How western media helped turn Israel’s genocide into ‘fake news’

Middle East Eye| Jonathan Cook

Israel’s justification for the mass slaughter of Gaza’s people and their starvation - now officially confirmed as a famine engineered by Israel - was built on a parade of easily discredited lies from the start: of beheaded infants, of babies in ovens, of mass rape. 

It should surprise no one that Israel continued advancing similarly outrageous lies as it set about - as all genocidal regimes must do - dismantling the most basic infrastructure of survival for Gaza’s population. 

It cut off humanitarian aid delivered by the United Nations agency Unrwa, and destroyed the enclave’s hospitals, while killing, jailing and torturing its medical personnel. 

Israel claimed it had documents proving the UN was a front for Hamas - documents it never produced. Meanwhile, all 36 of Gaza’s hospitals have been attacked - attacks whose implicit rationale was that they were built atop Hamas “command and control centres”, though those centres have never been found.

Expanding this narrative, Israel rounded up and jailed the enclave’s leading doctors, who had been working round the clock to treat the endless tide of maimed men, women and children, as supposed “Hamas operatives” in disguise. 

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Criticize Israel? You’re Fired.

The Intercept / Global Research

A climate of fear is gripping U.S. newsrooms as a growing list of journalists have been fired, suspended, or otherwise sidelined after refusing to abide by the pro-Israel bias across the U.S. news media.

The New York Times, Associated Press, BBC, and Los Angeles Times are just a handful of the more prominent news outlets where journalists say they were sidelined after criticizing Israel or expressing sympathy for Palestinians.

Meanwhile, the death toll in the Gaza Strip now exceeds 18,000, and more than 80 percent of Palestinians there have been displaced by the war.

Since October 7, there have been numerous incidents reported in which journalists were fired, demoted, suspended, or otherwise silenced after voicing criticism of Israel, including:

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See also:  "Israel’s Genocide Has Killed More Journalists Than WWI and WWII Combined" - "As of late March [2025] at least 232 journalists have been killed in the Gaza genocide, with the vast majority being Palestinians, according to a new paper by the Costs of War project in Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Nearly 380 journalists have been wounded in the violence as of January, per the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate". 

The head of the Committee to Protect Journalists stated in 2024, "Israel's war on Gaza is more deadly to journalists than any previous war"

Exclusive: Google Helped Israel Spread War Propaganda to 45 Million Europeans

Mint Press News | Aln Macleod

While it continues its conflict with its neighbors, Israel is fighting another war just as intensely, spending gigantic amounts of money bombarding Europe with messaging justifying their actions, and scaremongering Europeans that Iranian nuclear missiles will soon be turning their cities into rubble.

A MintPress study has found that, since it struck Iran on June 13, the Israeli Government Advertising Agency has paid for tens of millions of advertisements on YouTube alone. In clear breach of Google’s policies, these ads justify and lionize the attack as a necessary defense of Western civilization, and claim that Israel is carrying out “one of the largest humanitarian missions in the world” in Gaza.

The countries most targeted by this campaign include the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Germany, and Greece.

Information War

“A fanatical regime firing missiles at civilians, while racing towards nuclear weapons. While Iran deliberately targets cities, Israel acts with precision to dismantle this threat.” Thus starts one Israeli government ad that hundreds of thousands of YouTube viewers in Europe have been compelled to watch.

“Terror architects behind the elimination of Israel plan: eliminated. Israel targets only military and terror sites, not civilians. But the threat remains,” the voiceover continues, over ominous music and high-tech graphics. “We will finish the mission for our people, for humanity. Israel does what must be done,” it concludes. 

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Israel Assassinates 'Voice of Gaza,' Al Jazeera Journalist Anas al-Sharif

Mondoweiss

The Israeli army assassinated Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif and several of his colleagues on Sunday in a targeted airstrike on a journalists' tent outside al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. The strike has effectively wiped out the entire staff of Al Jazeera in Gaza City, claiming the lives of one child and six journalists, including Al Jazeera correspondent Muhammad Qreiqeh.

Widely celebrated as the "voice of Gaza," al-Sharif's assassination comes after months of incitement against him and puts an end to his coverage ahead of an expected Israeli invasion of Gaza City. The Israeli army has reportedly given Gaza City residents until October 7 to evacuate, when the Israeli army reportedly plans to invade northern Gaza as part of its stated plan of conquering the entire Strip.

Al-Sharif and Qreiqeh each have two children. Both stayed behind in northern Gaza as their families fled south when Israel forcibly displaced the population at the beginning of the genocide in late 2023.

Shortly after the airstrike that killed al-Sharif and his colleagues, the Israeli army released a statement claiming that al-Sharif was a member of Hamas and was responsible for "rocket attacks" on Israeli civilians and soldiers. The Israeli army claimed that "intelligence and documents from Gaza" allegedly "proved he was a Hamas operative."

In October 2024, the Israeli army published the names of al-Sharif and five other journalists who it claimed were Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters. One of those journalists, Drop Site contributor and Al Jazeera Mubasher correspondent Hossam Shabat, was assassinated on March 24, 2025. Another journalist on the "hit list" was Anas al-Sharif.

Israel has killed 238 journalists in Gaza since the start of the genocide, the Gaza Government Media Office said in a statement on Monday.

