The mainstream media are totally irresponsible in their priorities. At the moment of writing, five hours after the world’s most dangerous document was presented, no major Western media has featured it prominently. This means it won’t be. No chance it would go viral. The increasing risk of nuclear war isn’t important. Continue reading
Barely a day passes without a new development in the war on social media—that is, the war on us. Today, it is a report that Twitter has emailed hundreds of thousands of its users, warning them that they shared “Russian propaganda.” Continue reading
On November 18, Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt spoke about how Google will help to defeat Russia. He said that Google helps in this effort not by “censoring” Russian news media, but by “deranking” them in Google web-searches, so that web pages from these sites, which he calls “propaganda,” will show so far down in the rankings in any Google-search, so that users of Google will not encounter (or will be vastly less likely to encounter) Russian sites—or any other non-mainstream sites (such as this one), which refuse unquestioningly to trumpet government lies. Continue reading
I watched the sentencing of Dr. Nassar, convicted of molesting under the age of consent Olympic athletes. CNN ran the court drama for hours, interjecting comments from their regular panelists telling us what a monster Nassar was, sometimes concluding that he is the worst child molester of all. Continue reading
It is well known that effective propaganda works through slow, imperceptible repetition. “The slow building up of reflexes and myths” is the way Jacques Ellul put it in his classic, Propaganda. This works through commission and omission. Continue reading
America was never the land of the free and home of the brave from inception—far from it. Continue reading
It used to be that the New York Times and the Washington Post competed against each other to be the chief propagandist for the hundred or so top firms who sell to the U.S. federal government—the 100 top “federal contractors,” almost all of which are Pentagon contractors—mainly these are weapons-manufacturing firms, such as the biggest, Lockheed Martin. Continue reading
Within hours after Akayed Ullah, a Bangladeshi immigrant, allegedly detonated a pipe bomb in New York City on December 11, severely injuring himself and wounding four others, a most comprehensive official and media narrative emerged. Continue reading
USA Today, the most widely-circulated newspaper in the U.S, has penned a scathing takedown of President Donald Trump, calling him “uniquely awful,” unfit to clean the toilets in his predecessor’s presidential library, and a person “who can always find room for a new low.” Continue reading
To understand why the Internet’s in big trouble again, first know this about how Washington works these days. Continue reading
In an effort to combat the “mountain of lies” FCC chair Ajit Pai has deployed to justify his newly released plan to kill net neutrality, Democratic FCC commissioner Mignon Clyburn unveiled a fact sheet (pdf) on Wednesday aimed at helping Americans understand that Pai’s proposals are “worse than one could imagine” and highlighting their life-or-death implications for the open The fact sheet, an easily digestible two pages in length, runs through a series of commonly asked and frequently confusing questions surrounding net neutrality: what it is, why it’s important, and how Pai’s plan would affect the web. Continue reading
Battle lines are drawn. Trump’s FFC chairman Ajit Pai is on record against net neutrality, saying its days are numbered. Continue reading
The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) was established in 1938 as a means of fighting Nazi influence in the United States. The Russian funded cable network RT was recently forced to register under FARA in order to continue operating in the United States. The wave of ginned up anti-Russian hysteria has created a new and terrible precedent. Continue reading
Hostile US demands on popular English-language Russian media, combined with social media censorship of alternative views called “fake news,” threatens press freedom in America. Continue reading
Beginning in 2004, Mark Zuckerberg and his companions made a historic contribution to the annals of alchemy: They converted the lust for human contact into gold. Facebook’s current net worth is more than $500 billion, with Zuckerberg’s own share tallied at $74.2 billion, which makes him something like the fifth-wealthiest person in the world. Continue reading
Speech, media and academic freedoms in America are threatened—especially digital democracy, the last frontier of open and free expression. Continue reading
In a series of moves last week that have alarmed free speech advocates and critics of media consolidation, the Federal Communications Commissions (FCC) voted to abolish a rule requiring radio and television broadcasters to maintain studios near the communities they serve, and FCC chairman Ajit Pai announced further plans to end certain media ownership rules. Continue reading
In one of the largest, if not the largest, neo-Nazi demonstration in Europe since WW2, 20,000 facists marched through the streets of Ukraine’s capital Kiev last weekend under the silent gaze of the Western media. Other than Russian state media RT and Sputnik News, facists throwing Nazi salutes and parading in their tens of thousands in a European capital didn’t concern any of the major Western news outlet. Nothing on BBC, France24, CNN, New York Times, The Guardian . . . the silence of the media lambs when it comes to a growing facists movement in Ukraine is deafening. Continue reading
Israeli military censorship prohibits publishing anything about IDF high crimes against peace and daily persecution of Palestinians. Continue reading
Maltese investigative journalist Caruana Galizia, 53, who was killed in a car bomb explosion in Valletta on October 16, was on a trail that not only implicated Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat, his wife, and top aides in a scandal partly exposed by the release of the Panama Papers, but one that extended from Azerbaijan to the Trump Organization in New York. Galizia, whose blog generated more interest than Malta’s newspapers, had implicated the Muscat government in the sale of Maltese passports and receiving illegal funds from the government of Azerbaijan. Continue reading
It’s old news that Donald Trump abuses reason, knowledge, decency and dark-skinned people. You can’t tear your eyes away. You can already write tomorrow’s story: Today the vicious, deranged freak-show star trashed Enemy A, picked a fight with Failed Insider B, invited unconstitutional action C, insulted population D, declared his intent to abrogate Agreement E or make war on Country F, and denied facts G through Z. Fill in the blanks. Continue reading
U.S. presidential strongman Donald Trump has issued a stark warning via Twitter to the American press. In an October 11 tweet, Trump wrote, “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” It is not the first time Trump has threatened the First Amendment constitutional right of a free press. Trump has already threatened to use anti-trust laws to punish CNN for unfavorable coverage of him. Trump encouraged the Justice Department to block a merger between CNN’s parent company Time Warner and AT&T. Continue reading
Gather around, everyone, and let me tell you a story about rules. And greed and hypocrisy. Continue reading
Now that finally the U.S. government has officially terminated its arming and training of the jihadist gangs that are fighting to overthrow and replace Syria’s government, the neoconservative mainstream U.S. ‘news’ media are disagreeing with each other over how to communicate this fact to the American people without contradicting, or otherwise violating, the false ‘history’ they’ve all been presenting and preserving, throughout the past five years, which has described the U.S. government as being opposed to the jihadists in Syria, instead of as the U.S. government’s arming and training jihadists to overthrow and replace Syria’s government. That’s a pretty blatant ‘historical’ lie, which they’ve all been maintaining, now, for five years; and, they’re at loggerheads over whether or how they’ll deal with it, now that the program (whose very existence they’ve helped the government to hide from the public) has been so publicly and suddenly ordered to end. Continue reading
Think about the websites you visit. The movies you stream. The music you listen to online. The animal videos that are just too cute not to share. Continue reading
Ever since the dawn of modern telecommunications, the American public has been guaranteed by law certain inalienable rights. The law that established the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Communications Act of 1934, enshrined for all Americans the principle of universal access to communications services. Subsequent laws have expanded universal access from telephones to other services, such as high-speed Internet. There is a particular right of universal access to communications for those living in rural and insular areas, and low-income Americans. The other FCC law that guaranteed Americans the right of access to the communications conduits of the public commons, in this case, the public airwaves, was the Fairness Doctrine of 1949. The doctrine required holders of public broadcast licenses to provide honest, equitable, and balanced views of public importance. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan abolished the Fairness Doctrine in order to please the wealthy GOP donors who owned various media conglomerates. Continue reading
U.S. strongman Donald Trump’s comments and tweets, which have blasted the “fake media” and “fake news,” have endangered journalists across the United States. In combining the unique powers afforded by the presidential “bully pulpit” to every American president since Theodore Roosevelt, who coined the phrase, with the “lying press” (lügenpresse), verbiage favored by Adolf Hitler, Trump has rallied to his side some of the most unsavory political activists and bottom-feeders seen in the United States since the days of the red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy. Continue reading
Just over two years after the Federal Communications Commission, under President Obama, approved rules protecting a free and open Internet accessible to all, net neutrality is once again under fire. And once again, the public is being called upon to stand up and fight for freedom of speech. Continue reading
Even before its recent “redesign,” which was claimed to provide an “uncluttered” look, Google News was one of the worst news aggregator sites on the Internet. Many longtime Google News users have complained about the site’s quality and dubious “news” content. Google has offered no reasonable explanations for its poor business decisions that have resulted in Google News being a repository for misleading news links. Keeping in mind that Google received its initial seed investment from the CIA’s IN-Q-IT, now known as IN-Q-TEL, the agency’s venture capital firm in the Silicon Valley, the CIA may be playing some sort of massive social network experiment on Google News users. Continue reading
Media scoundrels abhor journalism the way it should be—especially on domestic and geopolitical issues mattering most, notably on virtually everyting related to imperial wars, Russia and Trump. Continue reading
On Sunday morning Trump seemed to promote violence against CNN. Continue reading
RSS
‘Fake news’ is fake news
Posted on February 14, 2018 by William Blum
The people who created Facebook and Google must be smart. They’re billionaires, their companies are worth multi-multi billions, their programs are used by billions around the world. Continue reading →