Much of Western media is a mixture of sensationalist accusations and fear mongering about ‘enemy’ states. It is difficult to find perspectives divorced from US foreign policy, American journalist Stephen Kinzer has told RT. I asked the author and journalist Stephen Kinzer how the corporate media came to be so devoid of honest content and discussed the rise of censorship by Big Tech. Kinzer is a Boston Globe columnist and formerly a correspondent for the New York Times. With over two decades of experience reporting from around the world, including areas being targeted by American imperialism, Kinzer can offer a much needed critique on the state of journalism today. He started as an independent journalist in Central America in the mid-70s, when few journalists were going there, later reporting from Central Asia, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Europe. “I’m sometimes asked why I developed a different perspective on the world than many other people who comment in the American press, ” he told RT. “I always seem to be the skunk at the foreign policy garden party. Why is that? “Upon reflection, I think it has to do with the way that I learned about the world. Many people who write about the world in the United States learned about the world the same way: they went to international relations schools, they went to work on congressional staffs, then they worked at think tanks. And they’re very steeped in this Washington-centric view of the world.” Unlike such journalists and commentators, Kinzer learned journalism by going places and writing firsthand what he saw and heard. “I learned about the world from the perspective of the people who were the victims of American foreign policy. I was in the places where people were getting bombed. I saw American foreign policy from the perspective of the rest of the world .” Having myself learned journalism the same way , I appreciated his words. And I had a followup question about the concept of journalistic qualifications, something my detractors have claimed I lack. According to Kinzer, there are many qualifications for being a journalist that are much more important than what school you went to or what you studied. “The most important one is independent thinking. The great curse of our press in the West is willingness to accept the official narrative ,” he said.

they are our God, we believe whatever they say