From Roxanne, I saw this story about the 10th anniversary of the “Dark Alliance” series that ran in the San Jose Mercury News. Reporter Gary Webb, in a three part story, established the reality of a link between the CIA and crack dealers in South Los Angeles in 80s. According to Nick Schou, the temper tantrum that the mainstream media threw after having this reporter for a tiny newspaper break one of the biggest stories of the decade was ugly. They tried every trick in the book to undermine Webb’s story and undermine the outcry that followed it, even resorting to lies and racist accusations in order to discredit the story.
All three major U.S. dailies, The Times included, debunked a claim that Webb actually never made — that the CIA deliberately unleashed the crack epidemic on black America. The controversy over this non-assertion obscured Webb’s substantive points about the CIA knowingly doing business south of the border with Nicaraguans involved in the drug trade up north.
The Washington Post titled one of its stories “Conspiracy Theories Can Often Ring True; History Feeds Blacks’ Mistrust.” The New York Times chipped in with a scathing critique of Webb’s entire career, suggesting that he was a reckless reporter prone to getting his facts wrong.
“That article included virtually none of the good things Gary did,” said Webb’s former Cleveland Plain Dealer colleague, Walt Bogdanich, now a New York Times editor. “It didn’t include the success he achieved or the wrongs he righted — and they were considerable. It wasn’t fair, and it made him out to be a freak.”
Some of the accusations flung at Webb were true, including the likelihood that he exaggerated the influence of CIA on the sale of crack in Los Angeles. But the fundamental truth of the story was not discredited, and especially infuriating is the way that the story was discredited in the bigger newspapers by running racist stories implying that black people are especially paranoid and therefore as a group cannot be trusted.
Nowadays, the first thing that comes to mind is “right wing bloggers” when I think about people who refuse to see the forest because they’re so busy running around pretending they’re discrediting trees. (For more on this subject, please read new superhero Fixateur D. Perspective explain to a bunch of schoolchildren that darkened smoke in a picture does not un-bomb Beirut and the word “later” does not make Iraqi civilians less murdered, amongst other things.) But the mainstream media can pull this stunt, too, albeit for a different reason. With the wingnuts, it’s an attempt to discredit anyone and everyone that makes Dear Leader look less than perfect. With the media, in this case at least, it’s trying to shut down anyone that makes them look bad.
When Roxanne sent this to me, she said that this whole situation was what made her really lose her trust in the major media. I can definitely say the way the media sat on and ignored the CIA/Contra tie to the crack epidemic was a biggie with me, as well. So the question of the day is: What made the scales fall from your eyes? When did you start to lose your trust in the mainstream media?
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I always had my suspicions about the media, but it was reading Noam Chomsky that really convinced me. I read him when I was 19 and fairly apolitical so I’m not sure what I would have thought otherwise, since the whole time I’ve been political I had that kind of framework. However, even before I knew anything about the issues, I just new that cable news was utter bullshit just by the idiotic commentators.
The Iraqi War. I was 16, a sophomore in high school, and I could see that no one was challenging the Bush claims.
I’ve always been skeptical, but I started just assuming that they were lying during the 2000 Presidential campaign. Between the smears on Al Gore and the total failure to report what a moronic fuck Bush was (and remains), I just stopped believing them.
Iran-Contra was the one for me. I still cannot understand why the folks who were involved in it are some of the same folks who are involved in “Operation Iraqi Liberation”…oops, that is “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. But when failure and misdeeds get you promotions and awards, I guess succeess is not the goal. And with the national media parroting whatever the administration proclaims, instead of investigating those claims, we have the setup of the duplicious leading the blind.
When Nixon died. It was the first time he wasn’t portrayed as an unremitting evil, and all of a sudden it was “China this” and “Kruschev that”. Somehow it was impolite to point out that he’d lied to the nation and shamed his office.
When Ronald Reagan became president and all the media began gushing about the era of “Gunnie Sax dresses and moccasins” being over, and the era of formal wear, shoulder pads, and big gas-guzzling limos being back “in.” There was a line in some paper (the WaPo?) about all the Volvos with “Save the Whales” bumper stickers heading out of DC, and big expensive cars pouring in.
