Swiss Propaganda Research — The Propaganda Multiplier: How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics

It is one of the most important aspects of our media system, and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York [AP], London [Reuters] and Paris [AFP]....

Why you can't always (ever?) believe what you see and hear on "the news," which is actually an echo chamber.The obvious question is, echoing whose voices? The article attempts to answer this but the subject is purposefully oblique and amorphous.

At the same time, actual news is dismissed as fake and investigative reporting is dismissed as conspiracy theory, while whistleblowers are persecuted and if possible prosecuted, while "anonymous sources" are treated as authoritative.

This would all remain unknown if it were not for the Internet, and the powers that be are now seeking to regain control of the narrative by introduction censorship, either directly or indirectly by "de-platforming."

This is incompatible with a functioning democracy, whether direct or representative.

True Publica
The Propaganda Multiplier: How Global News Agencies and Western Media Report on Geopolitics
Swiss Propaganda Research

See also

Russia Insider
The Oligarch Takeover of US media

John Hellevig

T. J. Coles — How Fake News Perpetuates Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is a toxic economic dogma that has serious social and political consequences. In Britain and the US, mainstream media have a long record of selling neoliberalism to the public and political lawmakers. Recall Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s slogan, “There is no alternative” (TINA). As I document in my new book, Real Fake News (Red Pill Press), elites throughout history have always used information to control the thoughts and actions of the public. But the modern project has stretched itself to the limit, and people are starting to say No.…

Fake news is perception management through narrative control, reality being a function of perception. When most of one's reality is not experienced directly, which Bertrand Russell called "knowledge by acquaintance." Rather, it is shaped by testimony, which Russell called "knowledge by description."

Knowledge by description is heavily influenced by authority. When authoritative sources are corrupted, perception strays from reality, which cannot endure in the long run. Truth will out and is victorious eventually. But deception can go on a long time before events that are experienced contradict "authoritative" reports.

Take, for example, the mainstream’s fake news about the crash. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University published a report on mainstream media coverage in the US and Europe. The authors found that one of the goals of big businesses, which rely on PR firms that often hand copy to journalists, is to perpetuate a “narrative of normality,” in which their greed is kept out of public view for as long as possible. As the authors put it, “no news is good news.” When a crisis does occur, the task is perception management.

“[S]tories originate from six main categories of sources,” the researchers found: from journalists, corporations, analysts, authorities and politicians and shareholders. Notice that unions, activists, alternative currency purveyors and dissident academics are not included. They can be found in the alternative online media and are thus at risk of being labelled “fake news” by the powerful. “When excluding the ‘default category’ of journalists, most of the information in news stories about the banking crisis comes from banks themselves.” Indeed, more than half came from financial institutions. “On average 52% of all information comes from banks, another 18% from analysts/experts.”…

Renegade, Inc.
How Fake News Perpetuates Neoliberalism

T. J. Coles | postdoctoral researcher at Plymouth University’s Cognition Institute and the author of several books, including Real Fake News

See also

RT
Tanks on Maidan, president’s gold bath & more outrageous Ukraine fakes by disgraced Spiegel reporter

DW (Deutsche Welle)
Opinion: Truth is the first casualty of Claas Relotius
The Guardian (UK)
Der Spiegel to run 23-page special on reporter who faked stories

AFP

Sputnik International — EXCLUSIVE: How Liberal Media 'Operates as Propaganda System for State Power'

In 2001 David Cromwell and David Edwards founded the website MediaLens, which scrutinizes the work of the mainstream media coverage. The experience has led them to a stark conclusion - "the Western 'free press' operates as a propaganda system for state-corporate power".…

"Mainstream news outlets don't merely distort, hype or 'sex up' — they reverse the truth, render issues completely impossible to understand, and ignore the most important facts, arguments and voices. It's an awesomely effective form of thought control, all happening in the absence of any controlling conspiracy. The key to understanding this was supplied by Noam Chomsky — 'the basic principle, rarely violated, is what conflicts with the requirements of power and privilege does not exist'," they tell Sputnik.…

