VKMHVM2

Fake News and Propaganda: Shaping Our Reality

by Dana Gabriel

The mainstream media is dominated by a handful of mega corporations who control what many of us hear, read, and believe. The propaganda masters are censoring and suppressing the truth from the American people. There are many reporters who know the truth but dare not talk or write about it, and what some report they don't even believe themselves. Those who are courageous enough to stand up to the establishment are often ridiculed, intimidated, and blocked by editors and producers who are acting as gatekeepers to the truth. There have been calls for the arrests and even death of those who criticize the government. You know you have slipped into a fascist dictatorship when those who dissent are treated like traitors, terrorists, and enemies of the state. We are being brainwashed with all the propaganda that we are subjected to in our everyday lives in an effort to control our minds and shift us into massive groupthink. We are being told that we are spreading democracy around the world while our own freedoms are being systematically taken away.

There is a war on the truth, and we are partly to blame as we have lost our respect for genuine news. Dissent is an important ingredient in any free society, yet there is an effort to silence those who criticize the government. Through propaganda, the global elite wish to control our thoughts and perceptions. Just as there is an assault on our personnel freedoms, there is war on the freedom of the press. When journalists are threatened for doing their jobs, the big loser is the free flow of information and ultimately the truth. The Founding Fathers envisioned the press as being independent, reporting the facts and uncovering the truth. Instead, it has become a circus of entertainment and theater mixed in with spin, lies, and disinformation. The Bush administration has been caught paying actors and journalists to appear in and write propaganda pieces. Television stations are using prepackaged news releases produced by corporate and governmental groups without such facts being disclosed. It is clear that we can no longer trust the mainstream media to hold the government accountable.

The Bush administration is spending millions, paying off journalists and producing fake news spots to promote their agenda. Some $10 million was spent in a propaganda-like advertising campaign to push President Bush’s Social Security plan. Fake news reports were also put out to promote his Medicare prescription drug program, with production company employees masquerading as reporters. These mock prepackaged reports are distributed to broadcast outlets across the country and inserted into local news casts. They look so authentic that most would mistake it for a real piece of independent journalism, not partisan propaganda politics. They are paying journalists and reporters to further advance the government's agenda. One of the best examples is commentator Armstrong Williams who was paid $240,000 by the Department of Education to help promote Bush’s No Child Left Behind. Maggie Gallagher also received tens of thousands of dollars from the Department of Health and Human Services to promote Bush's marriage initiative. The list goes on with the likes of Jeff Gannon, Michael McManus, and Karen Ryan, and these are only a few who were caught. This is not unique to the Bush administration as such practices were also common under President Clinton.

A very recent example of fake news occurred during a FEMA-orchestrated news conference which took place during the recent fires that ravaged Southern California. By all accounts, it had the makings of a real news conference, but the only thing missing was real reporters. Some of FEMA's employees posed as reporters, asking softball questions that were carried live by some news stations. It turned into a FEMA love fest, an event to showcase the great job they were doing in regards to the fires. It represented a miscarriage of information, and further legitimized the fact that there is a war on the truth. The only reason there was an apology was because FEMA was caught. It turned out to be a big mistake, an error in judgment, and we were told that this was an isolated incident. It has been reported that both the White House and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff were aware of the fake news conference, and would have more than likely given it the green light. This fake news conference can be best described as government-sponsored propaganda. If the intentions were not to deceive, why wasn't there a disclaimer announced beforehand? We would probably all be amazed by how much propaganda is being passed off as news.

It is through propaganda that our minds are being shaped and molded. A mass conditioning is taking place through the media, television shows, commercials, and video games. It is being used as a tool to control, program, and manipulate our minds through the power of suggestion and repetition. Our values are constantly being shaped and re-shaped, and at times our subconscious minds are unable to distinguish between fact and fiction. Ideas and premises are stored in our memory banks, and when they do become reality, we will have already accepted or at least warmed up to such scenarios. Television, radio and print media dictate to us what is important, what is in fashion, what are the latest trends, what to eat, read, and watch. To many, what they see on TV becomes their reality. There is definitely a correlation between the dumbing down of the population, the moral meltdown, and the amount of television being watched. One need not look any further than reality TV, where we are being desensitized to endless degrading acts on shows like Big Brother. These shows are inundated with sexual content, vulgarity, and humiliating, conniving, and backstabbing acts. Today’s television is destroying our very moral fiber and what is left of our values. When we are subjected to the true reality TV like the Iraqi prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, where is the outrage? We have become a decadent society and are on the decline, being made to accept things like torture. Many television shows, such as 24, openly advocate torture and it seems as if art is imitating reality. America is the new Rome, and we aren’t that far away from so-called terrorist and other enemies of the state being abused and even killed for our viewing pleasure.

