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3 Time Emmy Award Winning CNN Journalist: Mainstream Media Takes Money from FOREIGN Dictators to Run Flattering Propaganda
Painting by Anthony Freda: www.AnthonyFreda.com
If you've been paying attention, you know that the American media act as presstitutes for rich and powerful Americans.
But it turns out that the American media will turn "tricks" for foreign johns as well ...
Specifically, three time Emmy award winning reporter Amber Lyon was until very recently a respected CNN reporter:
Lyon was fired from CNN after she refused to stop reporting on her first-hand experience of the systematic torture and murder of peaceful protesters by the government of Bahrain.
Lyon's special report on Bahrain was scheduled to run on both CNN's U.S. and international networks, but was pulled after only a limited showing due to pressure from the Bahrainis and their lobbyists.
At the same time that Lyon was risking her life to do on-the-ground reporting in Bahrain, another CNN journalist was filming a paid propaganda piece on how the Bahraini leaders are a bunch of friendly pro-democracy reformers.
That's right ... the Bahraini government paid CNN to do what was literally an infomercial for that brutal regime and pretend it was real journalism.
Lyon says that China and many other foreign, authoritarian regimes also pay CNN and other mainstream networks to run flattering propaganda pieces.
We are grateful for Ms. Lyon's exposé of this revolting practice ... especially because real reporting is treated as terrorism by the American government.
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+1
Beat me to it.
Journalism is dying. The cost pressures have now reduced journalists to doing cut and paste jobs of material provided by governments, big business and others. Now , even the truth has its price.
What cost pressures? If anything technology has reduced costs. They're losing ratings because of their politically correct bias, it's sickening. They were biased in the past but people had no choice. Now they do, that's the difference.
"Journalism is dying"
or dead
or has relocated
and the irony of course is that "big business thinks it's a big winner" because of it. once we go down the road of "fudgy numbers" however...well, those are trillion deficits aren't they! and "as the hoped for inflation fails to materialize....
indeed a free journalism was already dead (in the USA) more than a century ago, at least...
just see what John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff, The New York Times, warned back then...
Asked to give a toast before the prestigious New York Press Club in 1880, JOHN SWINTON, the former Chief of Staff at the New York Times, made this candid confession [it's worth noting that Swinton was called "The Dean of His Profession" by other newsmen, who admired him greatly]:
"There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."
------------------
"The notion that journalism can regularly produce a product that violates the fundamental interests of media owners and advertisers…is absurd." - Robert McChesney, journalist and author
the caption under a picture showing two shriveled grease fried eggs:
"This is your brain on MSM"
(couldn't resist that golden oldie ad from the 70s)
very disappointing
hope she will land somewhere better
complete collapse of integrity
So what's the problem? On the purely profit motivated level, this is an unassailable practice. There's no reason the media has to report the actual news, as long as it brings in the numbers. They no more "owe" us unbaised reporting than the government "owes" anybody a living. The outrage is misplaced.
Uh, the govt is not in the business of handing us a living. Journalism is in the business of handing us unbiased reporting
Media owners have ALWAYS been in the business of reporting favourably on behalf of those who finance them by way of advertising dollars. Journalists...not so much (which has often caused conflict between owners and editors, and editors and reporters).
The government has nearly always been one of the main advertisers in the media (now, by far the largest) and its ability to remove advertising from an unfavourable outlet is the only stick that it needs.
Corrupted government supports the media that keeps it in power and provides the monopoly with the regulations and the power to keep independent voices from even getting licenses to broadcast.
The media has become an extension of the banker-controlled government.
“The public needs a constant reminder:
“The airwaves do not belong to the broadcasters. They do not belong to the advertisers. The owners, by law, are the people of the United States.” –Ben H. Bagdikian, The Media Monopoly.The FCC used to put strict limitations on media to prevent monopoly, but a bought-out Congress has since lifted those limitations, resulting in the suffocation of free-enterprise efforts by independent media until ownership of various old and new media has narrowed to a small number of very powerful media mega-corporations.
As Charles Hugh Smith wrote recently on ZH: “Enabled by a captured Central State, financial power has become concentrated in five banks, media control has been concentrated into six corporations, and so on, ad nauseum.”
Says Bagdikian: “In return for this monopoly protection of their frequencies, the Congress insisted that the licensed stations must operate ‘in the public interest.’
“... the refusal of the major media properly to address central public concerns has created a crisis in democracy. A public inadequately informed about the substance of the arguments that affect its most important social policies has lost the substance of citizenship rights. If voters do not have easy access to central facts and ideas concerning public issues, voting becomes meaningless. Increasing numbers of voters understand this and are becoming cynical. Cynicism poisons free societies.”cable tv is not "airwaves" and has no responsibility to run news of any kind. It is entertainment.
Why do you think the big networks have all stopped having meaningful news? They can't compete because they were once required to provide news.
+10 Million.The broadcast media is now merely a means of control.
The best revenge is to ignore it completely and urge others to do so as well.By definition the public interest is undermined by propaganda replacing news.This makes virtually all stations in the US in violation of their license.
FAIL,Epic.
I stopped watching television in the 80's.The short clips I see referenced here on ZH and other sites only make me ask "why would anyone subject themselves to such vile, dehumanizing lies?Why?"
It is not only worthless, it is toxic.
That is part of the reason I watch RT. The real reason are the girls; Smokin.
Quit TV altogether.
It is all trash.
No TV in my home for 12 years. My 11 year old hasn't grown up watching it. Best decision I every made.
JB
I haven't owned a TV since 2002. I have more time to read books, go for walkies, talk to people, etc. If I want information, I will look for it on the internet. I ignore the likes of CNN.com, BBC.uk, etc. They are either in the hands of big business, big government or foreign dictator regimes as this article shows. Sometimes I watch TV at friend's homes and it is all trash as you say. Why care about American Idol, sports games, "reality shows". Even Discovery channel is crap with these shows about trucks in the artic moving logged trees.
The closest thing I got to TV since 1995 is Netflix on my computer. I wonder how much of my sanity I saved since then? probably would not have started stacking when I did either.
Gave mine away back in 2001 and my life is far more enriched reading and going to on-line sites that actually give us the Truth of the world around us.
Good for you!
CNN also runs ads made to look like reporting for the real estate industry and Apple, not a day goes by that they don't have a fluff story about them.
Ted Turner would never do anything egotistical
Gee Wally,... What a suprise, does this mean we can't always trust what we see and hear on TV? Hope and Change the channel.
30 September 2012
Sunday Evening - Litanies in Times of Plague
.
http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2012/09/sunday-evening-litanies...
.
" September 1, 1939
by W. H. Auden, NYC, Oct 1939
I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night. ..."
...
interview with chri hedges at link to jca blog
author of " death of the liberal class "
I just finished watching that. Brilliant!
Chris Hedges ... the Unabashed Marxist
Personally, I think MSM should only take money from DOMESTIC dictators to run flattering propaganda...Oh, wait a minute, what?...
I don't know why anyone would be surprised ... CNN is certainly on the WH's marketing list
WH????? hehhehehe.....you better look a little "higher" than the whitehouse.......you might want to find out who is "their" puppetmaster. That rabbit hole goes very deep.
It's all good ... Puppetmasters own the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Newsweek, Time, AP, McClatchy, Politico, The Huff and Puff, and Reuters ... WH is just a revenue stream
Craig's List Sex Ads Accusations below her photo -- not TOO subtle. ALL CAPS <LMAO>
Is it just me?
It is just you... and the screen shot. She did a piece on the Craig's List trafficking and they probably pulled the pix from that file because it had the very credible Anderson Cooper looking somber. He is known (repeatedly) for "keeping them honest."
WOW!! You guys are in real trouble . Canada might be a safe place for you to have as a safety net.
Try Ecuador. Had Assange sought refuge in a canadian embassy he would now be kneeling in a orange jumpsuit.
At some point, those with nothing left to lose will just start killing those who steal everything that isn't theirs. I fully expect a mass-murder event "on" Wall Street within the next...few days...weeks...montths--no! They won't llive that long. The mass shootings around the U.S. are a sign that the tipping point is within sight, and that means being a bankster or congress person is a death sentence.
Same happened with the former head of IMF, and the former NY AG. Do the bankster bidding or be shunned and blackmailed.
My favorite example was CFTC Justice Painter explaining how former CFTC head Wendy Gramm told CFTC adminstrative Judges never to rule in favor of plaintifs. Wendy Gramm is wife of Phil Gram, banking deregulator and buster upper of Glass Steagal. After CFTC Justice Painter exposed the institutionally corrupt CFTC -see their silver manipulation whitewash- Justice Painter was discounted in the mainstream press as a crazy drunk who should be igorned.
More often, they trot out the "crazy drunk who should be ignored" in the first place. For example, if they wan't to discredit the birther movement, they trot out that Trump idiot.
Watching the MSM is dangerous to a person's mind, no matter how wide-awake a person is. They frame the argument, and even if you disagree with "both sides" of the ensuing "debate" and can spot the fallacies used, it's really difficult to see the "frame" for what it is much of the time. And it's almost always a false dichotomy, a sort of Hegelian Dialectic, with one "side" the thesis, the other "side" the antithesis, and the final "compromise", the synthesis -- which is the "result" they wanted to begin with.
Example: Over the weekend, a friend said that she couldn't understand whey the MSM still at times allow the talking heads to "debate" whether Obama is a Muslim or not, because she thinks the idea that he is a Muslim is absurd.
I agreed. The fact is, he sat in Jeremiah Wright's church almost every Sunday for about twenty years, a "Christian" church, listening to virulent racist, anti-American, communist rhetoric.
But TPTB don't want that truth to be mainstream, and prefer it be covered up and forgotten. So they frame the "debate" as a Muslim vs. non-Muslim dog-and-pony-show, when in this context the debate should be, America-hating commie racist vs otherwise.
Note that "even" FoxNews frames this argument in this manner. Same people pulling their strings. They're the antithesis to CNN's thesis and it all leads to TPTB's predetermined synthesis.
Welcome to the Matrix.
Shocked!
shocker. and CNBC?
CommunistNewsBroadcastingCorporation so I am shocked
Bahrain was the first Gulf state to discover oil
I'm sure this is irrelevant
Nonsense. Just look at the Piers Morgan show for an example of honest journalism. I just love it when Piers puts the smack down on Jesse Ventura. That stupid old hippy doesn't stand a chance against Mr. Morgan and the fine chaps at CNN.
@bluestaq
some here need the "/sarc" switch
Yes, my favorite smack down is when Piers accuses Jesse of having "crazy conspiracy delusions." Jesse proceeds to ask the crowd if they think his logic is crazy conspiracy delusions....and 1 person raises their hand.
Seems the crowd doesn't think Jesse is crazy.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/appeal-to-popularity.html
MDB is that you?
GW thanks for continuing to confirm our worst case scenarios.
The audience was in full agreement with you and Piers too... <sarc>
She's a very smart (and attractive) lady. He should STFU and let her tell the story.
this east coast elitist sodomite has no use for the opposite sex