Paid Lying - What Passes For Major
Media Journalism
By Stephen Lendman
11-9-9
Today's major media journalism is biased, irresponsible, sensationalist reporting that distorts, exaggerates or misstates the truth. It's misinformation or agitprop disinformation masquerading as fact to boost circulation, readership, viewers, or listeners, and on vital issues lie about or suppress uncomfortable truths to provide unqualified support for state and/or corporate interests - to the detriment of the greater good that's always sacrificed for profits and imperial aims.
As a result, major media sources produce a daily propaganda diet and what Project Censored calls "junk food news," and get most people to believe it. In their landmark book, Manufacturing Consent, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky explained the "propaganda model" that controls the public message by "filter(ing)" disturbing truths, "leaving (behind) only the cleansed residue fit to print" or air.
Today the media is in crisis and a free and open society at risk at a time fiction substitutes for fact, news is carefully controlled, dissent marginalized, and on-air and print journalists support powerful interests as paid liars, or what famed journalist George Seldes (1890 - 1995) called "prostitutes of the press."
As a result, imperial wars are called liberating ones. Civil liberties are suppressed for our own good. Major topics go unaddressed or are misrepresented. Government and business interests are endorsed wholeheartedly. America is always called "beautiful." Beneficial social change is considered heresy. The market works best, we're told, so let it, and patriotism means supporting lawlessness and corporate outlaws by shopping till we drop.
The New York Times - Its Lead Role in Distorting and Suppressing Truth
For many decades, The Times has been the closest thing in America to an official ministry of information and propaganda masquerading as real news, commentary and analysis.
Its unmatched clout once got media critic Norman Solomon to call its front page "the most valuable square inches of media real estate in the USA;" most everywhere, in fact, because its reports are widely circulated and followed globally.
The Paper of Record has a long history of:
-- supporting the powerful;
-- backing corporate interests;
-- endorsing imperial wars;
-- supporting CIA efforts to topple elected governments, assassinate independent leaders, prop up friendly dictators, secretly fund and train paramilitary death squads, practice sophisticated forms of torture, and menace democratic freedoms at home and abroad. For decades, in fact, some Times' foreign correspondents were covert Agency assets. Others today likely are as well as other prominent fourth estate members.
The Times management is also comfortable with:
-- Washington and corporate lawlessness;
-- an unprecedented and growing wealth gap;
-- Wall Street banksters looting the federal treasury;
-- a private banking cartel controlling the nation's money;
-- unmet human needs and increasing poverty, hunger, homelessness, and despair for growing millions in a nation run by rogue politicians who don't give a damn as long as they're re-elected;
-- a de facto one-party state;
-- deep corruption at the highest government and corporate levels;
-- democracy for the select few alone;
-- sham elections; and
-- a deepening social decay symptomatic of a declining state, yet The Times management won't use its clout to expose and help reverse it.
Of course, the same applies throughout the corporate media, the only variance being audience size, the ability to influence it, and the special impact of TV news and talk radio to arouse their faithful. Plus their power of round-the-clock persuasive repetition.
Examples of Journalism, New York Times Style
After a Washington staged February 29, 2004 middle-of-the-night coup ousted democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, The Times March 1 editorial lied by:
-- stating he resigned;
-- saying sending in Marines to abduct him "was the right thing to do;"
-- claiming they only came after "Mr. Aristide yielded power;"
-- blaming him for "contribut(ing) significantly to his own downfall (because of his) increasingly autocratic and lawless rule....;" and
-- accusing him of manipulating the 2000 legislative elections and not "deliver(ing) the democracy he promised."
In fact, he's a beloved democrat first elected in 1990 with 67% of the vote, ousted by a U
supported coup months later, returned to Haiti in 1994, then, because he couldn't succeed himself in 1996, ran in 2000 and was overwhelmingly re-elected with 92% of the vote. Today in exile, the great majority of Haitians want him back but paramilitary occupiers, under orders from Washington, won't let him.
Following Hugo Chavez's December 1998 election, The Times Latin American reporter, Larry Roher, wrote:
Regional "presidents and party leaders are looking over their shoulders (concerned about the) specter (they) thought they had safely interred: that of the populist demagogue, the authoritarian man on horseback known as the caudillo (strongman)" taking power.
Ever since, Times writers consistently:
-- turned a blind eye to Venezuelan democracy;
-- bashed Chavez as "divisive, a ruinous demagogue, provocative (and) the next Fidel Castro;"
-- said he "militarized the government, emasculated the country's courts, intimidated the media, eroded confidence in the economy, and hollowed out Venezuela's once-democratic institutions:" common conditions during decades of pre-Chavez rule that columnist Roger Lowenstein falsely said exist now in:
-- calling him anti-capitalist for sharing his nation's oil wealth with the people by providing essential social services, and for lifting the most needy out of poverty; and
-- denouncing his making foreign investors pay their fair share.
Lowenstein backed the aborted April 2002 coup by calling Chavez's ouster a "resignation," then saying Venezuela "no longer (would be) threatened by a would-be dictator."
Post-/911, the Times played the lead role in taking the nation to war by highlighting the "day of terror" and saying the "President Vows to Exact Punishment for 'Evil.' "
In the run-up to the Iraq war, Judith Miller was a weapon of mass deception with her daily front page Pentagon press release columns masquerading as real news, later exposed as manipulative lies, but they worked.
Following the September 15, 2009 Goldstone Commission report, a same day Neil MacFarquhar column suggested that Israel's "disproportionate attack" followed Hamas provocations, so perhaps it was justified. While The Times gave Judge Goldstone op-ed space, it:
-- published scathing letters denouncing his "one-sidedness" and a September 18 piece saying "the Obama administration said (today) that a United Nations report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza was unfair to Israel and did not take adequate account of 'deplorable' actions by the militant group Hamas in the conflict last winter."
The paper then imposed a near-blackout on its news and editorial pages to bury the story and kill it through silence - never mind its importance in documenting clear evidence of Israeli war crimes against a civilian population.