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Paid Lying: What Passes for Major Media Journalism

Stephen Lendman
Baltimore Chronicle
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:47 EST

Today's major media journalism is biased, irresponsible, sensationalist reporting that distorts, exaggerates or misstates the truth. It's misinformation or agitprop disinformation masquerading as fact to boost circulation, readership, viewers, or listeners, and on vital issues lies about or suppresses uncomfortable truths to provide unqualified support for state and/or corporate interests - to the detriment of the greater good that's always sacrificed for profits and imperial aims.

As a result, major media sources produce a daily propaganda diet and what Project Censored calls "junk food news," and get most people to believe it. In their landmark book, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explained the "propaganda model" that controls the public message by "filter(ing)" disturbing truths, "leaving (behind) only the cleansed residue fit to print" or air.

Today the media is in crisis and a free and open society at risk at a time fiction substitutes for fact, news is carefully controlled, dissent marginalized, and on-air and print journalists support powerful interests as paid liars, or what famed journalist George Seldes (1890 - 1995) called "prostitutes of the press."

Sott editors
SOTT.net
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:23 EST

Terrorism has been defined as "a criminal act that influences an audience beyond the immediate victim". We agree, but the question is, what entity today has the greatest capacity to carry out criminal acts and influence an audience beyond the immediate victim? Figure that one out, and you've got the real terrorists.

But first, let's look at some of the influences we've all come under during the month of October. Vaccination season has kicked off in US, Canada and UK and Obama has declared the swine flu a national emergency! Well, if Mr. Charm, Change and Hope says so, it must be true! Right? Read on and we'll take you through the talking points...

Alex Knight
The End of Capitalism
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:26 EST

This Halloween season, there is no book I could recommend more highly than Silvia Federici's brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004), which tells the dark saga of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe for more than 200 years. In uncovering this forgotten history, Federici exposes the origins of capitalism in the heightened oppression of workers (represented by Shakespeare's character Caliban), and most strikingly, in the brutal subjugation of women. She also brings to light the enormous and colorful European peasant movements that fought against the injustices of their time, connecting their defeat to the imposition of a new patriarchal order that divided male from female workers. Today, as more and more people question the usefulness of a capitalist system that has thrown the world into crisis, Caliban and the Witch stands out as essential reading for unmasking the shocking violence and inequality that capitalism has relied upon from its very creation.

Comment: Read also the two related SOTT Focus pieces:

Control of Uppity Women Behind Witchcraft Accusations?
Wars, Pestilence and Witches

Daniel Tencer
Raw Story
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:09 EST

KBR may have exposed as many as 100,000 people, including US troops, to cancer-causing toxins by burning waste in open-air pits in Iraq, says a series of class-action lawsuits filed against the company.

At least 22 separate lawsuits claiming KBR poisoned American soldiers in Iraq have been combined into a single massive lawsuit that says KBR, which until not long ago was a subsidiary of Halliburton, sought to save money by disposing of toxic waste and incinerating numerous potentially harmful substances in open-air "burn pits."

Global Research
Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:41 EST

Here is the speech by George Galloway MP at the War Crimes Conference & Exhibition that took place at the Putra World Trade Centre in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia on 28th October 2009 (parts one, two and three):

John Pilger
Johnpilger.com
Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:03 EST

In a speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of Australia's human rights prize, the Sydney Peace Prize, John Pilger describes the "unique features" of a political silence in Australia: how it affects the national life of his homeland and the way Australians see the world and are manipulated by great power "which speaks through an invisible government of propaganda that subdues and limits our political imagination and ensures we are always at war - against our own first people and those seeking refuge, or in someone else's country".

Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It's an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.

I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and "uttering unlawful oaths". In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a "courting day" - a rather desperate measure of social engineering. Mary and Francis met that way and were married on October 21st, 1823.

Spiegel Online
Sat, 07 Nov 2009 13:21 EST

In a Speigel interview, the national security adviser to the White House, General James Jones, has expressed strong skepticism regarding the request of General Stanley McChrystal for another 40,000 troops to be sent to Afghanistan.

"Generals always ask for more troops. Take it from me," Jones told Spiegel. "I believe we will not solve the problem with troops alone. The minimum number is important, of course. But there is no maximum number, however." General Jones explained: "You can keep on putting troops in, and you could have 200,000 troops there and Afghanistan will swallow them up as it has done in the past."

Instead of nation building, he brought up the idea of transferring responsibility to Afghanistan as soon as possible. General Jones said: "We need a better plan with the allies to gradually turn over responsibility for the country to Afghan institutions and organizations in as short a time as possible."

Sharon Weinberger
Wired
Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:33 EDT

The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Here, at the Psychotechnology Research Institute, human subjects submit to experiments aimed at manipulating their subconscious minds.

Elena Rusalkina, the silver-haired woman who runs the institute, gestured to the center of the claustrophobic room, where what looked like a dentist's chair sits in front of a glowing computer monitor. "We've had volunteers, a lot of them," she said, the thick concrete walls muffling the noise from the college campus outside. "We worked out a program with (a psychiatric facility) to study criminals. There's no way to falsify the results. There's no subjectivism."

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia's capital. The institute has for years served as the center of an obscure field of human behavior study -- dubbed psychoecology -- that traces it roots back to Soviet-era mind control research.

©Nathan Hodge

A dungeon-like room in the Psychotechnology Research Institute in Moscow is used for human testing. The institute claims its technology can read the subconscious mind and alter behavior.

Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 12:47 EST

An agent of the Israeli intelligence service worked on the staff of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) according to a newly declassified FBI file.

An August 13, 1984 secret communication from the FBI Washington Field Office (WFO) to the FBI director states, "WFO files disclose that AIPAC is a powerful pro-Israel lobbying group staffed by U.S. citizens. WFO files contain an unsubstantiated allegation that a member of the Israeli Intelligence Service was a staff member of AIPAC." The newly declassified document may be downloaded from the Israel Lobby Archive.

The secret FBI file was declassified and released to the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. IRmep sought the FBI files to file a third amicus brief urging Judge T.S. Ellis not to dismiss charges against two AIPAC staffers under the 1917 Espionage Act. The DOJ dropped espionage charges against former AIPAC staffers Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman on May 1, 2009

Barak Ravid and Natasha Mozgovaya
Haaretz
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:33 EST

Concerns are growing in Israel's government over the possibility of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence within the 1967 borders, a move which could potentially be recognized by the United Nations Security Council.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently asked the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama to veto any such proposal, after reports reached Jerusalem of support for such a declaration from major European Union countries, and apparently also certain U.S. officials.

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QUOTE OF THE DAY

"The free press is the mother of all our liberties and of our progress under liberty" Adlai E. Stevenson

"There is no more important struggle for American democracy than ensuring a diverse, independent and free media. Free Press is at the heart of that struggle." Bill Moyers

"This is, in theory, still a free country, but our politically correct, censorious times are such that many of us tremble to give vent to perfectly acceptable views for fear of condemnation. Freedom of speech is thereby imperiled, big questions go undebated, and great lies become accepted, unequivocally as great truths." Simon Heffer in The Daily Mail, 7 June 2000

"The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure." Thomas Jefferson to Lafayette, 1823

"A cantankerous press, an obstinate press, a ubiquitous press, must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know.": Murray I. Gurfein

One of the shrewdest ways for human predators to conquer their stronger victims is to steadily convince them with propaganda that they're still free. N.A. Scott