Denouncers of the Propaganda

A couple of years ago when two RT reporters quit the network and denounced it as biased, it immediately was picked up by the Western press and broadcast with great zeal and regularity.

Within the past couple of days a FOX news commentator and former military officer stepped aside and denounced the network as being little more than propaganda. In his case, he was hardly some kind of centrist. If anything he's a right-wing figure that has made some pretty outrageous statements in the past. Nevertheless even his tendentious eye and predilection for bellicose rhetoric reached its limits. It's quite a commentary on FOX and what it stands for that he of all people would reach his limit. They are of course downplaying the incident.

These stories are newsworthy and yet I can't help but reflect on the dozens, perhaps hundreds of journalists and news reporters who have over the decades abandoned various Mainstream news outlets and have denounced them as propaganda machines. These men and women have often abandoned accolade and sometimes lucrative compensation in order to walk with integrity and to pursue the truth. They have laboured quietly (and not so quietly) in the world of alternative media and in other cases have focused on writing books and other in-depth projects. They are prejudicially dismissed or categorised as conspiracy theorists or activists with an axe to grind.

One of the more notable examples, and yet he is but one among many is the recently deceased Robert Parry, who after leaving the AP and Newsweek in the 1990's went on to found the Consortium for Independent Journalism, better known as Consortiumnews. Parry earned great acclaim in helping to break the Iran-Contra story and also wrote extensively about the related issue of CIA drug smuggling. He helped PBS Frontline produce what are in my opinion some of its best documentaries including the one on the October Surprise of 1980.

By the 1990's he was all but banished to the journalistic wilderness. His enemies will say he turned 'nutty', while those who followed his work know he had stepped on one too many toes.

He left and has for the past twenty-plus years all but denounced the Mainstream Corporate Media. His personal reflections and biography are worthy of consideration, let alone his reporting.

Parry is but one of many that came forward and told the truth about the Corporate-Establishment media. Some like the now largely ostracised Seymour Hersh have laboured in those circles for years and are able to explain how the system works and how it has changed.

It's refreshing when people come forward and yet it's rare that their stories are openly told. They're out there but you have to be looking and let's be honest, most people aren't. Few are paying much attention and far too many devour mainstream news sources without questioning them.

Just today I was reflecting on NPR and the changes that network has undergone. In 2002 it was one of the only mainstream outlets daring to question the Bush agenda regarding WMD and its case for war in Iraq. Those of us who had been following the story of Iraq for some time weren't taken in for a moment and it was painful to watch the propaganda campaign begin to unfold in the fall of 2001. By the summer of 2002 the country was whipped into a fury and few news outlets had the courage or tenacity to challenge the momentum. NPR did, albeit in a somewhat tepid fashion but it was one of the few outlets that actually conducted interviews that challenged the Bush agenda. When policy spin-doctors appeared on-air, NPR hosts actually dared to ask confrontational and challenging questions. How times have changed. Today NPR is vying to lead the pack in the Anti-Russia/Syria campaign. They seem far more concerned with the McCarthyite 'Me-too' campaign and sodomite friendly television shows then any kind of hard or investigative reporting.

I listen (or used to listen) to a fair number of BBC programmes. Some of their material is very good and educational and at one time I relied on the BBC for solid international news stories. These days, the BBC is becoming increasingly unpalatable, once again reminiscent of the lead-up to the Iraq War. One programme I regularly listen to is Witness, their daily history show in which they usually interview someone that experienced the event first-hand. Sometimes it's a little on the fluffy side and it's often biased, but I still listen.

Over the past few months I have fallen behind and I've been downloading episodes from the fall that I missed. Today I listened to an episode on the Cuban Missile Crisis, a chapter in history that I have long found captivating... for various reasons. The BBC used clips from Robert McNamara and others to tell the story and yet it was clear they took a strong anti-Soviet bias. That's hardly surprising. They mentioned Khrushchev's demands that American nuclear missiles be removed from Turkey... usually a big part of the Crisis story that's omitted. I might also mention that they completely left out the Bay of Pigs and a lot of the background but perhaps they can be forgiven as the show is quite short and must therefore be narrowly focused.

But at the end of the episode, the Soviets had backed down and Kennedy's only acquiescence was in his promise not to invade Cuba.

The message was clear... stand up to the Russians and they back down.

Of course that's not the whole story. The Kennedy administration did agree to remove the missiles from Turkey and yet this was kept quiet because had this reality been made public it would have looked more like a quid pro quo exchange and stand-down as opposed to a Western tactical victory. The narrative would be destroyed. The fact that the US had placed nuclear weapons on the Soviet border (in Turkey) prior to Khrushchev's nuclearisation of Cuba would (and should) also have to be reckoned with.

But the BBC had no interest in telling that part of the story. Such questions are out of bounds. It was clear there was a lesson to be learned (stand up to the Russians) and they weren't going to allow inconvenient facts to dilute the message.

During the Cold War we always laughed at TASS and Pravda, the major sources of Soviet and Russian news. We knew they were just propaganda and yet when Soviet dissidents came to the United States they laughed in equal amazement. They realised our mainstream outlets CBS, NBC, ABC and later CNN were of the same stripe and sometimes even worse.

The funny thing is when I talk to people who grew up in the USSR they are knowledgeable and educated about pre 20^th century history, geography and current events... both during the Cold War and after. Yes, I know there are exceptions. Every land has its uneducated and ignorant classes and yet in the United States many of these same people have high-paying jobs, degrees and sometimes wield considerable power within domestic bureaucracies. The ex-Soviet people I'm referring to are regular folks and yet despite the fact that they grew up in being propagandised in the Soviet public education system... they seem to know a fair bit of history and have a competent grasp of world events.

This reality, among those I've cited here (and many more) have over the years given me great occasion to pause and reconsider the narratives of my Cold War Western childhood.