Tag Archives: Media Literacy

Phantom Performances – The Rise of the Spectacle

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By Kingsley L. Dennis

Source: Waking Times

ˈspɛktək(ə)l/

noun

a visually striking performance or display

an event or scene regarded in terms of its visual impact

“Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image.” ~John Ralston Saul, Voltaire’s Bastards

“Magical thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but also of totalitarian culture.” ~Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion

Welcome to the spectacle. Or perhaps I should say the kind of spectacle that has become the face of entertainment that pervades our westernized cultures. The way that the spectacle succeeds is that it isn’t so much about fooling us into believing its lies as real, but rather that it is we who ask to be fooled. We seek to suspend our sense of reality, to pursue a space of escape. The spectacle pulls us in because we lend our willingness to its agenda. If we are honest, in this post-truth age, we will admit to living in an age of spectacle. And it is from this that many of us receive our interpretation of reality. Since the middle of the 20th century onwards the ‘western spectacle’ has been in the form of media advertisement and propaganda. We may think that we’ve only recently arrived at the age of the spectacle, where Disneylandification is becoming the norm, and Super Bowls are interspersed with scantily-clad singers, and TV programs appear in the slots between advertisers. Yet the whole spectacle show has been a form of function creep ever since telecommunications first emerged as a social phenomenon. The image has been with humanity since the first dawn of our arising; from cave paintings to hieroglyphics to cuneiform clay tablets. The major difference is that today the spectacle of the image has not only gone global, but it has also gotten inside of our heads.

Western cultures especially (and the US specifically) have now made the image, the spectacle, and hence the illusion so grand, so vivid, and so persuasively realistic that they are becoming our basis of reality. We swing from one illusion to the alternative, which is still yet another grand spectacle; just as we swing from the political left to the right, believing each side is distinctly different. Yet each is a part of the same bubble that customizes our lives – they form a part of our news, our heroes, our tragedies, and our dreams. We now serve a mosaic of ideals carefully crafted as a patchwork of phantom performances. Nothing is ever real anymore except the painful extremes that pervade our daily existence: the violence, the suffering, the deprivation, the inequality, the disease. Only these fragments that create great pain become the real, and from these many of us seek refuge in a plenitude of diversions, distractions, and triviality.

Western civilization has chosen to be played out upon a grand stage where the performance – of invented storylines and scripts – runs the show. We move through social realities that are an entanglement of signs, virtual connections, and social media status. It’s all about who is going to be the next ‘influencer’? We are encouraged to project back into the world our entertainment-mediatized fantasies. People begin to act out their imaginary landscapes, often in violent and distorted ways, as young students massacre their classmates before going to eat at McDonalds. This is the hyperreal that distorts a stable reality, making it harder to gain a grounded perspective on things. People are increasingly being guided by the false totems of media-militarized-entertainment.

The media spectacle gives us our modern guiding images. This is similar to how in the Middle Ages images depicted in stained glass windows and paintings of religious torment or salvation acted to control and influence the social behavior of our ancestors. For many of us the white-bearded god above is dead, so we have media depictions of heroes, adventurers, McGyvers, celebrity-cosmetic makeovers, beauty pageants, talk shows and reality television to be our social guides. An illusory sensate reality has been erected that runs on pseudo-lives and phantom performances. Such phantom performances mask our personal failures and conveniently hide them behind a curtain of the unreal. People prefer to watch the rich and famous on television rather than face the domestic unhappiness of their own lives. Why have ice when you can have bubblegum-flavored ice-cream?

Luckily for those of us who live in the west we inhabit a world of easy-correction where we can make ourselves better if we buy certain products, ingest certain foods, and hang-out in the right yoga gyms. For every situation there is seemingly a commercial solution. We have not been abandoned, after all. In the realm of hyperreality, our fantasies are no longer an impediment to success. On the contrary, our fantasies are the portals through which we enter. All we need is for the world of the media to give us our dream. Everybody has talent, as the reality shows tell us – ‘Britain’s Got Talent,’ ‘America’s Got Talent:’ in fact, we’ve all got talent! We are all of us hidden unique performers, and the world ‘out there’ is begging for our arrival. This is not to be confused with the manipulation by greedy commercial enterprises that are ready to discard you as soon as your ‘talent’ no longer sells.

Yet the truth of the matter is that the spectacle of celebrity culture seeks commodities, not real individuals or souls. It doesn’t want that we seek for any form of transcendence, illumination, or real growth. It is a world that seeks only those that feed the phantom and encourage others to do the same. It is the ‘real’ that gets pushed into a black hole – to become a figment of the imagination, whilst imaginary dreams take its place. Celebrity culture thrives from the very lack of inner reflection. There is no ‘going within’ unless it is a form of medication going down our throats. If we are brutally honest, the celebrity spectacle is an ugly specter that can be as cruel as it is superficial.

The Spectacle of Celebrity Culture

No one achieves celebrity status on their own. It is a stage performance that requires a hoard of cultural enablers; from media, marketers, promoters, agents, handlers, and a host of hungry and gullible people. It is a veritable stage of actors, with each person in it to gain something for themselves. They either seek attention, satisfaction, fame, wealth, or a combination of these. Celebrity culture has come to dominate how many of us define our sense of belonging. It has come to define how we relate to the world around us, and in this respect has disfigured our notions of social belonging and community. Celebrity culture funds and feeds our own movies inside our heads as we invent our roles and behavior. It is a culture in which very few participants are even real for a day.

We idolize celebrities and often project them as idealized forms of ourselves. And yet through this substitution we move further away from any real self-actualization. The transcendent – the Real – does not do substitutes. By throwing our fantasies onto others we are diminishing our own power. In the words of one serious journalist,

We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them completely fictional, that have become the staple of news, celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop psychology …in contemporary culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft. 1

We are subtly pushed through the well-structured stagecraft whilst all the time thinking that it is real. Our contemporary ‘death of the gods’ has been replaced by a divine adoration of celebrities and celebrity culture. Celebrity items, like holy relics, are paraded, idolized, and sold for vast sums. People rush for autographs, only to sell them later on eBay to make an unhealthy profit. Celebrity personal possessions are sold off at prestigious auction houses for astronomical prices, so aging people can wear the clothes of their idols. The glitzy suit that Elvis wore before dying in a Las Vegas toilet; or the dress that Marilyn Monroe wore to show her knickers to the world above a subway vent. Everything is up for grabs – the profane is made sacred, and then sacrificed as celebrity talismans. It all engenders a performance of hysteria, leading sometimes to stalking, or what is nowadays referred to as ‘trolling,’ as celebrity private photos are hacked and shared online. It’s happened to Emma Watson, Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson, Scarlett Johansson…and the list goes on, and on, and on.

