The Agonist - MSM Criticism

Journalistic Malpractice

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:14:26 -0800

I'm a frequent critic of President Obama, but sometimes it's really important to read between the lines. Yesterday the AP posted this story. In it the writer reports that the upcoming 'jobs summit' at the White House isn't about jobs:

President Barack Obama says creating jobs isn't the goal of a coming White House forum on jobs and economic growth.

And the headline reinforces the lede:

Obama: Job creation not goal of Dec. 3 jobs forum

However, a close reading of the story in question would leave the reader confused:

More after the jump.

The president told NBC News on Wednesday that the purpose of the Dec. 3 summit is to figure out how to encourage hiring by businesses still reluctant to do so.

Confused? Well, after taking a look at the transcript of the interview with NBC's Chuck Todd its pretty clear what happened. Todd was looking for a 'gotcha' moment:

Q Right before you left for this trip in Asia, you announced that you were going to convene a jobs summit. This smacks of one of those classic Washington answers to a tough problem: convene a commission, convene a summit. How is this going to create a job?

Obama didn't take the bait. Here's his answer:

Well, that's not the goal. We're doing all kinds of things to make sure that employment is accelerated. Our first job was to make sure that economic growth was happening -- and we're starting to see that now. As I said even when we first passed the stimulus package, job growth tends to lag, it tends to happen after. So what we're seeing now is businesses are starting to invest again, they're starting to be profitable again, but they haven't started hiring again.

He answers Todd's question about the whole 'convening a summit' trope in the negative. And then goes on to very clearly state the jobs are the priority.

And so now a new meme might be floating out there, a la Gore invented the internet, etc. . . that Obama isn't trying to create jobs. Great work AP.

New York Times News Service to Cut Jobs and Relocate

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 06:36:08 -0800

Richard Perez-Pena | November 12

NYT - The New York Times News Service will lay off at least 25 editorial employees next year and will move the editing of the service to a Florida newspaper owned by The New York Times Company, the newspaper and the Newspaper Guild said Thursday. A spokeswoman for The Times, Diane McNulty, said 25 of 30 news service jobs would be eliminated at the main office in New York, with five employees retaining their positions. The guild put the number of jobs to be cut at 28. Some of the layoffs were scheduled for February and the rest for May.

Also on Thursday, the Times Company told nonunion employees that it would stop making contributions to their pensions at the end of this year and would instead take the less expensive step of contributing 3 percent of their salaries each year to their 401(k) plans. The Times did not say how much it would save with the changes in the retirement programs or the news service.

The plan for the news service calls for The Gainesville Sun, whose newsroom is not unionized and has lower salaries, to take over editing and page design. Ms. McNulty said new jobs would be created at The Sun to handle the work.

The "Gains" vile Times?

Murdoch may block google news searches

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:31:47 -0800

November 9

BBC - Rupert Murdoch has said he will try to block Google from using news content from his companies.

The billionaire told Sky News Australia he will explore ways to remove stories from Google's search indexes, including Google News.

Mr Murdoch's News Corp had previously said it would start charging online customers across all its websites.

He believes that search engines cannot legally use headlines and paragraphs of news stories as search results.

"There's a doctrine called 'fair use', which we believe to be challenged in the courts and would bar it altogether," Mr Murdoch told the TV channel. "But we'll take that slowly."

Mr Murdoch announced earlier this year that the websites of his news websites would begin charging for access.

The target had been for all its sites to charge by June next year, but indications are that this is now unlikely.
News Corp owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US.

Newspapers across the world are considering the best way to make money from the internet, particularly in a time of falling advertising revenues.

The risk is that charges may alienate readers who have become used to free content and deter advertisers.

Glenn Greenwald: ' "America's Priorities," by the Beltway elite'

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 05:40:14 -0700

October 24

Salon - Something very unusual happened on The Washington Post Editorial Page today.

They deigned to address a response from one of their readers, who "challenged [them] to explain what he sees as a contradiction in [their] editorial positions": namely, the Post demands that Obama's health care plan not be paid for with borrowed money, yet the very same Post Editors vocally support escalation in Afghanistan without specifying how it should be paid for.

"Why is it okay to finance wars with debt, asks our reader, but not to pay for health care that way?"

