The Bloviations of Christiane Amanpour, Queen of Fake News
by Sassy Surstein, December 11, 2016
The last week has peppered my feed with a clip of Amanpour accepting an award from the Committee to Protect Journalists, those most valuable of all citizens if you ask a journalist. Having worked in “alternative” foreign-policy journalism for years, I’m familiar with this walking talking intel op’s career shilling for US foreign policy, and it ain’t pretty. But watching this speech made me actually feel my face turning red, my heart pump a little harder. This hack had the gall to warn us about the dangers of “fake news.” This, from the mouthpiece who had a major hand in the media demonization of the Serbian people that made it easier for the US to intervene in the Balkans wars and finish off the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. They bombed Serbia for 78 days, killing around 500 people.
She also sneered at the “kangaroo courts” journalists often find themselves in after being accused of subversion (in bad non-Western countries, of course). In that room perhaps only she might recognize the irony that her own stenography in the 1990s got Slobodan Milosevic, the last resistant leader in the Balkans, tossed into one himself. Even so, he made such convincing arguments in that courtroom that he never made it out alive. The court later investigated itself and found that he had deliberately poisoned himself with a drug impossible for him to attain in a bid to get treated in Russia and then escape. If a prisoner had actually poisoned himself in a Serbian jail NATO would have bombed it and Amanpour would have written reams about the transparent ludicrousness of a suicide by poisoning in a maximum-security prison. Now imagine another inmate has also “committed suicide” in the same prison, the same week, charged in the same case. That’s what happened to a Croatian Serb general in the same prison as Milosevic. Nothing to see here.
Amanpour was instrumental in spreading the fabrication that was the Milosevic-ordered, Serb-executed massacre of Muslim women and children at Srebrenica. She gleefully parroted the outrageous, baseless claims that 100,000 Kosovo Albanians were slaughtered by the Yugoslav army.
The CNN star is married to James Rubin, the spokesperson for the Clinton State Department from 1997-2000 and considered Madeleine Albright’s “right-hand man.” Amanpour routinely regurgitated her husband’s bosses’ talking points, shoring up their credibility. Thusly she became and remains a respected reporter at one of the top news networks. What would be called near-nepotism if it happened in one of those weird eastern countries is just a professional coincidence, you see. While Rubin liaised with the Kosovo Liberation Army during the railroading of Yugoslavia into “asking for” the US bombing campaign, Amanpour propagandized for the US-backed terrorist group.
The sickest part is not just that it’s Amanpour talking about so-called fake news. She’s horrible and provides a perfect example of the irony of this particular situation, but she’s not a bad apple. Her audience at the CPJ function is just as complicit. Journalism under capitalism is essentially just advertising. It’s the informational side of diplomacy, also a corrupt endeavor under capitalism. The product is state and corporate policy, which are of course one and the same. The consumers are everyone lulled into acceptance at the savagery of this economic system, we subjects of the imperial core.
To illustrate, consider the fact that crack babies aren’t real, that Iraq had no WMDs, that African mercenaries were not being used to attack Gaddafi opponents, that the toppling of that Saddam statue was staged, that Aristide was not having his loyalists behead Haitians, that the Soviets were not giving MIGs to Grenada, that the Sandinistas did not kill 200,000 people, that bin Laden’s huge mountain fortress didn’t exist, that Jessica Lynch was neither a heroic warrior nor was she mistreated in captivity, that there were no concentration camps in Bosnia. All of the above were reported as fact in the news media. [See more in this helpful thread from @cordeliers]
The US government has spent decades planting disinformation in the news, from Floridians paid to libel Cuba in the 90s to painting Iran’s Mossadegh as a molester in the 1950’s all the way back to the incident that coined the term “yellow journalism,” the blowing up of the USS Maine.
Absorbing all that — just the tip of the iceberg, really — who could dare say these criminals are the arbiters of what’s real and fake, what is actually propaganda and what is merely journalism. They’re not, because they’re not even trying. They’re liars. But you can see it, if you read between the lines.
“The problem is not merely that reporters and academics are misinformed,” Professor Fernando Gil-White told Stephen Gowans after researching source material on the untrue allegations of Milosevic’s virulent nationalism. “It appears to be a conscious effort to misinform.”
