This article was written by Claire Bernish and originally published at The Free Thought Project.
Editor’s Comment: While the powers that be are determining the fate of alternative media voices that are now branded under the dubious label “fake news” and blacked out from online search results, it is worth keeping in mind all the disinformation and downright lies that have been perpetrated by the corporate news media – typically hand in hand with a political agenda.
Whether it is lies that took us to war, or the perception that a deadly attack was carried out by a certain group, the impressions they create play a significant role in determining world events. Often times, that role is one of deception, ensnaring people into supporting deadly and costly actions – in spite of the true facts.
These misleaders are the fake news, and the fake news problem has helped to ruin this country.
by Claire Bernish
A now-notorious list of ostensibly “fake” news sites — created by a liberal professor, seemingly out of thin air — spread like wildfire online in the past two days and was eagerly reprinted by corporate media presstitutes hoping to vindicate their own failed reporting on the 2016 election.
But branding perfectly legitimate outlets with the same scarlet letter as those devoid of integrity deemed the professor’s list a spurious attempt to defame alternative and independent media — anyone dissenting from the left’s mainstream narrative — as a whole.
This is, in no uncertain terms, a hit list — or, at least, a laughable attempt — and it fits conveniently into the establishment’s burgeoning war on independent media disguised as a battle against fake news.
When corporate media outlets from the Independent and Business Insider, to the Los Angeles Times and NYMag scrambled over one another to reprint this irresponsibly contrived hit list, they proved yet again a lack of journalistic integrity — the same issue that originally caused regular subscribers to abandon them in the first place.
Indeed, in this otherwise unknown professor’s foray into the world of journalism, a glaring mistake was made — the only mainstream outlets making the list were those who had heralded Bernie Sanders as the best candidate for the White House.
Such an obvious attempt to control thought could only be conjured in a totalitarian regime.
In fact, failing to place the exact corporate media organizations on the list, who for nearly a year praised fealty only to Hillary Clinton — and for decades have foisted on the public countless mendacious whoppers — constitutes a comedic lack of honesty. So, to bring that irony front and center, it’s imperative to examine some mainstream lies — most of which had appalling consequences — including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the United States and around the world.
1. George W. Bush’s Weapons of Mass Destruction
President George W. Bush decided to unleash the full force of the U.S. military upon the world in a new policy of war writ large disguised as a war on terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001. First arbitrarily designating Afghanistan as its primary victim due to the supposed identities of the attackers, Bush then chose Iraq to feel the wrath, and set out to invade the country following dubious claims Saddam Hussein harbored destructive chemical and biological weapons and was actively seeking far stronger munitions.
“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised,” the president asserted in a public address on March 17, 2003.“This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq’s neighbors and against Iraq’s people.”
Bush’s assertions were questioned by not only human rights experts, but by U.N. weapons inspectors and countless others — so shortly after the U.S. invaded the sovereign nation, the New York Times took up the slack to fill in the appropriatecasus belli.
Judith Miller notoriously reported on a source she described only as an Iraqi scientist who had seen several extensive caches of such weapons stored somewhere in the country. American weapons experts, she claimed, “said the scientist told them that President Saddam Hussein’s government had destroyed some stockpiles of deadly agents as early as the mid-1990’s, transferred others to Syria, and had recently focused its efforts instead on research and development projects that are virtually impervious to detection by international inspectors, and even American forces on the ground combing through Iraq’s giant weapons plants.”
In hindsight, Miller’s problematic report turned out to be horrendously flawed, and the Times spent months attempting tobacktrack, but the damage — fomenting widescale public support for a war no one wanted the military to undertake — had been done. Years later in 2014, the Times — after much internal strife — again took up Miller’s case, in a series reportingcatastrophic injuries U.S. military personnel suffered in handling chemical weapons in Iraq. But that report, and theparroting of it by multiple other mainstream mainstays, failed to fully disclose Hussein had been oblivious to the stockpiles presence — something the CIA had clearly stated in a report.
