Tag Archives: Mainstream Media

The truth about « fake news »

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While NATO was busy setting up a vast network with which to accuse Russia of perpetuating propaganda from the Soviet era, Washington was suddenly swamped by a wave of hysteria. In an attempt to discredit the new US President, the dominant media accuse him of talking rubbish – in response, the President accuses them of propagating fake news. This cacophony is amplified by the swift development of the social media, which had once been intended for use as weapons of the State Department against nationalist regimes, but which today are popular forums used to combat abuse by all kinds of elites – with Washington at the top of the list.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltaire Network

As soon as the announcement of his surprise election was made public, and even before he had access to the White House, the immense majority of US and NATO media began screaming about the negligence and insanity of President Trump. Battle was joined between the media class and the new President, with each side accusing the other of propagating fake news.

Almost everywhere in the NATO countries – and only in these countries – political representatives began denouncing fake news. This was intended to reveal the supposed influence of Russian propaganda within the « Western democracies ». The State which has been the most seriously impacted by this campaign is France, whose President Emmanuel Macron recently announced the drafting of a law specifically aimed at fighting these « attacks on democracy », but only during « an electoral period ».

The fact that the English expression fake news is maintained in all the languages of the NATO countries attests to the Anglo-Saxon origin of the problem, when in fact the phrase designates a phenomenon as old as the world – false information.

At the origin of the campaign against « fake news » – NATO

In 2009, at the NATO summit in Strasbourg-Kehl, President Obama announçed his intention of creating an Alliance « Strategic Communication » service [1]. It took six years to implement, using elements of the 77th Brigade of the British Land Army and the 361st Civil Affairs Brigade of the United States Land Army (based in Germany and Italy).

At first, their mission was to counter communications accusing the US deep state of having itself organised the attacks of 9/11, then those accusing the Anglo-Saxons of having planned the « Arab Springs » and the war against Syria — such communications were termed « conspiracy theories ». However, the situation evolved rapidly in such a way as to convince the populations of the Alliance that Russia was continuing to apply propaganda from the Soviet era – and thus that NATO was still useful.

Finally, in April 2015, the European Union created a « Work Group for Strategic Communications – East » (East StratCom Task Force). Every week, this group addresses a report on Russian propaganda to thousands of journalists. For example, its last edition (dated 11 January 2018) accuses Sputnik of pretending that the Copenhagen zoo feeds its predators with abandoned household pets. Lord help us, the « democracies » are under attack ! Clearly, it is difficult for these specialists to find meaningful examples of Russian interference. In August of the same year, NATO inaugurated its « Centre for Strategic Communication » in Riga (Latvia). The following year, the US State Department created a Global Engagement Center which works on the same principles.

How Facebook, Hillary Clinton’s pet obsession, turned against her

In 2009, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, at the instigation of Jared Cohen (leading member of the Policy Planning Staff ), persuaded herself that it was possible to overthrow the Islamic Republic of Iran by manipulating the social media. This theory did not have the desired affect. However, two years later, in 2011, the same Jared Cohen — since become the the CEO of Google Ideas — managed to mobilise the youth of Cairo. Although the « revolution » of Tahrir Square had not swayed the opinion of the Egyptian people, the myth of the extension of the American way of life via Facebook was born. As a result, the State Department sponsored a number of associations and assemblies to promote Facebook.

However, the US Presidential election of 2016 was a shock. An outsider, real estate promoter Donald Trump, eliminated all his rivals one by one, including Hillary Clinton, and was swept into the White House, having benefited from the advice of Facebook. For the first time, the dream of the Muse of professional politicians became reality, but worked against her. Overnight, Facebook was demonised by the dominant Press.

It became evident on this occasion that it is possible to artificially create crowd movements with the social media, but that after a few days, media users regain their senses. This is the constant fact for all systems of information manipulation — they are fleeting. The only form of lie which makes it possible to create long-term behaviour patterns supposes that one has forced the citizens into a form of minor engagement, in other words, that one has brainwashed them [2].

Indeed, Facebook understood this very well, creating its « Politics & Government Outreach Program » and handing it over to the care of Katie Harbath. It was intended to create collective emotions in favour of one client or another, but does not seek to organise lasting campaigns [3]. This is why President Macron proposes to legislate the social media only during electoral periods. He was himself elected thanks to a brief disorder created jointly by a weekly newspaper and Facebook against his rival François Fillon — an operation orchestrated by Jean-Pierre Jouyet [4]. Furthermore, Emmanuel Macron’s fear that next time the social media may be used against him fits with NATO’s desire to demonstrate the continuity of USSR-Russia propaganda. As an example of manipulation, Macron therefore cites an interview with Sputnik concerning his private life and the publishing of an allegation concerning a foreign bank account.

The Christopher Steele Report

During the US Presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s team ordered an inquiry on Donald Trump from an ex-agent of the British Secret Services, Christopher Steele. Ex-chief of MI6’s « Russia House », he was known for his scandalous and always unverifiable allegations. After having accused Vladimir Putin, without proof, of having commanded the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko by Polonium 210, he accused him of having caught Donald Trump in a sex trap and blackmailing him. The Steele Report was then discretely handed to various journalists, politicians and master spies, and finally published [5].

This is the source of the hypothesis according to which, seeking to get his puppet elected and hamper the election of Hillary Clinton, the lord of the Kremlin had ordered « his » media to buy publicity on Facebook and spread lies about the ex-Secretary of State – a hypothesis which may be supported by a conversation between the Australian ambassador in London with one of Donald trump’s advisors [6]. It doesn’t matter that Russia Today and Sputnik only spent a total of a few thousand dollars for publicity which rarely concerned Mrs. Clinton, the US ruling class is persuaded that they turned back the popular tide in favour of the Democrat candidate and her 1.2 billion dollar campaign. In Washington, people persist in believing that technological inventions can be used to manipulate the human race.

It is no longer a question of noting that Donald Trump and his partisans ran their campaign on Facebook because the totality of the written and audiovisual Press was hostile to them, but pretending that Facebook was manipulated by Russia in order to prevent the election of the Muse of Washington.

