Censorship, fake news, perception management

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Apr 13, 2023 2:08 pm

US Media Denounce Twitter’s ‘State Media’ Label—When It Affects NPR
JULIANNE TVETEN

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The Washington Post (4/5/23) questioned “the unsavory suggestion that [NPR‘s] reporting is tainted.”
As part of an ongoing, impulsive and reactionary vendetta against legacy news outlets, Elon Musk’s Twitter added National Public Radio to its list of “state-affiliated media”—a label from which all US media had, until recently, been exempt (FAIR.org, 1/6/23).
NPR (4/5/23) rebuked the label, and major media rushed to the public broadcaster’s defense. “Twitter Slaps NPR With a Dubious New Tag: ‘State-Affiliated Media,’” read a Washington Post headline (4/5/23). Vanity Fair (4/5/23) lambasted the “false equivalence between NPR and state propaganda agencies.” CBS News (4/5/23), AP (4/5/23) and CNN (4/5/23) emphatically quoted NPR’s self-description as a purveyor of “independent, fact-based journalism.” The New York Times (4/5/23) offered an oblique criticism of Twitter’s labeling schemes under Musk as “unevenly enforced.”

The issue soon reached the White House. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre avowed in a briefing (Forbes, 4/5/23) that “there’s no doubt of the independence of NPR’s journalists.” Reading from a script, Jean-Pierre continued: “NPR journalists work diligently to hold public officials accountable and inform the American people.”

All are right to impugn the whims of Musk, who, to all appearances, harbors a personal animus against NPR. Still, the outrage against Twitter’s policy is highly selective.

Double standards
Twitter introduced the “state-affiliated media” tag in August 2020, defining “state-affiliated media” as outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.
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Without being directly controlled by the state, CNN (8/6/20) knew not to quote the reaction of official enemies who were marginalized by Twitter.
The label disproportionately impacted countries the US deems adversarial, as numerous critics have observed, including Bryce Greene for FAIR (1/6/23). Upon implementing its labeling policy, Twitter identified platforms like Iran’s PressTV; Russia’s RT and Sputnik News; and China’s China Daily, Global Times, CGTN and China Xinhua News as “state-affiliated.” Meanwhile, legions of US and British media networks that met Twitter’s definition—among them the BBC, PBS, Voice of America and, of course, NPR—were spared the label on grounds of “editorial independence.”

This would have measurable effects on tagged media. As Twitter explained in August 2020:

We will also no longer amplify state-affiliated media accounts or their Tweets through our recommendation systems, including on the home timeline, notifications and search.

Subsequently, Chinese accounts with the “state-affiliated media” label “saw drops of over 20% per tweet” (Hong Kong Free Press, 1/21/21), while Twitter boasted that marked Russian accounts lost up to 30% of their circulation.

This was hardly unforeseeable. Yet leading US and UK media, far from their reproachful stances of recent days, offered little to no objection to Twitter’s initial labeling rubric. While Reuters (8/6/20) quoted one Russian official’s critique, CNN (8/6/20), Axios (8/6/20) and others saw no need to include the perspectives of impacted outlets and countries in their reporting, nor to underscore the blatant double standard. And, rather than condemn the policies as “unevenly enforced,” the New York Times didn’t publish the news at all. After all, Twitter’s algorithm was now further skewed in these outlets’ favor.

Thin defenses
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NPR (4/5/23) objected to being lumped in with “official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.”
In its response to Twitter, NPR (4/5/23) vehemently disagreed with the decision, arguing that the label would liken the organization to “official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.” The broadcaster insisted that it “gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.”

The 1% figure reverberated throughout major media outlets, and prominent US journalists took to Twitter to cite the number as evidence that NPR was not “state-affiliated.” (Technically, the statistic is accurate, though a bit cherry-picked; on its website, NPR confirms the 1% figure, but states that its member stations, which contribute heavily to NPR’s operating budget, received a total of 13% of funding from federal, state and local governments in fiscal year 2020.)

One might wonder, though, how an organization can receive federal funding, even if a comparatively modest amount, and not be “state-affiliated.” One might also wonder whether these journalists would apply the same logic to an Iranian, Chinese or Russian outlet receiving the same portion of federal funding as NPR.

Moreover, contrary to NPR’s argument, a low federal funding total hardly proves “editorial independence.” Regardless of its financial breakdown, NPR’s body of reporting shows that the broadcaster is exactly the “mouthpiece” and “propaganda outlet” it so indignantly claims not to be.

State (and corporate) affiliations

Over the years, FAIR and other media critics have catalogued dozens of instances of NPR’s advancement of official state narratives.

In the early 1980s, under pressure from the Reagan administration, NPR gave a jingoistic slant to its coverage of the US’s war against Nicaragua, reassigning reporters who were “too easy on the Sandinistas,” and hiring a right-wing pundit, as Greg Grandin wrote in his 2007 book Empire’s Workshop.

But the broadcaster needed “no state coercion to toe Washington’s regime change line on Venezuela” (FAIR.org, 8/5/19) when it omitted mentions of devastating US sanctions in order to blame the country’s economic woes on “authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro,” and exalt US puppet and former self-declared president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó (NPR, 5/30/19). (Never mind that Maduro was democratically elected.)
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NPR public editor Alicia Shepard (6/21/09) defended the use of euphemisms to describe torture committed by the US government, in part because “both presidents Bush and Obama have insisted that the United States does not use torture.”
NPR similarly echoed Washington when it ignored Seymour Hersh’s report that the US destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline, promoted baseless “Chinese spy balloon” conspiracy theories, minimized the US starvation of Afghan people after the US military’s withdrawal, obscured Israel’s ongoing violence against Palestinian people after journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder, and euphemized US-committed torture post-9/11. (This summary is far from exhaustive; four of these examples are from just the last ten months.)

And NPR has no problem explicitly endorsing the US’s economic system. Ira Glass, host of NPR program This American Life, declared in 2015: “I think we’re ready for capitalism, which made this country so great. Public radio is ready for capitalism.”

If, say, a Cuban radio-show host beamed that “socialism” made Cuba “so great,” it would be hard to imagine the New York Times and company publishing fervent defenses of the associated broadcaster’s editorial independence.

Additionally, even when it’s not advancing official US narratives directly, NPR should raise eyebrows for its reliance on another, much greater, source of funding: corporations.

In 2022, NPR projected corporate sponsorship to be its largest source of revenue, providing nearly 42% of its income (Current, 11/30/22). And NPR’s corporate funders as of 2021 include a number of entities that often work in tandem with US intelligence agencies: Amazon, Facebook and Google, to name a very small fraction. To suggest that the broadcaster could be “editorially independent” simply because of minimal public funding—with no accounting for corporate influence—is misleading at best.

Right move, wrong reasons
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Tweets from NPR now bear the designation “government-funded media.”
Following media’s outcry, Twitter edited NPR’s label from “state-affiliated media” to “government funded,” then “government funded media,” and affixed these labels (in the same sequence) to other qualifying Western outlets, including the BBC, PBS and Voice of America. But this softer descriptor is still selectively applied: Outlets in Iran, China, Russia, Cuba and other official enemies didn’t receive this update.

Were Twitter genuinely interested in educating the public about the influence of power on media, it might not award government-funded US and US-friendly publications their own label, separate from that attached to Official Enemies.

And it might account for the fact that the Washington Post’s and New York Times’ records of parroting US officials (Extra!, 3/14; FAIR.org, 5/24/19) should qualify those newspapers, too, as “state-affiliated media.”

It very likely won’t. Twitter’s decision to call attention to Western government–funded outlets is valid. But it’s also nothing more than a product of arbitrary, petty far-right grievance politics, curtailed only by the self-serving demands of corporate news outlets—the last thing that a true reckoning with the ideology of major US media needs.

https://fair.org/home/us-media-denounce ... fects-npr/

As dyed in the wool liberals FAIR has to take some shots at Muskie, but reference to NYT & WP as state-affiliated kinda balances, though 'class affiliated would be more accurate.

Of course liberals don't like to talk about the depth and intractability of the class war, they pretend it is reform-able. Ha!
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Apr 14, 2023 2:12 pm

The US Could Use Some Separation Of Media And State

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The US State Department’s spokesperson Ned Price is being replaced by a man named Matthew Miller. Like Price, Miller has had extensive prior involvement in both the US government and the mass media; Price is a former CIA officer and Obama administration National Security Council staffer who for years worked as an NBC News analyst, while Miller has previously had roles in both the Obama and Biden administrations and spent years as an analyst for MSNBC.

Like every high-level government spokesperson, Miller’s job will be to spin the nefarious things the US empire does in a positive light and deflect inconvenient questions with weasel-worded non-answers. Which also happens to be essentially the same job as the propagandists in the mainstream media.

In journalism school you are taught that there’s supposed to be a sharp line between government and the press; journalists are meant to hold the government to account, and there’s an obvious conflict of interest there if they’re also friends with government officials or are looking to the government as a potential future employer. But at the highest levels of the world’s most powerful government and the world’s most influential media platforms the line between media and state is effectively nonexistent; people flow seamlessly between roles in the media and roles in the government depending on who’s in office.

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We see this indistinctness between government and media with White House press secretaries even more clearly. The current press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre is a former analyst for NBC News and MSNBC, and the last press secretary Jen Psaki now has her own show on MSNBC. Prior to her stint as White House press secretary Psaki worked as a CNN analyst, and before that she was a spokesperson for the State Department like Price and Miller.

