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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Guardian UK:
"Vietnamese general behind victories over French and US dies aged 102. Giap went on to defeat the US-backed South Vietnam government in April 1975, reuniting a country that had been split into communist and non-communist states...
'No other wars for national liberation were as fierce or caused as many losses as this war,' Giap told the Associated Press in 2005 in one of his last-known interviews. ... 'But we still fought because for Vietnam, nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.' "
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/vietnam-general-giap-dies
-->To The NY Times, however, there was no victory over the US, and General Giap had only "fought a superpower to a stalemate." Moreover, it was the good general that had caused all the carnage: "his willingness to sustain staggering losses against superior American firepower was a large reason the war dragged on as long as it did, costing more than 2.5 million lives — 58,000 of them American." The US military wasn't responsible for the slaughter; it was the general who fought so hard to rid Vietnam of the invaders!
Noam Chomsky predicted as much in 1982: "American imperialism has suffered a stunning defeat in Indochina. But the same forces are engaged In another war against a much less resilient enemy, the American people. Here, the prospects for success are much greater. The battleground is ideological. not military. At stake are the lessons to be drawn from the American war In Indochina; the outcome will determine the course and character of new imperial ventures."
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Guardian UK:
"Radioactive Wastewater From Fracking Is Found in a Pennsylvania Stream. ...
Recently, a group of Duke University scientists decided to do some testing. They contacted the owners of one treatment plant, the Josephine Brine Treatment Facility on Blacklick Creek in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, but, 'when we tried to work with them, it was very difficult getting ahold of the right person,' says Avner Vengosh, an Earth scientist from Duke. 'Eventually, we just went and tested water right from a public area downstream.'
Their analyses, made on water samples collected repeatedly over the course of two years, were even more concerning than we’d feared. As published today in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, they found high concentrations of the element radium, a highly radioactive substance. The concentrations were roughly 200 times higher than background levels. In addition, amounts of chloride and bromide in the water were two to ten times greater than normal.
'Even if, today, you completely stopped disposal of the wastewater,' Vengosh says, there’s enough contamination built up that 'you’d still end up with a place that the U.S. would consider a radioactive waste site.' "
http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/10/radioactive-wastewater-from-fracking-is-found-in-a-pennsylvania-stream/
-->The NY Times doesn't do many fracking stories, especially if they involve contamination and radioactivity.
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Guardian UK:
"An octogenarian Roman Catholic nun, jailed for breaking into a nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee, is facing up to 30 years in prison after losing her plea for the most serious charge to be dropped.
Sister Megan Rice, 83, and two fellow peace activists staged a non-violent protest to symbolically disarm the Oak Ridge Y-12 nuclear weapons facility, home to the nation's main supply of highly enriched uranium, in July. They were initially charged with trespassing, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison, but felony charges quickly followed. They were eventually convicted of interfering with national security and damage to federal property.
This week, a judge denied a motion to acquit them of interfering with national security under the sabotage section of the US criminal code, which carries the harshest prison sentence of up to 20 years."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/04/nun-protesting-nuclear-weapons-denied-appeal
-->The NY Times does a lot of "People Magazine" stories about those in the news. The jailing of an 83 year old Roman Catholic nun and peace activist didn't make the cut.
Friday, October 11, 2013
Thursday, October 03, 2013
Fantasyland Media:
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.
------
Guardian UK:
"The National Security Agency is storing the online metadata of millions of internet users for up to a year, regardless of whether or not they are persons of interest to the agency, top secret documents reveal.
Metadata provides a record of almost anything a user does online, from browsing history – such as map searches and websites visited – to account details, email activity, and even some account passwords. This can be used to build a detailed picture of an individual's life.
The Obama administration has repeatedly stated that the NSA keeps only the content of messages and communications of people it is intentionally targeting – but internal documents reveal the agency retains vast amounts of metadata.
An introductory guide to digital network intelligence for NSA field agents, included in documents disclosed by former contractor Edward Snowden, describes the agency's metadata repository, codenamed Marina. Any computer metadata picked up by NSA collection systems is routed to the Marina database, the guide explains."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/nsa-americans-metadata-year-documents
-->For The NY Times, "Marina" is fashion model Marina Krtinic, who has hair that is "proudly, unconventionally frizzy." Our president lying to the American people isn't as newsworthy as Marina's provocative hair style, according to America's premier newspaper.
