"It was the daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons."
Oct. 11, 2016, "Debate Moderator Distorted Syrian Reality," Robert Parry, Consortium News
"The American people are receiving a highly distorted view of the Syrian war--much propaganda, little truth-including from one of the moderators at the second presidential debate."...
"How ABC News’ Martha Raddatz framed her question about Syria in the second presidential debate shows why the mainstream U.S. news media, with its deep-seated biases and inability to deal with complexity, has become such a driving force for wider wars and even a threat to the future of the planet....
The moderator’s failure to frame the Syrian issue in a factual and nuanced way contributed to this dangerously misleading “debate” on a grave issue of war and peace.
It is surely not the first time that the mainstream U.S. media has failed the American people in this way, but – given the stakes of a possible nuclear war with Russia – this propagandistic style of “journalism” is fast becoming an existential threat."
--------------------
Second citation for erroneous and deadly media reporting about Syria:
Media misleading the public is more dangerous in the US than in other countries. Because with public support, US has the power to decree the death of nations-Kinzer, Boston Globe, 2/18/16
"Our (American) ignorance is more dangerous, because we act on it. The United States has the power to decree the death of nations. It can do so with popular support because many Americans--and many journalists--are content with the official story."...Feb. 18, 2016, "The media are misleading the public on Syria," Boston Globe, Stephen Kinzer, opinion
"Coverage of the Syrian war will be remembered as one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the American press. Reporting about carnage in the ancient city of Aleppo is the latest reason why."...
......................
Third citation for deadly and unchallenged force of media today. Moving on from its triumphs in Ukraine ad Libya, it's now creating a new and dangerous Cold War and feeding it to US taxpayers:
Propaganda, the invisible government, has never been more powerful or as unchallenged as it is today. The allegedly refined liberal media actually love war, are directly responsible for creating millions of refugees, and are now preparing Americans for the greatest military buildup since WWII-Pilger, Consortium News
10/28/16, "Selling ‘Regime Change’ Wars to the Masses," Consortium News, John Pilger
"Propaganda is now such a pervasive part of Western governance that any foreign leader who resists the prevailing power structure can be turned into a demon and made a target of a “regime change” war....
Today, the invisible government has never been more powerful and less understood. In my career as a journalist and filmmaker, I have never known propaganda to insinuate our lives and as it does now and to go unchallenged....
Without this drumbeat of propaganda dressed up as news, the monstrous ISIS and Al Qaeda and the Nusra Front and the rest of the jihadist gang might not exist, and the people of Syria might not be fighting for their lives today....
The attack on Iraq, the attack on Libya, the attack on Syria happened because the leader in each of these countries was not a puppet of the West. The human rights record of a Saddam or a Gaddafi was irrelevant. They did not obey orders and surrender control of their country....
As WikLeaks has revealed, it was only when the Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad in 2009 rejected an oil pipeline, running through his country from Qatar to Europe, that he was attacked. From that moment, the CIA planned to destroy the government of Syria with jihadist fanatics – the same fanatics currently holding the people of Mosul and eastern Aleppo hostage.
Why is this not news? The former British Foreign Office official Carne Ross, who was responsible for operating sanctions against Iraq, told me: “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitized intelligence, or we would freeze them out. That is how it worked.”
The West’s medieval client, Saudi Arabia – to which the U.S. and
Britain sell billions of dollars’ worth of arms – is at present
destroying Yemen, a country so poor that in the best of times, half the
children are malnourished....The
bomb aimers in Saudi Arabia work side-by-side with British officers.
This fact is not on the evening news.
Propaganda is most effective when our consent is engineered by those
with a fine education – Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia – and with
careers on the BBC, the Guardian, the New York Times, the Washington Post.
These organizations are known as the “liberal media.” They present
themselves as enlightened, progressive tribunes of the moral zeitgeist.
They are anti-racist, pro-feminist and pro-LGBT.
And they love war.
While they speak up for feminism, they support rapacious wars that deny
the rights of countless women, including the right to life.
In 2011, Libya, then a modern state, was destroyed on the pretext
that Muammar Gaddafi was about to commit genocide on his own people.
That was the incessant news; and there was no evidence. It was a lie.
