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.

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:

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.)

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

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