Tag Archives: alternative media

Phantom Democracy in the Age of the Internet

Posted on by
Reply

trumpandflag

By Nozomi Hayase

Source: Dissident Voice

After the Electoral College vote, the Trump presidency is now official. As denial and blame games continue, it becomes clear this was not a foreign government coup d’état. The truth is that democracy in America has been rotten to the core for decades. It is meddled with by corporate lobbyists, Big Pharma, Big Oil and Wall Street –those who are addicted to money and power.

American democracy is hollowed out, veiled with a loud media echo chamber, bringing feigned solidity to its emptiness. Out of this vacuum emerges a madness for power. U.S. politics is a contest of those who are driven by insatiable hunger – the most callous, cunning and manipulative people in society.

In this system, only people who lack empathy and advance self-serving agendas without concerns for others can rise to the top. The results of this year’s presidential election may mean that this person who many saw as ‘unfit to be president’ was better suited to play this dirty game than his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Ascent of Trump

Donald Trump, a perceived outsider, seemed to appear out of nowhere. The former producer of the American game show The Apprentice sniffed the vulnerability of disfranchised Americans who are continually betrayed by the establishment. He then quickly moved in for the kill, turning the electoral arena into a new Reality TV show.

With social media as a hunting ground, this new Republican contender made direct connection with his audience, pouring out charm and grooming them with fake promises. By deploying words as weapons of control, he managed to garner favorable reactions from his followers. His language cast a magic spell where contradictory remarks and lies bypassed critical examination. Emotions triumphed over reason and under the grip of irrational logic, facts no longer seemed to matter. With a chameleon-like ability to shape-shift and say whatever voters wanted to hear, he was able to create a mirage and ensnare the populace into a grandiose fantasy.

What was the press, as a supposed watchdog of power doing during this Trump’s uncanny rise in popularity? Mainstream media did nothing to prevent it and instead facilitated this process. His bombastic comments hit jackpot high ratings in the corporate media and rhetoric not bound by facts was not only tolerated, but actively promoted with their shortsighted mentality of profit at any cost.

WikiLeaks and the Democratizing Power of the Internet

This same corporate media also buried a few important facts regarding the 2016 U.S. presidential election. This year’s election was an unprecedented phenomenon. This is not only because the lesser evil game was fought between two of the historically most disliked candidates, but also because of the role played by a new actor from outside of the U.S. electoral arena. Days before the election, a Forbes article acknowledged the significance of WikiLeaks’ DNC emails, calling them a “Holy Grail of understanding of U.S. electoral politics.” It noted how “few understand the importance of WikiLeaks in the eventual writing of the history of presidential politics.”

WikiLeaks has shown how elections in the existence of a truly free press will never be the same as before. U.S. politics sponsored by corporate masters creates a milieu of deception, lies and fraud that is fraught with corruption. These power driven politicians can only thrive in secrecy. When their actions are exposed, like Hillary’s highly paid Goldman Sachs speeches, crafted public images that suck the masses into their illusions of grandeur tend to shatter. Contrary to hysterical rants of ‘Russia hacked the election!’, the defeat of the Clinton dynasty was a testimony to the power of transparency.

WikiLeaks, the world’s first global 4th estate, which operates outside of any government was birthed on the Internet. It showed a potential for emancipation unleashed by this Net. Much of the force of democratization on the Internet is being subverted to create mass surveillance and censorship. Yet at the same time, its effect of empowering ordinary people cannot be denied.

In fact, Bernie Sander’s campaign was built on social media’s grassroots organizing. With independent campaign funding, this virtually unknown senator from Vermont successfully sparked the idea of socialism and raised issues of Wall Street corruption, economic injustice and poverty at a national level. Sander’s largest support came from millennials. It was these natives of the Internet that galvanized his political revolution.

Fake News and Fake Authority

Democrats appear to be disconnected with this new reality of the Internet’s bottom up spontaneous crowd gathering or even worse were adversaries to it. This was shown in their reaction to the corruption revealed in the DNC email database and Trump’s winning of the election.

On the second day of the Democratic National Convention, hundreds of Sanders delegates who learned about DNC’s rigging of the primary walked out in protest. Chanting “This is what Democracy looks like!”, they vowed not to go with Hillary. This crisis of the American political system opened up an opportunity for real democracy. But then, Bernie turned away, urging his supporters to nominate Hillary and sided with the corrupted Democratic Party. His failure to seize this historical moment helped throw the election to Trump, who the Clinton campaign had portrayed as a ‘pied piper candidate’.

After all this came the Fake News explosion. Some established liberal media, freaked out by the country quickly turning red in this Republican takeover, created a new red scare. On November 24, an article in The Washington Postmade wild accusations that Russia was engaging in propaganda during the election to spread ‘fake news’ in favor of Trump. The anonymous site that claimed to have identified these fake news sites that the author cited in the article, was shown to be nothing but a black list that labels anyone who challenges the official narrative as untrustworthy or even insinuating them to be Russian agents, spies or traitors.

Despite U.S. Intelligence Chief James Clapper’s claim that intelligence agencies lacked strong evidence for WikiLeaks’ connection with an alleged Russian cyberattack, it was way easier for progressives to ignore facts and spread paranoia, blaming the loss of Clinton on anyone but themselves.

In the age of the Internet, fake news can easily be manufactured and spread. Yet, at the same time it can also be shut down with countering views that surround them. Also, in this new environment, traditional media is losing its monopolizing power to disseminate information. They no longer can claim to be the sole purveyor of truth. In the case of the Washington Post‘s fake news scandal, The Intercept and Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone quickly denounced and challenged its claim, halting this report on ‘fake news’. Social media networks also countered the gatekeepers who tried to dictate what is real through filtering views that challenge the official narrative. In the end, this fake news article was debunked, with Wapo issuing a correction on that story shortly after its publication. What this has shown is the publisher’s false authority and the establishment’s desperate attempt to reassert their shrinking legitimacy to keep people under their sphere of influence.

From Regime Change to Game Changer

The election is over and liberals’ hope to stop the rise of demagoguery is fading. The president elect began recruiting his rich buddies into his cabinet. Recently, he convened a group of Silicon Valley tech leaders to invite them into his new ‘construction project to rebuild America’. As this void of American democracy is being filled with more blatant patronage networks, new insurgencies of civic power are also arising. The potent and creative power of the Internet is already here. Those who have experienced it will not easily succumb to the reality being handed down to them from the teetering Trump Tower.

