How to Tell a Hit Piece From Real Journalism

BREAKING: NJ ANTIFA Group Gets Infiltrated and Exposed by O’Keefe

 

Turning Point Journalist Says She Was ‘Brutally Assaulted’ By Anti-ICE Protesters - ...

Turning Point Journalist Says She Was ‘Brutally Assaulted’ By Anti-ICE Protesters — and Comes with Video

Sean James

Apr 11th, 2026, 6:16 pm



(Photo credit: Rhein Amacher on X)

Turning Point USA contributor Savanah Hernandez was attacked by multiple anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis on Saturday, with one female protester caught on camera hitting Hernandez with two punches to the head and knocking her to the ground.

Hernandez shared multiple clips of the anti-ICE protesters assaulting her on X on Saturday.

“I was just brutally assaulted by multiple people outside of the Whipple ICE facility in Minneapolis,” she posted. “Multiple people swung on me and a grown man pushed me to the ground. My glasses are broken. ANTIFA still alive and well. I’m talking with police about pressing charges.”

She followed that up with a clip showing her being heckled and surrounded by protesters, with one woman attempting to smack Hernandez in the face with a pink dildo. The clip then shows another woman punching Hernandez to the ground against a chain link fence; Hernandez got back on her feet quickly and was then confronted by another portly female protester, who threw her shoulder into Hernandez and then shoved her away with her right arm.

The footage shared by Hernandez was from YouTuber “BG on the Ground” and did not include audio; that clip has not been posted to BG’s YouTube page as of Saturday afternoon. Hernandez mentioned a few times on X a grown man pushed her to the ground, but that is not seen in a few of the clips she shared.

Hernandez also reposted a clip of the assault from a different angle.

Viewers can hear whistles blaring and one protester yelling “B*tch!” as Hernandez backpedals after she was hit to the ground; it’s appears more punches were thrown between the anti-ICE protesters and people from Hernandez’s side, but it it tough to discern from the clip. The shouting — and obviously, punches thrown at Hernandez — make it clear it was a chaotic scene.

You can see that clip below:

https://www.mediaite.com/media/turning-point-journalist-says-she-was-brutally-assaulted-by-anti-ice-protesters-and-comes-with-video/

Hernandez is a reporter for Turning Point USA, the conservative group founded by Charlie Kirk; she has covered illegal immigration and anti-ICE protests over the past few years.

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Lemon is ‘hiding behind the SHIELD of journalism,’ says former Justice department prosecutor

 

Minnesota citizen journalist exposes chaos, failed leadership, and lies ...

Trump Q&A at NABJ convention in Chicago (FULL STREAM)

African reporter reveals why Karine Jean-Pierre won’t meet with him till...

Dominican economist defended project as Odebrecht paid him

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Dominican economist defended project as Odebrecht paid him | Miami Herald

Influential economist defended construction giant. Secretly it paid his firm millions | Miami Herald

The Bribery Division: A look into Odebrecht’s bribery scandal

An investigation led by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists reveals that Odebrecht’s cash-for-contracts operation was even bigger than the Brazilian company has acknowledged. Here's a look into the bribery scandal.

THE BRIBERY DIVISION

Influential economist defended construction giant. Secretly it paid his firm millions


By Ben Wieder,

Kevin G. Hall, and

Alicia Ortega Hasbún 

June 27, 2019 09:02 AM, Updated June 27, 2019 09:02 AM


As questions swirled about the ballooning price tag for a $2 billion coal plant in the Dominican Republic, one of the strongest defenders of the project was a prominent Dominican economist named Andrés Dauhajre Hijo.

Writing in the newspaper El Caribe in February 2017, Dauhajre called criticism of the Punta Catalina project’s costs “the best-selling lie in recent years.”

But Dauhajre’s accounting of the project left out one detail.

He didn’t disclose that he had been paid more than $3 million by Odebrecht S.A., the Brazilian construction firm that had won a 2013 contract to build the plant. That $3 million was on top of the money his consulting firm had previously received from the government to help review the bids of Odebrecht and others.

Those payments were among the revelations in a tranche of leaked data and documents obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists showing the inner-workings of Odebrecht’s Drousys system, an alternative accounting system the company used to keep track of $788 million worth of bribes and other off-the-books payments it doled out to politicians and government officials in 12 countries in Latin America and Africa.

