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Mainstream media feeding lies to people: Pundit

Saturday, 21 November 2015 4:22 PM [ Last Update: Saturday, 21 November 2015 4:22 PM ]

Serbian police check the identification information of Syrian refugees at the Macedonia-Serbia border at Tabanovce, November 19, 2015. (AFP photo)

Press TV has interviewed Anthony Hall, a professor of globalization at Lethbridge University, about the CNN suspending one of its journalists.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Are journalists not allowed to have an opinion or is today’s journalists expected to be just as much a politician as a journalist?

Hall: Well that is pretty much how it is. These days what passes for news is often little more than stenography from official sources, just copying and disseminating the news from the hierarchs, from the official sources, from the authorities.

The real discussion that needs to happen is why is this huge migration taking place? What is the role of the United States in creating the conditions for the reality that people have to run for their lives? If you are going to destabilize an area and bomb, mass bomb and do all kinds of strange interventions and play both sides, of course you are going to make life impossible for the people in the region.

So the real discussion that is not happening where we need freedom of speech is to acknowledge and point to the real culprit, the real sources of Daesh, the funders, the organizers, the people providing the weapons, the people providing the organization.

Press TV: We have seen BBC and CNN journalists suspended and even canned for giving viewers the truth about certain events that may contradict western policy, as we saw in the Gaza Strip last year, or in Iraq, or in Afghanistan. What does this say about the future of mainstream media?

Hall: Well we are living in a time where ruling cabal is becoming desperate and the level of criticism is becoming audible and people within that cabal, they are people bailing out and the forces of reaction, whether it be freedom of speech, freedom of association, we are losing what we took for granted as civil liberties and it represents a certain desperation. There is a popular repulsion at this authoritarianism from above.

Press TV: Does this not constitute the manipulation of facts, the news, and ultimately of history?

Hall: Yes. The betrayal of the public interest in the common good by a corrupt media that is planting agendas and feeding us lies, lies particularly when it comes to this loaded word called “terror”, “terrorism”, the Islamophobia, the wedge politics, the division and the political exploitation and the effort to divide people and drive political advantage. We just went through an election in Canada. Whether there was some acknowledgement of that and reaction against that in the election of Justin Trudeau, hopefully the United States can come to its senses too.

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