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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Apparently that portion of the press conference where Chinese president Hu Jintao was asked about human rights issues was blacked out in the state-run China media. Damian Grammaticas, the Beijing correspondent of BBC News, says smugly, “Just hearing a Chinese president deal with direct questions on human rights is incredibly rare. In China the heavily state-controlled media doesn’t pose them”

But when have you heard anyone in the major US media ask Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton at a press conference how the US can lecture other countries on human rights when it is itself a serious serial violator?

The point is that the filters in the media that weed out independent thinkers works so well that it would never occur to almost all those who rise to the level of being allowed into these press conferences to pose such a question. Any journalist who had the temerity to do so would be frozen out by the government (and even his or her colleagues) and never be called upon again and would have to be replaced by his organization. This would be a bad career move and journalists likely realize this, at least at a gut level.

This is why the US does not have to be so crude as China and censor broadcasts. The media does it itself perfectly well.

Glenn Greenwald lists some of the hypocrisies of the US government when it comes to internet freedoms.

He leads off with the one concerning cyberwarfare. While the US government condemns it, it does nothing when Israel openly boasts about using it against Iran.

So as is the usual pattern, it is never the principle that determines what is right and wrong but who is doing it.

There is a documentary of Manufacturing Consent (the book that I talked about in the previous post) that you can see online for free, although the image quality is not great. Although it is two hours and forty-five minutes long, it is entertaining and provides an excellent overview of the subject and of Chomsky.

David Cay Johnson describes how the drive for profits in the newspaper industry is eliminating beat reporting and replacing it with filler material that is of little value.

Beats are fundamental to journalism, but our foundation is crumbling. Whole huge agencies of the federal government and, for many news organizations, the entirety of state government go uncovered. There are school boards and city councils and planning commissions that have not seen a reporter in years. The outrageous salaries that were paid to Bell, California city officials—close to $800,000 to the city manager, for example—would not have happened if just one competent reporter had been covering that city hall in Southern California. But no one was, and it took an accidental set of circumstances for two reporters from the Los Angeles Times to reveal this scandal.
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Far too much of journalism consists of quoting what police, prosecutors, politicians and publicists say—and this is especially the case with beat reporters. It’s news on the cheap and most of it isn’t worth the time it takes to read, hear or watch. Don’t take my word for it. Instead look at declining circulation figures. People know value and they know when what they’re getting is worth their time or worth the steadily rising cost of a subscription.
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During the past 15 years as I focused my reporting on how the American economy works and the role of government in shaping how the benefits and burdens of the economy are distributed, I’ve grown increasingly dismayed at the superficial and often dead wrong assumptions permeating the news. Every day in highly respected newspapers I read well-crafted stories with information that in years past I would have embraced but now know is nonsense, displaying a lack of understanding of economic theory and the regulation of business. The stories even lack readily available official data on the economy and knowledge of the language and principles in the law, including the Constitution.

What these stories have in common is a reliance on what sources say rather than what the official record shows.

Gareth Porter uses the latest WikiLeaks release to illustrate how the New York Times and the Washington Post lie to their readers by omission, carefully editing their stories to reflect the views of the government.

A diplomatic cable from last February released by Wikileaks provides a detailed account of how Russian specialists on the Iranian ballistic missile program refuted the U.S. suggestion that Iran has missiles that could target European capitals or intends to develop such a capability.

In fact, the Russians challenged the very existence of the mystery missile the U.S. claims Iran acquired from North Korea.

But readers of the two leading U.S. newspapers never learned those key facts about the document.

The New York Times and Washington Post reported only that the United States believed Iran had acquired such missiles – supposedly called the BM-25 – from North Korea. Neither newspaper reported the detailed Russian refutation of the U.S. view on the issue or the lack of hard evidence for the BM-25 from the U.S. side.

The Times, which had obtained the diplomatic cables not from Wikileaks but from The Guardian, according to a Washington Post story Monday, did not publish the text of the cable.

The Times story said the newspaper had made the decision not to publish “at the request of the Obama administration”. That meant that its readers could not compare the highly-distorted account of the document in the Times story against the original document without searching the Wikileaks website.

NPR is only marginally less obsequious to US government interests. As Paul Craig Roberts writes,

On November 29, National Public Radio emphasized that the cables showed that Iran was isolated even in the Muslim world, making it easier for the Israelis and Americans to attack. The leaked cables reveal that the president of Egypt, an American puppet, hates Iran, and the Saudi Arabian government has been long urging the US government to attack Iran. In other words, Iran is so dangerous to the world that even its co-religionists want Iran wiped off the face of the earth.

NPR presented several nonobjective “Iranian experts” who denigrated Iran and its leadership and declared that the US government, by resisting its Middle Eastern allies’ calls for bombing Iran, was the moderate in the picture. The fact that President George W. Bush declared Iran to be a member of “the axis of evil” and threatened repeatedly to attack Iran, and that President Obama has continued the threats–Adm. Michael Mullen, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has just reiterated that the US hasn’t taken the attack option off the table–are not regarded by American “Iran experts” as indications of anything other than American moderation.

Somehow it did not come across in the NPR newscast that it is not Iran but Israel that routinely slaughters civilians in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank, and that it is not Iran but the US and its NATO mercenaries who slaughter civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yeman, and Pakistan.

Iran has not invaded any of its neighbors, but the Americans are invading countries half way around the globe.

Notice that the items in the cables that have received the most publicity is how some Arab leaders want Iran to be bombed. The media spotlight this because this continues the demonizing of Iran, which is a key policy objective of the US and Israel and helps prepare the groundwork for a potential attack on Iran. They also act as if the views of these leaders are also the views of the people in those nations. Noam Chomsky, appearing on Democracy Now!, gives the unreported other side of the story:

[T]he main significance of the cables that have been released so far is what they tell us about Western leadership. So, Hillary Clinton and Binyamin Netanyahu surely know of the careful polls of Arab public opinion. The Brookings Institute just a few months ago released extensive polls of what Arabs think about Iran. And the results are rather striking. They show that Arab opinion does—holds that the major threat in the region is Israel, that’s 80 percent; the second major threat is the United States, that’s 77 percent. Iran is listed as a threat by 10 percent. With regard to nuclear weapons, rather remarkably, a majority, in fact, 57 percent, say that the region will be—it would have a positive effect in the region if Iran had nuclear weapons. Now, these are not small numbers. Eighty percent, 77 percent say that the U.S. and Israel are the major threat. Ten percent say that Iran is the major threat.

Surely the question of why the dictators of these Arab countries want the US to attack Iran in the face of wide opposition of their own people should be of some interest? But that is a discussion that you will rarely hear. But Roberts gives a possible explanation:

The “Iranian experts” treated the Saudi and Egyptian rulers’ hatred of Iran as a vindication of the US and Israeli governments’ demonization of Iran. Not a single “Iranian expert” was capable of pointing out that the tyrants who rule Egypt and Saudi Arabia fear Iran because the Iranian government represents the interests of Muslims, and the Saudi and Egyptian governments represent the interests of the Americans.

Think what it must feel like to be a tyrant suppressing the aspirations of your own people in order to serve the hegemony of a foreign country, while a nearby Muslim government strives to protect its people’s independence from foreign hegemony.

Undoubtedly, the tyrants become very anxious. What if their oppressed subjects get ideas? Little wonder the Saudis and Egyptian rulers want the Americans to eliminate the independent-minded country that is a bad example for Egyptian and Saudi subjects.

Pause for a moment and reflect. The government of Iran is by no means an admirable one. It has many, many serious defects. But the US and Israel would be very pleased if it were replaced by dictators like those in Saudi Arabia, a proud US ally, but a country whose rulers are far worse than Iran’s in almost every respect.

This is why anyone who really seeks to be informed has to find sources beyond the ones that are not mainstream ones. In a future post, I will try and provide a list of the sources I use that some readers might find helpful.