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The Forgotten Media Purges of the Great Depression

October 28, 2019

The Forgotten Media Purges of the Great Depression

Republican Hoover built the federal broadcasting shield in 1927. Roosevelt fashioned it into a weapon in 1934 and Democrats have never put it down since. One might consider the elaborate FCC speech barriers: A Poll Tax on Public Debate

One of the more enduring myths accepted as reality in our modern society is that America has a relatively free press. The ruling authorities and their entrenched accomplices promote that lie as diligently as they work to ensure that it never again becomes true.

America did have a mostly free and independent press until the rise of broadcasting in the 1920s. Within a few years, a small group of Republicans, progressives and corporate interests successfully nationalized the airwaves with restrictive licensing that blocked competition, rewarded insiders and squelched dissent.

Over the next few decades, the increasingly powerful medium of radio and then television drowned out the previously broad spectrum of information and ideas—with often three or more diverse choices of daily newspapers in many U.S. cities—and turned free speech into carefully rationed federal broadcasting privileges, their anointed urban newspaper monopolies and a few approved magazines.

One of the more ironic parts of this forgotten history is that a Republican, Herbert Hoover, led the initial charge to politicize the press. When the more authoritarian FDR took the reins in 1933—holding onto power until his death in 1945—he would ultimately purge the airwaves as well as the newspaper and magazine stands of the nation’s greatest commentators, publishers, editors and writers. In their absence, only pro-war / pro-welfare state neo-liberals and neo-conservatives would survive in mainstream media for generations to come.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Prosecution Of Julian Assange Is Infinitely Bigger Than Assange

April 22, 2019

The Prosecution Of Julian Assange Is Infinitely Bigger Than Assange

Julian Assange’s mother reported yesterday that the WikiLeaks founder has not been permitted any visitors during his detention in Belmarsh Prison, including from doctors and his lawyers. Doctors who visited Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy have attested that he urgently needs medical care. Belmarsh is a maximum security prison sometimes referred to as “the UK’s Guantanamo Bay“.

And yet we’re asked to believe that this has something to do with an alleged bail violation and a US extradition request for alleged computer crimes carrying a maximum sentence of five years. If you zoom out and listen to the less-informed chatter of the overt propagandists and the brainwashed rank-and-file western mass media consumers, you will also see that people believe this has something to do with Russia and rape allegations as well.

Actually, none of these things are true. Assange is being imprisoned under draconian conditions for journalism, and for journalism only. The Obama administration declined to prosecute him after WikiLeaks’ publication of the Manning leaks out of concern that doing so would endanger press freedoms, and the Obama administration didn’t have any more evidence at its disposal than the Trump administration has now. The “crime” Assange is accused of consists of nothing other than standard journalistic practices that investigative journalists engage in all the time, including source protection and encouraging the source to obtain more material. The only thing that has changed is an increased willingness in the White House to prosecute journalists for practicing journalism, and there are an abundance of reasons to believe that he will be hit with far more serious charges once extradited to US soil. They’re not going to all this trouble for a bail violation and a five-year maximum sentence.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Empire Versus Democracy and Freedom. Will The Espionage Act Displace the US Constitution?

April 19, 2019

5Empire Versus Democracy and Freedom. Will The Espionage Act Displace the US Constitution?

The public interest, and democratic political economies, both domestic and internationally, are poison to Empire. But this must be hidden from view, hence war propaganda/fake news is protected by legislation, while Constitutionally-protected, evidence-based real journalism, a dying phenomenon, continues to be attacked.

The First Amendment of the US Constitution, adopted on December 15, 1791,

“prevents the government from making laws which respect an establishment of religion, prohibit the free exercise of religion, or abridge the freedom of speech, the freedom of the press, the right to peaceably assemble, or the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.” [1]

However, the Constitution is under constant assault by US oligarch[2] ruling classes.

Freedom of the press has been negated by ruling class monopoly ownership and pervasive propaganda. Criminal propaganda is protected while “freedoms of speech” are under constant assault.

The fakery of the news stories is protected by (unconstitutional) laws embedded in the National Defense Authorization Act which blur the lines between reality and spectacle. In an earlier article I wrote,

According to an amendment to the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the House Bill H.R 5736 (now law), the federal government of the United States can now legally propagandize the domestic public.

Arguably, this makes staged theatrical presentations, featuring crisis-actors, and purporting to be ‘reality’, legal.