"The targeting of journalists and media institutions is a full-fledged war crime that aims to silence the truth and erase evidence of the genocide."

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Crypto Is Part of Free Speech, and Free Speech Is Everything

Graham Smith 
Activist Post 

 On July 23, U.S. Attorney General William Barr gave a speech demanding big players in the tech industry work with government agencies in providing backdoor entry points for encrypted devices and software. Per his reasoning, certain devices and messaging services pose a safety threat by providing a secure, third-party-inaccessible area where crime can rapidly proliferate. He didn’t note that this “warrant-proof encryption” also protects journalists, researchers, and individuals in areas of political unrest living under corrupt governments. Secure encryption also protects and verifies the financial assets and transactions of cryptocurrency holders everywhere. If strings of code — ideas, in essence — are now being made illegal, it would appear that a brand new battle for humanity’s free expression is just beginning. 

Crypto Is Free Speech

Article 19 of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Of course, governments worldwide, and the UN itself, do not abide by this proclamation, but that last point is still of critical importance. The reception, transmission, and search for information via any media “regardless of frontiers” is part of free speech. Crypto is a technology. An idea. And it’s not limited by geographical constraints or “frontiers.” It’s a means by which to impart, receive, and seek information. After all, a bitcoin transaction or encrypted message is, in essence, an expression of information. 

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The Rise of the Robot Reporter

NY Times

 

As reporters and editors find themselves the victims of layoffs at digital publishers and traditional newspaper chains alike, journalism generated by machine is on the rise.

Roughly a third of the content published by Bloomberg News uses some form of automated technology. The system used by the company, Cyborg, is able to assist reporters in churning out thousands of articles on company earnings reports each quarter.

The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures. And unlike business reporters, who find working on that kind of thing a snooze, it does so without complaint.

Untiring and accurate, Cyborg helps Bloomberg in its race against Reuters, its main rival in the field of quick-twitch business financial journalism, as well as giving it a fighting chance against a more recent player in the information race, hedge funds, which use artificial intelligence to serve their clients fresh facts.

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'The Book Community' and the return of book-burning

Tim Dawson
Spiked

The Book Community has jumped the shark. Who are the 'Book Community'? Well, they're the nebulous group of super-woke flakes who bullied young-adult (YA) fantasy author Amelie Wen Zhao into pulling the publication of her debut novel, Blood Heir. While it wasn't slated for release until June, some review copies had been sent out. Apparently the book has already shaken some readers - and some people who obviously haven't read it - to the core. Zhao's depiction of slavery in one scene has been deemed problematic. Reverse racism, lack of genderqueer representation, and a central antagonist with a limp are some of the other criticisms leveled against it, and Twitter is fuming. Zhao has issued an apology and agreed with her publishers to cancel publication.

The novel is probably terrible. I'm not particularly into sword and sorcery stuff - though the fact that it has upset so many flakes has naturally piqued my interest. But you don't need to like, or even read, a book to defend its right to be published. Of course, Amelie Wen Zhao halted publication herself. You could argue that she has 'listened to feedback' and acted accordingly. But the line between listening to feedback and being bullied by very angry zealots is a thin one, and this incident seems to have crossed it. Zhao relies on these people for her income and is scared. That's understandable. And really, really bad. Our cultural landscape is increasingly controlled by the permanently outraged. Books - even trashy fantasy novels - are a key component of civilisation. They are tangible, material repositories of humanity, in all its forms. Burning books is the sign of a society going wildly wrong. Banning books, also. Scaring authors into pulling the publication of their books surely sits in the same egregious territory.

Nobody has a monopoly on morality and it is gross to try to force writers to comply with your particular worldview. There is no requirement for any minority group (or, for that matter, any majority group) to be represented in a story. There is no requirement when representation does occur for it to be positive or negative. People who think otherwise have forgotten what fiction is, and they have forgotten what freedom is, too. 

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Digital Media Is a Wasteland

John DeVore
Medium

1. I am a writer and an editor who launched his first site in 1999. Since then, I have either launched or edited at least 30 sites, maybe more. I also used to drink too much. I am probably responsible for a hundred billion clicks, the most precious resource in the world.

Over the years, I have pivoted from print to digital, from digital to video, from video to digital, and from panic to depression. I have been laid off three times, and each one is different, like a snowflake of pain. I ran a cupcake blog once. I edited 20,000 zingers on a joke website. I have worked for a leading cable news website, and an Emmy-winning comedy website, and the blog of a prestigious magazine. I was an editor for a movie website, a travel website, and for two years I wrote a weekly column for a feminist website, which I’m very proud of even if I never, ever read any of those columns again. I was a mucky-muck for a viral clickbait factory. I ran a website for a mattress company. I have dispensed love and sex advice on the internet because the old saying is true: Those who can, do; those who can’t give love and sex advice on the internet. I was part of an infamous Bush-era political parody website and sometimes, late at night, I wonder if I helped make the world better or worse. I have written thousands of blog posts, slideshows, articles, and essays and I have even won awards. I have also managed social media accounts and real talk, social media is just the internet on crystal meth.

Now, I’m not bragging. Really. I’m not. I just feel that I’m qualified to write about digital media and I have no idea what’s going on and never have. Anyone who says they do is either lying or hasn’t properly had the shit kicked out of them by the internet.

