Social media platforms are aggressively censoring challenges to the dominant narrative on Ukraine, the ruling Democratic Party, the wars in the Middle East and the corporate state.
“Enough Said,” original illustration by Mr. Fish.
By Chris Hedges
ScheerPost.com
The ruling class, made up of the traditional elites that run the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, is employing draconian forms of censorship on its right-wing and left-wing critics in a desperate effort to cling to power.
The traditional elites were discredited for pushing through a series of corporate assaults on workers, from deindustrialization to trade deals. They were unable to stem rising inflation, the looming economic crisis and the ecological emergency.
They were incapable of carrying out significant social and political reform to ameliorate widespread suffering and refused to accept responsibility for two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East.
And now they have launched a new and sophisticated McCarthyism. Character assassination. Algorithms. Shadow banning. De-platforming.
Censorship is the last resort of desperate and unpopular regimes. It magically appears to make a crisis go away. It comforts the powerful with the narrative they want to hear, one fed back to them by courtiers in the media, government agencies, think tanks and academia. The problem of Donald Trump is solved by censoring Donald Trump. The problem of left-wing critics, such as myself, is solved by censoring us. The result is a world of make-believe.
“A new and sophisticated McCarthyism. Character assassination. Algorithms. Shadow banning. De-platforming.”
YouTube disappeared six years of my RT show, “On Contact,” although not one episode dealt with Russia. It is not a secret as to why my show vanished. It gave a voice to writers and dissidents, including Noam Chomsky and Cornel West, as well as activists from Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter, third parties and the prison abolitionist movement. It called out the Democratic Party for its subservience to corporate power. It excoriated the crimes of the apartheid state of Israel. It covered Julian Assange in numerous episodes. It gave a voice to military critics, many of them combat veterans, who condemned US war crimes.
It no longer matters how prominent you are or how big a following you have. If you challenge power, you are at risk of being censored. Former British MP George Galloway detailed a similar experience during an April 15 panel organized by Consortium News in which I took part:
“I have been threatened with travel restrictions were I to continue the television broadcast I had been doing for almost an entire decade. I have been stamped by the false label ‘Russian State Media,’ which I never had, by the way, when I was presenting a show on Russian state media. It was only given after I ceased to have a show on Russian state media, ceased because the government made it a crime for me to do so.”
My 417,000 Twitter followers had been gaining a thousand a day, going like a runaway train, then suddenly it hit the buffers when the Elon Musk story emerged. I expressed the view that oligarch that he no doubt is, I prefer Elon Musk to the kings of Saudi Arabia, who it turns out are presently major shareholders in the Twitter company. As soon as I joined that fight, my numbers literally crashed to a halt, with shadow bans and all the rest of it…
All of this is happening before the consequences of the economic crash brought about by Western policy and our misnamed leaders has really hit yet. When economies begin to not just slow down, not just hiccup, not just experience levels of inflation not seen for years, or decades, but becomes a crash, as well it might, there will be even more for the state to suppress, especially any alternative analysis as to how we got here and what we must do to get out of it.
Scott Ritter, a former UN weapons inspector in Iraq and Marine Corp intelligence officer, called out the lie about weapons of mass destruction prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Recently, he was banned from Twitter for offering a counter narrative about dozens of killings in the Kyiv western suburb of Bucha. Many of the victims in Bucha were found with gunshot wounds to the head and with their hands tied behind their back. International observers and eyewitnesses have blamed Russia for the killings. Ritter’s alternative analysis, right or wrong, saw him silenced.
Ritter lamented the Twitter ban at the forum:
“It took me three years to get 4,000 followers on Twitter. I thought that was a big deal. Then this Ukraine thing comes up. It exploded. When I got suspended for the first time for questioning the narrative in Bucha my account had just gotten over 14,000. By the time my suspension was lifted I was up to 60,000. By the time they suspended me again I was close to 100,000. It was out of control, which is why I am convinced the algorithm said: You must delete. You must delete. And they did. The excuse they gave was absurd. I was abusive and I was harassing by telling what I thought was the truth.
