This Is What Happens When Establishment Control Of The Media Cracks For A Moment

Every once in a while, establishment control of the mainstream media cracks for a moment.  In an effort to achieve higher ratings, mainstream news programs will invite guests on that promise to be "interesting", but then they will say something that is not part of the script and the entire system will go into a state of chaos for a moment. One example of this happened recently when two CNN "infobabes" interviewed former CIA officer Michael Scheuer about the situation on the ground in Libya. They asked Scheuer some questions regarding the role of the CIA in Libya, but the interview rapidly moved in some directions that the "infobabes" were not anticipating.  Instead of sticking to the "Republican" or the "Democrat" script, Scheuer ripped both parties and he detailed many of the reasons why we should have never gone into Libya at all.

The "infobabes" grew increasingly uncomfortable as Scheuer described how large numbers of the resistance fighters in Libya have fought against U.S. troops in the Balkans, in Afghanistan and in Iraq.  They did not seem pleased at all when Scheuer declared that the civil war in Libya is "none of our business" and that to the rest of the world this conflict looks like "Americans killing Muslims for oil" all over again.

The funniest part of the interview was when Scheuer accused one of the "infobabes" of "carrying the water for Mr. Obama".  After that statement, the female anchor that Scheuer was addressing was visibly flustered and quickly went to a commercial.

Video of this CNN interview with Michael Scheuer is posted below.  This is a video that should be shared with everyone you know....

 

Wasn't that hilarious?

When a big time establishment news network such as CNN goes "off script" it can be a beautiful thing to watch.

Of course Scheuer was exactly right.  We never should have gotten involved in the civil war in Libya.  It was none of our business.  When the rebels picked up arms and started shooting at government forces, they should not have been surprised when Gadhafi's forces started shooting back.

Over the past few decades, there have been some very real genocides happening all over Africa, but the U.S. never seemed to care about any of those.

But now the mainstream media has been trying really hard to spin the civil war in Libya into a "great humanitarian crisis".

Well, that might fool some of the American people, but as Scheuer aptly pointed out, the rest of the world sees this as just another U.S. war in the Middle East for oil (and banking).

But instead of getting a balanced view of the war in Libya, most of the time the corporate media has focused on an endless parade of establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats that fully endorse the war.  Of course the Republicans all try to score some political points by questioning how Obama is going about doing things, but in the end most Republicans and most Democrats are fully on board with what is going on in Libya.

Nearly everyone in the mainstream media seems to be fully on board with this war as well.

Why?

Well, because virtually all of the major media outlets are owned by the establishment, and the establishment wants this war.

Have you ever noticed that the news seems to have the same "flavor" no matter what channel you turn to?

There is a very good reason for that.

In an article that I previously authoried entitled "Who Owns The Media?", I explained that six incredibly dominant corporations control most of the news that we see today....

Back in 1983, approximately 50 corporations controlled the vast majority of all news media in the United States.  Today, ownership of the news media has been concentrated in the hands of just six incredibly powerful media corporations.  These corporate behemoths control most of what we watch, hear and read every single day.  They own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Sadly, most Americans don't even stop to think about who is feeding them the endless hours of news and entertainment that they constantly ingest.  Most Americans don't really seem to care about who owns the media.  But they should.  The truth is that each of us is deeply influenced by the messages that are constantly being pounded into our heads by the mainstream media.  The average American watches 153 hours of television a month.  In fact, most Americans begin to feel physically uncomfortable if they go too long without watching or listening to something.  Sadly, most Americans have become absolutely addicted to news and entertainment and the ownership of all that news and entertainment that we crave is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands each year.

The six corporations that collectively control U.S. media today are Time Warner, Walt Disney, Viacom, Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., CBS Corporation and NBC Universal.  Together, the "big six" absolutely dominate news and entertainment in the United States.

Yes, there are always some minor differences in news broadcasts, and in recent years we have seen outlets such as Fox News attempt to become "the establishment Republican news" and outlets such as MSNBC attempt to become "the establishment Democrat news", but at the end of the day the kind of news that we get from all of them is pretty much the same.

But sometimes there are moments when establishment control of the news crumbles for just a moment.

Another example of this happened recently when Donald Trump made an appearance on The View.  Not that Donald Trump is a huge "rebel", but apparently he has not gotten the message that you are not supposed to question Barack Obama's birth certificate on television.

