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MyAntiwar.org : Latest Headlines  Latest Headlines Support Media Lens  Latest Headlines - Channels - Search - Customise - Syndication - Site News - About [Login] Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 » Historic coalition launches call for councils to seize opportunity to demand new powersUKWatch.net - 15 Oct 2008Today (14 October), Hazel Blears will invite councils to ?opt in? to the Sustainable Communities Act. 55 of the UK?s leading voluntary and representative organisations, from the Association of Chief Police Officers to the Campaign for Real Ale, have written to the leaders and chief executives of every council in England today, asking them to seize this opportunity. Their letter will be unveiled today by Unlock Democracy Campaigns Director at a special conference about the Act being held by the Local Government Association in Westminster. The Act enables councils and their communities working co-operatively to get government help to assist them in reversing the decline of local services, dealing with fuel poverty, protecting the environment and obtaining greater involvement in civic activity. As part of the process they will also be able to formally request specific powers, currently held by national government, to be devolved to them. Government then has a legal duty to reach agreement with councils and the Local Government Association on how it will help them. Welcoming Hazel Blears? invitation to councils, Unlock Democracy?s Campaigns Director Ron Bailey said: ?The Sustainable Communities Act could not have come at a more crucial time. The global economic downturn will have a huge impact on our local communities. The government?s own advisers predict that recession will lead to a rise in criminal activity. Local high streets are likely to be decimated as stores are forced to close. ?If local communities are to weather this storm, they will need far more autonomy than they currently have. Local people are the experts on the problems of their areas and the solutions to them. Yet currently they are at the complete mercy of the global stock exchange. The Sustainable Communities Act will give real power to local people to protect and revive their areas.? Director of Unlock Democracy Peter Facey added: ?The Sustainable Communities Act is a unique piece of legislation. It became law as a result of an unprecedented bottom up campaign and creates an unprecedented bottom up way of redressing the creeping centralisation of successive governments. People have never felt more alienated from those who make decisions that affect their daily lives. Councils must opt into the Act to begin the fight back.? Originally a Private Members Bill introduced by Nick Hurd MP, the Sustainable Communities Act became law last November with full support from the Government and the Conservative and Liberal Democrat front benches. Then local government minister Phil Woolas described it as one of the most significant Private Members Bills of the past 40 years and said it could change the face of British politics.The day the music diedUKWatch.net - 15 Oct 2008And we all know the real song but we won’t sing along ‘cause our boyfriends and girlfriends and parents will say Don’t be a square, grow your hair and be happy It’s not god that made you this way – So lift up your top Lift up your top Lift up your top, got to use what you’ve got Try not to see anything but the fee It’s all tongue in cheek anyway! ‘Our Daughters Will Never Be Free,’ The Indelicates, 2008 We have a very short window in which to start asking some crucial questions about wealth and gender. We have a short window, whilst the FTSE and the Dow and the Nikkei buckle and collapse, to commit blasphemy. To say that the very nature of financial markets, of patriarchal capitalism itself, engenders ideological violence against women – and by association, men – everywhere. Fact: markets will seek to maximise profits. Fact: sexism sells. The image of the cackling city boy stuffing his bonus into a hooker’s disembodied garter – just the leg showing, never the face – has become one of the icons of hypercapitalist success. However you wrangle the incentives, an economic model spawned and nurtured in an atmosphere of male privilege will seek to make money by selling women’s bodies back to them, by selling them to other men, by exploiting women’s work and by hijacking femininity as a saleable commodity and nothing more. I remember the first time I met Ginger Spice. It was four years ago, and I was standing at the reception desk in the acute anorexia wing of a London mental hospital. I was there because there was nobody but my receptionist to watch me and make sure I took my meds and kept my meal supplements down, wearing a floppy hat and a tracksuit that flapped on the bent coat hanger of my body, drawing slogans to keep me occupied. And Geri Halliwell walked by. She was there to see the girl in the next room from mine, a friend and a fan. And my first thought was how very, very tiny she was ? barely five feet three in massive