JOHN PILGER : LA GUERRE DES MEDIAS ET LE TRIOMPHE DE LA PROPAGANDE
Objet : La guerre par les médias et le triomphe de la propagande - Par John Pilger - 12-2014
Décembre 05, 2014 "ICH" – Pourquoi tant de journalisme a-t-il succombé à la propagande ? Pourquoi la censure et la distorsion sont-elles la pratique standard ? Pourquoi la BBC est-elle si souvent un porte-parole d’un pouvoir rapace ? Pourquoi le New York Times et le Washington Post trompent-ils leurs lecteurs ?
Pourquoi n’enseigne-t-on pas aux jeunes journalistes à comprendre les programmes des médias et à contester la haute prétention et le faible objectif d’une objectivité truquée ? Et pourquoi ne leur enseigne-t-on pas que l’essence de beaucoup de ce qu’on appelle les médias dominants n’est pas de l’information, mais du pouvoir ?
Ce sont des questions urgentes. Le monde est confronté à la perspective d’une guerre majeure, peut-être d’une guerre nucléaire – avec les Etats-Unis clairement déterminés à isoler et à provoquer la Russie et éventuellement la Chine. Cette vérité est tournée sens dessus dessous et à l’intérieur et à l’extérieur par des journalistes, y compris ceux qui on favoriser les mensonges qui ont conduit au bain de sang en Irak en 2003.
La période que nous vivons est si dangereuse et si faussée dans la perception publique que la propagande n’est plus, comme l’appelait Edward Bernays, « un gouvernement invisible ». C’est le gouvernement. Il règne directement sans crainte de contradictions et son but principal est de nous conquérir : notre sens du monde, notre capacité de séparer la vérité des mensonges.
La période de l’information est en réalité, une période de médias. On a la guerre par les médias ; la censure par les médias ; la diabolisation par les médias ; le châtiment par les médias ; les distractions par les médias – une chaîne de montage surréaliste de clichés dociles et de fausses suppositions.
Ce pouvoir de créer une nouvelle « réalité » est en construction depuis longtemps. Il y a 45 ans, un livre intitulé The Greening of America (La prise de conscience écologique de l’Amérique) avait fait sensation. Sur la couverture, ces mots : « Une révolution est en route. Elle ne sera pas comme les révolutions du passé. Elle tirera son origine l’individu. »
J’étais un correspondant aux Etats-Unis à cette époque et je me souviens de l’élévation d’un jour à l’autre au statut de gourou de l’auteur, un jeune universitaire de Yale, Charles Reich. Son message était que dire la vérité et l’action politique avaient échoué et que seule « la culture » et l’introspection pouvaient changer le monde.
En quelques années, poussé par les forces du profit, le culte du « moi-isme » avait presque écrasé notre sens d’agir ensemble, notre sens de justice sociale et l’internationalisme. La classe, le genre et la race étaient séparés. Le personnel était la politique, et les médias étaient le message.
A la suite de la Guerre froide, la fabrication de nouvelles « menaces » a complété la désorientation politique de ceux, qui vingt ans plus tôt, auraient formé une opposition véhémente.
En 2003, j’ai filmé une interview à Washington avec Charles Lewis, le distingué journaliste d’investigation américain. Nous avons discuté de l’invasion de l’Irak, quelques mois plus tôt. Je lui ai demandé, « Que se serait-il passé si le média le plus libre dans le monde avait sérieusement contesté George Bush et Donald Rumsfeld et avaient vérifié leurs déclarations, au lieu de transférer ce qui s’est révélé comme de la propagande pure ? » Il a répliqué que si nous, les journalistes avions fait notre boulot « Il y a une très, très grande chance qu’on ne serait pas parti en guerre en Irak. » C’est une déclaration épouvantable, et qui est soutenue par d’autres journalistes fameux à qui j’ai posé la même question. Dan Rather, David Rose anciennement de l’Observer et des journalistes et des producteurs importants de CBS, m’ont fait la même réponse. A la BBC, ceux qui souhaitaient rester anonymes, m’ont fait la même réponse.
En d’autres mots, si les journalistes avaient fait leur boulot, s’ils avaient interrogé et investigué la propagande au lieu de l’amplifier, des centaines de milliers d’hommes, de femmes et d’enfants pourraient être en vie aujourd’hui ; et des millions n’auraient pas fui leur maison ; la guerre sectaire entre Sunnites et Chiites pourrait n’avoir jamais été allumée, et l’infâme Etat islamique ne pas exister maintenant.
