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cloudythescribbler

(2,598 posts)
4. I have for a while now wondered aloud widely -- where in the MSM ...
Sat Aug 6, 2016, 06:24 AM
Aug 2016

... is there ANY significant coverage of the jihadi internet chatter that we heard about so widely in the leadup to the Iraq War (they were gloating at what they correctly saw as a great opportunity for them and a blunder for the US). It's not as if the subject hasn't been covered before in the MSM. Also, at this point, an American major party nominee who says the things he does about Moslems and about torture as well as his disrespect of the Khans -- these surely must be widely discussed on the web in the Islamic World, including among jihadis.

Clearly, repeated specific reports of jihadi internet chatter -- and it surely is out there, the question is one of prevalence, specific spins etc -- would both severely hurt Trump's chances and provide potent fodder for Democratic and super-pac ads attacking Trump in a way that could devastate his level of support. Yes once again the MSM -- and a WHOLE lot of other actors -- are pulling their punches

There are powerful interests that would not want to see the Democrats win, and an even wider array of interests who ABSOLUTELY don't want to see a Democratic blowout, but secularly this doesn't explain it.

In the 80s, I started pointing out huge gaps that existed in US politics that one would expect to find in a truly free market place of ideas, in a functioning pluralist democracy: why is there no massive, door-to-door canvassing national grass-roots peace movement in the US? why is there no (not necessarily quite as massive) no mass-based movement to end absolute poverty ("world hunger&quot , given that milliions of Americans since the 60s have taken at least one course in college or graduate school in underdevelopment, and provide a pretty sizeable base of interested Americans to build some kind of national organization, at least of the size and scope of Greenpeace? There are more meetings and actions in a month I noted in the Bay Area CA (where I lived at the time) around animals' rights than around absolute poverty and global ecological issues combined (now with the gradual emergence of some mass based activism on climate change several decades later, that might not be as clearly true). There are lots of other examples large and small, pointing to what I say are 'glass walls' of underground repression -- something I have observed and horrifically experienced on many ways -- comparable to the potent 'glass ceilings' in many spheres of life that we have heard so much about. While some major progress has been made on the glass ceilings, not so for the glass walls at all.

Press silence on key issues, including during presidential elections, falls into that mold. When 'doing the job' means justifying the lying for professional media generally, it puts a crimp on democracy to the point that it is rendered more theatric than reality, and something that would normally be impossible, like a Trump presidency, can be rendered possible or even happen

Let's hope that enough people from the grass roots in this instance ask the right people in the right fora, where's the reportage on that jihadi internet chatter in the mainstream press, to MAKE it embarassing not to have it

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