Omitted media

Jan Oberg August 19, 2023 On August 19, 2023, it is 70 years ago that the US/CIA and others, with the assistance of their British peers, did one of its countless regime changes worldwide, namely in Iran: The U.S.- and UK-instigated, Iranian army-led overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Here is Wikipedia’s detailed account of this shameful act. And with the exception of the years under the Shah’s rule, relations between the West and Iran have been utterly conflictual ever since, and every potential for cooperation has been squandered. The US has felt its usual exceptionalist privilege to harass the country decade after decade, telling it that it will never acquire nuclear weapons, which the US itself and Israel have plenty of – and which it’s doubtful that Iran ever wanted to acquire –...

Esther Brito Ruiz & Jeff Bachman August 10, 2023 War entails suffering. How and how often that suffering is reported on in the U.S., however, is not evenhanded. Take, for example, the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen in March 2015 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The media attention afforded to the crises reveals biases that relate less to the human consequences of the conflicts than to the United States’ role and relationship with the warring parties involved. In Yemen, the U.S. is arming and supporting the Saudi-led coalition, whose airstrikes and blockades have caused immense human suffering. Meanwhile in Eastern Europe, the U.S. is arming and aiding Ukraine’s efforts by helping to counter missile strikes that have targeted civilian infrastructure and to retake occupied territories where horrific killings have taken place. As scholars who study genocide and other mass atrocities, as well as international security, we compared...

By Helmut Scheben* July 18, 2023 Mass media are often unreliable, but hardly anyone has time to check the news. If news reports later turn out to be false, they are usually already burned into the hard drive of collective memory as “historical truth”. Originally published at Zeit-Fragen After the Gulf War of 1991, it was forbidden for the media in the US to show pictures of the coffins of American soldiers killed in combat. This prohibition was lifted only in February 2009. Filming dead or wounded US soldiers were also banned, and the ban was enforced with extreme severity, especially during the Iraq war, as cameramen reported. Once, when I was looking for such footage in the vast archives of Swiss television, I found a single sequence that lasted about three seconds. An American soldier was trying to climb out of a burning tank. Three seconds out of thousands...

Just a little public relations for ourselves – Perspectives like these are now completely cancelled by Western mainstream media – MSM – US NATO mouthpieces. But we reach millions outside the West, and that is what matters for the future. Jan Oberg July 14, 2023 🔻 RT “CrossTalk” with Peter Lavelle, July 13, 2023NATO’s Epic Fall with Jan Oberg, Misty Winston, and Mike Jones. 🔻 Global Times, Beijing, July 13, 2023US-Nordic Summit sees NATO expansion, confusion and repetition 🔻 China’s Xinhua News Agency in English, July 12, 2023Three articles using quotes:Interview: NATO’s policies are gross violation of its own charter, int’l law, says Swedish expert.Roundup: NATO fails to give timetable for Ukraine membership at summit.NATO summit sparks global security concern, internal rifts remain 🔻 China’s national television, CCTV, July 12, 2023Jan Oberg: Three comments related to NATO’s Vilnius Summit新闻直播间]瑞典智库学者表示 北约自诩防御联盟 却持续扩张引发冲突Shared also by 163.com, CZTV.com, Jxnews.com.cn, Huanqui.com. 🔻 China Daily,...

Ukraine war: Lessons from the textbook of journalistic error Western journalists are all but unanimous that negotiating with Russia would equal forgiving its aggression. Nothing short of a crushing victory for Ukraine is conscionable. The risk of escalation is rarely mentioned. Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert July 3, 2023 This is from Le Monde Diplomatique a few months ago. It’s one of the most succinct and comprehensive analyses we’ve come across of the deep malaise called Western mainstream media and their coverage/promotion of NATO wars. And a scathing critique of the larger part of the so-called Left. Jan Oberg, editor Excerpt Eulogies, hugs, gushing questions: the Western press’s veneration of this president in khaki fatigues suggests media in thrall to political leaders. But that impression is misleading. Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and particularly since Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, ‘journalism’ in the United States and also in Europe has...

