Michael D. D. White, Co-founder of CDL Talks With Glasgow Loves EU About Control of Information and Privatization of Everything- Libraries and Court Prosecution of Steve Donziger Included

[Note: This post may get updated with additions]

On November 15, 2021 Michael D. D. White, Co-founder of Citizens Defending Libraries talked with Glasgow Loves EU as part of their regular series of interviews shared by Facebook and Zoom.  The conversation was about the control of information and the privatization of virtually everything, privatization of libraries as our library defenders well know, but also much more. . .

. . .  The conversation started out talking about privatization of the federal court `prosecution' of environmental justice lawyer Steve Donziger written about at Citizens Defending Libraries here:   What Library Defenders Need To Know About The Imprisonment of Environmental Attorney Steve Donziger Because He Obtained a Judgment Against Chevron For Its Pollution of The Amazon.
 
There is an absolute relationship and linkage between the control of information and privatization: The former is one reason you don’t hear about, or what’s bad about, the latter, and the latter is often a means to achieve the former.

We Tweeted a link to the talk where you can view video here.


You can also go directly to view it on Facebook.

Eventually it should be up at the archives.

This is the archive of the Glasgow Loves EU livestreams:

In discussing the privatization of everything Mr. White referred to the forums Citizens Defending Libraries have had about selling off public assets.  See, for example: Fourth Forum on Selling Off Public Assets, Presented by First Unitarian Congregational Society of Brooklyn's Weaving the Fabric of Diversity & Citizens Defending Libraries, April 8, 2017

During the chat, Mr. White said that he had been giving some thought to the theory of the “Tragedy of the Commons” and what would be its opposite.   You can find writing about the “Tragedy of the Commons” all over the place.  It gets enormous coverage, almost ad nauseam and almost too much despite the theory having its validity.  The “Tragedy of the Commons” is advanced as an argument for privatizing public property, privatizing property that is owned and shared in common.  The theory is that when everyone, all the public, has equal, unrestrained access to assets that are commonly owned, there is an incentive to use those assets to the point of depleting exhaustion.  Examples include the over-fishing of the oceans, or the race of landowners competing against each other to use, as fast a possible for their personal benefit, the ultimately limited water in the Ogallala Aquifer that lies under the lands in eight great plains states where we once saw the Oklahoma dust bowl.  That dustbowl area was retrieved from desolation, in part from newer technology pumping that aquifer water up from below.

Mr. White suggested what is likely the rightful opposite of the “Tragedy of the Commons” is rarely talked about although it’s a concept possibly just as valid, or even more so, than the “Tragedy of the Commons.”  Maybe the other theory doesn’t get equal play with the “Tragedy of the Commons,”  because the other theory argues against, rather than for privatized ownership.  In fact, you are unlikely to find the other theory that Mr. White presented articulated anywhere.  If you dig, you will be able to find what is referred to as the “Tragedy of the Anticommons.”  That theory is about what is lost when people sit on, and don’t share and combine, patents; when they keep information secret (like with the mediaeval guilds of old) so that others can’t similarly benefit from knowing things.  It is the kind of thing that was expressed well and talked about by Lewis Hyde in his book “Common as Air,” where he notes how a young America, departing from Britain, flourished as information was shared and experimented with disregarding British patents rights that encroached on the "cultural commons" and free experimentation. . .

. .  As a better opposite to the “Tragedy of the Commons,” Mr. White offered another, different theory of how decisions that privatize a world that’s better shared can be destructive.  He suggested that it was perfectly demonstrated by what environmental lawyer Steve Donziger had litigated against: The Chevron/Texaco takeover of Amazon rain forest lands as if those lands were that oil company’s private preserve to exploit and despoil at will.  He said that when one entity (or maybe just a few) was allowed to own an entire environment, an entire ecosystem, that the complex, multi-faceted, broadly inhabited environment would then be seen for only the limited value that the owning entity could see in it, not for the value that all of those dwelling in the environment, human and non-human could perceive in and glean from the environment.  (As fewer and fewer monopolies own more and more of the world this is more and more a problem.)  As Mr. White was speaking to a largely Scottish audience, you’ll see he mentioned that another possible example of this in Scottish history could be the private ownership (by Lairds) that led to the depopulation of Scotland in the 1700s when a new kind of sheep were introduced; it was something that Jane Jacobs wrote about in her “Cities and the Wealth of Nations” book.        

In other parts of the interview, Mr. White reprised things he has said in other interviews, for instance on the Project Censored Show.  See: Latest Project Censored Radio Show Features Interview With CDL Co-Founder Michael D. D. White On Dismantlement of Libraries- (And Another Interview With Investigative Reporter Dave Lindorff), May 22, 2019.
   
We furnished useful associated links at the time of that interview and furnish some of them again here:

The following are links you may want to us to delve deeper into some of things you’ll hear discussed in the interview:

Main Citizens Defending Libraries page

Of course, our our current main Citizens Defending Libraries page, which, with lots of links, takes you in any direction you would like to research more about the dismantling of NYC libraries.  In all, it provides a very good overview, fairly parallel to the interview, but with even more information, of what we are up against broken down by topics.

It's Not Just The Real Estate Industry Threatening Libraries: Examining The Panoply of Other Threats

Our CDL page on Digital vs. Physical books:  Physical Books vs. Digital Books.

Articles About Library Privacy and Surveillance In Libraries

Interesting to Think That it All Began With BOOKS? Except That Amazon and World’s Wealthiest Man (As We Know Jeff Bezos Today) Didn’t Exactly Begin That Way. . .

