Murdoch’s Fox caught red-handed faking ‘riot’ pictures

Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has been caught red-handed using digitally altered photos in its coverage of a section of the city that has become a centre of protest against police brutality and racial injustice.

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Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News has admitted it published bogus images of Seattle’s BLM protesters.

On Saturday, Fox News included an editor’s note at the top of at least three stories on its website covering Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), saying it replaced a “home page photo collage” because it “did not clearly delineate between these images” and that it “mistakenly” included a Minnesota photo in a slideshow about Seattle.

The largely peaceful zone has drawn the ire of President Donald Trump, who fumed on Twitter that the city had been taken over by “anarchists”.

Seattle Mayor says, about the anarchists takeover of her city, “it is a Summer of Love”. These Liberal Dems don’t have a clue. The terrorists burn and pillage our cities, and they think it is just wonderful, even the death. Must end this Seattle takeover now!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2020

The Seattle Times reported Fox News’ website featured at least two photos that amplified Mr Trump’s accusations – in one case inserting an image of a man standing with a military-style rifle

There were no disclaimers the images had been manipulated when featured on the network’s website prior to Saturday.

The unidentified gunman was lifted from a Getty Images photo taken on June 10 at the CHAZ protest area. But the original photo showed him leaning against a car.

Looks real, doesn’t it? Well it’s fake news because the gunman was digitally inserted to ‘illustrate’ the ongoing Seattle protests. Photo: ABC

Fox’s website used that gunman’s image for the network’s coverage of the protest zone, but the image was also included in a mashup of other photos from May 30 that depicted smashed windows in downtown Seattle — before the protest zone was set up and in a different neighbourhood.

Fox took down the photos after the newspaper inquired, and a Fox News spokeswoman acknowledged the issue in a statement that falsely claimed all photos were from the same week and the same location.

“We have replaced our photo illustration with the clearly delineated images of a gunman and a shattered storefront,” the Fox statement said.

While Fox was presenting images of gun-toting revolutionaries, CHAZ occupiers were building a sustainable garden. Photo: Twitter/Chaz Garden

The ethical standards of journalism require photo illustrations to be clearly marked, and caution used against using photos from different times and locations unless they are clearly marked because it can be misleading to the reader or viewer.

The gunman image was also inserted into a different June 10 Getty Images photo showing a sign from the protest zone that reads: “YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE CAP HILL.”

The gunman and sign photos were taken by Seattle freelance photographer David Ryder, who then distributed the photo through Getty Images.

“It is definitely Photoshopped,” Ryder told the newspaper.

“To use a photo out of context in a journalistic setting like that seems unethical.”

Here’s how Rupert Murdoch’s minions illustrated the Seattle protests. Big problem: the picture is an old one from the Minneapolis riots. Photo: ABC

The Seattle Times also reported that Fox’s package of stories on Seattle’s protest zone included a May 30 photo taken by an Associated Press photographer depicting a burning building and car that was in Minnesota. Fox has also since removed that image.

The CHAZ occupation, east of downtown Seattle, has evolved this week into a festival-like scene after police on June 8 removed barricades near the East Precinct and largely abandoned the station in an effort to de-escalate tensions between officers and demonstrators.

Meanwhile, a US judge on Friday ordered Seattle police to temporarily stop using tear gas, pepper spray and flash-bang devices to break up largely peaceful protests.

-A

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Is Tony Abbott a Sociopath?

Is Tony Abbott a sociopath?

 

BY TURNLEFT2013

BY Turn Left (Alison Parkes) with Penny Carter, first published on Progressives Tea Party, reproduced with permission

Actually, I have no idea whether Tony Abbott is a sociopath or not. I am not a psychiatrist. I am also not going to put up a list of Hare’s traits of a sociopath checklist and then trawl through Tony Abbott’s long history of violence, bullying, intimidation and abuse to find instances of quotes or actions that may correspond with that checklist.

