By Mick Meaney - RINF | A new major survey of world nations has found the majority of people support a free media and strongly object to government control on both traditional and Internet news organisations. The poll was conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org and involved 18,122 respondents in 20 of the world's largest nations including the United States, Great Britain, China, Russia, India, Egypt, ...

CNN |  A new poll suggests that George W. Bush is the most unpopular president in modern American history. A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush his handling his job as president."No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup poll; in fact, ...

By Jeff Cohen | In the fall of 2002, week after week, I argued vigorously against invading Iraq in debates televised on MSNBC. I used every possible argument that might sway mainstream viewers – no real threat, cost, instability. But as the war neared, my debates were terminated. In my 2006 book Cable News Confidential, I ...

By Andrew Clark - The Guardian | Four months after buying the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch has been accused by a special independent committee of breaking "the letter and the spirit" of an agreement to protect editorial integrity. A five-strong committee established as a condition of the Bancroft family's $5bn (£2.5bn) sale of the paper's ...

The Pentagon has temporarily stopped feeding information to pundits who generate 'favorable' war coverage for the Bush administration. According to The New York Times, the Defense Department had been giving information to retired military officers serving as pundits for various media organizations in a bid to garner favorable media coverage of the White House wartime performance. "Analysts have been wooed in hundreds of ...

By John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton - PR Watch | David Barstow of the New York Times has written the first installment in what is already a stunning exposé of the Bush Administration's most powerful propaganda weapon used to sell and manage the war on Iraq: the embedding of military propagandists directly into the TV networks as on-air commentators. We and others have ...

IPA | The recent New York Times front-page article "Behind TV Analysts, Pentagon's Hidden Hand" discloses Pentagon records which "reveal a symbiotic relationship where the usual dividing lines between government and journalism have been obliterated. "Internal Pentagon documents repeatedly refer to the military analysts [on TV] as 'message force multipliers' or 'surrogates' who could be counted on to deliver administration 'themes and ...

THE US publishing company Tribune has agreed in principle to sell the New York newspaper Newsday to Rupert Murdoch's News Corp for about $US580 million ($616million). Under the terms of a deal, Newsday would be part of a joint venture with the New York Post and other News Corp assets, The Wall Street Journal reported. News Corp would own most of ...

By George Monbiot | If you want to know how powerful Rupert Murdoch is, read the reviews of Bruce Dover's book, Rupert's Adventures in China. Well, go on, read them. You can't find any? I rest my case. Dover was Murdoch's vice-president in China, and took his orders directly from the boss. His book, which was published in ...

By DAVID BARSTOW In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from ...

Democracy Now! Among the dead was twenty-three-year-old Fadel Shana, a cameraman for the Reuters news agency. He was killed when an Israeli tank shell struck his clearly marked jeep. Shana was filming at the time of his death. Reuters released the video from his camera. It shows the shell being fired from a distance and then moments later the camera goes black. Reuters editor-in-chief David Schlesinger called Shana’s ...

Stephen Lendman RINF Alternative News At a time of growing public disenchantment with the major media, millions now rely on alternate sources. Many online and print ones are credible. One of the world's most relied on is not - the BBC. It's an imperial tool, as corrupted as its dominant counterparts, been around longer than all of them, now in it for profit, and it's vital that people know who BBC ...

AP BAGHDAD - An Iraqi judicial committee has dismissed terrorism-related allegations against Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein and ordered him released nearly two years after he was detained by the U.S. military. A decision by a four-judge panel said Hussein's case falls under a new amnesty law. It ordered Iraqi courts to "cease legal proceedings" and ruled that Hussein should be "immediately" released unless other accusations are pending. The ruling is dated Monday ...

Peter Chamberlin  If it is true that the power belongs to the people in America, and Congress still answers to the people, then what force prevents the people from rising up to demand that Congress answer to the people's will? The answer to that question is that the "silent majority" is only silent because they have been ...

As proof that mainstream health information continutes to become increasingly detached from reality, the mainstream media (MSM) has launched a new wave of misinformation designed to discredit the health benefits of drinking water! Just today, for example, Fox News ran a story entitled, Skip the Water, Have a Soda Instead. ((http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,345...) Other news organizations, such as the Chicago Tribune also jumped on the bandwagon, declaring that drinking eight glasses ...