AlterNet: Bloggers Strike Back

AlterNet: Bloggers Strike Back

Bloggers Strike Back

By Glenn Greenwald, AlterNet
Posted on May 11, 2006, Printed on May 11, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/36100/

With the consolidation of news media in this country, many Americans are frustrated by the closed and corporatized outlets for news and opinion. The same set of pundits have spewed their opinions, the same handful of established media outlets have decided what constitutes news and citizens have long been forced to just listen.

The blogosphere is changing all of that. Blogs are now a full-fledged alternative venue where citizens can directly communicate with and inform one another without having to rely only on establishment media sources. And they can obtain news analysis from a virtually infinite set of voices. Since its inception, though, the blogosphere has been largely self-contained, with bloggers able to exert influence on the dialogue within the blogosphere but having almost no influence outside of it.

But that is now changing, too.

---

click on "Expand text" for more

---

The growth of the blogosphere's influence -- both in terms of the sheer numbers who participate in the blogosphere and the growing appreciation of its importance -- renders inevitable the growing influence of bloggers outside of the blogsphere. The blogosphere is pursuing this opportunity by developing mechanisms to enable bloggers to demand a voice in the national political dialogue.

A little more than two weeks ago, on April 25, my forthcoming book, "How Would a Patriot Act?" jumped in just over 12 hours from No. 50,925 on Amazon's best-seller list all the way to No. 1, where it remained for the next four days. It reached the top spot despite the fact that it is not even scheduled to be released until May 15, and despite the fact that the publisher has not yet spent a single penny on advertising, beyond the cost of employee staff time to reach out via the internet.

The book's jump to No. 1 was galvanized exclusively by a discussion of the book's imminent release by a handful of liberal bloggers, including some with the largest blog readership on the web. The recommendation of these bloggers, combined with the familarity of many in the blogosphere with the work I have been doing on these issues at my blog, Unclaimed Territory, generated some much-appreciated enthusiasm, which drove the book to the top spot.

My book is purely a blogosphere book: Working Assets Publishing approached me about writing this book -- the new publisher's first book -- based solely on the contents of my blog. The book's ideas and arguments were developed almost exclusively as a result of writing for and interacting with my blog community. The research for the book was done primarily by my readers, and I discovered many of the arguments and much of the evidence in the book as a result of reading comments on my blog, as well as from reading the posts of my fellow political bloggers.

There are a few other blogger books currently on the market, including "Crashing the Gate" by Jerome Armstrong and Markos Moulitsas, "Get this Party Started" by Chris Bowers and "Hostile Takeover" by David Sirota. Publishing books by bloggers, the ideas for which largely emerge from the blogosphere, is clearly a model that works and will only grow.

Beyond books, it is becoming commonplace for well-known bloggers to appear on television as new pundits, to be given prominent op-ed space in the nation's largest newspapers or to be quoted as experts on various political matters in major news stories.

And bloggers are not only talking about the news, but making it, too. John Aravosis of AmericaBlog all but single-handedly broke and drove the Jeff Gannon story with original reporting on his blog. This month, Congress enacted legislation protecting the privacy of cell phone numbers as a result of Aravosis' discovery that companies were selling cell numbers for a low fee. A recent Time magazine article reported on an online argument between blogger Matt Stoller and anonymous high-level congressional staffers regarding whether Democrats are sufficiently tough and aggressive in the political tactics they use.

In February, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake and John Amato at Crooks and Liars led a blogger campaign to force the Washington Post ombudsman, Deborah Howell, to (very reluctantly) retract her factually false claim that not just Republicans, but also Democrats, received money from Jack Abramoff. When the Post hired far-right Regnery editor Ben Domenech as its new blogger, liberal bloggers quickly uncovered the news that Domenech was a serial plagarist and forced the Post to fire Domench days after it announced his hiring. And discoveries on my blog of various administration statements from 2002 regarding FISA, which directly contradict the administration's defenses in the NSA scandal, led to front-page stories in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and Knight-Ridder, all of which credited the blogosphere as having broken the story.

All of this matters not simply because bloggers are new faces, but because so many of the ideas, so much of the analysis, and the underlying approach to political change which characterize the blogosphere is just different in nature than most everything else that comprises the standard national media discussions of the political issues facing our country.

That isn't to say that the blogosphere is perfect (it definitely is not) or that it doesn't have disadvantages as compared to the national media (it does). But, generally speaking, the blogosphere is a fundamentally different way of talking about, thinking about and being engaged in political matters -- and in creating a more democratic media -- and all of this means that the content it produces and the ideas it generates are substantively different than what gets produced elsewhere.

Whole books could be (and, I believe, have been) written on how and why the blogosphere is different. The collaborative nature of it is definitely one of the principal factors -- unlike some paid media pundit who talks only to a handful of like-minded and similarly situated pundits and others in the isolated elite political class, the blogosphere is nothing more than the aggregate by-product of mass, undiluted conversations taking place among thousands of highly motivated, engaged and well-informed citizens every day.

But beyond being just collaborative, the blogosphere is characterized by an independence and autonomy that is glaringly absent in the conventional national media venues. As Hamsher eloquently observed last month, there has to be some significant motivation for someone to go to their computer every day and do the work to maintain a blog, just as something has to motivate people to spend time at their computers every day reading and participating in intense, detailed political discussions.

Bloggers, their readers and commenters are mostly just citizens who are highly dissatisfied with the conventional media outlets and dominant political institutions, all of which fail in too many ways to serve our democracy well. What is most significant about the blogosphere is that it enables direct and immediate communication -- and coordination -- among huge numbers of citizens who want to force new ideas and arguments into what was previously a closed and highly controlled media and political dialogue.

And, gradually and incrementally, it is working. We seem to be at the very beginning of that process, and the impact on our country's political processes will only grow, vastly. And as it does, not just new faces and new voices -- but whole new perspectives and approaches -- will force their way into our nation's mainstream political dialogue.

