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Unbelievable How Mainstream Media Has Become Just Liars

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Thomas Friedman of the New York Times demonstrates why mainstream media is just becoming so bought and paid for. You have to wonder if they should not be in prison for attempting to overthrow the government and start a revolution. Here he is still ranting about how Russia hacked the election and asserting that this is somehow a Pearl Harbor and 911 event. I suppose this is implying we should start world war III because Hillary lost.

The Homeland Security and the FBI both said that Russia’s hack of the DNC did not involve altering the vote. In fact, it was his own paper that reported on November 25, 2016: “The Obama administration said on Friday that despite Russian attempts to undermine the presidential election, it has concluded that the results “accurately reflect the will of the American people.”

PulitzerHearstWarYellowKids

Spaniards_search_women_1898The constant lies and manipulations seem intent upon creating war exactly as took place with the Spanish American War. We have returned to yellow journalism which is based upon sensationalism and crude exaggeration. Pulitzer and Hearst went head to head. I remember grade school history class blaming the Spanish American War on fake news. There is one such story that male Spanish officials were strip searching American woman tourists in Cuba looking for claimed messages from rebels. This was the front page of Hearst’s newspaper showing what has become known as “yellow journalism” whereby the illustration was by Frederic Remington published in the New York Journal, February 12th, 1897.

Hearst’s New York Journal was called out for this fake news by its rival Joseph Pulitzer’s, New York World,  reporting that this story was erroneous and its graphically illustrated strip-search of a woman aboard U.S. passenger steamer was fake.

 

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

How the Corporate Media Continues to Use the Russia Scapegoat as a Distraction from Status Quo Failure

How the Corporate Media Continues to Use the Russia Scapegoat as a Distraction from Status Quo Failure

Countless observers have noted the obvious fact that the corporate media’s all-encompassing obsession with anti-Russia hysteria is partly just a shameless campaign to prevent change within the Democratic Party by blaming its loss on an outside enemy as opposed to the oligarch-coddling, corrupt disaster it nominated. While true, the strategy is far bigger than that. So called Western elites have failed miserably across the globe, and the only way to retain their undeserved positions of power (many should be in jail), is to create and promote a mindless, highly emotional, non-domenstic distraction. Enter Russia.

Ken Wilber perfectly articulated the failure of our discredited status quo in his recent ebook, which I quoted extensively from in my recent post, How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology Created Trump – Part 1. He noted:

The problem very quickly became what Integral Metatheory calls a “legitimation crisis,” which it defines as a mismatch between Lower-Left (or cultural) beliefs and the Lower-Right systems (or actual background realities, such as the techno-economic base). The cultural belief was that everybody is created equal, that all people have a perfect and equal right to full personal empowerment, that nobody is intrinsically superior to others (beliefs that flourished with green). Yet the overwhelming reality was increasingly one of a stark and rapidly growing unequality—in terms of income and overall worth, property ownership, employment opportunity, healthcare access, life satisfaction issues. The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis— a culture that is lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long. 

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The Billionaire-Owned, Corporate Media is as Worthless as Ever

The Billionaire-Owned, Corporate Media is as Worthless as Ever

I think the U.S. citizenry is being afflicted by a sort of mass insanity at the moment. There are no good outcomes if this continues. As a result, I feel compelled to provide a voice for those of us lost in the political wilderness. We must persevere and not be manipulated into the obvious and nefarious divide and conquer tactics being aggressively unleashed across the societal spectrum. If we lose our grounding and our fortitude, who will be left to speak for those of us who simply don’t fit into any of the currently ascendant political ideologies?

From the post: Lost in the Political Wilderness

Rather than focus its journalistic energy on chronicling the economic insecurity plaguing so many of our fellow Americans, the billionaire-owned corporate media appears entirely obsessed with chattering endlessly about Russia conspiracy theories and domestic coup plots. Instead of looking in the mirror and admitting how its countless errors and propaganda pushing led to multiple humanitarian disasters over the last couple of decades, the oligarch-owned mainstream media insist upon a narrative that Trump the individual is at the root of our problems, as opposed to an entrenched executive branch with excessive power. This is because the mainstream media isn’t actually concerned about our cancerous, systemic metastasizing statism, it merely doesn’t want Trump in charge of it. I, on the other hand, want to dismantle that unconstitutional state entirely and transfer power to the American people where it belongs — self-government. Does anyone actually think for a second the media would be this adversarial if Hillary won?

This weekend’s article by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times represents a sort of coming out party for the billionaire-owned, corporate media.

