The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
For a case study in incestuous amplification and a detailed description of how it infects an entire culture, watch this video, which first aired in 2007.
Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: BIll Moyer on Incestuous Amplification”
March 19, 2013. Ten years ago today the Bush regime invaded Iraq. It is known that the justification for the invasion was a packet of lies orchestrated by the neoconservative Bush regime in order to deceive the United Nations and the American people.
The US Secretary of State at that time, General Colin Powell, has expressed his regrets that he was used by the Bush regime to deceive the United Nations with fake intelligence that the Bush and Blair regimes knew to be fake. But the despicable presstitute media has not apologized to the American people for serving the corrupt Bush regime as its Ministry of Propaganda and Lies.
It is difficult to discern which is the most despicable, the corrupt Bush regime, the presstitutes that enabled it, or the corrupt Obama regime that refuses to prosecute the Bush regime for its unambiguous war crimes, crimes against the US Constitution, crimes against US statutory law, and crimes against humanity.
In his book, Cultures Of War, the distinguished historian John W. Dower observes that the concrete acts of war unleashed by the Japanese in the 20th century and the Bush imperial presidency in the 21st century “invite comparative analysis of outright war crimes like torture and other transgressions. Imperial Japan’s black deeds have left an indelible stain on the nation’s honor and good name, and it remains to be seen how lasting the damage to America’s reputation will be. In this regard, the Bush administration’s war planners are fortunate in having been able to evade formal and serious investigation remotely comparable to what the Allied powers pursued vis-a-vis Japan and Germany after World War II.”
The media is doing its usual vapid tour of the 10th “anniversary” of the American invasion of Iraq. Far better to consider how the nation permitted the disgrace to happen. Mike Lofgren cites three important lessons to learn.
For myself, I believe it most important to consider the domestic politics and careerist posturing that drives civilian (and military) leaders to beat the drums of war in order to manipulate political (and budgetary) decisions, or worse to simply advocate war.
Consider Mike's lessons below as you read in the morning news articles of the current US B-52 exercises over the Korean peninsula and the hysteria of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in reacting to a historically minor budget correction. Given the nature of the North Korean regime, is this the time to bait them? Have the Joint Chiefs shown they are capable to dealing with budget events they have only had a year and a half to prepare for? Is there an American domestic political (and budgetary) content to the US escalation of events in Korea?
As you read Mike's important column below, it is useful to think about such questions.
Former Congressional Staffer, author of The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted
On the decennial of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the persons responsible have shown remarkably little guilt over launching an unprovoked war of aggression, even when the lamentable results might be expected to give one pause to rethink the enterprise. Marveling at the complacency about Iraq of America's foreign policy elite as they are fawningly interviewed on the Sunday talk shows, columnist Alex Pareene says that “[p]eople who were integral in the decision to wage that war sat there and opined on what the United States should do about Iran and China and North Korea and no one laughed them out of the room. It was disgusting.” Disgusting, but hardly surprising here in the United States of Amnesia.
Are there any lessons to be drawn from the debacle? Here are three tentative conclusions:
Continue reading “Winslow Wheeler: Iraq Invasion at 10 Years — Learning from the Past”
This is the latest on the major trend concerning the American media. Not a happy story. A democracy requires a healthy functional objective media to be healthy itself. The trend seems to be moving against this.
Click through to see the excellent clarifying graphs.
The State of the News Media 2013
Pew Research Center
EXTRACT
This adds up to a news industry that is more undermanned and unprepared to uncover stories, dig deep into emerging ones or to question information put into its hands. And findings from our new public opinion survey released in this report reveal that the public is taking notice. Nearly one-third of the respondents (31%) have deserted a news outlet because it no longer provides the news and information they had grown accustomed to.
It's Time for Academia to Coin a New Term: The Post-Journalism Era
>Watching Danny Schechter's documentary, “WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception,” a term stood out for me: the era of post-journalism. And I could see immediately that it's an accurate term that should be adopted by academia—-just as the terms, postmodern, neocolonialism, and neoconservatism have been—-because the tradition of journalists speaking truth to power died a long time ago. Business interests are a conflict of interest that contemporary journalism has not been able to rise above. Or as jazz legend Mose Allison once said in his song: Everybody Cryin' Mercy: “Everybody's cryin' justice . . . just as long as there's business first.”
So I entered the term: post journalism era into the Google search engine and I only came up with one decent link: an article by Russ Baker from his website: WhoWhatWhy.com.
Here are the first two sentences of his article: “The Washington Post has great reporters, but as a journalistic institution, it has been strikingly sympathetic to the ruling establishment. Over the decades, reporters there have complained repeatedly about how their efforts to break out of an emerging consensus have been stymied, overtly or more subtly.”
I also did a dot edu Google search and came up with zero hits for the term post-journalism era. I think this is a term that desperately needs to be coined and spread far and wide, especially in academica. In fact it should have been coined a century ago. But better late than never.
WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception
March 9, 2013
Deception. Dissection. A New Perception.
By Sara Faith Alterman via New England Film
It seems practical, even reasonable, to rely on news organizations to broadcast accurately. Such informational institutions exist to dig up the facts, right? Maybe not. In the aftermath of President Bush’s crusade to eliminate the seemingly omnipotent threat of ‘weapons of mass destruction,’ it has become pretty obvious that what initially appeared to be a deed of heroism and liberation was actually a vicious act of messy retribution. The burning question is, how much did the embedded American media uncover while reporting from the Middle East? Were American audiences actually getting the facts as they unfolded, or were we shielded from the truth?
Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Media Weapons of Mass Deception”
This is the latest on an important downward trend: the collapse of American media. A healthy Fourth Estate is essential to the running of a healthy democracy. I have written about this a number of times in the past, but this trend is gaining momentum, and should be of concern to every citizen.
Mainstream Media Meltdown!
ROBERT W. MCCHESNEY – Salon
This is the best assessment of the distorted behavior of Washington corporate media I have seen in some time. It explains why it is almost impossible, when you turn on the television, or open your paper, to get serious substantive news from American reporters, particularly those within the Beltway of Washington. And why I get so many of the reports I use in SR from overseas sources.
Bob Woodward and the Rules of Washington Morality
MICHAEL TOMASKY – The Daily Beast
