Media

Julie Hollar March 29, 2022 A lot less, particularly when they’re victims of the US As US news media covered the first shocking weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some media observers—like FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 2/28/22)—have noted their impressions of how coverage differed from wars past, particularly in terms of a new focus on the impact on civilians. To quantify and deepen these observations, FAIR studied the first week of coverage of the Ukraine war (2/24–3/2/22) on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. We used the Nexis news database to count both sources (whose voices get to be heard?) and segments (what angles are covered?) about Ukraine during the study period. Comparing this coverage to that of other conflicts reveals both a familiar reliance on US officials to frame events, as well as a newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians – when those civilians...

Maidan protests in 2014 in Kiev. GENYA SAVILOV / AFP – Getty Images Bryce Greene March 29, 2022 The history of U.S. involvement in Ukraine is rarely analyzed by corporate media. The desire to open Ukraine to finance capital, the 2014 U.S. backed coup, and the drive to expand NATO all played a role in creating the current crisis. As tensions began to rise over Ukraine, US media produced a stream of articles attempting to explain the situation with headlines like “Ukraine Explained” (New York Times, 12/8/21 ) and “What You Need to Know About Tensions Between Ukraine and Russia” (Washington Post, 11/26/21 ). Sidebars would have notes that tried to provide context for the current headlines. But to truly understand this crisis, you would need to know much more than what these articles offered. These “explainer” pieces are emblematic of Ukraine coverage in the rest of corporate media, which almost universally gave a pro-Western...

Wikimedia map of NATO expansion since 1949 created by Patrickneil.  Bryce Greene March 18, 2022 Originally posted on FAIR.org on March 4, 2022 Many governments and media figures are rightly condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin’s attack on Ukraine as an act of aggression and a violation of international law. But in his first speech about the invasion, on February 24, US President Joe Biden also called the invasion “unprovoked.” It’s a word that has been echoed repeatedly across the media ecosystem. “Putin’s forces entered Ukraine’s second-largest city on the fourth day of the unprovoked invasion,” Axios (2/27/22) reported; “Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine entered its second week Friday,” said CNBC (3/4/22). Vox (3/1/22) wrote of “Putin’s decision to launch an unprovoked and unnecessary war with the second-largest country in Europe.” The “unprovoked” descriptor obscures a long history of provocative behavior from the United States in regards to Ukraine. This history is important to understanding how we got here, and what...

Edward Curtin February 21, 2022 Two of the greatest speeches ever delivered by an American president bookend this extraordinary documentary film. It opens with President John F. Kennedy giving the commencement speech at American University on June 10, 1963 and it closes with his civil rights speech to the American people the following day. It is a deft artistic touch that suggests the brevity of JFK’s heroic efforts for world peace and domestic racial equality and justice before he was assassinated in a public execution in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. Originally published at Off-Guardian.org on January 23, 2022 In the former anti-war speech, he called for the end to the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the halt to the arms race, and the abolishment of war and its weapons, especially nuclear. He said: What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana...

Cartoon printed by The Japan Times Alex Lo February 18, 2022 Endless negative news stories and opinion pieces about how bad China is in almost every way are bound to shape public perception. Almost nine in 10 Americans (89 per cent) consider China a competitor or enemy, rather than a partner, according to the authoritative Pew Research. Commenting, Winston Lord, a US ambassador to China in the 1980s, said Beijing only had itself to blame. “The shift is caused by China’s actions under Xi [Jinping], the repression at home, the more aggressive approach abroad and intrusions in societies, including our own,” Lord said. “It has turned off not only Americans, but also Europeans and Australians.” Originally posted on “Pearls & Irritations – John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal” on February 9, 2022 Lord was once one of Henry Kissinger’s bright young proteges. There is no dispute that he understands China-US relations...

Paul Jay Paul Jay video interview with Lawrence Wilkinson February 3, 2022 When it comes to international affairs and peace, it’s never been more important than today to find and follow truly free and intellectual alternatives to the Western mainstream media. You cannot understand the world we live in through their more or less constructed narratives, homogenisation, omissions and -increasingly often – pure propaganda and lies. One such must-follow source is TheAnalysis.News by Paul Jay and Sharemini Peries. Please read about it and its noble aims here. And subscribe to its Newsletter. The Analysis.News recently brought us a 40 minutes conversation between Paul Jay and Larry Wilkerson which explores the dangerous madness, the immense risks, the human vanity and military/nuclear interest dominance behind the world’s risk crisis, here with a focus on the tension between NATO and Russia concerning Ukraine (and more). We highly recommend this conversation – for media...

