Alternative media
Nowhere does one read.. a condemnation of the five-year torture and pursuit of [alternative media] journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange ... holed up in the London embassy of Ecuador. ... His real crime, and the thing the US wants ... him ... for, is publishing leaked Pentagon documents and videotapes proving a policy in the Iraq war of massive and deliberate war crimes.... ~Dave Lindorff
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent... ~George Orwell in 1984
In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population.... chronic shortage of half the necessities... is deliberate policy to keep even the favored groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. ~George Orwell in 1984
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A general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges... War... not only accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world... by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society... In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. ~George Orwell in 1984
Corporate media.. fails to firmly support and defend the whistleblowers who often are critically important in bringing urgent stories of government and corporate wrongdoing to light. ~Dave Lindorff
Alternative media is media that expresses the views of a significant but often ignored segment of the population (the poor, minorities, labor groups, activists) that tend to challenge & question views promoted by the corporate mainstream media (establishment).
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QuotesEdit
Arranged chronologically
- The real purpose of state secrecy is to enable governments to establish their own self-interested and often mendacious version of the truth by the careful selection of “facts” to be passed on to the public. They feel enraged by any revelation of what they really know, or by any alternative source of information. Such threats to their control of the news agenda must be suppressed where possible and, where not, those responsible must be pursued and punished.
Revealing important information about the Yemen war – in which at least 70,000 people have been killed – is the reason why the US government is persecuting both Assange and Zikry.- Patrick Cockburn, Why the US is Persecuting Assange? CounterPunch (4 June 2019)
- I want to visit Julian to see he is receiving medical care and to let him know that there are many people around the world who admire him and are grateful for his courage in trying to stop the wars and end the suffering of others... Thursday 11th April, will go down in history as a dark day for the Rights of humanity, when Julian Assange, a brave and good man, was arrested, by British Metropolitan Police, forcibly removed without prior warning, in a style befitting of a war criminal, from the Ecuadorian Embassy, and bundled into a Police Van...
I visited Julian on two occasions in the Ecuadorian Embassy and was very impressed with this courageous and highly intelligent man. The first visit was on my return from Kabul, where young Afghan teenage boys, insisted on writing a letter with the request I carry it to Julian Assange, to thank him, for publishing on Wikileaks, the truth about the war in Afghanistan and to help stop their homeland being bombed by planes and drones. All had a story of brothers or friends killed by drones while collecting wood in winter on the mountains.
- I nominated Julian Assange on the 8th January 2019 for the Nobel Peace Prize. I issued a press release hoping to bring attention to his nomination, which seemed to have been widely ignored, by Western media. By Julian’s courageous actions and others like him, we could see full well the atrocities of war. The release of the files brought to our doors the atrocities our governments carried out through media. It is my strong belief that this is the true essence of an activist and it is my great shame I live in an era where people like Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and anyone willing to open our eyes to the atrocities of war, is likely to be hunted like an animal by governments, punished and silenced.
Therefore, I believe that the British government should oppose the extradition of Assange as it sets a dangerous precedent for journalists, whistleblowers and other sources of truth the US may wish to pressure in the future. This man is paying a high price to end war and for peace and nonviolence and we should all remember that.”
- WikiLeaks has achieved far more than what The New York Times and The Washington Post in their celebrated incarnations did. No newspaper has come close to matching the secrets and lies of power that Assange and Snowden have disclosed. That both men are fugitives is indicative of the retreat of liberal democracies from principles of freedom and justice. Why is WikiLeaks a landmark in journalism? Because its revelations have told us, with 100 per cent accuracy, how and why much of the world is divided and run.
- John Pilger quoted in New Cold War & looming threats, Frontline, India (21 December 2018)
- Facebook has erased numerous alternative media pages that had millions of likes as the corporate social media giant cracks down on numerous pages and accounts. Twitter also apparently coordinated with Facebook and suspended some of the same accounts behind these alternative media pages. In just one day, Facebook removed 559 pages and 251 accounts in one fell swoop. Among the pages targeted in this mass purge were popular websites such as Anti-Media and The Free Thought Project, which had roughly three million likes.
- Pages that monitored police brutality were also purged, including the page Cop Block and also Police the Police. Several antiwar pages were taken down as well, along with libertarian pages and left wing pages like Reasonable People Unite. Many of the personal Facebook accounts used by people who were admins for those pages were also removed. Facebook announced this purge in a blog post on its website on October 11. Facebook ambiguously accused the pages and accounts of “coordinated inauthentic behavior” and claimed the reason they were removed was based on behavior, not their content, supposedly.
- We’ve talked about this before on previous interviews, Ben, and we talked about VenezuelAnalysis being momentarily removed. There just seemed to be this arbitrary criteria and sites that were targeted tended to be the kind of sites that were challenging the Washington Consensus on foreign policy particularly. You mentioned the Atlantic Council. They are funded by NATO as well as Saudi Arabia, a bunch of Gulf States, arms manufacturers. They exist in Washington to really reinforce the consensus around permanent war.... we can deduce from what’s happened since Donald Trump was elected, was there was a hysteria about Hillary Clinton’s loss. She personally blamed fake news and what she called Russian active measures for her defeat. There’s been a campaign to prove that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to subvert the election and to basically win by illegitimate means....So, this is really the equivalent of taking a bone saw to alternative media, and we don’t know who’s going to get hit next. But it’s really disturbing...
- Some 300 newspapers, large and small, joined today in publishing... editorials defending the First Amendment’s freedom of the press... their own efforts to combat current threats to that freedom posed by President Trump’s attacks on journalists and the entire Fourth Estate, which Trump routinely denounces in tweets and at rallies as “enemies of the people.”
- However, missing from most of these full-throated editorials is any real defense of those who are in the trenches doing the hardest job of a free press, which is exposing the worst offenses of government: the war crimes, the craven systemic corruption of the political system, and the purveying of propaganda and disinformation in the furtherance of anti-democratic policies. (A good example would be the employment by most major news organizations of retired generals and colonels as war commentators without noting their roles on corporate boards of arms merchants that profit form war — a scandal that not one major news organization will expose.)
- Dave Lindorff in Mainstream Media Hypocrisy on Display, Counterpunch (17 August 2018)
- Nowhere does one read.. a condemnation of the five-year torture and pursuit of [alternative media] journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been holed up in the London embassy of Ecuador. ... His real crime, and the thing the US wants ... him ... for, is publishing leaked Pentagon documents and videotapes proving a policy in the Iraq war of massive and deliberate war crimes ... Press freedom is under serious attack these days, certainly by President Trump, but also by a corporate media itself that supports a censored internet and a two-tiered access to high-speed internet — both of which measures threaten alternative news media — and that fail to firmly support and defend the whistleblowers who often are critically important in bringing urgent stories of government and corporate wrongdoing to light.
- Dave Lindorff in Mainstream Media Hypocrisy on Display, Counterpunch (17 August 2018)
- If there is a threat to national and global security today, and a threat to free speech and independent media, it is not coming from Putin or the Kremlin – but rather from the United States. And until the American left gathers itself and stops listening to the warmongering pundits and establishment journalists parroting the Washington narrative, we have nothing but a bleak future in front of us with regards to the relation between the two old nemesis nuclear superpowers.
- Jonathan Sigrist in Russiagate and the Neo McCarthyite War on Alternative Media and Political Dissent, Global Research, (28 February 2018)
- I think that it makes a mockery of free speech in the United States. We go around lecturing the world about how they need to have freedom of the press and freedom of speech and yet here we are cracking down on free speech. ... the objective of doing this to RT news is not to block information from going to Russian citizens, it is to block the truth from reaching the American public in the United States ...
- Many Americans who have come to rely on RT News as the most valid, truthful broadcast medium in the United States ... CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC... are just a bunch of people screaming back and forth... Most of it is just propaganda... extremist opinion...
- You listen to RT news and they present very accurate information that is verifiable when you go and you and you actually research it... RT news ... has been a source of accurate information about NATO's provocations; their military provocations and their aggressive actions towards Russia in Europe. ... too many Americans have been saying you know what, what we're seeing on RT news seems to be much more factual than what we're seeing on CNN and some of these other broadcast media sources... millions of Americans have come to rely on RT news.
- U.S. Virginia State Senator Dick Black in Senator Richard Black talks to RT Int (14 November 2017)
- Orwell's 1984 explained that "the special function of certain Newspeak words … was not so much to express meanings as to destroy them." During the week after U.S. missiles hit sites in Sudan and Afghanistan, some Americans seemed uncomfortable. A vocal minority even voiced opposition. But approval was routine among those who had learned a few easy Orwellian lessons... At all times, Americans must be kept fully informed about who to hate and fear... When terrorists attack, they’re terrorizing. When we attack, we’re retaliating. When they respond to our retaliation with further attacks, they’re terrorizing again... No matter how many times they’ve lied in the past, U.S. officials are credible in the present. When they... [say] the bombed pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum was making ingredients for nerve gas, that should be good enough for us.... Might doesn’t make right — except in the real world, when it’s American might. Only someone of dubious political orientation would split hairs about international law.
- Norman Solomon in Orwellian Logic 101 — A Few Simple Lessons, FAIR (27 August 1998)
