Censorship, fake news, perception management

Questions, Comments, Concerns etc about The Bell
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Dec 06, 2024 3:11 pm

The War on Consortium News
December 4, 2024

From PayPal to Global News to anonymous hackers, there are forces that prefer you don’t read Consortium News.

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Monument to First Amendment in Philadelphia. (Kyle Dickson/Flickr)

By Joe Lauria

In an age of growing censorship and suppression of news, Consortium News is not exaggerating when it says it has abundant evidence of efforts to marginalize or silence us.

November 2016: At Thanksgiving eight years ago, a shady outfit called PropOrNot included CN on a blacklist of sites which this obscure group accused of publishing Kremlin propaganda. The Washington Post unethically allowed the anonymous people behind PropOrNot a voice on a national platform to smear CN and dozens of other publications without a shred of evidence nor due process.

October 2020: The Canadian electronic intelligence agency, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE), falsely accused Consortium News in an article and television report by Global News, Canada’s second most-watched private TV network, of being in the forefront of a Russian cyber attack against Canadian politicians. CN sued Global News for defamation in U.S. federal court on counsel’s advice. The case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds.

February 2021: YouTube removes an episode of CN Live! and gives a strike against Consortium News, suspending it for one week after misinterpreting a one-minute scene from guest Greg Palast’s documentary showing Trump supporters claiming the 2020 election was stolen, when the subject of Palast’s film was actually about voter suppression by Republicans in Georgia.

March 2022: Three months after we began reporting on Russia’s intervention in the Ukrainian civil war, the media rating agency NewsGuard wrote to accuse CN of publishing “false content” in its reporting on the 2014 Kiev coup and the role of neo-Nazism in the country. It later assigns Consortium News a red flag warning its subscribers to “proceed with caution.”

May 2022: PayPal permanently banned Consortium News from using its money transfer system, hurting our fundraising efforts. PayPal steadfastly refused to say why. But its user agreement prohibits spreading “misinformation,” and since information is our only trade, it was logical to conclude, given the hysteria surrounding the subject, that it objected to our Ukraine coverage.

June 2022: The GrayZone reported on leaked emails which showed that a British Foreign Office official had contacted Nina Jankowicz, who at the time was heading the Biden administration’s now disbanded Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Homeland Security. In an email, the official said he would look into CN‘s editor. He said Jankowicz told him she would “ask around” about Consortium News.

It is not clear who she asked, whether in or out of government. But Jankowicz told the official she thinks CN was not being “funded” — presumably by a foreign power such as Russia — but instead were just being “useful idiots.”

June 2022: Twitter, under previous management, permanently suspends CN columnist Patrick Lawrence. In 2022 it also suspends CN columnist Scott Ritter, who is reinstated by X under new management. Lawrence remains suspended without explanation. (CN is currently appealing X’s suspension of CN Live! executive producer Cathy Vogan.)

October 2023: Consortium News sues NewsGuard for defamation and the U.S. government for violating the First Amendment.

October 2024: According to our web host, Consortium News‘ web site is hacked. All of its content is removed and all staff is barred from entering the site, which for three days was replaced with a start-up landing page.

December 2024: Oral arguments in federal court in the Southern District of New York are expected soon on motions by defendants NewsGuard and the U.S. government to dismiss the case.

A pattern seems to be developing here: a clear effort to hinder us from delivering to you our alternative view of the news independent of the mainstream and free of influence from any corporation, foundation or government.

But we are not lying down. Help us to keep going, no matter what they throw at us by generously contributing today to Consortium News’ Winter Fund Drive.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/12/04/t ... tium-news/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Sat Dec 14, 2024 3:32 pm

Tom Neuburger: The Media’s Bizarre Treatment of the Mangione Case
Posted on December 14, 2024 by Yves Smith

Yves here. I am particularly fond of posts that look at media coverage of important news stories. The aversion by many outlets to providing important details about the alleged Mangione assassination, such as withholding his short manifesto, demonstrates how their class and economic interests are skewing their coverage.

While on this topic, a wee sidetrack. Per the aversion of many in the power structure to give Mangione any more attention than he is already getting, the last thing they want is a trial. But Mangione has the money to hire good legal representation and seems very unlikely to cut a plea deal. I hope he has a food taster.

But assuming Mangione gets his day in court, and if I have it right that his first shot hit Brian Thompson in the calf, he could try claiming that he did not intend to kill him but to kneecap him, to subject him to the same pain that he and his mother had suffered. If the jury bought that, he’d still be likely to found guilty of manslaughter in the first degree. New York sentencing guidelines call for 5 to 25 years in prison.

If he still has regular back pain, those prison beds and chairs will only make it worse.

By Thomas Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies

CEOs come and go and one just went
The ingredients you got bake the cake you get
—Jesse Welles


From one point of view, media behavior in the Luigi Mangione case is bizarre. According to journalist Ken Klippenstein (video here), New York Times management has said they don’t want to show photos of Mangione, the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

Klippenstein from his Substack:

NY Times Doesn’t Want You to See Shooter’s Face

Internal New York Times messages about its coverage of alleged gunman Luigi Mangione have been leaked to me and the contents are revealing. On Tuesday, management said “the news value and public service of showing his face is diminishing,” instructing staff to “dial back” its use of such photos.

“News value is diminishing” is the opposite of what’s true. As Klippenstein and the Breaking Points hosts point (see video linked above), big print media today is obsessed with traffic. With this order, they’re cutting their throats (metaphorically) to spite his face.

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The back of Luigi Mangione’s head. Photo: Rachel Wisniewski for The New York Times

Klippenstein also notes that not just the Times, but all other media outlets who have Mangione’s “manifesto,” have refused to publish most of it. You can read the full document at Klippenstein’s site. It’s in fact little more than a note of explanation. But why is he alone in presenting it?

Three Reasons
There are three layers of reason for this odd behavior, both with respect to his photo and “manifesto,” each more instructive and important than the last.

The So-Called Copy-Cat Problem

The first and uppermost layer of reasoning is a professed fear of inspiring a copy-cat, someone so craven or weak-willed that they’ll copy the act. Call this the fanboy factor.

“I think we will still not pub the whole thing,[”] editor Andrea Kannapell added, “so as not to provide bullhorn.”

This has not stopped media in the past, however. Any number of killer “manifestos” have seen print, including both Dylann Roof’s and Ted Kazinsky’s in the Times. In addition, this document has been circulated widely but privately in both press and non-press circles. Clearly the copy-cat fear isn’t that strongly held.

The Times justification, according to the chat, is that photographs and words might have the effect of “amplifying the crime and inspiring others,” as reporter Andy Newman said. Besides the New York Times’ inflated view of its ability to de-amplify a crime that practically everyone is already talking about, the internal chat sheds light on the other arguably bigger reason the media shies away from disclosure […]

Captured by Sources or Eager Security Partners?

Klippenstein suspects a deeper reason: “its fear of antagonizing the sources it relies upon for scoops.”

News people clearly need sources among the cops and other “security” forces, and those sources are in position to extract concessions. “By donning the ‘public safety’ hat, the major media is in effect deputizing itself as a branch of the national security state,” writes Klippenstein.

He underplays their current delight in this role, but the observation is spot on. Ever since the summer of 2016 and emergent Trump-Russia allegations, big media, rightly or wrongly, has been gladly on board, seeing its duty as aiding the security state at every turn.

Why would it not do so here? After close to a decade of practice, it’s a well-trod path.

The Class War Comes Home

But the deeper reason, which Klippenstein doesn’t address, is in fact the most obvious. It’s so obvious that everyone but media is pointing it out.

The billionaire class, the maybe 1000 people who run the country plus a bunch of their CEOs, has been milking the country of cash since at least Reagan days, and we’ve been allowing it, willing if not eager participants.

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Cows being milked (source)

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Humans being milked (from The Matrix)

But the constant advantage-taking has taken its toll. Ever since Obama promised us hope-and-change…


…and failed to deliver, the nation has been pre-revolutionary. Certainly both Sanders campaigns showed that the hunger for relief was not just felt on the Right, but in the whole country.

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Bernie Sanders rally, Minnesota, 2019

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Crowd comparisons from the 2016 Democratic Party primary

For a variety of reasons, this discontent has given us President Trump two times out of three, and while many on the Right are best pleased, those on the Left or the silent uncared-about center (voters and non-voters alike) aren’t feeling well served.

Okay, that’s a euphemism. The nation is pissed. Health care in particular is a death trap for many, who pay and never get back, and then often die. UHC in particular is an industry apex predator:

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Source

And Thompson is a perfect example of a CEO class that, let’s be honest, kills for profit by aggressive denial of care. His compensation is estimated at $10 million per year and the company’s “hugely profitable 2025 financial outlook [includes] expected revenues upwards of $450 billion.”

People watch people die and the rich grow fat. How else to explain the massive swell of support for Mangione’s deed? It’s hard to find articles documenting it, but the phenomenon itself is rampant on Twitter and TikTok. And it’s not just the kids. Doctors and patients weigh in.

Check it out for yourself. People sing Mangione’s praise and almost literally dance above Thompson’s grave. https://x.com/leahmcelrath/status/1866885834193969441

So the final reason for media fear is simple: It’s the class war come home.

People see murderers getting their just deserts — put simply, “Jack Reacher-style” (a widely loved hero-avenger, by the way) — and they’re not troubled at all. The fact is, most Americans will justify retribution. Didn’t most of us cheer while watching both Iraq Wars?

So the fear of a copy-cat wave is both wrong and right. It may not be the few and deranged that are inspired, but the many and done-being-had — not a simple repeat of an awful deed, but a sudden Arab Spring. You never know; there really are moments this fraught with radical paths.

I don’t condone murder, and I don’t want to live in a state filled with killing and war. But I do know people, and sometimes, when in Jefferson’s words “a long train of abuses and usurpations” drives people to act, they act regardless of outcome.

We may be watching that now. I think the rich think we are.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12 ... -case.html

It all true about Bernie in 2016, he easily had the nomination and could have beaten Trump like a cheap drum with a working class agenda as opposed to Trump's blather. But he didn't, he prostrated himself to a party which shat on him at every opportunity, abandoned the working class and gave the race to Trump.

Not that Bernie is any great shakes, but all those who followed him and thought, however vaguely, that socialism sounded like a good thing, were betrayed.

Whose side is Bernie on? Know them by their works...(And 'speaking truth to power ain't work', it's an affectation of cowards and hypocrites.)

While this event has highlighted growing frustration of the working class it also may well serve as a release for that pressure. The bosses have been adroit at that sort of thing, look how the managed 'Occupy'.

'Politics of the Deed' will never get us where we need to go, only the organized masses can do that, but these events do help remind people of the 'why' when the managed culture buries such thoughts in inanities.
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Dec 18, 2024 3:23 pm

Old Documents Reveal Roots of Modern-Day American Surveillance State
By Joel Sucher - December 17, 2024 0

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Reverend Edward Rowe in front of Church League of America headquarters in 1984. [Source: historicimages.com]

Church League of America developed a surveillance network, in collaboration with FBI offshoot Wackenhut, of American leftists during the Cold War.

With Dylan’s self-professed quasi-anarchistic philosophy, he may not be a member of any organized radical left movement. However, as history has proven, the credulous dupe has performed much more services to the collective cause than ten active members of the Communist Party. Herein lies the danger.
From a Church League of America file folder, titled “Bob Dylan”

It was December 10, 1992, and we were inside a cavernous warehouse picking through the discarded detritus of an out-of-business organization known as the Church League of America (CLA). For nearly a half-century it focused on peddling information about anyone suspected of being the least bit liberal/left or, generally speaking, out of step with the prevailing anti-communist ethos.

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[Source: Screengrab from video “Pacific Street visits CLA archive”]

By “we” I am referring to Steven Fischler—co-principal at Pacific Street Films — and me; for more than 50 years we have been personally engaged with all things surveillance-related, in part, due to our production of an iconic 1972 documentary film known as Red Squad.

That 1972 documentary was a product of our own experiences at NYU Film School—under the tutelage of Martin Scorsese—who supported our efforts to film and identify cops who flirted around the edges of peaceful anti-war demonstrations. They were NYPD’s own paparazzi, getting up close and personal, grabbing pictures of all who participated. That film—and our involvement—was the reason we became named plaintiffs in a 1971 class-action lawsuit, Handschu v Special Services Division, which led to restricting the activities of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division. Its impact can still be felt today.

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[Source: ovid.tv]

Handschu (titled after another named plaintiff, attorney Barbara Handschu), started us down a long, murky road, uncovering the spies, slugs and assorted flotsam and jetsam that made handsome money promoting their own social values. The Church League of America was among those with the loudest voices. Founded in 1936, while most Americans were struggling to put bread on the table, the CLA began preaching against any effort to secularize American culture. It was also determined to root out any creeping liberalism within the Church itself.

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, Liberty University Library]

The cast of characters populating the CLA included a coterie of fundamentalist Christians—folks like John Rice, J. Frank Norris and William Bell Riley—who could not understand why Americans were not apoplectic about Roosevelt and the New Deal not receptive to the anti-Semitic radio rantings of Father Coughlin. Other followers like JB Matthews—a one-time socialist who saw the light (and the money)—elevated anti-communism to new heights, becoming a fixture at various congressional committees beginning in the mid-1940s

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, found in CLA file “Veterans,” Liberty University Library]

Post-war panic about Joseph Stalin, coupled with J. Edgar Hoover’s dictum to ordinary Americans to search every crack and crevice for hidden Communists, fired up the organization’s afterburners (and fundraising). Embarking on a campaign to solicit tips from the public they re-packaged said squeals for a subscription base that included major law enforcement agencies around the country.

Armed with an adequate war chest the CLA began feasting on other anti-Communist data bases.

The aforementioned Matthews sold off most of his snoopings to the CLA in 1964, but the big one came in 1975 when the organization came into possession of a mother lode, namely, materials compiled by the Wackenhut Corporation.

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George Wackenhut [Source: upperdarbysb.org]

The Wackenhut Corporation, established in 1954 by George R. Wackenhut and two other former FBI agents, actively gathered background information on individuals, bolstered by Wackenhut’s anti-communist fervor. By 1971, bolstered by Wackenhut’s anti-communist fervor, the company had amassed files on 2.5 million people.

Following the implementation of the Fair Credit Reporting Act, they reduced their files considerably to something between 225,000 and 250,000. In 1975, most of these files were transferred to the CLA, which was exempt from the law’s disclosure mandates.

