Sunday Times
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Media Lens: ‘Address Your Remarks To Downing Street’ –The Sunday Times Editor Deepens His Snowden Debacle
As we noted in our previous alert, the Sunday Times dramatically claimed that Russia and China had ‘cracked the top-secret cache of files stolen by the fugitive US whistleblower Edward Snowden’. The ‘exclusive story’ contained precisely no evidence for its anonymous claims, no challenges to the assertions made and no journalistic balance. Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘We Just Publish The Position Of The British Government’ – Edward Snowden, The Sunday Times And The Death Of Journalism
And so we find that major news organisations continue to act as mindless conduits for anonymous state propaganda, somehow unable to learn the blindingly obvious lessons of past deceptions. Given the scale of the Iraq and Libyan catastrophes, this is powerful testimony indeed to the sheer depth of the structural corruption of the corporate media… Continue reading
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US Media Censors Cases of US Officials Implicated in Terrorism & Nuclear Espionage By Sibel Edmonds
In January 2008 The Sunday Times published the second report of its four-part investigative series concerning the U.S. government’s direct role in international terrorism networks and organized crime involving nuclear espionage: For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets. Continue reading
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BREAKING NEWS- How the Sunday Times Investigative Series on Sibel Edmonds & US Ties to Al-Qaeda Chief was Spiked
The Sunday Times Journalists Describe How the Edmonds’ Story was Inexplicably Dropped under the Pressure of Undisclosed “Interest Groups” Associated with the U.S. State Department. Continue reading
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South Africa’s ‘sub-imperial’ seductions By Patrick Bond
Thanks are due to an odd man, the brutally frank Zambian vice-president Guy Scott who last week pronounced, “I dislike South Africa for the same reason that Latin Americans dislike the United States”. Thanks are also due to South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma for forcing a long-overdue debate, just as the World Economic Forum Africa… Continue reading
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The Anti-Empire Report #114 By William Blum: Hugo Chavez…and others
There was no one in the entire universe that those who own and run “United States, Inc.” wanted to see dead more than Hugo Chávez. He was worse than Allende. Worse than Fidel Castro. Worse than any world leader not in the American camp because he spoke out in the most forceful terms about US… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Cartoon Politics: Rupert Murdoch, The Pro-Israel Lobby And Israel’s Crimes By David Cromwell
A crucial element of pro-Israel political lobbying is the reprehensible smearing of justified criticism of the Israeli state as ‘antisemitic’. Thus, a recent cartoon by Gerald Scarfe in the Sunday Times provided a convenient target for outrage. Continue reading
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Ronnie Kasrils: Marikana – It was like poking a hornet's nest
An order was given to deploy almost 500 police armed with automatic weapons, reinforced by armoured vehicles, horsemen and helicopters; they advanced on a desolate hill where 3000 striking miners were encamped. That denoted an order from on high with a determination to carry out a dangerous and dubious operation to clear an isolated, stony… Continue reading
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Media Lens: Postcard From The Precipice – An Appeal For Support
The great claim among sections of the left is that ‘We have to cooperate with the corporate media to get our message out – how else are we going to be heard?’ For decades, often well-intentioned progressives have committed themselves to ‘changing the system from within’. Alas, as ‘insiders’, it is more often the system… Continue reading
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Dinner with the Camerons? “It’ll be awesome for your business”
“It’ll be awesome for your business”. These are the words of Peter Cruddas, the then Conservative Party treasurer, who was caught on camera by a Sunday Times investigation offering unprecedented access to David Cameron and Number 10’s Policy Unit to donors prepared to pay the party a “premiere league” sum of £250,000. Continue reading
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‘Rebels killed Western journalists in Syria, not Assad army’
According to a source working for the office of the medical examiner in Syria, a nail was found in the skull of US journalist Marie Colvin, which proves she was killed by a handmade bomb. Continue reading
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New moves by British parliament to shield the Murdochs By Robert Stephens
The Murdochs rely on the fact that the British political elite and the police are seeking at all costs to prevent a serious investigation of the hacking of thousands of phones and the bribing of police officers, and block the bringing of criminal charges against the guilty. Continue reading
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News International: A scandal rooted in union-busting
Socialist journalist Eamonn McCann explains how the assault on newspaper unions helped pave the way for the scandal engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Continue reading
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Amid the Murdoch scandal, there is the acrid smell of business as usual By John Pilger
Rupert Murdoch is a 21st century Lord Copper. The amusing gentility is missing; the absurdity of his power is the same. The Daily Beast wanted victories; it got them. The Sun wanted dead Argies; Gotcha! Of the bloodbath in Iraq, Murdoch said, ‘There is going to be collateral damage. And if you really want to… Continue reading
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Media Lens: ‘Noble’ War In Libya Part 2
Like a skilled conjuror, the media slips effortlessly, and without explanation, between the obvious need for ‘positive engagement’ and the obvious need to ‘confront tyranny’. Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: “VEILED THREATS” OF “INDUSTRIAL CHAOS”
On 19 September, the Sunday Times ran a major interview with Brendan Barber, general secretary of the Trades Union Congress (Andrew Davidson, ‘King of compromise alone on a tightrope’, Sunday Times, business section, 19 September, 2010; online article is hidden behind a pay wall). The bias was clear even from the text immediately following the… Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: BROTHERS-IN-ARMS: CAPITALISM AND CORPORATE JOURNALISM
An essential role of corporate journalism is to shore up public confidence in an unjust, crisis-riven financial and economic system. Although plenty of gloom and doom is permitted, especially in the face of obvious crisis, the legitimacy of the system is rarely questioned. Continue reading
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MEDIA LENS ALERT: GATES OF DELUSION Media Distortions And +Real+ Climate Scandals
Since November last year, the public has been bombarded with the story of stolen emails from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, revealing a supposed “scandal” of scientific malpractice, stupidly and lazily named “climategate”. Further media frenzy erupted over an erroneous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change statement that 80 per cent… Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Cockroach Test
News that philosopher Alain de Botton had been hired as Heathrow’s “writer in residence” generated minor ripples across the media pond, including occasional murmurs of disapproval. Journalists momentarily failed to repress their awareness that truth into corporate profit-maximising does not go, although without perceiving the implications for themselves. Continue reading
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William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 73
If there’s anyone out there who is not already thoroughly cynical about those on the board of directors of the planet, the latest chapter in the saga of the bombing of PanAm 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland might just be enough to push them over the edge. Continue reading