John Oliver on Government Surveillance

Getting the News from Comedy Shows …
The self-censoring US mainstream media are usually not a very good source of impartial (read: non-government approved) information. We completely disagree with Noam Chomsky’s leftist political views, which in our opinion are astoundingly nave for someone of his intellectual stature, but we do believe he has always made quite valid points about how ‘consent is manufactured’ in the US (and elsewhere for that matter). Governments are lying routinely, and in theory, the press should challenge them on that. It just seems to happen only very rarely.
The hysterical pro-war propaganda disseminated in the mainstream media prior to the Iraq war will forever stand as one of the low points in this respect. Most of it was based on bald-faced lies, something that should have been glaringly obvious to anyone calling himself a journalist at the time. And yet, not one of the major mainstream media organizations even made an attempt to challenge the government’s lies and propaganda – instead they did everything to reinforce them. This was reportedly done to preserve ‘access’ to all those named and unnamed government officials feeding the press with what can only very loosely be termed ‘information’. One wonders what such access is worth if all the audience ever gets out of it is the amplification of government propaganda.
So where is the average couch potato going to get useful information? It seems to us that pretty much the only places on TV where controversial issues are receiving the attention they deserve are comedy shows these days. They have it easier to ‘get away’ with tackling thorny issues, because they can package them as satire. One show that has frequently stood out in this context is John Oliver’s show ‘Last Week Tonight’. With the renewal of the ‘PATRIOT’ Act fast approaching, Oliver decided to do a show on the topic of government surveillance. He even took the trouble to interview Edward Snowden. While the show contains no new revelations for those who have been paying attention, it makes one rather depressing and unfortunately true point: In the US, much of the public just doesn’t care.
It seems many people don’t even know who Edward Snowden is and what he made the world aware of. Actually, everything Snowden divulged had actually been revealed earlier by whistleblowers such as e.g. William Binney – whose assertions were verified by the Snowden documents – and Russell Tice. The difference was mainly that Snowden had the documentation to prove all these things, so it was no longer possible to sweep everything under the carpet.
As an aside to this, some of what Russello Tice has been saying remains under-explored to this day and is potentially highly explosive – namely his assertion that the Deep State gets away with many things by essentially blackmailing assorted politicians if they are judged to be dangerous to it or if they are deemed to be potentially valuable in helping its agenda. There is some proof that political figures have been the targets of surveillance (such as e.g. German chancellor Angela Merkel), but no proof as to how the information has been or is used. Still, it’s not as if Mr. Tice’s assertions were stretching credibility much. Here is an interview he has given to the Corbett Report, in which this aspect is discussed in some depth:

This post was published at Acting-Man on April 7, 2015.