Just as the power of the Internet can be used by the oligarchic class to corral the masses, it can also be used to empower the people, through its open network. When the liberating force of a free net is claimed by citizens to create movements across borders, linking diverse struggles, it can give all a chance to not only change a regime, but to change the game altogether.

One game changer is WikiLeaks. With the creative use of technology, this Internet of the media built a robust network that is resistant to censorship, making it possible for the organization to be free from state and corporate influence, allowing it to truly serve the interests of the people. It has gained its own credibility through a perfect record of authentication of documents and rigorous scientific journalism that publishes full and verifiable archives. Despite corporate media’s smearing of the organization, public opinion polls indicate that Americans strongly approve WikiLeaks’ Podesta leaks.

Another democratic tool that is available to people everywhere is cryptocurrency like Bitcoin. With this new invention, ordinary people now have power to create their own money and peer-to-peer networks that are not intermediated by any governments, banks or corporations. Just as WikiLeaks distributes free speech beyond borders and lets truth be discovered through each individual’s participation, with Bitcoin, free speech becomes an app that can be downloaded from anywhere by anyone and values are created through people transacting freely, verified by a consensus of equal peers.

In Their Nothingness, We Find Our Power

On January, 20 2017, Trump will be sworn in with the Oath of Office. The White House will become his new executive boardroom. With this United States Incorporated, the Constitution may be slowly shredded off from his business contract. With the president elect’s proposal on Twitter to give penalties, including jail time or loss of citizenship for burning the American flag, coupled with his recent call for the expansion of nuclear weapons, many are rightfully fearful of the future.

Yet, wars and destruction of civil society are already happening around the world. Crackdowns on cash and schemes of demonetization are taking place in countries like Venezuela and India. When faced with the reality of their national currencies quickly disappearing or losing value, people are waking up to the fact that these claimed values are fake and that they are not backed by real economic activity or anything of true value. More and more people are seeing bubbles pumped up by toxic assets and fraud of financial engineering that rent-seeks earnings of hard working people and creates money out of thin air.

In his speech “Currency Wars and Bitcoin’s Neutrality”, technologist and author Andreas Antonopoulos spoke of how “cash is being eradicated around the world as a scourge.” He then pointed out how governments are waging currency wars against other countries and their own people in order to benefit from a crisis they artificially created. He emphasized how governments and central banks can’t win this game, because “cash is something that we can create, electronic cash, self sovereign cash, digital cash – Bitcoin.” He then noted how this math-based ‘Internet of money’ offers an exit from this old world of currency wars. He alerted the Bitcoin community that as the battle intensifies, those who create a new infrastructure as an exit from nation-state gated economies, and those who point to this exit will be called traitors, criminals, thug and terrorists.

This war on cash and censorship with Fake News memes are attacks on our fundamental freedoms. It is a battle for truth, involving the question of who will define our human reality. This war is now full on, yet mostly brewing beneath the radar. Just before Christmas, President Obama quietly signed into law the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. This included the ‘Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act’, which was presented to help counter foreign enemy propaganda, yet is actually a McCarthy era-style censorship law.

We live in a time when traditional authority and leaders have failed us and there is vacuousness in this space where a center used to hold. In the story of Faust, Goethe wrote about a universal man following his thirst for knowledge. In this journey, Dr. Faust meets Mephisto (the devil) who tried to trick and tempt him to come under his control. In the scene A Dark Gallery, Faust told Mephisto, “In your Nothingness I hope to find my All”. He then took the key and entered into this mysterious unknown.

Our quest for real democracy invokes this thirst for knowledge. It invites us all to enter into the realm of Nothingness. We no longer want to believe; we want to know. We no longer blindly accept a world conceived by a few elites. Now, in this chaos and abyss we are descending into, we may be able to find the real source of our own legitimacy. With knowledge that springs from deep within, we are able to penetrate the deception of those who seek to control us and recognize their actual emptiness. In their nothingness, we can find the creative power that has always been there, power that can bring life back to this phantom of democracy.

 

Nozomi Hayase, Ph.D., is a writer who has been covering issues of freedom of speech, transparency, and decentralized movements. Her work is featured in many publications. Find her on twitter @nozomimagine. Read other articles by Nozomi.

How the Government is Manipulating America’s Youth

Posted on by
Reply

anti_public_education_propaganda_by_8manderz8-d5xz1cj

By Ryan Christian

Source: Waking Times

Few would disagree that this country’s school system is, at best, behind the times; at worst, stifling unique perspectives and creativity, and effectively the future. With all that we have discovered about the way the mind works, and how each child learns in their own specific way, in their own time, it should be clear to all that each child has a special unique way of seeing the world that should be celebrated instead of suppressed or controlled. Yet our school system continues to use standardized testing and conformation techniques designed to mold each distinct and thriving individual into yet another perfectly conformed subservient consumer.

To some, this may seem outlandish, because why would the government desire to stifle the growing minds of its people and force what could be the next Einstein, the next Michelangelo or Bob Dylan to see the world their way; the next outside the box thinker who breaks the mold and leads this struggling society toward salvation? Why would they desire to take that potential “mold-breaker” and place them squarely back inside the box, destined for life in retail sales, or something else as benign and in service of the Empire’s “greater good?”

There are many answers that could be given to that question, yet the ultimate end-goal is always control. A docile, unified populace, all conformed and aligned in their perspectives, is much easier to manipulate toward a specific agenda than those such as independent journalists or other critical thinkers who will question the choices of the nation’s leaders, as was the hope of the founding fathers when envisioning the American republic that never came to pass. The success of the nation is something no doubt desired by the majority of Americans, but not at the deceptive and forceful expense of our children’s creativity; their future.

Make no mistake, true innovation has always come from those pushing the boundaries; those widely considered “crazy” by the masses, until it is realized that they were trailblazers, creators, true pioneers of the human mind and what it could be capable of. Sadly, this realization all to often happens after one is long dead, and those who once chose to cast stones, now enjoy the fruits of their struggles.

Today’s school system effectively puts an end to any such “unauthorized” thinking. It dictates how each child thinks, acts and sees the world, and it is very much by design. The government has made no secret about the fact that they consider one of their largest problems to be “conspiracy theorists” or what some are actively attempting to label the “Alt-Right” despite the fact that much of the alternative media no longer identifies with any of their faux political parties. It has even gone as far as to label “bloggers” or independent journalists such as Luke Rudkowski from We Are Change, as “domestic terrorists,” for simply exercising his constitutional rights, and providing the American people with the Truth about this country’s less than honorable foreign policy.