Overnight, everything I had been taught was important — civil rights, women’s rights, health care, the environment — hell, even caring about other people (witness Reagan’s record on cutting funding for institutions for the mentally ill — was now a bad joke (silly liberals! with their beards and hairy armpits!), and we could all get back to living a life of greed and excess, thank goodness.
going to the US air force academy blew the game wide open for me.
i came in a happy go lucky little white fascists from the ‘burbs and came out red (Red red, pre-2000 red, not “Republican Red”).
seeing how stupid - more specifically - jingoistic, racist, sexist, homophobic - so many other cadets were put to rest the myth of the service academies gathering the “best of the best.” more ironically, it was one Capt. Corvisino, an officer who taught military history, who really smacked sense into me. Mouthing the platitudes of American exceptionalism, i asked him what it was about “the American solider” that made Him so special. Looking keen to smack me silly, Capt. told me to wonder about what made “the Vietnamese” or “the Afghanistani” soldier special. Deconstructing the imagery some decade before Saving Pvt. Ryan, he told me to “get the gauzy American flag out of my fucking eyes,” and instead look more honestly at US military history. What followed was discussion of the struggle between “different anti-fascisms” in the years leading up to WW2. This too was prescient, considering our latest ‘Islam(e)ofascist’ craze. Thanks Capt. C. Oh, and ditto on Noam Chomsky for a more detailed exposure of US Imperialist aims throughout southeast Asia.
For me it was seeing the same Administration defenders on the same Sunday Morning political shows saying the same things every week. And knowing that the things they were saying were lies. And knowing that they knew the things they were saying were lies while they said them…
I have to say, that Condi Rice holds a special place in this process because the things she said (and I’m sure still say - I don’t watch those shows anymore…) were so incredibly irreconcilable with reality.
She would say these bogus things, week after week, and all the news drones would treat her like she carried the word of god, instead of throwing into her face the blatant untruthfulness that was obvious to anyone with a brain and access to the Internet…
Disgusting…!
In case it matters, the San Jose Mercury News is hardly a “tiny” newspaper. (San Jose has a bigger population than San Francisco or Oakland, and back in the early to mid 90s the Merc was the Bay Area paper to get — Pulitzer Prize winning and all that.)
For me, it was when someone (probably back in the late ’70s) decided that the news ought to be entertaining rather than informative. People screaming talking points at each other at the top of their lungs isn’t news, it’s cock-fighting.
I think that Washington lobbyists and the 24-hour news networks killed America off back in the early or mid-’80s, and what we’re going through now is just an extended death rattle.
In 1998, the Cincinnati Enquirer published a huge set of stories detailing Chiquita’s despicable business practices in South America. It was later retracted with great fanfare — a huge apology on the front page and $10 million to Chiquita — because the reporter got some of the information from unauthorized voice mail access. While I realize that could be illegal, I couldn’t get over the fact that the story was still true.
I don’t understand why anyone would assume that a major institution - part of the ruling apparatus of any society - wouldn’t be primarily an instrument of the rulers. Sometimes there’s evidence that’s not the case, but my standard assumption is that all institutions of rule are controlled (or at least attempted to be controlled) by the rulers. Why would I not want to be skeptical of media (or any other insititution)? I lose nothing by being skeptical (if I’m wrong) and I gain by being skeptical (and I’m right).
“Amusing Ourselves to Death” by Neil Postman and the realization that 98% of the “news” is actually soundbites from vocal pundits and politicians.
I never had a deep abiding faith in the news media (my parents were very skeptical; I was always liberal; I’d read Chomsky), but I always maintained a shred of trust until recently. During the Clinton administration, I always could think, “Maybe it’s because they’re just sensationalist.” During the early Bush administration, I could think, “Maybe it’s because of the 9/11 thing.” More recently, I was able to think, “Well, they’re rich people; they’re just out of touch, or that they’re only out for themselves.”
But when Alberto Gonzales threatened the reporters with jail time for having informed the population about the warrantless wiretapping, and I didn’t hear a word from the mainstream media, I lost all hope (for them). They weren’t even solely self-interested — they were being threatened with prison time and they didn’t say anything. That was my “Oh my God, this is Pravda” moment.
