Media Manipulation ArticlesExcerpts of Key Media Manipulation Articles in Major Media
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Facebook knew that teen girls on Instagram reported in large numbers that the app was hurting their body image and mental health. It knew that its content moderation systems suffered from an indefensible double standard in which celebrities were treated far differently than the average user. It knew that a 2018 change to its news feed software, intended to promote "meaningful interactions," ended up promoting outrageous and divisive political content. Facebook knew all of those things because they were findings from its own internal research teams. But it didn't tell anyone. In some cases, its executives even made public statements at odds with the findings. The world's largest social network employs teams of people to study its own ugly underbelly, only to ignore, downplay and suppress the results of their research when it proves awkward or troubling. A pattern has emerged in which findings that implicate core Facebook features or systems, or which would require costly or politically dicey interventions, are reportedly brushed aside by top executives, and come out only when leaked to the media by frustrated employees or former employees. For instance, the New York Times reported in 2018 that Facebook's security team had uncovered evidence of Russian interference ahead of the 2016 U.S. election, but that Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Vice President of Global Public Policy Joel Kaplan had opted to keep it secret for fear of the political fallout.
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British people are [asking]: What is the deal with all of these medicine ads in the U.S.? England doesn't allow commercials for prescription drugs. While there are ads for over-the-counter drugs in most of the world, the U.S. and New Zealand are the only two countries that allow drug companies to advertise prescription drugs directly to consumers. Commercials for prescription drugs do not exist in Europe or South America or Asia or Africa or Mexico or Australia, just in the U.S. and New Zealand, which is a much smaller market. It wasn't too long ago that TV in the U.S. was like the rest of the world, completely free of prescription drug ads. The '60s, the '70s, most of the '80s, there are no ads like this. By the '80s, though, ... drug companies started saying, we don't want to advertise our drugs just to doctors and pharmacists anymore. We want to market our drugs directly to consumers. The FDA was worried about how commercials would impact demand for drugs - misuse, overuse, all kinds of things. But there were compelling reasons to go directly to consumers. So in 1981, the first direct-to-consumer ad runs in print in Reader's Digest. The FDA [decided television] commercials need to say, out loud, the major risks of a drug. You just had to include the major risks of a drug, along with places where consumers could get more information about the drug, like a phone number or a website or a recommendation just to talk to your doctor. And this is what really opens the TV ad floodgates.
Note: The pharmaceutical industry provides 75% of television advertising revenue in the US. So how likely are TV stations to carry stories that reveal problems with drugs or corruption in the industry? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma profiteering from reliable major media sources.
Ask questions or post content about COVID-19 that runs counter to the Biden administration's narrative and find yourself censored on social media. That's precisely what data analyst and digital strategist Justin Hart says happened to him. And so last week the Liberty Justice Center, a public-interest law firm, filed a suit on his behalf in California against Facebook, Twitter, President Joe Biden and United States Surgeon General Vivek Murthy for violating his First Amendment right to free speech. Hart had his social media most recently locked for merely posting an infographic that illustrated the lack of scientific research behind forcing children to wear masks to prevent the spread of COVID. In fact ... study after study repeatedly shows that children are safer than vaccinated adults and that the masks people actually wear don't do much good. The lawsuit contends that the federal government is "colluding with social media companies to monitor, flag, suspend and delete social media posts it deems 'misinformation.'" It can point to White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki's July remarks that senior White House staff are "in regular touch" with Big Tech platforms regarding posts about COVID. She also said the surgeon general's office is "flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread." "Why do we think it's acceptable for the government to direct social media companies to censor people on critical issues such as COVID?" Hart asks. The Post has been targeted repeatedly by social media for solid, factual reporting.
