The Media And Propaganda

33  2018-02-23 by Nightlight64

It's astonishing to me that most people fail to realize that the goal of the mainstream media oftentimes is to divide and conquer the masses. It's fascinating to me that people can't sit back and realize that the media is akin to a window that looks out onto the outside world—you control the media and you control what people see and think and believe. Without the media the masses would be blind to the world around them.

Open up the websites to many prominent major newspapers and you will read headlines that don't inform the individual reader on just the bare facts but push and paint a narrative. The line between reporting just the facts and pushing a narrative has long been blurred. You see it in the NY Times and Washington Post headlines, telling the reader what to think about any given situation or event, without laying out just the facts. Tells. Us. What. To. Think. Pushes. A. Narrative.

Why can't people see this? The media has done its job the last year because anyone seen critical of mainstream news is immediately branded a Trump supporter and ridiculed. It's highly convenient. Why can't the masses understand that the much of the mainstream media is in fact fake news and propaganda and yet Donald Trump really isn't a good person or president? The world isn't black and white.

The media is currently conflating and pushing the Russia-Trump narrative—indictments have been brought this week by Special Counsel Mueller against 13 Russians and the media has been pushing this "Trump can't call it a hoax any more" narrative. What did Trump deny? What did Trump call a hoax? Collusion between his campaign in 2016 and the Russian government to hack into the DNC servers and/or release pertinent emails damaging to the Clinton campaign. Have we forgotten that? The indictments of the 13 Russians had nothing to do with collusion. Neither did Manafort's. Neither did Flynn's. Neither did Papadopoulos's. Does stating those facts mean Trump is a good president? No.

Take this, for example. BEFORE the recent Nunes' memo was even released the NY Times editorial board wrote this as a headline. Under that headline? This. It literally reads like biased tabloid journalism.

We have people believing that between Obama leaving office and Trump entering office that suddenly the country turned on a dime and white supremacists are everywhere and that you should be scared. Who gave Richard Spencer, for example, attention? Why do we even know his name? Because the mainstream news has pushed him and has interviewed him constantly after the election. Why? Ask yourself that. Are there racists in the US? Yes. Should we be interviewing them on NPR and screaming about them on NY Times and CNN and giving them attention and a platform? The media is telling us what to fear and be scared of. It props up Boogeymen, like Spencer, like Bannon. Any other political junkie here remember when the whole "Steve Bannon is a white supremacist OMG!" began? Mere weeks after the election and it was pushed, constantly.Why wasn't this talked about before Trump won? I remember finding a false quote last year in a major magazine—Vanity Fair, I believe—stating that Bannon said that "Breitbart is a platform for white supremacists" or something similar and was so astonished about the outright lie that I emailed the writer to tell them the quote was wrong. Then again, I really don't like Bannon.

We have people who call themselves liberals who gloss over or even ignore the DNC rigging the 2016 Democratic primaries against Bernie Sanders yet want to rip their hair out and scream that Trump is illegitimate because the Russian government "won" the 2016 election for him. We have liberals suddenly praising the police state and mass surveillance intelligence community. We have liberals befriending and excusing George W. Bush. We have liberals bring forth a new age McCarthyism where anyone can be branded a traitor or collaborator without evidence.

The Russian government used fake ads and bots on Twitter and Facebook? What does that even mean? Aren't Facebook and Twitter private, worldwide companies which anyone or any entity in almost any country can use? What right does the US government have to tell private companies who to do business with on their services? Is buying ads illegal? Was anything actually illegal? What proof have we been shown that the Russian government was involved? IP addresses from within Russian borders? Really?

If these Twitter bots and Facebook ads were so serious and swayed the election then why has the FBI never independently verified the RUSSIAN hack into the DNC?

People are failing to realize that under the guise of Russian election "meddling" that Congress and the government is clamping down on social media and all forms of popular internet communication within the US. It's a convenient way for the government to insert more control, more spying, and overall more power over how the masses freely communicate. It's akin to the Patriot Act where we as citizens had to give up our Constitutional freedoms in order to be "safer".

The rich and elite and corporations use the politicians and the media to control how the masses think.  Yet we don't live in a black and white world where that means someone like Trump is somehow a savior. He isn't. He supported an accused pedophile—9 women accused Roy Moore and 9 women weren't all lying—for political expediency. That, in anyone's eyes, should make Trump a piece of garbage not worthy of the office. The masses shouldn't have to pick sides like this is a game and Republicans and Democrats are akin to sports teams. Both major parties are terrible, much of the media is propaganda and our government—intelligence agencies included—are corrupt. We. Know. This. By. Now.

