You Are Being Lied To

The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion,
Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths

edited by Russ Kick
published by Disinformation Books (a division of RSUB)
400 pp * ISBN 0966410076

Table of Contents (with links to selected excerpted chapters)

About Disinformation
Introduction/A Note to Readers

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Reality Is a Shared Hallucination | Howard Bloom
author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain; founder of the International Paleopsychology Project “Individual perception untainted by others' influence does not exist.”

THE NEWS MEDIA AND OTHER MANIPULATORS

What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream|Noam Chomsky
preeminent linguist and political dissident commentator; author of over 35 books “The real mass media are basically trying to divert people.”

Journalists Doing Somersaults | Norman Solomon
media watchdog; syndicated columnist (“Media Beat”); author of over 10 books “Today, just six corporations have a forceful grip on America's mass media.”

The Puppets of Pandemonium | Howard Bloom
“So I am angry at the press. I am angry at its dishonesty. I am infuriated by its moral corruption. I am disgusted with its laziness and lack of intellectual independence.”

New Rules for the New Millennium | Gary Webb
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter; author of the explosive “Dark Alliance” series and book “The rules are being changed, and they are being changed in such a way as to ensure that our government and our major corporations won't be bothered by nettlesome investigative journalists in the new millennium.”

The Covert News Network | Greg Bishop
publisher The Excluded Middle; editor of Wake Up Down There! “As one can imagine, the history of the US intelligence community's relationship to the news media is a long and sordid one.”

Why Does the Associated Press Change Its Articles|Russ Kick
editor of You Are Being Lied To; author of Outposts and Psychotropedia; regular contributor to the Village Voice “What I desperately want to know is: Who called the AP in the intervening hour and got them to yank those fourteen words? Who really calls the shots at the AP? Who gets the most prominent print-news organization to change its stories to protect the President, the Congress, the World Bank/IMF, and other powerful parties?”

We Distort, You Abide | Kenn Thomas
publisher of Steamshovel Press magazine; author of nine books “The writer Arthur Koestler coined the phrase ‘bisociation’ as the process by which new insights are gained through correlations between disparate sources.... At a time when shifting bisociative contexts should abound, the World Wide Web resembles more the outmoded newsstand, with every magazine reporting the same news from the same angle, or the uniform coverage of the three TV networks in the days before cable.”

The Media and Their Atrocities | Michael Parenti
leading progressive thinker and radical historian; author of ten books, including Against Empire “For the better part of a decade the US public has been bombarded with a media campaign to demonize the Serbian people and their elected leaders.”

Making Molehills Out of Mountains | Marni Sullivan
freelance writer who has appeared in Skin Art, LA Reader, LA Weekly, and numerous alternative music magazines “Most people, especially Americans, seem to believe that a great deal of the trouble comes from religious intolerance. Much of this stereotype results from a lack of understanding of the issues, which in turn results from a lack of information.”

Why They Hate Oliver Stone | Sam Smith
editor of Progressive Review; author of four books, including the upcoming Why Bother?: Getting a Life in a Locked Down Land “No, Stone's crime was not that his movie presents a myth, but that he had the audacity and power to challenge the myths of his critics.”

The Martin Luther King You Don't See On TV | Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
Jeff Cohen: media watchdog; syndicated columnist; author of four books; founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) Norman Solomon “King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.”

Sometimes Lying Means Only Telling a Small Part of the Truth | R.U. Sirius, et al
founder and original editor of Mondo 2000; freelance writer; 2000 Presidential candidate for the Revolution Party “Back in late June 1999, brief items appeared in papers and newsweeklies across the country telling us that anti-authoritarian counterculturalist Timothy Leary was ‘an FBI informant.’”

Upon Hearing of the Electronic Bogeyman | George Smith
editor of the Crypt newsletter; author of The Virus Creation Labs “The mainstream and very public line regarding the threat to the nation's well-being presented by hackers, electronic terrorists, and unseen cyber-warriors from "rogue states" has been quite clear-cut.... But a shocking amount of the rhetoric is based purely on the equivalent of modern-day ghost stories, exacerbated by the mainstream media's lack of understanding of computer technology and its love for exaggerated sensationalism.”

