http://www.fantasylandmedia.org
Each week, we cover the stories that are just left out of the US propaganda machine. News that the people in charge, the corporations and your government want to keep from the public eye.
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Common Dreams:
"Marine life in the gulf and the communities which dot its coast are rife with problems. As Phil Radford, Executive Director of Greenpeace USA and Aaron Viles, Deputy Director of Gulf Restoration Network write today: 'Throughout the food chain, warning signs are accumulating. Dolphins are sick and dying. Important forage fish are plagued with gill and developmental damage. Deepwater species like snapper have been stricken with lesions, and their reefs are losing biodiversity. Coastal communities are struggling with changes to the fisheries they rely upon. Hard-hit oyster reefs aren't coming back and sport fish like speckled trout have disappeared from some of their traditional haunts. BP's oily fingerprints continue to mar the landscape and destroy habitats."
'People should be aware that the oil is still there,' Wilma Subra, a chemist who travels widely across the Gulf meeting with fishers and testing seafood and sediment samples for contamination, told freelance journalist Jordan Flaherty. Subra thinks this what is now being seen in the gulf is just the 'beginning of this disaster.' In every community she visits, writes Flaherty, 'fishers show her shrimp born without eyes, fish with lesions, and crabs with holes in their shells.' According to Subra, tarballs are still washing up on beaches across the region."
-->NPR presented a different story on Marketplace April 19. According to Public Radio, the damage has gone away, and most of the oil has been dispersed naturally. There is no need to worry about spills like this in the future. Oil company propaganda on National Public Radio.
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FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting:
"The four-part series America Revealed, airing on PBS stations this month, looks at big-picture economic issues, from agriculture to transportation to manufacturing. The series underwriter? The Dow Chemical Company, whose commercial interests closely track the subjects covered in the PBS series.
The first episode, entitled Food Machine (4/11/12), focused on large-scale agriculture, which is one of the industries in which Dow is a major player. The program featured an extended look at the corn industry, including efforts to control pests. As the program explained, the food industry 'needed a game changer' in that fight. And it got one: The 'genetically modified organism, better known as a GMO.'
This positively portrayed 'game changer' just happens to be the very type of product Dow sells. Indeed, Dow is among a handful of companies that dominate the genetic seed market. The company has recently been trying to win approval for a new genetically modified corn that has been nicknamed 'Agent Orange' for its resistance to a highly toxic herbicide."
-->Both PBS and NPR have suffered greatly from their growing dependence on industry sponsorships. Major corporations now control much of their reporting, a direct result of less money from the federal government.
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Guardian UK:
"News organizations cultivate a reputation for demanding transparency, whether by suing for access to government documents, dispatching camera crews to the doorsteps of recalcitrant politicians, or editorializing in favor of open government.
But now many of the country's biggest media companies - which own dozens of newspapers and TV news operations - are flexing their muscle in Washington in a fight against a government initiative to increase transparency of political spending.
The corporate owners or sister companies of some of the biggest names in journalism - NBC News, ABC News, Fox News, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Politico, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and dozens of local TV news outlets - are lobbying are against a Federal Communications Commission measure to require broadcasters to post political ad data on the internet."
-->To its credit, The NY Times did report this story of big media trying to hide the source of political ad spending.
