Media Manipulation News StoriesExcerpts of Key Media Manipulation News Stories in Major Media
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Ever since the torture report was released last week, U.S. television outlets have endlessly featured American torturers and torture proponents. But there was one group that was almost never heard from: the victims of their torture. The War on Terror generally has been “reported” for 13 years and counting by completely silencing those whose lives are destroyed or ended by U.S. crimes. In 2002, Maher [Arar], a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent who worked as an engineer, was travelling back home to Ottawa when he was abducted by the U.S. Government at JFK Airport, [secretly] interrogated for weeks, then “rendered” to Syria where the U.S. arranged to have him brutally tortured ... for 10 months. He was completely innocent, [and was] unceremoniously released back to his life in Canada as though nothing had happened. U.S. courts refused even to hear his case, accepting the Obama DOJ’s claim that it was too secret to safely adjudicate. The Canadian government ... publicly apologized for its role, and paid him $9 million. There are hundreds if not thousands of Maher Arars the U.S. media could easily and powerfully interview. The detainees held without charges, tortured, and then unceremoniously released from Guantanamo and Bagram are rarely if ever heard from on U.S. television, even when the U.S. Government is forced to admit that they were guilty of nothing.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about government corruption that is supported by equally corrupt mass media.
James Risen, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005 for exposing the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program, has [been] threatened with prison by the Obama Justice Department. [This] is almost certainly the vindictive by-product of the U.S. government’s anger over his NSA reporting. He has published a new book on the War on Terror entitled Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War. Risen's [critique] is one of the first to offer large amounts of original reporting on ... a particular part of the War on Terror, namely the way in which economic motives, what [he] calls the Homeland Security Industrial Complex, has driven a huge part of the war. GLENN GREENWALD: How much of this economic motive is the cause of the fact that we’ve now been at war for 13 years? RISEN: It plays a really central role. After so many years there’s ... a post-9/11 mercenary class that’s developed that have invested. Not just people who are making money, but people who are in the government. Their status and their power within the government are invested in continuing the war. There’s very little debate about whether to continue the war. When Dick Cheney said, “the gloves come off,” ... that really meant, “We’re going to deregulate national security, and we’re going to take off all the rules that were imposed in the ’70s after Watergate.” That was just a dramatic change. It’s been extended to this whole new homeland security apparatus. People think that terrorism is an existential threat, even though it’s not, and so they’re willing to go along with all this.
Note: The complete interview at the link above provides details of James Risen's fight to preserve journalistic integrity against a corrupted government's attempts to manipulate the news. For more on Risen's deeply revealing investigation of the Homeland Security Industrial Complex, see this recent NPR interview.
Breast cancer giant Susan G. Komen has found its strangest bedfellow yet in one of the world’s largest oilfield services corporations, Baker Hughes. The two have teamed up for a second year to distribute 1,000 pink drill bits to oil fields worldwide. This is just the latest example of “pinkwashing” – when a company or organization claims to care about breast cancer by promoting a pink-ribbon product but at the same time manufactures or sells products that are linked to the disease. Pinkwashing has become a central component of the breast cancer industry: a web of relationships and financial arrangements between corporations that cause cancer, companies making billions off diagnosis and treatment, nonprofits seeking to support patients or even to cure cancer, and public relations agencies that divert attention from the root causes of disease. The partnership with fracking company Baker Hughes is among the worst examples of Komen’s pinkwashing so far. More than 700 chemicals are used in the process of drilling and fracking for oil and gas. In a study of about 350 of those chemicals, researchers found that up to half can cause health problems, including nervous, immune and cardiovascular symptoms. More than one-third can disrupt the hormone system. And a quarter of the chemicals, such as benzene and formaldehyde, increase the risk of cancer. Baker Hughes is doing more to cause breast cancer than to cure it. And Komen, with its poisonous partnerships, is giving Baker Hughes — and many other companies — the perfect pink disguise.
