Corporate Media Uses Hyperlinks To Confuse, Not To Clarify

 

If anyone wishes to argue with me that establishment media is NOT beyond abysmal and that many independent journalists are NOT doing vastly superior work, I offer this example, one of many, as exhibit A: https://www.forbes.com/sites/oliviaenos/2022/04/04/ms-bachelet---dont-go-to-xinjiang/?sh=a4e993c14d3e

There is no reason to subject yourself to the painfully obvious propaganda that is the article, I ask you only to focus on the first sentence of the fourth paragraph: “These horrific realities are very well-documented, yet the High Commissioner will see none of it on her visit to Xinjiang.” The words “well-documented” are underlined and in blue, meaning it is a hyperlink. One would think it would be a hyperlink to what it actually suggests, well-documented evidence of HORRIFIC REALITIES! Click on it. Go ahead, click on it.

It takes you to a blog post from the Heritage Foundation website. Look them up if you don’t know who they are. Suffice it for me to say they are not a source you should consider when you want reliable, unbiased information. But forget the source, even that doesn’t matter. The link takes you to a blog post titled “China Transparency Report”.

I thought the issue was a genocide of an ethnic minority. The Forbes article mentions “ongoing crimes against the Uyghurs”, talks about “China’s mounting atrocity crimes against Uyghurs” and “ongoing genocide and crimes against humanity”. “Today, an estimated 1.8 million to 3 million Uyghurs are held in political reeducation camps.” Imagine having that kind of build-up, and clicking on a link promising that “These horrific realities are very well-documented”, only to see the title “China Transparency Report”.

Yeah, I read it. Not many people read the links provided by mainstream media. You should, because even if you trust mainstream corporate media (you shouldn’t), you should trust but verify. But I read the China Transparency Report and it didn’t mention Uyghurs once. Nor the Xinjiang province. Nor crimes against humanity. Nor genocide. It is at this point where a rational person begins to believe that something irrational is unfolding.

There was, however, this hyperlink at the bottom of the blog post:

This is one step further than anyone would expect an honest source to ask of readers in search of truth. Any earnest and experienced searcher of truth would start thinking their chain was being yanked. But someone trying to prove a point, such as myself, would be willing to push that button and waste his time in order to prove exactly how useless establishment journalism is in providing people with useful information.

So I clicked it, confident at this point that I would not find any supporting evidence. I clicked it, knowing that I would have to concentrate very hard on a stream of nonsense in order to prove to others just how vapid the reporting of mainstream media really was.

Click.

You’ll have to concentrate on the upper right hand part of the screen. I tried to use the Snip And Sketch program in order to show you the warning I received, but the warnings disappeared when I tried it. It says “File Not Downloaded, Potential Security Risk”.

You’ll forgive me if I do not investigate further, I believe I’ve made my point to those willing to consider it, whereas no matter how far down I dig I will never make my point to those set in their beliefs. If anyone would care to do the download despite the warning, please let me know if you have found any “well documented” “horrific realities”. I do not hold out any great hope that such evidence is forthcoming. One does not light a lamp only to put it under a blanket.

Keep in mind that this is not my first rodeo and this if not the first time I have followed link after link without finding any substance to what is presented me. Rather, I find only obfuscation and — pardon the term — bullshit. Here is my attempt to dig down and find sources using the provided hyperlinks on the Uyghur Muslim assertions in the Guardian. Here is another article that not only has hyperlinks that do not mention what the headline promises, the article itself does not even mention Russia or Russians. Although it is a lot of work on my part, I promise to bring you more evidence on this subject in the future. I come across it all the time and you will too once you stop making the assumptions that their hyperlinks will always lead you to actual evidence.

This isn’t an accident. This is not an anomaly or a “whoopsie”. This is happening all the time at the most respected journalistic institutions. This is the media showing their contempt for their readers by asserting or promising what it does not deliver. And, might I emphasize, getting away with it. You are letting them get away with it because you trust them even though they are time and again proving themselves untrustworthy. This, my friend, is on you, as it is on me, as it is on all of us. We need to hold the media up to basic standards and we need to hold people accountable when they fail to meet basic journalistic standards. This will not be a small task.

This is journalism in the 21st Century. Don’t ask me to explain it — it is not rational — but please allow me to point out its many failings. This is simply me, a metal fabricator, pointing out what is wrong with establishment media. I welcome any contrary views from those who have a better understanding than myself. I only ask of you not to yank my chain, as establishment media has time and again done. Be honest, be open, be critical, but do not provide me links to evidence that does not reinforce your claims.

