Tag: media

Sincere Questions in a World of Lies

By Doug “Uncola” Lynn via TheBurningPlatform.com

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When I was in high school we had an English teacher who had the kids carry the ring of a toilet seat to the bathroom instead of asking him for a hall pass.  Although this took place before the selfie and social media days, it was mentioned in passing as a humorous anecdote in a story printed in the school newsletter.  In turn, it was picked up by the city paper, then a regional publication, and by the time the “story” hit the national news, it had been twisted into the teacher forcing the students into wearing the toilet seat around their necks.

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In internal memos, CIA Inspector General portrayed the media as Agency’s “principal villains”

Via Muckrock

A series of 1984 memos from the CIA Inspector General’s (IG) office reveals some alarming views on the press and how to deal with them. Among other things, the memo shows that 33 years before the Agency declared WikiLeaks a hostile non-state intelligence service, they were viewing the general press in the same terms.

Several weeks prior, CIA Director Casey had asked the IG to weigh in on officer Eloise Page’s paper on unauthorized disclosure. The IG passed the task onto someone on his staff, who produced a four page SECRET memo for IG James Taylor, who passed it onto Director Casey. The IG specifically endorsed the proposal for a program where the Agency would intervene with journalism schools, which is discussed further below.

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“Evil Spirits of the Modern Day Press” wrote Harper’s Weekly 1888 – How History Repeats

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

Minhaj Hasan

White House Correspondents’ Dinner host and Daily Show star Hasan Minhaj delivered a blistering criticism of Donald Trump Saturday night at the Washington D.C. gala, attacking the president for not showing up to the annual event that celebrates free speech and a free press. While the dinner is typically supposed to roast the President, Trump knew the media would use the event to just be more nasty and Hasan Minhaj, who is an American comedian of Indian heritage, claimed to be an immigrant but failed to distinguish between those who legally come and have to prove they have something to offer like every other country, and those who do not.

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Nixon’s Revenge: The Fall of the Adversary Press

Guest Post by Patrick J. Buchanan

Saturday’s White House Correspondents Association dinner exposed anew how far from Middle America our elite media reside.

At the dinner, the electricity was gone, the glamor and glitz were gone. Neither the president nor his White House staff came. Even Press Secretary Sean Spicer begged off.

The idea of a convivial evening together of our media and political establishments is probably dead for the duration of the Trump presidency.

Until Jan. 20, 2021, it appears, we are an us-vs.-them country.

As for the Washington Hilton’s version of Hollywood’s red carpet, C-SPAN elected to cover instead Trump’s rollicking rally in a distant and different capital, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Before thousands of those Middle Pennsylvanians Barack Obama dismissed as clinging to their Bibles, bigotries and guns, Donald Trump, to cheers, hoots and happy howls, mocked the media he had stiffed:

“A large group of Hollywood actors and Washington media are consoling each other in a hotel ballroom … I could not possibly be more thrilled than to be more than 100 miles away from Washington’s swamp … with a much, much larger crowd and much better people.”

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The American Media Hide From The Truth

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

The CIA created and accumulated from other sources a huge array of malware and cyber attack capability capable of stealing information from any individual, any government, any corporation, any intelligence agency and either leaving no trace or leaving a “fingerprint” of an innocent party. The CIA, being arrogant and incompetent, lost control over its monster which escaped and now is in the hands of we know not who. Floating around the Internet, it was sent to WikiLeaks. Listen to Julian Assange’s explanation of the capability of the CIA’s spyware, which includes end runs around encryption. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aha8bicPN88

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The New American Coup – Media Leading Charge to Topple Government

Guest Post by Martin Armstrong

Yates SallyThere is clearly a coup unfolding led by the Democrats and the media. They will not accept Trump and are determined to destroy the government as we have known it. Sally Yates obviously pulled a political move by declaring that she would not execute Trump’s ban of the selected countries. She has no problem arresting aliens and deporting them under the Clinton laws.

Trump’s executive order would only constitute deporting someone on the next plane that tried to come in to the USA who was not a legal resident. They would not be arrested or put in prison as Clinton’s laws mandate. What was Yates up to? Obviously what she did had no real legal meaning, it was a political stand and for that Trump rightly fired her. She is a disgrace to her career.

