Censorship, fake news, perception management

[blindpig]

Journalists Rebel Over Gaza Coverage
January 17, 2024

The contested concept of “impartiality” lies at the heart of running battles between unionised staff and news organisations in Australia, writes Mick Hall.


Ultimo Centre, the ABC’s national headquarters in Sydney. (J Bar, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0)

By Mick Hall
Special to Consortium News

A rash of Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) staff departures and the suppression of journalists critical of their organisations’ reporting on Gaza has been called a betrayal of the role of journalism in democracy.

Former Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) presenter Mary Kostakidis says the state-funded broadcaster and other news groups in Australia have refused to hold power to account by challenging official narratives by Israel and Western states supporting its attack on Gaza since Oct. 7.

Instead, the professional integrity of news staff battling to tell the truth is being challenged by their employers.

There is open and escalating conflict over reporting on what has been described by South Africa’s legal team at The Hague as genocidal acts by Israel, with one high-profile ABC employee fired in late December.

Strike action at the ABC over the sacking is now a possibility.

Presenter Antionette Lattouf was fired on Dec. 20 after management accused her of breaching its code of practice on maintaining impartiality as an employee, making her position untenable.

The Lebanese-Australian journalist had posted a Human Rights Watch link on Instagram that stated Israel was “using starvation of civilians as a weapon of war in Gaza.”

The previous day Lattouf had been warned by management to stay away from “controversial issues” as complaints had been received over an article she co-wrote pointed out that viral footage which appeared to show Palestinian solidarity protesters in Sydney chanting ‘gas the Jews’ could not actually be verified.

The contested concept of “impartiality” lies at the heart of running battles between unionised staff and news organisations.

Kostakidis said impartiality was “the biggest joke in journalism” and one used to rationalise a passive editorial stance in the face of powerful interests.

“The word is trotted out like the greatest badge of honour for a journalist when it is a dunce’s hat,” she said in an interview. “If the Fourth Estate’s role is enabling citizens to reach an informed decision, it fails them by resiling from hard truths in order to role play at impartiality.”


Rally against Israel’s attack on Gaza in Hyde Park, Sydney on Oct. 16, 2023. (Joe Lauria)

It was revealed this week Lattouf was subject to a co-ordinated campaign that included Zionist lawyers emailing ABC’s chairperson Ita Buttrose and managing director David Anderson suggesting legal action and lobbying of politicians was imminent over Lattouf’s role at the national broadcaster.

Union Reacts

The MEAA, Australia’s journalists’ union, has demanded an urgent meeting with staff to “address growing concerns about outside interference, culturally unsafe management practices and to stand up for journalism without fear or favour”.

MEAA union representative Mark Philips told Consortium News its members at the ABC were holding meetings this week over concerns about how management deals with external pressure from lobby groups, politicians and big business over the reporting of its journalists.

“Management should be supporting staff when they come under external attack or criticism to ensure that the public’s trust in the ABC to report without fear or favour can be maintained,” he said.

Lattouf is challenging ABC’s decision at an employment tribunal.

Kostakidis said political pressure that ensured Lattouf’s sacking had also sent a message to other staff at the ABC to toe the company’s editorial line.

Other staff members have left of their own accord. Senior political reporter Nour Haydar resigned in early January, citing the broadcaster’s Gaza coverage and treatment of staff. News presenter Helen Tzarimas also resigned, stating on Twitter on Jan. 16 that she “did the right thing.”


Unrest at ABC began to surface in early November, when approximately 200 ABC staff held a meeting to discuss the broadcaster’s coverage of Israel and Gaza, leading to an advisory panel to look at criticisms arising from it.

Journalists believed the broadcaster was mis-framing Israeli violence as a “war with Hamas”, while leaving out historical context of ethnic cleansing and a failure to accurately report the dynamics of violence in Gaza.

Anderson rejected the criticisms. He claimed the organisation was acting professionally within its charter by “not taking sides” and accused journalists of wanting to compromise editorial impartiality by engaging in partisan political activism.

Open Letter

Discontent then widened, with hundreds of journalists from both ABC and other corporate media outfits signing an open letter demanding reporters be allowed to hold power to account and that newsrooms approach Israel’s claims in Gaza critically, given a history of Israeli government lies and propaganda.

The letter warned the public was already viewing the conflict via social media and that legacy media risked losing credibility by not doing its job properly.

It stated:

“It is our duty as journalists to hold the powerful to account, to deliver truth and full context to our audiences, and to do so courageously without fear of political intimidation. … We risk losing the trust of our audiences if we fail to apply the most stringent journalistic principles and cover this conflict in full.”

It called for an end to “two-sideism” or false balance, as a hindrance to reporting the truth. It also urged the humanisaton of Palestinian victims, adequate coverage to credible allegations of war crimes, genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid, and the inclusion of historical context.

Anderson said terms like “apartheid” and “genocide” would not be used by the ABC but reported as allegations of crimes like others.

Approximately 300 journalists from the Guardian Australia, ABC, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Conversation, Schwartz Media and The Age who signed were roundly criticised by platformed academics and in MSM editorials for diminishing the profession by expressing pro-Palestine sentiment.

ABC’s director Justin Stephens issued an all-staff internal memo urging employees not to sign the letter.

Journalists employed by Nine at the Herald and The Age banned those who signed the letter from carrying out any role in covering unfolding genocide, inferring from it they could not be trusted to be impartial. It remains unclear what policy of companies like News Corp and Sky News have on the matter.


