NY Times urges Turkey’s Erdogan: “Don’t Discard the Mask of Democracy”

NY Times highlights possible plan to shut down critical media

Demonstrators wave Turkish flags as they gather outside the İstanbul Courthouse to protest the detention of a number of people including the editor-in-chief of Zaman daily and an executive of Samanyolu television on Dec. 19, 2014. (Photo: Reuters)

May 23, 2015, Saturday

MAHIR ZEYNALOV / WASHINGTON (todayszaman.com)

The New York Times has urged the US and other NATO allies to ask Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to turn away from “destructive path,” highlighting the prevailing fear among journalists that he might be preparing to shut down critical media outlets, including this newspaper. 

In an editorial titled “Dark clouds over Turkey,” the newspaper pointed to fear of critics that a new crackdown is starting to ensure that the ruling party he founded wins in upcoming parliamentary elections slated for June 7. Erdoğan didn’t make it secret that he wants to see the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) to win necessary number of seats to expand his presidential powers.

Missteps by Brazil Mar Visit by Pope

[The New York Times reports the Brazilian power elite’s attempts to attribute “blunders” — not mass resentment at religious and political arrogance, extravagance, and brutal repression — for the obvious breakdown of bourgeois authority and credibility in social and political life. — Frontlines ed.]

Pope Francis with Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff. Pope Francis, with a long history of support for repressive powers in Latin America, became an object of the ongoing mass protests against Dilma Rousseff’s corrupt and repressive regime — an unintended consequence of a visit planned to “fan the fervor of the faithful” and to distract the anger of the oppressed.

By SIMON ROMERO, New York Times, July 24, 2013

RIO DE JANEIRO — Pope Francis celebrated his first public Mass on Wednesday at one of Latin America’s largest shrines, asking Catholics to shun the “ephemeral idols” of material success, power and pleasure, but his visit to Brazil continued to be marked by tension over blunders by its Brazilian organizers.

The missteps began minutes after Francis arrived in Rio on Monday, when his small motorcade got stuck on a crowded thoroughfare, exposing the pope to a mob scene of people trying to touch him through the open window of his car. On Tuesday, Rio’s subway system broke down for two hours, leaving thousands gathered here for a conference of Catholic youth scrambling to reach a seaside Mass.

Rio’s political authorities have also faced scrutiny over their handling of street demonstrations around the pope’s visit. They acknowledged using undercover agents to infiltrate the protests but denied claims that their intelligence officers were to blame for violence, including the throwing of firebombs.

As Apple Corp. approaches $1 Trillion in wealth, its Chinese production workers rebel

[The class struggle continues to sharpen on global scale.  Simultaneous with the following news about “rioting” workers at Apple’s production contractor, Foxconn (in Taiyuan), the New York Times blog revealed that Apple Corporation, raking in super-profits from its intense marketing hype with iPhone 5, is now approaching $1 Trillion in wealth–a record among the largest capitalist corporations. As the NYT reported: “Apple could become the first company ever to be valued at $1 trillion.” Then they report that business analysts project the trillion-dollar milestone to be reached between  2013-2015.  “Not long ago, Apple was a boutique PC maker. Since then, it has rolled over almost every company in its path, first with music players, then with cellphones and, more recently, with laptops. Nokia, Sony, Research in Motion, Dell and Hewlett-Packard have all watched open-mouthed as Apple took markets they thought were secured. Each time, Apple’s stock rose and their stock fell.”  But the Times spoke only of Apple’s success over capitalist competitors, not of their successful exploitation of Chinese workers in oppressive factory conditions.  The Chinese workers are struggling to make the point which the NYTimes will not.–Frontlines ed.]

Report: Riots break out at Foxconn factory in China

By Ed Flanagan, NBC News

Reports early Monday from China suggest that a mass disturbance or riots may have broken out at a Foxconn factory in the Chinese city of Taiyuan.

It is still unclear what exactly happened, but posts on China’s popular twitter-like service, Weibo, from users in the area show photographs and video of large numbers of police in and around the factory – many in riot gear – blocking off throngs of people.

Other photos show debris strewn around the Foxconn compound and in one case, an overturned guard tower.

According to popular tech blog engadget, the disturbance kicked off after Foxconn security guards allegedly hit a worker around 10 p.m. on Sunday.

Censors in China have reportedly already started deleting pictures from the scene.

Twisting the News: the New York Times says US’ torture policy and practice is accidental

NYT’s Misleading Rendition of the Reason for Rendition

09/06/2011 by Peter Hart, FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting)

Documents discovered in Libya suggest a close relationship between the Libyan government and the CIA. The New York Times described it this way on September 3:

TRIPOLI, Libya — Documents found at the abandoned office of Libya’s former spymaster appear to provide new details of the close relations the Central Intelligence Agency shared with the Libyan intelligence service — most notably suggesting that the Americans sent terrorism suspects at least eight times for questioning in Libya despite that country’s reputation for torture.

