Propaganda instead of Journalism. The new reality. No need for facts anymore.

http://www.alternet.org/propaganda-has-triumphed-over-journalism-and-consequences-are-enormous?akid=12550.294211.-ur1q_&rd=1&src=newsletter1028244&t=9

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist.  We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier.  I asked him, “What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?”
He replied that if we journalists had done our job “there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”
That’s a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer.  David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.
In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.

Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.
But within a few months — apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate “bonuses” — the message changed. The mugshots of  guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called “austerity” became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?