"Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have." -- Richard Salent, Former President CBS News.

"News is what someone wants to suppress. Everything else is advertising". former NBC news President Rubin Frank

Asked to give a toast before the prestigious New York Press Club in 1880, John Swinton, the former Chief of Staff at the New York Times, made this candid confession [it's worth noting that Swinton was called "The Dean of His Profession" by other newsmen, who admired him greatly]:

    " There is no such thing, at this date of the world's history, as an    independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you
    who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know

    beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for

    keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others

    of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who

    would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the

    streets looking for another job.



    If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper,

    before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone. The business of

    the journalist is to destroy the truth; to lie outright; to pervert; to

    vilify; to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell the country for his

    daily bread. You know it and I know it and what folly is this toasting

    an independent press. We are the tools and vassals of the rich men

    behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and

    we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the

    property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes. "

Jayson Blair

As originally taken by AP As later posted by CNN Why the dehumanization?

Reuter's lies in a photo caption during the 2000 election.

The Reuter's caption reads, "WASHINGTON D.C. electoral college delegate Barbara Lett Simmons (L) signs papers certifying her vote for the 2000 U.S. presidential election December 18, 2000. Simmons decided not to cast a vote for either president or vice-president, protesting the election results./Khue Bui (Reuter's)"

Except that Simmons, a Gore delegate, was actually protesting the fact that DC does not have congressional representation, NOT the outcome of the election.

ABC's John Stossel apologizes!

On February 8th, 2000 20/20 broadcast a story by John Stossel claiming that foods sold at organic and health food stores were no more safe to eat than food bought at conventional supermarkets. Stossel claimed that tests commissioned by ABC TV showed that food purchased at organic markets had higher rates of E. Coli contamination and equivalent amounts of pesticides.

Investigation by the Environmental Working Group revealed that the experts cited by ABC's 20/20 for the story had never actually performed the tests ABC claimed in the story.

Despite the embarrassment, Stossel repeated the story on July 7, 2000, informing the EWG through an intermediary that he would not even respond to the allegations. ABC TV, however, embarrassed by the publicity, ordered Stossel to apologize.

Stossel has also been accused is mireporting in his story on Erin Brockovich, the California woman who found Chromium 6 in her town's drinking water.

Lies from the war in Kosovo!

The following frame is from a video shown on the mainstream media and captioned as being the wreckage of a downed Mig-29. Note the obvious english lettering.

Click for full size image

When the F117 went down, the Pentagon initially insisted that the plane had not been shot down, could not be shot down, and had crashed owing to a mechanical problem. Note the hole from a cannon shell to the right of the insignia.

Click for full size image

CBS biases it's polling!

ABC News chickens out

Not exactly a lie, but clear evidence that ABC will not report the news they do not care for!

On Thursday, July 30, 1998, ABC News ran a story claiming that their polls showed that most Americans did not think that perjury was grounds for the President to be impeached. ABC took severe criticism over the fact that this claim was directly contradicted by several online polls which showed that (as MSNBC was reporting) 2/3 of Americans favored impeachment.

So, on Friday Morning, July 31st, 1998, ABC News placed the question of impeachment as their online poll at their website. By noon (Pacific time) the results were beginning to match those found everywhere else.

At 12:15 PDT, ABC removed the online poll regarding impeachment.

The following screen capture of the ABC website was grabbed at 12:27 PDT July 31,1998 and shows the left portion of the web page, where the day's online poll would normally be found, is blank.

Click for full size image.

Recent Disgraces

NBC is reported to have interviews on tape with Juanita Broaddrick, a.k.a. Jane Doe #5, the Arkansas woman who accused Clinton of raping her 20 years ago. Despite having four corroborating witnesses, and having actually run the story several months prior, NBC bows to White House pressure and spikes the on-air interview in January 1999 during the impeachment trial of Bill Clinton. ABC also had the story and likewise spiked it after calls from the White House. FOX News not only runs the story (sans interview) but outs White House Press Spokesman Joe Lockhart for threatening them!

Up again with a new host!

• NBC Dateline defames a trucking company in a report which manufactured claims of unsafe driving. NBC had to pay a half million in damages.

