The Newspaper of War

[Octafish]

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident.

The Newspaper of War

by Howard Friel
Published on Tuesday, May 13, 2014 by Common Dreams

Many years ago, Ho Chi Minh’s North Vietnam, Communist China, and Soviet Russia were saying one thing about what had happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August 1964, while President Johnson and top administration officials were all saying the exact opposite. How should the Times have responded to that situation, assuming a commitment to an independent press and an informed citizenry?

Ten years earlier, in July 1954, the governments of Britain, France, the Soviet Union, and China all signed the Final Declaration of the Geneva Accord on Vietnam, which formally concluded France’s U.S.-supported colonial war in Vietnam. The United States refused to sign, and thereafter proceeded to undermine the most important stipulation of the accord – that elections to unify the northern and southern zones of Vietnam take place in 1956. By what journalistic criteria should the New York Times have covered this refusal by the Eisenhower administration to sign and comply with the Geneva Accord on Vietnam, which opened the door to the twenty-year American military campaign in Vietnam?

When Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, and Rice claimed in 2001-2003 that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, including an active nuclear weapons program, and when Saddam Hussein denied those claims, what journalistic standard did the Times apply in its response to those conflicting claims?

Journalism schools should teach a course focused on questions like these, given that over the past sixty years the Times and every other mainstream news organization has repeatedly flunked such tests, in each instance aiding the government’s efforts in its illegal interventions and wars.

CONTINUED...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/13-0

This is the "paper of record" that gave us Judith Miller and aluminum tubes, while failing to mention word that George W Bush's illegal domestic spying operation until after Selection 2004. I also want to emphasize this paper has done all it can to keep up the fiction that Lee Harvey Oswald alone shot President John F. Kennedy, who had ordered withdrawal of the U.S. from Vietnam. In addition, this is an important read for those interested in seeing how Corporate McPravda exclusively serves the warmongers and not the People, as intended by the nation's Founders in the First Amendment to the Constitution.

[Fred Sanders]

1. American news companies are the laughing stock of the world, resulting in a massively

misinformed public that is massively obedient......just as planned. The homogenous and compliant American mass media is the envy of democratic rulers everywhere.

And you thought the Lies of Iraq would change the business models?

[Octafish]

2. Thanks, Fred Sanders! It's why I still try.

A decent overview...

The Propaganda System That Has Helped Create a Permanent Overclass Is Over a Century in the Making

Pulling back the curtain on how intent the wealthiest Americans have been on establishing a propaganda tool to subvert democracy.

Wednesday, 17 April 2013 00:00
By Andrew Gavin Marshall, AlterNet | News Analysis

Where there is the possibility of democracy, there is the inevitability of elite insecurity. All through its history, democracy has been under a sustained attack by elite interests, political, economic, and cultural. There is a simple reason for this: democracy – as in true democracy – places power with people. In such circumstances, the few who hold power become threatened. With technological changes in modern history, with literacy and education, mass communication, organization and activism, elites have had to react to the changing nature of society – locally and globally.

From the late 19th century on, the “threats” to elite interests from the possibility of true democracy mobilized institutions, ideologies, and individuals in support of power. What began was a massive social engineering project with one objective: control. Through educational institutions, the social sciences, philanthropic foundations, public relations and advertising agencies, corporations, banks, and states, powerful interests sought to reform and protect their power from the potential of popular democracy.

SNIP...

The development of psychology, psychoanalysis, and other disciplines increasingly portrayed the “public” and the population as irrational beings incapable of making their own decisions. The premise was simple: if the population was driven by dangerous, irrational emotions, they needed to be kept out of power and ruled over by those who were driven by reason and rationality, naturally, those who were already in power.

The Princeton Radio Project, which began in the 1930s with Rockefeller Foundation funding, brought together many psychologists, social scientists, and “experts” armed with an interest in social control, mass communication, and propaganda. The Princeton Radio Project had a profound influence upon the development of a modern "democratic propaganda" in the United States and elsewhere in the industrialized world. It helped in establishing and nurturing the ideas, institutions, and individuals who would come to shape America’s “democratic propaganda” throughout the Cold War, a program fostered between the private corporations which own the media, advertising, marketing, and public relations industries, and the state itself.

CONTINUED...

http://truth-out.org/news/item/15784-the-propaganda-system-that-has-helped-create-a-permanent-overclass-is-over-a-century-in-the-making

Profits are way down for the industry, but, somehow, Rupert Murdoch manages to turn a buck. The nice man recently expressed interest in purchasing the Gray Lady.

[Octafish]

3. NYT publishes Michael Kinsley's First Amendment hit piece

The paper of record prefers authority, as in the wealthy and powerful, over democratic authority, as in the First Amendment.

Michael Kinsley Piles on Greenwald and the Free Press

by Matthew Rothschild
Published on Friday, May 23, 2014 by The Progressive

Michael Kinsley goes after Glenn Greenwald in a nasty review that was just published by the New York Times and that will appear in this Sunday’s Week in Review.

At stake not only is Greenwald’s reputation but the very notion of what constitutes freedom of the press on national security issues.

Kinsley dumps on Greenwald with ad hominem attacks, saying, “Greenwald seems like a self-righteous sourpuss,” and calling him bombastic and comparing him to Robespierre and Trotsky.

More seriously, he takes the side of David Gregory, host of Meet the Press, who asked Greenwald, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden . . . why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?”

SNIP...

As Hugo Black noted, the First Amendment explicitly protects the journalistic profession in unequivocal terms. And it does so for the best of reasons: to serve as a check on the very government that Kinsley wants to give more power to.

SOURCE: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/05/23-1

FTR: I defended Kinsley when a NAZI called him a "worm" on Crossfire. I still would.