MSM reports as we approach the 50th

[Kelly]

Hi tlr. You are right, but they still have a way of coming off as the "know it all" and "official" experts of every tragedy and situation.  I guess if any of the reporters had a backbone, they would be banned and lose their jobs. This is just so sad and upsetting to me. I don`t know what I was expecting, but it wasn`t this.

[echelon]

I think that this thread has had its day and should now be filed away in a dark corner, at least for ten more years.

Nonetheless ... one last throw of the dice (actually two long articles) by Pat Speer:

For decades now, single-assassin theorists and media pundits have been claiming 1) that the majority of Americans believe President Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy because they've been exposed to so much conspiracy-oriented material, and 2) the creators of the conspiracy-oriented material do so to make money, because that's where the real money is, in claiming Kennedy was killed by a conspiracy. These are truly some of the BIGGEST LIES ever told about the assassination. And yet they are repeated over and over. So, on the lead-up to the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's assassination I decided to put this to the test, and record how much conspiracy-oriented material is pushed upon the public, versus how much Oswald did-it-all-by-his-lonesome-and-we-should-all-get-over-it material is pushed upon the public.

Part 1 - http://www.patspeer.com/the-onslaught

Part 2 - http://www.patspeer.com/the-onslaught-part2

(Only for those with a strong constitution - pun intended).

[TLR]

That was amazing. I don't know how Speer sat through all of that.

I've always felt that an entire (lengthy) book could be written on the media and the JFK assassination. No one has ever done it to my knowledge.

[echelon]

Yes TLR, I have to admit I only skimmed his articles as I knew more or less what they contained.  He obviously has more staying power than me.

I also believe that both (a) the Phase 2 cover-up by the government and its associated agencies and (b) the failure of the media to follow-up anything of note are in many respects more serious concerns than the actual assassination itself.  After all, the killing was simply a criminal act.  The reactions to it demonstrate how far from the principles of the Founding Fathers America has fallen.

[echelon]

Larry Hancock comments on Speer's efforts over at EF:

All of which is idle speculation against one outstanding fact, the news media are simply not going to stand up one day and say hey, we, the established networks,  news services and our whole industry plus all of our most respected predecessors and the people who received our awards over the last few decades - including the most beloved nightly news figures in America - missed the biggest investigative story of the last century - but trust us, we are on top of it now.   That is just not going to happen.  The most you are going to get is just what we got - hey, I might have missed something but nobody else has come up with any solid proof of conspiracy so its unlikely we will ever know for sure.  Which of course is just about the best we did get.

How sad it all is.

Hope strings eternal that somebody will break ranks and somebody else will publish him/her.

[Phil Dragoo]

It started with a whisper

Patricia Johnson McMillan who can be trusted to write what we want, who in 2007 was still lying her ass off:

After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.

    Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life.

http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2007/06/lho.html

To today when O'Reilly and Matthews drink up and sing the prole songs in the pubs of Blair

Ozzie wuz a commie
an' his bullet sheer magic
No motive hae he
for lone acts so tragic

On textbooks, on wikis
on Google, on Yahoo
on DogPile, on LexisNexis,
on Ask and Bing
The ink-stained wretches
and the talking heads of flatscreen
the lefty and righty bloggers
the glossy magazine

Mockingbird, fly away

Lobotomy thy name is U.S. education
Newthink newspeak all abomination

From the far right Rush to the far left Rachel
they have no guts they have no spine and wear the Dulles facial

The shrieking fairies and carping harpies
flying monkeys sent by the witch
We have no one left to speak for us
isn't life a

We know the significance:  a war ensued over his dead body, and exploitation proceeded apace

All this claptrap and jawflap over Mandela is of nothing when the Great Mandala
displays the shameful denial of the coup and the elevation of the cabal

Now the NSA morphs into an octopus entrapping the globe
boasting Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach

Going forward every newscast is propaganda/
every newspaper propaganda/
every war and rumor of war the new revelation

A two minute hate for Snowden
Duck Dynasty and Survivor
then Soma and football
and to all a krystal night
Happy 1984 everyone

[TLR]

Brilliant stuff, Phil. Love the parody photos.

The State and its Institutions must survive; the loss of men like Kennedy, Oswald and Tippit is inconsequential. History must be re-written, photos altered if necessary. All the great leaders have done it.

[Alan Dale]

It started with a whisper

Patricia Johnson McMillan who can be trusted to write what we want, who in 2007 was still lying her ass off:

After decades of speculation about a grassy knoll, the Zapruder film, and an acoustical tape, the man behind it all is too often overlooked. Lee Oswald was not a cardboard figure but a human being, and although he had barely turned twenty-four at the time he killed President Kennedy, he had a motive.