2. Remember the Predator movies? They are a beloved sci-fi horror franchise about a giant alien gorilla-crab monster who hunts human beings. In one of the recent sequels, a group of humans — each more badass than the last — are kidnapped and dropped on another planet, to be hunted by the titular character. At one point, they stumble upon the skeleton of another person and learn that they are not the first group of prey to be dumped onto Planet Predator. Then, later, they meet a human, played magnificently by Lawrence Fishburne, who has found a way to survive on the intergalactic game preserve. Against all odds, he has eked out an existence without being blasted into chunks by lasers or butchered by space swords. But he’d already gone insane from years of isolation and fear — and from the knowledge that at any moment, randomly, he could be killed in a spectacular fashion.

Anyway, that’s how I feel after working in digital media for 20 years.

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This Startup Is Training AI to Gobble Up the News and Rewrite It Free of Bias

Comment: Let's dig that hole just a bit deeper....

--------------------

Singularity Hub

Bias in journalism is nothing new, but there are growing concerns technology is pushing us into echo chambers where we only hear one side of the story. Now a startup says it’s using AI to bring us a truly impartial source of news.

Knowhere launched earlier this month, alongside an announcement that it had raised $1.8 million in venture capital. The site uses AI to aggregate news from hundreds of sources and create three versions of each story: one skewed to the left, one skewed to the right, and one that’s meant to be impartial.

Natural language processing algorithms trawl through more than a thousand news sources to identify popular stories, the company told Motherboard. It analyzes these stories for narrative, facts, and bias and uses the resulting database to put together three versions of the story. In non-political stories the categories are impartial, positive, and negative.

These stories can be written in anywhere from 1 to 15 minutes, depending on how much disagreement there is between sources and human editors, who then give the article a once-over before it goes live.

The company says its aim is to get machines to do what humans can’t: sift through the flood of stories written about major events to distill the most salient facts and narratives.
“We are practicing a form of journalism that overcomes information overload and its resulting silos, attempting to reconcile the many different narratives spun out of every story, and taking our first steps towards a truly comprehensive and comprehensible source of record for all,” co-founder and chief editor Nathaniel Barling said in a statement.

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Modern Music: Promoting pedophilia to adults and sexual debauchery to children

Elliot Overton
Sott.net 

Human beings seem to thrive both cognitively and affectively when they are exposed to any number of the infinite combinations of melody, harmony and rhythm that make up a particular piece of what we know as "music". Music has the potential to enrich our lives, to enable us to learn about ourselves and others around us and experience and interact with reality in dynamic and creative ways. Music can have profound and unique effects on our well-being, it can help us cope with the stresses that life brings and can make us feel happier in ourselves, and it can also make our brains happier! But there's a darker side to music.

In our technologically 'advanced' society, different types of music are more accessible than ever before. In this day and age, with the multiplicity of specialized MP3 players, mobile phones and other assorted gadgets, an entire album can be downloaded within a matter of seconds... with little or no content restrictions in place.

So how much music do kids actually listen to these days? An English study published by North et al in 2000 showed that a sample of 2,456 adolescents listened to an average of 2.45 hours of music per day. It has also been reported that children aged eight to ten listen to an average of 1 hour per day. A more recent study (Roberts et al) in 2005 showed that a staggering 85% of children aged eight to eighteen years old listened to music on any given day. 

The effect of music and video on a developing human psyche

According to psychologists Ashby and Rich (2005) in their paper, Video killed the radio star:

"Music induces strong emotions that can make individuals more susceptible to changes in attitude or behavior. Multiple studies demonstrated the influence of visual media on risky attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors among adolescents. Combined in a music video, music and visuals may enhance, redirect, or contrast with the effects of the lyrics and introduce new aspects to the media experience that were not understood or considered previously by the viewer.

"The combination of music and video may be synergistic in their effect on adolescent attitudes and behavior. Once music establishes a mood, the lyrics and images that are portrayed may have more impact than either form alone. Music can alter an individual's receptivity to visual presentation. A study from the early years of music television found that the enhancement of rock music with a visual component increased appreciation of the music. Conversely, research shows that after watching music videos, the visual images persist with the viewer even when that individual is listening to an audio only version of a song; most music video viewers ''always'' or ''frequently'' thought of content from the music video when listening to the corresponding music. Rubin et al demonstrated that college students assessed music videos more positively and believed that they were more ''potent'' than music alone "

So, the presence of both audio and visual stimulation can cause the visual image portrayed in a music video to "persist with the viewer"? They further state:

"Music videos socialize young people by communicating ideas about expected behavior, relationships, and male and female roles. Although music videos are diverse and individual music videos portray a variety of gender roles and responsibilities, content analysis of music videos demonstrates that those who use music videos as a source of social learning generally receive specific information about the roles, responsibilities, and behavior of their gender in society."

OK! So we are now aware that children and adolescents listen to a lot of music, and we also can see that music can induce strong emotions and can "communicate ideas about expected behaviors, relationships and male and female roles" playing a definite role in a child's identity formation, while visual images can "persist with the viewer even when that individual is listening to an audio only version of a song". So what type of music do kids today listen to? 

