The reason I started covering journalists being killed?
Is because I had a long hard think about what I say myself, that endangers "real investigative" journalists.
After the lady in Malta was killed it started to dawn on me how dangerous it is getting to even be a real investigative blogger, if you manage to get a large captive audience without huge funding, you become a liability to the corrupt mobster politicians as we have seen, and with president Trump calling any news outlet that does a negative article about him"fake news" this has also had the effect of making all news outlets seem like fake news. And to a large extent a lot of them are just that, fake news narrative corrupt copy and paste presstitutes we call the MSM.
Putting all journalists into that narrative is dangerous and wrong though, as it makes people not sympathize with the ones that get killed like this last week, that were genuine investigative journalists writing about the corruption within governments and the Saudi royal family.
By making all media look bad, we then forget that there are some genuine and real investigative journalists left.
Psychopaths like Erdogan in Turkey have used this lessening of public belief in the media to good effect when he closed down all opposition radio and TV stations after the "supposed" failed military coup attempt. Nobody in the west has done anything about that, nor the fact he imprisoned teachers, army officials, doctors and anyone else that was seen as not on his side. In part this was enabled by the fact people like Trump are normalizing calling all news outlets fake news.
Maybe let me show you this article that thinks along the same lines as myself.
His name is Jamal Khashoggi, and he is dead. According to reports, he was murdered. Turkey claims to have evidence of the atrocity. Of course, the entire world, along with the poor man’s fiancé, is awaiting answers. Khashoggi was a fierce critic of the ruling Saudi Arabia family, and was essentially ‘persona non grata’ in the desert Kingdom. In fact, he’d been living in self-imposed exile in the United States because . . . well, he spoke the truth . . . “without fear or favour, and without worrying who feel one way or another. . .” Anyway, if the reports are to be believed, Mr. Khashoggi went into the Saudi embassy in Istanbul to get some documents needed for his upcoming wedding, and never walked out. The videotape shows the good journalist entering the embassy. There is no video record of him leaving.
To say that this is a bold and brazen assault on the press (Mr. Khashoggi was a columnist with the Washington Post) is putting it mildly. And if the Saudi thugs, allegedly acting at the behest of the ruling regime, are allowed to get away with this outrage, then despotic regimes all over the world, regimes that despise those that dare shine a light into the nether reaches of their corrupt governments, will be emboldened. Make no mistake!
Consider. A little more than a month ago, two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, were sentenced to seven years in prison in the banana republic called Myanmar for reporting on the plight of the Rohingya Muslims who were being displaced and murdered by the despicable Myanmar government. Despite international condemnation of the initial arrest back in December of last year, and calls by “Press freedom advocates, the United Nations, the European Union and [freedom-championing] countries like the United States, Canada and Australia for the men to be acquitted . . .,” the Myanmar government basically told the world to take a hike.
(Trump) he dismisses any press coverage that is unflattering to him as “Fake news!” In fact, he has used that phrase so often, much to the delight of dictators and tyrants, that it has become part of the worldwide authoritarian lexicon.
I for one am going to be more careful about lumping them all into one pile.
I read last year about news outlet's wanting to use AI for articles instead of journalists. I sincerely wish they would, as a lot of the news is copy paste from Reuters anyway, it is leave your brain at the door when you come to work for most hacks. If they did go to the AI route then at least we could differentiate between corporate news, and real news written by real people, and have the 2 run side by side, then see who people would choose to read, and I would wager 1 million of them English £'s that it would not be the AI corporate BS we get served up.
I aim to endeavor in the future covering the missing in action real journos, as some of you know anyway, some of them I call my friends. And should one of them be killed in Syria or anywhere else, the least I can do is give them a mention as they deserve a hell of lot more than that anyway.
Pizzagate started the whole "fake news" narrative from the established corporate press, though like anything people in power do, it has a blow back effect. It was intended to make the truth community irrelevant, I would suggest it has now turned full circle and made the media itself what it intended us to be "irrelevant" so Newtons law came into full effect once again, "for every action there is an equal and opposite one" though with this I smile as I type and think it went & backfired at 300%.
Another thing that makes me smile is this.
The more censorship by fb, google and silicon valley companies like twitter happens, the more people will take notice of the people being silenced, they know this anyway as they tried to do the same with the plant AJ, to see what the effect would be, so when they have these waves of trying to silence people, like again this week on fb, the blow back will be 3x worse than the silencing was itself, so I say fire away, try to shut us all up, it gives us a much larger audience and a lot more respect, to be attacked by those with unlimited income, when we have so little to use, is for me the single biggest complement they can give us. Imagine having billions of $ and being scared of a few bloggers lol, they must be finding it very hard to sleep at night, is all I can think of, if they are so paranoid to want to shut a few amateurs like us up!!!!!!!!
