A New York Times columnist writes Americans are so “dumbed-down” that they don’t know that Russia “invaded” Ukraine two years ago, but that “invasion” was mostly in the minds of Times editors and other propagandists, says Robert Parry. In a column mocking the political ignorance of the “dumbed-down” American people and lamenting the death of “objective fact,” New York Time [...]

The exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly c [...]

The label ‘conspiracy theorist’ is used by Western Establishment gatekeepers as a means of shutting down debate and smearing those who have the temerity to challenge elite-friendly narratives. As I argued in an Op-Edge last year, there's a great irony here. [...]

The major U.S. news media has consistently slanted its coverage of the Syrian conflict to back neocon desires for more U.S. military intervention in support of “regime change,” Gareth Porter wrote for FAIR. Coverage of the breakdown of the partial ceasefire in Syria illustrated the main way corporate news media distort public understanding of a major foreign policy story. [...]

Within the last 30 years, while we’ve chased bogeymen overseas and here at home, our Democracy has fallen. We have been taken over; defeated; our voices neutered; our freedoms trampled; our democracy vanquished.No invading force accomplished this; no jackboots echoed across our republic; no alien flag was raised above our lands. Not a single shot was fired by our vaunted military to halt this ta [...]

A Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist is joining the RT America team. Author and social critic Chris Hedges will host a weekly interview show called ‘On Contact,’ which will air “dissident voices” currently missing from the mainstream media. [...]

The belief that Vladimir Putin single-handedly “manufactured” the current conflict with the West to win domestic support, spark a surge in Russian patriotism and hold on to power at any cost, has been a staple of mainstream Western analysis of Russia since the Ukraine crisis began. That same belief — that Putin manufactures crises or otherwise inserts Moscow into them to distract an antsy [...]

As the West is sucked deeper into the Syrian conflict and starts a new Cold War with Russia, the mainstream news media has collapsed as a vehicle for reliable information, creating a danger for the world, writes Robert Parry. Does any intelligent person look at a New York Times article about Russia or Vladimir Putin these days and expect to read an objective, balanced account? [...]

Mark the date. Saturday May 14, 2016, the day the music died and a song contest whose well-intentioned original aim of national harmony has become the latest front in the Western elite’s obsessional and relentless new Cold War against Russia. A blatantly political song by Ukraine - which should not have been allowed in the contest in the first place as it clearly broke the European Broadcasti [...]

In an extraordinary act of culture and courage, a Russian orchestra performed in the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra recently liberated from the Islamic State, but Western media mocked the event, notes Gilbert Doctorow. Even those with a limited knowledge of Russia may be credited with having heard of St. Petersburg being called the Venice of the North. [...]

We have some fairly odd opinions. Cultural differences exist across borders, and because monoliths are mostly fantasies, often within them, too. That said, America, in particular, is culturally perplexing, and even confounding, to a lot of the rest of the world. I am not, as Americans are wont to do, laboring under the delusion that people in other places spend all that much time thinking about us [...]

There is a kind of drip-drip strategy of the Western media to make a correlation in people’s minds between atrocities and the Syrian government, Dan Glazebrook, political writer and journalist, told RT. An air strike on a refugee camp in the Syrian town of Sarmada, which is close to the Turkish border, has left at least 30 people dead and dozens more injured. [...]

To answer the dilemma whether “Panama papers” are part of the informational war, we need to look at the list of directly or indirectly mentioned persons. Who is and who is not mentioned in the papers? And who was financially assisted this operation? Because, “Consortium of Investigative Journalism” does not work for free? Or it just works for the ideals of the world freed of tax havens and [...]

The Obama administration protects its “credibility” by refusing to budge on its claims about the 2013 Syria-sarin case or the 2014 plane shoot-down in eastern Ukraine even as the evidence shifts, writes Robert Parry. What surprised me most about the Iraq War wasn’t how wrong the expectation of happy Iraqis showering American troops with flowers was or even how badly the war would turn out [...]

Mainstream U.S. journalism has completely lost its way, especially in dealing with foreign policy issues where bias now overwhelms any commitment to facts, a dangerous development, writes Robert Parry. Several weeks ago, I received a phone call from legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh who had seen one of my recent stories about Syria and wanted to commiserate over the state of modern [...]

Mainstream U.S. journalism and propaganda are getting hard to tell apart, as with the flurry of “corruption” stories aimed at Russia’s Putin and other demonized foreign leaders, writes Robert Parry. Sadly, some important duties of journalism, such as applying evenhanded standards on human rights abuses and financial corruption, have been so corrupted by the demands of government propagand [...]

Anti-Putin sentiment has reached boiling point in the West, and that to a large degree makes it next to impossible to talk about Russia in a positive manner, Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said, commenting on the so-called Panama leak. “Such 'leaks', in our view, are meant to target audiences overseas. It is also clear that the degree of Putinophobia has reached a point where to speak we [...]

More and more men are giving up on marriage, as Kit Daniels reveals. Men are now finding marriage undesirable and are marrying later in life, if at all. A Catholic pastor recently revealed he's only performing five marriages a year, down from 35 over 25 years ago. Here's why. Why Men Are Giving Up On Marriage  Why Are Men Frightened of Marriage? Dr Helen Smith Explains Why Men Need [...]

Harriet Beecher Stowe is reputed — in Stowe family legend at least — to have been greeted by President Lincoln with, “Is this the little woman who made this great war?”Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s novel that dramatized government-sanctioned human bondage, is credited, somewhat fancifully, with moving American public opinion about slavery and helping start the U.S. Civil War. [...]

The recapture of the ancient Syrian city of Palmyra was the single biggest defeat for ISIS since it declared its caliphate, but the West does not seem interested. Why? Because then they’d have to give some credit to Russia. Indeed, it must have been a tough weekend for Western media’s favorite Syria pundits. [...]

Either by omission or by commission, the US media actively misinforms the public on crucial issues that matter. The reason they do this is because they legally can. My mentor and dissertation committee member, Dr. Peter Dale Scott, recently wrote on his Facebook page: “Inadequate decently priced housing is one of America's most urgent domestic problems, with developers vacating neighborhoods [...]

Daesh-allied militants attacked a European city this week, setting off three bombs in Brussels that killed 31 and injured 260. In the United States, the response was immediate, first with the outpouring of support from the public, then, unsurprisingly, with a flurry of bellicose pronouncements from most of the remaining major-party presidential candidates. [...]