Given how empty, stagnant and corrupt that dialogue has been over the past several years, disruptive new perspectives can only be a great improvement.

Glenn Greenwald is a constitutional law attorney and chief blogger at Unclaimed Territory.

© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/36100/

Why journalism is failing us (Metro Times Detroit)

Why journalism is failing us (Metro Times Detroit)

Last week one of the most incredible gatherings in the history of Detroit happened — three Nobel Peace Prize winners came to Wayne State University for a public conversation on the world's most important issue.

You could have been there, by the way; there was plenty of space left in the auditorium where they spoke. You could also have met the laureates — Iran's Shirin Ebadi, Guatemala's Rigoberta Menchu and our own Jody Williams, all of whom were warm and accessible.

---

click on "Expand text" for more

---

However, you probably had no idea they were coming. Nor would you been able to find out what they talked about from our ghastly media.

There was barely a word about their appearance; later, I couldn't find a syllable about them in our "newspapers."

The next morning there was, however, on the front page, this drivel from Paul Anger, the editor of the newly Gannettized Detroit Free Press:

Today's paper is a fast read based on how so many of us spend Saturdays — rushing to play or work, maybe standing up and eating peanut butter out of a jar for breakfast ... Confession: The standup peanut butter breakfast has happened in my house.

For Free Press readers who found that not enough of a fast read, or who, perhaps, have trouble reading at all, there was a helpful photo, also on the front page, of an open jar of peanut butter with some on a knife.

No wonder there was no space to cover three Nobel Prize winners (actually four; another sent a videotape). U.S. Sen. Carl Levin also was there, as was Michigan Supreme Court Justice Maura Corrigan.

None of them discussed eating standing up. What they did talk about was governments and world peace.

During the evening, it hit me, in a way it never has before, that I am a citizen of a country guilty of massive crimes against humanity.

Yes, I have known that intellectually all my adult life; how many nations, after all, have dropped nuclear weapons on women and children without warning? But the gentle and eloquent testimony of these three incredibly classy women filled me with a sense that our atrocities aren't aberrations. They are what we are.

The peace prize winners weren't, by the way, much into America-bashing — except perhaps for Jody Williams, who has every right to do so.

She's lived in Vermont most of her life, when she wasn't facing down death squads in El Salvador. Yet Shirin Ebadi and Rigoberta Menchu, even through translators, made us see how the world sees us.

And what we saw was a world dominated by an incredibly rich country that behaves a lot like a 2-year-old. Incredibly rich and selfish, and full of people who believe they are morally superior, but who mostly just don't care. We just want what we want, when we want it.

Rigoberta Menchu said that sometimes, after some particular new atrocity, she and other Central Americans would shrug.

"The North Americans are like that," she said with a little chuckle that said nothing — and everything. She is a Guatemalan Indian peasant woman, with a warmly expressive smile, though how she can smile at all is beyond me. Her mother was arrested, tortured, raped and killed.

Her brother was tortured and killed by the army, and her father was tortured and murdered too. She went into hiding and then exile. Their crimes were fighting to get human rights for the peasants.

"They used to tell us, 'Be careful, or they'll say you are a Communist,'" she said, shaking her finger. Now, they call you a terrorist, "and of course no government can ever be guilty of terrorism," she said.

But my government is, I thought with a sense of dull horror; my government, which thinks it has the right to cook up a phony pretext and invade and occupy other countries.

If that isn't terrorism, what is?

Everything about Shirin Ebadi's manner says that she was born to be a judge. And she was one — actually, the first woman judge in Iranian history. But then the ayatollah came to power and the medieval maniacs demoted her to a clerk in her own courtroom.

Many professional and educated women fled then. But she stayed, at great personal risk to herself. Eventually, when conditions loosened a bit, she was granted a lawyer's license and went to work practicing law, often representing the victims of oppression.

Through it all, she has fought for human rights. Now she and the other laureates are increasingly worried that the Bush administration will turn its tender mercies toward her country, bombing it next.

They know that regimes the world over resort to military adventures to shore their sagging popularity. "We need to let them know that they are not doing it in our name," said Jody Williams, one of only three American women ever to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

I knew that Williams had done more than any other human being — yes, including Princess Diana — to ban landmines. I knew that more than 120 countries had signed the treaty to ban them, and that it had been ratified more quickly than any other treaty in history.

I also knew that our own government, believing in its moral superiority as firmly as did Adolf Hitler, had refused — under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush — to sign the treaty.

What I didn't know was that Jody Williams is a spellbinding speaker, intensely sarcastic and intensely funny, a flinty Vermonter with a heart. She swears and gets exasperated and reminded me of a brilliant, young and more attractive Phyllis Diller. Had she spoken for two hours without stopping I would not have minded one bit.

I wasn't a bit surprised that she wasn't covered by the local slugs who pretend to be journalists, but who are only the towel boys for the corporate interests who own them. "The vast majority of the media in the United States are controlled by only five corporations — did you know that?" she said. "And they want you to think that Brad Pitt and J. Lo are the most important people in the world.

"They want you to think a lot about where Angelina Jolie's baby is born, and not to think about what is happening to you, your country and the planet," she said.

What we need to do is to fight, and keep fighting.

She has done exactly that. Williams was barely in her 30s when she went to El Salvador and faced down death squads. Somewhere in the world, there are little children whose legs haven't been blown off, thanks to her.

"What really irritates me is when people come up to me and say, 'There are so many problems I don't know what to do.'

"Well, pick something! Pick the issue you care about the most. Go online, find a group and volunteer, even if it is only one hour a month. Do you realize what even that could accomplish?"

What I realized is that some of us may survive for a few decades, and that some day young people may ask what we did during the years when our leaders were doing so much to ruin our nation and the world.

And when that day comes, do you really want to say, "Well, I watched Paris Hilton, and then I got laid off and they took away my big-screen TV?"

Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Metro Times. Send comments to letters@metrotimes.com.

