LIBYA, Egypt, Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, are just but many of the hot spots that our media loves to tell us in gory details on how democracy is being trampled upon, just how ruthless the so-called despots who rule these countries with iron fists are and how the peoples of these far away lands are in need of democracy and how the American government needs to do something before all is lost.
Experience has taught me one thing, nothing is never as it seems on CNN, BBC or NBC or any other news channel because as the saying goes ‘there are three sides to every story’.
While traditionally the media’s role has been to objectively report, inform, entertain and educate its audiences, the growing power of the American corporation has made the Western media a tool to manipulate global events, perspectives and actions.
The mainstream media is the most obvious in its inherent bias and manipulation.
The mainstream media is owned directly by large multinational corporations, and through their boards of directors, are connected with a plethora of other major global corporations and elite interests.
An example of these connections can be seen through the board of Time Warner.
Time Warner owns Time Magazine, HBO, Warner Bros and CNN, among many others.
The board of directors includes individuals past or presently affiliated with: the Council on Foreign Relations, the International Monetary Fund, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Warburg Pincus, Phillip Morris, and AMR Corporation, among many others.
The major philanthropic foundations in the United States have often used their enormous wealth to co-opt voices of dissent and movements of resistance into channels that are safe for the powers that be.
As McGeorge Bundy, former President of the Ford Foundation once said, “Everything the Foundation does is to make the world safe for Capitalism.” Examples of this include philanthropies like the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation providing immense financial and organisational support to non-governmental organisations.
Furthermore, the alternative media are often funded by these same foundations, which have the effect of influencing the direction of coverage as well as the stifling of critical analysis.
The Israel Lobby uses the technique of branding everyone who criticises, no matter how constructively and moderately, any Israeli government policy, no matter how egregious, an anti-semite.
The Israeli government applies this tactic to its own Israeli political opposition and to Jews themselves who are branded, ‘self-hating Jews’ if they criticise government policy toward the Palestinians.
The effect is to deprive the Israeli government of constructive criticism.
Only the Israel Lobby could call former President Jimmy Carter an anti-semite. Anyone who is not totally enthusiastic about Israel’s theft of Palestinian lives and properties is an enemy of Israel.
During the Vietnam war when Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon papers, the New York Times published them.
However, during the Iraq war when a National Security Agency whistleblower leaked the information to the New York Times that the Bush regime was spying on Americans without obtaining warrants from the FISA court as required by law, the New York Times told the White House and sat on the story for a year until Bush was re-elected.
The newspaper might even have turned in the whistleblower.
When the Guardian and other newspapers were threatened by the US government, they turned on Julian Assange and Wikileaks, the suppliers of their headline stories.
Truth-tellers are inconvenient.
Major General Antonio Taguba was given the assignment of conducting the official inquiry into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse.
Instead of covering up the incidents as he was expected to do for his third star, he produced a professional and truthful report.
It was Taguba’s career that was terminated, not the careers of those responsible for the illegal torture of prisoners.
General Taguba was instructed to resign by General Richard Cody, the Vice-Chief of Staff of the Army.
When told that he was going to be investigated, Taguba said, “I’d been in the Army 32 years by then, and it was the first time that I thought I was in the Mafia.”
Al Jazeera was founded in the closing years of the 20th century to provide more objective news coverage of the Middle East than the spun news coverage of the Western media.
The news organisation soon fell afoul of Washington and its Middle Eastern puppet States and was reined in by censorship, threats, and actual physical attacks by US military forces on its Kabul and Baghdad offices.
Coming to recent events in Ukraine, the media has again force-fed us images of Putin the villain trying to start a new Cold War.
The media seems bent on convincing us that the whole referendum is some Russian plot to take over and once the ‘Russian invasion’ wins in Crimea, who knows which country is next.
But the truth in all this is that while Russia has had a part to play, the troubles in Ukraine began as an attempt by the West to instigate a coup in Ukraine through the fomentation and manipulation of a disillusioned minority, all in the hope of containing Russia.