And then today (9/6/11) the Times put it this way:

The cooperation appeared to be far greater with the American intelligence agency, which sent terrorism suspects to Libya for questioning at least eight times, despite the country’s reputation for torture. Britain sent at least one suspect, according to the documents.

As  Glenn Greenwald pointed out on Twitter (in fewer characters), the whole point of rendition was to send prisoners to countries the United States knew would treat them a certain way. It wasn’t a series of accidents. In other words, the CIA used Libya not despite its reputation for torture, but because of it.

New York Times: “Rioting Widens in London on 3rd Night of Unrest”

[The New York Times, the leading imperialist media organizer, reports the events in London and the crisis in Britain in terms which express contempt for the masses in rebellion, and calculations of where this is all going–in terms of the sharpening of battlefronts for the class war which is leaping out of the shadows of “normal” life.   All this from the viewpoint of the defenders, and managers, of the existing system. –Frontlines ed.]

By RAVI SOMAIYA and JOHN F. BURNS

August 8, 2011

Sang Tan/Associated Press A shop was set on fire Monday in Croydon, south London. The home secretary said there had been hundreds of arrests.

LONDON — The rioting and looting that convulsed poorer sections of London over the weekend spread Monday to at least eight new districts in the metropolitan area and broke out for the first time in Britain’s second-largest city, Birmingham, in what was developing into the worst outbreak of social unrest in Britain in 25 years.

By early Tuesday, unrest was also reported by the police in two other major cities, Liverpool and Bristol, and an enormous fire was consuming a large warehouse in the Enfield section of London.

Prime Minister David Cameron, apparently caught off guard while on vacation with his family in Tuscany, reversed an earlier decision not to cut short his holiday in the face of plunging world financial markets and boarded a plane for home to lead a cabinet-level meeting on Tuesday to deal with the turmoil.

For Mr. Cameron’s government — indeed for Britain — the rapidly worsening situation presented a profound challenge on several fronts.

For a society already under severe economic strain, the rioting raised new questions about the political sustainability of the Cameron government’s spending cuts, particularly the deep cutbacks in social programs. These have hit the country’s poor especially hard, including large numbers of the minority youths who have been at the forefront of the unrest.

Together with the inevitable pressures to restore some of the spending cuts, Mr. Cameron and his colleagues have to confront the dark shadow that the rioting has cast on plans for the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. That $15 billion extravaganza will have its centerpiece in a sprawling vista of new stadiums and an athletes’ village that lie only miles from the neighborhoods where much of the violence in the last three days has taken place. With the Games set to begin in barely 12 months, Britain will have to satisfy Olympic officials that there is no major risk of the Games being disrupted, or ruined, by a replay of the rioting.

Luke MacGregor/Reuters Police officers in riot gear tried to block a road near a burning car in the northern district of Hackney, in London, where rioting continued for a third night.

Beyond these challenges is the crisis that has enveloped London’s Metropolitan Police, popularly known as Scotland Yard, on which security for the Olympics, and the immediate hopes of quelling the rioting, depend.

Even before the outbreak of violence, the police have been deeply demoralized by the government’s plan to cut about 9,000 of about 35,000 officers and by allegations that it badly mishandled protests against the government’s austerity program last winter and failed to properly investigate the phone-hacking scandal that has dominated the headlines here for much of the summer. The force now faces widespread allegations that it failed to act quickly and forcefully enough to quell the rioting at its outset over the weekend.

Palestine in Scare Quotes: from the NYT Grammar Book

[The disinformation spewed out by the imperialist media is strategic in securing the disorientation and disempowerment of people throughout the US.  While many disinformation instruments focus on dumbing down with endlessly repetitive news of sex scandals and murderous moms, others take their lead from the New York Times, which wraps their disorientation in the guise of informed reporting.  But they deliver the disorientation nonetheless.  This detailed exposure, from Jadaliyya.com, of the NYT coverage of Palestine reveals some of the ways they confuse millions with what they call “All the News That’s Fit to Print.” — Frontlines ed.]

July 12, 2011

by Anthony Alessandrini

http://www.jadaliyya.com/pages/index/2109/palestine-in-scare-quotes_from-the-nyt-grammar-boo

Qalandiya Checkpoint. Photo by Anees of Jerusalem. Image from Mondoweiss

When I feel the need for my blood pressure to go up, I read the New York Times’ coverage of Israel-Palestine.

