“There is not one of you who dares to write your
honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never
appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinions out of
the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries
for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write
honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.
“If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one
issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.
“You know it and I know it, and what folly is this
toasting an independent press.
“We are the tools and vassals of the rich men behind
the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we
dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property
of other men.
Boylan said this to two of the station’s on-air
reporters, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, a husband-and-wife
investigative reporting team. WTVT is a Fox-affiliated station in
Tampa, Florida. The station manager was trying to get Akre and Wilson
to falsify their investigative report on Monsanto’s bovine growth
hormone (BGH) in the Tampa-area milk supply.
The report showed that studies link Monsanto’s BGH
in milk to cancer. So Monsanto pressured Fox News to cover it up, and
Fox News ordered WTVT to edit the story to be less damning to
Monsanto. Akre and Wilson refused, despite repeated attempts by the
corrupt station manager to have the story altered. Boylan even offered
to terminate them with full pay if they promised to never speak
publicly about their BGH findings. Finally, when Akre and Wilson
threatened to report the station to the FCC for falsifying news, they
were fired.
They sued WTVT, and on August 18, 2000, a Florida
state court jury unanimously determined that Fox News “acted
intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs’
news reporting on BGH.” The jury also found that Jane Akre’s threat to
blow the whistle on Fox News deception by reporting them to the FCC,
was the sole reason for the firing. The jury awarded Acre and Wilson
$425,000 in damages.
Fox News appealed, and on February 14, 2003 a
crooked judge reversed the jury, actually issuing a ruling that it
is legal for the media to deliberately lie and distort the news on a
television broadcast!
That had been a WTVT defense argument which was
rejected by three other judges on at least six separate occasions. So
to back up his crooked ruling, the appeals court judge said there is
no FCC rule or regulation that specifically makes it illegal to
mislead, distort, or falsify the news.
There you have it, folks! Mass-media deception
in your face. It can’t get more blatant than that!
For full details see:
http://foxBGHsuit.com/ BGH
Bulletin — News of Lawsuit Exposing Media Coverup of Suspected Danger
in Milk
“[The corporate mass-media] serve to divert the
unwashed masses and reinforce the basic social values: passivity,
submissiveness to authority, the overriding virtue of greed and
personal gain, lack of concern for others, fear of real or imagined
enemies, etc.
“The goal is to keep the bewildered herd
bewildered. It’s unnecessary for them to trouble themselves with
what’s happening in the world. In fact, it’s undesirable — if they see
too much of reality they may set themselves to change it.”
— Noam Chomsky
M.I.T. professor of linguistics
prolific author & U.S. foreign policy critic
What Uncle Sam Really Wants
“[In the U.S. mass-media] words are used to
disguise, not to illuminate, action: You liberate a city by destroying
it. Words are used to confuse, so that at election time people will
solemnly vote against their own interests.”
— Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
“Most people prefer to believe their leaders are
just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because
once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they
live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she
will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government
entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do
nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles.
Most people do not have the courage to face that choice.
“Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool
the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to
think at all.”
— Michael Rivero
WhatReallyHappened.com
The two-party system has been utterly homogenized by
corrupt money.
“The corporate grip on opinion in the United States
is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has
ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity —
much less dissent.
“Of course, it is possible for any citizen with
time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on,
but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only
news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of
flashing fictions...”
— Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
“Nothing appears more surprising to those who
consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness
with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit
submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions
to those of their rulers.
“When we inquire by what means this wonder is
effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the
governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It
is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and this
maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as
well as to the most free and most popular.”
— David Hume
Of the First Principles of Government
1758
quoted in Gore Vidal’s
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
“When I was Times bureau chief in
Washington, I was a member of the League of Gentlemen [i.e., the
establishment elite]; otherwise I never would have been bureau chief.
Time after time, good reporters...complained about not being able to
get stories in the paper. And time after time I said to them, ‘You’re
just not going to get that in the New York Times... it’s
too reliant on your judgement rather than on official judgement, it’s
too complex, it contradicts the official record more flagrantly than
the conventions of daily journalism allow.’”
— Tom Wicker
New York Times columnist
Guardian (London), February 13, 1985
quoted in
Democracy for the Few, by Michael Parenti
and “‘League of Gentlemen’ Rates Media,” by Kevin Kelly
“Following the same course that virtually every
other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series
of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the
media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths.
“The result has been that an increasingly
authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a
massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all
intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.”
— David McGowan
from the introduction to
Derailing Democracy
“...the corporate ownership of the country has
absolute control of the populist pulpit — ‘the media’ — as well as of
the schoolroom.”
— Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire
“Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy
finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.”
— George Orwell
author of the book 1984
“A world of unseen dictatorship is conceivable,
still using the forms of democratic government.”
— Kenneth Boulding
University of Michigan
quoted in
The Hidden Persuaders
“The enormous gap between what US leaders do in
the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of
the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political
mythology.”
— Michael Parenti
Political scientist and author of
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media
“The U.S. Government spends more than
$400,000,000 per year to employ more than 8000 workers to create
propaganda favourable to the United States. The result: 90 films per
year, twelve magazines in 22 languages, and 800 hours of Voice of
America programming in 37 languages with an estimated audience of 75
million listeners — all describing the ‘virtues’ of the American
way.”
