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Category: Censorship

  • Civicus raps Solomon Islands over rights curbs, tighter media controls

    Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    The Civicus Monitor has documented an uptick in restrictions on civic space by the Solomon Islands government, which led to the downgrading of the coiuntry’s rating to “narrowed” in December 2021.

    As previously documented, there have been threats to ban Facebook in the country and attempts to vilify civil society.

    The authorities have also restricted access to information, including requests from the media. During violent anti-government protests in November 2021, journalists on location were attacked with tear gas and rubber bullets from the police.

    Elections are held on the Solomon Islands every four years and Parliament was due to be dissolved in May 2023.

    However, the Solomon Islands is set to host the Pacific Games in November 2023, and Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has sought to delay the dissolution of Parliament until December 2023, with an election to be held within four months of that date. The opposition leader has criticised this delay as a “power grab”.

    There have also been growing concerns over press freedom and the influence of China, which signed a security deal with the Pacific island nation in April 2022.

    Journalists face restrictions during Chinese visit
    In May 2022, journalists in the Solomons faced numerous restrictions while trying to report on the visit of China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi to the region.

    According to reports, China’s foreign ministry refused to answer questions about the visit.

    Journalists seeking to cover the Solomon Islands for international outlets said they were blocked from attending press events, while those journalists that were allowed access were restricted in asking questions.

    Georgina Kekea, president of the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI), said getting information about Wang’s visit to the country, including an itinerary, had been very difficult.

    She said there was only one press event scheduled in Honiara but only journalists from two Solomon Islands’ newspapers, the national broadcaster, and Chinese media were permitted to attend.

    Covid-19 concerns were cited as the official reason for the limited number of journalists attending.

    “MASI thrives on professional journalism and sees no reason for journalists to be discriminated against based on who they represent,” Kekea said.

    “Giving credentials to selected journalists is a sign of favouritism. Journalists should be allowed to do their job without fear or favour.”

    The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) said that “restriction of journalists and media organisations … sets a worrying precedent for press freedom in the Pacific” and urged the government of the Solomon Islands to ensure press freedom is protected.

    Government tightens state broadcaster control
    The government of the Solomon Islands is seeking tighter control over the nation’s state-owned broadcaster, a move that opponents say is aimed at controlling and censoring the news.

    On 2 August 2022, the government ordered the country’s national broadcaster — the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation, known as SIBC – to self-censor its news and other paid programmes and only allow content that portrays the nation’s government in a positive light.

    The government also said it would vet all stories before broadcasting.

    The broadcaster, which broadcasts radio programmes, TV bulletins and online news, is the only way to receive immediate news for people in many remote areas of the country and plays a vital role in natural disaster management.

    The move comes a month after the independence of the broadcaster was significantly undermined, namely when it lost its designation as a “state-owned enterprise” and instead became fully funded by government.

    This has caused concerns that the government has been seeking to exert greater control over the broadcaster.

    The IFJ said: “The censoring of the Solomon Island’s national broadcaster is an assault on press freedom and an unacceptable development for journalists, the public, and the democratic political process.

    “The IFJ calls for the immediate reinstatement of independent broadcasting arrangements in the Solomon Islands”.

    However, in an interview on August 8, the government seemed to back track on the decision and said that SIBC would retain editorial control.

    It said that it only seeks to protect “our people from lies and misinformation […] propagated by the national broadcaster”.

    Authorities threaten to ban foreign journalists
    The authorities have threatened to ban or deport foreign journalists deemed disrespectful of the country’s relationship with China.

    According to IFJ, the Prime Minister’s Office issued a statement on August 24 which criticised foreign media for failing to follow standards expected of journalists writing and reporting on the situation in the Solomons Islands.

    The government warned it would implement swift measures to prevent journalists who were not “respectful” or “courteous” from entering the country.

    The statement specifically targeted a an August 1 episode of Four Corners, titled “Pacific Capture: How Chinese money is buying the Solomons”. The investigative documentary series by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) was accused of “misinformation and distribution of pre-conceived prejudicial information”.

    ABC has denied this accusation.

    IFJ condemned “this grave infringement on press freedom” and called on Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare to “ensure all journalists remain free to report on all affairs concerning the Solomon Islands”.

    Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Factchecking the Factchecker on Chomsky, Russia and Media Access

    Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, US-based media platforms have made an extraordinary effort to cut Western audiences off from news from a Russian perspective. When social critic Noam Chomsky pointed out how unprecedented this was, Newsweek‘s “factchecker” (7/26/22) declared his criticism “clearly untrue”—a determination that did more to confirm the ideological strictures of US media than to debunk them.

    Soon after Russia invaded Ukraine in February, Russia Today, funded by the Russian government, was removed from DirecTV and Dish Network (New York Times, 3/12/22), YouTube (France24, 12/3/22), TikTok, Meta (CNN, 3/1/22) Google News (Reuters, 3/1/22) and Spotify (Reuters, 3/2/22) in the United States and/or Europe. RT and Sputnik (another Russian state–funded network) were removed from the Apple app store (TechCrunch, 3/1/22).

    CNN: RT sees its influence diminish as TV providers and tech companies take action against the Russia-backed outlet

    CNN (3/1/22): “The actions taken by television providers and technology companies against RT have…reduc[ed] the Kremlin’s ability to peddle its narrative at a pivotal time.”

    Microsoft banned RT from the Windows app store, and deranked RT and Sputnik in Bing search results (TechCrunch, 3/1/22). Google (Reuters, 3/1/22), Meta (Reuters 2/26/22) and Microsoft (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22) barred RT from receiving any ad revenue through their platforms. RT was also banned by Roku, a streaming hardware company (CNN, 3/1/22).

    Motivations for banning RT and Sputnik were due to “extraordinary circumstances,” in Google’s words (Reuters, 2/26/22), and to protect “against state-sponsored disinformation campaigns” (Microsoft.com, 2/28/22). RT’s offices in the US had to close down their production completely (Washington Post, 3/3/22).

    PayPal has recently frozen the accounts of independent news outlets such as Consortium News (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22) and MintPress (Democracy Now!, 5/4/22; FAIR.org, 5/18/22). The circumstances around PayPal’s actions are less clear than with the actions against RT. The editor-in-chief of Consortium News, Joe Lauria, said he didn’t know why PayPal froze its account, but he suspects a clause in the user agreement against “purveying misinformation” may have been invoked (Democracy Now!, 7/12/22).

    One of the many chilling effects of the media blackout was that YouTube deleted its entire archive of commentary by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Chris Hedges (who formerly worked for the New York Times and NPR) because it was hosted by RT (Democracy Now!, 4/1/22).

    In May, the US announced new sanctions against Russian television networks Channel One Russia, Television Station Russia-1 and NTV Broadcasting Company (CNN, 5/8/22), cutting them off from US advertisers.

    ‘A kind of totalitarian culture’

    Newsweek: Fact Check: Noam Chomsky Claims American Access To News Worse Than In USSR

    Newsweek (7/26/22): “There are no justified parallels to be drawn between the Soviet Russia media landscape and that of the US today.”

    Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus of linguistics at MIT and a renowned media critic, responded to this consolidated effort to “counter the threat” posed by the “information war” (Newsweek, 7/26/22) in an interview with actor Russell Brand (YouTube, 7/22/22):

    Take the United States today; it is living under a kind of totalitarian culture which has never existed in my lifetime, and is much worse in many ways than the Soviet Union before Gorbachev. Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.

    Chomsky’s comments were “factchecked” recently by Tom Norton of Newsweek (7/26/22). He wrote:

    While the BBC and Radio Free America did broadcast in Russia post-WWII and during the Cold War, their frequencies were jammed by the Soviet government for decades. Any access that the Russian public did have was gained in spite of, not thanks to, their government’s efforts.

    The article briefly covers the history of signal jamming in the Soviet Union and other comments made by Chomsky, concluding:

    To suggest that Americans have less access to information than citizens in Soviet Russia is therefore, not only clearly untrue, but an argument that neglects the sacrifices and perils that journalists have endured to deliver accurate news about the country, and continue to endure to this day.

    The official ruling of Newsweek declared Chomsky’s comments false:

    By all accounts, Americans are able to access news from Russia despite many Western journalists having fled the country, and Russia having blocked its public’s access to most Western social media and news platforms.

    ‘A ubiquitous phenomenon’

    BBC: BBC Russian radio hits the off switch after 65 years

    BBC (3/23/11): “Listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.”

    One of the articles used to support the certification of falsehood was a New York Times article (5/26/87) from 1987 that reported “Russia had begun broadcasting Voice of America after blocking its signal for seven years.” A BBC article (3/23/11) from 2011 was also used to explain that between 1949 and 1987 the Soviets spent significant funds developing jammers to block Western transmissions.

    Interestingly, the same New York Times article reported that “a Harvard University study in the mid-1970s estimated that 28 million people in the Soviet Union tuned in [to US-funded VoA] at least once a week.’” And similarly, from the same BBC article cited by Newsweek:

    However, jamming was never totally effective, and listening to the [BBC‘s] Russian Service as well as other Western broadcasters had, by the 1970s, become a ubiquitous phenomenon among the Soviet urban intelligentsia.

    Using just two articles from Western sources selected by the factchecker, it seems that millions of people, including virtually all intellectuals in the Soviet Union, had access to and tuned into Western media in the 1970s, which is fairly consistent with Chomsky’s comments: “Go back to the 1970s, people in Soviet Russia could access BBC, Voice of America, German television, if they wanted to find out the news.”

    Newsweek reached out to Chomsky for comment, who responded:

    I was explicit. I referred to the banning of RT and other channels, comparing it with pre-Perestroika Russia when Russians were getting their news from BBC and VoA, according to US studies.

    A mass Soviet audience

    Cold War Broadcasting

    Cold War Broadcasting (CEU Press, 2010): “Some 52 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe tuned in weekly to the Voice of America in the early 1980s.”

    A collection of studies were published in 2010 in the book, Cold War Broadcasting: Impact on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, edited by A. Ross Johnson, a former research fellow at the Hoover Institute (a conservative think tank) and director of Radio Free Europe (US-funded media), and R. Eugene Parta, also a former director of RFE and a contributor to the Hoover Institution. The studies corroborate the claim that people in the Soviet Union were frequently listening to Western media.

    In the 1970s, simulations estimated by MIT put VoA weekly listenership reaching highs of 19% of the adult Soviet population, with the BBC topping out at 11%. “Study results showed that by the end of the 1970s, more than half of the USSR urban population listened to foreign broadcasting more or less regularly,” according to Cold War Broadcasting.

    Out of curiosity, what do the US studies have to say about the 1980s?

    Some 52 million people in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe tuned in weekly to the Voice of America in the early 1980s. That was approximately half of VoA’s global audience at the time.

    The Soviet war in Afghanistan apparently did not stop people from listening to Western broadcasts. In 1984, 40% of the urban population received information on the war in Afghanistan from Western radio, and in 1987 it was 45%.

    In the contemporary United States, however, this is not permitted. We cannot have people listening to the enemy in times of war.

    Cold War Broadcasting noted that

    the size of Western radio stations’ audience grew gradually from the beginning of broadcasting in the early post-war period to reach more than 50% of the Soviet urban population in the early 1980s.

    In other words, Western radio stations had a mass audience in the former USSR. The number of regular listeners was as high as 20–25%.

    Soviet listeners appeared to use their access to news from multiple perspectives to get a more comprehensive picture of events:

    Despite a relatively high level of trust in Western radio stations, most listeners did not totally accept all the information they heard. The Soviet audience took a more deliberate approach to understanding information that was based on a comparison of information obtained from Soviet mass media with that from foreign radio programs.

    So Western outlets and US studies seem to agree with Chomsky: Despite jamming, people had access and often listened to Western sources in the Soviet Union and were critically engaged with the news at the time, especially during the ’70s.

    ACTION ALERT: You can contact Newsweek here or via Twitter: @Newsweek. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.

    FEATURED IMAGE: Noam Chomsky on Democracy Now! (12/7/21).

     

    The post Factchecking the Factchecker on Chomsky, Russia and Media Access appeared first on FAIR.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • A Distant Mirror: Official Torture in the Roman Empire

    Much is to be learned from the political correspondence of such Roman luminaries as Julius Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, among many others.  Here I am restricting myself to a Gestapo-like bureaucrat, Pliny the Younger (61-113 C.E.), imperial governor of Bithynia province (now part of Turkey) under the divinely mandated autocracy of the Emperor Trajan (53-117 C.E.).

    In his numerous letters seeking orders from the emperor, Pliny repeatedly pledges his obeisant loyalty.  But his tone, which seems curiously modern to me, is that of a pragmatic administrator merely seeking clarification of official policy regarding treatment of a small but possibly disloyal, subversive cult.  Here is a high-level governor, entirely indifferent to any considerations of morality, writing in the matter-of-fact, legalistic style we have come to expect from present-day war planners and intelligence agency heads.  New religious cults posed a possible threat of disloyalty to the emperor, whose rule itself is sanctified by the official State religion.

    An eccentric, secretive cult known as Christians had become a concern, and Pliny simply requests orders as to how to deal with them:

    I do not know…whether it is the mere name of Christian which is punishable, even if innocent of crime, or rather the crimes associated with the name…. I have asked them in person if they are Christians, and if they admit it, I repeat the question a second or third time, with a warning of the punishment awaiting them.  If they persist, I order them to be led away to execution.

    On the other hand, after “enhanced interrogation,” many suspects said they had long ceased to be Christians, and, as proof, made offerings to Trajan’s statue and invocations to the official gods.  Christians had been in the habit of gathering to study the Gospels and share a meal afterwards.  But Pliny reports to the emperor that “they had in fact given up this practice since my edict, issued on your instructions, which banned all political societies.  This made me decide it was all the more necessary to extract the truth by torture from two slave-women, whom they call deaconesses… I have postponed any further examination and hastened to consult you.”

    Although the “wretched cult” has “infected” both citizens and non-citizens in innumerable towns and villages, Pliny assures the emperor that it is being gradually suppressed, one indication being that:

    People have begun to throng the temples which had been almost entirely deserted for a long time; the sacred rites which had been allowed to lapse are being performed again, and flesh of sacrificial victims is on sale everywhere, though up till recently scarcely anyone could be found to buy it [italics mine].

    Entirely pragmatic and focused solely on policy which would strengthen the empire, Pliny the Younger strikingly prefigures the modern “fascist” official.  Devoid of independent principles or even ordinary compassion, he furthers his governmental status through carefully consulting with, and carrying out, the edicts of his superior, the absolute ruler.

    We can easily discern the lineaments of the very modern-day tactics of intimidating, torturing and even executing without trial supposed “subversives” and suspected “terrorists” (Guantanamo, CIA renditions and black-sites, executions by drone without trial–ad nauseam).

    • Note: all direct quotations are from: Pliny the Younger, Complete Letters, trans. P. G. Walsh, Oxford World Classics, 2009.

