Why America Doesn’t Believe its Corporate Media Anymore

Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”    

Column: Society

Region: USA in the World

There’s been a lot of international events lately that have been covered by a wide range of media sources, including TV channels, newspapers and various sites. However, in an effort to attract the attention of a wider audience, some of these media sources start publishing misleading statements, unfounded acussisations or even straightforward propaganda articles, that create a distorted perception of reality among the Western population.

For these reasons, it is sometimes incredibly difficult to tell what is really happening, which prevents both ordinary citizens and politicians alike from getiting the story straight, even though the latter are responsible for taking logical and accurate decisions that would define the lives of a lot of people.

For this reason both Western politicians and citizens started rejecting the US corporate media, which is getting more and more biased by the day, while getting engaged in information campaigns that do only benefit certain political circles of the country.

According to the Gallup Institute, most Americans feel sharp disappointment with their national media, since the number of those who believes in MSM’s ability “to report the news fully, accurately and fairly “has dropped to its lowest level in Gallup polling history.

While it is clear Americans’ trust in the media has been eroding over time, the election campaign may be the reason that it has hit the rock bottom this year. With many Republican leaders and conservative pundits saying Hillary Clinton has received overly positive media attention, while Donald Trump has been receiving unfair or negative attention, this may be the prime reason their relatively low trust in the media has evaporated even more.

A majority of voters believe the media are in the driver’s seat this presidential election and that they define the agenda of this presidential campaign. A total of 74% of US Voters believes that in covering presidential candidates the media is more interested in creating controversies about them than in reporting where they stand on certain issues. Two-out-of-three Americans view political correctness as a threat and say they do not have freedom of speech anymore. It’s been reported that 66% of all Americans still think political correctness is a problem in the US today.

The growing mistrust towards the corporate media is caused by a number of factors, including straightforward lies, attempts to present other states as a US enemy, along with the justification of the short-sighted US policies in the Middle East and Europe.

There’s an illuminating case study because that shows that propaganda can take off on its own and exceed the intentions of its originators. The US establishment is fond of demonising its enemies – in recent times we have seen it happen to Milosevic, Saddam Hussein, bin Laden and many others – but those hate campaigns, once they had whipped up war support, ceased and were forgotten Washington’s current trouble is that it has never tried this technique against someone whom it can not get at, against someone who is not cowed and, worst of all, against someone who outwits it at every juncture. The propagandists have no idea of what to do except turn the volume up higher and higher. So the rhetoric builds and builds, more and more extreme, larger and larger until it bursts into full-blown psychosis and panic.

It’s been noted, that Putin is already the Moriarty, the Voldemort of the US propaganda machine: the hidden power behind everything bad. We were told that Putin had the very same uncanny influence over Donald Trump; in other words, he has such a grip on the American election that Hillary Clinton is the only truly American candidate left the second theme was the extraordinary ability of RT and other Russian media outlets to shape people’s thoughts, far exceeding the effects of the much (much) better funded Western outlets. Moreover, it seems that Putin has the power to cloud minds at a distance, he operates at a more than merely human status and he’s using that power to reshape the world.

By refusing to evaluate American politicians by the standards they apply to foreign leaders, instead they are happy to serve as a mouthpiece of Washington. By blindly obeying the instructions of the White House, Western journalists create the image of an enemy and rally the public in the face of the nonexistent confrontation, which allows the US government to get away with its numerous crimes.

   

http://journal-neo.org/2016/09/30/why-america-doesnt-believe-its-corporate-media-anymore/