Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Assange's case: media are often more like electrically lit barbarians

Assange is not prosecuted for what is normally understood as rape but for rather obscure reasons. Assange could never be prosecuted for such sex crimes, as they exist in Sweden,  in other countries. A closer look at those allegations reveals an entirely different picture than what might be assumed: sex by surprise.

Those allegations against Assange and their non reporting in many media are a blatant case of the media behaving as gatekeepers, letting their readers only know what they chose. That's the case in many matters as well only this time it might turn out to work out against them.

Instead of proper reporting, the readers are being served totally uniformed opinions and somehow with that being told how to think. The Guardian had an interesting article how newspapers were in 1984 andhow they had changed over the years. It begins:


How did readers know what to think in 1984? Once you get over the minuscule, blurred pictures and the lack of colour, the first thing that strikes you about the
newspapers of that year  is the paucity of opinionated columnists. The finger-jabbing, red-faced anger of today's commentariat, the passionate, omniscient certainty with which they declare opinions, scarcely existed 25 years ago. Incredibly, the Sunday Times – under that most opinionated of editors, Andrew Neil – did not then have a single serious regular weekly columnist, ...
 ...continue reading article

Other reasons why media are behaving strange is certainly that many are war mongers like Murdoch and his staff, his many pundits. A good idea of Murdoch as war monger on his own is provided in that article,telling it how he praised Tony Blair in 2003 for his courage to go to war against Iraq. And he also made some great economic predictions:
He said the price of oil would be one of the war's main benefits. "The greatest thing to come out of this for the world economy, if you could put it that way, would be $20 a barrel for oil. That's bigger than any tax cut in any country."
Following his own logic, stupid economic (bastard) reasoning, he has no idea
of the costs of the war, like here for the US.

And in order to complete the picture, a look at what Murdoch had to say recently. Speaking at a Baroness Thatcher lecture, he threw his support behind the coalition government tonight, applauding its tough approach to cutting the budget deficit and praising David Cameron."Strong medicine is bitter and difficult to swallow," he said. "But unless you stay the political course, you will neither be robust nor popular."

In other words, life is full of surprises for news consumers as well as non consumers the way things turned out economically and financially.