“This is just the public reaction – I understand some threats made privately have been far more direct — editors do not appreciate having their biases and loyalties revealed,” a former senior producer on ABC’s Four Corners investigative program, Peter Cronau, told Consortium News.

Cronau said there was palpable fear among staffers across all media platforms, the grim threat of being accused of partiality capable of cutting short a career in an instant.

“It is a remarkable moment in Australian journalism when Australian journalists feel compelled to call on their newsroom editors ‘to hold the powerful to account, to deliver truth and full context to our audiences, and to do so courageously without fear of political intimidation’,” he said. Cronau continued:

“And it is a remarkable moment, during the Israel-Hamas conflict, for the public to see how their media are so flawed. With their insiders’ perspective, these journalists’ calls for ‘integrity, transparency, and rigour’ have damned the state of press freedom in Australia. It should therefore be no surprise to see the paranoid reaction from those very newsrooms, which cautioned those journalists, warned of potential career impacts, and in some cases removed journalists from reporting roles on the conflict.

The pressure on the media from powerful elites to unquestioningly support the Western ‘consensus’, to not step out of line, to adhere to a warped sense of national ‘loyalty’, is the very pressure that must be resisted and revealed by journalists and others, if our media is to function as a bolster to our democracy.”

Over the past three months Israel has carried through on its leaders’ statements of genocidal intent, imposing a total siege on Gaza and bombing hospitals, bakeries, schools and refugee camps, killing approximately 30,000 people, mostly women and children.

‘Impartial’ Means Partiality to Israel


An Israeli Merkava Mk IV tank on a street in Gaza on Jan. 4. (Yairfridman2003, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

U.N. rapporteurs and human rights groups had warned since October that Gazans were facing genocide as Israel’s campaign of destruction gradually displaced over 2 million residents, obliterating the means of life in the coastal strip, while forcing them south towards Egypt’s border and the Sinai desert, a stated preferred location for mass expulsion.

South Africa’s legal representative Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh KC told judges at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Netherlands on Jan. 11, it was “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something”.

Yet, as Israel stands accused of genocide at The Hague, state and corporate newsrooms determined it inappropriate to even infer ‘war crimes’ were being committed by Israel, as defined by the Geneva Convention since Israel launched its Gaza operation in response to Hamas’ attack on Israel military installations and settlements on Oct. 7.

Kostakidis is in no doubt that the role media played in facilitating the unfolding genocide matches that of Western leaders who used U.S. vassal speak, namely, “Israel’s right to defend itself”, to lend diplomatic cover to the Gaza horror.

“It’s a betrayal of the role of journalism in democracy and their professional obligation,” she says. Kostakidis said:

“Media managers are either disingenuous or genuinely believe that impartiality ends where our own national interests begin, or the interests of the empire we’re subservient to.

Israel is strategically very important to the U.S. and that relationship is vital for Israel. The Israeli lobby is powerful here as elsewhere. As a result, the dispossession and killing of Palestinians is conveyed as normal, and the media has not exposed the public to the full horror of the violence and state terrorism that constitutes their daily lives.

Israel has gotten away with it for decades and has become emboldened to move to a final solution for Palestinians. There have been a substantial number of Israeli officials who have been transparent about their objectives, yet there is little reporting of this. The media bear substantial responsibility for the calamity that has been unleashed on Palestinian people.”


Kostakidis said stories in Australia were written from a distinctly Anglo-American worldview and that her experience at SBS demonstrated how news bosses viewed the Israeli position through a sympathetic colonial lens.

She says when she asked a chief producer to contact a Palestinian spokesperson for counter balancing comments instead of relying on Israel’s Australian spokesman Mark Regev for news updates, he replied: “Why? They’re all mad.”

“He had not long returned from the requisite Israeli junket for voluntary brainwashing,” she said.

Fidelity to Truth

Journalists involved in the open letter have pushed back on accusations of impartiality by pointing out newsroom junkets to Israel have been widespread in Australia, as in other countries, and that it should be transparent who has taken part in them.

Kostakidis says although the glib, reductionist claim to impartiality as one of “not taking sides” is nonsense, objectivity and a fidelity to truth above all else is, and ought to be, the bedrock of authentic journalistic endeavour.

Good journalism also involves the ability and openness to change one’s subjective opinion in the process of producing a story, she says. However, what militates against this is careerism and the fact bad journalism is institutionally rewarded.

“When you have approached a matter objectively — taking into account context, history and evidence — you have an obligation to reveal the truth,” Kostakidis said. She went on:

“That sometimes challenges your own personal biases when the process leads to a conclusion that surprises you. It’s about having an open and inquiring mind and the integrity to face inconvenient truths.

But how many outlets and individual journalists working in the mainstream media report the war in Ukraine impartially? How impartial have reports on leaders the West needs demonised like Putin, Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi and countless others been? It is a form of delusion that delivers a career pathway, so there is a vested interest in portraying the delusion as impartiality.”

Likewise, veteran U.S. war correspondent Chris Hedges calls the type of impartiality that Anderson refers to to justify not establishing facts to hold power to account “a fiction,” a sophistic devise used to mask implicit biases and agendas.

“The media is not impartial,” he said in an interview. [Hedges is a member of Consortium News‘ board of directors.] He said:

“I was a newspaper reporter for many decades and what we do is manipulate facts. That’s what I’m trained to do. I can take a set of facts and spin it in any way you want. It’s not wrong, but a good reporter has a covenant with the reader or the viewer and that is to tell the truth. However, there are moments when telling the truth, as in the case of Israel’s genocide against Gaza is not good for your career.

