Apr 15 2008

Disgusted: The Media as Accesories to Torture and War

“The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers… [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper.” –Thomas Jefferson

A Free Press is one of the foundations of a free country. But as with all freedom, it comes with responsibility. The press, the media, in America has not just abrogated that responsibility, they have thrown it on the ground and urinated on it. With very few exceptions, they have become more of a public relations arm of the government than the absolutely vital component of democracy it is their duty to be. The Fourth Estate, they were once called, in effect the fourth branch of government itself, the keepers of truth, the arbiters of honesty, the last resort against corruption. A great objective equalizer, the conscience of the nation.

Journalism was once a sacred and noble trust. Newsrooms were once sacrosanct chapels of Truth. Now they are an industry. Now they are little more than pimps for fast food…and fascism.

I am thoroughly appalled and disgusted that the President of the United States of America admits publicly to approving an entire network….a entire segment of OUR government paid for with our taxes….to torturing, raping, and killing often innocent HUMAN BEINGS…..human beings no different than you, or your children or your parents (regardless of their place of birth) …and todays media treat it as just anther ‘product’ for their ‘industry.’ They have the power to emphasize and pound this home to the American People, the power to serve justice and the Truth ….but… They. Do. Not.

As with the Democrats in Congress, the Free Press has failed America. Tragically so. To the point of betrayal. I condemn them from the bottom of my heart.

I urge all of us in the Blogosphere to do so daily as part of our regime of taking back our failed society. Failed by the President, Failed by Congress, Failed by the Judiciary, and Failed by our Free Press. Take it back, We the People. Take it back. It is up to us, now, that sacred trust of Freedom. We are all that is left of the Dream of Democracy.

                       Photobucket

But hey! Let’s look on the bright side! At least the Fourth Estate is not actively cheerleading for torture as they did for the invasion of Iraq.

At this point, all I can do is defer to Paddy Chayefsky, who predicted 22 years ago exactly what would happen when The Corporatocracy took over the Fourth Estate

Howard Beale: Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation; this tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers; this tube is the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people, and that’s why woe is us that Edward George Ruddy died. Because this company is now in the hands of CCA, the Communications Corporation of America; there’s a new chairman of the board, a man called Frank Hackett, sitting in Mr. Ruddy’s office on the twentieth floor. And when the 12th largest company in the world controls the most awesome goddamn propaganda force in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be peddled for truth on this network?

Nelson Chaney: All I know is that this violates every canon of respectable broadcasting.

Frank Hackett: We’re not a respectable network. We’re a whorehouse network, and we have to take whatever we can get.


Howard Beale: I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.

You’ve got to say, ‘I’m a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!’ So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell,

‘I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!’ I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell – ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Things have got to change. But first, you’ve gotta get mad!… You’ve got to say, ‘I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!’ Then we’ll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:

Howard Beale: [screaming at the top of his lungs] “I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

                                   Photobucket

51 comments

Skip to comment form

  1. Photobucket

    • DWG on April 15, 2008 at 20:08
    • #

    Conyers invited the Principals that participated in the choreographing of torture to a hearing (which they all declined).  Apart from that half-hearted gesture, there was only silence as more evidence emerged that the Bush administration is guilty of violating US and international laws by engaging in torture. Pelosi and Reid seem perfectly content to let Bush run out the clock on his administration, give him more money to squander in Iraq, and even give him a few more executive powers.  

    Photobucket

    Torture is not something we can ever forget or forgive.

    • OPOL on April 15, 2008 at 20:10
    • #

    sounds like a whisper.

  4. i cant even conceive of harming another living being.  id sooner inflict pain on myself.

    what are these creatures who imagine, perpetrate, condone, and allow such actions?  really, what are they???

    what is the name of a creature who would carry water for someone who would put electrodes on their testicles, with little provocation and no remorse?

    if theyre human, im not.

  5. But someone should tell that to Charles Krauthammer, Rush Limbaugh, and Jack Bauer.

    Iraq Moratorium

  6. aren’t into the big orange. But I thought Hunter nailed it today.

    • Edger on April 15, 2008 at 20:30
    • #

    By John Pilger, August 8, 2007

    The truth about most modern journalism: You first become a career media worker, you start climbing the ladder, and then you prostitute yourself. It’s as common as it’s straightforward.

    The following is a transcript of a talk given by John Pilger at Socialism 2007 Conference in Chicago this past June:

    The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which is the title of my book, and the book is meant as an antidote to the propaganda that is so often disguised as journalism. So I thought I would talk today about journalism, about war by journalism, propaganda, and silence, and how that silence might be broken. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called “professional journalism” was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment-objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, “entirely bogus”.

    For what the public did not know was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories-domestic and foreign-you’ll find they’re dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism.

    …

    One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said the spokesman, “that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don’t have to do any of that. What is the secret?”

    What is the secret? It is a question seldom asked in newsrooms, in media colleges, in journalism journals, and yet the answer to that question is critical to the lives of millions of people. On August 24 [2006] the New York Times declared this in an editorial: “If we had known then what we know now the invasion if Iraq would have been stopped by a popular outcry.” This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by not doing their job and by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and his gang, instead of challenging them and exposing them. What the Times didn’t say was that had that paper and the rest of the media exposed the lies, up to a million people might be alive today. That’s the belief now of a number of senior establishment journalists. Few of them-they’ve spoken to me about it-few of them will say it in public.

    Ironically, I began to understand how censorship worked in so-called free societies when I reported from totalitarian societies. During the 1970s I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group Charter 77, including the novelist Zdener Urbanek, and this is what he told me. “In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West. We’ve learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive.”

    …

    We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now.

    read the whole thing here…

  8. Is necessary in a democracy. Freedom of information, what a joke at this point. The net is the closest thing we have to an underground press. People say ‘You can’t trust the net’ it makes me laugh and cry as they are afraid of the truth. Refuse to believe it. The net requires you to sort it out yourself instead of being fed a false narrative that only the truly deluded would believe.

    Even the ‘entertainment” on the TV is conditioning. Dark and violent is okay, it’s the way the world is. The world is how we make it, not how these monsters mirror it. Billed as ‘cultural’ this violence and barbarism is just the American way, they say. Hard to get people to look outside this box. On the other hand my grandchildren are buying peace buttons and listening to songs of freedom and generally acting out. Maybe our brainwashing won’t take on those who’s minds are not filled with fear and greed.

    Boogiemen who are false and  dreams of an ‘ownership’ society  which don’t pan out, tends to bring reality itself to even the most deluded. Entitlement, is off the table cause they need everything you have and then some. We all have to go outside and the reality that pours through the TV doesn’t even come close to whats out side your door. Hope sounds mighty good about now.  Kill your TV.          

  9. At this point, it’s hard to keep from attributing every evil to someone in the Bush administration, yet–I find this very disturbing, no only because of the sadness of another life lost needlessly and because of the suffering that his family will be going through: Newspaper Carries Word of Another Mysterious U.S. Soldier Death in Iraq:

    Word emerged over the weekend of another mysterious, non-hostile fatality (not necessarily a suicide) in Iraq. His name is Jeremiah Hughes. The army is investigating and may never release its findings.

    But the final “mood” icon on his MySpace page, I discovered today, was a frown — with the word: “Crushed.”

    “…Army Spc. Jeremiah Hughes, 26, left for Iraq in December with the Stryker brigade from Hawaii — three years after a previous tour…”

    “…The Pentagon announced that he died Wednesday in Balad, Iraq, “from injuries sustained in a noncombat incident in Abu Ghraib…”

    Is it just me??

Comments have been disabled.