February 2017
MSM: Fake News Inc. : 1
THE EDITOR
| Pro.pa.gan.da : noun |
1. The spreading of ideas, information, or rumour for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person. 2. Ideas, facts or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause. Also: a public action having such an effect. |
“You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, |
| — ex-CIA agent |
Nine years ago this month, we devoted an edition to the mainstream media [MSM]. More recent subscribers can find the February 2008 editorial essay (Mediaworld) and feature article (The BBC & Big Media Betrayal) on our website. They relate the sort of bias, disinformation and lies spewed forth on a daily basis, manipulating public opinion and, consequently, public policy.
Drawing on the observations of MSM insiders, and the witness of whistleblowers like Emmy Award-winning CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg (whose best-sellers Bias and Arrogance laid bare the Olympian dishonesty behind the corporate scenes), we explained how advocacy journalism — self-interested opinion serving state and corporate agendas — had come to replace genuine journalism — servicing truth, the common good, and "social communication" properly understood.
It all added up to the death of dispassionate reporting of facts, regardless of where they lead: a demise welcomed above all by opaque and unaccountable Corporate States (like the EU), and parasitic vested interests with snouts in the public trough.
A recurring theme in our 2008 analysis was the ready admission of MSM luminaries that their godless views and lifestyles do not reflect those of the population in general; in the case of state broadcasters, not even those of the majority of their own viewers — who pay their huge salaries! And yet there was not the slightest desire to engage with opposing views, never mind weigh their merits and consider changing course.
This elitist attitude, confirmed by fair-minded liberal insiders like Goldberg, betrays the ideological mindset that informs and radiates from the self-righteous MSM bubble: a means-justifies-the-end approach that either marginalises, misrepresents or counts out altogether, any and all objections to their libertine-left agenda, for fear of having to account for them. The crusading 'conservative' press — actually libertarian but offering, on the whole, more straight information and fewer lies — often conveys the same ideological bent by skewing reportage to accommodate geopolitical designs of the State, and protecting sodomy, abortion and other horrors from serious scrutiny.
Since the closed nature of ideology carries within it the seeds of its own destruction (as well as everyone and everything else along the way), we should not be surprised that the MSM is finally imploding. Nearly a decade after our last 'media edition', its barefaced mendacity and collusion during recent momentous events has produced its own epochal tipping point.
Public disgust
Throughout the British referendum and American presidential campaigns, the usual suspects on both sides of the Atlantic (Financial Times, Economist, BBC, London Times, Guardian, New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CBS, NBC, et. al.) naturally backed the globalist cause; favouring the EU and Hillary Clinton respectively. This time around, however, with the libertine-left agenda and public money-trough of the Western Establishment under real threat, they panicked and threw caution to the wind. As a result, their bias was so outrageous, the reportage of Donald Trump and the Brexit Leave campaign (via Project Fear), so studiously negative, laughably exaggerated and flagrantly false, that it has accelerated flight from the MSM to terminal levels.
Already seeking their information from cyber sources in huge numbers, the public turned to online alternative media in unprecedented droves, in order to unravel the deception and lies of the MSM. In America, Donald Trump tapped and channelled their righteous disgust, declaring at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania: "We have a media that is so dishonest. These are among the most dishonest people you will ever, ever meet." He vowed to "punch through the media" because there was no other choice. "We have to," he said.
And so he did. Always being sure to connect the dots in the process. "The Washington Establishment, and the financial and media corporations that fund it," he regularly thundered, "exists for only one reason: to protect, and enrich, itself." (A charge he repeated before that very Establishment on 20 January.)
Speaking on the 11 January "Steve Malzberg Show," about post-election media reports on President-Elect Trump — from his business dealings to his New Year's Eve party — New York Times best-selling author Ronald Kessler echoed Trump: "They are so dishonest. They don't even realise how transparent their bias is. It's just disgusting."
