Now the Israeli army is trying the same doomed tactic again. Ban the press. Keep the cameras out. By yesterday morning, only hours after the Israeli army went clanking into Gaza to kill more Hamas members – and, of course, more civilians – Hamas was reporting the capture of two Israeli soldiers. Reporters on the ground could have sorted out the truth or the lie about that. But without a single Western journalist in Gaza, the Israelis were left to tell the world that they didn't know if the story was true.

One of Nicolas Sarkozy's most visible, and most controversial, attempts to transform the French way of life will take effect from 8pm tonight. Advertising will vanish from prime-time on all state-owned television channels as part of an attempt by the President to create, in his own words, a public television service to "rival the quality of the BBC".

Pacifici explains that the Italian Jewish community agreed with the Israeli ambassador on keeping a "low profile"at this time. "I can assure you - writes Pacifici - that the decision to send medicine to Palestinian and Israeli children was taken only for media purposes, and was only used for our struggle which will start on Monday in the media to support Israel". Pacifici announces that on January 10th there will be a "mega-event" with 1,500 personalities chosen together with the Israeli ambassador in order to "explain Israel's reasons and its right to make this war".

Pacifici explains that the Roman Jewish community did not spend "even one Euro" for the medicine, which was donated by "an international Jewish organization" and guarantees that "in any case not one piece of medicine will get to Gaza unless it has been authorized by the Government of Israel".

George Galloway didn't do his usual Saturday night/Sunday morning radio show last night. He was swapped with another presenter without notice.

It is suspected that the pro-Israeli Lobby put pressure on Talksport radio (http://talksport.net)

Israel launched its much-anticipated invasion of Gaza on Saturday. For over a week, U.S. media had provided largely one-sided coverage of the conflict, with little editorializing or commentary arguing against broader Israeli actions.

Most notably, after more than eight days of Israeli bombing and Hamas rocket launching in Gaza, The New York Times had produced exactly one editorial, not a single commentary by any of its columnists, and only two op-eds (one already published elsewhere). The editorial, several days ago, did argue against the wisdom of a ground invasion - - but even though that invasion had become ever more likely all week the paper did not return to this subject.

Amazingly, the paper has kept that silence going in Sunday's paper, with no editorial or columnist comment on the Israeli invasion.

Even when tiny vulnerable Israel is not bombing one of it's neighbors into oblivion, it's not really difficult to detect a certain bias on the part of America's news media. You can tell this bias by that which is not covered. Like the Rosen-Weissman-AIPAC espionage trial over the past few years, for example, or their lack of interest in Ben-Ami Kadish's recent guilty plea for handing over America's nuclear secrets to the Apartheid State (Our tough as nails Zionist Attorney General apparently promised him if he pleaded guilty he wouldn't spend a day in jail). This bias was also apparent in its complete lack of interest in the Mossad movers, who were watching the hijackers prior to 9/11, but who neglected to tell us about them(the video they took of themselves in Liberty Park waiting for the first impact at the World Trade Center is now classified by our Government, but do you think they care?).

This article was sent to Debbie Ducro, a American-Jewish journalist with the Kansas City Jewish Chronicle. She published it, and was fired the next day.

If anybody harboured any illusions about the settler state of Israel, surely now those illusions must shattered as surely as the shattered bodies of Palestinian children are.

The question is, what can we do about it when we have a complicit government and a complicit media ganging up on our consciousness?

Israel launched the offensive after more than a week of Palestinian rocket fire that followed a six-month truce.

“Whenever Israel is bombing, it is hard to explain our position to the world,” said Avi Pazner, Israel’s former ambassador to Italy and France, and one of the officials drafted in to present Israel’s case to the world media. “But at least this time everything was ready and in place.”

For whenever the most powerful military power in the Middle East needs that extra boost of rocket-propelled propaganda, they turn to The Associated Press to make sure we “understand” it wasn’t really their fault. I call this phenomenon the “informational secondary explosion” — so-named after one of the IDF’s favorite explanations for why the accidental and unfortunate results of its heroic airstrikes ”appear to be“ so “collaterally damaging.”

Here’s how it works.

The first explosion is the initial, shocking account of the death of women, children, elderly, etc., and the obliteration of mosques, ambulances, universities, and such; while the crucial, secondary explosion is the unbiased, objective, conscientious, contextual background on the ”unintended recipients” of said fate.

The informational secondary explosion has the suggestive net effect of telling the reader: “See? It wasn’t all that bad. When you put 2 and 2 together you get — uh, well — legitimate targets!”

