Mass Media

ABC Admits Error But Doesn’t Correct Bias

July 12, 2014 Peter Hart, www.fair.org Educate! Israel, Journalism, Mass Media, Palestine

On July 8, ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer gave viewers the latest on the violence in the Gaza Strip–by stressing the threat to Israel: We take you overseas now to the rockets raining down on Israel…. And here an Israeli family trying to salvage what they can, one woman standing speechless among the ruins. One problem: Neither of those images is an "Israeli family." Both photos are from the Gaza Strip, and capture the aftermath of Israeli attacks. I pointed this out to ABC World News on Twitter yesterday: .@ABCWorldNews Your anchor misidentified a photo of people suffering in Gaza as "an Israeli family." Correction? http://t.co/nEGygbIRHj — Peter Hart (@peterfhart) July 9, 2014 Thankfully, many others caught the same newscast, including Yousef Munayyer of the Palestine Center, which posted a video of ABC's embarrassing mistake. Journalist Rania Khalek wrote a piece for the Electronic Intifada (7/9/14) as well. So an honest mistake, right? That's one way of looking at it. But there's a pretty well-established pattern of corporate media trying to paint the conflict as between equals, a type of false balance that treats the threats to Israeli lives and Palestinians lives as similar.

The US Media Cannot Be Trusted On Israel-Palestine

July 11, 2014 Charlotte Silver, www.aljazeera.com Educate! Israel, Journalism, Mass Media, Palestine

Since Israel's brutal 21-day assault on Gaza in the winter of '08-'09 (dubbed by Israeli politicians as Operation Cast Lead) that led to over 1,400 Palestinian deaths - of which 930 were civilians including many women and children - followed by its deadly raid on a civilian Turkish ship headed to Gaza in June 2010 that resulted in nine casualties and dozens injured, many Palestinians as well as their advocates in the West have spoken of a significant "sea change" in the western media's once hegemonic support for Israel. However, since this latest military operation began - already claiming more than 30 lives and injuring hundreds - evidence of any changing tide has been scant. The New York Times and the BBC have always been reliable mouthpieces for Israel's line of justification for bombarding Palestinians, and they have not failed the Zionist state in this instance. However, their so-called liberal counterparts have scarcely hit a different tone.

German Protests Against The Federal Reserve And For Peace

June 30, 2014 WeAreChange, www.youtube.com Resist! Federal Reserve, Germany, Mass Media, Peace

In this video Luke Rudkowski talks to Ken Jebsen a former main stream media journalist in Germany and Lars Maehrholz a skydiver that became the main organizer of the massive Monday peace vigils in Berlin. The protests in Berlin are not a left or right movement but a social media movement against the establishment that have grown to over a 100 cities and 3 countries. They started with Lars 2 1/2 months ago and with the help of Ken fm have grown to a very large number which made the main stream media in Berlin slander and attack the movement. For those interested in the historic background: The German Monday Demonstrations (Montagsdemonstrationen) helped to bring down the repressive surveillance state GDR regime 25 years ago: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monday_....

Media Ignored Protest At World Cup Opening

June 16, 2014 Alan White, www.buzzfeed.com Resist! Brazil, Mass Media, Protest, world cup

According to Brazilian news site G1, a protest took place at the opening ceremony, but the TV cameras ignored it. The site reports that Werá Jeguaka Mirim was one of three children who released white doves just before the kick-off of the first game, between Brazil and Croatia. As he left the field, he opened a banner calling for new boundaries for Brazil’s indigenous lands. Pictures of the boy’s protest were posted on the Comissão Guarani Yvyrupa (CGY) Facebook page. The Guarani are an indigenous people from South America’s interior. The CGY describes itself as “an autonomous political organization that brings together the Guarani people of the villages located in the South and Southeast of Brazil in the common struggle for land.” There is currently a new law called PEC 215 being debated in the Brazilian legislature. It would transfer the power to demarcate their ancestral lands from the federal government to Congress, and has caused protests.

