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Thanks to the urge to be constantly wired, extremist propaganda is becoming easier and easier to feed to the masses; the industrial food system has a single aim—make CEOs and shareholders rich; meanwhile, legalizing gay marriage may make it more difficult for LGBT activists to effectively fight other types of discrimination. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Apr 5, 2013
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 Sony Pictures Classics
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By Sheerly Avni — How did Gael García Bernal, an outspoken leftist who has played Che Guevara not once, but twice, end up starring in a film that would appear, on the surface at least, to be a celebration of 20th century free-market economics?
Posted on Mar 23, 2013
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Even though drones are killing more civilians in Pakistan than terrorist leaders, they play no role in the U.S. presidential campaigns; California passes a bill legalizing self-driving cars; meanwhile, millionaires like Mitt Romney perpetuate the rags-to-riches tale by denying their roots. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on Sep 27, 2012
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 ssoosay (CC BY 2.0)
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Over the last decade, New Yorker columnist Malcolm Gladwell has managed to metamorphose from a trained shill for Big Tobacco, Big Pharma and the deregulatory movement into an intellectual darling of mainstream “liberal” America. How did he do it?
Posted on Jun 21, 2012
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By David Sirota — Desperate to cobble a pro-war cautionary tale out of a blood-soaked tragedy, we keep reimagining the loss in Vietnam not as a policy failure but as the product of an America that dishonored returning troops.
Posted on May 31, 2012
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The promised $70 million project to quicken Cuba’s Internet connection speed was never delivered; German voters are on Angela Merkel’s side when it comes to the European economy; meanwhile, a vial with Ronald Reagan’s blood is being auctioned, along with one of Scarlett Johansson’s used tissues. These discoveries and more after the jump.
Posted on May 28, 2012
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 JRockefellerIV (CC-BY)
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New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s involvement in a blatantly anti-Muslim film used to train cadets has leaders of Muslim-American groups calling for his resignation. Debbie Almontaser, who chairs the Muslim Consultative Network, documents some of the NYPD’s acts of aggression against the Muslim community.
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 Asian Development Bank (CC-BY)
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Uzbekistan President Islam Karimov is notorious for heading one of the world’s most oppressive regimes, and millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars are being given to a for-profit military contractor turned propaganda machine to make sure he remains a faithful and able ally in the global war on terror.
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Project Censored, a media research program founded by Carl Jensen in 1976, has for a long time drawn attention to stories that the mainstream media for one reason or another censor or ignore. The project will publish its 2012 edition this month, highlighting the most censored stories in the last year.
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 gizmodo.com
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The Chinese air force is drawing snickers after part of a video of military maneuvers broadcast on Chinese state television turned out to be not images of the country’s new stealth fighter but scenes from the American movie “Top Gun.”
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 AP / Khalid Tanveer
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An already fraught relationship between India and Pakistan got a bit more taut after a lapse of journalistic responsibility led several leading Pakistani papers to publish fabricated WikiLeaks cables that more resembled anti-Indian propaganda than diplomatic correspondence.
Posted on Dec 10, 2010
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 National Security Archive
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The National Security Archive has obtained documents confirming and expanding on what we already knew: The Bush administration was determined to invade and occupy Iraq whether there was justification or not. (continued)
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 obrag.org
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To all pundits, politicians and journalists who got everything wrong about the Iraq War, fear not. You may have no credibility, but Fox News is your refuge and your benefactor. As Media Matters documents, the propaganda network has only added to its collection of mendacious war boosters since helping to launch the Iraq disaster.
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 Wikimedia Commons / Justin McIntosh
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Sound the alarm: The Advanced Placement English Literature and Composition exam taken by high school students across the U.S. uses a quotation from the late Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said. Some Jewish students are complaining that use of the Said material politicizes the test.
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 AP / Richard Vogel
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By Robert Fisk — It’s sleek, it’s glossy, it’s in eloquent Arabic, Pashto and Dari, and it pours derision on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan; it is the brand new propaganda wing of the Taliban: not just Internet video of attacks on the Western armies in Helmand and Kandahar, but professionally produced magazines.
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 AP / Musa Sadulayev
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Call it reckless and/or call it propaganda: A Georgian newscast used footage of Russian troops crossing Georgia’s borders in 2008 to present a “simulation” of possible events, including Russian tanks en route to the capital and the killing of the nation’s president.
