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[Media Control and Propaganda]
"There is nothing puzzling
... about America's gratuitously aggressive foreign policy or
about the oligarchs' successful efforts to drag the Republic into
five wars. What an aggressive foreign policy accomplishes by slow
degrees, a state of war accomplishes in a trice. Overnight [war]
kills reform, overnight it transforms insurgents into traitors
and the Republic into an imperiled realm. Overnight it strangles
free politics, distracts and overawes the citizenry. Overnight
it blasts public hope."
Walter Karp
"There have been times,
living in America of late, when it seemed I was back in the Communist
Moscow I left a dozen years ago. Switch to cable TV and reporters
breathlessly relay the latest wisdom from the usual unnamed 'senior
administration officials... Everyone, it seems, is on-side and
on-message. Just like it used to be when the hammer and sickle
flew over the Kremlin."
Rupert Cornwell in the London-based
Independent newspaper
"You have presented to
stations around the world a model for freedom of speech and the
unhindered availability of information... You have shown that
despite media monopolies and manipulations it is possible to preserve
a spirit of tolerance, freedom and truth and to allow dissenting
voices to be heard... Your struggle to preserve your autonomy...
has revealed an unexpected similarity between the media in the
US and Serbia today, the freedom of speech is being stifled in
a similar manner, journalists are being .. intimidated and progressive
radio stations are prevented from operating. The character of
media repression is virtually the same under openly totalitarian
dictatorships as it is under democratic systems which are increasingly
influenced by conservative structures."
A message of solidarity from
banned independent radio station B92 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia to
Radio KPFA in Berkeley and Radio WBAI in New York, expressing
support in their struggle to preserve progressive community radio
in the United States - July 1999
" I have the greatest
admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried
out by experts who have had the best training in the world --
in the field of advertizing -- and have mastered the techniques
with exceptional proficiency ... Yours are subtle and persuasive;
ours are crude and obvious ... I think that the fundamental difference
between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple.
You tend to believe yours ... and we tend to disbelieve ours.
"
a Soviet correspondent based five
years in the U.S.
"What chiefly governs
the [U.S.] military budget is the need to spend enormous sums
of money in a useless way. The allegedly powerful Pentagon is
simply a receptacle for wasteful expenditure, just as a city dump
is the receptacle for the refuse of a city."
Walter Karp
" The U.S. should bomb
the Afghan infrastructure to rubble-the airport, the power plants,
their water facilities and the roads. This is a very primitive
country. And taking out their ability to exist day to day will
not be hard. Remember, the people of any country are ultimately
responsible for the government they have. The Germans were responsible
for Hitler. The Afghans are responsible for the Taliban. We should
not target civilians. But if they don't rise up against this criminal
government, they starve, period."
Bill O'Reilly - O'Reilly Factor
- Fox News
"Since free men cannot
judge for themselves what endangers their freedom if they believe
it is never in danger, it is the chief burden of the public school
curriculum to persuade children that their liberty is always secure."
Walter Karp
" The owners of the Washington
Post long ago acknowledged that the Post is the government's voice
to the people. In 1981, Katherine Graham, who owns the Post and
Newsweek announced that her editors would "cooperate with
the national security interests." National security in this
context means "CIA.""
John Stockwell, former CIA official
and author
" Any dictator would admire
the uniformity and obedience of the [U.S.] media."
Noam Chomsky
"There is no such thing
in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country
towns.
You know it and I know it.
There is not one of you who dares to writes (sic) his honest opinions,
and if you did you know beforehand that it would never appear
in print.
I am paid one hundred and fifty
dollars a week 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
his honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another
job.
The business of the New York
journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert,
to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his race
and his country for his daily bread.
You know this and I know it,
and what folly is this to be toasting an "Independent Press."
We are the tools and vassals
of 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."
John Swinton, former Chief of
Staff of New York Times, 1953
" Good journalism is being
criminalized or otherwise rendered perilous to its best practitioners.
Attack a government agency like the CIA, or a Fortune 500 member
..., or the conduct of the military in Southeast Asia and you
find yourself in deep trouble, naked and often alone. "
Daniel Schorr, journalist
" [The] media, our top
elected official, and our two dominant political parties rarely
criticize the growing power of large corporations because they
are bankrolled by them."
Nancy Snow, author
"Since free men cannot
judge for themselves what endangers their freedom if they believe
it is never in danger, it is the chief burden of the public school
curriculum to persuade children that their liberty is always secure."
Walter Karp
" The corporate grip on
opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western
world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so
entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent. "
Gore Vidal, novelist and critic
"As long as people are
marginalized and distracted [they] have no way to organize or
articulate their sentiments, or even know that others have these
sentiments. People assume that
they are the only people with a crazy idea in their heads. They
never hear it from anywhere else. Nobody's supposed to think that.
... Since there's no way to get together with other people who
share or reinforce that view and help you articulate it, you feel
like an oddity, an oddball. So you just stay on the side and you
don't pay any attention to what's going on. You look at something
else, like the Superbowl."
Noam Chomsky
"The military budget is
simply an enormous pork barrel of special privilege, the privileges
taking the form of windfall profits, of no-risk profits and, most
importantly, of enormous outlays of capital supplied by the Pentagon
to arms contractors."
Walter Karp
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