Amazon Headquarters Lands In Long Island City: What Happens When Our Elected Officials Hand The Task of Governing Over To A Private Sector Corporation

Citizens Defending Libraries has covered suppressed books, including here:
Books As Catalysts In A World Where Information And Points of View Are Often Suppressed

Biography of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham, one example of a suppressed book.

As for Pacifica stations getting more content out and the possibility of HD radio (and you can think about the parallels between why it's important to preserve traditional libraries and why terrestrial radio is similarly important, there's a bit written about HD radio here:

Feeling Constrained By Your Digital `Liberation’? Speaking Personally, I Am

Interestingly, what that article mentions about our doorbells no longer being zones of privacy became a NY Times op-ed subject (Time To Panic About Privacy) in the special Sunday Review privacy project (but the way the Times has it set up on line is creepy and may turn your brain off).

Michael White reported a little bit of Esprit de l'escalier (spirit of the staircase) after his Project censored interview-  He said that when co-host Chase Palmieri asked about implication of Amazon Prime's reach (and he couldn't answer that exactly), he should have one-upped the conversation respecting such concerns with a jump to mentioning Alexa.  And when it comes to Alexa, our YouTube channel has a short Alexa video that's funny in a creepy, black humor sort of way.  See:

We think you will enjoy this video: Alexa Explains Surveillance Valley (+ Siri on Alexa)

The video:
Alexa Explains Surveillance Valley (+ Siri on Alexa)

The Alexa video is also embedded in a CDL post about Yasha Levine's book (Levine could be a good Project Censored guest):

Reading on the Internet vs. Reading a Book You Picked Up Browsing In Your Library: Yasha Levine’s “Surveillance Valley- The Secret Military History of the Internet”

There is another immediate followup Citizens Defending Libraries post to the above Yasha Levine book post (below), but the implications of it are very layered, nuanced and frightening, offering an uncomfortably challenging perspective.  It would have been, a real "rabbit hole," to get into-- It's basically another angle on where Levine gets around to for the end of his book.  Levin was even interviewed about it on WNYC's "On The Media":

Self Proclaimed As Fighting Surveillance, Library Freedom Project Is Tied to Tor Service With Its Deep Ongoing Connections, Including Financing, To The U.S. Government

The article mentioned by Michael White at the end about the interview about the non-representation of super-majorities of the public on major issue after major issue  (including not giving us the libraries we can afford):

Everybody’s Realizing It Now: The Political Establishment Is Not Willing To Give The Public The Things The Vast Majority Of Americans Want And That We Could Easily Have

Signing our petition lets people get email updates.

Privatization of History: Scary Information About What Is Happening At Our National Archives and Records Administration

"Erasing" history or "privatizing" it?  Churchill, a man whose flaws you may be unfamiliar with said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”-- And he did.

This one hits home for us at Citizens Defending Libraries.  At Citizens Defending Libraries we have paid much attention to how the shutting down, selling and deliberate underfunding of libraries relates to information control, information elimination, and censorship.

On February 6th, Democracy Now had a story about how millions of documents are being expunged from the National Archives.  This was right after the National Archives delivered an altered version of history concerning the 2017 Women’s March by doctoring a photograph of the March that the Archives used as a main feature for a new exhibit, The doctoring removed criticisms of President Trump.  See:  Erasing History: The National Archives Is Destroying Records About Victims of Trump’s ICE Policies.

Our National Archives is a form library intended to be a repository for the protection of our country’s history, as well as a form of watchdog for its protection.  Let’s note again: It’s a form of library.  Matthew Connelly, professor of history at Columbia University and principal investigator at History Lab, interviewed for the Democracy Now story about the expungements said that:

a lot of what’s happening at the National Archives is happening because they are being starved of resources.  They have a smaller budget now than they had back in 2008. That budget has been cut every year for the last three years.

That sounds exactly like our New York City libraries.  And we will remind you that there is no excuse for starving our New York City libraries of resources the way we are being starved, because libraries are an almost infinitesimal portion of our city budget, especially in terms of the benefits they deliver.

Mr. Connelly was on Democracy Now, having written a recent piece for The New York Times on the Archive expungements headlined “Why You May Never Learn the Truth About ICE.”

While the hook that was used for both the Democracy Now interview and Mr. Connelly’s New York Times op-ed was the destruction of information about the recent and ongoing atrocities being committed by ICE under Trump, the violations of “immigrant rights” involved, and how ICE may be “destroying records from Trump’s first year, including the detainees’ complaints about civil rights violations and shoddy medical care,” Mr. Connally ventured further in his concerns.  He expressed his worries about our government’s “long history of destroying records related to the overthrow of democratically elected governments, mind control experiments and torture,” and he noted how our country has “destroyed all of the records of the deliberations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff [he didn’t get to finish his sentence].”  He noted that the “Department of the Interior and the National Archives have decided to delete files on endangered species, offshore drilling inspections and the safety of drinking water.”

The Democracy Now headline for its segment with Mr. Connelly refers to “Erasing History,” but is this characterization directly on target?  Isn’t this instead, a likely “privatization” of history?

In his New York Times op-ed Mr. Connelly mentions how now when things go into the National Archives, “Everything must be digital, or the departments and agencies must use their own resources to scan them.”

We are currently in an age when there is unprecedented private storage of data.  Everything is saved.  Data storage is insanely cheap, and keeps getting cheaper.  Much of that data storage is done by companies like Amazon, private companies that have strong ties to the CIA and the military industrial complex.