Scum like Amanpour operating from within anti-imperialist countries are the reason why those places ever needed laws curtailing the hallowed “freedom of the press.” Words ARE weapons, and the West knows this, which is why from its much richer, more powerful, and frankly, more sophisticated — from a marketing perspective — perch, it can launch a million missiles in every direction and demand its targets drop their shields. After all, communist propaganda is allowed in the US (now). You won’t really be able to find a job making it but hey, it’s your right to be poor! But this speech freedom isn’t uniformly recognized even in the West. The US will still lock you up for, say, broadcasting Hezbollah content. And much of Western Europe, at least officially, disallows the glorification of Nazism. And this is good. But let’s not pretend those who run the West truly think there’s an unalienable human right to free speech. It’s as provisional as it is under socialist revolutionary governments fighting for their lives against the Empire.
“Fake news.” News is fake. The higher the stakes for the ruling classes, the more you can be certain the mainstream news about it will be as fake as fuck and conversely, reports deemed fake by those same fakers should be duly considered on their merits.
Thanks to Tarzie for input on this post.
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It’s not easy to label someone as “fake news” in an article loaded up with fat propaganda and lies. Well done, off-Guardian, you’re no better than the ones you criticize.
The Serbs, particularly the Bosnian ones, demonised themselves. Read Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Goražde.
One person he interviewed was a Muslim woman, identified only as “Bahra”, who had seen many Serb families sending their kids and parents out of the area. Her spouse couldn’t bring himself to believe the worst and tried to minimise her concerns, but her boss, a Serb, said that he would would already have sent his family somewhere, if he could have, because “there is going to be no life together between Serbs and Muslims. Not just here in Goražde, but everywhere in Bosnia” and urged her to send her family to safety if she could.
One of his principal sources was Edin, university-educated in Sarajevo, who’d returned to Goražde during the ramp-up of the disaster to be with his parents. He spoke with many Serbs, both friends and strangers, trying to find out what was going on. They pretty much uniformly believed the propaganda that the Muslims planed to kill all the Serbs and Croats to create a Muslim-only state. (The only actual plan was Karadžić’s and Milošević’s to “cleanse” Bosnia of its Muslim population, as demonstrated in part by the massacre of ca. 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica).
Edin also talked with 2 Serb brothers who lived 3 houses down from Edin’s parents. They were pessimistic about being able to do anything except endure, because “nobody listens, the orders all come from above”. They suggested that Edin and his parents move in with them, since they’d fully stockpiled necessities in the cellar, but admitted that it would be even better for them if they could move somewhere else because Goražde, being surrounded and overlooked by Serbian artillery batteries across the river, was no longer safe for Muslims.
Clarissa Ward is the new up and coming Amanpour.
Reblogged this on Worldtruth.
“Journalism under capitalism is essentially just advertising. ” Rightly said, so true!
I paraphrase from Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, “We can only print what our advertisers (sponsors/owners) will pay for…”
In this lies the truth about much of journalism and the MSM.
All the isms from the same hidden hands hast arisen, designed to create mental schism and divide and rule derision.
To wit, ” The press should be not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, but also a collective organizer of the masses”, not John “faked death” Lennon, but close enough.
Chris A Man pour, the tranny fake “news” casters, in their thousands, of FTM & MTF deceit art they masters.
How totalitarian and dogmatic dystopians we have become in the west. You know theythe masters of the universe are loosing grip on their power. The MSM lies are getting bigger. Last week Newsweek(liesweek) Had an article blamimg the Boston bombing on the Russian Federation. If I do recall the GRU had warned the FBI 2 years in advance about the dubious brothers.
Perhaps they are not ‘bigger’ so much as obviously made up – but asserted for compliance and conformity of speech and behaviour in. Their Media led – but systematic compliance is the measure of the presumption of power that no longer has to pretend to align in anything true – because it decides what is ‘true’ and enforces or aligns penalty for non-compliance.
This sort of thing used to be assigned the divine right of kings – but is also – “because I say so! And I have the stick!” The nature of the stick is the power of deceit given power of allegiance. All who try to defeat it, become it. To merely oppose turns out to be made an asset of.
Does a world of agreement to live a world of competing lies become subverted by master liars?
