"Missing White Women Captive News Media, Raising Bias Questions. ...
'Research, including my own work, has shown that white missing women and girls do receive more initial coverage and they do receive more repeated coverage,' said Danielle Slakoff, an assistant professor at California State University, Sacramento, who researches criminal justice and the media.
She said that white women were typically depicted as good people, while women of color were often characterized as risk-takers or somehow complicit in their own disappearances. 'White victims tend to be portrayed as being in very safe environments, so it’s shocking that something like this could happen, whereas the Black and Latino victims are portrayed as being in unsafe environments, so basically normalizing victimization,' she said. ...
'I don’t think we can discount the profit motive and the fact that, historically, these types of stories have gotten tons of engagement, viewers and clicks,' Ms. Slakoff said. 'So I do think it could be argued that it’s kind of this vicious cycle.' ”
-->We have to give credit to the NYT for discussing the US media's inherent racism in reporting of victims. Of course, the NYT itself has also been part of the problem, having given pages of coverage to Gabrielle Petito's disappearance and murder.
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Black Agenda report:
"President Joe Biden has issued an executive order threatening to impose new US sanctions on Ethiopia and Eritrea for their roles in humanitarian crisis caused by the war in Ethiopia’s northern regions. Unilateral sanctions, meaning sanctions not approved by the UN Security Council, violate international law codified in the UN Charter.
'Famine' is the Ethiopian emergency that US AID Chief Samantha Power has been shrieking about most for nearly a year. The Ethiopian government, she says, is blocking food aid into war-torn Tigray. Never mind that the Tigray People’s Liberation Front, a US puppet for nearly 30 years, started the war that’s causing the suffering, as war always does. Or, that the Ethiopian government says that they wouldn’t starve their own people, that they are delivering more food to Tigray than any of the Western NGOs, but that they have set up checkpoints to make sure that aid convoys aren’t transporting arms to the TPLF. Power, like Blinken and Biden, don’t call the Ethiopian government’s account of facts on the ground a lie. They just ignore it, as do other Western officials and press. ...
Time will tell whether the US and its allies will go to such extremes to control the Horn of Africa, but President Biden has heightened the threats. Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed wrote an open letter in response, asking him to respect Ethiopia’s sovereignty, but Biden has not responded, and the letter has not been published by Western press.
-->The usual propaganda venues, like NPR and the NYT, are all over this suffering in Tigray. It looks like there is another orchestrated campaign to get US troops in the Horn of Africa. The American Empire can't seem to help itself, and our mainstream media is only too glad to lend a helping hand.
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Common Dreams:
"A new report released Wednesday identifies $86 billion worth of offshore tax loopholes that a dozen U.S.-based oil and gas companies exploit each year as part of a 'tax bonanza,' a finding that comes as climate justice advocates push Congress to eliminate subsidies to the fossil fuel industry. ...
The report (pdf), compiled by Friends of the Earth, Oxfam America, and BailoutWatch, reveals the consequences of 'two esoteric provisions in the tax code worth tens of billions of dollars to Big Oil's multinational majors, including ExxonMobil, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and other polluters most responsible for the climate emergency. ...
House Democrats' failure to stop showering Big Oil with public money—a move supported by a majority of people in the U.S. and many, though not all, Democratic lawmakers—has drawn progressives' ire. 'The House bill made a decent start by targeting Big Oil's international tax loopholes, but it went nowhere near far enough,' Lukas Ross, Climate and Energy Justice program manager at Friends of the Earth, said Wednesday in a statement."
-->No major media including the NYT wanted to print this story. The result is that the public remains unaware of the huge tax breaks given to oil and gas companies. Readers are also never told of the complicity of the Democratic Party in these tax giveaways.
