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Amazon, Jeff Bezos, And The Influential Washington Post
Amazon, Jeff Bezos, And The Influential Washington Post
After Jeff Bezos and several other CEOs testified before the House Judiciary antitrust subcommittee over anti-competitive conduct the following article has taken a huge leap in importance. The Washington Post is an influencer with great power. What is the definition of an influencer? The definition of an influencer is a person or entity thatexerts influence. An influencer inspires or guides the actions of others The old theme of laziness and mellowness runs counter to today’s influencers, who are business-people and upscale inspirational promoters. During recent years several of the tech giants have come under fire for skewing and manipulating public opinion but sliding below the radar is the Washington Post. This means few people question the newspaper’s findings, stories, articles, or opinions.
The Washington Post is by far the most influential newspaper in America. Its subtle ability to influence, shape, and mold the opinion of Americans cannot be overestimated. Day after day those working for the Washington Post are quoted time and time again as experts and authorities as they appear on talk-shows and news-feeds spreading their message. Much in the way a stone hitting the water sends out ripples, this amplifies their spin and in many ways determines the focus and direction in how we view issues. The Washington Post’s power goes far beyond just reporting the news but it has the ability to plant an idea like you would a seed. It then shapes public opinion utilizing various tools and even coordinating the timing to maximize their impact.
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The Press is Always the “Chief Ideological Weapon” to Brainwash the People
The Press is Always the “Chief Ideological Weapon” to Brainwash the People
QUESTION: Do you think CNN is deliberately trying to influence the election as they accused Russia?
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ANSWER: Absolutely! Nikita Khrushchev, the former head of the Soviet Union, made a famous statement about the press: “The press is our chief ideological weapon.” The press is a very dangerous tool, and it is clearly degenerating in the United States. CNN targets Trump for calling them out as FAKE NEWS, but around 38% of Americans, according to Statista, stated that they at least agreed that CNN regularly reports made up or fake news about Donald Trump and his administration.
CNN is openly being manipulated by Jeffrey Zucker, who is the CEO of CNN. Any CEO of a company would be fired if they took it from #1 to #5, and as far as most-watched channels, Fox is #5 and CNN is now #22. Zucker’s son, Andrew Zucker, at the age of just 15, served on the advisory board of Democratic politician Cory Booker’s startup tech firm. He was just 15-years-old! The fact Zucker is still employed by CNN is astonishing. Since CNN is owned by WarnerMedia News & Sports division of AT&T’s WarnerMedia, this calls into question the management of AT&T. Why have they allowed CNN to crash and burn simply to push a political agenda that is subversive?
On April 1, 2020, John Stankey announced that he would be stepping down as CEO of WarnerMedia and that former Hulu CEO Jason Kilar would be assuming that role effective May 1, 2020. Kilar reports to Stankey who will continue as COO of AT&T. On April 24, 2020, AT&T announced that effective July 1, 2020, Stankey would replace Randall L. Stephenson as CEO of AT&T. Stankey donates to the AT&T INC. FEDERAL POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE (AT&T FEDERAL PAC), which was among the top 10 spenders in politics during the 2016 elections.
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Propaganda Brainwashing, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Propaganda Brainwashing, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Propaganda is so advanced that rank-and-file members of the public will openly cheerlead their government’s imprisonment of Assange so that their government can continue to lie to them.
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The focus shouldn’t just be on bad things done by individual plutocrats – Gates did X, Bezos did Y etc. The primary focus should be on how we shouldn’t have a system which allows any individual to have that much power over our world. No individual should have that much power to do that much harm.
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You couldn’t create a more perfect profit-generating scheme than war. Entire civilizations can be streamlined into the task of cranking out top-of-the-line, name-brand killing machines at the drop of a false flag. War will continue as long as human behavior is driven by profit.
