CORONAVIRUS "LIVE EXERCISE", JAN 2020

OCCAM'S RAZOR ON TERROR EVENTS

Below are a number of indicators that the coronavirus is, essentially, a globally orchestrated "live exercise" in managing a pandemic (preceded in October last year by Event 201, a "pandemic tabletop exercise"). We can infer that the alleged purpose of this exercise is really a flimsy pretext for fear-mongering instigated by the global power elite in order to exercise better control - there are about 8,500 of them and 7 billion of us. The scope of social control laid bare by this pandemic is truly scary. What social controls will be implemented and how this event will be used as a pretext for blaming looming economic problems only time will tell.

Most importantly, however, the power elite always give us the chance to opt out of the response they wish to instil in us. Whenever they hoax us, they always provide deliberate signs, for example, obvious signs of fakery, over-the-top ridiculousness, contradictions, different versions of the story, physical impossibilities, poor expression, grammar and spelling (beyond what might be termed "sloppy journalism"), smiling grievers, lack of explanation where it is expected, Masonic numbers and symbols, the actual truth (or distorted version of it), etc.  They are also meticulous in never faking a single piece of evidence so well that it can be used by someone who believes their story to brandish it in defence of it. See They Tell Us Clearly for examples.

As responsible citizens it is our duty to call out the power elite when we can identify a very large number of anomalies in the story they drown us in with, additionally, not a single skerrick of evidence to support it.

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BBC Admits ‘Syrian’ Airstrike in Recent Story on Scarred Boy Turned Out to Be Turkish

Sputnik

The BBC has corrected its August 19 news story about a Syrian boy who was severely wounded in a 2018 airstrike, which the broadcasting company first said was carried out by Syrian forces but later admitted could be blamed on Turkey.

Some Twitter users posted screenshots showing that the BBC had actually redacted its text several times.

The headline of the short story, featuring a video about the life of a four-year-old Syrian boy whose face was scarred in the airstrike, originally referred to the incident as “a Syrian airstrike.” The mention of Syria was then deleted with an indication that it was “not clear who was responsible for the attack.” Now the headline refers to it as just “an airstrike,” and the article clarifies that “evidence indicates that Turkey carried out the airstrike.”

Last January, Turkish forces launched airstrikes on Kurdish fighters in Afrin, a city located in northern Syria, as part of a military operation dubbed Olive Branch. The boy, named Jouma, and his family were fleeing their home in Syria when an airstrike hit the bus they were on.

Jenan Moussa, a reporter for Arabic Al Aan TV, wrote on Twitter that Tolin Hassan, a close friend of the wounded boy’s family, told her that Jouma’s relatives “mentioned over and over to BBC-journo that the car was hit by a Turkish strike after escaping Afrin.”

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The Guardian apologizes for saying Sputnik posted ‘fake’ Notre Dame PHOTO vilifying Muslims

Comment: Hoisted by their own petard. This shows how the Guardian is feverishly looking for racism that isn't there and reveals how ideologially possessed they really are. 

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RT

The Guardian has issued a mealy-mouthed apology for accusing Russian news agency Sputnik of doctoring images in the immediate aftermath of the Notre Dame fire to perpetuate an anti-Muslim narrative online – four months later.

“In an episode of Fake or for real? published on 19 April, we suggested that a photo that went viral during the Notre Dame fire had been doctored,” the Guardian wrote in an Instagram story Monday. Instagram stories only have a shelf-life of 24 hours, but thankfully screenshots of the story exist.

“We have been contacted by the copyright owner of the photo, Sputnik France, and accept that it had not been doctored; we apologise for suggesting otherwise.”

The four-months late apology refers to the Guardian’s coverage of a photo from Sputnik France’s Facebook live coverage of the April 15 Notre Dame fire. 

The Guardian’s ‘Fake or for Real’ Instagram series suggested the photo was altered to depict ‘Muslims’ celebrating the fire at the world-famous cathedral. 

This particular angle appeared in various locations online, there was just one problem: Sputnik did not make any reference or speculation as to the men's background or religious beliefs. 

Sputnik France even released the full metadata relating to the image, allowing any and all ‘fact-checkers’ to see for themselves. 

