WHAT WILL IT TAKE?
How Many More Lies Will the Media Tell
Before We Stop Them?
Editor, TvNewsLIES.org - May, 2005
This is why so many good people support this criminal administration. They are good people with bad information!
This is not a matter of bias in the media; it is a matter of deception.
During this, my third year as editor of TvNewsLIES.org, I am stunned by the lack of outrage towards our news media by the people of this country.
How surreal do things have to get before we decide to stop the madness? What level of hypocrisy do our media have to reach before we explode? Are we waiting until there is no option other than taking to the streets to restore control of the airways to the citizens of this country? What is taking place today within our news media is beyond anything a democratic society can withstand. If our democracy is to survive we must no longer permit the assault of lies to continue.
This is not a matter of bias in the media; it is a matter of deception. Bias, however damaging, is nowhere as dangerous and destructive as the sheer deception that is taking place. People can detect bias, but unless they are actively exploring alternative news sources they might never even suspect that they are being deceived or lied to by omission. The corporate media have abused the trust that had been earned by journalists past. They know the public trusts them to tell the truth. They know that a public that trusts them will not spend time fact checking.
But over the past 6 or 7 years a drastic change has taken place. The lies of the media have become so egregious that they can no longer be ignored or allowed to continue.
US media has intentionally created a false impression in the minds of the populace as they cover for the deplorable acts, numerous lies and the unforgivable crimes committed by the Bush administration.
Today alone, two major examples of this deception were shot at us from the screens of our television sets like a high pressure fire hose spewing its lies and deceptions.
Images and descriptions of Britain ’s George Galloway shaking hands with Saddam Hussein have played like strobe lights on our TV screens. The networks might just as well have set up the crawl text at the bottom of the screen to rotate nothing but the sentence “Galloway Shakes Hands with Saddam!” Missing from this picture and from the past 3 years of news coverage are the discussions and images of Donald Rumsfeld doing the very same thing. Missing are the discussions of Donald Rumsfeld role along with Ronald Reagan & George Bush Sr. in arming Saddam Hussein to the teeth and arranging for Iraq’s acquisition of the very WMDs that were sited as the reason Rumsfeld’s war machine had to kill 100,000 Iraqis!
Senator Carl Levin made the media rounds discussing the money trail leading from the Food for Oil program to Galloway . He detailed a path where a person who received this money was a contributor to Galloway . There was no mention of today’s report citing the fact that our sitting vice president was directly involved in helping Saddam exploit the Food for Oil money while he was CEO of Halliburton. It is also known that Cheney did business with Libya and Iran, ignoring sanctions and breaking the law. Levin also pointed out the fact that Galloway wanted to end the sanctions Iraq . What was not said is that Galloway, as did with much of the world, opposed sanctions because they led to the suffering and mass death of the Iraqi people/children, while Cheney was an outspoken critic of the sanctions during the 90s out of sheer greed.
One day, one issue, two outrageously misleading media blitzes. This is why so many good people support this criminal administration. They are good people with bad information! The reason for this is that our primary source of information is a criminally deceptive organization that is known as corporate media.
Earlier today, on its website, the Chicago Tribune finally printed on their website the blockbuster story exposing the Bush administration’s lies about their intentions and reasons for invading Iraq. This is the smoking gun that demands an an investigation. This is not an allegation, but an official document that was released by Tony Blair’s government! It was not some forgery like the one presented to the UN by Colin Powell! This is impeachment material; perhaps even world court war crimes stuff! It took the Tribune 2 weeks to print it!
Enraged by this, I wrote the following to the Chicago Tribune reporters who published the story:
Wow, you finally found out about this 15 day old news!
Bravo! Did you know that they discovered that the world is actually round?
THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN ON YOUR FRONT PAGE FOR THE LAST 2 WEEKS! IT IS NOT EVEN ON YOUR WEBSITE’S FRONT PAGE!
Stop pretending to be journalists! You are traitors and you are responsible for the atrocities committed by the Bush/PNAC administration!
Here are some more headlines you might want to start printing on page 30 or so…
http://www.tvnewslies.org/html/where_s_the_news_that_s_fit_to.html
Editor, TvNewsLIES.org
I received this response:
It was on the website's front page today. Spare me the histrionics.
-- Mark Silva - mdsilva@tribune.com
According to Mr. Silva, a so called journalist, I am not supposed to be upset that the paper waited 14 days to report this story, only to have it appear on the front page of their website for less than one day!
This is the type of person on whom we depend on to preserve democracy and to protect us from the criminals and despots who infiltrate our government!
News is simply information about events taking place around us. What news is reported and how that news is presented influence and shape public opinion. The people who are responsible for reporting news have enormous power over public opinion. Corporate entities whose financial or political interest depends on the support of the people to advance their agendas can not and should not be trusted to control the information that shapes public opinion. This is an obvious and extremely dangerous conflict of interest.
