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[woodburner]

By questioning or attacking the integrity of reporter you are attacking the messenger and not engaging with the message.

Where was I questioning or attacking his integrity.

I said I didn't have a view.

I have just re-read his article.
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/sy ... 07726.html

I think it is a reasonably balanced article that highlights some of the conflicting claims about Douma.

raspberry-blower’s quoted sentence was part of a paragraph. This has been quoted separately, and consequently the meaning is different from the meaning within the paragraph. This is a perennial problem, where people selectively quote, and the context changes.

[johnhemming2]

This is a perennial problem, where people selectively quote, and the context changes.

True. Hence it is important where possible to give original sources.

[Mr. Fox]

Did anyone catch this God-awful piece in the Guardian?

Revealed: UK’s push to strengthen anti-Russia alliance

This article seems to have prompted quite a few responses... Jonathan Cook writes:

2018: When Orwell’s 1984 stopped being fiction

This is the moment when a newspaper claiming to uphold that most essential function in a liberal democracy – acting as a watchdog on power – formally abandons the task. This is the moment when it positively embraces the role of serving as a mouthpiece for the government. The tell is in one small word in a headline on today’s Guardian’s front page: “Revealed�...

..First, it is designed to disorientate the reader in Orwellian – or maybe Lewis Caroll – fashion, inverting the world of reality. The reader is primed for a disclosure, a secret, and then is spoonfed familiar government propaganda: ...

..Second, there is a remedy for the disorientation created by that small word “Revealed�. It subtly forces the reader to submit to the inversion...

Caitlin Johnstone also has a few choice words on it:

Any Discussion Of Russian Disinfo Is Invalid Unless It Addresses Iraq Lies

..Western mass media outlets everywhere have been sounding an increasingly shrill alarm about “Russian disinformation� regarding the Salisbury Skripal poisoning and the alleged Douma gas attack in Syria, and this Guardian article by Patrick Wintour forms a new step along the same trajectory.

No attempt is ever made to describe why it is so dangerous to “sow doubt� about unproven allegations long before investigations into either event have run their course.

More curiously, no attempt to address Iraq is ever made.

Wintour spins a narrative about the US, UK and their tight network of allies having a complete monopoly on truth and facts, taking it as an obvious truism that the Russians could only be lying about the sudden deluge of unproven accusations the west has been piling upon them ever since late 2016.

The western empire is plainly just and virtuous, so nobody questioning its assertions could be anything other than deceitful and evil.

Even though this same empire lied us into a war with Iraq fifteen years ago.

Nothing from MediaLens or OffGuardian about it... yet.

[stumuz1]

On this beautiful May day, take time to remember Andrés Nin Pérez, tortured to death by the Russians for being the wrong sought of communist during the Spanish civil war in Barcelona.

Officially denied by Moscow for over 50 years. It was with collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90's and the opening up of the KGB records to academics that the truth came out.

"They decided to abandon the dry method to get results. Then the blood flowed, the skin peeled off, muscles torn, physical suffering pushed to the limits of human endurance. Nin was subjected to cruel pain of the most refined tortures. In a few days his face was a shapeless mass of flesh"

There is a plaque remembering him outside the Moka cafe in Barcelona. I suppose the plaque could just be anti Russian propaganda.

[Mr. Fox]

Another great piece from Caitlin Johnstone:

How To Silence RT Forever

Luckily for the screaming hysterical Big Brother devotees, there is a very easy and 100 percent guaranteed way to get RT removed from western airwaves forever. Are you ready? Here it is:

Allow leftist and antiwar perspectives to be voiced on western mainstream media.

That’s it. That’s the whole entire recipe for RT’s destruction. If western media simply ceased deliberately excluding leftist and antiwar voices from mainstream discourse, there would no longer be any demand for RT’s output, since the only reason anyone outside of Russia watches RT is to get perspectives they can’t get anywhere else...

..This is a surefire way to get rid of RT without violating the US Constitution, committing unprecedented acts of government censorship, or having anything whatsoever to do with the Kremlin. But of course, we all know that it will never happen.

It will never happen because RT is not the real enemy. Leftists and antiwar activists are the real enemy....

