Media Feeds Americans Fake News About Afghanistan

Paktiya province, AfghanistanGlen Greenwald of Salon.com reports that Americans are being fed false and misleading "news" about the U.S. war in Afghanistan because major American media outlets, like the New York Times and CNN, publish propagandized Pentagon accounts of the violence and killing occurring there, without questioning the information they are fed.

An egregious example of this occurred on February 12, 2010, when NATO's joint international force issued a press release that bore the headline Joint Force Operating In Gardez Makes Gruesome Discovery. The release said that after "intelligence confirmed militant activity" in a compound near a village in Paktiya province, an international security force entered the compound and engaged "several insurgents" in a fire fight. Two "insurgents" were killed, the report said, and after the joint forces entered the compound, they "found the bodies of three women who had been tied up, gagged and killed."

But an Afghan news report about the same incident differed wildly.

Watching Bill Moyers

After an exhausting week, I was sticking to my usual routine of collapsing on the couch and tuning in to Bill Moyers Journal on PBS last Friday night. I was excited that one of the guests was www.eji.org Bryan Stevenson, the head of the Equal Justice Initiative, who has long been a hero of mine for his uncompromising, long-term battle against the death penalty.

The show was terrific, a wide-ranging discussion about the struggle for economic justice from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama for "those folks at the bottom of the well," with Stevenson and civil rights lawyer and author of "The New Jim Crow," Michelle Alexander. But deep into the show, well, to tell the shameful truth, I fell asleep. So I missed Moyer's great concluding essay and the big moment when he mentioned the Center for Media and Democracy and our Wall Street Bailout tally. The tally was the product of three months of hard work by our researcher, Conor Kenney, with contributions from half a dozen other staff.

Pfizer Pays Out Millions to Doctors

Pfizer, the world's biggest drug company, says it paid 4,500 doctors and other medical professionals about $20 million total in professional fees for services like consulting and speaking on behalf of the company, in just the last six months of 2009. During the same period, Pfizer also paid $15.3 million to 250 academic medical centers and other research groups for clinical trials.

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