School Textbooks | Earl Lee
radical librarian; freelance writer; author of two books “One of the most pervasive and yet poorly understood influences on American society is the high school textbook. Thanks to the virtual monopoly of public education, textbook publishers have a wide-ranging power to shape the ideas of young people. In reality, however, textbooks do more to misinform and mislead than almost any other print media.”

The Information Arms Race | Douglas Rushkoff
syndicated columnist; NPR commentator; author of several books, including Coercion, Media Virus, and Ecstasy Club “Unless we can have just as much of an effect on the director, writer, producer, or journalist as he has on us, we are not involved in a communication. We are merely the recipients of programming. Even the so-called "interactive" media, like computer games and most Websites, simply allow for the user to experience a simulation of free choice.”

POLITRICKS

The War Secrets Senator John McCain Hides | Sydney Schanberg
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter; subject of the Academy Award-winning film The Killing Fields; author The Death and Life of Dith Pran; head of the investigative team at APBnews.com “Over the years in Washington, McCain, at times almost single-handedly, has pushed through Pentagon-desired legislation to make it impossible or much harder for the public to acquire POW/MIA information and much easier for the defense bureaucracy to keep it hidden.... Literally thousands of documents that would otherwise have been declassified long ago have been legislated into secrecy.”

Jimmy Carter and Human Rights | Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon
“During his presidency, Carter proclaimed human rights to be ‘the soul of our foreign policy.‘ Although many journalists promoted that image, the reality was quite different.”

All the President’s Men | David McGowan
freelance writer; author of Derailing Democracy: The America the Media Don't Want You to See “The truth is that the Bush family closet is so jammed with skeletons that it is a wonder that they can still get the door closed. I’m betting that come election day there will be at least three troubling stories that will remain safely locked away there. Any one of these could have posed serious problems for the Bush candidacy; a wide airing of all three would undoubtedly permanently end Little George’s political career.”

Oil Before Ozone | Russ Kick
“Whether you approve or disapprove of Gore’s handling of the environment, abortion, Israel, and other issues is going to depend on your politics. We can also debate the importance of his personality and upbringing. But his hypocrisy, exaggerations, outright lies, unethical activities, unsavory associates (including communist spies), and lovey-dovey relationship with big-money interests should upset everyone, regardless of political views.”

God Save the President!| Robin Ramsay
editor and publisher of Lobster magazine; author of two books “Britain has been treated rather more like the so-called banana republics of Central America and the Caribbean than its rulers would have us realize.”

Colony Kosovo | Christian Parenti
freelance writer; author of Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis “Rather than a multiethnic democracy, Kosovo is shaping up to be a violent, corrupt, free-market colony erected on the foundation of a massive lie.”

The Truth about Terrorism | Ali Abunimah
peace activist; media analyst “The State Department's report, ‘Patterns of Global Terrorism, 1999,’ published on May 1, 2000, flatly contradicts the government's statements about terrorism, as well as the general public's perception of the phenomenon.”

You Can’t Win | James Ridgeway
Washington correspondent of the Village Voice; author of sixteen books, including Blood in the Face; producer and director of documentaries, including Feed “Beginning in the early 1980s in Bill Clinton’s Arkansas, the American blood supply was poisoned.” “The feds claimed no real harm resulted from the huge, purposely-set Cerro Grande wildfire, which burned approximately 8000 acres and nearly overran a plutonium stockpile.” “The US Secret Service was laying the groundwork until quite recently for a photo database of ordinary citizens collected from state motor vehicles departments.”

OFFICIAL VERSIONS

Anatomy of a School Shooting | David McGowan
“On May 15, 2000, the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office released the official report on the shooting deaths of fifteen people at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado..... Yet strangely enough, the press representatives closest to the scene, both socially and geographically, have reported facts about the case that don't appear to fit into the official scenario.”

How the People Seldom Catch Intelligence | Preston Peet
contributing editor at Disinformation; regular contributor to High Times magazine and Website, (and editor in chief of drugwar.com). “One would have to intentionally not look in order to miss the copious amounts of evidence of CIA-sanctioned and -protected drug-trafficking, even in LA, that exist today in the public record; the US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence succeeds admirably, disregarding sworn testimony and government reports, and ignoring what agents on the ground at the scene have to say.”