A sentiment mirrored in polls worldwide, the media is now rated as untrustworthy as bankers and politicians. Yet as Kessler alludes, this universal public contempt barely registers with the rank and file of the MSM. They cannot conceive how or why it could be so. In their eyes, only objective facts are "biased," because they diverge from the official narrative they are paid to defend and serve up to the masses. Convinced of the righteousness of their own propaganda, they see themselves not as ideologues but repositories of political enlightenment and moral superiority.
Their delusion is so extreme it is often comical. Last December, in a fit of pique, politically correct French broadcaster Jean-Jacques Bourdin, a media manipulator par excellence, launched his own Twitter poll on the matter, confident it would reveal a high level of public trust in MSM. He simply asked: "Does the media lie?" Out of 7,958 votes, only 9% said "No", while 91% voted "Yes"! Many added criticisms of Bourdin and his journalistic colleagues, destroying the credibility of the arrogant mediacrats and their mediacracy.
Rank deceit
During the presidential campaign, CNN epitomised the pervasive dishonesty decried by Trump and Kessler. Among its armoury of dirty tricks, all geared to inverting the reality of events to manipulate public opinion, was the constant rigging of their own polls.
For example, after each of the three presidential debates, in order to convey the false impression that Mrs Clinton was streaking away with the race, CNN sampled more Democrats than Republicans to produce a post-debate poll that handed Clinton big victories. This mattered because its official CNN-ORC poll was cited as the definitive post-debate poll by talking heads, as well as by liberal newswires feeding foreign headlines, despite its results being contradicted by the vast majority of other polls.
Take the final debate on 19 October. CNN reported that its post-debate poll found Hillary won by 52%-39%. This mirrored their polls after the first debate, which found that Hillary won 62%-27%, and the second debate, which trumpeted a 57%-34% victory. However, in each poll CNN deceitfully sampled more Democrats than Republicans — e.g., after the final debate Democrats accounted for 36% of the 547 registered voters surveyed, while only 29% of respondents were Republicans.
Similarly, in the first and second debates, CNN sampled 41% and 36% Democrats respectively, compared to just 26% and 27% Republicans. Out of those respondents, 58% already supported Clinton before the debate! No wonder CNN found that Hillary won all three encounters by wide margins.
Yet Trump himself was able to claim victory and provide numerous different polls to prove it, as he did after the final debate, citing: CSPAN: Trump 68% - Clinton 32%; Washington Times: Trump 77% - Clinton 17%; Fox 61 CT: Trump 60% - Clinton 36%. These were not results that adorned your daily paper or made the nightly news.
This is just one factual glimpse of the "totally rigged system" Trump denounced throughout his campaign (which blasphemous accusation convulsed the sacred Establishment). Along with rigged polls, Hillary was fed questions prior to debates and interviews; the record crowds that flocked to Trump all over the country were constantly played down or ignored, while the often trifling numbers who attended the Clinton rallies were inflated by flattering camera angles that suggested far greater numbers. Meanwhile, sexual abuse scandals and all kinds of business and financial improprieties were fabricated or exaggerated to make Trump look even worse than the depraved and criminal Clintons. (Since his victory, note how the headline abuse allegations against him have miraculously disappeared from view.)
Amid Hillary's disastrous campaign, this blitzkrieg of disinformation fermented an illusory brew she herself fully imbibed. On 21 September, clearly intoxicated by the MSM Kool-Aid, she wondered out loud: "Why aren't I 50 points ahead?" .
Alternative source
Had she bothered to look beyond the mainstream fakers who handed her victory — the New York Times and London Independent headlined her chances of winning as 85% and 99% respectively! — Mrs Clinton would not have asked that question. For, while the MSM was manipulating public perception with contrived polls, alternative online media outlets like Breitbart, Infowars, Drudge Report, et. al., were reporting the results of objective polling, which showed Trump not only neck and neck with Clinton, but sometimes leading her by 7, 10, 15 points or more.