The lie in the media is usually the lie of omission. So, for example, they won’t use the word ‘apartheid.’ They won’t use the word ‘genocide.’ They will continue 100 days after the event, to dredge up stories on Oct. 7, of the suffering, which at this point doesn’t begin to compare to what’s happening in Gaza.”[/i


Hedges at an Occupy D.C. event in 2012. (Justin Norman, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Hedges says the other issue is Israel has blocked foreign reporters from entering Gaza. He said:

“They have killed, many of them have clearly been targeted, over 100. So, most of the foreign press is in Jerusalem being fed stuff by the Israelis. I’ve covered conflict, so I can tell you that a huge percentage of those journalists, they don’t even want to go to Gaza because it’s dangerous.

So, they’re quite happy with the arrangements that have been made for them. I mean, for instance, I covered the first Gulf War and I didn’t abide by the so called ‘pool system’. I went out on my own, which essentially exposed most of the rest of the press that was sitting in a hotel being fed by pool reports. The fact is everywhere I’ve covered most, the majority, of the media don’t want to go out. They are poseurs.

It’s a combination of factors. To write or broadcast honestly about what’s happening in Gaza, is to have the wrath of, not just the Israel lobby, but the corporations that run these large entities, as well as governmental entities. Everybody’s going to come down on you, you’re going to become a target and most journalists are good careerists, so they don’t want to do it.

But the whole thing of impartiality is a fiction. You can write a factually correct story, which gives the completely wrong impression of what’s happening, but it’s factually correct.”

Hedges knows intimately the lonely place Antoinette Lattouf now finds herself, having had a similar experience with The New York Times during the U.S. coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003.

“I was seven years in the Middle East,” he said. “I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times and I had covered the U.N. inspection teams that had destroyed Saddam Hussein’s chemical weapons stockpiles. He did have them. I understood that the chances of him having weapons of mass destruction were almost zero, that he couldn’t even get spare parts for his military, that Iraq was falling apart and he had nothing to do with 9/11.”

Hedges said, “So, in the invasion of Iraq, all the Arabists understood the debacle that it became, but to say that was, especially in the wake of 9/11, to be a target. I was given a written reprimand, which under guild or union rules is the route to being fired. If the employee violates that written reprimand, again, it is grounds to fire them under guild rules.”

He points to double standards when being accused of expressing partiality and compromising the newspaper’s trust among its readership. Hedges said:

“I wasn’t the only one to speak about the war. John Burns [of the Times] and other reporters were quite public in their support for the invasion of Iraq, and yet Burns wasn’t reprimanded because he was spitting back the dominant narrative. So, it’s not that I was speaking about the war. And I had a lot more experience in the Middle East than John Burns did. It was that I was not reinforcing the dominant narrative.

Most of the reporters that I worked with in the Middle East, their opinion was no different from mine. They thought that this was insanity to invade Iraq, but they were smart enough to keep their mouth shut.

And those reporters who were cheerleaders for the war — and there were many of them – they then became contrite. A few years later — George Packer [The New Yorker] would be a good example, Michael Ignatieff, and others — they’ll say, you know, I made a mistake, but they didn’t make a mistake.

They knew precisely what was good for their career. That’s what they have always served, that’s what they serve. I really didn’t care, because I knew that people I cared about would be killed, that the cost in terms of suffering would be something that wouldn’t come close to what I would endure by having my career trashed. And I think in the end, that is because I, as a reporter, I always felt that the truth was paramount.”

ABC Responds

In a statement to Consortium News, the ABC denied it acted upon outside political pressure when reporting news or making editorial decisions and that it expected its staff “to carry out their duties properly as public-interest journalists.”

It said the ABC did not have “a position on this conflict in favour of any group” and said it “did not adopt the preferred language of one side or another in this conflict.”

“We opt for neutral, factual descriptors at all times. We will always be impartial and understand that impartiality does not mean false balance. We do not publish or broadcast information we know to be inaccurate in an attempt to ‘balance’ a different perspective.”

The statement added: “Maintaining trust and credibility as an ABC journalist means you forgo the opportunity to share your opinions about stories on which you report or may be involved in.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/01/17/j ... australia/

******

Mainstream Media Lies About U.S. Wars In Iraq Wear On

Another blatant mainstream media lie:

How Israel’s war in Gaza became a tangled crisis spanning the Middle East - Washington Post, Jan 17, 2024
> Roughly 2,500 U.S. personnel are based in Iraq, with Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani saying that their presence is needed to help stop the Islamic State from regaining ground. <

Reality:

Baghdad Seeking ‘Arrangements’ to End Deployment of Int’l Coalition - Asharq Al-Awsat, Dec 29, 2023
Iraq: PM says government to start process of removing US-led forces - MEE, Jan 5, 2024
Iraq decision to end US military presence ‘irreversible’: Sudani - ABNA, Jan 6, 2024
Iraq preparing to end presence of US-led coalition, says PM Mohamed Shia al-Sudani - WION via MSN, Jan 10, 2024
Exclusive-Iraq seeks quick exit of US forces but no deadline set, PM says - Reuters via AOL, Jan 10, 2024
Iraq seeks quick exit of US forces: Sudani - ABNA, Jan 11, 2024
Iraq discusses security cooperation with NATO - Iraqi News, Jan 17, 2024
> The meeting addressed the withdrawal of the international coalition forces in Iraq, which the government included in its agenda following the development achieved by the Iraqi forces.
The Iraqi Prime Minister also talked about the need to end the mission of the international coalition in Iraq through dialogue to ensure a smooth transition of its duties.