2. Gulf of Tonkin Incident
Often, the American mainstream media becomes a de facto government employee, taking the claims of U.S. officials and reporting them as proven fact — and nothing exemplifies this penchant better than reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin incident — perhaps one of most flagrant lies ever dreamed up as a justification for war.
On August 5, 1964, the New York Times reported “President Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”Additional outlets, such as the Washington Post, echoed this claim.
But it wasn’t true. At all. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as it became known, turned out to be a fictitious creation courtesy of the government to escalate war in Vietnam — leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of U.S. troops and millions of Vietnamese, fomenting the largest anti-war movement in American history, and tarnishing the reputation of a nation once considered at least somewhat noble in the eyes of the world.
In 2010, more than 1,100 transcripts from the Vietnam era were released, proving Congress and officials raised serious doubts about the information fed to them by the Pentagon and White House. But while this internal grumbling took place, mainstream media dutifully reported official statements as if the veracity of the information couldn’t be disputed.
Tom Wells, author of the exhaustive exposé “The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam,” explained the media egregiously erred in “almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information” and“reluctance to question official pronouncements on ‘national security issues.’”
If due diligence had been performed, and reporters had raised appropriate doubts about the Gulf of Tonkin false flag, it’s arguable whether support for the contentious war would have lasted as long as it did.
3. Suppression of brutality perpetrated in Bahrain during the Arab Spring
CNN sent reporter Amber Lyon and a crew to U.S. ally Bahrain for a documentary about technology’s role in the 2011 people’s uprising known as the Arab Spring, ultimately titled “iRevolution: Online Warriors of the Arab Spring” — but what they encountered instead bore the hallmarks of a repressive and violent regime, and its attempt to filter and censor the truth. Lyon and the other CNN reporters went to great lengths to speak with sources participating in the massive uprising — one the Bahraini government wished to quash at all costs.
“By the time the CNN crew arrived,” the Guardian reported, “many of the sources who had agreed to speak to them were either in hiding or had disappeared. Regime opponents whom they interviewed suffered recriminations, as did ordinary citizens who worked with them as fixers. Leading human rights activist Nabeel Rajab was charged with crimes shortly after speaking to the CNN team. A doctor who gave the crew a tour of his village and arranged meetings with government opponents, Saeed Ayyad, had his house burned to the ground shortly after. Their local fixer was fired ten days after working with them.”
Even the CNN crew experienced the wrath of the regime, upon showing up to interview one source, the Guardiancontinued, “‘20 heavily-armed men’, whose faces were ‘covered with black ski masks’, ‘jumped from military vehicles’, and then ‘pointed machine guns at’ the journalists, forcing them to the ground. The regime’s security forces seized their cameras and deleted their photos and video footage, and then detained and interrogated them for the next six hours.”
After returning to the U.S., Lyon felt it her duty to expose the abuse being perpetrated by the government of an ally nation — but CNN International didn’t agree. CNN U.S. eventually aired the one-hour documentary. Once. CNN Internationalnever did — worse, the organization gave Lyon the cold shoulder, ignoring her repeated requests to return to Bahrain, which would have put CNN ahead of the game in reporting government brutality. Its failure to air the documentary and refusal to provide justification for doing so angered seasoned CNN and other mainstream established journalists across the board.
Lyon met with CNN International president Tony Maddox twice — he first promised to investigate why the documentary wasn’t aired, and then turned against her, warning the journalist not to discuss the matter publicly. Bahraini officials contacted CNN International repeatedly complaining about Lyon’s continued reporting on what she’d witnessed. Intimidation continued until she was eventually laid off, putatively for an unrelated matter.
Attempting to save face, CNN International rebuffed the Guardian’s account and interview with Lyon — but the effort was an impotent justification for the obvious failure of integrity.
