OpEds | Paul Craig Roberts
January 27, 2017
Stephen Bannon Is 100% Correct—The Media Is Now The Political Opposition
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]annon is correct that the US media—indeed, the entire Western print and TV media—is nothing but a propaganda machine for the ruling elite. The presstitutes are devoid of integrity, moral conscience, and respect for truth. https://www.rt.com/usa/375271-bannon-trump-media-cnn/ Read the comments in which morons define freedom of the press as the freedom to lie to the public.
Who else but the despicable Western media justified the enormous war crimes committed against millions of peoples by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes in nine countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Palestine, and the Russian areas of Ukraine?
Who else but the despicable Western media justified the domestic police states that have been erected in the Western world in the name of the “war on terror”?
Along with the war criminals that comprised the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes, the Western media should be tried for their complicity in the massive crimes against humanity.
The Western media’s effort to sustain the high level of tension between the West and Russia is a danger to all mankind, a direct threat to life on earth. Gorbachev’s warnings are correct. http://time.com/4645442/gorbachev-putin-trump/?xid=time_socialflow_facebook Yet presstitutes declare that if Trump lifts the sanctions it proves that Trump is a Russian agent. It is paradoxical that the Democrats and the liberal-progressive-left are mobilizing the anti-war movement to oppose Trump’s anti-war policy!
By refusing to acknowledge and to apologize for its lies, euphemistically called “fake news,” the Western media has failed humanity in a number of other ways. For example, by consciously telling lies, the media has legitimized the suborning of perjury and false testimony used to convict innocent defendants (such as Walter McMillian in Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy) in America’s “justice” system, which has about the same relation to justice as genocide has to mercy. If the media can lie about world events, police and prosecutors can lie about crimes.
[su_pullquote][su_dropcap size=”3″]A[/su_dropcap]long with the war criminals that comprised the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes, the Western media should be tried for their complicity in the massive crimes against humanity. The Western media’s effort to sustain the high level of tension between the West and Russia is a danger to all mankind, a direct threat to life on earth.[/su_pullquote]
By taking the role of the political opposition to Trump, the media has discredited itself as an honest critic on topics where Trump needs criticism, such as the environment and his tolerance of oppressive methods used by police. The presstitutes have ended all chance of improving Trump’s performance with reports and criticism.
Trump needs moderating on the environment, on the police, and on the war on terror. Trump needs to understand that “the Muslim threat” is a hoax created by the neoconservatives and the military/security complex with the complicity of the presstitutes to serve the hegemony agenda and the budget and power of the CIA, Pentagon, and military industries. If the US stops bombing and slaughtering Muslims and training and equiping forces to overthrow non-compliant Muslim governments such as Syria, Iraq, and Libya, “the Muslim threat” will disappear.
Maybe Trump will add to his agenda breaking into hundreds of pieces the six mega-media companies that own 90% of the US media and selling the pieces to seperate independent owners who have no connection to the ruling elites. Then America would again have a media that can constrain the government with truth rather than use lies to act for or against the government.
This version reported by King World News has some delicious words from past journalists about how their only job is to lie for the rich: http://kingworldnews.com/paul-craig-roberts-an-ominous-warning-for-what-promises-to-be-a-very-dangerous-year/
There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to villify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same — his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an “Independent Press”! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
— John Swinton, editor, New York Sun (1880)
LEARN MORE ABOUT PRO-LABOR JOURNALIST JOHN SWINTON
[su_spoiler title=”Swinton’s ‘Some Things An Editor Dare Not Discuss'”. style=”fancy” icon=”plus-circle”]
John Swinton (1829–1901) was a Scottish-American journalist, newspaper publisher, and orator. Although he arguably gained his greatest influence as the chief editorial writer of The New York Times during the decade of the 1860s, Swinton is best remembered as the namesake of John Swinton’s Paper, one of the most prominent American labor newspapers of the 1880s. Swinton would also serve as chief editorialist of the New York Sun during two stints totaling more than a dozen years.
In its January 1943 issue the bimonthly American Notes & Queries wrote: It is more than likely that John Swinton’s statement that “there is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns ….” was made at the “Journalists’ Gathering” in the rooms of the Twilight Club in the Mills Building, New York City, on April 12, 1883. The subject of Swinton’s talk was “Some Things an Editor Dare Not Discuss.” Swinton at the time was chief of the editorial staff of Charles A. Dana’s New York Sun, a post which he left a very few months later to found his own ill-fated labor sheet, John Swinton’s Paper. The Twilight Club dinner at which Swinton and five or six other working newspapermen spoke was only very briefly reported in the New York papers. (p. 159 books.google).
