The main assumption of the prophets of the horrors of the Post Truth (sometimes called simply fake news) is that there is an official truth (brought to you by the corporate media), and that whatever contradicts that "truth" are the lies that the media is now snobbishly calling Post-Truth (*).
But the fact is corporate media lie, hide the truth and manipulate on a daily basis.
They have been telling each other lier since printed press exists, but they don't like someone else telling them. And they hate not being the only ones to be able to reach the masses.
But you may be one of those who believe that corporate media don't lie, at least not on purpose, maybe sometimes just by accident.
1st Case Study: Panama Papers
Remember the Panama Papers? Well, there were several interesting facts about them, or more precissely, about how the media treated them.
- First, I think it is quite surprising that the BBC made 4 tweets about Putin's friend before making any tweet about David Cameron's father (who was also in the papers), burying it in a secondary account with only around 300K followers (while Putin's friend deserved the most popular account, with several milions of followers.
But the most interesting aspect were the questions about the source of the papers. While we have seen how all western media assume russian hackers (under Putin's orders) are behind any leak in the USA or the EU even without any proof (or just the word of the CIA or the NSA, which means the same), asking who was behind the Panama Papers was like defending Putin himself. And the most funny thing, saying that Soros and the US government were behind the Papers was spreading fake news, although anyone could check it with just a few clicks in the website of one of the organizations (https://www.occrp.org/en - go to the bottom of the website).
But the fact is corporate media lie, hide the truth and manipulate on a daily basis.
They have been telling each other lier since printed press exists, but they don't like someone else telling them. And they hate not being the only ones to be able to reach the masses.
But you may be one of those who believe that corporate media don't lie, at least not on purpose, maybe sometimes just by accident.
1st Case Study: Panama Papers
Remember the Panama Papers? Well, there were several interesting facts about them, or more precissely, about how the media treated them.
- First, I think it is quite surprising that the BBC made 4 tweets about Putin's friend before making any tweet about David Cameron's father (who was also in the papers), burying it in a secondary account with only around 300K followers (while Putin's friend deserved the most popular account, with several milions of followers.
But the most interesting aspect were the questions about the source of the papers. While we have seen how all western media assume russian hackers (under Putin's orders) are behind any leak in the USA or the EU even without any proof (or just the word of the CIA or the NSA, which means the same), asking who was behind the Panama Papers was like defending Putin himself. And the most funny thing, saying that Soros and the US government were behind the Papers was spreading fake news, although anyone could check it with just a few clicks in the website of one of the organizations (https://www.occrp.org/en - go to the bottom of the website).
2nd Case Study: Chemical attack in Syria of the April 4th, attributed to Assad.
It was fascinating to see how all western media accused Assad of the chemical attack in Syria, without any evidence and without even wondering why the hell would he do that.
The New York Times tried to answer this question, arguing that "rather than an inexplicable act, analysts say, it is part of a carefully calculated strategy of escalating attacks against civilians."
First, this "analysts say" sounds too much to the "some people say" of the Fox News.
Second, and most important, it just doesn't answer the question seriously. Even if this alleged "calculated strategy of escalating attacks against civilians" was real, it doesn't answer the question "WHY NOW?". Let's be serious here, if Assad wanted to do this, he could just perfectly wait until his position was safe.
First, this "analysts say" sounds too much to the "some people say" of the Fox News.
Second, and most important, it just doesn't answer the question seriously. Even if this alleged "calculated strategy of escalating attacks against civilians" was real, it doesn't answer the question "WHY NOW?". Let's be serious here, if Assad wanted to do this, he could just perfectly wait until his position was safe.
Why did the western media believe the US army so blindly? How many times have we heard that the US government or army had indisputable evidence about some crime but we never got to see that evidence?
And why should we believe the word of the US government or army? It is not like they haven't lied before about chemical weapons in order to bomb one country (just think of Iraq).
So why didn't the western media consider that it could have been the rebels?
