seated on peter lavelle since the end of the cold war the media environment is transformed almost beyond recognition today there is a global battle for hearts and minds and the west mainstream media is losing that war. if you cross talk 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 an editor of the libertarian republican come 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 a pommel link 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 a 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 on all those shows and shake their feet. russia. syria all the people writing

in the speaking on the whole to the t. of media i wish i could say it was the last that i am fortunately i think that it's leave people who are on the mainstream media who set the agenda who dominates the conversation that's a very good point i see them go to you in washington i suppose we do still react to 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 and 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 immediately 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 if right now is the time when the mainstream media is having a big changeover and 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. it was

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 anyway 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 doom forty five minutes mama get it and that's i think when the the end of the credibility began and now of course 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 particularly 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 to 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 you 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 close to be called the truth. no 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 new media. rely very much on the traditional media because the traditional media. were able to gather news i did hear some 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 true that the traditional media are losing revenue and they're doing worse but in many ways that isn't a good thing because it means that they are even less able to run the bureaus to run the reporters to do the news gathering and they get more and more reliant on the same wire services and 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 is genuine. and very diligent and i'll go ahead anyway i 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 can leak where they did produce the news stories because 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 a radical transparency and sure. he has had 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 building 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 on us and one of the. sun so i thought i had you. know that all is good also that's the whole point is 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 and then if you look at it people will do it 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 a list of polls 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 of 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 of 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 i make sure if it was to sort of you know sort of what you think you were all that what they could see was brave new world what the consumer wants is not necessarily good for people kate george you know and that didn't matter it was sort of corporate media that's is i'm sure it's great people are looking at. you know let's go with a derogatory. the brave little leader go ahead george i know that's where the consumers want the i absolutely absolutely and. it works with yeah but the whole point is that you know we're 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 make 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 sure i mean we can you know we have how much can we say people total silence

to everybody i mean i really are we supposed to save people from themselves who had also go ahead. well i'm just saying you can't save people from themselves the media the pebble 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 we 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 will just tabloid newspapers everywhere let's just have you know or you know let's have nothing but sex and scandals i mean that's already i don't know you know saying no where will you go that was doing break it's like after that short break we'll continue our discussion on the media environment stay with us. leave the place with.

that nixon decided to close the gold window and turn the monetary system into a painting on a dollar bill and exchange for this deal with the cia devil the u.s. economy would never end we were told we could lead lives to balance school. see without cost. i've got news for you the portrait of on call center has been hit in the basement of fort knox behind the barbarous relic called gold and that portrait of old will send my dear people chose a tire hanger and an ugly old dude from monetary to power tree to school murder empires of dead and banking immorality. i restrained. in december two thousand and ten. more likely to be raped in college

than in the real world. and unthinkable did that to each other when they knew each other i thought rape was a stranger in the bushes. girl complaining about the son of an alumni whose gives millions of dollars to the school why listen to somebody who's going to lose money at a school if schools that make money based decisions are much more common than they would ever admit publicly. ingenues but eugenics vulgarize ation of darwin science and punishment for an uncommitted crying i was there a lot is to learn to believe in each of the few belonging to still today for the few i don't know why they look at me but i still don't know why genetic improvement

through forced sterilization the basis for nazi ideology don't stop at just sterilizing groups and now go to the point of death. for years rarely discussed on till now really rather not talk about that right. dramas that transfield ignored. stories others refused to notice. faces changed the walls of lights never. told pictures of today's events no longer from around the globe. up to. fifty. you know. it's

a. welcome back to cross talk we're all things are considered i'm people of our mind you were 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 and more often punished by the consumer because they think most people believe that the whole theory of objectivity is really gone that's why they go to fox you know even if 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 there's 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 here 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 conspiratorial to say this is being laid bare through the phone hacking scandal in the u.k. the degree of interconnectivity between top politicians and between media barons so this goes on time and time again plus of course. is a whole battery of alternate was which can be used to control and collapse the

media into reporting what the government who the military or the spice woman to pull it up to including secrecy i just sort of a jack in vanity fair and just say ok ousted in washington go ahead you know many of the 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 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 any 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 think i don't know hey i'm any because of what andy 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 this is 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 the 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 standard narrative now of course if you don't want to hear that and if you want to hear a much much better and a 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 policymakers were not listening to the alternative universe of the alternative

outputs are so it seems to me they're beginning to go i think ok go ahead 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 going in 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 are soon. going to head with degree there because george well i'll just say that i think that the issue of the pressure from below is yes it's up to her. true 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 john 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 legislative 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 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 rated anything so i read it and i really don't think george. george jump in and i you know i really don't think so i think that was a clear case that the ground fell from 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 know 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 shape foreign policy now but the i didn't do care years ago price and i was never going to get to 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 all right gentlemen of the judiciary had already been here as i was going to go to paris annie and 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 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 begin to yes people are finding their individual voices and they're losing their deference through authority and i think they're more willing and able to challenge that broken authority and that's what we're seeing now one of the. the pushback from that in my view it's almost like the arms race between we do people trying to hold onto our

rights and protest against some of these inequalities and injustices and illegal rules and then what space is now the military security state gathering more power is that they can watch us and surveyors and push back against our fight for our freedoms more effectively as we saw when they crushed occupying two thousand and eleven and ten and started putting c.c.t.v. cameras up all over the place to spy on them where they were putting people in prison just for being demonstrations on the streets when they 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 saying that the because of the time that was voted on used against those tyrants ok we're almost out of time here george i always thought the n.s.a. is what they claim they're to say 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 write their own blogs but 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 i mean you're there 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 first all dealt with 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 plan it in the is a sophisticated technology you need a movement you need all the organization so social media are one part of the jigsaw but by itself it's just not going to do all that model. that point thank you very much fascinating program many thanks to my guest in new york washington and paris

and thanks to our viewers for watching us here r.t. see you next time and remember profit off. the leash on. the for. the sake. of the trying to. play polo going to.

want to thank you. for. taking every minute of the a. mummy nolasco with. my alarm clock but. most of us think the sun setting all the time the excuse is going to lead to months. sometimes for nothing the i just. want. to it's not just me but still we can still be just if you could you see the stage eight will be live but he was. the lead. you got a lot. a sneering and negative price for your engagements here in russia especially

for the public appearances with food and even though they weren't explicitly politically or just supporting sports one of the things that certain people who zoom has become very adept at is controlling the media for example right here c.n.n. do i think c.n.n. is you know completely telling it like it is no i think is a have an agenda i think through is is bought and paid for. playing. i marinate join me. for in-depth impartial and financial reporting commentary in from news and much much. only on bombast and on.

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local. t.v. . france says it will join the u.s. and arming kurds in iraq as washington and its allies get ever deeper involved in the conflict. at least three people are killed as ukraine's army pounds the outskirts of donetsk with shells the u.n. says more than two thousand people have already been killed in the conflict. and the e.u. is reportedly pressuring other countries not to expand their trade with russia as moscow's food embargo takes its toll we take a look at how the trade wars are affecting europe's economy.