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| Taking a Closer Look at the Stories Ignored by the Corporate Media |
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Archive for the Month of June, 2005.
Viewing Media NEWS articles 1 through 37 of 37.
- As a longtime fan of both George Bushes' eccentric grasp of English, I naturally enjoyed this gem from W.: "See, in my line of work, you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda."
- To the average listener, Radio Free Ohio has all the earmarks of pirate radio. For weeks, it sounded as if amateurs had been bleeding their voices into the broadcasts of stations in Akron, Ohio, owned by Clear Channel, the corporate radio giant. But last week it came out that Radio Free Ohio was not a prank on Clear Channel but in fact a prank by Clear Channel.
- Soon, patrons of the Naperville Public Library - at least those wanting to use the Internet - will need more than a library card. They'll give a fingerprint.
- "We were set to perform The Hand That Feeds with an unmolested, straightforward image of George W. Bush as the backdrop. Apparently, the image of our president is as offensive to MTV as it is to me," Nine Inch Nails' leader Trent Reznor said in a statement posted on the band's Web site.
- So, even NPR, and PRI are running with fear, CNN, and others have long since capitulated, as has the NY Times and Washington Post—so all we have left are we few on the internet, and at some point, we’ll be shut down, and some of us will probably be “persons of interest” and possibly arrested for sedition and speaking out—as happened in Nazi Germany.
- The Pentagon war to annex Iraq as a profitable region of US capital's empire is still raging, long after the fragile pretexts for invasion have torn like tissue. The sheer brutality and colonial-style character of the occupation have unleashed a firestorm of resistance that enjoys widespread support in the Iraqi population. But not many people in the US are seeing the reality of life for Iraqis and GIs on TV news or in newspapers.
- When Google Inc.'s 19 million daily users look up a long-lost classmate, send e-mail or bounce around the Web more quickly with its new Web Accelerator, records of that activity don't go away.
- A troubling shift is underway in how lawmakers censor media in this country.
- Expressing alarm, public broadcasters and their supporters in Congress interpreted the move as an escalation of a Republican-led campaign against a perceived liberal bias in their programming. That effort was initiated by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's own chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson.
- Like Halliburton, Christ Inc. has become the latest recipient of taxpayer largesse, having won the contract to keep the media out of the news business, and to ensure that power speaks to truth, as opposed to the other way around. In recent months the escalating violence in Iraq and mounting evidence of US-run torture chambers has been dutifully ignored by the Christian News Network, a.k.a. “The Missing White Girl Network” who never miss an opportunity, these days, to provide their theo-con masters with a platform to discredit the administration's naysayers and whistleblowers.
- A study of media citations of think tanks in 2004—the 10th year of collecting such data—finds that think tanks of the right and center still predominate, despite a slight increase in citations of left-leaning think tanks.
- Users of Microsoft's new China-based Internet portal were blocked from using the words "democracy", "freedom" and "human rights" in an apparent move by the US software giant to appease Beijing. Other words that could not be used include "Taiwan independence" and "demonstration".
- Though outgoing FCC Chairman Michael Powell may find it funny to joke about a "Mercedes divide," the ever increasing gap "between those who have access to information technology and digital content and those who do not" is no laughing matter. One expert compared such high-speed Internet access inequity to "having the moderate and upper classes in IMAX theatres, while the underprivileged are still watching silent movies."
- If not deep-seated racism, what is it that makes American audiences more comfortable with Naomi Watts' blonde, freckled, blue-eyed appearance than with Nanako Matsushima's own beauty? Why would we prefer the Celtic blue eyes of Jennifer Connelly over the brown of Hitomi Kuroki? It's not enough for a film lead to be beautiful, it seems she must be white as well.
- Independent World Television will go public on June 15. The goal, as bold as it is big, is to create an alternative news and current affairs network that is, as its name implies, global in reach and free from corporate or government pressures.
- Arabic news channel Aljazeera says its new English-language service will not water down its reporting style, despite US criticism of its coverage of the fighting in Iraq. - ABC corporate executives at the network's highest levels ordered three interviews with Robert Kennedy Jr. pulled from ABC News programming.
- Investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting are examining $15,000 in payments to two Republican lobbyists last year that were not disclosed to the corporation's board. - Critics liken radio, TV spots to propaganda; agency defends use
- ABC News will now air the 'killed' Robert Kennedy Jr. interview after all. - The ideological Republicans are destroying a fine public institution. - In the event you never gave political clichés much thought, now’s the time to give it some. It might help you to understand how far into the Land of Condescension these back-slapping, bought-and-paid-for con artists try to take us. - The company insists its only motive is to help users make sense of the morass of information on the web. But some worry about the cultural influence of everything being filtered through the Google lens, particularly if it emerges as the arbiter of "truth" on the web.
- E-mail messages obtained by investigators at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting show that its chairman, Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, extensively consulted a White House official shortly before she joined the corporation about creating an ombudsman's office to monitor the balance and objectivity of public television and radio program.
- A contract between Google and the University of Michigan released publicly on Friday contains no provisions for protecting the privacy of people who will eventually be able to search the school's vast library collection over the Internet. - Yahoo! is facing a $10 million lawsuit that accuses it of cashing in on some disturbing chat rooms.
- ... are unaware that nations don't trade, corporations do....... are unaware that an 'official unemployment' of 5.8% means that 'effective unemployment' (including those who have given up looking and those working part-time, but wanting more work) is really 10%. - The newsreader reads carefully scripted and edited reports of how well we are doing in Iraq, shows Bush swaggering and chortling to a highly selected audience, gives ten second bites of some Republican senator praising his party, gives a three second summary of fighting between India and Pakistan and announces a National Day of Prayer.
- So the American government is pressuring foreign countries to censor their news. Aside from the fact that this act is the height of arrogance by the United States, it makes it exceedingly clear why so many Americans who rely on the corporate media for their news continue to be so misinformed/un-informed about the goings on in Iraq. If the American government is attempting to censor the news in foreign countries, you can imagine what they are doing at home.
- Federal prosecutors agreed Thursday to temporarily protect members of an adult industry trade group from strict new enforcement regulations. But thousands of porn sites are still fair game, and their webmasters now face hefty prison terms if they don't keep records proving that models and performers are over 18.
- A research team at Sonoma State University has recently finished conducting a network analysis of the boards of directors of the ten big media organizations in the US. The team determined that only 118 people comprise the membership on the boards of director of the ten big media giants. This is a small enough group to fit in a moderate size university classroom. These 118 individuals in turn sit on the corporate boards of 288 national and international corporations. In fact, eight out of ten big media giants share common memberships on boards of directors with each other.
- The US Supreme Court has ruled that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.
- Advocating for an invasion himself, Cavuto said, "I just don't know gentlemen what you do here short of a military invasion or quarantine or any of that stuff." - Yesterday, an Indymedia server in Bristol was seized by the police. An Indymedia volunter was also arrested during the raid, the organisation said.
- In a popular shopping area of Caracas, with street musicians playing a bolero in the background, Jorge Botero is filming a promo for Latin America's most ambitious new satellite channel. - So even the applause was fake.
- Mohammad Radwan Obeid is a threat to national security because he surfed terrorist Web sites and visited terrorist chat rooms, the FBI claims.
Pages for June, 2005
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