FREE WORLD OF CENSORSHIP ~~ PURGE AT HaARETZ NEWS « DesertpeaceMay 31, 2008
Many of my readers may have noticed that I have not been posting many articles by Amira Hass lately. I have also not been cross posting a regular column by Gideon Levy called ‘The Twighlight Zone’. To be honest with you, I have combed the pages of HaAretz looking for these tidbits but to no avail.
This morning I found out why… there has been a purge at HaAretz. New owners of the newspaper are slowly but surely ‘weeding out’ the only voices of truth and reason in the Israeli press…. so typical of what has been going on generally in the ‘free world of censorship’.
...
... According to inside sources, the new owner has carried out a rough, sittingroom survey that revealed that “the occupation doesn’t sell newspapers” and they are therefore concentrating on the business world (ie. The Marker). Twilight Zone, Gideon Levy’s regular Friday column, has been scrapped, Amira Hass has been degraded to freelance on half salary, Meron Rapaport has been fired and Akiva Eldar has lost at least one half page a week.
...
It appears that the Israelis are closing down many if not all of the sources of critical information coming out of Israel. The hypocrisy of it all is that Israel complains that when the British Academic Union proposes a boycott of Israeli academic institutions as a way to pressure Israel and to protest Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians the Israelis start to scream that the proposed boycott is a violation of freedom of speech and a violation of academic freedom. ...
Monday, June 02, 2008
Perhaps the most flagrantly racist of all the games was GTA: San Andreas (2004) ...
Anthony DiMaggio: Gaming the Ghetto May 31 / June 1, 2008 |
Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle
...
GTA IV has been celebrated, as with its award winning predecessors, as one of the best games of all time.Game Informer magazine deemed it a work of “perfection,” surpassing “epic gaming experiences” in its “stunning realism” and “unbelievable” action. Electronic Gaming Monthly deemed it a “magnificent” specimen of “destructive mayhem,” and a “truly exciting” gaming experience.
...
... Niko works for the Bratva (Russian mafia), conducting various assassinations and other jobs, keeping with the standard motif of the series. GTA IV’s depiction of the Eastern European “other” is merely one of many stereotypes employed throughout GTA’s history.
Previous games were centered on members of the Cosa Nostra (Italian mafia) and various black and Latino street gangs located in American cities. Perhaps the most flagrantly racist of all the games was GTA: San Andreas (2004), which was advertised on television alongside the tune “Welcome to the Jungle” (by Guns N’ Roses).
The advertisement portrayed inner city blacks and Latinos walking around with missile launchers and multiple Uzi’s, riding in bouncing low-riders, and partaking in drive-bys, carjackings, police chases, prostitution, and gambling. The not-so-subtle racist imagery and stereotypes of GTA: San Andreas were hard to miss, even for the game’s most ardent defenders. Inner city minorities were dehumanized and mongrelized in the construction of the city as the concrete jungle.
...
Political-Communication scholars Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki have uncovered evidence of a “racial subtext of Chicago’s local news.” In the period of coverage they examined during the 1990s, “white victims outnumbered Blacks in news reports – even though Blacks in Chicago and most core cities are more likely to be victimized.” Stories featuring black victims of violence were consistently shorter than those that focused on white victims, with a “total story time” ratio imbalance of 3:1 in favor of whites. Studies have also implicated violent media images in negatively affecting audience beliefs and perceptions.
Such studies go far beyond the simplistic, clumsy and unsubstantiated claims of those conservatives in the media who blame entertainment and video game consumption for “causing” children and teens to engage in violence against their family, friends, and peers. Rather, a substantial body of literature has developed in implicating media in far more subtly “cultivating” conservative, racist, and militaristic thinking within the minds of heavy television consumers. Heavy viewers of television programming have been found to be more likely to “express fear of crime,” particularly amongst those viewers who are white, and/or middle or upper income elites.
...
... Subsequently, those who more heavily consume television programs – including reality based crime shows and news reports – are significantly more likely to provide “higher estimates of crime prevalence” in society. It is perhaps the subtle effects of media violence on individual perceptions of crime and race that makes the Grand Theft Auto series so problematic. ...
Grand Theft Auto IV, Racist Media and the Concrete Jungle
...
