Max Blumenthal asks: “How did the US and Israel-funded emergency PA government of Abbas/Abed Rabbo/Erekat respond to Al Jazeera’s release of the Palestine Papers? They released a goon squad to vandalize Al Jazeera’s Ramallah office and apparently to attack the person filming the video, too.”
Category: Media
The Net Delusion
In this brilliant lecture Evgeny Morozov asks if free information means free people? The event was recorded on 19 January 2011 in LSE’s Sheikh Zayed Theatre. It was moderated by Alison Powell.
Available as: mp3 (38 MB; approx 82 minutes)
At the start of the twenty-first century we were promised that the internet would liberate the world. We could come together as never before, and from Iran’s ‘twitter revolution’ to Facebook ‘activism’, technological innovation would spread democracy to oppressed peoples everywhere. We couldn’t have been more wrong. Morozov destroys this myth, arguing that ‘internet freedom’ is an illusion, and that technology has failed to help protect people’s rights. Not only that – in many cases the internet is actually helping authoritarian regimes. From China to Russia to Iran, oppressive governments are using cyberspace to stifle dissent: planting clandestine propaganda, employing sophisticated digital censorship and using online surveillance. We are all being manipulated in more subtle ways too – becoming pacified by the net, instead of truly engaging. This event marks the publication of Evgeny Morozov’s new book The Net Delusion: How Not to Liberate The World.
Continue reading “The Net Delusion”
Wikileaks as a modern challenge
by Farid Farid
One of Australia’s most acclaimed authors, Tim Winton, has re-released Land’s Edge: A Coastal Memoir. Through a series of autobiographical reflections, Winton describes how Australia is a littoral society always on “the edge of things” – floods, bushfires, riots etc… Winton talks about the sensuality of water being central to the Australian imaginary. Through his prose about surfing and sharks, readers can also envision human cargo packed on a floating boat teetering between life and death.
It is perhaps then fitting that this was underscored a couple of days ago by the enthusiastic reception by foreign minister Kevin Rudd and defence minister Stephen Smith of their British counterparts William Hague and Liam Fox at the HMAS Watson on a naval base in Sydney harbour. In an ironic scene on the water, the Australian government’s foreign image untarnished by floods or asylum seekers was tactfully kept and strategic interests were shared between “cousins on opposite sides of the world” according to Hague and Fox.
Hague & Fox in their joint opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald opt for a turgid title that spells out their foreign policy objectives — ‘Stronger alliance required to meet modern challenges’. They probably had Wikileaks in mind as one of these trans-national challenges with both countries agreeing to tighten intelligence cooperation against cyber crimes.
Helen Thomas on the perils of criticizing Israel in the US media
A remarkably fair and respectful segment on legendary journalist Helen Thomas from CNN.
Facebook in Gaza
by Karma Nabulsi
Last weekend the Observer carried a dramatic account of ‘The Gaza Youth Manifesto’, written in English by a handful of young people in Gaza and posted on Facebook. Given the thousands of people in the West who have said they ‘like’ it on Facebook or posted positive comments, the manifesto is said to herald a new movement for change in occupied Palestine.
Because of Palestinians’ lengthy predicament of expulsion, dispossession and military occupation, there is a rich tradition of Palestinian manifestos and declarations: hundreds of them have been written since 1948. ‘Bayan Harakatina’ (‘Our Movement’s Statement’, 1959) played an important role in recruiting the first wave of young people to the Palestinian National Liberation Movement-Fateh, and in unifying their political consciousness. It was distributed clandestinely, ‘entrusting’ its readers with the key ideas of the new movement. Later documents, such as the founding manifesto of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (1967), were distributed more openly. These manifestos were written by organised Palestinian youth as mobilising documents, exclusively for young Palestinians.
Manifestos have been written by everyone: ‘Workers of Palestine Unite’ was issued by the General Provisional Committee of the Workers of Palestine in 1962; the Unified National Command of the Intifada released 46 communiqués between 1988 and 1990; ‘The Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel’ was published on 9 July 2005; ‘The Palestine Manifesto’ was published last year by the National Committee for the Defence of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People; dozens of statements have been issued by right of return committees in the refugee camps since 1998; Palestinian political prisoners in Israeli jails, from all parties, released the now famous ‘National Reconciliation Document’ in 2006.
