Media jackals try to smear Snowden and Glenn Greenwald

Patrice Greanville

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Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last three weeks you may have noted that the presstitutes that serve the corporate masters of the universe (their self appellation) are busily earning their keep, doing their best to blacken the name of NSA leaker Edward Snowden in an effort to deny him credibility. Now such campaign—almost openly encouraged if not orchestrated by the White House and the rest of the political class, is quickly extending to Glenn Greenwald, perhaps, they figure, an smear job will shut him up.  As could be expected, the stain and stench of this naked maneuver already covers the entire span of what passes for journalism in the United States and much of the West, from the most “august” organs of the “free press” (yea, laugh, it’s totally appropriate), like the WaPo and the NYT to the scurrilous Daily News, Murdoch’s NY Post, and so on, not to mention television, of course, the most influential whore of them all.

We have said many times that the sheer numerosity of media in the United States—thousands of media outlets, radio, print, tv, etc., —have long convinced the incautious citizen that such numerosity actually translates into authentic diversity and independence.  After all, if we live in a free country how could thousands of separate voices be coerced to speak in unison?  The critics must be wrong. Sadly, taking numerosity for diversity is a dangerous delusion. For whatever the heavily indoctrinated population may think, the American media are essentially cut from the same cloth in substantive content and style, their differences amounting to superficial and insignificant details. The taxonomy of the media personnel in the US is not difficult to sketch. It is roughly comprised of two groups: Those (usually in the upper echelons) who understand they are serving an anti-democratic/anti-ecology corporate agenda and continue to do so on account of careerism—let’s call these the cynics and opportunists—and those in the middle and lower echelons, the foot soldiers and water carriers who understand little, know less and are happy to have a job that is not ambulating up and down the aisles at the local WalMart’s. This army of ignoramuses—conceits aside—does not begin to glean the dimensions of its betrayal of the public interest, but as merry cogs in the disinformation/distraction machinery they do their part so the Leviathan keeps chugging along, killing and deflecting all manner of liberating truth.

If anything survives after this malignant system is done with the planet, perhaps historians decades from now will come to accept the melancholy fact that America was the first great civilization that committed suicide and global ecocide via self-administered false consciousness, enabled by tens of thousands of abject mediocrities who fancied themselves the rightful custodians of public opinion.

Cenk Uygur:
The Establishment Strikes Back