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The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby vox_mundi » Tue 04 Oct 2016, 18:35:50

Exclusive: Yahoo secretly scanned customer emails for U.S. intelligence - sources

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the National Security Agency or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events.

Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a U.S. Internet company agreeing to a spy agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

According to two of the former employees, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's decision to obey the directive roiled some senior executives and led to the June 2015 departure of Chief Information Security Officer Alex Stamos, who now holds the top security job at Facebook Inc.

"Yahoo is a law abiding company, and complies with the laws of the United States," the company said in a brief statement in response to Reuters questions about the demand. Yahoo declined any further comment. (...the 'Good German' defense)

... U.S. phone and Internet companies are known to have handed over bulk customer data to intelligence agencies. But some former government officials and private surveillance experts said they had not previously seen either such a broad demand for real-time Web collection or one that required the creation of a new computer program.

"I've never seen that, a wiretap in real time on a 'selector,'" said Albert Gidari, a lawyer who represented phone and Internet companies on surveillance issues for 20 years before moving to Stanford University this year. A selector refers to a type of search term used to zero in on specific information.

Experts said it was likely that the NSA or FBI had approached other Internet companies with the same demand, since they evidently did not know what email accounts were being used by the target. The NSA usually makes requests for domestic surveillance through the FBI, so it is hard to know which agency is seeking the information

Some Yahoo employees were upset about the decision not to contest the more recent edict and thought the company could have prevailed, the sources said.

They were also upset that Mayer and Yahoo General Counsel Ron Bell did not involve the company's security team in the process, instead asking Yahoo's email engineers to write a program to siphon off messages containing the character string the spies sought and store them for remote retrieval, according to the sources.

The sources said the program was discovered by Yahoo's security team in May 2015, within weeks of its installation. The security team initially thought hackers had broken in.

When Stamos found out that Mayer had authorized the program, he resigned as chief information security officer and told his subordinates that he had been left out of a decision that hurt users' security, the sources said. Due to a programming flaw, he told them hackers could have accessed the stored emails.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby vox_mundi » Thu 01 Dec 2016, 17:03:31

The 'outrageous' 40-year-old film that predicted the future

Forty years ago this month Network was released to widespread acclaim. But its shocking satire turned out to be eerily prescient, writes Nicholas Barber.

When Network was released in November 40 years ago, the poster warned audiences to prepare themselves “for a perfectly outrageous motion picture”.

But is it really “perfectly outrageous”? It’s easy to believe that, in 1976, Chayevsky and Lumet’s bleak view of television’s crassness and irresponsibility was deeply shocking. But the scary thing about re-watching Network today is that even its wildest flights of fancy no longer seem outrageous at all. The film was so accurate in its predictions that its most far-fetched satirical conceits have become so familiar as to be almost quaint.

It opens with a deadpan narrator introducing us to Howard Beale (Peter Finch, who died soon after the film was made, and was awarded a posthumous Oscar), the veteran news anchorman of a fictional New York-based television station, UBS. When he is given two-weeks’ notice as a result of his plummeting ratings, he announces on-air that he will commit suicide on his final programme; brilliantly, the programme’s producers are too busy chatting among themselves to listen. He soon backtracks. He won’t kill himself, he admits, but he will exactly say what’s on his mind. The station’s viewers are thrilled. Rather than sacking him, UBS rebrands him as “the mad prophet of the airwaves”, and encourages him to spout whatever bile comes gushing from his fevered brain. Rant Video

Max Schumacher (William Holden), the craggy president of the station’s news division, is appalled that Howard’s nervous breakdown is being exploited for the sake of ratings. But an ambitious producer, Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway), creates a glitzy new format for him - half current-affairs strand, half variety show - complete with Sybil the Soothsayer, who predicts the next night’s news, and a gossip specialist called Miss Mata Hari. Her argument is that while Howard may not be particularly coherent, or particularly sane, he is “articulating the popular rage”. His catchphrase now stands as number 19 in the American Film Institute’s list of best movie quotes: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

“Seen a quarter-century later,” wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times in 2000, “it is like prophecy. When Chayevsky created Howard Beale, could he have imagined Jerry Springer, Howard Stern and the World Wrestling Federation? It’s a fair question. A further 16 years later, though, it’s tempting to ask whether Chayevsky was imagining today’s podcasters, or even today’s shock-jock politicians, who sway voters by “articulating the popular rage” in terms no more sophisticated than Howard’s. Chayevsky and Lumet had more in common with Sybil the Soothsayer than they knew.

