Orwellian doublespeak at New York Times
by Jim Naureckas
The New York Times headline (4/15/15) paints a dire picture:
Turmoil at Voice of America Is Seen as Hurting US Ability to Counter Propaganda
But wait a second–isn’t Voice of America itself a propaganda outlet? Not in the New York Times stylebook, apparently. The piece, by Ron Nixon, describes VOA as “the government agency that is charged with presenting America’s viewpoint to the world.” Later on, the Times refers to what it calls “America’s public diplomacy.”
The US’s enemies, on the other hand, have “sophisticated propaganda machines that have expanded the influence of countries like China and Russia and terrorist groups like the Islamic State.” The difference between “propaganda machines” and “public diplomacy” is never explained in the article, but the former appears to be what “they” do while the latter is what “we” do.
Read more here.
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It amazes me how this “newspaper” blatantly ignores the real news, and just reports govt statements without question; and yet they see themselves, present themselves as independent.
Yes, I agree. I’ve just been reading another, and longer, analysis of the relations between the New York Times and the various administrations in Washington, and it strikes me as extraordinary that we continue to speak of our mainstream media as “the free press.” It’s a conceptual mistake of the first order.
We (many more of us) will have to find the courage to call things by their proper names and insist on the creation of laws to re-instate the very conditions of democracy among us if we’re to stop this slide towards a corporate-military-political fascism that’s still relatively soft on the majority but is already overtly repressive and vicious towards the most easily victimazable others.