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Corporate Media Is An Arm Of Power; We Must Build An Alternative

February 20, 2024 Margaret Flowers, Clearing the FOG. , , ,
In his new book, ¨Journalists and Their Shadows,¨ Patrick Lawrence describes his experience over decades as an editor and foreign correspondent of watching the media rise and fall in its ability to serve as a force to hold power accountable. Lawrence writes about the shadows, or authentic selves, that most journalists currently sacrifice in order to maintain employment in mainstream media outlets and the detrimental impact this has on public discourse. He also describes the antidote - an independent alternative media - and the current obstacles to creating a much-needed vibrant democratized media system. 

Should We Be Concerned About What ChatGPT ‘Thinks’ About Latin America?

April 22, 2023 John Perry, Council on Hemispheric Affairs. , , ,
ChatGPT is a powerful AI chatbot that is as easy to use as Google and provides more direct answers to users’ questions. Ask it anything you like, and you will receive an answer that sounds like it was written by a human, based on knowledge and writing skills gained from massive amounts of data from across the internet. Because of its growing popularity, there are already political questions about it, for example assertions that it has a left-wing bias or concerns about privacy issues, which have led to the bot being banned in Italy just this month. It is already banned in China and Russia. A search on Google reveals little or no discussion about the relevance of ChatGPT to writing or research about Latin America.

Elites Are Clueless, And So On

December 22, 2022 Editors, In These Times. , , ,
In 2005, Kurt Vonnegut wrote: Most of you, if not all of you, like me, feel inadequately educated. That is an ordinary feeling for a member of our species. One of the most brilliant human beings of all times, George Bernard Shaw said on his 75th birthday or so that at last he knew enough to become a mediocre office boy. He died in 1950, by the way, when I was 28. He is the one who said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” I turned 83 a couple weeks ago, and I must say I agree. Shaw, if he were alive today, would envy us the solid information that we have or can get about the nature of the universe, about time and space and matter, about our own bodies and brains, about the resources and vulnerabilities of our planet, about how all sorts of human beings actually talk and feel and live. This is the information revolution. We have taken it very badly so far. Information seems to be getting in the way all the time.

Free Speech Is More Complicated Than You Think

November 17, 2020 Eleanor Goldfield, Art Killing Apathy. , , ,
The truth is – words are dangerous. Words are the catalysts of all action – good or evil. To start with a cliché but solid example: words inspired millions of Germans to direct their ire towards Jews, Romani, LGBTQ and other state-labeled “degenerates.” Words inspired the Manson family to murder innocent people. Words inspired the murder of entire villages of Vietnamese, Afghan, and Iraqi civilians. Words convinced thousands of colonizers that this land was their land and that the native people were nothing but mere savages to be removed by force in the name of a pearly white Manifest Destiny.

Questions, Questions Where Are The Answers?

September 20, 2018 Ralph Nader, Nader.org , ,
In an oft-reported exchange between Gertrude Stein, an American widely known for her wisdom and glittering 1920s Parisian literary salon, and one of her earnest admirers, the admirer asked her – “What are the answers, Madame Stein?” She replied “What are the questions?” Within our media/political/corporate culture of self-censorship and taboo topics, we should restate Ms. Stein’s rejoinder—what are the questions of gravity and relevance that are chronically unasked? Here are some questions that should be asked, until answered!

Open Access Plan To Make Scientific Work Free To Read

September 9, 2018 Holly Else, Nature.com. , , ,
Research funders from France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and eight other European nations have unveiled a radical open-access initiative that could change the face of science publishing in two years — and which has instantly provoked protest from publishers. The 11 agencies, who together spend €7.6 billion (US$8.8 billion) in research grants annually, say they will mandate that, from 2020, the scientists they fund must make resulting papers free to read immediately on publication (see ‘Plan S players’).

The ‘Fake News’ Story Is Fake News

June 15, 2018 Phillip Weiss, Mondoweiss. , , ,
Almost every day on public radio or public television, I hear reports about how fake news is undermining our democracy. These high-minded reporters and anchors seem truly to believe that a feverish menace is overwhelming the minds of once-sensible people. This story is itself fake news for several obvious reasons. We’ve never had more good information than we have now; people are as well-informed as they want to be. There will always be outlets purveying lies; that is the nature of communication. And the insistence on the “fake news” issue is an effort to assign Trump’s victory not to those who brought it to us (the electorate, and the incompetence of the Clinton campaign) but on some nefarious agents.

The Information Explosion

May 18, 2018 John Scales Avery, Popular Resistance. , , ,
We need to reform our educational systems, particularly the teaching of history. As it is taught today, history is a chronicle of power struggles and war, told from a biased national standpoint. We are taught that our own country is always heroic and in the right. We urgently need to replace this indoctrination in chauvinism by a reformed view of history, where the slow development of human culture is described, giving credit to all who have contributed. When we teach history, it should not be about power struggles. It should be about how human culture was gradually built up over thousands of years by the patient work of millions of hands and minds.

The War Against Alternative Information

January 6, 2017 Rick Sterling, www.consortiumnews.com ,
By Rick Sterling for Consortium News - The U.S. government is creating a new $160 million bureaucracy to shut down information that doesn’t conform to U.S. propaganda narratives, building on the strategy that sold the bloody Syrian “regime change” war, writes Rick Sterling. The U.S. establishment is not content simply to have domination over the media narratives on critical foreign policy issues, such as Syria, Ukraine and Russia. It wants total domination. Thus we now have the “Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act” that President Obama signed into law on Dec. 23 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017, setting aside $160 million to combat any “propaganda” that challenges Official Washington’s version of reality.

The War Against Alternative Information

January 3, 2017 Rick Sterling, www.consortiumnews.com , , ,
By Rick Sterling for Consortium News - The new law mandates the U.S. Secretary of State to collaborate with the Secretary of Defense, Director of National Intelligence and other federal agencies to create a Global Engagement Center “to lead, synchronize, and coordinate efforts of the Federal Government to recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining United States national security interests.” The law directs the Center to be formed in 180 days and to share expertise among agencies and to “coordinate with allied nations.”

Monsanto Pays “Independent” GMO Researcher For Study

August 18, 2015 Cassius Methyl, www.theantimedia.org , , , ,
By Cassius Methyl in The Anti-Media - In January of 2015, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Oakland organization U.S. Right to Know requested email records between academics, scientists, and representatives of Big Agriculture. The FOIA requests were sent to 14 scientists at four public universities, requesting information on communications and email records. The FOIA findings included communications of well-known, staunch proponents of GM crops like Kevin Folta, a professor and chairman of the Horticultural Sciences Department at the University of Gainesville, who received a $25,000 grant from Monsanto. The emails reveal the funds could “be used at [his] discretion in support of [his] research and outreach projects”. About 4,600 pages of emails, among other records, were obtained from Folta.

NYPD Editing Wikipedia Entries On Their Police Brutality

March 14, 2015 Kelly Weill, www.capitalnewyork.com , , ,
Computers operating on the New York Police Department’s computer network at its 1 Police Plaza headquarters have been used to alter Wikipedia pages containing details of alleged police brutality, a review by Capital has revealed. “The matter is under internal review,” an NYPD spokeswoman, Det. Cheryl Crispin, wrote in an email to Capital after examples of the changes were presented to the NYPD. The edits and changes were linked to the NYPD through a series of Internet Protocol addresses, or IP addresses, which can be publicly tracked by various websites. (Here, for example, is one website that shows a number of IP addresses registered to the NYPD.) IP addresses can locate where a computer is when it connects to the Internet.
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