GTA IV has been celebrated, as with its award winning predecessors, as one of the best games of all time.Game Informer magazine deemed it a work of “perfection,” surpassing “epic gaming experiences” in its “stunning realism” and “unbelievable” action. Electronic Gaming Monthly deemed it a “magnificent” specimen of “destructive mayhem,” and a “truly exciting” gaming experience.
...
... Niko works for the Bratva (Russian mafia), conducting various assassinations and other jobs, keeping with the standard motif of the series. GTA IV’s depiction of the Eastern European “other” is merely one of many stereotypes employed throughout GTA’s history.
Previous games were centered on members of the Cosa Nostra (Italian mafia) and various black and Latino street gangs located in American cities. Perhaps the most flagrantly racist of all the games was GTA: San Andreas (2004), which was advertised on television alongside the tune “Welcome to the Jungle” (by Guns N’ Roses).
The advertisement portrayed inner city blacks and Latinos walking around with missile launchers and multiple Uzi’s, riding in bouncing low-riders, and partaking in drive-bys, carjackings, police chases, prostitution, and gambling. The not-so-subtle racist imagery and stereotypes of GTA: San Andreas were hard to miss, even for the game’s most ardent defenders. Inner city minorities were dehumanized and mongrelized in the construction of the city as the concrete jungle.
...
Political-Communication scholars Robert Entman and Andrew Rojecki have uncovered evidence of a “racial subtext of Chicago’s local news.” In the period of coverage they examined during the 1990s, “white victims outnumbered Blacks in news reports – even though Blacks in Chicago and most core cities are more likely to be victimized.” Stories featuring black victims of violence were consistently shorter than those that focused on white victims, with a “total story time” ratio imbalance of 3:1 in favor of whites. Studies have also implicated violent media images in negatively affecting audience beliefs and perceptions.
Such studies go far beyond the simplistic, clumsy and unsubstantiated claims of those conservatives in the media who blame entertainment and video game consumption for “causing” children and teens to engage in violence against their family, friends, and peers. Rather, a substantial body of literature has developed in implicating media in far more subtly “cultivating” conservative, racist, and militaristic thinking within the minds of heavy television consumers. Heavy viewers of television programming have been found to be more likely to “express fear of crime,” particularly amongst those viewers who are white, and/or middle or upper income elites.
...
... Subsequently, those who more heavily consume television programs – including reality based crime shows and news reports – are significantly more likely to provide “higher estimates of crime prevalence” in society. It is perhaps the subtle effects of media violence on individual perceptions of crime and race that makes the Grand Theft Auto series so problematic. ...
Who'll Unplug Big Media? US since its founding, relied on freedom of the press to rest authority in the people
Who'll Unplug Big Media? Stay TunedBy Robert W. McChesney & John Nichols | May 29, 2008
...
... With a voice vote that confirmed the near-unanimous sentiment of senators who had heard from hundreds of thousands of Americans demanding that they act, the legislators moved to nullify an FCC attempt to permit a radical form of media consolidation: a rule change designed to permit one corporation to own daily and weekly newspapers as well as television and radio stations in the same local market. The removal of the historic bar to newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership has long been a top priority of Big Media. They want to dramatically increase revenues by buying up major media properties in American cities, shutting down competing newsrooms and creating a one-size-fits-all local discourse that's great for the bottom line but lousy for the communities they are supposed to serve and a nightmare for democracy.
...
... Public broadcasting, community broadcasting and cable access channels have withstood assault from corporate interlopers, fundamentalist censors and the GOP Congressional allies they share in common. And against a full-frontal attack from two industries, telephone and cable--whose entire business model is based on lobbying Congress and regulators to get monopoly privileges--a grassroots movement has preserved network neutrality, the first amendment of the digital epoch, which holds that Internet service providers shall not censor or discriminate against particular websites or services. So successful has this challenge to the telecom lobbies been that the House may soon endorse the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.
...
... In sum, we need to establish rules and structures designed to create a cultural environment that will enlighten, empower and energize citizens so they can realize the full promise of an American experiment that has, since its founding, relied on freedom of the press to rest authority in the people.
Despite all the revelations exposing government assaults on a free press, too many media outlets continue to tell the politically and economically powerful, "Lie to me!" Five years into a war made possible by the persistent refusal of the major media to distinguish fact from Bush Administration spin, we learned this spring about the Pentagon's PR machine's multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign that seeded willing broadcast and cable news programs with "expert" generals who parroted the White House line right up to the point at which the fraud was exposed. Even after the New York Times broke the story, the networks still chose to cover their shame rather than expose a war that has gone far worse than most Americans know. ...
...
... With a voice vote that confirmed the near-unanimous sentiment of senators who had heard from hundreds of thousands of Americans demanding that they act, the legislators moved to nullify an FCC attempt to permit a radical form of media consolidation: a rule change designed to permit one corporation to own daily and weekly newspapers as well as television and radio stations in the same local market. The removal of the historic bar to newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership has long been a top priority of Big Media. They want to dramatically increase revenues by buying up major media properties in American cities, shutting down competing newsrooms and creating a one-size-fits-all local discourse that's great for the bottom line but lousy for the communities they are supposed to serve and a nightmare for democracy.
...
... Public broadcasting, community broadcasting and cable access channels have withstood assault from corporate interlopers, fundamentalist censors and the GOP Congressional allies they share in common. And against a full-frontal attack from two industries, telephone and cable--whose entire business model is based on lobbying Congress and regulators to get monopoly privileges--a grassroots movement has preserved network neutrality, the first amendment of the digital epoch, which holds that Internet service providers shall not censor or discriminate against particular websites or services. So successful has this challenge to the telecom lobbies been that the House may soon endorse the Internet Freedom Preservation Act.
...
... In sum, we need to establish rules and structures designed to create a cultural environment that will enlighten, empower and energize citizens so they can realize the full promise of an American experiment that has, since its founding, relied on freedom of the press to rest authority in the people.
Despite all the revelations exposing government assaults on a free press, too many media outlets continue to tell the politically and economically powerful, "Lie to me!" Five years into a war made possible by the persistent refusal of the major media to distinguish fact from Bush Administration spin, we learned this spring about the Pentagon's PR machine's multimillion-dollar propaganda campaign that seeded willing broadcast and cable news programs with "expert" generals who parroted the White House line right up to the point at which the fraud was exposed. Even after the New York Times broke the story, the networks still chose to cover their shame rather than expose a war that has gone far worse than most Americans know. ...
Tutu's Trip to Gaza Censored by the US media : Information Clearing House - ICH
Tutu's Trip to Gaza Censored by the US media : Information Clearing House - ICHBy Mike Whitney
“There can be no justice, no peace, no stability, not for Israel, not for the Palestinians, without accountability for human rights violations." Archbishop Desmond Tutu
01/06/08 "ICH" -- - Why was Desmond Tutu's trip to Gaza censored by the US media?
When Nobel Laureate and world renowned peacemaker Desmond Tutu goes to Gaza to visit the site of an Israeli massacre; that's news, right? So why is it impossible to find any account of his trip in America's leading newspapers? Is it because any information that is incompatible with the territorial ambitions of the Israeli leadership is simply “disappeared” into the media-ether?
Archbishop Tutu was a leader in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He is neaither a terrorist nor an anti-Semite. His work as a human rights activist spans 4 decades. Like former president Jimmy Carter he was shunned by the Israeli government and refused entry into Gaza.
...
Bishop Tutu had to go through Eqypt to get to Beit Hanoun; the town where 18 members of the al-Athamna family--including 14 women and children--were killed by Israeli artillery fire in November 2006. Tutu said that hearing "from the survivors of the massacre" had left him in a "state of shock".
Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, told the UK Guardian that her preliminary assessment of the attack was that it was a breach of international law.
"Firing in a way that cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants is clearly a violation of international humanitarian law," she said. "I don't think that the idea of a technical mistake takes away from the initial responsibility of the action of firing where civilian casualties are clearly foreseeable ... it has to be foreseeable when you give yourself such a small margin that any error has the potential to lead to civilian casualties." (UK Guardian)
Chinkin is right, of course. It was a massacre and should be thoroughly investigated by the international community. The responsible parties need to be held accountable.
According to the UK Telegraph, “No soldiers were ever charged in connection with the incident. Israel blocked attempts by the UN's Human Rights Council to investigate the shelling, saying that members of the body were "biased". ...
“There can be no justice, no peace, no stability, not for Israel, not for the Palestinians, without accountability for human rights violations." Archbishop Desmond Tutu
01/06/08 "ICH" -- - Why was Desmond Tutu's trip to Gaza censored by the US media?
