Stephen Sefton, May 6th 2022
Russia's military offensive in Ukraine is likely to inflict a conclusive strategic defeat on the corporate and political elites of North America and Europe. As it develops even now, that defeat is breaking the West's centuries old chokehold on the sovereign development of the majority world. However, faithful reporting of that reality is systematically suppressed because good faith reporting has practically vanished now across the Western world, not just in journalism but also in research and reporting by NGOs or academics and institutions of all kinds.
North American and European governments and corporations have long controlled Western reporting outlets and used them to wage aggressive psychological warfare against target countries overseas and too as a means of systematic repression against domestic populations. This comprehensive corruption of reporting standards in North America, Europe and allied Pacific countries aims to render genuinely truthful accounts untrustworthy and disreputable if they contradict official versions authorized by Western corporate and political elites.
The traditional concept that reporting a true and fair view of events can be done by posing relevant, appropriate questions in good faith about those events and their context has long been abandoned. Reporting errors and falsehoods are covered up or left unacknowledged, even when they have been exposed independently. In effect, Western reporting as often as not distorts events to such extremes as to render even the most absurd accounts plausible. This corruption of reporting standards makes independent investigation of controversial events practically impossible at all levels except by readily marginalized dissenting sources.
This is something that has been very clear in the case of special international tribunals investigating, among many other examples, events in Rwanda, in former Yugoslavia and in Lebanon. The International Criminal Court offers other examples, perhaps most obviously the grossly unjust procedure applied to Laurent Gbagbo, former president of Ivory Coast, who was finally vindicated and set free. Reporting by Western authorities, UN and other institutions and international media of current events in Ukraine very much underscore this reality.
In essence what the undeniable fascist union of corporate and political power elites in North America and Europe has done is to reshape reporting practice as an infinite false information feedback loop whose overriding purpose is the systematic creation of demented false beliefs among their countries' populations. With constant repetition over time, those false beliefs become false memories which governments exploit to justify policies serving the elites that own them against the fundamental interests of their respective countries' peoples.
A couple of things are worth remembering in this dismaying context.
Firstly the the Western intellectual managerial class runnng North American and European information outlets for their corporate and political owners are very much a minority in global terms. So globally, people in the West committed to truthful reporting of international affairs are not in a minority. Most by far of the majority world, know very well the endless crimes and perverse duplicity of Western corporate and political elites. So people who challenge false Western reporting by trying to report events in a true and fair way should very much remember that and not be intimidated.
In the end, while our knowledge of events may be incomplete, the events and evidence about them are determinate. So good faith reporting from countries targeted by the US and its allies based on first hand testimony and good documentation can and does expose the downright lies and systematic distortion of Western reporting outlets. Good reporting let's readers or viewers make up their own minds as much as possible and that is what genuine reporters and writers do implicitly whenever they challenge false official accounts with well founded reporting of their own.