    The post A Distant Mirror: Official Torture in the Roman Empire first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Backlash after Solomons government reins in public broadcaster

    RNZ Pacific

    The Solomon Islands government has prompted anger by ordering the censorship of the national broadcaster.

    The government of Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has forbidden it from publishing material critical of the government, which will vet all stories before broadcast.

    The Guardian reports that on Monday the government announced that the Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC), a public service broadcaster established in 1976 by an Act of Parliament, would be brought under government control.

    The broadcaster, which airs radio programmes, TV bulletins and online news, is the only way to receive immediate news for people in many remote areas of the country and plays a vital role in natural disaster management.

    Staff at SIBC confirmed to media that as of Monday, all news and programmes would be vetted by a government representative before broadcast.

    The development has prompted outrage and raised concerns about freedom of the press.

    “It’s very sad that media has been curtailed, this means we are moving away from democratic principles,” said Julian Maka, the Premier for Makira/Ulawa province, and formerly the programmes manager and current affairs head at SIBC.

    “It is not healthy for the country, especially for people in the rural areas who need to have balanced views available to them.”

    The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) has also condemned the move.

    “The censoring of the Solomon Islands’ national broadcaster is an assault on press freedom and an unacceptable development for journalists, the public, and the democratic political process. The IFJ calls for the immediate reinstatement of independent broadcasting arrangements in the Solomon Islands.”

    Claims of bias
    The restrictions follow what Sogavare has called biased reporting and news causing “disunity”.

    The opposition leader, Matthew Wale, has requested a meeting with the executive of the Media Association of Solomon Islands (MASI) to discuss the situation.

    The Guardian reports there have been growing concerns about press freedom in Solomon Islands, particularly in the wake of the signing of the controversial security deal with China in May.

    During the marathon tour of the Pacific conducted by China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, Pacific journalists were not permitted to ask him questions and in some cases reported being blocked from events, having Chinese officials block their camera shots, and having media accreditation revoked for no reason.

    At Wang’s first stop in Solomon Islands, MASI boycotted coverage of the visit because many journalists were blocked from attending his press conference. Covid-19 restrictions were cited as the reason.

    Sogavare’s office was contacted by the newspaper for comment.

    Mounting pressure on SIBC ‘disturbing’
    In Auckland, Professor David Robie, editor of Asia Pacific Report and convenor of Pacific Media Watch, described the mounting pressure on the public broadcaster Solomon islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC) as “disturbing” and an “unprecedented attack” on the independence of public radio in the country.

    “It is extremely disappointing to see the Prime Minister’s Office effectively gagging the most important news service in reaching remote rural areas,” he said.

    It was also a damaging example to neighbouring Pacific countries trying to defend their media freedom traditions.

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

  • Government Censorship Rebrands with “Disinformation” Campaign

    Last week the Social Media Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University’s School of Management released a report titled “The reach of Russian propaganda and disinformation in Canada”. According to lead author Anatoliy Gruzd, “the research provides evidence that the Kremlin’s disinformation is reaching more Canadians than one would expect. Left unchallenged, state-sponsored information operations can stoke societal tensions and could even undermine democracy itself.”

    But the report calls statements of fact “pro-Kremlin claims”. One flagrant example cited prominently is the idea that “since the end of the Cold War, NATO has surrounded Russia with military bases and broken their promise to not offer NATO membership to former USSR republics, like Ukraine.”

    “The reach of Russian propaganda and disinformation in Canada” follows on the heels of the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy releasing “Disinformation and Russia-Ukrainian war on Canadian social media”. The June report listed prominent Twitter accounts engaged in what it called “disinformation”, which includes “portraying NATO as an aggressive alliance using Ukraine as a proxy against Russia” and “promoting a specific mistrust of Canada’s Liberal government, and especially of Prime Minister Trudeau.” The widely mediatized report’s lead author, JC Boucher, has received millions of dollars in research funding from the military and is a product of the Canadian military’s vast ideological apparatus.

    Recently the Canadian Forces tweeted, “we’re working with international partners to detect, correct, and call out the Kremlin’s state-sponsored disinformation about Ukraine.” They linked to a webpage titled “Canada’s efforts to counter disinformation — Russian invasion of Ukraine”.

    Overseen by the Department of National Defense, the 2,700 employee Communications Security Establishment (CSE) also claims to combat “disinformation”. Its Twitter account regularly posts updates on Russian “disinformation” and the top item in its recently released annual report is “exposing Russian-backed disinformation campaigns and malicious cyber activity.”

    Ten days ago, the Trudeau government announced sanctions on 15 Russian entities engaged in “disinformation”. In March, Ottawa put up $3 million to counter Russian “disinformation.”

    At the legislative level Bill C11 is expected to require companies to remove content flagged as “disinformation.” A panel of experts appointed by the heritage minister to help shape the “online harms” legislation called for it to address “harmful content online, which includes disinformation, by conducting risk assessments of content that can cause significant physical or psychological harm to individuals.” The legislation is expected to further empower CSIS and establish a “digital safety commissioner”.

    One member of the expert panel advising the minister, Bernie Farber, has repeatedly sought to suppress challenges to Israeli apartheid. As head of the Canadian Jewish Congress, Farber pressured the York University administration against holding an academic conference entitled Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace, applauded the Stephen Harper government’s 2009 move to block former British MP George Galloway from speaking in Canada, spurred Shoppers Drug Mart to withdraw Adbuster from its stores, campaigned to suppress A Nation on Trial: The Goldhagen Thesis and Historical Truth and called on Toronto Pride to ban Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Today Farber is an advocate of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of anti-Semitism, which has repeatedly been used to suppress Palestine solidarity activism.

    After I interrupted justice minister David Lametti’s press conference to question him about Israel murdering al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh and illegal recruitment for the Israeli military, Honest Reporting Canada released an action alert titled “CBC and CPAC Broadcast Anti-Israel Radical Crashing Press Conference and Spewing Hatred”. The May 27 statement noted, “instead of cutting away from this radical interrupting the press conference, CBC News gave the anti-Israel activist a national platform to spew disinformation, falsehoods, and anti-Israel hatred for over 2 minutes.” They called on the two TV channels to suppress my “disinformation.”

    The Daily Dot, a US-based technology publication, published a similar response when I interrupted a speech by foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly to challenge Canada’s escalation of violence in Ukraine. In “Tech giants built digital dragnets to stop Russian propaganda—here’s how it still seeps through” Claire Goforth suggested Twitter and other social media outlets should have suppressed my 45 second video challenging Canada’s promotion of NATO and weapons deliveries. Bemoaning how “Russian propaganda and disinformation commingle across the web”, Goforth effectively argued that if Russian media promoted a video of a Canadian challenging their country’s foreign minister about Canada’s role in an important international issue it should be suppressed.

    Proponents of “disinformation” are overwhelmingly focused on information that displeases Western power. “Disinformation” campaigners don’t cry foul when articles suggest Canada seeks to help Haiti or uphold the international rules-based order. Even obviously false numbers are okay so long as they align with power. When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attended a memorial to the Rwandan genocide at last month’s Commonwealth Summit in Kigali CBC reported, “more than 800,000 Tutsis lost their lives across the country in the organized campaign that stretched over 100 days.” But it’s improbable there were 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda in 1994 and no one believes every single Tutsi was killed, as I detailed in the 2017 article “Statistics, damn lies and the truth about Rwanda genocide”. (Rwanda’s 1991 census calculated 596,387 Tutsi and a Tutsi survivors’ group concluded close to 400,000 survived.)

    In challenging his disinformation, I tagged the author of the CBC story, Murray Brewster, but he didn’t bother correcting the story. Canadian commentators claim more Tutsi were killed in the genocide than lived in Rwanda since it aligns with Washington, London and Kigali’s interests, as well as liberal nationalist Canadian ideology.

    As someone who spends hours daily countering “disinformation” about Canadian foreign policy, I find it odd objecting to efforts to combat the scourge. But current official talk about “disinformation” has largely become a euphemism for protecting empire and a rebranding of age-old government-run censorship.

    The post Government Censorship Rebrands with “Disinformation” Campaign first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Imagination: Finding the End of the World as Capitalists Know It!

    It’s truly amazing that the capitalists see the end of the world — human species, I suppose — way before they can imagine the end of capitalism. You know, that perfect system of slavery then, slavery now, and even more draconian slavery for the future. That sort is not based on whips, 15 hours a day toiling, not run by the masters of the Anglo Saxon variety raping and starving. The new-new slavery is capitalism on a digital bender. Food, water, activities, housing (not a house, but housing in the very generic term such as tents or mini-sheds), where one can live, jobs, the like. All will be dictated, and you and I will own nothing!

    If the mRNA vax dance has its way, more and more dead bodies, warped minds, sterilized wombs, dropping sperm counts, and zygotes from hell might end humanity, and, well, capitalism will live on in the metaverse, in the global computer. That old eugenics drama — corona bioweapons — but masked up with the Fauci’s and the Gates and those presidents and dictators following the jab jab lies will do it by death through 2 billion jabs.

    It’s amazing the lies fed us, and amazing how incredibly stupid we are as a collective. As if this SARS-CoV2 wasn’t/isn’t a fix, isn’t a messed with and serialized and gain of function facilitated “virus.” As if all those true ways to stop viral loads building up in the mucous cavities, in the lungs, in the cells are suddenly treated like snake oil. Imagine that, all the naturopathy and preventative potients, all thrown out the window. How can you get your pudding if you don’t eat your media meat (propaganda)?

    Daily, it is me meeting people who have zero idea about world history or about the USA, and I am not just talking about Ukraine and that part of the neighborhood. We are talking about our own neck of the woods, lands stolen by the white man, man. So much mind bleaching occurs in k12. And in higher education!

    Native Land.

    I hear people talking to me about the visitors here, the vacationers, who just have that entitled disease of myopia. “Yeah, I talk to my customers that not all is rosy here on the coast, that there are homeless people big time. They say, ‘What homeless people? I don’t see any.’ They say that while looking out the window at the bay where several men are hanging out smoking and just chilling. Homeless men. These tourists are looking right through them.”

    That’s the issue, no, seeing right through or just not noticing what’s around us. Out of sight, well, this time, In Plain Sight, Out of Mind. What did the original people of Mexico see when those ships entered the tidal shore? Nothing? Because ships were not of their culture, their natural order of things.

    (Why did Herman Cortez burn his ships when he invaded Mexico?)

    Then, another friend in Vancouver, WA, with his Handy Man service, and business is booming, as in mold and mildew mitigation and tear outs, he’s struggling to pay the taxman, to get all his bills and receipts in order. He’ll never have good credit score (sic) to buy a home. You know, AmeriKa, giving missiles and bombs and guns to Ukraine with, well, you get it, no real accounting, receipts, etc. All those things on the dark web, black market, gone. So, my friend will have taxes to pay, and fines, double taxes, penalties, late fees to pay, and weathering admonishments, threats. He finds it difficult to get young men and women to sign on for $20 an hour for all the work he undertakes. So he resorts to hiring, well, some of those very same people mentioned above: the homeless.

    Many are carless because of the fact they have had their driver’s licenses revoked for unpaid bills — child support, court fines, etc. There are almost 10 million in the USA with driver’s license revocation because of unpaid fines, or unpaid child support. Not because of driving under the influence of whatever.

    Debt-related driving restrictions make everyday life impossible. Currently, more than half of U.S. states still suspend, revoke or refuse to renew driver’s licenses for unpaid traffic, toll, misdemeanor and felony fines and fees. The result: millions of people are struggling to survive with debt-related driving restrictions.

    License suspensions are the primary way debt-related driving restrictions occur in the United States. However, many states restrict registrations, or other administrative automobile requirements, as a counterproductive means of coercing debt payments for unpaid parking, tolls and other court fines and fees. (Source)

    Check out the site,

    As I repeat incessantly — this is just one of a million things about capitalism that demonstrates the system is not for or about The People, We the People. This is just one of a million absurdities in our system. And there is always a gravy train for endless systems of oppression and bureaucracies and middle men and women. The entire systems of pain and double-pain in the USA is about debt, managing people’s pain, laying on shame and setting forth endless struggle to make it (pay for) in capitalism. So it makes sense in a sadistic way to take away the only viable thing — a car — for these people to get to work to pay these fines or child support.

    We know the fines are highway robbery, from the point of origin, to the add-ons and the endless late fees and penalties and handling fees.

    Best to listen to Michael Parenti to understand this ugly ugly system, that for many, will never die. Imagine, capitalism will never die! Over the human species dead body.

    Here: “If value is to be extracted from the labour of the many, to go into the pockets of the few, this system has to be maintained. The conditions of hegemony must constantly be refortified. And that’s something that no one IBM or General Motors could do for itself… to put it simply the function of the capitalist state is to sustain the capitalist order. And it must consciously be doing that.” Michael John Parenti is a political scientist who was raised by an Italian-American working class family in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. He received an M.A. from Brown University and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale University.

    Here, just the essence of it all, capitalism:

    And then, my real profession, in the old days, was journalism. I’ve heard all of my life that journalists are not real, that all of it is yellow journalism, that even the earnest work of a young reporter in a small town is smeared with the Yellow in Yellow Journalism. Bullshit!

    This is, of course, a lie, a broad brush stroke lie. Not that journalists are somehow immune from the reality of American Exceptionalism and the Lie after Lie of what this country is and was about. Yes, Mom, Flag and Apple Pie.

    Yet, that is not so true, that regular ethical journalists want to lie or damage or invent fake news. When I was learning the craft of journalism, we had a code of ethics. We worked hard as college newspaper reporters and editors to get the news of the campus, publicizing some amazing students and programs and departments, and to get the bead on the city, in this case, Tucson. The neighborhood, the people, the police beat, all the unique things that newspapers can do to publicize the goings on. Yes, school boards and city councils and all the college, in this case, University of Arizona, things that make a university like this one a mini-town, we tried to cover fairly.

    We were not after smear campaigns. We were not attempting to do hit pieces on people. We had a code of ethics. Really:

    Preamble

    Members of the Society of Professional Journalists believe that public enlightenment is the forerunner of justice and the foundation of democracy. Ethical journalism strives to ensure the free exchange of information that is accurate, fair and thorough. An ethical journalist acts with integrity.

    The Society declares these four principles as the foundation of ethical journalism and encourages their use in its practice by all people in all media.

    Seek Truth and
    Report It

    Ethical journalism should be accurate and fair. Journalists should be honest and courageous in gathering, reporting and interpreting information.

    Journalists should:

    Minimize Harm

    Ethical journalism treats sources, subjects, colleagues and members of the public as human beings deserving of respect.

    Journalists should:

    Act Independently

    The highest and primary obligation of ethical journalism is to serve the public.

    Journalists should:

    Be Accountable and Transparent

    Ethical journalism means taking responsibility for one’s work and explaining one’s decisions to the public.