With private data collection running rampant for every conceivable purpose, is it reasonable to think that any anything that ever exists in digital form, even if that digital existence is brief, is ever truly expunged, that it truly ever vanishes?  Is it reasonable to believe that just because we starve our libraries and public national archive, that the information they made available, however briefly, especially if it was made available digitally, will not continue to exist in private hands?  Probably not.

When information exists digitally, it is easy to suck it out on into private databases a wholesale basis. . .   It is instructive to remember that, before his premature and extremely disheartening death, Aaron Swartz, the young activist  who was, among other things, a fan of libraries and an advocate for democratic empowerment through publicly available information (plus an open internet with net neutrality), was legally persecuted by our government for sucking out digital information on a wholesale basis to do exactly the opposite: He downloaded 4.8 million academic journal articles from a from a private database with the probable intent of making them more publicly accessible.  A number of years before, Swartz downloaded and made more freely available to the public 2.7 million federal court documents (essentially the law) from a federal database, documents which were technically already public, but were somehow not actually readily accessible to the public unless they paid to go through private channels, except through private channels.  Prosecuted for his download of the academic journal articles, Swartz faced a potential 90 years in prison and his father accused the government of hounding him and bringing about his death.
         
It is therefore important to understand that what we are talking about is the privatization of history and information, not its erasure.

The control of history and its narratives has been going on for a long time with those who are powerful thinking a lot about it.  Winston Churchill famously said, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”  Our more liberal friends from the United Kingdom, who are better and more knowledgeably acquainted with Churchill, tell us they have very mixed feelings about “Winnie.”  Their feelings toward him are probably less favorable than ours, as we on this side of the pond, have likely been subjected to more unadulterated myth-making propaganda about the man.  There is much that was simply appalling about Churchill, but the fact that Churchill did, indeed, actually write a lot of the history about himself counteracts much of that.

Interviewed on On The Media, journalist Madhusree Mukerjee explained that after World War II, Churchill:

had complete access to all United Kingdom documents and an entire team of researchers and writers who helped him actually write six volumes or so of his World War II memoirs. And these volumes put Churchill at the center of the war, whereas historians have filled out some of the detail, which is that it was the Soviets who defeated the Nazis and the Americans who defeated the Japanese.

(See: Churchill's Forgotten, Ruthless Past, March 16, 2018)

Mukerjee also notes that “when his political career was in shards after the First World War, he wrote a history then, as well,” and that he wrote several histories, including “something called The History of the English-Speaking Peoples.”

Putting the resources of the British government at Churchill’s disposal to write is one way of letting history be written by those that command the reins of power. . . But pulling back on our public resources to put all of our history in the hands of private corporate monopolies that do not have the best interests of the public assuredly at heart is probably an even more serious surrender of the custodianship of truth and memory.  Global warming anyone?  How about perpetual wars?

. .  Privatizing history is probably far worse than just trying to erase it.

Our last thought on this: You may have already observed for yourself that, whether its studying to understand history or just trying to follow the news, the most vital key to comprehension is most certainly a careful focus on what the powerful don’t want you to know.

PS: (added February 29, 2020)– On February 21, On The Media caught up to run a segment, “The Vanishing National Archives," about  Matthew Connelly, his  New York Times op-ed and the expungements from the National Archives.

It mostly tracked the story above:

by the end of this year, they're [the archive is] going to be able to start destroying records from the first year of the Trump administration when it first began to crack down on undocumented immigration.

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[On the chopping block] . .  everything from aviation safety to the takeover of American firms by foreign nationals. All of those records are slated for destruction in the Department of Interior, records related to protection of drinking water, enforcement of laws on endangered species, the management of the mismanagement of native lands, native assets, all that stuff's gonna get deleted, too.

However, it ends using a nice quote from Churchill’s counterpart in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt:

“A nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people.” So to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

Citizens Defending Libraries Was At the Climate Strike March on September 20th In New York City.

Citizens Defending Libraries Was At the Climate Strike March on September 20th In New York City.

Here are some pictures.

And we were handing out small (non-paper-intensive) leaflets with links of interest o the subject of climate change and libraries.

Irony: Manhattan’s Newest “Library Of The Future” Will Be Named The “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library,” But A “Librarian Of The Future,” Personified By Edward G. Robinson In His Last Role Says Niarchos Acted “Miserably”

Edward G. Robinson playing a librarian of the future in his last role had stern and unappreciative things to say about Stavros Niarchos after whom the NYPL will name its newest "Library of the Future"

Perhaps you have picked up on this point already: What was once the Mid-Manhattan Library is undergoing going changes now, and it will be relaunched under a new name the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library.”  But is this “SNFL” rechristening of the library to name it after the Greek shipping millionaire fortuitous? . . .

The NYPL is promoting the book-eliminating changes at the Mid-Manhattan Library, a consolidating shrinkage that will simultaneously eliminate New York’s biggest science library (which will be turned into a comic book focused “Pop-Culture Museum” by another ship-owning multi-billionaire) as a “Library of the Future.”  There is, however, one thing that may inconveniently haunt that “future”: It’s a “Librarian of the Future” who says the Greek shipping magnate Niarchos “acted very miserably” towards him. 

We are speaking of Edward G. Robinson who played a librarian of the future, a “book,” in the science fiction, future dystopia film “Soylen Green.”  Robinson’s role as a future librarian was famously the last role he ever played shortly before dying: He died January 26, 1973 just 12 days after the filming.  Robinson’s remarks about Niarchos were published in the New York Times shortly before his death, November 5, 1972, in an interview about his life that he gave to promote the film: Little Caesar' Is Still Punching, by Charles Higham.