The film was prescient in other areas, too. After Howard goes on air to insist that American businesses should be owned by Americans, he is summoned to a boardroom by the owner of UBS, Arthur Jensen (Ned Beatty), and subjected to a fire-and-brimstone sermon on global capitalism. Fumes Jensen ...
... “You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples,” ... “There are no nations. There are no peoples ... There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.”

Perfectly outrageous? Over the top? On the contrary. In 2016, Beatty’s economic analysis doesn’t prompt any reaction more extreme than a nod and a muttered, “Sad, but true.

But the most prophetic part of Network has little to do with Howard. Running alongside his story, there is a sharper, funnier subplot concerning Diana’s other brainwave: The Mao Tse-Tung Hour. Her idea is a weekly drama series about a real revolutionary group, the Ecumenical Liberation Army, which incorporates footage of genuine crimes committed by the ELA itself. In short: Diana invents modern reality television.
Ahead of her time?

Diana has her idea when she sees some black-and-white footage of an ELA bank robbery - footage that was shot by the robbers themselves. At first, she is amazed. “You mean, they actually shot this film while they were ripping off the bank,” she marvels. Nowadays, though... well, which terrorist cell bothers to commit any crime without filming it? Which television station or social media outlet would hesitate to show such amateur footage? And the crazy notion that shots of a violent crime scene could be spliced into a weekly television docudrama? It didn’t stop American Crime Story: The People v OJ Simpson winning four Emmy Awards. Network repeatedly tells us that Diana is a diabolical femme fatale and a soulless, ambition-crazed moral vacuum. Actually, she is just ahead of her time.

Much of Network is depressing to watch now, because it envisages changes in the media which have since come to pass, and they are changes for the worse.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby onlooker » Thu 01 Dec 2016, 18:18:58

Great link Vox. If I may add my own reality is stranger than fiction observation. I read George Orwell's 1984 years back. It really made an impression on me. I submit that we are for all intensive purposes now living in a world very reminiscent of the world in that book. We have a general populace dumbed down, we have a media totally under the control of the powers that be, we have a three sets of people, the elites , the assisting tier that keeps the machines humming and the economy going and the rest who are the rabble being subsidized to live marginally by the State with a few addictive primitive pastimes and recreation. Then we have the Endless War, instead of changing sides seamlessly we have an Enemy who can be anyone anywhere at any time ie. the terrorist. Of course the War is not meant to be won just to go on indefinitely. We also, of course have an all seeing Big Brother ie. Govt. watching our every move and almost literally every thought as in the Internet. We have also the Politically correct jargon, we have the doublespeak, as in lies are truth and truth are lies. So yes I believe we are almost living now in the world of 1984, I for one will be glad when I can leave this Mess of a planet.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby sparky » Fri 02 Dec 2016, 16:44:41

.
@ onlooker , Fair call , one difference though , thee is no forced compulsion to conform
it's quite unnecessary , the opponents of this control are simply lumped with the tinfoil crowd
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby onlooker » Fri 02 Dec 2016, 17:09:27

sparky wrote:.
@ onlooker , Fair call , one difference though , thee is no forced compulsion to conform
it's quite unnecessary , the opponents of this control are simply lumped with the tinfoil crowd

Well actually Sparky that is also part of 1984. No overt forced compliance, the assisting tier of people are totally deceived and duped. History has been rewritten to depict a world that has always been the way it is. That same group is kept in a state of patriotic Fervour so not inclined to revolt or even protest. The Proles or Proletariat are dumbed down mostly illiterate and unable and disinclined to question their station in life and much less the structure of society. The elite class having no incentive to question or change anything as they are the beneficiaries of this system
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby dissident » Thu 08 Dec 2016, 19:32:32

http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-projec ... th-produce

British Govt-Funded Outlet Offered Journalist $17,000 a Month to Produce Propaganda for Syrian Rebels

The Revolutionary Forces of Syria (RFS) media office, a major Syrian opposition media outfit and frequent source of information for Western media, is funded by the British government and is managed by Westerners operating out of Turkey, according to emails provided to AlterNet by a Middle East reporter RFS tried to recruit.