The legal privilege of Google, Facebook and Twitter

By seeking to prove the interference of Moscow, the US Press underlined the exorbitant privilege enjoyed by Google, Facebook and Twitter — these three companies are not considered responsible for their content. From the point of view of US law, they are no more than transporters of information (common carrier).

The experiments carried out by Facebook, which demonstrated the possibility of creating collective emotions on one hand, and the legal non-responsibility of this company on the other, attest to an anomaly in the system.

Particularly since the privilege enjoyed by Google, Facebook and Twitter is clearly undue. Indeed, these three companies act in at least two different ways to modify the content they transport. First of all, they unilaterally censor certain messages, either via the direct intervention of their personnel, or mechanically, via hidden algorithms. Then they promote their vision of the truth to the detriment of other points of view (fact-checking).

For example, in 2012, Qatar ordered from Google Ideas, already directed by Jared Cohen, the creation of software which would make it possible to follow the progression of defections in the Syrian Arab Army. The point was to show that Syria was indeed a dictatorship, and that the people were beginning to revolt. But it very quickly became clear that this vision of affairs was false. The number of soldiers who defected never rose above 25,000 in an army of 450,000 men. This is why, after having promoted the software, Google discretely retired it.

Conversely, for seven years, Google promoted articles which relayed communiqués from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHD). Day after day, they gave the exact count of the number of victims in both camps. Of course, these figures are imaginary – it is impossible for anyone to count them. Never, in a time of war, has a state been able to determine, on a daily basis, the number of soldiers killed in combat and the civilians killed behind the lines. And yet, in the United Kingdom, the SOHD claims to know what the people who live there, in Syria, cannot know.

Far from being just the common carriers, Google, Facebook and Twitter are the forgers of the information they transport, and as such, they ought to be counted legally responsible for their content.

The rules of the freedom of expression

Let’s imagine that the efforts of NATO and those of President Macron against Russia in terms of audiovisual Internet traffic meet with failure. It is nonetheless necessary to enter these new medias into general law.

The principles which regulate the freedom of expression are only legitimate if they are identical for all citizens and for all media. This is not the case today. While the general law applies, there is no specific rule concerning denial or the right to reply for the messages on Internet and the social media.

As always in the history of information, the old medias attempt to sabotage the new. Thus I remember the violent editorial that the French daily Le Monde dedicated in 2002 to my work on the Internet concerning the responsibility for the attacks of 9/11. What shocked the newspaper just as much as my conclusions was that the Voltaire Network was free from the financial obligations of which it felt prisoner [7]. This is the same corporatist attitude that it demonstrates again, fifteen years later, with its service, Le Decodex. Rather than developing a critique of the articles or videos of the new medias, Le Monde proposes to note the reliability of its rival Internet sites. Of course, only the sites issued by their paper colleagues find grace in their eyes, all the others are judged less trustworthy.

To shore up the campaign against the social media, the Fondation Jean-Jaures (that is to say the foundation of the Socialist Party linked to the National Endowment for Democracy) has published an imaginary poll [8]. With a display of numbers, it aims to demonstrate that unsophisticated people – the working classes and the partisans of the National Front – are gullible. It claims that 79 % of French people believe in one conspiracy theory or another. As proof of their naïveté, it points out that 9 % of them are convinced that the Earth is flat.

However, neither myself nor any of my French friends consulted by Internet have ever met any of our compatriots who believe that the Earth is flat. The figure is obviously invented and discredits the entire study. As it happens, although it is linked to the Socialist Party, the Fondation Jean-Jaures still has Gerard Collomb as its general secretary – Collomb has since become President Macron’s Minister for the Interior. This same foundation had already published, two years ago, a study aimed at discrediting the political opponents of the system that it already qualified as « conspiracy theorists » [9].

 

Translation
Pete Kimberley

 

Mainstream Media & FBI Push Fake Terror Attack Even After Their Patsy Refused to Do It

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The mainstream media is praising the FBI after their agents targeted a “terrorist” who refused to go through with an attack they were attempting to set up.

By Rachel Blevins

Source: The Free Thought Project

It is no secret that agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation often look for and take advantage of vulnerable individuals on the internet by gaining their trust and convincing them to carry out attacks—but even in a case where the “terrorist” backed out of the attack, the mainstream media is still celebrating the FBI’s diligence in the War on Terror.

“FBI thwarts alleged plan to carry out terrorist attack in San Francisco on Christmas,” the Washington Post reported, claiming that the agency was able to prevent “a possible terrorist attack at San Francisco’s Pier 39 after arresting a man who told undercover agents he wanted to carry out an Islamic State-inspired suicide bombing at the popular tourist destination on Christmas Day.”

The New York Post joined in with the headline “FBI thwarts ISIS-inspired Christmas terror attack on San Francisco,” and the claim that the suspect was “former US Marine sharpshooter” Everitt Aaron Jameson, 26, who was discharged from the military for fraudulent enlistment, and now works as a tow truck driver.

The Department of Justice released a statement confirming that Jameson has been arrested for “attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization.” If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.

“According to court documents, Jameson had several online interactions with a confidential source in which he expressed support for the October 31, 2017, terrorist attack in New York City and offered his services for ‘the cause.’  In subsequent communications with an undercover agent, Jameson referred to his training in the U.S. military and noted he had been trained for combat and war.  Jameson later met with another undercover agent whom he believed to be associated with the senior leadership of the foreign terrorist organization, ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, also known as ISIL).  During his interactions with this undercover agent, Jameson offered to carry out violent acts and to provide financial support for the terrorist organization.”

Now, the question is—how did FBI agents find Jameson, and did he actually pose a threat of carrying out a terrorist attack?

The Los Angeles Times reported that Jameson began studying Islam one year ago, after he became “depressed and even suicidal over losing custody of his children.” However, his family insisted that he did not have violent tendencies, and had never mentioned anything about becoming involved with the Islamic State.

“He just ain’t no terrorist, no way,” Jameson’s father said. “He would never hurt people. Not ever. It’s just unbelievable. That’s not who he is.”

The criminal complaint filed against Jameson claimed that he first caught the agency’s attention when a “credible FBI Confidential Human Source” flagged his Facebook account as suspicious on Sept. 19, for “Liking” and “Loving” posts that were “pro-ISIS and pro-terrorism.”

“To provide an example of the types of posts Jameson was ‘Liking’ and ‘Loving’ during this time period, the CHS reported to the FBI that Jameson “loved” a post on November 29, 2017 that is an image of Santa Claus standing in New York with a box of dynamite. The text of the post reads, ‘ISIS post image of Santa with dynamite threatening attack on New York.’ The Propaganda poster shows Santa Claus standing on a roof next to a box of dynamite looking out over a crowd of shoppers with the words ‘We meet at Christmas in New York… soon.’ Under this post, Jameson selected the ‘Like’ option and then selected the “Heart” option to signify that he ‘Loved’ the post.”

However, the fact that Jameson “liked” a post on Facebook about an ISIS attack in the United States on Christmas day, does not guarantee that he would have actually carried out such an attack by himself.

While the complaint does detail the conversations Jameson had with FBI informants, and it shows that he appeared eager to provide supplies for an attack on a crowded area, and willing to carry out, he was never in contact with a suspected member of ISIS.

It is also important to consider the context. FBI informants were holding bait in front of a depressed, suicidal man, and were giving him a sense of attention and companionship that he was likely lacking in his own life. Ultimately, two days after meeting with FBI informants in person, the criminal complaint noted that Jameson sent a message on Dec. 18, saying, “I don’t think I can do this after all. I’ve reconsidered.”

It was too late. Even though he had not harmed anyone, and had declined to carry out the attack the agents were trying to talk him into, the FBI obtained a search warrant for Jameson’s home the next day. They seized a letter signed by “Abdullah Abu Everitt,” a last will and testament, and a series of weapons including “a Winchester .22 caliber rifle, a Ruger M77, a Ruger 9mm handgun, magazines, ammunition and fireworks.”

Everitt Jameson now faces up to 20 years in prison for engaging in conversations online with FBI informants who intentionally targeted his weaknesses, as the mainstream media celebrates the fact that the FBI has foiled yet another FBI terror plot, and the agents who are responsible for ruining an innocent man’s life, look for their next victim.

If Jameson never had any intention of carrying out a terror attack and the entire idea was forced on him by the FBI, why on Earth would this be on the news and touted as some foiled plot?

Well, the answer to that is simple.

Former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes actually reveals the answer as he defends the tactics used by the FBI to set up poverty-stricken, mentally ill men by offering them large sums of money and weapons to commit crimes.

After he defended the FBI’s role in bribing poor, mentally diminished people to get them to commit crimes, he let out a bombshell statement, confirming what many of us already know.

“If you’re submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you’re not going to submit the proposal that ‘We won the war on terror and everything’s great,’ cause the first thing that’s gonna happen is your budget’s gonna be cut in half,” states Fuentes. “You know, it’s my opposite of Jesse Jackson’s ‘Keep Hope Alive’—it’s ‘Keep Fear Alive.’ Keep it alive.”

There you have it. The FBI puts Americans in danger by grooming otherwise entirely innocent people into doing harm — so they can keep fear alive.

But what would’ve happened if Jameson would’ve actually carried out this attack that the FBI was trying to force on him? Would the FBI still claim they had informants attempting to groom him? Would they admit their role in his life at all?

David Steele, a 20-year Marine Corps intelligence officer, the second-highest-ranking civilian in the U.S. Marine Corps Intelligence, and former CIA clandestine services case officer, had this to say about these most unscrupulous operations:

“Most terrorists are false flag terrorists, or are created by our own security services. In the United States, every single terrorist incident we have had has been a false flag, or has been an informant pushed on by the FBI. In fact, we now have citizens taking out restraining orders against FBI informants that are trying to incite terrorism. We’ve become a lunatic asylum.”

Indeed, we’ve become a lunatic asylum.

 

The War on Fake News

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By Anthony Freda

Source: Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox

As it becomes increasingly clear that yesterday’s conspiracy theories are today’s real news, the call to kill the messengers just gets more shrill and hysterical.

The attacks on free speech with high-tech censorship campaigns and old-fashioned hit pieces in the “War on Fake News” are massive and concerted.

The book burners are starting so many fires it’s impossible to stamp them all out.

What are the horrible thought crimes committed by the alternative press?

The new media has consistently exposed the lies and crimes of our corrupt and broken institutions.

Pioneers of alt media have passionately and convincingly made the case that The Patriot Act literally reversed the gains to human liberty codified in The Bill of Rights.

Independent media dismantled the lies that were presented as the pretexts to the invasion of Iraq. The same lies aggressively promoted by Bush, Hillary Clinton, CNN and The New York Times and that resulted in the death of a million people and global chaos. By contrast, how many people have died as a result of alternative media reports? The answer iszero.

The independent press interviewed NSA whistleblowers who accurately described how the U.S. government was illegally spying on its citizens and retaining our data, and how these whistleblowers were being persecuted by their own government for coming forward and refusing to break the law.

This was years before anyone heard of Edward Snowden.

Amazingly, there was very little interest in these bombshell allegations in the mainstream press.

It’s hard to believe now, but in those days, people who claimed the government was surveilling innocent citizens were dismissed as paranoid by the self-proclaimed arbiters of truth at the NYT and CNN.

Grassroots media detailed a decade ago how police forces all over America were becoming militarized and predicted that this dangerous trend would lead to racially charged conflict on the streets of the nation. What kooks!

We have also railed against; torture, needless wars, police brutality, government corruption, the two-party duopoly, the criminality of the banksters and the end of privacy.

Now the very same mainstream media hacks who promoted the lies that lead to war in Iraq and Syria and mindlessly regurgitate whichever talking point is uploaded onto their teleprompter are gleefully assassinating what they call “fake news” using edited tape and misleading hit-pieces.

While these discredited war cheerleaders lie about why our sons and daughters are sent to die, we are bravely exposing the fraudulent casus belli they traitorously and disgracefully promote.

While these corporate spokespeople work for the interests of the oil and drug companies and political forces that pay their salaries, we risk everything to expose the crimes and scams of these same broken institutions.