Note: Wackenhut is still around—albeit with a new moniker—having been purchased for $570 million in 2002 by the Danish corporation Group 4 Falck, which later became part of the British company G4S. In 2010, G4S Wackenhut rebranded to G4S Secure Solutions (USA).

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[Source: en.wikipedia.org]

With the civil rights movement picking up steam in the 1960s, CLA—locked and loaded—turned its attention to those uppity African Americans and their civil rights campaigns.

“A negro newspaper here does nothing but incite the negroes,” proclaimed an unsigned hand-written note taped to a copy of the Memphis-based Tri-State Defender, dated June 28, 1969.

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But excitable “negroes” found themselves in good company. Other targets of the CLA included Eleanor Roosevelt, Pablo Picasso, Cesar Chávez, Bennett Cerf, Noam Chomsky, Bella Abzug, Maya Angelou, Charlie Chaplin, Pablo Casals, Ralph Abernathy, to name a few (along with the aforementioned Bob Dylan). [Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, Liberty University Library]

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, box retrieved from Liberty University storage]

Union organizing—and those who advocated for it—were also on the CLA hit list. The idea that the National Council of Churches—damnably liberal—could be supporting the work of Cesar Chávez was anathema to farm owners whose treatment of their workers was akin to the old plantation types who claimed that their slaves were healthy and happy.

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, letter found in CLA file, “Cesar Chavez,” Liberty University Library]

Before the CLA folded in 1984, it dumped its stash in a warehouse owned by Liberty University. You might remember Liberty; the evangelical Christian university founded by right-wing televangelist Jerry Falwell and later helmed by his son, the notorious Jerry Falwell, Jr.

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, Liberty University warehouse containing CLA files]

Our guess is that some hapless administrator was eager for anyone to come down and cart off this mold-laden crap so, obligingly, we headed down for a rendezvous with history.

In retrospect, I can understand the sentiments of all those East Germans who flooded Stasi headquarters after the Wall fell, poring through “confidential documents” looking for names.

We did the same; armed with a video camera we rummaged around rusted file cabinets and scattered bits of paper that littered the warehouse floor.

Soon we found our treasure:three-by-five file cards with my name, affiliation and references to the aforementioned Handschu lawsuit; another with the name of a colleague—Marc Weiss—who along with the two of us had traveled to Chicago in the early 1970s to document the activities of the notorious Chicago Police Department’s subversive unit.

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, Liberty University Library]

In another file folder, labeled “Anarchism,” we found circulars and flyers for films which brought nostalgic tears to our eyes. One of our early films—Inciting to Riot—produced while we were students of Martin Scorsese at NYU Film School—was part of the Anarchist offerings.

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, CLA file “Anarchy,” Liberty University Library]

There was no shortage of kitschy mid-century humor with items like a 1949 Saturday Evening Post article, proclaiming “Here’s Where Our Young Commies are Trained,” and an “expose” of the Jefferson School of Social Science. I chuckled at the synchronicity; the publication date being a mere 16 days before I entered this world.

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Saturday Evening Post, March 12, 1949. [Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, Liberty University Library]

I must admit that it was a heady feeling to be lumped into an archival graveyard sporting manila tombstones with names like Picasso, Angelou and Chaplin.

It was an experience emulating American Pickers well before that iconic series took off and our deep dive into the bowels of the “Deep State” foreshadowed all the tumult now created by current mentions of the term.

Although we had been invited to take what we wanted, there was no way, short of a semi-trailer, that we could transport all this treasure northward. We had to settle for one banker’s box.

Note: Liberty University eventually pawned off a combined CLA/Wackenhut paper dump to the Tamiment Library at NYU, where it currently gathers moss.

And then came TARU….

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TARU officers photographing protesters, 2004. [Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, from the author’s collection].

TARU stands for the Technical Assistance Response Unit and it was launched in the late 1990s when analog surveillance was in the process of a profound transformation. No longer was surveillance going to rely on celluloid, still film or movie footage, with a lag time owing to chemical processing. We were now in the digital age and members of the unit were duly tasked with showing up at “incidents” armed with the most advanced snoop-snatch-record technology that taxpayer money could buy. Smelling a huge profit opportunity there was no shortage of vendors peddling everything from handi-cams to pole-mounted all-seeing video “eyes.”

We first ran into members of this group during the tumultuous street demonstrations that accompanied the 2004 Republican National Convention where we dogged some TARU cops who had strategically placed themselves where protesters were gathering (and protesting). Finding a few, we started asking questions and hoped for a response.

One TARU cop expressed amusement that I actually knew what the moniker stood for. Another officer—filmed at a demonstration in 2005 bearing a video camera on a tripod—remained grim-faced but did respond, and his response spoke volumes about the nature of police surveillance:

“If you’re not doing anything wrong, there is nothing to be frightened about.”

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, screengrab from Pacific Street’s video, Red Squad follow-ups]

There is some ambiguity involving TARU’s support of the Intelligence Agencies’ mission and how the information gathered is stored and used, especially given the requirements of the Handschu settlement. A 2023 report issued by the Office of the Inspector General offered these conclusions (highlights added).

OIG-NYPD’s findings include:

While the Patrol Guide requires retention of TARU footage for no less than one and no more than three years, in the absence of certain specified reasons or “any specific purpose,” such footage in fact is never destroyed. NYPD takes the position that this approach serves the “specific purpose” of transparency, so that such footage is available if required for civil and criminal discovery, for oversight agencies, or in the event of a Freedom of Information Law (“FOIL”) request. The Patrol Guide’s broad language, however, gives no guidance as to the nature of the “specific purpose” that would justify indefinite retention, or the factors that should impact that decision. Furthermore, the NYPD’s consistent practice of indefinite retention in all case [sic] renders the specified reasons for extended retention in the Patrol Guide essentially moot.
While TARU has been capturing footage since at least 1998, TARU did not maintain any tracking system of TARU’s footage until 2012. Furthermore, until May 2020, NYPD did not maintain a log of the footage held in TARU’s repository.
While it appears that Intel’s access to TARU’s materials has been handled consistently with the Revised Handschu Guidelines as a matter of practice, NYPD currently lacks written policy or procedure governing that access.
TARU request logs generally provide only a boilerplate explanation for the need for TARU’s capabilities, and in some cases, the logs do not provide any explanation.
Based on the findings from this examination, OIG-NYPD issued eight recommendations:

NYPD should require in a written policy that TARU notify the Legal Bureau of any requests from the Intelligence Bureau for access to TARU footage.
NYPD should require in a written policy that the Legal Bureau process any requests from the Intelligence Bureau for access to TARU footage in accordance with the Revised Handschu Guidelines.
NYPD should revise Patrol Guide Procedure 212–71 to more accurately reflect NYPD’s approach to TARU record retention. If the Department intends to continue its indefinite retention of all video/photographic materials the policy should clearly state that position, and explain the purpose of indefinite retention, as well as any other purposes for which materials can be retained, and the appropriate length of any such retention.
NYPD should create an index/log for the over two decades of video/photographic footage that was captured prior to May 2020, when the Department began consistently cataloging and indexing such footage.
NYPD should replace the current hard copy logbook and content lists which catalogue the video/photographic material collected by TARU (its practice since May 2020) with an electronic tracking system that would enable more efficient searches for particular footage in TARU’s library.
NYPD should revise NYPD Patrol Guide Procedure 212–71 to address the circumstances in which TARU can be deployed without the requisite preauthorization from NYPD’s Legal Bureau, and in which retroactive authorization can be granted.
NYPD should revise NYPD Patrol Guide Procedure 212–71 to require that TARU request logs identify the specific basis and rationale for TARU’s request to be present and record at a public gathering, instead of using boilerplate language.
NYPD should require that TARU request logs specify what types of video/photographic technology is sought.
While accepting some recommendations, the NYPD rejected others.

FAST FORWARD: August 2024. The Handschu Committee’s Annual Report—mandated by the Federal class action lawsuit—reveals that the NYPD has, indeed, availed itself of information sent by “third party vendors.” Sound familiar? In particular, look at the qualifier, “to the NYPD’s knowledge, these third-party algorithms are not disparately impacting certain groups.”

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[Source: Photo courtesy of Joel Sucher, Sixth Annual Report of the Civilian Representative to the New York City Police Department’s Handschu Committee, p. 9]

Well, welcome to the Brave New World of “Predictive Policing.” It is where Science Fiction meets Science Fact and where algorithms drive lead-generated police investigations.

No longer are the NYPD’s gumshoes hiding out in hotel rooms listening to bugs they have planted via crappy, old Kel-Coms. The modern Red Squad detective is fixed to a computer screen watching algorithms make—in essence—criminal predictions.

We have turned a page; one Philip K. Dick wrote about in his dystopian 1956 novel, Minority Report. (made into a compelling 2002 film, starring Tom Cruise).

Through some 50 years of investigating the NYPD’s Intelligence Division we have revealed that there is nothing too imponderable that would have their members turn a blind eye to. As the digital world grows more complex the sales pitches from tech startups become more and more sophisticated, going beyond mere drones, eclipsing Pegasus cell phone software, facial recognition and license plate readers which are now de rigueur in China.

China is a true 1984 world where one can find the future of surveillance translated into social control where, literally, points are deducted if you are late to pay a bill or jaywalk; yes, it is a scheme to turn the population into good, obedient boys and girls.

Take the case of Voyager Labs, an outfit that claims it can make the invisible visible; finding connections between people, places, organizations using all sorts of proprietary algorithms to connect the dots and come up with a picture of who might do what to whom (and where).

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[Source: voyager-labs.com]

Does predicting criminal activity really amount to preventing a crime? Will a snoop be able to see someone walking down the street and figure he/she has some contraband joints packed away based on scraping their social media platforms?

Beginning in 2018, with a $9 million grant to Voyager Labs, the NYPD waded into this controversial world of social media snooping and the Brennan Center, among others, has sued the NYPD to reveal its online surveillance practices and see what millions of dollars have bought in the way of social media analysis tools.

Voyager has already found itself in federal court responding to claims that the company created 55,000 fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram, collecting data “to uncover … behavior patterns,” “infer human behavior” and “build a comprehensive presence” on their target(s).

Apart from the NYPD other major police departments, including Los Angeles, have swallowed the Voyager corporate spiel, hook, line and sinker, but it is not only Voyager that is offering surveillance technologies for sale; it is a booming, competitive, worldwide business.

There is Cobwebs Technologies, an Israeli-based group composed of ex-intelligence military types, that has been the subject of controversy in New Zealand for allowing its technology to sweep the social history of ordinary Kiwis.

New kids on the block include Cellebrite—with the tag line “accelerate justice”—that offers all sorts of analytic tools to do just that and maybe get ahead of the judicial process. Technology does seem to be taking the lead while “justice” may seem to be tagging along.

AI is a cop’s dream come true and, let’s face it, despite the claims that guardrails will prevent that paddy wagon from veering off the prescribed path the temptation to dip law enforcement toes in the toxic surveillance river is, well, tempting. Through the years Handschu oversight has resulted in numerous cases brought back to federal court when Red Squad agents were caught violating the agreement leaving their heavy hands exposed.

In monitoring the 2005 RNC demonstrations, for instance, a police helicopter was caught dawdling above an apartment house using its infrared camera to capture an oblivious couple in a fond embrace. All captured as part of an amusing short video we called, Ray Kelly’s Surveillance City.

Third-party vendors have come a long way since the days of the Church League of America. There is a lot of money at stake today, with new vendors popping up peddling new technologies to police departments, big, small and everything in-between. So…be scared, be very scared.

Perhaps, Bob Dylan should tiptoe down to the Tamiment Library at NYU and request the file that bears his name.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... nce-state/
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 19, 2024 2:57 pm

CNN’s reporting reaches new level of farce. What should its new CEO do?

Martin Jay

December 19, 2024

Where was the tipping point for CNN which now no longer has any credibility as a decent news outlet on the world stage, it once had in the early days?

CNN’s recent report in Damascus by Clarissa Ward deserves an award. But not a press award for its astute journalism, more of a Hollywood one for its almost comical parody. Mark Thompson, CNN’s new British CEO might be disturbed by Ward’s hilarious reportage as it not only comes across as fake, but as it transpires later, it stank of just mere amateurism. The new boss at Atlanta has his work cut out trying to bring back ratings to a network which has been a victim of its success from its former glory years. The bigger you are, the harder you fall, he might argue. What this Irishman, who calls himself a Brit, needs is a bit of the old luck associated with the emerald Isle.

Where was the tipping point for CNN which now no longer has any credibility as a decent news outlet on the world stage, it once had in the early days? And what is at the core which has led to now millions of humble people on social media being so attuned to its news reports which are so obviously faked? When watching Ward’s piece on the prisoner – who turned out to be an ex intel officer who was banged up due to a vendetta carried out against him by a senior officer – one is left with a dilemma. Are you disappointed by the fact that you are being lied to by a media outlet which is going to such extraordinary lengths to continue Israel’s fake news strategy? Or are you vexed, perhaps as journalists, at how amateur and clumsy the last minute amdram work is, like watching out takes of a British comedy show of soldiers singing on a stage to entertain battle weary soldiers of the British empire? Some mothers really do ‘ave ‘em, he might mutter to himself after watching Ward’s report but for sure our man will have thought also of 90s TV parody mock news show The Day Today which had one actress playing Barbara Wintergreen, an American reporter working for a network called CBN – sketches which mocked American style reporting and how contrived and corrupted its final version was.

Thompson has a real problem at CNN. He is learning after one year or so in the job that trying to rebuild credibility is very hard, even in the fatuous, almost satirical world of international news. Thompson’s biggest problem is that CNN has become so bad, that it has actually become parody or satire. Barbara Wintergreen has literally returned to our screens at Ward. CNN has become a joke and is becoming a liability for its paying masters. Decades of internal corruption coupled with a bigger geopolitical agenda which includes serving Israel’s interests have led to this cancer spreading so far, so quickly.

Ward herself has a terrible reputation for her on-screen drama. But who could blame her when the amateurism and fakery has been so well established for her? There are just too many examples of CNN staging the news in the most shameful theatrical way in recent months in Gaza just to make the point. But a recent report which centred on a work roster, written in Arabic and posted on the wall of a Gaza hospital, should have been a warning to all of us who the real powers are at CNN and what the game is. Fake news on a scale which we haven’t seen before. Indeed, it may well be that Israel and its lobby are patting themselves on the back for making CNN the world leader in fake news. The report of the Gaza hospital was shocking in that even the local CNN Palestinian fixer translated the paper for the journalist Nic Robertson who chose to accept the ludicrous claims of the IDF soldier in preference to the simple axiomatic truth under his nose.