Même maintenant, malgré les millions qui sont descendus dans la rue pour protester, la plupart des gens dans les pays occidentaux n’ont qu’une petite idée de l’envergure des crimes commis par nos gouvernements en Irak. Encore moins sont conscients que pendant les 12 ans avant l’invasion, les gouvernements US et britannique avait mis en place une motion d’holocauste en refusant aux populations civiles de l’Irak les moyens d’existence. Tels sont les mots d’un représentant britannique important responsable pour les sanctions en Irak dans les années 1990 – un siège moyenâgeux qui a causé la mort d’un demi million d’enfants de moins de cinq ans, rapporté par l’UNICEF. Le nom du représentant est Carne Ross. Au bureau des Affaires étrangères à Londres, il était connu comme “Mr Irak”. Aujourd’hui il conte la vérité sur comment les gouvernements trompent et comment les journalistes répandent de plein gré la duperie. « Nous alimentions les journalistes de renseignements apparemment factuels ou expurgés, » m’a-t-il dit, « sinon on les excluaient. »
Le principal « whistleblower” pendant cette terrible période de silence était Denis Halliday. A ce moment-là, assistant du Secrétaire général des Nations Unies et une autorité supérieure de l’ONU en Irak, Denis Halliday a démissionné au lieu d’appliquer une politique qu’il a décrit comme génocidaire. Il estime que les sanctions ont tué plus d’un millions d’Irakiens. Ce qui est arrivé alors à Halliday était instructif. Il a été vaporisé. Ou il a été diffamé. Sur le programme d’information de nuit de la BBC, le présentateur Jeremy Paxman lui a crié : « « N’êtes-vous pas simplement un apologiste pour Saddam Hussein ? ». Le Guardian a récemment décrit ceci comme un des « moments mémorables » de Paxman. La semaine dernière Paxman a signé un accord de £1 million pour un livre.
Les servantes de la répression ont bien fait leur travail. Considérez les résultats. En 2013, un sondage ComRes a trouvé qu’une majorité du public britannique croyait que le taux de victimes en Irak était inférieur à 10.000 – une petite fraction de la vérité. Une traînée de sang qui va de l’Irak à Londres a été nettoyée presqu’à fond.
On dit que Rupert Murdoch est le parrain de la clique médiatique, et personne ne devrait douter de l’augmentation de pouvoir de ses journaux – tous ses 127 journaux, avec une circulation combinée de 40 millions, et son réseau Fox. Mais l’influence de l’empire de Murdoch n’est pas plus grande que son reflet dans le reste des médias.
La propagande la plus effective est trouvée non pas dans le Sun ou sur Fox News – mais sous une auréole libérale. Quand le New York Times a publié des déclarations que Saddam Hussein avait des armes de destruction massive, on a cru ce faux témoignage parce que ce n’était pas Fox News ; c’était le New York Times.
La même chose est vraie pour le Washington Post et the Guardian, qui ont tous deux joué un rôle critique en conditionnant leurs lecteurs à accepter une guerre froide nouvelle et dangereuse. Les trois journaux libéraux ont déformé les événements en Ukraine comme un acte pernicieux de la Russie – quand, en fait, le coup dirigé par des fascistes en Ukraine, était le travail des Etats-Unis, aidés par l’Allemagne et l’OTAN.
L’inversion de la réalité est tellement omniprésente que l’encerclement militaire et l’intimidation de la Russie par Washington ne sont même pas contestés. Ce ne sont mêmes pas des nouvelles, mais dissimulée derrière une campagne de diffamation ou pour faire peur, du genre de celle avec laquelle j’ai grandis pendant la guerre froide. Une fois de plus l’empire mauvais s’amène pour nous avoir, dirigé par un autre Staline ou un nouvel Hitler. Nommez votre démon et allez à fond la caisse.
La dissimulation de la vérité sur l’Ukraine est un des black-out le plus complet dont je puisse me souvenir. La plus grande construction militaire occidentale dans le Caucase et l’Europe de l’Est depuis la Seconde guerre mondiale est effacée. L’aide secrète de Washington à Kiev et à ses brigades néo-nazis responsables de crimes de guerre contre la population d’Ukraine de l’Est est effacée. Des preuves qui contredisent la propagande que la Russie était responsable du tir contre un avion de ligne malais sont effacées.
Et de nouveau, des médias supposés libéraux sont les censeurs. Ne citant pas de faits, pas de preuves, un seul journaliste a identifié un dirigeant pro-russe en Ukraine comme l’homme qui a tiré sur l’avion de ligne et l’a abattu. Cet homme, a-t-il écrit, est connu comme le Démon. C’était un homme effrayant qui avait fait peur au journaliste. C’était la preuve.
