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Cartoon by K. Bendib, all rights reserved.
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"Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light." -Thomas Jefferson, 1779
AP president proposes media lobby to fight government secrecy - Denouncing increased official secrecy, Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley unveiled a plan Friday for a media advocacy center to lobby in Washington for open government. - "The powerful have to be watched, and we are the watchers," Curley said, "and you don't need to have your notebook snatched by a policeman to know that keeping an eye on government activities has lately gotten a lot harder." - At every level of government, records are being sealed and requests for information denied, and courts are imposing gag orders and sealing documents, Curley said, speaking in the Hays Press-Enterprise Lecture series. - "The point I want to make with these brief examples is an elemental one: The government's power is overwhelming. Its agents are armed and authorized to use force if they have to," Curley said. - "News is our business. We are the watchers," Curley said. "Open government is the personal interest and constitutional right of every citizen. But we of the fourth estate have by far the greatest means and incentive to speak and fight for it." - TVNL Comment: BRAVO! Simply BRAVO!
Under Bush, a New Age of Prepackaged Television News - To a viewer, each report looked like any other 90-second segment on the local news. In fact, the federal government produced all three. - Several major television networks play crucial intermediary roles in the business. Fox, for example, has an arrangement with Medialink to distribute video news releases to 130 affiliates through its video feed service, Fox News Edge. CNN distributes releases to 750 stations in the United States and Canada through a similar feed service, CNN Newsource. Associated Press Television News does the same thing worldwide with its Global Video Wire. - Under the Bush administration, federal agencies appear to be producing more releases, and on a broader array of topics. - United States law contains provisions intended to prevent the domestic dissemination of government propaganda.
IMAGINE ALL THE PEOPLE WHO MIGHT STILL BE ALIVE - HAD THE CORPORATE MEDIA NOT BETRAYED THEM!
- DEMOCRACY REDEFINED!
![]() - A TvNewsLIES.org ANALYSIS OF MANTRA MANIPULATION BY G. W. BUSH AND THE MEDIA
- US Media; Traitors of Humanity
- The Press and Freedom, Some Disturbing Trends
- TvNewsLies.org Tracks Iraq Invasion Coverage
- Protecting Bush
- Wave the Flag or be Silenced - Article expired.
- No questions asked
- The Fourhorsemen of Propaganda
- Bush's Top Gun Photo-Op
- “Journalism profession in somewhat of a paralysis”
- Intimidation Punditry - a Disservice
- Freedoms crumble, press sleeps
- Introspective Media Not in the Cards
- Just Another Week for The Bush Administration and the U.S. Media
- Toe-the-Line Media
- The China Syndrome - ‘ U.S. government's ability to reward media companies that do what it wants’
- Ed Garvey: Mainstream media still treating Bush with kid gloves
- Keepers of Bush Image Lift Stagecraft to New Heights - using the powers of television and technology to promote a presidency like never before.
- Bush's TV image is remote from reality
- Bush unchallenged by media
Hawks turned media into parrots - ANTONIA ZERBISIAS - Turns out that CNN was the Pentagon's Bitch after all. - But, in fairness to America's "most trusted'' news source, my indelicate term can also be applied to ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Fox's Special Report with Brit Hume and, yes, even unto PBS's NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. Handout Photos Don't Tell the Whole Story - The wire services -- behaving like adjuncts of the White House -- distributed the staged hospital scenes, and noted in their captions that the photos were handouts. U.S. media caved in to the Bush agenda - ‘I scanned the major U.S. networks for voices challenging the distortions and bunkum coming from the White House and neo-cons. There was virtually none.‘ U.S. media criticism of Bush too soft - The media critic for the Washington Post, Howard Kurtz, recently returned from London, where he was blown away by the harshness of the coverage of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. - "George W. Bush bloody well has it easy," Kurtz wrote. "He doesn't have to put up with the hour-by-hour pounding that the British press gives Tony Blair, with journalists calling him a liar and worse in a raging debate over whether Iraq really had weapons of mass destruction." We ask the questions - It took a British journalist to put the American Defence Secretary on the spot. Why, asks Justin Webb, are the US media so timorous? Bring Back the Skeptical Press - The Bush administration has been taking heavy flak for its as yet unproved claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. In fixing blame for the way the public appears to have been sold a bill of goods, don't overlook the part played by the media. Instead of closely questioning the administration's case, the nation's newspaper editorialists basically nodded in agreement. Media Weapon in 'War on Terror' - ‘Pakistani press is freer in its coverage of