    Journalists should:

    “The SPJ Code of Ethics is a statement of abiding principles supported by explanations and position papers that address changing journalistic practices. It is not a set of rules, rather a guide that encourages all who engage in journalism to take responsibility for the information they provide, regardless of medium. The code should be read as a whole; individual principles should not be taken out of context. It is not, nor can it be under the First Amendment, legally enforceable.”

    For an expanded explanation, please follow this link.

    Now, I know of so many other professions with codes of ethics, but so many have few ethics, or the profession is based on unethical foundations. Even as new reporters, we understood power, that is, the powers that are, and that powers that shouldn’t be. The headlines and stories about malfeasance or wrong doing, those could literally kill people. We knew the value of sources, and in our small town journalism work — we worked on a lab paper in Tombstone, Arizona, of all places — we had a duty to the people in that town. Did we want to break stories? Of course. Did we want to uncover wrong doing, or some sensational story? Yep. But our goal was simple news reporting and news writing. We had so many beats, and each beat had it’s own culture — arts, music, sports, entertainment, city, state, police, business, etc. But as students who were paid through student association money and who did not have direct oversight from the journalism department; we took our jobs seriously. We went to conferences, we did internships, we met with all sorts of people to understand the needs and wants of the small town, the big town, etc. We had advertising, and we were a big part of the community’s lifeblood: where communities get their news and information.

    We could break a story about the football coach’s unethical practice of pocketing unused travel (airline) vouchers, and we could see how much cost overruns the new engineering building was entailing. Each one of those controversial pieces we spent hours and weeks attempting to get right and not do unnecessary harm. We would report on interesting members of the community, on people who had unusual stories. The newspaper was a source of cultural connection. We strived for accuracy.

    We highlighted authors, authors, orators, movers and shakers, community enterprises, members of the community who were unique.

    We covered crime and punishment, codes and planning, and took many beads on the life of people, organizations and the community.

    Yet, even back in 1977, we knew how some newspapers were bending too close to the leanings and yearnings of big business, or at the owners’s whims. We were concerned about newpapers dying, concerned about editorial decisions that hurt our code of ethics listed above. We believed in newspaper ombudsmen, and we always wanted to learn what other newspapers and what other parts of the country were doing to enhance the community.

    Indeed, that was the goal of newspapers, and while everything is bastardized in capitalism and media, and while we knew the CIA infilitrated newspapers decades earlier, and we know that now, newspapers are in most cases, skeletons, and many cities and towns have no newspapers, we still took our roles seriously. We knew that on-line / WWW publications would eat at the soul of newsprint dailies and weeklies. We knew that once lively newspapers or magazines would get bought up by large and mid-sized media groups. Then decimated and sold.

    In the end, we still wanted to know. We wanted fairness and accuracy in journalism. We did want to do the stories that few were doing.

    Just listen to these three folk. It shows you the robust work of thinkers. In my other professions –education, planning and social work — we do have that level of scrutiny, and self-examination. But here, the journalists look really hard at themselves. I do not find this hard look into my other professions as robust and penetrating.

    Virtually nobody trusts what they read any more. The United States ranks dead last among 46 nations surveyed in confidence in the press. Only 29% of Americans say they broadly believe what they read, see or hear in mainstream media. And more than three quarters of the public think that big outlets knowingly publish fake news.

    The term “fake news” first came into common usage around the contentious 2016 election, where both the Trump and Clinton campaigns attempted to weaponize the term against their opponents. Clinton claimed that Trump was being buoyed by false information put out by Eastern European bloggers and shared on sites like Facebook, while Trump shot back at her, claiming the likes of Clinton-supporting networks CNN and MSNBC were themselves fake news.

    But joining MintPress Senior Staff Writer Alan MacLeod today are two guests who know that fake news and false information have a long history in America. Dr. Nolan Higdon is an author and university lecturer of history and media studies at California State University East Bay. Meanwhile, Mickey Huff is professor of social science, history and journalism at Diablo Valley College in California and the director of the critical media literacy organization Project Censored.

    But, now, with the Brave New World of up being down, Nazi being Jewish President, Lies as Truth, I am both disgusted and not surprised at how terrible the propaganda is and how lock step those who follow the lies of society and government have infected so-called traditional journalism. Yes, still, in the local rags, we get news, we get entertainment, but when it comes to the stories of a lifetime — Weapons of No Mass Destruction, World Trade Center 9/11, War for Oil, Cocaine for Contras, all of it — newspapers fail. Local newspapers do not have the guts to question everything.

    That failure in journalism is tied to consumerism, capitalism, collective delusion, Stockholm Syndrome Writ Large, Collective Trauma, Agnotology, and the Comic Book Ideology of the common people and the leaders in the USA/UK/Klanda/EU.

    The first casualty of capitalism is truth. Capitalism of course relies on deception, thieving, extirpation, extinction, survival of the fittest, divide and conquor, racism, classism, poisoning mind/body/soul/soil. So we lead back to the above, to Michael Parenti. Listen to him.

    The young people of the world are not all going to hell in a hand-basket. Really. Amazing journalists blazing trails. This is just one most recent example of attacking truth, the messenger:

    “Independent Donetsk-based journalist Alina Lipp of Germany speaks to Max Blumenthal about being prosecuted by the German state for violating new speech codes through her reporting in the breakaway Donetsk Republic. As the only German reporter on the ground in Donetsk, Lipp has exposed Ukrainian forces shelling civilians, attacking a maternity ward, mining harbors, and bombing a granary filled with corn for export. She faces three years in prison if she returns to her home country.”

    Newspapers being printed in printing press.
      
    To finish this off, an HBO special, Endangered, just out, to put more arrows in our quiver,

    Journalism can be a dangerous business. Forty-two journalists and media workers have been killed around the world in 2022 alone, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Those threats to press freedom have intensified in the U.S. and abroad, which is the subject of “Endangered,” a new documentary on HBO Max.

    “If you take away people’s access to information, you wind up with uninformed, manipulable voters,” says Ronan Farrow, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist and the film’s executive producer. “You wind up with greater flexibility for repressive leaders to do that kind of repression.”

    A perfect documentary? Nah, come on. But, the reality is that most journalists looking at pollution in countries, at coup d’etats, at the injustices of despots and capitalists, at the scarring of earth and cultures, and getting into places where armed power and uneven justice prevail, they are NOT FAKE journalists. Yet, I have leftist friends who have zero idea what it is to be one, to be on the ground and to be just regular good people looking to expose wrong doing and injustice. Not FAKE journalists that Trump-Pervert announced decades ago. Remember that unholy racist?

    President Donald Trump in Greenville, North Carolina, on July 17, 2019.

    Trump has repeatedly disparaged a group of black and Latino men wrongly accused of assaulting a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989.

    Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam and Korey Wise were all boys when they were convicted of raping Trisha Meili. They were then found innocent of the crime after convicted murder Matias Reyes in 2002 confessed to raping Meili, which was confirmed by DNA evidence. The city awarded the men $41 million in 2014, a decade after some of the men initially sued the city for how it handled the case.

    In 1989, Trump, then a popular business mogul, spent $85,000 worth of ads published in The New York Times, The Daily News, The New York Post and New York Newsday in which he lamented crime in the city and claimed there was no more “law and order.”

    ‘They admitted their guilt’: 30 years of Trump’s comments about the Central Park Five

    Trump claimed the city was being “ruled by the law of the streets, as roving bands of wild criminals roam our neighborhoods, dispensing their own vicious brand of twisted hatred on whomever they encounter.”

    Trump said he hated “these muggers and murderers.”

    He has refused to back down, again calling them “muggers” on Twitter in 2013 and labeling the $41 million “a disgrace.”

    Around a month before the 2016 election, Trump stood by his opinion that the five men were guilty even though they have since been exonerated of the crime.

    Nothing coming out of Trump’s mouth is truth, and he libels and he is now part of the war criminal league, along with Biden, Obama, Bush a and b, Clinton, Carter, et al.

    Soleimani assassination feature photo

    BAGHDAD — The recent assassination of Iran’s most popular and well-known general, Qassem Soleimani, has stoked fears that a new war pitting the U.S. and its allies against Iran could soon become a devastating and deadly reality. The airstrike that killed Soleimani, conducted by the U.S. in Baghdad, was conducted without the authorization or even prior notification of the U.S. Congress and without the approval of Iraq’s government or military, making the attack flagrantly illegal on multiple levels. The attack also killed Iraqi militia commander Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was an advisor to Soleimani.

    The assassination of an Iraqi military commander who holds an official position is considered aggression on Iraq … and the liquidation of leading Iraqi figures or those from a brotherly country on Iraqi soil is a massive breach of sovereignty,” Iraq’s Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said of the attack, adding that the assassination was “a dangerous escalation that will light the fuse of a destructive war in Iraq, the region, and the world.”

    Notably, the assassination of Soleimani comes just a few months after an alleged Israeli attempt to kill the Iranian general failed and amid a well-documented and decades-long push by U.S. neoconservatives and Israeli officials for a U.S.-led war with Iran.

    While the illegality of the assassination has been noted by many since news of the attack first spread, less attention has been given to the oddities of the Trump administration’s official reasoning and justification for the attack that has brought with it renewed tension to the Middle East. Per administration officials, the attack was aimed at “deterring future Iranian attack plans” as well as a response to a rocket attack at the K1 military base near Kirkuk, Iraq on December 27. That attack killed one U.S. military contractor and lightly wounded several U.S. soldiers and Iraqi military personnel. (source)

    The post Imagination: Finding the End of the World as Capitalists Know It! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How China’s creeping influence undermines Pacific media freedom

    ANALYSIS: The restrictions on Pacific news media during Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s recent Pacific trip are only the most recent example of a media sector under siege, writes Shailendra Singh.

    For the Pacific news media sector, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi’s recent eight-nation South Pacific tour may be over, but it should not be forgotten. The minister and his 20-member “high-level” delegation’s refusal to take local journalists’ questions opened a veritable can of worms that will resonate in Pacific media circles for a while.

    However, Wang’s sulky silence should not be seen as isolated incident but embedded in deeper problems in media freedom and development for the Pacific.

    Besides dealing with their own often hostile national governments and manoeuvring through ever-more restrictive legislation, Pacific media is increasingly having to contend with pressure from foreign elements as well.

    China is the most prominent in this regard, as underscored by Wang’s visit, but there have been other incidents of journalist obstruction involving countries like Indonesia as well.

    What is particularly appalling is how some Pacific governments seem to have cooperated with foreign delegations to stop their national media from asking legitimate questions.

    Fijian journalist Lice Mavono’s account of the extent to which local Fijian officials went to limit journalists’ ability to cover Wang’s visit is highly troubling. In scenes rarely seen before, Wang and Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama’s joint press conference was apparently managed by Chinese officials, even though it was on Fijian soil.

    When some journalists defied instructions and yelled out their unapproved questions, a Chinese official shouted back at them to stop. One journalist was ordered to leave the room with a minder attempting to escort him out, but fellow journalists intervened.

    Journalists obstructed
    Similar behaviour was witnessed at the Pacific Islands Forum-hosted meeting between Wang and forum Secretary-General Henry Puna, where Chinese officials continued to obstruct journalists even after forum officials intervened on the journalists’ behalf.

    The Chinese officials’ determined efforts indicated that they came well prepared to thwart the media. It also conveyed their disrespect for the premier regional organisation in the Pacific, to the point of defying forum officials’ directives.

    However, what should be most concerning for the region as a whole is the way this episode exposed the apparent ability of Chinese officials to influence, dominate, and even give instructions to local officials.

    This is all the more disturbing as China is ramping up its engagement with Pacific governments. Consequently, longstanding questions about China’s impact on the region’s democratic and media institutions become even more urgent.

    Indeed, just weeks after Wang’s visit, Solomon Islands media reported that Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare, in an extraordinary gazette, announced that the government would be taking full financial control of the state broadcaster, Solomon Islands Broadcasting Corporation (SIBC).

    There are fears that this arrangement — which draw comparisons with the Chinese state-owned broadcaster CCTV — will give the government far more control over SIBC, potentially both editorially and in its day-to-day management.

    This is troubling given Sogavare’s antagonism towards the SIBC, who he has accused of giving more airtime to government critics than to officials. Veteran Solomon Islands journalist Dorothy Wickham condemned the move, stating: “We now don’t have a public broadcaster!”

    Additional steps
    This trend indicates the need for additional steps to strengthen media rights by, among other things, boosting journalist professional capacity. This is simply because good journalists are more aware of and better able to safeguard media rights.

    To this end, one area that clearly needs work is a greater focus on reporting regional events effectively. As major powers jostle for influence, and Pacific politics become ever more interconnected, what happens in one country will increasingly affect others.

    Journalists need to be aware of this and more strongly frame their stories through a regional lens. However, this will not happen without focused and targeted training.

    In this context, media research and development is an oft-overlooked pillar of media freedom. While all kinds of demands are made of Pacific journalists and much is expected of them, there seems to be little regard for their welfare and not much curiosity about what makes them tick.

    To get an idea of how far behind the Pacific is in media research, it is worth considering that there has only been one multi-country survey of Pacific journalists’ demography, professional profiles and ethical beliefs in 30 years.

    This recent, important research yielded valuable data to better understand the health of Pacific media and the capabilities of Pacific journalists.

    For instance, the data indicates that Pacific journalists are more inexperienced and under-qualified than counterparts in the rest of the world. In addition, the Pacific has among the highest rate of journalist attrition due to, among other things, uncompetitive salaries, a feature of small media systems.

    Conditions ignored
    So, while governments make much of biased journalists, they conveniently ignore the working conditions, training, education, and work experience that are needed to increase integrity and performance.

    In other words, the problems in Pacific media are not solely the work of rogue elements in the news media, they are structural in nature. These factors are not helped by draconian legislation which is supposedly intended to ensure fairness, but in fact only further squeezes already restricted journalists.

    This situation underscores the need for further research, which can identify and offer informed solutions to the problems in the sector. Yet, scholarships and fellowships for Pacific media research are as rare as hen’s teeth.

    Furthermore, Wang’s Pacific visit and China’s activities in the region are a wake-up call for regional media as to the urgent need for capacity-building. Any remedial actions should be informed by research and need to consider problems in a holistic manner.

    As we have seen, “band-aid’ solutions at best provide only temporary relief, and at worst misdiagnose the problem.

    This China fiasco is also a reminder to care about Pacific journalists, try to understand them and show concern for their welfare. We should not regard journalists as merely blunt instruments of news reporting.

    Rather, a free and democratic media is the lifeblood of a free and democratic Pacific.

    Dr Shailendra B Singh is the head of journalism at the University of the South Pacific and a research fellow at the Australian National University. This article was first published by ANU’s Asia and the Pacific Policy Society Policy Forum and is republished here with the author’s permission.

  • Three Illuminating Quotes About The War In Ukraine

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Chris Hedges have lent their expertise to the subject of the war in Ukraine with some recent comments that help bring some much-needed clarity to an often confusing and always contentious issue. Here they are:

    “I’ve spent my career working in the mainstream, and I’ve covered probably seven, eight, nine shooting wars; I’ve never seen coverage so utterly consumed by a tsunami of jingoism, and of manipulative jingoism as this one.”

