Omitted media

82b7f244a4b771c73a0b601ec5″>Associated Press – right out of the Secretary of Defence’s own mouth. Newsweek picked up this – breaking – story but virtually no one else. Compare that with thousands upon thousands of articles throughout the Western press just parroting American officials’ statements, including President Trump’s when he found it appropriate in April 2017 to attack Syria with cruise missiles to teach “the regime” and its “dictator” a lesson for its alleged attack on Khan Seykhoun, stating that “there can be no dispute that Syria used banned chemical weapons.” Some of us thought it was a bit too early because there could be no dispute either about another, much more important, thing – namely that, at the time, there could not have been any evidence collected or analysed. TFF and its Associates has stated a few things about the media coverage of Syria in general and the chemical attacks in particular...

  – Pope Francis sent out a message that should have created headlines everywhere. It advocated a journalism for peace. The discussion of fake news has spread around the globe and there are all kinds of proposals on how to detect fake news and combat it – as the truly civilizational threat it is. Indeed one could day that fake is the debate 2017-2018. A quick DuckDuckGo search – no, I don’t use Google Search anymore because of its tracking and blatant censorship – reveals that a few leading US media took up the story, so did a series of religious media, of course, but the amazing statement didn’t obtain much attention. Objectively speaking, that is particularly strange since any editor and journalist should be professionally observant of a statement on their own profession from the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. But what can surprise you anymore...

  By Jan Oberg • Message sent to Facebook in response to its blocking attempt and change of algorithm, both serious restricting my freedom of communication.   Blocking personal messages to friends Yesterday it was my birthday and roughly 500 people sent me thoughts, pictures and good wishes – also for the international peace issues I work for every day. Today I send a thank-you message to everyone of them (as replies to their messages on my profile, not through Messenger of on their profiles) – with a link to the new platform outside Facebook that we have felt was necessary to build – for the reasons I explain below. Here is the text of that standard message: “Thank you so much for remembering me ! 🙂 May I urge you to visit TFF’s new peace portal and magazine: / – look around and use Get the News on top...

Glenn Greenwald On Democracy Now, January 2, 2018 • Facebook is being accused of censoring Palestinian activists who protest the Israeli occupation. This comes as Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked reportedly said in December that Tel Aviv had submitted 158 requests to Facebook over the previous four months asking it to remove content it deemed “incitement,” and said Facebook had granted 95 percent of the requests. We speak with Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald about his new report for The Intercept headlined “Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments.” Via democracynow.org     JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, we’re spending the hour with Glenn Greenwald. His new report for The Intercept is about Facebook censorship. It’s titled “Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments.” In it, he writes that Facebook representatives met with the Israeli government...

  • What is now unfolding in both North America and Western Europe is fake social activism, controlled and funded by the corporate establishment. This manipulated process precludes the formation of a real mass movement against war, racism and social injustice.   The anti-war movement is dead. The war on Syria is tagged as “a civil war”. The war on Yemen is also portrayed as a civil war.  While the bombing is by Saudi Arabia, the insidious role of the US is downplayed or casually ignored. “The US is not directly involved so there is no need for us to wage an anti-war campaign”. (paraphrase) In turn, dissent has become compartmentalized. Separate “issue oriented” protest movements (e.g. environment, anti-globalization, peace, women’s rights, LGBT) are encouraged and generously funded as opposed to a cohesive mass movement against global capitalism. This mosaic was already prevalent in the counter G7 summits and People’s Summits of the 1990s...

Introduction This is a collection of biographical sketches showing people whose wise voices from the past can help to guide us today. All of the women and men, brief glimpses of whose lives and ideas are portrayed here, gave a high place to compassion. None of them was a slave to greed. We need their voices today! A Lower-Upper Middle Class Family and Education Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was the great-grandson of Charles Blair, a wealthy country gentleman, and Lady Mary Fane, daughter of the Earl of Westmorland. Over the generations that separated Eric Blair from his great-grandparents, some of the gentility remained but most of the wealth disappeared, and he described his family as being “lower-upper middle class”. Eric Blair was born in British India where his father was working, but when he was one year old his mother took the...

