An Unbiased Reporter

[vt]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Obama and Nixon are cut of the same cloth when it comes to the press:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...nation/375274/

[don]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Oligarchs of Eastern Europe Scoop Up Stakes in Media Companies

By RICK LYMAN


BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — Across Eastern Europe, local oligarchs and investment groups — some directly connected to their countries’ political leadership — are snapping up newspapers and other media companies, prompting deep concerns among journalists and others about press freedom.

It is just one of an array of developments across the region raising questions, a quarter century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, about progress toward Western standards of democracy and free speech . As in Russia, there are increasing worries about a potentially dangerous concentration of power in the hands of people who have managed to acquire both wealth and political influence and are increasingly extending their control to media outlets. ( )

Here in Slovakia, a German media company sold a substantial stake in the nation’s last serious, independent newspaper to a well-connected investment group that had been among its investigative targets.

At a time of similar developments across the region, what stood out in the investment in Petit Press and its prominent SME flagship newspaper by the group, Penta Investments, was the reaction of the paper’s staff.

Matus Kostolny, 39, editor in chief for the last eight years, walked out the door. Four of his deputies followed. And 50 members of the paper’s 80-person staff submitted notice to leave by the end of the year.

“I think Penta intends to misuse the newspapers for their own purposes,” Mr. Kostolny said. “Their idea of free speech is entirely different from mine.”

But the situation in Slovakia is just the latest in which owners, often Western European or American, have chosen to sell Eastern European media properties and powerful local interests have stepped forward and snapped them up.

Andrej Babis, an agriculture and fertilizer tycoon, not only owns the Czech Republic’s largest publishing house and several important media outlets, he is the government’s minister of finance.

In Latvia, opaque disclosure laws obscured who controlled much of the country’s news media until a corruption investigation of one of the country’s richest businessmen revealed that he and two other oligarchs were the principal owners.

In Hungary, beyond outright state ownership of much of the news media, top associates of Prime Minister Viktor Orban control significant chunks. Chief among them is Lajos Simicska, who went to school with the prime minister and whose construction company has profited lavishly from state contracts, although the two are said to be feuding of late.

In Romania, the leading television news station, the right-wing Antena 3, is only part of the vast media empire owned by the billionaire Dan Voiculescu, the founder of the country’s Conservative Party. In August, Mr. Voiculescu was sentenced to 10 years in prison on money laundering charges.

Several oligarchs control the media companies in Bulgaria, regularly ranked in last place among European Union nations in the World Press Freedom Index. That includes a former lawmaker, Delyan Peevski, whose New Bulgarian Media Group — ostensibly controlled by his mother, though opponents charge that he holds the real power — has been closely linked to governments controlled by several parties.

In the 1990s, after the collapse of Communism, most media outlets were either owned outright by the state or utterly dependent on government advertising. When foreign owners — most notably from Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States — subsequently bought up local newspapers, magazines and broadcast outlets, journalists found that the distant owners had no interest in local politics. That was a relief for a time.

“For us, it was perfect,” Mr. Kostolny said of the German conglomerate that owned SME. “We had very professional owners who never picked up the phone and tried to influence the newspaper. Not once.”

But when the economy sank in 2008, most of these foreign owners decided to retreat to their core businesses back home and put their media companies in Central and Eastern Europe on the block. At that point, the distance between their Western owners and the political realities in their countries began to seem like a drawback, especially as the owners began selling to local interests with a direct stake in the coverage.

“It turned out that as much as they didn’t care about Slovak politics, they also didn’t care about who they sold the papers to and the impact of the sale on Czech and Slovak society,” Mr. Kostolny said.

The end result, said Marian Lesko, a commentator for Trend Magazine, a Bratislava-based business journal also owned by Penta Investments, is that “in Slovakia, independent media is no more, basically.”

[don]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

H. L. Mencken’s ‘Days Trilogy: Expanded Edition’

By P. J. O’ROURKE


If we exclude Mark Twain, whose reminiscences suffered the rapine of fiction and whose attempt at autobiography is a mess, the three best memoir writers in American literature are H. L. Mencken.

