Tag Propaganda

Entries 29 Total

Prefer more than a caricature of North Korea?

Jun 12, ’09 7:54 AM

Look no fur­ther than Media Lens:

How much do you know about the increased polit­ical ten­sions on the Korean pen­in­sula? The answer, even for dili­gent read­ers of the main­stream press, is likely to be ‘not much’. In place of ser­i­ous, pen­et­rat­ing ana­lysis the pub­lic has been sold a car­toon ver­sion of events based on a well-worn pro­pa­ganda tem­plate. It is a tale spun by journ­al­ists who appear to know little of the real issues and who have inter­n­al­ised the key rules of ‘bal­anced’ report­ing: do not point the fin­ger of blame at your own gov­ern­ment (or its allies), and do not ques­tion your government’s demon­isa­tion of offi­cial enemies (learn noth­ing from the past).

Read more…

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The train wreck that was Donald Rumsfeld

May 18, ’09 8:01 AM

Fas­cin­at­ing art­icle on Don­ald Rums­feld in GQ magazine that will make you cringe.

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Capitalist democracy in action: the fossil fuelled campaign for global warming

May 13, ’09 8:15 AM

Here they are, hav­ing weaselled them­selves into a pos­i­tion to dig up hugely valu­able resources from under our feet for a steal, only to flog them off to be burnt and dan­ger­ously pol­lute our only atmo­sphere. When we real­ise how dan­ger­ous it is, they use these stolen pro­ceeds to block any attempt to mend the dam­age by launch­ing a pro­pa­ganda cam­paign and buy­ing off politicians:

Obama’s key cli­mate bill hit by $45m PR cam­paign.

And people call this demo­cracy? These people are the highest of crim­in­als. For­get the war on ter­ror, what we should have is a war on fossil fuel pushers.

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The PR assault begins

Apr 23, ’09 7:36 AM

Doesn’t look like the UK police are going to get a clean up after­all. Instead what appears to be a pro­pa­ganda cam­paign begins, first up: how “aston­ish­ingly” good the G20 police actu­ally were. And all those videos of police run­ing amok, well they were just a few bad eggs, we’ll sort that out don’t worry.

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I can’t believe he said that

Apr 22, ’09 8:40 PM

Groups of people all over the world call­ing them­selves “news organ­isa­tions,” such as The Times, con­tinue to spread myths about Mah­moud Ahmad­ine­jad, such as that he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” or that he denies the Nazi Holocaust.

In the mean time the Israeli Deputy Prime Min­is­ter has been quoted as say­ing “What Iran is try­ing to do right now is not far away at all from what Hitler did to the Jew­ish people just 65 years ago.”

Sorry, what the fuck?

So on one hand you have an oil-rich nation — Iran — that has never attacked another, let alone with nuc­lear weapons, and has just had its oil-rich neigh­bour invaded and occupied.

On the other you have a nation that has invaded and occu­pied Iran’s neigh­bour and is the only nation in the world to have attacked another with ther­mo­nuc­lear weapons, along with another nuclear-armed quasi-nation — Israel — which can’t stop get­ting into wars with its neigh­bours, bru­tally represses those in its midst who don’t belong to the right race or reli­gion, and openly dis­cusses attack­ing Iran, along with its part­ners in the crime the U.S. and a group of European nations, all of whom helped cre­ate the racist state in the first place.

If you believe Iran is the bel­li­ger­ent party in all of this and is about to pull an Adolf Hitler on us, then you are a stu­pid fuck.

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Can you believe this guy?

Mar 22, ’09 1:32 PM

Under his and Blair’s lead­er­ship the eco­nomy tanks. What does he do? Blatantly tries to divert atten­tion by scream­ing “War on Ter­ror.” Little more than a pro­pa­ganda tool to take away the freedoms of the people of Britain.

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Israel’s new propaganda unit: the National Information Directorate

Jan 2, ’09 2:54 PM

Nat­ur­ally, Zion­ism sees new media as “a new war zone”:

The body, known as the National Inform­a­tion Dir­ect­or­ate, was set up eight months ago fol­low­ing recom­mend­a­tions from an Israeli inquiry into the 2006 Lebanon war. Its role is to deal with has­bara — mean­ing, in Hebrew, “explan­a­tion”, and refer­ring vari­ously to inform­a­tion, spin, and propaganda.

One of the chal­lenges of Israel’s media offens­ive has been to counter the dis­turb­ing images of Gaza in the con­flict. “In the war of the pic­tures we lose, so you need to cor­rect, explain or bal­ance it in other ways,” said Aviv Shir-On, for­eign min­istry deputy director-general for pub­lic affairs. “Sup­port doesn’t mean the world is stand­ing behind us, but it does mean people under­stand what we are doing and why.

The has­bara dir­ect­ive also liaises over core mes­sages with bod­ies such as friend­ship leagues, Jew­ish com­munit­ies, blog­gers and back­ers using online net­works. Last week the dir­ect­or­ate star­ted a You­Tube chan­nel show­ing Israeli bomb­ings in the Gaza strip. “New media is a new war zone within the media — we are plan­ning to be rel­ev­ant there,” said Leibovich.

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Scammer Blossom Goodchild and the aliens that stood her up

Oct 27, ’08 2:21 PM

Blos­som Good­child, the scam­mer who claimed ali­ens were com­ing to town on 14 Octo­ber, now has her own Wiki­pe­dia page (since deleted).

I can see the point of record­ing it, con­sid­er­ing the num­ber of people she hood­winked, but I won­der how many more book sales she’ll receive as a res­ult of a ded­ic­ated webpage on Wikipedia.

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U.S. spending $100 million a year on propaganda in Iraq

Oct 4, ’08 12:24 AM

Wash­ing­ton Post:

U.S. to Fund Pro-American Pub­li­city in Iraqi Media

The Defense Depart­ment will pay private U.S. con­tract­ors in Iraq up to $300 mil­lion over the next three years to pro­duce news stor­ies, enter­tain­ment pro­grams and pub­lic ser­vice advert­ise­ments for the Iraqi media in an effort to “engage and inspire” the local pop­u­la­tion to sup­port U.S. object­ives and the Iraqi government.

I love how they refer to it as “Pro-American Publicity.”

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Bush invokes UN Charter

Sep 23, ’08 10:12 PM

Bush Junior at today’s UN meet­ing invok­ing, I kid you not, the UN Charter:

The United Nations charter sets forth the equal rights of nations large and small. Russia’s inva­sion of Geor­gia was a viol­a­tion of those words.

Bwahhh… haha! He’s not ser­i­ously sug­gest­ing that UN bol­locks about justice means any­thing these days is he?

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