Mainstream Media: Fake News Through Lying by Omission
Numerous outstanding writers and journalists have commented cogently on Mainstream media lying and censorship and for alphabetically-organized compendia of such views see the websites “Mainstream media lying” and “Mainstream media censorship” [...]
Fake news is simply a new, Trump-popularized descriptive for media lying that occurs in 2 basic forms, lying by omission and lying by commission. Lying by omission is far, far worse than lying by commission because the latter can at least admit refutation and public debate.
Western Mainstream media impose a huge burden of fake news on Western societies through entrenched and pervasive lying by omission. Indeed the most egregious and pervasive Mainstream media lie of omission is suppression of reportage of such lying by omission. The unimpeded, remorseless, corporate-dominated Mainstream media, politicians and pliant intellectuals are now going further, and variously threatening residual effective free speech and Alternative media on the basis of asserted fake news.
Numerous outstanding writers and journalists have commented cogently on Mainstream media lying and censorship and for alphabetically-organized compendia of such views see the websites “Mainstream media lying” [1] and “Mainstream media censorship” [2]. In particular, Eric Zuesse (an historian and the author, most recently, of “They’re Not Even Close: the Democratic vs Republican Records 1910-2010” and of “Christ’s ventriloquists: The event that created Christianity”) has commented incisively on “the most suppressed news of all – news about the news-suppression by the ‘news’-media” (2014):
“Recognize how extremely far from being a democracy today’s United States has, in fact, become. This is the most shocking realization of all, because it’s the most suppressed news of all – news about the news-suppression by the ‘news’-media…. That’s how dire the condition of what used to be American democracy has now become. The biggest news-story of all is thus the one that is, and that will inevitably be, the most suppressed news-story of all: the news-suppression itself. It extends from the major ‘news’-media to the alternative and even to the specialized ‘news’-media… He [Edward Snowden] raised the extremely serious question as to whether, and the extent to which, a government can lie to its public and still be a democracy. That’s the question. How can the public have a government representing informed consent, if the ‘news’ media are constantly, and systematically, lying about the most important things, and covering up that government’s worst, most heinous, crimes? Yet, this is what Americans have today. The United States is thus no longer a model for any country except for a dictatorship. How likely is it that America’s press will let the American public know this now-established fact? Something’s wrong — and it’s not people such as Edward Snowden” [3].
Barbara Kingsolver (American novelist, essayist, poet and author of “The Poisonwood Bible” and other powerful works) explores Mainstream, media lying by omission in her great novel “The Lacuna” (lacuna meaning hiatus, blank, missing part, gap, cavity, or empty space) which has Russian Communist revolutionary and theorist Leon Trotsky (Lev) and his secretary Van having the following discussion about media (2009):
“But newspapers have a duty to truth”, Van said. Lev [Trotsky] clicked his tongue. “They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola [French novelist of “J’accuse” fame] wrote that the mendacity of the press could be could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.” Van got up from his chair to gather the cast-off newspapers. Lev took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t mean to offend the journalists; they aren’t any different from other people. They’re merely the megaphones of other people” … [Trotsky observes to his assistant Shepherd] “Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know” [4].
The lying journalists of corporate-owned Mainstream media can attempt to justify their lying by omission in terms of responsibility to the shareholders over-riding the responsibility they have for their readers and the public in general. A very good example of this neoliberal perversion is provided by John Perkins in his book “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” in which he describes how he spent most of his corporate life deliberately deceiving Developing Country governments in the interests of US corporate clients. Eventually his conscience outweighed the generous rewards from his employers and clients, but he sadly observes at the end of the book that while he knew what he would be doing was wrong when he was recruited straight out of university in the early 1970s, today business studies students in our universities are taught that their prime moral obligation is to the shareholders and not to truth.
