Matt Taibbi is right on target...just a few decades behind.
It's time to pull our heads out from under our earphones, put down our
cup of Brute and smell the gun powder. Long before the term "Fake
News" came to be, there existed a world of Make Believe/Let's Pretend
that was passed off on the American People as "Reporting the News".
From the beginning of the exploitation of this "New World", a Landed
Gentry, made up of landed, white, prosperous men, directed the news to
suit their dreams of power and wealth.
Currently, in my humble opinion, the control of the nation is in a tug
of war between the Mega Corporations(the present day Oligarchy)and the
Pentagon(War Czars).
And without listening to history, and with short gain profits as their
goal, the American Oligarchy is following the pattern established from
the beginning of recorded history.
Emboldened by the ease with which the Corporate Capitalists confuse
and control the minds of the Masses, even they fall under the magic
piping of their Pied Pipers and reach incredible heights in their use
of Miss Information.
While some reporters reach back to the events in Europe back in the
Thirties, leading up to the Second World War, to illustrate just how
foolish the Greed driven Masters build their fortunes and then loose
control to their very own military protectors, you have only to open
your front door or tune on your favorite FOX news channel if you want
to know how it works.
Look at our "Most Powerful Leader", Donald Trump. Look at the way he
treats the people working for him. Watch how he treats Information.
Donald Trump is no accident, he is the visible face of America today.
In Donald Trump is the universal image seen by the world, representing
all of us.
For some time I have suggested that the United States of America has
undergone a quiet coup by the Pentagon. Yes, the Oligarchy is still
in control of the Mass Media, but we should ask ourselves just who it
is that controls the weapons. The American Oligarchy has built the
world's most monstrous military might to protect it, But just like
Aladdin's Genie, promising untold fortunes until released from the
Lamp, control quickly changes hands.
Carl Jarvis: wondering if it was Aladdin's Lantern or Pandora's Box?
On 9/6/19, Miriam Vieni <
miriamvieni@optonline.net> wrote:
> The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?
> By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
> 05 September 19
>
> The Pentagon is using a moral panic over "fake news" to gain influence over
> the domestic news landscape
>
> If there's a worse idea than the Pentagon becoming Editor-in-Chief of
> America, I can't remember it. But we're getting there:
>
> From Bloomberg over Labor Day weekend:
>
> Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that
> the
> Defense Department is launching a project to repel "large-scale, automated
> disinformation attacks," as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts
> to
> protect the integrity of elections.
>
> One of the Pentagon's most secretive agencies, the Defense Advanced
> Research
> Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing "custom software that can unearth
> fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio
> clips."
>
> Once upon a time, when progressives still reflexively distrusted the
> military, DARPA was a liberal punchline, known for helping invent the
> Internet but also for developing lunatic privacy-invading projects like
> LifeLog, a program to "gather in a single place just about everything an
> individual says, sees, or does."
>
> DARPA now is developing a semantic analysis program called "SemaFor" and an
> image analysis program called "MediFor," ostensibly designed to prevent the
> use of fake images or text. The idea would be to develop these technologies
> to help private Internet providers sift through content.
>
> It's the latest in a string of stories about new methods of control over
> information flow that should, but for some reason do not, horrify every
> working journalist.
>
> From the Senate dragging Internet providers to the Hill to demand
> strategies
> against the sowing of "discord," to tales of hundreds of Facebook sites
> zapped for "coordinated inauthentic behavior" following advice by
> government-connected groups like the Atlantic Council, it's been clear the
> future of the information landscape is going to involve elaborate new forms
> of algorithmic regulation.
>
> Stories about the need for such technologies are always couched as
> responses
> to the "fake news" problem. Unfortunately, "fake news" is a poorly-defined,
> amorphous concept that the public has been trained to fear without really
> understanding.
>
> The term surged into public view three years ago. Experts insisted
> Macedonian troll farms and pranksters like the late Paul Horner (who once
> conned Fox News into doing a story that Barack Obama was funding a Muslim
> culture museum) had an enormous impact on Trump's victory.
>
> Had they? When "fake news" first became "a thing," as media critic Adam
> Johnson put it in The Nation three years ago, I was skeptical.
>
> Fake news has a long history in America. Its most pernicious incarnation is
> never the work of small-time scam artists. The worst "fake news" almost
> always involves broad-scale deceptions foisted on the public by official
> (and often unnamed) sources, in conjunction with oligopolistic media
> companies, usually in service of rallying the public behind a dubious
> policy
> objective like a war or authoritarian crackdown.
