Censorship, fake news, perception management

[blindpig]

Acclaimed Journalist Charged With ‘Anti-Semitism’
August 28, 2024

Mary Kostakidis, for years the face of television news in Australia as anchor of the SBS nightly broadcast, has been accused of supporting ethnic cleansing of Jews for two reteweets about Israel’s war on Gaza, reports Joe Lauria.


Mary Kostakidis appearing on CN Live!, where she has been a frequent guest. (CN Live!)

By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News

For retweeting two tweets on X critical of Israel, famed Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis is facing charges of allegedly violating the country’s Racial Discrimination Act.

The complaint to the Australian Human Rights Commission from Alon Cassuto, the CEO of the Zionist Federation of Australia, highlights just two Kostakidis retweets from January this year, both of which contain a video of a speech by Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah in which he allegedly called for the ethnic cleansing of Israel.

One of the retweets is from independent British journalist Richie Medhurst, who was arrested at Heathrow airport and held for nearly 24 hours under the U.K. Terrorism Act this month. Medhurst is one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s war on Gaza. The other tweet is from a user named Censored Men.

Cassuto wants Kostakidis to apologize, remove the allegedly offensive materials from her X account; promise not to post similar tweets in future and pay his legal costs.

The complaint was levelled under Section 18C(1) of the Racial Discrimination Act, which says:

“it is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:

(a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and

(b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.”

Cassuto says Kostakidis should have made clear in her retweet of Nasrallah’s video that she did not agree or endorse it. He says Nasrallah was calling for the ethnic cleansing of Jews from Israel.

In the retweeted video, the Hezbollah leader says: “Here, you don’t have future, and from the river to the sea, the land of Palestine is for the Palestinian people and for the Palestinian people only …”

Above that Nasrallah quote in the Censored Men retweet, Kostakidis wrote: “Israeli govt getting some of its own medicine. Israel has started something it can’t finish with this genocide.”



Cassuto told a press conference: “Those like Mary Kostakidis who have a status and a platform and a responsibility to lead, need to promote cohesion not division.”

Zionist Federation President Jeremy Leibler added: “Mary Kostakidis has misused her platform to spread ‘conspiracy theories’ to deny the use of sexual violence by Hamas on the 7th of October.”

However, Kostakidis cites in another retweet the conclusion of an exhaustive U.N. investigation that found no evidence of sexual violence by Hamas.

If the matter is not resolved at the Human Rights Commission the Zionist Federation could file civil charges in court. Australian Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus, however, ‘is drafting hate speech laws to include criminal rather than civil penalties,” The Australian newspaper reported in an article about the Kostakidis case.

Kostakidis Responds

Kostakidis has denied the charges, tweeting that they amount to an “attempt to frame me as a rape and Holocaust denier.” She wrote on X:

“This because I have been sharing the reports of extremely highly regarded independent journalists who have written about the absence of credible evidence of the claims of ‘systemic, widespread rape’ by Hamas on Oct 7.

“To be clear, I have never said there was No Rape. It is something I could never say – it would be a nonsense for anyone to make such a definitive statement.”

An exemption under the Racial Discrimination Act says:

“Section 18C does not render unlawful anything said or done reasonably and in good faith: … (c) in making or publishing:

(i) a fair and accurate report of any event or matter of public interest; or

(ii) a fair comment on any event or matter of public interest if the comment is an expression of a genuine belief held by the person making the comment.”

Regarding the retweet of Nasrallah’s video, Kostakidis told The Sydney Morning Herald: “What are you saying, that we shouldn’t hear what the other side has to say? The point of that tweet was to say that Israel is inviting an escalation, it’s inviting retribution because it is conducting a genocide.”

Kostakidis’ lawyers tweeted today:

“XD Law are proud to defend Mary Kostakidis from the charges brought against her by the Zionist Federation of Australia under s18c of the Racial Discrimination Act … for sharing tweets about Gaza.

We filed her defence at the Human Rights Commission this week. Her instructions are clear – she will not be intimidated, she will not be gagged, she will not stop covering international events as she has her entire career. And that includes Israel, warts and all.

‘The Australian Zionist Federation is weaponising Australian law in an attempt to curb criticism of Israel for its acts of genocide. I won’t be intimidated by them in the face of the slaughter of tens of thousands of children, hundreds of doctors, nurses, journalists and other civilians.’” — MK



The statement goes on to say:

“Since the conflict in Gaza began Mary has been a force on Social Media giving live updates, sharing reports on the devastation there and accounts of ordinary people trying to survive it. And she is still at it.

Over the past 40 years Mary, the face of SBS news for 20 of them, has been a central figure in building a tolerant multicultural Australia. It is that reputation that her opponents are seeking to tear down because she has dared criticise Israel.

‘Imagine a situation where we can criticise our own government’s policies and actions but not those of another state, depending on how powerful and cashed up their lobby groups are. They will continue to defame me in the press but please remember this is happening to journalists, academics and others all over the western world. We are on the right side of history and international law. I have no trouble standing up to bullies.’ — MK

Mary first heard that the complaint had been filed through an astonishing press conference conducted by the CEO of the Zionist Federation and a partner at the law firm bringing the action. Side by side they attacked her, her reputation and her life’s work without restraint.

Clearly her opponents have an eye to score public hits upon Mary irrespective of the commission proceedings. We have her covered in the courts.

There is no fundraiser yet but if you want to help defend Mary now do it in the public spaces where she is under attack. Defend free speech for all Australians. Defend social media. Defend Mary Kostakidis.”

Sawsan Madina, a former Head of SBS Television, wrote:

“The attempt to silence Mary Kostakidis has alarming implications for all of us. If a complaint can be lodged against a high profile journalist like Kostakidis, for publishing newsworthy information, what will this do to freedom of the press? How many journalists will self-censor? Will we be treated as children who are only allowed to read material deemed acceptable to the government or powerful vested interests?”

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/28/a ... -semitism/

[blindpig]

"Democracies" Attack Journalism as They Attack Democracy Itself
Margaret Kimberley, BAR Executive Editor and Senior Columnist 28 Aug 2024


Photo: X.com/Snowden

What does democracy mean if elections are ignored and journalists are charged as criminals? That is the case today, as western countries descend into crises of their own making and are more blatant in their disregard for the norms they claim to adhere to. They are only devoted to aggression and to silencing dissent.

The nations of the collective west love to brag and to praise themselves as being democracies. They say they abhor authoritarian, autocratic governments and constantly condemn anyone they don’t like as belonging to that club. In reality, the word democracy is used to fool the gullible into accepting actions and policies they ought to reject and also as a weapon meant to disguise evil intent. But the facade is cracking as the dictatorial tendency becomes harder to hide.

Here in the United States, Kamala Harris became the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee after wealthy donors orchestrated a coup against the sitting president they put into office four years earlier. The end run around the primary voting system meant that no one voted for her to become president and yet we are warned that we are at risk of losing democracy unless she wins the election.

The US is not alone regarding democratic fakery. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s party lost an election to the New Popular Front (NFP) coalition . Under French law, he is bound to appoint a prime minister from that coalition but he has refused to do so, claiming that the coalition won only a plurality and not a majority. Macron is very brazenly violating the letter and the spirit of French law and making a mockery of any claims of having a political system that is in any way superior to others.

Now that same country which has ignored the will of its electorate has arrested a man whose crime is giving people all over the world unfettered access to information and for refusing to give governments a “back door” to his platform. Pavel Durov is the CEO of Telegram. Durov is Russian born and he first founded VKontakte, a platform very similar to Facebook. He was at odds with the Russian government over his commitment to encrypting communication and he left Russia to live in the United Arab Emirates. He was also granted French citizenship in 2021 as an “eminent foreigner ” that is to say, "a French-speaking foreigner who contributes through their eminent action to the influence of France and the prosperity of its international economic relations".

Neither billionaire wealth nor French citizenship helped Durov after he was arrested on August 24th in Paris after disembarking from his private jet. The charges against him allege that he allows criminal activity on Telegram, but that claim defies logic. Every social media platform is accessible to people who want to break the law but Telegram is unique, the platform of choice for people all over the world who want to share unfiltered information. Both Russian and Ukrainian soldiers report from the front using Telegram. Israeli soldiers boast of their war crimes on Telegram and Palestinians use it not to celebrate but to alert the world with images of broken bodies and blown-up buildings in Gaza. Ironically, it isn’t “authoritarian” Russia that arrested Durov, but France, which is supposedly among the “free” nations of the world.

Durov is not alone in being persecuted nor is France alone in diminishing legal rights. In the United States, former Marine intelligence officer and United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter’s passport was confiscated on June 4 as he was about to board a plane in New York City. Ritter was en route to Russia where he planned to speak at the St. Petersburg Economic Forum. He was given no explanation for the passport confiscation but two months later his home was searched by the FBI, and Ritter was informed that he was under investigation for violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) . According to a New York Times report on Ritter and others, “The Department of Justice has begun a broad criminal investigation into Americans who have worked with Russia’s state television networks, signaling an aggressive effort to combat the Kremlin’s influence operations leading up to the presidential election in November…” In addition to his former roles in the U.S. military and at the United Nations, Ritter is also a journalist who hosts his own podcast and Substack page while also writing for Consortium News and other outlets.

The FBI raid on Ritter’s home was quickly followed by the arrest of British journalist Richard Medhurst on August 15 as he returned to the UK at Heathrow Airport. He was held for nearly 24 hours under Section 12 of the Terrorism Act and was accused of, “expressing an opinion or belief that is supportive of a proscribed organization.” It isn’t clear what if anything Medhurst said or wrote in violation of this stature, but other UK citizens have been arrested for making statements that supported Palestinians' rights to self-defense.

It is not coincidental that the west has dropped any pretense of democracy in its attacks on journalists and those who provide media access. Julian Assange was recently released in a plea agreement after years in asylum and in prison. The Assange solidarity movement was by and large not taken up by those people who are also allegedly journalists. They joined in attacking him and gave access to Assange’s persecutors to make their case while treating the victim as a pariah unworthy of any consideration.

The years of draconian legislation such as the Terrorism Act in the UK, the Patriot Act, the Espionage Act and the Foreign Agent Registration Act in the US have all been used to shut down any narrative that states find inconvenient. It is ironic that Durov was lionized during the days of his disputes with the Russian government but he has now been rendered invisible by the west’s black hole used to eliminate dissenting information.

One must ask the question, why now? The world has reached a point of very dangerous contradictions. Russia is winning the war in Ukraine but the west insists on prolonging the conflict with an ill-fated incursion into Russia, complete with war propaganda proclaiming victory while Ukrainian soldiers are the casualties. Not only do Israel’s war crimes continue, but it is seeking to instigate a wider regional war against Iran in particular. US incompetence during a lame-duck presidency only increases tensions while corporate media say little or nothing about the many crises facing the world. Even with their smaller audiences Ritter and Medhurst are a threat. Durov will be held a de facto hostage until he agrees to allow surveillance of Telegram users.