And, as if that isn’t enough, Don North writes in “US/NATO Embrace Psy-ops and Info-War” that,

“As reflected in a recent NATO conference in Latvia and in the Pentagon’s new ‘Law of War’ manual, the U.S. government has come to view the control and manipulation of information as a ‘soft power’ weapon, merging psychological operations, propaganda and public affairs under the catch phrase ‘strategic communications.’ “[3]

The Espionage Act[4] also contradicts the US Constitution, but it is being invoked with regard to the indictment against Julian Assange.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Cascading Cat Litter

April 12, 2019

Cascading Cat Litter

And so now Julian Assange of Wikileaks has been dragged out of his sanctuary in the London embassy of Ecuador for failing to clean his cat’s litter box. Have you ever cleaned a litter box? The way we always did it was to spread some newspaper — say, The New York Times — on the floor, transfer the used cat litter onto it, wrap it into a compact package, and put it in the trash.

It was interesting to scan the Comments section of The Times’s stories about the Assange arrest: Times readers uniformly presented themselves as a lynch mob out for Mr. Assange’s blood. So much for the spirit of liberalism and The Old Gray Lady who had published The Pentagon Papers purloined by Daniel Ellsberg lo so many years ago. Reading between the lines in that once-venerable newspaper — by which I mean gleaning their slant on the news — one surmises that The Times has actually come out against freedom of the press, a curious attitude, but consistent with the neo-Jacobin zeitgeist in “blue” America these days.

Anyway, how could anyone expect Mr. Assange to clean his cat’s litter box when he was unable to go outside his sanctuary to buy a fresh bag of litter, and was denied newspapers this past year, as well as any other contact with the outside world?

US government prosecutors had better tread lightly in bringing Mr. Assange to the sort of justice demanded by readers of The New York Times — which is to say: lock him up in some SuperMax solitary hellhole and throw away the key. The show trial of Julian Assange on US soil, when it comes to pass, may end up being the straw that stirs America’s Mickey Finn as a legitimate republic.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Avoid the Slippery Slope

October 27, 2018

Avoid the Slippery Slope

Everything government touches turns to crap.
Ringo Starr

Social media companies, search engines, and payments platforms are excising conservative, libertarian, and assorted anti-government voices. SLL argued in “The Friendly Faces of Fascism” that the largest and best known of these companies were essentially arms of the government. They are mechanisms for conveying information, opinions, and commerce between billions of people. Given their reach, importance, and ties to the government, should these ostensibly private companies be subject to the First Amendment’s prohibition of government restriction of free speech and the free press?

The First Amendment states that: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. By its terms, the amendment applies to one institution, Congress. By necessary implication, freedom of speech and the press must also be the freedom to choose what not to speak or publish.

In Pruneyard Shopping Center v. Robins, 447 U.S. 74 (1980), the Supreme Court held that California’s Constitution permissibly required a private shopping center to allow a group to express its political views on shopping center property regularly held open to the public. California’s Constitution created an affirmative right of free speech that the court reasoned went beyond the First Amendment, which is a set of prohibitions on the government, or negative rights.

Those who argue that the social media companies, search engines, and payments platforms shouldn’t be allowed to suppress viewpoints they don’t like hang their rhetorical hats on the Pruneyard rationale. These companies are virtual public forums or enable such forums, the argument goes. As such, they should be required to accept all viewpoints.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom

July 18, 2018

The War on Assange Is a War on Press Freedom

Mr. Fish / Truthdig

The failure on the part of establishment media to defend Julian Assange, who has been trapped in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since 2012, has been denied communication with the outside world since March and appears to be facing imminent expulsion and arrest, is astonishing. The extradition of the publisher—the maniacal goal of the U.S. government—would set a legal precedent that would criminalize any journalistic oversight or investigation of the corporate state. It would turn leaks and whistleblowing into treason. It would shroud in total secrecy the actions of the ruling global elites. If Assange is extradited to the United States and sentenced, The New York Times, The Washington Post and every other media organization, no matter how tepid their coverage of the corporate state, would be subject to the same draconian censorship. Under the precedent set, Donald Trump’s Supreme Court would enthusiastically uphold the arrest and imprisonment of any publisher, editor or reporter in the name of national security.

There are growing signs that the Ecuadorean government of Lenín Moreno is preparing to evict Assange and turn him over to British police. Moreno and his foreign minister, José Valencia, have confirmed they are in negotiations with the British government to “resolve” the fate of Assange. Moreno, who will visit Britain in a few weeks, calls Assange an “inherited problem” and “a stone in the shoe” and has referred to him as a “hacker.” It appears that under a Moreno government Assange is no longer welcome in Ecuador. His only hope now is safe passage to his native Australia or another country willing to give him asylum.

