The Corporate Media Complex: Drawing Back The Veil on The U.S. Propaganda Machine!

• “We are grateful to The Washington Post, The New York Times, Time Magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected their promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the work is now much more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national autodetermination practiced in past centuries.”
  David Rockefeller, founder of the Trilateral Commission, in an address to a meeting of The Trilateral Commission, in June, 1991.
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  “In March, 1915, the J.P. Morgan interests, the steel, shipbuilding, and powder interest, and their subsidiary organizations, got together 12 men high up in the newspaper world and employed them to select the most influential newspapers in the United States and sufficient number of them to control generally the policy of the daily press….They found it was only necessary to purchase the control of 25 of the greatest papers.
   “An agreement was reached; the policy of the papers was bought, to be paid for by the month; an editor was furnished for each paper to properly supervise and edit information regarding the questions of preparedness, militarism, financial policies, and other things of national and international nature considered vital to the interests of the purchasers.”
  U.S. Congressman Oscar Callaway, 1917
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• The western MSM is Illuminist owned. It is becoming more and more obvious that most of the articles coming out of the MSM are largely propaganda, outright lies and highly manipulative. The agenda is to sell: World Government, Illuminist hoaxes like global warming/carbon taxes, wars, false humanitarian causes…etc. Excerpts :
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  The Corporate Media Complex: Drawing Back the Veil on the U.S. Propaganda Machine
  by Dr. Robert P. Abele, http://www.globalresearch.ca/
  Even to the casual observer, the last thirty years has witnessed a
  revolution in American media,
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  1 No longer fulfilling the valued democratic function of “the fourth estate,” the media complex has co-opted itself simultaneously into both mega-corporations and government megaphone.
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  2 The result is a government-corporate-media complex, whose function is to profit those who run them and use them. It is the point of the following analysis to elucidate the existence, structure, and values of this mega-complex. The ensuing eight-part argument is intended to produce in the reader the commitment to become the media, since there is currently no fourth estate in the U.S.
  ….
  2. Defining propaganda
  The Oxford English Dictionary defines propaganda as: “Any association, systematic scheme, or concerted movement for the propagation of a particular doctrine or practice.”12 The nephew of Sigmund Freud and the watershed for advancing propaganda in a distinct direction favoring political and economic elites, Edward Bernays interpreted propaganda in narrow terms: democracy will only work if the mass of people is guided by an enlightened elite class that is imperceptible to the masses in their crafting of public opinion. This understanding comes from his intellectual hero, Walter Lippmann, who said that the people “are incapable of lucid thought and clear perception, and are driven instead by the herd instinct, raw emotions, and pure prejudice.”13
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  What we may take from this is that propaganda is a form of coercion—verbal manipulation of the people to whom it is directed by cloaking the message in terms with which no one can disagree (e.g. Euphemisms such as “American x,” “USA PATRIOT Act;” “Support our troops;” yellow ribbons, “fighting to bring democracy”), thereby creating the illusion in people that they are in control of their lives and their institutional structures, as well as the illusion of having free choice in such matters, while allowing the perpetrator of it to have their way.14 As the French philosopher Jacques Ellul states it: “The propagandist naturally cannot reveal the true intentions of the principal for whom he acts…That would be to submit the projects to public discussion, to the scrutiny of public opinion, and thus to prevent their success.”15
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  3. The elites behind the propaganda
  For the propagandist and the elites behind the propaganda, the function of propaganda is to create ideological conformity by limiting the range of “acceptable” dissent. Lippmann, for example, argues that “the democratic El Dorado” is impossible in and through the populace of America, because they are incapable of lucid thought and clear perception, and are driven instead by the herd instinct, raw emotions, and pure prejudice, and thus could not make
  rational and informed decisions.16
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   Noam Chomsky interprets Lippmann as maintaining that “the practice of democracy” must be “the manufacture of consent,” based on the position that the opinion of the masses could not be trusted, there are two political roles that are to be clearly distinguished: the role of the specialized class, the “insiders,” who have access to information and understanding; and “the task of the public” which “acts only by aligning itself as the partisan of someone in a position to act executively.” Lippmann’s ideas, according to Chomsky, “have an unmistakable resemblance to the Leninist concept of a vanguard party that leads the masses to a better life that they cannot conceive or construct on their own.”17
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  4. Structural analysis of the American media
  When one examines how this process of “manufacturing consent” works, one finds the following structure.18 The first structural dynamic leads us to see that there are elite media, such as the New York Times and Washington Post, CBS, NBC, etc., that set the news agenda that others use in their coverage of world and national news.
