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{ Tag Archives } BBC

BBC News – BP accused of ‘buying academic silence’

The head of the American Association of Professors has accused BP of trying to ‘buy’ the best scientists and academics to help its defence against litigation after the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

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MEDIA ALERT: MCCHRYSTAL – DEATH SQUAD POSTER BOY

In May 2009, Petras sampled from McChrystal’s CV. The general had played a central role in directing units involved in “extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions”. He was “the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building”.

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MEDIA ALERT: BROTHERS-IN-ARMS: CAPITALISM AND CORPORATE JOURNALISM

An essential role of corporate journalism is to shore up public confidence in an unjust, crisis-riven financial and economic system. Although plenty of gloom and doom is permitted, especially in the face of obvious crisis, the legitimacy of the system is rarely questioned.

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MEDIA ALERT: HEADSHOT – PROPAGANDA, STATE RELIGION AND THE ATTACK ON THE GAZA PEACE FLOTILLA – PART 2

As discussed in Part 1, media coverage of the non-violent Iranian capture of 15 British sailors (in Iranian waters) focused on the humiliating failure of the sailors to open fire in self-defence. Journalists took a very different view of the May 31 Israeli attack on the ship Mavi Marmara carrying human rights activists and supplies to the besieged population of Gaza.

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Letter of complaint to the BBC re its coverage of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla Massacre

We, the undersigned, wish to submit a complaint in respect of the BBCs coverage of Israels attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla and its murder of at least 9 activists on 31st May 2010. The BBCs coverage of Israels attack on the Mavi Marmora [MM] was even worse than its coverage of Israels attack on Gaza in 2008/9 and your news coverage was little more than an extension of Israels PR offensive.

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Israel, Nazi propaganda chief Göebbels would have been proud of you By William Bowles

As the true nature of the massacre on the Mavi Marmara becomes apparent now that witnesses can speak out, so too is the scale of the pre-planned propaganda blitz conducted by the Israelis, a blitz that was launched in tandem with the armed attack.

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PRC Action Alert: Direct Bias showed on BBC on Flotilla crime

In most of its coverage BBC depended on Israeli sources whilst the Palestinian side has been ignored. PRC suggests that such coverage harm the image of BBC and could classify it as an alternative for some Israeli media outlets.

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Welcome to BBC Israel By William Bowles

So it seems that the BBC care only about Israel’s reputation and that it will undoubtedly be a ‘public relations disaster’. The deaths of at least nineteen unarmed people doesn’t figure in the BBC’s universe of spin.

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BBC Shameful Reporting of Israeli Army Murder of Aid Activists

In their ‘reporting’ of the Israeli army’s killing of Free Gaza activists last night, the BBC revealed the exceptional depth of their pro-Israel stance, even when 16 civilians carrying humanitarian aid are murdered by the Israeli army in a completely illegal attack which was an act of piracy since the ships were in international waters.

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From International Brigade to Freedom Flotilla: Remembering the ancestors of our struggle By William Bowles

In the light of the Freedom Flotilla on its way to Gaza and the opposition it’s facing, not only from Israel, but the news blackout by the corporate/state media on the seven hundred brave people making the trip, it’s worth recalling that back in the 1930s the International Brigade was formed to defend Spain’s democratic Revolution against Fascism.

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‘A battle for the high seas. And the high ground’ By Lauren Booth*

After calls to newsrooms across the UK it is clear to me that the first ever sea bound fleet of international aid to Palestine is not of itself a big enough story for our media – until if fails. On Israel’s terms. The BBC has been taking some 200 calls in an hour from viewers wanting news of the mission – to no avail. So what’s going on?

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MEDIA ALERT: THE ART OF LOOKING PRIME MINISTERIAL – THE 2010 UK GENERAL ELECTION

On April 15, news media broadcast the first of three live, 90-minute “prime ministerial debates” between Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Nick Clegg, the leaders, respectively, of the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties. By the end of the second debate on April 22, the word ‘Iraq’ had been mentioned a total of five times over the course of the three hours of discussion.

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MEDIA ALERT: WHEN FACTS AND PROPAGANDA COLLIDE – THE BBC BENDS OVER BACKWARDS TO ACCOMMODATE ISRAELI CLAIMS

When a Thai kibbutz worker was killed in Israel by a rocket launched from Gaza last week, BBC News online gave the incident headline coverage flagged up on its home page. By contrast, the killing of two Palestinian teenagers, Mohammad Qadus and Osaid Qadus, by Israeli soldiers on Saturday was buried at the end of a short news report on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon’s Middle East visit.

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Capitalism cut adrift – Part 2: Looking Sideways By William Bowles

Television has become the major propaganda weapon of capital, serving not only to ‘entertain’ but to transform our understanding of where we came from and crucially, how we got here.

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MEDIA ALERT: WAR AS PR – OPERATION MOSHTARAK, MEANING “TOGETHER”

Idiocy is one thing, but the BBC’s idiocy all went one way – no journalist swooned with comparable helplessness at the feet of experts excoriating US-UK propaganda. As news of Sambrook’s move arrived, his former colleagues at the BBC were once again deferring to the “intelligent”, “thoughtful”, “sceptical” American and British politicians hawking the public relations event known as Operation Moshtarak in Afghanistan.

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Why is the BBC’s Haiti coverage so appalling? By William Bowles

I’ve been scanning through the BBC News website almost every day to see what our ‘impartial’ and ‘objective’ state-controlled news organization has to say on the subject. So first I searched through my BBC RSS feed from the 15 January to today, 25 January, using Haiti as the keyword. Only one out of twenty-six stories on Haiti refers to the issue of the US role. However, the article has precious little say about it.

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Securing Disaster in Haiti By Peter Hallward

Nine days after the devastating earthquake that struck Haiti on 12 January 2010, it’s now clear that the initial phase of the U.S.-led relief operation has conformed to the three fundamental tendencies that have shaped the more general course of the island’s recent history. It has adopted military priorities and strategies. It has sidelined Haiti’s own leaders and government, and ignored the needs of the majority of its people. And it has proceeded in ways that reinforce the already harrowing gap between rich and poor. All three tendencies aren’t just connected, they are mutually reinforcing. These same tendencies will continue to govern the imminent reconstruction effort as well, unless determined political action is taken to counteract them.

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What say you, BBC?

It has been a year since Israel’s savage assault on Gaza that killed more than 1400 civilians. For the duration of the attack the BBC did not have a single man or a woman inside Gaza to cover it. This would be understandable if there weren’t any means available to get a journalist into Gaza. But this was not the case. The BBC, unlike channels such as Al Jazeera International, appeared content to comply with Israeli demands to keep clear. Worse, its journalists parroted Israeli claims about the rationales and the consequences of the assault.

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BBC Climbs Down over Zionist ‘anti-Semitism’ Lies at SOAS Meeting

It was a simple and terrible accusation. The co-Chair of the Zionist Federation, Jonathan Hoffman, had got up to ask a question at a Bricup meeting, and he was subject to a shout of ‘Jew’ and ‘Jewish’ as well as being heckled because he was Jewish (not because of his views of course!). There was only one problem. None of it was true.

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Media Alert: Chilcot Inquiry – the establishment goes to work – part 2

The Iraqi “threat” was a fantasy invented by the immensely powerful, nuclear-armed bullies of the West. This is why former British ambassador to Washington, Christopher Meyer, was able to observe last month that prior to the attacks on September 11, 2001, Iraq was merely “a grumbling appendix”.

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