The world of celebrity culture thrusts us into a moral void. People are valued by their appearance and their skin-deep beauty rather than their humanity. Such a culture focuses upon onanistic desires and ways for self-gratification. The cult of self ‘has within it the classic traits of psychopaths: superficial charm, grandiosity, and self-importance; a need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying, deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel remorse or guilt.’2 The cult of self also promotes the right to get whatever we wish, and celebrity media plays into this, often at the cost of the celebrity who suffers from social media harassment and online trolling. Celebrity public life is not a sacred space; instead, it has become a theatre of performance that is open for all spectators. And those spectators who surround themselves with celebrity culture tend to live in the present, fed by an endless stream of packaged information. They live by credit promises, ignorant to the future prospect of unmanageable debt. They are hostage to a culture that keeps them enthralled, like a television commercial replete with pleasing jingles. They navigate their purchases through well-known brands, eyeing the famous logos as guides. It is an image-saturated reality, bright and tantalizing, offering comfort and satisfaction upon all levels – until the credit runs out. Then the person becomes an outlaw to the very system that fattened them up like foie gras ducks.

These are the trivial diversions that for many are necessary, and which exist in cultures that prize shallow entertainment above substance. We may wonder whether the consumerist celebrity culture is a compensation for the loss of our true freedom regarding the human spirit and our well-being. And celebrities too are often trapped within their own fairy-tale prisons. They are skillfully controlled by their handlers and pushed in front of the media – all this to compensate for the insatiable appetites of those thirsty spectators that swarm upon celebrity culture. We are tantalizingly shown that even us, the humble spectators, can triumph in fame through the lens of reality television. The celebrity machinery oils itself on the media-creation of third and fourth-rate celebrities that have their fifteen minutes of fame – crammed together on desert islands, stuffing insects into their mouths as they bad-mouth their once beloved ‘best-friend’ and vote them off the show. Reality survival, it seems, comes at a cost. And then when they finally emerge into the ‘real world’ of the hyperreal they throng and mingle with other reality-stars under the glare of media spotlight in the vain hope that together they can populate an illusory world of the celebrity.

The world of reality television is another limb on the body of phantom performance. In the last decade a multitude of reality shows have cropped up on our television screens; and they all have one thing in common – they involve being constantly watched. Popular shows such as Big Brother put strangers to live together with round-the-clock constant surveillance. These strangers are even videoed in their beds as they sleep or fondle and kiss with other contestants. Sex lives are ogled over alongside the tears and on-screen breakdowns. Then the television psychologists are wheeled out to offer ‘expert commentary’ on the contestant’s state for mass consumption. Yet underneath all this glamour and glitz is the subtle message that intrusive surveillance is a normal feature of contemporary societies. In fact, it even masquerades as something cool that can be shared online, and which can make us famous. However, the brute reality is that such reality shows normalize what would otherwise be blatant non-constitutional intervention. And yet such shows make surveillance not only routine but a potentially enjoyable part of our modern lives. We are being conditioned into monitoring and sharing our own lives for others to see. Our phantom performances can make any one of us into an enviable star.

Social media is now rife with home-grown videos where everyone from toddler to teenager to retiree is making their performances visible to the image-hungry collective. Selfies too are the new fashionable rage as we perform in front of ourselves. This trend has become so pervasive that each year the number of selfie-related deaths has been increasing. In 2015 more people died from taking selfies than from shark attacks.[i] A dedicated online Wikipedia page has been established to record some of the ongoing ‘selfie-deaths.’ Here are a few examples:

Two young men died in the Ural Mountains after they pulled the pin from a live hand grenade to take a selfie. The phone with the picture remained as evidence of the circumstance of their deaths. (Russia, January 2015)

An 18-year-old died when she attempted to take the “ultimate selfie”, posing with a friend on top of a train in the north-eastern Romanian city of Iași when her leg touched a live wire above which electrocuted her with 27,000 volts. (Romania, May 2015)

A 19-year-old from Houston died after trying to take an Instagram selfie while holding a loaded gun to his head. He accidentally fired the gun and shot himself in the throat. (USA, September 2015)

A 17-year-old student, Andrey Retrovsky from Vologda, Russia, fell to his death attempting to take a selfie while hanging from a rope from a nine-story building. The rope snapped. Retrovsky was known for taking ‘extreme’ selfies and posting them to his Instagram account. (Russia, September 2015)

Selfie deaths, it seems, are global – and not a rare occurrence. Our phantom performances come at a cost. In a world where the image is iconic, more and more people are losing themselves in a reality where a sense of achievement comes from catching the ‘ultimate selfie.’

The drive for inner fulfilment, transcendence, and growth has been wavered aside in favor of the pixilated image. We fear not being seen. We dread being anonymous. Even being a spectral ghost is preferable to being dead.

We Are the Image

The new perspective on the world is pixilated. We are awash with images without substance and which are routinely fetishized as iconic. Signs are lacking immanence; they are fleeting and transient like never before. That is why corporations spend millions trying to find an image logo that will stick around long enough to be implanted into our minds. Images are becoming signs to the disappearance of the real. Images are the new believable reality; now no one cares that the original behind the image has quietly slipped away. The world exists as if in a play of phantom appearances. The image has taken centerstage within the space of the new real. We are now the image.

Yet the danger here is that in being given the image with its glamour and glitz we are in return giving up our critical and intellectual tools that help us cope with a complex world. Where once we had the faculty of separating illusion from reality we now have a simplified hyperreal world where everything can be explained away by a platitude of post-truth phrases. Does it even matter anymore that Las Vegas with its illusion of France with the mock Eiffel Tower, or its pseudo-canals of Venice, are far from the reality of France or Venice? How many people care? Or that the fantasy worlds within the various Disney theme parks are merging with the entertainment-saturated lives outside? Would it truly matter if we were all living within a controlled environment as depicted within the film The Truman Show? Or maybe, just maybe, such films are actually trying to tell us something – to wake us up?

The danger now is that our cultural spectacles – our celebrity culture and spectral images – are making any other alternative seem dull to us. It may be that in an age of simplified gratification any complex reality is boring. What the ‘real’ presents us with may no longer be enough. In its place we are perhaps seeking a false magic.

We have lost touch with that essential something that can work like magic in our lives. As one thinker recently stated:

We live in changing times whereby humanity is undergoing a transformation…We need to understand phenomena at deeper levels, and not just accept what we are told, or what is fed to us through well-structured social institutions and channels. We must learn to accept that our thinking is a great tangible spiritual force for change. 2

The notion that our ideas, our vision, our projections onto the world can be a ‘great tangible spiritual force for change’ is eluding us. Never before has it been so important to trust in the power of the human spirit, and to put forth, with honesty and integrity, the innate human power. The alternative is that we slide into the slipstream of our own phantom performances – we become the image.

 

Extract from the book Bardo Times: hyperreality, high-velocity, simulation, automation, mutation – a hoax?