Reporters from McClatchy, The Miami Herald and el Nuevo Herald are part of a team of more than 50 journalists in 10 countries who analyzed the leaked documents for more than four months.

The Drousys system showed payments connected to several projects in the Dominican Republic, including more than $3.3 million in 2014 paid to a shell company associated with Dauhjare, called Baker Street Financial Inc.

That same company — with Dauhajre listed as the sole director — purchased a $2 million midtown-Manhattan apartment in December 2015.


Deed for Manhattan apartment purchased by Baker Street Financial by Ben Wieder on Scribd


When confronted with records of the payments and property records linking him to the shell company, Dauhajre acknowledged that he had been paid by the Brazilian company for “financial consulting services,” helping the company shore up financing for the coal plant when its original financing fell through.

“Baker Street Financial Inc. successfully and effectively provided the advisory service requested by Odebrecht during the years 2014 and 2015,” Dauhajre said in the statement. “Several of the financing options proposed by Baker Street Financial Inc. to Odebrecht were presented and eventually accepted by the Dominican State, allowing the development of the Project to materialize.”

In the Dominican Republic alone, Odebrecht gave out $92 million to government officials and their intermediaries, part of a much broader pattern of corruption involving assorted countries, according to Odebrecht’s December 2016 plea agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice. Odebrecht S.A. agreed to pay a record $2.6 billion fine in the case.

So far, the Dominican Republic’s attorney general has determined that many of Odebrecht’s 17 projects in the country were associated with graft.

 

Andrés Dauhajre Hijo’s consulting firm helped the Dominican government evaluate proposals to build the Punta Catalina coal-fired plant. When Odebrecht won the contract, the firm was paid millions by the company for its advice.

A Day In The Life of A Journalist Covering BILDERBERG

Pope urges foreign media to use power of press to seek truth

May 18, 2019 at 7:18 am Updated May 18, 2019 at 9:23 am



Pope Francis shares a laugh with a group of faithful as he poses for a family photo, at the end of his weekly general audience in St. Peter’s Square, at the Vatican, Wednesday May 15, 2019. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini)


By
The Associated Press

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis urged foreign correspondents on Saturday to humbly use the power of the press to search for the truth and give voice to the voiceless, saying journalism is an important tool to counter the hatred, prejudice and fake news.

In an audience with the Foreign Press Association in Rome, Francis also urged journalists to not fall prey to sending click-bait headlines and half-reported stories, saying errors can not only misrepresent the truth but damage entire communities.

He lamented attacks on journalists around the globe and assured reporters that the Catholic Church at large appreciated their work “even when you touch a raw nerve, including within the ecclesial community.”

While Francis meets with journalists regularly during his foreign trips, it was the first time a pope has received the Foreign Press Association, which represents journalists from more than 50 countries, since St. John Paul II in 1988.

Francis kept his distance from the press in his native Argentina. But in the past year, he and his aides have repeatedly praised the role of the media in exposing the clergy abuse scandal and for reporting about the plight of migrants, “forgotten wars” and other cases of human suffering.

Nicholas Kristof On What The Media Is Missing While It's Covering Trump

May 08, 2018

closemore President Donald Trump signals to beckoning reporters that he can't hear them over the sound of his helicopter as he returns to the White House after speaking Cleveland to tout the Republican tax cuts just ahead of Ohio's primary election Tuesday, in Washington, Saturday, May 5, 2018. (J. Scott Applewhite/AP)


With Jane Clayson


With Trump getting all the headlines, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof says other important issues at home and abroad are ignored. He joins us.

Guests:

Nicholas Kristof, Pulitzer-Prize winning columnist for the New York Times who write on human rights, women's rights, health and global affairs. (@NickKristof)
Interview Highlights:


On the media's complicated relationship with Trump


Nicholas Kristof: "Well, boy, it's awkward, isn't it, since we criticize him nonstop, justifiably, and yet he is crucial to it to our business model. You know, back in 2016 I remember some anxiety in newsrooms, because at that point we had huge audiences because of the election. But there was considerable concern that Hillary Clinton would win and then the world would become boring again, and her audiences would drop and the business model would erode. And, well, that has not happened.


"We have to cover President Trump. We the news media generally are crucial to providing that kind of accountability, and I dop's assault on institutions and norms in the country. But there are all these other fronts too."