 

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The Slow Strangling Of Our Consciousness

Asking the experts of today to solve the world’s problems is like asking the priests of the volcano god how to end the drought. All they will tell you to do is sacrifice a virgin, it’s all they know. Today’s experts are little different, there are just more of them. Ask them what their solutions are, and they will tell you to bomb it, privatize it or medicate it.

Everyone in a position of power in a corrupt system is de facto corrupt himself. In bowing to a corrupt authority, they have surrendered their conscience, have proven themselves unable to choose between right and wrong. They cannot save us, they can only hurt us. We must help ourselves, there is no other power we can turn to.

Those in power, those whose job it is to inform the public, are more herders of opinion than people interested in expanding our understanding of the circumstances we now face. Their job is to limit the view of those who must toil for the present system in the same way horses are blinkered to prevent them being distracted from the task demanded of them.

And in blinkering others, they blinker themselves. Intent on their task, they are so focused on it that they lose sight of their larger obligation to humanity. Not constricted themselves, they yet become even more myopic than those they blinker because, as it is said, none are so blind as those who refuse to see.

An object in motion tends to stay in motion. A rock rolling downhill not only continues to roll downhill, it picks up speed as it does. Media that is more concerned with directing thought than it is opening new paradigms and providing greater context for its viewers will not merely maintain the status quo but will continue to narrow the window through which the world is shown. This has been occurring for decades now, though it has happened just slowly enough that we somehow have not become aware of it. The imperfections of the human mind are many, and the study of how those imperfections can be exploited has been well funded. Kind and decent human beings can be manipulated into supporting the most inhuman of systems if they are led to believe that the “experts” know more than they. Research the Milgram experiments if you have any doubt.

There are two ways thought can travel: outward and inward. We can expand our understanding of the world we live in by permitting ourselves to hold more than one possibility, one paradigm at a time. By not demanding hard and simplistic answers we can drift off into seeing facts and events from multiple perspectives. This requires a degree of faith, a relative absence of fear. In this way we can acquire a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of the world and our place in it.

But fear is a barrier that bounces such understanding back upon ourselves. The media has erected a curtain of fear that causes us to seek simple answers in order to deal with immediate threats that may or not be real. The media would have you believe that ISIS, fascists, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and people of the party opposite yours are right outside the door. The crisis is perpetual, though ever-shifting, and in such a situation, you have little recourse but to trust those who have been kind enough to alert you to the threat. They have to run the media this way, it’s good for business.

Once your thoughts and perceptions begin to peer inward, once you begin to discard possibilities and embrace simplistic solutions, the lens through which you see the world continues to shrink. And like the teeth of a predator, the tools of the media are designed to grab hold of you and constantly direct you towards its awaiting maw. You sit transfixed, staring with fear and incomprehension at the world outside which is actually the world inside the media’s constricted narrative.

It is worth reminding yourself that the media is not your friend. What they do they do for money. There are ample examples easily found on the internet where those who are in the know admit as much. The CEO of CBS himself said of Donald Trump’s presidential run, “It might not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Are these the sort of people you want guiding you, guiding your nation? Are these the sort of people in whose hands you want to place your emotional and spiritual well-being? The future of the planet?

They do what they do for money. They do what they do for self-enrichment. Oh, I know, the mantra of the day is that the free enterprise system that rewards individual greed ends up being the ultimate delivery system for all that is good for us. It is repeated to us constantly until we accept it uncritically, indeed unthinkingly. And who is it delivering that message to us night and day? The media, a conglomeration of corporations that not only seek profit for themselves but seek a cultural milieu that justifies such profiteering for themselves and their sponsors.

The result is ultra hi-def television that nonetheless offers us only black and white broadcasting, the contrast level turned so high that there is little to no gray area. The definition our televisions are capable of is nothing short of miraculous, and yet so little detail is ever provided. Instead, instances of violence are looped continuously and the narrative that accompanies the video must play to the beat.

In short, the media is a Frankenstein monster created by powerful corporate interests and faithfully obedient to the Military Industrial Complex, the more direct weapon of those same corporate interests. It has a job, and it is not to inform you. It has a mission statement, and it is not the search for truth. It has an obligation to someone, and it is not the viewer. Unless you truly believe you live in a free society, you must know this is true.

