More on Greenwald’s CNN Schooling Session
December 29th, 2010 § 4 Comments
Following up on his debate/schooling session with Fran Townsend on CNN yesterday Glenn Greenwald writes:
Over the last month, I’ve done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable — identical — are the political figures and the journalists. There’s just no difference in how they think, what their values and priorities are, how completely they’ve ingested and how eagerly they recite the same anti-WikiLeaks, “Assange = Saddam” script. So absolute is the WikiLeaks-is-Evil bipartisan orthodoxy among the Beltway political and media class (forever cemented by the joint Biden/McConnell decree that Assange is a “high-tech Terrorist,”) that you’re viewed as being from another planet if you don’t spout it. It’s the equivalent of questioning Saddam’s WMD stockpile in early 2003.
As one PULSE commenter notes, CNN deserves credit for bringing Greenwald on at all. This is because CNN operates in an environment where Fox News is actually considered a legitimate news source (by some).
To compare coverage, consider that on December 27 Fox host Eric Bolling accused Bradley Manning of being a “liberal hero” and demonized the “Left” (which includes everyone that disagrees with Rupert Murdoch) for trying to bring attention to the inhumane treatment of Manning. At no point was Greenwald’s name mentioned on the Fox segment even though Greenwald is presumably the source of the alleged liberalization of Manning due to his excellent reporting on his case. Guest Jed Babbin who served with the first Bush Administration and was at one point called a political commentator also stated that Manning is being kept in solitary confinement for his own protection. Bolling and Nicole Deborde, a lawyer who is supposed to represent the other side of the argument, quickly agree.
Right, so credit to CNN for bringing Greenwald on. Much more so if they do it more often.
Manning is a saint. His conscience was disturbed by the carnage & murder of Iraqis & Afghanis and so he did what he could to make this info available, be/c the public has the right & duty to know what our gov. is doing.
Bradley Manning is being tortured. They don’t give all the details ‘solitary’ confinement included Manning never being able to get a night’s sleep. The soldiers woke him every 5 min. to ask if he were ok, if he were sleeping they woke him & they were under orders to keep at it until they got a verbal response.
Every 5 minutes for 23 out of 24 hours a day. To me this is sadistic torture is designed to break his sanity.
We are all social beings, even those of us who rarely leave home be/c of age, infirmities & so on, at least can have a dog or cat for company.
Has Manning even been officially charged with anything?
As an Australian, I have difficulty in seeing Assange as Saddam. While I personally think Assange has some slightly strange characterics, many of the people who have achieved great things in the world have been quite “unique”. Governments keep promising “transparency” – now we see how transparent they are not. I have to say the USA diplomats assessment of our last Prime Minister were interesting!
Noam Chomsky wrote the manual on the US Media propaganda model/machine. One of the techniques used by the corporate electronic hallucination is hidden or assumed premises. In the Greenwald CNN video, at the 1:29 mark, Greenwald say “Well, I would contest the premise of your question”. Here, Greenwald makes a perfect Chomskyite reaction. It is for this reason that Chomsky is no longer on the media and it is for this reason that Greenwald will soon join him.
There are a couple of other tricks used by the corporate media hologram. One is no-context. For the media, history started this morning. At the fall of the Berlin Wall Francis Fukuyama declared it to be the end of history, and that the neoliberal economic model was the sole victor. Maggie Thatcher declared that now there was no alternative to this rapacious laissez faire, supply side, trickle down, Reaganism. Now, thirty years later laissez faire lies in world wide trillion dollar bankruptcy, with the trillions provided by Keynesian public money and the only result for that public is inescapable debt peonage. The only countries moving successfully forward are the countries that have rejected this model. Too bad Chou En-lai wasn’t around to comment on Fukuyama’s and Thatcher’s inanities. Toward the end of Chou En-lai’s life a reporter ask him what he thought about the French Revolution, to which he replied, “Too soon to tell”
Another one is passive voice. For the media, “things just magically happen”. There is no personal agency. Well, s@#t doesn’t just happen, somebody did it. It is at this point that the media starts laughing and proclaims you to be a conspiracy freak. You’re god-damn right it’s a conspiracy, its’ a criminal conspiracy. And we’re going to get out the RICO act, hire a New York DA like Eliot Spitzer, start naming names and start frog marching these political and corporate mafiosos off to prison
That’s one of the great things about Wikileaks. There is no passive voice in Wikileaks, and the wikileaks dump is at a very low level intelligence classification. Can you imagine what a top secret and above top secret dump would look like. Well, I can.
“Over the last month, I’ve done many television and radio segments about WikiLeaks and what always strikes me is how indistinguishable — identical — are the political figures and the journalists.”
They get their marching orders from the same source – zionism, inc.