At a recent event for the news startup Semafor, Psaki was asked if she considers herself a journalist and she said she does, adding that “to me, journalism is providing information to the public, helping make things clearer, explaining things.” Which is a bit funny considering that Psaki’s political faction has spent the last seven years furiously insisting that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is not a journalist. In liberal brainworms land the world’s greatest journalist is not a journalist at all, but Joe Biden’s spin doctor is because she’s got a knack for “explaining things”.

Lest you get the mistaken impression that this phenomenon is unique to Democrats and their aligned media outlets, it should here be noted that Trump’s press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders got a job as a Fox News contributor immediately after resigning from that position, and now she’s the governor of Arkansas. Another Trump administration press secretary, Kayleigh McEnany, is now an on-air contributor to Fox News, and previously worked for CNN. Trump’s first press secretary Sean Spicer reportedly tried to get jobs with CBS News, CNN, Fox News, ABC News and NBC News after his stint in the White House, but was turned down by all of them because nobody likes him.

Without any clear lines between the media and the state, US media are not meaningfully different from the state media the west spends so much energy decrying in “tyrannical regimes” like Russia and China. The only difference is that in Tyrannical Regimes the government controls the media, while in Free Democracies the government is the media.

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On a related note, journalist Michael Tracey just observed on Twitter that all questions asked during the Pentagon press briefing today about the documents leaked online from the Department of Defense all pertained not to the information contained in those documents, but to the Pentagon’s failure to keep them from leaking to the public. Rather than trying to obtain more information and transparency from their governments as journalists should, they’re actually badgering their government to do more to prevent important information from getting into the hands of journalists.

So I suppose that’s another difference between Totalitarian Regimes and Free Democracies: in Totalitarian Regimes the government instructs the media to suppress inconvenient facts, while in Free Democracies the media instruct the government to suppress inconvenient facts.

As it happens the man who allegedly leaked the Pentagon documents, a 21 year-old National Guardsman named Jack Teixeira, was tracked down and named by The New York Times even before his arrest by the FBI. The New York Times assembled a crew of a dozen reporters to hunt down the leaker, even using contributing reporting from the empire-funded propaganda firm Bellingcat. This job typically undertaken solely by federal agents was undertaken first by reporters from the mainstream press; we’re just a click or two away from New York Times reporters kicking down the doors of people who leak classified information and shooting their dogs like proper feds.

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All this while state propaganda outlet NPR continues its ongoing tantrum about Twitter accurately labeling its account “Government Funded”, an upgrade from its also-accurate previous designation as “US state-affiliated media”. NPR has now officially rage-quit Twitter in objection to the label on the basis that “the platform is taking actions that undermine our credibility by falsely implying that we are not editorially independent,” which is hilarious because NPR has no credibility to undermine.

As we discussed recently, NPR receives funding from the US government, consistently promotes the information interests of the US government, and is run by the former CEO of the US government’s foreign propaganda network US Agency for Global Media. It doesn’t even deserve the label “Government Funded”; it should have the exact same labels as Russian and Chinese state media, because it is not meaningfully different from them.

This was made even funnier by the fact that America’s literally state-owned media outlet Voice of America is now standing in very unhelpful solidarity with NPR by also objecting to the “Government Funded” label that has been placed on its own account.

Voice of America writes the following in its own “news” reporting on NPR’s plight:

VOA’s public relations department on Monday also pushed back against Twitter’s decision, saying the label gives the impression that VOA is not an independent outlet.



Twitter did not respond to VOA’s request for comment.



VOA is funded by the U.S. government through the U.S. Agency for Global Media, but its editorial independence is protected by regulations and a firewall.



Bridget Serchak, VOA’s director of public relations, said that “the label ‘government funded’ is potentially misleading and could be construed as also ‘government-controlled’ — which VOA is most certainly not.”



“Our editorial firewall, enshrined in the law, prohibits any interference from government officials at any level in its news coverage and editorial decision-making process,” Serchak said in an email. “VOA will continue to emphasize this distinction in our discussions with Twitter, as this new label on our network causes unwarranted and unjustified concern about the accuracy and objectivity of our news coverage.”



As Branko Marcetic pointed out on Twitter, these claims about VOA’s “editorial independence” have been squarely refuted by someone who worked there for 35 years. In a 2017 article with Columbia Journalism Review titled “Spare the indignation: Voice of America has never been independent,” VOA veteran Dan Robinson says such outlets are entirely different from normal news companies and are expected to facilitate US information interests to receive government funding:

I spent about 35 years with Voice of America, serving in positions ranging from chief White House correspondent to overseas bureau chief and head of a key language division, and I can tell you that for a long time, two things have been true. First, US government-funded media have been seriously mismanaged, a reality that made them ripe for bipartisan reform efforts in Congress, climaxing late in 2016 when President Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Second, there is widespread agreement in Congress and elsewhere that, in exchange for continued funding, these government broadcasters must do more, as part of the national security apparatus, to assist efforts to combat Russian, ISIS, and al-Qaeda disinformation.

Everywhere you look you can find extensive entanglements between the US government and the news media outlets that westerners look to for information about the world, and that’s before you even get into the way the plutocratic class which owns and influences the US media is also not meaningfully separate from the US government. When corporations are part of the government, corporate media is state media.

It seems a safe bet that the US would be a completely different country if separation of media and state and separation of corporation and state were enshrined like the separation of church and state is.

The only reason Americans consent to the freakish status quo of their government which impoverishes and oppresses people at home while bombing and starving people abroad is because their consent has been manufactured by a media class that is not meaningfully separate from the government. Place the press in their proper place as oppositional scrutinizers of government behavior, and the dynamics underlying the nation’s problems would no longer be hidden from the public.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/14 ... and-state/
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 15, 2023 2:23 pm

The Response To Twitter Labeling NPR "State-Affiliated Media" Exposes The True Purpose Of The Labels All Along
Jacqueline Luqman 12 Apr 2023

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Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently became the broken clock that is right twice a day when he correctly pointed out the NPR and the BBC are state affiliated outlets. Corporate media work hand in hand with the state all over the world and censor any narrative coming from the left.

I hate agreeing with anything Elon Musk does, but recently Twitter labeled National Public Radio (NPR) as “state-affiliated media” on the social media site, a move some worried could undermine public confidence in the news organization. The Associated Press reported that it was unclear why Twitter made the move. But Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, quoted a definition of state-affiliated media in the company’s guidelines as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.” “Seems accurate,” Musk tweeted .

“NPR does receive 1-2% of its funding from the U.S. government , according to Forbes. But Forbes also points out that even if media outlets receive funding from their respective states, they can have editorial independence, like Australia’s ABC News and the UK’s BBC.”

I wonder what the criteria for that to be true is because for about a year now, we were told that media outlets that receive funding from the state are automatically biased in favor of that state, and can’t be trusted to present perspectives that deviate from state-sponsored talking points and “propaganda.” At least that’s the line when media outlets like Iran’s PressTV, China’s CGTN, Russia’s RT and Sputnik International and other foreign outlets with a slant that is critical of US policies toward their respective countries were slapped with the “state-affiliated media” or “state-sponsored media” labels on social media just after the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine. That’s what we were told about why those outlets were shut down in the US, as was the case of RT America, or de-platformed from YouTube and podcast platforms, as was the case with every show on Sputnik. We were told that because these outlets received money from their respective states, that their content is heavily influenced, if not completely controlled, by that state, that the outlets have no editorial independence to write what they choose, and that makes the content they produce “disinformation,” and that is why they had to be silenced - to protect Americans from all of this evil foreign-state-sponsored disinformation.

So even though NPR receives some of its funding from the US government, its journalism is unquestionably “fact-based and independent” and has unquestionable editorial independence. But any outlet that is funded by a foreign government is somehow not fact-based or independent, that is if the US has decided that the government is its enemy, is that right? This is exactly the case, according to Caroline Orr Bueno, PhD, who on Twitter said of NPR’s new label, “Wow, way to make this label meaningless. NPR is absolutely not even comparable to propaganda outlets like RT and Sputnik, which have no editorial independence. This is ridiculous and only helps actual propaganda outlets blend in with legitimate news outlets.”

This assertion that the label is now meaningless because it has been applied to NPR is fascinating, first because Dr. Orr disparages the journalistic integrity of people whose work she hasn’t read or heard when she claims that RT and Sputnik have no editorial independence, an allegation to which several journalists at Sputnik responded, only to have her then claim that she was “harassed.” I should note that RT journalists couldn’t respond, because there are no RT journalists in the US because RT America was summarily shut down last year, and those journalists lost their jobs. But freedom of the press, right?

This is important because Dr. Orr is not some random person with a misinformed opinion and a Twitter account, who would have been ignored by me if she were. Rather, this matters because she is a postdoctoral research associate for the ARLIS University Affiliated Research Center (UARC) at the University of Maryland. That’s on her own profile. What is ARLIS ? It’s the Applied Research Lab for Security and Intelligence, one of fourteen Department of Defense UARCs and the only UARC with a core mission to support the government's security and intelligence communities. So Dr. Orr is literally on the payroll of the US Department of Defense supporting US security and intelligence organizations as an “expert on disinformation,” who is spreading disinformation/propaganda about foreign media outlets being propaganda arms of governments that are declared “the enemy” by the US, and somehow that’s not supposed to be revealing as to her motives.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, because the idea behind her assertion, and those of all the people vociferously defending NPR as editorially independent despite receiving government funds, is that US media outlets are not propaganda arms of the US government like she claims Russian media outlets are. But how in the world can that be true considering how well the lack of editorial independence and even outright truthfulness of US media has been documented for decades.