Beaucoup de médias occidentaux ont fort travaillé pour présenter la population ethnique russe d’Ukraine comme des étrangers dans leur propre pays, presque jamais comme des Ukrainiens cherchant une fédération à l’intérieur de l’Ukraine et comme des citoyens ukrainiens résistant contre un coup orchestré par l’étranger contre leur gouvernement élu.
Ce que le Président russe a à dire n’a aucune importance ; c’est un pantomime de scélérat dont on peut abuser en toute impunité. Un général américain qui dirige l’OTAN et sort directement de Dr. Strangelove - un Général Breedlove – parle systématiquement d’invasions russes sans l’ombre d’une évidence visuelle. Sa personnalisation avec le Général Jack D. Ripper de Stanley Kubrick est le comble de la perfection. Quarante mille Russes sont massés à la frontière, d’après Breedlove. Cela a été suffisant pour le New York Times, the Washington Post et l’Observer – ce dernier s’étant déjà précédemment distingué lui-même avec des mensonges et des fabrications qui soutenaient l’invasion de l’Irak par Blair, comme l’a révélé son ancien journaliste, David Rose.
C’est presque le jeu d’esprit d’une réunion de classe. Les batteurs de tambour du Washington Post sont exactement les mêmes écrivains d’éditoriaux qui avaient déclaré que les armes de destruction massive de Saddam étaient « des faits vérifiés ».
« Si on se demande, » a écrit Robert Parry, « comment le monde pourrait trébucher dans la Troisième guerre mondiale – en grande partie comme il l’a fait pour la Première guerre mondiale, il y a cent ans – tout ce qu’on a à faire est de regarder la folie qui a enveloppé virtuellement l’entière structure politique/médiatique US au sujet de l’Ukraine où un faux récit de casquettes blanches contre des casquettes noires a été saisi tôt et s’est avéré imperméable aux faits ou à la raison. » Parry, le journaliste qui a révélé l’Iran-Contra, est un des rares qui enquête sur le rôle central des médias dans ce « jeu de poulets », comme l’a appelé le Ministre russe des Affaires étrangères. Mais est-ce un jeu ? Pendant que j’écris ceci, le Congrès US vote la Résolution 758 qui en un mot dit : « Soyons prêt pour une guerre contre la Russie. »
Au 19e siècle, l’écrivain Alexander Herzen décrivait le libéralisme laïc comme « l’ultime religion, bien que son église ne soit pas dans l’autre monde mais dans celui-ci ». Aujourd’hui, ce droit divin est bien plus violent et dangereux que n’importe quoi que le monde musulman crée, bien que peut-être son plus grand triomphe soit l’illusion d’une information libre et ouverte.
Dans les nouvelles, des pays entiers sont appelés à disparaître. L’Arabie saoudite, la source de l’extrémisme et de la terreur soutenue par l’occident, n’est pas un récit, sauf quand elle pousse le prix du pétrole vers le bas. Le Yémen a subi 12 ans d’attaques américaines de drones. Qui sait cela ? Qui s’en soucie ?
En 2009, l’Université de l’Ouest de l’Angleterre a publié les résultats d’une étude de 10 ans de couverture de la BBC du Venezuela. Des 304 reportages diffusés, seuls trois mentionnent des politiques positives introduites par le gouvernement d’Hugo Chavez. Le plus grand programme d’alphabétisation dans l’histoire humaine a à peine reçu une référence en passant. En Europe et dans les Etats-Unis, des millions de lecteurs et ceux qui regardent les TV ne savent pratiquement rien sur les changements de vie remarquables appliqués en Amérique latine, dont beaucoup inspirés par Chavez. Comme la BBC, les informations du New York Times, du Washington Post, du Guardian et le reste des respectable medias occidentaux étaient notoirement de mauvaise foi. On s’est même moqué de Chavez, sur son lit de mort. Comment explique-t-on cela, je me le demande, dans des écoles de Journalisme ?
Pourquoi des millions de gens en Grande Bretagne sont-ils persuadés qu’une punition collective appelée « austérité » est nécessaire ? A la suite du crash économique en 2008, un système pourri a été dénoncé. Pendant une fraction de seconde les banques ont été alignées comme escrocs avec des obligations envers le public qu’elles avaient trahi. Mais, endéans quelques mois, - à part quelques-unes envoyées en l’air pour des « bonus » excessifs – le message a changé. Les photos d’identité judiciaire de banquiers coupables se sont évanouis des journaux et quelque chose appelé « austérité » est devenu le fardeau de millions de gens ordinaires. Y a-t – jamais eu un tour de passe aussi effronté ?