The following is video footage of Trump's absolutely chaotic recent appearance on The View....

 

In the United States today, if you want to get into college or if you want to apply for a good job usually you have to give a great deal of information about your background and produce a whole host of documentation about your past.  For many jobs, applicants actually must be willing to submit to a very thorough formal background check.

Whatever you may think about Obama, you have to admit that what he has been able to accomplish is rather extraordinary.  He applied for the most important job in the world, and yet he kept vast sections of his background a complete and total secret.  He did not produce his birth certificate, he did not produce his Columbia University transcript (or much information at all regarding his educational background), there are quite a few years of his life that really can't be accounted for at all and there are very serious questions about his Social Security number.

Yet in spite of all that he convinced the American people to make him the president of the United States.

That has got to make Barack Obama one of the greatest con men in U.S. history.

Hopefully in the future a law will be passed or the American people will demand that all politicians disclose at least the most basic information about their backgrounds.

For Obama to be able to get this far while keeping vast portions of his background a complete and total secret is absolutely mind blowing.

In any event, it has been refreshing to see some "cracks" appear in the control of the mainstream news lately.

Whether it is the war in Libya or whether it is Barack Obama's background, the truth is that we should all be free to ask the important questions.

Our founding fathers believed very strongly in freedom of speech for a reason.  Free speech shines light in dark places and it holds people accountable.  Free speech protects our freedoms and it keeps tyranny at bay.

Free speech is very precious and it is easily lost.  Once free speech is gone it is incredibly difficult to get back.  Let us cling to free speech and cherish it deeply, because it is absolutely central to who we are as a nation.

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Disaster Relief 2.0: Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

Ed note: The report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies analyzes how the humanitarian community and the emerging volunteer and technical communities worked together in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and recommends ways to improve coordination between these two groups in future emergencies.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), together with the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, commissioned the report, which was researched and written by a team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

The Disaster Relief 2.0 Blog Series provides a public forum for people from both the humanitarian and volunteer and technical communities to discuss ideas in this report and the future of disaster relief.

You can follow conversations about the report on Twitter using the hashtag #DisasterTech and on the UN Foundation’s Facebook page. Readers can submit questions to the report’s authors through those channels; a transcript with answers to select questions will be published on UN Dispatch on April 11, 2011.

Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

By Jacobo Quintanilla

In Haiti, local citizens and communities affected by the Jan 2010 earthquake participated in the relief effort in unprecedented ways. Through social media and communication tools, this local participation was a revolution in humanitarian aid. Despite the many question marks and variables still to be addressed on this front, there are two main outcomes that deserve to be highlighted.

One is that for the first time ever the volunteer and technology communities engaged in a very significant and permanent manner in a humanitarian operation. Ushahidi, Crisis Mappers, Crisis Commons and OpenStreetMap engaged volunteers from around the world to connect with responders and individuals on the ground through mobile and online tools. This level of input was new and valuable, and deserves the attention and inclusion that it is already getting from the more “traditional” aid community.

Secondly, and even more importantly, the humanitarian community is progressively realizing that responses to crises are too often undermined by a lack of information among the affected population. When a crisis hits, outside aid agencies simply don’t know enough about the local context, the local media landscape, or how information is consumed, to be able to disseminate life-saving information immediately and gather critical feedback from affected communities. Understanding and utilizing that information ecosystem is precisely what Internews, in partnership with local media, local populations and the humanitarian community, tries to do in all our humanitarian media projects around the world.

Two of the most important channels for communicating information during crises are the existing local media, known and trusted by the local population, and the emerging mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We saw this in Haiti, documented in the report “Lessons from Haiti: Media, information Systems and Communities.

However, despite a great display of potential in the response to the earthquake in Haiti, new technologies, humanitarians, local media and affected populations have yet to connect in a predictable, reliable, and sustainable manner to improve the effectiveness of relief operations and increase community resilience. The lack of communication also undermines transparency and accountability of humanitarian actors and makes the people we serve feel further disengaged from the aid response.

As a community, we need to invest energy, expertise and resources into increasing the capacity of local media and local communities to prepare and respond to disasters effectively. In today’s 2.0 context, this includes understanding the effective utilization of a variety of new technology and social media tools to ensure that local media and local communities are better equipped to be the first responders in any emergency or disaster. Internews efforts to connect community radio stations by mobile network in Central Africa Republic and enable journalists in Kenya to use FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi outside of crisis situations are ways we’re working to build this capacity locally.

