TRUTH-TELLERS

"Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct.
Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time.
If you're right and you know it, speak your mind.
Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth."

Mahatma Gandhi

TRUTH-TELLERS 17

INDEPENDENT VOICES COMMITTED TO THE TRUTH

Gary Webb / Jim Tucker

"The scandal of contra cocaine trafficking and the CIA's protection of these crimes had surfaced in the 1980s, but the Big Three newspapers - New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times - paid the scandal little heed, mostly accepting the denials of Reagan administration insiders.
So, when Gary Webb shed new light on the scandal in 1996, the same newspapers subjected Webb to a merciless assault and rejoiced when Webb's editors [San Jose Mercury News] caved in to the pressure and forced Webb to quit in disgrace."

Robert Parry, 2009

Noam Chomsky / Hrvoje Moric / Scott Ritter

"The media elite in the US, are the watchdogs of acceptable ideological messages, the controllers of news and information content, and the decision makers regarding media resources. Their goal is to create global news distribution in a deliberate attempt to control the news and information available to society. The two most prominent methods used to accomplish this task are censorship and propaganda."

Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, 2009

Steve Rendall / John Coleman / Donald Bartlett / Wilfred Burchett

"American society, once we lose a system of information based on verifiable fact, will become disconnected from reality. All totalitarian societies impart their propaganda through manipulated images and spectacles. And the death of traditional news is one more stage in the terminal illness that is ravaging American democracy."

Chris Hedges

Russell Tice / Kathryn Olmstead / David Edwards / Alastair Crooke

"As a population, we have been intensely propagandized daily since birth. Generally speaking, our critical thinking skills and attention to, and comprehension of, deeper political and economic issues are virtually non-existent."

David DeGraw, 2010

Stephen Karganovic / Daniel Sheehan / Jason Hirthler / Steve Fraser

"What you have now are the leading journalists of America working for the largest corporations. They're incredibly well-paid. They are essentially not really journalists but media stars or celebrities. They are admitted into the highest levels of powerful. They're part of it. Socio-economically, they have much more in common with the powerful political people they're supposed to be covering, then they do what the ordinary Americans for whom they are supposed to be speaking."

Glenn Greenwald, 2011

Andrew Napolitano / Rania Khalek / Kevin Bales

"The 'alternative media' was largely dependent upon philanthropic foundations for support, such as the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, among many others. While more critical and infused with a better analysis than can be observed in the mainstream corporate press, the 'alternative' was still controlled by the same interests, as the boards of foundations - which are themselves institutions of concentrated wealth and power - represented elite industrialists, academics, and bankers. They function, essentially, as 'controlled opposition': allowing dissent up to a point, primarily focused on criticizing policies and effects, seeking to promote reforms and alterations to the existing system in order to make it more "fair." The discourse, however, still lacked a needed element: radical analysis of information, pushing not for reform, but systemic change, or, in a word: revolution."

Andrew Gavin Marshall, 2012

"In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Operation Mockingbird was a secret CIA effort to influence and control the American media and, thus, to influence and control the information received by the American people."

Brandon Turbeville, 2017

"There is no reason to consider the United States' corporate and commercial media as any more "mainstream" than the leading Soviet media organs were back in their day. They are just as dedicated as the onetime Soviet state media to advancing the doctrinal perspectives of their host nation's reigning elite-and far more effective."

Paul Street

"Our traditional media - which are predominantly financed by advertising or the state - represent the geopolitical interests of the transatlantic alliance, given that both the advertising corporations as well as the states themselves are dependent on the transatlantic economic and security architecture led by the United States."

former AP journalist Herbert Altschul

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