Note: Read about another lawsuit alleging collusion between government and big tech companies to censor dissenting views on pandemic policies. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
Snopes, which has long presented itself as the internet's premier fact-checking resource, has retracted 60 articles after a BuzzFeed News investigation found that the site's co-founder plagiarized from news outlets as part of a strategy intended to scoop up web traffic. "As you can imagine, our staff are gutted and appalled by this," Vinny Green, the Snopes chief operating officer, said. He said the Snopes editorial team was conducting a review to understand just how many articles written by David Mikkelson, the site's co-founder and chief executive, featured content plagiarized from other news sites. As of Friday afternoon, the team had found 60, he said. By Friday morning, dozens of articles had been removed from the site, with pages that formerly featured those articles now showing the word "retracted" and an explanation that "some or all of its content was taken from other sources without proper attribution." Mr. Mikkelson, who owns 50 percent of Snopes Media Group, will continue to be Snopes's chief executive, but his ability to publish articles has been revoked, Mr. Green said. In a statement, Mr. Mikkelson acknowledged he had engaged in "multiple serious copyright violations of content that Snopes didn't have rights to use." From 2015 to 2019 – under the Snopes byline, his own name and another pseudonym – Mr. Mikkelson published dozens of articles that included language that appeared to have been copied directly from The New York Times, CNN, NBC News, the BBC and other news sources.
Note: There are many serious questions about the biases of Snopes and some of their unscrupulous tactics, as is covered in this Forbes article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media corruption from reliable sources.
The Center for Countering Digital Hate published "The Disinformation Dozen" – a report on the 12 influencers it claimed were responsible for 65 percent of anti-vaccine falsehoods disseminated on Facebook and other social media platforms. But the story of charlatans peddling fake cures and political conspiracy theories isn't the only part of the Covid misinformation saga. Distrust in public-health messaging is also sown when public-health messengers show themselves to be less than completely trustworthy. The latest set-to in this drama was a July 20 screaming match between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Senator Rand Paul. The Kentucky Republican suggested that Fauci had lied to Congress in claiming that the National Institutes of Health had never funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Fauci took vehement exception, saying the research that the N.I.H. had funded ... didn't qualify as gain-of-function, a research technique in which a pathogen is made more transmissible. The larger truth – obscured until recently by fervent efforts (including by Fauci) to dismiss the lab-leak theory for the origins of the pandemic – is that the U.S. government's scientific establishment did support gain-of-function research that deserved far more public debate than it got. Beneficiaries of that funding engaged in deceptive tactics and outright mendacity to shield their research from public scrutiny while denouncing their critics as conspiracymongers.
Note: Read what happened when the publisher of "The Real Anthony Fauci" tried to place a full page ad in the New York Times for this #1 best seller. And why have all major media refused to review this book which is rated 4.8 stars on Amazon and has over 2,000 footnotes to back up the claims made? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media manipulation and the coronavirus from reliable sources.
Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time. Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group, the Israeli purveyor of weapons of mass surveillance. The Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data. Without forensics on their devices, we cannot know whether governments successfully targeted these people. But the presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents. Journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools. People whose phone numbers appear in the leak ... include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state. One phone that has contained signs of Pegasus activity belonged to our esteemed Mexican colleague Carmen Aristegui, whose number was in the data leak and who was targeted following her exposÄ‚© of a corruption scandal involving her country's former president Enrique PeÄ‚±a Nieto. At least four of her journalist colleagues appear in the leak
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and the disappearance of privacy from reliable major media sources.
Wikipedia has been taken over by Left-leaning volunteers and only offers a one-sided version of information, according to the online encyclopedia's co-founder. Larry Sanger, an American philosopher who co-founded the website in 2001, said the online reference bible seemed to assume "that there is only one legitimate defensible version of the truth on any controversial question". Mr Sanger, 53, cited page entries on Joe Biden and his son Hunter as an example. "The Biden article, if you look at it, has very little by way of the concerns that Republicans have had about him," he [said]. "So if you want to have anything remotely resembling the Republican point of view about Biden, you're not going to get it from the article." Wikipedia is thought to be the world's fifth largest website in the world in terms of site visits, with more than six billion people viewing it each month. The website relies on volunteers to edit and contribute to its pages. But Mr Sanger said the website had strayed from its original mission, committing it to "neutrality" and allowing site contributors to have a free exchange of ideas. "Now, especially over the last five years or so, Wikipedia has changed quite a bit," he said. "Now if you [public users] make any edit at all, you will be sternly warned if not just kicked out," he said. Asked if he thought Wikipedia could be trusted to give truthful information, he replied: "Well, it depends on what you think the truth is." He added that the website could be trusted to offer an "establishment" point of view.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media manipulation from reliable sources.
