© REUTERS/ Brian Snyder
The IT billionaires in Silicon Valley and elsewhere and the corporate mainstream media are reacting to Hillary Clinton's defeat in the US election by seeking to shut down genuine free speech, Wall Street analyst and Trends Research Institute head Gerald Celente told Sputnik.
According to Celente, media are "taking cheap shots at getting even by claiming it was fake news and not that people were disgusted with the Clintons."Merrimack College Assistant Professor Melissa Zimdars, a self-proclaimed feminist activist, recently created a list of the allegedly fake news sites. The corporate media extensively covered the list, which reportedly serves as the starting point in creating a narrative suitable to censor alternative and independent media in the United States, including the Daily Wire, Zero Hedge, Breitbart, WND, Red State and Infowars.
Celente recalled that Google had already been accused of repeatedly manipulating search results to favor Hillary Clinton earlier this year. Now Mark Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley IT billionaires who had enthusiastically backed Clinton are refusing to accept that they had lost fair and square in the established US political process."The Zuckerbergs, and the rest of the Silicon Valley billionaires — they lost and payback is tough to take," Celente stated. In their accusations that the independent and alternative media were peddling fake news, the huge US corporate media juggernauts were falsely accusing actual journalists of crimes that they themselves have continued to commit on a massive scale, Celente pointed out.
"Fake news? The mainstream media are pros at it. Not a week goes by without a propaganda piece about Syria, Russia, Iran or any of the governments Washington cannot control," Celente observed.
The track record of the
New York Times and other major US media outlets in putting out fake news unquestioningly on behalf of the US governments of the day went back more than half a century, Celente recalled. "Fake news? What fake news are they talking about: Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction and ties to al-Qaeda? No, I think maybe the Gulf of Tonkin incident that never happened. How about the propaganda surrounding the shooting down of MH-17?," he noted. The alleged attack on a US warship in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 was later proved never to have happened, but reports of it were used to push the US Congress into giving President Lyndon Johnson authorization to respond with what became the Vietnam War.
"How about the allegation that US president-elect Donald Trump is [Russian President Vladimir] Putin's puppet and the Russians hacked into Podesta's email?" Celente asked. John Podesta was the head of Hillary Clinton's unsuccessful election campaign whose hacked emails released by WikiLeaks revealed instances of corruption and questionable and unethical behavior on the part of the Clinton team.
Under a barrage of criticism for losing what their supporters had assumed was a certain victory, the establishment Democrats have responded since the election by criticizing a multitude of allegedly "fake news" sites which they blame for the election defeat. Outgoing US President Barack Obama jumped on the fake news bandwagon during his visits to Germany and Peru, and claimed that fake news harmed democracy.
Democracy is about convincing the majority of what is right and best while benefiting from that process regardless of the truth. The corporations that own the media can project their values across the world. Look at Brexit and how the vote became an international "concern" only to be followed soon after by the most international US election in history. The world hinged on world war and the corporations attempted to (and did so with reasonable success) sway the opinions of the international and American public through all of its resources (TV, Film & Music industries and statistics) into backing one political figurehead over another (according to the two party system which itself is overwhelmingly biased against any other rightful representative of the people); this is not democracy. Media donations to political parties is inherently unethical and as we just witnessed, divulged just how unethical the international mainstream media has become (5 mega corporations, right!!). What has failed to be aired is the risk to the operating licences of all of those media outlets. The New York Times even posted a policy change on 13th November "rededicating themselves to good journalism." This was a blatant move to demonstrate why they should not lose their media licence just in case this issue comes up but I doubt they actually hold the values their editor in chief pronounced (it IS corporate values at the end of the day). I do not hear a peep about corporations losing licences and thus far they have all gotten away with it.
So why attack the independent media, which by the way is quickly becoming anyone who has a diet for the truth and a YouTube channel; they all use the same sources. The US constitution allows for free speech and as the US media code of ethics stipulates - Seek truth and report it, Minimise harm, Act independently and Be accountable; so basically the mainstream media has abandoned their own code of ethics. Obviously the mainstream is [over]reacting against the alternative media purely out of guilt with a good measure of fear after committing gross bias.