"The Times, Telegraph and Daily Mail set limits on the extent to which racism, warmongering and open class war are acceptable in the mainstream. So it's vital to ask why The Guardian isn't publishing Chomsky's most excoriating critiques of Western power, rather than why The Times isn't — for if his work doesn't appear in The Guardian, it doesn't appear anywhere, and if it's not appearing anywhere, then we don't have a 'free press', which is a problem. The limits on free speech liberal media has imposed have had disastrous consequences for our own society and societies such Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen," they say.… 

To say the least, MediaLens' work has won the Davids few not a single friend in the corporate media — after all, their work places journalists "in an impossible situation".

For instance, Owen Jones and George Mobiot, The Guardian's best-known progressive commentators, have frequently clashed with the pair via email and social media. While revered by many readers as "dissidents" providing "no-holds barred commentary" on key issues, MediaLens has identified many major, crucial shortcomings in their analysis, which mean they fit easily into the mainstream propaganda matrix as any other journalist.

Moreover, the remaining filter — of elite ownership — still applies to The Guardian to a sizeable degree. Historically, the paper was owned by non-profit entity the Scott Trust, but it was wound up in 2008 and replaced by a limited company — its board is comprised of individuals with links to banking, insurance, advertising, consumer goods, telecommunications, information technology, venture investment, marketing services and other sectors of the establishment. As a result, the paper almost inescapably ends up serving power — but neither Jones nor Monbiot can discuss that openly....

Another reason to add to the list of why the Western elites hate Sputnik.

Sputnik International
EXCLUSIVE: How Liberal Media 'Operates as Propaganda System for State Power'

Jesse — Remembering Ed Schultz, Kind Of - This Is the World That We Live In Now

Remembering a patriot and champion of workers driven out and then degraded by the corporate culture. Sad, and a warning that difference and dissent won't be tolerated if it gains power and voice.

Jesse's Café Américain
Remembering Ed Schultz, Kind Of - This Is the World That We Live In Now

Jesse

See also

The Intercept
MSNBC Does Not Merely Permit Fabrications Against Democratic Party Critics. It Encourages and Rewards Them.

Glenn Greenwald

See also

Former MSNBC host Ed Schultz has broken his silence on his final months at the network, stating that MSNBC president Phil Griffin told him to not cover Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary.

YouTube

BBC — News Eddie Adams' iconic Vietnam War photo: What happened next

The BBC attempts to whitewash a murder.

Warning: This story includes Adams' photo of the moment of the shooting, and graphic descriptions of it.

It was an execution but war justified it, you see.

The article laments that the murder's career was (almost) destroyed by it.

Reminiscent of the many years of British colonialism, and why the Brits became hated even by their close neighbors, the Irish, who were also colonized. (Disclosure: I inculcated in the details of this as a child by the Irish side of my family.)

But the West is civilized, right? And Great Britain was the birthplace of liberalism as the foundation of the "Free World."

Inquiring minds wonder why this story was planted now.

BBC News
Eddie Adams' iconic Vietnam War photo: What happened next

Elizabeth Vos — Facebook Cracks Down On Independent Media, Under Guise Of ‘Enhancing Relationships’

Corporate media initiates "self-censorship" since government censorship is illegal.  The result is the same and few believe that the move is self-initiated.

Disobedient Media
Facebook Cracks Down On Independent Media, Under Guise Of ‘Enhancing Relationships’
Elizabeth Vos

Mainstream Media and Imperial Power — Dennis Bernstein and Randy Credico interview John Pilger

Noted journalist and filmmaker John Pilger’s collection of work has been archived by the British Library, but deep-rooted problems of Western media create an increasingly difficult landscape for ethical journalism, as Pilger explained in an interview with Dennis Bernstein and Randy Credico....

Consortium News
Mainstream Media and Imperial Power

Dennis Bernstein and Randy Credico interview John Pilger

Tim Hayward — The Guardian, White Helmets, and silenced comment

Setting the record straight on the fake news about the White Helmets and suppression of dissent.

