Americans Trust the Main Stream Press No More

Liberals’ and moderates’ views are now similar to conservatives’

By LYMARY MORALES | GALLUP | JULY 11, 2012

Americans’ confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point, with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. This marks a decline from 27% last year and from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in television news in 1993.

Trend: Americans' Confidence in Television News

The findings are from Gallup’s annual update on confidence in U.S. institutions, conducted June 7-10 this year. As such, the findings preceded the erroneous initial reports by cable-news networks CNN and Fox News regarding the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 28 decision about the constitutionality of the U.S. healthcare law.

Among 16 U.S. institutions tested, television news ranks 11th, following newspapers in 10th place. The 25% of adults who express a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers is down slightly from 28% last year. Confidence in newspapers is now half of what it was at its peak of 51% in 1979.

Trend: Americans' Confidence in Newspapers

This year’s updates mark a setback from last year for both television news and newspapers, when Americans appeared to be regaining some confidence in these institutions, though they are more in line with 2007-2010 readings.

Liberals’ and Moderates’ Faith Plummets Below Conservatives’

Liberals and moderates lost so much confidence in television news this year — 11 and 10 points, respectively — that their views are now more akin to conservatives’ views. This marks a turnaround from the pattern seen since 2009, in which liberals expressed more confidence than conservatives. Conservatives’ views of television news were last similar to liberals’ in June 2008, before the last presidential election. However, moderates are significantly less confident now than they were then, 20% vs. 28%.

Americans' Confidence in Television News by Ideology, 2003-2012 Trend

The decline since last year in confidence in television news among liberals did not coincide with a similar decline among Democrats. Democrats this year are the most confident in the television news media among key subgroups. Interestingly, postgraduates, who tend to be Democrats, are now the least confident.

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Obama Pressed for Cyber attacks against Iran with Stuxnet and Flame

Main Stream Media carefully justifies attacks under the excuse that Iran might be producing a nuclear bomb or that Al-Qaeda — a USA creation — is using computers somewhere.

By DAVID E. SANGER | NY TIMES | JUNE 1, 2012

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet.

At a tense meeting in the White House Situation Room within days of the worm’s “escape,” Mr. Obama, Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency at the time, Leon E. Panetta, considered whether America’s most ambitious attempt to slow the progress of Iran’s nuclear efforts had been fatally compromised.

“Should we shut this thing down?” Mr. Obama asked, according to members of the president’s national security team who were in the room.

Told it was unclear how much the Iranians knew about the code, and offered evidence that it was still causing havoc, Mr. Obama decided that the cyberattacks should proceed. In the following weeks, the Natanz plant was hit by a newer version of the computer worm, and then another after that. The last of that series of attacks, a few weeks after Stuxnet was detected around the world, temporarily took out nearly 1,000 of the 5,000 centrifuges Iran had spinning at the time to purify uranium.

This account of the American and Israeli effort to undermine the Iranian nuclear program is based on interviews over the past 18 months with current and former American, European and Israeli officials involved in the program, as well as a range of outside experts. None would allow their names to be used because the effort remains highly classified, and parts of it continue to this day.

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue.

Iran initially denied that its enrichment facilities had been hit by Stuxnet, then said it had found the worm and contained it. Last year, the nation announced that it had begun its own military cyberunit, and Brig. Gen. Gholamreza Jalali, the head of Iran’s Passive Defense Organization, said that the Iranian military was prepared “to fight our enemies” in “cyberspace and Internet warfare.” But there has been scant evidence that it has begun to strike back.

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Ron Paul Warns about Iran War Propaganda

by Luis R. Miranda
The Real Agenda
January 12, 2012

This is another Iraq in the making. Another false threat to take the United States and the rest of the world -international community- into another war that may be even more dangerous than the previous two in the middle east. This is the summary of what Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is warning about in a new ad that reminds us about false information, the yellow cake kind of information that took the United States and its allies to invade Iraq in 2003.

The same argument is being used in 2012 to provoke another war; this time with Iran. The unfounded “take it to the bank” proposition made by Colin Powell a few years ago, is now circulated around the decaying main stream corrupt media, that once again wants to make people feel afraid about a nonexistent threat. The WMD hoax ran by the Bush administration and the corporate media after 9/11, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks, and that he had pursued and successfully obtained nuclear material for a bomb took the United States and a handful of allies to invade Iraq and complete the killing of at least 1,000,000 Iraqis. Today both George W. Bush and Colin Powell say they regret having gone to war on the dubious information, but are quick to blame information the sources and not themselves.

Many years before the attacks on US soil and as a consequence the retaliation on Iraq came about, only Ron Paul used his limited time on the House floor to warn the public about unwarranted, illegal wars to come, which would be based on false information. This wars would, as he accurately pointed it out, help the consolidation of power over territories and resources in the middle east by the forces of the military industrial complex, otherwise known as the US military and the ‘international community’.