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Common Dreams:
"NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's words were entered as testimony at the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee in Brussels on Monday.
'...A culture of secrecy has denied our societies the opportunity to determine the appropriate balance between the human right of privacy and the governmental interest in investigation. These are not decisions that should be made for a people, but only by the people after full, informed, and fearless debate. Yet public debate is not possible without public knowledge, and in my country, the cost for one in my position of returning public knowledge to public hands has been persecution and exile. If we are to enjoy such debates in the future, we cannot rely upon individual sacrifice. We must create better channels for people of conscience to inform not only trusted agents of government, but independent representatives of the public outside of government.' "
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/01-8
-->Why wouldn't The NY Times print this short testimony by Edward Snowden? Does our newspaper of record think his words aren't relevant in the very country that is spying on all the world's internet communications? The lack of debate on civil liberties in America is a byproduct of our mass media's capitulation to governmental pressures.
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Guardian UK:
"Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.
It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".
He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends 'so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would' – or the death of Osama bin Laden. 'Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true,' he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011."
http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media
-->Seymour Hersh is one of America's best know journalist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize when he exposed the My Lai massacre. All those credentials don't help him much when he is saying the wrong things about the US media. The NY Times didn't cover this story, but the NY Daily News did, only to leave out all his comments about the pathetic state of the US media.
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.
------
Guardian UK:
"The National Security Agency is storing the online metadata of millions of internet users for up to a year, regardless of whether or not they are persons of interest to the agency, top secret documents reveal.
Metadata provides a record of almost anything a user does online, from browsing history – such as map searches and websites visited – to account details, email activity, and even some account passwords. This can be used to build a detailed picture of an individual's life.
The Obama administration has repeatedly stated that the NSA keeps only the content of messages and communications of people it is intentionally targeting – but internal documents reveal the agency retains vast amounts of metadata.
An introductory guide to digital network intelligence for NSA field agents, included in documents disclosed by former contractor Edward Snowden, describes the agency's metadata repository, codenamed Marina. Any computer metadata picked up by NSA collection systems is routed to the Marina database, the guide explains."
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/30/nsa-americans-metadata-year-documents
-->For The NY Times, "Marina" is fashion model Marina Krtinic, who has hair that is "proudly, unconventionally frizzy." Our president lying to the American people isn't as newsworthy as Marina's provocative hair style, according to America's premier newspaper.
------
Common Dreams:
"NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's words were entered as testimony at the European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee in Brussels on Monday.
'...A culture of secrecy has denied our societies the opportunity to determine the appropriate balance between the human right of privacy and the governmental interest in investigation. These are not decisions that should be made for a people, but only by the people after full, informed, and fearless debate. Yet public debate is not possible without public knowledge, and in my country, the cost for one in my position of returning public knowledge to public hands has been persecution and exile. If we are to enjoy such debates in the future, we cannot rely upon individual sacrifice. We must create better channels for people of conscience to inform not only trusted agents of government, but independent representatives of the public outside of government.' "
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/10/01-8
-->Why wouldn't The NY Times print this short testimony by Edward Snowden? Does our newspaper of record think his words aren't relevant in the very country that is spying on all the world's internet communications? The lack of debate on civil liberties in America is a byproduct of our mass media's capitulation to governmental pressures.
------
Guardian UK:
"Seymour Hersh has got some extreme ideas on how to fix journalism – close down the news bureaus of NBC and ABC, sack 90% of editors in publishing and get back to the fundamental job of journalists which, he says, is to be an outsider.
It doesn't take much to fire up Hersh, the investigative journalist who has been the nemesis of US presidents since the 1960s and who was once described by the Republican party as "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist".
He is angry about the timidity of journalists in America, their failure to challenge the White House and be an unpopular messenger of truth.
Don't even get him started on the New York Times which, he says, spends 'so much more time carrying water for Obama than I ever thought they would' – or the death of Osama bin Laden. 'Nothing's been done about that story, it's one big lie, not one word of it is true,' he says of the dramatic US Navy Seals raid in 2011."
http://www.theguardian.com/media/media-blog/2013/sep/27/seymour-hersh-obama-nsa-american-media
-->Seymour Hersh is one of America's best know journalist, winner of the Pulitzer Prize when he exposed the My Lai massacre. All those credentials don't help him much when he is saying the wrong things about the US media. The NY Times didn't cover this story, but the NY Daily News did, only to leave out all his comments about the pathetic state of the US media.
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