Holy Sh*t!

[Nevermore]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html

Oh. My. God. We can no longer trust our government at all.

[In My Memory]

So, our media outlets are really beginning to reflect our Ministry Of Truth.

 

Perhaps its best to sit back and enjoy a glass of Victory Gin, and try not to think about it at all. The Party will do all our thinking for us.

[Martin]

So' date=' our media outlets are really beginning to reflect our Ministry Of Truth.

 

Perhaps its best to sit back and enjoy a glass of Victory Gin, and try not to think about it at all. The Party will do all our thinking for us.[/quote']

 

who ever you are, that says it.

I didnt know what to say.

We need a new Orwell

 

michael moore does not have a strong enough imagination to

stick it to us what is happening to the country

nobody does, it needs someone Orwell-class

[Sayonara]

Summary of the article for non-NY Times members?

[Nevermore]

The bush administration has been fabricating news stories. Here's a google news link to the same story. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2005/03/13/MNGFEBOM6D1.DTL

[Sayonara]

How very unsurprising.

[Nevermore]

Is it anywhere near as bad in the UK?

[swansont]

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/13/politics/13covert.html

Oh. My. God. We can no longer trust our government at all.

 

You trusted the government before? The scary thing is the media getting into bed with government, rather than being an independent watchdog.

[Sayonara]

Is it anywhere near as bad in the UK?

Not in the least (so far as anyone knows).

[Pangloss]

The sad thing about this is that it's not secret. They're basically taking advantage of something that has been known for a long time now about the TV news business.

 

According to the article, they're perfectly up front about these "stories", telling the newsies exactly what they are and how they were made. The newsies show them anyway because they "play in Peoria". They're catering to their markets. They don't see the difference between something like this and showing the latest bear cub being born at the local zoo. Who cares, so long as the ratings are going up?

 

Not that it's any better at the network level, mind you. At that level the problem is "reporters" who take press releases from special interest groups or corporations and run them as news stories without ever so much as setting foot outside the newsroom or even picking up the telephone. They know full well that you're only going to watch ONE network at 6:30, so you're never going to notice the fact that, by some amazing coincidence, all three networks are running the same story that night.

 

(Tivo two network broadcasts and two local news broadcasts per night for a few nights and you'll notice this almost immediately. You'll laugh the first few times because it's so obvious and absurd -- this can't really be the way news is done, can it? And then you'll stop laughing.)

 

What are you going to do about it, folks?

 

You don’t really need to find out what’s going on

You don’t really want to know just how far it’s gone

Just leave well enough alone

Eat your dirty laundry

[Pangloss]

BTW, that no-subscribe link someone posted above just goes to an excerpt from the article. It's a full-length article in the Sunday Times, and it runs eight pages on the Times web site. I strongly advise reading the whole thing.

 

Registration at the Times is easy and (last I checked) doesn't even require email confirmation. Well worth having, IMO, because... well... it's the Times. It's not like anybody ELSE is doing real news anymore.

 

Here are a couple of quotes I thought were particularly interesting:

 

It is a sizable industry. One of its largest players, Medialink Worldwide Inc., has about 200 employees, with offices in New York and London. It produces and distributes about 1,000 video news releases a year, most commissioned by major corporations. The Public Relations Society of America even gives an award, the Bronze Anvil, for the year's best video news release.

 

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.

 

"No TV news organization has the resources in labor, time or funds to cover every worthy story," one video news release company, TVA Productions, said in a sales pitch to potential clients, adding that "90 percent of TV newsrooms now rely on video news releases."

 

A recent study by Congressional Democrats offers another rough indicator: the Bush administration spent $254 million in its first term on public relations contracts, nearly double what the last Clinton administration spent.

 

To me the above quote says a lot. (And by the way, anybody who reads the above quote, or my reaction to it, as anti-Bush, is completely missing the point here. The above quotation would obviously be true even if Gore had won in 2000.)

 

On Sept. 11, 2002, WHBQ, the Fox affiliate in Memphis, marked the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks with an uplifting report on how assistance from the United States was helping to liberate the women of Afghanistan.

 

Tish Clark, a reporter for WHBQ, described how Afghan women, once barred from schools and jobs, were at last emerging from their burkas, taking up jobs as seamstresses and bakers, sending daughters off to new schools, receiving decent medical care for the first time and even participating in a fledgling democracy. Her segment included an interview with an Afghan teacher who recounted how the Taliban only allowed boys to attend school. An Afghan doctor described how the Taliban refused to let male physicians treat women.

 

What the people of Memphis were not told, though, was that the interviews used by WHBQ were actually conducted by State Department contractors. The contractors also selected the quotes used from those interviews and shot the video that went with the narration. They also wrote the narration, much of which Ms. Clark repeated with only minor changes.

 

This has to be the best bit in the whole article right here:

 

WCIA, based in Champaign, has run 26 segments made by the Agriculture Department over the past three months alone. Or put another way, WCIA has run 26 reports that did not cost it anything to produce.

 

Mr. Gee, the news director, readily acknowledges that these accounts are not exactly independent, tough-minded journalism. But, he added: ''We don't think they're propaganda. They meet our journalistic standards. They're informative. They're balanced.''

 

More than a year ago, WCIA asked the Agriculture Department to record a special sign-off that implies the segments are the work of WCIA reporters. So, for example, instead of closing his report with ''I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for the U.S.D.A.,'' Mr. Ellison says, ''With the U.S.D.A., I'm Bob Ellison, reporting for 'The Morning Show.''