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER BY NY AD AGENCY IN MAINE BLOGGER CASE * A news item at mediabloggers.org

UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER BY NY AD AGENCY IN MAINE BLOGGER CASE * A news item at mediabloggers.org: "May 05, 2006
UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER BY NY AD AGENCY IN MAINE BLOGGER CASE

Moments ago, lawyers for the advertising agency suing MBA Member Lance Dutson filed a Notice of Voluntary Dismissal in U.S. District Court in Maine.

The notice reads simply:

'Pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 41(a)(1), Plaintiff Warren Kremer Paino Advertising, L.L.C. hereby dismisses the above-captioned action without prejudice.'

The decision to withdraw the lawsuit comes on the heels of a withering media campaign orchestrated by the Media Bloggers Association on behalf of MBA Member Lance Dutson. Hundreds of bloggers responded to the MBA's call to arms and were joined by media outlets around the world in highlighting the heavy-handed tactics of the state contractor."

Beating about the bush? Certainly not with Hersh

Beating about the bush? Certainly not with Hersh
Beating About The Bush? Not With Hersh

By Robert Fisk

05/03/06 "The Independent" -- - LONDON: Sy Hersh is an ornery, cussed sort of guy, not one to suffer fools gladly. As the man who broke the My Lai story and the atrocities at Abu Ghraib, I reckon he has a right to be ornery from time to time – and cussed.

---

click on "Expand text" for more

---

He’s dealing with powerful folk in Washington, including one – George W Bush – who would like to cut him down. And when Hersh wrote – as he did in The New Yorker this month – that “current and former American military and intelligence officials” have said Bush has a target list to prevent Iran obtaining nuclear weapons and that Bush’s “ultimate goal” in the nuclear confrontation with Iran is regime change – again! – you can see why Bush was worried. “Wild,” he called the Hersh story. Which must mean it has some claim to veracity.

So when I cornered Hersh at Columbia University in New York and dropped him a note during a Charles Glass presentation asking for an interview, I expected a stiff reply. “Anything you ask,” he scribbled obligingly on a piece of paper.

His own lecture was frightening. Bush has a messianic vision – and intends to go down in history (probably he has chosen the right direction) as the man who will have “saved” Iran. “So we’re in a real American crisis ... we’ve had a collapse of congress ... we have had a collapse of the military ... the good news is that when we wake up tomorrow morning, there will be one less day (of Bush). But that is the only good news.”

Hersh might have said that we’d also had a “collapse” of the media in the United States, a total disintegration of the Ed Murrow/Howard K Smith/ Daniel Elsworth/Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward school of journalism. The greying, bespectacled, obscenity-swearing Hersh is about all we have left to frighten the most powerful man in the world (save for the jibes of Maureen Dowd in The New York Times).

So it’s good to know he’s still doing some fighting, including other journalists on his target list. “I know some serious generals,” he says. “I can’t urge them to go public. They’d be attacked by Fox (TV), and the (New York) Times and The Washington Post would wring their hands. It’s a mechanism. You don’t get rewarded in the newsroom for being a malcontent.” Journalists on the mainstream papers are largely middle-class college graduates – not reporters who came up the hard way like Hersh’s street reporting in Chicago in his early days. They have largely no connection to the immigrants’ society. “They don’t know what it’s like to be on social welfare. Their families weren’t in Vietnam and their families are not in Iraq.” The BBC, too, has “fallen off the way”.

So what is the Hersh school of journalism? “In my business, I get information I check it out and I find it’s not true – that’s what my business is. Now there is (also) stuff in the military from people I don’t know – I don’t touch it ... I was seeing (President) Bashar (Assad of Syria) at the time of the assassination of (former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq) Hariri. There was obviously bad blood between Bashar and Hariri. Bashar was saying that Hariri wanted to take over the cell-phone business in Damascus. To this day I don’t know what happened. I saw Bashar from 11am until 1pm (on February 14, 2005). He talked about what a thief Hariri was. I didn’t write it.”

And there goes a scoop about bad blood, I said to myself. But on Iran, it was something different for Hersh. He was talking to a contact. “I brought up Iran. ‘It’s really bad,’ he said. ‘You ought to get into it. You can go to Vienna and find out how far away (from nuclear weapons production) they are.’ Then he told me they were having trouble walking back the nuclear option with Bush. People don’t want to speak out – they want the shit on my head.”

As Hersh said in his New Yorker report, nuclear planners routinely go through options – “we’re talking about mushroom clouds, radiation, mass casualties, and contamination over years,” he quotes one of them as saying – but once the planners try to argue against all this, they are shouted down. According to another intelligence officer quoted by Hersh, “The White House said, ‘Why are you challenging this? The option came from you’.” In other words, once the planners routinely put options on the table, the options become possibilities to be considered rather than technical reports.

“That whole Johns Hopkins speech,” Hersh goes on, referring to the address in which Bush attacked Hersh’s own article, “he talked about the wonderful progress in Iraq. This is hallucinatory – and there are people on a high level in the Pentagon and they can’t get the President to give this up. Because it’s crazy.

“In the UK, you might have some crazy view – but you knew it was. But these guys (in Washington) are talking in revelations. Bush is a revelatory at bedtime – he has to take a nap. It’s so childish and simplistic. And don’t think he’s diminished. He’s still got two years ... he’s not diminished. We’ve still got a Congress that can’t articulate opposition. This is a story where I profoundly hope, at every major point, that I’m wrong.”

Hersh has also been casting his wizened eye on the Brits. “Your country is very worried about what Bush is going to do – your people” – Hersh means the Foreign Office – “are really worried. There are no clearances ... no consultations.”

In Washington, “advocating humanity, peace, integrity is not a value in the power structure ... my government are incapable of leaving (Iraq). They don’t know how to get out of Baghdad. We can’t get out. In this war, the end is going to be very, very messy – because we don’t know how to get out. We’re going to get out body by body. I think that scares the hell out of me.”

