hello and welcome to cross talk where all things are considered on peter lavelle since the end of the cold war the media environment has transformed almost beyond recognition today there is a global battle for hearts and minds and the west mainstream media is losing that board. crosstalk alternative in mass media i'm joined by my guest george samuel in new york he is a senior research fellow at london metropolitan university and author of the new book obama's for peace nato's humanitarian war on yugoslavia in washington we have asked in peterson he is the c.e.o. of stone gate and editor of the libertarian republic dot com and in paris we cross

to any much shown she is a former british intelligence officer and writer all right crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i very much encourage it george if i go to you first here in new york we're calling this program hearts and minds and when i watch the state department briefings with jen psaki i have to wonder if the mainstream narrative is really losing this battle to make people believe in the elite of today. well it's very hard to say it's. the mainstream media is obviously taken the palm aling through the emergence of new media. it's certainly taken a pummeling through the emergence of new outlets such as the however i do think that the mainstream media do have very powerful legs. i can watch the sunday morning talk shows and i see the same faces the same cries for american action american. bombing american intervention and the alternative media

then. shows up a few hours later with very appropriate denunciations criticisms. ridicule but what really counts the people who come out of those shows and shake their fists at russia. syria all the people who are writing in the year or speaking on the alternative media i wish i could say it was the last that i am fortunately i think that it's the people who are on the mainstream media who set the agenda who dominate the conversation that's a very good point i see them go to you in washington i suppose we do still react to it myself in alternative media still do react to what the mainstream dictates as the narrative we do and we don't you know it's interesting that you bring this topic up peter because just this week variety magazine published an article about the diminished credibility of the night time news anchor if you remember during the

vietnam war walter cronkite had a great impact on the united states with his reporting on the vietnam war right now over at a.b.c. news it's george stephanopoulos there good morning america host that really has the most credibility over there people now don't look at the mainstream media as their main source of information anymore now people go to get breaking news to social media outlets or they go to opinion blogs or people that they trust people like glenn beck for example or people go and read my blog because they're looking for an alternative viewpoint to the mainstream media narrative i feel as if we're in right now sort of the change time the changeover period from the credibility of the mainstream media being the only outlet for resourceful reporting where people are looking for people who are more attached to news stories as they happen on the ground why would i want to read what george stephanopoulos has to say in new york city about the situation in ukraine when i can go and i can read newspaper reports and blogs i mean. you know you from the situations as they're happening on the

ground or i can subscribe to the twitter account of a reporter that's going on the ground i sort of feel as of right now is the time when the mainstream media is having a big changeover that's why they're having a loss of revenue that's why they're having to close down bureaus that's why c.n.n. is having to change their reporting style so i feel like right now is a good time for freedom of press for freedom of expression despite some of the crackdowns by intelligence agencies or newspapers like the guardian for printing the snowden leaks if you remember when they destroyed their hard drives and things like that any you know what kind of environment are we living in here because you know acid which is right the loss of revenue the loss of audiences but i would say the loss of credibility as well. i agree with all those points they are working on to a broken business model from the twenty twentieth century and we have new generations growing up the digital natives who get all their information over the internet so they're all model is no longer feasible charging for news is no longer feasible but yes i think credibility is the key problem here and this really set in the right

set in in the run up to the war against iraq in two thousand and three where all our corporate media rushed to support the invasion they repeated the lies and the fake intelligence pumped into the mainstream news by our intelligence agencies and that has been found to be absolute fabrication and yet for example in the u.k. on the very eve of the debate in the houses of parliament about whether to go to war this was the process that happened where the lies were fed into the mainstream media we had screaming headlines saying things like britain forty five minutes from forty five minutes moneghetti and that's i think when the the end of the credibility began and now of course and as often mentioned you know people do go to twitter they do want to see what's going on on the ground and they just don't trust the corporate media a particular because conglomeration of control of most of the corporate media now is in the hands of a very very small number of very powerful media companies who have courts very close to the seats of power to governments so there's that sort of credibility issue. george i sometimes think this is the age of disbelief because it's really

interesting is that we have so many outlets available to us now more than we could have imagined twenty years ago but me myself as a journalist i have to spend a lot of time to get the right frame story here because i know what. political opinion certain blogs have individuals certain institutions and you have to really keep your nose to the grindstone to really understand what's going on in my specialisation is the part of the world that i live in and i it's a lot of work you know antiwar dot com is a really good source but it's still a lot harder than i think most people think if you want to find out what's what could be called the truth though that's absolutely correct. there is now so much information just simply swamping the internet that it is very hard to sift through it all see what is reliable the problem is that the in the new media.