However “fake news” via lying by omission is most shocking when it is shamelessly purveyed by non-corporate, taxpayer-funded, national media such as Australia’s taxpayer-funded Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that is Australia’s equivalent of the taxpayer-supported UK BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation). Now lying by commission and massive lying by omission are entrenched both the ABC [6] and the BBC [7] but it is of particular interest here to get hard evidence that the ABC and the BBC lie by omission about their lying by omission. Fortunately, the ABC and the BBC have Search functions that enable one to quantitate relative reportage and non-reportage of particular matters by these lying organizations, as detailed below.
A Search of the UK BBC (on April Fool’s Day, 1 April 2017) for the term “lying by omission” yields only 6 items, with the 2 most recent (2014) about an actress “coming out” as a lesbian: “I am tired of hiding and I am tired of lying by omission”. In stark contrast, a search of the BBC for “fake news” yields about 360 items that are overwhelmingly in 2017. The lying BBC hides the horrendous reality of its fake news as lying by omission behind a barrage of “fake news” as inconsequential concoctions dreamed up by the “yellow press” and on the Web. Alarmingly, this Search of the BBC for ”fake news” throws up repeated calls for legislated and other censorship of Alternative media and the Web in addition to that already applied by authoritarian governments, Facebook and Google. One notes that a Google Search for “lying by omission” yields 139,000 results whereas a Google Search for “fake news” yields 32 million.
A Search of the Australian ABC (on 1 April 2017) for the term “lying by omission” yields 26 items, with none more recent than 2014, and 10 out of these 26 items being uncensored comments about ABC programs by one Dr. Gideon Polya (me).- there would have been more comments by me but remorseless censorship by the Neocon American and Zionist Imperialist (NAZI)-perverted and subverted ABC has effectively cut off this avenue for opposing ABC “fake news” and lying by omission [6]. In marked contrast, a Search of the ABC for “fake news” yielded 277 items of which 162 were from 2017.
What a disgrace. The taxpayer-funded ABC and BBC not only lie by omission, they also lie by omission about their lying by omission. Indeed, in an endless iteration of falsehood, the ABC and BBC are lying by omission about their lying by omission about their lying by omission …
The lying by omission by the ABC, the BBC and by Mainstream journalist, politician and intellectual presstitutes in general has deadly consequences in the sense that history ignored yields history repeated, genocide ignored yields genocide repeated, and holocaust ignored yields holocaust repeated.
Outstanding expatriate Australian journalist John Pilger has written cogently about lying by omission and” historical amnesia” (2012): “ Writing in his personal blog, ever so quietly, Jon Williams, the BBC world news editor, effectively dishes his own ‘coverage’, citing Western officials who describe the ‘psy-ops’ operation against Syria as ‘brilliant’.
As brilliant as the destruction of Libya, and Iraq, and Afghanistan. And as brilliant as the psy-ops of the Guardian’s latest promotion of Alastair Campbell, the chief collaborator of Tony Blair in the criminal invasion of Iraq. In his “diaries”, Campbell tries to splash Iraqi blood on the demon Murdoch. There is plenty to drench them all. But recognition that the respectable, liberal, Blair-fawning media was a vital accessory to such an epic crime is omitted and remains a singular test of intellectual and moral honesty in Britain. How much longer must we subject ourselves to such an “invisible government”?
This term for insidious propaganda, first used by Edward Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud and inventor of modern public relations, has never been more apt. “False reality” requires historical amnesia, lying by omission and the transfer of significance to the insignificant. In this way, political systems promising security and social justice have been replaced by piracy, “austerity”, and “perpetual war”: an extremism dedicated to the overthrow of democracy. Applied to an individual, this would identify a psychopath. Why do we accept it?” [8].
In the 2003-2011 Iraq War about 1.5 million Iraqis died from violence, and 1.2 million died from war-imposed deprivation [9]. However BBC estimates of Iraqi deaths in the Iraq War range from 90,000 to about 600,000, while the Australian ABC’s estimate on the occasion of US withdrawal in 2011 was a genocide-ignoring “tens of thousands”. The UK and Australia have invaded 193 and 85 countries, respectively, are both now into their 8th Iraq War since 1914, and are intimately involved in the Zionist-backed US War on Muslims (aka the US War on Terror) which has been associated, so far, with 32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or from imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 impoverished countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity [9].
What can decent people do in the face of burgeoning and deadly Mainstream imposition of “false reality” by lying by omission “fake news”? All that decent, informed people can do is to (a) inform everyone they can, and (b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Mainstream media, politicians and pliant intellectuals involved in deadly “fake news” lying by omission. Peace is the only way but silence kills and silence is complicity.
References:
“Mainstream media lying”.
“Mainstream media censorship”.
Eric Zuesse, “The Biggest Scandal In America Is Its Controlled Press”, Countercurrents, 4 December, 2014.
Barbara Kingsolver, “The Lacuna”, Faber & Faber, London, 2009, part 3, p159.
John Perkins, “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man”.
“ABC fact-checking unit & incorrect reportage by the ABC (Australia’s BBC)”.
“Censorship by the BBC”.
John Pilger, “Historical amnesia and psychopathic politics”, The Drum, ABC, 25 June 2012.
We would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics and international relations.
Serbia today is a member-State of United Nations (U.N.), after the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was split into several nations during the early 1990’s when war broke out between Serbian General Milosevic and neighboring nations. After partition, Serbia is still the most powerful “state” of the former Yugoslavia.“Kosovo”, the term used for the territory of southern Serbia, is de-jure recognised as a “state” by over 110+ “states”, but is not a “state” itself, as per the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States (1933), and is not a “state” at the U.N. where 2/3rd positive vote is ...
Today the Old (dying out) Continent is under multi-faced crises pressure some of them having older roots but the others are the product of current political decisions and moves by the European decision-makers (and those who are behind them across the Ocean).The European oldest and mostly painful crisis-problem is a biological declination of the whole continent what from the economic point of view means, at least for the western countries, an import of a huge number of the „outsiders“ in order just to keep the same level of the economic production and national GDP. This solution of course produces a ...
One of many Serbian Orthodox churches in Kosovo (14th century)A couple of months ago I chanced upon the Emperor’s Clothes Website.I noticed their startling claim that we have been systematically lied to about Yugoslavia, including Slobodan Milosevic. As they told it, he was not guilty of racist incitement and genocide; rather he advocated multiethnic peace. Since their views sharply contradicted my own, I started systematically checking their references by obtaining the relevant original documents. I have yet to find a single claim in error.This was particularly surprising regarding the famous speech that Slobodan Milosevic delivered at Kosovo Field in 1989 ...
Eleven Years ago: 11 July 1995, The Srebrenica MassacreFirst published by GR in February 2013.Renowned author Dr. Edward Herman spoke with John Robles of the Voice of Russia regarding the facts surrounding the Srebrenica Massacre, the pretext for the “humanitarian” invasion of the former Yugoslavia, and takes apart the “official” ; version that has always been promoted by the West. Dr. Herman reveals that there were in fact multiple massacres at Srebrenica, and that the killing of Bosnian-Muslim soldiers at Srebrenica (the West’s pretext) was in response to the killing of over 2,000 Serb civilians, mostly women and children, at ...
Around Srebrenica: Serbian victims of Bosnian Muslim terror during the civil war in 1990sTranscript of presentation by the author at the Conference of Independent Journalists’ Association for Peace, Vienna, Austria, May 2015.This year the twentieth anniversary of the massacre in Srebrenica is being observed. On July 11 a huge spectacle will take place at the Srebrenica Memorial center specially constructed for that purpose. It will feature the presence of most of the rather insignificant individuals purporting to be political leaders in the region and the Western-dominated world. Their speeches, which never vary substantially, will be infused with the predictable platitudes.I ...
Interactive maps at several websites show that within three months there have been more than 500 voluntary transfers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Moscow Patriarchate's (UOC-MP) parishes to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine recently created by Patriarch Bartholomew and president Poroshenko. The UOC-MP parishes total 12,000, so this is a significant value. However, according to the OHCHR Report on the human rights situation in Ukraine from 16 November 2018 to 15 February 2019, not all of these transfers were voluntary – in some cases they were undertaken by local authorities or far-right organizations, and those members of the UOC-MP ...
If the Trump phenomena showed anything, it showed the consensus reality the mainstream media attempted to create concerning Hillary’s certain victory, as well as the consensus reality erected for decades, is not omnipotent.In fact, the earliest days of mass print media were erected on a famous fraud known as the “Great Moon Hoax” of 1835 – something researcher Chris Kendall has long called attention to – wherein the “educated,” “elite” widely accepted the mainstream publications’ claim bat people inhabited the lunar surface.In our day, a similar hoax still reigns, as mainstream media is literally as credible as Weekly World News’ Bat Boy ...
The mainstream media (MSM) has declared war on alternative media websites labeling them “Fake News” ever since Hillary Clinton lost the election to Donald Trump. The New York Times editorial board expressed their frustration in an article calling for the censorship of alternative and social media ‘Facebook and the Digital Virus Called Fake News’ which claimed both social media platforms (Facebook and Google) has not been aggressive enough in blocking fake news sites:Most of the fake news stories are produced by scammers looking to make a quick buck. The vast majority of them take far-right positions. But a big part ...
Source: VPN MentorOrigins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth on history, global politics, and international relations.
In recent weeks, we have witnessed yet again how public broadcaster Croatian Radio-Television, HRT, continues to offer a platform to obscure historical revisionists.Jasenovac's realityLast week, while presenting the Festival of Patriotic Film dedicated to Goran Lederer, a Croatian journalist killed by the Yugoslav People’s Army in 1991, the organisers of the festival were given time to present highly controversial films on HRT’s widely-viewed morning show ‘Good Morning Croatia’.Besides the fact that the main organiser of the festival is a war veterans’ association whose president and founder was Croatian war criminal Tomislav Mercep, their selection of films is symbolically even worse.“There ...
Just when you think that the Russo-phobic hysteria of the Western world couldn’t possibly make itself any more ridiculous…something like this comes along. This is the europeanvalues.net list of “useful idiots”.The list is very long, over 2300 names, because it contains the name of every person to ever appear on either Sputnik or RT. Hosts or guests, hostile or friendly, it doesn’t matter. If you’re on the list, you are a useful idiot.They’ve highlighted some names in yellow, to denote they’re “particularly noteworthy”. Names receiving the yellow highlight – the Russian agent equivalent of twitter’s blue tick – include Harrison ...
The American media specializes in fake news. Indeed, since the Clinton regime the American media has produced nothing but fake news. Do you remember the illegal US bombing and destruction of Yugoslavia? Do you remember “war criminal” Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian president branded “the butcher of the Balkans,” who was compared to Hitler until Hillary passed the title on to the President of Russia? Milosevic, not Bill Clinton, was arrested and placed on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal. He died in prison, some say murdered, before he was cleared of charges by the International Criminal Tribunal. http://www.globalresearch.ca/milosevic-and-the-destruction-of-yugoslavia-unpleasant-truths-no-one-wants-to-know/5540873 Do you ...
This article by Professor James Tracy first published in August 2015 is of particular relevance in relation to the “fake news” campaign directed against the alternative and independent media.In a bitter irony, the media coverup of the CIA’s covert support to Al Qaeda and the ISIS is instrumented by the CIA which also oversees the mainstream media.Since the end of World War Two the Central Intelligence Agency has been a major force in US and foreign news media, exerting considerable influence over what the public sees, hears and reads on a regular basis. CIA publicists and journalists alike will assert they have few, ...
The British Labour Party no longer represents the working class. Under UK prime minister Tony Blair, the Labour Party became a vassal of the One Percent. The result has been a rebellion in the ranks and the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, a principled Labourite intent on representing the people, a no-no in Western “democracies.”Corbyn is too real for the Labour Party Blairites, who hope to be rewarded with similar nest eggs as Blair for representing the capitalist One Percent. So what is the corrupted Labour Party doing to prevent Corbyn’s election?The answer is that it is denying the vote to ...
The 13th report of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the human rights situation in Ukraine between 16 November 2015 and 15 February 2016, when the Minsk Agreements were in force, has come as a shock to Kiev.According to the UN, more than three million people live in the areas directly affected by the conflict. The exact number of people who have left Ukraine-controlled territory is still unknown, although rough estimates range from 800,000 to 1,000,000 people. The Ukrainian government has estimated that more than a million people have left southeast Ukraine for Russia, Belarus and Europe. This ...
1. Kosovo is not ancient Albanian landIts very name comes from the Serbian word "kos," meaning blackbird. Its Albanian name, "Kosova," means nothing whatsoever.Kosovo was the heartland of medieval Serbian state and the site of the 1389 battle in which both the Serbian prince and the Ottoman sultan died, checking the Turkish expansion into the Balkans for almost 70 years. Ethnic Albanians were settled there by the Ottomans over the intervening centuries, and became a majority due to pogroms and persecution of Serbs - which began under Ottoman rule but continued under Austro-Hungarian occupation in WWI and German/Italian occupation in ...
Article by Vladislav B. Sotirović: „A New Age of Global Security: The ‚Ukrainian Question‘ and ‚Kosovo Precedent‘“, Vojno delo (Military affairs), Interdisciplinary Scientific Theoretical Journal, International Edition, Vol. 69, Issue 4, 2017 (May-June 2017), ISSN 0042-8426, Ministry of Defence of the Republic of Serbia, Belgrade, Serbia, pp. 176−211.Origins of images: Facebook, Twitter, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, Flickr, Google, Imageinjection, Public Domain & Pinterest.Read our Disclaimer/Legal Statement!Donate to Support UsWe would like to ask you to consider a small donation to help our team keep working. We accept no advertising and rely only on you, our readers, to keep us digging the truth ...
Sultan Abdul Hamid II, in the face of a rising secular nationalism in the late 1800s, that culminated in the Young Turk movement, tried to restore the influence of the Ottoman Empire among Islamic nations and the Empire’s many peoples by stressing the importance of Islam and the Ottoman Caliphate, of the role of the Ottomans as the protectors of Islam and, in the modern world, a bulwark against western colonialism.Over a hundred years after he left power, after the Empire was broken up by the western powers after the First World War, after the Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal, ...
On December 31st, Josh Rogin of Bloomberg ‘News’ headlined “Inside Obama’s Secret Outreach to Russia,” and his opening sentence ‘reported’ on “the fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin has shown little interest in … halting his aggression in neighboring Ukraine.” That ‘reporter’ from Bloomberg ‘News’ was ‘reporting’ from only sources inside the U.S. Administration — only from individuals who are hired by and who represent Barack Obama, none who are hired by and who represent Obama’s enemy Vladimir Putin; and so the question naturally arises as to whether Rogin and Bloomberg ‘News’ are ‘reporting’ propaganda, or are they instead reporting ...
The media never merely report the news. They manipulate and distort the news. They want to tell you what and how to think. Pursuant to this role, they routinely rewrite history. A striking instance of media rewriting of history is in the reporting on Kosovo. In the AP article “US Prosecutor to Probe Kosovo Organ Trafficking”, it is reported that the alleged atrocity occurred “during Kosovo’s war for independence from Serbia” in 1999.Everyone remembers that war as one to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing, that it was “a humanitarian intervention”. But here it is now characterized and defined as a ...
The magazine is covering the research gaps uncovered by global Western hoax mainstream media platforms and academic teaching & research institutions.
This is an alternative information & academic research digest platform with the purpose to offer an alternative “another side of the truth”.
The magazine is independent, private, and free of any influence by any institution, organization, government, or pressure group. URL: www.global-politics.eu