They were also busy exposing other MSM scams, lies, dissembling and cover-ups: constantly releasing and analysing vital information sidelined or suppressed by the MSM, such as vital Wikileaks revelations; Soros-funded false-flag attacks; endless deliberate misreporting of Trump and his campaign; media collusion with the Clinton camp, etc..
Outraged and exasperated by a "totally rigged system" operating in plain sight, record numbers, in America and worldwide, switched off the propaganda and tuned in to breaking news reports and plain-speaking interviews that showed up the mainstream monopoly for what it is: a dinosaur left behind by the evolution of dynamic, truth-seeking 'citizen journalists' now performing the role abandoned by complacent corporate scribes.
Desperate to discredit this irrepressible competition, the lying-dying press smeared and mocked them. Yet their information, assessments and predictions proved not only far more accurate, but also more lively, absorbing and energising than the wildly erroneous assumptions and forecasts of tedious MSM 'experts' (— the same pompous bores who got the Brexit vote and its political, economic and financial fallout so completely and utterly wrong.)
This is why Trump's victory against all the odds did not surprise consumers of alternative media. They knew he had the numbers necessary to make him very competitive, at the very least. Their only fear — well founded and pressing — was whether the Clinton camp would succeed in stealing victory through electoral fraud (— which, in the event, Hillary did attempt, without a peep from the press).
Trump-supporting consumers of MSM content, on the other hand, were stunned by the result. While Clinton voters, steeped in the same rigged polls that wrote off Trump and conceded victory to Hillary, were confused and distraught. Their subsequent cultish hysteria was then exploited by the press. Tossing fuel on the fire of incomprehension and sense of injustice their bias and lies had incited, they cried foul, supported vote recounts (which only saw Trump gain more extra votes than Clinton!), and met the violence of anti-Trump, Soros-funded criminal gangs with a shrug.
Corporate control
Regurgitated as gospel by the clueless, MSM mendacity also confuses and demoralises those of good will in search of the truth. Even the well informed, however, may not appreciate the impact of the propaganda on their perception of national and international affairs. Yet when the same false narratives on Russia, Syria, Ukraine, Iran and Poland, for instance, are recycled every day, by MSM left and right, all drawing on the same incestuous journalistic cliques and/or partisan newswires (Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, New York Times, CNN, et. al.), even the most sceptical observer may unwittingly accept the Orwellian presentation of war as peace; mendacity as veracity; amorality as morality; patriotism and commonsense as fearful extremism. Repetition, after all, is the essence of successful propaganda. And the Western MSM is nothing if not the most controlling echo chamber in the history of mankind.
A simple experiment conducted by American talkshow host Conan O’Brien highlighted the robotic repetition. First, in rapid succession, he showed clips of 48 TV news anchormen and women across the country, on the same day, saying one after the other: "Don’t worry, be happy." Then, having previously announced that he himself would be officiating at a legally-binding same-sex marriage on his show, he again strung together 18 different TV news programmes parroting exactly the same line: "Conan O'Brien may be about to push the envelope on late night television…". Other online videos can also be found showing different presenters on different channels in different studios, all reading from the same script prepared by a central source or newswire service. As well as their sobering portrayal of the mind-rotting infotainment that masquerades as 'news', these videos also ram home the close control on which MSM agitprop depends.
But the simple, irrefutable proof of a controlled media — a claim naturally laughed to scorn as 'conspiratorial' by the MSM's corporate controllers — is found in these elementary and sobering facts: In 1983, 90% of U.S. media was owned by 50 companies. Today, just six corporations control 90% of U.S. media:
General Electric (GE), News Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, and CBS.
So, all the news heard, read and viewed in America, and thus the greater part of what is heard, read and viewed everywhere else, is disseminated by one of these huge media conglomerates, each with vested interests. Moreover, they keep devouring their competition. At the moment, Time Warner, a powerful content provider, is seeking an $85 billion merger with the massive distribution system of AT&T, which already has 26 million pay TV customers — or about 25% of the U.S. cable TV market — and nearly 130 million wireless subscribers.
