The reaction of the American mainstream media to the National Security Agency leak scandal — personalizing it by disparaging leaker Edward Snowden â has exposed cable news and other mainstream media outlets as government mouthpieces that allow for very few points of view to be aired. This was exceptionally ironic as one of the talking points against Snowden was that he went to countries with less than stellar records of press freedom, such as Russia, China and Ecuador. After all, it isn’t as though the United States offers diverse opinions on its airwaves or in its print outlets.
Just Because You Have Free Speech Doesn’t Mean You Should Speak Freely
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Many of these talking heads still think Russia and China are communist countries, so what do you expect?
We have such a free press that two American journalists, Greg Palast and Glenn Greenwald, work for British media to do exposés on American issues. Yeah, such freedom.
Yep – the media flare-up and piling on top of Paula Deen show that the drones, endless wars, creation of USA-haters and more “heroes” all over the world just fly over the heads of most people, while the “knee-jerk” responses to politically incorrect speech are manic! Where’s the flare-up and piling on over the GOP openly changing the voting time to ram through a ridiculously retrograde law in their war against women’s rights? This is how Ted got blackballed – someone grabbed a few comments of his and it went viral in hate responses. This is the bad side of the Internet and how it became the Tower of Babel it can be.
How free are we if a whistleblower and hero is ‘legally’ a traitor? Media reactions like this just remind us how limited in practice our Bill of Rights is.
If you don’t take politicians at their word, if you don’t for the most part cherish the status quo, if you don’t mostly support the two-party system, there’s no room for you in the echo chamber of the media’s squawking ‘political analysts.’
What does a nation-state’s history of freedom have to do with evading another nation-state’s pigs?
Stark is all too right about journalists here — hell, the United States drove out Greg Palast in the NINETIES and he broke the Florida Voter Fraud/Bush Rigged Election 2000 story in freakn’ October of that year — and I have never met a non-political junkie who knows that fact.
Paula Dean is a very good mention, rikster. Racists and bigots are acceptable if they’re part of the machine. So long as the racism serves the aristocracy directly, you’ll always get the benefit of a doubt from Liberals(tm). However, white trash and rednecks need not apply, even if they’re rich. (There’s rich and there’s establishment rich — just ask Martha Stewart.) Not to say that Paula Dean is a nice person, but the media jumped at the chance to crucify her. Remember when Jessica Lynch’s black comrade-in-arms was denied medical assistance by the military? Lynch had to campaign to get her help.
The U.S. is sinister not merely because it has a propaganda machine, it has a narrative machine, and if you don’t fit that narrative your story is dead not due to mere censorship, but due to the media zealously looking at something else. Pravda-style “nothing to see here” is for pikers; better to simply pretend that the dangerous facts didn’t happen at all and grant no acknowledgement, then concentrate on something petty, discouraging the non-lowest-common-denominator from even bothering to demand that the news show news.
Now, Ted – surely it’s a matter of sheer coincidence that that «vibrant free press» never saw a war of aggression abroad it didn’t like (at least until it turned sour)….
Henri