Note: For more along these lines, read this Los Angeles Times article about how fracking introduces carcinogens into drinking water, and see concise summaries of deeply revealing corporate corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
It has been more than two years since The New York Times revealed that “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties” of his drone strikes which “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ... unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” The paper noted that “this counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths,” and even quoted CIA officials as deeply “troubled” by this decision. After the Times article, most large western media outlets continued to describe completely unknown victims of U.S. drone attacks as “militants” — even though they (a) had no idea who those victims were or what they had done and (b) were well-aware by that point that the term had been “re-defined” by the Obama administration. Like the U.S. drone program itself, this deceitful media practice continues unabated. The U.S. government itself —let alone the media outlets calling them “militants”— often has no idea who has been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan. The Intercept previously reported that targeting decisions can even be made on the basis of nothing more than metadata analysis and tracking of SIM cards in mobile phones. Just last month, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism documented that “fewer than 4% of the people killed have been identified by available records as named members of al Qaeda.”
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about military corruption and high level manipulation of mass media from reliable sources.
The security services are facing questions over the cover-up of a Westminster paedophile ring as it emerged that files relating to official requests for media blackouts in the early 1980s were destroyed. Two newspaper executives have told the Observer that their publications were issued with D-notices – warnings not to publish intelligence that might damage national security – when they sought to report on allegations of a powerful group of men engaging in child sex abuse in 1984. One executive said he had been accosted in his office by 15 uniformed and two non-uniformed police over a dossier on Westminster paedophiles passed to him by the former Labour cabinet minister Barbara Castle. The other said that his newspaper had received a D-notice when a reporter sought to write about a police investigation into Elm Guest House, in southwest London, where a group of high-profile paedophiles was said to have operated. Theresa May, home secretary, this month told the Commons that an official review into whether there had been a cover-up of the Home Office’s handling of child-abuse allegations in the 1980s ... was prompted by the discovery that 114 Home Office files related to child abuse in the 1980s had gone missing. The two journalists, Don Hale, the former editor of the Bury Messenger, and Hilton Tims, news editor of the Surrey Comet between 1980 and 1988, both recall their publications being issued with D-notices around 1984.
Note: Explore powerful evidence from a suppressed Discovery Channel documentary showing that child sexual abuse scandals also reach to the highest levels of government in the US. For more along these lines, see these concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption and sex abuse scandal news articles from reliable sources.
The FBI confirmed Tuesday it faked an Associated Press story to catch a bomb threat suspect in 2007. Police in Lacey, near Olympia, sought the FBI's help as repeated bomb threats prompted a week of evacuations at Timberline High School in June 2007. The agency obtained a warrant from a federal magistrate judge to send a "communication" to a social media account ... which contained a software tool that could verify Internet addresses, (and) turned out to be a link to a phony AP story about the bomb threats posted on a Web page created by the FBI. The 15-year-old suspect clicked on the link, revealing his computer's location. The FBI did not initially respond to AP's request earlier Tuesday for further detail about the fake story, beyond saying the ruse was necessary. AP spokesman Paul Colford said Tuesday the FBI's "ploy violated AP's name and undermined AP's credibility." "We are extremely concerned and find it unacceptable that the FBI misappropriated the name of The Associated Press and published a false story attributed to AP." Kathy Best, editor of The Seattle Times, said in a statement that, "The FBI, in placing the name of The Associated Press on a phony story sent to a criminal suspect, crossed a line and undermined the credibility of journalists everywhere — including at The Times." The documents revealing the deception were publicized Monday on Twitter by Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing stories about questionable intelligence agency practices from reliable sources.
TLC cancelled ”Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” on Friday after photos surfaced of star Mama June hanging out with a convicted child molester. In August, “Sons of Guns” star Will Hayden was arrested on multiple rape charges against minors. Discovery, which owns TLC, swiftly cancelled that show, too. In 2013, reality TV producer Donald Luciano – who worked on some episodes of “Beverly’s Full House” about the life of former supermodel Beverly Johnson – pled guilty to possession of images of a minor engaged in sexually explicit conduct. So does reality TV have a pedophile problem? “The issue is not just about reality TV. Hollywood bears a lot of responsibility normalizing this behavior by sexualizing young girls,” said Dan Gainor, Vice President of Culture at the Media Research Center. “Too bad director Roman Polanski doesn’t get the (quick cancellation) treatment. He got an Oscar and a standing ovation and he raped a 13-year-old girl. ”Alec Shankman, Head of Alternative Programming & Digital Media at Abrams Artists Agency, noted that reality TV background checks are extremely thorough. “In the ‘Honey Boo Boo’ scenario, the guy wasn’t even on the show,” he said. "I wouldn’t say it is a problem in the genre, certainly no bigger than throughout the rest of Hollywood.” California-based criminal defense attorney Leo Terrell of CleartheCourt.com, noted that “The abuse is magnified when one of these predators appeared on a reality television show and/or is a public figure.”
