The Guardian, 10 June 2014
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Behind
NATO's propaganda outlet for progressives - The Guardian's board members
by
tortilla con sal, 3 July 2013
In this conversation Jorge and
toni discuss the underlying reality over which the revelations by
Edward Snowden have been laid to camouflage the ground people think
they are covering.
For anyone foolish enough to
believe that the revelations of Edward Snowden are not carefully
managed by the US-Anglo oligarchy, pay attention please to the
information below about the Guardian Media Group board members and the
board members of the Scott Trust which owns Guardian Media Group.
It is completely disingenuous
for anyone to suggest that the Guardian reports on Edward Snowden's
revelations are much more than a carefully managed propaganda
exercise deployed in the internal power struggle of the
US-Anglo elite about how best to manage their declining global power
and influence.
Likewise, it is absurd to
suggest that the Guardian editors are implementing a "publish and be
damned" policy, as Guardian writer Glenn Greenwald has suggested, when
it is inconceivable that their editorial policy on publishing Edward
Snowden's material will not have been closely coordinated on the basis
of the Board's relations with colleagues in the British government, in
British intelligence and in the US-Anglo corporate sector.
The most likely outcome is that
the Guardian and its fellow NATO propaganda outlet the Washington Post
will wear Edward Snowden like a pair of shoes to get to where they want
to go and then dump him the way they did Julian Assange.
go to the original link
to listen to the podcast:
http://www.tortillaconsal.com/albared/node/2176
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Notes
on the Guardian Media Group and Scott Trust boards based on information
from their respective web sites :
* the Chair of the Board of the
Guardian Media Group, the company that runs the Guardian, is Dame
Amelia Fawcett CBE and Dame Commander OBE, former head of Morgan
Stanley's banking business in Europe.
* the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, is a governor of the
Ditchley Foundation a non-profit founded
"to promote international understanding and relations, especially
Anglo-American relations". Rusbridger, supporter of mass-murdering NATO
aggression against Serbia, Libya and Syria, hobknobs with fellow
Ditchley Foundation war-mongers David Cameron, John Major, Lord George
Robertson, Malcolm Rifkind, Jack Straw, Lord Carrington, Peter
Mandelson and dozens of other acolytes of the NATO war machine
also on the board are
* Andrew Miller, previously
with Pepsico and Procter & Gamble.
* Neil Berkett, chief executive officer of Virgin Media, previously
with Lloyds TSB plc (UK), Prudential Assurance Company Ltd UK, St
George Bank, Eastwest Airlines Australia and ICL Australia.
* Ronan Dunne chief executive officer of Telefónica UK Ltd
(O2) also a member of the Telefónica Europe plc board and
chairman of Tesco Mobile, previously with Banque Nationale de Paris plc.
* Judy Gibbons, formerly corporate vice-president of MSN
Global Sales & Marketing at Microsoft.
* Brent Hoberman, a Young Global Leader for the World Economic Forum
and a UK Business Trade Ambassador.
* Nigel Morris, chief executive officer of Aegis Media Americas and
Aegis Media EMEA and a speaker at the World Economic Forum.
* John Paton, chief executive officer of Digital First Media also a
member of the Board of Advisors for the City University of New
York Graduate School of Journalism and a member of the board of
directors of El Pais.
* the previous Guardian Media Group CEO Carolyn McCall, formerly
non-executive director of Lloyd's Banking Group and of the Tesco
supermarket chain, is now CEO of the Easyjet airline
The Guardian is owned by the
Scott Trust, on whose board in recent years have figured
* Dame Liz Forgan DBE, former
managing director of BBC network radio
* Anthony Salz, executive vice-chariman of Rothschild's Bank
*Jonathan Scott, Ambac Assurance UK, a director of KPMG Corporate
Finance and of the global corporate financial giant SBC Warburg
So when Gleen Greenwald announces via Skype to the cheers of a US
socialist conference his faith in the integrity of the Guardian's
senior editors what one is witnessing seems to be the abandonment by a
broad sector of the North American neocolonial Left of any vestigial
anti-imperialist common sense they may once have had
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Reflections
on the category "journalism" and the revelations by Edward Snowden
by
tortilla con sal, 7 July 2013
The choices for Edward Snowden have narrowed to either returning home
to the United States on whatever may be the most favourable terms he
can negotiate, or taking up one of the offers of asylum from various
Latin American governments on the terms those governments may require
under their domestic legislation and under aggressive US and European
government pressure. In that context, this video on the Guardian web
site gives a very useful insight into the corporate pscychology of the
European and North American imperialist news media.
