‘Smoking gun proof’: fossil fuel industry knew of climate danger as early as 1954, documents show
Documents show industry-backed Air Pollution Foundation uncovered the severe harm climate change would wreak
#science #climatechange #ecocide #pollution #Guardian #journalism #fossilfuel
https://dankennedy.net/tag/greater-boston-news-bureau/
A nonprofit to cover Boston’s communities of color takes another step toward reality
BY DAN KENNEDY ON JANUARY 26, 2024
..."Yawu Miller, formerly the senior editor of The Bay State Banner, announced on Twitter that the nascent organization he’s launching with Claudio Martinez will be called the #GreaterBostonNewsBureau “with the aim of supporting #local #news outlets that serve communities of color in and around Boston.” Martinez is the executive director of La Vida Scholars, “a community based organization that equips low-income, high-achieving Lynn students with the resources and preparation needed to enter great colleges.”
...
Miller and Martinez comprise one of four teams that were awarded #grants by the #American #Journalism Project last year as part of its local news incubator program. Each team was awarded a $400,000 grant. The other teams are based in Miami, Phoenix and Oregon. The Phoenix project is aimed at serving that area’s LGBTQ community. According to the AJP’s announcement from last July:
The local news incubator, launched by the American Journalism Project, with support from the Google News Initiative, aims to lower barriers to entry for prospective founders of local news organizations and diversify the field. By providing robust funding and council, this kind of program allows local news talent to go all-in on their ideas and draw on lessons learned from other nonprofit local news organizations across the country, with the runway that will provide them financial security to take an entrepreneur’s leap."...
#politics #journalism #justice #Assange #wikileaks #FreeAssange
Think about the corruption of this world: Tucker Carlson is now the best journalist in the US.
Viral news story of botnet with 3 million toothbrushes was too good to be true
Alas, fiction is sometimes stranger than truth. There weren't really 3 million Internet-connected toothbrushes accessing the website of a Swiss company in a DDoS attack that did millions of dollars of damage. The toothbrush botnet was just a hypothetical example that some journalists wrongly interpreted as having actually happened.
Ping @sfb@nerdpol.ch
#ArsTechnica #ToothBrush #DDoS #Journalism #WheresStanleyBTW
source: https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/ai-based-disinformation-is-probably
Second, to succeed in such markets, content producers must achieve a good reputation (in the eyes of their target audience). One of many things that makes this really hard is that it is strongly in the interests of your competitors to destroy your reputation. In addition to legal accountability for lies and fabrications, this is one thing that keeps lots of media honest, at least when it comes to reporting on narrow matters of fact.
#media #news #politics #fake #facts #conspiracy #future #technology #press #journalism #problem #fakeNews
A informação foi divulgada pelo ex-primeiro-ministro belga Guy Verhofstadt, atual membro do Parlamento Europeu
#censura #censorship #imprensa #jornalismo #journalism #media #midia #ocidente #UE #EU #Europa #Europe #Putin #Russia #Rússia #TuckerCarlson
Tucker Carlson
@TuckerCarlson
Why I'm interviewing Vladimir Putin. — https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1754939251257475555
#tuckercarlson #journalism #media #anglophone #usa #uk #canada #australia
Meanwhile... tough times for independent #media - and quality #journalism, #truth, investigative reporting, etc.
As #disinformation bubbles cover the country with pre-fab 'opinion', 'news' and #cult messaging (Sinclair, Fox, etc.
Keeping reporters healthy over the long term often requires both systemic and behavioral changes, and getting buy-in often isn’t easy.
The Guardian
Our political and media elites are complicit in Gaza’s nightmare. Any vestige of moral authority has been lost for ever.
What is the value of a Palestinian life? For those retaining delusions not already buried in the rubble of Gaza alongside entire families – like the Zorobs, the Kashtans, the Attalahs – Joe Biden offered a definitive answer last week. In a statement marking 100 days since the current horror began, he rightly showed empathy for the plight of hostages – whose abduction by Hamas represents a grave war crime – and their traumatised families. Yet there was not a single mention of Palestinians. (...)
(Text continues underneath the photo.)
‘Life is cheap, they say: it is apparently meaningless if you are Palestinian.’ Palestinians search the rubble after airstrikes on Khan Younis, October 2023. Photograph: Mohammed Dahman/AP.
If the world’s powerful nations had not so brazenly shrugged off three-quarters of a million Palestinians being driven from their homes 76 years ago, accompanied by an estimated 15,000 suffering violent deaths, the seeds of today’s bitter harvest would not have been planted. (...)
If even some worth had been attached to Palestinian life then decades of occupation, siege, illegal colonisation, apartheid, violent repression and mass slaughter might never have happened. Oppressing others becomes difficult to sustain when their humanity is accepted. (...)
Surely 10,000 children suffering violent deaths, or the 10 kids having one or both legs amputated each day, often without anaesthetic, would stir powerful emotions. Surely 5,500 pregnant women giving birth each month – many having caesareans without anaesthetic – or newborns dying of hypothermia and diarrhoea would trigger unstoppable revulsion. (...)
This has not happened, and this is why the consequences will be severe.
The devaluing of Palestinian life is not a supposition, it is a statistical fact. According to a new study of coverage in major US newspapers, for every Israeli death Israelis are mentioned eight times – or at a rate 16 times more per death than that of Palestinians. (...)
All this will have a profound impact. For a start, forget about any future western claims about human rights and international law. (...) After the west armed and backed Israel as it imposed mass death on Gaza through bombs, bullets, hunger, thirst and the destruction of medical facilities, nobody other than the terminally gullible will listen to such claims ever again.
But it’s not just other countries that western political and media elites should be panicking about. They face moral collapse at home, too. Younger generations in countries such as the US and Britain have grown up taking racism far more seriously than those before them, and polling shows they are far more sympathetic to Palestinians than older citizens are. (...)
What do these young people then make of media coverage, or the statements of politicians, that don’t seem to treat Palestinian life as having any worth at all? (...)
So yes, we have seen how the refusal to treat Palestinians as human beings made today’s nightmare inevitable. We can see how the moral claims used to justify western global dominance are permanently shredded. But little thought has been given to how political and media elites in western nations have torched their moral authority, leaving it to fester alongside thousands of unidentified Palestinian corpses buried under the rubble. A turning point, to be sure, with consequences that will only be understood when it is much too late.
Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #gaza #human_rights #occupied_territories #media #news #journalism #journalist #media_coverage #international_law #war
#politics #journalism #democracy #freedom #Assange #Wikileaks #FreeAssange
#politics #freedom #journalism #information #Assange #Wikileaks #FreeAssange
Fighting for Julian’s freedom embodies so much more than compassion
for a brave man’s suffering.
It is a clarion call to assert and defend the inalienable rights of each human being;
to speak truthfully demanding justice and hold governments accountable for their actions;
to uphold the principles of civilised conduct in international relations;
and to strive for a just and peaceful world.
These are the aspirations and concerns which this conference will explore and advance.
Media Lens
‘I find Westerners in general, and Europeans in particular, extremely indoctrinated and obsessed with perceptions of their own uniqueness. Many see themselves as chosen people, after going through a one-sided education and after relying on their media outlets, without studying alternative sources.’
André Vltchek, Soviet-born US political writer, 1963-2020.
(Text continues underneath the photo.)
Displaced children having their faces painted ahead of New Year celebrations at an UNRWA school in Deir al-Balah, Gaza, 28 December, 2023. (Omar Ashtawy APA images)
On 20 March 2006, on the third anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, BBC diplomatic correspondent Bridget Kendall declared on the Six O’Clock News:
‘There’s still bitter disagreement over invading Iraq. Was it justified or a disastrous miscalculation?’
The supposed ‘justification’ claimed by Prime Minister Tony Blair was the ‘serious and current threat’ posed by Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. The BBC’s false notion of ‘balance’ was to present ‘disastrous miscalculation’ as the counterargument. In fact, as we detailed at the time in media alerts and in our books, the invasion was considered by many legal experts to be a ‘war of aggression’, the ‘supreme international crime’ as judged by the standards of the post-WW2 Nuremberg trials. (...)
But such narrative control is an endemic feature of state-corporate media, wrongly labelled ‘mainstream’. It is a fundamental requirement of political journalists and editors that they magically transform the crimes of ‘our’ governments into ‘miscalculations’, ‘mistakes’ or ‘misguided’ attempts to do good. (...)
Noam Chomsky succinctly explained the ideological underpinning of ‘mainstream’ news coverage:
‘In discussion of international relations, the fundamental principle is that “we are good” – “we” being the government, on the totalitarian principle that state and people are one. “We” are benevolent, seeking peace and justice, though there may be errors in practice. “We” are foiled by villains who can’t rise to our exalted level.’
(Chomsky, ‘Interventions’, Penguin Books, London, 2007, p.101). (...)