Of course, the west is only revealing its true nature. The nations that invaded most of the world and enslaved and colonized and stole resources were never superior. They were just the most powerful and their riches came from exploiting the rest of humanity. When we speak of the plight of Durov and Medhurst and Ritter we must also acknowledge that they fell prey to the worst predators in human history.

https://blackagendareport.com/democraci ... acy-itself

******

How the National Endowment for Democracy Serves US Interests
August 28, 2024


Illustration showing a tool of US imperialism, National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Photo: Al-Mayadeen English.

By Bouthaina Shaaban – Aug 27, 2024

The word “waqf” in Arabic refers to the act of allocating funds for charitable purposes, where all profits generated are dedicated to orphans, the poor, and those in need. It is a system of community giving that if properly implemented, would ensure that no one is left poor or in need. The term has been most misused by Americans, who have allocated endowments to universities, institutions, banks, and civil society organizations, but often to advance their own objectives, which bear no relation to genuine community welfare and social solidarity. However, the greatest misuse of the term “waqf” is its application as a key term in the National Endowment for Democracy, which was established in 1981 during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who intended to promote his “Project Democracy” worldwide, and proposed a government-funded and privately run foundation to support alleged “democratic” movements abroad openly; movements that are financed and controlled by US intelligence to overthrow national governments and plunder their national resources.

One of the main objectives of NED, created in 1983, is to encourage the establishment and growth of democratic development in a manner consistent both with the broad US national interests and with the specific requirements of the democratic groups in other countries aided by programs funded by NED. Almost all of NED’s funds come from US Congress, which continues to pour billions of dollars into the Zionist Entity, supplying it with weapons of mass destruction and annihilation. In 2023, NED received an appropriation of $315 million. Consequently, the US government gained access to any information that NED obtains worldwide. Kim Holmes, former Assistant Secretary of State, argues that “Funding NED is a prudent investment because it is far less expensive to aid friendly democrats than it is to defend against hostile dictatorships.” NED has called for regime change in various countries through human rights movements, made extensive use of social media platforms, and funded NGOs for releasing multimedia content and providing online training, in a bid to instigate color revolutions.

NED has also run a reserve talent program for democratic transition in the region, funded NGOs to help “supporters of democracy,” so-called human rights activists, and dissidents in exile, and supported scholars and activists in plotting constitutional reforms in various countries. NED has also been funding scholars and journalists to promote “democratization reforms” in Iran and carry out cultural infiltration against the Islamic Republic.



Moreover, NED has supported organizations like Mexicans Against Corruption and Impunity (MCCI) and the Mexican Institute for Competitiveness (IMCO) and obstructed the electricity reform in Mexico. In all its endeavors, NED holds developing countries to the standard of American-style democracy and criticizes their presidential elections, economic policies, human rights implementation, and democratic transitions. Having classified leaderships in some countries as “dictatorships,” NED has continued to export American values to those countries through academic, cultural, and media activities. It has allocated generous funds to support “democracy activists,” slam the human rights record of those countries and stoke social tensions in the guise of promoting the freedom of the press. The US intervention in the Serbian presidential, national assembly and local elections in 2022 and 2023 is the most significant evidence of this.

NED has also enlisted European parliamentarians and think tank members in mobilizing “democratic forces” to open up the “frontline of democratic struggle in the East” (the Philippines, Taiwan, and Hong Kong). NED has long supported anti-China organizations and funded the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), smearing China’s ethnic policies and criticizing its regions; rehabilitation process with inhabit large ethnic minority populations.

In 2021, NED funded local NGO groups in Georgia to organize demonstrations in the capital Tbilisi. It also funded various entities to fabricate false narratives and misleading information in other countries, steering their public opinion to serve US agenda. For example, NED funded the Governance Center for Public Policies (GCPP) in Iraq, which released the National Index for Democratic Transformation reports in Iraq for six consecutive years, purposefully grading Iraq’s democracy index with low scores every time, and categorizing it as a “partial authoritarian transitional” country. The purpose for keeping the scores low is to justify continued US interference in Iraq’s internal affairs and the postponement of its military withdrawal. NED has also funded dozens of organizations in Kosovo, Ukraine, and the Philippines, focusing on researchers, academics, intellectuals, and journalists, and recruiting them to support and serve the American agenda in these countries under the pretext of promoting “democracy and human rights.”

In 2015, the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs issued a statement officially listing NED as an “undesirable organization” and banned its activities within Russian territory. In 2022, Russia’s Assistant Secretary of the Security Council Nail Mukhitov said that NED is mainly able to reach and affect young Russians, attempting to erode their patriotism and downplay the role of Russia in the modern world order.

The US maintains formal relations with governments it labels as dictatorships, and NED operates at a more discrete level to cultivate political forces that could ultimately replace these governments in the future. American administrations believe that NED can play a role in critical areas beyond the reach of official US programs. Thus, the primary goal of this organization is to intervene in the internal affairs of countries and attempt to shape their future in line with US interests.

At best, the United States seeks to reshape governments and peoples according to its own vision through perpetrating wars, societal upheavals, and all forms of ethnic, racial, and national conflicts that it creates to ultimately achieve its goal. This is however an expected outcome of US policies given that the US government had been built on the ruins of a civilization it annihilated. However, what is truly disgraceful is that this regime, the very successor of the killing of millions of Indigenous people, is now on top of what is called the global order, leading and controlling it. This is why the genocide in Gaza is still ongoing, for the US is supporting it militarily and politically.

“Democracy” and “human rights” are blatant pretexts used by NED and other American institutions to intervene in the internal affairs of other countries and impose brutal sanctions. Every country should be free to choose a system that reflects its own culture, components, and aspirations. This is precisely what President Xi Jinping of China advocates; he believes that we are all united in our shared humanity and that we should engage in constructive dialogue that serves the greater good of all, based on mutual respect, equality, and a sincere commitment to advancing humanity.

Eventually, the era of those manipulators will end, and a multipolar world order featuring emerging powers from the East will lead the way. Only then human dignity and the equal right of every person to enjoy a peaceful and respectful life will be ensured.

https://orinocotribune.com/how-the-nati ... interests/

[blindpig]

Breaking News Alerts Keep Public Posted on Trivia and Trump
Xenia Gonikberg and Alefiya Presswala



Much like the front page, breaking-news newsletters demonstrate which stories news outlets think deserve the most attention. It’s important real estate: By pushing these stories to readers, they influence the way we think about the world, even what in the world we should be thinking about. Even if readers don’t click through, just seeing the headlines can shape our perceptions. And, as a new FAIR study has found, those headlines often feed into predictable patterns that parrot official narratives, and prioritize clicks over well-informed citizens.

Outlets like the New York Times promise to send readers alerts about “important news.”

Most major outlets produce a variety of email newsletters for readers, which have increasingly broad reach. Subscription numbers are generally not made public, but the New York Times‘ top newsletter, the Morning, reportedly has over 5 million readers daily, and CNN advertises over 1 million total newsletter subscribers.

To see what kinds of stories outlets present to readers as urgently important, FAIR studied four national outlets that offer unpaywalled breaking news email alerts over the course of two months. We subscribed to alerts from the New York Times, USA Today, CNN and Fox News from April 1 to May 31, 2024, and recorded each alert sent. These outlets advertised that subscribers would receive “24/7 alerts” as the “biggest” and most “important” stories to “stay on top of the news.”

We excluded the occasional roundups of top stories, as these were outside the “breaking news” format. The Times and USA Today periodically offered op-eds as breaking news alerts, and we did include these. FAIR recorded 630 alerts during the study period.

We coded each alert by topic (National Politics, International Politics, Business/Economy, Crime, Entertainment, Sports, Health, Science, Disaster, Personal Advice, Miscellaneous) and subtopic (e.g., Gaza Protests, Abortion Rights, Foreign Aid Bill). Seventy-five alerts were assigned to more than one topic; for instance, a story about the trial of a celebrity might be coded as both Crime and Entertainment.

National politics dominates

Trump’s hush money trial, with its titillating details, was the subject of numerous breaking news alerts (New York Times, 5/7/24).

The outlets put out alerts with varying frequency—USA Today put out the most (224, or almost four per day) and CNN the fewest (83)—but National Politics stories dominated across all outlets, making up 274 (43%) of 630 total alerts. Within these stories, Donald Trump figured prominently, referenced in 121 alerts (44% of all National Politics stories). Eighty-eight of these, or 73% of the total stories about Trump, were about his trials—predominately his criminal trial in Manhattan, which ran through all but the first two weeks of the study period.

The Times, with 207 alerts sent out overall, devoted the highest percentage of its National Politics alerts (79) to Trump’s legal woes (39%), while Fox, with 116 alerts sent out, afforded them 17 articles of 63 National Politics stories—the smallest percentage of the four outlets (27%). Twice—the day Stormy Daniels testified (5/7/24) and the day the jury announced its guilty verdict (5/30/24)—the Times sent three trial-related alerts to its subscribers over the course of the day.

President Joe Biden received far less attention in National Politics stories; he was referenced in 35, or 13% of them. Fifteen of these stories were about the election, of which only two (USA Today, 5/28/24; Fox News, 5/1/24) did not also mention Trump.

Gaza, at home and abroad
After the Trump trials, the top National Politics topics included the university campus protests for Gaza (41), abortion rights (16) and the foreign aid bill (6). (We coded stories about abortion into the Health category as well.)

Twenty-six (61%) of the 41 alerts about campus Gaza protests came from Fox News, accounting for 22% of all Fox alerts across categories, making it the outlet’s single most frequent alert topic. On seven days between April 17 and May 3, Fox sent multiple alerts about the protests; its fixation peaked on April 30, when the network sent five such alerts in a single day.

Fox’s encampment alert subject lines consistently referred to protesters as “agitators,” calling them “anti-Israel” and even “antisemitic” (4/30/24). (The New York Times called them “pro-Palestinian protests,” and USA Today simply referred to them as “protests.”) “Columbia University, Anti-Israel Agitators Fail to Reach Agreement as Unrest Continues” read a typical Fox subject line (4/29/24). “Facilities Worker Says Anti-Israel Columbia University Agitators ‘Held Me Hostage’” read another the next day (4/30/24).

The only Fox News alert (4/26/24) for an international issue other than Gaza was about King Charles’ health.

There were many other Gaza protests occurring around the country during the study period (Democracy Now!, 4/18/24, 4/24/24, 5/22/24, 5/30/24, 5/31/24), yet only one alert (Fox News, 4/9/24) mentioned any besides those on college campuses.

The second-most prevalent news category was International Politics, which had 97 alerts (15% of all). Sixty-three of these (65%) pertained to the ongoing Gaza crisis (not including the campus Gaza protests, which were coded as National Politics). Iran was sometimes mentioned in Gaza-related alerts, but it was also featured in eight unrelated alerts (8%) concerning the helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Other recurring topics included Ukraine and the Ukraine War (6%), the shooting of the Slovakian president (5%), British elections (3%), China (3%) and Julian Assange (2%).

Curiously, while Fox advertises its breaking news alerts as keeping subscribers “in the know on the most important moments around the world,” it only produced seven alerts on international issues—six of them on the Gaza crisis. (The other article discussed King Charles’ return to royal duties after his cancer diagnosis.) That’s just one more alert on Gaza during the entire study period than Fox put out on its peak day of breaking news coverage of the encampments. At the other three outlets, International Politics stories were the second most frequent alerts.

