the huge Phil Donahue Show, the regional radio show and TV news shows, the television networks and syndicated radio shows that would report and interview consumer advocates about the injustice, rip-offs, and harms done to the consumer by unscrupulous corporations. These shows are largely gone now. Shows marked by fluff, narcissism, trivia, and sensationalist, frenetic news bits are their replacements.

What is disturbing is that the major newspapers – the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal—are cutting back reporting on the revelations and doings of active consumers, and consumer organizations. Sure, they do occasional features that may gain them big journalism prizes. But the regular coverage of very important consumer struggles with Congress, the White House, the courts, and the state legislatures has vastly shrunken. Moreover, the media, especially TV, is dittoheading itself with the daily “big story”, as with the Trumpian escapades.

Serious readers are left with the New York Times daily Business pages (the Washington Post dropped its separate, daily business section a few years ago). Of late, the editors of the Times business section have been diluting its contents with what two former reporters called a more “business friendly” priority. My attempts to discuss this problem with their news editors have not been answered.

Last Sunday I picked up the weighty Sunday New York Times and went to the business page (business is often defined as stories about sellers, when it should include buyers and consumers). The cover page featured a huge photograph and article titled: “Tiger Is Back, Will Sponsors Follow?”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

More Lies from the Presstitutes

March 28, 2018

More Lies from the Presstitutes

The shameless liars that comprise the US media intentionally exaggerated the marchers against “gun violance” by four times the acutal number.

Why?

Why are the media presstitutes involved in advocacy of agendas and not in reporting factual news?

Recent polls show that a majority of Americans believe that gun ownership makes people safer. Americans do not believe that people should be denied safety because of an occasional nutcase or a staged shooting to advance the gun control agenda. Indeed, they wonder who is behind the gun control agenda. They wonder about the dumbshits who are protesting the Second Amendment instead of Washington’s rush into conflict with Russia.

I have no doubt that gun control groups are organized by agents of the police state. The United States is falling apart. All of the increase in income and wealth is going to the One Percent. Everyone else is hurting more each day. See Chris Hedges, for example: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49082.htm

The vast majority of Americans are being ground into the dirt by government at all levels. There is no democracy. There is only looting. The One Percent fear that sooner or later even insouciant Americans might rise up. But they can’t if they are disarmed. That is all gun control is about.

Deaths from what the propagandistic “gun violance” shills for the police state hype as a massive problem are such a small percentage of US deaths that they do not even show up statistically. Yet we have all this protest over an infintestimal number of deaths, and no protests at all by opponents of “gun violence” over police killings, which are larger that “gun violence” deaths or over America’s massive murders on a world scale. Where are the “gun violence” protests over the millions of deaths and millions of displaced peoples in Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan? Where are the “gun violence” protests against Trumpt’s chosen national security adviser John Bolton’s plan to bomb Iran and North Korea into the stone age?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

On Rational Optimism

March 23, 2018

ON RATIONAL OPTIMISM

“We got stick for questions like, ‘Who came second in the last war?’” he recalled. “But the contestants weren’t always the brightest tickets — some of their IQs didn’t reach room temperature. Once I accidentally read out the question and the answer: ‘Where was President Kennedy assassinated, in Dallas?’ And the contestant still answered ‘Chicago’.”

Jim Bowen, the host of the British TV show Bullseye, who died on March 14, 2018.

Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party is perhaps his most celebrated play. In a shabby seaside boarding-house, Stanley Webber, a retired pianist, is visited by two disquieting strangers, Goldberg and McCann. The Birthday Party introduced a generation of theatre-goers to the Pinteresque pause, to Pinteresque word play, to the ‘comedy of menace’ and ‘the theatre of the absurd’. There is an anecdote about the play that Pinter himself frequently retold. Having seen a recent production, a woman wrote to the playwright and asked,

Dear Sir, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men ? 2. Where did Stanley come from ? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal ? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your play.

Pinter’s response:

Dear Madam, I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points which I do not understand. 1. Who are you ? 2. Where do you come from ? 3. Are you supposed to be normal ? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions I cannot fully understand your letter.

