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“Trump-Media Logrolling”
SAM HUSSEINI, samhusseini at gmail.com, @samhusseini
Husseini is senior analyst with the Institute for Public Accuracy. He just wrote the piece “Trump-Media Logrolling.”
He writes: “Today, hundreds of newspapers, at the initiative of the Boston Globe, are purporting to stand up for a free press against Trump’s rhetoric.
“Today also marks exactly one month since I was forced out of the July 16 Trump-Putin news conference in Helsinki and locked up until the middle of the night. [See “I Came as a Journalist to Ask Important Questions” for The Nation.]
“As laid in my cell, I chuckled at the notion that the city was full of billboards proclaiming Finland was the ‘land of free press.’
“We should scrutinize both thuggish behavior toward journalists trying to ask tough questions — and to those professing to defend a free press when they are engaging in more of a marketing campaign.
“As some have noted, the editorials today will likely help Trump whip up support among his base against a seemingly monolithic media. But, just as clearly, the establishment media can draw attention away from their own failures, corruptions and falsehoods simply by focusing on some of Trump’s.
“Big media outlets need not actually report news that affects your life and point to serious solutions for social ills. They can just bad-mouth Trump. And Trump need not deliver on campaign promises that tapped into populist and isolationist tendencies in the U.S. public that have grown in reaction to years of elite rule. He need only deride the major media.”
Husseini is also founder of VotePact.org.
Blog Posts
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"Aides to Donald Trump, the U.S. president, hired an Israeli private intelligence agency to orchestrate a 'dirty ops' campaign against key individuals from the Obama administration who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, the Observer can reveal. People in the Trump camp contacted private investigators in May last year to 'get dirt' on Ben Rhodes, who had been one of Barack Obama’s top national security advisers, and Colin Kahl, deputy assistant to Obama, as part of an elaborate attempt to discredit the deal."[more]
15 Years Later: The Whistleblower Who Almost Blocked the Iraq War
Media Advisory:
Press Conference to Mark 15th Anniversary
Of Leak by GCHQ Translator Katharine Gun
Revealing US “Dirty Tricks” at UN for Iraq War
When: Thursday, 1 March 2018 at 11:00 a.m.
Where: Head office, National Union of Journalists
Headland House, 72 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NB
Who: Katharine Gun, Thomas Drake, Matthew Hoh, Jesselyn Radack
This press conference will take place the day before the 15th anniversary of the Observer's publication of the explosive March 2, 2003 story “US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war” -- based on a leak by GCHQ translator Katharine Gun -- revealing the US National Security Agency's UN surveillance memo that aimed to grease the way for the Iraq invasion.
Thomas Drake was a senior NSA executive at the time.
Matthew Hoh later fought in Iraq as a US Marine and then became a US State Department official before resigning in protest of the war in Afghanistan.
Jesselyn Radack was a whistleblower at the US Department of Justice in connection with the "war on terror" before becoming a national security and human rights attorney representing Drake as well as Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers.
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