Where were they when his administration excused the torturing criminals from the previous Bush regime? Or prosecuted more whistleblowers than all US presidents combined, like the mercilessly persecuted Chelsea Manning who exposed US war crimes? Or deported more undocumented people than any other US President? Or when the news of his “Kill List” surfaced? Or when his Secretary of State pushed for decimating Libya and ghoulishly celebrated the gruesome murder of its president on one of their news segments exclaiming in true imperialistic form: “We came, we saw, he died?” Their coverage of all of this was either weak as dishwater or buried in back pages, but they had no trouble reporting “news” related to celebrities or sports, or inflating crises and stoking paranoia as in the instance of the human tragedy of Ebola in West Africa.
The same corporate news imploring the public to shun “fake news” had no problem peddling propaganda that led to the war on Vietnam and Iraq and Libya. It downplayed the cruelty of the medieval kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain and the decades long system of apartheid in Israel. It has spent its lifetime being the mouthpiece for Empire, Inc. and made a career of manufacturing outrage, vapid celebrity obsession and paranoia, spinning the planet killing lies of the fossil fuel and war industries, and spreading Pentagon lies which have cost millions of lives and contributed to one of the biggest mass migrations in human history. It has suppressed existential news related to Fukushima and climate change, virtually ignored systemic racism and the prison/surveillance machine, and is turning a blind eye to the unfolding atrocities at Standing Rock Sioux. And yet somehow with all of this it has the gall to expect people of conscience to feel sorry for it, forget about these lies and omissions, and believe them now when they cry foul after that cloak of deception has been lifted.
The hubris of the powerful dances with willful ignorance in the most stunning of ways indeed.
Kenn Orphan 2016
Kenn Orphan 
Excellent piece, Kenn! I also think and have read in other essays that keeping the average American hypnotized and dumbed-down to the reality around them by entertainment, drugs and alcohol, low paying jobs where to survive one has to work 2-3 jobs, it’s no surprise a media mongul like Trump could conveience the masses to vote for him and they believed him because he spoke to their souls like the Devil does. With the rug pulled out from under Bernie Sanders chances, even though I truly believe Wall Street and the greedy 1% would never have allowed him to get far, America got what they deserved, I’m sad to say. Bob and I are saddened for our family and friends still in the US but we’re so glad we got out when we did. If global warming doesn’t do us all in in the next 15 years it will be very interesting to see where the US and the rest of the world ends up.
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Good one Kenn. Those lying frauds have a lot of nerve pretending to be the real news. It’s a qualification for their propaganda spreading jobs that they find a way to convince themselves that what they put out is really the truth. If they don’t really believe the BS they put out, people might sense that they know they are lying. It’s like Trump believing he’s a great guy doing all sorts of good deeds. As Scott Peck pointed out in his book People of the Lie, those who believe they are flawless paragons of good are those capable of the most enormous acts of evil.
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