General secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions GAWAIN LITTLE calls for support and participation in the national partnership organised to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1926 general strike
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BBC staff in open revolt over Gaza
Britain’s state broadcaster is facing major internal discontent about its reporting on the Israel-Gaza conflict. Journalists are claiming it is systematically biased and frames events in a misleading way, writes MARC VANDEPITTE
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After brutal police crackdowns on pensioners and the forced approval of secret IMF deals, trade unions are finally responding to grassroots pressure and fighting back against savage neoliberal reforms, reports BERT SCHOUWENBURG
Bizarrely, Trump’s latest attacks now include the National Zoo, but his real and racist agenda is to strip everything black from the country’s cultural institutions, writes LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
The transformation of a stable secular state into a fractured ruin largely ruled by Western-backed fundamentalists exposes the hollow nature of ‘multipolarity’ and the absence of principled anti-imperialism today, writes ZOLTAN ZIGEDY
Facing economic turmoil, Jim Callaghan’s government rejected Tony Benn’s alternative economic strategy in favour of cuts that paved the way for Thatcherism — and the cuts-loving Labour of the present era, writes KEITH FLETT
The economic value of disability benefits far outweighs their cost, argues Dr DYLAN MURPHY
As tensions rise in the Middle East, the role of Iran in the region’s political balance becomes ever more significant. STEVE BISHOP assesses the current situation
MAINSTREAM media rarely engage in outright media lies, but it does happen. Just think of the mass grave in Timisoara, the incubator babies in Kuwait, or the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. (For a more detailed explanation of these blatant lies, see the annex at the end of the article.)
More often, the distortion of reality happens more subtly, through framing, omitting or under-reporting events, leaving out context, selecting experts, exaggerating facts, using misleading headlines, suggestive photos and so on.
In most cases, this distortion of reality does not originate with individual journalists but is initiated and driven by their editors. These editors, in turn, are under pressure from commercial media tycoons. In the case of public broadcasters, they are under political tutelage and control.
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