(Time Warner is also one of just six companies that control 90% of the network offerings on cable television. The others are Viacom, CBS, ABC, Comcast-NBC, and 21st Century Fox.)
The Senator in charge of the Judicial Committee scrutinising the Time Warner/AT&T deal said: "There's concern that this acquisition will concentrate too much power into one
conglomerate.... There's also concern about the merger's implications for a free and diverse press." Quite.
For his part, President-Elect Trump branded the proposed merger as "an example of the power structure I am fighting." A power structure wielding its global propaganda apparatus to destroy him, as flagged by Time Warner's ownership of the nefarious CNN. Labelled the Clinton News Network, it continues to attack Trump with any fabricated or unconfirmed report that turns up, including the recent "dirty dossier" of lurid details of his alleged orgiastic depravity in Russia. A classified CIA and FBI summary of the details was leaked to CNN, which publicised its existence despite being "unverified", full of misspellings, geographical errors and other tell-tale signs of fraud. And so they kick-started a headline hatchet job worldwide, serving up still more anti-Trump vitriol to a sorely misled public.
Before we further consider this co-ordinated smear campaign, we need to understand one vital fact: that the soulless corporate conglomerates controlling the media are themselves controlled — by the omnipresent and coercive Central Intelligence Agency.
MOCKINGBIRD-media
This shocking influence of America's rogue intelligence agency has become widely recognised ever since Operation MOCKINGBIRD, a CIA-based initiative to control mainstream media, was exposed. In a piece titled "Who Controls the Media? — The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD," Alex Constantine provides a neat summary introduction to this vast conspiracy of media manipulation that determines 'news' and official 'truth', at the service of the oligarchs and their corporate-government empire:
It is beginning to dawn on a growing number of armchair ombudsmen that the public print reports news from a parallel universe — one that has never heard of politically-motivated assassinations, CIA-Mafia banking thefts, mind control, death squads or even federal agencies with secret budgets fattened by cocaine sales — a place overrun by lone gunmen, where the CIA and Mafia are usually on their best behavior. In this idyllic land, the most serious infraction an official can commit, is the employment of a domestic servant with (shudder) no residency status.
This unlikely land of enchantment is the creation of MOCKINGBIRD.
It was conceived in the late 1940s, the most frigid period of the cold war, when the CIA began a systematic infiltration of the corporate media, a process that often included direct takeover of major news outlets.
In this period, the American intelligence services competed with communist activists abroad to influence European labor unions. With or without the cooperation of local governments, Frank Wisner, an undercover State Department official assigned to the Foreign Service, rounded up students abroad to enter the cold war underground of covert operations on behalf of his Office of Policy Coordination. Philip Graham, a graduate of the Army Intelligence School in Harrisburg, PA, then publisher of the Washington Post, was taken under Wisner's wing to direct the program code-named Operation MOCKINGBIRD.
"By the early 1950s," writes former Village Voice reporter Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great [1979: the story of Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham (wife of Philip above), and her newspaper's close ties with the CIA], "Wisner 'owned' respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles, plus stringers, four to six hundred in all, according to a former CIA analyst." The network was overseen by [CIA Director] Allen Dulles, a templar for German and American corporations who wanted their points of view represented in the public print. Early MOCKINGBIRD influenced 25 newspapers and wire agencies consenting to act as organs of CIA propaganda. Many of these were already run by men with reactionary views, among them William Paley (CBS), C.D. Jackson (Fortune), Henry Luce (Time) and Arthur Hays Sulzberger (N.Y. Times).
Activists curious about the workings of MOCKINGBIRD have since been appalled to find in FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] documents, agents boasting in CIA office memos of their pride in having placed "important assets" inside every major news publication in the country. It was not until 1982 that the Agency openly admitted that reporters on the CIA payroll have acted as case officers to agents in the field.
"Of the meetings between Phil Graham and his CIA acquaintances at which the availability and prices of journalists were discussed," wrote Julian C. Holmes in a letter of complaint to the Washington Post of 25 April 1992, "a former CIA man recalls, “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month”."
