Suppression/Propaganda in Media

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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby alloneword » Thu Nov 14, 2019 10:05 am

Murray (yes, again) today picked up on an important point regarding 'Phillip Cross' regarding who was/is 'following' him on Twitter...

Le Mesurier Gets Cross

14 Nov, 2019 in Uncategorized by craig

Perhaps the only fact on James Le Mesurier about which I would agree with the MSM war cheerleaders is that he was a very busy man. It is remarkable therefore that he found the time and inclination to follow “Philip Cross” on twitter. Given that “Philip Cross” has virtually never posted an original tweet, and his timeline consists almost entirely of retweets of Nick Cohen, David Aaronovitch and openly pro-Israel propaganda accounts, why would Le Mesurier bother to follow him?

“Philip Cross” has never posted any news other than to retweet columnists. He has never given an insight into a story. In addition to James Le Mesurier, why then were all these MSM journailsts following “Philip Cross” from before “he” gained notoriety for his Wikipedia exploits?

Oliver Kamm, Leader Writer The Times
Nick Cohen, Columnist The Guardian/Observer
Joan Smith, Columnist The Independent
Leslie Felperin, Film Columnist The Guardian
Kate Connolly, Foreign Correspondent The Guardian/Observer
Lisa O’Carroll, Brexit Correspondent The Guardian
James Bloodworth, Columnist The Independent
Cristina Criddle, BBC Radio 4 Today Programme
Sarah Baxter, Deputy Editor, The Sunday Times
Iain Watson, Political Correspondent, The BBC
Caroline Wheeler, Deputy Political Editor, the Sunday Times
Jennifer Chevalier, CBC ex-BBC
Dani Garavelli, Scotland on Sunday

Prominent Freelancers

Bonnie Greer (frequently in The Guardian)
Mason Boycott-Owen (The Guardian, New Statesman)
Marko Attilla Hoare (The Guardian)
Kirsty Hughes
Guy Walters (BBC)
Paul Canning

What attracted all of these senior MSM figures to follow an obscure account with almost no original content? No reasonable explanation of this phenomenon has ever been offered by any of the above. What a considerable number of them have done is to use the megaphone their plutocrat or state overlords have given them, to label those asking this perfectly reasonable question as crazed conspiracy theorists.

This week, on the day of Le Mesurier’s death, “Philip Cross” made 48 edits to Le Mesurier’s Wikipedia page, each one designed to expunge any criticism of the role of the White Helmets in Syria or reference to their close relationship with the jihadists...


https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives ... ets-cross/

Weird, huh?
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Elvis » Thu Nov 14, 2019 11:18 am

^^^^ No conspiracy there, no sirree!

It'd be fun to ask each of those journalists why they followed Cross.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby stickdog99 » Thu Nov 14, 2019 5:52 pm

Nothing you didn't know about how much MSNBC is Anybody But Bernie: http://inthesetimes.com/features/msnbc- ... lysis.html

To understand how MSNBC may be shaping the 2020 election, In These Times analyzed the network’s August and September coverage of the Democratic presidential contest’s leading candidates—Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren. We focused on the network’s flagship primetime shows: The 11th Hour with Brian Williams, All In with Chris Hayes, The Beat with Ari Melber, Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell and The Rachel Maddow Show.

In These Times tallied how often the three candidates were discussed and logged whether the coverage was positive, negative or neutral. For example, while poll results by themselves (whether favorable or unfavorable to a candidate) were simply logged as neutral, commentary about a candidate “surging” was logged as positive and “stagnant” as negative. Clips and previews for upcoming segments were not included.

The coverage quickly revealed a pattern. Over the two months, these six programs focused on Biden, often to the exclusion of Warren and Sanders. Sanders received not only the least total coverage (less than one-third of Biden’s), but the most negative. As to the substance, MSNBC’s reporting revolved around poll results and so-called electability.


After the 2016 presidential election, in which the press was criticized for disproportionately giving Donald Trump $2 billion of free media, MSNBC may be repeating history. While pundits get paid to have opinions, MSNBC’s seem to dwell in an alternate reality: As momentum mounts for longstanding liberal goals like single-payer health care and bold climate action, MSNBC’s coverage seems devoted, instead, to narrowing the liberal imagination.

In its August and September coverage, by total mentions, MSNBC talked about Biden twice as often as Warren and three times as often as Sanders. By number of episodes, 64% of the 240 episodes discussed Biden, 43% discussed Warren and 36% discussed Sanders. A quarter of the episodes only discussed Biden, compared to 5% and 1% that mentioned only Warren or Sanders, respectively.

