Paul Waldie has another report on the Global Conference on Media Freedom in the Globe and Mail today. Once again, we need not invoke the name "Assange" in covering a conference on "press freedom" in London, because after all, Assange is not a journalist.
Instead, we meet Maria Ressa, whose plucky anti-Duterte website "The Rappler" is fast becoming a darling of the mainstream "press freedom" warriors. Oddly enough, up until Duterte's election in 2016, nobody in the capitals of the West ever gave a shit about democracy or the lack thereof in the Philippines, let alone how free the press might be there.
So what changed with the election of Duterte? He's threatened to follow an independent foreign policy and forge better relations with Russia and China. That's why "democracy" and a "free press" in the Philippines are suddenly top of mind.
Waldie informs us that a Pierre Omidyar "charity" has taken Ressa under it's wing. Omidyar is the billionaire founder of eBay, and, like so many of his billionaire buddies, has taken to investing his spare time and spare hundreds of millions dabbling in politics and journalism.
A quick scan of his Wikipedia page reveals that Omidyar has lots of fun collaborations with like-minded super-rich. He's on the advisory board of Berggruen Institute, a vanity project of billionaire Nicolas Berggruen, son of billionaire art dealer Heinz Berggruen and fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations, the grand-daddy of America-uber-alles think tanks.
He also funds, along with George Soros and others, the Poynter Institute, a non-profit "journalism" school which recently provided the public with a list of over five hundred "fake news" outlets. Alas, their list was quickly exposed as being fake news, and was taken down in a matter of days, in a replay of the Washington Post's (another billionaire plaything) ProporNot scandal.
Waldie quotes Ressa as claiming that Google and Facebook are "the real threats to media freedom because they've provided an accelerant for populism to take hold across Europe and Asia." Nevertheless, a few paragraphs later we learn that Ressa is now "working with Facebook in the Philippines."
So apparently that plucky website The Rappler has Facebook AND a bunch of billionaires in its corner. That should give Ressa the immunity card she needs to take on Duterte.
As for Facebook, let's not forget they were also a partner in the Integrity Initiative, a UK government attempt to shape what "news" your eyes get to light on. Ironically, the Integrity Initiative was exposed by RT and Sputnik - the two media outlets banned from the Global Conference on Media Freedom in London, because they "spread disinformation."
So, did I get to the bottom of the bullshit? Hell no!
But I think I can make a preliminary conclusion about the Global Conference on Media Freedom. When the likes of Jeremy Hunt, Chrystia Freeland, and Facebook are looking out for media freedom, at a conference where uttering the name of Assange is verboten, it's probably already too late.
Showing posts with label Paul Waldie. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Paul Waldie. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 10, 2019
Protecting "media freedom" while burying Assange
I notice that CBC is reporting on the "Faux Free Press Conference" in London while dutifully avoiding any mention of Julian Assange. Paul Waldie managed the same disappearing trick while writing about the conference in the Globe and Mail yesterday.
Jeremy Hunt has made no secret of his contempt for Assange. The kind of "free press" being celebrated in London is the kind that sticks to authorized government-approved talking points. Rogue journalists who reveal government lying and criminality are not "real" journalists at all and must face the full force of the law.
It's interesting to see that the Russian news sites Sputnik and RT have been banned from the conference for spreading disinformation about the Skripal affair. That's unintended confirmation that those outlets probably came a lot closer to the "truth" of that debacle than anything you might find in the Telegraph or the Guardian.
That ban is also sweet revenge of sorts for Chrystia Freeland, who was quick to blame "Russian disinformation" when the true story of her family's collaboration with the Nazis emerged (the actual real Nazis marauding all over Europe 75 years ago - not the wannabes supposedly lurking all over the internet today).
It's hard to fault RT for their response to the ban;
"It takes a particular brand of hypocrisy to advocate for freedom of press while banning inconvenient voices and slandering alternative media."
Jeremy Hunt has made no secret of his contempt for Assange. The kind of "free press" being celebrated in London is the kind that sticks to authorized government-approved talking points. Rogue journalists who reveal government lying and criminality are not "real" journalists at all and must face the full force of the law.
It's interesting to see that the Russian news sites Sputnik and RT have been banned from the conference for spreading disinformation about the Skripal affair. That's unintended confirmation that those outlets probably came a lot closer to the "truth" of that debacle than anything you might find in the Telegraph or the Guardian.
That ban is also sweet revenge of sorts for Chrystia Freeland, who was quick to blame "Russian disinformation" when the true story of her family's collaboration with the Nazis emerged (the actual real Nazis marauding all over Europe 75 years ago - not the wannabes supposedly lurking all over the internet today).
It's hard to fault RT for their response to the ban;
"It takes a particular brand of hypocrisy to advocate for freedom of press while banning inconvenient voices and slandering alternative media."