• CNN/Time - On June 7th, 1998, CNN reported that a Vietnam veteran had accused the Department of Defense of using nerve gas on it's own troops. While hardly the first time that the US has used chemicals against it's own people, this story proved to be un confirmable, and in the face of pressure from the Department of Defense, CNN retracted on July 2nd, 1998. Several reporters were fired, but CNN's Peter Arnett keeps his job by reminding everyone that he just reads what's given to him and has no way of knowing if it's true or not. At last report, Arnett, CNN and TIME have been sued for 100 million dollars for defaming the officers accused of the Sarin gas attacks.

• Steve Brill - Long time DNC donor Steven Brill created a magazine called "Brill's Content" and then shot his own magazine down with the debut issue, which instead of criticizing media offered up a 22 page attack on Kenneth Starr which was then used by the White House to again try to impede the investigation. No sooner had the Brill article debuted than virtually everyone interviewed for the article came forward to claim they had been misquoted and in one case to deny totally the statements attributed to them. Brill's shrill insistence that his quotes were indeed accurate and checked fell apart when one of the interviewees produced a tape recording of the interview. Brill was then forced to retract and apologize.

• Salon - An online magazine funded by Clinton donors, Salon, like Brill, was created to lend an air of credibility to some pretty silly accusations nobody else in the mainstream media would touch. Typical was the story Salon ran accusing Kenneth Starr of paying off witness David Hale. Upon examination, it turned out that Salon's sole source for the accusation was a woman who was a Clinton delegate, and had once worked for detectives trying to find dirt on Kenneth Starr. A (failed) professional psychic, she claimed she could control the rain with her mind and that it was she, not General Norman Schwartzkoppf, who had guided our troops to victory in Desert Storm. One of the reporters working for Salon is Jonathan Broder, who was fired from the Chicago Tribune for plagiarism.

• Stephen Glass - A reporter at the New Republic, Stephen wrote several award winning articles which reinforced the liberal's preconceived notions about conservatives and the nation at large. One example involved a story of a conservative conference that degenerated into drug use and group sex. The story passed editorial review and ran without basic fact checking. The story turned out to be a fabrication, along with almost 1/3 of the total work product of Glass's career at New Republic.

• Patricia Smith resigns her job at the Boston Globe after having to admit she fabricated characters for one of her stories. Later investigation shows that 52 of her articles for the newspaper cannot be verified as factual. Smith had been a finalist for a Pulitzer prize at the time of her disgrace.

• Mike Barnicle refused to resign his job at the Boston Globe after having been caught plagiarizing, and was fired. It was not the first time he had been investigated for fraud in his articles. Barnicle was suspended without pay for two months, which prompted an accusation of racial bias from the NAACP due to the difference in treatment between the white Barnicle and the black Pat Smith.

• The Weekly Standard settles a big lawsuit with Deepak Chopra.

• Both CNN and Tom Brokaw settle out-of-court with Richard Jewell.

• The Wall Street Journal loses a record libel suit filed by a Texas company, paying $200-million in damages.

The ABC "Primetime Live" Food Lion scandal

The Food Lion supermarket chain was awarded 5.5 million in damages in their lawsuit against ABC TV's "Primetime Live".

Two ABC producers posed as food workers in order to get jobs as food handlers at a Food Lion store. They were assisted by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which provided them with fake references. (The union had previously led an unsuccessful effort to organize the store's workers.)

The producers secretly videotaped the Food Lion workplace with the aid of cameras hidden in their wigs. Using this footage, ``PrimeTime Live'' reported that Food Lion sold tainted meat. The ensuing bad publicity led Food Lion to shut down 84 stores over the next two years, throwing thousands of employees out of work.

Outtakes of the hidden-camera footage showed that the charges leveled against Food Lion were a manufactured fraud! One showed an ABC producer taking chickens whose ``sell-by'' dates had expired and putting them up for sale, then telling another producer to videotape them.

Another outtake showed a producer ignoring instructions from legitimate employees on how to handle food. In another, one producer sells a piece of moldy kielbasa to an ABC employee several times for the benefit of the camera.

