De Oorlogsstaat 34

De Amerikaanse journalist Charles Sullivan schrijft: 'Ignorance by Content and Omission... No thinking person should assume that the corporate media is neutral or objective. They are not; however, they try to give the impression that they are. All for profit institutions have an agenda—the accumulation of private wealth. Credibility is important to them, facts are not. Like their brethren in the defense and oil industries, the corporate media is amassing fortunes by supporting an agenda of war and world domination. In a capitalist society the role of the media is not to inform and to educate—it is to make money by any and all available means. Capitalism does not care how its fortunes are made. Its modus operandi is Machiavellian: ends justify the means. Capitalism is unbridled greed unleashed upon the world for the privatization of wealth. It allows a small group of business owners and investors to get rich by exploiting the under class of all nations. Relatively few Americans are aware of the extent to which the corporate media played in putting George Bush in power, or the pandering of propaganda and outright lies that keep him there. They are unaware that under the guidance of ultra conservative Grover Norquist, a group of eighty of the nation’s wealthiest people gathers in the nation’s capital every week. This gathering, as one might expect, is not innocuous or benign. Its purpose is to create the talking points that will be purveyed each week in the commercial media to further their agenda. In essence, this group defines the news for the week and the manner in which it will be presented for public consumption. Their reach is enormous and their sole motivation is profit and power for the elite. Not only does Norquist’s group literally write the scripts followed by Rush Limbaugh and his robotic drones, it provides the content that defines the evening news and the daily newspapers. Every mainstream televised and audio program should be preceded by a Surgeon General’s Warning: Use of this product may be hazardous to your health! Thus every television and radio network incessantly preaches the same propaganda from the individual pulpits of class privilege. The key talking points are the same whether on Fox, CNN, CBS or ABC; or the nation’s newspapers. Likewise, conservative talk radio receives its marching orders directly from Norquist’s intimate group of billionaires. This is not benign advocacy for a particular point of view—it is blatant propaganda and outright lies packaged and sold as news. Without the aide of the corporate media and Norquist’s billionaires, we would not have invaded Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people would still be alive. We might even have taken global warming seriously and done something about it before it was too late. Truth and integrity might still mean something. Little by little the minds of the people have been poisoned by propaganda and it is called nourishment. As a result the more noble traits of our culture are incrementally dying. Through the judicious use of lies and distortions the people are deceived into supporting the atrocities of war and conquest that are committed in their name. Historical context reveals the unmistakable patterns that make these behaviors readily visible and renders them understandable to the present moment. The lack of historical perspective leaves one vulnerable to the lies and distortions that have always characterized our government. Of course, this historical context is not taught in our schools for reasons that should be obvious.' Lees verder: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12588.htm