News From Nothing

CNN and Fox “News” (the creations of, respectively, media monopolists Ted Turner, and Rupert Murdoch assisted by GOP Media Mephistopheles Roger Ailes) spent an hour April 17^th bloviating with their “correspondents” and various attention-hungry “experts” about the arrest of a suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing.

Too bad there was no such arrest and the suspect didn't exist.

It's gotten to the point with media misinformation on the case that the FBI has chided their long-time allies, the media, about their feckless “journalism,” (my quotes), instructing “the media” “to exercise caution and attempt to verify information through appropriate official channels before reporting.”

For the past few days there have been repeated false reports in the “mainstream” (i.e. big corporate) media of suspects under guard in hospital, of arrests, even of five unexploded bombs, that were apparently totally baseless.

(Are elements within the police establishment deliberately burning these hacks? Or are dumb cops spreading rumors among themselves which then get passed along to the hacks?)

CNN “broke the [entirely false] news” of an arrest at 1:45 pm Wednesday. Their “reporter,” John King, was no doubt thrilled to be first with his “scoop,” which he claimed came to him from “a law enforcement source,” as they say. Half an hour earlier, he performed some foreplay on his audience, breathlessly announcing a “breakthrough in the identification of a suspect,” “a dark-skinned male.” [Was he wearing a turban too, John?] King claimed to have multiple “law-enforcement sources.”

Murdoch's fascist agitprop rag, the New York Post, one of the world's worst “news”papers, falsely reported a Saudi man in custody in the bombing.

The AP also falsely reported along the same lines. Boston local television stations ran false arrest or suspect- in-custody stories the same day, citing “law enforcement sources.”

The fact that first King reported a “breakthrough” in identifying a “suspect,” “a dark-skinned male,” and half an hour later, an arrest, indicates he was being fed a stream of disinformation.

CNN claims it had three “credible sources” for the false arrest story.

Fox anchor Megyn Kelly tried to squirm out of the contretemps with this tortured statement: “It appears in this case some confirmations were issued when perhaps they should not have been.”

Yeah, perhaps. Perhaps your “law enforcement sources” shouldn't have burned you by “confirming” false information. Or disinformation, as they say in the secret police trade.

What are we to make of CNN's and Fox's claims of multiple police sources, including apparently FBI ones? Doesn't sound like one ill-informed flatfoot passing along a bum tip.

Whoever police and/or FBI agents are putting out this stuff, they are quite busy. We're talking multiple major media repeatedly reporting misinformation about unexploded bombs, Saudi suspects, arrests, swarthy perpetrators in custody. 

How should we interpret this? Are anti-Muslim police feeding disinformation to the media?

The FBI and police have repeatedly been caught using anti-Muslim “anti-terrorist training material” to indoctrinate their personnel. No doubt it had its intended effect on some of the trainees, making them zealots.

A more sinister possibility: extremist elements or moles within the police establishment are putting out red herrings to protect white racist/fascist bombers such as Timothy McVeigh and Eric Robert Rudolph types. (The innocent security guard Richard Jewell came within a hair's breadth of taking the rap for Rudolph's bombing of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, when the FBI tried to frame him up, using the media to preemptively convict him in the public's mind, after luring him to their lair and tricking him into playacting a “confession,” using the ruse of telling him it was an anti-terrorist exercise. Jewell's lawyer interceded in the nick of time.)

These aren't “conspiracy theories.” I have no theory to explain why people inside the police establishment are planting information they surely know is false in the media. Who is doing this and why should be investigated- but won't be. All I have raised are possibilities.

Sometimes alibi-makers for the corporate oligarchy's media make the excuse that “competitive pressures to be first with news” make their media sloppy. They mean well, you see, they can't help it, it's not their fault, they're under external pressure. And there's something to that- but not much.

When over and over they run with whatever their state security “sources” tell them, when these sources have proven over the years that they are unethical, manipulative, self-serving, and have a record of planting disinformation in the media, we cannot accept that the media people are naïve naifs being taken in.

Basically the corporate propaganda system is constantly manipulating the public. Its business is the manipulation of mass consciousness. So often it reports misinformation and disinformation and government propaganda planted with it. There have been entire campaigns of lies promulgated by the establishment's propaganda system for political ends. A few examples are the Tonkin Gulf incident, “Yellow Rain,” the “Pope Plot” (a Turkish fascist member of the Grey Wolves shot a Pope, and the CIA and U.S. media- and foreign media accomplices of the CIA- twisted that into an imaginary Bulgarian-KGB plot), Iraq's Al-Qaeda ties and “weapons of mass destruction.” We could go farther back in time for examples of U.S. media propaganda serving hidden political ends. Hearst instigating the Spanish-American war (the U.S. stealing the colonies of an enervated older empire), the Zimmerman telegram hoax, and many others.

Within a week after Pinochet assassinated Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt with a bomb made and placed by a Chilean secret police agent, Michael Vernon Townley, Newsweek carried a CIA-planted item, citing the CIA as the source, saying that Pinochet's secret police (DINA) didn't do it. (Of course they had done it- with CIA help, as a matter of fact. The director of the CIA at the time? One George H.W. Bush, later VP and President of the U.S.) Newsweek apparently thought it good as gold that the CIA could know for a fact, just days after the bombing, that the obvious culprits, the ones who had already assassinated numerous people in Latin America and Europe, didn't do it. How the CIA could possibly "know" this, within days of the assassination, apparently didn't pique Newsweek's curiosity. Of course, Newsweek was as much an accomplice in the destruction of democracy and the installation of a murderous fascist military dictatorship as the CIA was. The "liberal" U.S. media hailed the coup. For years afterwards the NY Times ran pro-Pinochet propaganda by a creature named Shirley Christian (a big defender of Anastasio Somoza, dictator of Nicaragua) as well as editorially hailing the coup.

Here's an even better one, if less grotesque and sinister. Another so-called “news” magazine, the chauvinistically named U.S. News and World Report, once ran a photo I saw of a “Soviet spy buoy” that supposedly washed up on a beach, surrounding by a boy scout troop that allegedly happened upon it. Just to make sure there was no doubt, the letters “U.S.S.R.” were helpfully imprinted on the buoy. Perhaps the Soviets did this in case their secret spy buoy got lost, so people would know who to return it to. But even though the Russian initials for their nation are C.C.C.P., they put the English version on, thinking I suppose that more people would know where it came from in that case. You know, the way the U.S. doesn't paint “USAF” on its planes, but paints foreign initials instead.

Absurd. And U.S. Puke and World Distort is not put out by children, so obviously they did this as part of a little secret police disinformation plot.

There's hundreds of thousands of additional examples that could be cited.

So “the” media is in the habit of having contempt for facts. It cares about effect, not accuracy. Sure, it is competitive to a degree- but if it's so competitive, why do all its separate entities toe the same line so often? Why in fact does it suppress accurate information, as it did in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq? Recall that MSNBC canceled its highest rated program, the Phil Donahue show, before the invasion because he was dissenting from the beat-the-war-drums “consensus” of the media.