by Propaganda
The Ottawa Citizen dutifully reported this fact regularly in covering highly controversial matters such as the location of a proposed casino in Ottawa, but if the public was outraged about this conflict, I failed to read about it in the Ottawa Citizen or in the Ottawa Sun for that matter. Godfrey had been CEO of Sun Media until 2000 when Quebecor acquired the chain and he left that position. When Kathleen Wynne became premier of Ontario in February 2013 in a minority Liberal government, she very soon dismissed Godfrey, the rest of the OLGC board then resigning, after strong political opposition to the board’s policies had become manifest. An incidental effect was the removal of Postmedia Network’s conflict of interest. See
www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/story/2013/05/16/olg-paul-godfrey.html>.
36 Edward Herman and Robert McChesney, interview, Z Magazine, October 1997;
37 Gutstein.
38 See
throttle-canadian-internet-connections>.
39 See
40 See
throttle-canadian-internet-connections>.
41 Ralph Nader, interview, The Bay Guardian, May 26, 2000. Nader is referring in this quote to the media circus surrounding the trial of football star O.J. Simpson for the murder of his wife and her friend; the return of young Elián Gonzales to his father in Cuba after his mother drowned attempting an illegal entry into Florida, where her relatives tried to keep him; and the sexual affair between Washington intern Monica Lewinsky and US president Bill Clinton.
42 Carey.
43 See, for example, William Greider, Who Will Tell the People? (New York: Simon and Schuster, Touchstone, 1992) Chapter 17; or Greider, One World, Ready or Not (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997) passim.
44 Richard Patten, “Democracy in Ontario: Fade to Black,” Ottawa Life (March 2000): 23.
45 Lawrence Martin provides an overview of such opinion among the political left and right in
theglobeandmail.com/commentary/our-new-normal-the-mockery-of-democracy/article4564647/>.
46 McChesney, “Salvaging Political Culture.”
47 Here I can bring some of my own experience to bear. I started a “Propaganda and Media” bulletin board on the National Capital Freenet in its early days and saw it grow to a participation of about 60 or more, who visited the site over 500 times a week. With the advent of numerous blogs, on-line newspapers and magazines, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest of the social media, this particular initiative went into steep decline. There were and are too many other competing interactive sites engaged in exposing mainstream media deceptions.
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A partial list, in no particular order, might include Truthout, Consortium News, Common Dreams, Reader Supported News, AlterNet, TruthDig, TomDispatch, Fact Check, Al Jazeera, The Nation, Straight Goods, Rabble, Unsilent Generation, and much else.
48 Greider, Who Will Tell the People?
49 McChesney, “The Internet and US Communication Policy-Making in Historical and Critical Perspective.”
50 When I typed in “NSRA” to various search engines, I came up with the Tennessee National Street Rod Association, the National Shoe Retailers Association, and the Norfolk Squash Rackets Association.
Someone looking for the Non-Smokers Rights Association might well give up, although in some search engines it was not far down the list of entries. When I typed in “Non Smokers Rights” (without adding
“Association”), I got a New York City group called CLASH who are actually a group opposed to controls on tobacco; there was no mention of the Canadian Non-Smokers Rights Association.
51 See for background
exclusive_julian_assange_on_wikileaks_bradley>.
52 Quoted in Blake Harris, “The Geopolitics and Cyberspace,” Infobahn (“The Magazine of Internet Culture”)
53 “Bush ‘IQ’ Study Bogus,” Ottawa Citizen, September 7, 2001: A15.
54 For the record, the US National Transportation Safety Board concluded in a final report in August 2000
that “the probable cause of the accident was an explosion of the center wing fuel tank, resulting from ignition of the flammable fuel/air mixture in the tank. The source of ignition energy for the explosion could not be determined with certainty, but, of the sources evaluated by the investigation, the most likely was a short circuit outside of the CWT (center wing fuel tank) that allowed excessive voltage to enter it through electrical wiring associated with the fuel quantity indication system.” See the NTSB website, specifically
com/news/business/html98/twa_19991209.html> and
TWA800Missile000716.html>, but the links have been broken.
