TV News LIES

Freedom of speech might allow journalists to get away with a lot in America, but the Department of Homeland Security is on the ready to make sure that the government is keeping dibs on who is saying what.

Specifically, the DHS announced the NCO and its Office of Operations Coordination and Planning (OPS) can collect personal information from news anchors, journalists, reporters or anyone who may use “traditional and/or social media in real time to keep their audience situationally aware and informed.”

Lynn Samuels, the former left wing radio host on WABC, died of a heart attack on Saturday. The 69-year-old had missed her Saturday morning Sirius XM radio, so, the Post reports, "SiriusXM sent someone to her apartment, and that person notified police, who found her body."

The Daily News' David Hinckley has a thorough obituary, noting how she worked at WBAI and then WABC for 15 years, where she was fired three times and rehired twice.

A Pentagon public relations program that sought to transform high-profile military analysts into “surrogates” and “message force multipliers” for the Bush administration complied with Defense Department regulations and directives, the Pentagon’s inspector general has concluded after a two-year investigation.

The inquiry was prompted by articles published in The New York Times in 2008 that described how the Pentagon, in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, cultivated close ties with retired officers who worked as military analysts for television and radio networks.

Few journalists have greater influence on U.S. foreign policy, particularly regarding the Middle East, than New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. But his tortured obit of a column this week on the official end of the neocolonialist disaster that has been the Iraq occupation reminds one that the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner often gets it wrong.

Was the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, which he did so much to encourage, a “wise choice”? Friedman hides behind one of his trademark ambiguities: “My answer is twofold: ‘No’ and ‘Maybe, sort of, we’ll see.’ I say ‘no’ because whatever happens in Iraq, even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it.”

Conservative columnist David Frum, who was speechwriter for former President George W. Bush, blasted Fox News on Sunday for creating an “alternative knowledge system.”

In an article published by New York Magazine in late November, Frum had argued that conservative media like Fox News and talk radio “immerse their audience in a total environment of pseudo-facts and pretend information.”

What the media says and what the media doesn't tell you.

The inseparable common thread between the patchwork of opposition groups now filling Russia's streets is their funding and support courtesy of the United States government and the National Endowment for Democracy. The mainstream Western media refuses to acknowledge this, and has been muted over the fact that the poll monitors reporting "corruption" and "election rigging" in the first place were also US NED-funded, including the frequently cited "Golos." When admissions are made, they are down-played, and words like "independent" are still used despite Golos' foreign-funding by a government clearly siding with Russia's opposition being a matter of record and illustrating an obvious conflict of interest.