TYT isn't asking the right questions.

Why isn't there a financial blockade on New York Times, Guardian, and Der Spiegel?

Who are wikileaks' funders, past and present?

How much does it cost to run a website that stopped accepting submissions years ago, and only hosts text and a few video files that are actually published by surrogates?

Why not use other funding methods? There's plenty of other payment processors and p2p solutions. Funny there's been a financial blockade in the US on online gambling for 5+ years, but you can find a way to send and receive funds if you really want to.

Must-read articles:

New York Times: Attorney General of N.Y. Is Said to Face Pressure on Bank Foreclosure Deal
Glenn Greenwald @ Salon: Obama administration takes tough stance on banks
Matt Taibbi @ Rolling Stone: Obama Goes All Out For Dirty Banker Deal
Yves Smith @ naked capitalism: Corrupt Obama Administration Pressuring New York Attorney General to Support Mortgage Whitewash

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/16/us/16quartzsite.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23

A short article in the New York Times about this situation.

>> ^bcglorf: It seems silly, the link is to the page you are reading now!
Here's the quotes for the benefit of others so there's no risk of anyone falling for your foolishness.
1. I claimed You dismiss everything from CNN, BBC and citizen journalism all as pro American fabrications.
You've said the following to support this claim:
Unbiased? So no mainstream news media then? Which covers the CNN and BBC claim.
Of course they're blaming Assad, that's what foreign-funded activists are paid to say. Which covers the citizen journalism side.
2.I claimed You dismiss everything from Al Jazeera as American funded propaganda.
You've said the following to support this claim:
Al Jazeera is state owned by Qatar, the same government sending weapons to Libya's Benghazi rebels (al-Qeada) Seems that Al Jazeera is sinful by association with Qatar, which is supporting the Benghazi rebels like a good American puppet. For those new to this, the Al Qaeda claim is not only taking Gadhafi at his word, it is also stated in the belief that America or it's evil puppet masters support Al Qaeda, making Qatar's support of Al Qaeda proof it's all still part of the conspiracy.
Suffice it to say, you've soundly rejected Al Jazeera as biased against the Syrian public and part of some foreign sourced insurrection there.
3.My last claim was You ACCEPT everything from Bashir Al-Assad's regime's media outlets as truth.
You've said the following to support this claim:
Well to be fair, I'm pretty sure they kicked out all foreigners. Can't really blame them when Foreign Intelligence members are the main instigators of the rebellions.
And the best gem of them all:
The truth is we don't know who is killing the civilians.
All you seem to know is that Assad is the one making sure everyone is silenced and that no information gets out. How convenient you can then throw up your hands and say we just don't know who is killing who.
The truth is survivors and defectors that escape are all telling the same story, Assad's men are killing unarmed civilians and are shooting any soldiers refusing to fire on the unarmed civilians as well.




I didn't dismiss anything. Earlier in the thread, I made a dig at mainstream media in general when ali wanted an "unbiased" source. I've posted links from Reuters, Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, so you're not making any fucking sense.
And as far as "Assad's regime's media outlets", I have no idea what you're talking about.

In wars and armed conflicts you never know all the facts. You shouldn't accept any report from any news source at face value unless you can corroborate it with other sources. Even then you're likely only getting part of the truth. Al Jazerra repeatably makes disclaimers in this video that they don't know the facts.

Given the circumstances and Assad's short history, I don't buy that he's ordering his army to open fire on civilians. Al Jazerra nearly always has a pro-Western spin and given the fact that Qatar is openly supporting NATO in Libya, they are clearly going to be biased when reporting on Syria. There's little credibility to anything they choose to broadcast on the subject.

There was a story about a month ago or so, where the Syrian army was ambushed in one city and something like 120 army servicemen killed. Did unarmed civilians do that? I also remember first hearing about civilians being killed by snipers that were part of Assad's "secret police". So I guess it could be Assad's men, but why would he use covert police AND the military? Doesn't make any sense. The more likely scenario is that foreign agents dressed as Assad's security force are opening fire on civilians. They're probably even doing it behind the backs of the activists they recruited and organized to protest.

But even if it is Assad that's gunning down civilians, it's not our fight. It's an internal conflict. Aiding one side or the other only brings about wider conflict with more fighting and more death.

Are these also Assad's forces shooting indiscriminately from inside this car?

Full Disclosure always helps.


