The ‘access’ model of mainstream media, where journalists seek to get close to powerful people and report what they say as if this is what constitutes news, leads to the kinds of pitiful servile mentality that The Daily Show skewers.

The New York Times will start putting some of its content behind a pay wall on March 28, like the Wall Street Journal already does.

But you can still read the articles for free. The newspapers know of this loophole but they keep it open because they need to keep their search engine rankings high and they think that most people are too lazy to go through the steps to get the free articles.

In the case of Ray Davis, the acting head of the CIA in Pakistan now in jail for gunning down two men in a busy street in Lahore, the US government claims that he has diplomatic immunity and thus should not have to face prosecution. There is some controversy over whether the diplomatic status was conferred on Davis only after the killings, which would make it dubious.

A former CIA agent who worked in Laos during the Vietnam war says that the use of diplomatic immunity for spies is quite routine and reveals how this works:
[Read more…]

It is interesting to note how often the phrase “according to cables released by WikiLeaks…” appears in US news reports these days, even as the US media try to portray WikiLeaks as some kind of rogue outfit. This is because WikiLeaks is simultaneously showing up the major US media as being really lousy journalists while providing them with invaluable information that enables them to do their jobs better. It must be really sticking in their craw to have to give WikiLeaks credit.

There is no question in my mind that WikiLeaks has done us all a huge service.

At last she says something I can agree with when she points out that when it comes to news coverage and impact around the world, al Jazeera is eating the US media’s lunch.

“Al Jazeera has been the leader in that are literally changing people’s minds and attitudes. And like it or hate it, it is really effective,” she said.

“In fact viewership of al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news. You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners,” she added.

Who knew that she was such a good media critic? But she should be careful what she wishes for. It is because the US media is so awful that all her hypocrisies (and those of Obama and the rest of the ruling class) do not get exposed.

Stop reading the moment you come across the names Lindsay Lohan and Charlie Sheen.

I skip over every single news item that speculates on who is or is not going to run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. All this exercise consists of are people trying to get their names in the news by coyly flirting with the idea.

This is the first in an ongoing series. Suggestions from readers are welcomed!

Watch this clip from NBC’s Today show where Katie Couric, Bryant Gumbel, and an unidentified person are puzzled about this new thing called the internet.

Apparently NBC has fired the person who unearthed this old clip and uploaded it to YouTube. Why? If it is because they think it is embarrassing to have their news anchors not know what the internet is, that’s absurd. They have nothing to be ashamed of because this took place in early 1994 and their views were typical for that time, which was the early days of the internet, whose origins were around 1989.

Since I worked in universities and national research labs, we used email a long time before the rest of the community although at that time there was a patchwork of communication methods. I remember using Bitnet for email and Telenet for remote access to computers.

The internet really took off with the arrival in 1993 of the first web browser called Mosaic. I remember how in 1993 I had to teach a group of people what the internet was and how it worked and I barely understood it myself. We were all struggling to understand and use it.

We forget how recently this world came into being, so the cluelessness of the NBC team is perfectly understandable.

Al Jazeera has become the go-to source for the current turbulence in the Middle East. Jeremy Scahill explains why it is that despite Al Jazeera being a worldwide news powerhouse, people in the US are not be able to subscribe to it through their cable companies. It is because the US government treated Al Jazeera as an enemy and the media companies here, ever obsequious to the government, duly refused to carry them.

During the Bush administration, nothing contradicted the absurd claim that the United States invaded Iraq to spread democracy throughout the Middle East more decisively than Washington’s ceaseless attacks on Al Jazeera, the institution that did more than any other to break the stranglehold over information previously held by authoritarian forces, whether monarchs, military strongmen, occupiers or ayatollahs. Yet, far from calling for its journalists to be respected and freed from imprisonment and unlawful detention, the Bush administration waged war against Al Jazeera and its journalists.

The United States bombed its offices in Afghanistan in 2001. In March 2003, two of its financial correspondents were kicked off the trading floor of NASDAQ and the NY Stock Exchange.
…
In April 2003, US forces shelled the Basra hotel where Al Jazeera journalists were the only guests and killed Jazeera’s Iraq correspondent Tareq Ayoub a few days later in Baghdad. The United States also imprisoned several Al Jazeera reporters (including at Guantánamo), some of whom say they were tortured.
…
Then in late November 2005 Britain’s Daily Mirror reported that during an April 2004 White House meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, George W. Bush floated the idea of bombing Al Jazeera’s international headquarters in Qatar.
…
The Falluja offensive, one of the bloodiest assaults of the US occupation, was a turning point. In two weeks that April, thirty marines were killed as local guerrillas resisted US attempts to capture the city. Some 600 Iraqis died, many of them women and children. Al Jazeera broadcast from inside the besieged city, beaming images to the world. On live TV the network gave graphic documentary evidence disproving US denials that it was killing civilians. It was a public relations disaster, and the United States responded by attacking the messenger.

Just a few days before Bush allegedly proposed bombing the network, Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Falluja, Ahmed Mansour, reported live on the air, “Last night we were targeted by some tanks, twice…but we escaped. The US wants us out of Falluja, but we will stay.” On April 9 Washington demanded that Al Jazeera leave the city as a condition for a cease-fire. The network refused. Mansour wrote that the next day “American fighter jets fired around our new location, and they bombed the house where we had spent the night before, causing the death of the house owner Mr. Hussein Samir. Due to the serious threats we had to stop broadcasting for few days because every time we tried to broadcast the fighter jets spotted us we became under their fire.”

Scahill sums up:

The real threat Al Jazeera poses to authoritarian regimes is in its unembedded journalism. That is why the Bush Administration viewed Al Jazeera as a threat, it is why Mubarak’s regime is trying to shut it down and that is why the network is so important to the unfolding revolutions in the Middle East. It is the same role the network plays in reporting on the disastrous US war in Afghanistan. [My italics]

But you can be sure that the US government is closely watching Al Jazeera now in order to get a fix on what is going on in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East.

As I wrote before, my social circle tends to be people who call themselves liberal and vote Democratic. What is interesting is that although these people tend to be avid followers of news, they are often unaware of important information. They watch the ‘serious’ news programs such as the NewsHour on PBS, they listen to NPR, they watch the Sunday talk shows such as This Week, Meet the Press, and Face the Nation. They disdain Fox News and all its offerings. They subscribe to the New York Times.

How can they devote so much time to learn about the world and yet miss so much? This is an example of Will Rogers’ warning that it isn’t what we don’t know that gives us trouble, it’s what we know that ain’t so, so I want to devote this post to point people to better sources of news.
[Read more…]