July 10, 2008
Guest post ~ Spinning in China and anti-cnn.com
I teach in China, where there are few alternative views to government propaganda. As blatant as it is, most people here actually are not aware that they are receiving propaganda.
After the events in Tibet in March, the overwhelming majority of students told me and wrote in the journals that CNN is so biased against China. When I asked them if they had read the original articles or seen the CNN newscasts on TV, not a single one had.
They had gone to a website, anti-cnn.com, whose author remains anonymous and whose purpose is unknown.
However, the government had picked up on the story. It makes a convenient way to shut down alternative viewpoints in the run-up to the Olympics or at least get the people to discount them.
I may not get anyone to change their viewpoints by suggesting they read the sources, but I do what I can.
Please keep this anonymous – it’s not safe for me to post my name.
April 6, 2008Priorities ~ Bowling for distraction
Recently, Constitutional lawyer Greg Greenwald posted the following on his website.
“In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
“Yoo and torture” - 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079″
Ths says something about our media, doesn’t it?
Another strange omission hits me. Al Gore announced on Sixty Minutes that he is investing $300,000,000 of his own money into a PR campaign to raise awareness of global warming. The coverage I saw focused on Gore’s candidate preferences to the exclusion of his new endeavor.
Whatever you think of Al Gore’s mission, to me, when ANYONE invests $300,000,000 in a cause, it should be news.
Gore is using a Unite and Concur strategy in his campaign. He is sponsoring bipartisan ads with political opposites such as Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton.
Great way to make a point that some issues transcend party affiliation, don’t you think?
PR strategist Scott’s points are instructive. Still, I wonder why an announcement of such a massive effort was upstaged by campaign speculation.
When you think your news source doesn’t have its priorities straight, let them know what matters to you.
And what doesn’t matter to you. That can mean saying requesting they give Obama’s lack of bowling acumen a rest.
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- SpeakStrong in Politics: You don’t miss what you don’t see
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- Congressman Lee Hamilton’s advice to the consensus-starved
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