Bird’s-Eye: A Potemkin Village is a fake image set up to fool the viewers about reality. Sometimes it’s set up by the media, as in the New York Times’ attempt to redefine torture to meet the needs of Dick Cheney. The fake nature of the villages can become clear when someone dares looks behind the facade, as shown the recent firing of Octavia Nasr when she praised a member of Hezbollah. Or sometimes the Potemkin villages can be set up by a government attempt to block factual information about villages and the real people who live in them, as illustrated by Stephen Harper’s ongoing attempt to eviscerate the Canadian Census.
* The NYT: We Changed Reality Because Cheney Wanted Us To The Daily Dish Andrew Sullivan
This is not editing. It is surrender. It is not journalism; it is acquiescence to propaganda. It strikes me as much more egregious a failing than, say, the Jayson Blair scandal. Because it reaches to the very top, was a conscious decision and reveals the empty moral center in the most important newspaper in the country. When historians look back and try to understand how the US came to be a country that legitimizes torture, the New York Times will be seen to have played an important role in euphemizing it, enabling it, and entrenching it. The evidence shows conclusively that there is not a shred of argument behind the dramatic shift in 2002 – just plain cowardice.
* Octavia Nasr’s firing and what The Liberal Media allows – Glenn Greenwald Salon.com
The reality is that “pro-Israel” is not considered a viewpoint at all; it’s considered “objective.” That’s why there’s no expression of it too extreme to result in the sort of punishment which Nasr just suffered (preceded by so many others before her). Conversely, while Hezbollah is seen by much of the world as an important defense against Israeli aggression in Lebanon, the U.S. Government has declared it a Terrorist organization, and therefore “independent” U.S. media outlets such as CNN dutifully follow along by firing anyone who expresses any positive feelings about anyone who, in turn, has any connection to that group. That’s how tenuous and distant the thought crime can be and still end someone’s career. It’s true that much of the world sees some of Hezbollah’s actions as Terrorism; much of the world sees Israel’s that way as well. CNN requires the former view while prohibiting the latter. As usual, our brave journalistic outlets not only acquiesce to these suffocating and extremely subjective restrictions on what our political discourse allows; they lead the way in enforcing them.
* Gutting Of Census Stirs Opposition To Stephen Harper Haroon Siddiqui The Toronto Star
In 1985 [ Ivan Fellegi] became head of Statistics Canada. He made it the world’s most respected census agency, before retiring in 2008. So when Ivan Fellegi says the Stephen Harper government is being stupid about next year’s census, you have to perk up and pay attention. He is so alarmed by the Tory decision to axe the mandatory detailed census form, he says, that had he still been the chief statistician, he’d have quit in protest…. But the Tories have decided that the longer form will no longer be mandatory. It will be voluntary.
Why? Because it’s “coercive and intrusive,” says the minister in charge, Tony Clement — he of G8/G20 infamy, of police coercion and of shovelling millions of dollars coerced out of taxpayers into his riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka….“I don’t accept that every time you make a change on every matter, you have to shout it from every rooftop,” said the arrogant Clement.