This photo has been shared tens of thousands of times on Facebook in the past 24 hours. It shows "Muslims laughing" walking away from #NotreDame. But the image is doctored. https://t.co/FYzZPhGdsz pic.twitter.com/M5Dr9Nio91

— PolitiFact (@PolitiFact) April 16, 2019

At the time, the ‘fact-checking’ community went into overdrive, including bastion of virtue, Politifact, which was forced to issue a multi-tiered retraction over the course of several weeks.

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Political indoctrination: UK govt unveils plan to teach school kids about 'fake news'

RT

The British government is planning a new initiative which will aim to help schoolchildren distinguish real information from 'fake news' — in an eyebrow-raising move which could be described as a little bit Orwellian.

British Secretary of State for Education Damian Hinds unveiled the new plan, warning that teachers need to better prepare students for the risks posed by "fake news" online, the Independent reported.

From 2020, British kids in both primary and secondary schools will learn about "confirmation bias" and "online risks" as part of a compulsory section of the curriculum. As part of the plan, teachers will help children identify techniques used for "persuasion" and be told "when to seek support." They will also learn about the reasons why someone might wish to "bend the truth" in the first place.

A concerned Hinds warned that the internet makes it easier for both state actors and individuals to "spread falsehoods." One area in particular which the government is looking at is "misleading content" regarding vaccinations. Without "firm action," the proliferation of allegedly misleading information online will "get a lot worse," he said.

Hinds recalled that propagandists have sought to "manipulate the truth" since "ancient times." Indeed, this is something any British government official should be well aware of, since it's well-known that the British mainstream media — including the BBC and British newspapers — have historically been infiltrated by intelligence agents from MI5 and MI6. One could probably safely assume that such inconvenient information will be left off the agenda, however, with the British program more likely to focus on the evils of propaganda emanating from Britain's geopolitical adversaries.

Aside from the obvious question of whether governments are best placed to create a curriculum on fake vs. real news, there's also the added dilemma of whether teachers should be responsible for imparting wisdom on media manipulation to children, when so much of the task of deciphering the news these days comes down to pure opinion. What one teacher might regard as real, another might view as fake.

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“Saving Syria’s Children”: Response to the HuffPo - The BBC's history of faking news

Comment: Incontrovertible evidence that the BBC is a primary propganda outfit working for the British Deep State. (The Jimmy Savile cover up already proved that). 

So, please donate to Robert's crowdfunding campaign here.

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Robert Stuart
Off Guardian

Corrections and clarifications to “Keith Allen Thinks The BBC May Have Faked ‘Apocalyptic’ Attack In Syria”

News and opinion website The Huffington Post has written about my campaign to crowdfund a documentary about the 2013 BBC Panorama programme Saving Syria’s Children.

Keith Allen Thinks The BBC May Have Faked ‘Apocalyptic’ Attack In Syria was published on May 4th 2019. Some notes in response follow.

Stuart says he has spent nearly six years compiling “a mountain of evidence” that shows the BBC’s footage was “faked”. He claims the national broadcaster worked “cheek by jowl with Isis” to produce the Panorama documentary, which was broadcast in September 2013.

Evidence that sequences in Saving Syria’s Children were fabricated is set out on my blog. Readers are free to make their own topographical analogies.

During the programme’s making BBC Panorama reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway were embedded with then ISIS partner group Ahrar al-Sham – a group described elsewhere by the BBC as “hard-line Islamist”. Less than three weeks earlier Ahrar al-Sham, ISIS and other groups together killed over 190 civilians, including women, children and elderly men, and kidnapped over 200 mostly women and children.

In the programme’s climactic scenes of the aftermath of an alleged incendiary attack the BBC crew filmed at close quarters an ambulance prominently bearing the ISIS emblem and its militarily attired occupants, at least one of whom was armed.

In an interview with TalkRadio on Friday, Stuart claimed “the only source of [this attack] is the BBC”. However, the strike was also reported by NBC News who interviewed doctors who described the “apocalyptic” attack in detail, documented in painstaking detail by the Violations Documentation Centre in Syria (VDCS), and confirmed by Human Rights Watch.

The NBC News article cited features an interview with a single volunteer doctor named “Roula”. This is clearly Dr Rola Hallam. Dr Hallam and Dr Saleyha Ahsan were being followed by the BBC Panorama team of reporter Ian Pannell and cameraman Darren Conway as they visited hospitals run by the UK charity Hand in Hand for Syria. As such Hallam was central to the BBC reports in question and cannot be considered an independent commentator. [1] [2] [3] [4]

The Violations Documentation Centre in Syria report cited gives the time of the alleged attack as follows:

On 26 Aug 2013, at 02:00 pm, the Syrian air forces shelled ‘Iqraa’ Institution in Orm Al Kubra in Aleppo, which had been under the Free Army’s control for several months then.

