the protesters have gathered in lost value lashing out against prime minister vladimir putin. that's one i didn't know there were palm trees in moscow it certainly isn't the first time the mainstream media has been dead wrong and it probably won't be the last so why is it that the people america turned supernews won't do a little bit of fact checking before going on the air. with the. group . and the mainstream media isn't the only one telling little white lies these days president obama is pushing for international internet freedom and yet another case

of do as i say not as i do. and speaking of ordering people around police forces across the us have ramped up their raids on the occupy wall street movement suppressing the public's right to assemble one city at a time but with military grade pepper spray and high tech weapons whose interests are they really serving and protecting. it's thursday december eighth eight pm in washington d.c. i'm liz wahl in you're watching r t. well as parliamentary elections play out in russia's seems that u.s. government leaders and the mainstream media are pushing their own agenda and covering it harsh criticism over the electoral process process attacking moscow for failing to conduct fair and free elections here's a look at some of the coverage. prime minister vladimir putin's party barely hanging on to their majority in the parliament while most go public station is

shown to have. we think we can be a votes against the ruling party it's alleged. it appears that a lot of people in russia are fed up with not having a choice but in covering the events it's the mass media that fail to report on the facts even showing wrong video in an effort to shape the story or to correspond a marina point in iowa takes a look at media coverage of the elections in russia and sets the facts straight. america has its fair share of protests and political dissent to be dealing with instead of keeping an eye on the ball the country's mass media machine has turned to protests in russia and dropped the ball on reporting the facts. the protesters have gathered in moscow lashing out against prime minister vladimir putin and his real united russia party the only problem is that this video is not from russia fox news channel aired a video of fires and chaos in athens convincing viewers that this mayhem is playing

out in moscow the fair and balanced network paid no mind to the greek lettering in the background in case you're wondering it says greek national bank what matters is that this is what moscow protests have looked like it's not surprising whatsoever that at the moment that there would be any kind of protest no matter how small it be in russia against the russian government that it would be greatly exaggerated in media and used by the u.s. government as well as a way to try to somehow push for a change in russia that would be more favorable to u.s. interests journalist and author eva golinger believes mass media is washington's most valuable weapon in encouraging revolt elsewhere under the mantle of spreading democracy such as the so-called orange revolution in ukraine. or ruse revolution in georgia. perception is created that something is happening in the

country that's not right and that the government is somehow responsible and so therefore if that government ends up being removed it somehow is justified that you know the media has played a key role in creating a justification for regime change similar anti-government demonstrators have been reported and other city in russia u.s. leaders have leveled harsh criticism against russia in the aftermath of sunday's parliamentary election and critics say it's free press has were. to reinforce the narrative the media tends to march in lock step with the government tends to take its cues from the government it tends to you know mobilize its resources to showcase what the government says is true even when later it turns out not to be true as was the case in this room is c.n.n. report well in eastern russia more than three thousand people protested against proposed changes to the country's time zones the video shown by c.n.n. is not of protesters but rather of soccer fans writing in moscow all over the

killing of a fellow supporter the problem is that we showed the wrong pictures only after the error was repeatedly noticed c.n.n. owned up to its mistake and to apologize for the era of grateful to the many russian viewers who've pointed out to us the sloppiness of it or it is reflecting you know the lack of awareness of the journalists themselves many of them are completely uninformed about the world they have opinions that have no factual basis to him but it doesn't stop them because it's what looks good that matters more than what really is true the truth is that america has its own social economic and political challenges to be dealing with and while washington works on getting its own house in order powerful mass media outlets can work on getting their facts straight marina point nine or r.t. new york and it's not just that mass media waging a war against moscow political leaders are condemning the country to take

