This article was originally published as a free update to RPI subscribers. Subscribe here.
I got cancelled. It’s not for anything I said, but for what I might have said. I might have told the truth about the Biden Administration’s insane push to war over Ukraine to an American audience steeped in mainstream media gaslighting. I might have mentioned that there is zero US national interest in who governs Ukraine. This crook or that one…who cares?
Let me back up a bit. Earlier today I got a message from the gentleman who helps us out with media bookings. A nationwide news outlet is looking for someone to do six minutes live on Russian President Putin’s remarks about the US response to a Russian security proposal, he wrote. Was I interested?
Washington and its obedient lapdog press have been pushing war with Russia over Ukraine for weeks and I thought I might be able to provide just a couple of gentle counter-points to the narrative. While Newsy, the requester, is not a network I was familiar with, it is owned by the E. W. Scripps Company, which is a billion dollar media organization. So I said “yes.”
The hit time was coming up. I set up the camera and the lighting and changed out of my gym clothes. And waited.
And waited.
At the last minute a call came in from our PR guy. He sounded a bit apologetic. “Well, here’s the thing, they said they don’t want anything ‘political’ so they are cancelling the segment.”
“Are they cancelling the story, or just cancelling me as a guest?” I asked.
“Well,” he said, “all the news outlets are being really weird right now about the Russia thing and they don’t seem interested in a ‘pro-freedom’ message.”
Shocker! (Not).
That exchange was a fascinating bit of insight into how the media manipulates the message rather than provides information for the consumer. They don’t tell you what’s going on: they tell you what to think about what is going on.
So somewhere in that approximately ten minutes between my accepting the media request and the cancellation some alarm bells must have gone off somewhere. “We CAN’T have anyone like THAT on our network! They’re the WRONG type of people!”
So Americans will never hear anyone tell them that the “massing Russian troops” are actually inside of Russia’s borders. And that the real “massing” is US and UK governments sending massive weapons shipments to Ukraine. Another half-billion dollars in weapons – including missiles – was approved by the US government, and US and UK military are on the ground helping train Ukrainians how best to use those weapons to kill Russians.
No one will ever tell their viewers that it is absurdly unlikely that the Russian military will launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine because it would make absolutely no sense. One does not need be a Putin apologist to recognize that Russian foreign policy is far more conservative than the endless interventionism that characterizes US foreign policy.
When a (likely US-backed) coup was launched in strategically critical Kazakhstan last month, Putin responded to a request for military assistance from its CSTO ally and sent peacekeepers. They were gone within a week. Compare that to the 20 year US occupation of Afghanistan and the near-20 year US military presence in Iraq. And let’s not talk about the continued illegal US military presence on sovereign Syrian territory.
We’ve got at least 750 military bases overseas…how many do the Russians have?
Biden last Friday told Ukrainian President Zelensky to “take cover” because the Russians were about to “sack Kiev” any minute. No one even asked: what would they do with it once they owned it? Who wants Kiev? Even Zelensky had to tell Biden to take his meds. Of course it was a bogus tip. Nothing happened.
No Newsy viewer will hear anyone draw this analogy: What if the shoe was on the other foot? What if an extremely hostile Mexico, which not long ago had an anti-US regime in power and armed to the hilt by China, hosted Chinese troops training Mexicans how to re-take California and Texas? Washington wouldn’t move a couple of troops around inside the US?
And if they did, would it be “aggression”?
No one will hear anyone pointing out that the Biden Administration – with plenty of hawkish Republicans in tow – is pursuing a policy that is in no way in America’s national interest, that in no way makes any sense, and that could very well backfire and get millions of people killed for nothing. No one will hear anyone tell them the truth: there are few things that matter less to the US and its security than who governs Ukraine.
“Ah,” I told our PR person, “I see how it is. It’s just like the run-up to war with Iraq, when the media didn’t want to have anyone on air saying that Saddam didn’t have WMDs and that attacking Iraq would be a foolish disaster.”
“Yep,” he said.
That way they can all in unison assure us when it all goes to hell that “nobody could have guessed it would turn out that way!”
This is the US media in a nutshell.
As an ironic postscript, no sooner had I pressed my shirt and prepped for my aborted Newsy appearance than I got a call from RT in Moscow eager to hear my take on the exact topic originally requested by Newsy. I would have told both outlets the same thing, but here in “free press” USA they didn’t want Americans to hear it.
Approved positions only. Freedom!