Endnotes 

1 Hedges, Chris. 2010. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books, p15

 2 Gulbekian, S.E. 2004. In the Belly of the Beast: Holding Your Own in Mass Culture. Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, p251

[i] See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/11881900/More-people-have-died-by-taking-selfies-this-year-than-by-shark-attacks.html

How To Defeat The Empire

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

One of the biggest and most consistent challenges of my young career so far has been finding ways to talk about solutions to our predicament in a way that people will truly hear. I talk about these solutions constantly, and some readers definitely get it, but others will see me going on and on about a grassroots revolution against the establishment narrative control machine and then say “Okay, but what do we do?” or “You talk about problems but never offer any solutions!”

Part of the difficulty is that I don’t talk much about the old attempts at solutions we’ve already tried that people have been conditioned to listen for. I don’t endorse politicians, I don’t advocate starting a new political party, I don’t support violent revolution, I don’t say that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and the proletariat will inevitably rise up against the bourgeoisie, and in general I don’t put much stock in the idea that our political systems are in and of themselves sufficient for addressing our biggest problems in any meaningful way.

What I do advocate, over and over and over again in as many different ways as I can come up with, is a decentralized guerrilla psywar against the institutions which enable the powerful to manipulate the way ordinary people think, act and vote.

I talk about narrative and propaganda all the time because they are the root of all our problems. As long as the plutocrat-controlled media are able to manufacture consent for the status quo upon which those plutocrats built their respective empires, there will never be the possibility of a successful revolution. People will never rebel against a system while they’re being successfully propagandized not to. It will never, ever happen.

Most people who want drastic systematic changes to the way power operates in our society utterly fail to take this into account. Most of them are aware to some extent that establishment propaganda is happening, but they fail to fully appreciate its effects, its power, and the fact that it’s continually getting more and more sophisticated. They continue to talk about the need for a particular political movement, for this or that new government policy, or even for a full-fledged revolution, without ever turning and squarely focusing on the elephant in the room that none of these things will ever happen as long as most people are successfully propagandized into being uninterested in making them happen.

It’s like trying to light a fire without first finding a solution to the problem that you’re standing under pouring rain. Certainly we can all agree that a fire is sorely needed because it’s cold and wet and miserable out here, but we’re never going to get one going while the kindling is getting soaked and we can’t even get a match lit. The first order of business must necessarily be to find a way to protect our fire-starting area from the downpour of establishment propaganda.

A decentralized guerrilla psywar against the propaganda machine is the best solution to this problem.

By psywar I mean a grassroots psychological war against the establishment propaganda machine with the goal of weakening public trust in pro-empire narratives. People only believe sources of information that they trust, and propaganda cannot operate without belief. Right now trust in the mass media is at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information is at an all-time high. Our psywar is fought with the goal of using our unprecedented ability to circulate information to continue to kill public trust in the mass media, not with lies and propaganda, but with truth. If we can expose journalistic malpractice and the glaring plot holes in establishment narratives about things like war, Julian Assange, Russia etc, we will make the mass media look less trustworthy.

By decentralized I mean we should each take responsibility for weakening public trust in the propaganda machine in our own way, rather than depending on centralized groups and organizations. The more centralized an operation is, the easier it is for establishment manipulators to infiltrate and undermine it. This doesn’t mean that organizing is bad, it just means a successful grassroots psywar won’t depend on it. If we’re each watching for opportunities to weaken public trust in the official narrative makers on our own personal time and in our own unique way using videos, blogs, tweets, art, paper literature, conversations and demonstrations, we’ll be far more effective.

By guerrilla I mean constantly attacking different fronts in different ways, never staying with the same line of attack for long enough to allow the propagandists to develop a counter-narrative. If they build up particularly strong armor around one area, put it aside and expose their lies on an entirely different front. The propagandists are lying constantly, so there is never any shortage of soft targets. The only consistency should be in attacking the propaganda machine as visibly as possible.

As far as how to go about that attack, my best answer is that I’m leading by example here. I’m only ever doing the thing that I advocate, so if you want to know what I think we should all do, just watch what I do. I’m only ever using my own unique set of skills, knowledge and assets to attack the narrative control engine at whatever points I perceive to be the most vulnerable on a given day.

So do what I do, but keep in mind that each individual must sort out the particulars for themselves. We’ve each got our own strengths and abilities that we bring to the psywar: some of us are funny, some are artistic, some are really good at putting together information and presenting it in a particular format, some are good at finding and boosting other people’s high-quality attacks. Everyone brings something to the table. The important thing is to do whatever will draw the most public interest and attention to what you’re doing. Don’t shy away from speaking loud and shining bright.

It isn’t necessary to come up with your own complete How It Is narrative of exactly what is happening in our world right now; with the current degree of disinformation and government opacity that’s too difficult to do with any degree of completion anyway. All you need to do is wake people up in as many ways as possible to the fact that they’re being manipulated and deceived. Every newly opened pair of eyes makes a difference, and anything you can do to help facilitate that is energy well spent.

Without an effective propaganda machine, the empire cannot rule. Once we’ve crippled public trust in that machine, we’ll exist in a very different world already, and the next step will present itself from there. Until then, the attack on establishment propaganda should be our foremost priority.

Twitter Suspends Accounts For Propaganda, Has Literal Propagandist As High-Level Executive

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

Middle East Eye‘s Ian Cobain has published an exclusive titled “Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army ‘psyops’ soldier”, exposing the fact that Twitter’s senior editorial executive for Europe, the Middle East and Africa also works for an actual, literal propaganda unit in the British military called the 77th Brigade. Which is mighty interesting, considering the fact that Twitter constantly suspends accounts from non-empire-aligned nations based on the allegation that they are engaging in propaganda.

“The senior Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for the Middle East is also a part-time officer in the British Army’s psychological warfare unit,” Cobain writes. “Gordon MacMillan, who joined the social media company’s UK office six years ago, has for several years also served with the 77th Brigade, a unit formed in 2015 in order to develop ‘non-lethal’ ways of waging war. The 77th Brigade uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as podcasts, data analysis and audience research to wage what the head of the UK military, General Nick Carter, describes as ‘information warfare’.”

https://twitter.com/IanCobain/status/1178590025128251392

MacMillan’s presence in a government psyops unit was not a secret; until Middle East Eye began raising questions on the matter, it was right there on his LinkedIn profile. This is not something that anyone considering him for promotion was likely to have been unaware of. According to his (now-edited) LinkedIn page, MacMillan has been in his current position as Head of Editorial EMEA since July 2016. According to Middle East Eye, MacMillan was already a captain in the 77th Brigade by the end of 2016. His current rank there is being hidden behind a wall of government secrecy.