A 1999 Harvard Business Review article on the lack of editorial independence and journalistic integrity gave the perspective of the problem based on three books about media manipulation in the US: News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works, Paul H. Weaver (The Free Press, 1994); Who Stole the News?: Why We Can’t Keep Up with What Happens in the World, Mort Rosenblum (John Wiley & Sons, 1993); and, Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America, Cynthia Crossen (Simon & Schuster, 1994).

In Paul Weaver’s book, he characterizes the relationship between the media and the government as “...two institutions [that] have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively.” The author of this analysis is a former political scientist at Harvard University, journalist at Fortune magazine, and corporate communications executive at Ford Motor Company - not the credentials of a critic of the capitalist empire.

The Harvard Business Review article then notes that Associated Press special correspondent Mort Rosenblum, author of Who Stole the News?: Why We Can’t Keep Up with What Happens in the World, said, “.. the press is far too willing to accept government officials’ self-promoting versions of events.” In his book, Rosenblum quotes Reuven Frank, a former president of NBC News, as asserting, “News is whatever the goddamn government says it is.”

And Cynthia Crossen’s book, Tainted Truth: The Manipulation of Fact in America, while clearly not the Harvard Business Reviews favorite of the three, still garnered valuable insight into the machinations of the media to mislead and misinform the American public. Crossen, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal at the time, asserts in her book that “...more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause.” This is critical in understanding how a nation that grew more and more reliant on statistics, polls, and research to make decisions - driven by the media, of course - are manipulated by special interest groups and the data they manufacture to support their position.

Do the people defending NPR on the basis that US media is not state propaganda believe that it has somehow gotten better since 1999? How can anyone believe that, when just a few years ago, CNN revealed in 2018 that dozens of local news anchors within the conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group were forced to recite a script that reflected then president Donald Trump’s views on “fake news” in mainstream media. Deadspin then produced a compilation of the news anchors reading the script verbatim. This incident was often cited at the time as a prime example of the undue influence conservative corporations, especially those whose CEOs openly supported Donald Trump, had over US media outlets.

But let’s not forget the so-called liberal media colluding to disappear Bernie Sanders’ insurgent campaign for the nomination for the Democratic Party in 2015. According to a study of network evening news campaign coverage by broadcast news monitor Andrew Tyndall, ABC, CBS, and NBC devoted a total of 504 minutes to the race in 2015, with the Clinton campaign receiving 82 minutes in network news time, which was second only to Trump who received 145 minutes of news coverage. But Bernie Sanders’ campaign received a whopping eight minutes of network news coverage in 2015.

And it wasn’t just network news that tried to disappear Sanders’ campaign, cable news stalwarts were guilty, too. CNN had to admit their own dismissal of Sanders’ campaign saying, “The dismissal of Sanders, including on occasion by CNN as well as other outlets, is especially palpable for his supporters, who feel like the candidate was written off because of both his temperament and his political beliefs.”

MSNBC exhibited what was perhaps the most astoundingly hostile commentary in 2016 about Sanders’ campaign from several of its hosts, with Chris Matthews comparing Sanders’ campaign to Hitler’s SS invading France (for which he later issued a mealymouthed apology), and then in 2020 compared a Sanders Democratic Primary win to what he thought electing a socialist could mean for America, which he said would produce public executions in Central Park like if “Fidel Casto and the Reds had won the Cold War.” James Carville, Bill Clinton’s former campaign guru, went on Morning Joe to rant about how a Sanders nomination would bring about the apocalypse, saying “The only thing between the United States and the abyss is the Democratic Party,” he said. “That’s it. If we go the way of the British Labour Party, if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days.” The same day, Chuck Todd, who also hosts NBC’s Meet the Press, read from an article from the right-wing website The Bulwark comparing supporters of Sanders, who is Jewish, to “brownshirts.”

Then in 2019, Bernie Sanders himself criticized the lopsided media coverage, or lack thereof, of his campaign, saying that the Washington Post didn’t cover him because he criticized Jeff Bezos, owner of the Post and Amazon, over his horrible employment practices. In response, Martin Baron, The Post’s executive editor, dismissed Sanders’s characterization as a “conspiracy theory.” CNN’s commentators accused Sanders of using President Trump’s playbook, which is also the position that allegedly editorially independent NPR took, dismissing Sanders’ criticisms by likening them to Donald Trump’s claims of “fake news” in mainstream media.

And Black Sanders voters weren’t spared the propaganda war against him either, with Jason Johnson, a political science professor, MSNBC contributor and politics editor at the African-American-focused The Root, who joined in the anti-Sanders chorus during an interview saying that some of Sanders’s staff and supporters were drawn from an “island of misfit black girls,” doing double-duty as a media apologist for the Democratic establishment, and a perpetrator of misogynoir toward Black women who dared not to fall in line behind Hillary Superpredator Clinton.

One of the few MSNBC’s pundits to push back on the anti-Sanders script being adhered to on the network, Anand Giridharadas, who openly criticized Chris Matthews during a segment saying, “Many in this establishment are behaving, in my view, as they face the prospect of a Bernie Sanders nomination, like out-of-touch aristocrats in a dying aristocracy.” It is impossible not to see that this is exactly what corporate media was reflecting, the refusal of the aristocracy of the Democratic Party and the liberal corporate elites to give any credence to a very real possibility of a candidacy of Bernie Sanders in media outlets they controlled, that threatened their grip on power, regardless of what the people who clearly preferred Sanders over both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump wanted.

But if that isn’t convincing enough about how utterly biased and in the tank for the state the US media apparatus is, don’t forget how every media outlet in the US ran like an Olympic sprinter with the Incubator Babies story that was one of the justifications for George H.W. Bush invading Iraq.

Before Democracy Now itself became an apologist for the US/EU/NATO proxy war in Ukraine, Rick MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, author of Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War explained on a broadcast in 2018 that the testimony before Congress of 15-year old Nayirah al-Sabah that she witnessed Saddam Hussein’s soldiers who had invaded Kuwait storming hospitals and ripping babies from incubators and tossing them to the floor to die was not only untrue, but the teenager was not just some random victim of the Iraqi army. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasser al-Sabah. Worse, her testimony had been coached by the US public relations firm Hill and Knowlton, which was working for the Kuwaiti government at the time. MacArthur discusses how the PR firm sought to use the girl’s testimony to turn US public opinion about Saddam Hussein by likening him to Hitler, which of course would mean that US opinion would shift to supporting the war because who would not want to stop another Hitler?

But most notably, MacArthur points out that the White House didn’t want to have another media situation like Vietnam, with reporters having access to every atrocity they saw US soldiers committing. So, he says, “...the decision was made to pool reporters and to censor them. In other words, you’d send groups of five to the front, wherever the Pentagon decided the front happened to be that day. They would get to take pictures and describe things, in theory, but their report would have to be shared with everybody else—there’d be no competition—and it would have to be vetted by Pentagon censors. So, obviously, the American public saw nothing. The reporters were permitted to see nothing.”

The Pentagon’s control of media coverage of the Gulf War by controlling the press pool was also the focus of a lawsuit filed by thirteen publications and writers, including The Nation, the Village Voice, and Harper's, but no major American news organization joined the suit, which the journalists lost. Do people defending NPR really believe that US media writ large is not still operating under the control of the White House and the Pentagon in regard to what is reported about the war in Ukraine, when media outlets are reporting the same talking points about the war very much like the Sinclair outlets’ anchors read from that pro-Trump script?

And if you think it is only the news media that is under the control of the invisible hand of the White House and the Pentagon, think again. Entertainment in the US is also subject to state approval, with the Pentagon, the CIA, and whatever other US agency that wants to ensure the right message about or involving them is conveyed. Some Hollywood-produced movies do not get made at all because of objections by the Pentagon specifically, over storylines that contain “...any suggestion of military incompetence or war crimes, loss of control over nuclear weapons, influence by oil companies, illegal arms sales or drug trafficking, use of chemical or biological weapons, U.S. promotion of coups overseas, or involvement in assassinations or torture. In fact, precisely the things the U.S. military is known to have been doing.”

And of course I would be negligent if I didn’t mention the pervasiveness of copaganda, and I’m not just talking about scripted television dramas like Law & Order SVU, Chicago PD and their ilk that paint the police in an overly positive light through gripping “ripped from the headlines” relatable stories every week. I also mean the coordinated media collusion to paint the police and their narrative in a positive light with how they report current issues involving policing. Such as how major media outlets will vilify protesters and valorize police , even if the data doesn’t jibe with the claims made. Or how the police themselves will take to social media and post feel-good stories showing them playing basketball with kids, or handing out ice cream, or delivering groceries to residents to make them appear humane and decent, while terrorizing the same population after their slick PR video is uploaded.

