Stalin through the journalism of his time: H.R. Knickerbocker’s interview with Ekaterina Geladze; Gareth Jones’s exposé of the Holodomor; W.E.B. Du Bois’s homage to a freedom fighter; and Raymond Aron’s optimism in 1956. Internazionale Storia 5 (2023) On the 70th anniversary of Stalin’s death, a special issue of Internazionale looks at the life and significance of the… Read More ‘The end of the big lie’
By Liam Barrett In an interview for the Guardian last week, MSNBC broadcaster Mehdi Hasan launched a broadside against Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Fox is less of a news channel, Hasan said, than “a propaganda arm of the Republican Party.” Hasan accused Murdoch of overseeing the “degradation of our democracy and media.” His criticisms mirror a general distrust of the mainstream… Read More Rupert Murdoch’s press empire is a threat to democracy
NB: A young friend has brought to my notice what this gizmo says about me – its a farrago of lies and half truths. This machine makes me two years older than I am (which is old enough thank you); and attributes to me new-age kind of mumbo-jumbo statements which I have never made. ChatGPT… Read More Noam Chomsky says ChatGPT is a form of High-Tech Plagiarism
RAMZY BAROUD ( Middle East Monitor ) – On 20 February, the United Nations Security Council approved a statement, described in the media as a ‘watered-down’ version of an earlier draft resolution which would have demanded that Israel “immediately and completely cease all settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territory.” The intrigues that led to the scrapping of what was meant… Read More The Words the Western Press are too Cowardly to Use about Israel’s Occupation of Palestine: War Crimes, Crimes against Humanity, Apartheid
From visa uncertainty to deportation threats, foreign correspondents recount in surveys how Modi government is making it harder for them to report from India. Arunabh Saikia India’s tax crackdown on the BBC, weeks after it aired a documentary critical of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has made news around the world. But foreign correspondents based in… Read More How the foreign press is being silenced: The Foreign Correspondents’ Club
Kenan Malik In January, the BBC broadcast a two-part series, India: The Modi Question, which looked forensically at the role of Narendra Modi in fomenting the Gujarat anti-Muslim riots of 2002 in which at least 1,000 people were killed. Now the prime minister of India, Modi was then the chief minister of Gujarat. The response in… Read More India enjoyed a free and vibrant media. Narendra Modi’s brazen attacks are a catastrophe
Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Delhi Since Modi came to power in 2014, some journalists and other media workers have alleged that a systematic silencing of critical reporting has taken place and that journalists have been targeted as “anti-national” threats to the state. In this year’s World Press Freedom Index, India dropped down to 150 out of 180 countries,… Read More Indian journalists say BBC raid part of drive to intimidate media
By Oliver Darcy, CNN Business Fox News has been exposed like never before. A trove of newly-released text messages and emails have laid bare how the right-wing media giant operated with little regard for fact in the weeks and months following the 2020 presidential election. The correspondence reveals that the network’s senior-most executives and highest-profile hosts chose not… Read More Fox News has been exposed as a dishonest organization terrified of its own audience
Guardian revelations about the scale and reach of deliberate misinformation prove the need to reset our internet Peter Pomerantsev In 1996, John Perry Barlow, former lyricist for the Grateful Dead and guru of Silicon Valley’s hippy-tech idealists, wrote a stirring utopian manifesto about the future of the internet. Addressing the leaders of the world order gathered… Read More The web is a Blade Runner nightmare, but there is a way to stem the tide of lies
Hannah Ellis-Petersen BBC offices in India have been raided by tax department officials, just weeks after the release of a documentary critical of the prime minister, Narendra Modi, which was later blocked by the government. According to those working at the broadcaster, more than a dozen officials from the country’s income tax department turned up at… Read More BBC offices in India raided by tax officials amid Modi documentary fallout
After the truth-shower 