I don’t have the same insight in the Ukraine I had in Iraq. Iraq, I was on the ground doing the job. But the techniques of observation and evaluation that you are trained as an intelligence officer to apply to any given set apply to Ukraine today. Simply looking at the available data set, you cannot help but draw the conclusion that it was Ukrainian national police, mainly because you have all the elements. You have motive. They don’t like Russian collaborators. How do I know? They said so on their website. You have the commander of the national police ordering his people to shoot people in Bucha on the day in question. You have the evidence. The dead bodies on the street with white armbands carrying Russian food packets. Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Could there be data out there I am not aware of? Absolutely. But it is not there. As an intelligence officer I take the available data. I access the available data. I provide assessments based on that available data. And Twitter found that objectionable.”
Two pivotal incidents contributed to this censorship. The first was the publication of classified documents by Julian Assange and WikiLeaks. The second was the presidential election of Donald Trump. The ruling class was unprepared. The exposure of their war crimes, corruption, callous indifference to the plight of those they ruled and extreme concentration of wealth shredded their credibility. The election of Trump, which they did not expect, made them afraid they would be supplanted. The Republican Party establishment and the Democratic Party establishment joined forces to demand greater and greater censorship from social media.
Jill Stein.
Even marginal critics suddenly became dangerous. They had to be silenced. Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party presidential candidate in 2016, lost about half her social media following after mysteriously going offline for 12 hours during the campaign. The discredited Steele dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, charged Stein, along with Trump, with being a Russian asset. The Senate Intelligence Committee spent three years investigating Stein, issuing five different reports before exonerating her.
Stein spoke of the threat to freedom of speech during the forum:
“We are in an incredibly perilous moment. It’s not only freedom of the press and freedom of speech, but it is really democracy in all its dimensions that is under threat. There are all these draconian laws now against protest. There are 36 that have been passed that are as bad as a 10-year prison sentence for demonstrating on a sidewalk without a permit. They differ state by state. You need to know the laws in your state if you protest. Drivers have been given license to kill you if you are out in the street in some states as part of a protest.”
The first indication that we were not only being marginalized – one accepts that if you defy established power and practice independent journalism, you will be marginalized – but censored came in November 2016.
The Washington Post building. (Wikimedia Commons/ Daniel X. O’Neil)
Craig Timberg, a technology reporter for The Washington Post, published a story headlined “Russian propaganda effort helped spread ‘fake news’ during election, experts say.”
It referred to some 200 websites, including Truthdig where I wrote a weekly column, as “routine peddlers of Russian propaganda.”
Unnamed analysts, described as “a collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds” from the anonymous “organization” PropOrNot, made the charges in the story. PropOrNot’s report drew up “the list” of 200 offending sites that included WikiLeaks, Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Naked Capitalism, Counterpunch, AntiWar.com, LewRockwell.com, ConsortiumNews and the Ron Paul Institute.
All these sites, they said, either wittingly or unwittingly functioned as Russian assets. No evidence was offered for the charges, since of course there was none. The only common denominator was that all were critics of the Democratic Party leadership.
When we challenged the story, PropOrNot tweeted out:
“Awww, wook at all the angwy Putinists, trying to change the subject – they’re so vewwy angwy!!”
We were blacklisted by anonymous trolls who sent out Twitter messages, later deleted, that sounded as if they were written by a gamer living in his parent’s basement.
Timberg did not contact any of us beforehand. He and the paper refused to reveal the identity of those behind PropOrNot. I taught at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. If one of my students had turned in Timberg’s story as a class assignment, he or she would have failed.
The established elites desperately needed a narrative to explain the defeat of Hillary Clinton and their own growing unpopularity. Russia fit. Fake news stories, they said, had been planted by Russians in social media to elect Trump. All critics, on the left and the right, became Russian Assets. Then the fun began.