In fact, Britain, Europe and the United States wanted what they like
to call “regime change” in Libya, the biggest oil producer in Africa.
Gaddafi’s influence in the continent and, above all, his independence
were intolerable.
So Gaddafi was murdered with a knife in his rear by fanatics, backed
by America, Britain and France. Hillary Clinton cheered his gruesome
death for the camera, declaring, “We came, we saw, he died!”
The destruction of Libya was a media triumph. As the war drums were beaten, Jonathan Freedland wrote in the Guardian: “Though the risks are very real, the case for intervention remains strong.”
Intervention – what a polite, benign, Guardian word, whose real meaning, for Libya, was death and destruction.
According to its own records, NATO launched 9,700 “strike sorties”
against Libya, of which more than a third were aimed at civilian
targets. They included missiles with uranium warheads. Look at the
photographs of the rubble of Misurata and Sirte, and the mass graves
identified by the Red Cross.
The Unicef report on the children killed
says, “most [of them] under the age of ten.”
As a direct consequence, Sirte became a capital of ISIS.
Ukraine is another media triumph. Respectable liberal newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Guardian,
and mainstream broadcasters such as the BBC, NBC, CBS, CNN have played a
critical role in conditioning their viewers to accept a new and dangerous Cold War. All have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a
malign act by Russia when, in fact, the coup in Ukraine in 2014 was the
work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO.
This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military
intimidation of Russia is not news; it is suppressed behind a
smear-and-scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first
Cold War. Once again, the Russkies are coming to get us, led by another
Stalin, whom The Economist depicts as the devil....
The drum-beaters of the Washington Post inciting war with Russia are the very same editorial writers who published the lie that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
To most of us, the American presidential campaign is a media freak
show, in which Donald Trump is the arch villain. But Trump is loathed by
those with power in the United States for reasons that have little to
do with his obnoxious behavior and opinions.
To the invisible government in Washington, the unpredictable Trump is
an obstacle to America’s design for the Twenty-first Century. This is
to maintain the dominance of the United States and to subjugate Russia,
and, if possible, China.
To the militarists in Washington, the real problem with Trump is
that, in his lucid moments, he seems not to want a war with Russia; he
wants to talk with the Russian president, not fight him; he says he
wants to talk with the president of China.
In the first debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump promised not to be
the first to introduce nuclear weapons into a conflict. He said, “I
would certainly not do first strike. Once the nuclear alternative
happens, it’s over.” That was not news.
Did he really mean it? Who knows? He often contradicts himself. But
what is clear is that Trump is considered a serious threat to the status
quo maintained by the vast national security machine that runs the
United States, regardless of who is in the White House.
The CIA wants him beaten. The Pentagon wants him beaten. The media
wants him beaten. Even his own party wants him beaten. He is a threat to
the rulers of the world – unlike Hillary Clinton who has left no doubt
she is prepared to go to war with nuclear-armed Russia and China....
Without a shred of public evidence, Clinton has accused Russia of
supporting Trump and hacking her emails. Released by WikiLeaks, these
emails tell us that what Clinton says in private, in speeches to the
rich and powerful, is the opposite of what she says in public.
That is why silencing and threatening Julian Assange is so important.
As the editor of WikiLeaks, Assange knows the truth. And let me assure
those who are concerned, he is well, and WikiLeaks is operating on all
cylinders.
Today, the greatest build-up of American-led forces since World War
Two is under way – in the Caucasus and Eastern Europe, on the border
with Russia, and in Asia and the Pacific, where China is the target.
Keep that in mind when the presidential election circus reaches its
finale on Nov. 8. If the winner is Clinton, a Greek chorus of witless
commentators will celebrate her coronation as a great step forward for
women. None will mention Clinton’s victims: the women of Syria, the
women of Iraq, the women of Libya. None will mention the civil defense
drills being conducted in Russia. None will recall Edward Bernays’s
“torches of freedom.”...
In 1946, the Nuremberg Tribunal prosecutor said of the German media:
“Before every major aggression, they initiated a press campaign
calculated to weaken their victims and to prepare the German people
psychologically for the attack. In the propaganda system,
it was the
daily press and the radio that were the most important weapons.”"
...............
No comments:
Post a Comment