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Israeli soldiers attacking, throwing stones at Press photographers

Two photojournalists are attacked by IDF soldiers in the West Bank Palestinian village of Nabi Saleh, April 24, 2015. Video by Miki Kratsman/Activestills.org.

NATO's Creepy New Plan to Infiltrate Twitter and Facebook

Adam Johnson
Alternet

On Sunday, NATO commander General Philip Breedlove said in an interview with the Associated Press that NATO must do more to “counter Russian propaganda online”:

NATO's supreme commander says the West must do more to counter Russia by employing a rapid-reaction approach to internet communications that counteracts Russia's "false narratives" spread on social media.

Gen. Philip Breedlove said Sunday that Vladimir Putin's Russia has been waging information warfare as part of its actions against Ukraine.

Breedlove said: "We need as a western group of nations or as an alliance to engage in this informational warfare. The way to attack the false narrative is to drag the false narrative into the light and expose it."

While details of such a plan remain vague, this mindset is part of a broader trend of social media psychological warfare that has been emerging largely unnoticed over the past five years. The first question that is rarely asked by our media is the most important one: what constitutes a “false narrative,” and who decides what constitutes one? Recent attempts by UK authorities to stifle the speech of the Russian-backed, English-language TV station RT show that false narratives are whatever Western governments determine they are.

According to the Guardian, "Russia Today is to be investigated by media regulator Ofcom over anti-western comments in a late-night discussion on Ukraine—its sixth ongoing inquiry into the Kremlin-backed news channel following complaints by viewers."

That Western officials would extend this crackdown on Russian-backed narratives from traditional to social media is not surprising. What is worth noting is that the media routinely downplays or under-reports what such a plan would entail—namely, the use of sockpuppet or fake social media accounts that would be used to counter these so-called false narratives. As the Guardian revealed in 2011, the Defense Department has been developing such technology for some time:

The US military is developing software that will let it secretly manipulate social media sites by using fake online personas to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda…
The Centcom contract stipulates that each fake online persona must have a convincing background, history and supporting details, and that up to 50 US-based controllers should be able to operate false identities from their workstations "without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries".
The multiple persona contract is thought to have been awarded as part of a programme called Operation Earnest Voice (OEV), which was first developed in Iraq as a psychological warfare weapon against the online presence of al-Qaida supporters and others ranged against coalition forces. Since then, OEV is reported to have expanded into a $200m programme and is thought to have been used against jihadists across Pakistan, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

These sockpuppet accounts, according to the Guardian report and separate revelations by Anonymous, are not your run-of-the-mill spambot accounts. They are not easily spotted, like Twitter accounts with egg avatars and 15 followers. They are formatted like the accounts of real people and are often operated by real military personnel (who run dozens at a time) to give the appearance of total legitimacy. We also know, as NBC reported in October, that the FBI has been using similar technology over the past few years to lure wannabe online jihadists:

[A review of Federal Court cases by NBC] shows that undercover FBI agents or informants first identified or connected with the suspects via social media in at least four cases, using fake social media identities to engage them and, in Sheikh's case, possibly engaging in "catfishing" by luring him into a personal relationship with a phony online persona. Agents also created a "false-flag" or "honeypot" Facebook page to help snare him.

The actual court transcript describes in further detail the fake “al Nusra” Facebook page and fake “al-Nusra nurse” the FBI set up to lure Mr. Sheikh: As the FBI would testify under cross examination:

Yes. The CHS (Confidential Human Source) had a Facebook page as well set at the direction of the FBI. Similar types of posts, the Islamic extremism point of view are on this Facebook page….

This type of social media infiltration, marked by increasingly sophisticated sockpuppeting software and mood analysis, is quickly becoming the preferred battleground for MISO (formerly known as “PsyOps or “psychological warfare”). While this may sound benign when targeting the evil “terrorists," in an age of global, real-time information sharing, compartmentalizing these types of militarized information campaigns is all but impossible. If NATO is countering “false” Russian narratives” on Twitter by using sockpuppets and other forms of modern psychological warfare, these efforts will undoubtedly bleed over into the average American’s social media experience. This fact should creep out even the most committed anti-Putin partisans.

Adam Johnson is a freelance journalist; formerly he was a founder of the hardware startup Brightbox. Follow him on Twitter at @adamjohnsonnyc.

The Decline and Fall of the American State; Enjoy It

Karen Kwiatkowski
ICH

The headlines at Drudge are an excellent barometer of what's up with government and culture. Glancing over cops being killed by the other side of law enforcement (the people), Hillary's new Whitewater files (this time electronic), Army and Secret Service partying, drug use, and sex rings, the predictable result of partial "legalization" of pot (neighborhood informers), we find a report that, "Confidence in government is lower than ever!"

Whaaa? The poll, taken in 2014, looked at consumer and investor faith in the "product", i.e. the president, judiciary, legislative as well as mainstream media, banks, big business, organized labor, organized religion, education, medicine and the scientific community.

We are government consumers and investors in these products, although we have little choice. The massive unitary state, this lock-stepping, integrated, wealth-consuming, constantly expanding Rube Goldberg machine is what we the people have bought, and we feed it daily. We are afraid not to, lest it fall down in a million pieces and smash us.

