Thread: Pax Americana

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Covert Drone War: The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

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CNN and MSNBC: No better than FOX


While FOX tends to receive the bulk of criticism from pundits and media watchdogs, the other two major 24/7 television "news" networks, CNN and MSNBC, often fly under the radar without examination.

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MSNBC cancels host for being "anti-war", "anti-Bush" (2/25/2003)

After having a program on MSNBC for less than a year, host Phil Donahue's show is cancelled. The initial reason given is low ratings; however, a leaked internal memo reveals that MSNBC felt Donahue would be a "difficult public face" in a time of war, going on to say that "he seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush, and skeptical of the administration's motives."

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MSNBC hires, fires, homophobic talk show host
(3/8/2003)

MSNBC hires radio talk show host Michael Savage to do a one-hour segment. Savage is known for making homophobic statements, but MSNBC insists on giving him the "benefit of the doubt".

Four months later, the following comments are made to a prank caller on his show and he is fired from his job at MSNBC as a result:

"Oh, you're one of the sodomites. You should only get AIDS and die, you pig. How's that? Why don't you see if you can sue me, you pig. You got nothing better than to put me down, you piece of garbage. You have got nothing to do today, go eat a sausage and choke on it. Get trichinosis."

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MSNBC host Chris Matthews: "We're all neocons now."
(4/9/2003)

After a statue of Saddam Hussein was toppled (an event staged for the networks), Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball", says: "We're all neocons now." If you're unfamiliar with what a "neocon" is, have a look here.

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MSNBC host Chris Matthews: Women like this war
(5/1/2003)

“We’re proud of our president. Americans love having a guy as president, a guy who has a little swagger, who’s physical. They want a guy who’s president. Women like a guy who’s president. Check it out. The women like this war. I think we like having a hero as our president. It’s simple. We’re not like the Brits.”

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MSNBC host Chris Matthews: George W. Bush "won [Iraq] war"
(5/1-4/2003)

Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball", says President Bush "deserves everything he's doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief?"

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MSNBC host Chris Matthews meets with Iraq war supporters
(6/29/2005)

Chris Matthews, host of MSNBC's "Hardball", presents viewers with a "town meeting" featuring a panel dominated by Iraq war boosters.

As reported by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR):

"The two-hour coverage, hosted by Chris Matthews, was anchored by a panel discussion that featured MSNBC reporter Norah O'Donnell, Islam scholar Reza Aslan, and four conservative Bush supporters: Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, MSNBC host Tucker Carlson, Bobbie Patray of the Eagle Forum of Tennessee and Jerry Sutton, pastor of the Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, where the event was held.MSNBC's coverage also included interviews with Newsweek's Jon Meacham, Democratic Sen. Joe Biden (who called for "more boots on the ground"), and Republican senators John McCain and John Warner."

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MSNBC declines joining PBS propaganda op investigation
(4/24/200

PBS reports on a Pentagon propaganda operation which utilizes retired military officers as "independent military analysts" to promote the Iraq War. CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX News either decline to participate in the report, or do not respond.

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MSNBC's parent company, General Electric, donates $2m politically
(11/15/2010)

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, MSNBC's parent company, General Electric, "made over $2 million in political contributions in the 2010 election cycle (stemming from the company's political action committee, or PAC). The top recipient was Republican Senate candidate Rob Portman from Ohio."

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MSNBC plays "crucial" role hyping 2011 Tuscon Shooting
(1/26/2011)

Paul Bond, a writer for The Hollywood Reporter, publishes an article accusing MSNBC of being a "crucial" element in "driving the narrative" that the man responsible for the 2011 Tuscon Shooting, Jared Loughner, was "egged on by violent political rhetoric", particularly from Sarah Palin. Bond also writes that "even after it was learned that the shooter was an atheist, flag-burning, Bush-hater", MSNBC still did not let up.

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MSNBC host Ed Schultz advocates support for Obama's 2011 bombing campaign in Libya
(3/23/2011)

MSNBC's Ed Schultz, host of "The Ed Show", writes an opinion piece on the Huffington Post supporting US involvement in Libya. He writes that the "president of the United States, Barack Obama, deserves the benefit of the doubt and our support in his decision to use military force in Libya."

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MSNBC President tells (former) show host Cenk Uygur that channel is part of "establishment" and host should "act like it"
(April 2011)

From the New York Times: "[...] in late June the channel’s president, Phil Griffin, decided to try out Mr. Sharpton, and offered Mr. Uygur a new contract that included a weekend show, but not a higher-profile weekday show.Mr. Uygur, who by most accounts was well liked within MSNBC, said in an interview that he turned down the new contract because he felt Mr. Griffin had been the recipient of political pressure. In April, he said, Mr. Griffin “called me into his office and said that he’d been talking to people in Washington, and that they did not like my tone.” He said he guessed Mr. Griffin was referring to White House officials, though he had no evidence for the assertion. He also said that Mr. Griffin said the channel was part of the “establishment,” and “that you need to act like it.”"