“Ecuador has been looking for a solution to this problem,” Valencia commented on television. “The refuge is not forever, you cannot expect it to last for years without us reviewing this situation, including because this violates the rights of the refugee.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Official Fake News

July 3, 2018

The Official Fake News

Emmanuel Macron, who was comfortably elected to the presidency with the support of almost the entire French media, has demanded that his parliamentary majority provide him with a law against ‘fake news’ during election campaigns. Perhaps he’s preparing for the next one.

The draft legislation reveals both the blindness of those who govern when challenged and their inclination to invent new coercive countermeasures. You would have to be myopic indeed to believe that the victory of ‘anti-establishment’ candidates, parties and causes (Donald Trump, Brexit, the Catalan referendum, Italy’s Five Star Movement) could, even marginally, be the consequence of authoritarian regimes spreading fake news. The US press has been trying to demonstrate for a year, as yet without conclusive evidence, that Trump owes his election to fake news manufactured by Vladimir Putin.

Macron has a similar obsession, to the point of hoping to make fake news vanish with a law that is both useless and dangerous. Useless because France’s Council of State pointed out on 19 April that ‘French law already contains several measures intended to combat the dissemination of false information’: in particular the law of 29 July 1881 on the freedom of the press, which permits curbs on the dissemination of false information and the expression of views that are defamatory or abusive or incite hatred.

And dangerous because the bill about to go before parliament would require a judge to act within 48 hours to ‘stop the artificial and large-scale dissemination of news constituting false information.’ But, the Council of State’s response continued, ‘these are hard to determine legally, especially when the judge must give a judgement within a very short time.’ Macron’s law would also strengthen Internet service providers’ and hosts’ duty of cooperation with the authorities, since it extends to all false information restraints that were initially aimed at preventing ‘apologism for crimes against humanity, incitement to hatred and child pornography.’

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Free Assange

June 27, 2018

Free Assange

Last week, rallies in support of Julian Assange were held around the world. We participated in two #AssangeUnity events seeking to #FreeAssange in Washington, DC.

This is the beginning of a new phase of the campaign to stop the persecution of Julian Assange and allow him to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London without the threat of being arrested in the UK or facing prosecution by the United States.

The Assange Case is a Linchpin For Freedom of the Press and Freedom of Information in the 21st Century

The threat of prosecution against Julian Assange for his work as editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks will be a key to defining what Freedom of the Press means in the 21st Century. Should people be allowed to know the truth if their government is corrupt, violating the law or committing war crimes? Democracy cannot exist when people are misled by a concentrated corporate media that puts forth a narrative on behalf of the government and big business.

This is not the first time that prosecution of a journalist will define Freedom of the Press. Indeed, the roots of Freedom of the Press in the United States go back to the prosecution of John Peter Zenger, a publisher who was accused of libel in 1734 for publishing articles critical of the British royal governor, William Cosby. Zenger was held in prison for eight months awaiting trial. In the trial, his defense took its case directly to the jury.

For five hundred years, Britan had made it illegal to publish “any slanderous News” that may cause “discord” between the king and his people. Zenger’s defense argued that he had published the truth about Cosby and therefore did not commit a crime. His lawyer “argued that telling the truth did not cause governments to fall. Rather, he argued, ‘abuse of power’ caused governments to fall.” The jury heard the argument, recessed and in ten minutes returned with a not guilty verdict.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Kick Turkey Out of NATO

March 7, 2016

Kick Turkey Out of NATO

There’s a Petition at Change.org to suspend Turkey’s membership in NATO.

Why kick Turkey out of NATO?

Because:

  • Turkey just shut down the largest Turkish newspaper using tear gas, water canons and brutality:


  • After reporters, local police and Turkish generals caught a weapons shipment from Turkey into Syria, they were all arrested on “treason” charges for exposing the shipment
  • Turkey provided the chemical weapons used in the famous attacks which killed hundreds in Syria. Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh – who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam  – previously reported that high-level American sources tell him that the Turkish government carried out the chemical weapons attacks blamed on the Syrian government

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Newly Published Clinton Email Reveals How Government Manipulates Media

October 2, 2015

Newly Published Clinton Email Reveals How Government Manipulates Media

A Hillary Clinton staffer planted questionsin a CBS 60 Minutes interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, according to email records released this week. At the time of the interview in early 2011, Assange had already leaked sensitive, embarrassing information from the State Department. The unclassified staff email to Clinton, released amid her ongoing email scandal, demonstrates not only that the former Secretary of State and her staff were out to discredit Assange, but that the government manipulates media and wields heavy influence over it.

