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How The Public Are Deceived By The ‘News'

By Eric Zuesse

11 March, 2015
Countercurrents.org

If the public is systematically lied-to by the Government and by a virtually uniformly cooperative press suppressing key facts in order to pump that lie, such as was the case during 2002 and 2003 in the lead-up to America's invasion of Iraq, then there can't possibly be an authentic democracy, because democracy is founded upon a truthfully informed public, and so any ‘news' institution that violates its solemn public trust of reporting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, is traitorous to democracy itself. 

That's why the press has been called “the fourth estate” of government. The first three “estates” are the aristocracy, the clergy, and the public. If the press represent not the public, but instead one of the two other classes — the aristocracy and/or the clergy — then what exists is a dictatorship by that actually ruling class against the public, not a democracy by the public. The public cannot rule in such a country. They instead are manipulated in it. 

They may be manipulated to believe that they rule, but it's only a manipulated illusion then; it's not real; it's a fraud, of the most massive type. Such a country cannot possibly be a real democracy; it's a fraudulent ‘democracy.'

Evidence will be presented here that democracy no longer exists in the United States. Part of this evidence is personal, something that I always prefer to avoid, but which happens to be integral to this particular news-report and analysis. So: it's necessary, in this case.

Already, a scientific analysis of a massive database has found that the United States is not a democracy but only a fake-democracy, actually an “oligarchy,” more-traditionally called an “aristocracy” (as I shall be calling it in this article); and the personal story narrated here will help to explain how and why this is the way our country actually functions.

Here is the broader framework in the United States, as it operates today: The aristocracy know that the way to control the public is via the ‘news' media; and they create, buy, and build, all of the ‘news' media that are of any substantial size or influence. It's the cheapest way for the aristocracy to control the government; and, besides, any aristocrat who owns a controlling interest in one ‘news' medium can then sell to his fellow-aristocrats favorable ‘news' coverage of his own companies and/or of the governmental policies that they seek. 

For example, if, say, The New York Times slants a report in favor of a certain change in the law, which will help one of its advertisers, then that advertiser won't merely be buying with his ad-dollars increased sales of his own products and services; he'll also be buying increased public support for that change in the law, favoring his company in a way that will increase his profit-margin, even if sales do not increase. Consequently, control over the ‘news' media is basically an “I'll scratch your back if you'll scratch mine” business among aristocrats: it's not really about journalism; it is instead about selling — and, what it is mainly selling is influence. That's influence over government, and not only influence over the sale of private products and services.

This is the way that the system actually works. Any reader who refuses to consider the possibility that this is so, should stop reading here, because what I'll be documenting from my own experience fits into that framework, and definitely does not fit into the framework, which I have found to be mythological, of the influential ‘news' media being authentic journalistic institutions — truth-driven, instead of public-manipulation-driven.

That, for example, is the reason why not only all of America's major ‘news' media, but even all of its major ‘alternative news' media, refuse to report that the U.S. Government carried out a very bloody coup d'etat in Kiev Ukraine in February 2014 under the cover of ‘democracy demonstrations,' and that our Government has ever since that time been carrying out (via its imposed new rabidly anti-Russian Ukrainian regime) an ethnic-cleansing campaign, which they call an ‘Anti Terrorist Operation' or ‘ATO,' in order to exterminate and/or terrorize to expell from Ukraine the residents in the particular area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the man whom Obama overthrew, Viktor Yanukovych. The people slaughtered there are not ‘terrorists' but victims of a government by terror. This government routinely uses firebombs in order to slaughter the residents there. The extermination is the goal, not an unfortunate side-effect of policy.