Author and former CIA agent Robert Baer said the brothers did not act alone. He’s right. Their uncle (Ruslan) was a contractor connected to Halliburton as well as the son-in law of (supposedly retired) CIA man Graham E. Fuller, the same Graham E. Fuller who is responsible for the getting Fethullah Gulen into the country and set up in his Saylorsburg, PA compound. (“Uncle Ruslan” who for a short time became a media darling (especially of CNN) even lived in Graham Fuller’s house for a year in Maryland.) And, yes, the same Gulen who has set up madrassas in states throughout the country, partially at tax-payer expense. (By why would US Americans care about that? They love throwing their money away to dubious Muslim clerics, as much as they love throwing it away on the apartheid regime of Israel. And, yes, the same Gulen who attempted the coup against Erdogan on our behalf. Anyone who thinks the CIA had nothing to do the Boston bombing is simply incredibly naive. But, I keep forgetting that this pretty well describes most US Americans.
Do you have a link to that article in Newsweek?
When Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher could get hanged at Nuremburg in 1946 for crimes against humanity, I wonder, why not the likes of Amanpour? Guess history is written by the winning side.
Christiane Amanpour Queen of Fake News character is very similar to the dangerous-mentally-sick and crazy-Hillary.
Reblogged this on Floating-voter.
I have always despised this bitch, the pathological liar… This-psychopath was reporting notorious lies against Serbs in Kosovo… She is married to a zionist-kazarian – Rubin (forgot the bastard name).
The credit to most of Christine Amanpour goes to her Zionist Jew husband who is known to have close link with Israel Lobby. James Philip Rubin is an Israel Hasbra Committee staffer. He is author of a 2001 ‘Foreign Policy Paper’. In the paper the creep recommended that the US would impose regime change by supplying arms to anti-Assad rebels, but without US troops, and that Russia wouldn’t dare oppose America – that the new US-backed Syrian government would abandon ties with Iran, turn against Hizbullah, and potentially negotiate a peace settlement with Israel, while the rest of the Arab world cheers America as fighting for their people.
https://rehmat1.com/2016/09/24/30-israeli-and-other-top-foreign-agents-killed-in-syria/
The credit for her egregious “reporting” on the breakup/destruction of Yugoslavia goes to Amanpour herself, as she was at it for almost a whole decade before marrying Rubin in 1998. If we held our media responsible for their actions, she’d be tried as a war criminal in her own right.
By contrast, (regards law applying to speech) note the recent trial and conviction of Michelle Carter which made a public witch-hunt (teaching example) for an act only implicated by one of various grief-stricken and confused texts made 2 months after another chose to end their life after using threat of such to manipulate Michelle over a period of time.
The skeletons in that cupboard include; the psycho-pharming delusion that induces the brain-imbalances it claims to treat or rather ‘manage’; family vendetta – the DA is related to the deceased – and personal gain; and he has just been nominated for prestigious promotion as a direct result of a high profile public ‘victory’.
This is the way the world works until ‘manipulative and manipulator’ wake to genuine relationship, growing sane choices with practical outcomes that don’t attract ‘medication’, whose generally destructive effects open pathways for power seeking to make false witness under appeals to hate, to gratify its own vendetta and self-aggrandizement.
But everyone has to play their part. Thought and speech crime is being magnified for mob-backed demonisation – by those who seek to use it for their own agenda. This is nothing new. But the interlocking interests of the power to protect the lie, take on new dimensions with extended technological abilities.
The break up of the former Yugoslavia was by geo-political design and various assets and proxies were activated to bring it about – at whatever level of ‘need to know’ within the actual agenda – which is to say they need to NOT know they are being used by means of mind-capture fitted to their personal sense of importance – which is only reinforced or consolidated by meeting personal attack from those assigned enemy status. Hate HAS to have an enemy or an object of its affliction to maintain itself as an ‘identity’ under threat, justifying attack by force and deceit.
Worship of grievance unites the world… in subjection – under the illusion it gives power.
I remember seeing this vile bitch shedding gallons of tears over the fake White Helmet atrocity videos, like Trump’s “beautiful little baybees.” Needless to say, they don’t have any “beautiful little baybees” in Yemen, Gaza, Mosul, Raqqa or Hebron.
They are properly called presstitutes .
https://jefffenske.wordpress.com/2015/12/17/n-y-times-editor-john-swinton-all-journalists-are-presstitutes-there-is-no-such-thing-as-an-independent-press-not-one-of-you-dare-write-your-honest-opinions-if-you-did-you/
Self delusion is an ugly, ugly, ugly trait.
Yes. Feeding the self righteous hypocrisy … “oh uncle Sam, you’ve done it again!”.
If you say so! But is self-delusion not pervasive and systemic in all manner of ways?
We assign degrees of truth to different behaviours and assertions – but is a false foundation not simply… false?
