Patrick Cockburn — When it comes to the Iran protests, be careful who you put your trust in

A vacuum of information is created which, at a moment of intense international interest, is going to be filled with dubious stories from partisan sources.

Never let a good crisis go to waste.

The Independent (UK)
When it comes to the Iran protests, be careful who you put your trust in

Patrick Cockburn

Also

A truism about U.S. politics and media is that once a foreign leader or a country has been demonized everything written or said about the subject will be skewed to the negative, a rule reflecting Washington’s groupthink and careerism, as ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar notes about Iran.

Consortium News
Gazing at Iran Through a Distorted Glass

Paul R. Pillar, retired CIA officer | nonresident senior fellow of the Center for Security Studies in the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, a contributing editor at The National Interest, formerly federal executive fellow at the Brookings Institution, a visiting professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University.

Norman Solomon — Rachel Maddow Plays Glenn Beck

When Rachel Maddow finished a 26-minute monologue that spanned two segments on her MSNBC program last Thursday night, her grave tones indicated that she thought she’d just delivered a whale of a story. But actually it was more like a minnow — and a specious one at that.

Convoluted and labored, Maddow’s narrative tried to make major hay out of a report from Moscow that a high-ranking Russian intelligence official had been dragged out of a meeting, arrested and charged with treason. Weirdly, Maddow kept presenting that barebones story as verification that Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had directly ordered the hacking and release of Democratic campaign emails in order to get Donald Trump elected president.

It was a free-associating performance worthy of Glenn Beck at a whiteboard. Maddow swirled together an array of facts, possible facts, dubious assertions and pure speculation to arrive at conclusions that were based on little more than her zeal to portray Trump as a tool of the Kremlin. Even when sober, Joe McCarthy never did it better.

We might dismiss her performance as just another bit of stagecraft on “MSDNC,” but Maddow was in sync with widespread fear-mongering by pundits and Democratic Party loyalists who think they’re picking some low-hanging fruit to throw at Trump. But what they’re doing is poisonous — and extremely dangerous....

Keith Olbermann has jumped the shark, too.

They have strayed into conspiracy theory in their zeal to delegitimize the president.

"Lame-stream media" indeed.

The opposition needs to get a grip.

Consortium News
Rachel Maddow Plays Glenn Beck

Norman Solomon | co-founder of RootsAction.org

See also

Coexist
This Philosophy Legend Has Some Hard Truths To Tell You About Our "Democracy"

Ben Schiller

Karoli — Media Punked By Fake 'Josie' Account Of Michael Brown Shooting

Another faux rush to judgment.

Crooks and Liars
Media Punked By Fake 'Josie' Account Of Michael Brown Shooting
Karoli

Rodney E. Lever — News Corp apocalypse

Scotland Yard has launched a new investigation into News Corporation, which may have disastrous ramifications for Rupert Murdoch and his employees.

Murdoch in trouble? Looks like he may have crossed the line.

British Labor politician Tom Watson, the first MP to speak out against Murdoch, is reported as saying he is not at all surprised that Murdoch is in deeper trouble than ever.

“He is solely responsible for the corporate culture that allowed this scandal to damage his global empire,” Watson said.
“I hope other jurisdictions like Russia will also begin to investigate all the activities of News Corporation around the world. The threat that thousands of people may lose their jobs is ridiculous. The company needs to clean up its act. It will survive without him. The people who work for it understand their social responsibility.”

Independent Australia
News Corp apocalypse
Rodney E. Lever
(h/t Blake Overall via email)

Dean Baker — Senate Unanimously Votes Against Cuts to Social Security: Media Don’t Notice

There are few areas where the corruption of the national media is more apparent than in its treatment of Social Security. Most of the elite media have made it clear in both their opinion and news pages that they want to see benefits cut. In keeping with this position they highlight the views of political figures who push cuts to the program, treating them as responsible, while those who oppose cuts are ignored or mocked.

This pattern of coverage was clearly on display last weekend. Both the New York Times and Washington Post decided to ignore the Senate's passage by voice vote of the Sanders Amendment. This was an amendment to the budget put forward by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that puts the Senate on record as opposing the switch to the chained CPI as the basis for the annual Social Security cost of living adjustment (COLA).

Truthout

Senate Unanimously Votes Against Cuts to Social Security: Media Don’t Notice
Dean Baker | Truthout | News Analysis

Chris Lehmann — Morning Jo(k)e

As economist James Crotty observes, the Beltway mindset has roots in the far Right’s resistance to the New Deal in the ’30s. Thanks to corporate-funded think tanks, political campaigns and—yes—broadcast media, the nostrums of the fringe Right of the 1930s now represent the policy mainstream. When it came to the automatic spending cuts of the sequester, “the people who fund the [right-wing] ideology [are] pretty happy,” Crotty says. “They want to privatize Social Security. They want to break the unions. They want to get the working class desperate for a job under any conditions and under any wages.”

But Joe Scarborough wants you never to forget, even for a moment, that Paul Krugman’s the one who’s being extreme.

In These Times
Morning Jo(k)e
Chris Lehmann | Contributing Editor

More neoliberal nonsense.

Eric Boehlert — How Fox News Screwed the GOP

The grand experiment of marrying a political movement around a cable TV channel was a grand failure in 2012.
AlterNet
How Fox News Screwed the GOP
Eric Boehlert

Good observations, but a glaring omission in that Rupert Murdoch is not even mentioned.

The Assange Affair — Fabius Maximus shows how to do journalism

Just the facts, ma'am.