There are just too many of these examples to list. Interns are resigning and exposing them like Ana Maria Monjardino in this excellent piece which should worry Thompson. Other big media outlets are actually feasting on CNN’s dirty work and exposing it for hundreds of millions to see for themselves, like Al Jazeera’s excellent documentary Failing Gaza: Pro-Israel bias uncovered behind the lens of Western media.

The real problem of Thompson is the extent of the rot and how corruption internally drives an agenda which encourages journalists of all ages and calibre to pump out these shocking lies on an hourly basis. In a nutshell, it is a culture.

I experienced it firsthand in 2011 when I worked for CNN as a freelance journalist and producer just how even CNN’s own staff had an almost cultish following for this and, in private, an absolute revulsion of the craft of journalism and its tenets.

In Morocco I was threatened over the telephone by CNN’s international editor, a Palestinian Christian – who, with bottom quivering lip and whispering into her mouthpiece of her telephone told me that if I complained about the lack of ethics or professionalism once more to other CNN employees, she would personally “destroy” me.

She kept her word. After the threat she tolerated me one more time with an abysmal display of office corruption by helping her Jewish friend Elise Labott – a producer at that time – to come to Morocco in 2011 and make a news package, entirely for the purposes of showcasing her work to CNN bosses so as to gain promotion to become a journalist. Labott was hopelessly underqualified to make a report about Morocco and relied on pillow talk bigotry from an UAE diplomat living in Rabat who convinced her that the Moroccan king was “clinging on to power”. Watching her crash and burn on an hourly basis was like watching your five-year old try to configure your smart TV. Not overburdened with neither intelligence nor any real skill-set, Labott was a spoof journalist who you couldn’t imagine ever being let out of the office to even cover a FEMEN boobs out photo op demo. Labott redefined the word ‘useless’.

She was to journalism what Ryanair is to luxury travel, what a Status Quo cover band is to haut couture. She was as suited or as comfortable with journalism as a reggae band at a KKK convention.

But this is CNN where dreams can come true. Her ineptitude was literally the antithesis of journalism in the form of a bellowing New York Jewish monster from the black lagoon. But Elise had one trick up her sleeve. She arrived in Morocco with the story already written and while I had to wind down the window of my car to try and quell her 12 decibel brawl which I feared might damage my eardrums, she, in her enthusiasm managed to break in half the door handle of my beloved beemah. In two pieces.

Labott shocked me over many days. Her record-breaking amateurism and rank zeal to not only get the job done but to pack as many lies into the report as possible, was impressive. A group of riot police mooching about chatting among themselves while a few hundred ‘protestors’ in Casablanca stood within a meter of them during a pause was an opportunity to film police brutality. She wanted me to make the police move so that I could film some ‘action’ and make it look like third world police attacking those standing for democracy. You know the sort of thing. This was trumped by a stunt the following day which was so unethical, I had to call the nephew of CNN’s boss Tony Maddox and report it. Labott was so desperate to show that she had come journalistic credibility that she stole, wholesale, an article from me which she put her name to on the CNN website. I complained. It was taken down. But no one at Atlanta was shocked. Was this normal?

The outstanding moment which rests with me to this day is not how deceitful the CNN lawyers were to me – they lied of course – after they finally agreed to investigate my allegations against her for unethical journalistic practice. It was not even the speed at which Labott had me fired when I refused point blank to do the “king Mohamed clinging onto power line” in the report. It was really her brazen lack of any professional shame for completely making up an entire narrative in a report and hoping to fake it with creative camerawork – and perhaps even more her response.

She simply explained to me that all the giants at CNN – including Christiane Amanpour, Anderson Cooper and CNN’s then VP Parisa Khosravi “all made up their reports when they travelled outside of the U.S.” and that I was somewhat naïve not to understand this.

It’s the corruption internally which protects those stars of course from any fact checking and disciplinary actions. This also was remarkable about Labott who, to my reckoning, was investigated three times at CNN for unethical reporting – largely, I would assume, as she was a fledgling and not important enough to leave alone. Her tawdry approach to help Hillary Clinton was finally her downfall and probably embarrassed the stars there although it was CNN bosses who initially sent her to Israel – following my case and her one and only Morocco report which trashed the king and lied about the Marrakech bomb, linking it to Al Qaeda when she knew there was no evidence whatsoever to substantiate such a wild claim. It seems at CNN if you lie well and serve Israel’s interests, there is only one way the network can take you, even if you are so useless you can’t even get dressed in the morning without help from a neighbour.

Naturally Labott was promoted and got her dream job as a journalist.

But was she protected by Israel? Impossible to say but her final departure was extremely low key with only one member of CNN’s vast team of presenters and journalists wishing her good luck as she left Atlanta, Wolf Blitzer, also a Zionist. Labott was literally the shining example of how far a joke can be taken, someone of such poor journalist ability it makes those around her pity her rank ineptitude. The point is that there is no fact checking at CNN as this goes against the cosy internal political working practice. If there were, Labott would never made it as a journalist and the stars who have on-screen presence would be forced to occasionally look at the odd fact that is chucked their way. Of course many will still blunder on with their sensational ignorance like the buffoonish Ben-get-me-outtah-here-im-so-shit Wedeman who, wait for it, during a live piece to camera during the days following the Beirut port bomb referred to the port as southwest to his own location in the centre of Beirut (it was northeast) and also stated that nearly all of Lebanon’s debt was “foreign”. Du’er. Wrong again Ben. It was domestic. Try harder.

The standard of on-screen reporting is brain dead deplorable. You might as well recruit your journos from the poorest neighbourhoods in white trash small towns where people’s level of education is limited to just a few hundred words in English and their knowledge of the world comes from the Simpsons. Oh wait, that’s what Atlanta does.

It’s so bad that it encourages the truly hopeless like Labott to come to the fore.

The Labott episode made me think a lot over the years. Could she have been right in her defence? Is everything that CNN does around the world basically to serve Israel’s agenda? Surely by now Mark Thompson must be realising that the kind of internal corruption which protected, nay encouraged Labott for so long to make fake news reports for Israel must be looked at in context. Ward’s reports have no credibility whatsoever as the world has woken up to what CNN is. Deplorably amateur at best, wicked propaganda at worse. Thompson will need more than Irish luck to give it any credibility. He will need a miracle as it’s only a matter of time now that the spoofed videos get more traffic than the real ones. It’s only a matter of time before Hollywood bangs the last nail in the coffin with a spoof movie about its so-called reporters working in the war zones. Think Tropic Thunder with Alec Baldwin playing a middle aged Ben–where-the-fuck-am-I Wedeman whose rounded torso is draped in Khaki jacket with the extra large pockets, walking around a Middle Eastern capital, lost, unable to get back to his own hotel without a team of fixers sent for him. Or Clarissa Ward played by Julia Roberts dropping to the floor when the fixer’s mobile phone gets a notification. I wonder who would play the hapless Labott?

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/ ... ew-ceo-do/

******

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Where Does The Aggression Really Begin?

The empire’s favorite trick is to begin the historical record at the moment its enemies retaliate against its abuses.

Caitlin Johnstone
December 19, 2024

New York prosecutors have charged Luigi Mangione with “murder as an act of terrorism” in his alleged shooting of health insurance CEO Brian Thompson earlier this month.

This news comes out at the same time as a Haaretz report titled “‘No Civilians. Everyone’s a Terrorist’: IDF Soldiers Expose Arbitrary Killings and Rampant Lawlessness in Gaza’s Netzarim Corridor.” The report contains testimony from Israeli troops that civilians are being murdered in Gaza and are then being retroactively designated as terrorists to justify their execution.

“We’re killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists,” a recently discharged officer told Haaretz.

These two stories together say so much about the way the label “terrorist” is used under the US-centralized power umbrella.

The guy who shot the health insurance CEO is a terrorist, but the people systematically slaughtering civilians in Gaza are not terrorists. The people fighting against those who are slaughtering the civilians are terrorists, and noncombatants are being categorized as belonging to this terrorist organization in order to justify killing them. The al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria were terrorists, but now they’re a US puppet regime so soon they won’t be terrorists — but they need to be designated terrorists for a little while longer because the claim that Syria is crawling with terrorists is Israel’s justification for its recent land grabs there. The Uyghur militant group ETIM used to be a terrorist group, but now they’re not a terrorist group because they can be used to help carve up Syria and maybe fight China later on. The IRGC is a military wing of a sovereign nation, but it counts as a terrorist group because of vibes or something.

Is that clear enough?

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Really the label “terrorist” is nothing more than a tool of imperial narrative control which gets moved around based on whether or not someone’s use of violence is deemed legitimate by the managers of the empire. Because Mangione’s alleged crime has ignited a public interest in class warfare, the label “terrorism” is being used to frame it as an especially heinous act of evil against an innocent member of the public.

The empire’s favorite trick is to begin the historical record at the moment its enemies retaliate against its abuses. Oh no, a health insurance CEO was victimized by an evil act of terrorism. Oh no, Israel was just innocently minding its own business when it was viciously attacked by Hamas. Oh no, Iran attacked Israel completely out of the blue and now Israel must retaliate. Oh no, Russia just launched an entirely unprovoked war on Ukraine.

Everything that led up to the unauthorized act of violence is erased from the record, because all of the violence, provocation and abuse which gave rise to the unauthorized act of violence were authorized by the empire. Authorized aggression doesn’t count as aggression.

Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. If you control the narrative you can control not only when the historical record of violence begins but what kinds of violence qualify as violence. Killing people by depriving them of healthcare because denying healthcare services is how your company increases its profit margins? That’s not violence. Inflicting tyranny and abuse upon a deliberately marginalized ethnic group in an apartheid state? That’s not violence. Violence is when you respond to those forceful aggressions with forceful aggressions of your own.


If we are to become a healthy society, we’re going to have to stop allowing some forms of violence, aggression and abuse to be redacted from the official records while others are listed and condemned. Those who care about truth and justice account for all forms of violence, aggression and abuse, not only those which inconvenience the rich and powerful.

It is an act of aggression to do things which sicken and impoverish others in order to advance your own wealth.

It is an act of aggression to pollute the biosphere we all depend on for survival in order to increase your profit margins.

It is an act of aggression to use your wealth to manipulate your nation’s politics in ways which exacerbate inequality and injustice.

It is an act of aggression to maintain an apartheid state which cannot exist without nonstop violence.

It is an act of aggression to surround the earth with military bases and encircle nations which disobey your dictates.

It is an act of aggression to try to rule the world using military violence, proxy conflicts, staged coups, threats, starvation sanctions, and financial and economic coercion.

These are all acts of aggression, and any retaliation against them will never be an unprovoked attack. As we move into the future while these abuses exacerbate, it’s going to become very important to maintain an acute awareness of this.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/12 ... lly-begin/

In the late 19th century 'terrorism' was an admitted tactic of colonial powers, that's what the newspapers of the time called the savagery unleashed on civilians in colonized nations. And it was thought acceptable because 'violence was the only thing the savages understood. Besides, it was for their own good.' Nowadays no major media calls the murder of civilians by military means terrorism. How's that for progress?
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Dec 24, 2024 2:26 pm

U.S. Media Ignored How CIA’s Operation Timber Sycamore Paved the Way For the Syrian “Revolution”
By Jeremy Kuzmarov - December 23, 2024 0

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[Source: greatgameindia.com]

Part of a pattern of media omissions and deception in its coverage of Syria

On December 8, 2024, Syria’s long-standing ruler Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia after being deposed by Sunni militia forces in what New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman called the “biggest…most game-changing event in the Middle East in the last 45 years.”[1]

Friedman was enthusiastic about the regime change, though Syria’s new head of state, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, had a $10 million bounty placed on his head by the U.S. State Department in 2017 as a wanted terrorist.[2]

The “blazer-wearing revolutionary,” as CNN called him,[3] had been imprisoned from 2006 to 2011 at Abu Ghraib and other U.S. military prisons for supporting al-Qaeda in Iraq.

Colin P. Clarke, a counterterrorism analyst at a security consulting firm in New York was quoted in The New York Times as stating that, under Jolani’s rule, northwest Syria was “a harsh place where critics are silenced, tortured, jailed and disappeared.”[4] Hookahs and music were also banned, as they were under the Taliban in Afghanistan.[5]

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[Source: unz.com]

Unperturbed by all that, the Biden administration expressed elation at Assad’s downfall, stating afterwards that Syria now faced a “historic opportunity for peace” and ”the establishment of a new Syrian state…at long last the Assad regime has fallen.”[6]

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Fleet of cars allegedly found in Assad’s garage publicized in London’s Daily Mail. [Source: dailymail.co.uk]

U.S. media echoed Biden’s triumphalism and became filled with stories about ghastly atrocities allegedly carried out by Assad and the gaudy riches that his family had supposedly accumulated.[7]

Ignored were reports of field executions by Syria’s new Islamist rulers, desecration of ancient shrines, and house-to-house searches of Assad supporters susceptible to revenge attacks.[8]

The Al-Nusra Front and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham under Jolani’s leadership had perpetrated suicide bombings and sectarian cleansing massacres against Shia Muslims, Druze and Alawites during the 2012-2017 phases of the Syrian civil war, which were also not discussed.[9]

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[Source: bbc.com]

A New York Times article by Neil MacFarquhar characteristically entitled “The Assad Family’s Legacy Is One of Savage Oppression” compared the Assads to the fictional Corleone Mafia family and quoted from a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Andrew J. Tabler, who stated that the Assads “cared nothing about the Syrian people. They launched Scud missiles against their own people —who does that?—while the chemical weapons were a sign of just how far they would go to hold on to power.”

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Neil Macfarquhar [Source: freshfiction.com]

The article further quoted from a former college friend of Assad who joined the opposition out of disgust over the lack of reform, who said that “they were not running a country with a history of 5,000 years of civilization. They were running it like the Mafia, as if it was a private estate, the whole country was their backyard inherited from their father.”[10]

Reappropriating Orientalist stereotypes of Middle Eastern rulers as despotic and savage, MacFarquhar’s piece advanced disinformation about chemical weapons attacks that had been disproven years ago by MIT scientist Theodore Postol, a weapons adviser to the U.S. Navy’s Chief of Operations, and journalist Seymour Hersh, among others.[11]

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Theodore Postol [Source: eir.news]

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Seymour Hersh [Source: salon.com]

The Times article further obscures the factors underlying the Assad dynasty’s durability, though does acknowledge that Syria was “known as the most unstable country in the Middle East after War War II” with “at least eight coups carried out right before Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970.”[12]

The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed in the wake of Assad’s downfall by reporter Sune Engel Rasmussen that celebrated the “Syrian revolution” for “dealing a historic blow to Iran.” Rasmussen wrote that Iran had “spent decades and billions of dollars building a network of militias and governments that allowed it to exercise political and military influence across the Middle East,” however, in a “matter of weeks, the pillars of that alliance came crashing down, with the fall of Bashar al-Assad serving as Iran’s latest strategic catastrophe.”[13]

Rasmussen continued to note that Syria under Assad’s leadership had provided Iran with land access to Hezbollah, the centerpiece of its self-labeled “axis of resistance” which, thanks to Tehran’s support became the world’s best-armed non-state actor, but was now effectively dismantled.