    ~ John Pilger

    This comment comes from a recent interview with the legendary Australian journalist by the South China Morning Post, and it says so much about the information ecosystem we now find ourselves floundering around trying to understand things in.

    From the earliest days of the invasion it was clear that the western world was being smashed with a deluge of propaganda unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. In the first full month of the conflict, American network TV stations gave more coverage to the war in Ukraine than any other war that the US has been directly involved in, including Iraq and Vietnam. Literal Iraq war architects were some of the first pundits sought out for analysis of the conflict by the mainstream press, and calls for insane escalations against Russia succeeded in pushing the Overton window of acceptable debate in the direction of warmongering extremism and away from support for diplomatic solutions.

    And this was all easily piped into mainstream consciousness because the way had been lubricated by years of Russia hysterica resulting from the mass scale psychological operation known as Russiagate. America’s most dangerous confrontation in generations just so happens to have been preceded by years of media-generated panic about that very same country, despite the Ukraine invasion having ostensibly nothing whatsoever to do with the conspiracy theory that the Kremlin had infiltrated the highest levels of the US government. Heckin’ heck of a coincidence right there, buddy boy.

    “It’s quite interesting that in American discourse, it is almost obligatory to refer to the invasion as the ‘unprovoked invasion of Ukraine’. Look it up on Google, you will find hundreds of thousands of hits. Of course, it was provoked. Otherwise they wouldn’t refer to it all the time as an unprovoked invasion.”

    ~ Noam Chomsky

    This quote, from an interview last month with Ramzy Baroud, is self-evidently true and should be pointed out more often.

    People don’t go adding the same gratuitous adjectives and modifiers to something over and over again unless they’re trying to manipulate how it’s perceived. If your neighbor always referred to his wife as “my wife who I definitely never beat,” you’d immediately become suspicious because that’s not how normal people talk about normal things. We don’t say “round Earth” or “the Holocaust that totally happened,” we just say the words, because their basic nature is not seriously in dispute and we’ve got nothing invested in manipulating or obfuscating people’s understanding about them.

    The need of the political/media class to continually bleat this phrase “unprovoked invasion” over and over again is itself a confession that they know they’re not telling the whole truth. It’s the imperial propaganda version of this classic tweet:

    Chomsky outlines many of the provocations the US/NATO power structure engaged in prior to the conflict, which many western analysts spent years warning was coming as a result of the provocative actions that were already being taken by the empire. The invasion could easily have been prevented with a little diplomacy and some low-cost, high-reward concessions ike honoring the Minsk agreements and providing assurances of neutrality for Ukraine, but they chose provocation and escalation instead. Add to that the exponentially increased shelling of the Donbas by Kyiv immediately prior to the invasion and you can understand why empire spinmeisters are working so hard to push the “unprovoked” line.

    None of this is to say that Russia is blameless in this war; if I provoke someone into punching somebody they are still morally responsible for having thrown the punch, but I am also responsible for having provoked it. Russia is responsible for its actions, and the US/NATO/Ukraine power structure is responsible for its actions. Putin is responsible for invading, the western empire is responsible for provoking that invasion. Not complicated.

    In the same interview Chomsky also says that “censorship in the United States has reached such a level beyond anything in my lifetime” regarding this war. That assessment plus Pilger’s testimony about war propaganda unlike anything he’s ever seen shows that imperial narrative management is at an all-time high, which wouldn’t be happening unless the empire had some major agendas it wanted to roll out in the coming years.

    “At no time, including the Cuban missile crisis, have we stood closer to the precipice of nuclear war.”

    ~ Chris Hedges

    Echoing the urgent warnings that Stephen Cohen was making at the end of his life, a new article by Hedges outlines the profoundly dangerous games the empire is playing with a nuclear superpower in its continually escalating proxy war against Moscow.

    The observations by Pilger and Chomsky about how much effort is going in to manipulating people’s understanding of this war make sense when you realize that the agendas the empire is trying to roll out against Russia now and then China later down the road stand not only to throw the world into poverty and starvation, but to wipe us off the face of this planet.

    It doesn’t have to be this way. There’s no good reason the world’s most powerful government needs to risk the life of everyone on earth in a bid to secure planetary domination. It is possible for all nations and peoples to simply get along and collaborate toward the common good together. All that would need to happen is for these agendas of total hegemony to be abandoned.

    Unfortunately the managers of empire don’t seem to have any plans to abandon their goal of global conquest anytime soon, so we the ordinary people of this world may end up having to force the issue with them at some point in the interests of our very survival.

    This is a hell of a time to be alive, but man they’ve been keeping it interesting.

    __________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • Political False Dichotomies: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    You may vote and debate freely on any issue which does not affect the functioning of the empire. When it comes to how money, weapons and resources move around the world, however, you suddenly find that your votes don’t matter and your position has no mainstream representation. They’ll let you argue until you’re blue in the face over whether or not you can have an abortion or whether minorities should have civil rights; they might even let you vote on it. But things like military expansionism and neoliberal globalization and deregulation are off limits.

    The empire relies on false political dichotomies like Democrats vs Republicans to keep everyone fighting over issues which don’t affect the functioning of the empire so the machine can trudge onward uninterrupted by the local riff raff. That is the entire job of those parties.

    The mainstream media exist to keep everyone spellbound by those false dichotomies on the level of discourse and debate. They manufacture culture wars which split the populace in half over an issue which doesn’t affect the empire, then continually feed into that debate.

    The Bernie/AOC/TYT “populist left” and the Trump/Tucker Carlson “populist right” factions are there to lure parts of the population who get a little too curious about the raw mechanisms of empire back into the political false dichotomy so they stop asking unauthorized questions.

    The entire political/media class exists for this purpose: not to help people, not to fight for civil rights, not to create a well-informed populace so that democracy can function, but to keep the grubby little mitts of the unwashed masses far away from the true levers of power. That’s their whole entire function.

    ❖

    Social media is where people go to pretend they’re anxious about culture war wedge issues to avoid admitting to themselves that they’re really anxious about economic, societal and environmental collapse and rising risk of nuclear war.

    ❖

    The mass media have been aggressively pushing a single narrative on Ukraine, Silicon Valley is censoring people who disagree with the US government about Ukraine, US officials admitted they’re circulating disinfo about Ukraine, but you need to be worried about Russian propaganda.

    ❖

    People aren’t grasping the significance of the fact that Silicon Valley is now shutting down content creators not because they allegedly harm the public good but because they disagree with the US government about a war. The censorship we’re seeing on Ukraine is a wildly unprecedented escalation.

    I strongly opposed Silicon Valley censorship on issues related to Covid, but that was done on the pretense that those who were censored threatened public safety. Now there is no such pretense, it’s just “We mustn’t allow people to think wrong thoughts about a war.”

    Financial censorship like YouTube demonetization and cutting people off from PayPal can be just as effective at silencing them as outright censorship, because it hurts their ability to create content full time. I know I couldn’t do what I do without support from patrons.

    They’re no longer pretending to be administering this kind of censorship for the public good; they’re just openly doing it to control public thought about a war in allegiance to their government. This is a new and drastic step, and it makes one wonder what the next one will be.

    If you mentally mute the justifications for each new expansion of censorship protocols and picture it as a cluster of unauthorized speech, it looks like a circle whose radius keeps expanding and expanding over time. That’s what this is really about: continually expanding that radius using bogus justifications, from Russian trolls to election security to domestic extremists to Covid to Ukraine.

    And now we’re at the point where consent for this expansion has been so widely manufactured that they don’t even need to be sly about it. They can just say “Yeah well that hurts our government’s propaganda war against Russia, so we can’t have that.” This is huge.

    ❖

    Propaganda, censorship and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation keep getting worse because the US-centralized empire needs to prevent the emergence of a true multipolar world and it will need to manufacture a lot of consent for the drastic actions needed to accomplish this.

    Stopping the rise of China requires knocking out its pillars of support like Russia. These are massive and extremely dangerous agendas that will financially hurt and existentially imperil pretty much everyone. Empire managers can’t allow a free flow of information in such times.

    ❖

    Rightists fixate on the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab like they’re the source and summit of all the world’s ills because this allows capitalism proponents to hold on to the belief that the system would be working fine if you just got rid of those few bad apples.

    ❖

    “It’s not capitalism it’s corporatism” is not an argument, it’s just vapid word-diddling. Nobody cares if you don’t like the word “capitalism” being applied to our current systems. Nobody cares if you feel your pet word is being mistreated. Address the argument.

    If your only line of argumentation consists of quibbling about definitions (incorrectly I might add), then you don’t have a line of argumentation. Address the actual arguments or stop interrupting adult conversations.

    ❖

    A globe-spanning empire is held together by the widespread and entirely faith-based belief that the best possible political, economic and foreign policy systems just happen to be the ones you’ve been told your entire life to support by mass media and schooling.

    _________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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  • Imperial Narrative Control Has Five Distinct Elements

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    All of our world’s worst problems are created by the powerful. The powerful will keep creating those problems until ordinary people use their superior numbers to make them stop. Ordinary people don’t use their superior numbers to stop the powerful because the powerful are continuously manipulating people’s understanding of what’s going on.

    Humans are storytelling creatures. If you can control the stories humans are telling themselves about the world, you control the humans, and you control the world.

    Mental narrative plays a hugely prominent role in human experience; if you’ve ever tried to still your mind in meditation you know exactly what I’m talking about. Babbling thought stories dominate our experience of reality. It makes sense then that if you can influence those stories, you’re effectively influencing someone’s experience of reality.

    The powerful manipulate the dominant narratives of our society in approximately five major ways: propaganda, censorship, Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, government secrecy, and the war on journalism. Like the fingers on a hand they are distinct from each other and each play their own role, but they’re all part of the same thing and work together toward the same goal. They’re all just different aspects of the US-centralized empire’s narrative control system.

    1. Propaganda

    Propaganda is the empire’s narrative creation system. While the other four elements of imperial narrative control are geared mostly toward preventing inconvenient narratives from circulating, propaganda is the means by which the empire generates narratives which benefit it.

    That foreign leader is a dictator and needs to be removed. That inconvenient politician is sinister in some way and must not be permitted to lead. Your government loves human rights and all its wars are humanitarian. Voting works. Capitalism is great. You can trust us, we’re the good guys.

    You’ll see variations on these and similar narratives churned out day after day by the corporate media and Hollywood. The wealthy media-owning class protects its own class interests by hiring media executives whose worldview matches its own, and those executives hire underlings with the same worldview, who hire their own underlings with the same worldview, and before you know it you’re looking at a media conglomerate full of people who all support the status quo politics of the media-owning class whose kingdoms are built upon that status quo.

    In fact these giant media institutions are so invested in protecting the status quo that they have a very large degree of overlap with other institutions responsible for maintaining the imperial status quo, like the US intelligence cartel. News punditry is now full of “former” intelligence officials, and anytime there’s a narrative an intelligence agency wants printed it simply has an officer or a proxy whisper it to a mainstream news reporter who then uncritically repeats that narrative disguised as a news story.

    Reporters within this system are not explicitly told to generate propaganda to protect status quo power. Rather, they develop a sense for what kind of reporting will get published and earn them attaboys in the newsroom and what will get spiked and cause their career to stagnate. If they fail to learn to navigate the system in this way, you simply never hear about them, because their careers peter out.

    2. Censorship

    Propaganda is geared toward putting narratives favorable to the oligarchic empire in front of people, while censorship is all about keeping unfavorable narratives away from public vision. We’ve long seen this expressed in the way the mass media simply refuse to give any platform or voice to critics of capitalism and imperialism, but imperial narrative management has required a whole new order of censorship since internet access became widely available.

    Because the widespread ability to share ideas and information poses a major threat to imperial narrative control, empire managers have been working toward normalizing and expanding censorship on internet platforms like Google/YouTube, Meta/Facebook/Instagram, and Twitter. Any online space where a large number of people gather will find itself pressured by the US government to remove a wider and wider spectrum of content in the name of public safety, election security, containing a virus, or just keeping people from thinking wrong thoughts about a war.

    Every few months since the US election in 2016 we’ve been fed a new reason why more internet censorship is needed, which is always followed by a giant purge of the newly-banned content and the accounts which created it. This trend has escalated dramatically with the Ukraine war, where for the first time there’s no pretense being made that content is being censored to protect the public interest; it’s just being censored because it disagrees with what western government and media institutions tell us.

    3. Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation

    This one relates to both propaganda and censorship, because it facilitates both. Silicon Valley officials have admitted to manipulating their algorithms to make sure that independent media doesn’t get seen very much while artificially elevating the online publications of mass media outlets on the basis that they are “authoritative sources” of information, despite the fact that those “authoritative sources” have lied to us about every war.

    Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation does more damage than overt forms of online censorship, because its consequences are much more far-reaching and because people don’t even know it’s happening. When Google changed its algorithms to ensure that leftist and antiwar media outlets ranked much lower in search results than they used to, it influenced the way millions of people gather information about the most important issues in the world. And hardly anyone ever knew it happened.

    If it weren’t for tech giants artificially directing traffic toward empire-approved media outlets, those outlets probably would have shut down by now. We saw a clear illustration of how disdainful the public is of mass media outlets when the paid streaming service CNN+ was forced to shut down just 30 days after its launch when it failed to maintain even ten thousand daily viewers. People don’t consume mainstream news media unless it is foisted upon them.

    4. Government secrecy

    Like censorship, government secrecy is another way the empire prevents inconvenient narratives from entering public awareness. By classifying information on the basis of “national security”, the empire prevents unauthorized narratives before they even get off the ground. As Julian Assange once said, “The overwhelming majority of information is classified to protect political security, not national security.”

    The amount of power you have should be inversely proportional to the amount of privacy you get. In a healthy society, ordinary people would have full privacy from the government while government officials should have to be fully transparent about their lives, finances and behavior. In our society it’s exactly reversed: the people are surveilled and monitored while those in power hide vast troves of information behind walls of government opacity.

    They hide everything they’re doing from the view of the public, then when people start taking educated guesses about what they might be up to behind the veil of government secrecy they get called “conspiracy theorists”. There would be no need to form theories about conspiracies if there was complete transparency for the powerful, but of course this would greatly hinder the ability of the powerful to conspire.

    They claim they need government secrecy to avoid giving an advantage to the enemy in times of war and conflict, but really they need government secrecy to start wars and conflicts.

    5. The war on journalism

    Lastly, in order to effectively control the dominant narratives about the world, the empire needs to wage a war on disobedient journalism. We’ve seen this unfold in various ways over the years, but right now none are so clear as the US empire’s persecution of Julian Assange.

    The goal of the Assange case is to establish a legal precedent for extraditing any journalist or publisher anywhere in the world who tries to get around US government secrecy. Once a precedent has been set and consent has been manufactured, the war on journalism can really get going.

