'Lying for the Paycheck': Money Sways Public Opinion, Laughs at Democracy
23:01 GMT 18.06.2024 (Updated: 23:42 GMT 18.06.2024)
© AP Photo / Mark Lennihan
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A Harris Poll report published in February showed that a majority (70%) of Americans want to push Ukraine toward a negotiated peace deal with Russia, even as Western media seems prepared to continue beating their war drums.
An article published in Pearls and Irritations claims that US presidential elections are rigged because mainstream political opinion is shaped by the powerful and wealthy who “control the sources from which Americans have been trained to get their information”, writes Caitlin Johnstone, the author of the article.
“So long as the rich and powerful can manipulate public opinion at mass scale through the corporate media, through Hollywood, and through Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, they can rig elections however they want,” she adds.
On Monday, Steve Poikonen, the host of AM Wake Up and Slow News Day joined Sputnik’s The Critical Hour to discuss Johnstone’s article.
“[Propaganda during the Nazi regime] would've never been as effective were it not for the intelligentsia and the chattering class and academia reinforcing it over and over and over,” Poikonen suggested. “So it's kind of a merger of these things that allows for complete and total narrative control. What Caitlin is talking about is an international conglomerate of people who don't like us, and they have not liked us generationally for a very, very, very long time.”
“If you're going to discuss how you may want to extricate yourself from some of it, definitely firing most of the media model is where you would start. These people have proven themselves to be liars. They've proven themselves to be lying for the paycheck. They've proven themselves to be bad at it. It is impossible for me to see how, other than a money laundering operation, any of the major media outlets are still operating right now,” Sputnik’s guest said.
Johnstone writes that even with a well functioning voting system and no money in politics, capitalism will always allow the wealthy the ability to rig elections by manipulating public opinion. And Sputnik’s Garland Nixon suggested that democracy does not exist when those who vote aren’t informed.
“George Carlin said it best,” Poikonen noted. “Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers - people who are just smart enough to run the machine and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.”
“And that's what the American education system - modeled on the Prussian education system - has been about from about the time Rockefeller had his first textbook printed,” he added.
“That was the plan, the deliberate dumbing down and oversaturation with counter reinforcing propaganda, which has become in the era of cable news, certainly now in the digital age, a 24-hour a day, seven day a week onslaught [on] our ability to think critically or rationally about any given situation,” the show’s guest said.
French Army General Peirre Schill suggested in an interview posted on Sunday that the Russia-Ukraine conflict has proven the flow of wartime information must be controlled “to influence both national and international public opinion,” RT reported.
“The army plays a crucial role in the information domain,” Schill said. “Without the capacity to convince and to counter adverse influence, any military engagement can fail. The emergence of social networks has reinforced this notion and has significantly accelerated the dissemination of information, whether true or false, while increasing its volume, reach and resonance.”
France deployed more than 500 troops to assist Ukraine just four days after the conflict first began. Those forces have grown to over 1,000 soldiers, and aid from France now includes an air defense detachment and a forward command element, RT reported citing Schill.
“We are now going to present General Schill to the rest of the French community, whereupon he's going to tell them how he is going to cage all information and let out the little bits that make him and his buddies and their funders look like good people,” Poikonen said sarcastically.
“[They try] if at all possible to criminalize any other opinion that may not reinforce [their view]. And I think that's more or less the crux of what General Schill was getting at, too. They were certainly trying to find some mechanisms by which to reinforce their displeasure at the extreme amount of 'Russian disinformation' that has been leaking into the good French people's ears and eyeballs simply by changing the channel,” he added.
Despite a New York jury verdict convicting former President Donald Trump of 34 counts in his hush-money trial, Trump holds a slight edge in public polls and has a greater chance of winning this year’s presidential election than the previous one, The Washington Post reported in May. However, this year’s presidential election has come to be known as the election “most Americans don’t want”. Sputnik’s Wilmer Leon noted the common adage that the “least of two evils is still evil”.
“That's exactly what it is. People are seeking reinforcement rather than any sort of enlightenment. They're seeking entertainment when they need to be informed. The landscape that we have for the media is set up for that. That's what cable was and is,” said Poikonen. “It's entertainment that brings you some sort of value and the validation and reinforcement that you're seeking. But it's not, nor will it ever be actual news.”
