*Ø* Blogmanac | No news is snow news
Odd. At least 150,000 Israelis demonstrate in Rabin Square in the heart of Tel Aviv, demanding immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops and Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip.
The huge rally is addressed by none other than the Leader of the Opposition, Shimon Peres, and by Yom Tov Samia, the former head of the Israeli army's southern command. It's a big story, and it's all over the Internet on news sites from non-American countries. ABC Radio National (Australia) reported a crowd of a quarter of a million.
It's a big story which happened within the last 24 hours but does not appear, as I write, on the front pages of the following websites: Google News, Reuters, Yahoo News, MSNBC News and the New York Times. The San Francisco Chronicle doesn't give it a mention either, and its lead story is about a singer called Brody Dalle. Fox News, to its credit, has the story, but no picture on page one, and gives a crowd estimate of only 100,000.
All of these sites are American-based, and they tend to feed 90% of the world's mainstream news media.
One recalls an anti-Iraq invasion demonstration in London that was held some months before the huge protests of February 15, 2003. At that big demo an estimated half a million people gathered, but it was on the same day as an anti-fox hunting demo that attracted fewer than 20,000 people. Only the latter was reported in the US media, even in the Washington Post, or so I recall from the time.
I also recall reading somewhere that 97 per cent of media consumed in America is produced in that country. By way of contrast, in Australia a minority of media consumed is locally produced. The effect for the good citizens of the USA seems to be an almost hermetically sealed information prison of their own making. Thank heavens for the Internet. Unfortunately, even the news on the Net is dominated by the handful of American TNCs (transnational corporations) that dominate world information.
And there are some dangerous backroom politics involved there as well. For example, a vast amount of Internet news is produced by MSNBC, which is co-owned by Microsoft and NBC.
So what? Well, NBC is fully owned by General Electric, the 14th largest contractor to the US military. Let's not mince words: the job of GE is to market the means of war to any purchaser. MSNBC is GE's PR wing. Worth thinking about.
Odd. At least 150,000 Israelis demonstrate in Rabin Square in the heart of Tel Aviv, demanding immediate withdrawal of Israeli troops and Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip.
The huge rally is addressed by none other than the Leader of the Opposition, Shimon Peres, and by Yom Tov Samia, the former head of the Israeli army's southern command. It's a big story, and it's all over the Internet on news sites from non-American countries. ABC Radio National (Australia) reported a crowd of a quarter of a million.
It's a big story which happened within the last 24 hours but does not appear, as I write, on the front pages of the following websites: Google News, Reuters, Yahoo News, MSNBC News and the New York Times. The San Francisco Chronicle doesn't give it a mention either, and its lead story is about a singer called Brody Dalle. Fox News, to its credit, has the story, but no picture on page one, and gives a crowd estimate of only 100,000.
All of these sites are American-based, and they tend to feed 90% of the world's mainstream news media.
One recalls an anti-Iraq invasion demonstration in London that was held some months before the huge protests of February 15, 2003. At that big demo an estimated half a million people gathered, but it was on the same day as an anti-fox hunting demo that attracted fewer than 20,000 people. Only the latter was reported in the US media, even in the Washington Post, or so I recall from the time.
I also recall reading somewhere that 97 per cent of media consumed in America is produced in that country. By way of contrast, in Australia a minority of media consumed is locally produced. The effect for the good citizens of the USA seems to be an almost hermetically sealed information prison of their own making. Thank heavens for the Internet. Unfortunately, even the news on the Net is dominated by the handful of American TNCs (transnational corporations) that dominate world information.
And there are some dangerous backroom politics involved there as well. For example, a vast amount of Internet news is produced by MSNBC, which is co-owned by Microsoft and NBC.
So what? Well, NBC is fully owned by General Electric, the 14th largest contractor to the US military. Let's not mince words: the job of GE is to market the means of war to any purchaser. MSNBC is GE's PR wing. Worth thinking about.
Pip Wilson posted item above at 10:04 AM | Permalink
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