In Rasmussen’s assessment, Israeli policy since October 7 could now be considered a great success as, “in more than a year of attacks, Israel has devastated Hamas, Iran’s main Palestinian ally…killed most of the leadership of Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that is Iran’s most powerful ally, and sent its surviving top commanders into hiding. Assad’s toppling [further] destroys the entire front line of Iran’s so-called ‘forward defense.’”

Amazingly, Rasmussen’s triumphalist account attempted to rebrand Israeli military aggression and crimes that have resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of people—most of whom were women and children—as a “strategic success.”

Rasmussen pays no heed at all to the historical factors that fueled the rise of Hamas and Hezbollah and massive human suffering Israeli policies have caused. Nor to the U.S. empowerment of the al-Qaeda-linked jihadists in Syria or the danger of a war with Iran.

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Sune Engel Rasmussen [Source: wsj.com]

The callous disregard for human welfare extends to Syria itself, whose population has suffered from biblical-scale calamities engendered by a civil war triggered by outsiders and as a result of the imposition of draconian sanctions designed to devastate Syria’s economy so that they would turn against the Assad government.

In 2023, more than 609,000 Syrian children under the age of five were stunted from chronic undernutrition; 12 million Syrians did not have enough food to meet daily dietary needs; 6.9 million people were internally displaced; and an estimated 90% of Syrians were living in poverty. Dr. Hizla al-Assad said that the U.S. war and sanctions had threatened to turn life in Syria back to the Stone Age.[14]

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[Source: voanews.com]

Most revealingly, the fact absent in U.S. media accounts was that the U.S. had engaged in a 13-year regime change operation that started with the Arab Spring and continued with the launching of Operation Timber Sycamore by the Obama administration, the largest covert operation since the CIA’s support for the Afghan mujahadin in the 1980s.

The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and even alternative media outlets like Democracy Now, made it seem like Assad had fallen suddenly and organically as a result of a popular rebellion and that this was a cause for celebration.[15] They avoided any mention of the $1 billion Operation Timber Sycamore.

Blogger Caitlin Johnstone wrote: “We’re all meant to pretend this was a 100 percent organic uprising driven solely and exclusively by the people of Syria despite years and years of evidence to the contrary” and the fact that the “U.S. power alliance [encompassing Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar] crush[ed] Syria using proxy warfare, starvation sanctions, constant bombing operations, and a military occupation explicitly designed to cut Syria off from oil and wheat in order to prevent its reconstruction after the [W]estern-backed civil war.”[16]

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Caitlin Johnstone [Source: thefreedomcycle.com]

The U.S. regime-change operation in Syria had been openly advertised years earlier when General Wesley Clark was told during a visit at the Pentagon after 9/11 that “we’re going to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years—we’re going to start with Iraq, and then we’re going to move to Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran.”[17]

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General Wesley Clark [Source: commons.wikimedia.org]

The ultimate geostrategic goal was for the U.S. and Israel to dominate the Middle East, access its rich oil resources, and profit from construction of a $10 billion Qatari oil pipeline passing through Syria that would transport natural gas into Europe, help isolate the Russians, and give the U.S. greater leverage over European politics.[18]

The methods that were utilized to oust Assad fit a long-standing regime-change playbook that had been applied by the U.S. in many countries around the world, including Ukraine and Libya.

The targets for U.S. regime change are inevitably leaders who are independent nationalists intent on resisting U.S. corporate penetration of their country and challenging U.S. global hegemony.

Bashar al-Assad fit the bill for the latter because he has stood up to Israel, aligned closely with Iran and Russia, and adopted nationalistic economic policies.

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[Source: france24.com]

A pivotal strike against him was his refusal to construct the Trans-Arabian Qatari pipeline through Syria, and his endorsement instead of a Russian-approved “Islamic” pipeline running from Iran’s side of the gas field through Syria and to the ports of Lebanon.

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[Source: alessandrobacci.com]

According to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., this latter pipeline would make “Shiite Iran, not Sunni Qatar, the principal supplier to the European energy market” and “dramatically increase [Iran]’s influence in the Middle East and the world”—which the U.S. and Israel would not allow.[19]

Operation Timber Sycamore
Secretly inaugurated by President Barack Obama in 2013,[20] Operation Timber Sycamore was run by the CIA’s Special Activities Division with support from British, Qatari, Saudi and Jordanian intelligence services and the Pentagon. Secret teams were trained at U.S. military bases in Jordan and Turkey where they were prepared for infiltration into Syria.

Weaponry dispensed under the operation, including rocket-propelled grenades, tank-destroying missiles and Kalashnikov assault rifles, consistently ended up in the hands of UN-recognized terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda and IS which summarily executed prisoners and committed other violations of the rules of armed conflict, as was reported in The New York Times.

A military history website noted that a major unintended consequence of Timber Sycamore was to “flood the Middle East’s black market with weapons.”[21]

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Armed by the CIA. [Source: youtube.com]
The staunchest supporter of Timber Sycamore and regime-change operations in Syria was CIA Director John Brennan, who was extremely close with President Obama.[22]

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Obama and Brennan—plotting murder and mayhem around in the world from the Oval Office. [Source: nytimes.com]

U.S. military personnel deployed to Syria directly included Special Forces, engineering experts and medical and psychological warfare teams who were supplied through a network of small airstrips set up on Syrian soil which received MC-130 and CV-22 transports.[23]

Small numbers of U.S. troops embedded with rebel counterparts—including the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF)—and called in air strikes from U.S. bases in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, and other countries.[24]

According to researcher A. B. Abrams, the U.S. was “in effect invading Syria to seize a portion of its territory and was doing so in a much more subtle and cost-free way than prior operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Grenada, Panama or other target states.”[25]

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An FSA combatant of the Jesus Christ Brigade prepares to launch an American-made anti-tank BGM-71 TOW missile. [Source: en.wikipedia.org]

The CIA effort involved a “rat line” to run weapons from Libya (attacked by NATO in 2011) to the jihadists in Syria. In 2014, Seymour Hersh described the operation in his piece “The Red Line and the Rat Line”:

“A secret agreement reached in early 2012 between the Obama and Erdoğan administrations… pertained to the rat line. By the terms of the agreement, funding came from Turkey, as well as Saudi Arabia and Qatar; the CIA, with the support of MI6, was responsible for getting arms from Gaddafi’s arsenals into Syria.”

In 2012, the UN had negotiated a peace agreement in Syria that was blocked by the Obama administration, which demanded that Assad must go on the first day of the peace agreement.

The U.S. wanted regime change, not peace, and now they have achieved it—at a tremendous cost to the Syrian people.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/1 ... evolution/

(Notes at link.)
"There is great chaos under heaven; the situation is excellent."

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Thu Dec 26, 2024 2:47 pm

Washington’s Unstoppable Superweapon
Posted by Internationalist 360° on December 23, 2024
Brian Berletic

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As geopolitical tensions escalate, the U.S. wields its most formidable weapon—not military might, but a sophisticated network of political and informational control that reshapes nations and regions to serve its interests.

In recent months, even across the collective West’s media, growing admissions are being made about both Russia and China’s superior military industrial capacity. With Russia’s first use of the intermediate-range ballistic missile, the Oreshnik, it is admitted that Russia (and likely China) possess formidable military capabilities the collective West currently lacks.

Despite the collective efforts of NATO in arming, training, and backing Ukraine, Ukrainian forces continue to give ground at an accelerated rate across the entire line of contact amid the ongoing Russian Special Military Operation (SMO).

Yet, even as this new paradigm sinks in, the US has demonstrated it still possesses a powerful and so far unparalleled and yet unanswered superweapon. It used it to create conditions across the Arab World to slowly and steadily hollow out both the Syrian economy and the Syrian Arab Army resulting in the total collapse of both in mid-December 2024 after years of staving off US-backed terrorists attempting to overrun the country.

Not only did the Syrian economy, army, and thus government collapse, many across the world cheered on as UN-listed terrorist organizations seized power in Damascus and publicly carried out atrocities in Syria’s streets against ethnic, religious, and political opponents.

All of this is owed to Washington’s unanswered “superweapon” and its control over global information and political space.

Washington’s Superweapon: Political Interference, Capture, and Control

Not as glamorous as an Oreshnik missile, Washington’s superweapon is, in fact, many times more powerful and more difficult to defend against.

Beginning as regime-change operations carried out by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it has transformed over the years into what is now known as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED*).

The NED oversees a network of subsidiaries (Freedom House, the International Republican Institute (IRI), and the National Democratic Institute (NDI)) as well as adjacent government organizations (USAID*) and private foundations (Open Society, Omidyar Network) which fund hundreds of organizations, projects, opposition groups, and political parties on every inhabited continent on Earth.

The Middle East: Setting the Battlefield for War with Iran

In recent years, it trained armies of agitators years ahead of the 2011 “Arab Spring” to return to their home nations and overthrow their respective governments. The political turmoil these US-backed agitators created was leveraged by likewise US-backed armed extremists to violently depose governments that refused to cave to political pressure.

While the NED’s own website claims it “promotes freedom around the world,” its political interference has destabilized and destroyed entire nations and even whole regions of the planet, leading to hundreds of thousands of dead and millions displaced. What is left of these nations is rendered into an internally warring failed state or a client regime serving Washington’s interests entirely at the expense of the targeted nation’s own best interests – sometimes a combination of both.

The region itself is taking a very deliberate shape aimed at encircling, isolating, and eventually targeting and toppling the nations of Iran, which represents the center of resistance to US hegemony in the region.

NED in Europe: Creating a “Democratic” Russia

Another example is Ukraine. Efforts by the US NED* to overthrow an independent and neutral Ukraine began as early as 2004, the Guardian would report. An identical operation would repeat itself again in 2014, this time succeeding. It included not only NED*-funded political agitators, but also armed extremists including Neo-Nazis joined on stage by US senators cheering them on in Kiev.

The purpose of NED*-funded political interference undermining the political independence of targeted nations is not only to politically capture the nation itself, but cobble it together with other captured states within the region to form a unified front against Washington’s chief adversaries.

In Europe, this adversary is clearly Russia.

Damon Wilson, as executive vice president of the Atlantic Council before joining the NED* as president and CEO, would talk about eliminating what he called “grey zones of insecurity” between NATO and Russia. These “grey zones” are simply neutral nations that provide a buffer between NATO and Russia.

Wilson admitted in remarks made at the Atlantic Council in 2018 that:

The strategy is not meant to create new dividing lines in Europe. The aim is to anchor a vulnerable insecure zone in the certainty of a stable and prosperous and free Europe, and over the long-term, this vision includes a democratic Russia.

But the pathway to reform in Moscow might just begin with choices that are made in Kiev, Chișinău, Yerevan, and Tbilisi.


This is an admission of intent. The overthrow and political capture of Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, and Georgia are meant to further encircle and isolate Russia, removing any buffer zone between NATO and Russia before eventually overthrowing and politically capturing Russia itself.

A “democratic Russia” is a euphemism for a Russia subjugated under US-NATO-imposed “democracy” controlled and administered by NED*-funded organizations, media platforms, institutions, and political parties.

The remarks Wilson made in 2018 have translated not only into US-NATO policy vis-à-vis Russia, but also into action within the NED* Wilson now serves as president and CEO of.

The NED in Asia: Creating a United Front Against China

The NED’s* “Asia” webpage, now stripped clean of the financial disclosures that propped up an illusion of “transparency,” boasts of over 338 projects operating in 16 countries, receiving at least 51.7 million USD in fiscal year 2023 alone.

It openly admits to involving itself in the region’s elections, the building of opposition parties, and even promoting separatism.

The page refers to what is recognized under international law as Xinjiang, China as “East Turkistan,” a non-existent entity claimed by the “East Turkistan Government in Exile,” created and based in Washington D.C.

US government support for separatism in China is a blatant violation of the UN Charter which under Article 2 states, “all Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.”

Not only does the US government harbor separatists in Washington D.C., through the NED it funds a number of organizations who openly seek separatism. This includes the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), a US NED grantee, which openly states on its website that, “the WUC declares a nonviolent and peaceful opposition movement against Chinese occupation of East Turkistan.”

The WUC, funded by the US government through the NED, is openly conspiring to violate international law by seeking to separate Xinjiang from China. While the WUC claims it seeks to do this as a “peaceful opposition movement,” it is separatism nonetheless dovetailing into violent terrorism carried out by militant Uyghur separatists like the “East Turkistan Islamic Movement” (ETIM) currently based in Syria, having spent years fighting alongside UN-listed terrorist organization Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (aka Jabhat Al Nusra), and now openly vowing to target China, the Telegraph recently reported.

The NED’s current “Asia” webpage makes it abundantly clear that its efforts aren’t focused solely on the political capture of individual nations across Asia, but that it seeks to create a regional united front against China.

Under the euphemisms of “promoting democratic unity,” the NED* declares:

China’s rise as a regional and global power and its economic leverage have made it a powerful benefactor to and influencer of regimes in the region. Using its considerable financial power, China has signaled that respect for democracy and human rights is not a prerequisite or even a desirable feature for any potential partners.

Recognizing the need to protect and uphold democratic values, the rule of law, and rules-based institutions, and to effectively push back against the growing illiberal trends in the region, Asian democracies are exploring how to cooperate and assume a greater responsibility in the defense and maintenance of internationally recognized norms and values.


It also says:

To that end, the NED* supports a variety of initiatives focused on bolstering democratic unity and cooperation among democratic nations in Asia, as well as strengthening and expanding regional solidarity and cooperation among democratic actors. Specifically, the NED* and the core institutes support partners in the region’s leading democracies to facilitate dialogue, build support, and promote greater leadership in defense of democratic norms and values. It supports regional networks of democracy and human rights activists and advocates that work to amplify democratic voices, facilitate exchanges, and strengthen regional solidarity around key democratic issues such as media freedom, free and fair elections, digital security and protection, and fundamental human rights.