Journalistic career[edit]
Swinton returned to New York City in 1860, writing an article on medicine for the New York Times which was so well-received that Swinton was offered a post as an editorial writer for the paper.[4] Swinton was no doubt aided in gaining this position by his brother Raymond Swinton, who had joined the Times in 1858 and had himself quickly rose through the managerial ranks.[4] He would remain at the Times for a decade, becoming the chief editorial writer for the paper, including the entire duration of the American Civil War.[2]
From 1870 to 1875 Swinton worked as a free lance journalist, writing extensively for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.[4]
Swinton became involved in radical labor politics in the spring of 1874, when he addressed a mass meeting at Tompkins Square in New York City — a gathering which was violently disbursed by the police.[2] Swinton’s qualities as an effective orator gained notice, however, and in the fall of 1874 he was persuaded to run for Mayor of New York at the top of the ticket of the fledgling Industrial Political Party.[2] Swinton received few votes and saw his candidacy as largely symbolic.[2]
Swinton immersed himself in the New York trade union movement, addressing gatherings of workers and speaking before the New York State Assembly on their behalf.[2] He became active in the affairs of the Cigar Makers’ International Union (CMIU) and was instrumental in that union’s campaign against the tenement system of cigar production.[2]
Following his stint as a freelancer, Swinton took a permanent position as an editorial writer for the New York Sun in 1875.[5] Before he left the Sun in 1883 to launch a newspaper of his own,[5] he delivered at a press dinner the outburst he is most famous for today:
“There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns […]” (for complete quote and source cf. q:John Swinton)
John Swinton’s Paper
The first issue of the eponymous John Swinton’s Paper appeared in New York City on October 14, 1883.[6] It was a 4-page broadsheet, split into six vertical columns and appearing once a week.[7] The masthead of each issue[8] declared Swinton’s purposes:
1. Boldly upholding the rights of Man in the American Way.
2. Battling against the Accumulating Wrongs of Society and Industry.
3. Striving for the Organization and Interests of Working men and giving the news of the Trades and Unions.
4. Uniting the Political Forces, searching for a common platform, and giving the new of all the Young Bodies in the field.
5. Warning the American people against the treasonable and crushing schemes of Millionaires, Monopolists, and Plutocrats…
6. Looking toward better times of fair play and Public Welfare.
In this publication Swinton was free to espouse his own radical ideas about the American labor movement and the publication gained a national readership.[5] Chief among Swinton’s targets were the so-called “Robber Barons” of the day, including Jay Gould and William H. Vanderbilt, who were subjected to an unending stream of satirical cartoons, poems, and aggressive editorials.[9] In his pages Swinton opined against the use of exploitative prison labor and contract immigrant labor, casting the perceived menace of Chinese immigration in particularly dark tones.[9]
Swinton’s agitation against contract convict labor, launched with a series of articles beginning on October 28, 1883, was credited with moving the New York State Assembly to investigate the issue, culminating in a prohibition of the system in the state beginning in 1885.[10]
Despite gaining a significant and influential readership in the labor movement, John Swinton’s Paper was never a self-supporting business venture.[13] Swinton refused to accept financial gifts for the publication, instead relying exclusively upon subscriptions ($1 per year), newsstand sales (3 cents per copy), and paid advertising (25 cents per column inch).[13] As early as December 1884 losses had begun to mount, a process which accelerated in 1887 when the Knights of Labor began a boycott of the publication over Swinton’s perceived antagonism and commitment to the network of rival trade unions which later congealed under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor.[14]
By August 1887 the financial shortfall had become untenable. In his penultimate issue, dated August 7, 1887, Swinton declared that he could no longer subsidize his publication’s losses. He wrote:
“My means are no longer sufficient to bear any further strain. I have been wrecked by this paper and the labors associated therewith, in which during the past four years, I have sunk tens of thousands of dollars — all of it out of my own pocket.”[15]
SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA
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[su_box title=”” style=”glass” box_color=”#099ff7″ title_color=”#e2e7e7″] Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. His internet columns have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts’ latest books are The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West, How America Was Lost, and The Neoconservative Threat to World Order.pk end share buttons [/su_box]
MAIN IMAGE: The Western media, as reliable as a viper.
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