{"id":7154,"date":"2015-04-09T06:14:42","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T11:14:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7154"},"modified":"2015-04-09T06:14:42","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T11:14:42","slug":"john-oliver-on-government-surveillance","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=7154","title":{"rendered":"John Oliver on Government Surveillance"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"art-postheader\"><a title=\"Permanent Link to John Oliver on Government Surveillance\" href=\"http:\/\/www.acting-man.com\/?p=36745\" rel=\"bookmark\">John Oliver on Government Surveillance<\/a><\/h3>\n<p><strong>Getting the News from Comedy Shows \u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The self-censoring US mainstream media are usually not a very good source of impartial (read: non-government approved) information. We completely disagree with Noam Chomsky\u2019s leftist political views, which in our opinion are astoundingly na\u00efve for someone of his intellectual stature, but we do believe he has always made quite valid points about how \u201cconsent is manufactured\u201d in the US (and elsewhere for that matter). Governments are lying routinely, and in theory, the press should challenge them on that. It just seems to happen only very rarely.<\/p>\n<p>The hysterical pro-war propaganda disseminated in the mainstream media prior to the Iraq war will forever stand as one of the low points in this respect. Most of it was based on bald-faced lies, something that should have been glaringly obvious to anyone calling himself a journalist at the time. And yet, not one of the major mainstream media organizations even made an\u00a0<em>attempt<\/em>\u00a0to challenge the government\u2019s lies and propaganda \u2013 instead they did everything to reinforce them. This was reportedly done to preserve \u201caccess\u201d to all those named and unnamed government officials feeding the press with what can only very loosely be termed \u201cinformation\u201d. One wonders what such access is worth if all the audience ever gets out of it is the amplification of government propaganda.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Oliver on Government Surveillance Getting the News from Comedy Shows \u2026 The self-censoring US mainstream media are usually not a very good source of impartial (read: non-government approved) information. We completely disagree with Noam Chomsky\u2019s leftist political views, which in our opinion are astoundingly na\u00efve for someone of his intellectual stature, but we do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4674,4675,496,1880,655,765,827],"class_list":["post-7154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-government-surveillance","tag-john-oliver","tag-mainstream-media","tag-noam-chomsky","tag-propaganda","tag-surveillance","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7154"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7154\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7155,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7154\/revisions\/7155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}