a listen to secretary of state hillary clinton's remarks. concerning russia you know we're watching the election results with great interest clearly the duma is going to have a different makeup than it did before this election. and we do have serious concerns about the conduct of the election and russian prime minister vladimir putin is accusing the u.s. of stirring up the protests he says the u.s. and other countries public millions and millions of dollars into anyone saying the russian elections who and points his finger right back at clinton straightaway the secretary of state assessed the election this is dishonest and unfair even though she hadn't even received the observers material but she set the tone for some of the personalities inside the country and gave them a signal our partners shake us from time to time so that we don't forget who owns this planet so that we know they have methods of pressure and influence on our country from within we choose to do so when it comes to humanitarian or health issues and that's one thing when foreign money is being invested into internal

political affairs that should make us think it's in the mind what's especially on acceptable getting it's a flow of foreign money into the electoral process it's absolutely unacceptable so just how are western powers aiming to shape political change and russia that's about all this and more i was joined by the always outspoken asia times correspondent pepe escobar those are things up i asked him to give me his take of this blatantly wrong reporting here's what he had to say. look you think forks news seriously that's a major mistake but i am american too by people all across the world this basically is a p.r. operation of the republican party the real real wing nut faction which is most of them of course c.n.n. basically is a mouthpiece of the state department but they're going to see i think they will have a reason to see that it was not true you have proved we've instances of american go so don't take these people seriously what we should take seriously it's good.

what's really happening inside russia and then you have to pay attention to russian media today on almost to to call their sons don't you know that they're all of able and and that you can the even use google translate and see what they're talking russian analysts talking ok there were some irregularities in the election just like barry riddle there it is in many elections in african countries in egypt there were irregularities in european countries in the u.s. in two thousand and florida in the u.s. in two thousand and four in ohio what's more important in my opinion is what's united russia should do to address grievances from barts of the russian population this is the real issue and you know we just heard calling out western powers for using mass media to encourage elsewhere in this case within his own country and we three are going to the nation such as freedom house they are tasked with what they

call spreading democracy now i want to ask you what if we were to turn the tables and russia or china were to pump money and time and effort and influencing the elections here look everybody knows that and he d. freedom house all these american n.g.o.s they influence elect they they flew as most of the colorful revolutions in central asia in effect the americas are now trying to promote the idea that gene sharp's effect invented that here square the egyptian revolution this is in it's a self reflection and it's a mix of ignore and send an arrogance that has been unmasked all over the world like you know give an example all over south america people don't trust anything they know that the americans tried a military coup and is on it doesn't do that they try the military coolly believing two thousand and five that they tried the military coping ecuador last year that

they effect called. ducted and were successful with the military coping the enduros so all across america in latin america people have seen through it and of course they have been used to the american tactics since the sixty's when the us supported all those military dictatorships in the specially in south america including chile which was the original nine eleven and nobody talks about that in the us anymore and that you know while the media and the government government leaders alike. there they're praising the protestors and russia for demonstrating against the government and exercising their freedom of speech but we have protests happening right here in the u.s. you know we've seen as violent crackdowns of the protests and occupy wall street protests and the police trying to silence them in the media their response in many cases has been to be little the protesters so why do we say that that's prey as a protest abroad but when they're happening here they're condemned it so it's

a double standard look. i would say the response in moscow and st petersburg dispensed with three days was heavy handed i'm not sure united russia knew how to react effect they should give a platform for those who were there express themselves including day internet but in us your q. by movement has been militarily criminalized in effect if you if you watch fox news i have to for professional reasons in fact most of those wackos they are old fox news all the time they say that the york you buyers are terrorists. plain and simple like you know in russia of course it was a heavy hand the repression i would suggest in either russia to be more magical effect but you know even in europe the occupy movement in european spain they're also being more or less criminalized as well in fact all across the world but one

