Crybullies.                                                            Keith Porteous  

crybully: noun, plural cry·bul·lies.

a person who self-righteously harasses or intimidates others while playing the victim, especially of a perceived social injustice: “It’s just another group of crybullies who can’t cope with anyone’s views but their own.”

Like most publications, The Islands Grapevine (TIG) has an editorial policy that supports the censorship of hate-speech, incitements to violence, and the use of pejorative language to smear or denigrate a private citizen. This policy mostly mirrors Canadian speech, slander, and libel laws, where there are limits to freedom of speech. TIG does not “print just about anything”, nor does it accept letters to the editor or opinion pieces without editorial review, and sometimes asks contributors to revise their submissions based on its publicly defined editorial policies, and these views are independent of the personal views of TIG’s editor.

More than 90% of TIG’s public health content has been contributed without controversy, and is sourced from government advisories. Some of that information turned out to be false, but TIG’s editor assumes that these errors and false claims were made in good faith. In other words, the public health experts and advocates making these false claims did so in their belief that they were true, even in the absence of later correcting themselves. But now that the available mainstream scientific and documented evidence has evolved, not all of TIG’s critics have accepted these facts, even falsely smearing the paper and making threats to boycott or pull advertising as a form of protest. I’ll be writing about this in more detail at a later date.

The biggest insult carried in the smears and threats, is the assumption that they will have an effect on TIG’s editorial policy. Apparently, those who have not revised their beliefs, based on the current mainstream documented scientific evidence relating to public health policy, think that TIG’s publisher is so lacking in his convictions that the editorial policy will be changed if an ad is withdrawn, or when someone claims they will no longer read the paper or contribute content. And these threats are also made in relation to other letters and opinions TIG has published. TIG has even received emails from people accessing taxpayer supported funds for public benefit, threatening to withdraw it from TIG advertising and redirect it elsewhere, based on their personal views. This is a clear form of corruption, and a conflict of interest.

It should also be said that TIG receives an enormous amount of support from its readership and advertisers, often quietly and privately, noting the social cost of speaking up against the crybullies. So what is all this really about? It’s not an issue of what is true, but an issue of who controls the messaging, and a mirror of the corporate media model that has been employed over the last 20 plus years. The corporate business model is now one that picks a lane and sticks to it, by telling its audience what it wants to hear, and nothing of what it doesn’t want to hear. This is true of both FOXNews and CBCNews. There is an expectation under this corporate model that you will rarely hear a perspective that you don’t like and don’t agree with. In independent media, there is a much wider inclusion of different perspectives, and less exclusion of perspectives that don’t mirror the dominant narratives as presented by government and corporate media. TIG is an independent and democratic free press that holds firmly to the principles of its editorial policies.

When yesterday’s “misinformation” becomes today’s accepted fact, we should take pause to ask the simple question, “who gets to determine what is true?” Apparently governments and corporate media believe that they do, while public trust in these institutions is at a historical low point. Legacy media is literally dying, while the political leadership’s favourability ratings are at an all time low. Most recently, based on the documented evidence and testimony of whistleblowers and independent journalists, a U.S. Federal Court judge ordered the Executive Branch of the U.S. government, including all of its law enforcement and security apparatus, to stop making contact with social media companies in order to suppress and censor information they don’t like, the so-called “malinformation” that carries inconvenient truths. Most widespread “disinformation” isn’t coming from “conspiracy theorists” and Russia, it’s coming from Western governments and their corporate media allies.

The Islands Grapevine is a community newspaper in the traditional sense, in that it mostly publishes information relating to community events, uncontroversial issues that reflect local culture and activities, advertising local businesses and independent services, with classifieds and crosswords and cartoons, and with a few letters to the editor and a couple of opinion pieces. It’s a locally owned small business that employs a few people, seeking to grow its engagement with the island communities it serves. TIG also prints The Flagstone monthly, at a below market cost. The readers and writers who publicly criticize TIG are often carried in its weekly issues, as a reflection of its commitment to a free press philosophy. Those who make empty threats and foolish accusations are merely the crybullies. If what you are looking for is the single lane idea of corporate media, or the echo chambered silos of your social media, you are still invited to read The Islands Grapevine free of charge, and turn the page if you see something you don’t like.

We’re Taught About Liberal And Conservative Bias In Media, But Not US Empire Bias

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE

AUG 4, 2023

 

One of the biggest problems with the urgent push for “media literacy” we’ve been seeing in the west these last few years is that everyone’s being taught about liberal bias and conservative bias in media, but they’re not being taught about US empire bias.

Your average western news media consumer will have some general awareness that Fox News has a conservative bias and MSNBC has a liberal bias, and if you try to use one of them to prove a political point to someone of the opposing ideology they’ll probably hasten to inform you of the biased nature of your source. A somewhat smaller but still very large percentage of the population will be aware that an outlet like RT is going to have a bias in favor of the Russian government, and if you try to cite RT to prove some point about Ukraine or whatever you’ll probably get called out on that right away.

That’s about as far as “media literacy” goes among the general public in the western world, which just so happens to work out very nicely in favor of the western empire. The radius of awareness extends just far enough to pose no threat to the empire’s information interests, and stops there.

https://twitter.com/Consortiumnews/status/1665723366810976256

What relatively few westerners are aware of is that the entirety of mainstream western media — both liberal and conservative — are so biased in favor of the US and its empire-like global sphere of influence that they are almost worthless for forming an accurate understanding of what’s happening in the world.

