Truest statement of the week

The establishment media has provided the vehicle by which this campaign has been waged. Outlets such as the Guardian, the New York Times, cable news channels, the ABC and tabloid media, have faithfully paired Julian Assange’s name and face with selected negative terms, concepts and emotions, over and over and over again, priming automatic unconscious negative emotional responses to Julian Assange.
This has served to foster emotional receptivity to demonising, misleading, counter-factual narratives on Julian Assange, along with narratives that rationalise and minimise his persecution, all of which have been woven from distortion, omission and outright fabrication. The scale of the censorship by omission, including media blackouts on critical pieces of information that undermine official narratives, has been staggering.

In the context of collective violence and atrocity, media that smear targets in this way function as instigators. Their role is to incite passive by-standing by creating what psychologists call an “atrocity generating situation.” In atrocity-generating situations, brutality is normalised and victims are demonised, dehumanised and debased, causing the public to morally and emotionally disengage from their abuse.

-- Lissa Johnson, "Clinical psychologist Lissa Johnson: They are trying to break Assange 'physically and psychologically'" (WSWS).