TOP ARTICLES ON MEDIA COMPLICITY
The following article summaries are listed chronologically
with the most recent posted articles on the top of this page.
Each article heading is a link to the article itself. Most of
these articles can also be found under the page heading
"Media Complicity".
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A Powerful Media Can Stop a War
By Jane Fonda, Women's Media Center
Posted on January 18, 2007, Printed on January 18, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/46820/_______________________________________________
Former President Carter blames media's 'pro-Israel bias'
on AIPAC and 'Christians like me'
12/17/2006 @ 12:18 pm
Filed by RAW STORY
In a letter addressed to Jewish citizens of America, former President Jimmy
Carter explains the media's "pro-Israel bias" partly on a powerful lobbying
organization which faces no "significant countervailing voices," but primarily
puts the blame on "Christians like me."
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Keith Olbermann Proves That Dissent Has An Audience
By Daphne Evitar, The Nation
Posted on December 2, 2006, Printed on December 2, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/45007/If you picked up the New York Times on October 18, you'd have had little reason to think
it was a particularly significant day in American history. While the front page featured a photo of George W. Bush signing a new law at the White House the previous day, the story about the Military Commissions Act -- which the Times never named -- was buried in a 750-word piece on page A20.
But if you happened to catch MSNBC the evening before, you'd have heard a different story.
It, too, began with a laudatory statement from the President: "These military commissions are lawful. They are fair. And they are necessary." Cut to MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann: "And they also permit the detention of any American in jail without trial if the president does not like him."
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CBS Owes Ed Bradley an Apology
By Eric Boehlert, Media Matters for America
Posted on November 22, 2006, Printed on November 22, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/44624/After breaking the news that legendary newsman Ed Bradley had died of leukemia,
CBS News officials said, and did, most of the right things. But CBS still owes Bradleya
belated apology stemming from its shameful decision during the 2004 presidential
campaign to pointedly refuse to run a factually solid story of his that chronicled how
the Bush administration had misled the country into war.
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'War by Media'
On 14 April 2006, the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University inNew York brought together John Pilger, Seymour Hersh, Robert Fisk and Charles Glass
for a discussion entitled 'Breaking the Silence: War, lies and empire'.
The following is a transcript of John Pilger's address
By John Pilger
06/15/06 "JohnPilger.com" --- During the Cold War, a group of Russian journaliststoured the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by their hosts
for their impressions. “I have to tell you,” said their spokesman, “that we were astonished
to find, after reading all the newspapers and watching TV, that all the opinions on all the
vital issues were, by and large, the same. To get that result in our country, we imprison
people, we tear out their fingernails. Here, you don't have that. What's the secret? How
do you do it?”
indoctrination that runs deep in western societies, deeper than many journalists
themselves understand or will admit to. Its power is such that it can mean the difference
between life and death for untold numbers of people in faraway countries, like Iraq.
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What Corporate Media Has Not Told You
If You Get Your News
From the Corporate Media:
Just Shut Up and Listen!!!Advice to the Uninformed
From TvNewsLIESIt’s very important in life to know when to shut up: Alex Trebek
THE ADMONITION
Enough! Just stop. You’ve had your say over and over and over. You’ve repeated yourself
ad nauseam for years without making an iota of sense. You’ve accomplished nothing constructive, absolutely nothing. You’ve repeated the same nonsense over and over without knowing a single fact. So just cut it out. Now it’s time to close your mouth and open your ears.Just shut up and listen!
All this time you’ve ignored people who know things you can’t even imagine. You’ve shut
your eyes and your mind to people who have spent years gathering information and checking out their sources. You’ve dismissed people with skills and credentials you can’t even pronounce. And you’ve demeaned people with knowledge and experience you can’t even come close to.All this time you’ve refused to hear a single thing they’ve said. You’ve strutted around like an arrogant peacock, believing you knew more than they. You had no basis for what you claimed to know. You just decided it was true. What unadulterated stupidity. It’s time to stop being a total idiot.It’s time to just shut up and listen.
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The Most Trusted Names in News (Really!)
By Larisa Alexandrovna, AlterNet
Posted on August 25, 2006, Printed on August 25, 2006
http://www.alternet.org/story/40803/American journalism is not represented by the media establishment, which has
essentially been co-opted into an extension of government-sponsored propaganda,
or else has demeaned itself into a Vanna White-style superficiality, spinning content
in order to sell another product.
