Glenn Greenwald properly ridicules secretary of state Anthony Blinken for sermonizing last Thursday on "World Press Freedom Day," using Radio Free Europe as his megaphone.  But his critique could be extended considerably.

Continuing his world tour doling out righteous lectures to the world, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday proclaimed — in a sermon you have to hear to believe — that few things are more sacred in a democracy than "independent journalism." Speaking to Radio Free Europe, Blinken paid homage to "World Press Freedom Day"; claimed that "the United States stands strongly with independent journalism"; explained that "the foundation of any democratic system" entails "holding leaders accountable" and "informing citizens"; and warned that "countries that deny freedom of the press are countries that don't have a lot of confidence in themselves or in their systems."

The rhetorical cherry on top of that cake came when he posed this question: "What is to be afraid of in informing the people and holding leaders accountable?" The Secretary of State then issued this vow: "Everywhere journalism and freedom of the press is challenged, we will stand with journalists and with that freedom." Since I know that I would be extremely skeptical if someone told me that those words had just come out Blinken's mouth, I present you here with the unedited one-minute-fifty-two-second video clip of him saying exactly this:

 

That the Biden administration is such a stalwart believer in the sanctity of independent journalism and is devoted to defending it wherever it is threatened would come as a great surprise to many, many people. Among them would be Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks and the person responsible for breaking more major stories about the actions of top U.S. officials than virtually all U.S. journalists employed in the corporate press combined.

Greenwald's focus is on Assange, but there is a lot more to worry about.  Democrats (and Liz Cheney) lately are fond of the expression "THE BIG LIE," frequently capitalizing it for emphasis.  The object is to invoke Nazi comparisons to questioning the integrity of the 2020 presidential election, even though Democrats endlessly questioned 2016's result and even fabricated evidence of "Russian collusion" to delegitimize Trump's presidency.

But there are "big lies" that continually plague our politics, and one of them is that we have a free press.  We don't, in point of fact.  We have a media structure that operates as an arm of the Democrats.  That includes the corporate media, 90% of which support Democrats, and social media companies — from which a substantial share of Americans get their news.

Both social media and corporate media push narratives favorable to Democrats and suppress information that might harm them.

The social media's suppression of the New York Post's story on Hunter Biden's laptop got Joe Biden elected.  Polls indicate he wouldn't have been elected if more people had known about Hunter's arrangements with China and Ukraine giving "The Big Guy" a rakeoff on the big money flowing into Hunter's pockets.

Our media have willingly surrendered the role of a free press in order to take sides with the progressives that want to radically restructure society with themselves in power, unconstrained by competitive elections.  It is a central fact of our current political era.

Photo credit: YouTube screen grab, cropped.

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