All of this is a long-winded way of admitting the US NED* seeks to create a regional anti-China movement eagerly parroting US State Department disinformation targeting China, poisoning the region’s population against China, all while expanding Washington’s influence and control over all regions in Asia along China’s periphery just as it has done in Europe vis-a-vis Russia.

ICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), could lead efforts in standing up multipolar alternatives to US-based social media platforms the rest of the world can share information on beyond the reach of US and European censorship and manipulation. Currently, Russian and Chinese social media platforms are optimized for domestic, not international use.

Finally, BRICS could also lead initiatives in exposing and confronting US (and also European) interference by encouraging regional and national NGO transparency laws and creating forums that both expose this danger and support member states taking action to confront them through legislation. This includes providing protection against US threats, sanctions, and other coercive measures aimed at forcing targeted nations to submit to US political and information control.

All of these steps are aimed at enhancing national sovereignty and upholding the self-determination of nations across the multipolar world, in line with the core principles of the UN Charter. The US National Endowment for Democracy – even in name – poses as promoting “democracy” worldwide, yet democracy is a means of self-determination and everything the NED funds is determined by and for Washington, not the nations NED funding is flooding into.

The NED represents Washington’s greatest “superweapon.” Its ability to enter into and capture a nation’s political, information, and academic space circumvents even the greatest conventional armies standing in the way of US hegemony worldwide. It has participated in the destabilization and destruction of nations and regions across the globe, causing damage greater than any missile Russia can design and deploy. The future of a truly multipolar world depends on defending against all of Washington and Wall Street’s weapons, especially its most far-reaching and effective.

An example of how the US NED does this was the October 2020 “Beyond Boundaries” Facebook Live event targeting audiences in Thailand titled, “Situation of the Uyghurs in China And How We Can Help Them,” featuring former NED employee Louisa Greve, now “director of external affair for the Uyghur Human Rights Project,” an NED* grantee.

The moderators included Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal, a supposed “pro-democracy activist” who participated in and promoted NED-funded subversion aimed at Thailand itself.

The purpose of the Facebook Live event was to continue poisoning receptive Thais against China, despite the nation being Thailand’s largest trade partner, investor, source of tourism, and infrastructure partner, including the building of Thailand’s first high-speed rail line.

NED*-funded opposition groups have also focused on outright blocking Thai-Chinese cooperation, including the ongoing Thai-Chinese high-speed rail project. The most overt example of this was when billionaire opposition leader Thanathorn Juangroongruangkit travelled to the United States to meet with representatives of the US State Department and NED*-subsidiary Freedom House as well as Arizona-based Hyperloop One before returning to Thailand to condemn the Chinese-built high-speed rail project.

Thanathorn insisted Thailand should instead invest in now defunct “hyperloop technology.”

During one public presentation, Thanathorn would insist that, “I think over the past five years we have been giving too much importance to China. We want to reduce that and rebalance our relationship with Europe, with Japan, [and] with the US more.”

Thanathorn would lead NED-backed protests in the streets of Thailand after losing the 2019 Thai general elections. In later years his party performed better at the polls, owed to the NED’s corrosive effect across Thailand’s unprotected information space.

Today, both in Thailand and across the rest of Southeast Asia, despite China offering an objectively better future, the US still wields unwarranted influence because of the NED, the networks of subversive political opposition groups, media platforms, and even political parties it controls, placing the region’s otherwise bright future in a precarious position much like Ukraine’s prior to 2014.

With the Philippines already fully captured and utilized by the US to confront and pursue conflict with China, a rising Asia still faces the possibility of being plunged into regional war like both Europe and the Middle East.

Defending Against Washington’s Superweapon

Russia and China have both devised able defenses against this US “superweapon” of political capture.

Both nations either demand transparency from so-called “nongovernmental organizations” (NGOs) funded from abroad, or ban them altogether.

Both nations have also secured their respective information space – restricting or banning US-based social media platforms working together with the US State Department to manipulate public opinion and even national identity in targeted nations, and overseeing the flow of information with their own domestic social media platforms.

Both nations have robust domestic media industries promoting their own respective values as well as international media platforms that communicate their side of the story to global audiences.

What both nations have so far failed to do, however, is extended this expertise to partner nations.

Both nations already sell a wide array of defensive systems to partner nations to defend traditional national security domains including airspace, land borders, and shores. Neither has integrated the means of defending a nation’s information space into these exports. In fact, both nations have failed so far to communicate the critical need in the 21st century to defend a nation’s information space in the first place.

Russia and China could export turn-key social media networks nations could set up and oversee within their respective information spaces, displacing US-based networks and reasserting control over the flow of information within their own borders. This would allow nations and their people to decide what information can and cannot be shared, instead of deferring to Silicon Valley and their partners in the US State Department.

A similar package could be offered to help nations set up international media platforms like Russia’s RT or Sputnik and China’s CGTN as well as domestic educational pipelines for producing local journalists, educators, and future politicians and diplomats that reflect that nation’s best interests, not Washington’s and Wall Street’s interests as programs like the US State Department’s Fulbright and Young Leadership Initiatives do.

Russia and China, as key members of BR

At first glance, the NED and other US efforts to control political and information space around the globe don’t appear to be “weapons” at all. Upon closer inspection, they represent the most devastating “weapons of mass destruction” employed this 21st century. They represent a serious threat to global peace, stability, and prosperity. Equally, serious efforts must be made to expose and defend against them.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Fri Jan 03, 2025 3:44 pm

Why Doesn’t the News Media Talk About the Real Issues in Life?
Posted on January 3, 2025 by Yves Smith
.
Yves here. Richard Murphy makes a critical point about the focus of media, that its notion of what amounts to news has become more divorced than ever from the concerns in most people’s daily lives. However, I am surprised at his sense of mystification as to how this came about. Admittedly, the causes in the UK may not be as obvious as in the US.

In no particular order:

The media has long had much of its content consist of purveying propaganda. The father of the public relations industry (and also Sigmund Freud’s nephew), Edward Bernays, wrote in his 1926 book Propaganda that half the stories on the front page of the New York Times were propaganda (he did a count on a representative day). He defined propaganda as “A consistent, enduring effort to create or shape events to influence the relations of the public to an enterprise, idea or group.”

At least in the US, newspapers increased their amount of “lifestyle” content to sell more ads. This of course would tend to be upscale lifestyles, since that’s where the ad dollars are. My impression is that this really got serious uptake in the 1990s, with book and movie review sections then leading to food (as in upscale cooking), health, real estate (shelter porn, as opposed to listings) and other advertiser-pleasing sections.

The increased effectiveness of businesses and governments in messaging has made it legitimately harder to do bona fide reporting. In 1999, I met then then New York Times reporter who had opened the Shanghai office for the Wall Street Journal in 1993 and returned to the US in 1999 shortly before jumping ship to the Times. He said he was stunned at how much the practice of journalism in the US had changed during his six year absence. When he left, it was possible to get to the bottom of most developments in the then-normal 24 hour news cycle. When he returned, not only had various spin-meisters gotten much better at telling their tales and deflecting inquiries, but also news cycles had shortened, thanks to the Internet.

The end of the ban on local media cross ownership. The FCC had banned the cross-ownership of local newspapers and local broadcasters in the same market in 1975. The explicit point of that rule was to foster a diversity of viewpoints. It was effectively ended with the Telecommunications Act of 1996. Touted as a way to increase competition, it instead resulted in considerable consolidation.

The Internet-induced end of classified ads gutted news budgets and over time reduced subscription revenues. Classified ads had accounted for roughly half of newspaper ad revenues. Not only was that stead income, but by coming from many small customers, it meant the publication did not have to worry about catering to business interests. The same was true of subscription income. As both eroded, newspapers, which had traditionally done the heavy lifting of news reporting, found themselves income-starved and more dependent on corporate display ads. The latter meant that content deemed offensive to them meant less ad revenues.

The resulting collapse in funding for reporting had further knock on effects, all detrimental to covering topics of interest to ordinary citizens. The first was industry consolidation, as many small and medium-sized city papers failed or were acquired by chains, resulting in a big reduction in local news coverage. Second over time was a class shift in newsroom staffing. I am not sure how this came about, but traditionally, local reporters and columnists typically came from blue collar backgrounds. That contributed to scrappy tenacity and limited willingness to accept things on the mere say-so of important people. Increasingly, at now-bigger-on-average news outlets, the writing positions are filled by grads of Ivies or other pretty status-y schools. They want to be welcome at parties with their peers. The great Michael M. Thomas pointed out how those incentives were backwards: “They were dining with people they should be dining on.”1

Readers may have additional factors to add. I would be curious to learn what the forces at work were in the UK.

By Richard Murphy, part-time Professor of Accounting Practice at Sheffield University Management School, director of the Corporate Accountability Network, member of Finance for the Future LLP, and director of Tax Research LLP. Originally published at Fund the Future

The world of politics remains in apparent lockdown.

The UK news media has almost nothing to say for itself, based on the morning’s newsletters from them, to which I subscribe.

Overnight, we learned, as if it were a surprise, that Elon Musk is a fan of the so-called Tommy Robinson. That makes it very clear precisely where on the political spectrum he, the incoming US administration, and, for that matter, Farage stand when it comes to politics. Robinson is, of course, currently serving time and was a very obvious aggravator in last summer’s race riots.

That apart, the feeling that much of the news is generated to feed the demands of the media rather than relating to matters that might be of real concern is strong as a result. Do we really need anything like the coverage that we actually get to know what is really going on in the world? In fact, is much of what passes as news really put out as cover for what is really happening? Does it simply provide dopamine hits for journalists, and maybe politicians, whilst actually ignoring the real issues of concern?

We get a great deal of tittle-tattle.

We receive endless reports of the day’s supposed political events, most of which are artificially generated for this purpose.

We have the endless regurgitating of press releases.

But do we get news stories on what really matters? Where is the coverage or poverty, the loss of hope, the endless grind of trying to make ends meet, and the crises for families who cannot get the education their child needs, the social care a family member needs, or the medical appointment that they have been told is required?

Where come to that, when it comes to economics, are the stories on the debt burdens of households for whom high interest rates continue to mean massive familial stress and so much more? And where are the stories about people whose lives are made miserable by the relentless demands of work, with the risk of burnout that they create, often on minimum wage?

These are real stories. They go unreported, and yet they are the lived experience of many, whilst the media is intent on telling them tales of lives so remote from the reality of most of us that they have almost no meaning at all.

Is it a surprise that so many do not pay any attention to the news?

And could that almost be deliberate? Is it better, in the eyes of the politician, that we do not notice what is going on around us so that we do not critically appraise the performance (or lack thereof) of those self-same politicians?

But might it be that this is also the reason why the far-right can recruit – because detachment from reality is already hard-baked into our society, and so believing the tales that the far-right has to tell becomes so much easier?

I stress these are musings written off the cuff in reaction to the absence of news. However, as a wise person once told me, always look at what is not reported when you want to find out what is going on. Even in the absence of many of the so-called normal news stories that generally populate the press and broadcast media, the real issues in life are not getting a look in. And might it be that this is the issue? Are we living in a world where politicians and the media are so used to playing a game that revolves around each other that they cannot, will not, or do not want to face up to the reality of life as it is, which is why the right-wing fantasists get their chance?

____

1 In fairness, Thomas made that observation apropos what he regarded as the beginning of the end of the New York Times, when Punch Sulzberger joined the board of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But IMHO Thomas’ point is generally applicable.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Mon Jan 06, 2025 4:04 pm

When False Flags Fly Upside Down: The ISIS Script You Weren’t Meant to Question
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 4, 2025
BettBeat Media

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A militant group that conspicuously avoids confrontation with Israel while primarily targeting Muslims across West Asia, ISIS’s perfectly-timed operations increasingly reveal its role in advancing US imperial interests.

When supposed ISIS terrorists can’t even hang their own flag right side up, it’s time to question the sprawling web of manufactured crises, surveillance technology, and corporate-state control.

“fool me once, shame on you… fool me… you can’t get fooled again” — George W. Bush.

Bush’s infamous stumbling over the saying “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” unwittingly captured a deeper truth about American society’s relationship with manufactured crises. Just as he couldn’t complete the simple proverb about learning from deception, Western populations seem unable to internalize the lessons of past psychological operations, even when the patterns become glaringly obvious. The recent New Orleans attack reactivated the same reflexive fears and unquestioning acceptance of official narratives that characterized the post-9/11 era, proving that despite many decades of exposed lies about WMDs, Gulf of Tonkin, and countless other deceptions, the public can indeed “get fooled again.”

The closing days of 2024 and dawn of 2025 painted a disturbing picture of how modern state control mechanisms operate through carefully orchestrated events and media manipulation. Two incidents in particular – the New Orleans attack and the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion – serve as perfect case studies in how crises are manufactured, managed, and leveraged for expanding state power.

A U.S. Army veteran in New Orleans allegedly pledged allegiance to ISIS before driving a rented vehicle through Bourbon Street on New Year’s Eve. ISIS — a militant group that conspicuously avoids confrontation with Israel while primarily targeting Muslims across West Asia, serving U.S. imperial interests — seemed an unlikely inspiration. The red flags were immediate and striking, though carefully overlooked by mainstream media. Most telling was the ISIS flag recovered at the scene, displayed upside down — a fundamental error that even the most basic supporter would not make, comparable to displaying a Christian cross inverted. This crucial detail casts serious doubt on the authenticity of the claimed ideological motivation.

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The “ISIS” flag found at the crime scene, unquestionably hung upside down.

The timing and location of the attack seemed perfectly calculated for maximum media exposure, while the perpetrator’s background as a military veteran with apparent mental health issues fits a recurring pattern we’ve seen in numerous previous incidents. The media’s immediate pivot to emphasizing “Islamic terrorism” despite these glaring inconsistencies served to reinforce prevailing narratives about border security, warfare in West Asia and immigration – convenient timing given current political debates.

Almost simultaneously, another military veteran, this time a Special Forces soldier, allegedly conducted an attack at Trump Hotel using a rented Tesla Cybertruck. The symbolism couldn’t have been more perfect – Elon Musk’s controversial vehicle, Trump’s property, and a highly trained military operative. Yet the media treatment of this incident stood in stark contrast to the New Orleans attack. Despite similar methodologies, one was immediately labeled terrorism while the other was treated as a possible mental health incident.

