It is hard to overstate the importance of what Little Green Footballs’ site operator Charles Johnson learned from a clearly knowledgeable person in the news business, and revealed in a post yesterday morning. Anyone who attempts to understand events in the Middle East but is unaware of what Johnson has exposed is being shortchanged, and very likely misled.

It was only a week ago that Johnson originally caught the photoshopped “Beirut Burning” picture that sparked a blogswarm of investigations into additional photo doctoring, event staging, and other photojournalistic abuses, all of which added a new word, fauxtography, to the vocabularies of those who follow the news.

Now Johnson has expanded what began as a “narrow” photojournalism controversy into an expose of how, for decades, the news we receive from the most volatile region in the world has, in exchange for what looks an awful lot like bribery, been twisted and controlled to meet a pro-Arab, pro-terorist, anti-Israel agenda.

Johnson’s reader provided him with an explanation of where the worldwide pictures and stories you ultimately see come from, and how they are “processed.” Read the whole thing.

For the purposes of this post, suffice it to say that Arab states have for decades paid substantial sums for control over content and other news-management privileges that I daresay would be refused at any price (with the mere request being treated as an earth-shaking scandal) if asked for by representatives of any Western country. So-called journalists who supposedly worship at the altar of “objectivity” not only appear not to have had a problem with this, but they clearly haven’t cared to tell us, their readers and viewers, how money has twisted and continues to twist the vast majority of news coverage originating from the Middle East.

Here are key excerpts from Johnson’s post (but you MUST read it all to get the full distasteful flavor; the entity covered is AP Television News, or APTN):

A Separate Service for Arab States

However, there is another significant part of their business model that affects the rest of the business. While most of the world takes news pictures with minimal interpretation beyond editing, the Arab Gulf States have asked for and receive a different and far more expensive service. These states pay for a complete news report service including full editing and voice overs from known journalists. The news organizations in the Arab countries don’t do anything (beyond verify that they are appropriate for local tastes) before broadcast.

What this means is that while there are around 50 people producing news pictures for the whole world working in Camden (UK) at any time, there are a further 50 Arabic speaking staff producing finished stories exclusively for the Arab states of the gulf. This has a tremendous effect on the whole feel of the building as these two teams feed pictures and people back and forth and sit in adjacent work areas. The slant of the stories required by the Gulf States has a definite effect on which footage is used and discarded. This affects both the Gulf newsroom and the main global newsroom.

This full service feed is much more expensive for the customers than the usual service, but it is also much higher margin for APTN (Associated Press Television News, “the largest television news gathering player” in the field, whose only “true competitor” is Reuters — Ed.). This is partly because there is great commonality in what they can send to most of the Gulf States taking this service: stories are made once and used in a number of countries.

Disproportionately Negative Coverage of Israel

Anything involving Israel is a favorite with Gulf Arab states for showing to their viewers.

….. A significant twist to what is seen, concerns what is not seen. Footage such as the Palestinian mob joyfully lynching two Israeli reservists in Ramallah in October 2000 is held by APTN’s library: any attempt to license this film for reshow is carefully vetted. Requests for the use of “sensitive clips” are referred directly to the Library director. This is not the case with clips that paint Israel in a bad light. Likewise, the re-showing of Palestinian celebrations on 9/11 is considered “sensitive”.

….. You will never see what the editors at APTN see before they compile your evening news. What do you think is cut out?

The Wrap-Up

….. Without question APTN’s interesting business model represents a concrete example of an ongoing financial “contribution” to an important communication agency promoting a pro-Arab bias.

There you have it. It is the equivalent of former CNN exec Eason’s Jordan’s sellout of journalistic integrity in Iraq for over a decade (in the process he “systematically covered up stories of Iraqi atrocities”) “to keep CNN’s Baghdad bureau open” (Jordan’s words), this time writ large over his entire “profession” in the most volatile region in the entire world.

Guys and gals in the media — How DARE you not inform us that you’ve been filtering and twisting Middle East news coverage all these years because the price has been right?

