http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/89728-0

American radio icon Don Imus disgraced, fired after threat to reveal 9/11 secrets

In a clear sign of its intent to reign in dissident American media personalities, and their growing influence in American culture, US War Leaders this past week launched an unprecedented attack upon one of their most politically 'connected', and legendary, radio hosts named Don Imus after his threats to release information relating to the September 11, 2001 attacks upon that country.

According to European reports of the events surrounding Don Imus that have gripped the United States this past week, it was during an interview with another American media personality, Tim Russert, who is the host of a television programme frequently used by US War Leaders, wherein while decrying the state of care being given to American War wounded stated, "So those bastards want to keep these boys [in reference to US Soldiers] secret? Let's see how they like it if I start talking about their [in reference to US War Leaders] secrets, starting with 9/11."

Unable to attack such a powerful media figure as Don Imus, directly, the US War Leaders, and as we have seen many times before, resorted to a massive media attack against him using as the reason a racial slur against a US woman's basketball team, but which has been pointed out by other media outlets was not by any means a rare occurrence for the legendary radio icon to make.

But, to the US War Leaders, Don Imus represented the most serious threat, to date, of the growing assault against them by America's media personalities threatening to expose the truths behind the events of September 11, 2001 and the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars; and to such an extent that another American media personality, Rosie O'Donnell, has expressed concern that US Military Leaders could actually imprison Mr. Imus.

From our past research of the tactics used against those threatening America's War Leaders, the likelihood of imprisonment for Don Imus would only occur should he persist in his threats to undermine their authority, and which appears, at this time, unlikely after the public disgrace he has had to endure.

It is expected, also, that the US War Leaders actions against Don Imus will have a further chilling affect upon other American media personalities questioning their authority, such as the popular US movie actor, Charlie Sheen, and who was one of the first to question the events of September 11, 2001, and as we can read as reported by New Zealand Herald News Service in their article titled "Charlie Sheen may voice 9/11 documentary", and which says:

"US actor Charlie Sheen is reportedly in talks to narrate an internet documentary that suggests elements of the US government were behind the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre."

Sheen's representatives say he was involved in the production of a new version of Loose Change, a 90-minute conspiracy theory film that has been seen by more than 10 million internet viewers."

Apparently lost upon America's media personalities is that a government being investigated by the International Red Cross for the torture of an Iranian Diplomat by whipping with steel cables on his feet; a government that would have its soldiers imprison in an Ethiopian torture jail a Swedish teenage girl; a government that would even contemplate the release of one of the World's most wanted terrorists, Posada Carriles; does not hesitate, for even a second, to crush any, and all, opposition to it.

To the American people themselves their remains no evidence that they know, much less care, about the dire state of their once Free Nation.

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Bant? Is that you?

This is from the state run media, right?

This article says more about Russia (i.e. their fundamental misconceptions of the workings of democracy) than it ever would about the U.S.

Lectured by Russia about human rights abuses? Give me a break!

Imprisonment for free speech? This world makes me sick.

they're used to it.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jh ... russ15.xml

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6554989.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6556739.stm

broken iris, do you read Hot Air

dude, it's from pravda. which was founded by leon trotsky..

or at least, it's from what pravda has now become.

Never heard of it until now, but it looks hi-larious. I found the link from drudge & fark. I gotta agree with the Hot Air site that Michael McMoore using 9/11 responders as pawns in his next film is pretty low. Which is sad, but he has done some descent stuff in the past.

I posted this because it's funny. With all the bad sh*t that goes down in this country you think Vladimir Gjhkfwknikof (or whatever the author's name is) wouldn't have to make stories like this up. People in another countries who don't know the context of the Imus non-event, will actually believe this stuff. Partly beucase it's printed and partly because they want to.

And I have got to find out where this guy got his shirt:

Well I pretty much agree with what you said, just wondering how you found this story.

Is that the author? I honestly don't understand why people who are somewhat educated even bother. And I really don't think its fair that people around here give me/whoever else shit for reasonably defending Iranians or Venezuelans because sometimes its appropriate and called for. But the only reason to cheer on groups like Hezbollah because you can't stand the occasional American/western atrocity is fucking pathetic and reactionary.