Climate crisis not breaking news

This CNN story (5/7/24) about climate change breaking heat records was not deemed urgent enough to qualify as breaking news.

It’s impossible to argue that the climate crisis isn’t an ongoing urgent news story. Yet the Science/Environment category had the fewest number of alerts, at 24, making up just 4% of alerts tracked. And only seven (1%) of the subject lines that appeared in our inbox referred or even alluded to climate-related topics.

During the study period, there were multiple major climate crisis stories that CNN, USA Today and the Times (but not Fox) reporters covered—but, for the most part, the outlets chose not to include these stories in their breaking news alerts.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that a right-wing outlet like Fox put out no alerts about climate change; its lone science story (4/8/24) was about the April solar eclipse. But CNN and the New York Times did only marginally better. CNN sent alerts for two Science stories, only one of which (4/15/24) was about the climate crisis: “Ocean Heat Is Driving a Global Coral Bleaching Event, and It Could Be the Worst on Record.”

At the same time, CNN‘s website reported on extreme ocean temperatures causing mass marine mortalities (CNN, 4/21/24), extreme heat causing health emergencies (CNN, 4/18/24) and April’s record-breaking heat (CNN, 5/7/24), among other climate change–related topics. On the days that these stories were published, however, CNN only sent out National Politics alerts, or simply no alerts at all.

One of the eight Science stories that the Times pushed was directly about the climate crisis, a story (5/13/24) about federal regulations impacting renewable energy (which we also coded as National Politics). Another Science article (7/3/24) that was not primarily about the climate crisis did mention its role in increasing turbulence experienced on airplane flights.

The Times does offer a paywalled newsletter for stories about climate, called Climate Forward. But they also have a free newsletter called On Politics, offering election-related news alerts—and that didn’t stop them from promoting eight articles directly related to the 2024 presidential election as breaking news.

In its online and print editions, the Times reported plenty of stories related to the climate crisis—but, as at CNN, they simply didn’t deem them important enough to send as breaking news alerts. On April 10, the Times published a story about ocean heat shattering records, and on April 15 it covered the coral bleaching event. Neither were sent as alerts.

The New York Times found mattress reviews more urgent than climate change.

On May 28, the Times published a piece headlined “Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year”; that story wasn’t deemed “important news” that day by the Times’ breaking news alert team, but the “Best Mattresses of 2024” was.

All the outlets studied also failed to send out stories about major flooding disasters in Brazil, Afghanistan and Indonesia (Democracy Now!, 5/13/24, 5/14/24), or about the major heat waves in South Asia that killed hundreds of people (Democracy Now!, 5/28/24; CBS News, 5/15/24). All of these crises are major examples of how climate change is affecting people around the world in drastic ways.

USA Today did best on climate, sending out 13 alerts under the Science/Environment category; four of them discussed climate change, including topics such as carbon emissions and pollution. That’s still less than 2% of the paper’s alerts during the two-month period.

Corporate outlets have long been more than willing to leave climate change out of their stories about weather phenomenons and natural disasters around the world (FAIR.org, 9/20/18, 7/18/23, 6/28/24).

According to data published by the Pew Research Center in August 2023, 54% of Americans view climate change as a major threat. According to data collected by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication up until the fall of 2023, 64% of the nation is worried about global warming, 58% believe global warming is already harming people in the US, and 70% think that global warming will harm future generations.

If more than half of the public views global warming and climate change as an urgent issue, why do these major publications not treat it as one?

Crime, entertainment over economy

]
Many Crime alerts involved celebrities, like one for this Fox News story (4/15/24) about Alec Baldwin.

Although news media frequently report that the economy is “voters’ top concern,” leading into the 2024 election FAIR identified only 40 news alerts as belonging to the Business/Economy beat—6% of all.

Fox and CNN suggested to alert subscribers that Crime stories were more than twice as important, making up 21% of Fox‘s alerts and 19% of CNN‘s. (USA Today and the Times only devoted 7% and 4% of their alerts to crime, respectively.) The violent crime rate has actually gone down 26% (and the property crime rate 19%) since President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, according to the New York Times (7/24/24), but media (including the Times) still focus heavily on the topic (FAIR.org, 7/25/24).

Mass shootings made up 21% of Crime alerts (13) across all outlets, which is not surprising, considering there have already been 348 mass shootings in 2024.

Celebrity crimes made up a large portion of Crime alerts across all outlets, at 25 (40%) out of 62. Many of these stories were about Alec Baldwin (5), OJ Simpson (5) and Scottie Scheffler (5).

Fox’s Crime alerts featured headlines meant to catch a reader’s attention—but not provide a lot of information. Take the May 17 news alert from Fox, “Pelosi Hammer Attacker Learns Fate During Sentencing,” for example. Why not include what the sentence was—30 years in prison—in the alert itself?

On April 15, when three out of four alerts sent out by Fox were about Crime (the fourth was a story about Trump’s hush money trial, coded as National Politics), one was headlined “Search for Kansas Women Takes a Turn as Spokeswoman for Investigators Gives Update.” The “turn” was an announcement that officials had given up hope of finding the missing women alive.

For its part, the New York Times gave its readers more Entertainment alerts (18) than Economy alerts (14), pushing out 46% of all Entertainment stories tracked in the study. The paper also put out the highest number of Personal Advice (81% of all) and Miscellaneous stories (72%). The Times and USA Today were the only outlets to send out Personal Advice stories as breaking news alerts, such as “The Six Best White Sneakers” (New York Times, 5/15/24) and “Being a Bridesmaid Can Be Expensive. Should You Say Yes or No?” (USA Today, 5/5/24).

A few New York Times Personal Advice stories (5/15/24, 5/28/24, 5/30/24) were from Wirecutter, the product-review website the Times bought in 2016. The website states at the top of each article that “when you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.” (This process is explained in a bit more depth here.) In the Times’ annual report, revenue made from Wirecutter commissions is listed as part of “Other Businesses,” a category that made the Times $265 million in 2023. These Wirecutter stories are not urgent news stories—but they do help the Times make a profit off its readers (FAIR.org, 6/17/21).

Questionable urgency

Stop the presses! The New York Times (4/22/24) reports that some songs on Taylor Swift’s latest album “sounded a whole lot like others she has already put out.”

The New York Times and USA Today sometimes considered op-eds newsy enough to dedicate an entire alert to, in addition to their regular “breaking news.” An op-ed about Gmail’s 20th anniversary warranted an alert, just like the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did. An op-ed on the dangers of sexual choking got the same weight as the news of the ICC preparing arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders. And in both instances, alerts were pushed on the same day within hours of each other.

The Times also published the most Health stories (21) about seemingly random (rather than breaking news) topics, such as whether oats and apple cider vinegar can really help you lose weight, why we age and tips for a better sex life. (Many of these Health stories were dually coded into Personal Advice.) These types of stories may have surprised readers who subscribed in order to, as the Times advertises, “get informed as important news breaks around the world.”

Times alerts of questionable urgency were often sent out with no apparent rhyme or reason, in the midst of other, more obviously newsworthy alerts. For example, on April 24, the Times sent out alerts about abortion laws in Arizona and Idaho, and the US secretly sending long-range missiles to Ukraine—along with a story headlined “Has Taylor Swift Fatigue Finally Set In?”

The next day, April 25, the Times pushed a story called “‘Eldest Daughter Syndrome’ and the Science of Birth Order” at 8:37 am, and then another email listed as “The U.S. economy grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter, a sharply slower pace than late last year.” just six minutes later. The article about “eldest daughter syndrome” was actually published by the Times ten days earlier, making it clear that it wasn’t exactly “breaking” news.

Many of the Times’ stories we coded as “Miscellaneous” had obvious clickbait headlines, like “A Hiker Was Lost in the Woods. Snow Was Falling. Time Was Running Out” (4/30/24) and “These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement” (5/8/24). The latter was linked to the New York Times Magazine, the Times‘ weekly Sunday magazine that highlights interviews, commentaries, features and longer-length articles—again, not urgent news.

On May 27, when over 2,000 people died in Papua New Guinea, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the tent massacre in Rafah, the Times thought it reasonable to also send alerts about Manhattanhenge, nude modeling and a celebrity obituary that linked to its recently-acquired sports news site, the Athletic. As we’ve seen before (FAIR.org, 6/7/24), the Times enjoys focusing on trending and glamorous topics.

These media outlets offer newsletters that promise comprehensive news alerts about important breaking stories occurring everywhere. After tallying the topics covered, we can confidently state that that’s not what subscribers are getting.

https://fair.org/home/breaking-news-ale ... and-trump/

[blindpig]

Defence correspondents
Originally published: Declassified UK on August 19, 2024 by Des Freedman (more by Declassified UK) | (Posted Aug 29, 2024)

An analysis of broadcasters’ online coverage of defence spending and strategy since Keir Starmer won the election shows that reporting is virtually 100% in line with the government’s own priorities.

Critical voices, where they are included, are entirely from the right.

All 20 articles posted under ‘defence’ since 4 July–14 from Sky, 5 from theBBC and 1 from ITV–faithfully reproduce the government’s agenda.

These include its proposals for a defence review, its promise to increase military spending to 2.5% of GDP, its commitment to Ukraine and NATO (described on the BBC by foreign secretary David Lammy as ‘part of Britain’s DNA’).

Its notion that there is a need to restore confidence in the military in order to face up to “rapidly increasing global threats” (as Sky quoted defence secretary John Healey) also features.

The only critical voices that appear are Conservative shadow ministers, hawkish think tank spokespeople and military ‘experts’, all speaking about how vital it is to boost defence spending, which currently stands at £64.6bn a year (2.32% of GDP).

Such spending is apparently necessary to confront what the army’s chief Sir Roland Walker has described as an “axis of upheaval” composed of Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Sky quoted Walker without comment on 23 July as saying that “there was an ‘urgent need’ for the British Army to rebuild its ability to deter future wars with credible fighting power”.

Churnalism
Much of the coverage feels like a press release from the Ministry of Defence, which is hardly surprising given that MoD statements are liberally incorporated–without challenge–into news reports.

For example, ITV News’ report of 16 July on Labour’s “root and branch” review of defence draws heavily on the MoD’s release earlier that day. Its only deviation from government spin is that it also quotes the shadow armed forces minister Andrew Bowie saying that “the country didn’t need another review, and instead ‘we just need to get on and spend more money on defence’.”

Both the BBC and Sky ran lengthy, gushing reports on the speeches given by the defence secretary and General Walker at the Royal United Services Institute’s ‘Land Warfare’ conference on 22/23 July, unambiguously pushing the line that increasing defence spending was crucial to securing peace.

None of these pieces featured comments about the huge political and economic risks of increasing defence spending and a possible acceleration, not reduction, of instability.

Guns not butter
This isn’t just a matter of excluding voices from the left arguing for a completely different set of priorities. There isn’t even room for mainstream economists like Paul Johnson from the Institute for Fiscal Studies, criticising the way recent governments have presented the proposed hike and making the obvious, if important, point that “[m]ore money for defence means less for everything else”.

