Recently, I went to see a concert featuring "Royal Flush: Music By, For and About Royalty", sung by the Master Chorale of South Florida; I esp. enjoyed the following pieces: Vaughan Williams' "Serenade to Music" , Rutter’s “This is the Day that the Lord Has Made” written for the recent royal British wedding and Aloha Oe written by Queen Lili'uokalani of Hawaii in 1877. Aloha Oe (Farwell to you) is such a lovely / melancholy song, esp. when you listen to it, while watching an Al jazeera English documentary on Hawaii.
If Queen Liliu'okalani could see how today, many native Hawaiians are living in stark poverty, she would have been outraged / heartbroken; the fact that, had I not seen this Al jazeera broadcast, I would not even be aware of the many issues facing this 'tropical paradise', is yet another example of 'injustice effectively hidden from public scrutiny' by the complicit corporate media.
Another illustration of Al jazeera English's stellar and diverse reporting can be seen here: Witness: The Bomber: "A fascinating glimpse into the powerful forces that led an 18-year-old boy to walk into the lobby of a Jakarta hotel and blow himself up".
Perhaps by becoming aware of how our actions are viewed by those on the receiving end of American 'shock and awe' foreign policies, we can "achieve more global peace and prosperity by transforming our institutional policies".
Read between the lines of each and every media report and help others do the same. The majority of our media outlets – newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, television stations, radio stations, etc. – are owned by huge international corporations and these corporations aren't afraid to manipulate the news they deliver. Always seek the truth and encourage others to do the same. -- John Perkins, author of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, from the site: Want to Know.info
Why doesn't CNN ('the most trusted name in the news') cover stories such as:
* Working in the US for .23 cents/hour
* Prison industrial complex
* Wells Fargo behind for-profit prisons
* The NYCLU Lawsuit Challenges Appalling Conditions at Suffolk County Jails is an eye-opening piece on the horrific conditions at Suffolk County (Long Island, NY) jails.
The fact that these issues are not widely reported on News 12 Long Island (the
local Long Island TV news channel), CNN, Newsday (a
local area paper), etc. is another troubling reminder that we have to look outside the US corporate media for US news ( I would recommend
Democracy Now with Amy Goodman,
RT America (a Russian owned broadcasting network, offering analysis / discussion focused on alternative economic and financial news), or sections of
Al jazeera English that cover US issues, such as:
* Are there any winners of the Iraq war?
* US anti-terrorism bill: Liberty vs security
* Inside Story US 2012 - Who can fix the US economy?
* Punishing the whistleblower? (re: Bradley Manning)
Compare the above stories with CNN, Time magazine, et al. coverage of nonsense 'news':
Obama's wearing 'mom jeans',
Obama's 'mommy-gate',
Mittens' 'cookie-gate', etc. It's as though Americans are constantly fed a dietary stream of 'junk' infotainment, while the rest of the world is getting 'real food for thought' information. As Glenn Greenwald wrote in
Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics:
Assange developed an alternative template to the corporate media — one that was far more independent of, and adversarial to, government power — and, in the process, produced more newsworthy scoops than all of them combined. As NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen once put it about WikiLeaks: "The Watchdog Press Died; We Have This Instead"...
.