HOW MAINSTREAM MEDIA LIES, WORSENS RACE RELATIONS, AND PROTECTS THE POLICE STATE
By Professor
Steven Yates
April 25, 2015
NewsWithViews.com
Anyone who spends time observing mainstream media outlets can only come away from the experience with one conclusion: they lie habitually, with what amounts to impunity. Neither the broadcasters on major news networks nor the shills who find their way onto editorial boards of big city newspapers would know the truth if it walked up and hit them. They have little reason to care that they are following scripted narratives. Alternative news sources, not controlled by one of the six leviathan corporations that control over 90% of mainstream media, and not sponsored by billionaires, do not have the resources or the reach to compete effectively with CNN, CBS, or FOX. So for the low-information population who get their “news” from TV, the lies go unchallenged.
On the night of February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman (then 28) shot and killed Trayvon Martin (age 17). This became March’s major news story. From the get-go, mainstream media lied to create an official narrative, consistent with the larger narrative on race, in which the U.S. is a racist society in which privileged whites don’t just discriminate against but sometimes murder blacks without significant penalty.
To support this narrative, mainstream media consistently presented a picture of a baby-faced Trayvon taken when he was 12. They did not show the 5-foot-11, 158 lb. youth who had confronted Zimmerman (and, yes, as full knowledge of what had happened emerged, it became clear that Martin had initiated the confrontation). Along similar lines, the standard picture used for Zimmerman was artificially darkened, to portray him as thuggish, with a vaguely angry, blank stare.
But if you found out that the reason Zimmerman shot Martin was that Martin was pounding his head into the pavement, that Zimmerman was yelling unsuccessfully for someone to help him, and that he had bloody lacerations on the back of his head to prove it, you probably learned of this from alternative media, as this was not initially reported. Zimmerman also had a broken nose, other facial lacerations, and a minor back injury. He nevertheless would find himself facing second-degree murder and manslaughter charges, and facing a special prosecutor appointed by Florida governor Rick Scott. No one really believes pressure in response to media reporting had nothing to do with this.
Mainstream media consistently presented ensuing events within a specific framework of assumptions: that we had yet another “angry white male” with a gun shooting an innocent, unarmed black teenager who had been minding his own business. Zimmerman is half-Hispanic, however, and so is technically a minority himself. This, too, was not initially reported. Later, mainstream media backpedalled using the term white Hispanic for Zimmerman’s ethnicity. Another irony is that the year before, Zimmerman had criticized local police in a public forum for their dishonest handling of an alleged beating of an unarmed black man by the son of a white officer.
The continued portrayal of Zimmerman as a racist thug and Martin as an innocent kid prompted Barack Obama’s speech. Obama stated that, “when Trayvon Martin was first shot I said that this could have been my son.” This was the first time in U.S. history that a U.S. president had injected a personal opinion into an ongoing criminal investigation.
Zimmerman, who initially had cooperated completely with authorities, went into hiding following death threats against him and his family. If you doubted that Zimmerman could get a fair trial in this poisonous environment, you were not alone. Somehow, from somewhere, both the special prosecutor and Zimmerman’s attorneys assembled a jury able to set aside emotion and decide the case on the evidence, which showed beyond all reasonable doubt that Zimmerman had acted in self-defense. Thus Zimmerman was acquitted. Sometimes the system works! Mainstream media outlets, however, spun this as supporting the official narrative: in Amerikkka, a racist thug can murder an innocent black kid and go free!
Zimmerman’s life had been permanently disrupted, however. Unemployable (because he reasonably didn’t feel safe in public), he’d had to go online to solicit donations to support himself and his family. Politically correct society had built for him the kind of psychic prison reserved for those seen as having crossed its lines. Mainstream media have drawn attention to more recent confrontations between Zimmerman and his estranged wife and with police, including a supposed road rage incident. However, suppose you had been attacked repeatedly in the press, whatever life aspirations you might have had destroyed, your family driven into seclusion; and when you came out in public someone immediately points at you or stared at you. Are you sure you’d be able to keep your temper indefinitely?
Corporate media plays a central role in destroying lives and families to maintain the official narrative of white racism and black victimhood. Its lies and omissions cause great harm to others as well. Both during Zimmerman’s trial and after his acquittal there were public attacks by gangs of blacks on lone whites including, for example, Dallas Watts (age 78) of Toledo, Ohio. In another case right after the Zimmerman verdict, two brothers were shot to death in a parking lot over what observers contended was most likely the Free Zimmerman bumpersticker on their vehicle. In other cases blacks were heard to say things like, “This is for Trayvon!” while attacking a lone white person. It is common knowledge among those of us associated with alternative media that black-on-white hate crimes are underreported by mainstream media. They do not fit the narrative.
Fast forward to just under two and a half years, to Ferguson, Missouri. Police officer Darren Wilson (white, age 28) sees two black teens walking down the middle of a street and tells them from his vehicle to get on the sidewalk. Wilson had just been informed of a convenience store robbery in his vicinity and realized these two matched the description he’d been given. So he confronted them.
Exactly what happened after that is still disputed.
Wilson insisted that Michael Brown (age 18) became verbally and then physically abusive, attacking him through his vehicle’s open window and trying to get his gun. Brown’s companion maintained that’s not what happened, that Wilson escalated the confrontation. We do know that a struggle ensued, resulting in Wilson’s gun being fired inside the vehicle. The incident, all agree, continued with Brown and his companion fleeing with Wilson in pursuit. At some point Brown turned to face Wilson, who then shot Brown five times. There is disagreement over whether Brown had his hands up and was trying to surrender when Wilson was shooting, or whether he’d charged Wilson. Wilson also claimed self-defense, and was not prosecuted due to lack of solid evidence.