Charlie
Rose is a liberal US media personality whose current affairs interviews
give his interviewees, in this case senior Guardian editors, the chance
to discuss their positions on whatever may be the issue of the day.
video:
Charlie
Rose - Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson
The video makes categorically
clear the deep and close coordination between the Guardian's senior
editorial staff and the US and British government and intelligence
establishments. It makes clear the commercial, corporate"scoop"
rationale for the Guardian's handling of the material made available by
Edward Snowden. It makes clear the political damage control aspect of
that perception management.
At one point, Guardian UK
editor Alan Rusbridger asserts that the Guardian is independent,
skimming over the fundamental question : What is the class commitment
of the Guardian editorial team, subject as they are to the control and
influence of their
own board and the board of the Scott Trust,
sole owner of the Guardian? What variety of independence does
Alan Rusbridger invoke, given that undeniable class reality?
Very, very clearly, the senior
Guardian editors are profoundly committed to the defence of NATO, of
Western corporate capitalism and the imperialist structures
of dominance that sustain that system through the infamous modalities
of double-edged aid and odious debt. They defend that system
despite its egregious failure and its massive transfer of
wealth to the NATO countries' corporate financial elites.
That is why the Guardian's
editorial policy has supported NATO country aggression, for example,
against Serbia, Ivory Coast, Libya and now Syria. Guardian editorial
policy has been consistently hostile and deeply dishonest, to cite the
most obvious cases, to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, to Hugo Chavez and
Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, to Rafael Correa in Ecuador and to Evo
Morales in Bolivia, to the FARC in Colombia and to the anti-Zionist
Resistance axis in Palestine, Lebanon and Syria.
On both Libya and Syria, the
Guardian has spread baseless propaganda lies in support of the NATO
propaganda and military aggression against those countries' legitimate
governments. So the variety of independence espoused by Alan
Rusbridger and his colleagues is one characterized unsurprisingly by an
absolute determination to defend their class interests as a privileged
caste comfortably ensconced in the NATO country ancien regime. All too
self-evident is the very understandable "don't shit where you
eat" rationality of the Guardian's senior editors.
Their class is the intellectual
managerial class controlling all corporate and most alternative
intellectual production of news and entertainment in North America and
Europe. In this respect, Glenn Greenwald's remarks are relevant because
he too insists on the moral dimension of the matter. Most probably, he
does so because that is more comfortable and reassuring from his point
of view than to look at the class dimension of the Guardian's handling
of the revelations by Edward Snowden. He writes :
"I've
been continuously amazed by how intrepid, fearless and committed the
Guardian's editors have been in reporting these NSA stories as
effectively and aggressively as possible. They have never flinched in
reporting these stories, have spared no expense in pursuing them, have
refused to allow vague and baseless government assertions to suppress
any of the newsworthy revelations..... they deserve a lot of credit for
the impact these stories have had....... Rather than sit on such a
newsworthy story - especially at a time when Latin America, for
several reasons,
is so focused on these revelations - they were enthused about my
partnering with O Globo, where it could produce the most impact. In
other words, they sacrificed short-term competitive advantage for the
sake of the story by encouraging me to write this story with O Globo."
(Full article link : http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/07/nsa-brazilians-globo...)
This version is somewhat
contradicted by the frank admission by senior Guardian editors in their
interview with Charlie Rose of close coordination with the US
and British authorities. In any case, few would disagree that most
Guardian staff are good, decent people trying to do their best
conscientiously by their own ideological lights. Of course they are.
The same is true of innumerable functionaries working away in the NATO
countries' diverse institutional framework, both governmental and
non-governmental. But they are doing so in a global class context and
an imperialist structure that renders all their best efforts grist to
the global NATO and corporate capitalist mill of domination and
oppression.
Edward Snowden's revelations
serve above all to confirm detail rather than to reveal much that is
decisively new. Back in the 1970s, Guardian and New Statesman writer
Duncan Campbell' s Tinkerbell revelations about Britain's GCHQ
surveillance system in large part set the modern European precedent for
contemporary whistleblowers like William Binney, Thomas Drake and now
Edward Snowden. One is entitled to ask why the Guardian's coverage of
the revelations by Thomas Drake and by William Binney was so muted. A
legitimate answer may well be that the NATO country elites were able to
contain those revelations more easily than those being made now by
Edward Snowden.
Let's look at the Guardian's
joint publication with O Globo. O Globo is a national corporate owned
conservative Brazilian media outlet. So politically, the publication of
some revelations in Brazil's O Globo follows the self-same
pattern of damage control and perception management as publication of
some of Edward Snowden's revelations in the Guardian or the Washington
Post. The Guardian itself suffers no commercial loss because it does
not have a Portuguese edition. On the contrary, it accrues somewhat
questionable moral prestige by sharing what has become Snowden's media
carrion with circling corporate scavengers like O Globo.