When questioned by Middle East Eye about MacMillan’s work in the British Army’s online propaganda program, Twitter hilariously responded, “Twitter is an open, neutral and rigorously independent platform. We actively encourage all our employees to pursue external interests in line with our commitment to healthy corporate social responsibility, and we will continue to do so.”

That’s very nice of Twitter, isn’t it? They encourage their employees to pursue wholesome external interests, whether that be tennis, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or moonlighting at a military program explicitly devoted to online psychological warfare. You know, just everyday socially responsible pastime stuff.

The fact that Twitter not only employs known propagandists but actively promotes them to executive positions is a very large and inconvenient plot hole in their “open, neutral and rigorously independent platform” story. Especially since, as I documented recently, the mass purges of foreign Twitter accounts we’ve been seeing more and more of lately always exclusively target governments and groups which are not in alignment with the interests of the US-centralized power alliance of which the UK is a part. We’ve seen mass suspensions of accounts from Cuba, China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and the Catalan independence movement on allegations of “coordinated influence operations” and “covert, manipulative behaviors”, yet Twitter currently employs a high-level executive for whom coordinated influence operations and covert, manipulative behaviors on behalf of the British government are a known vocation.

“On September 20 Twitter deleted a large number of accounts, including in MacMillan’s area of responsibility. How many of those were designated by the British state?” asks Moon of Alabama of this new report.

How many indeed?

This is just one more item on the ever-growing mountain of evidence that these giant, immensely influential social media platforms we’ve all been herded into are nothing other than state propaganda for the digital age. True, they operate in a way which disregards the official lines that are drawn between government power and corporate power and the lines that are drawn between nations, but then, so do our rulers. We are living in a globe-spanning corporate oligarchic empire, and these government-aligned Silicon Valley giants are a major part of that empire’s propaganda engine.

The real power of that empire and that oligarchy lies in their invisibile and unacknowledged nature. Officially we all live in separate, sovereign nations run by democratically elected officials; unofficially we live in a massive transnational empire ruled by a loose alliance of plutocrats and opaque government agencies where military propagandists are employed by social media monopolies to manipulate public narratives. The official mask exists only on the level of narrative, while the unofficial reality is what’s actually happening. Yet whenever you try to publicly discuss the threat that is being posed by oligarchic narrative control online, you get told by establishment loyalists and libertarians that Twitter is just a simple private business running things in a way that is entirely separate from government censorship and state propaganda.

All we clear-eyed rebels can do is keep documenting the evidence of what’s going on and pointing to it as loudly as we can. So once again for the people in the back: Twitter employs literal government propagandists as high-level executives while purging accounts from unabsorbed governments for circulating unauthorized narratives. This is a fact. Remember it.

The Incredible Belief That Corporate Ownership Does Not Influence Media Content

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By Alison Rose Levy

Source: FAIR.org

As Sen. Bernie Sanders (CJR, 8/26/19) has recently noted, corporate ownership of media interferes with the core societal function of the press: reporting and investigating key issues at the intersection of public need and governance. And nowhere is that more critical than when it comes to climate. Due to their corporate conflicts of interest, trusted news authorities have diverted us from our primary responsibility—assuring a viable habitat for our children and grandchildren.

As a journalist who has worked both inside and outside of establishment media, I see influence as embedded in a corporate media culture rather than in isolated cases of CEO dictates. It happens in little ways, such as how an interviewer frames a question, and in big ways, like the decision to exclude a topic, a person or a group of people from the airwaves.

Like most US companies, news organizations are hierarchies, which people who have worked in corporate offices can readily understand. Given that “90% of the United States’ media is controlled by five media conglomerates,” the top executive at many news outfits is likely the CEO of a multinational corporation. The word comes down from the business execs to the company’s division chiefs, as seen in countless movies (like the 1976 classic Network). This was how it was when I worked on primetime national news at CBS in the 1990s.

On the inside, it wasn’t easy to see organizational bias, when job security and team work required overlooking it. The response to the heavily promoted primetime news pairing of two well-known anchors exemplified how news personnel learn to toe the line. The two anchors had zero chemistry, but no one mentioned it, as if an unwritten code had been instantly internalized. This dragged on for two years, pulling down the network’s ratings.

Higher-ups would never offer editorial staff direct input on content. That’s what the executive and middle management were for. Would these managers confide to their staff that the big guns gave them a certain direction? No. Whatever it was, they would present it as their own, and it would be adopted.

Within this culture, controlling the content goes on in whispers, frowns, headshakes and decisions made behind closed doors. If anyone strays into a verboten zone, as I did when I proposed a feature about Native Americans, those in the know privately communicate the ethos that is expected and allowed. “We never put American Indians on air because they talk too slow,” a producer explained.

Despite such experiences, when I left CBS, I respected the many producers with whom I’d worked, many of whom are still employed at the various networks. That work experience honed editorial judgment in ways impossible to measure, for which I am infinitely grateful. It also showed me that organizational agendas and values can trump claims to objectivity.

Reporting from Independent Media

Yet over a decade later, working in progressive online media, I was still astonished that several major stories I covered, were anywhere from underplayed to entirely absent from establishment news.

When I began to cover fracking in New York state in 2009, at first both 60 Minutes (11/14/10) and the New York Times (11/27/09, 10/29/11) covered it as a Hatfield/McCoy feud between upstate rural neighbors, rather than as an invasive industrial activity with a host of health and environmental repercussions.

During the critical years of the major fracking buildout from 2005 to 2016, the  New York Times gave a prominent environmental platform to self-declared “climate champion” Andrew Revkin, whose reporting FAIR (Extra!, 2/10) called “a source of some comfort—and crowing—for the climate change denial crowd.” His pro-industry stance on fracking and naysaying on methane impacts condoned an industrial expansion that has produced far-reaching environmental damage.

The Times’ Ian Urbina (6/25/11)  did invaluable reporting on fracking’s faulty economic model. But in 2013, the paper of record closed its environmental desk, even as   Inside Climate News (1/11/13) was reporting that “worldwide coverage of climate change continued a three-year slide.”

MSNBC show hosts like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes rarely covered fracking, instead letting gas and oil industry ads reassert claims of safety. Nonprofit environmental groups, leading activists, along with a growing body of independent journalists filled the media void, including my own reporting at Huffington Post, AlterNet and EcoWatch.

The TTP

In 2014, I began to report on the Transpacific Partnership (TTP) and other concurrent global trade agreements, which are often characterized as core to President Barack Obama’s “legacy” (e.g., New York Times, 6/14/15; Washington Post, 6/24/15). The agreement’s full provisions were never revealed to the public prior to the June 2015 vote granting absolute trade authority to Obama—authority that would have passed to Trump if the agreement had been ratified in late 2016, as Obama hoped.

