How the Public Are Deceived by the 'News' - Washington's Blog

Top ‘News’ Executives Suppress Key Facts;

The Public Sees a Chaotic, Disjointed, Picture.

Here Is How that Is Done, in Personal Detail.

Eric Zuesse

If the public is systematically lied-to by the Government and by a virtually uniformly cooperative press suppressing key facts in order to pump that lie, such as was the case during 2002 and 2003 in the lead-up to America’s invasion of Iraq, then there can’t possibly be an authentic democracy, because democracy is founded upon a truthfully informed public, and so any ‘news’ institution that violates its solemn public trust of reporting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is traitorous to democracy itself.

That’s why the press has been called “the fourth estate” of government. The first three “estates” are the aristocracy, the clergy, and the public. If the press represent not the public, but instead one of the two other classes — the aristocracy and/or the clergy — then what exists is a dictatorship by that actually ruling class against the public, not a democracy by the public. The public cannot rule in such a country. They instead are manipulated in it.

They may be manipulated to believe that they rule, but it’s only a manipulated illusion then; it’s not real; it’s a fraud, of the most massive type. Such a country cannot possibly be a real democracy; it’s a fraudulent ‘democracy.’

Evidence will be presented here that democracy no longer exists in the United States. Part of this evidence is personal, something that I always prefer to avoid, but which happens to be integral to this particular news-report and analysis. So: it’s necessary, in this case.

Already, a scientific analysis of a massive database has found that the United States is not a democracy but only a fake-democracy, actually an “oligarchy,” more-traditionally called an “aristocracy” (as I shall be calling it in this article); and the personal story narrated here will help to explain how and why this is the way our country actually functions.

Here is the broader framework in the United States, as it operates today: The aristocracy know that the way to control the public is via the ‘news’ media; and they create, buy, and build, all of the ‘news’ media that are of any substantial size or influence. It’s the cheapest way for the aristocracy to control the government; and, besides, any aristocrat who owns a controlling interest in one ‘news’ medium can then sell to his fellow-aristocrats favorable ‘news’ coverage of his own companies and/or of the governmental policies that they seek.

Complete story at - How the Public Are Deceived by the 'News' Washington's Blog

#IlSontHypocrites: Why should Charlie Hebdo deaths mean more than those in E.Ukraine? — RT Op-Edge

The Western public justly condemns the murders at Charlie Hebdo, but continues to behave as if Kiev's terror victims in Donetsk are “subhuman.”

On January 7, masked terrorists massacred the staff of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo in downtown Paris, killing ten. Two police officers (one of them a French Muslim, Ahmed Merabet) were also gunned down in the attack, while five more innocents lost their lives during a subsequent hostage standoff at a Parisian kosher store. Three male suspects were killed by the police, while their female accomplice is reported to have fled to ISIS-held parts of Syria. The attack was allegedly a reprisal for the magazine's cartoon covers, condemned as “blasphemous” for mocking Islam and its prophet, Mohammed.

Meanwhile, in eastern Ukraine, forces loyal to the NATO-backed government in Kiev renewed the terror-bombing of civilians in Donetsk, killing and maiming indiscriminately. While the slain French cartoonists were declared martyrs on the altar of free speech in a social media campaign under the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie (I am Charlie), a similar Twitter campaign to raise awareness of civilian deaths in Donbass (#IamVanya) was soon hijacked by Russophobic propaganda.



Part of the problem is that free speech is demonstratively not a sacred value in the West. The same general public in Europe or the United States that is proclaiming #JeSuisCharlie today, has in recent years organized increasingly frequent public witch hunts in the name of political correctness, targeting individuals whose words or deeds had somehow “offended”, from scientists who dared mention IQ (or wear “sexist” shirts) to celebrities and video game producers. In 2009, Charlie Hebdo sacked its cartoonist Maurice Sinet (now 80); over one allegedly “anti-Semitic” cartoon. And France has arrested dozens of people, including the comedian Dieudonné, on charges of “hate speech” in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

Meanwhile, using the pretext of the attacks in Paris, the U.S. and British governments pushed for expanding their already extensive surveillance of the general public. This despite the fact that the alleged attackers on Charlie Hebdo were known terrorists and under constant surveillance, but were able to carry out the massacre unhindered.

Complete story at - #IlSontHypocrites: Why should Charlie Hebdo deaths mean more than those in E.Ukraine? — RT Op-Edge

Germans Abandon Major News Sites in Anger Over Slanted Russia Coverage - Russia Insider

They call it the Ulfkotte-effect. And it's beginning to resemble an avalanche.

Since the publication of Udo Ulfkotte's “Gekaufte Journalisten“ in September – now a #1 Amazon bestseller, in which he charges that the CIA regularly bribes top German journalists, himself included, – German readers' disaffection towards their mainstream media appears to have crossed a point of no return.

