George Carlin - Jeremy Corbyn - Zdenuk Urbanek - Marjorie Kelly - John Pilger - Robert Jenson - Noam Chomsky - Amy Goodman - Arthur C Clarke - Edward W Said - Edward R Murrow - Tom Stoppard - David Potorti - Mark Crispin Miller - Marshall McLuhan - Robert McChesney and John Nichols - Joyce Riley - Malcolm X - Richard Salent - Richard Cohen - David Brock - Edward Herman - Hank Williams - George Orwell - Tom Fenton - John K Wilson - Richard D Hall TV - Orwell Rolls In His Grave 2003 - Jim Morrison - Carl Sagan - Al Franken - J G Ballard - Alain de Botton - Christopher Hitchens - W H Auden - Rush Limbaugh - Gore Vidal - Graham Greene - Robert Anton Wilson - Adolf Hitler - Frontline TV - Jeremy Hunt - David Cameron - Rupert Murdoch: Battle With Britain TV - James Murdoch - Paul Foot - Max Mosley - Saul Bellow - Thomas Sowell - Diana - Andrew Marr TV - Patrick Henningsen - Simon Heffer - BBC News Editor - Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism 2004 - Control Room 2004 - Donald Trump - Abby Martin & Mike Hedges TV - Horizon TV - The Great Hack 2019 - How to Break into the Elite TV - Divide & Conquer: The Story of Roger Ailes TV - The Rise of the Murdoch Dynasty TV - Feral Beasts: Prime Ministers and the Media TV - Conspiracy: Lord Lucan Dossier 2015 - Julian Assange - Project Censored 2013 - The Corbett Report - A Glitch in the Matrix 2021 - Second Thought online - Who Rules America: The Power of the Media 2022 - Michael Rosen -
I don’t take very seriously the media or the press in this country who in the case of the Persian Gulf War were nothing more than unpaid employees of the Department of Defense. And who most of the time, most of the time function as a kind of unofficial public relations agency for the United States Government. So I don’t really listen to them, I don’t really believe in my country and I got to tell you folks I don’t get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. George Carlin
One thing I’ve learned over the past six months is how shallow, facile and ill-informed many of the supposedly well-informed major commentators are in our media. They shape a debate that is baseless and narrow with utterly disgusting subliminal nastiness. Jeremy Corbyn
In dictatorships we are more fortunate than you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know it’s propaganda and lies. Unlike you in the West, we’ve learnt to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines. Unlike you, we know that the real truth is always subversive. Zdenuk Urbanek, novelist & Charter 77, interview John Pilger
Corporate power lies behind nearly every major problem we face – from stagnant wages and unaffordable health care to overconsumption and global warming ... With all this happening, why do we not read more about the pervasiveness of corporate power? In large part because even the ‘Fourth Estate’, our media establishment, is majority owned by a handful of mega-corporations. Marjorie Kelly, How Popular Movements Can Confront Corporate Power And Win
Propaganda in liberal democracies like America and Britain is much more thorough than in dictatorships and totalitarian states. No imprisonment is required, no loss of fingernails called for. There is another far more effective way: unlike totalitarian states, the conformity of information and opinion is insidious. Its sameness implicit, engrained and even celebrated ... Technology seems to have almost anything seem possible except Truth ... Truth is always subversive, otherwise why should governments and their bureaucracies fear it so much and go to such lengths to suppress it. John Pilger, lecture July 1996, ‘The Hidden Power of the Media’
These days we are constantly told we live in an information society. On the contrary, I believe we live in a media society in which there may appear to be saturation information but in reality it’s information that is repetitive, controlled and above all safe. ibid.
As media giants like Murdoch get bigger and bigger, the way we see our own world is distorted, often without many of us realising. For example, when the Disney Corporation recently merged with ABC in America, it marked a further breakdown of the borders between news and entertainment. ibid.
During the miners’ strike a few years later television took on an almost Falklands role, with the miners often cast as the Argies. Picket line violence was the main media issue. When the strike was over the Council on Civil Liberties produced a report on the role of the police. The report said: ‘Contrary to the impression given by the media, most of the picketing during the strike had been orderly and on a modest scale’. This was not reported. ibid.
The Scott Inquiry provided the ammunition, but who apart from Paul Foot and one or two others have ever fired it? ibid.
On Christmas Eve, I dropped in on Brian Haw, whose hunched, pacing figure was just visible through the freezing fog. For four and a half years, Brian has camped in Parliament Square with a graphic display of photographs that show the terror and suffering imposed on Iraqi children by British policies. The effectiveness of his action was demonstrated last April when the Blair government banned any expression of opposition within a kilometre of parliament. The high court subsequently ruled that, because his presence preceded the ban, Brian was an exception.