And just for good measure, it’s worth noting that just last year Bryce Greene of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) pointed out how NPR continues to tow the State Department line on Afghanistan years after one of the main reasons the US gave for invading the country was thoroughly discredited. But as recently as August 2022, NPR was still trotting out the lie, “...that the Taliban “refused to turn over Osama bin Laden,” and that this “led to the US attack.” But Greene points out that “though part of the commonly accepted chronology of the war, [this] is a gross distortion of history. The truth is almost the exact opposite: The Taliban repeatedly offered to give up Bin Laden, only rejecting George W. Bush’s demands for immediate and unconditional acquiescence without discussion.” With all of its non-government funding and listener support, do people mean to tell me that the editorially independent journalists at NPR couldn’t figure that out?

Greene says toward the end of his article that, “NPR’s historical framing is an attempt to paint the Taliban as prepared to defend Bin Laden to the death, and thus complicit or supportive of the 9/11 attacks. This inaccurate portrayal serves to retroactively justify the US assault on one of the poorest countries in the world.” And he ends with, “In future reporting, NPR should present a clearer picture of historical events to provide proper context for their listeners, and to avoid legitimizing the ongoing, massively destructive policies of the United States by promoting official state mythology.”

So I guess NPR isn’t so editorially independent, after all, just like the rest of US media.

Ultimately I think the defense of NPR claiming that their new Twitter label renders the label meaningless has provided us an opportunity to remind ourselves that there is no real “free press” in the US, not if it is associated in any way with this capitalist imperialist system and the defense of it, and there has not been one among the “acceptable” media outlets for a very long time. It also gives us an opportunity to reflect on what those “state-affiliated” or “state-sponsored” labels were really meant to do when they were applied to other outlets, something that Liz Woolery, digital policy leader of the literary organization PEN America, alluded to when she said that Twitter’s decision to label NPR was “a dangerous move that could further undermine public confidence in reliable news sources.”

That is what the labels meant all along - an effort by the US regime to discredit reliable and credible non-US news sources that critiqued US foreign policy, so USians would dismiss the information that came out of those sources about US policy in general, and the war in Ukraine in particular, and to not question what comes from US media that is absolutely influenced by the US regime.

The labels never had any legitimacy beyond their application as a form of US state propaganda! Americans simply forgot that the media in this country is the most expansive and sophisticated propaganda machine in the world, having had their memories of this erased by that very propaganda machine.

https://www.blackagendareport.com/respo ... -all-along
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Apr 18, 2023 2:54 pm

BIDEN SEEKS TO EXPAND DIGITAL SURVEILLANCE AFTER PENTAGON PAPERS LEAK
Apr 17, 2023 , 3:16 pm .

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The government wants to "expand the universe" of social networking sites that US intelligence and law enforcement agencies monitor (Photo: Framestock Footages)

Joe Biden's administration seems prepared to increase Internet surveillance in response to leaked Pentagon documents that appear to have been posted on the Discord messaging platform, reports journalist Dave DeCamp, editor of the AntiWar site .

NBC News reported on Wednesday, April 12, that the White House was looking to expand the way it monitors social networking sites and chat rooms.

The report cited an unnamed senior administration official and a congressional official as saying the administration wants to "expand the universe" of social networking sites monitored by US intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

According to the congressional source, the report says that the "intelligence community is now grappling with how it can scour platforms like Discord for relevant material to prevent a similar leak in the future."

According to The Washington Post, the top-secret documents were posted on a private Discord server that a member later posted on public servers in March. The documents have been circulating on the Internet ever since and were exposed by The New York Times last week, after the leak leaked into crowded public online spaces of opinion.

The expansion of internet surveillance is just one way the Biden administration is considering responding to the Discord leak. Internally, the Pentagon has strengthened control of classified material and is studying other measures to take.

On Thursday, April 13, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested a 21-year-old member of the Air National Guard in Massachusetts, suspected of being the leaker. Many analysts have come to the conclusion that it is a scapegoat, and even that the leak has been controlled ( limited hangout ) by the Pentagon itself. However, the US government sees here an opportunity to increase the levels of government dictatorship in the digital field.

https://misionverdad.com/biden-busca-ex ... -pentagono

Google Translator

*******

Elon Musk claims US government had 'full access' to private Twitter DMs
Updated: 2023-04-17 22:21

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Twitter logo and a photo of Elon Musk are displayed through magnifier in this illustration taken October 27, 2022. [Photo/Agencies]

Twitter CEO Elon Musk claimed in an interview that the US government has "full access" to users' private direct messages, saying knowing that information blew his mind.

In an interview with Fox News, Musk said he was shocked to find out about the government's ability to read users' direct messages on his platform.

"The degree to which government agencies effectively had full access to everything that was going on on Twitter blew my mind," Musk, who recently founded an artificial intelligence company called X.AI, said in the interview set to air on Tuesday. "I was not aware of that."

http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/20230 ... ce1d7.html


Between the non-stop propaganda and the full on spying ya gotta wonder how my fellow Americans are able to function under the crushing weight of the greatest mass of cognitive dissonance in the universe. "Land of the Free..." Uh-huh.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 22, 2023 3:19 pm

Today In Empire: War Machine-Funded War Games, Facebook Censors Hersh, And More

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There’s a lot happening in the life of the empire, so we’re doing another multi-story article to wrap it all up. Today we’re discussing four stories:

Facebook is censoring multiple articles by Seymour Hersh.
Weapons industry-funded think tank helps Congress discover that Taiwan needs way more weapons.
The New York Times really, really doesn’t like RFK Jr.
Twitter drops its “state-affiliated media” and “government-funded media” labels.

1. Facebook is censoring multiple articles by Seymour Hersh.

Facebook has begun censoring a Substack article by journalist Seymour Hersh which asserts that the US government, in coordination with Norway, was behind the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines last September.

First flagged by author Michael Shellenberger on Twitter, this censorship is still occuring as of this writing some 36 hours later. If you try to share Hersh’s article on Facebook, as soon as you paste the URL you get a notification which warns, “Before you share this content, you might want to know that there’s additional reporting from Faktisk. Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways.” It also includes a link to a month-old article by Faktisk.no, a Norwegian “fact-checking” website produced in cooperation with Norwegian mass media and Norway’s state broadcasting company NRK.

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Facebook then gives you the option to “Cancel” or “Share Anyway”. If you opt for the latter, Facebook censors the article by pixelating the share like they would for images of extreme gore or hardcore pornography, and attaching a giant warning label on it saying “False information. Checked by independent fact-checkers.” Facebook does not explain how a “fact-checking” company which operates in conjunction with Norwegian state media can be regarded as “independent” regarding an article which explicitly accuses the Norwegian government of extremely egregious crimes.

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If you click through the second warning, you can finally get to Hersh’s article. If you click the option to “See why” the article is being hidden from visibility, you are taken to a Faktisk.no article “Flere feil om norsk innblanding i Nord Stream-sabotasjen” (“More mistakes about Norwegian interference in the Nord Stream sabotage,” subtitled “The award-winning journalist Seymour Hersh accuses Norway of being behind the Nord Stream explosions. But his article contains several errors.” per machine translation).

The article disputes Hersh’s claims using arguments that have been circulating since February, many of which have been disputed. But whether you think Hersh’s claims are valid or not, his reporting is indisputably a part of the conversation about the Nord Stream sabotage and is newsworthy in itself. The world’s largest social media platform is straightforwardly interfering in news distribution.

Facebook is also censoring another article by Hersh published earlier this month which alleges that the Ukrainian government has been embezzling at least $400 million from US taxpayers to illicitly purchase diesel fuel from Russia, and that the CIA knows about this. If you paste the URL into the Facebook share box to that article you get a warning like the one for the Nord Stream article, only this one includes a link to an article by the empire-funded Ukrainian infowar website StopFake.

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As Mintpress News’ Alan MacLeod reported last year, StopFake is funded by the CIA cutout National Endowment for Democracy and the empire-funded NATO think tank The Atlantic Council, as well as the British government and the Czech Republic. Despite this extremely obvious conflict of interest, Facebook has the temerity to call StopFake an “independent fact-checker” in the warnings it provides while censoring Hersh’s Ukraine article. One even goes so far as to say that “Independent fact-checkers say that this information has no basis in fact.”

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The Ukraine article is pixelated just like the Nord Stream one:

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The StopFake article looks nothing remotely like an “independent fact-checker”, written in typical ham-fisted Ukrainian infowar style beneath the words “FAKE” in red capital letters and citing nothing besides government assertions and its own forceful tone.

Dismissing the renowned journalist Seymour Hersh’s article as his “personal blog,” StopFake informs us that “American auditors and the White House have repeatedly stressed that after more than a year of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine, they found no violations by Ukraine in the use of Western weapons and material assistance.”

Oh well okay then.

2. Weapons industry-funded think tank helps Congress discover that Taiwan needs way more weapons.

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The House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party decided to roleplay as generals in a war game simulating a PRC attack on Taiwan. The war game was facilitated by the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) think tank, whose top donors include war industry giants Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon and Boeing, as well as the US Department of Defense and the de facto embassy of Taiwan.

Now this is going to surprise you and astonish you and take you aback, but believe it or not the war game conducted by the weapons industry-funded think tank has revealed that Taiwan is going to need a lot more weapons.

“We are well within the window of maximum danger for a Chinese Communist Party invasion of Taiwan, and yesterday’s war game stressed the need to take action to deter CCP aggression and arm Taiwan to the teeth before any crisis begins,” said the incredibly hawkish chairman of the Select Committee Mike Gallagher in a statement.

