Today, Greenwald and the Guardian went for the jugular of the New York Times (here) and Washington Post (here), showing that they have openly lied about the Edward Snowden affair and accusing them of being mouthpieces of the US Government. Whilst this might be seen as journalistic sniping, in my humble opinion, Greenwald and the Guardian are playing it exactly right, because as well as making the public aware of how corrupt their governments are, the public also need to be made aware of how in bed with this corruption the mainstream media are; ie, you cannot trust the mainstream media to tell you what’s really going on in this crazy fucked-up world. This is a truly terrifying situation, because the public are now unable to make informed decisions about the ‘democracy’ they live in, because they are not being informed.
I keep linking to the Guardian in these posts because they are one of the few large English language media organisations who are giving the NSA scandal full coverage. Another one is RT (Russia Today), which despite being a mouthpiece of the Putin government does report real news (you can find their rolling coverage of the NSA scandal here). As for the latest on Edward Snowden, he’s still holed-up in the transit zone of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport. On Monday it appeared as though both Venezuela and Nicaragua have granted political asylum to Snowden (here). Also on Monday the Guardian published the second part of its exclusive interview with Edward Snowden, conducted by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong last month. This second part is interesting because Snowden touches on the role of corporations and the media in all this…
You can find the first part of the Snowden interview here.
Last month I made a post about Russell Tice, who was one of the first NSA whistleblowers (here). As predicted, Tice has now been swooped upon by the likes of RT. Tice says some explosive things about the NSA and corruption, yet I’m including his RT interview here more because of what he says is the media’s role in it all…
Lastly, also this week we had some grim humour in all this: NSA staff were at the University of Wisconsin on a recruitment drive, and the students gave them a very hard time (amongst other things the recruiters were asked if being a good liar is a qualification for getting a job at the NSA). The student who asked most of the questions is called Madiha, and she recorded the exchanges and posted them on the internet. The recording is funny, as NSA recruiters squirm, but it also shows that despite the huge media propaganda machine, many Americans can still see straight. If the NSA scandal does not eventually bring down the US Government, America, and the rest of the world, has had it.