I always wanted to work in media. Whenever I actually got a job in media, I was stunned by the type of people running things.
I don’t really blame those working in media because I understand they need money and that they have very little say in what they are doing but that’s true only up to a point.
I am glad to share the work of someone who put his soul before money - Udo Ulfkotte.
This writer is yet another hero who died at a youngish age - he was probably murdered.
Presstitute is a term that references journalists and 'talking heads' in mainstream media who give biased and predetermined views misleadingly tailored to fit a particular partisan, financial or business agenda, thus neglecting the fundamental duty to report news impartially.
A presstitute is a journalist who will print or not print any story if payed to do so. Usually the presstitutes boss acts as a pimp because people will pay off the boss and he/she as pimp will make sure his hoes does what the client wants.
Worth waiting for expose of Western journalism as propaganda
This expose of Western journalism (the author is German) reads much like the insider view of the global neoliberal financial system "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man" by John Perkins. It is an insider's look at how the Western press operates in tandem with powerful elite interests and the intelligence community to manipulate public opinion in the direction those forces would have it go, rather than providing honest unbiased "news reporting."
For anyone attempting to better understand our propaganda systems this book is an excellent addition to "Manufacturing Consent," by Chomsky & Herman, and to "Taking the Risk Out Of Democracy," by Alex Carey.
Foreword
LSD? Crack? Datura tea? Cocaine? Crystal meth? In light of the reporting being done by our mainstream media in Germany, the question we find ourselves asking more and more often these days is: What drugs are they on in the editorial offices?
It seems like they've definitely lost their minds. What in the world are they mixing in their muesli every morning? Many Journalists have evidently lost their grip on reality.
While millions of Germans are worrying about how they can manage the rising prices of rent and food and electricity, some journalists are trying to cozy up to the elites, the very elites who are responsible for more and more of our suffering. And while the EU can only delay its inevitable bankruptcy by printing money around the clock, our leading media are encouraging us to bring even more bankrupt countries and their crises into the EU – of course, to benefit the financial elite.
Too much crack? Too much LSD? Or is it all that cocaine in the editorial offices?
While German citizens are already fed up with the casualties being brought home from foreign wars, select media pundits are strapping on steel helmets and enthusiastically cheering on plans for even more American wars.
Is this what happens when you take crystal meth? At the same time here in Germany, our alpha journalists seem to be experiencing a total blackout.
Somehow, they cannot or do not want to remember the inspiring words they used to glorify the Iraq War or our military deployment in Afghanistan. Or, how they first realized the financial crash was upon us and the euro was tanking until only after every German citizen was already suffering the consequences.
When a commercial airliner exploded over Ukraine in 2014, they would have loved nothing more than to send German soldiers to fight Russia, even before anyone knew who was actually responsible for the crash.
Preventing bloodshed by demanding more bloodshed - a killer idea.
Alone in Iraq, the more than 100,000 civilians who died are a testament to this, because the German media – with very few exceptions – cheered on the war in a delusional frenzy.
"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."
Dr. Udo Ulfkotte
"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."
Who or what controls these psychopaths in Germany's leading media?
Are they really on drugs? Or does this systematic insanity have completely different causes? Are there propaganda specialists operating behind the scenes?
In the past, we would have likely dismissed this as a simple conspiracy theory, but we now know that journalists from prestigious media outlets are the main target of the "spin doctors" who want the power to determine our news.
This is primarily how the US government and the Israelis operate.
There are even handbooks on how to influence the mainstream media.
One thing is clear: If you work in the mainstream media, you should exercise extreme caution towards lobbying groups, also around American and Israeli ones.
As we will see, some journalists are doing just the opposite. They obviously feel right at home in the web of influential American and Israeli organizations.
They even boast about being caught up in these networks too, proudly listing their "memberships" in the most controversial of circles.
When you keep uncovering more and more credible information about what's going on behind the scenes, you'll definitely begin to see our “news" in a completely different light.
However, you better not talk about it.
Our media representatives can't take a joke, even in satire. Author Josef Joffe, a "big-time journalist," and convicted tax evader Theo Sommer, a managing director at the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, showed that they're big party poopers when they split legal hairs in order to sue a satirical program on Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), one of the two main public broadcasting channels in Germany.
Joffe and Sommer's legal antics came after the show reported on their controversial contacts to questionable networks. Still, wouldn't it be better if the folks out there could get a peek at the powers behind the curtain?
Theo Sommer
Media specialist Thomas Stadler wrote: "For a flagship like Die Zeit, Joffe's legal proceedings (...) against ZDF are equivalent to a journalistic declaration of bankruptcy."
Josef Joffe
Nevertheless, it isn't only the likes of Josef Joffe that we need to be keeping a very close eye on.
Do you ever get the feeling that you are being constantly lied to and manipulated by the media?
Then you have something in common with the majority and with one of the richest people in Germany, Karl Albrecht. Albrecht recently passed away, in July of 2014 at the ripe old age of 94.
Even though his estate was estimated at more than 18 billion euros at the time of his death, the German media simply didn't know what to say about his life.
The link is here.
They just printed a photo and didn't include any of the details from his successful career. Albrecht, the founder of the Aldi supermarket chain, believed that politics was a dirty business.
His whole life, he never wanted to meet any of the German Chancellors, he relied on his own family instead of elite networks, and he despised banks and credit institutions.
He turned down all the honors and awards he was ever offered, even the Federal Cross of Merit. And, he never gave an interview. Why? One thing is clear: this ambitious family man didn't want to be used by anyone. He didn't want to be manipulated either. He was convinced that it would be best to steer clear of all these temptations.
So, why are more and more people out there starting to think like Karl Albrecht?
ln 1991, Professor Hans-Jürgen Bücher, a media scientist from Tübingen, published a research paper entitled "Media Language."
In it, he said we can't overlook "that the interaction between the press and politics today follows a complicated set of rules: through staged reporting events like press conferences, so-called off-the-record conversations, or also through subtle forms of press control."
Subtle forms of press control? Excuse me? We have a "controlled press?" To the average citizen, this sounds outrageous, but as we will see, it is our reality.'
Up until very recently, it was considered the stuff of “conspiracy theory" whenever anyone questioned why our media often seemed to be synchronized across the board.
We're supposed to be living in a democracy with a diversity of opinion. Yet this alleged "conspiracy theory'" is now becoming our bitter reality.
This book will expose an elite network of lobbyists, one that is operating within our media. Did the billionaire Karl Albrecht know this and was this the reason he kept his distance from the media?
It should go without saying that journalists shouldn’t be active in lobbying organizations or shadowy, elite networks, but many are – and they hate being unmasked.
You can expose them, one step at a time.
After all, there are many publicly available studies that clearly show the power of their opinions, based on their presence in the most influential newspapers and magazines.
All you have to do is comb through the electronic databases to see how frequently they are referenced.
Taking a further step, you can compare the names you find like this with the official lists of lobbyists registered with your national government.
Since I am concentrating on the German media in this book, I compared them with the register kept by the German Bundestag and with the lists maintained by Lobbypedia, a project of LobbyControl. (The Bundestag or German Parliament / House of Representatives will generally be referred to as the Bundestag throughout this English translation).
German Bundestag
When you then take look at the lobbying groups that these media personalities represent with their powerful opinions, you end up with a small circle of secretive, elite organizations.
Suddenly, some of these journalists don't look like journalists anymore, but more like actors posing as journalists.
It appears as though they're only simulating their independence and impartiality in front of their audience.
In other words: As a journalist, if you are getting exclusive access to powerful elite circles, doesn't this also mean that you have gotten much too close to the ones making this access possible?
As a journalist, aren’t you already long since "corrupted" at this point? Haven't you been pulling punches for so long, you don't even notice you're doing it anymore?
All of the journalists named in this book deny that they pull any punches or that they've been "corrupted" by getting too close to elite networks, but how are the readers going to see this?
Especially if the names of the organizations or journalists listed here can also be found in the WikiLeaks documents from the secret US embassy reports?
Why do the names of certain mainstream, German media organizations show up there over and over again? What this book will make clear is: There is an entire army of agents who appear respectable at first glance, but they are making money by influencing the German media on behalf of foreign interests.
They do this, for example, through supposedly charitable “transatlantic friendship organizations." Their job is to keep German political and media elites from building any intellectual alliances with Russia and holding them on a pro-American course.
After all, Washington is pursuing clear objectives in Europe and a new Cold War is one of them. To achieve their ends, they need the mainstream media in Germany as an ally.
Our first example: the US Department of Defense alone has spent billions of dollars on targeted propaganda over the years to influence media coverage around the world.
It is also easy to document the effects that this public opinion manipulation has had on the German-speaking world as well.
In recent months, you could even apply for grant money from the US embassy in Berlin to subversively direct public opinion in Germany toward America's interests – I will document this.