Journalism is a profession. It is a calling. Unfortunately, what the public sees as journalists are is far too often people staking out careers in corporate America . Why is it that in this country we now can rely only on the independent journalist (or news organizations) for unfiltered information? Regardless of one’s political position, people must understand that a free press can exist under a capitalist structure. However, profits, ratings or agenda should play no part in reporting news events to the public. News should not be a business. Surely, everyone in the journalism industry should be fairly compensated, but we can not permit vested interests, either political or economic, to affect the validity of the information that is delivered. And yet, this is exactly what is taking place today.
A quick glance at a single network can serve as a glaring example of the dangerous conflicts of interest that exist between people who are supposed to report unfiltered information and the people who control the news delivery process. The NBC network and their affiliates, including MSNBC, are owned by GE. GE is a huge defense contractor. They make money on war and they own a major segment of our news industry. Do the math. How did we allow this to happen? Does the warning by Dwight Eisenhower regarding the military industrial complex ring a bell? How did we not heed his warning? Was the entire nation sleeping when the laws permitting the creeping corporate ownership of the media were passed? Or, was this another example of how our privately or corporately owned Congress stole this nation from its citizens?
This problem has reached a point of no return. There is no correcting this problem simply by complaining to one another. The final media power grab has taken place under the very administration that hijacked our government during the coup that was the 2000 election. They have just about put the last few nails in the coffin, forever eliminating the ability for real journalism to exist under corporate ownership. The consolidation of wealth and power in the world has created an environment in which few people now own so much of the world that no one can compete with their power. These people not only own the news sources, but they are the people who advertise on the news programs. This virtually eliminates the possibility of a major independent news organization surviving because it can not financially sustain itself without advertisers. In fact, the advertisers in most cases are part of the multinational companies that now own our news media and military industrial complex. They are one in the same, and we, as a nation, are being royally screwed!
What to do? For one thing, get angry. When you look at your news broadcaster you should begin to feel a deep and focused rage. You should feel as if you are looking a member of a street gang that is violating your family. These people are truly violating us all, and are destroying our country every single day. It never stops. It never slows down. The more the truth is discovered by the independents and the bloggers, the more powerful and sustained the deception by the media becomes. We are like children with water guns fighting men with fire hoses. We can not win this way.
Solution…waterproof the public or terminate the hose bearers with extreme prejudice.
Who has the power? It lies in the hands of the peace movement. The many organizations that have the ability to mobilize millions of people have wasted their energies by organizing marches to empty buildings where there is no corporate media coverage. I tried to tell them to MARCH TO WHERE THE CAMERAS ARE! They can no longer chant meaningless mantras and give boring and repetitive speeches. It is time to use the powerful collective voice of the movement to inform the public. Every protest sign should have a message of information. Every speech should contain information omitted by the corporate media. We MUST address this problem with the urgency of the last survivor in the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, played by John McCarthy, where he tried to tell the people what was going on. We have to alert the rest of the country. This is not a joke. It is time to take action!
To prove a point, try this test: ask anyone what PNAC is. Five years into this administration and hardly anyone in America knows who orchestrated our foreign policy and what their motivations were. Hardly anyone knows about their desire for a “New Pearl Harbor” and how it might relate to the events of 9/11. Test it. You’ll see for yourself. Americans are sadly uninformed because of the irresponsibility of the corporate news media. If they had the facts, there is little doubt that a majority people in this country would have refused to support the radical extremists who were hell bent on war for decades before our tragic invasion of Iraq .
Today we are talking about approval ratings where we should be talking about prison terms, and our media is still relentlessly lying to us! The 9/11 research community was forced to take their case to the streets of Europe hoping to elicit the attention of the international media. At the same time our media has covered the entire 9/11 event from it’s unfolding to the present by reading, verbatim, copy as written by the Bush administration. This is not journalism, this is governmental control of the press witch is a telltale indication of fascism! Wake up, this is not a rant, it is description of what is taking place in our nation today.
What will it take for us to finally do something? Let’s not wait until reasonable options run out.
Jesse, Editor, TvNewsLIES.org – jesse@tvnewslies.org
P.S. Please feel free to influence the many good activist groups to focus on the media situation because all battles will be uphill until we even the playing ground. The corporate media are the common enemy of all who are working for a myriad of just causes. Let’s work together.
· Corporate News Media - Incompetent, Criminally Negligent or Complicit? A Direct and Personal Challenge to EVERYONE in the Corporate Media - This nation has no national news media and I will prove it to anyone who dares take me up on my challenge
· Don’t Yell, Sell - A Formula for effective Protest
http://www.tvnewslies.org/html/what_will_it_take_.html