Sue Abrams writes:

was just watching WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception and of course I heard your name. I haven’t had a memory since I hit 40, but your name was SO familiar and I realized where I knew it. Danny Schechter the News Dissector!!! I listened to you all the time on WBCN and I remember thinking you were great back then.

Your documentary was phenomenal and I’m going to look through your website too. Another one of my favorites (I have very few) in journalism is Robert Pelton and it’s wonderful he was in your story.

I wish we could hear from both of you much more often because the media is a dangerous thing now that it’s no longer news but entertainment. Please keep your voices heard!

Suzie Taft writes about Newsweek and Minnesota Public Radio

A poor analogy but imagine your local organic food co-op was approached by Coca Cola. Coca Cola offers a year’s worth of free pop to new sign-ups for co-op membership. There is nothing particularly evil about this - it just stinks.

That’s how I feel about Minnesota Public Radio and Newsweek Magazine. Never in the decades I’ve been an MPR member has the station done what it is now doing. It offers a prize for contributing any amount whatsoever - not a pledge, mind you, just a dollar or more to the mstation, and the prize is a year’s subscription to Newsweek.

They did this several months before the last presidential election and got my ruff up. I called MPR prez Bill Kling about it. Kling agreed with me it was creepy but explained, “They made it so easy”. I ventured this prediction to him: that I would get one issue (I had renewed during pledge week) and then not another for months, until just before the election, but that no hard core reporting would discourage passive Americans from going with the celeb-conservative of the year. That is exactly what happened. We are encouraged to think it was a fluke or that Newsweek couldn’t possibly have anything to do with propaganda or its ugly sister, corporate mining of our flimsy attentions/investments.

Simultaneous with MPR’s recent pledge week, which once again offered Newsweek for a year to contributors of even one dollar, Newsweek prints their George Clooney interview sans his cr tical remarks about the Bush Administration. Made me mad. I talked to MPR newsdesk guys and they said it was my problem. That I should complain to Newsweek if I thought they were not reporting well. Then I sent a blank check to Kling upon which I had written “Newsweek censored George Clooney. Not another dollar from me until you figure this out”.

Of course I gathered quickly that I’ll never work for MPR or if I write a book, not be interviewed or whatever. Also wondered plenty if I was wrong. I tried to explain that I lost dear friends to Argentina’s dirty war, that my classmates in Tucuman took me outside the school property often, shaken, white as ghosts, to tell me what they saw coming. Two of those same friends are listed on the disappeared list, abducted in Cordoba, 1969, which is where and when I saw them last.

1969?, you ask? Isn’t that several years before the official start of the Dirty War? Yep. Students I knew and loved in that year and before were being shot at. You know how those stories got squashed. You might also know that Kissinger met with Argentine powers around that time advising them to “do what they had to do quickly”. Police stations in downtown Tucuman and elsewhere were converted underground to torture and detention centers. Tell me, if they were detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists, why did the police raids add stealing suspect’s art, furniture, even babies to the “arrests”?

So, I am sensitive but I am not uninformed. I am writing you this in memory of Susana Medina and Ricardo Torres Correo, my friends, dissidents, warners, terrified of being arrested for speaking out and fed up with the slack, fat unworried alliances their
superiors and parents had made with the big guys.

Maybe Newsweek is not one of the big guys who would let giant crooks off the hook by stifling celebrity criticism, but as I see it, it’s a foul resemblance.

Thanks for listening - listening so hard.

REPORT ON WORLD CAN’T WAIT MEETING IN NY ON SATURDAY

The dedicated people who made it there are almost in panic mode: time is running out, we are in a race, they got to NY wanting and hoping to find a silver bullet and more than willing to do anything within the law to get theguys out of office yesterday if not last week.

2. This is what the people got: a lot of back slapping from the panels, a lot of pitching certain efforts and organizations, processes that they can initiate on their own but inevitably end up in a bottle neck called Congress.

The people came to NY for hope and you should have seen their boredom and their eyes rolling. People did not come to NY for another safety (relief) valve.

I would not say that people are resigned, they know our democracy is slipping, they know they cannot count on congress, they will keep on doing what they were doing because they believe in it; they do believe to be marginalized.

BOOKS
The great Eric Hobsbawn reviews literature on Spain http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2014119,00.html

ROCKY SOCKED IN AUSTRALIA
Stallone Detained at Sydney Airport By Associated Press

SYDNEY, Australia - Sylvester Stallone was detained for hours on arrival at Sydney Airport after officials found prohibited imports in his luggage and
that of his entourage, media reported Saturday.

Australian Customs Service national investigations…

VIA: http://ladyjaynestahl.blogspot.com

Globalvision is closed today but I am still open to your input, stories and suggestions. You can share them by writing: dissector@mediachannel.org