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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of December, 2005.
Viewing Media NEWS articles 1 through 50 of 50.
- The U.S. has looked at the media it can't control as the "enemy." - A report issued by the inspector general of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) reveals that its former chairman, Kenneth Tomlinson, violated federal laws in his efforts to refashion public radio and television as propaganda organs for the Republican right and the Bush administration. The report suggests that the entire CPB board was to one degree or another complicit in Tomlinson’s actions. - Fake and heavily spun news has emanated from the corporate media since (and before) the CIA launched Operation Mockingbird in the late 40s. ABC, NBC, CBS, Time, Newsweek, Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps-Howard, Copley News Service, etc., ad nauseam, have worked hand-in-glove with spooks and government overlords for decades...
- ...if a President who claims to be using the US military to liberate countries in order to spread freedom then conspires to destroy media that fail to echo his sentiments, he does not merely disgrace his office and soil the reputation of his country. He attacks a fundamental principle, freedom of the press--particularly a dissenting and disagreeable press--upon which that country was founded. - Despite C-SPAN’s stated goals, Extra!’s study found Washington Journal skewing rightward, favoring Republican and right-of-center interview subjects by considerable margins over Democratic and left-of-center guests. The study also found that women, people of color and public interest viewpoints were substantially underrepresented.
- The most prominent editorial voices of corporate America, from the ultra-right Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, the leading voice of upper-class liberalism, despite disputes over tactics and methods, agree that there is no alternative to using whatever level of violence is required for the United States to remain in control of the oil-rich Mideast country.
- Advertising claims serve the same function as body blows in boxing, which soften up the fighter before the uppercut to the head puts him out. Television lies train people so that in the end, they will accept almost any kind of propaganda from our incompetent and ill-intentioned government. - Interesting how it is a crime to reveal a war crime (or potential war crime), deemed a "damaging disclosure," and Keogh and O’Connor may actually go to prison while Bush and Blair will be free to become "elder statesmen" advising others on how best to kill innocent civilians and journalists.
- The Bush administration will pay both at home and in Iraq for buying puff pieces in the media.
- Suddenly certain media pundits have "discovered" that our government is fabricating news, and planting it in the Iraqi press? Hey, I've got news for you guys, since the end of the Vietnam War the corporate media have been disseminating "all the news the state views as fit to print."
- Military autopsy reports provide indisputable proof that detainees are being tortured to death while in US military custody. Yet the corporate media of the United States (US) is covering it with the seriousness of a garage sale for the local Baptist Church, media research organisation Project Censored has said.
- The coup d’etat is almost complete. Corporate America, the FOX like media, and the fundamentalist owned GOP have seduced religious-minded America. What better way to excite gullible Christians, amass more offerings, and generate corporate earnings than a fabricated war on Christmas? At the next FOX board meeting after Christmas, O’Reilly, Gibson, and Hannity can join CEO Rupert Murdoch and their GOP legislative lackeys in singing, "What a friend we have in Jesus"! - Today, inside the corporate media frame, history can be supremely relevant when it focuses on Hussein's torture and genocide. But the historic assistance of the U.S. government and American firms is largely off the subject and beside the point. - America On Line, Microsoft, Yahoo and others are slowly turning the Internet into an information superhighway dominated by barricades, toll booths, off-ramps that lead to dead ends, choke points, and security checks.
- By 1953 Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies, including the New York Times, Time, CBS, Time. Wisner's operations were funded by siphoning of funds intended for the Marshall Plan. Some of this money was used to bribe journalists and publishers." - by Ralph Nader - There are times when unchallenged commercial greed morphs into institutional insanity. I am referring to the overall advertising-saturated, trivialized performance of the media conglomerates' utilization of our public airwaves 24 hours a day and their dominance of the ever-expanding scores of cable channels. - ...Al-waleed bin Talal owns an influential and significant number of voting shares in the company and claims that he forced Fox News to eliminate on-air references to the Muslim role in the recent riots in France. He claimed to have accomplished this by speaking to News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch.
- Iraq has proven to be a particularly hazardous posting for journalists. More media workers have been killed there than during the two-decades-long war in Vietnam. And 15 have died at the hands of American forces.
- "Propaganda ruins not only democratic ideas, but also democratic behavior—the foundation of democracy, the very quality without which it cannot exist. The question is not to reject propaganda in the name of public opinion—which, as we well know, is never virginal—or in the name of freedom of individual opinion, which is formed of everything and nothing—but to reject it in the name of a very profound reality: the possibility of choice and differentiation, which is the fundamental characteristic of the individual in the democratic society." - If the Bush administration had its way, the whole criminal siege of Fallujah, with its depraved indifference to human life, would have gone unnoticed. The corporate media’s Pentagon-spun propaganda stories about liberation would have gone unchallenged by any unseemly intrusions of reality. Toward that end, the Pentagon declared Fallujah a no-reporting zone, barring all un-embedded journalists from the city. In short, the Pentagon hoped to control all images coming out of the massacre. And they would have pulled it off, had it not been for one independent freelance journalist from Alaska, Dahr Jamail, and an Al Jazeera TV crew. - Does Wal-Mart’s money buy more than ads? - The "liberal" Washington Post was among the first to report that Bush has finally put a number on Iraqi dead since the U.S.-led 2003 invasion. - With all the recent complaints about Internet censorship and e-mail blocking, one has to wonder -- what does "managing the world's unclassified knowledge" entail?
