TWO: Juan Cole & Charles Sullivan- On media, representation & BS

Juan Cole:

The Neocon Imaginary Middle East: Again

Speaking of political frauds, the Web site Newshog has nailed Kenneth R. Timmerman for falsely alleging that Iran has bought nuclear warheads from North Korea. In fact, Jane's Defense Weekly reported that Iran bought some ancient missile from Pyongyang, and there was never any question of a warhead. Timmerman is taken seriously by the White House, Congress, and the US press but in fact has no credibility as an Iran expert (at IC we like our Iran experts to know Persian, the way you'd expect an expert on France to know French; we're funny that way). Even the usually canny Jon Stewart gave Timmerman a respectful hearing.

French philosopher Michel Foucault defined "representation" as a process whereby a culture creates a stereotype of something and then substitutes the stereotype for the reality forever after. Once a "representation" is established, the reality can never challenge it, since any further information is filtered through the represenation. The "representation" of Iran as a nuclear power, when it just has a couple hundred centrifuges (you need thousands) and is not proven even to have a weapons program, is becoming powerful and unchallengeable in the US media.

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http://www.juancole.com/2006/04/neocon-imaginary-middle-east-again.html

Charles Sullivan:

Ignorance by Content and Omission
By Charles Sullivan

...The Bush cabal and its enablers in Congress are thus forced to call into service noble sounding euphemisms to hide the selfish motives behind their policies. Who but a fool or a madman would volunteer to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people for the sake of increasing the already obscene profits of defense contractors and oil companies? It is precisely because the agenda of those in power conflicts with the interest of the people that governments lie and distort. Those who carry out the agenda of Plutocratic Empire must be made to believe that they are serving noble purposes rather than feeding the insatiable hunger of corporate greed. They must be convinced to betray their own class by acting against its best interest. It would be impossible to accomplish such a monumental task of behavior modification without the aid of the commercial media.

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http://informationclearinghouse.info/article12588.htm

Kicked and recommended.

:kick: