While the danger posed by fake news sites like Breitbart is very real, so too is the danger posed by corporate-controlled news entities. They are the ones who pushed the Iraq lies, the Y2K fears, and the countless panic-inducing stories about diseases that only infected a handful of Americans. The Ring of Fire’s Farron Cousins discusses this.
Transcription of the above video:
There is no question that fake news, conspiracy theory news outlets in the United States are causing very real harm. This whole Pizzagate nonsense story promoted by Breitbart proves that. Fake news in the United States almost had a death toll from the crazy gunman who went in that pizza shop and shot it up because he thought it was some sort of pedophilia ring. That’s the damage that fake news can do in the United States. It is a very real threat and it’s a threat we have to take seriously, and one that frankly needs to be investigated and taken to court. But there is another threat from the news industry. That is the threat that the corporate media poses to our health and safety.
Think about it this way. When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld were trying to go to war with Iraq, who did they get to sell the idea that Saddam Hussein was stockpiling aluminum tubes and yellowcake? Remember those two little talking points, aluminum tubes and yellowcake? The corporate controlled media pushed that. The corporate controlled media that features advertisements from Boeing and Lockheed Martin, the people who benefited greatly from that Iraq war. The corporate media pushed us into a war with Iraq and that did have a death toll for the United States. Tens of thousands of American troops died because of the corporate media failing to do their job, not to mention the countless tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Pakistanis and Afghanistan people, citizens.
That’s the corporate media. They sold that lie to us. They do have blood on their hands and that’s a threat we need to take seriously. Think about the madness of Y2K that the media sold us for two years right before the turn of the century. All that panic that they caused, the stockpiling of goods and bottled water and canned goods and guns because the world was going to end; all electronics were going to shut down and we’d been sent back to the Stone Age. A lot of people made a lot of money off the Y2K scare and corporate media is one of them. What happened? Nothing. Literally nothing.
What about all those pandemics? Swine flu, bird flu, every other kind of flu you could imagine. Who perpetrated those myths? The corporate controlled media. Who profited from that? The corporate controlled media who gets advertisements from big pharma, who made a killing from Americans thinking they were going to get the bird flu or the swine flu, which turned out to be just as dangerous as the regular flu. The corporate controlled media has done far more damage to the United States than any other entity you could imagine. Fake news is a very serious, very dangerous and potentially deadly problem in the United States, but the corporate controlled media that spreads these lies, that get people killed?
They do have blood on their hands. That’s the same corporate controlled media that only tells you half the story. When was the last time you turned on MSNBC or CNN and they talked about a massive pharmaceutical recall because people were dying from taking that pills? When was the last you turned on MSNBC or CNN and they showed you the documents from a company where they said, ‘We know people are dying’ but covered it up? ‘Let’s go forward anyway.’ There is no answer to that question because they don’t do it. Their lack of reporting has killed people and they’re doing it to please their corporate masters.
Yeah, we have to take this fake news threat very seriously, and I do and I hope everyone does, but we have to take the failures of the corporate media just as seriously because they have gotten people killed in the past and if they keep on the path they’re on, they’re going to beat the drums of war during the Trump administration like we’ve never seen, and they’re going to result in even more American deaths, all because they want to make a few more dollars in advertising from their corporate masters.