[Mokele]

It's times like these that I'm glad I don't get the paper, watch the news, or listen to the radio.

 

Mokele

[Dave]

Yes, I've found myself tending towards that recently. I have to say that I find the article rather unsurprising, but it is still very worrying.

[YT2095]

hehehe, and this is considered "NEWS"?

 

it`s older than Gods dog! the propaganda machine has been in place since the 1`st 3 humans existed, lets not go too far back though, "Pravda" (Russian for the word "truth") was their main and trusted news outlet, it also was politicaly influenced in the Soviet days, the same still occurs now all over the world, why does/should America think it`s Immune to this mechanism?

 

THAT is the part I find strange!

[Pangloss]

What?! I believe everything I read in Pravda!

[Hellbender]

Although I am far from surprised, this is still pretty darn scary. And you guys beat me to all the 1984 references too, dang it.

[YT2095]

no 1984.

 

there`s prior to "19 hundred and frozen to death" when it all began.

 

and there`s nowt new about it my man

[reverse]

For me that turning point in the US was Nixon.

 

At least you can be sure that the National Enquirer will keep you up to date with the latest scientific information.

Say, why have there been no follow-up stories on the Giant baby or the Alien Elvis lovechild?

 

I wonder how they are getting on?

[Mokele]

They got an apartment with the Bat-Boy and adopted the world's fattest cat.

[In My Memory]

Mokele, Dave

Mokele It's times like these that I'm glad I don't get the paper, watch the news, or listen to the radio.

Yes, I've found myself tending towards that recently. I have to say that I find the article rather unsurprising, but it is still very worrying.

I think the large-scale deception that first had me worried was learning that the toppling of Saddam's statue was staged:

The Army's internal study of the war in Iraq criticizes some efforts by its own psychological operations units, but one spur-of-the-moment effort last year produced the most memorable image of the invasion.

 

As the Iraqi regime was collapsing on April 9, 2003, Marines converged on Firdos Square in central Baghdad, site of an enormous statue of Saddam Hussein. It was a Marine colonel — not joyous Iraqi civilians, as was widely assumed from the TV images — who decided to topple the statue, the Army report said. And it was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking.

The most upsetting part isnt that they staged it, but they managed to upset the Iraqi people in assuring them that we werent there to occupy the country, followed shortly by draping an American flag over the statue. (You'd think the Department of Army Propaganda ought to pay attention to detail.)

 

Unfortunately, I dont know of any watchdog groups who keep track of stories like this or the NYTimes article. My biggest worry is that some of these news stations have a great deal of political influence, but are too willing to allow their ethics to be bought and sold.

 

I was always taught to think of the large media outlets as a "free marketplace of ideas", and try to imagine to all the news networks competing and acting as watchdogs of one another in order to provide the most fair, free, and objective market. Nowadays, news can be broken down into 90 second infotainment slices, and all the hottest political topics can be summed up in whatever non-thinking catchphrase of the day, then our news and politics has about the same quality we expect in fast food.

 

I just hope that whatever rate news is being fabricated, that it doesnt lead to certain groups becoming disenfranchised.

 

But hope isnt lost, I still prefer to get my news about the US from non-US providers.

 

 

Pangloss,

 

BTW' date=' that no-subscribe link someone posted above just goes to an excerpt from the article. It's a full-length article in the Sunday Times, and it runs eight pages on the Times web site. I strongly advise reading the whole thing.

 

Registration at the Times is easy and (last I checked) doesn't even require email confirmation. Well worth having, IMO, because... well... it's the Times. It's not like anybody ELSE is doing real news anymore.[/quote']

As an aside, there is a website called http://www.bugmenot.com which allows for users to access (free) sites without subscription. I think the bugmenot service comes with Google Toolbar as well, but it is a nice system for people who dont care to subscribe.

[swansont]

They got an apartment with the Bat-Boy and adopted the world's fattest cat.

 

But can't the cat shed pounds while he sleeps, with the new miracle diet?

[Mokele]

Unfortunately, I dont know of any watchdog groups who keep track of stories like this or the NYTimes article. My biggest worry is that some of these news stations have a great deal of political influence, but are too willing to allow their ethics to be bought and sold

 

Well, maybe, just maybe, bloggers will step up to the plate. I know they did a number on that phoney document some important news station or other claimed was real. However, realistically, I cannot expect them to be able to wade through all the lies; they have lives too.

 

I think the large-scale deception that first had me worried was learning that the toppling of Saddam's statue was staged:

 

Ok, you know what this has me thinking: War of the Worlds.

 

Find some group of people with enough money and a sick enough sense of humor, get them to buy off all the media outlets, and we start claiming the martians are invading.

 

Mokele

[Mokele]

But can't the cat shed pounds while he sleeps, with the new miracle diet?

 

Yes, on my new Cestoda diet pill! Easy, fast, painful weight loss! Pay no attention to the giant tapeworm now living in your colon.

[reverse]

BBC radio is really good.

 

You get first hand stuff as it actually happens from locals.

 

it it really good

 

did I mention that.

[TimeTraveler]

Michael C. Ruppert is a former LAPD Narcotics investigator who discovered a link to the CIA and narcotics trafficking in 1977, he was fired in 1978 for no cause. He has been an investigative journalist for awhile now and has reported some serious criminal actions in American government and institutions that everyone needs to consider very carefully. He seems to be one of the very few people who are willing to step up and ask the hard questions that need to be answered. He reports with 'fearlessness'.

 

Here is his site:

 

http://www.fromthewilderness.com

 

Also his book Crossing the Rubicon is a definate must read, you make up your own mind.