We have done a great public service by exposing the deceptive, psychological methods used by the ruling elite to warp historical narratives, manipulate patriotism and manufacture consent.

By helping people to recognize and suspend their belief in propaganda and therefore their own complicity in it, the alternative media is helping to create a public awareness to the tactics our enemies use to keep us divided, steal our rights and slaughter countless innocents all over the world.

I know it’s fun and easy to call us tin-foil-hat wearers, or whatever pejorative has been chosen for you today, but let’s be clear about whose dirty work some are doing. Ironically, many are using talking-points written by deep-state operatives to ridicule the idea that the deep-state exists at all!!

Alternative media is in direct competition with the mainstream media for revenue and the MSM want to control the information we are exposed to.

The MSM are waging a concerted demonization campaign aimed at destroying some of the dominant platforms exposing the lies and crimes of their corporate and deep-state masters and many are helping them do it.

The MSM is an enemy of the truth and of the people. Friends of mine have been accused of being Russian agents in The NYT because they simply told the truth about Clinton during the campaign.

The corporate press has gone from lying to the American people to lyingabout the American people.

Do we have the will and power to destroy our common enemy?

www.AnthonyFreda.com

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

The attack on “fake news” is really an attack on alternative media

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As the author of an article labeled “pro-Russia propaganda,” I can testify that unorthodox views are under attack

By Dave Lindorff

Source: Salon.com

These are tough days to be a serious journalist. Report a story now, with your facts all lined up nicely, and you’re still likely to have it labeled “fake news” by anyone whose ox you’ve gored — and even by friends who don’t share your political perspective. For good measure, they’ll say you’ve based it on “alternative facts.”

Historians say the term “fake news” dates from the late 19th-century era of “yellow journalism,” but the term really took off in 2016, a little over a year ago, during Donald Trump’s run for the presidency. It described several different things, from fact-free, pro-Trump online media to sensationalistic and largely untrue stories whose only goal was eyeballs and dollars. During the primary season, Trump himself began labeling all mainstream media stories about him as “fake news.” The idea that there could be different truths, while dating at least back to the administration of President George W. Bush, when his consigliere Karl Rove claimed that the administration “made its own” reality, gained currency when Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, caught making stuff up in a TV interview, claimed that she was relying on “alternative facts.”

That dodge would be fine, on its own. Most people are primed to believe that politicians lie — whatever party or persuasion they represent — so their attempts to deny it when called a conjurer of falsehoods posing tend to be recognized as such.

The corporate media — The New York Times, The Washington Post, the network news programs and even National Public Radio — have all responded to being called liars and “fake news” fabricators of by promoting themselves as “the reality-based community” (NPR), or claiming they are fighting the good fight against ignorance, as demonstrated by the Post’s new masthead slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” The Times has stuck with its hoary “All the news that’s fit to print”slogan, but has added a page-three daily feature listing “noteworthy facts from today’s paper” and has taken to calling out Trump administration whoppers as “lies.”

Last December Congress passed a new law, promptly signed by then-President Barack Obama, that enacted an Orwellian amendment to the Defense Authorization Act of 2017. Called the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act, this measure tasks the State Department, in consultation with the Department of Defense, the director of national intelligence and an obscure government propaganda organization called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, to establish a “Center for Information Analysis and Response.” The job of this new center, funded by a $160 million, two-year budget allocation, would be to collect information on “foreign propaganda and disinformation efforts” and “proactively advance fact-based narratives that support United States allies and interests.”

What is “fake news”? The target keeps moving

This might all seem laughable, but as a journalist who has worked in this field for 45 years, in both mainstream newspapers and television and in the alternative media, and as a long-time freelancer who has written for publications as widely varied as Business Week, the Nation, the Village Voice and a collectively run news site called ThisCantBeHappening.net, I have watched as this obsession with “fake news” has turned into an attack on alternative news and alternative news organizations.

Last Nov. 24, The Washington Post published a McCarthyite-style front-page article declaring that some 200 news sites on the web were actually witting or unwitting “purveyors of pro-Russian propaganda.” The article, by Post National Security Reporter Craig Timberg, was based on the work of a shady outfit called PropOrNot, whose owner-organizers were kept anonymous by Timberg and whose source of funding was left unexplained. PropOrNot, Timberg wrote, had developed a list of sites which it had determined to be peddling “pro-Russia propaganda.”

For one of the sites on the list, the prominent left-wing journal Counterpunch, founded decades ago by former Village Voice and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn, PropOrNot offered up two articles as justification for its designation. One of those articles was by me. It was a piece I’d actually written for ThisCantBeHappening, which had been republished with credit by Counterpunch. The reviewer, a retired military intelligence officer named Joel Harding (who I discovered is linked to Fort Belvoir outside Washington, home to the U.S. Army’s Information Operations Command, or INSCOM), labeled my article “absurdly pro-Russian propaganda.”

In fact, the article was a pretty straightforward report on the Sept. 29, 2016 findings by the joint Dutch-Australian investigation into the July 2014 shoot-down of a Malaysian jumbo passenger jet over Ukraine, which concluded that Russia was the culprit. I noted in the article that this investigation was not legitimate, because two nations — Russia and Ukraine — were known to possess the Buk missiles and launchers that had brought down the plane, but only one of them, Ukraine, was permitted to offer evidence. Russian offers of evidence in the case were repeatedly rebuffed. The report also failed to mention that the Ukrainian government had received veto power over any conclusions reached by the investigators.

Was my report “fake news” or propaganda? Not at all.

The fake news in this case has been what has been written and aired by virtually all of the U.S. media, including the Times, the Post and all the major networks, about that horrific tragedy. They all continue to state as fact that a Russian Buk missile downed that plane, though no honest investigation has been conducted. (Technically it is true that the Buk missiles are all “Russian,” in that they were all manufactured in Russia. Left unsaid is that Ukraine’s military had Buk launchers since their nation was part of the Soviet Union and continued to purchase them after independence.)

 Laziest form of media criticism

“Labeling news reports that you don’t like as ’fake news’ is the laziest form of media criticism,” says Jim Naureckas, editor of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a New York-based journalism review. “It’s like putting your fingers in your ears and going ‘la la la’ really loudly. Both the government and the corporate media have reasons for not wanting the public to hear points of view that are threats to their power.”

