Symmetry wrote:Dukasaur wrote:Symmetry wrote:Dukasaur wrote:Symmetry wrote:Odd that. You'd think if you'd said that, it would be there in the stuff you said.
It was pretty clear.
If you're going to pretend to misunderstand, don't pretend to carry on a dialogue.
I don't understand. That's why I'm asking you, again, what the root of this hatred is.
It doesn't get any clearer than this:
Dukasaur wrote:What I said was, in view of so many reporters around the world having to live in fear because of the oppressive regimes they work under, it is particularly malodorous that American reporters do not live in fear, are free to publish the truth, and yet willingly choose to publish the government's lies instead.
Freedom is a precious gift. So many people around the world struggle to communicate truth despite official censorship or worse.
The American press has received this gift. They could be using it to disseminate truth, and they choose not to. How can anyone fail to be outraged? It is like the spoiled little rich kid who has a thousand toys and chooses to smash them up because he has no values. The American media has the freedom to work for good, and instead they choose to be sycophants, uncritically passing along the government's propaganda. And it is no secret why. Whoever does the best job of spewing the government's lies, is more likely to be granted juicy interviews with high-ranking members of the establishment in the future, at which time he'll be given even more lies to propagate, in an endless cycle of ever-more-uncritical sycophancy.
You cannot pretend not to know this.
I ain't pretending. I'm baffled. You seem to be under the, frankly bizarre, impression that American journalists are simpatico with the government. It's as if you've never heard of anything from Woodward and Bernstein to Fox news.
I really don't understand your point.
Oh, that's what you're quibbling about.
Well, let me dispel a few illusions for you.
Fox News are a bunch of partisan shills. They don't oppose the government's policies. They're only pissed off that a Democrat is in charge. Most of Obama's policies are inherited unchanged from Bush, and Fox News was all hunky-dory with Bush. Very little of what they say about Obama can be pinned down to actual alternatives; it's all just character assassination. For instance, they say that Obama was weak and that's the reason Putin had the balls to take Crimea. Oh really? If a Republican had been in the White House, what would he have done? Pretty much the same as Obama did. What are the policy options? Is someone in favour of dropping a few divisions of the U.S. Army into Crimea, possibly risking a nuclear war with Russia? Not bloody likely. If there had been a Republican in the White House, he probably would have done exactly what Obama did: make some angry noises, impose some trade sanctions, and go quietly to the bathroom to wipe the egg off his face. So you can disabuse yourself of the notion that Fox is criticizing the government right now. They are performing character assassination on one specific guy they don't like and a few of his henchmen. As soon as Kasich is in the White House they'll be all warm and fuzzy.
Okay, moving on.
You ever hear the one about the Weapons of Mass Destruction? Yeah, those. Today, it's hard to find anyone who wasn't skeptical about those, but apparently all those skeptics were tongue-tied at the time, because no major news outlet doubted the story at the time. "Weapons of Mass Destruction" were the lead story for weeks. Weeks! And the few sane columnists who said it was all bullshit were shuffled off to Page 6 or Page 8 or worse. And that only one of the two Big Lies that Bush was selling. The other was that Saddam was in cahoots with al-Qaeda, which is absolutely ludicrous, and again, the media ate it up without criticism.
Okay, I can almost sympathize with falling for the WMD gambit. There was no real evidence that Saddam still had WMD stockpiles, but no hard evidence that he didn't. either, so I can almost sympathize. But the Saddam + al-qaeda gambit? I mean, seriously, five minutes of serious study should have told anyone that Saddam was a secular leader, that he hated the religious extremists as much as anyone did, and while he may have had a conversation with them (in the same way that cops often have to have conversations with criminals in their area) he certainly wasn't on their side. Every single media outlet in the country should have cried "BULLSHIT!" with one united voice, but none did. They all helped sell America on the completely groundless charge that Saddam was somehow a friend of al-qaeda and presumably complicit in 9-11, paving the way for the Iraq war.
This is probably the biggest crime of the last 30 years. We don't know just how much suffering it will ultimately cost, because it isn't over. We know 100K or so died during the Iraq war and countless others were wounded, maimed, imprisoned, exiled, impoverished, or otherwise had their lives ruined. But it's not over! This is the gift that keeps on giving! We don't know if it will be 10, 20, or 50 years before stability returns to Iraq, and how much suffering there will be in the meantime. And all that because the American media crawled on its knees and elbows to hear the latest lies from the White House and the Pentagon, and then helped market those lies and sell them to the public, without once proclaiming the utter implausibility of them.