When Nobel Laureate and world renowned peacemaker Desmond Tutu goes to Gaza to visit the site of an Israeli massacre; that's news, right? So why is it impossible to find any account of his trip in America's leading newspapers? Is it because any information that is incompatible with the territorial ambitions of the Israeli leadership is simply “disappeared” into the media-ether?
Archbishop Tutu was a leader in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. He is neaither a terrorist nor an anti-Semite. His work as a human rights activist spans 4 decades. Like former president Jimmy Carter he was shunned by the Israeli government and refused entry into Gaza.
...
Bishop Tutu had to go through Eqypt to get to Beit Hanoun; the town where 18 members of the al-Athamna family--including 14 women and children--were killed by Israeli artillery fire in November 2006. Tutu said that hearing "from the survivors of the massacre" had left him in a "state of shock".
Christine Chinkin, professor of international law at the London School of Economics, told the UK Guardian that her preliminary assessment of the attack was that it was a breach of international law.
"Firing in a way that cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants is clearly a violation of international humanitarian law," she said. "I don't think that the idea of a technical mistake takes away from the initial responsibility of the action of firing where civilian casualties are clearly foreseeable ... it has to be foreseeable when you give yourself such a small margin that any error has the potential to lead to civilian casualties." (UK Guardian)
Chinkin is right, of course. It was a massacre and should be thoroughly investigated by the international community. The responsible parties need to be held accountable.
According to the UK Telegraph, “No soldiers were ever charged in connection with the incident. Israel blocked attempts by the UN's Human Rights Council to investigate the shelling, saying that members of the body were "biased". ...
Wolf_Blitzer_defends_CNN_preIraq_war_0529.html">Blitzer on defense: CNN had 'pretty strong' anti-war coverage
Blitzer on defense: CNN had 'pretty strong' anti-war coverage | David Edwards and Muriel Kane | Published: Thursday May 29, 2008
From the point of view of a network anchor like CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "one of the most provocative allegations" in former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book is his assertion that "those of us in the news media who cover the president" were "too deferential to the White House" during the run-up to the Iraq war.
Blitzer strongly defended CNN's pre-war reporting, pointing out that he had frequently interviewed people like Scott Ritter, who made the case that there was no evidence for Iraqi possession of WMD's. "I think we were pretty strong," Blitzer stated, "but certainly with hindsight, we could have done an even better job. There were a lot of things missing in our coverage. ... I think we asked the tough questions, but we could have done better."
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post pointed out to Blitzer that "anti-war voiced had limited access, it seemed, to the airwaves, while administration officials were on every day."
...
From the point of view of a network anchor like CNN's Wolf Blitzer, "one of the most provocative allegations" in former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book is his assertion that "those of us in the news media who cover the president" were "too deferential to the White House" during the run-up to the Iraq war.
Blitzer strongly defended CNN's pre-war reporting, pointing out that he had frequently interviewed people like Scott Ritter, who made the case that there was no evidence for Iraqi possession of WMD's. "I think we were pretty strong," Blitzer stated, "but certainly with hindsight, we could have done an even better job. There were a lot of things missing in our coverage. ... I think we asked the tough questions, but we could have done better."
Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post pointed out to Blitzer that "anti-war voiced had limited access, it seemed, to the airwaves, while administration officials were on every day."
...
CNN/MSNBC reporter: Corporate executives forced pro-Bush, pro-war narrative - enormous pressure from corporate executives
CNN/MSNBC reporter: Corporate executives forced pro-Bush, pro-war narrative - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.comThursday May 29, 2008
Jessica Yellin -- currently a CNN correspondent who covered the White House for ABC News and MSNBC in 2002 and 2003 -- was on with Anderson Cooper last night discussing Scott McClellan's book, and made one of the most significant admissions heard on television in quite some time:
JESSICA YELLIN, CNN CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: I think the press corps dropped the ball at the beginning. When the lead-up to the war began, the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation and the president's high approval ratings.And my own experience at the White House was that, the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives -- and I was not at this network at the time -- but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president.
I think, over time...
(CROSSTALK)
COOPER: You had pressure from news executives to put on positive stories about the president?
YELLIN: Not in that exact -- they wouldn't say it in that way, but they would edit my pieces. They would push me in different directions. They would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive, yes. That was my experience. ...
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