Please Write and Withdraw Your Support From NPR/PBS

There are countless examples of NPR propaganda that just make me feel sick. And now I'm needing to write again after reaching a tipping point late in the day today when I listened to yet one more interview on NPR that was pure poisonous propaganda. It made me want to scream! 

The topic was climate change, a term that NPR and PBS have increasingly  been using and professing to "cover." First, and please note, the term consistently used is climate change and NOT climate crisis or climate emergency. To some this may seem like not a big deal — which is exactly what makes NPR/PBS dangerous. The propaganda too often is subtle — unless you've been turning to independent non-corporate funded resources of integrity and are able to discern the difference between truth and lies.

On the program today — that was so incredibly 1984ish crazy-making! — there was a "brain expert" interviewed who was there to explain why we humans won't/don't act on "climate change." According to the "expert" it all has to do with our brains. He gave three criteria that would compel our human brains to act that he said were NOT relevant to climate change. 

Each point he made embodied breathtaking and chilling propaganda: (1) There needs to be some bad guys, someone to blame and hold accountable. But this, the expert said, was not true because climate change is "meteorological" and not caused by some bad people out there with malicious intent. (2) There needs to be a moral component, which, again, the "expert" denied was relevant. In other words, because there is no human cause to climate change, there's no moral imperative for our brains to shift into gear and do something about it. "It's not our fault, so there's no moral imperative to do anything." (3) There needs to be an " imminent threat," which the "expert' again denied as being relevant to "climate change." He said that while some people were being impacted now, most of us were not. Therefore, our brains would not be compel us to act because we are not personally affected. Maybe someone else is, but it's someone "out there." Or the threat is so far off in the distance that it doesn't affect me now. So our brains tell us that it's okay to not do anything.

This was NPR's "expert" opinion. Nothing but lies and soothing us into more compliance with the do-nothing status quo. Promoting such dangerous distortions of the reality that is directly tied to the greatest threat that humankind has ever faced is the absolute darkest of the dark. It is evil. When lies cost so many lies, cause so much suffering, and imperil life on Earth, those lies are evil. We need to call it what is is. 

And this is just a tiny snap shot of what NPR and PBS consistently engage in with their "independent news." Again and again and again I hear this propaganda which only serves to fuel our ignorance and inaction. Makes me furious! And, as Greta Thunberg exclaims, HOW DARE THEY!!!

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It needs to be illuminated that while NPR gave us their "expert" on climate change and the human brain today, Amy Goodman has spent the whole week in at the COP25 Climate Change Conference in Madrid. This was a story that she reported, among others, on Democracy Now! today: Greta Thunberg Slams COP25, Says Response to Climate Crisis Is “Clever Accounting and Creative PR”: https://www.democracynow.org/2019/12/12/greta_thunberg_speech_cop_time_magazine. The difference between corporate funded media and true independent journalism is vast beyond words. We need to not believe what the corporate powers are feeding us!! We need to tell them NO MORE! I am done believing you and I am done supporting you! 

At the same time, we need to throw our support behind independent media, which is something I've been doing for some time. There are so many resources who, as Amy Goodman states, "go to where the silence is" and, as Chris Hedges speaks to, embody "a profound commitment to the truth."

With Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!

With author and investigative journalist Chris Hedges

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I have already written, and shared multiple times, this piece on why I cannot support NPR or PBS: https://mollystrongheart.blogspot.com/2019/07/my-letter-to-npr-and-pbs-why-i-cannot.html.

This time I am actively asking others to join me. We must unite in speaking the truth and exposing the lies. 

Without the capacity for discernment, all too often those listening to resources like NPR may not be following the money or recognizing that the voices being heard, promoted, and interviewed are those with direct connections to the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, and other enormous wealthy capitalist interests. Consequently, we may be completely unaware of the intentional Bernie blackout, or the intentional vilification of Medicare for All, or the intentional collusion with endless war, or the talk about climate change while engaging in the intentional promotion of the deadly status quo — the status quo that demands silence and inaction related to what must be done NOW if we are to even have a chance of leaving a habitable planet to our children and grandchildren.

The case can also be made that NPR and PBS are in some ways more dangerous than resources like FOX, which is so blatantly a propaganda tool of the Republican Party and the extreme right. The harm that NPR/PBS engages in can be more insidious exactly because they do some excellent programming, which includes shows like Frontline. At the same time, and while they appear to be talking about climate change, too many get fooled into believing that they are getting the full story. They trust NPR and PBS to be reputable and trustworthy. 

Which makes NPR/PBS dangerous. Like FOX, CNN, MSNBC, and all corporate funded mainstream media, the priorities for NPR and PBS are with profits and their corporate donors and not with the people or the planet. This is why many who have done their deep homework have come refer to NPR as National Petroleum Radio or National Propaganda Radio. The great danger and harm of this illusion of quality independent broadcasting on NPR/PBS "news" is that interspersed between some excellent programming is the propaganda — the insidious, pervasive, poisonous propaganda.

 

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Long ago Bill Moyers was among the first that I was aware of who was warning about what was happening to PBS and NPR. He had also been championing the cause of the urgent need for media reform for many years. Today I recognize Bill Moyers as being among countless truth-tellers who have understood what the large corporate influences have meant for the authenticity, integrity, quality, and independence of journalists and what they are reporting to the American people. 

As the power of wealthy interests has grown and grown over what we are exposed to across the airwaves, on television programing, and in our newspapers and other media resources, there has been an insidious creeping impact within our brains, our emotions and belief systems, our level of awareness related to the most important issues of our times, and our capacity to live in alignment with values grounded in consciousness, truth, generosity, kindness, caring, wisdom, and love.

All of this reminds me of the words that my oldest son spoke to me twenty years ago, which have also come back to haunt and to inform me again and again. Brian challenged me with this question, "What better way to control a people than to convince them that they are not being controlled?" My son was speaking about our country, about the United States.

This slide into corporate control over what we hear and believe and think in America is incredibly frightening and disturbing and dangerous. And it's the answer to this essential question asked by Herbert Schiller: "How did thinking that benefited the few gain acceptance of the many?" 

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So much becomes clear as we get really brave and do a deep dive into our belief systems with a radical and fierce commitment to pursuing the truth. This process has been, and continues to be, what has empowered me to be waking up from my illusions, ignorance, and indoctrination. 

Looking upon us all with compassion, and especially those of us who have not felt like we were totally excluded from the "American Dream," how could we not have been fooled into unknowingly trading in consciousness and truth for massive and dangerous misinformation? We haven't known that we are being controlled. 

Just imagine if over the past 30 years we had been informed about the looming climate crisis. There never would have been a Donald Trump or anyone who even came close to denying the truth about our changing climate. Just imagine how vastly different our world would be...

So many wise and courageous truth-tellers have brilliantly written about the widespread normalization of propaganda in the United States. They are the canaries in the mine-shaft  — a constant reminder that who and what we choose to feed our minds and hearts and souls with is deeply, deeply important. Because there is a huge price we all pay when what we're constantly exposed to deadly misinformation — such as through a corporate media that, rather than holding the powerful accountable, acts as their mouthpieces.

And the consequences — of unknowingly acting to benefit the few rather than the many — are almost too unbearable to wake up to and look at... Endless wars. Mass dislocations and migrations. The glorification of the military while 22 veterans commit suicide every day. Mass shootings. The sixth mass extinction. Dying coral reefs. Melting glaciers. Rising sea levels. Catastrophic wildfires and droughts and floods and hurricanes. Deadly heatwaves and deadly winter storms. Thousands of houseless people living on the streets. Thousands of people without healthcare or with inadequate healthcare who are going bankrupt, suffering, and dying. Epidemics of addictions and mental illness, of anxiety and depression and despair, of child abuse and neglect, of domestic violence and misogyny, of racism and homophobia and xenophobia, of isolation and loneliness and shame and separation, and of crushing poverty and starvation and suffering of billions of humans and non-humans amidst the ongoing vast redistribution of wealth upwards into the hands of the very few. And the list goes on.

All this is occurring as we continue to live with, justify, enable, and normalize the domination ideology that supports the patriarchal, neoliberal, predatory capitalist system which — for hundreds of years right up to this present moment — has brought us the unfathomable suffering of living beings alongside the destruction of the Earth's life support systems. 

The fact that we have in place a system of propaganda that has been so effective that millions of us have bought into it — and have been unknowingly complicit with this system of death — is truly breathtaking, horrifying, and heartbreaking. This must change. This must radically change if we are not to perish while taking most of Earth's inhabitants with us into extinction. All that we love and cherish is at stake. 

Bless us all, no exceptions...

Molly

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"We need much more than a political revolution; we also need a moral, cultural, and spiritual revolution — an awakening to the dignity and value of each and every one of us no matter who we are, where we came from, or what we've done... It is this revolutionary spirit — a revolutionary love for all people and for life itself — that will ultimately determine our collective fate." — Michelle Alexander

"In our time, when high technology guided by values such as conquest, exploitation, and domination threaten our very survival, we need economics driven by an ethos of caring. We need a caring revolution." — Riane Eisler

"In place of the Old Bottom Line of money and power, a New Bottom Line of Love and Generosity is possible. People of all faiths need to shape a political and social movement that reaffirms the most generous, peace-oriented, social justice-committed, and loving truths of the spiritual heritage of the human race." — Rabbi Michael Lerner