posted 03-21-2003 11:37 PM            

“There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, as an independent press. You know it and I know it.

“There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly 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 honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job.

“If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

“The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell the country for his daily bread.

“You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press.

“We are the tools and vassals of the 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
New York Times editor
in a speech before the New York Press Club
1953

“Without censorship, things can get terribly confused in the public mind.”
— General William Westmoreland
United States Army

“In war, truth is the first casualty.”
— Aeschylus
525-456 B.C.

“The Central Intelligence Agency owns everyone of any significance in the major media.”
— William Colby
former Director of the CIA

“We paid $3 billion for these television stations. We will decide what the news is. The news is what we tell you it is.”
— David Boylan
WTVT station manager April 16, 1997

Boylan said this to two of the station’s on-air reporters, Jane Akre and Steve Wilson, a husband-and-wife investigative reporting team. WTVT is a Fox-affiliated station in Tampa, Florida. The station manager was trying to get Akre and Wilson to falsify their investigative report on Monsanto’s bovine growth hormone (BGH) in the Tampa-area milk supply.

The report showed that studies link Monsanto’s BGH in milk to cancer. So Monsanto pressured Fox News to cover it up, and Fox News ordered WTVT to edit the story to be less damning to Monsanto. Akre and Wilson refused, despite repeated attempts by the corrupt station manager to have the story altered. Boylan even offered to terminate them with full pay if they promised to never speak publicly about their BGH findings. Finally, when Akre and Wilson threatened to report the station to the FCC for falsifying news, they were fired.

They sued WTVT, and on August 18, 2000, a Florida state court jury unanimously determined that Fox News “acted intentionally and deliberately to falsify or distort the plaintiffs’ news reporting on BGH.” The jury also found that Jane Akre’s threat to blow the whistle on Fox News deception by reporting them to the FCC, was the sole reason for the firing. The jury awarded Acre and Wilson $425,000 in damages.

Fox News appealed, and on February 14, 2003 a crooked judge reversed the jury, actually issuing a ruling that it is legal for the media to deliberately lie and distort the news on a television broadcast!

That had been a WTVT defense argument which was rejected by three other judges on at least six separate occasions. So to back up his crooked ruling, the appeals court judge said there is no FCC rule or regulation that specifically makes it illegal to mislead, distort, or falsify the news.

There you have it, folks! Mass-media deception in your face. It can’t get more blatant than that!

For full details see:
BGH Bulletin — News of Lawsuit Exposing Media Coverup of Suspected Danger in Milk

“Most people prefer to believe their leaders are just and fair even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which they live is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of a corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice.

“Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.”
— Michael Rivero
WhatReallyHappened.com

“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.

“Of course, it is possible for any citizen with time to spare, and a canny eye, to work out what is actually going on, but for the many there is not time, and the network news is the only news even though it may not be news at all but only a series of flashing fictions...”
— Gore Vidal
The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

“When I was Times bureau chief in Washington, I was a member of the League of Gentlemen [i.e., the establishment elite]; otherwise I never would have been bureau chief. Time after time, good reporters...complained about not being able to get stories in the paper. And time after time I said to them, ‘You’re just not going to get that in the New York Times... it’s too reliant on your judgement rather than on official judgement, it’s too complex, it contradicts the official record more flagrantly than the conventions of daily journalism allow.’”
— Tom Wicker
New York Times columnist
Guardian (London), February 13, 1985
quoted in Democracy for the Few, by Michael Parenti and “‘League of Gentlemen’ Rates Media,” by Kevin Kelly

“Following the same course that virtually every other major industry has in the last two decades, a relentless series of mergers and corporate takeovers has consolidated control of the media into the hands of a few corporate behemoths.

“The result has been that an increasingly authoritarian agenda has been sold to the American people by a massive, multi-tentacled media machine that has become, for all intents and purposes, a propaganda organ of the state.”
— David McGowan
from the introduction to Derailing Democracy

“Think of the press as a great keyboard on which the government can play.”
— Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister

"The minority, the ruling class at present, has the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb. This enables it to organize and sway the emotions of the masses, and make its tool of them.”
— Albert Einstein
letter to Sigmund Freud
July 30, 1932

“Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.”
— George Orwell
author of the book 1984

“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 advertising — 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.”
— Soviet correspondent
based five years in the U.S.
quoted on thirdworldtraveler.com

“The CIA is not now nor has it ever been a central intelligence agency. It is the covert action arm of the President’s foreign policy advisers. In that capacity it overthrows or supports foreign governments while reporting ‘intelligence’ justifying those activities. It shapes its intelligence, even in such critical areas as Soviet nuclear weapons capability, to support presidential policy.

“Disinformation is a large part of its covert action responsibility, and the American people are the primary target of its lies.”
— Ralph McGehee
former CIA intelligence analyst
Deadly Deceits: My 25 Years in the CIA

“The [Central Intelligence] Agency has owned outright more than 240 Media operations around the world, including newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, radio and television stations, and wire services, and has partially controlled many more.”
— Michael Parenti
Political scientist and author of
Democracy for the Few and
Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media

“It’s been demonstrated that well within two minutes of watching television, most people enter a hypnotic alpha state bordering on theta. Viewers in this state are no longer able to critically evaluate, discern, or pass judgement from their own moral database on the material being viewed. The information just flows, unimpeded, into their subconscious year in and year out.”
— Jeff Rense
talk-radio host, Rense.com

“The great masses of the people... more easily fall victims to a big lie than a small one.”
— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“You furnish the pictures and I will furnish the war.”
— William Randolph Hearst

Hearst was the owner of a chain of grossly dishonest, jingoistic newspapers. In 1898 he sent the famous artist Frederic Remington to Cuba to provide American newspaper readers with sketches of the Cuban insurrection against Spanish rule. When Remington arrived he found no insurrection happening. He wired Hearst, saying: “Everything quiet. No trouble here. There will be no war.” Hearst wired back the notorious reply above.

“Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”
— Mark Twain
The Mysterious Stranger, 1916

“We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest — which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to public affairs, you and I, and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors would all become wolves.”
— Thomas Jefferson
3rd U.S. President

“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.”
— Herman Goering
Nazi Air Force (Luftwaffe) commander
at the Nuremberg Trials

“...the rank and file are usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious.

“The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly... it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
— Joseph Goebbels
Nazi Propaganda Minister

“How fortunate for governments that the people they administer don’t think.”
— Adolf Hitler

“Only two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity... and I’m not sure about the former.”
— Albert Einstein