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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle
Does the media serve its purpose to print all the news regardless of how that news affects stakeholders, who might be media owners, governments, politicians, or journalists themselves? Is the media a faithful servant of the dominant ideology, as Greenwald alleges? Is the media being naive/duplicious when it refuses to countenance the possibility that the US or other western powers might commit war crimes?* How much do we really know about what our various Govts get up to overseas?

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Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, (the journalist who broke the Snowden/NSA spying story) writing in his new platform 'The Intercept', has some searching questions for those who still believe that the media is free, independent and fearless.

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Glenn Greenwald, (the journalist who broke the Snowden/NSA spying story) writing in his new platform 'The Intercept', has some searching questions for those who still believe that the media is free, independent and fearless.

Analysing media treatment of, and reaction to the recent bombing of the Doctors Without Borders' hospital in Kunduz Afghanistan by US forces, Greenwald writes:

"The point here isn’t that it’s been definitively proven that the U.S. attack was deliberate. What exactly happened here and why won’t be known, as MSF itself has said, until there is a full-scale, truly independent investigation — precisely what the U.S. government is steadfastly blocking. But MSF’s Stokes is absolutely correct to say that all of the evidence that is known means that “mistake” is “quite hard to believe at this stage” as an explanation and that the compilation of all known evidence “points to … a war crime.”

Nonetheless, many U.S. journalists immediately, repeatedly and authoritatively declared this to have been an “accident” or a “mistake” despite not having the slightest idea whether that was true, and worse, in the face of substantial evidence that it was false.

What possible motivation would the U.S. government have for submitting to an independent investigation when — as usual — it has an army of super-patriotic, uber-nationalistic journalists eager to act as its lawyers and insist, despite the evidence, that Americans could not possibly be guilty of anything other than a terrible “mistake”? Indeed, the overriding sentiment among many U.S. journalists is that their country and government are so inherently Good that they could not possibly do anything so bad on purpose. Any bad acts are mindlessly presumed to be terrible, uintended mistakes tragically made by Good, Well-Intentioned People (Americans). Other Bad Countries do bad things on purpose. But Americans are good and do not.

They cling to this self-flattering belief so vehemently that they not only refused to entertain the possibility that the U.S. government might have done something bad on purpose, but they scornfully mock anyone who questions the official claim of “mistake.” When you’re lucky enough as a government and military to have hordes of journalists so subservient and nationalistic that they do and say this — to exonerate you fully — before knowing any facts, why would you ever feel the need to submit to someone else’s investigation?
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/06/u-s-journalists-who-instantly-exonerated-their-government-of-the-kunduz-hospital-attack-declaring-it-an-accident/

Does the media serve its purpose to print all the news regardless of how that news affects stakeholders, who might be media owners, governments, politicians, or journalists themselves? Is the media a faithful servant of the dominant ideology, as Greenwald alleges? Is the media being naive/duplicious when it refuses to countenance the possibility that the US or other western powers might commit war crimes?* How much do we really know about what our various Govts get up to overseas?

Further reading:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/06/world/asia/doctors-without-borders-seeks-explanation-for-kunduz-hospital-attack.html?_r=0
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-34738652
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/05/day-before-deadly-bombing-u-s-official-asked-if-any-taliban-were-holed-up-at-msf-hospital/
http://www.thenation.com/article/look-for-hospitals-as-targets/


* Many of us would have thought that about Israel for a long time. We all know how that one worked out - the Israeli Govt is a serial war criminal guilty of atrocity after atrocity.

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They're businesses, all of 'em, and have a readership to keep hold of. So in any newspaper you will get articles complete with a slant that pleases the reader.

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ORIGINAL: Kirata

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle

"the overriding sentiment among many U.S. journalists is that their country and government are so inherently Good that they could not possibly do anything so bad on purpose. Any bad acts are mindlessly presumed to be terrible, uintended mistakes tragically made by Good, Well-Intentioned People (Americans).

