Oké
mensen, niets nieuws, maar gezien het continu volhouden van leugens
in de reguliere westerse media (en door het grootste deel van de
politici), kan de waarheid niet vaak genoeg herhaald worden (als was het tegengif), inclusief het noemen van de bewijzen dat het om
leugens gaat. Dat geldt bijvoorbeeld voor alle leugens over ‘fake
news’ (nepnieuws), maar ook die over de illegale oorlogen van de VS
tegen Afghanistan, Irak, Libië, Syrië, Iran en Venezuela (de laatste
2 een economische oorlog die deze landen op de knieën moeten krijgen voor
de VS…..)…….

Overigens zijn de reguliere westerse (massa-) media in handen van super welgestelden (plutocraten) en investeringsmaatschappijen, die daarmee die media al sturen, ofwel winst über alles! Die winst gaat op zeker ver voor de waarheid, waarbij het inhumane neoliberalisme (‘fascisme light’) ten koste van alles moet worden beschermd en gepropageerd……. Over manipulaties gesproken……

Kit
Klarenberg is de schrijver van het hieronder opgenomen artikel,
eerder geplaatst op Sputnik, daarin beschrijft zij het boek van T.J. Coles met de
volgende titel: ‘Real Fake News: Techniques of Propaganda
and Deception-based Mind Control’.

Coles
gaat ook in op de geschiedenis van fake news, maar dan wel het ‘fake
news’ dat machthebbers gebruiken om hun positie veilig te
stellen…… Het eerst bekende gebruik van fake news was dat door de
Babylonische heersers, die daarmee hun goddelijke aanwijzing
probeerden te bewijzen (en dat lukte destijds wonderwel goed, later
nam het christelijk geloof het over om de koning en koningin als door god gegeven functies neer te zetten, deze achterlijke gedachtekronkel werd ook in de bijbel opgenomen). Terwijl de adel aanvankelijk bestond uit de sterkste en
wreedste boeren die de boel met veel geweld onder hun duim wisten te houden en het volk uitbuitten tot het erbij neerviel……..

Trouwens
over religies of geloven gesproken: als er één groot fake gebeuren
is zijn het de religies wel, al gaat het dan in het westen wel over ‘lang’ vervlogen tijden, tegenwoordig gebruikt men zoals gezegd de media (en de
politiek) als vehikel om ‘fake news’ (nepnieuws) te brengen……. De voorbeelden
van het verkondigen van fake news zijn overweldigend zie wat dat
betreft niet alleen het bericht hierna, maar ook de links die na dat
artikel zijn opgenomen.

HOW
ELITES USE MAINSTREAM MEDIA TO ‘MAINTAIN AND EXPAND THEIR POWER’

Tags:
NOVEMBER
18, 2018 FRIENDS
OF GREED 3ELITISM, FAKE
NEWS, MEDIA, POLITICS, PROPAGANDA,SPUTNIK

(Sputnik)
– For
quite some time, debate about ‘fake news’ has reverberated
clamorously in both mainstream and alternative discourse. One could
easily conclude the issue was a pressingly new plague, restricted to
certain corners of the web – but academic TJ Coles begs to differ.
In fact, he tells Sputnik fake news has been ubiquitous for thousands
of years.

It’s
difficult to pinpoint the precise moment the term ‘fake news’
entered the Western political and media lexicon, but the
election of Donald Trump as US President certainly
turbocharged its usage. For the controversial leader and his
supporters, the label can be automatically applied to any and
all media reporting critical of him, while his opponents play
much the same game when roles are reversed.

This
tit-for-tat sparring inspired TJ, director of the Institute
for Peace Research, to write a book on the subject —
the fruit of his labours, Real
Fake News: Techniques of Propaganda and Deception-based Mind
Control,
was published in September.

“All
that talk made me think ‘hang on a minute, we’ve always had
fake news’. It’s the nature of power — all power
structures want to maintain and expand their power, so it’s
therefore important to present information that benefits them,
and keeps populations in a psychological and/or intellectual
prison. The ‘fake news’ peddled by elite financial,
commercial and political financial interests, duly regurgitated
by major media organizations, eclipses any bogus story
perpetuated by alleged ‘bots’ on Twitter, or whatever,”
TJ says.

BABYLONIAN
BEGINNINGS

In
his work, TJ traces the birth of fake news all the way back
to ancient Babylon, when rulers sought to perpetuate the
notion they were descended from Gods and thus had a right
to dominate and control the populace — history’s first
recorded instance of the ‘divine right of kings’.

Similarly,
Plato famously popularized the idea of the ‘noble lie’ —
privileging untruths told for the benefit of elites and the
population alike. These ideas very much endure in the modern
day — TJ notes Wikileaks’ dump of the Clinton
campaign’s internal emails amply demonstrates her team felt it
wouldn’t be good, or necessary, for Hillary’s supporters
to be aware of her close connections to Wall Street,
so did their utmost to conceal the mephitic kinship.

