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The Media

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Never believe mainstream media about anything...It has been designed from the very beginning to be a propaganda device. People have to research for themselves and not have other talking heads tell them what to think and why. The true conspiracies are the party lines.
 
Glenn Greenwald puts some (Less than 1%) of these documents out for auction and invites book publishers to come and bid. He promises to reserve some of these highly-classified documents for the book deal offered by the highest bidder. The mainstream publishers take his invitation and start bidding on it so that they could publish some reserved and exclusive and juicy classified documents. The highest bidder offers millions of dollars and seals the exclusive deal. The government sees nothing wrong or illegal with this, and gives its consent with its silence and ‘go ahead’ nod. - See more at: Green-Light for Greenwald: Government Duplicity or Government Duality?
Green-Light for Greenwald: Government Duplicity or Government Duality?
o date, after six months of intense and nonstop mainstream media coverage of the Snowden-NSA topic, very little is known about Mr. Snowden himself, and this includes his real intentions and objectives, the nature and details of his deals and agreements with members of the press-including those made with Glenn Greenwald, and his position on the latest developments, which include the exclusive business deal struck between Greenwald and billionaire Omidyar, million dollar book and movie deals made based on exclusive publication of some of the leaked documents, and the highly mysterious change of position in the government’s stand and response in the midst of all the publicity and commoditization of the controversial leaked NSA cache. - See more at: Mr. Snowden, It’s Time to Come Out and Take a Stand Publicly as to Your Intentions
Mr. Snowden, It’s Time to Come Out and Take a Stand Publicly as to Your Intentions
We all know of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: The five stage model divided into basic (or deficiency) needs (e.g. physiological, safety, love, and esteem) and growth needs (self-actualization). I am not pompous enough to call myself a psychologist, even though one of my bachelor degrees was in the field of psychology. Instead, I am going to make a mere suggestion to be added to this famous list: The majority’s need for heroes and great saviors. - See more at: Establishment-Made Heroes, Blind Seekers of Saviors & SuckersEstablishment-Made Heroes, Blind Seekers of Saviors & Suckers
At 15:00 Angela Davis talks about the leadership of Martin Luther King:
 
The new figures follow on from reports in November last year that both CNN and MSNBC had lost nearly half their audience over the previous 12 months, with the two networks losing 59% and 52% respectively in the crucial demographic of viewers aged 25 to 54.
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news-cnn-and-msnbc-losing-the-information-war/5375493
Spurious Western reports lied about Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s border. Invasion perhaps is imminent, they suggested. Saying so is malicious propaganda.
The Washington Post, for example, made no attempt in its reporting to analyze what Clinton and the US senators were discussing. For instance, when Senator Richard Lugar, a known war hawk and military expansionist, said that the international media operations of the Broadcasting Board of Governors are “still a great force of diplomacy, to get our message across,” The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Joby Warrick did not even elaborate that what Lugar was talking about was the US government exerting its power over other nations by using the mass media to influence their governments through a US-tailored flow of information to their populations.
Controlling the Lens: The Media War Being Fought Over Ukraine Between the Western Bloc and Russia | Global Research



The Indoctrinated West
EDITOR'S CHOICE | 09.03.2014 | 18:15
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Comments: 2
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Is it really possible that the European public has no clue what was done to Ukraine? Are the men and women of the continent that lives in hallucination, that it is well educated and well informed, really unaware how its own governments have created and supported that ‘opposition movement’ in Kiev; a movement full of fascists and bigots? […]

* * *

Now, please, I am not trying to be funny and I am not trying to play with words: I am honestly wondering… I am humbly asking: “Are people in the West, particularly in Europe… are they pretending that they don’t know what is happening in Syria, Venezuela, Thailand and now, particularly, in Ukraine? Or have they simply turned into a cynical assembly of brainwashed degenerates?
The Indoctrinated West > Strategic-Culture.org - Strategic Culture Foundation
The question that I would ask everyone is what is your favorite news outlet and why?
 
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How the Media Conned the Public into Loving the FBI: Book Review

I watched episodes of the television drama while in my final year of high school and during my freshman year of college, and swallowed whole the idealized image of the FBI. But in the years since 1970 when I began my career as a professional journalist, I have cast a skeptical eye on all kinds of institutional glorification. I now know that much of the FBI story I bought qualified as… bullshit. In this book, Cecil spells out how Americans were sold an image of an FBI beyond reproach. It’s not only a solid, fascinating work of history, it’s a cautionary tale against current and future attempts to mold public opinion about government actions in the face of inconvenient facts.
How the Media Conned the Public into Loving the FBI: Book Review - WhoWhatWhy | WhoWhatWhy
 
The market is working its magic. Despite huge government support via subsidy and restricted access, the Mainstream Media is dying because people have grown weary of the lies.

