If you are a journalist writing about or a person concerned about issues like Free Speech, read or write in alternative media or news, Occupy movement, Ferguson, Gaza, Ukraine, Russia, police brutality, US interventionism, fair government, homelessness, keeping the government accountable, representative government, government intrusions like the NSA is doing, or you are liberal, progressive, libertarian, conservative, separation of church and state, religion, …
If you have a website, write, read, or like something in social media that strays outside the new lines the war isn’t coming, its now here.
What would we do? Disrupt, deny, degrade, deceive, corrupt, usurp or destroy the information. The information, please don’t forget, is the ultimate objective of cyber. That will directly impact the decision-making process of the adversary’s leader who is the ultimate target.”- Joel Harding on Ukraine’s cyber strategy.
Welcome to World of Private Sector IO (Information Operations)
IO or IIO (Inform and Influence Operations) defined by the US Army includes the fields of psychological operations and military deception.
In military IIO operations center on the ability to influence foreign audiences, US and global audiences, and adversely affect enemy decision making through an integrated approach. Even current event news is released in this fashion. Each portal is given messages that follow the same themes because it is an across the board mainstream effort that fills the information space entirely when it is working correctly.
The purpose of “Inform and Influence Operations” is not to provide a perspective, opinion, or lay out a policy. It is defined as the ability to make audiences “think and act” in a manner favorable to the mission objectives. This is done through applying perception management techniques which target the audiences emotions, motives, and reasoning.
These techniques are not geared for debate. It is to overwhelm and change the target psyche.
Using these techniques information sources can be manipulated and those that write, speak, or think counter to the objective are relegated as propaganda, ill informed, or irrelevant.
Meet Joel Harding-Ukraine’s King Troll
According to his own bio- Joel spent 26 years in the Army; his first nine years were spent as an enlisted soldier, mostly in Special Forces, as a SF qualified communicator and medic, on an A Team. After completing his degree, Joel then received his commission as an Infantry Officer and after four years transitioned to the Military Intelligence Corps. In the mid 1990s Joel was working in the Joint Staff J2 in support of special operations, where he began working in the new field called Information Operations. Eligible Receiver 1997 was his trial by fire, after that he became the Joint Staff J2 liaison for IO to the CIA, DIA, NSA, DISA and other assorted agencies in the Washington DC area, working as the intelligence lead on the Joint Staff IO Response Cell for Solar Sunrise and Moonlight Maze. Joel followed this by a tour at SOCCENT and then INSCOM, working in both IO and intelligence. Joel retired from the Army in 2003, working for various large defense contractors until accepting the position with the Association of Old Crows.
According to TechRepublic -The career of Joel Harding, the director of the group”s(Old Crows) Information Operations Institute, exemplifies the increasing role that computing and the Internet are playing in the military. A 20-year veteran of military intelligence, Mr. Harding shifted in 1996 into one of the earliest commands that studied government-sponsored computer hacker programs. After leaving the military, he took a job as an analyst at SAIC, a large contractor developing computer applications for military and intelligence agencies.
Joel Harding established the Information Operations Institute shortly after joining the Institute at the Association of Old Crows; he then procured the rights to InfowarCon and stood it up in 2009. Joel is an editor of “The IO Journal”, the premier publication in the field of IO. Joel formed an IO advisory committee, consisting of the 20 key leaders from Us and UK corporate, government, military and academia IO. Joel wrote the white paper for IO which was used as background paper for US Office of the Secretary of Defense’s QDR IO subcommittee.
For ten years the Association of Old Crows has been the Electronic Warfare and Information Operations Association, but there has been no concerted effort to rally the IO Community. This has changed, the IO Institute was approved as a Special Interest Group of the AOC in 2008 and we have already become a major player in the IO Community. This is especially important with the recent formation of the US Cyber Command, with the new definition of Information Operations coming out of the Quadrennial Defense Review, with a new perspective of Electronic Warfare and a myriad of other changes. The IO Institute brings you events, most notably InfowarCon. Our flagship publication is the IO Journal, already assigned reading by at least two military IO educational programs. IO classes are integrated with Electronic Warfare classes to educate, satisfy requirements and enable contractors to be more competitive.
When you look at the beginning of the NSA’s intrusive policies you find Joel Harding. Harding helped pioneer the invasive software used by government and business to explore your social networks, influence you, and dig out every personal detail. In Operation Eligible Receiver 1997 he used freeware taken from the internet to invade the DoD computers, utilities, and more. It’s because most of it is based in “freeware” that NSA snooping has a legal basis. If you can get the software for free and use it, why can’t the government use it on you?
Ukraine-Bringing it into Focus
Looking back at Joel Harding in 2012 seems like a different man. This is the same accomplished professional described above before Maidan. Here’s how he describes the Russian, Chinese, and American experience before his involvement in Ukraine.
…These experiences, and the fact that I spent nine years in Special Forces and that kind of thing, caused me to think. Then I began to wonder. How much of what we read and what we see is propaganda? Not foreign propaganda, but domestic? How much of that domestic ‘information’ is propaganda? …We are being smothered in one lie after another. All in the name of politics. It seems to me that these politicians are almost complacent with us behaving like suckling pigs, absolute ignorant morons…Free, unfettered, uncensored information exposes the lies their governments prefer to feed them, allowing their citizens to know and understand the truth. Authoritarians, like dictators, communists, fascists and many sectarian or religious governments, are said to enhance their authority over their citizens with the use of filters.”
So I ask you, do you see more lies and propaganda here than I saw in China or Russia? I would say it depends on your perspective. I see more lies aimed at us from our own politicians than I have ever seen anyplace else in the world… you tell me. Are Americans more susceptible to propaganda?-Harding
Joel Harding has quite a different opinion in 2014 after taking control of Information Operations (IO) in Ukraine.
Part of USIA formed what is now called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, the BBG, who oversee VOA, RFE/RL, RFA, MEBN, Radio Marti and other international broadcasting bureaus – their mission is to broadcast “fair and objective” reporting to what I called ‘denied areas’, such as Russia – Harding
Ukraine
Febuary 22nd 2014 marks Harding’s first involvement in the Ukrainian crisis. “Yesterday I agreed to help present the information of this situation, bringing in representatives from many of the sources cited above. It is time International Broadcasting is examined.”- Harding
On February 28th 2014 he was announced director of the NSE Strategy Center. Harding reached out immediately to the IO community to see what information anyone had on current Russian cyberspace operations. On March 1st 2014 Harding announced cyber options for Ukraine.
Pravy Sektor
In early March 2014 US President Barrack Obama issued an executive order stating anyone challenging the legitimacy of the new Ukrainian government was subject to US sanctions including US citizens. The way it is written journalists in the US wondered if they would be put on a terrorist list.
On March 3rd, only a few days into the new job Harding’s advice was “Now I have a thought bouncing around inside my head, which actually makes sense. But the repercussions are wild, off the charts, bloody and may destroy a nation. ..If one looks at that graphic, natural gas pipelines run through Ukraine. If one had the talent, one could close valves in any of those pipelines and shut down a major part of Russia’s exports and, therefore, a source of money, another kind of power which Putin must truly understand.
Bumping this up one step, blow up those pipelines, although that is going to make one helluva mess.
This would result in a Russian invasion. End of story? No. Imagine trying to defend thousands of miles of pipeline. Ukrainian insurgents would make Russia devote dozens of divisions of soldiers…” At the time Victoria Nuland was trying to court Pravy Sektor into legitimacy by offering money and support.
That same day Harding noticed
“Suddenly I have 510 people in Ukraine following this blog. That is a.. let’s see, 510 divided by four, multiplied by 100 is a 12,750 percent increase in one day! Gee, I wonder why?”- Harding
On March 16th Dimitri Yarosh answered. Yarosh threatened gaslines across Ukraine. The advice Harding gave threatened one of the only remaining sources of income remaining in Ukraine for the Kiev junta.
From that moment on Harding geared his public writing to Ukraine. He provided military advice, the unified press stories Ukrainian media put out, IO cyber tactics, military manuals, psy-op manuals, and unified the large international press cover the Eastern European emigre populations provided. Behind the scenes beyond creating new government ministries it’s easy to fathom the impact he is having.
“For all you Ukrainian intelligence officers about to put the lives of your soldiers at risk, I urge you to take a few hours and study this book, from cover to cover…Be professional, be calm, and do your absolute best. No matter what the circumstances. Good luck.”- Harding
Throughout the past year Harding and others fleshed out the Ukrainian version of democratic “free speech” based on how he has concluded it should be in the USA. On December 12th 2014 Harding wrote “Ukraine is a bright shining star. They approved a Minister of Information Policy. They received a National Information Strategy and are working on a counter propaganda center. Hopefully they are going to remove the paywall at KyivPost.com.” - Kiev Post did just that. They Read Joel Harding?
OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatovic is critical of Kiev’s decision to create the new ministry.
Dubbed “the Ministry of Truth” the new Ministry of Information Policy forbids journalists to write anything that is critical of the government policy.
“Wonderful news out of Ukraine. I submitted some papers to this end. I personally believe a few of my words survived. I know others involved in other parts of this effort…Minister of Information Policy Yuri Stets has five missions…”-Harding
On February 23rd 2015 Harding tweeted the creation of the i-army. The next day it was announced to the world. “This effort is geared to contain what they call Russian propaganda in the west. “In late January, Ukraine’s Minister of Information Policy, Yuriy Stets, promised to create an “information-army” to fight Russian propaganda…”
War on Western Journalists, News sites, and Americans
On January 11th the peacemaker website went live with a mission to …In the future the Peacemaker site will be similar to the site of the Viennese Simon Wiesenthal Center, which since the late 1940s has been focused on tracking and catching Nazi war criminals. In the case of Ukraine, these will be criminals who destroyed the Ukrainian people — the traitors,collaborators, Russian and other mercenaries, and military personnel taking part the undeclared and therefore illegal war by Russia, he concluded…”
Under Ukrainian law journalists that disagree with Kiev’s policies are collaborators. They are subject to any mechanism Kiev can devise to stop them. In the case of RT Ruptly or the Guardian this means developing a strategy to ruin their reputations. The Interpreter was developed to that end. Kiev has gone so far as to petition the UK government to censure the Guardian for its coverage of events in Ukraine hoping to bully the publication into line. US broadcasters (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty) have put RT on the same list as ISIS.
Who is a Propagandist?
Since Harding’s definition of propaganda is “any news coming out from your opponent”, a propagandist would be tightly defined as the enemy operative that writes the news. In this view any journalist or news outlet; both mainstream and alternative that publishes articles or video going against his agenda is propaganda or worse -active measures.
It is the term “active measures” below that needs to be keyed in on. Almost all of Joel Harding’s professional career has been devoted to Information Operations and developing a cyber offense to combat terrorists. A person employed in “active measures” according to its definition is committing political warfare against the USA , is a terrorist, and their writing is just short of a hot war.
The writings of 1976 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Mairead Maguire fit the bill describing a terrorist that is working to overthrow the US government because she writes about the injustices done in Gaza, and Syria.
Just by reading the titles it is obvious she is completely biased – anti-American, anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian and pro-Syria. She is entitled to her opinions but an educated reader will note her consistent bias. Shades of Soviet, now Russian, Active Measures. Ask a well established distinguished person to write not slightly skewed, but highly biased articles bashing America and Israel. I would guess if someone were to investigate Global Research.ca they would find funding leading right to PressTV. I wouldn’t even be surprised to find a link to Rossiya Segodnya, RIA Novosti, Voice of Russia or RT. Welcome to Propaganda 101, 21st Century style.- Harding
Private citizen Joel Harding has used both his connections and training as an SF to create a private foreign IO army which today is over 40,000 strong with the sole purpose of destroying publications, journalists, and people that “he deems” as supporting Russian propaganda and people engaged in “Russian active measures.”Add into this that Harding wrote the white paper the doctrine of US Army Cyber Defense is based in, he pioneered the field of cyber warfare, developed the means and methods of the NSA and you have one of the most formidable practitioners on the planet. People spread throughout mainstream media that came after him were taught or mentored by him, his colleagues, and belong to the groups and associations he leads.
Long story short, if you write about social justice like Mairead Maguire, you are a targetable terrorist. It has been decided by private citizen Joel Harding. Today Ukraine is his project and if you are writing about it that’s what you stepped into.
In truth it doesn’t matter what you write about, his minions cover everything corporations and governments have an interest in. Ukraine isn’t the test case, America was through the NSA. America failed miserably guarding responsible free speech. Ukraine is the first full scale rollout operation. The people and methods employed will continue long after the Ukraine War is over if they win the information war we are all in.
Take it from someone who was hearing military drones 2 or 3 times a week for months, spent a month in a town “occupied” at times by both Pravy Sektor and the Natz Guardia, whose home shook for months because of the artillery and rockets, and at the end of that occupation found themselves only hours from becoming another “cleansing casualty” before we were rescued. As much as I have written about these things I had to leave many things unsaid.
From my experience YOU, where ever you are would rather face 100 men with the capabilities of Navy Seals, or Delta Force and heavy weapons than just 10 men with ¼ of Mr. Harding’s capabilities, intelligence, and connections. In the end 100 extremely trained warriors remain 100 men. Within months Harding has turned very few into a highly focused 40,000 and most of the propagandists he writes need to be dealt with by his army are Americans on American soil. That army is going to work influencing millions to go to war with Russia.
How Far Will Ukraine’s King Troll go to destroy You?
And there are many kinds of propaganda; let me focus on what we are mostly seeing being dumped on us by Russia …I’ll put them in a spreadsheet and send it to anyone wanting to help. Together we’ll see if we can send that to enough people to make a case against him, embarrass him and make it impossible for his to show his face without being labeled a bad journalist, a liar, guilty of perjury, and a dirty propagandist…Photographs can be photoshopped, so can videos. Eyewitness accounts are suspect. Reporters stories are only as reliable as the news sources and that means they are not reliable. Even if the most reliable person in the world says something, their word can always be branded speculation, biased or that they are a paid troll, be it Russian or otherwise (although I really don’t know of any others). Harding Aug 31
Mechanisms of Enforcement
“They probably have been really frightened by the idea of bearing criminal responsibility sooner of later for their actions or for becoming persona non grata in the civilized world,” Herashchenko wrote.
It is also noteworthy that foreign intelligence services have become interested in the Peacemaker site — the CIA, FBI, European intelligence and counterintelligence. The reason in simple. The civilized countries, drawing on information on the pro-Russian militants-terrorists, will be able to create their own databases of suspicious persons and individuals that must be neutralized and isolated from society, he said.
Before discounting the underlined as having anything to do with you bear in mind that Harding “worked IO on the Joint Staff in the Pentagon and was one of the plankholders of the Joint Staff IO Response Cell.” The Security Service of Ukraine reached an agreement with Google Inc. to jointly fight with the Russian secret services, who are constantly spreading propaganda network in the Kremlin and sow panic among the population. - Harding
If you like Mairead Maguire are employing Russian active measures according to Harding’s definition, you are the Russian secret services he is talking about. She doesn’t write about Ukraine. You are the people to be isolated from society, “suspicious”, that must be neutralized. You are the journalists, activists, or people who read alternative news that must be put on lists with the CIA, FBI, INTERPOL, intel, and counter intel.
Who’s Getting Attacked?
Throughout 2014 Harding made it clear that journalists, writers, and scholars that publish articles at GlobalResearch were agents engaged in Russian propaganda and active measures. Like the labeling of Mairead Maguire it doesn’t need to be written remotely concerned with Ukraine, Donbass, or Russia, just against his agenda.
Global Research is a constant focus of his IO disrupt and destroy work through his private Cyber army in Ukraine.
GlobalResearch.ca. You are unprofessional for doing this, you do not deserve any association with the proud profession of journalism and you should be shut down. GlobalResearch.ca Remember that name, put it on your “bad” list and spread the word. They are despicable, vile, the opposite of journalists. GlobalResearch.ca- Harding
Some of Ukraine’s IO army Targeted Websites
Propaganda. “The word is frequently used to describe any news emerging from one’s opponent.”- Joel Harding
These are only a few of the websites that have been targeted for attacks as Russian propaganda and active measures. The very recent jump in spam comments is just the beginning of a large unified effort.
People the IO army are Targeting
Topping the list in terms of importance is Congressman Alan Grayson who has been an outspoken opponent of intervention in Syria as well as Ukraine. Perhaps someone should tell him he’s being watched. Every Congressmen that is against interventionism or for human rights should look into why a private citizen can grind axes with Americans using a foreign government/ private IO army he is creating. It is in part a branch of the Ukrainian Military and under a ministryof the Ukrainian government that Harding helped create. He is also steering its efforts.
Below are Russian terrorists according to the definition “news emerging from one’s opponent.”
Peppy Escobar and Steven Lendman are both “active measures” agents for writing about John Kerry, the State Department, RT bashing, and of course Ukraine. Blog talk Radio host Dr. Rick Staggenborg both a veteran an d peace activist is labeled a Russian propagandist. Professor Michel Chossudovsky and every journalist and activist that publishes at GlobalResearch.ca which is a large list including Paul Craig Roberts and Robert Parry are Russian active measures agents in the Ukraine war and every “agendized news event they write on. Tyler Durden, connected writers and journalists are Russian propagandists. Deena Stryker, an editor at OpedNews is noted because of her PressTV interview for saying the US is engaged in a propaganda war.
All conspiracies aside it wouldn’t feel right without adding Alex Jones and Michael Rivera. Harding developed what seems to be a fixation about Jones and company a few years back. Its not that he hates Jones’ news sites any more than the others, but it is personal. Joel Harding’s favorite nephew rates Jones take on international events as more credible than what Harding has to say.
George Eliason - As for those documents, Eliason must have contacted the cyber-militia directly, because they haven’t made any public posts online since December. All of this was unusual enough to warrant further investigation into George Eliason’s online identity.
Only a short year ago very few people could even point out Ukraine on a map. During this past year an American has given the government and military of Ukraine the power and tools to attack people in the United States, Europe, and where ever you are reading this.
The people listed are only a few of many. If you have a blog, website and write about current events, you are included too.It shows is an across the board monolithic effort to destroy alternative news and free speech, journalists, and activists. If you are writing about Ferguson and police brutality, human rights, or responsible government -How how long does an organized IO army need to destroy your reputation, income, and work when its focus- is YOU. Whats next? Wait and see.
"You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." - CIA operative discussing with Philip Graham, editor Washington Post, on the availability and prices of journalists willing to peddle CIA propaganda and cover stories. "Katherine The Great," by Deborah Davis (New York: Sheridan Square Press, 1991)
"The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media." -- William Colby, former CIA Director, cited by Dave Mcgowan, Derailing Democracy
"There is quite an incredible spread of relationships. You don't need to manipulate Time magazine, for example, because there are [Central Intelligence] Agency people at the management level." -- William B. Bader, former CIA intelligence officer, briefing members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein
"The Agency's relationship with [The New York] Times was by far its most valuable among newspapers, according to CIA officials. [It was] general Times policy ... to provide assistance to the CIA whenever possible." -- The CIA and the Media, by Carl Bernstein
"Senator William Proxmire has pegged the number of employees of the federal intelligence community at 148,000 ... though Proxmire's number is itself a conservative one. The "intelligence community" is officially defined as including only those organizations that are members of the U.S. Intelligence Board (USIB); a dozen other agencies, charged with both foreign and domestic intelligence chores, are not encompassed by the term.... The number of intelligence workers employed by the federal government is not 148,000, but some undetermined multiple of that number." -- Jim Hougan, Spooks
"For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government.... I never had any thought that when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak and dagger operations." --former President Harry Truman, 22 December 1963, one month after the JFK assassination, op-ed section of the Washington Post, early edition
'As terrible as it is to live in a nation where the press in known to be controlled by the government, at least one has the advantage of knowing the bias is present, and to adjust for it. In the United States of America, we are taught from birth that our press is free from such government meddling. This is an insideous lie about the very nature of the news institution in this country. One that allows the government to lie to us while denying the very fact of the lie itself.'
'The Spanish Government intends to pass a reform of the Penal Code that would criminalise the organisation of street protests that "seriously disturb the public peace", by any kind of media including online social networks such as Facebook.
On 11 April 2012, Jorge Fernandez Diaz, the Spanish interior minister, announced in the Congress the government was planning a reform of the Penal Code to criminalise those involved in organising street protests, following the widespread series of demonstrations that have taken place in Spain since May 2011. The law intends to prevent the organisation of any kind of protest organised through the Internet, thus qualifying as criminal any civil demonstration or public gathering.
The Spanish bill is extremely worrying not only by the censure it implies but by its implications as well, the measures being also totally disproportionate with regard to the declared goal in opposition to the necessity to safeguard people’s freedoms.
The bill could actually lead to criminalise the sharing of information online. According to the proposal, retweeting an event considered by the government violent, would be liable to two years imprisonment. As Internet Sans Frontieres points out, the dissemination and sharing of information “should not be criminalised in a disproportionate way, without taking into account the rights and freedoms of individuals, including the right to express freely on the Internet.” The determination of a violent event would implicitly lead to the violation of privacy as, in order to determine that someone is "organizing a violent rally over the Internet", the Government has to violate the right to privacy of Internet users. Also, such a qualification of an action can lead to an administrative injunction, without any control of an independent judge, to assess the profile of a user creating an event on a social network or calling for a demonstration on his/her website.......'
'The Ley Mordaza, or Gag Rule law passed Spain’s lower house of Parliament late last week. It essentially bans all public protest and imposes heavy fines on anybody who dares peacefully protest against the government or shows disrespect for authority and police.
The offenses, reported by Revolution News, are as follows:
1.Photographing or recording police – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
2.Peaceful disobedience to authority – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
3.Occupying banks as means of protest – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
4.Not formalizing a protest – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
5.For carrying out assemblies or meetings in public spaces – 100 to 600€ fine.
6.For impeding or stopping an eviction – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
7.For presence at an occupied space (not only social centers but also houses occupied by evicted…'
'......Although France has taken the lead in this inter-governmental effort (see below), the preliminary assault began this past fall with British Prime Minster David Cameron publicly announcing on two separate occasions, that all of these so-called ‘conspiracy theories’ (anything which challenges the official orthodoxy) should be deemed as “extremist” and equivalent to “terrorist” and should be purged from society on the grounds of ‘national security’. The first came with Cameron’s warped speech at the UN, and afterwards, a similar charge was made by the UK leader against anyone who dares press the issue of institutional paedophilia and child abuse.....'
'....As yet, few are aware of how in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo shootings, French Prime Minster,Francois Hollande delivered an official declaration (see full report and text from his speech below). However, Hollande takes it beyond the usual hyperbole and focuses on giving the state an administrative and legal foothold for policing both speech and thought crimes in France. If this can be accomplished in France, then a European roll-out would soon follow.
Ironically, in order to achieve this fascist leap forward, Hollande has equated “conspiracy theories” to Nazism, and is calling for government regulations to prevent any sharing or publishing of any views deemed as ‘dangerous thought’ by the state. Specifically, Hollande is citing “Anti-Semitism” and also anything which could inspire ‘acts terrorism’ – as the chief vehicles for what the state will be designating as ‘dangerous thoughts’. With the thumb of Hebdo still pressing down, this may just sound like politics writ large by the French leader, but in reality it’s full-blown fascism....'
'....RINF reports how the new censorship regime has already been implemented this week:
“Earlier this week, the Interior Minister of France — with no court review or adversarial process — ordered five websites to not only be blocked in France, but that anyone who visits any of the sites get redirected to a scary looking government website, saying:
While it could be argued that the four websites initially listed by the government for ‘blocking’ were exclusively for ISIS/ISIL-related activity and thus, should be kept hidden, the government has made no caveat in its reams of policy literature, other than some vague language as to what it defines as ‘extremist’, as to where this growing list will stop, or indeed, if it has any limits at all. Because this process is extrajudicial, then there will be no warning to gov’t targets of this new regime. In fact, as RINF reports, this has already happened:
“In that first batch was a site called “islamic-news.info.” The owner of that site not only notes that he was never first contacted to “remove” whatever material was deemed terrorist supporting (as required by the law), but that nothing in what he had posted was supporting terrorism.”
Will French gov’t censors also block this website – because it is challenging the government’s new public filtering program? Are we entering a new intolerant, Chinese-style policing culture in Europe, and throughout the west? Certainly they have the ability and the legal clearance to do just that right now.
Fear of losing control over manipulative narratives has always been a primary obsession with those in power, and clearly, based on what we’ve seen here – governments are making an aggressive move on free speech now. Skeptics will no doubt argue that this 21WIRE article itself constitutes a conspiracy theory. If that was the case, then why have western governments, particularly those in the US and Britain, already spent millions, if not billions in state funds in order to infiltrate, disrupt, and occupy forum websites, and social networking groups of so-called ‘conspiracy theorist and even creating entirely new groups just to contradict them? Does that not already prove what the government modus operandi is?
As if that wasn’t enough already, now France wants to take it to a whole new authoritarian level. It may sound ridiculous, but this is exactly what is taking place in government as we speak.
History shows that once this new regime is in place, they will not relinquish any new powers of censorship, and so a long, intellectual dark age is certain to follow…'
Spain will impose a raft of new laws to combat popular protests in opposition to EU central bankster austerity.
The Ley Mordaza, or Gag Rule law passed Spain’s lower house of Parliament late last week. It essentially bans all public protest and imposes heavy fines on anybody who dares peacefully protest against the government or shows disrespect for authority and police.
The offenses, reported by Revolution News, are as follows:
1.Photographing or recording police – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
2.Peaceful disobedience to authority – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
3.Occupying banks as means of protest – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
4.Not formalizing a protest – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
5.For carrying out assemblies or meetings in public spaces – 100 to 600€ fine.
6.For impeding or stopping an eviction – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
7.For presence at an occupied space (not only social centers but also houses occupied by evicted families) – 100 to 600€ fine.
8.Police black lists for protestors, activists and alternative press have been legalized.
9.Meeting or gathering in front of Congress – 600 to 30.000€ fine.
10.Appealing the fines in court requires the payment of judicial costs, whose amount depends on the fine.
11.It allows random identity checks, allowing for profiling of immigrants and minorities.
12.Police can now carry out raids at their discretion, without the need for “order” to have been disrupted.
13.External bodily searches are also now allowed at police discretion.
14.The government can prohibit any protest at will, if it feels “order” will be disrupted.
15.Any ill-defined “critical infrastructure” is now considered a forbidden zone for public gatherings if it might affect their functioning.
16.There are also fines for people who climb buildings and monuments without permission.
Spaniards have reacted to EU imposed austerity with massive demonstrations. Since 2011, protest participants, who are sometimes referred to as the “indignados,” have staged continuous demonstrations in Madrid and across the country.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2015 11:28 am Post subject:
BBC Trust vice-chair criticised over role in defence company
Campaigners say Sir Roger Carr should be ousted from corporation’s governing body due to his chairmanship of BAE Systems
BBC Trust vice-chairman Sir Roger Carr has been criticised over his role at BAE Systems
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/apr/24/bbc-trust-vice-chair-sir- roger-carr-bae-systems
Friday 24 April 2015 11.40 BST Last modified on Friday 24 April 2015 11.42 BST
The head of a £16bn defence company accused of arming dictatorships should be ousted from the governing body of the BBC, say campaigners.
Sir Roger Carr, chairman of Europe’s biggest arms dealer, BAE Systems, is due to start work as vice-chairman of the BBC Trust on 1 May. But a campaign has been launched to get him sacked because of fears that he could influence BBC coverage of the arms trade.
A petition demanding his dismissal has been signed by more than 5,500 people, and is due to be handed in to BBC Broadcasting House in London on 30 April. “Arms industry executives have no place in public service broadcasting,” it says.
BAE Systems has sold weapons to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Libya, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, which have all been criticised for poor records on human rights. Saudi Arabia has reportedly used the company’s Eurofighters in recent attacks on Yemen.
“BAE Systems has made its money through arming dictatorships and human rights abusers around the world,” said Andrew Smith from Campaign Against Arms Trade, which is organising the petition.
“Carr is the public face of the company and is the last person who should be given the legitimacy of a role at the heart of public broadcasting. Not only does his appointment send out a terrible message, it also raises serious concerns about how the appointment might impact on the BBC’s coverage of the arms trade.”
Carr was appointed to the BBC Trust post, which pays £70,610 a year, for four years by ministers. He is a member of David Cameron’s Business Advisory Group.
As chairman of BAE Systems he earns £650,000 a year. He has previously chaired Thames Water, Cadbury and Centrica, and been deputy chairman of the Bank of England as well as a past president of the CBI.
The BBC Trust’s job is ensure that the BBC delivers its mission to “to inform, educate and entertain.” It sets strategic objectives and is “the guardian of licence fee revenue and of the public interest in the BBC”.
“Trustees have no influence over the editorial decisions taken at the BBC”, said a spokeswoman for the trust. “All decisions about editorial output are taken by the BBC executive.”
The Department for Culture, Media and Sport pointed out that candidates for the BBC Trust were asked to flag any conflicts of interest. “Where raised, these are discussed with the selection panel,” said a department spokesman. “There were no concerns in relation to Roger Carr.”
A spokeswoman for BAE Systems described the company as world class. “We are proud of the vital role we play in helping our customers safeguard national security,” she said.
Introduction
We feel incredibly fortunate to have Richard Keeble, Professor of Journalism at the University of Lincoln, as an occasional blogger at Media Lens (www.Media Lens.org/weblog/) alongside Sharon Beder, Mark Curtis, David Miller and the Media Lens editors. Richard’s posts are always tremendous, but his latest submission, below, is so important and interesting that we feel it merits a much wider audience.
So how many journalists are actually agents of the state, or working for agents of the state? We can think of several very likely candidates - and not just in the right-wing media.
Best wishes
The Editors
Hacks And Spooks - Close Encounters Of A Strange Kind
And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference organised by the city’s Student Peace Movement. And what a great event it turns out to be! Lots of excellent speakers – including author and peace activist, Milan Rai, Alan Simpson MP, Dr Meryl Aldridge, of Nottingham University, and a representative of Notts Indymedia. And there’s lots of excellent, lively and constructive discussions.
I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services:
While it might be difficult to identify precisely the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as “intelligence”, “security”, “Whitehall” or “Home Office” sources) on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.
As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented: "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of “one of Britain’s most distinguished journals” as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. As “satellites” of the secret state, their list included “agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career”.
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.
A brief history
Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer -- probably as a cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them. Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service’s unit liasing with the French resistance.
The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body -- which even Orwell aided by sending them a list of “crypto-communists”. Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it “ran” dozens of Fleet Street journalists and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.
According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour of the British intelligence agencies was hidden. And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today
In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate’s Church Committee and the House of Representatives’ Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists. And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll. David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: “We have somebody in every office in Fleet Street”
Leaker King
And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming “embarrassing publications”. Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, “was a longstanding agent of ours” who “made it clear he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction”. Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet Street journalists. Wright comments: “No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot” King was also closely involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten
Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper. David Walker, the Mirror’s foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
Maxwell and Mossad
According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners’ strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the 1970s MI5’s F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success. In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6 were equally as strong.
Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks were fascinating. For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: “Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse during the Cold War.”
The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked to lunch by the head of MI6. “It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms of first-hand knowledge.”
And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain. Lawson strongly denied the allegations.
Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from “dodgy security services”. She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission: “We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not being used.” (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)
Growing power of secret state
Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US. But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into the heart of Blair’s ruling clique so these links are even more significant.
Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats. According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by the Rockingham cell within the MoD. A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.
Similarly the disinformation about Iraq’s WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists. Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: “Saddam Hussein has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of the United Nations inspectors.” The source of these “revelations” was said to be “intelligence picked up from within Iraq”. Early in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies about Saddam Hussein’s supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group, the Iraqi National Congress.
Sexed up – and missed out
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the “war” and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government (in collusion with the intelligence services) had “sexed up” a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq. The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition? But those facts will be forever secret. Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists’ links with the intelligence services was ignored by the inquiry.
Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times’ dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.
Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a “calculated set-up” devised to foster the propaganda case for war. “In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam’s regime.” And he concluded: “The information fog is thicker than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures, especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor.”
Let’s not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Sat Jul 11, 2015 11:59 pm Post subject:
Ah, Polish government now censoring too
In this case Moscow's English language Sputnik Radio
Investigative journalist Tony Gosling shares his thoughts on the Polish initiative to ban Sputnik news agency
Amazing the extent to which the BBC will go to protect Israeli military lies
Propaganda: Israel's 150+ nuclear weapons taboo on BBC radio as Iran nuclear deal signed Tue14Jul15
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z9iX6dmhaWU _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
News or theatre?
The post Wapping age of digital news...
"He who controls the past controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future."
TITLE: News Or Theatre? Technological Dystopia and the Death of British Journalism
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Technocracy rising: Do we, like the citizens of Oceania, have a short, fuzzy memory? Mass media is the nerve-system of the nation. Honest producers, journalists and editors make sure we don't forget important contextualising events of the past. The dishonest mass media we now have, however, reinforces lies and makes the most important events of history taboo.
How the technological changes to the British media over the last thirty years have meant, despite the internet age, war is peace. The powerful have quietly turned news into propaganda like never before in history. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 25 Jul 2005 Posts: 18335 Location: St. Pauls, Bristol, England
Posted: Thu Aug 20, 2015 2:37 pm Post subject:
lots in here about 7/7 particularly
comments/criticism welcome folks
Whitehall_Bin_Men wrote:
News or theatre?
The post Wapping age of digital news...
"He who controls the past controls the present. He who controls the present controls the future."
TITLE: News Or Theatre? Technological Dystopia and the Death of British Journalism
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Technocracy rising: Do we, like the citizens of Oceania, have a short, fuzzy memory? Mass media is the nerve-system of the nation. Honest producers, journalists and editors make sure we don't forget important contextualising events of the past. The dishonest mass media we now have, however, reinforces lies and makes the most important events of history taboo.
How the technological changes to the British media over the last thirty years have meant, despite the internet age, war is peace. The powerful have quietly turned news into propaganda like never before in history.
'by using fake identities to influence conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. It’s called “Online Persona Management Services.” Under the Centcom contract, it allows the creation of up to 10 fake online persona’s, known as “sock puppets,” for every service man or woman working on the program.
Its purpose is to control free speech according to an article that appeared in the Guardian titled Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media:
“The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control
and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.”
According to Centcom, their only objective is to counter extremists and enemy propaganda outside of the U.S., saying that it would be unlawful to address U.S. audiences.
However, the 2013 version of the NDAA included an amendment that legalized domestic deceptive propaganda. The new law allows the U.S government to legally carry out misinformation campaigns against U.S. citizens.
Is this surprising to anyone? The corporate media is basically a propaganda arm of the U.S. government, isn’t it? Why do you need to legalize the use of propaganda when you already have an entire mainstream media establishment reprinting government press releases without question?
Perhaps even more disturbing than all of this is fact that the CIA has infiltrated the biggest press institutions since the early 1950s. One has to look no further than Operation Mockingbird – a secret CIA campaign to spread disinformation and false stories to foreign governments during the cold war. The CIA did this by manipulating the media into focusing on propaganda, sabotage, and subversion.
It was later revealed in Congressional hearings consisted of literally paying off editors and reporters and most mainstream news outlets: the New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, Reuters, and countless others. Isn’t it nice to know that the supposed watchdogs of the government can be so easily bought?
How do we know that Operation Mockingbird is not still in effect? We don’t.
Last year it was confirmed that the U.S. Military has been manipulating social media by using fake identities to influence conversations and spread pro-American propaganda. It’s called “Online Persona Management Services.” Under the Centcom contract, it allows the creation of up to 10 fake online personas, known as “sock puppets,” for every service man or woman working on the program.
Its purpose is to control free speech according to an article that appeared in the Guardian titled Revealed: US spy operation that manipulates social media:
“The project has been likened by web experts to China’s attempts to control and restrict free speech on the internet. Critics are likely to complain that it will allow the US military to create a false consensus in online conversations, crowd out unwelcome opinions and smother commentaries or reports that do not correspond with its own objectives.”
“Spiritual
According to Centcom, their only objective is to counter extremists and enemy propaganda outside of the U.S., saying that it would be unlawful to address U.S. audiences.
However, the 2013 version of the NDAA included an amendment that legalized domestic deceptive propaganda. The new law allows the U.S government to legally carry out misinformation campaigns against U.S. citizens.
Is this surprising to anyone? The corporate media is basically a propaganda arm of the U.S. government, isn’t it? Why do you need to legalize the use of propaganda when you already have an entire mainstream media establishment reprinting government press releases without question?
In fact, aside from everything else, the Pentagon already spends four billion dollars per year to influence public opinion, and the DoD spends hundreds of millions on information campaigns in countless countries occupied by the U.S. military.
But, perhaps even more disturbing than all of this is fact that the CIA has infiltrated the biggest press institutions since the early 1950s. One has to look no further than Operation Mockingbird – a secret CIA campaign to spread disinformation and false stories to foreign governments during the cold war. The CIA did this by manipulating the media into focusing on propaganda, sabotage, and subversion.
It was later revealed in Congressional hearings consisted of literally paying off editors and reporters and most mainstream news outlets: the New York Times, CBS, Washington Post, Newsweek, AP, Reuters, and countless others. Isn’t it nice to know that the supposed watchdogs of the government can be so easily bought?
How do we know that Operation Mockingbird is not still in effect? We don’t.
[CORRECTION: OH YES WE DO! It's so bloody obvious it's not funny.(outsider)]
So, the next time you sit down to read the Sunday paper or visit an online forum, don’t believe everything you read (including this – do your own research).
'Richard Helms is the founder and Chief Executive of Ntrepid Corporation. After a nearly 30-year career in the Central Intelligence Agency, he founded Abraxas Corporation. It was sold 10 years later but retained 145 engineers and product development lines going back years. Ntrepid Corporation was then formed to solve extremely difficult product challenges. Those product lines are now known as ION, Nfusion, Passages, Timestream, Tartan, Virtus and ELUSIV... and MetalGear. Just kidding. We have never had a MetalGear product, and suggestions that we have are the result of a misreading and an inaccurate description of contracted work.......'
I know I've put this up before, but it is worth repeating:
'Presstitute Turn Whistleblower: 'Bought Journalism' Paid By CIA':
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_q7SR_kYxIM _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 6060 Location: East London
Posted: Wed Oct 21, 2015 10:22 pm Post subject:
Shutting up the few honest journalists:
In just a few short days, there will be a court hearing for two reporters arrested while covering the Ferguson protests — and exposing abusive police tactics.
Since the charges against Wesley Lowery of the Washington Post and Ryan J. Reilly of the Huffington Post were filed this summer, St. Louis County has charged other journalists covering the protests, including CTV’s Tom Walters1 and NYU journalism student Matthew Giles.2
Since the Ferguson protests, journalists and those performing acts of journalism have been documenting the strength of the Black Lives Matter movement, despite repeated attempts to censor information coming from the streets. We need these voices to protect our communities, record powerful authorities, and tell the world what is happening on the ground.
As lawyers for Lowery and Reilly gather in court next Monday to fight the charges, our message is simple: Journalism is not a crime.
Tell St. Louis County to drop the charges against Lowery and Reilly and stop prosecuting the press.
Thanks for all that you do—
Mike, Fiona, Joe and the rest of the Free Press team
freepress.net
P.S. Help Free Press continue to protect everyone's First Amendment rights with a monthly donation of $5 (or more!) today. Thank you!
Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund are nonpartisan organizations fighting for your rights to connect and communicate. Learn more at www.freepress.net.
Join us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Lufthansa CEO vows to see out strike as cancellations mount
Wed Nov 11, 2015 4:59pm GMT
image
By Peter Maushagen
FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Lufthansa (LHAG.DE) said it will not back down in a row with cabin crews over pensions even after cancelling 930 flights on Wednesday and a 933 on Thursday in what is shaping up to be the longest strike in the airline's history.
Cabin crews started a series of walkouts on Friday in a long-running dispute over early retirement benefits and pensions and have now forced the cancellation of almost 4,000 flights, disrupting the travel of more than 430,000 Lufthansa customers.
Wednesday's and Thursday's cancelled flights at Frankfurt, Munich and Duesseldorf airports represent about a third of the total operated by the German airline group each day. Lufthansa said earlier this week the strikes were costing it at least 10 million euros ($10.7 million) a day.
"We have to sit it out in order to safeguard our position," Lufthansa Chief Executive Carsten Spohr said at a conference in Frankfurt on Wednesday.
"We put it off for too long," he said, adding that Lufthansa had made errors in the past by giving in to striking workers.
Lufthansa is negotiating with various staff groups as it tries to reduce costs. Despite announcing at the end of October that it expected record profits in 2015, Spohr said the airline must cut costs now if it is to deal with increased competition from the likes of Ryanair (RYA.I) and easyJet (EZJ.L).
The strike is also boosting bookings at Germany's second largest carrier Air Berlin (AB1.DE), it said on Wednesday.
Lufthansa has resorted to legal action to try to halt the strike, but with little effect so far.
It won a temporary injunction that forced striking crew at Duesseldorf airport to return to work on Tuesday. But its bid to extend the injunction until Friday was rejected by the same court on Wednesday. Lufthansa said it will appeal.
A court in Darmstadt, near the airline's main Frankfurt hub, turned down overnight a bid to halt strikes until Friday.
Lufthansa reiterated that it was open to a mediation process with the union, but said it must first halt the strikes.
Arriving at the injunction hearing on Wednesday, union head Nicoley Baublies again rejected the offer, saying there would be no talks as long as Lufthansa insisted on an end to strikes as a condition for negotiations.
Lufthansa could appeal the Darmstadt court decision, but said it has no plans to do so.
($1 = 0.9314 euros) _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
TG pontificating about George Orwell's 1943 BBC resignation and the corporation's latest propaganda trip Link
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IedVx137VdI _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Joined: 13 Sep 2006 Posts: 2568 Location: One breath from Glory
Posted: Mon Nov 30, 2015 12:43 am Post subject:
And their No TV Licence letters are getting more threatening. Newest one I have come across now shows a calendar with a red circle around a date
Quote:
"We're Giving You 10 Days To Get Correctly Licensed"
"We will not visit you for 10 days....
"If you don't contact us we will start a full investigation of your address"
signed by the Enforcement Manager
What does that mean--we are going to start a full investigation of your address. They know the address as they have posted letter to it and they know according to their records it is not licensed. Do they want to know what colour the wallpaper is. Or is it a veiled threat to spy on the house and send round the TV Detector Van..
People don't want to pay to fund an organisation that shelters paedophiles _________________ JO911B.
"for we wrestle not against flesh and blood but against principalities, against powers, against rulers of the darkness of this world, against wicked spirits in high places " Eph.6 v 12
Dr. Udo Ulfakatte is a top German journalist and editor and has been for more than two decades, so you can bet he knows a thing or two about mainstream media and what really happens behind the scenes. Recently, Dr. Ulfakatte went on public television stating that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job. He recently made an appearance on RT news to share these facts:
I’ve been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public. But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia — this is a point of no return and I’m going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe.
It’s important to keep in mind that Dr. Ulfakatte is not the only person making these claims; multiple reporters have done the same and this kind of truthfulness is something the world needs more of. One (out of many) great examples of a whistleblowing reporter is investigative journalist and former CBC News reporter Sharyl Attkisson. She delivered a hard-hitting TEDx talk showing how fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages.
Another great example is Amber Lyon, a three-time Emmy award winning journalist at CC, who said that they are routinely paid by the US government and foreign governments to selectively report and even distort information on certain events. She has also indicated that the government has editorial control over content.
Ever since Operation Mockingbird, a CIA-based initiative to control mainstream media, more and more people are expressing their concern that what we see in the media is nothing short of brainwashing. This is also evident by blatant lies that continue to spam the TV screen, especially when it comes to topics such as health, food, war (‘terrorism‘), poverty, and more.
Things have not changed, in fact, when in comes to mainstream media distorting information and telling lies. They have gotten much worse in recent years, in fact, so it is highly encouraging that more people are starting to see through these lies, even without the help of whistleblowers like Dr. Ulfakatte. One great example is the supposed ‘war on terror,’ or ‘false flag terrorism.’ There are even Wikileaks documents alluding to the fact that the United States government planned to “retaliate and cause pain” to countries refusing GMOs. Mainstream media’s continual support of GMOs rages on, despite the fact that a number of countries are now banning these products.
The list of lies goes on and on. It’s time to turn off your T.V. and do your own research if you are curious about what is happening on our planet. It’s time to wake up. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Hitchens describes engaging with David Cameron like engaging with a blancmange (27+ minutes in), an expression used by my wife Francine about him in March 2000 when David and Samantha came for cream tea when David was seeking PPCship of Witney constituency.
So This is how it REALLY
Works.... Over Christmas...
Good to see my hero sociologist C Wright M ills cited here
A family that plays together stays together: a happy holiday season for the UK’s political-media elite
DES FREEDMAN 23 December 2015
Murdoch, Cameron, Osborne, Brooks - all the old gang met up for a heartwarming Christmas get together.
Families should be together at Christmas. That’s the simple message we should take from the merry noises emanating from Rupert Murdoch’s London apartment where, on Monday night, David Cameron, George Osborne, Rebekah Brooks and a slew of top News Corp personnel joined the mogul in capping off what has been a pretty decent year for him. After all, this was the year in which authorities in both the UK and the US dropped all remaining charges against News Corp and in which Sky, effectively controlled by Murdoch, posted record profits of nearly £1.2 billion. Four years after his annus horriblis of 2011, Murdoch has felt confident enough to restore Brooks, the former Sun editor, to the centre of his UK newspaper operations, has seen his family’s wealth double and has seen his titles contribute to the return of David Cameron and the Tories to Downing Street. Phone hacking, it appears, is simply old news.
Monday’s soiree may have been a little colder outside but the political temperature remains similar to those parties in the summer of 2011 where the UK’s political and cultural elites gathered to soak up the hospitality of the Murdoch clan. First we had Rupert’s summer party where the prime minister and his wife joined then Labour leader Ed Miliband and the ‘great and the good’ of British journalism and politics in celebrating the influence of the great man. Two weeks later, we had the gathering hosted by Elisabeth Murdoch in her Oxfordshire home that was attended by an impressive range of government ministers, advisers, senior Labour politicians, journalists, musicians and PR gurus. Then three days after that event, the phone hacking scandal erupted.
Jane Martinson has written in the Guardian that the Christmas party was the ‘culmination’ of Murdoch’s rehabilitation into British public life since his ‘humbling’ at the hands of the culture select committee. Of course the fact is that Murdoch never fully retreated from the corridors of power. Research from the Media Reform Coalition showed that News Corp executives met with government officials ten times in the twelve months up to March 2015 and that Murdoch himself was present on eight of these occasions. We also now know that George Osborne met twice during the summer with Murdoch immediately before the former’s highly controversial decision to saddle the BBC with the costs of paying for free television licences for the over-75s – a decision that weakens the BBC and, therefore, strengthens the position of Sky. Perhaps it is not so much Murdoch that is being rehabilitated so much as the reputations of Cameron and Osborne in the eyes of Murdoch himself.
One man, however, was missing from last Monday’s festivities: Andy Coulson. The former News of the World editor and subsequently director of communications under David Cameron who was jailed in 2014 for his involvement in phone hacking was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps this is because he was too busy writing one of his columns for the Telegraph, the first of which drew on his time in Belmarsh Prison to make the case for a compulsory National Citizen Service in which young people give something back to community and country. Too bad for Coulson (and all the staff at the News of the World) that he didn’t learn the key lesson of the NCS early enough: that, in his own words, ‘you are less likely to damage or destroy something you played a part in building.’
Private Eye has since reported that the Telegraph has hired him not simply as a columnist but as a ‘strategic advisor’ to its chief executive Murdoch MacLennan for a £60,000 fee (a charge apparently denied by the Telegraph). Now you may well say that this is a worthy example of a commitment to rehabilitate even the most compromised jailbird and that the company is simply demonstrating its loyalty to a man it has long praised. After all, MacLennan actually provided a character reference for Coulson during the hacking trial arguing that ‘I have always found him to be extremely honest and reliable’ and praising his ‘huge achievements at the News of the World which is easy to forget’. His fellow columnist Matthew d’Ancona was a victim of phone hacking but nevertheless describes Coulson as ‘a man of great decency.’ That is the kind of loyalty that money alone can’t buy.
On the other hand, you could describe Coulson’s ‘normalisation’ as a scandalous rebuff to both the victims of phone hacking and to those many journalists who were not tempted to resort to criminal behaviour to secure a story. You might have expected the Telegraph to tread just a little carefully before exposing itself to yet more allegations of corrupt behaviour. This is the newspaper, after all, whose former chief political commentator, Peter Oborne, resigned over its reluctance to cover HSBC’s tax affairs in case it undermined the paper's commercial relationship with the bank. And you might think that the developing relationship between the Telegraph and Coulson is a ‘most sinister development’, to use Oborne’s phrase, in its demonstration of total indifference to the implications of hacking and unethical journalism.
So the nexus between political and media elites – or as the American sociologist C. Wright Mills called it in The Power Elite, the ‘interlocking directorate' – continues on its merry way into 2016. Murdoch will resume his monthly meetings with government and his titles will continue to attack anyone who stands in the way of a securitised and neoliberal Britain: Jeremy Corbyn, anti-war campaigners, refugees, benefit claimants and public service broadcasters. Every now and again, the Sun will overstep the mark and publish lies that force even the supine press regulator IPSO to demand a front page correction; but then the Sun’s quirky humour means that it will hide the correction in a corner under a picture of footballer Theo Walcott, safe in the knowledge that one of Murdoch’s most loyal lieutenants, former political editor Trevor Kavanagh, has just been promoted to the board of IPSO.
Murdoch, Cameron, Osborne, Brooks, MacLennan, Coulson, Kavanagh: this is the villainous cast list for a Christmas panto about vested interests in today’s Britain. Behind them stand the victims of phone hacking demanding a review of the CPS decision not to prosecute News Corp for corporate wrongdoing, the campaigners determined to press for Leveson Part 2 to examine the failure of the police to investigate phone hacking, and a Labour Party leadership that has now promised to challenge the concentration of media ownership that has contributed so much to the corrupt relations between political and media elites. Sadly, this corruption seems to be for life and not just for Christmas, unless we discover the resources and energy to tackle it.
Des Freedman tweets @lazebnic and his inaugural lecture, Be the Media, Know the Media, Change the Media, is at 5.30pm on Tuesday 19 January at Goldsmiths, University of London. Free tickets are available here.
Our journalism is always free to read but not free to produce. If you enjoy our material and would like to contribute you can do so here. _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Journalists were told the devices would help plan measures to improve energy efficiency. Photograph: Martin Argles for the Guardian
Ben Quinn and Jasper Jackson
Monday 11 January 2016 21.13 GMT
The Daily Telegraph has announced that it is withdrawing devices installed to monitor whether people are at their desks, after it was heavily criticised by the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) for carrying out “surveillance” on its staff.
Journalists at the newspaper’s London HQ arrived on Monday morning to find the boxes, which reportedly track whether someone is at their desk using heat and motion sensors, BuzzFeed reported.
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Telegraph management emailed staff at lunchtime, saying the monitors would be in place for four weeks to help plan measures to improve energy efficiency. However, they were told in a later memo that it had been decided to withdraw the under-desk sensors immediately “in the light of feedback we have received”.
“We will be looking at alternative ways to gather the environmental sustainability data we need, and will keep staff in touch with any new proposals,” it added.
The NUJ’s assistant general secretary, Seamus Dooley, said that monitoring had no place in the office. “Employers must adhere to strict rules governing the collection of data in the workplace,” he added.
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“Workers have very strong privacy rights and these must be protected. The right to be consulted on new procedures governing such data is enshrined in law. The NUJ will resist Big Brother-style surveillance in the newsroom.”
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The devices, made by Blackburn-based firm Cad-Capture, are designed to help companies save money by reducing the number of desks, and provide a dashboard that shows when each desk is occupied.
The website for the product, called OccupEye, says: “With the global economic climate demanding that all organisations – large and small – find savings through increased efficiency, the pressure on property and accommodation managers has never been greater.”
The earlier Telegraph memo, which Buzzfeed said was sent to staff after it got in touch with the newspaper, said: “Over the weekend we have installed a number of under-desk sensors across some areas in advertising, editorial, technology, production, newspaper sales and marketing. They will be in place for a duration of four weeks.
“These devices are part of our drive to make our floors in the building as energy efficient as possible and reduce the amount of power we consume for heating, lighting and cooling the building at times of low usage. Accordingly, they are designed to record occupancy across each 24-hour cycle for all seven days of the week to make sure we are making best use of our space in the building.” _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
Even a progressive journalist like Glenn Greenwald can't shake off a rose-tinted view of the paper he once wrote for:
'Like everything, it's very imperfect, but survival of the @Guardian as a large, vibrant media outlet is important'
But in what sense is the Guardian's survival actually 'important?' Our response:
'Important for the hawking of Perpetual War as "humanitarian intervention" and corporate tyranny as "democracy".'
From the moment Jeremy Corbyn stood as prospective Labour leader, the Guardian has waged a relentless campaign to destroy this rare shoot of progressive hope. The paper has backed away from the truth about state and corporate power fuelling yet more catastrophic climate change. It has failed to fully and consistently expose the corporate basis to the climate denial campaign and the corporate capture of the 'mainstream' media in facilitating this. These are salient horrors, but the list could go on...
Like most newspapers, the Guardian is struggling financially and is desperately worried about a dwindling stream of advertising revenue. The paper's declared intent of becoming 'the world's leading liberal voice', with rapid expansion in the US and Australia, has backfired, leading to the need for significant cuts including likely job losses.
As a result, the paper is heading ever deeper into the murky world of 'branded content' to raise much-needed funds from corporate advertisers. This is overseen by the pseudoscientific-sounding 'Guardian Labs', a division of Guardian News & Media which was launched in 2014. Guardian Labs currently brings in 16% of the newspaper group's revenue. But it is expected to 'make a far, far greater contribution' over the next three years.
Readers should be ever more sceptical about what this means for the supposed fiercely independent and balanced journalism that the paper forever claims to publish. The latest salvo in this Guardian PR blitz appeared last Monday when Chris Elliott, the readers' editor, wrote about changes in how commercially sponsored content in the paper is to be labelled.
Firstly, the phrase 'sponsored by' will no longer appear. It will be replaced with 'supported by' which will, claimed Elliott, 'describe editorially independent content' even when the funding has come from 'third parties'. Such funding includes:
'The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to help support the Guardian's Global Development site; and a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation to support the Guardian's Cities project.'
These 'independent' pieces are written by Guardian and Observer journalists 'to the same standards expected in all of our journalism'. The mind boggles.
Secondly, straight 'advertisement features' will now be labelled 'paid content/paid for by'. Such content is 'paid for and controlled by the advertiser rather than' the Guardian.
In his defensive piece, Elliott dismissed a recent campaign by pressure group 38 Degrees aimed at the Guardian's partnership with Shell, the giant oil corporation. Last year, the paper had attempted to project a green image by supporting a move away from fossil fuels and to 'keep it in the ground' instead. Elliott now provided a corporate response issued by a 'Guardian spokesman' to justify its close assocation with Shell:
'Shell and the community jobs site Working Mums are co-sponsoring the Guardian's Work/Life balance hub on our Women in Leadership network. The hub is focused on how working parents can use flexible working culture to manage both their job and their home life.'
That PR statement may as well have come from Shell itself.
The 'Guardian spokesman' continued:
'The acceptance of advertising or partnership content in no way affects our editorial position.'
Of course, newspapers always make this claim, adamant that there is a 'firewall' between advertising and journalism. The reality is different, as we have noted on several occasions. Indeed, advertising is one of the five 'news filters' identified in Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model that provides the best explanation for the state- and corporate-biased output of Western news media.
Even the BBC's Andrew Marr, a journalist who is about as firmly embedded in the establishment as it is possible to be, admitted that advertising helps to shape the news:
'It does, of course. It's hard to make the sums add up when you are kicking the people who write the cheques.' (Andrew Marr, 'My Trade - A Short History Of British Journalism', Macmillan, 2004, p.112)
Corporate Press Release Disguised As Guardian News Article
The Guardian's trumpeting of its commitment to 'clear labelling' of branded content is therefore a cynical distraction from the inherently biased nature of advertising-reliant news media. Moreover, even the paper's spurious claim to 'clear' labelling collapses under scrutiny.
Consider the following powerful example. In November 2014, the Guardian laudably published a piece by investigative journalists Claire Provost and Matt Kennard on its 'Global development' website. The article was critical of corporate behaviour over scarce water resources in El Salvador. It noted that:
'While big companies make millions from El Salvador's water-rich Nejapa municipality, locals have little or no access to water.'
Large corporations run factories and warehouses in Nejapa, bottling water and fizzy drinks for distribution and export. These industrial operations consume huge supplies of water, even as the locals struggle to find enough clean water to drink. One local woman compared the companies moving into her area to the Spanish conquistadors who invaded America in the wake of Christopher Columbus:
'I think we are practically reliving the period. They come, they exploit, they destroy, and then they leave to find some other place where they can continue the exploitation and destruction. And we have nothing.'
One of these companies is a subsidiary of SABMiller, the world's second largest brewer and one of the world's largest bottlers of Coca Cola products. It just so happens that SABMiller sponsors a section of the Guardian's Global Development Professionals Network. Just three days after Provost and Kennard's critical piece appeared online, a supposed Guardian news article was published that was, in effect, a press release from SABMiller intended to limit damage to its reputation. The piece absolved the company of any wrong-doing, deflecting blame elsewhere:
'Latin America's efforts to manage its fresh water supplies are being frustrated by poor infrastructure, a lack of sewerage systems and inconsistent regulation.'
The Guardian article largely consisted of a string of quotes provided by Karl Lippert, president of the Latin American division of SABMiller. He was bluntly dismissive of any criticism levelled at his company:
'The way that the public and the politicians think about water is too simplistic.'
Lippert sniffed that 'people will say things' and that while 'we understand that they're frustrated', their anger 'is misplaced'. The Guardian itself boosted his propaganda by pointing to SABMiller's supposed 'commitment to collaboration and sustainability'. The claim was the Guardian's own; not a quote provided by Lippert. Advertising really does pay, it seems.
That the newspaper should publish what was clearly a face-saving press release disguised as a news story, a mere three days after a critical piece of reporting, is remarkable. This further exposes the deception that newspapers are unbending before powerful corporate advertisers. Can you imagine, for example, an environmental organisation or peace group having that kind of clout with a newspaper? How likely is it that the Stop The War coalition, for instance, would be allowed a puff piece masquerading as news three days after taking a hammering in a Guardian article?
Matt Kennard, co-author of the article exposing SABMiller's role in water exploitation in El Salvador, told Media Lens that the company has 'the most aggressive PR team I've ever come across', adding that 'they went ballistic when I told them I would not send them the article in full before publication' (email, February 3, 2016).
As proof of their supposed social and environmental credentials, SABMiller sent Kennard a link to what he describes as a 'CSR [corporate social responsibility] fluff piece' (since removed) that was published on the Guardian 'Sustainable Business' partner zone website. This is illustrative of the cynical way big business can exploit a 'partnership' with the Guardian.
They also sent him a SABMiller report co-authored by Coca Cola and Oxfam America, as proof of the kindness of their corporate hearts. The report professed a corporate mission 'to foster sustainable communities', to seek ways for business to 'bring more benefit to more people' and to 'meet the needs of our consumers and the communities in which we operate'. All of this corporate PR-speak was given kudos by the collaboration with Oxfam America. The anti-poverty group describes its involvement with ruthless corporations that exploit developing countries as 'engag[ing] with companies seeking to leverage their resources, creativity, and influence to pro-poor ends.'
As Kennard told us:
'NGOs [Non-governmental organisations] are very much into taking corporate money now, a story we are working on at the moment.'
We have also previously noted the co-opting of NGOs by big business.
Kennard continued:
'The Guardian must have come under intense pressure from SABMiller after publishing our piece. The company, I imagine, contacted the paper and demanded they do an interview about water stress in Latin America. The Guardian should have refused, and may well have refused if it were not for the funding. Who knows?'
As we observed near the beginning of this alert, the Guardian is already deeply compromised by its involvement with, indeed reliance on, large corporate advertisers. This particular example brings such compromise into stark perspective; but it is a systemic problem. It would be surprising if similar cases have not happened before and have simply gone unnoticed. Perhaps they have been allowed to pass in silence because the relevant journalists did not wish to harm their employment prospects in the media industry.
The Guardian's ongoing attempts to sell itself as untainted by the undoubted impacts of corporate advertising in manufacturing consent for elite aims are dishonest and do not fool informed readers.
DC
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If you decide to contact a journalist in response to our alert, please keep the tone civil. We do not condone abusive language.
In autumn 2002 the Observer newspaper’s correspondent Ed Vulliamy found confirmation of a terrible truth many of us already suspected. In a world-exclusive, he persuaded Mel Goodman, a former senior CIA official who still had security clearance at the Agency, to go on record that the CIA knew there were no WMD in Iraq. Everything the US and British governments were telling us to justify the coming attack on Iraq were lies.
Then something even more extraordinary happened. The Observer failed to print the story. In his book Flat Earth News, Nick Davies recounts that Vulliamy, one of the Observer’s most trusted reporters, submitted the piece another six times in different guises over the next half year. Each time the Observer spiked the story.
Vulliamy never went public with this monumental crime against real journalism (should there not be a media trials section at the Hague?). And the supposedly liberal-left Observer was never held accountable for its grave betrayal of its readership and the world community.
But at the weekend maybe the tables turned a little. The Observer gave Vulliamy a platform in its comment pages to take issue with its editorial the previous week savaging Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour Party leader.
In understandably cautious mode, Vulliamy called the paper’s stance towards Corbyn “churlish”, warning that it had lost the chance to stand apart from the rest of the British media, including the Guardian. All had taken vehemently against the new Labour leader from the very beginning of his candidacy.
we conjoined the chorus with our own – admittedly more progressive – version of this obsession with electoral strategy with little regard to what Corbyn says about the principles of justice, peace and equality (or less inequality).
What do these two confrontations between Vulliamy and the Observer –13 years apart; one public, one not – indicate about the changing status of the liberal-left media?
To understand what’s going on, we also need to consider the coverage of Corbyn in the Guardian, the better-known daily sister paper of the Sunday Observer.
All the Guardian’s inner circle of commentators, from Jonathan Freedland to Polly Toynbee, made public that they were dead against Corbyn from the moment he looked like he might win. When he served simply to justify claims that the Labour Party was a broad and tolerant church, these commentators were in favour of his standing. But as soon as he began to surge ahead, these same liberal-left pundits poured more scorn on him than they had reserved for any other party leader in living memory. In a few months Corbyn has endured more contempt from these fearless watchdogs of the left than the current Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, has suffered over many years.
The Guardian’s news coverage, meanwhile, followed exactly the same antagonistic formula as that of the rightwing press: ignore the policy issues raised by Corbyn, concentrate on trivial or perceived personality flaws, and frame the stories in establishment-friendly ways. We have had to endure in the Guardian the same patently ridiculous, manufactured reports about Corbyn, portraying him as sexist, anti-semitic, unpatriotic, and much more.
We could expect the rightwing media to exploit every opportunity to try to discredit Corbyn, but looking at the talkbacks it was clear Guardian readers expected much more from their paper than simple-minded character assassination.
Red neoliberals
The reality is that Corbyn poses a very serious challenge to supposedly liberal-left media like the Guardian and the Observer, which is why they hoped to ensure his candidacy was still-born and why, now he is leader, they are caught in a terrible dilemma.
While the Guardian and Observer market themselves as caring about justice and equality, but do nothing to bring them about apart from promoting tinkering with the present, hugely unjust, global neoliberal order, Corbyn’s rhetoric suggests that the apple cart needs upending.
If it achieves nothing else, Corbyn’s campaign has highlighted a truth about the existing British political system: that, at least since the time of Tony Blair, the country’s two major parliamentary parties have been equally committed to upholding neoliberalism. The Blue Neoliberal Party (the Conservatives) and the Red Neoliberal Party (Labour) mark the short horizon of current British politics. You can have either hardcore neoliberalism or slightly more softcore neoliberalism.
Corbyn shows that there should be more to politics than this false choice, which is why hundreds of thousands of leftists flocked back to Labour in the hope of getting him elected. In doing so, they overwhelmed the parliamentary Labour party (PLP), which vigorously opposed him becoming leader.
But where does this leave the Guardian and Observer, both of which have consistently backed “moderate” elements in the PLP? If Corbyn is exposing the PLP as the Red Neoliberal Party, what does that mean for the Guardian, the parliamentary party’s house paper?
Corbyn is not just threatening to expose the sham of the PLP as an alternative to the Conservatives, but the sham of Britain’s liberal-left media as a real alternative to the press barons. Which is why the Freedlands and Toynbees, who are the keepers of the Guardian flame, of its undeserved reputation as the left’s moral compass, demonstrated such instant antipathy to his sudden rise to prominence.
They and the paper followed the rightwing media in keeping the focus resolutely on Corbyn rather than recognising the obvious truth: this was about much more than one individual. The sudden outpouring of support for Corbyn reflected both an embrace of his authenticity and principles and a much more general anger at the injustices, inequalities and debasement of public life brought about by neoliberalism. Corbyn captured a mood, one that demands real, not illusory change. He is riding a wave, and to discredit Corbyn is to discredit the wave.
Character assassination
The Guardian and the Observer, complicit for so long with the Red Neoliberals led by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband, thought they could kill off Corbyn’s campaign by joining in the general media bullying. They thought they could continue to police the boundaries of the political left – of what counts as credible on the left – and place Corbyn firmly outside those borders.
But he won even so – and with an enormous lead over his rivals. In truth, the Guardian’s character assassination of Corbyn, rather than discrediting him, served only to discredit the paper with its own readers.
Corbyn’s victory represented a huge failure not just for the political class in all its narrow neoliberal variations, but also for the media class in all its narrow neoliberal variations. It was a sign that the Guardian’s credibility with its own readers is steadily waning.
The talkback columns show the Guardian’s kneejerk belittling of Corbyn has inserted a dangerous seed of doubt in the minds of a proportion of its formerly loyal readers. Many of those hundreds of thousands of leftists who joined the Labour party either to get Corbyn elected or to demonstrate their support afterwards are Guardian readers or potential readers. And the Guardian and Observer ridiculed them and their choice.
Belatedly the two papers are starting to sense their core readership feels betrayed. Vulliamy’s commentary should be seen in that light. It is not a magnanimous gesture by the Observer, or even an indication of its commitment to pluralism. It is one of the early indications of a desperate damage limitation operation. We are likely to see more such “reappraisals” in the coming weeks, as the liberal-left media tries to salvage its image with its core readers.
This may not prove a fatal blow to the Guardian or the Observer but it is a sign of an accelerating trend for the old media generally and the liberal-left media more specifically. Papers like the Guardian and the Observer no longer understand their readerships both because they no longer have exclusive control of their readers’ perceptions of what is true and because the reality – not least, polarising inequality and climate degradation – is becoming too difficult to soft-soap.
Media like the Guardian are tied by a commercial and ideological umbilical cord to a neoliberal order a large swath of their readers are growing restless with or feel downright appalled by.
In 2003 the Observer knowingly suppressed the truth about Iraq and WMD to advance the case for an illegal, “preventive” war, one defined in international law as the supreme war crime. At that time – digitally the equivalent of the Dark Ages compared to now – the paper just about managed to get away with its complicity in a crime against humanity. The Observer never felt the need to make real amends with Vulliamy or the readers it betrayed.
But in the age of a burgeoning new media the Observer and Guardian are discovering that the rules are shifting dangerously under their feet. Corbyn is a loud messenger of that change.
For decades in art circles it was either a rumour or a joke, but now it is confirmed as a fact. The Central Intelligence Agency used American modern art - including the works of such artists as Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko - as a weapon in the Cold War. In the manner of a Renaissance prince - except that it acted secretly - the CIA fostered and promoted American Abstract Expressionist painting around the world for more than 20 years.
The connection is improbable. This was a period, in the 1950s and 1960s, when the great majority of Americans disliked or even despised modern art - President Truman summed up the popular view when he said: "If that's art, then I'm a Hottentot." As for the artists themselves, many were ex- communists barely acceptable in the America of the McCarthyite era, and certainly not the sort of people normally likely to receive US government backing.
Why did the CIA support them? Because in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US. Russian art, strapped into the communist ideological straitjacket, could not compete.
The existence of this policy, rumoured and disputed for many years, has now been confirmed for the first time by former CIA officials. Unknown to the artists, the new American art was secretly promoted under a policy known as the "long leash" - arrangements similar in some ways to the indirect CIA backing of the journal Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender.
The decision to include culture and art in the US Cold War arsenal was taken as soon as the CIA was founded in 1947. Dismayed at the appeal communism still had for many intellectuals and artists in the West, the new agency set up a division, the Propaganda Assets Inventory, which at its peak could influence more than 800 newspapers, magazines and public information organisations. They joked that it was like a Wurlitzer jukebox: when the CIA pushed a button it could hear whatever tune it wanted playing across the world.
The next key step came in 1950, when the International Organisations Division (IOD) was set up under Tom Braden. It was this office which subsidised the animated version of George Orwell's Animal Farm, which sponsored American jazz artists, opera recitals, the Boston Symphony Orchestra's international touring programme. Its agents were placed in the film industry, in publishing houses, even as travel writers for the celebrated Fodor guides. And, we now know, it promoted America's anarchic avant-garde movement, Abstract Expressionism.
Initially, more open attempts were made to support the new American art. In 1947 the State Department organised and paid for a touring international exhibition entitled "Advancing American Art", with the aim of rebutting Soviet suggestions that America was a cultural desert. But the show caused outrage at home, prompting Truman to make his Hottentot remark and one bitter congressman to declare: "I am just a dumb American who pays taxes for this kind of trash." The tour had to be cancelled.
The US government now faced a dilemma. This philistinism, combined with Joseph McCarthy's hysterical denunciations of all that was avant-garde or unorthodox, was deeply embarrassing. It discredited the idea that America was a sophisticated, culturally rich democracy. It also prevented the US government from consolidating the shift in cultural supremacy from Paris to New York since the 1930s. To resolve this dilemma, the CIA was brought in.
The connection is not quite as odd as it might appear. At this time the new agency, staffed mainly by Yale and Harvard graduates, many of whom collected art and wrote novels in their spare time, was a haven of liberalism when compared with a political world dominated by McCarthy or with J Edgar Hoover's FBI. If any official institution was in a position to celebrate the collection of Leninists, Trotskyites and heavy drinkers that made up the New York School, it was the CIA.
Until now there has been no first-hand evidence to prove that this connection was made, but for the first time a former case officer, Donald Jameson, has broken the silence. Yes, he says, the agency saw Abstract Expressionism as an opportunity, and yes, it ran with it.
"Regarding Abstract Expressionism, I'd love to be able to say that the CIA invented it just to see what happens in New York and downtown SoHo tomorrow!" he joked. "But I think that what we did really was to recognise the difference. It was recognised that Abstract Expression- ism was the kind of art that made Socialist Realism look even more stylised and more rigid and confined than it was. And that relationship was exploited in some of the exhibitions.
"In a way our understanding was helped because Moscow in those days was very vicious in its denunciation of any kind of non-conformity to its own very rigid patterns. And so one could quite adequately and accurately reason that anything they criticised that much and that heavy- handedly was worth support one way or another."
To pursue its underground interest in America's lefty avant-garde, the CIA had to be sure its patronage could not be discovered. "Matters of this sort could only have been done at two or three removes," Mr Jameson explained, "so that there wouldn't be any question of having to clear Jackson Pollock, for example, or do anything that would involve these people in the organisation. And it couldn't have been any closer, because most of them were people who had very little respect for the government, in particular, and certainly none for the CIA. If you had to use people who considered themselves one way or another to be closer to Moscow than to Washington, well, so much the better perhaps."
This was the "long leash". The centrepiece of the CIA campaign became the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a vast jamboree of intellectuals, writers, historians, poets, and artists which was set up with CIA funds in 1950 and run by a CIA agent. It was the beach-head from which culture could be defended against the attacks of Moscow and its "fellow travellers" in the West. At its height, it had offices in 35 countries and published more than two dozen magazines, including Encounter.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom also gave the CIA the ideal front to promote its covert interest in Abstract Expressionism. It would be the official sponsor of touring exhibitions; its magazines would provide useful platforms for critics favourable to the new American painting; and no one, the artists included, would be any the wiser.
This organisation put together several exhibitions of Abstract Expressionism during the 1950s. One of the most significant, "The New American Painting", visited every big European city in 1958-59. Other influential shows included "Modern Art in the United States" (1955) and "Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century" (1952).
Because Abstract Expressionism was expensive to move around and exhibit, millionaires and museums were called into play. Pre-eminent among these was Nelson Rockefeller, whose mother had co-founded the Museum of Modern Art in New York. As president of what he called "Mummy's museum", Rockefeller was one of the biggest backers of Abstract Expressionism (which he called "free enterprise painting"). His museum was contracted to the Congress for Cultural Freedom to organise and curate most of its important art shows.
The museum was also linked to the CIA by several other bridges. William Paley, the president of CBS broadcasting and a founding father of the CIA, sat on the members' board of the museum's International Programme. John Hay Whitney, who had served in the agency's wartime predecessor, the OSS, was its chairman. And Tom Braden, first chief of the CIA's International Organisations Division, was executive secretary of the museum in 1949.
Now in his eighties, Mr Braden lives in Woodbridge, Virginia, in a house packed with Abstract Expressionist works and guarded by enormous Alsatians. He explained the purpose of the IOD.
"We wanted to unite all the people who were writers, who were musicians, who were artists, to demonstrate that the West and the United States was devoted to freedom of expression and to intellectual achievement, without any rigid barriers as to what you must write, and what you must say, and what you must do, and what you must paint, which was what was going on in the Soviet Union. I think it was the most important division that the agency had, and I think that it played an enormous role in the Cold War."
He confirmed that his division had acted secretly because of the public hostility to the avant-garde: "It was very difficult to get Congress to go along with some of the things we wanted to do - send art abroad, send symphonies abroad, publish magazines abroad. That's one of the reasons it had to be done covertly. It had to be a secret. In order to encourage openness we had to be secret."
If this meant playing pope to this century's Michelangelos, well, all the better: "It takes a pope or somebody with a lot of money to recognise art and to support it," Mr Braden said. "And after many centuries people say, 'Oh look! the Sistine Chapel, the most beautiful creation on Earth!' It's a problem that civilisation has faced ever since the first artist and the first millionaire or pope who supported him. And yet if it hadn't been for the multi-millionaires or the popes, we wouldn't have had the art."
Would Abstract Expressionism have been the dominant art movement of the post-war years without this patronage? The answer is probably yes. Equally, it would be wrong to suggest that when you look at an Abstract Expressionist painting you are being duped by the CIA.
But look where this art ended up: in the marble halls of banks, in airports, in city halls, boardrooms and great galleries. For the Cold Warriors who promoted them, these paintings were a logo, a signature for their culture and system which they wanted to display everywhere that counted. They succeeded.
* The full story of the CIA and modern art is told in 'Hidden Hands' on Channel 4 next Sunday at 8pm. The first programme in the series is screened tonight. Frances Stonor Saunders is writing a book on the cultural Cold War.
Covert Operation
In 1958 the touring exhibition "The New American Painting", including works by Pollock, de Kooning, Motherwell and others, was on show in Paris. The Tate Gallery was keen to have it next, but could not afford to bring it over. Late in the day, an American millionaire and art lover, Julius Fleischmann, stepped in with the cash and the show was brought to London.
The money that Fleischmann provided, however, was not his but the CIA's. It came through a body called the Farfield Foundation, of which Fleischmann was president, but far from being a millionaire's charitable arm, the foundation was a secret conduit for CIA funds.
So, unknown to the Tate, the public or the artists, the exhibition was transferred to London at American taxpayers' expense to serve subtle Cold War propaganda purposes. A former CIA man, Tom Braden, described how such conduits as the Farfield Foundation were set up. "We would go to somebody in New York who was a well-known rich person and we would say, 'We want to set up a foundation.' We would tell him what we were trying to do and pledge him to secrecy, and he would say, 'Of course I'll do it,' and then you would publish a letterhead and his name would be on it and there would be a foundation. It was really a pretty simple device."
Julius Fleischmann was well placed for such a role. He sat on the board of the International Programme of the Museum of Modern Art in New York - as did several powerful figures close to the CIA. _________________ 'And he (the devil) said to him: To thee will I give all this power, and the glory of them; for to me they are delivered, and to whom I will, I give them'. Luke IV 5-7.
Government contractors effectively run a press office for opposition fighters but communications conceal UK’s role
How Britain funds the 'propaganda war' against Isis in Syria
Government contractors effectively run a press office for opposition fighters but communications conceal UK’s role
A Free Syrian army fighter fires an anti-tank missile in Syria.
A Free Syrian army fighter fires an anti-tank missile in Syria. Photograph: Reuters
Ian Cobain, Alice Ross, Rob Evans and Mona Mahmood
Tuesday 3 May 2016 14.00 BST Last modified on Saturday 7 May 2016 14.58 BST
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The British government is waging information warfare in Syria by funding media operations for some rebel fighting groups, in the foreign front of what David Cameron has called “the propaganda war” against Islamic State.
The campaign aims to boost the reputation of what the government calls the “moderate armed opposition”, a complex and shifting alliance of armed factions.
Deciding which factions to support is risky for the government because many groups have become increasingly extremist as the five-year civil war grinds on.
Contractors hired by the Foreign Office but overseen by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) produce videos, photos, military reports, radio broadcasts, print products and social media posts branded with the logos of fighting groups, and effectively run a press office for opposition fighters.
Syria's civil war: five years of Guardian reporting
Read more
Materials are circulated in the Arabic broadcast media and posted online with no indication of British government involvement.
As the Guardian has reported, the Home Office’s Office of Security and Counter-Terrorism is running a parallel effort within the UK, aiming to bring about “behavioural and attitudinal change” among British Muslims by producing anti-Isis messaging “at an industrial pace and scale”.
In both the foreign and domestic campaigns, the government’s role is often concealed. Messages are put out under the banner of apparently independent groups – community organisations in the UK, and armed groups in Syria.
The UK regards information as a vital element of modern conflict. The MoD has drawn up a doctrine describing information as “so prevalent, potent and unavoidable that it forms as much a part of the strategic environment as the terrain or weather”, and saying how it should be managed through “strategic communications”.
The UK’s propaganda effort for the Syrian armed opposition began after the government failed to persuade parliament to support military action against the Assad regime. In autumn 2013, the UK embarked on behind-the-scenes work to influence the course of the war by shaping perceptions of opposition fighters.
Contract documents seen by the Guardian show the government appears to view the project as a way to maintain a foothold in the country until there can be greater British military involvement, offering “the capability to expand back into the strategic space as and when the opportunity arises”.
Through its Conflict and Stability Fund the government is spending £2.4m on private contractors working from Istanbul to deliver “strategic communications and media operations support to the Syrian moderate armed opposition” (MAO).
The contract is part of a broader propaganda effort focused on Syria, with other elements intended to promote “the moderate values of the revolution” and help mould a Syrian sense of national identity that will reject both the Assad regime and Isis.
Free Syrian army fighters
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Free Syrian army fighters, one of the groups often considered to be part of the moderate armed opposition. Photograph: Reuters
The documents call for contractors to “select and train a spokesman able to represent all the MAO groups as a single unified voice”, as well as providing media coaching to “influential MAO officials” and running a round-the-clock “MAO central media office” with “media production capacity”. One British source with knowledge of the contracts in action said the government was essentially running a “Free Syrian army press office”.
The contract to support the moderate armed opposition was briefly held by Regester Larkin, an international communications consultancy, where it was headed up by a former lieutenant colonel in the British army who had also worked as a strategic communications specialist at the MoD. He set up a company called Innovative Communications & Strategies, or InCoStrat, which took over the contract from November 2014, a Regester Larkin spokeswoman told the Guardian.
An InCoStrat spokesman confirmed: “InCoStrat is providing media and communication support to the moderate Syrian opposition to assist Syrians to better convey the reality of war and those involved in it.”
Both emphasised the close supervision of the work by the British government. An insider also described “tremendous oversight”, with handlers from the FCO and MoD meeting contractors up to three times a week. “They had the last say in everything,” the source said.
Much of the material produced under these contracts is day-to-day wartime propaganda, aimed at Syrian civilian and military audiences. It includes bulletins of successful military engagements, or videos of opposition fighters handing out food.
Some media, however, serve an additional military purpose, two sources familiar with the projects said. For example, a video of a shoulder-to-air missile shooting down a regime helicopter signals to those inside Syria that the group is well-armed and effective. But it also sends a message to those arming the group. “That’s good PR to go back to the Pentagon,” the insider said.
An MoD spokeswoman emphasised that the groups the UK supports are moderate. But identifying which groups really are is fraught with risk, as they can commit unpalatable acts or ally with groups considered unacceptably extremist.
The contracting document seen by the Guardian lists several “mid-level units” as examples of groups considered to be part of the “moderate armed opposition”. These include Harakat al-Hazm, which received military assistance from the US, and Jaysh al-Islam, a group reportedly set up with Saudi backing.
Most young Arabs reject Isis and think 'caliphate' will fail, poll finds
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But six months before the document was written in November 2014, Human Rights Watch identified Jaysh al-Islam as the likely kidnappers of four human rights activists in December 2013. The four are widely assumed to have been murdered. The group has also been criticised for using imprisoned civilians as human shields, and for releasing a glossy video last June showing the grisly murder of 18 captive Isis fighters, a war crime under the Geneva convention.
The government initially denied that the group was referenced in its contracting documents. It later acknowledged that it was mentioned but said it was referenced in the document as part of a description of how other groups had described the moderate armed opposition.
An MoD spokeswoman said: “Jaysh al-Islam has never been given any assistance by the MoD, FCO or any contractors working on HMG’s [Her Majesty’s government] behalf … All recipients of our assistance are rigorously assessed to ensure they are not involved in any extremist activity or human rights abuses.”
A source said contractors had provided media support for Harakat al-Hazm, but the group collapsed in March 2015 and its weaponry, including anti-tank missiles provided by the US, fell into the hands of the al-Nusra Front, a group that has pledged allegiance to al-Qaida.
An MoD spokeswoman said: “The UK has been a longstanding supporter of the moderate opposition in Syria, who are standing up to both the tyranny of the Assad regime and the poisonous and murderous ideology of Daesh [Isis].”
Reporting team: Ian Cobain, Alice Ross, Rob Evans, Mona Mahmood, Nick Fielding and Safak Timur
Picture the scene: No.10 Downing Street, September 16: 'a gentlemen's-club-style reception room, given factitious poshness by two marble pillars'. The event: a book launch party hosted by Prime Minister David Cameron himself to 'mark the publication' of a political novel, 'Head of State', by the BBC's senior interviewer and former political editor, Andrew Marr.
Reporting for the Independent, eyewitness John Walsh saw the significance:
'To see how the establishment operates, you really needed to be at this week's launch party for Andrew Marr's new book.'
Walsh noted that the room was packed with political and media bigwigs:
'Jeremy Hunt, George Osborne, Yvette Cooper. Journalists talked to each other, eyes busily flickering, desperate not to miss anything. Beside the bar stood Jason Cowley, editor of the New Statesman.'
The BBC's creative director, Alan Yentob, was there. So, too, was Lord Chadlington, or Peter Gummer - brother of John Selwyn Gummer, or Lord Deben, former chairman of the Conservative Party - who 'has long-standing links' to David Cameron, is President of the Prime Minister's Witney Conservative constituency association and 'lives in a manor house that neighbours Mr Cameron's Oxfordshire home'. Chadlington is also chief executive of Huntsworth, a major public relations firm. In 2011, Cameron bought a plot of land from Chadlington for £140,000, the latter having donated £10,000 to Cameron personally to fund his 2005 run for the Conservative leadership.
John Walsh describes Lord Chadlington 'as the link between Marr and David Cameron', adding of Marr's fictional debut:
'It was [Chadlington] who gave Marr the central idea for the plot; his name is on the book's copyright page; there's an introductory note about him by Marr, and another one by himself, delivering his imprimatur.'
If that sounds chummy, so, too, did Cameron, commenting in his speech at the book launch:
'I haven't read Andy's book yet, but I gather it's about political assassination. After the week I've had, that sounds like a very welcome idea...'
One wonders just how favoured Marr must be to receive such gracious treatment from the unlovely Tory grandees he is supposed to be holding to account.
Remarkably, an awkward question managed to breach the bonhomie. Liz Thomson, co-editor of the website 'Book-Brunch', asked Marr if having Cameron host the book launch 'mightn't compromise his position as impartial political interviewer for the BBC'. (Private Eye, Books & Bookmen column, Issue 1376, 19 September - 2 October, 2014)
According to Private Eye magazine, Marr became 'very defensive indeed'. Marr's wife, Jackie Ashley – Guardian columnist and daughter of Lord Ashley of Stoke – buttonholed Thomson, declaring, 'you've ruined my evening'. Ashley subsequently 'resumed the harangue, calling [Thomson] 'despicable' and 'a B-I-T-C-H'.
It says plenty about the state of modern journalism that Ashley was appalled that one of the BBC's most senior political journalists should be asked the one question that cried out to be raised. Or perhaps she would think nothing of her husband having his book launch party hosted by Putin, or Assad, or Maduro. Or, more to the point, of a leading Russian journalist teaming up with Putin in the same way.
Ironically, in his book, 'My Trade', Marr was happy to discuss the issue:
'If you really talk with a politician about their in tray, and the problems of rival departments, or of dodgy past initiatives, it is hard to avoid seeing things their way. The same perspective that gives you insight, also blunts your hostility... then you drift closer to them emotionally and may very well flinch from putting the boot in when they have failed in some way.' (Andrew Marr, 'My Trade - A Short History of British Journalism,' Macmillan, London, 2004, p.184)
Also ironically, the problem was explored in a WikiLeaks cable from the US Embassy in London to Hilary Clinton:
'On the public diplomacy side, I hope you can take some time out to tape an interview with leading British journalist Andrew Marr, to be broadcast on his Sunday morning BBC TV talk show... It would be a powerful way for you to set out our priorities for Afghanistan/Pakistan, and underline our premier partnership with the United Kingdom. Marr is a congenial and knowledgeable interviewer who will offer maximum impact for your investment of time.'
It is not, then, that Marr is biased towards the Conservatives. Indeed, in 2005, the former BBC reporter and producer, Tim Luckhurst, wrote in the Daily Mail:
'Andrew Marr has dismayed licence-payers with apologias for New Labour in general and Tony Blair in particular... Such conscientious rewriting of history deserves a place in George Orwell's 1984, not on a national television station funded by the taxpayer.' (Luckhurst, 'As John Humphrys announces his retirement. The giant the BBC hasn't got the guts to replace,' Daily Mail, May 3, 2005)
A wry comment piece in the Evening Standard was 'amazed' by the launch party: 'we simply had no idea that Marr and Cameron were such close chums'. After all:
'it just doesn't seem that long ago that Marr and his wife... were staunch allies of Cameron's rivals, hosting intimate dinner parties for Labourites Tony Blair, David Miliband and Tessa Jowell. Blair even returned the favour by having the pair over at Chequers, back when he had the keys'.
Historian Walter Karp observed:
'It is a bitter irony of source journalism that the most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the "best" sources.' (Quoted Sharon Beder, Global Spin, Green Books, 1997, p.199)
True. And notice that the BBC is not owned - no gimlet-eyed media mogul is either available, or required, to pressure Marr to obey rules that are perfectly understood for all that they are unwritten.
Owen Jones – Lost In Mogul's Wood
The former Independent, now Guardian, columnist Owen Jones tackles similar themes in his latest book, 'The Establishment – And How They Get Away With It'. Jones devotes an entire chapter to what he calls the 'mediaocracy', writing:
'The terms of political debate are in large part dictated by a media controlled by a small number of exceptionally rich owners...' (Jones, 'The Establishment – And How They Get Away With It,' Allen Lane, digital edition, 2014, p.19)
True enough, wealthy owners are part of the problem. No argument here.
The media is very much part of the Establishment: 'its owners share the same underlying assumptions and mantras'. (p.21)
Again, yes, wealthy owners are a problem.
The media, in fact, is 'mogul-owned' (p.287), serving 'as a platform for the ambitions, prejudices and naked self-interest of a small number of wealthy moguls'. (p.712) It is 'the plaything of a small number of politically driven moguls' (p.286): the 'media barons' (p.233) and 'media oligarchs' (p.285). There is a pressing need to 'scrutinize and challenge' the lies 'peddled by wealthy mogul-owned media outlets'. (p.751) Indeed, 'newspapers are the toys, the playthings of their owners' (p.238), the 'media barons who run the British media'. (p.155)
A pattern in the analysis is beginning to emerge... Media performance is no surprise 'given that their owners are themselves part of that elite, ideologically committed to the status quo' (p.215). After all, most of the corporate media 'is controlled by a very small number of politically motivated owners...' (p.218) There is a 'process by which owners stamp their ideological imprint on the papers' (p.238): 'It's a media that's ideologically driven by its owners...' (p.219) And so: 'The political views of media owners set the tone for their newspapers, transforming them into effective political lobbying machines.' (p.235)
Jones comments on ideas for media reform proposed by the Leveson Report: 'After the proposals were announced, the media owners mobilized against them.' (p.285) After all, media 'ownership [is] in the hands of a small number of oligarchs' (p.286) and in fact 'much of the media is a political machine, lobbying for the often personal objectives of their owners'. (p.299)
Jones's main focus, then, over and over again – media moguls. Happily, his employer, the Guardian, is not owned by a media mogul but by a trust. He quotes journalist Christopher Hird:
'With the exception of The Guardian, all of the papers in Britain are owned by people who basically believe that if you work for them, that is the framework in which things are going to be written about.' (p.239)
Again, convenient for Jones, a recent Guardian recruit, and his focus on the problem of media moguls.
Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook put Jones's analysis in perspective in an article titled, 'The Dangerous Cult of the Guardian':
'The Guardian, like other mainstream media, is heavily invested – both financially and ideologically – in supporting the current global order. It was once able to exclude and now, in the internet age, must vilify those elements of the left whose ideas risk questioning a system of corporate power and control of which the Guardian is a key institution.'
A quote from comedian and activist Russell Brand appears on the cover of Jones's book:
'Owen may have the face of a baby and the voice of George Formby, but he is our generation's Orwell.'
A bold claim - even Orwell was not his generation's Orwell at 29 (Jones's age when Brand made the comment). The real Orwell would have dismissed Jones' laser-like focus on mogul-owned media as a liberal herring. He wrote:
'Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip. But the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.' (Orwell, 'As I Please', Tribune, 1944)
No boss is required. Jones mentions the large number of privately educated journalists, the filtering out of less well-off applicants, the revolving door between media and politics, and the lack of female and minority ethnic journalists. But key issues of structural corporate media corruption are not even mentioned. Orwell wrote:
'Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.'
About this crucial problem of media dependency on advertising - a non-mogul related problem that applies every bit as much to the Guardian as it does to the Tory and tabloid press - Jones has literally nothing to say.
Compare Jones's media analysis with that of Edward Herman, co-author with Noam Chomsky of the classic text, 'Manufacturing Consent':
'The dominant media are firmly imbedded in the market system. They are profit-seeking businesses, owned by very wealthy people (or other companies); they are funded largely by advertisers who are also profit-seeking entities, and who want their ads to appear in a supportive selling environment. The media are also dependent on government and major business firms as information sources, and both efficiency and political considerations, and frequently overlapping interests, cause a certain degree of solidarity to prevail among the government, major media, and other corporate businesses.
'Government and large non-media business firms are also best positioned (and sufficiently wealthy) to be able to pressure the media with threats of withdrawal of advertising or TV licenses, libel suits, and other direct and indirect modes of attack. The media are also constrained by the dominant ideology, which heavily featured anticommunism before and during the Cold War era, and was mobilized often to prevent the media from criticizing attacks on small states labelled communist.
'These factors are linked together, reflecting the multi-levelled capability of powerful business and government entities and collectives (e.g., the Business Roundtable; U.S. Chamber of Commerce; industry lobbies and front groups) to exert power over the flow of information.' (Herman, 'The Propaganda Model Revisited,' Monthly Review, July 1996)
Media ownership is obviously just one of a range of internal and external pressures generating media conformity. Andrew MacGregor Marshall, the former head of the Reuters bureau in Iraq, adds some detail:
'So I think that there is tendency for the Western media to claim that it is neutral and unbiased, when in fact it's clearly propagating a one-sided, quite nationalistic and selfish view of its own interventions in these countries... If you want to accuse the US military of an atrocity, you have to make sure that every last element of your story is absolutely accurate, because if you make one mistake, you will be vilified and your career will be over. And we have seen that happen to some people in recent years. But if you want to say that some group of militants in Yemen or Afghanistan or Iraq have committed an atrocity, your story might be completely wrong, but nobody will vilify you and nobody will ever really check it out.'
Again, about these deep structural problems compromising the corporate media system, Jones has little or nothing to say. He communicates the message that his problem is not with profit-oriented corporate media, like the Guardian, reporting on a world dominated by corporations, but with mogul-owned media distorted by wealthy individuals. Curiously, the term 'corporate media' appears just once in the entire book (p.582).
All A Bit Old-Boys-Network
Jones concludes 'The Establishment' with this comment:
'I want to extend a special thanks to The Guardian and all the brilliant people there for giving me a platform to articulate my beliefs, and to The Independent for having originally taken me on and been so supportive.' (p.783)
A suitable sign-off for a book that contains not a word of criticism of his former and current employers – two newspapers that have done so much to support the Establishment's destruction of democracy at home, through the New Labour deception, and of whole nations abroad through 'humanitarian intervention'. The real Orwell wrote:
'I really don't know which is more stinking, the Sunday Times or The Observer. I go from one to the other like an invalid turning from side to side in bed and getting no comfort whichever way he turns.' (Quoted, Bernard Crick, 'George Orwell, A Life,' Penguin Books, 1992, p.233)
John Pilger – a very credible candidate for the title 'our generation's Orwell' - wrote in 2011:
'The truth is, Britain's system of elite monopoly control of the media rests not on News International alone, but on the Mail and the Guardian and the BBC, perhaps the most influential of all. All share a corporate monoculture that sets the agenda of the "news", defines acceptable politics by maintaining the fiction of distinctive parties, normalises unpopular wars and guards the limits of "free speech".'
Jones endlessly lambasts Murdoch and his ilk. But as Pilger commented:
'Tony Blair, soaked in the blood of an entire human society, was once regarded almost mystically at the liberal Guardian and Observer as the prime minister who, wrote Hugo Young, "wants to create a world none of us have known [where] the mind might range in search of a better Britain...". He was in perfect harmony with the chorus over at Murdoch's Wapping.'
In the article referenced above, Jonathan Cook wrote of the Guardian:
'The paper's role, like that of its rightwing cousins, is to limit the imaginative horizons of readers. While there is just enough leftwing debate to make readers believe their paper is pluralistic, the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations on which the system of Western dominance rests is either unavailable or is ridiculed.'
This explains the Guardian's willingness to host Jones's work. His book contains no discussion of key radical perspectives challenging the foundations of the system provided by the likes of Noam Chomsky, Edward Herman, David Peterson, John Pilger, Jonathan Cook, Chris Hedges, Harold Pinter, Howard Zinn, Glenn Greenwald, all unmentioned. Orwell receives one mention in the 'Acknowledgements', on the 'exhausting struggle' of book-writing (p.780).
The key potential of non-corporate, internet-based media is discussed in passing in a couple of paragraphs: 'The Internet and social media offer some hope of breaking the stranglehold of the mainstream press'. (p.751) But the 'stranglehold' is, yet again, absurdly defined as 'wealthy mogul-owned media outlets' (p.751) and 'wealthy individuals with a stake in the status quo'. (p.752)
WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are unmentioned. Edward Snowden and the NSA are mentioned once, in a single paragraph. The Establishment's recent, catastrophic overthrowing of the Libyan government is unmentioned – Libya receives one comment in passing. Syria – the great Establishment target before Isis - gets four brief mentions, including:
'In the summer of 2013, hundreds of Syrian civilians were gassed to death, almost certainly by regime forces.' (pp.692-693)
No evidence is presented for this strongly contested claim. Libya and Syria are awkward issues for a journalist openly reluctant to criticise his employers - both the Guardian and Independent have worked hard to promote the idea that the West has a 'responsibility to protect' people in these countries.
As so often on the left, the book essentially ignores climate change, describing it as a 'potentially existential threat' (p.741) but with nothing more to say. The words 'carbon', 'emissions' and 'Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change', do not appear.
In truth, Jones is part of an Oxbridge, Guardian/Observer/Independent/New Statesman/BBC niche on the 'liberal-left' of the Establishment. It is acceptable because it indeed does not offer the kind of radical perspectives needed to question the very foundations of the status quo.
In a review of Jones's book in the Independent, Archie Bland - former Independent foreign, Saturday and deputy editor, now senior writer - asked 'whether Jones himself, a prominent, well-connected figure who knows powerful people on first-name terms, counts as part of the Establishment, or an establishment, anyway...'
Good question. And was it, perhaps, a problem that Bland, a journalist at the Independent, was reviewing a book by Jones, a former corporate colleague at the Independent? Bland wrote:
'I know him slightly from his days working on this paper, and through friends of mine who he knew at Oxford, and I like him; now I'm reviewing his book. Even if no-one's doing anything untoward on purpose, this is all a bit old-boys-network, isn't it?'
It certainly is.
DE
Suggested Action
The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.
Originally appeared at Voltaire Network. Translated by Roger Lagassé
The European Parliament should, on July 12 2016, adopt a resolution on "strategic communications of the European Union."
At the initiative of Zbigniew Brzeziński and Polish figures who have already launched an "initiative for information warfare" against Russia at the heart of the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) in Washington, NATO has established a Centre for strategic communication in Latvia and the European Union should adopt a similar structure.
The idea is to centralize all media manipulation efforts thus far divided into fields of psychological warfare, propaganda etc.
The initial program was entirely directed against Russia. However, in recent months, one component was added against Daesh (not against jihadism).
In the internal documents of NATO and the EU, we were surprised to read that one of the authors of the Voltaire Network was one of the leaders of Russian propaganda in Europe; a sign that anti-Russian work is not very serious.
Currently, the EU has a working group for strategic communications towards the East (East StratCom Task Force) within its External Action Service (EEAS). This cell sends e-mail items twice a week to several hundred journalists to insert in their articles to discredit the Russian media.
Despite a huge media sponsorship budget, the Union is particularly concerned about losing control of Euronews and about witnessing the development of Sputnik and RT’s audience.
The resolution to create a veritable strategic communications service within the Union will be introduced through a report by the former Polish Foreign Minister, Anna Fotyga Elżbieta.
ON FIRE
A Stark Nuclear Warning 98 6,412
Russian Spies Pooped On U.S. Diplomat’s Carpet, Which Really Tied The Room Together Man 20 1,707
Putin in Helsinki: 'NATO Would Gladly Fight Russia Until the Last Finn' 186 10,478
NATO General Plotted Against Obama to Escalate Russia Tensions 18 2,587
EU Court Shielded Suspected Istanbul Bomber From Russia Extradiction 38 2,501
Stockman: "At Last The Tyranny Of The Global Financial Elite Has Been Slammed" 13 1,966
New US 'Offer' to Cooperate With Russia in Syria Is Deceptive Nonsense 56 3,883
Hacked Emails Reveal Gen. Breedlove Plotted Against Obama to Escalate Ukraine War 77 3,510
BECOME A MEDIA SKEPTIC
In this eye-opening talk, veteran investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson shows how astroturf, or fake grassroots movements funded by political, corporate, or other special interests very effectively manipulate and distort media messages.
Sharyl Attkisson is an investigative journalist based in Washington D.C. She is currently writing a book entitled Stonewalled (Harper Collins), which addresses the unseen influences of corporations and special interests on the information and images the public receives every day in the news and elsewhere. For twenty years (through March 2014), Attkisson was a correspondent for CBS News. In 2013, she received an Emmy Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for her reporting on “The Business of Congress,” which included an undercover investigation into fundraising by Republican freshmen. She also received Emmy nominations in 2013 for Benghazi: Dying for Security and Green Energy Going Red. Additionally, Attkisson received a 2013 Daytime Emmy Award as part of the CBS Sunday Morning team’s entry for Outstanding Morning Program for her report: “Washington Lobbying: K-Street Behind Closed Doors.” In September 2012, Attkisson also received an Emmy for Oustanding Investigative Journalism for the “Gunwalker: Fast and Furious” story. She received the RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Investigative Reporting for the same story. Attkisson received an Investigative Emmy Award in 2009 for her exclusive investigations into TARP and the bank bailout. She received an Investigative Emmy Award in 2002 for her series of exclusive reports about mismanagement at the Red Cross.
This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx
Follow me on Twitter - https://twitter.com/PressResetEarth
Follow me on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/PressResetEarth _________________ --
'Suppression of truth, human spirit and the holy chord of justice never works long-term. Something the suppressors never get.' David Southwell
http://aangirfan.blogspot.com http://aanirfan.blogspot.com
Martin Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother."
Martin Van Creveld: I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they don't win, and the rebels win by not losing."
It was set up by people censored or kicked out from commenting for their opinions on articles by The Guardian comments moderators.
I think the old Guardian has become very NeoLiberal of late.
Here is an article from OffGuardian that may be of interest.
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