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Main Source on Russian Bots ‘Not Convinced on Bot Thing’ Those “Russian bots”—automatic Twitter accounts supposedly controlled by the Kremlin—sure have been busy, according to US news media accounts: After the Parkland Shooting, Pro-Russian Bots Are Pushing False-Flag Allegations Again (Washington Post, 2/16/18) Russian Bots Were Sowing Discord During Hunt for Austin Bomber, Group Says […]
As FAIR has noted before (e.g., Extra!, 1/17; FAIR.org, 4/2/18), the term “clash” is almost always used to launder power asymmetry and give the reader the impression of two equal warring sides. It obscures power dynamics and the nature of the conflict itself, e.g., who instigated it and what weapons if any were used. “Clash” […]
Will interest payments take up the entire federal budget? A Wall Street Journal column by Greg Ip (3/28/18) gave us another rendition of this old scare story. The argument is that the interest paid on US government debt will soon impose an enormous burden on the federal government, choking off spending on important government programs. […]
NPR Brings You the Unheard Voice of Rush Limbaugh…Boosting Trump’s Tax Bill With ‘Bonus’ Hype…NYT: Don’t Be Misled by Claims That CEOs Are Rich…Israel’s ‘Retaliatory’ Bombing of Syria for Shooting Down an Israeli Bomber…From ‘Sidelines,’ US Controls 1/4th of Syria…‘Anti-Propaganda Warrior,’ You Have a Mission Closer to Home…Pro-Capitalist Times
The rise of social media platforms like Twitter (launched in 2006) and Facebook (opened to the general public in the same year) allowed people to share news and opinions directly, giving them an opportunity to gravitate towards outlets and outlooks that resonate with them.
“This is a time for us to be pushing harder. We can change the political feasibility. That’s something that the public has the power to do.”
For the New York Times, the US is always lagging behind the Russian menace. Previously, the Times has told us how America was losing the “scramble for the Arctic” and falling behind in election-meddling. Now it’s in the realms of cyber and nuclear war that the Times sees dangerous gaps.
Despite the fact that the property destruction in the aftermath of the Philadelphia Eagles was similar in scope to the damage caused by protests against police killings of young black men over the past three years, only the latter were described as “violence.”
The linguistic gymnastics needed to report on police violence without calling up images of police violence is a thing of semantic wonder. The case of Ohio Deputy Richard Scarborough shooting and killing 16-year-old Joseph Haynes inside a courthouse checked off nearly all the pro-police propaganda tropes:
To the leading liberal US cable news network, Yemen is relevant when Americans die—not when thousands of Yemenis are killed, bombed daily by Saudi Arabia, with US weapons, fuel and intelligence.
Journalism lost one of its most valuable investigators when Robert Parry died on January 27, from pancreatic cancer, at the age of 68. He was the first reporter to reveal Oliver North’s operation in the White House basement (AP, 6/10/1985), and the co-author of the first report on Contra drug-smuggling (AP, 12/21/1985). He did some […]
Dreamers Shut Out of Shutdown Commentary Out of 34 op-eds and editorials in three leading papers from three days before to three days after the government shutdown (1/17–25/18), only one—by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (1/22/18)—criticized Democrats for selling out the Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who had been granted limited protection by the Obama […]
Dreamers Shut Out of Shutdown Commentary Out of 34 op-eds and editorials in three leading papers from three days before to three days after the government shutdown (1/17–25/18), only one–by New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg (1/22/18)–criticized Democrats for selling out the Dreamers, young undocumented immigrants who had been granted limited protection by the Obama […]
CBS News’ 60 Minutes (11/19/17) took a deep dive into the humanitarian crisis in Yemen without once mentioning the direct role the United States plays in creating, perpetuating and prolonging a crisis that’s left over 10,000 civilians dead, 2 million displaced and an estimated 1 million with cholera.
Under the cover of a shallow understanding of “balance,” corporate media have internalized the outlandish idea that it is “partisan,” and thus not “neutral,” to acknowledge the undeniably destructive effects of particular political policies.
Ed Herman was the main author of Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, written with Noam Chomsky—the 1980s masterwork that exposed how elite US media typically function as propaganda organs for US empire and militarism.
It almost sounds like the newspaper owned by the second-wealthiest person in the world doesn’t want people talking about how much the extremely rich own compared to the rest of us.
Ignoring the Fantasies That Kill Real People… Here’s What Forgetting History Looks Like… Disclosure: I Get Paid to Fool WaPo Readers About Climate… Freebooter Turns Freelancer… And by ‘Dethroning,’ We Mean One-10th as Popular… Trump’s Problem Is That New York Doesn’t Understand Media… Questions That Don’t Require Asking
What constitutes “extremism” is…ideologically worthless
Poorer residents tend to be concentrated in areas more prone to flooding