On how coverage of Trump boosts audiences for media organizations


NK: "As a journalist, you know, I know that I can just about hit an F5 key and a anti-Trump column will pour out. It will get huge traction and a lot of readers. Or I can travel halfway around the world to, for example, try to cover the genocide against the Rohingya, and my audience will decline. And you know I'm at this point I'm at a stage in my career when I'm perfectly happy to do that to lose audiences...But I do think that there is a real challenge, and maybe especially for cable television — partly because they have real metrics about exactly how many people are watching at any one moment.

Pope Francis: Catholic media must not fall behind in digital age

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Pope Francis: Catholic media must not fall behind in digital age



Junno Arocho Esteves - Catholic News Service

May 01, 2018

Visitors look at the digital media offerings at the booth of technology giant Google at the Republica 17 digital conference May 8, 2017, in Berlin. (CNS photo/Filip Singer, EPA)


VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- In an age when technology is ever-evolving, Catholic news organizations must be willing to adapt to effectively proclaim the Gospel to all, Pope Francis said.

Speaking to directors and employees of Avvenire, the daily newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference, the pope said that the use of new digital platforms not only requires significant technological updates but also a willingness to accept that "the attachment to the past may prove to be a dangerous temptation."

"Authentic servants of tradition are those who, while keeping memory alive, know how to discern the signs of the times and open new paths," he said May 1.

Pope Francis said that the use of new digital platforms requires a willingness to accept that "the attachment to the past may prove to be a dangerous temptation."
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Pope: Media sins by dredging up, sensationalizing old news

Associated Press

•December 16, 2017

Pope Francis stands during the audience with Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno at the Vatican, Saturday, Dec. 16, 2017. (Andreas Solaro/Pool Photo via AP)

VATICAN CITY (AP) — Pope Francis is criticizing journalists who dredge up old scandals and sensationalize the news, saying it's a "very serious sin" that hurts all involved.

Francis, who plans to dedicate his upcoming annual communications message to "fake news," told Catholic media on Saturday that journalists perform a mission that is among the most "fundamental" to democratic societies.

But he reminded them to provide precise, complete and correct information and not to provide one-sided reports.

The pope said: "You shouldn't fall into the 'sins of communication:' disinformation, or giving just one side, calumny that is sensationalized, or defamation, looking for things that are old news and have been dealt with and bringing them to light today."
He called those actions a "grave sin that hurts the heart of the journalist and hurts others."

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Church allowed abuse by priest for years

JAN. 6, 2002 | PART 1 OF 2

Aware of Geoghan record, archdiocese still shuttled him from parish to parish


JANUARY 06, 2002

JIM DAVIS / GLOBE STAFF

Former priest John J. Geoghan leaving his family home in Scituate in November.

Read more from the 2002 Boston Globe report on the Catholic Church abuse crisis.


This article was prepared by the Globe Spotlight Team: reporters Matt Carroll, Sacha Pfeiffer, and Michael Rezendes; and editor Walter V. Robinson. It was written by Rezendes.

Since the mid-1990s, more than 130 people have come forward with horrific childhood tales about how former priest John J. Geoghan allegedly fondled or raped them during a three-decade spree through a half-dozen Greater Boston parishes.

Almost always, his victims were grammar school boys. One was just 4 years old.

Then came last July’s disclosure that Cardinal Bernard F. Law knew about Geoghan’s problems in 1984, Law’s first year in Boston, yet approved his transfer to St. Julia’s parish in Weston. Wilson D. Rogers Jr., the cardinal’s attorney, defended the move last summer, saying the archdiocese had medical assurances that each Geoghan reassignment was “appropriate and safe.”

But one of Law’s bishops thought that the 1984 assignment of Geoghan to St. Julia’s was so risky, he wrote the cardinal a letter in protest. And for good reason, the Spotlight Team found: The archdiocese already had substantial evidence of Geoghan’s predatory sexual habits. That included his assertion in 1980 that his repeated abuse of seven boys in one extended family was not a “serious” problem, according to an archdiocesan record.

Christiane Amanpour named UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for Freedom of Expression

U.N. - Top StoriesWednesday 29th April, 2015

29 April 2015 - The United Nations agency mandated to promote and protect press freedom worldwide has named renowned journalist and CNN Chief International Correspondent Christiane Amanpour its Goodwill Ambassador for Freedom of Expression and Journalist Safety.