The VDCS report also quotes Mustapha Haid, “Head of ‘Doulati Organization/My State Organization’”:

At 3 in the afternoon, On 26 Aug 2013, I was in Al Atareb City and I heard rumours about a ‘chemical attack’ on Orm Al Kubra and that tens of casualties were brought to Al Atareb Hospital.

However the BBC has categorically stated in complaints correspondence that:

The attack happened on the 26th of August at around 5.30pm at the end of the school day.[5]

The VDCS report quotes a second witness, Issa Obeid, “Head of Nursing Department in Al Atareb Hospital”, who provides a first-hand account of his actions at Atareb Hospital:

We washed the casualties with water and serums after taking off their clothes. We used ‘Florasline’ liniment on the burnt areas and provided the casualties with fluids and some of them were given tranquilizers like Morphine.

However on 26 August 2013 Issa (or Iessa) Obied would appear not to have been present at Atareb but to have been attending a battle first aid training course in Antakia, Turkey. [6]
Iessa Obied has been photographed posing with an arsenal of weaponry including assault rifles, an anti-aircraft gun and a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. [7] [8] 

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Media Bias/Fact Check: Part of a Larger Operation to Destroy Alternative Media

Kurt Nimmo

While doing research for a Newsbud video, I came across the Media Bias/Fact Check (MBFC) website. This is one of a growing number of “fact checking” websites designed to discredit news websites not following official narratives closely enough. 

Here’s what the site has to say about Newsbud and my participation:

Newsbud (NB) is a right wing, conspiracy and anti-government site founded by, among others, Kurt Nimmo, the former lead editor and writer for Infowars. What sets NB apart from other sites of this type is that the stories are, for the most part, well written and contain numerous sources. The bias of the writing is also more subtle than sites such as Infowars, but just as prevalent. Both as an overtone to all the stories as well as the sometimes questionable sources and / or the conclusions drawn from the source material. Additionally, many of their sources are other NB stories, or work the author and editors have done elsewhere.

MBFC imparts misinformation in the first sentence. If it had done appropriate research, its ideologically driven checkers would have discovered Newsbud was established by Sibel Edmonds. I was invited to participate after the website was established and I am not a founder, as MBFC claims. 

This error—more accurately described as shoddy and careless research—reveals the liberal bias of the site and its proprietor, Dave Van Zandt. 

MBFC’s methodology is admittedly “subjective,” but this is not an issue for those working to destroy alternative media. In fact, it appears such subjectivity and bias are considered a plus in the effort the block sites deemed “dangerous,” as the performance artist Alex Jones and his website Infowars (which I indeed edited for eight years, almost exclusively focusing on geopolitics, neocon wars, and the surveillance-police state). 

From Wikipedia, which MBFC has elevated as a fount of truth and unbiased information (see Wikipedia Is More Biased Than Britannica, but Don’t Blame the Crowd), we discover Dave Van Zandt’s project serves as a touchstone for AI “solutions” to “disinformation,” that is information that does not conform to the various mythologies and half-truths put out by the propaganda media at the behest of a corporate state.

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Wikipedia isn’t just spreading fake news about natural medicine; it’s also pushing the fake media’s lies about the Trump Russia hoax

Natural News

Though it pretends to be an unbiased source of factual information maintained by “the people,” Wikipedia has once again been exposed as a Leftist propaganda outlet for pushing fake news about the revelations contained in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. 

Dispelling all doubts that the site only spreads lies and misinformation about natural medicine, Wikipedia was recently caught pushing the myth that the Mueller report did “not exonerat[e]” President Donald Trump on the issue of obstruction of justice, even though Attorney General William Barr and deputy AG Rod Rosenstein both agreed that the report did, in fact, exonerate the Commander-in-Chief.

As revealed by Breitbart News, some Wikipedia editors on the Trump-Russia entry page actually referred to the bogus Steele Dossier as “evidence” of Russian collusion, even though that conspiracy theory has long been debunked as Leftist-contrived fake news.

