Category: Media

The President gave a compelling prime time Press Conference last week mostly about Health Care Reform — the most pressing Issue of our time, and what was the lead story for the next several days?

The merits of Public Option competition?

The plight of 14,000 citizens losing their Health Insurance each day?

No, the lead story was the President’s take on the arrest of his friend — on the emotionally charged “wedge issue” of Racial Profiling. A worthy discussion, no doubt —

But what about the issues of Health Care Reform?  What about that Debate?

Of course the Media has been failing to have a Real Health Care Debate for some time now …

ABC Censors Obama’s Longtime Doctor, Dr. Scheiner

Lynn Sweet “Surprised” Obama Said Cambridge Cops “Acted Stupidly”

copyright © 2009 Betsy L. Angert.  BeThink.org

It was not the first time.  Many individuals fear it will not be the last.  Last evening, during a Presidential press conference, millions witnessed the characteristic wonderment that is Lynn Sweet.  Whilst citizens in this country anxiously awaited more words from the President on what, for most is truly a tangible issue, Health Care coverage, Ms Sweet decided to move the conversation in her own memorable manner.  Provocateur , otherwise known as Chicago Sun Times Columnist Lynn Sweet did as she often does.  She changed the subject.  

Space:

Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Framing:

a frame refers to the way media and media gatekeepers organize and present the events and issues they cover, and the way audiences interpret what they are provided. Frames are abstract notions that serve to organize or structure social meanings. Frames […] not only tells what to think about, but also how to think about it.

http://www.tcw.utwente.nl/theo…

For those of you who claim that the media is anything other than owned by the right-wing and the corporatocracy, I give you this:

I found this story at Cryptogon, but it originated at ComputerWorld:

The NSA Wiretapping Story Nobody Wanted

This demonstrates, yet again, how incestuous is the relationship between the corporate-owned Big Brother government and its Mouthpiece Media:

I was most worried at the time when the LA Times was killing my story, but at the same time the LA Times showed it to the government. Then I really was panicking because that meant that the government knew everything and probably knew my name, but I didn’t have any publicity.

IDGNS: The media merit a full chapter (entitled: ‘Going Public vs. Media Chickens’) in your book. What happened there?

Klein: The LA Times was particularly egregious because they were planning a front-page spread. They were the first entity I’d given all the documents to. Then they talked to the government about it, and it turned out they were talking to not only the NSA director, but the director of national intelligence, who was John Negroponte at the time. So that meant the government knew it. And then a few weeks later the LA Times killed the story. So the only thing you can read into is that basically the government squashed the story. [The LA Times’ editor in early 2006, Dean Baquet, said the government had nothing to do with the decision. ‘We did not have a story, that we could not figure out what was going on,’ he told ABC News — ed.]

IDGNS: How long did they have the story?

Klein: I started dealing with them in late January 2006, and in February they showed it to the government, and then they started wobbling. By the end of March 2006, they officially told me the story was killed.

IDGNS: Did they cover it in April, after it became public?

Klein: No that was funny. After it finally hit the news everywhere else, The LA Times didn’t run with the stuff I’d given them. They’d squashed the whole thing.

CNN

Political sex scandals a nonpartisan affair

“(CNN) — If there’s one thing Democrats and Republicans have in common, it’s sex scandals.

No matter which party the philanderer belongs to, the public wants all the juicy details, as evidenced most recently by the public’s fascination with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford’s Argentine travels.

“That’s just prurience,” said Sally Quinn, a longtime Washington journalist and columnist. She’s married to former Washington Post Executive Editor Ben Bradlee. “Sex sells and everybody’s interested in sex, so when there’s a sex scandal, it’s got everything — you’re talking about sex, you’re talking about power, and in a lot of cases, money is involved. You are talking about how the mighty have fallen,” she said.”

We’re supposed to believe this shit?:

Dick Cheney, the former vice president, ordered a highly classified CIA operation hidden from Congress because it pushed the limits of legality by planning to assassinate al-Qaida operatives in friendly countries without the knowledge of their governments, according to former intelligence officials.

GASP!  Dick Cheney as trying to kill Al Queda leaders!   Because he was really trying to protect the United States.  He’s just like Jack Bauer!  