In this case, a reasonable person not on the scene would have difficulty judging who was at fault. Every halfway honest person knows that a lot of black teenagers act like thugs. It is not “racist” to point this out. That’s the official narrative talking again.
On the other hand, every honest person also knows that many cops now operate practically outside the rule of law. They can kill innocent people and receive desk duty. SWAT teams can throw flash grenades into houses where they land in cribs and maim infants for life, again facing neither prosecution nor even a court order to cover the innocent families’ millions in medical expenses.
You are in more danger of being shot and killed by a cop in post-9/11, Homeland Security era America, than you are from criminals. Every halfway honest person who does his homework now knows this, too.
In 2013, according to one aggregate, police killed 768 people. In 2014, the number went up to 1,100 people. That’s roughly three per day. These figures are not perfect. Many police agencies do not keep data on the number of people killed by officers on duty, and are in any event unwilling to share what they do keep track of with independent journalists and researchers. Thus the actual figure could be higher!
Two thousand fifteen is on track to break last year’s record for deadly violence by police. So far, as of this writing (morning, Mar 27), 270 people have been killed by cops in the U.S. this year!
In this environment, we are bound to find quite a few cases of white cops shooting presumably innocent black people. We are also bound to find a few cases of black cops shooting white people, black cops shooting black people, and white cops shooting white people. You would have to have spent the past half century in a cave not to realize which cases are going to turn up on your evening news. The other cases will either not be reported, or reported with no mention of the races involved. Given the mindset that seems to be drawn to policing these days, we are bound also to find some bona fide racists alongside the rest of the sociopaths.
In the case of the Michael Brown shooting, though, again inflammatory mainstream media reporting transformed what could have been a moment of awakening and the beginning of a hard look at what is going on in police departments today into a near race riot.
What has happened (courtesy of Homeland Security and the mindset of fear it has encouraged) is the transformation of police into the equivalent of an occupying army which treats the civilian population as the enemy. Instead of honoring their responsibility to be truthful, we have seen still more mainstream media spin, its focus exclusively on white cops shooting and killing blacks, fitting the scripted narrative! The Eric Garner police killing in New York City also fits this narrative; so mainstream media reported it.
Result: the streets filled with unrest which turned to violent protests when Wilson was not prosecuted and those who killed Garner were not pursued. Unrest continues to this day on the streets of Ferguson, Mo., and elsewhere. So do the police murders, which will continue unabated as long as mainstream media (helped by charlatans like Al Sharpton) can keep the focus on race!
Race relations are clearly at a nadir, worse than before the Zimmerman case and the Ferguson shooting. The police state is also worse today than it was in 2012. In a handful of cases (e.g., this one), cops are being prosecuted, because numbers such as the above are increasingly hard to hide; but these are still the exceptions.
The point is, mainstream media has worsened race relations while protecting the police state.
In this respect, mainstream media dropped the ball. They had a golden opportunity to start a conversation about where the U.S. is heading in the Homeland Security era, and they blew it! My judgment is that this was deliberate. The alternative is to assume a mainstream media run by complete idiots. Anyone with the intelligence God gave a horse has to have figured out by now that the past half century of official policies on race, be they antidiscrimination laws, “bussing” to achieve racial balance in schools, programs like Head Start, affirmative action hiring, set-asides in (e.g.) construction contracts, “racenorming” in law school admissions, racial favoritism in entertainment media, political correctness to protect it all from sustained criticism, have not significantly benefitted blacks as a group (allowing for the sake of argument the dubious assumption that this was their intent).
We don’t have to assume mainstream media are run by idiots. All we need realize is that like most other major U.S. institutions, they serve the interests of money and power: globalism’s plutocratic oligarchs.
The larger purpose of the official narrative on race is to keep the races divided and mutually hostile. Globalist plutocrats cannot have members of different races dropping their hostility and turning their attention to what is happening at the top of the economic pyramid, after all!
The official narrative has to be maintained, therefore: the reason mainstream media hang on every word uttered by Al Sharpton while ignoring (for example) Thomas Sowell. Sharpton is a professional rabble-rouser who mouths the official script perfectly. While Sowell does not get everything right (imho), his analyses tend to be thoughtful and nuanced — requiring the same of their audience. Where race is concerned, thought and nuance are the last things the globalist oligarchy wants as it furthers its actual goals at present: more stealth trade deals that enrich corporations, more immigration to drive down wages, more low-information voters to support the next non-choice in 2016.
If some incident results in a race riot, moreover, wealth and power has an excuse for the crackdown on remaining liberties that is doubtless wanted sooner or later in superelite circles.
To keep you safe, of course.
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What can change this? At present, I have no idea. As I noted at the outset, mainstream sites have far more resources and reach than sites like this one. Writers like myself — working for free since alternative sites cannot afford to pay writers — can urge people to shun major newspapers and turn off the well-paid shills on TV until we are blue in the face. I have the sense of shouting into the wind, at people who will never see this site.
Perhaps (I say in all irony) we ourselves should seek a billionaire who would bankroll our efforts. After all, if another Ferguson-type incident should spiral out of control during the next economic downturn, billionaires have no guarantee of being able to hide out in their gated communities indefinitely, any more than us ordinary mortals.
� 2015 Steven Yates - All Rights Reserved
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Steven Yates has a doctorate in philosophy and currently lives in Santiago, Chile. He is the author of Four Cardinal Errors: Reasons for the Decline of the American Republic (Brush Fire Press International, 2011). He also owns an editing business, Final Draft Editing Service.
Steven Yates's new ebook is entitled: Philosophy Is Not Dead: A Vision of the Discipline's Future.
E-Mail: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