According to reports, it was Newsbusters, a project of the Media Research Center, that first identified these problem on the Jimmy Wales-owned website, noting that many paTrumpges related to Trump and the investigation “had not been updated with the result or didn’t place it more prominently,” to quote Breitbart News‘s T.D. Adler.

“While many articles were eventually updated to include the results or place them more prominently in the article, they also criticized an effort to downplay or misrepresent Barr’s letter announcing the results,” Adler adds.

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US Government’s Lies on Aid Trucks “Torched” by Maduro are Exposed

Sputnik 

The Trump administration accused Nicolas Maduro’s government of torching a truck with humanitarian aid amid a civil plight in Venezuela in February. The State Department later released a video of the incident, and the narrative was instantly picked up by the MSM.

The New York Times, which has obtained unpublished footage and previously release
d clips, has exposed the inconsistency in reports on the burning trucks with humanitarian aid filmed on the Venezuela-Colombia border on 23 February.

While the majority of mainstream media advanced the official narrative that the convoy was set afire at President Nicolas Maduro’s order, the video presented by The New York Times, in fact, appeared to show an opposition protester hurling something akin to a Molotov cocktail at the convoy, which was most likely the trigger for the blaze.

According to the newspaper, the same protester can be seen 20 minutes earlier in a different video, throwing an incendiary device at another truck, without torching it.

The NYT published an article and a detailed video two weeks after the incident, proving that this entire story was an elaborate lie, but the media outlet was not the first to debunk the US and Colombia’s claims that Maduro was behind the fire.

On 24 February, the day the story hit world headlines, several independent journalists pointed out that it was fake news. 

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BBC Producer Blows The Whistle & Admits The “Gas Attack” Footage From Syria “Was Staged”

Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution

 

“The problem of fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee, but rather because we as citizens, we as users of these services, help each other. We talk and we share and we point out what is fake. We point out what is true. The answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.” –Edward Snowden (source)

It’s truly amazing what’s happening in regards to information today. It’s being heavily censored. News browser extension NewsGuard is one of the latest examples, which promises to help readers pick out fake news. However, NewsGuard is funded and run by individuals tied to the CFR, Atlantic Council, and prominent elite figures who own mainstream media. You can read more about that here.

There is a war on information right now, especially any information that threatens the elitists’ and globalists’ agendas or corporate profits. It’s not morally right to have government authorities step in and determine for the population what is real and what is fake, and what to censor and what not to censor. Our free speech is being shut down, and this is evident by Facebook’s recent deletion and mass censorship of multiple alternative media outlets acting as a new ‘ministry of truth.’ It’s truly Orwellian-like.

Truth, however, cannot be stopped, and it’s mainstream media that’s recently been outed as promoting the most ‘fake news,’ which is evident by the multiple award-winning mainstream media journalists who’ve ‘blown the whistle,’ so to speak, about mainstream media and how they are paid by corporations, governments and intelligence agencies to spread and alter the news they share. There are also some very telling documents that go into detail regarding mainstream media’s relationship with multiple governments, and how it’s used to alter the perception of the masses and keep a tight grip on the information that’s disseminated through academia and journalism. I provide many examples within this article if you’re interested, which includes access to those documents. The article is about William Arkin, a well-known military and war reporter who is best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010, who just went public outing NBC/MSNBC as completely government run agencies.

But let’s get to this latest example regarding Syria.

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A New Narrative Control Firm Works To Destroy Alternative Media

Caitlin Johnstone
Medium

The frenzied, hysterical Russia narrative being promoted day in and day out by western mass media has had two of its major stories ripped to shreds in the last three days.

A report seeded throughout the mainstream media by anonymous intelligence officials back in September claimed that US government workers in Cuba had suffered concussion-like brain damage after hearing strange noises in homes and hotels with the most likely culprit being "sophisticated microwaves or another type of electromagnetic weapon" from Russia. A recording of one such highly sophisticated attack was analyzed by scientists and turned out to be the mating call of the male indies short-tailed cricket. Neurologists and other brain specialists have challenged the claim that any US government workers suffered any neurological damage of any kind, saying test results on the alleged victims were misinterpreted. The actual story, when stripped of hyperventilating Russia panic, is that some government workers heard some crickets in Cuba.