But threats for Lyon to remain silent followed her off the job, and when she persisted in exposing the Bahraini regime, as well as the suppression by CNN, the outlet sent a stern warning to halt. Lyon, however, said she had never signed a non-disclosure agreement and would not be pressured into their lies — ultimately walking away reputation in hand — something that could not be said for CNN.
4. That time Fox News hired a CIA operative who wasn’t a CIA operative
Wayne Shelby Simmons made guest appearances on Fox News as a security expert with insider expertise from his work as a CIA operative — for over a decade. However, Simmons had never been employed by the agency — in fact, the imposter’s lies eventually caught up with him and he was arrested and sentenced to 33 months in prison.
“Instead of verifying whether Simmons had actually worked for the CIA, Fox News and the Agency allowed him to make fools out of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Andrew Napolitano, Neil Cavuto, and everyone at Fox & Friendsfor over the last twelve years. After building a false reputation as a CIA agent on Fox News, Simmons obtained an interim security clearance when an unnamed government contractor hired him in 2008. Simmons also falsely claimed on national security forms that his prior arrests and criminal convictions were directly related to his supposed intelligence work for the CIA, and that he had previously held a top secret security clearance from 1973 to 2000,” The Free Thought Project’s Andrew Emett explained.
In other words, mainstream Fox News didn’t bother with journalism at all — proffering fake expertise as the real deal — because the outlet failed the most basic of tasks any hourly wage employer would perform.
Simmons’ commentaries weren’t harmless stabs in the dark, either — relentlessly parroting baseless Islamophobic rhetoric to drum up support for the government’s insidious war on terror likely poisoned the minds of thousands of viewers, furthering the already divisive atmosphere in the U.S.
5. Vapid anti-marijuana propaganda and the furtherance of the war on drugs
According to the Drug Policy Alliance, over $51 billion is spent fighting the war on drugs in the United States — each year. In 2015, a striking 38.6 percent of all arrests for drug possession were for cannabis — 643,121 people were arrested for marijuana-related offenses.
What those figures don’t show are the millions of lives ruined by criminal conviction for the government’s unjustifiable quest to eradicate, demonize, and vilify this beneficial plant. It would be an impossible task to tally the number of families whose homes have been destroyed by SWAT teams searching for marijuana — whether or not police bothered to verify anaddress. An untold number of others have been slain by police for the same reason.
But worst of all, the mainstream media propagates nonsensical, false propaganda about cannabis to convince the gullible and ignorant among us to equate it with heroin, cocaine, and other ‘illicit’ substances. And while a majority of the populace has seen through such lies, some outlets have obstinately continued the drug war — seemingly of their own volition.
One stunning example occurred in March last year, when Dr. David Samadi made a guest appearance on Fox News to fearmonger the horrors of marijuana and scare the bejeezus out of the viewing audience.
“It actually causes heart attacks. It increases your heart rate. And on and on,” Samadi claimed, fecklessly distorting statistics. “We’re seeing in Colorado that we had 13 kids that came to the emergency [room] and ended up in the ICU as a result of overdose from marijuana. Now we have crack babies coming in because pregnant women are smoking this whole marijuana business.”
Fortunately, the Internet has provided the public with alternatives to these corporate media lies — and as of two years ago, despite these and other claims about pot being a dangerous substance, Pew Research Center found fully 69 percent of the population felt alcohol was more harmful than cannabis.
* * *
While this list presents only a few of the bigger lies of the corporate press, there are innumerable examples of its proud history of actual fake news. Keep these in mind when the mainstream presstitutes rush to reprint a hit list targeting journalists and outlets whose narratives counter the establishment. Indeed, it would be the corporate media — with its vast captive audience — who most deserves to be listed as propagators of lies.
This article was written by Claire Bernish and originally published at The Free Thought Project.
https ://youtu.be/9itWsqzFMVo
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Ron Paul reveals “the real fake media news list”
Zerohedge
Direst link…
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-11-19/ron-paul-exposes-real-fake-media
I consider many American journalist and teachers to be traitors for subverting people with propaganda and lies and should be hung by the neck until dead. They have pushed , many young, people into doing horrific acts against their country and their families. They are the lowest of scum…
what? no mention of benghazi???
For me this is very personal. My older daughter was subverted by her husband, teachers and east coast newspapers over a number of years. She now as a “white” girl she is at these political BLM rallies. They are so extreme into this I have not seen my grand kids in 5 years. So yeah I have a big bone to pick with these ba$tards…
Oh yeah Benghazi…
No, he’s crying over Vietnam, Iraq, and the pot laws. Somehow I think his take on Waco, Ruby Ridge, Benghazi, and such things fall right in line with the leftist playbook.
Buttcrackofdoom, did you like being lied to by the main-stream media about Benghazi? Susan Rice was reselling that lie a month after the attack. Did you think it was appropriate for the executive branch of our govt. to repeat the lie to the surviving family?
Did you like a**Holder’s lies about “Fast & Furious”? A little journalistic integrity and some research could have revealed the lies.
Did you like the lies about the motivation for having a “private server” regarding the email scandal? For those of us that have been involved with security requirements, it is not OK.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcb4_QwP6fE
Having both lived through and being drafted during the Viet Nam War, I recall that everywhere you went in country there were reporters both good and bad, but mostly bad, at every military post. Often they would ask questions like, “What missions have you been on?” or “How many gooks did you kill yesterday?” or “will you kill more gooks when you go out again?” It was never anything like “How many of your own men did you save their lives on your last patrol?”
These were the slimiest vermin that they could scrape out of the bottom of the sewers to send over to gather more negative crap. Then there were the increased numbers of casualties that one could see falling on each mission and all of it to make more bucks for the military industrial complex.
Congress was just as involved in the coverup of how many of these “Distinguished Gentlemen” owning stocks in such companies as General Dynamics, McDonald Douglas, Boeing, etc, etc and they got filthy rich off our Blood for profits campaigns. IT I believe is still the same here in 2016-7. It came out on Senator Thomas Eagleton in 1972 when he ran with Senator McGovern for president. That was what cost the tow the presidency. Unfortunately it cost us as well.
They are not really news people. They are readers. Reading what their editors, directors, and producers tell them to read and say. The editorial staff are working for TPTB. Their job is to create consensus and give the sheep the opinions they want the sheep to have. I see the effects of this on a daily basis.
My grandmother worked for the Gallop Poll in the 1950s for about 6 months. The boss asked her about a poll, some water reclamation project, and she showed him the results.
He said, “that is not the numbers we want, change it to this….”
Needless to say she quit shortly thereafter.
Rabbitone, look no further than the disgusting j*w CEOs of certain corporations who own and control 95% of all print, online, radio, and TV media sources; collectively known as the mainstream media. The same tribe also controls Hollywood, especially the porn industry. Not to mention Wall St.
What if the MSM were required to report only weather, business, sports, crime, accidents, traffic etc. And what if the MSM were required to report their opinions and commentary (spin) in a separate entity which would carry a mandatory warning label identifying it as such? Would this be bad? Would this violate the 1st Amendment? Warning labels, an idea that they pushed on every other product out there. Karma’s a bitch.
Or just pull their broadcasting license for promoting Ideas that are destructive to the GENERAL WELFARE of the United States
I never thought I’d see liberal hogwash here but …
I have personal knowledge that her libtard assertations in #1 above is flat out wrong.
#4 is a matter of debate – as to the effect of a single person appearing on a single network.
#5 makes me laugh. Really? Where is this moron from? Where marijuana laws have been repealed like Colorado and Washington, its because of the liberal journalists championing the cause of stoned tokers not able to speak properly to the mainstream population. And if you actually investigate you will find it was progressives at the turn of the century who got anti drug laws passed as an almost side effect of clean water and pure food efforts.