Clandestine case-study
German journalist Udo Ulfkotte's more recent testimony herein, confirms the ongoing conspiracy. Mockingbird lives! Consider how it facilitated the Trump-Russian "dossier" scandal.
BuzzFeed, the online entity that published the entire 35-page dossier without any evidence that it was authentic, is owned by NBC. Wayne Madsen notes that "NBC News has been in the tank for the CIA ever since the days when the network was owned by RCA and its CEO David Sarnoff. A close friend of CIA director Allen Dulles, Sarnoff regularly assisted the CIA in its international and domestic media propaganda operations, a project generally known as Operation MOCKINGBIRD."
In other words, NBC’s treatment of the unvetted Trump dossier is in line with the network’s longtime advancement of CIA-spun 'news' stories. As the scandal unravelled this seemed ever
more likely.
The (supposedly 'ex') MI6 spy who is believed to be the principal collator — not author — of the "dossier," is reported to have been engaged by both the Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton presidential campaigns to dig up dirt on Trump (— an unsurprising revelation, since Trump threatens the myriad rackets of both these criminal families). Having launched his dirty grenade and sent UK-Russian relations to absolute rock-bottom, the spook went into hiding. What a surprise. Meanwhile, the Kremlin called it a work of "pulp fiction"; investigative journalist Wayne Madsen (who consistently exposes cover-ups from deep within the U.S. government) said "The entire script is more Austin Powers than James Bond"; and Bob Woodward, the famed Watergate reporter, now associate editor of the Washington Post, called it "a garbage document." All the marks of another CIA cock-up, in other words.
While repeating the charge of Trump's alleged deep ties to Russia, levelled at him during the campaign, the dossier also claimed that Michael Cohen, general counsel at the Trump Organization, met secretly with Russian officials in Prague last summer. Mr Cohen promptly clarified that he's never been to Prague in his life, producing his passport to prove it.
With the veracity of the document crumbling, NBC News desperately tried to pump up the credentials of the 'ex'-MI6 spy by quoting a discredited British pulp fiction author and former Tory MP; a vexatious litigant described by one trial judge in 2001 as "a profoundly dishonest man" and "one of the most dishonest witnesses I have ever seen." A perfect source for a stitch up! (— and perfectly in keeping with the "anonymous sources" relied upon by NBC and the Washington Post in Russian hacking stories.)
On 13 January, Trump summed up the debacle, tweeting: "It now turns out that the phony allegations against me were put together by my political opponents and a failed spy afraid of being sued. Totally made up facts by sleazebag political operatives, both Democrats and Republicans – FAKE NEWS!"
A strong denial. But as with the intelligence leak that ignited the firestorm, it must be viewed in context. The CIA, as well as the other 16 official U.S. intelligence agencies have been rebuked by Trump, who considers them highly politicised and bloated. Moreover, in view of their catastrophic record (recall Colin Powell's repeated statements that all 16 intelligence agencies confirmed that Saddam had WMD), he sensibly wishes to broaden his sources of information beyond their regular presidential briefings. In doing so, he has put himself in their cross-hairs.
In what amounts to a veiled threat to Trump from the CIA, Senator Chuck Schumer recently chortled, "You take on the intelligence community — they have 6 ways from Sunday at getting back at you." To that end, the entertainment-media, as Alexander Constantine explains, is one of its primary weapons. He indicates, too, how the infiltration of the press inevitably sowed the seeds of broader control, leading to the explosive Snowden revelations of Orwellian mass surveillance by the U.S. intelligence agencies today:
The commercialization of television, coinciding with [Ronald] Reagan's recruitment by the Crusade for Freedom, a CIA front, presented the intelligence world with unprecedented potential for sowing propaganda and even prying in the age of Big Brother. .... Operation Octopus, according to federal files, was in full swing by 1948, a surveillance program that turned any television set with tubes into a broadcast transmitter. Agents of Octopus could pick up audio and visual images with the equipment as far as 25 miles away.
