Part I Chapter 4a

The Mainstream Corporate Propaganda Media: Free but very much *not* democratic

Propaganda and pablum
As talked about in the last two chapters, the first and central parts of the answer about why we are facing such seemingly insurmountable problems in trying to turn back this hostile takeover of our country are that we are not a *real* democracy at all so participating in a political process completely controlled by those who have stolen our society is guaranteed to be completely fruitless, and the oligarchical rulers are using our complete ignorance of how the money-credit-accounting system functions to, basically, play one of the greatest frauds/scams/cons in history as they rob us blind and create huge debt chains stretching across generations as a justification for their ongoing usurpation of 'our' country and rolling back of our 'democracy' to earlier times when it was kind of the accepted 'natural order' that the Lords under whatever name they called themselves at any given time and place ran things, and the peasants/citizens accepted their lot with minimal complaining.

The rather large question left begging from these sections about pseudo-democracy and the great money scam is, of course, if indeed the country is not the 'great democracy' we have been well-trained to believe it is, or the 'money supply' situation is the great con stealing so much for so long, both as explained rather undeniably earlier, how it could be that so few people understand what is going on with things, especially here, in Canada, one of the most advanced countries in the world, populated by reasonably intelligent, reasonably well-educated, somewhat-at-least engaged citizens with access to pretty much any information they want through libraries and book stores and the internet, which is so well served by our 'great free media', led by the world class CBC????

How indeed.

As happens so often when dealing with a problem of some kind, simply getting the right questions framed and asking them out loud, getting the problem out there where we have to face and think about it rather than assuming something that isn't really correct, turns on, to the at least somewhat 'free' mind able to go places the more 'do what they are told, think what they are told is allowable to think' mind is less able to, the big flashing sign pointing to the answer for those Holmesians truly seeking such answers and willing to go where the facts lead them, rather than staying in whatever comfort zone in front of the television they have been trained to spend their lives in, points rather clearly to where the answer lies, uncomforting though it may be to many. The realisation is, of course, that, like the lies about 'democracy' and 'great economic leadership' we absorb as more-or-less unquestioned deeply internalised beliefs during our years of education-indoctrination, and then are exposed to on a more or less daily basis through the media and peer assumptions all through our busy lives, the idea that Canada is well-served by one of the free-est, greatest medias in the world and our really great 'journalists' is, sadly but very importantly, the third great deception that must be understood and faced if we are to understand why we are losing this 21st century struggle against the wouldbe new feudalists and get ourselves on the road to some more intelligent and effective resistance.

Again, in terms of the 'great free Canadian media', as with the lie of 'democracy', we have the great lie leading people into wandering in impotent circles based on one or more 'truths' - a 'free' media is indeed extremely important to the success or strength of a democracy, and our rulers, and the media people themselves, point out that basic truth very frequently, and emphasize how free the great Canadian media are, especially, they are always quick to emphasize, compared to them damned godless commie or 'islamist' countries and so on who brainwash all their people and have a state-controlled media lying to them all the time, and thus, in the 'logical' step where the truth suddenly becomes considerably compromised for those paying sufficient attention, they urge us to believe, among other things, we must be a great democracy, because we have a great free media, which would surely not be tolerated in any country *not* such a great 'democracy', and is utterly reliable in keeping an eye on things we need an eye kept on.

As with the missing parts in the mythology of the struggle for democracy, and how our economy really works, there is a rather significant part missing in the 'great free Canadian media' story as well, a part which, when considered and understood, turns the entire argument right on its head. Certainly, as they remind us endlessly, a 'free' media is fundamentally important in a democracy, as the citizens absolutely require complete and accurate information about what is going on in their country and world to make good, informed decisions, and our media certainly seem free enough to pry into the sex lives of celebrities or 'expose' political 'scandals' like Mike Duffy or others spending 'taxpayers' money!!' on one thing or another the media think outrageous and want YOU to be outraged too, and there's obviously no restrictions on the level of gossip they are free to engage in, as the rather unbelievable months long teenage-girl-level gossipfest concerning Rob Ford proved a couple of years back, and many other things - a day is not complete in the Cdn media if they don't have some juicy gossip about some celebrity or politician. But then, we need to get a bit beyond what the media tell us, and consider things for ourselves, informed by the what-should-be-obvious idea that the media reporting on themselves is obviously a bit of a conflict of interests, and anyone needs to be a bit vigilant in such situations. And at some point, we need to understand that 'freedom' is only half the story, and an even more important question is - Who, exactly, is the 'free' media **responsible** to? Or to put it another way - Who is the 'free' media serving? For a media that is quite obviously 'free' - but which is working for those who desire to reduce 'democracy' to a hollow shell by dispensing propaganda and encouraging passivity and acceptance of things those people might not want to accept if they understood the options available through ongoing indoctrination reinforcement, and gatekeeping information that the public really needs to know about various things going on around us, and providing a lot of titillating but irrelevant gossip and other spectacle to divert attention away from thinking about more important things - such a 'media' is also entirely necessary for the establishment and maintenance of an oligarchy managing a pretend-democracy.