Every foreign policy agenda of the US and its allies is reliably facilitated by the western media, because the western media do not exist primarily to report the news, they exist primarily to administer propaganda. The New York Times has reliably supported every war the US has waged. Western mass media focus overwhelmingly on foreign protests against governments the United States dislikes while paying far less attention to widespread protests against US-aligned governments. The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. US media did such a good job deceitfully marrying Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks in the minds of the public in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that seven in ten Americans still believed he was connected to 9/11 months after the war began. To name just a few obvious glaring examples of far too many to list.

Kids aren’t being taught about this type of bias in school. Websites like AllSides and Media Bias/Fact Check set up to help improve “media literacy” and teach people about media biases focus only on biases of ideological partisanship, not international conflicts and foreign policy.

You’ve probably seen charts like this one from the Media Bias section of the AllSides website, where the biases of outlets are ranked from “Left” to “Center” to “Right”:

What you’ve never seen anywhere is a chart that ranks outlets in terms of how sympathetic they are to the US-centralized empire, with outlets like The New York Times, The Guardian and Fox News being listed on the extreme end of one side and more US-critical outlets like Consortium News, Mintpress News and Antiwar toward the other side. Notice how the above chart is so completely uninterested in foreign policy that it lists militarist smut rag The Atlantic in the same category as outlets that are often critical of US foreign policy like Jacobin and The Nation.

Here’s what the Media Bias/Fact Check profile on my (currently malfunctioning) website looks like as of this writing:

It places me on the far left ideologically, which is of course fair, but it doesn’t tell you anything about my attitude toward the US and its allies, which consumes a huge amount of my focus and commentary. Am I one of those “yay NATO” lefties or am I a “boo NATO” lefty? Am I one of those lefties who focuses on domestic issues and pretends foreign policy doesn’t exist? In international conflicts do I tend to side with the US, side with some other government, remain neutral, or some mixture of the above? It doesn’t say.

It doesn’t say for anyone else either. The New York Times is listed as having a “left-center bias” with a credibility rating of “high”. The New York Post is listed as having a “center-right” bias with a “mixed” credibility rating. It’s all about where they can be placed on the left-to-right ideology scale and some arbitrary determination about how “credible” they’re found to be, without any mention of the fact that they are both fiercely loyal to the US empire.

This is entirely by design. The whole push to promote “media literacy” and improve online information has never actually been about training people to see and understand the biases of media outlets, it’s been about training people not to see and understand them. At least not where it matters.

Foreign policy is the single most consequential aspect of government behaviour when it comes to the US and its allies, because it affects the most people to the greatest degree. Domestic policy has very real consequences for the kind of life people will have under the US power alliance, but you’re talking about questions like whether they’ll be able to afford healthcare or purchase legal cannabis, not whether they’ll be bombed, starved by crushing economic sanctions, or killed in a nuclear war. And yet our entire society is being trained not to look there when determining the biases of the sources we look to for information.

And this is exactly because foreign policy is so immensely consequential. Those who run the empire don’t care whether women can have an abortion or whether marginalized groups are abused by police, so they’re happy for the biases of their propaganda organs to be highlighted on such matters and for everyone to pour all their energy into debating them. What they absolutely do care about a very great deal is the operation of the globe-spanning empire, which is held together by nonstop violence and abuse and the threat there of.

So we are indoctrinated into supporting the US empire’s agendas of war, militarism, manipulation and resource extraction around the world, and we are trained not to look at the fact that we are being indoctrinated by sources of information who are all wildly biased in favour of that empire.

https://twitter.com/caitoz/status/1662795554869641219

By keeping the western media’s US empire bias out of the spotlight, imperial spinmeisters shrink the Overton window of acceptable opinion down to those foreign policy views which are promoted by mainstream information sources whose only criticisms of the empire come down to minor quibbles about the specifics of how the empire should be run, instead of whether a globe-spanning power structure should exist at all.

This is just one of the many sly little ways our perception of our world is tilted toward the interests of our rulers. It’s what Chomsky was talking about when he said, “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”

A passive and obedient populace is exactly what the empire wants, so the imperial media keep the debate restricted to things like culture war issues and electoral politics, with the edges of the Overton window eclipsing out issues like capitalism, militarism, oligarchy and empire. In this way we are kept barking and snarling at each other, without ever turning our gaze upon our rulers, and without ever noticing how many more there are of us there are than them.

All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

 

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A Tribute to a National Treasure

Kazuo Ishiguro, author of Remains of the Day, has called Eleanor Wachtel “one of the very finest interviewers of authors I’ve come across anywhere in the world.”  She was one of the very few interviewers who truly enjoyed discovering her subjects and their writings and thrived on the necessary research—Pierre Berton had the same intense desire to prepare thoroughly before sitting down with a guest.  Eleanor eschewed the banal; her questions and responses were intelligent and considered.  That quiet enjoyment of all things literary and their importance to a well rounded life shone through in every interview she did.  She swam against the current stream in believing that a high level of objectivity was attainable and did her best to keep her own biases out of her conversations.  Her example is one we can all learn from; she conducted her interviews with compassion, wit, sensitivity, and humour—attributes sorely lacking in so much of our current cultural onslaught of opinion.

She is a Canadian ‘National Treasure’ and her Sunday afternoon hour for the past 33 years is a loss to our identity.  On her final show June 25 she had tributes from Salman Rushdie, Zadie Smith, and Jonathon Franzen; she was joined on the program by Gary Shteyngart and Brandon Taylor.  She will be sorely missed by many Canadians as well as listeners wherever she was broadcast around the world.  We can only hope she will continue writing and broadcasting in her inimitable style.

Fortunately we can still access podcasts of many of her interviews and she has promised to make all 33 years worth available.  For a second career as brilliant as her first,

Oakley Rankin