Interrupting your busy Holiday Schedule

On our bafuture yahoo group there is quite some discussion going on regarding the What is wrong with TV News? post.

Quite fitting to that theme, there is a great chance to see how the media is covering the Iraq war in the new movie: Weapons of Mass Deception playing this weekend at the Embarcadero (and in Berkeley too).

Please take a break from the Holiday frenzies and join us for the 7:30 showing tomorrow Saturday 11th of December at the Embarcadero theater. Danny Schechter the director will be at hand to answer some questions after the film. If that wasn't enough, we will head to the next watering hole afterwords for more discussions too.

The Chicago Reader says it goes beyond Michael Moore and offers a "comprehensive and devastating critique of the TV news networks complacency and complicity in the war in Iraq ....brilliantly argued and well documented ." .

Noam Chomsky in 1988 talks about manufacturing consent. I am sure that we will see some of that documented tomorrow night. (Another summary of Chomsky's book written by David Cromwell)

Think about all the things that don't get reported too, or did you know about the Cuban political prisoners in the US? I didn't until I read a Chomsky interview:

Cuba approached the United States with an offer to cooperate in combating terrorism and, in fact, the FBI sent people to Cuba to get information from the Cubans about it. The next thing was that Cubans who had infiltrated the terrorist groups in the United States were arrested. That is utterly shocking! Do you think it's reported? Nobody knows about it. I mean, here are Cubans who are infiltrating illegal, terrorist organizations in the United States, which are violating US law and the infiltrators are arrested, not the terrorists.

Shocking. He is referring to this William Blum's article in Counter Punch as one of the few good accounts.

Quite some food for thought and discussion tomorrow night. See you all there.