The same could be said for the popular view of MSF, but the reality is somewhat different. MSF was allowing non-Taliban patients to be discharged against medical advice in order to free beds for wounded Taliban fighters, and failed to display on the roof of its facility any of the three internationally recognized symbols that would have allowed it to be recognized as a hospital from the air.

See here and here.

K.

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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer

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They're businesses, all of 'em, and have a readership to keep hold of. So in any newspaper you will get articles complete with a slant that pleases the reader.

There's more of that involved than I once thought. The Sun, the biggest-selling newspaper here, was always thought to have been largely involved in propagandising for the Tories. But one analyst I was reading a while ago thought otherwise: it's more about just giving the readership what it wants to see because *that's what sells papers'. Thus Murdoch, he said, 'simply wants to be on the "winning side".

We just must have heroes - who will be 'our lads' in the British military - and we just must have villains, who will be led by Johnny Foreigner. That's always going to be the story that Joe Public will want to see, so Murdoch and fellow media moguls will provide it.

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ORIGINAL: thompsonx


ORIGINAL: Kirata

CNN's Marc Lamont Hill wished veterans a "Happy Veteran's Day" with this:



He deleted it after he was informed that those weren't American soldiers.

Cuba is no longer part of n. amerika? Did it sink or was it abducted by aliens?

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ORIGINAL: tweakabelle



"The point here isn’t that it’s been definitively proven that the U.S. attack was deliberate.


* Many of us would have thought that about Israel for a long time. We all know how that one worked out - the Israeli Govt is a serial war criminal guilty of atrocity after atrocity.

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Frequent media critic Brent Bozell was shocked when research for a new book threw up just how biased the establishment media was during the last election, he tells Newsmax in an exclusive interview.

"When the publishers first approached me on the content, I thought it was so self-evident, the bias, that there wasn't going to be anything that hasn't been covered already," he explained. "But my colleague, Tim Graham, wanted to take a crack at it so he went off and did several months' worth of research. When he came back, the information that he put together was shocking and startling so much so that we threw ourselves into this book."

"It was far worse than we thought it was," Bozell, the founder of the Media Research Center, told Newsmax TV. "This was an effort by the national news media deliberately, conscientiously, to deliver the presidency to Barack Obama."

The book, "Collusion: How the Media Stole the 2012 Election — and How to Stop Them from Doing it in 2016," hit shelves Tuesday [this is from three years ago]. It is co-written by Bozell and Graham.

Asked why he used the word "collusion" in the title, Bozell responded, "Collusion was a tough word; 'stealing an election' is a tough phrase and at first I was uncomfortable with it but then when we looked at the research I stood by the statement and by that headline.

"Let's look at one example, the scandal coverage," he continued. "With every single Republican who appeared on the scene in 2011 and 2012 in the primary process, every single one had a major negative story attributed to them which became national news. Things like a rock on a ranch that the Perry family used in 1988 was a national news story. Herman Cain and the alleged affairs that he had. Even a national news story on who Karen Santorum dated before she even met Rick Santorum."

On the Democratic side, however, Bozell, said the media "actually presented to the American people the idea that there was no scandal involving Barack Obama, never mind covering up."

Bozell said the collusion is continuing, pointing to the media coverage of the Obama administration's recent decision to delay implementation of the employer mandate in the Affordable Care Act.

"There is a deliberate decision to censor news from the American people if it goes against the narrative of the Obama presidency and the Obama legacy and [that] is a perfect example," he explained.

"How could that not be news? How could the IRS scandal have disappeared as a news story? How could it not be news what's going on in Benghazi, which we have not resolved? So many of these things are absolutely unquestionably news stories and the media are deliberately avoiding them. It's censorship."

Asked how he would grade the major television networks, Bozell said NBC and MSNBC are "probably the worst because NBC should denounce MSNBC but they've become two peas in a pod."

He continued, saying "ABC and CBS are deliberately involved in the act of censorship. Both of them are guilty of not covering stories that hurt the Obama narrative" and "CNN has become a laughing stock. It used to be a serious journalism enterprise. No one's watching it and the reason no one's watching it is because there's nothing serious there."

