the Independent
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From ‘al-Qu’eda’ to ‘Abductions’-the deceptions continue By William Bowles
17 May 2007 It’s ages since I’ve dumped on my favourite newspaper, the Independent for its ‘news’ coverage but I broke down and bought the damn thing because of what I found on the front page this week. Under the head of “An American Nightmare” (15/5/07) we read that US troops have been “kidnapped” by Continue reading
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Media Lens: Eating the Planet – Swallowing The Context Of “Earth’s Ecological Debt Crisis”
24 October 2006 — Media Lens The Bland Leading The Bland October 9 saw one of the Independent’s explosive front-page stories on the global environment: “Earth’s ecological debt crisis.” According to a new study, humanity is “putting an intolerable strain on nature”. Martin Hickman, the Independent’s consumer affairs correspondent, explained: Continue reading
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Lies by Omission By William Bowles
6 October 2006 “An increasing number of people see a dark cloud hanging over Europe. They fear that the birthplace of the Enlightenment and the cradle of free speech is being silenced by the growing assertiveness of an intolerant strain of Islam.” — The Independent Editorial, Wednesday, 4 October 2006. The London Independent’s editorial headed Continue reading
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Independence Day By William Bowles
There could be no better exemplar of the mindset of the servants of capital than yesterday’s (3/6/06) editorial in the London Independent. Titled ‘A protracted and messy conflict, with its myriad dark corners’, at first reading it would seem to be a condemnation of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, but a closer examination reveals… Continue reading
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Bush-whacked? Not by the media that’s for sure By William Bowles
Now as regular readers maybe aware I often have a go at the Independent for its crass and often just plain inaccurate reportage but in the edition of 31/1/06 it outdoes itself in deception, myopia and dissembling regarding the Bush presidency and its significance for those of us living in the real world. Continue reading
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Media Lens: Beyond The ‘Blog-O-Bots’ – Part 2
23 January 2006 — Media Lens In Part 1 of this alert we reviewed Robert Fisk’s observation that “more and more people are trying to find a different and more accurate narrative of events in the Middle East. It is a tribute to their intelligence that instead of searching for blog-o-bots or whatever, they are Continue reading
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Media Lens: The Independent – Power, Privilege, And The Projection Of Establishment Values
11 October 2005 — Media Lens A Special Kind of Independence “I am a maximalist. I want more of everything.” (Sir Anthony O’Reilly, chief executive, Independent News & Media Plc) “More than a million species could die out as a result of global warming. And it is not an asteroid that will have caused this, Continue reading
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Africa Bound By William Bowles
Dowden and co would have us believe that the fundamental problem lies with African governments, that removing corruption would, in some way, remove a fundamental obstacle to African development when nothing could be further from the truth. For the truth resides in hundreds of years of economic exploitation that has un-developed Africa to the benefit… Continue reading
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Fallujah: Unpacking the press destroying the myths By William Bowles
Western press coverage of the horror that is Fallujah has with the odd exception been nothing short of outrageous in its distortions and blatant propagandising. Even where it purports to be critical of the US in its destruction of Fallujah and its inhabitants, the sub-text continues to push the Western line of ‘foreign militants’, ‘mistakes’… Continue reading
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Depoliticising Death By William Bowles
9 August 2004 Today’s (9/8/04) Independent has the headline: “A race against time “Darfur is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Read the statistics, and then find out how to help” With of course, the obligatory photograph of an emaciated baby, followed by the also obligatory round-up of ‘statistics’ on the plight of the Sudanese. Strange Continue reading
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al-Zarqawi or al-Invention? By William Bowles
Today’s Independent (06/7/04) has a front page story titled “A video nasty: Terror chief shows off his deadly work” and is about yet another “foreign-led” group of “militants” purportedly headed by the one-legged Jordanian and ‘right-hand man’ of Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Yet the story presents not a single shred of evidence to… Continue reading
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Pundit’s Paradise By William Bowles
Once more, in Iraq, the entirely false notion is promulgated of a civil war, a civil war moreover, that is only being averted by the presence of an occupying army! Where does this nonsense come from and on what is it based? Continue reading
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Media Dumps on Aristide By William Bowles
Haiti, yet another US foreign policy disaster area, Western press coverage has been predictably less than forthcoming over the deteriorating situation. Indeed, trying to find out anything meaningful at all about the current situation has proved to be extremely difficult. Aside that is from what has become a de facto methodology of reportage of events… Continue reading
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Damn! What a Week (and it’s only Wednesday) By William Bowles
Hard to know where to begin what with Blair desperately seeking solutions. Kay, Jones, Powell and co, all spilling the beans (not, I add of the ricin kind) and jumping ship in what now looks remarkably like a total rout for the imperium. Blair protests in Parliament that Saddam’s ‘plans’ are pretty much the same… Continue reading
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Mea (Ex)culpa By William Bowles
Aish! Well I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised but in an op-ed piece in today’s Independent(03/02/04) by Mary Dejevsky headed “Let’s be honest: journalists failed as well”, we are told that: “We journalists failed to ask pertinent questions that could have at least cast doubt on the information the government supplied…. How could so congenitally… Continue reading
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How much the value of a (Palestinian) life By William Bowles
In a ten-day period, there were over 70 individual violent actions against Palestinians by Israeli Occupation Forces resulting in deaths and woundings of innocent civilians, destruction of property, confiscations and deportations. Where was the coverage in the Western Media? Continue reading
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Upping the anté & wishy-washy liberalism By William Bowles
Richard Perle’s latest book “An end to evil: What’s next in the war on terrorism?” might well be described as the handbook for the imperium’s agenda for 2004 with its call for an invasion of Syria and Iran and a Cuba-style blockade of North Korea. The question to be asked of this quasi-fascist’s quest for… Continue reading
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Reverting to Type By William Bowles
Fisk’s headline is “This dictator will continue to haunt Iraq”. But it should have read “In spite of Saddam’s capture, the occupation will continue to haunt Iraq”. By making Saddam the focus of his ‘humanity’ Fisk reveals the hypocrisy of the liberal mindset, that finds it convenient to focus on the individual rather than on… Continue reading
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Samarra: Claim and counter-claim By William Bowles
The mass media carries what I suppose can be called a ‘worldview’ through which events are filtered of which the ‘war on terror’ is a prime example. There’s not a single mass media outlet that doesn’t buy into the idea that the ‘war on terror’ is a ‘response’ to the acts of terrorists. Not a… Continue reading
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“Coercive Democratisation” By William Bowles
“Coercive Democratisation”. Wonderful description isn’t it. It’s from the mouth of a former White House advisor now fucking up students’ heads at Oxford University, as heard on the BBC’s 10pm news (19/11/03) on Radio 4. It must be a first, where invading a sovereign state and occupying it, and then going on to kill around… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 