I believe America is just as heavily propagandized and indoctrinated as the old Soviet Union, if not more. Instead of State-owned and operated media outlets that misinform the public, delete information, and create stories in order to justify the actions of the so-called Communist Party, the American corporate-owned and operated media has an agenda to keep profits rolling in for their owners and advertising business partners and to justify their increasing domination of, well, the planet. This manifests itself in the same fashion as the Soviet Union (misinformation, half-stories, and manufactured news).
NBC is owned by General Electric - one of the world's largest arms manufacturers. The news presented on NBC is incredibly supportive of U.S. militarism because of their profit-agenda, often to the point of downright blind support of all U.S. military intervention. The news becomes incredibly one-sided and from the direct perspective of the State Department, Department of Defense, Pentagon, etc. They rarely, if ever show other perspectives, or even go into details on these military situations, showing all sides because it is contrary to their profit-agendas. They rarely cover dissent, and when they do, it either comes in the form of eight second soundbites that are taken completely out of context or it is highly sensationalized and watered-down. And then they cut to a few commericals, and then its the weather and sports and more commericals. Also important to note is the tabloidization of mass media - it's one Monica Lewinsky story after another, completely ignoring the real scandals of corporations/government and, in this case, the real reasons Clinton should have been impeached.
Sensationalized and watered-down? For example: I actually did see corporate coverage of the May Day events throughout Europe. All they showed was the highly sensational clashes and street-battles from the perspective of the European police, not the reasons people were out there or the perspective of those protesting. They interviewed, of course, an officer of a riot-control squad and then cut to a statement by Tony Blair (in each case, they condemned the activists). They did not interview those who were actually involved. Any real, non-agenda institute of journalism would have shown both sides for the sake of informing and enriching the public. Instead the public is left with - Damn, those morons have nothing better to do. I hope the police beat 'em up.
Why wouldnt they show both sides of these issues? Well, they dont want to commit suicide. Look at what happened last time they broadcasted dissent and opposition to U.S. militarism - the mass uprising during the 1960's. The American public now will not be shown such graphic and detailed reports of events. It is too risky for the corporations in charge, just the same as it was too risky for the Communist Party to give real information to the populations for fear of them realizing how fucked up the USSR was. The owners and operators of media have too much to gain economically in such military conflicts to allow people to see the truth, in effect risking public backlash and an end to their profit.
The corporate news media is a jingoism factory. Remember the Gulf War? Remember Kosovo? Ask any American their opinion on what happened and their answer will be identical to that of what was presented by the corporate media. And then ask them if they know the background of the situations and the sources of these conflicts. They will usually draw a blank and then say something to the effect of - we are the good guys and there are these bad guys who were doing bad things as always so we bombed them and saved the day and everything is just fine because we are the good guys. USA! USA! And then when you challenge their perspective, they will become quite defensive and say on cue No, I always read between the lines and I am critical about the media that I absorb. I'm a free-thinker. What are you a commie? America is the land of the free!
There was a study that I read about recently; essentially it concluded Those who watch the corporate news primarily know less about world affairs than those who do not. And this is exactly where big business and their subordinates in government want the public - as ill-informed, ignorant patriots that would rather go to the mall than challenge their overwhelming power structures, but will blindly support U.S. action when a conflict breaks out. Yellow Ribbon Uber Alles.
In the freest press on Earth, humanity is reported in terms of its usefulness to US
power
by
John Pilger
Long before the Soviet Union broke up, a group of
Russian writers touring the United States were
astonished to find, after reading the newspapers and
watching television, that almost all the opinions on all
the vital issues were the same. "In our country," said
one of them, "to get that result we have a dictatorship.
We imprison people. We tear out their fingernails.
Here you have none of that. How do you do it? What's
the secret?"
The secret is a form of censorship more insidious
than a totalitarian state could ever hope to achieve.
The myth is the opposite. Constitutional freedoms
unmatched anywhere else guard against censorship;
the press is a "fourth estate", a watchdog on
democracy. The journalism schools boast this
reputation, the influential East Coast press is
especially proud of it, epitomised by the liberal paper
of record, the New York Times, with its masthead
slogan: "All the news that's fit to print."