    All of these five points are used to control the way people see, think about, and talk about their world, thereby controlling how they act and how they vote at mass scale. This enables the powerful to maintain an entirely enslaved populace which never tries to escape its enslavement, because it thinks it is already free.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • National Security State Censoring of Anti-Imperialist Voices

    The US rulers use many tools to disrupt and disorganize the anti-war and anti-imperialist left. Three discussed here include: (1) corporate control of the news media gives them free reign to spread disinformation and fake news against foreign and domestic targets; (2) they use government and corporate foundation resources to fund and promote a compatible left to counter the anti-imperialist left; and (3) the rulers use their control of social media and internet to censor those voices.

    Since 2016 their censorship of websites, Facebook pages, Twitter, and Paypal accounts has escalated alarmingly. They target those who counter the narratives the government and big business media feed us, whether it be US intervention and attempted overthrow of other governments, Covid, or stories of Russian interference.

    With the Ukraine war, the US government and corporate media immense propaganda power has been directed against Russia and intensified on an overwhelming scale.

    As the US empire began the Cold War soon after the end of World War II, with the rise of McCarthyism (which predated Joe McCarthy), news manipulation and suppression often fell under the control of the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird. The corporate media followed CIA directions in representing the interests of the US rulers. The CIA secretly funded and managed a wide range of front groups and individuals to counter what the US rulers considered its enemies. It encouraged those on the left who opposed actually existing socialism, seeking to foster splits in the left to undermine the communist and build the non-communist left.

    Significant liberal and left figures who worked with the CIA included Gloria Steinem, key feminist leader, Herbert Marcuse, considered a Marxist intellectual, Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers Union (1946-1970), David Dubinsky, president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (1932-1966). The CIA collaborated with Baynard Rustin, Socialist Party leader and close associate of Martin Luther King, with Norman Thomas and Michael Harrington, who became the fathers of the third campist (“neither Washington nor Moscow”) Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Likewise, Carl Gershman, a founder of Social Democrats, USA, and later founding director (1983-2021) of the CIA front National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

    Through  the Congress for Cultural Freedom, the CIA underwrote the publishing of leftist critics, such as Leszek Kolakowski and Milovan Djilas’ book The New Class. The CIA aided the “Western Marxism” of the Frankfurt School, which included Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, former director of New School of Social Research, also subsidized by the Rockefeller Foundation.

    Corporate foundations, such as the Rockefeller, Ford, Open Society, and Tides foundations, among many others, funneled CIA money to progressive causes. The Cultural Cold War (pp. 134-5) noted that from 1963-66, nearly half the grants by 164 foundations in the field of international activities involved CIA money. The Ford Foundation continues as one of the main financers of progressive groups in the US; for instance, both Open Society and Ford foundations have heavily funded Black Lives Matter.

    The CIA is regarded as a ruthless organization overthrowing democratic governments that US corporations considered a threat to their profits. While true, overlooked is “gentler” CIA work: underwriting and encouraging a compatible left, one which looks to forces in the Democratic Party for political leadership. This third camp left provides an alternative to an anti-imperialist or a communist left, and yet appears progressive enough to lure radicalizing youth, activists and intelligentsia. This cunning CIA strategy has fostered confusion, dissension, and divisions among these sections of the population.

    These secret US government and CIA operations have been detailed in The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America, Finks: How the C.I.A. Tricked the World’s Best Writers, The Cultural Cold War, and AFL-CIO’s Secret War against Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?

    In 1977 Carl Bernstein revealed CIA interconnections with the big business media. More than 400 journalists collaborated with the CIA, with the consent of their media bosses. Working in a propaganda alliance with the CIA included: CBS, ABC, NBC, Time, Newsweek, New York Times, Associated Press, Reuters, United Press International, Miami Herald, Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune. The New York Times still sends stories to US government for pre-publication approval, while CNN and others now employ national security state figures as “analysts.”

    Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat operate similarly, participating in covert British government funded disinformation programs to “weaken” Russia. This involves collaboration with the Counter Disinformation & Media Development section of the British Foreign Office.

    The CIA pays journalists in Germany, France, Britain, Australia and New Zealand to plant fake news. Udo Ulfkotte, a former editor at Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, one of the largest German newspapers, showed how the CIA controls German media in Presstitutes: Embedded in the Pay of the CIA. Ulfkotte said the CIA had him plant fake stories in his paper, such as Libyan President Gaddafi building poison gas factories in 2011.

    The CIA was closely involved with the long defunct National Students Association and with the trade union leadership. The AFL-CIO’s American Institute of Free Labor Development, received funding from USAID, the State Department, and NED to undermine militant union movements overseas and help foment murderous coups, as against President Allende of Chile (1973) and Brazil (1964), as well as defended the rule of their masters at home. This continues with the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center, which receives $30 million a year from NED.

    The CIA created publishing houses, such as Praeger Press, and used other companies such as John Wiley Publishing Company, Scribner’s, Ballantine Books, and Putnam to publish its books. It set up several political and literary journals such as Partisan Review. This CIA publishing amounted to over one thousand books, mostly geared to a liberal-left audience, seeking to bolster a third camp left, and undermine solidarity with the once powerful world communist movement.

    That mission largely accomplished years ago, today the national security state works to undermine the anti-imperialist left and build up a left inclined towards the “lesser evil” Democratic Party.

    Recent US Government and Media Thought Control Measures

    CIA use of corporate media to undermine perceived threats to the national security state escalated with Obama signing NDAA 2017, which lifted formalistic restrictions on security state agencies feeding fake news directly to the US population. The Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act in the NDAA, which went into effect in the early stages of Russiagate, created a central government propaganda organ:

    to counter active measures by the Russian Federation to exert covert influence over peoples and governments (with the role of the Russian Federation hidden or not acknowledged publicly) through front groups, covert broadcasting, media manipulation, disinformation or forgeries, funding agents of influence, incitement, offensive counterintelligence, assassinations, or terrorist acts. The committee shall expose falsehoods, agents of influence, corruption, human rights abuses, terrorism, and assassinations carried out by the security services or political elites of the Russian Federation or their proxies.

    Glen Ford observed:

    Every category listed [above], except assassinations and terror, is actually a code word for political speech that can, and will, be used to target those engaged in ‘undermining faith in American democracy’ — such as Black Agenda Report and other left publications defamed as ‘fake news’ outlets by the Washington Post [article on PropOrNot].

    This Disinformation and Propaganda Act created the innocuously named Global Engagement Center, operated by the State Department, Pentagon, USAID, the Broadcasting Board of Governors [renamed US Agency for Global Media], the Director of National Intelligence, and other spy agencies. This Center oversees production of fake news supporting US imperial interests, focused primarily against Russia and China (such as Uyghur genocide and Russiagate), but also against Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, and others. Verifiable reports exposing US regime change operations and disinformation are often outright censored or labeled pro-Russian or pro-Chinese propaganda.

    The Global Engagement Center finances journalists, NGOs, think tanks, and media outlets on board with campaigns to vilify non-corporate media reporting as spreaders of foreign government disinformation. This may shed light on the origins of smears that opponents of the US regime change against Syria or in Ukraine are Putinists, Assadists, tankies, Stalinists, part of a red-brown alliance.

    National security state propaganda against Russia surged after it aided Syria in thwarting the US-Saudi war against the Assad government. It reached levels of hysteria with the fabricated Russiagate stories designed to sabotage the 2016 Trump presidential campaign. Seymour Hersh disclosed that the widely covered news of Russian hacking of DNC computers in 2016 was CIA disinformation. Hersh confirmed from FBI sources that Hillary Clinton’s emails were taken by Seth Rich and offered to Wikileaks for money, and that the fake news story of Russian hacking was initiated by CIA head John Brennan. However, exposures of the Clinton-neocon-national security state Russiagate fake news were themselves written off as disinformation concocted by pro-Russian operators.

    An example of Global Engagement Center work may be a recent smear against anti-imperialists as agents of Russia appeared in The Daily Beast. It targets Lee Camp, Max Blumenthal, Ben Norton, and others: “propaganda peddlers rake in cash and followers at the expense of the truth and oppressed people in Ukraine, Xinjiang, and Syria” because of their accurate reporting that goes against the US propaganda line.

    Other articles may indicate this government Disinformation Center use of the third camp left in the tradition of Operation Mongoose. George Monbiot’s article in The Guardian fit the billing:

    We must confront Russian propaganda – even when it comes from those we respect – The grim truth is that for years, a small part of the ‘anti-imperialist’ left has been recycling Vladimir Putin’s falsehoods.

    Louis Proyect crusaded for Syria regime change, and against those opposing the US war on the country as being part of a “red-brown alliance.” Proyect often relied on British Foreign Office funded Bellingcat for his articles, writing, “The Bellingcat website is perhaps the only place where you can find fact-based reporting on chemical attacks in Syria.” Proyect defended “Syrian revolution” “socialist” Anand Gopal, of the International Security Program at the New America Foundation, funded by the State Department and corporate foundations, and run by Anne-Marie Slaughter, former State Department official.

    Democracy Now, which also repeatedly relied on Anand Gopal as a news source, has long received foundation money, and we see the self-censoring effect this has on its former excellent anti-war journalism degenerating into compatible leftism.

    Another product of this government-corporate aid for this Democratic Party “lesser evil” left may be NACLA’s articles smearing the Nicaraguan government. NACLA Board Chair Program Director is Thomas Kruse of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. In 2018, NACLA, New York DSA, and Haymarket Books hosted anti-Sandinista youth activists while on a tour paid for by right-wing Freedom House.

    In These Times, which receives hundreds of thousands in foundation money, ran similar articles smearing socialist Cuba. It claimed Cuba was “the Western Hemisphere’s most undemocratic government” – not Bolsonaro’s Brazil, Chile with its police who blinded pro-democracy protesters, not Colombia’s death squad supporting government, nor Honduras’ former coup regime, or Haiti’s hated rulers.

    Haymarket Books, which produces many third camp left books, receives Democratic Party aligned think tank and nonprofit money via the pass through Center for Economic Research and Social Change. The Grayzone reported that the DSA, Jacobin Magazine, and Haymarket sponsored Socialism conference featured NED and State Department funded regime-change activists.

    Jacobin editor Bhaskar Sunkara is former vice-chair of the Democratic Party’s reform oriented DSA. In 2017 the Jacobin Foundation received a $100,000 grant from the Annenberg Foundation, set up by billionaire publisher and Nixon administration U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain Walter Annenberg.

    This milieu includes New York’s Left Forum, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, underwritten by the German government.

    Bob Feldman revealed corporate financing for the Institute of Policy Studies, The Nation, In These Times, NACLA, Middle East Research & Information Project (MERIP), Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), Progressive, Mother Jones, AlterNet, Institute for Public Accuracy, among others.

    The US Chamber of Commerce discovered that foundations gave $106 million to workers centers between 2013-2016, and concluded that the worker center movement was “a creature of the progressive foundations that encouraged and supported it.”

    These are but a few examples of US ruling class financing of anti anti-imperialist leftists, an effective means to channel and organize the left milieu into an opposition that poses no real threat to their control.

    An essential characteristic of this milieu is looking to the Democratic Party as a lesser evil ally.

    Alexander Cockburn  pointed out the dangers of this financing back in 2010:

    The financial clout of the “non-profit” foundations, tax-exempt bodies formed by rich people to dispense their wealth according to political taste… Much of the “progressive sector” in America owes its financial survival – salaries, office accommodation etc — to the annual disbursements of these foundations which cease abruptly at the first manifestation of radical heterodoxy. In the other words, most of the progressive sector is an extrusion of the dominant corporate world, just as are the academies, similarly dependent on corporate endowments.”

    Right after Trump’s surprise 2016 election win, the Washington Post cranked up the anti-Russia McCarthyism by introducing PropOrNot. ProporNot’s catalog of supposed Putin-controlled outlets sought to resurrect the witchhunts of the Red Scare era,  when 6.6 million people were investigated just between 1947-1952. The PropOrNot blacklist includes some of the most alternative and anti-war news sites on the web, including Anti-war.com, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig, Naked Capitalism, Consortium News, Truthout, Lew Rockwell.com, Global Research, Unz.com, Zero Hedge, and many others.

    PropOrNot asserted 200 websites were “Russian propaganda outlets.” No evidence was offered. PropOrNot refused to reveal who they were or their funding. Alan Mcleod recently uncovered: “A scan of PropOrNot’s website showed that it was controlled by The Interpreter, a magazine of which [Michael] Weiss is editor-in-chief…[a] senior fellow of NATO think tank The Atlantic Council.” The Atlantic Council itself is financed by the US government and Middle Eastern dictatorships, weapons manufacturers Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, Wall Street banks such as Goldman Sachs; and petrochemical giants like BP and Chevron. Mcleod concluded, “Thus, claims of a huge [foreign] state propaganda campaign were themselves state propaganda.”

    Soon after PropOrNot, the German Marshall Fund, largely financed by the US government, concocted Hamilton 68: A New Tool to Track Russian Disinformation on Twitter. This identifies supposed “accounts that are involved in promoting Russian influence and disinformation goals.” Daniel McAdams of Ron Paul Liberty Report noted, “They are using US and other government money in an effort to eliminate any news organization or individual who deviates from the official neocon foreign policy line on Russia, Syria, Ukraine, etc.”

    This year, the Department of Homeland Security presented a new censorship and disinformation organ, allegedly to combat pro-Russian fake news, the Disinformation Governance Board. As the Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act and PropOrNot showed, what challenges US national security state narratives is often labeled Russian disinformation. Glenn Greenwald forewarned, “The purpose of empowering the Department of Homeland Security to decree what is and is not “disinformation” is to bestow all government assertions with a pretense of authoritative expertise and official sanction and, conversely, to officially decree dissent from government claims to be false and deceitful.”

    The national security state, which lied about Russiagate, lied about National Security Agency’s 24/7 spying on the US population, lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, plans to decide what is true and false, and enforce that on big business and alternative media outlets.

    Thus, the CIA’s secret Operation Mongoose, devoted to encouraging hostility to actually existing socialism among the left, has morphed into official, public US government McCarthyite agencies directed at shutting down or smearing outlets and activism opposing the US empire and its wars.

    What Corporate Social Media instruments are targeting which anti-war outlets?

    This joint US government corporate media censorship has become an increasingly open attack. Paypal has allied itself with the Zionist Anti-Defamation League to “fight extremism and hate through the financial industry and across at-risk communities… with policymakers and law enforcement.”

    Twitter has shut down many political accounts, even possessed the power to suppress the President of the United States’ account. In 2020, Twitter deleted 170,000 accounts “spreading geopolitical narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China,” and in 2021, it deleted hundreds of accounts for “undermining faith in the NATO alliance and its stability.” The company has hired a number of FBI officers for this censorship work. Twitter executive for Middle East is British Army ‘psyops’ soldier Gordon MacMillan of the 77th Brigade, which uses social media platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to conduct “information warfare.”

