The Blood Stains on the Corporate Media's Hands . . . .

A fantastic, albeit disheartening, article by award winning British based journalist/war correspondent John Pilger, analyzing the corporate media's role, and lack of accountability, in the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Iraq.

An excerpt:

"Imagine if the lies of governments had been properly challenged and exposed as they secretly prepared to invade Iraq - perhaps a million people would be alive today," says John Pilger.

This is a transcript of John Pilger's contribution to a special edition of  BBC Radio 4's 'Today' program, on January 2, 2014, guest-edited by the artist and musician PJ Harvey.

A recent poll asked people in Britain how many Iraqis had been killed as a result of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The answers they gave were shocking.

A majority said that fewer than 10,000 had been killed. Scientific studies report that up to a million Iraqi men, women and children died in an inferno lit by the British government and its ally in Washington. That's the equivalent of the genocide in Rwanda. And the carnage goes on. Relentlessly.

. . . 

Today liberal democracy is being replaced by a system in which people are accountable to a corporate state and not the other way round, as it should be. In Britain, the parliamentary parties are devoted to the same doctrine of care for the rich and struggle for the poor. This denial of real democracy is an historic shift.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21043-is-the-media-now-just-another-word-for-control


And so it goes that the first line of that article, "Imagine if the lies of governments had been properly challenged and exposed as they secretly prepared to invade Iraq - perhaps a million people would be alive today," is the underlying reason why The Gadfly has lost all faith and trust in the media of this country to provide him with the truth.  Because the fact of the matter is, the corporate, mainstream media had ample time and opportunity to investigate, challenge, and expose Tony Blair's, George Bush's, Dick Cheney's, and Condi Rice's lies which were cynically being shoveled to the American people, and the world for that matter, as their justification for rushing to invade Iraq.  And it goes without saying that they failed miserably in that duty.

We dirty fucking hippies warned our fellow Americans years ago of the danger to democracy of allowing a handful of corporate behemoths to consolidate and control most of the mass media in the country, which by the way, is another one of those wonderful outcomes of the myopic people who are constantly peddling deregulation nirvana, for which The Gadfly says, "thank you you fucking morons for yet another one of your disastrous deregulation schemes that had the predictable outcome of producing the exact opposite results of what you told us it would be."

Anyhow, why should we worry our pretty little minds over a million dead Iraqi civilians right? They're just faceless brown people on the other side of the planet.  Except of course for the not so insignificant reality that some of those million deceased had family members and friends who probably aren't viewing America and Americans in much of a forgiving mood these days, if you catch The Gadfly's drift.



----TFG