When Arianna nabbed $25 million from Oak Investment Partners, of Palo Alto, California, she was acquired by a financial network that also has significant investments in the Israeli arms industry – an industry, I might add, directly subsidized and controlled by the Israeli government. For example, Oak Investment has invested in IET/Intelligent Electronics, now morphed into Clickservice Software, an Israeli-based company that makes sophisticated weapons systems and sells them to clients such as "an unnamed Far Eastern country." Oak Investment partner Fred Harman now sits on the Huffington Post's board.

Case closed. Mystery solved.

Connecticut lawmaker Frank Nicastro sees saving the local newspaper as his duty. But others think he and his colleagues are setting a worrisome precedent for government involvement in the U.S. press.

So… the Israelis come out into international waters and scatter the waves with machine gun fire and then ram this boat, “Dignity” and some people are asking if it even happened or happened anywhere near the way they said it happened because Cynthia, you know, she likes to push policemen around and she’s got that 9/11 virus. Official sources say that this boat, which isn’t built for the job, took evasive action and that’s why it happened when …the boats that are designed for this sort of thing hit her. Later it was just called an accident that happened three times. The cool thing about dealing with reality instead of fiction is that you don’t have to stretch the truth cause the truth will just stretch itself to contain whatever's needed to prove once again that truth is stranger than fiction depending on your version of the truth.

The Associated Press Lies and Deceives While Defaming Islam and Christianity, in Its Latest Apologia for Israel’s Massacre on Gaza

As the media struggles to get up-to-date information, television news coverage is narrow, and often relies on interviews with Israeli government officials explaining why the killings are righteous and legitimate expressions of democracy and freedom, more and more people are turning to online news sites (like WRH) for their war coverage.

The Israeli military has therefore announced that online media and the blogosphere are another warzone for the military to manage.

Despite international outcry over escalating violence, the U.S. mainstream media continues to privilege a prepackaged narrative in which Israel's actions are never disproportionate, never counterproductive and certainly never gratuitous. According to the mainstream media, the U.S. must continue uncompromisingly supporting Israel because the allegedly beleaguered democracy is held hostage by monomaniacal Islamofascists who are inherently evil. Promoting a paradigm in which Israel is always David up against Goliath, the U.S. media presents suffering Palestinians as expendable for the greater cause of Israel winning its epic struggle. To justify U.S.'s carte blanche to Israel, the mainstream media restricts American readers to an echo chamber in which the following claims are repeated ad nausem until they are mistaken for fact:

“Americans like their wars movie length and with a happy ending,” Mr. Boettcher said. “If the war drags on and there is no happy ending, Americans start to squirm in their seats. In the case of television news, they began changing the channel when a story from Iraq appeared.”

The Internet has surpassed newspapers as the main source for national and international news for Americans, according to a new survey.

The Internet has surpassed newspapers as the main source for national and international news for Americans, according to a new survey.

Brzezinski says the incident happened as she waited for a car to pick her up for the 6 a.m. broadcast. She says she was embarrassed by what happened and complained the bell desk should have been paying attention.

If your TV screen goes blank Wednesday afternoon, don't panic—it's only a test.

Martin supports a-la-carte programming, while the cable industry opposes it. Under a-la-carte programming, cable customers could pick which channels they want rather than pay a flat rate for a bundle of stations.

At first blush, the idea sounds like a good one that could give customers more choice and allow for lower bills. But in reality the logistics of customizing every subscriber's cable package and bill would likely drive up prices. At the same time, many of the smaller niche channels would disappear for lack of subscriber interest, resulting in fewer choices.

Conventional wisdom holds that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald ordered the FBI to arrest Rod Blagojevich before sunrise Tuesday in order to stop a crime from being committed. That would have been the sale of the Senate seat vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

The US newspaper industry is in a full-blown crisis that has seen its business model dynamited by technology and its dwindling prospects threatened by the financial meltdown, which has, in effect, forced advertising revenue off a cliff.

"What's black and white and completely over?" Stewart asked viewers of his popular mock news television show on Comedy Central.

"Newspapers!"

Planet P. Cockburn is particularly interesting to the curious observer, because of its elliptical orbit around both state-corporate media and the alternative ones and because of its influence on people and events.

Appeared in the Counterpunch Galaxy, Total Defeat for U.S. in Iraq - It's All Spelled Out in Unpublicized Agreement, dazzles as a star: "America's bid to act as the world's only super-power and to establish quasi-colonial control of Iraq, an attempt which began with the invasion of 2003, has ended in failure."

This Caylee story must be one of the most important events in the world. Why else would the news channels spend so much time on it?

I heard that in another part of the world there are also a few children dying. Starving, blown to bits or from lack of medical care.

Now where is that place? The talking heads are silent on it so it's easy to forget. The budget must be tight because I don't think Gretta has been sent there. Not newsworthy I suppose.

Oh yeah, I remember now, someplace called Gaza.

