That steaming gobbet of disinformation on the front page of yesterday's NYTimes that is, the one about 5G and Russia was something rather different from their usual spitballs of state/corporate propaganda, such as their epic tour of Syria's "secret torture prisons," their shrieking updates on the measles "threat," and their promotion of Juan Guaido as the "acting president" of Venezuela (a title that's more accurate than they want us to perceive).
What's different about the Times' 5G/Russia piece is that it's mainly driven not by some US state agency, but by plain old corruption, of the kind that used to be the norm throughout the Fourth Estate, as exposed by Upton Sinclair in The Brass Check, published a century ago. Such criticism pushed the owners and managers of our free press (as it then partly was) to proclaim their commitment to what's known as journalistic ethics which meant, among other things, not letting any mere financial interest, whether the advertisers' or the paper's owners', dictate the news.
That noble prohibition sounds pretty quaint today, after decades of commercial interference with the news throughout (what we once called) the broadcast media -- even CBS News, despite the venerable legacy of Edward R. Murrow. (On the subversion of "60 Minutes" in particular, see Michael Mann's great movie The Insider.) The New York Times has long appeared to be exceptional in this regard, its journalistic mission always (seemingly) pursued "without fear or favor," including the financial interests of the paper's advertisers, or its owners.
However true that used to be, there's no truth to it now, as that slowly failing paper is, first of all, its advertisers' b*tch, covering, or covering up, the news in perfect harmony with the financial interests of Big Pharma and the cell phone cartel (to name two frequent purchasers of full-page ads). And, as of yesterday, the Times made shockingly clear that it has no compunction whatsoever about letting (what some of us still call) the truth get in the way of its own financial interest, even if that truth is crucial to our health, and telling it, honestly and clearly, a matter of life and death for all of us.
The New York Times is, seemingly, pushing 5G on the rest of us in service to its top shareholder, Carlos Slim, who owns 17% of the Gray Lady, and who made his awesome fortune ("Mr. Slim and his family are billionaires 50 times over," the Times reported, with admirable candor, in 2016) in the cell phone business south of the border. He therefore stands to profit hugely off 5G, although he's rich enough already to live far from any of the cell phone towers that will have millions of us battling tumors, or dropping dead from heart attacks about which "Mr. Slim" is also (obviously) rich enough already not to care.
Call me a "conspiracy theorist," but it seems more than likely that it was Carlos Slim who urged the Times's other big shareholders including (of course) the Sulzberger family to approve a joint venture with Verizon to build a "5G journalism lab." This project was unveiled, to much applause, in January, at the 2019 Consumer Electronics Show, where Hans Vestberg, Verizon's CEO, had Times CEO Mark Thompson join him at the podium to rave euphorically about the journalistic wonders of 5G. (The other of the two "iconic companies" that Vestberg invited there "to talk about how they use [and] view 5G" was Walt Disney Studios, personified in Disney CTO Jamie Voris.)
"The Times exists to tell stories. To tell the stories that the world wants and needs to hear." (Scroll down for the unedited transcript.) Thus the New York Times' top manager erased the necessary civic function of the news: what citizens should know, for their own good, and for the good of their republic. In Thompson's view, the Times should do what Disney does: tell stories to "the world," as if that "world" (i.e., ourselves) were a drowsy multitude of children, and the Times were soothing us to sleep with bedtime "stories."
Such "children" as envisioned by Mark Thompson, and kept unconscious by the Times' "story-tellers," can have no way of knowing, nor the wisdom to suspect, that those "stories" aren't just false, but dangerous, bringing on an electronic system that will make our children sick, along with many adults.
Such wide-eyed "children" don't yet know that those who tell such "stories," while smearing those who try to tell the truth as Russian trolls, should not be walking free, and making handsome salaries as journalists, but truth be told, on trial for crimes against humanity.
MCM
https://www.investopedia.com/
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/
https://www.verizon.com/about/
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