Tag: mainstream media

Report Shows How Military Industrial Complex Sets Media Narrative on Ukraine

Wealthy donors have long funded think tanks with official-sounding names that produce research that reflects the interests of those funders (Extra!, 7/13). The weapons industry is a major contributor to these idea factories; a recent report from the Quincy Institute (6/1/23) demonstrates just how much influence war profiteers have on the national discourse.

The Quincy Institute—whose own start-up funding came mainly from George Soros and Charles Koch—looked at 11 months of Ukraine War coverage in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, from March 1, 2022, through January 31, 2023, and counted each time one of 33 leading think tanks was mentioned. Of the 15 think tanks most often mentioned in the coverage, only one—Human Rights Watch—does not take funding from Pentagon contractors. Quincy’s analysis found that the media were seven times more likely to cite think tanks with war industry ties than they were to cite think tanks without war industry ties.

With 157 mentions each, the top two think tanks were the Atlantic Council and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Both of these think tanks receive millions from the war industry. The Atlantic Council has long been the brain trust of NATO, the military organization whose expansion towards Russia’s borders was a critical factor in Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine. (See FAIR.org, 3/4/22.) Both think tanks receive hundreds of thousands of dollars from Raytheon and Lockheed Martin, companies which have already been awarded billions of dollars in Pentagon contracts as a result of the war in Ukraine.

CSIS was revealed in a New York Times expose (8/7/16) to produce content that reflected the weapons industry priorities of its funders.  It also “initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations” of military funders.

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9/11: Whodunnit? and Why It Matters to the Peace Movement

“I have chosen this time and this place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived — yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace . . .”— PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, JUNE 10, 1963

Sixty years later it behooves us more than ever to penetrate the tenacious ignorance of which Kennedy spoke. To honor my friend and colleague, TRANSCEND member Prof. Graeme MacQueen, who passed away in April, this editorial addresses topics he was passionate about, namely peace, justice and truth, in particular 9/11 truth.

If we’re not willing to open our minds to the abundant evidence refuting the narrative, fed to us mere minutes after the heinous crimes of 9/11 unfolded before our eyes, that a band of foreign militants from the Middle East was solely responsible for those crimes, then we risk continuing to fall prey to propaganda leading to unending wars and suffering.

Johan Galtung introduced me to Graeme at a 2011 TRANSCEND symposium in North Carolina. 9/11 was not on the formal agenda, but came up in side conversations as the 10-year anniversary approached. Galtung has always promoted open dialog on challenging topics, bucking the penchant of academic institutions and major media platforms to ignore dissenting views on 9/11 and dismiss them as crazy conspiracy theories. He thus proposed adding a session on 9/11 to the symposium and opening it to the general public. Three of us presented our views, followed by Q and A.

Galtung accepted the official narrative that 9/11 was perpetrated by foreign Muslim extremists, viewing it as blow-back from the many injustices the US had inflicted on the Middle East. He called it a public execution of 3 buildings (World Trade Center 1 and 2, and the Pentagon) that symbolized the US military-financial complex. 

Graeme and I enumerated unexplained anomalies pointing to complicity of key agents within the US Government and cast doubt on the culpability of Al-Qaeda operatives. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind of 9/11, confessed involvement only after being subjected to prolonged torture via waterboarding, while videos of Osama bin Laden claiming credit for the attacks look suspiciously fake.

We all agreed, however, along with most peace activists, that the US response to the events of 9/11 was reprehensible: declaring the unending war on terror, fomenting widespread Islamophobia, curtailing civil liberties, decades-long military incursions in Afghanistan and Iraq that ruined both countries and cost countless lives. The US leadership justified its violent response by the fear, outrage and desire for revenge that swept across much of the nation, horrified at the shock and awe it had witnessed that fateful day. How could that have been prevented?

Imagine what our world might look like if the propaganda machine set in motion the morning of 9/11 had failed. What if most journalists, commentators, engineers, pilots, firefighters, police, and politicians on mainstream media had pressed for answers to valid questions, like:

How could damage and fires on the upper floors have caused both twin towers to explode and disappear into their footprints? How could World Trade Center 7, a third skyscraper not hit by a plane, have imploded symmetrically at free fall speed? How could an alleged hijacker who flunked flight school on small planes have executed a harrowing maneuver to ram a passenger jet into the Pentagon going 500 mph at ground level? How did the US, with its hundreds of billions in defense spending, fail to defend the nerve center of its military headquarters in the nation’s capital? 