Sorry, but one can't find some sort of moral guidebook that would tell you its acceptable to root for brutal Islamic extremists simply because they aren't Americans who pick fights and undermine democracies by staging coups. That's where I draw the line. Fuck those people.

This site apparently was founded in 1999. I can't find any "about us" links on the page, so I have no idea who they are affiliated with, if anyone.

as i said, it's from what pravda has now become. pravda was founded by leon trotsky in the build up to the russian revolution. the original pravda closed 15 or so years ago and i believe this website is run by people who used to work there.

wikipedia, recent history:

On August 22, 1991, a decree by Russian President Boris Yeltsin shut down the Communist Party and seized all of its property, including Pravda. Its team of journalists did not struggle for their newspaper or for its history. Instead, they registered a new paper with the same title just weeks after that.

A few months later, the then-editor Gennady Seleznyov (now a member of the Duma) sold Pravda to a family of Greek entrepreneurs, the Yannikoses. The next editor-in-chief, Alexander Ilyin, handed Pravda's trademark — the Order of Lenin medals — and the new registration certificate over to the new owners.

By that time, a serious split occurred in the editorial office. Over 90% of the journalists who had been working for Pravda until 1991 quit their jobs. They established their own version of the newspaper, which was later shut under government pressure. These same journalists led by former Pravda editors Vadim Gorshenin and Viktor Linnik in January 1999, launched Pravda Online, the first web-based newspaper in the Russian language; English, Italian and Portuguese versions are also available.

The new Pravda newspaper and Pravda Online are not related in any way, although the journalists of both publications are still in touch with each other. The paper Pravda tends to analyze events from a leftist point of view, while the web-based newspaper often takes a nationalist approach.

Meanwhile, in 2004, a new urban guide Pravda has been launched in Lithuania. It has no resemblance to the original communist Pravda whatsoever, although in its ironic mission it purports "to report the truth and nothing but the truth".

Pravda today is often used in a negative sense, to criticize media outlets that are one-sided and biased, in particular towards a leftist point-of-view.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/22/world ... ussia.html

50% Good News Is the Bad News in Russian Radio


April 22, 2007


By ANDREW E. KRAMER

MOSCOW, April 21 — At their first meeting with journalists since taking over Russia’s largest independent radio news network, the managers had startling news of their own: from now on, they said, at least 50 percent of the reports about Russia must be “positive.”

In addition, opposition leaders could not be mentioned on the air and the United States was to be portrayed as an enemy, journalists employed by the network, Russian News Service, say they were told by the new managers, who are allies of the Kremlin.

How would they know what constituted positive news?

“When we talk of death, violence or poverty, for example, this is not positive,” said one editor at the station who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution. “If the stock market is up, that is positive. The weather can also be positive.”

In a darkening media landscape, radio news had been a rare bright spot. Now, the implementation of the “50 percent positive” rule at the Russian News Service leaves an increasingly small number of news outlets that are not managed by the Kremlin, directly or through the state national gas company, Gazprom, a major owner of media assets.

The three national television networks are already state controlled, though small-circulation newspapers generally remain independent.

This month alone, a bank loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin tightened its control of an independent television station, Parliament passed a measure banning “extremism” in politics and prosecutors have gone after individuals who post critical comments on Web chat rooms.

Parliament is also considering extending state control to Internet sites that report news, reflecting the growing importance of Web news as the country becomes more affluent and growing numbers of middle-class Russians acquire computers.

On Tuesday, the police raided the Educated Media Foundation, a nongovernmental group sponsored by United States and European donors that helps foster an independent news media. The police carried away documents and computers that were used as servers for the Web sites of similar groups. That brought down a Web site run by the Glasnost Defense Foundation, a media rights group, which published bulletins on violations of press freedoms.

“Russia is dropping off the list of countries that respect press freedoms,” said Boris Timoshenko, a spokesman for the foundation. “We have propaganda, not information.”

With this new campaign, seemingly aimed at tying up the loose ends before a parliamentary election in the fall that is being carefully stage-managed by the Kremlin, censorship rules in Russia have reached their most restrictive since the breakup of the Soviet Union, media watchdog groups say.

“This is not the U.S.S.R., when every print or broadcasting outlet was preliminarily censored,” Masha Lipman, a researcher at the Carnegie Moscow Center, said in a telephone interview.

