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

edited by Russ Kick
published by Disinformation Books
400 pp * ISBN 0966410076

Table of Contents (annotated)

About Disinformation
Introduction/A Note to Readers

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Reality Is a Shared HallucinationHoward Bloom: author of The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain; founder of the International Paleopsychology Project
"Individual perception untainted by others' influence does not exist."

THE NEWS MEDIA AND OTHER MANIPULATORS

What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream
Noam Chomsky: pre-eminent linguist and political dissident commentator; author of over 35 books
"The real mass media are basically trying to divert people."

Journalists Doing Somersaults: Self-Censorship and the Rise of the Corporate Media State
Norman Solomon: media watchdog; syndicated columnist ("Media Beat"); author of over 10 books
"Today, just six corporations have a forceful grip on America's mass media."

The Puppets of Pandemonium: Sleaze and Sloth in the Media Elite
Howard Bloom
"So I am angry at the press. I am angry at its dishonesty. I am infuriated by its moral corruption. I am disgusted with its laziness and lack of intellectual independence."

The New Rules for the New Millennium
Gary Webb: Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter; author of the explosive "Dark Alliance" series and book
"The rules are being changed, and they are being changed in such a way as to ensure that our government and our major corporations won't be bothered by nettlesome investigative journalists in the new millennium."

The Covert News Network
Greg Bishop: publisher The Excluded Middle; editor of Wake Up Down There!
"As one can imagine, the history of the US intelligence community's relationship to the news media is a long and sordid one."

Why Does the Associated Press Change Its Articles?
Russ Kick: editor of You Are Being Lied To; author of Outposts and Psychotropedia; regular contributor to the Village Voice
"What I desperately want to know is: Who called the AP in the intervening hour and got them to yank those fourteen words? Who really calls the shots at the AP? Who gets the most prominent print-news organization to change its stories to protect the President, the Congress, the World Bank/IMF, and other powerful parties?"

We Distort, You Abide: Diminishing Bisociative Contexts and Expanding Media Technologies
Kenn Thomas: publisher of Steamshovel Press magazine; author of nine books
"The writer Arthur Koestler coined the phrase 'bisociation' as the process by which new insights are gained through correlations between disparate sources . . . At a time when shifting bisociative contexts should abound, the World Wide Web resembles more the outmoded newsstand, with every magazine reporting the same news from the same angle, or the uniform coverage of the three TV networks in the days before cable."

The Media and Their Atrocities
Michael Parenti: leading progressive thinker and radical historian; author of ten books, including Against Empire
"For the better part of a decade the US public has been bombarded with a media campaign to demonize the Serbian people and their elected leaders."

Making Molehills Out of Mountains: How the US Media Downplay and Distort the Conflict in Northern Ireland
Marni Sullivan: freelance writer who has appeared in Skin Art, LA Reader, LA Weekly, and numerous alternative music magazines
"Most people, especially Americans, seem to believe that a great deal of the trouble comes from religious intolerance. Much of this stereotype results from a lack of understanding of the issues, which in turn results from a lack of information."

Why They Hate Oliver Stone
Sam Smith: editor of Progressive Review; author of four books, including the upcoming Why Bother?: Getting a Life in a Locked Down Land
"No, Stone's crime was not that his movie presents a myth, but that he had the audacity and power to challenge the myths of his critics."

The Martin Luther King You Don't See On TV
Jeff Cohen: media watchdog; syndicated columnist; author of four books; founder of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
Norman Solomon
"King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever. Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV."

Sometimes Lying Means Only Telling a Small Part of the Truth
R.U. Sirius: founder and original editor of Mondo 2000; freelance writer; 2000 Presidential candidate for the Revolution Party
"Back in late June 1999, brief items appeared in papers and newsweeklies across the country telling us that anti-authoritarian counterculturalist Timothy Leary was 'an FBI informant.'"

Upon Hearing of the Electronic Bogeyman
George Smith: editor of the Crypt newsletter; author of The Virus Creation Labs
"The mainstream and very public line regarding the threat to the nation's well-being presented by hackers, electronic terrorists, and unseen cyber-warriors from "rogue states" has been quite clear-cut . . . But a shocking amount of the rhetoric is based purely on the equivalent of modern-day ghost stories, exacerbated by the mainstream media's lack of understanding of computer technology and its love for exaggerated sensationalism."

School Textbooks: Unpopular History vs. Cherished Mythology?
Earl Lee: radical librarian; freelance writer; author of two books
"One of the most pervasive and yet poorly understood influences on American society is the high school textbook. Thanks to the virtual monopoly of public education, textbook publishers have a wide-ranging power to shape the ideas of young people. In reality, however, textbooks do more to misinform and mislead than almost any other print media."