Wikipedia is part of the very internet developed by the military with public money in the 1950s-60s, then called ARPANET. Generally speaking, corporations hope that the systems developed in the military that evolve in the public-corporate realm–satellites, computers, data analysis, etc.–will inspire new military-intelligence innovations in a permanent feedback loop. The overarching "values" [of Wikipedia] and its contributors–mainly young, white, middle-class liberals–will reflect those "values". They include progressive slogans but reactionary policies, humanitarianism but pro-war positions, and conformity to consensus opinion even when the consensus is wrong (e.g., "regime change" in Libya and Syria). By 2006, the Intelligence Community had developed its own Intellipedia. A Top Secret report released under a FOIA request instructed intelligence officers how to edit Wikipedia's entry on MK-ULTRA, the CIA's mind control program (1953-circa 1970s), for Intellipedia. Funded by weapons contractors like BAE Systems and Boeing, and until recently led by people like Katherine Maher, ex-World Banker and Fellow of the Truman National Security Project, which exists to promote "US values" at home and abroad, the Wikimedia Foundation that enables Wikipedia does not exist in a vacuum. Wikipedia does not present unbiased, scholarly encyclopedia entries. It is as much part of the military-industrial-complex as mainstream corporate media.
Note: Some Wikipedia entries have been professionally manipulated. Watch a fascinating video with Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, who now says he no longer trusts the website he's helped created. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
At the bedside of a single Covid-19 patient who's already received the full official treatment protocol and is failing anyway, the decision to administer a drug like ivermectin, or fluvoxamine, or hydroxychloroquine, or any of a dozen other experimental treatments, seems like a no-brainer. Nothing else has worked, the patient is dying, why not? Telescope out a little further, however, and the ivermectin debate becomes more complicated, reaching into a series of thorny controversies, some ridiculous, some quite serious. The ridiculous side involves ... the censorship of ivermectin news. Anyone running a basic internet search on the topic will get a jumble of confusing results. YouTube's policies are beyond uneven. It's been aggressive in taking down videos ... and doling out strikes to independent media figures. Ivermectin has suffered the same fate as thousands of other news topics since Donald Trump first announced his run for the presidency nearly six years ago, cleaved in two to inhabit separate factual universes for left and right audiences. The drug has become a test case for a controversy that's long been building in health care, about how much input patients should have in their own treatment. Should people on their deathbeds be allowed to try anything to save themselves? That seems like an easy question to answer. Should the entire world be allowed to practice self-care on a grand scale? That's a different issue.
Note: Don't miss the entire article to see just how crazy the medical establishment has become in treating COVID. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
Portions of a military information campaign meant to influence the Canadian public during the COVID-19 pandemic continued to operate months after the chief of the defence staff at the time ordered it shut down in the spring of 2020. The Canadian military recently conducted four reviews of controversial initiatives. A copy of one of those reviews was obtained by CBC News under access to information legislation. That review shows that even after the then-chief of the defence staff, Jonathan Vance, verbally called off the overall influence campaign in April 2020, some influence activities aimed at Canadians carried on for another six months – until Vance issued a written edict in November 2020. The military deployed propaganda techniques in Canada without approval during the pandemic and gathered information about Canadians' online activities without permission from authorities. DND denies it has used psychological warfare techniques, honed during the Afghan war, on Canadians. But the line between psychological warfare and information operation campaigns has become increasingly blurry over the last few years. The review document obtained by CBC News says the Canadian Joint Operations Command (CJOC) ... "liberally interpreted" department policy. The unit decided it had the authority to conduct information operations on Canadians without government approval because it was asked by the government to help with the response to the pandemic.
Note: Learn more in this article titled, "Military leaders saw pandemic as unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on Canadians, Forces report says." For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
The US Department of Justice is under increasing fire for the still-unfolding scandals involving the secret surveillance of journalists and even members of Congress in the waning days of the Trump presidency. In response to the growing scandal – and the scathing condemnations from the surveillance targets at the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN – the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, has vowed the DoJ will no longer use legal process to spy on journalists "doing their jobs." The Times, the Post and CNN are set to meet with the justice department this week to seek more information on what happened. Administrations in both parties have spied on journalists with increasing abandon for almost two decades, in contravention of internal DoJ regulations and against the spirit of the first amendment. Before Trump was known as enemy number one of press freedom, Barack Obama's justice department did more damage to reporters' rights than any administration since Nixon. But there is another issue looming large over this debate. Garland has said so far that the DoJ won't spy on journalists unless they are engaged in a crime. Well, the DoJ is currently attempting to make newsgathering a crime, in the form of its case against the WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange. The actions described in the indictment against him, most notably the 17 Espionage Act charges, are indistinguishable for what reporters do all the time.
Note: Read more about the growing trend to criminally prosecute journalists who rely on confidential sources to expose corruption. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
People who believe the coronavirus was manufactured in a lab haven't been allowed to say so on Facebook since February – until Wednesday, that is, when Facebook announced it was lifting the ban. Presumably this has something to do with the wavering elite consensus on lab leaks. This consensus was never as monolithic as proponents claimed. But it did produce a Facebook ban and a lot of journalism dismissing the hypothesis as a well-debunked conspiracy theory. In one light, this is a happy scientific ending. Over time, with study, natural transmission looked less likely, and a lab accident somewhat more so. As the evidence changed, a previously hard-and-fast consensus became more open to other possibilities, as should be the case for any good scientific theory. But in another light, this story is a disaster. How did so many smart people come to believe, not just that a natural origin was much more likely than a lab leak – which is still, to be clear, the opinion of many scientists – but that a lab leak was basically an impossibility? Labs have leaked deadly viruses in the past. And a lab in the same city where the pandemic began happened to study bat coronaviruses and had a sample of this coronavirus's closest known relative, gathered from a cave hundreds of miles away. It's possible, and maybe even probable, that this was pure coincidence. But it is a hell of a coincidence, and it wasn't kooky to say so.
Note: Top officials were told not to explore the possibility that the virus escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus from reliable major media sources.
Facebook's secret internal rules for moderating the term "Zionist" let the social network [to] suppress criticism of Israel amid an ongoing wave of Israeli abuses and violence, according to people who reviewed the policies. The rules appear to have been in place since 2019, seeming to contradict a claim by the company in March that no decision had been made on whether to treat the term "Zionist" as a proxy for "Jew" when determining whether it was deployed as "hate speech." The policies ... govern the use of "Zionist" in posts not only on Facebook but across its subsidiary apps, including Instagram. Both Facebook and Instagram are facing allegations of censorship following the erratic, widespread removal of recent posts from pro-Palestinian users critical of the Israeli government, including those who documented instances of Israeli state violence. Mass violence has gripped Israel and Gaza since last week. Israeli security forces stormed the Al Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem's old city. The Palestinian militant group Hamas responded with rocket fire aimed at Israel. Israel, in turn, unleashed massive aerial bombardments and artillery attacks against the occupied Palestinian Gaza Strip. Though none of Facebook and Instagram's content removal has been tied conclusively to the term "Zionist," users and pro-Palestinian advocates were alarmed by disappearing posts and notices of policy violations over the last week.
Note: Read how a U.S. Congresswoman is being slammed for asking legitimate questions about Israel. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media manipulation from reliable sources.
While Facebook has long sought to portray itself as a "town square" that allows people from across the world to connect, a deeper look into its apparently military origins and continual military connections reveals that the world's largest social network was always intended to act as a surveillance tool to identify and target domestic dissent. LifeLog was one of several controversial post-9/11 surveillance programs pursued by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that threatened to destroy privacy and civil liberties in the United States. LifeLog sought to .. build a digital record of "everything an individual says, sees, or does." In 2015, [DARPA architect Douglas] Gage told VICE that "Facebook is the real face of pseudo-LifeLog." He tellingly added, "We have ended up providing the same kind of detailed personal information without arousing the kind of opposition that LifeLog provoked." A few months into Facebook's launch, in June 2004, Facebook cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz [had] its first outside investor, Peter Thiel. Thiel, in coordination with the CIA, was actively trying to resurrect controversial DARPA programs. Thiel formally acquired $500,000 worth of Facebook shares and was added its board. Thiel's longstanding symbiotic relationship with Facebook cofounders extends to his company Palantir, as the data that Facebook users make public invariably winds up in Palantir's databases and helps drive the surveillance engine Palantir runs for a handful of US police departments, the military, and the intelligence community.