I strongly recommend “Amusing Ourselves to Death” - you’ll never look at the news quite the same way. Also try to catch NPR’s “On the Media” if you can - it illuminates a lot of the underbelly of the corporate media.
For me it was Iran-Contra and the entire way the Sandanistas were (and are still) portrayed. I had some good will towards the press ‘cause of Watergate, but it didn’t last much past Carter.
U.S. History, tenth grade, and seeing that the mainstream history books left out a ton of information that I knew from growing up and listening to my parents. Like the buildup to the civil rights movements of the 1960s - my grandparents were union organizers and members of the Communist Party from way back, and I knew that these movements were gathering force way before 1964 or whatever arbitrary date the textbook assigned.
When I first realized that the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages was willing to straight up lie to me in High School. The OJ case as well. I was watching that thing every day and seeing what was going on. Then I watch the news and like…what the hell? It’s one of those dark underbelly realization of my situation. A black man surrounded by a whole bunch of miseducated white people fed disinformation for convenience. Disinformation that made it uncomfortable for me, while I tried to explain that OJ’s lawyers really did do a good job, and the cops probably really was out to get him, guilty or not to my classmates.
I had also read a number of books about the media, the key ones being about sexuality in the media and the use/abuse of statistics.
Didn’t much read WSJ until college when I realized that I simply had to ditch the last two pages…
Oh and one more thing, it drives me bananas that people still talk about israel winning the Yom Kippur War. They fuckin’ well DIDN’T, ok? They more or less lost on the egyptian front, with the best interpretation of stalemate. The total permeation of israeli propaganda drives me gaga, since I have to figure out who’s on the up and up, if the topic has something to do with israel. And that’s alot of work. And I’m lazy.
I knew the media treated news as entertainment-to-drive-advertising-sales. But it was in the aftermath of 9-11 that I started feeling like not only did they do a bad jobs as gatekeepers on the news, but there was an agenda that was troublesome. Why keep suggesting the 4th plane was headed for the White House and Bush was therefore in danger, when he was nowhere near the White House?
Then came the run up to the Iraq war. Pro-war opinions and “news” were presented always as completely truthful, even when obviously wrong, or the information presented without question now directly contradicted something presented before without question. I saw, suddenly, that Americans were expected to let the news rewrite ‘facts’ as in 1984. And no one was calling anyone on bullshit if it was pro-war, but anti-war voices, or even voices of caution, were talked over, stopped by moderators, ignored, insulted. MSM had become nothing but propaganda.
Molly Ivins, Krugman, and a few other voices in the opinion pages of the newspaper were still talking about reality, so I looked for them online as my paper ran them less often.
It was a sudden jolt out of the blue one day…some nightly news show (they’re all crap to me) was on during the Iraq War circus, and I noticed that on the lower right side of the screen was a graphic reading “Operation Iraqi Freedom.”
All of a sudden, the wheels started turning in my little head, and I thought to myself, “Wait. I thought we were invading them because of WMD’s, not to ‘free’ them.”
I’ve been listening to NPR or reading BBC World News ever since.
The Clinton Impeachment stuff, my senior year in college, made me lose faith in the network news. It all just felt so salacious and dishonest (I remember Brokaw saying something like “Of course everyone is appalled by Clinton on a personal level, but do they want him impeached?” and I was like, don’t fucking speak for me asshole!). I still felt pretty good about PBS an NPR. It was the Iraq War that made me lose faith in them. When they would interview someone and they would say something that I knew for a fact to be untrue, and no one would question it (I think because the number one virtue of a PBS/NPR reporter is being courteous, and asking hard questions and calling someone on a lie is not courteous). It made me crazy how they treated everything, even objective facts, as a he said/she said story. And then they were so used to telling each story that way, with one side being the Republican’s and one being the Democrats, that they totally dropped the ball when the dems and reps were essentially in lockstep on the war. Oh, and for newspaper media, I lost faith when I started going to protests and saw how they were reported (like that huge DC anti-war protest that the NYTimes said had like 10 thousand people, and then later they sort of half retracted the story, by actually just running a second story, never acknowledging the low number in the first story).
