From Andrew Boyd and John Sellers of Agit-Pop, May 21, 2008:

Bush & Cheney & McCain & Fox News & the whole neo-con cabal have been rattling their sabers about bombing Iran for nigh on a few years now. Yesterday, the Jerusalem Post confirmed it :

“US President George W. Bush intends to attack Iran in the upcoming months, before the end of his term,” Army Radio quoted a senior official in Jerusalem as saying Tuesday.

And now the entire Bush team is denying it in The New York Times. We think they doth protest too much. And so, we’ve launched our latest, ass-kicking mini-video:

Don’t Bomb Iran 

It’s currently being featured on YouTube Politics. And our partners at True Majority are using it to build rapid support for Senate Resolution 356: “Any offensive military action taken against Iran must be explicitly approved by Congress before such action may be initiated.” 

P.S.  A new trans-partisan coaltion - The Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran - is following the lead of Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and others in calling for “immediate, unconditional, and comprehensive talks” with Iran. Many of their member groups will be using our video soon.

Support them here: http://www.newiranpolicy.org

Submitted by Jon Truskey, from Robert Greenwald and the Brave New Team:

You may have heard of Rev. John Hagee, the McCain supporter who said God created Hurricane Katrina to punish New Orleans for its homosexual “sins.” Well now meet Rev. Rod Parsley, the televangelist megachurch pastor from Ohio who hates Islam. According to David Corn of Mother Jones, Parsley has called on Christians to wage war against Islam, which he considers to be a “false religion.” In the past, Parsley has also railed against the separation of church and state, homosexuals, and abortion rights, comparing Planned Parenthood to Nazis.

John McCain actively sought and received Parsley’s endorsement in the presidential race. McCain has called Parsley “a spiritual guide,” and he hasn’t said whether he shares Parsley’s vicious anti-Islam views. That’s because the mainstream media refuses to ask. And so, we’ve taken matters into our own hands, joining Mother Jones to present the truth about McCain’s pastor.

(more…)

Pentagon’s Propaganda Documents Go Online, but Will the TV Networks Ever Report this Scandal?
by John Stauber
Center for Media and Democracy/PR Watch
May 6, 2008

Eight thousand pages of documents related to the Pentagon’s illegal propaganda campaign, known as the Pentagon military analyst program, are now online for the world to see, although in a format that makes it impossible to easily search them and therefore difficult to read and dissect. This trove includes the documents pried out of the Pentagon by David Barstow and used as the basis for his stunning investigation that appeared in the New York Times on April 20, 2008.

The Pentagon program, which clearly violated US law against covert government propaganda, embedded more than 75 retired military officers — most of them with financial ties to war contractors — into the TV networks as “message surrogates” for the Bush Administration. To date, every major commercial TV network has failed to report this story, covering up their complicity and keeping the existence of this scandal from their audiences. (more…)

Message Machine: Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand
by David Barstow
New York Times
April 20, 2008

In the summer of 2005, the Bush administration confronted a fresh wave of criticism over Guantánamo Bay. The detention center had just been branded “the gulag of our times” by Amnesty International, there were new allegations of abuse from United Nations human rights experts and calls were mounting for its closure.

The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly. Early one Friday morning, they put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo.

To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.

Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.

Read the rest of the article here. It’s long but fascinating.

And, check out this New York Times multi-media report, How the Pentagon Spread Its Message also by David Barstow, April 20, 2008.

Barstow, an investigative reporter for The Times, examines primary source documents detailing the Pentagon’s response to criticism of then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld by a group of prominent retired generals.

thanks Nancy

Submitted by Josh Jasper:

How local TV embraced fake news
Americans’ first source in news is overrun by marketing videos.
by Farhad Manjoo

Note: Here is another excerpt from my new book, True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society. (For previous excerpts, see here and here.) The book argues that new communications technologies are loosening the culture’s grip on what people once called “objective reality.” Here, I look at how fakery has overrun local TV news.

Excerpted from True Enough by Farhad Manjoo (Wiley, 2008)

Late in the holiday shopping season of 2005, Robin Raskin began to worry about a hidden danger posed by the world’s most popular gadget: Pornography was popping up on the iPod. Raskin, a pert middle-aged woman with short brown hair and a deep, authoritative voice, considered herself an expert on how kids use technology (she’d once written a magazine column called “Internet Mom”). She approached local TV news broadcasts across the country with her iPod worries. They bit.

“There’s scores of ‘iPorn’ everywhere,” Raskin warned in an appearance on KGUN, an ABC affiliate in Tucson, Ariz. The iPod had become “a pedophile’s playground,” she said, and Apple was doing little to stem the smut. On Pittsburgh’s Fox affiliate, WPGH Channel 53, Raskin called the iPod one of the “scariest” gifts of the season. The ABC station in Columbus, Ohio, featured Raskin’s warnings as part of a report by Kent Justice, a correspondent who produces a regular segment called “On Your Side.” Justice told viewers, “If you didn’t know it, now prepare for it: Hundreds of Web sites are selling iPorn.”

Nine stations aired Raskin’s warnings. Her segments had the look and feel of ordinary local news: Super-coifed anchors offer alarmist assessments of everyday objects, story at 11. (more…)

Pakistan Causes Worldwide YouTube Outage
by Peter Svensson
AP Technology Writer
February 24, 2008

New York (AP) — Most of the world’s Internet users lost access to YouTube for several hours Sunday after an attempt by Pakistan’s government to block access domestically affected other countries.

The outage highlighted yet another of the Internet’s vulnerabilities, coming less than a month after broken fiber-optic cables in the Mediterranean took Egypt off line and caused communications problems from the Middle East to India.

An Internet expert said Sunday’s problems came after a Pakistani telecommunications company complied with the block by directing requests for YouTube videos to a “black hole.” So instead of serving up videos of skateboarding dogs, it sent the traffic into oblivion.

The problem was that the company also accidentally identified itself to Internet computers as the world’s fastest route to YouTube, leading requests from across the Internet to the black hole.

The Pakistan Telecommunication Authority had ordered 70 Internet service providers on Friday to block access to YouTube.com because of anti-Islamic movies on the video-sharing site, which is owned by Google Inc.

The authority did not specify what the offensive material was, but a PTA official said the ban concerned a trailer for an upcoming film by Dutch lawmaker Geert Wilders, who has said he plans to release a movie portraying Islam as fascist and prone to inciting violence against women and homosexuals. (more…)

From Skeptic.com:

In this week’s eSkeptic, Steve Salerno discusses the fundamental flaws of broadcast journalism as a tool for informing viewers.

Journalist-Bites-Reality!
by Steve Salerno
eSkeptic.com
February 13, 2008

How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil.

It is the measure of the media’s obsession with its “pedophiles run amok!” story line that so many of us are on a first-name basis with the victims: Polly, Amber, JonBenet, Danielle, Elizabeth, Samantha. And now there is Madeleine. Clearly these crimes were and are horrific, and nothing here is intended to diminish the parents’ loss. But something else has been lost in the bargain as journalists tirelessly stoke fear of strangers, segueing from nightly-news segments about cyber-stalkers and “the rapist in your neighborhood” to prime-time reality series like Dateline’s “To Catch a Predator.” That “something else” is reality.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, in a given year there are about 88,000 documented cases of sexual abuse among juveniles. In the roughly 17,500 cases involving children between ages 6 and 11, strangers are the perpetrators just 5 percent of the time — and just 3 percentof the time when the victim is under age 6. (Further, more than a third of such molesters are themselves juveniles, who may not be true “predators” so much as confused or unruly teens.) Overall, the odds that one of America’s 48 million children under age 12 will encounter an adult pedophile at the local park are startlingly remote. The Child Molestation Research & Prevention Institute puts it like so: “Right now, 90 percent of our efforts go toward protecting our children from strangers, when what we need to do is to focus 90 percent of our efforts toward protecting children from the abusers who are not strangers.” (more…)

False Pretenses
by Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith
The Center for Public Integrity
January, 2008

Following 9/11, President Bush and seven top officials of his administration waged a carfully orchestrated campaign of misinformation about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration’s top officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Nearly five years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.

On at least 532 separate occasions (in speeches, briefings, interviews, testimony, and the like), Bush and these three key officials, along with Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and White House press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, stated unequivocally that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (or was trying to produce or obtain them), links to Al Qaeda, or both. This concerted effort was the underpinning of the Bush administration’s case for war. (more…)

Update, January 17, 2008: A new article, How the Pentagon planted a false story, by Gareth Porter from the online Asia Times, outlines how an incident, described by Pentagon officials as a “careless, reckless and potentially hostile” provocation by Iranian boats that nearly led to gunfire, was actually a nonthreatening, “almost routine” encounter that officials in Washington distorted. via Center for Media and Democracy’s PRWatch.com.

‘Filipino Monkey’ may be behind radio threats, ship drivers say
by Andrew Scutro and David Brown
Navy Times
January 11, 2008

The threatening radio transmission heard at the end of a video showing harassing maneuvers by Iranian patrol boats in the Strait of Hormuz may have come from a locally famous heckler known among ship drivers as the “Filipino Monkey.”

Since the Jan. 6 incident was announced to the public a day later, the U.S. Navy has said it’s unclear where the voice came from. In the videotape released by the Pentagon on Jan. 8, the screen goes black at the very end and the voice can be heard, distancing it from the scenes on the water.

“We don’t know for sure where they came from,” said Cmdr. Lydia Robertson, spokeswoman for 5th Fleet in Bahrain. “It could have been a shore station.”

