The Russian attack on Ukraine and the Western propaganda systemby Ian SinclairMorning Star14 March 2022 The Russian invasion of Ukraine has confirmed the criminal barbarity of the Russian government and the leadership of its armed forces. On 8 March Filippo Grandi, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said two million people had fled Ukraine since […]
Noticing the way journalists seemed unable to resist commenting on our work, even if it was just to slag us off, Glenn Greenwald tweeted us in 2012: ‘You are really deeper in the heads of the British establishment-serving commentariat than anyone else – congrats.’ ((Greenwald, Twitter, 12 September 2012.)) If that was true then, our relationship […]
Book review. Propaganda Blitz: How the Corporate Media Distort Reality by David Edwards and David Cromwell
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
11 February 2019
Named Collins Dictionary’s Word of the Year in 2017, “Fake News”, along with Russian interference in Western political systems, has become an obsession for the UK and US media and political classes.
Book review. Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis by Laura Basu
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
December 2018-January 2019
This is an essential read for anybody – activists very much included – who wishes to gain a deeper understanding of the 2007–2008 economic crash and its subsequent political after-shocks, from the election of Donald Trump in the US to Brexit and rise of Jeremy Corbyn in the UK.
The propagandistic nature of the liberal media: Interview with Florian Zollmann
by Ian Sinclair
Open Democracy
5 June 2018
Book review: Media, Propaganda and the Politics of Intervention by Florian Zollmann
by Ian Sinclair
Peace News
June-July 2018
‘The biggest immediate single problem we face… is mainstream media reporting’, British historian Mark Curtis recently argued in an Open Democracy interview about UK foreign policy.
Natalie Nougayrède: a victim of the propaganda system she doesn’t think exists
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
22 February 2018
Last month Guardian columnist and leader writer Natalie Nougayrède wrote an op-ed examining propaganda in our supposed age of “lies and distortion”.
Science Officer Spock: “Evil does seek to maintain power by suppressing truth.”
Dr. Bones McCoy: “Or by misleading the innocent.”1
*****Right off the bat, monopoly media commentators attributed the killings of Charlie Hebdo staff to Muslim terrorism.
Noam Chomsky characterizes the Revolutionary War period as engendering the “vicious repression of dissident opinion.” The repressive measures to which Chomsky alludes have become portents of the myriad repressive policies and suppressions of dissidence that bleed out of Revolutionary times and spill well into the present. The late Howard Zinn corroborated Chomsky’s observation with stressing that, only “seven years after the First Amendment became part of the Constitution, Congress passed a law very clearly abridging the freedom of speech” in America—the Sedition Act of 1798.