See ad below:

During a time when the war drums beat louder than ever, not even the usual suspects can hide the fact that an open war is being fought in the shadows against Iran and that it is Israel itself the one conducting most of it with the help of the United States intelligence agencies. As reported by Fox News, IDF chief of staff Benny Gantz testified secretly for Israel’s Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee, and revealed that Israel itself was engaging in sabotaging Iran’s nuclear program through a series of “unnatural” acts:

“2012 is expected to be a critical year for Iran.” He cited “the confluence of efforts to advance the nuclear program, internal leadership changes, continued international pressure and things that happen to it unnaturally.”

Ron Paul continued to warn against unprovoked wars back in 2002 as he explained to an unsuspecting public and a gullible Congress, that waging war on countries that had not threatened or posed a real threat to the United States would increase the chances that more hatred and attacks abroad and at home occurred. “Yisrael HaYom’s coverage further reinforces the notion that he was referring directly to the “mysterious explosions” that have rocked Iran of late. As the FoxNews article notes, it’s no accident that the hearing occurred less than 24 hours before the latest assassination,” reports RichardSilverstein.com

As Dr. Ron Paul has explained at length, Iran is completely right to show its preoccupation with the continuous aggression that comes from the United States and its partners in the region. Although the Department of Defense denies that the most recent movements and war games carried out along with Israel are a direct response to Iran’s preparations for what seems to be an imminent attack on its nuclear energy installations, three new warships have moved closer into the Strait of Hormuz in order to press Iran to abandon its current position in the region.

“Another carrier strike group, led by the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, concluded a port visit to Thailand on Tuesday and was now in the Indian Ocean. It is on track to join the Vinson in the Central Command area of operations, which begins in the neighboring Arabian Sea,” reports Reuters.

But Iran’s response to US aggression has been exactly to not back off from its position. From all the countries threatened by the US, Israel, Britain and France in the last few months, Iran is the only one that has held strong. Its military is ready to conduct another significant naval drill over the next couple of weeks in preparation for a major US/Israeli military exercise. This scenario raises the chances that both Iran and the US may use the opportunity to cook up a false flag event. The message from Iran has been clear so far:  “stay out of the Persian Gulf”.

With many of his warnings becoming true after 30 years of being straightforward with the public, Ron Paul is riding a wave of popularity that does not seem to end. In the latest national poll, the Congressman from Texas is second among independents and Republicans when these two groups are added together. In the last poll, he was only 1 percent behind Obama, a number well within the margin of error. These numbers greatly increase his chances of heading into the next few primaries in a head to head fight against current front runner Mitt Romney, who is still expected to hit a plateau and sink, just like all other contenders did. Ron Paul on the other hand has risen steadily passing everyone but the former Massachusetts governor.

Even Fox News’ Neil Cavuto has come out to warn that Mr. Paul may not only be a force during the current Republican primaries, but also a strong candidate for a run as an independent. Cavuto explains that as things are right now, Paul has the potential to steal important amounts of votes from both the Republican front-runner, as well as the incumbent president. See the video below:

As things are right now, it seems that Ron Paul still has a lot of room to grow as his message continues to resonate with more and more Americans of all ages, especially young adults and military servicemen and women. He continues to climb on the polls in the state of South Carolina positioning himself among the top three contenders, leaving behind people like Rick Perry, John Huntsman and Rick Santorum who just a few weeks ago were above Paul. Is it his consistent message what has earned Paul his meteoric rise? Probably. Will this rise in the polls and continuous appearances in second and third places guarantee Mr. Paul a strong showing on future primaries? It seems it will. Will his rise be strong enough to beat up the establishment candidates? We will see.

Empire and the Lies of the Corporate Media: Are we Living in a Fool’s Paradise?

by William Bowles
Global Research
December 25, 2011

Well 2011 has been nothing if not eventful but frankly, in spite of all the #Occupy this and #Occupy that, it’s not been a good year for us progresssives or the planet. The Empire acts with increasing, not decreasing impunity, desperate now to try and keep ahead of events lest events take control of it.

Are we living in a fool’s paradise?

A question keeps nagging at me: Are all of us, including the left, reacting to an entirely engineered reality, fed to us via an all-embracing media? We get blown this way and that, all of it being determined by whatever ‘event’ the globalized media decides to feed us with. Then, just as ‘mysteriously’, the ‘event’ disappears to be replaced by yet another ‘event’.

The old Anarchist cry of ‘Do not adjust your mind, there’s a fault in reality’ takes on an entirely new kind of import given the power of the media to determine what’s ‘real’ for us.

What this means is that the media effectively acts as an agent provocateur for the state and big business as it decides for us what is actually going on in the world. In turn, progressives make decisions based not on what needs to be done, but as a reaction to the ‘news’ in a weird political version of the Heisenberg Effect.