[...] A Hydra of private foundations sprang up to finance the propaganda push. One of them, Operations and Policy Research, Inc. (OPR), received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CIA through private foundations and trusts.
[...] In Hollywood, the visual cortex of The Beast, the same CIA/Mafia combination... sank its claws into the film studios and labor unions.
[...] In the 1950s, outlays for global propaganda climbed to a full third of the CIA's covert operations budget. Some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts. The cost of disinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year by 1978, a budget larger than the combined expenditures of Reuters, UPI and the AP news syndicates.
In 1977, the Copely News Service admitted that it worked closely with the intelligence services — in fact, 23 employees were full-time employees of the Agency.
Most consumers of the corporate media were — and are — unaware of the effect that the salting of public opinion has on their own beliefs. A network anchorman in time of national crisis is an instrument of psychological warfare in the MOCKINGBIRD media. He is a creature from the national security sector's chamber of horrors. For this reason consumers of the corporate press have reason to examine their basic beliefs about government and life in the parallel universe of these United States.
The Russia beat up
In the cyber age, this dangerous alternate universe contrived by spooks is presented all over as never before. Accordingly, as the MSM implodes, the CIA is doubtless turning more of its attention and inexhaustible black budget to subverting alternative online media, as it morphs into the NMSM: the new mainstream media. Constantine's warning to think critically, therefore, becomes more pertinent with time. Especially as CIA disinformation is far more insidious than that spread by an international news agency like Russia Today.
Ironically denounced by Brussels last November as "Russian propaganda," this state network airs many refreshing commentaries and documentaries, revealing information studiously avoided by MSM propagandists. However, we are instinctively alert to bias, lies and disinformation because we know its slant. The Western corporate media, on the other hand, is duplicitous; claiming to be independent, even as they push the interests and agendas of their CIA-controlled corporate masters. Only a healthy scepticism combined with wider reading from multiple sources, therefore, can protect the public from being duped. Especially since domestic and international 'news' is often mutually reinforcing when it comes to CIA bogeys: like Trump, Putin, Russia, and hacking.
Cyber-security experts interviewed by alternative media insist that hacking is difficult for governments to accurately assess, since nations regularly hack each other, and once planted, "malware" (software designed to disrupt, damage, or gain authorised access to a computer system) can long remain in place. Censoring this expert opinion that disrupts their narrative, the MSM — aided and abetted by discredited U.S. intelligence which pioneered such hacking — continues to headline alleged Russian snooping during the election as a certainty, and the only news worth reporting.
Yet whatever Russia might have contributed to exposing Crooked Hillary (Deo gratias!), Julian Assange has consistently maintained that Wikileaks did not obtain its information from the Russians. And we know that patriotic anti-Clinton elements within the government, the broader intelligence community, and the DNC itself, did leak information to Wikileaks (as attested by a former British ambassador, and former CIA operative and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, Steve Pieczenik). Ignoring Assange and these informants, MSM agitprop has fuelled a bipartisan call for increased sanctions against Russia, viz., 'for meddling in our democracy' (— pots and kettles anyone?). A further baseless provocation of Putin, it epitomises the madness that takes hold whenever politicians succumb to a CIA 'virus': in this case, the same anti-Russian frenzy that has covered over Soros/CIA activity in Eastern Europe for so long.
Domestically, the Russian beat up (as opposed to downplaying Chinese hackings) serves to distract attention from many things: including the lax cyber security of the Democratic National Committee [DNC] — which invited and enabled hacking in the first place (hackers were unable to hack the Republican National Committee because of its strong security) — and the damning content of the leaked emails — such as Hillary's criminality; her conspiracy to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders; and the defamation of Catholics. Not to mention the sheer ineptitude that engineered a massive loss despite MSM assistance and spending twice as much as the winner.
