More “Activists Said” Journalism on Syria, This Time at Raw Story

by Scott Creighton

With a complicit and shameless media on their side, globalists don’t even need to go through the hassle of staging fake death scenes like that of Neda in Iran or actually kill Maryknoll nuns like they did in El Salvador. Destabilizing nations is easier now than it has ever been thanks to “activists said” journalism.

These days, NGO pro-democracy “activists” from globalist free-market think-tanks can pretty much make up any ridiculous story they want, with absolutely no corroborating evidence, they can change the stories, add to them, make them worse than they were at first, and the reporters will report it as fact with no hesitation, no supporting investigation, and no questions asked. Even your “progressive” dissident sites like Raw Story will post up these completely unsubstantiated stories as “news” … which is why Raw Story is no longer linked to on the blogroll of this site.

The following is from a Reuters news agency report reposted on Raw Story.

“activists said… Activists said…a witness who gave his name as Omar… Activists and residents said… said one activist who declined to be named… Rights groups say… Activists say… The activist who declined to be named said… whom activists say…” Reuters

The sensationalist headline states that 34 Syrians were killed by government snipers at a protest and there is no evidence at all that it is true. There are no videos, no pictures, the entire thing is based on the say-so of one unnamed “activist” and obviously the “activist” has a vested interest in making the Syrian government look as bad as possible. This obvious ethical flaw in the reporting seems to be completely missed by the editors and publishers over at Reuters and Raw Story alike.

Yesterday I wrote about another story dealing with Syria, that one from MSNBC, which was based on exactly the same NGO “activist”  testimony.

The globalist think-tanks are now taking to naming their for-profit destabilization NGOs in various targeted countries “human rights groups” in order to give their reports an air of credibility. Take for example the London based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Their website has various banner ads running on the sides and bottom of the pages. Compare SOHR’s website to that of Human Rights Watch, the UN Human Rights organization, or the Universal Declaration for Human Rights Campaign, and you quickly notice a striking difference in the quality and tone of the pages. Not to mention not a single real human rights organization’s website has a single ad.

The SOHR has been outed by others as nothing more than a cynically  named destabilization campaign so the above referenced article from Reuters didn’t even mention them by name in their story, they simply them as “rights groups”

This trend towards reporting completely fabricated propaganda as fact is an extension of their successful efforts in Libya to do the same thing. Remember, they couldn’t do this during the run-up to war with Iraq. They had to go back to Saddam’s crushing of the Kurdish uprising in the north as an example of his cruelty toward his own people. In Libya, all of the reports of civilian casualties caused by Gadhafi forces have so far come from the al Qaeda linked “rebels” who have been heavily armed and supported by the globalist nations since the very beginning. Even the recent ICC accusations against Gadhafi were based entirely on “activist said” investigations, as the ICC prosecutor never set one foot inside Libya during his entire “investigation”

This is a dangerous departure from even the minimal standards of journalistic integrity that remain in this country today. If this is the new standard of proof for these “news” agencies, we are certainly fucked. Anything can now be reported by unnamed activists and then woven through the news cycle, one paper quoting another, til it becomes unquestionable fact.

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