At the end of the year, New York Police Department announced an unusual and dangerous weapons bust: A young couple in Greenwich Village apparently had an array of weapons and an explosive in their apartment.
Bad enough, assuming the details are as they seem. (The explosive was reportedly seven grams, about a quarter of an ounce, of a substance called HTMD, which is slightly less explosive than TNT; this amount seems more suitable for blowing off your fingers than for blowing up a building.)
But the Murdoch-owned New York Post gave the story a political angle (12/31/12):
The pregnant daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend–a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist–were busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a powerful bomb-making explosive in their apartment in a Greenwich Village brownstone.
That’s right–Occupy Wall Street. This isn’t the first time the paper has reported a link between a criminal case and the activist movement. Back in July, the paper reported that DNA from an Occupy protest was linked to an unsolved 2004 murder. The DNA “match” turned out to be contamination by an employee of the police department lab.
And this time around, the OWS link would seem to be nonexistent. No one associated with Occupy seems to know who this Aaron Greene person might be. The paper notes in the final paragraph that Greene “has five prior run-ins with the police,” which might be more relevant than a seemingly phantom connection to an activist group.
The Post‘s report was cited in other news accounts; the Associated Press (12/31/12), for instance, put it this way:
The New York Post reported in its Monday editions that Gliedman is the daughter of a prominent Manhattan doctor. It described her boyfriend as a Harvard graduate and an Occupy Wall Street activist.
And on CBS This Morning (1/2/13), Seth Doane reported:
CBS News has learned that police seized two shotguns, a flare launcher, nine high-capacity rifle magazines, various handwritten notebooks containing formulas, literature on how to make booby traps and homemade weapons, and pages from a do-it-yourself manual called The Terrorist Encyclopedia. The New York Post reported Greene was a member of the Occupy Wall Street movement but the group has denied this.
But CBS doesn’t leave it there. They followed that with a soundbite from Mitchell Silbe of K2 Intelligence, who spun out this scenario:
The assumption is that the vast majority of the people there were peaceful protestors, but there was a more radical fringe element to the group, and there was a concern that at some point they might turn to violence if they weren’t accomplishing their political aims.
It’s bad enough to treat a unsubstantiated claim by a partisan news outlet, with a record of sensational misinformation on the same subject, as a relevant fact in a story. But how do you justify using this junk journalism as a chance to let a source give free rein to his fantasies of how Occupy might take a turn towards violence?
That’s just the thing.
The corpress doesn’t have to justify diddley. They control the game, or more precisely control it for those who interests they serve, and while we’re not talking about the Goebbelsianism practiced by the Murdoch cabal – though that’s only a matter of degree, and not kind – only the most naive see them as other than essentially propaganda outlets for those interests.
As testament to the depth of their duplicity, we have to ask just what impact have the exposes by FAIR and other media watchdogs had on their modus operandi? Occasionally they’re compelled to retract some baldfaced lie, but they blithely move on to the next one, don’t they?
From the “controversy” over climate change to the “fiscal cliff” to Iranian nukes to the promotion of a GWOT that is defined by the very thing it claims to combat, the corpress can be counted on to twist the narrative to suit the exploiter class.
That’s its raison d’etre – to propagate all the news that printed to fit.
The least we can do is make that plain at every opportunity, and cease pretending to be puzzled by their perversion of journalism.
tv news is very boilerplate and sickeningly bad. all of it is murdoch-level idiotic, and at the same time there’s the psychological war at its very essence. in other words, it’s idiotic yet it’s ABSOLUTELY dangerous, very bad for your brain, if you have one left after a lifetime of it. and now it’s SO even(ly) worse! who can bear their laughter and their constant pet or animal stories, wedged in between very sad crime or horrid accidents EVERY DAY, SAME SAME ON EVERY STATION. oh, and i love how they tell you to bring your raincoat or wear your warm clothes for the weather. i’ve seen kindergarten teachers treat their students with more intelligence.
thanks for a followup to this occupyterrorism story. i heard one of the msm barbiedolls ask, “and didn’t they find some WEIRD LITERATURE, too??” but isn’t “weird” normal to those tv “reporters”? why would they even they even use the word?
oh yeah, to throw us off ! ..whatever. TURN THEM OFF! AND TELL YOUR EVERYONE-YOU-KNOW-OR-EVER-SEE-ANYWHERE-ON-EARTH! TURN THEM OFF! tv news is for pinheads! as they say, LOL…..-not!