Instead, the tactic has been to impose state ownership on media companies and replace editors with those who are supporters of Mr. Putin — or offer a generally more upbeat report on developments in Russia these days.

The new censorship rules are often passed in vaguely worded measures and decrees that are ostensibly intended to protect the public.

Late last year, for example, the prosecutor general and the interior minister appeared before Parliament to ask deputies to draft legislation banning the distribution on the Web of “extremist” content — a catch phrase, critics say, for information about opponents of Mr. Putin.

On Friday, the Federal Security Service, a successor agency to the K.G.B., questioned Garry Kasparov, the former chess champion and opposition politician, for four hours regarding an interview he had given on the Echo of Moscow radio station. Prosecutors have accused Mr. Kasparov of expressing extremist views.

Parliament on Wednesday passed a law allowing for prison sentences of as long as three years for “vandalism” motivated by politics or ideology. Once again, vandalism is interpreted broadly, human rights groups say, including acts of civil disobedience. In a test case, Moscow prosecutors are pursuing a criminal case against a political advocate accused of posting critical remarks about a member of Parliament on a Web site, the newspaper Kommersant reported Friday.

State television news, meanwhile, typically offers only bland fare of official meetings. Last weekend, the state channels mostly ignored the violent dispersal of opposition protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Rossiya TV, for example, led its newscast last Saturday with Mr. Putin attending a martial arts competition, with the Belgian actor Jean-Claude Van Damme as his guest. On the streets of the capital that day, 54 people were beaten badly enough by the police that they sought medical care, Human Rights Watch said.

Rossiya and Channel One are owned by the state, while NTV was taken from a Kremlin critic in 2001 and now belongs to Gazprom. Last week, a St. Petersburg bank with ties to Mr. Putin increased its ownership stake in REN-TV, a channel that sometimes broadcasts critical reports, raising questions about that outlet’s continued independence.

The Russian News Service is owned by businesses loyal to the Kremlin, including Lukoil, though its exact ownership structure is not public. The owners had not meddled in editorial matters before, said Mikhail G. Baklanov, the former news editor, in a telephone interview.

The service provides news updates for a network of music-formatted radio stations, called Russian Radio, with seven million listeners, according to TNS Gallup, a ratings company.

Two weeks ago, the shareholders asked for the resignation of Mr. Baklanov. They appointed two new managers, Aleksandr Y. Shkolnik, director of children’s programming on state-owned Channel One, and Svevolod V. Neroznak, an announcer on Channel One. Both retained their positions at state television.

Mr. Shkolnik articulated the rule that 50 percent of the news must be positive, regardless of what cataclysm might befall Russia on any given day, according to the editor who was present at the April 10 meeting.

When in doubt about the positive or negative quality of a development, the editor said, “we should ask the new leadership.”

“We are having trouble with the positive part, believe me,” the editor said.

Mr. Shkolnik did not respond to a request for an interview. In an interview with Kommersant, he denied an on-air ban of opposition figures. He said Mr. Kasparov might be interviewed, but only if he agreed to refrain from extremist statements.

The editor at the news service said that the change had been explained as an effort to attract a larger, younger audience, but that many editorial employees had interpreted it as a tightening of political control ahead of the elections.

The station’s news report on Thursday noted the 75th anniversary of the opening of the Moscow metro. It closed with an upbeat item on how Russian trains are introducing a six-person sleeping compartment, instead of the usual four.

Already, listeners are grumbling about the “positive news” policy.

“I want fresh morning broadcasts and not to fall asleep,” one listener, who signed a posting on the station’s Web site as Sergei from Vladivostok, complained. “Maybe you’ve tortured RNS’s audience enough? There are just a few of us left. Down with the boring nonintellectual broadcasts!”

The change leaves Echo of Moscow, an irreverent and edgy news station that often provides a forum for opposition voices, as the only independent radio news outlet in Russia with a national reach.

And what does Aleksei Venediktov, the editor in chief of Echo of Moscow, think of the latest news from Russia?

“For Echo of Moscow, this is positive news,” Mr. Venediktov said. “We are a monopoly now. From the point of view of the country, it is negative news.”


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But.... but..... Fox News! Fox News!