NP dishonest journalism

[Doug Millison]

If there is a propaganda machine currently in place that is anywhere 
in the same ballpark as the Nazi propaganda machine, it might be the 
nexus of media corporations that dominates U.S. book publishing, 
newspapers, magazines, TV, radio, cable TV,  which, as we see in 
report after report from the media critics at FAIR, and from our own 
close reading, consistently defend the government and its corporate 
sponsors and ignore or under-report or actively distort the kind 
criticism that still appears in mainstream press outlets outside of 
the U.S. That's still an exaggeration of course, because the U.S. 
corporate media have not served, lockstep, a single program as 
monstrous as the Nazi program, even though they have managed to 
distort, cover-up, ignore, and make palatable any number of heinous 
crimes.

That IBM gets tarred in a book with as much media attention as this 
recent one could be explained by the internal contridictions of this 
massive complex of for-profit entities; on the one hand, a book 
publishing arm may profit from the book and TV profits from coverage, 
while on the other hand the business press will profit as it excuses 
and contextualizes and adopts IBM's own spin until Americans have no 
need to fear that IBM -- or any of their precious brand producers -- 
really had anything to do with war crimes or genocide, then or now.

No wonder that reports of Bush family links to the Nazis are 
pooh-poohed and relegated to the fringe -- see what the U.S. 
propaganda machine has done to reports of the CIA (headed by a fellow 
named Bush, wasn't it) involvement in cocaine trafficking in the 
broader context of the Iran-Contra affair and the long, sordid 
history of CIA involvement in Central and South American politics 
and, more generally, with drug dealers around the world in countries 
with governments that the CIA wants to prop up. We've discussed in 
the past how the establishment press closed ranks and hounded Gary 
Webb for his reporting on CIA involvement in bringing crack cocaine 
to the U.S., first published in the San Jose Mercury News and a model 
of investigative journalism practice, vile retrospective attacks by 
interested parties notwithstanding.

So, I agree with another vocal Pynchon-L participant, yes there is a 
massive and well-coordinated propganda machine  that actively 
distorts, lies, covers-up, fabricates, heaps on blame, incites hatred 
and persecution... all in the service of the government and the 
corporate sponsors of the government -- it's the corporate media, the 
establishment that relegates to the fringe those unsavory reports 
about Bush, Jr. and his progenitors.

"Never Reporters that anyone else was likely to believe,-- men who 
ate the Flesh and fornicated with the Ghosts of their Dead, murderers 
and Pirates on the run, monks in parchment Coracles stitched together 
from copied Pages of the Book of Jonah, fishermen too many Nights out 
of Port, any Runagate craz'd enough to sail West." -- Mason & Dixon
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