“If we are to speak of the great injustice here, nothing has changed,” says Pilger at the start of the film, “What has changed is that the Palestinians have fought back. Stateless and humiliated for so long, they have risen up against Israel’s huge military regime, although they themselves have no army, no tanks, no American planes and gunships or missiles. Some have committed desperate acts of terror, like suicide bombing. But, for Palestinians, the overriding, routine terror, day after day, has been the ruthless control of almost every aspect of their lives, as if they live in an open prison.
Media
Beyond Propaganda: Discourse of War and Doublethink. “When the Lie Becomes the Truth”
The media are lying to us, but at the same time, they show us that they are lying. It is no longer a matter of changing our perception of facts in order to get our support, but to lock us in the spectacle of the omnipotence of power. Showing the annihilation of reason is based on images that serve to replace facts. Information no longer focuses on the ability to perceive and represent a thing, but the need to experience it, or rather to experience oneself through it.
Jon Snow on Gaza – worthy compassion, but where’s the context?
In his video piece, Snow speaks of a necessary ‘preparedness to listen, and watch and read’.
But surely journalists like Snow must also have a duty to read and watch and listen to what’s long been recorded about the true reasons for the murder of Gaza.
And if he did, it wouldn’t, with dutiful moral heart, take much additional effort to amplify the truth that America is not an ‘honest broker’. It is financing and backing Israel to the hilt. Therefore, it’s the problem.
A chessboard drenched in blood
The damaged MH17 starboard jet engine suggests a shape charge from an air-to-air missile – and not a Buk; that’s consistent with the Russian Ministry of Defense presentation graphically highlighting an Ukrainian SU-25 shadowing MH17. Increasingly, the Buk scenario – hysterically peddled by the Empire of Chaos – is being discarded. Not to mention, again, that not a single eyewitness saw the very graphic, thick missile trace that would have been clearly visible had a Buk been used.
Moscow, in building its case on the MH17 tragedy, will bide its time to debunk Kiev’s claims and maximize its own credibility. The game now moves to the black boxes and the cockpit voice recorder. Still Ukraine will remain the do or die battlefield – a chessboard drenched in blood.
MH17 and Gaza: Two different elite reactions
The gap between the Russophobic obsessions of the elite, and the real concerns of ordinary people is however huge, and was starkly demonstrated again by last weekend’s massive anti-war marches. Media Lens, the media monitoring organization, captured this “disconnect”’ perfectly in a single tweet:
Fact-Free Zone
The real crime is in exploiting this tragedy in order to smear and insult an entire people. Don’t worry, the people in question are too wise to respond to such ridiculous provocations. But the reputations of western journalists who have been covering this tragic event have already gone up in smoke. All of western media is now about as good as Pravda was back in the Soviet days—good for wiping your ass with, that is. It’s a sad day for anyone who cares about the truth but can only understand English.
What the Media Won’t Report About Malaysian Airlines Flight MH17
While western media outlets rush to repeat government propaganda on the event, there are a few things they will not report.
They will not report that the crisis in Ukraine started late last year, when EU and US-supported protesters plotted the overthrow of the elected Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. Without US-sponsored “regime change,” it is unlikely that hundreds would have been killed in the unrest that followed. Nor would the Malaysian Airlines crash have happened.
A Tale Of Two Titans – Jon Snow of C4 News And Jeremy Bowen of BBC News
So why do we even bother challenging journalists? Because our objective is to raise public awareness of the systemic constraints in the corporate media, even on the supposed ‘Titans’ like Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Marr, Jeremy Bowen and ‘pinko liberal’ Jon Snow. Our hope is that by exposing the distortions and omissions in corporate news – very much including the BBC and Channel 4 News – we will help to build a head of steam for alternative, truly democratic and accountable media.
Some Deaths Really Matter – The Disproportionate Coverage of Israeli And Palestinian Killings
The missing, ugly reality is that over the last 13 years, on average, one Palestinian child has been killed by Israel every 3 days. Since the outbreak of the second Intifada in September 2000, 1,523 Palestinian children have been killed by Israel’s occupation forces. Over the same time period, 129 Israeli children have been killed. Thus, the ratio of Palestinian children to Israeli children killed is more than ten to one. You would be forgiven for not having the slightest inkling of this from Western media coverage.
Avoiding The J Word: Ilan Pappe on Hardtalk
History is an attempt to narrate the past. A few brave historians aim for a consistent narrative that sets events within the appropriate context which includes ideology, culture and heritage. Most historians however, are engaged in the opposite: the active concealment of the shameful i.e. that which is better to shove under the carpet. Instead of identifying the Zionist crime within the context of Jewish history and culture, Pappe attempts to isolate the Zionist crime by disconnecting it from Jewish history and continuum.
I was bullied by BBC over academic report on indyref bias – the Scottish media blackout must end
Senior BBC figures reported me to senior staff at my university and colleagues of mine were even warned to ‘stay away’ from me. I see this as a clear form of bullying by a powerful corporation. The great crime I’d committed was in publishing the results of a study which indicated that BBC Scotland’s coverage of the Scottish independence referendum between September 2012 and September 2013 noticeably favoured the No campaign.
Rebekah Brooks
While she was Editor, and while she was Chief Executive, numerous people who reported directly to her were engaged in an active criminal conspiracy, the results of which she was seeing almost every single day, and to which hundreds of thousands of pounds of company money were diverted without her noticing. The leader of the criminal conspiracy, Coulson, not only reported directly to her, but she was shagging him too. She still noticed nothing.