Thom Hartmann is the #1 progressive radio talk show host in the US

New York Times:

Lawrence Mishel, Heidi Shierholz and Kathryn Edwards, all of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, are three such economists, and they have laid out their arguments against structural unemployment in a report released today.


How to Identify Liberal Media Bias

>> ^nock:

Just erase the nytimes.com cookie in your browser and the counter resets.


If logging in, use bugmenot.com.

Remember that golfer with the big ears elected by the perpetually-fooled in 2008? His lapdog media's been lying about a "recovery" for some time now. 22% unemployment, gas and food through the roof, hyperinflation.

Palin couldn't fk things up any more than the thugs in power now. You may not know it, but the leftmedia knows she can beat His Earness next year, and so the hammering continues...

It's too bad we can't always have a brilliant genius like Joe Biden in high office, or this clown:

"Who are these people????" --supergenius Al Gore at Monticello (Jefferson's home) just before the 1992 inauguration, with news reporters present, pointing to busts of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin (New York Times, January 17, 1993)

What your really saying is people don't have rights to restrict their property. I would like to use your house for my parties from now on then. Once again, you don't have a right to the internet just like you don't have a right to the New York Times. This entire argument is flawed. If people want to restrict access to their pipes, then that is their shallow grave. Consumer retaliation can be strong, devastatingly so. (Just ask Time Warner)

I mean, it isn't like everyone has internet. Go up to some rural mountain areas and you can't get it during the winter at times. And I am not just talking about broadband, I am talking about the internet. Are their first amendment rights being violated? Not being able to consume a product you desire has nothing to do with rights, at all. No one owes you speech, that is something you owe yourself.

I think your heart is in the right place on this, I think your demands are completely unreasonable, and in the end, lead down a path I don't think you desire. Does the FCC create free speech on TV? Or does it take an active role in making sure things aren't said? Same with the radio, are they handing out tickets for people not being expressive enough, or expression something they don't want heard? You really, really, really, don't want governments deciding how content is delivered on the internet...you really don't.

http://www.hacer.org/chile/?p=22

Naomi Klein’s disastrous yet popular polemic against the great free market economist.

In the future, if you tell a student or a journalist that you favor free markets and limited government, there is a risk that they will ask you why you support dictatorships, torture, and corporate welfare. The reason for the confusion will be Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

In a very short time, the book has become a 21st-century bible for anticapitalists. It has also drawn praise from mainstream reviewers: “There are very few books that really help us understand the present,” gushed The Guardian. “The Shock Doctrine is one of those books.” Writing in The New York Times, the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz called it “a rich description of the political machinations required to force unsavory economic policies on resisting countries."

Klein’s basic argument is that economic liberalization is so unpopular that it can only win through deception or coercion. In particular, it relies on crises. During a natural disaster, a war, or a military coup, people are disoriented, confused, and preoccupied with their own immediate survival, allowing regimes to liberalize trade, to privatize, and to reduce public spending with little opposition. According to Klein, “neoliberal” economists have welcomed Hurricane Katrina, the Southeast Asian tsunami, the Iraq war, and the South American military coups of the 1970s as opportunities to introduce radical free market policies. The chief villain in her story is Milton Friedman, the economist who did more than anyone in the 20th century to popularize free market ideas.

To make her case, Klein exaggerates the market reforms in question, often ignoring central events and rewriting chronologies. She confuses libertarianism with the quite different concepts of corporatism and neoconservatism. And she subjects Milton Friedman to one of the most malevolent distortions of a thinker’s ideas in recent history.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703411304575093572032665414.html

What Chile did have was intellectual capital, thanks to an exchange program between its Catholic University and the economics department of the University of Chicago, then Friedman's academic home. Even before the 1973 coup, several of Chile's "Chicago Boys" had drafted a set of policy proposals which amounted to an off-the-shelf recipe for economic liberalization: sharp reductions to government spending and the money supply; privatization of state-owned companies; the elimination of obstacles to free enterprise and foreign investment, and so on."

In left-wing mythology—notably Naomi Klein's tedious 2007 screed "The Shock Doctrine"—the Chicago Boys weren't just strange bedfellows to Pinochet's dictatorship. They were complicit in its crimes. "If the pure Chicago economic theory can be carried out in Chile only at the price of repression, should its authors feel some responsibility?" wrote New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis in October 1975. In fact, Pinochet had been mostly indifferent to the Chicago Boys' advice until the continuing economic crisis forced him to look for some policy alternatives. In March 1975, he had a 45-minute meeting with Friedman and asked him to write a letter proposing some remedies. Friedman responded a month later with an eight-point proposal that largely mirrored the themes of the Chicago Boys.

