What trips off the tongues of journalists costs lives, says Sheila Coombes. What we need trouble makers who ask the right questions.
WITH Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Palestine and now Ukraine, the Western mainstream media, through its one sided narrative, has failed the citizens of the West and in doing so is complicit in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people affected by Western military actions.
It has acted as a mouthpiece for hawks and warmongers through its dissemination of lies, manipulations and deliberate distortions.
Why should this ‘profession’ of journalists be held in such high esteem, when most of us who obtained a reasonable capability in shorthand could transcribe, word for word what they are told by respective governments, with no recourse to the due diligence of investigation.
Too many times, erroneous and very damaging assertions by a complicit media are passed over as unfortunate mistakes. Mistakes which enable nations to be devastated by the warmongers to whom they offer dictation services.
Dissenting journalists in the style of John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Robert Parry, Helen Thomas, Jonathan Cook, Finnian Cunningham, Felicity Arbuthnot, Pepe Escobar and many more, who offer real investigative journalism and insight into geo-political strategies which embroil us in successive conflicts, are given a platform only on media which has to be sought out, not offered on mainstream radio, television or print media.
This imprisons those who have a capacity for critical thinking into a mainstream narrative through a lack of accessible alternative information.
Respect must go to Matt Lee, who constantly probes successive White House spokespeople, unlike the standard tradition of White House Correspondents.
We should all be aware that the euphemistic use of language by these spokespeople, and similarly by our own government representatives, disguises an on-going strategy of advancing the Western model across the world by way of destabilisation under the guise of ‘democracy promotion’ or ‘Responsibility to Protect’, ‘No fly zones’, or ‘non-lethal military aid.
Journalists parrot these phrases which mask reality and cause us not to question their true nature.
Why are those ranging from academics and intellectuals to politicians and the judiciary, fooled by a profession whose standards have become a matter of choosing between personal morality and probably no job, or complicity in a morass of vested interests entailing geo-political manipulations, and a pay packet.
It shouldn’t be this way for them or for us, or for those who suffer under this system. War and intervention is a very serious business - foreign correspondents have a duty to get their facts right.
What trips off their tongues could cost lives. Take back your profession, make it a profession that people like me will look up to and respect.
We don’t want stenographers, we want trouble makers who ask the right questions.
http://stopwar.org.uk/news/from-afghanistan-to-ukraine-a-complicit-media-has-blood-on-its-hands
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