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If you want more of something, apply capitalism; if you want less of something, apply socialism. Capitalism is great for making a ton of stuff, but for making less stuff it’s shit, whether that be making less illness, less pollution, less ecocide, less war, less prisoners, etc. Right now we live in a world that needs a great reduction of a great many things, and there’s just no way to get there as long as human behavior is driven by profit.
This is obviously true of things like healthcare, where actually eliminating illness kills demand. But it’s also true of even things like charity programs, where if you actually fix the problem people are throwing money at then a lot of professionals lose their income sources. You’ve got to actually incentivize people to disappear the problems, but capitalism doesn’t have an effective way of disappearing things. It necessarily incentivizes people to perpetuate them.
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As Long As Mass Media Propaganda Exists, Democracy Is A Sham
As Long As Mass Media Propaganda Exists, Democracy Is A Sham
A new Reuters/Ipsos poll has reportedly found that a majority of Americans believe the completely discredited narrative that the Russian government paid Taliban-linked fighters to kill the occupying forces of the US and its allies in Afghanistan.
“A majority of Americans believe that Russia paid the Taliban to kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan last year amid negotiations to end the war, and more than half want to respond with new economic sanctions against Moscow, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Wednesday,” Reuters reports.
“Overall, 60% of Americans said they found reports of Russian bounties on American soldiers to be ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ believable, while 21% said they were not credible and the rest were unsure,” says Reuters.
Those 21 percent are objectively correct: the story is not credible, and it’s not even close. Gareth Porter shows in The Grayzone how the “Bountygate” narrative is so utterly baseless that even US intelligence agencies have dismissed it, Joe Lauria of Consortium News explains how it doesn’t make any sense on its face, and FAIR’s Alan MacLeod breaks down the appalling journalistic malpractice that went into circulating this incredibly thinly sourced story to the mainstream public.
The story advances no solid facts or verified information. What it does advance is pre-existing imperialist agendas like remaining in Afghanistan, killing the last of the remaining nuclear deals with Moscow, and manufacturing public support for new Russia sanctions.
And yet a majority of people believed it, and still believe it. The narrative that Russia paid Taliban fighters to kill occupying forces is now regarded as an established fact in many key circles, despite being backed by literally zero facts.
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Why The US Empire Works So Hard To Control The International Narrative About Russia
Why The US Empire Works So Hard To Control The International Narrative About Russia
On a December 2010 episode of Fox News’ Freedom Watch, John Bolton and the show’s host Andrew Napolitano were debating about recent WikiLeaks publications, and naturally the subject of government secrecy came up.
“Now I want to make the case for secrecy in government when it comes to the conduct of national security affairs, and possibly for deception where that’s appropriate,” Bolton said. “You know Winston Churchill said during World War Two that in wartime truth is so important it should be surrounded by a bodyguard of lies.”
“Do you really believe that?” asked an incredulous Napolitano.
“Absolutely,” Bolton replied.
“You would lie in order to preserve the truth?” asked Napolitano.
“If I had to say something I knew was false to protect American national security, I would do it,” Bolton answered.
“Why do people in the government think that the laws of society or the rules don’t apply to them?” Napolitano asked.
“Because they are not dealing in the civil society we live in under the Constitution,” Bolton replied. “They are dealing in the anarchic environment internationally where different rules apply.”
“But you took an oath to uphold the Constitution, and the Constitution mandates certain openness and certain fairness,” Napolitano protested. “You’re willing to do away with that in order to attain a temporary military goal?”
“I think as Justice Jackson said in a famous decision, the Constitution is not a suicide pact,” Bolton said. “And I think defending the United States from foreign threats does require actions that in a normal business environment in the United States we would find unprofessional. I don’t make any apology for it.”
I am going to type a sequence of words that I have never typed before, and don’t expect to ever type again:
John Bolton is right.
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This Russia-Afghanistan Story Is Western Propaganda At Its Most Vile
This Russia-Afghanistan Story Is Western Propaganda At Its Most Vile
All western mass media outlets are now shrieking about the story The New York Times first reported, citing zero evidence and naming zero sources, claiming intelligence says Russia paid out bounties to Taliban-linked fighters in Afghanistan for attacking the occupying forces of the US and its allies in Afghanistan. As of this writing, and probably forevermore, there have still been zero intelligence sources named and zero evidence provided for this claim.