https://twitter.com/Malinka1102/status/ ... 0162576385
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby dissident » Sat 17 Dec 2016, 13:05:45

http://blogengine.hellevig.net/post/201 ... ntrol.aspx

After a decade and a half of intensive anti-Russian propaganda, the Western mainstream media and their masters are experiencing a virtual meltdown of their propaganda narrative. During the last half a year, they doubled down on their propaganda with a campaign of declaring all critical alternative media and dissidents as ‘fake news” sources. This campaign has now culminated with the first round of repressive media and speech control laws both in the European Union (EU Parliament, 14 October 2016, on EU strategic communication to counteract propaganda against it by third parties; referenced below) and in the United States (US House of Representatives bill of November 30 announcing a crackdown on media, blogs and individuals who are involved in “spreading Russian propaganda and misinformation”).

However, while Russia has been identified both in the EU and the US as the supposed adversary against whom these states are supposedly protecting, the real target of their crackdown is internal dissent. Their scandalous calls to an infowar against Russia is actually a red herring intended to conceal the much more sinister aim of establishing a totalitarian media regime and speech control with all-out propaganda and censorship internally in the EU states.


While everyone is arguing about whether Trump is a Nazi, totalitarian media control laws have been passed in both the EU and the USA. Enjoy the freedom, suckers.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby sjn » Sat 17 Dec 2016, 14:12:00

dissident, do you think Trump will reverse it? It's actually even worse here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

Even private communications are now routinely intercepted and can, and are used as evidence of suspected "extremism". That includes any type of dissidence, such as anti-fracking or opposing badger culls.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby dissident » Sun 18 Dec 2016, 15:56:59

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-1 ... -fake-news

So freedom of expression will lead to jail time. Nice. Creeping totalitarian takeover.

Anyone who supports this is a certifiable retard. It wasn't needed during the Cold War but now it is? And the existence of the internet has nothing to do with it. Samizdat and underground literature was available during the Cold War in the "free world" and in the commie realms.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby dissident » Sun 18 Dec 2016, 16:00:26

sjn wrote:dissident, do you think Trump will reverse it? It's actually even worse here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016

Even private communications are now routinely intercepted and can, and are used as evidence of suspected "extremism". That includes any type of dissidence, such as anti-fracking or opposing badger culls.


For me, it will be a litmus test of his presidency. If he is what he claims to be, then he must reverse all of this Obummer and Killary instigated human rights abuse. But I don't expect much. I think that the ruling elites rule for a reason. They succeed in keeping their power. If some POTUS candidate could overturn their power then we would be in a different reality. I support Trump because he stepped back from the suicidal lunacy advanced by Killary. There must be a saner faction among the ruling elites.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby onlooker » Sun 18 Dec 2016, 19:39:40

As its turning out Trump may be be Killary 2.0 , given that Trump seems to be filling key positions with military/corporate people. Let's not underestimate the entrenched power of the military/industrial/finance complex
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby dissident » Sat 31 Dec 2016, 23:17:08

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-3 ... an-hackers

Washington Post publishes a fake news piece on some US utility being "hacked by Russians" (TM) even though this was just a case of some Ukrainian malware on a laptop:

Alas, there was just one minor problem, namely that the entire article was completely fabricated. Apparently the esteemed "journalists" of the Washington Post didn't even bother to contact the Burlington Electric Department to confirm their bogus story...and why should they...it fit the "Russian hacking" narrative so perfectly therefore it must be true, right?

Well, apparently not. The quick spread of WaPo's "fake news" story forced the Burlington Electric Department to issue a clarifying statement assuring worried residents that, indeed, their electricity grid had not been hacked, but rather a single "laptop not connected" to the grid had been found to have a malware virus.


Killary and Obummer have put the US into a state of hysteria because they are sore losers and don't care that WWIII may result from their lies.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby sparky » Mon 02 Jan 2017, 16:22:27

.
To all the NSA employees ........ Happy new year !!
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby sparky » Sun 08 Jan 2017, 06:34:39

.
Why is the Western media is dying ?

beside the argument of what exactly western media is , some recent developments

the Washington post ran an article
"Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to U.S. electrical grid security, officials say"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/na ... 93e62e3555

The Washington post did not even check their story , mentioning unnamed officials .
the story went viral through the world !
as Bolshevik a publication as Fortune , Forbes , Investors and fox came out swinging that the Post were a bunch of crooks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOAl-X2k7hM

it turned out that the story was totally bogus , a single laptop , unconnected to anything ,owned by a single guy
was used to check out porn and was infected by an old ,off he shelf malware program .
did the Washington post grovel in apology ?

nope , after rewriting the story twice , they finally conceded in an half arsed manner and slipped a minor correction in the old headline
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby vox_mundi » Fri 27 Jan 2017, 11:53:20

With smartphones and social media becoming the de facto 'news sources' of the 21st century for the masses, these mergers will concentrate what people hear and see into the hands of a smaller and smaller group of people.