Even if one disagrees with his perspective of the truth, it is still his right as an American to speak out. Yet in today’s police state, the Truth can be a very dangerous thing, and that is made all the more clear with every attempt to cast doubt on what the rest of the world now knows to be true; to cast doubt on anyone spreading that Truth. Those choosing to seek answers for the people in this society of questions, should be the embodiment of what this country used to stand for, and what is now a word that has been so diluted and overused that is has largely lost its meaning in today’s America: freedom.

It is all too easy to put the issue of our failing school system on the back-burner, while this country ‘s news feed is dominated with police shootings, the US government’s ISIS boogeyman, and a circus of an election that has become a world-wide laughingstock. Yet it is important to realize that this is the next generation of Americans that are being carefully constructed like some kind of “build-your-own-American” program. Much of what is seen in the news could very well be designed to keep everyone focused elsewhere while the nation’s youth is programmed to compliance.

As unsettling as it might be to consider that one’s government might be conducting such a sinister operation, two things must be considered: First, is that this country has a very clearly documented history of conducting exactly this type of mind-altering control experimentation on those willing and unwilling alike; it’s just that we like to think that the worst of our checkered past is somehow from a different America that we have grown away from. Yet sadly, deep down, most know that is not the case. Secondly, many of those conducting such invasive experiments, to some degree, have convinced themselves that what they are doing is for the greater good of the American people. The question we all must ask ourselves, is at what point did this arbitrary idea of the “greater good” begin to supersede our rights as Americans, and as human beings?

 

Ryan Cristian is the author of website, The Last American Vagabond.

Foxes Guard Facebook Henhouse

Posted on by
Reply

hqdefault

By F. William Engdahl

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The latest mantra of CIA-linked media since the “Pizzagate” leaks of data alleging that Hillary Clinton Campaign Manager John Podesta and other highly influential political persons in Washington were connected to an unusual pizza place near the White House run by a 41-year old James Achilles Alefantis called Comet Ping Pong, is the need to crack down (i.e. censorship) on what is being called “Fake News.” The latest step in this internet censorship drive is a decision by the murky social media organization called Facebook to hire special organizations to determine if Facebook messages are pushing Fake News or not. Now it comes out that the “fact check” private organizations used by Facebook are tied to the CIA and CIA-related NGO’s including George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

In the last weeks of the US Presidential campaign, Wikileaks released a huge number of emails linked to Clinton Campaign Manager, John Podesta. The contents of thousands of emails revealed detailed exchanges between Podesta and the oddly-influential Comet Ping Pong pizza place owner, Alefantis, as well as the Clinton campaign, which held fundraisers at Comet Ping Pong.

The Pizzagate scandal exploded in the final weeks of the US campaign as teams of private researchers documented and posted Facebook, Instagram and other data suggesting that Alefantis and Comet Ping Pong were at the heart of a pedophilia ring that implicated some of the most prominent politicians in Washington and beyond.

The New York Times and Washington Post moved swiftly to assert that the Pizzagate revelations were Fake News, quoting “anonymous sources” who supposedly said the CIA “believed” Russia was behind hackers who exposed emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John Podesta. Former NSA senior intelligence expert William Binney claimed the Podesta and Clinton campaign data were leaked, not hacked. The NSA, he pointed out, would immediately identify a hack, especially a foreign hack, and they have remained silent.

The uncovering and release to Wikileaks of the Podesta emails were immediately blamed on Russian intelligence by the CIA, and now by the US President, with not a shred of proof, and despite the fact that NSA. Wikipedia, whose content is often manipulated by US intelligence agencies, rapidly posted a page with the curious title, “Pizzagate (Conspiracy Theory).”

To make certain the neutral interested reader gets the message, the first line reads, “Pizzagate is a debunked conspiracy theory which emerged during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle, alleging that John Podesta’s emails, which were leaked by WikiLeaks, contain coded messages referring to human trafficking, and connecting a number of pizzerias in Washington, D.C. and members of the Democratic Party to a child-sex ring.”

‘Fake News’ Mantra Begins

My purpose in mentioning Pizzagate details is not to demonstrate the authenticity of the Pizzagate allegations. That others are doing with far more resources. Rather, it is to point out the time synchronicity of the explosive Pizzagate email releases by Julian Assange’s Wikileaks web blog, with the launch of a massive mainstream media and political campaign against what is now being called “Fake News.”

The cited New York Times article that Wikipedia cites as “debunking” the Pizzagate allegations states, “None of it was true. While Mr. Alefantis has some prominent Democratic friends in Washington and was a supporter of Mrs. Clinton, he has never met her, does not sell or abuse children, and is not being investigated by law enforcement for any of these claims. He and his 40 employees had unwittingly become real people caught in the middle of a storm of fake news.” The article contains not one concrete proof that the allegations are false, merely quoting Alefantis as the poor victim of malicious Fake News.

That New York Times story was accompanied by a series of articles such as “How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study.” Another headline reads, “Obama, With Angela Merkel in Berlin, Assails Spread of Fake News.” Then on November 19, strong Clinton supporter, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg is quoted in a prominent article titled, “Facebook Considering Ways to Combat Fake News, Mark Zuckerberg Says.”

Facebook uses CIA Censors

Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of the world-leading social media site, Facebook.com, the world’s 5th wealthiest man at an estimated $50 billion, has now established a network of “Third Party Fact Checkers” whose job is to red flag any Facebook message of the estimated one billion people using the site, with a prominent warning that reads, “Disputed by Third-Party Fact Checkers.”

Facebook has announced that it is taking its censorship ques from something called The International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). This IFCN, a new creation, has drafted a code of five principles for news websites to accept, and Facebook will work with “third-party fact checking organizations” that are signatories to that code of principles.

If we search under the name International Fact-Checking Network, we find ourselves at the homepage of something called the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in St. Petersburg, Florida.

OK. If we look a bit deeper we find that the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network in turn, as its website states, gets money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google, the National Endowment for Democracy, the Omidyar Network, the Open Society Foundations of George Soros.

