COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN SPUTNIK
Last week, UK
Secretary of Defense Michael Fallon accused Sputnik and RT of "weaponizing
misinformation," and said that the outlets need to be "called
out" for "misleading or not duly impartial" reporting.
"Fallon's Attack
on Sputnik Reveals Panic Over End to Mainstream Media Hegemony"
That describes the situation exactly.
The West's mainstream press has been "weaponizing
misinformation" all of my life. The Guardian, The Times, The Independent, The
Telegraph, BBC - all have played this game for as long as I can remember.
In the United States, the New York Times, the Washington
Post, CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and even PBS play the game night and day.
In Germany, from what someone who does not read German can
tell, it is much the same. On the Internet, only the German Economic News
offers an informed, interesting, non-official view, and it is under attack from
government-inspired sources right now, but it is available only in Google's
[fairly poor] translation.
It is all so obvious, and the pretense of people like Fallon
that it is otherwise is tiresome, for people who are critically-minded and want
genuinely to understand what is going on, especially on matters of great
consequence and of life and death.
Governments like the United States have long felt free to
drag their people into wars without any real explanation to the people paying
for them, both in money and lives, offering only flimsy reasons written up and
colored-up by a fully compliant press. I am not sure the reality is all that
different to the peasants of a liege lord in the Middle Ages being taken to
war.
Believe me, it is great to see sources which don't follow
that crowd.
I'm not one who believes everything I read anywhere
automatically, but you must judge the nature of competing stories to get some
sense of truth.
Just as when you write a term paper, you cannot, with
academic integrity, cite a single source for something critical. It is
incumbent upon the writer to cross-check.
People like Fallon literally demonstrate their own lack of
integrity by speaking against this. They also effectively are insulting the
intelligence of their own people by saying they cannot distinguish the truth
when they read different sources.
Sputnik and RT provide an extremely valuable service to
people in Europe and America, another source, a well-resourced source, of
information with which to compare and cross-check things of great importance.
Of course, they have Russia’s interests to heart, but so what? Russia is an
important part of the world community, and increasingly so.
The mainline press in the West is all big corporate
interests today, and it faithfully reflects those interests as well as the
interests of the governments upon which they depend for permissions, licenses,
tips, interviews, and even leaks.
Even the alternate or independent press virtually all have
agendas, and those agendas reflect the interests of those who bankroll them.
The bigger, better-financed the source, the more you can be
sure that has bias built into it. All those big, new, shiny alternate news
sites – outfits like Breitbart or Alex Jones - on the Internet are biased in
their own ways just as surely as is the New York Times.
Only some of the small-scale independent bloggers or
journalists are not totally encumbered by bias, but they are encumbered by a
lack of resources.
The main value of the new alternate and independent sources
is to supply another point of view.
If you want to truly understand something vaguely resembling
what is really happening, you cannot depend on a single source of any kind
You must read and analyze and compare different sources,
keeping in mind their various biases.
Only then can you begin to be informed.
But even with that effort, you will fail to understand some
matters because governments and large organizations of every description lie
about or hide some of what they are doing. No matter who is reporting about
them.
