Propaganda WarThis MintPress study reveals that ninety percent of recent opinion articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal have taken a hawkish view on the Ukraine conflict written by pundits tied to the national security state promoting NATO as a defender of the free world & describe Putin as Hitler incarnate.
So there is another ‘leak’ of papers about tax saving offshore investments by people the U.S. doesn’t like: Continue reading
19 June 2021 — MintPress News
In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained, although trust in the media has been plummeting for years.
by Alan Macleod
22 March 2021 — FAIR
The Guardian (3/17/21) pretends not to understand the difference between overthrowing a government and arresting someone for overthrowing a government.
One can imagine an editor of the London-based Guardian (3/17/21) shaking her head sadly as she typed the headline: “Cycle of Retribution Takes Bolivia’s Ex-President From Palace to Prison Cell.” The subhead told readers, “Jeanine Áñez’s government once sought to jail the country’s former leader Evo Morales for terrorism and sedition—now she faces the same charges.”
10 March 2021 — FAIR
UN investigator Alena Douhan (2/12/21) “urges the US government to end the national emergency regarding Venezuela.”
Alena Douhan, the UN special rapporteur on the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights, published her preliminary report on February 12 on the impact of US and European sanctions on Venezuela.
5 March 2021 — FAIR
NBC‘s headline (2/26/21) is more confident than the article it accompanies, which says that “Iranian-backed militias were most likely behind the attack the US said it was “retaliating against.”
When the Biden administration bombed Syria on February 25, the attack killed “at least 22,” most of them members of Iraqi militias, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based monitoring organization opposed to the Syrian government. The US said the bombing was retaliation for three rocket attacks on US bases in Iraq that it claims were carried out by groups allied with Iran (NBC, 2/25/21). In one of the attacks, rockets fired at Erbil airport killed a military contractor and an Iraqi civilian.
23 October 2020 — FAIR
Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party won a decisive victory in the country’s presidential elections on Sunday, with its candidate Luis Arce apparently winning by a large enough margin to avoid a runoff, likely achieving an absolute majority. The leading opposing candidate, neoliberal Carlos Mesa, and the right-wing unelected President Jeanine Áñez congratulated Arce on his victory. Continue reading
2 July 2020 — Children’s Health Defense
By Jeremy R. Hammond and the Children’s Health Defense Team
In November 2019, the Washington Post and other major news media accused Children’s Health Defense (CHD) of using Facebook advertisements to spread “misinformation” about vaccines. The basis for these accusations, which have since continued, is a study published in the prestigious medical journal Vaccine that named CHD as a top buyer of vaccine-related Facebook ads. What the media failed to inform the public, however, is that the government-funded authors of this study failed to identify even a single example of a Facebook ad from CHD that contained any misinformation.
5 March 2020 — FAIR
The Washington Post editorial board (11/11/19) stated as fact that Bolivian President Evo Morales “moved to falsify the results of the October 20 vote so as to hand him a first-round victory.”
President Evo Morales won re-election in Bolivia’s presidential election last October 20, as pre-election polls predicted. He received 47% of the vote in an election with 88% turnout. He beat his nearest rival by just over 10 percentage points, which meant a second round was not required.
24 August 2019 — Strategic Culture Foundation
Jeff Bezos is the owner of the daily newspaper in Washington DC, the Washington Post, which leads America’s news-media and their almost 100% support of (and promotions for) neoconservatism — American imperialism, or wars. This includes sanctions, coups, and military invasions, against countries that America’s billionaires want to control but don’t yet control — such as Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia, Libya, and China.
7 April 2018 — FAIR
The White House made clear that Trump’s talk of pulling out of Syria was just talk (Independent, 4/4/18)–but not before numerous media figures expressed alarm that the illegal occupation might end.
At a rally in Cleveland last week, President Donald Trump said that the US will get out of Syria “very soon.” It is now clear that the 4,000 US troops currently occupying Syria (Washington Post, 10/31/17) will in fact stay in Syria (Independent, 4/4/18), even though keeping troops in another country in defiance of that country’s government is a violation of international law. Yet the very possibility of US withdrawal from Syria rendered apoplectic journalists who are convinced of the legitimacy of Washington’s domination of the country—international law be damned.
24 January 2018 — FAIR
The Washington Post (10/2/17) maintains that is unfair to compare the wealth of its owner with that of ordinary people.