It’s all put neatly by one of Hersh’s sources in the Pentagon: “The problem is that the Iranians realise that only by becoming a nuclear state can they defend themselves against the US. Something bad is going to happen.” What was that line from Bogart as Rick Blaine in Casablanca, when he asked Sam, his pianist, what time it is in New York? Sam replies that his watch has stopped, and Bogart says, “I bet they’re asleep in New York. I’ll bet they’re asleep all over America.” Except for Hersh. – The Independent


Click below to read or post comments on this article

Comment (0) | Trackback (0)

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is Information ClearingHouse endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)

Smoking Mirrors

Smoking Mirrors

Tuesday, March 14, 2006

Those Fat Little Lying Whores in their Spandex Hot Pants.

Notorious sleaze-bag Kate O'Beirne said something about how it was improper to leak/disclose the existence/location of secret prisons on right-wing fantasy show- Hardball the other day. It seems like everywhere you go what used to be known as journalists (but certainly can no longer be called that under the dictionary definition) are forming opinions for the mass mind or fabricating news that they then comment on- or justifying anything, no matter how immoral or illegal.

---

click on "Expand text" for more

---

When Tony Blair wants the public to react in a predictable manner he goes to one of Murdoch’s tabloids and has something fabricated for public consumption. It doesn't matter how outrageous or false it is. How deep into the ugly shit of the day is the media embedded? All you can see of them are the bubbles breaking on the surface.

Let’s think about this. Some collection of individuals- over a fairly long period of time- gain control of all of the organs of public information. This includes radio and television as well as the print media. Hand in hand with the corporations that pay their way through advertising and hand in hand with the government that creates and applies the laws, these three formulate the common world view and enforce it. This world view is enhanced by manufactured events, Photo-shop altered photos, fake recordings and videos and news releases and opinions on the meaning of events.

Here are some of the members of PNAC; Robert Kagan, William Kristol, William Bennett, Jeb Bush, Dick Cheney, Richard Pearle, Karl Rove, Donald Rumsfield, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, Dov Zakheim, Richard Armitage, Dan Quayle, James Woolsey, Ellen Bork, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Charles Krauthammer, John Bolton, Norman Podhertz. There are a few others. It’s a bit of an eye-opener to see that most of the architects of American foreign policy and the Iraq attack are listed here. It’s also interesting to note that some of the individuals strategically involved in compromising the 2000 presidential election are also here. It is further interesting to note that Dov Zakheim was the man in charge at the pentagon when something in excess of one trillion dollars went missing and… how about that William Kristol (who along with Robert Kagan founded PNAC) who runs the Weekly Standard? He works for Rupert Murdoch. Nah...geddouddahere! What a whole lot of coincidence I see. Of course, only a conspiracy nut would begin to connect the dots in this perfectly innocent collection of cosmic altruists.

But… what is most interesting is that PNAC called for a “New Pearl Harbor” and boom! There it is. That single event on 9/11 galvanized a gullible world into collective outrage against the Arab world and set the nation on a course of applied fascism. Since that time 9/11 has been used to justify just about everything done by the Bush administration. Since that time all questions about glaring inconsistencies in the official explanation of what took place has been suppressed. It is interesting to note the sudden appearance of 'detailed' pornography accusations against Charlie Sheen now that he's pointing the finger at all the 9/11 bullshit. Does one thing have anything to do with the other?

Now, you and I KNOW, that the Bush administration with the guidance and assistance of The Zionistas and British intelligence orchestrated 9/11. You know and I know that 9/11 was an inside job. You and I know that they control the media and the armies and the police forces and that they have some agenda at work. We can see part of that. I imagine that there are parts of it we cannot see. I imagine that the parts that we cannot see are even uglier than the ones we know about.

Let’s get back to the press. Who are these people who manipulate global perceptions and fabricate news? If you were industrious you could do the research and you could see who a large part of these individuals are. You could see who owns the companies and who sits on the Boards of Directors. You can find out where their sympathies lie politically and you can move on to what happens to people who point out the obvious.

It appears that we are outgunned. When I say we I mean those of us courageous enough to say something about it and to put ourselves in harms way as a result. Why would we do this? Is the truth that important? Does it matter what happens to other people as long as it isn’t happening to you? Isn’t it better to curry favor with the people in charge and see if you can’t get yourself some of that pie? It certainly seems so to the wooden headed flacks who fabricate the news, who spin the news, who do what they are told and who close their eyes to what is obvious in order to get closer to the honey pot.

Materialism is a funny thing. Its power is often severely under-estimated. There are men and women, hundreds of thousands of them, who will give up their honor, their dignity and their self-respect to publicly shill for a lie. They will do it over and over again. I don’t understand these people. I can’t get a handle on what makes them that way. It’s obvious that they are robot-controlled because you would expect, at least occasionally, that one of them would finally just break down on the news and scream, “It’s all a lie. I’ve been lying. I’ve been telling you what they told me to tell you. I knew better but I did it anyway and I am sorry.” But it never happens. Why is that?

These people took their native integrity and they dressed it up in thigh-high boots and hot pants and they put it out on the avenue for anyone with whatever it costs to do what they want to with them. They parade around as whores and they celebrate it. They are proud of it. Chris Mathews goes on TV every day and presents himself as a truth seeker and then gets down on his knees in front of millions of people and performs felatio on mass murderers. We get all outraged and vengeful and shocked when we hear about Charlie Manson or Ted Bundy. These cats were pikers. Bush and Cheney and all those other names I mentioned kill more people every hour than these guys did in their whole career. They torture and burn and mutilate. They imprison and frame and slander. They kill whole families every single day and it is okay.

Then Chris Mathews or any one of the other whores has them on TV and talks to them like they are, not just ordinary people- but leaders of the free world. They are treated with respect. They are believed. They lie constantly and they are caught out constantly and it doesn’t matter. Instead of sitting on death row or doing life in prison these mass murderers give speeches and send other men to war in illegal conflicts that are justified by lies that have been exposed a hundred times already.