The propaganda masters are experts in the art of building favorable public opinion with their spin, double speak, and talking points. David Rockefeller is quoted as saying, “We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subjected to the lights of publicity during those years.” Nevertheless, many are now conscious to the fact that the mainstream media is spreading lies and disinformation, and as a result, television news viewership and newspaper circulations are on the decline. Many are turning to the web for their news and entertainment, abandoning television and print altogether. As a result there is a greater effort to further control the Internet and regulate online speech. Nazi Germany and their Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels used many different techniques including ad nauseam, which is the repeating of an idea until it is taken to be the truth. President Bush has said, “see in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over again for the truth to sink in, to catapult the propaganda.”It is quite obvious that those at the top of the power structure and their puppets wish to shape our reality.

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It's All Here!

Dr. Albert Pastore: An Independent Investigation of 9-11 and the War on Terrorism

BillCosby

Orwell's Preface to Animal Farm -
George OrwellGeorge Orwell was the pseudonym of English author Eric Arthur Blair, born in 1903 in Bengal, where his father worked for the Opium Department of the Government of India. His first book publication was Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) dealing with his experience of poverty and homelessness in those two cities, which Orwell researched by living as an indigent for some months. For the same publisher he produced The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), which was controversial for including Orwell's trenchant criticism of England's left-wing intelligentsia alongside a larger attack on the flaws of capitalism as exemplified in the wretched lives led by the working poor. Orwell also wrote six fictional novels, including Animal Farm (1945) and the chock-full-of-neologisms 1984 (1949), as well as a number of essay collections and an account of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia (1938). He died in 1950 after a long battle with tuberculosis.
The essay below was written as a preface to the first edition of Animal Farm but was not included in the published book and only discovered in the author's original typescript some years later. It is now a favourite citation for critics of our supposedly free press, as an illustration of how the media can work to suppress uncomfortable truths without this necessitating some vast conspiracy. It is "ironic" that the particular example of self-censorship Orwell referred to in the essay was the refusal of the left-wing and liberal press of the time to publish criticism of the Soviet Union - not a major feature of Western media orthodoxy in later years. Indeed, the subsequent popularity of Animal Farm and 1984 had much to do with their usefulness in attacking the USSR and "International Communism" (more usually, of course, these attacks were simply on anyone, left-leaning or otherwise, the attacker was anxious to demonise). Even now, Orwell is better known for these two books, apparently intended as critiques of socialism, than for the many works he wrote espousing socialism. Using Orwell's works to make generalised attacks on the left is problematic, even for the two novels championed thus - while Animal Farm is very clearly a deserved satire on the Soviet Union, its greatest criticism of the Russian leaders is that they sold out socialist principle to accommodate themselves with capitalist countries ("The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which."); 1984, meanwhile, is less an attack on the left than a satiric extrapolation drawn from the argument of James Burnham's The Managerial Revolution, which predicted the replacement of left/right ideology with a new ruling class of technocrats and social scientists. (This sixty year old idea is much favoured by post-modern intellectuals of the Fukuyama ilk - the difference being that they seem to approve.)

