Tag: Sunday Times

Media Lens: ‘Address Your Remarks To Downing Street’ –The Sunday Times Editor Deepens His Snowden Debacle

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24 June 2015 — Media Lens

‘Address Your Remarks To Downing Street’ –The Sunday Times Editor Deepens His Snowden Debacle

George Orwell once wrote:

‘I really don’t know which is more stinking, the Sunday Times or The Observer. I go from one to the other like an invalid turning from side to side in bed and getting no comfort which ever way he turns.’ (George Orwell, quoted, Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, p. 233, Penguin Books, 1992)

The competition remains fierce, but the Sunday Times edged marginally ahead with a recent front-page exclusive that stank to truly celestial heights. 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. In a CNN interview the same day, lead reporter Tom Harper trashed his own credibility, and that of his paper, when he blurted:

‘We just publish what we believe to be the position of the British government.’

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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

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17 June 2015 — Media Lens

In the wake of the greatest crime of the twenty-first century, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, you might have thought that the days of passing off unattributed government and intelligence pronouncements as ‘journalism’ would be over. Apparently not. On June 14, the Sunday Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published what has already become a classic of the genre (behind a paywall; full text here).

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US Media Censors Cases of US Officials Implicated in Terrorism & Nuclear Espionage By Sibel Edmonds

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20 May 2013 — www.boilingfrogspost.com

Mother of All Rules Governing US Media: Censor & Cover-Up US Government Criminality 

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.

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South Africa’s ‘sub-imperial’ seductions By Patrick Bond

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9 May 2013 — Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

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 summit opens in Cape Town: is Pretoria a destructive sub-imperialist power? Continue reading →

The Anti-Empire Report #114 By William Blum: Hugo Chavez…and others

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11 March, 2013 — Anti-Empire Report

Hugo Chávez

I once wrote about Chilean president Salvador Allende:

Washington knows no heresy in the Third World but genuine independence. In the case of Salvador Allende independence came clothed in an especially provocative costume – a Marxist constitutionally elected who continued to honor the constitution. This would not do. It shook the very foundation stones upon which the anti-communist tower is built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that “communists” can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population. There could be only one thing worse than a Marxist in power – an elected Marxist in power.

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Media Lens: Cartoon Politics: Rupert Murdoch, The Pro-Israel Lobby And Israel’s Crimes By David Cromwell

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31 January 2013 — Media Lens

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.

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Ronnie Kasrils: Marikana – It was like poking a hornet's nest

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26 August, 2012 — Sunday Times (South Africa) — Those in power say, don’t point fingers. But we need exactly that if we’re to learn from this, writes Ronnie Kasrils.

Our country reels with horror and shock at last week‘s Marikana shootings. There is disbelief around the world that this has happened in a democratic South Africa.

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Media Lens: Postcard From The Precipice – An Appeal For Support

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29 March, 2012 — Media Lens

Erich Fromm understood that ‘selective inattention’ was at the heart of the problem. He devoted his life to exposing man’s capacity for ‘not observing what he does not want to observe; hence, that he may be sincere in denying a knowledge which he would have, if he wanted only to have it’. (Fromm, Beyond The Chains Of Illusion, Abacus, 1989, p.94)

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New moves by British parliament to shield the Murdochs By Robert Stephens

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30 July 2011 — WSWS

On Friday, members of Parliament’s Commons Culture Select Committee voted against recalling News Corporation Chairman James Murdoch to give more evidence on phone hacking and police corruption. Labour MP Tom Watson had called on Murdoch, the son of international media mogul Rupert Murdoch, and two ex-News of the World executives, former editor Colin Myler and the newspaper’s ex-legal manager Tom Crone, to appear.

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News International: A scandal rooted in union-busting

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28 July, 2011 — Belfast Telegraph

Socialist journalist Eamonn McCann explains how the assault on newspaper unions helped pave the way for the scandal engulfing Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

Strikers and their supporters march against Murdoch's union-busting

Strikers and their supporters march against Murdoch's union-busting

NINETEEN-YEAR-OLD Michael Delaney died after being run over by a truck in east London on a Saturday night in January 1987. An inquest jury found that he had been a victim of unlawful killing. But nobody has ever been prosecuted.