I neither watch nor listen to “news” promulgated by the far “right” corporate and megarich owned media. Even NPR and PBS are too far to the “right” for me. I listen to Liberal talk radio and, yes, NPR. I read The Nation magazine. Only about 0.5% of the media is Left enough for me.
According to Reporters without Borders, the US ranked 47th in their current World Press Freedom Index (http://en.rsf.org/IMG/CLASSEMENT_2012/C_GENERAL_ANG.pdf)
No wonder, with media ownership intent on getting their viewpoint out. And with cops so afraid of the local press that they will do whatever it takes to comply with the wishes of the one percent.
Why would anybody believe anything that is in the New York Post? Further, why would other supposedly professional journalistic venues pick up on a story when everything points to that nobody at the Occupy movement knew this guy Greene. I know the answer, corporatists slimeballs will do and say anything to discredit the good work done by Occupy! That is not to say that if there are some legitimate bad players from any group shouldn’t be stopped, but making up stories is not appreciated.
Silber isnt any old spy. From the Village Voice article: “It’s unclear why CBS doesn’t bother to identify him as such, but well into 2012, Silber was the Director of the Analytic and Cyber Units in the NYPD’s controversial Intelligence Division, where he was associated with the division’s program of widespread surveillance of Muslim Americans.” http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared/2013/01/more_misreporti.php
Thank you yet again for another excellent piece.
It are these kind of lengths that law enforcement will go, backed up by the mainstream media I just can’t seem to get through the heads of some of my fellow occupiers. Nor the dangers, us in Occupy media and elsewhere, face on a daily basis as the resistance continues.
Again – keep up the good work FAIR!!!
I didn’t realize anyone actually read that paper. I thought it was only used as a birdcage liner.
euphoric manipulators leading us into dark times-complete information control. using mind control-remote neural monitoring conditioning society to accept neo-fascism
The fanaticism with which the Post would still attack Occupy shows that it still has the potential to scare the right
How do we justify? Let me count the way$, one billion, two billion, three billion, and on to infinity and beyond with the Advertisers money. Need they have any other reason?
Ok this story has zero legs……unless you count what Fair is trying to grow from a mountain to a mole hill.
The crypto-fascist police state we see growing and has been around for some time only now larger, better funded and nationally coordinated. They have always been used against dissidents to the status quo. This is just another example. Be careful they may choose you next.
Well yes night gaunt I would agree that under Obama the stride has been to create a massive Fed government that has tentacles in every aspect of ones life.The idea that he is the leader of a fascist police state though is spurious in the extreme.
Opinion: Advances in genomic research and other evolutionary & social studies empirically suggest that the current police state (spearheaded by fbi/cia/dod/police)being formed globally actually has profound, longterm and irreversible effect on civilization by ensuring the ultimate survival of the most violent and corrupt human beings in our culture (homicidal sociopaths), making them the dominant alpha group of the emerging homo sapien *species.
MASS MURDERERS ARE THE SAME, WHETHER BRANDED AS HEROES OR VILLAINS
http://sosbeevfbi.ning.com/profiles/blogs/mass-murderers-are-the-same-whether-branded-as-heroes-or-villains
http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v194/__show_article/_a000194-000497.htm
*Reduce mankind to a fearful, trembling species:
http://sosbeevfbi.ning.com/profiles/blogs/drones-etc
So,
http://sosbeevfbi.com/worldwidenetwork.html
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