Press coverage of the Summer Riots is a perfect example of this process in action whereby the media, by focusing solely on the violence and destruction, not only transformed it into a ‘riot without a cause’ but in doing so actually incited even more violence and destruction, just as ASBOs (Anti-Social Behaviour Orders) are worn as ‘badges of honour’ by alienated youth who actually go out of their way to get one (or two).

Aside from anything else it demonstrates just how out-of-touch the political elite is with the reality of life as it is really lived by a goodly chunk of the population; the so-called underclass.

Life as supplied to us is now an endless succession of ‘crises’ or public spectacles (the lines between the two often blur):

‘Ground-to-air missiles ‘may protect’ London 2012 games’BBC News, 14 November 2011.

In fact, the very nature of BBC’s headlines headlines betray the essence of how to report the ‘news’ as a succession of dramas to be played out, not in the real world that you and I live in but in the world created by a globalized, corporate media machine.

‘Crises’ are played out in the TV equivalent of ‘flaming’ (shooting off at the mouth without thinking). Dictators come and go… All but the dramatic essence is removed and along with it real meaning disappears. This is the triumph of television, the ability to be able to cut and paste reality in its entirety.

And the question, what of life outside the media-supplied ‘reality’ has been brought home to me by MSM’s coverage of the #Occupy ‘movement’. The left debates its relevance and its potential endlessly but within the confines of a media-supplied reality. All that’s solid melts into air, or in this case bits and bytes.

The #Occupy movement exists for as long as it grabs the headlines and for said headlines to work, an element of violence is an absolutely necessary ingredient for it to become ‘news’. But once the ‘confrontations’ are gone and the ‘struggle’ safely removed to the controllable environment of the High Court, the story is no longer ‘newsworthy’ except as a footnote to ’2011 – Year of Occupations’.

We are now literally, passive observers of our own funerals in a world of total media saturation and control. A world of endless tragedy but at a distance, mediated by an unseen hand and fed to us pretty much like an out-of-control soap opera, where events break and at first reporting is chaotic and normally wrong but as soon as the MSM has gotten hold of the ‘right script’ then ‘reasons’, ’causes’ and ‘solutions’ can then be inserted for each unfolding, dramatic episode.

Gaddafi’s tortured, broken and abused body presented to us as the rightful end to a ‘weirdo celebrity’, a victim of his own success and failure. First courted then betrayed, an epic worthy of a plot by Shakespeare.

The ‘story’ can then be handled as spectacle and for as long as it remains spectacle it’s a product that can be safely and passively consumed. In this sense the #Occupy movement has also become a victim of its own success. It plays out its life not in the real world but in that other reality, that the rest of us live in, the one supplied by the corporate media machine.

In turn this determines our relationship with it or lack of one. The media for example talks of how occupations or strikes affect the public, as if by some miraculous process, the occupiers or strikers are no longer part of the ‘public’. They’ve been relocated to media-land to live lives as ephemeral as the photons they are made of.

It’s for this reason that the question of the role of class in the proceedings rarely if ever figures in media-land, for if it were to explore the role of class with as much zeal as it explores the ‘role’ of violence, it would have to redefine its use of the word ‘public’ let alone violence. It would also have to reveal which side of the class divide it’s actually on.

If it’s true, and I think it is, that it’s working people who are paying the price for the crimes of the 1%, the ones who own the capital that (just about) makes capitalism work, then it’s a question of a struggle between two classes; those who own capital and those who don’t.

Currently the media represents the interests of the 1% of the ‘public’ that imposes its reality on the proceedings as if it’s ours. A reality in which certain fundamentals are a ‘given’, for example, the rule of private capital, the primacy of the state to act with impunity in all things in order to ‘protect our national interest’. In a phrase, the preservation of the existing order and way of doing things.

Even the tools that we now have including blogs, social networking and instantaneous video have proved to be very powerful tools of propaganda for the Empire. Tools that have been turned against us as is the case with Libya and now Syria.

The BBC’s use of video from cellphones–mostly unattributed and revealing nothing about what is actually going on in Syria–have become the staple diet of the BBC’s alleged news coverage of Syria, claiming that they’re not allowed into the country.

And ‘bloggers’ are now a regular feature of MSM coverage, which is fine except that only a couple of years ago, the MSM was ranting on about how ‘blogging’ was going to be the death of ‘professional’ journalism. If only…

But no more, the MSM realized that ‘reality’ video was the perfect tool of propaganda, as it appears that it’s ‘the people’ speaking. The BBC is merely relaying ‘reality’ to its public and in the process it accrues the authenticity needed to make it believable. To make it credible.

And in doing so, the MSM has jettisoned the last remnants of what it chooses to call ‘impartial and objective’ journalism.