Oh my, oh my! Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation who partners with Soros in numerous nasty projects such as convincing African countries to accept Genetically Modified or GMO seeds? Google, whose origins date back to funding by the CIA and NSA as what intelligence researcher Nafeez Ahmed describes as a “plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority‘ “?

The Omidyar Foundation is the foundation of eBay founder and multi billionaire, Pierre Omidyar, which finances among other projects the online digital publication, The Intercept, launched in 2014 by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.

And the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the US Government-financed “private” NGO behind every Color Revolution CIA regime change from the Ukraine Color Revolutions to the Arab Spring? The NED was a CIA project created in the 1980’s during the Reagan Administration as part of privatizing US intelligence dirty operations, to do, as Allen Weinstein, who drafted the Congressional legislation to establish the NED, noted in a candid 1991 Washington Post interview, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

And if we dig even deeper we find, lo and behold, the name George Soros, convicted hedge fund insider trader, tax-exempt philanthropist and giga-billionaire who seems to fund not only Hillary Clinton and virtually every CIA and US State Department Color Revolution from Russia to China to Iran through his network of Open Society Foundations including the 1990’s Jeffrey Sachs Shock Therapy plunder of Russia and most of former Communist East Europe.

Another one of the media working with Zuckerberg’s Facebook censorship of Fake News is the Washington Post, today owned by Amazon billionaire founder Jeff Bezos. Bezos is a major media business partner of….The US Central Intelligence Agency, a fact he omitted to inform about after taking over ownership of the most important newspaper in Washington.

Bezos’ Washington Post recently published a bizarre list of 200 websites it claimed generated Fake News. It refused to identify who gave them the list. Veteran Washington investigative reporter, Wayne Madsen, exposed the source of the McCarthy-style taboo list of so-called Fake News. It was a “website called PropOrNot.com that has links to the CIA and George Soros.”

It’s not merely the Pizzagate revelations that have triggered such a massive attack on independent Internet websites. It seems that back in January 2014 at the Davos World Economic Forum control of information on the Internet was a top item of discussion. At the time, Madsen noted, “With the impending demise of World Wide Web ‘net neutrality,’ which has afforded equal access for website operators to the Internet, the one percent of billionaire investors are busy positioning themselves to take over total control of news reporting on the Internet.”

It’s not even the foxes who are guarding the Internet Henhouse. It’s the werewolves of CIA and US Government censorship. Whether the explosive Pizzagate Podesta revelations merely triggered a dramatic acceleration in the timetable for the CIA’s planned “Fake News” operation as the successor to their 1980’s “Conspiracy Theory” linguistic discrediting operation, it’s clear this is no unbiased, objective, transparent public service to protect the Internet public from harmful content.

And, besides, who are they to tell me or you what you are allowed to read, digest and form your independent ideas about? This is a 21st Century reincarnation of the Spanish Inquisition, one by the real fake newsmakers–Washington Post, AP, ABCNews, Snopes.com, FactCheck.org, the CIA and friends. I would say it’s an alarming development of cyber warfare, not by Russia, but by those CIA-run networks that are fomenting Fake News to demonize any and everyone who opposes Washington intelligence propaganda.

 

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.” 

 

Facebook, Twitter, Western Media Attempt to Reassert Monopoly Over “Truth”

Posted on by
6

logos-v12-1

By Ulson Gunnar

Source: New Eastern Outlook

In a surreal and stunning example of 21st century propaganda and censorship, Google has cobbled together a coalition it is calling “First Draft” to tackle what it calls “misinformation online.” 

First Draft’s “founding partners” include News Corporation’s (parent company of Fox News) Storyful and NATO think tank Atlantic Council’s “Bellingcat” blog, headed by formally unemployed social worker Eliot Higgins who now fashions himself as a weapons expert and geopolitical analyst despite no formal training, practical real-world experience or track record of honest, unbiased reporting. In fact, between News Corporation and Bellingcat alone, Google’s First Draft appears to be itself a paragon of, and nexus for “misinformation online.” 

Google’s Glaring Conflicts of Interest 

Google too, having for years now worked closely with the US State Department, faces its own conflicts of interest in “social newsgathering and verification.” In fact, Google has admittedly been involved in engineering intentional deceptions aimed specifically to skew public perception, including doctoring its maps and Google Earth in real-time amid conflicts in favor of US-backed militant groups and through the development of applications designed to psychologically target the Syrian government into capitulating before US-backed militant groups.

The UK Independent in its article, “Google planned to help Syrian rebels bring down Assad regime, leaked Hillary Clinton emails claim,” would report that:

An interactive tool created by Google was designed to encourage Syrian rebels and help bring down the Assad regime, Hillary Clinton’s leaked emails have reportedly revealed.

By tracking and mapping defections within the Syrian leadership, it was reportedly designed to encourage more people to defect and ‘give confidence’ to the rebel opposition.

The article would continue:

The email detailing Google’s defection tracker purportedly came from Jared Cohen, a Clinton advisor until 2010 and now-President of Jigsaw, formerly known as Google Ideas, the company’s New York-based policy think tank.

In a July 2012 email to members of Clinton’s team, which the WikiLeaks release alleges was later forwarded to the Secretary of State herself, Cohen reportedly said: “My team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from.”

Cohen would conclude:

“Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.”

Can Google then be relied upon to sort out “misinformation online” if it itself is directly involved in manipulating public perception to achieve US foreign policy objectives? To impartial observers, the answer is clearly “no.”

First Draft would publish on its website a post titled, “Social networks unite with global newsrooms to take action against misinformation online,” adding further details behind the alleged rationale of the coalition. It would state:

Today, news breaks online. Today, the first images to emerge from a breaking news event have been captured by an eyewitness. Today, injustices that may never have been reported become global news stories because a bystander reached for their smartphone. Today, malicious hoaxes and fake news reports are published in increasingly convincing and sophisticated ways. 

We live in a time when trust and truth are issues that all newsrooms, and increasingly the social platforms themselves, are facing. In July, the Guardian’s Editor-in-Chief Katharine Viner wrote about the ways technology is disrupting the truth, explaining “in the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same – whether they come from a credible source or not.” Filtering out false information can be hard. Even if news organisations only share fact-checked and verified stories, everyone is a publisher and a potential source.

The members that constitute the First Draft coalition, however, have enjoyed an uncontested monopoly for decades in determining just what the “truth” actually is, as well as a monopoly over propagating things the global public now know for a fact were “untruths.” Again, we see another case of the proverbial fox guarding the hen house.

