How You Can Be Absolutely Certain That Mainstream Media Lies About Everything
HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.
The extremely powerful corporate conglomerates which comprise the mainstream media are lying to you about everything. By this I don’t mean that the individual stories reported by corporate media outlets have no basis in fact, I mean that they’ve been lying to you about your world, your country, your society, your government and the way it all works for as long as you’ve been alive. They are more or less telling the truth when they report that a celebrity has died or that a cute little white kid has gone missing, but they are knowingly lying about the big picture within which those small events happen.
Throughout the course of my humble little gig here I’ve been trying to highlight this fact by pointing out the individual lies of these corporate media giants, like the time CNN knowingly staged a fake interview featuring a seven year-old girl who can’t speak English reading scripted war propaganda to their unsuspecting audience, or the way they’ve been relentlessly promulgating the debunked Russiagate conspiracy theory, but these can still be looked at as isolated instances by those not quite ready to look straight at the reality of the all-encompassing web of deceit that these corporate giants have been weaving. Luckily, this can be done simply by applying logic and reason to the simple, undeniable fact that the world is shitty right now and the status quo doesn’t work.
[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he most damning indictment of the mainstream media is the status quo itself. While the vacuous talking heads on TV tell you which politicians you should vote for or which ones you should have voted for, US policy marches on unchanged regardless of who is in office, with neoliberal domestic policies creating greater and greater wealth inequality while choking Americans to death and incarcerating those who get lost in the shuffle in the largest prison population in the history of civilization, and neoconservative foreign policies pouring unfathomable amounts of money and resources into shoring up an unrivaled empire which stomps into the dust any government which dares oppose it. While they assure you that the greatest threats you should concern yourself with are Islamic terrorists, Russian hackers, the opposing political party and the president’s latest tweet, our species is hurtling toward extinction via climate chaos if these insane escalations between two nuclear superpowers don’t get us killed first.
If the mainstream media were not lying about everything, the world would look completely different from the way it looks today. People would be using the real, non-imaginary power of their votes to make informed, reality-based choices in their own healthy self-interest to create a government that helps them instead of helping the predatory billionaire owners of multinational corporations and banks.
Between stories about celebrity deaths and missing white kids, these propagandists for the US oligarchy tell you that your vote is a real thing that makes a difference in the way your country behaves; that the US political system operates just like how they taught you in school. They speak as though democracy is not 100 percent dead in America, where money fully dominates the behavior of government, a corrupt two-party system with barely distinguishable parties is rigidly enforced, and one of those two parties openly asserts that it has no obligation to hold real party primaries. They report enthusiastically on nonsense and bullshit instead of telling you what’s really happening. They lie about everything.
If the mainstream media were not lying about everything, the world would look completely different from the way it looks today. People would be using the real, non-imaginary power of their votes to make informed, reality-based choices in their own healthy self-interest to create a government that helps them instead of helping the predatory billionaire owners of multinational corporations and banks. Resources would go toward helping the public instead of going toward corporate welfare, tax breaks for government-buying plutocrats, and the military-industrial complex. America would have the best healthcare system instead of the worst. Both government and citizenry would be using the true information given to them by the media to create a more enjoyable nation to live in.
This of course has not happened. The five giant corporate conglomerates which control virtually all media in America today work toward ensuring that the system which so immensely benefits their plutocrat owners becomes more and more beneficial to those plutocrat owners, and strengthening the powerful alliances those plutocrats have formed with the rest of America’s unelected power establishment. They do this by selling the public lies.
Has it not been your experience that basing your decisions and behavior on truth and integrity is more efficacious than basing them on lies? If you lived your life based on truth and integrity instead of deceit, would you be failing in every conceivable way and hurtling toward self destruction the way your society is currently doing? Of course not. Humanity isn’t hurtling toward self destruction because its behavior is being informed by truth, humanity is hurtling toward self destruction because its behavior has been informed by lies. And the people who are responsible for advancing those lies appear before you every day in the mainstream media.
That’s really the only conceivable possibility. The only other possibility is that the mainstream media tells the truth with integrity, but that acting in alignment with truth and integrity necessarily leads to madness and self destruction. You know from your own experience that this is not the case in this reality, so you can know for certain that you are being lied to by the mainstream media. Join the media war and kill the lying establishment propaganda machine so that our species may begin informing its behavior with truth instead of lies. Our survival depends on it. The status quo that these liars support does not work, and is killing us. We cannot keep doing this.
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About the Author
Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The most damning indictment of the mainstream media is the status quo itself. While the vacuous talking heads on TV tell you which politicians you should vote for or which ones you should have voted for, US policy marches on unchanged regardless of who is in office, with neoliberal domestic policies creating greater and greater wealth inequality while choking Americans to death and incarcerating those who get lost in the shuffle in the largest prison population in the history of civilization, and neoconservative foreign policies pouring unfathomable amounts of money and resources into shoring up an unrivaled empire
Parting shot—a word from the editors The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found
In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.—Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report