Benign Intent: Tools of Corporate Media Propaganda

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In a healthy society governed by democratic principles and the rule of law, news media would be analogous to a powerful telescope, a roving, scrutinizing eye from which little or nothing can hide. Corrupt societies — ones that require the vast majority of the population to be passive, obedient, misinformed, ignorant, distracted and consumptive — require instead a media that acts as a kind of prism, a distorting lens that presents a perversion of reality.

The scale of this distortion varies greatly around the world, with some — mostly independent — media (sometimes lone journalists) laudably aiming to shine a torch as best they can on state and corporate power. At the other extreme, dictatorships like North Korea use state media to portray a false reality to help control their people, who nonetheless are surely aware that their freedoms are strictly limited.

Western corporate-owned media, however, is unique and quite remarkable in that while it depicts a reality as laughably false as that shown to the North Koreans, its readers/viewers — more accurately its consumers — are overwhelmingly unaware that they are being fed a pack of lies, that the picture given to them is — in key areas that concern corporate power and Western control of world resources — diametrically opposite to reality. With a corporate media monopoly over the information that enters people’s brains, information that is crucial to the formation of their worldview, reality is skewed with ease to serve the interests of capital and control. Not only are consumers of such information not aware of this cynical manipulation, they are not even aware that they are not aware.

Refugee Rights in the Mother of the World: Perspectives on Darfuri Activism in Exile

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From 1996 to 1997, Abdel Rahman first lived as an exile in Libya. There, he bore witness to a bleak reality, where human rights held little to no ground. From the outset, he endured what he calls “the grim choice to stay and die, or leave and risk it:”

In Libya, there were continuous arrest campaigns, and arbitrary detentions and deportations of illegal and legal migrants. They were migrants who came to Libya at the request of Colonel Gaddafi, who had declared that his country welcomed all Arabs, as well as the oppressed and poor Africans.

There was permanent persecution and discrimination against black Libyan and Sudanese migrants in particular. The racism against blacks in Libya was a practice of the Libyan state, and society. They publicly called the Sudanese “slaves”, and if you tried to defend yourself you were beaten by every Libyan present at that moment. The police would not interfere to protect you because it was mentioned in “Holy Koran of the Arab Muslims” that the blacks are slaves of the Arabs.

Refugee Rights in the Mother of the World: Sudanese Refugees and Civil Rights in Egypt

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With respect to international attention directed towards Darfur, the Huffington Post reported, “Darfur: The Genocide the World Got Tired of” in August of this year. One day prior to publishing the article, tens of thousands of displaced civilians, largely women and children, were attacked by military and security forces of the dominant national regime of Sudan, the National Congress Party (NCP) led by President Omar Al-Bashir. Those who were not arrested, and threatened with torture were beaten, and robbed. The humiliation is enough to writhe the stomachs of any thinking person, all the more so the immediate relations of the survived forced to live abroad, without the means to help their people. Truly, the appalling neglect of Darfur in diaspora, especially in Egypt, where so many have fled since the beginning of the conflict, is part of the genocide, albeit in a slower, while equally torturous form.

Imagine 140 heavily armed vehicles rolling into El Salam camp, where on August 5th countless people were unprotected by the UN/African Union (UNAMID), which has vowed, principally, to protect civilians. Ironically, the UNAMID headquarters was only a few miles away from El Salam, in Nyala, the capital of Darfur. UNAMID has often been restricted from accessing scenes where atrocities have been committed by the state, adding to terrifying lack of security for so many tens of thousands of innocents. Silence, and impunity is, in such contexts, a prerequisite to the stability of UN, and NGO missions. While the UN looks to UNAMID for field knowledge, the indigenous Radio Dabanga is often the only reliable, and consistent source of awareness for outsiders.

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