Reassessing OKC | Cletus Nelson
freelance writer; contributing editor at Disinformation “From day one, a surfeit of scientific anomalies and inexplicable events have surrounded the allegedly airtight case against the two men. Indeed, despite widespread public belief that the crime has been solved, a number of looming questions remain unanswered.”

Votescam | Jonathan Vankin
freelance writer; author of several books, including Conspiracies, Cover-Ups and Crimes and 70 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time “On election night, when the three major television networks announce the next president, the winner they announce is not chosen by the voters of the United States. He is the selection of the three networks themselves, through a company they own jointly with Associated Press and United Press International. That company is called News Election Service (NES).... The US government does not tabulate a single vote. The government has granted NES a legal monopoly, exempt from antitrust laws, to count the votes privately.”

The Rabin Murder Coverup | Barry Chamish
author of six books, including Who Murdered Yitzhak Rabin and The Last Days of Israel “Yigal Amir was not just a religious kid who got mad one night and shot a prime minister. He had an intelligence background.”

What Missing from This Picture? | Jim Marrs
author of numerous scripts, columns, and books, including the JFK classic Crossfire and the UFO classic Alien Agenda “Missing evidence has become a hallmark of American politics. Apparently the idea is that, circumstances notwithstanding, if there’s no proof then there can be no guilt.”

THE SOCIAL FABRICATION

Don’t Blame Your Parents | interview with Judith Rich Harris
Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Nurture Assumption “The evidence I've put together in my book indicates that parents have little or no long-term effect on their children's personality, intelligence, or mental health.”

The Female Hard-on | Tristan Taormino
Village Voice columnist; editor of radical lesbian magazine On Our Backs; editor of the Best Lesbian Erotica series; author of The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women “The truth is that 40 percent of American women experience some form of sexual dysfunction. It's actually a bigger problem than it is for men (30 percent suffer from some form of dysfunction), and yet all the money and research has focused on the boys.”

Art and the Eroticism of Puberty | David Steinberg
columnist and freelance writer of sexual culture/politics; editor of Erotic by Nature and The Erotic Impulse “In general, the designated pervert of any given era will be whoever most threatens to overturn the prevailing myth of asexual innocence.”

“A World That Hates Gays” | Philip Jenkins
Distinguished Professor of History and Religious Studies; author of fourteen books, including Using Murder and Moral Panic “Through the 1990s, it was common to claim that gay victims represented perhaps a third of the teen suicide ‘epidemic,’ and this figure became simply a social fact, something that ‘everybody knows.... In fact, estimates for the level of gay teen suicide are quite misleading and wildly inflated.”

Apt Pupils | Robert Sterling
editor and publisher of the Konformist Website; freelance writer “The true purpose behind the Western schooling system was to transform the young into killers.... Could such a phenomenon such as social persecution develop independently across nearly every high school in the country without it being a byproduct of some design?”

A Panic of Biblical Proportions over Media Violence | Paul McMasters
First Amendment Ombudsman at the Freedom Forum; executive director of the Freedom Forum First Amendment Center “It would be impossible to produce a list of 1,000 studies that state an unequivocally causal link between media and ‘aggressive behavior’ in children, let alone violent acts by children. Yet this ‘fact’ has been tossed about so often by politicians and activists that even professionals and scholars feel safe in using it.”

The Man in the Bushes | interview with Philip Jenkins
“The best breakdown of known American serial-killer cases is by Eric Hickey, who finds substantial numbers of women and minorities as serial killers.” “The idea of child abuse is so deeply ingrained in our society that it seems absolutely obvious that all sensible people, everywhere, will think likewise unless they are deeply sick. To the contrary, even this absolute orthodoxy is in fact very new in historic terms.”

CONDEMNED TO REPEAT IT

Amnesia in America | James Loewen
University of Vermont professor; author of several books, including Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America “The ideology of progress lets historians sequester repugnant people and events, from racists to robber barons, in the distant past, so we don't have to worry about them now.”

Columbus and Western Civilization | Howard Zinn
Boston University professor emeritus; author of several books, including the classic A People’s History of the United States “In Columbus’ journal, an entry of September 1498 reads: ‘From here one might send, in the name of the Holy Trinity, as many slaves as could be sold...’” “The argument about children ‘not being ready to hear the truth’ does not account for the fact that in American society, when the children grow up, they still are not told the truth.”

