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Free and independent media?

The most striking aspect of the campaign against Ecuador is that the corporate-owned “free and independent” media these outlets wish to defend can be seen to work in unison to generate timely propaganda against “official enemies” ? such as Venezuela, Ecuador, Assange and Snowden.

This is why the discourse of “free press” against “autocratic governments” needs to be questioned.

Corporations are just as willing to prosecute libel suits as governments. Broadcasters can be, and often are, threatened with the cancellation of lucrative advertising contracts for showing critical news and documentaries.

In Australia for instance, GetUp recently had a paid advertisement detailing Woolworths’ ownership of poker machines pulled from Channel Seven without explanation.

In its reporting on Snowden, Time wrote that Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua ? the left-wing alliance supporting Assange and Snowden ? “sport some of Latin America’s more checkered human-rights records”. In reality, this claim holds no weight unless all of the US’s allies in the region are excluded.

The media has done their job well, that is they have actively assisted in the dumbing down of america.

You are correct, but lets be clear: "The Media" is overwhelmingly dominated by corporations, and it is not just Americas problem. Those corporations are overwhelmingly interconnected with the interests of a vast array of other unrelated businesses, be it just advertising revenue or outright arms of the same corporation. The mass corporate media is using FUD/muddying the waters/dumbing down just enough to make the majority of voters for political reasons, they are doing so because it is good business for other arms of their corporation and their partners.

This is also the reason the mass worldwide corporate media react so violently, distort the facts as far as to turn them upside down, make unfounded extreme accusations when any country or individual calls out the massive, obviously society destroying conflicts of interest that we have today in corporate media. Imagine what the worlds media combined do when a country starts to pass media and airspace legislation to even up the playing field with more to share the space with social organizations (say 33% government channels, 33% private companies with no other business interests in country, 33% to social groups and organizations)? Well no need to imagine, we have a good example: Ecuador. If your first reaction to naming Ecuador as a shining example is that you start frothing at the mouth, wanting to post AC to educate me on "the human rights abuses", "censorship", "repression"... etc etc of Ecuador - then you are knee-jerk reacting, a product of the pervasive mass media dumbing down we are talking about here. There are even " international press freedom organizations" lining up to condemn the country - all of them with dubious shady origins when you look into the details and all of them making claims that dont add up when you look critically into the facts. If your one of those then you owe it to yourself to read the link provided and do a bit of searching outside of mass media channels on this topic. Ecuador is the only country I know of that is attempting to tackle front on the conflict of interest that dominates mass media today (Apart from some organizations - Wiklleaks Party is trying to make it part of their election campaign in Australia, see "Can we trust the media").

For example Rafael Correa told a well known Spanish interviewer Anita Pastor, and a paraphrase, "How could we reform the banking system when 80% of the countries media was owned by banks". As an aside, Anita Pastor during the course of the interview claimed that the worlds press was free and independent. In a stroke of irony she was fired shortly after by an incoming government due to asking the ministers uncomfortable questions during the election campaign. The same government and the other major party in Spain has now passed decrees in true American style,that all election interviews will be controlled, with controlled questions in a controlled marketing directed act. They have even changed the government controlled media so that all stories pass by them before being published. Just like nearly every other western country now. Free press, indeed.

We identify things by both their characteristics and their context.

For example, if something looks like a duck we are tempted to say that it's a duck, and without regard to context that's the most likely explanation.

But then consider the context: If the context doesn't match, we change our assessment accordingly. If it's on top of a mountain, we think it's a rock that resembles a duck. In a store window, we think it's a stuffed-doll resembling a duck. If it's in the MIT swimming pool, we think it's a robot resembling a duck.

Absent any context, Sweden's request for extradition is innocent and benign - how could he possibly refuse such a simple legal request?

But the context surrounding the extradition does not match. There's a number of contextual inconsistencies with the situation, all of which indicate that this is not an extradition, it's something different.

It is abundantly clear that we're not seeing an actual duck. You can argue the probability in various ways, but it's not 100%.

You might next consider "so what?" What's so bad about being extradited to the US?

Consider the risk/reward equation. Julian probably carries around in his head contact information for informants and associates which the US does not know about, and activities of various people which the US would consider evidence of espionage. Once on US soil, it would be nigh impossible to keep this information from the US authorities. He would be forced(*) to give up not only his own freedom, but the freedom of people who put their trust in him. (Not to mention the chilling effect this would have on future whistle-blowers.)

It's likely that the value of this information is so high that even a tiny risk of extradition multiplied by the value potentially lost results in a negative payout. Taking the chance is too risky, it's not a good bet.

... There's no actual evidence for that, and no real reason to believe it.

