04.04.14
Spin Watch: ‘WikiLeaks’ Forum, Transparency, Disappearing Aircraft, Tobacco, and BBC
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WikiLeaks-Forum: Who’s Who?
Regrettably, the owner of WikiLeaks-Forum strives to manipulate public opinion in several ways with the help of his staffers. The forum pretends to host lively discussions of a huge community while in fact most of the forum posts (more than 90 percent) are done by staffers.
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The Republican Street Fight Over Transparency in Government
Several in the GOP want to stop a request for scientists to disclose financial conflicts in their research. What good reason could they possibly have?
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Disappearing Aircraft
I had fairly well concluded that the most likely cause was a fire disrupting the electrical and control systems, when CNN now say the sharp left turn was pre-programmed 12 minutes before sign off from Malaysian Air Traffic control, which was followed fairly quickly by that left turn.
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How Big Tobacco’s lobbyists get what they want from the media
Almost everything is fake. The brave proverbs with which we were brought up – the truth will out, cheats never prosper, virtue will triumph – turn out to be unfounded. For the most part, our lives are run and our views are formed by chancers, cheats and charlatans. They construct a labyrinth of falsehoods from which it is almost impossible to emerge without the help of people who devote their lives to navigating it. This is the role of the media. But the media drag us deeper into the labyrinth.
There are two kinds of corporate lobbyists in the UK. There are those who admit they are lobbyists but operate behind closed doors, and there are those who operate openly but deny they are lobbyists. Because David Cameron has broken his promise to shine “the light of transparency on lobbying in our country and … come clean about who is buying power and influence” we still “don’t know who is meeting whom. We don’t know whether any favours are being exchanged. We don’t know which outside interests are wielding unhealthy influence … Commercial interests – not to mention government contracts – worth hundreds of billions of pounds are potentially at stake.” (All that was Cameron in 2010, by the way) At the same time, the media is bustling with people working for thinktanks which refuse to say who is paying them, making arguments that favour big business and billionaires.
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The BBC, not its young viewers, might be the biggest losers when BBC3 goes
The channel has made an extraordinary connection with its target audience of 16- to 34-year-olds. Its closure could alienate a generation