Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years). Follow her on Twitter @EvaKBartlett
Sunday, June 27, 2021
Boston Globe Columnist Stephen Kinzer on Honest Content and The State of Journalism Today
No name recognition there yet..you might want to get to know him and find out more information
BLOGGER NOTE: Your MesaZona blogger was at-a-loss-for-words-today, taking liberty to extract and re-arrange some material from this Op-Ed
‘Many US commentators have never BEEN to countries they comment on, see entire world from Washington perspective’ – Stephen Kinzer
By Eva Bartlett
"Much of Western media is a mixture sensational accusations and fear mongering. It is difficult to find perspective divorced from U.S. foreign policy, American journalist Stephen Kinzer has told RT.
I asked the author and journalist Stephen Kinzer how the corporate media came to be so devoid of honest content and discussed the rise of censorship by Big Tech.
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“The job of journalists is to rebel against the narrative. We are out there as the eyes and ears of the world. If you don’t want to do it, fine, but don’t pretend that you’re doing it, and sit in your little cubicle and think of the stereotypes you’ve been fed and just regurgitate them. That is not journalism, it’s just public relations.”
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He started as an independent journalist in Central America in the mid-70s, when few journalists were going there, later reporting from Central Asia, Turkey, the Caucasus, and Europe.
“I’m sometimes asked why I developed a different perspective on the world than many other people who comment in the American press,” he told RT. “I always seem to be the skunk at the foreign policy garden party. Why is that?
“Upon reflection, I think it has to do with the way that I learned about the world. Many people who write about the world in the United States learned about the world the same way: they went to international relations schools, they went to work on congressional staffs, then they worked at think tanks. And they’re very steeped in this Washington-centric view of the world.”
Unlike such journalists and commentators, Kinzer learned journalism by going places and writing firsthand what he saw and heard. According to Kinzer, there are many qualifications for being a journalist that are much more important than what school you went to or what you studied.
“The most important one is independent thinking. The great curse of our press in the West is willingness to accept the official narrative,” he said. In his view many American journalists are merely stenographers. “They’re sitting down at a press conference, they write down what some government spokesman says, then they go and print that in a newspaper. . .
“And when you want to have a story that’s very well-sourced, they call the State Department, and the Defense Department, and several think tanks, and some congressmen. And they think, ‘Well I sure covered the landscape on this one!’”
But that, Kinzer argues, is not what covering the landscape is about.
“The great qualification you need for a journalist is the confidence to go out and see for yourself, and believe that your eyes are actually telling you more than press releases from some other country. . .
“It’s truly amazing, I’ve seen the decline of this profession into such willing subservience. We don’t have any core of regular columnists or people trying to challenge established narratives. We do have voices that pop up periodically, but they’re so drowned out by the regular columnists who just voice the same tropes over and over again,” Kinzer said.
“The intellectual laziness of the American press in covering the world has never been as extreme as it is now.
In the past several years, there has been an increase in social media giants deciding what content is acceptable and what “violates” so-called “community standards.” Commenting on the matter, Kinzer said that “the power of private companies to decide what people see and don’t see is greater now than ever.”
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Not-Quite-Ready for The Dustbin-of-History: So it went and Here it Goes
Like they say Time is the Great Equalizer. . .Look back and look ahead and sometimes it all appears in a rear-view mirror glancing at the road ahead
FROM TECHDIRT > from the so-it-went department
This Week In Techdirt History: June 20th - 26th
Five Years Ago
This week in 2016, the Supreme Court was chipping away at the Fourth Amendment while the FBI was continuing to use its bad facial recognition database and getting away with problematic warrants and hacking — and congress was seeking to legalize more FBI abuses (in an attempt that narrowly failed).
The DOJ was fighting against privacy advocates, and CIA director John Brennan was bizarrely claiming that only the US had encryption technology.
We were also disappointed to see Twitch bring CFAA and trademark claims against bot operators.
Ten Years Ago
This week in 2011, Righthaven was losing lawsuits left and right, and the CEO was not taking it well. Sony was fighting against PS3 modding and Microsoft was claiming it could use the DMCA to block competing Xbox accessories, while Universal launched a war on popular hip-hop sites and blogs, which even swept up 50 Cent's own website. A new court filing explained how ICE's domain seizures violate the First Amendment, while Senator Leahy was praising the agency's initiative. We also took a look back at the many things that people thought would kill the music industry in both the analog and digital eras.
Fifteen Years Ago
This week in 2006, the NY Times was in the midst of one of its many paywall experiments while the LA Times was subjecting reporters to stifling web filters. Blockbuster was fighting against Netflix's patents while GoDaddy was sued over a patent on server auto-configuration. We wrote about how ISPs were screwing everyone, and how their cooperation with the NSA was boosting the encryption market. Meanwhile, social media sites were booming but struggling to figure out how to make money, and of course still facing a variety of vague freakouts.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Lessons Learned: License-To-Practice Law Suspended In New York State For Trump's Personal Attorney For Lying
Sooner - rather than later - not telling-the-truth can topple aspirations for higher office.
It was not just one "Big Lie" that took Rudy down. . .The same State that turned both former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Real Estate Titan Donald Trump loose on America and the world has taken action against one of the two. It remains to be seen who's next.
It’s a good thing that some institutions, at least, are finally asserting the authority they have to protect this country from the damage wrought by Trump’s and Giuliani’s big lie.
INSERT:
The Ruling Suspending Rudy Giuliani’s Law License Is Kind of Hilarious
Back in November, four top scholars on legal ethics argued in Slate that it was time for courts and state bar organizations to start disciplining lawyers who were pushing Donald Trump’s big lie that the 2020 election had been stolen from him.
A little more than seven months later, a committee of five judges from the Appellate Division of the New York Supreme Court, First Judicial Department, has unanimously suspended Rudy Giuliani’s legal license pending a disciplinary hearing for false claims he made about election fraud as part of his representation of Trump.
Thursday’s ruling is unsparing, with the five judges concluding
. . .there is uncontroverted evidence that [Giuliani] communicated demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers and the public at large in his capacity as lawyer for former President Donald J. Trump and the Trump campaign in connection with Trump’s failed effort at reelection in 2020.
Here are some of the most ridiculous of Giuliani’s suspension-worthy antics, as documented by the five-judge committee: Here's just one relating to Arizona
> Rudy Said Tens of Thousands of Undocumented Immigrants Voted in Arizona
At various points, Giuliani said 10,000, 32,000, or 250,000 undocumented immigrants voted in Arizona in the 2020 election. From the ruling: On their face, these numerical claims are so wildly divergent and irreconcilable, that they all cannot be true at the same time. Some of the wild divergences were even stated by respondent in the very same sentence.
. . .As the judges took pains to note—and in spite of their maybe inadvertently hilarious presentation—this is actually no laughing matter. In their conclusion, they pointed to audits “that arise from the narrative of a stolen election” going on around the country and laws proposed to restrict the vote based on that narrative as major ongoing harm that Giuliani and his cohort continue to cause.
“One only has to look at the ongoing present public discord over the 2020 election, which erupted into violence, insurrection and death on January 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol, to understand the extent of the damage that can be done when the public is misled by false information about the elections,” the judges wrote.
It’s a good thing that some institutions, at least, are finally asserting the authority they have to protect this country from the damage wrought by Trump’s and Giuliani’s big lie.
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Here's a replay from the home-town NY Daily News
POLITICS
New York Daily News Flips An Old Rudy Giuliani Boast To Oprah Winfrey Back On Him
The former New York mayor is getting what he deserves, the tabloid’s editorial board declared in a scathing column about the suspension of his law license.
The New York Daily News editorial board on Friday highlighted former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s fall from grace with something he once told Oprah Winfrey.
In a scathing essay responding to the suspension of Giuliani’s law license for promoting the election lies of his former client, ex-President Donald Trump, the newspaper’s board recalled Giuliani telling Winfrey years ago that he “always tried to be honest when communicating with people.
But “that man is dead and buried,” said the board.
“Words have consequences, especially for attorneys,” the board noted.
“Rudy knew the rules, and he broke them again and again, spouting lies about the November election,” it said. “Nor is this some case of broken windows ethical policing; the calumnies were as big as they come, about a subject as consequential as they come.”
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Here are more news stories
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Saturday, June 26, 2021
Former U.K. Health Secretary Matt Hancock Resigns After Snockering Incident in Elevator
Another day + another episode caught-on-cam in The Land of Government Hypocrisy
UK Health Secretary Matt Hancock resigns after Covid rule-breaking kiss caught on camera 
26 Jun, 2021 17:25 / Updated 4 hours ago
British Health Secretary Matt Hancock has resigned. Hancock was caught on CCTV footage released this week kissing an aide, in breach of his own social distancing guidelines and his marital vows.
Hancock announced his resignation on Saturday, apologizing again for breaking social distancing rules, and to his family for “putting them through this.”
“We owe it to people who have sacrificed so much in this pandemic to be honest when we have let them down as I have done by breaching the guidance,” a statement by Hancock read.
BREAKING: Matt Hancock resigns - full statement: 👇 pic.twitter.com/9BkS0iPhsr
— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) June 26, 2021
A day earlier, The Sun published still images from CCTV footage showing Hancock embracing and kissing aide Gina Coladangelo, a married lobbyist who he had promoted to a paid position last year.
Shortly after the written statement, Hancock posted a video message to Twitter. "Those of us who make these rules have got to stick by them and that's why I've got to resign," he said.
— Matt Hancock (@MattHancock) June 26, 2021
Hancock had apologized on Friday for breaking the social distancing guidelines he helped draft, and said he was “very sorry” for letting the country down. Prime Minister Boris Johnson accepted Hancock’s apology, with Downing Street deeming the “matter closed” later that day.
However, calls for his sacking proliferated in the media and online, especially given the fact that Hancock backed the resignation last year of Professor Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist and government adviser who was caught breaking quarantine to meet with his married lover.
The resignation comes after multiple Conservative MPs broke ranks on Saturday and added their voices to the chorus demanding Hancock step down.
Hancock is married with three children, and wrote in his resignation letter that he needs “to be with my children at this time.” . . .
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