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MSNBC host Ed Schultz calls Laura Ingraham a slut
(5/24/2011)

On his radio program, Ed Shultz calls Laura Ingraham a slut. He says:

"Rain, thunderstorms, winds getting whipped into tornadoes of horrific proportions. Hot weather, all of this stuff. And what are the Republicans thinking about? They're not thinking about their next-door neighbor. They're just thinking about how much this is going to cost. President Obama is going to be visiting Joplin, Missouri, on Sunday. But you know what they're talking about? Like this right-wing slut, what's her name, Laura Ingraham? Yeah, she's a talk slut. You see, she was, back in the day, praising President Reagan when he was drinking a beer overseas. But now that Obama's doing it, they're working him over."

MSNBC announces the next day that Shultz will take one week off, unpaid, as a result of the comments.

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CNN invites PSYOPs Team to Georgia HQ
(3/24/2000)

CNN allows the 4th Psychological Operations Group (PSYOPs) based at Fort Bragg in North Carolina to briefly work at their Atlanta, Georgia, headquarters.

As reported by Democracy Now, an "enterprising Dutch journalist named Abe De Vries came up with this important story[...] and he remains properly astounded that no mainstream news medium in the United States has evinced any interest in the story."

FAIR also covered this, and received a response from CNN, which can be read here.

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CNN guest suggests dealing with 9/11 by killing people, even if some are not "directly involved" (9/11/2001)

After the 9/11 attacks, major news networks, including CNN, largely turn their coverage on to themes surrounding retaliation.

Says former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger: "There is only one way to begin to deal with people like this, and that is you have to kill some of them even if they are not immediately directly involved."

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CNN and other networks limit Osama broadcasts
(10/11/2001)

Five major US television networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and FOX News) agree to "limit broadcasts" of Osama Bin Laden and his associates out of fear that audio/video tapes may contain coded messages designed to wake "sleeper cells" in the U.S.

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CNN Chairman orders correspondents to balance reporting from Taliban POV with reminders that Taliban harbor 9/11 terrorists
(10/31/2001)

CNN chairman Walter Isaacson orders his staff to balance CNN coverage of US-led civilian devastation in Afghan cities with reminders that the Taliban harbor those who attacked the United States on 9/11.

In an internal memo to CNN correspondents, Isaacson writes:

"As we get good reports from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, we must redouble our efforts to make sure we do not seem to be simply reporting from their vantage or perspective. We must talk about how the Taliban are using civilian shields and how the Taliban have harbored the terrorists responsible for killing close to 5,000 innocent people."

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CNN anchor cuts broadcast of press conference with Iraqi Information Minister because US government "would disagree" with content
(3/26/2003)

"All right, we’re going to interrupt this press briefing right now because, of course, the U.S. government would disagree with most of what he is saying."
—CNN anchor Carol Costello

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CNN and FOX misrepresent toppling of Saddam statue
(4/9/2003)

CNN covers the toppling of a Saddam Hussein statue in central Baghdad, Iraq. It is portrayed as a spontaneous event started by "liberated" Iraqis overjoyed with the U.S. presence in their country.

It is later revealed to be entirely the work of a Marine colonel who decided to take down the statue. As reported by the Los Angeles Times: "[It] was a quick-thinking Army psychological operations team that made it appear to be a spontaneous Iraqi undertaking."

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CNN: Why report civilian deaths in Iraq?
(4/15/2004)

CNN anchor Daryn Kagan interviews Al-Jazeera's editor-in-chief, Ahmed Al-Sheik, and uses the opportunity to badger Al-Sheik about whether civilian deaths in Iraq are really "the story" in Fallujah.

"Isn't the story, though, bigger than just the simple numbers, with all due respect to the Iraqi civilians who have lost their lives-- the story bigger than just the numbers of people who were killed or the fact that they might have been killed by the U.S. military, that the insurgents, the people trying to cause problems within Fallujah, are mixing in among the civilians, making it actually possible that even more civilians would be killed, that the story is what the Iraqi insurgents are doing, in addition to the response from the U.S. military?"

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CNN's Wolf Blitzer on Hurricane Katrina victims: "they are so black"
(9/2/2005)

Covering the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Wolf Blitzer says:

"You simply get chills every time you see these poor individuals, as Jack Cafferty just pointed out, so tragically, so many of these people, almost all of them that we see, are so poor and they are so black, and this is going to raise lots of questions for people."

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CNN briefly banned from Iran over "mistranslation" of Iranian leader
(1/2006)

CNN is briefly banned from Iran after "mistranslating" Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as saying Iran has the right to use nuclear "weapons" rather than nuclear "technology".

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CNN's Anderson Cooper interned with CIA
(9/6/2006)

It is revealed that CNN's Anderson Cooper "spent his summers interning" at the Central Intelligence Agency's headquarters in Langley, Virginia, "in a program for students interested in intelligence work", as reported by Rawstory.

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CNN declines joining PBS propaganda op investigation (4/24/200

PBS reports on a Pentagon propaganda operation which utilizes retired military officers as "independent military analysts" to promote the Iraq War. CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, NBC, and FOX News either decline to participate in the report, or do not respond.