The outliers many of us find repugnant began to disappear. In 2018, Facebook, Apple, YouTube and Spotify deleted the podcasts, pages and channels of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his Infowars website from their platforms. The precedent was set. Once they could do it to Jones, they could do it to anyone.
“The outliers many of us find repugnant began to disappear.”
Twitter, Google, Facebook and Youtube used the charge of foreign influence to start employing algorithms and shadow banning to silence critics. Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal Al Saud, chair of the Kingdom Holding Company, which dismissed Elon Musk’s recent offer to buy the social media platform, has a large stake in Twitter. It is hard to find a more despotic regime than Saudi Arabia, or one more hostile to the press, but I digress.
Sites that once attracted tens or hundreds of thousands of followers suddenly saw their numbers nosedive. Google’s “Project Owl,” designed to eradicate “fake news,” employed “algorithmic updates to surface more authoritative content” and downgrade “offensive” material.
Traffic fell for sites such as Alternet by 63 percent, Democracy Now by 36 percent, Common Dreams by 37 percent, Truthout by 25 percent, The Intercept by 19 percent, and Counterpunch by 21 percent. The World Socialist Web site saw its traffic fall by two-thirds. Julian Assange and WikiLeaks were all but erased. Mother Jones editors in 2019 wrote that they suffereda sharp decline in its Facebook audience, which translated to an estimated loss of $600,000 over 18 months.
(Geralt via Wikimedia Commons)
The IT people at Truthdig, where I had a weekly column at the time, found that impressions – specific words such as “imperialism” typed into Google that bring up recent stories including mine – now did not include my stories. Referrals to the site from impressions for my stories fell from over 700,000 to below 200,000 in a 12-month period.
But pushing us to the sidelines was not enough, especially with Democrats’ looming loss of Congress in the midterm elections and Joe Biden’s abysmal poll numbers. Now we must be erased. Dozens of lesser-known sites, writers and videographers are disappearing. Facebook, for example, removed a “No Unite The Right 2-DC” event connected to a page called “Resisters,” appearing to advertise a counter-rally on the anniversary of the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia. Paul Jay, who runs a site calledThe Analysis, ran a video essay on Feb. 7, 2021 called, “A Failed Coup Inside a Failed Coup.” YouTube banned the piece, saying it was “content that advances false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S presidential election is not allowed on YouTube.”
Tulsi Gabbard, after posting on March 13 that the U.S. funded bio labs in Ukraine and blaming the Russian invasion of Ukraine on Biden’s foreign policy, said she was shadowbanned on Twitter.
The “Russians with Attitude” podcast account was suspended on Twitter. It covered the information war in Ukraine and “cried foul” on the Ghost of Kiev. Social media platforms have been especially harsh on those questioning Covid policy, blocking websites and forcing users, social media platforms, or online outlets to delete posts.
These sites make billions of dollars by selling our personal information to corporations, advertising agencies and political public relations firms. They know everything about us. We know nothing about them. They cater to our proclivities, fears, habits and prejudices. And they will silence our voices if we do not conform.
Censorship will not halt America’s march towards Christian fascism. Weimar Germany attempted to thwart Nazi fascism by enforcing rigorous hate-speech laws.
In the 1920s, it banned the Nazi party. Nazi leaders, including Joseph Goebbels, were prosecuted for hate speech. Julius Streicher, who ran the virulently anti-Semetic tabloid The Stormer (Der Stürmer), was fired from his teaching post, repeatedly fined and had his newspapers confiscated. He was taken to court numerous times for libel and served a series of jail sentences.
Donald Trump speaking to supporters at the “Save America” rally in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021. (Voice of America, Wikimedia Commons)
But like those serving sentences for the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, or like Trump, the persecution of Nazi leaders only enhanced their stature the longer the German ruling class failed to address the economic and social misery.
There are many similarities to the 1930s, including the power of predatory international banks to consolidate wealth into the hands of a few oligarchs and impose punishing austerity measures on the global working class.
“More than anything else, the Nazis were a nationalist protest movement against globalization,” notes Benjamin Carter Hett in The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and The Downfall of the Weimar Republic.
Shutting down critics in a decayed and corrupt society is equivalent to turning off the oxygen on a seriously ill patient. It hastens mortality rather than delaying or preventing it. The convergence of a looming economic crisis, fear by a bankrupt ruling class that they will soon be banished from power, the growing ecological catastrophe and the inability to thwart self-destructive military adventurism against Russia and China, have set the stage for an American implosion.
Those of us who see it coming, and who desperately seek to prevent it, have become the enemy.
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. He previously worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News, The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.
Author’s Note to Readers: There is now no way left for me to continue to write a weekly column for ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show without your help. The walls are closing in, with startling rapidity, on independent journalism, with the elites, including the Democratic Party elites, clamoring for more and more censorship. Bob Scheer, who runs ScheerPost on a shoestring budget, and I will not waiver in our commitment to independent and honest journalism, and we will never put ScheerPost behind a paywall, charge a subscription for it, sell your data or accept advertising. Please, if you can, sign up at chrishedges.substack.com so I can continue to post my Monday column on ScheerPost and produce my weekly television show, The Chris Hedges Report.
This column is from Scheerpost, for which Chris Hedges writes a regular column. Click here to sign up for email alerts.
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
I did a google search my query, “Congressional testimony by head of CrowdStrike “, one of the possible selections offered was Shawn Henry – Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Which I selected.
hxxps://www.dni.gov/files/HPSCI_Transcripts/2020-05-04-Shawn_Henry-MTR_Redacted.pdf
Titled, Interview of Shaw Henry , Tuesday, December 5, 2017, consists of 80 short double spaced pages with only a handful of redactions concealing sensitive names evidently.
Did not take long to read and is worth the effort for at least a couple of reasons. The lines of questioning, which seemed a little anemic to me given the nature of the topic and the responses from Henry, who seemed plenty concerned not to cross FBI.
Most interesting is that the HPSCI decided to conduct an unclassified hearing on a matter that had been under intense scrutiny by many. Many times Mr. Henry sighted security concerns saying politely he couldn’t answer the question a,b, or c because of the unclassified nature of the hearing.
IMHO committee members allowed themselves to under perform by not being able to press for more specific answers. Everyone involved glossed over the issues critics had revealed about the forensics of the issues involved.
It reads like a white wash and I believe it was. Especially in light of the events since, this seems to be a story everyone in congress would like to see go away.
Bottom line Mr. Henry states that his experts, some of them , say other experts are wrong, but still no forensic evidence to defend his statement. According to Henry testimony the data was staged but no proof exists that it ever left the DNC server. His opinion based on circumstantial evidence, weakly explained during the hearing but no real proof or technical argument to defend his position. And no mention of anything being in the interest National security.
So why no classified hearing? This is simply another sad tale of government not doing it’s job.
Read the damned report and determine if you think it passed a litmus test for due diligence by this committee.
Thanks CN
Thanks for another great Hedges article. While the focus is on what gets censored out of print or broadcast, there is also the censorship involved in items/events/news that never sees the light of day, and so sets the stage, so to speak. Here’s an example: while Ray McGovern (disclosure: my brother), Bill Binney (former technical director of the NSA) and fellow VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals For Sanity) pretty much proved through forensics, to say nothing of plain logic, way back in 2017, that there was no hack by the Russians of Hillary’s or the DNC’s emails, the final proof that that was so was the sworn Congressional testimony by the head of Crowdstrike, the computer company the FBI used to discover what happened, that there was NO hack at all – not by the Ruskies, not by anyone. That testimony was kept out of the public for 3 years, but when made public more than a year ago, it was met with silence by The Times, WAPO and the rest of the MSM. So, an American public still in the dark about that, can more easily be led to believe more dark propaganda about Russia.
As the Washington Post says on ever online page, “Democracy dies in darkness” and America is getting close to blacked out, WAPO included.
Actually, as one of the primary shades on the light, WaPo is an agent of darkness.