J.B., thanks for reminding me of the media’s essential role in the Clinton conspiracy. That really did do a lot to destroy their credibility…
Of course, in the process they sold their souls to the wingnuts, and we’ve seen the results ever since…
I never ‘trusted the media’ and therefore never had an awakening in that sense, because I only started paying attention to the newsmedia around the time I realized that skeezy things were afoot in American politics. Meaning that my first relevant experience with media was learning that they’re skeezy. And I first started realizing that Bad Things were going on in politics - I mean, badder than the Clinton hunt, which I was interested in but followed through word of mouth from teachers (I was in 11th grade then) - was the disputed election thing.
I voted Nader (in Illinois, before you jump on me), but still, when I heard that they were going to stop counting and give it to the Supreme Court, my first response was, hey, that doesn’t sound right… The fact that they couldn’t call the election on election night set off a few bells, the court decision set off a few more, and though I was opinionless on the Iraq war at the beginning*, the fact that Saddam didn’t have anything to do with it seemed odd to me. Then it just went downhill from there until the day two years ago when I told the doctor I thought the neocons were coming to get me and that I was afraid to sleep. Thanks to modern medicine I can now sleep without fear of Ann Coulter hiding under my bed without having to give up any of my concerns about this country.
*my feelings were, “well, you know someone’s going to feel like we have to go finish the job left over from Persian Gulf I, so might as well do it now when we’ve got Clinton’s surplus and can afford it.” I gave the administration the courtesy of not immediately assuming they were morons who couldn’t even run a war, and look how they repaid me.
philosophizer - “I never ‘trusted the media’ and therefore never had an awakening in that sense, because I only started paying attention to the newsmedia around the time I realized that skeezy things were afoot in American politics. Meaning that my first relevant experience with media was learning that they’re skeezy. And I first started realizing that Bad Things were going on in politics - I mean, badder than the Clinton hunt, which I was interested in but followed through word of mouth from teachers (I was in 11th grade then) - was the disputed election thing.”
This is where I really feel bad for you young’ins… (seriously!)
I remember watching Walter Cronkite, David Brinkley, Mike Wallace (before “60 Minutes�), etc. Those were people who had gravitas, believability, and credibility. Since then, there have been two generations of Americans who have had to learn (some of them - most stay ignorant) the hard way that the “news media� is in the entertainment business, and the bottom line is the bottom line.
The only reason anyone is informed anymore is because of the Internet…
For the American media, it was the way they handled the Clinton media circus. For my own Canadian media, however, it was when all of a sudden ‘everyone’ wanted Chretien out and Martin in, despite the fact that Martin had no vision, no charisma and no particular qualificatons, whereas Chretien had charisma coming out his ass, had won three straight majority elections, and had governed for a decade or so about as well as you can hope a professional politician to govern. I never heard of anyone aside from the hardcore Martin partisans in the Liberal party who had any interest in getting rid of Chretien, but from the way the media told it tyou’d think there were huge demonstrations going on daily outside Parliament.
Professor Avenger taught me at an early age (and had to remind me from time to time until I was at university) that just because something is printed or broadcast doesn’t mean that it has any relationship to reality.
I saw this at work in the Watergate affair, as someone who heard the initial radio news broadcast about the break-in late at night in the Pacific time zone, and saw how except for the WP there was virtually no coverage until after the Presidential election, when the cover-up started to fall apart.
I should mention that Professor Avenger as an undergrad at San Jose State along with a few friends protested Nixons’ visit to the campus in 1952 as the VP candidate, and Mother Avenger taught me to always vote for Democrats, no matter what.
I’m with philosophizer: I don’t remember a time during which i was actually paying attention that i have really trusted the media. I never followed the news very much until i entered college in 2002, but even then i was suffering from depression, so i only paid a small amount of attention to how the media portrayed the run-up to the Iraq war.
What really sealed the deal for me was reading the presidential endorsement Editorial in my hometown paper (Fort Worth Startlegram, if you care) on election day two years ago. It basically ran through all of Bush’s failures from his first term in office in the first few paragraphs, but then endorsed him in the final paragraph because of his great display of bipartisanship…during his six years as governor of Texas. It was doubly laughable because in addition to ignoring all the criticisms of the beginning of the editorial, it failed to take into account the fact that the governor is incredibly weak in Texas government; the Lt. Governor (who sets the agenda in the state senate) and Speaker of the House both have considerably more power.