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing sex abuse scandal news articles from reliable major media sources.
TERRY GROSS: James Risen [is] an investigative reporter for The New York Times. He, along with Eric Lichtbau, broke the story about warrantless wiretapping. Now Risen is facing a prison sentence for refusing to reveal his source or sources for that story. [Risen] has a new book called "Pay Any Price: Greed, Power And Endless War," which is a series of investigations into who's making money on the War on Terror and what are some of the secret operations within it. You recently wrote an article in The New York Times with Laura Poitras who broke the Edward Snowden story along with Glenn Greenwald. And you reported on how American intelligence is trying to harvest facial imagery with the intention of - what's it for? RISEN: Facial recognition ... in a way that no [one] really understood before has become a central focus of the NSA today. They can link that up with a signals intelligence, which is the communications that they intercept [and] basically find where you are, what you're doing, who you're seeing and virtually anything about you in real time. GROSS: So ... your big story turned out kind of differently than the celebrations facing Woodward and Bernstein. RISEN: I think the times have changed. We had this period in journalism for about 30 years where there was the government and the press. The government ... wouldn't go after whistleblowers or reporters very aggressively. It's only after the - after 9/11 and after the plane case, which you may remember where Judy Miller was sent to jail. I think the post-9/11 age, the government has decided to become much more aggressive against reporters and whistleblowers.
Note: The above quotes are from the transcript of a radio interview that you can listen to by clicking on the news story link provided. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing stories about high level manipulation of mass media from reliable sources.
As part of their insurgency against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, some of the C.I.A.-backed contras made money through drug smuggling, transgressions noted in a little-noticed 1988 Senate subcommittee report. Gary Webb, a journalist at The San Jose Mercury News, thought it was a far-fetched story to begin with, but in 1995 and 1996, he dug in and produced a deeply reported and deeply flawed three-part series called Dark Alliance. That groundbreaking series was among the first to blow up on the nascent web, and he was initially celebrated, then investigated and finally discredited. Pushed out of journalism in disgrace, he committed suicide in 2004. [The movie] Kill the Messenger ... suggests that he told a truth others were unwilling to. Mr. Webb was not the first journalist to come across [such matters]. In December 1985, The Associated Press reported that three contra groups had engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua. Major news outlets mostly gave the issue a pass. Peter Landesman, an investigative journalist who wrote the screenplay, was struck by the reflex to go after Mr. Webb. Planeloads of weapons were sent south from the U.S., and everyone knows that those planes didnt come back empty, but the C.I.A. made sure that they never knew for sure what was in those planes, he said. But instead of going after that, they went after Webb." In 1998, Frederick P. Hitz, the C.I.A. inspector general, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that after looking into the matter at length, he believed the C.I.A. was a bystander or worse in the war on drugs. However dark or extensive, the alliance Mr. Webb wrote about was a real one.
Note: Webb's story was not deeply flawed, as reported in this article. His editor even commented that four Washington Post writers could not find one significant factual error, but then changed his mind after CIA leaders threatened the paper. Read a Sacrament Bee newspaper article for more on Webb and his story. For more along these lines, see the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Mass Media Information Center.