The Liars Who Lied About WMDs in Iraq Will Protect Us from Liars Online? 

Indeed, many of the organizations that constitute First Draft’s coalition played a pivotal role in perhaps the most destructive and costly lie of the 21st century (to date), that involving alleged “weapons of mass destruction” or “WMDs” in Iraq, serving as the pretext for the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq.

According to some estimates, up to a million perished in the initial invasion and subsequent occupation. More conservative estimates are still in the hundreds of thousands.

Undoubtedly, the invasion, justified by lies propagated across the entirety of US and European media, helped trigger a predictable chain of catastrophes that have left the Middle East to this day in conflict and ruination. These same US and European media organizations, the same ones now signing their names to First Draft, also helped justify the continued presence of US troops in Iraq for years after the invasion, up to and including today.

And the same names signed on to First Draft are also the same names who helped sell the disastrous intervention in Libya and who are now attempting to sell yet another direct Western military intervention in Syria.

And it is perhaps the lack of success these same names are having in selling this most recent potential intervention in Syria that has precipitated First Draft’s creation in the first place.

There is a burgeoning alternative media composed of individual independent journalists, analysts and commentators both biased and impartial, both professional and amateur, competing directly with and overcoming the West’s longstanding monopoly over international public perception. There is also the emergence of professional and competitive national media organizations across the developing world who are taking increasingly large shares of both the West’s media monopoly and its monopoly over the public’s trust.

It is clear that First Draft has no intention of protecting the truth as none among its membership have done so until now individually, but rather in collectively protecting what the special interests behind these organizations want the global public to believe is the truth. First Draft is a desperate measure taken by Western special interests to reassert the West’s dominance over global public perception by leveraging the widely used social media platforms it controls, including Facebook and Twitter, as well as IT giant Google and its large range of services and applications.

In the end, all that First Draft is likely to accomplish is convincing the developing world of the necessity of creating domestic alternatives to Facebook, Google and Twitter, as well as to continue expanding their own domestic media organizations to better represent their respective national interests upon the global stage and to dilute the dangerous and destructive media monopoly the West has enjoyed and abused for decades.

Until the members of First Draft can cite a lie told by their competitors that is as destructive and as costly as their own lies preceding and underpinning the invasion and occupation of Iraq or the more recent destruction of Libya, their efforts appear more as a means of further deflecting away from the truth, not defending it.

The Second Phase of the propaganda Fake News War: Economic Strangulation. What Comes Next?

Posted on by
2

index

Frustrated and outraged at how reality has turned out, the ruling class denizens of Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential tent are lashing out at truth-tellers. “Fake news” is whatever contradicts their lies, and Russia is their all-purpose boogeyman. “Google and Facebook have joined theri corporate media compatriots in an attempt to limit the public’s access to alternative news analysis and independent investigative reporting.”

By Dr. Marsha Adebayo

Source: Black Agenda Report

“The public has determined that the corporate media is actually the purveyor of “fake news” and turned to media organizations, such as BAR, Truthout and other outlets for information.”

Within the last 14 days, two phases of the “fake news” strategy has been rolled out for public consumption.  Phase I of the fake news strategy was to demonize news organizations, such as Black Agenda Report (BAR) through McCarthy-era red-baiting and intimidation that included government officials pondering whether the FBI should investigate alternative media on “the list” or hinting that such organizations could be subject to legal prosecution under foreign espionage laws.  The corporate media’s thinly veiled intimidation tactics are intended to depress readership of “fake” news organizations and to link these media outlets with an alleged Russian strategy to elect Donald Trump president of the US.

Corporate media gatekeepers determine which stories are labeled fake news dependent upon which stories serve US foreign and domestic interests and which stories expose US corruption. The corporate media obsession with “fake news” would be laughable if not for the individuals committed to truth-telling who will be sacrificed in the process. Where was the corporate news obsession with fake news when Secretary of State (General) Colin Powell beat the war drums for America’s war adventures in Iraq based on fictitious intelligence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?

However, anyone familiar with duopoly propaganda strategy against progressive news organizations would expect an escalation in their intimidation tactics. A covert strategy that would move from a campaign of mere words to direct and consequential actions with corporate coalition members poised to play their part.  Phase 2 of this strategy would exact a higher cost to the intended progressive media targets and by extension to their supporters.

This week, it was revealed that the escalation to Phase 2 will be economic sanctions or economic strangulation. This will be the pressure point in an attempt to force progressive news organizations to heel.  Two of the largest internet companies have joined their counterparts in government to squeeze legitimate investigative reporting into compliance.

Google was the first media giant to announce that it would ban websites that “peddle fake news” from using its online advertising service. In other words, media organizations, such as BAR, Truthout, Truthdig, etc could no longer advertise on Google in order to reach a larger audience or raise funds.

Hours later, Facebook, the social network, updated its policy and announced that “it will not display ads in sites that contains content considered by the duopoly as “fake news” according to corporate news gatekeepers.

The Facebook statement asserted:

“We have updated the policy to explicitly clarify that this applies to fake news…Our team will continue to closely vet all prospective publishers and monitor existing ones to ensure compliance.”

What was “explicitly” clear was that Google and Facebook have joined their corporate media compatriots in an attempt to limit the public’s access to alternative news analysis and independent investigative reporting.

The bait and switch corporate media/government strategy recognizes that the public no longer trusts corporate media, such as the Washington Post and New York Times, to investigate government corruption. There is a growing public recognition that a conflict of interest exists between corporate media investigating government since these two groups are inextricably linked by class and economic interests.  The public has determined that the corporate media is actually the purveyor of “fake news” and turned to media organizations, such as BAR, Truthout and other outlets for information.

This is not the first time corporate power has joined with the political duopoly to undermine the media’s ability to engage in truth-telling.  Julian Assange accused right-wing US politicians of imposing a “death penalty’ on WikiLeaks after major US credit cards blocked its card holders from making contributions to the organization. Assange asserted that six US payment firms blocked WikiLeaks from receiving contributions at a cost of £30 million.

Visa and Mastercard started the financial stranglehold after WikiLleaks published some 250,000 secret State Department cables in December 2010.  WikiLeaks presented documents that proved these financial decisions were made at the instigation of “right-wing” members of Congress. This attack against WikiLeaks forced the staff to take a 40% pay cut.  However, the financial “war” was just the beginning. The unforeseen Phase III of this attack would eventually find Assange and Chelsea Manning incarcerated; Assange taking refuge in an Ecuadorian Embassy in London and Manning sentenced to serve time at Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas.