The poll designers were either extremely naive or extremely perspicacious. They have cogently asked how we like our fascism, sunny side up or easy over? Not surprising, the people indicated they'd prefer to skip breakfast, due to a growing queasiness in the pit of their stomachs, and a sense that something is going to fall on our heads.

The poll indicates that we are disgusted by government media, government legislation and 15 straight years of diktatcracy. We have no faith in the justice system and organized religion, and our discontent with the corporate state of big business, big medicine, big education, and big science is seething. All good signs of course, that change is coming. Our identity as "US Citizen" is becoming something we'd rather not talk about. This is how all empires collapse, and the one led by Washington, D.C. is not special. Unlike all the children in Lake Wobegone, we are beginning to recognize our child in D.C. is not above average or exceptional; rather he is a pretty nasty devil who is never going to make something of himself.

Maybe it's the weather, or Snowden, or independent media, or our empty bank accounts. At some point, hard facts around us inspire calls from the crowd of "Why, the emperor isn't wearing anything? He's buck naked! And butt-ugly, too! Hahahahahahahahaha!"

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Outdoing Dr. Goebbels: The propaganda war against RT

Neil Clark

Propaganda. At its best – a wonderful German pop group of the 1980s who had their biggest hit with a track named ‘Duel’. At its worst – the comments of the new BBG chief Andrew Lack, which put RT in the same category of ‘challenges’ as ISIS.

READ MORE: Head of US state media put RT on same challenge list as ISIS, Boko Haram
 
“We are extremely outraged that the new head of the BBG [US Broadcasting Board of Governors] mentions RT in the same breath as world’s number one terrorist army. We see this as an international scandal and demand an explanation,” says Margarita Simonyan, RT’s editor-in-chief. Anyone who supports genuine pluralism in the international media should be demanding an explanation too.

It would be easy to say that Dr. Joseph Goebbels, the infamous Nazi Minister of Propaganda would be proud of Lack’s comments. But in fact the propaganda war against RT – of which Lack’s comments are only the latest example, actually – ‘out-Goebbels’ Dr Goebbels’.

The reason for these attacks is fear. What is clear is that the success of RT has caused real panic in the ranks of the west’s neo-con/‘liberal interventionist’ elite.

RT urges us to question more – and questioning more is the very last thing that the elites in the west want us to do. They want us to accept hook, line and sinker THEIR narrative of world events – a narrative which told us that Iraq possessed WMDs which could be deployed within 45 minutes and which posed a threat to the entire world. A narrative which told us that Muammar Gaddafi was ‘massacring his own people’ and so, for the benefit of the Libyan people, who our leaders cared so much about – we had to have a ‘humanitarian intervention’.

A narrative on Ukraine which casts Russia and its ‘evil’ President as the aggressors and which portrayed a violent, anti-democratic putsch financed by the west and spearheaded by some very nasty far-right extremists as a victory for ‘democracy’.

Again, we’re expected to accept these narratives and not to question them.

For years, the serial-war lobby, which has been at the forefront of the attacks on RT, had it easy. Mainstream news media in the US and other western countries faithfully parroted the official NATO line while neo-con / ‘liberal interventionist’ pundits provided the vast majority of the commentary.

But then along came RT – and millions of people started to watch it.

Voices that we didn’t hear very often – if at all – on the other channels, now had a platform. Voices that actually reflected majority public opinion on foreign policy issues.

So the attacks on the station began. The same ‘free speech’ crowd who had campaigned against Iran’s Press TV- now had a new target for their poison pens.

These attacks intensified after Russian diplomacy – and a vote in the British Parliament – helped to avert planned air-strikes on Damascus in the summer of 2013. As I noted here, the war lobby were furious that for once, they hadn’t got their way. Something I observed from quite early on was the very strong overlap between obsessive RT-haters and people who supported the Iraq war and who wanted western military intervention against Assad’s forces in Syria. (Whenever you read an attack on RT I suggest you put the authors’ name into a search engine with the words ‘Iraq war’ and ‘Syria’. It's usually quite revealing).

Neo-con propagandists writing for neocon propaganda sheets accused RT of peddling ‘propaganda’ showing that the age of satire was not dead.

McCarthyite gatekeepers obsessively monitored RT programmes, using a variety of smears to attack guests and pundits who held the ‘wrong’ views, i.e. views that the McCarthyite gatekeepers didn’t agree with. Those who committed the ‘crime’ of re-tweeting a RT interview or article, or citing RT with approval, were admonished.

Journalists were urged not to appear on the station- and were attacked when they did so. All by people who claimed to be in favour of ‘free speech’ and ‘media pluralism’! 

Even the Secretary of State has joined in with the RT-bashing. 

In April last year, John Kerry called RT a ‘propaganda bullhorn’.

That‘s the same man who said – with a straight face – “you just don’t invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests.” But of course, that wasn‘t ‘propaganda’ was it?

The latest, desperate elite attack – equating RT with ISIS is deeply ironic considering the way RT has covered the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East. RT was reporting on the significant jihadist presence in the Syrian ’uprising’ at a time when the neo-cons wanted us to believe that the ‘rebels’ opposing President Assad were all cuddly, peace-loving democrats. RT pundits – myself included – also challenged the ’dominant’ narrative that Assad had little public support in Syria.

