Confusion can arise when trying to understand why millions of people still tune into mainstream media. Because of this, they (mainstream media) are still having a huge impact on the consciousness of those who watch and surf their platforms for information about what’s happening in our world.

That being said, many have come to the conclusion that mainstream media often does have an agenda, and will push their own version of ‘fake news,’ while at the same time, labeling other narratives, perspectives, and evidence as the real ‘fake news.’ What’s required in this time of confusion is doing our own research, and seeking independent media sources to better understand our world.

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Are people even reading for information anymore? Or are they simply looking at headlines on the internet while watching T.V. news broadcasts? Are we seeing what fits our narratives as opposed to what’s challenging them?

The evidence that what we have been told by mainstream media is either false or lacking the full picture comes in the form of official declassified documentation, real world examples, and from multiple award winning mainstream media journalists who have committed the rest of their lives to letting people know how the media has deceived people.

Those who are participating in actions they know are deceptive to people and that does not create a better world are having a change of heart, and as a result they are speaking out. We are also seeing this with many soldiers returning from modern wars, realizing they themselves are tools of destruction rather than forces of peace.

Some Back Story

One person to speak out recently is NBC/MSNBC reporter William Arkin, a longtime and well-known military reporter who is best known for his groundbreaking, three-part Washington Post series in 2010. He co-reported it with two-time Pulitzer winner Dana Priest on how sprawling, unaccountable, and omnipotent the national security state has become in the post-9/11 era. This report dealt with black budget operations, programs that not even the commander in chief nor Congress has any idea about.

It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief know nothing about. – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defence Minister

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Their investigation lasted approximately two years and concluded that America’s classified world has “become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.”

This was many years ago, and the latest developments with regards to these programs has come in the form of $21 trillion missing dollars from the Department of Defence, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Michigan State professor and Economist Mark Skidmore, along with former assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development Catherine Austin Fitts found that this money was going towards black budget programs as well. Fitts has also been quite outspoken about a secret space program.

You can read more about that particular story here.

With regards to the report by Arkin,

When that three-part investigative series, titled “Top Secret America,” was published, I hailed it as one of the most important pieces of reporting of the war on terror, because while “we chirp endlessly about the Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Democrats and Republicans, this is the Real U.S. Government: functioning in total darkness, beyond elections and parties, so secret, vast and powerful that it evades the control or knowledge of any one person or even any organization.”(source)

This is one of many proofs of the Deep State. It’s been referenced by countless politicians and academics throughout history.

Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day. – Theodore Roosevelt

The most recent politicians to reference it were Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad, as well as Vladimir Putin. Western mainstream media will have you believe this narrative as being completely ‘fake,’ despite the fact that many western politicians themselves have also shared this perspective.

William Arkin Speaks Out Against NBC & MSNBC

Arkin recently blasted NBC News along with MSNBC news in an email for “becoming captive and subservient to the national security state, reflexively pro-war in the name of stopping President Donald Trump, and now the prime propaganda instrument of the War Machine’s promotion of militarism and imperialism.” This is something, based on my research, mainstream media has always been. It’s why they were created in the first place.

Arkin stated that, as a result of this, “the national security establishment not only hasn’t issued a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength, and “is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism.”

Another great quote comes to mind here,

“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation . . . The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties . . . [and] control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.” (source)– Mayor of New York City from 1918-1925

Arkin has worked with NBC and MSNBC since 2016, and it’s great to see that he’s leaving due to the fact that these outlets have become nothing but the “central propaganda arm of the CIA, the Pentagon, and the FBI. This network alone consists of former CIA, NSA and Pentagon officials as news analysts. MSNBC host and former Bush-Cheney Communications Director Nicole Wallace is one of multiple great examples.

Establishment Media Mouthpieces

MSNBC’s star national security reporter Ken Dilanian was widely mocked by media outlets for years for being an uncritical CIA stenographer before he became a beloved NBC/MSNBC reporter, and let’s not forget CNN’s Anderson Cooper’s connections to the CIA.

Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program to infiltrate mainstream media and use it to influence the minds of the masses decades ago, seems to be in full effect today, at a larger scale than anyone can possibly imagine.

In early 2018, NBC hired former CIA chief John Brennan to serve as a “senior national security and intelligence analyst.”

A declassified document from the CIA archives in the form of a letter from a CIA task force addressed to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency details the close relationship that exists between the CIA and mainstream media and academia. The document states that the CIA task force “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation,” and that “this has helped us turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success” stories,’ and has contributed to the accuracy of countless others.” Furthermore, it explains how the agency has “persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.”

The Email

Again, all of this lead to Arkin publishing a critique of NBC and MSNBC in the form of an email he sent to multiple outlets, including the Intercept where I first came across this story.

You can read it in its entirety below.

My expertise, though seeming to be all the more central to the challenges and dangers we face, also seems to be less valued at the moment. And I find myself completely out of synch with the network, being neither a day-to-day reporter nor interested in the Trump circus. …

To me there is also a larger problem: though they produce nothing that resembles actual safety and security, the national security leaders and generals we have are allowed to do their thing unmolested. Despite being at “war,” no great wartime leaders or visionaries are emerging. There is not a soul in Washington who can say that they have won or stopped any conflict. And though there might be the beloved perfumed princes in the form of the Petraeus’ and Wes Clarks’, or the so-called warrior monks like Mattis and McMaster, we’ve had more than a generation of national security leaders who sadly and fraudulently have done little of consequence. And yet we (and others) embrace them, even the highly partisan formers who masquerade as “analysts”. We do so ignoring the empirical truth of what they have wrought: There is not one county in the Middle East that is safer today than it was 18 years ago. Indeed the world becomes ever more polarized and dangerous. …

Windrem again convinced me to return to NBC to join the new investigative unit in the early days of the 2016 presidential campaign. I thought that the mission was to break through the machine of perpetual war acceptance and conventional wisdom to challenge Hillary Clinton’s hawkishness. It was also an interesting moment at NBC because everyone was looking over their shoulder at Vice and other upstarts creeping up on the mainstream. But then Trump got elected and Investigations got sucked into the tweeting vortex, increasingly lost in a directionless adrenaline rush, the national security and political version of leading the broadcast with every snow storm. And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself – busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play.

I’d argue that under Trump, the national security establishment not only hasn’t missed a beat but indeed has gained dangerous strength. Now it is ever more autonomous and practically impervious to criticism. I’d also argue, ever so gingerly, that NBC has become somewhat lost in its own verve, proxies of boring moderation and conventional wisdom, defender of the government against Trump, cheerleader for open and subtle threat mongering, in love with procedure and protocol over all else (including results). I accept that there’s a lot to report here, but I’m more worried about how much we are missing. Hence my desire to take a step back and think why so little changes with regard to America’s wars. …

In our day-to-day whirlwind and hostage status as prisoners of Donald Trump, I think – like everyone else does – that we miss so much. People who don’t understand the medium, or the pressures, loudly opine that it’s corporate control or even worse, that it’s partisan. Sometimes I quip in response to friends on the outside (and to government sources) that if they mean by the word partisan that it is New Yorkers and Washingtonians against the rest of the country then they are right.

For me I realized how out of step I was when I looked at Trump’s various bumbling intuitions: his desire to improve relations with Russia, to denuclearize North Korea, to get out of the Middle East, to question why we are fighting in Africa, even in his attacks on the intelligence community and the FBI. Of course he is an ignorant and incompetent impostor. And yet I’m alarmed at how quick NBC is to mechanically argue the contrary, to be in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war. Really? We shouldn’t get out Syria? We shouldn’t go for the bold move of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula? Even on Russia, though we should be concerned about the brittleness of our democracy that it is so vulnerable to manipulation, do we really yearn for the Cold War? And don’t even get me started with the FBI: What? We now lionize this historically destructive institution?

Arkin has joined many others to blow the whistle on how all of this works, and how mainstream media as “become ground zero for these political pathologies of militarism and servitude to security state agencies.”

A Few More Examples

Dr. Udo Ulfkotte is a top German journalist and editor and has been for more than two decades. He went on the record stating that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also mentioning that noncompliance would result in him losing his job. Not long ago, he made an appearance on RT news Stating that:

“I’ve been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not to tell the truth to the public. But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia — this is a point of no return and I’m going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over Europe.”

Here is a great TEDx talk from veteran investigative journalist and former CBS NEWS investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson. In it, she explains how “astroturf,” or fake grassroots movements, funded by political, corporate, or other special interests, are very effectively manipulating and distorting mainstream media messages, whether it be political or corporate.

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Amber Lyon is a three time Emmy award winning journalist at CNN. She has gone on record stating that the mainstream media outlets are routinely paid by the US government as well as foreign governments to selectively report and distort information on certain events. She has also stated that the United States government has editorial control over mainstream media content.

Again, these are just a few examples out of many.

“The problem of fake news isn’t solved by hoping for a referee, but rather because we as citizens, we as users of these services, help each other. We talk and we share and we point out what is fake. We point out what is true. The answer to bad speech is not censorship, the answer to bad speech is more speech. We have to exercise and spread the idea that critical thinking matters, now more than ever, given the fact that lies seem to be getting more popular.” –Edward Snowden (source)

The Takeaway

What’s happening on Earth right now is something that’s never happened before. There is an evolution happening, a gigantic shift in consciousness, and more people are starting to see what was well hidden before, and that’s the fact that what we are told about our world and events that take place on it are often highly manipulated and grounded in a state of consciousness tied to separation. More than ever we are questioning so much of what we hear, and never before have we been presented with so many examples to see just how far from ‘conspiracy theories’ these facts truly are.

It can be hard to wake up to the fact that the world is not how we’ve been told, or what we are taught, and we may wish to hold to cognitive dissonance, but ultimately, we are much more than what we’ve been made to believe. Only through questioning our current worldview will we realize this.

This grand ‘awakening’ does not only encompass waking up to deception and trickery, but also realizing that were are spiritual beings having a human experience, and there are plenty of experiences on Earth that our souls no longer desire to experience. We are ready to move on, take off the training wheels and fly. Transparency and truth are KEY elements in this awakening. Information is light, and without truth and transparency we can never really move forward and experience our full potential as human beings. It’s an exciting time to be alive.

 

*Article originally appeared at Collective Evolution.