Link
June 03, 2013
13 notes
Myths, falsehoods and misrepresentations about Iran
  • Iran has no nuclear weapons.
  • Since 2007, US intelligence has thought that Iran hasn’t got a programme to develop nuclear weapons.
  • The IAEA does not assert that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons programme.
  • Iran doesn’t breach the Non-Proliferation Treaty - it’s acting just like Brazil is.
  • Iran’s nuclear facilities are open to IAEA inspection, but those of Israel and India (allies of the United States) are almost entirely closed to the IAEA. Iran faces ferocious sanctions and threats of military action; Israel (with perhaps as many as 400 nuclear bombs, and the capacity to deliver them anywhere in the Middle East) is the object of more than $3 billion a year of US military aid.
  • Iran never threatened to “wipe Israel off the map”.

Really amazing article on Iran, and how similar the media climate is to pre-Iraq’s “cheerleader for war” shitstorm.

Drops a ton of truth bombs about the USA’s influence on the IAEA, repeated misleading by world leaders about the issue, and more.

Boom.

Tags: Iran nuclear weapons nuclear war media analysis mythbusting

Link
May 23, 2013
1 note
Woolwich Attack: A journalist’s guide to reporting violent death
In light of newspaper layoffs and in the interests of continued professional education, we at Ceasefire are proud to continue our free online advisory course for journalists. This week’s topic: how do you report violent death?

Great satire, really cuts to the heart of the racist approaches most media take to violent death.

Tags: racism anti-racism media analysis ceasefire violent death terrorism Woolwich Islamophobia

Video
May 20, 2013
3 notes

I love Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People!

It’s an analysis of around a thousand Hollywood films involving Arabs, and turns up some shocking stats (~25% include anti-Arab slurs).

I didn’t even remember the racist-for-no-reason inclusion of Arabs into Back To The Future, how many women in burqas there are in the background of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

There’s even a special part of the film on Palestinians, and how they’re presented in American films only as terrorists and never as an occupied people. Also, I love that as it’s targeted at Americans, they have to specify that Yemen is “a real country in the Middle East”.

Kudos, Jack Shaheen, kudos (as long as you gloss over the “we’re over anti-black racism” bit)

Tags: racism anti-Arab Palestine Hollywood film media analysis Islamophobia terrorism media Arab comedy 9/11 stereotyping

Quote
April 24, 2013
9 notes
"

Muslims face prejudice, but Muslims from the Caucasus face a particular kind of prejudice - the kind born of ignorance so great it perversely imbues everything with significance.

Knowing nothing of the Tsarnaevs’ motives, and little about Chechens, the American media tore into Wikipedia and came back with stereotypes. The Tsarnaevs were stripped of their 21st century American life and became symbols of a distant land, forever frozen in time. Journalist Eliza Shapiro proclaimed that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was “named after a brutal warlord”, despite the fact that Tamerlan, or Timur, is an ordinary first name in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Her claim is equivalent to saying a child named Nicholas must be named in honour of ruthless Russian tsar Nicholas I.

"

— The wrong kind of Caucasian – REALLY great article about how fucked-up the baseless media speculation was for the Boston bombing.

Tags: Boston marathon Boston media analysis ignorance media manufacturing consent Caucus racism

Chat
February 11, 2013
2 notes

Two Years of Meta-Narratives: How Not to Cover Syria

  • The Amateur Journalist: If he is not kidnapped on his first day of reporting, after mistaking a mukhabarat informant for a taxi driver, the Amateur goes on to send starry-eyed reports from FSA-held Idlib province. His story most likely includes an adrenaline-soaked adventure of running through bullet fire as he crosses the Turkish border with the help of men wearing black scarves with white squiggly lines on them. The article usually follows with this freelancer’s encounter with a local FSA leader (or activist, since these are considered interchangeable) who coincidentally turns out to be in charge of most of the province. This leader's long, scruffy beard contributes to his stoic, battle-worn mystique. The Amateur aims to show the human side of the story. The leader chats with him while nursing to health a stray wounded cat while the leader’s wife, who is wearing a traditional abaya that flows in the wind, refills the would-be journalist’s glass of hot, sticky tea. For two weeks, the mujahid gives the amateur the exclusive inside scoop on the revolutionary democratic system that he and his fellow villagers have implemented. A system where everyone - except of course women, young people, and Alawites - has a voice in deciding the appropriate sentence for those sinful souls who stole bread from the bakery. Yes, the future looks bright for the amateur journalist who chose war-torn Syria for his first beat (we are not counting his summer internship at the North Dakota Times).
  • The Syrian-American FSA Revolutionary: The Syrian-American FSA Revolutionary's maternal great-grandmother was born in Damascus and immigrated to the US in her childhood. Since the beginning of the uprising, the revolutionary reminisces on Twitter about those two summers spent at his teta's house in the Shaam, where he would chase his cousins under the olive trees as the call to prayer emanated from the Umayyad mosque. This Revolutionary makes you look twice -- you may think he is reporting to you live from Aleppo, with his tweets every three minutes describing the situation on the ground with exacting detail and certainty, but after a few weeks, you find out he is actually broadcasting from the messy and chaotic battleground of his college dorm room in Chicago. His preferred news sources include "my second cousin Abu Mohammed in Homs," the Syrian Revolution Facebook page, blurry and unverified YouTube videos, and "#Syria" on Twitter. His "confirmed" reportage of events is retweeted religiously by his 5,272 followers, and even if his assertions are later contradicted, he rarely follows up: he is too busy hoisting his revolution flag at fundraisers for Syria with unverified recipients. The Revolutionary mocks the piss-poor media coverage of Syria, as he believes deeply in the importance of disseminating leaked naked pictures of Asmaa al-Assad, ridiculously good looking Syrian rebels nuzzling kittens, Bashar wearing different wigs, and other essential topics.

