I recently read an article on rt.com written by Cynthia McKinney, the first black woman elected to the Georgia Legislature. The title of the article was “Why Does The U.S Media Lie So Much?” I’ll continue after a brief aside to talk about rt.com (which stands for Russia today).
Rt.com is a news outlet sponsored by the Russian government, much like British Broadcasting Corporation of Britain, CBC of Canada and ABC of Australia. A few months ago, I was in a discussion group and I mentioned rt.com, which I visit daily, and a young man (30-ish) interrupted me to inform me that rt.com was nothing but Russian propaganda.I immediately thought of the quote attributed to everyone from Shakespeare to Mark Twain to Winston Churchill, “Never do battle of wits with an unarmed man.” Contributors to rt include economists Paul Craig Roberts, Richard Wolff, Michael Hudson, Noam Chomsky, Lee Camp, Gerald Celente, Max Keiser, Larry King, Thom Hartmann and other Americans. Also George Galloway, former member of parliament in Britain. Why would any of these people want to be part of Russian propaganda?
Anyway, back to McKinney’s article. Why does the U.S media lie so much? The simple answer is — and the courts have ruled — that they can and it’s legal. They claim that it is part of free speech and that the responsibility is on the public to be informed as to whether the information is true or not. Thomas Jefferson said basically the same thing.
Therein lies the problem.
The American public has been lulled into watching the evening news and thinking they are being informed. They aren’t. They’re being manipulated. If you question the reports you are given the handy label conspiracy theorist and dismissed. A study showed that Fox News told the truth 17 percent of the time. Critics have even divided the remaining 83 percent into partially true, mostly false and ‘pants on fire’.
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