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. Thats 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. ...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 Washingtons military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. Its 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. Washingtons 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. 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. ...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: Lets 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 twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares? In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBCs 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. ...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? ...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. axiomatica.org/culture/corporate-media-deception/1624-john-pilger-how-the-media-promotes-the-lies-leading-us-to-catastrophic-war
Posted on: Sat, 13 Dec 2014 05:27:50 +0000
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