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The Dissidents and the Media

Guest Post by The Zman

Back in the 80’s, one of the more irritating things about following politics was watching stupid Republicans walk onto liberal news programs and get ambushed. It was if they were just made aware of the fact that the Left never plays fair. It was not just Republican politicians. Conservative chatters would also fall into these traps. It was very frustrating until I figured out that it was all a show. The “conservative” was hired to play a role in the drama. George Will, in private, thought you people were gross and disgusting.

This model persisted through the 90’s and it was only when Fox News came on-line did we see some fair treatment of people outside the Progressive orbit. Even there, the obsession with being fair often resulted in being stupid. Exactly no one gives a crap what Juan Williams has to say about anything. Yet, FNC felt they needed to decorate the set with him. Even so, it was just one outlet among many so the prevailing model was a Progressive gang-up on anyone not professing the One True Faith.

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Trump’s Opponents See Normal Americans as Deplorables

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

I guess we have all noticed that the holier-than-thou groups who whined that Trump wasn’t going to accept the outcome of the election refuse to accept it themselves.

Because I was critical of the George W. Bush regime, the liberal-progressive-leftwing and homosexual/transgendered rights groups have me on their mailing lists.

And it is unbelievable. The entirety of “the other America” refuses to accept the people’s decision. They think that their concerns are more important than the concerns of the American people, who they regard as nothing but a collection of racist homophobic rednecks.

Unless they provoke him beyond reason, Trump is not going to bother any of these people.

Trump wants to bring middle class jobs back to Americans, including for all those paid to protest him.

In order to avoid nuclear war, Trump wants to restore normal relations between the major nuclear powers.

When there are no jobs for Americans that pay enough to support an independent existence, Trump doesn’t see the point of massive legal and illegal immigration.

This is only common sense.

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I’m All Blacked Out

Guest Post by The Zman

On my way home last night, I saw a couple of young black women on a corner, holding signs that had “Black Lives Matter” on them with some other writing. I think one of them had something about Charlotte, but I don’t know for sure. They were hoping to get the attention of drivers, but it seemed like no one was paying any attention. As traffic slowed, I did not see any heads turning their way, but in the city, drivers look straight ahead out of habit. That way the bums and panhandlers are not encouraged to molest you.

I caught the light so I was sitting at their intersection with a chance to observe for a few minutes. They stepped into the street and starting taunting the white drivers by holding their signs up against their windows and chanting something. When young black women get worked up, their voices reach a pitch close to a dog whistle. It’s just high pitched echolalic babbling, that is intended to annoy, rather than convey information. I had my windows up so I could make out nothing. My guess is it was just some gibberish they saw on-line or on TV.

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The Revolt of the Media

Guest Post by The Zman

Way back in the olden thymes, “the media” was the local newspaper, news radio and the evening news on the television. My father would read the paper every evening after dinner, while my mother would watch the evening news. Once in a while my mother would put on the radio and listen to the news channel, but that was rare. If the people in charge wanted to get the attention of the peasants, they had to do it in those small windows when people paid any attention to the news.

We live in a different age, but it is a very new age. We are saturated with media. Young people have no frame of reference so they just assume it has always been thus, but our modern mass media culture is one of those rare things that is truly new. It really was not so long ago when it was easy to be entirely uninformed about the world. It took great effort to be well informed. That’s not to say we are all worldly cosmopolitans, but the world is literally at our fingertips. More important, media is everywhere and it hard to escape it.

This newness means that the people in charge have struggled to put it to their uses. Buying off a few newspaper publishers was easy. Controlling the three TV networks required hardly any effort at all. A free wheeling mass media with millions of bloggers, podcasters and small outlets is a different task. Rounding up the farm’s bull is a hard job, but rounding up all the barn cats is actually much tougher. The former can get you killed, but the latter has a maddening number of variables.

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Why Is the Progressive Left Helping the Elite Elect Hillary?

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Have you noticed that it is not only the presstitute media and the two establishment political parties that are beating up on Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump but also the progressive left? Sometimes the messages overlap so much that the progressive left sounds like the One Percent. But mainly the progressive left is down on Sanders because he is “not pure,” and they don’t like Trump because he hurts people’s feelings and doesn’t apologize.

