In the current environment, to express even a mildly dissenting opinion, point out basic but unwelcome facts such as the presence of significant public support for the government in Syria, or highlight the frequently brutal acts of rebel groups, has seen many people ridiculed and attacked on social media. These attacks are rarely, if ever, reasoned critiques of opposing views; instead they frequently descend into personal, often hysterical, insults and baseless, vitriolic allegations.
When I first went to Palestine as a young reporter in the 1960s, I stayed on a kibbutz. The people I met were hard-working, spirited and called themselves socialists. I liked them. One evening at dinner, I asked about the silhouettes of people in the far distance, beyond our perimeter. “Arabs”, they said, “nomads”. The words were almost spat out. […]
“The US is setting up its military bases in the territories that were liberated from Daesh by our fighters during the fight against terrorism,” ~ Senior Representative of the US armed, proxy, SDF forces. With very little fanfare from the western media, the US is quietly creating a hostile military footprint inside Syria. By establishing a chain of airbases, military outposts and missile bases inside Syria, the US […]
This fetishization of the ‘British Soldier’, emblem of the armed forces as a whole, has become pathological in its intensity in parallel with our foreign military interventions being prosecuted in an era of unprecedented political mendacity. The more profound the corruption, the greater the need for propaganda and, importantly, the cruder it needs to be as the most skilled propagandist of them all, Joseph Goebels, well understood when he declaimed that propaganda ‘must always be essentially simple and repetitious’ and must ‘appeal to the emotions and instinct, never the intellect.’ ‘Hero’, ‘Help For Heroes’, ‘our heroes overseas’, ‘our courageous men and women protecting our freedoms’, ‘protecting us’, ‘doing it for us’… ‘for us’, ‘for us’, for us’.
The mainstream media is so hostile to challenges to its groupthinks that famed journalist Seymour Hersh had to take his take-down of President Trump’s April 6 attack on Syria to Germany, says ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
Paradoxically, over the past decade, as social media has created a more democratic platform for information dissemination, the corporate media has grown ever more fearful of a truly independent figure like Hersh. The potential reach of his stories could now be enormously magnified by social media. As a result, he has been increasingly marginalised and his work denigrated. By denying him the credibility of a “respectable” mainstream platform, he can be dismissed for the first time in his career as a crank and charlatan. A purveyor of fake news.
Sent to ‘Save The UK Fire Service’ group, a powerful and emotional story from a firefighter who attended Grenfell Tower. “Some things I will miss out as they don’t need to be said, some I can’t say, other things I will simplify so hopefully everyone can understand them, I’m not looking for praise, I just want to let you know we did all we could.”
For nearly two years now we have been following the dedicated work of Robert Stuart in exposing the possible fabrications behind the infamous BBC Panorama documentary “Saving Syria’s Children.” On June 11 he gave a public presentation summarising his work to date, which is also available as a PDF. As an overview of the evidence in the case, it is […]
In memory of those who perished and whose deaths are indistinguishable from the fact they were poor and working class, let Grenfell be the line over which Tory greed and mendacity does not pass.
Last week, Jeremy Corbyn humbled the entire political and corporate media commentariat. With a little help from Britain’s student population. And with a little help from thousands of media activists. Without doubt this was one of the most astonishing results in UK political history. Dismissed by all corporate political pundits, including the clutch of withered fig leaves at the Guardian, […]
Overnight, the world was introduced to Omran, who became the poster child of suffering in Syria due to extensive coverage by Western corporate media. The al-Qaeda-affiliated White Helmets, and subsequently the media, made the child’s injuries out to seem far more serious than they actually were.
With Corbyn, the election campaign proved that there is a huge appetite for his honesty, his passion, his commitment to social justice – at least when audiences got a chance to hear from him directly, rather than having his policies and personality mediated and distorted by a biased and self-serving corporate media.