The Library of America has issued “Happy Days,” “Newspaper Days” and “Heathen Days” in a single volume that contains a chronology of Mencken’s life and useful notes to help us identify figures of immortal renown, some forgotten for 100 years. More important, the edition includes Mencken’s previously unpublished additions to, corrections of and commentaries on his own books — a retrospective upon retrospectives sufficient in length to turn “The Days Trilogy” into a quartet.

H. L. Mencken was a self-esteeming, even self-obsessed, man who began subscribing to a clipping service for news about himself when he was 23. He donated so much Menckeniana to the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore that it fills eight collections and spills over. But in his memoirs Mencken manages the prestidigitation of absorbing readers under his magic cloak of self-absorption. He turns his specific detail of the workaday into a universal generality of jubilee.

Mencken does it by leaving out what might bore him or — in his office as locum tenens for the reader — us. For example, in “Happy Days,” which covers the years until he is 12, his younger sister is mentioned only once.

When Mencken is interested, he goes to work with a writing style that retired undefeated. The hot dogs of his time were served in pastry shells, not “the soggy rolls prevailing today, of ground acorns, plaster of paris, flecks of bath sponge and atmospheric air all compact.”

Mencken applies the balm of humor to raw nostalgia. He caps an obligatory yarn of childhood play by stating: “A few years ago . . . I encountered a ma’m in horn-rimmed spectacles teaching a gang of little girls ring-around-a-rosy. The sight filled me suddenly with so black an indignation that I was tempted to grab the ma’m and heave her into the goldfish pond. In the days of my own youth no bossy female on the public payroll was needed to teach games.”

And Mencken expresses a warm honesty about the cold heart of a child. “Happy Days” ends with the death of his grandfather. “The day was a Thursday — and they’d certainly not bury the old man until Sunday. No school tomorrow!”

The same Mencken expression, unblinking but unfrowning, is turned upon the press. “Newspaper Days” and “Heathen Days” are correctives for those who lament the present media’s sensationalism, and curatives for those who think newsmongers go around speaking truth to power.

Journalism, Mencken explains, is fun, “especially for a young reporter to whom all the major catastrophes and imbecilities of mankind were still more or less novel, and hence delightful.” And “a newspaperman always saw that show from a reserved seat in the first row.”

When he wasn’t part of the show himself. Sundays were light on news when Mencken was at The Baltimore Morning Herald in 1903 — until “a wild man was reported loose in the woods . . . with every dog barking for miles around, and all women and children locked up. I got special delight out of the wild man, for I had invented him myself.”

“Journalism,” Mencken notes, “is not an exact science.”

And partisanship was a newsman’s obligation. When Mencken was at The Baltimore Sun, its editor, Charles H. Grasty, and the city’s mayor, James H. Preston, were engaged in a furious quarrel. To condense Mencken slightly: “If Preston, as mayor, proposed to enlarge the town dog pound, Grasty denounced it . . . as an assault upon the solvency of Baltimore, the comity of nations and the Ten Commandments, and if Grasty argued . . . that the town alleys ought to be cleaned oftener, Preston went about the ward clubs warning his heelers that the proposal was only the opening wedge for anarchy, atheism and cannibalism.”

“In my daily column,” Mencken writes, “I accused Preston of each and every article in my private catalog of infamies. . . . I was fond of him, thought he was doing well as mayor, and often met him amicably at beer parties.”

Mencken became famous as a writer of opinion pieces. Here he is in “Prejudices: Fifth Series,” published in 1926, editorializing on William Jennings Bryan: “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without sense or dignity . . . deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, . . . all beauty, all fine and noble things. . . . Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.”

But before anyone is tempted into the editorializing field, he or she should read Mencken on the subject: “If anyone in the city room had ever spoken of an editorial in his own paper as cogent and illuminating, he would have been set down as a jackass for admiring it and as a kind of traitor to honest journalism for reading it at all.”

An advantage to having all three “Days” books and their addenda in one place is that we get a full picture of Mencken. And we need one. He was a man born with many contradictions who set out to bring each of them into a perfect state of conundrum.

Mencken was perhaps the most convivial curmudgeon ever. In the course of 795 pages of text, he reports, I believe, not going to only two parties. Once (and seemingly only once), he wasn’t invited. And once there was a boozefest hosted by a man so notorious for supporting Prohibition, even Mencken’s fondness for hypocrisy was overcome.

