Media amnesia let politicians off the hook for the economic crisis.

Dr Laura Basu explains that the media allowed politicians to re-write history, erasing the true causes of the economic crisis.

US Senator Cory Booker rebuked US Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen last week for saying she could not remember President Trump’s exact words at an immigration meeting, where he reportedly described Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries”. “Your silence and your amnesia is complicity,” he told her.

Politicians regularly use amnesia to rewrite history and wash away their own past actions and words. Forgotten Brexit promises on sides of buses are all too fresh in the memory’s of many members of the British public, though not the politicians who put them there. Politicians rewriting history is nothing new, but it seems that in our age of information overload history is being rewritten at warp speed – indeed it is being rewritten while it is happening. Henry Giroux describes “the violence of organised forgetting” by an array of US institutions, a political amnesia that short circuits critical thought and helps sustain an increasingly coercive society – amnesia allowed, or facilitated by the media.

Full story at Red Pepper.