Thank God for the Internet. Why I do not Trust US Press as an Unbiased Factual Source Any More

The Screwing of Cynthia McKinney By Greg Palast, AlterNet :

"Months before the 2000 presidential elections, the offices of Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris ordered the removal of 90,000 citizens from the voter rolls because they were convicted felons . . . and felons can�t vote in Florida. There was one problem: 97 percent of those on the list were, in fact, innocent.

They weren�t felons, but they were guilty . . . of not being white. Over half the list contained names of non-whites. I�m not guessing: I have the list from out of the computers of Katherine Harris� office -- and the �scrubbed� voter�s race is listed with each name.

And that�s how our President was elected: by illegally removing tens of thousands of legal African American voters before the race.

But you knew that . . . at least you did if you read the British papers -- I reported this discovery for the Guardian of London. And I reported again on the nightly news. You saw that . . . if you live in Europe or Canada or South America.

In the USA, the story ran on page zero. Well, let me correct that a bit. The Washington Post did run the story on the fake felon list that selected our President -- even with a comment under my byline. I wrote the story within weeks of the election, while Al Gore was still in the race. The Post courageously ran it . . . seven months after the election.

The New York Times ran it . . . well, never, even after Katherine Harris confessed the scam to a Florida court after she and the state were successfully sued by the NAACP.

So, I can�t say the New York Times always makes up the news. Sometimes the news just doesn�t make it."

At BBC Television, we had Florida�s computer files and documents, marked �confidential� -- stone-cold evidence showing how the vote fix was deliberately crafted by Republican officials. Not a single major U.S. paper asked for the documents � not from the state of Florida nor from the BBC. Only one U.S. Congressperson asked for the evidence and made it public: Cynthia McKinney of Atlanta.

Many years ago, a friend at the university commented to me on how weak the American Press reporting was.

I did not take him seriously.

Later, in England, I meet an Indian student and commented to him that I was reading CNN on the Internet. He openned his eyes in disbelief that I would still listen to American Press. I asked, why? He said that it was controlled by particular interest, and did not tell the truth. I resisted to believe.

It was only after the fiasco of the reporting of the non existen WMD and the non-reporting of the Downing Street Memo, that I was finally forced to face the facts.

I was under the spell of "all the president men's" success story, where American journalism would risk anything for fullfilling their democratic mission of keeping the public well informed. But, regretabbly I have had to face the reality that now such is certainly not the case.

Of course once you have been burnt by trusting professionals in a field with such powers, one becomes suspicious of all media. Is any one telling the truth? I am being guilty of conspiracy theory paranoia? or is it true that voices of dissent in the USA are ably disabled through effective mass propaganda and character assessination?

The more I read, the more I become convinced that that is the case. That is why every time I found some new piece of evidence of media deception, in my Internet browsing I post it in this blog. Because I do not want to be the victim of ideological blindness. I want the truth, where ever it may lead. And so far it is leading me to conclude that the USA government and the mainstream media are not to be trusted, but to represent their own vested interest. Bill O'reilly's illusion of 'fair an balance' is not only his. It is widely held accross the spectrum of American Press Opinion, which not always deals with reporting fairly both sides of an issue, and has been instrumental in misleading the American public with ideologically loaded mis-information.

I want truth. If I cannot get it, at least I will not stop with the official mis-information. Now we have the Internet to search for the other sides of these equations.