You do know it is true. On some level you are unable to accept the lie. In your calmer moments, those moments where the media is not busily herding ideas that have strayed too far from the official narrative the way a sheepdog herds the flock, you have admitted as much. But then the powers that be find some new unsavory business to attend to and the media is put into motion once again in order to justify some great evil, such as destroying the environment or bombing nations that have done nothing to us. Then the fear sets in and you cling to the narrative the media spins the way Harlow’s lab monkeys clung to their cloth mothers.

It's time to step away from the artificial zone of comfort the media has constructed for us. Not only is it a trap but it is one that crushes us once we are inside it.

It will seem like madness at first, because you have been conditioned your whole life to think within the box. Those paths to death and destruction are the only ones we’ve been shown, and you’ve been corrected every time you’ve strayed too far from them. But one only has to look honestly at the ever-shrinking mindset that the authorities present to realize they offer no hope to humanity. They offer death, fear, environmental destruction. Their hope for the future is a technology bereft of all morality or humanity, Their hope is that perhaps we can export a few fortunate ones to some new planet to begin again this dysfunctional system. Hope for tomorrow is just another product or viewpoint they’re trying to sell, not a guiding principle.

We’re on our own. Humanity must evolve or perish. The system that exists today, the one all the authorities and institutions promote in order to advance themselves, is a death cult hell-bent on wasting Earth’s precious resources to make weapons in order to blow up more of Earth’s precious resources. Where are the voices in government, in business, or the media that decry the insanity? They are not merely silent, they are loudly crying for more.

Syria, Russia, And What I Can Say With Certainty (Part 3)

What I Can Say With Certainty

It came without warning like a force of nature, a tsunami crashing upon the land, sweeping all other concerns away. It was like a sudden lightning storm in the dark of night, making clear what was previously obscure. And yet there was a sense of coordination to it, perhaps more like a blitzkrieg than thunderstorm. One moment everything was in the shadows, the next everything so clear, so fully certain.

And fear. Although we were oh so very certain of so much, fear was nevertheless part of the equation. We were both absolutely certain of many facts while possessing a gaping hole in our knowledge where our worst fears could reside.

I refer to the revelation of Russian hacking, where in no time at all the story became the story of stories, driving everything else from our consciousness. The media only broke from the story to report on Syria, which only further highlighted the insidious nature of the Russians.

The source of all this certainty and fear, at least initially, was unnamed. Sometimes this source was an unnamed intelligence insider, sometimes the source was an anonymous senior congressional staffer. Here is an example of the typical news article reporting on Russian hacking, containing many different esteemed sources without names or faces: NBC News In this case, the source was listed in the title as “U.S.”

This is not journalism, this is not even reporting. This is simply putting into print press releases sent from government agencies. And yet they somehow needed three reporters names on the byline: what exactly did they do?

As far as I’m aware, not a single news agency did any actual investigation into the matter. They simply reported what was told to them by government officials, reported the narrative and in the process swallowed it whole. In the weeks and months that have now followed, never once did I witness in any mainstream American news outlet any sort of critical questioning of the official narrative. It was simply accepted as fact.

Never in the history of germs, conspiracy theories, or cute puppy videos have I ever seen anything spread so quickly, so authoritatively.

Well, that’s not quite true. I have seen this sort of behavior on the part of the media before, many times in fact, though the previous practice has obviously made for perfection. It was the very likeness of those other examples that made me question the Russian hacking story, even more than the story’s inherent flaws.

I have seen it played out before, in the build-up to wars. I have seen it played out when we wished to demonize a country or a government. I have seen it every time our government is about to do something very bad and knows it needs to invent justifications for why they are doing it.

Usually such media blitzes are accompanied by first-hand accounts of babies being killed. Usually words like “genocide” or “WMD” are used to pepper arguments that are strong on emotion and weak on facts and logic. But as such typical propaganda tools didn’t seem to apply, we relied on unflattering pictures of Vladimir Putin to become a focus for our rage. His very Russianness was enough for us old enough to remember Rocky IV or Rambo III (you remember, when Rambo went to help the heroic “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan, those same types who later killed little girls for trying to go to school, who blew up statues of the Buddha and harbored the likes of Osama Bin Laden. Those freedom fighters are still alive and well today, fighting our enemies in Syria as they once did in Afghanistan).

It turns out it’s not the strength of the argument that counts but the conviction in the voice of those who deliver it and the frequency of times it is delivered. Cults indoctrinate members by surrounding them with people repeating the same message while cutting recruits off from those who might say something different. The Russian Hacking story is a similar case where the story was everywhere at all times while any voices to the contrary were made to seem like Russian propagandists or ignorant, racist Trump supporters.