What makes a man like Chris Mathews or Rupert Murdoch? What makes a woman like Katie O’Beirne or Ann Coulter? What do these lying faces on CNN and Fox News tell themselves when they lay in bed? They must know that they are lying whores. How could you not know? But it doesn’t seem to matter. Thousands of people are dying because of lies and greed and it is just okay. It’s just okay.

I don’t get it. Is it the power? Is it the exposure? Is it being believed and admired by people too stupid to tell the difference? Can you really enjoy being admired by people too stupid to see that you are a lying whore? Can there be satisfaction in knowing you are part of a machine that tortures and kills people on a daily basis?

We have seen- up close and irrefutably- of late, that there is no question now that these are all lying whores. Every single day the evidence of the lies mount and new lies are added. What a terrific irony that those who work daily to subvert and spin the news, who fabricate and lie, are also forced to report the truth that refutes their lies. By this time you are either cooperatively evil or too stupid to live if you can’t see this. Well, I may never get any further than I am and I may never know the perks and bennies that are the daily fare of these strange and unusual people but… at least I am not a lying whore who is proud of being a lying whore.

posted by Visible at 3:58 PM

Free Press : media reform through outreach, activism, lobbying and networking

Dear media reformer,

At a Washington press event today, Free Press and our partners at the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) will release a groundbreaking report on the extent to which corporate propaganda has infiltrated local TV newscasts across the country.

All told, we caught 77 local stations slipping corporate-sponsored "video news releases" — segments promoting commercial brands and products — into their regular news programming. These advertisements, flogging everything from vitamin supplements to porn-free search engines, were passed off to you, their viewers, as legitimate news reports.

---

click on "Expand text" for more

---

This deception is illegal, and it's a serious breach of the trust between stations and their communities. Take action to stop fake news today:

Tell the FCC to Crack Down on Fake Local News

By disguising advertisements as news, stations violate both the spirit and the letter of their broadcasting licenses, which obligate them to be honest brokers in service of the public interest.

The evidence suggests a strong tie between media consolidation and the tendency to abuse the airwaves with deceptive, pre-packaged propaganda. More than 80 percent of the stations snared in the inquiry are owned by large conglomerates. A list of the worst offenders reads like a who's who of Big Media, including stations owned by Sinclair, Fox Television and Clear Channel.

Free Press and CMD delivered extensive evidence of this local TV abuse to the FCC. Our investigation — documenting less than 1 percent of fake news being offered to newsrooms — exposed only the tip of the iceberg; it's likely that fake news reports have been aired on hundreds more local newscasts.

We need your help as we continue to investigate the many facets of propaganda in local news and to pressure Washington to guard our airwaves against the spread of fake news.

Tell the FCC to Stop Fake News Today

Send a strong message to the FCC: Investigate this abuse by local news stations, enforce rules against the airing of covert propaganda and penalize all broadcasters that truck in fake news.

Act Now!

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net

The full report — "Fake News: Widespread and Undisclosed" — is available at www.prwatch.org/fakenews/execsummary.

Don't forget to tell your friends about this: http://action.freepress.net/freepress/join-forward.html?domain=freepress&r=QdNQT_M1jBqH&

If you received this message from a friend, you can sign up for the Free Press at: http://action.freepress.net/freepress/join.html?r=QdNQT_M1jBqHE&

Unknown News - Mental Health Moment - Commentary by Helen & Harry Highwater

CNN is committing treason

by Helen & Harry Highwater, Unknown News

March 28, 2006


Americans are a decent people, who wouldn't stand for this utterly un-American Bush administration... if they knew what was happening. But most Americans don't know, because corporate-controlled media like CNN are simply not reporting the news.

When so much hangs in the balance, that's beyond irresponsible. It's treason, by either of the two definitions in my dictionary:

1. Violation of allegiance toward one's country or sovereign, especially the betrayal of one's country by waging war against it or by consciously and purposely acting to aid its enemies.
2. A betrayal of trust or confidence.

It is no exaggeration to describe George Bush as America's enemy. He and his cohorts stand foursquare against every principle America is proud of, from 'open, honest government' to 'freedom of speech', from 'innocent until proven guilty' to 'liberty and justice for all'. American troops are at war in two nations without any sane reason, and the Bush-Cheney administration is leading the nation toward a third war...

And the news is nowhere to be found at CNN. It is obvious that CNN and other American news media have betrayed any trust Americans' once had for journalism.

If you have the time and internet savvy to seek out alternative and foreign news sources, then you know that America is in grave peril. We have a President who has never told Americans the truth about anything, who has exercised abysmal judgment about remarkably important matters, who breaks the law with impunity and announces it plainly and often. The Bush-Cheney administration has committed dozens of impeachable offenses, but it's impeach-proof, because Bush's Republican Party controls Congress, and allows no oversight of the White House.

But if you don't have the time or don't know where to look beyond bland American mainstream news, chances are you don't know much of the above.


CNN Radio even has the chutzpah to end its radio newscasts with the most frightening words regularly aired on any commercial broadcasts:

"This is CNN, the most trusted name in news."

If that's true, that's why Americans don't know the grave peril their nation faces.

CNN, and its equally empty colleagues at Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS, have helped the White House convince Americans that the nation's most dangerous enemy is an Iraqi rebel, or an al Qaeda terrorist.

But that's a lie, and most professional reporters aren't dummies; they must know it's a lie.

America's most dangerous enemy, by far -- the enemy seeking to destroy our way of life and eliminate our freedoms -- is the enemy in our midst -- the enemy in our White House.

Media that won't report that fact, is media that's aiding and abetting the enemy.

There's much more than this at Unknown News.
We don't have cable TV, and haven't for years. Instead we listen to lots of talk radio, on a local station that plays CNN Radio News at the top of the hour. In a four-minute newscast, CNN's top story is almost perpetually pabulum. CNN will reliably report when the latest pretty white woman is kidnapped, or when somebody's lost kitten is found, or when a celebrity is caught in an embarrassing situation.