Yeargh.
Good question. I don’t think I had any emotional investment in their truthfulness, but before college I did trust the media more than I do now. In college I worked through some internal contradictions, adopted a more skeptical scientific-minded form of thought and realized for the first time just how much bull the system had fed me. The Clinton impeachment happened in the middle of these years.
It came on kind of gradual for me. Even before I left my reactionary home, I started reading old _Doonesburys_ in the community college library; that and a, um, liberal dose of science fiction sort of opened the way. Already by my first election, 1984, I was embarrassed to vote Republican and voted Democratic instead. A critical moment in self-criticism came when I was arguing with women in Dabney House at Caltech about proposals to revise the language of the Caltech student government bylaws to eliminate sexist terms; eventually I said, “look, if you are really worried as women that the use of words like “he” and “him” are going to seriously be interpreted to bar you from office, why not just put one clause at the beginning of the bylaws that stipulates the pronouns are generic for both sexes and leave the rest alone?” It belatedly dawned on my that I had just proposed a version of the ERA.
But all this was just groundwork; even reading the _Illuminatus!_ trilogy just seemed amusing until I finally saw the fnords myself.
I saw the fnords maybe a year later, I think summer 1985. At the time, the newspapers were full of anger at the Japanese for alleged sharp trading–chip dumping, that sort of thing.
And, apparently just entirely by random coincidence, in the lifestyle section there was some article about how mean and nasty and intolerant of foriegners the Japanese allegedly were.
I saw the pattern, and I saw that I was not meant to see the pattern. After that, it was painfully obvious to me that the media moved in fads and feeding frenzies; that one season we were supposed to be terrified of drugs, the next of day care centers, then it would be terrorism season for a while, then AIDS. And it seemed to go deeper than just that the media were incredibly shallow and stupid and given to fads; the fear du jour pointed to falling in lockstep behind a political agenda.
I saw the fnords.
Now why would my comment be in moderation?
Meanwhile–you all do realize that Webb is dead, right?
Allegedly a suicide. Him and Hunter Thompson.
i agree, good question.
i’m a youngin, too. it’s painful. i really believed in the goodness of journalism, honestly, until recently.
i guess there wasn’t one big realization moment. for a long time i tried to avoid newsmedia in general, but during the clinton trials i remember thinking that even i was having a hard time avoiding headlines about semen stains or vast right-wing conspiracies, and that must mean the media was gorging on this stuff day after day, week after week, month after month, and wasn’t that a little strange?
(i say that even though today i look back on it and think, well hey, wasn’t that sexual harrassment? but i think that makes it even clearer, in retrospect, that at the time there were few people calling it that, compared to all the people calling it things it wasn’t, like “just a bj” or “high crimes.”)
after that i was reading the news more. so the 2000 election started changing how i felt, like someone said earlier, with the supreme court bs and the fact that ballots just fucking disappeared and stuff. that was a lot worse than the 9/11 coverage; but then there was “smoke ‘em out” and “bring ‘em on.” the news was serving as unadulterated propaganda. then the iraq warmongering: aluminum tubes! then abu ghraib and the fact that there were fights over what the press should be “allowed” to publish. then joe wilson / valerie plame / bob novak / judith miller / scooter libby / karl rove: what the fucking fuck. i’d actually defended her protection of sources, only to find she was a crock journalist who tarred it for everyone else. what next.
then katrina, dammit. i was in atlanta, trying to get through to my family and friends, watching every channel at once and wondering whether they’d ever deign to actually identify all the flooded swaths of land they kept showing. wishing geraldo and anderson cooper weren’t so obviously pulling visual stunts of reportage for tv news. wondering whether all the reports of increasingly horrific crimes could possibly be accurate. the truth was, i had no way of knowing. (until i found blogs about it, in fact. so there you go.) this is when the full force of the phrase “morbid voyeurism” really hit me.
then a year later i found myself evacuating again, from lebanon, wondering whether the press would all disappear after the westerners were whisked away to safety. and, especially, wondering why when the international media quoted the IDF as saying “we are not targeting civilian structures, and we are avoiding civilian casualties” (yep) none of them thought to say, well hey, then can you please explain the bombed-out granaries and dairy farms and hospitals and ambulance convoys and cooking gas stations etc etc etc? nobody did that, for the first two weeks the only ones mentioning those attacks at all were the local stations. stuff like that. or just how every time there was a report of “30 lebanese civilians just killed” they’d add “and earlier today 3 israelis were killed,” or they’d just quote back and forth among olmert and bush and nasrallah, it was just like “he said / she said” stories, because that’s how you make a story fair and balanced.
so now i know better and i want to die. naive? absolutely.