But in a media era where propagandists and shills are ascendant, there remain a
number of journalists who sustain the principles on which our free press was founded:
to protect the governed from their elected officials and from the unelected corporate
elite, always determined to skirt the law and undermine the social contract.
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The First Amendment of the Internet – the governing principle of net neutrality,
which prevents telecommunications corporations from rigging the web so it is easier to
visit sites that pay for preferential treatment – took a blow from the House of Representatives Thursday.
Bowing to an intense lobbying campaign that spent tens of millions of dollars – and held out the promise of hefty campaign contributions for those members who did the bidding of interested firms – the House voted 321 to 101 for the disingenuously-named Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (COPE). That bill, which does not include meaningful network
-neutrality protections creates an opening that powerful telephone and cable companies hope to exploit by expanding their reach while doing away with requirements that they maintain a level playing field for access to Internet sites.
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FCC Wants to End TV, Newspaper Ownership Rules
RAW STORY
Published: Thursday April 6, 2006In a message that undoubtedly warmed the hearts of large media concerns such as Tribune Co., Gannett Co. and Media General, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin delivered a sharp critique of regulations preventing newspaper publishers from owning TV stations in the same markets, and pleaded with other publishers to lobby more vigorously for its repeal, AD AGE reports Thursday. (Since it's registration restricted, we've reprinted excerpts.
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Walter Cronkite Criticizes Network Newscasts
Walter Cronkite has castigated producers of the network nightly newscasts for including
stories about "your health and mine and your backyard and mine and all that kind of thing"
at the expense of more substantive reports. "It doesn't belong in the evening news," Cronkite
said during an interview on Texas Monthly Talks, which airs on Texas public broadcasting stations.
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How one right-wing billionaire uses his business and media empire to pursue a partisan
agenda at the expense of democracy
July 16, 2004
In recent years, Australian-born billionaire Rupert Murdoch has used the U.S. government's increasingly lax media regulations to consolidate his hold over the media and wider political debate in America. Consider Murdoch's empire: According to Businessweek, "his satellites deliver TV programs in five continents, all but dominating Britain, Italy, and wide swaths of Asia and the Middle East. He publishes 175 newspapers, including the New York Post and
The Times of London. In the U.S., he owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studio, Fox Network,
and 35 TV stations that reach more than 40% of the country...His cable channels include
fast-growing Fox News, and 19 regional sports channels. In all, as many as one in five
American homes at any given time will be tuned into a show News Corp. either produced
or delivered." But who is the real Rupert Murdoch? As this report shows, he is a far-right
partisan who has used his empire explicitly to pull American political debate to the right. He
is also an enabler of the oppressive tactics employed by dictatorial regimes, and a man who
admits to having hidden money in tax havens. In short, there is more to Rupert Murdoch than
meets the eye.
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'When You Can't Obscure the News, Buy It:
How the Economic News is Spun"
Posted on Friday, March 03 @ 09:53:57 EST
Readers ask me to reconcile the jobs and debt data that I report to them with thepositive economic outlook and good news that comes to them from regular news
sources. Some readers are being snide, but most are sincere.
I am pleased to provide the explanation. First, let me give my reassurances that thenumbers I report to you come straight from official US government statistics. I do
not massage the numbers or rework them in any way. I cannot assure you that the numbers are perfectly reported to, and collected by, the government, but they are the only numbers we have.
Here is how to reconcile my reports with the good news you get from the mainstreammedia:
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Iraq: How Corporate Media Promotes War
By Rohan Pearce
15 February, 2006
When, for example, media magnate Rupert Murdoch came out in favour of “regime change” in Iraq, his vast empire of media outlets predictably parroted him. “You have got to admit that Rupert Murdoch is one canny press tycoon because he has an unerring ability to choose editors across the world who think just like him”, Roy Greenslade wryly noted in a February 17, 2003, op-ed for the British Guardian. “How else can we explain the extraordinary unity of thought in his newspaper empire about the need to make war on Iraq?”
However, this was not just true of the Murdoch media. Nearly all of the corporate media in the “coalition of the willing” countries — Australia, Britain and the US — acted as propaganda outlets for their governments, uncritically reporting these governments’ claims that Iraq had an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that threatened “international peace and security”.
The gaping holes in these claims were papered over with shoddy journalism.
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The Pentagon’s War On The Internet
By Mike Whitney
14 February, 2006
UruknetThe Pentagon has developed a comprehensive strategy for taking over the internet
and controlling the free flow of information. The plan appears in a recently declassified
document, "The Information Operations Roadmap", which was provided under the
FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) and revealed in an article by the BBC.