"The term "Islamophobia" refers to hostility toward Islam and Muslims that tends to dehumanize an entire faith, portraying it as fundamentally alien and attributing to its followers an inherent, essential set of negative traits, such as irrationality, intolerance and violence....

If the printed page dies, there is no denying that the fatal wounds have been self-inflicted. There was an elitist smugness even in the press boxes of the 1960s, when Howard Cosell was just a radio nobody hustling for interviews in clubhouses filled with sports writers who treated him like a wad of gum stuck to the soles of their Florsheims. One of my early idols, Dick Young, railed at TV crews trolling for sound bites on his clubhouse turf. And this was before the Internet had a name or an existence.

Tribune Co. - the US publisher, broadcaster and owner of the LA Times and Chicago Tribune - is preparing to file for bankruptcy protection.

Across the United States, more than 30 daily newspapers are for sale, and buyers are scarce.

From Los Angeles to New York, leading newspapers have slashed newsrooms with buyout offers, and when those failed to reach budget-cutting goals, with layoffs.

The newspaper industry has been caught in a tailspin for three years, a trend variously blamed on plummeting ad revenues, declining readership, growing competition from the Internet and a deepening national recession.

Used to doling out a steady diet of bailout propaganda on a daily basis, CNN bosses were probably not amused when Schiff started to blame the government’s obsession with rescuing failed companies for the deepening severity of the economic crisis.

CNN, the Cable News Network, announced yesterday that it will cut its entire science, technology, and environment news staff, including Miles O’Brien, its chief technology and environment correspondent, as well as six executive producers.

The saddest news of the TV week is Fox's announcement that it is canceling its entire Saturday morning cartoon slate in favor of infomercials.

Hold on there, Baba Looey! This represents to me the elimination of one of the last vestiges of innocence and idealism left in the medium.

After brazenly declaring that the Mumbai attacks were the work of Al-Qaeda, the corporate media has been forced to backtrack, while India continues to blame Pakistan in a dangerous escalation of rhetoric between the two nuclear-armed powers.

Bellicose propaganda about Bin Laden being behind the massacre, which was initially propagated by the BBC, London Times and Fox News amongst others, has largely evaporated, with the majority of the establishment press being forced to admit they have no idea who was behind the siege on India’s financial capital.

CN8, the East Coast regional television network run by Comcast Cable, will shut down by year's end, resulting in the loss of local news programs and sports coverage for millions in New Jersey.

At its peak in 2004, the company's combined stock value was more than $2 billion. On Friday, Lee's combined stock value was $64 million -- teetering on the brink of being de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange. The exchange de-lists if a company's value drops below $25 million or if its stock value stays below $1 for a month. Lee's stock closed Friday at $1.42 and has dipped as low as $1.07 this year.

If you invested $1,000 in Lee shares at the peak, that original investment, excluding dividends, would be worth $29 today.

Iran has categorically rejected a report in the New York Times which accuses the country of having enough nuclear fuel to make nuclear weapon.

Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Ali Asghar Soltaniyeh, said that the report was unjustified and politically motivated, Press TV reported.

"The allegations are aimed at misleading the public and have no technical basis," Soltaniyeh said.

The New York Times cited a nuclear expert as saying that the amount of low enriched uranium at Iran's disposal could help Iran to make nuclear bomb.

Arianna Huffington looks set to cement her position as the Queen of Capitol Hill in the next few days.

The Times has learnt that the Huffington Post, her influential political website, will confirm within the next week that it has completed a $15 million (£10 million) fundraising from investors.

The money will finance the expansion of HuffPo, as it is known, into the provision of local news across the United States and into more investigative journalism. And it will ensure that Ms Huffington's influence continues to spread across the US political scene.

An influential psychiatrist who was the host of the popular NPR program “The Infinite Mind” earned at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007 giving marketing lectures for drugmakers, income not mentioned on the program.

The psychiatrist and radio host, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, is the latest in a series of doctors and researchers whose ties to drugmakers have been uncovered by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Dr. Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is the first news media figure to be investigated.

The US media distinguishes itself by obeying the guiding hand of
neglect when it comes to ignoring issues detrimental to corporate
interests. Here is an overview from the Real News Network.

As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover.

With newspapers cutting back and predictions of even worse times ahead, Rupert Murdoch said the profession may still have a bright future if it can shake free of reporters and editors who he said have forfeited the trust and loyalty of their readers.

Israelis are accustomed to violence with their Palestinian neighbors but have traditionally felt relatively safe from violent crime. In recent years, however, mob wars also have plagued Israeli towns and cities.

Rival underworld gangs have waged bloody battles for control of gambling and protection rackets, including one involving bottle recycling.

They target each other with bullets, bombs and even anti-tank missiles in violence that has killed dozens of gangsters and at least eight bystanders in the last three years. Monday's noontime attack was by far the most high-profile to date.