Media
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Reporting 'Says' Rather Than 'Says It Believes' Could Make a War of Difference By Jim Naureckas
White House Says Syria Has Used Chemical Arms. Well, that’s pretty definitive, isn’t it? But then if you read the first line of the story, you get a different picture Continue reading
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Media Advisory: Syria Skepticism – Chemical claims should be investigated, not used as pretext for war
U.S. suggestions that the Syrian government could have used chemical weapons have been treated as fact by some media outlets, and are helping to fuel the case for greater U.S. military involvement. But subsequent reporting has called into question these early, credulous reports–and highlighted the continuing media failure to treat WMD claims with the skepticism… Continue reading
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Israel Bombs Syria Becomes Israel Is Only Defending Itself By Danny Schechter
An Israeli plane bombs a target in Syria. The news is passed along first to Fox News, (huh?) by someone in the Administration. It happened on a Thursday, but we find out about it late on Friday. The New York Times assigns three reporter to cover the story that goes up on the website in… Continue reading
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FAIR TV: Syria Sarin Skepticism, Tom Friedman's Sick Madness, Darkening the Tsarnaevs By Peter Hart
This week on FAIR TV: Do the claims about Syria’s chemical weapons hold up? And why do some pundits seem to want to push for a U.S. military response? Also, we’ll take a look at Tom Friedman’s column about the “sick madness” of attacking innocents, and how The Week magazine turned the Caucasian Tsarnaev brothers… Continue reading
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Apologists for Israel take top posts at BBC By Amena Saleem
The American poet T.S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month.” The phrase springs to mind in April 2013, the month that a new director-general took up his post at the BBC and, within two weeks, had installed a line-up of hardline Zionists at the top of the world’s largest publicly-funded news organization. Continue reading
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The Orwellian Paradigm: Killing You for Your Own Safety By Faisal Moghul
Almost thirty years ago, cultural critic Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death that television’s gradual replacement of the printing press has created a dumbed-down culture driven by mindless entertainment. Continue reading
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"Shadows of Liberty": New Film Explores How Corporate Control of Media Erodes Press Freedoms
Shadows of Liberty: Using individual cases of journalists whose attempts to tell their stories have been muzzled by corporations and the government, the film shows how a corporate-controlled media can silence the truth about issues ranging from war to labor practices. In one instance, CBS refused to re-air an investigation by the prize-winning journalist Roberta… Continue reading
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North Korea ‘Rattles Sabres’; Meanwhile, U.S. Pretends to Drop Nuclear Bombs on Them By Peter Hart
The dominant narrative would have you believe that the United States was basically minding its own business when North Korea began lashing out. On CBS Evening News (3/29/13), Major Garrett explained: :North Korean saber-rattling is common every spring when the United States and South Korea engage in military exercises” Continue reading
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North Korea 'Rattles Sabres'; Meanwhile, U.S. Pretends to Drop Nuclear Bombs on Them By Peter Hart
The dominant narrative would have you believe that the United States was basically minding its own business when North Korea began lashing out. On CBS Evening News (3/29/13), Major Garrett explained: :North Korean saber-rattling is common every spring when the United States and South Korea engage in military exercises” Continue reading
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BBC defends false claims linking Rachel Corrie to killings of Israeli soldiers By Amena Saleem
The extent to which the BBC is prepared to misreport on the Israeli occupation has been made clear once again. A new ruling by the BBC Trust has defended the corporation’s coverage of the Rachel Corrie case, even though it falsely implied that the unarmed activist was in some way responsible for the deaths of… Continue reading
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The BBC and Iraq Ten Years On By David McQueen
The tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq was marked in Baghdad with a wave of deadly bombings that killed at least sixty people and injured over two hundred. In Britain the anniversary brought on a wave of retrospectives and handwringing recollections by the likes of the BBC’s John Simpson. Simpson and other media pundits… Continue reading
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The Media Didn’t Fail on Iraq; Iraq Just Showed We Have a Failed Media By Jim Naureckas
The real job of the media is not to sprinkle 1 percent truth amidst 99 percent bullshit, so that diligent researchers can search it out like Easter eggs. The job of the media is to present information so that when when its audience consumes it in the usual manner, that audience can get some sense… Continue reading
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The Media Didn't Fail on Iraq; Iraq Just Showed We Have a Failed Media By Jim Naureckas
The real job of the media is not to sprinkle 1 percent truth amidst 99 percent bullshit, so that diligent researchers can search it out like Easter eggs. The job of the media is to present information so that when when its audience consumes it in the usual manner, that audience can get some sense… Continue reading
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The BBC: Impartial Reporting or Pro-Israel Bias? By Lesley Docksey
Is the BBC anti-Semitic as Israel claims or, as many others claim, does the BBC have a pro-Israel bias in its reporting? Continue reading
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How to Read Stories About Israel in the NY Times (Hint: Very Carefully) By Peter Hart
Some days the Newspaper of Record says a lot–not always in ways you might expect. Today (3/21/13) a story by Mark Landlerand Rick Gladstone about allegations of chemical weapons in Syria includes something you see often–anonymous government sources. That can often be a bad thing; but today it’s pretty useful: Continue reading
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Media Advisory: Iraq War, Ten Years Later: ‘In a Few Days We’re Gonna Own That Country’
Today marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the bombing and invasion of Iraq. The war could not have proceeded as it did without the support of a compliant, servile press corps. Continue reading
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Media Advisory: Iraq War, Ten Years Later: 'In a Few Days We're Gonna Own That Country'
Today marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the bombing and invasion of Iraq. The war could not have proceeded as it did without the support of a compliant, servile press corps. Continue reading
The New Dark Age 