[J]ournalists can be relied upon to perform the necessary whitewashing: the Gulf War in 1990-91, Nato’s bombing of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, Iraq sanctions from 1990-2003, the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003, the destruction of Libya in 2011, the US-sponsored toppling of the Ukrainian government in 2014, US-Nato air strikes against Syria, participation in the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen, and now the attacks on ‘Iran-backed’ Houthi rebels. (Of course, convention decrees that the Houthi are always described as ‘Iran-backed’, whereas Israeli forces are not routinely labelled ‘US-backed’.) (...)
In several powerful books, based on careful research of formerly secret UK government documents, historian Mark Curtis, co-founder of Declassified UK, has laid bare the motivations and reality of British foreign policy. Ethical concerns and morality are notable in these internal state records by their absence. (...)
[T]he major source of international terrorism is the West, notably the United States, supported by its ‘special relationship’ ally, the UK. Curtis wrote:
(...) Yet state-sponsored terrorism is by far the most serious category of terrorism in the world today, responsible for far more deaths in many more countries than the “private” terrorism of groups like Al Qaida.
(Curtis, ‘Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World’, Vintage, London, 2003, p. 94.)
The Financial Times reported last October:
‘Western support for Israel’s assault on Gaza has poisoned efforts to build consensus with significant developing countries on condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine, officials and diplomats have warned.’ (...)
The senior G7 diplomat added:
‘What we said about Ukraine has to apply to Gaza. Otherwise we lose all our credibility. The Brazilians, the South Africans, the Indonesians: why should they ever believe what we say about human rights?’
Why indeed. (...)
Last week, South Africa presented a detailed 84-page submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) – essentially the UN’s global law court – arguing that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. (...)
The South African legal team showed ample evidence of Israeli genocidal acts in Gaza, as well as the stated intention to commit genocide, indicated in public statements by numerous senior Israeli political and military leaders. (...)
Around 24,000 people have been killed in Gaza since 7 October last year, including over 10,300 children and 7,100 women. There may be another 7,000 buried under the rubble. (...)
According to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, by the end of 2023, 1.9 million people – nearly 85 per cent of the total population of Gaza – had been internally displaced under Israel’s attacks. (...)
Jonathan Cook noted that the West is now standing in the dock alongside Israel at the ICJ:
‘Israel expects support from western capitals because they have nearly as much to fear from a verdict against Israel as Israel itself. They have staunchly backed the killing spree, with the US and UK, in particular, sending weapons that are being used against the people of Gaza, making both potentially complicit.’ (...)
Israel’s most brutal assault in Gaza’s history is a continuation of its long war of oppression against the Palestinians. (...)
[The political writer Caitlin Johnstone] explained:
‘The demolition of Gaza is indeed being perpetrated in defense of western values, and is itself a perfect embodiment of western values. Not the western values they teach you about in school, but the hidden ones they don’t want you to look at.’ (...)
‘What we are seeing in Gaza is a much better representation of what western civilization is really about than all the gibberish about freedom and democracy we learned about in school.’
True to form, Washington is doing its utmost to protect Israel. During a press briefing, US national security spokesman John Kirby told reporters:
‘South Africa’s lawsuit against Israel is “meritless, counterproductive and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever”.’
Interviewed by Andrew Napolitano, a former judge and law professor, Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University responded to Kirby’s dismissive remark:
‘I just wish there were grown-ups in power. Grown-ups who are responsible, who are honest, who are decent, who would read an 84-page detailed complaint and give a serious answer, rather than a one-sentence smack-off like that.’
He added:
‘I wish, at the same time, that the White House press corps would follow up more seriously. (...)
‘Why don’t the journalists do their job, rather than feeding us the propaganda from the White House? They should be questioning the propaganda. (...)
Media academics have analysed Israel-Palestine coverage and found that Palestinian perspectives are given ‘far less time and legitimacy’ than Israeli views in the British media. (...)
‘The Palestinian perspective is effectively absent from the coverage, in how they understand the reasons for the conflict and the nature of the occupation under which they are living.’ (...)
We should all reject the output of ‘the powerful opinion-forming corporations’ and look elsewhere, to those internet oases of real journalism, in order to understand the world and to radically change it for the better.
