Марк Дайс - The True Story of Fake News - How Mainstream Media Manipulates Millions

As Ben Bagdikian, the former dean of the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism points out in The New Media Monopoly , “The possibilities for mutual promotion among all their various media is the basic reason the Big Five [now six: Comcast, News Corporation, Time Warner, Disney, Viacom, and CBS] have become major owners of all kinds of media. For example, actors and actresses in a conglomerate’s wholly owned movie studio can appear on the same company’s television and cable networks, photographs of the newly minted celebrities can dominate the covers of the firm’s wholly owned magazines, and those celebrities can be interviewed on the firm’s wholly owned radio and television talk shows. The conglomerate can commission an author from its wholly owned book publishing firm to write a biography or purported autobiography of the new stars, which in turn is promoted on the firm’s other media.” 87

Bagdikian points out that these multi-platform conglomerates, “have power that media in past history did not, power created by new technology and the near uniformity of their political goals” 88and that, “Technically, the dominant media firms are an oligopoly, the rule of a few in which one of those few, acting alone, can alter market conditions.” 89He continues, “The major media socialize every generation of Americans. Whether the viewers and listeners are conscious of it or not, they are being ‘educated’ in role models, in social behavior, in their early assumptions about the world into which they will venture, and in what to assume about their unseen millions of fellow citizens.” 90

George Orwell warned of this same propaganda power in his classic novel Nineteen Eighty-Four when he said, “All the beliefs, habits, tastes, emotions, mental attitudes that characterize our time are really designed to sustain the mystique of the Party and prevent the true nature of present-day society from being perceived.” 91

The editors of a college textbook titled Questioning The Media, which I still have from my days as a student earning my bachelor’s degree in communication, point out that the major media conglomerates, “serve to define what is of political concern, of economic importance, of cultural interest to us. In short, we live in what is often described as a media culture.” 92Even though this book is over 20 years old, it still rings true to this day.

Television is such a powerful form of media that it is credited with being the reason John F. Kennedy became president. When he was running against Richard Nixon in 1960, television had just become a household medium and for the first time in history the presidential debates were televised. Before this they had been aired on the radio, but now Americans could see the debates, and that changed everything.

Marking the 50th anniversary of this historic event, Time magazine said, “It’s now common knowledge that without the nation’s first televised debate◦— fifty years ago Sunday◦— Kennedy would never have been president.” 93Why, you wonder? Well, people who listened to the debate on the radio (which many did because not everyone had a television back then) thought that Nixon won, but the people who saw it on TV had a completely different conclusion. The reason was that because of the hot lights on the stage, which were needed to properly light the candidates, and because Nixon refused to put on makeup to take the shine off his face, which today everyone on TV knows is a standard practice◦— he looked pale, sweaty and shiny; while Kennedy had a tan from campaigning outdoors in the days leading up to the debate, and took the advice of producers and wore makeup, so he looked to be “radiating health” and confidence to the viewers watching on TV, whereas Nixon looked kind of sickly and weak. 94

Over 2500 years ago the Chinese military strategist and philosopher Sun Tzu wrote The Art of War, which isn’t just a manual of strategies for physical battle, but also psychological operations as well. He formulated tactics to both intimidate the enemy, and to encourage people to support a conflict. Since then, war propaganda has advanced in step with technology, and now instead of a group’s leader giving an impassioned speech to their citizens in the town square about the ‘need’ to go to war, now they do it through newspapers, radio and television.

William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer were partially, if not largely, responsible for the Spanish-American War in 1898 because their newspapers sensationalized and misreported an incident after a U.S. ship, the USS Maine, blew up in Havana harbor in Cuba. 95The explosion was just an accident, but America’s two most popular papers at the time, The New York Journal (owned by Hearst) and New York World (owned by Pulitzer) whipped the American people into a frenzy by publicizing misinformation about the explosion and blamed the Spanish for allegedly bombing the ship. 96Both Hearst and Pulitzer used their papers to call for war, and historians often use their sensational stories about the incident as examples of yellow journalism and propaganda, but unfortunately this would become just one of many examples of disinformation being used to convince Americans to support going to war.

Both liberal and conservative mainstream media in America endlessly repeated the fear mongering false claims of the Bush administration about the (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein supposedly had, and hyped up the looming War in Iraq as if it were an exciting plot in a Hollywood thriller. 97A few years after the war started many people began doubting the reasons for it, and people’s skepticism fueled a closer look at why we were really there.

One of the key “reasons” for going into Iraq was that Saddam Hussein was supposedly somehow involved in the 9/11 attacks, which we now know is completely false. 98That, and he had allegedly acquired, or was manufacturing, weapons of mass destruction◦— WMDs. The documents that purported to show that Saddam had attempted to purchase yellowcake uranium, which is used to build nuclear weapons turned out to be forged. 99If the documents were real, it would have been proof that Iraq had been in violation of United Nations sanctions, but for at least a year after the Bush Administration knew they were fake, they kept using them to build support for their invasion. 100Unfortunately, every mainstream television network including liberal MSNBC seemed to support the looming war. It wasn’t just the forged documents that led us to war◦— they were just one part of an international propaganda campaign trying to make it happen.

The CIA’s British counterpart, MI6, was found to have planted propaganda pieces in the media in the UK and other parts of the world claiming Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in order to drum up support for the war in what was dubbed Operation Mass Appeal. 101Former UN arms inspector Scott Ritter said, “Mass Appeal served as a focal point for passing MI6 intelligence on Iraq to the media, both in the UK and around the world. The goal was to help shape public opinion about Iraq and the threat posed by WMDs.” 102

The Sunday Times of London later published a story titled “How MI6 Sold the Iraq War,” and said, “The Secret Intelligence Service has run an operation to gain public support for sanctions and the use of military force in Iraq. The government yesterday confirmed that MI6 had organized Operation Mass Appeal, a campaign to plant stories in the media about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” 103

At the onset of the Iraq War in 2003, the Department of Defense paid Iraqi newspapers to publish stories supporting the U.S. invasion which were written by Americans but appeared as if they were from Iraqis. 104A year before the 9/11 attacks it was also discovered that soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations Group had been working undercover at CNN and NPR (National Public Radio). 105Once this was reported in the European press they were fired. 106