First, we know that the rebels have used chemical weapons several times already:
"Khan al Asal, 19 March 2013: 111. The United Nations Mission collected credible information that corroborates the allegations that chemical weapons were used in Khan al Asal on 19 March 2013 against soldiers and civilians."
"Jobar, 24 August 2013: 113. The United Nations Mission collected evidence consistent with the probable use of chemical weapons in Jobar on 24 August on a relatively small scale against soldiers…"
"Jobar, 24 August 2013: 113. The United Nations Mission collected evidence consistent with the probable use of chemical weapons in Jobar on 24 August on a relatively small scale against soldiers…"
"Ashrafiah Sahnaya, 25 August 2013 117. The United Nations Mission collected evidence that suggests that chemical weapons were used in Ashrafiah Sahnaya on 25 August 2013 on a small scale against soldiers." [United Nations website]
Second, there are serious reasons to believe that the rebels (aided by foreign governments) have been planning and probably had already executed false flag attacks:
"Accumulating evidence offers persuasive proof that Syrian rebels supported by Turkish intelligence – not Syrian Army troops – bear responsibility for the infamous sarin nerve-gas attack killing hundreds of people on Aug. 21, 2013 in Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. The incident bears all the earmarks of a false-flag attack." [Mintpress News]
zerohedge explains why the April attack could be in fact another false flag action, including a removed article from The Daily Mail from 2013!
"Leaked emails have allegedly proved that the White House gave the green light to a chemical weapons attack in Syria that could be blamed on Assad's regime and in turn, spur international military action in the devastated country.
A report released on Monday contains an email exchange between two senior officials at British-based contractor Britam Defence where a scheme 'approved by Washington' is outlined explaining that Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons. "
A report released on Monday contains an email exchange between two senior officials at British-based contractor Britam Defence where a scheme 'approved by Washington' is outlined explaining that Qatar would fund rebel forces in Syria to use chemical weapons. "
And like this we could continue, with endless examples of how corporate media lie, hide and manipulate. We could remember the Noam Chomsky case against The New York Times regarding Cambodja and East Timor (nowadays could be Syria and Yemen), we could remember how they convinced the American people to "free" Kuwait on fabricated stories, how the Kosovo war was promoted by Madeleine Albright with the collaboration of the media, we could go on and on (and maybe we will add some more examples in the future).
Other study cases:
The death of Aylan Kurdi
When the horrible photo of Aylan Kurdi's small body appeared in the newspapers, to say that the main reason of his family's trip was that his father wanted new teeth was a lie, fake news, although the aunt of the child herself, who paid for the trip, explained it in tv.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22FenqnfWQk]
But the "truth" was that the Kurdi family were escaping war the war in Syria, although they came from Turkey were Aylan's father, although with small salary, had a job.
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3232251/Aylan-father-s-REAL-story-Abdullah-Kurdi-forced-deny-smuggler-new-questions-emerge-picture-shook-world.html].
Gulf War
"Although there were human rights abuses committed in Kuwait by the invading Iraqi military, the alleged incidents which received most publicity in the US were inventions of the public relations firm hired by the government of Kuwait to influence US opinion in favor of military intervention." "Among many other means of influencing US opinion, (...) the firm arranged for an appearance before a group of members of the US Congress in which a woman identifying herself as a nurse working in the Kuwait City hospital described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators and letting them die on the floor.[98]
The story was an influence in tipping both the public and Congress towards a war with Iraq: six Congressmen said the testimony was enough for them to support military action against Iraq and seven Senators referenced the testimony in debate. The Senate supported the military actions in a 52–47 vote. However, a year after the war, this allegation was revealed to be a fabrication. The woman who had testified was found to be a member of Kuwait's Royal Family, in fact the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US.[98] She hadn't lived in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion.