While Kellyanne Conway claimed her right to offer “alternative facts” as a way to justify getting caught in a lie, there are also alternative facts which are real but don’t get reported in the corporate media. A classic example was in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the entire corporate media reported as fact that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was attempting to develop a nuclear bomb.

There were plenty of alternative news organizations who quoted UN inspectors saying that none of that was true and there were no WMDs or WMD programs in Iraq, but they were simply blacked out by the corporate media like the Times, the Post and the major news networks.

These days another dubious story is that the Russians “hacked” the server of the Democratic National Committee. It may have happened that way, but in fact, the vast intelligence system the U.S. has constructed to monitor all domestic and foreign telecommunications has offered up no hard evidence of such a hack. National Security Agency whistleblower William Binney and retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern have suggested that some evidence indicates a DNC insider must have been involved.

There is certainly fake news all over the internet, and baseless conspiracies run rampant on both the left and the right. But all too often, articles like mine cited by PropOrNot (a genuine purveyor of fake news!) are being labeled as propaganda in what Naureckas says is simply “the use of irony as a defense mechanism” by news organizations that themselves are actually guilty of publishing really fake news, as the Post did with its PropOrNot blacklist “scoop.”

“What the government and the corporate media are trying to do, with the help of the big internet corporations,” argues Mickey Huff, director of the Project Censored organization in California, “is basically to shut down alternative news sites that question the media consensus position on issues.”

A wide threat to online media

That’s a threat to any online news organization, including this one, that depend upon equal access to the internet and to fast download speeds. Already, Huff charges, there are reports that Facebook is slowing down certain sites that have links on its platform, in a misguided response to charges that it sold ad space to Russian government-linked organizations accused of trying to influence last November’s presidential election.

An end to internet neutrality, the equal access to high-speed internet for surfing and downloading that has been guaranteed to all users — but that is now under attack by the Trump administration, its Federal Communications Commission and a Republican-led Congress — would make it that much easier for such a shutdown of alternative media to happen.

The real answer, of course, is for readers and viewers of all media, mainstream or alternative, to become critical consumers of news. This means not just looking at articles critically, including this one, but going to multiple sources for information on important issues. Relying on just the Times or the Post, or on Fox News or NPR, will leave you informationally malnourished — not just uninformed but misinformed. Even if you were to read both those papers and watch both those networks, you’d often be left with an incomplete version of the truth.

To get to the truth, we need to also check out alternative news sources, whether of the left, right or center — and we need to maintain the critical distinction between unpopular or unorthodox points of view and blatant lies or propaganda. Without such a distinction, and the freedom to make such decisions for ourselves, maintaining democracy will be impossible.

Organized Chaos and Confusion as Political Control

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Dissident Voice

There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.

— Buffalo Springfield 1967

It’s not supposed to be clear, now or then.  If you’re confused by the news you’re hearing, you should be.  They want you to be.  They try to make you be.  But you don’t have to be.

Who are “they”?  They are the corporate mainstream media (MSM) that serve as mouthpieces for the power elites, who are connected through an intricate system of institutions and associations, both obvious and shadowy.  They run the show that the media produce for the masses.  To paraphrase the illustrious American propagandist, Edward Bernays: This is the engineering of the consent of the ignorant herd by the intelligent few.

That this has been going on for a long time should be obvious.  That such propaganda is surround-sound today is a fact.  It is total and non-stop.  Even its critics are often seduced as they are horrified.

But I utter the obvious to explore the obscure.  In particular, the ways the elites try to manage the public mind by confusing contradictions, half-truths, multiple and conflicting narratives, and revelations proffered to conceal more fundamental facts.

The basic way people’s thinking is controlled today is by confusing them and creating a perpetual state of mental vertigo.  Muddled and disordered by double-speak, illogical reporting, and a kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of conflicting reports, the average person is reduced to a mental mess.  “To the average man who tries to keep informed,” writes Jacques Ellul in Propaganda, “a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he can’t understand.”

Take Donald Trump.  He is regularly castigated by the media for his endless stream of tweets and contradictory statements.  He is called a moron, mentally imbalanced, and a clown.  But what these critics fail to grasp is that he is beating them at their own game of sowing confusion.  He is our modern mythic Johnny Appleseed, wildly spewing seeds of bedlam to incite and confound.  He is no anomaly.  He has stepped out of our celebrity reality-TV screened world to carry on the media’s task of what Orwell said was a necessary task for the rulers in a totalitarian society: “to dislocate the sense of reality.”

The mainstream media do this daily.  Think of their reporting of some recent news and ask yourself what exactly have they said – Russia-gate, the Iran agreement, the Las Vegas massacre, Catalonia, health insurance, etc. Gibberish piled upon gibberish, that’s what they’ve said.  A salmagundi of contradictory verbiage that leaves a half-way sentient person shaking one’s head in astonishment.  Or leaves one baffled, devoid of any sense of the truth.

While the gross Harvey Weinstein, buddy to Democrat politicians who took large sums from his deep pockets, dominates the MSM’s spotlight, as if his exploits suddenly appeared out of nowhere, the U.S. war against Syria and so many other countries “isn’t happening,” as Harold Pinter put it in his Nobel acceptance speech when he said the systematic crimes of the United States have been disappeared behind “a highly successful act of hypnosis.” The nuclear threats to Russia and China aren’t happening.  It doesn’t matter right now anyway.  We might get back to that next week or next month, if we are finished with Weinstein by then or if Stephen Paddock’s autopsy report isn’t back from Stanford where they are studying his brain tissue to find the cause and manner of his death – you know what deep secrets brain tissue can reveal.  And yes, we will be exploring a question a brilliant reporter asked the Las Vegas authorities: “Do you think Paddock did it because he could?”