Biden was also the only one of the three candidates to see his on-air mentions increase, rather than decline, in September, even as his polling numbers steadily went south. Part of the reason was the Ukraine scandal that erupted in September: News broke that President Trump had conditioned the release of aid to Ukraine upon an investigation of Biden’s son, who had accepted a well compensated position with a Ukrainian oil company in 2014. MSNBC gave the story wall-to-wall coverage, pushing up Biden’s mentions. Almost all of this coverage was neutral—stating that Trump was trying to dig up dirt on Biden—but was occasionally positive, as when Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson speculated that the “impeachment dynamic sort of confirm[s] Biden’s aura of electability because he’s the one Trump is most afraid of, so maybe he’s one we ought to go with.”


In August, however—before the Ukraine scandal took off—Biden still received around 2.5 times as much coverage as Sanders and about 1.7 times as much as Warren.

This coverage was not all positive. In total, 11.3% of Biden’s mentions were negative. Generally, this negative coverage focused on Biden’s gaffes and lackluster debate performances, and how they might affect his electability— the quality upon which Biden is staking his candidacy. The shows hosted by Chris Hayes and Ari Melber featured proportionally the most negative coverage of Biden.

The handful of more substantive criticisms of Biden included Chris Matthews and Jason Johnson, politics editor at The Root, questioning how sincere Biden was when he accused Trump of being a white supremacist, as well as primary candidate Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) criticizing Biden’s tough-on-crime record and vote for the Iraq War.

By and large, however, such critiques of Biden were subsumed by positive coverage, presenting him as the safest, strongest choice to take on Trump—or, as Matthews put it, the Democrats’ “designated driver.”

“What happens if you get Joe Biden and a rocky stock market? That’s a bad combination for President Trump,” MSNBC host Stephanie Ruhle said on Brian Williams’ show, contrasting Biden with an unnamed “socialist” whom she implied Trump would successfully redbait.


One common line, deployed in six different episodes by both hosts and guests, was that the contest between Biden (on one side) and Warren or Sanders (on the other) was a battle between the “head” and the “heart” of the Democratic Party—implying Biden was the smart choice.

Guests across all six shows played down Biden’s widely panned debate performances. In a Last Word appearance, Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. waved away criticism in other media (including on Melber’s show) of Biden’s infamous “record player” comment. Biden had responded to a question about the legacy of slavery by suggesting social workers be deployed in the homes of African Americans to help parents “deal with how to raise their children” by, for example, making sure they have a “record player on at night.” Dionne joked, “[Biden] had that appeal to hipsters by talking about record players. Aren’t they into vinyl these days?” He added, “People aren’t giving him credit for how he— what he had in mind there.”


The most Biden-friendly shows were those hosted by Lawrence O’Donnell, Matthews and Williams. On August 8, O’Donnell effusively praised a speech of Biden’s that cast Trump as a racist aberration in a long line of good, tolerant presidents, saying Biden had “told the hard truths of American history.” Five days later, O’Donnell lauded a Biden tweet calling for the United States to lead the world in rallying support for protesters in Hong Kong. “That’s the way presidents in this country used to sound,” O’Donnell gushed.


On Williams’ show, the most-watched cable news show in its 11 p.m. slot for five straight quarters, NBC News correspondent Mike Memoli played down Biden’s bizarre statement to an Iowa crowd that “poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” Memoli said that, to the Iowans in the audience, the comment “may not have even registered.”


MSNBC’s most pro-Biden host was Chris Matthews, who in 2017 called for Biden to run. Matthews’ guests waved away Biden’s gaffes and talked him up as the all-but-certain winner of the general election.

“Today, I saw a splash of sunlight in what’s been a grim Democratic tussle for president,” Matthews began August 1, before launching into a soliloquy about a Biden press conference in Detroit, where the candidate, “his face toward the sun,” reminded Matthews that “hope” still existed. Matthews lamented that criticism of Biden’s record would only lead to “even more destruction of our national unity.”

When Sirius XM host Danielle Moodie-Mills cautioned that she didn’t think Biden “conjures that kind of action that are going to get people into the streets,” Matthews responded, “Okay, well, that’s your opinion,” and cut to a Biden campaign ad.

Only a few of the 240 episodes discussed Biden’s reliance on big-dollar donations, and none singled out his fundraising from industries such as healthcare and banking that have a strong interest in current policy debates. Melber noted that Biden was struggling among grassroots small donors compared to Sanders and Warren. The other times Biden’s big-dollar fundraising came up, it was in the context of airing criticisms of Warren for having engaged in it herself before swearing it off for this year’s primary.

In terms of policy coverage of the candidates—arguably the most important role played by the fourth estate when reporting on candidates—Biden barely registered.

On healthcare, the biggest campaign issue for a majority of voters, Biden’s “plan to protect and build on the Affordable Care Act”—which his website admits would leave 3% of Americans uninsured—was only occasionally discussed, while being praised for giving Americans “choice” by guests such as ousted centrist Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.).