In an email from January 28, 2011, Philip J. Crowley, then Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, alerted Hillary Clinton that 60 Minutes conducted an interview with Assange set to air on the 30th. As Crowley informed her, “We had made a number of suggestions for outside experts and former diplomats to interview to ‘balance’ the piece.” This statement alone shows the access to media that powerful government agents enjoy.

He goes on to further reveal that influence: “60 Minutes assures me that they raised a number of questions and concerns we planted with themduring the course of the interview,” Crowley said, suggesting the interview would not be embarrassing to Clinton or the State Department: “We will be prepared to respond to the narrative Assange presents during the program.”

The 2011 interview features a younger looking Assange with interviewer Steve Kroft.

Several minutes into the conversation, Kroft asks Assange point-blank if he is a “subversive.” Interestingly, the only politician Assange names directly in his response is Clinton herself: “I’m sure there are certain views among Hillary Clinton and her lot that we are subverting their authority. But you’re right, we are subverting illegitimate authority. The question is whether the authority is legitimate or whether it is illegitimate.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The West Suppresses Report on Ukraine’s Suppression of Journalists

September 24, 2015

The West Suppresses Report on Ukraine’s Suppression of Journalists

OSCE Squelches Ukrainian Commission on Human Rights Speaker

At a 21 September 2015 meeting of the OSCE (Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe), which is run by the Western powers and which is the leading organization concerning security and cooperation in Europe, a couragous speech against Ukraine’s imprisonment and killing of independent journalists was made by Alexey Tarasov, the Chairman of the All-Ukrainian Commission on Human Rights. Nearly halfway through the prepared text of his intended 6-minute summary description of the main cases, his speech was terminated by the Chairperson. It was cut off at 2:31 in this video:

Screen Shot 2015-09-23 at 6.48.34 PM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=malosUt-9jc

However, in this video of it, the termination is at 2:38:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=161&v=RxeCM_EBZdE

Here, then, is the complete printed text, as it was posted at Fort Russ on September 22. I have additionally placed a mark at the point where Tarasov’s speech was cut short:

——

Dear colleagues,

Please allow me to welcome this meeting.

Probably everyone knows that today’s Ukraine is the most problematic European country in terms of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Especially where it concerns the tragic situation with the freedom of speech and freedom of expression, the situation of access to information, limitation of journalists’ activity and the mass media in general.

According to information by the Institute of Mass Media, since the beginning of 2015 in Ukraine, there has been recorded 224 violations of the rights of journalists. According to the Institute’s reports, almost every day journalists in Ukraine are beaten or intimidated.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

‘Kiev persecuting media reporting truth’ – blacklisted Spanish journo to RT

September 18, 2015

Kiev persecuting media reporting truth’ – blacklisted Spanish journo to RT

The Ukrainian government is “persecuting people who are telling the truth,” Cesar Vidal, Spanish historian and journalist, who has been blacklisted by Kiev along with other European journalists, told RT.

Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko on Wednesday introduced sanctions against hundreds of individuals and legal entities, including dozens of journalists. Among them were employees of the BBC, El Pais, Die Zeit and RT’s Ruptly. On Thursday, apparently caving to pressure from European organizations and the media, he shortened the list striking off the names of journalists for British, German and Spanish media outlets.

READ MORE: Kiev revokes sanctions on British, German & Spanish journalists after western outcry

Cesar Vidal, historian, writer and contributor for Spain’s de La Razon, told RT that he was not surprised that Kiev did not remove him from the blacklist on Thursday.

He believes that he was included in the sanctions list in the first place because he wrote “about the falsehood of the thesis of Ukrainian nationalism” and about some media coverage of “the reality in Ukraine.”

“Ukrainian nationalism is a real enemy of freedom,” he said. The Ukrainian government is “persecuting people who are telling the truth. They are denying terrible tragedies like the 2 million Ukrainians who have fled to Russia, fleeing from Poroshenko and his government. This is the real reason.”

“Nobody can believe that there is total freedom in Ukraine now in many aspects,” he believes.

Meanwhile on Thursday, the US State Department encouraged Kiev to keep in mind the importance of freedom of press.

“As [the] Ukrainian government continues to review the list we encourage it to keep in mind the importance of unfettered and factual journalism in a democratic society,” Spokesperson John Kirby said in a daily briefing.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

GCHQ and me: My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers

August 3, 2015

GCHQ and me: My Life Unmasking British Eavesdroppers

I stepped from the warmth of our source’s London flat. That February night in 1977, the air was damp and cool, the buzz of traffic muted in this leafy North London suburb, in the shadow of the iconic Alexandra Palace. A fellow journalist and I had just spent three hours inside, drinking Chianti and talking about secret surveillance with our source, and now we stood on the doorstep discussing how to get back to the south coast town where I lived.