The truth may be out there, but you'll never find it.

Surge in media mergers is expected under Trump's pro-business agenda

Buckle up: Media companies are preparing for some whirlwind courtships in what’s expected to be the biggest merger bonanza in years.

Verizon’s biggest competitor, AT&T, already is trying to buy one of the nation’s most prominent entertainment companies, Time Warner Inc., which owns HBO, CNN, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network and the Burbank-based Warner Bros. movie and television studio. That $85.4-billion deal was announced in October, and must undergo a review from Trump’s Justice Department and possibly the FCC.

This week, Trump designated Ajit Pai, a free-market advocate on the Federal Communications Commission, to lead the agency and its new Republican majority.

Pai has been an outspoken critic of the FCC’s merger review process and has indicated he would be more willing to bless corporate deals.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby vox_mundi » Sat 28 Jan 2017, 14:22:57

Why So Many Celebrities? They Are the Masks that Humanize Corporations

Image

We've even just elected our second celebrity president, a man known more as a "brand" than as person, the first being Reagan. Why did we do that?

Why are there so many of celebrities, and what do they really do? Is it something about the media, or the 20th century nationalization of publicity, that creates these people — for example, via the earlier movie fan magazines and now television and the Internet? Or is media not the cause? Is the presence of all these celebrities in our media a result of something else, of something more hidden from us?

Monbiot thinks he has the answer to the question "why so many celebrities?" and I think he's right. His two main points:
- Corporations are lifeless predatory monsters. They need human faces to make them look like our friends. This is like putting a face-like mask on a robot before it asks you out to dinner ... to eat you. Celebrities act as their masks and supply those human faces.
- At the same time that celebrities humanize the corporations that use them, they themselves become less human, productized, marketed (by themselves and others) as things — masks or "brands" — good mainly for their utility to the corporate world that employs them

As Monbiot puts it in his piece: "Celebrity is not harmless fun – it’s the lieutenant of exploitation." The essay is called "Imaginary Friends". Here are two excepts, each making one of the two points above.

The rise of celebrity culture did not happen by itself. It has long been cultivated by advertisers, marketers and the media. And it has a function. The more distant and impersonal corporations become, the more they rely on other people’s faces to connect them to their customers.

Corporation means body; capital means head. But corporate capital has neither head nor body. It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise, owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours. It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living; her role is to exist in our minds. By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.
An obsession with celebrity does not lie quietly beside the other things we value; it takes their place.

A study published in the journal Cyberpsychology reveals that an extraordinary shift appears to have taken place between 1997 and 2007. In 1997, the dominant values, as judged by an adult audience, expressed by the shows most popular among 9-11 year olds were community feeling, followed by benevolence. Fame came 15th out of the 16 values tested. By 2007, when shows like Hannah Montana prevailed, fame came first, followed by achievement, image, popularity and financial success. Community feeling had fallen to 11th; benevolence to 12th.

A paper in the International Journal of Cultural Studies found that, among the people it surveyed, those who follow celebrity gossip most closely are three times less likely than people interested in other forms of news to be involved in local organizations, and half as likely to volunteer. Virtual neighbors replace real ones.
“There are three classes of people: those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.” ― Leonardo da Vinci

Insensible before the wave so soon released by callous fate. Affected most, they understand the least, and understanding, when it comes, invariably arrives too late.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby dissident » Tue 07 Mar 2017, 11:43:58

Image

And the BBC is supposed to be "credible"? Yeah, right.
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Re: The Western Media Is Dying and Here’s Why

Unread postby Tanada » Tue 07 Mar 2017, 13:11:09

This is the problem with 'reporting' to drive a political point of view rather than just presenting the facts in a rational open and honest fashion.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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