Ms. Amanpour received the honour during a ceremony at UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris.

UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova praised Ms. Amanpour for "her efforts to promote free, independent and pluralistic media, having the right to work free from the threat of violence, and contributing through this to peace, sustainability, poverty eradication and human rights."

"In the most challenging situations, addressing the most demanding interlocutors" said the Director-General, "integrity and courage have always guided you, with the conviction that freedom of expression, media freedoms are essential for stronger societies, for healthier democracies, for peace and reconciliation as well as sustainable development "we need to defend these principles more than ever today, at a time when they are challenged across the world."

In her acceptance speech, Ms. Amanpour stressed the important role of journalists as "pillars of reform, freedom and democracy" whose task is to "strengthen civil society."

"We"re here to make the world a better place" she said. She also made an impassioned plea for the release of all imprisoned journalists, wherever they may be, and condemned the increasing number of attacks and assassinations of media professionals.

Ms. Amanpour has won every major television journalism award, including 11 News and Documentary Emmy Awards, four Peabody Awards, two George Polk Awards, three duPont-Columbia Awards and the Courage in Journalism Award.

She has also received nine honorary degrees, has been named a Commander in the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) and was this year inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame. She is a member of the board of directors of the Committee to Protect Journalists, one of UNESCO"s partners in its work for freedom of expression and journalists" safety.

UNESCO Goodwill Ambassadors are a group of personalities who use their talent and status to help shine a light on the work of the Organization in education, science, culture and communication.

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2014: The Year Propaganda Came Of Age

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 12/27/2014 18:31 -0500


By Raúl Ilargi Meijer of The Automatic Earth

2014: The Year Propaganda Came Of Age

From just about as early in my life as I can remember, growing up as a child in Holland, there were stories about World War II, and not just about Anne Frank and the huge amounts of people who, like her, had been dragged off to camps in eastern Europe never to come back, but also about the thousands who had risked their lives to hide Jewish and other refugees, and the scores who had been executed for doing so, often betrayed by their own neighbors.

And then there were those who had risked their lives in equally courageous ways to get news out to people, putting out newspapers and radio broadcasts just so there would be a version of events out there that was real, and not just what the Germans wanted one to believe. This happened in all Nazi – and Nazi friendly – occupied European nations. The courage of these people is hard to gauge for us today, and I’m convinced there’s no way to say whom amongst us would show that kind of bravery if we were put to the test; I certainly wouldn’t be sure about myself.

Still, without wanting to put myself anywhere near the level of those very very real heroes, please don’t get me wrong about that, that’s not what I mean, I was thinking about them with regards to what is happening in our media today. I’ve mentioned before that I don’t think Joseph Goebbels had anything on US and European media today.

That propaganda as a strategic and political instrument has been refined to a huge extent over the past 70-odd years since Goebbels first picked up on Freud’s lessons on how to influence the unconscious mind, and the ‘mass-mind’, as a way to ‘steer’ an entire people, not just as a means to make them buy detergent. These days, the media can make people believe just about anything, and they have the added benefit that they can pose as friends of the people, not the enemy.

But there is a reason why such a large ‘industry’ has developed on the web with people writing articles that don’t say what the mass media say. That reason for is, obviously, first and foremost that not everybody believes whatever they are told. The problem is equally obvious: not nearly enough people are being reached to make a true difference, and to question the official narratives.

Me, I have no claim to fame outside of the appreciation I get from first, my readers and second, from my colleagues and peers. I get a lot of both, and I thank you for that, but this certainly is not about me. If anything, it’s about trying to live up to the desire for truth in the face of odds squarely stacked against it, and against the people I try to reach out to. Trying to do just 0.1% of what the WWII underground press was about.

A few days ago, I wrote in About That Interview:


The FBI claims they are certain the hackers are North Korean, but they have provided no proof of that claim. We have to trust them on their beautiful blue eyes. I think if anything defines 2014 for me, it’s the advent of incessant claims for which no proof – apparently – needs to be provided. Everything related to Ukraine over the past year carries that trait. The year of ‘beautiful blue eyes’, in other words. Never no proof, you just have to believe what your government says.

