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 13

INDEPENDENT VOICES COMMITTED TO THE TRUTH

Patrick Henningsen / Pepe Escobar

"The typical modern-day citizen consumer of media reporting has less access to the truth than one would have had a hundred years ago. Only those who are willing to invest their time in finding out the real state of affairs through alternative Internet based information resources can possible stay truly informed. This is precisely why those in power have moved so forcefully against dissident sources on the Internet. They are adamant to patch up that crack in the propaganda wall."

Jon Hellevig, 2019

Yanis Varoufakis / Federico Pieraccini / Ben Bagdikian / George Galloway

"The mainstream media are tasked by the powers that be with marketing war in order to advance US foreign-policy objectives. Without the moral justification for war, it becomes more difficult to convince Americans and Europeans to send their sons to die thousands of miles away from home."

Federico Pieraccini, 2019

Godfree Roberts / Lewis Lapham / Kevin Phillips

"The major news media serve at the pleasure of a commercial oligarchy that pays them, and pays them handsomely, for their pretense of speaking truth to power... The prominent figures in our contemporary Washington press corps regard themselves as government functionaries, enabling and codependent."

Lewis H. Lapham

Henry Makow / Edward Said / Nancy Snow

"The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it."

George Orwell

Andre Damon / Sheldon Rampton / Vandana Shiva / John Stauber

"What Facebook, Apple, Google and others have made clear at this point is that fake news is fine as long as it's repeating lies of the government or intelligence agencies. There's no amount of war-creating government inspired fake news someone can spread that will ever get you banned by the tech giants, but if you dare to have a discussion about vaccines or 9/11, you'll never be heard from again."

Michael Krieger, 2019

Martha Stout / Jack Rasmus / Jan Oberg / Mark Zepezauer

"There is no such a thing in America as an independent press, unless it is out in country towns. You are all slaves. You know it, and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to express an honest opinion. If you expressed it, you would know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid $150 for keeping honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should allow honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, I would be like Othello before twenty-four hours: my occupation would be gone. The man who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the street hunting for another job. The business of a New York journalist is to distort the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread, or for what is about the same - his salary. You know this, and I know it; and what foolery to be toasting an 'Independent Press! We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are jumping-jacks. They pull the string and we dance. Our time, our talents, our lives, our possibilities, are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes."

John Swinton (1829-1901) - American journalist and newspaper publisher

"Plutocrats own the mass media and the status quo-friendly voices, which creates an environment full of peer pressure to conform and workplace pressure to advance establishment-friendly narratives. Add to this the phenomenon of access journalism, wherein journalists are incentivized to cozy up to power and pitch softball questions to officials in order to gain access to them, and things get slanted. All of this can create an environment of consensus which has nothing to do with facts or reality, but rather with what narratives favor the US-centralized empire and the plutocrats who control it."

Caitlin Johnstone, 2018

"On the internet, as in the realm of foreign policy, the U.S. security state is bipartisan in its bid to control the boundaries of acceptable behavior and thought, shepherding them by hook or crook into compliance.
The security state has sought to master this craft for more than half a century by sweeping through massive amounts of sociological data, tracking the attitudes, movements, and demographics of vast numbers of people in a bid to better map the tendency toward rebellion before it occurs. Tracking how billions of people navigate the internet, innocent of the knowledge they're even being watched, has provided the security state with the greatest petri dish it could have asked for."

Morgan Artyukhina

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