10 of the Top Least Reported Stories of the Week

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Compiled by Cheryl Seal

Anyone who routinely scans multiple sources for news, taking in AFP, BBC, Al Jazeera, the Guardian, US Newswire, and other non-Bush-controlled sources will quickly begin to see the gaping holes in US corporate media coverage. Not only do these holes tend to be uniformly in the interests of G.W. Bush and his campaign, they are systematic: it is rare to find one of the members of the US media cartel breaking ranks and giving prominent coverage (as in not buried on page A22 or C12), to a story suppressed by the others. There are laws against price-fixing - a practice acknowledged by all as fraud. So why aren't there laws against "news fixing?" It, too, is fraud.

Lists on site
10 of the Most Important Stories the US Media Failed to Report to the American People this Week
http://www.democrats.com/view.cfm?id=23072

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1. dis

gust
ting

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2. Face it, the US media is no longer a vehicle for honesty and information.

It is just a front for it's corporate owners and the administration that they need in order to maintain it's dominance over American foreign and domestic policy.

Never rely on the American media for anything, always go to the foreign press. A lesson we understand here at DU, but most Americans are either woefully or willfully ingorant to learn.

[Catt03]

3. True; NYT Public editor addressed this

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/weekinreview/08bott.html

snip

In this all-news all-the-time environment, society is immersed first in a flood of facts and then in a rush of opinion. Inescapably, the public's interest is soon saturated. Too soon.

With such saturation coverage, news gets used up faster, decaying rapidly into what Russell Baker calls "the olds.'' Public curiosity, let alone the public interest, is exhausted, and the mass media are quick to look for some new sensation even if that means leaving important issues unresolved. News grows old before its time.

Last winter, The Times reported that Thomas Scully, then the head of Medicare, threatened to fire the program's chief actuary if he gave Congress an accurate estimate of the cost of the drug bill about to be enacted - at least $100 billion more than the White House had claimed. The bill passed narrowly. An internal investigation later confirmed Scully's threat. So? Has the administration offered a reasonable explanation or apology? What have members of Congress done to ensure that they get honest answers in the future?

snip

And this paragraph, essentially what we are all clamoring for:

Consider also the acceleration of news reporting. In the 1992 campaign, the Clinton forces devised what has become a staple of modern political practice, the War Room, where every charge or claim of the opposition is heard and answered immediately. Now, the Bush campaign includes a 24-hour operation with a core staff of eight, plus interns, that starts work each day at 5 a.m.

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So....we need the Kerry War Room to get their butts going and also activists need to bombard the media with letters, phone calls etc to ask "what happened too".