And that truly defines 2014 for me. A level of propaganda I don’t recognize, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. 2014 has for me been the year of utter nonsense. To wit, it just finished in fine form with a 5% US GDP growth number, just to name one example. Really, guys? 5%? Really? With all the numbers presented lately, the negative Thanksgiving sales data – minus 11% from what I remember -, the so-so at best Christmas store numbers to date, shrinking durable goods in November and all? Plus 5%?

It really doesn’t matter what I say, does it? You have enough people believing ridiculous numbers like that to make it worth your while. After all, that’s all that counts. It’s a democracy, isn’t it? If a majority believes something, it becomes true. If you can get more than 50% of people to believe whatever you say, that’s case closed.

With well over 90 million working age Americans counted as being out of the labor force, and with 43 million on food stamps, you can still present a 5% GDP growth number, if only you can get a sufficiently large number of people to ‘believe’. And you do, I’ll give you that. As far as the media goes, we have achieved the change we can believe in. We may not have that change, but we sure do believe we have, don’t we? And isn’t that what counts? Are congratulations in order?

Well, not where I’m at, they’re not. I should do a shout out to the likes of Zero Hedge, Yves Smith, David Stockman, Wolf Richter, Mish, Steve Keen, Jim Kunstler, and so many others, we’re a solid crowd by now even if we’re neglected, and please don’t feel left out if you’re not in that list, I know who you are. The problem is, we’re all completely neglected by the mass media, even though there are a ton of very sharp minds in this ‘finance blogosphere’. And perhaps we should make it a point to break through that ridiculous black-out in 2015.

2014, in my eyes, has been the year of propaganda outdoing even its own very purpose, and succeeding too. We are supposed to be living in a time of the best educated people in the history of mankind, and everyone thinks (s)he’s mighty smart, but precious few have even an inkling of a clue of what transpires in the world they live in. Talk about a lost generation. Or two.

We really need to question the value of higher education, if all we get for it is a generation of people so easily duped by utter blubber. What do they teach people at our universities these days? Certainly not to think for themselves, that much is clear. And then what is the use? Why spend all that time raising an entire generation of highly educated pawns, sheep and robots? I can think of some people liking that, but for society as a whole, it’s devastating if that’s all higher education is.

And if you would like to raise doubts here, the very existence of finance blogosphere I mentioned before is proof that we indeed have raised a generation of sheep. If we had functioning media, there’d be no need for that blogosphere. We are the people who keep on pointing out where the mass media fail, let alone the politicians, simply by being there and being supported to the extent we are by the few people who escape the sheep mentality.

But that’s not nearly enough. Journalists, reporters, whatever they call themselves, working for Bloomberg, Reuters, CNBC etc. should at the very least quote Zero Hedge on a daily basis, and Mish, and Steve, and Yves, and perhaps even me – though it’s fine if they continue to ignore me, as long as they give the rest their rightful place.

There are many people in the blogosphere who are many times smarter than the people who write for the mass media, and that’s a very simple and hardly disputable fact that needs to be recognized. When you read something in your paper or at your online news provider, it should be second nature to ask yourself: but what would Tyler Durden say, or the Automatic Earth, or Naked Capitalism, or David Stockman?

But we’re nowhere near that, are we? We’ve been fooled with economic stats for years, not just in the US, not even just in the west, but all over, they all grabbed on to the potential of providing people with numbers that have little to do with reality, but that simply feel good. Or even just look good.

Still, boy, have we been, and are we being, fooled. Then again, most of you wouldn’t know, would you? We people tend to discount the future, to see today as more important than tomorrow, and in the same manner we find our children’s future much less important than our own. Because that feels good too. If we are comfy right now, screw them. Not that we’d ever put it into those terms.

But you know, that’s really all old hack by now. 2014 brought us a whole other class of nonsense. And we swallowed it all hook line and entire sinker.

2014 gave us Ukraine. And you just try and find anyone today who doesn’t think Vladimir Putin is and was the evil genius mind behind the whole thing, including the 4500+ people who died there over the past 10 months. Why is it so hard to anyone who doubts that narrative? Because our media told us Putin is the bogeyman. And ‘we’ never asked for any proof. That is, except for those of us in that same blogosphere.

Meanwhile, round after round of sanctions against Russia have been set up and activated by EU and US, causing hardship for both Russian people and European businesses. But why, what exactly is Putin allegedly guilty of?