Go Out and Kill People Because This Article Told You To | Nick Mamatas
freelance writer/columnist; editor of Soft Skull Press; coauthor of Kwangju Diary “It seems that nearly everyone, from pornographers and bomb-throwers, to holy rollers and goose-steppers, are just sure that the secret cabal of wealthy landowners who founded this country would be so eager to read their tracts and pamphlets.”

Saving Private Power | Michael Zezima
freelance writer; author of Saving Private Power “American lives weren’t sacrificed in a holy war to avenge Pearl Harbor nor to end the Nazi Holocaust, just as the Civil War wasn’t fought to end slavery. WWII was about territory, power, control, money, and imperialism. Sure, the Allies won and ultimately, that’s a very good thing-but it doesn’t mean they did it fair and square.”

What I Didn’t Know about the Communist Conspiracy | Jim Martin
editor and publisher of Flatland magazine; proprietor of Flatland Books; author of Wilhelm Reich and the Cold War “These messages revealed an extensive Soviet espionage apparatus operating in Washington, New York, and San Francisco throughout the war years. The FBI, working in cooperation with cryptoanalysts at the National Security Agency, had identified many US government officials at a wide range of federal agencies.”

TRIPPING

Drug War Mythology | Paul Armentano
Senior Policy Analyst for the NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) Foundation in Washington, DC “In 1998, police arrested 682,885 Americans for marijuana offenses, more than the total number of arrestees for all violent crimes combined, including murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault.”

Toad-Licking Blues | Thomas Lyttle
freelance writer; publisher and editor of Psychedelic Monographs and Essays; editor of several books “It is important to note that bufotenine-a minor constituent of all Bufo toad venoms-is not hallucinogenic.”

Poppycock | Jim Hogshire
freelance writer; author of several books, including Sell Yourself to Science and Opium for the Masses “Prosecutions for crimes involving opium or opium poppies are rare. But that has less to do with the frequency of poppy crimes and everything to do with suppressing information about the opium poppy.”

AA Lies | Charles Bufe
freelance writer; publisher of See Sharp Press; author of numerous books, including Alcoholics Anonymous: Cult or Cure? “There are probably more myths and misconceptions about Alcoholics Anonymous, America’s most sacrosanct institution, than there are about any other mass organization in our country.... AA is not only far from the only way to deal with an alcohol problem, but the best available scientific evidence indicates that it is ineffective.”

The Unconscious Roots of the Drug War | Dan Russell
proprietor of Kalyx.com, Shamanshop.net, and Drugwar.com; author of two books, including Drug War: Covert Money, Power & Policy “The Drug War can’t be separated from the cultural compulsion of our conquistador history.”

HOLY ROLLING

The Truth about Jesus | M.M. Mangasarian (1859-1943)
prolific freethought writer and lecturer; author of six books “We have in the story of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus, an ancient and nearly universal Sun-myth, instead of verifiable historical events.”

The Bible Code | David Thomas
physicist; president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason; Skeptical Inquirer consulting editor “The promoters of hidden-message claims say, ‘How could such amazing coincidences be the product of random chance?’ I think the real question should be, ‘How could such coincidences not be the inevitable product of a huge sequence of trials on a large, essentially random database?’”

Mystics and Messiahs | interview with Philip Jenkins
“One criterion that people try to use to differentiate cults from churches is that cults have no roots in a given society, that they are new outbreaks of alien ideas. By those standards, there are no cults. The example I use is that America had Rosicrucians and alchemists before it had Methodists, so the occult is nothing new-we have groups organized by the 1690s.”

Who’s Who in Hell | interview with Warren Allen Smith
freethought activist and writer; author of Who’s Who in Hell: A Handbook and International Directory for Humanists, Freethinkers, Naturalists, Rationalists, and Non-Theists “Playwright Arthur Miller, for example, when asked what kind of humanist he is, replied that it depends on the day.... Thomas Mann granted me the right to label him whatever I wished. ‘Humanism is the most precious result of rational meditation upon our existence and that of the world,’ wrote Albert Schweitzer, avoiding my question. Robert Frost simply told me his mother was a Swedenborgian.”

BLINDED BY SCIENCE

Environmentalism for the Twenty-First Century | Patrick Moore
founding member of Greenpeace; former Director of Greenpeace International; founder of Greenspirit “Let me give you some specific examples that highlight the [environmental] movement's tendency to abandon science and logic and to get the priorities completely mixed up through the use of sensationalism, misinformation and downright lies.”

