Syria: As West's narrative unravels, cognitive infiltration begins
By Tony Cartalucci
US, UK, NATO, Saudi, and Israeli backed terrorists carrying out a campaign of systematic atrocities in Syria have finally been acknowledged and reported on by Human Rights Watch, who has for nearly 2 years intentionally portrayed the conflict as one-sided violence carried out by the Syrian government alone.
With evidence and admissions emerging that the so-called “Syrian rebels” are in fact Libyan terrorists, armed, funded, and flown in by NATO to cross into Syria and attack government troops, organizations like Human Rights Watch have faced deteriorating legitimacy, even with watered-down admissions like their most recent report titled, “Syria: End Opposition Use of Torture, Executions.” In the report, Human Rights Watch admits that “armed opposition groups have subjected detainees to ill-treatment and torture and committed extrajudicial or summary executions in Aleppo, Latakia, and Idlib.”
Much of the torture described by Human Rights Watch involves obtaining false confessions by victims, admitting tat they are “shabeeha” militia men. The Western media has long excused terrorists operating in Syria for their atrocities, claiming that the victims were “suspected” shabeeha. It now appears, as was suspected all along, these victims were innocent, and the Western press, the BBC and CNN in particular, were complicit in covering up egregious crimes against humanity.
Human Rights Watch also acknowledged that those carrying out the atrocities are indeed the same groups being financed and armed by Western nations, and “urged countries assisting opposition groups to condemn publicly the human rights and humanitarian law abuses by those groups.”
Of course, despite the West using reports produced by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International – and other faux-NGOs funded and directed by the very interests arming terrorists in Syria – to justify the violent subversion of the Syrian government, it is already evident that reports illustrating that human rights abuses are being carried out by Western-backed terrorists will incur no condemnation, nor affect in any way the continued supplying of arms, cash, and covert military support.
“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.” - George Orwell
China: Tiananmen Square ‘massacre’ was a myth
By Deirdre Griswold
How many times have we been told that the U.S. is an “open” society and the media are “free”?
Usually such claims are made when criticizing other countries for not being “open,” especially countries that don’t follow Washington’s agenda.
If you live in the United States and depend on the supposedly “free” and “open” commercial media for information, you would without a doubt believe that the Chinese government massacred “hundreds, perhaps thousands” of students in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. That phrase has been repeated tens of thousands of times by the media of this country.
But it’s a myth. Furthermore, the U.S. government knows it’s a myth. And all the major media know it too. But they refuse to correct the record because of the basic hostility of the U.S. imperialist ruling class to China.
Messing With Our Minds: The Ever Finer Line Between News and Advertising | Kingsley Dennis
Modern programs of social influence could not exist without the mass media. Today it exists as a combination of expertise and knowledge from technology, sociology, social behaviorism, psychology, communications and other scientific techniques. Almost every nation needs a controlled mainstream media if it is to regulate and influence its citizenry. By way of the mainstream media, a controlling authority is able to exert psychological influence upon people’s perception of reality. This capacity works hand in hand with the more physical components, such as enforcing the legal system and national security laws (surveillance and monitoring). State control, acting as a “psychological machine,” instigates specific psychological manipulations in order to achieve desired goals within its national borders (and often beyond). Examples of these psychological manipulations include the deliberate use of specific cultural symbols and embedded signifiers that catalyze conditioned reflexes in the populace. These triggers have included the words “red” and “communist” during the United States’ 1950s McCarthyism, and “Muslim terrorist” during the currently constructed war on terror. Targeted reactions can thus be achieved, making the populace open to further manipulation in this state. This is a process of psychic re-formation that works repeatedly to soften up the people through continued and extensive exposure to particular stimuli. These are the symbols, artificial and human-made, that we live by in order to allow for the construction of a compliant society. [++]
(Source: theamericanbear)
free ursula
Well, essentially in Manufacturing Consent what we were doing was contrasting two models: how the media ought to function, and how they do function.
The former model is the more or less conventional one: it’s what the New York Times recently referred to in a book review as the “traditional Jeffersonian role of the media as a counter-weight to government”—in other words, a cantankerous, obstinate, ubiquitous press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningful control over the political process.
That’s the standard conception of the media in the United States, and it’s what most of the people in the media themselves take for granted.
The alternative conception is that the media will present a picture of the world which defends and inculcates the economic, social, and political agendas of the privileged groups that dominate the domestic economy, and who therefore also largely control the government. According to this “Propaganda Model,” the media serve their societal purpose by things like the way they select topics, distribute their concerns, frame issues, filter information, focus their analyses, through emphasis, tone, and a whole range of other techniques like that.
Noam Chomsky - Understanding Power (via noam-chomsky)