What I will do, is put up Hare’s checklist, and let readers draw their own conclusions, not about whether Tony Abbott is a sociopath, or not… but whether the entire country as a whole needs some time on the leather couch talking about our feelings, our childhoods and our mothers:
• glibness
• superficial charm
• grandiose sense of self-worth
• need for stimulation
• proneness to boredom
• pathological lying
• cunning
• manipulative behaviour
• lack of remorse
• shallow affect [superficial emotional responses]
• callousness
• lack of empathy
• parasitic lifestyle
• poor behavioural control
• lack of realistic long-term goals
• promiscuity
• impulsivity
• irresponsibility
• failure to accept responsibility [for their own actions]
• criminal versatility ¹
• relying on sociological strategies and tricks to deceive

The problem is not so much that there are sociopaths, they have always existed, and will always exist in our societies. The problem is we keep electing them to govern over us, then bizarrely, expect they will govern inour best interests.

Like a nation of sheep we bought the lies and myths propagated in the Murdoch and Murdoch mini-me (ABC) media about how Tony is a changed person. Not even three months in, and that choice at the ballot box is proving disastrous. The almost cult-like worshiping of the thug who conned his way into the Lodge means our media has to tell us on a daily basis that black is white in order to maintain the illusion that Tony Abbott is the new messiah who will save Australia from the regional peace and AAA prosperity that Labor delivered us.

This is not who we are, there is nothing peculiarly Australian that requires us to vote in a violent, abusive, bullying man to become Prime Minister. Just as there was nothing in the German people in the 1920s and ’30s that meant they were more likely to vote in a fascist government. The only question is why they continued to support the fascist government, when it become blindingly obvious their leader was a dictator.

As Howard Zinn said: “Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders…and millions have been killed because of this obedience… Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity and war and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves… [and] the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem.”
(A video of Matt Damon reading that full speech can be found here…)

The lust for power, the easy access to the bottomless ATM known as taxpayers, the ability to get courts and federal police to bend to your will, is a lure so strong that those with evil and malevolent intentions find it difficult to resist. For these people, the ends justifies the means. The ‘ends’ being access to unlimited power, the ‘means’ is throw anyone under the bus that gets in their way. The trouble is, when the elected officials use lies, propaganda and intimidation to get there, they need to reproduce those tactics on a much larger scale to maintain their position of power, then our democracy gets thrown under that bus.

Do we still think our elected leaders act in the best interest of our country? As recent events in the US has shown, the Right Wing Teaparty republicans were prepared to crash the US economy by hitting the debt ceiling because they are ideologically opposed to poor people getting medical care that doesn’t result in bankruptcy. Our current government (it seems) is governing for the benefit of select few – Tony Abbott, George Pell, Gina Rinehart, Rupert Murdoch.

This current governments policies are ideological, and designed to transform our environment to maximise profits for mining magnate Rinehart, transform our economy to benefit a foreign billionaire Murdoch, push the stone-age values of a religious institution, and our work place laws to benefit a handful of foreign corporation and not millions of people who work for their wages.

We, as a nation, have surrendered our freedom, optimism, compassion, generosity, empathy, in exchange for security* and ended up with neither.

* an illusion of security, both budget and border. I say illusion because the crises that Liberals promise to save us from exist only in their own minds and in newspaper headlines, and do not reflect reality. Our budget under Labor was not an ‘emergency’, it was one of the best in the world, our borders are not in crisis because of a couple of boats.

Source: Psychopathy: Antisocial, Criminal, and Violent Behavior
edited by Theodore Millon, Erik Simonsen, Morten Birket-Smith, Roger D. Davis (2003)

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Billy Graham, Religious Huckster; Amid His Kindred

Worth 1,000 words: The awful state of American evangelical Christianity after Billy Graham

By Fred Clark

This is a picture taken this week at the celebration Franklin Graham held for the 95th birthday of his father, Billy Graham. It is also a parable, a metaphor, an astonishingly revealing snapshot of the sorry state of evangelical Christianity in America in 2013.

Seated in the middle there is Billy Graham, the world-famous evangelist who was, for more than 50 years, the face of white evangelical Christianity in America and the second-most influential Baptist pastor of the 20th century.

At 95, Graham is frail and in ill health. His image and his legacy have been usurped as political tools used by his son Franklin Graham, who seems desperate to be a political player and kingmaker. Not content with living off the interest of his father’s legacy, Franklin has been burning through the capital.