Summary: The Affair Assange provides a mirror in which we can see ourselves and our institutions. It’s not a pretty picture.

Fabius Maximus.com
The Affair Assange rips off the veil concealing the face of modern journalism
Fabius Maximus

Dan Ariely — Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don't Realize It)

We asked thousands of people to describe their ideal distribution of wealth, from top to bottom. The vast majority -- rich, poor, GOP and Democrat -- imagined a far more equal nation. Here's why it matters.

Read it at The Atlantic
Americans Want to Live in a Much More Equal Country (They Just Don't Realize It)
Dan Ariely | James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Mark Gongloff — TV News Is Not Aware Of This Libor Scandal Of Which You Speak

Maybe instead of asking why Americans don't careabout the Libor scandal, we should be asking whether they've even heard of it.
The scandal that has been not-crazily called the biggest financial scandal in history has gotten all of zero minutes' air time on the ABC and NBC nightly news broadcasts and only a little more time than that on CBS and the major cable news channels, according to a report by the progressive media watchdog Media Matters.

Read it at The Huffington Post | Business
TV News Is Not Aware Of This Libor Scandal Of Which You Speak
Mark Gongloff | Chief financial writer, The Huffington Post

Apparently the media has decided that Libor is just too complicated for ordinary people to understand, or too wonky to be interested in.

Paul Buchheit — 3 Big Lies Perpetuated By the Rich

Too many Americans continue to be numbed by the soothing sounds of conservative spin in the media. Let's take a look at the facts.

Read it at AlterNet
3 Big Lies Perpetuated By the Rich
Paul Buchheit

Paul Krugman calls "Soviet"

Today, however, the big threat to our discourse is right-wing political correctness, which — unlike the liberal version — has lots of power and money behind it. And the goal is very much the kind of thing Orwell tried to convey with his notion of Newspeak: to make it impossible to talk, and possibly even think, about ideas that challenge the established order....

Actually, this reminds me of an essay I read a long time ago about Soviet science fiction. The author — if anyone remembers where this came from — noted that most science fiction is about one of two thoughts: “if only”, or “if this goes on”. Both were subversive, from the Soviet point of view: the first implied that things could be better, the second that there was something wrong with the way things are. So stories had to be written about “if only this goes on”, extolling the wonders of being wonderful Soviets.

And now that’s happening in America.

Read it at The New York Times | The Conscience of a Liberal
The New Political Correctness
by Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics and International Affairs Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University

Getting close to Godwin's Law.

Here's a relevant snippet from Joshua Holland's AlterNet interview of Roseanne Barr, who is now running for the presidential nomination of the Green Party in competition with Jill Stein.

JH: ... it strikes me that "Roseanne" was one of a very small number of shows on TV that had characters who were good people struggling to pay their bills. Maybe "Good Times" was another one. I’m hard pressed to think of any others. In a sense, you offered a class analysis that’s almost entirely absent from any TV entertainment. Why do you think that is?

RB: Well, because that’s what I wanted to do. 

JH: But why don’t we see more of that? I mean, so many families are struggling you would think that our culture would reflect that once in a while. 

*** 

JH: It’s a shame for our culture I think that we don’t see regular people dealing with the issues that regular people actually deal with.

RB: I don’t think that would be in the interest of the people who control what goes on here. It wouldn’t be in their interests. They kind of narrowed the field so they would get approval of all content that was shown over the people’s airwaves. That’s been coming since when the FCC was deregulated. That’s what happened.

JH: That’s the Telecommunications Act of 1996.

RB: Yes, that’s exactly what happened. They took control of all content, all context and all message. They think that the plight of the 99 percent of Americans isn’t worthy of being discussed in any media. 

JH: And we’re probably the only advanced country that doesn’t have really any sense of class. We’re supposed to pretend that class difference don’t exist.

Steve Roth has two related posts on the big rip-off

But is Unz talking about the financial industry and its government (particularly Republican) toadies? Of course not. That would be admitting that he and his movement are largely at fault for the problems he’s describing....

The financial industry, empowered and unleashed by that defanging (with American conservatives cheering and pushing every step of the way), has captured 20-40% of corporate profits over the last decade or so. But it’s the media that’s doing the extracting?All I can say is they’re not very damned good at it. Wouldn’t you expect the extractive elite to successfully . . . extract a lot of money into offshore bank accounts? Exactly which industry is doing that?

Some might find it significant that the word “banks” never appears in the article.

Read it at Asymptosis
The American Conservative: “Extractive Elites” and “Macro-Corruption”

by Steve Roth

The whole purpose of the private equity industry is to destroy the kind of mittelstand, long-lived, profitable, specialized, often family-owned and -operated companies that The Economist, Business Week, et al keep touting as the backbone of Germany’s remarkable success and resilience — its very “model of success.” Private equity’s model is to extract the expected future value of those companies in cash, while simultaneously, in most cases, destroying that value.

Mitt Romney, American Parasite, Destroys America’s Mittelstand

by Steve Roth

Al Jazeera takes line of the 1% regarding papper spray incident

Al Jazeera has put up the video of the pepper spray incident accompanied by a story giving the side of the police and university officials only. The source is listed as, Source: Al Jazeera and agencies

This is quite puzzling and not a little disconcerting, since the video shows that the story provided by the authorities is fabricated.

However, since the video is provided, readers can make up their own mind.

It alerts us, however, on whose side the management of Al Jazeera stands.

US university probes protest pepper spraying