a grassroots movement to support Free Press.

The western world is forced by their elites to follow a direction that is based on hudge unequality, exploitation, suppression, foreign interference, agression and wars.

The greedy elite that can’t manage to share any of their wealth to the people and instead is always looking for obtaining more profit, and has managed to control states, secret services, mass media,  and many ngo’s and public institutions, use their dominant position to manufacture consent and suppress all dissent.

Manufacturing Consent

Following is the Chapter 1 opening text of the 30 year old book Manufacturing Consent– The Political Economy of the Mass Media, written by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988)

A Propaganda Model

The mass media serve as a system for communicating messages and symbols to the general populace. It is their function to amuse, entertain, and inform, and to inculcate individuals with the values, beliefs, and codes of behavior that will integrate them into the institutional structures of the larger society.
In a world of concentrated wealth and major conflicts of class interest, to fulfill this role requires systematic propaganda.
In countries where the levers of power are in the hands of a state bureaucracy, the monopolistic control over the media, often supplemented by official censorship, makes it clear that the media serve the ends of a dominant elite. It is much more difficult to see a propaganda system at work where the media are private and formal censorship is absent. This is especially true where the media actively compete, periodically attack and expose corporate and governmental malfeasance, and aggressively
portray themselves as spokesmen for free speech and thegeneral community interest. What is not evident (and remains undiscussed in the media) is the limited nature of such critiques, as well as the huge inequality in command of resources, and its effect both on access to a private media system and on its behavior and performance.
A propaganda model focuses on this inequality of wealth and power and its multilevel effects on mass-media interests and choices. It traces the routes by which money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their messages across to the public.
The essential ingredients of our propaganda model, or set of news “filters,” fall under the following headings:
  1.  the size, concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms,
  2. advertising as the primary income source of the mass media,
  3. the reliance of the media on information provided by government, business, and “experts” funded and approved by these primary sources and agents of power,
  4. “flak” as a means of disciplining the media, and
  5. “anticommunism” as a national religion and control mechanism.
These elements interact with and reinforce one another. The raw material of news must pass through successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print. They fix the agingpremises of discourse and interpretation, and the definition of what is newsworthy in the first place, and they explain the basis and operations of what amount to propaganda campaigns.
The elite domination of the media and marginalization of dissidents that results from the operation of these filters occurs so naturally that media news people, frequently operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news “objectively” and on the basis of professional news values.
Within the limits of the filter constraints they often are objective; the constraints are so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.

In the following 30 year, we saw a consolidation of this consent manufacturing, after which even the most incredible information is made credible.

An upcoming new media since that year 1988 is the Internet, of which  the infrastucture is owned by the elite, and on which some corporate internet service providers gained a critical central position. All of them are now owned by the same elite, and forced to play a role in this manufacturing of consent.

Journalists and writers who refused to fit in this elite owned consent manufacturing, created their own online media platforms, from simple weblogs to professional online news networks. Together they produce a huge amount of good investigative journalism, that is able to counter the false narrative of the mass media. For the distribution however, they can’t rely on the Internet and the dominant internet services.

To support them and try to bring their information to a broad audience, we developed some grassroots projects:

  • FreeG Networks: Wireless Europe (2011 – 2018since )
  • Straat-tv (street-TV, only in the Netherlands): Showing important news-items and interviews on the street, when the mainstream media refuse to even mention them. (since 2014)
  • Several street expositions (since 2015)
  • Internet TV: Advice and tools for extending the programs on your home television set with a cheap microcomputer. (since 2015)
  • Alterlook:  Creative commons search index for information that is censured or surpressed by the mainstream search services. (since 2017)
  • FreeG Networks, wifiblogs: Broadcasting  personal weblogs with (mobile) WiFi-routers. (since 2018)