HIghly disturbing behavior by newspaper and Live TV sources in complying with the San Bernardino Sheriffs.
At approximately 7 PM ET, I listened through a police scanner as San
Bernardino Sheriffs gave the order to burn down the cabin where
suspected murderer Christopher Dorner was allegedly hiding. Deputies
were maneuvering a remote controlled demolition vehicle to the base of
the cabin, using it to tear down the walls of the cabin where Dorner was
hiding, and peering inside.
In an initial dispatch, a deputy reported seeing “blood spatter”
inside the cabins. Dorner, who had just engaged in a firefight with
deputies that killed one officer and wounded another, may have been
wounded in the exchange. There was no sign of his presence, let alone
his resistance, according to police dispatches.
It was then that the deputies decided to burn the cabin down.
“We’re gonna go ahead with the plan with the burner,” one sheriff’s
deputy told another. “Like we talked about.” Minutes later, another
deputy’s voice crackled across the radio: “The burner’s deployed and we
have a fire.”
Read on...
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Showing posts with label mainstream media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mainstream media. Show all posts
Why America Loves Serial Killers
Long Island again. Serial killer(s) again. The media have—a little too overeagerly—been conjuring up the specter of "the Long Island serial killer," even though those five words compress at least two unproven assumptions: There's no proof that the remains of up to 10 victims (so far) found on the sandy barrier island that parallels Long Island's South Shore were killed by a Long Islander, or even by a single individual. Or that they were killed on Long Island. For all we know, they were killed by a Yale comp lit professor, who deconstructed them in Connecticut and carried them to Long Island where he "unpacked" them from the trunk of his Prius.
But even if the perp or perps came from elsewhere, at least one of the presumed murdered prostitutes, Amber Lynn Costello, operated out of a seedy home in Long Island's West Babylon. It was she who was the subject of murderous speculation in a chat room that made the front page of the New York Daily News: "HOOKER SLAY EXCLUSIVE, WEB OF L.I. SICKOS, Inside secret site where johns plotted revenge." It's indisputable that these "sickos" did come from Long Island and apparently patronized the murdered hooker from West Babylon. (There's a name to deconstruct!)
But it's evident that in tab world, Long Island and serial killer seem to go together. I feel a certain responsibility for that, having thrown a spotlight on the L.I./serial killer connection back in the '90s in a lengthy essay for the Times magazine, when my "Guyland" homeland—as I fondly called it in tribute to the way the L.I. accent rendered it: "Lawn Guyland"—had begun sprouting corpses (20 or so) from serial killers like Joel Rifkin. It was a time when Long Island also had to endure the embarrassingly seedy Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco scandal—and the three made-for-TV movies based on the case of Fisher, the "Long Island Lolita."
Teenagers Now Look Favorably On Torture Because The Media Taught Them It Was Morally Acceptable
Over at the Daily Beast, Daniel Stone dives into a study on torture conducted by the American Red Cross. "Americans' opinions on torture seem to have fractured," the report said, "largely on generational lines."
So, who are the biggest supporters of torture? "A surprising majority -- almost 60 percent -- of American teenagers thought things like water-boarding or sleep deprivation are sometimes acceptable," the study found. Overall, teens are "significantly more in favor of torture than older adults."
It's a dispiriting result, and Stone does a fine job taking on the reasons why these results came down in this fashion. As he relates, there's been a general uptick in the visibility of torture (er..."enhanced interrogation techniques") in the media. Along with that comes the effort undertaken by the Bush administration to normalize torture, despite its attendant lack of success as an intelligence gathering technique. Stone also notes that there are "societal influences that may be responsible for de-stigmatizing torture, including increasingly graphic media."
But the bottom line, he says, is that young people are just at a significant remove from the world of war and conflict:
Update: Obama Administration to Spanish Judge: We Won’t Investigate Bush Lawyers’ Role in Torture
Crunch the numbers: Crime rates are going down
EDWARD GREENSPAN and ANTHONY DOOB
Everyone wants to reduce crime and use resources effectively. But the Conservative government’s “tough on crime” agenda would have you believe that crime is increasing and can only be reduced by using tougher penalties. This assertion is wrong, as is a study by an Ottawa-based think tank that reviewed the 2009 Statistics Canada report on crime.The study, by former Alberta Crown attorney Scott Newark for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, suggests that violent crime is increasing, contrary to the Statscan report and all reasoned examinations of existing data. Mr. Newark’s study is filled with problems: It compares figures that can’t be compared. It presents figures that are inaccurate. And it ignores evidence supporting the conclusion that crime is, in fact, decreasing.
Mr. Newark criticizes Statscan for not including crime rates for all criminal offences. This information is available to anyone in the world on Statscan’s website. The figures clearly show (see Column 1 of our table) a substantial decrease over time. It’s no wonder Mr. Newark only chose to criticize, rather than present the numbers.
Why would the mainstream media publish something that was factually challenged? Tom
Black-Out in DC: Pay No Attention to Those Veterans Chained to the White House Fence
There was a black-out and a white-out Thursday and Friday as over a hundred US veterans opposed to US wars in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world, and their civilian supporters, chained and tied themselves to the White House fence during an early snowstorm to say enough is enough.
Washington Police arrested 135 of the protesters, in what is being called the largest mass detention in recent years. Among those arrested were Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst who used to provide the president's daily briefings, Daniel Ellsberg, who released the government's Pentagon Papers during the Nixon administration, and Chris Hedges, former war correspondent for the New York Times.
No major US news media reported on the demonstration or the arrests. It was blacked out of the New York Times, blacked out of the Philadelphia Inquirer, blacked out in the Los Angeles Times, blacked out of the Wall Street Journal, and even blacked out of the capital's local daily, the Washington Post.
Wikileaks and the Reactionary Impulse to Repress
By Matthew Rothschild, November 30, 2010
The single biggest Wikileaks revelation is not that the Saudis are still funding Al Qaeda, or that Hillary Clinton ordered the State Department to spy on foreign diplomats and the U.N., or that many Arab countries favor an attack on Iran.
No, the real eye-opener is the reactionary impulse of people in power to repress those who disseminate information.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the disclosure “not just an attack on America’s foreign policy interests. It is an attack on the international community.”
Wikileaks is doing the job the mainstream media abdicated long ago. Tom
U.S. Deports Lou Dobbs
CNN Host Had Been Living Illegally In Country Since 1961
Luis Miguel Salvador Aguila Dominguez, alias "Lou Dobbs," is escorted by DHS agents to the airport to be sent back to Mexico.
WANTAGE, NJ—Acting on anonymous tips from within the Hispanic-American community, U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials on Wednesday deported Luis Miguel Salvador Aguila Dominguez, who for the last 48 years had been living illegally in the United States under the name Lou Dobbs.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, federal agents stormed the undocumented immigrant's home in an evening raid just hours after the 64-year-old newscaster suddenly announced that he was resigning from CNN, and immediately placed him on an Aeromexico flight departing from Newark Liberty Airport.
Shocking. Tom
When Pat Buchanan Isn't Racist Enough
Every once in a while the mask slips. Big time:
That's the host of Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade, saying:
That's the host of Fox & Friends, Brian Kilmeade, saying:
We keep marrying other species and other ethnics...The problem is the Swedes have pure genes. They marry other Swedes, that's the rule. Finns marry other Finns; they have a pure society. In America we marry everybody. We will marry Italians and Irish.
Read on...
This is 2009 and this commentary takes place in the U.S. mainstream media. And I think he still has his job. Tom
Sotomayor, Gingrich, and the Demise of Our Press Corps
Last week's press coverage of Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court was gruesome in so many ways, as reporters routinely fell down and failed to reflect even the most basic tenets of journalism.
One of the most disturbing examples of how fundamentals were ignored involved Sotomayor's now-infamous quote from eight years ago about a "Latina woman" judge reaching a "better conclusion" on the bench than her white male counterparts. Sotomayor made the comment as part of a speech she gave at University of California, Berkeley, in 2001 in which she explored what it would mean to have more women and minorities on the bench.
To see just how dreadful the coverage of that story became, let's look at the efforts by The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, which published nearly identical news articles about the unfolding political battle surrounding Sotomayor and the "Latina woman" quote, which conservatives have latched onto. The quote became the basis for the incendiary claim made by Newt Gingrich and Glenn Beck, among others, that Sotomayor is, in fact, a racist because she thinks Hispanic judges render better decisions than whites.
TradMed terrified of right wing role in P-burgh story
by David Waldman
TradMed terrified of right wing role in P-burgh story
Mon Apr 06, 2009 at 01:50:04 PM PDT
Earlier, I expressed my astonishment that the Pittsburgh shooter's cop killer's (Poplawski is no longer even Pittsburgh's top shooting story) motives, described by his friend in a television interview, resulted in the following rather amazing exchange:
Reporter: Did he ever say anything to you? Like, ever indicate any signs that made you concerned, or made you...
Friend: He just basically told me he didn’t like the Zionist control over our government, he didn’t like that there was about to be military policing, he didn’t believe in the fact that there was about to be a gun ban. He didn’t like anything that was going on in the political forefront, and he was basically very politically active, and he didn’t agree with what was going on right now in the United States of America. But what made him snap, I have no clue.
Reporter: So he never... there was never, when he was expressing his opinion, there was never something that went off inside, that made you [think] that there could be a situation like this?
