MEDIA SCOUNDRELS

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—Our job is to wake up the mainstream public. This is very feasible, as trust in the imperial media is at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information is at an all-time high. It does mean we need to stop thinking of ourselves as radicals (we’re not radical, we’re just sane) and push inward from the fringes to the heart of the mainstream public as hard as we can.

JEREMY KUZMAROV—Even a broken clock is right twice a day. And even a liar like Donald Trump can sometimes tell the truth. During the 2020 election campaign, Trump accused Biden of corruption with regard to secret deals involving the Ukraine and China, in which the Vice President venally leveraged the power of his office and title to enrich himself and his son in clear violation of the law.

In that charge, Trump was absolutely right. But he did not know the half of it. Joe Biden’s history of deceit and corruption did not begin with the 2020 election campaign, nor is it limited to his dealings with the Ukraine and China, although they are a good place to start unraveling the myth of Joe Biden as secular saint, whose incorruptible honesty and nobility of character have been so vigorously propagated by corporate media and internalized even by large segments of the left. For example, let us look at “Ukrainegate” and Joe Biden’s part in it.

GLENN GREENWALD—In a January Wall Street Journal op-ed, tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy and Yale Law School’s constitutional scholar Jed Rubenfeld warned that Congress is rapidly approaching this constitutional boundary if it has not already transgressed it. “Using a combination of statutory inducements and regulatory threats,” the duo wrote, “Congress has co-opted Silicon Valley to do through the back door what government cannot directly accomplish under the Constitution.” Added: Deleted: That article compiled just a small sample of case law making clear that efforts to coerce private actors to censor speech implicate core First Amendment free speech guarantees.

Many people around the world, and now, the goverments of Russia, China and Iran, are also claiming that Covid-19 probably originated in a US bioweapons lab. This is a legitimate news, says Kim Iversen, a respected commetator on world affairs. The story was even carried by Western news services, but in her case Big Tech decided to censor her. Why? Apparently because she is not a dependable conduit for the official narative, which seeks to pin blame on foreign state actors, chiefly China.

JAMES TRACY—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, if any, relationships, yet the seldom acknowledged history of their intimate collaboration indicates a far different story–indeed, one that media historians are reluctant to examine.

When seriously practiced, the journalistic profession involves gathering information concerning individuals, locales, events, and issues. In theory such information informs people about their world, thereby strengthening “democracy.” This is exactly the reason why news organizations and individual journalists are tapped as assets by intelligence agencies and, as the experiences of German journalist Udo Ulfkotte (entry 47 below) suggest, this practice is at least as widespread today as it was at the height of the Cold War.