Neo-con and ‘liberal interventionists’ repeatedly told us that Assad would soon be toppled – you had to go to RT to find the truth – which was that the Syrian government – whatever our own opinions of it – did have substantial support – and that support for it was growing due to people being turned off by the brutality of the ‘rebels’.

The fact that radical jihadists were a leading part of the ‘popular democratic uprising’, ‘against Assad and his government’ did not fit the official good guys vs. bad guys narrative so it was left out. Only when IS started to threaten the oil fields of Kurdistan did the elite western narrative change. Then it DID become acceptable to talk about jihadists in Syria – and to publicise their massacres. Where just a few months earlier – almost all the atrocities in Syria were blamed on Assad and government forces – it was now fine to report on the violence of those opposed to Assad.

But RT once again, was telling us the truth long before we were supposed to know it. The attacks on RT are evidence that the channel is doing an excellent job. If only it had been around in 2002/3 to challenge the dominant narrative back then. 

US Army declares war on independent media by sabotaging, blocking and hacking communications

Gordon Duff
PressTV

The United States Army, operating from a secret base in Arizona, has declared war on independent media through hacking, blocking communications and sabotaging both radio broadcasts.

Computer security teams working with Veterans Today traced a pattern of attacks to Fort Huachuca, headquarters of the US Army Intelligence School.

This base, in the tiny town of Sierra Vista, Arizona, just north of the Mexican border, is home, not only to this spying operation but also to America's drone program as well. Every drone attack begins there, with "pilots" trained at Fort Huachuca and drones developed and tested there.

The attacks on independent news and media organizations were discovered when a number of websites, not just Veterans Today, began noting unusual traffic patterns and clumsy hacking attempts. Security software traced these attacks to Fort Huachuca and to a number of local police computer systems around the US.

At Fort Huachuca, the internet censorship, operating to block websites worldwide that report news unfavorable to some US policies or that are critical of Israel, a pattern clearly recognized, was traced to commands tasked with training "Cyber Warfare" specialists.

These training classes, funded by Congress and paid for by the American people, are intended to protect government computer systems from attacks by unfriendly governments and terror organizations. In reality however there are other issues as well. America protects her secrets but those secrets are, more often than not, how the American government violates America's laws. 

The Cyber Warfare specialists of Fort Huachuca, operating well outside the authority of the US Constitution, censor the internet, run "sock puppet" websites spreading propaganda and disinformation, orchestrate smear campaigns against journalists and activists who are not under total control and use electronic countermeasures to silence freedom of speech.  

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Lady Gaga’s Leaked Video “Do What U Want” featuring R. Kelly Glorifies Entertainment Industry Abuse

Vigilant Citizen

There are so many things that are wrong with Lady Gaga’s video Do What U Want that it boggles the mind. One can understand why the video was not released. On the other hand, why was it even shot? It was a horrible idea even before a single frame was captured on camera.

First, the song features R. Kelly. That’s all I need to say. For those who don’t know, he was accused of various offenses involving underage girls. In January, the Village Voice published a few articles describing R. Kelly’s “stomach-churning” assaults, refreshing the memories of “fans” who seem to have forgotten his crimes.

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Disinformation: How It Works

altmarket.com
Brandon Smith
9 August 2012

There was a time, not too long ago (relatively speaking), that governments and the groups of elites that controlled them did not find it necessary to conscript themselves into wars of disinformation.

Propaganda was relatively straightforward. The lies were much simpler. The control of information flow was easily directed. Rules were enforced with the threat of property confiscation and execution for anyone who strayed from the rigid socio-political structure. Those who had theological, metaphysical or scientific information outside of the conventional and scripted collective world view were tortured and slaughtered. The elites kept the information to themselves, and removed its remnants from mainstream recognition, sometimes for centuries before it was rediscovered.

With the advent of anti-feudalism, and most importantly the success of the American Revolution, elitists were no longer able to dominate information with the edge of a blade or the barrel of a gun. The establishment of Republics, with their philosophy of open government and rule by the people, compelled Aristocratic minorities to plot more subtle ways of obstructing the truth and thus maintaining their hold over the world without exposing themselves to retribution from the masses. 

Thus, the complex art of disinformation was born.

The technique, the “magic” of the lie, was refined and perfected. The mechanics of the human mind and the human soul became an endless obsession for the establishment.

The goal was malicious, but socially radical; instead of expending the impossible energy needed to dictate the very form and existence of the truth, they would allow it to drift, obscured in a fog of contrived data. They would wrap the truth in a Gordian Knot of misdirection and fabrication so elaborate that they felt certain the majority of people would surrender, giving up long before they ever finished unraveling the deceit. The goal was not to destroy the truth, but to hide it in plain sight.

In modern times, and with carefully engineered methods, this goal has for the most part been accomplished. However, these methods also have inherent weaknesses. Lies are fragile. They require constant attentiveness to keep them alive. The exposure of a single truth can rip through an ocean of lies, evaporating it instantly.

In this article, we will examine the methods used to fertilize and promote the growth of disinformation, as well as how to identify the roots of disinformation and effectively cut them, starving out the entire system of fallacies once and for all.

