Nearly 200 pages of Drug Enforcement Administration contracts with producers were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They show for the first time how the agency interacts with television and film productions. Continue reading
Involuntary confinement in Ecuador’s London embassy for nearly seven years, compounded by his unlawful arrest and isolation under appalling conditions in Britain’s Gitmo, gravely harmed Assange’s physical and emotional health. Continue reading
The corporate media is concealing a leaked UN agency report that shows Syrian government innocence in an alleged chemical attack. Continue reading
One thing for which the right-wing neoconservatives specialize is the production of dodgy dossiers and “official” reports. England has been ground-zero for the production of many dodgy dossiers, including the latest passed to NBC News’s resident “useful idiot,” Richard Engel, by a Mikhail Khodorkovsky-funded entity in London called the Dossier Center. Continue reading
Major media cheered his unjustifiable April 11 police state arrest, shifting his loss of freedom in Ecuador’s London embassy to incarceration at Britain’s Gitmo—prelude to handing him over to Trump regime hardliners for unjustifiable crucifixion. Continue reading
Whenever Washington goes to war or plans one, naked aggression every time launched based on Big Lies and deception, US media genuflect supportively, acting as Pentagon press agents—backing what demands denunciation. Continue reading
On Fox News Channel’s May 2 edition of “The Story with Martha MacCallum” it was alleged, by the program host (at 2:45 in this video), that one reason we must invade Venezuela (if we will) is that “People have lost 24 pounds” there. So (her point was), if we invade, that’s not evil, it’s no coup, but instead it’s humanitarian (presumably like it was in Iraq in 2003, when we invaded that country, which likewise had never invaded nor threatened to invade the United States—it was raw international aggression, by our country, against Iraq). Continue reading
As some of the last minute Democratic presidential candidates scramble to qualify for the DNC’s upcoming June 26/27 primary debate, the latest poll results become more than nominally important given their elevated role in whether a candidate meets the requirements to participate. Continue reading
WASHINGTON—Just a week after the former CIA director and now secretary of state admitted that the agency prior to and under his direction “lied,” “cheated” and “stole,” Mike Pompeo has delivered another claim that, despite his recent admission of dishonesty, has been regurgitated with little scrutiny by a variety of media outlets. Continue reading
Liberals are just as much true believers in imperialism as the right wing they claim to oppose. Continue reading
Michael Copps is a former FCC commissioner who at one point served as acting chair of the Federal Communications Commission. A former deputy assistant and assistant secretary of commerce, he holds a PhD in United States history, is one of our most articulate public interest advocates and currently leads the Media and Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause. Continue reading
April 11, 2019, brought us a new word for Judas: Moreno—the puppet president of Ecuador who sold Julian Assange to Washington for his 30 pieces of silver. Continue reading
The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years. Continue reading
There is a reason why buffoonish political leaders like Donald Trump can get away with attacking the news media. Unlike the print and broadcast journalists who covered Watergate and Iran-Contra, many of today’s, mostly cable news reporters and editors, cannot even get basic facts about geography, political systems, and other fundamentals correct. President Richard Nixon never called his media critics “stupid,” because Nixon and his gang understood that they were up against a professional and very well-informed news media. Similarly, in the Iran-Contra scandal, the news media, including the emergent Cable News Network (CNN), covered the scandal with the intuitiveness and tenacity expected of the reporters, editors, and bureau chiefs. Continue reading
The American dictatorship is by the aristocracy of the country’s 585 billionaires, and has been scientifically proven beyond any doubt, now, not only in the classic Gilens and Page study, which examined thousands of bills in Congress and their money-backers and their ultimate outcomes (passage or failure to pass), during the studied period, 1981-2002. But also another (though less rigorous) study suggests that this control of the U.S. government by America’s billionaires is getting even worse. So, America is clearly a dictatorship, by America’s aristocracy. Continue reading
Governments around the world began trying to bring the Internet under control as soon as they realized the danger to their power represented by unfettered public access to, and exchange of, information. From attempts to suppress strong encryption technology to the Communications Decency Act in the US and China’s “Great Firewall,” such efforts have generally proven ineffectual. But things are changing, and not for the better. Continue reading
In a recent column on the mating dance between Big Government and Big Tech, I noted that “Big Tech wants to be regulated by Big Governments because regulation makes it more difficult and expensive for new competitors to enter the market.” Continue reading
NEW YORK—On March 13, a report in the Daily Beast revealed that the New York-based outlet The Intercept would be shutting down its archive of the trove of government documents entrusted to a handful of journalists, including Intercept co-founders Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, by whistleblower Edward Snowden. However, that account did not include the role of Greenwald, as well as Jeremy Scahill—another Intercept co-founder, in the controversial decision to shutter the archive. Continue reading
According to CNN Business, “Facebook, YouTube and Twitter struggle to deal with New Zealand shooting video.” Continue reading
US wars of aggression, color revolutions, and coups like what’s ongoing against Venezuela wouldn’t get out of the starting gate without major media acting as press agents for Washington’s imperial plots. Continue reading
Growing up Irish-Catholic in the Bronx in the 1960s, I was an avid reader of the powerful columns of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill in the New York newspapers. Passion infused their reports. These guys were extraordinary wordsmiths. They would grab you by the collar and drag you into the places and faces of those they wrote about. Passion infused their reports. They were never boring. They made you laugh and cry as they transported you into the lives of real people. You knew they had actually gone out into the streets of the city and talked to people. All kinds of people: poor, rich, black, white, Puerto Rican, high-rollers, low-lifes, politicians, athletes, mobsters—they ran the gamut. You could sense they loved their work, that it enlivened them as it enlivened you the reader. Their words sung and crackled and breathed across the page. They left you always wanting more, wondering sometimes how true it all was, so captivating was their storytelling abilities. They cut through abstractions to connect individuals to major events such as the Vietnam War, the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Central Park jogger case, AIDS, among others. They were spokesmen for the underdogs, the abused, the confused, and the bereft, and relentlessly attacked the abuses and hypocrisies of the powerful. Continue reading
CARACAS, Venezuela—The international outrage generated by images of U.S.-donated “humanitarian” aid on fire at a Colombian-Venezuelan border crossing last month inspired a frenzied call for Venezuelan regime change from top U.S. politicians and media outlets once the blaze was promptly blamed on the Venezuelan government led by President Nicolás Maduro. Continue reading
The neocon/CIA-connected broadsheet serves Langley’s interests, supporting its involvement in the Trump regime’s coup plot to eliminate Bolivarian social democracy in Venezuela. Continue reading
Here will be yet another current example to demonstrate that all U.S. mainstream ’news’ media hide from their respective public that the U.S. government is lying, when the U.S. government lies—i.e., that all of the mainstream ’news’ media in America hide the truth, when the government itself is lying. In other words: the U.S. mainstream ’news’ media are propaganda organs for the U.S. government. Continue reading
The self-styled newspaper of record, The New York Times, has global reach, why it matters—an establishment publication supporting Wall Street, the military, industrial, security complex, Big Oil, and other predatory corporate giants. Continue reading
Don’t you think something is fishy when the presstitutes orchestrate a fake news “humanitarian crisis” in Venezuela, but totally ignore the real humanitarian crises in Yemen and Gaza? Continue reading
Here are America’s recent targets for regime-change (against which have been used economic sanctions, invasion, and enormous destruction)—and all of them are nations that never invaded nor threatened to invade America: Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, Syria 2011-2018, Yemen 2015-now, Ukraine 2014, and Venezuela 2017-now. Continue reading
Whenever the US goes to war, plans one, or stages color revolutions or old-fashioned coups to try toppling sitting governments, establishment media can be relied on to cheerlead what demands denunciation, operating as supportive imperial tools. Continue reading
There is not an ounce of integrity anywhere in the Western print and TV media Continue reading
The hiring by CNN of Sarah Isgur Flores, a longtime Republican Party hack and former spokesman for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, as the political director for the 2020 campaign should not surprise anyone. Lest anyone point to MSNBC as having more sense than CNN, it is noteworthy that Isgur also interviewed at 30 Rockefeller Center, NBC News headquarters in New York, for a position there prior to accepting the one at CNN. For a Donald Trump puppet, someone who gladly signed a loyalty pledge to Trump before accepting the political director’s job at CNN—a network Isgur has previously called the “Clinton News Network”—points to the degradation of broadcast news to nothing more than mindless infotainment and political insider navel gazing. The cable news networks and their money-losing broadcast cousins at ABC, CBS, and NBC are totally governed by ratings and not what’s in the public interest. For those who believe PBS is a safe haven, its Corporation for Public Broadcasting now counts Trump loyalists and contributions from the Koch Brothers among its many journalistic sins. Continue reading
Censorship is the new normal in America—speech, independent media, and academic freedoms threatened. Continue reading
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What is so rare as a (fake news) day in June?
Posted on June 10, 2019 by Frank Scott
While the continued mental assault on what is left of public consciousness still features the idiotic fiction of Russiagate, or how the evil Putin arranged to trash our great American democracy and defeat holy mother Hillary on behalf of cursed father Donald, the month of June offered not one but two major fictional treatments of historic reality to further reduce innocent minds to enslaved mentalities. The fables of D-Day, celebrated every year in glorification of a war actually won by the Soviet Union but taught as America’s gift to the global marketplace, and the unholy terror alleged by evil China in the infamous Tiananmen uprising treated here as a story worthy of creation by Disney, Spielberg, Mother Goose and Ronald Reagan combined. Continue reading →