The Internet has been a blessing and has been certainly the most significant development thus far in the 21st Century. Bringing the truth to more people greatly assisted in the election of Barack Obama. But in case you don’t know who they are, Newsmax. com is not about news. It is about propaganda.
Newsmax.com and now a magazine called Newsmax, of probably 70,000 or 80,000 committed Neocons are not journalism in the sense we used to know it. This type of media is new. It began simultaneously with the ceding of the airwaves to major corporations and the decision by very wealth Neocons that they could make money while promoting their vicious and totalitarian agenda. Rush Limbaugh is a perfect example. He was making tens of millions of dollars a year and recently signed a contract said to be for $400 million over ten years. So how much do you think the people who own the radio networks make if they can pay him this much money?
Now let’s defend the statement about this type of media being sheer propaganda. None other than Karl Rove has said that the intention of the group of Neocons that supported President George W. Bush was to control the government at all levels for as long as possible–they thought indefinitely–by dividing the country and getting merely one more vote than the opposition. It turned out that they were able to do that. Despite the fact that their policies in government were diametrically opposed to the best interests of the majority of Americans, they did it by using media that were ostensibly independent but were actually Neocon owned and operated. One such was and is Newsmax.com.
Newsmax.com was the brainchild of a pretty smart guy named Chris Ruddy. He was a young guy on the make who had a break with a story while at an alternative news source about a PBS documentary that was not accurate. He parlayed that exposure eventually into cynically accepting the financial support of the most prominent anti-Middle Class Right Winger in the country, William Mellon Scaife and other wealthy Right Wingers. It wasn’t ever really an independent blog.
Newsmax.com was always a Right Wing propaganda vehicle, starting with the promotion of investigations of Vince Foster’s suicide. None other than Ken Starr, after several pointless investigations, concluded and stated publicly that Foster’s death was, in fact, what apparently everyone but Ruddy…to make a few extra bucks…knew it was–suicide. But by then Ruddy had used the tragic incident to incite people against Scaife’s chief target, Bill Clinton.
That’s how he got started in the late 1990’s, doing the bidding of William Mellon Scaife, who funded many attempts to get Clinton. Scaife spent tens of millions and caused the government to spend at least $50 million in repeated Neocon investigations that proved only that Clinton was having some kind of relationship with a younger woman. Whooppee! The sky is falling.
Today, this Neocon propagandist has the following on the home page of his so-called “news” blog: “Latest: A Call to Arms to Protect Your Financial Future from Obama.” The landing page is an ad for a broadcast about how President Obama is leading us deeper and deeper into Socialism. How Obama, the man who walked away from Wall Street to become a community organizer in one of the poorest black districts in the entire country, is somehow in cahoots with the “big banks.”
The message is that he is “giving” your tax dollars, $3 trillion of them, to financial institutions, with no strings, and for some undefined purpose, rather than the truth–that the government is stimulating the economy as the investor of last resort. Ruddy, of course, not mentioning that his hero, George W. Bush, allocated the first $700 billion, that the policies of George W. Bush caused the financial crash, and that many serious economists, Nobel Laureates, feel that the loans, not gifts, of $3 billion may not be enough of a stimulus to pull us out of the crisis. And does not mention the $6 trillion in debt that Bush caused BEFORE leading us into the Bush Depression.
The point is this: where does this hypocrisy leave off and become criminal behavior? When does promoting lies that damage the average working man, enrich the very wealthy, and promote a totalitarian agenda become treason? Newsmax.com and other similar propaganda vehicles, use the Rovian method: lie to the hicks. Appeal to their baser natures. Set one average middle class person against another. Pretend that a man making $80,000 is the enemy of one making $25,000 and they both are the enemies of someone making $350,000. Divide, spread hate, and win elections in order to win elections, and cut taxes for your wealthy Right Wing supporters.
It has been pointed out that before he ever made a speech, made a public announcement or even decided, George W. Bush had already been told that $60 million was allocated for him to run as the Republican candidate in 2000. What kinds of individuals have that kind of money for political campaigns–and why would they spend it? These are the people who support the Right Wing propaganda machine to get what they want from government.
Back to a new definition, a more sophisticated definition of treason. Let us suppose that a man works for and is paid by people who sole objective in life is to help greedy, rich friends and diminish the lives of other citizens. When he hide his true purposes and when he lies about those who are really trying to help the people…exactly when does that stop being hypocrisy and become treason? Suppose a propaganda machine lies about the state of the security of the nation to send boys off to war for money-making purposes rather than security? Who is responsible for the damage and the loss of lives…young lives?
Clearly Dr. Goebbels was held responsible for promoting the lies that the Nazis told to fool the German public. Why should we not hold these propagandists culpable for 4,500 deaths of American boys and hundreds of thousands of civilian Iraqis, plus tens of thousands of ruined lives of wounded American soldiers? If it turns out that this war was begun for oil and greed rather than our national security? Who should pay for knowingly promoting a lie to go to war or elect people who would loot and destroy our country? Who pays for knowlingly lying about greedy investors, about political appointees who loot their departments and hold illegal political meetings to further their party, not adminsiter their government department? Who should be responsible for telling lies to persuade that fifty percent plus one, to elect Neocon Republicans whose goal is to take what they can and leave the economy in tatters? Certainly Newsmax.com is one of the prime candidates.
The question is: do we owe allegiance to a piece of paper called the Constitution or to a government of elected representatives, to your fellow citizens, their lives, their families and their children and grandchildren? If it is the latter, then clearlypeople like Christopher Ruddy, William Mellon Scaife, Rush and David Limbaugh, William Kristol and many others, including the principals…Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and others may indeed be traitors.
We no longer rush to the barricades, despite the Right-Wing-media organized demonstrations recently, where all kinds of misinformation spread by these propagandists sent the loonies to the streets. They shouted about being overtaxed at virtually the same time as their paychecks were being increased by the Obama tax cuts. Much of the rant was very pointedly bigoted and the rest diffuse and difficult to understand. That it was propaganda induced was borne out by the fact that when many were interviewed, they thought that Obama was President illegally because of false information spread on places like Fox News.
When are we going to say: enough! This IS shouting fire in a crowded theater and the huge profits being made by these unscrupulous propagandists and their misuse of the airwaves and the Internet against the majority of the American people must end.
Newsmax. com which is often described as a successful news organization is actually neither. It is not successful as an independent news organization. It is basically supported by Neocon financial interests. And it is not successful in disseminating the news, if one expects the news to be factual and objectively true. Does anyone see the causality in the Newsmax.com headline: “Recession Linked to Rise in Abortions”?
Journalists should be made to tell the truth. If they lie there must be sanctions and serious sanctions built into the law. Freedom of speech does not mean that you can spread rabid misinformation against the government and then promote a “call to arms.” It is time for a “call to regulate and adjudicate” against all these propaganda machines that have been avoiding prosecution or severe civil penalties on technicalities for years.