Qatar has become a hostile target for two nations with significant influence in the U.S.: Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Israel is furious over Qatar’s support for Palestinians ... while the UAE is upset that Qatar supports the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This animosity has resulted in a new campaign in the west to demonize the Qataris as the key supporter of terrorism. The Israelis have chosen the direct approach of publicly accusing their new enemy in Doha of being terrorist supporters, while the UAE has opted for a more covert strategy: paying millions of dollars to a U.S. lobbying firm – composed of former high-ranking Treasury officials from both parties – to plant anti-Qatar stories with American journalists. That more subtle tactic has been remarkably successful, and shines important light on how easily political narratives in U.S. media discourse can be literally purchased. The Camstoll Group [has] key figures [who] are all former senior Treasury Department officials ... whose responsibilities included managing the U.S. government’s relationships with Persian Gulf regimes and Israel. Most have backgrounds as neoconservative activists. Camstoll’s Managing Director, Howard Mendelsohn, was Acting Assistant Secretary of Treasury, where he also had ample policy responsibilities involving the Emirates. In other words, a senior Treasury official responsible for U.S. policy toward the Emirates leaves the U.S. government and forms a new lobbying company, which is then instantly paid millions of dollars by the very same country for which he was responsible, all to use his influence, access and contacts for its advantage. The UAE spends more than any other country in the world to influence U.S. policy and shape domestic debate, and it pays former high-level government officials who worked with it ... to carry out its agenda within the U.S.
The police response to the shooting death of an unarmed black teenager by a white police officer in Ferguson, Mo. — which included heavily armed militarized police clashing with protesters in the St. Louis suburb — is a case study for how not to manage a crisis. The St. Louis Police Academy seems to agree, offering a new fall course that teaches "tactics, skills and techniques that will help you WIN WITH THE MEDIA!" According to the Oct. 24 program's description, the "highly entertaining" class will cover lessons learned from both Ferguson and Newtown: • Meet the 900-Pound Gorilla • Feeding the Animals • "No Comment" is a comment • Dont' Get Stuck on Stupid! • Managing Media Assault and Battery. The one-day course, led by former WGN anchor-turned-public relations consultant Rick Rosenthal, is aimed at "upper-echelon law enforcement professionals" who expect to face the media, including "top-level decision-makers," supervisors and public information officers. During the protests, the city of Ferguson retained a PR firm to help its communications department deal with the "large volume of media queries." But some criticized the city for hiring a firm, Common Ground, with an all-white staff.
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
A prominent national security reporter for the Los Angeles Times routinely submitted drafts and detailed summaries of his stories to CIA press handlers prior to publication, according to documents obtained by The Intercept. Email exchanges between CIA public affairs officers and Ken Dilanian, now an Associated Press intelligence reporter who previously covered the CIA for the Times, show that Dilanian enjoyed a closely collaborative relationship with the agency, explicitly promising positive news coverage and sometimes sending the press office entire story drafts for review prior to publication. In at least one instance, the CIA’s reaction appears to have led to significant changes in the story that was eventually published in the Times. Dilanian’s emails were included in hundreds of pages of documents that the CIA turned over in response to two FOIA requests seeking records on the agency’s interactions with reporters. They include email exchanges with reporters for the Associated Press, Washington Post, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and other outlets. In addition to Dilanian’s deferential relationship with the CIA’s press handlers, the documents show that the agency regularly invites journalists to its McLean, Va., headquarters for briefings and other events.
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing major media corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
Washington’s elite media, as usual, ... are baying for war. They are ... essentially demanding a major military assault [on ISIS]. Watching post-invasion reality in the region should have made it clear to anyone paying any attention at all that ... military action kills not just enemies but innocent civilians, creates refugee crises, ... further destabilizes entire regions, and alters the future in unanticipated and sometimes disastrous ways. In a nation that considers itself peaceful and civilized, the case for military action should be overwhelmingly stronger than the case against. It must face, and survive, aggressive questioning. There is no reason to expect that kind of pushback from within Congress — leading figures ... are falling into line with the hawkish consensus for some sort of action. And Vice President Joe Biden [said on September 3] that the U.S. will follow ISIS “to the gates of hell“. In the absence of a coherent opposition party or movement, it’s the Fourth Estate’s duty to ask those questions, and demand not just answers, but evidence to back up those answers. [In an interview,] Paul R. Pillar, formerly the CIA’s top Middle East analyst, ... marveled at the “kind of mass emotional phenomenon” based in part on the recent barbaric beheadings of captured free-lance journalists and the scary maps that make it seem like ISIS is about to take Baghdad. But, he said, the press is “getting excited in a way that I think has been blown well out of proportion.” Have we considered whether part of the group’s purpose is to provoke more U.S. intervention?
