Ryan Gallagher has unearthed a directive from the US military that tells their members not to read any news item from Gallagher’s news operation The Intercept. The directive states:
[Read more…]
Mano Singham
Just another Freethought Blogs site
Now that David Gregory has been fired from his job as host of the NBC Sunday morning talk show, there have been many reasons given for why his show was awful and advice to his successor Chuck Todd on how to turn things around (see here and here). None of them will work because the underlying problem is structural and tinkering with the host and format will not help.
[Read more…]
Among many news watchers, the venerable CBS News program 60 Minutes is seen as a hard-hitting investigative show. I was never overly impressed with it and never watch it unless I am pointed to a segment for some reason or other. A real investigative reporter Charles Lewis, founder of the Center for Public Integrity that produces some excellent news stories and whose work I have long admired, recounts his own story of being hired as a producer on that show and also working at ABC News.
[Read more…]
Margot Adler died recently at the age of 68. She was one of the NPR reporters I liked to listen to. She mostly worked on feature items about people and her stories reflected an affinity for those on the margins, the outsiders, those different from the mainstream, trying to understand them and make the rest of us aware of their point of view.
[Read more…]
By all accounts, Ebola is a deadly disease, now ravaging parts of west Africa and taking a dreadful toll on people there. But for the US media, there is no scare in any part of the world that cannot be made into a scare here. We have seen one media-fuelled panic after another over the past few years, with bird flu, swine flu, SARS, and I forget what else. If ever a real epidemic hits, we have more to fear from being crushed by mobs of people running around wildly in panic than from the disease itself.
[Read more…]
My nomination for that would be its ‘national security reporter ‘ Dina Temple-Raston whom I have long castigated for being an unapologetic propagandist for the organs of the national security state. Glenn Greenwald gives yet another example of her breathless and uncritical coverage, this time of claims made by the CIA and its front organizations.
[Read more…]
When the Bush-Cheney regime went on an orgy of torture, they denied that what they were doing deserved that label and the US media became extremely coy about calling it that, although the practices such as waterboarding had been unambiguously condemned as torture when done by Japanese on American prisoners of war and the perpetrators had been executed. The New York Times was one of the worst culprits during that period, routinely using the phrase ‘enhanced interrogation’ that the Bush administration wanted them to use instead of calling it torture.
[Read more…]
The Daily Show‘s Jordan Klepper talks to a group of idealistic young college newspaper journalists who seem to have no idea of what the future world of digital news holds in store for them.
[Read more…]
In January 2009, Israel took advantage of the period before Barack Obama’s inauguration to unleash a yet another massive assault on Gaza, killing over 1,400 Palestinians, again mostly civilians and children. Operation Cast Lead, as it was called by Israel, created a major worldwide outcry because of the sheer brutality of the Israeli bombardment, similar to what is happening again now, and even led to a UN commission to investigate.
[Read more…]