TV News LIES

Investigative journalism is hard enough in a country as small as Israel, and an intensifying onslaught against freedom of the press is endangering it even further.

Conducting a journalistic investigation is like climbing a mountain studded with bear traps. When you finally reach the top, you find the glory all too short-lived. En route you pass lawsuits, embarrassed publishers, boycotts by advertisers. You lose your friends and get threatened with prison. Sometimes you die.

Earlier today I asked whether American news outlets would do their due diligence in evaluating the content of the newly-released batch of "Climategate" emails hacked from the University of East Anglia two years ago. It didn't take long for our esteemed print outlets to disappoint.

Writing on the Washington Post's website, Juliet Eilperin quotes an email exchange that she said was about "whether the IPCC has accurately depicted the temperature rise in the lower atmosphere":

The phone hacking scandal roiling the British press has claimed a Murdoch — James Murdoch.

The son of media mogul Rupert Murdoch has resigned as head honcho of New Group Newspaper Ltd., which publishes London-based newspapers The Times and The Sunday Times, and a racy tab called The Sun, British media reported Tuesday.

Former US president George Bush and his former counterpart Tony Blair were found guilty of war crimes by the The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal which held a four day hearing in the Malaysia.

The five panel tribunal unanimously decided that Bush and Blair committed genocide and crimes against peace and humanity when they invaded Iraq in 2003 in blatant violation of international law.

Do you want to know what country produced the food you eat? Too bad, says the World Trade Organization (WTO). That’s a barrier to free trade, so you don’t get to know.

The US instituted a labeling law requiring that all foods’ country of origin be on the label; it was part of the 2008 Farm Bill. Canada and Mexico complained to the WTO, saying that it would discourage food imports. It took three years, but the WTO decided that labeling food with its country of origin is a “technical barrier to trade”.  In 1979, the US signed a treaty that includes prevention of technical barriers to trade. Of course, that term was not fully defined. It was up to the WTO to say just what it means. And they’ve done just that in regard to food—though for some inexplicable reason, meat is not included. Therefore, country of origin labeling can continue with meat.

In Seymour Hersh’s insightful book, The Samson Option, which addresses Israel’s nuclear weapons arsenal, Hersh covers John Kennedy’s fight to stop Israel’s nuclear proliferation. He writes that Kennedy was “fixated” on stopping the Jewish state’s nuclear build up.

Australian police are investigating a former senator's allegations that an executive from Rupert Murdoch's News Limited offered him favourable newspaper coverage and "a special relationship" in return for voting against government legislation.

The allegations are embarrassing for News Corp, whose ownership of 70% of Australia's newspapers has raised criticisms from within the government that Rupert Murdoch's empire has too much control over the country's media.

On a bright fall day in 2008, Scott Ely arrived at the natural gas well a few hundred feet from his home to find work strangely stilled.

His fellow employees of Cabot Oil and Gas Corp.'s drilling subsidiary were watching the only thing moving: a huge plume of gas "like Niagara Falls going upwards" buffeting the drilling rig from below, he remembered. The gas in the air was sickening.