But given that most people get their news either from corporately
owned newspapers or from corporate radio and TV stations, it doesn't
really matter what I or other journalists critical of the Establishment
write because it won't appear in the corporate media. Since most
Americans, unlike most Chinese people, assume that they live in a
society with a free press and no censorship or control of information,
they don't even bother to look beyond the information that is spoon-fed
to them by corporate media sources.
The result is that in my experience I have found peasants in rural
Jiangsu or Anhwei Province to in many cases be better informed about
their own country and the world than are typical American suburbanites.
Certainly if an American wants to be informed, all the information she
or he could want is available, but one has to be first of all aware
that one isn't getting certain information via the obvious sources, and
then one has to want to get it, and make the effort to find it. For
most Americans, all three of these elements are missing.
The list of censored stories and issues in the US, about which the
American public knows almost nothing is staggering, going well beyond
just the use of nasty weapons.
Do Americans know, for instance, that all the other modern western
Democracies in the world have some form of national health care "either
a state-run system like that in the UK or a single-payer model like
that in Canada, or some hybrid like they have in France or
Switzerland "and that in all those countries, the systems are so popular
that they have survived decades of conservative governments? No. Our
corporate media instead report on the crank critics of those systems
and allow us to believe they are hated by their citizens.
Do Americans know that the US no longer boasts the best standard of
living in the world "or even close? No. Because the American media
continue to portray the US as "number one.
Do Americans know that Al Qaeda was actually a creation of the CIA?
No. This important bit of information doesn't get mentioned in the US
media, which always starts the organization's history at 1988, when it
got its name, when actually, its early origins date to the arming of
the mujahadeen by the CIA and the CIA-linked Pakistani intelligence
service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Agency, in the late 1970s and
early 1980s, when the US wanted to create and support resistance to the
Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
And of course, we rarely get to see the slaughter of women and
children that our beloved soldier "heroes are conducting in Iraq and
Afghanistan in our name.
No censorship in America?
Mr. President, please. You may fool us, but at least don't insult the intelligence of your Chinese audience.
____________________
DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. He spent seven
years in China and Hong Kong and Taiwan as a Fulbright journalism
professor and a correspondent for Businessweek magazine. He is author,
most recently, of "The Case for Impeachment (St. Martin's Press, 2006)
and is the winner of a Project Censored award. His work is available at
www.thiscantbehappening.net
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