CHINA'S PRESS CENSORSHIP

FOLLOW THE MONEY

There is no such thing in America as an independent press. You know it and I know it.  There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. If I allowed my honest opinions to appear in one issue of my paper, before twenty-four hours my occupation would be gone.

The business of the journalists is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press?  We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.--John Swinton, Chief of Staff, The New York Times,  New York Press Club, 1953.


Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame recently renounced his “citizenship,” pulling the plug on his Amazon Prime membership and calling for a boycott of Amazon after he discovered that the company had buckled under pressure from Washington and scrubbed WikiLeaks from its Web servers. The Nation.


Most countries' media support their governments and cheerfully lie for them ("weapons of mass destruction").  Venezuela is unusual in that its corporate media regularly calls for the assassination of their democratically-elected President, making it the freest national media on earth.  But such examples are rare.

Most countries have one-party governments and one-party media.  The US has a Capitalist government and Capitalist media which are naturally controlled by capitalists and which permits no criticism of Capitalism; China has Communist government and a Communist media which is controlled by communists. It publishes a lot of criticism of the government--but no criticism of Communism. Both countries' media are heavily censored. US media is censored by the handful of billionaires who own it.  China's media is censored by a handful of bureaucrats. Neither country is a democracy: American elections do not feature anti-capitalists; Chinese elections do not feature anti-communists. 


Recently the Chinese have begun to publicly discuss their own media censorship, as this piece from the Financial Times illustrates. Now we may hope for a similar discussion in our Western media:

China microblogs: confusion, not crackdown – FT.com- Experts dismiss the idea that the Beijing Daily heralds new regulation.“I think more important would be for the mainstream media to raise the requirements it has towards itself,” said Liu Genqin, a media expert at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. “Beijing Daily is not [the Communist party mouthpiece] People’s Daily, and even People’s Daily’s line seems to be changing every few days now.”What is more important to watch is how the microblogs themselves change. $Sina Weibo, which used to list the posts that had received the most attention in a ranking, now only offers lists of “suggested” posts. This gives the internal censors the website is required to employ on behalf of the government much more leeway in burying posts that could prove unsettling or politically risky. Last month, Charles Chao, chief executive of Sina, said the company would tighten the microblog service’s internal content controls.Liu believes that is already having an impact on the medium’s vitality. “I have a feeling that the popularity has slackened a bit, that users are less lively, the topics more mediocre. One reason could be the attitude of the propaganda authorities, another the management by Sina, yet another the choices of netizens themselves.”

All countries exercise censorship, as seen in this article about American ally Australia:

MELBOURNE - Google has withdrawn from China, arguing that it is no longer willing to design its search engine to block information that the Chinese government does not wish its citizens to have. In liberal democracies around the world, this decision has generally been greeted with enthusiasm.

But in one of those liberal democracies, Australia, the government recently said that it would legislate to block access to some Web sites. The prohibited material includes child pornography, bestiality, incest, graphic "high impact" images of violence, anything promoting or providing instruction on crime or violence, detailed descriptions of the use of proscribed drugs, and how-to information on suicide by Web sites supporting the right to die for the terminally or incurably ill....  [Peter Singer]

And advocates of 'Freedom of the Press' , like Reporters Without Borders (RWB or RSF) are really just fronts for US corporate interests, as this excerpt demonstrates:  After years of trying to hide it, Robert Menard, Paris-based Secretary-General of Reporters Sans Frontieres or RWB, confessed that the RWB budget was primarily funded by "US organizations strictly linked to US foreign policy."

Those US organizations behind RWB include the Open Society Foundation of billionaire speculator, George Soros, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the US Congress' National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Also included is the Center for Free Cuba, whose trustee, Otto Reich, was forced to resign from the George W. Bush Administration after exposure of his role in a CIA-backed coup attempt against Venezuela's democratically elected President Hugo Chavez.

As one researcher found after months of trying to get a reply from NED about their funding of Reporters Without Borders, which included a flat denial from RSF executive director Lucie Morillon, the NED revealed that Reporters Without Borders received grants over at least three years from the International Republican Institute. The IRI is one of four subsidiaries of NED.--F. William Engdahl, "Reporters Without Borders seems to have a geopolitical agenda,"

The National Endowment for Democracy, as its Orwellian name implies, is devoted to overthrowing democracies and all forms of government that express independence from the (Capitalist) Party line:

The NED, as I detail in my book, Full Spectrum Dominance:Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, was created by the US Congress during the Reagan administration on the initiative of then-CIA Director Bill Casey to replace the CIA's civil society covert action programs, which had been exposed by the Church committee in the mid-1970s. As Allen Weinstein, the man who drafted the legislation creating the NED admitted years later, "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA."

Reporters Without Borders (RWB), the champion of billionaire-controlled media, ranks the Chinese media freedom at #170—almost the lowest freedom rating on earth--and ranks the USA at #20: among the highest.  Makes you wonder, doesn't it?  Because according to the Pew Charitable Trusts, only 30% of Americans feel that our media is trustworthy, while 88% of Chinese trust their government and its media.  Perhaps that's because their government tells then that it censors the media, while Americans are told that their media is "free"?


And this jewel:

Big Brother is watching Facebook and Twitter

21 June 2012 by Jim Giles

The US government wants to monitor activity on social networks to get hints of political unrest...

..officials at the Department of State issued a procurement notice on 1 June asking software developers to submit bids for a contract to supply tools that provide "deep analysis of topics, conversations, networks, and influencers of the global social web". These tools will analyse conversations taking place in at least seven foreign languages, including Chinese and Arabic.

Once the bids are in, the software systems will undergo a six-month trial in which they will examine online reaction to a specific event, such as a talk given by a US ambassador.

The military is even further along with such plans. In 2007, the US air force awarded defence giant Lockheed Martin a $27 million contract to develop theWeb Information Spread Data Operations Module, or WISDOM, which analyses posts made to news forums, blogs and social media. Military analysts are already using it to monitor Central and South America and the Pacific region. Lockheed Martin is now upgrading WISDOM with a $9 million contract from the navy, which wants to "understand the latest regional trends and sentiment and predict threats from groups and individuals" Read More...