It’s an interview well worth reading.  You’ll find yourself feeling for the elderly Robinson who had suffered and was feeling the effects of a number of tribulations at the end of his life, including having battling with the House Committee on Un-American Activities when his blacklisting meant he was suddenly deprived of any opportunities to work in the early 1950s.

In the interview Robinson describes the Soylent Green film:

“Soylent Green’ is, I believe, an important picture, a harrowing projection of our existence 50 years from now. It shows very clearly what may well become of us if we don't look out. It is set in Manhattan, a city of 40 million people living miserably and horribly in a depersonalized Orwellian state.

Made in 1972 and released in 1973, the film looked forward to what was then decades away, the year 2022, a year we are now actually about to arrive at.  Whatever people will tell you about when we truly first knew about the dangers of greenhouse emissions and global warming, the film presciently explains that in its version of 2022 “greenhouse effect” has created a stiflingly warm world climate, “A heat wave all year round” where “everything’s burning up.”  The world ecosystems have collapsed and people are starving because food production is minimal.

In this Manhattan of the future, wealth inequality is extremely accentuated, with the wealthy living apart in tall luxury towers protected by extra security.  They treat the common folk of the world as disposable and, with a sort of Harvey Weinstein sort of callousness, apartments come optionally with attractive and usable young women referred to as “furniture.”  The wealthy of this world are more likely than not connected with a few conglomerate mega-corporations, which, if you look behind the scenes, are in control of and virtually indistinguishable from the government that's in charge.  The highest government official wears a military style jacket.  The public is helpless and uninformed.

If you want to know anything, if you want to have any hope of piecing together any part of the big picture to understand matters in context, things that might otherwise never be fully understood or investigated in this world of the future, then books are important . . .

Edward G. Robinson, the future's librarian, a "book"

. . . That’s where the character played by Edward G. Robinson comes in.  He is the one who has access to books and who does critical research to understand the world better.  In the future slang of the movie’s invention he is known as “a book,” but that slang term is essentially the term for the librarians still functioning in that future. The Sol Roth character played by Robinson has his own personal library of books in his shared apartment.  To extend the utility of that small collection he periodically meets with other “books” (other librarians of the future) to exchange books and their knowledge of them as part of a more effectively functioning commons.  A key point plot in terms of learning the landscape of power behind what's unfolding is a banned corporate book that reveals what the powerful corporate elite knew, but weren’t sharing about the escalating waste of the world’s environment.  The frail and elderly Roth is also a touchstone in that he remembers distinctly the once robust natural world of plenty that has vanished.

A key censored book: what the powerful corporate elite knew, but weren’t sharing about the escalating waste of the world’s environment.

Roth, “the book,” lives with and is a symbiotically functioning sidekick assisting the film’s main protagonist, a police detective played by Charlton Heston.

Charlton Heston and Edward G. Robinson in the film

A major set-piece in the film that sets up the film’s climax is the ceremonially orchestrated death that Robinson’s Sol Roth chooses for himself.  The scene was filmed just days before Edward G. Robinson’s own actual death and, to add the ultimate pathos, Robinson reportedly waited to tell Charlton Heston  (and only Heston) that his doctor had told him he was actually about to die until just before the cameras rolled.  And this reportedly affected Heston’s performance.

Edward G. Robinson’s gripe with Stavros Niarchos, laid out fully in the Times interview, involves how  Robinson lost $3 million worth of paintings in a divorce suit.  Robinson had been an avid art collector.  Then, when he was still financially weakened in the wake of his recent blacklisting, he was forced to sell much of his collection.  He sold to Niarchos who later was unwilling to sell back paintings that Robinson was most personally attached to:

    . . .  in order to comply with the California community property laws in his divorce from the former actress Gladys Lloyd, whom he had married in 1927, he had to sell more than half his superb collection, started in 1933, of masterpieces of art. “It was so brutal—the worst ordeal I ever went through. I went to everyone I could think of—rich men who had an affinity for art—Winthrop Rockefeller, Bobby Lehman, Kirkeby out hereto try to arrange for a loan to pay off the estimated worth of half the paintings, but these men played games with me; they only agreed to help provided I would sell them four or five of the paintings for little or no money. And so I said, ‘No deal.’

    “My wife had been very ill, and it proved impossible to reach any kind of sane agreement with her. I had no real estate, very few stocks, nothing else could sell. I had put my money, my whole life's blood, into paintings. Finally, some dealers took the paintings for over three million on behalf of Niarchos, the Greek shipping millionaire. He acted very miserably in the whole matter. He wouldn't let me buy back what I wanted when I finally got the money. Just a few things he condescended to part with, crumbs from the master's table. It was horrible.

    “The worst blow of all was losing Rouault's ‘The Old Clown.’ It was the king of my collection, I used to call him ‘Everyman’ The symbol of man's inhumanity to man. After that divorce suit, I realized just what the phrase inhumanity to man’ really meant.”

    Robinson's eyes clouded over with tears. “As for the remainder of the pictures, I don't know what I'll do with them. For years selected groups, classes, have come to see them. I have never closed them off from the public. You don't own any painting, you pay for the privilege of being a custodian. But I don't like the idea of them ending up in a museum. It's like putting a beautiful dead man or woman in morgue. Last December, I was in the Prado and I was horrified: the paintings there are badly hung, badly lit, you can't see the details. And it's supposed to be a foremost tourist attraction of Spain. No, I don't want to leave these lovely things to a museum, although I suppose inevitably they will end up there. What will I do with them otherwise? I don't know. I don't know.”