    Oswald was a believing Marxist, and his motive was to strike the deadliest blow he could imagine at capitalism in the United States. Oswald had been headed that way most of his sentient life.

http://www.washingtondecoded.com/site/2007/06/lho.html

To today when O'Reilly and Matthews drink up and sing the prole songs in the pubs of Blair

Ozzie wuz a commie
an' his bullet sheer magic
No motive hae he
for lone acts so tragic

On textbooks, on wikis
on Google, on Yahoo
on DogPile, on LexisNexis,
on Ask and Bing
The ink-stained wretches
and the talking heads of flatscreen
the lefty and righty bloggers
the glossy magazine

Mockingbird, fly away

Lobotomy thy name is U.S. education
Newthink newspeak all abomination

From the far right Rush to the far left Rachel
they have no guts they have no spine and wear the Dulles facial

The shrieking fairies and carping harpies
flying monkeys sent by the witch
We have no one left to speak for us
isn't life a

We know the significance:  a war ensued over his dead body, and exploitation proceeded apace

All this claptrap and jawflap over Mandela is of nothing when the Great Mandala
displays the shameful denial of the coup and the elevation of the cabal

Now the NSA morphs into an octopus entrapping the globe
boasting Nothing Is Beyond Our Reach

Going forward every newscast is propaganda/
every newspaper propaganda/
every war and rumor of war the new revelation

A two minute hate for Snowden
Duck Dynasty and Survivor
then Soma and football
and to all a krystal night
Happy 1984 everyone

^ Superb.

[echelon]

The Media’s Hypocritical Oath - Mandela And Economic Apartheid
By David Edwards

Global Research
Published December 13, 2013

What does it mean when a notoriously profit-driven, warmongering, climate-killing media system mourns, with one impassioned voice, the death of a principled freedom fighter like Nelson Mandela? Does it mean that the corporate system has a heart, that it cares? Or does it mean that Mandela’s politics, and the mythology surrounding them, are somehow serviceable to power?

Consider, first, that this is what is supposed to be true of professional journalism:  ‘Gavin Hewitt, John Simpson, Andrew Marr and the rest are employed to be studiously neutral, expressing little emotion and certainly no opinion; millions of people would say that news is the conveying of fact, and nothing more.’ (Andrew Marr, My Trade – A Short History of British Journalism, Macmillan, 2004, p.279)

Thus, Andrew Marr, then BBC political editor, offering professional journalism’s version of the medical maxim, ‘First, do no harm’. First, do no bias.

The reality is indicated by Peter Oborne’s comment in the Telegraph:  ‘There are very few human beings who can be compared to Jesus Christ. Nelson Mandela is one … It is hard to envisage a wiser ruler.’

Responding to 850 viewers who had complained that the BBC ‘had devoted too much airtime’ to Mandela’s death, James Harding, the BBC’s director of news, also expressed little emotion and certainly no opinion when he declared Mandela ‘the most significant statesman of the last 100 years, a man who defined freedom, justice, reconciliation, forgiveness’.

In other words, the corporate media had once again abandoned its famed Hypocritical Oath in affirming a trans-spectrum consensus. As ever, a proposition is advanced as indisputably true, the evidence so overwhelming that journalists simply have to ditch ‘balance’ to declare the obvious.

[...]

Former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook also recognised Mandela’s ‘huge achievement in helping to bring down South African apartheid’. But:  ‘Mandela was rehabilitated into an “elder statesman” in return for South Africa being rapidly transformed into an outpost of neoliberalism, prioritising the kind of economic apartheid most of us in the west are getting a strong dose of now.’

And Mandela was used:  ‘After finally being allowed to join the western “club”, he could be regularly paraded as proof of the club’s democratic credentials and its ethical sensibility … He was forced to become a kind of Princess Diana, someone we could be allowed to love because he rarely said anything too threatening to the interests of the corporate elite who run the planet.’

[...]

The point is a simple one. State-corporate expressions of moral outrage and approval are never - not ever - to be taken at face value. While of course there may be some truth in what is being said, the systemic motivation will always be found in the self-interested head rather than the altruistic heart.


http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-medias-hypocritical-oath-mandela-and-economic-apartheid/5361399

[echelon]

... we can do better!

Politically bankrupt China dare not tolerate freedom of the press
By Will Hutton

The Observer
22nd December 2013

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/22/china-journalism-suppression-of-truth

According to Wang Qinlei, a former producer at China Central TV's top political programmes, who was fired a few weeks ago for publicly criticising its coverage of the concocted attacks on a famous social blogger, political influence is everywhere. His blog was deleted almost instantly. "In the space of a year, we get upwards of a thousand propaganda orders," he wrote. "How many of these orders were issued in the national interest and how many were issued to serve the political and economic interests of some individual, group or leader? And how often did we castrate ourselves as a result of trying to fathom the attitudes of high officials? Our leaders should understand that if the amount of news you can't report climbs too high, people won't believe the news you can report – because it's propaganda chosen with a purpose."

President Xi's response is to require every Chinese journalist to take an ideology exam early next year in order to qualify for their press cards. The manual on which the exam is based insists that journalists must not deviate from the party line and that the relationship between the party and news media is "one of leader and the led". The aim is to make sure any successors to Wang and Chen know their limits. Self-censorship, after all, is much better than censorship.

(Emphases added).

Ahh, those nasty, nasty Communists (sic)!

So glad such a thing could not happen here, in the free, open and democratic Western world.

This could be called a marvellous example of irony, although I doubt that's what Hutton intended.  Indeed, I've heard that our American friends don't "get" irony.