Thank you, Chris Hedges! I’ve followed your work over the years and admire you more than ever. How sad that you are being cut off from speaking publicly, which is what is happening to you from so-called liberals, who control the internet, t.v. outlets, newspapers. May somehow, someway your voice through your writings and interviews come back to many more. Wishing you courage on the journey.
Chris Hedges is the best of the best….But I don’t understand why it is so costly to sign up for chrishedges.substack.com….Can anyone enlighten me?
I don’t have lots of $, yet even I can afford to kick in $6.00 a month. It’s well worth it to me for what he brings.
They wouldn’t have gotten away with it if the ruling class hadn’t created the conditions for them to exploit. History is repeating itself.
According to the media, both the corrupt corporate media and the censored social media, one is always left with the idea that authoritarian governance is a right wing creation. Ironically, or perhaps, calling a spade a spade, hypocritically, it is the no-wings, all-wings, Deep State tool Democratic Party that seeks to deprive us of freedom of speech, freedom of beliefs and freedom of action, all encompassed within the concept of liberty. It then, sets people to fighting and dying all over the world (excluding them and their families of course), purportedly in defense of, you guessed it, liberty. Not that the GOP is angelic, it’s just not as hypocritical. The Clintons crystalized the concept of loudly accusing everyone else of what it was they, in fact, were doing, under the guise that a good offense (or being really offensive) is the best defense, a concept artfully polished by the Obamas and unartfully bludgeoned by the Bidens, all with the massive assistance of the cautery of sycophantic faux journalist and Hollywood “celebrities” who trail in their wake, apparently considering that it renders them woke. The foregoing seems an excellent article on point.
I was just barred from Facebook from live a postings or advertisements for 30 days for violation of community standards dealing with posting this article with the commentary reflected above. I disagreed and asked for review, and upon review, the post was reinstated, I assume, my restrictions were lifted. It kind of makes the articles point, with an exclamation.
FB banned me for a week for posting a picture of Benito Mussolini with the quote “Fascism is the merger of corporate & political power.”
Guess it hit too close to home ;<)
Authoritarian governance is a right wing creation; it is not a contradiction that it is a creation of the Democratic Party. Liberalism, and its American Democratic Party brand is in no way of the left.
The idea that it is, is a relatively new thing.
Quote from the article: “More than anything else, the Nazis were a nationalist protest movement against globalization,” notes Benjamin Carter Hett in The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and The Downfall of the Weimar Republic. End quote
Correction: More than anything else, the Nazis were a movement glorifying violence, militarism, fascistic macho manliness (that which Tucker Carlson has recently pushed), Germanic racial superiority, virulent anti-Semitism and the desire to conquer the world at any cost.
They wouldn’t have gotten away with it if the ruling class hadn’t created the conditions for them to exploit. History is repeating itself.
Wrong. He was referring to the *beginnings* of the Nazis, not where they ultimately ended up.
You did not understand what the author was getting at. Violence, militarism, manliness are not ends to themselves; they are reactions to perceived loss of national character, chaos, and undemocratic governance (oligarchy).
That we are now approaching such conditions and perceptions (loss of trust, chaos, unrepresentative government) by a very significant part of OUR population, as partly represented by the most popular TV news program (Tucker) and most popular podcasts is a blinking red ight on our civilization.
The Dem Party and MSM/Online Media attempt to just block all this out is not going to work: people’s eyes were opened too much by the 2008 economic crisis and the Trump years’ nonsense. Violence et al are some of the natural responses to all this.
Social media as a concept holds a lot of promise. Social media for profit is a nightmare that may end liberal democracy. Social media, like the invention of the printing press, is a disruptive technology. So was the invention of gunpowder and dynamite. But the people using it are just as banal they were before. The technology does not make them wiser. The effect is like giving dynamite to children to play with. Solely because there is such a profit to be made, social media is deemed as “good.” Now we have government by Twitter. Twenty or so years ago, that would have been considered a bad joke. Now, it signifies the end of the democratic social/governmental paradigm and social contract. What follows is in question. Unfortunately, social media has overwhelmingly exacerbated human banality. That tells you everything, and is all that really matters.
we are losing the freedom of speech and to question the propaganda by our corporate leaders. we can not spread the truth that becomes a traitor!
