Media And Control Of The Narrative

The Horrifying Rise Of Total Mass Media Blackouts On Inconvenient News Stories

Caitlin Johnstone 

Two different media watchdog outlets, Media Lens and Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR), have published articles on the complete blackout in mainstream news institutions on the revelation by Icelandic newspaper Stundin that a US superseding indictment in the case against Julian Assange was based on false testimony from diagnosed sociopath and convicted child molester Sigurdur Thordarson.

FAIR’s Alan MacLeod writes that “as of Friday, July 2, there has been literally zero coverage of it in corporate media; not one word in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, Fox News or NPR.”

“A search online for either ‘Assange’ or ‘Thordarson’ will elicit zero relevant articles from establishment sources, either US or elsewhere in the Anglosphere, even in tech-focused platforms like the Verge, Wired or Gizmodo,” MacLeod adds.

“We have not found a single report by any ‘serious’ UK broadcaster or newspaper,” says the report by Media Lens. “But in a sane world, Stundin’s revelations about a key Assange witness – that Thordarson lied in exchange for immunity from prosecution – would have been headline news everywhere, with extensive media coverage on BBC News at Six and Ten, ITV News, Channel 4 News, front-page stories in the Times, Telegraph, the Guardian and more.”

“For those who still believe the media provides news, please read this,” tweeted Australian journalist John Pilger regarding the Media Lens report. “Having led the persecution of Julian Assange, the ‘free press’ is uniformly silent on sensational news that the case against Assange has collapsed. Shame on my fellow journalists.”

Yet now every WikiLeaks-related story that is inconvenient for the US-centralized empire is carefully kept out of mainstream attention, with a jarring uniformity and consistency we’ve never experienced before. If the media environment of today had existed ten or fifteen years earlier, it’s possible that most people wouldn’t even know who Assange is, much less the important information about the powerful that WikiLeaks has brought to light

Anyone who dared publicize the leaks anywhere near the mainstream liberal echo chamber was bashed into submission by the herd, and without any legitimate reason it was treated like a complete non-story at best and a sinister Russian op at worst. And then, lo and behold, in April of this year Hunter Biden acknowledged that the leaks could very well have come from his laptop after all, and not from some GRU psyop.

Once you’ve accepted that journalists have not just a right but a duty to suppress news that is both factual and newsworthy in order to protect a political agenda, you’re out in open water in terms of blatant propaganda manipulation. And we saw the mainstream press shoved into alignment with this doctrine in the wake of the 2016 election.

Again, this is a new phenomenon. Mainstream media have always been propaganda firms, but they’ve relied on spin, distortion, half-truths, uneven coverage, and uncritically parroted government assertions; there weren’t these complete information barricades across all outlets. You’d see them giving important stories an inadequate amount of coverage, and some individual outlets would neglect inconvenient stories. But you’d always see someone jump at the chance to be the first to report it, if for no other reason than ratings and profit.

That’s simply not how things work now. A major story can come to light and only be covered by media outlets which mainstream partisans will scoff at and dismiss, like RT or Zero Hedge.

The way the mass media have begun simply ignoring major news stories that are inconvenient for the powerful, across not just some but all major news outlets, is extremely disturbing. It means any time there’s an inconvenient revelation, mainstream news institutions will just pretend it doesn’t exist.

Seriously think about what this means for a moment. This is telling whistleblowers and investigative journalists that no matter how hard they work or how much danger they put themselves in to get critical information out to the public, the public will never find out about it, because all mainstream news outlets will unify around blacking it out.

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