Just look at how Franklin has exploited his father here. The famous preacher is silent now, a voiceless prop called upon to lend a sheen of respectability to the likes of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and Rupert Murdoch and his Fox News lackeys.

To his credit, Billy Graham looks uncomfortable being dragged out to offer his apparent blessing to a gaggle of dishonest strangers and charlatans that includes two racist billionaires. The scowl on the old preacher’s face may reveal his recognition that this is what has become of his legacy — that everything he did and worked for has led only to this, to the empowerment of lying hucksters and the politics of resentful privilege. Perhaps he’s even realizing that something like this was bound to happen — that the intensely otherworldly focus of his lifelong ministry meant that it couldn’t plant deep roots in earthly soil.

But just look at that horrifying photograph. Soak it in.

This is evangelical Christianity in America in 2013.

White. Rich. Right-wing. Dishonest. Predatory. Outwardly pious, inwardly corrupt.

It’s all about political tribalism. Jesus simply isn’t in the picture.

Related articles

• Rupert Murdoch: At the Left Hand of Billy Graham (barthsnotes.com)
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Is The FCC Set to Give Rupert Murdoch A Media Monopoly?!

Is The FCC Set to Give Rupert Murdoch A Media Monopoly?!

Posted by Locker

Obama’s FCC Set to Give Rupert Murdoch a Media Monopoly

Murdoch is currently jockeying to buy the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, which just so happen to be the largest newspapers in the nation’s second and third largest cities. That will add to his current media empire in the United States, which includes the most watched cable news network in the nation, Fox so-called News, and the most circulated newspaper in the nation, The Wall Street Journal.

The only thing standing in Murdoch’s way of full-spectrum media domination in America are Federal Communication Commission rules that forbid one company from owning both a newspaper and a television station in one community. Murdoch already owns local television stations in both Chicago and Los Angeles.

But according to sources within the FCC, Chairman Julius Genachowski is quietly planning to scrap those rules. Under pressure from major media moguls like Murdoch, who see big bucks and huge political power in a consolidated national and local media, Genachowski circulated a new order to other FCC Commissioners that would allow for cross-ownership of TV and newspapers in the nation’s twenty biggest media markets.

Yea that’s what we need, more Rupert Murdoch mentality infecting our media.

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Rupert Murdoch’s Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory Endorsed By Neocon, Right Wing Jews

[Were it any other voice aside from Rupert Murdoch, circumstance or situation, these same Jewish Neocon and Rightist voices would typically be howling and barfing “anti-Semitism” until they were blue in the face.]

Rupert Murdoch and the ‘Jewish Owned Press’   

Eric Alterman

 

Rupert Murdoch. Reuters/Paul Hackett

The Joseph Kennedy portrayed in The Patriarch, David Nasaw’s magisterial new biography, didn’t dislike Jews per se. In fact, he rather admired the way they stuck together, looked out for their corporate interests and ultimately, in his view, trapped (or brainwashed) Franklin Roosevelt into allowing the United States to become embroiled in the fight against Nazi aggression. But he blamed “a number of Jewish writers and publishers” for trying to “precipitate a war with Germany.” While Jewish community leaders were desperately trying (and failing) to convince Roosevelt to intervene on behalf of the victims of Hitler’s repression (soon to be genocide), and to lobby other nations to do so, Kennedy—then ambassador to the Court of St. James’s—did everything in his power to frustrate these aims, believing that Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews was unworthy of American attention.

One particularly disturbing aspect of the story Nasaw tells concerns the tendency of Jewish communal leaders—particularly the Zionist leaders—to fool themselves about Kennedy. Rabbi Stephen Wise, for instance, wrote his colleagues in New York that the new ambassador was “going to be very helpful, as he is keenly understanding” of the Jewish position on immigration and could be counted on to lobby Roosevelt in its favor.

Like Joseph Kennedy, Rupert Murdoch is a man of immense wealth and political influence, much admired in the Jewish professional community. Also like Kennedy, Murdoch sees a world in which Jews use their financial power on behalf of the Jews themselves. Or, more accurately, he thinks this is what they should do, and complains when they do not.

During the initial days of the recent Israel-Hamas conflict, Murdoch tweeted, “Why is Jewish owned press so consistently anti-Israel in every crisis?” Consistent with the Murdoch media ethos, he presented no evidence for either contention: that the US press was “Jewish owned” or that it was “consistently anti-Israel.” In fact, both contentions are ridiculous. The mainstream media are largely owned by multinational corporations. The most powerful single owner of media in the United States is Murdoch himself. Viacom, Disney, Comcast, Time Warner and Bertelsmann are not “Jewish owned.” Neither, though it may come as a surprise to Murdoch, is The New York Times. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is neither Jewish by birth—according to traditional Jewish law—nor by choice. (He was raised Episcopalian, his mother’s faith.)

True, the percentage of Jews working in the MSM is high, as it is in the medical, legal, financial and entertainment fields. But most of the time, when someone insists that Jews use their power in these industries on behalf of so-called Jewish interests—much less bias their actions deliberately on behalf of another country—they are correctly deemed to be anti-Semites. Would Murdoch expect a Jewish president to act explicitly on the basis of what was “good for the Jews”? If so, maybe we should scotch that idea right now, since my landsmen do not represent even one-fiftieth of the country’s population.

It’s worth remembering that Murdoch’s employees at Fox News have been known to engage in some hateful Jewish stereotyping as well. Fox News host Bill O’Reilly once told a Jewish caller to “go to Israel” if he found himself offended by public Christmas displays. Glenn Beck, while a Fox employee, slandered George Soros as America’s “puppet master,” an old anti-Semitic canard, and even displayed the image of a Star of David while doing so.

Complaints about the allegedly Jewish-owned media are supposed to spur organizations like Abe Foxman’s Anti-Defamation League into action. But Murdoch is not only a powerful right-wing publisher; he is also a billionaire who funds quite a few of the right-wing Jewish publications and organizations he does not own, picking up awards (and apologists) from them like lint on a cheap suit. I didn’t make it to the ADL International Leadership Award dinner honoring Murdoch, or the Simon Wiesenthal Humanitarian dinner, the Museum of Jewish Heritage Award dinner, the American Jewish Committee National Human Relations Award dinner, etc., though I did once attend a United Jewish Appeal-Federation “Humanitarian of the Year” ceremony for the guy. (The award was presented, I kid you not, by Henry Kissinger.) Norman Podhoretz took the podium to thank Murdoch for helping keep Commentary afloat after the American Jewish Committee (belatedly) cut it loose.

Now that Commentary, like a family dry-cleaning business, has been passed down to the younger (and lesser) John Podhoretz, it is not so surprising to see its blogger, Jonathan Tobin, endorse Murdoch’s anti-Semitic formulation. Tobin, who recently worked himself up into a froth over an allegedly anti-Semitic Maureen Dowd column about Mitt Romney’s foreign policy advisers that made no mention of anyone’s religion or ethnicity, insisted that “it wasn’t unreasonable for the non-Jewish Murdoch to wonder why these [Jewish-owned] papers as well as much of the liberal media are often so reflexively hostile to Israel’s cause.” Other Jewish neocons followed suit. When Murdoch issued a narrowly worded clarification, Seth Lipsky’s New York Sun (which I did not know still existed) declared that Murdoch’s “apology was unnecessary.” Michael Goldfarb, a former Bill Kristol protégé now at a Koch brothers–sounding outfit called the Center for American Freedom, tweeted “New York Times proves @RupertMurdoch correct,” also apparently unaware that the paper is not Jewish-owned (nor, it must be said, consistently or even inconsistently critical of Israel). Foxman, too, has chimed in on Murdoch’s behalf.

When FDR died in April 1945, Joe Kennedy, while admiring the Jews’ “marvelous organizing capacity,” nevertheless celebrated the fact that “the power of certain groups to control the future life of this country [is] finished.” Rupert Murdoch is apparently betting that the old man was wrong yet again.

So who really does own the media? More and more, it’s the fewer and fewer. Read New Press head André Schiffrin on “How Mergermania Is Destroying Book Publishing.”

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