This has, in fact, been the first time in American history when the U.S. Government has actually installed a racist-fascist, or nazi, government (one the likes of which we actually fought against in World War II), and has (along with the cooperating aristocracies in Europe) imposed an ethnic-cleansing campaign, a war to exterminate the residents in a region. And we're doing it in Europe, in Ukraine, on Russia's border. The U.S. aristocracy are so heavily invested, for such a long time, in overthrowing Russia's Government, so that Ukraine is now being used by them as the proxy-state to do it. Killing, or driving into Russia, those strongly pro-Russian residents, is necessary in order for future national elections in Ukraine to retain in power the new, rabidly anti-Russian, Government, a Government that wants to join NATO and to place nuclear missiles against Russia, at Russia's border, a veritable nuclear checkmate, more devastating for Russia even than the dozen currently existing formerly Russia-allied nations that now belong to the anti-Russian U.S. military alliance, NATO. Russia's President, Vladimir Putin, has every reason to consider the United States now to be a deadly hostile nation, because America's aristocrats are deadly serious in this genocidal anti-Russian gambit, which is a preliminary step to destroy Russians.

I have been writing articles about this matter for about a year, and all of them can be seen at the following two sites, besides a few other sites that have run some of them; so, these articles, listed at the following two links, fill in the details on this:


With that as background, then, here is the narrative I experienced:

I had sent the following news-report to virtually all of the U.S. and UK national news-media:

That report is news because no one has ever reported it before, and because it is fact, not mere opinion. A lie is a lie; it is not an ‘error,' and it is not a ‘truth'; and the allegations on which those sanctions are based are not only false but are known to be false by our Government, which alleges them. To state that a lie is a lie is either true or false. That news-report provides its own documentation, through links to its sources. The reader can judge its accuracy at least as well as when a journalist cites some ‘expert' (or government-source) as an ‘authority' on what is true and what is false. Often, propagandistic ‘journalists' pre-select ‘experts' whose opinions just happen to agree with the ‘facts' that the given journalist's employer wants to sell as ‘reality.' 

This news-article I was submitting to virtually all national U.S. news-media, is different from such propaganda, which is widely published; it's a news-story, and it is an important one. The very title of the news-report asserts a startling allegation; if it is true, then the consequences are enormous. Whether it is well-written and well-documented, is only for each individual reader to judge. I would hope that each reader would judge it on the basis of the quality of the evidence that it cites and links to. However, the executives at news organizations are gate-keepers; they filter what news-reports you see, and which ones you don't. And, like all of my news-reports on Ukraine, this one was published only by very few.

It was, in fact, published only by the following


All others (all the rest of the national ‘news' media) declined to publish it.

The news-story reported there is important because massive economic harm is being done both to Russia and to Europe by these sanctions — and by the lies that are the basis for these economic sanctions; and also because any such lies by the United States Government against Russia might end up producing a disastrous nuclear war. This is why the public should be informed that they are lies — totally untrue (as you can see documented there). Furthermore, economic sanctions are a prelude to military war.

If the public do not know that these economic sanctions are being done on the basis of pure lies, then how can the American people vote intelligently in the 2016 Presidential election? Foreign policy is a quintessentially national and Presidential thing. There can be no democracy on that type of basis, the basis of the public's ignorance about such a crucial interntional-affairs matter — only dictatorship by liars. Only forced Government, in which the force that is being used against the public is mental force, deception, instead of physical force, violence. 

So: almost all ‘news' media turned out to be not real news-media, in this particular and very important instance. That should be major news, in itself.

Selections regarding what to publish, and how favorably to position a given news-headline, determine what the public comes to know, and what they don't come to know. The news-media are, in fact, the gateway to democracy. If the gateway is closed-off at all of the major ‘news' media, then how can the given nation possibly be democratic? It can't — not really. It's then a manipulated public, and the “I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine” aristocracy, with its servants rotating from government to mega-corporations and then back to government, back-and-forth, is actually manipulating the public, rather than serving the public, because the aristocracy is being served instead.

With the exception of about ten news-media, all news-media in the U.S. and UK have rejected all of my many news reports about different aspects of America's rape of Ukraine, a rape that has been done specifically to use Ukraine as a proxy-battlefield to draw Russia into war, so that the American aristocracy can take over Russia. This rape has been supported by most European leaders. The Ukrainian people are being used.

