It’s recently been reported that two-out-of-three Americans view political correctness as a threat and say they don’t have freedom of speech anymore. This was the conclusion that Rasmussen Reports came to after making a poll on the state of press freedom in the US.
In his collumn for The American Conservative a notorious author and ideologist of the paleoconservatism, Patrickk J. Buchanan would note that allies, like the Brits, and America’s own leaders mislead and lie to the US population, leading the country into unnecessary wars, while meddling in the internal affairs, including the elections, of regimes that the US doesn’t like, pretty much the job description of the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy.
Buchanan notes that history suggests it is America’s own War Party that bears watching. Consider Operation Iraqi Freedom. Who misled, deceived, and lied about Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, the “fake news” that sucked the US into one of the country’s greatest strategic blunders? Who lied for years about an Iranian nuclear weapons program, which almost dragged the US into a war, before all 16 US intelligence agencies debunked that propaganda in 2007 and 2011? Yet, there are those who insist that Iran has a secret nuclear weapons program, since they crave for war with Iran.
The same American Conservative believes that the more there’s US meddling in other regions of the world, the less attention is being paid to those facts by the US media sources.
In fact, President Obama has spent eight years talking about withdrawing the United States from the Middle East but has in fact expanded the military footprint of the United States. He has done so without much real debate in the mainstream news about the wisdom of his actions. Tellingly, what debate has occurred has focused on erroneous claims that Obama has appeased America’s enemies by withdrawing too much.
This distorted coverage resulted in the White House expanding the US military presence in the Middle East for two years in a row, without being subjected to scrutiny or critisim of any sort. In spite of the fact that the US is expanding its operations in Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Libya, those are rarely being mentioned in the US press. There’s a chart that tracks the monthly mentions of the president, the US military, and specific countries in the same story in three major national papers (the Post, the Times, and the Journal), and they have all been dropping over the last two years despite increased US involvement in all four places in the same period.
One should note that these numbers are stories per month, so in a given month this year US military involvement in Syria might be mentioned once every ten days. The even smaller number for Yemen is the least surprising of the four.
According to Amber Lyon, a three-time Emmy award winning journalist, CNN is routinely paid by the US government and foreign governments to selectively report on certain events and make up fake news stories. Furthermore, the Obama administration pay CNN for editorial control over some of their content.
Unfortunately ,this is where we are today with the state of press freedom in the West. The only freedom we have now, is the freedom of the White House to exercise all sorts of control over what we watch and read on the daily basis.
Grete Mautner is an indepenent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
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