The hero who couldn’t find work when he came home.
Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. (Source:AP) |
It was the summer of 1936 and Nazism was running rampant throughout pre-World War II Eastern Europe. The Olympics were coming to Berlin and Adolf Hitler viewed it as a golden opportunity to showcase his country and prove to the rest of the world that his Aryan race was superior. Not so fast, Adolf.
Twenty-two-year-old American Jesse Owens didn’t care much for Hitler’s politics—or any politics for that matter. He just wanted to show off his immense skills and represent his country to the best of his abilities. Just over a year earlier, on May 25, 1935, Owens recorded one of the more mind-boggling performances in track and field history. He broke three world records and tied another at the Big Ten Track and Field Championships in Michigan—in just 45 minutes!
Hitler viewed African-Americans as inferior and chastised the United States for stooping to use these “non-humans.” Despite the endless racial epithets and the constant presence of the red and black swastika, Owens made Hitler eat his words with four gold medals.
The first gold was in the 100 meters, where Owens edged out teammate Ralph Metcalfe in a time of 10.3 seconds.
Gold number two came in the long jump, where he fouled on his first two attempts. One was just a practice run where he continued down the runway into the pit, but German officials didn’t buy it and counted it as a jump. Top German long jumper Luz Long suggested Owens play it safe and jump a few inches before the usual take-off spot. He took his advice and qualified for the finals, where he won the gold with a leap of 26—5½. And Long was there to congratulate him. “It took a lot of courage for him to befriend me in front of Hitler,” Owens would later say. “You can melt down all the medals and cups I have and they wouldn’t be a plating on the 24-karat friendship I felt for Luz Long at that moment.”
The third gold was in the 200-meter dash, where he defeated, among others, Jackie Robinson’s older brother Mack and broke the Olympic record with a time of 20.7 seconds.
Gold number four was a controversial one—not with the Germans, but with his fellow Americans. American Jews Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller were supposed to run for the United States on the 4×100 relay team. At the last minute, they were replaced by Owens and Metcalfe and it was reported that Hitler asked U.S. officials not to embarrass him any further by having two Jews win gold in Berlin. Whether that’s true or not, the Owens-led U.S. team rolled to victory in a world record time of 39.8 seconds and Owens’ magical Olympics came to a close.
http://mediamatters.org/embed/static/clips/2015/07/16/40878/fnc-yw-20150716-herridge-isis-3
Four Marines were killed when a shooter fired on two military sites in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Fox News reported that the attacks may be connected to ISIS because an ISIS supporter purportedly discussed the shooting on Twitter before it happened. Fox host Sean Hannity repeated the false claim on his radio show.
In fact, the tweet Fox News referenced was posted well after the shooting had already occurred. Mashable editor Brian Ries first pointed out the discrepancy.
On Your World, Fox’s chief intelligence correspondent Catherine Herridge reported, “the last investigative thread I would mention at this point is that we’re taking a hard look at a Twitter account — an ISIS-linked Twitter account — that seemed to have foreknowledge of the shooting in Chattanooga. The tweet went out at 10:34 with the hashtag Chattanooga referring to American dogs and a likely shooting. This of course was about 15 minutes before the shooting took place.”
On his radio show, Fox News host Sean Hannity also referenced the inaccurate information.
HANNITY: We have a report from Robert Spencer’s Jihad Watch, that he’s put together — a timeline regarding today’s, what they are now calling a domestic terrorist act in Chattanooga. We have four Marines that have been killed. By the way, our thoughts, our prayers are with the families and the entire military community there. According to the AP, the shooting started around 10:30, 10:45. The Islamic State tweeted a warning about the attack, posted at 10:34 a.m. The ISIS tweet specifically mentioned Chattanooga, which is an obvious reference to the attack. If it’s true that ISIS was taking credit for the shooting at the exact same time, or maybe slightly before the shooting commenced, that would be pretty strong evidence of a connection. And Spencer reminds us the Islamic State has called on Muslims to murder American military personnel here in the U.S.
Fox repeated the claim in further segments on Your World, The Five, and later on Special Report.
The source of the claim is conservative blogger Pamela Geller, who has a long history of anti-Muslim activism.
Geller made the claim on Twitter and on her blog, writing, “This morning an ISIS supporter tweeted this at 10:34 am — the shooting started at 10:45.” The report cited by Hannity from Jihad Watch cites Geller as the source. Spencer has often worked with Geller on anti-Muslim projects.
But the tweet was posted at 1:34 p.m. Eastern time, not 10:34 a.m., as Geller asserted. According to news reports, the shooting “unfolded at two sites over 30 minutes” and started “around 10:45 a.m. ET.”
The image of the tweet she references on her blog appears to be stamped with the Western time zone — Twitter time stamps are based on the user’s time zone, not the time zone of the person who made the tweet.
Media Matters took this screenshot of the ISIS supporter’s Twitter account at 5:13 p.m. ET, and it shows that the post was made 4 hours previously (near the 1 o’clock hour Eastern time).
Conservative blog Weasel Zippers also made the erroneous conclusion about the tweet in a post headlined, “Islamic State Account Tweets Warnings About Chattanooga Moments Before Shooting Began.”
UPDATE: After this story was published, Fox News began to pull back on their allegation. From Special Report with Bret Baier:
BRET BAIER: Let me be careful about the tweet to the ISIS-related account. In Garland, Texas we know that it came out before the shooting, before that happened. In this case, the time stamp does say 10:34, but we don’t know if that’s Pacific time, Mountain time, Eastern time, so we have to be careful about it coming out before the shooting. Point is there are ISIS accounts that are pointing directly to this incident and touting it as one of own.
UPDATE #2: On The O’Reilly Factor, this story was addressed at least three more times.
At the top of the Factor, O’Reilly reported the “sensational” ISIS tweet story, even after admitting it wasn’t “exactly clear whether it’s accurate.”
Midway through the show, Catherine Herridge reappeared and admitted that “there are now some questions about the time stamp on one of the ISIS tweets earlier today.” When O’Reilly pressed her on how she learned about the tweet, she said, “I first saw it this afternoon, it was part of the social media that was circulating.”
At the end of the Factor, Special Report anchor Bret Baier clarified the timing of the tweet, saying that “all indications now are that it came out after the attack.” When O’Reilly asked if that meant the ISIS tweet story was “a bogus situation,” Baier replied, “yeah.”
For a very long time, Aboriginal people were given very little chance to reply to racist comments, in a media saturated by non-Indigenous voices. It was just one of the reasons behind the emergence of an Aboriginal media, which thrives in some sections, but is nonetheless, constantly endangered.
The importance of Aboriginal media was demonstrated this week, when Gameroi journalist Danny Teece Johnson posed a vital question in a piece for NITV National News.
His target was former Labor MP Gary Johns – a frequent and perhaps unwelcome commentator on Aboriginal affairs – and right-wing shock jock Andrew Bolt, known for his obsession with the identity of light-skinned Aboriginal people, and for his campaign to deprive the Stolen Generations of true justice and.
Johns had appeared on The Bolt Show, which screens on Channel Ten every Sunday morning, where he had used an already inaccurate discussion on constitutional reform to highlight his offensive, disgusting, overtly racist views about Aboriginal women.
According to Johns: “Look, a lot of poor women in this country, a large proportion of whom are Aboriginal, are used as cash cows, right? They are kept pregnant and producing children for the cash. Now, that has to stop.”
Johns prefaced his offensive comments by quoting the disproportionately high rates of family violence perpetuated against Aboriginal women. But his comments were in itself a form of emotional abuse, which is too often inflicted on Aboriginal women. Only this time, instead of coming from those closest, it came in the form of a privileged white man with a media platform that far outweighs his intellect.
And where did his comments come from? According to Aboriginal academic Prof Marcia Langton, it was from a piece in The Monthly she wrote on the new Healthy Welfare Card, a proposal of mining magnate and saviour of blackfellas, in the eyes of his public relations team at least, Andrew Twiggy Forrest.
Prof Langton took to Twitter to claim an anecdote in her piece had been misinterpreted by Johns. She had written “social security entitlements for single parents are a rich playground for male welfare ‘gamers’ across the country, regardless of ethnic or cultural background”.
“In some parts of Australia, pregnancies are not accidents – they are planned so that women can obtain additional social security payments for each child, which are then harvested by the men as a livelihood. These men move from women to women, and they call their exploits by a variety of names, including ‘bareback riding’,” she wrote.
How Johns twisted this comment into a sick tirade against Aboriginal women and their reproductive choices, continuing the historical legacy of demonising and demoralising them, is indicative of a cancerous strain of the mainstream media intent on stripping Aboriginal communities of their humanity.
It also demonstrates how men like Johns will take anything out of context in order to make sweeping, broad statements that defame Aboriginal women, in order to suit their own agenda.
The fact Prof Langton was using an anecdote of this sort to advocate for a controversial piece of welfare reform based on the recommendations of Forrest is another matter entirely.
As the national media finally turns its attention to family violence, the majority of Aboriginal women are again deprived of their voice, they become docile caricatures whom things are ‘done’ to. And there is very little right of reply. Which is where the importance of Aboriginal and independent media comes in.
Welling up in frustration, Danny Teece Johnson asked his NITV audience on Tuesday night: “Imagine if NITV had a TV show where a panel of three Aboriginal commentators spent 30 minutes every Sunday morning demonising white Australians?
“We’d be off the air quicker than you can say treaty.”
Which is true, although I think a majority of Australians find the idea of ‘treaty’ just as unpalatable.
Teece Johnson then went on to compare Johns’ comments to the recent furore over Zaky Mallah’s appearance on ABC Q&A, which sparked outrage from the Abbott government and resulted in a review.
Teece Johnson said on NITV News “so while Bolt and his all-Anglo panel take turns whacking their Aboriginal piñata, we ask whether a major commercial network should provide a platform for these types of attacks on minority groups.
“… Andrew Bolt has built a career on his inflammatory style and unashamedly conservative agenda,” he said. “But as the federal government comes down hard on ABC’s Q&A…. over questions of editorial ethics, the Bolt report remains a protected series. Surely a prime time discussion that fuels racist stereotypes and blames the victim, is potentially more damaging to Australia’s First Peoples than Zaky Mallah’s brief appearance on Q&A to Australia’s war on terror.”
For what it’s worth, Andrew Bolt doesn’t consider Gary John’s comments ‘racist’.
“Gary Johns made important points in a debate. They were in no way racist, particularly given that he specifically noted he was talking of poor people, both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal,” Bolt told NITV.
“Stop playing the outrage game and engage with the real issues that Gary is so passionate about – the deadly welfare culture that keeps poor people poor.
“Screaming ‘racist’ is pathetic.”
Which demonstrates exactly why the views of Johns and Bolt are so dangerous, and the failure by white Australia to be collectively outraged as a nation, is even more insidious.
Bolt does not understand the nature of Australian racism, because he is a frequent perpetrator of it. He claims that any attempt to recognise Aboriginal people in the constitution, is ‘racist’. He claims a constitutional guarantee for an Indigenous advisory body is ‘racist’. He claims somehow removing the racial provisions in the nation’s founding document are somehow ‘racist’.
He wouldn’t know a racist if it was staring in front of him in the mirror every morning.
Why do we let men like Bolt and Johns continue to parade their disgusting, bigoted views on mainstream television? What would happen if Aboriginal media actually had the budget to comment on the streams of rubbish produced by the pens of people like Bolt?
Instead, the Abbott government treats him like a protected species.
We even have national debates about amending legislation designed to protect minorities when he is called out on his shoddy journalism.
Aboriginal women shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed for having children, for wanting what so many other Australian women want. They should not be vilified as ‘cows’ who do not respect their children, just as all Aboriginal men shouldn’t be demonsied as child abusers.
If Aboriginal journalists produced the same nonsense as Johns and Bolt we would be rightly called out on it. But we don’t. Because we know about the consequences of words. We’ve seen it in policies like the NT intervention, how lies about Aboriginal men, women and children can lead to disgusting discriminatory policies that are condemned internationally.
Let’s hope one day people like Bolt and Johns feel the extent of those consequences too.
– See more at: https://newmatilda.com/2015/07/16/black-power-press-face-andrew-bolts-white-media-noise#sthash.Yxc4FSTt.dpuf
In the final installment of The Real News Network’s series of interviews on “Reality Asserts Itself,” Truthdig Editor-in-Chief Robert Scheer explains how an infatuation with American culture and an ignorance of American history have led to unbelievable levels of brutality and destruction.
“The arrogance of our culture is numbing,” Scheer says. “It leads to not just insensitivity, it leads to callousness. It leads to brutality. If you want to understand Abu Ghraib, if you want to understand what we did in Guantanamo, you want to understand—I mean, for me, the most compelling experience of my life was to be in Vietnam and to have witnessed, in the North particularly, the effect of the carpet bombing, the napalming—I mean, it’s just incredible—in the South, just what we were doing to a people who—now, right, you’ve got Vietnamese all over the place. You go have some pho at some restaurant, and you don’t say to yourself, oh, I had the right to napalm that person who just served me the pho, I had the right to send or pay for, as a taxpayer, and support a government that sent airplanes over there and just bombed people like that, right, who had no capacity to shoot down this airplane. Right? No military threat to our homeland. And yet we could do that.
“That’s a sickness in any culture. But when you come from the most powerful country in the world that is also the most arrogant because of its claim to be the depository of human freedom, etc., it makes for—it’s a toxic cocktail. You get drunk on the power of this culture and its military, its wealth, and you can become incredibly destructive. And we have been incredibly destructive.”
The interview is part of a 10-part series conducted after the publication of Scheer’s book, “They Know Everything About You: How Data-Collecting Corporations and Snooping Government Agencies Are Destroying Democracy.” Watch Parts One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight and Nine. (Transcript follows video).
Ross Gittins envisions a very different newsroom of the future.
There is perhaps no part of newsroom culture as ingrained as the high regard for the scoop. Journalists can be frequently wrong, biased or formulaic, but as long as they break stories, they’ll get a pass (if not praise and promotions) from most editors.
But according to Ross Gittins, journalism’s eternal search for scoops and exclusives is part of what makes the media so easy to manipulate. Those with information — such as politicians, businesses and others with an interest in good coverage — know they can dole it out in drips and drabs and ensure compliance from journalists who fear the tap being turned off.
“People complain about politicians dropping sensitive stories on Friday afternoons,” Gittins told Crikey. “When they do that, they exploit all the quirks in how journos think, which is, ‘if I can’t write a story on Friday for Saturday, and another journalist takes a bite on Sunday, I can’t touch it on Monday’. That’s madness.
“A decent, strong, confident editor would say: ‘You play games like that, and I will go out of my way to defeat your efforts to manipulate me and my news outlet’. Anything else is teaching politicians how to manipulate us. At the moment, we have a system where it’s very easy for spin doctors to play the media against each other, and take advantage of our hangups about timeliness and exclusiveness.”
Gittins, the SMH’s long-serving economics editor, is on something of a media tour these days. He’s spruiking his new book (Gittins: A life among budgets, bull dust and bastardry), the final chapters of which are a battle plan for the future of his profession. His suggestions are, to your correspondent’s eye anyway, highly logical, but they go fiercely against the grain of many of the news-gathering instincts that have served newsrooms well for decades.
The loss of classified advertising means newspapers have been forced to conduct large redundancy rounds, the end result of which has been fewer people trying to work more productively — doing more with less. Gittins says the real solution for the loss of advertising revenue should be doing less with less. As well as disrupting the media business model, the internet has also opened up opportunities for readers to read more widely. So, Gittins asks, why should newspapers work so hard to cover everything, instead of focusing on their core specialities?
His model, he freely admits, would probably need fewer journalists than are currently employed by Australia’s quality print media (by which he means the Fairfax metro papers, as well as The Australian Financial Review and The Australian). “Newspapers will be a lot smaller than they are now,” he says when asked how small newsrooms can get. His book has come out at a time when Fairfax and others are widely believed to be gearing up for another redundancy round.
Newspapers, Gittins says, can survive at least for a time by exploiting the “last monopoly” — that is, local, deep coverage of their city and state government.
In Sydney, for example, the SMH competes with only The Daily Telegraph for comprehensive, detailed coverage of local roads, schools, health systems and law and order. “Local news is our last great strength,” Gittins said, and so naturally newspapers should focus on it. A lot of other things can be jettisoned. Foreign correspondents, for example, make little sense at a time when readers can just as easily read The New York Times or The Guardian. And “news” — meaning snappy, short snippets of the latest happenings — can be covered by simply pulling copy from wire services. It might not be as good as what can be done in-house, but it’s usually good enough.
“Gittins says scoops bring traffic, but he’s sceptical of whether being the first to break stories is what encourages people to pay up.”
“Most journalism is about reporting the news. We try to get exclusives, and try to write our stories better than the people down the road, but most of the time, we report news. The big thing that’s changing is that you can’t make money simply reporting the news — it’s ubiquitous,” he said. A genuine scoop is very quickly picked up by other outlets, which can do so entirely legally so long as they don’t directly lift copy and say who first reported it, Gittins says. As news has become commodified, it’s hard to make money off it, so newspapers should stop trying.
With news covered off, and far fewer general news reporters employed, the quality press should focus on explaining, in depth, what developments in a city mean. Not in the sense of answering the traditional journalistic questions of what, who, how and when, but the more complex questions of why something happened, what the background to it is, where it might be going, whether or why it matters, and whether anything should be done about it.
“I think there’ll be a lot fewer journalists, but they’ll be a lot more specialised, and they’ll be reasonably well-paid, because there’ll be some degree of competition for the services of the best specialists, who have good sources to tap to find out what things mean,” Gittins said.
“I think it’s also likely they’ll get much more research assistance. A very well-versed person in a particular area can’t possibly do everything that it would be good to do. So you give them a researcher who digs out a lot of the facts and figures. There’s a tiny bit of that going on already, but I think it’s the obvious way to go. And the simple commercial fact is that researchers don’t get paid as well as a really senior journalist.”
This might mean a very different class of people become journalists. “At the moment we just hire BAs, maybe with a few law degrees. We don’t grab people with specialist knowledge — those with backgrounds in business, medicine, economics … who are much better placed to make sense of developments. It amazes me we don’t do that. I’ve been predicting and expecting papers to do more of that for 40 years. But I think it will happen.”
And once those people get there, they can focus on in-depth, explanatory journalism, and genuine investigations. But few “scoops”. The aim for the quality press should be paid subscriptions and interest from wealthy readers (to be sold to high-end advertisers). Gittins says scoops bring traffic, but he’s sceptical of whether being the first to break stories is what encourages people to pay up.
“I think it suits every journalist from the top editor to the newest trainee to believe that [scoops bring subscriptions],” Gittins said. “But if there is strong research evidence showing that’s what the market wants, what the customers want, and that’s what they’re prepared to pay for, I haven’t seen it or heard about it. My guess is that editors don’t want to do market research testing that proposition because that would shake one of the fundamental drivers of the journalistic profession, which is that being first and getting exclusives is the meaning of life.
“When we have genuine scoops that bring to public attention things the public needs to know and wouldn’t know without us, that is a genuine scoop and a very virtuous act. But that’s a tiny proportion of all the things labeled as ‘exclusive’. Usually, and to a huge extent, these exclusives are things that have suited some vested interest, usually politicians or lobbyists. By focusing so much on scoops and exclusives, the media is playing right into their hands.”
From David Gregory to Andrew Ross Sorkin to David Brooks, the ranks of Washington’s hottest new club continues to swell. Call it Journalists Against Journalism — a group of reporters and pundits who are outraged that whistle-blowers and news organizations are colluding to expose illegal government surveillance. To this club, the best journalism is not the kind that challenges power or even merely sheds light on the inner workings of government; it is about protecting power and keeping the lights off.
Before today, this club could be seen as a collection of individuals. But not anymore, thanks to the hard-to-believe house editorial of the Washington Post titled “Plugging the Leaks in the Edward Snowden Case.” Inveighing against the disclosures of NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the paper wrote that “the first U.S. priority should be to prevent Mr. Snowden from leaking information” and then fretted that Snowden “is reported to have stolen many more documents, encrypted copies of which may have been given to allies such as the WikiLeaks organization.”
What’s so utterly revealing about this editorial is not merely that it reads like hard-boiled talking points given to politicians by their surveillance-industry campaign donors. No, what sets this Washington Post editorial apart — what vaults it into the annals of history — is how it is essentially railing on the Washington Post’s own source and own journalism.
Yes, that’s right, the Post was one of two news organizations that Snowden originally contacted and that subsequently began breaking the NSA stories. That means the Washington Post editorial represents the paper’s higher-ups issuing a jeremiad against their own news-generating source and, by extension, the reporters who helped bring his leak into the public sphere.
Such an unprecedented move exposes the intensity of the paper’s — and the larger establishment media’s — ideological antipathy to journalism. Simply put, the Post’s higher-ups are apparently so ideologically committed to subservience and to the national security state that they felt the need to take the extraordinary step of publicly reprimanding their own source and their own newsroom for the alleged crime of committing journalism. Indeed, their concern is not that Snowden and journalists might be muzzled, but that they might not be before they break any more news.
As overused as Watergate analogies are, one is particularly apt in this case because of the paper in question. And that analogy should be obvious: Today’s editorial is the equivalent of the paper issuing an editorial in 1972 not demanding more information from President Nixon, but instead insisting the Nixon administration’s first “priority should be to prevent Deep Throat from leaking information” and worrying that Deep Throat “is reported to have more information” that could soon be broken by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
At one level, this is all downright hilarious. But at another level, it isn’t because it potentially intensifies a larger chilling effect on investigative journalism that is happening throughout the media. After all, even though there is theoretically a divide between editorial boards and newsrooms, the former is known to speak for the decision makers at a newspaper. And here we have one of the biggest set of media decision-makers saying to reporters at the Post — and all those reporters elsewhere, who hope one day to work at the Post — that cultivating sources and working with whistle-blowers is not something that will necessarily be rewarded.
In fact, it says quite the opposite: that it won’t be rewarded, and it will more likely be frowned upon. You can bet every reporter who reads that editorial will understand that message, and many will unfortunately take it to heart.
David Sirota is a senior writer for the International Business Times
By Sophie McAdam / trueactivist.com
A poll in 2012 showed that trust in the mainstream media is increasing, which should worry all of us who value truth, integrity and press freedom.
However, a recently released analysis by PunditFact revealed that out of every statement made by a Fox News host or guest, over half of them were completely false. What’s more, only 8% percent could even be considered “completely true.”
But for anyone who regularly tunes into the conservative news show, such revelation is nothing new. PunditFact only confirmed what many have been aware of for a while now: Fox News lies – like, a lot.
But keep in mind it’s not just Fox that tends to weave more tales than truth…
Why? Here are 10 disturbing things everyone needs to know about the global media giants who control our supply of information, wielding immense power over the people- and even over the government.
What´s the purpose of the mainstream media? Saying that the press exists to inform, educate or entertain is like saying Apple corporation´s primary function is to make technology which will enrich our lives. Actually, the mass media industry is the same as any other in a capitalist society: it exists to make profit.Medialens, a British campaigning site which critiques mainstream (or corporate) journalism, quoted business journalist Marjorie Kelly as saying that all corporations, including those dealing with media, exist only to maximize returns to their shareholders. This is, she said, ´the law of the land…universally accepted as a kind of divine, unchallengeable truth´. Without pleasing shareholders and a board of directors, mass media enterprises simply would not exist. And once you understand this, you´ll never watch the news in the same way again.
So how does the pursuit of profit affect the news we consume? Media corporations make the vast majority (typically around 75%) of their profit from advertising, meaning it´s advertisers themselves that dictate content- not journalists, and certainly not consumers. Imagine you are editor of a successful newspaper or TV channel with high circulation or viewing figures. You attract revenue from big brands and multinational corporations such as BP, Monsanto and UAE airlines. How could you then tackle important topics such as climate change, GM food or disastrous oil spills in a way that is both honest to your audience and favorable to your clients? The simple answer is you can´t. This might explain why Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times- sponsored by Goldman Sachs- is so keen to defend the crooked corporation. Andrew Marr, a political correspondent for the BBC, sums up the dilemma in his autobiography: ´The biggest question is whether advertising limits and reshapes the news agenda. It does, of course. It’s hard to make the sums add up when you are kicking the people who write the cheques.´ Enough said…
The monopolization of the press (fewer individuals or organizations controlling increasing shares of the mass media) is growing year by year, and this is a grave danger to press ethics and diversity. Media mogul Rupert Murdoch´s neo-liberal personal politics are reflected in his 175 newspapers and endorsed by pundits (see Fox news) on the 123 TV channels he owns in the USA alone. Anyone who isn´t worried by this one man´s view of the world being consumed by millions of people across the globe- from the USA to the UK, New Zealand to Asia, Europe to Australia- isn´t thinking hard enough about the consequences. It´s a grotesquely all-encompassing monopoly, leaving no doubt that Murdoch is one of the most powerful men in the world. But as the News International phone hacking scandal showed, he´s certainly not the most honorable or ethical. Neither is Alexander Lebedev, a former KGB spy and politician who bought British newspaper The Independent in 2010. With Lebedev´s fingers in so many pies (the billionaire oligarch is into everything from investment banking to airlines), can we really expect news coverage from this once well-respected publication to continue in the same vein? Obviously not: the paper had always carried a banner on its front page declaring itself ´free from party political bias, free from proprietorial influence´, but interestingly this was dropped in September 2011.
Aside from the obvious, one of the most disturbing facts to emerge from Murdoch´s News International phone hacking scandal (background information here ) was the exposure of shady connections between top government officials and press tycoons. During the scandal, and throughout the subsequent Levesoninquiry into British press ethics (or lack of them), we learned of secret meetings, threats by Murdoch to politicians who didn´t do as he wanted, and that Prime Minister David Cameron has a very close friendship with The Sun´s then editor-in-chief (and CEO of News International) Rebekah Brooks. How can journalists do their job of holding politicians to account when they are vacationing together or rubbing shoulders at private dinner parties? Clearly, they don´t intend to. But the support works both ways- Cameron´s government tried to help Murdoch´s son win a bid for BSkyB, while bizarrely, warmongering ex Prime Minister Tony Blair is godfather to Murdoch´s daughter Grace. As well as ensuring an overwhelming bias in news coverage and election campaigns, flooding newspapers with cheap and easy articles from unquestioned government sources, and gagging writers from criticizing those in power, these secret connections also account for much of the corporate media´s incessant peddling of the patriotism lie– especially in the lead-up to attacks on other countries. Here´s an interesting analysis of The New York Times´s coverage of the current Syria situation for example, demonstrating how corporate journalists are failing to reflect public feeling on the issue of a full-scale attack on Assad by the US and its allies.
You could be forgiven for assuming that the most interesting part of Edward Snowden´s status as a whistleblower was his plane ride from Hong Kong to Russia, or his lengthy stint waiting in Moscow airport for someone- anyone– to offer him asylum. Because with the exception of The Guardian who published the leaks (read them in full here), the media has generally preferred not to focus on Snowden´s damning revelations about freedom and tyranny, but rather on banal trivia – his personality and background, whether his girlfriend misses him, whether he is actually a Chinese spy, and ahhh, didn´t he remind us all of Where´s Waldo as he flitted across the globe as a wanted fugitive? The same could be said of Bradley Manning´s gender re-assignment, which conveniently overshadowed the enormous injustice of his sentence. And what of Julian Assange? His profile on the globally-respected BBC is dedicated almost entirely to a subtle smearing of character, rather than detailing Wikileaks´s profound impact on our view of the world. In every case, the principal stories are forgotten as our attention, lost in a sea of trivia, is expertly diverted from the real issues at hand: those which invariably, the government wants us to forget.
´Check your sources, check your facts´ are golden rules in journalism 101, but you wouldn´t guess that from reading the mainstream press or watching corporate TV channels. At the time of writing, Obama is beating the war drums over Syria. Following accusations by the US and Britain that Assad was responsible for a nerve gas attack on his own civilians last month, most mainstream newspapers- like the afore-mentioned New York Times– have failed to demand evidence or call for restraint on a full-scale attack. But there are several good reasons why journalists should question the official story. Firstly, British right-wing newspaperThe Daily Mail actually ran a news piece back in January this year, publishing leaked emails from a British arms company showing the US was planning a false flag chemical attack on Syria´s civilians. They would then blame it on Assad to gain public support for a subsequent full-scale invasion. The article was hastily deleted but a cached version still exists. Other recent evidence lends support to the unthinkable. It has emerged that the chemicals used to make the nerve gas were indeed shipped from Britain, and German intelligence insists Assad was not responsible for the chemical attack. Meanwhile, a hacktivist has come forward with alleged evidence of US intelligence agencies´ involvement in the massacre (download it for yourself here ), with a growing body of evidence suggesting this vile plot was hatched by Western powers. Never overlook the corporate media´s ties to big business and big government before accepting what you are told- because if journalism is dead, you have a right and a duty to ask your own questions.
Michael Grunwald, senior national correspondent of Time, tweeted that he ´can´t wait to write a defense of the drone that takes out Julian Assange.´ Salon writer David Sirota rightly points out the irony of this: ´Here we have a reporter expressing excitement at the prospect of the government executing the publisher of information that became the basis for some of the most important journalism in the last decade.´ Sirota goes on to note various examples of what he calls the ´Journalists against Journalism club´, and gives several examples of how The Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald has been attacked by the corporate press for publishing Snowden´s leaks. The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin called for Greenwald’s arrest, while NBC’s David Gregory´s declared that Greenwald has ´aided and abetted Snowden´. As for the question of whether journalists can indeed be outspoken, Sirota accurately notes that it all depends on whether their opinions serve or challenge the status quo, and goes on to list the hypocrisy of Greenwald´s critics in depth: ´Grunwald has saber-rattling opinions that proudly support the government’s drone strikes and surveillance. Sorkin’s opinions promote Wall Street’s interests. (The Washington Post´s David) Broder had opinions that supported, among other things, the government’s corporate-serving “free” trade agenda. (The Washington Post´s Bob) Woodward has opinions backing an ever-bigger Pentagon budget that enriches defense contractors. (The Atlantic´s Jeffrey) Goldberg promotes the Military-Industrial Complex’s generally pro-war opinions. (The New York Times´s Thomas) Friedman is all of them combined, promoting both “free” trade and “suck on this” militarism. Because these voices loyally promote the unstated assumptions that serve the power structure and that dominate American politics, all of their particular opinions aren’t even typically portrayed as opinions; they are usually portrayed as noncontroversial objectivity.
It´s sad but true: bad news really does sell more newspapers. But why? Are we really so pessimistic? Do we relish the suffering of others? Are we secretly glad that something terrible happened to someone else, not us? Reading the corporate press as an alien visiting Earth you might assume so. Generally, news coverage is sensationalist and depressing as hell, with so many pages dedicated to murder, rape and pedophilia and yet none to the billions of good deeds and amazingly inspirational movements taking place every minute of every day all over the planet. But the reasons we consume bad news are perfectly logical. In times of harmony and peace, people simply don´t feel the need to educate themselves as much as they do in times of crises. That´s good news for anyone beginning to despair that humans are apathetic, hateful and dumb, and it could even be argued that this sobering and simple fact is a great incentive for the mass media industry to do something worthwhile. They could start offering the positive and hopeful angle for a change. They could use dark periods of increased public interest to convey a message of peace and justice. They could reflect humanity´s desire for solutions and our urgent concerns for the environment. They could act as the voice of a global population who has had enough of violence and lies to campaign for transparency, equality, freedom, truth, and real democracy. Would that sell newspapers? I think so. They could even hold a few politicians to account on behalf of the people, wouldn´t that be something? But for the foreseeable future, it´s likely the corporate press will just distract our attention with another picture of Rhianna´s butt, another rumor about Justin Bieber´s coke habit, or another article about Kim Kardashian (who is she again?) wearing perspex heels with swollen ankles while pregnant. Who cares about the missing $21 trillion, what was she thinking?
Have you read George Orwell´s classic novel 1984 yet? It´s become a clichéd reference in today´s dystopia, that´s true, but with good reason. There are many- too many- parallels between Orwell´s dark imaginary future and our current reality, but one important part of his vision concerned language. Orwell coined the word ´Newspeak´ to describe a simplistic version of the English language with the aim of limiting free thought on issues that would challenge the status quo (creativity, peace, and individualism for example). The concept of Newspeak includes what Orwell called ´DoubleThink´- how language is made ambiguous or even inverted to convey the opposite of what is true. In his book, the Ministry of War is known as the Ministry of Love, for example, while the Ministry of Truth deals with propaganda and entertainment. Sound familiar yet? Another book that delves into this topic deeper is Unspeak, a must-read for anyone interested in language and power and specifically how words are distorted for political ends. Terms such as ´peace keeping missiles´, ´extremists´ and ´no-fly zones´, weapons being referred to as ´assets´, or misleading business euphemisms such as ´downsizing´ for redundancy and ´sunset´ for termination- these, and hundreds of other examples, demonstrate how powerful language can be. In a world of growing corporate media monopolization, those who wield this power can manipulate words and therefore public reaction, to encourage compliance, uphold the status quo, or provoke fear.
The only press that is currently free (at least for now) is the independent publication with no corporate advertisers, board of directors, shareholders or CEOs. Details of how the state has redefined journalism are noted here and are mentioned in #7, but the best recent example would be the government´s treatment of The Guardian over its publication of the Snowden leaks. As a side note, it´s possible this paper plays us as well as any other- The Guardian Media Group isn´t small fry, after all. But on the other hand- bearing in mind points 1 to 9- why should we find it hard to believe that after the NSA files were published, editor Alan Rusbridge was told by the powers that be ´you´ve had your fun, now return the files´, that government officials stormed his newsroom and smashed up hard drives, or that Greenwald´s partner David Miranda was detained for 9 hours in a London airport under the Terrorism Act as he delivered documents related to the columnist´s story? Journalism, Alan Rusbridge lamented, ´may be facing a kind of existential threat.´ As CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather wrote: ‘We have few princes and earls today, but we surely have their modern-day equivalents in the very wealthy who seek to manage the news, make unsavory facts disappear and elect representatives who are in service to their own economic and social agenda… The “free press” is no longer a check on power. It has instead become part of the power apparatus itself.’
Not everyone has equal rights to education. Guess which gender is the victim of unequal access to education? The same that is over two times more likely to be sexually abused or burnt as a senior citizen, one third of whose members will experience some form of abuse or violence in their lifetime, the same one that has to fight every day just for equal rights.
Sex is coming. I apologize for boring everyone with yet another serious news piece, this time about the empowerment of women and the right of girls to an equal education. By now I would have lost the attention of over 98 per cent of readers, who would have zapped onto an advertisement for a bikini-clad maiden, clicked on a pic of a fast car or scrolled down to the lower sections hoping to find a snap of a topless model.
I mean let’s have a quick look through the dailies, shall we? Sky News is talking about a dog’s poo glowing orange, in the printed press there are multiple stories about a new phenomenon, the “competitive eater”, namely someone who consumes vast amounts of food within a few minutes, racing against a clock gobbling down a five-food-long sandwich before puking publicly in a bucket, while 700 million people are starving to death. One or two serious publications highlight issues such as child abuse (commendably) and true, there are stories about climate change, the water crisis in California but then the most read are the ones about a new (revolting-looking) pizza, some girl called Esther Dolezal and the hit counters don’t lie.
That’s why I started the first paragraph with the words “sex is coming”. What a caddish, unorthodox way of getting the readers to stay on course and read about something serious: equal rights to education and responsible reporting and now that you’ve started you may as well finish.
So as we pat ourselves on the back and congratulate ourselves on having overcome many of the world’s main diseases (for the time being), on having very few children down coal mines, on getting the vote for the woman, even though many still say “I will ask my husband to see who we are voting for”, let us ask ourselves whether everything is really so rosy.
How can it be when girls, in the year 2015, continue to have unequal access to education, the fundamental building blocks of the future career, the foundations which define to a great extent who a person is to become and where a person is to go? So let us congratulate ourselves on the statistic that in one third of countries access for girls to elementary education is unequal when compared with access for boys, let us congratulate ourselves on the fact that the statistic is worse (nearly half the countries) when we speak about lower secondary education.
In recent years, there have been attacks against schools for advocating girls’ education. Where? Why in Afghanistan, of course. Probably Pakistan as well. Maybe Yemen? According to the UNO, these attacks have been perpetrated in at least seventy countries, seven zero. The violence was not the result of the girls being instructed, it was the result of fear of social change once the girls become educated women.
And what does that mean? The latest report drawn up by experts in the UNO and working with the organization, Statistics on Women, states clearly that the well-being and education of a country’s female population is the best indicator of its prospects for peace and development. I repeat, the well-being and education of a country’s female population is the best indicator of its prospects for peace and development.
In conclusion, we have nothing to congratulate ourselves on. Any progress we make is ephemeral because the lobbies have decided that the money has to be controlled by mega-corporations which are engaged in the area of banking, weaponry, pharmaceutical products catering for public health calamities, once they have taken hold of course (watch MERS-CoV), and claiming the world’s energy resources as their own before selling them to us at inflated prices. They may as well start selling air.
And who is to blame for this? The guy whose first act of the day on leaving home is to walk to the newspaper kiosk, grab a tabloid, open it at page three and say “Cor! Look at those!” on seeing a half-clad student who bore her breasts to help pay for her studies, or the “newspaper” that carries such nonsense? Forgive me, dear reader, for speaking about serious issues.
Timothy Bancroft-Hinchey
– See more at: http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/17-06-2015/130998-responsible_reporting-0/#sthash.AHeawx1k.dpuf
http://mediamatters.org/embed/static/clips/2015/06/10/40346/fnc-ff-20150610-ramadan
Fox News is outraged that the U.S. Embassy in Indonesia — where over 87% of residents are Muslim — moved their annual Fourth of July celebration “out of respect” for those observing Ramadan in the country, claiming that they’re just being “overly sensitive” to Islam and using the event to claim the United States is “leading from behind” on foreign policy.
On June 4, the United States Embassy in Indonesia celebrated the Fourth of July after Ambassador Robert Blake moved up the celebration one month “in order to respect the upcoming Ramadan month,” according to The Jakarta Post.
During the June 10 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends host Elisabeth Hasselbeck and guest Jim Hanson criticized the embassy’s decision to move up the Independence Day celebration, blasting them for being “overly sensitive to Islamic sensibilities.” Citing the decision as evidence that the Obama administration has “lost its way,” Hanson asserted that the U.S. is “the exceptional nation” and “should act like it. That’s not being rude or insensitive to other people, that’s just what you should do.” Hasselbeck agreed, suggesting that this is another example of the administration “leading from behind”:
Hanson argued that “Indonesians are hardly the most extreme Muslims,” but Fox’s outrage ignores that Indonesia has the highest population of Muslim residents in the world. According to the Pew Research Center, 87.2% of the population in the country identifies as Muslim — meaning the large majority of the country would be fasting in observance of Ramadan during the celebration had it not been moved.
olddogthoughts 
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