As we discussed yesterday, the only correct response to unsubstantiated claims by anonymous spooks in a post-Iraq invasion world is to assume that they are lying until you’ve been provided with a mountain of hard, independently verifiable evidence to the contrary. The fact that The New York Times instead chose to uncritically parrot these evidence-free claims made by operatives within intelligence agencies with a known track record of lying about exactly these things is nothing short of journalistic malpractice. The fact that western media outlets are now unanimously regurgitating these still 100 percent baseless assertions is nothing short of state propaganda.
The consensus-manufacturing, Overton window-shrinking western propaganda apparatus has been in full swing with mass media outlets claiming on literally no basis whatsoever that they have confirmed one another’s “great reporting” on this completely unsubstantiated story.
“The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have confirmed our reporting,” the NYT story’s co-author Charlie Savage tweeted hours ago.
“We have confirmed the New York Times’ scoop: A Russian military spy unit offered bounties to Taliban-linked militants to attack coalition forces in Afghanistan,” tweeted The Washington Post‘s John Hudson.
“We matched The New York Times’ great reporting on how US intel has assessed that Russians paid Taliban to target US, coalition forces in Afg which is a pretty stunning development,” tweeted Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Lubold.
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Lies, Damned Lies and Covid19
Lies, Damned Lies and Covid19
Growing up as I did in the Cold War, I still experience a special kind of shudder whenever I come across an anecdote like that of Katya Soldak, whose Soviet nursery school teacher once showed her class a photograph clipped from a Western newspaper, “depicting skinny [Russian] children in striped robes walking in a straight line.”
The capitalists who printed that picture wanted people to think Soviet children were “treated like prisoners,” the teacher declared angrily, “when in reality the kids were on their way to a swimming pool in their bathrobes.”
Which was a nice story (thought little Katya) — except that “I had never even seen a pool…. [T]hey existed in my mind as does an exotic animal or an unvisited city.”
A time capsule from a remote dystopia? Think again.
Staring at me right now from the latest quarterly newsletter of my alma mater, the University of Virginia, is an identical piece of bad-is-good fakery: a photograph of an involuntarily isolated graduate student named Kalea Obermeyer, accompanied by a caption blandly informing the reader that the woman seated alone on a trunk in the confines of a cramped dormitory room, clumsily swathed in a surgical mask, “shelters in place” in “her most secure housing during the pandemic.”
Welcome to Pravda, COVID19 style.
Being an honest sort, I have considered whether I ought to write to the editors of my old university’s magazine, accusing them of playing toady to democracy-destroying propagandists.
Should I remind these so-called educators of the young that the term “shelter in place” is properly applied to air raids, not to “pandemics,” and is a cruel hoax when pressed into service to describe what is actually an illegal quarantine?
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Narrative Control Operations Escalate As America Burns
Narrative Control Operations Escalate As America Burns
Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, and mainstream media are falling all over themselves with censorship and spin jobs to get the narrative back under control as mass protests continue to sweep across America.
In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed in a US Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”
“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told by cold warrior think tank denizen Clint Watts. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”
“Stopping the false information artillery barrage landing on social media users comes only when those outlets distributing bogus stories are silenced—silence the guns and the barrage will end,” Watts added.
Those words rattle around in the memory now as America burns with nationwide protests demanding an end to the police state, and as narrative control operations ramp up with frantic urgency.
Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing@BenjaminNorton on how a cabal of editors got us listed as a “deprecated source” entirely on the basis of our political views and in violation of Wikipedia guidelines https://thegrayzone.com/2020/06/10/wikipedia-formally-censors-the-grayzone-as-regime-change-advocates-monopolize-editing/ …Wikipedia formally censors The Grayzone as regime-change advocates monopolize editing | The GrayzoneOn Wikipedia, regime-change advocates and right-wing Venezuelan opposition supporters blacklist and “deprecated” The Grayzone on political grounds, violating encyclopedia guidelinesthegrayzone.com
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Civil War inside Mainstream Newspapers
Civil War inside Mainstream Newspapers
There is a civil war inside the New York Times as is the case in just about every major newspaper. This war is emerging between the young journalists and the 40+ old-wing liberals who have lost their way and surrendered all ethics of what was once journalism. What has changed is that the classically liberal process has transformed from investigative objectivity to always criticizing in public any opposition which in itself requires that one holds certain opposite convictions which means any objectivity has been surrendered. The capacity of reason to determine right from wrong has become biased to one’s own side to prevail and what has been rejected is debate. The substance is never addressed, simply they attack the messenger. There is no evolution of thought or advancement for society through the historical give and take of argument.
Journalism has lost any degree of modesty about the likelihood of any comprehensive moral and political view triumphing so decisively that competing views vanish or shrink to the furthest margins of a free society. Indeed, journalism has become just personal propaganda. Once upon a time, journalism was a noble cause for it was about a practical and functional form of truth that may not be even absolute or philosophical, but it was the pursuit of the truths that impacted our society. It was once perhaps a lofty goal that began with the professional discipline of assembling and verifying facts as was the case with the legal and political professions.
But journalists, have succumbed to bias and no longer try to convey a fair and reliable account of their events. FAKE NEWS has simply become a platform for personal bias warranting no further investigation. Journalism has digressed to nothing more than standing on a soap-box at Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park, London. Journalists are no longer transparent about sources or methods so audiences can make their own assessment of the information.
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Revolutionary Boiling Point, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Revolutionary Boiling Point, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Still mad at China’s brutal authoritarian government for imprisoning Julian Assange after his journalism exposed Chinese war crimes.
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Arresting people for future crimes is called “pre-crime”, and it’s the stuff of dystopian horror fiction.
Violently dominating an entire planet because another country might hurt yours in the future is called “US foreign policy”, and it’s the stuff of mainstream news punditry.
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Saying a US politician is bad on foreign policy but good on domestic policy is a bit like saying “Yeah my boyfriend murders hitchhikers, but he cooks.”
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Dominant revolutionary thought consistently fails to adequately appreciate the power of oligarchic propaganda and its ability to manipulate the way people think, act and vote. Until this changes, there will be no revolution.
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I was upset the Democrats nominated a candidate with a decades-long track record of reactionary warmongering corporate cronyism, but I changed my mind when I learned he has a “task force” where vaguely left-wing voices are allowed to speak words into a hole in the ground.
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“Obamagate” will not lead to anything. Since 2016 both mainstream US parties have been saying the other party is about to be obliterated any minute now by scandalous revelations, and they’re always wrong. Both parties are pure swamp; you cannot use the swamp to drain the swamp.
If you still believe that one of America’s two mainstream parties is about to be brought to its knees by earth-shattering revelations any minute now, I highly recommend you also take up watching WWE, because you’ll definitely love it.
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COVID-19: Propaganda & the Art of Exploiting a Pandemic
COVID-19: Propaganda & the Art of Exploiting a Pandemic
Throughout the U.S., institutions that have no real interest in public health are exploiting our sense of vulnerability to benefit their public images and their bottom lines, says Dr. Mike Pappas.
We have all likely seen or heard the commercials. They typically start with slow music and maybe a nice sunrise. The ads then give lip service to the “strange and uncertain” times in which we’re living. But never fear, your savior is here: some large corporation wants to let you know that they are “here for us.” Do not worry, even after the pandemic is over, they will still be “here for us.” This touching treacle would be incomplete without a nod to the “healthcare heroes” continuing to fight during this pandemic. It just touches your heart, doesn’t it? But the eerie similarity of many of the commercials is a bit off putting… It is almost as if there is a propaganda campaign designed to exploit our worry and vulnerability during the global pandemic.
