In the aftermath of the two great propaganda operations of our era— Iraq WMD claims and the dismissal of pandemic lab origins— the media focus on the lies of bit players to avoid a reckoning.
-by Sam Husseini
Ben Bagdikian, the late author of The Media Monopoly, would talk about how Big Media will sometimes try to gain credibility by going after small time corruption — by exposing a small business that’s cutting corners or the like — while letting the big fish off the hook.
The two most monstrous edifices of lies that enveloped US culture through media platforms in my adult life were:
The claim, which peaked in 2003, that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
The notion that the Covid pandemic, which turned billions of lives upside down, could not have had lab origin.
Both of these had various corollaries and were associated with other Big Lies: that the US government was moral and upholding international law in invading Iraq, that the murderous sanctions in the years prior to the invasion were justifiable and so on. And in the second case, that the actions of various officials and organizations like the WHO were based on honest scientific assessments in pursuit of the public good.
But those were the two cores.
The media and political system has ways of distracting and defending itself. Big Media mouthpieces like Lester Holt continued lauding fraudulent figures like Anthony Fauci as he left office even though the structure of his lies, like planting pivotal stories in the media and then citing them in interviews, was remarkably similar to that of Dick Cheney.
Another way of letting the system off the hook after it lied us into a catastrophe is to focus on falsifications of small time liars as Bagdikian suggested.
It’s become the media obsession du jour that George Santos lied about his resume. By focusing on this, Big Media attempt to paint themselves as upholders of the truth, and by inference, give a measure of credibility, at least relatively speaking, to other lying political figures from Biden on down.
Indeed, in a culture drenched with useless people who are famous for being famous and which operates on lies, it’s almost fitting that someone should become a celebrity for lying.
Santos now is playing a similar role to that of the long forgotten Jayson Blair, pictured above. In May of 2003 Blair resigned from the New York Times following charges of plagiarism and other malfeasance in stories he filed for The Times.
And back then, media was abuzz with what a crooked journalist Blair was. This had the effect of distracting the public mind from methodically scrutinizing the lies around the Iraq invasion, which was completed the prior month.
Focusing on relatively inconsequential lies of petty crooks is one tool of the overall political media system to obscure and distract in desperate attempts to maintain some measure of legitimacy it in no way deserves.
whatever good is in this is totally repudiated by its treatment of Fauci.
I'm frankly surprised you sullied your already dubious column with it.
And the cheney campaign to get dumber than shit americans to support PNAC's invasion of Iraq started with the DOD weaponized american anthrax mailed to media and democraps which was intended to implicate Saddam and Iraq.
The media failed to report that the anthrax was american, weaponized by the dod, and that it could not have originated anywhere else... even as the charade included draining a pond looking for equipment that may have been used to create it.
PNAC's anthrax killed a couple hapless postal workers. Cheney's torture regime killed at least dozens of "combatants", man…