Thursday, May 1, 2014

Principles of Propaganda 101: only tell half the story

This story at CBC News by Trinh Theresa Do makes an interesting case study. It is interesting in the main because it appears to go beyond the usual anti-Putin boilerplate that we have come to expect from Western media.

Why lookee, there's even a quote from David Carment, Fellow at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, advising the US to butt out of Ukraine! What could be more fair and more balanced?

What makes the story a propaganda classic is what it includes and what it doesn't. Included is the Turkey-Russia economic relationship. And yes, we are told that Turkey has been since 1952 and remains today a NATO member and therefore our staunch ally.

All true.

Not mentioned is President Erdogan's concerns over America's efforts to undermine his democratically elected government, concerns he voiced on the Charlie Rose Show just a few days ago.

And he has a point. The US has been actively working to undermine and eventually overthrow Erdogan for years. That's the NATO big dog working against the democratically elected government of another NATO nation.

Erdogan should be pissed off.

Also not mentioned is the Gulen gambit. America has been grooming Erdogan's successor, providing Fethullah Gulen with a lot more than sanctuary in the US for many years. Gulen is destined to be more than an Erdogan replacement; in fact, simply being leader of Turkey is probably far too trivial a trinket to entice Gulen at this point.

Gulen is destined to become the face of moderate Islam world-wide, fully endorsed by the CIA, Pentagon, and the beltway think-tankers.

So there's at least a couple of angles that escaped this otherwise well-balanced progaganda piece.

Which is why it's propaganda and not news.

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