One ‘news'-medium that has rejected all of these Ukraine reports is alternet, which had published a number of my previous news-reports, just none that deal with the rape of Ukraine, a rape that has been done by the Obama Administration, and especially none of my reports about the U.S. coup which had brought about the current racist-fascist (or nazi), anti-Russian Government there, and none about the new regime's ethnic-cleansing to get rid of the residents in the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the man Obama overthrew. All of that is suppressed by them.

Ever since the 2 May 2014 Odessa massacre of pro-Russian demonstrators by Government thugs (largely financed by a friend of the Obama White House whom they appointed to become a key governor in Ukraine), I have been writing mainly about Ukraine, because I am attracted to those topics that are the most-suppressed news-beats in my country, the U.S., which is supposedly a democracy. Ukraine turns out to be the most-suppressed topic of all. The ‘news' on it today is like the ‘news' about Iraq was in 2002 and 2003: it's stenographic ‘reporting' from U.S.-Government-approved sources. Lies. And the harms that can result from the matter in Ukraine are vastly worse even than in Iraq.

On 31 July 2014, I emailed to Don Hazen, the founder and controlling person at alternet (and he was also the former publisher of Mother Jones — a magazine that likewise publishes nothing about the U.S. coup and ethnic cleansing in Ukraine) asking him: 
"Nothing [of mine] has been posted since May 30th. Is something wrong?” This was right after my latest article, written after my looking at the polls, had concluded that the only thing that could possibly block a Republican takeover of the U.S. Senate and a solid-Republican Congress in Obama's final two years as President would be a congressional Democrat introducing a bill of impeachment of Obama that would cite progressive reasons why he should be impeached. Doing this — that declaration of independence against a then-very-unpopular pro-aristocratic President — would remove the stain that Obama brings to the Democratic label, a stain that was holding down the electoral support for Democratic congressional candidates during this election year. Removing that authoritarian stain (especially when he was the most unpopular of all recent Presidents after the length of time he had spent in the White House) would be the only way that congressional Democrats could run for re-election without the Obama stain — the stain that “if you vote for Senator X, you are voting for Obama.” He turned the article down, like he turned down all of my Ukraine articles. 

People such as Hazen were hiding the truth about Obama from liberals, in order to continue the myth that we have a real two-party system — not a government of the public by the nation's aristocracy, a one-party system at the deeper level. Hazen replied:

sorry, but I don't follow this, or buy into it as a scenario.  the GOP is not going to impeach Obama… 
at least not now., it would hurt them in the elections in November. [I had dealt with that in my article, as you see there, but he ignored it.] Or probably never… Presidents do 
lots of ugly things… but they don't get impeached. .. unless they are crooks or get blow jobs in the white house. 
  I wouldn't have favored Bush being impeached either. Still,  it will never happen because it is only the right-wing base that has any taste for impeachment. 

You are imagining a scenario without a constituency. You seem far afield of how American politics works.
Why would any Democrat try to impeach Obama.. it would be for most, an act of political suicide. [His entire comment was ignoring, not responding to, what I said, and the polling-data, in the submitted article.]

You do, in my mind, seem blinded by your intense feelings about Obama… He does not have the passion
you imagine.  And the end of the Obama administration is going to be mostly stalemated.. not a gleeful right-wing march as
you describe. [I had described no such thing.]

The real issue here was that Hazen simply didn't care about Obama's bringing nazis into control of Ukraine right next-door to Russia — something that presents an existential threat against our fellow-nuclear-power, Russia, the threat of building a NATO missile base in Ukraine a mere ten-minute flight-time to Moscow — a threat like the dictator Khrushchev had presented in 1962 against the United States and which our President JFK treated, correctly, as an existential threat to us. Why should Putin not treat this Obama-gambit in Ukraine the same way JFK did when the shoe was on the other foot, in Cuba? Hazen evidently feels that a racist-fascist, rabidly anti-Russian but nominally ‘Democratic' President, who reigns for America's aristocracy, should simply be accepted by Democrats as representing what we consider to be Democratic. But then, the Party means nothing at all.

I cannot wear that Party label any more — nor any party's label. No congressional Democrat came forward with a bill of impeachment against Obama, a bill that many Republicans would have had to sign onto in order to keep the ‘Tea Party' with them, and that could have passed Congress, but that in any case would have freed Democratic candidates from the Obama-nazi stain (the stain of not just elitism, as before, but now also nazism), and enabled them to prove that the 2014 congressional elections were about each one of these individual Democrats in Congress, and not at all about this unpopular President. Each Democrat in Congress would then have been able to go public with his view about this President, and thus maybe enough of them could have won for the Party to retain control in the Senate. My submitted article had proposed what I argued there was the only way that was even possible for the Demcratic Party not to lose the Senate. (All polls for months had shown that, barring some fundamental change in the political dynamics such as what I was here proposing, the Democrats would lose the Senate, so that Obama's final two years would be spent signing and occasionally vetoing only Republican-written legislation. Hazen's email entirely ignored my analysis, argument, and data.)

For me, it was bad enough that Obama (with his Wall Street bailouts etc.) is the first President in U.S. history to increase instead of decrease the inequality of income after an economic crash. Obama's having gone nazi in Ukraine was simply too much.

On February 27th, after my having submitted to alternet a news-story titled “The Entire Case for Sanctions Against Russia Is Pure Lies” (a report that you also can see and evaluate for yourself at that other site), I received back from “article submissions” at alternet, the brief note, “Feel free to stop sending us your submissions.” I asked Hazen whether he was behind that; he never answered. 

Well, now, alternet virtually admits that they don't even consider my article-submissions, after I had started criticizing Obama for his nazism and ethnic cleansing in Ukraine.

If anyone wonders why the polls show that Americans' fear of Russia is soaring, after the U.S. has turned the tables on the Cuban Missile Crisis and become itself the dictatorship now, it's this country's controlled press (like Hazen). The aristocracy creates and builds all of the large ‘news' media in this country; they block out the truth regarding the most important issues (such as Ukraine), the ones that voters most need to know about, in order to vote intelligently.

If readers wonder why Mother Jones, Progressive, Nation, Atlantic, Harpers, NBC, CNN, NYT, WSJ, Salon, Slate, Alternet, etc., don't even report the Obama-stooge-regime's bombings to exterminate or expell the residents (Obama's people call them all 'terrorists') in the area of Ukraine that had voted 90% for the man whom Obama overthrew in February 2014 — if anyone wonders how the U.S. could in silence become the sponsor of such a vicious and ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign — it's because of 'news' executives such as Don Hazen. They don't want the public to know certain things; and both ‘right' and ‘left' sides of the aristocracy are censoring-out this type of reality.  

Readers should treasure news-sites like this one, the one you're now reading, that refuse to bow to the aristocracy. Readers here should tell their friends about this site. They should spread the word about it, and about the corruptness of the ‘news' media in general, in our fading ‘democracy.'

How can democracy exist if the news-media are controlled by the aristocracy? It can't. What exists then is an aristocratic government. Not a democratic government.

Any country whose major political parties (meaning the ones that seriously contend to win leadership) are all controlled by the aristocracy, is no democracy at all. That's what we now have. Ukraine is an aristocratic operation, which could blow up the world, and which already has caused over a million refugees, where there had previously been peace. Yet, only about ten (all rather small-audience) sites (such as this), are reporting the reality — all others are hiding the reality — about historically so very important a matter, which could end up producing a nuclear war.

News-sites like this one are therefore the only hope for restoring democracy, where democracy formerly had existed. And maybe we're not yet too late to prevent a nuclear war.

Each reader can check a news-site's honesty, by googling its name and the word “Ukraine” and seeing whether the realities that I have linked to here are reflected there. If the answer is no, then I would not call it a news-site, but merely a propaganda-site — because these realities are precisely that: they are real. And they are important.

That's the best way I know of, to test the honesty of any given national-news site.

 





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