[Peace-discuss] [Fwd: [republican-609] DON'T TRUST U.S. MAINSTREAM NEWS]

[E. Wayne Johnson]

This from the NE Florida Republican Liberty Caucus---

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[republican-609] DON'T TRUST U.S. MAINSTREAM NEWS
Date: 	Tue, 13 Jan 2009 19:14:43 -0500
From: 	John Stevens <johncharlesstevens at msn.com>
Reply-To: 	republican-609 at meetup.com
To: 	republican-609-announce at meetup.com



*The Difficulty of Being an Informed American*
/by Paul Craig Roberts/
/Thursday, 8 January 2009/

The function of the ?mainstream media? is to sell products and to 
brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups. By 
subscribing to it, Americans support their own brainwashing.The American 
print and TV media have never been very good. These days they are 
horrible. If people intend to be informed, they must turn to foreign 
news broadcasts, to Internet sites, to foreign newspapers available on 
the Internet, or to alternative newspapers that are springing up in 
various cities. A person who sits in front of Murdoch?s Fox ?News? or 
CNN or who reads the New York Times is simply being brainwashed with 
propaganda.

Before conservatives nod their heads in agreement, I?m not referring to 
?the liberal media.? I mean the propaganda that issues from the US 
government and the Israel Lobby.

It was neoconservative Bush regime propaganda fed to America through 
Judith Miller and the New York Times and through Murdoch?s Fox ?News? 
that convinced Americans that they were in danger from a small secular 
Arab country half way around the globe called Iraq. It was the American 
media that convinced Americans that getting rid of dangerous ?weapons of 
mass destruction,? weapons that did not exist in Iraq, would be a 
cakewalk paid for by Iraqi oil revenues.

It is the same propagandistic American print and TV media that have 
rationalized Bush?s illegal invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan based on 
seven years of lies and deception.

It is the same media that today provids only Israeli propaganda as 
?coverage? of the Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

It was the New York Times that spiked for one year the leaked 
information from the National Security Agency that the Bush regime, in 
violation of US law, was illegally spying on Americans without warrants. 
The ?liberal? New York Times agreed to suppress the story so that Bush 
would not face reelection under the cloud of his outlaw behavior.

Conservatives think the Washington Post is ?liberal media? despite the 
fact that the editorial and commentary pages are controlled by neocons 
and their sympathizers.

During the run up to wars and during wars, the American press has always 
been a propagandist for the government. The only exceptions occurred 
during the later phases of the Vietnam war and the Contra-Sandinista 
conflict in Central America. Karen de Young and some others tried to 
honestly cover the Contras and Sandinistas and were demonized by 
?patriots? taken in by the government?s lies.

Conservatives still blame the ?liberal? media for losing the Vietnam 
war, when in fact all the media did was to provide some truthful reports 
that opened some American eyes.

When the truth cuts against the position of the US government, 
conservatives see it as ?liberal.?

When propaganda supports the government?s lies, conservatives see it as 
?patriotic.?

However, any resemblance to independent reporting disappeared from the 
American media when the Democratic regime of President Clinton allowed 
Murdoch and a small handful of moguls to concentrate the American media 
in a few corporate hands. That was the end of American reporting.

Journalists disappeared from media management and were replaced by 
corporate advertising executives with an eye not to offend any source of 
advertising revenue, and certainly not to offend the government, which 
controls the broadcast licenses that comprise the value of the 
mega-companies. Today reporters write the stories that their masters 
want to hear, or they are out. The function of editors is to make 
certain that no uncomfortable information reaches the public.

The public is slowly catching on, and the print media is dying. The New 
York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Los Angeles Times are all on the ropes.

Americans are still subjected to Fox ?News? and CNN propaganda piped 
into airport waiting rooms, doctors? offices, and exercise centers

People ask me where they can get reliable information. I tell them that 
their goal cannot be reached without their commitment of time.

People who have access to television services that provide English 
language foreign broadcasts, such as Iran?s Press TV, Russia Today, or 
Al Jazeera, can get get news and insights from those parts of the world 
demonized by the US media.

The BBC World Service still reports facts while covering itself by 
providing the views of the US, UK, and Israeli governments.

Both the Asia Times and Israeli newspapers, such as Haaretz can be read 
online in English. There are other such newspapers, and all of them 
provide information that Americans will never see in their own media. 
Any American newspaper that was as truthful about the Israeli government 
as Haaretz would be closed down.

The only US print source with which I am familiar in which some honest 
reporting can be found on a regular basis is the McClatchy papers.

Americans addicted to print media must turn to alternative newspapers, 
which tend to be weekly or bi-weekly. However, the news and commentary 
provided are often superb..

Alternative newspapers are often the children of people motivated by a 
sense of justice and the love of truth. Such people have become an 
endangered species in the American ?mainstream media.? The free press 
Americans have today is online and in the alternative media.

The function of the ?mainstream media? is to sell products and to 
brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups. By 
subscribing to it, Americans support their own brainwashing.

/Paul Craig Roberts is an economist who served as an Assistant Secretary 
of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration earning fame as the "Father 
of Reaganomics". He is a former editor and columnist for the Wall Street 
Journal, Business Week, and Scripps Howard News Service. He is the 
author of Supply-Side Revolution: An Insider's Account of Policymaking 
in Washington; Alienation and the Soviet Economy: The Collapse of the 
Socialist Era and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the 
co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions: 
How Prosecutors and Law Enforcement Are Trampling the Constitution in 
the Name of Justice./

Link to Article:
http://baltimorechronicle.com/2009/010909Roberts2.shtml




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