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Looking for Unbiased War News?
AlexisKai asks: "With the forecast for tomorrow being sunny with a 90% chance of airstrikes, the US government will be clamping down on unpatriotic stories and the rest will be self-censored by the major media anyway. Where are Slashdot readers planning to look for reliable, disinterested reports as events in Iraq unfold?"
the best source I've been able to find is Guerrilla News Network (gnn.tv)
Ain't no such animal. Imho the closest thing online is BBCi and that's where I'll be spending my bandwidth over the next (hopefully very) few weeks.
Life is like surrealism: if you have to have it explained to you, you can't afford it.
Canada is not participating in the attack against Iraq and therefore any news reported out of Canada will be unbiased. CBC is the Canadian government owned national broadcaster. Click here for a direct link.
For links to stories about how hidden elements of the U.S. government sell everyone else on war, see What should be the Response to Violence?
U.S. government agencies like the NSA, CIA, and FBI function as a world-wide secret police force. If they make trouble, they get more attention and funding. There is a huge conflict of interest.
Big weapons makers in the U.S. like GE own media companies, so they can make sure that war is seen as necessary and even interesting and fun. For many people in the U.S. war is an adult video game. They don't really think of the pain and suffering the U.S. government has caused. The U.S. government has bombed 14 countries in 35 years and killed more than 3,000,000 people.
U.S. taxpayers pay Israel $900 per year for every man woman and child in Israel. That money must be used to buy weapons from U.S. weapons makers. So much money for war tends to prevent peace.
The U.S. interferes with needed governmental change in Saudia Arabia. I don't think violence is justified. However, Saudi friends have told me that Osama bin Laden's complaints about the U.S. government are justified.
I find it deeply painful to realize that the government of the U.S. is partly corrupt.
google bases itself mostly on news sources from the US and US allies. Hardly unbiased.
Jilles
Shoot, take a course in Latin America's history and the idea that the government of the U.S. is partily corrupt will seem like a gross understatement.
The U.S. government's foreign policy is in no way dictated or influenced by the opinions or needs of American citizens (or any other world citizen, for that matter) or moral imperatives. U.S. foreign policy decisions are made entirely on the basis of economic interest, Cold War style paranoia, or both.
& a quick look at the financial profiles of Bush & a large number of Congress members makes it fairly obvious that U.S. politics has reached a state where lawmakers and U.S. government leaders don't really even need to be bribed by interest groups, they can bribe themselves. For example, Bush's oil-industry stock is going to skyrocket if the U.S. can take control of the Iraqi oil fields for a multitude of reasons. On the domestic side of things, that same oil-industry stock portfolio also discourages him from enacting good environmental policies such as a push for more fuel-efficient automobiles or programs to encourage the development of the United States's public transportation infrastructure.
Radio Netherlands
Guardian
Messages to/for me ( in me journal )
http://www.alternet.org
Independant Media Center http://www.indymedia.org/ Indymedia is a collective of independent media organizations and hundreds of journalists offering grassroots, non-corporate coverage. Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate tellings of truth.
There is an article about this in the the register. Seems an english war reporter was threatened of having her communication uplink targeted.
These were useful during the Afghan invasion: Lebanon, Jordan, Arab News, Gulf News
ALL news will be censored since the pentegon have said unauthoriesd satellie broadcasts (including those from journalists) will be targets. Read this from Kate Adie. (Kate Adie is a BBC reporter who covered the last gulf war and is regared very highly in the UK)
If the US blocks all outside broardcasts we can only wait until after the war to see anything like the truth. Censorship sucks.
Anyone quoted by a reporter knows how little they understand
Don't believe what you read is the truth.
Calling Indymedia unbiased is the height of telling lies.
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
Kate Adie is probably one of the most experienced and well-respected war reporters in the world. She has an outstanding reputation, earned the hard way by telling it how it is, and not necessarily by telling it by how certain Western governments would have you believe.
She's covered just about every conflict - major and minor - of the last 20 years, and she didn't make it this long by being dumb, so when she says that unathorised transmissions are considered to be legitimate targets by the US forces, it's because she's been told so, and having been told so she double-checked with her sources to verify what she was reporting was accurate.
I find it far more plausible to believe that the Pentagon was trying to spin this story back their way than to believe that Adie misrepresented the facts - either intentionally or unintentionally.
Besides, I've heard the same story being reported by several other news sources and agencies. I find it hard to believe that they've all got it wrong.
Please, let's not make the truth any more a casualty of this war/invasion than it already is.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
_Partially_ true. Nobody "threatened to attack" journalists, but they were warned that broadcasting from somewhere behind enemy lines can make you a target. This is only because of the new RADAR-seeking missiles that are being used to destroy Iraqi radar and communication installations...
A missile isn't smart enough to tell the difference between a high-power television transmission and a radar dish of the same power... RTFA people, this isn't censoring of the media, they're simply trying to keep the reporters from getting themselves killed.
Liberal bias is calling 80000 protestors 250000 like in San Fansisco on 2/15.
Liberal bias is not showing video of protestors spitting on cops and hitting horses trying to provoke a "nazi crackdown on their freedom".
Liberal bias is calling Bush a cowboy with no world support (35+ nations disagree)
Liberal bias is thinking that the US should surrender its soverignty to the UN.