Check out “Into the Buzzsaw: Leading Journalists Expose The Myth of a Free Press,” edited by Kristina Borjesson. Gary Webb wrote a chapter in the book about reporting the story Dark Alliance and what subsequently happened to him. Each chapter tells a similar story: respected journalist tackles a story that corporate powers don’t want told and they lose their careers. Free press? No longer exists.
It was high school in the 1980s—AIDS was the issue. Other things have heightened my mistrust through the years (and here I am teaching classes on the media now), but (mis-)(under-)coverage of AIDS is what started me along that path.
I’m young as well, but I was well aware of the AIDS issue (due to personal acquaintance with it) and the fact that there was a huge blackout in the media regarding it only until it became obvious it was a much larger problem than just a “homosexual disease”. The media used that label to make AIDS appear to its audience that it was something only the undesirable people could catch, and therefore, we should let the government off the hook in regards to research funding. I have never trusted the media.
The AIDS coverage was the very first thing I can remember watching on the news (I was like 7 and they called it GRIDS still). I grew up in the Bay Area so it was sort of a big story here, and there was really a sense of hysteria. Perhaps if I had been older than that would have been what made me distrust the media. My other earliest news memories are all Iran Contra (and the challenger explosion). Again, if I was older maybe that would have done it. Instead I went along believing in the media another 12 years.
Oh, I never had any faith in the cable news. I never had cable, so I would only catch things like at airports at stuff, and I always felt like those people were living in an alternate reality.
Where I live, one station was doing good coverage of Katrina. The reporters spent a lot of time at the Convention Center as well as showing other groups. They showed how people were rationing out water to the children and sick; how the people were trying to get survival supplies, one man with a car with his purpose written on the windows in the hopes he wouldn’t get shot at as he sought food and water for the sheltering people. They showed patient people attempting to ask police officers about evacuation or supplies only to be threatened away from the patrol car at gunpoint. They interviewed one person who had watched police chase out people who were trying to gather groceries at a WalMart, only to set it up as a sort of base while looting the valuables such as jewelry and electronics themselves. We were shown a city that was in chaos due to corruption and incompetence on the part of officials at all levels, while the civilians took care of each other.
(Shorter version of my trapped response)
When I was, I think, a sophomore at Caltech, which would have been summer 1985, the newspapers were full of anger at the Japanese for alleged sharp trading–chip dumping, that sort of thing.
And, apparently just entirely by random coincidence, in the lifestyle section there was some article about how mean and nasty and intolerant of foriegners the Japanese allegedly were.
I saw the pattern, and I saw that I was not meant to see the pattern. After that, it was painfully obvious to me that the media moved in fads and feeding frenzies; that one season we were supposed to be terrified of drugs, the next of day care centers, then it would be terrorism season for a while, then AIDS. And it seemed to go deeper than just that the media were incredibly shallow and stupid and given to fads; the fear du jour pointed to falling in lockstep behind a political agenda.
Oh heck, still trapped in M.
Here, I put my response on my own blog.
Enter at your own risk.
Have you seen the fnords?
It was the OJ case for me too. I watched 90% of that trial, and the spin the media put on the days events in their coverage made me wonder if they were actually watching the trial.
Y’all…Amazing litany of epiphany.
For me…sucked into a lot of fascism when younger (including JBS and their ‘Illuminati’
paranoia).
Thought I was well informed. Read Burke, Paine, Mill and deToqueville.
Matthew Arnold, ‘Federalist Papers’ and ‘Rise…Meritocracy’ too.
Still have ‘em all and either bound or cased.
Naturally Goldwater material, 1964
Got busy…got oblivious…for a long time — then Tallahasee Re-thug staffers surfaced on the tube and 2000 happened.