Media Disinformation Methods

The mainstream media, once tasked with the job of investigating government corruption and keeping elitists in line, has now become nothing more than a public relations firm for corrupt officials and their Globalist handlers. The days of the legitimate “investigative reporter” are long gone (if they ever existed at all), and journalism itself has deteriorated into a rancid pool of so called “TV Editorialists” who treat their own baseless opinions as supported fact.

The elitist co-opting of news has been going on in one form or another since the invention of the printing press. However, the first methods of media disinformation truly came to fruition under the supervision of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, who believed the truth was “subjective” and open to his personal interpretation.

Some of the main tactics used by the mainstream media to mislead the masses are as follows:

Lie Big, Retract Quietly: Mainstream media sources (especially newspapers) are notorious for reporting flagrantly dishonest and unsupported news stories on the front page, then quietly retracting those stories on the very back page when they are caught. In this case, the point is to railroad the lie into the collective consciousness. Once the lie is finally exposed, it is already too late, and a large portion of the population will not notice or care when the truth comes out.

Unconfirmed Or Controlled Sources As Fact: Cable news venues often cite information from “unnamed” sources, government sources that have an obvious bias or agenda, or “expert” sources without providing an alternative “expert” view. The information provided by these sources is usually backed by nothing more than blind faith.

Calculated Omission: Otherwise known as “cherry picking” data. One simple piece of information or root item of truth can derail an entire disinfo news story, so instead of trying to gloss over it, they simply pretend as if it doesn’t exist. When the fact is omitted, the lie can appear entirely rational. This tactic is also used extensively when disinformation agents and crooked journalists engage in open debate.

Distraction, And The Manufacture Of Relevance: Sometimes the truth wells up into the public awareness regardless of what the media does to bury it. When this occurs their only recourse is to attempt to change the public’s focus and thereby distract them from the truth they were so close to grasping. The media accomplishes this by “over-reporting” on a subject that has nothing to do with the more important issues at hand. Ironically, the media can take an unimportant story, and by reporting on it ad nauseum, cause many Americans to assume that because the media won’t shut-up about it, it must be important!

Dishonest Debate Tactics: Sometimes, men who actually are concerned with the average American’s pursuit of honesty and legitimate fact-driven information break through and appear on T.V. However, rarely are they allowed to share their views or insights without having to fight through a wall of carefully crafted deceit and propaganda. Because the media know they will lose credibility if they do not allow guests with opposing viewpoints every once in a while, they set up and choreograph specialized T.V. debates in highly restrictive environments which put the guest on the defensive, and make it difficult for them to clearly convey their ideas or facts.

TV pundits are often trained in what are commonly called “Alinsky Tactics.” Saul Alinsky was a moral relativist, and champion of the lie as a tool for the “greater good”; essentially, a modern day Machiavelli. His “Rules for Radicals” were supposedly meant for grassroots activists who opposed the establishment and emphasized the use of any means necessary to defeat one’s political opposition. But is it truly possible to defeat an establishment built on lies, by use of even more elaborate lies, and by sacrificing one’s ethics? In reality, his strategies are the perfect format for corrupt institutions and governments to dissuade dissent from the masses. Today, Alinsky’s rules are used more often by the establishment than by its opposition.

Alinsky’s Strategy: Win At Any Cost, Even If You Have To Lie

Alinsky’s tactics have been adopted by governments and disinformation specialists across the world, but they are most visible in TV debate. While Alinsky sermonized about the need for confrontation in society, his debate tactics are actually designed to circumvent real and honest confrontation of opposing ideas with slippery tricks and diversions. Alinsky’s tactics, and their modern usage, can be summarized as follows:

1) Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.

We see this tactic in many forms. For example, projecting your own movement as mainstream, and your opponent’s as fringe. Convincing your opponent that his fight is a futile one. Your opposition may act differently, or even hesitate to act at all, based on their perception of your power. How often have we heard this line: “The government has predator drones. There is nothing the people can do now…” This is a projection of exaggerated invincibility designed to elicit apathy from the masses.

2) Never go outside the experience of your people, and whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.

Don’t get drawn into a debate about a subject you do not know as well as or better than your opposition. If possible, draw them into such a situation instead. Go off on tangents. Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty in your opposition. This is commonly used against unwitting interviewees on cable news shows whose positions are set up to be skewered. The target is blind-sided by seemingly irrelevant arguments that they are then forced to address. In television and radio, this also serves to waste broadcast time to prevent the target from expressing his own position.
3) Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.

The objective is to target the opponent’s credibility and reputation by accusations of hypocrisy. If the tactician can catch his opponent in even the smallest misstep, it creates an opening for further attacks, and distracts away from the broader moral question.

4) Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

“Ron Paul is a crackpot.” “Gold bugs are crazy.” “Constitutionalists are fringe extremists.”
Baseless ridicule is almost impossible to counter because it is meant to be irrational. It infuriates the opposition, which then reacts to your advantage. It also works as a pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

5) A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.

The popularization of the term “Teabaggers” is a classic example; it caught on by itself because people seem to think it’s clever, and enjoy saying it. Keeping your talking points simple and fun helps your side stay motivated, and helps your tactics spread autonomously, without instruction or encouragement.

6) A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.