55 Chafee 494.
56 “Navy Captain Faces Pornography Charge,” cbc.ca, June 11, 2004;
story/2004/06/11/navyporn_040611.html>.
57 See
com/5887140/everyones-trying-to-track-what-you-do-on-the-web-heres-how-to-stop-them>.
58 See Daniel J. Solove, “Digital Dossiers and the Dissipation of Fourth Amendment Privacy,” University of Southern California Law Review 75 (July 2002): 1083-1168.
59 See Leo Lehtiniemi’s 2002 submission to the Department of Justice on behalf of the Civil Liberties Association, National Capital Region,
60 Sean MacBride, Many Voices, One World: Towards a New More Just and More Efficient World Information and Communication Order (Paris: International Commission for the Study of Communication Problems, 1980).
61 John Seigenthaler of NBC told a meeting of the Radio-Television News Directors Association in Minneapolis, September 2000, that “It’s no secret that all news media suffer from a loss of credibility” and added that the public often considers the credibility of journalists to be on par with auto dealers and politicians; see
62 My own such account was published in
63 See for example
64 Jeffrey Simpson, “So Who’s Using the Internet? Political Junkies,” Globe and Mail, August 9, 2000.
65 These were listed, with percentage of adult use, as Facebook, 66%; LinkedIn, 20%; Twitter, 16%; Instagram 12%; Pinterest, 12%; and Tumblr, 5%.
66
67 Daniel Ellsberg: “There has been a concerted attempt to paint Bradley Manning as a terrorist and traitor. He is neither. He is a patriotic American who deserves better than to be tried in the media ... before he has had any opportunity to speak publicly for himself or to present his own case in court.” As quoted CHAPTER 8: PRoPAgAnDA , DEMoCR ACy, AnD THE InTERnET 343
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in Greg Mitchell’s Blog in The Nation, February 21, 2011:
WikiLeaks-news-views-blog-tuesday-day-87>.
68 See Bill Keller, “The Boy Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” New York Times Magazine, January 30, 2011.
69 News-Max.com, July 31, 2010,
gingrich-treason/2010/07/31/id/366209>.
70 “Flanagan Regrets WikiLeaks Assassination Remark,” CBC News, December 1, 2010,
news/politics/story/2010/12/01/flanagan-wikileaks-assange.html >.
71 See Tom Curry, “McConnell Optimistic on Deals with Obama,” MSNBC, December 5, 2010,
msnbc.msn.com/id/40517039/ns/politics/40516927.msnbc.com> 5.
72 See Potter, Deadly Spin, for a good insider’s view on workings of this kind as they relate to the medical insurance business.
73 See Michael Yeo, “Propaganda and Surveillance in George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’: Two Sides of the Same Coin,” Global Media Journal, Canadian Edition 3, no. 2 (2010): 49-66.
74 My judgment is based largely on analyses by Robert Parry in Consortium News, whose accounts I have found to be more consistent, well-grounded, and to stand up better in the test of time than the official narratives he so often opposes. See, for one among many of his relevant columns on “Plamegate,”
consortiumnews.com/2010/111410a.html>. There are many contrary accounts referenced in Wikipedia, under “Joseph C. Wilson” and “Plamegate,” and the reader can make up his or her own mind on who to believe. See, as one example, Rem Rieder’s article, “October/November Preview: Whatever” in American Journalism Review, August/September 2006,
plamegate-finale-we-were-right-they-were-wrong#axzz2WnTVLug7>.
75 For a fuller ethical treatment of aspects of this subject, see my “Propaganda and the Ethics of WikiLeaks,”
Global Media Journal—Australian Edition 5-1 (2011): 50-57.
76 See Chapter 4, p. 171f for Whately’s analysis.
77 Gerald M. Craig, ed., Lord Durham’s Report (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart: 1963) 29-30.
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