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 AP / Tsvangirayi Mukwazhi
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Zimbabwean human rights groups have called out soccer’s international governing body for handing Robert Mugabe, the country’s notorious leader, a “propaganda coup” when he was permitted to hold up the World Cup trophy while it made its way through the African continent.
Posted on Nov 27, 2009
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 cubaheadlines.com
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After vexing Cuban officials (and citizens, no doubt) for three years, a U.S. government-sponsored electronic billboard that featured news and information blips tailored for a Cuban audience from an American-friendly angle has been switched off in the interest of changing the diplomatic tone between the two countries.
Posted on Jul 27, 2009
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 abc.go.com
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As previously reported on Truthdig, there’s a lot going on in Homeland Security that doesn’t make it onto the reality show of the same name. The Center for Investigative Reporting’s G.W. Schulz continues to dig into the department’s unsavory bits, including an immigration officer who was arrested for allegedly having sex with an 11-year-old girl in Rio while there on official business.
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It’s always a little spooky and a little funny to listen to a person from the past predict a future that may have already come to pass. In this clip from 50 years ago, Mike Wallace interviews “Brave New World” author Aldous Huxley, and while some of what Huxley says sounds goofy, some sounds uncomfortably familiar.
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In response to Scott McClellan’s suggestion that White House talking points somehow found their way onto Fox News pundits’ teleprompter feeds, Bill O’Reilly took to the airwaves to defend his honor, denying he ever served as a mouthpiece to the Bush White House and declaring, “McClellan would never dare say that to my face.”
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Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan has dropped yet another bombshell, telling “Hardball” host Chris Matthews on Friday that the Bush administration helped “shape the narrative” of Fox News by passing “taking points” to certain members of Fox’s nighttime lineup.
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State propaganda works through repetition, brevity, fear and unquestioned punditry. Meet “The O’Reilly Factor Lite,” a brilliantly produced one-minute clip that will provide everything you need to know to understand what “The O’Reilly Factor” is really about.
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 cnn.com
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John Amaechi is not your typical basketball star. The former center for Utah, Orlando and Cleveland is the first NBA alumnus to openly declare that he’s gay, and now he’s combining sports and cultural politics in another sense by serving as Amnesty International’s sports ambassador to this summer’s Beijing Olympics.
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 White House Photographers
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Scott McClellan takes the Bush administration to task in his new memoir, but he had quite a different tune when he was the president’s mouthpiece. Here’s what he had to say about Richard Clarke’s post-administration book: “Well, why, all of a sudden, if he had all these grave concerns, did he not raise these sooner?” Why, indeed, Scott?
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 White House / Eric Draper
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Scott McClellan was one of George W. Bush’s most loyal aides, so it is surprising to learn that he savages the president and his administration in his new memoir. Among other bombshells, McClellan refers to the administration’s “propaganda campaign” to sell the war and accuses Karl Rove and Scooter Libby of meeting in secret during the Plamegate scandal in order to get their stories straight.
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 AP photo / Noah Berger
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Athletes participating in this summer’s Olympic Games in Beijing could be expelled if they fly the Tibetan flag or express political opinions that constitute “propaganda” in official ceremonies and spaces, according to International Olympic Committee President Jacques Rogge, but questions abound as to the precise definition of that term.
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 breitbart.tv
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Last Sunday’s alleged confrontation between five Iranian boats and a U.S. Navy vessel, the Hopper, in the Strait of Hormuz was not the dangerous confrontation American officials claimed it was, as evidenced by the somewhat confusing footage the Pentagon released Tuesday. In fact, according to a source in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, the video itself was “fabricated.”
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When Barack Obama first started running for the White House, Fox News tried to paint him with the terrorism brush. Rather than play games with the network, the Obama campaign simply blackballed Fox. Robert Greenwald’s “Fox Attacks” brings us up to date after Bill O’Reilly’s manhandling of an Obama staffer last weekend.
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FEMA has admitted that it was probably a mistake to hold a press conference without members of the press. On Tuesday the agency, perhaps trying to get a jump on the kind of negative publicity it received after Hurricane Katrina, stuffed a press briefing with its own employees, who lobbed softballs such as “Are you happy with FEMA’s response so far?”
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