From: eleni constantinou <tpanayiotou@...>
Subject: [Alternative_Energy_Politics] Corporate beast on the prowl!
To: Alternative_Energy_Politics@yahoogroups.com
Date: Thursday, July 2, 2009, 2:21 PM






Paul Joseph Watson



Wednesday, July 1, 2009



A stinging attack by John Hartigan, the CEO of Rupert Murdoch's News Limited,
labels bloggers and alternative media outlets as "political extremists".
Hartigan implies that bloggers should be jailed as they are in oppressive police
states like China and Burma.



In a speech to the National Press Club, Hartigan savagely dismissed blogs as,
"Something of such little intellectual value as to be barely discernible from
massive ignorance."



"Bloggers don't go to jail for their work. They simply aren't held accountable
like real reporters….It could be said the blogosphere is all eyeballs and no
insights," barked Hartigan.



"In the blogosphere, of course, the mainstream media is always found wanting. It
really is time this myth was blown apart."



"Blogs, and a large number of comment sites, specialise in political extremism
and personal vilification. Radical sweeping statements without evidence are
common."



Hartigan doesn't seem to grasp the fact that the mainstream media is always
found wanting because they habitually lie about news events and spin stories to
suit the demands of their corporate owners. This is the very reason why blogs
and alternative media outlets have become so popular and have eaten into the
mainstream media's audience share, because people are sick of being treated like
idiots, sick of being lied to, and are desperately in search of the truth.



Indeed, Hartigan's boss Rupert Murdoch confessed to the fact that his media
empire tried to shape public opinion to support the war in Iraq In other words,
Murdoch's many prominent news outlets wantonly put out propaganda supporting the
manufactured case for invasion. Murdoch admitted to this while lamenting the
corporate media's "loss of power" to alternative media and Internet blogs,
seemingly unaware of the fact that the two are directly connected.



When the people know that the corporate media is deliberately lying to them
about Niger yellowcake and weapons of mass destruction, they are going to seek
alternative avenues of information. The fact that the corporate media habitually
lies is a manifestly provable reality, not a "myth" as Hartigan ludicrously
claims.



In addition, while mainstream media routinely uses anonymous sources and little
more than bluster and hot air to back up their stories, blogs provide links to
almost every claim they make so readers can research the source evidence for
themselves. This is the opposite from Hartigan's claim that blogs make "radical
sweeping statements without evidence." Indeed, this phrase perfectly
characterizes tactics employed by the mass media on a daily basis.



(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)



http://www.prisonpl anet.com/ murdoch-ceo- labels-bloggers- political-
extremists. html



The corporate media monopoly has terminal cancer and they are losing their power
to blogs and alternative media, which is why people like Hartigan are so angry
and also why the establishment is aggressively moving to phase out the old
Internet altogether and replace it with "Internet 2," a highly regulated and
controlled electronic Berlin wall, where alternative voices will be silenced and
giant corporate propaganda organs will dominate once again.



As blogger Darryl Mason writes today, "John Hartigan is full of shit. Bloggers
have gone to jail for their work, and to protect their sources, in North Korea,
Iran, Egypt, the list of countries persecuting bloggers grows longer by the
week. And the CEO of Australia's biggest news corporation doesn't know this?"



The jailing of bloggers for speaking too much truth is obviously not the kind of
news that John Hartigan, a Rupert Murdoch CEO, is interested in. How could he
not know about those jailing and prosecutions.



Remember those words. "Political extremism".



You will hear that call more and more as the major news corporations scale up
their war against independent media, and bloggers.



The source of the establishment' s move to claim that bloggers and alternative
media outlets are "extremists" or at worst "terrorists, " as we first reported
in September 2006, was a White House strategy document that the government had
been following since 9/11.



In a September 5, 2006 speech President George W. Bush referred to the document
as "an unclassified version of the strategy we've been pursuing since September
the 11th, 2001," that takes into account, "the changing nature of this enemy."



The strategy paper on how to `win the war on terror' cites "conspiracies" as one
of the wellsprings of terrorism and threatens to "address" and "diminish" the
problems they are causing the government in fulfilling their agenda.



This notion then reappeared in a March 2009 Homeland Security document entitled
"Domestic Extremism Lexicon," in which the "alternative media" is listed
alongside other radical extremist groups with the implication that people who
disagree with the mass media's version of events are potential domestic
terrorists.



According to World Net Daily, the DHS document was almost immediately rescinded,
but the groups listed alongside Neo-Nazis, Aryan prison gangs and black power
extremists again prove that the federal government is targeting American
citizens who are merely knowledgeable about their rights and up on current
issues as potential domestic terrorists to be treated as a "threat" to law
enforcement.