Walter Cronkite and the US news media (Revisited)

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By David Walsh • wsws.org
20 July 2009

Preface: The global crisis entrapping humanity in a trifecta of political and economic evils, ecocidal policies, and bizarre health threats is accentuating day after day the role played by the capitalist media in facilitating and aggravating this infernal situation. This article highlights the degeneration of the corporate media, a useful account even if its moral and functional disintegration dates back at least 50 years before Walter Cronkite came on the scene, only to become a brand, "CBS anchor for The CBS Evening News, "the most trusted man in America", yada yada yada. Fact is, Cronkite or no Cronkite, the US media—posing as journalistic resources—never served the people. But what in the age of Cronkite was simply mediocre, thinly-veiled complicit journalism by the mainstream media has now become a broad daylight scandal, a whorehouse of collaboration with imperialist power. David Walsh, a distinguished Marxist geopolitical and cultural analyst, is able in this dispatch to diagnose in a comprehensive manner the sociopolitical undercurrents that explain this malignant evolution. —PG

THIS IS A REPOST. FIRST PUBLISHED ON 20 JULY 2009.
Walter Cronkite, a fixture in a great many American homes as host of the CBS evening news from 1962 to 1981, died in New York City July 17 at the age of 92.

Inevitably, a good deal of what is being said about Cronkite in the American media is self-congratulatory and self-serving. In part, the various commentators overpraise the former CBS newsman, painting him as the soul of objectivity and insight, in hopes that a little of the television networks’ former “glory,” by extension, will render the present deplorable and discredited state of broadcast journalism more attractive.

There is also no doubt a nostalgic longing within elements of the media, without the intelligence or moral capacities that would be needed to make it something more than a vague wish, for a return to a time when television reporters were looked upon, with a certain amount of justice, as individuals of substance.

The decline in the quality and seriousness of the television news programs over the past several decades has been accompanied by an astonishing drop in viewership. In 1980, the year before Cronkite gave up his evening news slot at CBS, total viewership of the evening news programs on CBS, NBC and ABC was 52.1 million, and 42.3 percent of US households tuned in to the programs.

Over the past quarter-century the number of viewers for the networks’ evening news has fallen approximately one million per year. In 2008, some 22.8 million viewers watched the programs, a decline of 53 percent since 1980. Only 15.6 percent of American households tuned in to the programs, down 61 percent in the same period. Moreover, the median age of nightly news viewers was 61.3 years for all three network newscasts in 2008.

A Gallup poll at the end of December 2008 found that for 31 percent of Americans, the Internet is now a daily news source, a 50 percent increase since 2006.

The network news programs, concoctions of superficial “sound bites,” half-truths and outright pro-government and pro-military propaganda, fully deserve their ratings crisis. The cable channels, which have gathered their own following, are no alternative, having concentrated their recruiting efforts, it would seem, on well-coiffed, but otherwise unprepared men and women quite at a loss when anything interrupts their carefully rehearsed presentations.

Analyzing the extent to which Cronkite represented something different, and better, involves considering how the US political and media establishment as a whole has shifted in the past several decades, under conditions of the decline of American capitalism in global economic terms. Different historical periods produce different public personalities.

The repudiation of New Deal or even Kennedy-like liberalism and the relentless war on the remnants of the welfare state, as well as the spelling out of—and acting upon—the doctrine of the unlimited right of American imperialism to use force wherever and whenever it likes (the so-called Bush Doctrine, pursued as well in all its important aspects by the Barack Obama administration), calls “from the vasty deep” a different sort of human type than that represented by Cronkite. Today’s anchor people, paid vast sums of money, without important knowledge or scruples, conduits for the “official story” in virtually every case, are a sorry lot.

Cronkite emerged as a reporter under different historical conditions. The son of a dentist, born in St. Joseph, Missouri on the eve of US entry into World War I, Cronkite initially pursued journalism in the middle of the Depression in Houston, Texas. After a brief stint in radio back in Missouri, he went to work for United Press (UP), the news service, becoming a World War II correspondent. Cronkite covered a number of critical battles, including the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 and the Battle of the Bulge.

After the war, significantly, he was the chief UP correspondent at the Nuremberg war crimes trials of Nazi leaders; Cronkite also served a stint as the wire service’s Moscow bureau chief.

Cronkite’s career in television, where he was truly to make his name, began in 1950, when he was invited to join CBS News by Edward R. Murrow. Prior to and during the war, Murrow gathered around him at CBS a number of talented journalists, including William L. Shirer (future author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich); Eric Sevareid, who had had contact with the left in Minneapolis as a student; Charles Collingwood, who would be an outspoken critic of McCarthyism; Howard K. Smith, a fixture at CBS and later ABC until the late 1970s; Richard Hottelet, another UP correspondent, who remained with CBS News for 41 years; Larry LeSueur, who wrote a book about his experiences on the Russian front, “Twelve Months That Changed the World,” and others.

On top of the desperation and upheaval of the Depression, and the New Deal, a number of these reporters experienced fascism in Europe in a personal and intimate fashion.

In 1940 Smith interviewed Hitler at his retreat in Berchtesgaden, along with Himmler and Goebbels. When he refused to include Nazi propaganda in his reports, the Gestapo seized his notes and threw him out of the country. Hottelet was arrested by the Nazis as a suspected spy at the outset of World War II, and imprisoned for four months.

These individuals went through and were marked by genuine and significant experiences. Cronkite too came of age intellectually at that time. Having reported on great events, he and the others had a certain conception of being a newsman—as an exposer of truths and big injustices—and even a capacity for moral outrage.

The narrow postwar political framework, however, within which these individuals would subsequently be obliged to operate was established early on. In 1947, Shirer, perhaps the most talented of the crowd, was forced out at CBS, without Murrow’s coming to his assistance, for criticizing the Truman Doctrine (that the US, as leader of the “free world,” must lead a worldwide crusade against communism) and the network’s kowtowing to corporate sponsors. Shirer was named in Red Channels, the anti-communist tract published in 1950, and blacklisted for all intents and purposes.

Cronkite was not of that stature. He apparently found no great difficulty in accepting the limits set by the American establishment during the Cold War. He was known to be critical, as was Murrow, of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the anti-communist witch-hunting, but he made a career for himself nonetheless.

He began doing the news for a CBS station in Washington, D.C, and by 1953 he was appearing on nationally aired public affairs programs. Cronkite narrated the first episode in the semi-documentary series You Are There in February of that year.

The program, which made use of a number of blacklisted actors and writers (including Walter Bernstein and Arnold Manoff in the latter category), as well as several future feature film directors (Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer and Bernard Girard), recreated famous historical events, with CBS News reporters, in modern dress, interviewing the various participants. Each program would end with Cronkite intoning, “What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times... and you were there.” As pompous as this may sound, the program had an undeniable gravitas.

It may be that Cronkite eventually became the anchor on the CBS evening news program precisely because he was something of a lowest common denominator. In late 1961 competition for the job emerged between Collingwood, Sevareid and “the outsider, Walter Cronkite,” journalist David Halberstam notes in his The Powers That Be (2000).

Halberstam argues that Cronkite’s “style was now more compatible with what the show needed. His roots were in the wire service, he was the embodiment of the wire-service man sprung to life, speed, simplicity, scoop, a ten-minute beat ... He came through to his friends and to his listeners alike as straight, clear, and simple, more interested in hard news than analysis. ... He looked like Middle America, there was nothing slick about his looks (he was the son of a dentist in St. Joe, Missouri, and his accent was midwestern). He was from the heartland, and people from the Midwest are considered trustworthy, they are of the soil rather than of the sidewalks, and in American mythology the soil teaches real values and the sidewalks teach shortcuts.”

Cronkite retained the anchor job at CBS for nearly twenty years, famously announcing the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963, along with other traumatic events of those explosive decades. In February 1968, in the wake of the Tet Offensive, in which Vietnamese nationalist forces stunned the US military, Cronkite toured the southeast Asian country and on his return reported his “personal” conclusions to his viewers:

“For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster. ...

“[I]t is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, (sic) and did the best they could.”

President Lyndon Johnson is alleged to have watched the program and commented, more or less, “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost the country.” In the midst of growing anti-war sentiment and turmoil, Johnson announced his decision not to run for another term as president on March 31.

Later, in 1968, Cronkite grew visibly angry over the brutal treatment of anti-war protesters outside the Democratic national convention in Chicago at the hands of city police and referred to the latter as “thugs.” Around this time, Cronkite was voted “the most trusted man” in America.

The technological transformation of the evening news during Cronkite’s tenure (at the time he became anchorman, the CBS evening news was a 15-minute broadcast produced in primitive conditions) and its sociological transformation into a critical instrument for shaping and manipulating public opinion on a daily basis, are subjects for a separate discussion.

Inevitably, no one in his position escapes becoming an institution, and there is no need to portray Cronkite in unduly glowing colors. He was, in the end, a figure of the liberal establishment. His oft-noted enthusiasm for the US space program (he also reported on the landing of the first man on the moon 40 years ago), while no doubt genuine, seemed motivated as well by the desire to see Americans unified around something “uplifting” in a period of discontent and strife. Still, one can also see in his excitement over space exploration a genuine belief and confidence in science and progress.

Cronkite lived through or witnessed significant and world-changing events, the Depression, fascism in Europe, the war, the McCarthyite purges, as well as the civil rights movement and the upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He clearly maintained, and this is now almost entirely lost in the American media, a democratic sensibility and a feeling for ordinary people.

In Reporting America at War (Michelle Ferrari and James Tobin, 2003), for example, Cronkite is quoted in the following manner: “I think it’s one of the reasons why news people, as a group, are inclined to be more liberal than others. They live with the common people. I’m talking about the beat reporters. This isn’t true of anchor people today or of editors sitting back in the home office. But those who are out there with the people understand a great deal more about what the average man and woman have to live through.

“I think that, in some ways, the high pay of editors and anchor people today is unfortunate, because it has removed them from the actual environment of the working man in America. In my early days as a reporter, our salaries were equivalent to a fireman’s, a policeman’s, a stock clerk’s and those were the people we drank with in the evening. Those were the people whose budget problems we understood.”

In the comments he also criticized the increasing determination of the US military to suppress the truth about its interventions. He noted that “any war situation ... is the most intimate commitment that the American government can make of its people. ... We need to know every detail about how they [US troops] are performing in our name, both when they perform well and when they perform badly. It’s most important when they perform badly, as a matter of fact. So war should be covered intimately.”

