Tag Archives: Mainstream media

Why Alternative News is America’s Last Hope for True Journalism, by Jeff Thomson

This is preaching to the choir on this site, but if you have family or friends tuned in to the mainstream, you may want to show them this article and suggest they read it. People are awakened one at a time, but once they see the light they stay awakened. From Jeff Thompson at theorganicprepper.com:

“How can you believe that? I mean, look at your source. It’s an alternative news site. According to my TV, the truth is the polar opposite.”

How often have you heard similar responses from those you try to share the truth of current events? The argument is that your sources can’t be trusted because they don’t fall within the domain of the mainstream media. 

As if television is the harbinger of truth, right? (Hear No Evil. See No Evil. Speak No Evil?)

News flash: the era of Walter Cronkite is long gone. 

Your TV does lie to you – it is not to be trusted blindly – and to believe otherwise is to be incredibly naïve. You are willingly setting yourself up to fall for every bit of propaganda thrust upon the public by thinking otherwise.

Did Joseph Goebbels teach us nothing? 

Propaganda works, and the informed American can discern both what is true and what is not. If you’re willing to drink from a cesspool, don’t be upset when you later discover you’ve been ingesting sewage. 

But, can you provide evidence for such a notion? 

Well, let’s look at the track record: 

Does anybody else remember the entire “those white boys are making fun of an Indian!” fiasco? Dagney Taggart wrote the truth about the witch hunt here. [And for more information here’s a source and another source] 

Do you recall the Jussie Smollett case? 

Have you ever delved into how your local news is reading off of the same script? Here is an incredibly powerful video of Operation Mockingbird:

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The Media’s Role in the U.S. “War Machine”, by Bill Bonner

Some still politely refer to mainstream hacks as journalists or reporters, but more and more they’re called presstitutes or government whores, which are more descriptive and honest. From Bill Bonner at rogueeconomics.com:

OITOU, FRANCE – Our subject this week…

…how the Big Tech companies became such jackasses.

Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al. raced ahead with innovations that brought them millions of customers. They provided the equivalent of an “open mic,” where anyone could sing any tune he wanted. Then, they sold the info to advertisers, who used it to find customers of their own.

But then, the tech companies decided to impose their own musical tastes. If they think you’re off-key, you’ll be canceled, deplatformed, and disappeared.

It happened, famously, to Donald Trump. The ex-president is, of course, a moron. And private companies can cut him off if they want.

But if Twitter took down the accounts of every moron who can’t carry a tune, it would be out of business.

Instead, the social media companies just cut off some morons… not all of them. And therein hangs a tale…

Political Business

As politics become more important, private companies become more political. That is, when a country’s elite goes mad, its private sector goes mad, too.

Just try opening a bank account.

First, there are fewer local or regional banks; the smaller ones have been less and less able to survive in the world of complex federal control.

Second, the big banks that are left act more like chartered, federal monopolies. They don’t give you a toaster anymore. They give you a grilling…

Who are you? Can you prove where you live? Where did your money come from?

And then, thanks to the Federal Reserve, you put money on deposit and the banks don’t pay you any interest.

ValuePenguin, whatever that is, tells us that the average rate of interest on savings accounts is 0.06%. At today’s inflation rate, a saver loses over 5% per year.

The big banks get their money from the Fed. They are regulated by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC). Naturally, they lick the hand of their masters whenever it is offered.

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India’s Ivermectin Blackout, by Justus R. Hope

The two ways the mainstream media treats India’s apparent success treating Covid-19 with Ivermectin is to ignore it or claim that India’s numbers are fake. From Justus R. Hope at thedesertreview.com:

Ivermectin Wins in India

News of India’s defeat of the Delta variant should be common knowledge. It is just about as obvious as the nose on one’s face. It is so clear when one looks at the graphs that no one can deny it.

Yet, for some reason, we are not allowed to talk about it. Thus, for example, Wikipedia cannot mention the peer-reviewed meta-analyses by Dr. Tess Lawrie or Dr. Pierre Kory published in the American Journal of Therapeutics.

https://www.thedesertreview.com/opinion/columnists/wikipedia-and-a-pint-of-gin/article_22ffa0d8-dde9-11eb-be75-d7b0b1f2ff67.html

Wikipedia is not allowed to publish the recent meta-analysis on Ivermectin authored by Dr. Andrew Hill. Furthermore, it is not allowed to say anything concerning www.ivmmeta.com showing the 61 studies comprising 23,000 patients which reveal up to a 96% reduction in death [prophylaxis] with Ivermectin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AIvermectin

One can see the bias in Wikipedia by going on the “talk” pages for each subject and reading about the fierce attempts of editors to add these facts and the stone wall refusals by the “senior” editors who have an agenda. And that agenda is not loyalty to your health.

The easy way to read the “talk” page on any Wikipedia subject is to click the top left “talk” button. Anyone can then review the editors’ discussions.

There is a blackout on any conversation about how Ivermectin beat COVID-19 in India. When I discussed the dire straits that India found itself in early this year with 414,000 cases per day, and over 4,000 deaths per day, and how that evaporated within five weeks of the addition of Ivermectin, I am often asked, “But why is there no mention of that in the news?”

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After Russiagate, Why WOULDN’T People Be Skeptical About Covid? by Caitlin Johnstone

The US government and its media arm have been lying to us for decades. How many lies do we have to catch them in before it’s okay not to believe them anymore? From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

You hardly ever hear about Russiagate anymore. The last time it made a blip in the radar was when disgraced Collusion author Luke Harding published a very thinly-sourced story in The Guardian claiming to have proof that Donald Trump was a Kremlin asset, but other mass media outlets barely touched it and it vanished as quickly as it came.

Looking at mainstream news outlets in 2021, you’d hardly know they’d recently spent years hammering the story into public consciousness that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government, day after day after day after day after day.

But they did. Vast fortunes were raked in off the public interest generated by click-friendly stories about the latest BOMBSHELL revelation involving some peripheral member of Trump’s associates perhaps maybe having some kind of contact with a Russian national at some point. Entire careers were built on this.

Then the Mueller investigation invalidated the entire claim by failing to indict a single American for conspiring with the Russian government, and the mass media who’d spent the previous few years bashing everyone in the face with that story just kind of slowly sidled away from it.

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Pentagon Papers Failed to Stop Media Kowtowing, by James Bovard

Explosive as the Pentagon Papers were when published, in the longer span of history they were barely a ripple on the pond in terms of changing the mainstream media’s relationship with the government. From James Bovard at consortiumnews.com:

The revelations of the secret study should have spawned permanent, radical skepticism concerning the candor and competence of U.S. foreign interventions, writes James Bovard. 

June 26, 2007: An embedded civilian journalist, at right, taking photographs of U.S. soldiers in Pana, Afghanistan. (Michael L. Casteel, U.S. Army, Wikimedia Commons)

Fifty years ago, The New York Times began publishing excerpts from a massive secret report called the “History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Vietnam Policy.” Those excerpts, which quickly became known as the “Pentagon Papers,” provided shocking revelations of perennial government deceit and spurred an epic clash over the First Amendment. Unfortunately, many of the media outlets celebrating the Pentagon Papers anniversary have long since become lap dogs of perfidious politicians dragging America into new foreign conflicts.

The report that became the Pentagon Papers was a secret study begun in 1967 analyzing where the Vietnam War had gone awry. The 7,000-page tome showed that presidents and military leaders had been conning the American people on Southeast Asia ever since the Truman administration. Like many policy autopsies, the report was classified as secret and completely ignored by the White House and federal agencies that most needed to heed its lessons. New York Times editor Tom Wicker commented in 1971 that “the people who read these documents in the Times were the first to study them.”

Unfortunately, few Washingtonians bothered to read the Pentagon Papers after their disclosure and missed lessons that could have spared the nation fresh debacles.

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What If the Media Had Told the Truth? Five MSM Lies for Which Trump Has Been Vindicated, and the Damage They Caused, by PF Whalen

Once upon a time you could count on the media being biased, that’s a given, but by and large while the respectable media fed you it’s slant, it didn’t knowingly feed you out-and-out lies. Now they do. From PF Whalen at thebluestateconservative.com:

Remember that time when the mainstream media lied about former President Donald J. Trump, only to have Trump proven correct afterwards? “Can you be more specific,” you ask? Good point. There are so many to mention, we need to be more precise, so let’s narrow the list down to five, and let’s consider the true impact of their dishonesty. While the media may have been successful in sustaining political damage against Trump, the Republican Party, and the conservative movement – which was their ultimate goal, no doubt – they also caused significant collateral damage, either unwittingly or uncaringly.

1. The Russia Hoax –

For those of us on the political right, it’s easy to forget the magnitude of this farce. We were bombarded with nonsense every day, we agonized over the ridiculousness of it all, and many of us have tried to put this circus behind us. The loser of the 2016 presidential election Hillary Clinton, along with her Democrat apologists, pushed on this narrative from the beginning. Trump was an illegitimate president due to his collusion with Russia leading up to the election, they said, an infraction so malicious he may have actually been guilty of treason and deserving of the death penalty. There have been instances of political malice between parties in our nation’s past, but never one quite like this.

What made this charade so absurd was the media’s complicity in it. This wasn’t just a situation of the media tilting a storyline and inserting opinions into supposed news articles, they actively hyped the story ad nauseum and actively participated in the misinformation. “The walls are closing in on Trump,” they told us. “We have another bombshell regarding President Trump and Russia,” they promised. It was all a lie, as the Mueller Report clearly proved.

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How American Journalism Became a Mouthpiece of the Deep State, by Peter Van Buren

You’d have trouble inserting a extremely sharp knife between the intelligence community and the mainstream media; they’re thick as thieves. From Peter Van Buren at theamericanconservative.com:

The intelligence community uses the media to manipulate the American people and pressure elected politicians..

The Washington Post’s David Ignatius (Wikimedia Commons)

Reporters joke that the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions, say, “No comment,” and head to happy hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information. They meanwhile profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.

Leon Panetta, once director of CIA, explained bluntly that the agency influenced foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.” The CIA has been running such ops to influence foreign elections continuously since the end of WWII.

The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, operating the media outlet yourself. The problem is this is easily exposed, destroying credibility.

A more effective strategy is to become a source for legitimate media such that your (dis)information inherits their credibility. Most effective is when one CIA plant is the initial source while a second CIA plant acts seemingly independently as a confirming source. You can push information to the mainstream media, who can then “independently” confirm it, sometimes unknowingly, through your secondary agents. You can basically write tomorrow’s headlines.

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The Unanimous News Conforms, by Jon Rappoport

Any deviation among the mainstream media would lead people to question the news, so there is no deviation. From Jon Rappoport at lewrockwell.com:

The rise of television news, and its power over the mind, necessitated an agreement among the major networks:

On most issues, the networks would have to mirror each other’s coverage. Otherwise, the audience would experience an unacceptable level of confusion and cognitive dissonance.

This principle of agreement was basically about the rules of propaganda—and nowhere was it more evident than in matters of medical science.

For example, suppose, recently, the COVID PCR test became an occasion for disagreement among NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and FOX?

Three networks fell into line with the CDC and the WHO in claiming the test was accurate and meaningful, while the other two strenuously reported on the irreparable and fatal flaws in the test. (I’ve exhaustively detailed those flaws in many articles.)

The network dissonance would upset a huge apple cart smack in the middle of COVID “science.” The public wouldn’t know where to turn.

Therefore, the truth of the matter had to take a back seat to conformity. All the major networks robotically echoed the CDC/WHO.

And the network anchors had to sell the PCR lies. Lester Holt (Lurch/ the Addams family); David Muir (Sears underwear model); Norah O’Donnell (student council president); Wolf Blitzer (“smart bombs went right down chimneys in Iraq”); a collection of shiny suits at FOX; they all had to pretend they’d looked at more than the opening lines of public health press releases.

The guiding light of network news is unanimity, and social media have adopted that m.o. as well.

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They Don’t Work To Kill All Dissent, They Just Keep It From Going Mainstream, by Caitlin Johnstone

They don’t care as long as most of the people stay fooled most of the time. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:

One of the most consequential collective delusions circulating in our society is the belief that our society is free. Our society is exactly free enough to create the illusion that we have freedom; from that line onwards it’s just totalitarianism veiled in propaganda.

I get comments from people every day wagging their fingers at my criticisms of western imperialist agendas against nations like China or Iran saying “If you lived over there you wouldn’t be allowed to criticize the government the way you criticize western governments!”

It is true that dissidents are permitted to criticize the government systems of the US-centralized empire to an extent, but only to an extent. Yes, as long as my criticisms of capitalism, oligarchy and imperialism remain relegated to the fringes of influence I am indeed permitted to express my views unmolested. If however I somehow ascended to a position of significant mainstream influence I would be targeted and smeared until my reputation was ruined or I had a psychological breakdown and went away. You may be certain of this.

The managers of empire do not work to crush and silence all dissent like a conventional totalitarian regime would do. They are much more clever than that.

In a society that maintains the illusion of freedom in order to prevent outrage and revolution, it does not serve rulers to stifle all dissent. Just the opposite in fact: their interests are served by having a small number of dissidents hanging around the fringes of society creating the illusion of freedom. If Johnny Hempshirt over there is allowed to stand on a soapbox and criticize the US war machine, then the US must be a free country.

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Opening the CIA’s Can of Worms, by Edward Curtin

You can’t understand the history of the US since 1947 without understanding the CIA…and you may not want to. From Edward Curtin at off-guardian.org:

The CIA and the media are part of the same criminal conspiracy,” wrote Douglas Valentine in his important book, The CIA As Organized Crime.

This is true.  The corporate mainstream media are stenographers for the national security state’s ongoing psychological operations aimed at the American people, just as they have done the same for an international audience. 

We have long been subjected to this “information warfare,” whose purpose is to win the hearts and minds of the American people and pacify them into victims of their own complicity, just as it was practiced long ago by the CIA in Vietnam and by The New York Times, CBS, etc. on the American people then and over the years as the American warfare state waged endless wars, coups, false flag operations, and assassinations at home and abroad.

Another way of putting this is to say for all practical purposes when it comes to matters that bear on important foreign and domestic matters, the CIA and the corporate mainstream media cannot be distinguished.

For those who read and study history, it has long been known that the CIA has placed their operatives throughout every agency of the U.S. government, as explained by Fletcher Prouty in The Secret Team; that CIA officers Cord Myer and Frank Wisner operated secret programs to get some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom among intellectuals, journalists, and writers to be their voices for unfreedom and censorship, as explained by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Cultural Cold War and Joel Whitney in Finks, among others; that Cord Myer was especially focused on and successful in “courting the Compatible Left” since right wingers were already in the Agency’s pocket. 

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