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing major media corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
It was revealed this week that many government information officers block specific journalists they don't like from accessing information. The news comes as 47 federal inspectors general sent a letter to lawmakers criticizing "serious limitations on access to records" that they say have "impeded" their oversight work. The data about public information officers was compiled over the past few years by Kennesaw State University professor Carolyn Carlson. Her surveys found that 4 in 10 public information officers say "there are specific reporters they will not allow their staff to talk to due to problems with their stories in the past." Carlson has conducted surveys of journalists and public information officers since 2012. In her most recent survey of 445 working journalists, four out of five reported that "their interviews must be approved" by government information officers, and "more than half of the reporters said they had actually been prohibited from interviewing [government] employees at least some of the time by public information officers." The Associated Press reported earlier this year that in 2013 "the government cited national security to withhold information a record 8,496 times — a 57 percent increase over a year earlier and more than double Obama's first year." This week's letter from more than half of the federal government's inspectors general [said] that government agencies' move to hide information from them represents a "potentially serious challenge to the authority of every Inspector General and our ability to conduct our work thoroughly, independently, and in a timely manner."
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government secrecy news articles from reliable major media sources.
The New York Times announced on [August 7] that it will use the word torture to describe the United States' controversial interrogation tactics on terror suspects. "From now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information," said Times executive editor Dean Baquet. In the past, the Times had been sharply criticized for not using the word torture. Instead, [it] had referred to torture as "brutal interrogation," or similar epithets. The Times is hardly the only major media outlet to avoid using the word "torture." Reuters referred to the tactics as "brutal interrogation methods" and the AP has called them "enhanced interrogation techniques." The media have been accused of following along with President Bush's denial that the U.S. does not use torture. Banquet [says] that "while the methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of 'torture.'” Baquet said that reporters and editors had debated the issue in wake of the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report, which has yet to be released. Last week, President Obama admitted that the CIA "tortured some folks" in post-9/11 anti-terror efforts.
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing media cover-ups news articles from reliable major media sources.
[Phil Donahue:] I [have] produced ... an anti-Iraq War documentary. It’s titled “Body of War,” and it is available on Netflix. I’d very much like you to see the behavior of the [US] congressmen [in my film]. They were summoned to the White House by WHIG, White House Iraq Group. This is a Karl Rove committee that included the advertising warriors who named our invasion “Shock and Awe,” and “Rolling Thunder,” like video games. And they gave them their talking points: “A smoking gun will become a mushroom cloud”; “The longer we wait, the more dangerous he becomes”; “Saddam has more weapons of mass destruction than Hitler ever had”; “I see Hitler in Saddam Hussein.” And they read this, they’re looking down at the piece of paper, in what was at most a shell debate, that led to the deaths of over 4,500 service people, men and women both, not to mention how many injuries, we’re not even sure, we’re not even sure how many Iraqis are dead, and the refugees are in the millions. This is unbelievable. You’ve got to see this debate. It’s truly a very instructive piece on what you can do if you scare the people. George Bush took this nation, the mainstream media included, and led it right into this war. It was an amazingly executed, brilliantly executed, plan. The politics of fear. We haven’t won a war, and we’re spending $2 billion a day on things that go “boom.” We have become a warrior nation. We have no respect for diplomacy. We have to be tough, and we don’t talk to people we don’t like.
Note: Learn lots more about the politics of fear by watching online the BBC documentary Power of Nightmares. For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing government corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
The lead-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 was not The Times’s finest hour. Some of the news reporting was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism. Many Op-Ed columns promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous. Readers have not forgotten. In recent weeks, with Iraq in chaos, military intervention there again has been under consideration, and readers are on high alert. Given The Times’s troubled history when it comes to this subject, readers have good reason to be wary about what appears in the paper about military intervention in Iraq. Many readers have complained ... that The Times is amplifying the voices of hawkish neoconservatives and serving as a megaphone for anonymously sourced administration leaks, while failing to give voice to those who oppose intervention. The readers have a point worth considering. On the Op-Ed pages and in the news columns, there have been very few outside voices of those who opposed the war last time, or those who reject the use of force now. But the neoconservatives and interventionists are certainly being heard. A recent profile of the historian Robert Kagan, a leading proponent of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 who is once more in the news, was one focus of sharp reader criticism. The coverage has not featured the kind of in-depth attention that readers want as a counterbalance to pieces like the one on Mr. Kagan.