And the primary correction, the restoring of true currency of communication?
Is the ‘self-delusion’ the phishing of mind to align in defence (attack) against itself unknowing?
And in particular – to see, judge and attack the ‘other’ for the very thing I am doing but completely unwilling and unable to see?
I seek to consider this without moral authority over another – by insinuation or implication – but in moral integrity of self – which cannot be a mere presentation, asserted and defended, but a congruency of thought, word and deed.
Entanglement in dreams that turn to nightmare from which one cant escape one’s own convictions are inversions, reversals and distortions of the self that can behold and know that it is Good.
The attempt to GET RID of the hated is the sense of being threatened and attacked by it.
That mind-set – insofar as we click into in it – is a delusory attempt to split off from and assert over or defend against. Here is ‘divide and rule’ – yet is it rule ‘over’ or fear’s illusion? If conformity and compliance is mandatory – what life or truth can be shared and known?
I don’t argue that the distortions of our self and world are ugly – but that looking at them in order to break the spell of blind reaction in fear or rage – opens the awareness and desire in which to see differently – rather than persisting in attempts to escape that actually wind up or reinforce the original error.
And to live this in desire for a truly common and just law of true account – where discernment of the spirit or purpose operates to free us from being phished by forms of assigned or set ‘meanings’. For uniqueness is the signature of true being and that means the present is not defined by the past excepting the insistence that because something takes the same form it must be the same thing.
Exclusion filters, rules and defences operate automatically to protect against “known” irritants or evils and limit Everything to serve a bubble reality. But the nature of the lie is to use this both to smear and invalidate the true witness AND to hide in the forms of the righteous insight, recognition or understanding (ideology and belief) as a masked intent. As if insight is a personal possession and not the willingness to rest from focusing in out-sight and listen or receive from a wholeness of being – that we tend to call ‘within’ – but it is not within the frame of our thinking.
How to use the false witness and deceits of the world (of self-delusion) to illuminate truth for the willingness to receive and share in it? Not in the frame the deceit sets – which is well represented as a phishing screen that ‘fits’ and therefore ‘targets’ our trigger into ‘blind’ or un-mindful reaction. It isn’t the reaction that makes guilty so much as the inner beliefs the reaction testifies to. If we catch ourselves we can release reaction and ‘feel’ for a current relationship – or alignment in presence – before taking action or making decision.
I cannot – nor would I want to – make anyone else’s choices for them or judge them for their current or past choices. But I can become more open and honest within myself as to choices I make knowingly or by habitual and conditioned reaction – that are lost from choice until I own them within a desire to be free of pain instead of owning them in a guilt that immediately hides from awareness in complexity, confusion and conflation of truth with fear-dictated illusion.
“Forgive then Father for they know not what they do” applies not in ‘the world’ so much as within myself. Blind-hate knows not it’s ‘maker’ or foundational belief – nor the true being beneath the distortion of that belief.
Nor that it is hate – for hate seeks escape in forms of righteousness or mutually reinforced ‘justifictions’.
But hate is not escaped by using it.
The war of conquest has no regard for (awareness of) truth excepting its distortion or fabrication. Broad spectrum dominance means using every means of influence to ‘win’. The war will draw upon various narrative justifications that de-humanize and break off the channel of communication such as not to be able to listen – but only to gather intel and use it to strategise, gain assets, generate masking strategies and defence and denial capabilities.
How much of our moral outrage is an attempt to guilt others into changing behaviour or focus hatred on them in desire for vengeance?
What are the characteristics of those who align in the embodiment of hate as power?
This is open ended – because merely to say they are psychopaths or scum is a complete dead end in which we justify dehumanising them and assign them as a target for hate.
The energetic communicates by reaction. So what are the narratives actually driving conquest? And what is the soil in which such stories take hold as assertive identity and probably an irrevocable investment.
I am not suggesting pitying anyone or justifying anyone – but rather opening awareness within myself/ourselves to also watch our own emotional reactions.
False witness recognized as such should no longer be ‘parleyed with’. But you can and are illuminating something of the nature and cost of such acts and I feel that is enough. When you run your own personal frustrations with the story – it plays into being seen as seeking emotional reinforcement for focussing hate on the person rather than extending illumination upon the nature of false communication and consequence.
I understand that you feel what you feel. I do not seek to invalidate your feelings, but rather to feel what you feel and allow it into a different quality than vengeance.
