The Beautiful Death of CNN

The Dollar Vigilante

By Jeff Berwick

I grew up behind the iron curtain in the 1970s in communist northern Canada with a black and white TV that you actually had to get up to change the channel on the knob. The knob had theoretically 13 channels but only 4 of them actually had anything on them.

One was the government propaganda channel, CBC, the other was CTV and then there was some sort of local channel and there was also something on channel 13, if memory serves, but it mostly looked like a snowstorm through the rabbit ears.

If you are under 20 years old you have absolutely no idea of what I am talking about above. If you are over 40 you probably remember it well. Remember when they used to turn off all the TV stations at night and usually “signed off” by playing more government propaganda with the national anthem?

At some point during the late 1980s, however, all of a sudden there were dozens of channels, all in relatively good quality and I remember the first time I noticed CNN.

It was during the first “Gulf War” in 1990. I had just become an adult, according to the government age restrictions, and had begun to become a bit more aware of what was going on in the world. The USSA had just begun its terrorist attacks in Iraq (amazing how time flies isn’t it… 25 years later and they are still there bombing and terrorizing that entire region) and CNN was the thing to watch.

It had 24 hours per day coverage of this heinous war crime and I admit I was glued to my TV. Something about their coverage struck me as rather staged… like it was a movie. But since it was all new to me I watched it for days on end as they reported every terrorist attack by the US government and the “coalition”.

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