The US/EU installed a government in Kiev in February (yeah, yap about it), which is still in place, with a bunch of US citizens recently added for good measure – and for profit-. The chocolate prince president was indeed elected months later, but the prime minister – Yats – was handpicked by America, and is still -amazingly – in place. That’s the same government that had it own army murder thousands of its own citizens, and not a thing has been resolved so far.

The whole thing came to a head when MH17 was shot down over the summer. That too was blamed on Putin. Or was it? Well, not directly, nobody said Putin ordered that plane to be shot. Nor did anyone say Russia shot it. There is the accusation that Russian speaking Ukrainian ‘rebels’ did it, but proof for that was never provided in the 6 months since the incident. And there must be a best before date in there somewhere.

Is it possible the ‘rebels’ did it? We can’t exclude it, but that’s for the same reason we can’t exclude the option that little green Martians did it: we don’t know. But even then, even if they did, there’s the question whether that would have been on purpose. Which seems really stretching it: nothing they want would be served by shooting down a plane full of European, Malaysian and Australian holiday goers.

But here we are: no proof and layer upon layer of sanctions. And nary a voice is raised in the west. If one is, it’s to denounce the Russians as bloodthirsty barbarians. Even though there is no proof they did anything other than protecting what they see as their own people. Something we all would do too, no questions asked.

Ukraine defines 2014 as the year western propaganda came into its own. Not just fictional stories about an economic recovery anymore, no, we had our politico-media establishment ram an entire new cold war down our throats. And we swallowed it whole. We may have had a million more years of higher education than our parents and grandparents, but we sure don’t seem to have gotten any smarter than them.

There is a lot of information out there, written by people inspired by things other than monetary incentives or job security or anything like that, people who simply want to get information out that your trusted media won’t give you anymore than Goebbels’ media did in occupied Europe in the 1940s. And you don’t even have to risk your lives to access that information. All you have to do is to get off your couch.

The Automatic Earth is but a small part of a very valuable and fast growing resource that warrants a lot more attention than it’s been receiving to date. A reported 5% US GDP growth print is one reason why, the entire Ukraine fantasy story is another. The blogosphere is full of functioning neurons, which is more than you can say for your papers and online MSM.

As far as media is concerned, 2014 has been downright scary in its distortion of reality. Let’s try and move 2015 a little bit closer towards what’s actually happening.

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War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda

By John Pilger
Global Research, December 05, 2014
Theme: Media Disinformation



Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.

This power to create a new “reality” has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.”

I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only “culture” and introspection could change the world.

Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of “me-ism” had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.

In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new “threats” completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, “What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

He replied that if we journalists had done our job “there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”
That’s a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.

Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.

Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s – a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official’s name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as “Mr. Iraq”. Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he told me, “or we’d freeze them out.”
The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis.

What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC’s Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: “Aren’t you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?” The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman’s “memorable moments”. Last week, Paxman signed a £1 million book deal.

The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 – a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean.

Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers – all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch’s empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.

The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News – but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn’t Fox News; it was the New York Times.

The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia – when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington’s military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It’s not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war.

Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington’s secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.

And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.

Many in the western media haves worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads Nato and is straight out of Dr. Strangelove — one General Breedlove – routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick’s General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect.

Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer — the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair’s invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.

There is almost the joi d’esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to be “hard facts”.

“If you wonder,” wrote Robert Parry, “how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.”

Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this “game of chicken”, as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: “Let’s get ready for war with Russia.”

In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as “the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this”. Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.

In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?

In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC’s coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.

In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism?
Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called “austerity” is necessary?

Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.
But within a few months — apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate “bonuses” — the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called “austerity” became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?

Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt – the debt of crooks. The “austerity” cuts are said to be £83 billion. That’s almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch’s News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees – a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.

The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who’s keeping record straight? Isn’t that what journalists are meant to do?

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian revealed something similar in this country.

None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear Julian Assange – though other rewards can be plentiful.

It’s clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media’s gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He became not only a target, but a golden goose.

Lucrative book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.
None of this was mentioned in Stockholm on 1 December when the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn’t exist. They were unpeople.

No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively – and brilliantly – rescued Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.

What made this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament — whose craven silence on the Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

It’s this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war.