This is the time to support BAR, Truthout and other progressive media organizations under attack by forces that attempt to obfuscate and distort US domestic and foreign policy. Frederick Douglass during his 1857 address on “West India Emancipation” at Canandaigua, New York, on the 23rd anniversary of the event said:

“The general sentiment of mankind is that a man who will not fight for himself, when he has the means of doing so, is not worth being fought for by others, and this sentiment is just. For a man who does not value freedom for himself will never value it for others, or put himself to any inconvenience to gain it for others.”

Phases I and II forebode a challenging Phase III for truth-tellers in the current iteration of a corporate “fake news” strategy.  This is our time to fight for press freedom and the right to blow the whistle on government corruption. The future of our families and our planet depend on our uncompromising passion for justice.

Dr. Marsha Adebayo is the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated: No FEAR: A Whistleblowers Triumph over Corruption and Retaliation at the EPA. She worked at the EPA for 18 years and blew the whistle on a US multinational corporation that endangered South African vanadium mine workers. Marsha’s successful lawsuit led to the introduction and passage of the first civil rights and whistleblower law of the 21st century: the Notification of Federal Employees Anti-discrimination and Retaliation Act of 2002 (No FEAR Act). She is Director of Transparency and Accountability for the Green Shadow Cabinet and serves on the Advisory Board of ExposeFacts.com.

 

Related Video:

How War Propaganda Keeps on Killing

Posted on by
Reply

071216fake

By Robert Parry

Source: Consortium News

A key reason why American foreign debacles have been particularly destructive mostly to the countries attacked but also to the United States is that these interventions are always accompanied by major U.S. government investments in propaganda. So, even when officials recognize a misjudgment has been made, the propaganda machinery continues to grind on to prevent a timely reversal.

In effect, Official Washington gets trapped by its own propaganda, which restricts the government’s ability to change direction even when the need for a shift becomes obvious.

After all, once a foreign leader is demonized, it’s hard for a U.S. official to explain that the leader may not be all that bad or is at least better than the likely alternative. So, it’s not just that officials start believing their own propaganda, it’s that the propaganda takes on a life of its own and keeps the failed policy churning forward.

It’s a bit like the old story of the chicken that continues to run around with its head cut off. In the case of the U.S. government, the pro-war or pro-intervention “group think” continues to run amok even after wiser policymakers recognize the imperative to change course.

The reason for that dilemma is that so much money gets spread around to pay for the propaganda and so many careers are tethered to the storyline that it’s easier to let thousands of U.S. soldiers and foreign citizens die than to admit that the policy was built on distortions, propaganda and lies. That would be bad for one’s career.

And, because of the lag time required for contracts to be issued and the money to flow into the propaganda shops, the public case for the policy can outlive the belief that the policy makes sense.

Need for Skeptics

Ideally, in a healthy democracy, skeptics both within the government and in the news media would play a key role in pointing out the flaws and weaknesses in the rationale for a conflict and would be rewarded for helping the leaders veer away from disaster. However, in the current U.S. establishment, such self-corrections don’t occur.

A current example of this phenomenon is the promotion of the New Cold War with Russia with almost no thoughtful debate about the reasons for this growing hostility or its possible results, which include potential thermonuclear war that could end life on the planet.

Instead of engaging in a thorough discussion, the U.S. government and mainstream media have simply flooded the policymaking process with propaganda, some of it so crude that it would have embarrassed Joe McCarthy and the Old Cold Warriors.

Everything that Russia does is put in the most negative light with no space allowed for a rational examination of facts and motivations – except at a few independent-minded Internet sites.

Yet, as part of the effort to marginalize dissent about the New Cold War, the U.S. government, some of its related “non-governmental organizations,” mainstream media outlets, and large technology companies are now pushing a censorship project designed to silence the few Internet sites that have refused to march in lockstep.

I suppose that if one considers the trillions of dollars in tax dollars that the Military Industrial Complex stands to get from the New Cold War, the propaganda investment in shutting up a few critics is well worth it.

Today, this extraordinary censorship operation is being carried out under the banner of fighting “fake news.” But many of the targeted Web sites, including Consortiumnews.com, have represented some of the most responsible journalism on the Internet.

At Consortiumnews, our stories are consistently well-reported and well-documented, but we do show skepticism toward propaganda from the U.S. government or anywhere else.

For instance, Consortiumnews not only challenged President George W. Bush’s WMD claims regarding Iraq in 2002-2003 but we have reported on the dispute within the U.S. intelligence community about claims made by President Barack Obama and his senior aides regarding the 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria and the 2014 shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine.

In those two latter cases, Official Washington exploited the incidents as propaganda weapons to justify an escalation of tensions against the Syrian and Russian governments, much as the earlier Iraqi WMD claims were used to rally the American people to invade Iraq.

However, if you question the Official Story about who was responsible for the sarin gas attack outside Damascus on Aug. 21, 2013, after President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry and the mainstream media pronounced the Syrian government guilty, you are guilty of “fake news.”

Facts Don’t Matter

It doesn’t seem to matter that it’s been confirmed in a mainstream report by The Atlantic that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper advised President Obama that there was no “slam-dunk” evidence proving that the Syrian government was responsible. Nor does it matter that legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has reported that his intelligence sources say the more likely culprit was Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front with help from Turkish intelligence.

By straying from the mainstream “group think” that accuses Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of crossing Obama’s “red line” on chemical weapons, you are opening yourself to retaliation as a “fake news” site.

Similarly, if you point out that the MH-17 investigation was put under the control of Ukraine’s unsavory SBU intelligence service, which not only has been accused by United Nations investigators of concealing torture but also has a mandate to protect Ukrainian government secrets, you also stand accused of disseminating “fake news.”

Apparently one of the factors that got Consortiumnews included on a new “black list” of some 200 Web sites was that I skeptically analyzed a report by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) that while supposedly “Dutch-led” was really run by the SBU. I also noted that the JIT’s conclusion blaming Russia was marred by a selective reading of the SBU-supplied evidence and by an illogical narrative. But the mainstream U.S. media uncritically hailed the JIT report, so to point out its glaring flaws made us guilty of committing “fake news” or disseminating “Russian propaganda.”

