War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda - John Pilger via Counterpunch
Excerpt:
Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?
Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.
The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.
The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.
This power to create a new “reality” has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revoluti
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/05/war-by-media-and-the-triumph-of-propaganda/
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go west young man
(4,856 posts)Stephen Cohen How the New York Times got Ukraine wrong- The Nation Magazine
The Nation magazine January 7th audio interview with US based Russian scholar Professor Stephen Cohen discussing how the New York Times is spreading propaganda.
http://www.thenation.com/blog/194441/stephen-cohen-how-new-york-times-got-ukraine-wrong
Excerpt:
On Tuesday, The Nation’s Stephen Cohen joined The John Batchelor Show to discuss Western policy towards Ukraine and the media’s latest attempts to cover it. Cohen began by discussing The New York Times’s recent investigation on the ouster of former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych, a piece that he called an “astonishing piece of media malpractice.” In their eagerness to justify US support of the new government, Cohen said, the Times completely missed the story in Ukraine—including the fact that multiple independent investigations by scholars, journalists and witnesses have concluded that the sniper attacks in Kiev in February were part of an “ultra-nationalist” coup. The Times article, Cohen went on to say, is ” an attempt to airbrush out of history one of the looming questions of how we got into this new Cold War.”
