I was going to list some basic problems facing us as consumers of the mainstream news today as it relates to Covid-19, but upon reflection I realized that there were other issues that were just as important that are NOT being reported on and will be information that might be new to you. Luckily, if you want to get up to speed, you have someone who spends most of his news time digging deep into the news and finding the sources that are doing the hard work and who are not a part of traditional mainstream media who are being paid by rich billionaires, which is the case with mainstream media today (six billionaires own the majority of media within the United States). The mistake many make is assuming that the mainstream media is better than any other source. Unfortunately, if you didn’t already know, there is a crisis of information in the midst of a wealth of it.
The problem a lot of people have is they can’t spend all day tracking down whether a news story has been reported correctly. So many have become used to getting their news from mainstream media. The only problem with most of the media giants is they have business interests that preclude them from being willing to just tell you like it is. It may sound cynical, but I have observed from news cycle to news cycle that this winds up being true. As a result, if you want the full story, you aren’t going to be getting it from MSNBC, NBS, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, or FOX. The problem though is if you do watch these news outlets, you may feel there is nothing wrong with their reporting and may wonder if I am off my rocker and gone full tin-foil hat. You wont do that until or unless you dig deeper to find that in reporting by the New York Times that important facets of the story have either been ignored or are just being incorrectly reported full-cloth. Anyone who knows what happened in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration will know what I mean. That, however, has not been a one-off. Instead, it exists as a continuing modus operandi where certain key interests come into the picture that effect reporting honestly. The thing is, you don’t know about the existence of these interests in the midst of news reporting. Digging deeper, though, outside of their news reporting will most often begin to pull back the curtain on what these interests are. It isn’t like they will tell you because they themselves are biased by the forces that come to them from above. Again, I know this sounds conspiratorial talk, but all you need to do is to do the work and dig deeper in order to see just what it is that is being left out or being so skewed. Then it becomes much easier to follow the money, because that is precisely what this is all about.
While I have no interest in going into a deep dive on why mainstream media hasn’t been doing its job for years now, I will provide you with a few examples of how these media giants fall short and why.
Remember the meltdown at Fukishima in the earlier portion of this decade? At the time, most news reporting appeared to be clear-eyed and upfront: there had been an explosion in their reactor and some radioactive water had been released, but it was being contained. News reporting on NBC was interestingly muted on the topic and the other media giants more or less followed suit. I had been looking at alternative media, which was back then composed of people doing investigations in Japan and along our Western coast to measure the radioactivity of rainwater both there as well as here along the North American continent. I was able to see that none of this information, which was alarming and of great concern, was making its way into the mainstream news cycle. Why would NBC be resisting doing hard hitting investigation into what had happened in Japan in March of 2011? The corporation that owned NBC was G.E. G.E. had supplied the nuclear equipment to the company that ran the plant in Japan. Want to see your stock plummet anyone? Not bloody likely. G.E. stayed the quiet course and then came under criticism for it only later.
A generation ago our own C.I.A. developed a way of working or operating that involved using news agencies as a cover for operatives. That all sounds well and good, but an outgrowth of that program was what was called Program Mockingbird involved the C.I.A. planting stories in media in order to influence American opinion about a host of subjects that the C.I.A. obviously felt were important to be told. This amounted to propaganda pure and simple, and the effects of this program was that many news agencies had become handmaidens of the intelligence state and had become subverted in being able to tell the truth to the American people.
In one case when a magazine began to reveal what the C.I.A. was doing within its own ranks, the C.I.A. sought to blackmail journalists who worked for the publication in order to keep them from revealing the truth of what had been happening, which was that the C.I.A. was running a propaganda program within their ranks and those of other news agencies. This was done by a small liberal-leaning publication in 1967 called Ramparts. Instead of the news media being an unwitting victim of C.I.A. infiltration, it was revealed that the media itself had become complicit in publishing propaganda, which was affecting news reporting in a variety of ways across the spectrum. The C.I.A. had gone outside of its mandate of not acting against U.S. interests by pursuing an information war against the U.S. public, and this happened with the cooperation with the news media.
What happened years later with the invasion of Iraq and the subsequent reporting done on it across mainstream media is an example of how this took place again in our present day. You need only examine how many C.I.A. operatives serve as “consultants” on shows that air on both FOX, MSNBC, NBC, and ABC, along with CNN. In most cases the backgrounds of these consultants is never even disclosed, which in some cases result in direct conflicts of interest, or impropriety at the very least.