He went on: “Today we have no independent film of the [1991] Persian Gulf War—none—because our correspondents, our film crews, were not permitted to go out on the front with the troops. They should have been. The tape they shot should have been sent back to censorship. If it couldn’t be released immediately, at least it would be held for eventual release and for history. We don’t have that history now. That history is lost to us. It’s a crime against the democracy.”

The processes Cronkite refers to have qualitatively deepened and worsened. There is no news coverage worth speaking about of the neo-colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the US media has become little more than an arm of the state and the military.

The author also recommends:

Exit NBC anchor Tom Brokaw: a nonentity in the service of wealth and power

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David Walsh is senior cultural and cinema critic for wsws.org, a Marxian publication.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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The Russian Peace Threat examines Russophobia, American Exceptionalism and other urgent topics

U.S. Officials Disseminate Disinformation About ‘Virus Disinformation’

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DISPATCHES FROM MOON OF ALABAMA, BY "B"
This article is part of an ongoing series of dispatches from Moon of Alabama

VOA, an official propaganda organ of the US state, is also disseminating the anti-Russia accusations.

In another round of their anti-Russian disinformation campaign 'U.S. government officials' claim that some websites loosely connected to Russia are spreading 'virus disinformation'.

However, no 'virus disinformation' can be found on those sites.

The Associated Press as well as the New York Times were briefed by the 'officials' and provided write ups.

AP: US officials: Russia behind spread of virus disinformation

Two Russians who have held senior roles in Moscow’s military intelligence service known as the GRU have been identified as responsible for a disinformation effort meant to reach American and Western audiences, U.S. government officials said. They spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

The information had previously been classified, but officials said it had been downgraded so they could more freely discuss it. Officials said they were doing so now to sound the alarm about the particular websites and to expose what they say is a clear link between the sites and Russian intelligence.

Between late May and early July, one of the officials said, the websites singled out Tuesday published about 150 articles about the pandemic response, including coverage aimed either at propping up Russia or denigrating the U.S.

Among the headlines that caught the attention of U.S. officials were “Russia’s Counter COVID-19 Aid to America Advances Case for Détente,” which suggested that Russia had given urgent and substantial aid to the U.S. to fight the pandemic, and “Beijing Believes COVID-19 is a Biological Weapon,” which amplified statements by the Chinese.

Korybko: Scrupulous journalist defamed by a clumsily ignorant and dishonest government.

The first mentioned piece, Russia's Counter-COVID Aid To America Advances The Case For A New Detente, is by the well known author Andrew Korybko, a U.S. political analyst living in Moscow. It was published at OneWorld.press. The essay discussed the Russian Coronavirus aid flown in early April from Russia to the U.S. The analyst concludes that such aid can be seen as the beginning of a new détente between the U.S. and Russia.

There is zero 'virus disinformation' in the Korybko piece. The aid flight did happen and was widely reported. In a response to the allegations the proprietors of OneWorld point out that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in a recent Q&A also alluded to a new détente with Russia. Was that also 'virus disinformation'?

The second piece the 'officials' pointed out, Beijing believes COVID-19 is a biological weapon, was written In March by Lucas Leiroz, a "research fellow in international law at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro". It is an exaggerating analysis of the comments and questions a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry had made about the possible sources of the Coronavirus.

The original spokesperson quote is in the piece. Referring to additional sources the author's interpretation may go a bit beyond the quote's meaning. But it is certainly not 'virus disinformation' to raise the same speculative question about the potential sources of the virus which at that time many others were also asking.

The piece was published by InfoBRICS.org, a "BRICS information portal" which publishes in the languages of the BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa). It is presumably financed by some or all of those countries.

Another website the 'U.S. officials' have pointed out is InfoRos.ru which publishes in Russian and English. The APnotes of it:

A headline Tuesday on InfoRos.ru about the unrest roiling American cities read “Chaos in the Blue Cities,” accompanying a story that lamented how New Yorkers who grew up under the tough-on-crime approach of former Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg “and have zero street smarts” must now “adapt to life in high-crime urban areas.”

Another story carried the headline of “Ukrainian Trap for Biden,” and claimed that “Ukrainegate” — a reference to stories surrounding Biden’s son Hunter’s former ties to a Ukraine gas company — “keeps unfolding with renewed vigor.”

U.S. officials have identified two of the people believed to be behind the sites’ operations. The men, Denis Valeryevich Tyurin and Aleksandr Gennadyevich Starunskiy, have previously held leadership roles at InfoRos but have also served in a GRU unit specializing in military psychological intelligence and maintain deep contacts there, the officials said.

InfoRos calls itself a 'news agency' and has some rather boring general interest stuff on its site. But how is its writing in FOX News style about unrest in U.S. cities and about Biden's escapades in the Ukraine 'virus disinformation'? I fail to find any on that site.

In 2018 some "western intelligence agency" told the Washington Post, without providing any evidence, that InfoRosis related to the Russian military intelligence service GU (formerly GRU):

Unit 54777 has several front organizations that are financed through government grants as public diplomacy organizations but are covertly run by the GRU and aimed at Russian expatriates, the intelligence officer said. Two of the most significant are InfoRos and the Institute of the Russian Diaspora.