Do you know what I learned, listening to CNN Radio News on Sunday and Monday? A dog playing 'fetch' with its owner somehow got a stick lodged in its throat. The sexiest woman in show business is no longer Jessica Alba or Angelina Jolie, it's now Scarlett Johansson. The Muslim divorce chant ("I divorce thee, I divorce thee, I divorce thee") is legal, even if the husband is such a coward he says it while his wife is asleep.

And no, I am not making this up. That was the news at the heart of CNN Radio's hourly news updates.

When CNN Radio News actually does touch on a subject that's newsworthy, they'll first make sure all the facts that matter are removed. Yesterday, for example, CNN Radio News reported that the House of Representatives had passed an immigration bill, and that Congressional Representatives applauded when it passed. CNN mentioned nothing about the content of this despicably evil bill that will, if it becomes law, illegalize babysitting for "illegal" immigrants, outlaw giving "illegals" a lift or a sandwich or a Band-Aid. CNN said nothing about the huge protests that have been held against this bill, nothing about the Catholic Church's stand against it, nothing to provide any context at all. They merely reported that a bill had passed the House, and members of Congress applauded.

Then it was back to the fluff and non-news stuff. A preacher's wife is accused of killing her reverend husband. Somebody's house burned down. An NFL player was arrested for boisterous dancing at a night club. That's the standard for CNN's radio newscasts -- all this in a newscast that only lasts four minutes, presented just once an hour, with each hour's newscast almost invariably including a few minutes of "rerun" material from the previous hour.

For us, since we're listening to an ongoing, fairly intelligent discussion of news on a talk radio station, the break for CNN News isn't a break for the news, it's a break from the news. But it's a syndicated newscast, so those few minutes of fake news are the only news listeners will hear on hundreds of rock'n'roll, jazz, or oldies stations, all across America.

Which means, millions of listeners will hear virtually no news. Or fake news.

CNN Radio even has the chutzpah to end its radio newscasts with the most frightening words regularly aired on any commercial broadcasts: "This is CNN, the most trusted name in news." If that's true, that's why Americans don't know the grave peril their nation faces.

CNN, and its equally empty colleagues at Fox, ABC, NBC, and CBS, have helped the White House convince Americans that the nation's most dangerous enemy is an Iraqi rebel, or an al Qaeda terrorist. But that's a lie, and most professional reporters aren't dummies; they must know it's a lie.

America's most dangerous enemy, by far -- the enemy seeking to destroy our way of life and eliminate our freedoms -- is the enemy in our midst -- the enemy in our White House.

Media that won't report that fact, is media that's aiding and abetting the enemy.

© by the author.

Professor Says American Publisher Turned Him Down

Professor Says American Publisher Turned Him Down

Professor Says American Publisher Turned Him Down
By Ori Nir
March 24, 2006

John Mearsheimer says that the pro-Israel lobby is so powerful that he and co-author Stephen Walt would never have been able to place their report in a American-based scientific publication.

"I do not believe that we could have gotten it published in the United States," Mearsheimer told the Forward. He said that the paper was originally commissioned in the fall of 2002 by one of America's leading magazines, "but the publishers told us that it was virtually impossible to get the piece published in the United States."

---

click on "Expand text" for more

---

Most scholars, policymakers and journalists know that "the whole subject of the Israel lobby and American foreign policy is a third-rail issue," he said. "Publishers understand that if they publish a piece like ours it would cause them all sorts of problems."

In their paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," the two professors accuse "the lobby" of "policing academia," intimidating scholars and stifling dissent on campuses, mainly through accusing critics of being antisemitic.

Mearsheimer said that he and Walt expected to be accused of being anti-Israel and antisemitic, so they made a point of stating in the study that the establishment of Israel was morally justified and that America's support of Israel, in principle, is justified as well. He said the paper takes issue with the extent of American support for Israel and the role that the pro-Israel lobby plays in pushing for such assistance.

Asked if the study may have been initially rejected by the American publisher because of poor research, Mearsheimer said that the "evidence in the piece is just the tip of the iceberg," and that the study's observations are supported by a large body of evidence. He did concede, however, that none of the evidence represents original documentation or is derived from independent interviews. All the additional supporting material — just like the references footnoted in the paper — is of a secondary nature: citations of books and newspaper articles, Mearsheimer said.

Mearsheimer dismissed accusations and insinuations that people or entities hostile to Israel encouraged him and Walt to write the paper or that they did so to appease Arab donors to their universities. "We did this independently," he said.

Mearsheimer said that he and his colleague do not intend to become "policy advocates" calling for diminishing the role of America's pro-Israel lobby in foreign policy.

"We decided to write a really serious piece on what we thought was a very important subject and put it in the public domain and hopefully that would open up the debate or the discussion in a civilized tone," he said. "But there was no intention to write a piece that was anti-Israel or that would in any way shape or form challenge the legitimacy of the State of Israel. That was not our intention."

Google Caught Censoring Charlie Sheen 9/11 Story

Google Caught Censoring Charlie Sheen 9/11 Story
Quickly re-indexes pages during live radio discussion

Paul Joseph Watson & Alex Jones/Prison Planet.com | March 23 2006

Note: Before you e-mail please understand that we are aware of the fact that Google now carries links to Sheen 9/11 articles, that is not our point as you will read below. The censorship issue began before Google reversed their policy this afternoon.

Google is again embroiled in a censorship scandal after being caught blocking information about Charlie Sheen's 9/11 comments, despite the fact that every other major search engine had indexed the pages.

---

click on "Expand text" for more

---

For days, major search engines like Yahoo and others contained tens of thousands of web pages relating to Sheen's comments first broadcast on the Alex Jones Show on Monday afternoon. Last night CNN aired a piece on the issue and by early this morning both the New York Post and the Boston Herald ran articles.