The fealty that U.S. media pays to outside interests like the C.I.A. also results in having news cycles upended because of the financial interests of those who own the business. It might be oil, or it might be to get a pipeline through a country that is resisting such a move. Bloomberg News recently had no critical reporting of its owner who ran as a late candidate in the Democrat primaries. Similarly, The Washington Post, now owned by Jeff Bezzo’s shows no sign of doing hard hitting journalism on the slew of issues being exposed by other news companies about Amazon’s treatment of its workers.
NPR fairly recently hired CEO John Lansing of USAGM, which is the parent body behind better-known Voice Of America as its own Chief Officer. The only problem with this is that VOA is a news agency funded by the U.S. government as a propaganda arm of its own operations. What makes this so bad is that VOA and its many subsidiaries that operate in other countries was found to be ginning up a new war with Russia. Further, Lansing has been on record stating that his work for VOA was real journalism that was free from government influence.
To understand what is at stake for us and for those who listen to NPR regularly, it is important to understand what Laura Flanders said in a recent article on Common Dreams about the subject:
The high dudgeon ill-suited a man who, as he spoke, oversaw an empire of federally-funded influence campaigns with origins in Cold War US psy-ops: The Voice of America, Radio y Televisión Martí, and Radio Free Europe, as well as Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, and Radio Persia. According to Yasha Levine at Pando, when Lansing took the reins of this holding company, which was then called the Broadcasting Board of Governors, it had a budget of $721 million, reported directly to the Secretary of State, and was managed by a revolving crew of neocon and military think tank experts, including Ryan Crocker, former ambassador to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria.
SOURCE: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/09/15/voice-america-npr-new-ceo-lansings-glass-house
Now contrast this with the view that most people have of NPR as that friendly, left-leaning news agency that begs for money each year, supposedly helping to boost its image as somehow more independent than all other forms of media. Admit it, NPR always struck you as being fair-minded and inclusive. In fact, many of you even listen to NPR and feel that they can be trusted…..because they feel so friendly.
When media isn’t hiring propagandists, it is not choosing to exercise full rigor on vetting information that others provide it.
To show how information is poorly vetted by mainstream news, recently the mayor and governor of Minnesota both claimed that the majority of people being arrested in their cities during recent protests and riots were outsiders who did not live in their area. This was picked up by most in the mainstream media and was trumpeted as true even though there was clear evidence that this was in fact not true. Either both leaders were themselves misinformed, or had lied to the people. Other news agencies dug into the story in order to point out that this number was in fact incorrect and was really just propaganda (I am betting that the leaders felt embarrassed that their own people had done all of the demonstrations, the rioting and looting that had taken place and chosen to lie instead of telling the truth). The problem is that CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NPR and others were all reporting this information without doing their due diligence first. This effectively amounts to malpractice, but when are they taken to task? Sometimes, though, a news agency will do the right thing and admit errors, but more often than not, they don’t. Even when a story has been shown to have been made up out of whole cloth many news agencies will simply refuse to admit error. This effectively serves to keep the propaganda story in place through the sin of omission.
In a later article in Slate, this assertion about what took place in Minnesota was revealed to be incorrect. In that article it goes on to state:
The officials were questioned about their claims after journalists went to look at jail records and found that the overwhelming majority of people arrested in connection to the unrest in Minneapolis had Minnesota addresses. NBC affiliate KARE 11 found that of 36 cases, 86 percent had Minnesota addresses. Fox 9, meanwhile, has a slightly different number, but it tells the same story.
Susan Rice, who served in the Obama administration came forward at this same time period in an interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer and said that what was happening in Minnesota was “right out of the Russian playbook…” While she admitted in the interview that she was no longer privy to intelligence reports, she suspected that this was the case. What?!? Bear in mind, Blitzer sat quiet and still as Rice made this statement and did nothing to dig deeper into it or to question it’s veracity. There was no push back, which is an important job, a duty, of every self-respecting journalist. We know now why this statement, which had absolutely no supporting proof whatsoever, was allowed to be trumpeted across the news. The news media, including CNN had become invested in an evidence-free conspiracy theory about Russia for close to three years. To understand this a little better, we need to understand how such a conspiracy theory was allowed to run free throughout mainstream in the U.S. media for three years.
Russia Russia Russia!
A U.S. president-elect colluding with Russia sounds like a very serious thing. It might be, were it true. Unfortunately, it wasn’t. If you watch Rachel Maddow, you would see her sow fear on her show night after night, even going so far as to say that Russia might turn off the gas to countless Americans during a cold snap in the winter. After countless efforts to frame a story around Trump being involved or those in his transition team with cozying up to Russia, the story grew legs and did so with the flimsiest of information that was touted as true. In order to understand what a “show” this all was, you have to do what I have prescribed, you have to dig into the details and follow where the information takes you.
The whole collusion mess hinged on several pieces of evidence, which came about in large part due to a hack of the DNC servers in the midst of the 2016 Presidential campaign. The DNC claimed that its servers had been hacked by agents inside of Russia, but when it came time for the F.B.I. to examine that server, the DNC refused. Instead, it hired a company to examine its servers that was not connected to the F.B.I. and the F.B.I. appeared to blink. To date no source within the U.S. government has yet to examine the DNC servers.
Next, the F.B.I. claimed that a troll farm known as IRA had been acting on the part of Russia to sway public opinion during the Presidential campaign. What the Mueller investigation did not directly reveal during Congressional testimony was the exact nature of the interference. While that information was in the report for anyone to see, no news agency reported on it specifically within mainstream media with any degree of rigor. It turns out that this troll farm had spent about $46,000.00 in Facebook ads during the campaign that included ads of Sanders bare-chested sitting atop a horse with Putin. Another ad was an ad to help men with problems related to masturbation by a Christian group, offering to, I kid you not, “give you a hand” with their problem. Other memes that came from the troll farm produced memes which were equally hard to see as being tied to the election at all. Then, after the election, in January and February, the troll farm directed about $100,000.00 worth of ads at Americans. This, the F.B.I. insisted, was their proof. As if I needed to point this out, the Clinton campaign alone spent about one billion dollars in its ads during its campaign. The amount spent by this troll farm was like using a toothpick to swat away a mosquito. Most of the money the troll farm spent fell outside of the election cycle. And yet, if you search the internet you will see story after story about how influential this company was in changing the minds of Americans during the election. $46,000.00 would be a fraction of a small company’s add spend for driving customers to their web sites in one month. But you don’t know that, and as long as Americans are kept in the dark on this issue, the lie can be printed and no one will question. Those who do tell the truth are demonized and discredited, all of which are ad hominem in nature. Many of the stories that have been produced, one by NPR, still stick by the story that Russia was spending huge sums of money in this effort for changing the hearts and minds of the American public. In a story in February of 2018 The Atlantic admitted that the efforts of the troll farm were ineffectual. yes, technically Russia was involved in social media awareness or propaganda campaigns but the degree to which those in media and political circles tried to puff them up were laughable.
You wont at present see much in the way of how ineffective the efforts the IRA actually were in the press, but there are sources that point this out in very specific terms. One of these is a study that looked at all of the available data covering the activity of IRA on U.S. internet sites like Twitter and Facebook. You can find that study source HERE
The MIT Technology Review reached a similar conclusion. Yes, there was interference, but it was minor in nature. However, as the article points out, concern over the power of the Russian bots is probably overblown in the minds of most Americans. This writer suspects that the concern is overblown because of how both those in the media and government have seized on the Russian interference and blown it out of proportion, to effectively seek to turn attention from the real problems here at home that we should all be attending to. In short, this rather small fact has been the subject of a propaganda campaign to both paint Russia as an enemy and to divert attention away from the reasons behind why Hillary Clinton lost to a game show host. Hint: things have gotten so bad in the U.S.politically that after decades of candidate hopefuls to the presidency, little if anything, has substantively changed. This is, in my personal view, the topic that should be at the forefront of our discussions today. It is important because it hinges on how the popular perception of the loss of the middle class and the poor have not just been left behind, they have been crushed under the weight of support by these presidents to corporate interests. But I digress…
Gucifer II & The DNC Hack
The DNC hack has been shown to have been an inside job by whistleblower Bill Binney formerly of the NSA and the chief engineer of the internet snoooping software called Thinthread which collected data in a constitutionally responsible way in order to help combat terrorism, and not the result of internet hacking as has been represented. But before this was discovered, a source came forward that seemed to be someone who knew about the DNC hack happening as if it had happened over the internet. The source of the hack was described by media and political operatives here in the U.S. government as belonging to Russia based on an admission from a self-proclaimed hacker named Gucifer II who had used a computer whose ISP originated within Russia and which also revealed that a Cyrillic keyboard had been used in his communication. Those in the intelligence field have pointed out that hackers wont tip their hand in terms of the type of computer that they use. This hack, it was claimed, was proof that someone within Russia was acting against U.S. interests in the election. But hang on. Wikileaks, it was claimed, was the recipient of the hacked DNC data, which is one reason why Julian Assange was taken out of the embassy where he had been given asylum recently. Assange, when asked, has said consistently that the information in the DNC emails did not come from a government source nor from a government actor, which also supports what Bill Binney explains, whose own analysis follows. The problem with this assertion about the hack as has been proposed as having been performed over the internet are the details contained in the data itself.
It turns out that whenever a file is copied from a computer, phone, or similar device, a small bit of meta data is produced that tells you both about the computer from which the data is copied as well as the manner in which the data was copied. It becomes something of a general fingerprint that may not tell you precisely who acted, but it will tell engineers and forensic experts a lot about how the data was copied, whether it was copied over the internet or onto removable data, and the transfer rates involved, for example.
In interviews with top NSA technical director and whistle blower Bill Binney, Binney has helped to reveal that the meta data contained in the emails, those packets of information that are attached to the transfer of computer generated data, shows that the supposed “hack” did not involve files being sent over the internet. There are two reasons for this Binney says: the file contained two indicators that it had been copied to a removable drive and that the time in which the file was copied, the time lapse between copying the data and full acquisition of it on another device, effectively its “download speed” meant that it could not have been copied using the internet as the medium of data transfer. The transfer rate, Binney explains, is much too fast for the internet.
In interviews with alternative media, Binney explained that he and other former and current intelligence officials, members of the group VIPS Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) which is a group of current and former officials of the United States Intelligence Community, including some from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the U.S. State Department’s Intelligence Bureau (INR), and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) attempted to put the assertion that the DNC hack was done over the internet to the test. The group was formed in January 2003 as a way to protest the use of faulty intelligence upon which the Iraq Afghanistan war was based. These members of the intelligence agencies transferred data across the internet using servers all over the world to see how data rates compared to one another. Their conclusions were the same for every service provider that they tested from Russia, the Balkans, Europe, Asia, and the U.S., which was that the data could not have been transferred in the time that the metadata indicated that the DNC emails had been copied. In fact, Binney explains, the transfer or copy rates were consistent with the speeds found when copying data from one computer to another through a wired connection and not through the medium of the internet.
Binney explains that when a file is copied to an external drive such as a thumb drive or a CD or DVD or other removable media, it results in a FAT file being produced. A FAT file has as part of its protocol to always round the time base of the copy time up to an even fraction of a second, which is exactly what the Wikileaks file contained, even numbers. All of these facts, Binney explains, is why the hack did not happen through the internet, but came from a removable drive. SOURCES:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv0-Lnv0d0k
The implications of this find is that the hack was not as represented at all. Instead, it is much more likely, Binney says, that an insider within the DNC who had physical access to the computers was involved in copying the email data between Clinton and others like John Podesta. This may also mean that the DNC launched all of this as a way to shift attention away from the leak that happened from within their ranks by suggesting that it was Russia who did the hack.
The Steele Dosier
The Clinton campaign paid a company to try and dig up dirt on Trump through what is now known as the Steele dossier. This document has itself fallen apart under scrutiny. It contains heresay and innuendo, but was used in order to attack Trump and his allies. In an article by The Hill on 5/09/19 it explains that,
Newly unearthed memos show a high-ranking government official who met with Steele in October 2016 determined some of the Donald Trump dirt that Steele was simultaneously digging up for the FBI and for Hillary Clinton’s campaign was inaccurate, and likely leaked to the media.
The article goes on to say,
The concerns were flagged in a typed memo and in handwritten notes taken by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Kathleen Kavalec on Oct. 11, 2016.
Her observations were recorded exactly 10 days before the FBI used Steele and his infamous dossier to justify securing a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign adviser Carter Page and the campaign’s contacts with Russia in search of a now debunked collusion theory.
It is important to note that the FBI swore on Oct. 21, 2016, to the FISA judges that Steele’s “reporting has been corroborated and used in criminal proceedings” and the FBI has determined him to be “reliable” and was “unaware of any derogatory information pertaining” to their informant, who simultaneously worked for Fusion GPS, the firm paid by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and the Clinton campaign to find Russian dirt on Trump.
A dossier paid for by the Clinton camp with false information in it about their opponent that was used as the pretext to spy on Carter Page. Got it.
In recent developments, Flynn was exonorated in his part of having spoken to a Russian diplomat during the transition phase of the Trump Presidency, a move which the DOJ has proclaimed was itself not an illegal act. In fact, the very conversation that Flynn had with a Russian diplomat was completely in keeping with conversations that high ranking officials have during transitions of this type. While Flynn may not have been entirely correct in his descriptions of what he remembered, this did not itself mean that he was somehow dealing with a Russian diplomat in a way that was improper.
As a result, the entire Russian collusion story was written down to an evidence-free conspiracy theory which took over two and a half years of time in reporting by the mainstream press and held many opponents of Trump in its sway.
It is important to note the players who were involved in doing the journalistic work that revealed the specious character of the Russia Collusion hoax to the American People, none of which are in the mainstream media. Those who did that reporting are noted below and I will also point out are without exception, self-proclaimed liberal-leaning individuals. Most of them are:
- Aaron Maté of Pushback
- Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept
- Mat Taibi and Katy Halper RollingStone’s Useful Idiots
- Chris Hedges of Truthdig and Common Dreams
- Jimmy Dore of The Jimmy Dore Show
- Crystal Ball and Saager Enjeti of The Hill’s Rising show
- Kyle Kulinski’s Secular Talk Radio
There are other news sources (like Joe Rogan) that are not thought of as bonafide journalists who do important work digging up information important to knowing the full story. I will note that if you do your own search of news stories online that many of the examples I have shown you remains unavailable through mainstream sources. Even now, you will only find limited admissions on the part of mainstream media that their reporting was wrong. There remains a considerable bias which these outlets and others like them have revealed in mainstream media including Russia, Venezuela, Yemen, and the Middle East (most recently).
This is why it is important to use media sources that are involved in reporting the news without the bias that exists within the billionaire-owned media outlets that have monopolized our news cycle. I will note that all of these reporters are either given broad leeway from their outlets (The Hill and Rolling Stone), or are independent media with no dog in the fight. As a result, views of traditional media have been falling for years while viewership on alternative media has been rising.
The head of Comcast recently said that alternative media was killing his company. Interestingly, Google, through Youtube, has been deplatforming (banning) some of these alternative news outlets or they have demonitized their shows as a way of marginalizing their content creation, trying to just get them to go away, or to cap their growth. Fortunately, this is not working as for most, it only serves to galvanize support for a movement that seeks to be less politically polarized in reporting the news so that the public can know just what is happening in the world. For many of these journalists, they view this work as a battle for the heart of truth and freedom here in the United States. Kuddos to all of them for bringing this truth to light.
In my view, these are the real journalists. There is plenty to not like about Trump, but if everyone who does not like Trump responds entirely in a knee jerk fashion to nearly everything he says, we may miss some important points about what is happening in our world. In just the same way that many conservatives believed that there were weapons of mass destruction years after this assertion was proven demonstrably false, so too does a new generation of liberals believe that Russia is out to get us. In the latter case, there is a very real concern that latching onto this narrative could fuel a new cold war effort with Russia and the same kind of arms race that once kept every person on the planet under the specter of nuclear annihilation. The forces that are interested in just such a new cold war are those who would profit from the buildup of arms from such a war. We need to resist such moves if we are to have a more just and sane world for ourselves and our children.
Bloomberg News made it clear that they were not going to cast a critical eye on their owner while he was running as a candidate in the Democratic primary. Also, in similar fashion, The Washington Post will not be overtly critical of its owner Jeff Bezos owner of Amazon either. Truth dies in darkness, or something like that. These examples are plenty of fuel for concern about the principles in place over media ownership and where their interest lie and how those interests come into conflict with their being able to report on the news. So buyer beware.
Now to make everything else so crystal clear, let me also say that on some topics mainstream media does very well, it’s just a certain sector of the news where they fail miserably. But that sector is an incredibly important component to our understanding how the world is working, behaving, and how to make sense of things for ourselves. It may be that in some cases, were we to know the full story, we might vote someone out of office, someone who is helping an elite class with their business dealings like big pharma or the MIC (military industrial complex). These are just examples for cases that have popped up in the past as problematic for the truth tellers to…..you know, to tell the truth about. In many cases parts of the story are told rightly while other bits are left out, or outright distorted or lied about. As a result of this, large swaths of the populace have begun to flock to alternative media. I saw the writing on the wall when I began hearing “fake news” in 2015 in the run-up to the next election. I suspected then and know now that those who decry the fake news are most often the ones who are dealing the most in it. I didn’t have to wait but a few more years to hear Glenn Greenwald of The Intercept come forward with his own critique which amounted to saying exactly the same thing.
Until then, be safe and get outside! Tell jokes, smile, and hold your love ones close.
Up Next: Using pandemics and social unrest as a test for your own level of development spiritually.
Waking The Infinite 