Media Doesn’t Cover Poverty, Despite Record Poverty

June 4, 2014 Steve Rendall, Emily Kaufmann and Sara Qureshi , www.fair.org Educate! GOP, Inequality, Mass Media, Poverty

With poverty at 15 percent, inequality rising and Republican politicians talking about addressing the problem by cutting federal programs that help the poor, one might expect poverty to occupy a solid spot on media agendas. This isn’t the case, according to a new FAIR study of nightly network news shows. The study looked at ABC World News, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News for a 14-month period (1/1/13– 2/28/14) in the wake of the 2012 elections. FAIR examined stories in the Nexis news database that included and discussed the terms “poverty,” “low income,” “food stamps,” “welfare” or “homeless.” (Stories that included only passing mentions of these terms, without even a minimal discussion, were excluded.) A total of 23 such segments were found, three of which were “rip and read” briefs, anchor-read stories containing no sources. The other pieces included a total of 54 sources, less than half of which—22—were people personally affected by poverty. That means, on average, someone affected by poverty appeared on any nightly news show only once every 20 days.

USTR Told: Help Workers Not Just Corporations

June 4, 2014 Dave Johnson, www.ourfuture.org Resist! Congress, Corporatism, Mass Media, TPP

Last week 153 Democratic members of Congress – three-fourths of the Democrats in the House – signed a letter to U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) Michael Froman demanding that trade negotiators focus first on protecting the rights of working people to organize before asking Congress to approve the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Currently the negotiations appear to be focused primarily on increasing corporate and investor rights – even as lethal violence continues against union organizers in Colombia following the trade agreement approved by Congress and signed by President Obama in 2011. Past trade agreements have cost millions of American jobs and increased our country’s trade deficit while helping to dramatically increase income inequality.

The Limits Of MSNBC

May 27, 2014 David Swanson, www.davidswanson.org Educate! Journalism, Mass Media, Wars and Militarism

Michael Arria's new book Medium Blue: The Politics of MSNBC is a nice summary of how a liberal corporate or liberal partisan television network falls short -- something of an update from Jeff Cohen's Cable News Confidential and the bad old days when MSNBC dumped Cohen and Phil Donahue for being anti-war. It turns out the good new days of MSNBC-gone-liberal are seriously flawed as well. The flaws do a disservice to a large section of the population, many majority perspectives, and large numbers of people whose opinions would improve if their information did. Yes, of course, it's nice to have a 24/7 channel that everybody receives making fun of Republicans. But the Comedy Channel (Comedy Central) does that too. The comedy fake news shows also make fun of Democrats and anyone else they can identify; they build cynicism and disgust without offering any better course of action than a mass Rally-for-Nothing to give people too smart to attend other rallies a chance to rally ironically. But what does MSNBC offer? Beyond its mocking of Republicans, it gives a significant pass to Democrats, resulting in dishonest presentations of facts and a proposed course of action that's doomed to fail.

Is The Mainstream Media Dying?

May 24, 2014 Michael Snyder, www.activistpost.com Educate! Mass Media, Media

Ratings at CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have all been plummeting in recent years, and newspaper ad revenues are about a third of what they were back in the year 2000. So is the mainstream media dying? Despite what you may have heard, the mainstream media is certainly not completely dead just yet. The average American watches approximately 153 hours of television a month, and as I pointed out in a previous article, about 90 percent of the "information" that is endlessly pumped into our heads through our televisions is controlled by just six gigantic media corporations. However, there are a whole host of signs that things are changing - especially when it comes to news. More Americans than ever are losing faith in the establishment-controlled media and are seeking out alternative sources of information. Is this a trend that the big media companies are going to be able to reverse at some point?

Is NY Times Trying To Lead US Into War?

April 24, 2014 Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com Educate! Mass Media, Russia, Ukraine

Exclusive: After starting a propaganda stampede – with a lead story about photos of Russian troops purportedly in Ukraine – the New York Times admits the pictures really don’t prove much, and one photo was labeled as snapped in Russia when it was really taken in Ukraine, writes Robert Parry. Two days after the New York Times led its editions with a one-sided article about photos supposedly proving that Russian special forces were behind the popular uprisings in eastern Ukraine, the Times published what you might call a modified, limited retraction. Buried deep inside the Wednesday editions (page 9 in my paper), the article by Michael R. Gordon and Andrew E. Kramer – two of the three authors from the earlier story – has this curious beginning: “A collection of photographs that Ukraine says shows the presence of Russian forces in the eastern part of the country, and which the United States cited as evidence of Russian involvement, has come under scrutiny.”