Al-Sudani explained that Iraq does not mind cooperating with the countries of the international coalition in fields of armament, training, and equipment within the framework of bilateral ties that unite Iraq and the coalition’s member countries. <

Posted by b on January 18, 2024 at 10:13 UTC | Permalink

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2024/01/m ... l#comments

[blindpig]

(This is a very long piece, see link.Always knew the illusion of free press would have to go and now seems a tactically plausible time as Western capital's hegemony is crumbling bigger platforms/bullhorns are not enough. Even as the US populace has been herded into the D/R duopoly dystopia that is no longer good enough to keep dissonance at a manageable level. And so the hammers will fall, wrapped in the liberal banners of Goodness...)

Year of Troubles: The Hatchets Come Out for Substack and Simplicius

SIMPLICIUS THE THINKER
JAN 19, 2024

Year of troubles, season of hatchetmen.

As of several weeks back, Substack has been under a massive seemingly coordinated attack from subversive forces seeking to create a viral exodus from the site by reputationally damaging it. Unfortunately, it seems the program is of such wide scope as to even target individual high volume accounts, of which I appear to be one—as I too have now come under the hatchetmen’s blade of deplatformization.

First, a brief background:

Substack, as most people know, is a fairly young business. Though the company opened doors in 2017, it didn’t really begin gaining widespread appeal until around 2020, when a host of dissident voices found it to be the only non-censorial pulpit from which to shout the truth surrounding the unprecedented fraud of the 2020 election:



I remember myself first hearing of it somewhere around that time, from the likes of big-reach Twitter influencers like Mike Cernovich and his conservative milieu. After that, and the subsequent Covid “pandemic”, Substack naturally took its place as an oasis from the censorship and deplatformization found virtually everywhere else, rising to new heights in the process.

As soon as that happened, Substack predictably became a target for all the most detestable hallmonitor organizations seeking to gatekeep the truth via their corporate brand of ‘fact-checking’ and censorship. It culminated in a high-visibility attack from the ADL itself early last year:



You can read their entire hitpiece here. https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/anti ... substack-0

Once the ADL blew the war shofar it was game on, as this was treated as marching orders to all the most reprehensible organizations and fake news outlets to begin mustering to formation.

This culminated in what was the most high-profile hitpiece of all, last month’s Atlantic feature:



https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archi ... rs/676156/
The piece’s job was precisely to browbeat Substack into “addressing” the issue, for which an entire offensive response package was already developed. Naturally, Substack was forced to respond, holding the line against censorship, which initiated Phase 2.0 of the operation:



These articles generated a firestorm of anti-Substack agitation designed to be the leading edge of the coordinated attack and planned migration wave that would soon follow. Using the article as circular “evidence”, a critical mass of high-profile leftist Substackers immediately leapt to the podium to announce their withdrawals from the platform, hypocritically accusing Substack of transgressions which are found in even greater quantities at all the other corporate-orthodoxy toeing platforms they purported to be leaving for.

The dizzying scale of the attack made it appear orchestrated. Here’s just a few of the high profile bandwagon exits:



The above, with 40,000 subscribers, even lists Jonathan M. Katz’ blog on its ‘recommendations’—Katz is the author of the original Atlantic hitpiece: “Substack Has a Nazi Problem.”



Maybe the largest self-exile is Casey Newton’s Platformer—with nearly 200,000 subscribers:



This was followed by Ryan Broderick’s Garbage Day, with nearly 70,000 subscribers:

It’s very clear to see why this is happening now, of all times. Just as Substack may have owed its initial popularity to the trench-war surrounding the 2020 election, J6, and Covid, Substack likewise stands to be at the center of what is certainly going to be an unprecedented, controversial, and dangerous historical firestorm later this year, and early next.

Think that’s silly? A middling platform by the standards of market capitalization and total users can’t possibly be such a ‘dangerous’ bugbear to the elites, can it? Yet those who’ve been following will know that some of the empire’s most dangerous dissident voices reside exclusively on Substack. Does Matt Taibbi, Alex Berenson, Seymour Hersh, and many others ring a bell? Some of these Substack writers have been central to the most momentous political scandals and revelatory bombshells of recent times. Hell, Taibbi even paid for it with a retaliatory federal case against him:





That’s right: Substack gives succor to dissidents viewed as grave dangers to the establishment, and they cannot allow Substack to remain unfettered going into the critical end of 2024 cycle.

That is why the attack had to come now, to begin seeding the groundwork to try and discredit and eventually dismantle one of the last remaining free speech bastions on the internet. And they’re doing that with the same ol’ tired shtick, claiming some tiny obscure holdout of “Nazis” is not only denning on the site, but are forcing their way into people’s recommends.

This quite obviously stinks of the same type of contortion Media Matters was accused of just last month, wherein they were said to game the system by refreshing ads hundreds of times until landing on the chance ‘desired result’, which then served as smear-piece fodder about ‘dangerously’ unwanted ads appearing unbidden next to their content.

(Much more, finish this at link.)

https://simplicius76.substack.com/p/yea ... chets-come

(It does seem to me the a large factor in the timing of this repression of information is the Western public's overall rejection of Israel's monstrous crimes against the Palestinian people and their government's collusion. They know a slippery slope when they see one.)