In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn’t wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika – an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.

It’s 100 years since the First World War. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

It’s time they knew.

The above text is the transcript of John Pilger’s address to the Logan Symposium, “Building an Alliance Against Secrecy, Surveillance & Censorship”, organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism, London, 5-7 December, 2014. www.johnpilger.com

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Does America have a Government Controlled Media?

Well, I wouldn't say that we take a random sample to assess whether the country's media is biased.

I have a few 'journalists' in mind...

Let's take a look at 3 young turks of the news media, and analyze their political inclination (persuasion).

• Chuck Todd: Moderator of  NBC's weekly Sunday news program, Meet the Press. 

Before coming to the world of political reporting and analysis, Todd earned practical political experience on initiative campaigns in Florida and various national campaigns based in Washington, D.C.^[7] While in college, Todd worked for the 1992 presidential campaign of Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and later started part-time at The Hotline.

Todd resides in Arlington, Virginia, with his wife, Kristian Denny Todd, daughter Margaret, and son Harrison.^[17] Kristian Denny Todd is a communications professional and cofounder of Maverick Strategies and Mail, which provides direct mail and consulting services for Democratic candidates and progressive causes;^[17][18][19] she was spokesperson for Senator candidate Jim Webb.^[20] He received the honorary degree Doctor of Humane Letters in recognition for his work in journalism from Marymount University during its sixty-second commencement ceremony.^[21]

• George Stephanopoulos:  Today he is chief anchor^[4] and chief political correspondent forABC News, co-anchor of ABC News' Good Morning America, and host of ABC's Sunday morning This Week.^[5]
  Stephanopoulos is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.^[6]

Stephanopoulos was, along with David Wilhelm and James Carville, a leading member of Clinton's 1992 U.S. presidential campaign. His role on the campaign is portrayed in the documentary film The War Room (1993).

At the outset of Clinton's presidency, Stephanopoulos served as the de facto press secretary, briefing the press even though Dee Dee Myers was officially the White House Press Secretary. Later, he was moved to Senior Advisor on Policy and Strategy, when Myers began personally conducting the briefings (following several verbal missteps by Stephanopoulos) and David Gergen was brought in as the new White House Communications Director. The move was largely viewed as a rebuke to Stephanopoulos's handling of public relations during the first six months of the Clinton administration.^{[by whom?][citation needed]}

• Jay Carney: After more than three years as President Obama's press secretary, Jay Carney, 49, joined CNN on Sept. 10. Personally recruited by CNN Worldwide president Jeff Zucker, whom Carney met during the 1990s when wife Claire Shipman was White House correspondent for NBC News, Carney says he's not thinking about a long-term TV career. Rather, the former Time magazine D.C. bureau chief is keeping his options open while sparring with the likes of John McCain.

Prior to his appointment as Press Secretary he was director of communications for Vice President Joe Biden. Carney previously served as Washington Bureau Chief for Time magazine, a post he held from September 2005 until December 2008, and as a regular contributor in the "roundtable" segment of ABC News' This Week with George Stephanopoulos. President Obama announced he had accepted Carney's resignation as press secretary on May 30, 2014.

The White House Press Corps noted that while President Obama promised a more transparent administration, CNN's Brianna Keilar notes, "anyone here can tell you there's less access than under the Bush administration".^[9] Carney proceeded to cite the rise of internet journalism for making photojournalists obsolete, but promised the White House would do everything it could to rectify this problem. ^[11]



Well, does my assertion that these youthful democrats manifest a distorted and biased opinion impress anyone?  It simply baffles me how they can get away with calling themselves journalists, when they should more appropriately be called political agents promoting a party's agenda. 

Well does America have a government controlled media?

Just in case you had any doubts; By simply examining these three newscasters, I hope that now you can see that it does not.

Arsenio.

Resources

Wikipedia
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/obama-alum-jay-carney-new-733404
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Snowden: I Left the NSA Clues, But They Couldn’t Find Them

BY ANDY GREENBERG
08.13.14 |
7:00 AM |




Platon

If the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of the greatest leak of secrets in its history, it’s not because of Edward Snowden’s attempts to cover his tracks. On the contrary, the NSA’s most prolific whistleblower now claims he purposefully left a trail of digital bread crumbs designed to lead the agency directly to the files he’d copied.