I know I already commented on this, but I can't help doing so again, seeing it all laid out in front of me a second time.
Read on...
Yes hate talk radio, and hate talk on tv probably fueled the Pittsburg shooter of three police officers. The mainstream media prefers the "dog peed on the floor" theory. Tom
TradMed terrified of right wing role in P-burgh story
Mon Apr 06, 2009 at 01:50:04 PM PDT
Earlier, I expressed my astonishment that the Pittsburgh shooter's cop killer's (Poplawski is no longer even Pittsburgh's top shooting story) motives, described by his friend in a television interview, resulted in the following rather amazing exchange:
Reporter: Did he ever say anything to you? Like, ever indicate any signs that made you concerned, or made you...
Friend: He just basically told me he didn’t like the Zionist control over our government, he didn’t like that there was about to be military policing, he didn’t believe in the fact that there was about to be a gun ban. He didn’t like anything that was going on in the political forefront, and he was basically very politically active, and he didn’t agree with what was going on right now in the United States of America. But what made him snap, I have no clue.
Reporter: So he never... there was never, when he was expressing his opinion, there was never something that went off inside, that made you [think] that there could be a situation like this?
I know I already commented on this, but I can't help doing so again, seeing it all laid out in front of me a second time.
Read on...
Yes hate talk radio, and hate talk on tv probably fueled the Pittsburg shooter of three police officers. The mainstream media prefers the "dog peed on the floor" theory. Tom
25 Most Important Stories the Media Isn't Reporting (w/ poll)
by StanMO Wed Nov 19, 2008 at 09:00:37 PM PST
Need a break from talk of Joe and Hillary?
Project Censored conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media. Each year, Project Censored publishes a ranking of the top 25 most censored nationally important news stories in the yearbook, Censored: Media Democracy in Action.
Here is this year's list:
Read on...
All these stories are important and dutifully ignored by the dying MSM. They are all major, interesting stories but I draw your attention to numbers 7, 18 and 20. I haven't read them all but number 25 also looks interesting. Tom
Need a break from talk of Joe and Hillary?
Project Censored conducts research on important national news stories that are underreported, ignored, misrepresented, or censored by the US corporate media. Each year, Project Censored publishes a ranking of the top 25 most censored nationally important news stories in the yearbook, Censored: Media Democracy in Action.
Here is this year's list:
Read on...
All these stories are important and dutifully ignored by the dying MSM. They are all major, interesting stories but I draw your attention to numbers 7, 18 and 20. I haven't read them all but number 25 also looks interesting. Tom
Sarah Palin sounds like she knows she lost. She also refuses to say if she voted for Stevens.
John Aravosis (DC)
Can't get rid of "that one" fast enough. Watch the video, she and her husband both sound like they know they lost. And it's simply amazing that she may have voted for a convicted felon for Senator.
The woman did next to no real interviews, never held a press conference, and McCain hasn't held one in two and a half months. And the media did nothing about it. On that account, they let us down. Yes, there is something they could have done. How about not letting Palin and McCain go on SNL and Letterman and every other goofy fluffy show until they hold a real press conference? How about pulling your reporters off their bus and their plane? Our media allowed McCain to set a precedent where presidential candidates are no longer required to be publicly accountable. Yet another way in which the Republicans are continually watering down our democracy, and the media, the supposed watchdogs of that democracy, yet again are complicit.
Yes the media failed just like the Canadian media allows itself to be manipulated by Harper. But the media's performance in the U.S., when Bush gave press conferences, was hopeless in any case. Its not like they ever asked him any tough questions. Just shows how bad a choice Palin was that she couldn't even be trusted to talk to the cheerleading, emasculated mainstream U.S. media. Tom
Can't get rid of "that one" fast enough. Watch the video, she and her husband both sound like they know they lost. And it's simply amazing that she may have voted for a convicted felon for Senator.
The woman did next to no real interviews, never held a press conference, and McCain hasn't held one in two and a half months. And the media did nothing about it. On that account, they let us down. Yes, there is something they could have done. How about not letting Palin and McCain go on SNL and Letterman and every other goofy fluffy show until they hold a real press conference? How about pulling your reporters off their bus and their plane? Our media allowed McCain to set a precedent where presidential candidates are no longer required to be publicly accountable. Yet another way in which the Republicans are continually watering down our democracy, and the media, the supposed watchdogs of that democracy, yet again are complicit.
Yes the media failed just like the Canadian media allows itself to be manipulated by Harper. But the media's performance in the U.S., when Bush gave press conferences, was hopeless in any case. Its not like they ever asked him any tough questions. Just shows how bad a choice Palin was that she couldn't even be trusted to talk to the cheerleading, emasculated mainstream U.S. media. Tom
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