While the threat — “I am coming to you. You will explode in a few minutes” — was picked up during the incident, further jacking up the tension, there’s no proof yet of its origin. And several Navy officials have said it’s difficult to figure out who’s talking.

See the Pentagon’s version of the video

A link to the Iranian version (click the camera icon)

(more…)

[Editor’s note: Controversies have always surrounded incitements to war. The sinking of the U.S.S. Maine in 1898, which precipitated the Spanish American War could have been an act of sabotage meant to start the war, or an accidental explosion. The true cause is still unknown. This week’s interaction between Iranian speedboats and the U.S. Navy, with both sides producing different video documentation, may also be a prelude to the beginnings of a bigger conflict. We may never know the truth about either, however, sometimes all that’s needed is the declassification of existing but secret documents…]

Submitted by Rose Fox:

Report reveals Vietnam War hoaxes, faked attacks
Yahoo News
January 8, 2008

Washington (AFP) - North Vietnamese made hoax calls to get the US military to bomb its own units during the Vietnam War, according to declassified information that also confirmed US officials faked an incident to escalate the war.

The report was released by the National Security Agency, responsible for much of the United States’ codebreaking and eavesdropping work, in response to a “mandatory declassification” request, the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) said Monday.

From the first intercepted cable — a 1945 message from Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh to his Russian counterpart Joseph Stalin — to the final evacuation of US spies from Saigon, the 500-page report retold Vietnam War history from the perspective of “signals intelligence,” the group said in a statement. (more…)

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The Whoppers of 2007
December 30, 2007
by Brooks Jackson, with the staff of
FactCheck.org

We review some notable political falsehoods and distortions of the year.

Summary

The year 2007 wasn’t a good one for political honesty. Though not even technically an election year, it provided a bumper crop of falsehoods and distortions nonetheless.

Presidential candidates kept us busy:

Misinformation came both from Congress and the White House: (more…)

Republicans Debate in Des Moines
FactCheck.org
December 12, 2007

More exaggerations and mis-statements in the final GOP debate before the Iowa caucuses.

Summary:

Read the detailed analysis here.

The 90-minute debate was sponsored by the Des Moines Register and televised nationally on CNN, Fox News Channel, MSNBC and C-SPAN3. It was the final debate among GOP candidates before the first-in-the-nation Iowa presidential nomination caucuses, which are scheduled for January 3.

Here’s an interesting, controversial and challenging hour and 51 minute film produced in 2006 by Aaron Russo (1943-2007).

From the Conscious Movie Network:

“Determined to find the law that requires Americans to pay income tax, Aaron Russo (The Rose, Trading Places) sets out on a journey. Neither left- nor right-wing, this startling examination exposes the systematic erosion of civil liberties in America. Through interviews with US Congressmen, a former IRS Commissioner, former IRS and FBI agents, tax attorneys and authors, Russo connects the dots between money creation, federal income tax, voter fraud, the national identity card (becoming law in May 2008) and the implementation of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to track citizens. A striking case about the evolving police state in America.”

However, David Cay Johnston wrote an article in the New York Times, July 31, 2006, refuting some of the filmmaker’s assertions about American income tax laws. This is none-the-less a very compelling story.

Links of interest:

Thanks Brian Truskey. Photo: Mikkelina’s Thoughts.

A substantial hoax discrediting the burning of fossil fuel as the root cause of global warming, perpetrated by British novelist and journalist David Thorpe and his colleagues, unfolded over the last week. It showed once again that those who choose to believe only what they wish to believe will take the bait of false evidence to support their cause.

That Geoclimatic Studies hoax - and what it was about
by David Thorpe
The Low Carbon Kid
Saturday, November 10, 2007

Are there only opinions about reality, that we can only trade insults about, or is it possible to refer to independent, or ‘objective’ correlations for those opinions, which can be what they’re based on, and be tested?

The debate on whether modern climate change is caused by human behaviour or due to natural cycles is for some highly emotive, because a great deal of vested interest and money depends on the outcome*.

The sceptics can be divided into two camps: those who base their arguments on a good and transparent understanding of the science and economics; and those who don’t, instead attacking the proponents on personal grounds. And they do get extremely vituperative.

I recently collaborated in an elaborate hoax - called “a spoof that puts the fun back into lying about science” by desmogblog - that was intended to smoke out the latter sort. It was so successful it was syndicated across 600 radio stations in the US. (more…)

From FactCheck.org:

A Bogus Cancer Statistic
October 30, 2007

In a new radio ad, Rudy Giuliani falsely claims that under England’s “socialized medicine” system only 44 percent of men with prostate cancer survive.

We tracked down the source of that number, which turns out to be the result of bad math by a Giuliani campaign adviser, who admits to us that his figure isn’t “technically” a survival rate at all. Furthermore, the author of the study on which Giuliani’s man based his calculations tells us his work is being misused, and that the 44 percent figure is both wrong and “misleading.” (more…)