>
> From the sinking of the Maine in 1898, to rumors of a union-led socialist
> insurrection before the Palmer raids in 1919, to the Missile Gap in the
> late
> fifties and early sixties (here is the CIA's own website admitting that one
> was "erroneous"), to the Gulf of Tonkin lie that launched the Vietnam War,
> to the more recent WMD fiasco, true "fake news" is a concerted, organized,
> institutional phenomenon that involves deceptions cooked up at the highest
> levels.
>
> The other "fake news" - the dubious panic over which began in
> November-December of 2016 - is a strange, hybrid concept that mixes fear of
> fever-swamp conservative lunacies with satire, Russian propaganda,
> legitimate dissent, and other content.
>
> The most infamous example usually cited is Pizzagate, in which Hillary
> Clinton and campaign chief John Podesta were falsely said to be running a
> pedophile ring out of the basement of a Washington pizza restaurant. The
> hoax carried import because a 28 year-old North Carolinian named Edgar
> Maddison Welch was idiot enough to shoot up the joint in response.
>
> But the other specific examples cited of "fake" news most often cited are
> patently absurd: that the Pope or the Amish endorsed Donald Trump, that
> Hillary Clinton sold weapons to ISIS, that an FBI agent investigating
> Clinton had died in a house fire (a story broken by the nonexistent "Denver
> Guardian"), that the Democrats paid protesters to heckle Trump events, etc.
>
> The idea that these fake tales had a major impact in 2016 is absurd on its
> face. They didn't change things any more than ALIEN BACKS CLINTON swayed
> the
> 1992 election.
>
> It was laughable beyond belief to see stories in outlets like the New York
> Times and the Washington Post taking seriously the notion that small-time
> hoaxers like Horner - who was trying to sucker Trump fans to websites so he
> could make maybe ten grand a month off click ads - were a major threat to
> national security. (That some cited Horner's own claim of responsibility
> for
> Trump's election was even more preposterous).
>
> When officials calling for a crackdown talk about "fake news," you'll often
> see them conflating examples of provably false stories with true stories
> circulated or interpreted in undesirable ways: the Clinton email scandal,
> the Uranium One story, the Podesta email leak, etc.
>
> Even a controversy about Hillary Clinton's health, cited by Ohio State
> University researchers as an example of the pernicious impact of fake news,
> was an amalgam of true and fake.
>
> There was indeed wild speculation on the Internet and by goons like Sean
> Hannity about Clinton suffering from seizures or dementia. This was mixed
> in
> with real events like a 2012 collapse that caused a concussion, the
> subsequent discovery of a blood clot in Clinton's brain (ABCnews.com called
> it "life threatening" in a headline), and Clinton's September, 2016
> collapse
> at a 9/11 memorial event.
>
> The New York Times, CNN, CBS, the Washington Post and other reputable
> outlets covered the latter episode in great detail. As Vox noted at the
> time, this turned an online conspiracy theory into a "mainstream debate."
>
> If there's a fake news story out there, it's the fake news panic itself. It
> has the hallmarks of an old-school, WMD-style propaganda campaign.
>
> It includes terrifying pronouncements by unnamed "intelligence officials,"
> unprovable, overblown, or outright fake statistical assertions about the
> threat (like the oft-cited claim that fake election news had more
> engagement
> than real news), open conflation of legitimate domestic dissent with
> foreign
> attack, and routine dismissal of experts downplaying the problem (here are
> two significant studies suggesting the "fake news" phenomenon is
> overstated).
>
> Of course, the final, omnipresent ingredient in most major propaganda
> campaigns is the authoritarian solution. Here, it's unelected, unsupervised
> algorithmic control over media. We've never had a true news regulator in
> this country, yet the public is being conditioned now to accept one,
> without
> thinking of the consequences.
>
> The most enormous issue posed by the modern media landscape is the
> industry's incredible concentration, which allows a handful of private
> platforms - Facebook, Twitter, Google - to dominate media distribution.
>
> This makes it possible to envisage direct levers of control over the
> public's media habits that never existed back when people got much of their
> news from local paper chains with individual distribution networks. We've
> already seen scary examples of misidentified foreign subversion, from the
> Washington Post's repeat editorials denouncing Bernie Sanders as a useful
> idiot for the Kremlin to the zapping of hundreds of domestic political
> sites
> as "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
>
> What if the same people who can't tell the difference between Truthdig and
> Pravda get to help design the new fake news algorithms? That's a much
> bigger
> worry than the next Paul Horner or even, frankly, the next Russian Facebook
> campaign. While Donald Trump is in the White House, progressives won't
> grasp
> how scary all of this is, but bet on it: In a few years, we'll all wish we
> paid more attention when the Pentagon announced it wanted in on the news
> regulation business.
>
>
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