Consortium News Robert Parry (8/13/09) is citing media-promoted “‘deathers‘ who claim that President Barack Obama’s healthcare plan would promote euthanasia,” along with how the U.S. “population was persuaded that Iraq was some lethal threat” and “fear-mongering about Iraq somehow sending small remote-controlled airplanes across the Atlantic” as strong arguments against “hopeful slogans that ‘the truth will out.'”
To Parry, “truth is a battle” and “the reality is that there are no automatic mechanisms for stopping lies and distortions”:
What I have seen during more than three decades in Washington is that many truths remain effectively hidden, even if technically they have been revealed. A rare moment of truth-telling can be easily overwhelmed by a steady barrage of falsehoods and an infusion of well-calibrated doubts.
Before long, it is the oft-repeated faux reality that is remembered. It becomes Washington’s conventional wisdom and then the official history. [See, for instance, Robert Parry’s Lost History.]
In the United States today, there is a massive infrastructure for spreading lies and distortions—a right-wing media machine that reaches from newspapers, magazines and books to cable TV, talk radio and the Internet.
By simple repetition, this machine can transform any crazy theory or bald-faced lie into something that many Americans believe.
Case in point is “when the right-wing media…pushed the lies about Iraq’s WMD and intimated that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was connected to the 9/11 attacks.” See the FAIR magazine Extra!: “From Speculation to History: ‘Saddam’s Bluff’ Becomes Conventional Wisdom—With No Evidence Presented” (5–6/04) by Seth Ackerman.
I think it’s important to point out that revisionism didn’t begin with the rise of rightist propaganda organs.
I think it’s important to point out that revisionism didn’t begin with the rise of rightist propaganda organs.
(Cut off for some reason – here’s the rest of the story)
I think it’s important to point out that revisionism didn’t begin with the rise of rightist propaganda organs.
It’s been a staple of the corpress since Hector was a pup – indeed, before the modern media conglomerate as we know it had even come into existence – hasn’t it?
The rulers control the truth – through state and religious mythology, through mainstream media, through the education system.
It’s not quite as neat as that, but it is the bottom line, isn’t it?