The dysentery of the $10 million-a-year journalist: Brian Williams back story

The anchor and managing editor of NBC Nightly News, which CBC News describes, in all seriousness, “as one of the most respected TV news organizations in the world.” The media is in a tizzy, flabbergasted about the lies and “memory loss” of a colleague, whom they present as a lone journalist.

NY Post – Williams claimed to have gotten dysentery from drinking floodwater and seeing dead bodies float past his hotel in the New Orleans French Quarter while covering Hurricane Katrina.

However, the The New Orleans Advocate noted that the French Quarter was not flooded and quoted a local health expert who did not recall anyone getting such a stomach ailment.

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Freedom of the Press, US style: How to drive a colleague to his grave and sleep easy at night

On the collaboration of American monopoly journalists. “The fact that the Contras were the CIA’s army, and not, say, the Bolivian secret service’s army, was crucial to understanding the story – and therefore Webb’s attackers did everything they could to obscure this point.” JIM NAURECKAS*

Gary Webb

Ryan Grim’s 2009 book This Is Your Country on Drugs–recently excerpted in the Huffington Post (10/10/14)–sheds light on the establishment media’s 1996 effort to discredit Gary Webb’s Contra crack revelations (“Dark Alliance,”San Jose Mercury News, 8/18-20/96) by talking to some of the key players. As depicted in the new biopic Kill the Messenger, other journalists’ attacks on Webb cost him his job, and after being run out of the profession he loved, in 2004 he apparently took his own life. But the people who wrote those attacks sleep very well, they want you to know–it’s an object lesson in how to do bad without feeling bad.

The short, happy Iraq War of Howard Kurtz – war criminal

By FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting)*

AS THE world marks the sixth anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, corporate media’s most prominent journalism critic is wondering if Barack Obama’s Iraq policy isn’t being sufficiently scrutinized. As Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz asked recently on his CNN program (3/15/09): “What about the previous president? I mean, he famously landed on that aircraft carrier, declared ‘Mission Accomplished,’ and we’re still there. Could journalists be falling into the same trap of taking a president’s word about Iraq at face value?” (Oddly, FAIR does not mention the name of the program or that Kurtz has been host of CNN’s weekly program Reliable Sources since 1998 – TS.)

It’s a good question to ask –  but is Kurtz really the best person to ask it? In the heady days of “post-war” Iraq, Howard Kurtz went out of his way to criticize those journalists who didn’t adopt Bush’s short-sighted optimism about the “success” of the invasion.

The return of PSYOPS

U.S.military’s media manipulation in advance of the recent attack on Fallujah demands more investigation, says FAIR, the media watchdog group

THE Los Angeles Times revealed this week (12/1/04) that the U.S. military lied to CNN in the course of executing psychological warfare operations, or PSYOPS, in advance of the recent attack on Fallujah. This incident raises serious questions about government disinformation and journalistic credibility, but recent discussions of the government’s propaganda plans have excluded some valuable context.

On the role of the media to facilitate the disinformation of the U.S. state

Three items on a U.S. psychological operation suppressed by the American monopoly media and obviously never mentioned on “Reliable Sources,” CNN’s own media monitoring program hosted by Howard Kurtz. (Postscript: In May 2013, Kurtz, the American journalist who publicly defended the war on Iraq on CNN along with a legion of generals parading as “analysts” as the bombs began to fall on Baghdad, was cashiered by Newsweek from The Daily Beast, allegedly over his boneheaded reporting about gay basketball star Jason Collins.)

Why were government propaganda experts working on news at CNN?

By FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting)* 

(March 27, 2000) – REPORTS in the Dutch newspaper Trouw (2/21/00, 2/25/00) and France’s Intelligence Newsletter (2/17/00) have revealed that several officers from the US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) Group at Ft. Bragg worked in the news division at CNN’s Atlanta headquarters last year, starting in the final days of the Kosovo War.