Another thing that’s going to shock and astonish and surprise you (and you might want to sit down for this one) is that none of the reporting on this war game from the political/media class has made any mention of the immense conflict of interest that the Center for a New American Security would necessarily have in this war game. Articles by Reuters, The Hill and The National Review ominously informing their audiences of the grave findings of the war game have made precisely zero mention of the think tank’s funders, giving the impression that these are just impartial foreign policy experts and not indirect employees of the war profiteering industry.

As I never tire of reminding my readers, this is journalistic malpractice. It is never legitimate to mention war machine-funded think tanks promoting more war and militarism without also informing readers of their obvious conflict of interest in the matter.


The Center for a New American Security is one of the nastiest think tanks pulling strings in the information ecosystem today. As we discussed last year when CNAS bizarrely hosted another one of its “war games” on MSNBC, it has extensive degrees of overlap with the Biden administration and has been playing a crucial role in marketing war with China to American liberals.

One of the most insane things happening in the world right now is the way the entire political/media class routinely cites war machine-funded think tanks in the promotion and formulation of important foreign policy decisions without ever disclosing this extreme conflict of interest to the public. Future generations, if there are future generations, will scarce believe we once allowed war profiteers to directly influence government policies on war and militarism using the money they made from profiting off war and militarism. It’s one of the most evil arrangements you could possibly come up with.

3. The New York Times really, really doesn’t like RFK Jr.

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The New York Times has published an article in its “news” section — not labeled “opinion” or anything — smearing Robert F Kennedy Jr for his Democratic presidential primary candidacy with jaw-dropping aggression.

The article’s author, Trip Gabriel, comes right out of the gate claiming that Kennedy has announced a presidential campaign built on “shaking Americans’ faith in science.” Again, I cannot stress this enough, this is presented by The New York Times as a hard news story.

Gabriel describes Kennedy’s campaign announcement speech as “rambling”, calls him a “fringe” presidential aspirant, and strongly implies that Kennedy is only running to bring attention to himself. He goes out of his way to say that Kennedy’s campaign has “appalled” members of his famous Democratic family, and quotes a former aide to Ted Kennedy as saying RFK Jr’s presidential run is “contrary to everything his uncle Ted Kennedy ever did.”

I’m not going to support any US presidential candidate and it’s as certain as sunrise that whoever gets sworn in on January 2025 will be a corrupt and murderous swamp monster like all the rest, but I do expect that candidates like Kennedy will cause the propaganda machine to overextend itself in some ways that can be useful in highlighting its nefariousness for the public. Framing an obvious spin piece as hard news is brazen journalistic malpractice, one more item on the mountain of evidence that The New York Times is garbage.

4. Twitter drops its “state-affiliated media” and “government-funded media” labels.

In some positive news, Twitter has taken the unannounced step of removing all “government-funded” and “state-affiliated media” labels from all accounts of every national origin. The “state-affiliated media” labels have been removed from accounts like RT and Press TV, as well as from individuals who’d been branded with that label because of their associations with state media, and the “government-funded” label has been removed from outlets like NPR, PBS and CBC.

If this turns out to be a permanent move, it is an objectively good thing. The use of these labels has always been blatantly propagandistic and obscenely biased in favor of the US and its allies, and should never have happened in the first place. It’s not Twitter’s place to make sure people trust western propaganda outlets and distrust propaganda outlets from Russia and China; that’s the role of a propagandist, not an impartial platform for free communication.

I’ve been very critical of Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover and generally dismissive of claims that his ownership is a marked improvement over the previous owners, but if this is for real I’ll have to eat a big steaming pile of crow, because Twitter functioning less as a US propaganda organ is indisputably a significant improvement. If his free speech values aren’t just limited to easing hate speech restrictions and actually create a more egalitarian information ecosystem on real matters of international consequence, I was definitely wrong, and the platform is better off under his control.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/21 ... -and-more/

Ms Johnstone, please stop maligning swamp monsters, compared beasts like US presidents, they are benign.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Apr 24, 2023 2:47 pm

The Empire Of Hypocrisy: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

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The US is raging about Russia jailing a Wall Street Journal reporter on espionage charges, while the US is:

*Jailing Julian Assange for doing good journalism.
*Threatening to imprison Matt Taibbi.
*Charging African People’s Socialist Party members with “propaganda” crimes.

Such hypocrisy is damning not because hypocrisy itself is a particularly terrible thing, but because it shows that the US does not actually value press freedoms or free speech; it only pretends to in order to advance its own foreign policy objectives. It only cares about these freedoms insofar as it can rhetorically bludgeon governments it dislikes for not having them.



So it turns out that after the Hunter Biden laptop leak Tony Blinken contacted his CIA buddy Mike Morell to make it go away, and Morell has now admitted to cooking up the bogus “Russian disinfo” letter from 51 US intelligence insiders to “help Vice President Biden… because I wanted him to win the election.”

Obama’s acting CIA director just coolly admitting that he used his intelligence connections to orchestrate a psyop to change the outcome of a presidential election completely invalidates anything the US government does under the banner of fighting “election interference”. Keep this glaring hypocrisy in mind as the US government continues churning out indictments and ramping up authoritarian measures in the name of fighting “disinformation” and protecting American “democracy”.



Still stuns me that the global north is full of fully grown adults who sincerely believe Putin invaded Ukraine completely unprovoked, solely because he is evil and hates freedom, and that the US is defending Ukraine because it wants to protect freedom and democracy from tyrants.



The Democratic Party is what the natural, healthy human impulse to promote civil rights and economic justice looks like after you filter it through the most powerful propaganda machine that has ever existed and put it in charge of an empire that is fueled by human suffering.



The death of the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign marked the end of any meaningful push toward economic justice in the US. Ever since then all political oxygen has gone into ramping up culture war hostilities that won’t put a single cent into any struggling American’s bank account.



Some days I hate Republicans more than Democrats because while Democrats facilitate all the most murderous and destructive tendencies of the most powerful government on earth, Republicans do exactly the same thing while pretending they’re a persecuted and disempowered group.



Don’t be a pro bono Pentagon propagandist. If you oppose the empire, don’t preface everything you say about China, Russia or other empire-targeted governments with “Of course their regime is evil and tyrannical, but”. Those messages are already being amplified by society’s most influential voices, and they get paid a lot for it. Don’t do their job for free.



Indie media who spend a lot of time sniping at other indie media aren’t in it to fight the power or make the world a better place, they’re in it to build a brand. If you’re serious about this shit you keep your crosshairs on the top of governmental, political and media power.



This is the dystopia you were warned about. A mind-controlled populace thinking, speaking, shopping, moving and voting in accordance with the will of the powerful. All that’s left now is to secure the few dissidents on the fringes and keep bolstering the mind control matrix.

This doesn’t mean it’s hopeless, it just means we’ve got to acknowledge reality and start working from where we’re at. The biggest obstacle to real freedom is the belief that we already have it.



It’s important to watch out for red flags in the early stages of a new relationship, because if you don’t see any it means they’re probably not a communist and are therefore bad in bed.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/23 ... ve-matrix/

My personal opinion is that the revelations of Assange and those other famous 'leakers' of the recent past did not reveal anything particularly earth-shaking but might in fact constitute a "limited hangout". That said, Assange as a symbol of the press is another thing entirely and important.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Apr 26, 2023 2:51 pm

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Facebook censors journalist Seymour Hersh’s report on Nord Stream pipeline attack
By Ben Norton (Posted Apr 26, 2023)

Originally published: Geopolitical Economy Report on April 24, 2023 (more by Geopolitical Economy Report) |

Facebook has censored a report by the world’s most famous investigative journalist, Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, on the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline between Russia and Germany.

While discouraging its users from posting Hersh’s article, Facebook instead recommends a website that is funded and partially owned by the government of NATO member Norway.

Facebook has millions of dollars worth of contracts with the U.S. government, including with the Pentagon and Department of Homeland Security.



The Nord Stream system consisted of two sets of two pipelines each (known as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2) that delivered natural gas from Russia, through the Baltic Sea, to Germany.

Nord Stream AG, the Switzerland-based international consortium that built and oversees the pipelines, is owned by five European companies. Russia’s state gas giant Gazprom has 51% of the shares, but the other 49% belong to two German companies, a Dutch firm, and a French company.

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In September 2022, the Nord Stream pipelines were sabotaged in a suspicious explosion.

World-renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh reported that the pipelines were attacked by the U.S. government, in an operation overseen by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland.

All three officials are hard-line anti-Russia hawks. Nuland was a key architect of the violent coup d’etat that overthrew Ukraine’s democratically elected, geopolitically neutral government in 2014 and installed a pro-Western regime.

Hersh published the bombshell story at his personal blog at the website Substack in February.

If a Facebook user posts a link to this report by Hersh, a notice pops up that says: “Before you share this content, you might want to know there’s additional reporting from Faktisk. Pages and websites that repeatedly publish or share false news will see their overall distribution reduced and be restricted in other ways”.

The page Facebook links to, Faktisk, is a fact-checking website from Norway, which is funded and partially owned by the government of that NATO member state.

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Faktisk discloses that one of its owners and main funders is NRK: the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, a state-owned media outlet.

NRK states clearly on its website, “NRK is Norway’s biggest media house. The broadcaster is state-owned and the Parliament (Stortinget) has given the mandate and the ownership role to the Ministry of Culture”. It notes that “NRK is publicly financed (97%) by a individual tax everybody in Norway has to pay”.