Mencken was so perfectly attuned to the period from the end of World War I to Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 that in the next period he was obliviated. At the low ebb of his popularity, when being forced to resign from The Sun for his antiwar and anti-Roosevelt views, he turned his full attention to his memoirs. They were all successful.

He was an atheist who said of religion, “Dismissing the thing itself as a mere aberration is a proceeding that is far more lofty than sensible.”

He was a nearly lifelong bachelor with an encyclopedic knowledge of Baltimore’s houses of ill repute who, in his 50s, became the devoted husband of a Goucher College professor dying of tuberculosis.

He was, with a trade school education, the pre-eminent scholar of the American language.

He remains a hero to conservatives, although he called a reporter friend “a congenital and incurable Republican,” and held firmly to the wisdom that “in politics a man must learn to rise above principle.”

He is an idol of libertarians for his animadversion upon the nanny state’s “vast rabble of inspectors, smellers, spies and bogus experts.” Never mind his racism and anti-Semitism — of which he had the midcentury white middle-class man’s standard complement.

Others have made so much of Mencken’s racist attitudes and anti-Semitic statements that there’s not much more left to make. Mencken liked to combine Enoch Pratt erudition with the back-alley vulgate and did so at a time of great racial and ethnic vulgarity.

Mencken’s taste was untrustworthy. A well-read man, he praised Dreiser and disdained George Eliot. An ardent amateur musician, he had “an intense distaste for vocal music,” and he thought of “even the most gifted Wagnerian soprano as no more than a blimp fitted with a calliope.”

For all his prejudices, it would have been utterly inconsistent for the Mencken we get to know in these books not, in 1931, to publish a series of outraged and threat-inducing articles on the lynching of a Maryland black man, causing The Nation to recognize Mencken for “distinguished journalism in the face of personal danger.”

Or, in 1938, to write a column proposing the United States open its borders to Jews fleeing Nazi persecution.

Or, in 1948, in his last published column, to argue against segregation.

THE DAYS TRILOGY
Expanded Edition
By H. L. Mencken
Edited by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers
Illustrated. 872 pp. The Library of America. $35.

H. L. Mencken

P. J. O’Rourke is the H. L. Mencken research fellow at the Cato Institute.

[don]

John Pilger

War by media and the end of truth
By John Pilger

Why has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what's called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war - with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an "invisible government". It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media - a surreal assembly line of obedient cliches and false assumptions.

This power to create a new "reality" has building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: "There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual."

I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only "culture" and introspection could change the world.

Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of "me-ism" had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.

In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new "threats" completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, "What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channeling what turned out to be crude propaganda?"

He replied that if we journalists had done our job "there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq."

That's a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.

Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.

Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s - a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official's name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as "Mr Iraq". Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. "We would feed journalists factoids of sanitized intelligence," he told me, "or we'd freeze them out."

The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis. What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC's Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: "Aren't you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?" The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman's "memorable moments". Last week, Paxman signed a 1 million-pound (US$1.56 million) book deal.

The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 - a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean. Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers - all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch's empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.

The most effective propaganda is found not in the Sun or on Fox News - but beneath a liberal halo. When the New York Times published claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, its fake evidence was believed, because it wasn't Fox News; it was the New York Times.

The same is true of the Washington Post and the Guardian, both of which have played a critical role in conditioning their readers to accept a new and dangerous cold war. All three liberal newspapers have misrepresented events in Ukraine as a malign act by Russia - when, in fact, the fascist led coup in Ukraine was the work of the United States, aided by Germany and NATO.

This inversion of reality is so pervasive that Washington's military encirclement and intimidation of Russia is not contentious. It's not even news, but suppressed behind a smear and scare campaign of the kind I grew up with during the first cold war.

Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.

The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember. The biggest Western military build-up in the Caucasus and eastern Europe since world war two is blacked out. Washington's secret aid to Kiev and its neo-Nazi brigades responsible for war crimes against the population of eastern Ukraine is blacked out. Evidence that contradicts propaganda that Russia was responsible for the shooting down of a Malaysian airliner is blacked out.

And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence Many in the western media haves worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads NATO and is straight out of Dr Strangelove - one General Breedlove - routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick's General Jack D Ripper is pitch perfect.

Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer - the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair's invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.