Day after day, night after night, season upon season, he remains a beacon, illuminating the great crime of Iraq and the cowardice of the House of Commons. As we talked, two women brought him a Christmas meal and mulled wine. They thanked him, shook his hand and hurried on. He had never seen them before. ‘That’s typical of the public,’ he said. A man in a pinstriped suit and tie emerged from the fog, carrying a small wreath. ‘I intend to place this at the Cenotaph and read out the names of the dead in Iraq,’ he said to Brian, who cautioned him: ‘You’ll spend the night in the cells, mate.’ We watched him stride off and lay his wreath. His head bowed, he appeared to be whispering. Thirty years ago, I watched dissidents do something similar outside the walls of the Kremlin.
As the night had covered him, he was lucky. On 7 December, Maya Evans, a vegan chef aged 25, was convicted of breaching the new Serious Organised Crime and Police Act by reading aloud at the Cenotaph the names of 97 British soldiers killed in Iraq. So serious was her crime that it required 14 policemen in two vans to arrest her. She was fined and given a criminal record for the rest of her life.
Freedom is dying.
Eighty-year-old John Catt served with the RAF in the Second World War. Last September, he was stopped by police in Brighton for wearing an ‘offensive’ T-shirt which suggested that Bush and Blair be tried for war crimes. He was arrested under the Terrorism Act and handcuffed, with his arms held behind his back. The official record of the arrest says the ‘purpose’ of searching him was ‘terrorism’ and the ‘grounds for intervention’ were ‘carrying placard and T-shirt with anti-Blair info’ (sic).
He is awaiting trial.
Such cases compare with others that remain secret and beyond any form of justice: those of the foreign nationals held at Belmarsh Prison who have never been charged, let alone put on trial. They are held ‘on suspicion’. Some of the ‘evidence’ against them, whatever it is, the government has now admitted, could have been extracted under torture at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They are political prisoners in all but name. They face the prospect of being spirited out of the country and into the arms of a regime which may torture them to death. Their isolated families, including children, are quietly going mad.
And for what?
Between 11 September 2001 and 30 September 2005, 895 people in total were arrested under the Terrorism Act. Only 23 have been convicted of offences covered by the Act. As for real terrorists, the identities of two of the 7 July bombers, including the suspected mastermind, were known to MI5, yet nothing was done. And Blair wants to give the security services more power. Having helped to devastate Iraq, he is now killing freedom in his own country.
Consider parallel events in the United States. Last October, an American doctor, loved by his patients, was punished with 22 years in prison for founding a charity, Help the Needy, which helped children in Iraq stricken by an economic and humanitarian blockade imposed by America and Britain. In raising money for infants dying from diarrhoea, Dr Rafil Dhafir broke a siege which, according to Unicef, had caused the deaths of half a million under the age of five. John Ashcroft, the then US attorney general, called Dr Dhafir, a Muslim, a ‘terrorist’, a description mocked by even the judge in a politically motivated travesty of a trial.
The Dhafir case is not extraordinary. In the same month, three US circuit court judges ruled in favour of the Bush regime’s ‘right’ to imprison an American citizen ‘indefinitely’ without charging him with a crime. This was the case of Jose Padilla, a petty criminal who allegedly visited Pakistan before he was arrested at Chicago airport three and a half years ago. He was never charged and no evidence has ever been presented against him. Now mired in legal complexity, the case puts George W Bush above the law and outlaws the Bill of Rights. Indeed, on 14 November, the US Senate in effect voted to ban habeas corpus by passing an amendment that overturned a Supreme Court ruling allowing Guantanamo prisoners access to a federal court. Thus, the touchstone of America's most celebrated freedom was scrapped. Without habeas corpus, a government can simply lock away its opponents and implement a dictatorship.
A related, insidious tyranny is being imposed across the world. For all his troubles in Iraq, Bush has carried out the recommendations of a Messianic conspiracy theory called the Project for the New American Century. Written by his ideological sponsors shortly before he came to power, it foresaw his administration as a military dictatorship behind a democratic facade: ‘the cavalry on the new American frontier’, guided by a blend of paranoia and megalomania. More than 700 American bases are now placed strategically in compliant countries, notably at gateways to sources of fossil fuels and encircling the Middle East and central Asia. ‘Pre-emptive’ aggression is policy, including the use of nuclear weapons. The chemical warfare industry has been reinvigorated. Missile treaties have been torn up. Space has been militarised. Global warming has been embraced. The powers of the president have never been greater. The judicial system has been subverted, along with civil liberties. The former senior CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who once prepared the daily White House briefing, told me that the authors of the PNAC and those now occupying positions of executive power used to be known in Washington as ‘the crazies’. He said: ‘We should now be very worried about fascism.’
In his epic acceptance of the Nobel Prize in Literature on 7 December, Harold Pinter spoke of ‘a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed’. He asked why ‘the systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought’ of Stalinist Russia were well known in the west while US state crimes were merely ‘superficially recorded, let alone documented, let alone acknowledged’.