Veiwership numbers of mainstream "news" are dropping. More and more people are transitioning to real citizen-produced media that does not have "Inc." after the name.
 
Dropping like flies! There's figures on the viewership of Fox/MSNBC/you-name-it that are quite startling. The only time I ever see the content of these networks is in an airport when I'm traveling, or a supermarket, etc. Still, they count those TV sets as viewers, and their viewer statistics are still lousy, nothing like what they were even ten years ago.

I suspect that lots of people gave up "television", as it used to be known, when the digital switch-over happened, and have never looked back. I don't miss it a bit!
 
It's going to awesome when we don't have to worry about stupid computer passwords anymore.

Instead of providing our own security, the Government will do it for us. Yes!

This will clear all the "undesirables" and "weirdos" off the internet.

Ahhh. Security and Safety, just like every sane person wants.

Here is a short video from NIST.GOV showing how cool it will be....

 
War by media and the end of truth
By John Pilger
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/World/WOR-01-081214.html

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what's called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war - with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of obedient cliches and false assumptions.

This power to create a new "reality" has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual."

I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only "culture" and introspection could change the world.

Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of "me-ism" had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.

In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new "threats" completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

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

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

That's a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.

Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.

Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s - a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official's name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as "Mr Iraq". Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitized intelligence," he told me, "or we'd freeze them out."

The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis. What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC's Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman's "memorable moments". Last week, Paxman signed a 1 million-pound (US$1.56 million) book deal.

The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 - a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean. Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers - all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch's empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.

The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't Fox News; it was the New York Times.

The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO.

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war.

Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington's secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.

And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence Many in the western media haves worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads NATO and is straight out of Dr Strangelove - one General Breedlove - routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick's General Jack D Ripper is pitch perfect.

Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove
. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer - the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair's invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.

There is almost the joi d'esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to be "hard facts".

"If you wonder," wrote Robert Parry, "how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason."

Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this "game of chicken", as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: "Let's get ready for war with Russia."

In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as "the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this". Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.

In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured 12 years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?

In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a 10-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.

In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism? Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called "austerity" is necessary?

Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.

But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?

Today, many of the premises of civilized life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be 83 billion pounds. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of 100 billion pounds in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.

The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who's keeping record straight? Isn't that what journalists are meant to do?

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian revealed something similar in this country.

None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear Julian Assange - though other rewards can be plentiful.

It's clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media's gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his

bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of obedient cliches and false assumptions.

This power to create a new "reality" has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual."

I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only "culture" and introspection could change the world.

Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of "me-ism" had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.

In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new "threats" completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

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

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

That's a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.

Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.

Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s - a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official's name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as "Mr Iraq". Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitized intelligence," he told me, "or we'd freeze them out."

The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis. What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC's Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman's "memorable moments". Last week, Paxman signed a 1 million-pound (US$1.56 million) book deal.

The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 - a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean. Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers - all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch's empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.

The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't Fox News; it was the New York Times.

The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO.

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war.

Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington's secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.

And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence Many in the western media haves worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads NATO and is straight out of Dr Strangelove - one General Breedlove - routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick's General Jack D Ripper is pitch perfect.

Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer - the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair's invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.

There is almost the joi d'esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to be "hard facts".

"If you wonder," wrote Robert Parry, "how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason."

Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this "game of chicken", as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: "Let's get ready for war with Russia."

In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as "the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this". Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.

In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured 12 years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?

In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a 10-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.

In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism? Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called "austerity" is necessary?

Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.

But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?

Today, many of the premises of civilized life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be 83 billion pounds. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of 100 billion pounds in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.

The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who's keeping record straight? Isn't that what journalists are meant to do?

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian revealed something similar in this country.

None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear Julian Assange - though other rewards can be plentiful.

It's clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media's gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He became not only a target, but a golden goose.

Lucrative book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.

None of this was mentioned in Stockholm on December 1 when the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn't exist. They were unpeople.

No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively - and brilliantly - rescued Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.

What made this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament - whose craven silence on the Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.

"When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."

It's this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war.

In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika - an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.

It's 100 years since World War I. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don't know and can't know."

It's time they knew.

This was John Pilger's address to the Logan Symposium, "Building an Alliance Against Secrecy, Surveillance & Censorship", organized by the Centre for Investigative Journalism, London, December 5-7, 2014.

