journalists
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Reporters Without Borders: Report on Internet Surveillance, Focusing on 5 Governments and 5 Companies Enemies of Internet
On 12 March, World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, Reporters Without Borders is releasing a Special report on Internet surveillance, available at surveillance.rsf.org/en. It looks at the way governments are increasingly using technology that monitors online activity and intercepts electronic communication in order to arrest journalists, citizen-journalists and dissidents. Around 180 netizens worldwide are currently in prison… Continue reading
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Bradley Manning Nobel Peace Prize Nomination 2013 By Birgitta Jónsdóttir
February 1st 2013 the entire parliamentary group of The Movement in the Icelandic Parliament, the Pirates of the EU; representatives from the Swedish Pirate Party, the former Secretary of State in Tunisia for Sport & Youth nominated Private Bradley Manning for the Nobel Peace Prize. Continue reading
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Where Are They Now? The Reporters Who Got Iraq So Wrong By Peter Hart
Ten years ago today, Colin Powell made the Bush administration’s case for going to war against Iraq. Much of what he said about Iraq’s threats to the United States was false. But the media coverage gave the opposite impression, and most of the pundits and journalists who promoted the justifications for the war paid no… Continue reading
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WikiLeaks accuses Oxford Union of “censorship” By Xin Fan
WikiLeaks has accused the Oxford Union of “censor[ing]” footage of Julian Assange’s address to the debating society in January. It alleged on Twitter that the Union had replaced the backdrop of the video, which was personally selected by Assange, with a plain still of the Oxford Union logo Continue reading
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VTJP Occupied Palestine and Israel News and Articles 28 January 2013
28 January 2012 — VTJP News International Middle East Media Center Netanyahu Seeks A Broad Coalition GovernmentIMEMC – Senior officials in the Likud Party of Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, stated that Netanyahu intends to form a broad coalition cabinet that also includes the Jewish Home fundamentalist party. … Continue reading
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Who’s Faking It? Pentagon “Cyber-Warriors” Planting “False Information on Facebook” By Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich
On November 22, 2012, the Los Angeles Times published an alarming piece of news entitled “Cyber Corps program trains spies for the digital age”. The “cyber-warriors” who are headed for organizations such as the CIA, NSC, FBI, the Pentagon and so on, are trained to stalk, “rifle through trash, sneak a tracking device on cars… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Eyes Like Blank Discs – The Guardian’s Steven Poole On George Orwell’s Politics And The English Language By David Edwards
January 21, ‘Orwell Day’, marked the 63rd anniversary of George Orwell’s death, Steven Poole notes in the Guardian. To commemorate 110 years since Orwell was born (June 25), BBC radio will broadcast a series about his life while Penguin will publish a new edition of his essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’. This essay, Poole… Continue reading
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The Guardian vs. the Conventional Wisdom on Venezuela By Alex Main
Just as it appeared that the current conventional wisdom on Venezuela had spread and hardened irreversibly throughout the major media, on Monday the UK daily The Guardian published an editorial entitled “Venezuela, defying predictions – again.” The piece deftly takes on a few commonly held views found in much of the media coverage of Venezuela. Continue reading
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The CIA’s Hollywood Release: “Zero Dark Thirty”, or How People Lose Their Humanity By Annie Day
So how did they feel about liking a film that upholds something they would otherwise find deplorable? Several people said it’s just a movie and shouldn’t be taken so seriously. One woman said she appreciated coming to understand, from the CIA’s perspective, why they used torture. And far too often, the answer was, “It’s complicated.” Continue reading
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Prosecutors to Present “Evidence” that Al Qaeda including Osama bin Laden “Benefited” from Bradley Manning Leaking By Naomi Spencer
On Wednesday afternoon, government prosecutors said they planned to present evidence that Al Qaeda members, including Osama bin Laden, directly benefited from the publication of materials Manning is charged with leaking. Continue reading
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South Africa: The road from 1996 to Mangaung By Terry Bell
The tortuous road to the governing ANC’s centennial conference at Mangaung ends next week. And, not to put too fine a point on it, much of the country is gatvol with the route it has taken and where it has arrived. Continue reading
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UK Reporting on Venezuela Continues to be Clouded by Partiality
As Hugo Chávez receives further cancer treatment in Cuba, this time seemingly with much higher stakes than before, the UK media has again shown where its interests lie when it comes to reporting on left-wing Latin American governments. The attack has come in many forms, from portraying once again the country as militaristic, to demonising… Continue reading
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Truth, Propaganda and Media Manipulation
Never before has it been so important to have independent, honest voices and sources of information. We are – as a society – inundated and overwhelmed with a flood of information from a wide array of sources, but these sources of information, by and large, serve the powerful interests and individuals that own them. The… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘The Special One’ – Celebrity, Comedy And Spiritual Egotism – Part 1 By David Edwards
After I published my first book, I encountered quite a few celebrity writers, journalists and activists. I discovered that some of the planet’s most difficult and arrogant people have devoted their lives to ‘making the world a better place’. They claim to be driven by compassion, but their harshness and hatred of criticism (as though… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Cogitation: ‘The Special One’ – Celebrity, Comedy And Spiritual Egotism By: David Edwards
Twitter and Facebook have been cunningly designed to exploit our need to feel ‘special’. To be ‘retweeted’, ‘favourited’ and ‘followed’ on Twitter subtly suckles our ego, generating quiet, short-lived satisfaction. Other users who have 100,000 or 1,000,000, or – God help us! – 20,000,000 ‘followers’, seriously challenge the idea that we are ‘the one’. Negative… Continue reading
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Leveson and Leviathan, or What the Papers Won’t Say By Dan Hind
At the moment the press are taking full advantage of their privileged position to talk a lot of nonsense about the menace that statutory regulation would pose to a free press. The unnamed authors of a Telegraph editorial tell their readers that “the growing clamour for press regulation backed by statute threatens a priceless British… Continue reading
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Leveson and Leviathan, or What the Papers Won’t Say By Dan Hind
At the moment the press are taking full advantage of their privileged position to talk a lot of nonsense about the menace that statutory regulation would pose to a free press. The unnamed authors of a Telegraph editorial tell their readers that “the growing clamour for press regulation backed by statute threatens a priceless British… Continue reading
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The Long and the Short of Press Regulation By Dan Hind
Free expression is important. Its importance is often couched in terms of the common good. A society in which people can speak freely is one in which injustice can be remedied, corruption punished and so on. But it is also a good for the individual. Free speech is best means by which we can discover… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 