The drama and (hidden) tragedy of the destruction of Libya was played out for us as if it were cinema veritas, all grainy footage and hand-held cameras swinging about wildly all over the place, inter-cut with BBC propagandists masquerading as news men standing in front of a weapon of death boasting to the viewer of its awesome fire power.

As the Empire acts with increasing impunity, so too does the media. The Media and the Empire in total lockstep.

George Orwell’s Guide to the News

by Adrian Salbuchi
Russia Today
December 1, 2011

The Western mainstream media falsifies the news resorting to euphemisms, half-truths and lies in the best (worst) style of George Orwell’s novel 1984. We all live in the unreal world of “Newspeak” used by the Global Power Elite to control our minds.

Man gets confused when things that happen around him and to him, or which are done in his name, cannot be properly grasped, understood or made sense of. Normally, such confusion leads to inaction. If you’re lost at night in the middle of a forest but you can still see the stars, then a bit of astronomical knowledge will at least quickly tell you which way is north. But if it’s cloudy or you’re ignorant of the constellations in starry heaven, then you might as well light up a fire and do nothing until dawn…. You’re Lost!

Today, mainstream media coverage uses programmed distortion, confusion, even outright lying when its Money Power masters order it to support the “official story” on any major political, economic or financial process. When looked at closely, however, the “official story” of things can be seen to be inaccurate, misleading, often hardly believable if not downright stupid.

Examples of this: Iraq’s inexistent WMD’s leading to the invasion and destruction of that country; global mega-banker bail-outs with taxpayer money; irrational US diplomatic, military, financial and ideological alignment to Israeli objectives; “we-killed-Osama-Bin-Laden-and-dumped-his-body-into-the-sea”; and the wide array of “whodunits” surrounding 9/11 in New York and Washington, 7/7 in London, the AMIA/Israeli Embassy attacks in Buenos Aires in 1992/1994, and – of course – that all time favorite: who shot JFK…?

These are but a few of the paradigmatic cases that have at least served to trigger millions of people to wake up and think with their own minds instead of the mainstream media’s! But unfortunately the vast majority of such cases are not so clear-cut. The vast majority of Newspeak lies are like knots, difficult to untie as they carry built-in complexity resembling Gordian Knots. And, as with all Gordian Knots, you need to cut right through them, and this requires swift and precise action plus a good measure of intellectual courage.

To give an example of what we say, let’s take a quick look at how a “Newspeak” operation works. It requires sequential planning, it requires time, it requires proper logistics, it requires “credible” spokespeople in public and private sectors, it requires choosing the right words and images at the right time and in the right circumstances.

So, let’s say the Global Power Elite – working through the governments of the US, UK, EU into which they are deeply embedded, and joint-venturing with a wide array of media outlets, defense companies, oil companies, security and construction companies, and powerful lobbies – decide that they wish to overrun and destroy a specific country… Libya, for example…

How do they ensure that “the international community” will just quietly look on (except for the still relatively small minority of voices that are increasingly raising hell against them)?

The Seven Step Mainstream Media Country Destruction Guide

1. First, they start by targeting a country ripe for “Regime Change”, and brand it a “rogue state”; then…

2. They arm, train, finance local terrorist groups through CIA, MI6, Mossad, Al-Qaeda (a CIA operation), drug cartels (often CIA operations) and call them “freedom fighters”; then…

3. As mock UN Security Council Resolutions are staged that rain death and destruction upon millions of civilians, they call it “UN sanctions to protect civilians”; then…

4. They spread flagrant lies through their “newsrooms” and paid journalists, and call it “the international community’s concerns expressed by prestigious spokespeople and analysts…” then…

5. They bomb, invade and begin to control the target country and call it “liberation”; then…

6. As the target country falls fully under their control, they impose “the kind of democracy that we want to see” (as Hillary Clinton before visiting Egypt and Tunisia on March 10, 2011), until finally…

7. They steal appetizing oil, mineral and agricultural reserves handing them over to Global Power Elite corporations, and impose unnecessary private banking debt and call it “foreign investment and reconstruction.”

Their keynotes are: Force and Hypocrisy, which they have used time and again to destroy entire countries, always in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “peace” and “human rights”. Utmost force and violence is used to achieve their ends and goals.

Their Elders recommended this many decades ago in a blueprint for World Domination written on a hoary manuscript of old…

“What did you say…? That you don’t want to be ‘liberated’ and ‘democratized’?!?”

“Then, take this Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, Berlin, Dresden, Baghdad, and Basra!! Take that Tokyo, Gaza, Lebanon, Kabul, Pakistan, Tripoli, Belgrade, Egypt, El Salvador and Grenada!! And take that, Panama, Argentina, Chile, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Somalia, Africa!!”

Always bombing people to smithereens… Always, of course, in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “peace” and “human rights”

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