Fidel Castro tells Ahmadinejad: Stop denying the holocaust

catefrances

Commy wrote:

yosi wrote:

The news is not supposed to represent opinion. It is supposed to convey the facts of what is happening in the world with as little subjective opinion as possible.

see i think all mainstream media, in general, is accurate in the facts they present, its how they choose to present those facts that is so damning. but its presented through an opinion. leading up to the iraq war for example...the opinion they represented almost exclusively supported the push for war.


they were giving americans, and this is almost across the board, from fox to msnbc.......a view of things that weren't representative of reality.



they were presenting a picture that didn't ask "should we go to war?" but "when?" and "how? this despite the fact that a large percentage of americans opposed the war. the majority wasn't represented in mainstream media, still isn't.



its called manufacturing consent, its a form of propaganda.



and its important what facts you present, even if you take all opinion out of it. fox news, even today, is accurate, for the most part, as is msnbc, they have to be. but what facts you present, or how you report them, can shape opinion.

take the Israel/Palestine situation. almost without exception violence committed by Israel is referred to as "in response to" or "in retaliation to", on every outlet, from MSNBC to FOX.. while pelestinians are referred to as militants, even when they're 12. justifying live fire when they are only throwing stones. or how they report on Israeli deaths on a scale of 5-1. Deaths of Israeli children get reported on 100% of the time, while Palestinian children only 20% of the time. the facts presented may be accurate, but how they present those facts, and what facts they choose to report, can shape opinion.


media serves the state, from Fox to MSNBC, true today. and the state is bent on expansion, set to serve israel. media reflects that mentality.

good to see youve been reading your chomsky .

redrock

yosi wrote:

The news is not supposed to represent opinion. It is supposed to convey the facts of what is happening in the world with as little subjective opinion as possible.

'News' is presented selectively. Whether one likes it or not. How 'facts' are presented in one country will differ to another, depending on the agenda. The news is a great source of propaganda.

Commy

catefrances wrote:

Commy wrote:

yosi wrote:

The news is not supposed to represent opinion. It is supposed to convey the facts of what is happening in the world with as little subjective opinion as possible.

see i think all mainstream media, in general, is accurate in the facts they present, its how they choose to present those facts that is so damning. but its presented through an opinion. leading up to the iraq war for example...the opinion they represented almost exclusively supported the push for war.


they were giving americans, and this is almost across the board, from fox to msnbc.......a view of things that weren't representative of reality.



they were presenting a picture that didn't ask "should we go to war?" but "when?" and "how? this despite the fact that a large percentage of americans opposed the war. the majority wasn't represented in mainstream media, still isn't.



its called manufacturing consent, its a form of propaganda.



and its important what facts you present, even if you take all opinion out of it. fox news, even today, is accurate, for the most part, as is msnbc, they have to be. but what facts you present, or how you report them, can shape opinion.

take the Israel/Palestine situation. almost without exception violence committed by Israel is referred to as "in response to" or "in retaliation to", on every outlet, from MSNBC to FOX.. while pelestinians are referred to as militants, even when they're 12. justifying live fire when they are only throwing stones. or how they report on Israeli deaths on a scale of 5-1. Deaths of Israeli children get reported on 100% of the time, while Palestinian children only 20% of the time. the facts presented may be accurate, but how they present those facts, and what facts they choose to report, can shape opinion.


media serves the state, from Fox to MSNBC, true today. and the state is bent on expansion, set to serve israel. media reflects that mentality.

good to see youve been reading your chomsky .

and zinn, mainly inspired howard zinn.

Commy

TriumphantAngel wrote:

Commy is right on.

just to use one example. when the 4 settlers were murdered in Hebron recently, the whole world knew about it and it was loudly condemned (and rightly so). every media outlet picked up on it and Hillary Clinton had plenty to say. so did people around here.

a few days later when the elderly Palestinian man, his grandson and another youth were murdered, the world and media were strangely quiet.

any reason why this is not front page news in the US and media outlets and Clinton is not condemning this?

http://www.pchrgaza.org/portal/en/index ... Itemid=194

^^^






you are right on TA. this is one example of thousands.









and yeah, examples mean nothing, taken individually, even taken as a whole. but to compare them with examples from something we dont' like...then you have a perspective on reality, something that has been done plenty.






there is no doubt, media serves the state.

yosi

You guys are aware of all the times that media has been a check on the state, right? Like, I don't know, Nixon-Watergate comes to mind.