Posted with permission www.johnpilger.com

(Copyright 2014 John Pilger)





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It's not that the populace believes or doesn't believe the news put before them. People are simply lazy and don't care what is going on in the world. As long as the cable is working and there are plenty of potato chips in the house, all is good.

If you don't believe people have lost interest in worldly affairs, just look at the drones walking down the street staring at their smartphones. I rest my case.
 
It's not that the populace believes or doesn't believe the news put before them. People are simply lazy and don't care what is going on in the world. As long as the cable is working and there are plenty of potato chips in the house, all is good.

If you don't believe people have lost interest in worldly affairs, just look at the drones walking down the street staring at their smartphones. I rest my case.
I have often wondered about this DaveM. The truth is easy to find. Here on this site, I think, people are on this site because they have had experiences outside what is the acceptable norm. I would think that this would cause them to question more than the average person what they are told but I find this is not the case. I think what blocks people from seeing and caring is that there is, that they think deep in their hearts that there is nothing that they can do that would change anything.
 
It's not that the populace believes or doesn't believe the news put before them. People are simply lazy and don't care what is going on in the world.

I disagree. Most of the people in my work-a-day life do listen to "news" while commuting to work and in the evenings on television. There are only so many hours a week any working person can spend on it.

The problem really is as Pilger describe in his speech above. The Mainstream Media lie, both via commission and omission. Most people don't know that.

Yesterday I rode to lunch in my boss's car. He keeps "the news" running on his car's satellite radio continuously. He knew all about some dumb 350 million dollars thrown away on some unused NASA launch tower (the outrage!), but is completely clueless to the fact that FedGov simply hands over BILLIONS of dollars to prop up the Big Banks every month. Billions per month! Per month!!!

Why is that?
 
I have often wondered about this DaveM. The truth is easy to find. Here on this site, I think, people are on this site because they have had experiences outside what is the acceptable norm. I would think that this would cause them to question more than the average person what they are told but I find this is not the case. I think what blocks people from seeing and caring is that there is, that they think deep in their hearts that there is nothing that they can do that would change anything.
If you read any Hindu literature, we are currently in the Kali Yuga, the Iron Age. It means we are in an unenlightened age full of pain and suffering.

The good part is that there are individuals who are trying to ride it out and bring some good to the world. You could point to the Dalai Lama as such a person, and no, I am not a Buddhist.
 
I disagree. Most of the people in my work-a-day life do listen to "news" while commuting to work and in the evenings on television. There are only so many hours a week any working person can spend on it.

The problem really is as Pilger describe in his speech above. The Mainstream Media lie, both via commission and omission. Most people don't know that.

Yesterday I rode to lunch in my boss's car. He keeps "the news" running on his car's satellite radio continuously. He knew all about some dumb 350 million dollars thrown away on some unused NASA launch tower (the outrage!), but is completely clueless to the fact that FedGov simply hands over BILLIONS of dollars to prop up the Big Banks every month. Billions per month! Per month!!!

Why is that?
Charlie, between seven to ten companies control 90% of the media in the US depending on who is counting. It sounds like your boss thinks he is up to date even though he is being spoon fed the news by one of these companies.
 
It sounds like your boss thinks he is up to date even though he is being spoon fed the news by one of these companies.

He does indeed fancy himself "well-informed". I asked him yesterday about the bank bail-outs. Blank stare.

In the 20th century anyone who proposed that Taxpayers should cover the gambling losses of Big Banks would have been laughed at. In 2008 when I heard a continuous stream of stories on NPR promoting the bail-outs, I was shocked.

That was when I began learning how the giant corporate foundations like Ford, MacArthur, Gates, Koch, Sorors, et al. actually set the public narrative by funding certain media projects, and starving others.

Like John Pilger documentaries, a person cannot consider themselves informed on how media works without watching all of Adam Curtis' documentaries. No boring reading required. Adam Curtis - IMDb
 
Good documentary, but what are we to take away from this? If I were the enemy, knowing that this is what happens when you PO the Americans, I might think it was really bad idea. You are going to have your country turned into disaster zone, while most of the world watches it on TV. No matter whether it was over false claims of WMDs or placing a bounty on every American's head ( source ), it's just a really bad idea. It's like the American war machine was tacitly saying: "Maybe it wasn't Iraq who was behind 911, but we had to attack somebody, and if you ( the middle east ) attack us again, we'll take over another one of your countries ... maybe Syria. Eventually we'll get the right one. It's basically all one big desert anyway." Would you really want to get that kind of power ( whether it be good or evil ) focused on taking you out of the picture? Not me.
 
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