point that i would like to make which i think is very important this is just a detail in a much bigger picture the much bigger picture it's been reset between us and russia is over like you know as we speak they are in brussels discuss the missile defense american ambassador to nato evil daalder said we're going to build it whatever the russians think about it and dimitri rugs. the russian ambassador nato said ok if they proceed like this we're going to have a we're going to establish our response which is. deploy radar stations and missile missile defense russian way in cleaning right for instance near the borders of poland to lead to a new so the reset is over plus the americas that it raises absolutely she mean because russia and china vetoed a u.n. security resolution against syria and the fact that russia has a naval base with also docking rights for your own your ships and they used to make it their own at the port of tartus in syria when you put this all together explains

steve reaction especially from juba to stress especially from hillary clinton hillary don't forget hillary clinton published last month's the money fast forward to this century an american century as a pacific century and when obama went to southeast asia told strain in southeast asia and his latest trip he announced the fact that the u.s. is going to basically cool day owned a spot china but also russia in central asia as the same saying a thousand times correspondent pass com by. and speaking of the double standards u.s. leaders now urging governments abroad to embrace internet freedom today secretary of state hillary clinton was at the hague to advocate to avocate internet freedom and today as people increasingly turn to the internet to conduct important aspects of their lives we have to make sure that human rights are as respected on

line as offline and the president obama has also urged other countries to open up freedom of speech on the web the more freely information flows the stronger the society becomes because then citizens. come through. their own governments accountable but at the same time the u.s. is making moves to tighten internet security here at home federal law enforcement and national security aiming to get new regulations that would make it easier for them to wiretap internet communications so that includes e-mail facebook skype and other sites the mandate what allowed the u.s. to wiretap these sites to talk more about this i spoke to associate editor at reason magazine mike riggs i started off by asking him why is this a case of do as i say not as i do when it comes to the u.s.

and internet freedom here is his take. i think there's always some cognitive dissonance between what the u.s. is promoting in terms of foreign policy and then what we're doing domestically you know you can attribute this to a couple things one the agencies that are responsible for not violating internet freedom at home i'm not going to say protect me i'm going to say not violating it it's not the state department you know it's the n.s.a. is the department of justice it's local law enforcement so on the one hand and then it's also you know the congress that is responsible for sort of like either creating laws that protect internet freedom or more often than not creating laws that chip away at it so you have that sort of dissonance in the state department you know is not concerned with domestic matters and the other reason i think we see this is that as terrifying as some of these laws are that the congress is proposing the stop online piracy act is one of them this this bill that is currently in the subcommittee that would allow wiretapping of digital communications making it easier. i think the other reason that that stuff is not it's just not quite as bad

as what you see in southeast asia in the middle east that doesn't mean that there's not a degree of hypocrisy there what we're talking about when we look at these domestic policies that we're facing is sort of our our right to be left alone sort of being infringe on right i mean nobody's going to tell us what sites we can and can't visit what we can say over really what these policies do is they expose us to interference in our day to day lives when we say something through digital communications that looks like terrorism or looks like a crime whereas in these other countries the it's just a much lower base level of freedom it's this idea that in china there are just sites you can't visit you know in the middle east there's words that if you try you know that you can't search in a search engine stuff so there's dissonance there but it's far enough apart that we sort of have the luxury of being able to lecture these countries about what they should and shouldn't be doing right and. as we just heard secretary of state land

lecturing these other countries you know saying that they shouldn't be disabling twitter and other types of communications that they are using to organize. their demonstrations over there in tahrir square but it's not like this is totally unheard of in the u.s. something happened in california back in september where cell phones are disabled so i know you're kind of aware of situations. right here in the u.s. where right the similar things have happened yeah the bay area rapid transit which we know by the bar which oversees the transit system in the california shut down cell phone service during the beginning of the occupy protests because they saw on twitter and other social networks that protesters were going to try and move from one protest area to another via the transit system and you know. it is sort of