No.  I don’t think so.   This is crap, and it’s crap for several reasons:

A.  Anyone who has been paying attention already knew that the U.S. was already doing this years ago.

B.  There are instances of this, revealed to the public, of this already being implemented.  Like, a long time ago.

C.  The people telling us this are ex-CIA.   These sources are automatically suspect.

Here is the story, from Time Magazine in 2002, where this was publicly acknowledged to be occurring:

Yemen Strike Opens New Chapter in War on Terror

The officially unacknowledged CIA missile strike that killed a key al-Qaeda leader on Sunday is a major tactical victory in the U.S. war on terrorism – a war whose rules and terms are quite unlike any America has ever known. Indeed, the assassination by Predator drone of Ali Qaed Sinan al-Harthi in the wilds of northern Yemen encapsulates much about the new war – one of covert actions, sometimes in murky circumstances, designed to disrupt the terrorists’ efforts to regroup far from erstwhile sanctuaries in Afghanistan. And it shows the U.S. is plainly now open to assassination as a means of eliminating terror threats.

So no, this is classic “old news”.  Are people’s memories REALLY that short?

There’s simply no WAY that this is The Big Ugly Scary Secret that Dick Cheney was pulling the wool over everyone’s eyes about.  

This is just another propaganda tactic designed to make us think that “you’ve gotta usurp the Constitution and the rule of law to protect Americans, and Dick Cheney was just the guy to do it”.  

Yet everybody’s falling for it, and I mean everybody.  

“I saw it on CNN!  It must be true!   I read it in the NY Times!   It must be true!   And even “I read it on Dailykos!  It must be true.”

No.  It doesn’t even BEGIN to pass the “smell test”.

Please spread this around.   I’m banned at Dailykos, so I can’t post it there, but somebody needs to, because that crap is all over the place there.  

I used to go to Thinkprogress.org at least once a day.  They were a fantastic source of news you wouldn’t get anywhere else.

Since Obama has been elected, however, they’ve become, frankly, pathetic.

Almost every single story over there now is about Republicans.  

It’s almost like they didn’t notice that Republicans are out of power now.  

Hello, guys, those fools lost the election.  They are no longer in power.  They like to make a lot of noise to DISTRACT YOU.

Why is a place as smart as thinkprogress taking that bait?

Here is a list of the stories there right now:

Right Wing Concocts False Claim That Obama Is Steering Stimulus Money To Areas That Backed Him

Right winger’s argument against a right to health care: ‘Should food be a basic human right?’

Aspiring philosopher Palin quotes ‘Plato.’

Jeb Bush: ‘I don’t know’ if Obama is a socialist.

Palin’s key reason for resigning was inflated.

King’s New Rationale For Voting Against Slave Labor Resolution: It Wasn’t ‘A Balanced Depiction Of History’

Steele dismisses Palin as ‘old school’: ‘That’s not the generation of candidates I’m trying to groom.’ (Updated)

All of this is completely irrelevant.  NOBODY CARES about any of this bullshit.   Not even the Repubs believe their own bullshit except for the TRUE idiots like Michelle Bachman.  

How about some stories like this one:

AIG seeks clearance to give $235 million in bonuses.

Or about how Obama’s new Vietnam is killing American servicemen every damn day.

How about some real news?

I think it’s sad.  And disturbing.  

“We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing. ”

– Charles Bukowski



The dazzling propaganda onslaught conducted by the financial sector has been shock and fucking awe as the amazing resuscitation of the FIRE industry roars into the next quarter. A dirty as a pig in shit corporatist media waged total war against reason, morality, facts, history and the law itself in allowing the treasonous looters from Wall Street bounce back off of the ropes and reassert their control over the government and the country at large. Now under the cover of the saturation coverage of the Michael Jackson freak show (I doubt that I will see this shit end in my lifetime) the still annoying little trickles of doom, like the impending implosion of Arnoldland are stomped on by gatekeepers who just play another card from the Whacko Jacko deck of jokers. Face it people, we are fucked! With the celebrity infatuated lemmings in this rotting from the insides empire it is only a matter of time until they start seeing the great one’s ghoulish visage appearing on tortillas and grilled cheese sandwiches. If there were such a thing as a truly American Jesus it would be Michael Jackson. Neverland will become the bastardized equivalent of Lourdes, Jerusalem and Graceland uniquely spliced together to resemble our sick, twisted and mutated national DNA.