For starters, its owners are heavily indebted to a bullion bank.

* * *

Dear Friend of GATA and Gold:

If you're wondering why mainstream financial news organizations refuse to report the biggest financial news story in history -- the rigging of all major markets by Western central banks -- another reason has emerged in the last few days with the resignation of the chief political writer of the London Telegraph, Peter Oborne.

The Telegraph is a great newspaper with a wide scope, the standard bearer of the British Conservative Party, whose reporting is often cited favorably by GATA and frequently has been brave, as when a couple of years ago it exposed the scandal of expense padding by members of Parliament, including Conservative members.

But the Telegraph won't touch surreptitious intervention by Western central banks in the gold market any more than any other respectable Western financial news organization will, and departing the Telegraph, Oborne complained that the newspaper had gone soft in its reporting about a big investment bank that is a major advertiser, HSBC. Reports about Oborne's resignation are collected at the Google news archive here:

http://tinyurl.com/kxgj4fc

On Friday one of the Telegraph's two main competitors among the serious British papers, the Financial Times, suggested that its rival's softness on HSBC may involve far more than advertising:

* * *

Telegraph Owners' Yodel owed L242 Million to HSBC

* * *

Of course in addition to being an accomplice lately in various crimes involving money laundering and tax evasion, HSBC is a major bullion bank as well as custodian of the gold purportedly held by the exchange-traded fund GLD even as the bank is believed to be a big short in the gold market, thereby putting its GLD clients in what may seem like the awkward position of entrusting their gold to an entity with a huge interest in keeping the monetary metal's price down.

At least three editors of the Telegraph know all about the Western central bank gold price suppression scheme because your secretary/treasurer has corresponded with them about it for years and a couple of months ago even discussed it with one of them at great length in person in London. This editor was sympathetic, found gold price suppression entirely plausible now that most other markets are acknowledged to have been manipulated -- and volunteered that any mainstream financial journalist who put a critical question about anything to any central bank probably would be fired.

That is, the huge indebtedness of the Telegraph's owners to HSBC is probably not entirely why the newspaper can't report gold market rigging by central banks, but of course that indebtedness can't be encouraging investigative journalism either.

Seven years ago GATA figured that it might encourage news reporting about its work by placing a full-page color advertisement in the foremost financial publication in the United States, The Wall Street Journal. It was your secretary/treasurer's idea, in large part because of his career as a newspaper editor. GATA's board concurred and the ad was written, designed, and published at a cost of $264,000:

http://www.gata.org/node/wallstreetjournal

But absolutely nothing came of it. We didn't even get invited to the Journal's Christmas party that year, and now that we're broke, your secretary/treasurer wishes that it all could be undone.

Your secretary/treasurer has often provided GATA's documentation to several of the Journal's reporters and a few years ago even met with one of them at length at the newspaper's office in New York. But you'll have to spend a lot more than $264,000 to get The Wall Street Journal to pay attention to gold price suppression when every other page of its first section carries advertisements from JPMorganChase, Goldman Sachs, and other banks involved in the gold market, including -- yes -- HSBC itself.

Freedom of the press, the American journalist and essayist A.J. Liebling noted, belongs to those who own one, and in recent decades most Western news organizations have been so conglomerated and corporatized that even if they are not owned outright by the financial establishment, they are owned in outlook and spirit.

Thank God for the Internet, whose ease of access is subverting all establishments. But while the Internet provides plenty of different views, it provides little more actual journalism than already was being provided without the Internet. Ninety-nine point nine percent of all journalism in the world continues to be provided by news organizations that preceded the Internet.

So one needs to learn how to read and watch news organizations. Nearly all have their political ideologies, blind spots, and sacred cows. Those who aspire to citizenship must strive to be as inclusive as possible, to pay attention to many sources of news, crediting and discounting them as necessary to adjust for their biases. On a worldwide scale, this means striving to bring to the East the news from the West that will be blocked by the government-controlled Eastern press, and to bring to the West the news that will be blocked by the government-controlled Western press.

A breach in the blockade will come eventually, through GATA's work or someone else's. This is all just another case of the phenomenon of human psychology described long ago by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale "The Emperor's New Clothes," in which nonsense that is obvious to all continues only because it can't be acknowledged in polite company, as such acknowledgment would show that the leaders of society are as vain and foolish as everyone else.

Maybe as gold and silver mining companies increasingly fail while imaginary metal, "paper" gold and silver, becomes so much cheaper than the real thing, even a mining company executive may blurt out something, if only from frustration. But it sure won't be from courage.

CHRIS POWELL, Secretary/Treasurer
Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee Inc.

* * *

| Digg This Article
 -- Published: Sunday, 22 February 2015 | E-Mail  | Print  | Source: GoldSeek.com

comments powered by Disqus
Previous Articles by Bill Murphy