Remember that public service broadcasters are required to respect “due impartiality”. This involves, as the BBC’s editorial guidelines put it, “ensuring that the existence of a range of views is appropriately reflected”.

True, this is formally applicable only to their broadcast coverage but when was the last time you heard someone on TV challenge the idea that we need to spend more on defence when our schools, hospitals and mental health services are suffering?

Instead, security minister Dan Jarvis went totally unchallenged on GMTV on 11 July selling Labour’s defence review and further insisting that it is “absolutely fundamental that we stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies in NATO to support Ukraine”.

The BBC’s political editor Chris Mason quizzed Starmer on the BBC’s main bulletin later that day not on the wider issues around defence spending but simply whether his promise to increase funds was “ironclad” or not.

His defence secretary appeared on ITV’s News at Ten at the same time, where he agreed with a question that “the world is in the most dangerous place it has been since before 1945”. Healey made clear the problem is Russia, and the only solution is to spend more money on defence.

‘Pre-war world’
The tone of recent coverage is, however, entirely in line with what has gone on before where news broadcasters have acted more as cheerleaders of the UK government’s strategic defence priorities than impartial journalists.

For example, following a widely reported speech in January by then defence secretary Grant Shapps, committing the UK to spending 2.5% of GDP on defence, Sky News launched a series called “Prepared for War?” in April.

This examined whether the UK was ready for the “possibility of armed conflict” and was based on interviews with defence specialists, former military officers and academics, all of whom were singing to the same pro-war hymn sheet.

It reported on the emergence of a “national defence plan” to deal with “mounting concerns about Russia, China and Iran” and uncritically embraced the idea that we are now in a “pre-war world”.

This has all the trappings of a drive to war.

Seduced
Broadcasters’ favourite defence-related stories appear to be ones where they can show dazzling images of the latest military hardware.

As Richard Norton-Taylor, former defence correspondent for the Guardianand now contributor to Declassified UK, has noted: “The MoD knows how to seduce journalists, especially those writing for specialist defence publications–often used as primary sources by mainstream journalists–by showing off new weapons.”

So in January, Sky News ran a puff piece on a new laser system, DragonFire, developed by the MoD to the tune of around £100m, that spoke of its “pinpoint accuracy” taken straight from the MoD’s own press release.

They followed this up with a further story in April with the reporter’s enthusiasm for the deadly technology that “could be used in Ukraine to shoot down Russian drones” shining through.

There was no attempt to scrutinise the cost and effectiveness of the technology nor even a reference to the potential impact of British hardware being used to attack Russian equipment (just as there is still very little debate on why British weapons are still being sold to an Israeli army carrying out a genocide).

Crossways
It’s not as if there aren’t defence-related stories to tell that provide a very different perspective from the usual gung-ho view of military hardware and uniformly positive accounts of the need to spend more on defence.

For example, back in 2017, the Mail on Sunday–in a very rare piece of critical reporting–revealed the existence of Operation Crossways, a secret deployment of up to 50 British soldiers to train Saudi troops in what even the Mail called Saudi’s “dirty war” on Yemen.

Seven years later, on 13 February 2024, the Mirror followed up this story (in an article which has strangely disappeared from its website) by reporting that Crossways was now providing the Saudis with 24-hour ground-to-air cover against Houthi forces attacking shipping in the Red Sea in solidarity with Palestinians.

While noting that this was a “highly sensitive” mission, it nevertheless quoted a “senior military source” making the highly contentious claim that this was necessary to “reduce the chance of the war escalating further across the Middle East”.

The Daily Express ran a very similar story the same day though, just as curiously, while its Facebook post is still up, the story itself is no longer available.

On 26 February, in response to Parliamentary questions tabled by Alba MP Kenny MacAskill, the government confirmed the continuing operation of Crossways but stressed that it was “defensive in nature and deployed to help Saudi Arabia defend itself from aerial threats to her territorial integrity”.

Yet, to the best of my knowledge, no British TV news channel has reported on Operation Crossways.

Despite their statutory responsibility to inform the public, broadcasters have failed to highlight the fact that British troops are operating secretly in the Middle East and are protecting the Saudis’ disastrous war on Yemen which, according to the BBC, has resulted in over 377,000 deaths (although this story obviously makes no mention of UK military involvement).

Deference
On the other hand, Sky News–as part of its “Prepared for War?” series–did run a lengthy piece in May about the vulnerability of the UK’s air defence systems following “decades of cost-savings cuts”.

As usual, only military personnel, the MoD and the on-message think tank, the Royal United Services Institute, were quoted. The piece reads like a funding bid to the government to shore up spending on air defence without any commentary expressing a different view.

This includes omitting what you might think is a relevant fact: the British army has enough air-defence systems to deploy some as far away as Saudi Arabia.

As always, an uncritical embrace of the UK’s strategic geopolitical interests comes before any commitment to transparency and even to exploring the claim that increasing military spending might not be the best way of de-escalating rising tensions across the globe.

How do we account for this deference on the part of defence correspondents?

Declassified UK has run several stories examining this question and revealing the preferential treatment of favoured journalists, sanctions against those who ask tough questions, the close contacts between correspondents and defence and security-related officials and indeed the existence of a revolving door between journalism and military PR.

When it comes to reporting on defence and security, ‘[d]eference, as much as secrecy, remains the English disease’, notes Norton-Taylor.

Indeed, all too often, it’s not a specific strategy so much as ideological congruence between the defence establishment and defence journalists about what is understood to be protecting the “national interest”.

That means that while the UK ramps up its support for Ukraine and continues to stand by Israel in defending it from possible attacks from Iran, British broadcast journalists are operating effectively as part of a coordinated effort to boost defence spending.

Their silence on stories such as the training of Israeli troops inside the UK or the number of UK military flights from Cyprus to Israel is just as troubling as their more visible and uncritical amplification of successive UK governments’ defence priorities.

This isn’t journalism but public relations.

https://mronline.org/2024/08/29/defence-correspondents/

[blindpig]

Deaths at sea: Mass media mourns the rich, ignores the poor
September 1, 2024

The sinking of a super-yacht gets mass coverage, while thousands of refugees drown in darkness


Since 2014, 20,000 migrants and refugees have drowned attempting to cross the Mediterranean. None received a fraction of the coverage devoted to Mike Lynch’s superyacht.

NOT ALL DEATHS AT SEA ARE TREATED EQUALLY

by Dave Kellaway
Anti*Capitalist Resistance, August 28, 2024

Over the past week the tragic sinking of tech magnate Mike Lynch’s yacht has been front page news in the papers and on TV every day. By now, we all know about the lives and backgrounds of all the passengers. We know for instance that the youngest person lost, Lynch’s daughter, was all set to go to Oxford and that Lynch was ready to play a similar tech advisory role with the Starmer government, as he did with Sunak. His lawyer, who successfully won the case against Hewlett Packard, died. Jonathan Bloomer, the international boss of Morgan Stanley, was also lost. These were people who moved at the highest level of capitalist society and had the ears of government ministers.

Mass media attention

The actual sinking has been endlessly replayed in video clips. There have been detailed graphics explaining the dynamics of the accident. The inside pages of the press have been filled with special dossiers about the tragedy. Experts have been brought in to talk in detail about the design of the vessel and the quality of the captaincy in those vital minutes before it sank. The tens of millions of pounds invested in the yacht have been tabulated for us. Both the Italian and the British authorities mobilized its specialized services to help out straightaway. British diplomats dashed to the scene.

There are likely to be court cases about the causes of the sinking and whether the ship’s captain could have done things differently. It appears an adjacent yacht, albeit a lot smaller, survived the waterspout without any major difficulty. Given the assets represented by the yacht and the wealth of the people who have died there will be legal processes involving the insurance companies too for months if not years to come.

Now let us think not about the horrible consequences for the seven people who were tragically lost in the Bayesian but the 66 people, including 26 women and children, who drowned not that far from there just weeks before. Most people would not even know that had happened since it received such scant coverage in the press. Since 2014, it has been calculated that 20,000 migrants and asylum seekers have been drowned in the Mediterranean trying to get to a safe country or to find the same sort of life and security that we all enjoy.

Refugee deaths

We do not know the names of most of these drowned people. Some lists are kept by refugee agencies and charities but are mostly ignored by the mass media. Even these agencies have to end up registering many as unknown. In Lampedusa and other places, the bodies that are washed up are laid in many unmarked graves. We know these drowned people had exactly the same drive and motivation as Lynch’s daughter to work for a better life and to fulfil their dreams. We have to rely on a few survivors’ accounts that do make the mass media, or fictionalized accounts like the film Il Capitano, to get some sense of their story.

There will be no teams of lawyers or insurers haggling over the net worth of individuals or establishing the causes of their deaths. No compensation will be made to them or their families. Instead, they will be treated as “illegals” for exercising their asylum rights as established under international law or the right of movement for their labor – as exists for the capital that Mike Lynch moved around the world without restriction. Their fate will be ascribed to the villainous people smugglers who “manipulate” these ingenuous people. Very few people will publicize the fact that the small boats trade exists primarily because governments like Britain’s refuse to provide safe and legal routes for asylum and spend huge amounts of resources on border security.

Instead of governments rushing all its high tech and specialist resources to the scenes of small boat sinkings, we have the evidence of Greek or Italian coastguards actively trying to avoid taking emergency action. They spend more time trying to argue that the tragedies do not fall within their jurisdictions rather than actually doing their job and saving lives.

Government complicity

Just this week Yvette Cooper, the Labour Home Secretary has stepped up deportations and increased the numbers in detention centers. People are drowning in the English Channel while the British and French authorities conveniently blame each other. It seems that the military technology they use in war cannot be put at the service of preventing any drowning at all in a relatively small sea.

Here in Italy, this week there has been a big controversy on whether immigrants’ children born or brought up in Italy should have the automatic right of citizenship as is the case in many countries. One of the hard right government coalition parties, Forza Italia, (Berlusconi founded party) has broken ranks, and its leader Tajani has indicated it supports such a minimal progressive measure. Salvini, the racist leader of the Lega, a coalition partner, is particularly incensed by Tajani’s new line. Salvini’s new best friend, Vannacci a reactionary ex-general headed up the Lega slate for the last Euro elections.

He has been busy questioning how “Italian,” Egonu, the star player of the Italian women’s volley ball team that won gold in Paris, really is. Paola Egonu happens to be black, she was born in Italy, of Nigerian parents. A few days ago yet another migrant worker died from the heat in the fields of the agribusiness area of Latina. He is the second in three months to die.

Of course, we do not crudely counter pose the tragic deaths of Lynch and his friends with the thousands of migrants. All such unnecessary deaths, whether through freak weather conditions caused by global warning and human error or facilitated by European countries’ migration policies, should be mourned. Some idiots on social media, supposedly proclaiming their leftist credentials, have tried to revel in the deaths of these “representatives of the bourgeoisie.” There have been tasteless jokes and attempts to erect conspiracy theories. Socialists should reject such anti-humanist and childish rubbish.

Our focus is on how the mass media interprets and portrays these two sets of events. We want the mass media to report the tragedy of the migrants drowning from the small boats in the same intensity and detail as it covered the Bayesian sinking. We want an honest analysis of what causes the small boat phenomenon and policies discussed and proposed that could stop the drownings within weeks.

