Bernie making waves

Presidential contender Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Monday released a plan to protect independent news outlets and journalists from the effects of widespread media consolidation.
Sanders, decrying the mega-mergers he says have led to a handful of large corporations acting as gatekeepers for the information most Americans receive, calls for concrete steps “to rebuild and protect a diverse and truly independent press so that real journalists can do the critical jobs that they love” in an editorial for the Columbia Journalism Review.

"Today, after decades of consolidation and deregulation, just a small handful of companies control almost everything you watch, read, and download," Sanders writes. "Given that reality, we should not want even more of the free press to be put under the control of a handful of corporations and 'benevolent' billionaires who can use their media empires to punish their critics and shield themselves from scrutiny."

Going for the throat. Who controls the narrative controls the world.

As an aside, "who controls the narrative controls the world," used to apply to American soft power. Over the past several decades the US has managed to shrink its formerly awesome soft power considerably through endless war and imperial arrogance.

The Hill
Sanders releases media plan: Press shouldn't be controlled by corporations, 'benevolent' billionaires
Zack Budryk

Bernie Sanders recently released his plan for implementing the Green New Deal. These include such comprehensive goals as transitioning to 100% renewable energy for electricity and transportation by 2030 and decarbonizing the entire economy by 2050 (full details here).

To get there, Sanders plans a number of ambitious projects, including massive and job-creating infrastucture spending and "declaring climate change a national emergency." The implications of the latter are not entirely spelled out. A number of candidates have proposals that "declare a national emergency" regarding climate change, but not in the same sense that George W. Bush, for example, may have meant had he declared the 9/11 attacks a national emergency (he didn't, but he could have).

That kind of national emergency, a Bush-Cheney kind, implies an exercise of presidential power that approaches martial law, something that most pro-climate Democrats don't contemplate. Does the Sanders plan contemplate a stronger-than-rhetorical response to climate change? It's not clear yet from Sanders camp messaging.

We aren't there yet, but when climate change becomes front page news we will be and people will be demanding that a national emergency be declared, as coastal cities are threatened by rising sea level, for example.

Down with Tyranny

Bernie Sanders' GND Plan Will Nationalize Power Generation in the U.S.

See also

The continued inability of America’s liberal democratic establishment to address the ills besetting the country—climate change, unregulated global capitalism, mounting social inequality, a bloated military, endless foreign wars, out-of-control deficits and gun violence—means the inevitable snuffing out of our anemic democracy. Overwhelmed by the multiple crises, the liberal elites have jettisoned genuine political life and retreated into self-defeating moral crusades in a vain and futile attempt to deflect attention away from the looming social, political, economic and environmental catastrophes.

These faux moral crusades, now the language of the left and the right, have bifurcated the country into warring factions. Opponents are demonized as evil. Adherents to the cause are on the side of the angels. Nuance and ambiguity are banished. Facts are manipulated or discarded. Truth is replaced by slogans. Conspiracy theories, however bizarre, are incredulously embraced to expose the perfidiousness of the enemy. Politics is defined by antagonistic political personalities spewing vitriol. The intellectual and moral sterility, along with the inability to halt the forces of societal destruction, provides fertile soil for extremists, neofascists and demagogues who thrive in periods of paralysis and cultural degeneracy.

Liberals and the left have wasted the last two years attacking Donald Trump as a Russian asset and look set to waste the next two years attacking him as a racist. They desperately seek scapegoats to explain the election of Trump as president, no different from a right wing that tars its Democratic Party enemies as America-hating socialists and that blames Muslims, immigrants and poor people of color for our national debacle. These are competing cartoon visions of the world. They foster a self-created universe of villains and superheroes that exacerbates the mounting polarization and rage.

“Bourgeois society seems everywhere to have used up its store of constructive ideas,” Christopher Lasch wrote in 1979 in “The Culture of Narcissism.” “It has lost both the capacity and the will to confront the difficulties that threaten to overwhelm it. The political crisis of capitalism reflects a general crisis of western culture, which reveals itself in a pervasive despair of understanding the course of modern history or of subjecting it to rational direction. Liberalism, the political theory of the ascendant bourgeoisie, long ago lost the capacity to explain events in the world of the welfare state and the multinational corporation; nothing has taken its place. Politically bankrupt, liberalism is intellectually bankrupt as well.”...