    Google and Youtube executives team up with government spy agencies to censor anti-imperialist voices. Google’s “Project Owl,” designed to eradicate “fake news,” employed “algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative [compatible] content” and downgrade “offensive” [anti-imperialist] material. As a result, traffic dropped off to websites such as Mint Press News, Alternet, Global Research, Consortium News, liberal-left Common Dreams and Truthout.

    Wikipedia censors articles on its website, as Ben Norton notes:

    The CIA, FBI, New York Police Department, Vatican, and fossil fuel colossus BP, to name just a few, have all been caught directly editing Wikipedia articles.

    A minor player,  NewsGuard, “partners” with the State Department and Pentagon to tag websites that deviate from the establishment line.

    Facebook relies on PropOrNot’s Atlantic Council to combat reporting contrary to the US government line. Facebook later announced it would further fight “fake news” by partnering with two propaganda organizations sponsored by the US government: the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and the International Republican Institute (IRI). The NDI was chaired by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, while Senator John McCain was the longtime IRI chair.

    Just as The Mighty Wurlitzer, The Cultural Cold War, and Bernstein’s The CIA and the Media showed with the big business print media, we are witnessing an integration of social media companies into the national security state.

    Who have been censored by this corporate media and social media integration with the national security state? 

    Like with any censored book list, national security state targets provide a Who’s Who of what we should be reading and watching: The Grayzone, TeleSur,  Venezuelanalysis, Lee Camp, By Any Means Necessary, Caleb Maupin, Syria Solidarity Movement, Consortium News, Mint Press News, Abby Martin, Chris Hedges, CGTN and other Chinese media, George Galloway, Pepe Escobar, Scott Ritter, ASB Military News, RT America, Strategic Culture Foundation, One World Press, SouthFront, Gonzalo Lira, Oriental Review, Revolutionary Black Network, Sputnik News, Ron Paul’s Liberty Report.  Youtube warns us of watching Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire. Journalists who have collaborated with a Russian media outlet are now dubbed “affiliated with the Russian government.”

    The FBI directly shut down American Herald Tribune and Iran’s Press TV. RT and Sputnik are already shut down in Europe. PropOrNot listing of 200 media sites catalogs for us what the national security state doesn’t want us to read, listen to, know, or think.

    Since the beginning of the first Cold War, there has been a continuous CIA-national security state operation to neutralize, marginalize, and create disunity among its opponents, often with the collaboration of the left that consider the Democratic Party a lesser evil. This strategy includes extensive foundation financing of leftist outlets and NGOs in order to tame them.

    Therefore, it is mistaken to fault the US left for its weakness. The CIA and the foundations have been key players in covertly manipulating opposition to US imperial rule, in part by strengthening the left soft on the Democrats to undermine any working class or anti-US empire challenge. To date, this national security state mission has also shown considerable success.

    The problems of building a working class left-wing partly results from the US rulers’ decades long campaign to disrupt the movement. This involves not just imprisoning and killing activists, such as Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, or the Black Panthers, but also big business media marketing disinformation as news, their funding of a compatible left, and the present social media and internet censorship of anti-imperialist voices. Rebuilding an anti-war and working class left wing requires us to directly address and navigate through this maze ruling class sabotage has created.

    The post National Security State Censoring of Anti-Imperialist Voices first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • All the News that’s Fit to Post

    Thought control hides behind Veterans For Peace (VFP) flags on the VFP Discussion Group site and this is causing consternation among members.

    At a glance, the banner at the top of this page showcasing fluttering VFP flags emblazoned with its widely recognizable dove and olive branch logo appears to be an official VFP link, but it’s not. Below the banner on another line is a vague addendum informing readers that the link is a “Group by Willie Hager” and two lines under that in smaller, soft grey lettering it says “Private group.”

    This spring I visited the site to learn more about the group’s controversial decision to ban articles from RT. Detractors were arguing that readers should be able to marshal out facts for themselves and that alternative media venues have traditionally been one of the few places where dissenting voices including VFP members could find platforms.

    After attempting to post an RT article listing awards they’d won at a prestigious New York festival I was kicked off the page for about a day. One award was for a story about drought in India and another on the plight of homeless children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

    Later during the first week of June, I was not allowed to post a story about censorship published by Consortium News. A couple days later I posted this — “Hi VFP discussion group moderator, I submitted a link a few days ago to this site from Consortium News and still don’t see it. Is the article still under review or have you decided not to publish it?”

    The comment was removed about five minutes later, but it was republished shortly after I messaged Hager on FB. However, I wasn’t allowed to comment or respond to it with an emoji. When I messaged Hager again and asked him to explain this, he said he’d look into it and get back to me. He also said that he’d decided against having an interview with me and that’s the last I heard from him. The comment was deleted again too.

    Discussion group moderator Joey B King did agree to an interview. He believed Hager was largely responsible for the rules and said the discussion page administrators didn’t meet on a regular basis to discuss policies. He wasn’t sure about the differences between moderators and administrators. When I asked him a little later about the clamorous background noise present throughout our scheduled interview he said he was loading dishes and pots.

    Twice during the brief interview he assured me allegations about censorship were overblown and there was “no story.” He laughed when I asked him to address concerns former National Board President Gerry Condon and others had about the page having an anti-Russian bias. “Gerry went to Syria and visited the president” he said alluding to Condon’s participation in a peace and fact-finding delegation that traveled to Syria in 2016 to meet with religious leaders, NGO representatives and big wigs that included a personal meeting with President Basher al-Assad. King ended the interview shortly after with another laugh saying he had “better things” to do.

    Condon’s frustration with the group is evident in his post below from early June:

    Two articles I posted on VFP Discussion today were removed with the flimsiest of explanations “lacking 3 sources” and “unsubstantiated.”

    Both articles were by respected writers and academics, Ted Snider and William J. Astore. Both articles warned about the negative consequences of sending more high-powered weapons to Ukraine.

    One can only conclude that this is an opinion that the managers of this Facebook page do not want people to hear. The sooner they drop the “VFP” from their name, the better.

    VFP member Gene Marx believes the discussion group has a pro-NATO and Russophobic bias and its speech regulations are out of an Orwellian Ministry of Truth playbook. He further states:

    Censoring any anti-war content from social media or cable news is playing into the hands of US pro-war narrative managers, and for it to occur on a  Veterans For Peace platform is not only dereliction of duty but violates the first provision of the VFP Statement of Purpose: To increase public awareness of the causes and costs of war.

    Garrett Reppenhagen, Executive Director of VFP mentioned in Minneapolis last month he was tired of hearing about the issue and felt there wasn’t much of anything he could do because FB allows the Willie Hager group to use the VFP name. In a chain-message he wrote:

    The board is currently working to disconnect the national organization from the facebook discussion group. These minor personal platforms don’t have the impact or attention worth concentrating energy and resources from the VFP office and directors. I feel the most we will get from the situation is a disclaimer on the page ensuring visitors the opinions in the discussion group are not the official position of VFP.

    In a note back to Reppenhagen, Independent VFP member Mike Madden thinks the page crossed a line when Marx and others were censored. He also criticized moderators and administrators for suppressing information and urged the Board to take action.

    On June 8, VFP national Board member Jeff Paterson weighed in with a disclaimer requesting that administrators of private VFP groups adhere to core national principles while acknowledging that the national VFP Communications Committee has no ability to ensure this occurs. He also posted an eight-point code of conduct. Accusations of censorship were not addressed.

    So far, VFP Board President Susan Schnall hasn’t responded to my request for an interview although she said she’s open to revisiting the issue at the next Board meeting.

    Until then, those with gripes about censorship seem to have two choices — ignore the site or hold out for a management that doesn’t try to steer the narrative by restricting comments and blocking or removing contrarian links. Behavior that’s generally interpreted by critical thinkers as disrespectful (and embarrassing to many VFP members) — especially to those who take the open interchange of ideas seriously. Perhaps those concerns can be added to the recently released code of conduct under a new category — Tolerance For Other Points of View.

    The post All the News that’s Fit to Post first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Plot Against GrayZone & Suspicions About Consortium News

    The Establishment’s war against independent media took an even darker turn with revelations by The GrayZone on Thursday that the British government and private disinformation “experts” discussed how to damage The GrayZone’s credibility and funding, while raising suspicions about Consortium News.

    The Gray Zone is the main target discussed in leaked emails between Paul Mason, a British journalist now running for Parliament, and Amil Khan, a former Reuters Middle East correspondent embedded with jihadists, who later helped spread the notion of moderate terrorists in Syria. He now runs a counter-disinformation firm called Valent Projects.

    The emails were leaked anonymously to The GrayZone and were authenticated through their metadata, GrayZone reporter Kit Klarenberg, who co-authored the piece with GrayZone editor Max Blumenthal, told Consortium News.

    The post The Plot Against GrayZone & Suspicions About Consortium News appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Educating Journalists about Canada’s Propaganda System an Eyeopener

    Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.
    —Noam Chomsky, Media Control:  The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, April 1, 1997

     Propaganda isn’t a euphemism for how the other side controls information. Nor is it simply about jailing journalists or shuttering media outlets. A serious discussion of the matter must look at the broader forces shaping information dissemination and suppression.

    On May 22 I spoke on a panel at the Canadian Association of Journalists conference titled Censorship, Journalism and War. The Ukraine-focused exchange climaxed with journalist Justin Ling asking if I was “ashamed” for having been interviewed by RT. Nope.

    The CEO of Ethnic Channels Group, Slava Levin, launched the discussion by describing how broadcasters Rogers, Bell and Shaw summarily removed RT from their networks. As the distributor of RT and many international channels in Canada, Levin pointed out how the decision subverted the regulatory process.

    The broadcasters and Liberals indifference to the regulatory process warrants criticism but I sought to drive the discussion away from RT, Russia, China and authoritarian enemies. Even without formal restrictions, the corporate media (and CBC) permit only a narrow spectrum of opinion regarding Canadian foreign policy, as I detail in my 2016 book A Propaganda System: How Government, Corporations, Media and Academia Sell War and Exploitation. Various internal and external factors explain the media’s biased international coverage. Most importantly, a small number of mega corporations own most of Canada’s media and depend on other large corporations for advertising revenue. Less dependent on advertising, CBC relies on government funds and has long been close to the foreign policy establishment. All major media firms rely on easily accessible information, which is largely generated by US wire services, Global Affairs, DND, internationally focused corporations and a bevy of think tanks and academic departments tied to the military, arms industry and corporate elite. Finally, the military, foreign affairs, organized ethnic lobbies and major corporations have the power to punish media that upset them.

    In their coverage of Russia’s war with Ukraine/NATO the Canadian media and RT are the mirror image. They are exceedingly one-sided and their divergent reactions to antiwar disrupters highlight the point.

    At the panel, I contrasted the Canadian and Russian ‘propaganda systems’ reaction to my March 21 interruption of foreign affairs minister Melanie Joly on Canada’s role in escalating violence in Ukraine, opposing the Minsk peace accord and promoting NATO expansion. With the exception of a short clip by CTV News World, Canadian media outlets that covered Joly’s speech on Ukraine ignored my intervention.

    The Russian media treated the intervention differently. They portrayed me as an important author with a number of the top Russian channels inviting me on to comment. Russian media treated my disruption in a similar way to how the North American media covered Marina Ovsyannikova two weeks earlier. After she held a “no war” sign on Russia’s Channel One the western media hailed Ovsyannikova.

    I told the audience that the CBC refuses to offer vital context. Just prior to the Russian invasion I wrote about senior CBC military writer Murray Brewster, who published a slew of reports in the proceeding weeks portraying Canada/US positively and Russia negatively while failing to report information he’d previously revealed that undercuts the notion that Canada is on the side of angels in the Ukraine crisis. In 2015 Brewster revealed that the protesters who overthrew elected President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014 were stationed in the Canadian embassy in Kyiv for a week. That year Brewster also reported that Canadian soldiers trained neo-Nazi political forces in Ukraine and in 2008 that Canada pushed Ukraine’s adhesion to NATO against Russian, French and German objections. These measures increased tensions, led to war in the east part of the Ukraine and helped precipitate Russia’s illegal invasion.

    In his intervention senior CBC international correspondent Saša Petricic described how in countries with more repressive media climates that an “atmosphere” of self-censorship develops. In response I asked who in the room had heard of the Ottawa Initiative on Haiti?

    In 2003 Canadian officials brought together top representatives of the US and French governments to discuss Haiti’s future without inviting anyone from that country’s government. According to the March 15, 2003, issue of L’Actualité (Quebec’s equivalent to Maclean’s), they discussed ousting elected president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, putting Haiti under UN trusteeship and re-creating the disbanded Haitian army. Thirteen months later what was discussed largely transpired yet the dominant media largely ignored the Ottawa Initiative meeting. A Canadian Newsstand search I did in 2016 while writing A Propaganda System found not one single English-language report about the meeting (except for mentions of it by me and two other Haiti solidarity activists in opinion pieces). It wasn’t until 2020 that Radio-Canada’s flagship news program “Enquête” finally reported on the meeting, interviewing the minister responsible for organizing the meeting Denis Paradis.

    What type of “atmosphere” exists in the Canadian media that would lead it to ignore this important meeting Haiti solidarity activists raised repeatedly?

    I asked the room of 30 journalists if they knew which institution has the largest public relations apparatus in the country. No one answered. The Department of National Defence/Canadian Forces (CF) has the largest PR (propaganda) machine in Canada, employing hundreds of “public relations professionals” to influence the public’s perception of the military. Last fall the military, reported the Ottawa Citizen, established “a new organization that will use propaganda and other techniques to try to influence the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of Canadians.” Previously the head of CF called for the “weaponization of public affairs”, which proposed a plan to induce positive coverage and deter critical reporting. Journalists producing unflattering stories about the military were to be the target of phone calls to their boss, letters to the editor and other “flack” designed to undercut their credibility in the eyes of readers and their employers.

    The editor in chief and executive director of CBC news, Brodie Fenlon, told the room it didn’t matter that DND had the largest PR apparatus in the country since they don’t determine what’s covered. True enough. But historically the public broadcaster’s close ties to the military have made it highly deferential to the CF. According to Mallory Schwartz in War on the Air: CBC-TV and Canada’s Military, 1952-1992, “When CBC-TV produced programs that raised controversial questions about defence policy, the forces or military history, it did so with considerable care. Caution was partly a result of the special relationship between the CBC and those bodies charged with the defence of Canada.” CBC’s ties to DND sometimes translated into formal censorship. After broadcasting The Homeless Ones in 1958 Deputy Federal Civil Defence Co-ordinator Major-General George S. Hatton requested the film’s withdrawal from the NFB Library and the public broadcaster cancelled its planned rebroadcast. Hatton insisted the CBC clear all content on civil defence with his staff.

    The public broadcaster’s independence from DND has increased over the years. But since its inception the government has appointed CBC’s board and provided most of its funds.