rely very much on the traditional media because the traditional media. were able to gather news i mean here it's very expensive to run a bureau it's very expensive to have reporters all over the world so what goes on in the alternative media the very social media is essential. transmission of stories that have been gathered in the traditional media so it's not like the new media are actually doing a lot of news gathering themselves because it's very hot here and so while it's it's true that the traditional media are losing revenue and they're doing worse but in many ways that is a good thing because it means that they are even less able to run the bureaus to run the reporters to to do the news gathering and the not more. more reliant on the

same wire services of almost same reporters and so much of what happens is gathered in the traditional media is sounds exactly the same because it's all coming from the same sources so what we have in the social media. i'm going to let you know go ahead anyway you want to jump in go ahead please do and i mean i take the point you're just making but i think he's missing there is a sort of elephant in the room about the new media here at the moment and that is the model that is that started out with we keep leaks where they did produce the news stories because they they got the information wrong and they could put the information out directly to the people who needed to read it to citizens without filtering it through the prism of news gathering organizations so this is sort of radical transparency and sure we can mix it has its problems but of course it spawned a whole new generation of leaks type sites things like globally and secured to open a whole range of other bewildering leaks and i think this is this is the new model of media this is the alternative media and that's why the old model i think it's

just playing catch up now are sort of one of the. sort of so exciting that i had thought oh no it's good also that's the whole point is you are going to go ahead i just want to talk about i want to talk about consumption patterns here you know the atlantic published an article that's week that took a look at the analytics for what kind of news and journalism that people are consuming and they basically compared it to cotton candy versus broccoli limit if you look at it people will be when they're polled like al-jazeera did a poll saying what kind of news and journalism do people want and they found that most people are liars they'll say i want good hard hitting news and journalism but what they really want if you watch their consumption patterns is buzz feed like all this tickles of cat pictures and so if we look at this from a honest person active of corporate control versus consumption patterns you have to understand that nowadays it's the consumer that has the power in the in the media market and the consumer is deciding by by their clicks exactly what kind of journalism happens around the world. so i don't really see any more of

a sort of overarching conspiracy by corporate media elites are controlling of the narrative where it's really just a matter of revenue it's where is the money going i actually just created a brand new website that's aimed at that cotton candy market and it's called liberty viral dot com and we don't do any real hard journalism other than to sort of rehash the argument that have already been made we make buzz feed stylistical and i mean it explodes consumers want this kind of media and so yeah i'm a curious and i want to sort of you know sort of what you think the role of the what the consumer the brave new world what the consumer wants is not necessarily good for people george you know and that mattered i'm sure a corporate media that's is i'm sure it's great people are looking at. you know let's go invade iraq if you get brave. go ahead go hard and i know that's where the consumers want to let absolutely absolutely. yeah but the whole point is that you know where in the news media business and we are trying to create an informed

public we are trying to ensure that we have an informed citizenry that can we take good sound decisions of policy i mean if you could just put pictures of kids and cats fighting dogs and little children messing around in the on the beach i mean for sure i mean we can you know how much can we say people should or shouldn't do everybody i mean really are we supposed to save people from themselves could also go ahead. well i'm just saying you can't save people from themselves the media or the public eye what they want you have to give them what they want or you're going to be out of business george last word before the break well no i mean i really don't think that way i really don't think we should be in the business of catering to the lowest common denominator because then i mean the you know let's just have it just tabloid newspapers everywhere let's just have you know all you know let's nothing but sex and scandals i mean that's already not only saying no we're going to go which joint break it's like after that short break we'll continue. discussion

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you. trying. to find out more visit arabic t.v. dot com. welcome back to cross talk we're all things are considered i'm peter all about mind you we're discussing mainstream and alternative media. and i might go back to you in paris it seems to me another trend here is that news out words that claim to be jeff do of are being more in more often punished by the consumer because i think most people believe that this whole theory of objectivity is really gone that's why they go to fox you know even admit it that's why they

come to our t.v. they want they want something much more edgy ok beyond cats and dogs and going to the beach but this objectivity thing i think is it's a car wreck now it doesn't work anymore that's why c.n.n. is being punished so much. well i know that the american press has traditionally prided itself on its objectivity but i think that the long gone from the u.k. media should we say yes and where it's been well known for decades that the spin and the political slant of newspapers is always dictated by the owner by the. owner of the outlet so for example. and his news international group running newspapers like the sun and the old news of the world could legitimately say that he could actually pick governments because by throwing the weight of his media outlets behind chosen politicians he could sway the voters and i think this is very dangerous path to go down for democracy where these relatively anonymous corporate barons can have such an impact on the democratic direction of a country and it's not going. spiritual to say this is being late bet through the

