Dispatches from
STEPHEN LENDMAN
with blitz commentary by Patrice Greanville
John McCain disgraces the office he holds. He’s part of Washington’s lunatic fringe. He’s not one of Capitol Hill’s brightest, graduating near dead last in his 1958 Naval Academy class (894th out of 899 midshipmen). His public disservice shows it, hawkishly favoring wars of aggression against nonexistent enemies, denigrating Russia irresponsibly, perhaps pushing for direct confrontation – madness if it ever happens.
In two weeks, Trump will be sworn in as America’s 45th president. It appears he’s heading for a rough-and-tumble start, perhaps continuing throughout his tenure.
Part Two
Media Scoundrels Cheerlead Big Lies About Nonexistent Russian Hacking
ADDENDUM
The Insidiousness of the Establishment Media
Blitz commentary by Patrice Greanville
The conformist, status-quo supporting pack mentality of the US media is historically well documented. The US public have long confronted a huge irony in the way they acquire their “news” about the world. Simply stated, they are media rich but information poor, in fact deprived. On any given day, the US media offer a much narrower spectrum of news and opinion about current events than Chile or Bolivia, let alone larger nations with a still truly diverse press, such as Italy, Spain, Britain and even Russia. This shameful lack of diversity is not just the result of the inexorable dynamics of monopoly under capitalism, but also a class question. The capitalist class—now a puny minority amounting to perhaps 0.00002% of the population, the “billionaires”—literally owns the media (“public” too, as the infiltration of PBS by corporate money has shown repeatedly), and naturally uses it to promote and defend its interests. Thus, despite their enormous numbers, the American media appear tediously uniform in topicality and viewpoint. Under such conditions, the people often confuse “numerosity” with “diversity”.
This feature is common and well illustrated below by CBS, for example, whose behaviour toward the “Russian [nonexistent] hack” is practically identical to the posture exhibited by its sister broadcast networks, cable news channels, and leading print media, all aligned with and taking their cues from the reigning political establishment (in this case Obama and the Democrats). In all such instances where this story is “reported” the mode of expression is affirmative and conclusive from the headline on, “the Russians did it”, and the same accusation is voiced by myriad, supposedly different independent sources, thereby contributing to the idea that what is in effect a huge lie is actually irrefutable fact.
The “pack” phenomenon has been studied by radical social scientists and (in their more honorable days) decried by left liberals, like Mother Jones’ Adam Hochschild. Such observers have accurately pointed out the anti-democratic effect of such practice, inevitable under conditions of capitalist ownership of public media. In his pathbreaking essay The Packaged Consciousness, an essay that absolutely every American should read, Herbert Schiller (also an early colleague and supporter in my own media struggles and contributor to Cyrano’s Journal), a man widely regarded by his peers as one of the leading political analysts of mass communications in the 20th century (Vide The Mind Managers), denounced the myth of media diversity as an important and inherently devious prop for meaningless elections:
Personal choice exercised in an environment of cultural-informational diversity is the image, circulated worldwide, of the condition of life in America. This view is also internalized in the belief structure of a large majority of Americans, which makes them particularly susceptible to thoroughgoing manipulation. It is, therefore, one of the central myths upon which management flourishes. Choice and diversity, though separate concepts, are in fact inseparable; choice is unattainable in any real sense without diversity. If real options are nonexistent, choosing is either meaningless or manipulative. It is manipulative when accompanied by the illusion that the choice is meaningful.
Though it cannot be verified, the odds are that the illusion of informational choice is more pervasive in the United States than anywhere else in the world. The illusion is sustained by a willingness, deliberately maintained by information controllers, to mistake abundance of media for diversity of content. It is easy to believe that a nation that has more than 6.700 commercial radio stations [1975], in excess of 700 commercial TV stations, 1,500 daily newspapers, hundreds of periodicals, a film industry that produces a couple of hundred new features a year, and a billion-dollar private book-publishing industry provides a rich variety of information and entertainment to its people.
The fact of the matter is that, except for a rather small and highly selective segment of the population who know what they are looking for and can therefore take advantage of the massive communications flow, most Americans are basically, though unconsciously, trapped in what amounts to a no-choice informational bind. True variety of opinion, as opposed to superficial differences, on foreign and domestic news or, for that matter, local community business, hardly exists in the media. This results essentially from the inherent identity of interests, material and, ideological, of property-holders (in this case, the private owners of the communications media), and from the monopolistic character of the communications industry in general. (H. Schiller, The Packaged Consciousness)
We should keep in mind that Schiller wrote the above long before the nation and the world had entered the current explosion of media and the proliferation of various platforms for “news channeling” and social commentary, chiefly due to the Internet revolution and the multiplication of multimodal information platforms, from iPhones to iPads, portable laptops and other devices.
PRESENTED AS FACT: “CIA: Russia tried to help Trump win election with hackings”
PRESENTED AS FACT: Schumer, McCain call for probe of Russian influence (the “influence” is taken as already established.)
Insidiousness writ large
On Jan. 6, the Los Angeles Times editors, apparently believing the choir of denunciations was not deafening enough, added yet more fuel to the phony Russian hack story, by allowing the royally misguided David Horsey to file a piece which openly paints Donald Trump as some sort of a stooge under Putin’s “ominous” influence. How could this influence –no matter how benign or even non-existent—be anything but bad? After several years of nonstop demonization of Russia and Putin, in which new depths of mendacity have been plowed, even the suggestion of a connection with Putin is enough to taint the target, and that is precisely what this pack of jackals are aiming for. The object is to prepare the grounds for the impeachment of Donald Trump, his real sin threatening to upset the highly profitable warmongering applecart, while also reviving the Cold War with a big bang. From their cynical viewpoint, it’s a win-win situation. Should they fail in their impeachment gambit, they can always withdraw from the field with the equally important trophy of having poisoned the well of Russia-American relations for the duration of Trump’s administration and beyond, putting this tortured planet that much closer to universal radioactivity. The final curtain. Well done, boys and girls.
Curious that these same abject media flacks remain totally silent when it comes to the longstanding and highly corrosive influence of Israel or Saudi Arabia on US policy, to mention just two foreign players who openly influence US elections, always for the worse.—PG
Will John McCain protect America from Trump’s strange affinity for Putin?
The image is eloquent and malicious enough, but the cartoonist adds injury to insult by waxing poetic about McCain, one of the foulest creatures in world politics today, attributing to this obsessive warmonger the characteristics of a national champion:
Will John McCain protect America from Trump’s strange affinity for Putin? (LA Times, 1/6/17)
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David Horsey |
I would love to know what John McCain is thinking right now as he ponders the coming presidency of a man who appears to admire a Russian tyrant far more than he does the intelligence agents of his own country. Does a word like treason run through his mind?
The Republican senator from Arizona is a conspicuously honorable man in a profession filled with people who sell their honor rather cheaply. There is nothing more important than honor to a third generation military man like McCain. He proved that through five years of confinement and torture as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. While many, if not most, of his Republican colleagues in the Senate and House are putting themselves through ideological contortions to get aligned with the erratic narcissist who is now their leader, McCain is resisting. He is a hero and he is a patriot and it is not hard to imagine that, right now, McCain’s righteous anger is rising to a boil as he sees the president-elect of the United States discounting hard evidence of Russian espionage aimed at undermining American democracy.
AND NOW WATCH THIS, GLENN GREENWALD’S TESTIMONY ON THE “RUSSIAN HACK”.
Although presented on a platform we no longer trust—Amy Goodman’s show DemocracyNow!—we still think Greenwald is a truth-teller, a brave and invaluable voice in the midst of the current campaign of generalized deceit.
Glenn Greenwald: Mainstream U.S. Media is Culpable for Disseminating Fake & Deceitful News on Russia
Published on Jan 5, 2017
http://democracynow.org – We are joined by Glenn Greenwald, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and one of the founding editors of The Intercept. His latest article is headlined “WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived.” In it, he writes, “Any story that bolsters the prevailing D.C. orthodoxy on the Russia Threat, no matter how dubious, is spread far and wide. And then, as has happened so often, when the story turns out to be false or misleading, little or nothing is done to correct the deceitful effects.”
Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs weekdays on nearly 1,400 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream 8-9AM ET: http://democracynow.org
Q.E.D.
STEPHEN LENDMAN lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III." ( http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html ) Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.
Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post's editor in chief.