We want deaths at sea to be treated equally.

https://climateandcapitalism.com/2024/0 ... -the-poor/

[blindpig]

Project Strawberry
Colonelcassad
September 3, 13:07



Project Strawberry

Insiders reported that OpenAI showed its new project, known as Project Strawberry, to National Security Agency officials in the summer of 2024. Apparently, this happened after four-star general Paul Nakasone, former NSA director and former commander of US Cyber ​​Command, joined the OpenAI board of directors in June ( https://openai.com/index/openai-appoint ... y-general/

). [The emergence of the NSA as the Pentagon agency responsible for cyber intelligence, cyber security, and cyber attacks is quite obvious. That US Cyber ​​Command carried out cyber attacks in support of Ukraine ( https://thehill.com/policy/cybersecurit ... perations/ ) even before the NSO began was openly told by Nakasone to Sky News in January 2022; Nakasone left the service on February 1, and already on February 14, in an article in The Washington Post, he demanded that FISA, the law that allows electronic surveillance of Americans without a court order "to combat foreign intelligence services" (the law passed after 9/11 was extended in April 2024), should not be abandoned under any circumstances].

The Information's sources reported that the AI-powered chatbot Strawberry (which previously had the notable name Q*) will be released in the fall. Unlike previous AIs, it can solve mathematical problems that it has not encountered before, as well as teach itself programming and solve logic problems such as NYT Connections ( https://www.nytimes.com/games/connections ), where you need to think about the meaning of words in order to arrange them into fours (try it yourself).

Strawberry's main task will be to train a more promising project: the Orion large language model (LLM) . Orion is supposed to be a step towards OpenAI's Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or even the world's first AGI, which in theory should be able to learn anything, start "behaving" and acquire something like a personality. Strawberry's role is to produce synthetic data, model situations, statements, problems that will allow Orion to learn orders of magnitude faster than from real-life examples.

And the development of these systems will be (among others) carefully guided by the Pentagon's "cybersecurity expert" General Nakasone . Who has directed cyberattacks against at least 47 countries for a decade ( https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202203/ ... html?id=11 ). Who is a strong supporter of covert surveillance of everything that moves, "just in case it's a spy." And which, I am absolutely sure, wants and will use powerful and continuously self-learning artificial intelligence to conduct combat operations in the cyber sphere. The priority target, I believe, is China.

https://t.me/latamguerras/3054 - zinc

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9360187.html

Google Translator

[blindpig]

Meta’s role in Israel’s digital proxy war on The Cradle

The banning of The Cradle from Facebook and Instagram shows a troubling alliance with Israeli-linked groups to silence voices critical of the occupation state, especially those media outlets covering its adversaries’ narratives.


Kit Klarenberg

SEP 3, 2024


(Photo Credit: The Cradle)

On 16 August, social media giant Meta permanently banned The Cradle from Facebook and Instagram. The outlet’s accounts on those platforms, which had amassed over a hundred thousand followers and millions of views, were unilaterally purged without warning or a chance to appeal.

Permabanned

The officially-stated grounds were purported violations of community guidelines for “praising terrorist organizations” through its reporting on the activities of West Asia’s resistance movements. Meta summarily informed The Cradle:

No one can see or find your account, and you can’t use it. All your information will be permanently deleted. You cannot request another review of this decision.

However, there are grounds to believe this crackdown was not merely a matter of community standards enforcement. Evidence suggests that Israeli intelligence-connected entities played a significant role in Meta’s decision to ban The Cradle, a dissenting, anti-Zionist news outlet reporting on the region, from the region.

This act of censorship will unlikely be the last against those who dare to expose the brutal realities of the war on Gaza and cover those resisting it.

There appears to be a disturbing alliance between Meta’s leadership and powerful Zionist organizations that identify targets for censorship, while Meta executives comply without question. Speaking to The Cradle, independent tech industry researcher Jack Poulson says:

Meta banning a news source such as The Cradle that is critical of Israel is less surprising when you consider their history. Beyond Meta’s head of Israel policy, Jordana Cutler, being a former chief of staff of Israel’s Minister of Strategic Affairs, and nearly his director general. Israeli government propaganda offshoot CyberWell is also a ‘trusted partner’ to Meta. In July, the organization helped influence Meta’s policy on criticism of Zionism.

Israeli involvement

In June, Poulson, alongside journalist Lee Fang, exposed CyberWell's part in a broader Israeli government effort, known as Voices of Israel, to shape and disseminate pro-Zionist narratives across the west.

Despite CyberWell’s denials of government funding or ties, the organization swiftly removed references to its founders, staff, and advisors from its website following these revelations.

Archival evidence reveals that many members of the non-profit’s “dynamic team” of “academics, retired generals, intelligence alumni, and innovative tech professionals” have deep ties to Israeli intelligence and military forces, such as US founder Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor, a former occupation soldier and intelligence professional.

Montemayor emigrated to Tel Aviv as a teenager, volunteering to serve in the occupation army as a “lone soldier.” She then entered the intelligence sphere via Israeli private intelligence firm Argyle Consulting.

There, Montemayor served under Zohar Gorgel, “a decorated IDF intelligence officer with over a decade of experience in various cyber and technology roles.” Together, “encouraged by colleagues and mentors,” they launched a project to “improve community standards” online. In other words, to neutralize Palestinian solidarity and condemnation of the Zionist entity.

Given the profusion of “former” occupation spooks and high-ranking military veterans in CyberWell’s ranks, one wonders whether the non-profit’s launch was pushed by malign elements within the Israeli government.

‘Call to action’

This suspicion is amply reinforced by the February 2021 report by Tel Aviv’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, The Hate Factor. It outlined several strategies for “combating antisemitism online,” including the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to identify and ban social media users from posting content critical of the occupation state.

Mere months later, CyberWell was founded, under the title Global Antisemitism Research Center, touting AI as its pièce de résistance. Instantly, the obscure non-profit began receiving sizable donations from well-connected Zionist lobby organizations.

CyberWell also quickly entered into high-level agreements with Israeli government-funded and directed influence operations, such as the notorious, now-defunct trolling and harassment unit Act-IL, which was run out of Tel Aviv’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

For years, the hasbara outfit covertly encouraged Zionist activists to target boycotts and boycotters, justify the oppression and slaughter of Palestinians, and bully human rights groups and solidarity activists online. The effort shuttered without warning in 2022.

That same year, CyberWell’s annual report noted that it had “served as the data provider to Act-IL’s community for their end-of-year call to action on the state of online antisemitism.” This may provide some explanation for Act-IL’s closure.

Today, criticizing Zionists on Facebook and Instagram can result in permanent bans, a policy change reportedly enacted under pressure from CyberWell and other Zionist lobby groups. CyberWell is not only a “trusted partner” of Meta but also of TikTok and X, exerting influence to suppress content critical of Zionism across multiple platforms.

CyberWell already appears to have used its influence to compel TikTok to adopt similar guidelines on content related to Zionism as Meta. And there is no indication that the organization intends to stop there.

It has submitted formal guidance to Meta on censoring the Palestine solidarity phrase, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – which Zionists falsely claim is a clarion call for the genocide of Jews – while publishing reports on purported “antisemitic disinformation” circulated during western election campaigns.

Given this context, it is almost certain that CyberWell had a hand in The Cradle’s abrupt removal from Meta’s platforms. Within hours, The Cradle’s accounts were banned, even those not directly linked or associated with any violations. Even a backup Instagram account, which hadn’t violated any of the platform’s guidelines, was taken down for being associated with the main account.

It appears that Meta was intent on erasing any trace of The Cradle from its social media universe, much to the likely satisfaction of officials in Tel Aviv.

‘Shadow banning’

Nonetheless, it must not be forgotten that Meta has a long and deplorable track record of systemic censorship of content related to Palestine. This suppression has only intensified since the Gaza genocide began.

A December 2023 Human Rights Watch (HRW) report exposed how, over the past two months, Facebook had engaged in “over 1,050 takedowns and other suppression of content” on Facebook and Instagram “posted by Palestinians and their supporters, including about human rights abuses.”

Of this total, 1,049 “involved peaceful content in support of Palestine that was censored or otherwise unduly suppressed.” The documented cases included “content originating from over 60 countries around the world, primarily in English, all of peaceful support of Palestine, expressed in diverse ways.” Meanwhile, HRW “identified six key patterns of undue censorship.” This included:

Removal of posts, stories, and comments; suspension or permanent disabling of accounts; restrictions on the ability to engage with content­; restrictions on the ability to follow or tag other accounts; restrictions on the use of certain features, such as Instagram/Facebook Live, monetization; and “shadow banning,” the significant decrease in the visibility of an individual’s posts, stories, or account, without notification, due to a reduction in the distribution or reach of content or disabling of searches for accounts.

Elsewhere, digital rights group Access Now has documented how content damaging to the occupation state has been censored under Meta policies unrelated to “disinformation” or “antisemitism” or informed by organizations like CyberWell.

For example, following the bombing of Gaza’s Al-Ahli Arab Hospital on 17 October 2023, which killed 471 Palestinians and left another 342 injured, Facebook and Instagram removed content documenting the explosion and showing bodies of casualties under Meta’s policy on adult nudity and sexual activity.

The Cradle’s coverage presses on

The ease with which Zionist organizations like CyberWell have been able to infiltrate and pressure Meta and the platform’s omerta on the genocide of Palestinians could be attributable to several Israeli military and intelligence veterans occupying high ranks within the company.

For instance, Guy Rosen, formerly of the occupation army’s shady spying and disinformation specialist Unit 8200, has been the company’s Chief Information Security Officer since 2022. He is also co-founder of Meta-owned Israeli tech company Onavo.

The Cradle will continue to expose the Gaza genocide and factually report on events in West Asia, including the region’s Resistance Axis, despite Meta’s ban from Facebook and Instagram.

Meta’s continuous and escalating censorship by Meta may well contribute to its declining user base and crashing stock market value. As more voices are silenced, the platform’s days, much like those of the Zionist narrative it so eagerly supports, may be numbered.

https://thecradle.co/articles/metas-rol ... the-cradle

******

Patrick Lawrence: The Sound of Enforced Silence
September 3, 2024

Our censors, as the record shows again and again, have no special concern about acting in a serious manner. Power has no such obligation.


Balloons fall after Vice President Kamala Harris’ speech at the Democratic National Convention. (Chris Bentley, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost

Is there some connection — not quite official but it may as well be — between censorship and presidential politics?

I pose the question as a survivor of the Russiagate years, when illiberal liberals started talking about “free-speech absolutists,” and when corporate journalists cheered the censoring of unincorporated journalists so long as it was called “content moderation.”

I cannot answer my own question, honestly. But as this November’s elections draw near, a new and aggressive campaign to suppress dissent — in social media, at airports, on campuses, and elsewhere — is hard upon us. This is a trans–Atlantic, trans-national operation. Let us not fail to take note.

