Ignoring the Glaringly Important

Ron Unz today addresses the long-established pattern by which mainstream media manage to ignore the important. My personal list of examples would include the absence of evidence (and sense) behind charges that Hussein had WMD and intended to use them, back in 2002 and 2003; the continuous obfuscation over the absence of evidence that Iran constitued any real “nuclear threat,” given the absence of any nuclear weapons in Iran; the poverty of evidence (and sense) behind a number of charges that the Damascus regime had used chemical weapons against US and other foreign-backed jihadists. We had the astonishing ability of western mainstream media, in the course of one of the most hysterically covered “scandals” of all media history to ignore the admission by Crowdstrike security officer Shawn Henry that there never was any actual evidence for claims that his cybersecurity company had determined Russian footprints behind alleged hacking of DNC/DCCC servers in 2016. Very recently, media at first completely ignored and then sheepishly, slyly, deprecated evidence of US destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline in favor of a totally outlandish CIA alternative narrative that did not stand up longer than a couple of days, and even though both Biden and Nuland had talked of their determination to ensure that Nord Stream would not survive a Russian invasion of Ukraine. Over this past weekend we saw the amazing ability of western mainstream media to pretend that somehow Bakhmut had not really fallen - because after all the Green Tee said that it hadn’t or that it wasn’t occupied by Russia - and that Ukraine was really winning.

Unz (undoubtedly a very clever man, who is himself a longstanding victim of Facebook censorship) turns his attention to Jonathan Turley and the case of Biden family corruption. He describes Jonathan Turley as a leading establishmentarian figure who holds the Shapiro Chair of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. In a recent column in The Hill, Turley expresses his amazement at “the total unwillingness of our media to report the massive evidence of financial corruption engulfing the family of President Joe Biden". You can read this at the link below:

American Pravda: The Limits of Media Corruption

Ron Unz

As you will know, I have long been bothered by President Biden’s involvement in supporting the US-backed coup d’etat against a democratically elected government in Ukraine in 2014, the involvement of his son Hunter Biden in a major Ukrainian energy company, Burisma, and the evidence contained in Hunter Biden”s laptop (a scandal that western mainstream media at first tried to laugh off as Russian disinformation) suggestive of pay-backs to the Biden family for access and other favors. A 634 page analysis of the Hunter Biden laptop by a research group, Marco Polo, listed six alleged crimes committed by Joe Biden – including tax evasion and violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) – alongside 459 crimes it alleges were committed by Hunter, including illegal foreign lobbying and money laundering (Hunter Biden).

Corruption at Presidential level is parelleled by corruption at the level of the Supreme Court. Randall D. Eliason writes in the New York Times that “Over more than two decades, the Supreme Court has gutted laws aimed at fighting corruption and at limiting the ability of the powerful to enrich public officials in a position to advance their interests. As a result, today wealthy individuals and corporations may buy political access and influence with little fear of legal consequences, either for them or for the beneficiaries of their largess” (Why the Supreme Court Is Blind to Its Own Corruption).

Might we dare think that even western mainstream media are corrupted? Well, the history of the Murdoch empire, to name but one egregious example, is replete with very high level trade-offs (not least, Thatcher overriding monopoly concerns to allow Murdoch to buy the London Times in exchange for his support). We later heard evidence of wiretapping by Murdoch properties and the buying off of senior policemen. The equally egregious silences from media of which I provided examples above are testimony to the strong likelihood of extensive corruption. It is difficult to explain how media for at least four years, and it is really closer to seven, sat on or sidelined their own culpability for extending any kind of credibility to the Russiagate hoax, as the Durham report most recently has chronicled.

Lo and behold, who is surprised that Ukraine, destiny of hundreds of billions of US and NATO taxpayer aid and comfort. also exhibits these same traits. Corruption was the ostensible and first reason for the Maidan protests in 2013, doubtlesss egged on by outfits funded by the US National Endowment for Democracy, as Nuland boasted at the time, before the protests were hijacked by far-right Banderite organizations committed to violence. The 2014 coup d-etat was itself a supreme instance of corruption, and levels of corruption following the coup did not subside but intensified. Even Zelenskiy had the nerve to fight for the presidency in 2019 on both anti-corruption and peace initiatives. He had already been tarnished by the Pandora Papers (Revealed: ‘anti-oligarch’ Ukrainian president’s offshore connections) and other scandals (How Corrupt Is Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky?) Instead, he has plunged his country into a war by provocation, short-circuited democratics processes (The Zelensky Narrative is Shifting | Opinion), turned a blind eye to suppression of dissident media and other voices, and attacked the Orthodox Church. He is a president who, in addition to sacking others for alleged corruption (Ukraine war: why Zelensky’s corruption purge could be key to the outcome of the conflict), works with generals who appear to abuse western aid, and a military system that sells western equipment into the black market (NATO’s weapons are leaking to black market – Western journalist). And now, it appears, just as in the USA, corruption undermines the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in Ukraine (Head of Ukraine’s supreme court held in anti-corruption investigation).

Bearing the lessons of Russiagate firmly in mind we see corruption inside and across: Presidencies, Supreme Courts, Major Political Parties, Military Industrial Complexes and Media. HBO’s “Succession” seems quite tame by comparison.