foreign policy issues than the American media.' Recent events, particularly in the aftermath of the Iraq War, seem to corroborate Fisk critical perspective on the American media view of the 'war on terror', since it has almost become a partner of the Pentagon in promoting and projecting the officially-certified truth, even at the cost of its credibility and professional ethics. THE NEW AMERICAN ORDER - From here, from Paris and from other capitals, it appears that the administration of George W. Bush is operating only in its own reality. And sometimes the American press seems to be doing the same thing. British and French correspondents are "dissing" the American press as just another branch of the U.S. government. - TVNL comment: Pay attention to this one folks. Have you ever been in a relationship where everyone around you sees that the person you are with is no good for you, but you don’t see it? You ignore them and you tell them that they do not understand your partner. Then after years of abuse you finally break it off only to realize that your friends were right all along only it is too late to prevent all the damage done. Well America, we better start listening to our friends! AP silently strikes line about anti-Bush protestors - “Many held signs protesting the Bush administration's foreign policy.” - However, the emphasized sentence has been stricken from most of the other versions around the web. News media abandon historic role -- and public suffers - Millions of Americans accept what they are told and think they understand what they see. And what they are told and what they see is most often news as a manipulated commodity. But the facts that really count rarely reach a significant number of the public's ears or eyes. - Also, most reporters know governments lie, mislead and deceive. They also know that the press is ostensibly there to keep an eye on governments, to dissect errors and omissions by offering more truthful counter-narratives. What the Hell is going on with CBS?! - WHO is LYING? What the hell is going on at CBS? This looks like a disinformation campaign. Who got to them? Lawyers? The CIA? The Bush Cartel/Rove Machine? Frustrated Democrats complain of media bias - Democrats in Congress claim the mainstream print and broadcast media are giving the Bush administration and Republican leaders on the Hill a free ride. - These lawmakers complain that the press holds President Bush to a much lower standard of accountability than it did President Clinton. Bush’s predecessor weathered such media firestorms as Whitewater, Travelgate, and Monica Lewinsky The press gives Bush a free ride on his lies - I’M GLAD THAT the press is finally making an issue of President Bush's knowing use of a faked intelligence report on Iraq's supposed nuclear weapons program. But most of the press keeps missing the behind or who actually benefits from the tax cuts or what kind of drug coverage the administration's Medicare amendments will really provide or how the Bush Clear Skies Act actually degrades clean-air standards, the press has given the administration an astonishingly free ride.v No Question: The Media Is Right - It used to be big news when leaders were dishonest. The media forced politicians of both parties to pay a price for even the slightest infraction. Just ask Al Gore, who was tarred and feathered for a few careless comments about the Internet. That has changed. The media now barely flinches when the truth is distorted. In just a few years, the same media that tenaciously attacked the last White House over the tiniest appearance of impropriety now barely reports when the current White House deceives, hides information and knowingly ignores hard facts. Parallel Universes - If British newspaper readers learned anything of Blair's rapturous reception here last week, they learned it from British articles denouncing the slavish U.S. media. If French television viewers learned anything about American perceptions of the war in Iraq, they learned it from French news items on the jingoistic U.S. media. A Pattern Of Deception - Duping The Nation - Bush's statement on Iraq shows his telltale MO. Moreover, duping the nation into war is only one case of the pattern of calculated deception that has gone on since the outset of his administration. - Using Propaganda - A hard truth appears to have escaped the notice of the public and received scant attention from the media: Bush is the first president in American history to use deceptive propaganda as his main means of communications in selling his policies. His pattern of deception continues unabated and in direct conflict with the notion of the public's informed consent that is central to American democracy. U.S. Media Are Too Soft on the White House - One of the main problems with American reporting has been reflexive deference toward pivotal administration players like Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice. Chronic overreliance on official sources worsened for a long time after 9/11, with journalists failing to scrutinize contradictions, false statements and leaps of illogic. The Cheshire Story - And after the American media was done, nothing was left but a grin. - Back almost a year ago, there was a huge flap in the media over a remark made by the German Minister of Justice, Herta Daeubler-Gmelin. She