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Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin: Look Out For i360 and DataTrust
MediaThere are two dangers in the media howl over Trump’s computer gurus Cambridge Analytica, the data-driven psy-ops company founded by billionaire brown-shirts, the Mercer Family. The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique “bad apple” of the cyber world. But the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis
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Mainstream Media and Imperial Power
MediaEmmy award-winning filmmaker John Pilger is among the most important political filmmakers of the 20th and 21st century. From Vietnam to Palestine to atomic war, Pilger’s work has been on the cutting edge, and his stinging critique of western media has always be revelatory. And, no doubt, his biting analysis is more relevant and important now than ever. His latest film, The Coming War on China powerfully presages the growing potential for war between the US and China.
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The Scary Void Inside Russia-gate
MediaInstead, the several investigations, desperate to find actual evidence of collusion, have spread to “contacts with Russia” on the part of a growing number of people, often going back many years before anyone imagined Trump as a presidential candidate. The resulting implication is that these “contacts” were criminal or potentially so. This is unprecedented, preposterous, and dangerous, potentially more so than even Joe McCarthy’s search for “Communist” connections.
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Canadian Media Just Created Another Alt-Right Superstar
MediaHere’s a quick primer on the ever-growing dumpster fire: Lindsay Shepherd, a 22-year-old teaching assistant at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, showed a video of notorious transphobe and alt-right sympathizer Jordan Peterson to a class of first-year communications students. At least one student complained that it was inappropriate to display such content without sufficient context.
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Media’s formulaic approach to terror attacks ignores roots of violence
MediaCoverage of terrorist attacks is so formulaic in 2017 that reporters, if asked, could certainly write a story without an actual event. It would have the sophistication of a puppet show in the town square. The victims, of course, would be European or western allies. There would be fine details of weapons, injuries, trauma, shattered witnesses and mourners and deranged hoodlums as perpetrators.
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RIP Edward Herman, Who Co-Wrote a Book That’s Now More Important Than Ever
MediaHerman and Chomsky’s work was a great gift to a generation of thinkers trying to make sense of how power in the West sold itself to populations. The late Herman should be honored for that critical contribution he made to understanding American empire. It’s a shame he never wrote a sequel. Now more than ever, we could use another Manufacturing Consent.
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Ezra Levant’s Hateful News Outlet Enabled by Canada’s Media Establishment
MediaLevant and his crew of propagandists exist because the Canadian media establishment allowed them to. Journalists and industry associations should have denounced the outlet and its correspondents as hateful and dangerous and refused to defend it when it encountered problems while attempting to gain press credentials. They could have taken a stand on behalf of oppressed peoples.
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Coverage of Winnipeg’s Rooster Town Blockade Reveals Media’s Anti-Indigenous Biases
Canadian PoliticsMuch of the media coverage of the situation has frequently regurgitated blatant colonial biases. These range from allotting a disproportionate percentage of word counts to the arguments of the developer and his lawyer, deploying the language of capitalist conceptions of property ownership, and refusing Indigenous defenders the ability to self-define.
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Castro coverage shows fake news is ubiquitous
MediaPerhaps the biggest media story of 2016 was the overdue discovery of fake news: totally manufactured information slickly packaged as journalism. Getting a lot less attention was the story that real news can be fake news, too, and often is. As the Huffington Post points out, when opinion (which is cheap) is blended with fact (which is expensive) and is endlessly recycled, it gets hard to tell the difference between 60 Minutes and The Daily Show.
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The Anti-Russian Lynch Mob Fails
MediaWith an all-but official declaration of a new “Cold War” on Russia by the United States, the journalistic atmosphere in the US, the EU and the exiting UK has become poisonous. Dissent is hardly permitted. All evils are now assumed to be the work of Moscow until proven otherwise, even by the most liberal of publications.
