John Pilger tells Going Underground what has been revealed by Trump winning the US election and what he thinks the role of the liberal media and its journalists was in it:
Pilger: I think the only people who are surprised are those who enabled it to happen…and I’m speaking about mainly, what I would call in the United States, a liberal class. They told us that only a corrupt, warmongering status quo would be acceptable to the majority. They created Trump in the same way they created Blair (in this country).
Rattansi: Even the elites who are part of that corruption surely need to know facts on the ground; why the elites, and all the media that goes along with it: NBC, ABC, CNN, BBC over here, why would the journalists, the people themselves, not want to know the facts, that Trump was going to win. You said you weren’t surprised, yet they seem surprised?’
Pilger: They’re not journalists. They’re anti-journalists. One of the most revealing aspects of this has been the exposure of journalism. The exposure of journalism as an extension of that same corrupt, established power that I’ve been speaking about. They’re not independent. They are echo-chambers. They amplify and echo that which is handed down to them. And the worst, of course…are the so-called enlightened, respectable, liberal press. The New York Times has become a kind of cold war propaganda sheet with all the nonsense about Russia interfering in this campaign. The Guardian. The Guardian has given up, yesterday we had in The Guardian an article called The Hall of Shame by Jonathan Freedland in which he pointed the finger at a truth-teller like Julian Assange as if he would be to blame if Hillary Clinton, this paragon of liberal virtue, was defeated. It was grotesque. That’s not journalism. And whether journalists now stand back..they can sulk and wring their hands and say we have somebody now who’s a monster…not at all. There was a monstrous situation applied in the United States, and journalists enabled it. In a sense they created Trump.
Rattansi: The liberals? The pro Hillary people?
Pilger: Yes. The media, along with the Pentagon, the CIA, the State Department, and all the rest, including the Republican Party, were Trump’s opponents…they were the shouters; the BBC, CNN, The Guardian, The New York Times…they were all there because Hillary Clinton represented them.
