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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
>Lish<
Published Letters: 65
In the USA, federal circuit courts have recognized the First Ammendment right of journalists in the news media to conceal the identities of their confidential sources. ABC News is using this legal privilege to justify its refusal to divulge any information about the anonymous sources behind their story on Iran's uranium enrichment capabilities.
While this law only restricts the use of legal subpoenas against the press, I think it could be argued that it and the First Ammendment prohibits the government from attempting to regulate the press or to impose on it any legal standard of truth or accuracy.
Thus it falls to private organizations and individuals such as Glenn to hold the press accountable for the credibility of assertions that it claims are legally protected by Reporters' Privilege. What's interesting is how the internet provides us with one of the few publicly accessible media that is independent of the press itself. We're witnessing the emergence of what could be called a "Fifth Estate", watchdogs who stand outside the news media and demand public accountablity from the Fourth Estate of Constitutionally privileged journalism.
Glenn, you're not the only one who's interested in Brian Ross' confidential sources. In an ABC News blog last April, Brian revealed that the feds had been tracking calls placed by his cell phone:
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/federal_source_.html
Ross went on to speculate that "Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. The CIA asked for an FBI investigation of leaks of classified information following those reports."
I'd be interested to hear how other posters of my generation would compare MSM coverage of the Viet Nam war to that of Iraq. I recall having the same feelings of contempt for the bland recitation of government propaganda, the same disgust at the servile deference paid to lying politicians, the same revulsion at the persistent pimping of war-mongering demagogues. One difference now is that back then, it was only us dirty hippies who'd dare use terms like "propaganda" and "lies" to characterize the news media.
One memorable bellwether, however, was the slow and steady awakening of skepticism in the voice of Walter Cronkite, in his nightly recap of the evening news. From the Tet Offensive, to the Chicago Democratic Convention police riots, to the Watergate scandal, Cronkite's dawning awareness of government duplicity fractured the glaze of conventional wisdom. Through his somber eyes, many ordinary Americans began to see through the veil.
It seemed like there was a brief flashback of visceral understanding in the minds of some of the reporters covering the Katrina disaster. Shocking events taking place right before their eyes, outpacing the bureaucratic spin they were accustomed to regurgitating. It wasn't really a radicalizing experience, though, more like a brief glimpse out the door in the back of the sound stage, into the dark alley behind the network studios.
What's stunning is reading through the hundreds of comments posted under Klein's article. His readers are virtually unanimous in rejecting his obtuse straw man arguments. I could not find a single comment that supported Klein's viewpoint; the only positive responses he received were acknowledgments of respect for his responding publicly to Glenn's criticism. Faint praise indeed.
L.W.M. - "Some forms of signal processing: attenuation, modulation, amplification, limiting, gating, distortion, compression, even echo and reverb, etc..."
Let's not omit one of the most important forms of signal processing: filtering. A background process used by the MSM to suppress parts of the signal they have no interest in reporting.
Like Michael Harold on page 2 of this comment stream, I made a post to Alter's comment section that was not printed by Huffington Post. At the time I made the post, there was just a single comment visible under the article. When I checked the article an hour later, there were several more comments, and I noticed something unusual. The lone comment I had seen before was no longer the first comment, it was preceded by a comment referring to Glenn's criticism of Broder here on this blog. Clearly, this post had been held back for a time while the site editor considered whether to publish it or not.
I think it's also quite clear that Huffington Post exerts editorial control over their comment sections.
Golden Boy said: Consider: 2.3 million Muslims in America, according to the poll. About half would be under 30, so that's 1.15 million. A quarter of these refuse to condemn bin Laden, or actively support him.
Muslims aren't the only ones who refuse to condemn bin Laden for 9/11. Neither the FBI nor the US Dept. of Justice has seen fit to accuse bin Laden of any crime in association with the 9/11 attacks.
According to the following article, FBI sources explain that "The reason why 9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page is because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11."
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=20060610&articleId=2623
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
219 Democrats and one Republican join in favor of the legislation, which passed by a narrow margin
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Salon headlines in your mailbox