    Another element that helps make sense of Fenlon downplaying the importance of the CF’s PR machine is his (positive) assessment of the institution. But, as I pointed out, the CF is deeply integrated with the biggest purveyor of violence the world has ever seen — US military — and Canada has only fought in one war that could even be argued was morally justifiable. Sudan, South Africa, World War I, Korea, Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Libya were not morally justifiable wars.

    Fenlon is, of course, unlikely to have risen to a position of influence within CBC news if he shared my assessment of the Canadian military’s ties to the US Empire.

    As I was leaving the room, a young CBC journalist came over to say how much she appreciated my work. She then laughed and said she hoped her boss hadn’t heard her.

     

    The post Educating Journalists about Canada’s Propaganda System an Eyeopener first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Fractured Russian Opposition

    A conversation with Ilya Budraitskis on how the invasion of Ukraine has transformed Russian society.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Guarding Democracy from News

    The past month has seen blows against freedom of speech for independent news outlets and, indeed, for all Americans. I’m not being hyperbolic here. There are real threats to our freedom of speech against which we ought to mobilize.

    First, the Biden administration named something called a “Disinformation Governance Board,” housed in the Department of Homeland Security, whose job will supposedly be to “standardize the treatment of disinformation by the agencies it oversees.”  That means that the government will be the final arbiter of what disinformation is. It will decide what we can and can’t read. At least that’s the plan. (It is now on hold after an angry backlash.)

    The post Guarding Democracy from News appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Until the Destruction of the Last Cage

    Welcome to another Episode of System Fail. In this episode we will be covering the trend of rising state repression around the globe.

    We start in so-called Chile where the newly elected ostensibly left-libertarian president Gabriel Boric has failed to deliver on his promise to free political prisoners.

    Meanwhile in Munich, police have raided a number of apartments, an anarchist library, and a print shop.

    Then in Greece, long term anarchist prisoner Giannis Michaildis has announced a hunger strike demanding his release.

    Finally, a run down of the recent events at the Defend the Forest Atlanta encampment.

    The post Until the Destruction of the Last Cage first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Shireen Abu Akleh And Israel’s War On Journalism

    The cold-blooded killing of Shireen Abu Akleh earlier this month has made headlines around the world. An Israeli soldier shot the veteran Al-Jazeera journalist in the head while she was reporting on their raid on a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin. Shireen’s niece Lina first heard of the news from her father, who phoned her early in the morning to tell her she was injured. Today, Watchdog host Lowkey speaks to Lina Abu Akleh about her aunt’s work, legacy, and the ongoing war against the press.

    The post Shireen Abu Akleh And Israel’s War On Journalism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Peter Dutton’s defamation defeat

    Australian parliamentarians can and do use their position to protect their thin skins. It is welcome news that Shane Bazzi won an appeal overturning a ruling that he defamed Peter Dutton. Binoy Kampmark reports.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • They’re Worried About The Spread Of Information, Not Disinformation

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    We’re in the final countdown to British Home Secretary Priti Patel’s decision on the fate of Julian Assange, with the WikiLeaks founder’s extradition to the United States due to be approved or rejected by the end of the month. Joe Lauria has a new article out with Consortium News on the various pressures that Patel is being faced with from both sides of this history-making issue at this crucial time.

    And I can’t stop thinking, as this situation comes to a boil, about how absurd it is that the US empire is working to set a precedent which essentially outlaws information-sharing that the US doesn’t like at the same time western news media are full of hand-wringing headlines about the dangerous threat of “disinformation”.

    Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) has an article out titled “‘Disinformation’ Label Serves to Marginalize Crucial Ukraine Facts” about the way the mass media have been spinning that label to mean not merely the knowing distribution of false information but also of information that is true but inconvenient to imperial narrative-weaving.

    “In defense of the US narrative, corporate media have increasingly taken to branding realities inconvenient to US information goals as ‘disinformation’ spread by Russia or its proxies,” writes FAIR’s Luca Goldmansour.

    Online platforms have been ramping up their censorship protocols under the banner of fighting disinformation and misinformation, and those escalations always align with narrative control agendas of the US-centralized empire. Just the other day we learned that Twitter has a new policy which expands its censorship practices to fight “misinformation” about wars and other crises, and the Ukraine war (surprise surprise) will be the first such situation about which it will be enforcing these new censorship policies.

    Then there’s the recent controversy over the Department of Homeland Security’s “Disinformation Governance Board,” a mysterious institution ostensibly designed to protect the American people from wrongthink coming from Russia and elsewhere. The board’s operations (whatever they were) have been “paused” pending a review which will be led by Michael Chertoff, a virulent swamp monster and torture advocate. Its operations will likely be resumed in one form or another, probably under the leadership of someone with a low profile who doesn’t sing show tunes about disinformation.

    And this all comes out after US officials straight up told the press that the Biden administration has been deliberately sowing disinformation to the public using the mainstream press in order to win an infowar against the Kremlin. They’ve literally just been circulating completely baseless stories about Russia and Ukraine, but nobody seems to be calling for the social media accounts of Biden administration officials to be banned.

    You see so many discrepancies between what the oligarchic empire says and what it actually does regarding the issue of disinformation because the empire has no problem with disinformation. The empire that is built on propaganda and lies has no problem with propaganda and lies. It has a problem with the truth.

    They’re not worried about disinformation, they’re worried about information. They’re worried about journalists using the unprecedented information-sharing power of the internet to reveal inconvenient facts about the largest and most murderous power structure on earth. They’re worried about people finding out that they’ve been lied to their entire lives about their world, their nation and their government. They’re worried about people using their newly connected minds to decide together that they don’t much like the status quo as it’s been laid out for them, and deciding to build a new one.

    All the safeguards they’re setting up now to manipulate the flow of information online are not there to eliminate lies, they’re there to eliminate truth. These people have a vested interest in keeping things dark and confused, and we the ordinary people of the world have a vested interest in shining a big inconvenient spotlight on everything. The elite agenda to keep things endarkened is at direct odds with the people’s agenda to get things enlightened.

    We are not being protected by a compassionate alliance of corporations and governments who only want us to know the truth, we are being manipulated and oppressed by an oligarchic empire that wants us to believe lies. That’s why they’re locking up Assange, that’s why they’re censoring the internet, that’s why they’re filling our minds with propaganda, and that’s why we can’t let them win.

    ______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    Image via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Liberals Drive State Censorship

    Twice in the month of April Barack Obama spoke about “disinformation.” First at the University of Chicago and then at Stanford University he claimed that democracy is at risk because of social media. Less than one week after the Stanford speech the Department of Homeland Security announced the establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board. While republicans deemed lesser lights and the butt of liberal jokes such as Representative Lauren Boebert spoke out against the very problematic entity, liberals said nothing at all. Bernie Sanders, House members known as “the Squad” and others thought of as progressives or leftists were silent. While democrats go along with and defend every Biden administration policy, republican members of congress held a press conference to share their concerns. Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other republicans are seeking to defund the Board. “The President’s Ministry of Truth is just an un-American abuse of power, which is a scheme conjured up by Washington Democrats to grant themselves the authority to control free speech.” Of course abuses of power are very American but McCarthy’s assessment of what Biden and the democrats want to do is correct.

    The post Liberals Drive State Censorship appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • German Police Attack Palestine Supporters On Nakba Day

    On Sunday, police in Berlin arrested and repressed anyone they saw demonstrating support for Palestine. Among those who were detained was Ramsy Kilani, a Palestinian whose family was massacred in an Israeli bombing attack in Gaza in 2014. The attacks on protesters came after authorities in the German capital banned a Jewish group from holding a vigil in memory of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera correspondent assassinated last week, with all evidence pointing at Israel being responsible.

    The post German Police Attack Palestine Supporters On Nakba Day appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Twitter To Ramp Up Censorship Of ‘Misinformation’ About The Ukraine War

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    Twitter has published what it calls a “crisis misinformation policy” announcing that it will be actively reducing the visibility of content found to be false which pertains to “situations of armed conflict, public health emergencies, and large-scale natural disasters.”

    If you’ve been paying attention to the dramatic escalations in online censorship we’ve been seeing in 2022, it will not surprise you to learn that the Ukraine war is the first crisis to which this new censorship policy will be applied.

    Twitter says that it “won’t amplify or recommend content” found to violate its new policy, and will also attach warning labels to individual tweets and even hide offending content behind a warning label and disable the retweet function on particularly naughty posts.

    The problem here is of course the question of how to impartially establish whether something is objectively false without it turning into at best a flawed system guided by fallible human biases and perceptual filters and at worst a powerful institution shutting down unauthorized speech. Twitter says it formed its new policy with input from unnamed “global experts and human rights organizations,” and will be enforcing it with the help of “conflict monitoring groups, humanitarian organizations, open-source investigators, journalists, and more.” This will come as no comfort to anyone who’s familiar with the history of propaganda peddling that can be found in every single one of those respective categories.

    Twitter lists the following examples of the kind of content that will be found in violation of its crisis misinformation policy:

    • False coverage or event reporting, or information that mischaracterizes conditions on the ground as a conflict evolves;
    • False allegations regarding use of force, incursions on territorial sovereignty, or around the use of weapons;
    • Demonstrably false or misleading allegations of war crimes or mass atrocities against specific populations;
    • False information regarding international community response, sanctions, defensive actions, or humanitarian operations.

    When Jack Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO last November, I noted the warning signs we were seeing that his replacement, Parag Agrawal, supported the use of measures which make unauthorized content much less visible than authorized content without eliminating the unauthorized content altogether.

    “There’s a lot of content out there,” Agrawal said in a 2020 interview. “A lot of tweets out there, not all of it gets attention, some subset of it gets attention. And so increasingly our role is moving towards how we recommend content and that sort of, is, is, a struggle that we’re working through in terms of how we make sure these recommendation systems that we’re building, how we direct people’s attention is leading to a healthy public conversation that is most participatory.”

    This agenda to “direct people’s attention” toward “healthy public conversation” by controlling how content is “recommended” to viewers echoes the censorship-by-algorithm tactics we’ve seen employed by Facebook, Google, and by Google-owned YouTube. Google has been hiding dissident media in its search results for years, and in 2020 the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet admitted to algorithmically throttling World Socialist Website. Last year the CEO of YouTube acknowledged that the platform uses algorithms to elevate “authoritative sources” while suppressing “borderline content” not considered authoritative. Facebook spokeswoman Lauren Svensson said in 2018 that if the platform’s fact-checkers (including the state-funded establishment narrative management firm Atlantic Council) rule that a Facebook user has been posting false news, moderators will “dramatically reduce the distribution of all of their Page-level or domain-level content on Facebook.”

    Twitter has generally been the most reluctant of the major platforms to exercise censorship on behalf of the empire, which is what has made it a better source of ideas and information than any other major platform. But now we’re seeing the most pernicious form of online censorship, censorship by manipulation of content visibility, take hold there as well.

    Censorship by visibility manipulation is the most destructive form of online censorship that exists, because its consequences are both so much more far-reaching and so much less attention-grabbing than the controversial act of banning users from platforms or removing their posts. It’s a kind of censorship that people don’t even know is happening, and it’s happening all over the place.

    It is deeply disturbing how Silicon Valley megacorporations have simply accepted that it is their job to help the US win a propaganda war against Russia, and how everyone’s just going along with that like it’s fine and normal. Our ability to share ideas and information on the platforms where most people congregate is being increasingly restricted, not on the basis of whether our speech is harmful, or even whether it is true, but on whether it helps or hinders the US propaganda campaign against Russia.

    Silicon Valley censorship with the Ukraine war is an unprecedented escalation because they’re not pretending to be doing it to protect people from a virus or to safeguard elections or defend the public good in any way. It’s literally just “Well we can’t have people thinking wrong thoughts about a war,” without even really explaining why that’s important in any coherent and sensical fashion.

    There’s no longer any pretense that the internet is being censored to protect the public interest. It’s just open censorship of information about a war, solely because they take it as a given that it’s their job to control the things people think and say about that war. They’re coming right out and saying yes, we are the platforms you come to in order to share ideas and information with your fellow humans, and yes, we are agents of the US empire. This is a dramatic escalation.

    All this public hand wringing about misinformation and disinformation is itself disinformation. They’re not worried about the spread of disinformation, they’re worried about the spread of information. Your rulers are not concerned that you’ll start learning false things about Covid or the war in Ukraine, they are worried you’ll start learning true things about your rulers. That’s what all this fuss is really about.

    They are locking down our minds and sanitizing our information ecosystem for the protection of the empire. I will keep saying this and saying this for as long as I am able: we’ve got to wake up and stop these bastards before it is too late.

    ______________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

    Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2

     

    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Censoring Palestine: Swarms Of Israeli Bots Are Crippling Pro-Palestinian Twitter Accounts

    “These accounts were following the exact same people that were tweeting about Palestine, but from France or Francophone accounts that work on Palestine,” Razek said of her new followers.

    The advocacy director of Rābet, the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy’s digital platform, became wary of the issue after Abier Khateb, a grants manager at Open Society Foundations, reported mass followings as well.

    Razek told MintPress News that she began individually reporting each account as fake but kept her own account open — lest she let the alleged bots win. But after a few days, Razek made her profile private. At the peak of the mass following, Razek had accumulated 400 fake followers.

    The post Censoring Palestine: Swarms Of Israeli Bots Are Crippling Pro-Palestinian Twitter Accounts appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • More Facebook Censorship

    So, I posted the above meme on my personal Facebook page with this silly caption: “Business idea: Woke yoga school called Reverse Warrior. (They’re gonna need a whole lot of flexibility to keep contorting themselves in and out of all these poses.)”

    Obvious comedy, all around…right? Not in The Land of the Free™.

    For my heinous transgressions, I got this notice:

    My crime, you wonder?

    Where exactly is the “false information”? That I’m not really gonna open a yoga school? Nah, those A.I. bots are carefully programmed to suss out unacceptable denials of reality like “Men couldn’t get pregnant anymore.”

    Never mind that memes are the most popular form of modern humor, there is no room for laughter — or variance. Either you obey or you lose your privileges. Just think of how any prison runs if you need a base of comparison.

    In all my many years of cynical writing, I never imagined living in such a dystopia. If the rise of this behavior across the spectrum of American social life isn’t freaking you out — if it doesn’t have you petrified for the young people of the world — it’s time you got your head out of your ass.

    The world being created by the powers that shouldn’t be can still be stopped. But you will be required to take off the blinders and actually do something. This is a spiritual war. Which side are you on?

