Charlie's Picks

After years of working as a respected journalist, Nick Davies broke the unwritten rule of the media by investigating the practices of his fellow colleagues. In this eye-opening exposé, Davies uncovers an industry awash in corruption and bias. His findings include the story of a prestigious Sunday newspaper that allowed the CIA to plant fiction in its columns; the newsroom that routinely rejects stories about black people; the respected paper that hired a professional fraudster to set up a front company to entrap senior political figures; as well as a number of newspapers that pay cash bribes to bent detectives. His research also exposes a range of national stories that were in fact pseudo events manufactured by the public relations industry and global news stories that were fiction generated by a machinery of international propaganda. The degree to which the media industry has affected government policy and perverted popular belief is also addressed. Gripping and though-provoking, this is an insider’s look at one of the world’s most tainted professions.

From Publishers Weekly Herman of Wharton and Chomsky of MIT lucidly document their argument that America's government and its corporate giants exercise control over what we read, see and hear. The authors identify the forces that they contend make the national media propagandisticthe major three being the motivation for profit through ad revenue, the media's close links to and often ownership by corporations, and their acceptance of information from biased sources. In five case studies, the writers show how TV, newspapers and radio distort world events. For example, the authors maintain that "it would have been very difficult for the Guatemalan government to murder tens of thousands over the past decade if the U.S. press had provided the kind of coverage they gave to the difficulties of Andrei Sakharov or the murder of Jerzy Popieluszko in Poland." Such allegations would be routine were it not for the excellent research behind this book's controversial charges. Extensive evidence is calmly presented, and in the end an indictment against the guardians of our freedoms is substantiated. A disturbing picture emerges of a news system that panders to the interests of America's privileged and neglects its duties when the concerns of minority groups and the underclass are at stake. First serial to the Progressive.

Stauber and Rampton cite a classic example of image manipulation in this chilling analysis of the PR business. During the aftermath of the 1975 Three-Mile Island nuclear accident, a company spokesman said that a spark in the accumulated hydrogen bubble could result in a "spontaneous energetic disassembly"?otherwise known as an explosion. The authors trace certain specious practices of the $10 billion PR business to P.T. Barnum, who in 1836 wrote anonymous pro and con letters to editors about himself, generating heated interest. Modern public relations has evolved "crisis management" and "anti-" PR campaigns including sabotaging the tours of authors who challenge industry clients, for example, Jeremy Rifkin, author of Beyond Beef. The new euphemism for sewage sludge, "biosolids," is part of a campaign to convince the public that municipal sludge, replete with an astounding array of toxic substances, is good for farm soil. The authors point to Business for Social Responsibility, an organization that includes The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry's and others, as now containing "some of the most environmentally destructive corporations on the planet." Giant agencies extend their contracts to selling national policies, as Hill & Knowlton did in selling the Gulf war to the American public. Although most large news organizations at least rewrite PR materials, many smaller markets "rip and read" prepackaged video news releases. This is a cautionary reminder that much of the consumer and political world is created by for-hire mouthpieces in expensive neckties.

In The War on Truth - the long-awaited sequel to The War on Freedom - Nafeez Ahmed provides the most comprehensive and controversial critique of the government's official version of what happened on 9/11. In this extensive new analysis, Ahmed doubles the data and investigates the worldwide web of terrorist networks across space and time. Deconstructing the findings of the 9/11 Commission Report and the Joint Congressional Inquiry, he exposes disturbing liaisons between American, British and European intelligence services and al-Qaeda operatives in the Balkans, Caucasus, North Africa, Middle East, Central Asia and Asia-Pacific - liaisons linked not only to 9/11, but also to prior terrorist attacks including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1998 US embassy bombings. Against this background, Ahmed accomplishes the most detailed and wide-ranging study to date of the powerful vested interests and intrigues responsible for the collapse of US national security in the years and months leading to 9/11. Government documents, whistleblower testimony, and the findings of official inquiries are scrutinized to trace the innermost workings of the intelligence community, revealing precisely which government policies and operations facilitated the 9/11 intelligence failure, and pinpointing the specific agencies, individuals and decisions that emasculated the US air defense system. Finally, Ahmed unlocks the underlying geostrategy of the War on Terror - the culmination of a decades-long plan to secure and expand an increasingly unstable system. For anyone who remains uneasy about government policies on, and after, 9/11, The War on Truth is an invaluable resource that will radically alter perceptions of international terrorism, national security, and the clandestine machinery of Western power. About the Author Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development in Brighton, and the bestselling author of The War on Freedom: How & Why America was Attacked: September 11, 2001, which won him the Naples Prize, Italy's most prestigious literary award. He has a first-class Masters degree in Contemporary War and Peace Studies from the University of Sussex, where he is currently a PhD candidate in International Relations. A regular political commentator on BBC Southern Counties Radio, Ahmed has been named a Global Expert on War, Peace and International Affairs by The Freedom Network of the International Society for Individual Liberty in California.

From Publishers Weekly
Well before the beginning of the Cold War, the Soviet Union achieved a series of propaganda successes by using front organizations that ostensibly served independent purposes but were orchestrated by Moscow. In the late 1940s, Frank Wisner, chief of political warfare for the newly created CIA, proposed a U.S. version: a mighty Wurlitzer that like its namesake would play the music America desired. California State–Long Beach professor Wilford describes the Wurlitzer as most successful in supporting Western Europe's noncommunist leftist unions, students and intellectuals during the 1950s. As the Cold War spread, the CIA organized programs in the Third World combining development with anticommunism. The CIA was more a source of funding and fine-tuning than the master player its organizers intended; few of its front groups were unaware of the connection. What made the system work was a shared, principled and intense anticommunism combined with trust in America's intentions and capabilities. As these eroded during the Vietnam era, the Wurlitzer's music grew discordant, then ceased altogether. Wilford's conclusion that winning hearts and minds is best left to overt processes and organizations is predictable and defensible. Still, Wisner's Wurlitzer helped level the playing field at a crucial period of the Cold War.