"Goebbels said that what you want in a media system - he meant the Nazi media system - is to present the ostensible diversity that conceals an actual uniformity." - Mark Crispin Miller

One of the unquestioned 'accepted truths' we are supposed to believe without thinking about, 'free' does not automatically equate with things like 'truthful' or 'trustworthy' or 'working for the people', it just means they are 'free' to work either for someone, or against someone, they are free to promote whatever propaganda or spin they like, or simply gatekeep information they'd rather their 'media consumers' not think about, or know about at all, or to slowly but surely turn the media from a 'news' institution to a 'creating the narrative for dumbed down pseudo-citizens' Orwellian Ministry of Truth clone, creating and maintaining a compliant citizenry in their Brave New World. To be 'free' does not necessarily mean that you will not betray the people you are supposed to be working for - Brutus was free to give good advice to, or to betray Caesar, and although he was indeed a faithful companion for years, he was free to decide to be true no more, and when he secretly sold his loyalty elsewhere, it was only after some rather fatal damage had been done that Caesar learned of his perfidy.

Freedom just means you have no-one telling you what to do - it has nothing to do with the way you use that freedom. Atilla the Hun was 'free' to go marauding all over Asia - we don't usually point to him as an exemplar of how great 'freedom' is - and we need to stop eulogizing our media simply because they are 'free', and start thinking about how 'freedom' in a moral and ethics free zone can be abused, and is, and how we need to start paying considerably more attention to just who this free media is actually working for, as it very clearly is not 'we the people'.

The Big Lie in action - some truth if necessary to create some trust in your intended victim, but very much not necessarily much truth much of the time, would it be inconvenient to those doing the manipulating.

A *free* media's very important **democratic** job is to keep an eye on government, and very wealthy people or others who aspire to power and/or to influence the government in ways favorable to them and antithetical to the interests of average people, people who don't consider themselves particularly constrained by any rules or laws that are supposed to apply to us all, and make sure 'we the people', whom they are supposed to be serving, are well and truthfully informed about these things, and other things going on in the world - and when you actually examine things, it becomes pretty clear that our current media are not doing a very good job of this at all.

What we are failing to understand - largely because even 'progressives' have been well trained to think about things they are told to think about by those they look to as leaders and most of the major 'alternative' media is also under the control of the enemy, and those who tell us such things have very good reasons for keeping this train of thought away from our minds - is that while 'freedom' is certainly a good idea, in a country and world totally organised around 'money' as the current world is, in a much more important sense of the word, the degree of 'freedom' any of us have is pretty directly related to how much money we have - and those with essentially bottomless bank accounts have a great deal more freedom than the rest of us - including the freedom to start newspapers or buy television stations. And people with a great deal of money, and therefore power, are not likely to be running newspapers asking penetrating questions about that power or money. And people who might ask such questions rarely have the money to start newspapers, and aren't going to be hired by those who don't want to encourage such thinking in their readership.

And the failure of so many people to understand the complete fictional world that has been created around us by the media, the false narrative, the propaganda matrix within which we all live, is, again, one of the central reasons we are losing this struggle for our lives, country and civilisation.