"Even More Divided On The Issue"

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 12:08:41 -0700

Last night I had the great misfortune of watching ABC's Nightly News. On it the anchor discussed this news of a recent poll on the public option. From the Post:

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows that support for a government-run health-care plan to compete with private insurers has rebounded from its summertime lows and wins clear majority support from the public.

He then asked George Stephanapolous what he thought the poll meant. He answered something to this effect:

"It makes the country even more divided on the issue of healthcare."

I try not to make a habit of screaming at the TV, but I did.

This, folks, is why I don't watch TV anymore.

A Censored Headline and why it Matters

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:54:19 -0700

A Censored Headline and why it Matters:

German High Court Outlaws Electronic Voting

Justices of the German Federal Constitutional Court. Image

(DailyCensored.Com) The justices above are clearly the most rational group of high level functionaries in the industrialized world. They did what no other court would do in Europe or the United States. They effectively outlawed electronic voting. On March 3, 2009, the German Federal Constitutional Court declared that the electronic voting machines used in the 2005 Bundestag elections for the German national parliament were outside of the bounds of the German Constitution.

They reasoned that electronic voting is not verifiable because citizen votes are counted in secret. It obscured a technology inaccessible to all but a very few initiates. Most importantly, the German high court noted, electronic voting machines don't allow citizens to "reliably examine, when the vote is cast, whether the vote has been recorded in an unadulterated manner" Mar. 3, 2009.

The written opinion effectively bars electronic voting in future elections based on the complexity of voting machines and the inability of voters to watch their vote being counted. This raises the bar of acceptability well above the meaningless solutions offered by "paper trails" for touch screen voting or the so-called "paper ballots" for computerized optical scan voting machines, the most popular form of voting in the United States.

Germany's 2009 Bundestag elections were conducted with hand counted paper ballots.

Have you heard that one of the world's leading economic powers, the fourth largest economy in the world, banned electronic voting; said it was undemocratic? Given the multitude of problems encountered in the U.S. and the number of questionable election results, wouldn't it make sense that when Germany banned electronic voting and replaced it with paper ballots, there would be at least a days worth of national coverage in the United States?

Nothing like that occurred. The Associated Press (Times of India) story on the verdict danced around the periphery of the world media market with coverage in Turkey, India, Australia, and Ireland. But there were no major media takers for the AP story in the United States.

There was every reason to carry the story. In a 2006 Zogby poll, 92% of the 1028 registered voters surveyed said they agreed with this statement:

Citizens have the right to view and obtain information about how election officials count votes - 92% agree. New Zogby Poll On Electronic Voting Attitudes Aug. 21, 2006

That's exactly the proposition that the German court upheld. Surely there was an audience for the German decision but there was hardly a word from corporate media.

Why did this happen?

There are certain vital stories that the U.S. corporate media won't touch. The most prominent censored headline is "Over One Million Iraqi Civilians Dead in Conflict." This figure has been known since 2007 while a previous survey showing 650,000 dead was spiked in 2006. The Iraqi civilians died as a result of internal conflict unleashed by the U.S. invasion in 2003. Had Bush-Cheney not invaded with the approval of a sleep walking Congress, these people would not have died as they did.

Another vital story that isn't covered is election fraud, fixing an entire election. The corporate media simply can't raise the possibility that election fraud exists. The preliminary steps enabling election fraud through computerized voting are outsourcing elections to private vendors; the lack of any verifiable connection between your vote and the voting machines processes; and, security risks.

However, corporate media are more than happy to cover the nearly nonexistent "voter fraud" stories about masses of illegal voters showing up at the polls. The Bush administration was only able to produced 24 convictions of citizens and non citizens combined over a three year period.

The media will discuss electronic voting malfunctions but they simply won't connect the dots. Computers function as programmed, by definition. "Malfunctions" during vote counting are part of any given program. When the errors benefit one side of the political equation, it is highly relevant to raise questions about intentional "errors." However, the treatment of these stories is always within the context of computer problems instead of a broad inquiry into why elections are outsourced to private vendors and the resulting risks and problems and. U.S. elections will be virtually dominated by one private firm out of Omaha, Nebraska, ES&S.

German Citizens Prevail

A recent article by elections activist Kathleen Wynne, former Associate Director of BlackBoxVoting.org, told the story of the story of the landmark German case with a link to an extensive radio interview with litigant Dr. Ulrich Wiesner (Electronic Voting Declared Unconstitutional in Germany).

