MEDIA SCUM

ERIC ZUESSE—Furthermore, since the less-educated persons aspire to be more-educated, they are — even without knowing it — aspiring to become less open to contrary views, instead of to become more open to such views. One bad consequence of this is: it strangulates imaginativeness, openness, and creativity, in favor of being rote, rigid, and bureaucratic. Another bad consequence of it is that the authority-figures, in such a society, are, in some important ways, actually inferior to the rest of the population. Moreover, America’s colleges and universities are not increasing their students’ open-mindedness (as they should) but the exact opposite — they are reducingtheir students’ open-mindedness.

THE SAKER—One more example: the Empire is now sending ships into the Black Sea as some kind of “show of force”. Yet, every military analyst out there knows that the Black Sea is a “Russian lake” and that no matter how many ships the US or NATO sends into the Black Sea, their life expectancy in case of a conflict would be measured in minutes. There is a popular expression in Russia which, I submit, beautifully sums up the current US/NATO doctrine: пугать ежа голой задницей, which can be translated as “trying to scare a hedgehog with your naked bottom”.

Scathing exposé of Maddow’s tedious lies. “She’s a puke and a liar,” says Jimmy, and we agree. But she’s a presstitute, an obscenely well paid phony first and above all hired by powerful plutocratic forces that dominate both Fox and MSNBC, as all corporate media —”left” and “right”— sell the same message, just different packaging. 

TOM CARTER—It is not a question of “speaking ill of the dead” but of maintaining a standpoint of independence and objectivity, and of not getting swept away by the deluge of official propaganda. These campaigns of official mourning are a ritualized spectacle of American political life. The deceased is inevitably held up as an “icon,” a “towering figure” and a “legend.” Every bourgeois politician and media personality is expected to line up to render the proper obeisance, with each individual politician “paying respects” becoming a news item in itself. The accomplishments of the decedent, sometimes real and sometimes invented, are spun out of all proportion to reality. The propaganda campaign functions as a sort of loyalty test, with anyone who is not willing to recite the official slogans flagged as a possible traitor.

YASHA LEVINE—It was November 2016. Evgenia and I were living in St. Petersburg, Russia, then. She was shooting a short film about a murderous old lady, I was finishing Surveillance Valley. Donald Trump had won, but hadn’t yet been sworn in as President. Liberal America was in turmoil, and all sorts of panicked “Russia did it” stories were just beginning to swamp the news cycle. One of the most egregious was a rabid Washington Post article that laundered what was clearly an intel propaganda op: a shady media blacklist that accused some of America’s most respected alternative journalists and media outlets of being part of a Russian disinformation network.