Posted 20th September 2001

Dangerous News
by Alan Marston

(Photo shows a Muslim prayer and memorial service at the islamic Centre of Southern California for the victims of 11 September Terrorist attack) Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. CNN toward absolute end of scale in its heightening of hatred and promotion of war.

All around the world we are subjected to a handfull of huge news distributors, and one of them is CNN. Every TV watcher, and that is just about everybody in the `market economies', has been in the last week subject to many images and verbal instruction from this company and much of what we saw and heard is poisonous to personal and social health. Manipulation of visual and verbal images is also something done by the BBC, however it seems to me that CNN's credibility for taking care over its news and attempts at objectivity are both rated near 1 in a 1 to 10 scale, where 1 is a childlike inflation of ego and its deification and 10 is ego-detachment.

In particular, one set of images is proving, unsurprisingly, to be hyper-inflammatory and dangerous, the Palestinians presented as celebrating the NY terrorist attack, out on the streets, eating some cake and making funny faces for the camera. There is evidence in an (M·rcio A. V. Carvalho, State University of Campinas - Brazil, per IndyMedia article that those images were shot in 1991, images of Palestinians celebrating the invasion of Kuwait. Even if they were actual and real, I believe that CNN's agenda in showing them is selfish in the extreme and doesn't do humanity a service in this pivotal time.

The huge news corporates have arguably more power than governments. They virtually are governments, witness the predictions way ahead of facts, of the 2000 US Presidential election winner by CNN, NBC, etc. But unlike governments they don't ever have to answer to any semblance of people's higher will, they simply pander to people's base reptilian-brain fears and desires. It is my contention that humanity has to move out of reptilian thinking to a higher consciousness, or we'll be crushed by the fall of the corporate dinosaurs, something turned from image to reality last Tuesday US time.

CNN is the biggest media reptile, and the most dangerous, but its not alone in its un-enlightened approach to the most lucrative `product' of our age, information. With power comes responsibility and if that responsibility is not taken for the good of humainity then the power must be taken away... by the only social body left capable of representing group interests, elected governments.... .