Granted, sales of newspapers and magazines have fallen everywhere, not just in Germany. But this is different. This is a boycott that is affecting web traffic. Germans are steering clear of mainstream media websites.

Many Germans have not been too shy to announce their intention on social networks. Some have uploaded videos calling for a boycott on YouTube. Others have created groups calling for the same on Facebook.

The other visible result of reader disaffection has been that throughout September the number of unique visitors to six major German newspapers and magazines was falling steadily.

In October, it simply sank.

Yet up until early summer these same websites had been generating a large and stable amount of traffic. This is an unprecedented trend, and one that is wholly distinct from the fall in newspaper sales generally.

The graphs below show Google analytics provided by Alexa, a company that specializes in actionable analytics for the web.

Complete story at - Germans Abandon Major News Sites in Anger Over Slanted Russia Coverage - Russia Insider

Promoting Confrontation with Russia

Washington's rage for war may end up targeting Russia next. Major media propaganda and disinformation seem inexorably heading in this direction.

Madness explains what's happening. Truth is systematically buried. It's turned on its head. Big Lies, distortions and deception substitute.

Western readers and viewers get a daily diet of outrageous managed news misinformation. America's so-called MSM are worst of all.

From The New York Times to Fox News, a systematic drumbeat of anti-Russian propaganda drowns out real news, information and analysis.

Winston Churchill once said "(a) lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on."

Today it circulates instantly. Joseph Goebbels once said "(i)f you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it."

He called truth "the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

Corporate media giants, so-called US public broadcasting and radio, Britain's BBC, Qatar's Al Jazeera, and similar operations regurgitate, hype, and proliferate state-sponsored lies, misinformation, distortions and deception.

The bigger the lie, the more often it's featured and repeated ad nauseam. Russia-bashing is outrageous. It substitutes for real news, information and analysis.

Complete story at - Promoting Confrontation with Russia

Western Media Blackout on the Reality in Ukraine | The Smirking Chimp

On 2 May 2014, there was a massacre that was initially reported as being of 116 anti-Kiev (or independence) demonstrators at the Trade Unions Building in Odessa. The latest reliable report (from an American, George Eliason, who lives in that area) indicates it to be instead "now counted at 272 people that were tortured, gassed ..., bludgeoned, ..., etc.," above and beyond the numbers who had been incinerated there by the firebombing of the building. Western news-media unfortunately seem to be doing all they can to keep the public ignorant of what went on there, and of why. 

For example, despite the many youtube videos that were posted on the night of May 2nd showing the actual massacre, and making clear that this was a massacre of anti-Kiev, pro-independence, demonstrators by pro-Kiev (pro-central-government) thugs, here is what came up on May 20th in a google search at Huffington Post of the two terms "Ukraine" and "Odessa" (all suggesting that Russia's Vladimir Putin was behind this, not that America's Barack Obama, who had actually installed the Kiev Government, was): 

Reuters:

“Ukraine: Odessa Unrest Planned And Financed From Abroad”

“Ukraine Accuses Russia Of Engineering Deadly Clashes”

Associated Press:

“Ukrainian unrest spreads; dozens dead in Odessa”

“Ukraine offensive sparks deadly clashes in Odessa”

Complete story at - Western Media Blackout on the Reality in Ukraine | The Smirking Chimp

Samantha Power’s brazen hypocrisy: Media swallows propaganda, but here’s the truth about Ukraine - Salon.com

This is American foreign policy Version 2014: Often disrespectful, often unlawful, purposefully destructive of order, possessing no idea of limits. There is no more Saddam Hussein, and it takes some doing to bring him in for reconsideration, no more Gadhafi, no Morsi, no Yanukovych, there would be no more Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela if Washington had its way. You have to climb over a mountain of prejudice and misinformation to consider what Washington has done wrong in these cases, but it is wrong. The quality of these leaders has nothing to do with it.

“The first casualty of war is truth.” Most journalists, at least of my cohort, know this sentence from the Philip Knightley book “The First Casualty,” a history of war correspondents that begins, ironically, in mid-19th century Crimea. Maybe we should be talking about the State Department’s war, not its policy, because the reporting of it has been near to fatally awful.

This is my other point of clarity. The media entered the post-Cold War era in bad shape, having surrendered almost all ground that separates them from power (political, corporate, financial by way of the stock market). But they are now not short of craven.

There have been red-handed cases to match the WMD-in-Iraq bit Judith Miller made infamous: Washington’s role in the Egyptian coup, the gas attack last August in Syria, now the State Department’s provocative manipulations in Ukraine. But beyond these, you find a day-to-day effort to slant and mislead, a grinding, relentless use of vocabulary, juxtaposition, innuendo and other such devices that poisons the news columns.

Again, we have our saving grace. I harbor no illusions: Millions of people read and watch these Washington-generated narratives and believe them. But the forward edge of the phenomenon is how many people no longer do or never have.

