A reliable New Zealand source tells me “I watched the NZ tv news for the first time in ages and the propaganda spigot was fully opened. If the words ‘hated’, ‘evil’, ‘despot’, ‘brutal’ mentioned along with ‘Gadaffi’, were a drinking game, I would have been blind drunk.”
The NZ tv news he watched came from the government-owned station. NZ media are highly concentrated. Media “reporting” like this is probably quite similar in Australia, Canada, Great Britain, and perhaps other NATO countries, although I have not studied this. How these common narratives of the empire propagate through the system is, I suspect, through a pervasive socialization, a common outlook and opinion that have been molded, selection of reporters, the promotion and reward systems, imitation and following of key reports, and money control. There is no official Ministry of Propaganda but the system replicates it.
Views that do not support the empire’s story lines are given short shrift, scorned, treated as oddball, or otherwise ignored and deprecated by the media organs that support the empire. My main point here is that this propaganda system is international in scope.
As in Orwell’s 1984, an enemy can become a friend and a friend can become an enemy overnight. People are fed contradictory story lines: A victory can be declared against Gaddafi, but in the next breath the people will be told that the West must soldier on because Libyan politics are unstable and intervention is required so that the place doesn’t become a hellhole of fighting interests. There are no stable guidelines of justice or natural law in any of this propaganda machinery. Instead, we are being instructed that the empire makes its own law through its power. We are being indoctrinated into the view that there are always new evil forces to be identified and combated in never ending wars and struggles.
The reporting within this propaganda system comes across as “natural,” commonplace, unruffled, acquiescent, and subservient. The empire’s powers are taken for granted. Such can be seen, for example, in the local (Tennessee) news report that Lew put up here just recently. This report is done in a casual, unexcited, matter-of-fact way, and yet it is reporting of massive civil rights violations. It even uses the term “random searches.” It encourages people to spy on one another and report “suspicious behavior.” It acts as if terrorism were an everyday event that requires constant vigilance. In other words, the empire’s constant war theme or narrative has gone domestic too.