So InfoRos is getting some public grants and was allegedly previously run by two people who before that worked for the GU. What does that say about the current state and the content it provides? Nothing.

The NYT adds that hardly anyone is reading the websites the 'U.S. officials' pointed out but that their content is at times copied by more prominent aggregator sites:

“What we have seen from G.R.U. operations is oftentimes the social media component is a flop, but the narrative content that they write is shared more broadly through the niche media ecosystem,” said Renee DiResta, a research manager at the Stanford Internet Observatory, who has studied the G.R.U. and InfoRos ties and propaganda work.

There are plenty of sites (including this one) who copy content from various outlets and reproduce it under their name [with proper attribution]. But that does not turn whatever they publish into disinformation.

All the pieces mentioned by AP and NYT and attributed to the 'Russian' sites are basically factual and carry no 'virus disinformation'. That makes the 'U.S.officials' claims that they do such the real disinformation campaign.

And the AP and NYT are willingly falling for it.

Posted by b on July 29, 2020 at 16:56 UTC | Permalink

Comments Sampler

People being prepared for Russia having the worlds first covid19 vaccine, the US will of course say it was stolen from them. Infantile politicians create infantile press to feed infantile articles to adult children. Critical thinking skills do not exist in the US population.

Posted by: Getald | Jul 29 2020 17:44 utc | 1

There's a corporativist aspect to all of this.

The development of propagation of information/disinformation through the internet eroded the power of the old newspapers/news agencies. It's not that this or that particular website is getting more views, but that the web of communications - the the imperialistic blunders + decline of capitalism post-2008 -, as a whole, weakened what seemed to be an unshakeable trust on the MSM (the very fact that this term exists already is historical evidence of their loss of power).

And this process manifests itself not only in loss of power, but also loss of money: this is particularly evident in the social media, where Facebook (Whatsapp + Facebook proper) and Google are beginning to siphon advertisement money from both TV and the traditional newspapers (printed press). When those traditional printed newspapers went digital, they behaved badly, by using paywalls - this marketing blunder only accelerated their decline in readership and thus further advertisement money, generating a vicious cycle for them.

The loss of influence of public opinion for the MSM also inaugurated another very important societal shift: the middle class' loss of monopoly over opinion and formation of opinion. Historically, it was the role of the middle class to be highly educated, to go to academia (college) and, most importantly, to daily read the newspapers while eating the breakfast. The middle class was the class of the intellectuals by definition, thus served as the clerical class of the capitalist class, the priests of capitalism. With the popularization of the internet, the smartphone and social media, this sanctity was broken or, at least, begun to deteriorate. We can attest this class conflict phenomenon by studying the rise of the term "expert" as a pejorative one. In the West's case, this shift begun through the far-right side of the political spectrum, but the shift is there.

The popularization of what was once a privilege is nothing new in capitalism. The problem here is that capitalism depends on infinite growth to merely exist (i.e. it can't survive on zero growth, it is mathematically impossible), so it has to "monetize" what still isn't monetize in order to find/create more vital space (Lebensraum - a term coined by the hyper-capitalist Nazis) for its expansion and thus survival. Hence the popularization of college education in the USA (then in Europe). Hence the popularization of daily news through the internet/social media. This process, of course, has its positives and negatives (as is the case with every dialectical process) - the fall of the MSM is one of the positives.

So, in fact, when the likes of AP, Reuters, NYT, WaPo, Guardian, Fox, CNN spread disinformation against "alt-media", they are really just protecting their market share - the fact that it implies in suppression of freedom of speech and to mass disinformation and, ultimately, to war and destruction, is merely collateral damage of the business they operate in. They are, after all, capitalist enterprises above all.

Posted by: vk | Jul 29 2020 17:44 utc | 2

Excellent analysis, as always, by b. And vk's points are very pertinent too. One tiny quibble: I doubt that the Nazis coined, though they certainly popularised, the term lebensraum.
There is an air of desperation about these campaigns against "Russian" "disinformation" massive changes are occurring, and, because they are so vast, they are moving relatively slowly.
The old media model, now totally outdated, was the first thing to fall. Now capitalism itself is collapsing as a result of the primary contradiction that, left to itself, the marketplace will solve all problems.
As Washington, where magical thinking is sovereign, is demonstrating, left to itself the hidden hand will bring only misery, famine, death and the Apocalypse. This was once very well understood, as a brief look at the history of the founding of the UN will show, now it is the subject of frantic denial by capitalism's priesthood who have grown to enjoy the glitter and sensuality of life in a brothel. It is a sign of their mental decay that they can do no better than to blame Russians.

Posted by: bevin | Jul 29 2020 18:16 utc | 3

One should presume the anonymous officials responsible for this ground-breaking report (sarc) are close to the various "combatting Russian disinformation" NGOs. They are merely living up to the mission statements of their benefactors. AP and NYTimes are being unprofessional and spreading fake news by failing to reveal their sources. It's mind-numbing - the BS one must wade through.

Posted by: jayc | Jul 29 2020 18:23 utc | 4

@ b who ended his posting with
"
And the AP and NYT are willingly falling for it.
"

Sorry b, but AP and NYT are active participants in the disinformation campaign of failing empire and are not falling for anything

The folks that are falling for it are the American public that has lost its ability to discriminate with the fire hose volume of lies told to them on a daily basis.

Empire is in the process of defeating itself which is the only safe way of ending the tyranny of global private finance. I commend China and Russia for having the patience and fortitude to hold the safe space for the dysfunctional social contract having private control of the lifeblood of human commerce to self destruct.

Posted by: psychohistorian | Jul 29 2020 19:19 utc | 5

This is SO hilarious! The propagandists are worried about Russian virus dis-information when most dis-information has come from the US government in the person of Trump and from the CDC, which spent months discrediting the effectiveness of face masks!!!

Theses propagandists need to get real jobs dealing with real world problems.

Posted by: JohnH | Jul 29 2020 19:21 utc | 6

Theses propagandists need to get real jobs dealing with real world problems.

Posted by: JohnH | Jul 29 2020 19:21 utc | 7

there has been no national response to coronavirus but there must be a national acceptance that this national non-response is China's fault. and any sources reporting truthfully about the US or disseminating statements easily found elsewhere, as long as they are Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, Cuban, Iranian, etc., is pure disinformation. How brittle and weak the US is. Where's the Pericles to say to the Spartans, "enter our city and inspect our defenses"? The US is a nation of heavily-armed mice and sheep.

btw, the China love on display around here is pretty funny. in that the Chinese government has mounted a national response to a very serious threat, China is a nation in a way that the US is not. There is no US or we would not have 50 states doing different things in response to the corona outbreak. the US is already dead. But China is a thoroughly authoritarian capitalist state. they are who they are in a dialectic competition with the US and other capitalist powers, not because of some Maoist-Confucian amalgam that inspires such wisdom in their brilliant leaders, who are just as quick to destroy their environment for capitalist gain as anyone on this planet is. The decline of the US will not make China or Russia or any "emerging" power less authoritarian or violent. au quite the contraire. They are Shylocks who will try to better instruction.

However, none of this is of concern to people in the US, whose only concern is the Nazi spawn who've been running "the West" for much longer than the last 75 years. but it's time to kill the bitch, not let it keep screwing us and breeding.

Posted by: jason | Jul 29 2020 19:25 utc | 8

Russia’s rush to have the first COVID vaccine will be viewed by the propagandists as just another evil attempt by Putin to embarrass the US. Should it prove safe and effective, you can bet that it will be banned in USA, because anything Russian is by definition bad.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/russia-hopes-register-worlds-first-covid-19-vaccine-aug-12

Posted by: JohnH | Jul 29 2020 19:30 utc | 9

As others already said, this is a bit rich, considering that virus disinformation comes from Trump himself, both live and on Twitter, quoting genuine hacks and megalomaniac doctors, depending on the week.
Reality check: Russians will be able to travel across the world way before Americans, for obvious healthcare reasons.

Posted by: Clueless Joe | Jul 29 2020 19:46 utc | 10

@2 I would think adblocking has a lot to do with it too. I'm always surprised that it has been allowed to continue.

Posted by: dh | Jul 29 2020 19:50 utc | 11

Out of the supposed 15 million confirmed cases worldwide, only 4.1 percent of those resulted in death. In other words if you catch it you have generally a 96 percent chance of surviving it. 80 percent of persons with covid have mild to no symptoms at all.

Better efficacy than most vaccines already out there.

The hysteria and huge governmental overreaction and overreach is nowhere near warranted.

Who stands to gain the most? Big Pharma.

Anyone who can't see this scamdemic for what it truly is has been breathing too much of their own CO2.
Biggest and most powerful lobby in Washington DC and the world? Big Pharma
Largest profit margins in the world? Big Pharma
Largest profit centers for Big Pharma? vaccinations.

If a mask is all one needs to protect themselves from a supposedly contagious and deadly virus why would you need to have a BSL 4 suit in a BSL 4 lab to work with said viruses?

Posted by: O | Jul 29 2020 20:00 utc | 12

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SouthFront is Censored under Cover of Pandemic

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by Rick Sterling

Censorship of alternative media is becoming more widespread in the COVID19 era. This article documents the case of SouthFront.

Introducing SouthFront

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]here do you find daily news, videos, analysis and maps about the conflict in Syria? Detailed reports about the conflicts in Libya, Yemen and Venezuela? News about the rise of ISIS in Mozambique? Original analysis of events in the US and Russia? SouthFront is the place.

SouthFront is unique and influential, reaching a global audience of hundreds of thousands. They have opinion articles but their reports and videos are informational and factual. Their website says,

"SouthFront focuses on issues of international relations, armed conflicts and crises.... We try to dig out the truth on issues which are barely covered by the states concerned and the mainstream media."

Censorship by Facebook and YouTube

A major disinformation and censorship drive against SouthFront was recently launched. On April 30 the SouthFront Facebook account with about 100,000 subscribers was deleted without warning or notice.

On May 1, SouthFront's main YouTube account with over 150 thousand subscribers was terminated. The English language channel had 1,900 uploaded videos with 60 million views over the past 5 years.

While the SouthFront website continues as before, the above actions remove important distribution channels which SouthFront has painstakingly built up.

The censorship has been accompanied by a parallel disinformation campaign promoted by corporate, governmental and establishment "think tank" organizations. This is in the context where the US State Department's Global Engagement Center (GEC) has a direct liaison with Silicon Valley companies and teams focused on "countering the propaganda" from Russia, China and Iran with a current budget of $60 million per year.

Connecticut's Sen. Chris Murphy (D). The Dems have spearheaded the killing of free speech, essentially a bipartisan project. Scum like Murphy prove that political imperialist yahoos don't only come from South Carolina and other benighted states. That the anti-democratic sickness afflicts the whole political class.

In a March 2020 hearing, Senator Chris Murphy (D - Conn) lobbied for increased funding and more censorship. He said, "It's hard to chase one lie after another. You have to actually go after the source and expose the source as illegitimate or untrustworthy, is that right?” Lea Gabrielle, head of GEC, responded "That's correct."

When the Senator says "it's hard to chase one lie after another", he is acknowledging that it's often hard to show that it's a lie. Even more so when it is not a lie. It is much easier for the authorities to simply say the source is untrustworthy- or better yet to eliminate them - as they have tried to do with SouthFront.

False Accusations by Facebook

The elimination of SouthFront's Facebook account was based on a Facebook sponsored investigation titled "April 2020 Coordinated Inauthentic Behavior Report". The 28 page report says, "We're constantly working to find and stop coordinated campaigns that seek to manipulate public debate across our platforms....We view influence operations as coordinated efforts to manipulate public debate for a strategic goal where fake accounts are central to the operation.... This month we removed eight networks of accounts, Pages and Groups..... Our investigation linked this activity to ... two media organizations in Crimea - News Front and SouthFront. We found this network as part of our internal investigation into suspected coordinated inauthentic behavior."

First, SouthFront is not trying to "manipulate public debate"; they are providing news and information which is difficult if not impossible to find elsewhere. It seems to be the censors who are trying to manipulate debate by shutting out some voices.

Second, SouthFront does not have "fake accounts"; they have a public website plus standard social media outlets like Facebook and YouTube (until cancelled). Third, SouthFront has no connection to NewsFront nor operations in Crimea.

NewsFront and SouthFront are completely different organizations. They share the name "Front" but that is irrelevant. Does Facebook confuse the New York Times with Moscow Times? After all, they both have "Times" in their title.

Facebook has shut down SouthFront on the basis of misinformation and smears.

False Accusations by DFRLab

The Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab) was created by the Atlantic Council, a "non partisan organization that galvanizes US global leadership". It is another organization which is quick to label alternative foreign policy voices as "Russian propaganda". DFRLab claims to have "operationalized the study of disinformation by exposing falsehoods and fake news". They reported the censorship of SouthFront with a report titled "Facebook removes Russian propaganda outlet in Ukraine" with subtitle "The social network took down assets connected to News Front and SouthFront, propaganda websites supportive of Russian security services". They reported that the two "demonstrated a close relationship by liking each other's pages." As anyone who uses Facebook is aware, it is common to "like" a wide variety of articles and publications. The suggestion that "liking" an article proves a close relationship is silly. (And a cynical falsehood.—Ed)

The DFRLab report says News Front and SouthFront "disseminated pro-Kremlin propaganda in an array of languages, indicating they were attempting to reach a diverse, international audience beyond Russia."

First, NewsFront and SouthFront are completely distinct and separate organizations. Second, is there anything unusual about a website trying to expand and reach different audiences? Don't all publications or outlets do that? This is a tactic of the new censors: to portray normal behavior as sinister.

Another censorship tactic is to assert that it is impermissible to question the veracity of certain findings. Thus DFRLab report says NewsFront posted "outright disinformation" when it published a story that "denied the culpability of Russian-backed separatists' involvement in the shoot-down of Malaysia Airlines MH-17". They suggest this proves it is Russian propaganda and false. However, the facts about the downing of MH-17 are widely disputed. For example. one of the foremost American investigative journalists, the late Robert Parry, came to the same conclusion that the MH-17 investigation was manipulated and the shoot-down was probably NOT as portrayed. Parry did many articles on this important event, confirming that it is not "Russian propaganda".

The Atlantic Council is one of the most influential US "think tanks". It appears they have created the DFRLab as a propaganda tool to disparage and silence the sources of alternative information and analysis.

Disinformation by European Council "Task Force"

The goals and priorities of the European Union are set by the European Council. They are also increasingly active in suppressing alternative information and viewpoints.

In 2015 the European Council created an East StratCom Task Force to "address Russia's ongoing disinformation campaigns". Their major project is called EUvsDISINFO. They say, "Using data analysis and media monitoring services in 15 languages, EUvsDISINFO identifies, compiles, and exposes disinformation cases originating in pro-Kremlin media."

This organization is part of the disinformation campaign against SouthFront. In April 2019 they published an analysis "SouthFront - Russia Hiding Being Russian". The story falsely claims that SouthFront "attempts to hide the fact it is registered and managed in Russia." The SouthFront team is international and includes Russians along with numerous other nationalities. Key spokespersons are the Bulgarian, Viktor Stoilov, and an American, Brian Kalman. They do not hide the fact that the website is registered in Russia or that PayPal donations go to an account in Russia. The website is hosted by a service in Holland. It is genuinely international.

EUvsDISINFO demonstrates disinformation tactic of falsely claiming to have "exposed" something that is "hidden" when it is public information. There is nothing sinister about collaboration between different nationalities including Russia. EUvsDISINFO suggests there are sinister "pro-Kremlin networks". In reality, SouthFront is a website run by a dedicated and underpaid staff and lots of volunteers. While the European Council gives millions of dollars to EUvsDISINFO, SouthFront operates on a tiny budget without government support from Russia or anywhere else.

False accusations by US Department of Defense

On April 9, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, Laura Cooper, spoke at a press briefing. She identifies SouthFront by name and accuses them of "reporting that there actually was no pandemic and that some deaths in Italy might in fact have been from the common flu".

The first accusation is because of the SouthFront article "Pandemic of Fear". In contrast with the accusation, the article says, "The COVID-19 outbreak is an apparent threat which cannot be ignored." The article also discusses the much less reported but widespread pandemic of fear.

The second false accusation is regarding the high death toll in Italy. SouthFront reported the findings of a report from the Italian Ministry of Health which suggested the previous mild winter and flu season had "led to an increase in the pool of those most vulnerable (the elderly and those with chronic illnesses) that can increase the impact of the epidemic COVID-19 on mortality and explain, at least in part, the increased lethality observed in our country." This is very different than saying the deaths were caused by the common flu. In any case, the findings came directly from Italian health authorities not SouthFront.

In the same press conference, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense says she wishes to "reign in malign actors that are spreading misleading disruptive information". The censors claim the higher ground but engage in misinformation and falsehoods as they seek to silence discussion and debate.

Conclusion

There is a coordinated effort to manipulate and restrict what the public sees and hears in both North America and Europe. Under the guise of "fact checking" and stopping "Russian propaganda", the establishment has created private and government sponsored censors to distort and diminish questioning media. They label alternative media "Russian" or "pro Kremlin" even though many of the researchers and writers are from the West and have no connection or dependency on the Russian government.

SouthFront is an example of a media site doing important and original reporting and analysis. It is truly international with offices in several countries. The staff and volunteers include people from four continents. The censorship and vilification they are facing seems to be because they are providing information and analysis which contradicts the western mainstream narrative.

In recent developments, SouthFront is posting videos to a secondary YouTube channel called SouthFront TV. When that was also taken down on May 16, they challenged the ruling and won. The channel was restored with the acknowledgment "We have confirmed that your YouTube account is not in violation of our Terms of Service."

SouthFront is still trying to have their main channel with 152K subscribers restored. Their Facebook account is still shut down and attempts to disparage their journalism continues. The censorship has escalated during the Covid19 crisis.

[post-views]

Rick Sterling is an investigative journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He can be reached at rsterling1@protonmail.com

Puke if you must

This bloodsoaked monster is probably the most evil person on planet earth https://t.co/nGq2H1EPHt

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 9, 2020

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ALL CAPTIONS AND PULL QUOTES BY THE EDITORS NOT THE AUTHORS

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Assange’s Persecution Has Exposed Media Depravity The World Over

Please make sure these dispatches reach as many readers as possible. Share with kin, friends and workmates and ask them to do likewise.

Caitlin Johnstone

This is the speech I gave at a demonstration last night in Melbourne for Julian Assange, whose extradition trial begins February 24th.

[dropcap]J[/dropcap]ulian Assange started a leak outlet on the premise that corrupt and unaccountable power is a problem in our world, and that problem can be fought with the light of truth. Corrupt and unaccountable power responded by detaining, silencing and smearing him. His persecution has proved his own thesis about the world absolutely correct.

Power is the ability to control what happens. Absolute power is controlling what people think about what happens. Humans are story-oriented creatures, so if you can control the stories that the humans are telling each other about what’s going on, you can control those humans.

This is the power of narrative management. This is why governments and billionaires use propaganda, advertising, buy up media conglomerates and fund think tanks, employ public relations and spin doctors, buy up troll armies and bot farms: because they know that those who control the narrative, control the world.

You can do whatever you like, as long as you can control what people think about what you’re doing.

No one understands this better than Julian Assange. He famously said that if wars are started by lies, then they can be stopped by truth. That’s the basis of WikiLeaks. Bringing truth to the public in the most pristine and revolutionary way possible. They made it so people could leak documents to them safely, and then they released them with minimal redactions and editorial. Like many online innovations it cut out the middle man, and the middle man, in this case, are the media spinmeisters who normally present information with an overlay of establishment-friendly narrative.

"This is the power of narrative management. This is why governments and billionaires use propaganda, advertising, buy up media conglomerates and fund think tanks, employ public relations and spin doctors, buy up troll armies and bot farms: because they know that those who control the narrative, control the world..."

You know the ones. The ones that are like, “Here’s what I found out, but more importantly, this is what you should think about what I found out”.

It had immediate effects. Global reach, exposing the most corrupt roots of the most powerful people in an environment where the growing alarm at the GFC, climate change and endless war meant that people were hungry for the truth about why these things are still happening despite their unpopularity and despite our every effort to stop them.

The spotlight Assange’s persecution has thrown on the institution of journalism is one of the untold stories, mainly because the villains are the journalists–the people we usually rely on to tell us all the stories. This corruption was unearthed not so much through leaked documents, but through what we have been witnessing as the media-driven public mobbing of Julian Assange the person.

The mainstream media, to this day, lies constantly about Assange. If you pick up any recent story about Assange it will be littered with smears and lies. They’ll say offhand how he colluded with the Russians like that’s true, or that he was ”charged” with rape, or they’ll have a throwaway line about how he smeared poo on the walls of the embassy, or they will say the reason he was granted asylum by Ecuador was to flee rape charges (like that’s a thing).

There are dozens and dozens of lies, and they get repeated as truth throughout any reporting on Assange even after months or years of being debunked. There is a story on The Guardian website right now from November of 2018 that claims that Assange met with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chair. Can not have happened. Did not happen. The Ecuadorian embassy was the most surveilled building on planet earth at the time. Every single person who went in or out of there had to jump through many bureaucratic hoops.

No video evidence or any evidence at all was ever found for this claim, and there were plenty of people who wanted to find it. It didn’t happen.

And yet, that story is still on The Guardian website today over a year after it was first published. It still comes up as the number one result on Google when you search assange and manafort. There’ve been no retractions. No apologies.

The Guardian. Not New Idea. Not Hello!. Not News of the World. The Guardian. The bastion of all things worthy and noble.

It has been very revealing.

Assange has only ever been persecuted because he exposed US war crimes. No one has ever gone to jail for those war crimes, but instead of concentrating on that, the press decided to go after Assange.

Let’s be clear: when journalists use their power and privilege to cover up and divert attention from war crimes, they become war criminals themselves.

Journalists today are finally waking up to the fact that the legal precedent the Trump administration is setting by reaching out across the Atlantic, taking an Australian journalist, from an Ecuadorian embassy, in the middle of London, is devastating to journalism all over the world. Not just in the US, not just in the UK, but all over the world. No journalist is safe. Because if they can do that to him, they can do it to anyone.

We also learned that the United States do not consider foreign nationals to have a First Amendment protection, so the US is effectively saying that the long arm of US law can extend to get you anywhere, but they also don’t have to extend its protections.

And journalists are finally realizing that, but still silence is pretty deafening. Australian journalists should be writing furious op-eds vigorously defending Assange and demanding that our politicians act immediately, but at best we are getting tepid, smear-laden, mealy-mouthed wet squibs of copy that try to maintain that they were, of course, correct in the past, but also hit the alarm button.

And it just doesn’t work.

Until journalists admit they were wrong and Assange was right, and the US really didwant him in jail for publishing like he said back in 2010, back when they were calling him paranoid, their readers aren’t going to notice that its time to change course. They aren’t going to know to act.

There is a lot of confusion about what to do. Radio host Alan Jones had a very popular Facebook poll going this morning asking whether the Australian government should intervene and bring Assange home. I saw it a few hours ago and it was at 75 percent for “Yes” with thousands of responses already, six days to go, and gathering hundreds of pro-Assange comments. He deleted it. Obviously that was not the response he was planning on.

So there is confusion, and there is silence. But silence is space. A space has opened up before us. In Australia right now, there are two kinds of people: those who think that Assange should be brought home, and those who don’t want to think about it at all. They’ve gone quiet. And we’re so used to being on the defense, we’ve gone quiet too.

A space has opened up.

The narrative is there for the taking.

All we have to do is to stand up as one and take control of this story.

Let our voices ring out.

This man is innocent.

We must bring him home.

Publishing is not a crime!

Viva Assange!

____________________

Thanks for reading! The best way to get around the internet censors and make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast on either Youtube, soundcloud, Apple podcasts or Spotify, following me on Steemit, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, purchasing some of my sweet merchandise, buying my new book Rogue Nation: Psychonautical Adventures With Caitlin Johnstone, or my previous book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish or use any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge.

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This is a dispatch from our ongoing series by Caitlin Johnstone

About the Author

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

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Walter Cronkite and the US news media (Revisited)

By David Walsh • wsws.org
20 July 2009

U.S. Officials Disseminate Disinformation About ‘Virus Disinformation’

SouthFront is Censored under Cover of Pandemic

by Rick Sterling

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

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Assange’s Persecution Has Exposed Media Depravity The World Over

Caitlin Johnstone

PRESSTITUTES: IN THE PAY OF THE CIA- A CONFESSION FROM THE PROFESSION. BOOK INTERVIEW WITH JOHN-PAUL LEONARD AND ANDREW SCHLADEMAN.

Jeff J. Brown
CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND

The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.

Walter Cronkite and the US news media (Revisited)

By David Walsh • wsws.org 20 July 2009

U.S. Officials Disseminate Disinformation About ‘Virus Disinformation’

SouthFront is Censored under Cover of Pandemic

by Rick Sterling

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in Deiner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

Keep truth and free speech alive by supporting this site. Donate using the button below, or by scanning our QR code.

Assange’s Persecution Has Exposed Media Depravity The World Over

Caitlin Johnstone

PRESSTITUTES: IN THE PAY OF THE CIA- A CONFESSION FROM THE PROFESSION. BOOK INTERVIEW WITH JOHN-PAUL LEONARD AND ANDREW SCHLADEMAN.

Jeff J. Brown CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND

The battle against the Big Lie killing the world will not be won by you just reading this article. It will be won when you pass it on to at least 2 other people, requesting they do the same.

By David Walsh • wsws.org
20 July 2009

Keep truth and free speech alive by supporting this site.
Donate using the button below, or by scanning our QR code.

Jeff J. Brown
CHINA RISING RADIO SINOLAND