In conducting multiple interviews with trade analysts, as well as following the protests in Europe and the resulting leaks of the contents, I learned from  trade analyst William Waren (Connect the Dots,  1/28/15) that even prior to the TPP’s  passage and ratification, plans were underway for the buildout of  fracking, gas and oil, and coal trade and global export freed by its anticipated passage.

Nothing within the unenforceable Paris Agreement would have prevented it. In fact, the Paris Agreement provisions were nonbinding, while the trade agreements that were being secretly negotiated concurrently, including the Trade in Services Agreement(TiSA), were designed to be binding, to “effectively trump whatever commitment is made in Paris,” Waren revealed on Connect the Dots (12/9/15).

Further, the TPP’s planned instatement of an international corporate tribunal with international legal authority over all nations would have mortally injured global democracies. In 2016, Mark Ruffalo summed up what was at stake in the fight: Expanding the Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions in NAFTA via TPP

would block worldwide environmental and social progress while empowering corporations to undermine existing climate and environmental policies.

As we witness the Trump administration’s deconstruction of US environmental regulatory infrastructure—appointment by appointment, policy by policy—let’s appreciate that in defeating TPP and associated trade deals (thanks to the work of grassroots organizers and independent media), Americans dodged a bullet.

If the US had passed the TPP as planned during the 2016 lame duck session of Congress, both the US and all co-signers (a total of 12 countries) would have been contractually bound to a wholesale takedown of environmental regulations and economic barriers to fossil fuel development—as well as the loss of any right to challenge corporate rule or prevent health and environmental impacts. The climate impacts of the intended gas and oil buildout would likely have been devastating and decisive.

Nevertheless, the forward drive to pass the TPP occurred in a near void of corporate coverage. What had been negotiated behind closed doors with multinational corporations remained their business secrets. Prior to its authorization in June 2015, no mainstream outlet thoroughly investigated and disclosed the TPP’s provisions. Obama’s most memorable pro-TPP television appearance was singing about it with Jimmy Fallon.  FAIR (6/11/16) called the enthused Vox coverage (6/10/16) of Obama’s performance

a borderline parody of everything wrong with corporate-owned “new media”: What we have here is a Comcast-funded website plugging a Comcast-owned TV show to promote a trade deal aggressively lobbied for by Comcast.

Both the New York Times and its liberal economist columnist, Paul Krugman, covered the TPP infrequently. Krugman (10/6/15) professed he was a “lukewarm opponent” of it, and minimized its importance. “We’re not talking about a world-shaking deal here,” he wrote (3/11/15) three months before the Senate granted Obama the authority to sign the final agreement without further consultation or deliberation.

Prior to the vote, a college friend of the MSNBC host Chris Hayes assured me that Hayes, a former environmental reporter for The Nation, would be deeply concerned about these trade deals. I was dubious, but she was insistent. With the contact she provided, I sent all of my TPP research and sources on to Hayes. I received no response.

Rather than cover the TPP, MSNBC went on to fire Ed Schultz, the sole show host who covered trade agreements. (Sadly, the 64-year-old Schultz died in 2018.) In surveying TPP coverage, Media Matters(2/4/15) found that Schultz was the exception in a near-total blackout by all three major networks. Week after week, Hayes and other MSNBC hosts devoted airtime to meticulously dissecting far more minor concerns.

As in any large organization, the firing and hiring of staff speaks volumes to surviving staff members about the owners’ priorities. The unseen casualties among reporters of integrity, and the disservice to journalism, cannot be overestimated. Those working in corporate media get the message without anyone having to tell them, and highly paid show hosts have the most to lose.

The press’ mission is to inform the citizenry and flag abuses to power, not promote special interests. When citizens blind themselves to a news organization’s corporate entanglements, and trust the outlet to be truthful anyway, it is, to put it mildly, extraordinarily naïve.

It’s not about whether or not the public has access to a private conversation or confidential memo sent to editorial with a corporate dictate. The evidence is what’s given airtime and what isn’t over many years.

Was it just happenstance that MSNBC, for example, failed to cover the TPP after firing Ed Schultz? Comcast, the owner of MSNBC, sat at the table behind closed doors during the five-year long negotiations of the TPP’s specific trade provisions.

Have MSNBC or any of its competitors uncovered Comcast’s agenda for the trade agreements? What if concerns over intellectual property rights, for example, made it a corporate mission to pass a deal that also happened to radically hasten the climate tipping point? Should any company have that much power?

No business, no matter how sizeable, should have the right to subvert the actions and political choices necessary to address climate, as well as the activated movement capable of assuring that at long last we do what needs to be done. The only sane response is to support the movement, and the independent media outlets that provide a platform for ideas, facts, studies, polls, policy initiatives and disclosures outside the corporate media frame—and to overhaul the media to address this unfair use of public airwaves for gain and compromise as the world burns.

If the Facts Come Out, it Could Spell the End for Joe Biden

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By Ray McGovern

Source: Consortium News

The Joe Biden-friendly Establishment media has mounted a full-court press to “prove” that Biden is, well, not a crook.

The stakes are extremely high, Biden is vulnerable, and media players are using to a faretheewell the old adage about the best defense being a good offense.  The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal are desperately trying to steal the ball and get ahead in the publicity game.  But time is about to run out, and pre-emptive propaganda is unlikely to snatch victory out of the jaws of defeat. IF the facts do come out and IF they are reported, Biden’s presidential hopes may suffer a mortal blow.

When the corruption in which the former Vice President and his son Hunter were involved in Ukraine becomes more widely known, the press wants to be in position to “show” that it’s all the fault of President Donald Trump and his lawyers for trying to derail Biden’s candidacy by exposing him.  If past is precedent, the media will largely succeed.  The question is whether enough people will, nevertheless, be able to see through this all-too-familiar charade.

In an interview with The National Interest, Joe Lauria put this episode in context:

“’It was in February [2014] when Yanukovych was overthrown, and just a few months later (in May), Joe Biden’s son and a close friend of John Kerry’s stepson, they both join the board of this Ukrainian gas company. And the name of that was Burisma Holdings,’” said Joe Lauria, editor of Consortium News and a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. “’So just after an American-backed coup, you have Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden and this John Kerry family friend joining the board of probably the largest private gas producer in Ukraine. They installed the new government, and as the bounty of this coup, Joe Biden’s son personally profited. He would not have gotten that job if Yanukovych was still in power,’” Lauria told The National Interest.”

Will U.S. voters have any way of putting these dots together, and also in discerning, for example, how much truth there may be in charges that Vice President Biden pressed hard for the ouster of Ukraine’s Prosecutor General, Viktor Shokin, who was canned after investigating corruption at Burisma Holdings Ukrainian gas company of which Hunter Biden was a board member?

In this video Biden admits on the record to essentially using a billion dollar line of credit as a bribe to get the prosecutor fired.

If the truth does come out, no one will have to rely on remarks from the likes of Rudy Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers, who has called the episode “an astounding scandal of major proportions.”  That may be hyperbole but, still, the damage to Biden could be fatal.

And so, damage control is in full swing today at the Times, the Post, the Journal and other “usual suspects,” with the  Times winning the laurels with its Editorial Board, no less, weighing in with “What did Trump tell Ukraine’s president?” There have also been op-eds by Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, Anne Applebaum, Greg Sargent and (my favorite), George T. Conway III and Neal Katyal at the Post, whose headline is: “Trump has done plenty to warrant impeachment. But the Ukraine allegations are over the top.”

That title is correct.

Biden’s Brain Is Swiss Cheese And It’s Creepy That We’re Not Talking About It

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By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: CaitlinJohnstone.com

I didn’t watch the last Democratic presidential primary debates because I figured that without Tulsi Gabbard in there shaking things up it would be a boring, vapid parade of insubstantial verbal foam, and I love myself too much to go through such a horrible ordeal. By all accounts my prediction was correct, but I did miss one thing that’s been making the rounds in video clips for the last couple of days which I find absolutely bizarre.

Most of you have probably heard about Biden’s infamous “record player” comment by now, but for those of you who missed it, Biden was asked by debate moderator Linsey Davis to defend some comments he made about America’s problems with racism in the 1970s, and he responded by essentially saying that Black people don’t know how to raise their kids so they need to be taught how by social workers. Biden has been receiving mainstream criticism for his racist and paternalistic position, along with plenty of mockery for saying that parents need to be told to “make sure you have the record player on at night” so that kids hear enough words in early childhood.

It is pretty clear that Biden was trying to communicate an idea that is premised on a deeply racist and condescending worldview, so it’s to be expected that people would want to talk about that. It’s also to be expected that people would be making jokes about how the cute old man said “record player” like a grandpa. But what isn’t being discussed nearly enough is the fact that what Biden said was also a barely coherent, garbled word salad stumbling out of a brain that is clearly being eaten alive by a very serious neurological disease.

I’ve typed out a transcript of what Biden actually said, verbatim. There are no typos. I’ve also noted where Biden closes his eyes, probably to concentrate, which he does whenever he seems to be struggling especially hard to string words together. Try to read through it slowly, word-for-word, resisting the instinct to mentally re-frame it into something more coherent:

“Well they have to deal with the– Look, there is institutional segregation in this country. And from the time I got involved I started dealing with that. Redlining. Banks. Making sure that we’re in a position where– Look, talk about education. I propose that what we take is those very poor schools, the Title 1 schools, triple the amount of money we spend from 15 to 45 billion a year. Give every single teacher a raise that equal [closes eyes] raise to getting out– the sixty-thousand dollar level. 

“Number two: make sure that we bring into the help the–[closes eyes] the student, the, the teachers deal with the problems that come from home. The problems that come from home. We need–We have one school psychologist for every fifteen hundred kids in America today. It’s crazy. The teachers are reca–Now, I’m married to a teacher. My deceased wife is a teacher. They have every problem coming to them. [Closes eyes briefly] We have make sure that every single child does in fact have three, four, and five year-olds go to school–school, not daycare. School. We bring social workers into homes of parents to help them deal with how to raise their children. It’s not that they don’t wanna help, they don’t want–they don’t know quite what to do. Play the radio, make sure the television, [closes eyes tightly] the– ‘scuse me, make sure you have the record player on at night, the-the-the-the phone, make sure the kids hear words. A kid coming from a very poor school, [closes eyes] a very poor background, will hear four million words fewer spoken by the time they get there.”

Notice how it gets more garbled the longer he speaks. The response I transcribed was about eighty seconds in length. That was just one small part of a debate in which the former vice president performed no better and forgot three of his fellow candidates’ names.

Compare this befuddled, incoherent mess with footage of a younger Biden, like his famous quip about how Rudy Giuliani only ever mentions “a noun and a verb and 9/11” in a sentence, or this clip where he said if Israel didn’t exist America would have to invent it to protect its interests in the Middle East. Biden has always been notoriously gaffe-prone, but he was also sharp, alert, and articulate enough to deliver a punchline. As journalist Michael Tracey has been pointing out, what we’re consistently seeing over and over again from the former vice president now are not “gaffes”, but clear signs of cognitive decline. Contrast the difference between Biden’s younger footage and what was seen at the last debate with footage of Bernie Sanders throughout the decades, who has remained virtually identical save for appearance and hoarseness. Age does not account for this difference. Biden’s brain is dying.

It is certainly understandable that people are concerned about the presidential frontrunner having a racist worldview. But what’s really weird and creepy is how few people are discussing the obvious fact that the presidential forerunner is also clearly suffering from the early stages of some kind of dementia. The brain that spouted the gibberish transcribed above would probably score poorly on a basic test for the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, yet discussion of his inability to complete a coherent sentence is relegated to the margins of political discourse. This is someone who is campaigning to have access to the nuclear codes, yet we’re only talking about how he’s kind of racist and not about the fact that his brain is turning into Swiss cheese right before our eyes. It’s freaky.

It’s freaky, but it kind of makes sense. One common difficulty in getting early treatment for people with Alzheimer’s disease is that those suffering from it often go to great lengths to hide their impairments, and another difficulty is that their families are often deeply in denial about their loved one’s mental decline. According to the Mayo Clinic, “Some people hide their symptoms, or family members cover for them. That’s easy to understand, because Alzheimer’s dementia is associated with loss, such as loss of independence, loss of a driving privileges and loss of self.”

I think we’re seeing precisely this happening, both with Biden, and with his supporters. Biden himself is clearly doing everything he can to feign mental competency, and as a powerful politician aiming to accomplish a lifelong ambition to become the US president he’d certainly have a lot egoically invested in doing so. His supporters seem to be doing all kinds of denial mental gymnastics around his cognitive decline as well; just check out the responses to this Washington Post tweet for its article about Biden’s “record player” response.

Here are a few examples:

“Don’t pretend you didn’t understand what he was saying.”

“Actually, I recently saw a turntable for sale at Best Buys & vinyl records are back on the market. Try to keep up, WaPo.”

“My 22 year old son and all his friends play records on record players these days. If you’re insinuating that Joe is out of touch, you’re out of touch.”

“Actually currently, there are some people playing record players because they find the vinyl record has better sound quality. I think you are just picking and choosing who to go after.”

“He was saying they not hearing enough words. We did. We were read to. We listened to children’s albums. We had conversations. He was trying to get at the importance of those things. He didn’t do a great job on communicating it but he was right.”

“Twitter snark aside, there are studies to back up that claim.”

“He got 80% of the way through the debate without an embarrassing gaffe that highlights his age. Of course, Trump couldn’t get halfway through a debate without threatening his opponent with imprisonment.”

“Honestly…so what. I got the sentiment.”

