A Plea for Peace Journalism — Peace by Peaceful Means

TRANSCEND News, 30 Apr 2018

Maung Zarni – TRANSCEND Media Service

TRANSCEND Media Service is having a fund drive to keep its valuable service – tailored to those of us who want in-depth and critical analyses – not sensationalist corporate media reportage with its shallow “Trumpish-All-sides” “balance”.

In most cases of realities that involve blood, invasion, genocides, war crimes, exploitation, systematic acts of state propaganda, “all sides” and “balance” in journalism, are not simply acts of moral cowardice, but the total absence of intellectual substance. Peace, nonviolence, social justice are TMS ideologies rooted on basic human rights and needs, non negotiable principles.

Noam Chomsky, the author of Manufacturing Consent, would agree if I make an “outlandish statement” such as there are no ‘Gold Standards’ in journalism. The idea of Gold Standard is itself propaganda.  Ask James Bond’s real world employer – Military Intelligence Unit 5 or “MI5”, which has been vetting the BBC’s hiring since the “Master Class” Propaganda Industry’s inception when the broadcast technology was the cutting edge.

So, I’d rather throw TRANSCEND a lifeline than watch BBC and pay the license fee.  Who in their right mind would pay to be brainwashed by yet another military-industrial complex?

Think about it and Please Act! Thank you.

https://www.transcend.org/tms/donate/

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A Buddhist humanist from Burma, Maung Zarni is a member of the TRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment, former Visiting Lecturer with Harvard Medical School, specializing in racism and violence in Burma and Sri Lanka, and Non-resident Scholar in Genocide Studies with Documentation Center – Cambodia.  His analyses have appeared in leading newspapers including the New York Times, The Guardian and the Times. Among his academic publications on Rohingya genocide are The Slow-Burning Genocide of Myanmar’s Rohingyas (Pacific Rim Law and Policy Journal), An Evolution of Rohingya Persecution in Myanmar: From Strategic Embrace to Genocide, (Middle East Institute, American University), and Myanmar’s State-directed Persecution of Rohingyas and Other Muslims (Brown World Affairs Journal, forthcoming). He holds a PhD (U Wisconsin at Madison) and a MA (U California), and has held various teaching, research and visiting fellowships at the universities in Asia, Europe and USA including Oxford, LSE, UCL Institute of Education) , National-Louis, Malaya, and Brunei. He is the recipient of the “Cultivation of Harmony” award from the Parliament of the World’s Religions (2015).

 

This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 30 Apr 2018.

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