Western Propaganda
There are countless examples of spin, bias, and censorship in leftist mainstream media:
It's hard to find an authoritative news source that's a no-spin zone. So how does one see through media bias?
Caitlin Johnstone posits an approach in her 17 May 2025 Lew Rockwell article, How To Make Your Mind Harder for the Propagandists To Manipulate.
Johnstone describes the nature of western propaganda:
The domestic propaganda that westerners are fed by the powerful does not typically consist of whole-cloth fabrications, but rather of distortions, half-truths, manipulated emphasis, and lies by omission.
The worst mistake you can make when reading the news is to assume there's a good reason why the mass media report on something in the way that they do. That there’s a good reason why Israel-Palestine gets framed as a complex and morally ambiguous issue with no clear path forward, even though it all looks pretty self-evident to you...
So much western ignorance is facilitated by the manipulative way the imperial media report on what's going on in the world...
The only reason the western public is ever told about anything bad that happens at a high level of frequency and urgency is when it is convenient for the western empire, like when Russia invaded Ukraine. When that happened it was the main story in every western outlet for ages, and Russia was clearly framed as the evil aggressor, with all the NATO aggressions which provoked the invasion going completely unmentioned...
The domestic propaganda that westerners are fed by the powerful does not typically consist of whole-cloth fabrications, but rather of distortions, half-truths, manipulated emphasis, and lies by omission...
Western propaganda doesn't consist so much of manipulating what gets reported but how it gets reported...
Johnstone then explains that:
The only way to get around this is to maintain an acute awareness of what’s being reported while ignoring distorting factors like frequency, emphasis and tone. You have to just focus on the raw data of what's being reported...
So one of the most important things you need to do to maintain a truth-based worldview is to take complete control over your own understanding of the importance of the pieces of information which come across your field of vision...
