Media
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Questions for BBC on new White Helmets podcast series attacking OPCW whistleblowers
A new BBC podcast, “Mayday,” uses smears, gaping omissions, leaps of logic, and factual errors in a desperate attempt to repair the image of late White Helmets founder James Le Mesurier, and discredit the OPCW inspectors who challenged a cover-up of their Syria chemical weapons probe. Mayday’s producer has failed to answer the following questions. Continue reading
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Greenwald Splits With Intercept Over Visions of Editing
Less than a week before voters across the US headed to the polls in the 2020 presidential election, famed journalist Glenn Greenwald made a stunning announcement: He was leaving the Intercept, the outlet he helped found in 2013, and striking off on his own at the newsletter website Substack. Continue reading
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Israel’s growing strategic threat to our freedom of speech
There is an old saying that you should not put the fox in charge of the hen house. It makes perfect sense, and yet that’s exactly what Western governments are increasingly starting to do when it comes to their freedom of speech policies. All bluster about “cancel culture” aside, the leading threat in the world… Continue reading
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How Western Media (and others) are Still Failing Ethiopia
Evelyn Waugh would have a field day with what’s happening in Ethiopia right now. The talented author of Brideshead Revisited and Scoop was a racist little creep sent out by a rightwing, pro-Fascist newspaper in 1935 to cover Mussolini’s invasion. Just to give you an idea of the man, he wrote home to a friend, “I have got to… Continue reading
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Meet the Censored: Andre Damon
Increased content moderation has been sold as a tool to control the far right, but the World Socialist Web Site was among the first to sound the alarm Continue reading
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FBI and DOJ prepared takedown of ‘Iranian’ American Herald Tribune website with years of legal chicanery
The new powers claimed by the FBI to seize “Iranian” outlets could have serious implications for the basic American freedom to publish and access news and opinion. Continue reading
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Farcical Coverage of Julian Assange’s Farcical Hearing
US corporate media have buried coverage of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s extradition hearing in the UK, despite its being the media “Trial of the Century” (FAIR.org, 9/25/20). Continue reading
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How We’re Misled About Syria: UK Propaganda and the BBC
Previous posts about misleading Syria coverage – from MSF, Amnesty International, Channel 4 and George Monbiot of the Guardian – used the past tense in their title. However, this one is current. At the time of writing, the BBC is about to start airing a new radio series centring on the life and work of… Continue reading
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UK plays leading role in legal threats against investigative journalists, new report says
Across the world, journalists investigating financial crime are most likely to face international legal action by UK-based companies, according to new research. Continue reading
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The Knives Come Out as Greenwald Splits From the Intercept Citing Censorship
Funded by a billionaire oligarch and increasingly seen as a mouthpiece for the neoliberal establishment, The Intercept suffered its biggest blow yet with the very public departure of Greenwald. Continue reading
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From a Wealthy Socialite to an Israeli Govt Censor, Facebook’s New “Free Speech Court” Is Anything but Independent
Freedom of speech on the Internet is all but extinct, and on the eve of the 2020 US elections, a de facto “free speech court” is going to make sure it never comes back. On Facebook at least. Continue reading
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Obama-Era Officials Call for More Government Control of Your Facebook Feed
Facebook content is already partially curated by government-linked think tanks, but for Samantha Power and others, that is simply not enough. Continue reading
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After Socialist Victory in Bolivia, Media Still Whitewash Coup
Bolivia’s Movement Towards Socialism (MAS) party won a decisive victory in the country’s presidential elections on Sunday, with its candidate Luis Arce apparently winning by a large enough margin to avoid a runoff, likely achieving an absolute majority. The leading opposing candidate, neoliberal Carlos Mesa, and the right-wing unelected President Jeanine Áñez congratulated Arce on… Continue reading
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People Need to Reclaim the Internet
No matter how much you dislike Trump, only a fool can fail to see the implications for public access to information of the massive suppression on the internet of the Hunter Biden leaks. Continue reading
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5G – Bias and conflict of interest at the BBC
Since the start of the Covid-19 crisis, in addition to a host of reports on the subject in its news and current affairs programmes, the BBC has run a few stand-alone radio and TV documentaries on what it refers to as “5G conspiracy theories”. Continue reading
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Lord Advocate Launches War on Twitter
In what we think is a world first, the Lord Advocate of Scotland is claiming in the contempt of court case against me that I am legally responsible for the content of replies to my tweets. Continue reading
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Criticising Monbiot isn’t ‘demonisation’. It’s a first step on the path to reclaiming our minds
The other day I wrote a piece criticising Guardian columnist George Monbiot for his failure to speak out loudly in support of Julian Assange during last month’s hearings in which the United States has been seeking to extradite the Wikileaks founder so that he can be locked away for the rest of his life on… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 