TRUTH-TELLERS

"Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct.
Never apologize for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time.
If you're right and you know it, speak your mind.
Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth."

Mahatma Gandhi

TRUTH-TELLERS 23

INDEPENDENT VOICES COMMITTED TO THE TRUTH

Philip Agee / Jim Jatras

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

George Orwell

Anthony Arnove / Medea Benjamin / David Harvey / Tony Benn

"Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series [San Jose Mercury News] offered a unique opportunity for the major news outlets to finally give the contra-cocaine scandal the attention it deserved.
But that would have required some painful self-criticism among Washington journalists whose careers had advanced in part because they had not offended Reagan supporters who had made an art out of punishing out-of-step reporters for pursuing controversies like the contra-cocaine scandal.
Also, by the mid-1990s, a powerful right-wing news media had taken shape and was in no mood to accept the notion that many of President Reagan's beloved contras were drug traffickers. That recognition would have cast a shadow over the Reagan Legacy, which the Right was busy elevating into mythic status."

Robert Parry, 2009

Rick Sterling / Joe Lauria / Aaron Mate

"Increasingly we live with a journalism that rarely speaks truth to power and routinely echoes the platitudes of the powerful. Even when journalists raise critical questions, too often it is within the parameters set by the wealthy and their political allies."

Robert Jensen, 2009

Filip Kovacevic / Alfred de Zayas / Vijay Prashad

"The function of the "mainstream media" is to sell products and to brainwash the audience for the government and interest groups. By subscribing to it, Americans support their own brainwashing."

Paul Craig Roberts

Dahr Jamail / Pia Klemp / Dana Frank / Leon Tressell

"The decline in critical thinking as a result of the intrusiveness of marketing in our lives serves a political function: it allows those in power to reshape our way of looking at the world without the fear that we will catch on."

Elliot D. Cohen and Bruce W. Fraser

Neda Bolourchi / Ahsan Butt / Chuck Collins / Lance deHaven Smith

"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."

Voltaire

"Big media in the United States effectively represent the interests of corporate America."

Peter Phillips and Mickey Huff, 2009

"For most people, the primary source of their information is the mainstream. It is mainly television."

John Pilger, 2009

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