Tags: #human_rights #russia #ukraine #iraq #invasion #sovereignty #gaza #palestine #palestinians #israel #occupied_teritories #genocide #war_of_agression #media #journalism #journalist #media_bias #news #press #corporate_media #mainstream_media #msm #bbc #the_guardian
https://futurecrunch.com/goodnews2023/
66 Good #News Stories You Didn't Hear About in 2023
Angus Hervey
"The news is supposed to tell us what's happening in the world. It doesn't. It tells us what's going wrong. Thanks to a combination of commercial pressures, cognitive biases and cultural habits, news organisations have become modern-day doom machines, showcasing the worst of humanity, without highlighting any progress, healing or restoration. Yes, #journalism is supposed to hold truth to power and when terrible things happen we shouldn't turn away. But when we only hear stories of doom, we fail to see the stories of possibility. We deny ourselves the opportunity to do better.
The American journalist Krista Tippett says that we're all fluent enough by now in the language of catastrophe and dysfunction, and what's needed are more of what she calls 'generative narratives.' This year, we found over 2,000 of those kinds of stories, and shared them with tens of thousands of readers in a weekly email. Not dog-on-a-surfboard, baby-survives-a-tornado stories, but genuine, world changing stuff about how millions of lives are improving, about human rights victories, diseases being eliminated, falling emissions, how vast swathes of our planet are being protected and how entire species have been saved.
We rounded up 400 of our favourites, and then crammed all of those again into this final list of 66. We think many of them will surprise you, and a few might just change the way you think about the world. It's been a difficult year, but in so many ways and in so many places, we've made progress too."...
. . .
The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) calculates that Israel has killed more than 70 media workers in the latest war in Gaza, making it the deadliest conflict for journalists in decades. Others put the toll at more than 100.
The CPJ says that the scale and circumstances of the killings, including direct threats to reporters and their families by Israeli officials, is evidence that Palestinian reporters in Gaza are being targeted. Murdered, in other words. If so, it’s a war crime and, as Al Jazeera has demanded, the international criminal court should add these killings to its investigation of Israel’s other alleged breaches of the Geneva conventions across occupied Palestine.
. . .
#Israel #Hamas #Gaza #journalism #freePress #war #warCrimes #Palistine #TheGuardian
The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?
We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.
--- John Swinton, managing editor of the New York Times, when offered to toast to an independent press
Source: this page on blatantpropaganda.org, which quotes from Labor's Untold Story, by Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, published by United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America, NY, 1955/1979
The Crucial Years
The world—its politics, its economy, and its journalism—has trouble coping with the scale of the climate crisis. We can’t quite wrap our collective head around it, which has never been clearer to me than in these waning days of 2023.
Because the most important thing that happened this year was the heat. (...)
And yet you really wouldn’t know it from reading the wrap-ups of the year’s news now appearing on one website after another. (...)
Those stories in the Times and Post were a way to search for a new angle to a story that doesn’t change quite fast enough to count as news. (In geological terms, we’re warming at hellish pace; but that’s not how the 24/7 news cycle works.) (...) We’re programmed—by evolution, doubtless, and in the case of journalism by counting clicks—to look for novelty and for conflict. Climate change seems inexorable, which is the opposite of how we think about news.
The war in Gaza, by contrast, fits our defintions perfectly. (...) But in a sense, it is the very familiarity of the war that makes it easy for us to focus on it; “mideast conflict,” like “inflation” or “presidential elections,” is an easily-accessed template in our minds. (...) Next year seems likely to be another orgy of familiarity: Joe Biden and Donald Trump, yet again. (...)
[W]e’re literally in uncharted territory, dealing with temperatures no human society has ever dealt with before. And to head off the worst, we are going to require an industrial transition on a scale we’ve never seen before: there were signs this year that that transition has begun (by midsummer we were installing a gigawatt worth of solar panels a day) but it will have to go much much faster.
These changes—the physical ones, and the political and economic ones—are almost inconceivable to us. That’s my point; they don’t fit our easy templates. (...)
"The only really important question is, 'How many more years like this we have to have before the reality of how bad climate change is breaks into the public's consciousness?'" (...)
Tags: #climate #climate_change #climate_crisis #heatwaves #extreme_weather #flooding #fossil_fuel #co2 #media #news #news_cycle #journalist #journalism
After three months of destruction, displacement and the killing of Palestinians, we take a deep dive into the way the Gaza story has been covered.Since the a...#AlJazeera #AlJazeeraEnglish #alJazeera #aljazeeraEnglish #aljazeeralive #aljazeeravideo #aljazeera #aljazeeraEnglish #aljazeeralatest #aljazeeralive #aljazeeralivenews #gazawar #genocide #history #israelpalestineconflict #journalism #latestnews #media #newsheadlines #thelisteningpost
The crucial context to the genocide in Gaza | The Listening Post
