Coming Soon: The Mother Of All 9/11 Truth Hit Pieces

http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2007/020807hitpiece.htm

History Channel, Popular Mechanics, NBC & Hearst Publishing team up for smear job as conflicts of interest run rife

Steve Watson & Paul Joseph Watson Prison Planet, August 2, 2007

An upcoming documentary entitled The 9/11 Conspiracies, to be aired on the History Channel, may represent the biggest hit piece to date on the 9/11 truth movement and is rife with bias, cronyism and conflicts of interest.

The so-called documentary promises not to look at the flaws in the official story from a neutral perspective but to start out by suggesting that any deviation from the official line is "outrageous".

The program also features so called independent "experts" who are actually in the employ of the program makers themselves who in turn rely on scores of multi-million dollar contracts with the government and the military-industrial complex.

The program, scheduled for Sunday, August 12 at 8:00 PM and Monday, August 13 at 12:00 AM, will feature Alex Jones, the Loose Change crew and other 9/11 researchers such as Professor Steven Jones and Webster Tarpley.

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One may therefore be forgiven for thinking the piece could allow for a fair representation of the 9/11 truth movement. However, a short blurb on the History Channel's website sets a rather familiar one sided tone (click for screenshot).

An Internet search for "9/11 conspiracy theories" yields nearly two million hits. Were the attacks on 9/11 perpetrated by the Bush Administration to advance its own interests? Could a government missile have hit the Pentagon? As outrageous as these ideas may sound, many people believe them. Why do these theories arise in the first place? An interview with James Meigs, Editor-in-Chief of Popular Mechanics, who refutes many of these theories. Watch as experts in the fields of aeronautics, engineering and the military put these theories to the test.

This suggests that we should be prepared for more pseudo psychology as "experts" condescendingly explain why people turn to "conspiracy theories" for comfortable simple explanations of complicated world events. Maybe the History Channel will even seek the expert analysis of the former director of the X-files just as the BBC did in their own 9/11 hit piece which was broadcast earlier this year and received a great deal of criticism for its reliance on emotional bias and avoidance of the core issues.

In the same vein as the BBC piece, the new documentary will once again feature James Meigs, Editor-in-Chief of Popular Mechanics, who is neither an expert on 9/11 research nor on engineering, but rather is an expert on yellow journalism and shilling for the Bush Administration.

Meigs has an illustrious pedigree that puts him right up there with the professors and scholars that have studied 9/11 and the architects who designed the WTC - we just can't decide which title to give prominence, his position on the editorial staff of that bastion of scientific empiricism Entertainment Weekly or the equally respected Video Review.

Meigs has flatly refused to debate 9/11 questions with either Alex Jones or the Loose Change producers and will now only appear unopposed.

Popular Mechanics is owned by Hearst Publishing. As fictionalized in Orson Welles' acclaimed film Citizen Kane, William Randolph Hearst (pictured below) wrote the book on cronyism and yellow journalism and Popular Mechanics hasn't bucked that tradition.

Enter the term "yellow journalism" in the Encyclopedia Britannica and one of the first entries you will see is William Randolph Hearst. The listing attributes to Hearst a legacy of "distorted" and "lurid" reporting, and cites him as being hugely influential in fanning the flames of the Spanish-American war as a result of his newspaper's sensationalist yellow journalism.

Popular Mechanics is owned by the very corporation that defined yellow journalism!

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Popular Mechanics is not politically independent nor is it non-partisan. Indeed, the foreword to Popular Mechanics' Debunking 9/11 Myths book was written by Republican Senator and presidential candidate John McCain.

In the foreword, McCain re-hashes an abhorrent amount of Neo-Con detritus that relies solely on 9/11 having happened exactly as the government claims it did. "We liberated Afghanistan from the murderous rule of the Taliban, our attackers' proud hosts. We chased Al Qaeda around the globe," barks the Arizona Senator.

Does this sound politically neutral to you?

In addition, Popular Mechanics' Debunking 9/11 farce has been thoroughly debunked itself and shown to be nothing more than a strawman assault based around nepotism, shoddy research and agenda-driven politics.

Hardly a good starting point for any serious or balanced investigation into 9/11 questions.

Further investigation into the makers of the new documentary also throws up a whole host of conflicts of interest.

Loose Change's Jason Bermas an Korey Rowe during taping for the upcoming History Channel hit piece.

Firstly, The History Channel is part of the A&E Television Network which is jointly owned by The Walt Disney Company (37.5%), The Hearst Corporation (37.5%), and NBC Universal (25%).

Immediately then it becomes apparent that the owners of Popular Mechanics are also the joint owners of the History Channel. Once again it is not a good starting point for a neutral investigation when the people you choose to represent one side of a factual debate are actually on the payroll.

No doubt there will be a great deal of advertising of Popular Mechanics' 9/11 debunking book within the so-called documentary in order to fatten up Hearst's profits.

Furthermore, the other joint owner of The History Channel, NBC Universal, is run by General Electric, the world's second largest corporation and one of the major players within the military industrial complex.

GE is a major supplier of arms and the “war on terrorism” has seen GE’s government and military contracts rise substantially to over $2.2 billion.

In short GE really has very little to gain and a great deal to lose from probing into questions concerning the possibility of 9/11 being a military intelligence operation to seed the "war on terror" and to justify a huge increase in military activity around the globe.

We spoke to the producer Brad Davis about the upcoming show and he refused to comment on the conflicts of interest, but did tell us in a previous conversation that the show would not be a hit piece, so we will reserve full judgement until the documentary is aired and then it will become immediately apparant if Mr. Davis was telling the truth or not.

On average the History channel has up to 10 million viewers prime time in the US alone and their programs repeat ad infinitum for years. Infowars and Prisonplanet.com will be all over this program as soon as it airs exposing and countering each and every lie and piece of misinformation it contains, just as we have done with every other hit piece so far.

In the meantime, it would be fairer if the History Channel add a proviso, as do CNN when they carry a story about their parent company Time Warner, that their upcoming show is nothing more than an infomercial for the Popular Mechanics book Debunking 9/11 Myths and that any attempt to portray it as a neutral investigation would permanently taint the reputation of the channel as nothing more than a propaganda arm of the Bush administration in the same league as Fox News and Popular Mechanics.

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