Submitted by Laura Miller on
"To cut through the barriers of hateful propaganda, the Voice of America and other broadcast services are expanding their programs in Arabic and Persian -- and, soon a new television service will begin providing reliable news and information across the region," George W. Bush said in his State of the Union address.
Submitted by John Stauber on
The Guerrilla New Network has "picked the administration's packaging and sale of the case for war based on Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction as our Spin of the Year. The case has turned out to be so flimsy that the administration has been forced to backtrack and deflect questions about the still missing weapons. Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair this summer that it was a 'bureaucratic' decision to focus on the WMD, and even Rumsfeld has repeatedly contradicted specific claims he made to reporters in the run-up to the invasion."
Submitted by John Stauber on
"The man leading the US hunt for Iraqi weapons of mass destruction [David Kay] will leave his post prematurely in the next few months amid dwindling expectations that there is anything to be found. ... 'This is a big blow to the administration and it will signal the effective end of the search for weapons of mass destruction,' said Joseph Cirincione, a weapons expert at the Carnegie Endowment Institute for Peace in Washington. 'Some will continue looking but very, very few expect there to be any significant finds at this point.' ...
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
In Weapons of Mass Deception, we showed how the U.S. news media virtually ignored the use in Iraq of cluster bombs -- anti-personnel devices like land mines that leave behind a deadly litter of unexploded "bomblets." Now Paul Wiseman has written a major report in which he concludes, "The Pentagon presented a misleading picture during the war of the extent to which cluster weapons were being used and of the civilian casualties they were causing. Gen.
Submitted by John Stauber on
"In the first case of its kind since the Nuremberg trials, an international court [convened in Tanzania] convicted three Rwandans of genocide for media
reports that fostered the killing of about 800,000
Rwandans, mostly of the Tutsi minority, over several months
in 1994. A three-judge panel said the three men had used a radio
station and a newspaper published twice a month to mobilize
Rwanda's Hutu majority against the Tutsi, who were
massacred at churches, schools, hospitals and roadblocks.
Submitted by John Stauber on
Democracy Now! featured a debate between Lauri Fitz-Pegado, the account supervisor for Hill & Knowlton's PR campaign on behalf of "Citizens for a Free Kuwait," and John Stauber, co-author of Weapons Of Mass Deception and Toxic Sludge Is Good For You.
Submitted by John Stauber on
A Buzzflash editorial rips and deconstructs the latest propaganda effort to link Saddam to 9/11, noting: "the charge that Saddam Hussein was connected to Osama bin Laden, which was recently denied by Bush himself, was resurrected last week in the Weekly Standard. The Standard, owned by Rupert Murdoch, is the 'intellectual' Neo-con bed of radical ideas, subversive to American Democracy. It is kind of like a Pravda for Neo-cons with advanced degrees.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "has transformed himself from corporate henchman to a crusty old guy who can say anything any time with few repercussions," writes James Ridgeway. "Last year he wanted to set up a special propaganda bureau called the Office of Strategic Influence, but he had to close it down amid reports it was putting out false information in an effort to sway public opinion.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Georgia Military College officials sent out a news release earlier this week inviting reporters to hear a speech by a helicopter pilot involved in Jessica Lynch's rescue. When they came, however, the college informed them that the pilot, Marine Maj. Craig Kopel, didn't want the news media around. When reporters stayed, hoping to interview and photograph Kopel, the college said they were trespassing and called the police on them.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
Now that Private Jessica Lynch has told the truth about the conditions of her capture and rescue in Iraq, right-wing telebabbler Joe Scarborough is complaining that she "started whining about the Pentagon PR machine and the fact that they told parts of the stories that may have made her more of a hero than she considered herself to be. ... Well, Jessica, I've got bad news to break to you. It was because of the Pentagon PR machine that turned you into an American hero -- that got book publishers interested in paying you $1 million to tell your story. It was the Pentagon PR machine that told America how you were a hero that got NBC interested in doing a movie about your story. It was the Pentagon PR machine that's turned you into a millionaire."
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