Emergencies are not the best time to experiment with untested initiatives. We learned in Haiti that trying to introduce new technologies during an active operation can be unnecessarily frustrating, ineffective, and even a disruptive exercise. This was highlighted, along with many of the important achievements and opportunities for partnership and dialogue between the humanitarian and the technology community, in the report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies.

We need to know what tools work and what processes they can improve. The key component is still to figure our how communication tools and processes can be further localized to serve the needs of local communities. This effort takes specific investments of time and resources in advance of the next disaster.

We may never be truly ready for an emergency, but we can help local communities and local media to be better prepared. We also need to keep in mind that we still need to get the low-tech solutions right first. At the end of the day, everything goes back to basics: human interaction.

Jacobo Quintanilla is Humanitarian Director at Internews, an international media development organization, and Board Member of the infoasaid project, an Internews/BBC World Service Trust joint initiative that aims at improving how aid agencies communicate with disaster affected communities. Jacobo was part of the Internews Emergency Response Team to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and later became the first Coordinator of Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) in Haiti. In 2011, Internews launched a new Center on Media, Innovation, Research & Learning aimed at maximizing the potential of digital technologies and innovative approaches to solve new challenges in the rapidly changing global information and communication landscape.

View the original article here

Disaster Relief 2.0: Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

Ed note: The report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies analyzes how the humanitarian community and the emerging volunteer and technical communities worked together in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and recommends ways to improve coordination between these two groups in future emergencies.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), together with the United Nations Foundation and Vodafone Foundation Technology Partnership, commissioned the report, which was researched and written by a team at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.

The Disaster Relief 2.0 Blog Series provides a public forum for people from both the humanitarian and volunteer and technical communities to discuss ideas in this report and the future of disaster relief.

You can follow conversations about the report on Twitter using the hashtag #DisasterTech and on the UN Foundation’s Facebook page. Readers can submit questions to the report’s authors through those channels; a transcript with answers to select questions will be published on UN Dispatch on April 11, 2011.

Leveraging the power of new technologies, local media and local communities in humanitarian responses

By Jacobo Quintanilla

In Haiti, local citizens and communities affected by the Jan 2010 earthquake participated in the relief effort in unprecedented ways. Through social media and communication tools, this local participation was a revolution in humanitarian aid. Despite the many question marks and variables still to be addressed on this front, there are two main outcomes that deserve to be highlighted.

One is that for the first time ever the volunteer and technology communities engaged in a very significant and permanent manner in a humanitarian operation. Ushahidi, Crisis Mappers, Crisis Commons and OpenStreetMap engaged volunteers from around the world to connect with responders and individuals on the ground through mobile and online tools. This level of input was new and valuable, and deserves the attention and inclusion that it is already getting from the more “traditional” aid community.

Secondly, and even more importantly, the humanitarian community is progressively realizing that responses to crises are too often undermined by a lack of information among the affected population. When a crisis hits, outside aid agencies simply don’t know enough about the local context, the local media landscape, or how information is consumed, to be able to disseminate life-saving information immediately and gather critical feedback from affected communities. Understanding and utilizing that information ecosystem is precisely what Internews, in partnership with local media, local populations and the humanitarian community, tries to do in all our humanitarian media projects around the world.

Two of the most important channels for communicating information during crises are the existing local media, known and trusted by the local population, and the emerging mobile Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). We saw this in Haiti, documented in the report “Lessons from Haiti: Media, information Systems and Communities.

However, despite a great display of potential in the response to the earthquake in Haiti, new technologies, humanitarians, local media and affected populations have yet to connect in a predictable, reliable, and sustainable manner to improve the effectiveness of relief operations and increase community resilience. The lack of communication also undermines transparency and accountability of humanitarian actors and makes the people we serve feel further disengaged from the aid response.

As a community, we need to invest energy, expertise and resources into increasing the capacity of local media and local communities to prepare and respond to disasters effectively. In today’s 2.0 context, this includes understanding the effective utilization of a variety of new technology and social media tools to ensure that local media and local communities are better equipped to be the first responders in any emergency or disaster. Internews efforts to connect community radio stations by mobile network in Central Africa Republic and enable journalists in Kenya to use FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi outside of crisis situations are ways we’re working to build this capacity locally.

Emergencies are not the best time to experiment with untested initiatives. We learned in Haiti that trying to introduce new technologies during an active operation can be unnecessarily frustrating, ineffective, and even a disruptive exercise. This was highlighted, along with many of the important achievements and opportunities for partnership and dialogue between the humanitarian and the technology community, in the report Disaster Relief 2.0: The Future of Information Sharing in Humanitarian Emergencies.

We need to know what tools work and what processes they can improve. The key component is still to figure our how communication tools and processes can be further localized to serve the needs of local communities. This effort takes specific investments of time and resources in advance of the next disaster.

We may never be truly ready for an emergency, but we can help local communities and local media to be better prepared. We also need to keep in mind that we still need to get the low-tech solutions right first. At the end of the day, everything goes back to basics: human interaction.

Jacobo Quintanilla is Humanitarian Director at Internews, an international media development organization, and Board Member of the infoasaid project, an Internews/BBC World Service Trust joint initiative that aims at improving how aid agencies communicate with disaster affected communities. Jacobo was part of the Internews Emergency Response Team to the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and later became the first Coordinator of Communicating with Disaster Affected Communities (CDAC) in Haiti. In 2011, Internews launched a new Center on Media, Innovation, Research & Learning aimed at maximizing the potential of digital technologies and innovative approaches to solve new challenges in the rapidly changing global information and communication landscape.

View the original article here

Corporate Media Ignores Astronomical Fukushima Radiation Levels

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The Kyodo News Agency reports that radiation around the hobbled Fukushima nuclear plant is 1,600 times the normal level. The astounding figure was released to the media by the International Atomic Energy Agency officials on Monday.

Data collected by an IAEA team show that radiation levels of 161 microsievert per hour have been detected in the town of Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, the officials said, according to a report posted by House of Japan.

Tests carried out by IAEA technicians in numerous locations around the plant revealed radiation levels ranging between 2 and 160 microsievert per hour, while the normal level for the area should not exceed 0.1 microsievert per hour, the Russian newsite RIA Novosti reports.

A CBS affiliate in Wisconsin also reported on the high radiation levels that will ultimately be dispersed around the world and will undoubtedly result in unprecedented health problems and premature death from cancer. Most of the corporate media, however, did not bother to report the story.

Reuters reported that there was 500 microsieverts of radiation per hour on March 18 at the site but does not explain what this means. It did not mention the 1,600 number.

Earlier in the week, nuclear energy critic and author Hirose Takashi wrote about the media effort to obfuscate the truth about Fukushima:

Around Fukushima Daiichi Station they measured 400 millisieverts – that’s per hour. With this measurement (Chief Cabinet Secretary) Edano admitted for the first time that there was a danger to health, but he didn’t explain what this means. All of the information media are at fault here I think. They are saying stupid things like, why, we are exposed to radiation all the time in our daily life, we get radiation from outer space. But that’s one millisievert per year. A year has 365 days, a day has 24 hours; multiply 365 by 24, you get 8760. Multiply the 400 millisieverts by that, you get 3,500,000 the normal dose. You call that safe? And what media have reported this?

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The corporate media as the complaisant handmaiden of the elite are obliged to cover up the truth. In the end, all of us – especially our children – will pay for it.

I wrote for Investigate Magazine from 2000-2005, then decided to invest my energy in the alternative media, when I became aware of the rise of fascism that was being concealed from the public under the guise of hoaxes, such as the "war on terror," by the mainstream media.

View the original article here

Corporate Media Ignores Astronomical Fukushima Radiation Levels

Kurt Nimmo
Prison Planet.com
Wednesday, March 23, 2011

The Kyodo News Agency reports that radiation around the hobbled Fukushima nuclear plant is 1,600 times the normal level. The astounding figure was released to the media by the International Atomic Energy Agency officials on Monday.

Data collected by an IAEA team show that radiation levels of 161 microsievert per hour have been detected in the town of Namie, Fukushima Prefecture, the officials said, according to a report posted by House of Japan.

Tests carried out by IAEA technicians in numerous locations around the plant revealed radiation levels ranging between 2 and 160 microsievert per hour, while the normal level for the area should not exceed 0.1 microsievert per hour, the Russian newsite RIA Novosti reports.

A CBS affiliate in Wisconsin also reported on the high radiation levels that will ultimately be dispersed around the world and will undoubtedly result in unprecedented health problems and premature death from cancer. Most of the corporate media, however, did not bother to report the story.