June 26, 2023 New York Times About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Originally published in The New York Times on Dec. 26, 1977 Not long after John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, arrived in India in 1961 to take up his new post as American Ambassador, he became aware of a curious political journal called Quest that was floating around the Asian subcontinent. The following oracle is bused on reporting by John M. Crewdson and Joseph B.Treaster. It was written by Mr. Crewdson. “It had a level of intellectual and political competence that was sub‐zero,”...

Caitlin A. Johnstone June 12, 2023 When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves. Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media. Originally published at Mronline, on May 28, 2023 A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of...

Ben Freeman, Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft June 5, 2023 Executive Summary (excerpts) “Think tanks in the United States are a go–to resource for media outlets seeking expert opinions on pressing public policy issues. But think tanks often have entrenched stances; a growing body of research has shown that their funders can influence their analysis and commentary. This influence can include censorship — both self-censorship and more direct censoring of work unfavorable to a funder — and outright pay–for–research agreements with funders. The result is an environment where the interests of the most generous funders can dominate think tank policy debates. One such debate concerns the appropriate level of U.S. military involvement in the Russian invasion of Ukraine… The analysis offers a number of key findings.  First, of the 27 think tanks whose donors could be identified, 21 received funding from the defense sector (77 percent). Unfortunately, because donor disclosure...

The citizen’s starter kit to understanding the new global information cartel Susan Schmidt, Andrew Lowenthal, Tom Wyatt, Techno Fog, and 4 others Originally published by Racket News on Substack on May 10, 2023 Introduction by Matt Taibbi On January 17, 1961, outgoing President and former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower gave one of the most consequential speeches in American history. Eisenhower for eight years had been a popular president, whose appeal drew upon a reputation as a person of great personal fortitude, who’d guided the United States to victory in an existential fight for survival in World War II. Nonetheless, as he prepared to vacate the Oval Office for handsome young John F. Kennedy, he warned the country it was now at the mercy of a power even he could not overcome.  Until World War II, America had no permanent arms manufacturing industry. Now it did, and this new...

Arie Pauil, Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas May 4, 2023 On the 20th anniversary of the US- and British-led invasion of Iraq, the New York Times continued to dedicate itself to a waffling narrative, one that writes out most of history and opts for a message of “it’s complicated” to discuss the disaster it can’t admit that it helped create. On Saturday, the Times (3/18/23) published an article on its website headlined, “20 Years After US Invasion, Iraq Is a Freer Place, but Not a Hopeful One.” The next morning, the article (under the headline “Lost Hopes Haunt Iraqis, Two Decades After Invasion”) was featured at the top-right corner of its front page—making it one of the most prominent articles in the English-speaking world that day. Originally published at FAIR on March 22, 2023 The New York Times (3/18/23) looks back on the Iraq invasion: “For many Iraqis, it is hard to appreciate the positive developments.” The article, by...

Chandran Nair March 14, 2023 The mass hysteria reflects the biases inherent in the world’s most powerful media outlets.  A key feature of mainstream Western media today is the relentless China-bashing. It is off the charts and tiring, often involving regurgitated trivia or fabricated stories with no evidence to support callous statements about the country, demonstrating a deep lack of understanding. But such stories continue to be churned out with no end in sight. Countering this in international media by offering more balanced views for a global audience is near impossible as censorship is rife. There almost seems to be a global compact to control the narrative, a propaganda war powered by today’s digital technology. Just try looking for a positive story on China any day of the week in any of the leading global media outlets. Apart from reports in January about the Lunar New Year, there will hardly be...

Caitlin Johnstone November 15, 2022 Listen to a reading of this article here So it turns out the US intelligence cartel has been working intimately with online platforms to regulate the “cognitive infrastructure” of the population. This is according to a new investigative report by The Intercept, based on documents obtained through leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, on the “retooling” of the Department of Homeland Security from an agency focused on counterterrorism to one increasingly focused on fighting “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” online. Originally published in Caitlin Johnstone’s newsletter on November 1, 2022 While the DHS’s hotly controversial “Disinformation Governance Board” was shut down in response to public outcry, the Intercept report reveals what authors Lee Fang and Ken Klippenstein describe as “an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms” in order to “curb speech it considers dangerous”: According to a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review,...