In 2003 the Bush administration blatantly lied about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to wage a barbaric and criminal war against Iraq.  Then Obama glided in on the giddy fantasies of liberals, the same people who supported Clinton’s savaging of Serbia in 1999.  He smiled and smiled and spoke articulately about the need for war, drone assassinations, the bailing out of Wall Street and the big banks, the need to confront Russia over his own administration’s engineered Ukrainian coup, and a crackdown on whistleblowers. For decades the media echoed the blatant deceptions of these men.  From slick to obvious to slick went the propaganda.  And then the shock and awe of Mr. Trump’s election.  How to deal with one of their own, one spawned from the entertainment-media-news complex? Trump accused them of creating fake news.  He relentlessly attacked them, as if to say: you hypocrites; you accuse me of what you do.  Then he continued to tweet out his messages meant to confuse and inflame.  He continued to make statements that were then contradicted.  What were the poor media to do except one-up him.  This they have done.

We have now entered a new phase of propaganda where sowing mass confusion on every issue 24/7 is the method of choice.

But therein lies hope if we can grasp the meaning of Oscar Wilde’s paradoxical statement: “When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.”

Media’s Grim Addiction to Perseverance Porn

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By Adam Johnson

Source: FAIR

You’ve seen or heard or read the personal interest story a thousand times: An enterprising seven-year-old collects cans to save for college (ABC7, 2/8/17), a man with unmatched moxie walks 15 miles to his job (Today, 2/20/17), a low-wage worker buys shoes for a kid whose mother can’t afford them (Fox5, 12/14/16), an “inspiring teen” goes right back to work after being injured in a car accident (CBS News, 12/16/16). All heartwarming tales of perseverance in the face of impossible odds—and all ideological agitprop meant to obscure and decontextualize the harsh reality of dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Man walks eight miles in the snow to get to work every day (ABC 27, 3/14/17). Or was it a teen walking 10 miles in freezing weather to a job interview (New York Daily News, 2/26/13)? Or was it 10 miles to work every day (Times Herald Record, 3/17/17)? Or was it 12 (ABC News, 2/22/17) or 15 (Today, 2/20/17) or 18 (Evening Standard, 2/9/09) or 21 (Detroit Free Press, 1/20/15)? Who cares—their humanity is irrelevant. They’re clickbait, stand-in bootstrap archetypes meant to validate the bourgeois morality of click-happy media consumers.

These stories are typically shared for the purposes of poor-shaming, typically under the guise of inspirational life advice. “This man is proof we all just need to keep walking, no matter what life throws at us,” insisted Denver ABC7 anchor Anne Trujillo, after sharing one of those stories of a poor person forced to walk thousands of miles a year to survive.

A healthy press would take these anecdotes of “can do” spirit and ask bigger questions, like why are these people forced into such absurd hardship? Who benefits from skyrocketing college costs? Why does the public transit in this person’s city not have subsidies for the poor? Why aren’t employers forced to offer time off for catastrophic accidents? But time and again, the media mindlessly tells the bootstrap human interest story, never questioning the underlying system at work.

One particularly vulgar example was CBS News(12/16/16) referring to an “inspiring” African-American kid who had to work at his fast food job with an arm sling and a neck brace after a car accident. To compound the perseverance porn, he was, at least in part, doing so to help donate to a local homeless charity. Here we have a story highlighting how society has colossally failed its most vulnerable populations—the poor, ethnic minorities, children and the homeless—and the take-home point is, “Ah gee, look at that scrappy kid.”

Journalism is as much—if not more—about what isn’t reported as what is. Here a local reporter is faced with a cruel example of people falling through the cracks of the richest country on Earth, and their only contribution is to cherry-pick one guy who managed—just barely—to cling on to the edge.

Perseverance porn goes hand in hand with the rise of a GoFundMe economy that relies on personal narrative over collective policy, emotional appeals over baseline human rights. $930 million out of the $2 billion raised on GoFundMe since its inception in 2010 was for healthcare expenses, while an estimated 45,000 people a year die a year due to a lack of medical treatment. Meanwhile, anchors across cable news insist that single-payer healthcare is “unaffordable,” browbeating guests who support it, while populating their broadcasts with these one-off tales of people heroically scraping by.

It’s part of a broader media culture of anecdotes in lieu of the macro, moralizing “success” rather than questioning systemic problems. Perseverance porn may seem harmless, but in highlighting handpicked cases of people overcoming hardship without showing the thousands that didn’t—much less asking broader questions as to what created these conditions—the media traffics in decidedly right-wing tropes. After all, if they can do it, so can you—right?

3 Signs You Might Be a Pawn of the New World Order

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By Sigmund Fraud

Source: Activist Post

The mother lode of all conspiracies is the New World Order. In essence, it is a high-level, multi-generational plan to render all sovereign national governments subservient to an unelected, supranational, authoritarian world government. In this scheme, the people of planet earth will be micromanaged with strict social, technological and financial controls. It is the total consolidation of global power into the hands of a ruthless, minority elite who aim to rape the planet and enslave the human race.

They can’t do it alone, though, they need your help. They need witting and unwitting minions to set the brush fires of revolutionary change in our towns and cities. They need pawns to agitate and disrupt the relative peace, and to upend the status quo with turmoil. They need senseless, animal-like violence, caught on camera and replayed ad infinitum on cable news and social media. They need terror, of both the foreign and domestic variety. They need fear in the streets, and fear in the minds of the proles.

Most of all, though, they need you to create chaos, so that they can bring order.

The powers that be, those demons of the deep state, those orchestrators of fear, famine, debt and war, cannot achieve their plan without leading the masses into confusion and disarray, for only then will the masses demand an end to their own freedoms and privacy. And sadly, it appears their army of minions is growing in strength and audacity.

In the aftermath of Charlottesville it is more clear than ever that there is no shortage of pawns for the New World Order. The armies of ignorance are gathering, and here are three signs you might be among them.

1. You’re Playing the Divide and Conquer Game

Left vs. Right. Black vs. White. Republican vs. Democrat. Citizen vs. Immigrant. Communist vs. Fascist. Have vs. Have Not. My Team vs. Your Team. Me vs. You.

There a thousand and one ways for a society to faction and split apart, but without community and unity we are lost, doomed and done. If you’re entrenched in one side of any dualistic paradigm, seeking to convert or to crush the other side, then you’re playing right into the hands of the NWO.