In his book The Warmongers: A History of US Propaganda, 1917-2005 (Die Kriegsverkäufer: Geschichte der US-Propaganda (not available in English), the historian and media scientist Andreas Elter proved how the Americans exert their influence on our journalists.
Amazingly, and unfortunately, his work went largely unnoticed.
Since then, however, the WikiLeaks documents have been published. With the help of a WikiLeaks search engine, anybody can easily look up how often certain, leading German media outlets have been mentioned by name in these secret diplomatic cables for their pro-American reporting.
It is also conspicuous that the media outlets that are clearly very sympathetic to Germany's former occupying power, the USA, neglect to publish any reporting critical of the US.
Are they doing this in Washington's interests? What is actually going on here? The operators of the WikiLeaks internet platform are dedicated to making all types of classified documents accessible to the public.
Among other documents, a memorandum classified as “CONFIDENTIAL/NOFORN (US)," which means confidential and only accessible to US citizens, was available for download in 2010.
The author turned out to be the "CIA Red Cell," a team of intelligence officers who were appointed by the CIA Director, in his own words, "to think outside the box," “encourage thinking" and "offer alternative views."
This is where I found a document from the spin doctors in the CIA with the title: "Afghanistan: Sustaining West European Support for the NATO-led Mission – Why Counting on Apathy Might Not Be Enough."
This secret document dealt with ensuring support among NATO's Western European allies for the war in the Afghan Hindu Kush.
The Western European public was to be persuaded to tolerate the increase in casualties, both among their own soldiers and the Afghani civilian population, expected for the spring and summer of 2010.
For this, a customized "strategic communication program" would be required for the NATO states providing troops. Germany was one of the countries included in the list.
This secret document is nothing more than an instruction manual, prepared by the CIA, on how to influence public opinion in the German-speaking world.
Surprisingly, the CIA justified the need to influence German public opinion based on the findings of a transatlantic organization: the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
They had determined that only about one percent of the Germans they polled felt that stabilizing Afghanistan was Germany's most important national goal.
Therefore, this is exactly what needed to change.
The German public was then inundated with US propaganda through the mainstream media – with war propaganda.
Aren't secret documents like the ones WikiLeaks published reason enough for leading German media groups to try and avoid any suspicion of influence by US organizations and their propaganda?
If the CIA is creating "strategic communication programs" for the German-speaking media, then our "quality media" should have to steer clear of any organizations showing up in the sphere of US intelligence services.
Yet the opposite is the case. The German mainstream media are drooling at the mere prospect of being tolerated by elite transatlantic organizations, if not joining them directly.
The result is shocking in my opinion: one-sided and freely interchangeable propaganda.
Today, this can be found increasingly often in the German media.
It used to be that intelligent, well-informed people would read several newspapers a day. It gave them differing points of view and a more accurate picture of curent events.
This is no longer worth the effort these days, because editorial content is freely interchangeable and basically identical.
One example: On one day in July 2014, photos of Angela Merkel cooking were published on the front page of all leading media in Germany.
Why would they do that? If Angela Merkel is cooking, that's about as important to the average German citizen as a sack of rice falling over in China.
If you place the newspapers next to each other, the mainstream monotony is unmistakable. What was once reserved for the tabloids in the supermarket checkout lane - that is, the German Chancellor in her kitchen - can now be found on the front pages of the so-called "quality media."
At the same time, Germany's national newspapers now stand out for constantly delivering reporting and commentary that contradicts the perceptions and opinions of a clear majority of the population.
The newspaper analyst Professor Andreas Vogel from Cologne says, "Consumers today can generally choose between different features when they're purchasing products and services, only the daily newspaper publishers believe that they can serve every single reader with one standard product.”
In his view, the publishers themselves are responsible for the rapid decline in German daily newspaper sales, not the internet.
One example: Among the Madsack publishing group (including the Leipziger Volkszeitung and Ostsee-Zeitung), the various papers' content is often identical.
This means that one article can appear in up to 18 newspapers.
This loss in the diversity of opinion, the standardization of the product and the increasingly extreme one-sidedness can only be understood by those who know how the "flows of information" are being channeled behind the scenes.
The shady network of media, lobbyists and politics has been well-disguised up to this point.
In the following chapters, we will identify this network and ask the following questions: Who is being influenced by whom? And even more importantly: Who is bribing whom and why? And how are we as (German) citizens being manipulated by the media? Now, let's set out on an exciting search for clues.