In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer.
She told me that the ‘patriotic messages’ of her films were dependent not on ‘orders from above’ but on what she called the ‘submissive void’ of the German public.
Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. ‘Yes, especially them,’ she said.
I think of this as I look around at the propaganda now consuming Western societies.
The BBC has disabled comments under a tweet celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s “longstanding relationship” with Africa after the post drew public outrage, with people calling the tribute a “rebranding of colonialism.” The post in question was published on Twitter by the BBC’s African arm on Thursday in the wake of the long-serving monarch’s death, and featured a four-and-a-half-minute video celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s relations with Africa and its leaders throughout her 70-year reign. However, a number of people took issue with the post, stating that the BBC was trying to “rebrand colonialism” by sugarcoating Britain’s rule over Africa, which continued into the late 20th century. In 1980, Zimbabwe became the last African nation to gain independence from the UK.
Reports regularly expose the mainstream media (MSM) Following are two reports:
Israeli military contract. Google employees protest.
Google employees protesting the company’s Project Nimbus contract with Amazon Web Services and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have gone public with a week of protest actions set to culminate in a multi-city demonstration headlined No Tech for Apartheid.
A multiethnic, multireligious group of Googlers calling themselves Jewish Diaspora in Tech hopes to pressure the tech giant into dropping the mammoth $1.2 billion contract on moral grounds, arguing that by allowing Israel access to its most sophisticated machine learning and AI technology, Google is enabling heinous crimes against the occupied Palestinian population.
True to its name, the Wall Street Journal never fails to lay bare its corporate sympathies. In a recent feature headlined “The Place With the Most Lithium is Blowing the Electric-Car Revolution” (8/10/22), the Journal warps anti-neoliberal and Indigenous resistance to ecological destruction and resource plundering into pesky obstacles to green capitalist innovation.
2/4 George Orwell could have told us who orders such things in a "democracy"? I had a similar bizarre experience with Foreign Policy magazine when I returned to a piece by a German editor Peter Kuras that I read 3 months ago on Nazi past of EU leader Ursula von der Leyen's family
4/4 Now I find those paragraphs have been simply removed! Evidently, Ursula's legacy is being recreated as the Saviour of Ukraine, which is how Americans want to project her now! What Babi Yar? (The Aristocratic Ineptitude of Ursula Von Der Leyen, April 30, 2021, Foreign Policy)
Earlier this month, a New York Times (7/2/22) report, “How the Russian Media Spread False Claims About Ukrainian Nazis,” argued that falsely branding people as Nazis is inherently propagandistic:
The lie that the government and culture of Ukraine are filled with dangerous “Nazis” has become a central theme of Kremlin propaganda about the war.
The New York Times (7/2/22) attributed a spike in mentions of Nazism at the start of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to Putin describing Ukraine as “full of Nazis,” but did not discuss Western media comparing Putin to Hitler.
To say Ukraine is “filled” with Nazis is an obvious exaggeration, although even a relatively small number of Nazis has wielded disproportionate influence in the Ukrainian government (Kyiv Post, 3/26/19; Euronews, 8/4/21). Nevertheless, FAIR (3/7/14, 1/15/22, 1/28/22, 2/23/22) has covered the Western media’s denial of the far-right’s role in the Ukrainian 2014 coup, as well as their complicity in amplifying Ukrainian neo-Nazi publicity stunts during the war.
Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 2/28/22): “Unfortunately, there was virtually no focus on civilian death and agony when it was the US military launching the invasions.”
As US news media covered the first shocking weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some media observers—like FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 2/28/22)—have noted their impressions of how coverage differed from wars past, particularly in terms of a new focus on the impact on civilians.
To quantify and deepen these observations, FAIR studied the first week of coverage of the Ukraine war (2/24–3/2/22) on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. We used the Nexis news database to count both sources (whose voices get to be heard?) and segments (what angles are covered?) about Ukraine during the study period. Comparing this coverage to that of other conflicts reveals both a familiar reliance on US officials to frame events, as well as a newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians—when those civilians are white and under attack by an official US enemy, rather than by the US itself.
Ukrainian sources—no experts
One of the most striking things about early coverage has been the sheer number of Ukrainian sources. FAIR always challenges news media to seek out the perspective of those most impacted by events, and US outlets are doing so to a much greater extent in this war than in any war in recent history. Of 234 total sources—230 of whom had identifiable nationalities—119 were Ukrainian (including five living in the United States.)
KIEV, UKRAINE — We are living in dangerous times. All around the world, intense military actions are taking place. Last week alone, Russia launched a huge military invasion of Ukraine; Saudi Arabia carried out dozens of strikes on Yemen; Israel launched a wave of deadly missile attacks against Syria; and the United States restarted its bombing campaign in Somalia.
These four deadly incidents happened concurrently. Yet judging by media coverage, it is highly unlikely that many will even be aware of the final three. A MintPress News study of five leading Western media outlets found that overwhelming attention was paid to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while the others were barely mentioned, if at all.
Virtually nobody trusts what they read any more. The United States ranks dead last among 46 nations surveyed in confidence in the press. Only 29% of Americans say they broadly believe what they read, see or hear in mainstream media. And more than three quarters of the public think that big outlets knowingly publish fake news.
The term “fake news” first came into common usage around the contentious 2016 election, where both the Trump and Clinton campaigns attempted to weaponize the term against their opponents. Clinton claimed that Trump was being buoyed by false information put out by Eastern European bloggers and shared on sites like Facebook, while Trump shot back at her, claiming the likes of Clinton-supporting networks CNN and MSNBC were themselves fake news.
July 21, 2021Print this post.Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.
This is an article from our series on septic media
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WikiLeaks tried to break the disinformation stranglehold, and see what happened: the Empire quickly moved to make an example of Assange. Disinformation is the lifeblood of a criminal world order.
What Americans call “the right” and “the left” do not exist. In reality, there are a few oligarchs (rulers in an oligarchy, rule by the wealthy and powerful) on top. The rest of us are bottoms who influence nothing and control less. Tops, working through the political, security and media establishment (today including social media), promote divisions within the bottoms to distract the bottoms and keep them from joining together to throw out the tops.
Journal of People 