Lots of extracts from the article but there's more at the link and it's well worth the read.

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This column was published in Consortium News and appears here courtesy of Consortium. We have inserted new material concerning the funding the U.S. covertly provides Rappler, the faux-independent publication whose cofounder, Maria Ressa, just received the Nobel Peace Prize.

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10 OCTOBER—Ten days ago came news that Steven Donziger, the courageous attorney who fought Chevron and won a $9.5 billion environmental case in Ecuador and who now fights the judicial system in America, has been sentenced to six months in prison for a patently ridiculous contempt charge.

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He was sentenced, this is to say, without a jury trial after a corrupt judge appointed Chevron’s law firm to conduct the prosecution. Take a sec to read that sentence again if you need to.

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If you read anything at all in the corporate press about this travesty, you read something like this, the Reuters lead:

NEW YORK, Oct 1 (Reuters)—A disbarred American lawyer who spent decades battling Chevron Corp (CVX.N) over pollution in the Ecuadorian rainforest was sentenced Friday to six months’ imprisonment for criminal contempt charges arising from a lawsuit brought by the oil company.

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The sins of omission in the coverage—see also The Wall Street Journal and The Guardian, here and here—are almost too numerous to count.

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The power of leaving out, POLO, is my name for this common phenom.

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On the same day the Donziger news arrived, Alan Macleod, the ever-trenchant reporter at MintPress News, tweeted out an interesting bit of information on the state of our media:

Politico’s *defense newsletter is sponsored by Lockheed Martin, its health newsletter by a private pharma group, its tech one by Comcast, and its prescription medication one by a lobbying group dedicated to opposing Medicare for All.

How can this be taken seriously as journalism?*

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Macleod included a screenshot of four Politico news items in which the above information is casually noted in “presented by” form.

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“Propaganda,” as Edward Bernays noted with extraordinary candor in his 1928 book of that title, “is the executive arm of the invisible government.” This is what Americans have instead of a free press.

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Here is a true doozy. On Sunday The Times published an item concerning the troubles besetting Rappler, the online publication cofounded by Maria Ressa, the Filipina sharing this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. In 2018, The Times reported, Manila’s version of the SEC revoked Rappler’s operating license because it violated constitutional prohibitions against foreign ownership. Later in the piece The Times reported that President Duterte has charged that the publication is “fully owned by the Americans.”

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O.K. Surely The Times is going to tell us whether any of this is true and if the Duterte government has a valid point. The question hangs above the paper’s report like some kind of immense dirigible.

Absolutely not.

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One goes online to discover that the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front, reported a grant of $180,000 to Rappler in the financials it published last February. Then one discovers by way of Rappler that Pierre Omidyar’s foundation and something called North Base Media own nonvoting shares in Rappler by way of a dodge that circumvents the foreign ownership rule.

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North Base Media lists among its partners the Media Development Investment Fund, which was founded and seeded by none other than George Soros to make the same sorts of investments.

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Nothing of this in The Times.

This is POLO at its very most base. There is only one thing worthier of our contempt. Rappler’s piece on all this, as linked above, is a gem of obfuscation, conniving this way and that to avoid disclosing where its money comes from.

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Consortium News is high among those that have followed the Assange case with the proper dedication. I have mentioned others: Media Lens, MintPress News, Monthly Review’s online editions. (Good old MR.) There are many more doing the work that needs to be done—Jonathan Cook, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté; among non–Western publications there is The Cradle. This is not to diminish the many journalists and publications that deserve places on any such list.

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It is to say this: If the American press has any future, it lies with these independent media.

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Article archived: https://archive.is/EUjFX

Tweet archived: https://archive.is/AqWyP