5 Times When The Mainstream Media "Created Fake News"... And People Died As A Result
by Tyler Durden
Nov 18, 2016 10:00 PM Zero Hedge
As SHTFPLan.com's Mac Slavo notes...
While the powers that be are determining the fate of alternative media voices that are now branded under the dubious label “fake news” and blacked out from online search results,
it is worth keeping in mind all the disinformation and downright lies
that have been perpetrated by the corporate news media – typically hand
in hand with a political agenda.
Whether it is lies that took us to war, or the perception that a
deadly attack was carried out by a certain group, the impressions they
create play a significant role in determining world events. Often times,
that role is one of deception, ensnaring people into supporting deadly
and costly actions – in spite of the true facts.
These misleaders are the fake news, and the fake news problem has helped to ruin this country.
5 Times Corporate Media Got Caught Publishing Fake News Causing the Death & Suffering of Millions
Authored by Claire Bernish and originally published at The Free Thought Project.
A now-notorious list of ostensibly “fake” news sites — created by a
liberal professor, seemingly out of thin air — spread like wildfire
online in the past two days and was eagerly reprinted by corporate media
presstitutes hoping to vindicate their own failed reporting on the 2016
election.
But branding perfectly legitimate outlets with the same scarlet
letter as those devoid of integrity deemed the professor’s list a
spurious attempt to defame alternative and independent media — anyone dissenting from the left’s mainstream narrative — as a whole.
This is, in no uncertain terms, a hit list — or, at
least, a laughable attempt — and it fits conveniently into the
establishment’s burgeoning war on independent media disguised as a battle against fake news.
When corporate media outlets from the Independent and Business Insider, to the Los Angeles Times and NYMag scrambled
over one another to reprint this irresponsibly contrived hit list, they
proved yet again a lack of journalistic integrity — the same issue that
originally caused regular subscribers to abandon them in the first
place.
Indeed, in this otherwise unknown professor’s foray into the world of
journalism, a glaring mistake was made — the only mainstream outlets
making the list were those who had heralded Bernie Sanders as the best
candidate for the White House.
Such an obvious attempt to control thought could only be conjured in a totalitarian regime.
In fact, failing to place the exact corporate media organizations on
the list, who for nearly a year praised fealty only to Hillary Clinton —
and for decades have foisted on the public countless mendacious
whoppers — constitutes a comedic lack of honesty. So, to bring that
irony front and center, it’s imperative to examine some mainstream lies —
most of which had appalling consequences — including the deaths of
hundreds of thousands of innocent people in the United States and around
the world.
1. George W. Bush’s Weapons of Mass Destruction
President George W. Bush decided to unleash the full force of the
U.S. military upon the world in a new policy of war writ large disguised
as a war on terrorism following the attacks of September 11, 2001.
First arbitrarily designating Afghanistan as its primary victim due to
the supposed identities of the attackers, Bush then chose Iraq to feel
the wrath, and set out to invade the country following dubious claims
Saddam Hussein harbored destructive chemical and biological weapons and
was actively seeking far stronger munitions.
“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no
doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the
most lethal weapons ever devised,” the president asserted in a public address on March 17, 2003.“This regime has already used weapons of mass destruction against Iraq’s neighbors and against Iraq’s people.”
Bush’s assertions were questioned by not only human rights experts, but by U.N. weapons inspectors and countless others — so shortly after the U.S. invaded the sovereign nation, the New York Times took up the slack to fill in the appropriatecasus belli.
Judith Miller notoriously reported
on a source she described only as an Iraqi scientist who had seen
several extensive caches of such weapons stored somewhere in the
country. American weapons experts, she claimed, “said the
scientist told them that President Saddam Hussein’s government had
destroyed some stockpiles of deadly agents as early as the mid-1990’s,
transferred others to Syria, and had recently focused its efforts
instead on research and development projects that are virtually
impervious to detection by international inspectors, and even American
forces on the ground combing through Iraq’s giant weapons plants.”
In hindsight, Miller’s problematic report turned out to be horrendously flawed, and the Times spent months attempting tobacktrack,
but the damage — fomenting widescale public support for a war no one
wanted the military to undertake — had been done. Years later in 2014,
the Times — after much internal strife — again took up Miller’s case, in a series reportingcatastrophic injuries U.S. military personnel suffered in handling chemical weapons in Iraq. But that report, and theparroting of it by multiple other mainstream mainstays, failed to fully disclose Hussein had been oblivious to the stockpiles presence — something the CIA had clearly stated in a report.
2. Gulf of Tonkin Incident
Often, the American mainstream media becomes a de facto government
employee, taking the claims of U.S. officials and reporting them as
proven fact — and nothing exemplifies this penchant better than
reporting on the Gulf of Tonkin incident — perhaps one of most flagrant
lies ever dreamed up as a justification for war.
On August 5, 1964, the New York Times reported “President
Johnson has ordered retaliatory action against gunboats and ‘certain
supporting facilities in North Vietnam’ after renewed attacks against
American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.”Additional outlets, such as the Washington Post, echoed this claim.
But it wasn’t true. At all. In fact, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, as
it became known, turned out to be a fictitious creation courtesy of the government
to escalate war in Vietnam — leading to the deaths of tens of thousands
of U.S. troops and millions of Vietnamese, fomenting the largest
anti-war movement in American history, and tarnishing the reputation of a
nation once considered at least somewhat noble in the eyes of the
world.
In 2010, more than 1,100 transcripts from the Vietnam era were released, proving Congress and officials raised serious doubts
about the information fed to them by the Pentagon and White House. But
while this internal grumbling took place, mainstream media dutifully
reported official statements as if the veracity of the information
couldn’t be disputed.
Tom Wells, author of the exhaustive exposé “The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam,” explained the media egregiously erred in “almost exclusive reliance on U.S. government officials as sources of information” and“reluctance to question official pronouncements on ‘national security issues.’”
If due diligence had been performed, and reporters had raised
appropriate doubts about the Gulf of Tonkin false flag, it’s arguable
whether support for the contentious war would have lasted as long as it
did.
3. Suppression of brutality perpetrated in Bahrain during the Arab Spring
CNN sent reporter Amber Lyon and a crew to U.S. ally
Bahrain for a documentary about technology’s role in the 2011 people’s
uprising known as the Arab Spring, ultimately titled “iRevolution: Online Warriors of the Arab Spring”
— but what they encountered instead bore the hallmarks of a repressive
and violent regime, and its attempt to filter and censor the truth. Lyon
and the other CNN reporters went to great lengths to speak
with sources participating in the massive uprising — one the Bahraini
government wished to quash at all costs.
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