Events were about to take me on a different journey. Behind me, sharp footfalls broke the stillness. A squad was running, hard, toward the porch of the house we had left. Suited men surrounded us. A burly middle-aged cop held up his police ID. We had broken “Section 2″ of Britain’s secrecy law, he claimed. These were “Special Branch,” then the elite security division of the British police.

For a split second, I thought this was a hustle. I knew that a parliamentary commission had released a report five years earlier that concluded that the secrecy law, first enacted a century ago, should be changed. I pulled out my journalist identification card, ready to ask them to respect the press.

But they already knew that my companion that evening, Time Out reporter Crispin Aubrey, and I were journalists. And they had been outside, watching our entire meeting with former British Army signals intelligence (Sigint) operator John Berry, who at the time was a social worker.

Aubrey and I were arrested on suspicion of possessing unauthorized information. They said we’d be taken to the local police station. But after being forced into cars, we were driven in the wrong direction, toward the center of London. I became uneasy.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Case of John Peter Zenger and the Fight for a Free Press

July 30, 2015

The Case of John Peter Zenger and the Fight for a Free Press

This week marks the 280th anniversary of a landmark event in the history of a free press: the trial of John Peter Zenger in New York. Zenger, publisher of the New-York Weekly Journal, was found not guilty of seditious libel by a 12-member jury at a two-day trial that began on August 4, 1735.

The charge was brought by a tyrannical colonial governor of New York, William Cosby, who accused Zenger of printing “false, scandalous, malicious and seditious” articles. The New York-Weekly Journal had been going after the governor, exposing his shady machinations.

Zenger, who had been jailed for nine months, was represented by Andrew Hamilton, considered the foremost lawyer in the colonies. Hamilton took the case pro bono, riding to the rescue from Pennsylvania where he had been former attorney-general.

Hamilton confounded the prosecution by admitting that Zenger had published the offending material, but he took the position that what was involved was the truth. Chief Justice James Delancey, a Cosby henchman, didn’t agree with the defense of truth.

But Hamilton’s response was that: “Leaving it to judgement of the court whether the words are libelous or not in effect renders juries useless.”

On August 5, Hamilton addressed the jury in an eloquent, brilliant summation—parts of which as a journalism professor I read to my students every semester.

Hamilton spoke about how it was “my duty, if required, to go to the utmost part of the land where my services could be of any use in assisting to quench the flames of prosecutions upon informations set on foot by the government, to deprive a people of the right of remonstrating and complaining, too, of the arbitrary attempts of men in power.”

He said: “Men who injure and oppress the people under their administration provoke them to cry out and complain, and then make that very complaint the foundation for new oppressions and prosecutions.”

Hamilton declared: “The question before the court and you, gentlemen of the jury, is not

 

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

UK Police Confirm Ongoing Criminal Probe of Snowden Leak Journalists

July 25, 2015

UK Police Confirm Ongoing Criminal Probe of Snowden Leak Journalists

A secretive British police investigation focusing on journalists working with Edward Snowden’s leaked documents remains ongoing two years after it was quietly launched, The Intercept can reveal.

London’s Metropolitan Police Service has admitted it is still carrying out the probe, which is being led by its counterterrorism department, after previously refusing to confirm or deny its existence on the grounds that doing so could be “detrimental to national security.”

The disclosure was made by police in a letter sent to this reporter Tuesday, concluding a seven-month freedom of information battle that saw the London force repeatedly attempt to withhold basic details about the status of the case. It reversed its position this week only after an intervention from the Information Commissioner’s Office, the public body that enforces the U.K.’s freedom of information laws.

Following Snowden’s disclosures from the National Security Agency in 2013, the Metropolitan Police and a lawyer for the British government separatelystated that a criminal investigation had been opened into the leaks. One of the London force’s most senior officers acknowledged during a parliamentary hearing that the investigation was looking at whether reporters at The Guardian had committed criminal offenses for their role in revealing secret surveillance operations exposed in the Snowden documents.

In January, The Intercept sought details about the status of the investigation through requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. But the Metropolitan Police, the largest and most powerful of the 45 regional police forces across the United Kingdom, stonewalled the requests. It cited fears about “increased threat of terrorist activity” and claimed that it could not reveal details about the investigation because they could “assist any group or persons who wish to cause harm to the people of the nation.”

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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