Just last night on Wide Awakes Radio with Matt and Mark of Weapons of Mass Discussion, and before seeing Johnson’s post for the first time this afternoon, I said that it has become painfully obvious that you simply cannot take any news that comes out of Lebanon or “Palestine” at face value.

Make that the entire Middle East — and now you know why.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

ANSWER: It’s hard NOT to think so.

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Here is the first of small sample of the multitude of stories out there about demonstrable Ohio vote fraud –

September 17, 2004:

Registration Volunteers Under Investigation For Vote Fraud
Individuals Investigated For Filling Out False Registration Cards
POSTED: 4:54 pm EDT September 17, 2004

CLEVELAND — Suspected vote fraud is under investigation in several counties around the state, including Cuyahoga County, concerning voter registration cards for people who don’t exist.

NewsChannel5’s Debora Lee reported that three individuals are being investigated in Cuyahoga County.

These people, known as paid volunteers, were being paid by voter registration organizations to go out and sign people up to vote.

The paid volunteers would receive $1 to $2 for every registration card that they turned in, but the people under investigation are suspected of filling out the cards themselves with names of people who don’t exist, so they could submit them for payment.

Cuyahoga County Board of Elections director Michael Vu stressed that it is individual paid volunteers that are being investigated, not the groups that hired them.

Sorry, I’m not buying the last paragraph based on the final and much more recent item below. And who ARE these organizations registering new voters?

September 23, 2004:

More Than 800 Voter Registration Cards Being Investigated

Akron, OH — The state of Ohio is stepping in to investigate possible voter fraud in Summit County. And the Lake County prosecutor is also looking into fraud there.

More than 800 voter registration cards in Summit County are under investigation, NewsChannel5 reported.

The Board of Elections said the voter registration cards in question are for addresses that don’t exist, spelling mistakes or have similar handwriting.

Fifty of those questionable cards apparently came from the AFL-CIO central office in Cleveland, WEWS reported.

The AFL-CIO said it’s registering thousands of union members this year, and had no knowledge of the faulty cards, which are filled out by volunteers.

AFL-CIO Executive Secretary John Ryan told NewsChannel5’s partner The Akron Beacon Journal that “it’s not only a felony, but it’s playing with democracy in a dangerous, horrible way.”

Elections officials said the bogus cards were kicked out by the computer and forwarded to state investigators.

In the meantime in Lake County, elections officials said some voter advocacy groups are forging registration cards.

In one example, a man who’s been dead for 20 years is apparently a new registered voter.

And in another case, it looks as if an entire neighborhood will be out of town on Election Day. Everyone there applied for absentee ballots.

Hmm. The AFL-CIO denies it all, despite another report (link is to The Buck Stops Here blog; Akron newspaper link no longer available) that “The cards were mailed to the board by the AFL-CIO office in Cleveland, which is part of a larger voter registration drive effort in Cuyahoga County. Summit workers are sending confirmation cards to all the voters at the addresses listed on cards in the packet forwarded by the AFL-CIO. Most have been returned. So far, none has been valid, Williams said.”

And here’s one example of a “voter advocacy group” forging registration cards –

October, 20, 2004 (photo no longer available):

UNDATED PHOTO - Chad Staton, 22, of Defiance, Ohio, is shown in this undated Defiance County Sheriff’s photo. Staton is charged with false registration of voting forms. Sheriff’s officers allege that Staton filled out more than 100 voter registration forms for Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, with fake names. Authorities allege that Staton was paid in crack …

More on this one from the October 19, 2004 The Toledo Blade:

Defiance County Sheriff David Westrick said that Mr. Staton was working on behalf of a Toledo woman, Georgianne Pitts, to register new voters. She, in turn, was working on behalf of the NAACP National Voter Fund, which was formed by the NAACP in 2000 to register new voters.

Sheriff Westrick said that Pitts, 41, of Toledo, admitted she gave Mr. Staton crack cocaine in lieu of cash for supplying her with completed voter registration forms. The sheriff declined to say how much crack cocaine Pitts supplied Mr. Staton, or to say whether Pitts knew that the forms Mr. Staton gave her were falsified.

Hmmm. AFL-CIO. NAACP. Raise your hand if you think election officials caught all the registration hanky-panky in 2004 (I don’t see any).

So of course Bobby Kennedy Jr. and his acolytes think the big story out of Ohio’s 2004 election is Republican-orchestrated voter fraud. Uh-huh.

As far as REAL and not fantasized voter fraud is concerned, nothing has changed this year:

August 11, 2006 (HTs Right Angle Blog and Porkopolis)

Workers paid by a liberal group to register voters in Franklin County have turned in more than 500 forms with nonexistent addresses and potentially fake signatures, elections officials said yesterday.

Board of Elections Director Matthew Damschroder said he has forwarded the cards to county authorities for possible criminal charges.

Elections workers verifying new-voter forms discovered signatures with the same handwriting, addresses that were for vacant lots and incorrect information for voters who already were registered, Damschroder said. One card had the name of an East Side man who’s dead.

All the questionable cards were turned in by workers for Ohio ACORN, a group that’s also paying people to gather signatures for a proposed November ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage.

Katy Gall, the group’s head organizer, said ACORN is cooperating with the investigation and already has fired some of its paid circulators.

“We are interested in seeing people who are gaming the system prosecuted,” she said.

ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, faced similar problems in 2004 during a drive that added 189,000 new voters to Ohio’s rolls. Prosecutors were unable to trace the originators of some falsified forms, but one ACORN worker was indicted by a Franklin County grand jury. (August 15 Update: One of the story’s authors, Robert Vitale, e-mailed a reply to a question I sent him, and told me that the indicted worker pled guilty. I appreciate the response.)

Interesting — ACORN even has a track record of association with registration fraud. Last Sunday’s New York Times was worried about whether the new rules about registrations “are making it much harder to register the poor,” and quoted ACORN’s Katy “Nearly-in-Hot-Water” Gall whining about them. Anyone want to take odds that the Times will follow up on the recent “difficulties” Ms. Gall’s organization is facing?

As has been the case since the 2000 election, and often before, the people accused of vote fraud, fixing elections, and suppressing the vote are the ones trying to keep the election process clean. And as usual, the ones perpetrating the real fraud are, “strangely” enough, closely associated with the party that throws around the reckless accusations.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s a very good thing that A Rose by Any Other Name is at the top of the SOB Alliance blogroll on your right.

She consistently brings military-related stories to her readers that in previous wars (yes, even Vietnam) would have come to our attention through “regular” media channels. But that doesn’t happen any more.

Here are two examples of very recent stories you probably haven’t, and won’t, otherwise hear:

• Humanitarian Aid — more than 100 tons of humanitarian aid have been delivered to Beirut by ….. (drum roll, please) ….. The US Navy. The donated aid itself, valued at over $2 million, came the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and, with the help of the Islamic Relief Organization (IRO), is being disbursed to approximately 20,000 Lebanese citizens.

• Silver Stars — Three soldiers received the Silver Star, the Army’s third-highest award for valor in combat in Afghanistan. The story, “right there” in The Fayetteville (NC) Observer, is the kind that would have been picked up by the wire services and spread around in days gone by. But not now. Oh, the AP picked it up, reduced the story’s content by about 70%, and it got to a few papers and TV station sites in the region (NC, SC, and VA), but that’s it. As Anna noted, you sure won’t see it on any of the alphabet networks, even though they probably have 24-7 coverage instead of the few hours (at most) available during previous wars.

Stories like the above are why I recommend near-daily visits to A Rose by Any Other Name.

Answer: I would say so.

Here’s what they’re up to (from a Tuesday story at PCmag.com):

Sprint Nextel will build the first nationwide mobile WiMax network, giving 100 million Americans wireless Internet access four times faster than current high-speed networks by the end of 2008, Sprint CEO Gary Forsee said at a press conference today.

The “4G” (fourth-generation) network will launch by the end of 2007, Forsee said. Prices will be considerably less than current data charges, said Sprint CTO Barry West. Sprint right now charges $60/month for unlimited access to their EVDO network.

