MEDIA SCUM

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—“We need to stop pretending FB and Twitter aren’t arms of the US state,” Artyukhina said in a popular Twitter thread last month after another purge. “For over a year they’ve deleted accounts of Iranians, Venezuelans, Russians, and Chinese simply for daring to voice opinions different from the imperialist narrative, under the aegis of combating ‘disinformation’.” “These reports often claim the accounts were ‘used to promote content from inauthentic news sites,’ but that simply refers to outlets like PressTV and TeleSUR, which don’t toe the Western MSM line,” Artyukhina added. “As always, it’s only propaganda when somebody else does it.”

PATRICE GREANVILLE—If nothing else I found this episode interesting because it shows how much sharper the mind of a genuine radical is, when compared to that of even a bright semi-establshmentarian liberal, like Taibbi. Let us recall that while Taibbi can be at times a very fine jornalist, he is still politically far more a temperamental rebel, a bourgeois “enfant terrible” than a genuine left social analyst. In that sense he remains ensconced in the old journo illusion that more facts assure a better grasp of the subject, forgetting that this is also a sure formula to miss the forest for the trees, and that context, the historical, cultural and socioeconomic and political contexts of anything being reported is the guarantor of clarity and public mobilisation.

STEPHEN COHEN—Russiagate’s core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political life—in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed people.

GERALDINA COLOTTI—It is worth remembering that Milton Friedman, a theorist of neoliberalism fiercely opposed to  any state intervention in the economy, inspired the policies of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States at the time, and had a decisive influence on the devastating economic choices imposed on Chile during Pinochet’s dictatorship.

ED CURTIN—So we are reassured that the new head of NPR, the chief of all U.S. propaganda, is a champion of a free press.
Perhaps NPR will soon enlighten the American public by interviewing its new head honcho and asking him if he thinks Julian Assange and Chelsey Manning, by exposing America’s war crimes, and Edward Snowden, by exposing the U.S. government’s vast electronic surveillance programs of its own citizens, deserve to be jailed and exiled for doing the job the American mainstream “free press” failed to do. What NPR failed to do.