Dave Lindorff
The sorry performance of the US corporate media, which blacked out stories questioning the official line on the so-called “Iraq Threat” until the nation was deeply mired in to pointless, bloody war in that country, and which has almost completely ignored a three-year, nation-wide movement calling for the impeachment of the president and vice president, has continued.
Search far and wide, and you will find no reporting on the fact that Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who has filed a total 36 proposed articles of impeachment against President Bush, is finally going to get to formally present his case to the House Judiciary Committee, beginning on July 25. Although this is not an impeachment hearing, it is putting impeachment “on the table,” from which it has been banned for two years by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Although the House last week voted 251-166 to send Kucinich’s articles to the Judiciary Committee for hearings, the New York Times, the Washington Post and the nation’s television news organizations ignored this breakthrough (which included 24 Republicans voting for the measure). Only USA Today, at least in its online edition, even mentioned it, with a headline saying “Pelosi cracks door open on impeachment resolution”–and that was just a five-sentence story. More
Bill Moyers
Our media institutions, deeply embedded in the power structures of society, are not providing the information that we need to make our democracy work. To put it another way, corporate media consolidation is a corrosive social force. It robs people of their voice in public affairs and pollutes the political culture. And it turns the debates about profound issues into a shouting match of polarized views promulgated by partisan apologists who trivialize democracy while refusing to speak the truth about how our country is being plundered.
Our dominant media are ultimately accountable only to corporate boards whose mission is not life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for the whole body of our republic, but the aggrandizement of corporate executives and shareholders.
These organizations’ self-styled mandate is not to hold public and private power accountable, but to aggregate their interlocking interests. Their reward is not to help fulfill the social compact embodied in the notion of “We, the people,” but to manufacture news and information as profitable consumer commodities.
Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of the state and the privileged interests that the state protects. And nothing characterizes corporate media today more than its disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and its indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people. More
Wall Street Journal
HONG KONG — Aggressive Chinese bloggers make an art of challenging Chinese government propaganda. This week, they can claim a victory. On Friday, Chinese authorities announced that four Communist Party, local government and security officials in Guizhou province’s Weng’an county were sacked for “severe malfeasance” over the alleged coverup of a murder, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.
That change in stance appears to be a direct result of pressure brought by journalists and Chinese bloggers such as Zhou Shuguang, a self-styled “personal news station,” who didn’t allow the issue to drop, posting to the Internet unofficial reports along with photos and pleas from the family of the dead youth. When mainstream Chinese Web sites began deleting posts on the issue, some bloggers turned to technical workarounds, including writing their posts backwards and reposting material that had been taken down elsewhere.
Exposed to online postings that sprout up and multiply before they can be censored, the public has come to expect more transparency and responsiveness from the government. China is home to 223 million Internet users, according to official statistics, nearly as many as the U.S. More Also See: Chinese riot over police ‘cover-up’
The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday announced plans to cut 250 positions across the company, including 150 positions in editorial, in a new effort to bring expenses into line with declining revenue. In a further cost-cutting step, the newspaper will reduce the number of pages it publishes each week by 15%. “You all know the paradox we find ourselves in,” Times Editor Russ Stanton said in a memo to the staff. “Thanks to the Internet, we have more readers for our great journalism than at any time in our history. But also thanks to the Internet, our advertisers have more choices, and we have less money.” More
Each major news network spends only 2 minutes per week on the Iraq war. The networks are not talking about the nearly 1 Million Iraqis killed due to the 2003 US invasion, the Millions of Iraqi widows of war, and the 5 Million displaced Iraqis. Instead, the networks (like CBS Evening News) lead off with stories about star golfers (Tiger Woods) and their injuries.
From Mediabloodhound
Statement from Rick Kaplan, Executive Producer of CBS Evening News, who, I was also informed, had a direct hand in making this decision:
“The Tiger Woods injury story was of major importance and we felt we needed to devote time to it as the lead. Tiger is arguably one of the world’s premiere athletes and his career is in some jeopardy with Tiger halting playing the sport for the year. It was certainly the most talked about story of the day, and the biggest story in most national newspapers. Our story contained implications for sports, millions of fans, and many aspects of business; which have by and large been revolutionized by the Tiger Woods phenomenon.”
Michael Arrington
TechCrunch.com
Thursday, June 19, 2008; 1:09 AM
I’m not normally one to subscribe to conspiracy theories, but something is just plain rotten in this whole New York Times/Associated Press/Media Bloggers Association love fest.
