You’ve seen it by now: Two women and two little children, barefoot and in diapers, fleeing teargas on the US-Mexico border. The powerful image has gone viral, and it’s not the first time. But to what end? Taken on Sunday by Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon, the photo soon appeared on the front pages and splashed…
Here’s the ugly truth: Facebook and Google are profit-maximizing quasi-monopolies who will do anything to protect their monopolies. Of the many remarkable trend changes of the past year, few are more striking than the fawning embrace of Facebook et al. by Big Media turning to an enraged sense of betrayal. Facebook and Google–by their own self-definitions,…
Journalists need to take some sort of Hippocratic oath pledging to tell no lies, otherwise we could end up with a war even more calamitous for humanity than Iraq. As cited by American journalist Sharyl Attkisson in her excellent book ‘The Smear’, John H. Johnson, author of ‘Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data…
In order to understand today’s demonization of Vladimir Putin, one must go back to US President George W. Bush’s propaganda for “regime-change in Iraq” and demonization of Saddam Hussein at that time. The US regime now has come to recognize that with Putin’s high approval-ratings from the Russian public, the US aristocracy’s dream of fomenting Putin’s ouster by…
After a Twitter backlash, the Guardian was forced to amend a brazenly propagandized headline which sought to undermine the basic rights of Palestinians and elevate Israeli soldiers to levels previously thought unimaginable. “We remain editorially independent, our journalism free from commercial bias and our reporting open and accessible to all,” reads an advertisement on the…
Face it: it’s been an abusive time, to use a word he likes to wield. In his telling, of course, it’s he or his people who are always the abused ones and they — the “fake news media” — are the abusers. But let’s be honest. You’ve been abused, too, and so have I. All…