Meanwhile, Sanders’ “Medicare for life thing”—as Matthews calls it—was criticized as “throwing 149 million people off their healthcare” (Sen. Amy Klobuchar [D-Minn.]) and taking away “choice.” Biden’s deputy campaign manager told Matthews that Sanders’ plan would “mean a tax increase on middle tax [sic] families,” ignoring the fact that independent studies have determined Medicare for All would lower overall healthcare costs. Warren’s refusal to say taxes would go up to fund Medicare for All was characterized alternately as evasive, or a shrewd tactic to “help her sustain” her rise in polling.

This is a far cry from the polls that show the majority of Democratic voters are favorable toward the policy.

While the broader progressive media landscape was chock-full of stories about Biden’s fundraising from powerful interests, his lack of grassroots enthusiasm, his incoherent public statements and his unfair attacks on Medicare for All, MSNBC viewers mostly saw the Biden that his campaign presented: a decent, beloved, steady hand who is the country’s safest bet.

Sanders, meanwhile, received less coverage on MSNBC than Biden or Warren. Of the three candidates, Sanders was least likely to be mentioned positively (12.9% of his mentions) and most likely to be mentioned negatively (20.7%). The remaining two-thirds of his mentions were neutral.

Sanders received no negative mentions on Maddow’s show (which had the least primary coverage of the six programs analyzed), and only a handful on O’Donnell’s, Melber’s and Hayes’ shows. Rather, 87% of negative mentions came from just two programs: Matthews’ Hardball and Williams’ 11th Hour.

Sanders was especially criticized on 11th Hour after he suggested the negative campaign coverage coming from the Washington Post—owned by billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos—was related to Sanders’ criticism of Amazon’s labor practices. Williams and a guest both took the opportunity to liken Sanders to Trump, who frequently complains about his media coverage. Williams then quoted a tweet from an anonymous online anti-Sanders troll—sent before the Bezos controversy had even begun—accusing Sanders of not working to defeat Trump in 2016. (In fact, Sanders stumped at 17 pro-Hillary Clinton events in 11 states in November 2016.)


Although Warren was almost as under-covered as Sanders relative to her polling numbers, her treatment was very different. Warren had the lowest proportion of negative coverage of all three candidates (just 7.9% of all her mentions) and the highest proportion of position mentions (30.6%).

Criticisms of Sanders and Warren were often paired. Nevada Independent editor Jon Ralston suggested to Williams on August 20 that Warren and Sanders had endangered their chances of winning a general election by backing “things that [the] majority of Americans may not like,” such as Medicare for All.

By that same day, however, Matthews had pioneered a new tone toward Warren. Mere moments after saying voter support for the two was “unchanged since June” and “too close to call,” Matthews declared Warren was “making big strides in her efforts to take over the party’s left lane from Sanders” and “eating his lunch every day.” In a later episode, Matthews and The Root’s Johnson claimed African American women were “leaving Bernie” and “breaking for Warren,” even though a Pew Research Center poll that week showed Sanders’ base to be the least white (49%) of the leading four candidates (including Sen. Kamala Harris), Warren’s was whitest (71%), and all four had about 50% women supporters. (Matthews specified that he meant “African American women who tend to be influencers.”)


Williams highlighted what he described as an “excitement deficit” between Warren and the other candidates, ignoring that Sanders continued to draw large crowds and was the first to reach the benchmark of 1 million individual donations.

Zerlina Maxwell, a Clinton campaign alum and frequent guest, told Matthews that Warren and Sanders shared a “bold vision,” but Warren coupled it with “specific policy proposals” that tell you “how we’re going to get there”—implying that Sanders did not.


Commentators framed the September debate as a showdown between Warren and Biden, often leaving Sanders out. “Any sort of discussion between those two candidates will be one that could help a lot of voters decide who they’re supporting,” said the Wall Street Journal’s Tarini Parti.


After that debate, commentators singled out Warren’s performance with praise. Matthews’ and Williams’ shows saw a pronounced uptick in positive coverage of Warren, with commentators calling her “ingenious” and “the strongest natural talent,” and plotting out future scenarios where she ran away with the Democratic nomination.

As pundits warmed to Warren, they increasingly singled out Sanders for criticism. He “shouted his way through that last debate and came off as a bit of a scold,” said Williams. He was “out of step on the biggest sort of cultural issue in the country right now,” said Deadline: White House host Nicole Wallace, in reference to guns. He was helping Trump’s re-election chances, said former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele on Hardball.


Appearing on The 11th Hour, Republican strategist Rick Wilson called Sanders the “communist Ron Paul” and “a recipe for electoral disaster.”


Overall, MSNBC's primary coverage was devoid of policy discussion. Viewers were told often that Warren “has a plan for everything”—but not what those plans might contain.

Sanders and Warren released, respectively, eight and 10 detailed policy plans over this two-month period, covering topics from investing in rural America, empowering indigenous people, getting to 100% renewable energy and muzzling corporate lobbyists (Warren) to workplace democracy, a Green New Deal, housing for all and a wealth tax (Sanders). Most of these 18 plans were ignored by MSNBC, and only two were discussed in any depth: Hayes interviewed Sanders about his August 22 Green New Deal plan and Maddow interviewed Warren about her September 16 anti-corruption plan. (Biden, for his part, introduced zero plans.)

Instead, MSNBC’s coverage builds around incoming poll results, which may be cause for concern. Social scientists have long been critical of the way polls can shape news coverage, as poll coverage risks calcifying what might otherwise be fleeting shifts in popular opinion. The hosts In These Times analyzed occasionally acknowledged that polls are not always reliable, but relied on them anyway. Only Melber explicitly dismissed polls, saying “they don’t matter right now,” reporting instead on online donation numbers. He was alone in mentioning Sanders’ historic surge in small-dollar donations.

Political commentator Walter Lippmann, patron saint of patrician liberalism, argued in 1922 that, because “the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely,” they “can be managed only by a specialized class”—in other words, the misguided masses can’t recognize their own interests without guidance from the best and brightest. Lippmann would likely have put MSNBC anchors in this special class, interpreting and shaping reality for the liberal public to, as Lippmann put it, “create consent.” Of course, the anchors on MSNBC’s flagships are part of a larger corporate media system, and the parameters of the consent they create is modulated by the terms of acceptable public discourse. When political actors cross those parameters—including climate crisis activists like the Sunrise Movement, antiwar Catholic Worker protestors like the Ploughshares Seven, prison abolitionists like Critical Resistance and democratic socialist members of Congress like Sanders—the fourth estate buttresses the status quo to protect the establishment from any such incursions. So when the Democratic establishment was besieged by small-d democrats in search of a political revolution in 2016, rather than investigate, the mainstream press simply performed as expected—by emphatically promoting a candidacy that turned out to be fatally flawed.

MSNBC has close ties to a Democratic establishment that finds the politics of Biden (and even Warren) more palatable than Sanders’ “political revolution.” In the leadup to the 2016 primary, MSNBC frequently drew hosts and guests from Hillary Clinton’s campaign. According to the New York Times and other outlets, in the lead-up to the race for the Democratic nomination, this same establishment— including former Clinton staffers and donors—has held secret meetings to strategize how to stop Sanders.

Once the primaries are over, the election will be decided by the turnout and preferences of voters who pay little or no attention to MSNBC, or cable news in general. But at the moment, as the Iowa caucuses near, MSNBC has a powerful bullhorn. In 2016, the Democratic establishment backed the “safest,” most “electable” candidate in Hillary Clinton, with disastrous results. It bears asking if they’re repeating the same mistake.
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Elvis » Thu Nov 14, 2019 6:35 pm

stickdog99 wrote:To understand how MSNBC may be shaping the 2020 election, In These Times analyzed the network’s August and September coverage of the Democratic presidential contest’s leading candidates—Sen. Bernie Sanders, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.


Remiscent of Thomas Frank's piece on WaPo's concerted attacks on Sanders on 2016:

https://harpers.org/archive/2016/11/swat-team-2/

From the November 2016 issue
Swat Team
The media’s extermination of Bernie Sanders, and real reform

By Thomas Frank
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Belligerent Savant » Wed Dec 18, 2019 12:40 am

.


As Bernays has said, “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.”



The placement of convincing or confusing disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.


Their techniques of propaganda developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency’s courting of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s “the compatible left,” having already had the right in its pocket.



the average people that Lippman and Bernays trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.

This is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called “average” people’s thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different perspectives on a topic.

This is what some call the professional and intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces. It is this segment of the population that considers itself “informed,” but the information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.





The Art of Doublespeak: Bellingcat and Mind Control
Edward Curtin

In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain.

In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays, who developed “public relations” (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites.

Bernays had honed his skills while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City.

There is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis’s documentary, The Century of Self (above), where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp, reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed in his wake.

He says the reason he couldn’t call his new business “propaganda” was because the Germans had given propaganda a “bad name,” and so he came up with the euphemism “public relations.” He then adds that “if you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for peace.”

Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with fake news broadcasts).

He says “the Germans gave propaganda a bad name,” not Bernays and the United States with their vast campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction).

He sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it led to support for the “war to end all wars” and subsequently to a hit movie about WWI, Yankee Doodle Dandy, made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn’t achieve its lofty goal.

As Bernays has said, “The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.”

He was a propagandist to the end. I suspect most viewers of the film are taken in by these softly spoken words of an old man sipping a glass of wine at a dinner table with a woman who is asking him questions.

I have shown this film to hundreds of students and none has noticed his legerdemain. It is an example of the sort of hocus-pocus I will be getting to shortly, the sly insertion into seemingly liberal or matter-of-fact commentary of statements that imply a different story.

The placement of convincing or confusing disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.

In the following years, Bernays, Lippman, and their ilk were joined by social “scientists,” psychologists, and sundry others intent on making a sham out of the idea of democracy by developing strategies and techniques for the engineering of social consensus consonant with the wishes of the ruling classes.

Their techniques of propaganda developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency’s courting of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s “the compatible left,” having already had the right in its pocket.

Today most people are, as is said, “wired,” and they get their information from the electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots with government propagandists.

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks increased or decreased over your lifetime.

The answer is obvious: the average people that Lippman and Bernays trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.

This is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called “average” people’s thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different perspectives on a topic.

This is what some call the professional and intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces. It is this segment of the population that considers itself “informed,” but the information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.

Recently I have noticed a group of interconnected examples of how this group of the population that exerts influence incommensurate with their numbers has contributed to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Within this group there are opinion makers who are often journalists, writers, and cultural producers of some sort or other, and then the larger number of the intellectual or schooled class who follow their opinions.

This second group then passes on their received opinions to those who look up to them.

There is a notorious propaganda outfit called Bellingcat, started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins, that is funded by The Atlantic Council (a think-tank with deep ties to the U.S. government, NATO, war manufacturers, and their allies), and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) (another infamous U.S. front organization heavily involved in so-called color revolution regime change operations all around the world), that has just won the International Emmy Award for best documentary.

The film with the Orwellian title, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, received its Emmy at a recent ceremony in New York City.

Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine. It has been lauded by the corporate mainstream media in the west.

Its support for the equally fraudulent White Helmets (also funded by the US and the UK) in Syria has also been praised by the western corporate media while being dissected as propaganda by many excellent independent journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Catte Black, among others.

It’s had its work skewered by the likes of Seymour Hersh and MIT professor Theodore Postol, and its US government connections pointed out by many others, including Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone. And now we have the mainstream media’s wall of silence on the leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concerning the Douma chemical attack and the doctoring of their report that led to the illegal US bombing of Syria in the spring of 2018.

Bellingcat was at the forefront of providing justification for such bombing, and now the journalists Peter Hitchens, Tareq Harrad (who recently resigned from Newsweek after accusing the publication of suppressing his revelations about the OPCW scandal) and others are fighting an uphill battle to get the truth out.

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy, fulfilling Bernays’ point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today.

Who presented the Emmy Award to the filmmakers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges.

Why he did so, I don’t know. But that he did so clearly sends a message to those who follow his work and trust him that it’s okay to give a major cultural award to a propaganda outfit. But then, perhaps he doesn’t consider Bellingcat to be that.

Nor, one presumes, does The Intercept, the billionaire Pierre Omidyar owned publication associated with Glen Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, and also read by many progressive-minded people.

The Intercept that earlier this year disbanded the small team that was tasked with reviewing and releasing more of the massive trove of documents they received from Edward Snowden six years ago, a minute number of which have ever been released or probably ever will be.

As Whitney Webb pointed out, last year The Intercept hosted a workshop for Bellingcat. She wrote:

The Intercept, along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York.

The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using “open source” tools — with Bellingcat’s past, controversial investigations for use as case studies…

…Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as “independent” and “investigative journalism.”


Then we have Jefferson Morley, the editor of The Deep State, former Washington Post journalist, and JFK assassination researcher, who has written a praiseworthy review of the Bellingcat film and who supports Bellingcat.

“In my experience, Bellingcat is credible,” he writes in an Alternet article, “Bellingcat documentary has the pace and plot of a thriller.”

Morley has also just written an article for Counterpunch – “Why the Douma Chemical Attack Wasn’t a ‘Managed Massacre’” – in which he disputes the claim that the April 7, 2018 attack in the Damascus suburb was a false flag operation carried out by Assad’s opponents.

“I do not see any evidence proving that Douma was a false flag incident,” he writes in this article that is written in a style that leaves one guessing as to what exactly he is saying.

It sounds convincing unless one concentrates, and then his double messages emerge.

Yet it is the kind of article that certain “sophisticated” left-wing readers might read and feel is insightful. But then Morley, who has written considerably about the CIA, edits a website that advertises itself as “the thinking person’s portal to the world of secret government,” and recently had an exchange with former CIA Director John Brennan where “Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest,” said in February 2017, less than a month after Trump was sworn in as president, that:

With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most—perhaps the only—credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump’s “wrecking ball presidency.”


Is it any wonder that some people might be a bit confused?

“I know what you’re thinking about,” said Tweedledum; “but it isn’t so, nohow.”

“Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn’t, it ain’t. That’s logic.”


As a final case in point, there is a recent book by Stephen Kinzer, Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control, the story of the chemist known as Dr. Death who ran the CIA’s MK-ULTRA mind control project, using LSD, torture, electric shock therapy, hypnosis, etc.; developed sadistic methods of torture still used in black sites around the world; and invented various ingenious techniques for assassination, many of which were aimed at Fidel Castro.

Gottlieb was responsible for brutal prison and hospital experiments and untold death and suffering inflicted on all sorts of innocent people. His work was depraved in the deepest sense; he worked with Nazis who experimented on Jews despite being Jewish himself.

Kinzer writes in-depth about this man who considered himself a patriot and a spiritual person – a humane torturer and killer. It is an eye-opening book for anyone who does not know about Gottlieb, who gave the CIA the essential tools they use in their “organized crime” activities around the world – in the words of Douglass Valentine, the author of The CIA as Organized Crime and The Phoenix Program.

Kinzer’s book is good history on Gottlieb; however, he doesn’t venture into the present activities of the CIA and Gottlieb’s patriotic followers, who no doubt exist and go about their business in secret.

After recounting in detail the sordid history of Gottlieb’s secret work that is nauseating to read about, Kinzer leaves the reader with these strange words:

Gottlieb was not a sadist, but he might well have been…. Above all he was an instrument of history. Understanding him is a deeply disturbing way of understanding ourselves.


What possibly could this mean? Not a sadist? An instrument of history? Understanding ourselves? These few sentences, dropped out of nowhere, pull the rug out from under what is generally an illuminating history and what seems like a moral indictment. This language is pure mystification.

Kinzer also concludes that because Gottlieb said so, the CIA failed in their efforts to develop methods of mind control and ended MK-ULTRA’s experiments long ago. Why would he believe the word of a man who personified the agency he worked for: a secret liar? He writes,

When Sydney Gottlieb brough MK-ULTRA to its end in the early 1960s, he told his CIA superiors that he had found no reliable way to wipe away memory, make people abandon their consciences, or commit crimes and then forget them.


As for those who might think otherwise, Kinzer suggests they have vivid imaginations and are caught up in conspiracy thinking: “This [convincing others that the CIA had developed methods of mind control when they hadn’t] is Sydney Gottlieb’s most unexpected legacy,” he asserts.

He says this although Richard Helms, the CIA Director, destroyed all MK-Ultra records. He says that Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and Helms themselves were caught up in a complete fantasy about mind control because they had seen too many movies and read too many books; mind control was impossible, a failure, a myth, he maintains. It is the stuff of popular culture, entertainment.

In an interview with Chris Hedges, interestingly posted by Jefferson Morley at his website, The Deep State, Hedges agrees with Kinzer. Gottlieb, Dulles, et al. were all deluded. Mind control was impossible. You couldn’t create a Manchurian Candidate; by implication, someone like Sirhan Sirhan could not have been programmed to be a fake Manchurian Candidate and to have no memory of what he did, as he claims. He could not have been mind-controlled by the CIA to perform his part as the seeming assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy while the real killer shot RFK from behind. People who think like this should get real.

Furthermore, as is so common in books such as Kinzer’s, he repeats the canard that JFK and RFK knew about and pressured the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro.

This is demonstrably false, as shown by the Church Committee and the Assassinations Record Review Board, among many others. That Kinzer takes the word of notorious liars like Richard Helms and the top-level CIA operative Samuel Halpern is simple incredible, something that is hard to consider a mistake. Slipped into a truth sandwich, it is devoured and passed on. But it is false. Bullshit meant to deceive.

But this is how these games are played. If you look carefully, you will see them widely. Inform, enlighten, while throwing in doubletalk and untruths.

The small number of people who read such books and articles will come away knowing some history that has no current relevance and being misinformed on other history that does. They will then be in the know, ready to pass their “wisdom” on to those who care to listen. They will not think they are average.

But they will be mind controlled, and the killer cat will roam freely without a bell, ready to devour the unsuspecting mice.




https://off-guardian.org/2019/12/15/the ... d-control/
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby chump » Wed Dec 18, 2019 1:50 am

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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Oct 15, 2020 9:36 am

.

https://techstartups.com/2020/10/14/big ... not-great/

Understatement of the week:
“Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable,” Dorsey wrote in the tweet.





Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologizes for NY Post story censorship: “Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was Not great …and URL blocking unacceptable”



Big tech companies have started a war that they cannot win. Earlier today, we wrote about Facebook and Twitter after the two tech giants censored sourced reporting from the New York Post’s story about bombshell emails and video obtained from Hunter Biden’s laptop. Twitter later censored New York Post tweets and locked its account

Now about three hours later, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey apologizes after U.S. Presiden Trump threatened to remove Facebook and Twitter protections and called them ‘terrible’ for blocking the New York Post story. President Trump is called for an end to Section 230 immunity that protects sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and others.

In a tweet, Dorsey said the following:

“Our communication around our actions on the @nypost article was not great. And blocking URL sharing via tweet or DM with zero context as to why we’re blocking: unacceptable.”







The current reality is that this thread can easily be updated daily, but then it'd simply become a Google News amplifier
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Elvis » Thu Oct 15, 2020 7:44 pm

Posted in "The Russian Conspiracy as RI subject" thread but goes well here:

https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/imagi ... ff7e7563b1
Imagine If MSM Consistently Applied The Evidentiary Standards It’s Applying To Hunter Biden’s Emails
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Harvey » Thu Oct 15, 2020 8:06 pm

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41725&sid=173362ce7dc0c18d5056b7ef93e519b0&start=45#p682158

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy, fulfilling Bernays’ point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today.

Who presented the Emmy Award to the filmmakers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges.


^ Does anyone know if he ever offered an explanation?
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Elvis » Fri Oct 16, 2020 10:43 pm

Harvey » Thu Oct 15, 2020 5:06 pm wrote:
http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41725&sid=173362ce7dc0c18d5056b7ef93e519b0&start=45#p682158

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy, fulfilling Bernays’ point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today.

Who presented the Emmy Award to the filmmakers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges.


^ Does anyone know if he ever offered an explanation?


That bugs me, too. I haven't seen an explanation, and I think Hedges' handing out the award mostly just goes to show how effective the propaganda can be.
“The purpose of studying economics is not to acquire a set of ready-made answers to economic questions, but to learn how to avoid being deceived by economists.” ― Joan Robinson
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby JackRiddler » Sat Oct 17, 2020 12:00 pm

Elvis » Fri Oct 16, 2020 9:43 pm wrote:That bugs me, too. I haven't seen an explanation, and I think Hedges' handing out the award mostly just goes to show how effective the propaganda can be.


What's he going to do at that point? Abscond with the statuette, or club Elliot with it? Pull a Steve Harvey and misread the card? He should have refused the gig back when he learned that Bellingcat was among the nominees.
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Harvey » Sat Oct 17, 2020 2:41 pm

JackRiddler » Sat Oct 17, 2020 5:00 pm wrote:He should have refused the gig back when he learned that Bellingcat was among the nominees.


One hopes he didn't know they were, up until the moment he presented it.
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Belligerent Savant » Sat Oct 17, 2020 3:07 pm

,

Unfortunately, I lean towards the opposite.

[Arguably, the points raised in the below may not be due to Hedges as a 'compromised agent', but rather, he may be willfully -- or perhaps unwittingly -- raising blinds to certain unpleasant truths... but is Hedges the type that would succumb to the latter?]


...

A recent article, Our Invisible Government, by the well-known journalist, Chris Hedges, is a typical case in point. As is his habit, he sheds light on much that is avoided by the mainstream press. Very important matters. In this piece, he writes in his passionate style that

"The most powerful and important organs in the invisible government are the nation’s bloated and unaccountable intelligence agencies. They are the vanguard of the invisible government. They oversee a vast “black world,” tasked with maintaining the invisible government’s lock on power."

This, of course, is true. He then goes on to catalogue ways these intelligence agencies, led by the CIA, have overthrown foreign governments and assassinated their leaders, persecuted and besmirched the names of those – Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, et al. – who have opposed government policies, and used propaganda to conceal the real reasons for their evil deeds, such as the wars against Vietnam, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. He condemns such actions.

He spends much of his article referencing Stephen Kinzer’s new book, Poisoner in Chief: Sydney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control and Gottlieb’s heinous exploits during his long CIA career. Known as “Dr. Death,” this Bronx born son of Jewish immigrants, ran the CIA’s mind control programs and its depraved medical experiments on unknowing victims, known as MK-ULTRA and Artichoke. He oversaw the development of various poisons and bizarre methods to kill foreign leaders such as Fidel Castro and Patrice Lumumba. He worked closely with Nazi scientists who had been brought to the United Statesby Allen Dulles in an operation called Operation Paperclip. Gottlieb was responsible for so many deaths and so much human anguish and suffering that it is hard to believe, but believe it we must because it is true. His work on torture and mind control led to Abu Ghraib, CIA black sites, and assorted U.S.atrocities of recent history.

Hedges tells us all this and rightly condemns it as “the moral squalor” and “criminality” that it is.Only a sick or evil person could disagree with his account of Gottlieb via Kinzer’s book. I suspect many good people who have or will read his piece will agree with his denunciations of this evil CIA history. Additionally, he correctly adds:

"It would be naive to relegate the behavior of Gottlieb and the CIA to the past, especially since the invisible government has once again shrouded the activities of intelligence agencies from congressional oversight or public scrutiny and installed a proponent of torture, Gina Haspel, as the head of the agency."

This also is very true. All these truths can make you forget what’s not true and what’s missing in his article.

But something is missing, and some wording is quite odd and factually false. It is easy to miss this as one’s indignation rises as one reads Hedges’ cataloguing of Gottlieb’s and the CIA’s obscenities.

He omits mentioning the Clinton administration’s dismantling wars against Yugoslavia, including 78 days of non-stop bombing of Serbia in 1999 that killed thousands of innocent people in the name of “humanitarian intervention,” wars he covered for the New York Times, the paper he has come to castigate and the paper that has a long history of doing the CIA’s bidding.

