February 23, 2005 – The New Dark Age

23 February 2005

“Oh god mike – do you take care of these sorts of things, or do we ignore them?”
Judy Swallow, presenter of the BBC’s World Service Newshour, sent presumably to a BBC colleague concerning the letter sent by a listener to Ms Swallow about the BBC’s coverage (or lack thereof) of events in Fallujah. (Read the full MediaLens story)

“Journalists are supposed to perform a watchdog function, not a lapdog function”
Danny Schechter, editor of Mediachannel.org, and a former journalist with CNN and ABC.

“At least 12 journalists” were killed by US military in Iraq, Dominic Timms, Guardian, 18 February 2005.

Do I get a sense that the ‘enterprise’ is unravelling or is it merely wishful thinking on my part? Judging by the media’s (mis)handling of for example, the situation in Iraq as well as the ‘war on terror’, it would seem so. On many fronts, the corporate/state-run media is under concerted assault from the so-called alternative press for its complicity in covering up the crimes of the imperium as never before. So have we come ‘of age’?

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23 February 2005 — Media Lens

“Stupidity, outrage, vanity, cruelty, iniquity, bad faith, falsehood – we fail to see the whole array when it is facing in the same direction as we.” (Jean Rostand)

Nuremberg – Article Six

On February 13, The World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI), an international peoples’ initiative, declared much of the Western media guilty of deception and incitement to violence in its reporting on Iraq. The tribunal, meeting in Rome, made its pronouncement after taking testimony from independent journalists, media professors, activists, and a member of the European Parliament.

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