On the newest edition of Media Roots Radio, Abby and Robbie Martin discuss how fear is used as a commodity by the media and political establishment to control society in the context of the Boston Bombings and murder in Woolwich, UK. They also talk about how the increased access to information online will make it harder to discern truths and distinguish reality in the future.
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This is a very interesting discussion. I would like to add a couple points here:
1) Democracy Now is actually pretty bad, despite the good things that they do. On various issues, they serve as Establishment propaganda. The Libya War was the most recent example. Amy Goodman ran these stories about one woman who was supposedly raped and pooped on (no joke) by “Ghaddafi henchmen” before she just happened to wander into a hotel with a bunch of Western reporters to whom she told her tale. Russ Baker wrote about the Libyan rape propaganda here:
http://whowhatwhy.com/2011/03/30/libya-rape-charge-view-with-caution/
Democracy Now also devoted very little (zero?) airtime to critics of the war. The war was a clearly illegal and imperialist adventure undertaken by a Nobel Peace Prize winning President. His fawning liberal supporters cannot get past their blind adoration of the man to notice that he illegally wages war across the globe. Libya was Iraq with a different MO. At least Saddam was given a sham trial before he was hanged; Ghaddafi was droned, buggered by our al Qaeda proxies, and then murdered. And in the crucial early stages of this war, Democracy Now was running war propaganda stories while (to my knowledge) refusing to air any critical stories about the US involvement.
You mention that in America we have historically falsified event like the political assassinations of the 1960’s and Watergate. This is another area into which Democracy Now will not go. A sad yet comical example of this is when Amy Goodman interviewed the great John Pilger, here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZ27B4bSqEw
Pilger was there when RFK was shot. He states that he and people there knew that there were multiple shooters (In fact the autopsy of RFK establishes pretty clearly that Sirhan did not fire the shot that killed RFK). But notice that Amy is having none of it. She awkwardly tries to change the subject, before weakly trying to correct Pilger, stating that his version of those events is not the accepted one.
If I may make a prediction, Democracy Now will provide bad coverage of the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination. They may state that it is a controversial event. They may even have some token representation of the critical community, but I would be shocked if their tone wasn’t overall supportive of the “Two lone nuts” version of events, starring Krazy Lee Oswald and Krazy Jack Ruby.
2) You mention that it is historically documented that the US created and used the terrorist networks that became al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The use of these networks by the US is actually far more extensive. They were used throughout the 1990’s as US proxies in places like Bosnia, Azerbaijan, Chechnya, and Kosovo.
A great write up on all this is here:
http://newint.org/features/2009/10/01/blowback-extended-version/
Happy Birthday Robbie!
You’re “#FrequencyMaster”.
I wish you all the best!
Keep this project alive folks has the potential in it.
Can’t wait to listen to this!
Me too!