Anybody with a Keyboard can call themselves Journalist. Liars every where. One keyboard commando author make some outlandish claim, then all the other fear porn sites grab the headline and repost the babble. Like if somehow it lends credibility to any of them. 2 Liars repeating the same lie, is not confirmation of a fact.
I’m still waiting for Obama to “Cancel the Election” like Michael Snyder said he was going to do, then that bog fat outlandish lie was reposted here.
Bottom line, Stop the Lying!! How about every lie that is posted the Author of the lie, spends a day in Jail. And that goes for everybody. MSM and websites posting FAKE BS.
We’re gonna need a bigger jail.
So,ignore em/cut the cables/ect.,really,keep up on who these fucks are and eiter ignore,or,start boycotting/hacking ect.,really,there are a lot out there that are with you,WE ARE NOT ALONE!
Anyone who is awake and has an IQ higher than room temperature realizes that ALL media is either biased or propaganized to some degree, NONE of the media outlets are 100% real, NONE OF THEM
I read a lot of news sites daily.
One of those is Pravda and they often write
some of the most pro second amendment articles
I’ve read outside the NRA American Rifleman
magazine.
The trick is to read several sites and cross check
between them.
Generally American and British media
are the most horrible ways to get the news.
Brietbart is good but are preaching to the choir.
Free republic is good but they are very quick
to ban any dissent not matching the “cult” ideal.
And of course SHTPLAN is always good for info and
some interesting opinions.
Keep on prepping!
Keep on prepping!
Tsunami,,,,
Thats my bet on disaster for us, is going to come from the Alutians, its been quiet up there for a while now,
Hilo got hammered in the 50s by the last big one, so did everything on the north shore of all the islands, you folks are lucky you have a decent landing strip in Kona and a port at Kawaihai that can unload barges, we got shit on the south side, ALL the infrastructure is on the north, main power plant is on south side but they are in an inundation zone.
Its not if, its when
I saw 5 helicopters scooping up water one after the other, from the south side of Maui and dumping it on the grassy hill wild fires near the row of electrical wind turbines on the mountain side. I hear those turbines produce about 15% of Maui’s electricity. So not everything is exactly safe from disaster. That was an amazing sight to see.
Check the headlines of MSM (Drudge is actually a pretty good source for starting your search), cross check with (further)left and right
scources(kind of like what the MIB did in the movie) see what they have in common, check the commentary(very important, pay attention to what the Trolls are saying), and finally try to figure out what they’re NOT saying. The unsaid portions will key you in on what’s important alot of times.
The lying anti-white, anti-Christ, AIPAC idolitors, and J*wish Supremist genocidal co-conspiratorial traitorous to America, media; hates competition.
__
The smokescreen media owners hide operatives like Soros, Rockefeller, et al. It is their purpose. Distraction from the truth is their specialty and the root cause of the news war is morality after all. I find that very refreshing because the NWO is amoral, period. After returning morality we must then return integrity and go forward championing these traits. As a species we owe it to ourselves to try that at least once before greed extinguishes and consumes every thing good. When a global effort to contain and end Fukushima is mounted, then maybe we may have righted ourselves enough to determine root causes and begin to heal. I use that collective choice as a sign post. A sign post that I fear I may never pass and that is not a good sign. There will be 25,000 election campaigns before that deadly contamination goes away naturally. Do you think we can last? It is a moral question, yes or no.
Of course they left out the “fake news” promotion of GMO filled toxic fake food garbage, vaccine promotion, and Big Pharma toxic poison advertising by the psychopaths in the treasonous criminal “softkill genocide” supporting mainstream media, which has created a society of dumbed down, disease ridden, depressed, obese, addicted to everything, dying early toxic dump cowards, who are easily manipulated, programmed, and indoctrinated by Globalist fascist GENOCIDAL psychopaths.
Yea,,,
On the surface the GM thing sounds good,
Drout tolerance, etc could be good, but when they mess around creating stuff that has pesticides spliced in and resistance to herbicides, one has to wonder what the side effects are,
Personally i dont trust BT, they say its an “organic approved” pesticide so its safe,,,,
BS if you ask me, have seen first hand the collapse of the bee populations because of it, they say no way, UH agronomist dont want to hear it, state doesnt want to hear it, but think about it, the larval stage of a bee is a grub, BT is an organic grubicide basicly, no the bees dont pollinate corn, but they definitely collect pollen from the corn tassle, so they take that BT pollen back to the hive and deposit it with the rest of their load and boom, hive dies, slowly but it does nonetheless,,,
Its $ pure and simple, greed
I do Youtube videos on Organic Growing, and our family runs an organic farm using organic self sustaining COMPOST ONLY and DEEP MULCHING methods, so not only has 5 years of extensive research into how our food supply has been taken over by GENOCIDAL psychopaths shown our family the evil deadly lies and manipulation of the mainstream media, the last three years on an organic farm has given us first hand knowledge and in the dirt experience of just how easy, safe, self sustaining, and inexpensive organic farming actually is. Our family knows the big DEADLY lies of the Chemical/Biotech/ Big Agri “SOFTKILL GENOCIDE” death machine of America, and thankfully many more poisoned toxic dump Americans are waking up everyday to what these psychopath monsters have done to our population, their families, and their children’s future. Nuremberg Style trials are on the horizon for these Globalist fascist genocidal psychopaths, who hijacked our government a long, long time ago.
The newswires carry the stories; no story is accurate if their source(s) are inaccurate. However, now it is just pull it out of the air or just take someone’s word for it(no checking).
The politically correct requirement doesn’t seem to apply when taking about “white privilege”.
I’ve seen others state that what we have in this story is largely utter nonsense. Agree for the most part.
First, regarding #1, there WERE weapons of mass destruction. And yes, many of them were transported into Syria. Where do you think Assad got the weapons he has been using? I received first hand intelligence when in Israel in 2006. Besides, how many times have IED’s, car’s full of explosives, pressure cookers, and other items referred to as ‘weapons of mass destruction’ in our own media? It doesn’t take much of an explosive device to be a ‘weapon of mass destruction.’
Regarding #2 – what is written here is utter garbage. Yes, the Gulf of Tonkin incident was vastly overblown by the administration to drag us into war — but it WAS NOT fiction! I worked with a gentleman who served aboard the ship hit by the VC. There was an attack, though it was only one speedboat, and one lone shooter with an AK-47 who buzzed the ship and shot it up as best he could as he sped by. There was an event, though vastly over blown. So it was not a fiction, it did happen.
I’ll not address the rest, but why do we continue to see articles like this in the alternative media? We’re just as bad as the MSM. Let’s cut it out and report the truth, and quit the ‘fear porn.’ God in heaven help us. Read, report, and respond with a critical eye and discerning mind.
Blessings on all,
Son of Liberty
Iraq had chemical weapons at one time. We know that because we gave them to Saddam Hussein in the 80s so he kill Iranians. Established fact. Google Saddam /Rumsfeld for a pic of his meeting with SH.
The 2003 war was over WMDs made after the 1991 war (Gulf War 1). The invasion forces found no evidence of any WMDs having been produced after 1991. Zero, zip, nada. George Bush himself admitted this in 2006.
As for Iraqi WMDs going to Syria. Not a chance. Syria’s WMDs came from Egypt and the USSR in the 70s.
George W., the neocons and even Clinton, suckered us into that war for Murika. Knowing what we knonw, I would hope that good American parents would tell their children to go to Canada before fighting another illegal war like that one.
What nation in the world, with a military, does not have weapons of mass destruction? Maybe the vatican…but that’s it…so to claim iraq had none is ignorant and dishonest.
Sounds like 1984.
(made-up) Propaganda is now ‘legal’ and history is re-written (made-up) to suit the ‘Party’ agenda.