hacking scandal in the u.k. the degree of interconnectivity between top politicians and between media baron so this goes on time and time again plus of course is a whole battery of other knew it was which can be used to control and cost the media into reporting what the government the military or the spice woman to report up to make leading. vanity fair and just say ok asked in washington go ahead you know media media media barons have free speech too i mean come on why can't they use their money and power to try and influence people all they're doing is engaging in free speech that's what the media is you talk about you use the word control and certainly i agree with many of your points but you know free speech doesn't exert control people still have the option to choose what sort of media they consume and again rupert murdoch certainly is a free citizen and gets to decide what he wants to print and publish and people get to choose what they consume so i don't really like the idea that people get to say oh well you are controlling the media because no one really has a monopoly on the media you know russia today exists fox news exists and i never

really believed in the concept of objectivity when it came to reporting i mean you're not objective when you choose what story you want to report vary by choosing a story that you want to report your that you're deciding what the narrative is going to be for the day and i think that this whole idea that there was never any sort of objectivity has sort of been like a wall over there are over the eyes the conservatives have never in the united states have never made any bones about the fact that they are not being objective they're biased but they're fair and the reality is that this is the liberals in our country who have said you know a.b.c. news all were objective in the media the republican party just came out with an announcement in the last month saying that they are going to start picking and choosing which debates which networks are going to be allowed in the whole presidential debates because they know that it's a farce that the liberal media in the united states has any semblance of objectivity they never have they only convinced people that they were george but it seems to be because of what i've become you know hey i'm any because of what any did say and what austin said one of the things that i think that's happening and i find it bothersome in some ways is that we have. parallel universes you could have

murdoch in his little universe there and then you have people people on twitter on facebook and they're getting more and more divorced and then i think this could be very dangerous because people feel a sense of just not being enfranchise in society they have their own small communities believe me i know that from facebook personally. yes that's exactly right. and so what we now have is these news new news shows in which a standard narrative is presented and most recently we had the standard narrative of russia and the ukraine and the standard narrative what is putin up to it is putin want to revive a soviet empire and that's the narrative now of course if you don't want to hear that and if you want to hear a much much better and much more balanced account of what was going on in the ukraine there were other sources however what was important was what was happening

in those mainstream outlets because they were shaping policy they were the ones that were getting their message across to the policymakers on the policy makers were listening to them the policy makers were not listening to the alternative universe of the alternative it's ok asif it seems to me they're beginning to go i think you're going to hear any job in paris go ahead. just just a very quick point on that for example although the mainstream narrative about the need to intervene in syria over the last few years was being pushed to go towards intervention and for example the u.k. politicians were keen to follow that narrative however there was so much distrust in the mainstream media is next with around syria after what happened in iraq and after what had happened in libya that the pressure came from below in order to stop cameron from actually getting an intervening so it can you know that this distrust this discord between the consumers of the media and the mainstream media is growing and i think it is beginning to influence some of the political decisions asked. and

i greatly glad i had to disagree there because we're going to charge well i'll just say that i think that the issue of the pressure from below is yes it's up to a point but there was pressure from below before the invasion of iraq i mean there was an enormous amount of number of protests throughout the world millions of people demonstrated on the eve of the iraq invasion it didn't make one bit of difference syria there was a there was a vote in parliament and there was a change we don't know the exact mechanics of why obama back the way the last minute but obama was clearly planning on bombing i mean we were i was away i realised i had the exam to cancel are going on as i have a pretty good because of the rise of the power go ahead on it and i know why obama backed away it was because he had said he had no support from neither the republican party or the democratic party because the difference between the war in iraq and the war in syria is that anti-war activists didn't have a half a million to a million fans on facebook back in two thousand and one because the social media

power didn't exist you see things have changed in the last decade people like myself we now have huge audiences which we can use real democrat democratic power against our legislators our elected officials when you talk about democracy i mean social media is the real democracy now if there is a new initiative that's going on such as the push for a war in syria people like myself an antiwar dot com can go out and we can now tap our wide array of resources that we have in order to put pressure on our legislators and the pressure from the american public came in the form of democracy it came in the form of electronic mails and that came in the form of social media i mean no one wants to have a say a negative social media campaign aimed at them and no one even knew what that was back during the war in iraq but now nobody wants their facebook page assaulted by you know the tea party anymore so i think that things have really changed in the last decade and how you know i read anything so i read it and i really don't think george. george jumping. you know i really don't think so i think that was