The extent to which the Times’ reporting (or misreporting) is deeply slanted, selective, and misleading has been thoroughly documented in Richard Falk’s and Howard Friel’s Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East. Meanwhile, Electronic Intifada and Mondoweiss provide excellent ongoing critiques of the Times’ day to day coverage (see, for example, this recent piece by Ali Abunimah), and both were quick to report the seemingly obvious conflict of interest in the fact that Jerusalem Bureau Chief Ethan Bronner’s son is currently serving in the Israeli Defense Forces. The Times’ editor-in-chief responded to the revelation of this fact by dismissing its effect upon Bronner’s reporting, even going so far to suggest that his “personal ties in the region” help to “supply a measure of sophistication about Israel and its adversaries that someone with no connections would lack” (“connections” in this case seem to stand in for, say, “expertise” or “knowledge” — as though critics might suggest replacing Bronner with a journalist who knew nothing about the region). As’ad AbuKhalil has noted that Bronner and the Times, in covering the Goldstone Report, have “devoted more space to Israeli and Zionist criticisms of the Goldstone report than to the report itself,” while Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) has produced a number of exemplary media critiques of the Times, for example a blistering criticism of the paper’s coverage of Operation Cast Lead and its horrifying effect in Gaza, noting that when it comes to addressing the facts on the ground in Gaza, the Times’ fetish for “balance” and “equivalence” leaves readers with “the sense that the truth is too one-sided.”

Wikileaks Beyond Wikileaks?

[Many have noted that the US government’s attacks and threats against WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are turning attention away from government misdeeds, deceptions, and war crimes by “attacking the messenger.”  This essay pursues a different point–that the messenger may be a significant and useful historic actor, but those who believe Wikileaks has the method and the script for effective solution to government misdeeds, deceptions, and war crimes are mistaken, as shown by the collaborative “embedding”  of WikiLeaks (and their joint redacting of information) with the New York Times and The Guardian. –Frontlines ed.]

by Saroj Giri

Corporate media most likely tries to buy you off only if you pose a real danger – radical and subversive to ‘power’. While attacking Wikileaks for corporate collusion, therefore, its original radical potential cannot be overlooked.

Wikileaks’ close collaboration with big corporate media (including The New York Times and Guardian) and the ‘redactions’ raise serious doubts over whether information is actually flowing freely (Michel Chossudovsky, ‘Who is Behind Wikileaks?’ Dec 13, 2010, Global Research). And yet the Wikileaks’ intervention cannot be cast away in a cynical manner – the only way to welcome it however is by saving it from Wikileaks itself, in particular from its liberal slide. Let us problematise the kind of politics or the ‘attacks on power’ which Wikileaks represents, even as stories circulate about corporate-funding and CIA-backing. Indeed one gets deeply suspicious when for example The Guardian reports that, for the hackers, ‘the first global cyber-war has begun’, ‘the first sustained clash between the established order and the organic, grassroots culture of the net’. On the other hand, for someone like Jemima Khan typical of a whole swathe of liberal supporters, Wikileaks stands for something far less dramatic. In her already apologetic piece, ‘Why did I back Assange?’, she states that it is only about ‘a new type of investigative journalism’, about freedom of information and so on. What is it really?

New York Times: Massacre of Migrants in Tamaulipas, Mexico

“We [the US] have delegated to drug lords the job of managing our immigrant supply, just as they manage our supply of narcotics.”

New York Times Editorial, August 29, 2010

The full story of the massacre in Tamaulipas, in northeast Mexico, awaits telling by its one survivor. The early news accounts are horrifying: 72 people, said to be migrants from Central and South America on their way to the United States, are waylaid and imprisoned by drug smugglers on a ranch 100 miles south of Texas. They refuse to pay extortion fees and are executed. The survivor, shot in the neck, hears their screams for mercy as he flees. After a gun battle with the authorities, the killers escape in S.U.V.’s. The dead, 58 men and 14 women, are found piled in a room, discarded contraband.

The temptation may be to write this atrocity off as another ugly footnote in Mexico’s vicious drug war. But such things do not exist in isolation. Mexico’s drug cartels are nourished from outside, by American cash, heavy weapons and addiction; the northward pull of immigrants is fueled by our demand for low-wage labor.

Israeli Assault on Flotilla: The New York Times Accused of Covering It Up for Israel

01. Jul, 2010

by David Morris

For the past month, the alternative media have sought concrete evidence that the mainstream U.S. media, including the New York Times, willfully aided Israel’s cover-up of information about their Gaza flotilla attack.

Prima facie evidence of their complicity is abundant.

The Times’ role in the cover-up ranged from suppression of facts and failure to follow leads that might (and did) contradict Israel’s version of the massacre, to serving as a shameless conduit for Israeli propaganda. The Times persisted in publishing and republishing the official line of Israel and became a virtual bulletin board for crackpot opinions and commentary. A prime example is Michael Oren’s “An Assault on Israel, Cloaked in Peace,” arguing delusionally that this humanitarian effort was an “act of aggression” that threatened the very nation of Israel.

The news we Americans received on the massacre seemed written by an Israeli propaganda minister — in fact, some of it was. The Israeli army  generously provided our media with a carefully edited video of their attack, which major news outlets dutifully broadcasted.