Truthdig
The Curse of Moral Purity
Chris Hedges

Dennis J Bernstein — Russia-gate’s Reach into Journalism

The investigation to somehow blame Russia for Donald Trump’s election has now merged with another establishment goal of isolating and intimidating whistleblowers and other dissidents, as Dennis J Bernstein describes.

Narrative control is essential to elite control in a representative democracy.

Consortium News
Russia-gate’s Reach into Journalism

Dennis J Bernstein, a host of “Flashpoints” on Pacifica

Also

A smear campaign targeting Seder accused him of joking about rape in a satirical tweet from 2009.

Vox
MSNBC won’t cut ties to Sam Seder after all: succumbing to alt-right outrage was a “mistake”
Aja Romano

Also

Business Insider
Wikileaks faces U.S. probes into its 2016 election role and CIA leaks: sources

Reuters

Robert Parry — NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms

Propaganda + psyops + censorship = totalitarian control.

Just days after sporting First Amendment pins at the White House Correspondents Dinner – to celebrate freedom of the press – the mainstream U.S. media is back to celebrating a very different idea: how to use algorithms to purge the Internet of what is deemed “fake news,” i.e. what the mainstream judges to be “misinformation.”

The New York Times, one of the top promoters of this new Orwellian model for censorship, devoted two-thirds of a page in its Tuesday editions to a laudatory pieceabout high-tech entrepreneurs refining artificial intelligence that can hunt down and eradicate supposedly “fake news.”

But a paradox of liberalism arises here.

To justify this draconian strategy, the Times cited only a “fake news” report claiming that the French establishment’s preferred presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron had received funding from Saudi Arabia, a bogus story published by a Web site that mimicked the appearance of the newspaper Le Soir and was traced back to a Delaware phone number.

Yet, while such intentionally fabricated articles as well as baseless conspiracy theories are a bane of the Internet – and do deserve hearty condemnation – the Times gives no thought to the potential downside of having a select group of mainstream journalistic entities feeding their judgment about what is true and what is not into some algorithms that would then scrub the Internet of contrary items.

There is an increasing proliferation of not only genuinely fake news aimed to distort and influence, but also phishing scams to trick people out of money, into providing information for identity theft, and the like.

Obviously, not everything goes, but where and how to draw lines is not simple.

Consortium News
NYT Cheers the Rise of Censorship Algorithms

Robert Parry

See also

A so-called free press is a privatized press. But is a corporate owned media actually a free press other than in name?

Fort Russ
Free Press? A luxury few states can afford

Op-ed by Denis Churilov

Jon Hellevig — EU's Infowar On Russia - Putting In Place A Totalitarian Media Regime And Speech Control

... while Russia has been identified both in the EU and the US as the supposed adversary against whom these states are supposedly protecting, the real target of their crackdown is internal dissent. Their scandalous calls to an infowar against Russia is actually a red herring intended to conceal the much more sinister aim of establishing a totalitarian media regime and speech control with all-out propaganda and censorship internally in the EU states.

Obviously the EU and USA have very little to fear from Russia's quite limited media resources. Russia has no propaganda reach over the West and based on my observations has not even been engaged in any such attempts. Russia has, however, increased its legitimate reporting in English with an aim at Western and other global audiences. These are quite insignificant operations and reach only a very limited audience. Hereby, there is no need for Russia even to try to do anything called propaganda – in the sense of trying to push false narratives by subterfuge. The Western propaganda machine is the one that takes care of producing the propaganda content, and Russian and other alternative media sources need not do anything else than sit there and refute the Western propaganda narratives 24 hours a day, as well as report the real news.

For sure, this is annoying enough for the West, but their real concern is yet much more baleful. They have a need to enact a totalitarian media regime and speech control in order to continue unhindered in their geopolitical new world order machinations and in their endeavors to establish a World Government with its political and cultural agenda....