If we merely sing to our ‘choir’, we will not open communication with those who are somewhat willing to explore beyond their official narrative beliefs.
No one so cruel as humans – nor so loving.
Would we do unto ourself what we do unto others?
At some level – I say yes – for there is deep self-hate even within our own heart.
If this world is a hell, is it because fear keeps us split, terror from rage? In heart break and powerlessness – that fuel rage and terror?
If we are identified with a lie – what other defence have we but to lie and to do so in such a way as to cover and divert from true? The sense of oneself as evil or unworthy of existence is a drive to hide, cover and mask in semblance of power – and so align in and of that which seems power because it was first experienced as the power that denied, deprived and rendered a dissonance of being. The world is both a human quality of exploration and experience and a masking cover story for Self-evasion as ‘self-survival’.
Words as weapons teach only war. But a true word teaches that deceits are not a true basis to act from or react to – not just in the what of their meaning – but in the way that aligns context and content as one.
Disinfo is the ‘post truth’ narrative – but it isn’t post truth – it is simply untruth and what is true is here to be given witness as I am truly moved – and not as I am baited to react – though that also is feedback for me to own and consider.
No matter how much you want to, please consider finding other ways to convey your point than personal attack.
One of the most insightful/wise comments that i have ever read. Thank you sincerely for your astute postings binra. You never disappoint. Keep up the great work. Inspirational indeed. Sh!ne on.
‘The energetic communicates by reaction’
The first reaction is anger, hence the name calling (especially for the less articulate)
Then comes letters, comments, street protest, poems, songs, opting out of consumerism, Veganism, joining activist groups, planting trees etc etc.
Done that, been there and I’m still gonna call a spade a spade.
Their propaganda is far more insidious.
Inside-e-us.
If anger drives you – then no matter the forms it takes – it is still negatively defined. The positive face may mask over the drive – but it will come out in any and every triggered reaction because it remains un-owned.
The nature of deceit is to divide you from yourself and lock you into a fear-defined identity with carrot and stick.
In fear and confusion choices are made without consciousness – though they still operate consciousness in terms of conditioned interpretations and reactions. Such consciousness runs blind because it is defended against change excepting to use it to ‘survive’ in the terms of its sense of power and protective abilities. It is perhaps easy to see that this applies to those psychopaths – but less so the many who align knowing or not – in supporting them, giving energy, attention and validity – even in reaction and opposition.
Part of my sense is that there are some who become aware of the nature of the psychic-emotional underpinnings to the consensual experience of the world – but are still orientated in using insight as a lever and a weapon (PR mind-or narrative control) to change the world by capturing or dominating the mind that dreams the world (defines it). The basic premise of power struggle is the attempt to change the symptoms – as if they are the cause of threat. But the deceit within the template is to keep true cause hidden so as to persist indefinitely in struggle as the ‘management and plunder of’ the nurtured symptoms.
Perpetual war is ‘The Economy’. Or rather is the usurping of true worth and wealth by a system of self-inflation leading to entrapment in self deceits that deliver unto ever more debt-sacrifice. The Economic hit-man says deliver your Own unto evil and save yourself – or suffer evil consequence. It may start out with self-inflating sweet deals and privileges – but it boils down to being owned.
This is writ large in world events – but is true of every one in their abiding with self-integrity instead of working to maintain the presentation of having it – (masking the lie).
If the movement is not truly a movement in being – it becomes a subverted or controlled ‘opposition’. When the mind runs ‘ahead’ its supply lines are switched and it runs the thing it believes it works against – but in different forms. The deceiver is the idea of masking hidden intent under or within forms of accepted meaning.
The forms are not the cause – but our minds are deeply conditioned to react as if they were. A true reception is an undistorted signal. Working on distortions as truth is foolish – particularly when the signal is being intercepted and filtered by ‘narrative control’ of vastly inflated negative agendas – like the Pharma and Energy Corps and the Millitary Industrial complex – that thrive upon destruction – and the banks that thrive upon debt.
By all means live the life that is yours to uncover and share – but don’t let its meaning be gotten from its effect or lack thereof on whether or not others make choices that have destructive outcomes. There IS change in the world of a different order – but the fixation in conflict will not see it or recognize it. You be the change because it is the true of you and not to manipulate an outcome in order to validates the invalid. Such is the nature of operating from a self invalidating or self-negative sense of self and world. But it does not see its own premise – excepting in terms of judging and blaming the ‘other’.