 Something is happening outside. The skies over Baghdad have been illuminated. We're seeing bright flashes going off all over the sky. Best two hours ago, Allied Air Force began an attack on military targets in Iraq and Kuwait. This conflict started August 2nd when the dictator of Iraq invaded a small and helpless neighbor. In the year 1990, Saddam's forces invaded Kuwait. There were horror stories that started coming out of the brutality of Saddam's soldiers. But there weren't enough eyewitness reports till the young 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl called Naira turned up at a U.S. Congress panel on human rights. She told a story which was simply shocking about how Saddam's soldiers were treating newborn babies in a hospital. While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers coming to the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying. Between 35 to 53 million Americans saw that testimony on TV. And President George Bush, the senior, used that testimony several times to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And at least seven senators are believed to have voted in favor of the war because of that girl's testimony. It was an eyewitness testimony about the horrors of the war in Kuwait and the invasion of Kuwait that turned public opinion. It turned the tide of public opinion in favor of George Bush's war. There's one problem here though that Naira, whose identity was hidden at that time on the grounds that if Saddam's occupying forces got to know who she was, her family would be targeted back in Kuwait. She turned out to be, in reality, the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the U.S. Saud Nasir al-Sabha. And you can see him here in this picture with George Bush senior. But that wasn't known at that time. Everyone bought Naira's testimony including Amnesty International. It got huge play in the global media and it was only when Kuwait was liberated that the truth came out. A reporter from American Broadcasting Corporation ABC News went and asked people in that hospital. This was after Saddam's soldiers had gone back and it turned out that this was an entirely concocted story. It took another six odd months for another truth to come out. That was who Naira was. And this came out in a New York Times story written by John R. MacArthur. After the story came out, Amnesty International retracted its report which had backed Naira's story and it accused the George Bush administration of that time of opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement. The Naira story is today considered to be a classic case of media manipulation or building public opinion. But this is an extreme case. Newsrooms do not need to be manipulated in that manner through lies. They speak the voice of power entirely of their own accord. To understand this, you have to understand the power structure inside every newsroom. In every news organization, there is always a struggle, a competition to get a headline story. The Senate has confirmed a smaller percentage of Obama's judicial appointees than any other Senate and any other president. No reason to care about that. And headlines usually come from these broad topics. Government, politics, national security, defence and foreign affairs and business and economy. And reporters compete with each other to be on these bates to get the headline story because that ensures visibility and ensures that they will be able to rise up the newsroom ladder. Soon they begin to develop sources in these bates, these important powerful bates. And their sources give them the first bite at a headline story which we call a scoop. In return, the journalists have to keep their sources happy. They have to sometimes put out stories which their sources want. That is why they say one person's scoop is another person's plant. And soon, since reporters in these bates tend to spend most of their time in the corridors of power, whether it is politics, government or business, they start looking at things from the point of view, from the perspective of the elite. And it's natural that the newsroom replicates the power structure that exists outside the newsroom. And reporters from these so-called important bates like politics, government and business end up becoming top editors. And they end up prioritising stories about politics and business at the expense of stories which really matter to the people. But that's not all. On top of all this, there's the business of news, earnings before information. I'm going to be standing up there at the annual CCA management review meeting and I'm going to announce projected earnings for this network for the first time in five years. And this is where news becomes a game of entertaining people. Our purpose here is quite clear one, to entertain. Why? Manisha Pandey of News Laundry gives us a great example of the reason. TV news channels and their obsession with celebrity marriages is a threesome made in heaven. Now, before you accuse me of being against Indian sanskriti and all that, let me just explain. Our voyeuristic curiosity, as a society, what celebrities eat? How do they live? How do they party? How do they get married? All this is legit information that we all seek all the time. This curiosity is fed wrong day and night by the right news, TV news channels. And it becomes a big eye-balls market. And where the eye-balls will be, they will be at Vigyapan. That's a threesome made in heaven. This is a vicious cycle which keeps on expanding. We watch or read stories which entertain us. And newspapers and television channels make more money because we get more viewers and get more readers. And because they make more money, they feed us the same rubbish that we continue to watch. This is a cycle that goes on and on. And because of this, we open up the door for corporate-owned media to push an agenda which is pro-business, pro-elite, pro-ruling class. And we allow them to manipulate us to create the public discourse and to manufacture our consent. The only way to stop that is to stop watching news that is only meant for profit, news that is controlled by the elites. You need to support organizations which are independent, which work for you. And that is where subscribing to a channel like ours comes in. Subscribe to us, do press on the bell icon so that you get to know every time a new video shows up on our channel. Like this video, share it as well.