May 2011
14 posts
Fallujah, Iraq 2004 — Misrata, Libya 2011 →
On April 20, we challenged the BBC’s Jonathan Marcus on his coverage of the war in Libya:
Hi Jonathan
I’m sure you believe your reporting is completely neutral. You write: “there seems to be a general sense that something more must be done…” to help rebels “defeat their government opponents on the ground”. You ask “But what? None of the options are quick or simple”. You then...
Prince Philip: 90 gaffes in 90 years →
“Do you still throw spears at each other?” Prince Philip shocks Aboriginal leader William Brin at the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland, 2002.
How not to answer interview questions
From a New Left Project interview with Hamid Dabashi, author of Brown Skin, White Masks:
Can you give us a brief synopsis of your main argument?
I think it should be left to my readers to find out for themselves what this book is about. Any act of writing is an act of successive and open-ended discovery, predicated on the initial impetus that places a person in front of a...
If At First You Don't Succeed — Four Decades Of... →
Richard Keeble:
Behind a wall of silence, the US and UK have been conducting over the last four decades a massive, largely secret war against Libya — often using Chad, the country lying on its southern border, as its base. The current attacks on Col. Gadafi’s troops and attempts to assassinate the Libyan leader with the US deployment of unmanned drones are best seen as part of a wide-ranging...
The Guardian Conundrum →
Craig Murray:
Two-faced doesn’t describe it. The Guardian’s compartmentalised indignation at civil liberties abuse is written on blood-smeared pages.
Is Sugar Toxic? →
But some researchers will make the case, as Cantley and Thompson do, that if something other than just being fatter is causing insulin resistance to begin with, that’s quite likely the dietary cause of many cancers. If it’s sugar that causes insulin resistance, they say, then the conclusion is hard to avoid that sugar causes cancer — some cancers, at least — radical as this may seem and despite...
Media Lens on Flat Earth News →
[Nick] Davies’s book [Flat Earth News] presented a superficial, holier than Swiss cheese analysis, as you would expect, which meant it was widely hailed as profound and strikingly honest (as a rule, genuinely radical media analysis is ignored). ‘Churnalism’, of course, is a problem – journalists are under pressure to write expanded versions of corporate and government press releases, and so on....
Ten Years Of Media Lens — Some Questions And... →
The media presents itself as a neutral window on the world. We are to believe that the view we see through the window is ‘the world as it is’. It’s ‘All the news that’s fit to print’ because ‘Comment is free but facts are sacred’. What’s to challenge? When you take a closer look at the ‘window’, you realise it’s not a window on the world at all; it’s a kind of painting of a window on the world....
The man who fooled the media →
Chris Atkins:
You go in, say ‘I’ve got a great idea. It’s about the erosion of civil liberties’ and they go ‘Ah, we’ve had a civil liberties season, we’ve had a Blair season, why don’t you do something about food?’ … If you have an Oscar-winning idea and you go to a TV commissioner they’ll tell you it’s crap and say ‘Why don’t you make something about food?’ … because that’s what they’ve...
Get Osama! Now! Or else… →
Pepe Escobar, August 30th 2001:
Officially, Musharraf has rejected his support for this latest Hollywood ploy, and has been frantically trying to convince the Americans any brutal action against Osama or his so-called “terrorist sanctuaries” will fuel a radical Islamic backlash in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia of “burn, baby, burn” proportions. It doesn’t matter that the strike would...
And what of art direction? | Readability Blog →
On the web, art direction has been shown the door. The content succumbs to the tyranny of the CMS and its allies. Not only is art direction absent in the web view, there is no room for it. The print version stands in stark contrast. The content — the copy and bold photograph — stand alone with design integrity fully intact. It is no wonder that publishers are looking away from the web — to...
U.N. Reported Only a Fraction of Civilian Deaths... →
The number of civilians killed in U.S. Special Operations Forces (SOF) raids last year was probably several times higher than the figure of 80 people cited in the U.N. report on civilian casualties in Afghanistan published last week, an IPS investigation has revealed.
The report also failed to apply the same humanitarian law standard for defining a civilian to its reporting on SOF raids...
Jonathan Cook: An Empire of Lies →
But even the Guardian, often regarded as fearless in taking on powerful interests, packaged its report in such a way as to deprive Curveball’s confession of its true value.
The facts were bled of their real significance. The presentation ensured that only the most aware readers would have understood that the US had not been duped by Curveball, but rather that the White House had exploited...
Chris Hedges: Huffington’s Plunder →
Any business owner who uses largely unpaid labor, with a handful of underpaid, nonunion employees, to build a company that is sold for a few hundred million dollars, no matter how he or she is introduced to you on the television screen, is not a liberal or a progressive. Those who take advantage of workers, whatever their outward ideological veneer, to make profits of that magnitude are charter...