[blindpig]

Pro-Israel Washington Post Reporter Smears the Grayzone as Holocaust Deniers in ADL-Affiliated Hit Piece
JANUARY 27, 2024


A graphic of Elizabeth “Lizza” Dwoskin over the logos of the Washington Post, the National Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) and the Anti-Defamation League. Photo: The Grayzone.

By Max Blumenthal and Wyatt Reed – Jan 24, 2024

In a falsehood-filled attack, the Washington Post’s ardently pro-Israel Elizabeth Dwoskin attacked The Grayzone’s factual reporting with “research” from a spook-infested outfit closely tied to the Anti-Defamation League.

Dwoskin also relied on an Israeli special forces vet heading a “Digital Iron Dome” campaign to censor social media criticism of Israel’s assault on Gaza.

On January 21, The Washington Post published an article purporting to expose a terrifying and “spreading” phenomenon: so-called “Oct. 7 truther’ groups” who “say [the] Hamas massacre was a false flag.” Unable to name those “truther groups,” the piece’s author, Elizabeth “Lizza” Dwoskin, cobbled together a random assortment of comments by 4chan and Reddit users to create the sense that antisemitic conspiracism was not only sweeping the internet, but taking over city councils across the country.

The piece took direct aim at The Grayzone, maliciously associating our factual reporting on friendly fire orders which led to many Israeli deaths on October 7 with Holocaust denial.

The Post’s Dwoskin went on to falsely claim that “articles on… Grayzone [sic] exaggerated” reports that Israelis were killed by the Israeli army “to suggest that most Israeli deaths were caused by friendly fire, not Hamas.” Yet no one associated with The Grayzone has ever claimed that “most” Israelis who died on October 7 were killed by the Israeli army, nor has it published any material suggesting October 7 was a “false flag.”

The author of the Post’s shoddily-sourced smear job, Elizabeth Dwoskin, is an ideologically committed Zionist who once referred to Palestinians as “desert Bedouins without a sense of national identity as we know it today.”

During a phone call with The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate during their livestream, Dwoskin refused to discuss her Zionist sympathies and hung up when asked about her reference to Palestinians as “desert Bedouins.” She neglected to quote from the on-the-record call in her piece.


A close review of Dwoskin’s factually-challenged hit piece reveals her work was guided by a shadowy “think tank” manned by a team of former national security state apparatchiks, as well as current and former US intelligence officers. Known as the National Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), the pro-censorship outfit was founded by a former researcher for one of the Israel lobby’s key pressure groups: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Washington Post relies on ADL spinoff behind hysterical reports on foreign meddling

According to the Washington Post’s Dwoskin, NCRI is a mere “nonprofit tracking disinformation.”

The NCRI, for its part, bills itself as “the world’s foremost expert in identifying and forecasting the treat [sic] and spread of misinformation and disinformation across social media platforms.” Founded in 2018 by the Rutgers University based “counter-disinformation” operative Joel Finkelstein, the outfit has emerged as a one-stop shop for legacy media publications pushing paranoia about nefarious activity by foreign actors.

A quick glance at media reports dependent on NCRI research makes the organization’s purpose abundantly clear. A Fortune Magazine writeup of an NCRI study claimed with threadbare evidence that “Russian propagandists” are “trying to sow distrust of COVID vaccines,” while an “exclusive” piece in TIME — based largely on the organization’s flimsy claims — screamed in its headline, “Iran Steps up Efforts to Sow Discord Inside the US.”



The hysterical tone of this coverage is driven by the NCRI’s “research.” Its most recent report, bearing a typically bombastic and Strangelovian title, is instructive: “A Tik-Tok-ing Timebomb: How TikTok’s Global Platform Anomalies Align with the Chinese Communist Party’s Geostrategic Objectives.”

The official NCRI website previously boasted of “affiliations” with George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Charles Koch Foundation, and the Anti-Defamation League. The section of the site which referenced these affiliations was deleted in 2021 after a report by The Grayzone exposing the supposedly independent group’s connections to the US national security state. The “About” page was removed entirely from the site the following month.

The exact nature of the relationships between NCRI and its affiliates is unclear, but they appear to be quite intimate. As previously documented by Tech Inquiry, “according to NCRI founder Joel Finkelstein’s LinkedIn profile, he was simultaneously a research fellow with the ADL and running NCRI between December 2018 and October 2020.” In 2019, the ADL announced it was partnering with NCRI “to produce a series of reports that take an in-depth look into how extremism and hate spread on social media – and provide recommendations on how to combat both.”


A section removed from NCRI’s website promoting affiliating with the ADL, Soros and Koch. Photo: Grayzone.

Claiming a danger to Jews “unprecedented in history,” the ADL released a report this January citing a whopping 3000 antisemitic incidents since October 7, amounting to a 360% increase in anti-Jewish activity. However, as The Grayzone’s Wyatt Reed revealed, the ADL reclassified protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza as “antisemitic incidents” to pad its report.

In all, the ADL claimed that 45% of the 2031 supposed antisemitic incidents it tracked were actually “anti-Israel rallies.”


To attack The Grayzone, Washington Post turns to Israeli special forces vet behind “Digital Iron Dome” censorship campaign
NCRI was not the only national security state cutout to be featured prominently in the Washington Post hit piece. The publication also cites Achiya Schatz, director of FakeReporter, which the Post’s Dwoskin generously describes as “an Israeli watchdog organization dedicated to fighting disinformation and hate speech online.”