I suppose that’s why the story caught hold in the more liberal sections of the population, among those who despised Donald Trump and could not fathom how Hillary could be likewise despised by anyone with morals and a brain. Surely Russian hacking is the only possible explanation.

Besides, what if it is true? What if the Russians did hack our election and managed to get their chosen candidate elected? If this is the case, then is not all of the fear warranted? Isn’t it only common sense that the media spend so much time getting to the truth on an issue of such importance?

Perhaps, but that is not what the media is doing. It is not attempting to unearth facts and string them logically into different possible narratives. The media is merely repeating what certain government agencies are leaking to them. Many, often the ostensibly most “progressive”, are amplifying it. Funny, but I can no longer recall what Rachel Maddow used to talk about before the Russian hacking story came along.

In short, the only thing the media has done was to foster panic and hatred. It has used the Russian hacking story as a focus for all the hatred Hillary voters are feeling while ignoring all the horrible things Trump is doing. The Democrats have now become the party of war and imperialism and they just don’t seem to see anything wrong with that.

Thank God for the deep state. They are the heroes in this narrative. The cry is that something must be done and the only people who can possibly get us out of the crisis we’re in are those anonymous, unaccountable government agents who want what is best for us. We must surrender thoughts of being in charge of our own government in moments like these, must relinquish control to the experts who have selflessly prepared their whole lives for a situation like this. Once the crisis has passed, they will gladly cede the power they have temporarily taken on as a burden. The only thing you need concern yourself with now is maintaining a proper amount of fear and helplessness.

That is the argument being given by the deep state. The media does not merely not question it, it wholeheartedly endorses it. I have a different take. I believe there is never a good time to panic, there is never a good time to refrain from critical thinking. One needs to keep one’s head, especially in a crisis. When a group foregoes reason and abandons themselves to the herd mentality, that is when things go horribly wrong. That is when people stampede each other in an attempt to escape a burning building, it is when economies collapse because of runs on the market. It is the start of wars.

Human beings should never forsake their higher faculties in troubling times, nor should the media ask them to. And while we’re at it, there is never a good time for the media to abandon their central tenets, their standard operating procedures and their principles. Which brings me to the point of this post.

In the first two parts of this three-part blog, I spoke of what I was not sure of, whether Russia hacked or Syria gassed. Now it is time for me to speak of what I know with certainty: when the government has an agenda to push—a goal it is intent on achieving—it is then that the illusion of an independent media dissolves. When called upon, the media abandons its alleged commitment to objective journalism in favor of channeling the official line. Of that there can be no doubt. Never have I seen it work otherwise. It seems to be a universal law that power wins out over principle.

NPR, The New York Times, CNN, etc., they all capitulated to the official story that had at its source anonymous officials from private and unaccountable government agencies. They did not do what news organizations are supposed to do, dig for the truth and corroborate testimony.

There is not a single reason for the failure of the U.S. media, not a heavy-handed power that is easy to point to. Don Henley made it all too clear in his song Dirty Laundry just how vapid TV news was in 1982 and it has rapidly gone downhill since then. Where once news sources made some pretense of putting truth over profit, now just as in every other field, profit is the only justification for anything. It would be foolish to believe that the same media that obsesses about Caytlain Jenner can switch gears when an important story arises. Talking heads are cheaper than hiring a staff of investigative journalists, and a whole lot less troublesome.

There are few independent media outlets anymore, institutions that aren’t funded directly or indirectly by powerful interests. There are some real investigative journalists still out there but they have been pushed to the edges. And now those edges are being labelled “fake news” by those who wouldn’t know news if it bit them. Journalists who practice the long-established craft are either forced to beg for contributions like Greg Palast, or have gone to work for RT like Chris Hedges. Do your country a favor and throw a few bucks in the tin cup of one of the last of the old-time journalists: Donate

Journalism is dead. What they now call news is whatever they feel will draw and keep the interest of viewers for their advertisers. Investigation is expensive, while talking heads from the pentagon are willing to come in and recite the official position for free. War is profitable, not only for the weapons manufacturers but for ratings as well.

I can’t tell you if Russia was in any way involved in the hacking of the 2016 presidential election, nor can I tell you if President Assad used Sarin gas on his own people. The information is not available to me. The mainstream media has no interest in or ability to deliver the information citizens require to make the best decisions for ourselves and our country. Of that I am quite certain.