One piece of videotape that did air showed a dirty meat slicer, even though it was the undercover producer's job to clean it.

In a glaring example of deception by ABC, a Food Lion employee talked about how she had cooked a batch of out-of-date chicken by mistake. That footage aired. But in the portion of the video tape that had been cut out, the employee related being told by her manager to throw the cooked chicken out, which she did.

Many of the discarded video sequences featured producers' frustration at their inability to come up with incriminating footage. In one case, the ABC team reacts with the word,"shit", when a Food Lion employee starts to clean a meat slicer that had gotten dirty.

The Producer in charge of the Food Lion segment, Rick Kaplan, soon left ABC to take charge of CNN. An Alumni of the Lincoln Bedroom sleep overs, Kaplan issued a directive to the writers at CNN not to use the word "scandal" in connection with President Clinton, and regularly offers suggestions to Bill Clinton on how to handle the media as each new eruption occurs.

The NBC Fuel tank hoax.

NBC news did a story on side mounted fuel tanks on GM trucks.

The claim of the story was that when such a truck was struck, it would burst into flames. GM insisted that it's side mounted truck fuel tanks were more than sturdy enough to survive the average traffic collision.

NBC produced and aired a video segment that showed a vehicle colliding with the side fuel tank of a GM truck at low speed, and the GM fuel tank exploded.

It later turned out that the fuel tank had been rigged with explosive devices by NBC to manufacture the explosion seen in their news report!

TIME article on the NBC hoax.

I had been tempted to start a page on the issue of media disinformation ever since CBS 60 Minutes Executive Producer Don Hewitt was caught on video tape bragging about how he edited the Gennifer Flowers segment to help Bill Clinton win the nomination.

Excerpt from "The Clinton Chronicles"; 60 Minutes' Executive Producer Don Hewitt on video, discusses the handling of the Gennifer Flowers segment.

DON HEWITT (Executive Producer, "60 Minutes"):   And they came to us  because they were in big trouble in New Hampshire.  They were about to  lose right there and they needed some first aid.  They needed some  bandaging.  What they needed was a paramedic.  So they came to us and  we did it and that's what they wanted to do.  When I told Tim Russer  that I was persona-non-grata at the White House, he said, "Why?"  I  said, "The Gennifer Flowers interview."  He said, "You got him the  nomination."  I said, "I know that."  As far as I know from the  conversations I've had, Bernie Nussbaum knew that, Gergen knows that,  Lloyd Cutler certainly knows it 'cause Lloyd had a hand in his coming  on that night.     You know it was strong medicine the way I edited it but he was a very  sick candidate.  He needed very strong medicine, and I'm not in the  business of doctoring candidates but he got up out of a sick bed that  night and walked to the nomination and as I said to Mandy, "You know  if I'd edited it your way, you know where you'd be today?  You'd still  be up in New Hampshire looking for the nomination."  He became the  candidate that night.   

But it took the below photograph, with it's obvious alteration, to make this page mandatory!

Legal Notice. The "Fair Use" doctrine of the copyright law allows for the usage of published materials for non-profit educational usage. As long time readers are aware, I have gone out of my way to not sell T-shirts, books, or video tapes (even though video production is something I am equipped to do).

In the following example, the text and photo used is presented in their entirety so that readers will have a non-distorted view of how this material was presented by Reuter's News Service, the better to understand that a deception has taken place.

The Reuter's "Doctored" photo.

Click to download full size jpg (48.9K)

The caption that accompanied this photo follows.....

BETHLEHEM, ISRAEL, 3-APR-97: A Palestinian wearing a New York Yankees  baseball cap fires a rock with a slingshot during a brief clash with  Israeli soldiers on April 3. About 200 Palestinians marched through  town with Arab flags and a coffin in a march meant to symbolize that  the peace process between the Palestinians and Israel is dead. A  brief clash ensued as the demonstrators broke through the Palestinian  police lines and began hurling rocks at Israeli soldiers. [Photo by  Jim Hollander, Reuter's]  

Wearing a New York Yankees cap????

