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NETRON...
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Musings , esoteria, and eclectic diatribes
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Wednesday, September 10, 2003
CNN = "Contains No News" - my analysis. I followed up the article quoted below, on the fact that CNN broadcasts damn all news, by analysing 30 minutes of CNN Europe's lunchtime broadcast. Actual news is highlighted. Running total of minutes of actual news in italics 1300-1301: Brief summary of headlines 1 minute 1301-1303 : Israel/Palestine/Iraq - new Palestinian PM speaking - he gets 15 seconds on air. 3 minutes 1303-1307 - Commentary/opinion by reporter in Israel. That's 4 minutes solid, compared to the Palestinian PMs 15 seconds. 1307 - 1307 30 seconds - Ariel Sharon coming back from trip abroad 3 minutes 30 secs 1307 30 secs - 1309 - Iraq. Attack on U.S. soldiers 5 minutes 1309 - Commentary/opinion from reporter in Iraq 1310 for 30 seconds - Blair in parliament justifying himself for not finding WMDs. Old news from archives. 1310. 30secs - 1313 - Indonesia, Bali bomber trial.7 minutes 30 seconds 1313 Adverts , infomercials 1315-1319 "911 the legacy" - reporter commentary, documentary. Not news. 1319 Adverts, informericals 1321-1324 Weather report 1324-1326 Stock markets 1326-1327 WTO Summit , Cancun 8 minutes 30 secs 1327 RIAA sueing 12 year old 9 minutes 30 secs 1328: Teller, creator of H Bomb dies 40 secs 10 minutes 10 secs 1328 40 secs to 1430 Adverts informericals So, in my half hour snapshot, I estimated that out of 30 minutes broadcast, only 10 minutes 10 seconds was devoted to actual reporting of hard news. Note the amount of reporting on the WTO Summit. This summit has far reaching consequences for the entire planet, yet it gets a meagre 1 minute, and that is tucked right at the end of the 1/2 hour broadcast. Note also, the complete lack of coverage of anything in Europe , despite the fact that I was watching "CNN Europe". Also note how the conflict in Palestine/Israel takes prominence. Why are killings in Israel more "important" than the WTO summit? Or what's actually going on in , err.. say... Europe??? It's supposed to be CNN Europe after all. With such a lack of news, you would think that CNN has run out of things to report maybe. Well, here's some stories that weren't covered by CNN in any shape or form, during that 30 minutes of my analysis. U.S. Marines contracted malaria in Liberia Sept 11th - 30th Anniversary of Overthrow of Allende in Chile by the CIA US Government plans color-coding for passengers Schroeder: More Troops Won't Help Security in Iraq CNN = "Contains No News" A detailed analysis of a CNN primetime news broadcast reveals that 1 hour of broadcasting yielded less than 5 minutes of news. Events that took place on the day of analyzed broadcast that were not deemed newsworthy by CNN:
Monday, August 18, 2003
Why Hasn’t “IT” Happened Yet?  "Why hasn’t IT happened yet? Because the Fed has played Fire Chief and kept liquidity flowing. But there is only so long that the Fed can the spigots wide open. All they are doing is delaying the inevitable, not curing it. Adding liquidity has made many of our economic problems worse, not better. " Iraqi Commander Swears He Saw US Air Force Fly Saddam Out of Baghdad Treat this story as suspect until corroborating evidence emerges.  U.S. tried to plant WMDs, says whistleblower The source of this story is suspect, but I'll let you make up your own mind. Saturday, August 16, 2003
Wednesday, August 13, 2003
Reeding and riting is wrong Good article on the decline of English literacy in . ahem, England, amongst 16 year olds. The "GCSE" is the UK 16 year old examination. "Good intentions, endless initiatives, literacy hours, targets and league tables have still to make any real impact on the standard of school-leavers' written English. Employers and university lecturers alike bemoan the fact that young people cannot be relied on to spell, punctuate or write clearly. Even Oxford dons complain that some of our brightest students cannot write accurately. " "Twenty per cent of the marks in English Language GCSE are for "speaking and listening". Many people who cannot write well can speak very well indeed. However, what employers and universities want to know is how good a student is on paper. " Friday, August 08, 2003
Osama Bin Laden - The Big Excuse "Presumably Osama Bin Laden is a reasonably intelligent man if, as we are repeatedly told, he has managed to create this huge network of evil terrorists that are terrifying most of the Western world into sacrificing their civil liberties. If he was responsible for the attacks on Sept 11th, why wasn't he out shouting about it on the day? Why wasn't he out making videos with statements like 'We want to see an end to Israel's illegal occupation of Palestine, the sanctions on Iraq and the U.S. troops out of Saudi Arabia - OR THERE WILL BE MORE ATTACKS LIKE THIS ONE.'" Hmmm.... good point. Bin Laden Denies Involvement in 9-11 Wednesday, August 06, 2003
An Axis of Junkies Classified pages in the Congress report on September 11 have stirred curiosity about the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia, says Julian Borger. "Washington abhors a vacuum, and loves a mystery. Plenty of aficionados here are still obsessed with the 18 and a half minutes missing from the 6,000 hours of tapes of Richard Nixon's White House. Likewise, many are devoted to guessing exactly who Deep Throat was. Now a new gap has opened up in the capital's collective consciousness, becoming just as great a source of fascination. It is the 28 pages blanked out in the Congress report on September 11. " Julian Borger says in the article , later on: The US is addicted to cheap oil, and shows no inclination to wean itself off it. Meanwhile, Washington officialdom is hooked on the easy money Riyadh offers in the world of consultancies and thinktanks when they retire. If they play their cards right, senior US officials need never worry about a pension plan. George Bush senior, his secretary of state, James Baker, and the former CIA director, defence secretary and national security advisor, Frank Carlucci, have all picked up big consultancy fees and commissions for visiting Riyadh after leaving office. So has the former British prime minister John Major. German Firm Probes Final WTC Deals "German computer experts are working round the clock to unlock the truth behind an unexplained surge in financial transactions made just before two hijacked planes crashed into New York's World Trade Center on September 11. Were criminals responsible for the sharp rise in credit card transactions that moved through some computer systems at the WTC shortly before the planes hit the twin towers? Or was it coincidence that unusually large sums of money, perhaps more than $100 million, were rushed through the computers as the disaster unfolded? " Thursday, July 24, 2003
How to rig an election - step by step New Zealand's "Scoop" on the Diebold voting machines, which will be used in the 2004 elections. "The computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how to record and tally votes are allowed to be held as "trade secrets." Can citizen's groups examine them? No. The companies that make these machines insist that their mechanisms are a proprietary secret. Can citizen's groups, or even election officials, audit their accuracy? Not at all" New York Times -Computer voting open to easy fraud "The software that runs many high-tech voting machines contains serious flaws that would allow voters to cast extra votes and permit poll workers to alter ballots without being detected, computer security researchers said yesterday. "We found some stunning, stunning flaws," said Aviel D. Rubin, technical director of the Information Security Institute at Johns Hopkins University, who led a team that examined the software from Diebold Election Systems, which has about 33,000 voting machines operating in the United States." High-Ranking Officials Admit 9/11 Could've Been Prevented The Memory Hole collects together quotes on a single page. |
