The NY Times. Through The Looking Glass Press

Arthur Gilroy

19 years ago

I ran into this little piece of surreal mainstream press whoredom last night, and could not resist bringing it to the attention of BT. It is a piece of media business as usual, but important nonetheless. I harbor no illusions that this situation will change in America…Operation Mockingbird (The PermaGov takeover of the media) is now so embedded in the basic fabric of our society that in a sense it IS that society…but if the opposition is to change the way things are working here even a little bit we MUST remain aware of just how twisted the whole mainstream media has become.

Read on.

The article is titled U.S. Is Said to Pay to Plant Articles in Iraq Papers, and it is in the “Media” section of the paper. I am sure most of us are familiar with the story. It has recently been exposed…please notice that exactly who did the exposing or for what reasons is never emphasized in the broad outline of the story as we are fed it in the mainstream media… that the U.S, military has been running a “multimillion-dollar covert campaign to plant paid propaganda in the Iraqi news media and pay friendly Iraqi journalists monthly stipends.”

The purveyors of this merchandise is one Lincoln Group.

…a Washington-based public relations firm paid by the Pentagon, documents from the Pentagon show. The contractor’s job is to translate the articles into Arabic and submit them to Iraqi newspapers or advertising agencies without revealing the Pentagon’s role.

Note well the words “documents from the Pentagon show.” From where or whom those documents have appeared (or for what reason they are appearing only now) is never mentioned. Gotta protect those “sources”, right?

Sound somehow familiar?

And then one step later we go right on through the looking glass with the Good Grey Lady. Right on down the old rabbit hole to Queensland.

Queer Street, as boxers refer to what happens after a knockout punch.

Even as the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development pay contractors millions of dollars to help train journalists and promote a professional and independent Iraqi media, the Pentagon is paying millions more to the Lincoln Group for work that appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism.

OOOOOOoooooo, those bad, BAD Lincoln Group people!! Subverting freedom of the press like that!!!

This “…appears to violate fundamental principles of Western journalism.”

Why…MONEY has even changed hands!!!

In addition to paying newspapers to print government propaganda, Lincoln has paid about a dozen Iraqi journalists each several hundred dollars a month, a person who had been told of the transactions said.

Come ON here, fellas!!!

This is the same newspaper, owned and administrated by the same people, that kept Judith Miller busy churning out a high level version of the same boilerplate pap regarding the invasion of Iraq for three years. Do you think it possible that money…or its journalistic career equivalent in power, access and prestige…did not change hands in THAT effort? Hell, once Ms. Miller had been thoroughly exposed as an administration plant and had to be dumped for public relations reasons, her golden parachute ALONE (An undisclosed amount, but…hey, this IS the big leagues, right???) would probably be sufficient to keep me and my descendants in the clover for a couple of generations if properly administered.

And here these clowns are, throwing this garbage out with the straightest of faces to be unthinkingly consumed by the sleeping middle class media pigs of the world over their morning coffee and croissants before they troop off to work shoring up this massive establishment of deceit and misdirection that we laughingly call “America”.

Please.

And the military stonewalls.

Military spokesmen in Washington and Baghdad said Wednesday that they had no information on the contract. In an interview from Baghdad on Nov. 18, Lt. Col. Steven A. Boylan, a military spokesman, said the Pentagon’s contract with the Lincoln Group was an attempt to “try to get stories out to publications that normally don’t have access to those kind of stories.” The military’s top commanders, including Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, did not know about the Lincoln Group contract until Wednesday, when it was first described by The Los Angeles Times, said a senior military official who was not authorized to speak publicly.

Pentagon officials said General Pace and other top officials were disturbed by the reported details of the propaganda campaign and demanded explanations from senior officers in Iraq, the official said.

The story will eventually disappear down the lie hole along with literally thousands of other piece of shit stories that have no impact whatsoever on what is happening except to keep the public is a state of complete confusion over who is really running the game and under which shell the media con game pea REALLY resides.

The article goes on to flap its gums about this dastardly effort, but once the reader accepts the basic premise of the story…that the mainstream media is ever on the lookout for such rancid examples of planted journalism…the damage is done. The readers go right into their usual NY Times trances, and mission accomplished.

So once again I mention this idea.

NEWSTRIKE!!!

And I suggest to almost anyone who has even the slightest immediate negative reaction to the presentation of such an idea…that all of us need to go cold turkey and kick the media habit immediately, that we need to stop mainlining this shit straight into the veins of our information system until we are completely and forever cured of the addiction… that if you do not consider EACH AND EVERY PIECE OF MEDIA INFORMATION THAT YOU CONSUME with a completely critical eye, you are in a state of media hypnotism that is past all understanding once the trance hits.

It is a DRUG, people. And you can refuse that drug once, twice, three times in a day, consider yourself immune to its temptations, and then while you are thinking that you are safe and secure, simultaneously belly right up on to the bar and down a double that goes straight to your limbic system. And then there you jolly well are, aren’t you. RIGHT back in Wonderland with Alice and the boys in the band.

You must first get to a point where the logo

(or any OTHER mainstream media logo…the Woodward…errrr, Washington…Post, CBS, CNN, etc.) causes an almost allergic reaction in your very being. An automatic and complete cessation of belief instead of the ongoing and completely automatic surrender of DISBELIEF that we have all been taught so well and so thoroughly since early childhood when confronted with the Howdy Doody media show.

“What time is it, kids? It HOWDY DOODY time!!!”

“YAAAAAAAAY!!!”

ZZZZzzzzzz….

I am telling you…achieving this state of ongoing and complete media disbelief is the most dangerous and truly revolutionary thing that ANY of us can do right now. If this in the Information Age, then any revolution must take place on an informational level.

And the idea of a NEWSTRIKE!!!…an internal, individual and complete NEWSTRIKE!!!, just for STARTERS…is informational rebellion at its highest level.

George Orwell’s “1984” was just a sketch, a cartoon compared to the mind control apparatus in place in the U.S.A. today. (Hmmm…USA Today. Sounds somehow…familiar.)

It might better be called the U.S.H.

The United States of Hypnosis.

And there are mighty damned few of us who are completely free of that trance state.

Look within.

Have you internally believed ONE THING that the media has told you over the last 10 years or so?

Do you refer to Bush as “President” Bush?

Do you root for the Yankees or some other team of bread and circus performers?

Watch ANY TV show with an accepting and uncritical eye? Even the most apparently innocuous ones?

EVER buy a brand name ANYTHING when you have a choice not to?

Unconsciously let the droning TVs in waiting rooms (and WAY too often in living rooms and bedrooms as well) spew their subliminal societal rank and file-ism into your brain?

Then you are a junkie.

“Not ME, bro”!!! I’m just sniffin’!!! Just skin poppin’, baby. I’m no junkie!!!”

Right.

Kick.

Go a year or two without reverting.

Go ahead.

I dare ya.

A last word from that NY Times story:

Asked whether the information and news products would identify the American sponsorship, a media relations officer with the special operations command replied, in an e-mail message last summer, that “the product may or may not carry ‘made in the U.S. “signature” but they would be identified as American in origin, “if asked.”

Right.

You think it’s any different right here at home?

“If asked.”

So ask.

But…who ya GONNA ask?

Ghostbusters?

Spookbusters.

You must ask YOURSELF.

Information rebellion.

The REAL “last frontier”.

(Fade out to Star Trek theme. And thanks SO much, Gene Roddenberry. For Mr. Spock. Mr. SPOOK. Drop the fuck out, folks. It really DOESN’T compute.)

Later…

0 0 votes

Article Rating