09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0
The Christian Science Monitor is an excellent new source.
They have won many awards, respected by the industry, and are very neutral. They do have points of view, but are expressed in op/ed type sections, not news stories.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
I recommend looking to The Onion. It is, after all, America's Finest News Source.
In all seriousness, I shall probably be checking the BBC's web site regularly (News Ticker (Win32) | RSS), as well as buying a decent newspaper for greater depth and insight.
Of course, for those committed to both sides of the argument, I recommend visiting Al-Jazeera with the use of a Arabic-English translator. Apparently, Al-Jazeera will soon be launching an English language service (e.g. the end of March).
In a past life I was one of the guys who tested these puppies (Shrikes, HARMS, Cruise Missles, Mavericks, Smart Bomb guidance systems, etc.) at China Lake NWC. For Shrikes and HARMS we would setup dozens of "threat" simulators, each with slightly different modulation (CW, PRF, PW, jitter, spread codes, etc.) to simulate particular makes and models of radar, and each at different location to simulate real life deployment. You don't want to be near any source that is on a target signal profile list. One of my other duties included measuring the distance between the boresite and the missle's impact crater after a test. Often enough my simulators were damaged or destroyed by inert warheads alone :-). Let's just say the 100-hour 1st Gulf War wasn't much of a surprise - China Lake has geography a lot like Kuwait and Iraq.
It's certainly possible to discriminate targets well enough to avoid targetting TV satellite uplinks. It's even possible that journalist's military-supplied uplinks are provided with known spread code signals that are put on an avoid list. A warning and insistence on "equipment registration" may be CYA - unless they know the equipment's signature, there's still a small chance of a "mishap". However, unless they choose to target TV stations it would still probably be pretty safe (How many TV broadcasters does Iraq really have? Ah, maybe one? Compared to simply being shot by accident?) The spectral signatures of analog or digital TV are pretty different from radar (even spread spectrum radar).
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Despite my experience with this stuff, I'm still against this war and the facile justifications pathetically provided for it. If you don't see a patriot described above, you need to get your head examined!
This war is about extension of the Monroe Doctrine to the entire world and Manifest Destiny as a world hyperpower. It's spelled out on the PNAC web site. Note the founders include Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and other major hawks in the Bush Adminstration. Also note that the entire obsession with regime change and axis of evil predates 9-11 back to when Clinton was approached by PNAC with essentially the same Iraq/Axis of Evil plan. Clinton rejected it. Bush has embraced it. Linkage between Al Qaida and Iraq? Machiavelian fiction, nothing more. Weapons of Mass Destruction (worked on those too ;-| )? Doesn't add up in the context of post-War Iraqi infrastructure and economics, and especially not with forged documentery evidence provided by the US and UK intelligence agencies.
Creating a hegemon might not even seem so bad if you happen to be an American, but this type of foreign policy is certain to be mirrored in domestic policy: the beginning is Patriot I, Patriot II, TIA, CAPP and other recent laws and proposals.
For those who have read Linked, consider what a Bose-Einstein condensation of a geopolitical social network is in comparison to what it is for an economic social network. Consider that one of the desires of PNAC is to assure that the relationship between the US and each other country shall be stronger than the relationships between any pair of countries. What social network topology is that? Can you say: "All Roads Lead to Washington".
There are many active and reserve duty officers with similar concerns. I recently gave a speech about this subject where an officer I know, who is now serving in the Middle East, was in attendence. I was concerned about his reaction - these are scary ideas most people would prefer to ignore - but he approached me after the speech and was my stron
Uhhh, India.
3 of the 10 daily English language newspapers with the largest circulation are in India (The Times Of India is the most circulated English language newspaper _worldwide_, and oh about 10% of India's population understand it reasonably well. They're not particularly pro-war.
And there's good ol' Canada up to the north. I hear that they have a lot of English speakers.
And there's also South Africa, the Phillipines, Pakistan, Ireland, and New Zealand if you want other countries with sizable English speaking populations.
Many other countries have English newspapers that are online.
The BBC is where I've been heading. My local NPR station has been running BBC radio reports, and my local PBS TV station is running BBCWorld Service on TV after the PBS news programs.
I think two things are worth noting. The BBC aren't afraid to note that a column of American troops are in fast retreat (wording unheard by my ears on American broadcasts by any network, yet apparently the first column heading into Basra met with stiff enough resistance a retreat was ordered until air support could arrive).
Also, it's been my experience that the BBC has very little issue with taking Blair to task when need be. They have reporters at every front and with most mobile armoured columns heading into the frays.
Last, but not least, while watching BBC World Service last night, one of their reporters noted that he'd seen several dozen, approaching 100, Iraqi soldiers surrendur. The response of the studio anchor was this line, paraphrased mostly, but the meaningful words are quoted: "So, then, Iraqi soldiers are indeed surrenduring? The unconfirmed reports aren't just a piece of American propaganda?"
Ya ain't gonna hear that charge on CNN, MSNBC, ABC, Fox News, CBS.
The reporter's response was: "Yes. Initially there were only a few soldiers who'd surrendured, but as we proceeded, we've actually picked up well over 100."
If you knew me, you wouldn't need this here...