2 American News Anchors Get Fed Up With Political Propaganda and Quit Jobs on Air

By JG Vibes
theintelhub.com
November 23, 2012

Two news anchors in Bangor, Maine quit their jobs on the air this week, after becoming frustrated with management over the course of many years.  The reporters also complained of being forced to put forward “unbalanced” political information.

According to Bangor Daily News:

“News co-anchors Cindy Michaels and Tony Consiglio announced their resignations at the end of Tuesday’s 6 p.m. newscast.

Michaels and Consiglio, who have a combined 12½ years’ service at WVII (Channel 7) and sister station WFVX (Channel 22), shocked staff members and viewers with their joint resignations Tuesday evening.”

The news anchors decided not to tell anyone about their departure before making the announcement on the air because they feared that management would not allow them to say goodbye to the audience after they resigned.

Michaels explained to the local newspaper one of the main reasons for their frustration, saying that:

“It’s a culmination of ongoing occurrences that took place the last several years and basically involved upper management practices that we both strongly disagreed with,” she explained. “It’s a little complicated, but we were expected to do somewhat unbalanced news, politically, in general.”

Michaels continued:

“There was a constant disrespecting and belittling of staff and we both felt there was a lack of knowledge from ownership and upper management in running a newsroom to the extent that I was not allowed to structure and direct them professionally,” Michaels explained. “I couldn’t do everything I wanted to as a news director. There was a regular undoing of decisions.”

Both of them also said that they had very little freedom in the issues that they covered and that they were forced to present controversial information from a propagandized perspective.  This definitely speaks to the immense amount of control that comes from the top down in the media, which is the reason why only one version of reality is presented through mainstream sources.

For these massive corporations that run the media to actually control the political and philosophical dialogue they are dependent upon the talking heads to make the sales.  At the end of the day, most of the talking heads throughout the world are just average people, at least at local stations anyway.  These human beings have the ability to withdraw support whenever they choose to.

Especially now with the internet, any one of these local news anchors that quit still have the ability to do the exact same thing they were doing before, but less restricted, on the internet.  These particular news anchors have expressed taking different directions in their lives, writing novels, or working in the media in other ways.  It would be great to see more people from the media, even on a local level withdraw their support in this kind of way.

These newscasters, and many others who are still in the field will agree that what is on television is not the news, it is a propagandized version of events that is crafted by the corporations that advertise on the station and the government that regulates the airwaves.

VIDEO:

Officials: Israel's Gaza Offensive Was Training For A Possible Fight With Iran

Israel's eight-day Gaza offensive was a dry run for any future armed confrontation with Iran, U.S. and Israeli officials told The New York Times.

“In Operation Pillar of Defense, Israel was not confronting Gaza, but Iran,” Israeli ambassador to the U.S. States and military historian Michael B. Oren told the Times.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) employed F-16 fighter jets to drop bunker-busting bombs on underground tunnels as well as Apache helicopters and drones to hit more than 1,500 targets in Gaza.

The first strike of the conflict may have been Oct. 22 when fighter jets bombed an Iranian arms factory in Sudan. Israel has been mum about the strike, but everyone from Sudan to the U.N. believes four Israeli stealth jets targeted the factory because it was used to supply arms — including Fajr rockets like those fired at Tel Aviv and Jerusalem — to Hamas in Gaza.

Learning and reducing the capabilities of Iran's surrogates — Hamas and (especially) Islamic Jihad in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon — is important to Israel because those groups would contribute to the 200,000 rockets and missiles that could strike Israel during any military confrontation with Iran.

And as Moran Stern wrote in The Atlantic, the operation also went toward preparing Israel's military and populace for consequences that would follow a strike on Iran's nuclear facilities.

Israel's Iron Dome, partially funded by the U.S., intercepted 84 percent of the 1,506 rockets fired from Gaza that were targeted, but it wouldn't deter Hezbollah's medium-range rockets or Iran's long-range missiles because it is designed to counter only short-range rockets launched from 50 miles of less.

“The general lesson is that missile defense is effective, it can work,” said Uzi Rubin, the former head of Israel’s missile defense program, told The Washington Post. “But Iron Dome has nothing to do with threats from Iran.”

To that end Israel is developing a medium-range missile defense system, called David’s Sling, which was tested in computer simulations during the recent American-Israeli exercise (i.e. Austere Challenge), and has fielded a long-range system called Arrow.

“Nobody has really had to manage this kind of a battle before,” Jeffrey White, a defense fellow for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Times. “There [would be] lots of rockets coming in all over half the country, and there are all different kinds of rockets being fired.”

Operation Pillar of Cloud likely decimated Hamas' arsenal of 10,000 to 12,000 rockets, but the offensive didn't come close to the firepower and strategy needed to attack Iran.

What it did was bring the U.S. deeper into the mix: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton helped prevent a Israeli ground invasion, three U.S. warships were sent to Israel and President Barack Obama told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the U.S. would intensify efforts to help Israel address the smuggling of weapons and explosives into Gaza.

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IDF Soldiers Kill 1 Palestinian, Wound 19 Others at Gaza-Israel Border 2 Days After Ceasefire

A wounded Palestinian is treated at a hospital in Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip November 23, 2012.(Reuters / Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

image from twitter by @AlqassamBrigade

One adult has been killed and 19 others injured after Israeli soldiers opened fire at the Gaza-Israel border. The incident happened east of the village of Khuzaa in southern Gaza.

The deceased was identified as 21-year-old Abdelhadi Qdeih, Palestinian emergency services told AFP.
The clash erupted after a group of Palestinian farmers wandered into the disputed 300-meter buffer zone along the border.

­The farmers reportedly may have entered the buffer zone to check on their crops after hearing a news report claiming that travel restrictions had been lifted for the area.

“They were not rioting. They were really trying to see if it was possible for farmers to return to their land. Now if we accept that Israel had to shoot 500 meters into the Palestinian territory, injuring 19 and killing 1, then really there can not be a ceasefire realistically for the people of Palestine, because the farmers can’t return to work,” journalist Sarah Lauren Booth told RT from Gaza.

In a separate, contradictory account, the group approached the border fence to salvage scrap from an Israeli army jeep damaged during the conflict, AP quoted a Gaza health official as saying.

“Under the ceasefire, most Gazans [thought] that the no-go military buffer zone which Israel had imposed on the Palestinian side of the border had been raised and that the farmers in that area…would now be able to farm there. So Palestinians went to what they thought was now again Palestinian territory to look at an Israeli Jeep…and one Palestinian was killed,” Gaza-based journalist Harry Fear told RT. 

 Israel claimed that a group of about 300 people approached the fence and that some attempted to break through.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) initially said only that it had fired "warning shots" after seeing a group walking towards the fence, but later stated that soldiers shot at the group’s legs after the warnings were ignored.

Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri said the group would discuss the incident with Egypt, which brokered the recent ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. 

This is the first incident since Israeli troops and Hamas fighters laid down arms two days ago, following eight days of heated conflict.

“Looking at the situation politically on both sides of the border, I don’t think the ceasefire will break, even though this man has been killed. It’s not in the interest in the state of Israel. It’s not in the interest of Hamas. And I think this is going to be one of the gravest tragedies of these last couple of weeks,” Fear said.

The IDF bombardment of Gaza and the retaliatory shelling of Israel by Hamas mortar and rockets both ended on Wednesday night. Hostilities in the region broke out when the IDF assassinated Hamas military leader Ahmed Jabari on November 14. A reported 163 Palestinians and six Israelis died in the conflict.

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