Category: Media

Hollywood and the war machine

Empire examines the symbiotic relationship between the movie industry and the military-industrial complex.

 

Frost/Assange

The WikiLeaks founder talks about secrets, leaks and why he will not go back to Sweden.

The Death of the Liberal Class

Chris Hedges discusses his new book The Death of the Liberal Class. The Q&A is over the fold. Produced by The Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy NY, this event was co-sponsored by Bethlehem Neighbors for Peace.

Continue reading “The Death of the Liberal Class”

Greenwald discusses Wikileaks on FAIR’s Counterspin

On this week’s Counterspin Glenn Greenwald of Salon discusses new developments in the Wikileaks saga.

(I think Al Jazeera is head and shoulders above competitors in the mainstream as a media institution. But I can’t say I am a fan of its media watch show The Listening Post. The show lacks political edge, and the media analysis is trite. One wishes they would follow the hard hitting style of FAIR‘s excellent Counterspin.)

This week on CounterSpin: The journalism organization WikiLeaks is under massive attack by U.S. government officials, corporations, and journalists. Many are calling for the group and its spokesperson Julian Assange to be prosecuted; some have even called for Assange’s execution or assassination. Transnational companies like Visa, MasterCard and Paypal have cut off services, and even liberal US pundits are attacking the group with inaccurate smears. WikiLeaks crime? Making leaked U.S. diplomatic cables available to the world both directly and through its mainstream media partners. In this special extended CounterSpin interview, we’ll talk to Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald about the assault on WikiLeaks and Assange, and what it means for journalism.

Naomi Wolf schools CNN’s secrecy apologist

Islamophobia goes mainstream

It is too easy to mock the crude prejudices of the Tea Party. But in the US, Islamophobia has universal sanction, from Bill Maher to Bill O’Reilly. The following is therefore disturbing but not entirely surprising. Kudos to Anderson Cooper for bringing some sense to American mainstream television.

The War You Don’t See

A new John Pilger documentary is always a media event. For over four decades he has set the bar for incisive and intrepid investigative journalism. In The War You Don’t See, his latest, Pilger indicts the mainstream media for its responsibility in enabling wars by sanitizing its image and glorifying its aims.

Jody McIntyre exposes the BBC’s disabilities

This is what passes for journalism on the BBC.  Here is Jody McIntyre, a disabled youth, a wonderful human being, who was assaulted by the police at a student protest. And what does the BBC do? It spends over eight minutes fearlessly interrogating the wheelchair-bound youth with cerebral palsy, prodding him to explain how he invited the attack by ‘provoking’ the police. McIntyre demonstrates that he may be physically impaired, but he is a moral giant. The BBC on the other hand is disabled both morally and ethically.

The disgusting sack of shit conducting the interview is called Ben Brown. Please make sure to register your displeasure: http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/ and please share widely, lest anyone still harbour the belief that the BBC is anything but a state propaganda organ.

UPDATE: Reader Squall has this useful suggestion:

Don’t complain to the BBC. They’re already rejecting complaints about this, and they never agree that they’ve failed to be impartial anyway.

Complain to Ofcom. State that the BBC has broken section 5.1 (Due Impartiality and Due Accuracy in News) of the Broadcasting Code.
https://stakeholders.ofcom.org.uk/tell-us/specific-programme-epg