Okay, enough about Iraq. No wait, one more egregious lie comes to mind. This is from the first Gulf War, Bush Sr. instead of Jr. "Oh, the children!"
In preparation for Gulf War I, the Pentagon hired the Rendon Group. Hill & Knowlton, and and a variety of other PR companies to prepare the propaganda war. Iraq had up until then been on relatively smooth terms with the U.S., not warm, but not hostile. To recast Saddam Hussein as Public Enemy Number One was going to take a major propaganda coup. A lot of negative stories were planted, but the most ludicrous of all was the babies on the floor.
Coached by Hill & Knowlton, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nasyirah testified before a group of Congressmen (not an official Committee of the Congress as the media reported, but a select group of Congressmen) that she had witnessed Iraqi soldiers ripping babies out of incubators and dropping them on the floor. She reported that she had seen this happen to 15 babies, but George Bush (who repeated the story many times) gradually upped the ante, and at one point said 312 babies had suffered this fate.
To their credit, a number of American newspapers considered the information unreliable, and refused to run the story. The majority, however, swallowed it hook, line and sinker. One marvels at the extent of the self-deception. Even if one accepts that Saddam Hussein was Satan Incarnate, what policy goal could have been served by walking through the halls, dropping babies on their heads, and leaving them there for witnesses to find? I don't think I could tell that story to an eight-year-old and be believed. It just boggles the mind that the vast majority of news outlets ran this story without verification, without investigation, without proof, without even asking logical questions about "why?"
One final thing, and then we'll leave the Gulf War behind. The F-117. The Pentagon trotted it out, and the reporters prostrated themselves and begged to lick the feet of the assembled generals to be the first one allowed to touch it. Every report on every station was spoken in these awe-struck tone, replete with "ooh" and "aah" galore. Every report made it sound like this was something that Luke Skywalker would be jealous of. I remember one media analyst saying "this will guarantee America's military pre-eminence for the next century."
Guaran-fucking-tee America's military pre-eminence for the next century? What a load of bullshit. The F-117 was mediocre in the ground-strike role and barely above average in the air superiority role, and it did all that at an enormous price tag that would have bought a dozen aircraft more useful. It was eventually shuffled off to early retirement, but even the
retirement of the F-117 came in way over budget! But the media didn't care about the price tag or ask to see evidence of its performance. The Pentagon told them this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and the Pentagon is always right.
Okay, getting away from the Gulf, for real this time.
How about Noriega? I believe he was the prototype for Saddam, a little scale model, a test of the gullibility of the American voter. Noriega went from being America's Little Buddy to America's Worst Enemy in such a short time, it was staggering. Okay, leave aside the fact that it was the CIA who originally recruited him to sell drugs for them. Leave aside the fact that until 1983 he did everything the CIA commanded, allowed them to spy on Canal traffic in direct violation of the canal treaties. He allowed the CIA to use Panama as a base for helping the Contras, funneling money and weapons through to them, and only balked when he was asked to provide direct military assistance. For this act of disloyalty, they decided to depose him and install someone more supine.
Okay, so far no big argument. I understand bullies get angry when someone they're accustomed to being obeyed by suddenly discovers his backbone. But what follows next could only be described as comedy, if not for the fact that it was a tragedy. Almost overnight Noriega was reclassified from Friend to Enemy. Oh, no doubt about it, he was your typical kleptocrat. I don't weep for him. But the invasion of Panama, in blatant violation of all the U.S. and U.N. statements about the rights of sovereign nations to rule themselves, was purely illegal and immoral. The media bought it all and asked for a scoop of ice cream on top.
wikipedia wrote:On December 29, the General Assembly of the United Nations voted 75–20 with 40 abstentions to condemn the invasion as a flagrant violation of international law.[27][28] According to a CBS poll, 92% of Panamanian adults supported the U.S. incursion, and 76% wished that U.S. forces had invaded in October during the coup.[29] However, activist Barbara Trent disputed this finding, claiming in a 1992 Academy Award winning documentary The Panama Deception that the Panamanian surveys were completed in wealthy, English-speaking neighborhoods in Panama City, among Panamanians most likely to support U.S. actions.[30]
CBS wasn't content to just
pass along official lies, it actually worked at helping to create them!