Reuters reported that there was 500 microsieverts of radiation per hour on March 18 at the site but does not explain what this means. It did not mention the 1,600 number.

Earlier in the week, nuclear energy critic and author Hirose Takashi wrote about the media effort to obfuscate the truth about Fukushima:

Around Fukushima Daiichi Station they measured 400 millisieverts – that’s per hour. With this measurement (Chief Cabinet Secretary) Edano admitted for the first time that there was a danger to health, but he didn’t explain what this means. All of the information media are at fault here I think. They are saying stupid things like, why, we are exposed to radiation all the time in our daily life, we get radiation from outer space. But that’s one millisievert per year. A year has 365 days, a day has 24 hours; multiply 365 by 24, you get 8760. Multiply the 400 millisieverts by that, you get 3,500,000 the normal dose. You call that safe? And what media have reported this?

Stock up with Fresh Food that lasts with eFoodsDirect (Ad)

The corporate media as the complaisant handmaiden of the elite are obliged to cover up the truth. In the end, all of us – especially our children – will pay for it.

I wrote for Investigate Magazine from 2000-2005, then decided to invest my energy in the alternative media, when I became aware of the rise of fascism that was being concealed from the public under the guise of hoaxes, such as the "war on terror," by the mainstream media.

View the original article here

MEDIA COVERAGE OF JAPANESE REACTORS AND THE TRUTH

Last night Channel 4 "News" broadcast an item from somebody standing in front of a taxi rank in Tokyo who said that the fact that there were taxis there unused (2 of them) proved that residents were staying home, which in turn proved a level of panic.

   My girlfriend, who has been in Japan, said that, because people downsized from Japanese industry, had gone into taxiing there was always a considerable oversupply of taxis. It is not like Britain and in particular London, where licencing regulations keep the numbers artificially below market demand. Clearly C4 were deliberately lying to promote their anti-nuclear scare story to the British audience.

  The fact is that nobody has been killed in this "catastrophe"; nobody has been injured; less radioactivity has been absorbed by anybody offsite than would be absorbed from an X-ray, air flight, or probably from eating a banana; far less radioactivity is being emitted than a conventional coal burning plant would over time (coal contains natural radioactives, like bananas & everything else). There is no honest journalist or politician who says or implies that nuclear is less than 100s of times safer than conventional power.
-----------------------
That is a comment I put up on Channel 4 News' site this morning. It has yet to appear.
I also sent a letter based on Saturday's entry to dozens of newspaper's worldwide, none of whom, according to Google News, have published it.

The coverage of an incident which has neither killed not injured anybody at all now clearly greatly exceeds that for the rest of the entire Tsunami/earthquake. Occasionally MSM reporting will include, very quietly, a mention of the fact that the amount of radiation anybody is going to experience is on the level of eating a banana. However far more often they get somebody on from some eco-fascist organisatio9n to tell all sorts of alarmistt lies without allowing any balance (eg C4 again had a Greenpeace spokesman balanced by a government one in the knowledge that the government one would not dismount from the fence).

   Sensible discussion comes from Jerry Pournelle and interestingly enough from The Register. Do yet again we see the blogsphere is where you go for actual information. Presumably why in America now and Britain next year, more people choose to get their news online than from the press.

   On the other hand if you think journalists talk nonsense look at how the EU are describing zero injuries as the "Apocalypse"
Labels: eco-fascism, International politics, Media

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27 Signs That The Nuclear Crisis In Japan Is Much Worse Than Either The Mainstream Media Or The Japanese Government Have Been Telling Us

Controlling the Media

I notice that ITV has taken offence on behalf of "others" that some shite TV programme based in a fictitious English village contains no Eskimos or Amazonian tribes with plates in their lips.

One of the reasons I refuse to watch TV. Utterly ridiculous that my brain and my own eyes are not to be trusted by the "authoroties" to make their own decisions, instead, a rural English village must be the mirror image of the Fabians dream of Eastenders, chock full of one legged Lesbian Muslims with ADHD and Aids. To reflect "society"

Tickets for Olympics went on sale today. I intend to kick up an ALMIGHTY fuss when the 100m men's final is full of straight black men, not in wheelchairs. What on EARTH are they thinking, the bastards? Heads, like wheelchairs, must roll.

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