There is almost the joi d'esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction to be "hard facts".

"If you wonder," wrote Robert Parry, "how the world could stumble into world war three - much as it did into world war one a century ago - all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason."

Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this "game of chicken", as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: "Let's get ready for war with Russia."

In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as "the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this". Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.

In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured 12 years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?

In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a 10-year study of the BBC's coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.

In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism? Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called "austerity" is necessary?

Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.

But within a few months - apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate "bonuses" - the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called "austerity" became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?

Today, many of the premises of civilized life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt - the debt of crooks. The "austerity" cuts are said to be 83 billion pounds. That's almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch's News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of 100 billion pounds in free insurance and guarantees - a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.

The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who's keeping record straight? Isn't that what journalists are meant to do?

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian revealed something similar in this country.

None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear Julian Assange - though other rewards can be plentiful.

It's clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media's gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He became not only a target, but a golden goose.

Lucrative book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.

None of this was mentioned in Stockholm on December 1 when the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn't exist. They were unpeople.

No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively - and brilliantly - rescued Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.

What made this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament - whose craven silence on the Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.

"When the truth is replaced by silence," said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, "the silence is a lie."

It's this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war.

In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn't wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika - an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.

It's 100 years since World War I. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in C P Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: "If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don't know and can't know."

It's time they knew.

This was John Pilger's address to the Logan Symposium, "Building an Alliance Against Secrecy, Surveillance & Censorship", organized by the Centre for Investigative Journalism, London, December 5-7, 2014

[TBBNF]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

There are no unbiased reporters. I like the folks who are honest about what they believe.



There, fixed it for you. Corporations are creations of the state. Too bad the state did not adequately protect it's self from it's creation.

+1!!

[don]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

I like the folks who are honest about what they believe.

Or who they're paid to represent (however convoluted their approach to the mission)

Give me transparency . . . please.

[vt]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-w...-against-press

[Thailandnotes]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/scott-w...-against-press

"At NewsBusters, we watch the liberal media so YOU don't have to! But ONLY YOU can equip NewsBusters with the resources needed to expose the radical media..."

radical media?
I wish.

[vt]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

ABC and Ann Compton are not Fox. It is likely a fair number of active reporters feel the same, but are afraid to with this sick administration.

Obama's the closest we've seen to Nixon since Nixon.

[Raz]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

ABC and Ann Compton are not Fox. It is likely a fair number of active reporters feel the same, but are afraid to with this sick administration.

Obama's the closest we've seen to Nixon since Nixon.

I agree. He's an incompetent, lying, hyper-political creep.

[don]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

I agree. He's an incompetent, lying, hyper-political creep.

Just the man for the job

[don]

With A Little Help From My Friends . . .

By Asia Times Online staff

The death of Joe Cocker in Colorado on Monday at the age of 70 will rouse many memories, bitter and sweet, among the now-fading "flower-power generation" - and even their offspring. Today, variations of Cocker's iconic 1969 rendition of With a Little Help From My Friends performed at the Woodstock festival will be blaring, no-doubt at speaker-shattering volumes, in homes, in commuters' cars, on ear-phones of office-bound workers - even in old-folks' homes …

"Where were you when you first heard Joe Cocker sing With a little help … ?" For many who know the song, it was "at Woodstock" - whether they were among the lucky thousands there in person, the thousands more who watched the movie of the event in cinemas, or the thousands who have the sound track in their music collections in one format or another.

It was a Lennon/McCartney song, but no-one has ever sung it better than the British-born Cocker, and over the 45 years since that utterly memorable, utterly unshackled, Woodstock performance, its savagely/tenderly sung truth … "I get by with a little help from my friends" … has been lived out by those who heard it then and have heard it since - through riches, through poverty, through addictions of one sort or another (well, it was the flower-power generation); through personal disasters and business/work catastrophes and celebrations; drunk or sober, high or low.

They have got by, as every generation does, somehow, but not least of all thanks to a little help from their friends, often with Cocker's voice filling the party moment of the day - or the vacuum when little else offered support.

And today, with Cocker's voice blasting defiantly through the tropical air and as we bring out this last edition of 2014, Asia Times Online has great cause to reflect on the truth of those lyrics.

