Source: Unz.com
For 45 years I’ve read the New York Times in its print edition almost each and every morning, together with the Wall Street Journal. Until about a decade ago, I also read four of California’s leading newspapers in similar fashion, but as they declined into just pale shadows of what they once had been, I abandoned them, a decision made easier when the Los Angeles Times and the Sacramento Bee stopped local delivery in my area; and given the huge decline in the quality of the Gray Lady in recent years, one of these days it may suffer that same ignominious fate. Meanwhile, for the last quarter century, I’ve balanced these very mainstream morning sources of information with a wide variety of extremely alternative news and opinion websites on the Internet, whose offerings have always provided a very different view of those same events.
I’d never spent much time watching cable news or other TV offerings, regarding them as merely presenting a diluted and dumbed-down version of what was contained in those print newspaper articles, probably providing about 1% of the same mainstream information, but often distorted in foolish ways. The sole exception had been the once much higher-quality PBS Newshour, and I think I abandoned it for its outrageous coverage of the Iraq War, while I stopped reading my weekly issues of the Economist at the same time and for much the same reason.
However, since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in early 2022, I’ve begun closely following a couple of YouTube channels, grateful that they feature podcast interviews of numerous very knowledgeable individuals, able to offer a wealth of important information and analysis. In particular, Judge Andrew Napolitano, a former FoxNews host, has gradually accumulated an extremely strong collection of regular guests, and I usually spend at least several hours each week absorbing their cogent views on the Ukraine war, the Israel/Gaza conflict, and other geopolitical developments, material that seems vastly superior to the nonsense I casually see in my morning Times, let alone the total junk that presumably dominates all the various cable shows.
Just as a snowball rolling downhill accretes mass, Napolitano’s willingness to provide a convenient platform for those experts whose views are unwelcome in our mainstream media outlets has led more and more such individuals to join his stable of guests. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University are two of our most distinguished academic scholars, enjoying enormous international reputations, with the latter having been personally involved at the highest level of Russian and Ukrainian political events for more than three decades. Ray McGovern spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, rising to become head of its Soviet Analysis group while also serving as the personal intelligence briefer to a half-dozen American presidents. Former ambassador Chas Freeman held numerous senior government positions during his distinguished, half-century career, whose earliest days included serving as President Richard Nixon’s personal translator during his historic 1972 meeting with China’s Chairman Mao.
As the longtime chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson spent many years participating in the highest levels of our national security decision-making process and Col. Douglas Macgregor has enjoyed a very strong military reputation, holding important positions in the Defense Department, while former British diplomat and senior MI6 officer Alastair Crooke spent decades deeply involved in crucial Middle East negotiations. Military and intelligence experts such as Scott Ritter, Philip Giraldi, and Larry Johnson regularly provide their perspectives, as do younger journalists such as Max Blumenthal, Aaron Maté, and Anya Parampil of the Grayzone, along with various other recurring guests.
Under other circumstances, many of these figures would currently be serving near the very top of the American government and its foreign policy and national security apparatus, much as some of them had done in the past, or at least they would be prominently featured on our opinion pages and welcomed as regular guests on cable news shows. But all of them have instead been purged and almost entirely blacklisted both from government service and from our mainstream media for their refusal to endorse an officially-promoted but totally Orwellian account of today’s important world events.
Although hardly emphasized in our history books, such media purges along ideological lines have not been uncommon throughout American history as I first discovered a couple of decades ago in the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks and the political preparation for our disastrous Iraq War. The recent death of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue prompted me to recall that history, which I had described in a 2018 article:…