Journalism Glance
Sean Penn has defended Hugo Chávez as a model democrat and said those who call him a dictator should be jailed. The Oscar-winning actor and political activist accused the US media of smearing Venezuela's socialist president and called for journalists to be punished.
"Every day, this elected leader is called a dictator here, and we just accept it, and accept it. And this is mainstream media. There should be a bar by which one goes to prison for these kinds of lies." Penn, who has visited Chávez in Caracas, said Venezuela's poor majority had willingly embraced his leftist revolution, but that this view was concealed from Americans.
"We are hypnotised by the media. Who do you know here who's gone through 14 of the most transparent elections on the globe, and has been elected democratically, as Hugo Chávez?"
Sean Penn: Journalists who call Hugo Chávez a dictator should be jailed
Welcome To The World’s First Murdochracy
What is a murdochracy? It is where the fealty and augmentation of Murdoch’s editors and managers are undisguised, an inspiration to his choir on seven continents, where even his competitors sing along and wise politicians heed the Murdochism: “What’ll it be? A headline a day or a bucket of shit a day?”
U.S. media replays Iraq fiasco on Iran
Major U.S. news organizations, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, are engaged in a replay of the kind of slanted coverage that paved the way to war in Iraq, only this time regarding Iran.
The treatment of Iran’s election last June, the depictions of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the alarm over Iran’s nuclear program all parallel the one-sided coverage that the U.S. news media directed toward Iraqi Saddam Hussein and Iraq’s alleged WMD program before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.
In both cases, the leading U.S. news outlets took sides; they cast developments in the “enemy” Muslim nation in the harshest possible light; they treated the leaders as unrelentingly evil; they exaggerated the threats (and potential threats) posed by the country’s weaponry, real and imagined.
Americans Prefer Online News After TV, Report Find
New insight into how Americans get news shows most of us are not loyal to one news organization and consume information from a myriad of platforms, be it TV, the Internet, local newspapers, radio, and national newspapers. According to the authors of the study, Pew Research Center's Pew Internet & American Life Project, the Internet is now the third most popular news platform, behind local television news and national television news.
"People use their social networks and social networking technology to filter, assess, and react to news," the Pew report says. A full 75 percent of online news consumers get news stories delivered via e-mail or social networking, and 52 percent of those people will share news stories with others online.
Leaked ACTA draft reveals plans for internet clampdown
The US, Europe and other countries including New Zealand are secretly drawing up rules designed to crack down on copyright abuse on the internet, in part by making ISPs liable for illegal content, according to a copy of part of the confidential draft agreement that was seen by the IDG News Service.
Cuba's aid to Haiti ignored by the media
"It is striking that there has been virtually no mention in the media of the fact that Cuba had several hundred health personnel on the ground before any other country," said David Sanders, a professor of public health from Western Cape University in South Africa.
The Cuban team coordinator in Haiti, Dr Carlos Alberto Garcia, says the Cuban doctors, nurses and other health personnel have been working non-stop, day and night, with operating rooms open 18 hours a day.
The Lobbying-Media Complex
While lobbyists and PR flacks have long tried to spin the press, the launch of Fox News and MSNBC in 1996 and the Clinton impeachment saga that followed helped create the caldron of twenty-four-hour political analysis that so many influence peddlers call home.
Since then, guests with serious conflicts of interest have popped up with alarming regularity on every network. Just examine their presence in coverage of the economic crash and the healthcare reform debate, two recent issues that have engendered massive cable coverage.
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