Tuesday, Hong Kong’s Chinese anointed leader of the Legislative Council, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-Ngor, assured protesters that the controversial extradition bill was ” dead.” Previously she had assured the protesters that the same bill was “suspended.” The protesters ain’t buying it. Continue reading
Establishment media never met a sovereign independent country they didn’t want transformed into a US client state. Continue reading
As I have reported on many occasions, the presstitutes constitute not a free press but a Ministry of Propaganda for the government and ruling oligarchic interests. Continue reading
In the US, political cartoons have been part of the national heritage since before the birth of the republic. Continue reading
I’ve been writing political commentary for decades. Starting in the late 80s and through around the time of George W. Bush’s Iraq War and for a few years beyond I wrote many articles that were published online. Some appeared in Online Journal (now Intrepid Report), at Consortium News, at TomPaine.com, at BushWatch, at the Smirking Chimp and several other sites. Continue reading
The past couple of days have seen interesting developments. The US or Israel struck a Japanese ship with small rockets and tried to blame it on Iranian mines. The Japanese ship owner put a halt to the false flag event. He pointed out that the damage was above, not below the water line and that crew members observed objects approaching in the air. Continue reading
A total of 18 charges against Assange, with reportedly more to come, are all about wanting truth-telling journalism the way it should be on vital domestic and geopolitical issues silenced. Continue reading
After the failure of Newsguard—the news rating system backed by a cadre of prominent neoconservative personalities—to gain traction among American tech and social media companies, another organization has quietly stepped in to direct the news algorithms of tech giants such as Google, Facebook, and Microsoft. Continue reading
Journalists did not appreciate the implications for themselves of the contrived and false indictment of Julian Assange by a corrupt US government. It was obvious to a few of us that the indictment by the US government, a government constrained by the First Amendment, of a foreign national for publishing leaked material, an action never before regarded as espionage or a crime, was the beginning of the end of any Western government ever again being held accountable by a free press. Continue reading
While the continued mental assault on what is left of public consciousness still features the idiotic fiction of Russiagate, or how the evil Putin arranged to trash our great American democracy and defeat holy mother Hillary on behalf of cursed father Donald, the month of June offered not one but two major fictional treatments of historic reality to further reduce innocent minds to enslaved mentalities. The fables of D-Day, celebrated every year in glorification of a war actually won by the Soviet Union but taught as America’s gift to the global marketplace, and the unholy terror alleged by evil China in the infamous Tiananmen uprising treated here as a story worthy of creation by Disney, Spielberg, Mother Goose and Ronald Reagan combined. Continue reading
Nearly 200 pages of Drug Enforcement Administration contracts with producers were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. They show for the first time how the agency interacts with television and film productions. Continue reading
Involuntary confinement in Ecuador’s London embassy for nearly seven years, compounded by his unlawful arrest and isolation under appalling conditions in Britain’s Gitmo, gravely harmed Assange’s physical and emotional health. Continue reading
The corporate media is concealing a leaked UN agency report that shows Syrian government innocence in an alleged chemical attack. Continue reading
One thing for which the right-wing neoconservatives specialize is the production of dodgy dossiers and “official” reports. England has been ground-zero for the production of many dodgy dossiers, including the latest passed to NBC News’s resident “useful idiot,” Richard Engel, by a Mikhail Khodorkovsky-funded entity in London called the Dossier Center. Continue reading
Major media cheered his unjustifiable April 11 police state arrest, shifting his loss of freedom in Ecuador’s London embassy to incarceration at Britain’s Gitmo—prelude to handing him over to Trump regime hardliners for unjustifiable crucifixion. Continue reading
Whenever Washington goes to war or plans one, naked aggression every time launched based on Big Lies and deception, US media genuflect supportively, acting as Pentagon press agents—backing what demands denunciation. Continue reading
On Fox News Channel’s May 2 edition of “The Story with Martha MacCallum” it was alleged, by the program host (at 2:45 in this video), that one reason we must invade Venezuela (if we will) is that “People have lost 24 pounds” there. So (her point was), if we invade, that’s not evil, it’s no coup, but instead it’s humanitarian (presumably like it was in Iraq in 2003, when we invaded that country, which likewise had never invaded nor threatened to invade the United States—it was raw international aggression, by our country, against Iraq). Continue reading
As some of the last minute Democratic presidential candidates scramble to qualify for the DNC’s upcoming June 26/27 primary debate, the latest poll results become more than nominally important given their elevated role in whether a candidate meets the requirements to participate. Continue reading