See previous link, or google for yourself. Plenty of evidence, you are stating an untruth.

(*)Ref: Bradley Manning's treatment

This is one of the most misinformed comments I have ever seen on /. You clearly have no knowledge whatsoever about the Indian farmer suicide problem, which began years before Monsanto started selling GM seed in India, and is absolutely nothing to do with the company. The suicides are, according to most analyses I've seen, usually linked closely with widespread crop failures which follow monsoon drought seasons. It's a climate problem, not a Monsanto problem.

If you check your own source, it states: "monsoons leading to a series of droughts, lack of better prices, exploitation by Middlemen, all of which have led to a series of suicides committed by farmers across India." If the droughts were the main cause then prices would go up from lack of supply. Since prices are falling, the pricing problem is largely for other reasons, including middlemen like Monsanto.

And farmer suicide being the #2 killer in India? That's so stupid it hurts to read. If you check the WHO mortality data, you'll find non-communicable diseases and infectious diseases account for 9/10 of the top ten causes of death, with accidental injury being the 10th.

Again, if you check your own source, the WHO data is irrelevant since it's for all of India, not just farmers. If you check your Wikipedia source, this states that farmer suicides are increasing.

Please, in future, try not to comment until you have the slightest clue what you're talking about.

You would do well to take your own advice; but then apologists rarely do.

Additional sources: Monsanto in India and Vandana Shiva.

Not quite.

It is certainly true that many Middle Eastern countries are actively hostile both to jews and to the state of Israel, but not every country, or it's citizenry is actively hostile to both. The brush with which you paint is a little too broad.

All that claptrap about "the free press" and "guardians of democracy" is a pile of cow dung, as anyone who lived through the last 10 years can easily tell. Read your history books and you will see that it has always been thus.

This is true only if U.S. history begins at World War II. In the late 1800s and early 1900s there were labor papers which were mainly subscription supported, with local news, educational articles, and union events. There were many of these, some small, some with a broader reach. For example as late as the 1930s the Institute for Propaganda Analysis, which taught people how to read and think critically, had significant influence.

The media consists almost entirely of hired shills, whose job it is to influence your opinion in exchange for money.

While this is generally true of US corporate news, here are four exceptions: Amnesty International, Christian Science Monitor, DemocracyNow, and Z Magazine.

It's the ad-supported news that increasingly becomes business-supporting news; particularly when the news media organization is owned by big business.

RMS has been using libre since at least 2007. Someone asked in another post when it came about. He didn't mention in a 2006 lecture, but he did in 2007.

Well, it wasn't mentioned here in RMS's 2006 lecture. It is here with "free/libre" in 2007.

Ecuador ranks a whooping 101 on the press freedom index, with an annually deteriorating index value. I'm not quite convinced it's the best country to exile to for people publishing inconveniant documents.

The compilers of that "press freedom index" is Reporters Without Borders. RWB are primarily funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy which was founded during the Reagan administration to channel funds to organizations abroad that would support US foreign policy. Sometimes this funding is direct, sometimes it is conducted through the international arms of the US Democratic Party or Republican Party.

I would consider that the "US State Dept Press Freedom Index".

Reporters Sans Frontiers/Reporters Without Borders are primarily funded by the US government [zcommunications.org] through the National Endowment for Democracy which was founded during the Reagan administration to channel funds to organizations abroad that would support US foreign policy. Sometimes this funding is direct [ned.org], sometimes it is conducted through the international arms of the US Democratic Party or Republican Party [counterpunch.org].

I'm sure that the US government would much prefer that whistleblowers send any leaked video of massacres by US troops or State Department cables to this new site rather than Wikileaks [wikileaks.org]. The only way it would be easier for them to discover the identity of the whistleblower would be if the leak went directly to the CIA with a return address.

It appears to me that this new Reporters Sans Frontiers project is a honeypot intended to catch would-be whistleblowers.

Reporters Without Borders are primarily funded by the US government through the National Endowment for Democracy which was founded during the Reagan administration to channel funds to organizations abroad that would support US foreign policy. Sometimes this funding is direct, sometimes it is conducted through the international arms of the US Democratic Party or Republican Party.

I'm sure that the US government would much prefer that whistleblowers send any leaked video of massacres by US troops or State Department cables to this new site rather than Wikileaks. The only way it would be easier for them to discover the identity of the whistleblower would be if the leak went directly to the CIA with a return address.

Monsanto is a culprit but the issue much larger than just this one company. We need to help governments pull their collective heads out of their collective you know whats. This link sums up a lot of the impacts that can be seen and forecast due to various Countries' Seed Acts. http://www.zcommunications.org/the-indian-seed-act-and-patent-act-by-vandana2-shiva