a militarizing police agency which we saw right now i mean they had an incident where they shot a restrained suspect i think two years ago but what bart decided to do was they they shut down cell service they didn't actually have a policy regarding this. after the fact they came up with a policy saying anytime public safety is in jeopardy we reserve the right to restrict cell service and the federal communications commission is currently headed by a democrat just to show that this is completely nonpartisan. said you know that's great as long as it's for preserving public safety so in the u.s. we have the public safety argument here and then in part of the middle east that have restricted access to social networks it's more it's also being wrapped in the same language the real point i think is actually to prevent regime change which is what they're going for over here and again this is just basically us being on opposite sides of this issue though we are moving much closer together i think eventually will see these countries liberalize and unfortunately i think will see us internet policy and communications policy get more restrictive over time you

will have fewer negative rights to be left alone on the internet so you're saying that we are moving in the direction of these countries that we kind of criticize and yes and i think that also moving towards us at the same time i know it's probably the place that a lot of world governments are going to find themselves maybe five or ten years down the road or is one where a place like you're much freer to use the internet in china and much less free in your internet activities or at least you're going to have to be much more cautious in the united states and you just mentioned what happened in california and what this new push to regulate the internet do you think that will we might see more more instances like this. there's definitely a possibility i think as of right now the the people who see nothing wrong with restricting internet freedoms i don't think their primary interest right now is being able to shut down access in fact i think they actually like the idea of us using as many social networks as possible because what they want to do is they want

to eavesdrop they want to be able sweep for data they want to be able to you know quote unquote prevent threats before they happen so i honestly think that the sort of prevailing ideology regarding internet censorship is one actually what people say as much as they want then let us watch let us collect it and then let us do whatever we want with that information whether that's indefinite detention or whether that's shutting down web sites but there's definitely the prevailing ideology is let this get out there and then let us react however we want to it very interesting mike thank you so much for weighing in on this that was associate editor at a reasonable magazine and mike. also had on our tail as the u.s. government hones in on internet freedoms its police forces are launching an all out war against another american liberty freedom of assembly from high tech weapons to military grade pepper spray they are armed and dangerous but whose interests are they really protecting and serving. you know sometimes you see

a story and it seems so you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else here's some other part of it and realize everything. you don't know i'm sorry is a big issue. what drives the world the fear mongering used by politicians who make decisions to break through it's already been made can you cry no one who is you you know. with global reach where we had a state controlled capitalism school fascism when nobody dares to ask we do our tea question more. and as the us government hones in on internet freedoms police forces across the

country are honing in on it another american liberty freedom of assembly these days it looks like the role of law enforcement in the us may be changing and their power expanding we've shown you image after image of police using pepper spray on seemingly peaceful protesters so pepper spray has become a mainstream weapon of choice but that's just the beginning of what police have in their arsenal these days thanks to a program out of the pentagon one that not very many people know about local police are getting their hands on weapons and equipment from the military and two thousand and eleven the department of fence forked over five hundred million dollars worth of military machinery to local police departments so is the government gearing up for main street to rise up and what else is law enforcement getting their hands on these days well to answer some of these questions i spoke to maxim blumenthal writing fellow for the nation institute take a listen. speaking of police funding police have as you said just this year in two thousand and eleven received half

a billion dollars in surplus military weaponry from the pentagon which is authorized through the pentagon's ten thirty three program during the late seventy's congress passed legislation called posse comitatus barring the military from operating on american soil and in the early eighty's there was an effort to circumvent that in congress by arming police with military grade weaponry and now we're seeing that play out in the streets people in the inner city in the u.s. have been experiencing this since the eighty's and now middle class americans in the occupy movement are facing not only pepper spray but things like the sound. cannon the long range acoustic device which can blast your cranium with one hundred forty decibels shaking your skull so hard even earplugs won't stop it and as i reported for allah akhbar english this weapon has been tested on palestinians in the occupied west bank by the israeli army so civilians in the us are now up against basically military style policing so as you sound like you are