“Not sure why people are being so condescending. Vinyl outsold CD last year, so, you know, record players are everywhere these days. You could say he’s stuck in the past or you could say he’s trending. Be kind.”

We saw this same impulse to protect and compensate for Biden’s mental decline from audience members during the debate, who gasped out loud when Julian Castro suggested that Biden had forgotten what he’d said two minutes ago. Many rank-and-file Democrats are so desperate for an end to an administration that is making them increasingly anxious and neurotic that they find it cognitively easier to compartmentalize away from the obvious fact that Biden is in a state of mental decline than to turn and face that reality. So they make excuses and pretend that his demented word salads are perfectly rational, hip references to the resurging popularity of vinyl records.

The only people who are absolutely acutely aware of Biden’s cognitive decline and yet still want him to become president are his handlers. There is no way his consistent pattern of verbal unintelligibility has gone unnoticed by those who are responsible for facilitating his election, and indeed The Hill reports that his “allies” have been floating the idea of scaling back his campaign appearances and scheduling them for earlier in the day when he’s not tired to help minimize his “verbal flubs”. These people are aware that Biden is losing his mind, but they are pushing him toward the White House anyway.

If Biden supporters were really intellectually honest with themselves about what’s going on, they’d see that they don’t actually want Joe Biden to be president, they want his unelected, unaccountable handlers to be president. From a position of intellectual honesty they’d be taking the position of arch neocon Bill Kristol, who once said he’d “prefer the deep state to the Trump state.”

And of course that wouldn’t be a first among US presidents even in recent history. Ronald Reagan had early signs of Alzheimer’s disease during his presidency according to his own son, and George W Bush was infamously just a puppet of his handlers like Dick Cheney. Indeed it would be possible to have an actual, literal Jim Henson puppet as president of the United States without America’s unelected power establishment skipping a single beat.

But that’s exactly the point: having a real human being in there with even a semi-functional mind can put some inertia on the most sociopathic impulses of America’s unelected permanent government. Both Trump and Obama are of course horrible presidents who have continued and expanded the Bush administration’s most evil agendas, but Obama slowed down the push to arm Ukraine against Russia and slammed the brakes on a full-scale bombing campaign on Syria, while Trump was unable to get along with John Bolton and is losing interest in Venezuela while resisting the push to start new wars. Despite all their flaws, they’ve resisted the permanent government’s worst impulses in some key ways. If it’s just Biden’s handlers and the unelected power establishment, there’s no humanity anywhere near the brake pedal.

https://twitter.com/BetaODork/status/1164553547960246272

So this makes sense to talk about no matter how you look at it. But we’re not. In mainstream discourse we’re speaking as though this is just a charmingly gaffe-prone old man who makes a few controversial statements from time to time but would still make a fine president, when really he shouldn’t even be allowed a driver’s license.

And I just find that really creepy and uncomfortable. As someone who’s never been able to leave elephants in rooms alone, the fact that the leading presidential contender is neurologically incapable of speaking coherently for eighty seconds sticks out like dog’s balls and it’s absolutely freakish that this isn’t front and center of our political discourse right now. Biden’s dementia should be the very first thing we discuss whenever his name comes up, not the last.

 

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Freedom Rider: Hollywood Propaganda Attack on Venezuela

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By Margaret Kimberly

Source: Black Agenda Report

The US is starving and killing Venezuelans in real life and, for your family’s viewing pleasure, on television screens.

“Imperialism is quite bipartisan and liberal Hollywood never saw propaganda it didn’t want to hype.”

“The military intervention of #Venezuela, put ‘on the table’ by @realDonaldTrump and his gang of fanatic supremacists, is supported by the gringo propaganda machine. Here is a fragment of their ‘cultural offerings.’”— Ernesto Villegas, Venezuela Minister of Culture

Americans are loathe to think of themselves as being propagandized.  The idea is inconsistent with notions of exceptional goodness and superiority that are constantly evoked in this country. But government propaganda does not work in a vacuum. It is bolstered by the corporate media and that includes the entertainment industry.

The latest in the story of fictitious CIA agent Jack Ryan is a case in point. The Ryan character appeared in five different feature films before moving to the small screen via Amazon Prime Video. The new season premieres in November and in this latest incarnation Ryan fights to prevent a nuclear armed Venezuela .

The upside down presentation is typical of the perversion of truth so prevalent in the United State. This country is the only one to have used nuclear weapons and still possesses more than any other. It is the United States that recently withdrew unilaterally from decades old nuclear agreements with Russia. Yet Hollywood has woven a tale of Russia, the country which wanted to keep the non-proliferation agreements, as a villain giving nuclear weapons to Venezuela.

“Government propaganda is bolstered by the entertainment industry.”

Venezuela is the victim of United States aggression in reality and now on the screen. The doctrine of “maximum pressure” has killed 40,000 Venezuelans through sanctions that have deprived that nation of food and medical care. That proof of U.S. aggression is known only to those who access independent media sources. The corporate media, even those who are allegedly liberal, parrot Donald Trump administration talking points, even if they otherwise deride the president and his team. Imperialism is quite bipartisan and liberal Hollywood never saw propaganda it didn’t want to hype.

Of course liberals who are usually overcome by Trump derangement syndrome are happy to go along with aggression schemes. Very few Democrats have expressed opposition to the anti-Venezuelan plots hatched by Trump. There is indeed foreign policy collusion but it doesn’t exist in a relationship with a foreign government. The determination to support American hegemony is an important part of the elite consensus.

That obvious truth is also disappeared and is not to be discussed in what passes for polite and “serious” company. According to myth, America is a classless, post-racial meritocracy and accepting of every political viewpoint. Of course it is anything but. The hierarchies are rigid and tenaciously defended.

“The corporate media, even those who are allegedly liberal, parrot Donald Trump administration talking points.”

Propaganda delivered via popular entertainment plays a particularly insidious role in this process. The goal is to change minds and ensure support for any act the government should choose to make. If this particular iteration of the Jack Ryan story isn’t challenged then no act or aggression will be challenged either.Media imagery is very powerful, that is why governments work so closely with corporate media to present their narratives.

Mace Neufeld  created the Jack Ryan film franchise. In 2014 he received a lifetime achievement award from the Israeli Film Festival. Curiously, the event wasn’t held in Israel at all. Instead Beverly Hills was the venue. Neufeld’s co-honoree was Arnon Milchan, a former Mossad operative who parlayed that career into producing hit films such as Twelve Years a Slave.

Israel isn’t alone in this regard. The CIA and the Pentagon both have film liaison offices . Movie credits often end with thanks to the department of defense. That always means that the plot line is approved by the military and the surveillance state.

“Movie credits often end with thanks to the department of defense.”

