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Behaving as media should.
Whistle-blowers usually take great risks to get out information to the public. I suspect that it was not WikiLeaks fault that this individual has been arrested, but rather a reverse engineering by the US military of who had access to what and where.
“The army intelligence specialist charged with leaking U.S. military secrets to the WikiLeaks website has been moved from Kuwait to a military jail in Virginia.
In a statement issued Friday, the U.S. army said Pte. Bradley Manning was flown Thursday to Quantico Marine Base, where he will be held while awaiting trial for leaking top-secret military intelligence to WikiLeaks, a site devoted to publishing leaked government and other sensitive documents.”
Mr. Manning, allegedly, has been a very naughty and very busy bee, apparently he is also responsible for the video from the gun cameras of attack helicopters shooting up civilians in Iraq along with the thousands of documents made available on WikiLeaks.
“White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the leak of tens of thousands of secret military documents already has jeopardized the lives of Afghans working with the U.S. and its war allies.”
If our media had actually been doing its job and reporting about what was happening in Afghanistan and Iraq, we would not have had the need for this particular leak. Instead through our journalistic mandarins continue to go meekly through their routines of obedience toward elite power. Journalism is not performing its original function any more, that is bringing the news to the people. Battered by calls for “objectivity” and “balance” what we get is a tendentious smear of propaganda; this vile pap masquarading as “news” for consumption by the public.
A side note, Mr.Manning will probably be publicly drawn and quartered for his heroic actions Al Jazeera opines in their article about the WikiLeaks source:
“In a statement, the defence department said Manning was transfered to the US “due to a potentially lengthy pre-trail confinement because of the complexity of the charges and an ongoing investigation.”
Our correspondent said that the US military wants to use Manning to send a message to future whistleblowers.
“If you violate the trust of security clearance, you will be prosecuted,” she said.”
A rational decision by the US military, but I do not think it will really help their security situation much in the long run. Too much malfeasance, for too long involving so many individuals, one will always have the temerity to challenge the system. This may not have happened if our media was less complacent when it came to analyzing and presenting facts about the current military imbroglios. There is some hope though.
The media is being slowly replaced, people can see the inherent bias in the system and now are cross checking and consulting many sources for a better view of what is happening in the world. So when I hear the newspapers bleating about their costs going up and advertisers leaving them I have no sympathy. If they did their job, people would buy their product. As is, who needs to see elite opinion reiterated for the nth time only in a different medium?
I never write posts during the week, but I saw this and had to get it up it is Robert Fowler’s speech to the Canada 150 conference. What he says is what most people want to have happen in the middle east; at least until politics happens
Robert Fowler’s speech to the Canada 150 conference.
A paradigm for reading news and following events that should really become more popular. Triangulation. That grab the same story from several feeds and see what is reported and emphasized and more importantly, what is *not* reported in the story in question.
In our case we have the instance of Hakimullah Mehsud either being allegedly dead or really just doing fine. The answer depends on whether you look at the report from the CBC, or the report from English Al-Jazeera.
The CBC says:
“The militant leader’s death would be an important success for both Pakistan, which has been battling the Pakistani Taliban, and the U.S., which blames Mehsud for a recent deadly bombing against the CIA in Afghanistan.
The army’s disclosure came shortly after Pakistani state television, citing unnamed “official sources,” reported that Mehsud died in Orakzai, an area in Pakistan’s northwest tribal region where he was reportedly being treated for his injuries.
“We have these reports coming to us,” army spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas told The Associated Press. “We are investigating whether it is true or wrong.”
Versus
Al-Jazeera:
“There has been a call to a local television station and Qari Hussein, a senior commander of the Pakistani Taliban, is said to have denied reports of the death of Hakimullah Mehsud,” Al Jazeera’s Kamal Hyder, reporting from Islamabad, said.
“There is no concrete evidence to suggest that Hakimullah Mehsud is dead, but there is also some suspicion because there has been no video message to prove that he is alive.”
