RT America Torched In Witch Hunt '17
RT-America-12-Nov-2017
By Chris Hedges, truthdig.com
November 14th, 2017
Above Photo: Chris Hedges in a screen shot from his RT America program, "On
Contact." (RT America)
In one of the most horrendous blows to press freedom since the
anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the U.S. Department of Justice has
forced the news broadcaster RT America to file under the Foreign Agents
Registration Act (FARA).
The assault on RT America, on which I host the show "On Contact," has
nothing to do with the dissemination of Russian propaganda. It is driven by
RT America's decision to provide a platform to critics of American
capitalism and imperialism, critics who lambast a system of government that
can no longer be called democratic. And it is accompanied by the
installation of algorithms by Google, Facebook and Twitter that divert
readers away from left-wing, progressive and anti-war websites, including
Truthdig. The World Socialist Web Site has seen its search traffic from
Google fall by 74 percent since April. Google, in a further blow, this month
removed RT from its list of "preferred" channels on YouTube. Twitter has
blocked all advertising by the channel.
Put the censorship campaigns together and the message is clear: Left-wing
critics, already marginalized by the state, must be silenced.
It would seem, given how we are locked out of the corporate media and public
broadcasting, that the assault is overkill. But the ideology that sustains
the corporate state, the "free market" and neoliberalism has lost all
credibility. The corporate state has no counterargument to its critics. The
nakedness of corporate greed, exploitation and repression is transparent
across the political spectrum. The ideological fortress erected by corporate
power and sustained by its courtiers in the press and academia has
collapsed. All it has left is a crude censorship.
Complicit in this censorship is a bankrupt liberal class. The institutions
tasked with defending press freedom-including the ACLU, Human Rights Watch,
the Committee to Protect Journalists and PEN-along with major news outlets
such as The New York Times, have served as the corporate state's useful
idiots. Only a handful of journalists, including Truthdig Editor in Chief
Robert Scheer, grasp and decry the very real danger before us.
The charge that RT and these left-wing sites disseminate "foreign
propaganda" is the beginning, not the end, of a broad campaign against press
freedom. Once this precedent of state censorship is normalized, far more
tepid and compliant media outlets will be targeted. Max Blumenthal wrote two
good pieces on AlterNet about the puppet masters behind the censorship
campaign. [Click here and here.]
The venom of the state toward its critics was displayed in a report by the
Director of National Intelligence (DNI), "Assessing Russian Activities and
Intentions in Recent U.S. Elections," issued Jan. 6. In the report, seven
pages were specifically directed at RT America, much of the language focused
on the journalist Abby Martin. Martin became one of the best-known critics
of the corporate state during the Occupy movement. Her show on RT, "Breaking
the Set," which had been off the air for nearly two years when the report
was published-a glaring error for an intelligence community awash in budgets
of tens of billions of dollars-was denounced as a disseminator of "radical
discontent." The report complained that RT gave airtime to third-party
candidate debates. The document attacked RT hosts for asserting that the
two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the
population and is a sham. It excoriated the network for covering Black Lives
Matter, Occupy Wall Street and fracking.
The report charged:
RT's reports often characterize the United States as a "surveillance state"
and allege widespread infringements of civil liberties, police brutality,
and drone use.
RT has also focused on criticism of the US economic system, US currency
policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the US national debt. Some of RT's
hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and have predicted
that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US financial
collapse.
The "Alice in Wonderland" quality of the report would be laughable if it was
not so ominous. The United States, in fact, is a surveillance state. Civil
liberties have been eviscerated. Police brutality is endemic. Our drone wars
have made us state terrorists. The economic structure serves the wealthiest
corporations and oligarchs. Wall Street is run by a criminal class. Our debt
is unsustainable, especially once the dollar is no longer the world's
reserve currency, and like all decaying empires we are headed for collapse.
The DNI report clarifies what the ruling elites fear-not fake news but the
truth. And the truth is that the elites have destroyed the country and are
traitors to democracy.
The DNI report was followed by a congressional hearing on "Extremist Content
and Russian Disinformation Online," held Oct. 31. Executives of Facebook,
Twitter and Google were grilled about their roles in distributing fake news
and extremist content that in the words of Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley
included "spread[ing] stories about abuse of black Americans by law
enforcement." The executives promised to double down on their censorship,
and they did so.
The ruling elites are desperately trying to shift the focus away from the
cause of the political insurgencies on the left and the right: extreme
social inequality. It is for this reason that critics who highlight and
explore the roots and causes of social inequality must be discredited or
silenced. If social inequality is accepted as the driving force behind the
decay of the American state and the mounting rage of much of the population,
then the structures that profit from this inequality will come under
assault. All the elites have left is to paint their critics as "agents of a
foreign power."
The United States increasingly resembles a totalitarian state. Our anemic
democracy is on life support. A reasoned debate about social inequality or
the crimes and misjudgments of empire is becoming impossible. This presages
a frightening future. There will be many "good" Americans who, when the
history of this moment is recorded, will be responsible. And one day, to
their surprise, they too will be victims.
