Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Lincoln Group, the PR firm that covertly placed U.S. military-written stories in Iraqi newspapers and has been called "amateurish" by former associates, has won a new two-year, $6.2 million Pentagon contract. Additional requests from Washington DC could increase the value of the contract up to $20 million total.
Submitted by Judith Siers-Poisson on
Submitted by Jonathan Rosenblum on
Willem Marx, a recent graduate from Oxford, dreamed of becoming a foreign correspondent. He applied for an internship in which he would "pitch story ideas" and "interact with the local media" in Iraq. That's how the U.S. government-funded Lincoln Group advertised it. Sent off to Baghdad with virtually no training, Marx was soon packing a loaded Glock and helping buy good press for America--$3 million in cash in his apartment safe and another $16 million coming for "news," PR and advertising.
I happened to be in Vancouver Sunday evening and all day Monday, so spent 9/11 north of the border. While people in the U.S. and other parts of the world only had The Path to 9/11 docudrama as a television viewing choice, I was fortunate to be able to watch two excellent documentary films about 9/11 and its aftermath aired by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC).
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
Newly-available documents detailing the early work of the "Future of Iraq Project," the U.S.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
The FireDogLake weblog has featured an article by Sheldon Rampton describing the ABC television network's plan to broadcast a right-wing "docudrama" that attempts to place a lion’s share of the blame for the 9/11 terrorist attacks on alleged failures of the Clinton administration.
Submitted by Diane Farsetta on
The U.S.-led military force in Iraq is asking for bids on a two-year, $20 million PR contract. The goal is "to effectively communicate Iraqi government and coalition's goals, and build support among our strategic audiences." The work includes monitoring "Iraqi, pan-Arabic, international and U.S. national and regional markets media in both Arabic and English," including U.S. TV, wire services and newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
According to a recent survey conducted by two Michigan universities, 91.7 percent of Iraqis now oppose the presence of U.S. troops in their country — a nearly 20 percent increase since 2004. A big majority (76 percent) thinks the U.S. is in their country for the oil. The survey also found "a growing sense of powerlessness, pessimism about the future and insecurity.
Juan Cole has an interesting blog post that contrasts the media's obsession with JonBenet Ramsey with its relative silence about the murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza al-Janabi, the 14-year-old Iraqi girl who was reportedly raped and murdered, along with her family, by U.S. soldiers. Cole writes,
Both victims were pretty little girls. Both were killed by sick predators. But whereas endless speculation about the Ramsey case, to the exclusion of important real news stories, is thought incumbent in cabalnewsland, Abeer al-Janabi's death is not treated obsessively in the same way. ... CNN even calls the little girl a "woman" at first mention, because the US military indictment did so. Only later in the article is it revealed that she was a little girl. The very pedophiliac nature of the crime is more or less covered up in the case of al-Janabi, even as looped video of Ramsay as too grown up is endlessly inflicted on us.
The message US cable news is sending by this privileging of some such stories over others of a similar nature is that some lives are worth more than others, and some people are "us" whereas other people are "Other" and therefore lesser. Indeed, it is precisely this subtle message sent by American media that authorized so much taking of innocent Iraqi life in the first place.
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton on
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