Yet we continue to fall for the game and let them divide us.

Why did the news push Trump 24/7 during the 2016 campaign? Ratings. $$$. Why did the news ignore Sanders during the primaries and even run constant hit pieces—looking at you WaPo—on him? Why did the news say Trump had no chance in hell of winning and showed Clinton winning every poll? Why did Anderson Cooper ask after Trump won on election night "Why would the public ever trust us after this?" Why are the top Democrats—Schumer and Pelosi—suddenly for many things in Bernie Sander's 2016 agenda that they openly and publicly scorned and joked about a year and a half ago?

This is modern day neolibralism at its finest. Ex CIA. A "Never Trumper" in 2016 that ran as a Republican alternative to Trump in several states. Lumping Bernie Sanders in with extremists.

Why is the media repeatedly whining about Trump attacking the 1st Amendment and the Constitution when it does the same thing with the 2nd Amendment? More people are killed by car accidents every year than death by guns. Ditto with cigarettes. All that whining about the opioid epidemic? Vastly more people are killed by cigarette smoking PER YEAR in the US than via opioids and gun related deaths combined. Actually more people die in ONE YEAR from cigarette smoking in the US than have been killed by opioids from 1999 to 2016. Yet I can walk into almost any gas station in the US and buy cigarettes, legally.

Both parties are corrupt. The media is corrupted. We know this yet we all remain apathetic to it. The system itself—low wages, student loan debt, credit card debt, the powers employers have over employees, lack of universal healthcare—is corrupt. The rich get richer and the percentage of the poor becomes larger and even poorer. We live in a misinformation and propaganda state where we are fucked over constantly and told to enjoy it. We are divided along political lines so infighting insues and so we won't pay attention to how we are being fucked over.

13 comments

3  rkowna 2018-02-23

This is nothing new, media is a business, and business wants to make a profit. I can't think of one media source, not just one mainstream media source, but one source period, that doesn't try to sell its product to a certain audience it identifies as its target. I think if you know the bias you can at least sift for information that is true, like panning for gold. And like panning for gold you are going to throw out more than you keep, far more in fact.

I was just watching an old Lenny Bruce clip from 1959. This clip is from when America was "great", not from when America was working to be great again. The media has gotten better at bullshit but I suspect if you found stone tablets of the first written news somewhere in it is bullshit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHW51JGtzS4

-2  HeavyWinter 2018-02-23

So you think jim crow laws were great?

3  rkowna 2018-02-23

What are you talking about? How does anything I said lead you to such a ridiculous conclusion?

0  HeavyWinter 2018-02-23

It was in reference to you saying that the 50s were when America was great. Great for who exactly? Everybody?

2  rkowna 2018-02-23

Did you see the quotes? I didn't say America was great, the quotes are exactly what they imply. This is an era some people believe was when America was "great". I don't, hence the quotes. And like the angry tone, so before I block you so I don't have to read anything you could potentially waste my time with in the future ellipses, those little marks, on either side of the word great, "great" so you can see it, implies the author is calling into question others, not their own, reverence for a time they don't believe was great.

3  feynmaniac 2018-02-23

Upvote for exposure. Too bad nowadays posts like these only get hate on here.

2  CitizenJetsam 2018-02-23

I secretly believe that a majority of Americans realize and agree with most of the points you illustrated. Sadly, we Americans, have been trained to not discuss religion and politics in "polite" company. Simultaneously we have been taught (conditioned) to argue and react emotionally to any opposing view point instead of critically and respectfully debating. We have, by design, denied ourselves the ability to listen to each other. We will never really know how similar in thought we all are or find the solutions to our problems because of this.

0  DaveSheepel 2018-02-23

Neoliberalism has and always will be the real conspiracy. Great post

-3  HeavyWinter 2018-02-23

Trump said he believed Putin when Putin said Russia didn’t meddle. The indictments prove that to be a lie.

Our own president doesn’t care that a foreign nation carried out an orchestrated attempt to disrupt our elections, steal the identities of American citizens, and foment chaos. It’s pathetic

3  ShinigamiSirius 2018-02-23

Original claims: Trump literally manchurian candidate!

We are at: Hey some Russians ran a troll farm and shitposted. Most of their tweets were factually accurate and used sources like Washington Post and CNN, and there is no evidence that they had anything to do with the Russian government. The kicker? ALL of the 13 Russians indicted by Meuller were already previously exposed by Russian journalists, years ago.

