The role of real journalists is to question every allegation made by officials of whatever stripe. If you work for the New York Times, however, you like to give anonymity to a motley collection of “American officials” to talk about allegedly malign Iranian influence on the world. Because of course Washington’s influence is so benign…
Showing all posts tagged mainstream media
Challenging MSM approved imperial enforcers
Here’s a book review I wrote a while ago published here exclusively: The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work Belen Fernandez Verso, $22.95 Michael Ignatieff: The Lesser Evil? Derrick O’Keefe Verso, $22.95 Antony Loewenstein Back in May 2003, two months after the start of the American-led war in Iraq, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman…
“Paper of record” still too keen to report US/Israeli view over Iran
Editor of the New York Times Jill Abramson claims her paper’s coverage on Israel and Iran is impartial and there’s no chance the “flawed” 2003 reporting over Iraq could happen again (via Politico): Q: What are the concerns and considerations you take into account when covering the tensions between Israel and Iran, especially in light…
What serious media would have reported about Wikileaks (but did not)
So many stories and so much missed deliberately or wilfully ignored. Interesting extract from a new book, The phone hacking scandal: journalism on trial. This is by Justin Schlosberg and details how many key media outlets consistently fail to hold power to account (and no, it ain’t an accident): The performance of serious media in…
The Al-Qaeda media plan fond of MSNBC?
Fascinating information, if true, by David Ignatius in the Washington Post: Among the last known images of Osama bin Laden is a video seized at his compound the night he was killed, which shows the al-Qaeda leader hunched before a television screen studying a video of himself. It’s testimony to bin Laden’s obsession with the…
What our media don’t tell us about the Middle East
Yet more fascinating insights from the recently released Wikileaks documents of Stratfor, published by Lebanon’s… Al Akhbar. One: US government officials requested that an American private security firm contact Syrian opposition figures in Turkey to see “how they can help in regime change,” the CEO of one of these firms told Stratfor in a company email…
MSM ignore it but past spin, AfPak war now about face saving for America
Britain’s former ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray cuts through the lies and unloads: UK Defence Secretary Philip Hammond’s visit to Tashkent on 28 February was not covered in any UK mainstream media that I can find, which is peculiar, given the media’s obsession with covering anything to do with “Our heroes” in Afghanistan. It was…
American hypocrisy on massive scale
Does anybody serious believe American officials when they talk about supporting human rights? Hillary Clinton recently said this… at a UN Secretary Council debate on the Arab Spring: … we reject any equivalence between premeditated murders by a government’s military machine and the actions of civilians under siege driven to self-defense. Such a statement requires a…
Corporate media admit; we’re far too close to power
This speaks for itself (via the Guardian): Politicians and journalists have had an unhealthily close relationship to one another, according to… Chris Blackhurst, editor of… The Independent He told a Bath literature festival audience that MPs and reporters formed “a giant club” at Westminster. Successive governments had courted newspaper proprietors, said Blackhurst, and told of his time…
Memo to media; US massacre in Afghanistan is about Afghans not US military
Another tragedy in Afghanistan. And what do most of the corporate media focus on? How will this affect NATO strategy? What will US troops do? Will Obama’s supposed counter-insurgency tactics be derailed? What about wondering about the Afghans themselves? Here’s FAIR: The news that a U.S. Army sergeant killed 16 civilians, most of them children,…