The editor-in-chief of Faktisk, Kristoffer Egeberg, discloses in his biography on the website that he served in the Norwegian Armed Forces as a soldier and officer, participating in NATO and UN operations in Lebanon, Bosnia, and Kosovo.

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A worker testing part of the Nord Stream pipelines

What this means it that Facebook is censoring a report by the world’s most famous investigative journalist and instead promoting a website partially owned and funded by a NATO member state, Norway, which is edited by a former Norwegian military officer who participated in NATO operations.

Despite attacks on Hersh, U.S. government and media fail to provide alternative explanation
The U.S. government publicly denied Hersh’s report on the Nord Stream attacks, but Washington has always rejected the investigative journalist’s stories, which have consistently proven to be true.

Hersh won his Pulitzer Prize for exposing the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which the U.S. military killed hundreds of civilians. The U.S. government had denied this massacre, although it was later proven to have happened.

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Twitter profiles of RT or Sputnik

Similarly, Washington initially denied Hersh’s blockbuster 2004 report exposing the U.S. military’s use of torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which was similarly proven to be correct.

In response to Hersh’s report on the Nord Stream attacks, anonymous U.S. government officials used the New York Times to undermine the reporter, instead blaming an unidentified “pro-Ukrainian group”, which they claimed was not linked to the Ukrainian government or any other NATO member state.

Washington and its allies in the corporate media have been desperate to smear Hersh, nitpicking over very minor details he may have mistakenly reported, but they have utterly failed to provide any tangible evidence or compelling alternative explanation of how the Nord Stream pipelines were destroyed.

The massive pipelines were built out of steel, surrounded with thick concrete, and located 50 to 100 meters underwater.

It would be extremely difficult for a small ragtag “pro-Ukrainian group” to sabotage these pipelines. The attack clearly involved a lot of planning and resources, which suggests that a state was very likely involved.

Western governments censor Russian (and Iranian) media outlets

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Facebook is by no means the only U.S. social media giant that has censored dissident voices over the war in Ukraine.

YouTube, which is owned by Google, blocked the channels of Russia’s state media outlet RT everywhere on the planet.

Like Facebook, Google has millions of dollars of U.S. government contracts, with the CIA, Pentagon, FBI, and various police departments.

Furthermore, the European Union banned RT and Sputnik, another Russian state media outlet.

If someone in the EU tries to access the Twitter profiles of RT or Sputnik, a message appears stating, “Account Withheld”.

The U.S. government even went so far as to seize the domain name of Iran’s state media outlet Press TV.

“The domain presstv.com has been seized by the United States Government”, reads a notice on the website, published jointly by the Departments of Justice and Commerce.

https://mronline.org/2023/04/26/faceboo ... ne-attack/

It is tiresome to repeat but every sin and atrocity which the US accuses it's chosen enemies of it something it has done or is doing.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Apr 29, 2023 1:42 pm

Reminder: The Media Once Bashed Trump For Transgressing The One-China Policy The US Now Spits On

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The US has been increasingly treating Taiwan like a sovereign nation with whom diplomatic relationships and alliances can be formed, in violation of its longstanding One-China policy that has kept the peace for decades. And I just think it’s worth noting that the western media who’ve lately been condoning these moves became outraged at Donald Trump just a few years ago for doing the same thing to a far lesser degree.

After his victory in the 2016 presidential election but before taking office, Trump received a phone call from Taiwanese president Tsai Ing-wen, in transgression of Washington’s longstanding policy of declining to acknowledge the sovereignty of Taiwan’s government. This position was enshrined back in the seventies during Washington’s efforts to normalize relations with Beijing in order to pull it away from Moscow during the last cold war, reversing its previous Guaido coup-like policy of insisting that China’s true government was in Taiwan.

The reaction from the mass media was adversarial and immediate. “Donald Trump insults China with Taiwan phone call,” said a headline from CNBC. “Trump’s phone call with Taiwan president risks China’s wrath,” warned The Guardian. “This Is Why Trump’s Taiwan Call Was Truly Bizarre,” said Vanity Fair. “Trump may have just thrown decades of US-China relations into disarray,” exclaimed Vox. “Trump-Taiwan call breaks US policy stance,” said the BBC.

“We have what’s called a One-China policy, where we recognize there’s only one Chinese government,” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow told her audience after the news of Trump’s phone call broke. “And it took us a long time to get there. It sounds rational now, but it took us a long time — it took us decades to get there — and that’s where we are. And Donald Trump apparently took that silverware drawer out of the kitchen cabinet today and turned it upside down over his head and just started shaking the silverware to see what happens. It took decades to develop the ground on which we talk to China, and Donald Trump tore it up today.”


And yet now we’re seeing dramatically more aggressive erosion of Washington’s One-China policy than a president-elect answering a phone call, all without the mass media blinking an eye. Two successive House speakers have now had physical visits with Tsai Ing-wen, with Nancy Pelosi visiting Taiwan last August and Kevin McCarthy meeting with Tsai in Washington a few weeks ago. President Biden has unequivocally stated that the US would go to war against China to defend Taiwan from an attack by the PRC, and his Director of National Intelligence later confirmed that this is indeed the new position of the US government.

Escalations involving Taiwan are developing on a near-daily basis now. In a new article titled “Taiwan Now Has ‘Real Time’ Intelligence Sharing Link With Five Eyes,” Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp discusses the revelation that Taiwan is being integrated into the Five Eyes intelligence alliance of the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Taiwan becoming a de facto sixth eye in the alliance would surely be seen as a major provocation by the PRC, who sees Taiwan as a rebel province. And it should here be noted that Russia invaded Ukraine largely because it saw it as gradually being made into a de facto member of the NATO alliance.

In another recent article titled “House China Committee Prepares Proposals to Rapidly Arm Taiwan,” DeCamp reports on the latest efforts to ramp up the deluge of military weaponry being sent to the island, again a move which echoes the lead-up to the war in Ukraine. One of the silliest things the US empire asks us to believe is that the act of amassing large proxy arsenals on the borders of its enemies is something that should be regarded as a defensive action, rather than the incendiary provocation of extreme aggression that it self-evidently is.

In another recent article titled “China says Taiwan inviting ‘wolves’ with US defence industry forum,” Reuters reports that Beijing is “extremely concerned” about a US military-industrial complex forum that will be hosted in Taipei next week.

This is just in the last few days; reports about these escalations are coming out all the time. And yet the mass media have little or nothing critical to say about any of this.



So what changed since late 2016? Well for one thing Trump is no longer in office, and the imperial narrative managers who hated him because they saw him as an untrustworthy steward of the empire don’t have the same commitment to sowing distrust of the current US president.

More importantly, the agendas of the US empire changed. Ramping up aggressions against China were a back-burner issue back then, and the idea of a military confrontation between the world’s two most powerful countries seemed an unthinkable impossibility. Now the US is rapidly ramping up its military encirclement of China and pouring weapons into Taiwan at a time that just so happens to coincide with China beginning to become the exact sort of rival superpower that the US empire has long had a standing policy of preventing.

As the agendas of the empire have changed, so too have the positions of the imperial media. We’re now seeing more and more promotion of anti-China hysteria in the media, and the continuing erosion of the One-China policy is now being overlooked at best and overtly endorsed at worst. While China is being given more and more reasons to see US involvement in Taiwan as an unacceptable threat, the mainstream press are for the most part refusing to apply an appropriate level of scrutiny to the consequences which could begin erupting from this at any time.

Now we’re getting reports that President Xi Jinping directly threatened Biden about Washington’s meddling this past November, saying he will not be the Chinese leader who goes down in history as having lost Taiwan and that there will be war if his hand is forced.

So the worst thing that could happen if we keep going along this trajectory is pretty much as bad as anything you could possibly imagine. The mass media’s negligence on this front is horrifying.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/29 ... -spits-on/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon May 01, 2023 3:23 pm

You’re Not Deficient, You’re Just Ruled By Assholes

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Stress, anxiety and depression are on the rise, and they have been for years. Studies have found that increases in cost of living have a lot to do with this deterioration in mental health, while others have linked it to widespread social media use, and the financial and social stressors ensuing from government Covid restrictions certainly haven’t helped.

What nobody seems to be doing any research at all into investigating is the possibility that all these mental health problems have something to do with the fact that we are ruled by tyrants who are squeezing the working class harder and harder while continually pounding people’s minds with mass-scale psyops.

William Gibson said “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.” And speaking from personal experience this is fantastic advice; I’ve found that many of the problems I had previously ascribed to flaws in myself and necessary difficulties that are built into the nature of human living quickly disappeared from my life at the same time assholes did.

But even more worthwhile than pointing out that a lot of your assumed mental health problems have more to do with being surrounded by assholes is considering the possibility that you are in fact ruled by assholes. By tyrants who are making life needlessly difficult for ordinary people while psychologically abusing them into thinking their situation is normal and appropriate.



A popular socialist YouTuber called Second Thought has a good new video out called “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda” which examines the subject from a different angle than you might be used to. Second Thought emphasises the mundane, everyday nature of propaganda in our society as opposed to the shinier, better-known instances of its use like the consent-manufacturing for the Iraq invasion; the way it manipulates our understanding of who we are and what our values should be so that we will blame our struggles on ourselves instead of the neoliberal systems of oppression that are crushing people’s spirits throughout western civilization.

