I like Ground News

One of the things Julian Assange said (OMG Oran don’t mention that man Assange!), back when the Wikileaks controversy was at it zenith, was his devastating critique of the pervasive control mechanisms that were operating in the media, that we were being fed a narrative that was highly questionable, and that we believed it, that it was causing and justifying wars, like the WMD in Iraq controversy back in the early 2000’s, and the abuse of prisoners, of torture (those horrendous photos). We believed the news because we trusted the media to tell us the truth or at least the closest human approximation to the truth that didn’t put soldiers and operatives lives in danger. No one wanted that. But, in a way, this isn’t about that. One of the four horsemen of the end of a functioning democracy and economy is censorship. Trumps war on the media is having a massive effect Stateside, for instance. Its part of the totalitarian playbook to crush the media and reduce them to peddling the party line, whatever that is. Big tech and vast corps are colluding with him for fear of lawsuits and being decimated by his state department. Though Assange made mistakes, very big ones (Snowden wouldn’t touch him for instance), he was absolutely on the money on this one, pun intended. That being said he accepted one ridiculous plea of espionage, which probably was the only way he could get back to Aussie Land and have some kind of a life. John Kiriakou, who exposed the torture program, did real hard time for exposing something (torture which he emphasized as a CIA guy, doesn’t work) that was illegal in a dozen different ways. Justice, how are ya. We live in a very weird world indeed. Anyway, in the years following the WikiLeaks debacle(s) we saw big tech effectively buy and/or control the media, acquiring major newspapers, not to mention corporations merging, powerful independent newsfeeds being subsumed into the data streams and vast networks of data harvesters whereby you do not get the news, but a version of the news. So your version of the news would be different to mine, and each of us are having our biases confirmed, the story being sandwiched inside a slick two minute video that gives all the appearance of factuality, or a quick read that slants towards how one already sees the world. Ground News, a useful app, gives all sides of the argument and shows one how often each story is appearing on the left or right or centre. Its important. I like it.