About 240 people attended a forum on “Wikileaks, Assange & defending democracy” on April 19.
Presented in partnership with the WikiLeaks Australian Citizens' Alliance (WACA), the forum argued that conversations about WikiLeaks and its editor-in-chief Julian Assange are about much more than the organisation and the individual behind it. They encompass freedom of speech and the press, whistleblower protection, government transparency, the underlying tenets of our democracy and civil rights.
Media
While WikiLeaks was preoccupied with preparing its new “The Global Intelligence Files”, where we released on February 27 actual documents from the privatised spying world in collaboration with 25 newspapers, Swedish tabloid Expressen was preoccupied with filling its paper with false reports based on thin air.
In late February, Expressen claimed WikiLeaks was preparing a “smear campaign against Sweden” and cited as sources both a WikiLeaks "insider" and a WikiLeaks “internal memo”.
On March 18, Sudan's National Intelligence and Security Services confiscated the entire print run of Al Midan, the Sudanese Communist Party's newspaper. This was the third consecutive issue to be censored by the NISS.
The March 18 Sudan Tribune said: "Sudanese authorities routinely confiscate copies of newspapers as a punishment for publishing contents critical of the government. The measure is intended to inflict financial damage on the already hard-pressed papers."
Living Black
Sundays, 4.30pm on SBS One
from March 18
“I had a terrible time at school,” Living Black presenter Karla Grant tells Green Left Weekly.
The veteran journalist, who is about to host a new series of the flagship Aboriginal affairs show she launched for SBS a decade ago, has come a long way since being taunted as a “boong” and “coon” in Adelaide playgrounds.
“It was awful,” says Grant, who is now Living Black’s executive producer as well as its host. “They were very ignorant - and I was the only Aboriginal kid at the school.”
Beattheblockade.org released the statement below on March 16. * * * Today marks the launch of “Beat the Blockade” — a day of action on April 5 to protest the extrajudicial financial blockade of WikiLeaks and raise vital funds for its work to continue.
War by media, says current military doctrine, is as important as the battlefield. This is because the real enemy is the public at home, whose manipulation and deception is essential for starting an unpopular colonial war.
Like the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, attacks on Iran and Syria require a steady drip-effect on readers' and viewers' consciousness. This is the essence of a propaganda that rarely speaks its name.
Activists delivered an early birthday present for Rupert Murdoch to The Advertiser building in Adelaide on March 9.
Occupy Murdoch delivered a yellow “uranium” cake, along with demands for media reform, to the office of the News Ltd tabloid.
Activist Tamara Otello baked the cake, which she explained was intended “for The Advertiser staff”.
She said: “It hasn’t been laced with anything nasty ... unlike The Advertiser. It’s actually a chocolate mudcake.”
Media watchers should be forgiven for a degree of confusion over statements by federal treasurer and deputy prime minister Wayne Swan in the past two weeks.
He began the month with a Press Club address, published in The Monthly’s March edition titled “The 0.01%” where he attacked “the rising power of vested interests” — naming mining magnates Clive Palmer, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart — for “undermining our equality and threatening our democracy”.
“Capitalism wrecks everything,” Liam Flenady, Socialist Alliance candidate for South Brisbane in the March 24 Queensland election, told a meet-the-cadidates forum sponsored by Green Left Weekly on March 6.
"The neoliberal agenda of the past three decades means privatising profits, and socialising losses. Queensland and Australia are in the midst of a political crisis right now.
"People have generally lost confidence in the major parties and their support for the status quo. But they don't yet have a firm belief in a viable alternative project.
Among the 5 million emails and documents leaked by WikiLeaks from the US-based private intelligence firm Stratfor are details of some of its secret media partners. The company’s “Confederation Partners” are spread across four continents.
Vultures’ Picnic
Greg Palast
416 pages, 2011
Penguin
www.gregpalast.com
Investigative reporter Greg Palast is back ― and this time, it’s personal.
The former United States corporate crime investigator, who exposed the 2000 and 2004 elections of George W Bush as frauds, has gone for a more intimate feel in his latest book, Vultures’ Picnic.
More than 400 people crowded into a lecture theatre at the University of Technology on February 17 to attend a public forum, “Don’t shoot the messenger: WikiLeaks, Assange and Democracy”.
Speakers at the forum included socialist historian Humphrey McQueen, Greens Senator Scott Ludlum, London-based human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson and Christine Assange, the mother of Julian Assange.
- Previous page
- Page 31
- Next page