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing media corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
A U.S. soldier imprisoned for leaking documents to WikiLeaks broke her silence in a fiery editorial accusing the United States of lying about Iraq. Chelsea [formerly Bradley] Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison in 2013 for leaking 750,000 pages of classified documents to the anti-secrecy group. Manning has stayed out of the limelight since the conviction. But she was back Saturday, with an opinion piece titled "The Fog Machine of War" in The New York Times. In it, she accuses the U.S. media of looking the other way when chaos and corruption reigned in Iraq and Afghanistan. "I believe that the current limits on press freedom and excessive government secrecy make it impossible for Americans to grasp fully what is happening in the wars we finance." She said that during the 2010 elections in Iraq, the media duped the world into thinking that all was well. "You might remember that the American press was flooded with stories declaring the elections a success, complete with upbeat anecdotes and photographs of Iraqi women proudly displaying their ink-stained fingers," she wrote. "The subtext was that United States military operations had succeeded in creating a stable and democratic Iraq. Those of us stationed there were acutely aware of a more complicated reality." She said at the time, she got regular reports detailing security forces' crackdown against dissidents "on behalf" of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. "I was shocked by our military's complicity in the corruption of that election," she said. "Yet these deeply troubling details flew under the American media's radar."
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war crimes news articles from reliable major media sources.
NPR’s David Folkenflik has a revealing new look at ... one of the most important journalistic stories of the last decade: The New York Times‘ 2004 decision ... to suppress for 15 months (through Bush’s re-election) its reporters’ discovery that the NSA was illegally eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. This episode was one significant reason Edward Snowden purposely excluded the Times from his massive trove of documents. In an interview with Folkenflik, the paper’s new executive editor, Dean Baquet, describes the paper’s exclusion from the Snowden story as “really painful.” But ... Baquet has his own checkered history in suppressing plainly newsworthy stories at the government’s request, including a particularly inexcusable 2007 decision, when he was the managing editor of The Los Angeles Times, to kill a story based on AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein’s revelations that the NSA had built secret rooms at AT&T to siphon massive amounts of domestic telephone traffic. In his NPR interview, Baquet insists that he has had a serious change of heart on such questions as a result of the last year of NSA revelations: "[Baquet] says the experience has proved that news executives are often unduly deferential to seemingly authoritative warnings unaccompanied by hard evidence." Dean Baquet’s epiphany about the U.S. government and the American media ... is long overdue, but better late than never. Let us hope that it signals an actual change in behavior.
Note: For more on this, see concise summaries of deeply revealing media corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
Reports from an oil rig worker who saw a fire in the sky on the night Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared are being taken seriously, police sources have confirmed. But New Zealander Mike McKay, 55, has lost his job in the ‘‘circus’’ that developed after his report to authorities was leaked. Mr McKay had been working on the Songa Mercur oil rig in the South China Sea when he saw an ‘‘orange light’’ on an especially clear night. The object was still in one piece and close to where MH370 first dropped off radar between Malaysia and Vietnam on March 8 with 239 people on board. He emailed his employer and Vietnamese authorities about his sighting, but his statement was leaked, which included his full name, email, passport number, and full details of the company operating the rig. In the ensuing media storm, Mr McKay said the Japanese-based petroleum company, Idemitsu, was flooded with emails and he was taken off the rig. He is now unemployed and disappointed his efforts at reporting potentially vital information turned into such a circus. ‘‘I was only trying to privately help,’’ he told Fairfax Media during a series of interviews. ‘‘If it was the aeroplane I saw, then it must have been an external fire. How far would an aeroplane stay in the air after such a fire?’’
Note: So much strangeness here. Why was this man fired for reporting simply what he saw? And why isn't this getting more media attention? For possible answers, see our essay on media corruption.
Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.