As I wrote earlier today, the New York Times just won’t stop defending the Associated Press and their position that quoting from their articles is a copyright infringement (it isn’t). The NYTimes’ Saul Hansell has now written three blog posts and one feature article on the mess, all defending the A.P. None of those articles disclose the NYTimes’ partial ownership or board seat with the A.P.
In the first article, Hansell wrote that the A.P. was negotiating with the Media Bloggers Association to negotiate guidelines around use of A.P. content, even though copyright law already sets forth very clear guidelines on fair use. Any more restrictive measures wouldn’t be enforceable, but the A.P. has shown that it’s willing to use it’s army of lawyers to make life hell for anyone that tries. The easy way out is to simply pay the A.P. for quotations of more than four words.
Throughout Hansell’s posts there is a noticeable lack of criticism towards the A.P., or even recognition that this is a two sided issue. In his third post, this source left a comment basically retracting all the original material. More
NightBlogger
Who the hell put the “Media Bloggers Association” in charge? They don’t speak for me and they don’t decide the rules, and neither does AP. The Associated Press and corporate media reside in a Norman Rockwell-like bubble. They fail to realize that the days of media monopoly are coming to an end. Newspapers across the country are cutting staff and have seen a steady circulation decline year after year. More and more people flock to the web for unfiltered information and ignore network news. Citizen Journalism is here to stay; media consolidation is an endangered species. If the AP had the slightest sensitivity and foresight to future trends, they would have implemented a Creative Commons license approach to their content to maintain readership and authority in an age of horizontal communication. Now, because of their journalistic megalomania, they’ll lose both. This event should serve as a warning to the rest of the media consolidated world: get with the program or die a slow and agonizing death.
This kind of journalistic megalomania brings me back to the news networks’ impudent and arrogant reaction to the Military Analyst fiasco and Scott Mcclellan’s indictmentof mainstream media’s shameful reporting of events leading up to the invasion of Iraq. As Bill Maher was exiled from network kingdom for speaking his mind, the rest of the media’s complicit court jesters served as nothing short of shameful stenographers for the Pentagon. And still, they make excuses for themselves.
from Digital Journal
For example, Markos Moulitsas, founder of one of the largest liberal websites online called the Daily Kos, is going head to head with them hoping they will take this to court. Kos as he is known, quoted 120 words from an AP article and then states, “Hey AP — that’s 120 words. Have your lawyers call my lawyers.”
Lots of blogs are calling for boycotts of AP content. Not me. I’m going to keep using it. I will copy and paste as many words as I feel necessary to make my points and that I feel are within bounds of copyright law (and remember, I’ve got a JD and specialized in media law, so I know the rules pretty well). And I will keep doing so if I get an AP takedown notice (which I will make a big public show of ignoring). And then, either the AP — an organization famous for taking its members work without credit — will either back down and shut the hell up, or we’ll have a judge resolve the easiest question of law in the history of copyright jurisprudence.
Enter Michelle Malkin, a popular conservative website, has been quoted extensively by the AP, who never bothered to link to her original pieces, nor paid her a dime for the usage.
Patterico’s Pontifications has been quoted extensively by the AP as of late…. with no payment and in another post he gives people one more option for fighting back against the AP, to use their quotes, within the bounds of the law’s fair use policy, and just do not link to them at all, he says.
Don’t refuse to quote them.
Just don’t link them.
There’s no law that says you have to link what you quote. Just use a quote that fits within fair use, do your commentary, and deny them the link.
In a front-page article headlined “Is McCain Like Bush? It Depends on the Issue,” the New York Times (6/17/08) managed to locate “striking differences” between Sen. John McCain and George W. Bush on several issues—in spite of contradictory evidence reported in the very same article about the two politicians’ overwhelming similarities on these very issues.
In the article, reporter Elisabeth Bumiller writes that “on the environment, American diplomacy and nuclear proliferation, Mr. McCain has strikingly different views from Mr. Bush.” Yet Bumiller offers little evidence for these supposedly striking differences. In fact, on the environment, she points out that while McCain has called for limits on greenhouse gas emissions, he “has a mixed record on the environment in the Senate — he has missed votes on toughening fuel economy standards and has opposed tax breaks meant to encourage alternative energy.”