The 9/11 Effect

What makes these events particularly noteworthy is their shared characteristics. Both perpetrators were military veterans who had served at Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty). Both chose to use vehicles rented through the Turo platform. Both incidents occurred during periods of maximum visibility. And perhaps most tellingly, both immediately sparked calls for increased surveillance and security measures.

The media response to these events reveals the sophisticated nature of modern narrative control. Major media outlets, now increasingly controlled by oligarchs like Larry Ellison with deep ties to intelligence agencies, carefully shaped distinct narratives for each event. The timing and presentation seemed meticulously designed to maximize specific political responses while minimizing genuine investigation into deeper connections.

Such events follow a familiar blueprint — the 9/11 template — where suspicious attacks trigger swift legislative responses. The formula remains consistent: mental health issues mysteriously align with ideological motives, while the military or veteran status of perpetrators hints at potential manipulation. This methodology has become so repetitive, so predictable, that its orchestrated nature can no longer be dismissed as coincidence. Like a script being followed, each new incident reinforces the pattern, revealing the calculated nature of these operations.

The convenience of timing, the perfect alignment with political agendas, and the immediate push for expanded surveillance all reveal a system that has mastered crisis manufacturing for specific ends. These orchestrated events simultaneously justify Western imperialism in West Asia — from supporting Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, now in its fifteenth month and confirmed as genocide by both the UN and Amnesty International, to maintaining illegal U.S. occupation of Syrian oil and wheat fields, while building momentum for potential aggression against Iran.

The mainstream media’s refusal to investigate deeper connections between these events, or question the imperial agenda they serve, exposes their role as guardians of these manufactured narratives. Each new “crisis” conveniently reinforces both domestic control and foreign military objectives, creating a seamless bridge between internal surveillance and external imperialism.

As we proceed to examine the broader infrastructure of surveillance and control that these events help justify and expand, it’s crucial to understand how these incidents serve as perfectly timed catalysts for the continued erosion of civil liberties and the expansion of state power.

The Architecture of Control – Surveillance Infrastructure and Corporate Power

The events in New Orleans and Las Vegas didn’t occur in a vacuum but rather within an expanding web of surveillance and control that has been decades in the making. At the center of this web sits Larry Ellison’s Oracle, a company whose origins trace back to CIA funding and whose future increasingly shapes the boundaries of our digital lives. Ellison’s recent acquisition of Paramount Global represents more than just another corporate merger – it symbolizes the final dissolution of any meaningful boundary between corporate surveillance, state intelligence, and mass media.

Larry Ellison openly declares AI’s imminent role in enabling unprecedented mass surveillance, positioning his corporation as the eager architect of this control infrastructure. His vision extends beyond mere monitoring, advocating for AI systems that will keep everyone “on their best behavior” through constant, algorithmic observation of daily life – a chilling euphemism for automated social control.

Oracle’s transformation from database provider to surveillance titan mirrors the West’s broader evolution into what scholars term a “control state.” Ellison’s vision of AI-powered monitoring of all citizen behavior isn’t speculative fiction — it’s being actively deployed through coordinated partnerships with law enforcement, intelligence agencies, and corporations worldwide. The company’s database systems now track everything from purchase histories to social media engagement, building behavioral profiles that surpass even Orwell’s imagined Big Brother.

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Forget China or “Radical Islam”, the Danger is at Home

The irony lies in ignorant Western populations still clinging to tech oligarchs’ carefully crafted narrative that China represents the primary surveillance threat to freedom. This manufactured ignorance, combined with decades of orchestrated false flag operations stoking anti-Muslim sentiment, has created a uniquely manipulable Western citizenry openly accepting the erosion of all their freedoms. While fixating on foreign bogeymen, these populations remain blind to the comprehensive control grid being constructed around them by their own tech oligarchs and security agencies.

The recent proliferation of drone sightings across New Jersey serves as a perfect example of how this system expands through manufactured crises. Within days of these mysterious sightings, legislation expanding surveillance capabilities was rushed through, with minimal public debate or scrutiny. The bill would grant law enforcement sweeping authority to intercept private electronic communications without consent. Under the guise of “drone detection,” it authorizes dragnet surveillance of all phones near airports, capturing data from everyone in these areas – not just drone operators. Like the now-normalized Stingray technology used to monitor protesters, this represents another expansion of mass surveillance justified by a manufactured threat.

This pattern – crisis, fear, legislative response – has become so predictable that it raises serious questions about the organic nature of these incidents.

Consider the integration of military-grade surveillance technology into civilian law enforcement. The same systems developed for battlefield awareness in Iraq and Afghanistan are now being deployed in American cities, often without public knowledge or consent. Police departments across the country have access to technologies that can track cell phone movements, monitor social media in real-time, and even predict future crime locations based on AI analysis of historical data.

The FBI’s documented history of entrapment operations takes on new significance in this context. With access to comprehensive surveillance data, identifying and manipulating vulnerable individuals becomes frighteningly efficient. The bureau’s focus on mentally ill, suspicious or unstable individuals — i.e., the vulnerable, people of color/minority groups and the poor — suggests a systematic approach to manufacturing threats that justify expanded powers.

Invisible Control

What makes this system particularly insidious is its invisible nature. Unlike traditional authoritarian control, which relies on obvious force and suppression, this new architecture of control operates through subtle manipulation of information, economic pressure, and psychological operations. The average citizen, struggling with healthcare costs and job insecurity, is too preoccupied with survival to question the expanding surveillance state.

The merging of corporate and state intelligence capabilities has created a situation where private companies effectively function as extensions of government surveillance programs. Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras, for instance, create a nationwide network of surveillance devices that law enforcement can access without warrants. Google’s collection of location data provides intelligence agencies with detailed movement patterns of millions of Americans.

This surveillance infrastructure is complemented by sophisticated AI systems — yet plagued by major errors rooted in racial, gender, and class biases encoded by its human programmers. Facial recognition routinely misidentifies minorities at much higher rates, while gait analysis and behavioral prediction algorithms perpetuate existing social prejudices through faulty pattern recognition. Despite these fundamental flaws, these systems work in concert to create what Ellison terms a “total information awareness” apparatus. The goal transcends mere monitoring – it seeks to predict and modify human behavior through algorithmic manipulation of information flows, targeted advertising, credit scoring, and social engineering of economic incentives.

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Modern AI, disproportionately programmed by White male tech workers, reflects the racist and sexist judgments rooted in Western cultures.

The system’s effectiveness relies heavily on public acceptance of its necessity. Each new crisis, whether real or manufactured, serves to justify further expansion of surveillance capabilities. The media, predominantly controlled by powerful Western oligarchs with direct ties to the intelligence community, plays a crucial role in maintaining this acceptance through careful narrative management and selective reporting.

Manufacturing Consent – Media Control and the Art of Narrative Management

Today’s narrative management operates through layers of subtle manipulation, corporate ownership consolidation, and the careful cultivation of what appears to be organic public discourse. The transformation of social media from open forums into carefully curated spaces of approved thought perfectly illustrates this evolution.

Consider how the stories of the New Orleans and Las Vegas incidents were shaped. Initial reports emerged through seemingly independent sources, but within hours, a coordinated narrative appeared across all major networks. This isn’t the result of explicit censorship but rather the product of a system where journalists, editors, and media executives understand their role in maintaining social order. Those who deviate from acceptable narratives find their careers stalled, their sources dried up, and their credibility questioned. Chomsky warned about this subtle form of thought control – where the powerful shape public understanding not through force, but through controlling which perspectives — and thus what kind of journalists — are considered legitimate.

The concentration of media ownership into the hands of a few corporate entities has created an unprecedented ability to shape public perception. When Larry Ellison acquired Paramount Global, he gained control not just of a entertainment company but of a vast mechanism for social engineering. The same databases that track consumer behavior now inform content creation, ensuring that entertainment serves the dual purpose of distraction and indoctrination.

Access journalism has become a powerful tool for controlling information flow. Reporters who wish to maintain their sources in government and corporate circles understand the unwritten rules of what can and cannot be questioned. The result is a form of soft censorship where critical perspectives are simply never aired rather than actively suppressed. This creates the illusion of press freedom while ensuring that truly threatening ideas never reach mass audiences.

Social media platforms, once hailed as democratizing forces in public discourse, have been transformed into sophisticated tools of narrative control. The algorithms that determine what content reaches users are carefully tuned to promote certain viewpoints while suppressing others. This manipulation is so subtle that most users remain unaware they’re experiencing a carefully curated version of reality.

The system’s genius lies in its ability to create the appearance of diverse viewpoints while actually narrowing the spectrum of acceptable debate. Heated arguments about surface-level issues mask a deeper consensus on fundamental questions of power and control. The media encourages passionate disagreement about social issues such as transgender issues, abortion or gun control while maintaining strict limits on discussions of economic power, imperialism or surveillance state expansion.

Westerners: The Most Propagandized People on Earth

The system is so genius that I have come to recognize Westerners as the most thoroughly propagandized people in human history. Westerners are among the most controlled populations on Earth, while remaining utterly convinced they are freer than anyone else on the globe.

The role of fact-checking organizations deserves particular scrutiny. Originally conceived as tools for ensuring journalistic accuracy, they’ve evolved into mechanisms for enforcing approved narratives. Questions about election integrity, vaccine safety, or financial system stability are labeled “misinformation” not based on their factual accuracy but on their potential to disrupt social control.

The entertainment industry plays a crucial role in this system. Television shows and movies consistently portray surveillance and control mechanisms as necessary tools for maintaining safety and order. The hero is often a (white) government agent who must break rules to protect the public from (black and brown) danger, reinforcing the idea that civil liberties are luxuries we cannot afford in dangerous times.

Journalists who attempt to investigate deeper connections between events like the New Orleans and Las Vegas incidents quickly discover how career-threatening such inquiries can be. Sources become unavailable, editors become hesitant, and subtle pressures mount until the investigation is abandoned. This creates a self-censoring system where certain questions are simply never asked.

Economic Chains – The Financial Architecture of Control

The true genius of modern control systems also lies in their ability to leverage economic pressure as a means of enforcing compliance. Unlike traditional forms of coercion, financial control operates invisibly, making resistance appear not just futile but irrational. The integration of surveillance capitalism with traditional banking systems has created a web of economic control that reaches into every aspect of daily life.

Employment has become the primary mechanism of social control. The shift from defined benefit pensions to 401(k) plans wasn’t just about cutting corporate costs – it created a population dependent on market performance for retirement security. When your future depends on stock market stability, questioning the system becomes personally threatening. Add employer-provided healthcare to this equation, and the pressure to conform becomes nearly irresistible.

The healthcare system itself functions as a sophisticated control mechanism. The fear of losing medical coverage keeps workers compliant and reluctant to challenge authority. Those with pre-existing conditions or family members requiring ongoing care find themselves effectively trapped in their current employment situations. This medical dependence creates a compliant population that’s far more concerned with maintaining their insurance than questioning the larger systems of control.

Mussolini’s Definition of Fascism

Corporate-government partnerships have evolved into something far more intricate than the military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about. Today’s arrangements involve data sharing, surveillance capabilities, and social control mechanisms that blur any meaningful distinction between state and corporate power — In other words: fascism.

Take the banking system’s evolution into a surveillance mechanism. Every transaction creates data that feeds into vast databases, building detailed profiles of individual behavior patterns. The push toward a cashless society isn’t about convenience – it’s about creating perfect financial surveillance. When every purchase is tracked and analyzed, behavioral control becomes remarkably precise.

The student loan system deserves particular attention as a control mechanism. Young people begin their adult lives burdened with debt that cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. This debt shapes career choices, encourages compliance with authority, and creates a population more focused on financial survival than questioning power structures. The recent moves toward partial loan forgiveness demonstrate how the threat of debt can be used to influence political behavior.

The rise of social credit systems, while officially denied in Western nations, is already operational through informal mechanisms. Credit scores affect not just lending but employment opportunities, housing access, and insurance rates. The system punishes nonconformity and rewards compliance, creating powerful incentives for self-regulation.

The recent push for Central Bank Digital Currencies represents the ultimate fusion of financial surveillance and control. These systems would allow for perfect monitoring of all transactions and the ability to impose instant financial sanctions on individuals who deviate from approved behaviors. The potential for abuse is limitless, yet the system is being marketed as a convenience and security enhancement. The template has already been tested – they’ve crippled entire nations like Venezuela through financial isolation and even tried to bring giants like Russia to their knees through banking restrictions.

Once such systems are in place, applying the same tactics to individual citizens will be trivially easy. What they’ve done to nations, they’ll do to people – but with even greater precision and totality of control.

Digital Chains – Quantum Destruction of Privacy

The integration of artificial intelligence and quantum computing into surveillance systems marks a qualitative shift in human society’s power dynamics. We’re witnessing the emergence of control mechanisms so sophisticated that they can predict and preempt resistance before it materializes. This isn’t science fiction – it’s the current reality being implemented through partnerships between tech giants, intelligence agencies, and financial institutions.

Consider the rollout of facial recognition technology across urban centers. While publicly marketed as a tool for fighting crime, its true purpose becomes clear when examining its deployment patterns. These systems don’t just identify individuals; they track movement patterns, social interactions, and emotional states. When combined with AI analysis, they create predictive models of human behavior that would have seemed impossible just a decade ago.

The quantum computing revolution, led by companies like Google and IBM, isn’t just about processing power – it’s about breaking the fundamental limits of current encryption technology. Once quantum supremacy is achieved, the concept of digital privacy becomes meaningless. Every encrypted communication, every blockchain transaction, every attempt at anonymous online activity becomes transparent to those controlling these systems.

This isn’t theoretical anymore – Chinese researchers demonstrated the first practical quantum attack that shattered complex encryption previously considered unbreakable. They accomplished what experts predicted wouldn’t be possible until far into the future. If this is what’s being publicly revealed, imagine what capabilities already exist in the classified realm. The era of digital privacy is ending faster than anyone predicted, and most people don’t even realize it.

Smart cities represent another frontier in technological control. The integration of IoT (Internet of Things)-sensors into urban infrastructure creates unprecedented capabilities for monitoring and influencing population behavior. Traffic patterns, energy usage, waste management – every aspect of city life becomes a data point feeding into centralized control systems. The convenience these systems offer masks their true function as mechanisms of social control.

The metaverse isn’t just Facebook’s rebranding exercise – it’s the next phase in human surveillance and behavioral modification. By creating immersive digital environments, tech companies aim to capture not just our external behaviors but our emotional and psychological responses in real-time. The data harvested from these interactions will create psychological profiles of unprecedented detail and accuracy.