For his trouble, Friedman would spend the rest of his life being defamed as an accomplice to evil: at his Nobel Prize ceremony the following year, he was met by protests and hecklers. Friedman himself couldn't decide whether to be amused or annoyed by the obloquies; he later wryly noted that he had given communist dictatorships the same advice he gave Pinochet, without raising leftist hackles.

As for Chile, Pinochet appointed a succession of Chicago Boys to senior economic posts. By 1990, the year he ceded power, per capita GDP had risen by 40% (in 2005 dollars) even as Peru and Argentina stagnated. Pinochet's democratic successors—all of them nominally left-of-center—only deepened the liberalization drive. Result: Chileans have become South America's richest people. They have the continent's lowest level of corruption, the lowest infant-mortality rate, and the lowest number of people living below the poverty line.

Wow.
I recognize the downtown buildings from some images over at the New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/

>> ^mgittle:

>> ^MaxWilder:
What is the difference between "whistle blowers" and WikiLeaks???
Each one makes claims and provides what evidence they have available, as a last resort because normal channels aren't working.
It blows my mind that these people are talking like they are different things. Wikileaks just gives whistle blowers a platform to be heard.

They are different things. There is a legal difference. If you leak classified documents in the US, that is a punishable offense because you probably signed some contract saying you wouldn't leak things in order to be able to get a classified clearance of some kind. If you report to others information that has been leaked by a whistleblower, that falls under freedom of the press and is not punishable by law.
That's why the US gov't is trying to hard to find evidence that Julian Assange coerced Bradley Manning into leaking classified information...to connect Assange to a crime. You say "Wikileaks just gives whistleblowers a platform"...yeah, so do all sorts of news organizations. Trade any news source with "Wikileaks"...try your sentence out with "New York Times", for example.
Don't ask a rhetorical question when you don't already know the answer.


Sorry, I didn't make my baffled outburst clear. The assholes claiming that WikiLeaks is a bad thing both support whistle blowers as a necessary measure when all normal channels to right a wrong have been attempted.

Is it not patently obvious to anybody that WikiLeaks is the worlds biggest supporter of whistle blowers? Is it not further patently obvious that shutting down WikiLeaks would make it harder for whistle blowers to get the attention they need? Therefor how could any sane person support one and not the other? (Rhetorical question. Answer: they can't. They are hypocrites and liars.)

Edit: I hasten to add that I have no problem with an open investigation to confirm that Assange was not colluding with those who are breaking the law in gathering the information. That is something that could happen to any news organization, and is fairly reasonable when the release is as significant as those diplomatic cables. But the public harassment is absurd.

>> ^MaxWilder:

What is the difference between "whistle blowers" and WikiLeaks???
Each one makes claims and provides what evidence they have available, as a last resort because normal channels aren't working.
It blows my mind that these people are talking like they are different things. Wikileaks just gives whistle blowers a platform to be heard.


They are different things. There is a legal difference. If you leak classified documents in the US, that is a punishable offense because you probably signed some contract saying you wouldn't leak things in order to be able to get a classified clearance of some kind. If you report to others information that has been leaked by a whistleblower, that falls under freedom of the press and is not punishable by law.

That's why the US gov't is trying to hard to find evidence that Julian Assange coerced Bradley Manning into leaking classified information...to connect Assange to a crime. You say "Wikileaks just gives whistleblowers a platform"...yeah, so do all sorts of news organizations. Trade any news source with "Wikileaks"...try your sentence out with "New York Times", for example.

Don't ask a rhetorical question when you don't already know the answer.

Main stream media outlets like these, you mean?

The Washington Post
The New York Times
Forbes
Forbes 2
USA Today
Wired News
>> ^Xaielao:

Why is the main stream media ignoring all of this information? This is a huge news story!

I don't understand why there have to be perfect villains and perfect heroes. Assange is flawed and his own agenda, the New York Times is flawed and has its own agenda.

I suggest going back and listening to this "news report" again with a critical ear. It is a smear piece, with loaded language, and is in no way a piece of journalism. It has its own personal agenda to stir up feelings rather than report on facts.

I am deeply sick of the whole trumped up drama.

edit: By the way, the title of this vid is more trumped up drama. I avoided watching it for a long time, but finally caved in to Top 15 peer pressure. But I'm not down voting. I'm just annoyed.