Race / Ethnic Issues

An anti-Semitic web site called the "Barnes Report" is distributing fake whistleblower memos on media bias in the Iraq war that attempt to exploit public skepticism about the accuracy of U.S. news coverage. Excerpts from the alleged memos appear on a series of web pages titled "Controlling the News." The "memos" instruct reporters to avoid showing scenes of violence from the war and to stress images that depict U.S. policy in a favorable light.

"The momentum that ended in Trent Lott's resignation yesterday as the Senate majority leader did not, primarily, come from the traditional behemoths of the US media - the New York Times, the Washington Post and the main TV news networks," observes Oliver Burkeman. Those publications initially failed to report on Lott's racist comments at Strom Thurmond's birthday party. "In the interim, writers on numerous weblogs, or 'blogs,' were condemning the remarks - and swiftly uncovering evidence of a pattern in Mr.

"An Egyptian satellite television channel has begun teasers
for its blockbuster Ramadan series that its producers
acknowledge incorporates ideas from the infamous czarist
forgery "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." That
document, a pillar of anti-Semitic hatred for about a
century, appears to be gaining a new foothold in parts of
the Arab world, some scholars and observers say."

For an interesting example of propaganda during wartime, check out "A Challenge to Democracy," a 1944 documentary produced by the U.S. government about the massive internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. "This weird film -- the U.S. government's view of life inside its World War II Japanese-American internment camps -- is an early exercise in political damage control," writes reviewer Ken Smith. "One of its more enjoyable aspects is its baldfaced use of pleasant-sounding euphemisms to recast the nasty things it shows us. ...