See rule No. 5. Don’t become old news. If you keep your tactics fresh, it’s easier to keep your people active. Not all disinformation agents are paid. The “useful idiots” have to be motivated by other means. Mainstream disinformation often changes gear from one method to the next and then back again.

7) Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.

Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new. Never give the target a chance to rest, regroup, recover or re-strategize. Take advantage of current events and twist their implications to support your position. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

8) The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.

This goes hand in hand with Rule No. 1. Perception is reality. Allow your opposition to expend all of its energy in expectation of an insurmountable scenario. The dire possibilities can easily poison the mind and result in demoralization.

9) The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

The objective of this pressure is to force the opposition to react and make the mistakes that are necessary for the ultimate success of the campaign.

10) If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

As grassroots activism tools, Alinsky tactics have historically been used (for example, by labor movements or covert operations specialists) to force the opposition to react with violence against activists, which leads to popular sympathy for the activists’ cause. Today, false (or co-opted) grassroots movements and revolutions use this technique in debate as well as in planned street actions and rebellions (look at Syria for a recent example).

11) The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem. Today, this is often used offensively against legitimate activists, such as the opponents of the Federal Reserve. 

Complain that your opponent is merely “pointing out the problems.” Demand that they offer not just “a solution”, but THE solution. Obviously, no one person has “the” solution. When he fails to produce the miracle you requested, dismiss his entire argument and all the facts he has presented as pointless.

12) Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it and polarize it.

Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. The target’s supporters will expose themselves. Go after individual people, not organizations or institutions. People hurt faster than institutions.

The next time you view an MSM debate, watch the pundits carefully, you will likely see many if not all of the strategies above used on some unsuspecting individual attempting to tell the truth.

Internet Disinformation Methods

Internet trolls, also known as “paid posters” or “paid bloggers,” are increasingly and openly being employed by private corporations as well governments, often for marketing purposes and for “public relations” (Obama is notorious for this practice). Internet “trolling” is indeed a fast growing industry.

Trolls use a wide variety of strategies, some of which are unique to the internet, here are just a few:

1. Make outrageous comments designed to distract or frustrate: An Alinsky tactic used to make people emotional, although less effective because of the impersonal nature of the Web.

2. Pose as a supporter of the truth, then make comments that discredit the movement: We have seen this even on our own forums — trolls pose as supporters of the Liberty Movement, then post long, incoherent diatribes so as to appear either racist or insane. The key to this tactic is to make references to common Liberty Movement arguments while at the same time babbling nonsense, so as to make those otherwise valid arguments seem ludicrous by association. In extreme cases, these “Trojan Horse Trolls” have been known to make posts which incite violence — a technique obviously intended to solidify the false assertions of the think tank propagandists like the SPLC, which purports that Constitutionalists should be feared as potential domestic terrorists.

3. Dominate Discussions: Trolls often interject themselves into productive Web discussions in order to throw them off course and frustrate the people involved.

4. Prewritten Responses: Many trolls are supplied with a list or database with pre-planned talking points designed as generalized and deceptive responses to honest arguments. When they post, their words feel strangely plastic and well rehearsed.

5. False Association: This works hand in hand with item No. 2, by invoking the stereotypes established by the “Trojan Horse Troll.” For example: calling those against the Federal Reserve “conspiracy theorists” or “lunatics”; deliberately associating anti-globalist movements with racists and homegrown terrorists, because of the inherent negative connotations; and using false associations to provoke biases and dissuade people from examining the evidence objectively.

6. False Moderation: Pretending to be the “voice of reason” in an argument with obvious and defined sides in an attempt to move people away from what is clearly true into a “grey area” where the truth becomes “relative.”

7. Straw Man Arguments: A very common technique. The troll will accuse his opposition of subscribing to a certain point of view, even if he does not, and then attacks that point of view. Or, the troll will put words in the mouth of his opposition, and then rebut those specific words.

Sometimes, these strategies are used by average people with serious personality issues. However, if you see someone using these tactics often, or using many of them at the same time, you may be dealing with a paid internet troll.

Stopping Disinformation

The best way to disarm disinformation agents is to know their methods inside and out. This gives us the ability to point out exactly what they are doing in detail the moment they try to do it. Immediately exposing a disinformation tactic as it is being used is highly destructive to the person utilizing it. It makes them look foolish, dishonest and weak for even making the attempt. Internet trolls most especially do not know how to handle their methods being deconstructed right in front of their eyes and usually fold and run from debate when it occurs.

The truth is precious. It is sad that there are so many in our society who have lost respect for it; people who have traded in their conscience and their soul for temporary financial comfort while sacrificing the stability and balance of the rest of the country in the process.

The human psyche breathes on the air of truth. Without it, humanity cannot survive. Without it, the species will collapse, starving from lack of intellectual and emotional sustenance.

Disinformation does not only threaten our insight into the workings of our world; it makes us vulnerable to fear, misunderstanding, and doubt: all things that lead to destruction. It can drive good people to commit terrible atrocities against others, or even against themselves. Without a concerted and organized effort to defuse mass-produced lies, the future will look bleak indeed.

You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com

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Yet, lawyers challenging the secrecy warn that the blackout constitutes a severe threat to civil liberties and justice. In modern history, no UK criminal trial has been this closed to the public, although partial gag orders have been imposed.

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