CBS: Another Corporate Media Outlet Aligns With The CIA

April 17, 2014 Danny Well, www.rinf.com Educate! CIA, Edward Snowden, Mass Media

CBS News has hired former acting director of the CIA, Mike Morell, as their senior security correspondent. Morell has been a frequent guest on CBS’ Face the Nation, where he has disseminated CIA propaganda and misleading information, raising questions about CBS’ journalistic integrity. Morell also works for Beacon Global Strategies, a DC consulting firm which peddles its government connections to defense contractors, raising even more questions about his role at CBS. On December 23, 2013, Morell appeared on Face the Nation, where he promoted the government’s campaign to prosecute Edward Snowden. On this day Morell stated: “He violated the trust put in him by the United States government. He has committed a crime, in my view. You know a whistleblower doesn’t run. A whistleblower does not disclose information that has nothing to do with what he says his cause is which is the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.

Pulitzer: Publishing NSA Leaks Was A Public Service

April 15, 2014 Michael Calderone, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Edward Snowden, Mass Media

The Guardian and The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service on Monday for their coverage of the National Security Agency, reporting which followed last year's bombshell disclosures from former contractor Edward Snowden. The Pulitzer board's decision to honor NSA coverage, and specifically to single out the reporting as a public service, makes a strong statement about the importance of the worldwide surveillance revelations, especially given that Snowden has been charged under the Espionage Act for leaking the classified documents. The Pulitzer committee praised the Post's "authoritative and insightful reports" as helping "the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security."

The Media Still Cannot Say The Word “Torture”

April 14, 2014 Jack Mirkinson, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Mass Media, Torture

In recent weeks, the controversy surrounding the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA interrogations during the Bush administration has been a major media story. From Sen. Dianne Feinstein's dramatic allegation that the CIA had spied on Senate aides as they prepared the report, to the leaking of most of the study's major findings, journalists have had no shortage of new material to sift through. What's not new is the media's persistent dance around the word at the heart of the entire story: "torture." Much has been made in the past decade or so about the news business' sudden conversion to euphemism when it came to describing techniques that had been previously universally recognized as torture. One study, for instance, found that major outlets abruptly stopped defining waterboarding as torture when the Bush administration began using it.

The Media Won’t Tell You: Eight Reasons To Revolt

April 7, 2014 Paul Buchheit, www.alternet.org Resist! Inequality, Mass Media

he following are all relevant, fact-based issues, the "hard news" stories that the media has a responsibility to report. But the business-oriented press generally avoids them. 1. U.S. Wealth Up $34 Trillion Since Recession. 93% of You Got Almost None of It. That's an average of $100,000 for every American. But the people who already own most of the stocks took almost all of it. For them, the average gain was well over a million dollars -- tax-free as long as they don't cash it in. Details available here. 2. Eight Rich Americans Made More Than 3.6 Million Minimum Wage Workers A recent report stated that no full-time minimum wage worker in the U.S. can afford a one-bedroom or two-bedroom rental at fair market rent.

Whose Propaganda? Lessons From Media Reaction To Liz Wahl Resignation

April 3, 2014 Steve Horn, www.whowhatwhy.com Educate! Mass Media, Propaganda, Russia

Liz Wahl’s on-air resignation as a Russia Today news anchor came amid a perfect geopolitical storm. She announced her departure from RT just as tensions escalated between the U.S. and Russia over Ukraine. “I cannot be part of a network funded by the Russian government that whitewashes the actions of Putin,” said the 28-year-old American reporter and show host, who worked at RT America for two-and-a-half years. “I am proud to be an American and believe in disseminating the truth. And that is why, after this newscast, I am resigning.” Wahl’s camera-ready goodbye quickly went viral on the web, and made her a U.S. mainstream-media darling. Most commentators saw the Wahl resignation as a casebook study in how government-sponsored journalism inevitably degenerates into rank propaganda. Yet few have examined what this incident reveals about the mind-set of America’s corporate-owned media.

Venezuela: When Corrections Are The Most Important News

April 2, 2014 Mark Weisbrot, www.cepr.net Educate! Mass Media, Protest, Venezuela

It says something about overall media coverage of a subject when some of the most important news appears in the form of corrections. On February 26, the New York Times corrected a false statement in a news report that had incorrectly referred to Globovision as “[t]he only television station that regularly broadcast voices critical of the government.” This was false, and it was easy to show that other major television stations regularly broadcast opposition views. Today the Times corrected an even more important false statement that appeared in an op-ed by jailed Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo López. López had written that “more than 30” protesters had been killed in Venezuela in the recent protests. In fact the “more than 30” number cited by López includes all protest-related deaths, a fraction of whom appear to be protesters. Although it has not been mentioned in major media coverage, a compilation of press reports indicates that the protesters themselves – not security forces – are responsible for about half of the deaths.

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