The tactic of top-down divide and conquer is the oldest play in the book of how to overthrow sovereign people. The rulers foment conflict amongst the people, then step out of the way and let them fight it out, so that they can step in later as the benevolent savior… big brother.

If you’re playing this game, then you’re doing their work for them.

2.) You’re a Vocal Supporter of the War Du Jour

Today the drums are beating for a nuclear assault against North Korea… and military intervention in Venezuela. Just recently we’ve been told we need to prepare for conflict with Russia, and that an invasion of Syria is in our best interests. Prior to that we destroyed Libya and Iraq, we occupied Afghanistan, and we’ve been using the war on drugs and the war on terror as casus belli for interference in dozens of countries around the world.

The imperial mindset is several generations deep in America, and the citizenry has all but fully abandoned the anti-war stance in favor of gung-ho, jingoistic cheerleading of any and all military escapades.

The New World Order is brute force, but in our hyper-connected world they need to create the appearance of public support in order to advance the military industrial colonization of the world. It cannot do this without the public support and advocacy of at least some segment of the proletariat.

If you’re always on board for the expansion of international conflict, taking cues from mainstream media in this regard, and demanding action against all of our perceived enemies, you are aiding and abetting the New World Order.

3.) You Direct Your Anger and Frustration Towards Anyone but Those at the Very Top of the Pyramid

Zero doubt there are a million problems plaguing our complex world today, and it can be comforting to blame someone whom you can look in the eye, someone who is unprotected by the wealth and security afforded by the oligarchy. Emotional reactions to the stresses in our modern world are to be expected, but without knowledge of the contemporary power structures pulling the big strings, those reactions can be sorely misdirected onto lesser players and other pawns.

The truth is out there. At the root, a geo-political financial elite is conquering the world through manipulation of currencies, the imposition of astronomically insurmountable levels of public and private debt, and full-spectrum military dominance of uncooperative nations. This program is far above and beyond the capacity of your fellow citizen.

If you’re convinced that taking your outrage to the streets in war against your fellow countrymen is going to solve the problems of the world, you’re helping to fulfill the goals of the New World Order.

Final Thoughts

Social unrest and civil war are the final stepping-stones to a brave new authoritarian future. In order to get there, the American people must exhibit a self-motivated and determined resolve for violence against each other.

The New World Order needs blue pill takers, those people who deliberately choose ignorance in exchange for spurious peace of mind. They need useful idiots to help distract the rest of the population from the crimes of the oligarchy. They need armies of volunteer foot soldiers and pawns who will create the conditions necessary for martial law and even broader restrictions of rights and freedoms.

For the New World Order to succeed, we must ultimately demand our own slavery.

How mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media pump their government’s lies to deceive the public

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: Intrepid Report

Now that finally the U.S. government has officially terminated its arming and training of the jihadist gangs that are fighting to overthrow and replace Syria’s government, the neoconservative mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media are disagreeing with each other over how to communicate this fact to the American people without contradicting, or otherwise violating, the false ‘history’ they’ve all been presenting and preserving, throughout the past five years, which has described the U.S. government as being opposed to the jihadists in Syria, instead of as the U.S. government’s arming and training jihadists to overthrow and replace Syria’s government. That’s a pretty blatant ‘historical’ lie, which they’ve all been maintaining, now, for five years; and, they’re at loggerheads over whether or how they’ll deal with it, now that the program (whose very existence they’ve helped the government to hide from the public) has been so publicly and suddenly ordered to end.

On July 19, a neoconservative Democratic Party newspaper, the Washington Post, headlined one of their many anti-Trump news-articles, “Trump ends covert CIA program to arm anti-Assad rebels in Syria, a move sought by Moscow.” Their angle on this (actually momentous and constructive) action by Trump to abandon ‘the rebels’ (almost all of whom are, in fact, jihadists), was that this Republican president had done that in order to please Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (who defends Syria’s government, which secular government is knee-jerk-vilified in this and all American newspapers), and the WP article quoted neoconservatives who criticized the move by Trump to end the program.

The August 7 issue of a neoconservative Republican Party magazine, The Weekly Standard, headlines “Trump Got This One Right: Shutting down the CIA’s ghost war in Syria,” and doesn’t attack the previous, Democratic, president for having initiated and run that “ghost war,” and doesn’t make clear what it was, or why it was being waged, but does say hostile things against the leaders both of Russia and of Syria, such as that “Putin . . . has the blood of many Syrian civilians on his hands,” and allegations also against the Syrian government, such as:

Russian and Syrian jets have indiscriminately and repeatedly bombed civilian targets. The Assad regime has used chemical weapons, which Trump himself objected to, bombing a Syrian airfield in response. The United States cannot endorse these war crimes by allying itself with the perpetrators of mass murder in Syria.

Besides the fact that at least some of those assertions are demonstrably false, the United States government has actually (and often) done such things as that propaganda-article alleges Russia and Syria to have done, but nothing is said in this far-right magazine about that; readers of The Weekly Standard don’t get to see even a mention of this reality. The publication fools its readers, instead of informs them.

What’s even more important to take note of here, however, is that the article does not so much as even just mention the key fact: that Russia’s forces were invited into Syria by Syria’s secular government, in order to defend it against the jihadist gangs America was assisting, and that America’s forces weren’t invited by Syria’s government, but are instead invaders there, trying to overthrow that government, and are not only trying to help to defeat the ISIS jihadists who have also invaded Syria in order to overthrow Syria’s secular government. The crucial fact, that the Obama administration was insistent that Russia in Syria not bomb Al Qaeda forces in Syria and that that insistence upon protecting Al Qaeda there was the key reason why Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to reach an agreement with Russia about Syria had failed (they were actually sabotaged by his own boss, President Obama), is ignored by The Weekly Standard. (Also ignored by this far-right magazine is that the U.S. government has the blood of at least as many “Syrian civilians on its hands” there, as does the Russian government or any other participant in the war. That magazine’s playing to this false ‘us’-against-‘them’ prejudice, insults the intelligence of its readers, but is done in order to divert their duped reader’s attention away from the reader’s real enemies, which include the owners of that magazine, who want to manipulate, instead of to inform, their readership, for the benefit of Republican aristocrats. Those aristocrats need these dupes to remain duped.)