Woke up enough to wonder and finally saw ‘Dean’s Scream’ rerun endlessly, mindlessly by the MSM.(Blitzer especially as I recall) and I think turned my corner.
Mike Ess has it exactly right…they don’t do news anymore they do ‘infotainment’.
Turn on anything today and you get…Jon Benet and almost nothing else.
signed: pretty old, usually stupid and only just awake (he hopes).
I want to point out, the Illuminatus! trilogy is in no way fascistic. It’s a parody, an exercise in Dada paranoia taken to hyperbolic and humorous extremes, in which every friggin’ crazy conspiracy theory is true, especially the mutually contradictory ones. (Except that I don’t recall that the anti-Semitic fnord ones were given any substance at all–one of the main characters, a Jewish detective, tells his partner if there is a fnord world Jewish conspiracy they’ve been leaving him out of the loop.)
and I thought that woulda been a deep-cut coastal inlet in Norway.
who? mighta knew.
Remind me what JBS means here?
Mark, don’t underestimate the power of shallowness and stupidity. They probably added those attacks on the Japanese mainly because they thought it might sell papers. Incidentally, you forget that Hitler or the person who controlled his mind lived in Israel at the time of the Illuminatus! story, along with some other Elder members of the conspiracy. He may even have met one of the many definitions of Jewishness.
Largely apathetic politically until Dim Son was selected in 2000, when I actively started to pay attention to the News. Sept 11 2001, the media went apeshit, and the psychotic break between what I saw on TV, and what I was seeing from the accumuilated other sources online wasn’t matching up at all anymore. The final nail in the coffin was reading Eric Alterman’s “What Liberal Media?”.
Since then, I haven’t been abe to read the news without askiing a half dozen questions the article never touches.
Ah yes, the Illuminatus trilogy. How many here have read the Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy, which was sort-of-a-sequal to Illuminatus.
I think in my case I always knew there was a discrepancy between the US media and reality because I grew up reading the Economist (when they didn’t print in the US and you would get an international edition printed on incredibly flimsy paper).
Another jar-to-the-conciousness was being in Japan back in 1978 for a year, returning to the US, and noticing the immense difference between the international edition of Time and the US edition of Time. (I gave up on most US magazines soon after.)
I brought up _Illuminatus!_ largely because in my personal case, it came first in sequence. Who knows whether I would have seen the real-world discrepencies I saw later in the same light or not without it?
The day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, I was on an airplane coming home to LA from Seattle. I was all abuzz to gossip with a friend who was picking us up at LAX to take us home about the amazing fishing boat wars the Canadian press had been publishing when we had been visiting Vancouver the week before. Of course the Canadian papers talked about US Coast Guard ships harassing and intimidating Canadian vessels as though this had been going on years or decades if not forever; but of course I’d heard a breath of a mention of any such conflict between Uncle Sam and the Lady of the Snows back home–not even in the Seattle papers.
Naturally all this was swept aside when we got off the plane and found that the man whom yesterday only “irresponsible” pinkos criticized had suddenly committed the worst possible crime ever and we were launched on the course for war. Who (aside from the Chomsky-Pacifica Network axis anyway) could possibly have forseen such a stunning thing?
Well, um, maybe the editors of _Scientific American_. It so happened I had bought that month’s issue of SciAm, fresh on the newsstands, at the airport in Seattle, and amused myself on the flight by reading among other things a “Science and the Citizen” segment talking all about Saddam’s many grievances with Kuwait and how he had been blustering how he just might do something the Kuwaitis would regret if they wouldn’t cut him some slack on paying back the loans he’d taken from them to fight Iran, and stop offset drilling to steal oil from under Iraqi territory.
When you consider that a magazine article must be written months before it gets to the newsstands–edited, rewritten, sent to lay-out, printed, then distributed–I had just a little trouble believing Bush (I, but mostly the same guys as for II) claim they were shocked, shocked, shocked.
But as I said I’d seen the fnords half a decade or so before.
Perhaps just as good a question to ask as “When did you first get clued in yourself” would be “What was your most frustrating experience with being surrounded by people still blind to the manipulation while you could already see?”