George Rouault's "Le Vieux Clown" or "The Old Clown." 
"The symbol of man's inhumanity to man."  -
"It was horrible. . .  I realized just what the phrase inhumanity to man’ really meant.”

Coming June 1st - Forum (The second) Where Do You Get Your News? What Are The Channels of Public Information Communication You Can Plug Into?

The first forum was great so we are having the second Friday June 1st.  Citizens Defending Libraries is all about people getting the information they need and should have.  (Use the links below to listen to a high quality recording of the first forum.)

Forum (The Second): Where Do You Get Your News? What Are The Channels of Public Information Communication You Can Plug Into?

Friday, June 1, 2018, 7:00 PM to 8:45 PM
First Unitarian Universalist Congregation Chapel
119-121 Pierrepont St, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Join a discussion to exchange information and ideas about how you get your information about important events in the world.  Where do you go to seek reliable news and complete information?  Should the country’s main stream media have reported the recent succession of unprecedentedly calamitous weather events without mentioning climate change?  Does a media drumbeat for war seem off-base? Do we hear about its cost?  Picking up newspapers, do you feel like you are reading compiled corporate press releases? As much of media ownership is consolidated in fewer corporations and when a wealthy few with disinformation agendas like the Kochs buy up ownership of outlets like Time magazine, where does truth take refuge to be found?  If your media literacy tells you that the most important part of narratives you are being served is what has been edited out how do you find what fills in the blanks?  Let’s identify what kinds of critical stories go unreported and how can we find out about them.

Conversely, when things need to become news, need to be known by the general public, what channels are there to transmit that information?  When structural reforms need to be made in our society they cannot be made unless we are able to exchange information about the changes that are needed: Serviceable channels for circulating information may be our threshold basic need.  How reliable is social media as an avenue for transmitting information and in what ways is it deceptively not?

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Facebook Event Pages To Share and Say You Are Coming

There is Facebook Event page posted for this event that you can share:

•        One Facebook Event Page is posted by Citizens Defending Libraries (if you click on "see all posts" on the event page there are postings of relevant articles for discussion).

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A Grist For Thought Sheet For the Forum

See if the sheet below helps you think about and prepare for the forum.

Grist for thought.  (Click to enlarge- You can also print it.  Or you can save the image to zoom in on it.)

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Here are links you can use to listen to a high quality recording of the first forum held March 4th.*

(* The discussion was moderated by Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michal D. D. White.)

You can listen to a recording of the forum (one hour twenty minutes): Where Do You Get Your News? (audio via Dropbox) or Where Do You Get Your News (audio via Soundcloud) or
Where Do You Get Your News (audio via Chirbit).

Audio on Soundcloud below.


Audio on Chirbit below


Check this out on Chirbit  

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Here is a link to listen to a very relevant recent speech by Mickey Huff of Project Censored about the present state of the mainstream news media in the United States:

Fake News and the Truth Emergency - A Speech by Mickey Huff

Another recent spellbinding speech listen to that is also quite relevant to potential discussions is by Peter Phillips, who has also been involved in Project Censored, discussing the central topic of his soon to be published new book, the concentration of power and increasing unequal distribution of resources that is affecting messages that are being disseminated to the world’s public.  (Do you know how much total wealth in the world and who has most of it and in what proportions?)

Giants - The Global Power Elite

What do you know about the six conglomerate companies that own almost all the media?  Here is a link to read about them (National Amusements, Disney, TimeWarner, Comcast, Newscorp, SONY): The 6 Companies That Own (almost) All Media.

Do you know which of these which of these conglomerates have what ties to military, industrial surveillance complex investments?

Here from the above article are the media holdings just of Comcast:

Do you know what the alternative media is if you want to turn to sources other than the mainstream media conglomerates.  Are they the sources of news that Google has not been censoring?

Here is a list of outlets that recently suffered, became more obscure and harder to find when Google implemented new algorithms (its "Project Owl") to direct people away from them and to more mainstream outlets typically owned by the conglomerates:

Sites that Google is suppressing (Project Owl):

   •    DemocracyNow!
   •    Alternet
   •    Naked Capitalism
   •    Counterpunch
   •    TruthOut!
   •    Truthdig
   •    Consortium News
   •    World Socialist Web Site
   •    The Socialist Worker
   •    Common Dreams
   •    Wikileaks
   •    The Intercept
   •    Media Matters (Media watchdog site)
   •    Black Agenda Report
   •    Russia Today (and particularly its 9/11 and Operation Gladio coverage)
   •    International Viewpoint
   •    Global Research

Project Censored has another longer list of alternative media sites: Project Censored List of Independent News Outlets.

Here are sites that have been outlets to publish work that has won Winners of the Izzy Award (The Izzy Award from- Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College is named after maverick journalist I. F. Stone. Presented annually for "special achievement in independent media," the Izzy Award goes to an independent outlet, journalist, or producer for contributions to our culture, politics, or journalism created outside traditional corporate structures.)-

    •    2017- Mother Jones &The Nation
    •    2016-  INSIDE CLIMATE NEWS, and the Invisible Institute, Democracy Now!
    •    2015- The Nation and The Guardian
    •    2014- Independent journalists JOHN CARLOS FREY (for reporting on U.S./ Mexico border deaths) and NICK TURSE (for reporting on civilian casualties of U.S. wars from Vietnam to Afghanistan). And the first members of the newly-established I.F. Stone Hall of Fame were inducted: GLENN GREENWALD and JEREMY SCAHILL.
    •    2013- Mother Jones
    •    2012- Democracy Now,  Center for Media and Democracy
    •    2011- Truthdig.com and City Limits
    •    2010- The Intercept, The Nation and Democracy Now!.”       
    •    2009- Democracy Now!

