The media keeps saying that the West isn't
involved in Syria. This isn't true.
By Ian Sinclair: “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is
largely voluntary”, George Orwell noted
in his censored preface to his 1945 book Animal Farm. “Unpopular ideas can be
silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official
ban”. Orwell went onto explain that “at any given moment there is an orthodoxy,
a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept
without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other,
but it is ‘not done’ to say it”.
The corporate media’s ‘coverage’ of Syria
adds a twist to Orwell’s dictum – inconvenient reports and facts do
occasionally appear in respected newspapers and on popular news programmes but
they are invariably ignored, decontextualised or not followed up on. Rather
than informing the historical record, public opinion and government policy
these snippets of essential information are effectively thrown down the memory
hole.
Instead the public is fed a steady diet of
simplistic, Western-friendly propaganda, a key strand of which is that the US
has, as Channel 4 News’s Paul Mason blindly asserted
in January 2016, “stood aloof from the Syrian conflict”. This deeply ingrained
ignorance was taken to comical lengths when Mason’s Channel 4 News colleague
Cathy Newman interviewed
the former senior US State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter, with both
women agreeing the US had not armed the insurgency in Syria.
By Ian Sinclair: “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is
largely voluntary”, George Orwell noted
in his censored preface to his 1945 book Animal Farm. “Unpopular ideas can be
silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official
ban”. Orwell went onto explain that “at any given moment there is an orthodoxy,
a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept
without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other,
but it is ‘not done’ to say it”.
The corporate media’s ‘coverage’ of Syria
adds a twist to Orwell’s dictum – inconvenient reports and facts do
occasionally appear in respected newspapers and on popular news programmes but
they are invariably ignored, decontextualised or not followed up on. Rather
than informing the historical record, public opinion and government policy
these snippets of essential information are effectively thrown down the memory
hole.
Instead the public is fed a steady diet of
simplistic, Western-friendly propaganda, a key strand of which is that the US
has, as Channel 4 News’s Paul Mason blindly asserted
in January 2016, “stood aloof from the Syrian conflict”. This deeply ingrained
ignorance was taken to comical lengths when Mason’s Channel 4 News colleague
Cathy Newman interviewed
the former senior US State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter, with both
women agreeing the US had not armed the insurgency in Syria.