Elon Musk’s Neuralink and similar brain-computer interface technologies represent perhaps the most ambitious attempt at technological control. While marketed as medical innovations, their true potential lies in creating direct neural links between human consciousness and digital systems. The implications for privacy and autonomy are staggering, yet the technology advances under the guise of therapeutic benefit. That this push comes from Musk – an Apartheid South African-born billionaire whose family wealth stems from apartheid-era emerald mines, and whose public statements often echo colonial and white supremacist talking points – adds another disturbing dimension.
This concentration of unprecedented technological power in the hands of white male tech oligarchs, with their documented biases and questionable histories, raises alarming questions about who will control humanity’s neural future and to what end.
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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Tue Jan 07, 2025 2:45 pm

Partyism: An Analytical Error
Posted by Internationalist 360° on January 5, 2025
The Anti Empire Project

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When America sends the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute abroad, they are teaching the rest of the world the best political system invented so far, the worst one except for all the others as Churchill said, the system at the end of history as Fukuyama declared, the system that peoples around the globe fought and bled for, multiparty democracy.

Ideally, two-party democracy, so that people have a choice, but not too much choice.

Never mind that rather undemocratic means can be used to keep other parties out of the game; or that begging rich people for campaign money is the principal activity of American politicians; or that politicians do not do what they promised; or that decisions like investment, pricing, money supply, energy and military planning are either jointly private-public or entirely private matters outside of democratic control.

There’s a jest in the East that in the Chinese system you can change the policy but not the party, while in America you can change the party but not policy.

This is another thing the genocide should have taught us. After an American election season where both parties promised enthusiastically to continue the genocide of Palestinians, while in other Western countries parties compete to show the most fealty to the genocidal state, Western electorates have never been more helpless. Given the opportunity to change the party, they’ll change the party. But it makes no difference.

In the Global South, elections often matter. They’re high stakes affairs for several reasons. First, a real alternative might get into office and engage in actual wealth redistribution, land reform, or measures towards economic sovereignty. Second, if voters dare to vote for such an alternative the country will face US-backed coups, sanctions, and sabotage.

In the West, though, democracies are more mature. The most important policies won’t be changed through something as capricious as the public will. Americans who want Medicare For All, for their police to kill fewer of them each year, or simply an end to the genocide, can’t vote those in. The notion of asking the public to vote on regime change, covert wars, or overt ones, in Eastern Europe or West Asia – is even more ridiculous.

Analytical energy is being wasted on what the Biden administration is trying to do before Trump comes in, or how Trump might want to take on the deep state but for now he has to bide his time, or in Canada how hapless the liberal leader is and how prime ministerial the conservative candidate looked in the latest podcast video with an immensely popular, totally conventional pro-Israel commentator who is of course portrayed as an outsider and maverick.

In the West, these frothy shows known as elections are of tremendous value to the corporate interests and owners of private fortunes that decide whether the masses of the Global South will have peace or genocide, whether the masses of the Global North will have public health care and education or crumbling infrastructure. To name a few of these benefits:

Elections channel nearly all the mass energy for change into the false hope of change, stabilizing corporate rule and hiding it behind the scenes.
The media / social media spectacle employs otherwise idle journalists, professionals, and political operators, while circulating and laundering billions of dollars.
It’s a huge distraction and diversion of attention, pre-empting the possibility of large numbers of people working – or even strategizing about what it would actually take – to change policies.
The belief that established Western political parties offer meaningful differences in policy from one another has taken different forms.

Advocates of lesser-evilism admit that the differences between what parties do in power are actually very small, but argue that these small differences matter and so it’s important to go and vote for the lesser evil.

Advocates of strategic voting argue that you need not like a party or candidate but that you should vote for them anyway to fulfill some broader strategic objective, which is usually blocking the party you don’t like from coming to power.

I propose subsuming these variants and coining the word, partyism, for any form of the belief that Western political parties are meaningfully different on important policy matters. Partyism can never be disproven, since we could never know what the loser would have done had the winner not won. We could only ever speculate. But circumstantial evidence against partyism is presented every time a party betrays their electoral promises – something that does happen from time to time, though notably, neither Harris nor Trump were willing even to make a promise to end the genocide that they could later renege on.

Instead of falling into the partyist trap, look at a country’s billionaires, the statements by the chambers of commerce, the policies advocated for the country in America’s business newspapers (regardless of which country you’re in). Political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page have done a big study twenty years ago and another ten years ago to show that politicians listen to the rich, not to you.

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Re: Censorship, fake news, perception management

Post by blindpig » Wed Jan 08, 2025 2:54 pm

BBC Middle East Editor Collaborated With CIA, Mossad
January 7, 2025

Alan MacLeod reports on the connections of Raffi Berg, now at the center of a scandal over the BBC’s systematic pro-Israel bias, to the U.S. national security-state and an Israeli intelligence agency.

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BBC logo, Manchester, Engliand, 2009. (TechnicalFault formerly Coffee Lover, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

By Alan MacLeod
MintPress News

A senior BBC editor at the center of an ongoing scandal into the network’s systematic pro-Israel bias is, in fact, a former member of a C.I.A. propaganda outfit, MintPress News can reveal.

Raffi Berg, an Englishman who heads the BBC’s Middle East desk, formerly worked for the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a unit that, by his own admission, was a C.I.A. front group.

Berg is currently the subject of considerable scrutiny after 13 BBC employees spoke out, claiming, among other things, that his “entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel” and that he holds “wild” amounts of power at the British state broadcaster, that there exists a culture of “extreme fear” at the BBC about publishing anything critical of Israel, and that Berg himself plays a key role in turning its coverage into “systematic Israeli propaganda.” The BBC has disputed these claims.

Our Man in London

Berg came to public attention in December after Drop Site News published an investigation based on interviews with 13 BBC staffers who present him as a domineering figure, systematically blocking coverage critical of Israel and manipulating stories to suit pro-Israel narratives.

The 9,000-word report, written by popular journalist Owen Jones, is extensive and well-researched. However, one aspect of the story it almost completely avoids is Berg’s connections to the U.S. national security state, which MintPress News can now reveal.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Berg was an employee of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) three years before joining the BBC. The FBIS is understood the world over to be a C.I.A. front group known for gathering intelligence for the agency.

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(Via MintPress News)

As the first two lines of its Wikipedia entry read:

“The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the United States.”

In 2005, the FBIS was subsumed into the C.I.A.’s new Open Source Enterprise.

Berg does not dispute that he was, in fact, a C.I.A. man. In fact, according to a 2020 interview with The Jewish Telegraph, he was “absolutely thrilled” to be secretly working for the agency. Berg said, “One day, I was taken to one side and told, ‘you may or may not know that we are part of C.I.A., but don’t go telling people.’”

He was unsurprised by this news, as the application process was extremely long and rigorous. “They went through my character and background with a fine tooth comb, asking if I had ever visited communist countries and, if I had, did I form any relationships while I was there,” he said.

Mossad Collaborator

The C.I.A., however, is not the only clandestine spy organization with which Berg has a long history of collaborating. He also has a rich professional relationship with Mossad, Israel’s premier intelligence agency.

In 2020, for instance, Berg published Red Sea Spies: The True Story of Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort, a book that tells the story of the Israeli operation to clandestinely smuggle Ethiopian Jews into Israel.

Really pleased my book is now available in Israel in Hebrew! Bringing this exciting #Mossad story home!
??? ??? ?? ?????? ?? ???? ??? ?? ??????! ???? ?? ?????? ????? ?? ????? ?????! https://t.co/T0nGA3d5Al pic.twitter.com/17px5Bu3IK

— Raffi Berg (@raffiberg) April 3, 2022



That the 320-page account lionizes Israel and its spies is perhaps unsurprising, considering how much input Mossad had in its creation.

Berg said that he wrote the book “in collaboration” with Mossad commander Dani Limor, whom he relied on extensively, as he, in his own words, knew “next to nothing” about the story and its background before writing it.

Limor opened numerous doors and was able to secure “over 100 hours of interviews” with Israeli military and intelligence officials, including with the head of Mossad.

Limor and Berg became extremely close friends. In 2020, he posted a picture of himself with his arm around the ex-Mossad commander. The first page of Red Sea Spies is simply a glowing recommendation from Efraim Halevy, former director of Mossad, a group Berg describes as “the world’s greatest intelligence service.”

Berg has aggressively promoted his book and has, on multiple occasions, expressed his delight that Benjamin Netanyahu has shown interest in it. In August 2020, for example, he shared a picture of Netanyahu at his desk in front of a copy of his book.

“First time I’ve been on a prime minister’s bookshelf. I know I’ve got one of Israel Prime Minister Netanyahu’s on mine – but wow!” he exclaimed, tagging Mossad, the Israeli Likud Party, and the Israeli Embassies in the United Kingdom and United States.

? First time I've been on a prime minister's bookshelf! I know I've got one of ?? #Israel PM @netanyahu's books on mine – but wow! ? #RedSeaSpies #Mossad @IsraeliPM @LikudUK @IsraelinUK @IsraelinNewYork @KasaBHarbor @jonnygouldpod @iconbooks https://t.co/Bg7LWAAssD pic.twitter.com/NlcggJGgwx

— Raffi Berg (@raffiberg) August 23, 2020


The following year, he messaged Netanyahu’s son, Yair, stating, “Your dad has my book, ‘Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad’s Fake Diving Resort,’ and sent me a lovely letter about it.”

That letter can be seen on the wall of Berg’s office in his many public posts and videos, framed and placed beside pictures of him meeting a Mossad commander and meeting Mark Regev, the former spokesperson for the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office.

That a BBC Middle East editor would not only frame these images and documents and put them pride of place in his office but also choose to display them while talking publicly and in an official role is telling. The BBC sells itself as an impartial distributor of news on the Middle East and beyond.

And yet, Berg, who, by most accounts, calls the shots when it comes to the network’s Israel-Palestine coverage, clearly believes that this is acceptable and unremarkable behavior.

If the opposite were true — that even a low-level BBC employee was openly sharing pictures of themselves embracing Hamas commander Yahya Sinwar or displaying a glowing letter from Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei — it is clear that there would be serious repercussions.

The BBC suspended six of its reporters for simply liking pro-Palestine tweets. And yet, in Berg’s case, his overt pro-Israel advocacy has been treated as entirely unproblematic.

Relentlessly Pro-Israel

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Foreign Broadcast Information Service staff listening to international broadcasts in January 1945. (U.S. government, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

Of course, it is entirely possible that a pro-Israel stance would help one climb the ladder at the BBC, an organization long known to display a strong bias in favor of the country and its interests.

Born and raised in England, Berg always took a keen interest in Israel, moving there to study Jewish and Israel Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He worked at the FBIS between 1997 and 1998 and joined the BBC in 2001, starting as a world news writer and producer.

One of his first BBC articles profiled the Israeli military and its recruits, presenting the IDF as brave protectors of their homeland and as a “source of national pride” and framed women serving as a win for sexual equality.

In 2009, at the height of Operation Cast Lead — the Israeli attack on Gaza that killed more than 1,000 people — Berg attended a pro-Israel demonstration in central London. Moreover, he even chastised the Israeli newspaper, The Jerusalem Post, for noting that only 5,000 people showed up to the event.

In Berg’s opinion, there were three times as many in attendance. The BBC would later change its guidelines to prevent its newsroom employees from attending controversial demonstrations.

During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli military was found to have indiscriminately targeted and killed civilians, used Palestinians as human shields, and used banned chemical weapons, such as white phosphorous, on civilian areas.

Three years later, in November 2012, Israel launched Operation Pillar of Defense, a high-profile, bloody assault on Gaza that made worldwide headlines. As Israel bombarded the densely-populated civilian area, Berg went on his own internal offensive, telling his BBC colleagues to word their stories in a way that does not blame or “put undue emphasis” on Israel.

Instead, leaked emails show, he encouraged journalists to present the attack as an operation “aimed at ending rocket fire from Gaza,” thereby framing Hamas as the aggressor.

Another Berg email instructed his coworkers to “Please remember, Israel doesn’t maintain a blockade around Gaza. Egypt controls the southern border” – a highly contestable opinion not shared by the United Nations, which declared that Israel was the occupying power besieging the strip.

Extraordinary Revelations

Shortly after Operation Pillar of Defense, Berg was promoted, becoming head of the BBC’s Middle East desk. This position gives him enormous influence in shaping the platform’s presentation of Israel’s current war on Gaza.

In this role, he has helped turn the network into “systematic Israeli propaganda,” according to one journalist quoted by Jones in his Drop Site investigation. “This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” said another.

The BBC staff Jones talked to painted a picture of a pro-Israel zealot systematically suppressing any content or information that would paint Tel Aviv in a negative light. A micromanager, numerous journalists reportedly attempted to notify management of their issues with Berg, but their complaints fell on deaf ears.

“Almost every correspondent you know has an issue with him,” one staffer stated. “He has been named in multiple meetings, but [management] just ignore it.”

“How much power he has is wild,” another journalist told Jones, who explained that essentially every story or segment featuring Israel would have to be signed off by Berg first, even leaving other editors in “extreme fear” of commissioning anything without his approval.

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BBC Bias Kills – London protest against Israel’s assault on Gaza, May 15, 2021. (Alisdaire Hickson, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0)

Berg is alleged to have made extensive pre-publication edits to others’ stories, changing the framing of news events to shield Israel from blame. One example of this is the whitewashing of the Israeli attack on the funeral of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.

In May 2022, Israeli snipers shot the Al Jazeera anchor in the head and proceeded to lie about their culpability. Israeli forces subsequently attacked the public funeral, beating mourners and firing tear gas. The BBC’s text, allegedly penned by Berg himself, read:

“Violence broke out at the funeral in East Jerusalem of reporter Shireen Abu Aqla, killed during an Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank.

Her coffin was jostled as Israeli police and Palestinians clashed as it left a hospital in East Jerusalem.”

Thus, Abu Akleh’s murder by Israeli forces was downgraded to a mere death during an operation (with no perpetrator mentioned), while a police attack on a funeral procession was presented as a “clash” between rival factions, presumably of roughly equal responsibility.

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Mourners carry Shireen Abu Akleh’s body, wrapped in a Palestinian flag and a blue press jacket. (alwatan_live, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons)

A more recent example of this, Jones claims, comes from a July story about IDF soldiers setting an attack dog on Muhammed Bhar, a severely disabled Gazan man, and letting him bleed to death. Under Berg’s supervision, the original headline ran: “The Lonely Death of Gaza Man with Down’s Syndrome.”