Unmentioned entirely is that fact that — according to his profile on Middle East Initiatives — Schatz “served between 2005 and 2008 as a soldier and commander in Duvdevan,” a notorious plainclothes Israeli special forces unit best known for serving as the inspiration for Netflix hasbara show Fauda. Duvdevan soldiers are actively involved in Israel’s ongoing assault on the besieged Gaza Strip.

Schatz’s FakeReporter has spun out an initiative called “Digital Iron Dome” which allows users to “report inappropriate, hateful, antisemitic or anti-Zionist content with a single click,” according to Israel21c, a pro-Israel propaganda outlet. In other words, Schatz is leading a campaign to pressure social media platforms to censor content that casts the Israeli military in a negative light.

FakeReporter claims a 55% success rate in requests to censor “inflammatory content” appearing on social media, leading to suspensions for 40% of the accounts it targeted.


From FakeReporter’s Digital Iron Dome webpage. Photo: Grayzone.

While baselessly accusing The Grayzone of distorting testimony by an Israeli pilot who appeared to open fire on civilians at the Nova music festival, Schatz – and by extension, the Washington Post – ignored the publication of a blockbuster investigation that confirmed our reporting on friendly fire orders on October 7.

According to a January 10 report by Yediot Ahronoth, Israel’s most widely read newspaper, the Israeli military ordered all combat units on October 7 to stop Palestinian fighters from returning to Gaza with captives “at all costs.” It therefore issued a directive “to use the ‘Hannibal Procedure’ [authorizing the killing of Israeli captives] although without clearly mentioning this explicit name.” The Israeli outlet also revealed that 70 vehicles came under attack “by a combat helicopter, an anti-tank missile or a tank, and at least in some cases everyone in the vehicle was killed.”

On January 23, Grayzone editor-in-chief Max Blumenthal wrote Washington Post executive editor Sally Buzbee and over a dozen of her colleagues to alert them to Dwoskin’s factual errors, unsourced allegations, omissions, and record of anti-Palestinian propaganda.

We also inquired about whether the Washington Post routes stories on the Israeli assault on Gaza through its Jerusalem bureau, as CNN does – a practice placing its reporters at the mercy of the Israeli military censor.

Over 24 hours since emailing Washington Post leadership, we have not received a response.

The full text of Blumenthal’s email is below:

Max Blumenthal
@MaxBlumenthal
·
Follow
I sent the following note to WaPo exec editor @SallyBuzbee and her colleagues demanding corrections of Dwoskin's errors and an explanation of journalistic malpractice in her malicious smear of The Grayzone. Unsurprisingly, no response.

I am the founder and editor-in-chief of… Show more

Elizabeth Dwoskin
@lizzadwoskin
Sharing a piece I worked very hard and very carefully on — about Oct 7 “trutherism” - a growing movement that denies basic facts about the Hamas massacre. It’s about connections to Holocaust denial, QAnon, and the power of the Internet to erase history.

https://washingtonpost.com/technology/2 ... cy-israel/
8:06 PM · Jan 24, 2024

(Grayzone)

https://orinocotribune.com/pro-israel-w ... hit-piece/

[blindpig]

Across the Anglo-American mainstream media the killing of Palestinians is seen as normal. It’s only Israeli lives that matter, writes Des Freedman.


Israeli air strike destruction in the Gaza Strip, Oct. 17, 2023. (Fars Media Corporation, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0)

By Des Freedman
Declassified UK

Twenty-four Israeli soldiers were killed in two separate incidents in Gaza on Jan. 22. Mainstream media outlets around the world reacted in unison: this was the “deadliest day” for Israel since Oct. 7.

This exact phrase was used in headlines on Jan. 23 carried by news agencies such as Reuters and AFP, and major broadcasters including the BBC, CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC and ITV News.

The exact same phrase was also used by leading news titles including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, The Daily Telegraph, The Sun, The Jerusalem Post, The Guardian, London’s Evening Standard, Financial Times, The Independent and Yahoo News.

On the same day, Israeli forces killed almost 200 Palestinians in Gaza including at least 65 people in Khan Younis alone.

These deaths received no headlines in the above outlets. Where they were reported, they were listed as part of the regular daily round-up of events in an unfolding genocide that has now seen more than 26,000 people killed in Gaza.

How is it possible that the world’s media could embrace exactly the same phrase in relation to Israeli victims but largely ignore the identities of the much higher number of Palestinians killed?

Why would Jan. 22 be described as “deadly” for one group of people but not for another?

Unequal Value

You might expect that editors took the “deadliest day” phrase from press statements from the Israeli government or military.

Yet Israel Defense Forces (IDF) spokesperson Daniel Hagari did not use this phrase in his statement and neither did the IDF Chief of the General Staff Herzi Halevi, who instead simply called it a “difficult day.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu also described it as “one of the most difficult days” while Israel’s President Isaac Herzog spoke of “an unbearably difficult morning.” He used the same language as both Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana and Minister Benny Gantz, both of whom referred to a “painful morning.”

Of course, it is possible the phrase was used in private and informal briefings to the press on the morning of Jan. 23. It is, however, equally conceivable that this was a trope that came “naturally” from a deep-rooted idea in the western media that the lives of Israelis and Palestinians are not of equal value.

And, therefore, that measuring the “deadliness” of a particular day should only be done for Israelis (where every life matters) and not for Palestinians (whose individual lives clearly appear to count for less).