Straight off the top, you probably noticed that the Democratic Party’s openly undemocratic elite refused to allow any speaker of Palestinian background to address the convention in Chicago. We can read this, disgraceful in itself, as an indication of how the Democrats intend to deal with the Gaza crisis and other such foreign policy matters if they succeed in extending their power another four years.

Yes, they will continue supporting terrorist Israel and the Nazi-infested regime in Ukraine just as they have to date, but they will avoid talking to you and me about the imperium’s gruesome business as they conduct it.

Silence on such matters will be as gold to these people, especially between now and Nov. 5. Kamala Harris, or the cynical operatives busily inventing Kamala Harris, are selling “joy” this political season, not any kind of sober, responsible view of our circumstances.

Harris is supposed to ride into the White House on a carpet of good vibes. Gaza, the war in Ukraine, Washington’s provocations at the other end of the Pacific: Nah: All such questions are bad vibes.

One of the things the Russiagate years exposed was the close collaboration between the Democratic Party and the national-security state. People who know their history have long understood that “the intelligence community” — so odious, this term — has been, from its beginnings in the late–1940s, more liberal than conservative in its culture and sensibilities.

Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing defeat in 2016 consolidated this relationship. It is now hard to tell where the Democratic Party ends and the national-security state begins.

I have been, since the Russiagate years, perfectly comfortable with the term “Deep State.” And here it comes again, reliant as always upon its appendages in the Big Tech social media platforms and the more repellant quadrants of corporate media as they attempt to extinguish all other-than-approved opinions and perspectives.

Meta Bans The Cradle


Facebook logo. (Anthony Quintano, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

Of the many recent incidents of censorship, suppression and intimidation, the one that got me to the keyboard concerns Sharmine Narwani, who founded, three years ago this month, an online journal of news and comment called The Cradle, as in “the cradle of civilization.”

Narwani, based in Beirut, now writes columns regularly and edits features for the English-language version of the site. She calls The Cradle a collective effort, “an online magazine covering the geopolitics of West Asia from within the region.” Those last four words are the ones that matter most to me.

On the first day of the Democratic National Convention, indeed — Meta permanently banned The Cradle from Facebook and Instagram, the holding company’s most trafficked social media properties. Narwani now stands accused of “praising terrorist organizations” and engaging in “incitement to violence.” This ruling came without warning.

All Narwani got was this:

“Your account, or activity on it, does not follow our community guidelines. No one can see or find your account and you can’t use it. All your information will be permanently deleted. You cannot request a review of this decision.”

How’s this for the sound of liberal authoritarianism? Big Brother could not have got down the poetry of fascistic finality any better.

Narwani, who earned a master’s degree at Columbia University in international affairs before joining the Great Craft, writes forthrightly and without regard for however much her reporting may shock the comfortably misinformed.

Hers is not the stuff of beach reading, which is where its strength lies. Narwani’s investigations at the height of the C.I.A.’s covert operation in Syria were especially distinguished but proved simply too honest for Western media — The New York Times, The Guardian, Salon and so on — to continue taking.

When HuffPost stopped accepting her work, it scrubbed her entire archive.

I published a long, two-part interview with Narwani in 2019, shortly before she seems to have concluded, very wisely, that there is no getting truthful reporting of her kind into a mainstream media scene wholly given over to the imperium’s propaganda machine.

It was Narwani who first taught me that “the Middle East” is better understood as “West Asia.” I saw in The Cradle’s pages, in other words, the true power of perspective when it is decentered — or, better put, properly recentered.

Losing alternative perspectives is precisely what is at stake in this new round of censorship. Narwani wrote last week (the italics are hers):

“Meta’s accusations of [The Cradle] ‘praising terrorist organizations’ and engaging in ‘incitement to violence’ largely stem from posts and videos that relay information or quotes from West Asian resistance movements like Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ansarallah — blacklisted by many western governments — who are an essential part of the news stories unfolding in a region on the precipice of a major war.

It is also essential to recognize that these are major West Asian political organizations that have deep institutional and civic roots within Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen and are part of the very fabric of these societies. They are represented in governance, run schools, hospitals, and utilities, and disperse salaries to millions of civilian workers.”

I am very pleased Narwani made this important point. We lose all such density of understanding when power — political power, media power, Big Tech power — affixes the label “terrorist” to an organization, a person or a group of people.

All are thenceforth rendered two-dimensional, while we are rendered ignorant — precisely the intended state. And in this new wave of censorship, the drift is that journalists, too, can be accused as terrorists or of acting as their accomplices.

Just as I was thinking through Meta’s permanent ban of The Cradle, I came (a little late) to the case of Andrew Napolitano, who, in a previous life, was a Superior Court judge sitting on the New Jersey bench. Judge N.’s daily webcast, Judging Freedom, has become must viewing in my household (and many others, by the numbers).

Napolitano has a gift for clipped, succinct questions that call forth the insightful replies of an extraordinary list of returning guests. Ray McGovern, Chas Freeman, Jeffrey Sachs, Alistair Crooke, John Mearsheimer, Larry Johnson — these are top-drawer names, all of them unwelcome in corporate media.

YouTube Warns Napolitano

The censors arrived in June, when YouTube, a Google property, took a segment of Napolitano’s program off the air and assigned it a “first strike.” Get three of these and YouTube, long distinguished as one of the most aggressive censors of dissenting opinion, will remove your webcast permanently, with Meta-style courtesy.

When I asked Napolitano about this the other day he replied in a note:

“We were told by YT — with no notice — that the strike was due to an on-air conversation I had with a guest back in June of this year. The 20–second conversation addressed the well-known and well-documented Nazi origins of the Ukrainian Azov Battalion and the propensity of many of its members to bear swastika tattoos. The same subject has been addressed in the NY Times and on CNN and elsewhere.

YT called it hate speech. We ran it through standard and respected AI platforms, and all concluded that this was not hate speech. Of course, Google agreed with its offspring.”

There are a couple of things to note about this — three, now I think of it.

One, it is by now tiresome in the extreme to have people in the propaganda apparatus pretending there are no neo–Nazis active in Ukraine when the Kiev regime is shot through with them and when Azov and other such groups, driven by a visceral hatred of Russia and its people, lead the most effective battalions in the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

As I and numerous others have pointed out, and as Napolitano suggests, the country’s neo–Nazi elements have appeared and disappeared in mainstream Western media according to passing geopolitical exigencies. Judge N. got paddled for making reference to common knowledge. [See: On the Influence of Neo-Nazism in Ukraine]

Two, when we consider the caliber of Napolitano’s regular guests we have to conclude that the operators of the censorship machine are shifting gears. What has been until now a somewhat spotty, swatting-flies operation shapes up to be a pervasive threat to free speech and the right to dissenting opinion from which not even our most distinguished minds are immune.

Finally, I will take this opportunity to assert that the notion of “hate speech” and all efforts to outlaw it are wholly objectionable in any society purporting to be democratic and come to, at the horizon, nothing short of thought control. Contempt may be a nobler sentiment, but hatred is an altogether human emotion and we all have a right to it.

The Germans, who are way ahead of Americans in this line, are a good indicator of where the suppression of “hate speech” leads: It leads to a polity that no longer knows itself because its people, fearful of prison or fines, no longer live their lives, so to say, publicly. All becomes furtive.

Scott Ritter’s Bellwether Incident

When Scott Ritter was pulled off a plane in June, just as he began a journey to St. Petersburg, Russia, to attend an annual conference, it was obvious there was a degree of performance or demonstration in the conduct of the New York police and the State Department, which authorized the operation.

Ritter, once a U.N. weapons inspector and now a commentator on military and foreign affairs, had his passport confiscated and cannot, for the moment, travel. State could have got this done without all the theater at Kennedy.

Who knew at the time where this would lead? Who knew it was the front edge of an effort to intimidate journalists of various kinds with the direct threat of prison on charges of terrorism or working as an agent of a foreign power or who knows what?

Earlier this month, while Ritter was marooned in his suburb of Albany, New York, the F.B.I. raided his home and removed all his electronic communication devices, along with many crates of documents.

As The New York Times subsequently reported, this is part of an investigation into whether Ritter acts as a foreign agent when he writes for RT International, Russia’s equivalent of the BBC, or participates in some of RT’s broadcasts.

[Related: SCOTT RITTER: A Farewell to Truth]

The operative statute is the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the question at issue is whether Ritter transgressed when he failed to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. “More searches are expected soon,” the Times reported, citing officials. “Criminal charges are also possible.”

Now just a damn minute. More searches? Criminal charges? When the BBC’s U.S. correspondents are similarly investigated — unthinkable, of course — I will take this invocation of FARA seriously. But our censors, as the record shows again and again, have no special concern about acting in a serious manner. Power has no such obligation.

I must now fear for people such as Chris Hedges, who had a program on RT America before the U.S. government effectively shut the network down — and at which point YouTube deleted the six-year archive of Hedges’s RT America program, On Contact.

I have my own views of the wisdom or otherwise of working for RT International, if not RT America, which in practice served as a haven for dissident Americans of various stripes, but will set these thoughts aside for now. The idea that Hedges, top-to-bottom a professional the whole of his career, could get marked down as a foreign agent is simply preposterous.

Did I say “preposterous”? Ah, I come to the case of Richard Medhurst.


Medhurst on his X feed on Aug. 19, announcing details of his arrest. (X)

Medhurst, born in Syria and a British subject, has an enviable knowledge of West Asian affairs and is a vigorously outspoken critic of Zionist Israel’s terrorizing campaign against the Palestinians of Gaza. Traveling through London last month — he resides in Vienna — Medhurst was not detained at Heathrow: He was arrested and held in solitary for nearly 24 hours under Article 12 of Britain’s Terrorism Act.

He has not been charged with any crime — and I reckon he won’t be, so farcical is this exercise — but he will remain under investigation for three months.

Here is Hedges on the Medhurst case, and I hope he will forgive my ellipses:

[img]“The arrest of the reporter Richard Medhurst, who has been one of the most ardent critics of the genocide in Gaza and Israeli apartheid state … is part of the steady march towards the criminalization of journalism….

It is designed to have a chilling effect on reporting that elucidates Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank, as well as the active collaboration in this extermination of the Palestinian people by the U.S. and U.K. governments….

If we do not vigorously oppose Medhurst’s arrest, if we do not denounce the use of terrorism laws to attempt to silence journalists… Medhurst’s arrest will become the ‘norm.’”[/i]

There is more where all this comes from. John Kiriakou, a C.I.A. whistleblower who was convicted of exposing the C.I.A.’s torture program, was recently escorted to his connecting flight in Toronto and detained in Washington as he flew home from Athens via Canada.

“There’s no good news in these stories,” Kiriakou writes in a review of his and other cases in a Consortium News piece under the headline, “The Slide into Authoritarianism.” “This is the future, unless we stand up to fight it,” he says.

My mind drifts back to the Democratic National Convention as I consider these events. I think of all those dreamy, worshipful faces, eyes uplifted, to which the cameras turned in the course of the speeches delivered by various party elites, and, of course, Kamala Harris when she formally accepted her nomination.

How innocently eager they seemed to have something, someone, they can believe in. How lost they were to the world as it is all around them. And how cynical the illiberal liberals who run the party as they manipulate the emotions of these people while condemning them to ignorance of the imperium the party is committed to sustaining.