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It Is About Time That We Had A President That Was Willing To Go To War With The Mainstream Media

It Is About Time That We Had A President That Was Willing To Go To War With The Mainstream Media

Donald Trump Waving - Public DomainThursday afternoon’s press conference was perhaps the most memorable moment of Donald Trump’s presidency so far.  Trump’s blistering attack on the media was quite a spectacle, but the truth is that it was desperately needed.  For decades, the mainstream media has dominated political discourse in this country no matter who has been in control of the White House or Congress.  They have become masters of guiding and shaping public opinion, and in recent years they have completely discarded any pretense of being “unbiased” or “objective”.  These monolithic media organizations relentlessly push the progressive agenda of their owners (the global elite), and that is why the “news” always seems to be just about the same no matter which network it is coming from.  Their monopoly is slowly being broken by the rise of the alternative media, but the truth is that most Americans still rely on just a handful of ultra-powerful media organizations for their news.

So when Trump brutally attacked the mainstream media at his press conference on Thursday, millions upon millions of Americans greatly rejoiced, because they finally got what was coming to them.  And then on Friday, Trump posted a message to Twitter calling the New York Times, NBC, ABC, CBS and CNN “the enemy of the American people”…


The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes@NBCNews@ABC@CBS@CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

There’s a Difference: Fake News and Junk News

There’s a Difference: Fake News and Junk News

Media junkies on the tragic path to extinction believe the junk news, non-junkies see through the manipulation.

The mainstream media continues peddling its “fake news” narrative like a desperate pusher whose junkies are dying from his toxic dope. It’s slowly dawning on the media-consuming public that the MSM is the primary purveyor of “fake news”– self-referential narratives that support a blatantly slanted agenda with unsupported accusations and suitably anonymous sources.

Many of these Fake News Narratives are laughably, painfully bogus: that President Trump is a Russian tool, to take a current example. (That President Obama was a tool of the neocon Deep State–no mention of that. According to the MSM, America doesn’t even have a Deep State–har-har…the joke’s on you if you are credulous enough to swallow this risible absurdity.)

But the real danger isn’t fake news–it’s junk news. Junk News (the title of a 2009 book by an Emmy Award–winning journalist– Junk News: The Failure of the Media in the 21st Century) —is related to Junk Science and Junk Food.

Junk science is presented as “science” but cherry-picks data to support a specific but unstated agenda–an agenda that requires downplaying or overlooking conflicting data.

One common example of junk science is the approval of new medications by the FDA. If you actually dig into Phase III data, you may well find that the “benefits” of the new wonder-drug are barely above statistical chance, and the potential interactions with commonly prescribed (or imbibed) drugs are ignored.

This is how we end up with medications with an unfortunate side-effect: deathfrom misadventure, addiction, in combination with other commonly prescribed meds, etc.

(For more junk science, check out how meds going off-patent magically get FDA approval for additional –and immensely profitable– patent protection.)

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

16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won

16 Fake News Stories Reporters Have Run Since Trump Won

Journalists, media types, reporters, you have two choices: you can fix these problems, or you can watch your profession go down in flames.

Since at least Donald Trump’s election, our media have been in the grip of an astonishing, self-inflicted crisis. Despite Trump’s constant railing against the American press, there is no greater enemy of the American media than the American media. They did this to themselves.

We are in the midst of an epidemic of fake news. There is no better word to describe it than “epidemic,” insofar as it fits the epidemiological model from the Centers for Disease Control: this phenomenon occurs when “an agent and susceptible hosts are present in adequate numbers, and the agent can be effectively conveyed from a source to the susceptible hosts.”

The “agent” in this case is hysteria over Trump’s presidency, and the “susceptible hosts” are a slipshod, reckless, and breathtakingly gullible media class that spread the hysteria around like—well, like a virus.

It is difficult to adequately sum up the breadth of this epidemic, chiefly because it keeps growing: day after day, even hour after hour, the media continue to broadcast, spread, promulgate, publicize, and promote fake news on an industrial scale. It has become a regular part of our news cycle, not distinct from or extraneous to it but a part of it, embedded within the news apparatus as a spoke is embedded in a bicycle wheel.

Whenever you turn on a news station, visit a news website, or check in on a journalist or media personality on Twitter or Facebook, there is an excellent chance you will be exposed to fake news. It is rapidly becoming an accepted part of the way the American media are run.

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Paul Craig Roberts’ Ominous Warning For What Promises To Be A Very Dangerous 2017

Paul Craig Roberts’ Ominous Warning For What Promises To Be A Very Dangerous 2017

Today former Assistant U.S. Treasury Secretary, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, issued an ominous warning for what promises to be a very dangerous 2017.