Humans Have Already Been Cloned | Russ Kick
“It’s now routine to see news stories about various mammals being cloned. Almost always, these reports mention that this ‘brings us one step closer to cloning humans,’ ‘human clones are right around the corner,’ and other clichés. What every last one of these insightful stories fails to mention is this: Humans have already been cloned.”

NutraFear & NutraLoathing in Augusta, Georgia | Alex Constantine
freelance writer; author of several books, including Virtual Government and The Covert War Against Rock “The FDA has received more complaints of aspartame poisoning than all other food additives combined, about 75 percent.”

Forbidden Archaeology | Michael Cremo
lecturer; author of Forbidden Archeology “Over the past 150 years archaeologists have found abundant evidence showing that human beings like ourselves have existed for hundreds of millions of years. This evidence, practically unknown to both scientists and members of the public, radically contradicts the picture of human origins that is presented to us by Darwin’s modern followers, who say that we evolved fairly recently-within the past 100,000 years or so-from some more apelike ancestors.”

There Is So Much That We Don’t Know | William R. Corliss
freelance writer; science consultant; publisher of Sourcebooks; author of over 55 books “My view is that anomaly research, while not science per se, has the potential to destabilize paradigms and accelerate scientific change. Anomalies reveal nature as it really is: complex, chaotic, possibly even unplumbable.”

THE BIG PICTURE

Will the Real Human Being Please Stand Up? | Riane Eisler
president of Center for Partnership Studies; author of several books, including the classic The Chalice and the Blade “This kind of approach to the study of human evolution makes it possible for people to refocus from selfishness and violence as the main themes in our evolution to caring and creativity as equally, and in some ways more important, themes. It also makes it possible for us to see that these qualities are part of the nature of both women and men.”

You Are Being Lied To: A Disinformation Books Roundtable | Alex Burns
editor of the Disinformation Website; freelance writer Over 30 social activists, media analysts, cutting-edge scientists and philosophers, avant-garde artists, counterculture icons, and conspiracy theorists give a short answer to the question “Are we being lied to, why, and by whom?” Participants include Charles Tart, Stewart Brand, Clifford Pickover, Jodi Dean, John Shirley, and Jeffrey Mishlove.

I Have Met God and He Lives in Brooklyn | Richard Metzger
cofounder of Disinformation; producer and host of Disinfo Nation television series “[Howard] Bloom wants us to understand hatred, racism, and genocide, to understand our evolutionary development-ourselves, who we are down to the microbial level-so we can outwit the script that an apparently insane programmer, God himself, wrote into our genetic code.”

Church of the Motherfucker | Mark Pesce
creator of VRML (virtual reality for the Web); author of four books, including the classic Browsing and Building Cyberspace “You are your own High Priest. This is the greatest of all the mysteries, the greatest of heresies, that which must not be True if the Center-their center-is to hold.”

A Sentient Universe | Peter Russell
author of several books, including The Brain Book and The Global Brain Awakens; producer of videos; lecturer; consultant “Whether we are considering a human brain with its tens of billions of cells, or a nematode worm with a hundred or so neurons, the problem is the same: How can any purely material process ever give rise to consciousness?”

A Lost Theory? | David Loye
former Princeton professor; author of numerous books; cofounder of the General Evolution Research Group “I discovered there were actually two halves to Darwin’s theory. There is the first half, or foundation, of a biological base for his theory, with which we are somewhat familiar. But then Darwin went on to complete his theory with the superstructure of a psychological, systems scientific, humanistic, and morally-grounded ‘higher’ half-of which today we know almost nothing.”

Appendix A: More Lies, Myths, and Manipulations | Russ Kick
Short takes on over two dozen more subjects rife with distortion: electroshock, fertility, guns, population, Prozac, sanctions against Iraq, TWA 800, the global economy, world hunger, and more.

Appendix B: More Reading | Russ Kick
Short reviews of and quotes from two dozen books exposing misinformation about race, maps, George W. Bush, male-on-male rape, cousin marriage, animal sexuality, the younger generation, Pearl Harbor, marijuana, the Catholic Church, alternative medicine, psi phenomena, and more.

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