The Pentagon sees the internet in terms of a military adversary that poses a vital threat
to its stated mission of global domination. This explains the confrontational language in
the document which speaks of "fighting the net"; implying that the internet is the equivalent
of "an enemy weapons system."
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Official Resigns Public TV Post
By STEPHEN LABATON
and ELIZABETH JENSENWASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The top television executive at the Corporation for
Public Broadcasting announced on Thursday that he would be stepping down.
This is the latest in a string of departures of officials and consultants who played
central roles in an effort by conservatives to bring what they viewed as more balance
to public television and radio.
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History of Media Lies and CIA and FBI Involvement
To read this article, just click on title above.
Part 1. An Age Of Lies
Part 2: The dishonesty of the media.
Part 3: The FBI and COINTELPRO - harassment of those who try to
expose the lies.
Part 4: The NTSB and TWA 800
Part 5: The crash of John F. Kennedy Jr's aircraft and the indications
of a cover-up.
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by Jeff Chester
Published on Thursday, February 2, 2006 by The Nation
The nation's largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an alarming set of
strategies that would transform the free, open and nondiscriminatory Internet of today
to a privately run and branded service that would charge a fee for virtually everything
we do online.
Verizon, Comcast, Bell South and other communications giants are developing strategies
that would track and store information on our every move in cyberspace in a vast
data-collection and marketing system, the scope of which could rival the National
Security Agency. According to white papers now being circulated in the cable, telephone and telecommunications industries, those with the deepest pockets--corporations, special-interest groups and major advertisers--would get preferred treatment. Content from these providers would have first priority on our computer and television screens, while information seen as undesirable, such as peer-to-peer communications, could be relegated to a slow lane or simply shut out.
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By David Podvin
5/18/01
First Paragraph
The obscure but decisive factor of the 2000 presidential election was the
issue of concentration of power in broadcasting. The huge conglomerates
that own the networks and the big city newspapers desperately wanted to
eliminate the federal regulation prohibiting one corporation from owning
both the broadcast stations and the newspapers in a city. Al Gore and the
Democratic Party supported the existing regulation, which was enacted to
prevent a corporation from gaining a monopoly on a city’s media. George
W. Bush and the Republican Party supported repealing the regulation, which
would mean HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars in profits to the big media companies.
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The Coming War on Iran: Fox News Fans the Hysteria
Posted on Tuesday, January 31 @ 09:46:56 EST
In keeping with its established role as purveyor of disinformation, Fox "News" talkinghead Brit Hume misreported Fox's own poll. On "Special Report" (January 26) Hume
said that 51% of Americans "would now support" air strikes on Iran. What the poll found
is that if diplomacy fails, 51% would support air strikes.
Can we be optimistic and assume that diplomatic failure does not include orchestratedfailure by the Bush administration? Alas, we cannot expect too much from the American
people as even the corrected report indicates a majority of the population in thrall to
disinformation.
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It's time we learned the rudiments of "scandalology," as John Dean calls it in
his excellent book, Worse Than Watergate. For a scandal to be a scandal, Dean
says, the media must certify it. When Newsweek's Howard Fineman said of Bill Clinton at the height of the Lewinsky scandal, "We have to wonder whether we can continue to respect ourselves as a people if a man like this remains president," he was expressing exactly the kind of moral outrage that makes a scandal.
If the media have the power to manufacture a crisis, as with the Clinton impeachment,conversely, "if the media learn of a transgression and fail to react, there is no scandal."
In a very real sense, our mass media establish the rules governing public and political decency.
________________________________________________________________Mystery of Woodward's Three Sources
By Robert Parry
November 29, 2005Buried deep in an article by the Washington Post’s media writer Howard Kurtz is new
evidence that senior Bush administration officials knew their case for war with Iraq was
shaky – and that the Post’s star reporter Bob Woodward ducked his duty to the American
people to present this information before the invasion began.
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'The Rise of Rectal Journalism'
David Sirota, Working For Change
A lot has already been written about Joe Klein's latest column - a true foray into fantasy.The man is the epitome of a journalist who is so self-absorbed, so obsessed with himself, or so lazy that he quite literally thinks he can just make things up. But sadly, Klein epitomizes a new brand of journalism sweeping the nation. It's what I call Rectal Journalism because its based on reporters and pundits simply pulling stuff right out of their asses and peddling it as fact, when in fact it is anything but.