We first noticed that there were no search results related to the story on Google the day after we broke the Sheen story. At first we decided to be fair and wait another day for Google to index an article which was by now linked on thousands of other websites and blogs. By Thursday afternoon, and with the story receiving more traffic, Google still had not indexed any material relating to the Sheen interview, from Prison Planet.com or any other websites. This despite the fact that the Drudge Report had briefly directly linked to our article, sending it millions of visitors.

During a live radio discussion of this issue between Alex Jones and Paul Joseph Watson on Alex Jones' broadcast Thursday afternoon, Google, as if they had people listening to the show, immediately re-indexed the pages and a search for 'Charlie Sheen 9/11' now returns 111,000 results at time of writing.

Pictured below are screenshots we managed to cache shortly before Google re-indexed the pages with the search terms 'Charlie Sheen 9/11' and the entire headline "Actor Charlie Sheen Questions Official 9/11 Story". As you can see, the Boston Herald story is linked from Google News (Google do not censor their affiliates) but the main search engine below returned no results. To stress again, this is three days after we broke this massive story. The usual index time for a story of this size is 12-24 hours and at the same time that Google returned no results whatsoever, tens of thousands were being carried by other major search engines like Yahoo.

CLICK FOR ENLARGEMENTS

To make it crystal clear, Google's web spidering process is automated and we have received high Google rankings in the past for nothing stories that get little traffic. The Sheen story was linked everywhere and to eliminate it from Google's search results would have required technicians to physically access the spidering control panel and exclude an enormous amount of varied search terms.

Google has a history of censoring websites it dislikes within the US. Google Inc. banned and removed a mainstream news website from all its worldwide search engines, seemingly due to the website's reports on China's geopolitical affairs and military technology.

Google has banned its users inside the US and the rest of the world from accessing the Space War website from its search engine. Space War speculated at the time that this was at the behest of the "boys from Beijing."

Space War is a reasonably tame mainstream website that focuses on geopolitical affairs and satellite and military technology advancements. It is based in Australia and carries articles from AFP and United Press International.

After a complaints campaign supported by this website, Google agreed to re-index the website.

Did our defense of Space War cause Google to impose a blackballing campaign on our major articles or is this just a response to the sheer magnitude and influence of the Charlie Sheen story?

To emphasize, Google is now carrying search results related to Charlie Sheen's 9/11 comments, but only after it was exposed live on nationally syndicated radio that they had stonewalled this issue for three clear days even as it raged around the rest of the Internet as a viral story and broke into the mainstream yesterday and early this morning.

The floodgates on the Sheen story have opened, with CNN airing a balanced piece on the controversy. Meanwhile mainstream publications like Human Events, the New York Post, CBS and the Boston Herald used Sheen's comments to attack him and demonize anybody who questions the official line on 9/11. A round-up article of today's reaction to Charlie Sheen's comments will follow later tonight.

Another Day in the Empire: Profs Document Hijacking of U.S. Foreign Policy

Another Day in the Empire

Profs Document Hijacking of U.S. Foreign Policy
Tuesday March 21st 2006, 9:36 am

It comes as no surprise two “of America’s top scholars,” having released an article criticizing the hijacking of American foreign policy by AIPAC, the neocons, and the tiny outlaw state of Israel, are unable to get a hearing in the corporate media. John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt of Harvard’s Kenney School “say that [AIPAC] is so strong that they doubt their article would be accepted in any U.S.-based publication,” reports United Press International. “They claim that the Israel lobby has distorted American policy and operates against American interests, that it has organized the funneling of more than $140 billion dollars to Israel and ‘has a stranglehold’ on the U.S. Congress, and its ability to raise large campaign funds gives its vast influence over Republican and Democratic administrations, while its role in Washington think tanks on the Middle East dominates the policy debate.”

---

Click "Expand Text" for more ...

---

Mearsheimer and Walt come close to stating what many of us have known for some time—a clique of Straussian neocons, wedded to radical Likudites in Israel, and share “close ties to pro-Israel groups like JINSA (Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs) or WINEP (Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy),” exploited nine eleven to “adopt the general goal of ousting Saddam” and push forward “preventive war,” that is to say invasions of sovereign Muslim and Arab nations, a plan long in the tooth and at the heart of Likudite Zionism. Unfortunately, the authors do not arrive at the natural conclusion—not only did the neocons exploit nine eleven, they orchestrated it from within the Pentagon, as a previous cabal of Pentagon insiders, including the Joint Chiefs, attempted to create an earlier nine eleven by way of Operation Northwoods. Fortunately for the American and Cuban people, that earlier plan was eighty-sixed by Robert McNamara and John F. Kennedy. No such luck with nine eleven.

Mearsheimer and Walt name names—Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, William Kristol, Bernard Lewis, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, key members of the inner circle of the neocon clique. It is interesting a name not normally associated with the neocons is mentioned—Bernard Lewis. It was the elderly “Arabist” Lewis who urged “Lebanonization” in the Arab and Muslim Middle East. “In 1992, in the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, Lewis celebrated in the pages of the New York Council on Foreign Relations’ Foreign Affairs that the era of the nation-state in the Middle East had come to an inglorious end, and the entire region should expect to go through a prolonged period of ‘Lebanonization’—i.e., degeneration into fratricidal, parochialist violence and chaos,” write Scott Thompson and Jeffrey Steinberg.

“Lebanonization” is a reference to the implementation of the Sykes-Picot Agreement by the French under the League of Nations in the 1920s, dividing Lebanon into five provinces based along ethnic and religious lines. Of course, this artificial construct eventually resulted in a bloody civil war between Lebanese Christians and Muslims, exacerbated by the Israeli lebensraum policy of ethnically cleansing Palestinians (this conflict resulted in the death of over a 100,000 people and created 900,000 refugees), and was intensified and prolonged by an Israeli invasion and political and military participation by the United States.

Lewis concluded his Foreign Affairs article by predicting the “Lebanonization” of the entire region with the notable exception of Israel: “Most of the states of the Middle East … are of recent and artificial construction and are vulnerable to such a process. If the central power is sufficiently weakened, there is no real civil society to hold the polity together, no real sense of common national identity or overriding allegiance to the nation-state. The state then disintegrates—as happened in Lebanon—into a chaos of squabbling, feuding, fighting sects, tribes, regions and parties,” a process well underway at this moment in Iraq.

