I’ve been raving a lot lately about how our corporate media has failed completely in its mission to inform the American public about what the hell is going on in this country and the world.
You want a for instance?
Jimmy Carter, the former president, yeah that Jimmy Carter, spoke the other day at Atlantik Bruecke, a private organization working to further the German/US relationship.
What did he say? Only that the NSA operation has essentially resulted in a suspension of American Democracy. This isn’t Glenn Greenwald talking; this is a former president of the United States. Now wouldn’t you figure, that a statement like that from a source like that would have made news. After all a former President of this country had just said that the American intelligence community was responsible for the failure of Democracy. Well, maybe you found it in the papers but I sure as hell didn’t. No wait. I lie. It did make one paper, Der Spiegel,
Isn’t that interesting. Not one major U.S paper carried the story, just like none have carried stories about Barrett Brown and almost none have carried stories about Bradley Manning. We used to have a name for this kind of situation. It was called a conspiracy of silence. Now it’s just another example of what can happen when a country’s spy networks get too much power. Now it’s George Orwell, out there screaming “We Love big brother.” Now we are all victims if the Gestapo and the Stazi only now it’s called the NSA.
Last week the whole nation was in an uproar about the trial of George Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin. Right now all over the country people are in the streets demonstrating about the perceived injustice that was the verdict. There’s no question that Trayvon was a symbol and there’s no doubt that the verdict was offensive to huge numbers of people and our hearts go out to Trayvon’s parents and family but let’s get a little perspective on this.
One kid got murdered in a country when over a hundred kids get murdered every day and it has been in every major paper and every TV station for weeks. MSNBC and CNN have done wall to wall coverage on the trial and every time the judge farted, it was front page news in every major paper, with the result that the name Trayvon Martin is a household word and the boy Trayvon Martin is a national cause and no one knows who Barrett Brown, Bradley Manning, Julien Assange or even for that matter Edward Snowden are and that is wrong.
The only reason why we don’t know those names is because the corporate media won’t print them. The corporate media, in a monumental conspiracy of silence, won’t let you know what is going on in this country that is directly effecting the way you will live your life in the coming years.
Trayvon Martin’s death will directly effect his family and friends for the rest of their lives. Edward Snowden’s revelations will directly effect the privacy and freedom of every man, woman and child in this country for the rest of their lives. Which do you think is more important?
Trayvon Martin is and should be a symbol but Bradley Manning, Barrett Brown, Julien Assange and Edward Snowden are much more than symbols. Trayvon Martin had his life taken from him but these men have given up their lives to create an awareness in the American public about what is being taken from every single citizen in the country. And still the corporate media censors our news according to the wishes of the intelligence community and the White House.
Manning, Brown and Snowden are whistleblowers, men who have sacrificed their lives so that we will know what our government is doing to erode our privacy and freedom but what abut Assange? Julien Assange is a publisher , just like Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. is the publisher of the New York Times or the legendary Katharine Graham was the publisher of the Washington Post when the Watergate scandal hit the headlines.
The Times has published much of what WikiLeaks has published in the Manning case but the government isn’t chasing Sulzberger in and out of airports all over the world the way they are Assange. I guess it pays to be part of the establishment no matter what you do. No one suggested jailing Ms Graham when her reporters revealed that Nixon was leading a criminal conspiracy in the White House. They all became heroes. But that was before the government had a death grip on the press. That was before our national security systems were aimed at the citizens instead of the bad guys.
If you don’t think that the American government is trying, far past any constitutional parameters to suppress the American people than you are living a fantasy. It was recently revealed that the FBI failed to notify leaders of the “Occupy” movement that they had uncovered threats against their lives. Why not? What did Occupy ever do to the American government except sit in a park in downtown New York City and point out that Wall Street, which had caused the depression of 2007 had gotten away with no blame and no punishment. How Un-American is that? And yet local and national government has done everything in its power to crush Occupy because no one in the government likes anyone to point out how badly they’ve screwed up. Which is exactly the case of the whistleblowers and if we don’t understand this and if we don’t fight to save these men and the information that they have and will reveal then we will all be crushed with them. Power breeds power, and more, and more power until the only possible end game is that it crushes everything but itself.
We are already approaching the end game in this country. The only question left to answer is will we do something to stop the erosion of our freedom or will we sit complacently on the sideline and watch contentedly as we are enslaved and crushed by the esablishmen?