“Elites
the world over are acutely aware information is power, and
actually quite open about their use and abuse of the news
to shape public perceptions and preserve sociopolitical
conditions benefitting them. For instance, the UK Ministry of Defence
regularly publishes projections of how planners think the world
will look in 10 — 20 years, and they routinely note the
media is one of the key ways to maintain the current
paradigm, and discuss the various ways information can be
‘weaponized’ against the public,” he says.

TJ
suggests elites shape and control the public mind so effectively
because they exploit fundamental facets of human nature. First,
the well-established instinctive inclination to reflexively
believe something reinforcing one’s existing beliefs, rather
than assessing whether alternative facts or viewpoints have any
value, or indeed considering whether what one believes might be
wrong, or informed by confirmation bias.

This
tendency is greatly exacerbated by the use of internet and
social media algorithms that present a ‘personalized’ picture
of the world to users, unfailingly presenting individuals
with content they want to see, and tacitly suppressing
information contrary to their existing opinions.

“Elites
also know how easy it is to exploit guilt, which is why atrocity
propaganda is so widespread today. Most sympathize with the
victims of major atrocities, and naturally want to do
something to help, so this aspect of human nature can be
easily manipulated to justify aggressive foreign policy
actions — ‘look at what we’re letting happen to poor
defenceless people, we have a responsibility to protect them’
etcetera. It’s funny, when it comes to the economy, the
powerful are quick to say people are naturally selfish, so it’s
everyone for themselves, but when it comes to foreign
policy, we should care about our fellow human beings and do
something to help,” TJ says.

ABSENCE
IS EVIDENCE

As
the academic’s work makes clear, atrocity propaganda doesn’t even
need to have any grounding in reality whatsoever. In the
lead-up to the NATO-backed violent overthrow of Libyan
leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, the mainstream media was awash
with reports government forces fuelled by viagra were
conducting mass rapes of civilians, and planning a borderline
genocidal massacre of rebel forces — claims used
to justify the imposition of a no-fly zone over the
country, and NATO airstrikes.

The
stories were subsequently found to be entirely
without foundation —
similarly, serious question marks hover over the veracity
of numerous
claimed chemical
weapons attacks in Syria, which likewise have provided a pretext
for Western attacks on the country.

“It’s
especially easy to exploit guilt when you present bite-sized
news reports about an atrocious event stripped of all
context, and exclude the voices of people who are actually
on the ground. Occasionally, contradictory voices do filter
through the system, although largely by accident. For
instance, the BBC made the mistake of inviting Peter Ford,
former UK ambassador to Syria, on air to discuss
chemical weapons attacks — he quickly demolished their
propaganda. He hasn’t been invited back since,” TJ says.

Ford
is surely but one of a great many talking heads
to effectively be banned from appearing on the BBC
for daring to state views and evidence contrary
to ascendant elite narratives. However, the British state
broadcaster’s blacklisting activities also extend to its own
employees — in April
2018,
the BBC admitted that for decades, job applicants and serving
staff were subject to political vetting by MI5, in an
effort to prevent “subversives” gaining employment with the
Corporation.

Often,
individuals were ostracized on extremely tenuous grounds. For
instance, respected film director John Goldschmidt was blacklisted
in the late 1960s, with two projects he was working on for
the Beeb cancelled midway through production without warning
or explanation — MI5 deemed him a potential subversive as he’d
spent a few weeks in Czechoslovakia in his youth, as part
of a student exchange program. Similarly, award-winning
journalist Isabel Hilton was refused a job by BBC Scotland
in 1976 — that she spoke Chinese and had been a member
of Scottish China Association at Edinburgh University made
MI5 extremely anxious.

Under
the policy, popular children’s book author and playwright Michael
Rosen was also outright sacked from the BBC in 1972 while a
graduate trainee for a number of ‘transgressions’, including
student activism at Oxford, and producing a film featuring clips
of US soldiers being tested with LSD. The American Embassy
in London complained about the project to both MI5 and
the BBC directly, whereupon Rosen was shown the door.

The
policy was wound down in the 1990s, and it’s unknown whether
any comparable structures existed at other major news
organizations — although City
University research suggests
dissenting voices remain rare in the British mainstream media.
The 2016 study concluded UK journalists are overwhelmingly white,
male, and elite-university educated — and are far more
trusting of politicians, the government, police and military
than the general population, which the study’s authors partly
attributed to reporters’ “reliance on these
institutions as sources of information”.

Such
widespread faith in the establishment may account for why
so many prominent reporters see no problem with maintaining
close relationships with the intelligence services. The
Guardian’s Luke Harding has frequently, openly and proudly
advertised his warm bond with British spying agencies
in articles and books — and equally frequently been
condemned for uncritically running stories of questionable
probity potentially provided to him by agency staff. In
a September article he
claimed Russian diplomats had held secret talks in London
with associates of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, in an
attempt to assist in his escape from the UK. The
covert action would’ve allegedly seen Assange smuggled out of
the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge under cover
of Christmas Eve in a diplomatic vehicle and transported
to Moscow.

The
story was entirely based on the testimony of anonymous
sources, the identity of which Harding didn’t even hint at in
the piece. In response, Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador
to Uzbekistan, slammed the article, calling it a “quite
extraordinary set of deliberate lies” and “entirely black
propaganda” published by an “MI6 tool”.

