{"id":283698,"date":"2016-12-10T09:42:37","date_gmt":"2016-12-10T08:42:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=283698"},"modified":"2016-12-10T09:43:22","modified_gmt":"2016-12-10T08:43:22","slug":"u-s-newsmedia-proven-cannot-trusted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/u-s-newsmedia-proven-cannot-trusted\/","title":{"rendered":"How The U.S. ‘News’Media Has Proven It Cannot Be Trusted"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The great metascientist and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb headlined on November 22nd a devastating takedown of U.S. \u2018news\u2019media and academia,\u00a0\u201cSyria and the Statistics of War\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and he began it by exposing the highly honored Harvard fraud, Dr. Steven Pinker, but then went pretty much through the entire U.S. \u2018intellectual\u2019 Establishment, including all of its major \u2018news\u2019 media, as being untrustworthy on the part of any intelligent person. (Regarding Professor Pinker specifically, Taleb linked to\u00a0this scientific paper that Taleb had co-authored<\/span><\/a>, which shredded one of Pinker\u2019s highly honored and biggest-selling books. Taleb and his colleague mentioned there\u00a0an article that had appeared in Britain\u2019s Guardian<\/i> raising serious questions about Pinker\u2019s work<\/span><\/a>, and they were here offering statistical proof of the fraudulence of that work.)<\/span><\/p>\n

The scenario of exposing intellectual fraud is so common: the only reason why it\u2019s not better known among the public is that usually the disproofs of highly honored work have no impact, and fail to dislodge the prejudices that the given established fraud has \u2018confirmed\u2019. Another good example of that occurred when the University of Massachusetts graduate student\u00a0Thomas Herndon<\/span><\/a>\u00a0issued his\u00a0proof of the fraudulence<\/span><\/a>\u00a0of the extremely influential economics paper by Kenneth Rogoff and Carmine Rinehart, \u201cGrowth in a Time of Debt\u201d, which had been\u00a0widely cited by congressional Republicans and other conservatives as a main \u2018justification\u2019 for imposing Draconian economic\u00a0austerity on the U.S. and other nations during the recovery from the 2008 economic crash. Years later, that graduate student is still a graduate student (i.e., unemployed), while\u00a0Kenneth Rogoff<\/span><\/a>\u00a0remains, as he was prior to his having been exposed: one of Harvard\u2019s most prominent professors of economics, and a member of the Group of 30<\/span><\/a> \u2014 the world\u2019s 30 most influential and powerful economists.\u00a0Carmen Rinehart<\/span><\/a>\u00a0likewise retains her position also as a Harvard Professor. Previously, the Harvard Economics Department had guided communist Russia into a crony-capitalist (or fascist)\u00a0 <\/span>\u2018democracy\u2019<\/span><\/a>, but then Vladimir Putin took over Russia and got rid of the worst excesses of Harvard\u2019s \u201ccapitalism\u201d<\/span><\/a> and so became hated by the U.S. aristocracy and its \u2018news\u2019 media<\/span><\/a> \u2014 hated for having tried to establish Russia\u2019s national independence, Russia\u2019s independence from the U.S. aristocracy (which expected, and still craves, to control Russia<\/span><\/a>). And now after Donald Trump\u2019s victory against the super-neoconservative hater of Russia, Hillary Clinton,\u00a0the U.S. Establishment, through its voices such as the Washington Post<\/i>, is trying to smear \u2014 like Joseph R. McCarthy smeared America\u2019s non-fascists back in the 1950s \u2014 the tiny independent newsmedia<\/span><\/a>\u00a0that had been reporting truthfully about U.S.-Russian relations and\u00a0America\u2019s coups and invasions trying to weaken and<\/span><\/a>\u00a0ultimately\u00a0to conquer Russia<\/span><\/a>\u00a0even\u00a0if that means nuclear war<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Similarly, when George W. Bush and his stenographic national \u2018news\u2019media pumped\u00a0Bush\u2019s lies about \u2018Saddam\u2019s WMD\u2019 in 2002<\/span><\/a>, and were assisted in that by such scholars as\u00a0the Brookings Institution\u2019s Kenneth Pollock and Michael O\u2019Hanlon<\/span><\/a>, there was no accountability: Bush was re-elected and all of\u00a0the corrupt scholars kept their jobs and continued to be retained as \u2018experts\u2019 by CNN and other U.S. \u2019news\u2019 media to comment upon foreign affairs<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 and CNN and The New York Times<\/i> and other leading \u2019news\u2019media weren\u2019t cancelled by an American public who had had enough of being lied-to; Americans wanted to be lied-to more.\u00a0The public distrust the \u2018news\u2019 media more than ever<\/span><\/a>, but do they distrust it enough to quit subscribing to them? No.<\/span><\/p>\n