The details of the Hill & Knowlton public relations campaign, including the incubator testimony, were published in John R. MacArthur's Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), and came to wide public attention when an Op-ed by MacArthur was published in The New York Times. This prompted a reexamination by Amnesty International, which had originally promoted an account alleging even greater numbers of babies torn from incubators than the original fake testimony. After finding no evidence to support it, the organization issued a retraction. President Bush then repeated the incubator allegations on television." [Wikipedia]
Obama's great uncle and Auschwitz
Remember when Obama lied about his uncle liberating Auschwitz?
Never heard of that? Not a surprise, because the same mainstream media that are so eager to audit Trump's lies, do't seem to care much about Obama's lies. But he did say that his uncle (in fact it was his great uncle, but ho cares about such "small" details...) liberated Auschwitz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVRaA_Z7430), despite the fact that it was the Soviet Army that liberated it
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp#Evacuation.2C_death_marches.2C_and_Soviet_liberation).
For instance, if you search "obama+auschwitz" from site nytimes.com, the only results you get back is from a blog entry (https://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/obamas-staff-corrects-wwii-story/). The official excuse given was the Obama's uncle helped liberated another, less known camp, Buchenwald, and he had "simply" confused the names.
Can you imagine what the press would have said if Trump had made such "mistake"? If you think it is not so important that the President of the USA doesn't know who liberated the most infamous concentration camp in WW2 history, maybe you think this is more important (despite not being either in any NYT fact-check:
"He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside." [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2009/12/13/obamas-big-sellout-president-has-packed-his-economic-team-wall-street-insiders]
War in Bosnia
Western media explained us for years (and still do) how Milosevic planned and guided the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.
Well, one thing is sure: they didn't have any evidence of that, as the International Court for the Former Yugoslavia has made clear:
"...there was no sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milošević agreed [with Radovan Karadžić] with the common plan [of ethnic cleansing]"
[http://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/tjug/en/160324_judgement.pdf]
So, if after more than 20 years the tribunal created to investigate the war crimes was not able to find any evidence linkin Milosevic with the ethnic cleansing, what was the news accusing him based on? It means they were lacking any fact.
War in Kosovo
They also told us how NATO was bombing Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, although this was a lie, becasue the so called ethinc cleansing, started after the bombing, as proven in this documentary from the BBC
[http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/bf9e62b3abd846d398e2629c4fbf10d5]
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
One example that I have already covered in previous posts is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. As Wikipedia says, it "is frequently quoted by major Western news media, such as Voice of America, Reuters, BBC, CNN and National Public Radio."
But if you continue until the description of this organization you will have a surprise: "The organisation is run by one man, Rami Abdulrahman (sometimes referred to as Rami Abdul Rahman), from his home in Coventry. He is a Syrian Sunni Muslim who owns a clothes shop." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Observatory_for_Human_Rights)
Cologne New Years Eve
"Several media outlets at first did not cover the story and, according to Jörg Luyken, only started reporting on the incidents on 5 January, after a wave of anger on social media made covering them unavoidable.[49] This delay was criticised by several politicians, including Hans-Peter Friedrich.[192] The public television channel ZDF later acknowledged that they had failed to report on the incidents despite having sufficient knowledge to do so.[193][194]
ZDF later called the delay in reporting a "clear misjudgment", and said since then, it has been "over-whelmed with hate and anger".[176] This has reinforced discontent previously held by parts of the German public with news coverage relating to the European migrant crisis, as well as a readiness to support the idea of the "Lügenpresse" (literally lying press).[176][195]
The delay in reporting on the assaults in the media lead to accusations that the authorities and the media attempted to ignore or cover up the attacks to avoid criticism against the current asylum and migration policy of the government.[1][196][197] The BBC's Gavin Hewitt wrote, "What has fuelled the sense of crisis is the suspicion - now widely held - that the German establishment is not telling the truth."[176] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany#Criticism_of_late_media_reporting]
(*) About the origins of the post-truth concept:
It is funny that the concept post-truth is now used by the media to talk about Russia and other non-aligned countries, because in their origin it was almost dedicated to american politcs:
