We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Wednesday, January 21, 2015

PBS-TV’s Frontline Misrepresents Russia’s Vladimir Putin

Click here to access article by Eric Zuesse from RINF Alternative News. 

I watched the first part of this program and was shocked by the blatant Empire propaganda that the program used to attack Putin. In the past I have been impressed by the quality of Frontline's investigative reporting, but it seems that this program also has come under the direct control of Empire directors. If Joseph Goebbels were alive today, I'm sure he would be envious of this and many other propaganda efforts of the Empire that we are subject to today.  

I had my first experience with this type of propaganda when I witnessed the gross distortion of facts spewed by corporate media shortly after the Cuban Revolution in 1959. I had a fair awareness of US-Cuban history from a friend I had in the Army from which I had just been discharged. During my Army service I had befriended a former Cuban citizen who had immigrated to the US with his parents earlier in the decade. From him I learned how Cuba had been used and abused as a whorehouse and a mafia-controlled gambling paradise, US corporate domination of the Cuban economy, and the record of US interventions in the government of Cuba to insure that it served US interests. Subsequently this awareness of corporate propaganda was further reinforced by my experiences in the Civil Rights Movement and anti-Vietnam War movement

However the decline in anything like objective reporting has astonished me since 9/11, and it seems that this deterioration is accelerating. Just when I think things couldn't get any worse, news reporting gets worse. Just this morning I witnessed CBS News using a former CIA director as a source of information on Yemen. Upon viewing this last program, Goebbels would be reminded of his use of former SS officers giving news reports over German radio about how German troops liberated France.

I'm sure that Putin is no paragon of virtue, but Zuesse points to many outright lies that were presented as facts in this program.