“I
was closely involved with Julian and with Fidel Narvaez
of the Ecuadorean Embassy at the end of last year
in discussing possible future destinations for Julian. It
is not only the case Russia did not figure in those plans, it is
a fact Julian directly ruled out the possibility as undesirable.
The entire story is a complete and utter fabrication. It is very
serious indeed when a newspaper like the Guardian prints a
tissue of deliberate lies in order to spread fake news
on behalf of the security services. I cannot find words
eloquent enough to express the depth of my contempt
for Harding and Katherine Viner, who have betrayed completely
the values of journalism,” Murray wrote.

Similarly,
in 2007 the Campaign Against Sanctions and Military Intervention
in Iran published
an analysis of
44 articles written by Daily Telegraph Defence Editor Con
Couglin on Iran — including stories suggesting North
Korea was helping Tehran prepare a nuclear weapons test, and the
country was grooming Bin Laden’s successor. They found the pieces
almost invariably were based on “unnamed or untraceable” sources
in intelligence agencies or the UK Foreign Office and “published
at sensitive and delicate times” when there’d been
“relatively positive diplomatic moves” towards Iran, and
contained ‘exclusive revelations’ about Iran combined
with eye-catchingly controversial headlines, which were
typically based on a single sentence in the wider article.

PRISON
BREAK

Despite
his bleak analysis, TJ does not view the elite monopoly
on information as insurmountable, or invincible —
there’s much individuals and groups can do to shatter the
stranglehold.

“People
should keep a keen eye on sources that analyse news reporting
and misreporting, such as Glasgow
University Media Group and MediaLens,
which offer alternative information and tell you what media coverage
is actively omitting from the real story. However, change must
come from within too — people should divorce themselves
from preconceptions, and question their beliefs wherever and
whenever possible. When presented with information that doesn’t
conform to our predispositions, we should ask ourselves whether
it’s true, rather than reflexively dismissing it outright,”
TJ says.

While
having less trust in the media more generally is a must, the
academic also warns against placing too much faith
in alternative news outlets and social networks, despite them
being valuable resources with a significant positive potential.

“Independent
media is growing in size and strength, but its overall
reach is still relatively tiny — while print circulation is
obviously down, people still get the vast bulk of their
information from mainstream outlets. Similarly, social media
could’ve democratized the spread of information, but it
hasn’t — and in fact any such potential has probably
been neutered by the proliferation of ‘fact-checking’
resources, which are anything but unbiased and disinterested
arbiters of truth,” TJ notes.

One-such
‘fact-checker’ is the Atlantic Council, a NATO-offshoot
with a board
of directors comprised
of a ‘who’s who’ of contentious US political figures,
including Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, Robert
Gates, Michael Hayden and David Petraeus, among others.

It
partnered with Facebook in May to “independently monitor
disinformation and other vulnerabilities” and combat the spread
of fake news on the platform. To
date,
the collaboration has resulted in untold hundreds of pages
and personal accounts being shut down — rather than being
promulgators of propaganda though, the overwhelming bulk of the
banished were alternative news sources, political organizations and
individuals, highlighting issues and events the mainstream media
downplays or ignores, such as US interventionism, drug
legalization and police brutality.

Moreover,
that elites exploit social media’s information-sharing capabilities
to suit their own objectives is well-established.

“The
US State Department has used major social networks to recruit
revolutionaries on several occasions, most notably during the
‘Arab Spring’, connecting ‘moderate rebels’ — actually
violent jihadist lunatics — in select countries.
Washington wanted Assad, Gaddafi and Mubarak gone, because they
weren’t following orders — but there were no
Twitter or Facebook ‘revolutions’ in the Gulf states,
because the American empire wanted their rulers to remain
in place. In Cuba, the CIA even went as far as creating
a social network for the same purpose,” TJ concludes.

The
views and opinions expressed by the contributors do not
necessarily reflect those of Sputnik

This
report prepared by Kit
Klarenberg for Sputnik

=========================================

Zie ook:

‘New York Times: eerste Israëlische inval in Gazastrook sinds 2014 >> fake news!‘

‘Noord-Koreaans ‘bedrog met nucleaire deal’ is fake news o.a. gebracht door de New York Times‘

‘‘Fake News’ misbruikt door dictaturen en de reguliere (massa-) media‘

‘Twitter weert waarheid: Paul Craig Roberts in de ban, Roberts >> de grote criticus van de illegale oorlogen die de VS voert‘

‘Russiagate sprookje ondermijnt VS democratie en de midterm verkiezingen‘

‘Bolsonaro, de fascistische nieuwe president van Brazilië, werd volgens Avaaz en fake news brengers als de NYT gekozen door manipulatie via WhatsApp‘

‘Facebooks zuivering van de alternatieve (nieuws) media staat nog in de kinderschoenen‘

‘Politico rapport bevestigt: Russiagate is een hoax‘ (Russiagate, de enorme leugen op basis waaraan we de huidige censuurgolf te danken hebben……)