MEDIA SCUM

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—A recent Bloomberg article titled “U.S. Unleashes Military to Fight Fake News, Disinformation” reports that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is funding a new project called the Semantic Forensics program with which “the military research agency hopes it can spot fake news with malicious intent before going viral.” “If successful, the system after four years of trials may expand to detect malicious intent and prevent viral fake news from polarizing society,” Bloomberg reports. DARPA (formerly ARPA) is a top contender among some very stiff competition for the absolute creepiest of all US government agencies. Journalist Yasha Levine has done a lot of work documenting the way the agency has been intimately involved in internet surveillance since before the internet was even really a thing.

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—The old saying “actions speak louder than words” resonates with people because words can lie while actions cannot. And while the millionaire pundits of the billionaire media continually assure us with their words that we live in a free society, the actions of the people who wield official and unofficial power over us tell us that we actually live in a society which tortures and imprisons dissident journalists for telling inconvenient truths.

Jimmy Dore interviews Peter Lavelle about his journey from academic life to investment banking and later life in Poland, and Russia, where he started writing on a more regular basis, and eventually landed a job with Russia Today, now better known as RT.com, where he hosts a well known show, CrossTalk.

MAX PARRY—It is apparent that the caricature of the Soviet Union in both productions is really a stand-in for the present-day Russian government under Vladimir Putin. As only American exceptionalism could permit, Hollywood did not hold the same disdain for his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, whose legacy of high inflation and national debt have since been eliminated. In fact, most have forgotten that the same filmdom community outraged about Russia’s supposed interference in the 2016 U.S. election made a celebratory movie back in 2003, Spinning Boris, which practically boasted about the instrumental role the West played in Yeltsin’s 1996 reelection in Russia.

Jimmy discusses the stubborn effort by the BBC and similar “prestigious” mainstream news organisations to bend the truth in service to the Western empire, in Syria, Libya, Ukraine and any other spot where Washington and its allies are involved in some criminal enterprise.This falsification of reality has been going on for eons, as the capitalist press has never been “impartial” in reporting the news, as it often claims.