The AFP news agency reported that a senior Taliban spokesman had said that Mehsud was “alive and safe”.
Now, it is hard to evaluate who has a more accurate reports, as who has information about the sources. We have to base much of our news on the veracity of sources that we cannot easily verify.
So is the Taliban leader alive or dead? Who do you believe?
Given the bias of our media, this story should be filed in the official ‘memory hole’ of our imperial consciousnesses.
“Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are marking one year since the start of Israel’s 22-day offensive on the territory, which left hundreds dead and damaged millions of dollars worth of infrastructure.”
Had this happened to an ally, or at least a non official enemy, the network feeds would be all over this. As is, the somber notes are duly recorded by Al Jazeera.
“Ismail Haniya, the deposed Palestinian prime minister, was expected to unveil a plaque commemorating the 1,600 people that Hamas officials say were killed during the war.
Other estimates put the Palestinian death toll closer to 1,400, the majority of whom were civilians, including around 400 children.”
400 hundred children slain. Ho Hum. Why all the carnage in the first place?
“The stated aim behind Israel’s “Operation Cast Lead” was to cripple the ability of Hamas and other Palestinian groups from launching rockets into southern Israel.
Avital Leibovich, an Israeli military spokesperson, told Al Jazeera on Sunday that the operation had been successful.”
Ah, those darn children making rockets. Oh I’m sure it can be all dismissed by calling them collateral damage and the fault of Hamas by intentionally putting innocents in harms way. Was it worth it? Not according to Hamas sources:
“Dr Ahmad Yousuf, a senior Hamas official and former advisor to Haniya, said that the political movement also remained strong despite the devastation caused by the Israeli offensive. “The Israelis failed their objectives on all accounts,” he told Al Jazeera from Gaza City. “Hamas is still there and we try to help our people, but we are still under occupation and suffering from sanctions.”
Hmm. Complete success and complete failure depending on who you ask. For 1400-1600 hundred people it does not really matter anymore. Oh hey, western media look here a story that is reporting from both points of view. You should try it sometime.
Oh and another little tidbit that ‘escapes notice’ in the western media:
“Last week, 16 rights groups including Amnesty International and Oxfam issued a joint statement saying the world has “betrayed” civilians in the Gaza Strip by failing to end the Israeli blockade of the enclave.”
Huh. But of course, they are of the wrong nationality, colour and political leanings. We can safely ignore them and their concerns.
It has been strangely quiet in the news about Iraq. It takes a significant event, as CBC reports, to make headlines about the shattered country.
“At least 136 people died Sunday after two car bombs detonated in Baghdad. With casualty figures still rising, officials said that nearly 600 people had been injured and taken to six area hospitals.
So many people were wounded that even civilian cars were pressed into service to take the casualties to area hospitals, said a Baghdad hospital official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The two vehicles were packed with explosives and detonated less than a minute apart in the centre of the Iraqi capital, officials said.”
Are we purging our collective memories of Iraq and the atrocities we have committed there? Do we think that not bringing Bush and Cheney in for war crimes will not incense the rest of the world?
Iraq is still being torn asunder. The coverage has moved on to Afghanistan and so has our consciousness. Our actions leave us accountable for so much destruction and chaos. We owe the people of Iraq and Afghanistan more than just bullets and bomb craters.
It is nice to be able to form a common frame of reference while discussing certain issues. The topic of the media and bias almost always comes up and this is a useful framework for analyzing how our Media functions. Medialens has a great summary of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s mass media model. I’ll post the link to the entire work and the introduction here.
“In their 1988 book ‘Manufacturing Consent – The Political Economy of the Mass Media’, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky introduced their ‘propaganda model’ of the media. The propaganda model argues that there are 5 classes of ‘filters’ in society which determine what is ‘news’; in other words, what gets printed in newspapers or broadcast by radio and television. Herman and Chomsky’s model also explains how dissent from the mainstream is given little, or zero, coverage, while governments and big business gain easy access to the public in order to convey their state-corporate messages – for example, ‘free trade is beneficial, ‘globalisation is unstoppable’ and ‘our policies are tackling poverty’.
We have already touched upon the fact that corporate ownership of the media can – and does – shape editorial content. The sheer size, concentrated ownership, immense owner wealth, and profit-seeking imperative of the dominant media corporations could hardly yield any other result. It was not always thus. In the early nineteenth century, a radical British press had emerged which addressed the concerns of workers. But excessive stamp duties, designed to restrict newspaper ownership to the ‘respectable’ wealthy, began to change the face of the press. Nevertheless there remained a degree of diversity. In postwar Britain, radical or worker-friendly newspapers such as the Daily Herald, News Chronicle, Sunday Citizen (all since failed or absorbed into other publications) and the Daily Mirror (at least until the late 1970s) regularly published articles questioning the capitalist system.”
One of the most exasperating comments I hear on a fairly regular basis is that the Media has a left wing bias. If you look even a centimeter inside and below official received opinion you can see there is no left wing bias in the mainstream media. If anything, a right wing bias exists. The news we get generally reflects elite opinion on the topic at hand. That is why it is so important to get your news from as many different outlets as possible hopefully with a few of the ‘alternative’ media outlets thrown into the mix. Medialens is an orginization that watches the British press for the veracity of their stories and accuracy of their reporting. As it is with most things, it is better to show than to tell. I have a short blurb to look at illustrating exactly how filtered our ‘independent MSM’ actually is.
On August 26, the Guardian newspaper published an article titled, ‘US takes on Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s nuclear programme in one massive gamble.’ Julian Borger and Ewen MacAskill told readers:
“The Obama administration’s approach to two of the world’s most intractable and dangerous problems, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran’s nuclear programme, is to link them together in the search for a solution to both.
“The new US strategy aims to use its Iran policy to gain leverage on Binyamin Netanyahu’s government.”
The “Iran policy” is based on US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s threat of “crippling sanctions” against Iran. (BBC online, ‘Israel-US settlement deal “close”’, Analysis by Jeremy Bowen, August 26, 2009; http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/8221559.stm)
The sanctions threat is to ensure that Iran does “not compromise on uranium enrichment by the end of next month.” The Guardian told its readers that not only are sanctions supposed to pre-empt any Israeli military action against Iran, “they are also a bargaining chip offered in part exchange for a substantial freeze on Jewish settlements in the West Bank.” The paper quoted one official “close to the negotiations”:
“The message is: Iran is an existential threat to Israel; settlements are not.”
So much for Obama’s much-hailed Cairo speech in June 2009 in which he promised a “new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world.” (‘Obama speech in Cairo’, Huffington Post, June 4, 2009; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/06/04/obama-speech-in-cairo-vid_n_211215.html)
Okay, so we have the original from the Guardian. Now lets look at the objection from David Cromwell at MediaLens which bases its critique of the article on reality instead of received opinion.
The Guardian article presented the US as a valiant peace-seeker:
“The Obama administration is setting out to juggle two potentially explosive global crises, while walking the tightrope of a shaky and nervous global economy. It is not going to be easy, but Washington appears to have decided it has no option but to try.” (Borger and MacAskill, op. cit.)
This is a deeply misleading picture of the US in the Middle East and the wider world, as we have often explained in our books and in media alerts. We are to believe that the world’s number one rogue state is searching for benign solutions to the world’s most “intractable problems”. This fiction is standard in corporate media coverage.
As the independent journalist Jonathan Cook commented to us:
“This analysis in yesterday’s Guardian is almost a masterclass in how the liberal media unthinkingly reflect elite priorities.” (Jonathan Cook, email, August 27, 2009)
Huh. A little different that what you read in the newspapers all the time. It gets better, Cromwell writes a email to the editor of the Guardian for failing to address the issues in the middle east.
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