Another report which dominated news headlines all of yesterday claimed that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort (the same Paul Manafort who the Guardian falsely claimed met with Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy) had shared polling data with a Russian associate and asked him to pass it along to Oleg Deripaska, who is often labeled a "Russian oligarch" by western media. The polling data was mostly public already, and the rest was just more polling information shared in the spring of 2016, but Deripaska's involvement had Russiagaters burning the midnight oil with breathless excitement. Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall went so far as to publish an article titled "The 'Collusion' Debate Ended Last Night", substantiating his click-generating headline with the claim that "What's crystal clear is that the transfer to Kilimnik came with explicit instructions to give the information to Deripaska. And that's enough."

Except Manafort didn't give any explicit instructions to share the polling data with Deripaska, but with two Ukrainian oligarchs (who are denying it). The New York Times was forced to print this embarrassing correction to the story it broke, adding in the process that Manafort's motivation was likely not collusion, but money. 

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YouTube Debuts Plan to Promote and Fund 'Authoritative' News

wired.com

Following a year in which YouTube has repeatedly promoted conspiracy-theory videos during breaking news events like the shootings in Parkland, Florida, and Las Vegas, the company announced on Monday a slew of new features it hopes will make news on the platform more reliable and less susceptible to manipulation. The company is also investing $25 million in grants to news organizations looking to expand their video operations, as part of a larger, $300 million program sponsored by YouTube's sister company, Google.

According to YouTube executives, the goal is to identify authoritative news sources, bring those videos to the top of users' feeds, and support quality journalism with tools and funding that will help news organizations more effectively reach their audiences. The challenge is deciding what constitutes authority when the public seems more divided than ever on which news sources to trust—or whether to trust the traditional news industry at all.

Among the many changes YouTube announced Monday are substantive tweaks to the tools it uses to recommend news-related videos. In the coming weeks, YouTube will start to display an information panel above videos about developing stories, which will include a link to an article that Google News deems to be most relevant and authoritative on the subject. The move is meant to help prevent hastily recorded hoax videos from rising to the top of YouTube’s recommendations. And yet, Google News hardly has a spotless record when it comes to promoting authoritative content. Following the 2016 election, the tool surfaced a Wordpress blog falsely claiming Donald Trump won the popular vote as one of the top results for the term “final election results.” 

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Facebook Algorithm Flags The Declaration Of Independence As “Hate Speech”

Comment: This says it all. 

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Mac Slavo SHTFplan.com

Over the last couple of years major social media, news and video platforms have been actively engaged in the censorship of what they believe to be fake news and information. Often spearheaded by third-party review organizations known to have biased views, there have been countless examples of unpopular speech and commentary that has seen its distribution suppressed or outright banned.

While there is most certainly a human element involved in the review and flagging of information, mega Silicon Valley conglomerates have also implemented automated systems to identify potentially hateful and repulsive content.

To give you an idea of the kind of automation in play and what words and ideas are being identified as running contrary to the principles of media aggregators and distributors, consider that Facebook recently banned America’s founding document from being posted.

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72% Think Traditional Media Reports Fake News

Axiom

Nearly all Republicans and Republican-leaning independents (92%) say that traditional news outlets knowingly report false or misleading stories at least sometimes, according to a new Axios/SurveyMonkey poll. Democrats and non-leaning independents also feel this way, but not nearly to the same extent.

Data: SurveyMonkey poll conducted June 15-19, 2018. Poll methodology; Chart: Axios Visuals

Why it matters: The data shows that trust in the media is heavily influenced by partisan politics, with Republicans more skeptical of mainstream media than their Democratic and Independent counterparts. Other studies from Gallup and Pew Research Center have drawn similar conclusions.

Democrats Are The Only Group Left That Believes The Mainstream Media

Zero Hedge

In what looks like a validation of the growing public expressions of anger directed at members of the media, a new Axios poll found that nearly all (a staggering 92%) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believe that mainstream media organizations knowingly report false or misleading stories, at least occasionally. And while Democrats proved to be the most credulous group, a majority still doubt that US media organizations are 100% credible.

All told, 72% of respondents said they believe mainstream media organizations to be knowingly misleading. Other studies from Gallup and Pew Research Center have drawn similar conclusions, with Democrats, unsurprisingly, revealed as the only group that still has any substantial level of trust in the media. Back in the 1970s, trust in media rose as high as 74% during the aftermath of Watergate.

The poll also found that 43% of Democrats say they utilize "Fact-Checking" resources like Snopes and FactCheck.org, while only 30% of Republicans and Independents do the same.

