Tuesday, February 1, 2011

Radiagate Scandals and The Palestinian Papers Deserve More Coverage in the Mainstream Media


The two main news items that took my interest this week were about Radiagate scandals and The Palestine Papers.

Radiagate scandals is a series of conversation taps between corporations, top media persons, and lobbyists in India. It basically shows how politically biased the Indian Media is, a kind of bias which can be attributed to other countries as well. Certain figures are known to be biased, and no one would be surprised if there are any complaints about such persons. What seems to be shocking was the personal integrity of media persons who are of high esteem are now being questioned. Even the quality of information and the way it was obtained and confirmed seems too low. Just going through some of the revealed conversations disillusions what the seemingly big media is, behind the screen. This scandal is supposed to shake the Indian media industry.
The Palestinian Authority and Al-Jazeera were always perceived to be having conflicting interests. While The Palestinian Authority - PA - accuses Al-Jazeera of being pro-Hamas, Al-Jazeera continues their reporting as usual. Most of the news items that appear in Al-Jazeera about the PA were not very positive. This seems to fuel the fire and the PA continues to reject the comments and the news provided by Al-Jazeera, accusing them to be speculative and lacking substance. From Jan 23rd to Jan 26th, Al-Jazeera started publishing "The Palestine Papers", more then 1600 documents, in a fashion similar to that of wikileaks. Some of the published documents are pure shocks.
What bothers so much is that both of the above did not receive much coverage in the mainstream media.

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