heels, dwarfed by shopping bags and a bunch of violent pink crepe-wrapped roses. Tiny and fragile-looking, all desperate smile and thin hair bleached back to its natural pale strawberry-blonde, Geri Halliwell had been in the press all year, and still is, thanks to a much-touted recovery! from anorexia, bulima and other lapses in celeb inscrutability. Through the haze of numb, sour fear that dogged those hospital days I remember thinking: that?s Ginger Spice. That pale, frantic creature is the same girl whose posters I had on my walls, whose feisty, pumped-up pop smashes were the first singles I ever bought with my pocket money. That?s Girl Power, right there. There it goes. How sad, and how empty it all seems now. In 1996, we were told that anything was possible. Girls were powerful! Girls were sexy! Girls were marketable! You could be anything you wannabeed! Fast forward twelve years and the record is scratched and broken, the Spice Girls themselves bleached by years of pap-dashes into wasted, desperate husks of the energetic, ballsy girls we once thought we knew. We made ourselves into products again the instant empowerment was wrenched away from the feminist movement and assaulted with price-tags, we were consumed; we consumed ourselves. Femininity was for sale, and too much of it made us sick. Sick of ourselves, sick of our lives, sick of looking forward to another twenty years of hard sell until we could no longer pretend that we were young and available and found ourselves consigned to the scrap-heap with the computer shells, splitting bin-bags and acid-leaking fridges. The year I started eating again – really eating, not just subsisting on crackers and tea – the sub-prime mortgages broke and the markets began to deflate like a balloon at the end of a long party. Right now, a loaf of bread costs more as a percentage of the average wage than it ever has. Groceries are getting harder for everyone to afford. We can no longer stuff ourselves with impunity, but right now, right this second, I feel something I spent my whole life missing. I feel something girlishly blasphemous and slightly obscene. I feel full. Shopping, preening, starving, serving, fucking. Five key activities for my generation of young women under capitalism. We were born in the shadow of Thatcher and taught to prepare ourselves not for productivity, but for producthood. We do not remember living through anything but boomtimes, but for us, money is still something we will not win without the trappings of servility; we came to learn that nothing sells better, or faster, than our bodies, and the better and faster we could cash in, the happier and worthier our lives would be – There’s no better example of the pitfalls of unregulated capitalism than the strange case of the 22-year-old woman, known by the pseudonym Natalie Dylan, who is selling her virginity in hopes of financing her college education. She wants to be a marriage and family therapist. This transaction is “capitalism at its best,” according to the manager of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch in Nevada, which is brokering the deal. He made the point on a TV show last week on which we both appeared as guests. I argued this is capitalism at its worst. You’ve got a desperate woman (she was allegedly defrauded out of a hunk of cash by her no-good dad); virtually no safety net if you’re poor; gargantuan college fees, thanks to little government assistance or regulation; and the perfect storm of circumstances that makes a young woman think it’s OK to sell her body. Scary? Yeah. Does it have to be this way? No. It’s about the morality of the market. Marian Meed-Ward, Kingston Whig-Standard, Ontario 25.09.2008 Maybe I’m a little biased, being accustomed to a student lifestyle and still having no job to lose- but I say let it all come down. Let the markets crash, and let the ugly arrogance of a society rent by the gashes of commodified gender come tumbling with them. So what if the glittering future that was promised to us as long as we behaved ourselves like good little girls has vanished? We may have been trained as hyper-consumers, but we don’t have to live that way. Let it all come down. Let’s see the arrogance of the testosterone-stinking trading floors thwarted and the altars of deregulated markets toppled: we don’t need the old gods and their archaic laws any more. Now that governments have intervened with basic financial packages to has save us from utter disaster, we can breathe a little easier – but the ideology of Western capitalism will never be the same again, and its discourses of gender are open to decimation. Bring it all down.Comment Is ClosedUKWatch.net - 15 Oct 2008MEDIA ALERT: INTELLECTUAL CLEANSING: PART 3 In Part 1 of this alert, we noted how journalists who threaten their employers’ interests – and the interests of their key political and corporate allies – tend to be unceremoniously dumped. We also described how the force of the law can be deployed to silence dissidents seeking to expose chronic media bias. In Part 2, we hosted journalist Jonathan Cook’s splendid analysis