May 2nd, 2008
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2842
On the fifth anniversary of George W. Bush’s speech beneath the “Mission Accomplished” banner where he declared the end of “major combat” in Iraq, it’s appropriate to recall the crucial role pundits and reporters played in triumphantly hyping the war. This FAIR media advisory was originally sent out in March 2006.
Media Advisory
3/15/06
‘The Final Word Is Hooray!’
Remembering the Iraq War’s Pollyanna pundits
Weeks after the invasion of Iraq began, Fox News Channel host Brit Hume delivered a scathing speech critiquing the media’s supposedly pessimistic assessment of the Iraq War.
“The majority of the American media who were in a position to comment upon the progress of the war in the early going, and even after that, got it wrong,” Hume complained in the April 2003 speech (Richmond Times Dispatch, 4/25/04). “They didn’t get it just a little wrong. They got it completely wrong.”
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Posted in Creative-i on the media, Guest Writers, Iraq | No Comments »
May 2nd, 2008
Anti-Empire Report, May 1, 2008
The Anti-Empire Report Read this or George W. Bush will be president the rest of your life
May 1, 2008
www.killinghope.org
Since I gave up hope, I feel better.
‘More than any time in history, mankind now faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly.’ — Woody Allen
Food riots, in dozens of countries, in the 21st century. Is this what we envisioned during the post-World War Two, moon-landing 20th century as humankind’s glorious future? It’s not the end of the world, but you can almost see it from here.
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Posted in Creative-i on Capitalism, Guest Writers | No Comments »
April 30th, 2008
Have you noticed that whenever we see/hear a corporate boss or government hack open their mouths, they’re invariably no more than mediocre creeps in shiny suits?
Either, they’re trying to worm their way out of their role in the latest disaster to befall us or, they’re peddling some twaddle intended to obfiscate, confuse or just plain lie about events and their causes and of course, their role in it.
And it stretches across every sector of business and government, from agriculture to telecoms. Under ‘New Labour’ all kinds of ‘regulatory’ bodies have been created (or they’re revamps of existing ones). But it’s all smoke and mirrors, window-dressed by creepy PR and marketing sleazoids. In reality, these ‘regulatory’ bodies are no more than rubber stamps for Big Business.
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Posted in Creative-i on Capitalism, From the Editor | No Comments »
April 29th, 2008
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
April 29, 2008
A Vain Search For Principle
In a BBC interview in 1996, Andrew Marr, then of the Independent, described the ’spectrum’ of media available to the British public:
“We have a press which has, it seems to me, a relatively wide range of views – there is a pretty small ’c’ conservative majority, but there are left-wing papers, and there is a pretty large offering of views running from the far right to the far left, for those who want them.” (www.zmag.org/Chomsky/interviews/9602-big-idea.html)
The “left-wing papers” Marr had in mind were the Guardian, the Observer, the Independent and the Independent on Sunday.
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Posted in Creative-i on the media, Guest Writers | 1 Comment »
April 26th, 2008
Le Monde diplomatique, April 26, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/83555/
The military adventurers in the Bush administration have much in common with the corporate leaders of the defunct energy company Enron. Both groups thought that they were the “smartest guys in the room” — the title of Alex Gibney’s prize-winning film on what went wrong at Enron. The neoconservatives in the White House and the Pentagon outsmarted themselves. They failed even to address the problem of how to finance their schemes of imperialist wars and global domination.
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April 25th, 2008
An Exchange With The BBC’s Middle East Editor Jeremy Bowen
MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
April 22, 2008
The media reported last week that at least 22 people, including five Palestinian children, had been killed during Israeli ‘incursions’ into Gaza. The Israeli military ‘operations’ were ‘sparked’ by a Hamas ambush that had left three Israeli soldiers dead. Reporting followed the usual script that Israel’s state-of-the-art weaponry is deployed as ‘retaliation’ for ‘militant’ Palestinian attacks.
The latest deaths followed the killing in early March of over 120 Palestinians under a massive Israeli assault on Gaza. (See our Media Alerts: ‘Israel’s Illegal Assault on the Gaza “Prison”’, March 3, 2008, and ‘Israeli Deaths Matter More’, March 11, 2008,)
One of last week’s dead was a Reuters cameraman, a 23-year-old Palestinian, killed by a shell fired from an Israeli tank he was filming. Few details emerged of the other numerous victims of Israeli violence.
Media Lens emailed Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East editor:
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April 25th, 2008
The word Socialism is unfortunately, much-discredited yet and still the idea lives on regardless, as events in the Southern Americas reveal. But what of us in the so-called developed world?
Revolution I hear you cry? In the West? Not likely is it? In fact, both Marx and Lenin, when asked about revolution in the UK were a little more than disparaging about the idea. And what goes for the UK probably goes for the rest of the West.
Then what hope is there for the future? Well of course neither Marx nor Lenin were soothsayers and the times they have changed. Late in his life Marx looked to the German working class who were the most developed, the most educated and organized of all the European countries. But it was not to be.
So what’s the deal here? Marx accurately unpacked the workings of capitalism, so much so that one hundred and fifty years later his analysis holds true: boom and bust, crisis, war and barbarism are as fundamental to capitalism today as they were then.
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Posted in Creative-i on Capitalism, Creative-i on Socialism, From the Editor | No Comments »
April 17th, 2008
Using food as a weapon is as old as the siege but today’s barbarians have upped the anté by several orders of magnitude.
“…There are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly. Or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way. There are, of course, many ways in which the death rates can go up. In a thermonuclear age, war can accomplish it very quickly and decisively. Famine and disease are nature’s ancient checks on population growth, and neither one has disappeared from the scene … To put it simply: Excessive population growth is the greatest single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the developing world.” — Speech to the Club of Rome by Robert McNamara, Oct. 2, 1979
“Overpopulation and rapid demographic growth of Mexico is already today one of the major threats to the national security of the United States. Unless the U.S.-Mexico border is sealed, we will be up to our necks in Mexicans for whom we cannot find jobs.” —Robert McNamara, then World Bank president, March 19, 1982
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Posted in Creative-i on Capitalism, From the Editor | 3 Comments »
April 9th, 2008
When a group of so-called Aboriginals from I believe Borneo (or maybe it was Papua New Guinea) visited the UK recently they were gob-smacked to find homeless people on the streets of London. The concept ‘homelessness’ simply didn’t exist in their vocabulary and reinforced by the vast wealth that surrounded them (the ‘Aboriginal and the homeless). So too was the idea of the ‘nuclear family’. The concept of ‘living apart’ is totally alien to them.
So anyway, somebody had had the idea of making a TV doccie series about their visit, Margaret Mead in reverse so-to-speak. We saw them living with a ‘typical working class family’ and also with a ‘well-off’ one and we followed them as they toured the UK, increasingly bemused by what they found. But is it simply reverse anthropology, having them look at us for a change?
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Posted in Creative-i on Capitalism, Creative-i on Socialism, From the Editor | 1 Comment »
April 9th, 2008
NATO moved eastward, upping the ante yet again with Russia, warns Eric Walberg
The big news at the recent NATO meeting in Romania is that Croatia and Albania are now happy members of the family of peace-loving nations conducting a brutal war in Afghanistan. The bad news is that Ukraine, Georgia and Macedonia didn’t get the green light, with Russian and Greek revanchism the culprit — clearly a great setback to the cause of world peace.
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