Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” reframed as a defiant call of support for those backing democratic change in Iran. Tehran’s authoritarianism is being noticed:
Showing all posts in June 2019
Knowing that Afghanistan is a failure
Simon Jenkins writes in the Guardian that the Wikileaks war logs are significant. But will the media war cheer-leaders be listening? Is it the death of war? In Vietnam the horror of fighting was brought to TV screens in real time. Such was the reaction that American citizens withdrew their consent. In the 1980s computers…
Open letter to MEAA over ExxonMobil funding of journalism
Following the recent decision by Australia’s leading journalist’s union to ask ExxonMobil to fund its annual conference, the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism – I’m a research associate there -is circulating the following letter. I’ve signed it, as have many other leading reporters: Open Letter Chris Warren Secretary Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance Dear Chris…
Will Obama accept this Israeli ruse?
Well, I guess this headline in Haaretz settles the problem: Netanyahu: Extending settlement freeze will cause government to collapse
Demeaning Tamils on a mission
When the wolves of the tabloid press are looking for victims, rest assured they’ll always find the most powerless in society. Case study one: A Tamil refugee who went on a 23-day hunger strike in Parliament Square last year has received an apology and almost …£80,000 in damages from the Daily Mail and the Sun…
What if Wikileaks does nothing at all?
What if the political elite dismisses public opinion so greatly that revelations by groups such as Wikileaks simply change little or anything in public policy? A GritTV discussion with Jay Rosen and Michael Otterman.
The Greens may like the Palestinians just a little too much
The Australian Zionist lobby AIJAC are worried that the Greens, likely to poll very well in the upcoming election, aren’t sufficiently pro-Israel. Opposing the West Bank settlements is supposedly a bridge too far for Zionists who talk about a “two-state solution” but in reality believe in ongoing colonisation.
Navigating the Wikileaks leak, from the man himself
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on ABC TV Lateline last night: TONY JONES: You said in your press conference that you and the conventional journalists you’d worked with had only managed to read between one and 2,000 of the reports properly. Is that correct? JULIAN ASSANGE: Yeah, that is true. To read and to read them…
Palestinian art is “propaganda”
It’s supposedly offensive to support Palestine. Makes you a backer of Hamas, supposedly: Outrage over “propaganda” at a recent Chapel off Chapel art show has prompted an apology from Stonnington Council. But the show’s organisers are defiant, saying they were entitled to express “free speech” in the printed flyers. The Painting Blue Skies Over Gaza…
Australia is increasingly owned by somebody else
My following article appears in Crikey today: The Crikey/ACIJ series on Australian companies profiting from the foreign aid budget is a welcome discussion of the rapid privatisation of services in Australia and overseas, an area largely ignored by the mainstream media. The market, lightly regulated or not, is simply accepted by most commentators as the…