"Fake News" and Propaganda

After finding this URL, https://taskandpurpose.com/news/dont-get-trapped-by-fake-news-blue-falcons/, I responded with a comment which began:

"I'm a Vietnam-era vet (USNR) and have mixed feelings about a site you feature as an example of a questionable site which should be taken with more than a grain of salt (VeteransToday.com). As an enlisted man with no ambitions to advance, I looked forward to the end of my 2 years of active duty. During those years, I experienced being told things by my superiors which turned out to be false. There's "need-to-know" and then there's just BS to cover up (ahem) untruths deemed necessary to satisfy control requirements of underlings (more subtle and effective than "you didn't see/hear that"). Remarkably, there have been moments of candor where official spokespeople have admitted that "the government has a right to lie" when "matters of national security" are involved. As Wikipedia reports, "historically, propaganda had been a neutral descriptive term of any material that promotes certain opinions or ideologies." Today, it's primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. I'm now 78; when I was 18, I heard the news that JFK had been shot and killed. Initial news reports quickly settled on an official narrative: a lone gunman named Oswald was the shooter." 

(Exceeding their length limit for comments, I ended with "Continued on my blog, EverythingIknewWasWrong.blogspot.com." This blog entry is what I would have entered there, if there was no limit.)

I'm a Vietnam-era vet (USNR) and have mixed feelings about a site you feature as an example of a questionable site which should be taken with more than a grain of salt (VeteransToday.com). As an enlisted man with no ambitions to advance, I looked forward to the end of my 2 years of active duty. During those years, I experienced being told things by my superiors which turned out to be false. There's "need-to-know" and then there's just BS to cover up (ahem) untruths deemed necessary to satisfy control requirements of underlings (more subtle and effective than "you didn't see/hear that"). Remarkably, there have been moments of candor where official spokespeople have admitted that "the government has a right to lie" when "matters of national security" are involved. As Wikipedia reports, "historically, propaganda had been a neutral descriptive term of any material that promotes certain opinions or ideologies." Today, it's primarily used to influence or persuade an audience so as to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded language to produce an emotional rather than a rational response to the information that is being presented. 

I'm now 79; when I was 18, I heard the news that JFK had been shot and killed. That event, its aftermath and my search for truth since then has shaped the way I evaluate any new information. Here’s why.

Initial news reports about the assassination quickly settled on an official narrative: a lone gunman named Oswald was the shooter. It would be 20 years until the internet’s “World Wide Web” became available to the general public for information searching. Mass Media was the primary source of timely information for local and world affairs, through 3 national TV networks, metropolitan and national newspapers and magazines, syndicated news services and radio stations. Most Americans got nearly all their information from the same set of sources. Everyone wanted to know who killed our president, the sooner the better, and the mass media did not disappoint. It was also an era when public trust of this media was quite high.

Even with that high level of trust in mass media (which no longer exists, replaced by assertions  from all sides that the “news” is fake until proven otherwise), skepticism of that original official story ran high. The Warren Commission was established ostensibly to find the truth, but it became obvious to young and old that its real purpose was to disprove any evidence that more than one shooter was involved—because more than one shooter, by definition, required a conspiracy—a coordinated group effort. This purpose was even acknowledged in some official quarters on the imperative of “national security;” the Cold War was still in full swing then, with Khrushchev’s words in 1961 of “We will bury you” still ringing in the national ear. The United States had claimed the mantle, as it still does, of “leader of the free world;” if a conspiracy to assassinate a US President could be traced to a source inside the government, that leadership might be fatally weakened. (The CIA had been implicated in assassinations of many foreign leaders, and JFK had made many enemies in his thousand days in office, including the CIA.) 

It was thus deemed essential that no presidential assassination conspiracy be considered. The facts of the case were then manipulated to match the desired conclusion—a lone gunman was the only permissible conclusion, and any other conclusion had to be given the pejorative, even treasonous, label of (say it with me) “a conspiracy theory.”

In the years since the assassination, ample and convincing evidence has accumulated of such a conspiracy, as has continuing official denial of that evidence. After 21 years, the phrase has maintained its pejorative status, despite all reason, and the reasons for that label are unknown to those too young to remember JFK.

Those like me who were young at the time may remember the fear connected with becoming a skeptic of that “mother of all conspiracy theories.” Once the mass media had proclaimed the national-security imperative of “conspiracy denial,” it seemed our entire culture adopted that imperative; those who spoke out against it lost their status in their community, their feeling of safety, even their jobs (or ability to regain employment). Imagine yourself waking up to a world in which your national leaders and the corporations who employed most Americans of the middle and upper classes were enforcing a status quo in which a President who did not “get with the program” could be liquidated like the leader of a “banana republic.” Would you protest, or quietly cower in fear of your life and livelihood? If you were the breadwinner of your family (in those days there was only one), which would you choose? If you were in school, would you stand up to the derision of your classmates, or keep silent? I know what I did, and I’m not proud of it. 

Today, "our government" is financially and (by default) morally supporting Israeli Zionist propaganda designed to conceal by repeatedly denying the obvious truth (admitted in past and present, by Israel, but suppressed in the dominant Western news media) that Israel's goal since 1948 has been to erase the existence and history of Palestine, a total erasure of a semitic population who have lived there for generations, usually in peace with their neighbors.

(Expand on the theme, reusing prewritten items when possible.)