As for the central villain in the CIA's scary narrative, Vladimir Putin, whose sociopathy we have treated more than once in these pages, he may or may not be more self-serving, corrupt and murderous than his sociopathic and criminal U.S. counterparts of recent times (the Bushes, Clinton and Obama). Certainly, it would be a close call. Nonetheless, Putin did not cause the current strife in the Ukraine/Crimea or Syria. Like so much else, these cataclysms are all down to Obama and his predecessors.
The Ukraine blackout
The White House and the Western press assert that the overthrow of President Yanukovych was merely the result of the U.S. government’s decades-long, multi-billion dollar attempt to establish 'democracy' in Ukraine. Even the American founder and CEO of Stratfor, a major private intelligence firm, says it was nothing of the sort. In a 19 December interview in the Russian magazine Kommersant, George Friedman said the deposing of Yanukovych on 22 February 2014 "really was the most blatant coup in history." Other voices muted or ignored by the MSM include the likes of American political scientist John Mearsheimer, who concluded that "Washington […] evidently supported the putsch in Ukraine." And French politician Thierry Mariani: "What happened in Yanukovych’s downfall in Ukraine is nothing other than a putsch supported by NATO and the West."
Put simply: Russia copped the initial sanctions because of the fallout from Barack's failed coup. The latest sanctions are the fallout from Hillary's self-inflicted defeat. Full stop.
Left-wing propagandist John Pilger got it right for once in this December 2014 assessment of the Ukraine crisis, in which he excoriates his equally complicit left-wing colleagues:
The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington’s secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.
And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.
There are telltale signs of CIA propaganda campaigns. One is the abrupt cessation of hitherto saturation coverage of an element of its false narrative. This was strikingly evident after the Malaysian airline tragedy. The 28 July 2014 cover of Germany's largest newsweekly, Der Spiegel, typified the MSM response. Pasted with photos of the victims of flight MH17, it screamed:
"Stop Putin Now!" But evidence gradually fingered America's neo-fascist Ukrainian allies as the real perpetrators of the mass murder. After much ducking and diving, the complicit U.S. State Department cut its losses. Having severely damaged Russia and upped the war ante, it breezily shifted its position from "Russian atrocity" to "tragic accident." On cue, furious anti-Russian reportage disappeared overnight. One searched in vain, however, for a fresh and truthful headline screaming: "Stop Obama Now!" Pilger continues:
Many in the western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.
What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads Nato and is straight out of Dr. Strangelove – one General Breedlove – routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. ...
Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer – the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair’s invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed. ... The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to be “hard facts”.
“If you wonder,” wrote Robert Parry, “how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.”
Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this “game of chicken”, as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: “Let’s get ready for war with Russia.”
In a series of tweets on 7 January, the commonsense of President-Elect Trump once again put them all to shame:
- Having a good relationship with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. Only "stupid" people, or fools, would think that it is bad!
- We have enough problems around the world without yet another one. When I am President, Russia will respect us far more than they do now and....
- both countries will, perhaps, work together to solve some of the many great and pressing problems and issues of the WORLD!
(He followed up by telling the London Times a week later that he will offer to end sanctions against Russia in return for a deal with the Kremlin that would see nuclear arms "reduced very substantially." Imagine that! Making good deals and talking about mutual benefits; not fomenting world war for massive profits. No wonder the oligarchy wants rid of this man!)
Ultimately, concentrating on Russian wrongdoing serves to distract from America's own appalling litany. Last October, the Secretary of State, John Kerry, called for a war crimes investigation of Russia and Syria. One of his spokesmen confirmed that Mr Kerry "does think this is a conversation worth having inside the international community." Fair enough. But how about the MSM pushing for a simultaneous roundtable on America's decades-long subversion, destruction and/or pillaging of sovereign nations? Perhaps they could start with its CIA/Soros-facilitated coup in the Ukraine (10,000 already killed according to the UN; 50,000 say German intelligence), and work backwards from there?
Do you think the CIA might unleash its MOCKINGBIRD-media to that just and impartial end? (Answers on the back of a bus ticket.)