Most mass media have done an abysmal, unprofessional job in reporting on the Armenian Genocide resolution in the U.S. Congress.

Well, SOME news sources are worth checking out for political news. Others, not so much.

My roommate back in college admitted once that he spent an awful lot of time complaining about things (Usually justifiably, I thought) but felt he really had to make an exception once and to declare that the meal we were eating at a usually not-so-great cafeteria was really first-class. In the same light, I'd really like to commend the front-page piece in the Inky today summing up the health care summit yesterday. It's a solid, substantve piece that lets one know where all the players in the health care game are standing and where they're headed.

Political Scientist Michael Parenti catalogued seven generalizations about the way the news media create anti-union messaging--from painting workers as greedy, to omitting the salary of management or depicting public officials (like Mayor Nutter) as neutral. Using this lens to dissect the coverage of the SEPTA strike, it becomes clear that local media like the Inquirer and Daily News have a dangerous anti-union bias, once again making the case that to build our own movement we need our own media. Read More | Related: Rivers Casino nightshift supervisor John Kovach had demanded that the 22 plus casino security professionals working on that shift remove their SPFPA Union RESPECT pins from their jackets...

Just how seriously can we take criticism from "The Village" (Blogger term for the press corps) concerning the "war" between Fox News and the Obama Administration?

I've lived in Philadelphia for over twelve years -- without cable. For much of that I didn't have internet access at home, either. Like thousands of my neighbors, if I wanted local news and weather, I turned to my broadcast TV. This past December and January, when students, block captains, neighbors, and friends worked to stop the city from shutting down our local libraries, it was an thrill to see all of us on TV -- and to know that others across the city were joining the fight after seeing themselves reflected on their local airwaves.

Center for Media Justice

A letter to our local paper on the uses of newspapers.

Since Congress passed the first $168 billion government stimulus, the “S” word has become a favorite term for the corporate media in referring to socialism. It would be more appropriate to use the “S” word to refer to “stimulus” because it is evident that the capitalists are moving no closer to a transition to socialism; however, as the U.S. economic crisis continues to expand and the failure of capitalism become more apparent to the world, the wealthy ruling elite are now sustaining capitalism with one stimulus after another.

Readers of the Inky will have noticed that the editors endorsed Barack Obama on October 19th, but ran a dissenting editorial along with the endorsement. This is significant. It had never done this before, and as several letter respondents noted the “dissent” consisted of a series of Republican campaign slogans of little intellectual merit [Oct. 22]. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the dissent reflects the input of Publisher-Owner Brian Tierney, whose rightwing views and marketing orientation are well-known.

In this Kafkaesque age everything is stood on its head. The champion violator of international law and sovereignty and the territorial integrity of states is gung ho for respecting state sovereignty and territorial integrity (of Georgia, but not Pakistan); primary terrorist and ethnic cleansing states (the United States and Israel) invade, bomb, and torture, but wax indignant at retail terrorism that flows largely in response to their wholesale terror; and these same two states, brimming over with nuclear arms and increasingly threatening to use them, are aghast that Iran might want and someday be able to make a nuclear weapon.

See Also by Herman: Inky Notes, November 3, 2008 and Poor Marlise: Her Old Allies Are Now Attacking the Tribunal and Even Portraying the Serbs as Victims, where he writes: "Perhaps most painful was the disclosure that in 1999 the Kosovo Albanian KLA sent as many as 300 captive Serbs to Albanian to be killed and their internal organs 'harvested' for sale abroad, a matter barely mentioned in the New York Times."

EMBEDDED VIDEO: Truth Game, by John Pilger

Marlise Simons, the New York Times's main reporter on the Milosevic trial and International Criminal Trial for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), has had a difficult year. Perhaps most painful was the disclosure that in 1999 the Kosovo Albanian KLA sent as many as 300 captive Serbs to Albanian to be killed and their internal organs "harvested" for sale abroad, a matter barely mentioned in the New York Times (see below).