"According to Oxford Dictionaries, the term post-truth was first used in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation. Tesich writes that following the shameful truth of Watergate, more assuaging coverage of the Iran–Contra scandal and Persian Gulf War demonstrate that "we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world."[10][11] In 2004, Ralph Keyes used the term "post-truth era" in his book by that title.[12] The same year American journalist Eric Alterman spoke of a "post-truth political environment" and coined the term "the post-truth presidency" in his analysis of the misleading statements made by the Bush administration after 9/11.[13] In his 2004 book Post-democracy, Colin Crouch used the phrase "post-democracy" to mean a model of politics where "elections certainly exist and can change governments," but "public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams." Crouch directly attributes the "advertising industry model" of political communication to the crisis of trust and accusations of dishonesty that a few years later others have associated with post-truth politics.[14]
The term "post-truth politics" was coined by the blogger David Roberts in a blog post for Grist on 1 April 2010, where it was defined as "a political culture in which politics (public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance of legislation)".[15][16]" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics]
Other study cases:
The death of Aylan Kurdi
When the horrible photo of Aylan Kurdi's small body appeared in the newspapers, to say that the main reason of his family's trip was that his father wanted new teeth was a lie, fake news, although the aunt of the child herself, who paid for the trip, explained it in tv.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22FenqnfWQk]
But the "truth" was that the Kurdi family were escaping war the war in Syria, although they came from Turkey were Aylan's father, although with small salary, had a job.
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3232251/Aylan-father-s-REAL-story-Abdullah-Kurdi-forced-deny-smuggler-new-questions-emerge-picture-shook-world.html].
Gulf War
"Although there were human rights abuses committed in Kuwait by the invading Iraqi military, the alleged incidents which received most publicity in the US were inventions of the public relations firm hired by the government of Kuwait to influence US opinion in favor of military intervention." "Among many other means of influencing US opinion, (...) the firm arranged for an appearance before a group of members of the US Congress in which a woman identifying herself as a nurse working in the Kuwait City hospital described Iraqi soldiers pulling babies out of incubators and letting them die on the floor.[98]
The story was an influence in tipping both the public and Congress towards a war with Iraq: six Congressmen said the testimony was enough for them to support military action against Iraq and seven Senators referenced the testimony in debate. The Senate supported the military actions in a 52–47 vote. However, a year after the war, this allegation was revealed to be a fabrication. The woman who had testified was found to be a member of Kuwait's Royal Family, in fact the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the US.[98] She hadn't lived in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion.
The details of the Hill & Knowlton public relations campaign, including the incubator testimony, were published in John R. MacArthur's Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), and came to wide public attention when an Op-ed by MacArthur was published in The New York Times. This prompted a reexamination by Amnesty International, which had originally promoted an account alleging even greater numbers of babies torn from incubators than the original fake testimony. After finding no evidence to support it, the organization issued a retraction. President Bush then repeated the incubator allegations on television." [Wikipedia]
Obama's great uncle and Auschwitz
Remember when Obama lied about his uncle liberating Auschwitz?
Never heard of that? Not a surprise, because the same mainstream media that are so eager to audit Trump's lies, do't seem to care much about Obama's lies. But he did say that his uncle (in fact it was his great uncle, but ho cares about such "small" details...) liberated Auschwitz (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVRaA_Z7430), despite the fact that it was the Soviet Army that liberated it
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auschwitz_concentration_camp#Evacuation.2C_death_marches.2C_and_Soviet_liberation).
For instance, if you search "obama+auschwitz" from site nytimes.com, the only results you get back is from a blog entry (https://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/obamas-staff-corrects-wwii-story/). The official excuse given was the Obama's uncle helped liberated another, less known camp, Buchenwald, and he had "simply" confused the names.
Can you imagine what the press would have said if Trump had made such "mistake"? If you think it is not so important that the President of the USA doesn't know who liberated the most infamous concentration camp in WW2 history, maybe you think this is more important (despite not being either in any NYT fact-check:
"He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers "at the expense of hardworking Americans." Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it's not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.