President Trump regularly lashes out at the "Fake News" media during his rallies and tweets. But most recently, it was Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin who took the media to task for sloppy reporting, rebutting a Wall Street Journal  and Bloomberg scoop about the administration's plans to block investment by Chinese firms. According to Mnuchin, the story got important details about the administration's strategy wrong, including its focus on China. Mnuchin shared finalized details about the policy earlier this morning.

Facebook Is Hiring “News Credibility Specialists” That Will Pass Judgment On Which Sites Are “Credible” And Which Sites Are Not

Michael Snyder
The American Dream

The war on “fake news” is about to go to an entirely new level. According to media reports, Facebook has been seeking to hire “news credibility specialists” that will be tasked with “evaluating” which news publishers are “credible” and which are not. If the goal was just to simply filter out the handful of websites that purposely publish fake news stories, that would be fine. But as we have seen so many times in recent years, these types of programs inevitably discriminate against conservative viewpoints. Facebook is highly liberal, and they will be hiring from a California talent pool that is also highly liberal. And liberals invariably consider liberal viewpoints to be more “credible” than conservative viewpoints. Facebook built an empire by giving everyone a voice, and it is simply not fair for them to try to exclude conservative viewpoints now just because they do not like them.

Hopefully we can get some answers from Facebook about this. On their official job site, the advertisement for these positions indicated that these “news credibility specialists” would be involved in the creation of “a list of credible news organizations”…

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Governments And Social Media Companies Are Collaborating To Censor Anyone That Would Dare To Question Mainstream Media Narratives

Michael Snyder
End of The American Dream

The era of free and unfettered speech on the Internet is rapidly ending.  All over the world, national governments are working very closely with social media companies to take control of “Internet news”.  Up until recently, the Internet really was a wonderful marketplace of ideas, and ordinary people like you and I were empowered to share information with one another like never before in human history.  But now the elite have seen the power that this can have, and they are cracking down hard.  The term “fake news” has come to mean any source that would dare to question the official narratives that are being fed to us from the mainstream media, and in reality the push to censor “fake news” is really just an all-out effort to eliminate independent thought.  Before the Internet, it was much easier for the elite to control the flow of information, and now they are taking unprecedented measures to control the flow of information in the digital age.

Just check out what is happening in France.  A proposed law would give authorities the power “to immediately halt the publication of information deemed to be false”…

Under the law, French authorities would be able to immediately halt the publication of information deemed to be false ahead of elections.
Social networks would have to introduce measures allowing users to flag up false reports, pass their data on such articles to authorities, and make public their efforts against fake news.
And the law would authorise the state to take foreign broadcasters off the air if they were attempting to destabilise France — a measure seemingly aimed at Russian state-backed outlet RT in particular.

New measures under consideration by the European Union as a whole are even more draconian.

According to a Breitbart report, all social media companies would be forced to use “content recognition technologies” to “monitor and control all uploads”…

The European Union (EU) is less than a month away from voting to introduce aggressive new online copyright laws and “widespread censorship” measures, which critics say could strangle new media websites and stifle satire and online meme culture.
Unelected European Commission bureaucrats have drafted legislation which detractors say could force online platforms to monitor and control all uploads to some platforms with “content recognition technologies”. They are also said to have proposed what has been termed a ‘link tax’, which could compel blogs and other websites to pay just to reference content.

To give you an idea of what that would look like in practice, all we have to do is to consider what is already happening over in China.

Internet censorship in China has already achieved legendary status, and the largest social media network in China has already blocked at least 500 million postings in the battle against “fake news”…

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How The Truman Show Predicted the Future

James Charisma
Vulture.com

It may have been Descartes who first asked how we can trust that the world actually exists and that we’re not just being deceived by some evil genius. But it was writer Andrew Niccol who answered that question, in 1998’s The Truman Show: We don’t. And worse yet, that evil genius could work in television.

“We accept the reality of the world with which we are presented,” explains Christof (Ed Harris), the director of the show-within-the-movie of The Truman Show. Two decades since Jim Carrey’s dramatic turn playing the oblivious main character in a reality show fabricated around his life, The Truman Show continues to act as a digital-age Nostradamus. Critics described the film like a big-budget episode of The Twilight Zone when it premiered 20 years ago this week, but Truman garnered acclaim for the thoughtful way it broached unsexy topics like metaphysics, Christianity, utopia, artificial reality, and the power of mass media. The film even gave rise to an informal medical syndrome: the Truman Show delusion, the sufferers of which believe their lives are staged shows or that they’re being watched on camera.

