Why it's so easy to scoop the New York Times

Even for “pot-addled hillbillies”.

And not just the Times of course, or the Globe or Reuters.

You see, it’s not that they’ve been “scooped,” it’s just that they choose to ignore certain stories.

Here’s a fine example. For almost a year major American media outlets reported the fiction that the conflict in Syria consisted of the Syrian military on the one side and “unarmed protesters” on the other. Then in February CNN aired video that had come to it via the BBC that showed a completely different reality.

Suddenly the “unarmed” protesters were very well armed indeed. Who knew?

The very networks and news sites who had failed to pass this news on to the news consumers obviously knew, but chose not to share the information. The information that the Syrian opposition was armed from the beginning of the uprising was readily available on news sites from Turkey, Russia, and Iran among others.

So why did so many media outlets suppress this crucial aspect of the story? Because it doesn’t fit into the over-arching narrative, which requires an evil dictator on the one side and innocent victims on the other, just like in Libya.

The purpose of this “news” isn’t so much to inform us of what’s going on; it’s to groom us for the next “humanitarian intervention”.

Similarly, coverage of the never-ending eurobaloney crisis has it’s own not unrelated narrative, and the “news” we are permitted is all about how the irresponsible over-spending under-working Greeks are the authors of their own misfortune and only a strong dose of neo-liberal tough love can save them.

It simply wouldn’t do to write stories about how the same clutch of  financial wizards who profited every step of the way while Greece was running up huge debts continue to profit from these supposed “bail-outs”.

So these “scoops” aren’t scoops at all. If our news media were about delivering news I’m sure they know where to find these stories.

But they’re in the business of propaganda.