Note: Consider reading the full article by investigative reporter Whitney Webb to explore the scope of Facebook's military origins and the rise of mass surveillance. Read more about the relationship between the national security state and Google, Facebook, TikTok, and the entertainment industry. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
When Covid cases were rising in the U.S., the news coverage emphasized the increase. When cases were falling, the coverage instead focused on those places where cases were rising. And when vaccine research began showing positive results, the coverage downplayed it, as far as [Dartmouth professor Bruce] Sacerdote could tell. He began working with two other researchers, building a database of Covid coverage from every major network. The researchers then analyzed it with a social-science technique that classifies language as positive, neutral or negative. The results showed that Sacerdote's instinct had been right. The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media. About 87 percent of Covid coverage in national U.S. media last year was negative. The share was 51 percent in international media, 53 percent in U.S. regional media and 64 percent in scientific journals. Notably, the coverage was negative in both U.S. media outlets with liberal audiences (like MSNBC) and those with conservative audiences (like Fox News). If we're constantly telling a negative story, we are not giving our audience the most accurate portrait of reality. As Ranjan Sehgal, another co-author, told me, "The media is painting a picture that is a little bit different from what the scientists are saying."
Note: Explore an inspiring article sharing some of the good news to come out of these challenging times. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on mass media corruption from reliable sources.
China last winter censored doctors who shared "dangerous" misinformation about the novel coronavirus on social media. Now America's self-anointed virus experts and social-media giants are also silencing doctors with contrarian views in an apparent effort to shut down scientific debate. Facebook this week appended a Wall Street Journal op-ed "We'll Have Herd Immunity by April" by Johns Hopkins surgeon Marty Makary (Feb. 19) with the label "Missing Context. Independent fact-checkers say this information could mislead people." According to Facebook, "Once we have a rating from a fact-checking partner, we take action by ensuring that fewer people see that misinformation." The Facebook label links to the third-party site Health Feedback ... an affiliate of the nonprofit Science Feedback that verifies scientific claims in the media. Another Science Feedback affiliate fact-checks climate-related articles in predominantly conservative media. Dr. Makary ... made a projection, much like the epidemiologists at Imperial College and University of Washington do. But the progressive health clerisy don't like his projection because they worry it could lead to fewer virus restrictions. Facebook's fact-checkers "cherry-pick," to borrow their word, studies to support their own opinions, which they present as fact. Facebook's fact checkers are presenting their opinions as fact and seeking to silence other scientists whose views challenge their own.
Note: Read more in this excellent article. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on media manipulation from reliable sources.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has banned from his social media platforms any claims that the novel coronavirus vaccine alters DNA, although he himself expressed similar concerns last year. Project Veritas released video Tuesday of Mr. Zuckerberg raising questions about whether vaccines include risks of side effects such as "modifying people's DNA and RNA" in July during a virtual Q&A meeting with staff. "I do just want to make sure that I share some caution on this because we just don't know the long-term side effects of basically modifying people's DNA and RNA to directly code in a person's DNA and RNA," Mr. Zuckerberg said in the video. "Basically the ability to produce those antibodies and whether that causes other mutations or other risks downstream." In a Feb. 8 post, Facebook updated its COVID-19 and vaccine policies "to protect people from harmful content and new types of abuse related to COVID-19 and vaccines," saying it would remove posts that included "Claims that the COVID-19 vaccine changes people's DNA." Project Veritas president James O'Keefe said that the newly leaked tape showed Mr. Zuckerberg "violating his own code of conduct" and that "he would be censored on the platform today for what he said." "Isn't it interesting that Zuckerberg can vacillate and evolve his thinking on the subject of vaccines, but as soon as he's made up his mind or appears to have made up his mind on the topic, he disallows the almost three billion Facebook users to do the same?" Mr. O'Keefe asked.