Oh, and all of the indictments are proccess crimes, financial crimes and corruption, which everyone, including the people "investigating," are guilty of. You have to be beyond ignorant if you think they are doing this for "justice" and not their own political gain. They aren't going to investigate themselves after this fiasco.

The following MPN article is very well-written, and anyone who wants a nonpartisan, factual outlook on what's happening should give this a read.

This section in particular details why these indictments mean nothing for "collusion":

https://www.mintpressnews.com/something-for-everyone-mueller-indictment-a-boon-for-partisan-status-quo/237970/

Partisan politics aside, there are many interesting facets of the indictment that have largely been glossed over by the mainstream press. Chief among these is the fact that no evidence was presented that shows that the Russian nationals were acting at the behest of the Russian government. They were foreign nationals who, as some have pointed out, were making internet memes and social media groups prompted by an economic motivation as opposed to having been motivated by a Russian intelligence operation to interfere in the U.S. political process.

Furthermore, journalist Adrian Chen, who in 2015 investigated the so-called “Russian troll farm” at the center of the indictment, has noted that its operations were unsophisticated and “ineffective,” and that its employees “have a bare grasp of the English language.” Also noteworthy is the fact that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein noted that the “troll farm’s” efforts did not affect the outcome of the 2016 presidential election, buoying Chen’s claims of the group’s ineffectiveness.

In addition, none of the 13 Russian nationals named in the indictment will ever face trial in the U.S. — meaning that Mueller and his team will never need to prove their case against them, as the evidence laid out in the indictment will never be scrutinized in a legal setting. Thus, the American public is unlikely to ever know if this recent indictment is fact-based or not. As McAdams pointed out, “prosecutors often lie and they may be lying here.”

Other criticisms of the indictment include the fact that, of the ads and social media campaigns allegedly produced by the Russian nationals, many were aired after the election and 25 percent were never seen at all — while some included content promoting Hillary Clinton, progressive causes like Black Lives Matter and even puppies.

https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/17/anti-trumpists-use-mueller-indictments-to-escalate-tensions-with-nuclear-armed-russia/

The word “Russians” is America’s top trend on Twitter at the time of this writing because of a Mueller indictment of 13 alleged members of a Russian troll farm, those nefarious supervillains who posted pictures of puppies and promoted Bernie Sanders to “sow discord in the U.S. political system, including the 2016 U.S. election.”

Predictably, no evidence is added to cohesively tie the establishment Russia narrative together with allegations of Russia hacking the Democratic Party and giving their emails to WikiLeaks, meeting with Donald Trump, Jr. at Trump Tower, any shenanigans with well-hydrated Russian prostitutes, or indeed anything tying the troll farm to Trump or the Russian government at all.

The focus instead is on people disguising their identities to troll Americans on social media, which we have now learned constitutes a “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” As Disobedient Media’s Elizabeth Lea Vos rightly points out, it is also behavior that the Hillary Clinton campaign is known to have funded and engaged in extensively.

In response to this underwhelming revelation, Democrats and Never-Trumpers are howling for new Cold War escalations with Russia. This despite the fact that this administration has already killed Russians in Syria, greatly escalated nuclear tensions with Russia, allowed the sale of arms to Ukraine (a move Obama refused for fear of angering Moscow), established a permanent military presence in Syria with the goal of effecting regime change, forced RT and Sputnik to register as foreign agents, expanded NATO with the addition of Montenegro, assigned Russia hawk Kurt Volker as special representative to Ukraine, shut down a Russian consulate in San Francisco and expelled Russian diplomats as part of continued back-and-forth hostile diplomatic exchanges.

1  Faux-Mulder 2018-02-23

Great Jimmy Dore show, with some facts I'd never heard before (troll farm discovered years ago). Your whole comment could be a separate new post.

1  ShinigamiSirius 2018-02-23

Thanks! Jimmy does a very good job consistently. The most interesting point IMO is in the MPN article (other than the troll farm's ineffectiveness):

In addition, none of the 13 Russian nationals named in the indictment will ever face trial in the U.S. — meaning that Mueller and his team will never need to prove their case against them, as the evidence laid out in the indictment will never be scrutinized in a legal setting. Thus, the American public is unlikely to ever know if this recent indictment is fact-based or not. As McAdams pointed out, “prosecutors often lie and they may be lying here.”

I'm just gonna keep reposting that comment to anyone who spouts "muh 13 indictments."