Then he got elected.
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside." [https://www.commondreams.org/news/2009/12/13/obamas-big-sellout-president-has-packed-his-economic-team-wall-street-insiders]
War in Bosnia
Western media explained us for years (and still do) how Milosevic planned and guided the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia.
Well, one thing is sure: they didn't have any evidence of that, as the International Court for the Former Yugoslavia has made clear:
"...there was no sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milošević agreed [with Radovan Karadžić] with the common plan [of ethnic cleansing]"
[http://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/tjug/en/160324_judgement.pdf]
So, if after more than 20 years the tribunal created to investigate the war crimes was not able to find any evidence linkin Milosevic with the ethnic cleansing, what was the news accusing him based on? It means they were lacking any fact.
War in Kosovo
They also told us how NATO was bombing Serbia to stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, although this was a lie, becasue the so called ethinc cleansing, started after the bombing, as proven in this documentary from the BBC
[http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/bf9e62b3abd846d398e2629c4fbf10d5]
Syrian Observatory for Human Rights
One example that I have already covered in previous posts is the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. As Wikipedia says, it "is frequently quoted by major Western news media, such as Voice of America, Reuters, BBC, CNN and National Public Radio."
But if you continue until the description of this organization you will have a surprise: "The organisation is run by one man, Rami Abdulrahman (sometimes referred to as Rami Abdul Rahman), from his home in Coventry. He is a Syrian Sunni Muslim who owns a clothes shop." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syrian_Observatory_for_Human_Rights)
Cologne New Years Eve
"Several media outlets at first did not cover the story and, according to Jörg Luyken, only started reporting on the incidents on 5 January, after a wave of anger on social media made covering them unavoidable.[49] This delay was criticised by several politicians, including Hans-Peter Friedrich.[192] The public television channel ZDF later acknowledged that they had failed to report on the incidents despite having sufficient knowledge to do so.[193][194]
ZDF later called the delay in reporting a "clear misjudgment", and said since then, it has been "over-whelmed with hate and anger".[176] This has reinforced discontent previously held by parts of the German public with news coverage relating to the European migrant crisis, as well as a readiness to support the idea of the "Lügenpresse" (literally lying press).[176][195]
The delay in reporting on the assaults in the media lead to accusations that the authorities and the media attempted to ignore or cover up the attacks to avoid criticism against the current asylum and migration policy of the government.[1][196][197] The BBC's Gavin Hewitt wrote, "What has fuelled the sense of crisis is the suspicion - now widely held - that the German establishment is not telling the truth."[176] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaults_in_Germany#Criticism_of_late_media_reporting]
(*) About the origins of the post-truth concept:
It is funny that the concept post-truth is now used by the media to talk about Russia and other non-aligned countries, because in their origin it was almost dedicated to american politcs:
"According to Oxford Dictionaries, the term post-truth was first used in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation. Tesich writes that following the shameful truth of Watergate, more assuaging coverage of the Iran–Contra scandal and Persian Gulf War demonstrate that "we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world."[10][11] In 2004, Ralph Keyes used the term "post-truth era" in his book by that title.[12] The same year American journalist Eric Alterman spoke of a "post-truth political environment" and coined the term "the post-truth presidency" in his analysis of the misleading statements made by the Bush administration after 9/11.[13] In his 2004 book Post-democracy, Colin Crouch used the phrase "post-democracy" to mean a model of politics where "elections certainly exist and can change governments," but "public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small range of issues selected by those teams." Crouch directly attributes the "advertising industry model" of political communication to the crisis of trust and accusations of dishonesty that a few years later others have associated with post-truth politics.[14]
The term "post-truth politics" was coined by the blogger David Roberts in a blog post for Grist on 1 April 2010, where it was defined as "a political culture in which politics (public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance of legislation)".[15][16]" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-truth_politics]
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