I was amazed at the incident on July 3, 1988, when the USS Vincennes shot down Iran Air 655 over the Persian Gulf. The Navy immediately issued statements justifying this murder of nearly 300 non-combatants, containing what I later counted up to be five lies–they claimed the plane was off its course but it was on course; they claimed it had its tracking transponder turned off but it was on; they claimed it was diving but it was rising; they claimed to have warned off the plane but the Navy did not; they claimed the plane was maintaining radio silence but there was ample radio traffic between it and the control towers of the airports it was flying between, in English no less as per standard international civil flight procedure.
The Navy’s “justification” was in the story on page one, top of fold, in the LA Times. Several days later, the Navy admitted that their ships had “mistakenly” reported things that, actually, weren’t true. They enumerated these errors, all of which added up to, there was no reason for the Vincennes to think that it was being attacked. Was this article on Page 1, above the fold? Nope, it was somewhere around page 8, bottom right hand. Next to the funeral home ads or something like that.
What was really crazy about this was that I had some pretty left-leaning friends, as I thought, who were perfectly willing to believe the Navy’s initial line that the Airbus jumbo jet had indeed made strange and threatening moves that made it look like an F-14 on a missile strike run. Specifically, because it was an Iranian plane, they thought it was credible the pilots would suddenly decide to take themselves and their passengers, overwhelmingly fellow Iranians, straight to Paradise just because they were Muslims. As I say, these were my liberal friends who considered this possibility more plausible than my assumptions that either the Navy had screwed up in a tight situation we had no business putting them into, or that it was a deliberate aggression of ours against Iranians.
I have always mainly leaned on the former theory, but
here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
you can actually find evidence of both, particularly in the way the captain of the Vincennes was known even by Navy standards as a bit of a mad dog.
The Iran Air/Vincennes thing weighed heavier in my mind by being bookended by events before and after. When the Soviets had shot down KAL 007 over Siberia five years before, of course that was ballyhooed all over the world as evidence that the Russians were total savages. The Korean 747 had actually been over Soviet territory when the Russians shot it down, whereas we had to send a Naval task force to the other side of the world to bag our limit for the decade of innocent rival-camp civilian passengers. But somehow or other, most people in the American press were seeing no parallel whatsoever between these incidents.
Then some months or years later, the Vincennes was due to return home. The newspapers were full of articles about how afraid the captain, crew, and their families in port were of dreaded Muslim fnord revenge terror. In real life, no such thing happened, then or ever. But what did happen was, that numerous American Muslims (as well as people who “looked Islamic”–Indians, Sikhs, etc) were attacked or harassed by American vigilantes and anonymous thugs. I believe there were a number of deaths among the victims.
So, for all of you who woke up to the nature of media manipulation on 9/11–welcome, this has been going on for quite some time.
Listening to newscasters and reporters repeatedly assert in 2000 that Al Gore claimed he invented the internet, even though I knew full well that a) he never said such a thing and b) he actually played a major role in securing government support for the internet. Yet when I heard the media repeat the ‘fact’ that Al Gore said he invented the internet over and over again, it was my first inkling that something was up. Not that I was a huge fan of Gore by any long shot - I voted for Nader that year - but nonetheless, the fact that I heard that lie in the media, and then heard it repeated ad infinitum by people I knew, was very much a ‘clicking’ point for me.
I never trusted the MSM, but despite their little attempts at spinning reality, I have never seen someone more inspired to spread lies and mislead naive young adults into being nonsense spewing useful idiots for the purpose bringing the world and all humanity to a rapid demise as I have witnessed Noam Chomsky to be doing.
The fact that there are people stupid enough to take his fantasy of being a socio-political expert seriously is the ringing of humanity’s death bell. Chomsky has no legitamacy as anything other than being a discredited linguist and a certified looney, who, even in the area in which he actually had an educational background to qualify as being somewhat knowledgeable, his great theories turned out to be false. Chomsky is an idiot-his liguistic claims have been discedited, and he was actually educated as a linguistics scholar.
His claims outside the realm of linguistics are totally unsubstantiated and he has no qualifications to even think about, let alone publish a book devoted to promoting his stupid and ridiculous notions. A Chomsky opinion is like the one your mother has about what it must be like to live on another planet-or like a 2 year olds explanation of meteorogical phenomenon.