Note: Explore an informative essay on this on the Project Veritas websites. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on coronavirus vaccines and media manipulation from reliable major media sources.
Google's YouTube has ratcheted up censorship to a new level by removing two videos from a U.S. Senate committee. They were from a Dec. 8 Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs hearing on early treatment of Covid-19. One was a 30-minute summary; the other was the opening statement of critical-care specialist Pierre Kory. Dr. Kory is part of a world-renowned group of physicians who developed a groundbreaking use of corticosteroids to treat hospitalized Covid patients. His testimony at a May Senate hearing helped doctors rethink treatment protocols and saved lives. At the December hearing, he presented evidence regarding the use of ivermectin, a cheap and widely available drug that treats tropical diseases caused by parasites, for prevention and early treatment of Covid-19. He described a just-published study from Argentina in which about 800 health-care workers received ivermectin and 400 didn't. Not one of the 800 contracted Covid-19; 58% of the 400 did. Before being removed from YouTube and other websites, Dr. Kory's opening statement had been viewed by more than eight million people. Unfortunately, government health agencies don't share that interest in early treatment. A year into the pandemic, NIH treatment guidelines for Covid patients are to go home, isolate yourself and do nothing other than monitor your illness. The censors at YouTube have decided for all of us that the American public shouldn't be able to hear what senators heard.
Note: You can access the entire article free of charge on this webpage. Can it be any more blatant that facebook is in cahoots with big Pharma in not wanting cheap, effective treatments for COVID-19? Watch an excellent, eye-opening 14-minute interview with a facebook insider revealing how censorship works. Read about how Silicon Valley is shutting down even live streams by legitimate journalists. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and media manipulation from reliable major media sources.
I am guilty of violating the Espionage Act, Title 18, U.S. Code Sections 793 and 798. If charged and convicted, I could spend the rest of my life in prison. This is not a hypothetical. Right now, the United States government is prosecuting a publisher under the Espionage Act. The case could set a precedent that would put me and countless other journalists in danger. I confess that I – alongside journalists at The Guardian, The Washington Post and other news organizations – reported on and published highly classified documents from the National Security Agency provided by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden, revealing the government's global mass surveillance programs. This reporting was widely recognized as a public service. Last year ... the Justice Department indicted Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of WikiLeaks, with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. None of the architects of the "war on terror," including the C.I.A.'s torture programs, have been brought to justice. Mr. Assange is facing a possible sentence of up to 175 years in prison. I spoke to one of the best First Amendment lawyers in the country. He read the Espionage Act out loud and said it had never been used against a journalist, but there is always a first time. It is impossible to overstate the dangerous precedent Mr. Assange's indictment under the Espionage Act and possible extradition sets: Every national security journalist who reports on classified information now faces possible Espionage Act charges.
Note: The above was written by award-winning journalist Laura Poitras. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and media manipulation from reliable sources.
In a year that witnessed a crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong, China has detained more journalists in 2020 than any other country, extending a role it assumed last year, two leading media rights groups say in studies published this week. The reports, published on Tuesday by the Committee to Protect Journalists and on Monday by Reporters Without Borders (RSF), found Asia and the Middle East to be the most challenging regions of the world for journalists to operate freely. According to RSF ... the top five countries for imprisoning journalists in 2020 were China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Vietnam and Syria, which collectively accounted for 61% of the 387 journalists they had documented behind bars as of Dec. 1. RSF said at least 117 journalists were detained in China this year. Meanwhile, CPJ reported a record number of detained journalists – 274, according to its report, adding that China, Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia imprisoned journalists at the highest rates. Officials from both organizations said the coronavirus pandemic even provided cover for some governments to more openly target the press in retaliation for critical COVID-19 coverage. "Fourteen journalists were arrested in connection with coverage of the pandemic," RSF Editor-in-Chief Pauline Ades-Mevel says, in response to what their governments called unfair or imprecise coverage. We've seen a backlash around the world against journalists reporting on the pandemic itself as well as government responses to the pandemic.
Note: Explore more on this and on censorship around questioning the official story of COVID-19. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on the coronavirus and media manipulation from reliable sources.
Important Note: Explore our full index to key excerpts of revealing major media news articles on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.