in response. Cook’s main point was that media managers rarely have to take such extreme measures because few journalists “make it to senior positions unless they have already learnt how to toe the line.” An interesting question arises, then, in the age of the internet: To what extent will these same ultra-sensitive media companies tolerate public criticism? For example, will they allow visitors to their websites to post material that is critical of their journalism, and perhaps even damaging to their interests? Last month, we tested the limits of dissent on the Guardian’s Comment Is Free (CiF) website. On September 20, we posted a message on CiF in response to an article written by Guardian journalist Emma Brockes. Brockes had commented wryly on Tania Head, a 9/11 survivor, “of whom it has been alleged that she was not on the 78th floor of the South Tower on September 11th as she claimed, but may have been in Spain at the time…” Brockes added: "But well below the level of mental illness a lot of low-level fakery is actively embraced and rewarded." (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/20/uselections2008.usa?commentpage=1&commentposted=1) We posted the following comment: “This is from the same journalist [Brockes] who wrote in October 2005: "’[Noam] Chomsky uses quotations marks to undermine things he disagrees with and, in print at least, it can come across less as academic than as witheringly teenage; like, Srebrenica was so not a massacre.’” In our post, we described Chomsky’s outrage at the suggestion that he had denied that the Serb killings of Bosnians at Srebrenica in 1995 constituted a massacre. In 2005, Chomsky wrote to us of Brockes’s article: “Even when the words attributed to me have some resemblance to accuracy, I take no responsibility for them, because of the invented contexts in which they appear… her piece de resistance, the claim that I put the word ‘massacre’ in quotes. Sheer fabrication.” Chomsky described his treatment by Brockes and the Guardian as "one of the most dishonest and cowardly performances I recall ever having seen in the media.” (See our media alerts: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051104_smearing_chomsky_the_guardian.php and http://www.medialens.org/alerts/05/051121_smearing_chomsky_the_guardian.php) We were interested to see how these comments would be received by the Guardian website. In the event, our message remained in place for 48 hours but was then deleted. The site moderator explained in an email: “The article that Medialens replied to was about emotional fakery and its role in American political culture. The comment that was removed did not address this topic but instead raised a past journalistic error by the author.” (Email to Media Lens, September 23, 2008) In fact, while Brockes had discussed emotional fakery, focusing on “self dramatisation”, she had also written: “fakery no less shameless goes on every day in the political debate and the way we the audience internalise it. McCain flatly contradicts himself within the space of a single day.” Political fakery and self-contradiction were exactly the themes of our post, but it was deleted as “off topic” by the Guardian gatekeepers. Only a handful of comments had been posted in response to Brockes’s article. When we and one or two other people posted messages protesting the deletions, these were also deleted and someone called the Community Moderator shut down the debate, writing: “This discussion will now close, as it has mostly been off topic.” A final message appeared: “Comments are now closed for this entry.” The website shows five messages deleted alongside just nine posts remaining. Other posts had been removed altogether: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/20/uselections2008.usa?commentpage=1&commentposted=1 Self-Deceits Held In Common – Groupthink We have seen how the propaganda system is filtered by a range of carrot and stick pressures: professional training, selection for obedience, promotions and demotions, sackings, legal pressures, and the rest. The final piece of the jigsaw is much more elusive and mysterious. In his book Vital Lies, Simple Truths, psychologist Daniel Goleman examined the human capacity for self-deception. According to Goleman, we build our version of reality around key frameworks of understanding, or “schemas”, which we then protect from conflicting facts and ideas. The more important a schema is for our sense of identity and security, the less likely we are to accept evidence contradicting it. Goleman wrote: “Foremost among these shared, yet unspoken, schemas are those that designate what is worthy of attention, how it is to be attended to – and what we choose to ignore or deny… People in groups also learn together how not to see – how aspects of shared experience can be veiled by self-deceits held in common." (Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths – The Psychology of Self-Deception, Bloomsbury 1997, p.158) Goleman concluded: "The ease with which we deny and dissemble – and deny and dissemble to ourselves that we have denied or