That the European mainstream media had been converted into a totalitarian propaganda machine should have become clear to the most lazy observer by the latest in 2013/2014 with the jaw-dropping anti-Sochi propaganda and the massive propaganda support and whitewashing of the Ukrainian coup and the atrocities in its wake - which clearly were perpetrated by people and groups that openly displayed their adherence to fascist and Nazi ideologies – on the Maidan, Odessa, Mariupol and its war of terror on the population of Donbass. The Western propaganda war on Syria in support of jihadists and Western mercenary terrorists labeling these groups “moderate rebels” should have come as final proof for those who still wanted to give the Western media the benefit of the doubt. – Now, they want to remove that doubt once and for all by the introduction of a totalitarian media regime and speech control.

Jon Hellevig's Blog
EU's Infowar On Russia - Putting In Place A Totalitarian Media Regime And Speech Control
Jon Hellevig, founder, Awara Group

Bill Boyarsky — Investigation Into ‘PropOrNot Blacklist Case’ Finds Shoddy Methods and an Ominous Potential

In-depth analysis of PropOrNot. Bayarsky concludes that the aim not exposure but censorship. Neo-McCarthyism. And this would likely have gone nowhere without promotion by the Washington Post.

Truthdig

Investigation Into ‘PropOrNot Blacklist Case’ Finds Shoddy Methods and an Ominous Potential

Bill Boyarsky | Truthdig columnist, former city editor of the Los Angeles Times, former lecturer at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California and former member of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission

Margarita Simonyan — U.S. media's false narrative of Russian election influence

While much of the Western media has been whipping itself into frenzy over the phantom Russian Menace to Freedom & Democracy™, we can't help but note the irony of the situation. You see, RT, which is so often accused of trying to create an alternate reality, seems to have been one of the rare news organizations to actually report on, well, reality.

It started a while back. During the fall of 2011, RT was the only major news network present on the scene of the nascent Occupy movement in New York for nearly three weeks.

The protests were initially treated as a fluke by the mainstream media. The movement went on to become a global phenomenon, energizing support for the expectation-defying presidential run of Bernie Sanders at a time when most of the American establishment press projected Hillary Clinton to sail through to the Democratic nomination unchallenged.

These winds of change were not just a U.S. phenomenon—they also swept through Europe. When anxiety over austerity policy, immigration and security went largely unaddressed by E.U. top brass, the people of Europe, and the U.K. in particular, found new champions for their grievances amongst the likes of Nigel Farage, Alexis Tsipras, and Jeremy Corbyn.

From day one, the political and media establishments on both sides of the Atlantic dismissed these voices and their supporters as 'fringe'. RT chose to listen to them at the outset, and report on them. Today, they are far from the periphery, with some shaping the continent's future. Of course, when “fringe” gains widespread public support, it no longer fits into the simple, established narratives and needs to be explained away. To accept domestic issues as the main reason behind societal shifts would force the powers that be to examine and address their own failings. That can be uncomfortable. It’s much easier to ape the same conspiracy theorists they mock and find external scapegoats.

Russia has been accused, by widely respected voices, of weaponizing everything from migrants and attractive women, to its own economy—even dolphins!—in its “efforts" to bring down Western Civilization. Anyone who doesn’t play the 'blame Russia' game automatically becomes a 'Kremlin stooge.' Jill Stein, Farage, Corbyn, Tsipras, Marine Le Pen, Miloš Zeman and Viktor Orban, among others, have all been accused of nefarious ties to Moscow. Trump has actually been dubbed a "Russian agent" in the popular U.S. press…. 

The Hill
U.S. media's false narrative of Russian election influence

Margarita Simonyan is Editor-in-Chief of RT (formerly known as Russia Today)

John Pilger — Propaganda’s Triumph over Journalism

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

Consortiums News
Propaganda’s Triumph over Journalism
John Pilger

Andrew O'Hehir — From Gary Webb to James Risen: The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism

In thinking about the cases of Gary Webb and James Risen, two famous investigative reporters aggressively persecuted for their explosive revelations (in very different situations, and with different results), we are drawn into the thorny question of journalism and its so-called professional ethics. How well do the supposed codes of journalism work, and whom do they serve and protect? Is the primary role of journalism as a social institution to discover the truth as best it can and raise the level of public discourse, or to preserve its own power and prestige and privilege? I don’t claim to know the answers with any certainty. If anything, the stories of Webb and Risen suggest that those questions yield different answers in different contexts.

AlterNet
From Gary Webb to James Risen: The Struggle for the Soul of Journalism
Andrew O'Hehir | Salon