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  Second, there are five filters the elite media use in determining the news: 1) The size: concentrated ownership; owner wealth; profit orientation of  the dominant mass-media firms; 2) Advertising as the primary income source of the mass media; 3) Reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and “experts” funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power; 4) “Flak” as a means of disciplining the media; 5) The “national religion and control mechanism of news: “Anticommunism,” now changed, in the words of Edward Herman, to “the miracle of the market.”19
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  This structure of the media is what media analysts refer to today as “the mainstream media.” According to many analysts, its function is to divert attention away from the important issues and into side issues, leaving the elite to determine solutions to the main issues. For example, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion by the United States and a few minor allies in 2003, the mainstream media focused on issues of the threat of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, creating fear in the population, and also stating without critical review the Bush administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein was connected to the attacks on the U.S. on September 11, 2001. If the structural dimensions of the media had been different, instead of asking such “side show” questions, the questions would have been more along the lines of verifying such assertions, and most importantly asking whether the U.S. had the right by ethics and international law to invade Iraq.20
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  Kenneth Pollack, a former CIA analyst of the Iraq army, was also a supporter of the invasion. He wrote at least two articles in the New York Times, in September of 2002 and February 21, 2003, providing his pro-invasion arguments. his second article embracing the coming invasion of Iraq was written on February 21, 2003. Entitled “Last Chance to Stop Iraq,” Pollack uses the same line that the Bush administration had been using: that stories from Iraq defectors indicate that Iraq was very close to developing a nuclear weapon.  Because of the discrepancy between U.N. inspector reports and Iraqi defector reports, Pollack concludes that “we simply do not know how close Iraq is to acquiring a nuclear weapon . . . What we do know is that for more than a decade we have consistently overestimated the ability of inspectors to impede the Iraqi efforts and we have consistently underestimated how far along Iraq has been toward acquiring nuclear weapons” (emphasis mine). Had the media been doing its job and acting as a critical agent in reporting such claims, it would have said some of the following. First, on the basis of ignorance of another nation’s potential weapons systems, one nation has no right to invade another, either ethically or by international law (e.g. see United Nations Article 51). Second, using defectors as evidence is a little like using tortured prisoners: they will say whatever they think the other side wants to hear in order to get what they want.
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  Third, Pollack’s reliance on unnamed and uncorroborated defector stories is an insufficient premise for him to use to conclude the dubious nature of the inspection process, let alone justify an invasion by U.S. military forces.
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  In March, Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, added to the beating of the war drums by arguing in the Times that there are “Good Reasons for Going Around the U.N.” in order to war with Iraq. Her main reasons for maintaining included the fact that the U.S. has done it before, with Kosovo; and that the U.N. “cannot be a straightjacket, preventing nations from defending themselves or pursuing what they perceive to be in their vital national security interests.”21 Ms. Slaughter concludes “that which is legitimate is also legal.” But this is a non-sequitur argument, as Ms. Slaughter completely ignored international law in this argument, which would clearly see the invasion as illegal. Significantly, she disregarded the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, to which the U.S. was a signatory. This Act rejected recourse to war as an instrument of foreign policy. Additionally, she ignored the Nuremberg Charter, Article 6, which makes criminal invasions of other countries as “Crimes against Peace,” and the United Nations Charter, Articles 2(3), 2(4), and 51, all of which condemn the use of force against another nation without imminent provocation. Stated philosophically, Ms. Slaughter places a perceived national interest above the law, which is a dubious contention, and certainly not a casus belli. But her weakest premise is her first one, arguing that historical precedent makes for legality. That same premise would legitimate Hitler’s invasion of France, once he had invaded other countries.
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  … for the full article here!

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