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 ...

By James H. Ewert Jr. Kalle Lasn is a fighter for the right to communicate. A privilege, says the founder of Adbusters magazine, that goes one step farther than the freedom of speech. “You can stand on the corner and shout at people as they are going by,” Lasn says. “But if a handful of corporations have media in their pocket, they can totally hoodwink the public.” From his home in ...

A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers." Since the start of the Iraq war, there's been a raucous debate in military circles over how to handle blogs -- and the servicemembers who want to keep them. One faction sees blogs as security risks, and a collective waste of troops' time. The other (which includes top officers, like Gen. David Petraeus ...

"It is somewhat surprising," Larry Elliott, economics editor of London's The Guardian observed recently, "that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.” If such a fraud was taking place, and if Wall Street’s financial crisis, according to the usually staid Economist, was on the edge of “disaster” with a “financial nuclear winter” ...

"All the more reason for us to elect the right person come November -- so that in four years, we don't run the risk of seeing someone from the next administration yawn in the public's face." People were shocked last Wednesday, on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war, to hear Vice President Cheney say "So?" in response to ABC News reporter Martha Raddatz's questions about public opposition to the ...

WASHINGTON — At a time of continued government secrecy, the news media should press the presidential candidates on whether their administration would enforce "the spirit as well as the letter of the law" protecting the public's right to know, says Associated Press President and CEO Tom Curley. "Secrecy is one of the handiest tools for government that wants to be accountable only to itself regardless of the spirit of any law," ...

Evening Standard condemned by press watchdog for coverage of the Camp for Climate Action's Heathrow protest. Claim of fabrication upheld. In a much awaited ruling the Press Complaints Commission (PCC) issued a stinging rebuke against the Evening Standard today. The usually mild- mannered PCC slammed the Standard's coverage of last summer's Camp for Climate Action at ...