Original Post:
I asked, concisely and simply, what was being hidden from us. Most of them just berated me, one user claimed the Syria conflict to which I provided a link to a recent UN Statement on which quite accurately reflected the conflict start to finish. Another user claimed that the recently declassified Nixon era documents about the Chilean revolution and coup, but I was able to find a 1973 archived Newspaper accusing the Nixon Admin of having a hand in it from Times Magazine meaning it was already a mainstream theory at the time.
Two things are happening, I think:
Nonsense. There was a free press that freely discussed all the topics you mentioned. It’s true that the mainstream was pretty supportive of the status quo but even there you’d find, for instance, plenty of warnings of climate change and open discussions about it.
Noam Chomsky wrote a bunch of books about the free press’s coverage of geopolitical issues and one of his biggest points of emphasis was how the whole spectrum of permissible debate was basically indistinguishable. That’s why I used Israel as one example.
I think you’d be hard pressed to find even a single newspaper article in the run-up to 2000 that was willing to simply say plainly that Al Gore was objectively right about climate change and what a fucking emergency it was, for example. It was always represented as a “debate” and his absolutely voice-in-the-wilderness diagnosis was a “viewpoint.” He had to make a whole movie of his own to be able to speak plainly about what was going on, because literally no one in the news was explaining what needed to be explained about it. And that was all after counterculture news started to get a little bit of early traction on the internet and puncture the monopoly a little bit.
It is almost impossible for people who grew up post-internet to grasp how constrained the news in the pre-internet era was. It sounds like we’re making it up, like of course it couldn’t have been like that.
You mean the guy who was all buddy buddy with Epstein? Well, in that case it must be true, of course.
Yeah, Noam Chomsky is openly siding with Russia’s invasion, isn’t he? “A Stronger NATO is the last thing we need” he said.
Even then, he’s been a prominent figure and part of the available media in the USA for a very long time, so clearly an example of not being censored.
Yeah. He went off the deep end once he got elderly and his viewpoint of the world ossified. It doesn’t invalidate his earlier scholarship, though.
(Also, his support for Russia is overblown by the disinfo machine. Mostly what he’s saying in things that I have read is that NATO and the West have done ten times worse than Russia is doing in Ukraine right now, so the freakout is a bunch of hypocrisy, which is of course completely accurate. The disinfo likes to spin it like he’s saying Russia is the good guys, which isn’t at all what he’s saying. But yes, I also think he’s missing the central point in Ukraine because it doesn’t fit with how he likes to look at things.)
Well… the US doesn’t have state-sponsored censorship like most socialist countries. That part is true. My point, and I think the OOP cartoon’s point, is that because our media is capitalist, it was more or less impossible before non-big-business media developed out of the internet for certain messages to get out. I do think that’s a fair point. Just the fact that one academic was able to get one counterculture message out (and generally be regarded by 100% of the external political spectrum as a terrorist as a result) doesn’t invalidate that to me.