Eric Zuesse
Western ‘news’ media simply refuse to report the lying that’s done by Western ‘news’ media and their governments.
Western media didn’t even report — and
more than a decade after the fact, they still are not reporting — that
George W. Bush was lying when he said
on 7 September 2002 that the IAEA had just issued a report saying that
Saddam Hussein was six months away from having a nuclear weapon — when
he said this even though the IAEA repeatedly denied having ever issued
such a report. (And: largely because Western media still don’t report that he had lied there, the Gallup Poll, on 20 June 2014,
found that former President George W. Bush was continuing to be
well-regarded by the American public: he still had an approval rating of
53%, and only 44% of Americans disapproved of him. His approval-rating
within his own Republican Party continued to be an astronomically high
88%. His failure to have acted on pre-9/11 intelligence about Al Qaeda,
the massive needless bloodshed from foreign invasions, trillions of
dollars wasted, millions of needless Iraqi refugees produced, tortures
and ‘renditions’ in violation of international law, and the explosion of
financial fraud and its resulting economic crash, all failed to cause
him to be generally unpopular amongst the American people, whose nation
he had actually almost wrecked. Such is the power of a constantly lying
press, which claims that all these catastrophes were ‘well-intentioned’
by the ‘democratically’ ‘elected’ President.)
And, more than a decade later, the media are still not reporting that Barack Obama lies saying
that the August 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria was from Assad’s forces
and not from the rebel side — which it actually was. (Obama repeats this
lie every time he ‘justifies’ his invasion of Syria. He’s actually
supporting the people who did that sarin attack — and he knows it.)
When will Western ‘news’ media start
behaving as if they’re actual news-media in an authentic democracy,
instead of mere propaganda-outlets for their government against the
various nations that the local aristocracy (the Western aristocrats who
also own the ‘news’ media) want to take over or else destroy — first,
Libya, then Ukraine, now Syria — all allies of Russia (as had been Saddam Hussein’s Iraq), which Russia is the American aristocracy’s actual ultimate target here.
It’s like George Orwell’s 1984, in “the West.” It’s no real democracy here. It’s fake. It’s built on lies. (Just as all U.S. Presidents since the end of the Soviet Union have been lying about Russia.)
And it has been going on like this for
decades in the United States. For example, farther on, in that same
video (at 3:17) which is linked here at the top of this article, is also
the 1990 Congressional testimony of “Nurse Nayirah” about Saddam
Hussein’s atrocities in her country Kuwait, which testimony was used in
Congress to ‘justify’ Bush Senior’s war against Saddam’s army in Kuwait.
That ‘evidence’ too was a U.S. government hoax, engineered with the assistance of Kuwait’s U.S. Embassy and the PR firm Hill and Knowlton. (And a fuller description of that PR campaign can be found here. And also here.) It wasn’t publicly revealed, that Nayirah was a member of Kuwait’s royal al-Sabah family, she was the daughter of Kuwait’s Ambassador to the United States, Saud Nasser Al-Saud Al-Sabah. The al-Sabah family
plus the National Parliament, own Kuwait (they jointly control the
country and own its oil wells), and the al-Sabahs had hired Hill and
Knowlton for this propaganda-operation. None of that was revealed to the
public when “nurse Nayirah” was shown crying on U.S. television as she testified lying
in Congress. What the al-Sabah family were actually crying about was
the theft of Kuwait from them, after they had (centuries earlier)
largely stolen Kuwait from the Kuwaiti public and privatized it largely
to themselves. For this theft from the al-Sabahs and from the National
Parliament, the Bush family, long allied with the Saud family (friends
of the Sabah family) sent America’s soldiers in to kill, and be killed,
in Kuwait.
We know why the Bushes did this. Why is Obama doing it? Who are his friends?
And, above all: When will the Western ‘news’ media start reporting about their own fakeness? Isn’t that the pre-condition for any intelligent consumer
of news to start to take them seriously? (Perhaps Western ‘news’
executives don’t think so; perhaps they think that, instead, hiding their fakery is the only way to keep their ‘dumb’ audience’s trust.)
Here and here
are two Western news-reporters who have gone public about those
individual journalists’ personal refusals of demands by management to
deceive the public. (Both of them were fired and then blackballed for
doing this. Journalists are actually trapped.)
