Category: Media

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SchwartzReport: 2012 Summary of Mainstream Media Malpractice and Self-Censorship

Corruption, Media

schwartz report2012: Another Year in Mainstream Media Malpractice

amerigus Monday December 31, 2012

As we ring in 2013, it’s time to recognize how the major media buries the issues most important to Americans. With newsrooms focusing so much right now on the fiscal cliff and gun rights, it’s instructive to see nobody looking at the heart of either issue.

But even bigger issues face us, now in the fifth year of prolonged recession and the second decade of a debt-fueled war on terror. It’s more evident each year how “professional” journalists are unable or unwilling to report on reality-based news, making them ever more feeble.

The major media is not useless to you just because of billionaire ownership, it’s also the non-disclosure clauses in contracts that prevent anchors or reporters from telling the story behind the story. Final editorial control over what goes out over the air causes major behind-the-scenes conflict. Even when marquee names try to blow the whistle, the contractual gags always hold in the end.

List Only (Commentary for Each in Article):
The Fiscal Cliff
Gun Control
Obama's Non-Prosecution of Fraud
Industry Ads Trump Science in Hydrofracking Debate
FCC Unaware of Federal Communications Law
Top Media Covers Up for the “ACORN Pimp”
Ignoring the Bigger Picture: Our Constitution Under Attack
The Sixth Amendment
The First Amendment
The Fourth Amendment
“Sons of Citizens United” Creeping in Every Direction

I Said It Last Year And I’ll Say It Again This Year
I’m not sure what you saw, read or wrote that was under-reported in media this year, but feel free to share it in the comments below.

I’ll bet however, that regardless what your foremost burning issue is, whether it’s war, income disparity, health care, energy, the environment, education, civil liberties, corporate personhood, food safety, human rights, LGBT equality or anything else, I guarantee the problem stems from the bigger issue of money in politics and cannot be fixed until our elections are fixed first.

Read full article.

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Mini-Me: Sandy Hook Massacre — Still Conflicted

Collective Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, Law Enforcement, Media
Who? Mini-Me?
Who? Mini-Me?

Huh?

Sandy Hook: Huge Hoax and Anti-Gun “Psy Op”

By Jim Fetzer and Dennis Cimino

Jim Fetzer, a former Marine Corps officer, is McKnight Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

Dennis Cimino, who has extensive engineering and support experience with military electronics, predominantly US Navy Combat Systems, was the Navy’s top EMI troubleshooter before he went to work for Raytheon in the 1980s.

There are obvious signs that tell the difference between genuine and fabricated event. The recent shooting of police and firemen responding to a deliberately-set fire has all the signs of being a bona fide event: there is a single consistent narrative, one shooter has been clearly identified, and there has been no good reason to doubt that the subject, William Spengler, went off the rails and committed the crimes. There are many articles about it, which relate the same basic themes: “Killer of 2 NY Firemen had semiautomatic rifle, left note”: “Police say the man who lured firefighters in Webster, N.Y., into a deadly ambush had the same make and caliber semiautomatic rifle as the one used in the Connecticut school massacre. Webster Police Chief Gerald Pickering said Tuesday that 62-year-old William Spengler was armed with a .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle, a .38-caliber revolver and a 12-gauge shotgun in Monday’s ambush. Spengler killed two firefighters and wounded two others before fatally shooting himself.”

Continue reading “Mini-Me: Sandy Hook Massacre — Still Conflicted”

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Richard Wright: Friedman on Hagel — Zionists Backing Down? Steele Overview & Remember the USS Liberty

Ethics, IO Deeds of Peace, Media, Military
Richard Wright
Richard Wright

Given the out of control slander and vicious opposition of the Zionists and the neo-cons to Chuck Hagel's leaked nomination prospects, this comes as a pleasant surprise.

Give Chuck a Chance

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

New York Times December 25, 2012

In case you haven’t heard, President Obama is considering appointing Chuck Hagel, a former United States senator from Nebraska and a Purple Heart winner, as the next secretary of defense — and this has triggered a minifirefight among Hagel critics and supporters. I am a Hagel supporter. I think he would make a fine secretary of defense — precisely because some of his views are not “mainstream.” I find the opposition to him falling into two baskets: the disgusting and the philosophical. It is vital to look at both to appreciate why Hagel would be a good fit for Defense at this time.

The disgusting is the fact that because Hagel once described the Israel lobby as the “Jewish lobby” (it also contains some Christians). And because he has rather bluntly stated that his job as a U.S. senator was not to take orders from the Israel lobby but to advance U.S. interests, he is smeared as an Israel-hater at best and an anti-Semite at worst. If ever Israel needed a U.S. defense secretary who was committed to Israel’s survival, as Hagel has repeatedly stated — but who was convinced that ensuring that survival didn’t mean having America go along with Israel’s self-destructive drift into settling the West Bank and obviating a two-state solution — it is now.

I am certain that the vast majority of U.S. senators and policy makers quietly believe exactly what Hagel believes on Israel — that it is surrounded by more implacable enemies than ever and needs and deserves America’s backing. But, at the same time, this Israeli government is so spoiled and has shifted so far to the right that it makes no effort to take U.S. interests into account by slowing its self-isolating settlement adventure. And it’s going to get worse. Israel’s friends need to understand that the center-left in Israel is dying. The Israeli election in January will bring to power Israeli rightists who never spoke at your local Israel Bonds dinner. These are people who want to annex the West Bank. Bibi Netanyahu is a dove in this crowd. The only thing standing between Israel and national suicide any more is America and its willingness to tell Israel the truth. But most U.S. senators, policy makers and Jews prefer to stick their heads in the sand, because confronting Israel is so unpleasant and politically dangerous. Hagel at least cares enough about Israel to be an exception.

Read full article.

Continue reading “Richard Wright: Friedman on Hagel — Zionists Backing Down? Steele Overview & Remember the USS Liberty”

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Chuck Spinney: The Patraeus Myth & the Pentagon’s Big Lie

Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Media, Military
Chuck Spinney
Chuck Spinney

Herewith is a stunning series of reports by Gareth Porter, one of the very best investigative journalists in America.  Not only does he show how King David created the myth of his success and became naked in the process, he puts the failures of the surges in Iraq and Afghanistan into a definitive perspective.  But perhaps most importantly, at least to my thinking, Gareth also expose the emptiness of real lesson learned by the US military from its failure in Vietnam … namely how protect the institution from criticism by manipulating and controlling the narrative of  failing wars and a breakdown of leadership by capturing the thinking and imagination of the press.  This manipulation was evident in the uncritical coverage of the First Gulf War, but the superficial appearance of success in those wars masked the rot embedded (pun intended) in the “lesson learned.”  Thanks to Gareth, it is now clear to anyone who makes an effort to study this report.

Chuck Spinney

All 4 Parts: How Petraeus Created the Myth of His Success

 

By Gareth Porter

Truthout, Tuesday, 27 November 2012 17:43

Part 1: How the Myth Began – Petraeus in Mosul

Part 2:  How Petraeus Quietly Stoked the Fires of Sectarian War Without Getting Burned

Part 3: Petraeus Rising: Managing the “War of Perceptions” in Iraq

Part 4 True Believer: Petraeus and the Mythology of Afghanistan

Final paragraph:

The Petraeus Legacy: Conscious and Unconscious Falsehoods

David Petraeus always demonstrated political agility in his management of the “war of perceptions” in Iraq and Iran, gravitating to story lines that would create an image of success even though the larger picture still looked uncertain, if not unfavorable.

But in Afghanistan, the Petraeus strategy did have the same effect as it had in Iraq. He was never able to show that the Taliban insurgency had been brought under control. As Lt. Col. Danny Davis, who returned from his second tour in Afghanistan in late 2011 after having traveled more than 9,000 miles around the country, reported in an 84-page assessment, the level of Taliban attacks in 2011 was still at or above the 2009 levels that had prompted US officials to fear that the war was being lost.

Davis charged that Petraeus' March 2011 report to Congress was “misleading, significantly skewed or completely inaccurate.” Davis presented a classified version of his report to a bipartisan group of Senators and House members that cited dozens of classified documents in support of his charge. And in a telling reflection of Petraeus' failure of to make a credible case, The New York Times covered Davis' critique in a front page story in January 2012. The only question about his attack on Petraeus' claims was whether Petraeus was knowingly lying or saying what he chose to believe.

The record of Petraeus' command in Afghanistan – especially the case of the Taliban impostor – suggests that his public posture on the progress of his command combined claims he knew were untrue with some that he actually believed were true. His need to maintain the image he had so artfully created had led him to believe increasingly his own myth.

Continue reading “Chuck Spinney: The Patraeus Myth & the Pentagon's Big Lie”

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SchwartzReport: Lack of Integrity in the US Media – On Murdoch & Petraeus

Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Media

schwartz reportWhy the US media ignored Murdoch's brazen bid to hijack the presidency

Did the Washington Post and others underplay the story through fear of the News Corp chairman, or simply tin-eared judgment?

The Guardian,

So now we have it: what appears to be hard, irrefutable evidence of Rupert Murdoch‘s ultimate and most audacious attempt – thwarted, thankfully, by circumstance – to hijack America's democratic institutions on a scale equal to his success in kidnapping and corrupting the essential democratic institutions of Great Britain through money, influence and wholesale abuse of the privileges of a free press.

In the American instance, Murdoch's goal seems to have been nothing less than using his media empire – notably Fox News – to stealthily recruit, bankroll and support the presidential candidacy of General David Petraeus in the 2012 election.

Read rest of article.

Continue reading “SchwartzReport: Lack of Integrity in the US Media – On Murdoch & Petraeus”

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SchwartzReport: Fake Images Impacting on Humans

Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Media

schwartz reportHow fake images change our memory and behaviour

Rose Eveleth

BBC, 13 December 2012

Doctored images can affect what we eat, how we vote and even our childhood recollections. The question scientists are asking is why there’s nothing we can do to stop it.

The year was a memorable one – looking back at the unforgettable images over the past 12 months, you might think of apocalyptic-looking clouds over Manhattan during Hurricane Sandy, or Mitt Romney’s children mistakenly standing in a line spelling out the word “MONEY”, or even the winning US Powerball lottery ticket that became the most shared picture on Facebook. There’s only one problem. All these images are fake.

It would be fine if we could dismiss these images as a fleeting joke, an amusing but harmless tidbit shared among our friends and followers, if it weren’t for the fact that our minds appear to have a curious but fundamental glitch. People tend to think of their memories as a transcript, a rough history of events from some early age until the very moment they are experiencing. But human memory is far more like a desert mirage than a transcript – as we recall the past we are really just making meaning out of the flickering patterns of sights, smells and sounds we think we remember.

Read full article with examples of doctored images.

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Mongoose: Connecticut Discrepancies List (32+)

07 Other Atrocities, Civil Society, Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Law Enforcement, Media
Mongoose
Mongoose

One of many lists of discrepancies with top-level commentary.  Troubling to say the least.

Phi Beta Iota: We welcome Mongoose, a serving counterintelligence officer, to our number.

Questions About the Connecticut School Shooting

Dr. Kevin Barrett

The Truth Seeker, December 17th, 2012

In my “quickie” article published less than an hour after the news broke about the Connecticut school shooting, I tried to inject some historical context into the discussion – and do it as fast as possible. Since we know that many if not most “lone nut” massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists out of business.

Friday’s radio guest Paul Rea responds: “To avoid any appearance of reflexively pour new wine into old cognitive categories, you might consider gathering information, to emerging narratives, and then providing critique of them.” I agree that there is a place for this kind of  critique – the “judicious study” by the “reality-based community” of the false realities created by “history’s actors.” But unfortunately, Karl Rove was right: No amount of “judicious study” of false-flag events is ever going to undo the powerful first impressions hammered into the deepest levels of the public mind by media propaganda.

So the first priority of all truth-seekers must be to “catapult the counter-narrative” as quickly as possible.

THEN we can get around to picking apart the details. Enter Lori Price and Clare Kuehn.

Lori Price of Citizens for Legitimate Government quickly and brilliantly deconstructs false-flag massacres. If you are going to subscribe to one email news service, other than VT, it should be CLG News.

Lori asks a very good question here: Was Adam Lanza’s internet record scrubbed?

Riddle me this: Adam Lanza, ‘computer genius,’ left no online footprint

Clare Kuehn, a participant in the Vancouver 9/11 Hearings, is also asking some interesting questions (32 in number, all below):

Continue reading “Mongoose: Connecticut Discrepancies List (32+)”