‘Deadliest Day’

Indeed, a search of the Nexis database of U.K. national and local news (including BBC broadcast bulletins) reveals that there were 856 uses of the phrase “deadliest day” from Oct. 7, 2023 until Jan. 25, none of which directly referred to evidence of Palestinian deaths in Gaza.

The only exception to this were some BBC bulletins on Oct. 25 which mentioned “Palestinians reporting the deadliest day in Gaza” (emphasis added).

Otherwise, there was not a single reference during this period across the British media to “the deadliest day for Palestinians” or “for the people of Gaza.”

The other approximately 850 references directly related only to Israeli casualties. Some 28 percent of them focused on the killing of IDF soldiers on Jan. 22.

The vast majority referred to the events of Oct. 7, described either as “the deadliest day for Jews” or “the deadliest day for the Jewish people” which accounted for some 25 percent of all references.

Many of these stories were focused on the words of U.S. President Joe Biden who, in a much publicised speech to Jewish leaders at the White House, described the Hamas attack on Oct. 7 as the “deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust.”

Biden’s words alone make up 20 percent of all references to the “deadliest day” trope.

Perhaps Biden’s words were on the minds of editors across the world as they listened to Israeli spokespeople on the morning of Jan. 23 and that the deaths of 24 IDF soldiers merited such a phrase when talking about Israeli lives.

Framing the War


Biden addresses a group of Jewish Community leaders about his support for Israel on Oct. 11, 2023. (White House, Adam Schultz)

But why has the phrase not been used in relation to Palestinians and, indeed, why is there so little preoccupation with days when particularly large numbers of Gazans are killed?

Precisely because the war is not framed in a way which recognises the equal worth of all those affected — in other words, a situation where every instance of significant Palestinian casualties would deserve a headline — it’s hard to be certain of which have been the very deadliest days for the residents of Gaza.

However, it’s clear that the period immediately after the temporary ceasefire in the last week of November saw particularly intense airstrikes and there were, according to Al Jazeera, at least 700 Palestinians killed on Dec. 2 alone.

Yet there was no mention in the U.K. media about this being the “deadliest day” for Palestinians. Instead, The Guardian simply ran with a headline of “‘Israel says its ground forces are operating across ‘all of Gaza’” while The Sunday Times wrote: “Fears for hostages as Gazans say bombardment is worse than ever.”

According to The Mail Online, “Israel says it is expanding its ground operations against Hamas’ strongholds across the whole of the Gaza Strip as IDF continues to bomb territory after terrorists broke fragile truce.”

The BBC’s TV news bulletins on Dec. 3 carried distressing footage of casualties but also featured a quote from an adviser to Netanyahu saying that “Israel was making the ‘maximum effort’ to avoid killing civilians” without carrying an immediate rebuttal of this outrageous claim.

In other words, despite the fact that 30 times more Palestinians were killed on Dec. 2 than when the 24 IDF soldiers were killed on Jan. 22, there was no recognition of the “deadliness” of that day.

Instead, the framing was all about the strategic plans of the Israeli military rather than the mass slaughter of Palestinians.

‘Intensive Strike’

On Dec. 26 a further 241 people were killed by Israeli bombs. Britain’s “newspaper of record,” The Times, responded with the headline: “Israel-Gaza war: Palestinians hit by ‘most savage bombing’” with a sub heading: “Israel launches most intensive strike since Hamas attack on October 7.”

You could be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing deadly about this episode because, after all, Palestinians were only being “struck” as opposed to brutally killed.

But this was hardly an exceptional day given that Oxfam reported earlier this year that Israel’s military was killing Palestinians at an average rate of 250 people a day, a figure it said exceeded the daily death toll of any other major conflict of recent years.

There is clearly a brutal politics to counting the dead. The New York Times ran an article on Jan. 22 headlined, “The Decline of Deaths in Gaza” arguing that average daily deaths across a 30-day period have now fallen below 150.


For the NYT, it is “plausible that a lower percentage of deaths are among civilians now that Israel’s attacks have become more targeted and the [average] daily toll has declined.”

Not only, however, is there little evidence that the IDF is in any way opposed to killing civilians but the idea that casualties are declining at a time when we are soon likely to see a total of 30,000 Palestinian deaths is profoundly shocking.

Any slowdown in the rate of killing is hardly a consolation to the millions who still live in fear of IDF raids and rockets.

Media Consensus

The media consensus that only Israelis are the victims of the “deadliest days” in the region and not Palestinians, despite the latter accounting for 95 percent of deaths since Oct. 7, is one of the many illustrations of the unequal and profoundly distorted coverage of this war.

Until the South African government submitted its partially successful claim to the International Court of Justice, news organisations were unwilling even to investigate the genocidal language of Israeli political and military leaders.

The media also routinely uses dehumanising and differential language where Israelis are “massacred” while Palestinians simply “die.” This illustrates the awful role of the mainstream media in paving the way for the ethnic cleansing we are currently seeing.

The real reason you don’t see or hear the media talk about a “deadly day” for Palestinians is that every day is deadly when you live in Gaza.

Des Freedman is a professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London and a founding member of the Media Reform Coalition.

This article is from Declassified UK.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/01/f ... es-matter/

*******

Leading Papers Skewed Gaza Debate Toward Israeli and Government Perspectives
JULIE HOLLAR
Guests Essayists on Gaza Crisis by National Affiliations



At the New York Times and Washington Post, despite efforts to include Palestinian voices, opinion editors have skewed the Gaza debate toward an Israel-centered perspective, dominated by men and, among guest writers, government officials.