The U.S. public have apparently been responding to the election or selection of Donald Trump as the next President, by soaring numbers of subscriptions to the major U.S. \u2019news\u2019media, presumably because this is somehow \u2018justified\u2019 on account of (as all of those \u2019news\u2019media \u2018verified\u2019) Trump was lying even more\u00a0than Hillary<\/span><\/a>\u00a0\u2014 more than\u00a0the lying<\/span><\/a>\u00a0by the candidate whom all of the media-moguls had wanted to become President. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the immediate wake of the election, there have been\u00a0all-time-record-high numbers of new subscriptions to The New York Times<\/i>, Wall Street Journal<\/i>, and to \u2018non-profit\u2019 \u2018news\u2019media such as Pro-Publica, and to NPR member-stations<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0CNN reported that<\/span><\/a>, “The New York Times has added 41,000 paid subscriptions across its print and digital\u00a0platforms in the week since the presidential election, representing the largest subscription\u00a0increase since it introduced its pay-wall in 2011.\u201d Then, on November 29th, CNBC headlined \u201cNew York Times subscription growth soars tenfold, adding 132,000, after Trump’s win\u201d<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

During an earlier era, the U.S. public responded similarly to the \u2018news\u2019 media that had lied the U.S. into World War I (a conflict where the rights and wrongs were far less clear than was to be the case regarding WW II, but where the Wall Street banks were vastly more invested in Britain than in Germany and so Wall Street\u2019s position on the matter was far more unified then in favor of Britain, and so the U.S. \u2018news\u2019media\u2019s position likewise was<\/span><\/a>). Americans at that time did not lapse their subscriptions to the propaganda media that had lied their country into war. America\u2019s \u2018news\u2019media used similar tactics to get us into WW I to help Britain\u2019s aristocrats, as they used to help U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush\u2019s regime in 1990 to invade Iraq to help Kuwait\u2019s aristocrats (the Sabah family)<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, America\u2019s \u2018news\u2019 media don\u2019t all lie in the same direction. For example, when the Republican George W. Bush was in the White House, the most deluded of all the major-media audiences was that of the Republican Party\u2019s Fox News Channel, which audience gave the highest percentages of false answers<\/span><\/a> (they\u2019d been lied-to the most), because Republican \u2018news\u2019 operations were then spouting Republican propaganda about a Republican President \u2014 stenographically pumping out Republican propaganda as \u2018news\u2019. But when the Democrat Barack Obama was in the White House, the Democratic Party\u2019s \u2018news\u2019 media were lying at least as much as Fox<\/span><\/a> and other Republican media were lying when the President had been a Republican. None of the major American \u2018news\u2019 media, either mainstream or \u2018alt news\u2019, can be at all trusted by an intelligent reader, listener, or viewer. A person needs to go instead to the types of news-sites such as publish articles like the current one \u2014 and none of these sites has a very large audience. (Most of them ended up on this list<\/span><\/a> of sites the U.S. aristocracy wants banned.) But, above all, nobody should trust any \u2018news\u2019 report without spot-checking its linked sources; and, if the main sources aren\u2019t linked, then an intelligent reader won\u2019t trust the article at all. The only way intelligently to trust any news-report is to spot-check its sources and evaluate their credibility on one\u2019s own; and any \u2018news\u2019 report which makes that difficult to do should simply be distrusted \u2014 and this includes especially newspapers, magazines, television, radio, and other such \u2018news\u2019 media, because they rely upon audiences who have no easy means of verifying or else disproving what they\u2019re alleging. (Only online newsmedia that link to their sources are worthy of being even considered.) All of the best news-sources are thus small-to-medium-sized online-only ones \u2014 and those happen to be the ones that the aristocracy (the billionaires and centi-millionaires) haven\u2019t yet taken control of.<\/span><\/p>\n

When Win\/Gallup International polled 67,806 respondents from 65 countries, they found that, by far and with no close second<\/span><\/a>, the \u201cUS is considered to be the greatest threat to peace in the world\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and so the question naturally arises of whether that\u2019s because foreigners are being lied-to by their press, or instead because Americans are being lied-to by ours. Almost no U.S. \u2018news\u2019media reported that finding, at the time, but this is what people around the world were believing, regardless of whether or not Americans were informed that they believed it. The global public knows that the U.S. is the invasion-and-coup champion of the world, and that the vast majority of the injuries and deaths that those invasions and coups cause are in the countries that are America\u2019s victims; far fewer Americans are destroyed in these invasions and coups. But America\u2019s \u2018news\u2019media present our country\u2019s participation as if our government\u2019s intention had been \u2018humanitarian\u2019 or in America\u2019s self-defense. Delusions prevail. It\u2019s not because America is a democracy; it\u2019s because\u00a0America isn\u2019t<\/i> a democracy<\/span><\/a>. Americans are constantly being lied-to \u2014 and democracy cannot exist in such a country as that. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at strategic-culture.org The great metascientist and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb headlined on November 22nd a devastating takedown of U.S. \u2018news\u2019media and academia,\u00a0\u201cSyria and the Statistics of War\u201d, and he began it by exposing the highly honored Harvard fraud, Dr. Steven Pinker, but then went pretty much through the entire U.S. \u2018intellectual\u2019 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":261042,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-283698","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/261042"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}