PERSONAL NOTE:
No one pays me to write this sort of
thing. I offer my news reports and commentaries free to all American and
many other Western news-media, in order to persuade them that they
should start to become honest — and also in order to encourage readers
to support the few that already are honest
enough to report the truth about what has actually happened to the
media in the Western world (google the headline to this report between
quotation-marks, and see who published this and who didn’t).
The reason that I do this is that the
biggest news-story of all, to me, is actually about the press itself.
(Incidentally: America’s self-styled ‘critics’ of the press, such as
MediaMatters, FAIR, and AIM, don’t report this particular news-beat
either — they too are mere propaganda-vehicles.) And, in fact, the
biggest scandal is that there is no market for honesty in the
journalism-profession in the West.
The West is all that I know about and
have investigated; so, I can’t say whether this corruption is the same
elsewhere, and I won’t speculate about that. My concern is the
corruption here, not there. And I have found lots of that corruption,
such as: here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here and here.
Until the Western press starts reporting
its own corruptness, democracy will be impossible in the West. Wars and
other catastrophes can be the result. Criminal invasions such as of Iraq
in 2003, or perhaps even of Russia itself yet to come, can result from a
lying press. That’s why I am concerned about this.
* Regarding
the RT investigative news report that starts this article, the BBC even
had the nerve to headline, after it was telecast, a ‘news’ report
supposedly exposing the RT news report as false, while not identifying
anything in it to be false. On 21 September 2015 they headlined, very misleadingly, “UK regulator Ofcom backs BBC in Russian TV case,” and opened (also misleadingly saying what had allegedly been affirmed in what they had ‘won’):
“The BBC has won a case against Russian TV channel RT, which claimed
the corporation faked a report on Syria. The station [RT] said the BBC
had ‘staged’ a chemical weapons attack for a news report, and digitally
altered the words spoken by an interviewee. The BBC complained to Ofcom,
saying the ‘incredibly serious’ allegations struck ‘at the heart’ of
its obligations to accuracy and impartiality.” (At least that much from
the BBC was honest: this RT report really did strike at the heart of the
BBC’s trustworthiness.) However, only at the end of this BBC ‘news’
article, after a lot of misdirection and side-tracking in the BBC’s
article, was the actual decision from Ofcom quoted from, or even
summarized, when it finally said: “It [Ofcom] ruled: ‘We did not
consider that viewers would have clearly understood that the ‘massive
public investigation’… was a complaint by a member of the public to the
BBC which had been responded to in detail by the BBC and that it was
also based on a number of online articles detailing individuals’
opinions.’ RT has been directed to broadcast a summary of Ofcom’s
decision that its programme was misleading.” Nothing was identified in
this BBC ‘news’ article as having been ‘misleading’ in the RT news
report. And, specifically, RT’s allegation that the BBC had staged and
“faked a report on Syria” wasn’t actually denied in the BBC’s article
(though the opening of the BBC ‘news’ article misleadingly suggested
that the charge that the BBC had engaged in fakery there had been found
by Ofcom to be a false allegation by RT as the BBC was alleging — which
wasn’t at all true). However, in order for RT to retain its license in
UK, they had to comply with the British regulatory agency’s command. And
Britain doesn’t have a censored ‘news’ media? The UK is a ‘democracy’?
The Home Team (BBC) can use the home-nation’s media-regulator to punish a
foreign competitor that has exposed the Home Team’s lies, and this is
supposed to be ‘democracy’?
Here is what Ofcom’s actual report on this case actually said:
“Ofcom has not taken forward [i.e.,
accepted] the BBC’s complaint of due accuracy under Rule 5.1 as this
rule applies to news reports and is therefore not applicable to the
Programme which was an investigative current affairs programme. However,
Ofcom considered that the [RT] Programme raised issues warranting
investigation under Rule 2.2 of the Code which states: ‘Factual
programmes or items or portrayals of factual matters must not materially
mislead the audience.’”
In other words: Whereas the BBC’s ‘news’
story here had opened by alleging that, “The BBC has won a case against
Russian TV channel RT, which claimed the [BBC] corporation faked a
report on Syria,” that statement by BBC was false. Ofcom’s report had
clearly stated that, “accuracy … is … not applicable to the program.”