Meanwhile, despite Bumiller’s claim about McCain and Bush’s “strikingly different views” on diplomacy, an accompanying chart includes “Diplomacy with Iran and Syria” as an area where Bush and McCain “mostly agree. ” As the chart observed, “Like the president, Mr. McCain has ruled out direct talks with Iran and Syria for now. Mr. McCain supported Mr. Bush when he likened those who would negotiate with ‘terrorists and radicals’ to appeasers of the Nazis, a remark widely interpreted as a rebuke to Senator Barack Obama.” More
David North and David Walsh
The treatment of Russert’s demise, in its own peculiar fashion, speaks more eloquently about the state of American journalism and the milieu of which he was a part than it does about Russert. No doubt there is shock over the abruptness and unexpectedness of his death, for it is a troubling reminder to the social elite that success, celebrity and immense amounts of money do not bestow immortality, or even, necessarily, a long life.
In the end, after all, Russert was a celebrity, little more than that. Was he an important or insightful journalist? Or a serious political thinker? There is no evidence to support such claims. In spite of his lengthy tenure as anchor of a major news program (he was the longest-serving moderator of “Meet the Press”), it is not possible to link Russert’s name to a significant journalistic work or even an instance of acute political analysis. On the contrary. He was a typical representative of what passes for journalism in the United States’ corporate-controlled media: conformist and philistine in his views, a purveyor of received wisdom who had no doubts whatever about the values and legitimacy of the political establishment. More
NEW YORK (AP) — Americans dissatisfied with political sound bites are turning to the Internet for a more complete picture, a new study finds. In a report Sunday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project said that nearly 30 percent of adults have used the Internet to read or watch unfiltered campaign material - footage of debates, position papers, announcements and transcripts of speeches.
“They want to see the full-blown campaign event. They want to read the speech from beginning to end,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew group. “It’s a push back from the sound-bite culture.” Google Inc.’s YouTube and other video sites have become more popular. Thirty-five percent of adults have watched a political video online during the primary season, compared with 13 percent during the entire 2004 presidential race. Read More
Rupert Murdoch of News Corp / Fox News Admits Manipulating the News for Agenda - Admits he supported the Bush Agenda in Iraq - He is part of the Bilderberg group.
Bill Moyers charged an audience of more than 3,500 at the National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis. Moyers said the work of the media reform movement has “challenged the stranglehold of mega-media corporations over our press” and fostered “alternative and independent sources of news and information that people can trust.”
We had the military analyst story by the NYTimes, then the plethora of defensive reactions by those thin-skinned pundits like Couric, Brian Williams, and Chris Matthews, all defending themselves against McClellan’s criticisms of the “liberal media” and how they acted as “deferential, complicit enablers” of the administration’s “propaganda” leading up to the Iraq war. Where are they Now that we’re inches from a war in Iran?
mediachannel
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, struck a glum note when asked about the possibility of preemptively striking Iran’s nuclear facilities. “I actually am very hopeful that we don’t get into a position where we have to get into a conflict,” Mullen responded, according to Reuters. “It would be a very significant challenge for the United States right now to get into a third conflict in that part of the world.”
But on May 20, testifying before the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, Mullen sounded far more combative. Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the US designated a terrorist organization in 2007, is “directly jeopardiz[ing]” peace in Iraq, said Mullen, according to the Associated Press (AP). And then: “Restraint in our response does not signal lack of resolve or capability to defend ourselves against threats.”
The AP report on Mullen’s congressional testimony didn’t note his change in rhetoric. Neither did the New York Times, which made only passing reference to Mullen’s testimony. (The Times story, which focused on the Jerusalem Post’s claim that the US plans to attack Iran this year, was buried on A13.) And the May 21 Washington Post didn’t mention Mullen’s testimony at all. More
Photo shht
YouTomb is a website created by MIT Free Culture (a student organization in MIT) that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. We all know that there is a very large amount of videos currently uploaded in YouTube that violates copyright laws. Some of them we never got to see because they have been taken down almost instantly after hitting the YouTube pages while some are taken down after gaining popularity and the original content owner decides to pull the plug.
