Read what Mano says about Glenn Greenwald. I will simply agree 100% with it.
One of our major problems in the US is that the journalists have mostly curled up and died, and we’re getting our news from lickspittles and news organizations shackled to both corporate interests and political favoritism. I appreciate someone who breaks out of that incestuous relationship.
My respect for the Washington Post went down the drain when they fired Greenwald. Their effort to placate the conservative base has diminished the credibility of American Journalism and elevated a group of people who long ago ran out of ideas for a better and stronger America.
American media have become faithful stenographers of the Powerful. Instead of doing journalism they cram their tongues half a meter up the cloacas of officialdom in return for “access”
Most people seem to understand that the so-called ‘news media’ is bought and sold by wealthy corporate-political interests. Whatever the manipulation, it is interesting that as many that buy the crap and who actually agree with what is defecated out of the so-called ‘news organizations’ (the so-called ‘conservative rightwing’) bark as loudly about how rotten the “the media” is as those who don’t buy it (the so-called ‘liberal leftwing’). Its obvious that part of the general strategy in the manipulation involves assuming a false position of
What is rather strange is that so few of the latter seemed to be so shocked and outraged by the so-called Snowden ‘NSA revelations’. Apparently, few remember the statements made by members of the Bush administration in reference to a move toward “total information awareness” by the intelligence community. Its stranger still that so many who DO remember that seem to think that all of that would have been switched off the moment Obama was elected to office.
oops, the 1st paragraph left dangling, finishes:
…anti-government sentiment, the standard camouflage of competent propaganda everywhere, in the appearance of being agreeably chummy with the hard-working tax-payer consumer voting electorate.
this whole story amazes me, every part of it. The shear size of the data that is being gathered and stored, at what it must be costing and its effectiveness ?
The leaks from Snowden and Manning in the volume and detail are staggering. The reaction of the governments involved and politicians? How the story is covered or not by the media .
But what is the result of all of this short term and long term. What is the public reaction to this
One thing seems to be that secrecy seems to be.changing as is privacy. Are Big Secrets harder to hide?
The government agents destroying some hard drives is an amazing a display of ignorance have they not understood anything? Can you not simply backup files without any data lose in minutes numberless times any where?. Do they think that they are immune from hacking in all of those computers all over the world??
uncle frogy
uncle frogy:
The effectiveness of these vast surveillance programs is not in question: they do not Keep Us Safe™.
Richard Reid, the would-be “Shoe Bomber” managed to get a bomb on board an American Airlines flight to Miami. When he tried to set it off, passengers smelled smoke, passengers subdued him. Alert passengers: 1. NSA: 0.
Even with a heads up from CIA, US intelligence officials actually allowed suspected al-Qaeda collaborator Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board a flight to the US. Unfortunately, he had a bomb in his underwear. Fortunately, passengers subdued him, too. Alert passengers: 1. NSA: 0
Faisal Shahzad, the would-be “Times Square Bomber” was thwarted when a t-shirt vendor noticed smoke coming out of an awkwardly parked SUV and alerted a mounted police officer. The area was safely cleared and the bomb was defused. T-shirt vendor: 1. NSA domestic surveillance: 0.
For a more recent and far more devastating example, consider the Boston Marathon Bombers. The U.S. government was tipped off twice about Tamerlan Tsarnaev by the Russians. He had been on a terrorist watch list watch for eighteen months before the bombings. NSA: -3. (Boston bomb victim deaths.)
In at least these four instances, NSA’s invasive surveillance did not, in fact, Keep Us Safe™. Sure, NSA Director Keith Alexander says “dozens of terror plots” were thwarted by secret surveillance. I call bullshit: If the feds had captured even a single aspiring terrorist, the story would have been purposefully leaked and splashed all over the news. That’s how we’re all kept scared and deluded into accepting and supporting all of this. I doubt we will ever know for sure, though, given that the highest officials defending these programs are lying liars, lying even to the Congress. (Which is only a crime when done by baseball players taking steroids.)
I want to agree with this, but at the same time, you can’t get over that hump of dealing with people, not just their ideas. I might be overly cynical, but in politics especially I have seen so many examples in recent years of persons who despite being on the whole disagreeable to me did espouse some policies which in my mind made them more moderate and agreeable than their fellows. And when one of these individuals, say, was selected by his party as their candidate for President, all that supposed moderation and those few agreeable policies went into the memory hole.
And even when that isn’t the case I just can’t extricate the one or two points of agreement from the bundle of garbage they come packaged with. Or I might even suspect that those points of agreement might not even be sincere (anytime I am tempted to agree with a libertarian about anything, it’s good to have a look not just at their words but at their record).
the only thing I know for sure about any of this is that this secret business of the NSA and it’s assorted private contractors have probably not been very effected by the “sequester”
uncle frogy
I’ve only got one real response to the problem of the media being such sell outs these days –
Go watch Cenk Uygur at The Young Turks! http://www.tytnetwork.com/
Live weekdays 6-8 eastern at http://www.tytnetwork.com/live/
He’s progressive, smart, agnostic, and in nobodys pocket.
@ anuran #2
TTBOMK Greenwald was the first to use the word “stenographers” to refer to the obsequious members of the media.
And for calling out the worst of the pseudo-journalists, my favorite was the time he found pictures of the most aggressively war-mongering pundits who wrote using the most bizarre references to masculinity as related to “national security,” arguments in favor of water-boarding and attacking their critics. They all looked like the kids who got the most wedgies in high school.
TxSkeptic:
See also: Abby Martin/Breaking the Set.