Tim Burton, Brian De Palma, Terry Gilliam, Barry Sonnenfeld, and Steven Spielberg were all originally considered as directors (Niccol was viewed as too green at the time), but it was Peter Weir who won the job, due in no small part to having found success nearly ten years prior with Dead Poets Society, another movie that cast a comedic actor (Robin Williams) in a serious role.

Niccol would ultimately create close to 30 drafts and rewrites of the script, while Weir scouted locations, oversaw the design of Truman’s world (Norman Rockwell and mid-century Sears, Roebuck catalogues played a big inspiration), and waited a year for Jim Carrey to finish work on The Cable Guy and Liar Liar. Instead of shooting on sound stages at Universal, Weir’s wife suggested the master-planned resort community of Seaside, Florida, with a pastel and picturesque look that lent itself to sitcoms of the 1950s.

In 2018, The Truman Show still feels as authentic as ever — probably even more so now than when it debuted, considering the subsequent rise of reality TV, social media, artificial reality, and “fake news.” How accurately has this movie predicted the future? Let us count the ways. 

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“Assassinated” Anti-Putin Journalist Wasn’t Actually Assassinated

Comment: More examples of anti-Russian psyops going wrong... Amateur night.

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Zero Hedge

 

According to reports, Arkady Babachenko, was shot three times in the back in his apartment building in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev last Tuesday after going out to buy bread. 

 

A 41-year-old former Russian soldier-turned-journalist reported to have been assassinated on Tuesday, faked his own death as part of an elaborate sting operation by Ukraine to bust an actual hit planned by Russia, according to the head of the SBU, Ukraine’s national security service. 

 

According to Tuesday’s media “reports”, the journalist, Arkady Babachenko, was shot three times in the back in his apartment building in the Ukrainian capital of Kiev last Tuesday after going out to buy bread – his wife found him in a pool of blood after she came out of the bathroom following the “murder.” He was pronounced dead in an ambulance on the way to the hospital. 

 

A photo of Babachenko taken by his wife, which was staged, was posted online.

Then, in a remarkable “recovery” on Wednesday, Babachenko showed up to a press conference, reporting that the SBU had intelligence about the actual assassination scheme and that he helped them to derail the plot. The assassin who received the real order to kill Babachenko along with the person who organized the hit, have reportedly been detained.

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How the people who control America manufacture our consent to their rule

Comment: These are the kinds of people infecting academia and teaching students how to interpret the world; "experts" and "teachers" who should be ashamed at their sycophancy toward this repellent individual.

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Eric Zeusse
Washington's Blog 

Modern dictatorship, as Walter Lippmann pointed out in 1921 about “the manufacture of consent,” is the “creation of consent” and “is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in fact, improved enormously in technic,” so that we now have artificial ‘democracy’, which George Orwell prophetically allegorized in his 1949 novel 1984. But here is the real version of it, today:

On May 26th, a youtube was posted titled “TIME Editor Literally Admits He’s For Gov. Propaganda!” It’s about, and discusses this: Richard Stengel, who was a former Managing Editor of TIME magazine (2006-2013), and then the U.S. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy (2014-2016), had hosted, on April 20th, at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a Workshop for College and University Educators — in other words, for professors — and this workshop was titled “Political Disruptions: Combating Disinformation and Fake News”. Stengel and his panel of ‘experts’ were teaching these professors how to recognize ‘Fake News’, and Stengel made clear there that it’s whatever violates America’s “master narrative.” (Truth-falsity has nothing to do with it, he and they were teaching.)

After a lot of unquestioning questions from his academic audience, and only near the very end of the entire workshop, an unidentified attendee asked a questioning question: 

Q: I’m going to kind of go against the grain here and challenge us to … think about the media cartels, which control and dominate the way that the discourse is shaped. Is that not fake news in certain ways? … So for example, I’ll talk about the events in Gaza three weeks ago. Every American — every mainstream American and world outlet wrote a title that said, “Palestinians killed” or “die in clashes with Israel.” There were snipers, hundreds of feet away, shooting at unarmed demonstrators, but every major newspaper outlet — or every major news outlet called it clashes. No one calls that fake news.