“Read no more odes my son, read timetables:
they’re brief and to the point. Roll out the sea charts
before it’s too late. Be watchful, do not sing,
for once again the day is clearly coming
when they will brand refusers on the chest
and nail up lists of names on people’s doors.
Learn how to go unknown, learn more than me:
To change your face, your documents, your country.
Become adept at every petty treason,
The sly escape each day and any season.
For lighting fires encyclicals are good:
And the defenseless can always put to use,
As butter wrappers, party manifestos,
Anger and persistence will be required
To blow into the lungs of power the dust
Choking, insidious, ground out by those who,
Storing experience, stay scrupulous: by you.”
– Hans Magnus Enzensberger
Thank you for this essay, and for pointing out the role of Google in the shadow censorship of alternative perspectives. Most people are generally aware that Google has algorithms for placing some websites higher in a search (and other sites correspondingly lower). But most of us probably don’t consider that Google (the most-used search engine) can ‘passively’ censor any website by adjusting its algorithms to put that website near the bottom of a search. That website is then effectively ‘buried’, yet it has not been overtly banned. It’s there, you just can’t find it (or have to go to a lot of trouble to find it).
Google started out as a smarter search engine. I still don’t understand why Yahoo didn’t buy it early on, when the two originators approached Yahoo and offered to sell it. Unfortunately, Google has been (IMHO) the prime mover in commercializing the Internet, and what was once a lovely interconnected network and a fun place to seek basic information is now a vast strip mall of gaudy commercial signs and tacky shops, extending to the horizon.
I use DuckDuckGo most of the time, which doesn’t track me as much as Google, but I still have to wade through all the commercial advertising, which really took off when Google came online. Oh well, not much chance of putting that genie back into the bottle, but it should be possible to organize a neutral search engine for open access to political news from around the world.
Thanks again to Consortium News for being here!
Dear Chris, The elites of Weimar manoeuvred the Nazis into a coalition government in 1933 after murdering the Weimar republic in 1930. The respectable fascists turned to the Nazis to thwart a return to the democracy that they had extinguished. The German electorate always denied the elites and their parties a majority in every free election and even refused to back the Nazis in the half-bent one of March 1933.
I wanted to listen to some of Andrea Bocelli on Easter, and he was on TBN with Joel Osteen from Lakewood church, quoting Matthew 6, “but seek first his kingdom..” and it was a bizarre thing, he said that we should not be afraid of the future at all, and not be afraid of dying, or our last breath with a big toothy grin. It’s like people are looking to these religious charlatans to find comfort and make some sense out of the chaos and the walls closing in. And the ruling elites and Christian fascists don’t want us to think critically, we should just take it and not complain and just let it all happen. It dovetails with the censors, we are supposed to trust them to only present us with happy, positive narratives, and they will filter out any of the bad stuff and then all will be well again.. The oxygen has been cut off now, we’re down to our last gasps of life.
Well, you convinced me.
If anyone has any difficulty accessing/interpreting the content of any of the following articles, Google Translate (or other alternative online translation resources) and/or the resources I outline in this article (andeanist.wordpress.com/2021/11/19/digital-decontextualization-archival-practice-in-the-internet-era) are your friends.
“The fact that the first network to buy the rights to the show was the Russian one, ‘RT’, the Kremlin propaganda network, sparked virulent controversy against WikiLeaks. ‘The World Tomorrow’ is produced by a small company of young British filmmakers, Quickroll Productions [a partner of Journeyman Pictures, and co-produced with Dartmouth Films – see IMDb listing]; Russian television is one of the networks that bought the show, as did ‘l’Espresso’ for Italy.”
