Hard to sell America as a shining example of civil liberties and democracy
when the internet is drowning in pics of killer cops beating down on anyone
in sight.
Yasha Levine
1
Looks like our main regime propaganda outlet - Radio Free Europe/Radio
Liberty - is censoring and downplaying the orgy of police violence that’s
being unleashed against people protesting killer cops and the murder of
George Floyd.
Here’s the front page of the RFE/RL English-language portal from yesterday,
Friday June 5, 2020. (Thanks to Bryan MacDonald for catching it.)
Notice anything missing?
Now compare it to other state-funded media. For example, here’s Germany’s
Deutsche Welle - also for June 5:
And the BBC for the same day:
Hard not to notice is a difference: Both the BBC and Deutsche Welle carry
multiple front-page stories about the protests, while there is absolutely
nothing on America’s premier regime propaganda outlet.
With a budget that hovers around $100 million, RFE/RL broadcasts to
something like to 22 countries in 26 languages. And the same censorship
regime extends to just about every RFE/RL language division. I’ve looked at
about a dozen of them. Most have no coverage of the protests at all. A
couple - like the Russian and Afghanistan division - do have a tiny protest
stories, but they are given very little attention. (And in the case of the
Russian coverage, the protests are presented from the most reactionary
perspective possible - like blaming the violence on organized armed
anarchist communist groups.) The protests are definitely not treated as the
major political event that they are, and the police violence appears to be
majorly downplayed.
All this isn’t that surprising.
The history of United States regime propaganda starts more or less with
Radio Liberation and Radio Free Europe - which are today combined into one
entity: Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. They started in the early 1950s as
covert psychological warfare and espionage ops run out of Europe by the CIA.
They employed a whole army of immigrants: Nazi collaborators,
anti-communists, fascists, prisoners of war, and were explicitly set up to
inflame and weaponize nationalism against communism and the Soviet Union.
After they were exposed in a series of reports in the late 1960s and early
1970s, there was a weak movement to shut these propaganda ops down
completely - an effort driven by Senator Fulbright. But instead of getting
canned, the went “legit” and were expanded.
Yasha Levine
@yashalevine
In 1972, Senator Fulbright wanted to shut down America's government-fnded
propaganda radio stations RFE/RL: "I submit that these radios should be
given an opportunity to take their rightful place in the graveyard of cold‐
war relics."
They weren't shut down, but expanded.
NYT:
December 27th 2017
18 Retweets35 Likes
In the 19070s, RFE/RL came out of the shadows and began operating in the
open, with funding annually appropriated Congress.
From then on, RFE/RL was supposed to get more professional and objective.
And they frequently were. (Well, aside from the glorification of fascists,
antisemites, and Nazi collabos.) I personally know people who work there and
they’re good journalists.
Still, this regime media outfit has stayed true to its original purpose: to
promote the interests of American Empire. And the bloody police repression
of protesters taking place in cities all across America right now really
fucks with its central ideological and rhetorical weapon.
Hard to sell America as a shining example of civil liberties and human
rights and orderly democracy when the internet is drowning in pics of killer
cops and soldiers beating down on anyone in sight. So the censorship is
really not that hard to get!
Lily Lynch
@lilyslynch
The LAPD shot a homeless man in a wheelchair in the face.
June 5th 2020
194,368 Retweets473,116 Likes
-Yasha Levine
PS: Next up, I’m going to write about the insane racist libertarian pro-cop
reactions of most Russians in Russia in response to these protests. It’s
actually really nuts. They fully support the cops! As Evgenia says, “It
makes me embarrassed to be Russian.”
