Democracy Then! Propaganda Now

Democracy Now!, legacy alternative media for the latte left, has been repeatedly exposed as biased in favor of the U.S./NATO empire. But most who watch DN! cannot tolerate the cognitive dissonance to acknowledge this shift.

Credit for the title of my post -- Democracy Then! Propaganda Now --  goes to "Diogenes" who posted a version of it commenting on this discussion between Max Blumenthal, Aaron Mate and Randy Credico on The Grayzone's YouTube channel. 

A shorter version of the video can be found attached to this Grayzone tweet, but the longer version (11 or so minutes) is worth watching if only to see Julian Assange lied about to his face as he repeatedly denies the false charge that wikileaks said Donald Trump would be less dangerous as president than Hillary Clinton. 

Count how many times Assange says "No, we didn't" while DN!'s guest talks over him.

Summary of The Grayzone's charges against Democracy Now!:

• John Pilger told Blumenthal he was banned from DN! because their funder the Lannan Foundation did not like Pilger's views
• DN! was wrong on wikileaks & Julian Assange, and has never apologized
• DN! was wrong on the Syrian war & the White Helmets
• DN! was wrong on Russiagate, which it heavily promoted
• DN! was wrong on alleged Uyghur genocide
• DN! is wrong on the Ukraine war origins & goals, and clearly biased against Russia

The propaganda of the U.S. empire is, as many have observed, outstandingly effective. 

It has split the antiwar movement in the U.S. by capturing many of their sources of information.

I once worked in marketing (for cars) and learned of the strong spending to build brand loyalty among college students. Because research shows that brand loyalties are formed when we are quite young and these loyalties are extremely resistant to change for most people. 

This is why it's effective to lure people into trusting a news outlet like Democracy Now! (or Common Dreams, or NPR, etc. -- those are posts for another day). Once trust has been established, the slow drift toward supporting the imperial narrative can begin. Much like the frog in that pot of slowly warming water, most won't notice and many will employ strong denial tactics to maintain  that they're not being boiled to death.

Some have identified the first sign of Democracy Now!'s rightward drift in their coverage of the unfortunate events of 9/11/01. Since the current nonstop warmongering of the U.S. kicked off using 9/11 as a pretext, that makes a lot of sense. But substantiating that claim would take more research than I have time for at the moment. 

Just something to think about.