YouTomb catalogs most of the popular videos which are already taken down. If you are thinking that you can watch the videos in YouTomb then you are mistaken, screen shots of the video and information about the takedown is as close as you can get to the buried videos. If that is the case then you may be wondering what the point is. Ever since YouTube decided to automate its takedown process for copyrighted audios and videos, MIT Free Culture became interested on how the YouTube takedown algorithm works. The goal of this project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm. Basically, anyone can file a DMCA takedown notification at any time that cause YouTube to immediately remove alleged infringing content. If the algorithm makes a mistake then this will usually cause inconvenience to the person submitting the video and the users of YouTube. More
Photo powerbooktrance Jack Shafer Slate
In 1993, novelist Michael Crichton riled the news business with a Wired magazine essay titled “Mediasaurus,” in which he prophesied the death of the mass media—specifically the New York Times and the commercial networks. As we pass his prediction’s 15-year anniversary, I’ve got to declare advantage Crichton. Rot afflicts the newspaper industry, which is shedding staff, circulation, and revenues. It’s gotten so bad in newspaperville that some people want Google to buy the Times and run it as a charity! Evening news viewership continues to evaporate, and while the mass media aren’t going extinct tomorrow, Crichton’s original observations about the media future now ring more true than false. Ask any journalist.
So with white flag in hand, I approached Crichton to chat him up once more. Magnanimous in victory, he said he had often thought about our 2002 discussion and was happy to revisit it. (Read the uncut e-mail interview in this sidebar. More
Photo oddsock The Nation
On a Thursday in mid-May, the Senate did something that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. Led by Democrat Byron Dorgan, the senators–Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives–gave Rupert Murdoch and his fellow media moguls the sort of slap that masters of the universe don’t expect from mere mortals on Capitol Hill.
With a voice vote that confirmed the near-unanimous sentiment of senators who had heard from hundreds of thousands of Americans demanding that they act, the legislators moved to nullify an FCC attempt to permit a radical form of media consolidation: a rule change designed to permit one corporation to own daily and weekly newspapers as well as television and radio stations in the same local market. The removal of the historic bar to newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership has long been a top priority of Big Media.
They want to dramatically increase revenues by buying up major media properties in American cities, shutting down competing newsrooms and creating a one-size-fits-all local discourse that’s great for the bottom line but lousy for the communities they are supposed to serve and a nightmare for democracy. More
“While Katie Couric impressively argued that the media did fail to do its job — pointing out that the White House threatened networks which were perceived to be too critical with cutting off access to the war and that anyone who questioned the war was deemed unpatriotic and all of that “affected the level of aggressiveness that was exercised by the media” — the painfully empty-headed Charlie Gibson and the mindlessly establishment-defending Brian Williams both insisted that the media did a perfectly fine job and that they would do nothing different.”
Chris Matthews whines about how the press was manipulated by Bush and White House instead of admitting the media didn’t do their job. Journalists can’t be manipulated if they’re objectively reporting the news instead of serving as government stenographers.
SilentPatriot crooksandliars
Although Scott McClellan’s memoir is chock full of juicy bits about George Bush, Karl Rove, Scooter Libby and the myriad pre-war lies the White House force-fed America, perhaps the most important (and most overlooked) critique McClellan levels is aimed squarely at the “liberal media” and how they acted as “deferential, complicit enablers” of the administration’s “propaganda” leading up to the war. On the TODAY show this morning, Matt Lauer asked “the big three” — Charlie Gibson, Brian Williams and Katie Couric — whether they thought McClellan was accurate in his criticism of the press. Their answers are revealing to say the least. [Throw in Chris Matthews, Larry King and Wolf Blitzer; they all did the Brian Williams thing].
To her credit, Couric admits that mistakes were made and that she could have done a better job vetting the administration’s claims; although she also admitted that the White House threatened to cut off her access after she filed critical reports. But Gibson and Williams (along with, one would assume, the majority of the elite press) simply lack the ability to recognize that they were duped, and that they thus duped their viewers. Indeed, as Glenn documents in a lengthy post today:
“This is why most establishment journalists will never be convinced that they failed to do their job, no matter how much evidence is presented: because of the understanding they have of what ‘their job’ actually is.” More
LARRY NEUMEISTER
A $1 billion copyright infringement lawsuit challenging YouTube’s ability to keep copyrighted material off its popular video-sharing site threatens how hundreds of millions of people exchange all kinds of information on the Internet, YouTube owner Google Inc. said.
Google’s lawyers made the claim in papers filed in U.S. District Court in Manhattan as the company responded to Viacom Inc.’s latest lawsuit alleging that the Internet has led to “an explosion of copyright infringement” by YouTube and others.
The back-and-forth between the companies has intensified since Viacom brought its lawsuit last year, saying it was owed damages for the unauthorized viewing of its programming from MTV, Comedy Central and other networks, including such hits as “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” More
Malaysia Sun
Even when the deadly 7.9-magnitude earthquake wrecked havoc in China earlier this month, the Government censors in the country continued to monitor the Internet. “Reporters rushed to the scene, and there was general feeling that the government had lifted the restrictions on reporters,” Wired News quoted Robert Dietz, the Asia program coordinator for the U.S.-based Committee to Protect Journalists, as saying.