- The United States has tied with Myanmar, the former Burma, for sixth place among countries that are holding the most journalists behind bars, according to a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists. - A $300 million Pentagon psychological warfare operation includes plans for placing pro-American messages in foreign media outlets without disclosing the U.S. government as the source, one of the military officials in charge of the program says.
- Cuddly software giant Microsoft will use its new Windows Live geolocation finder as a Big Brother location device for the police. - Already over 20 million PCs worldwide are equipped with a tiny security chip called the Trusted Platform Module, although it is as yet rarely activated. But once merchants and other online services begin to use it, the TPM will do something never before seen on the Internet: provide virtually fool-proof verification that you are who you say you are.
- On the second page of a report which reveals the White House engaged in warrantless domestic spying, the New York Times reveals that it held the story for a full year at the request of the Bush Administration... - The expulsion by U.S. military officials of two embedded journalists in Kuwait, reportedly for photographing a shot-up military vehicle, has prompted outrage from Military Reporters and Editors (MRE), which is calling for a change in embed rules that apparently led to the action. - Copley columnist Doug Bandow resigned as senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute on Thursday after admitting that he had accepted payments from indicted Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff for writing articles favorable to his clients. - Normalizing Evil
- In Latin America, less than one-third of the TV programming originates in the region. Seventy percent of the programming is imported, and within that volume, 62 percent comes from the United States. - ...tallying up guests from think tanks who've appeared on NPR shows. The score to date: Right 239, Left 141.
- ...it is a story of how today's major media behave with near total deference to power and its own profit motive. What we are watching, even in the seemingly small details of the coverage, is no less than the media's complicity in helping estsablish a quasi-legal framework for what was a clearly illegal abuse of government power. It is in the clearest sense the media being used as tools of state power in overriding the very laws that are supposed to confine state power. - Two air marshals gunned down an American citizen last week in Miami, and the press swallowed the government's now-flawed explanation of a "bomb threat" hook, line, and sinker.
- The main issue surrounding the release of the NBC story, finding Bush directly ordered the NSA and DOD to use its data base to spy on citizens is not the substance of the story but its timing.
- Yesterday I received an email from the journalist Mike Whitney informing me that if he does not remove a statement he made about Blackwater and the so-called Abu Ghraib scandal the mercenary corporation will sue him for defamation. - In reality, the primary reason they have been selected is because of their immense personal fortunes. From the viewpoint of the editorial offices of the mass media in America, wealth and power dazzle and impress, and should be duly acknowledged. It matters not that these Persons of the Year travel in an orbit thoroughly disconnected from the lives of the overwhelming majority of the world’s population. - A few Sundays ago, the 27th of November, at the corner of Quinquela Martín and Hornos, the transmission of Barracas Community TV was broadcast on Channel 5. They watched coverage of the anti-Bush march done by the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo video group, shorts made by children at various schools of the barrio, independent documentaries and interviews with Barracas organizations.
- While New York City’s striking transit workers were winning broad sympathy and support from millions of working people this week, the mass media swung into action with a predictably unanimous campaign of hysterical slanders against the strikers.
- Follow these simple steps. - Factoring in telecommunications industry mergers, it is not difficult to determine what companies are involved in domestic surveillance today
- ...the fourteenth annual P.U.-litzer Prizes, for the foulest media performances of 2005 - ...it can be assumed CNN—long infested with PSYOPS operatives and the corporate media long ago penetrated by the CIA under Operation Mockingbird—is running yet another propaganda campaign designed to stigmatize Muslims as the Straussian neocons...
- We are pleased to announce broadcast journalist, former newspaper bureau chief, former presidential speechwriter, and best-selling author Chris Matthews has earned the title of 2005's "Misinformer of the Year." - The 10th annual list of the year's most overhyped and underreported stories. - ...news seems to be coming our way faster and with a greater fury than ever before. A tsunami of "Breaking News" bulletins courses through the veins and ganglia of what passes for an information system. A corporate news system pumps it on more platforms dedicated to "more news in less time" on the web, on TV, on the radio, and now on the phone. It's hard to escape the deluge.
- A request by the Corporate Media - Not since Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese (left), made a crusade against pornography a top priority has there been such a broad-scale attempt to destroy First Amendment protections for sexual expression and sexual privacy as the one currently being mounted by the Bush administration and congressional Republicans.
- ...all the information we receive through the corporate conduits—from "revelations" about the neocon rape and torture apparatus to "leaks" about Bush’s effort to snoop all suspicious Americans—is information engineered for our consumption. Our government, hijacked years ago by vicious Machiavellian Straussists (a Zionist take on the neolib paradigm), wants us to know about the rape and torture camps, the death squads, and now they want us to fear—or those of us who are activists or write blogs—the roving eye of Big Brother, neocon-style.
Pages for December, 2005
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