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From: chapman@fornax.uucp
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: 'Free' Trade?
Message-ID: <189@fornax.uucp>
Date: Sat, 21-Feb-87 00:32:16 EST
Article-I.D.: fornax.189
Posted: Sat Feb 21 00:32:16 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 21-Feb-87 10:09:19 EST
Distribution: can
Organization: School of Computing Science, SFU, Burnaby, B.C. Canada
Lines: 59

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> of Canadair or de Haviland?  Give an example of "foreign" coverage
> in the Canadian media that is not matched in one way or the other
> by the US media.  Are you hard pressed?  Not at all?  Good let's
> hear it.
> 
Ok I can give you an example(s). You *cannot* get anything like an accurate
view of world events if your primary source of information is the US media.

I will give you an example; I hesitate to use this because I cannot remember
the exact source, however...
It seems a group of generals from a south american military dictatorship,
supported by the US government, spent quite a bit of time touring the US
to promote (this is going to be hard to believe) tourism.  They spent
a lot of their time having/hosting luncheons for US publishers.  So far
so good.  Well it seems this reporter (in Toronto I think) got curious
about this a couple of years later and decided to do an online database search.
She searched the NY Times database (containg the news from the largest 300
newspapers in the US) for reports of human rights abuse in this country.
She found almost nothing in a years worth of data.  So to check her
procedures she tried it with some innocuous country like Sweden and
actually got more articles on abuses there than in this notorious
dictatorship.  Then she tied searching the Globe&Mail database for the
same period and got many (>100) citations of Globe articles dealing
with abuses in the S.A. country.  Make what you will of it.

If anyone has more information about this occurrence feel free to
correct my details.  If I can remember my original source I will
look it up and post any necessary corrections.

If you want *good* documented examples of how incredibly biased the
US media is (i.e. how often the lie, bend, and otherwise mutilate
the truth) you should read one of Noam Chomsky's books, particularily
the two volume set "The political economy of Freedom". They deal with
the US media's reporting of US activities in South America and Vietnam.
One story he tells I can remember particularily well: TIME was going
to publish an article on atrocities performed by the vietnamese 
communists with accompanying pictures.  Chomsky somehow got ahold of
the pictures before press and recognized the scenes as being in
(US backed) Thailand.  He called the TIME editor responsible and told
him about it - the repsonse was "Well it *could* happen in
communist territory too" or something to that effect and they published
the original story unchanged.

Read the books for a real eye opening experience.


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> 	Alas, my bark is worse than my bite
> 
> 		Bjorn R. Bjornsson
> 		alberta!bjorn
john

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