Commy

yosi wrote:

You guys are aware of all the times that media has been a check on the state, right? Like, I don't know, Nixon-Watergate comes to mind.

it also had a hand in ending the vietnam war.

but i can still find evidence of propaganda, going back to the late 70's.

but corporations merge and power and opinion consolidate and narrow. interviewed guests are more likely to be business executives or government officials than not.

Byrnzie

yosi wrote:

You guys are aware of all the times that media has been a check on the state, right? Like, I don't know, Nixon-Watergate comes to mind.

Once again, I suggest you read some Chomsky - 'Manufacturing Consent' and 'Necessary Illusions'. If you think that the reporting of the Watergate scandal proves the U.S media is a check on the state, well....

...the C.O.I.N.T.E.L.P.R.O scandal was much bigger than Watergate but hardly anyone's heard of it.

As for Watergate, that had more to do with Nixon's recklessness than with any moralistic heroics on the part of the Washington Post.

http://www.chomsky.info/books/responsibility01.htm

QUESTION: Within this framework, how do you interpret the Watergate affair, which has often been presented in France as the "triumph" of democracy?

CHOMSKY: To consider the Watergate affair as a triumph of democracy is an error, in my opinion. The real question raised was not: Did Nixon employ evil methods against his political adversaries? but rather: Who were the victims? The answer is clear. Nixon was condemned, not because he employed reprehensible methods in his political struggles, but because he made a mistake in the choice of adversaries against whom he turned these methods. He attacked people with power.

The telephone taps? Such practices have existed for a long time. He had an "enemies list"? But nothing happened to those who were on that list. I was on that list, nothing happened to me. No, he simply made a mistake in his choice of enemies: he had on his list the chairman of IBM, senior government advisers, distinguished pundits of the press, highly placed supporters of the Democratic Party. He attacked the Washington Post, a major capitalist enterprise. And these powerful people defended themselves at once, as would be expected. Watergate? Men of power against men of power.

Similar crimes, and others much graver, could have been charged against other people as well as Nixon. But those crimes were typically directed against minorities or against movements of social change, and few ever protested. The ideological censorship kept these matters from the public eye during the Watergate period, although remarkable documentation concerning this repression appeared at just this time. It was only when the dust of Watergate had settled that the press and the political commentators turned toward some of the real and profound cases of abuse of state power -- still without recognizing or exploring the gravity of the issue...

...In comparison with Cointelpro and related government actions in the 1960s, Watergate was a tea party. It is instructive, however, to compare the relative attention accorded to them in the press. This comparison reveals clearly and dramatically that it was the improper choice of targets, not improper acts, that led to Nixon's downfall. The alleged concern for civil and democratic rights was a sham. There was no "triumph of democracy."

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/19730920.htm
'...While public attention was captivated by Watergate, Ambassador Godley testified before Congress that between 15,000 and 20,000 Thai mercenaries had been employed by the United States in Laos, in direct and explicit violation of congressional legislation. This confirmation of Pathet Lao charges, which had been largely ignored or ridiculed in the West, evoked little editorial comment or public indignation, though it is a more serious matter than anything revealed in the Ervin committee hearings.

The revelation of secret bombings in Cambodia and northern Laos from the earliest days of the Nixon Administration is by far the most important disclosure of the past several months...

As for the press, it showed as much interest in the bombings at the time as it now devotes to the evidence that Thai mercenaries in Laos are being shipped to Cambodia and that casualties of fighting in Cambodia have already arrived in Bangkok hospitals.11 The press is much too concerned with past deception to investigate these critical ongoing events, which may well have long-term implications for Southeast Asia.

...Still more cynical is the current enthusiasm over the health of the American political system, as shown by the curbing of Nixon and his subordinates, or by the civilized compromise that permitted Nixon and Kissinger to kill Cambodians and destroy their land only until August 15, truly a model of how a democracy should function, with no disorder or ugly disruption.

Liberal political commentators sigh with relief that Kissinger has barely been tainted -- a bit of questionable wire-tapping, but no close involvement in the Watergate shenanigans. Yet by any objective standards, the man is one of the great mass murderers of the modern period. He presided over the expansion of the war to Cambodia, with consequences that are now well known, and the vicious escalation of the bombing of rural Laos, not to speak of the atrocities committed in Vietnam, as he sought to achieve a victory of some sort for imperial power in Indochina. But he wasn't implicated in the burglary at the Watergate or in the undermining of Muskie, so his hands are clean.

