Saturday, Dec 20th
Last update10:11:42 AM GMT
Journalism Glance
As almost everyone knows by now, various major daily newspaper published, on July 10, a photograph of four Iranian missiles streaking heavenward; then Little Green Footballs (significantly, a blog and not a daily newspaper) provided evidence that the photograph had been faked.
And if they are evidence, don’t we have to know that the evidence is reliable, that it can be trusted?
For years it has been a joke that news in the United States is terrible: obsessed with trivia and celebrity; fronted by Botox bimbos; forever interviewing citizens about some artefact of small-town life when a major news story is breaking elsewhere.
It's not the absolute dearth of real news that is the problem, however. It's the fact that the news that is presented isn't news but mindless, misleading gossip.
So where do you get your news while living in the US? News-starved Americans usually hold up National Public Radio, NPR, as the best option. But with interlude music fresh from the 1920s and a twee, kitchen-table-chat approach, this is news wrapped in a tea cosy.
On July 18, 2008 The New York Times published an article by Israeli-Jewish historian, Professor Benny Morris, advocating an Israeli nuclear-genocidal attack on Iran with the likelihood of killing 70 million Iranians 12 times the number of Jewish victims in the Nazi holocaust.
The New York Times provides a certain respectability to mass murder, which Morris' views otherwise would not possess if say, they were published in the neo-conservative weeklies or monthlies. The fact that the NYT considers the prospect of an Israeli mass extermination of millions of Iranians part of the policy debate in the Middle East reveals the degree to which Zionofascism has infected the 'higher' cultural and journalist circles of the United States. Truth to say, this is the logical outgrowth of the Times public endorsement of Israel 's economic blockade to starve 1.4 million Palestinians in Gaza ; the Times' cover-up of Israeli-Zionist-AIPAC influence in launching the US invasion of Iraq leading to over one million murdered Iraqi citizens.
Stanford Law professor Lawrence Lessig details government plans to overhaul and restrict the Internet.
Lawrence Lessig, a respected Law Professor from Stanford University told an audience at this years Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in Half Moon Bay, California, that "There’s going to be an i-9/11 event" which will act as a catalyst for a radical reworking of the law pertaining to the internet.
Lessig also revealed that he had learned, during a dinner with former government Counter Terrorism Czar Richard Clarke, that there is already in existence a cyber equivalent of the Patriot Act, an "i-Patriot Act" if you will, and that the Justice Department is waiting for a cyber terrorism event in order to implement its provisions.
Perhaps these reporters have never actually opened their eyes in their own country. While China's censorship of news websites is deplorable, the U.S. is engaged in a far more restrictive, freedom-crush brand of censorship in the health industry: The censorship of truthful descriptions of health products by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
No retraction or correction notice --- unethically, in our opinion --- was given for WaPo's odd swaperoo. The Friday WaPo story we linked to that day --- which was dated "Friday, August 1, 2008; 5:46 PM" and reported that that the purported "Anthrax Killer", Bruce E. Ivins "had no access to dry, powdered anthrax" at his U.S. Army bioweapons lab in Fort Detrick, MD --- was simply swapped out with a completely different story in its place on the matter, dated Saturday, August 2, 2008. The same URL was used for both stories, but the Saturday story didn't have the bulk of the reporting which quoted named experts and colleagues questioning Ivins' ability to even carry out such an attack.
Ron Fournier, a former White House correspondent, national political writer and online political editor for The Associated Press, has been named chief of the AP's Washington bureau.
TVNL Comment: Why is the image on the AP press release that of military personnel?
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