King World News - Lies, Propaganda And What Is Really Going To Shock The WorldWestern Media’s Giant Propaganda Machine
(King World News)
 Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: Bannon is correct that the US media—indeed, the entire Western print and TV media—is nothing but a propaganda machine for the ruling elite. The presstitutes are devoid of integrity, moral conscience, and respect for truth. https://www.rt.com/usa/375271-bannon-trump-media-cnn/ Read the comments in which morons define freedom of the press as the freedom to lie to the public…

Paul Craig Roberts continues:  “Who else but the despicable Western media justified the enormous war crimes committed against millions of peoples by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes in nine countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Palestine, and the Russian areas of Ukraine?

King World News - Paul Craig Roberts - Corruption, Propaganda And Why The U.S. Government Won't Answer My Letter

Who else but the despicable Western media justified the domestic police states that have been erected in the Western world in the name of the “war on terror”?

Along with the war criminals that comprised the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes, the Western media should be tried for their complicity in the massive crimes against humanity.

kwn-roberts-i-1272017Gorbachev’s Warns “The World Is Preparing For War”
The Western media’s effort to sustain the high level of tension between the West and Russia is a danger to all mankind, a direct threat to life on earth. Gorbachev’s warnings are correct. http://time.com/4645442/gorbachev-putin-trump/?xid=time_socialflow_facebook Yet presstitutes declare that if Trump lifts the sanctions it proves that Trump is a Russian agent. It is paradoxical that the Democrats and the liberal-progressive-left are mobilizing the anti-war movement to oppose Trump’s anti-war policy!

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Mainstream Media’s Russian Bogeymen

Mainstream Media’s Russian Bogeymen

Exclusive: The mainstream hysteria over Russia has led to dubious or downright false stories that have deepened the New Cold War, as Gareth Porter notes regarding last month’s bogus tale of a hack into the U.S. electric grid.


In the middle of a major domestic crisis over the U.S. charge that Russia had interfered with the U.S. election, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) triggered a brief national media hysteria by creating and spreading a bogus story of Russian hacking into U.S. power infrastructure.

DHS had initiated the now-discredited tale of a hacked computer at the Burlington, Vermont Electricity Department by sending the utility’s managers misleading and alarming information, then leaked a story they certainly knew to be false and continued to put out a misleading line to the media.

Even more shocking, however, DHS had previously circulated a similar bogus story of Russian hacking of a Springfield, Illinois water pump in November 2011.

The story of how DHS twice circulated false stories of Russian efforts to sabotage U.S. “critical infrastructure” is a cautionary tale of how senior leaders in a bureaucracy-on-the-make take advantage of every major political development to advance its own interests, with scant regard for the truth.

The DHS had carried out a major public campaign to focus on an alleged Russian threat to U.S. power infrastructure in early 2016. The campaign took advantage of a U.S. accusation of a Russian cyber-attack against the Ukrainian power infrastructure in December 2015 to promote one of the agency’s major functions — guarding against cyber-attacks on America’s infrastructure.

Beginning in late March 2016, DHS and FBI conducted a series of 12 unclassified briefings for electric power infrastructure companies in eight cities titled, “Ukraine Cyber Attack: implications for U.S. stakeholders.” The DHS declared publicly, “These events represent one of the first known physical impacts to critical infrastructure which resulted from cyber-attack.”

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The Mainstream Media is Asking for a Government Bailout Via Censorship

The Mainstream Media is Asking for a Government Bailout Via Censorship

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The current controversy is different. Many people in Washington are irate over Wikileaks — not because the email were untrue but because they proved what many had long suspected . . . that Washington is a highly corrupt place full of truly despicable people. For people who make their living on controlling media and information, it was akin to the barbarians breaching the walls of Rome. So the answer is to call for government regulation to combat what will be declared “fake” news or propaganda. It is only the latest effort to convince people to surrender their rights and actually embrace censorship. 

– From Jonathan Turley’s: Washington Post Issues Correction To “Fake News” Story

Watching Hillary Clinton attack “fake news” and calling for legislative action against free speech she doesn’t like got me thinking. Why is she doing this? Yes, it’s obviously related to her notorious personality trait of never taking responsibility for anything and attaching herself to an invented controversy in order to deflect blame for her monumentally embarrassing loss to Donald Trump. But there’s more going on here. A lot more.

To set the stage, we need to examine the types of people who are most jumping on the “fake news” meme. What you’ll find is that it’s a who’s who of the most contemptible and corrupt people in America. As Glenn Greenwald so accurately noted in his piece published earlier today:

Those who most loudly denounce Fake News are typically those most aggressively disseminating it.

