Tag: Propaganda
Verbatim
Personally, if I had $100 million to build a mosque that promotes interfaith tolerance, I would not build it in Manhattan. I’d build it in Saudi Arabia or Pakistan. That is where 9/11 came from, and those are the countries that espouse the most puritanical version of Sunni Islam — a version that shows little tolerance not only for other religions but for other strands of Islam…That resistance to diversity, though, is not something we want to emulate, which is why I’m glad the mosque was approved on Tuesday. Countries that choke themselves off from exposure to different cultures, faiths and ideas will never invent the next Google or a cancer cure…
— Thomas Friedman, author and New York Times columnist
Tea Baggers Exposed Gaming the Digg System
Here’s a story we doubt you’ll see reported on FOX News. AlterNet recently completed a year-long investigation into so-called “gaming the system” at the content aggregator, Digg. A Yahoo group calling itself the Digg Patriots (whose site has since been taken down) figured out how to rig Digg’s voting. If you don’t know, at Digg and many similar sites, you can vote for the stories you want to see featured prominently, or in this case, those you want “buried.” As AlterNet reported:
It’s easier to tell you what the group is against than what it’s for: Obama, progressives, diplomacy, health care reform, immigrants, science, the separation of church and state, acknowledgment of human-induced climate change, the government, pro-choice protections, public schools, and higher education. They also claim to believe Obama is a Muslim and a socialist, and that he was born in Kenya.
Literally thousands of stories have already been artificially removed from Digg due to this group. When a story is buried, it is removed from the upcoming section (where it is usually at for ~24 hours) and cannot reach the front page, so by doing this, this one group is removing the ability of the community as a whole to judge the merits or interest of these stories on their own (in essence: censoring content).
The immensity of the impact is commensurate with the reach of Digg. Again, according to Alternet:
It is ranked 50th among US websites by Alexa (117th in the world), by far the most influential social media site…Digg generates around 25 million page views per month, over one third of the page views of the NY Times. Front page stories regularly overwhelm and temporarily shut down websites in a process called the “Digg Effect.”
Irony on Parade: Tea Party Hotheads Turn on One of the Men Who Invented Them
Scott made millions as CEO of Columbia/HCA. The hospital chain founded by the Frist family (as in former Senate majority leader Bill Frist) swallowed competitors in the ’90s by dictating terms to suppliers. They’d merge with most of the hospitals in a given area, then tell vendors how much they wanted to pay for products. If a vendor balked, they simply switched to a lower bidder, leaving the first one with nobody to sell to. One of the repercussions of this strategy was the trend toward labor outsourcing by American companies, with medical product suppliers moving facilities to Mexico in order to meet pricing demands.
A “shouting, finger-pointing” crowd demands an explanation
Columbia was found guilty in 2000 of bilking Medicare and Medicaid in a massive, concerted, company-wide fraud effort under Scott. The chain was fined $1.7 billion, the largest penalty ever, and Scott was forced to resign or face criminal charges. He soon bounced back, founding the Solantic chain of urgent care clinics, which mainly serves the uninsured. Scott and several confederates have been the big bucks behind the so-called “astroturf” (meaning it looks like grassroots but it isn’t) opposition to health care reform.
Which brings us to the ironic position in which he recently found himself at a Tea Party gathering on the campaign trail.
Obama Not the Only Recent President to Miss Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Ceremony
The great thing about having Facebook friends who watch Glenn Beck is that you don’t have to. It’s like having Jon Stewart in your news feed, only not nearly as funny.
Three presidents in recent history missed the Arlington ceremony: Reagan, Bush, and Bush.
That’s how I know that the big tea bagging deal at the moment is the idea that Pres. Obama is betraying the troops by spending Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, and therefore will miss laying a wreath on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington National Cemetery. Instead, Vice Pres. Biden will perform the ritual while Obama and the First Lady participate in a service at Abraham Lincoln National Cemetery in Elwood, Ill.
One immediately wonders if any past president has committed a similar omission without being called a commie, and David Corn, writing for Politics Daily did the research. Turns out three presidents in recent history missed the Arlington ceremony: Reagan, Bush, and Bush.
In 1983, President Reagan was at a summit meeting, and the deputy secretary of defense — not even the veep! — placed the wreath. Nine years later, President George H.W. Bush passed off the wreath to Vice President Dan Quayle (who had used family connections to get a slot in the National Guard during the days of the Vietnam War draft). And in 2007, Vice President Dick Cheney took on the wreath mission, while President George W. Bush was in Texas, perhaps clearing brush.
O’Reilly Sanctimoniously Denies GOP Senator’s Charge That Fox Disinformed Viewers with Claim Medical Uninsured Will Go to Prison – Cue Video of 20-Plus Instances of Fox Propagandists, Including O’Reilly, Making That Exact Claim
It’s hard to find someone to root for in this one. Bill O’Reilly, the leading right-wing propagandist on Fox before they hired Glenn Beck versus Sen. Tom Coburn, R-0kla., a member of the Family, the scary Christian corporatist cult that owns the infamous C Street house on Capitol Hill.
In the video, O’Reilly chastises Sen. Coburn because, at a town hall meeting earlier this month, the senator had corrected a constituent who had expressed concern that under the health-care reform law people who didn’t buy health insurance would go to prison. Coburn, rightly assuming she’d heard the jail-for-the-uninsured canard on Fox, warned her not to believe everything she heard on the network and encouraged her to get her news from a variety of sources. In the interview, O’Reilly insists that he had researched transcripts and that no one on Fox had ever said the uninsured would be imprisoned.
Poll: Huge Majorities of Fox Viewers Duped by GOP Lies about Reform – 75% Believe in ‘Death Panels’
Just days after a poll found Fox News to be the least trustworthy among the cable channels, a new poll from NBC News — not teaming this time with Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall St. Journal — finds that around three-quarters of self-identified Fox viewers believe the four big lies being promulgated by the GOP about health-insurance reform:
Results as alarmingly bad as these would cause a panic at a real news organization.
- 72 percent believe undocumented residents will be covered
- 79 percent believe they will lead to a government takeover
- 69 percent believe abortions will be covered
- 75 percent believe there will be “death panels”
All of these lies have been refuted umpteen times by nonpartisan sources, including FactCheck.org.
Results as alarmingly bad as these would cause a panic at a real news organization. Senior managers’ jobs would be in jeopardy, and the taint of having worked for a news organization so irredeemably incompetent would discredit everyone involved.
But no heads will roll at Fox. In fact, there may be raises — because the real indictment here is that these results expose Fox for what it is really is: a propaganda outlet for the Republican Party and the corporate interests that own it.
The results of these polls are a damning indictment of Fox News any way you slice it.