Tags: looolz Syria FSA Free Syrian Army Bashar Al-Assad media analysis journalism war reporting

Photoset
January 25, 2013
9,621 notes

dapsandhugs:

this week on White People are Wild

is anybody even remotely surprised at this point

well this is fucking depressing

newsflash: RACIST FILMS INSPIRE RACISTS

(Source: hylianears, via thisisnotarab)

Tags: Zero Dark Thirty racism media analysis islamophobia twitter

Text
January 14, 2013
64 notes

The screenshots prove it: New York Times altered headline to remove words “Israeli-occupied”

xeb695:

image

Cached image of New York Times story before headline was changed to omit words “Israeli-occupied West Bank.

A New York Times headline accidentally told the truth today about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land, before it was ‘fixed.’

The story is about today’s action by Palestinians to establish a village called Bab Al Shams on land that Israel has seized for construction of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank.

The original headline read “Palestinians Set Up Camp in Israeli-Occupied West Bank Territory.” Later, the headline was altered to remove the words “Israeli-occupied.” It now reads “Palestinians Set Up Tents Where Israel Plans Homes.”

The website Newsdiffs.org shows that the original headline was posted at 1:09 PM EST. It was discovered to have been changed at 7:10 PM EST.

A key goal of Israeli propaganda is to eliminate the term “occupied” from media coverage of Israel’s, well, occupation. Many media have adopted terms like “disputed” that grant false legitimacy to Israeli claims to the land which are totally null and void in international law.

The Times article still describes the area as “hotly contested piece of Israeli-occupied West Bank territory known as E1.” And yes, I’ve taken a screenshot in case they decide to change that too.

image

How the headline appears after the change.

gross

(Source: cameranzeb, via stay-human)

Tags: Israel Palestine journalism media analysis Israel lobby New York Times

Video
December 20, 2012
3 notes

With all the progress made in 2012, you’d think advertisers would have stopped objectifying women and girls, right?

Well, no, obviously not. Watch the damn video (it’s from Miss Representation!)

(Source: osocio.org)

Tags: sexism feminism media analysis advertising marketing Miss Representation

Quote
December 11, 2012
13 notes
"

In accordance with the canons of good journalism, the press is supposed to tap competing sources to get both sides of an issue. In fact, both sides are seldom accorded equal prominence. One study found that on NPR, supposedly the most liberal of the mainstream media, right-wing spokespeople are often interviewed alone, while liberals — on the less frequent occasions they appear — are almost always offset by conservatives. Furthermore, both sides of a story are not usually all sides. The whole left-progressive and radical portion of the opinion spectrum is amputated from the visible body politic.

False balancing was evident in a BBC World Service report (December 11, 1997) that spoke of “a history of violence between Indonesian forces and Timorese guerrillas” — with not a hint that the guerrillas were struggling for their lives against an Indonesian invasion force that had slaughtered some 200,000 Timorese. Instead, the genocidal invasion of East Timor was made to sound like a grudge fight, with “killings on both sides.” By imposing a neutralizing gloss, the BBC announcer was introducing a serious distortion.

The U.S.-supported wars in Guatemala and El Salvador during the 1980s were often treated with that same kind of false balancing. Both those who burned villages and those who were having their villages burned were depicted as equally involved in a contentious bloodletting. While giving the appearance of being objective and neutral, one actually neutralizes the subject matter and thereby drastically warps it.

"

— Michael Parenti (via jayaprada)

Tags: media analysis bias impartiality journalism mainstream media war

Link
November 26, 2012
Whitewashing an Assault: BBC Coverage of the Israel-Gaza Ceasefire

‘In Jerusalem tonight, Israel’s Prime Minister hinted at more severe military action if the new ceasefire doesn’t hold’, we were told in the televised news on the ceasefire. It is yet another example of BBC journalists not holding a critical eye on power, like last week when Jonathan Marcus wrote of Netanyahu’s ‘choice’ to establish a ‘policy of targeted killings’. Now, Netanyahu may flippantly ‘hint’ at ‘more severe military action’ without scrutiny applied to the praise of his ‘peace-bringing’ role offered by Obama et al.

During the last week BBC’s journalists in Gaza have provided an exceptional level of reporting throughout the conflict, their twitter accounts a valuable resource in keeping up-to-date with events inside Gaza. This standard, however, does not extend to the reports on the BBC website, which instead rely heavily on the rhetoric of ‘officials’ and politicians.

Read more

Tags: Israel gaza media analysis BBC media bias ceasefire