So there’s a question here about how we are defining and what merits our attention as fake news that we need —

STENGEL: So just to — so a — so give me — give examples of the master narratives that existed — or still exist that maybe need to be questioned.

Q: American master narrative about — what is it — destiny — manifest destiny. American narrative about entitlement to American land despite American — Native Americans’ presence and the massacres against them. The denial of the continuing aftermath of slavery that is continuing to be a part of American mainstream media and mainstream consciousness. 

[The invited panel of ‘experts’ then answered with irrelevancies. Finally, Stengel came in with:] 

STENGEL: So I’ll — you will be the last question, but I just want to weigh in on that for one second. So there’s another word for master narratives. It’s called history. 

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The Medium Is (Not) the Message: Political Indoctrination Through Media Literacy Initiatives

Ed Hannan
INSURGE Intelligence

When misrepresenting recent events and exaggerating external threats have become standard practice, are we aware of the influence that bias in mainstream media has on young people?

 

Published by INSURGE intelligence, a crowdfunded investigative journalism platform for people and planet. Support us to report where others fear to tread.

 

Anyone paying attention to popular culture trends in the West often disregard the messages that aim to shape political opinions of young people, whether this is through Hollywood or the gaming industry, TV shows or music. If the children that we know personally tend to have good mental health and carry a sufficient sense of self-awareness and emotional intelligence, then we’ll generally regard this messaging as innocuous. We would reserve more careful judgement for when these messages might influence vulnerable young people. But the problem with this is it has made us much less vigilant.

New efforts ostensibly intended to inform young people of the dangers of fake news and misinformation are increasing in line with collective Western attempts to contain Russia and China’s growing influence. However well-intentioned they are, even a cursory look at these efforts reveals they are promoting confirmation bias: their content ranges from mild propagandistic messaging to full-blown jingoistic deception. They have made it easy for critics to anticipate a process that will look subjectively instructional rather than objectively educational.

The BBC launched their iReporter game earlier this month. On March 15th it was received positively while news of the initiative spread online. We were told it aims to educate young people on “the dangers of Fake News” and predictably the mainstream reports welcomed this without any scepticism, and without a definition of what fake news actually is:

indy100.com: “Which sources should you trust? How quickly should you break the story with limited facts? And how are you going to do all this and keep your editor happy?”

belfasttelegraph.co.uk: “…led by the broadcaster called School Report, which also offers workshops and events featuring BBC journalists, including Huw Edwards.”

gizmodo.co.uk: “…designed for kids and their teachers, in an effort to show how to recognise which sources can be trusted and which ones are complete nonsense.”

huffingtonpost.co.za: “Fake news has become a problem over which both governments and social media companies have had to step in and take action.”

I have asked in a previous piece — which examines the meme of fake news — that if the dangers of misinformation are so great as to warrant legislation which can threaten our freedom of speech and right to privacy, then should not every article that sets out to inform us about misinformation do that task more rigorously?

As outlined in the mainstream’s stenography journalism, the game is part of larger initiative called the BBC School Report national programme to help 11–18 year olds identify fake news; and, they claim, to develop “critical thinking and media literacy skills” in young people. BBC cited A National Literacy Trust report which details (deep breath): the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Literacy’s launch of the Commission on Fake News and the Teaching of Critical Literacy Skills in Schools. Their claim is that one in five children believe everything they read online is true.

And so primary and secondary school teachers will be entrusted with leading new initiatives because they are described as “ideally placed” to help children develop the skills they need. I’d suggest that parents should hope the teachers will be open to refining their own critical literacy skills in the process. The director of the trust, Jonathan Douglas, had this to say:

“In this digital age, children who can’t question and determine the reliability of the information they find online will be hamstrung — at school, at work and in life […] By bringing together the greatest minds and authorities on fake news and education, the new parliamentary commission gives us a fantastic opportunity to make the case for critical literacy to sit at the heart of our education system.”

This is a very serious matter, so much that the greatest minds and authorities on fake news must be enlisted to help the children. I can’t argue with the case for critical literacy to sit at the heart of an education system, but how might one determine who the greatest minds and authorities on fake news are? I’d suspect it would be those who propagate the notion that fake news is a profound threat to our Western democracies. In which case we can rest assured that the children will indeed be guided by those with authority — how great their minds are, though, would remain to be seen.

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