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An advertisement run in New York Magazine by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization  (UNESCO) honoring World Press Freedom Day, a day to remind a reminder people of the countries around the world where the press and the news are censored: “Don’t just read New York, Read. .” and the list it gives is The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Economist, USA Today, National Review, BBC News, Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker, Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News, because “It all starts with a free press.”  But how representative of a truly free uncensored free press is this list of corporately owned, mostly mainstream, mostly legacy publications?

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A Banned Segment from Saturday Night Live (click through for best viewing)

The 1998 Robert Smigel animated short film "Conspiracy Theory Rock," part of a March 1998 "TV Funhouse" segment, has been removed from all subsequent airings of the Saturday Night Live episode where it originally appeared. SNL producer Lorne Michaels claimed the edit was done because it "wasn't funny". The film is a scathing critique of corporate media ownership, including NBC's ownership by General Electric/Westinghouse.

 SNL Banned Episode ~ Media Controlled Conspiracy Theory Rock ~ from DianeDi on Vimeo.  (If this video is deleted yet again by those who continue to seek to ban it you may have to search to find it.- Your library is unlikely to have a reference copy retained and available under the doctrine of fair use.)

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List of journalists fired or self-exiled from mainstream media outlets because they expressed or wanted to express views unacceptable to the outlets they were working for:

•        Phil Donahue- Legendary television host fired from his top-rated program by the “supposedly liberal” MSNC in 2003 during the run up to the Iraq War because he was expressing anti-war views.

    •    Bill Maher- Fired by ABC from his “Politically Incorrect” program for not saying exactly the right things about 9/11 in its aftermath.  He said that terrorists “staying in the airplane” that was to hit a building could not described as “cowardly.”  Since that time Maher has been has been doing Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO where he has always been careful not to be anti-corporate and has, as well, been careful about what he says about 9/11.

    •    James Risen- Risen was a reporter for the New York Times.  He and another Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau, wrote a story about the  secret illegal and unconstitutional surveillance of the American public by the George W. Bush administration that won the New York Times a Pulitzer Prize in 2006, but the Times originally suppressed that story.  Risen now works for the Intercept.

    •    Robert Parry- An award-wining American investigative journalist (and finalist for the 1985 Pulitzer Prize) best known for his role in covering the Iran-Contra affair for the Associated Press (AP) and Newsweek.  In 1995, Parry self-exiled himself from mainstream media to found Consortium News (the Consortium for Independent Journalism Inc.)

    •    Ed Schultz- Fired from the position if MSNBC in the spring of 2014 host after bridling about things such as directions he received from MSNBC management concerning what to cover and not to cover, including directions not to cover the Bernie Sanders campaign, including Sanders’ announcement that he was going to run for president.  Schultz now works for RT where he says he has far more freedom to cover what he wants how he wants.

•        Gary Webb- A journalist forced to resign from the San Jose Mercury News in 1997 and subsequently railroaded out of journalism with the CIA working at it in the background after Webb wrote a 1996 series uncovering the CIA's role in importing cocaine into the U.S. to secretly fund the Nicaraguan Contra rebels through the manufacture and sale of drugs in the U.S.  Pressured to drop pursuit of his story Webb published his evidence in the series "Dark Alliance" for which the national Society of Professional Journalists voted Webb "Journalist of the Year" for 1996.  Webb had earlier contributed Pulitzer Prize winning work at the paper.   He subsequently experienced a vicious smear campaign during which he found himself defending his integrity, his career, his family that ended in his unfortunate death.  Later revelations about CIA involvement in illegal drugs coming into the United States validated and amplified what Webb was the first to report.

    •    Seymour Hersh- It is observed that Hersh has been “increasingly marginalised and his work denigrated” although he once worked for the New York Times Washington Bureau to report such stories as the Watergate scandal, and exposed the My Lai Massacre and the US military’s abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.  Hersh has been forced from one outlet to another, each outlet more remote from where U.S. citizens are likely to learn what he is reporting: Publication of Hersh's work has moved from the New Yorker, to the London Review of Books to the German publication, Welt am Sonntag.  Thus the American public is unlikely to learn about Hersh's most recent reporting that although a sarin gas chemical weapons attack in Syria was used as an excuse for Trump's recent order of a “retaliatory” strike against the country, there was zero evidence of such an attack.  Similarly, previously reporting, based on what Hersh's contacts within the security and intelligence establishments, revealed that Assad's alleged use of sarin gas in Ghouta, outside Damascus in 2013 also failed to stand up to scrutiny.  In between the Hersh's reporting on these alleged sarin attacks mainstream media reacted in a suspectly ostracizing way to Hersh's scoop about ways in which the public was misled respecting the reported killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.  Even in the London Review of Books the bin laden story immediately attracted so much attention it reportedly crashed the LRB servers. (In the fascinating Netflix "Wormwood" documentary by Errol Morris, which is about the still mysterious 1953 death, subsequent coverup and probable assassination by our government of an American scientist and Central Intelligence Agency employee participating in a secret government biological warfare program, Mr. Hersh explains what he is and isn't willing to report about events within the very secret intelligence community without sufficient sourcing.)