As for Fox News, Bozell said, "There's one reason why it's public enemy number one. It's because it's the only network that covers the news." [left that in there just for you fox news haters]

Bozell also warned that conservatives need to stop the media from doing in 2016 what it did in 2012.

"Conservatives have to be a lot smarter with the news media and they have to understand that the news media is their biggest problem. If they can't get their message to the American people free of these distortions, then it doesn't matter how good their message is," he said.

"I do believe, however, that there are ways around it. There is this growing entity called social media where you can communicate directly with the public. The Romney effort ignored it completely. The Rove effort ignored it completely. The Obama effort spent tens of billions, and it worked."

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They never mind the stories that seem to, for example — and I did plenty of them — go against the grain of the Republican Party....I didn’t sense any resistance in doing stories that were perceived to be negative to the Bush administration — by anybody, ever. I have done stories that I perceived were not received well because people thought they would reflect poorly upon this [the Obama] administration.”
— Former CBS News investigative correspondent Sharyl Attkisson on CNN’s Reliable Sources, April 20, 2014.

“There is no doubt that the press failed to scrutinize this program [ObamaCare] at the time of passage and during the context of the President’s re-election. I think any reporter who would argue otherwise would be putting their head in the sand.”
— Time/MSNBC political analyst Mark Halperin on FNC’s The O’Reilly Factor, November 21, 2013.

Buzzfeed’s Michael Hastings: “The presence of Obama, even on the press corps, even on the people who follow him every day, when they’re near him, they lose their mind sometimes. You know, they start behaving in ways that are juvenile and amateurish. And they swoon.”
Host Martin Bashir: “And, of course, you don’t.”
Hastings: “Oh, I do. No, I do, I do, I do. Oh, I totally, oh, man....”
— Discussing Hastings’ book about the 2012 presidential campaign on MSNBC’s Martin Bashir, January 24, 2013.

“Ultimately journalism has changed....Partisanship is very much a part of journalism now.”
— CBS Corporation Chairman and CEO Les Moonves as quoted in a June 7, 2012 Los Angeles Times story by Robin Abcarian and Kathleen Hennessey.

“I think that the media is as divided on this issue [of gay marriage] as the Obama family — which is to say not at all. And so he’s never going to get negative coverage for this....When you have almost the entire media establishment on your side on an issue in a presidential campaign, it’s very hard to lose politically.”
— Mark Halperin on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, May 10, 2012.

“No person with eyes in his head in 2008 could have failed to see the way that soft coverage helped to propel Obama first to the Democratic nomination and then into the White House.”
— New York Magazine political reporter John Heilemann, January 27, 2012.

MSNBC's Joe Scarborough: "The media has been really, really biased this campaign, I think....Is the media just in love with history here, Mark, do you think?"...
Time's Mark Halperin: "I think mistakes have been made and people will regret it....If Obama wins and goes on to become a hugely successful President, I think, still, people will look back and say it just wasn't done the right way."
— MSNBC's Morning Joe, October 28, 2008.

Host Howard Kurtz: "Are journalists rooting for the Obama story?"
The Politico's John Harris, referring to when he worked at the Washington Post: "It wouldn't surprise me that there's some of that....A couple years ago, you would send a reporter out with Obama, and it was like they needed to go through detox when they came back — 'Oh, he's so impressive, he's so charismatic,' and we're kind of like, 'Down, boy.'"
— Exchange on CNN's Reliable Sources, January 13, 2008.

"I don't know if it's 95 percent...[but] there are enough [liberals] in the old media, not just in ABC, but in old media generally, that it tilts the coverage quite frequently, in many issues, in a liberal direction....It's an endemic problem. And again, it's the reason why for 40 years, conservatives have rightly felt that we did not give them a fair shake."
— ABC News political director Mark Halperin appearing on The Hugh Hewitt Show, October 30, 2006.