Saturday, April 22, 2017
Why I drag my feet
I drag my feet over all kinds of shit.
Just as a for instance, I've had my doctor hounding me about a colonoscopy for years. Ain't gonna happen. There are just some things you don't have to know. If my bowels are indeed consuming themselves from the inside out, what good does it do to know this?
Sure, you could "take measures."
That tends to involve hugely invasive medical procedures that will a) make the payments on my doctor's BMW for several years, and b) completely destroy my quality of life.
So I'll take the quality of life, and the quality of mine is pretty damned good, thank you very much.
Just this afternoon me and the Farm Manager were sitting out in front of the barn, out of the wind. Every now and then a car goes by, but most of the time all you hear is the wind in the trees and the birds singing to one another.
Once in awhile an airplane flies over. I've used the Flight Tracker website enough now to know roughly where they're coming from and where they're going.
The northwest to southeast flights are usually heading to Toronto from points west in Canada.
The southwest to northeast flights are usually heading to Europe from somewhere in middle America. From Chicago to virtually any European destination takes you right over Falling Downs. So does Los Angeles to Zurich or London. Those are the ones where you wonder who's on that airplane.
It's not just passenger jets flying over. This afternoon I saw a red-tail hawk swing by with a couple of small birds in hot pursuit. They were mightily pissed, and Mr. Hawk was doing his best to evade them, without a lot of luck.
Quality of life.
Not much in my Globe and Mail today. Paul Waldie brought me up to speed on that French election. Apparently the far-left fringe candidate Melenchon is a communist and wants to align France with Venezuela. That's the take on the French election from Canada's newspaper of record.
I pity the poor folks who rely on the Globe for their news. They don't actually send Waldie to Europe to "research" this shit, do they? That was about as lame a take on the French election as anyone could possibly imagine. An unpaid intern with an interest in politics could easily put together a more informative article from a computer terminal in their local public library in Toronto.
If you want some insight into the election in France, don't read the Globe and Mail, read this instead.
Chloe is the real reason I drag my feet. She's the cat I got out of the clinic where Karla Homolka worked. She's got to be twenty years old by now. She has outlived all the dogs we've ever owned; Buddy, Charlie, Gus, Roxy, Peaches... and she's on track to outlive the two hounds at Falling Downs today, Boomer and Lucy.
For the first fifteen years of our life together she studiously avoided me. The last few years she's really warmed up, to the point where she follows me around from morning till night. She's literally under my feet every moment of the day.
I drag my feet to avoid stepping on her.
Tomorrow we're off to the city to move Junior out of residence at U of T. He's studying economics...
Where did I go wrong?
Just as a for instance, I've had my doctor hounding me about a colonoscopy for years. Ain't gonna happen. There are just some things you don't have to know. If my bowels are indeed consuming themselves from the inside out, what good does it do to know this?
Sure, you could "take measures."
That tends to involve hugely invasive medical procedures that will a) make the payments on my doctor's BMW for several years, and b) completely destroy my quality of life.
So I'll take the quality of life, and the quality of mine is pretty damned good, thank you very much.
Just this afternoon me and the Farm Manager were sitting out in front of the barn, out of the wind. Every now and then a car goes by, but most of the time all you hear is the wind in the trees and the birds singing to one another.
Once in awhile an airplane flies over. I've used the Flight Tracker website enough now to know roughly where they're coming from and where they're going.
The northwest to southeast flights are usually heading to Toronto from points west in Canada.
The southwest to northeast flights are usually heading to Europe from somewhere in middle America. From Chicago to virtually any European destination takes you right over Falling Downs. So does Los Angeles to Zurich or London. Those are the ones where you wonder who's on that airplane.
It's not just passenger jets flying over. This afternoon I saw a red-tail hawk swing by with a couple of small birds in hot pursuit. They were mightily pissed, and Mr. Hawk was doing his best to evade them, without a lot of luck.
Quality of life.
Not much in my Globe and Mail today. Paul Waldie brought me up to speed on that French election. Apparently the far-left fringe candidate Melenchon is a communist and wants to align France with Venezuela. That's the take on the French election from Canada's newspaper of record.
I pity the poor folks who rely on the Globe for their news. They don't actually send Waldie to Europe to "research" this shit, do they? That was about as lame a take on the French election as anyone could possibly imagine. An unpaid intern with an interest in politics could easily put together a more informative article from a computer terminal in their local public library in Toronto.
If you want some insight into the election in France, don't read the Globe and Mail, read this instead.
Chloe is the real reason I drag my feet. She's the cat I got out of the clinic where Karla Homolka worked. She's got to be twenty years old by now. She has outlived all the dogs we've ever owned; Buddy, Charlie, Gus, Roxy, Peaches... and she's on track to outlive the two hounds at Falling Downs today, Boomer and Lucy.