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CNN quotes "official", neglects evidence, blames murders in Afghanistan on Taliban
(4/16/2010)

CNN quotes a "senior military official" who claims that several recent deaths in Afghanistan were the result of an "honor killing", a "murder carried out by a family or community member against someone thought to have brought dishonor onto them."

The unnamed official suggests the Taliban could be responsible. CNN incorporates this claim by the "official" into their article headline: "Bodies found gagged, bound after Afghan 'honor killing'"

The other side of the story is picked up by the Associated Press, which says that "relatives of the dead accused American forces of being responsible."

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CNN's Sanja Gupta and his close relationship with drug companies
(10/19/2010)

CNN's medical correspondent, Sanjay Gupta, and his colleague, Robin Meade, have in the past "hosted a fluffy health information show on AccentHealth, a network of closed circuit TVs in doctor and hospital waiting rooms nationwide, sponsored by drug companies."

As reported by BNET, "Gupta has been an AccentHealth host since 2003. AccentHealth says its clients are “primarily pharmaceutical and consumer packaged goods companies.”"

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CNN's weekend host advises President Obama on foreign policy
(5/13/2011)

CNN's Fareed Zakaria, host of the weekend show Fareed Zakaria GPS, admits on CNN that he has been advising President Obama on foreign policy matters.

CNN journalist urges Americans to stop being 'nosy'
(6/2012)

LZ Granderson, a regular CNN columnist and contributor, writes: "Though to be fair, it’s not entirely our fault. Between the 24/7 news cycle, social media and reality TV, we have been spoon fed other people’s private business for so long we now assume it’s a given to know everything. And if there are people who choose not to disclose, they must be hiding something. Being told that something’s “none of your business” is slowly being characterized as rude, and if such a statement is coming from the government, it seems incriminating. Times have changed. Yet, not everything is our business. And in the political arena, there are things that should be and need to be kept quiet. . . . You see, freedom isn’t entirely free. It also isn’t squeaky clean. And sometimes the federal government deems it necessary to get its hands a little dirty in the hopes of achieving something we generally accept as good for the country. . . . And maybe it’s better for us not to be so nosy, not to know everything because, to paraphrase the famous line from the movie “A Few Good Men,” many of us won’t be able to handle the truth."

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There's no doubt that FOX News deserves most of the criticism it gets because essentially, the network is nothing more than an outlet for the Republican Party. However, as the record clearly shows, CNN and MSNBC are no more trustworthy, no less blameworthy. All three of these networks ought to be held fully accountable for their actions.
http://screechingkettle.blogspot.com...and-msnbc.html

PAX AMERICANA

Today there’s an elephant in the room: a huge, yet ignored, issue that largely explains why Social Security is now on the chopping block. And why other industrialized countries have free college education and universal healthcare, but we don’t. It’s arguably our country’s biggest problem – a problem that Martin Luther King Jr. focused on before he was assassinated 45 years ago, and has only worsened since then (which was the height of the Vietnam War).

That problem is U.S. militarism and perpetual war.

In 1967, King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today” – and said, “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”

Nowadays MSNBC hosts yell at Fox News hosts, and vice versa, about all sorts of issues – but when the Obama administration expanded the bloody war in Afghanistan, the shouting heads at both channels went almost silent. When Obama’s drone war expanded, there was little shouting. Not at MSNBC, not at Fox. Nor at CNN, CBS, ABC or so-called public broadcasting.

We can have raging debates in mainstream media about issues like gun control and gay marriage and minimum wage, but when the elites of both parties agree on military intervention – as they so often do – debate is nearly nonexistent. Anyone in the mainstream who goes out on a limb to loudly question this oversized creature in the middle of the room known as militarism or interventionism is likely to disappear faster than you can say ‘Phil Donahue.’
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/09-1


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlLqm3eDYMg
Drone Strikes: Where Are Obama's Tears For Those Child Victims?

"For more than five years, Brandon Bryant worked in an oblong, windowless container about the size of a trailer, where the air-conditioning was kept at 17 degrees Celsius (63 degrees Fahrenheit) and, for security reasons, the door couldn't be opened. Bryant and his coworkers sat in front of 14 computer monitors and four keyboards. When Bryant pressed a button in New Mexico, someone died on the other side of the world.

The container is filled with the humming of computers. It's the brain of a drone, known as a cockpit in Air Force parlance. But the pilots in the container aren't flying through the air. They're just sitting at the controls."

Innocent women and children were killed by drone strikes in the al-Majala region of Yemen. The United States is responsible for a very high number of innocent civilian deaths from drone strikes; a soldier wracked with guilt told his story of dehumanizing rationalization after killing a child. The senseless deaths of innocent children in Newtown, Connecticut devastated the nation, causing President Obama to cry openly for them. Why are children in places like Yemen or Pakistan not mourned? Cenk Uygur discusses the disparity.

*Read more from Nicola Abé/ Spiegel.de:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/w...

Read more about the deaths caused by drone strikes from Brave New Foundation: http://www.bravenewfoundation.org/