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Underreported stories - media mystery |
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organised habits
and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic
society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society…is the
true ruling power…we are governed, our minds are moulded, our tastes
formed…it is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.”
Thus wrote Edward Bernays in his book Propaganda, the nephew of
Sigmund Freud and the father of modern propaganda, at whose suggestion,
the United States’ War Department, at the time called the National
Military Establishment, was renamed the Department of Defence in 1949.
In the ‘age of the corporate media’, where 90 percent of the American
media is owned by six corporations — General Electric, News Corp.,
Disney, Viacom, Time Warner and CBS — down from 50 back in 1983, it is
not difficult to understand how what the majority of the ‘public see and
doesn’t see’ depends and is controlled by the agenda of a small number
of corporations and ultimately, by those who control them. This is
especially the case as it is also the ‘age of the repeater journalists’.
Where you have the majority of mainstream journalists worldwide simply
‘repeating the narrative’ portrayed in the powerful quarters of the
world media, namely the Western (American) media, and the information
they receive from the biggest news agencies (Western mostly), instead of
doing their job — ‘questioning what happened’ and ‘investigating how’
it did.
When such impervious power rests in the hands of a handful of
individuals, you will of course have a select number of stories being
regularly reported by the media. And some stories, never. So what were
some of those stories worthy of being covered in the news that were not?
Well one of them is related to the story perhaps most covered in the world media — the US elections.
Or rather one who contested the elections — Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Throughout 2016, as she was campaigning to become the next US President,
Wikileaks constantly proved to be a thorn in her side. But the
revelations made public by Wikileaks have largely gone unreported in the
mainstream press.
And one of the main reasons is because they involved the media itself. For
example, according to Wikileaks, 65 mainstream reporters were working
“hand-in-glove with the Hillary Clinton campaign to rig the US
elections” (Wikileaks exposes secret list of 65 mainstream
media reporters who are part of the Clinton mafia -- The Duran, October
28, 2016).
And for those who find it hard to believe that she, or the Democratic
Party itself, would dare to do something so un-democratic, 20,000
e-mails released by Wikileaks also showed how the Democratic Party
worked against Bernie Sanders and “derailed his campaign” (Wikileaks
Proves Primary Was Rigged: DNC Undermined Democracy, The Observer, July
22, 2016). Despite the near media blackout, the incident was so
scandalous that the Democratic National Committee Chairwoman, Debbie
Wasserman Schultz, was quietly forced to step down from her position.
The leaks also revealed that CNN’s political commentator Donna Brazile had sent Presidential Debate questions to Ms. Clinton prior to the debate
which, again, forced CNN to drop her. But, perhaps the most important
revelations came during an interview of Julian Assange, the founder of
Wikileaks, by John Pilger, when he said that Hillary Clinton had urged
John Podesta, the then advisor to Barack Obama, to “bring
pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia, “which are providing clandestine
financial and logistic support to ISIL [Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and
other radical Sunni groups”.
He further said, “All serious analysts know, and even the US
government has agreed, that some Saudi figures have been supporting ISIS
and funding ISIS… But that email says that it is the government of
Saudi Arabia, and the government of Qatar that have been funding ISIS.”
In the same vein, he added that what is most ironic is that some of the
biggest donors to the Clinton campaign also happen to be the governments
of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The next story which has criminally gone underreported also
involves the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It is the war being waged ‘on’
Yemen. Journalist Rose Delaney wrote on September 2, 2016, for
the Inter Press Service that “The sheer gravity of Yemen’s conflict
should subsequently ignite a deafening global cry for justice, however,
as long as the public are ‘strategically’ kept in the dark, little
change can realistically be implemented.”
I have already written a piece highlighting the scale of the violence
taking place in Yemen in a previous article titled ‘The Tragedy in
Yemen’ published by The Daily Star on August 29, 2016. The article also
includes facts and figures which show the massive amounts of weaponry
being supplied by the US and the UK to Saudi Arabia that have been used
on the Yemeni people. But what I would like to highlight now is the fact
that no Saudi airstrikes would be possible without the help of the US
and UK as Saudi Arabia has no means to refuel its own warplanes (also US
and British manufactured) in mid-air. Once you understand how damaging it
would be for the US to have people learn about what is really going on
in Yemen, it is not difficult to unravel why the media has so blatantly
failed to cover it.
And while underreporting is what is most often used to shape public
perception, one which is even more effective, is misdirecting the public
through false reporting. And 2016 revealed further, the extent of the
misconception created in the public mind by the media, in regards to the
Syrian crisis.
And this relates to another topic that has gone underreported — the
mountain of evidence that has come out in 2016 showing that the Syrian
crisis, rather than being a civil war, is a proxy war being waged
against Syria by outside forces. Some of these ‘evidences’ were
presented at the United Nations on December 9 by activist Sara
Flounders, lawyer and human rights and peace activist Donna Nassor,
Member of the Coordinating Committee for the Hands Off Syria and
Organisation Secretary of US Peace Council Dr. Bahman Azad, and
independent Canadian journalist Eva Bartlett, ‘who have all visited
Syria’ themselves, including Aleppo, recently.
At the conference, Bartlett, who has visited Syria six times in the
past two years and has spoken with Syrians in Arabic, in agreement with
the other panellists said, “whatever you hear in the corporate media is
exactly the opposite of reality [of what is happening in Syria]… our
media and the Gulf media has made Syria out to be sectarian which is
something the Syrians themselves have denied…it’s a tool to make people
confused…believe it’s Sunnis against Bashar al-Assad.”
When the truth, according to the panellists, was that people in Syria
overwhelmingly support the government and the army. And they “are tired
of the lies and are very well aware of the lies that our [Western
mainstream] media and human rights groups are reporting”.
The last, but not least, important topic that has not been reported
in the mainstream press has been the collapse of public confidence in
the mainstream media. People across the world, as more and more stories
are underreported or falsely reported by the media, have shown, more
than ever in 2016, that they have lost all faith in the sincerity of the
mainstream press to be truthful and unbiased.
Hence, we have had organisations such as Wikileaks filling the vacuum
created by the absence of an unbiased press, attracting more and more
people to look towards it for information. And although it is a real
shame that these stories and so many others have gone unreported in
2016, what 2016 has taught us is that they can no longer be blacked out
completely, largely because of organisations such as Wikileaks and
others. And that, dear reader, is the biggest story of 2016, regardless
of whether it was reported, or not.
Source: Global Research
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