WASHINGTON—Just a week after the former CIA director and now secretary of state admitted that the agency prior to and under his direction “lied,” “cheated” and “stole,” Mike Pompeo has delivered another claim that, despite his recent admission of dishonesty, has been regurgitated with little scrutiny by a variety of media outlets. Continue reading
Liberals are just as much true believers in imperialism as the right wing they claim to oppose. Continue reading
Michael Copps is a former FCC commissioner who at one point served as acting chair of the Federal Communications Commission. A former deputy assistant and assistant secretary of commerce, he holds a PhD in United States history, is one of our most articulate public interest advocates and currently leads the Media and Democracy Reform Initiative at Common Cause. Continue reading
April 11, 2019, brought us a new word for Judas: Moreno—the puppet president of Ecuador who sold Julian Assange to Washington for his 30 pieces of silver. Continue reading
The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years. Continue reading
There is a reason why buffoonish political leaders like Donald Trump can get away with attacking the news media. Unlike the print and broadcast journalists who covered Watergate and Iran-Contra, many of today’s, mostly cable news reporters and editors, cannot even get basic facts about geography, political systems, and other fundamentals correct. President Richard Nixon never called his media critics “stupid,” because Nixon and his gang understood that they were up against a professional and very well-informed news media. Similarly, in the Iran-Contra scandal, the news media, including the emergent Cable News Network (CNN), covered the scandal with the intuitiveness and tenacity expected of the reporters, editors, and bureau chiefs. Continue reading
The American dictatorship is by the aristocracy of the country’s 585 billionaires, and has been scientifically proven beyond any doubt, now, not only in the classic Gilens and Page study, which examined thousands of bills in Congress and their money-backers and their ultimate outcomes (passage or failure to pass), during the studied period, 1981-2002. But also another (though less rigorous) study suggests that this control of the U.S. government by America’s billionaires is getting even worse. So, America is clearly a dictatorship, by America’s aristocracy. Continue reading
Governments around the world began trying to bring the Internet under control as soon as they realized the danger to their power represented by unfettered public access to, and exchange of, information. From attempts to suppress strong encryption technology to the Communications Decency Act in the US and China’s “Great Firewall,” such efforts have generally proven ineffectual. But things are changing, and not for the better. Continue reading
In a recent column on the mating dance between Big Government and Big Tech, I noted that “Big Tech wants to be regulated by Big Governments because regulation makes it more difficult and expensive for new competitors to enter the market.” Continue reading
NEW YORK—On March 13, a report in the Daily Beast revealed that the New York-based outlet The Intercept would be shutting down its archive of the trove of government documents entrusted to a handful of journalists, including Intercept co-founders Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, by whistleblower Edward Snowden. However, that account did not include the role of Greenwald, as well as Jeremy Scahill—another Intercept co-founder, in the controversial decision to shutter the archive. Continue reading
According to CNN Business, “Facebook, YouTube and Twitter struggle to deal with New Zealand shooting video.” Continue reading
US wars of aggression, color revolutions, and coups like what’s ongoing against Venezuela wouldn’t get out of the starting gate without major media acting as press agents for Washington’s imperial plots. Continue reading
Growing up Irish-Catholic in the Bronx in the 1960s, I was an avid reader of the powerful columns of Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill in the New York newspapers. Passion infused their reports. These guys were extraordinary wordsmiths. They would grab you by the collar and drag you into the places and faces of those they wrote about. Passion infused their reports. They were never boring. They made you laugh and cry as they transported you into the lives of real people. You knew they had actually gone out into the streets of the city and talked to people. All kinds of people: poor, rich, black, white, Puerto Rican, high-rollers, low-lifes, politicians, athletes, mobsters—they ran the gamut. You could sense they loved their work, that it enlivened them as it enlivened you the reader. Their words sung and crackled and breathed across the page. They left you always wanting more, wondering sometimes how true it all was, so captivating was their storytelling abilities. They cut through abstractions to connect individuals to major events such as the Vietnam War, the assassinations of President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Central Park jogger case, AIDS, among others. They were spokesmen for the underdogs, the abused, the confused, and the bereft, and relentlessly attacked the abuses and hypocrisies of the powerful. Continue reading
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Selling war, deploring peace, how the US and its press agent media operate
Posted on July 4, 2019 by Stephen Lendman
The US is a warrior state, permanently at war with invented enemies. Real ones haven’t existed since WW II ended. The power of state-sponsored and supportive media propaganda creates them. Continue reading →