was addressing a convention of trade unionists (try to imagine the US counterpart, John Ashcroft, talking to a union convention!), and was talking about whether George W. was mounting an offensive against Saddam Hussein in order to distract the public from his domestic problems. Hardly an outrageous conspiracy theory - What created the huge flap is that Daeubler-Gmelin was quoted as saying, "That's a popular method. Even Hitler did that." The American media promptly started howling that she was comparing the sainted President to Adolf Hitler. - So when a recent member of the cabinet for Tony Blair came out and flat out accused the President of the United States of being complicit in the murders of 3,000 people, and of treason against his country, the American media must have gone right out of its mind with self-righteous rage, right? Wrong. Why isn't the truth out there? - The willingness of journalists to accepts the establishment's view of the events of, and after, 9/11 is truly staggering, says Paul Donovan - One of the major weaknesses of journalism today is how easily some are seduced by power. The premier role of the journalist should be as a check on power, however, many seem to turn this dictum on its head and get greater job satisfaction as parrots of the official truth. Are the News Media Soft on Bush? - That much-ballyhooed “liberal press” hasn’t been nearly as tough on President Bush as it was on his predecessor. One key reason: Bush’s controversies have involved policy rather than personal peccadilloes, and the media have a much bigger appetite for the latter. But does the weapons of mass destruction flap presage a shift? ACTION ALERT: - "Bush's Way" Unchallenged in U.S. News & World Report - The cover of the November 17 U.S. News & World Report reads: "Bush's Way: The Promise and Peril of Seeing the World in Black and White." But the article inside provides an evaluation of the Bush administration's foreign policy that relies primarily on the Bush administration itself, to the exclusion of Bush critics. - TVNL Comment: This is called an infomercial! Media's silence speaks clearly about their loyalties - The Washington press corps apparently decided that respecting one journalist's dubious secrecy pledge outweighed any professional duty to get to the bottom of a nasty, and potentially explosive, instance of deceit and reprisal. Tide turning on Bush flashdance - U.S. editorialists seek probe into war - Yesterday afternoon at 1, CNN's Kyra Phillips gave us the headlines, and then paused dramatically, "First, the story everybody's talking about today ..." - A news junkie could be forgiven for expecting the lead item to be how U.S. President George W. Bush's approval ratings are 49 per cent, an all-time low. It is now undeniable that the White House misled the country into war. It is so under the gun that, yesterday, Bush announced an "independent" panel to examine the false — falsified, surely — intelligence that hurled his nation into the Iraqi quagmire and a fiscal nightmare. - But no. Instead Janet Jackson's nipple jewelry was flashdanced again, as if hundreds of millions of people hadn't already caught her Super Bowl boob job over and over again. - Now it's up to the media to hold the administration's feet to the fire and emphasize that, if Bush himself is "putting together a independent bipartisan commission" — which he is — then it won't be so independent. - The media must also remind citizens that the White House has consistently undermined the 9/11 Independent Commission, which is investigating the tragedy that Bush used to justify later foreign aggressions. - Last year, the U.S. media acted as Bush's cheerleaders and half-time entertainment. Murdoch brings in Bush adviser - The US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice is to address the News Corporation thinktank involving Rupert Murdoch's most senior newspaper executives from the UK, US and Australia. - She will will deliver her speech by satellite at the invitation of Mr Murdoch's Fox operation, which includes Fox News which has been hugely supportive of George Bush and achieved notoriety in the UK during the Iraq war for its ultra-patriotic reporting. - Mr Murdoch's News Corp summits are seen as key opportunities to influence the political bias of his news outfits. Smear Without Fear - In short, CNN passed along a smear that it attributed to the White House. When the smear backfired, it declared its previous statements inoperative and said the White House wasn't responsible. Sound familiar? - But if unnamed "administration officials" spread rumors about administration critics, reporters have an obligation to check the facts before giving those rumors national exposure. And there's no excuse for disseminating unchecked rumors because they come from "the White House," then denying the White House connection when the rumors prove false. That's simply giving the administration a license to smear with impunity. Why didn't America's top journalists grill Bush on Iraq War? - Allowing President George W. Bush to duck hard questions and not demanding the difficult answers, American reporters failed to support our troops in Iraq whose causality numbers increase, day by day. They similarly failed our nation, waiting for answers about a war that could have been avoided. - TVNL Comment: The obvious answer...they are NOT America’s TOP journalists. They are America’s CORPORATE journalists. NBC Blocking Use of Bush TV Footage for Film Critical of War in Iraq - NBC is using its copyright protection to deny an award-winning filmmaker access to film of a recent appearance by President Bush on "Meet the Press," possibly because the network is trying to protect the President politically, a Stanford Law professor said today. - The footage was requested by film director and producer Robert Greenwald, who last year produced an award-winning documentary about the Iraq War, "Uncovered," in which CIA, Pentagon and foreign service experts detailed the lies, misstatements and exaggerations by the Bush Administration that led to the U.S. invasion more than a year ago. Google kills ad critical of Bush, lets pro-Bush ads continue running - Advertisements promoting pro-Bush playing cards continue to run on Google and its affiliate sites, including George Bush Playing Cards, "52 Reasons to Re-elect G.W. Bush," and "Political Playing Cards." Another ad appears for a tamer site selling caricature cards of the President's associates, saying, "George Bush may not have a full deck." Beware of Media-Assisted Republican Dirty Tricks - Republican dirty tricks helped by media complicity let George W. Bush steal the election from Al Gore in 2000. Data from the journalism resource service, Nexus-Lexus, strongly suggest that if the mainstream media had covered George Bush’s actual lies with the same frequency and depth that they carried the RNC lies manufactured to discredit Al Gore, then Gore would have won by a landslide. Never underestimate the power of Republican dirty tricks. Stewart gets serious, why won't reporters? - U.S. journalists keep kid gloves on - Do not adjust your set: U.S. TV journalists are finally asking politicians the tough questions they should have been posing in the run-up to the attack on Iraq. - Trouble is, more often than not, they're asking those questions of Democrats. - Meanwhile, newscasters act as stenographers, as if publishing what each side says — or at least edited bits of what they say — serves the public, let alone the truth. Since when is journalism tape recording? - The Bush administration continues to massacre the truth with almost no contradiction from the media. All the President's Spin - The Bush White House’s philosophy that the media serve no particular democratic function guides its relationship with journalists. Because it sees them as a hostile force in search of the next headline, the administration has no reservations about employing an arsenal of public relations and news management tools to try to shape coverage. These include half-truths and strategically ambiguous language that are difficult for “objective” reporters to expose, relentless message discipline, restrictions on press interaction with Bush, direct pressure on journalists, and dishonesty about policy issues that the media find boring. By wielding these tactics against reporters reluctant to criticize the President after Sept. 11, Bush was able to neuter the press corps for most of his first three years in office. CHARADE - Journalists have had Bush dead to rights several times, including catching him in multiple lies about his association with Enron and his whopper for the ages regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Repeatedly, reporters have served the financial ends of the media conglomerates by letting Bush off the hook. There has been a seemingly improbable series of blunders, the most outrageous of which was the “misinterpretation” of the data from the major media’s own Consortium study that confirmed Bush had stolen the 2000 election but was reported to the public as proving exactly the opposite. Media Lies About "Initial" Bush Tsunami Aid Package - The amount of money the Bush administration initially pledged to the relief effort in Southeast Asia seems to change by the day on Fox News as well as on other "news" outlets. By changing the amount, the press is not only lying to the public, but giving the Bush administration a very, very BIG break as has been so frighteningly common over the last few years. A televisual fairyland - The US media is disciplined by corporate America into promoting the Republican cause - How did a fantasy president from a world of make believe come to govern a country whose power was built on hard-headed materialism? Check your media lap dogs, Mr. President - If America's mainstream media really were as liberal as conservatives claim we are, we would be ballyhooing the fiasco of James D. Guckert, a.k.a. Jeff Gannon, with Page 1 banner headlines and hourly bulletins. - Imagine, then, how the conservative choir would sing out at this point if a Democratic White House knocked long-tenured journalists off its press room access lists so that it could give access to a fellow like Guckert, 47, who dependably asks softball questions because he reports for a partisan Web site that supports the Bush administration. BuzzFlash Vs. The New York Times - In a David vs. Goliath battle, we think BuzzFlash is holding its own. For one thing, the New York Times is starting to get a little defensive at our criticisms of their roll over and play dead coverage of the White House.
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