Touché.

In his best-selling book Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari asks what it is about the human species Homo Sapiens that caused it to win out against all its competitor species during man’s prehistory. One of his answers (spoiler alert) is that the ability of Homo Sapiens to cooperate in large numbers arose from our unique ability to believe in things that exist solely in the imagination, such as gods, countries, and money. Human beings, he argues, have a distinctive cognitive capacity for fiction.

Our aptitude for the largely imaginary also leaves us with a perverse requirement for certainty where certainty cannot exist. (Nobody, other than economists, ever said that human beings were either consistent, or rational.) A good example is financial market commentary provided by traditional media. Why did the market perform the way it did yesterday ? Traditional media will tell us. Whether there is any fundamental ‘reality’ or substance to their account is debatable.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

America’s Troll Farm Media

March 9, 2018

America’s Troll Farm Media

Photo by Porsche Brosseau | CC BY 2.0

Despite all the smoke and mirrors, most Americans seem to see where the stenographers of corporate capitalism are taking us. A recent Gallup poll found that while 84% of Americans see media as “critical” or “very important” to democracy, only 28% see the corporatist mainstream news media (MSM) as actually supporting democracy. They’re right on both counts of course. The quality of a democracy is only as good as the information people have to make informed judgements about public policy and politicians.

Even as the mainstream news media continue to lose street cred, they persist in a rumor-saturated full court press against the “Trump-Putin presidency,” which only further exposes their lack of professionalism and increasing vulgarity. MSM management and their boardroom bosses have long understood that as long as they spice up their “nothing burger” news, ratings and advertising rates will keep them in business and please their commercial and government clients. Tabloid journalism, which can describe most American mainstream media these days, even when wrapped up as “all the news that’s fit to print,” is in constant search of sensation, scandal, gossip, and profit – and only occasionally in public-oriented investigative integrity.

What else does the citizenry have to say? A mere 18% have “a lot” of trust in the MSM, while 74% see them as “biased” (Pew Research, July 2016). A study by the Harvard-Harris polling organization in May 2017 confirmed this, finding that 65 percent of Americans consider the so-called “free press” biased, obsessed with scandal, and full of “fake news” and therefore cannot be trusted. Among the concurring are a majority of both Democrats (53%) and Independents (60%) as well as 80% of Republicans.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Peter Schiff: ‘We Will Live Through Another Great Depression Which Will Be MUCH MUCH WORSE’

March 2, 2018

Peter Schiff: ‘We Will Live Through Another Great Depression Which Will Be MUCH MUCH WORSE’

Financial guru Peter Schiff, who accurately predicted the recession of 2008, says the problems we face now are even bigger. We will live through another Great Depression if Schiff is correct. And one of the main concerns is something very few dare to even mention or show a concern about: the national debt.

Schiff’s podcast from a few days ago highlights a very important problem with not only the economy as we know it but the mainstream media as well. Unable to take their attention off gun control regulations for even a moment to focus on a much bigger concern, the national debt, the mainstream media is effectively trying to hide what’s coming down the pipe. The lack of coverage seems to be spurring a lackadaisical attitude about the almost $21 trillion debt.

Let’s start at the beginning. Schiff begins his podcast talking about a book his father wrote; one of the only books to have been banned by the United States government. Yes, the US government banned a book titled “The Federal Mafia: How It Illegally Imposes And Unlawfully Collects Income Taxes” by Irwin Schiff in the “land of the free.”

“The bad news is, we are going to live through another Great Depression and it’s going to be very different. This will be in many ways, much much worse, than what people had to endure during the Great Depression,” Schiff says. “This is going to be a dollar crisis.”

“These hot inflation numbers that we’ve been getting are going to get a lot hotter…all this inflation that has been in the financial markets, in the stock markets, in the bond market, in the real estate market, everybody loved inflation when it was making you rich…the problem is going to be when it makes you poor.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: mainstream media

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts