How ironic.
It is the BBC’s ‘edited’ version of Donald Trump’s speech that is at the centre of the current BBC ‘fake news’ scandal, and it was Donald Trump himself who controversially (at the time) created the now commonly used term ‘fake news’ back when he was first running for President in 2016.
When Trump created that term ‘fake news’ back in 2016 he was criticised and derided by many as crazy. But he wasn’t exaggerating when he used the word fake. He absolutely meant fake. By using that term he was telling the world that mainstream media was not just flawed, it was not just a little skewed at times, it was not just a little biased. He was telling people around the world that the mainstream media, everywhere, was actually fake. Made up news. A manufactured creation carefully designed and orchestrated by the powers that be to achieve specific outcomes for directing, manipulating, and controlling society.
The implications of the current BBC scandal are enormous. If you want to control a population, then you need to control the information and the narrative that the people receive. See George Orwell’s 1984 for further reference on that matter. This is exactly what today’s mainstream media does.
This current BBC scandal is no small matter of a simple ‘editing glitch’. This particular piece of fake news was designed and timed specifically to compromise Donald Trump’s 2024 US election campaign. It was designed to help stop Donald Trump from winning the 2024 US election by deliberately framing him as promoting radical extremism and violence, when he did nothing of the sort. That is why Donald Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for billions. The much deeper implications of a systemic culture of carefully calculated fake news are why the Chief Executive and others at the BBC immediately resigned. They know that what they’ve been doing is criminal at a very high level, and that it is now being exposed.
There are those who are still clinging to the comfort of the position that this current BBC scandal was just a one off ‘misjudgement’ of editing and that the BBC, and other mainstream media networks around the world really are still independent, unbiased, and largely trustworthy. Sadly, this is no longer a tenable position, and has not been so for a long time.
Whatever people think of Donald Trump as a politician, on the issue of the media and ‘fake news’, he is 100% correct, and he very well knows it. The latest BBC scandal is simply a slap in the face to society that reinforces that position. The mainstream media creating false or grossly misleading news items about Donald Trump has been happening time after time ever since he first stepped forward into the US Presidential race in 2015. Why is that? Fake news is now systemic in mainstream media around the world. Why is that, and how has that come about? These are extremely important questions for the whole world.
In order to get some broader perspective on these questions of the evolution of systemic, centrally controlled fake news media, we need to roll the clock back a little on several crucial points about how we got to where we are now. In the US the first big shift happened in the early 1900s. The major banker JP Morgan ran some research to try to find out how much of the US media would need to be controlled in order to largely control what the population thought. The answer he got was around 25%, which is what he went ahead and did.
The next key point in the evolution of systemic fake news was post WWII when the CIA was created. The CIA covertly created ‘Operation Mockingbird’ which aimed to achieve a controlling influence of virtually every significant media outlet in the US and Europe. The controlling influence would be achieved either by having one of their own CIA ‘assets’ in a controlling position within a particular media network, or simply controlling a media network through monetary payment. Currently in the US, more than 90% of all mainstream media outlets of all kinds are owned by just six mega-media owners.
Operation Mockingbird became so pervasive, influential, and controlling that it led to President Kennedy calling a major meeting of the US media at the Press Club in 1961 where he made his famous secret societies speech to them. In that speech he pleaded with the US media not to turn away from being independent, and to instead maintain their important duty to the truth and to society and the people. In that speech he was clearly telling the media that covert, controlling influences were at play, and that the controlling impact that was having on the media could end up greatly compromising the future freedom of the United States. He was right, and it has.
Unfortunately, President Kennedy’s plea to the collective media in 1961 was unsuccessful and Operation Mockingbird continued to expand and tighten its covert grip on the media. In the 1970s Operation Mockingbird was publicly exposed through formal investigations, and while it was stated that Operation Mockingbird had been shut down, it was not, and it has covertly continued to this day.
Another important development in the tightening grip of systemic fake news was via President Obama in 2012 when he had the Smith-Mundt Act revoked. The Smith-Mundt Act was created in 1948 following the end of WWII. That Act made it illegal for US media to put forward untrue information for the purposes of propaganda. So, prior to 2012 what was being done through Operation Mockingbird was officially illegal, but still occurring nonetheless. But after 2012, thanks to President Obama, Operation Mockingbird, and other forms of government controlled media propaganda became legal.
Julian Assange and Wikileaks have also shone a big spotlight onto the issue of media control and fake news, and Assange has paid a very big price for doing that. Assange has stated that every war of the past 50 years has been allowed to go ahead only through media lies and propaganda used to manipulate public perception, and that if the media had simply told the public the truth then every one of those wars would have been prevented.
Let that sink in as to the importance of this issue
This is why Donald Trump has attacked the fake news issue so openly and so forcefully. JFK and Donald Trump are the two US Presidents who have really made an effort to call out this problem. JFK called it out politely and diplomatically in 1961, and Donald Trump has called it out in his own unique style of no holds barred straight shooting over the past 10 years. Both of them have been fully aware of the immense consequences to humanity and the world of systemic, centralised fake news, as Julian Assange has so clearly pointed out.
Since the rise of social media in the last 15 years or so, the world of media has been transformed into a global information war zone. The rise of independent social media has thrown a major spanner into the works of the fake news control system. Independent social media has been able to call out the mainstream media fakes news propaganda machine, which is now buckling under that assault, and public trust has plummeted to all-time lows as truth is increasingly exposed. The fightback by the system against this has been strong, with major censorship of social media becoming the norm across so many social media platforms.
This social media censorship pushback by the system was taken to new extreme levels in January 2021 immediately following the so called ‘insurrection’ of January 6th following the 2020 US election. Just two days later on January 8th 2021, tens of thousands of social media accounts around the world, across multiple platforms, were immediately suspended indefinitely, with no explanation given. This included Youtube, Twitter, Facebook and others. Anyone on those platforms who had a significant public following and had raised questions or concerns about elements of the 2020 US election, and other issues against the official media narratives, had their accounts indefinitely suspended. Tens of thousands of the strongest voices around the world who were challenging the official fake news narratives were instantly silenced.
So, this is the media information battlefield that is in play in today’s world. Anyone who thinks that today’s mainstream media of any kind is independent, unbiased, and in any way trustworthy are sadly mistaken. That includes here in New Zealand where the Ardern government paid at least $55 million (most likely considerably more) to the key mainstream media outlets to ensure that they reported ‘appropriately’ on a list of specific key items.
The current BBC fake news scandal is most definitely not just an unfortunate editing glitch in an otherwise appropriate media world. Sadly, it is simply just a very public example and symptom of a very deep and very widespread epidemic of systematic, orchestrated fake news media that goes back 100 years or more. But at least the problem is no longer hidden and unseen.
Thanks to the BBC, institutionalised fake news media has been laid bare for all of the public to see and hopefully understand.
Yes and our lame stream media 1 & 3, shared it all and went along with it, even though they say they didn’t. Don’t they realise the internet is forever 🙄.
Well put. The veil on the role of mainstream media being propaganda is coming down, and their lies over the past few years is plain for all to see.
Since 2016,bullocks, been going on for decades,if not longer
Yes! The global warming and climate fearmongering has been going since 1960 (probably more). Icecaps melt and flood nations, ozone layer is diminishing, acid rain will destroy our forests, etc etc, and the “climate crises” is the push now. But what it actually is, is money laundering. Your tax being funnelled to corrupted third parties until the next “catastrophe” is announced. CO2 is the lifeblood – photosynthesis. The more CO2 the more and bigger our plants. Plants feed us and give us oxygen. Without CO2 we will die.
President of the United States, Donald J Trump’s litigation threat in response to the BBC’s ‘ Panorama’ error in splicing two of Trump’s January 6, 2021, statements to his disadvantage is as hypocritical as he can get. (Well, maybe!)
His speech was to a “Save America March” and rally, which he called, and which was followed by a violent mob that entered the Capitol to disrupt a joint session of Congress as it certified each state’s electoral college vote making it official that Democrat Joe Biden won the presidency.
It is documented that he said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” but that is early on and the one only reference to peace in his whole statement.
There are, however, 27 words ‘fight’ in Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech but the most significant are in his final comments where he said:
“But I said something is wrong here, something is really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” and then “So we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue – I love Pennsylvania Avenue – and we are going to the Capitol. And we are going to try and give – the Democrats are hopeless, they are never voting for anything, not even one vote – but we are going to try to give our Republicans – the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help – going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
Just beforehand Trump allegedly called Vice-President Pence appealing him to block then-incoming President Joe Biden’s certification as the winner of the 2020 election. When Pence refused, Trump reportedly told him that he would “go down as a wimp.”
Trump was diverted from joining the mob by his security unit then while in the White House spent hours TV watching events unfold and ignoring pleas for him to call the riot off.
In effect this was an attempted self-coup two months after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Such is Trump’s corrupt way of operating that on his second inauguration day he granted full pardons to nearly everyone charged with offenses related to the Capitol riot, totalling approximately 1,500 individuals.
Very recently he issued a wave of pardons for his alleged co-conspirators, including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Boris Epshteyn, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, and 72 others also tied to the effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
The ’Panorama’ incident pales in significance.
President of the United States, Donald J Trump’s litigation threat in response to the BBC’s ‘ Panorama’ error in splicing two of Trump’s January 6, 2021, statements to his disadvantage is as hypocritical as he can get. (Well, maybe!)
His speech was to a “Save America March” and rally, which he called, and which was followed by a violent mob that entered the Capitol to disrupt a joint session of Congress as it certified each state’s electoral college vote making it official that Democrat Joe Biden won the presidency.
It is documented that he said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.” but that is early on and the one only reference to peace in his whole statement.
There are, however, 27 words ‘fight’ in Trump’s January 6 Ellipse speech but the most significant are in his final comments where he said:
“But I said something is wrong here, something is really wrong, can’t have happened, and we fight. We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell you’re not going to have a country anymore.” and then “So we are going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue – I love Pennsylvania Avenue – and we are going to the Capitol. And we are going to try and give – the Democrats are hopeless, they are never voting for anything, not even one vote – but we are going to try to give our Republicans – the weak ones because the strong ones don’t need any of our help – going to try and give them the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
Just beforehand Trump allegedly called Vice-President Pence appealing him to block then-incoming President Joe Biden’s certification as the winner of the 2020 election. When Pence refused, Trump reportedly told him that he would “go down as a wimp.”
Trump was diverted from joining the mob by his security unit then while in the White House spent hours TV watching events unfold and ignoring pleas for him to call the riot off.
In effect this was an attempted self-coup two months after Trump’s defeat in the 2020 presidential election.
Such is Trump’s corrupt way of operating that on his second inauguration day he granted full pardons to nearly everyone charged with offenses related to the Capitol riot, totalling approximately 1,500 individuals.
Very recently he issued a wave of pardons for his alleged co-conspirators, including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Boris Epshteyn, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, and 72 others also tied to the effort to overturn the 2020 election results.
The ’Panorama’ incident pales in significance.