The Iraq-WMD Case

Presumably, if the hysteria about “fake news” had been raging in 2002-2003, then those of us who expressed skepticism about Iraq hiding WMD would have been forced to carry a special marking declaring us to be “Saddam apologists.”

Back then, everyone who was “important” in Washington had no doubt about Iraq’s WMD. Washington Post editorial page editor Fred Hiatt repeatedly stated the “fact” of Iraq’s hidden WMD as flat fact and mocked anyone who doubted the “group think.”

Yet, even after the U.S. government acknowledged that the WMD allegations were a myth – a classic and bloody case of “fake news” – almost no one who had pushed the fabrication was punished.

So, the “fake news” stigma didn’t apply to Hiatt and other mainstream journalists who actually did produce “fake news,” even though it led to the deaths of 4,500 U.S. soldiers and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. To this day, Hiatt remains the Post’s editorial-page editor continuing to enforce “conventional wisdoms” and to disparage those who deviate.

Another painful example of letting propaganda – rather than facts and reason – guide U.S. foreign policy was the Vietnam War, which claimed the lives of some 58,000 U.S. soldiers and millions of Vietnamese.

The Vietnam War raged on for years after Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and even President Lyndon Johnson recognized the need to end it. Part of that was Richard Nixon’s treachery in going behind Johnson’s back to sabotage peace talks in 1968, but the smearing of anti-war dissidents as pro-communist traitors locked many officials into support for the war well after its futility became obvious. The propaganda developed its own momentum that resulted in many unnecessary deaths.

A Special Marking

In the Internet era, there will now be new-age forms of censorship. Your Web site will be excluded from major search engines or electronically stamped with a warning about your unreliability.

Your guilt will be judged by a panel of mainstream media outlets, including some partially funded by the U.S. government, or maybe by some anonymous group of alleged experts.

With the tens of millions of dollars now sloshing around Official Washington to pay for propaganda, lots of entrepreneurs will be lining up at the trough to do their part. Congress just approved another $160 million to combat “Russian propaganda,” which will apparently include U.S. news sites that question the case for the New Cold War.

Along with that money, the House voted 390-30 for the Intelligence Authorization Act with a Section 501 to create an Executive Branch “interagency committee to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence,” an invitation to expand the  McCarthyistic witch hunt already underway to intimidate independent Internet news sites and independent-minded Americans who question the latest round of U.S. government propaganda.

Even if a President Trump decides that these tensions with Russia are absurd and that the two countries can work together in the fight against terrorism and other international concerns, the financing of the New Cold War propaganda — and the pressure to conform to Official Washington’s  “group think” — will continue.

The well-funded drumbeat of anti-Russian propaganda will seek to limit Trump’s decision-making. After all, this New Cold War cash cow can be milked for years to come and nothing – not even the survival of the human species – is more important than that.

 

Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative,either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).

 

The Corporate Media’s Gulag of the Mind

Posted on by
3

looks-like-youve-had-a-bit-too-much-to-think-support-your-local-thought-police-dont-speak-out-or-question-closed-minds-stop-thought-crimes

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Your crime, as it were, need not be substantiated with evidence; the mere fact you publicly revealed your anti-Establishment thought convicted you.

One of the most remarkable ironies of The Washington Post’s recent evidence-free fabrication of purported “Russian propaganda” websites (including this site) is how closely it mimics the worst excesses of the USSR’s Stalinist era.

Those unfamiliar with the Stalinist era’s excesses will benefit from reading Solzhenitsyn’s three-volume masterpiece The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, The Gulag Archipelago 2 and Gulag Archipelago 3.

One episode is especially relevant to the totalitarian tactics of The Washington Post’s evidence-free accusation. Solzhenitsyn tells the story of one poor fellow who made the mistake of recounting a dream he’d had the previous night to his co-workers.

In his dream, Stalin had come to some harm. In Solzhenitsyn’s account, the fellow was remorseful about the dream.

Alas, mere remorse couldn’t possibly save him. He was promptly arrested for “anti-Soviet thoughts” and given a tenner in the Gulag–a tenner being a ten-year sentence in a Siberian labor camp.

The Washington Post’s accusation is based on a “behavioral analysis”–in other words, publicly sharing “anti-Soviet thoughts”–in our era, the equivalent is sharing anti-Establishment thoughts.

Your crime, as it were, need not be substantiated with evidence; the mere fact you publicly revealed your anti-Establishment thought convicted you.

This is the Corporate Media’s Gulag of the Mind. We’ll tell you what’s “true” and what is correct to think and believe. Any deviation from the party line is a threat and must be discredited, marginalized or suppressed.

Where is the Post’s hard evidence of Russian ties or Russian influence? There isn’t any–but like Stalin’s henchmen, the Post has no need for evidence: merely going public with an anti-Establishment thought “proves” one’s guilt in the kangaroo court of America’s corporate media (a.k.a. mainstream media or MSM).

While The Washington Post is owned by billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the vast majority of what we read, watch and hear is controlled by a handful of corporations loaded with cash and connections to the ruling elite.

media-concentration2

This concentration of media control creates the illusion of choice— the same elite-propaganda spin is everywhere you look; our “choice” of “approved” (i.e. corporate) media is roughly the same as that offered the Soviet citizenry in the old USSR.

This is why the billionaire/corporate media is so desperate to discredit the non-corporate media: if an alternative to the corporate media’s elite-propaganda catches on, the corporate media will lose its audience, its advert revenues and a substantial measure of its influence.

The cornered elite-propaganda beast is lashing out, undermining its waning credibility with every attack on an independent free press. As I noted in a recent conversation with Max Keiser, democracy requires the citizenry to sort out who benefits from whatever narrative is being pushed.

That’s what terrifies the elite-propaganda mainstream media: the status quo narrative they’ve spewed for years doesn’t benefit the bottom 95%– rather, it actively impoverishes and disempowers the bottom 95%–and the citizenry is slowly awakening to this reality.

So for goodness sakes, if you have an anti-elitist dream, keep it to yourself or you’ll end up on the ruling elite’s “enemies list.”

The final irony in all this: the real enemy of democracy and freedom of the press is The Washington Post and the rest of the billionaire/corporate media. The only way to escape the Corporate Media’s Gulag of the Mind is to stop watching their TV channels, turn off their radio stations and stop reading their print/digital propaganda–except of course if you have a taste for dark humor.