    •    Peter Arnett (and Producers April Oliver & Jack Smith)- Arnet, a Pulitzer Price who worked for CNN for 18 years and was famous for reporting from Baghdad during the Gulf War was, he said “muzzled,” and then fired by CNN, like his producers April Oliver and Jack Smith they did entitled "Valley of Death," (and a more senior producer resigned), because of an investigative report (a joint production of CNN and Time magazine), presenting evidence about how Army special forces venturing into Laos in September of 1970 used sarin gas in an operation to kill American soldiers who had defected into Laos from Vietnam.

•        Dan Rather (and his producer Mary Mapes)-  Dan Rather and others including his "60 Minutes" program producer Mary Mapes were fired by CBS (Rather's was a slow-burn firing) when covering the 2004 presidential election campaign they were subject to criticism for alleged liberal bias in reporting a basically true story about preferential treatment of George W. Bush in the National Guard (1968 to 1973 during which time Bush did not show up for a medical exam and stopped fulfilling his flying commitments).  The criticism leading up to the firing focused on the fact that documents with which the newspeople had been supplied to support their story were likely faked in whole or in part by somebody, possibly in a dirty trick intended to sucker them.  When a 2015 feature film, "Truth," starring Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford was made dramatizing the issues and events with respect to the firing CBS refused to run advertisements for it.

 •        Chris Hedges- Hedges was another award winning journalist working with a team to win a Pulitzer Prize for the New York Times in 2002.  Amnesty International gave him an award that year for international journalism.  He’s worked for Christian Science Monitor, NPR and was a foreign correspondent for the Times for fifteen years.  Hedges, under pressure from the Times, was forced to leave the Times in 2003 (listen at 14 minutes) because he had been denouncing the those urging the U.S. forward to its invasion of Iraq.  (Hedges was an early critic of the war.- We invaded in March of 2003.)  Hedges now writes for Truthdig and is a host of “On Contact” for RT.          

 •        Ashleigh Banfield-  NBC fired news journalist Ashleigh Banfield, host of “MSNBC Investigates,” from MSNBC in 2004 after officially scolding her in the spring of 2003, and thereupon banishing her, because she criticized her TV news colleagues for “sugarcoating Iraq war coverage with patriotism and not showing the reality of the conflict.”  She had criticized  “cable news operators who wrap themselves in the American flag and go after a certain target demographic.”

 •        Marc Lamont Hill- In November, 2018, Mr. Hill, an American academic, author, activist, and television personality, a Professor of Media Studies and Urban Education at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was fired from his position as a commentator for CNN twenty-four hours after he expressed his opinion on the Arab–Israeli conflict before the U.N. saying that Palestinians have a right to resist their occupation by Israel through international boycotts of Israel and to defend themselves from the Israeli military.  This point of view was considered unacceptably anti-Israel (while some tried to cast his view as being antisemitic). The coverage by FAIR, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, is especially insightful and detailed, plus it includes a call to action.

 •         William M. Arkin- (Added after January 2019 resignation)- We will see whether William M. Arkin who resigned NBC with his 2,228-word farewell “blistering critique” of what he calls “perpetual war” and the “creeping fascism of homeland security” stays self-exiled from NBC and the rest of the mainstream, corporately-owned media.  He may not have a choice.  Arkin was clear his critique “applies to all of the mainstream networks,” CNN, Fox, etc, not just NBC.  And Arkin said he wanted to “step back” and “think about how we can end this era of perpetual war and how we can build some real security, both in the United States and abroad.”  Arkin pointed out that, in the prior year, the United States has been bombing (listing them) nine countries (ten if we include, as we should, the U.S. participation in the bombing of Yemen).

 •        Tareq Haddad- (added December 2019)- Tareq Haddad resigned from Newsweek at the end of 2019 because Newsweek and its senior editors were burying a scandal.  The scandal was about the covering up of evidence, now with an every greater number of whistleblowers from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons coming forward, that a supposed chemical attack in Duoma, Syria, supposedly by the Assad regime, was faked to provoke the United States to escalate military actions in the country.  Haddad’s furnished a very detailed account, complete with screen shots of emails from his senior editors, of how his story was suppressed and how Newsweek mobilized with not so subtle efforts to communicate that he was out of line to think these kinds of stories should get published.  Haddad said about suppression of information by mainstream corporate media (providing evidence he cited) that "The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those the profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media — imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department . .  filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked."
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"Deniable censorship"  as contributor to the hijacking of our democracy- Supermajorities of Public  (70%+) go unrepresented.

On key issue after issue, a very long list, the American public is progressive by polls exceeding 70%.  But the public and those huge majorities don’t get represented by their elected officials.  The nonresponsive elected officials are instead accountable to moneyed interests and enact contrary policies.  They are aided and abetted in this hijacking of democracy by a corporate mainstream media ruled by “deniable censorship” (to use Julian Assange’s term).   

Here is a description of the “pyramid of censorship,” “deniable censorship” provided by Julian Assange in his 2012 book “Cypherpunks.”  It was read Saturday evening April 20, 2019 on WBAI by Chris Hedges at the end of his show “On Contact.”

My experience in the West is that it is just so much more sophisticated in the number of layers of indirection and obfuscation about what is actually happening. These layers are there to give deniability to the censorship that is occurring. You can think about censorship as a pyramid, This pyramid only has its tip sticking out of the sand, and that is by intention. The tip is public— libel suits, murders of journalists, cameras being snatched the military, and so on– publicly declared censorship. But that is the smallest component, Under the tip, the next layer is all those people who don't want to be at the tip, who engage in self-censorship to not end up there. Then the next layer is all the forms of economic inducement or patronage inducement that are given to people to write about one thing or another. The next layer down is raw economy— what it is economic to write about, even if you don't include the economic factors from higher up the pyramid.  Then next the next layer is the prejudice of readers who only have a certain level of education, so therefore on one hand they are easy to manipulate with false information, and on the other hand you can't even tell the something sophisticated that is true.  The last layer is distribution— for example, some people just don't have access to information in a particular language. So that is the censorship pyramid.

If you want to hear Hedges reading this on his show you can also go to the beginning of this video:

The Censorship Pyramid - Chris Hedges reads Cypherpunks by Julian Assange

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Do you know about these media watchdog sites?:

    •    Project Censored
    •    FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting) and Counterspin
    •    Media Matters
    •    On The Media (? WNYC)
    •    OffGuardian (watches the Guardian.)
    •    Jimmy Dore Show (also on YouTube)
    •    Atlantic Yards Report (Former Times Report and now Atlantic Yards Pacific Park Report- Watches New York City real estate reporting and started by watching the New York Times slanted reporting of the Atlantic Yards Project)  

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Here is what is offered as a “Media Navigator” by Swiss Propaganda Research that “classifies more than 60 news outlets based on their political stance and their relationship to power” noting that, “in many cases, the latter is more significant.”  Swiss Propaganda Research (SPR) describes itself as “an independent research group investigating geopolitical propaganda in Swiss and international media.”
 
Noting the position of different news media outlets on the x/y chart, particularly the posited "relationship to power" (including "The Nation," "The Intercept," "Democracy Now," "Mother Jones," and "Counter Punch") can be thought provoking.  Also provoking thought is the fact that arranging the square icons on the grid with this symmetrically doesn't not allow nuance or for two outlets to have an identical ranking- Still it works fairly well.

Click to enlarge

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Books?

There is fast news and there is the slow absorption of news and information that puts it in context that can come from books.  As for books, Citizens Defending Libraries has previously posted giving examples about how important books have been suppressed: Books As Catalysts In A World Where Information And Points of View Are Often Suppressed.  NYU professor Mark Crispin Miller created Forbidden Bookshelf as a way of allowing the public to find and read controversial books that, almost impossible to obtain, are about subjects that have effectively been censored.

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Have you considered how less news might be better a better way to be informed; that addicts to the 24/7 news cycle may want, instead to read classic books to help them understand current events because of how the 24/7 news cycle is addicted, with it voracious appetite to “access journalism,”   which is inherently biased to be flattering to those in power.  That problem is compounded by the unfolding censorship crisis that is making the internet as a source of news increasingly treacherous, which mainstream outlets mat not be concerned about at all.  More here:

On The Media Interview With Dean Starkman: The Difference Between "Access Reporting" and "Accountability Reporting" Explains How Very Important Things DON'T Get Reported- Plus Consider The Censorship Crisis 

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Facebook (and social media generally?)— Reliable filters for the news that will influence you?

Facebook has acknowledged experimenting with its influence on voter turnout and voter biases.  Before the 2016 election Facebook altered its algorithms (without `colluding with the Russians’)  so that deceptive news stories favoring Trump were more prevalent in its ecosystem.

If this is as troublesome as it sounds, what might be the solution? . . . .   

FAIR’s May 25, 2018 Counterspin program lacerated this treacherously counterproductive proposed solution.

Facebook announced it’s partnering with D.C. think tank the Atlantic Council to `monitor for misinformation and foreign interference.’ The details of the plan are vague, but the council has stated the goal is to design tools `to bring us closer together, instead of driving us further apart,’ whatever that means.  Behind it’s bland name, The Atlantic Council is associated with very particular interests: It’s funded by the U.S. State Department, Navy, Army and Air Force, along with NATO, various foreign powers and major Western corporations, including weapons contractors and oil companies.  Fair’s Adam Johnson notes that what diversity of opinion exists is largely about how much and where U.S. military and soft power influence should be wielded, not if they should. But, with the exception of Splinter, news outlets showed no curiosity at all about a government-backed entity telling us which news is fake, or how it works when a venture supposedly meant to curb `foreign interference’ is bankrolled by the United Arab Emirates, Japan and Taiwan, to name a few. . .  Not that U.S. government money is exempt from the “foreign” qualifier with its suggestion of malicious influence; to most of Facebook’s 2.2 billion users, after all, the United States is a foreign country.

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See our post about vulture hedge fund Alden Global Capital dismantling local news outlets around the country with the prospect that republished corporate press releases will be the only source of news:

Where Will You get Your News When There Is A Mass-Dismantling of Outlets Like The Denver Post By Wall Street Vulture Capital Funds?

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Latest Non-reporting of the News?– Deaths in Puerto Rico (Second most deadly Hurricane in U.S. history)

This seems like the latest non-reporting of the news: an update on the (intentional?) mishandling of the crisis in Puerto Rico that has gone largely unreported.   . .  What does the number 4,645 on the San Juan Mayor's hat mean?  You'd be unlikely to guess given the  lack of reporting in the media and misinformation in these New York  Times headlines.  . . . What was the media devoting huge time to covering while leaving this national disaster news essentially unreported?: The firing of Roseanne Barr!

Latest Non-reporting of National News?– Deaths in Puerto Rico

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Maybe you would like to get involved in the discussion early?  In the comment section to this page you may want to supply information about where you go to get your news and why.  Or maybe you'd like to post about what you think are the biggest issues that mainstream media is not reporting on?  Climate change?  The cost of war?  Voting irregularities in the last election?

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