Jeff Jarvis writes about how the Obama administration is coming to realize the cost of its repeated lying and other attempts at media manipulation.

That is the punchline of the Snowden affair: when we can’t trust what government tells us, we come to trust those whom government doesn’t trust. Thus, we no longer necessarily care what the official line is and who delivers it. And when that happens, access – the currency of the Beltway – becomes worthless. Ah, the irony.

The one big lesson is that whatever one might think about the advisability of the revelations by WikiLeaks, Manning Snowden, Greenwald, etc., they have not lied to us while the government has repeatedly lied.

So who are you going to believe?

Many people in the US do not realize the extent to which the government has gone to instill fear in journalists. One way they have done this by threatening to cut off access to them. This should not be a serious problem if journalists were doing their jobs the proper way, which is to investigate those things that governments want to keep secret. But so many of them have become dependent on insider gossip provided by anonymous high level sources that being cut off can be a career-ender. They have become content with becoming part of the government propaganda machine. [Read more…]

Via Juan Cole, I came across this clip from 1990 in which Noam Chomsky talks about how in the propaganda model, words have technical meanings in addition to their normal meanings. In the US media it is the technical meanings that are used because they provide justification for anything that the US government does. What Chomsky said then still holds up, including the examples he gives of this practice, especially as it pertains to the Middle East ‘peace process’ that is back in the news. [Read more…]

The coverage of the efforts by Edward Snowden to get asylum in the four Latin American countries (Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, and Nicaragua) has been accompanied by much snickering among the chattering classes about the ‘irony’ that a whistleblower championing transparency would seek asylum in countries that supposedly do not themselves have much press freedom. This ignores the obvious fact, of course, that now that he has largely achieved his goal of blowing the lid off the US government’s actions, his primary task is to find a country that will not let him fall into the hands of the repressive Obama regime. [Read more…]

The government’s vicious assault on whistleblowers and those who report the leaks has led them to a confrontation with the press and opened up a debate on who is a journalist and what protections they should have to report the news. The First Amendment protections of freedom of speech and the press should protect everyone who publishes any news or opinion in any forum. But the government does not want that. What they want is a compliant media, and they have sought to find a way to separate the ‘good’ media (i.e., those who know their proper role is to be subservient to the government) from the ‘bad media’ (i.e., those who actually break news even if it is not in the government’s interest). [Read more…]

Do you recall the Cheerios commercial I wrote about last month that featured a mixed-race couple and their child and that sparked so much anger when it was shown on YouTube that the comments had to be shut down? Well, the show Kids React showed the commercial to their child panelists to get their reaction. It is well worth watching. [Read more…]