Think about the consequences it would have on mental health to continually be bombarded with messaging that you need to keep working like a machine under whatever conditions your employer sees fit to provide, for whatever compensation your employer sees fit to offer, and that if you can’t thrive in this soul-crushing environment the problem lies with you and not the system which permits such an exploitative relationship. Then consider the possibility that this is exactly what’s happening.

This nonstop propaganda messaging is further bolstered by the just-world fallacy, a cognitive bias which causes people to incorrectly assume that if anything bad happens to someone it’s because they deserved it. This common glitch in human reasoning arises because of people’s need to feel like they’re in control of their lives; they get that feeling of control by espousing the fallacious belief that as long as people always make good common sense decisions, nothing bad will ever happen to them. As a Twitter follower named Joe Ligato recently pointed out to me, this fallacy would cause people to blame themselves for problems in their lives that actually exist because of exploitative systems.



Some people wonder why mental health conditions are so bad, while I marvel at the fact that they’re not much worse. It’s actually amazing anyone’s functioning at all in a civilization that’s ruled by exploiters and abusers who dominate the world using mass-scale psychological manipulation. It’s a testament to human resilience that anyone is sane. When everyone’s mind is always being pummeled with messaging that you’re deficient if you can’t thrive under our oppressive systems, that you’re flawed if you don’t look, think and act a certain way, that poverty is normal and acts of mass military slaughter are acceptable, it’s a wonder we don’t all snap.

When everyone’s consciousness is being continually warped and twisted to suit the agendas of the powerful and keep us all thinking, speaking, working, shopping and voting in ways that advance their interests, it’s surprising we’re not seeing more suicides, more mass shootings, more substance abuse, more clinical depression and anxiety. In a totalitarian dystopia that’s held together by mass-scale psychological abuse, it’s entirely reasonable that people are finding themselves overwhelmed with despair, alienation, depression and anxiety.

Everything seems phony, meaningless and needlessly difficult because it is. This isn’t a statement about human nature or life as it naturally exists, it’s a statement about the artificially constructed systems we live under currently. Systems that were built by people and are being maintained by people. Systems which can be changed and restructured by people, too.

In the meantime, please be gentle with yourself. If you’re struggling to get by, don’t heap extra problems upon yourself by beating yourself up about it. If you’re feeling deficient because you can’t live up to the standards of success and worthiness you’re using, maybe take some time to consider whom those standards might benefit. If they’re the sort of standards that would help turn the population into productive gear-turners of the capitalist machine, they’re probably not the best gauge with which to measure your success as a person.

There’s no real reason life needs to be this difficult. There’s no reason we can’t provide for everyone while technological advancement gives us all more and more free time. There’s no reason we can’t learn to live in collaboration with each other and with our ecosystem instead of in competition for the benefit of a few abusers at the top. All that’s required is for enough of us to decide we’re not going to take it anymore.

Times are hard, and they’re getting harder, but we can turn this thing around. Please be kind with yourself in the meantime.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue May 02, 2023 2:10 pm

The Coming War
Posted by INTERNATIONALIST 360° on MAY 1, 2023
John Pilger

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Dec. 20, 2008: Protesters in Montreal threw shoes at a target poster of President George Bush outside the U.S. Consulate to show support for the Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zeizi , who threw his shoe at the real Bush. (Anirudh Koul, Flickr, CC BY-NC 2.0)

Silences filled with a consensus of propaganda contaminate almost everything we read, see and hear. War by media is now a key task of so-called mainstream journalism.


In 1935, the Congress of American Writers was held in New York City, followed by another two years later. They called on “the hundreds of poets, novelists, dramatists, critics, short story writers and journalists” to discuss the “rapid crumbling of capitalism” and the beckoning of another war. They were electric events which, according to one account, were attended by 3,500 members of the public with more than a thousand turned away.

Arthur Miller, Myra Page, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett warned that fascism was rising, often disguised, and the responsibility lay with writers and journalists to speak out. Telegrams of support from Thomas Mann, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, C Day Lewis, Upton Sinclair and Albert Einstein were read out.

The journalist and novelist Martha Gellhorn spoke up for the homeless and unemployed, and “all of us under the shadow of violent great power.”

Martha, who became a close friend, told me later over her customary glass of Famous Grouse and soda:

“The responsibility I felt as a journalist was immense. I had witnessed the injustices and suffering delivered by the Depression, and I knew, we all knew, what was coming if silences were not broken.”

Her words echo across the silences today: they are silences filled with a consensus of propaganda that contaminates almost everything we read, see and hear. Let me give you one example:

On March 7, the two oldest newspapers in Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, published several pages on “the looming threat” of China. They coloured the Pacific Ocean red. Chinese eyes were martial, on the march and menacing. The Yellow Peril was about to fall down as if by the weight of gravity.

No logical reason was given for an attack on Australia by China. A “panel of experts” presented no credible evidence: one of them is a former director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a front for the Defence Department in Canberra, the Pentagon in Washington, the governments of Britain, Japan and Taiwan and the West’s war industry.

“Beijing could strike within three years,” they warned. “We are not ready.” Billions of dollars are to be spent on American nuclear submarines, but that, it seems, is not enough.”‘Australia’s holiday from history is over”: whatever that might mean.

There is no threat to Australia, none. The faraway “lucky” country has no enemies, least of all China, its largest trading partner. Yet China-bashing that draws on Australia’s long history of racism towards Asia has become something of a sport for the self-ordained “experts.” What do Chinese-Australians make of this? Many are confused and fearful.

The authors of this grotesque piece of dog-whistling and obsequiousness to American power are Peter Hartcher and Matthew Knott, “national security reporters” I think they are called. I remember Hartcher from his Israeli government-paid jaunts. The other one, Knott, is a mouthpiece for the suits in Canberra. Neither has ever seen a war zone and its extremes of human degradation and suffering.

“How did it come to this?” Martha Gellhorn would say if she were here. “Where on earth are the voices saying no? Where is the comradeship?”

Post-Modernism in Charge

The voices are heard in the samizdat of this website and others. In literature, the likes of John Steinbeck, Carson McCullers, George Orwell are obsolete. Post-modernism is in charge now. Liberalism has pulled up its political ladder. A once somnolent social democracy, Australia, has enacted a web of new laws protecting secretive, authoritarian power and preventing the right to know. Whistleblowers are outlaws, to be tried in secret. An especially sinister law bans “foreign interference” by those who work for foreign companies. What does this mean?

Democracy is notional now; there is the all-powerful elite of the corporation merged with the state and the demands of “identity.” American admirals are paid thousands of dollars a day by the Australian tax payer for “advice.” Right across the West, our political imagination has been pacified by PR and distracted by the intrigues of corrupt, ultra low-rent politicians: a Boris Johnson or a Donald Trump or a Sleepy Joe or a Volodymyr Zelensky.

No writers’ congress in 2023 worries about “crumbling capitalism” and the lethal provocations of “our” leaders. The most infamous of these, Tony Blair, a prima facie criminal under the Nuremberg Standard, is free and rich. Julian Assange, who dared journalists to prove their readers had a right to know, is in his second decade of incarceration.

The rise of fascism in Europe is uncontroversial. Or “neo-Nazism” or “extreme nationalism,” as you prefer. Ukraine as modern Europe’s fascist beehive has seen the re-emergence of the cult of Stepan Bandera, the passionate anti-Semite and mass murderer who lauded Hitler’s “Jewish policy,” which left 1.5 million Ukrainian Jews slaughtered. “We will lay your heads at Hitler’s feet,” a Banderist pamphlet proclaimed to Ukrainian Jews.

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Stepan Bandera torchlight parade in Kiev, Jan. 1, 2020. (A1/Wikimedia Commons)

Today, Bandera is hero-worshipped in western Ukraine and scores of statues of him and his fellow-fascists have been paid for by the EU and the U.S., replacing those of Russian cultural giants and others who liberated Ukraine from the original Nazis.

In 2014, neo Nazis played a key role in an American bankrolled coup against the elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, who was accused of being “pro-Moscow.” The coup regime included prominent “extreme nationalists” — Nazis in all but name.

At first, this was reported at length by the BBC and the European and American media. In 2019, Time magazine featured the “white supremacist militias” active in Ukraine. NBC News reported, “Ukraine’s Nazi problem is real.” The immolation of trade unionists in Odessa was filmed and documented.

Spearheaded by the Azov regiment, whose insignia, the “Wolfsangel,” was made infamous by the German SS, Ukraine’s military invaded the eastern, Russian-speaking Donbass region. According to the United Nations 14,000 in the east were killed. Seven years later, with the Minsk peace conferences sabotaged by the West, as Angela Merkel confessed, the Red Army invaded.

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A march of Azov veterans and supporters in Kiev, 2019. (Goo3, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

This version of events was not reported in the West. To even utter it is to bring down abuse about being a “Putin apologist,” regardless whether the writer (such as myself) has condemned the Russian invasion. Understanding the extreme provocation that a NATO-armed borderland, Ukraine, the same borderland through which Hitler invaded, presented to Moscow, is anathema.

Journalists who travelled to the Donbass were silenced or even hounded in their own country. German journalist Patrik Baab lost his job and a young German freelance reporter, Alina Lipp, had her bank account sequestered.