Once it was announced hijacked planes were crashing into buildings, why did Secret Service agents allow President Bush to remain in a Florida classroom with children, leaving them vulnerable to attack? Who made money on a significant increase in stock market betting right before 9/11 that prices of American and United Airline stocks would drop? 

What if honest eye-witness journalists, who in the morning had reported explosions both before and during the destruction of the towers, had continued to develop that thread and ask deeper questions throughout the day and following days, rather than being diverted by select experts and pundits who silenced the “explosion” theme, supplanting it with unproven assertions that Osama bin Laden did it.

Had these questions — many raised also by 9/11 victims’ family members — been relentlessly pursued, the flimsy tale of Muslim extremists from remote parts of the world with no ties to any government being the lone perpetrators of this apocalyptic theatrical display would have soon disintegrated.

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Is TikTok Really To Blame for Titanic Conspiracy Theories?

The Titanic never actually sank. Or maybe it did, but not because of an accidental run-in with an iceberg. It was really a dastardly plot by Irish Catholics, or perhaps banker J.P. Morgan or an Egyptian mummy’s curse is to blame.

Those—and plenty more—wild conspiracy theories about the disaster that unfolded in the North Atlantic during the early morning hours of April 15, 1912, have been circulating for years, with some starting almost immediately after the Titanic reached the ocean floor.

But now they’re also spreading on TikTok, and The New York Times seems convinced that the social media app is a uniquely dangerous place for kids to encounter ideas that they might otherwise have to find in books, in movies, or elsewhere on the internet.

On TikTok, “musty rumors merge with fresh misinformation and manipulated content—a demonstration of TikTok’s potent ability to seed historical revisionism about even the most deeply studied cases,” the Times‘ Tiffany Hsu and Sapna Maheshwari declare in a piece about the video site’s “Titanic Truthers.”

But the story’s dramatic framing and its specific targeting of TikTok seem at odds with reality—a problem for any article, but especially one that’s supposed to be combating misinformation. Indeed, near the bottom of the piece, Hsu and Maheshwari admit that these TikToks are “just the latest recycling bin for false narratives about the Titanic.”

Is there something uniquely dangerous about the way these ideas spread via TikTok? I asked Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who has written extensively about conspiracy theories (including in the pages of Reason), whether this is a worrying development.

“No, we should not be worried,” says Uscinski. “The ability of social media to turn people into conspiracy theorists is vastly overrated, largely because people don’t believe everything they hear and see, and oftentimes, the things they hear and see are things that they sought out purposely because those things match their preexisting beliefs.”

If TikTok—or social media in general, or even the internet as a whole—was causing people to believe in more conspiracy theories, researchers would be able to see that trend. Instead, surveys by Uscinski and others have found that, at the mass level, conspiracy theory beliefs tend to be stable over time.

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NBC News DEFENDS ‘we’re coming for your children’ chant at NYC drag march, arguing it’s ‘been used for years at Pride events’

The Drag March in Manhattan’s East Village featured topless women and plenty of drag performers chanting “We’re coming for your children.” A clip from Timcast of the event, the chanting, and the festivities went viral on social media, infuriating many who value childhood innocence. In response, NBC defended the chant, saying that it was just for fun, and is a way for LGBTQIA+ people to “own” the slurs that have been leveled against them.

“We’re here, we’re queer, we’re coming for your children,” they sang to each other.

NBC asserted that the drag marchers were saying “We’re here, we’re queer, we’re not going shopping,” and that it’s only “one voice that is louder than the crowd” who said, “We’re coming for your children.” They quote the drag march organizer, Brian Griffin, who said that they chanted obscene things to basically own the slurs. 

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White House Edits Out Troublesome Reporter From Press Briefing

The White House seems to have edited out footage of Today News Africa reporter Simon Ateba confronting Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre Monday with a series of comments that prompted her to threaten to end the briefing altogether.

Ateba again accused Jean-Pierre of refusing to call on him for any questions for months, after the Press Sceretary had claimed that the Biden Administration is “committed to freedom of the press.”

