Lies, d..n lies and media headlines

In a society which is driven by news headlines, we are being fed a diet of media distortion which is taking us back into the Germany of the 1930s.

by Watchman

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed.?" Mark Twain

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." George Orwell

"The truth is rarely pure and never simple." Oscar Wilde

"The history of our race, and each individual's experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal." Mark Twain

"Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them 'pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing ever happened." Sir Winston Churchill

In his prize-winning book entitled 'From Beirut to Jerusalem', Thomas Friedman, the American journalist and former Middle East Bureau Chief for the New York Times, recounts a meeting in the mid 80s with a top official of the PLO. When ushered into the latter's office, Friedman discovered that the militiaman had a copy of every news piece that Friedman had sent back to his head office in America. Though the message to the journalist was implicit it was also very powerful: "Ensure you report in our favour if you want to keep in touch with the news and stay healthy."

"Did you catch my spontaneous action; or do you need me to run it for you again?"

Journalists, news publishers and broadcasters are obliged – either by intimidation or the prospect of being 'cut off' from their sources – to report what the well-honed Palestinian media operatives want the world to see and hear. This is not such a huge problem if alternative news reports are also available: but they are not. And the great danger, in a frenzied world of information overload, is that opinion is formed by headlines and pictures from a single source and perspective.
As one Middle East journalist remarked:
"The natural tendency of the media is to gravitate toward the sources that are most obvious and available. Tyrants and terrorists like Saddam Hussein, Slobodan Milosevic, and Osama Bin Laden learned to welcome reporters - to stage media events, some of them horrific in nature. The possibilities available to them for distortion, manipulation, and disinformation are growing."

The power of control over the media has been evidenced when the occasional piece of news has 'slipped out' through the censoring filter - the lynching of two Israeli soldiers in 2000, and the pictures of Palestinians dancing in the streets when the Twin Towers fell in 2001. How quickly - having once been flashed across our screens - did these reports and pictures disappeared. The media fell into line.
Regarding the lynching event on 19/10/00, an Italian reporter released a film of the two Jewish reserve soldiers who took a wrong turn into Ramallah and were savagely murdered, then thrown out of a first-floor window and mutilated by the mob, with the Palestinian Police looking on.
The TV station was threatened by Arafat's team so the media boss wrote a letter of apology, disclaiming credit and blaming others. Films shot by other film crews were confiscated at the point of a gun by Arafat's media-wise terrorists who were on the spot to insure such footage did not reach the public.
With persistent drip-drip effect of media bias, we are now in a situation in the West which is similar to that pertaining in Germany in the early 1930s.
Inverness High Street - Saturday, 17 January, 2009

Athough there have been many public displays of support for Israel (which are very seldom reported), there has been widespread protests against Israel's attacks on the Gaza terrorist groups. (And of course fighting a guerilla war amongst a civilian population who are being used as human shields, will, inevitably and very sadly, result in civilian casualties).
The Jews are once again being demonised by the media, and there are now strong indications that the churches - at a corporate level - are rapidly becoming part of the establishment chorus of anti-semitism.

Melanie Phillips is a columnist for the Daily Mail and frequent TV panellist. She has recently written of "Britain's surrender" in her column for the European edition of the Wall Street Journal...
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Britain’s surrender

Wall Street Journal (Europe), 20 January 2009

In Britain, the war in Gaza has revealed the extent to which the media, intelligentsia and political class have simply crumbled in the face of the global jihad.
The U.K. is a major player in European and world politics and is America’s most significant strategic ally. Until now, it has been considered one of Israel’s firm supporters and a linchpin of the Western defense against the world-wide Islamist onslaught. With the reaction to Gaza, however, that reputation is no longer sustainable.
Years of demonizing Israel and appeasing Islamist extremism within Britain have now coalesced, as a result of the media misrepresentation of the Gaza war as an atrocity against civilians, in an unprecedented wave of hatred against Israel and a sharp rise in attacks on British Jews.
Throughout the war, London’s streets have witnessed a hallucinatory level of violent and explicit support for Hamas from Muslims, members of the far left and supposedly progressive individuals.
Night after night, Israel’s embassy in well-to-do Kensington found itself under violent siege. Demonstrators attempted to storm the building, howling their support for the terrorist body whose genocidal intentions toward Israel and the Jews necessarily includes killing every one of the occupants inside.
Certainly, there have been anti-Israel protests around the world. But in Britain, not only have these been particularly violent but the authorities have done nothing to stop such incitement of hatred.
Read on.....
(Author: Watchman)

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