Source:
Stefania Maurizi, “Lo show di Assange su L’Espresso” [“Assange’s show on L’Espresso”], L’Espresso, April 23, 2012
—
“Three years after he left CNN, Larry King will be back on the TV dial in more than 100 countries.
The former CNN host’s weekly political talkshow, ‘Politicking with Larry King,’ will be carried worldwide by RT, a network funded by the Russian government. RT cut an expanded distribution deal with Ora TV, backed by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, which produces both ‘Politicking’ and general-interest talker ‘Larry King Now,’ both of which are available on Hulu and Ora.tv.”
Source:
Todd Spangler, “Larry King Politics Show Gets Global TV Distribution via Russian-Backed Network,” Variety, July 28, 2013
—
“Key programmes such as Mr. Galloway’s Sputnik chat show and the eponymous Keiser Report are provided by Global Media Services, a commercial production arm of the major American news organisation Associated Press.”
Source:
Dominic Kennedy and Tom Parfitt, “Kremlin Television Station Has Its British Bank Accounts Closed,” The Times (London), October 17, 2016
The Old Left has a problem. The ideals of the past Gay Lesbian, Black Equality Womens Rights have been cleverly co-opted by our rulers, so they become the new establishment tools. So now the Left wants to go to war with Putin because he does not support LGBTQ+ rights.
Take a cue from Tulsi Gabbard, Glenn Greenwald and Tucker Carlson by discarding notions of Left and focus on bridging the divide with Americans. As odious as the Right is to to Old Left, you are far more likely to get an audience with them than the New Left.
And the latest slur is to call anyone who doesn’t agree with woke a right-winger or a Nazi. Pretty darn funny coming from people who support Nazism. Feminists howl with laughter when the wokerati say that we’re being funded by right-wing Christians, people who would never give a nickel to support radical feminism.
It is morbidly fascinating that, e.g., George Galloway’s “Sputnik” and Julian Assange’s “The World Tomorrow” (and WikiLeaks by extension), are written off as “Russian state-affiliated media” in the minds of the powers-that-be and a seemingly growing number of emotionally-manipulated people (“Larry King Now” and “Politicking” almost certainly would have been to an even greater extent as well post-February 2022, had the eponymous host not had the arguably good fortune to die when he did).
Such critics leave out or are unaware that by doing so, they have effectively declared the British independent documentary production company Dartmouth Films, Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim Helú’s Ora TV, and even the Associated Press (AP) themselves are somehow Russian media, since those were the companies that actually produced those shows, only licensed to air on RT as one broadcaster among several.
“The fact that the first network to buy the rights to the show was the Russian one, ‘RT’, the Kremlin propaganda network, sparked virulent controversy against WikiLeaks. ‘The World Tomorrow’ is produced by a small company of young British filmmakers, Quickroll Productions [a partner of Journeyman Pictures, and co-produced with Dartmouth Films – see IMDb listing]; Russian television is one of the networks that bought the show, as did ‘l’Espresso’ for Italy.”
Source:
Stefania Maurizi, “Lo show di Assange su L’Espresso” [“Assange’s show on L’Espresso”], L’Espresso, April 23, 2012
—
“Three years after he left CNN, Larry King will be back on the TV dial in more than 100 countries.
The former CNN host’s weekly political talkshow, ‘Politicking with Larry King,’ will be carried worldwide by RT, a network funded by the Russian government. RT cut an expanded distribution deal with Ora TV, backed by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim Helú, which produces both ‘Politicking’ and general-interest talker ‘Larry King Now,’ both of which are available on Hulu and Ora.tv.”
Source:
Todd Spangler, “Larry King Politics Show Gets Global TV Distribution via Russian-Backed Network,” Variety, July 28, 2013
—
“Key programmes such as Mr. Galloway’s Sputnik chat show and the eponymous Keiser Report are provided by Global Media Services, a commercial production arm of the major American news organisation Associated Press.”
Source:
Dominic Kennedy and Tom Parfitt, “Kremlin Television Station Has Its British Bank Accounts Closed,” The Times (London), October 17, 2016