dissembled – is remarkable." Psychologist Donald Spence noted the sophistication of this process: “We are tempted to conclude that the avoidance is not random but highly efficient – the person knows just where not to look.” (Ibid, p.107) This tendency to self-deception appears to be greatly increased when we join as part of a group. Groups create a sense of belonging, a “we-feeling”, which can provide even greater incentives to reject painful truths. As psychologist Irving Janis reports, the ‘we-feeling’ lends “a sense of belonging to a powerful, protective group that in some vague way opens up new potentials for each of them.” (Ibid, p.186) Members are thus reluctant to say or do anything that might lessen these feelings of security and empowerment. In this situation, even pointing out the risks surrounding a group decision may seem to represent an unforgivable attack on the group itself. This is ‘groupthink’. Individual self-deception, combined with groupthink, helps explain why journalists are able to ignore even the most obvious facts. In our September 16 Media Alert, we wrote that the Independent had devoted 153 words in the first two weeks of September to the flooding catastrophe in Haiti. By that time, 1,000 people were reported killed with 1 million made homeless out of a population of 9 million. (http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/080916_not_very_interesting.php) In response, the Independent’s former Washington correspondent, now Asia correspondent, Andrew Buncombe, wrote to us: Dear Davids, Hello and best wishes. Hope all is well. Your latest alert about Haiti is as thought-provoking as ever but I think there are a couple of clear errors you’ve made that ought to be cleared up. Firstly you say The Independent did not report the hurricanes raging down on the country and that "the Independent has not mentioned Haiti since September 5. But the paper has at least helped explain its own prejudice". That simple point clearly is not true. Guy Adams filed on September 7 a page lead pointing out the chaos facing untold thousands.http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/haiti-in-crisis-after-tropical-storm-claims-more-than-500-lives-921716.html But beyond that you also claim "This indifference has led to an appalling level of non-reporting, not just of the latest floods, but also of the killing of unarmed civilians by United Nations forces (Minustah), the Haitian National Police, and death squads". You say a raid in Cite Soleil in July 2005 was reported only by a few US newspapers but that is not the case. The Independent reported on the raid and revealed evidence collated by Kevin Pina that unarmed civilians were killed. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/peacekeepers-accused-after-killings-in-haiti-500570.html This was followed up in Feb 2007 by more details of civilians being killed by UN troops. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/civilians-caught-in-crossfire-during-portauprince-raids-434723.html You’re correct in saying that Haiti does not get as much coverage as the US but your claim that the paper has not reported on Haiti, its problems and its ongoing challenges is not true. A simple search on Google for articles about Haiti over the last few years would quickly show that. Best wishes, Andy Buncombe Andrew Buncombe Asia Correspondent The Independent We replied on September 21: Dear Andrew Many thanks for your email. You’re right about Guy Adams’ September 7 article. For some reason, that wasn’t picked up by our LexisNexis search. We note, though, that the piece devoted 360 words to the disaster in Haiti. At the time we wrote the alert, that figure could have been added to the 153 words mentioning Haiti in the paper that month. That would have totalled 513 words for a 16-day period when perhaps 1000 people died and utter catastrophe befell the island. You write: "You say a raid in Cite Soleil in July 2005 was reported only by a few US newspapers but that is not the case." In fact we weren’t commenting on UK reporting in that section. We were describing research presented in Dan Beeton’s report on US media performance: ‘Bad News From Haiti: U.S. Press Misses the Story.’ We wrote: "... only a few US newspapers mentioned the incident. These mostly portrayed the incident as a successful UN attempt to eliminate gang members – reports of civilian deaths were ignored. "The US press has given similar treatment to atrocities committed by the Haitian National Police." We thought it was clear that we were referring to Beeton’s analysis solely of the US press, but perhaps we could have been clearer. It’s hard not to reflect on the deeper significance of your response. You’re right that the Independent devoted 513 rather than 153 words to the devastation of Haiti from September 1-16. But, really, so what? Would you be focusing on this tiny difference in assessing the Independent’s performance if you were not working for the paper? Wouldn’t a dispassionate, rational observer join with us in criticising the Independent’s appalling indifference to the disaster