Furthermore: elsewhere in Ofcom’s report, there was also this: “Ofcom’s
functions do not extend to regulating the provision of the BBC’s
services in so far as they concern the accuracy or impartiality of the
content of any programme included in the BBC’s UK public broadcasting
services.” In other words: As regards the BBC itself, accuracy isn’t
required, not only in “an investigative current affairs program” but in anything at all which
comes from the BBC. Wow! Why would Ofcom — supposedly the BBC’s (and
all news-media’s) regulator, say such things? The reason is obvious once
one reads the rest of Ofcom’s report. The BBC in its complaint to
Ofcom, which had sparked this ruling by Ofcom, provided no documentation disproving or in any way contesting the truth of what the RT news-report had reported.
For this reason, Ofcom instead applied a different, totally vague and
therefore pliable standard, namely that “factual matters must not
materially mislead the audience.” Even if the given “investigative
current affairs programme” is 100% “accurate,” it must not “materially
mislead” (unless it’s the BBC, which is free to falsify. The BBC is
allowed to be entirely inaccurate anywhere, but RT isn’t allowed even to
merely “materially mislead” — whatever that’s supposed to mean).
So: what was the basis for Ofcom’s ruling
that this RT program did “materially mislead”? Ofcom presented details
of where the progam was “misleading.” Most of them consisted of
arguments to the effect that the private person who had investigated the
BBC’s report, Robert Stuart, and who was quoted at several points in
the RT report, had produced no ‘massive public investigation,’ though it
was, in fact, massive and had, in fact, been made public on the Web, at
https://bbcpanoramasavingsyriaschildren.wordpress.com/.
The Ofcom report said that: “The BBC said
that the ‘extremely disturbing findings’ of the ‘massive public
investigation’ referred to and relied on in the [RT] Programme were in
fact the complaints of Mr Stuart and that the statement of Mr Stuart
which is read out in the Programme is portrayed as the ‘outcome of an
official public investigation’. The BBC said that these assertions are
false and ‘un-evidenced’.” Ofcom there stated the BBC’s accusation,
using BBC’s original complaint from BBC.
However, in fact, Mr. Stuart’s
investigative report was “massive,” and it was “public” in the sense of
its being online; and, as far as “official” is concerned, that
three-word phrase “official public investigation” employed by the BBC
in their complaint against RT, used by BBC in their charge filed at
Ofcom against RT, describing RT’s references to RT’s investigation, that
it was an ‘official public investigation,’ was a fabrication by the
BBC: Not once in the RT news-report was that three-word phrase actually used.
Never was Mr. Stuart’s report being referenced there as an “official
public investigation,” nor was it referred to there as any “outcome of
an official public investigation.” (You can easily confirm this fact by
examining the transcript of the segment
— you’ll need to click there on “Read the full transcript.”) The BBC
lied there to Ofcom, and Ofcom simply took their lie on that as being
the Gospel Truth.
Ofcom concluded its finding: “For the
reasons stated above, Ofcom was of the view that the Programme, in
stating that the BBC was the subject of a ‘massive public investigation
which made some extremely disturbing findings’ presented the audience
with a materially misleading fact, and therefore, within the context of
the Programme which was a current affairs programme, had the potential
to cause harm to viewers.”
As if the BBC’s faked chemical-weapons
attack by Assad’s forces hadn’t caused real harm to the BBC’s viewers —
and to democracy itself? That’s right; that’s Ofcom.
Therefore, (p. 124) “Ofcom found that the
Programme as broadcast resulted in unfairness to the BBC. [Oh? It’s not
‘harm to viewers’ that Ofcom was actually concerned about here, after
all?] Therefore, Ofcom has upheld the BBC’s complaint of unjust or
unfair treatment in the Programme as broadcast.”
Clearly, by Ofcom’s phrase there, “unjust
or unfair treatment,” they were referring to the BBC as being their
client — not the BBC’s viewers, at all.
Therefore, RT, afraid that their license
will be revoked if any further complaints against them by the BBC are
filed at Ofcom, did whatever they were told.
According to Britain’s pro-imperialist New Statesman magazine, RT is “Putin’s Mouthpiece” and is thus a threat. So: this is how Britain deals with that alleged situation — by imitating the Soviet Union.
A nation doesn’t need to be communist in
order to be a dictatorship. Just ask Julian Assange, involuntarily
imprisoned for years in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London because he runs
an operation (wikileaks) that exposes dictatorships that call
themselves ‘democratic’ though they aren’t. Perhaps the most-successful
dictatorships are the ones that (like the U.S.) deny that this is what they are.
It’s a lot easier to lead the herd to slaughter if they don’t know what is happening behind the wall at the front of the line.
Ofcom’s real message to the British public: Get in line, herd!
—————
Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.
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