Only after a gigantic worldwide outcry did the BBC change its framing to note anything about how Bhar met his end. “There has to be a moral line drawn in the sand. And if this story isn’t it, then what?” one BBC journalist said, commenting on the affair.

Since the investigation was published, Berg has remained silent, although he has hired defamation lawyer Mark Lewis, the former director of U.K. Lawyers for Israel.

The BBC, meanwhile, has offered unequivocal support for him and his work, rejected any suggestion of a lenient stance towards Israel, and alleges that the Drop Site article “fundamentally misdescribe[s] Berg’s power, influence, and how the network works.”

Israeli soldiers set an attack dog on this disabled man, and watched him bleed to death.

You'd never guess this from this BBC headline, though. pic.twitter.com/dvEapeK4O4

— Alan MacLeod (@AlanRMacLeod) July 16, 2024


A Worldwide Network

Whatever the veracity of the Drop Site allegations, the undisputed fact that a former U.S. State Department and C.I.A. operative is calling the shots at the BBC for its Middle East coverage is undoubtedly of public interest.

It also bears a striking resemblance to the accusations of journalist Tareq Haddad. In 2019, Haddad resigned in frustration from Newsweek, claiming that the outlet systematically stymied him from covering important Middle East news stories that did not align with Western objectives.

Perhaps most strikingly, though, he claimed that Newsweek employed a senior editor whose only job was seemingly to vet and suppress “controversial” stories, in the same vein as Berg. This editor also had a similar background with state power. As Haddad concluded:

“The U.S. government, in an ugly alliance with those the [sic] profit the most from war, has its tentacles in every part of the media — imposters, with ties to the U.S. State Department, sit in newsrooms all over the world. Editors, with no apparent connections to the member’s club, have done nothing to resist. Together, they filter out what can or cannot be reported. Inconvenient stories are completely blocked.”

When contacted by MintPress News for comment, Haddad said he found the BBC, State Department and C.I.A. links to be “staggering,” adding:

“When I resigned from Newsweek, I did so because all reporting on foreign affairs went through a particular editor, who, in my case, turned out to be connected to the European Council on Foreign Relations. That prevented me from writing truthfully when it came to a number of sensitive issues.”

C.I.A.-Affiliated Media

The implications of former U.S. national security state operatives dictating global media output are profound. This is not least because the State Department and C.I.A. are among the world’s most notoriously dishonest and perfidious institutions, regularly injecting lies and false information into public discourse to further Washington’s ambitions.

As Mike Pompeo, former director of the C.I.A. and then-secretary of state, said in 2019:

“When I was a cadet, what’s the cadet motto at West Point? You will not lie, cheat, or steal or tolerate those who do. I was the C.I.A. director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on] it!”

[See: When Pompeo Spat on West Point]

Furthermore, both organizations have a long history of organizing invasions of and coups against foreign countries, drugs and weapons smuggling and operating a worldwide network of “black sites,” where thousands are tortured.

The C.I.A., in particular, has an extensive record of penetrating media outlets. As far back as the 1970s, the Church Committee unearthed the existence of Operation Mockingbird, a secret project to infiltrate newsrooms across America with secret agents masquerading as journalists.

Investigative reporter Carl Bernstein’s work found that the agency had cultivated a network of over 400 individuals it considered assets, including the owner of The New York Times.

John Stockwell, former head of a C.I.A. task force, explained on camera how his organization infiltrated media departments across the planet, establishing fake outlets and news agencies that worked to control global public opinion and spread false information demonizing Washington’s enemies. “I had propagandists all over the world,” he admitted, adding:

“We pumped dozens of stories about Cuban atrocities, Cuban rapists [to the media]… We ran [faked] photographs that made almost every newspaper in the country… We didn’t know of one single atrocity committed by the Cubans. It was pure, raw, false propaganda to create an illusion of communists eating babies for breakfast.”

This process continues to this day, as the C.I.A. continues to promote dubious stories about so-called Havana Syndrome and Russia putting bounties on American soldiers in Afghanistan.

Cable networks routinely employ a wide range of former State Department or C.I.A. officials as personalities and trusted experts. Former C.I.A. Director John Brennan is employed by NBC News and MSNBC, while his predecessor, Michael Hayden, can be seen on CNN. Top anchors such as Anderson Cooper and Tucker Carlson have their own connections to the agency.

Meanwhile, in 2015, Dawn Scalici, a 33-year C.I.A. veteran, left her job as national intelligence manager for the Western hemisphere at the Director of National Intelligence to become the global business director of the international news conglomerate Reuters.

That this was a political hire was barely hidden; in Scalici’s official announcement, the company declared her primary responsibility would be “advancing Thomson Reuters’ ability to meet the disparate needs of the U.S. government.”

Social media, too, is full of former U.S. national security state agents. A previous MintPress News investigation uncovered a network of dozens of ex-C.I.A. officials working at Google. Most of these individuals work in highly politically sensitive roles such as security and, trust and safety, effectively giving them control over the algorithms that decide what content gets seen and what is suppressed worldwide.

Some were even directly recruited from the C.I.A., leaving the agency to join the Silicon Valley giant.

[Related: Chris Hedges Report: Big Tech’s Complicity in Genocide]

Competing with Google for the crown of employing most former C.I.A. agents is Facebook. The company’s senior product policy manager for misinformation, Aaron Berman, the man most responsible for deciding what the world sees (and does not see) in its news feeds, was directly parachuted in from Langley, Virginia.

Berman was one of the agency’s highest-ranking officers, writing the president’s daily brief for both former presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump until July 2019, when he made the switch from big government to big tech.

And since it became a target of Washington’s ire, TikTok has been on a hiring spree, recruiting large numbers of U.S. State Department officials to run its internal affairs. The company’s head of data public policy for Europe, for example, is Jade Nester, who was previously the State Department’s director of internet public policy.

These connections were explored in a MintPress investigation entitled, “TikTok: Chinese “Trojan Horse” Is Run by State Department Officials.”

Cheering on a Genocide

In recent years, Washington has shown considerable interest in influencing the British press. The National Endowment for Democracy—another unofficial branch of the C.I.A.—has spent millions of dollars funding a wide range of media outlets in the U.K. The NED’s sister organization, USAID, is the third-largest funder of BBC Media Action, the company’s charitable arm, donating over $2 million annually.

The BBC itself has faced repeated accusations of pro-Israel bias, not only from the public but also internally. Their headquarters are a common start or end point for numerous pro-Palestine marches, including an upcoming national rally in London on Jan. 18.

In November, over 100 BBC staff signed an open letter to the corporation’s director-general, Tim Davie and Chief Executive Officer Deborah Turness. The letter admonishes the company for consistently providing “favorable coverage to Israel,” failing to uphold even “basic journalistic tenet[s]” when covering its war on Gaza, and aiding in “systematically dehumanizing Palestinians.”

Haddad agreed that much of the network’s coverage had been subpar, telling MintPress:

The BBC, of course, like many institutions, has fallen way short of their coverage in documenting what Israel has done in a densely populated strip of land we know as Gaza over the last 14 months and prior.”

Partially as a result, public confidence in the broadcaster has fallen to an all-time low. By July 2023, just 38 percent of Britons said they trusted the BBC to tell the truth – down from 81 percent 20 years previously. Since Oct. 7, its biases have been put under even more scrutiny.

Israel’s actions, Haddad said, are “growing harder to ignore.” Officially, the death toll from the Israeli attack on Gaza stands at almost 50,000, although credible estimates put the likely figure at many times that. International organizations, such as the United Nations and Amnesty International, have described the onslaught as “genocidal.”

Israel could not sustain its attack without vital military, logistical, economic, and political support from Western powers. It is, therefore, vital for Washington, London and the E.U. that public opinion does not turn too far in favor of Palestine to the point where widespread public rebellion forces a change in policy.

The BBC, with its deeply misleading and one-sided coverage of the events, therefore, plays an important role in the perpetuation of crimes against humanity. That this is being driven from the top down by overtly pro-Israel editors, including one with a history in both the State Department and C.I.A., is perhaps unsurprising but no less shocking, nonetheless.

To be clear, this article does not claim that Berg or anyone at the BBC is a plant. Nor is it accusing him of any specific wrongdoing beyond working at a distinctly biased network. What it is stating is that it is telling that the person in charge of its Middle East reporting has framed pictures and letters of Mossad commanders and high Israeli officials on the wall, as if they are rock stars and he is a teenage fan.

That someone such as this rose the ranks is a clear indication of the kind of culture that exists at the BBC – one that has systematically demonized Palestinians and manufactured consent for genocide.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

https://consortiumnews.com/2025/01/07/b ... ia-mossad/

*****

CovertAction Bulletin: The Media’s Real Agenda On The Alleged ISIS Attack
By Rachel Hu and Chris Garaffa - January 8, 2025 0

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[Source: AP]

(Podcast at link)

CLICK HERE to listen on podcast platforms worldwide https://linktr.ee/CovertActionBulletin
Support this broadcast: become a patreon!

Early on New Year’s Day, a truck drove into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, resulting in dozens of injuries and at least 14 deaths. The alleged attacker, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was killed in a shootout with police. Immediately, the media and government seized on supposed and self-described connections with ISIS with no critical thought towards what they’re calling a terrorist attack.

On this episode, we interrogate who benefits from this framing, what else is behind this story and how it’s being used by the system to prop up the war drive as well as Islamophobia and anti-immigrant hate in the context of the Biden-Trump transition and beyond. We’re joined for the conversation by Syed, a human rights activist and local organizer with Al-Awda in Houston.

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2025/0 ... is-attack/

******

WaPo Kills Cartoon That Mocked the Boss—and Trump
Pete Tucker

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Rough draft of Anne Telnaes cartoon showing Jeff Bezos and other billionaires paying homage to Trump.

When Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post cartoonist, submitted a draft sketch shortly before Christmas, she must have known she was stirring the pot.

But after watching a parade of Big Tech CEOs jet down to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage—and millions of dollars—to Trump, a cartoon depicting these groveling billionaires must have seemed natural, even if it included her own boss, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Post since 2013.

“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote in a Substack post (1/3/25) announcing her resignation from the Post, where she’s worked since 2008. “I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”

Telnaes’ post went further, criticizing media owners like Bezos for abandoning their responsibility to safeguard the free press “to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting.”

In addition to Bezos, the other billionaires Telnaes depicted bowing before Trump were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

And lying prostrate beneath these men was Mickey Mouse, Telnaes’ apparent nod to the cowardly $16 million settlement Disney-owned ABC recently offered Trump (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).

‘Bias against repetition’
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Somehow the Washington Post running a column by Adam Lashinsky (12/30/24) about MAGA’s internecine battles over H-1B visas didn’t prevent it from publishing a cartoon on the same theme the next day (12/31/24)—or another one the next week (1/4/25).
The unenviable job of ensuring a thin-skinned Bezos wasn’t embarrassed by a cartoon in his own newspaper fell to Post opinions editor David Shipley. “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said in a statement justifying his killing of Telnaes’ cartoon:

My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column—this one a satire—for publication. The only bias was against repetition.

It’s bizarre to argue that a regular cartoonist’s work should be killed because the paper published a column—or even two!—with similar content. Even so, we can only find one recent Post opinion column addressing Bezos’ efforts to curry favor with the president-elect (12/18/24).

What’s more, a search of the Post’s “latest cartoons” shows the paper has no problem publishing cartoons on the same topic as opinion pieces. Recent examples include Republicans’ difficulties finding a speaker (1/2/25, 1/4/25), Republican infighting over H-1B visas (12/30/24, 12/31/24, 1/4/25) and controversy over Biden’s death penalty commutations (12/23/24, 12/26/24).

Outside of opinions, the Post has run a few recent stories on the efforts of Big Tech executives, including Bezos, to mollify Trump (12/13/24, 12/19/24, 12/31/24).

Aside from repetitiveness, deputy opinions editor David Von Drehle offered another reason for spiking Telnaes’ cartoon. “I didn’t think it was a very good cartoon. It seemed pretty ham-handed to me,” Von Drehle told Post media critic Erik Wemple (1/6/25).

Wemple’s blog post also disclosed that Post executive editor Matt Murray wants the paper to stop covering its own problems. “I did set a policy that broadly we should not cover ourselves,” said Murray, who claimed his change was made weeks ago and wasn’t “specifically tied to the cartoon.”

Von Drehle’s denigrating comment about Telnaes’ cartoon only appeared in Wemple’s blog, not in a Post news story. In fact, amid the swirling controversy, the Post hasn’t written a single original news story on the spiked cartoon, only running an AP story (1/4/25) on the topic.

Exodus of talent
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“It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility,” wrote Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (10/28/24) in a column that did just that.
Following the rejection of her cartoon, Telnaes resigned, marking just the latest departure from the storied paper.

“The Post is shedding talent at an unprecedented rate,” observed media journalist Oliver Darcy (Status, 1/6/25), who earlier noted (1/2/25): “Eventually treating employees with little respect has consequences.”

The growing exodus comes in the wake of Bezos spiking the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in late October—a move he took to curry favor with Trump (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).

Amid the ensuing backlash—in which 300,000 Post readers reportedly canceled their subscriptions—Bezos scapegoated Post reporters for his craven action, claiming their untrustworthiness had forced him to abandon the paper’s longstanding practice of issuing presidential endorsements. “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media,” was the headline accompanying Bezos’ self-serving op-ed (Washington Post, 10/28/24).

Ingratiation ratcheted up
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Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 12/4/24) said he hopes to persuade Donald Trump that the press is “not the enemy”—in part by giving him a $1 million donation.
After Trump’s win, Bezos ratcheted up his ingratiation, saying Trump has “grown in the past eight years” and is now “calmer.” Bezos also told the New York Times’ Dealbook conference he’s “very optimistic” about Trump’s second term, and hopes to work with him (Washington Post, 12/4/24).

“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him,” Bezos said. “We do have too much regulation in this country.”

Bezos also trekked down to Mar-a-Lago, gifts in hand—just as Telnaes depicted. In addition to ponying up $1 million for Trump’s inauguration fund, Amazon is also broadcasting the inauguration live on Amazon Prime, an in-kind donation worth another $1 million (BBC, 1/4/25). Meanwhile, Amazon will release a new documentary on Melania Trump, who’s an executive producer of the film; Bezos’ company reportedly paid $40 million for the rights (Puck, 1/7/25).

Bezos didn’t become the second-richest person alive by prioritizing civic responsibility. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

Meanwhile at the Post, the paper today “started laying off roughly 4% of its work force” (New York Times, 1/7/25).

https://fair.org/home/wapo-kills-cartoo ... and-trump/
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