It has been a bitter 12 months since our "jumbo" year-end edition of 2013. Funds have dried up, staff have gone unpaid, "hopes" have proved to be without foundation, a much-worked-on prospective purchase fell through … and incredibly patient correspondents have found their more-than-12-month-long patience unrewarded.

"Would you believe in a love at first sight? Yes I'm certain that it happens all the time …"

It is almost true to say that it happened for this writer when he first came across Asia Times Online, by then a well-established, Internet-housed reincarnation of the Bangkok-based Asia Times print newspaper.

Here was a rare web site, one packed with well-written, well-edited, well-informed news and analysis about Asia (and, for this reader and editor, a delightful absence of standard newspaper "furniture" - that clutter of pictures, captions, graphics - you name it - whose preparation, placement and checking too often merely sucks up time, absorbs resources, and diverts attention from the issue at hand - the words).

As he came to work at Asia Times Online, another fact, a most remarkable fact, became apparent. There was no proprietorial interference. The only limits placed on news or analytical content were these: was it interesting, was it a good read - oh, and to the best of our knowledge, was it original and honest? What was the cost? Pay it …

There was no proprietorial interference - so far as one knew. And the passage of time having cruelly scraped away the thin barrier between the new arrival and the senior editor, that can be restated with even greater confidence seven years later - proprietorial interference has been notable only through its total absence. What freedom.

That rare umbrella of disinterest cannot be forgotten nor overlooked. Allied to years of huge and unsung generosity, it has made everything else possible and of value.

As funds have dried up, we cannot claim there was no warning. There was warning aplenty, more reliable than a long-range weather forecast; and there was plenty of time to jump ship.

Some friends did, and quite sensibly so. Professional journalism is not a charity and has no place for publications that do not deliver on payments. But those who "jumped" did so reluctantly, sometimes long after they should have, and their loyalty, however stretched, remains a foundation of what has been best about this site.

Some friends remained, and others joined. While Asia Times Online has over the past two years become a patchwork of patch-ins, hundreds of "strangers" have submitted articles for consideration with no strings attached, seeking only a place where their voice and views could be heard.

Not only were their articles frequently of a remarkably high standard, they kept the site afloat while rescuers were sought who could return it to some sort of health.

In adversity, we have found friends - or they have found us - from remarkable places the length and breadth of Asia and beyond. Just this past week, a Pakistani journalist, in the wake of the Peshawar school massacre and totally against the wishes of his family, pressed us to let him cover more fully events in his country and so follow in the footsteps of the late, much-lamented and unbelievably courageous Syed Saleem Shahzad.

So, as the year turns, we remember other friends no longer with us - not least, this site's two founding editors, Allen Quicke and Tony Allison, who guided this ship for more than its first decade; and among correspondents, the remarkable chronicler (from 2006) of the 2008 financial crisis, Julian Delasantellis. Numerous others have shared their personal as well as professional lives with us over the years, whether it concerned oncoming blindness or personal suffering on an unimaginable scale, from Syria, to Bangladesh, to China; you are not forgotten.

Nor is the Asia Times Online diaspora forgotten; still alive and kicking, many former staffers continue (when they can) to fly the flag of independent journalism around Asia. And alongside all of these, we thank the thousands of readers who have turned and still turn to this site. Without you, it would all be in vain. Friends, one and all.

As the late, great, Joe Cocker sings on, we hope we have not misused his memory and the sad coincidence of his passing; and we join in with a full, roaring voice - we got by with a little help from our friends.

Until next year, best wishes.

[thriftyandboringinohio]

Re: With A Little Help From My Friends . . .

RIP Joe, one of my favorite singers.

Cocker did OK for himself in the golden age of rock and roll.
He owned a pretty spectacular manor house in Colorado, and a night club in the little nearby town.

My wife was with friends playing at that club, and Cocker's wife invited them to stay at their home.
Big thrill for her.

Here's the house


Here's a recent performance by him of one of my favorites.

[don]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Speaking of Friday, is the MSM really scripted? C'mon . . . .

everything is going to be just fine in 2015

[santafe2]

Re: An Unbiased Reporter

Speaking of Friday, is the MSM really scripted? C'mon . . . .

They need to fire the ad-libber who tossed in a "3" between 2 and 10. That sort of thought and discourse are not allowed in the MSM.