More media panic for the boys

Mondoweiss understands the point exactly in my latest column on why old media simply don’t understand the changing rules of the game: Smart piece by Antony Loewenstein down under saying that the mainstream media are going away not just because of a technological change but because they’re invested more in the establishment hierarchy than in…

Who will face trial over this?

Western state terrorism of the most brutal kind: Air strikes and artillery barrages have taken a heavy toll among the most vulnerable of the Iraqi people, with children and women forming a disproportionate number of the dead. Analysis carried out for the research group Iraq Body Count (IBC) found that 39 per cent of those…

American war criminals inc.

Laith Mushtaq was… one… of only two non-embedded cameramen working throughout the April 2004 ‘battle for Fallujah’ in which 600 civilians died. He recounts the harrowing US-led massacre: One day, I think it was April 9, 2004, someone with a loudspeaker in Fallujah’s main mosque said: “The Americans will open a gate and women and children can…

Anybody but the Palestinians

Mahmood Mamdani is currently Herbert Lehman Professor of Government at Columbia University and author of the new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror. He tells the Boston Globe about the real agenda behind the global Save Darfur campaign: In a context where African tragedies seem never to be noticed, I…

What our job should always be

Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman on the true role of journalists: That media is broken right now. And I think the embedding process has brought the media to an all time low. You have reporters embedded in the front lines of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. What about being embedded in Iraqi hospitals and Afghan…

We’ve got to keep on talking

Lebanese Chess is a fascinating blog written by a Lebanese Australian. His recent post is titled, “A week of speeches“: Khatami, Halper and Loewenstein … three public speakers at Australia’s main political university, the Australian National University (ANU), in a week. I went to see them all, and nothing much out of the three surprised…

This is what the news should be

An example of collaborative journalism, courtesy of the US-based Center for Investigative Reporting, that the mainstream media is simply failing to do: Baghdad|Los Angeles, a four-month collaboration between the Annenberg School for Communication at USC and the Center for Investigative Reporting in Berkeley, explores the impact of the Iraq war in Southern California. Stories include:…

No, truth doesn’t matter

Medialens explains that most of the mainstream media have no memory or ethics: Have journalists learnt nothing from recent history? It truly is a wonder when a reporter can assert in public, on the BBC News no less, that “Tony Blair passionately believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and posed a grave threat.”…

Hardly a democrat

Last night in Sydney I attended this (my average pics here): Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has called on Australia to play an active role in the reconstruction of his country, while thanking it for taking in thousands of Iraqi refugees. Addressing the Lowy Institute in Sydney last night, Mr Maliki said Iraq was hindered…

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