Renegade News
The Guardian, White Helmets, and silenced comment

Tim Hayward | Professor of Environmental Political Theory at At Edinburgh University and founding Director of the Just World Institute and the Ethics Forum. He is a founding member of the Britain and Ireland Association for Political Thought

See also

It's so absurd it's hard to believe, but when it comes to US policy absurdity has been par for the course over the past years. At an international meeting hosted by France on global chemical weapons proliferation Secretary of State Rex Tillerson blamed both Syria's President Bashar al-Assad and Russia for carrying out a purported new chemical attack in the Damascus suburb of East Ghouta. Speaking from Paris on Tuesday, Tillerson said, "Whoever conducted the attacks Russia ultimately bears responsibility for the victims in eastern Ghouta and countless other Syrians targeted with chemical weapons since Russia became involved in Syria."

That's right - in the same sentence Tillerson leveled the accusation against Russia, while simultaneously pointing the finger at Assad, he admitted that he really doesn't know much at all about "whoever conducted the attacks"....

Zero Hedge
Tillerson Blames Russia For Alleged Syria Chemical Attack After Admitting He Doesn't Actually Know Who Did It
Tyler Durden

Edward S. Herman — Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017

It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of “fake news.” These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of government, and sites of corporate power.

An important form of mainstream media fake news is that which is presented while suppressing information that calls the preferred news into question.…

Controlling the narrative.

Monthly Review
Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017
Edward S. Herman

Edward Samuel Herman (April 7, 1925 – November 11, 2017) was professor emeritus of finance at the Wharton School of Business of the University of Pennsylvania and a media analyst with a specialty in corporate and regulatory issues as well as political economy. He also taught at Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. He is probably best known for developing the propaganda model of media criticism with Noam Chomsky. Wikipedia

See also

Recent revelations have simple, credible explanations that are overshadowed by conspiracy theories and hype.

Bloomberg View
Simpler Explanations Are Usually Correct. Even on Russia.
Leonid Bershidsky

Caitlin Johnstone — I’ve Been Banned From Facebook For Sharing An Article About False Flags

The censorship saga continues

In a corporatist system of government, corporate censorship is state censorship. When there’s no meaningful space between corporate power and government power, it doesn’t make much difference whether the guy silencing your dissent is Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Sessions. America most definitely has such a system.

If they’re going to get us locked down and propagandized into their vapid brain boxes, this will be how they’ll do it. Not by government censorship, but by corporate censorship. Government can’t make an overt attempt to stop a dissenting voice from speaking, but the corporations who own the venue of their speech can.

Corporations working with government on policy has a name — corporate statism aka fascism aka transnational corporate totalitarianism.

"It can't happen here."

Looks like it is already in gear and shifting up.

Medium
I’ve Been Banned From Facebook For Sharing An Article About False Flags

Caitlin Johnstone

Robert Parry — How War Propaganda Keeps on Killing

The “fake news” hysteria has become the cover for the U.S. government and mainstream media to crack down on fact-based journalism that challenges Official Washington’s “group thinks,” writes Robert Parry....

A key reason why American foreign debacles have been particularly destructive mostly to the countries attacked but also to the United States is that these interventions are always accompanied by major U.S. government investments in propaganda. So, even when officials recognize a misjudgment has been made, the propaganda machinery continues to grind on to prevent a timely reversal.

In effect, Official Washington gets trapped by its own propaganda, which restricts the government’s ability to change direction even when the need for a shift becomes obvious.

After all, once a foreign leader is demonized, it’s hard for a U.S. official to explain that the leader may not be all that bad or is at least better than the likely alternative. So, it’s not just that officials start believing their own propaganda, it’s that the propaganda takes on a life of its own and keeps the failed policy churning forward....

Even if a President Trump decides that these tensions with Russia are absurd and that the two countries can work together in the fight against terrorism and other international concerns, the financing of the New Cold War propaganda will continue.