— Pratkanis and Aronson
Age of Propaganda: the everyday use and abuse of
persuasion
1992
“I have the greatest admiration for your
propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who
have had the best training in the world — in the field of
advertising — and have mastered the techniques with exceptional
proficiency... Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and
obvious... I think that the fundamental difference between our
worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to
believe yours... and we tend to disbelieve ours.”
— Soviet correspondent
based five years in the U.S.
quoted on
thirdworldtraveler.com
“The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a
central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the
President’s foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows
or supports foreign governments while reporting ‘intelligence’
justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in
such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapons capability, to support
presidential policy.
“Disinformation is a large part of its covert
action responsibility, and the American people are the primary
target of its lies.”
— Ralph McGehee
former CIA intelligence analyst
Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA
“The [Central Intelligence] Agency has owned
outright more than 240 Media operations around the world, including
newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, radio and television
stations, and wire services, and has partially controlled many
more.”
— Michael Parenti
Political scientist and author of
Democracy for the Few and
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media
“It’s been demonstrated that well within two
minutes of watching television, most people enter a hypnotic alpha
state bordering on theta. Viewers in this state are no longer able
to critically evaluate, discern, or pass judgement from their own
moral database on the material being viewed. The information just
flows, unimpeded, into their subconscious year in and year out.”
— Jeff Rense
talk-radio host
Rense.com
“I am astonished, each time I come to the U.S.,
by the ignorance of a high percentage of the population, which knows
almost nothing about Latin America or about the world. It’s quite
blind and deaf to anything that may happen outside the frontiers of
the U.S.”
— Eduardo Galeano
Latin American writer and historian
The Progressive, July 1999
“In the [U.S.] media, the world is turned upside
down. The Contras and the KLA are ‘democratizers’; the lethal
sanctions against [the people of] Iraq exist to deliver its people
from their dictator; the destruction of Yugoslavia through aerial
bombardment of civilians and their infrastructure is a ‘humanitarian
intervention.’”
— Michelle Stoddard
CovertAction Quarterly magazine
“To make sense of [American] political discourse,
it’s necessary to give a running translation into English, decoding
the doublespeak of the media, academic social scientists and the
secular priesthood generally.
“...the effect [of doublespeak] is to make it
impossible to find words to talk about matters of human significance
in a coherent way. We can then be sure that little will be
understood about how our society works and what is happening in the
world...”
— Noam Chomsky
What Uncle Sam Really Wants
“The great masses of the people... more easily
fall victims to a big lie than a small one.”
— Adolf Hitler
Mein Kampf
“History is a lie agreed upon.”
— Napoleon
“You furnish the pictures and I will furnish the war.”
— William Randolph Hearst
Hearst was the owner of a chain of grossly
dishonest, jingoistic newspapers. In 1898 he sent the famous
artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to provide American newspaper
readers with sketches of the Cuban insurrection against Spanish
rule. When Remington arrived he found no insurrection happening.
He wired Hearst, saying: “Everything quiet. No trouble here. There
will be no war.” Hearst wired back the notorious reply above.
“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies,
putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man
will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will
diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of
them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is
just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this
process of grotesque self-deception.”
— Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger
1916
“The process [of mass-media deception] has to be
conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision,
but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a
feeling of falsity and hence of guilt... To tell deliberate lies
while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has
become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to
draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny
the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account
of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably
necessary.”
— George Orwell
in the book 1984
“One of the intentions of corporate-controlled
media is to instill in people a sense of disempowerment, of
immobilization and paralysis. Its outcome is to turn you into good
consumers. It is to keep people isolated, to feel that there is no
possibility for social change.”
— David Barsamian
journalist and publisher
“History will have to record that the greatest
tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident
clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good
people.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
emancipator
“The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been
accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing.
Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view,
is silence about truth.”
— Aldous Huxley
“We have the greatest opportunity the world has
ever seen, as long as we remain honest — which will be as long as we
can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become
inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and
Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.”
— Thomas Jefferson
3rd U.S. President
“A popular government without popular information
or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a
tragedy or perhaps both.
“Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a
people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with
the power knowledge gives.”
— James Madison
co-author of the United States Constitution
now defunct
“I know of no country in which there is so little
independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”
— Alexis de Tocqueville
French political thinker, traveller
author of Democracy in America
1805-1859
“Our government has kept us in a perpetual state
of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor —
with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some
terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going
to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it...”
— General Douglas MacArthur
1957
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep
the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by
menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary.”
— H. L. Mencken
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be
brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to
do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the
pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to
danger.”
— Herman Goering
Nazi Air Force (Luftwaffe) commander
at the Nuremberg Trials
“...the rank and file are usually much more
primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be
essentially simple and repetitious.
“The most brilliant propagandist technique will
yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind
constantly... it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them
over and over.”
— Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister
“How fortunate for governments that the people
they administer don’t think.”
— Adolf Hitler
“Only two things are infinite: the universe and
human stupidity... and I’m not sure about the former.”
— Albert Einstein
“If you want free speech you can go down to a street corner and
shout.”
— Jim Olson
owner of Humboldt Internet
September 26, 2001
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