Michael had been among trade unionists picketing the News International plant at Wapping against the sacking of more than 5,000 workers and the de-recognition of unions. The dispute lasted almost a year.

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Amid the Murdoch scandal, there is the acrid smell of business as usual By John Pilger

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21 July 2011 — John Pilger

In Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s brilliant satire on the press, there is the moment when Lord Copper, owner of the Daily Beast, meets his new special war correspondent, William Boot, in truth an authority on wild flowers and birdsong. A confused Boot is brought to his lordship’s presence by Mr. Salter, The Beast’s foreign editor.

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Media Lens: ‘Noble’ War In Libya Part 2

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March 28, 2011 — Media Lens

Part 2 Part One here.

As a Sunday Times leader made clear on March 20, sometimes you just have to draw a line:

‘[T]here can be no accommodation with a man like Gadaffi or any of his family who aspire to succeed him.’ (Leading article, ‘Allies need a rapid victory to outwit Gadaffi,’ Sunday Times, March 20, 2011)

Seven years earlier, Alan Massie wrote in the same newspaper:

‘The sight of Tony Blair shaking hands with Colonel Gadaffi last week will have disgusted many… One may sympathise with these sentiments but, pushing emotion aside, Blair has shown courage. It would be lovely if international politics could be conducted so you were always dealing with decent people. It might be nice if governments were able consistently to pursue the “ethical foreign policy” of which Robin Cook used to speak so enthusiastically but the world isn’t like that.’ (Massie, ‘Keeping Gadaffi close is the safest option,’ Sunday Times, March 28, 2004)

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MEDIA LENS ALERT: “VEILED THREATS” OF “INDUSTRIAL CHAOS”

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28 September, 2010 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

THE SUNDAY TIMES INTERVIEWS TUC LEADER BRENDAN BARBER

In a despairing article in the Guardian last week, George Monbiot described the true extent of the failure to respond to the threat of climate change. Beyond all the bluster and rhetoric, Monbiot wrote, “there is not a single effective instrument for containing man-made global warming anywhere on earth.” It is, quite simply, “the greatest political failure the world has ever seen”.

Monbiot explained:

“Greens are a puny force by comparison to industrial lobby groups, the cowardice of governments and the natural human tendency to deny what we don’t want to see.” (George Monbiot, ‘Climate change enlightenment was fun while it lasted. But now it’s dead’, Comment is Free, 20 September, 2010; www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/20/climate-change-negotiations-failure)

The lobby groups are indeed powerful. But the notion of government “cowardice” is a classic liberal herring – the problem has always been the government +alliance+ with corporate power, not its “cowardice”.

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MEDIA LENS ALERT: BROTHERS-IN-ARMS: CAPITALISM AND CORPORATE JOURNALISM

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16 June, 2010 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

CRUSHING ECONOMICS, CHEERLEADING MEDIA AND A LOFTY DISMISSAL FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES

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.

For example, a recent Sunday Times article cited approvingly the views of Jim O’Neill, chief economist at Goldman Sachs. In a note to clients, titled ‘Why the World is Better Than You Think’, O’Neill tried to allay fears that the collapse of financial markets had made the world seem a “scary place”. It is not so bad; indeed, “global recovery” was underway.

The Sunday Times piece then quoted a hedge fund manager proclaiming “massively good profits in the US”, and beaming that “emerging markets [in Brazil, India and elsewhere] are still booming.” The article conceded “it could be a very nervous summer”. But for whom? The journalists certainly weren’t focusing on the pressing concerns of the general population – jobs, pensions, student loans. Instead, the principal “worry” was financial uncertainty “spooking the markets”. But despite the modicum of caution, the article’s message boiled down to “positive fundamentals for the global economy.” (David Smith, Kate Walsh and Michael Woodhead, ‘Merkel’s stab in the dark’, Sunday Times, May 23, 2010; business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article7133865.ece)

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MEDIA LENS ALERT: GATES OF DELUSION Media Distortions And +Real+ Climate Scandals

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22 February, 2010 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

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 of Himalayan glacier area would very likely be gone by 2035. Other climate-related storms in a teacup have been appearing in the corporate media almost on a daily basis. This nonsense is distracting attention from a mountain of evidence that human-induced climate change is accelerating and poses a deadly threat to civilisation.

James Hansen, the leading NASA climate scientist who first warned the US Congress of the dangers of global warming in 1988, gave us his view of media performance on “climategate”:

“The media have done a great disservice to the public. This mess should be cleared up in the next year or so, although the damage may linger a while, because some people who paid attention to sensationalism may not bother with accurate explanations of the truth.

“The impression left from this affair is that there are some parts of the media that care less about responsible reporting than about selling newspapers or other ware. Some of the problem may be honest ignorance, as the quality of science reporting has declined in recent decades. And of course some media are controlled by people who have a political axe to grind.” (Hansen, email to Media Lens, February 18, 2010)

Misleading the Debate on Climate

The excellent Realclimate website at www.realclimate.org, run by authoritative climate scientists, has been diligently issuing rebuttals of the relentless barrage of disinformation churned out by the Daily Mail, the Sunday Times, the Daily Telegraph and, yes, even the Guardian, the self-proclaimed flagship newspaper of the environment. (See Realclimate, ‘Whatevergate,’ February 16, 2010; www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/whatevergate/)

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Media Lens: The Cockroach Test

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22 September, 2009 — MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media

Alain de Botton, “Branded Conversations”, and Runaway Climate Change

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.

Thus Dan Milmo, writer in residence at the Guardian, noted that de Botton was “the latest artistic figure to tread the precarious line between creative independence and commerce after signing a publishing deal with the financial support of Heathrow’s owner, BAA.” (Milmo, ‘High minded: Heathrow hires De Botton: Philosophical author begins work as airport’s writer-in-residence,’ The Guardian, August 19, 2009)

Milmo recalled how novelist Fay Weldon had been found to be responsible for “one of the most notorious sell-outs of recent times” when it emerged that her latest novel had been sponsored by the Italian jewellery firm Bulgari. Weldon explained last month:

“I was accused of defiling the novel. The deal was that I must mention Bulgari 12 times in a novel I wrote for them as a giveaway. My agent was terribly good and knocked them down to nine and a half mentions. In the end I mentioned them 46 times.” (www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/30/fay-weldon)

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William Blum: Anti-Empire Report, Number 73

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2 September, 2009 — Anti-Empire Report, Number 73

‘And on the most exalted throne in the world sits nothing but a man’s arse.’ — Montaigne

William BlumIf 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.

Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, the only person ever convicted for the December 21, 1988 bombing, was released from his Scottish imprisonment August 21 supposedly because of his terminal cancer and sent home to Libya, where he received a hero’s welcome. President Obama said that the jubilant welcome Megrahi received was ‘highly objectionable’. His White House spokesman Robert Gibbs added that the welcoming scenes in Libya were ‘outrageous and disgusting’. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he was ‘angry and repulsed’, while his foreign secretary, David Miliband, termed the celebratory images ‘deeply upsetting.’ Miliband warned: ‘How the Libyan government handles itself in the next few days will be very significant in the way the world views Libya’s reentry into the civilized community of nations.'[1]

Ah yes, ‘the civilized community of nations’, that place we so often hear about but so seldom get to actually see. American officials, British officials, and Scottish officials know that Megrahi is innocent. They know that Iran financed the PFLP-GC, a Palestinian group, to carry out the bombing with the cooperation of Syria, in retaliation for the American naval ship, the Vincennes, shooting down an Iranian passenger plane in July of the same year, which took the lives of more people than did the 103 bombing. And it should be pointed out that the Vincennes captain, plus the officer in command of air warfare, and the crew were all awarded medals or ribbons afterward.[2] No one in the US government or media found this objectionable or outrageous, or disgusting or repulsive. The United States has always insisted that the shooting down of the Iranian plane was an ‘accident’. Why then give awards to those responsible?

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