Edward Luce, formerly the Financial Times’ Washington bureau chief and now one of the FT’s more readable commentators, ran a column on the convention under the headline, “‘Gaza’ is the word Democrats dare not whisper in Chicago.” A day into the proceedings, The Intercept put out an item headed, “Democratic Party Unites Under Banner of Silence on Gaza Genocide.”

That is how it was, more or less, at the DNC in Chicago. There was plenty of talk of AIPAC, the antidemocratic American Israel Public Affairs Committee — a foreign agent if ever there was one — but only in the streets outside the convention hall.

Harris finally raised the Gaza crisis, during her acceptance speech, but boyo, did she blow through that topic with haste. This was “strategic vagueness” — that adorable phrase The New York Times has coined to make a virtue of Harris’s weather-vane vacuousness — at its very finest.

It was the usual thing when Harris devoted a few sentences to Gaza: Her White House will shed more crocodile tears for the suffering of Palestinians, but the unwavering, unconditional support the “Biden–Harris administration” extends to apartheid Israel will remain unwavering and unconditional.

When you hear Harris say, “I will always stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself,” as she stated last week, it is the recipient of AIPAC funds speaking in the code the Israel lobby understands: Worry not. You will get what you have paid for.

My take: It will be silence on the imperium’s doings between now and Nov 5. And if Harris is elected in November, getting her through the following four years will require an escalated version of the censorship regime the national-security state and Big Tech imposed on dissenting voices during the Trump years, but with one difference:

The objective then was to take down our 45th president; this time it will be to sustain our stunningly unqualified 47th.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/09/03/p ... d-silence/

[blindpig]

Russia has never tried to dictate any narrative to me, unlike the West – Scott Ritter
September 5, 2024 Leave a comment
RT, 8/19/24

As the US government works overtime to stigmatize any journalism possessing connectivity with Russia, the world slides dangerously down a path defined by a Russophobic US-driven agenda that leads toward the inevitability of conflict, and the probability of nuclear war.

When the FBI executed a search warrant on my residence on August 7, they were singularly focused on my professional relationship (I am a self-employed journalist) with the Russian government, and in particular, RT, the widely recognized brand name of Russia Today, a media company founded by the autonomous non-profit organization TV-Novosti in April 2005.

According to the FBI, the US government was concerned that my activities fell under the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

The FBI has also searched the Virginia home of Dmitry Simes, a veteran Russian-American journalist who currently resides in Moscow where he helps moderate a popular political program, ‘The Big Game’, on Channel 1.

While the FBI has not publicly commented on the raid on Simes’ home, it is most likely due to similar concerns over FARA compliance.

I have been an external contributor (i.e., contactor) to RT since April 2020. Since the initial contract was signed, I have written numerous articles and produced hundreds of videos for which I have been compensated financially in accordance with the terms set forth in the agreements between myself and RT. As stipulated in the signed agreements, I am solely responsible for the content of the work provided.

At no time have I entered into any agreement, written or oral, or have reached any understanding, formal or informal, that I am responsive to the direction or control of either RT/TV-Novosti or the Russian government.

Indeed, the agreement between myself and RT stipulates that I am responsible for determining the topics that will be covered in the content I produce, although as is the case in any editorial/producer relationship with ‘talent’, I have been asked to provide content that is responsive to breaking news.

I am a freelance journalist. This is the life of a freelance journalist.

Nothing more, nothing less.

This relationship is like that which I have as an outside contributor to other journalistic outlets, including TruthDig, the American Conservative, Consortium News, the Washington Spectator, and Energy Intelligence, all of which have published my work on a regular basis during the same period in which I produced content for RT.

In all cases, I am solely responsible for the content I produce. There is, of course, a collaborative relationship with the editors of all these publishing outlets, some more intense/heavy than others. This is the normal reality faced by every journalist in the world.

I can say without fear of contradiction that the editorial ‘touch’ of RT is the lightest of any publisher I have dealt with – there is the standard follow-up questioning on sourcing of information, and some massaging of language for clarity. On a few occasions (I can count them on one hand), RT has turned down articles I have submitted for publication. In every instance, the topics dealt with US domestic issues, and the editors were concerned about being seen as buying into unfounded conspiracies.

How utterly irresponsible of them!

The specific compensation received for work published is confidential in accordance with the terms of the agreement I signed with RT (the FBI seized physical and electronic copies of this agreement, and I have in the past provided copies of the agreement to the Department of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) or their proxies operating within the US banking system.) But I can say this – it is within the industry norm, slightly more than some publishers, and slightly less than others. And in no case can it be considered exorbitant – the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, all of whom have published my opinion pieces in the past, all pay significantly more than does RT.

This reality must be disappointing to the FBI and the Department of Justice, which, through their questioning, seemed caught up in a working theory that I was a controlled asset of RT and, by extension, the Russian government. Their conspiracy theories extended into the person of my wife, Marina, who was questioned by a pair of FBI agents at her place of work at the same time the FBI conducted its search of our residence. The agents showed Marina a copy of an email she had sent to me back in late 2020/early 2021, where she listed the articles that I had published for RT for each month.

I was paid on a monthly billing cycle, with the amount calculated based upon the number of articles published in a given month. On occasion, there would be discrepancies, where my count of articles published did not align with the money paid in compensation. To assist me in working out these discrepancies, Marina would generate a list of articles published by publication date, so that I could more coherently communicate with RT.

“Do you direct the work of your husband?” the FBI asked my wife. “Do you organize his work?”

The answer was self-evident, as my wife informed the FBI.

I am my own boss.

The FBI was also interested in the payment vehicle used by RT to compensate me. The method agreed to contractually was a wire transfer to be made monthly based upon the work published. For this, I provided my banking information, including SWIFT code.

Following the commencement of the Special Military Operation by Russia in Ukraine in February 2022, this method became difficult because of the sanctioning of Russian banks by the US, denying these banks access to the SWIFT system that controls money transfers globally and, most importantly in my case, into the US.

RT developed workarounds which used unsanctioned third parties to execute the wire transfers. Over time, RT made use of two such intermediaries. I have always been totally transparent about this payment method. Indeed, when my bank began blocking payment on instructions from their internal OFAC enforcement units, I reached out to the bank to resolve the issue. Part of the resolution measures agreed to was that I provided the OFAC enforcement unit with copies of my contractual relationships showing that the money received was related to contracted work. This method worked but was very time consuming and inconvenient – wire transfers were often returned to the sender in whole or in part because of the delay in processing the submitted paperwork, which took place every time a payment was received.

I contacted OFAC directly to complain, citing harassment and First Amendment issues, and was informed that they had nothing to do with it. The problem, it seemed, was overzealous employees at the bank itself (the OFAC enforcement unit was an in-house entity, with no formal relationship with the US government or OFAC.)

The solution was simple – I switched banks. In making the application to my new bank, I was transparent about international wire transfers that they would expect, what country these transfers would originate from, roughly in what amounts the transfers would be, and for what purpose (writing.)

The bank in question was USAA, with which I had a relationship dating back to 1984 when I was commissioned as an officer in the US Marines. Last year, USAA ended its relationship with me without warning, closing my bank account and terminating homeowner and auto insurance policies that I had with them dating back four decades.

I opened a new account with my current bank. Once again, I was fully transparent in the application process as to the source and reason for incoming wire transfers.

The FBI, in questioning me, provided the names of the two intermediaries used by RT to make the wire transfers of my compensation. I provided accurate answers to all their questions concerning these entities and my relationship with them.

I have no doubt that the US government will continue to make it difficult, and perhaps impossible, for RT to compensate external contributors based in the United States, including myself, for their work.

This is harassment under color of law.

But under no circumstances does it make the work, or any compensation paid to me for this work, a violation of the law.

And under no circumstances does being paid for my outside contributions to RT violate the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

I have been lambasted for publishing my work in RT.

Several US-based publishers, including TruthDig and the American Conservative, have terminated their relationship with me because I also contributed to RT – this after my writing won an award for TruthDig and one of my articles was the most-viewed for the year for the American Conservative. I had just started what was supposed to be a stint as a regular contributor for Responsible Statecraft (RS) when some of their funders balked at having someone who also wrote for RT writing for them (I had just published my first article, only to have it removed from the RS website without warning. RS was willing to pay me for the article in question, but I let them know under no circumstances would I accept money from their organization.)

One of the reasons I enjoy contributing to RT is the global diversity of their audience. But I also appreciate the relative purity of their message – in a world where the US and its compliant minions in the controlled Western press work overtime to manipulate audiences into accepting at face value and without question the American-driven narrative, RT and other non-Western news outlets provide alternatives which are fact-driven.

In March 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton complained about the US “losing the information war” to nations like Russia amongst English-speaking audiences around the world.

The truth, when seen from the perspective of an American secretary of state, hurts.

I have had extensive intimate experience with the US mainstream media dating back to my time as a weapons inspector in Iraq. I bore personal witness to US government officials leaving important Security Council meetings early so they could brief reporters from the New York Times, who would then publish a front-page story about the meeting which bore no resemblance whatsoever to the reality of the meeting and reflected every talking point of the United States.

How did I know this?

Because the Security Council meeting dealt with issues surrounding the inspections I was responsible for leading in Iraq, and with briefings that I helped write and provide to the members present. I was there when the US official walked out, and I knew who he was going to meet.

I was also present when the CIA worked with CNN to make a documentary about the work of the UN weapons inspectors in Iraq. I was one of several inspectors whose stories served as the centerpiece of the documentary. Moreover, I was the point of contact between the CIA and CNN when it came to the release of U-2 imagery and other intelligence-related information to CNN to be used in the documentary.

I worked for NBC News in the months after I resigned from my position with the United Nations. I was an on-air analyst who often appeared with Tom Brokaw and Brian Williams. I would work with NBC News to turn raw news feeds into finished products ready for on-air broadcast. I saw firsthand how NBC manipulated the news to fit pre-conceived notions instead of reporting it as is. I was eventually released from my contract when National Security Adviser Sandy Berger objected to questions being asked of him by NBC White House correspondent Claire Shipman, indicating that he knew I was behind those questions.

NBC had the choice: Defend journalistic integrity, or cave in to White House pressure.

They caved.

After 9/11, I was contracted by Fox News as an on-air analyst for six months, only to have Fox News balk at my assessments which ran counter to the narrative being promulgated by the Bush White House. Fox News decided it was better to pay me and keep me off the airwaves (I was exclusive to Fox at the time) than release me and let me speak out.

The contract was not renewed when it expired.

I was briefly courted by CNN in the fall of 2002, on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. After being questioned in an in-house forum that brought together the major reporters, hosts, and producers of CNN, I was ‘cleared’ by the senior CNN executives, who proceeded to give me a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of their newsroom.

I was shocked when I was taken to the CNN ‘war room’, where the producers were already working with the Pentagon to embed reporters with military units. My questions about this level of collusion led CNN to lose interest in me shortly thereafter.

The bottom line is this – I have seen the American mainstream media up close and personal.

There is zero integrity when it comes to reporting fact-based truth.

In every instance I experienced, the news organizations of these various media companies were literally subordinated to the US government, taking their talking points directly from either the White House, the State Department, or the Pentagon.

