Until the profit motive is removed – until the news is no longer treated as a glossily-packaged product – this ‘Malala Syndrome’, along with the myriad other ills in our media that arise from the same poisoned spring, will continue to confuse and mislead viewers/readers, making it more likely that they will come to false conclusions about the world, thereby greatly harming democracy, which depends on a well-informed populace for its survival.
‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’
‘National security is the first duty of government. We will remain a first-rate military power.’
In its first report on press freedom in the United States, the Committee to Protect Journalists warns President Obama has ushered in a paralyzing climate of fear for both reporters and their government sources.
In MEDIASTAN, an undercover team of journalists drives across the central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and into US occupied Afghanistan, before continuing its journey into the west; regrouping in Julian Assange’s kitchen, ambushing the editor of the Guardian, and obtaining candid footage of the New York Times editor and its publisher Arthur Sulzberger speaking about Obama.
As the baton travels around that notional ‘family’ of two billion people, starting in Delhi, it would be great to have a country-by-country account of Britain’s conquests, wars and plundering, past and present.
We could even have the historian Mark Curtis, author of Unpeople and Secret Affairs: Britain’s Collusion with Radical Islam, on-hand to help chart the ten million deaths that Britain is complicit in since 1945 alone.
The mainstream US media has once again mistranslated an Iranian president’s words.
Last time, they were lying to make the former President of Iran sound anti-West and anti-Israel. Now they are lying to make the new President of Iran sound pro-West and pro-Israel.
I suppose that is an improvement. Lying for peace is at least marginally better than lying for war.
But for those who care about truth, the Western mainstream media’s non-stop lies are nothing short of an ongoing holocaust.
Let’s take a closer look at the latest example of Western media duplicity.
Genuinely independent ‘mainstream’ journalists would of course be energetically exploring and debating the uncertainties surrounding US-UK claims, particularly in light of the catastrophic Iraq deception and the clear difficulty of assessing the quality of all information coming out of Syria.
I am a journalist, and I am fascinated both by the processes by which news is produced and the ways we as journalists and the media more generally try to keep you, the readers, ignorant of those processes. Why do journalists not talk about journalism, their “profession”? Are we magicians worried about losing our trade secrets? Or is it that the mythologies of journalism are designed to keep you passive consumers, deferential to a supposedly authoritative media?
The following two BBC video reports on the victims of the same incident in the Syrian civil war raise very troubling questions about the corporation’s journalistic ethics. The two reports use seemingly identical footage of an interview with a British doctor but the words are different. Her mouth is covered by some kind of medical mask.
the reality is that, if they [journalists] wish to be taken seriously as a pundit, they have to subscribe to a fairly narrow set of political views. All aspirational journalists (and commentators and reporters in the mainstream media have been aspiring to reach these giddy heights since they were young) will over the years gravitate towards political views that conform to the political spectrum allowed in the media. That’s so obvious, it shouldn’t really need stating, but the media do such a good job of concealing that simple truth that it needs constantly reiterating.
It has become abundantly clear in recent years that the mainstream media can not be identified as anything other that a collective of mediocre, corporate/government ass-kissing presstitutes. Different media outlets cater to different special interests, but the end result is all the same. MSNBC for example is essentially a straight up PR outlet for the Democratic Party, while Fox News represents the neo-con arm of the Republican Party and the military-industrial complex generally. CNBC has a special position in the presstitute media hierarchy. They basically defend Wall Street at all costs. The station represents the most important media gatekeeper for the financial oligarch, crony class.
As we have seen through history, the only protection against a slide towards totalitarianism is a free media that allows a free transfer of ideas between people without the need to self-censor. The global US military-security complex is embedded into the DNA of the internet. We cannot rely on the USA to voluntarily hand back the powers it has grabbed, we can only work around them as Brazil has suggested it will do, and as the EU is contemplating.
Other than that, responsibility for our privacy rests in our own hands.
