Tag: Washington Post

US Isn’t Leaving Syria—but Media Lost It When Possibility Was Raised By Gregory Shupak

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7 April 2018 — FAIR

Independent: US troops will remain in Syria despite Trump telling rally he ‘wanted’ to bring them home

The White House made clear that Trump’s talk of pulling out of Syria was just talk (Independent, 4/4/18)–but not before numerous media figures expressed alarm that the illegal occupation might end.

At a rally in Cleveland last week, President Donald Trump said that the US will get out of Syria “very soon.” It is now clear that the 4,000 US troops currently occupying Syria (Washington Post, 10/31/17) will in fact stay in Syria (Independent, 4/4/18), even though keeping troops in another country in defiance of that country’s government is a violation of international law. Yet the very possibility of US withdrawal from Syria rendered apoplectic journalists who are convinced of the legitimacy of Washington’s domination of the country—international law be damned.

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WaPo Defends Its Owner Against Charges That He's Very Wealthy By Jim Naureckas

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24 January 2018 — FAIR

WaPo: Bernie Sanders claims the world’s six wealthiest people have as much wealth as half the global population

The Washington Post (10/2/17) maintains that is unfair to compare the wealth of its owner with that of ordinary people.

The vaunted Washington Post fact-checking team (10/2/17) took a look at this assertion:

Bernie Sanders Claims the World’s Six Wealthiest People Have as Much Wealth as Half the Global Population

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Media: WaPo Fails to Note Raytheon, Saudi Funding of Advocate for Raytheon Arms to Saudis

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6 June 2017 — FAIR

Gerald Feierstein (image: Middle East Institute)

The Washington Post (3/8/17) quoted former Ambassador Gerald Feierstein on the wisdom of selling Raytheon weapons to Saudi Arabia–without noting that Feierstein’s Middle East Institute is funded by both Saudi Arabia and Raytheon. (image: Middle East Institute)

In a piece for the Just Security blog (6/5/17) about the impact of weapons industry contributions on a Saudi arms vote, Ryan Goodman notes that “money also pollutes other policy spaces that influence congressional votes”—including the news media:

In March of this year, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee invited former ambassador Gerald Feierstein—director of the Center for Gulf Affairs at the Middle East Institute—to speak about the situation in Yemen and about his views on the sale of US arms to the Saudis. As one might have anticipated from his interview in the Washington Post, Feierstein told the committee, “Accusations of war crimes leveled against Saudi and Coalition armed forces and threats to end arms sales to the Saudis have the potential to inflict long-lasting damage to these relationships.”

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Media: WaPo Provides Platform for Calls to Imprison WaPo Sources

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25 May 2017 — FAIR

Washington Post: No pardon for Edward Snowden

Washington Post editorial (9/16/16)

For the third time in a year, the Washington Post has promoted the prosecution of Washington Post sources.

Last September,  the Post controversially published “No Pardon for Edward Snowden” (9/16/16), an editorial calling for prosecution of the whistleblower who helped the paper win a Pulitzer Prize in 2014.

In the past weeks, two Post columnists have joined the Post editorial board in calling for Post sources to be jailed—this time in regard to the Post’s major scoop (5/16/17) about President Donald Trump leaking classified intelligence to Russian diplomats.

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WaPo’s Factcheck of WikiLeaks Highlights Paper’s Strange View of Facts

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11 January 2017 — FAIR

Washington Post: Julian Assange’s claim that there was no Russian involvement in WikiLeaks emailsThe Washington Post (1/5/17) “factchecks” Julian Assange’s claims without either proving or disproving them.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (Fox News, 1/3/17) again denied that the leaked e-mails he published during the election came from Russia—an assertion contradicted by many anonymous US intelligence officials. “We can say, we have said repeatedly over the last two months, that our source is not the Russian government, and it is not a state party,” Assange told Sean Hannity.

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Rather Than Exposing Propaganda, WaPo Shows How It’s Done

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9 December 2016 — FAIR

As the Hillary Clinton campaign slogged toward victory in the long primary campaign against Sen. Bernie Sanders, word came from WikiLeaks that it had scored a trove of hacked emails to and from the Democratic National Committee. Among other things, they proved that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, along with their organizations, had been working hand-in-glove to skew the primaries in Clinton’s favor.

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Media Lens: Fake News About ‘Fake News’ – The Media Performance Pyramid

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5 December 2016 — Media Lens 

In the wake of Brexit and Trump, ‘mainstream’ media have done the formerly unthinkable by focusing on media bias. The intensity of focus has been such that the Oxford Dictionaries have announced that ‘post-truth’ is their ‘Word of the Year 2016’.

‘Post-truth’ refers to ‘circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’. Continue reading →

Election Meddling: Bad if Done to USA, Bad to Complain About if Done by USA

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15 August 2016 — FAIR

The Washington Post (8/10/16) published what has to be one of the most naked examples of projection ever displayed by a major American paper. The Post’s editorial board, in another effort to bash Russia, lumped its President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s increasingly autocratic ruler President Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a generic “strongman” category, and warned of their paranoia:

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Sanders a Bourgeois Deviationist, Washington Post Declares By Jim Naureckas

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11 February 2016 — FAIR

Sanders a Bourgeois Deviationist, Washington Post Declares

Bernie Sanders in Reuters video accompanying Dana Milbank's columnComrades! Commissar Milbank has exposed Bernie Sanders as a false revolutionary! (image: Reuters video accompanying Dana Milbank’s column)

The day before the New Hampshire primary, the Washington Post (2/8/16) ran a column headlined:

Bernie Sanders Is No Revolutionary

—written by Dana Milbank, that noted expert on revolutionary movements.

“For a guy running against the establishment, Bernie Sanders sure seems to crave its approval,” wrote Milbank. “Sanders portrays himself as an iconoclast, an anti-politician. But he behaves in many ways like a conventional pol.”

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WaPo Tallies Police Killings–but Holds Back Some of the Numbers That Count

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29 December 2015 — FAIR

WaPo Tallies Police Killings–but Holds Back Some of the Numbers That Count

Killer cop Lisa Mearkle (photo: Dan Gleiter/AP)

The lead image of the Washington Post‘s report on 965 people killed by police in 2015 isn’t of any of the victims, but of one of the killer cops: Lisa Meakle, a Pennsylvania officer acquitted of manslaughter for killing an unarmed David Kassick. (photo: Dan Gleiter/AP)

Concerned that official records undercount the number of people shot and killed by police in the United States every year,  the Washington Post (12/26/15) attempted to compile a list of every fatal police shooting in 2015. The paper found nearly a thousand such cases—more than twice as many as the FBI reports in a typical year.

The Post‘s project—which corroborates a similar tally conducted by the British Guardian (6/9/15)—is a journalistic accomplishment, as well as an achievement of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has worked to call attention to police violence in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. Continue reading →

‘Radioactive’ Putin Is ‘Stalin’s Spawn’ By Peter Hart

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7 May 2014 — FAIR Blog

With Official Enemies, too much is not enough 

Putin, by Jem SullivanIf there were a guide for corporate media treatment of Official Enemies, the first rule might be that you can hardly ever go too far. So Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Crimean region of Ukraine meant that he was either “taking a page out of the Hitler playbook,” as Fox News host Bill O’Reilly (3/3/14) put it, or was, as Washington Post columnist George Will (3/17/14) said, “Stalin’s spawn.”

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