Aujourd’hui beaucoup des prémisses d’une vie civilisée en Grande Bretagne sont démantelées afin de rembourser une dette frauduleuse – la dette d’escrocs. Les coupes de « l’austérité » sont estimées à £83 milliards. C’est presque exactement le montant d’impôts évité par les mêmes banques et des entreprises comme Amazon et Murdoch's News UK. De plus, on donne aux banques malhonnêtes un subside annuel de £100 milliards en assurance libre et en garanties – un montant qui alimenterait complètement le Service de santé nationale. La crise économique est de la pure propagande. Des politiques extrêmes dirigent maintenant la Grande Bretagne, les Etats-Unis, et une grande partie de l’Europe, du Canada et de l’Australie. Qui se lève pour la majorité ? Qui raconte leur histoire ? Qui met les choses au point à ce sujet ? N’est-ce pas ce que les journalistes sont supposés faire ?
En 1977, Carl Bernstein, fameux pour le Watergate a révélé que plus que 400 journalistes et d’exécutifs d’informations travaillaient pour la CIA. Ils comprenaient des journalistes du New York Times, du Time et de réseaux de TV. En 1991, Richard Norton Taylor du Guardian a révélé quelque chose de semblable dans son pays.
Rien de tout cela n’est nécessaire aujourd’hui. Je doute que quelqu’un ait payé le Washington Post et beaucoup d’autres diffuseurs médiatiques pour accuser Edward Snowden d’aider le terrorisme. Je doute que quelqu’un paie ceux qui systématiquement diffament Julian Assange - bien que d’autres récompenses peuvent être abondantes. Il est clair pour moi que la raison principale pour laquelle Assange a attiré autant de venin, de malveillance et de jalousie est que WikiLeaks a mis par terre la façade d’une élite politique corrompue maintenues en haut par des journalistes. En proclamant une époque extraordinaire de révélations, Assange s’est fait des ennemis en illustrant et faisant honte aux portiers des médias, et pas le moins au journal qui a publié et s’est approprié cette grande exclusivité. Il est devenu non seulement une cible mais une poule aux œufs d’or. Des livres lucratifs et des accords de films à Hollywood ont été conclus et des carrières médiatiques lancées ou démarrées sur le dos de WikiLeaks et de son fondateur. Des gens ont fait beaucoup d’argent, tandis que WikiLeaks a lutté pour survivre.
Rien de tout cela n’a été mentionné à Stockholm, le 1er décembre quand l’éditeur du Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, a partagé avec Edward Snowden le Right Livelihood Award, connu comme un Prix Nobel de la paix alternatif. Ce qui était choquant au sujet de cet événement était qu’Assange et WikiLeaks étaient évaporés. Ils étaient des non-personnes. Personne n’a parlé en faveur de l’homme qui a été le premier à dénoncer digitalement et a fourni au Guardian une des meilleures exclusivités dans l’histoire. De plus, c’était Assange et son équipe WikiLeaks qui ont effectivement et brillamment – sauvé Edward Snowden à Hong Kong et lui ont assuré la sécurité. Pas un mot. Ce qui a rendu cette censure par omission si ironique et poignante et scandaleuse était que la cérémonie se déroulait au Parlement suédois – où le silence veule sur le cas Assange était de connivence avec une grotesque erreur judiciaire à Stockholm.
« Quand la vérité est remplacée par le silence, » disait le dissident soviétique Yevtushenko, « le silence est un mensonge ». C’est ce genre de silence que nous, journalistes, devons briser. Nous devons nous regarder dans un miroir. Nous devons appeler à la responsabilisation un média irresponsable qui sert le pouvoir et une psychose qui menace le monde d’une guerre mondiale.
Au 18e siècle, Edmund Burke a décrit le rôle de la presse comme un Quatrième Etat contrôlant les puissants. Cela a-t-il jamais été vrai ? Cela ne marche certainement plus. Ce dont nous avons besoin est un Cinquième Etat : un journalisme qui contrôle, qui déconstruit et contrecarre la propagande et enseigne aux jeunes à être des agents du peuple, pas ceux du pouvoir. Nous avons besoin de ce que les Russes appelaient perestroika –une insurrection contre la connaissance assujettie. Je l’appellerais le journalisme réel.
On est 100 ans après la Première guerre mondiale. Des journalistes alors ont été récompensés et ennoblis pour leur silence et leur collusion. Au somme du massacre, le Premier ministre britannique David Lloyd George s’est confié à C.P. Scott, éditeur du Manchester Guardian : « Si les gens savaient vraiment (la vérité) la guerre serait arrêtée demain, mais bien sûr, ils ne savent pas et n’ont pas la possibilité de savoir. »
Il est temps qu’ils sachent.