The vaunted Washington Post fact-checking team (10/2/17) took a look at this assertion:
Bernie Sanders Claims the World’s Six Wealthiest People Have as Much Wealth as Half the Global Population
6 June 2017 — FAIR
The Washington Post (3/8/17) quoted former Ambassador Gerald Feierstein on the wisdom of selling Raytheon weapons to Saudi Arabia–without noting that Feierstein’s Middle East Institute is funded by both Saudi Arabia and Raytheon. (image: Middle East Institute)
In a piece for the Just Security blog (6/5/17) about the impact of weapons industry contributions on a Saudi arms vote, Ryan Goodman notes that “money also pollutes other policy spaces that influence congressional votes”—including the news media:
In March of this year, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee invited former ambassador Gerald Feierstein—director of the Center for Gulf Affairs at the Middle East Institute—to speak about the situation in Yemen and about his views on the sale of US arms to the Saudis. As one might have anticipated from his interview in the Washington Post, Feierstein told the committee, “Accusations of war crimes leveled against Saudi and Coalition armed forces and threats to end arms sales to the Saudis have the potential to inflict long-lasting damage to these relationships.”
25 May 2017 — FAIR
Washington Post editorial (9/16/16)
For the third time in a year, the Washington Post has promoted the prosecution of Washington Post sources.
Last September, the Post controversially published “No Pardon for Edward Snowden” (9/16/16), an editorial calling for prosecution of the whistleblower who helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize in 2014.
In the past weeks, two Post columnists have joined the Post editorial board in calling for Post sources to be jailed—this time in regard to the Post’s major scoop (5/16/17) about President Donald Trump leaking classified intelligence to Russian diplomats.
11 January 2017 — FAIR
The Washington Post (1/5/17) “factchecks” Julian Assange’s claims without either proving or disproving them.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Fox News, 1/3/17) again denied that the leaked e-mails he published during the election came from Russia—an assertion contradicted by many anonymous US intelligence officials. “We can say, we have said repeatedly over the last two months, that our source is not the Russian government, and it is not a state party,” Assange told Sean Hannity.
9 December 2016 — FAIR
As the Hillary Clinton campaign slogged toward victory in the long primary campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders, word came from WikiLeaks that it had scored a trove of hacked emails to and from the Democratic National Committee. Among other things, they proved that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, along with their organizations, had been working hand-in-glove to skew the primaries in Clinton’s favor.
5 December 2016 — Media Lens
In the wake of Brexit and Trump, ‘mainstream’ media have done the formerly unthinkable by focusing on media bias. The intensity of focus has been such that the Oxford Dictionaries have announced that ‘post-truth’ is their ‘Word of the Year 2016’.
‘Post-truth’ refers to ‘circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. Continue reading
15 August 2016 — FAIR
The Washington Post (8/10/16) published what has to be one of the most naked examples of projection ever displayed by a major American paper. The Post’s editorial board, in another effort to bash Russia, lumped its President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s increasingly autocratic ruler President Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a generic “strongman” category, and warned of their paranoia:
11 February 2016 — FAIR
Comrades! Commissar Milbank has exposed Bernie Sanders as a false revolutionary! (image: Reuters video accompanying Dana Milbank’s column)
The day before the New Hampshire primary, the Washington Post (2/8/16) ran a column headlined:
—written by Dana Milbank, that noted expert on revolutionary movements.
“For a guy running against the establishment, Bernie Sanders sure seems to crave its approval,” wrote Milbank. “Sanders portrays himself as an iconoclast, an anti-politician. But he behaves in many ways like a conventional pol.”
29 December 2015 — FAIR
The lead image of the Washington Post‘s report on 965 people killed by police in 2015 isn’t of any of the victims, but of one of the killer cops: Lisa Meakle, a Pennsylvania officer acquitted of manslaughter for killing an unarmed David Kassick. (photo: Dan Gleiter/AP)
Concerned that official records undercount the number of people shot and killed by police in the United States every year, the Washington Post (12/26/15) attempted to compile a list of every fatal police shooting in 2015. The paper found nearly a thousand such cases—more than twice as many as the FBI reports in a typical year.
The Post‘s project—which corroborates a similar tally conducted by the British Guardian (6/9/15)—is a journalistic accomplishment, as well as an achievement of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has worked to call attention to police violence in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 