In a WIRED interview published today, the 31-year-old megaleaker has revealed that he planted hints on NSA networks that were intended to show which of its documents he’d smuggled out among the much larger set he accessed or could have accessed. Those hints, he says, were intended to make clear his role as a whistleblower rather than a foreign spy, and to allow the agency time to minimize the national security risks created by the documents’ public release.

The fact that NSA officials have told the press that his haul may have been as large as 1.7 million documents, says Snowden, is a sign that the agency has either purposely inflated the size of his leak or lacks the forensic skills to see the clues he left for its auditors. “I figured they would have a hard time,” Snowden tells WIRED, describing the agency’s attempts to reverse-engineer his leak. “I didn’t figure they would be completely incapable.”

In a speech late last year, NSA director Keith Alexander said that Snowden had given reporters “between 50,000 and 200,000 documents.” But in later statements to the press, NSA officials have said only that Snowden “accessed” 1.7 million documents, without specifying how much of that access was part of his authorized NSA duties. And Alexander also admitted in an interview after his resignation that the NSA still doesn’t know the full extent of Snowden’s leak. Indeed, an agency official said in a 60 Minutes interview that its post-leak investigation removed from the NSA’s classified network every computer Snowden could have ever accessed, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars, for fear that he might have planted spyware on the machines for future data collection.

That image of Snowden as a stealthy spy contrasts sharply with Snowden’s own depiction of his leaking actions. As journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote in his book No Place To Hide, Snowden claims he could have left no trace on the NSA’s network due to its lack of audit controls. But he said he instead left behind some “footprints” to show NSA investigators that he had acted alone and to prevent suspicion of his coworkers.

Snowden’s new claims go further: That he intended those footprints to outline exactly what he’d taken. In addition to shedding light on his motives, Snowden says he meant the clues to allow the NSA to avoid collateral damage from his leaks, changing codenames and plans to anticipate the release of some of its most sensitive secrets.

The repetition of the 1.7 million number by political figures and the press is at least partly intended to mischaracterize Snowden’s intentions, argues his lawyer Jesselyn Radack, who is also national security director for the whistleblower-focused Government Accountability Project. “I think they probably didn’t spot the bread crumbs,” she says of the NSA’s investigators. “Even if they did get them, I think this [1.7 million] number is manufactured out of whole cloth to give the impression of a wholesale data dump. In fact, Ed very carefully selected exactly what he wanted to turn over and why.”

When WIRED asked an NSA spokesperson to comment on Snowden’s new claims or its internal estimate of the size of his leak, spokesperson Vanee Vines responded with this statement: “If Mr. Snowden wants to discuss his activities, that conversation should be held with the U.S. Department of Justice. He needs to return to the United States to face the charges against him.”

In a followup inquiry through his ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner, Snowden wouldn’t offer any more details on how exactly he left his network bread crumbs for the NSA or the real total number of documents he took. In forensic analyses of a typical computer network, a leaker’s behavior could be found in everything from logs kept by network monitoring tools to changes in operating system files like Windows’ system registry, which can be analyzed to show what documents a user has opened.

Despite his early intention to make the NSA aware of the scope of his data theft, Snowden may have good reason to now keep the extent of his leaks secret. That knowledge could serve as an important bargaining chip if Snowden seeks to return to the U.S. and negotiate a plea deal, an option he’s hinted at exploring.

In the meantime, Snowden tells WIRED—perhaps with a certain amount of schadenfreude—that the government’s overestimation of the size of his leak has left it to imagine the worst. “I think they think there’s a smoking gun in there that would be the death of them all politically,” Snowden says. “The fact that the government’s investigation failed—that they don’t know what was taken and that they keep throwing out these ridiculous huge numbers—implies to me that somewhere in their damage assessment they must have seen something that was like, ‘Holy shit.’ And they think it’s still out there.”

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CBS Lost Appetite For Government Watchdog Stories, Attkisson Says

Photo (Courtesy) http://newsbusters.org/blogs/matthew-balan/2014/03/10/sharyl-attkisson-resigns-cbs-kept-spotlight-benghazi-fast-and-furious

by DAVID FOLKENFLIK
July 07, 2014 5:21 AM ET

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When the investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson left CBS this year, she did not do so quietly. She contends the network refused to run stories that might damage President Obama.

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