While the prevailing orthodoxy of the dystopian society Orwell depicts in 1984 is termed English Socialism, this only goes to show that Orwell undoubtedly viewed the possibility of a socialist system being perverted into oppressive militarist totalitarianism as more horrifying than the same happening in a capitalist state - in the latter case, at least socialism would still be an alternative. In any event, casting Orwell as a gadfly of socialism requires serious distortion of his political viewpoint and the intention behind his writing - throughout his life, Orwell remained a confirmed socialist and worked almost exclusively for socialist journals. Indeed, his often bitter criticisms of the British Left might be seen to stem from his unswerving commitment to its essential positions. Orwell despised pointless attacks on the Right for the benefit of a left-wing audience, satirising this "preaching to the choir" in 1984 as the duckspeak of mindless ideologues. Rather, what more important task was there for a socialist intellectual than to warn fellow socialists where they were going wrong?
On the other hand, given his (thoroughly justified) hatred of Stalinism, it is possible that Orwell would have made, had he lived, the same ideological journey Burnham did, from leftist to Cold Warrior. His distrust of the Soviet Union was forged in the Spanish Civil War, where he witnessed the betrayal of the non-Stalinist Left by their pro-Russian "comrades". In the years after the Second World War, he argued that, if such was the choice, it would be better to be part of the American empire than under the thumb of Russia (probably true for an Englishman; a Guatemalan might disagree). And, despite a life spent emphasizing the importance of extending to our enemies the considerations and freedoms we consider indispensable for ourselves, Orwell then spent much of his last years drawing up and distributing lists of those of his fellow writers he considered to be Soviet pawns. One might wish to cut a dying man some slack over such McCarthyist behaviour, but, even so, for a long term champion of freedom and humanity to act thus suggests that the danger of sliding into "Fascist ways of thought", as he termed them, must be real indeed.

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror

kblair7

Thanks for the posts, intresting information all around


Overall I am going to have to disagree with the 1st post on one point. That simply is not true that all information coming out of the mainstream media some big lie. If there was one state run news station and the internet was heavily controlled by the government. Then I would agree and we probably would not be having this coversation. Still, I maintain people will choose the news or information that suits their particular POV. Which explains the continued existence of media outlets like Fox News and there counterparts on the left. There are plenty of places to get good information, often the case is people do not want to take the time to read its cause its (omg!) in print, and runs several pages.
The information has not changed, which segways into my point--- the way we wish to receive it has. In this world of instant gratification and television news where you don't have to think, perhaps you are correct. That many people will take propoganda for truth. As I said above, the art of journalism is still alive and well on the internet, in some publications, and newspapers. In order to read these sources you have to have some background knowledge and be prepared to take more than five minutes to listen to soundbits.

jowey

Some News agencies are editing and censoring posts on their sites that they do not agree with, posts that are not politically correct.

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White Rabbit

That's for fucking sure and if you knew how wide and deep it was it would scare the shit out of you.

kblair7

Well all aluminum foil helmets and CIA conspiracies aside.

We still have a free press in this country and you have to make good choices as to where you choose to get your news. Its that simple.

VKMHVM2

__________________
It's All Here!

Dr. Albert Pastore: An Independent Investigation of 9-11 and the War on Terrorism

kblair7

The problem here is not the media. Its the fact you people do not understand the difference between NEWS and TALKSHOWS

NEWS reports events objectively does not give opinions. An example of this would be the CNN news room where they simply tell me what happened and where and when and how. They don't try to tell me why.

TALKSHOWS (Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Rielly, Anderson Cooper, etc) usually any television show with a personality that its center. This is NOT news, its opinions or interpretations of those events reported.

You can't even tell my WHY we don't have free press in this country. Cause you don't know and you have no proof. Reports make mistakes like anyone, the press is after all, a human institution. The people whom you refer to are TALKSHOW hosts not REPORTERS.

VKMHVM2

The public is being brainwashed by an avalanche of lies, distortions, and outright impossibilities, so that when someone does try to give them vital information that has been vetted and checked for accuracy, they become hostile not to their manipulator, but to the messengers that have given them the epiphany.

__________________
It's All Here!

Dr. Albert Pastore: An Independent Investigation of 9-11 and the War on Terrorism

kblair7

Ya huh...

What lies or distortions are you referring? Did you ever hear the saying, the simplest answer is usually the right one?

I tend to choose the simplest explanations that are in line with logic and what I know about human nature. That is usually not a mass conspiracy or a ridiculous
theory based on postulations of some loser living a his parents basement watching "Lost in Space" reruns all day.