“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”― Soren Kierkegaard
As a teacher of History I do make long detailed entries because I want the truth and the whole truth to be told all based on carefully detailed research of factual and reliable sources.
As I pointed out in one of my latest Blog entries, I abhor lies and the "art of dezinformatsiya", which is regretfully used way too often by unscrupulous "News Sources (Mass Media) and Social Media" today to pervert the truth.
In the 1950's during the "Cold War" the Soviet Union initiated a super-secret program to undermine the Western Democracies through the use of the cherished democratic "Freedom of the press" by the cynical "art of dezinformatsiya", a format that was created by Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, who was chief of the People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD).
According to Vasily Mitrokhin, who was a former senior officer of the Soviet Foreign Intelligence service, and later demoted to KGB archivist. It was Joseph Stalin who coined the term in Russian in a closed meeting with Beria. However, it was Beira who choose to use a French-sounding name to claim it had a Western origin.
It is this “art” of dezinformatsiya that uses information inadmissible in proper historical discourse, by presenting known forged documents as genuine; inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents; attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite; manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view; and deliberately mis-translating texts (in languages other than the revisionist's) all have been fabricated around a kernel of truth, but unattributable to those who publish them to push lies and political agendas.
We have seen this also all over the world wide web and social media of how people ignorant of science are openly spreading lies and conspiracy theories based on fraudulent or "cooked" information regarding vaccinations and the Corona Virus.
The exact same is true of journalism today. The audience and paying customers today wish to watch rather than read has lead to the widespread demise of the market for printed "newspapers" and magazines. This has led the editors and management of printed journalism to accept the change and adopt the World Wide Web and create web sites.
Once management of the printed newspapers could guage their profit and attractability to advertisers by the amount of newspapers or magazines sold.
For all news sources today it is a totally different form of assessment based on "visits" hits to their websites which are the major source for enticement to advertisers as well as paying customers who are drawn to the websites by articles designed to attract customers.
There are editors of many once respected News sources who have cynically turned to the use of "click bait" on Talkbacks to lure in readers and to gain responses (clicks) and have turned their backs on the once taunted "Ethical journalism" like the New York Times whose byline was once "All the news fit to print".
The Editorial management of "News sites", as we have witnessed today, could care less about monitoring the vile comments made n response to their articles -because for them the more comments that are made the greater the "hits" their web page receive and this increases web page interaction and therefore increases the value of their web site to advertisers.
Many times the articles posted are from unscrupulous or nefariously biased sources paid local journalists and photo-journalist known as "stringers" whose "photo ops" or "news stories" that they relay to the actual journalists are many times tainted by the use of mendacious lies, blatantly false and fictitious historical revisionism and abject hatred to draw attention.
The image of the ethical Journalist, and especially foreign news correspondents, who once would do his or hers own detailed and thorough research to present the news in an honest, ethical, and unbiased way is regretfully a thing of the past.
Freedom of the press and freedom of speech should not extend to political subversion and the spreading of false accusations and conspiracy theories nor to spread terrorist propaganda. Those "news sources" that do spread lies and defame the freedom of the press and speech should be openly ostracized and boycotted.
It should be ascertained that the core purpose of a journalist is to present facts objectively to allow the readers to form their own conclusions as in being a true unbiased News Source.