Suivez John Pilger sur twitter @johnpilger
Le texte ci-dessus est la transcription du discours de JohnPilger au Logan Symposium, « Construire une alliance contre le secret, la surveillance et la censure », organisé par le Centre pour le journalisme d’investigation, Londres 5-7 décembre 2014,www.johnpilger.com
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War by Media and the Triumph of Propaganda
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> By John Pilger
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> By John Pilger
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December 05, 2014 "ICH" - Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?
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> Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what's called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
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> These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war - with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.
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> The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.
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> The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.
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> This power to create a new "reality" has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual."
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> I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only "culture" and introspection could change the world.
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> Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of "me-ism" had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.
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> In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new "threats" completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
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> In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, "What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?"
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> He replied that if we journalists had done our job "there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq."
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> That's a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers of CBS, gave me the same answer. in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.
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> In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.
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> Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.
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> Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s - a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official's name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as "Mr. Iraq". Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence," he told me, "or we'd freeze them out."
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> The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis.
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> What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC's Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman's "memorable moments". Last week, Paxman signed a £1 million book deal.
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> The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 - a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean.
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> Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers - all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch's empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.
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> The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't Fox News; it was the New York Times.
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> The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.
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> This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war.
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> Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.
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> The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington's secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.
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> And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.
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> Many in the western media haves worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.
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> What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads Nato and is straight out of Dr. Strangelove - one General Breedlove - routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick's General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect.
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> Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer - the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair's invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.
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> There is almost the joi d'esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to be "hard facts".
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> "If you wonder," wrote Robert Parry, "how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason."
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> Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this "game of chicken", as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: "Let's get ready for war with Russia."
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> In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as "the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this". Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.
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> In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?
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> In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.
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> Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what's called the mainstream media is not information, but power?
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> These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war - with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.
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> The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.
>
> The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.
>
> This power to create a new "reality" has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual."
>
> I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only "culture" and introspection could change the world.
>
> Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of "me-ism" had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.
>
> In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new "threats" completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.
>
> In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, "What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?"
>
> He replied that if we journalists had done our job "there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq."
>
> That's a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers of CBS, gave me the same answer. in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.
>
> In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.
>
> Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.
>
> Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s - a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official's name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as "Mr. Iraq". Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence," he told me, "or we'd freeze them out."
>
> The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis.
>
> What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC's Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman's "memorable moments". Last week, Paxman signed a £1 million book deal.
>
> The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 - a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean.
>
> Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers - all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch's empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.
>
> The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't Fox News; it was the New York Times.
>
> The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and Nato.
>
> This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war.
>
> Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.
>
> The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington's secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.
>
> And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.
>
> Many in the western media haves worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.
>
> What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads Nato and is straight out of Dr. Strangelove - one General Breedlove - routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick's General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect.
>
> Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer - the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair's invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.
>
> There is almost the joi d'esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to be "hard facts".
>
> "If you wonder," wrote Robert Parry, "how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason."
>
> Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this "game of chicken", as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: "Let's get ready for war with Russia."
>
> In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as "the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this". Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.
>
> In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?
>
> In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.
> In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism?
Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called "austerity" is necessary?
>
> Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.
>
> But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?
>
> Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be £83 billion. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.
>
> The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who's keeping record straight? Isn't that what journalists are meant to do?
>
> In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian revealed something similar in this country.
>
> None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear Julian Assange - though other rewards can be plentiful.
>
> It's clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media's gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He became not only a target, but a golden goose.
>
> Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.
>
> But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?
>
> Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be £83 billion. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.
>
> The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who's keeping record straight? Isn't that what journalists are meant to do?
>
> In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian revealed something similar in this country.
>
> None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear Julian Assange - though other rewards can be plentiful.
>
> It's clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media's gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He became not only a target, but a golden goose.
> Lucrative book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.
>
> None of this was mentioned in Stockholm on 1 December when the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn't exist. They were unpeople. No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively - and brilliantly - rescued Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.
>
> What made this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament - whose craven silence on the Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.
>
> "When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."
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> It's this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war.
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> In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika - an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.
>
> It's 100 years since the First World War. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in C.P. Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don't know and can't know."
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> It's time they knew.
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> Follow John Pilger on twitter @johnpilger
The text aboveis a transcript of John Pilger’s address to the Logan Symposium, “Building an Alliance Against Secrecy, Surveillance & Censorship”, organised by the Centre for Investigative Journalism, London, 5-7 December, 2014. www.johnpilger.com