The well-funded drumbeat of anti-Russian propaganda will seek to limit Trump’s decision-making. After all, this latest New Cold War cash cow can be milked for years to come and nothing – not even the survival of the human species – is more important than that.

Consortium News
How War Propaganda Keeps on Killing

Robert Parry

Anthony DiMaggio — Post-Fact Politics: Reviewing the History of Fake News and Propaganda

My point is simple: fake news is nothing new.  We have long lived in a post-truth society, with political propaganda dominating the “mainstream” news media, and contributing to disinformation campaigns aimed at manipulating public opinion.  Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky documented the propagandistic elements of the news media in detail in their seminal Manufacturing Consent (MC) nearly three decades ago.  Other works preceding MC – such as Herbert Schiller’s The Mind Managers – also emphasized the efforts of political, economic, and media elites to manipulate public preferences via propaganda.

I’ve devoted my academic career to spotlighting propaganda, writing numerous books on the subject.  So it’s more than a little disturbing when I see references to “propaganda” in the corporate press that completely obscure the broader role that manipulation plays in reinforcing domestic political-economic elites’ agendas and in padding the pocketbooks of corporate media conglomerates.  Empirical media studies have documented since the 1970s the overwhelming government dominance of the news. Government control of the news is uncontroversially labeled propaganda in dictatorships like North Korea and the old Soviet Union, but when journalists working for private media corporations willingly roll over for government interests, allowing them to monopolize newspapers and the airwaves in favor of their own agendas, we call it “objectivity.”  So it is in an effort to add some sanity to our modern discussion of propaganda that I draw CounterPunch readers’ attention to the longstanding existence of fake news propaganda in U.S. media....

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Counterpunch
Post-Fact Politics: Reviewing the History of Fake News and Propaganda

Anthony DiMaggio | Assistant Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University

David Edwards — Fake News About 'Fake News' - The Media Performance Pyramid

To reiterate, 'fake news' is said to refer to 'websites [that] publish hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation to drive web traffic'. A simple, table-top experiment can help us understand why this definition can be generalised to all corporate media, not just social media.

Place a square wooden framework on a flat surface and pour into it a stream of ball bearings, marbles, or other round objects. Some of the balls may bounce out, but many will form a layer within the wooden framework; others will then find a place atop this first layer. In this way, the flow of ball bearings steadily builds new layers that inevitably produce a pyramid-style shape.

This experiment is used to demonstrate how near-perfect crystalline structures such as snowflakes arise in nature without conscious design. We will use it here as a way of understanding Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's 'propaganda model' of 'mainstream' performance.

Imagine now that the four sides of the wooden framework are labelled to indicate the framing conditions shaping the corporate media:

1. Corporate nature, elite/parent company ownership and profit-maximising orientation
2. Dependence on allied corporate advertisers for 50% or more of revenues
3. Dependence on cheap, subsidised news supplied by state-corporate allies
4. Political, economic, legal carrots and sticks rewarding corporate media conformity and punishing dissent

When facts, ideas, journalists and managers are poured into this framework, the result is a highly filtered, power-friendly 'pyramid' of media performance. Every aspect of corporate media output is shaped by these framing conditions.…

Put simply, it is not reasonable to expect corporate media to report honestly on a world dominated by corporations. With perfect irony, the latest focus on 'fake news' is itself fake news because the corporate media never have discussed and never will discuss the framing conditions that make it a leading purveyor of 'hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation'.…

Media Lens — Editorial

Fake News About 'Fake News' - The Media Performance Pyramid

David Edwards | Editor
 ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

John Andrews — Corporate Media: The Real Fake News Specialists

America has always had "yellow journalism," but the situation deteriorated seriously when corporate media, following Rupert Murdoch, adapted the tabloid model to generate revenue through infotainment. When "truthiness" replaced truth, propaganda was swift to follow. 