“But the central propaganda department never stopped handing down directives, never stopped telling people how much to report,” he added. For controlling the Internet, China uses its “Golden Shield” program which is also known in the West as the “great firewall”. More
Ben Jones
Again, it’s one of the few bastions of anti-corruption, Wikileaks, that has spilled the beans on this unsavory topic. Yesterday the site revealed a document proposing a treaty that will significantly limit the privacy and rights of Internet users, to the benefit of multimillion dollar companies.
“ACTA” is basically an attempt to criminalize the Internet, thus allowing a virtual police state to occur by the selective prosecuting of crimes. In short, it’s an international treaty, or hopes to be, that will greatly increase already draconian copyright measures, in a poor attempt to appease the copyright and patent industries.
The proposal is based on the assumption that ‘intellectual property rights’ (a term used nine times on the first page of the proposal, and 24 times over the entire 3 ½ page document) trump personal privacy, data protection, probable cause, and lots of other important principles in western democracies.
Read more
U.S. News & World Report
With a White House veto threat looming, the Senate voted Thursday night to throw out a new Federal Communications Commission rule allowing a newspaper in any of the nation’s top 20 media markets to own a TV or radio station in the same market. The measure, introduced by North Dakota Democrat Byron Dorgan, passed on a voice vote.
Earlier in the day, the Bush administration defended the FCC rule, saying it “modestly and judiciously modernizes decades-old media ownership regulations that highly restrict cross-ownership of newspapers and broadcast stations.”
Officials said President Bush’s advisers would urge him to veto the measure should it pass the House, where a companion resolution has been introduced. Read more
Rarely has one Federal Communications Commission filing provoked as much ire as this. Thirteen major broadcast and newspaper groups have filed lengthy denunciations of a public interest group’s appeal to redo the FCC’s recent relaxation of its TV station/newspaper cross-ownership ban. Their comments once again expose the enormous divide between public opinion and big media on this issue.
“The Commission should deny the petition,” insists CBS. “CBS has submitted hundreds upon hundreds of pages of comments, facts, and studies in this proceeding, all with the goal of demonstrating that the FCC’s broadcast ownership scheme is woefully and perilously out of sync with the realities of today’s media marketplace. To that end, we have urged the Commission to deregulate all of its media ownership rules.” Read more
EXPOSED: Media ignore Pentagon military analyst scandal
Glenn Greenwald/Salon.com
The Pentagon has posted to its website the roughly 8,000 pages and audio tapes it was forced to provide to the New York Times regarding its “military analyst” program. Anyone who reads through them, as I’ve now done, can only be left with one conclusion (other than being extremely impressed with David Barstow’s work in putting together this story): if this wasn’t an example of an illegal, systematic “domestic propaganda campaign” by the Pentagon, then nothing is. Read more
Moroccan authorities have decided to stop the pan-Arab satellite TV news station Al-Jazeera from broadcasting a daily news programme covering the Maghreb countries (Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria) from its studios in the Moroccan capital Rabat.
The station has been the target of a great deal of harassment in both the Maghreb and the Middle East, ranging from bureaucratic obstructiveness to the arrest of several of its correspondents. In Morocco, Al-Jazeera was able to open a regional bureau and cover the country’s parliamentary elections of September 2007 in detail. Read more
Outfoxed examines how media empires, led by Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, have been running a “race to the bottom” in television news. This film provides an in-depth look at Fox News and the dangers of ever-enlarging corporations taking control of the public’s right to know.
(Reuters) -
Newspapers seeking to compete with the Internet are likely to become free and place greater emphasis on comment and opinion in the future, a survey of the world’s editors showed on Tuesday. Some 86 percent of respondents believed newsrooms should become more integrated with digital services as two in three believe the most common form of news consumption will be via electronic media such as online or mobiles within a decade. “The evolution of the 4th Estate is no longer questions of if, when or how. Editors now know the solution: Innovate. Integrate. Or perish.” Read more
Considering the silence from ABC, CBS, and NBC since The New York Times reported on the hidden ties between media military analysts and the Pentagon, this lecture by Australian journalist, author, and film maker John Pilger, is timely. He speaks about global media consolidation, war by journalism, US military’s quest for domination/hegemony in the post 9/11 era, and false history in the guise of “objective journalism”. This was filmed in Chicago on August 7, 2007.