The Field of Public Relations
Exploring the field of public relations is helpful when examining the recent flood of sentimental adverts. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, is universally known as the “father of public relations.” In the 1920s he pioneered the technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he called “engineering consent.” In his influential 1928 book “Propaganda,”Bernays highlights the need to utilize people’s emotions to steer public opinion. He states:
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in the democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of the country.”
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Syria Spinmeisters Fumble Attempts To Narrative Manage OPCW Leaks
Syria Spinmeisters Fumble Attempts To Narrative Manage OPCW Leaks
It’s been over 72 hours since The Grayzone published new leaks further exposing how the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) has been lying about its investigation into an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria two years ago.
These new documents make it abundantly clear that OPCW leadership were just plain lying when they claimed that a ballistics expert named Ian Henderson was not a part of the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) in Douma and played only a “minor supporting role” there. Henderson disagrees with the organisation’s official findings implicating the Syrian government in a chlorine gas attack, finding instead that the gas cylinders on the scene were “manually placed”, indicating that the crime scene was staged and the dozens of civilians killed were the victims of a still-unsolved mass murder.
The silence on these revelations from the OPCW and its usual narrative managers has been deafening.
No reply yet from “OPCW public affairs, to my query about Greyzone allegations,m devastating if true both to official position of OPCW and to lapcat @Bellingcat. : https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/06/opcw-douma-whistleblower/ …Exclusive: OPCW chief made false claims to denigrate Douma whistleblower, documents reveal | The…The Grayzone has obtained documents exposing numerous falsehoods and misleading claims by OPCW Director General Fernando Arias to degrade the…thegrayzone.com
Peter Hitchens, one of the only high-visibility journalists to cover the OPCW scandal, tweeted when the documents first emerged: “I have today formally requested OPCW public affairs to comment on these allegations, which call into question an important statement made by the organisation’s chief and retailed by lapcat Bellingcat about the status of Inspector Ian Henderson.”
“No reply yet from OPCW public affairs, to my query about Greyzone allegations, devastating if true both to official position of OPCW and to lapcat Bellingcat,” Hitchens tweeted a day later.
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New OPCW Leaks Prove They Are Lying To Us About Syria
New OPCW Leaks Prove They Are Lying To Us About Syria
The Grayzone‘s Aaron Maté has published some explosive new leaks from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which make it clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that the organisation, and the narrative managers associated with it, have been lying about the investigation into an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria two years ago.
In May of last year an Engineering Assessment signed by South African OPCW inspector Ian Henderson was leaked to the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media, saying in direct contradiction of the OPCW’s official findings that the chlorine cylinders allegedly dropped upon the scene via aircraft were in fact “manually placed” there. Since Douma was then occupied by the Al Qaeda-linked and Saudi-backed Jaysh al-Islam group, who were fighting against the Syrian government, this would mean the Syrian government was not responsible for whatever killed dozens of civilians. And it would have the very serious implication that the US, UK and France launched airstrikes against the Syrian government on false grounds.
From the moment Henderson’s leaked document first emerged, both the OPCW and the establishment spinmeisters responsible for managing the imperial narrative on Syria have been dismissing Henderson’s Engineering Assessment on the grounds that he was not a part of the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), the team which went to Douma to investigate the incident. Since that time mountains of evidence have surfaced both corroborating Henderson’s assessment and revealing that attempts to portray him as not a part of the FFM are disingenuous pedantic manipulations at best, but these new leaks by The Grayzone are the first hard proof we’ve seen that this spin job was actually an outright, bald-faced lie.The Grayzone@TheGrayzoneNews
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Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)
Why You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)
Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.
This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.
I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.
“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant.”
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/temporary-coronavirus-censorship …The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is HereAs the Covid-19 crisis progresses, censorship programs advance, amid calls for China-style control of the Internettaibbi.substack.com
Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.
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