Selected Articles: Most Underreported News Stories of 2016, Ban Ki-moon’s ‘Yes Man’ Legacy, Remembering Camus
“Repeater Journalism” versus the Biggest Underreported Stories of 2016
By Eresh Omar Jamal, January 04 2017
You have the majority of mainstream journalists worldwide simply ‘repeating the narrative’ portrayed in the powerful quarters of the world media, namely the Western (American) media, and the information they receive from the biggest news agencies (Western mostly), instead of doing their job — ‘questioning what happened’ and ‘investigating how’ it did. When such impervious power rests in the hands of a handful of individuals, you will of course have a select number of stories being regularly reported by the media. And some stories, never. So what were some of those stories worthy of being covered in the news that were not?
The Top Ten Under-Reported News Stories of 2016
By Neil Clark, January 04 2017
What would George Orwell have made of 2016? Some of the biggest news stories of the year, promoted by pro-Establishment media, were either false, such as the claims made in December that a ‘Holocaust’ was taking place in eastern Aleppo, or not backed up by any hard evidence, such as the allegations that Russia interfered in the US election. Ironically, these stories were pushed most aggressively by media outlets that expressed the most concern about ‘fake news’ and the urgent need to take action against it!
Ban Ki-moon: Requiem for a UN ‘Yes Man’
By Joe Lauria, January 04 2017
After ten years of almost total obedience to Washington, Ban Ki-moon stepped down Sunday as United Nations Secretary-General, leaving behind a sorry legacy that has undermined the U.N.’s legitimacy, which rests on its real and perceived neutrality in overseeing world affairs.
Aping Washington: Tony Abbott, Israel and Australian Foreign Policy
By Dr. Binoy Kampmark, January 04 2017
Former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott has gotten, of late, into the business of clairvoyance. At the very least, he is having a punt at the idea of what the United States is going to do next, notably in certain realms of foreign policy. Where they go, he wishes Australia to adoringly follow.
Inexhaustible Memories of Palestine
By Barbara Nimri Aziz, January 04 2017
One wonders how many more impassioned, compelling chronicles we need to inform us of the ongoing drama and injustices in their homeland. Yet, opening the pages of this ‘return’ I found myself following Karmi’s chronicle as if it were a crime story. (At one level it is a crime story.) Unlike many narrators of Israeli crimes, this book begins as an account of ‘soft’ crimes, those by Palestinian officials and the United Nations in complicity with the Palestinian Authority (PA) in their charade of possessing power and winning justice.
Remembering Albert Camus’ “The Plague”: The World as a Prison, It is the U.S….?
By Edward Curtin, January 04 2017
On this date, January 4, in 1960, Albert Camus died in a car crash at a point when he thought his true work had not even begun. He was 46 years old. He had already written The Stranger, The Fall, and The Plague, among other works. He had won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Yet he felt that in his writing he had to hide behind a mask that stifled him. After all these successes, as well as criticism from the left and right French intelligentsia, he was looking forward to a time when he would be able to speak his own truth without the mask of depersonalization – to enter a period of création en liberté.
