Our choices of news-services reflect our prejudices, and vice versa. It’s probably always been like that. Those who are always quoting conservative newspapers or mainstream TV are conservative and mainstream individuals; those whose references are to online blogs or forums (while ignoring the standard news-sources) are probably rebels and sceptics. People judge our characters by our choices. The internet has broadened the range, but the division is an old one.
What the internet changed, mainly, are the quality of the reporters and the independence of commentators’ opinions. The official news-media allows no departure from the Party Line. Indeed, it allows no departure from the teleprompter’s version.
A couple of months ago a Korean plane crashed while landing at a California airport. A local TV newsreader carefully read out the pilots’ names, while her audience could see the names printed on the separate video feed. Sum Ting Wong (Captain), Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk (she pronounced it “fook” rhyming with “book”) and Bang Ding Ow. You can Google those names, if you want to do your own peer review.
It was a one-off, and it would be unfair to build a case on one brief example of mindless recitation. Or would it? It did illustrate the mainstream zombies’ instructions to say what their superiors tell them to say – no hesitation, no doubts, no deviation.
An Israeli senior executive at the BBC ordered his minions to play down Israel’s bombing of a Gaza suburb during one of its raids. That sort of manipulation is common in the MSM these days. In general, it is beholden to its advertisers and to the legislators who can make life difficult – and to the lobbyists who own the legislators. A satirist on a US TV channel invented the word “truthiness” to describe the official versions of events.
The “alternative media” is free of such restraints. It offers alternatives to the official “truths”. Mainstream reporters, to a man and woman, presume they are reporting the truth; freelance bloggers increasingly presume they are being lied to by the authorities. The alternative media doubted Saddam Hussein had WMDs; the mainstream media weren’t allowed to doubt. If they were told sum ting wong, they reported it.
The mainstream news sources parrot the official versions of WTC #7 (the building that allegedly collapsed in its own footprint because of a few office fires), the gassings in Syria, the Iranian nuclear plans, and the death of Osama. The blogosphere insists the official stories are blatant propaganda, and wonders what is being covered up, and why. I myself jeered at the Osama lies in a post of May 2011, and at the infamous “wiped off the map” false-translation in February 2012. [Both posts available in the Archives.]
There is a gulf of mistrust. Parallels are being drawn with earlier false-flag attacks. The Reichstag Fire paved the way for Hitler’s equivalent of the so-called PATRIOT Act, also drafted ahead of the event. It has emerged that most of the military experts interviewed on Western TV are in the paid service of companies with a vested interest in Western wars. They are all part of a pro-war propaganda machine – TV stations and interviewees alike.
Unquestioning belief generates heresies that must be quashed, and heretics who must be persecuted. The MSM has become an arm of a 21st-Century Inquisition.
We are on a slippery slope, now, with a rapidly increasing distrust of officials and their mouthpieces. There is a disconnect between us and them. On the one side the establishment’s stooges and shills: on the other, amateurs and anarchists. There is little scope for compromise.