 

Related Video:

‘Fake news stories’ eclipse ‘conspiracy theories’ in globalist/Sorosite lexicon

Posted on by
1

fakenews

By Wayne Madsen

Source: Intrepid Report

The corporate news media, allied with “media watchdog” groups, many financed with global billionaire troublemaker George Soros, have trotted out a new dog whistle to attack their opponents: “fake news stories.” The issue of “fake news stories” was even raised by outgoing President Barack Obama in a news conference in Berlin with German chancellor Angela Merkel. Both leaders cited “fake news stories” as something that threatens international stability.

Of course, there are an ample number of fake news stories that emanate from disreputable and discredited websites, many of them vanity sites intending to serve as “click bait” for the unsuspecting web surfer and even a few professional journalists taken in by alarmist headlines. A number of individuals have been duped by totally fake stories written by “Sorcha Faal,” a pseudonym for David Booth, allegedly a U.S. computer programmer and which may also be a pseudonym for another individual or group of individuals. Faal, Booth, or whatever his name is acts as a cyber version of an arsonist who releases fake stories attributed to Russian intelligence sources and then sits back to assess the impact of his prankster works. The fact that a number of Russian news organizations have re-published Faal/Booth fake articles as actual news leads some to believe that U.S. intelligence plays a role in the obvious disinformation operation. Faal/Booth has a number of competitors in the field of cyber-pranksterism.

However, the most prominent purveyors of fake news stories are the very corporate media entities that decry “fake news.” There are a number of examples of corporate media trafficking in fake news. The following are a few stark examples:

  • In 1981, Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for a story about an 8-year old heroin addict named “Jimmy.” Washington, DC, Mayor Marion Barry was taken in by the story and launched a city-wide effort to search for “Jimmy” and provide him with treatment. Barry claimed “Jimmy” was real but, in fact, Cooke made up the entire story of “Jimmy’s World” and Barry lied about the supposed existence of the boy. Although Cooke’s story was totally fake, Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward submitted it to the Pulitzer committee for an award for best feature writing. Woodward, who concocted the fictional “Deep Throat” source in his Watergate reporting for the Post, was never sanctioned for advancing a fake story for a supposed serious professional journalism honor. The Post can be attributed to two major “fake news stories”—”Jimmy” the heroin addict and “Deep Throat” the high-level Nixon administration source who was not FBI deputy director Mark Felt.
  • New York Times reporter Jayson Blair wrote a series of fake news stories for the so-called “paper of record.” The following are a few of his fake news headlines that appeared in the Times:

 

October 30, 2002—”US Sniper Case Seen as a Barrier to a Confession.”
February 10, 2003—”Peace and Answers Eluding Victims of the Sniper Attacks.”
March 3, 2003—”Making Sniper Suspect Talk Puts Detective in Spotlight.”
March 27, 2003—”Relatives of Missing Soldiers Dread Hearing Worse News.”
April 3, 2003—”Rescue in Iraq and a ‘Big Stir’ in West Virginia.”
April 7, 2003—”For One Pastor, the War Hits Home.”
April 19, 2003—””In Military Wards, Questions and Fears from the Wounded.”

Blair made up from whole cloth stories about the DC sniper and Iraq war veterans. In all, 36 of the 73 national stories penned by Blair were fake. However, a number of media outlets, including the Times, reported as fact fake stories about Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” all of which were false. New York Times reporter Judith Miller reported as fact information from Iraqi exiled leader Ahmed Chalabi alleging that Iraq possessed mobile weapons laboratories. The information was false, as was other U.S. “intelligence” on Iraq that was fed Miller and other reporters that was all bogus, including stories on Saddam Hussein allegedly trying to procure yellow cake uranium from Niger.

  • In May 1998, Stephen Glass of The New Republic wrote an article titled “Hack Heaven” about a 15-year old hacker and a non-existent software firm called “Jukt Micronics.” It was later determined that 27 articles Glass wrote for The New Republic were fabrications.
  • USA Today reporter and Pulitzer nominee Jack Kelly allegedly fabricated a number of stories for the newspaper, including a 1999 story alleging that the Yugoslavian armed forces was ordered to ethnically cleanse an Albanian village in Kosovo.
  • The Dateline NBC story of November 17, 1992, titled “Waiting to Explode” and alleging that poor fuel tank design caused General Motors’ pick-up trucks to explode on impact was based on rigged tests and staged explosions.
  • NBC anchor Brian Williams was suspended after making several false claims about his prior reporting. He claimed to have been riding on board an Army Chinook helicopter that was forced to land in an Iraqi desert after it was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. The story was false as was another in which Williams claimed to have flown into Baghdad with Navy SEAL Team 6. Williams also falsely claimed to have seen a man commit suicide in the New Orleans Superdome in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. Williams also claimed to have personally witnessed the Berlin Wall coming down. He was not in Berlin until a day after the wall fell.
  • In 2013, CBS “60 Minutes” interviewed a U.S. security contractor who claimed he witnessed the attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya on September 11, 2012. The contractor was not in Benghazi during the attack and the account was bogus.
  • Rolling Stone published a falsified story in 2014 about a University of Virginia gang rape victim named “Jackie” and school administrator Nicole Eramo. The magazine falsely claimed that Eramo covered up rape incidents at the university. A federal jury later found that Rolling Stone libeled Eramo.
  • Several news organizations falsely claimed that security guard Richard Jewell was the chief suspect in the July 27, 1996, bombing of Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta. Jewell successfully sued CNN, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (“FBI suspects ‘hero’ guard may have planted bomb”), NBC, and The New York Post for libel.
  • Fox News often featured a commentator named Wayne Simmons, described by the network as a former CIA “operative.” In fact, Simmons never worked for the CIA and he was a fraud. He was later sentenced to 33 months in prison for his fraudulent activities.

The corporate media is legitimized by a very phony “arbiter” of what and what does not constitute accurate news: the very problematic Snopes.com. Snopes traffics in as much fakery in its “debunking” of alternative media articles as does the corporate media in its national and international reporting.

It is clear that Obama, Merkel, the Soros operation, and others are attacking “fake news stories” in order to hide the real target for their invective rhetoric: the alternative media, which does not kow-tow to corporate executives, advertisers, and special interests ranging from Big Pharma to the Israeli Lobby. The alternative media provides the lifeblood for the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of the press. The corporate media is a bloated and deceitful artifice whose time is coming to an end.

 

Related Videos: