DAILY INSULT—Now Facebook trotted out to smear Russia

The above sounds like a complete rejection of what the mainstream media would like us to think about their role and performance, but our brief is irrefutable. What matters most in the marketplace of ideas (which is really the marketplace of political ideologies), is that in a deeply class-divided society such as the United States, with uber billionaires on one side and paupers on the other, each class viewpoint should be fairly represented, with plenty of media transmitting their particular interpretation of issues and events. Of course, as anyone could expect in the real world, this never happens in the corporate media universe, which invariably broadcasts factoids and news, or coarse distraction, only to protect, advance and benefit the interests of the global capitalist class. The illusion of free media and diversity is also supported in the US by the perception that most if not all media are privately owned, hence not "state" or "government-controlled", the supposed telltale sign of dreaded totalitarianism. Unfortunately, in this, Americans are also terribly wrong. For in a system of deeply integrated corporate fascism with a "friendly consumerist" face, as the US has developed, the distinction between the corporate line and the state line is virtually non-existent.

In this section we will simply aim to show you instances of disinformation. Corporate propaganda is not just a question of scandalous lies. The best approach to mind manipulation is simply the systematic omission of truth, and that can be accomplished almost without a trace by eliminating truly critical voices from the mainstream debate. Or by filtering out at the hiring point journalists with solid education, firm moral principles, and inquiring minds.  Jason Hirthler, one of the most astute observers of the media degeneracy in the Anglophone world, and in general throughout the capitalist world, has summed it up beautifully. Speaking of fake news and the CIA's vast infiltration of newsrooms, he noted acidly that,

Here American media rooms generally need not be ‘infiltrated’, not that this hasn’t been relentlessly done (then buried). Yet the effect of decades of fake news promoting American exceptionalism and excessively demonizing all non-capitalists has produced several generations of robotic groupthinkers that have internalized the values of power. Rarely must such journalists even be instructed what to say; they already know what to say; they already know how to balance a story, how to under-report, how to deprioritize, how to frame, how to produce dead ends, how to terminate a train of thought, and how to remove responsibility from active agents using the passive tense. The techniques are myriad. Modern newsrooms are full of such obsequious zombies.  (see  J. Hirthler, Condemned to Repeat It: History as Rerun,).

That's right, zombies. And that is not as hyperbolic as it sounds.

Given this fact our examples will not feature the exceptional, but simply the norm, sampled at random. Regard this column therefore as a simple reminder, a "for the record", and keep it handy for when the time arrives to rectify this horrid mess. Sharpen your critical faculties by inspecting the pieces we present and spotting the distortions. And, by the way, if we use one channel, say CBS, or the NYTimes, more than another, this is simply for our convenience: just assume that the rest in that bunch are equally bad.—PG