By Jan Oberg December 29, 2021 The Summit slogan by Biden was: ”Democracy doesn’t happen by accident. We have to defend it, fight for it, strengthen it, renew it.” The first sentence is empty of meaning. The rest is confrontational – fight, be strong; someone – guess who? – threatens our democracy. And renewal was absent. With no intellectuals or other thinkers invited, the Summit was theoretically and philosophically void. The hours I browsed didn’t reveal any new concepts or visions of democracy – but instead platitudes, tired metaphors, self-congratulatory words by governments leaders on their own achievements and how they meet ”challenges.” Plus the repeated, extremely unfair, appeal to young people to fix what the present generation has so irresponsibly destroyed. A summit could be used to sum it up: Diagnosis + Prognosis + Solutions: What must we do differently in the future? It wasn’t. We learned that democracy...

Collage © Jan Oberg 2021 Fredrik Heffermehl December 9, 2021 The 2021 Nobel Peace Prize honoured press freedom and – no surprise – was welcomed by the world press. As I listened to the announcement, on October 8, an old story from the Cold War kept coming back to me: A Soviet official had been travelling in the US for a couple of weeks. As he left, he remarked to his hosts, in puzzled bewilderment “How can it be that you have such perfect control, even with a completely free press?” He was right. Society makes one huge exception from democracy and press freedom: national security. The Military-Industrial Complex is in control, thoroughly disciplined media see it as a sacred duty to keep their own nation strong and united behind the flag and the forces. Nations are governed by fear that any doubt or deviation from military orthodoxy would harm...

Jan Oberg December 7, 2021 Imagine that the Nobel Prize in Literature is given to a book publisher or papermaker and the official motivation is that publishers or papermakers are preconditions for the writer writing and being read. Roughly, this is how the Nobel Peace Committee, reasons – unreasonably. Here’s how it legitimates that its 2021 prize goes to Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov way outside the letter and spirit of Alfred Nobel’s will: “Without freedom of expression and freedom of the press, it will be difficult to successfully promote fraternity between nations, disarmament and a better world order to succeed in our time. This year’s award of the Nobel Peace Prize is therefore firmly anchored in the provisions of Alfred Nobel’s will.” See? – “without papermakers and publishers, it will be difficult to successfully write good literature and be read…” I believe my readers easily grasp just how far-fetched...

John Mcevoy November 25, 2021 Yahoo! News (9/26/21) published a bombshell report detailing the US Central Intelligence Agency’s “secret war plans against WikiLeaks,” including clandestine plots to kill or kidnap publisher Julian Assange while he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Following WikiLeaks‘ publication of the Vault 7 files in 2017—the largest leak in CIA history, which exposed how US and UK intelligence agencies could hack into household devices—the US government designated WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” (The Hill, 4/13/17), providing legal cover to target the organization as if it were an adversarial spy agency. Originally published at FAIR.org Within this context, the Donald Trump administration reportedly requested “sketches” or “options” for how to kill Assange, according to the Yahoo! expose (written by Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff), while the CIA drew up plans to kidnap him. (Assange was expelled from the embassy in 2019 and has since then been in British prison, fighting a demand that he...

Caitlin Johnstone November 26,2021 The New York Times has published a very solid investigative report on a US military coverup of a 2019 massacre in Baghuz, Syria which killed scores of civilians. This would be the second investigative report on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes by The New York Times in a matter of weeks, and if I were a more conspiracy-minded person I’d say the paper of record appears to have been infiltrated by journalists. The report contains many significant revelations, including that the US military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the US war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at...

School History November 13, 2021 Originally posted on School History Key Facts & Summary Operation Mockingbird indicates the CIA’s involvement in the manipulation of the news published in the United States and across the world. Today, one can identify such manipulation with fake news Operation Mockingbird commonly refers to the CIA’s involvement in journalism during the 1970s The CIA bribed students as well as established journalists and reporters to write a CIA version of the events Senator Frank Church established the Church Committee in order to investigate ‘government operations and potential abuses’ The CIA admitted their manipulation of mainstream media in order to change the American people’s mind and published the Family Jewels. Overview The idea of a large organisation controlling the minds and thoughts of individuals, pushing them towards a specific ideology and certain life choices, may seem as science fiction, or as an absurd conspiracy that can be...