Complete story at - Samantha Power’s brazen hypocrisy: Media swallows propaganda, but here’s the truth about Ukraine - Salon.com

Hurtling into Darkness | Dissident Voice

But we have reached a new level in these matters, a level where the extent of the misrepresentation almost severs the social contract between those governed and their government. America’s neo-con faction has had its agenda adopted over the last few decades, that of freely and happily using America’s great military and economic power to crush those abroad who disagree with America’s arbitrary pronouncements, creating a long crusade intended to re-order the affairs of others with no apologies to them and no honest explanation to America’s own people who pay the taxes and provide the lives of soldiers. While the neo-cons are a passing phenomenon, much as the Middle-eastern garrison state with which they are ferociously associated, the values and lessons they have successfully imparted will remain part of America’s ruling consciousness, serving yet other interests. A tool once successfully used is rarely abandoned.

Not only is there a quantitative difference now, there is a new qualitative difference. After the holocaust of Vietnam (3 million dead Vietnamese justify the term), the United States military realized that it could no longer depend upon citizen-soldiers in its colonial wars. It also realized that it could no longer tolerate even a moderately free press nosing around its battlegrounds, thus was born the idea of an imbedded press in a professional army. Of course, in the intervening years, America’s press itself changed, becoming an intensely concentrated corporate industry whose editorial policies are invariably in lock-step over colonial wars and interventions and coups, almost as though it were an unofficial department of government. In addition, this corporatized press has abandoned traditional responsibilities of explaining even modestly world affairs, reportage resources having been slashed by merged corporate interests as well as by new economic pressures on advertising revenue, the result of changing technologies.

There is only one lens in America’s mainline journalistic kit, and that is one that filters everything through corporate American views, an automatic and invariable bias found in every image taken or written outside America’s borders. Now, some will say in response that a few newspapers like The New York Times or The Washington Post are exceptions here, but they couldn’t be more wrong. When a journalistic institution gains a reputation for thoroughness and detail in some of its operations, it becomes all the more able to powerfully leverage its reputation in matters which concern the establishment. If you examine the record of these newspapers for some decades, you will find absolutely without exception, their close support for every dirty war and intervention, as you will find their close support for the brutal, criminal behaviors of favored American satrapies like Israel. In a number of cases, CIA plants have worked directly for these papers as disinformation pipelines, but in all cases, reportage and editorial reflect nothing beyond what the publicity offices of the Pentagon and CIA would write themselves. It actually is a sign of how distorted American perceptions are that these papers are in any way regarded as independent, disinterested, or demonstrating consistent journalistic integrity.

Complete story at - Hurtling into Darkness | Dissident Voice



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Washington Is Humanity’s Worst Enemy -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org

How does Washington get away with the claim that the country it rules is a democracy and has freedom? This absurd claim ranks as one of the most unsubstantiated claims in history.

There is no democracy whatsoever. Voting is a mask for rule by a few powerful interest groups. In two 21st century rulings (Citizens United and McCutcheon), the US Supreme Court has ruled that the purchase of the US government by private interest groups is merely the exercise of free speech. These rulings allow powerful corporate and financial interests to use their money-power to elect a government that serves their interests at the expense of the general welfare.

The control private interests exercise over the government is so complete that private interests have immunity to prosecution for crimes. At his retirement party on March 27, Securities and Exchange Commission prosecutor James Kidney stated that his prosecutions of Goldman Sachs and other “banks too big to fail” were blocked by superiors who “were focused on getting high-paying jobs after their government service.” The SEC’s top brass, Kidney said, did not “believe in afflicting the comfortable and powerful.” In his report on Kidney’s retirement speech, Eric Zuesse points out that the Obama regime released false statistics in order to claim prosecutions that did not take place in order to convince a gullible public that Wall Street crooks were being punished. http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/04/09/65578/

Democracy and freedom require an independent and aggressive media, an independent and aggressive judiciary, and an independent and aggressive Congress. The United States has none of the above.

The US media consistently lies for the government. Reuters continues to report, falsely, that Russia invaded and annexed Crimea. The Washington Post ran an obviously false story planted on the paper by the Obama regime that the massive protests in former Russian territories of Ukraine are “rent-a-mobs” instigated by the Russian government.

Not even Washington’s stooges in Kiev believe that. Officials of the Washington-imposed government in Kiev acknowledged the need for some autonomy for the Russian-speaking regions and for a law permitting referendums, but this realistic response to widespread concerns among Ukrainians has apparently been squelched by Washington and its presstitute media. US Secretary of State John Kerry continues to turn a deaf ear to the Russian Foreign Minister and continues to demand that “Russia must remove its people from the South-East.”

Complete story at - Washington Is Humanity’s Worst Enemy -- Paul Craig Roberts - PaulCraigRoberts.org



CC Photo by Flickr User 54253205@N00 Subject is Capital Building Washington DC