this month rather than arguing that "your claim that the paper has not reported on Haiti, its problems and its ongoing challenges is not true"? We did not argue that the Independent has "not reported on Haiti". We argued that its performance, particularly this month in offering a few hundred words – less than one word per death – was pitiful. We have a great deal of respect for you. But isn’t your response on this occasion an example of a kind of corporate ‘groupthink’? Best wishes David Edwards and David Cromwell It is painful for a journalist to be aware of both his or her employer’s shortcomings and his or her powerlessness to remedy them. As Daniel Goleman has noted, “when one can’t do anything to change the situation, the other recourse is to change how one perceives it.” (Goleman, op. cit, p.148) This, finally, is the key human trait that enables "brainwashing under freedom" – journalists are able to perceive as important only that which allows them to thrive as successful components of the corporate system. The price is high, as Norman Mailer noted: "There is an odour to any Press Headquarters that is unmistakeable… the unavoidable smell of flesh burning quietly and slowly in the service of a machine." (Mailer, The Time of Our Time, Little Brown, 1998, p.457) SUGGESTED ACTION The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone. Write to Matt Seaton, editor of the Guardian’s Comment is Free website. Ask him why he rejected Greg Philo’s excellent piece. Email: matt.seaton@guardian.co.uk Write to the the Sunday Herald. Ask them why Martin Tierney will no longer be reviewing books for them: Email: letters@theherald.co.uk and books@theherald.co.uk Please send a copy of your emails to us Email: editor@medialens.org Please do NOT reply to the email address from which this media alert originated. Please instead email us: Email: editor@medialens.org This media alert will shortly be archived here: http://www.medialens.org/alerts/08/1015_intellectual_cleansing_part3.php The Media Lens book ‘Guardians of Power: The Myth Of The Liberal Media’ by David Edwards and David Cromwell (Pluto Books, London) was published in 2006. For details, including reviews, interviews and extracts, please click here: http://www.medialens.org/bookshop/guardians_of_power.php Please consider donating to Media Lens: http://www.medialens.org/donate Please visit the Media Lens website: http://www.medialens.org We have a lively and informative message board: http://www.medialens.org/boardSaudi Hosts Taliban Talks to Bolster PakistanAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008NATO Ships Head to Join Anti-Piracy OperationsAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008US Protests to Syria Over Detained JournalistsAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Zimbabwe Opposition Leader Pessimistic About TalksAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008India Ask UN for Strong Measures to Fight Al-Qaeda, TalibanAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008UK Government Considering Huge Telecoms DatabaseAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 200814 Accused of Sending Illegal Profits to MideastAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008US, Iraqi Negotiators Finalize SOFA, Pact Still Faces Long Road to Final ApprovalAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Nepali Police Detain 10 Over BlastAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Widow Says Husband’s Slaying Not Army’s FaultAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Russia-Georgia Talks Suspended Until NovemberAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Bomb Blasts Kills Three in Southeast NepalAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Damascus Says Lebanon, Syria Face Same ThreatAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008North Korea’s Seductress Spy Sent to PrisonAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Palestinian Group Threatens Israeli MinisterAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Israeli Arab Gets House Arrest for Yom Kippur DriveAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Thousands of Christians March in Jerusalem ParadeAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Iraq Finds 22 Bodies Dumped in Mass GraveAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Swede Killed by US Forces in Iraq: Swedish GovtAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008US Agrees to Limited Iraqi JurisdictionAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008UK General Says Iraq Has Not Sought Force RemovalAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008Australia Drops Legal Threat Against Iranian PresidentAntiwar.com - 15 Oct 2008 Pages: [1] 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 »    Previous Headlines October 2008Wed 15Tue 14Mon 13Sun 12Sat 11Fri 10Thu 9Wed 8Tue 7Mon 6Sun 5Sat 4Fri 3Thu 2Wed 1September 2008Tue 30Mon 29Sun 28Sat 27Fri 26Thu 25Wed 24Tue 23Mon 22Sun 21Sat 20Fri 19Thu 18Wed 17Tue 16Mon 15Site by Keyvan Minoukadeh |
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