Well, that's enough, really, as a kind of introduction, as other people have spent a great deal of time raising the alarm about the propaganda function of the corporate press, and there's no point in me simply going over it all again. But if you are not familiar with this work, a few good places to start your education might be:

• I think Noam Chomsky has probably done the most work here, and you should be familiar with his main works, Necessary Illusions (when the CBC was still in transition from a 'we the people' broadcaster to the current 'we serve Power' corporate propagandist, Chomsky was asked to do a Massey Lectures series on the book and you can listen here - Massey Lectures, Necessary Illusions - interesting to see in some of the discussion following a couple of the lectures how the Cdn media of the time are quite huffy about having the truth pointed out - by 1989, the transition spoken of above was well under way...) - and his other classic on corporate state propaganda is Manufacturing Consent - he has many, many lectures available now on the internet on this and many other things, one here (the NFB documentary, from again a time before the Canadian government was completely taken over by the corporate NWO-ers).
• Project Censored is always a good read, they put out a book every year on the 'most censored stories'. The director, Mickey Huff, also does a lot of speaking, available on the net - here Huff interviewed by Abby Martin on RT
• Media lens is a Brit site that continually calls out the major Brit media, including the BBC and Guardian, about their propaganda - not much Cdn stuff, but the Cdn corporate media carries the same propaganda as the Brit places, so various insights can be found there that won't be found in any of the Cdn media For example, Jousting With Toothpicks - The Case For Challenging Corporate Journalism or this - You say what you like because they like what you say..
• Robert Parry on the beginnings of MSM propaganda (good overview)
• Listen to people who see clearly - people like Chris Hedges, many good speeches on the net, here talking with Noam Chomsky
• Paul Craig Roberts - just watch for him on RT, for example this interview about the so-called 'Greek Crisis' of 2015 - many things obviously true, but never mentioned in the corporate media, as they had a completely different agenda, and narrative, about this situation (as they do about most important things)

- well, there's lots of other places out there, once you realise the Canadian corporate media are a serious barrier to a real democracy, a central part of the problem, and to get an accurate idea of what is going on in our country and world, you need to be looking other places.

One of our central problems with the media in Canada is that it appears a very large number of people who think of themselves as 'progressive' in one way or another, who realise there are some problems with our country that need fixing and are doing what they can, are basically followers of the CBC - they believe the CBC to be a great broadcaster, and they can generally trust what they hear or see or read on the CBC. I'll get into some more detail later, but although it is true the CBC **used** to be a great broadcaster for 'we the Canadian people' and our job of creating an ever better democracy here, since the 1970s the CBC has been moving more and more and more towards being controlled by the same corporate elite who control the 'private' media in Canada, and certainly for the last 20 years or so they have been nothing more than a corporate propagandist, aimed at the specific 'progressive' demographic, whose primary objective is keeping the 'progressives' from leading the serious challenge to the current ongoing corporate usurpation of our government.

In the next chapter, I will 'meld' a few letters I have written to the CBC over the past few years - similar in content to many I have written to many Canadian mainstream media outlets over the years, always in response to some editorial or similar thing from they themselves telling us all what wonderful great journalists they were and serving us all so well (fuck I need a sarcasm font, somebody get at it, eh?) pointing out some places I thought they were not quite as good as they were presenting themselves as, not accurately reporting on themselves or much else of importance, not giving us the whole picture -I wrote some of these letters kind of just on the off chance they were actually well-meaning wannabe but not very well trained journalists, really looking for the truth, or as close to that thing as we humans can aspire to, and would be happy to have a bit of help in pointing out some places they might benefit from taking a closer look at.

Not surprisingly, if my theory they are all at the higher levels very well aware of what they are doing as propagandists, gatekeepers, servers of pablum and spectacle, is correct, I have never gotten a response to any of these letters. (you can read some at my VGI Archives if interested - some good stuff, far better than you read in any of the corporate press today - that's not just blowing my own horn, there's a reason for that - when you have a media devoted to hiding the truth, you simply can't have any seriously good writing, as the few really good writers will not let their writing be used in the service of evil, so won't get published by these people - all the best writing today is where good writers are still free to speak Truth, on the internet - which of course the corporate press is devoting great efforts to getting under control, but so far we still have this space where we can talk.)

The realisation that the MSM, including the tragically fallen CBC, have become state corporate propagandists, is pretty undeniable from a position of perspective outside the box, and the very last thing they want is to get into any public debate about this - so far the CBC have managed to keep their true colors well-concealed from most people, but most of these same people are not really all that stupid, at least yet, regardless of years of dumbing down, and would indeed be able to understand the truth, if they were ever exposed to it, and had it held up in contrast to the propaganda. One of the main roles of the 24/7 surround-sound media coverage today is ensuring that reality never has a chance to get any wide exposure.

And one of the purposes of this book is to shine the great light of Truth on what the CBC is really up to.

---

Go to: I-4b - The CBC - corporate state propagandist
or back to Democratic Revolution Handbook - Home

---

---