Selling the First Gulf War
More than two decades after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, Al Jazeera takes a look at the media’s role in selling the Gulf War, the military’s attempts to control the story and the ’round-the-clock’ coverage that changed television news forever.
PULSE’s Top 10 Media Figures of 2010
This list is an attempt to honor those individuals and institutions responsible for exemplary reportage and awareness-raising in 2010. It is aggregated from the suggestions of PULSE writers and editors and is comprised of journalists, editors and publishers who have shown a commitment to challenging power, holding it to account, highlighting issues pertaining to social justice and producing output that bucks conventional wisdom and encourages critical thinking. (Also check our Top 10 Global Thinkers of 2010)
Julian Assange
2010 was the year of Wikileaks. From the antiseptic cruelty of the Apache attack on Iraqi civilians, the matter-of -fact entries of routine horrors recorded in the Afghan and Iraq war logs, to the locker-room candour of the US State Department diplomatic cables, Wikileaks has laid bare the casual attrition that sustains empires. Behind it all is Julian Assange, an enterprising, politically savvy, and morally upstanding individual who has shown the transformative potential of new media, which, through courage and imagination, could be made to serve as a check even on a hyper-power. By leveraging the mainstream media’s need for exclusives, Assange has ensured the broadest possible audience for his revelations. True, Assange is not Wikileaks, but from listening to the statements of his defecting colleagues–who fault him for needlessly confronting a superpower when he should have been concerned with building his institution–we are convinced that without someone as assertive and clear-headed as Assange, Wikileaks would have ended up as yet another web project with interesting information, infrequently cited, but with none of the amplification that it currently enjoys.
Helen Thomas
A rare critical voice in the mainstream media, particularly during George W. Bush’s reign, Helen Thomas was the first woman officer of the National Press Club, the first woman member and president of the White House Correspondents Association and the first woman member of the Gridiron club. Her career as one of history’s gutsiest female US press corp reporters was ended in her 90th year after some off-the-cuff comments she made to a roving rabbi with a camcorder were made public. She later apologized for her words, citing her “heart-felt belief that peace will come to the Middle East only when all parties recognize the need for mutual respect and tolerance.” While Thomas was attacked from all fronts, she was also defended by progressive media figures like Real News Founder Paul Jay who directed attention to the “hyper-pro-Israel lobby” which was just waiting for an opportunity to silence Thomas, and progressive American Jews like Medea Benjamin who stated on camera: “We should look at the 50+ year record of a very probing journalist and insightful commentator and not look at a 30 second soundbite.” Even the Washington Post felt compelled enough by Thomas’s outstanding legacy to allow The Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel to bring attention to Thomas’s “legendary career” as a “a trailblazer for women journalists.”
David Bromwich on Obama, the Establishment President
David Bromwich is the Sterling Professor of English at Yale, and easily the most astute observer of Barack Obama’s performance and character. He has written some of the most insightful articles on the Obama presidency in which he subjects Obama’s oratory and style to close textual and formal analysis, and highlights the various traits that are symptomatic of his approach to politics. In this wide ranging discussion with Christopher Lydon of the excellent Radio Open Source (based at Brown University’s Watson Institute) Bromwich brings his formidable analytical skills to bear on Obama’s langauge, the difference between his improptu and scripted speech, his attempts at humour, and what it reveals about the man. He also makes an interesting comparison between Obama’s style and that of former presidents such as Lincoln, Reagan and Kennedy.
The Persecution of Bradley Manning
From Dylan Rattigan’s excellent show on MSNBC, an interview with one of Bradley Manning’s friends who describes the conditions under which he is being held.
By comparison, following is Al Jazeera’s Patty Culhane, a second rate journalist who generally recycles the consensus view of the Washington punditocracy with little in the way of scepticism or original thought. You can tell from the report below that she even manages to render critical reports in the language of the beltway hack.
Pilger: War, Media and Wikileaks
Filmmaker and journalist John Pilger discusses his latest film, The War You Don’t See, the media’s role in conflict and his defence of WikiLeaks on Al Jazeera’s Listening Post.
The rest of the show investigates the role of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), the brainchild of a former Israeli intelligence officer and a US-based organisation that specialises in providing (mis)translations of Arabic-language broadcasts to American journalists and plays a central role in shaping the public’s (mis)perceptions of the Middle East.
P U L S E 