Sprint’s mobile WiMax system will be supported by “single and multi-mode devices” from Motorola, Motorola CEO Ed Zander said. Samsung will also provide dual-mode phones, and “Sprint is actively engaged with [consumer electronics] product leaders,” according to Forsee. Motorola, Samsung and Intel will all help build Sprint’s WiMax infrasutructure.

Consumers should expect to see a whole range of different kinds of devices on the network, including “new, small types of PCs,” said Intel executive vice president Sean Maloney, also present at the press conference.

….. Mobile WiMax, otherwise known as 802.11e, will boost real-world download speeds to 2-4 megabits/second, Forsee said.

“Much of this 4G usage will be user-generated content,” Forsee said. “Imagine accessing and building MySpace and YouTube literally on the fly.”

….. But the advantage of Mobile WiMax isn’t just that individual download speeds will rise. It’s that Sprint’s virtual “pipes” will be able to support more simultaneous users at less cost, West said, and that WiMax chips cost “around 1/10″ the price of those of competing technologies.

“I set the target for my team to generate a gig of data per customer per month for less than $20. With the Mobile WiMax technology, we are significantly south of that,” West said. That means Mobile WiMax will be price-competitive with cable and DSL, he said.

So it won’t be long until there are at least four high-speed Internet connectivity options: Cable, DSL, EVDO enhanced, and Mobile WiMax. If pricing for Mobile WiMax ends up being in the neighborhood of current DSL or cable, then the newly-pokey DSL and cable will have to lower their prices to roughly where dial-up is now to stay viable.

All this, and no mention of content restrictions, without net neutrality legislation. Imagine that.

They didn’t believe the guy when he said he was on the “Most Wanted” lists (link also has video; HT Good News Blog):

Wednesday, August 9, 2006
Sheriff praises heroes
Newspaper employees say heroic act just exemplified the way they were raised

VICTORVILLE, CA — A day after they captured suspected serial killer John Wayne Thomson, two Daily Press pressmen received personal thanks from Sheriff Gary Penrod who gave them a bag filled with Sheriff’s Department goodies, including job applications.

Penrod, along with Capt. Mark Taylor of the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Victorville station , stopped in at the Daily Press about 2 p.m. Tuesday to extend their gratitude to Rey Bantug and Joe Iskandar for restraining Thomson when he tried to carjack a woman in the Cask ‘n Cleaver parking lot.

“We’ve had some citizens jump in and help out, but nothing of this magnitude where it’s this bad of a guy,” Penrod said.

….. Bantug and Iskandar have been inundated with the media frenzy surrounding their good Samaritan act, but both have been able to keep their actions in perspective.

“Nothing’s really changed. To be honest, me and Rey have both probably had better fights in a bar than what this guy put up,” Iskandar said. “We thought we were just helping one person out, but it turns out it was a lot bigger than that. We didn’t ask for the publicity, we’re happier that we may have saved another victim and that the victims’ families are a little more at ease.”

The men said that regardless of whether Thomson was a serial killer or a just a carjacker as they originally believed, they would have responded the same way.

The men were not convinced, even when they restrained Thomson and he told them that he was one of the most wanted people in the area, Bantug said.

“I just thought he was a crackhead. I said, ‘yeah, and I’m the pope,’ ” Iskandar said.

After his arrest, initially for attempted carjacking, Thomson spent about 2 1/2 hours at the Victorville station. But it only took a second for authorities to know who they were dealing with.

“He walked in the door and we went, ‘that’s the guy,’ ” Taylor said. “We kind of thought that he was still around, and we thought he might be in the High Desert.”

….. “It’s great recognition, we’re both honored. We were raised this way, but I think what Rey and I have found out through all this is that most people wouldn’t do the same in this situation, which is really sad. It lets people know that there are still people willing to help. We may look like some young punks, but you can’t judge someone by the way they look,” Iskandar said.

Iskandar has been a Daily Press employee for eight years and Bantug for two years. But after meeting Penrod and receiving the job application Bantug joked, “I don’t know about you Joe, but I’m applying.”