Physicist Ulrich Wiesner, PhD and Prof. Joachim Wiesner, PhD, an eminent German political scientist, brought suit against the use of electronic voting machines in the 2005 Bundestag elections. The evidence gathered supported the findings of the court described above. While both Wiesner's on the suit have PhD's and distinguished careers, they brought the landmark case on their own as citizens. Undeterred by the odds and the dismissal of German politicians, they stood by their cause and won.

It's a great story, father and son team prevail against huge odds to ensure that all Germans get their vote counted. But none of the majors here bit.

These articles constitute most of the serious coverage of this story in the United States. Paul Lehto wrote two articles for OpEdNews.com on March 3 and 19, 2009: Germany Bans Computerized Voting, Will Hand Count in 2009 and German high court honors US democratic principles. Activist Bev Harris wrote a commentary on 3-19-09: Let's get off the hamster wh..., BlackBoxVoting.org. Newsweek ran an insightful column in its education section on June, 2009, We do not trust machines. While AP ran the story, it wasn't picked up and featured by any major media outlet in the United States. The International Herald Tribune also covered the decision but its sister paper, The New York Times, dropped the ball.

The Wynne article told the story of the citizens who made the decision happen, the Wiesner father and son team. Deadline Live with Jack Blood, the radio show, carried a comprehensive interview of German litigant, Dr. Ulrich Wiesner and follow up discussions with Kathleen Wynne and Bev Harris

But that's it. The highest court in the nation with the world's fourth largest economy makes law that bans electronic voting after determining that computerized elections are fundamentally opposed to democratic principles. The decision applies directly to the electronic voting systems used in the United States. What do we hear from the U.S. corporate media? Just about nothing.

In this case, when a tree falls in the forest and just a few people hear it, it's no big deal. But it should be.

END

For more information on hand counted paper ballots and evidence for this case, see:
Center for Hand-Counted Paper Ballots
VoteRescue.org
Hacking the Electoral Law, Ulrich Wiesner, PhD, 23rd Chaos Communications Conference (PDF)

This article may be reproduced in whole or in part with attribution of authorship and a link to this article.

Conspiracy Theories: When sceptics fight back

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 06:35:38 -0700

Arran Frood | Oct 6

BBC - Conspiracy theorists have used the internet to co-ordinate increasingly slick attacks on the accepted versions of events, but now a group of scientists and sceptics has decided it's time to organise and fight back.

Conspiracy theories are pervasive and popular.

A poll for the Scripps Howard media organisation in 2006 suggested 36% of Americans suspected government involvement or deliberate inaction in the 9/11 attacks, and belief in a Kennedy conspiracy ran at 40% in the same poll.

A decade after Princess Diana's death, one survey found a fifth of Britons believed she was murdered. And to millions across the world, 2009's Apollo Moon landing 40th anniversary was a hollow sham because we have never been there.

Conspiracy theories predate the internet but the web has provided a fast, accessible platform for groups to unite, gather research and disseminate information without even meeting or leaving their houses.

While many people find them harmless fun, others believe there is a darker truth - that conspiracy theories are rewriting history, warping the present and altering the future. Enough is enough they say - it's time to fight back.

Enter the sceptics with the gathering of The Amazing Meeting (TAM) in London, the first of the conferences outside the US. A fundraising offshoot of the non-profit James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), TAM London saw scientists, writers and comedians target conspiracy theories - and their close cousins pseudoscience and medical quackery - in front of an audience loosely allied by their desire for more rational, critical thinking.

"A lot of sceptics feel very isolated," says psychologist and magician Prof Richard Wiseman. "It's not a popular position to be saying 'Father Christmas does not exist' so it motivates people and acts as a springboard for people to see what we're up to."
9/11
Many conspiracy theorists believed the government was complicit in 9/11

This brand of scepticism is not new. The movement was first galvanised in the early 80s when spoon-benders like Uri Geller claimed not to be magicians, but to really have paranormal powers. It was an age that saw a test of Geller's abilities make its way into the prestigious journal Nature.

The internet era has changed everything. The web-only film Loose Change, which questions the findings of the 9/11 commission, had already been viewed 10 million times by May 2006. It has had a massive impact. But the sceptics are also using the internet to organise loose networks of informal meetings.

Poll: News media’s credibility plunges to all-time low

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 12:43:56 -0700

Washington | Sept 14

AFP - Public trust in the US media is eroding and increasing numbers of Americans believe news coverage is inaccurate and biased, according to a study released on Monday.

Just 29 percent of the 1,506 adults surveyed by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press between July 22-26 said news organizations generally get the facts straight.

Sixty-three percent said news stories are often inaccurate, up from 34 percent in a 1985 study, Pew said.

Sixty percent of those polled said the press is biased, up from 45 percent in 1985. Just 26 percent in the latest survey said that news organizations are careful their reporting is not politically biased.

Seventy-four percent said news organizations tend to favor one side in dealing with political and social issues. Eighteen percent said they deal fairly with all sides.

Pew Research: Press Accuracy Rating Hits Two Decade Low

A Spontaneous Post about Rick Sanchez

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:09:32 -0700

Holy hell. I know news programs are pretty bad and tend to cover inane subjects--or, if covering something important, descend into inanity pretty quickly. That being said, I was just watching Rick Sanchez on CNN Newsroom while eating lunch when I saw the following.

Sanchez wrapped up a news segment on a teenage fight club somewhere in the state of TN, then some images of a flood-devastated area in Istanbul, Turkey appeared on screen. He mentions that dozens have died and many more have lost everything, while pictures of survivors picking through mud-caked ruins are played on the screen. He then says that watching flood waters come on so suddenly and strongly is amazing, like nothing you'd expect, etc. Sanchez must have then looked up at the screen for the first time since starting the flood story and said (paraphrased) "sorry folks, I thought we had better footage... this isn't that interesting."

He made one more trite, half-hearted statement and then asked his producers to cut back to him (before the segment was supposed to end), whereupon he stated that they'd be going to commercials and, after the break, be discussing what some person or another said about President Obama. Stay tuned!

Well, let's see here--what's the bigger story? Dozens die in floods deemed "disaster of the century" by the Turkish prime minister? Or discuss the latest gossip about something someone said about President Obama? Well, clearly the first one is just boring, so Sanchez decided that gossip was better. Actually, I bet he has a better feel for his audience than I do. Covering foreign disasters without spectacular footage of explosions or destruction probably loses viewers.

Drugs: The CIA Comes Clean

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:05:56 -0700

In 1989, newly elected president, Bush 1 pardoned Secretary of the Army Caspar Weinberger and other Iran/contra defendants ending the investigation of Iran/contra crimes. Stonewalling, perjury, obstructing justice, shredding evidence, retaliating against truth tellers had proved to be effective.

The Kerry subcommittee reported: "the saga of Panama's General Manuel Antonio Noriega represents one of the most serious foreign policy failures for the United States...It is clear that each US government agency which had a relationship with Noriega turned a blind eye to his corruption and drug dealing, even as he was emerging as a key player on behalf of the Medellin Cartel. Manuel Noriega was allowed to establish "the hemisphere's first ‘narcokleptocracy.’”

According to Noriega on March 18, 1988, he met with US State Department officials William Walker and Michael Kozak, who offered him $2 million to go into exile in Spain. Noriega said he refused the offer. Dec. 30, 1989 the US invaded Panama with the loss of 24 soldiers. Deaths of Panamanian civilians were estimated at 3,000 to 5,000 and 20,000 to 30,000 were left homeless. Noriega was brought to the US. At his trial, a government witness swore that the Medellin drug cartel had given $10 million to the contras, as reported by the Kerry subcommittee.

1996, Gary Webb began a series of stories for the San Jose Mercury Times connecting three career criminals to the CIA and the devastation of crack cocaine on black youth. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, “Freeway” Ricky Ross was L A’s most known crack dealer in the 1980s, Oscar Blandón Reyes, was described by one US assistant district attorney as “the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States,” and Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero was alleged to have brought Blandón into the drug business to support the contras and supplied him with cocaine.

The Washington Times used ex-CIA officials who had been part of the contra war to refute the charges. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times relied on the CIA’s internal reviews in 1987 and 1988 that had denied the spy agency was involved in contra drug smuggling. The Washington Post said it was old news, that “even CIA personnel testified to Congress they knew that those covert operations involved drug traffickers.” Besides, the traffickers Webb mentioned were small time. Blandon “handled only about five tons of cocaine,” although Norwin Meneses may have handled more.

Faced with major media criticism the Mercury Times published a front-page column criticizing Webb’s stories, stopped the newspapers contra-cocaine investigation and reassigned Webb. Webb resigned in disgrace.

1998 Rep. Maxine Waters placed into the Congressional Record a letter of understanding between the CIA and the Justice Department written Feb. 11, 1982. Scarcely a year after Reagan’s inauguration CIA Director William Casey requested that the CIA be freed from legal requirements that it report drug smuggling by CIA assets. Even that early, the memo was too late. Reagan, inaugurated in 1981, provided the CIA $19.9 million to organize a covert war against Nicaragua. ADREN contras had turned to crime “in order to feed and clothe their cadre,” according to a June 1981 CIA report. ADREN made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981. Months later Attorney General William French Smith agreed that the CIA need not obey a law they had already violated.

CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz confessed to the Senate Intelligence Committee that the 1987 internal investigation had lasted only 12 days, the 1988 investigation only three days. He promised a more thorough review. January 1998 Hitz’s first report revealed that CIA officials failed to investigate contra-cocaine allegations fully, withheld incriminating information when they had it, and thwarted official inquiries into the crimes.

The devastating second report was not released until December, 1998. Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade and revealed how the Reagan administration protected the drug operations and circumvented federal investigations that threatened to expose the crimes.

In 1980, Bolivia drug merchant Roberto Suarez bankrolled a coup in Bolivia that ousted the elected government with the support of Argentina’s military regime and made Bolivia the region's first narco-state. Bolivia’s government-protected cocaine shipments turned the Medellin cartel into a huge operation delivering cocaine to the US. Suarez invested more than $30 million in various right-wing groups, including the contras. Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse told the US Senate that drug money was laundered through front companies in Miami before going to Central America. There, veteran Argentine intelligence officers trained the contras. In 1981, Reagan ordered the CIA to collaborate with the Argentines in building the contra army that controlled no territory and attacked villages instead of the Nicaraguan army.

In 1981, Frank Castro, a veteran of the CIA's Cuba operations was charged with four counts of narcotics trafficking. Castro pled guilty to a weapons charge and was fined $500. In 1983, Castro was alleged to be part of a plan to smuggle 425,000 pounds of marijuana to Beaumont, Texas. An unsigned, handwritten note read: “DOJ (Department of Justice) is willing to drop (charges) if (Castro) was in fact associated (with) Agency.” Castro financed a training base in the Everglades and a group that trained openly and boasted of plans to fight in Nicaragua without government interference. The drug charges against Castro were dropped. In 1986, the CIA withheld information about Castro from the Kerry subcommittee.

In 1982, the CIA sent to run the Costa Rica-based contra operations a “contractor”, known as “Ivan Gomez,” who had been working in his family's drug-money-laundering business. “Gomez” directly participated in illegal drug transactions, concealed participation in illegal drug transactions, and concealed information about involvement in illegal drug activity. CIA officials protected “Gomez” from law enforcement and congressional oversight even after he left the agency in 1988.

In 1983, fifty drug traffickers were arrested near San Francisco. Contras in Costa Rica claimed in a letter to the federal court that $36,020 seized from a drug defendant belonged to them. CIA headquarters protested planned depositions of contra figures in Costa Rica. Assistant US attorney Mark Zanides was told by CIA counsel Lee Strickland that the CIA would be “immensely grateful” if the depositions were dropped. They were. The money was returned to Zavala. CIA headquarters sent a cable to the Costa Rica station about the CIA's role in derailing the depositions: “We can only guess as to what other testimony may have been forthcoming.”

In 1984, a DEA report revealed that Meneses-Canterero, named in Webb’s story, was tracked by US law enforcement officials as early as 1976.

A December 1984 cable to CIA headquarters revealed Felipe Vidal’s ties to Rene Corvo, suspected of drug trafficking. Vidal had a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker but the CIA hired him to serve as a logistics coordinator for the contras. Corvo was working with Frank Castro. Oliver North's liaison to the contras, Robert Owen, warned the National Security Council that the “Cubans (Corvo and Castro) involved in drugs.”

Fabio Ernesto Carrasco, a pilot for Columbian drug smuggler Jorge Morales, testified that in 1984 and 1985, he flew planes loaded with weapons for contras operating in Costa Rica. The weapons were offloaded and military bags of drugs were loaded on the planes for flights to the US. Carrasco also testified that Morales provided “several million dollars” to the contras. Morales did not testify about the contras but his non-contra DEA cooperation won him early release from prison.

July 1985, North noted a call from retired Air Force General Richard Secord in which the two discussed a Honduran arms warehouse from which the contras planned to purchase weapons with money Reagan secretly raised from Saudi Arabia. According to North’s notes, Secord told him that $14 million of the purchase money came from drugs.

1985, Two DEA agents testified that North had wanted to take $1.5 million in Medellin Cartel bribe money and give it to the contras. DEA officials rejected the idea.

The CIA knew that contra-cocaine tracked into Reagan’s National Security Council. Moises Nunez worked directly for the NSC since 1985 and for two drug-connected seafood importers, Ocean Hunter in Miami and Frigorificos de Puntarenas in Costa Rica. Frigorificos was created in the early 1980s as a cover for drug money. In 1987, the CIA asked Nunez about ties to the drug trade. “Nunez revealed that since 1985, he had engaged in a clandestine relationship with the National Security Council,” Hitz reported. “Nunez refused to elaborate on the nature of these actions, but indicated it was difficult to answer questions relating to his involvement in narcotics trafficking because of the specific tasks he had performed at the direction of the NSC.”

Joseph Fernandez, former CIA station chief in Costa Rica, said that Nunez “was involved in a very sensitive operation” for North’s “enterprise.” The nature of that NSC-authorized activity is still unknown. The CIA gave special prosecutor Walsh the material about Nunez’s claim of NSC authorization as part of a large batch of documents delivered at the end of Walsh's North investigation.

Michael Levine, a former undercover DEA agent, reviewed the evidence of the Reagan administration’s role in the contra-cocaine operations and said, “...you have Oliver North, a high-level official in the National Security Council running a covert action in collaboration with a drug cartel. That's what I call treason. We'll never know how many kids died because these so-called patriots were so hot to support the contras that they risked several generations of our young people to do it...where does Congressman Hyde think the drugs went that paid for the contras’ weapons? Into kids’ bodies.”

Contra leader Adolfo Calero testified that SETCO Air, owned and operated by Honduran drug trafficker Ramon Matta Ballesteros, was paid from bank accounts controlled by Oliver North. SETCO also received $185,924 from the State Department for ferrying supplies to the contras in 1986.

1986, the DEA in Miami seized 414 pounds of cocaine from a contra operative in Costa Rica to Ocean Hunter. Federal prosecutor Jeffrey Feldman believed the evidence of contra crimes was strong enough for a grand jury. Feldman's boss, Leon Kellner agreed. Attorney General Ed Meese flew to Miami. Kellner reversed himself, rewrote Feldman's memo to reject a grand jury, signed Feldman’s name without informing Feldman of the changes and without permission. The revised memo was leaked to the media to undermine Kerry's investigation.

1986, Owen wrote North that a Vortex plane being used to carry “humanitarian aid” to the contras was previously used to transport drugs. Vortex was partly owned by marijuana trafficker Michael Palmer. Despite Palmer's history of drug smuggling and a Michigan indictment on drug charges, Palmer received over $300,000 to fly supplies to the contras from the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Aid Office overseen by North, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, and CIA officer Alan Fiers.

1986, Robert Owen sent a message about contra leadership, capitalizing the words, “THIS WAR HAS BECOME A BUSINESS TO MANY OF THEM.”

DEA reported that “intelligence information...shows that during the month of January, 1986, (Gerardo Duran) was in charge of a crew which loaded over 400 kilos of cocaine into an aircraft in Costa Rica piloted by a DEA (informant).” The DEA chose not to indict Duran.

1986, a Southern Air Transport airplane, the principal airline of North's Iran/contra operations was shot down in Nicaragua. Ed Meese briefly blocked a federal investigation on national security grounds.

The Reagan administration planted stories in the media dismissing the contra-drug allegations as fiction. Reagan won congressional approval for the $100 million annual amount that contra backers claimed was needed to fund the war. That was in addition to drug cartel funding and $80+ billion in arms sales to Iran that was supposed to go to the contras.

1988, The politicization of the Justice Department became so bad that six Republican senior officials, including the deputy attorney general and the chief of the criminal division, resigned in protest.

In 1996 Washington attorney Jack Blum, special counsel to the Kerry committee testified that “The government made a secret decision to sacrifice a part of the American population for the contra effort.” Reagan officials were “quietly undercutting law enforcement and human-rights agencies that might have caused them difficulty. Policy makers absolutely closed their eyes to the criminal behavior of the contras.”

In 1998, when Hitz’s complete report of White House crimes was released, the media were too enraptured by Monica Lewinski to notice. George W. Bush moved into the White House, with the approval of five Supreme Court justices whose names will live in infamy, and Bush sealed the Reagan/Bush records that are the property of We the people because there was so much that needed to be hidden.

Daniel Ortega was elected president in 1984, failed reelection in 1990, was reelected in 2006, and is presently president of Nicaragua. Nicaragua continues to have a mixed economy and an opposition media.

For more information see the report of the Kerry subcommittee and the CIA IG report both available at (nsarchive.org) Also, Robert Perry, consortiumnews.com

Greenwald On GE, MSNBC And More

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 09:43:31 -0700

The rot is deep. As Greenwald notes.

Future of 'The Observer' in doubt following huge losses

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 19:55:48 -0700

Ian Burrell | August 3

The Independent - Guardian Media Group (GMG) is considering closing the world's oldest Sunday newspaper, The Observer, after the group's disastrous performance in the past year when it recorded losses of close to £90m.

The Observer, which was founded in 1791 and was a platform for the early writing of George Orwell, was bought in 1993 by the publishers of The Guardian, who promised to safeguard its future.

GMG is thinking of replacing the Sunday paper with a Thursday magazine, which may be branded as The Observer in a nod to tradition. Journalists at the paper are deeply unhappy that a dummy edition of such a magazine is being prepared and some are lobbying to ensure it never reaches the news-stands. The alternative would be to keep the newspaper running as a slimmer product.

Fox Wins

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 18:42:15 -0700

There is only one take-away from this Times front pager: Fox won.

For years I have criticized the corporate media for having too much power and having it's ultimate interests aligned towards the corporate parent, as opposed to news and newsgathering. This goes to the heart of it.

Here's what happened. Olbermann attacks Bill O'Reilly's media practices. He does this for years and gets under his skin. O'Reilly isn't stupid--whatever else me may be--and attacks the business side of the corporate parent GE. Some of the attacks are clearly below the belt. But this is all part and parcel of Fox's way of reporting the news. Fox doesn't have a corporate parent to answer to like GE. It's a full-blown, vertically integrated news organization and can weather anything Olbermann brings.

Finally, Immelt cries uncle. That's the only conclusion I can come to, although the way the article is written, in that soi disant news-style which presents both sides as being equal and both as valid, makes it out to have been a two way war. But it wasn't. Olbermann attacked O'Reilly's politics and news persona. O'Reilly attack the parent. And when the parent had enough Olbermann was muzzled. It would be like two boxers in the ring, one trying to make head shots (Olbermann) and the other (O'Reilly) hitting below the belt and in the kidneys. The refs just look the other way. Or wring their hands at how violent boxing is, while enjoying the spectacle.

Our media is fucked. And it will not change until the news organizations are ripped away from their corporate parents in an anti-trust action.

Washington Post more a church than a paper?

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:59:58 -0700

David Carr at the NYT opines on the cancellationof the Washington Post salon fiasco. He comments that the upstart beltway Politico has caught

the paper on a fundamental lapse in the wall between church and state.

The More Things Change, The More They Don't

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 10:51:51 -0700

As if there was really any question that our mainstream media wasn't composed entirely of whores--although a whore might be insulted by the comparison, let there be no remaining doubts:

The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

With the newsroom in an uproar after POLITICO reported the solicitation, Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli said this morning that he was "appalled" by the plan and said the newsroom will not participate.

"It suggests that access to Washington Post journalists was available for purchase," Brauchli told The Post’s media reporter, Howard Kurtz. The proposal "promises we would suspend our usual skeptical questioning because it appears to offer, in exchange for sponsorships, the good name of The Washington Post."

I'm speechless.