“You’ve been discriminating against me for the past nine months,” Ateba charged, much to the chagrin of the other reporters at the briefing.

“Stop. How is she discriminating?” another reporter intervened, to which Ateba responded “She called on you, she gave you a few questions. Please, allow me to do my job and ask my question.”

Jean-Pierre tried to ignore Ateba and go to aq different reporter for a question, but he refused to be passed over.

Jean-Pierre then stated “If this continues, we’re gonna end the press briefing. If this continues – you’re being incredibly rude. You’re being incredibly rude. You’re talking over your colleagues.”

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Media Use Failed Russia ‘Coup’ To Knock Bombshell Biden Scandal Off The Front Page 

Last Thursday, House Republicans released two explosive testimonies from IRS whistleblowers that, if true, further suggest President Joe Biden sold his political power for profit from our enemies abroad via his son Hunter’s business dealings. Moreover, they allege the Department of Justice has done everything in its power to for years protect the Bidens, even to the point of massively interfering in an American election.

This story is huge — bigger than Monica Lewinsky and Watergate combined. If confirmed, it means that the sitting President of the United States is potentially compromised by our nation’s adversaries, and the intelligence apparatus are enabling his corruption. We have no choice but to tear it down.

Yet you wouldn’t know any of that from the headlines this weekend. Sunday’s premiere, front-page stories in each of America’s biggest newspapers — The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and The Washington Post — were all about the quick and unsuccessful “coup” in Russia. Mentions of the Biden scandal were scant. The New York Times’ only featured Biden scandal article, titled “The Real Lesson From the Hunter Biden Saga,” reads like satire, dismissing all the mounting allegations against the president and even praising him as a “model of … love and support” for people with drug-addicted family members.

It’s pretty interesting that almost immediately after the publication of the IRS whistleblower testimonies, the White House and State Department began sounding alarm bells over a “coup” that was over almost as soon as it started. Naturally, the corporate media was grateful to be handed a distraction story on a silver platter. The short-lived mutiny has not only dominated the headlines this weekend but was also granted wall-to-wall coverage on every major TV news channel. CNN, in particular, has really taken advantage of the Russia “coup,” using it as an opportunity to extol Biden for his “mastery of foreign policy.”

None of this is to say that this alleged attempted coup against the Kremlin isn’t newsworthy. The story has its place in the “world news” section. However, a foreign uprising that may or may not impact a war America has no business participating in should not be commanding the front pages for days on end, especially when we have far bigger fish to fry.

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The real casualties of Russia’s ‘civil war’: the Beltway expert class

Numerous serious casualties were incurred during Wagner chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s supposed “coup.” The Grayzone offers an in-depth look at the massacre carried out by some of America’s top Russia experts against their own credibility.

When Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin launched a supposed revolt against Russian President Vladimir Putin on June 23, sending his forces on a march toward Moscow following a series of tirades against the country’s defense establishment, Washington’s expert class overflowed with an orgy of regime change fantasies. 

For just over 12 hours, everyone from former US ambassador to Russia and noted Hitler apologist Michael McFaul to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to neocon pundit Anne Applebaum exploded with seemingly libidinal excitement about a supposed “civil war” that was certain to feature “Russians…killing Russians,” along with “lots of casualties” and Putin “probably hiding somewhere.”

It was as though the Soviet Union was collapsing all over again, and Prigozhin, a character named on the FBI’s most wanted list whom the US government has sanctioned for leading what it described as a “transnational criminal organization,” was suddenly a white knight storming into Moscow to liberate Russia from “the Putin regime” on the back of a tank. Move over, Juan Guaido.

Expecting a bloodbath and seismic political upheaval, corporate networks like CNN had budgeted wall-to-wall coverage of the coup that wasn’t, filling cable news green rooms with rent-a-generals, K Street think tankers, and war-hungry former diplomatic corps hacks.

On the afternoon of June 24, however, news broke across the US that Prigozhin had struck a deal with Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to end his protest and go into exile. Thus ended a largely bloodless affair that ultimately saw fewer documented deaths than the January 6 Capitol Riot.