This shows that even when Republican ‘news’ media defend a Republican president who is reversing an imperialistic policy of his Democratic predecessor, it’s done in such a way, so it’s designed to keep the American public still deceived about the actual ugly history, which indicts both of America’s political parties—indicts the U.S. government itself, at its highest levels, where both parties are united together, in order to conquer the entire planet (including Syria, including Russia), for the benefit of America’s aristocrats.

Instead of reporting this crucial truth, The Weekly Standard says:

Russia intervened in Syria in September 2015, and the timing was not accidental. Just months earlier, in March, the “Army of Conquest” took over the northwestern province of Idlib. This rebel coalition was no band of moderates. It was led by Nusra and included its closest Islamist and jihadist partners. The Army of Conquest was on the march, threatening the Assad family’s stronghold of Latakia on the coast.

The message the magazine is trying to convey to its conservative American readership, is that Russia there was defending “the Assad family,” and not defending Syria’s sovereignty over Syria’s own territory—not defending the independence of the Syrian government, from the demands of the U.S. aristocracy (which are mainly concerned with building oil and gas pipelines through Syria in order to replace Russia as the main energy-supplier to the world’s biggest energy-market, the EU, by the U.S. and its royal Arab allies as the main energy-suppliers there).

This is an imperialistic war, and the only way for the U.S. aristocracy to win it, is militarily (and/or via coups such as it did in Ukraine) to break apart Russia’s foreign alliances, in order to grab control of Russia’s assets (including that oil and gas)—but the U.S. oligarchs are also going after China’s assets, and Iran’s assets, and the assets of any well-armed government that’s not yet a vassal-nation to the U.S. aristocracy (vassals such as Europe, Japan, and all other U.S. allies).

America (with the assistance of the Sauds, and of the U.S. aristocracy’s other fundamentalist-Sunni business-partners in the Middle East) uses jihadists to serve as those “boots on the ground,” against secular governments such as Syria and Russia, because that’s a lot cheaper to do than to re-institute the U.S. military draft and to send tens of thousands of American soldiers out to overthrow, or at least to weaken, the ‘enemy’ government. It’s much cheaper “boots on the ground,” to grab new territory via these proxies, than via U.S. troops.

The supreme international issue in our time is sovereignty—the independence, or freedom, of nations. It’s international democracy, which is really at stake, in all of this. The alternative (which the U.S. government leads) is international fascism. It’s a vast program, not composed merely of invasions (the ‘Defense’ Department) and of coups (the State Department, etc.).

Now that (after 24 February 1990) the United States has been committed to world-conquest, there is, regarding international news-reporting in the United States, nothing that is fundamentally true that’s reported in the U.S. ‘news’ media, regarding international relations—it’s all based upon a shared lie by both wings of the U.S. aristocracy, Republican and Democratic, saying that the U.S. government supports freedom and democracy around the world, and that the nations which the U.S. government is trying to conquer, do not favor international freedom and democracy. The standard American account (that it supports, instead of opposes, democracy around the world) is the exact opposite of the truth.

For example: How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when twice in one day the secretary general of the United Nations said that the U.S. president’s insistence upon having a veto-power regarding who would, and who would not, be allowed to become Syria’s next president, was “totally unfair and unreasonable” and that instead “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people.” No publicity for those statements. None at all. The fact (that the U.S. president refused to accept that “The future of Assad must be determined by the Syrian people”) was shocking. But it wasn’t reported to the American people. Americans never knew about it.

How much publicity did the U.S. ‘news’ media provide when the U.S. government was one of only three governments in the entire world to vote in the U.N. General Assembly against a resolution to condemn racism, fascism, and denial of the Holocaust? None. None at all. The fact was shocking. But it, too, wasn’t reported.

And: How many Americans know that on the night of 24 February 1990, the U.S. president secretly told the chancellor of West Germany that all of their statements to Soviet President (soon to become only Russia’s president) Mikhail Gorbachev that the U.S. and its alliances would end the Cold War on their side if the Soviet Union and its alliances did on theirs, had been mere lies and that the Cold War would henceforth continue to be waged on the Western side until Russia itself would be conquered?

How can a nation be a ‘democracy,’ while its government (and its ‘news’ media) hides the most important parts of history, and pumps instead lies, to its people, regarding international relations? Who is the actual sovereign in the United States—its public, or its aristocracy?

And how many U.S. news media will carry this article, which is submitted to all of them, to publish free-of-charge? For any of them that has a large audience, to publish it, could precipitate an unprecedented revolution within the U.S. aristocracy itself (a revolution against their lies), because it would, in effect, officially acknowledge that the existing ‘history’ is founded upon lies. But, if this fact is not publicly recognized in the U.S. now, then when will the truth about these matters be allowed to be published here? Or, will it ever? Or will it never.

The Washington Post’s article said that “a current official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity” said: “Putin won in Syria.” The anonymous source didn’t say: “The Syrian people won in Syria.”

Western-sponsored polls in Syria showed that 55% of Syrians wanted Assad to remain as president, and 82% of Syrians blamed America for the presence of jihadists in Syria trying to overthrow Assad.

Are the U.S. ‘news’ media hopeless—beyond salvaging? Is democracy in America beyond salvaging? Is 1984 here locked-in? What would that mean for the future of the world?

‘News’ media in the countries that are allied with the U.S. are just as trashy. For example, here’s an article from a brilliant blogger ripping to shreds an August 1 article from Britain’s Reuters ‘news’ agency, about the war in Yemen. That Reuters ‘news’-report could just as well have been published by the New York Times or Washington Post.

Maybe ‘news’ media now are that rotten all over the world. But any mainstream ‘news’ medium in the U.S., or its allied countries, has no realistic basis for criticizing ‘news’ media in other nations. Yet they do criticize the press in those nations, constantly. That’s just another lie, from ‘news’ media that might as well be pure lies.

The presumption when reading the ‘news’ should therefore be: What are they really trying to sell, and to whom? In a world dominated by lies, the thing that’s actually more important than anything else, is the motives. And nothing should then be believed on the basis of trust. In international relations, everything now is war, and the first victim of war is truth. And that is the reality today.