In Growing Up Online, FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. “The
Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults, and now it’s something that really is the province of teenagers, ” says C.J. Pascoe, a postdoctoral scholar with the University of California, Berkeley’s Digital Youth Research project. At school, teachers are trying to figure out how to reach a generation that no longer reads books or newspapers.
“We can’t possibly expect the learner of today to be engrossed by someone who speaks in a monotone voice with a piece of chalk in their hand,” one school principal says. “We almost have to be entertainers,” social studies teacher Steve Maher tells FRONTLINE. “They consume so much media. We have to cut through that cloud of information around them, cut through that media, and capture their attention.
Watch the FRONTLINE program
Like Fox and CBS, NBC News outright refused to answer any questions about the allegations [to the military analyst story] when asked by the NYT’s David Bartsow, and its prime time anchor, Brian Williams, has delivered seven broadcasts since the story was published and has not uttered a word to NBC’s viewers about any of it. Yesterday, I wrote about an entry on Williams’ blog — which he calls “The Daily Nightly” — in which Williams found the time to mock one frivolous cultural puff piece after the next in the Sunday edition of the NYT, even as he still had refused even to acknowledge the expose in last Sunday’s NYT that calls into serious question the truthfulness and reliability of his “journalism.”
After I wrote about Williams’ blog item yesterday, his blog was deluged with commenters angrily demanding to know why he has failed to address the NYT expose. In response, Williams wrote a new blog item last night in which he purports — finally — to respond to the story, and I can’t recommend highly enough that it be read by anyone wanting to understand how our establishment journalist class thinks and acts.
The essence of Williams’ response: he did absolutely nothing wrong. Nor did any of the military analysts used by NBC News. Nor did his network. These are all honest, patriotic men whose integrity is beyond reproach. Here’s but a sampling of Williams’ defense:
It’s all very reminiscent of something I read in Orwell’s book 1984:
“The process has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt…. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies-all this is indispensably necessary”.–George Orwell, 1984
The Pentagon is setting up a global network of foreign-language news websites, including an Arabic site for Iraqis, and hiring local journalists to write current events stories and other content that promote U.S. interests and counter insurgent messages. The news sites are part of a Pentagon initiative to expand “Information Operations” on the Internet. Neither the initiative nor the Iraqi site, www.Mawtani.com, has been disclosed publicly. At first glance, Mawtani.com looks like a conventional news website. Only the “about” link at the bottom of the site takes readers to a page that discloses the Pentagon sponsorship.
Read more
…the chairman of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign, Terry McAuliffe, uttered four words that the Fox News Channel would not soon forget. “Fair and balanced Fox!,” he exclaimed, noting that the network was the first to project Clinton’s Pennsylvania primary win. The next day it showed up in promotions. All of a sudden, the once-frosty relationship between Fox News and the Democratic candidates seems to have grown warmer. Clinton and Barack Obama, who steadfastly refused to attend Fox-sponsored debates last year, are now giving plenty of interviews as they court Fox’s viewers, who are largely white, conservative and undecided.
Read more
Since The NewYork Times reported on the hidden ties between media military analysts and the Pentagon on April 20, ABC, CBS, and NBC have still not mentioned the report. By contrast, during their April 28 evening news broadcasts, all three networks reported on the Vanity Fair photo of Miley Cyrus.
Read more
The average paid weekday circulation of eighteen out of twenty of the nation’s top newspapers saw a decline for the six-month period ending in March, as reported today by the Audit Bureau of Circulations. The newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years according to figures from the Newspaper Association of America. Nielsen Online’s Top 30 News Sites listed The Drudge report as number 1, followed by Daily Kos, Fox News Digital Network, CNN Digital Network and AOL News, ranking in the top 5.
While a handful of news sources dominate the web, still bottlenecking information as did print and broadcast media, the playing field’s been leveled considerably. Options for alternative news are there. All we have to do is search for them. Citizen journalism and Blogs have skyrocketed in recent years; bloggers are reshaping the information landscape into a powerful horizontal structure, empowering its readers with unbiased views on world events, politics, books, music, consumer advice and non-vested interest opinions. Powerful corporations take this exploding trend very seriously by monitoring the daily activity in the blogosphere with companies like BlogPulse who analyze, report, and track key issues, people, news stories, news sources, blog traffic flows from discussions, and conversations.
Consider the well-documented attacks on the Church of Scientology by “Anonymous,” a group of hackers and activists who’ve delighted in posting confidential documents and unflattering stories about the Chu