The following image was enlarged and converted from the original jpg to gif using Version 3.0 of John Bradley's "xv" program.

Click to download full size gif (23.3K)

Take a good look at the logo on the cap. Not only too large and clearly off center, it extends down from the crown of the cap down onto the brim but without following the perspective of the brim itself. Indeed, it almost looks like the lettering is on the verge of running off the left side of the brim as opposed to extending towards the front.

This photo is a lie!

The New York Yankees logo has been added to the photograph in a digital paintbox, most likely to obscure the fact that something else was removed from the front of the cap.

One thing is for certain. This is not a harmless prank, but a deliberate attempt to deceive the viewer regarding the nature of this photo.

What was on the cap that contradicts the caption?

What was on the cap that We The People are not supposed to see?

Why are we being told and shown lies about what is happening in Israel?

VISIT MY JFK SECTION AND SEE HOW POST MAGAZINE LIED TO THE PUBLIC 3...

When JFK was assassinated, Dan Rather was a small town TV newscaster in Texas. It was he who, immediately after viewing the Zapruder film, reported to all America that John Kennedy's head was "rocketed forward" by the head shot.

The Zapruder film then vanished into TIME/Life's vaults, never to be publicly seen until the Jim Garrison trial subpoenaed it, and Dan Rather leapt to network status.

Visit World Net Daily for the story of how "60 Minutes" covered up ...

1. Propagandist must have access to intelligence concerning events and public opinion.

2. Propaganda must be planned and executed by only one authority. a. It must issue all the propaganda directives b. It must explain propaganda directives to important officials and maintain their morale
c. It must oversee other agencies' activities which have propaganda consequences

3. The propaganda consequences of an action must be considered in planning that action.

4. Propaganda must affect the enemy's policy and action. a. By suppressing propagandistically desirable material which can provide the enemy with useful intelligence b. By openly disseminating propaganda whose content or tone causes the enemy to draw the desired conclusions
c. By goading the enemy into revealing vital information about himself
d. By making no reference to a desired enemy activity when any reference would discredit that activity

5. Declassified, operational information must be available to implement a propaganda campaign

6. To be perceived, propaganda must evoke the interest of an audience and must be transmitted through an attention-getting communications medium.

7. Credibility alone must determine whether propaganda output should be true or false.

8. The purpose, content and effectiveness of enemy propaganda; the strength and effects of an expose; and the nature of current propaganda campaigns determine whether enemy propaganda should be ignored or refuted.

9. Credibility, intelligence, and the possible effects of communicating determine whether propaganda materials should be censored.

10. Material from enemy propaganda may be utilized in operations when it helps diminish that enemy's prestige or lends support to the propagandist's own objective.

11. Black rather than white propaganda may be employed when the latter is less credible or produces undesirable effects.

12. Propaganda may be facilitated by leaders with prestige.

13. Propaganda must be carefully timed. a. The communication must reach the audience ahead of competing propaganda. b. A propaganda campaign must begin at the optimum moment
c. A propaganda theme must be repeated, but not beyond some point of diminishing effectiveness

14. Propaganda must label events and people with distinctive phrases or slogans. a. They must evoke desired responses which the audience previously possesses b. They must be capable of being easily learned
c. They must be utilized again and again, but only in appropriate situations
d. They must be boomerang-proof

15. Propaganda to the home front must prevent the raising of false hopes which can be blasted by future events.

16. Propaganda to the home front must create an optimum anxiety level. a. Propaganda must reinforce anxiety concerning the consequences of defeat b. Propaganda must diminish anxiety (other than concerning the consequences of defeat) which is too high and which cannot be reduced by people themselves

17. Propaganda to the home front must diminish the impact of frustration. a. Inevitable frustrations must be anticipated b. Inevitable frustrations must be placed in perspective

18. Propaganda must facilitate the displacement of aggression by specifying the targets for hatred.

19. Propaganda cannot immediately affect strong counter-tendencies; instead it must offer some form of action or diversion, or both.

Based upon "Goebbels' Principles of Propaganda" by Leonard W. Doob published in "Public Opinion and Propaganda; A Book of Readings edited for The Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues."

Politprop Library