A recent event at Columbia University, “Reporting War“, with Robert Fisk, Charles Glass, John Pilger and Seymour Hersh, agreed that the current business model for journalism was destined to solely represent the powerful and ignored the victims of state power. The article on the event was written by a citizen journalist working for OhmyNews.
Showing all posts in June 2019
Talk to them
The Washington Monthly explains, yet again, that the current “crisis” over Iran is far more complex than the mainstream media is revealing.… Diplomacy can work. Unless, of course, the Bush administration wants war, no matter what. John Howard seems determined to blame the Islamic state for the high price of oil, rising international tensions, global…
Disregarding the ‘other’
The Israelis are attempting to disengage from the entire Palestinian population in an act guaranteed to bring more bloodshed to the conflict. Meron Benvenisti, former deputy major of Jerusalem, writes that the colonial mindset is firmly entrenched in the Jewish psyche: For the first time since the beginning of the tragic encounter more than 100…
The first real casualty of war
John Pilger, New Statesman, April 24: The oldest cliche is that truth is the first casualty of war. I disagree. Journalism is the first casualty. Not only that: it has become a weapon of war, a virulent censorship that goes unrecognised in the United States, Britain and other democracies; censorship by omission, whose power is…
No please, tell us what you really think
Is this America’s most offensive radio host? Of course, maybe I’m just being overly politically correct.
Oz media wimps out on Middle East balance
The following article appears in today’s edition of Crikey: Antony Loewenstein, blogger, journalist and author of the forthcoming My Israel Question (MUP), writes: There is one foreign affairs issue that remains virtually taboo in public debate. The close relationship between Israel and the US is almost universally avoided in the mainstream, Western press. When attempts…
Press freedom curtailed
As more evidence emerges of Yahoo’s complicity with the Chinese authorities in the jailing of dissident Jiang Lijun, Burundi is experiencing yet more government interference in press access. Amnesty reports: Press freedom and human rights in Burundi suffered a severe blow yesterday, when around thirty journalists and human rights monitors were held – and some…
Freedom still so far away
The following email was sent by Israeli whistle-blower Mordechai Vanunu, still not given freedom of movement in the Jewish state: Hi Everybody, April 21st has arrived and the second year since of my release has ended.… The news now is that the Israeli Government has issued a third year order of restrictions.… These are the…
The lobby challenged
Following my article in this week’s Australian about the Israel lobby, and the response by AIJAC executive director Colin Rubenstein, the newspaper publishes only one letter today about the controversy: Rubenstein misses targets Colin Rubenstein’s reply (“Israel seen as an asset”, Opinion, 19/4) to Antony Loewenstein’s article on the Israel lobby debate misses most of…
A lobby, not a conspiracy
Following local debate over the influence of the Israel lobby, leading US thinker Tony Judt poses the ultimate question in the New York Times: Looking back, we shall see the Iraq war and its catastrophic consequences as not the beginning of a new democratic age in the Middle East but rather as the end of…