The Cleveland area has been the scene of an appalling sequence of crimes recently. We had one case of a serial killer Anthony Sowell who preyed on poor women, raping and killing them and burying them on the premises. Then we had the case of Ariel Castro who kidnapped and held captive three women for about a decade, fathering a child with one. Now we have another person accused of being a serial killer too. [Read more…]
When William Shakespeare had Hamlet say (Act 2, Scene II), “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”, he had not anticipated the rise of the 24/7 cable news networks in the US that, despite the fact that they have so much time to discuss the inevitable nuances of complex political issues, still seem to be so rushed that everything must be quickly reduced to a one-word answer to a simple question: Is it good or bad? [Read more…]
In addition to Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, the new Greenwald-Omidya venture has hired Dan Froomkin and Liliana Segura, both well-known journalists with an independent turn of mind. [Read more…]
British prime minister David Cameron is threatening to take action against British newspapers like The Guardian for publishing the Snowden leaks. He used as his excuse for such an action a newspaper report in which an anonymous security source had said that the leaks had hampered their terrorist investigations. [Read more…]
Today is the 75th anniversary of the famous radio broadcast of the Orson Welles production of the H. G. Wells story The War of the Worlds, that began with a series of fake news bulletins that announced an alien invasion and supposedly triggered widespread panic. There are bound to be news items that refer to this event. [Read more…]
The new media venture by Glenn Greenwald has caused the traditional media to sit up and take notice. The combination of Greenwald’s blockbuster scoops on the NSA, his openly expressed contempt for the way that much of traditional media operates, and the deep pockets of the financier underwriting it, has made them realize that the cozy world in which they operate is soon going to be under serious attack. [Read more…]
Don Yelton, the Republican party official in North Carolina who was forced to resign because of the stupid things he said to The Daily Show‘s Aasif Mandvi made the usual excuse that his remarks had been ‘taken out of context’ and the interview edited to make him look bad. [Read more…]
Henry Farrell, associate professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University, has a good article on how Greenwald’s new media venture is shaping up and why it is a big deal. [Read more…]
I tend to like much of the new technology, though some of it is quite gimmicky and appeals only to those who like technology for its own sake. I am usually slow to adopt them waiting until I am sure that I really need it. What really bothers me is when people think that technology will solve a problem that the lack of technology did not create. [Read more…]
When the history of the Snowden revelations are written, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras will of course figure prominently. But we have to give The Guardian newspaper and its editor Alan Rusbridger a lot of credit for being willing to publish the original revelations. There is no question that having a mainstream media outlet with a wide readership take the lead had a huge effect on the impact the story had. It is not surprising that the British government plans to retaliate against them, over and above ordering the extraordinary destruction of its computers. Rusbridger himself says that the scope of the NSA surveillance goes beyond George Orwell’s imagination. [Read more…]