a clear case that the ground fell from under under the feet oh i i'm under the there was a great deal of collapse in the government's case i mean it was clear that. hersh has written about this extensively the intelligence agencies had pulled the rug from under obama's feet he really didn't have any backing for his claims and obama was looking for a way out and president putin provided him with a way out obama doesn't care and the good ministration doesn't care about people on facebook of public opinion public opinion does not change foreign policy now but the i didn't do care years ago price and i was never going to get or an authorization of military force the president was never going to get an authorization of military force from this congress because the elected officials our country our presidents network presidents never get authorization i did only in the judiciary had already been hearing as i was going to go to paris annie oakley

one of the interesting thing i agree with and says we have the advent of facebook and we have you tube very important twitter etc etc but one of the things the broader picture understand ok we have but very importantly it has been mentioned on this program was the illegal war in two thousand and three against iraq in the subsequent occupation which is disastrous but we also have the financial crisis of two thousand and eight two thousand and nine which i think a lot of people looked at the establishment and the media as they were they were betrayed by that you know the one percent were saved and bailed out within a matter of months everybody else was left in the gutter and i think when we get these new tools again going back to my analogy of parallel universes and the brokerage business model as you mention but we are going in different directions here there is empowerment from below i don't know if it's ever ever works out very well in the end but people do feel empowered. and they'll beginning to yes people are fine. the individual voices and they're losing their deference through

authority and i think they are more willing and more able to challenge that broken or forty and that's what we're seeing now one of the pushback from that in my view it's almost like the arms race between we'd the people trying to hold onto our rights and protest against some of these inequalities in injustices and illegal wars watches and surveyors and push back against our fight for our freedoms more effectively as we saw when they crushed occupy in two thousand and eleven and and just started putting c.c.t.v. cameras up all over the place to spy on and where they were putting people in prison just for being demonstrations on the streets when i deemed occupy london to be domestic extremist terrorists these are people exercising their democratic rights and so people can see this threat so people are noble i think and i think it's a shot in the arm for our rights here george you know they're just saying that the because of the total result of all used against those tyrants ok we're almost out of time here george i always start the. claim that if those are looking for

terrorists but no they're not they're looking at people like us on this program to make sure we stay in line. though that that's exactly right i mean that's the point about the internet is that yes i mean there were people can now write their own blogs it also means that governments can monitor exactly what everybody is up to just to go back to work and his point about the occupy movement i mean you'd have thought that this movement which captured people's imaginations now with all the social media occupy should have had a huge impact let me tell you that because you can do so many more things now with the social media than you could a few years ago it was repressed and it also fizzled out but you know i remember you know the strikes of the miners strikes of the one nine hundred seventy s. in britain it was just one guy with a payphone and yet they were able to mobilize the masses of people moving from one . plant to another coke plant it in the is a sophisticated technology you need a movement you need all the organization so. social media all one part of the

jigsaw but they you know by itself is just not going to do that model scale mount point thank you very much fascinating program many thanks and i guess to new york washington and paris and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember profit off. you know the old. as a new physician i swear to abide by the hippocratic oath. to the best of my ability and judgment. i will prescribe for the good of

my patients. i will not give deadly doses to anybody. or advise others to do so. i will never do harm to the. doctors of the dogs on. the field with economic ups and downs in the final months they belong to the old sang i and the rest that life. will be everything onto me.

this is what we do we kill people and break things. we can see something if simple as people playing a soccer game you can see individual players and if you see the ball. you can only

see his facial expression you can see he is a mouth open and crying out. maybe he cursed us or maybe he asked. for forgiveness for. there must be near certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured. what a wonderful show marginalize the public face to face i feel alone and. a pleasure to have you with us here on t.v. today i'm sure.

breaking news here on r.t. international a russian cameraman he's killed in eastern ukraine is the military opens fire on a bus carrying journalists and civilians hours before a ceasefire expires. also jihadists in syria and iraq declare the creation of an islamist state spanning across the border of both nations spurred on by washington's middle east policies. and if the extremists continue their advance on baghdad we report on the plight of iraq's many minorities left unprotected in the collapsing country. first so look at the strange world of online selling where even the.