But the problem here goes way beyond mere hypocrisy. Complaints about Fake News are typically accompanied by calls for “solutions” that involve censorship and suppression, either by the government or tech giants such as Facebook. 

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

Manufacturing Normality

Manufacturing Normality

Who’s behind this “fake news” menace? Well, Putin, naturally, but not just Putin. It appears to be the work of a vast conspiracy of virulent anti-establishment types, ultra-alt-rightists, ultra-leftists, libertarian retirees, armchair socialists, Sandernistas, Corbynistas, ontological terrorists, fascism normalizers, poorly educated anti-Globalism freaks, and just garden variety Clinton-haters.

Fortunately, for us, the corporate media is hot on the trail of this motley of scoundrels. As you’re probably aware, The Washington Postrecently published a breathtaking piece of Pulitzer-quality investigative journalism shamelessly smearing hundreds of alternative publications (like the one you’re reading) as “peddlers of Russian propaganda.” The piece, a classic McCarthyite smear job perpetrated by the Post‘s Craig Timberg, was based on the groundless, paranoid claims of what Timberg unironically describes as “two teams of independent researchers,” The Foreign Policy Research Institute, a third-rate, former anti-Communist think tank, and an anonymous website, propornot.com, that no one had ever heard of prior to its sudden appearance on the Internet last August, and which, based on the tenor of its tweets and emails, appears to be run by Beavis and Butthead.

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The Ultimate “Fake News” List

THE ULTIMATE “FAKE NEWS” LIST

The mainstream media is the primary source of the most harmful, most inaccurate news ever

Isn’t it ironic how the mainstream media has the nerve to lecture everyone else about “fake news” when they are the primary source of fake news on a consistent basis stretching back years?

Fake news stories and fake narratives put out by the mainstream media have resulted in deaths, destruction and people’s lives being ruined.

The most harmful fake news is routinely published by the mainstream media. They are the main progenitors of fake news.

– The fake news that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that Iraq was involved in 9/11, dutifully regurgitated without question by the mainstream media, resulted in hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis, thousands of dead and injured U.S. troops, and the destabilization of an entire continent.

– The fake news that the rebels in Syria were “moderates”who did not have jihadist sympathies and should be supported led to the destruction of Syria, Libya and the rise of ISIS.

– The fake news narrative that the media was balanced in its coverage of the presidential election was completely obliterated when Wikileaks emails revealed that countless mainstream media reporters were in bed with the Clinton campaign, feeding them debate questions beforehand and conspiring with Hillary’s staff to portray her in a positive light.

– The fake news that George Zimmerman was obsessed with Trayvon Martin’s race before the altercation that led to Martin’s death was accomplished by means of NBC deceptively editing an audio tape. This incident stoked racial tensions across the country and laid the groundwork for the violent ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement that was to follow.

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Gallup Poll: Trust Level of Mainstream Media Falls to 32%

woodward-bersteing-watergateGallup first began asking if Americans trusted the mainstream media in 1972. America’s trust and confidence in mainstream media stood at its highest level back in 1976 at 72%. Of course, that was due to the investigative journalism regarding Vietnam, and naturally Woodward and Berstein, with the Watergate scandal. Following that period, the media began to attack the right with Reagan. By the late 1990s, the Americans’ trust in the media fell steadily into the low to mid 50% level.

Following 2005, the trust in mainstream media dropped into the mid 40% range. It has consistently been below a majority level ever since the 2007 economic decline. However, after the 2016 election and the extreme bias for Hillary, where virtually 99% of mainstream media deliberately tried to manipulate the people to vote for Hillary, the trust factor has collapsed to 32%. When they polled just conservative Republicans, it was 14%. So the 32% level is the average American.

media

news-readerOur models on the confidence in American mainstream media using the Gallup Poll data projects a sharp decline into 2019/2020, which is the bottom of the current 8.6-year Economic Confidence Model. This will be 43 years from high. Note that 2007 was 31 years from that peak. It was 2007 and the collapse in the economy that has marked the collapse in public confidence in government and the media.

We should expect that the media will viciously attack Donald Trump in a futile effort to cling to some level of importance and to desperately try to demonstrate that they were not wrong with 99% of the media endorsing Hillary. But the media willingly conspired to make Hillary president. They will now try to vindicate themselves by trashing Trump at every possible chance. They will now fuel the civil divide and help lay the foundation for the collapse of the United States itself by turning left against right. Even the New York Post wrote that what they were witnessing was the end of journalism.

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East vs. West Division Is About The Dollar – Not Nuclear War

East vs. West Division Is About The Dollar – Not Nuclear War

The interesting thing about working in alternative economics is that inevitably you will become the designated buzzkill. You may be presenting the facts on the ground and the reality behind the numbers, but most of what you have to report will not be pleasant. Alternative economists are doomed to be labeled “doom and gloomers.” And that’s okay…

The truth is what it is, and sometimes it hurts people obsessed with undue positivism and bull market naivety. However, as bad as we seem to be when it comes to a negative outlook, we do not necessarily present the most ugly options on the table.

There is an undeniable trend by some within the liberty movement to assume a Mad Max-style end game to our ever expanding house of cards. That is to say, they see the only plausible outcome being apocalyptic in nature, and nuclear holocaust fits well within this viewpoint. In many cases, the argument is sometimes presented that WWIII is in the best interests of global elites seeking a catalyst for their so-called “new world order.”

This is not to say that I don’t think WWIII is a possibility; it certainly is.  But I remain rather skeptical of the usefulness of nuclear war for the elites. Primarily because everything they openly claim they hope to accomplish can be accomplished without nukes.

The narrative of a coming conflict between the East and the West has been boiling steadily as the U.S. election nears its end. Even the mainstream media is insinuating the potential for shots fired. Some believe the results of the election will determine the odds of war. I hold a different position.

 

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How US Propaganda Plays in Syrian War

How US Propaganda Plays in Syrian War

U.S. foreign policymakers have experimented at planting propaganda in social media and then citing it as evidence to support their goals, a process now playing out in the Syrian “regime change,” as Rick Sterling explains.


Manipulation of public perception has risen to a new level with the emergence of powerful social media. Multibillion-dollar corporate giants, such as Facebook, Twitter and Google, influence public perceptions, often via payments for “boosting” Facebook posts, paid promotion of Tweets, and biased results from search engines. 

Marketing and advertising companies use social media to promote their clients, but so do U.S. foreign policy managers who hire or enlist these companies to influence public perceptions to support U.S. foreign policy goals.

A heart-rending propaganda image designed to justify a major U.S. military operation inside Syria against the Syrian military.

A heart-rending propaganda image designed to justify a “no-fly zone,” a major U.S. military operation inside Syria against the Syrian military.

For example, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described making sure that Twitter was primed for street protests in Iran following the 2009 election, ready to spread and manage news of protests following the election and the killing of a young woman, which was blamed on the Iranian government although the circumstances of her death were murky. [Hard Choices hardback, p 423] 

The results of similar media manipulation can be seen in the widespread misunderstanding of the conflict in Syria, amid the demonization of the Syrian government and leadership and the skillful use of social media by anti-government activists. Influenced by both mainstream and this alternative media, most people in the West do not know that Bashar al-Assad remains popular with many Syrians. Nor do they realize that Assad won an election two years ago.

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Unprecedented Mainstream Media Criticism of Central Banking Bodes Ill for the Larger Economy

econ-crisis

Unprecedented Mainstream Media Criticism of Central Banking Bodes Ill for the Larger Economy

DoubleLine’s Gundlach says ‘central banks are losing control’ …  Jeffrey Gundlach, the chief executive of DoubleLine Capital, said on Tuesday investors are dropping risky assets and turning to safer securities including Treasuries and gold because they are losing faith in central banks.  –Reuters

There is definitely considerable negativity about central banking in the mainstream media these days.

This is surprising, on the one hand, because central banking provides the foundation of the current economic system, worldwide.

On the other hand, such negativity may be signaling far worse.

Our theory, for years has been that the central banking system is presented as something that is economically positive when, in fact, it is quite negative and responsible for the gradual collapse of Western prosperity.

The mainstream media makes no real reference to the state of the West – or the world – when it comes to the larger economy.

China is collapsing. The European Union is half-bankrupt. The US is in a kind of depression.

But until recently the system that has created this mayhem has been treated as a kind of eternal or natural constant, like the sky or the moon or the sun.

Now however, with half the West running on negative interest rates, the cracks cannot be papered over.

The recent Bilderberg meetings apparently focused in large part on the economy.

Disaster was predicted and preparations were made.

In fact, this is how economies and economic systems “evolve.”

Out of “chaos,” order.

And to ensure that the responsibility for the chaos is not blamed on the bankers who run the central banking system behind the scenes, the central banking system itself  is beginning to be blamed.

This is quite unusual. In past times, investment banking was blamed. Wall Street was blamed. Commercial banks were blamed. Now central banks are blamed.

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

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