It takes only a day or two back in the US to be
reminded of how deep state censorship runs. It is
censorship by omission, and voluntary. The source of
most Americans' information, mainstream television,
has been reduced to a set of marketing images shot
and edited to the rhythms of a Coca-Cola commercial
that flow seamlessly into the actual commercials.
Rupert Murdoch's Fox network is the model, with its
peep-shows of human tragedy. Non-American human
beings are generally ignored, or treated with an
anthropological curiosity reserved for wildlife
documentaries.
Not long ago, Kenneth Jarecke was talking about this
censorship. Jarecke is the American photographer
who took the breath-catching picture of an Iraqi burnt
to a blackened cinder, petrified at the wheel of his
vehicle on the Basra Road where he, and hundreds of
others, were massacred by American pilots on their
infamous "turkey shoot" at the end of the Gulf war. In
the United States, Jarecke's picture was suppressed
for months after what was more a slaughter than a
war. "The whole US press collaborated in keeping
silent about the consequences of that war," he said.
The famous CBS anchorman Dan Rather told his
prime-time audience: "There's one thing we can all
agree on. It's the heroism of the 148 Americans who
gave their lives so that freedom could live." What he
omitted to say was that a quarter of them had been
killed, like their British comrades, by other Americans.
He made no mention of the Iraqi dead, put at 200,000
by the Medical Educational Trust. That American
forces had deliberately bombed civilian infrastructure,
such as water treatment plants, was not reported at
the time. Six months later, one newspaper, Newsday,
published in Long Island, New York, disclosed that
three US brigades "used snow plows mounted on
tanks to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers - some still
alive - in more than 70 miles of trenches".
The other day, both the Washington Post and the
New York Times referred to Iraq without mentioning
the million people now estimated to have died as a
direct result of sanctions imposed, via the UN, by the
United States and Britain. That, writes Brian Michael
Goss of the University of Illinois, is standard practice.
Goss examined 630 articles on sanctions published
in the New York Times from 1996 to 1998. In those
three years, just 20 articles - 3 per cent of the
coverage - were critical of the policy or dwelt upon its
civilian impact. The rest reflected the US official line,
identifying 21 million people with Saddam Hussein.
The scale of the censorship is placed in perspective
by Professors John and Karl Mueller, of the University
of Rochester. "Even if the UN estimates of the human
damage to Iraq are roughly correct," they write,
sanctions have caused "the deaths of more people in
Iraq than have been slain by all so-called weapons of
mass destruction throughout history."
A third of the people of East Timor were put to death
by the Suharto dictatorship during Indonesia's 24-year
occupation. Yet the American media skirted this epic
crime until shortly before the 1999 referendum. Their
silence was in striking contrast to the saturation
coverage of the "genocide" in Kosovo, used to justify
the Nato bombing campaign, and was in line with
suppression of the post-bombing disclosure that
there was no genocide. In East Timor, the United
States helped Suharto execute his invasion, secretly
and illegally, with weapons and aircraft. For most of
the 24 years of bloody occupation, the US media
maintained a virtual blackout on East Timor.
In the freest press on earth, humanity is reported in
terms of its usefulness to American power. Kosovo
was a major story; it demonstrated the "credibility" of
Nato and America's control over the Balkans. East
Timor was a non-story, "a road bump on the way to
Indonesia", according to a State Department official.
In a study of the New York Times and Washington
Post cited by Goss, 75 per cent of the sources were
government officials - a record not that far behind the
old Pravda. Truly independent reporters such as
Seymour Hersh are described, revealingly, as
"dissidents" and "advocates". What is most telling is
the media's presumption of innocence of the
rapacious American imperial role, rather like
Hollywood's post-Vietnam celebration of America as a
noble victim. In a lead editorial recently, the New York
Times identified the problems of the world, ranging
from poverty to terrorism to disease, as "challenges
to American safety and well-being". That the United
States consumes a quarter of the world's resources,
controls the channels of world trade and the
institutions of inequality, and squeezes whole nations,
such as Iraq, to death, is simply not news.
"The most powerful weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed." ~ Stephen BikoEdited by Agent Cooper on 05/28/01 05:43 PM.
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