..The only people the plutocrat-owned media corporations have ever had a problem with are those who oppose plutocratic interests, be they oligarchy or war profiteering or ecocidal fossil fuel agendas.

So remember that the next time you hear some empire loyalist whining about RT. They have no problem with RT. They have a problem with you.

[woodburner]

I’m on the side of “right�, it’s the MSM plutocrats who are the enemy.

[Little John]

Caitlin Johnson is a very good and sometimes great writer

[johnhemming2]

Al Jazeera offer a different perspective as well. RT are as I understand it funded externally so I would not expect them to disappear merely because other outlets started putting people on air that are not on air at the moment.

[Mr. Fox]

John Cleese on why he's leaving the UK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULfqhCNHQPA

The Monty Python star said it's down to a lack of trust in the newspapers; "it’s the lying and the triviality that I object to".

In this interview with Newsnight's Emily Maitlis, he shows her just how little trust he has.

Can't say I blame him.

[BritDownUnder]

John Cleese on why he's leaving the UK:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULfqhCNHQPA

The Monty Python star said it's down to a lack of trust in the newspapers; "it’s the lying and the triviality that I object to".

In this interview with Newsnight's Emily Maitlis, he shows her just how little trust he has.

Can't say I blame him.

I thought he has lived in the US for years? Santa Barbara I think. Apparently he even had a butler called Manuel!

Leaving the UK was the best thing I did, not from a financial viewpoint, but from a personal viewpoint.

[emordnilap]

Leaving the UK was the best thing I did, not from a financial viewpoint, but from a personal viewpoint.

+1

[emordnilap]

I've been interested for as long as I can remember in 'News' itself as a subject - how and why it's made, how it frames issues and limits the terms and scope of 'acceptable' debate, how it's use as a propaganda tool impacts us, the 'consumers', moulds opinion and carries 'emotional payloads' that appear to cut off rational thought.

You'd be interested in this, then, Mr. Fox.

Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.

Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to "providing a breadth of view" and to properly inform the public of "matters of public policy", the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation's most cherished institutions. A BBC headline said: "Bill which gives power to GPs passes." This was pure state propaganda.

There is a striking similarity with the BBC's coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair's lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed. A study by the University of Wales, Cardiff, found that the BBC reflected the government line "overwhelmingly" while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation's much-vaunted "principle" of impartiality was never a consideration.

[careful_eugene]

I've been interested for as long as I can remember in 'News' itself as a subject - how and why it's made, how it frames issues and limits the terms and scope of 'acceptable' debate, how it's use as a propaganda tool impacts us, the 'consumers', moulds opinion and carries 'emotional payloads' that appear to cut off rational thought.

You'd be interested in this, then, Mr. Fox.

Edwards and Cromwell have dissected the 2012 Health and Social Care Act, whose innocuous title belies its dire consequences. Unknown to most of the population, the Act ends the legal obligation of British governments to provide universal free health care: the bedrock on which the NHS was set up following the Second World War. Private companies can now insinuate themselves into the NHS, piece by piece.

Where, asks Edwards and Cromwell, was the BBC while this momentous Bill was making its way through Parliament? With a statutory commitment to "providing a breadth of view" and to properly inform the public of "matters of public policy", the BBC never spelt out the threat posed to one of the nation's most cherished institutions. A BBC headline said: "Bill which gives power to GPs passes." This was pure state propaganda.

There is a striking similarity with the BBC's coverage of Prime Minister Tony Blair's lawless invasion of Iraq in 2003, which left a million dead and many more dispossessed. A study by the University of Wales, Cardiff, found that the BBC reflected the government line "overwhelmingly" while relegating reports of civilian suffering. A Media Tenor study placed the BBC at the bottom of a league of western broadcasters in the time they gave to opponents of the invasion. The corporation's much-vaunted "principle" of impartiality was never a consideration.

The 2012 health and social care act has basically opened up the NHS for privatisation, I can remember some protesting voices at the time but the BBC was nowhere to be seen. This is similar to the ongoing academisation of schools where control of public money for education is handed to private organisations with little or no noise from the media.