Global Research

The Council on Foreign Relations vs. Global Research

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Julie Lévesque

Global Research, June 02, 2014

While Global Research operates on a shoe string budget compared to the well-endowed establishment think tanks, it has more readers than the powerful Council on Foreign Relations (CFR at cfr.org). (see graph below).

In late January, however, on the day of Obama’s State of the Union address, the number of CFR readers shot up and then tumbled down again.

One would expect that with ample financial resources and a panoply of “authoritative” authors and analysts, the CFR website would have a broad and diversified readership.

Source: Alexa. Global Research is ranked among the 11,000 most popular websites Worldwide
Why are people not reading the CFR? Why are they reading GR?
The CFR is a mouthpiece for US foreign policy. It’s in close liaison with Wall Street and the US State Department.
The CFR’s authors go out of their way to “give a human face” to America’s wars and covert military operations in different parts of the World.

Countries which do not abide by Washington’s diktats are the object of a carefully orchestrated smear campaign. They are singled out as “rogue states”.
Political leaders who oppose Washington’s demands are casually tagged as “dictators” or “war criminals”, not withstanding the fact the US has since the end of World War II committed countless atrocities in the name of “Western democracy”. More recently, extensive war crimes have been committed against the people of Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and the former Yugoslavia.
The CFR will justify the deployment of US special forces in the Middle East and Africa as a means to going after and “taking out” Al Qaeda.
In contrast, GR will reveal, based on carefully documented research that the “Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT) is a Big Lie and that Al Qaeda is not an “outside enemy” which threatens the American Homeland.

Al Qaeda is a CIA intelligence asset going back to the Soviet-Afghan war, which has recently been used to commit terrorist acts with a view to destabilizing countries which are on the Pentagon’s hit list. In this regard, Global Research articles have documented in detail how covert US support and financing has been channeled to Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists in Libya and Syria.

The Crisis in Ukraine
A Coup d’etat supported by Washington has recently taken place in Ukraine leading to the demise of a democratically elected president.
The CFR praises the new regime, without addressing the fact that the protest movement integrated by gunmen and Neo-Nazi Brown Shirts militia was covertly supported by the US, NATO and the EU. The role of the Neo-Nazi parties including Svoboda and Right Sector in Ukraine’s self-proclaimed coalition government is not mentioned.
The CFR’s objective is to build a legitimacy for the Pentagon’s “long war”, namely to present war as a humanitarian undertaking.
The Project for a New American Century (PNAC), a NeoCon Washington-based think tank, with close links to the CFR, calls upon the US to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars” in different regions of the world as well as perform the so-called military “constabulary” duties “associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions”.
Global constabulary implies a worldwide process of military policing and interventionism, including covert operations and “regime change”, all of which are carried out in accordance with a “humanitarian mandate”.
Military actions are implemented simultaneously in different regions of the world (as outlined in the PNAC) as well as sequentially.

GR reveals the “Big lie” behind US foreign policy. In an era of media disinformation, our focus has essentially been to center on the “unspoken truth”. The underlying concept is the “democratization” of research and media reporting, while maintaining high standards of investigation and analysis.
Global Research –with several hundred committed authors and a large readership in North America and overseas– is involved in the critical analysis of civil rights and the US Surveillance State, the social impacts of the global economic crisis, war crimes and the devastating impacts of US militarization, the destructive nature of biotechnology and genetically modified seeds, the dangers of nuclear radiation, the environmental impacts of shale gas fracking, etc.
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GR confronts mainstream media propaganda with carefully documented reports. Truth and honesty in reporting are powerful weapons. GR is committed to 9/11 Truth. Our ultimate objective is to reverse the tide of war and social injustice and create conditions for the development of “real democracy.”
In course of the last month, Global Research had on average more than 140,000 unique readers a day. In the last few days it was up to 190,000. According to Alexa, Global Research is ranked among the 11,000 most popular website Worldwide (all categories) and 4500 in the USA
While the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) describes itself as “an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher” its ultimate goal is to further America’s imperial agenda. This objective is achieved through its links to major financial institutions, asset management companies, private military contractors and leading multinationals, among others. A quick glance at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) home page is enough to see the obvious, subtle propaganda against whatever stands in the way of U.S. foreign policy.

Spreading imperial ideas and setting the foreign policy agenda is undertaken by the CFR by insuring the control of information through its close relations with virtually every single major media outlet in the U.S.
Unlike the independent journalists and researchers at Global Research, the CFR has “high-level discussions with world leaders, U.S. government officials, CEOs”. That’s understandable, since access to the high spheres of finance and politics is not granted to honest independent journalists, but only to those who avoid challenging the prevailing structures of power and who accept to spread lies and half truths on their behalf.
Given its close relation to the powers that be, embodied by the CFR, the mainstream media cannot be viewed as “neutral”. It is nothing but the voice of the corporate and political elites. Carne Ross, a former British official once explained how the media was manipulated:

“We would control access to the foreign secretary as a form of reward to journalists. If they were critical, we would not give them the goodies of trips around the world. We would feed them factoids of sanitised intelligence, or we’d freeze them out.” (Cited in David Cromwell, Bias Towards Power *Is* Corporate Media ‘Objectivity’: Journalism, Floods And Climate Silence, Meida Lens, February 18, 2014)

In a nutshell, to have a successful career in the mainstream media, criticizing power is not an option. And people are starting to see through the smoke screens and mirrors of the mainstream media’s “objectivity”.
However, even though the CFR has access to money and power, its website does not attract a broad readership.
Occasionally, “once in a blue moon” the CFR web site gets more hits than Global Research. And when that happens, it coincides with the President’s State of the Union Address. (See graph above)
Why is that?

The CFR speaks to the elites. Global Research speaks to you. That’s the difference.
But they have the money. We don’t. We operate out of a small office in Montreal. All our authors as well as the senior GR editors are volunteers, committed to peace, social justice and democracy.
The CFR has Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, the Carlyle Group, JPMorgan, Lockheed Martin, et al.
We rely on our readers,
Our target is to increase our readership from an average of 140,000 a day to 200,000 in the course of the next three months. We seek your support in this endeavor. We are facing mounting costs.
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Articles by: Prof Michel Chossudovsky and Julie Lévesque

About the author:

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal and Editor of the globalresearch.ca website. He is the author of The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003) and America’s “War on Terrorism”(2005). His most recent book is entitled Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011). He is also a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. He can be reached at crgeditor@yahoo.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Michel Chossudovsky est directeur du Centre de recherche sur la mondialisation et professeur émérite de sciences économiques à l’Université d’Ottawa. Il est l’auteur de "Guerre et mondialisation, La vérité derrière le 11 septembre", "La Mondialisation de la pauvreté et nouvel ordre mondial" (best-seller international publié en plus de 10 langues). Contact : crgeditor@yahoo.com