You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths - Softcover

Kick, Russ

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0966410076 ISBN 13: 9780966410075

Publisher: Disinformation Books, 2001

Synopsis

You Are Being Lied To is a massive collection of articles that ruthlessly destroy the distortions, myths, and outright lies that are fed to us by the government, the media, corporations, history books, organized religion, science and medicine, and society in general. No one is spared, and all sacred cows are candidates for the grinder.

Do you believe any of the following?

• Alcoholics Anonymous is effective.
• Hackers pose a grave threat to the nation.
• There's a hidden code in the Bible.
• The Big Bang is an airtight fact.
• Thousands of species have gone extinct because of deforestation.
• Licking certain toads will get you high.
• Most terrorists are Middle Eastern.

Wake up! You're being lied to.

This book acts as a battering ram against the distortions, myths, and outright lies that have been shoved down our throats by the government, the media, corporations, organized religion, the scientific establishment, and others who want to keep the truth from us. An unprecedented group of researchers--investigative reporters, political dissidents, academics, media watchdogs, scientist-philosophers, social critics, and rogue scholars--paints a picture of a world where crucial stories are ignored or actively suppressed and the official version of events has more holes in it than Swiss cheese. A world where real dangers are downplayed and nonexistent dangers are trumpeted. In short, a world where you are being lied to.

Among the revelations inside:

• Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Sydney Schanberg on John McCain's efforts to conceal information on POW/MIAs
• Howard Bloom on liars in the media
• Riane Eisler on the realities of human nature
• James Ridgeway on tainted blood and more
• Jim Marrs on missing evidence in important cases
• Greenpeace cofounder Peter Moore on environmental myths
• Michael Parenti on atrocities in Kosovo
• Douglas Rushkoff on the information arms race
• Gary Webb on the gutless corporate media
• Howard Zinn on Columbus

About this title

From the Publisher:

This is the first in a planned series of Disinformation Guides. We chose Russ Kick as the editor of Disinformation Books because he is without doubt the best qualified candidate for the job. Once you see this book, we're sure you will agree with us that we made the right choice. The book contains 68 essays by 60 authors, is 400 pages long and measures 9"x12" - and its absolutely jammed with revelation after substantiated revelation.

Russ has assembled a literally unprecedented line-up of investigative reporters, activists, academics, parapolitical researchers, media watchdogs, scientist-philosophers, social critics, and rogue scholars. Many are very well-known: Howard Bloom, Noam Chomsky, Riane Eisler, Jim Marrs, Michael Parenti, James Ridgeway, Douglas Rushkoff, Gary Webb, Howard Zinn, and Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Sydney Schanberg.

Other contributors are very well-known within their fields, which include parapolitics, media criticism, drugs, radical science, sociology, environmentalism, sex radicalism, and hidden history.

In case you are not aware of the Disinformation brand, this is the "About Disinformation" text that appears at the front of the book:

Disinformation is more than it seems. Literally. From early beginnings almost a decade ago as an idea for an alternative Sixty Minutes-type TV news show to the book that you are now holding, Richard Metzger and Gary Baddeley have taken a dictionary term and given it secondary meaning to a wide audience of hipsters, thinkers, anti-establishmentarians and the merely curious.

The Disinformation Web site went live on September 13, 1996 to immediate applause from the very same news media that it was criticizing as being under the influence of both government and big business. The honeymoon was short – some three weeks after launch the CEO of the large US media company funding the site discovered it and immediately ordered it closed down. Needless to say, Metzger and a few loyal members of his team managed to keep the site going and today it is the largest and most popular alternative news and underground culture destination on the Web, having won just about every award that’s ever been dreamed up.

Disinformation is also a TV series, initially broadcast on the UK’s Channel 4, a music imprint in the US in a joint venture with Sony Music’s Loud Records, and a huge counterculture conference, the first of which was held shortly after the turn of the Millennium in 2000. By the time this book rests in your hands Disinformation will probably have manifested itself in other media too. Based in New York City, The Disinformation Company Ltd. is a vibrant media company that Baddeley and Metzger continue to helm. They continue to look for the strangest, freakiest and most disturbing news and phenomena in order to balance the homogenized, sanitized and policed fare that is found in the traditional media.

We hope you will enjoy the book and please post your feedback here on amazon.

From the Author:

The 20th Century was an era of great achievement. It was also an era of genocide. It was an era of media expansion. And it was an era in which the media lied. We moved from newspapers with circulations of a million in 1900 to the rollout of 600 radio stations in 1922, of television in the 1950s, and of the Internet and the World Wide Web when the century ended. But we inched no further toward the truth. Mass murders in the Soviet Union took an estimated 40 million lives in the 20th Century. Mass killings in Mao's China took another 40 million. Between 1963 and 1999 over a million died in the ongoing battles between Central Africa's Hutus and Tutsis. Between 1975 and 1979, 1.5 million lost their lives in the killing fields of Cambodia. Yet none of these crimes against humanity made headlines until it was far too late. Similar savageries are taking place today, but once again we are all too blind. Sometimes the reason has been media ignorance or indifference. Sometimes it's been press enthusiasm for the "ideals" of the killers, or, worse, sheer cowardice. In the 1930s, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times of London, was less disturbed by the atrocities unfolding in Germany than he was by the idea of offending the Nazis. He wrote to a friend, 'I simply cannot understand why they should be so much annoyed with The Times at this moment. I spend my nights in taking out anything which I think will hurt their susceptibilities, and in dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them.' William Randolph Hearst was no better. He ordered his German correspondent to stop sending stories he called 'incendiary.' If the media won't tell us what's truly important, then it's up to us to ferret out the facts for ourselves. You Are Being Lied To is a good place to start.

—(Howard Bloom, author of the book's Keynote Address and author of "The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition Into the Forces of History")

About this edition

• Publisher: Disinformation Books
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0966410076
• ISBN 13: 9780966410075
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 350