So from that point of view,
Glenn Greenwald's attempt to accrue further moral bonus points on that
score for the Guardian falls flat. One might equally well interpret the
move to publish in O Globo as a savvy attempt to further extend the
Guardian's and the Washington Post's perception management of Edward
Snowden's revelations into Latin America. There is little difference in
this case from the joint perception management of the Wikileaks
revelations which were also handled by the Guardian along with fellow
centre-right media like the New York Times, Le Monde. Der Spiegel and
so on.
Of course, supporters of those
media would reject the "centre-right" label, because their self-image
is one of being politically and socially liberal, social
democrat, progressive or even radical. But things only look that way as
a result of forty years of accommodation to the rolling back of the
radical, subversive tide of the 1960s, of seeking to subvert the Cuban
and Libyan and other revolutions, of containing the Soviet
Union and China, of consolidating the Zionist entity in Palestine and,
lately, smearing the governments of Venezuela and Iran, in all of which
the Guardian has been an enthusiastic collaborator one way or another.
For
any one committed to anti-imperialism who has lived for any time
outside the NATO country system of mind control with its strictly
enforced categories of admissible dissent and inadmissible extremism,
the phenomenon of the Guardian's damage control management of Edward
Snowden's revelations offers nothing new. Most people who have written
from an anti-imperialist position for any length of time are long
accustomed to the marginalization and smear campaigns applied against
them by the NATO country intellectual production apparatus and its
alternative media counterparts.
One
way this apparatus excludes ordinary people - the people whose
interests they falsely purport to champion - is by the erection of
production categores like "journalist" or "academic" or
"expert/analyst/commentator". If one fails to satisfy the formal
corporate capitalist prerequisites for such categories one's opinions
and views don't count. Certainly, anti-imperialist dissenting views are
either systematically excluded or relegated to the status of
ineffectual comment.
In
fact, people outside those categories of intellectual production may
have incomparably more insight, knowledge and experience of a given
country or issue than the formally accredited "journalists",
"academics" or "experts/analysts/commentators". Our experience at
Tortilla con Sal has been very much along these lines. We have
consistently seen woeful ignorance, downright falsehoods and
disingenuous omission in the intellectual production of journalists
covering Nicaragua and the ALBA countries in all the main NATO country
news media we have read and in most of the alternative media.
For
us, it was coverage of Nicaragua's 2008 municipal elections that made
us realize how comprehensively pernicious NATO country intellectual
production is, across the board. The false anti-Sandinista reporting on
those elections and their sequel was soon followed up by the completely
skewed reporting of the Zionist attack on Gaza over Chistmas of
2008 and, subsequently, the protests around Iran's elections
in 2009. But even this ignoble phase was surpassed in infamy
by the NATO countries' corporate and alternative media coverage of the
wars against the Ivory Coast, against Libya and now against Syria.
Not
only editors and journalists, materially contracted to and
intellectually co-opted by their managers and their boards of directors
function in terms of loyalty to their class. Academics like Noam
Chomsky and Gilbert Achcar and Santiago Alba Rico, alternative media
gurus like Ignacio Ramonet, anti-system figures like Al Giordano and
Amy Goodman, all alike joined with their corporate counterparts in
acceptance and even celebration of NATO's catastrophic destruction of
Libya. Their class solidarity with their NATO media counterparts was
truly impressive.
The
Libyan war made clearer than ever before the depth and reach of the
global psychological war waged by the NATO country elites against
humanity's impoverished majority. In that world propaganda war, as the
Charlie Rose interview shows, centre-right NATO-loyalist social
democrats work hard to defend their class interests. Against them and
their more reactionary colleagues are ranged the State media of NATO
target countries and also a broad range of committed but informal
anti-imperialist media outlets.
In
our case at Tortilla con Sal, we are proud of our committment to the
Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional. We do our best
through our intellectual production to counteract largely fact-free
coverage of Nicaragua and the other ALBA countries by corporate NATO
country media, their local regional accomplices and their
accomplices among the North American and European neocolonial Left.
This may or may not satisfy conventional criteria for journalism. If
the conventional example of the Guardian's senior editors is anything
to go by, perhaps we should be relieved that it might not.
We
hope Edward Snowden makes it to safety and avoids the brutal repression
prepared for him by the US authorities. We think his revelations are
important in the short term because they give confirmation of what was
already widely known about NATO country global surveillance abuses. But
what may be far more important in the medium and long term is the
further confirmation we are now finding of the intimate collusion by
major NATO news and entertainment media with their countries'
governmental and corporate structures. They are all struggling to
manage as effectively as possible their relentless, albeit relative,
global decline.
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