Noriega brings to mind Gary Webb, who prepared an exhaustively-researched expose about the CIA's drug-running operations, and was drummed out of the media for his trouble. After his own newspaper retracted his story, he was publicly humiliated from coast to coast, never got another job, and eventually committed suicide.
Gary Webb of course brings to mind Assange and Snowden. The American media is full of speculation whether Snowden will ever return home. The American media is full of speculation about whether the Russians will ever extradite him. The American media is full of speculation about whether, if and when he ever is returned, he will draw the death penalty. One thing that the American media is
not full of is speculation about why people are tolerating the prosecution of this national hero who alerted them to criminal acts being conducted against them by their own government.
This is the independent media that bought the Warren Commission Report, hook, line and sinker. Today, even the government admits that the WCR is "erroneous" although of course they won't go so far as to admit that it is bullshit fabrication from start to finish. At least they're admitting that it's wrong. But for 50 years the WCR was Gospel, and anyone who questioned it was described in the news as a "crackpot" or "kook."
All the lies underpinning the War on Terror, which has allowed the government to almost completely eradicate habeas corpus protection without actually preventing Terror, are passed through the media uncritically. All the lies of the War on Drugs, which has resulted in the world's highest rate of incarceration without noticeably reducing drug use, are passed through the media uncritically. There are arguments about this particular law or that particular law, but the basic assumption, that it's good to protect people from the evils of drugs by granting them the benefit of incarceration, is not questioned, except of course by "crackpots" and "kooks." Probably the same Cs and Ks who question the Warren Commission Report.
The fucking Food Pyramid. All the research now shows that carbs, not fat, are the core problem in the American diet, but still, every morning on Good Morning America a nutritional expert from the Department of Agriculture will be paraded to tell the kiddies about how important it is to eat a good breakfast of five pounds of bread with one microgram of protein. Meanwhile America gets fatter, and fatter, and fatter, and still the media trumpets the government-sponsored lies about how people should eat more bread and less meat.
Even programs that pretend to tell the truth actually perpetuate the lies. "Supersize Me" talked about the nutritional nightmare that is a Big Mac combo, but then the guy proceeded to turn the spotlight on the fat in the burger instead of talking about the whopping load of starch in the bun and the fries. Here's a guy gobbling down 146 grams of carbs, but he's bitching about the 40 grams of fat. And of course, based on the criminally fraudulent Food Pyramid, he's right, because according to that, people should be eating 300 grams of carbs every day. Meanwhile, 60% of Americans are either diabetic or pre-diabetic, and most of them are desperately trying to follow what the government tells them is a healthy balance.
You want to talk about Woodward and Bernstein? Ok, tip of the hat, nice work on that one. But while America sat transfixed for two years on the Watergate hearings and watching Nixon's secretary describe how often she changed tapes in the tape recorder, here's the real story they missed: the perpetuation of the War Economy. After every previous war there was a rollback of the War Economy and relief for the taxpayer, but it didn't happen after Vietnam. The war ended, the troops came home, but the bloated budget of the government didn't shrink! This is what Americans should have been screaming about and marching in protest of, while the Watergate hearings kept them busy.
Much the same happened 40 years later with Benghazi. Here we have America hotly debating who saw which email at what time of day, when what they really should be debating is the fact that destabilizing Libya was a stooooopid idea from start to finish. Instead of expressing dismay about the four Americans who died, maybe they should be expressing dismay at the 10,000 Libyans who died. Or maybe hundreds of thousand, for who knows, this is another war that isn't over yet, and it may be decades before the full tally is done. But yeah, the government did a little sleight-of-hand and distracted everybody into a debate about office email protocol, and the media is too happy to oblige and help make sure nobody talks about the real issue here.
Oh, yes, remember the youtube video? Nice one! I'll bet three quarters of Libyans don't even know what youtube is, but it's all about that. Every media outlet in the country repeated that particular lie. Only once it was debunked, suddenly they don't remember that they propagated it.
As Noam Chomsky said, "Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." The supine American media exists to help maintain the Daily Hate against whoever are the current state-sponsored pariahs, and to keep people's attention away from how their own government is screwing them.
