War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda

[newthinking]

Secrecy, Surveillance and Censorship
War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda
by JOHN PILGER

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.

Continued:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/12/05/war-by-media-and-the-triumph-of-propaganda/

[Wellstone ruled]

1. Interesting and everyone better

read this and be ready for what is really going on in D.C.,and it ain't paddy cakes. The Neo-Cons are back in the saddle and it isn't going to be pretty.

[FiveGoodMen]

2. Neo-cons were never out of the saddle

We were delusional about that.

But some
Of us were really
Greatly delusional

[polly7]

3. Great article. K&R. nt.

oops ...... meant to reply to the OP.

[jakeXT]

4. when wartime generations are pushed aside by their children, who need to learn the truth all over a

This is a time of year for memories, and the ones that keep bothering me are from my childhood, which seemed at the time to be wholly happy and untroubled.

Yet all the adults in my life still dwelt in the shadow of recent war. This was not the glamorous, exciting side of war, but the miserable, fearful and hungry aspect.

My mother, even in middle-class suburban prosperity, couldn’t throw away an eggshell without running her finger round it to get out the last of the white. No butcher dared twice to try to cheat her on the weights.

Haunted all her life by rationing, she would habitually break a chocolate bar into its smallest pieces. She had also been bombed from the air in Liverpool, and had developed a fatalism to cope with the nightly danger of being blown to pieces, shocking to me then and since.

http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/2014/12/forget-evil-putin-were-the-bloodthirsty-warmongers.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter