Sunday, Dec 21st
Last update09:46:34 AM GMT
Journalism Glance
In an action called Occupy Wall Street, thousands of activists took to the streets of Lower Manhattan on September 17. The protests are continuing, with demonstrators camped out on the Financial District's Liberty Street in support of U.S. democratization and against corporate domination of politics.
But you wouldn't know much about any of this from the corporate media--outlets that seem much more interested in protests of the Tea Party variety.
Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab news network financed by Qatar, named a member of the Qatari royal family on Tuesday to replace its top news director after disclosures from the group WikiLeaks indicating that the news director had modified the network's coverage of the Iraq war in response to pressure from the United States.
Al Jazeera is under intense scrutiny in the Middle East over its varying coverage of the Arab Spring revolts. Although the network is nominally independent - and its degree of autonomy was itself a revolution in the context of the region's state-controlled news media when it began in 1996 - many people contend that its coverage of the region still reflects the views of its Qatari owners.
Millie Dowler's family have been offered a multimillion-pound settlement offer by Rupert Murdoch's News International, in an attempt to settle the phone-hacking case that led to closure of the News of the World and the resignation of the company's chief executive, Rebekah Brooks.
It is understood that News International has made a settlement offer estimated by sources at close to £3m, a figure that would include a £1m donation to charity. But the publisher has not yet reached agreement with the Dowler family, whose lawyers were thought to be seeking a settlement figure of closer to £3.5m.
There is a specter haunting America today. It is the specter of stupidity. A few months ago, I wrote a column I called “The Problem of Republican Idiots.” Believe me, this problem has not gone away. Rick Perry, the Republican Party’s presidential front-runner right now, believes the phenomenon of man-made global warming to be a conspiracy by “a substantial number of scientists who have manipulated data.”
No less alarming is that this stupidity is apparently contagious. The men and women who inhabit the upper reaches of the US media (and pull down the multimillion-dollar salaries) appear to believe that to do their jobs properly, they must make themselves behave like idiots in order to be “fair” to the Republicans and their idiotic ideas.
Earlier this week, Oversight Committee Ranking Member Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) along with other members of his panel called on Oversight chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) to probe News Corporation over allegations that the company broke the Foreign Corrupt Practices Law and may have even hacked the phones of victims of the 9/11 tragedy.
Yesterday on Fox News, a subsidiary of News Corp, Issa responded to those calls by claiming that (1) the Justice Department is investigating the matter so he doesn’t need to, (2) it is not his responsibility to look into an issue that occurred “in another country,” and (3) the “most inappropriate” course of action would be “picking on media”:
CNN, which likes to boast that it’s America’s non-ideological cable news network, revealed in its Republican presidential debate collaboration with the Tea Party Express the hidden political reality behind “centrist” journalism – a never-ending pandering to the Right.
The basic truth about mainstream journalism is that the careerists who dominate the national news media are keenly attuned to where the worst career dangers lie and steer away accordingly. And, by far, the biggest risk to a journalist’s career is to be deemed “liberal” by the Right’s powerful attack machine.
Noting that since the September 11th terrorist attacks on the United States, the response by governments to the threat of terrorism had been massively disproportionate, resulting in.
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