Silence of Intimidation

In Britain, the silence of the liberal intelligentsia is the silence of intimidation. State-sponsored issues like Ukraine and Israel are to be avoided if you want to keep a campus job or a teaching tenure. What happened to former Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn in 2019 is repeated on campuses where opponents of apartheid Israel are casually smeared as anti-Semitic.

Professor David Miller, ironically the country’s leading authority on modern propaganda, was sacked by Bristol University for suggesting publicly that Israel’s “assets” in Britain and its political lobbying exerted a disproportionate influence worldwide — a fact for which the evidence is voluminous.

The university hired a leading QC to investigate the case independently. His report exonerated Miller on the “important issue of academic freedom of expression” and found “Professor Miller’s comments did not constitute unlawful speech.” Yet Bristol sacked him. The message is clear: no matter what outrage it perpetrates, Israel has immunity and its critics are to be punished.

A few years ago, Terry Eagleton, then professor of English literature at Manchester University, reckoned that “for the first time in two centuries, there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the Western way of life.”

No Shelley spoke for the poor, no Blake for utopian dreams, no Byron damned the corruption of the ruling class, no Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin revealed the moral disaster of capitalism. William Morris, Oscar Wilde, HG Wells, George Bernard Shaw had no equivalents today. Harold Pinter was alive then, “the last to raise his voice,” wrote Eagleton.

Where did post-modernism — the rejection of actual politics and authentic dissent — come from? The publication in 1970 of Charles Reich’s bestselling book, The Greening of America, offers a clue. America then was in a state of upheaval; Richard Nixon was in the White House, a civil resistance, known as “the movement,” had burst out of the margins of society in the midst of a war that touched almost everybody. In alliance with the civil rights movement, it presented the most serious challenge to Washington’s power for a century.

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On the cover of Reich’s book were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.”

At the time I was a correspondent in the United States and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of Reich, a young Yale academic. The New Yorker had sensationally serialised his book, whose message was that the “political action and truth-telling” of the 1960s had failed and only “culture and introspection” would change the world. It felt as if hippydom was claiming the consumer classes. And in one sense it was.

Within a few years, the cult of “me-ism” had all but overwhelmed many people’s sense of acting together, of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political and the media was the message. Make money, it said.

As for “the movement,” its hope and songs, the years of Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton put an end to all that. The police were now in open war with black people; Clinton’s notorious welfare bills broke world records in the number of mostly blacks they sent to jail.

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George Floyd protesters in Miami react to police firing chemical irritants on May 30, 2020. (Mike Shaheen, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

When 9/11 happened, the fabrication of new “threats” on “America’s frontier” (as the Project for a New American Century called the world) completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In the years since, America has gone to war with the world. According to a largely ignored report by the Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the number killed in America’s “war on terror” was ‘at least’ 1.3 million in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan.

This figure does not include the dead of U.S.-led and fuelled wars in Yemen, Libya, Syria, Somalia and beyond. The true figure, said the report, “could well be in excess of 2 million [or] approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware and [is] propagated by the media and major NGOS.”

“At least” one million were killed in Iraq, say the physicians, or 5 percent of the population.

No One Knows How Many Killed

The enormity of this violence and suffering seems to have no place in the Western consciousness. “No one knows how many” is the media refrain. Blair and George W. Bush — and Straw and Cheney and Powell and Rumsfeld et al — were never in danger of prosecution. Blair’s propaganda maestro, Alistair Campbell, is celebrated as a “media personality.”

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the acclaimed investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, “What if the constitutionally freest media in the world had seriously challenged George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of spreading what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

He replied. “If we journalists had done our job, there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”

I put the same question to Dan Rather, the famous CBS anchor, who gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer, who had promoted Saddam Hussein’s “threat,” and Rageh Omaar, then the BBC’s Iraq correspondent, gave me the same answer. Rose’s admirable contrition at having been “duped,” spoke for many reporters bereft of his courage to say so.

Their point is worth repeating. Had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, a million Iraqi men, women and children might be alive today; millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and Islamic State might not have existed.

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Mock coffins placed near the offices of military contractors during a protest against the Iraq war in and around Washington. March 21, 2009. (Victor Reinhart, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Cast that truth across the rapacious wars since 1945 ignited by the United States and its “allies” and the conclusion is breathtaking. Is this ever raised in journalism schools?

Today, war by media is a key task of so-called mainstream journalism, reminiscent of that described by a Nuremberg prosecutor in 1945:

“Before each major aggression, with some few exceptions based on expediency, they initiated a press campaign calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people psychologically… In the propaganda system… it was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”

One of the persistent strands in American political life is a cultish extremism that approaches fascism. Although Trump was credited with this, it was during Barack Obama’s two terms that American foreign policy flirted seriously with fascism. This was almost never reported.

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fibre of my being,” said Obama, who expanded a favourite presidential pastime, bombing, and death squads known as “special operations” as no other president had done since the first Cold War.

According to a Council on Foreign Relations survey, in 2016 Obama dropped 26,171 bombs. That is 72 bombs every day. He bombed the poorest people and people of colour: in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Pakistan.

Every Tuesday — reported The New York Times — he personally selected those who would be murdered by hellfire missiles fired from drones. Weddings, funerals, shepherds were attacked, along with those attempting to collect the body parts festooning the “terrorist target.”

A leading Republican senator, Lindsey Graham, estimated, approvingly, that Obama’s drones had killed 4,700 people. “Sometimes you hit innocent people and I hate that,” he said, but we’ve taken out some very senior members of Al Qaeda.’

In 2011, Obama told the media that the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was planning “genocide” against his own people. “We knew…,” he said, “that if we waited one more day, Benghazi, a city the size of Charlotte [North Carolina], could suffer a massacre that would have reverberated across the region and stained the conscience of the world.”

This was a lie. The only “threat” was the coming defeat of fanatical Islamists by Libyan government forces. With his plans for a revival of independent pan-Africanism, an African bank and African currency, all of it funded by Libyan oil, Gaddafi was cast as an enemy of Western colonialism on the continent in which Libya was the second most modern state.

Destroying Gaddafi’s “threat” and his modern state was the aim. Backed by the U.S., Britain and France, NATO launched 9,700 sorties against Libya. A third were aimed at infrastructure and civilian targets, reported the UN. Uranium warheads were used; the cities of Misurata and Sirte were carpet-bombed. The Red Cross identified mass graves, and Unicef reported that “most [of the children killed] were under the age of ten.”

When Hillary Clinton, Obama’s secretary of state, was told that Gaddafi had been captured by the insurrectionists and sodomised with a knife, she laughed and said to the camera: “We came, we saw, he died!”

On 14 September 2016, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee in London reported the conclusion of a year-long study into the NATO attack on Libya which it described as an “array of lies” — including the Benghazi massacre story.

The NATO bombing plunged Libya into a humanitarian disaster, killing thousands of people and displacing hundreds of thousands more, transforming Libya from the African country with the highest standard of living into a war-torn failed state.
Under Obama, the U.S. extended secret “special forces” operations to 138 countries, or 70 percent of the world’s population. The first African-American president launched what amounted to a full-scale invasion of Africa.

Reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century, the U.S. African Command (Africom) has since built a network of supplicants among collaborative African regimes eager for American bribes and armaments. Africom’s “soldier to soldier” doctrine embeds U.S. officers at every level of command from general to warrant officer. Only pith helmets are missing.

It is as if Africa’s proud history of liberation, from Patrice Lumumba to Nelson Mandela, has been consigned to oblivion by a new white master’s black colonial elite. This elite’s “historic mission,” warned the knowing Frantz Fanon, is the promotion of “a capitalism rampant though camouflaged.”

In the year NATO invaded Libya, 2011, Obama announced what became known as the “pivot to Asia.” Almost two-thirds of U.S. naval forces would be transferred to the Asia-Pacific to “confront the threat from China,” in the words of his defence secretary.

There was no threat from China; there was a threat to China from the United States; some 400 American military bases formed an arc along the rim of China’s industrial heartlands, which a Pentagon official described approvingly as a “noose.”

At the same time, Obama placed missiles in Eastern Europe aimed at Russia. It was the beatified recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize who increased spending on nuclear warheads to a level higher than that of any U.S. administration since the Cold War – having promised, in an emotional speech in the centre of Prague in 2009, to “help rid the world of nuclear weapons.”

Obama and his administration knew full well that the coup his assistant secretary of state, Patricia Nuland, was sent to oversee against the government of Ukraine in 2014 would provoke a Russian response and probably lead to war. And so it has.

I am writing this on 30 April, the anniversary of the last day of the longest war of the 20th century, in Vietnam, which I reported. I was very young when I arrived in Saigon and I learned a great deal. I learned to recognise the distinctive drone of the engines of giant B-52s, which dropped their carnage from above the clouds and spared nothing and no one; I learned not to turn away when faced with a charred tree festooned with human parts; I learned to value kindness as never before; I learned that Joseph Heller was right in his masterly Catch-22: that war was not suited to sane people; and I learned about “our” propaganda.

All through that war, the propaganda said a victorious Vietnam would spread its communist disease to the rest of Asia, allowing the Great Yellow Peril to its north to sweep down. Countries would fall like “dominoes.”

Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam was victorious, and none of the above happened. Instead, Vietnamese civilisation blossomed, remarkably, in spite of the price they paid: 3 million dead. The maimed, the deformed, the addicted, the poisoned, the lost.

If the current propagandists get their war with China, this will be a fraction of what is to come. Speak up.

https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/05/ ... oming-war/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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