Tag: propaganda

April Fool: A man in Jalawla walked into a bar…

Medialens spotted that the BBC attributed a bomb attack on Monday in Iraq to “al-Qaeda”, with apparently little evidence.  They wrote to the BBC’s “man in Baghdad”, Hugh Sykes, and asked him “what is the evidence that al-Qaeda, rather than some other insurgent group, were behind the attacks”?.

Hugh’s answer genuinely made me think this was an early April Fool’s joke. In fact I’m still not sure Medialens aren’t making me look like an idiot:

No proof, but circumstantial evidence and reasonable presumption of AQI [al-Qaeda in Iraq] involvement – very much their modus operandum. Suicide attacks are their signature method, and this was a dramatic detonation suggesting a lot of explosive – again, very AQI.

And…who else would do this?

So, process of elimination, history of AQI attacks in Diyala etc.

And the logic of it Sunni Arab vs Iraqi Kurds. As a man in Jalawla told Reuters:

“Al-Qaida is targeting the Kurds because it believes that
we are involved in the political process and collaborating
with the Americans.”

This blows my mind. “very AQI” and “a man in Jalawla told Reuters”. “Who else would do this?”

As Medialens point out, the BBC claim they are “committed to evidence-based journalism”. Except they pick and choose when their committment applies, such as when they refused to report the use of banned weapons by US forces in their November 2004 assault on Falljuah.

BBC Racism

The public can see for themselves the ‘neutral’ media language used to describe Israeli actions: ‘incursion’, ‘retaliation’, ‘military operations’. By contrast, Israel endures ‘terrorist attacks’, ‘slaughter’, ‘a bloodbath’. Careful analysis by Greg Philo and Mike Berry, of the Glasgow University Media Group, found a persistent, ugly pattern:

“In our samples of news content, words such as ‘mass murder’, ‘savage cold-blooded killing’ and ‘lynching’ were used by journalists to describe Israeli deaths but not those of Palestinians/Arabs. The word ‘terrorist’ was used to describe Palestinians, but when an Israeli group was reported as trying to bomb a Palestinian school, they were referred to as ‘extremists’ or ‘vigilantes’.” (Philo and Berry, ‘Bad News From Israel’, Pluto Press, London, 2004, p. 259)

http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080311_israeli_deaths_matter.php

News Sniffer: Revisionista

The latest News Sniffer project went live today: Revisionista. It tracks changes in corporate news articles and marks the differences. So you can choose a BBC news article and see how it’s changed since it was first created. Most changes are on breaking new articles which get updated as more information becomes available, but some changes are rather telling of policy.

Currently only the BBC is monitored, but it’s pretty easy for me to add support for any site with an RSS feed.

Some examples:
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Guardian Warming

This article on the Guardian website is amusing. They tell the tale of Al Gore’s new Documentary about global warming, named An Inconvenient Truth.

The Guardian, as most mainstream media, make the vast majority of their income from advertising. And the majority of advertising revenue comes from the automotive industry. So, obviously, the Guardian cannot afford to discourage automotive advertising in its newspaper and on its website by taking global warming seriously.

The article reduces the film to “wooden vice-president and failed presidential candidate, wheeling his suitcases from town to town and presenting a slideshow about climate change”. It goes on to suggest that it’s only popular because it was produced by the same guy as Pulp Fiction (huh?).
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Chávez is a threat

Chávez is a threat because he offers the alternative of a decent society.

Fact-deprived attacks on Chávez in the Times and the Financial Times this week, each with that peculiar malice reserved for true dissenters from Thatcher’s and Blair’s one true way, follow a travesty of journalism on Channel 4 News last month, which effectively accused the Venezuelan president of plotting to make nuclear weapons with Iran, an absurd fantasy.

In contrast, Tony Blair, a patrician with no equivalent democratic record, having been elected by a fifth of those eligible to vote and having caused the violent death of tens of thousands of Iraqis, is allowed to continue spinning his truly absurd political survival tale.

John Pilger – http://informationclearinghouse.info/article13026.htm