“For the past several decades, and especially since the Six-Day War in 1967, the centerpiece of US Middle Eastern policy has been its relationship with Israel,” Mearsheimer and Walt continue. “The combination of unwavering support for Israel and the related effort to spread ‘democracy’ throughout the region has inflamed Arab and Islamic opinion and jeopardized not only U.S. security but that of much of the rest of the world. This situation has no equal in American political history. Why has the U.S. been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies in order to advance the interests of another state?”

It is a situation, the authors conclude, created by the influence of AIPAC, an organization representing the Jabotinsky-Likudite faction in Israel. According to Thompson and Steinberg, Bernard Lewis’ son, Michael, is “the director of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee’s super-secret ‘opposition research section.’ This is one of the most important wellsprings of propaganda and disinformation, presently saturating the U.S. Congress and American media with war-cries for precisely the Clash of Civilizations Bernard Lewis has been promoting for decades.” Defecting AIPAC staffer Gregory Slabodkin told the Washington Report in 1992 that AIPAC’s secret “opposition research section” concentrates on “releasing derogatory (and generally false or misleading) information about American ‘enemies of Israel’ to their rivals in the media and academia.”

Israel “works ruthlessly to suppress questioning of its role, to blacken its critics and to crush serious debate about the wisdom of supporting Israel in U.S. public life,” the UPI summarizes the not destined for prime-time conclusions of Mearsheimer and Walt.

“Not surprisingly, the Jewish establishment organizations are lining up behind Aipac and not too subtly rolling out the traditional big guns by suggesting that the accusations themselves might be motivated by anti-Semitism,” writes Michael Lerner. “Aipac and a variety of closely linked Jewish organizations regularly use the anti-Semitism card to attack anyone who dares criticize the occupation of the West Bank. Increasingly dominated by Jewish neo-cons and their worldview, the Jewish establishment has moved far to the right in the past two decades, spurred in part by Aipac’s powerful impact.”

As we know, the neocon “worldview” is one of endless conflict and misery abroad and subversion of American ideals at home. The Straussian neocons—and it is important to stress the Straussian aspect with its Machiavellian philosophy and fascist ideology taking cues from the authoritarian idealism of a Nazi jurist, Carl Schmitt—are decidedly behind schedule on implementing the next phase of their master plan, gleaned in part from Oded Yinon’s “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s”, of attacking and balkanizing Iran.

Once again, Bush reminds us of the tight relationship between Israel’s territorial aspirations and its connection to the military prowess (now in obvious decline) of the United States. “The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That’s a threat, a serious threat. It’s a threat to world peace,” said our Caesar. “I made it clear, and I’ll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel.”

In fact, this is the only approach, as long ago sketched out by the Straussian neocons and their Jabotinksyite overlords, and diplomacy is but a shell game introduced to make the neocons appear reasonable, when in fact they are neo-Jacobin radicals. Bush’s neocons, in control of the Pentagon, plan to eventually attack Iran, certainly not this month as initially speculated, but some time down the road, maybe this summer, maybe next year, but eventually, as the Straussian neocons, the anti-American AIPAC, and the reprehensible Israeli Jabotinskyite racists have long planned, even if it results in the ultimate destruction of America.

The Truth Will Set You Free: The Most Powerful Weapon in the World

The Truth Will Set You Free: The Most Powerful Weapon in the World

The Most Powerful Weapon in the World

The MEDIA - hands down.

The death of Justin, a 1st Cavalry Division machine gunner, stunned his parents . . .

[A] year and a day after his son was killed, [Joe] Johnson was [in Iraq], pulling escort duty for fuel convoys on the bomb-pocked desert highways from Jordan.

Why did he go?

"[A] sense of duty. I was pissed off at the terrorists for 9/11 and other atrocities."

Now where did he get that idea from?

Second, I'd only trained. I wanted combat." And then, he said, "there's some revenge involved. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't."

But there was more . . .

"I don't really have love for Muslim people," Johnson said. "I'm sure there are good Muslims. I try not to be racist."

But, the media has him programmed.

[H]e hasn't read the Quran, or spoken with Muslims, [but] he has "heard" the Islamic holy book "teaches to kill Jews and infidels. And it's hard to love people who hate you."

And from where did he get this false impression?

He could love Iraqi children, though, and said he'd hoped "to see them grow up to know right and wrong."

[W]hen speeding civilian cars passed the Americans' Humvees and Johnson failed to level his gun and open fire, which "I think anyone else," fearing car bombs, "would have done."

"I really don't want to kill innocent people," he now says. "I don't want to live with that the rest of my life."

But what about revenge?

"If I go home and didn't kill a terrorist, it's not going to ruin my life," he said. "Maybe I'd just as soon not. I don't know what it would do to my head."

Nevermind what it does to the so-called "terrorist."

[Joe's] elder soldier son, Josh, 26, might [also] be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.

"I don't like that Joe's there," Jan Johnson said when called by satellite telephone from al-Asad. "But it's something he felt he had to do. People heal in different ways. This is how he heals after Justin's death."

Like Joe and his brother Justin, Josh must be propelled by his sense of patriotism and his intolerance of 'evil' Muslims.

And the rest of the images that flank this AP piece?

No pictures of the family leading ordinary lives. Every image is draped with flags or patriotic messages of support. This is not by chance. The producers don't care about who these people are. They only care about what they represent.

This man's life and the lives of his sons were consumed by the fear and intolerance fabricated by the media, all in the name of an abstract notion of freedom and nationalism that simply does NOT represent reality.

Wakeup America. This is the height of fascism. You're being manipulated and controlled by the media to serve a war machine that feeds corporate interests.

Remember, everything is relative. Your sacrifice may be worth it to them. But, it's not worth it for you.