He claims that Gottlieb and the CIA’s scientists failed in their “vain quest” for mind control drugs or electronic implants that might, among other things, get victims to act against their wills, such as acting as a Manchurian candidate, and as a result, “abandoned” their efforts. That they failed is not true, and that they abandoned their efforts is unknowable, unless you wish to take the CIA at its word, which is a hilarious thought. How could Hedges possibly know they abandoned such work? A logical person would assume they would say that and continue their work more secretly. On one hand, Hedges says, “It would be naive to relegate the behavior of Gottlieb and the CIA to the past,” but then he does just that. Which is it, Chris? By definition, the “invisible” government, the CIA, never reveals their operations, and lying is their modus operandi, especially with their brazen in-your-face biblical motto: “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.”

He says the invisible deep state “failed to foresee…the 9/11 attacks or the absence of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.” This is factually wrong and quite absurd, as is well documented. They simply lied about these matters ex post facto. He suggests such failures were due to “ineptitude,” a coy word used by numerous other writers who find reasons to deny intentionality to the “deep state.”

He therefore is implying that the attacks of September 11, 2001, a subject that he has consistently failed to address over the years even while he has written in detail about so much else, did not involve America’s “invisible government forces.” The ineptitude explanation fails elementary logical analysis.Does he think it was intelligence ineptitude that allowed operatives to wire the highly-secure Twin Towers and Building 7 for controlled demolition that brought those buildings down, as the testimony of one’s eyes and that of hundreds of NYC firefighters who reported explosions throughout the buildings affirm? Ineptitude is another word for avoidance of evidence, gathered over the years by careful scholars and researchers. Ineptitude is another word for the belief “in miracles,” as David Ray Griffin has phrased it.

What does he think Colin Powell was doing at the United Nations on February 5, 2003 with CIA Director George Tenet sitting behind him when he lied repeatedly and fabricated evidence for Iraq having weapons of mass destruction to promote and justify the U.S. war against Iraq? Ineptitude? A failure of intelligence?

Chris Hedges is a very intelligent man, so why does he write such things?

Most importantly, why, when he writes about the past evil deeds of the intelligence operatives –Gottlieb and the CIA’s overseas coups and assassination of foreign leaders, etc. – does he fail to say one word about the CIA’s assassination of domestic leaders, including President John Kennedy in 1963, the foundational event in the invisible government’s takeover of the United States. Can an act be more evil and in need of moral condemnation? And how about the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in 1968, or Malcolm X in 1965? Why does Hedges elide these assassinations as if they are not worthy of attention, but Gottlieb’s sick work for the CIA is? Like the attacks of September 11, 2001, he has avoided these assassinations throughout the years.

I don’t know why. Only he can say. He is a very well-read man, who is constantly quoting from scholars about various important issues. His books are chock full of such quotations and references. But you will look in vain for references to the brilliant, scholarly work of such writers on these assassinations, the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the CIA’s criminal and morally repugnant activities as James Douglass, David Talbot, David Ray Griffin, William Pepper, Graeme MacQueen, Lisa Pease, and so many others. Is it possible that he has never read their books when he has read so much else? If so, why?

As I said before, Chris Hedges, who has a passionate but mild-mannered style, is not alone in his disregard of these key matters. Other celebrity names on the left have been especially guilty of the same approach: Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Alexander Cockburn, to name just a few (Zinn and Cockburn are dead).They have avoided these issues as if they were toxic. Nor would they logically explain why. The few times they did respond to those who criticized them for this, it was usually through a dismissive wave of the hand or name calling, a tactic such as the CIA developed with the term “conspiracy theory.” Cockburn was particularly nasty in this regard, priding himself on dismissing others with words such as kooks, lunatics, and idiots, even when his logic was deplorable. He liked to use ineptitude’s synonym, “incompetence,” to explain away what he considered intelligence agency failures. “Why,” he wrote in one piece attacking September 11 critics while upholding the government’s version, “does the obvious have to be proved?”

The CIA’s mind control operations need to be exposed, as Hedges does to a degree in this latest article. But revealing while concealing is unworthy of one who condemns “creeps who revel in human degradation, dirty tricks, and murder.” It itself is a form of mind control.

Perhaps he will see fit to publicly explain why he has done this.




https://countercurrents.org/2019/09/why ... -his-bets/
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Belligerent Savant » Thu Oct 29, 2020 2:48 pm

.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-res ... -intercept



My Resignation From The Intercept


The same trends of repression, censorship and ideological homogeneity plaguing the national press generally have engulfed the media outlet I co-founded, culminating in censorship of my own articles.



More at link.
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Re: Suppression/Propaganda in Media

Postby Harvey » Thu Oct 29, 2020 6:17 pm

It was a while coming. I wish him well.
And while we spoke of many things, fools and kings
This he said to me
"The greatest thing
You'll ever learn
Is just to love
And be loved
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