The Gall! The Pot Calling the Kettle Black! CBS “expert” claims Russian government controls the way people see reality!

PATRICE GREANVILLE
For TGP Superstation | Media Studies

[I]n  an example for the ages of the pot calling the kettle black, the American media are now accusing the Russians of being manipulated by their media.

The expert: Beth Knobel

As part of their character assassination offensive against President Putin and Russia, the US media are now clearly  punching below the belt, as this segment filed by CBS on 23 July (2014) shows. There’s little doubt that at this point  the US imperial system in its quest to maintain global hegemony, is hell bent on restarting the Cold War, with even graver consequences than in its earlier iteration, and that the American media, always obedient to their masters, is already doing everything possible to comply. 

In any case, after many months of increasing invective directed at the Russians over the Ukraine fiasco, a mess the US government initiated, and one of the most misreported and under-reported stories in the shameful history of Western media disinformation, on 23 July (2014) CBS ran a segment that directly impugned the professional fides of their Russian counterparts, accusing them of being a propaganda box, of rolling over like a lapdog whenever Putin commanded. They must have been looking in the mirror. 

The ultimate Big Lie—Accusing the Russkies of propagandizing their own people…Of course, we don’t do that.

Considering the well-documented appalling record of the US press, an institution that long ago degenerated into a cynical propaganda appendage to the plutocratic power structure, a key component of the new military-industrial-media complex, an indispensable accomplice in the promotion of enormous imperial crimes, it certainly takes some cheek, some galactic size sanctimoniousness, to declare with a straight face that the Russian government and media manipulate the news…while ours, innocent and pure as the driven snow, doesn’t.

Unbelievable indeed to any well informed observer, but the smug assertions are there alright. The segment states, quite literally (in case some dense members of the audience didn’t catch on), that our media are superior—free, brave and independent. If you believe that you’ll also believe we have a vibrant functioning democracy.

Mind you, we do not deny that the Kremlin may indeed want to influence the media and probably often does (all governments do, and some that strut around as models of democracy can act pretty shabby with their errant journos when the case demands it, as we saw  in the case of the British police trashing the offices of the Guardian newspaper in London over l’affaire Snowden, on orders from their superiors in Washington).

But while media tampering may exist in Russia, we still find that more often than not these days it is Russian-origin dispatches that come far closer to the truth of critical events than those produced by their Western rivals. Not to mention that the actions of the Russian government today, with its general reluctance to act like an imperial bully (they saved our ass from an even greater war in Syria and the Mideast not too long ago) are a lot healthier for humanity than the power-mad agenda followed by the hypocritical, warmongering cliques in Washington.

But something else needs stating in this regard: the biggest, smoothest and by far the most effective propaganda machine that history has ever seen, a veritable Orwellian Ministry of Truth, is the American corporate media itself.  Nothing else comes close. Anyone who doubts that is a member of that foul structure or has not been paying attention for the last 100 years.

Guardians of ideological purity

In case you just climbed out from under a rock, the US media role is to keep the American mind ignorant and loyal to global US imperialism. And to pacify the masses at home. The objective proof of this, something that even Dr. Beth Knobel, the august expert trotted out by CBS to lecture the Russkies on what constitutes true good journalism, might know even if she will never admit, is that Americans themselves are by far the most politically confused, propagandized and ignorant people on earth. Many surveys by unimpeachable institutions, including Ivy League universities, have confirmed this sorry fact. This the central reason why American democracy is now a fiction. How does that simple truth square with the supposed wonderfulness of the media which CBS and Dr Knobel are so proud of?

Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post’s founding editor. He believes that the problem of the media is far more urgent and serious than most people realize. 

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The sheer sanctimoniousness of it all—

Russian perspective on airliner shoot down / (CBS News)