If we try to keep a sense of balance, the exposures of the past several months are analogous to the discovery that the directors of Murder Inc. were also cheating on their income tax. Reprehensible, to be sure, but hardly the main point.'

yosi

Oh, well, if Chomsky says so...

Commy

right only the most cited living author in the world, what does he know?

yosi

About linguistics, a lot. About politics...well probably also a lot, but that doesn't mean his interpretation has any validity. There is a reason why everyone not on the extreme left thinks he's kind of a nutbag.

Byrnzie

yosi wrote:

About linguistics, a lot. About politics...well probably also a lot, but that doesn't mean his interpretation has any validity. There is a reason why everyone not on the extreme left thinks he's kind of a nutbag.

So then how do you explain this?:

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2005/ ... tualspoll/

Global public intellectuals poll
David Herman
20th November 2005 — Issue 116

The Prospect/Foreign Policy list of 100 global public intellectuals suggested that the age of the great oppositional thinker was over, but Noam Chomsky's emphatic victory shows many remain nostalgic for it

The two most striking things about this poll are the number of people who took part and the age of the winners. Over 20,000 people voted for their top five names from our longlist of 100, and they tended to reinforce the trends of the original list. More than half of the top 30 are based in North America. Europe, by contrast, is surprisingly under-represented—a cluster of well-known names in the top 20 (Eco, Havel, Habermas) but then it is a long way down to Kristeva (48) and Negri (50). The most striking absence is France—one name in the top 40, fewer than Iran or Peru.

There is not one woman in the top ten, and only three in the top 20. The big names of the left did well (Chomsky, Habermas, Hobsbawm) but there weren’t many of them. Scientists, literary critics, philosophers and psychologists all fared badly. And voters did not use the “bonus ball” to champion new faces. The top two names, Milton Friedman and Stephen Hawking, do not represent new strands of thought. (In fact, Friedman was specifically named in last month’s “criteria for inclusion”—along with other ancient greats like Solzhenitsyn—as an example of someone who had been deliberately left off the longlist on the grounds that they were no longer actively contributing to their discipline.)

The poll was in one sense a victim of its own success. Word spread around the internet very quickly, and at least three of our top 20 (Chomsky, Hitchens and Soroush), or their acolytes, decided to draw attention to their presence on the list by using their personal websites to link to Prospect’s voting page. In Hitchens’s and Soroush’s case, the votes then started to flood in. Although it is hard to tell exactly where voters came from, it is likely that a clear majority were from Britain and America, with a fair sprinkling from other parts of Europe and the English-speaking world. There was also a huge burst from Iran, although very little voting from the far east, which may explain why four of the bottom five on the list were thinkers from Japan and China.

What is most interesting about the votes, though, is the age of the top names. Chomsky won by a mile, with over 4,800 votes. Then Eco, with just under 2,500, Dawkins and Havel. Only two in the top nine—Hitchens and Rushdie—were born after the second world war. And of the top 20, only Klein and Lomborg are under 50. This may reflect the age of the voters, choosing familiar names. However, surely it also tells us something about the radically shifting nature of the public intellectual in the west. Who are the younger equivalents to Habermas, Chomsky and Havel? Great names are formed by great events. But there has been no shortage of terrible events in the last ten years and some names on the list (Ignatieff, Fukuyama, Hitchens) are so prominent precisely because of what they have said about them. Only one of these, though, is European, and he lives in Washington DC.

You can read more elsewhere in this issue about Chomsky. Even if you disagree with his attacks on US foreign policy, there are two reasons why few would be surprised to see him at the top of the poll. First, his intellectual range. Like a number of other figures in the top ten, he is prominent in a number of areas. Havel was a playwright and statesman; Eco a literary critic and bestselling author; Diamond was a professor of physiology and now has a chair in geography at UCLA, and writes on huge issues ranging over a great time span. Second, and more important, Chomsky belongs to a tradition which goes back to Zola, Russell and Sartre: a major thinker or writer who speaks out on the great public issues of his time, opposing his government on questions of conscience rather than the fine print of policy.

I said last month in my commentary on the original Prospect/Foreign Policy list of 100 names that it seemed to represent the death of that grand tradition of oppositional intellectuals. The overwhelming victory for Noam Chomsky suggests that we still yearn for such figures—we just don’t seem to be able to find any under the age of 70.