For the first fifteen years of our life together she studiously avoided me. The last few years she's really warmed up, to the point where she follows me around from morning till night. She's literally under my feet every moment of the day.
I drag my feet to avoid stepping on her.
Tomorrow we're off to the city to move Junior out of residence at U of T. He's studying economics...
Where did I go wrong?
Saturday, December 3, 2016
Propornot?
Made a point of getting into town bright and early, in hope of avoiding last Saturday's debacle.
It worked! I got my weekend newspaper for ten bucks minus a handful of change... and there was nothing in it!
Well, that's not quite true. Mark MacKinnon had pretty much the entirety of the "Focus" section to himself for a major, and I mean major, effort about the origins of the Syrian "civil war." Most of his salient points about the actual origins were spelled out well over four years ago in this story, but he did have some original insights into what's become of the protagonists since then.
I was cheered to see a little less Trump this week. That's almost unfortunate after Trump moots a guy nick-named "Mad Dog" for SecDef.
I'm gonna have to re-see "Idiocracy" again before I make up my mind on that one... introducing your new Secretary of Defence, Mad Dog Mattis!
Get the fuck outta here!
But my actual propornot moment came when I read a story by Paul Waldie, who is apparently the Globe's "European correspondent." That's in addition to MacKinnon traipsing around Europe for months updating a story from 2012.
No wonder I'm paying over five bucks for my newspaper!
Anyway, Waldie gets pretty much a whole page in the first section to pontificate on what's wrong with France. Seems the French are mightily pissed with those gosh-darned socialists who have ruled the roost since 2012. They are yearning for the freedom and prosperity that only a right-wing government can bring.
I know this because nowhere in the story is there any hint whatsoever that there exists a substantial polity to the left of the so-called Socialists of Hollande.
Hollande and his party are "left" in the same sense that Hillary's Democratic Party is "left." As in, not really.
In the last French election the Left Front and a couple of fringe left parties garnered about 15% of the popular vote. By now, anybody who expected "left" policies from the centre-rightist "socialist" Hollande will be thoroughly disillusioned.
Will those voters swing right or swing to the real left? I'm guessing most of them will go to the left.
Even if only half of the ten million voters who marked their ballots for Hollande on the last go-round retreat to the real left, the real left becomes a real threat in the upcoming election.
Not a hint of that in Mr. Waldie's story.
Why? I'm guessing it's because the billionaires who own popular media world-wide would rather not broadcast the fact that there is such a thing as a "real" left.
And Waldie correctly surmises that it's better to tell half the story and keep a full paycheque, than to tell the whole story and have no paycheque.
It worked! I got my weekend newspaper for ten bucks minus a handful of change... and there was nothing in it!
Well, that's not quite true. Mark MacKinnon had pretty much the entirety of the "Focus" section to himself for a major, and I mean major, effort about the origins of the Syrian "civil war." Most of his salient points about the actual origins were spelled out well over four years ago in this story, but he did have some original insights into what's become of the protagonists since then.
I was cheered to see a little less Trump this week. That's almost unfortunate after Trump moots a guy nick-named "Mad Dog" for SecDef.
I'm gonna have to re-see "Idiocracy" again before I make up my mind on that one... introducing your new Secretary of Defence, Mad Dog Mattis!
Get the fuck outta here!
But my actual propornot moment came when I read a story by Paul Waldie, who is apparently the Globe's "European correspondent." That's in addition to MacKinnon traipsing around Europe for months updating a story from 2012.
No wonder I'm paying over five bucks for my newspaper!
Anyway, Waldie gets pretty much a whole page in the first section to pontificate on what's wrong with France. Seems the French are mightily pissed with those gosh-darned socialists who have ruled the roost since 2012. They are yearning for the freedom and prosperity that only a right-wing government can bring.
I know this because nowhere in the story is there any hint whatsoever that there exists a substantial polity to the left of the so-called Socialists of Hollande.
Hollande and his party are "left" in the same sense that Hillary's Democratic Party is "left." As in, not really.
In the last French election the Left Front and a couple of fringe left parties garnered about 15% of the popular vote. By now, anybody who expected "left" policies from the centre-rightist "socialist" Hollande will be thoroughly disillusioned.
Will those voters swing right or swing to the real left? I'm guessing most of them will go to the left.
Even if only half of the ten million voters who marked their ballots for Hollande on the last go-round retreat to the real left, the real left becomes a real threat in the upcoming election.
Not a hint of that in Mr. Waldie's story.
Why? I'm guessing it's because the billionaires who own popular media world-wide would rather not broadcast the fact that there is such a thing as a "real" left.
And Waldie correctly surmises that it's better to tell half the story and keep a full paycheque, than to tell the whole story and have no paycheque.
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