This is astounding. Here we are faced with the corrupt media and the corrupt party establishments determined to put in the Oval Office a tried and proven agent of the One Percent, and the progressive left is beating up on the only two alternatives!

I doubt that Sanders or Trump would be able to achieve much for the American people except to reduce the flow of official lies that the presstitutes turn into truths by constant repetition. The Oligarchy is too strong. It was more than a half century ago that President Eisenhower warned us of the threat to American democracy from the military-security complex. That complex is much stronger today, and, in addition, we have Wall Street and the mega-banks that control the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, the Israel Lobby that has the US Congress wrapped around its little finger, the extractive industries (energy, mining, timber) that prevails over the environment and preservation, and agra-business that poisons our food, exterminates honey bees and butterflies and produces chemical fertilizer runoff into waters that result in massive fish kills from algea blooms. None of these powerful interests will permit the welfare of the American people to get in the way of their agendas and profits.

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How the Media Blows Things Out of Proportion

Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist

Every year, it seems that there is a new type of virus or an imminent technological disaster that will purportedly threaten the existence of humankind.

If it wasn’t the Y2K apocalypse that would bring society back to the Stone Age, it was going to be the bird flu or cellphone brain tumors that would kill us all.

However, as today’s data visualization from Information is Beautiful shows, these fears are mostly overblown. The media finds a way to tap into these hot-button issues and then people inevitably get worked into a frenzy.

“Swine flu”, which broke out in the U.S. in 2009, blew up into a full-on panic by media and authorities. While it did eventually kill about 12,000 people, that’s not very remarkable when it turns out that the common seasonal flu kills between 3,000 to 49,000 people each year, according to the Center for Disease Control.

The public consumed information on the swine flu like there was no tomorrow. Here’s Google searches for “swine flu” surpassing the amount of searches for the newly-elected “Barack Obama”.

 

But do you know what was even worse than swine flu? Ebola, of course.

In the very first chart on this post, the true length of the data for “ebola” is cut off because the series is literally off the chart. Here’s a revised version that puts all of the data in full perspective:
Ebola vs. all else

Based on this level of coverage and interest, the virus must have surely been on the level of the Black Plague, right?

According to The Economist, there were just 28,637 ebola cases and 11,315 deaths worldwide. The World Health Organization officially declared the outbreak to be over in January, and there hasn’t been a trace of the virus since.

Next time the talking heads on television are discussing the newest global distraction, take a deep breath. There’s no need to panic if mountains are being made out of molehills.


How They Brainwash Us

Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts

Anyone who pays attention to American “news” can see how “news” is used to control our perceptions in order to ensure public acceptance of the Oligarchy’s agendas.

For example, Bernie Sanders just won six of seven primaries, in some cases by as much as 70 and 82 percent of the vote, but Sanders’ victories went largely unreported. The reason is obvious. The Oligarchy doesn’t want any sign of Sanders gaining momentum that could threaten Hillary’s lead for the Democratic nomination. Here is FAIR’s take on the media’s ignoring of Sanders’ victories: http://fair.org/home/as-sanders-surges-cable-news-runs-prison-reality-show-jesus-documentary/

We can observe the same media non-performance in the foreign affairs arena. The Syrian army aided by the Russian air force just liberated Palmyra from ISIS troops that Washington sent to overthrow the Syrian government. Although pretending to be fighting ISIS, Washington and London are silent about this victory on what is supposed to be a common front against the terror group.

It has been left to the Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/why-is-david-cameron-so-silent-on-the-recapture-of-palmyra-from-the-clutches-of-isis-a6955406.html), RT (http://www.globalresearch.ca/russia-questions-the-wests-silence-on-syrias-strategic-victory-against-isis-in-palmyra/5517194) and the Mayor of London to break the silence.

What the Washington/London silence on the victory tells me is that Washington still intends to unseat Assad. The most likely reason for Secretary of State Kerry’s trips to Moscow is to try to work out a deal in which Washington accepts the defeat of ISIS in exchange for Moscow’s acceptance of Assad’s removal. The neoconservatives have not lost control of the Obama regime, and they remain committed to removing Assad for the benefit of Israel. Moscow wants to get along with Washington, and if Moscow is not careful about trusting Washington, Moscow will lose in diplomacy the war it has won.

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