December 12, 2017, marks the anniversary of the liberation – the West called it fall – of Aleppo in Syria. What happened is conveniently forgotten today by the West. Some of us can’t and won’t forget what was both world, regional and local history. Important for Syria, for the West and for the future world order – for at least 5 reasons:   1. The Western mainstream media’s deceptive – constructed, ignorant, or both – narrative since 2011 was debunked. Perspectives that media and political decision-makers deliberately omitted (remember omitted stuff is more important than fake): • History and the colonialists’ role in Syria. • The immense complexity of the Syrian society. • Syria as a 7000 year-old civilisation and as end of the Silk Road. • The decades-long conflicts underlying the violence, since CIA’s coup in 1949. • The Western-driven regime change policies years since before 2011. • Other...

Via ethicalmarkets.com • In the USA, founders feared concentration of power in government.  They installed separation of powers in the US Constitution—-buttressed by freedom of the press.  The very first Amendment reinforced this free media which became known as “the Fourth Branch” of US democracy. Today, two new threats have emerged:   1):  political interference with press freedom by intimidation, propaganda from both foreign powers and domestic interest groups, advertising, planting fake news, trolling online and mainstream media using “bots” and big data analytics. Crusading media experts’ reports, such as Jacques Ellul’s classic Propaganda (1968), Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message (1964) on the power of advertising and television and Ben Bagdikian’s The Media Monopoly (1983) all warned us of the accelerating merger and consolidation of control of US and global media.  Today the 50 owners of 90% of  US media described by Bagdikian is down to six!  The takeover of media ownership now controls most...

Via wikileaks.org By Julian Assange • In this extract from his new book When Google Met Wikileaks, WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange describes the special relationship between Google, Hillary Clinton and the State Department — and what that means for the future of the internet. WikiLeaks readers can obtain a 20 percent discount on the cover price when ordering from the OR Books website by using the coupon code “WIKILEAKS”. Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk, about three hours’ drive northeast of London. The crackdown against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like an eternity. It was hard to get my attention. But when my colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted...

Via jonathan-cook.net November 22, 2017 By Jonathan Cook • Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free and open internet is rapidly coming to an end in the west? In China and other autocratic regimes, leaders have simply bent the internet to their will, censoring content that threatens their rule. But in the “democratic” west, it is being done differently. The state does not have to interfere directly – it outsources its dirty work to corporations. As soon as next month, the net could become the exclusive plaything of the biggest such corporations, determined to squeeze as much profit as possible out of bandwidth. Meanwhile, the tools to help us engage in critical thinking, dissent and social mobilisation will be taken away as “net neutrality” becomes a historical footnote, a teething phase, in the “maturing” of the internet. Can anyone still doubt that access to a relatively free...

By Jan Oberg • Oberg comments on the tit-for-tat policies of the U.S. and Russia when they force each other to register their media as “foreign agents”. It is a weak U.S. that cannot accept that it no longer has a virtual monopoly on shaping perceptions of the world. Just find your role and accept that there are other angles and priorities than those you’ve dominated the global information structure with fore decades. As we have said before, censorship is not the way – educating people to sense the difference between real and fake news and look for omitted news, angles and facts – in contrast – is a solution.

Russia Today so you should of course not trust it but somehow this video and text and the man in it seems quite factual, not fake and obviously not omitted. It documents that Eric Emerson Schmidt, the Executive Chairman of Alphabet – an American multinational conglomerate that owns a lot and among them Google – is working on “de-ranking” alleged propaganda outlets such as Russia Today, RT – the world’s third largest television network – and Sputnik. Who is Eric Schmidt? On the Wikipedia link you can read more about Mr. Schmidt, one of the richest person on earth, an advocate of net neutrality, a corporate manager and owner of a lot, a collector of modern art, etc. And you can read about his heavy involvement with Hillary Clinton’s recent campaign and the Obama administration and about Schmidt’s involvement with Pentagon, too. Eric Emerson Schmidt’s name is associated with the...