Consortium News this month pays tribute to the life and work of John Pilger, an all-time great journalist who died Dec. 30. Today we republish his essay from April 2019 just after Julian Assange’s arrest.
Silences filled with a consensus of propaganda contaminate almost everything we read, see and hear, warned the late John Pilger last May. War by media is now a key task of so-called mainstream journalism.
There is overwhelming support for Palestinians in Scotland and the fact that U.K. tax money is being spent on committing a genocide should galvanize a further push for independence, writes Craig Murray.
With the stated aim of providing “context,” The Guardian instead has destroyed the historical context that puts Western foreign policy towards the Middle East in a very grim light, writes Joe Lauria.
There can’t be democracy and colonial war; one aspires to decency, the other to fascism. Meanwhile, once welcomed mavericks are heretics now in an underground of journalism amid a landscape of mendacious conformity.
When Western media discusses terrorism against the West, such as 9/11, the motive is almost always left out, even when the terrorists state they are avenging longstanding Western violence in the Muslim world, reports Joe Lauria.
Despite Colin Powell’s presentation and the U.S. media’s embrace of it, every other nation on the Security Council, with the exception of Britain and Spain, was highly skeptical of the U.S. argument for war, including allies Germany and France.
The case to invade Iraq on March 19, 2003 was based on an NIE that was prepared not to determine the truth, but rather to “justify” preemptive war, when there was nothing to preempt.