Though the supposed revolt in Russia burned out faster than a Leopard tank on the way to Zaporizhzhia, we now know that a number of serious casualties were incurred inside the DC Beltway. The Grayzone obtained an exclusive look at the massacre some of America’s top Russia experts carried out against their own credibility.

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Legacy Newspapers Bury Hunter Biden Bombshell On Page 15

The Friday print editions of The New York Times and The Washington Post relegated their reporting on Thursday’s explosive Hunter Biden revelations from Internal Revenue Service (IRS) whistleblowers to the bottom of page A15 of their newspapers.

Both papers placed stories about the visit of the Indian Prime Minister, the Titan submarine, a tornado in Texas, Donald Trump and the Arab-Israeli conflict ahead of their coverage of the IRS whistleblower testimony, which alleges that Hunter Biden leveraged his father’s political influence for personal financial gain and that Department of Justice (DOJ) officials had interfered with the investigation. The whistleblower documents included text messages allegedly from Hunter Biden, in which he said President Joe Biden was “sitting here” with him while Hunter conducted business activities with a Chinese associate.

The NYT ran a story on the bottom of page A15 titled “Hunter Biden Used Father’s Name to Pressure Associate in ’17, Documents Show,” referring to Hunter’s alleged promise to a Chinese businessman to “make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction,” as alleged in the testimony. The Post reported in their business section that an “IRS whistleblower says Justice Dept. slowed and stifled Hunter Biden case,” also on the bottom of page A15.

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CIA’s Extraordinary Role Influencing Liberal Media Outlets Daily Kos, The Daily Beast, Rolling Stone

As a longtime investigative journalist and author, I have spent a good portion of my career researching corruption within U.S. intelligence agencies. I was nevertheless surprised to learn about the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) central role in crafting the militarized governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. documents in the final chapters of his new runaway best-seller, “The Real Anthony Fauci.”

I’ve known Kennedy for more than two decades. I have interviewed him and collaborated with him on environmental articles and several books, including “Climate In Crisis.” I have great respect for his legal work and the accomplishments of his ongoing Waterkeeper Alliance. And I appreciate his dedication to alerting the public about alternative narratives related to the pandemic.

I am fully vaccinated and a believer in the efficacy of the vaccines. However, as a bedrock liberal with a deep reverence for the First Amendment and time-honored right to freedom of speech, I became alarmed that social media sites, including Instagram and YouTube, have banned Kennedy from pointing out flaws in the dominant narratives surrounding the COVID crisis.

In my view, Kennedy has been falsely vilified as an anti-vaccination disinformation “conspiracy theorist.” Blanket censorship by mainstream media seems to prohibit him from responding to such attacks.

And it disturbs me that once-idealistic liberal media outlets have devolved into apologists for the pharmaceutical industry (including its captured public health technocrats), as well as their stifling of any dissent. Why the vitriol against Kennedy, I wondered, from leading liberal news websites such as Daily Kos, The Daily Beast, and more recently, Rolling Stone?

A The Daily Beast headline appearing one year before the pandemic set the tone (Feb. 8, 2019): “Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. spouts his insane anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory in measles hot zone.”

Seeming to borrow a page from the CIA’s propaganda manuals, the liberal blogs have employed the signature trope of portraying opposition to official theology as the dangerous product of right-wing extremism.

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Mainstream news outlets want to end Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s primary challenge

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced his primary challenge to Joe Biden in April, the media shrugged him off as a meme candidate who would soon collide with political reality. Two months later, Kennedy is polling as high as 20% and his campaign is gaining momentum. And the media — unwilling to let Biden be primaried by this pedigreed populist — have decided it’s time to step in.

And step in they have. Over the past weeks, major print and broadcast organizations have laid the foundations for a powerful narrative designed to hobble Kennedy’s campaign before a single vote is cast. The strategy is to disqualify Kennedy by labeling him a font of misinformation, out to serve America’s monied technocrats. In other words: a Republican in Kennedy clothes.

Earlier this month, Kennedy joined Elon Musk for a live Twitter Space, the first ever by a presidential candidate. The response from the fourth estate was instant derision. 

The New York Times set the pace with a takedown brimming with accusations and innuendo. From word one, the article didn’t hesitate with its heavy-handedness — accusing Kennedy in its headline of “Pushing Right-Wing Ideas and Misinformation.” 

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