Tag Archives: alternative media

The Historic Collapse of Journalism, by Patrick Lawrence

Posted on September 7, 2022 | Leave a comment

There was a time when journalists weren’t just shills for the establishment. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

Accuracy no longer matters. Witnessing no longer matters. Conformity matters, writes Patrick Lawrence.

I have never gotten over a story The New York Times ran in its Sunday magazine back in May 2016. Maybe you will remember the occasion. It was a lengthy profile of Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s chief adviser for “strategic communications.” It was written by a reporter named David Samuels.

These two made a striking pair — fitting, I would say. Rhodes was an aspiring fiction writer living in Brooklyn when, by the unlikeliest of turns, he found his way into the inner circle of the Obama White House. Samuels, a freelancer who usually covered popular culture celebrities, had long earlier succumbed to that unfortunately clever style commonly affected by those writing about rock stars and others of greater or lesser frivolity.

Rhodes’ job was to spin “some larger restructuring of the American narrative,” as Samuels put it. “Rhodes is a storyteller who uses a writer’s tools to advance an agenda that is packaged as politics.” A professional flack straight out of Edward Bernays, in plain English. A teller of tales trafficking in manipulable facts and happy endings. “Packaged as politics:” a nice touch conveying the commodification of our public discourse.

Rhodes and Ned Price, his deputy, were social-media acrobats. Price, a former C.I.A. analyst and now the State Department’s spokesman, recounted without inhibition how they fed White House correspondents, columnists, and others in positions to influence public opinion as a fois gras farmer feeds his geese.

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Bonfire of the Governments, Part Two, by Robert Gore

Posted on March 23, 2022 | 24 comments

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wsj.com

Welcome to the bonfire of the governments, history’s greatest conflagration.

Part One

Think of an activity that’s essential for a government bent on subjugation: censorship and the suppression of expression. Governments on both sides of the present conflict have further jacked up their efforts to control expression from the plateau reached with Covid. Russia just passed a law imposing a 15-year prison sentence for anyone spreading “fake news” about its invasion of Ukraine. The U.S. and European governments and lapdog legacy and social media have blanketed populaces with official propaganda. Just as with Covid, questions and deviations from the approved narrative are stifled, censored, and punished.

It was all so much easier back in the post World War II, pre-internet good old days. In the U.S. and Europe, there were several “papers of record” that had been infiltrated by intelligence agencies, and state-licensed radio and television stations. In the Soviet Union there wasn’t even that, just a few official propaganda organs.

Yet even with that degree of control, government repression wasn’t wholly effective. In the U.S. the truth got out about the Vietnam War. The Soviets could stop everything but people talking with each other, albeit in hushed tones. The cynical humor became legendary. (“They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.”) Humor always contains an element of truth, which is why statists can’t do humor. The number of citizens red-pilled to Soviet corruption and incompetence and the comparative freedom and wealth of the West reached critical mass and the government fell. It took way too long, but it happened.

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Today, there are billions of potential journalists and video producers—anyone with a cell phone and access to the internet—and trillions of text and email communications. People still occasionally engage in face-to-face conversations. The infrastructure needed to monitor all this is complex, gargantuan, and costly. Only algorithms and artificial intelligence can sort through it to identify threats to the state. Once identified, a separate infrastructure is necessary to apprehend, arrest, process, incarcerate and perhaps execute those engaged in wrongthought, wrongspeak, wrongwrite, and wrongact.

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The Fall Of The Mainstream Media And The Biggest Lies They Told In 2021, by Brandon Smith

Posted on January 1, 2022 | 1 comment

People are turning to the alternative media. Brandon Smith mentions his site’s increased readership in 2021. The same thing is going on at SLL. Viewership was up 30 percent over 2020, which in turn was up 58 percent over 2019. The mainstream media has destroyed its credibility. For SLL or any other alternative media site, credibility is its chief asset, and sites that lose it find themselves quickly consigned to oblivion. (Whatever happened to the Drudge Report?) From Smith at alt-market.com:

If the past year has confirmed anything it is that the mainstream media is thoroughly dishonest. Yes, most people already suspected this, but the last 12 months have provided more confirmation than the past several years combined. 2021 has made it clear that the mainstream media is a propaganda arm of political and corporate elitists, from big government to big pharma.

While there have been a few shining examples of independent and mostly unbiased journalism in the MSM, these moments are as rare as Loch Ness Monster sightings and almost as unbelievable. The public has been lied to so consistently that sometimes we ignore legitimate journalism when it pops up because it’s safer to assume the media is disingenuous at all times.

I’ve personally noticed a wash of commercials lately paid for by major legacy media platforms like the New York Times desperately trying to convince the public that they are still relevant. The message is that they are the only “true source” of news information while they beg people to start subscribing and reading their hot garbage once again. Leftist media is crumbling, with online propaganda peddlers and click-bait prostitutes like Buzzfeed and Vox imploding. The lack of profits is obvious and the layoffs have been aggressive.

These platforms survived for the past few years on tech media hype and venture startup capital, but the free money has run out and now they don’t know what to do. Buzzfeed’s scheme was to go public and sell shares, but this plan failed so completely and the company’s stock plunged so hard that the event has exposed all other fledgling tech media to wider scrutiny. In other words no one has faith in these outlets, at least not enough to invest in them, and now the veil of their supposed “success” has been lifted. Buzzfeed used to claim they were worth $1.5 billion; reality revealed they are worth almost nothing.

Legacy media has also seen its audience numbers plummet over the past ten years, but the last year in particular has been especially unkind to them. ALL of the major corporate news channels saw their audience ratings decline, with CNN seeing the largest drop overall. CNN is facing an epic cut of 68% in its prime time numbers in 2021, while MSNBC now has the smallest prime time audience it has witnessed since 2016. Fox also dealt with audience declines this year but continues to remain the most watched cable news outlet so far, probably because of the continued popularity of commenters like Tucker Carlson.

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Psyops, by Patrick Lawrence

Posted on October 19, 2021 | Leave a comment

Anybody who has been reading alternative media for any length of time generally recognizes when someone is trying to peddle Official Narrative as Renegade Truth. It looks like it may happen more frequently as the powers that be once again try rid themselves of the alternative media thorn in their side. From Patrick Lawrence at consortiumnews.com:

The Deep State’s imperative to colonize independent media is now before us.

(U.S. Embassy in Chile)

Watch and listen, O you with open eyes and ears. The national security state’s long, very long campaign to control our press and broadcasters has taken a new turn of late. If independent media are what keep alive hope for a vigorous, authentic Fourth Estate, as argued severally in this space, independent media are now subject to an insidious, profoundly anti-democratic effort to undermine them.

The Independent Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Frances Haugen, Maria Ressa: Let us consider this institution and these people. They are all frauds, if by fraudulent we mean they are not what and who they tell us they are and their claim to independence from power is bogus.

The Deep State — and at this point it is mere pretense to object to this term — long ago made it a priority to turn the mainstream press and broadcasters to its purposes — to make a free press unfree. This has gone on since the earliest Cold War decades and is well and responsibly documented. (Alas, if Americans read the many excellent books and exposés on this topic, assertions such as the one just made would not arrive as in the slightest outré.)

But several new realities are now very evident. Chief among them, the Deep State’s colonization of corporate media is now more or less complete. CNN, filling its airtime with spooks, generals, and a variety of official and formerly official liars, can be counted a total takeover. The New York Times is prima facie government-supervised, as it confesses in its pages from time to time. The Washington Post, owned by a man with multimillion-dollar CIA contracts, has turned itself into a comic book.

For reasons I will never entirely fathom, corporate media have not merely surrendered their legitimacy: They have actively, enthusiastically abandoned what frayed claim they may have had to credibility. The national-security state incorporates mainstream media into its apparatus, and then people stop believing the mainstream media: The thrill is gone, let’s say.

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Corporate Media’s War to Snuff Out Independent Journalism, by Jonathan Cook

Posted on May 13, 2021 | Leave a comment

For the legacy media, the competition hasn’t gotten too big and too popular. From Jonathan Cook at consortiumnews.com:

Journalist Jonathan Cook’s searing talk at the International Festival of Whistleblowing, Dissent and Accountability on Saturday on the counterattack from legacy media.

I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about my experiences over the past two decades working with new technology as an independent freelance journalist, one who abandoned – or maybe more accurately, was abandoned by – what we usually call the “mainstream” media.

Looking back over that period, I have come to appreciate that I was among the first generation of journalists to break free of the corporate media – in my case, The Guardian – and ride this wave of new technology. In doing so, we liberated ourselves from the narrow editorial restrictions such media imposes on us as journalists and were still able to find an audience, even if a diminished one.

More and more journalists are following a similar path today – a few out of choice, and more out of necessity as corporate media becomes increasingly unprofitable. But as journalists seek to liberate themselves from the strictures of the old corporate media, that same corporate media is working very hard to characterise the new technology as a threat to media freedoms.

This self-serving argument should be treated with a great deal of scepticism. I want to use my own experiences to argue that quite the reverse is true. And that the real danger is allowing the corporate media to reassert its monopoly over narrating the world to us.

‘Mainstream’ Consensus

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Here Are The ‘Alt Tech’ Platforms Trump Supporters Are Flocking To After Parler Executed By Amazon, by Tyler Durden

Posted on January 15, 2021 | Leave a comment

There’s been workarounds and alternative media ingenuity to continue getting the message out. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Over the past week, President Trump has been kicked off of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and was blocked from e-commerce platform Shopify – all because of a pair of relatively benign tweets on January 8th, two days after the Capitol ‘riot’ in which a small group of Trump supporters and a BLM activist were allowed into the Capitol Building through an opened door.

Trump’s ‘offending’ tweets:

Trump’s last two tweets which resulted in his permanent ban from the platform, via mirrored account at gab.com

Twitter, likely realizing the ‘last straw’ used to justify banning a sitting US president was extremely weak sauce (a move which has shocked the world), said the tweets “must be read in the context of broader events in the country.”

Furious Trump supporters immediately began to abandon Twitter for so-called ‘alt-tech’ conservative-friendly alternatives, Parler and Gab.

Over the weekend, however, Amazon and Google banned Parler from their app stores, while Amazon Web Services dealt the death-blow by kicking them off their AWS cloud hosting service, rending the site ‘homeless’ and inaccessible until they find another host. Thanks to a flood of ‘cancel culture’ activists targeting all things Trump, Parler continues to be ‘dead’ for all intents and purposes.

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US – UK Intel Agencies Declare Cyber War on Independent Media, by Whitney Webb

Posted on November 23, 2020 | 1 comment

Covid-19 “truth deniers” is the latest excuse for the intelligence agencies’ escalation of their war on independent media. From Whitney Webb at unlimitedhangout.com:

British and American state intelligence agencies are “weaponizing truth” to quash vaccine hesitancy as both nations prepare for mass inoculations, in a recently announced “cyber war” to be commanded by AI-powered arbiters of truth against information sources that challenge official narratives.

In just the past week, the national-security states of the United States and United Kingdom have discreetly let it be known that the cyber tools and online tactics previously designed for use in the post-9/11 “war on terror” are now being repurposed for use against information sources promoting “vaccine hesitancy” and information related to Covid-19 that runs counter to their state narratives.

A new cyber offensive was launched on Monday by the UK’s signal intelligence agency, Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which seeks to target websites that publish content deemed to be “propaganda” that raises concerns regarding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccine development and the multi-national pharmaceutical corporations involved.

Similar efforts are underway in the United States, with the US military recently funding a CIA-backed firm—stuffed with former counterterrorism officials who were behind the occupation of Iraq and the rise of the so-called Islamic State—to develop an AI algorithm aimed specifically at new websites promoting “suspected” disinformation related to the Covid-19 crisis and the US military–led Covid-19 vaccination effort known as Operation Warp Speed.

Both countries are preparing to silence independent journalists who raise legitimate concerns over pharmaceutical industry corruption or the extreme secrecy surrounding state-sponsored Covid-19 vaccination efforts, now that Pfizer’s vaccine candidate is slated to be approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) by month’s end.

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How I Became a Heretic to My Liberal Friends, by Tom Couser

Posted on October 25, 2020 | Leave a comment

The alternative media wins another convert. From Tom Couser at antiwar.com:

My wife has become increasingly nervous when political topics arise in conversations with our friends over dinner or drinks. She’s afraid I’ll disrupt a pleasant occasion by expressing views that are anathema to our liberal, Democratic friends.

Like what? you might ask.

Well, there are several, but the most inflammatory one is my denial that Russia meddled in the 2016 Presidential election in a consequential way, much less with the intention of electing Trump.

“What?” you say. Every MSNBC-watching, New York Times WaPo-reading Democrat knows that the Russians hacked the DNC emails and passed them on to WikiLeaks to hurt the Clinton campaign. And how about all those social media posts?

The second I express myself, I am invariably accused of parroting Fox News or even of endorsing Trump. But I despise Trump and have never watched Fox news live for more than a minute or two. (Occasionally, I watch an interview with a left-leaning heretic like myself, who cannot get airtime on the “legacy media.”)

How did this happen? How did I come to reject beliefs my liberal friends hold sacred?

Well, to paraphrase an old commercial, I came by my heretical views the old-fashioned way: I earned them. I looked beyond the MSM to independent sources of news and commentary, reading widely and open-mindedly and thinking critically. Some of these sources publish reporting, others opinion; many are left-leaning; most oppose American foreign policy. I weighed them against one another, and the MSM, to assess their reliability.

In short, I investigated American journalism – and found corporate media woefully misleading. I would say I found it unprofessional but, as a friend reminded me, the job of corporate journalism is to maximize profit; doing so is not conducive, to say the least, to challenging the dominant power structure and its ideology.

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The New Media Has Become like the Old Media—And That Means the Usual Bias, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on October 15, 2020 | Leave a comment

If you don’t regularly peruse a variety of alternative media outlets, there’s no way you can really know what’s going on. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

A sizable majority of American adults say—when polled—that social media organizations “censor” political viewpoints:

A Pew Research Center survey conducted in June finds that roughly three-quarters of U.S. adults say it is very (37%) or somewhat (36%) likely that social media sites intentionally censor political viewpoints that they find objectionable. Just 25% believe this is not likely the case.

At this point, of course, it’s hard to see how this is even debatable. While “censor” is perhaps not the most accurate term to use here—given the word’s connotations of state intervention—it is apparent that social media firms, at the very least, limit discussion and the reach of certain political viewpoints by banning certain users. These firms also openly admit to biasing readers against certain content through the use of “fact checkers.” Anecdotal evidence also strongly suggests that these social media firms also engage in tactics like “shadow banning,” which hides certain posts and content from certain users.

This is no haphazard or “neutral” bias, either. It is clear that the user bans and “fact checking” warnings against certain posts are designed to fall most often on groups that could be described as “conservative,” or “libertarian,” or which advocate in favor of Donald Trump and his allies.

As far as media companies go, this is just par for the course. What is perhaps so unusual in this case is that so many self-identified conservatives and libertarians seem surprised that things turned out this way.

This may be due to the fact that many continue to believe the false notion that social media companies are a sort of “public utility.” The social media companies themselves promote this myth and like to give the impression that they are open forums facilitating open communication. In reality, the firms are essentially just media companies like CNN, NBC, or the New York Times. Like ordinary media companies they modify and promote content to reflect the firm’s preferences. This is clear every time a social media company intervenes to modify “trending topics” lists, or remove content altogether.  Consequently, the only meaningful difference between standard media companies and social media companies is that social media firms don’t produce their own content like ABC News or the Washington Post do. Rather, social media companies have convinced their users to produce all the content. The social media companies then reap the rewards in terms of selling personal information to advertisers and curating user-produced content to suit the companies’ own vision and needs.

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The delusion called Fauci, by Jon Rappoport

Posted on May 29, 2020 | 1 comment

The mainstream likes to deride any claims to science found in the alternative media, but there are significant admissions from mainstream science of major deficiencies. From Jon Rappoport at nomorefakenews.com:

This one was too good to pass up.

In an interview with the National Geographic, Tony Fauci made comments about “alternative views” of the origin of the coronavirus. But he was really talking about all unorthodox medical information:

“Anybody can claim to be an expert even when they have no idea what they’re talking about—and it’s very difficult for the general public to distinguish. So, make sure the study is coming from a reputable organization that generally gives you the truth—though even with some reputable organizations, you occasionally get an outlier who’s out there talking nonsense. If something is published in places like New England Journal of Medicine, Science, Nature, Cell, or JAMA—you know, generally that is quite well peer-reviewed because the editors and the editorial staff of those journals really take things very seriously.”

Right you are, Tony.

So, Tony, here is a very serious statement from a former editor of one of those “places,” the New England Journal of Medicine:

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.” (Dr. Marcia Angell, NY Review of Books, January 15, 2009, “Drug Companies & Doctors: A Story of Corruption)

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