Time to Play Hardball with the Media

by

     M. Richard Maxson


      Glenn Greenwald is an American columnist, blogger, and author. He  was named by Foreign Policy Magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013. Three of the four books he authored have been New York Times bestsellers. Greenwald is a frequent speaker on college campuses, including Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the University of Pennsylvania, Brown University, UCLA School of Law, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Maryland. Greenwald became widely known after The Guardian published the first of a series of reports detailing United States and British global surveillance programmes, based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden. His NSA reporting has won numerous awards around the world, including top investigative journalism prizes from the 2013 Online Journalism Awards.

      So it is of no surprise that at the thirtieth annual Chaos Communication Congress he presented the keynote address. In it he condemned the mainstream media and accused his colleagues of failing to challenge erroneous remarks routinely made by government officials around the globe. He argued that the media establishment at large is guilty of failing significantly with respect to accomplishing its most crucial role: keeping governments in check. He stated, "....the reason why we have a free press is because national security officials routinely lie to the population in order to shield their power and get their agendas advanced.” He added, "journalists tasked with reporting on those issues have all too often been compliant with the blatant lies made by officials from those governments." 

       Using the NSA revelations as a recent example he said, "...I think one of the ways that you can see what it is that we were targeting is in the behavior of the media over the past six months since these revelations have emerged almost entirely without them and despite them. We knew in particular that one of our most formidable adversaries was not simply going to be the intelligence agencies on which we were reporting and who we were trying to expose, but also their most loyal, devoted servants, which calls itself the United States and British media.”

      From there, he went on to cite the example of US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who earlier this year made remarks to Congress that were quickly proved false by documents leaked to Greenwald by Mr. Snowden. The very first National Security Agency document he was shown, Greenwald said, “revealed that the Obama administration had succeeded in convincing court, a secret court, to compel phone companies to turn over to the NSA every single phone record of every single telephone call.” Clapper then “went to the Senate and lied to their faces...which is at least as serious of a crime as anything Edward Snowden is accused of." 

       Greenwald said that the established media continues to reject the notion that government officials spew lies. Snowden’s NSA documents have exposed those these lies on more than one occasion, yet reporters around the world continue to take the word of officials as fact rather than dig from the truth. The US “knows that its only hope for continuing to maintain its regiment of secrecy behind which it engages with radical and corrupt acts is to intimidate and deter and threaten people who are would-be whistleblowers and transparency activists from coming forward and doing what it is that they do by showing them that they’ll be subjected to even the most extreme punishments and there’s nothing that they can do about it,” he said. “And it’s an effective tactic.”

       The wealthy Socialists, who now control everything in the US media. They recently met with Mr. Obama to decide which news will be reported. This quote from the White House sums it all up nicely. “By meeting privately with the people who shape national opinion, the president ensures that his points of view will be represented in the media — even if those points of view aren’t directly attributable to him. The President's private conferences with columnists "serve as an alternative means of shaping the debate in Washington: a private back-channel of genuine sentiment that seeps into the echo-chamber."

      
       Someone once said that "the propagada in the US media makes the old Soviet Union's look like child's play. Those of us that have a world view could not disagree with this statement. We are given a pablum of slanted news stories 24/7. If you have read one newspaper, it seems as if you have read them all. The articles all seem to be the same – the same wire service telling us what to think and what they say is important to know.

       The US Media is not our friend, it is the enemy.  They have been trying to swing national elections since at least the early 1990s. In 2008 and again this year, we saw the media cravenly cover up for the incompetence and deceit of this President. This is on top of the daily barrage of insults that Constitutionalists must endure at the hands of this arrogant bunch of elitist snobs. 

       What can you say about reporting by such well known journalists like Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post and  David Gergen, of CNN, stated for the record "  "This has been a scandal-free administration by and large, and we should appreciate that." Bias is one thing, but this is a mental disorder that some call Democratic Socialism. We  need to be prepared to play hardball with the Pravda press from here on out.