calling with a military as ation of the police force why is it happening and what is behind it. well it's been happening since the war on drugs and what's behind it is a mentality among our police forces or local police that views common civilians protesters and common criminals or as common criminals and as i reported for allah akbar english in my piece the israel if occasion of american domestic security the former head of the israeli shin bet intelligence services avi dichter who is accused of war crimes against the palestinians. spoke beside f.b.i. director robert mueller at a police convention at a convention before eleven thousand top law enforcement officers and after mueller called victor his mentor and counterterrorism dichter urged american police to see

the the to view their opponents those they seek to arrest as crim a terrorist in other words to blur the line between common criminals and terrorists so what we're seeing is not only a legal blurring of the lines between criminals terrorists and protesters but something in the mindset of american policing and in their training in which the civilian population is viewed as a hostile and menacing force that can be acted against with military grade weaponry and that was a writing fellow for the nation institute mike blumenthal. now is the time up well that's what credit ratings giant standard and poor's thinks the ratings agency has announced a massive european debt downgrade shaking up international markets and causing investors to cut and run even germany in the arizona economic backbone was not spared all is not get lost however as e.u. leaders gather in brussels to come up with a last ditch plan to save the euro artie's tests are selah as more. the

years on crisis has been good fodder for cartoonists but it's no laughing matter for major rescue packages numerous and popular sturdy measures two years and hundreds of billions of euros in bailouts later it's still in need of a shot for the elusive big bazooka solution hopes are high that december ninth e.u. summit will finally be a decisive day for the euro's future german chancellor angela merkel is pushing for a treaty change with a fiscal union as the end goal she wants brussels to have veto powers over national budget plans that breached e.u. limits automatic sanctions for debt violators a date court for repeat offenders. in a word merkel wants to impose discipline french president nicolas sarkozy is generally on the same page but is resisting giving more powers to brussels. whoever pays the piper gets to call the june and germany pace we've all of you in the euro

zone want to keep the same accounted say you must be prepared for that you must be prepared for giving up your fiscal sovereignty perhaps maybe you can even save some public money by distorting your national finance ministries but this german m.e.p. begs to differ but what is the sovereignty for germany at the moment paying billions and billions of risk there's no sovereignty we are forced to do this because the euro is a reality so basically regaining sovereignty by sharing it on the european level is what the whole operation is about. while germany may be for greater fiscal integration it's dead set against the euro bond idea for euro countries sharing debt and idea pushed by the european commission albeit renaming it stability bonds in effect italy's debt interest rates for example would go down from its worrying six to seven percent level while germany's would go up merkel's response is

a resounding no germany won't let the deficit sinners off the hook by taking on their debt if sarkozy ever got his way he'd like the european central bank to act as a lender of last resort but again merkel said no she won't let the e.c.b. swoop in to save the day at least not until countries learn to keep their finances in check but it's widely seen that the e.c.b. will have to expand its role one way or another and is already considering it and what of other e.u. members who don't use the euro the idea of a two tier europe or the euro zone and the rest doesn't sit well with a major economy like the u.k. it was actually it's important that the euro is successful because a lot of outrage depends on it but on the other hand to us if there is a group a central group which are in the euro zone another group which is not who makes up the rules which control the single market. it appears that any plan agreed upon will have to have germany's backing and work will dismiss the idea of germany

dominated europe as absurd although that's how it's recently been perceived for better or for worse. or to brussels. and be sure to tune and tomorrow as yet another e.u. summit gets underway it's do or die for the euro and world leaders are trying to tackle a crippling economic crisis once and for all so will they be able to find a viable solution are are they postponing the inevitable will take you to brussels for the latest on the european debt crisis but that is going to do it for now for more of the stories we covered go to r.t. dot com slash usa and check out our youtube page it's youtube dot com slash r t america you can also follow me on twitter liz wall the big picture with thom hartmann is coming up in just a half hour tonight on a sitting down with congressman ted deutch to talk about the amendment he proposed to end corporate personhood in the u.s. but that's going to do it for the news have a great night.