This grotesque lying on a mass scale cannot be ignored. The propagandists know that repetition plays a huge role in the process of indoctrination. For years Venezuela has been used as a bogeyman to convince people in this country to act against their own interests. “Socialism doesn’t work, just look at Venezuela,” is a statement made to end discussion of free health care or college education or housing or anything else that people need and want. After the 100th New York Times article which says nothing about the U.S. attack but points out that Venezuelans are hungry, the job has been done. Venezuela is now so thoroughly demonized that only a small number of people will come to its defense or even question their government’s policy against that nation.

“Venezuela is now so thoroughly demonized that only a small number of people will come to its defense.”

In 2002 and 2003 the president, the corporate media, and members of Congress all claimed that Iraq possessed chemical weapons. They wanted to make a case for war and they succeeded. Nearly 20 years later there has been no explanation or apology from the guilty parties. The same people claimed that Syria had chemical weapons and advocated for a larger war there. It isn’t hard to believe that a lie about chemicals or nukes in Venezuela could be used to do the same thing if that is what the establishment desired.

Entertainment isn’t harmless. That is why the ruling clique work together to ensure that they all stay on message. They haven’t spent millions of dollars honing the false message that Venezuela is a failed state with evil leadership for no reason. Venezuela’s culture minister, Ernesto Villegas, hits the nail squarely on the head when he describes this latest insult as “crass war propaganda masquerading as entertainment.”  If the U.S. should take military action or continue its regime change efforts, the plot will have succeeded. A few well informed people will speak out but the masses will either support an atrocity or ignore any horror that their leadership cares to visit upon the Venezuelan people. Washington and Hollywood are still working hand in hand.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.

Freedom Rider: Protest and the Corporate Media

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By Margaret Kimberly

Source: Black Agenda Report

The corporate media are steadfast partners with the United States government and faithfully follow the party line on foreign policy issues.

“The networks and the newspapers can seldom be believed.”

Corporate media always let us know who is in with the in-crowd and who is on the outs with the United States government. They don’t do so with any transparency, but by promoting some stories and disappearing others. They give great attention to events that they believe are advancing U.S. interests. The invisibility treatment goes to those who tell inconvenient truths and defy American dictates.

Protests in Hong Kong against the Chinese government and in Moscow against the Russian government are covered extensively. But only those who know where to look are aware that the #NoMoreTrump campaign in Venezuela drew thousands of people into the streets of Caracas. Likewise only the most discerning are aware that Haitians are part of the Venezuela story. Their corrupt leadership stole millions of dollars that the pre-sanctions Venezuela government set aside for the benefit of the Haitian people. Thousands of Haitians expressed their anger in the only way they can, with sustained mass demonstrations.

“Only those who know where to look are aware that the #NoMoreTrump campaign in Venezuela drew thousands of people into the streets of Caracas.”

The bias isn’t confined to the global south. The yellow vest protests continue throughout France after nearly one year with no sign of letting up, but media coverage has diminished. Of course, even in this instance there is a pecking order. The yellow vests get some attention but African immigrants protesting their plight in France receive hardly any.

The corporate media are steadfast partners with the United States government and faithfully follow the party line on foreign policy issues. They may provide hours of coverage to protests in Hong Kong but won’t mention that the organizers meet with State Department officials. They don’t bother to tell the history of Hong Kong and how it was stolen by the British during the Opium Wars. Hong Kong is part of China and it is up to that government to make decisions about its future. It is indeed suspicious when “pro democracy” demonstrators wave the American flag and the Union Jack.

“The yellow vest protests continue throughout France after nearly one year with no sign of letting up.”

The story of the Moscow protests is similar. Alexei Navalny is once again the leader. He is supported by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a former oligarch now living in exile after Vladimir Putin imprisoned him for 10 years. Khodorkovsky uses his remaining wealth to further many anti-government actions. This easily verified fact is seldom mentioned when American media tell the story.

The reporting about these manipulated protests is blatant in its disregard for the truth. Yellow vest protesters have been shot in the eyes by police bullets and hundreds have been injured. The Moscow police release most arrested protesters within a day, and unlike in France no one has lost an eye.

The yellow vests put Emanuel Macron on the ropes and he is unlikely to be re-elected. The depth of anger directed at the neo-liberal schemes which tear at the French safety net is clear and his political viability is in doubt. But the Moscow protests orchestrated by a media savvy movement are of far less significance. There is no indication that they have moved beyond a core group of Vladimir Putin opponents or that they reflect the ideology of the nation at large.

“It is indeed suspicious when “pro democracy” demonstrators wave the American flag and the Union Jack.”

Russians were very angry when Putin proposed raising the retirement age, a quite logical response to neo-liberal mischief. But there is no indication that the inability of his opponents to get on the ballot for Moscow municipal elections is a cause for concern among the masses of people.

In Hong Kong the hand of the United States government and its NGOs is obvious. Following the money shows who is leading the less than spontaneous demonstrations. In Moscow the new neo-liberals want to replace the old ones and do so at the urging of people who would attack Russian sovereignty vis a vis the United States.

China and Russia are full of contradictions that cause confusion among the uninformed. Neither country is democratic in the way that Americans understand but, then again, their country isn’t either. The important point is that they are viewed as enemies by a nation which isn’t satisfied unless all others are allies, lap dogs or utterly destroyed.

Every act condoned by the U.S. is a sign of desperation, including threats to physically blockade Venezuela, or goading subservient allies like the U.K. to seize Iranian oil tankers, and now to making it appear that those labeled adversaries are endangered by street protests. The tanker has now sailed on after Iran proved that it wouldn’t be intimidated and can play the same game. Nicolas Maduro is still the president of Venezuela and all the attempts of the U.S. and the cheer leading of friends in media won’t change that fact.

“The task is to oppose U.S. interventions and to defend the rights of all people to practice self-determination.”

Trump administration “maximum pressure” has led to China buying Venezuela’s oil and Iran leaving the nuclear power agreement that allies wanted to preserve. American foreign policy victories exist only as propaganda. The ship, like the seized Iranian oil tanker, has sailed and they are left with lies spread by a compliant media. As always, beware when the designation of friends and foes come from the networks and the newspapers. They can seldom be believed.

One need not like or dislike targeted foreign leaders in order to understand what is happening. The hegemon is in trouble and has picked a foolish trade fight with China which has been no more successful than any other policy decision. The task is to oppose U.S. interventions and to defend the rights of all people to practice self-determination. Supporting faux democracy movements will not lead to justice. Every effort to disrupt the world order just leads to more defeats for the U.S. and that is the best outcome of all.

 

Margaret Kimberley’s Freedom Rider column appears weekly in BAR, and is widely reprinted elsewhere. She maintains a frequently updated blog as well at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com . Ms. Kimberley lives in New York City, and can be reached via e-Mail at Margaret.Kimberley(at)BlackAgendaReport.com.