    The post More Facebook Censorship first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Attacks on Libraries Are Attacks on Labor

    When Emily Drabinski was elected president of the American Library Association (ALA) in mid-April, she tweeted her excitement that someone like her, a self-proclaimed Marxist lesbian, could garner enough votes to head the oldest and largest association of library workers in the United States. The ALA was founded in 1876 “to enable librarians to do their present work more easily and at less expense,” thereby incorporating the Gilded Age’s capitalist efficiency into libraries from its very beginning. Given the now near-total dominance of neoliberalism in the field — from ever-escalating austerity budgets to constant calls to manage libraries as if they were businesses — Drabinski’s election was anything but a given. It’s exciting, because only a densely organized library workforce can have the power to push back against political entities that would strip libraries, alongside other public institutions, of what remaining power we have to make our communities better places to live for everyone. Strong libraries are what most people want. According to the Pew Research Center, almost 80 percent of American adults, across the political spectrum, believe libraries help people find trustworthy and reliable information. This comes as little surprise. After all, who could be against a library?

    Well, it turns out that enough people could be. Drabinski’s election was immediately picked up by right-wing trolls who cast her as yet another “groomer” pushing gay books on young children. These attacks mirror the attacks on library workers — particularly at school and public libraries — who have been battling challenges to books about racial inequality and gender and sexual identity at rates not seen since the McCarthy era.

    We can understand these challenges as part of a white supremacist and patriarchal backlash against social movements that have produced waves of protest against police violence, a mainstreaming of prison abolition as a political possibility, the normalization of queer life in media, and a union movement seeing wins once thought impossible against corporations, such as Starbucks and Amazon. These are also attacks against labor. Librarians are trained to select books and other resources to be shared in common by groups of readers. This is the job we are paid to do. The books that are making it to target lists, such as Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, Kyle Lukoff’s Call Me Max and Maia Kobabe’s Gender Queer, don’t find their way to library shelves as part of the gay or Black “agenda.” They are selected and acquired by librarians who use funds to purchase books that meet the reading needs and interests of our communities. Of course, those decisions are often made collaboratively with those communities — faculty and students make book requests, parents express concerns that are then managed through existing policy and protocols. But this current spate of highly politicized and well-organized challenges is meant to circumvent all of these ordinary library processes. What we see now are concerted attacks not just on books and authors, but on the expertise of library workers.

    Nobody knows this better than rank-and-file library workers. As many of us work a second shift pushing back against these incursions, we need the support of our institutions and the public to do our work effectively. If libraries are the terrain of struggle, we are the people most directly involved in the fight. Our efforts are made all the more difficult when our institutions actively work against us. Alongside the very public efforts to ban books from library shelves, library workers face a host of other challenges that directly impact our capacity to do the work necessary to preserve these institutions. Management rolls out absurdly strict attendance policies in the wake of a union campaign in Baltimore County, Maryland. Library boards are taken over by people who then vote to slash funding and hours in Flathead County, Montana, and Niles, Illinois. Full-time librarians flee to other employment sectors or to retirement, and are replaced by part-time positions. Core library functions, including collection development and resource description, are contracted out to for-profit private companies that lock us into expensive systems we don’t control. School librarian ranks are thinned as only wealthy ZIP codes choose to afford that staff. These issues may not be as well-discussed as Breitbart calling us all “groomers,” but they are every bit as insidious, stripping our institutions of the very people best positioned to save them.

    Libraries are crucial social infrastructure. Like the post office, they are a site for the circulation of public goods such as books and films, but also tax forms, overdose-prevention medications such as Narcan, and COVID tests. Like parks, library buildings produce space for the public where anyone can use the bathroom, grab some computer time, sit down, stay warm in the cold and cool in the heat. And like all social infrastructure, libraries are under attack from an organized right that knows well that the best way to crater public institutions is to relentlessly attack them until they become unusable, leading to their abandonment by everyone except those who have no other choice. We need a strong library workforce equipped to resist the dismantling of our public institutions. Rightfully, there has been ample public outcry in response to right-wing attacks on our libraries, the books and other materials they contain, and the people who read those books. However, what worries me is that in our focus on book burnings we’ll forget to build the power of our most potent weapon: the people who work in the library.

    Drabinski’s election to the presidency of ALA — in a year that saw more votes cast than any in the past decade — represents a vote for labor organizing as a mode of both vocational and political change. Her campaign put labor front and center, making a very public argument that organizing collectively on the behalf of the public good is the most important thing library workers can be doing right now. Whether she’ll make good on this Marxist lesbian promise remains to be seen, and will require all of us who work in and use libraries to join the fight.

  • The Chris Hedges Report: Gerald Horne On The Unrelentingly Radical Life Of Paul Robeson

    Heroic dissidents are demonized, marginalized, physically and psychologically destroyed, or assassinated by the American ruling class. Before the persecution of Julian Assange, before the FBI assassination of Fred Hampton and Malcolm X, before the murder of Martin Luther King, there was the relentless campaign to silence the activist, actor, and singer Paul Robeson. Robeson, the most internationally known and revered Black American of his day, was a socialist and a militant who stood with the crucified of the earth.

    Historian Gerald Horne is author of the biography “Paul Robeson: The Artist as Revolutionary,” and is the Moores Professor of History and African American Studies at the University of Houston. In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, he joins Chris Hedges to discuss the life of “the most blacklisted performer in America,” linking the persecution of Paul Robeson directly to the persecution of Julian Assange, held today in a high security prison in London where his mental and physical health—like Robeson’s at the end of his life—is in serious decline.

    The post The Chris Hedges Report: Gerald Horne On The Unrelentingly Radical Life Of Paul Robeson appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Most Joe Biden Thing Ever: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix

    Listen to a reading of this article:

    ❖

    A hostile military alliance expanding to Russia’s borders isn’t a provocation, sending weapons to be used by CIA-trained fighters backed by US intelligence isn’t a proxy war, those Nazis aren’t Nazis, you’re being censored for your own good, trust the media, the government is your friend.

    ❖

    It’s a good thing Trump lost because otherwise Roe v Wade would be on the chopping block and immigrants would still be getting mistreated and the Iran deal would still be dead and the military budget would keep inflating. That bastard would probably have us on the brink of World War 3 by now.

    ❖

     

    Joe Biden doing a live infomercial for Javelin missiles while everyone who voted for him worries about women’s reproductive rights is the most Joe Biden thing that has ever happened.

    ❖

    Once you see that both mainstream US parties are part of a single oligarchic power structure it stops looking like a battle between opposing parties and looks more like one giant bully standing in front of voters saying “Let me hit you with my left fist or I’ll hit you with my right.”

    What is the correct response when that happens? What’s the correct response when a mainstream political party keeps communicating that they’ll never do anything to help you but you need to support them anyway or they’ll let their friends in the other mainstream political party take away your rights? Is it to say “Ah well the left fist won’t hurt as much so that’s clearly the lesser evil,” or is it to take on an oppositional relationship with the tyrant who keeps punching you with both fists year after year?

    ❖

    Learning about what’s wrong with the world is like watching a marathon of shitty Scooby Doo episodes from the sixties, except it’s way more repetitive and predictable, and the villain under the mask is always the US empire.

    ❖

    Western media keep shrieking about Russia’s nuclear threats as though it was some kind of secret that Russia will use nukes if it feels its existence is threatened, and as though western powers wouldn’t nuke Russia for the same reason.

    ❖

    ❖

    The only argument against the observation that the US/NATO/Ukraine power structure could easily have prevented this war with a few low-cost diplomatic concessions is “Actually Putin would have invaded anyway because he’s a cartoon supervillain who does evil things for no reason.”

    War is all the worst things that can happen to a person multiplied by the population you target. When you refuse diplomacy, you are condemning whole cities to unimaginable suffering.

    ❖

    Nobody actually believes “tankies” are dangerous, some people just have a deep psychological need for the US empire’s fiercest critics to be wrong because it’s more comfortable than considering the possibility that everything you’ve been taught about the world is a lie.

    ❖

     

    There’s a lot in the news right now but none of it is as important as the fact that we’re being shoved toward nuclear war for no good reason by a few idiots who want to rule the world.

    Again, the real risk of nuclear war is not that any side will deliberately start one but that the explicit agreement in “Mutually Assured Destruction” will be set into motion by a nuke being deployed by accident, miscommunication, miscalculation or malfunction as things escalate. During the last cold war such accidental nuclear exchanges came all too close to happening multiple times. The more tense the nuclear standoff gets, the greater the likelihood of such an event occurring:

    We survived the last cold war not by skill or by competence, but by sheer dumb luck. There’s no logical reason to assume we’ll get lucky again.

    ❖

    So yeah, just so we’re clear, the US empire is rapidly restructuring the systems people look to for information about the world in order to ensure iron-fisted control over our dominant narratives while it scrambles to subvert its rivals in cold war maneuverings and secure unipolar planetary hegemony.

    The primary purpose of expanding censorship and propaganda on subjects like Ukraine, Russia, Covid, extremism etc is not to control the narrative about those subjects specifically, but to expand and normalize censorship and propaganda. Narrative control is an end in itself, and it’s the absolute highest priority because all the empire’s power is built upon it.

    Few seem to understand that the oligarchic empire seeks narrative control as an end in itself. They’re not always necessarily increasing censorship and propaganda about a given topic because of that topic; it’s often mainly because they want to normalize and expand censorship and propaganda. Certainly there are narratives right here and now that the empire would rather we believe, but that’s of secondary strategic importance to ensuring ongoing and continually expanding control over all narratives around the world into the future.

    Not all powerful people support the same narratives, but all powerful people seek narrative control. Narrative control is power. Any manipulator understands this, from the most powerful oligarchs right down to the narcissistic gossip queen at the office.

    Any manipulator of any level spends an extraordinary amount of energy working to dominate the stories people tell about them and about others. This is because they know humans are storytelling creatures, and if you can control the stories they tell, you control the humans. This is most especially true of the globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States; its narrative control via corporate news media, Hollywood and Silicon Valley is completely unparalleled and historically unprecedented.

    Censorship, propaganda, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation are just different aspects of narrative control. Nobody does this as well as the US-centralized empire and its managers. Nobody ever has.

    _______________________

    My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, or throwing some money into my tip jar on Ko-fi, Patreon or Paypal. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my American husband Tim Foley.

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    This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.

  • Media freedom slide in Australia ‘undermining’ ability to project democratic values

    Pacific Media Watch newsdesk

    A Melbourne-based Indonesian media academic has warned that declining media freedom in Australia is undermining the country’s ability to project liberal democratic values to the Asia-Pacific region.

    “Many people who have been watching media and journalism in Australia have been worried,” Tito Ambyo, a journalism lecturer at RMIT, told ABC News.

    He said governments in Australia needed “to start seeing journalists as an important part of democracy”.

    “We don’t have journalists being killed or imprisoned in Australia, but we have seen a lot of abuses,” he said, pointing to online harassment that was “often racist or gendered in nature”.

    Ambyo was responding to the 2022 World Press Freedom Index released this week by the Paris-based media freedom watchdog Reporters Without Borders which reported a big slump in media freedoms in Australia.

    Media freedom in Australia is “fragile” and less protected than in New Zealand and several emerging democracies in Asia, RSF concluded in its annual Index. The assessment measures have become more comprehensive in changes introduced this year.

    Australia slid from 25 to 39 in the Index, ranking below New Zealand in 11th place and Timor-Leste at number 17, but above Samoa (45th), Tonga (49th), Papua New Guinea (62nd) and Fiji (102nd) — with both the latter Pacific countries experiencing big falls while facing elections this year.

    Taiwan, which has transitioned from a military dictatorship to a liberal democracy since the late 1980s, ranked just above Australia at 38th.

    The Press Freedom Index, which assesses the state of journalism in 180 countries and territories, highlights the disastrous effects of news and information chaos — the effects of a globalised and unregulated online information space that encourages fake news and propaganda.

    ‘Fox News model’
    Within democratic societies, divisions are growing as a result of the spread of opinion media following the “Fox News model” and the spread of disinformation circuits that are amplified by the way social media functions.

    At the international level, democracies are being weakened by the asymmetry between open societies and despotic regimes that control their media and online platforms while waging propaganda wars against democracies.

    Polarisation on these two levels is fuelling increased tension, says RSF.

    The invasion of Ukraine (106th) by Russia (155th) at the end of February reflects this process, as the physical conflict was preceded by a propaganda war.

    China (175th), one of the world’s most repressive autocratic regimes, uses its legislative arsenal to confine its population and cut it off from the rest of the world, especially the population of Hong Kong (148th), which has plummeted in the Index.

    Confrontation between “blocs” is growing, as seen between nationalist Narendra Modi’s India (150th) and Pakistan (157th). The lack of press freedom in the Middle East continues to impact the conflict between Israel (86th), Palestine (170th) and the Arab states.

    Media polarisation is feeding and reinforcing internal social divisions in democratic societies such as the United States (42nd), despite President Joe Biden’s election, reports RSF.

    Social media tensions
    The increase in social and political tension is being fuelled by social media and new opinion media, especially in France (26th).

    The suppression of independent media is contributing to a sharp polarisation in “illiberal democracies” such as Poland (66th), where the authorities have consolidated their control over public broadcasting and their strategy of “re-Polonising” the privately-owned media.

    The trio of Nordic countries at the top of the Index — Norway, Denmark and Sweden — continues to serve as a democratic model where freedom of expression flourishes, while Moldova (40th) and Bulgaria (91st) stand out this year thanks to a government change and the hope it has brought for improvement in the situation for journalists even if oligarchs still own or control the media.

    The situation is classified as “very bad” in a record number of 28 countries in this year’s Index, while 12 countries, including Belarus (153rd) and Russia (155th), are on the Index’s red list (indicating “very bad” press freedom situations) on the map.

    The world’s 10 worst countries for press freedom include Myanmar (176th), where the February 2021 coup d’état set press freedom back by 10 years, as well as China, Turkmenistan (177th), Iran (178th), Eritrea (179th) and North Korea (180th).

    Fatal danger for democracies
    “Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT (the former Russia Today), revealed what she really thinks in a Russia One TV broadcast when she said, ‘no great nation can exist without control over information,’ said RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire.

    “The creation of media weaponry in authoritarian countries eliminates their citizens’ right to information but is also linked to the rise in international tension, which can lead to the worst kind of wars.

    “Domestically, the ‘Fox News-isation’ of the media poses a fatal danger for democracies because it undermines the basis of civil harmony and tolerant public debate,” he said.

    “Urgent decisions are needed in response to these issues, promoting a New Deal for Journalism, as proposed by the Forum on Information and Democracy, and adopting an appropriate legal framework, with a system to protect democratic online information spaces.”

    Pacific Media Watch collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • PayPal Cancels CN Account; May Seize Balance

    PayPal has canceled Consortium News‘ account without any prior notice or due process and with virtually no explanation.

    As Consortium News is today launching its Spring Fund Drive, it has lost one of its most important ways for its viewers and readers to show their support through donations.  Clicking on the yellow PayPal donate button on our home page now yields this message: “You can’t use PayPal anymore. … We noticed activity in your account that’s inconsistent with our User Agreement and we no longer offer you PayPal services. … Because of potential risk exposure, we’ve permanently limited your account. You’ll no longer be able to use the account for any transactions.”

    The post PayPal Cancels CN Account; May Seize Balance appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.