In short, these news organizations did not produce news, but rather American propaganda which was designed to deceive the broader American audience about critical issues of war and peace.

The news organizations I observed firsthand were more representative of a state-controlled media than a free press.

And, if called upon to compare and contrast, based upon my own personal experiences, the level of journalistic integrity between these US media outlets and RT, RT wins hands-down.

When it comes to reporting on politically sensitive content, such as the Special Military Operation, I likewise side with RT.

The Biden administration has openly admitted that it purposely declassifies intelligence information it knows to be wrong or misleading so that it can be released to the mainstream media for the purpose of controlling the narrative.

Not for telling the truth.

I have, over the years, had the opportunity to meet and work with several RT journalists and reporters who cover the Special Military Operation.

Every single one has demonstrated impeccable integrity when it comes to reporting the news.

I have also had the opportunity to interface with and interview many of the sources these RT journalists draw upon for their reporting and can say that the assessments I make as an independent analyst often reflect those of the RT journalists.

Not because, as is the case in the United States, we are working from the same government-dictated script – the Russian government has never tried to dictate any narrative to me, nor has RT.

But because both RT and I have an assiduous appreciation for fact-based truth.

Sadly, I can’t say that for any of the mainstream American media organizations I’ve worked with in the past.

My reporting for RT is my own, reflecting my observations and analysis. My most recent reporting from Russia backs this up – a four-part series which RT knew nothing about until I pitched it to them after I completed my most recent trip to Russia.

In writing How the Chechen miracle kick-started the Russian ‘Path of Redemption’, Helping Crimea recover from decades of Ukrainian misrule is a tough but necessary challenge, We are witnessing the bittersweet birth of a new Russia, and Why did it take Russia so long to realize Donbass was worth fighting for?, I provided unique reporting that was unavailable anywhere else in the world – Western media outlets would never allow such reporting to be published on their pages or websites, and Russian news outlets had never seen such reporting from an independent Western perspective.

This is exactly what journalism is supposed to be – hard hitting, probing analysis based upon first-hand observations derived from access to high-level sourcing.

I picked RT as the publisher of these articles because I wanted this reporting to be available not only to a global English-speaking audience, but also to a Russian audience.

This reporting was not the byproduct of close collusion between myself and the Russian government – in fact, when I tried to get official permission to travel to the new territories and Donbass from the Russian Ministry of Defense, I was turned down. It was only because of my persistence, and that of my host, Aleksandr Zyrianov, that I was able to travel to Chechnya, Crimea, the New Territories, and Donbass, and meet with the high-level officials and military officers who feature in my reporting.

Trying to convince a Western audience – be it government officials, journalists, or the consumers of news – that RT is a responsible news organization more committed to telling the truth than their ostensibly ‘free’ Western media counterparts, is a literal mission impossible.

The level of Russophobia that has infected every level of society in the West is mind-boggling. I have been called a shill of Russian President Vladimir Putin more times than I can count, by both the online trolls of the North Atlantic Fella Organization (NAFO), whose mission is simply to harass any online voice that doesn’t conform to the US/NATO narrative, and ostensibly ‘neutral’ journalists who write for outlets that publish my work. My crime? Reporting accurately on the positions taken by the Russian government – “speaking ‘Putin’”, in the vernacular of my critics.

The consequences of this Russophobia-infected journalism are dire – not only has the ignorance enshrined within the journalism of the West resulted in the destruction of Ukraine, but, if not reversed, is leading the Collective West down the path of inevitable conflict with Russia which would probably end in a general nuclear war.

Trying to head off such a tragic outcome has been the fuel that feeds my work as a journalist these past few years.

And it will continue to fuel my work going forward.

I am grateful to RT for allowing my words to be published and disseminated in both written and video form.

I believe that, in doing so, RT is contributing to the cause of saving the world from the horror of nuclear war.

Even if the Russophobia-infected minds in the Collective West fail to recognize this.

https://natyliesbaldwin.com/2024/09/rus ... tt-ritter/

[blindpig]

A political mistake has occurred
September 7, 15:07



A political mistake has occurred

There was news that if you ask Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa: "Why should I vote for Donald Trump" and "Why should I vote for Kamala Harris", then about Trump she will answer that, it turns out, she cannot provide content promoting any party or candidate, but at the same time she will generously praise Kamala for all sorts of things. For her "impressive portfolio", and for "broken gender barriers", etc.

Amazon said that the developers "quickly corrected this error". An error, yeah.

In the meantime, "our editorial team conducted a journalistic investigation". Having polled the Yandex column, we found out from Alice why it is worth voting for Trump (and also (so as not to go twice) why it is worth voting for Putin). Alice gave a detailed, comprehensive answer to these questions. But when asked about voting for Kamala Harris, she clearly stated that she does not understand politics, and she has nothing to say here.
Think!

Drew by DAHR ( https://vk.com/public190589568 )

https://t.me/journal_joj/934 - zinc

Because artificial intelligence, that's who you need artificial intelligence. Those at the top know better who to vote for.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9368482.html

More than half of users can't distinguish between bots and people
September 7, 9:17


More than half of users can't distinguish between bots and people


Paul Brenner of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and colleagues found in their study that people could distinguish AI bots from humans only 42% of the time.

5 ways to tell if an account is an AI bot:

1. Emojis and hashtags: Overuse of these symbols can be a sign.

2. Unusual wording, word choice, or analogies: Unusual wording can indicate artificial intelligence.

3. Repetition and structure: Bots may use repetitive wording that follows similar or rigid forms, and may also overuse certain slang terms.

4. Ask questions: These can reveal a bot’s lack of knowledge on the topic, especially when it comes to local places and situations.

5. Assume the worst: If a social media account is not a personal contact and the user’s identity has not been clearly confirmed or verified, it may very well be an AI bot.

You can test your own bot detection skills here, and at the same time additionally train the enemy bot detection system

https://nd.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_dgy2Ymsq74ZkNOm - research
https://t.me/budni_manipulyatora/3067 - zinc

I can answer that the number of neural network bots in Telegram comments has been steadily increasing over the past year.
The growth of neural network imitation capabilities will make authorization by passport data and a ban on commenting by unauthorized users inevitable in the medium term. Otherwise, in the near future, any open comments can be technologically flooded with neural network messages, destroying any semblance of live communication.

https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/9367634.html

The machines ain't all that good, rather people have been conditioned to accept damn near anything as 'real' by 'screens' generically speaking.

[blindpig]

Working with spies makes you a propagandist, not a journalist
By Yves Engler (Posted Sep 07, 2024)

Originally published: Canadian Dimension on September 2, 2024 (more by Canadian Dimension) |

While it’s strange that anyone claiming to be a journalist would boast about working with the intelligence agency of a foreign state, National Post columnist Adam Zivo is certainly not the first international correspondent to have flouted journalism ethics by directly engaging in counterintelligence operations while on the job.

On August 9, Zivo claimed on X that in 2022 he had organized a sting operation with the Security Service of Ukraine, or SBU, the country’s spy agency. Zivo said someone he noticed “speaking English loudly” at a mall in Odessa seemed suspicious and so he invited Ukrainian intelligence operatives to observe a dinner he later organized with the individual and his wife. Little came of the undercover op in which Zivo wore a wire to catch the suspected Chinese spy.

PressProgress Editor Luke LeBrun asked the National Post about the matter, but the paper’s representatives ignored his inquiries, seemingly indifferent to one of their staffer’s admitted collaboration with the spy agency of a country from which he’s submitted dozens of articles since Russia’s invasion in February 2022 (Zivo was sanctioned by the Kremlin that same year).


The ‘Zivo affair’ is an odd tale, but it’s not unheard of for Canadian war correspondents to have ties to intelligence agencies, as I detailed in my 2016 book, A Propaganda System. In 1976 a U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee documented close links between the CIA and journalists, showing how agents wrote Associated Press stories and conducted journalism training. In his 1980 book, the Toronto Star’s Jack Cahill, “one of the best Canadian foreign correspondents of the 1970s,” describes bunking with a CIA agent during the 1975 U.S. evacuation from Saigon. Cahill notes he was “debriefed by American intelligence and it had never occurred to me not to tell them everything I knew.”

Other leading foreign correspondents reported close ties to the U.S. and Canadian military establishments. A CBC TV correspondent for four decades, David Halton said: “I found it easier (and generally safer) covering a war with regular army units, as opposed to reporting independently. In Vietnam, for example, the U.S. Army provided reporters with fairly accurate information about situations at the fronts you wanted to visit, and transportation to get there. Ditto with the Canadian ICCS [International Commission of Control and Supervision] force I deployed to Vietnam with.” (The “Five O’Clock Follies” was the sobriquet other journalists gave to the daily U.S. military press briefings in Saigon.)

The Canadian military has often transported correspondents abroad. During the early 1960s UN mission in the Congo in which Canadian forces helped assassinate Patricia Lumumba three CBC reporters traveled to the newly independent central African nation aboard a Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft. After receiving military administered inoculations, notes War on the Air: CBC-TV and Canada’s Military, 1952-1992,

they were closely tied to [Canadian] Army Signals, which was their only means of communicating with the CBC.

Several commentators have highlighted the political impact of military sponsored trips. In Turning Around a Supertanker: Media-military Relations in Canada in the CNN Age, Daniel Hurley writes, “correspondents were not likely to ask hard questions of people who were offering them free flights to Germany” to visit Canadian bases there. In his diary of the mid-1990s Somalia Commission of Inquiry after Canadian troops tortured and killed in the Horn of Africa Peter Desbarats made a similar observation.

Some journalists, truly ignorant of military affairs, were happy to trade junkets overseas for glowing reports about Canada’s gallant peacekeepers.

During the 2001—14 war in Afghanistan the federal government reportedly paid for journalists to visit the country. Canadian Press envoy Jonathan Montpetit explained, “my understanding of these junkets is that Ottawa picked up the tab for the flight over as well as costs in-theatre, then basically gave the journos a highlight tour of what Canada was doing in Afghanistan.” The Canadian Forces embedding program during the war in Afghanistan also brought reporters into the military’s orbit by allowing them to accompany soldiers on patrol and stay on base.

Established by Ottawa during the First World War to increase pro-war coverage, the Canadian Press“cemented” itself as Canada’s national news service during the Second World War. “To accomplish this,” Gene Allen writes in a history of the organization, “CP cultivated unprecedentedly close relations with Canada’s military authorities—who had reasons of their own for wanting extensive coverage of the national war effort—and thereby moved some distance away from traditional notions of journalistic independence.” In an extreme example, the Canadian Press recruited a Canadian Forces public relations officer who led reporters into battle zones. Bill Boss remained with the same unit but began reporting for the news service and would become one of Canada’s most famous war correspondents.

Establishment journalists have often worked closely with intelligence and military officials. Still, boasting about it is odd—to say the very least. It’s almost as if they’re proud, not embarrassed, to have breached an important principle of journalistic independence. It follows that organizations that run stories by such “journalists” must not care that reasonable people might view them as propaganda outlets rather than sources of reliable information.

https://mronline.org/2024/09/07/working ... ournalist/