Corporate Propaganda Is The Enemy of the People

By

 M. Richard Maxson

      It was a bad week for American mainstream journalism. The string of errors followed a pattern of earlier false and misleading reporting and other violations of journalistic standards, a sorry record that has been the hallmark of the corporate press. Anyone who has any minimal concerns about journalistic accuracy should demand an accounting as to how major U.S. media outlets continue filling so many people’s brains with totally false news.

      Opinion and insinuation is NOT news. Media corporations are doing the opposite of what journalists ought to do: Rather than informing the public about what happened and providing minimal transparency and accountability for themselves and the high-level officials who caused this to happen, they are hiding behind meaningless, obfuscating statements crafted by P.R. executives and lawyers.

      Journalists should be on the same team as the truth. Instead, many cherry-pick facts to push their own narratives and personal interest, particularly on television and on social media. So, how can journalists and news outlets so flamboyantly act offended when they’re attacked as being “Fake News” when this is the conduct behind which they hide when they get caught disseminating incredibly consequential false stories?

      The major U.S. media outlets fill so many people’s

brains with totally false news. Virtually every false story published goes only in one direction: to be as inflammatory and damaging as possible on the Trump-Russia story and about Russia particularly. No Russian Facebook ad or Twitter bot could possibly have anywhere near the impact as CNN and others when it comes to deceiving people with blatantly inaccurate information.At some point, once “mistakes” all start going in the same direction, toward advancing the same agenda, they cease looking like mistakes.

      This type of recklessness and falsity is now a clear and highly disturbing trend — one could say a constant — when it comes to reporting on Trump, Russia, and WikiLeaks. It is reporting(?) like this — and the subsequent corporate efforts to obfuscate — that have made the U.S. media so disliked and that fuel and empower Trump’s attacks on them.

      A socio-cultural-political structure is in place wherein

the individual is bombarded, to the point of psychical saturation, with self-serving, elitist manufactured media content. This attitude is a systemic problem in the press, and especially at CNN. The calls for violence and action against current administration official reeks of totalitarianism. By its nature, totalitarianism conspires to keep the conscience in a state of angst, oblivious to reality. Is it any wonder that the president has called the current US media as “enemies of the people?”

     At yesterday's press conference CNN representative Jim Acosta demanded the press secretary codemn the president's remarks – her response was spot on truth...

“It’s ironic, Jim, that not only you and the media attack the president for his rhetoric when they frequently lower the level of conversation in this country. Repeatedly, repeatedly the media resorts to personal attacks without any content other than to incite anger.”

      She went on to say the media have attacked her personally “on a number of occasions” before specifically calling out rhetoric she said aired on CNN. “Including your own network said I should be harassed as a life sentence. That I should be choked. ICE officials are not welcomed in their place of worship,” Sanders said.

      “When I was hosted by the Correspondents’ Association, which almost all of you are members of, you brought a comedian up to attack my appearance and call me a traitor to my own gender,” Sanders said. “As far as I know, I’m the first press secretary in the history of the United States that’s required Secret Service protection.”

     Sanders said the media “continues to ratchet up the verbal assault against the president,” noting that the administration has a “role to play” but the media are also responsible for the discourse in America.
The administration has been very clear on this as the press secretary has stated........

      “Look, the President is simply calling out a very direct and false accusation lodged against him. There was nothing more than an individual trying to put their bias into their reporting, and something that, frankly, has gotten a little bit out of control. We've seen it time and time again over the last couple of weeks. A number of outlets have had to retract and change, and rewrite, and make editor's notes to a number of different stories -- some of them with major impacts, including moving markets. This is a big problem and we think it's something that should be taken seriously.”

      “You cannot say that it's an honest mistake when you're purposefully putting out information that you know to be false, or when you're taking information that hasn't been validated, that hasn't been offered any credibility, and that has been continually denied by a number of people, including people with direct knowledge of an instance. There's a very big difference between making honest mistakes and purposefully misleading the American people -- something that happens regularly.”

      The first amendment guarantees a free press, but what if the press is not free, but merely a propaganda tool for the special interest cabals that lurk in the shadows? No matter your views on those political controversies, no matter how much you hate Trump or regard Russia as a grave villain and threat to our cherished democracy and freedoms, it has to be acknowledged that when the U.S. media is spewing constant false news this, is a grave threat to our republic and our cherished freedom.