The success of this depends on public trust. The Big Lie is so outrageous that the public simply doesn't consider that their government could be lying to them on this scale. However, after several exposures public trust declines and the media becomes suspect even with they happen to be reporting the facts and telling the truth about them.

This problem with British propaganda is serious. Many people think that propaganda is something only the Russians do, or the Syrians, or the North Koreans, or any other nation we’re supposed to despise. It’s not something we would ever do. And that’s the main reason why British propaganda is so much more successful than less advanced countries: most of us instinctively trust and believe our corporate news providers; most never think for one second our news could be wrong or, horror of horrors, deliberately misleading propaganda. But that’s exactly what most of it is; any national newspaper can supply limitless examples every day of the week.

Dissident Voice
Corporate Media: The Real Fake News Specialists
John Andrews, British author and activist

Glenn Greenwald — Political Ignorance of Americans is Stunning - Glenn Greenwald. Thanks Corporate Media!

Why the US has oligarchic "democracy." Most people in the US are not politically engaged and many of those that do are brainwashed by corporate media.

The title of the post says "stunning." "Shocking would be a better term.

Given this level of ignorance, disinterest, non-participation, and media control, there isn't much hope for the American experiment. It's already failed.

Many  of us already concluded this back in the Seventies and got busy building an alternative.

The Intercept
Political Ignorance of Americans is Stunning - Glenn Greenwald. Thanks Corporate Media!

Glenn Greenwald

Phil Butler — The New Militarism: Basking in the Arms of a New Arms Race

A recent report issued by the Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) in Britain, it virtually assures us we’ll see a brand spanking new arms race. Now we see the main reasoning behind the west-east divide of the last months.

Sanctions and sword rattling, dirty tricks and death dealing over the geography of Europe and the Middle East, it’s all about weapons and money, as if we didn’t know.…

The trident

The dogma, ideals, and failed strategies of such men are telling if we consider peace in our time a goal of nations. Gates, a protégé of President Carter’s National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, he’s advised every administration since the Carter presidency. If you’re looking for a least common denominator in US and western policy, then these two and their colleagues like Henry Kissinger are your policy ring leaders. 

If these men are one point of a US hegemony trident, then corporate owned media is a second one.… 

People like Barack Obama or David Cameron, they possess very little real power actually. Consider them media celebrities, or the connective tissue in between the thinkers, talkers, and instigators. 

Our third pointy facet is the latter of these, those that provide the funding, give the orders, and who build the weapons and washing machines. The industrialists who’ve always played at world domination, they’re the ones doing us all in. In the United States, in particular, the grease that runs Washington comes from Corporations now, more than ever.

I would sum the trident up as 1) the deep state, 2) the corporate media, and 3) the ruling elite that have captured the apparatus of the state through oligarchic "democracy". It's about establishing the neoliberal oligarchic world order as a fait accompli because "freedom and democracy".

Their argument is that there is no alternative to liberalism, and liberalism equates to neoliberalism, or at least ordoliberalism, but not the social liberalism of social democracy, which is economically inefficient and therefore wasteful short term and unworkable in the long run, threatening a descent into socialism.

Russia Insider | Opinion

The New Militarism: Basking in the Arms of a New Arms Race

Phil Butler

Phil Butler (born 1955) is an American journalist, editor, and analyst. He is a partner at Pamil Visions, a leading digital PR firm, and is the former managing editor of Everything PR News, Europe's leading public relations news portal. He contributes to such online publications as The Epoch Times, the Huffington Post, Japan Today, and RT, as well as dozens of others.… 

Phil holds a Masters in Political Science, and was formerly an engineering professional for a number of Fortune 500 companies including Nucor Steel, Ameristeel, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., and Tenneco Automotive. Phil's first professional writing experience came as a member of the crew of the USS Iowa, one of the World War II battleships modernizer for Ronald Reagan's 600 ship navy. Phil was a technical writer then, on a team creating all the ship's new technical and training manuals. He transferred this engineering experience into a career in industry until being sought out for covering Web 2.0 technology innovations.

He blogs at http://www.phillip-butler.com/