In the first two months of the current Gaza crisis, the Times featured the crisis on its op-ed pages almost twice as many times as the Post (122 to 63). But while both papers did include a few strong pro-Palestinian voices—and both seemed to make an effort to bring Palestinian voices close to parity with Israeli voices—their pages leaned heavily toward a conversation dominated by Israeli interests and concerns.

That was due in large part due to their stables of regular columnists, who tend to write from a perspective aligned with Israel, if not always in alignment with its right-wing government. As a result, the viewpoints readers were most likely to encounter on the opinion pages of the two papers were sympathetic to, but not necessarily uncritical of, Israel.

Many opinion pieces at the Times, for instance, mentioned the word “occupation,” offering some context for the current crisis. However, very few at either paper went so far as to use the word “apartheid”—a term used by prominent human rights groups to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.

Clear calls for an unconditional ceasefire, while widespread in the real world, were vanishingly rare at the papers: two at the Times and at the Post only one, which itself was part of a collection of short responses to the question, “Should Israel agree to a ceasefire?,” which included strong opposition as well.

For guest perspectives, both papers turned most frequently to government officials, whether current or former, US or foreign. And the two papers continued the longstanding media bias toward male voices on issues of war and international affairs: the Times with roughly three male-penned opinions for every female-written one, and the Post at nearly 7-to-1.

Gaza Crisis Opinion Pieces, by Gender
Opinion pieces on the Gaza crisis with male vs. female bylines, New York Times and Washington Post, Oct.7-Dec 6, 2023
20
40
60
80
100
87%13%
88%12%
73%27%
77%23%
Post Guest EssaysPost Regular ColumnistsTimes Guest EssaysTimes Regular Columnists
MaleFemale

Percentages of 17 guest essays and 46 regular columns at the Post, and of 48 guest essays and 74 regular columnists at the Times.
Chart: Fairness and Accuracy in ReportingCreated with Datawrapper
For this study, FAIR identified and analyzed all opinion pieces published by the two papers from October 7 through December 6 that mentioned Israel or Gaza, using Nexis and ProQuest. Excluding editorials, web-only op-eds, letters to the editor and pieces with only passing mentions of Israel/Palestine, we tallied 122 pieces at the Times and 63 at the Post.

New York Times writers
During the first two months of the Gaza crisis, the New York Times published 48 related guest essays, along with 74 pieces by regular columnists, contributing writers (who write less frequently than columnists) and editorial board members (who occasionally publish bylined opinion pieces).

Of the 48 guest essays, the greatest concentration (16, or 33%) were written by Israelis or those with stated family or ancestral ties to Israel. Another 13 (27%) were written by Palestinians or people who declared ties to Palestine. Most of the rest (12, or 25%) were written by US writers with no identified family or ancestral ties to either Israel or Palestine.

The occupational category the Times turned to most frequently for guest opinions was government official, with current or former officials from the US or abroad accounting for 11 (23%) of the guest essays. (US officials outnumbered foreign officials, 6 to 5.) Journalists came in a close second, with nine (19%), followed by seven academics (15%). Six represented advocacy groups or activists (13%); four of these were Israeli and two Palestinian.

Guest Essayists on Gaza Crisis, by Occupation
Oct.7-Dec.6, 2023.
Gaza Crisis Guest Essayists by Occupation, NYT and WaPo
New York TimesWashington Post
Government Official
23%
30%
Journalist
19%
24%
Academic
15%
12%
Advocacy Group or Activist
13%
12%
Think Tank
8%
12%
Family Member of Hostage
6%
6%
Military
6%
6%
Lawyer
6%
0%
Author
4%
0%
Humanitarian Group
4%
0%
Pollster
4%
0%
Medical
2%
6%
Religious Leader
2%
0%
Out of 48 guest opinion essays published at the Times and 17 published at the Post. Some guests were identified with more than one occupation, so sum totals exceed total number of guest essayists.
Source: Fairness & Accuracy In ReportingCreated with Datawrapper

The paper also relied heavily on the opinions of men rather than women. Ninety-two of the Times opinion pieces were written by men (75%), while 30 were written by women (25%), an imbalance of more than 3-to-1.

Of the 17 pieces written by the Times‘ regular female columnists, eight came from Michelle Goldberg, and the preponderance were about domestic implications of the crisis. Examples of these include Goldberg’s “The Massacre in Israel and the Need for a Decent Left” (10/12/23) and Pamela Paul‘s “The War Comes to Stanford” (10/13/23), both of which decried the response to the Gaza crisis by the US pro-Palestinian left.

Washington Post writers
The Post published 46 pieces by regular columnists and only 17 by guest writers. Even given that the Post typically publishes fewer opinion pieces than the Times, that’s a strikingly small number of guest op-eds—roughly one every four days.

Unlike at the Times, the Post guest op-eds were dominated by US writers (7, or 41%), with only four by Israelis (24%) and three by Palestinians (18%). The Israeli-bylined op-eds expressed varied viewpoints, from hard-line support (“Every innocent Palestinian killed in this conflagration is the victim of Hamas”—10/10/23) to a call for “concrete steps to de-escalate the immediate conflict and to sow seeds for peace and reconciliation” (10/20/23). Two of the Palestinian-bylined pieces came from the same writer, journalist Daoud Kuttab (10/10/23, 11/28/23), who both times argued that Biden must recognize a Palestinian state as the only way forward.

Guest Essayists on Gaza Crisis, by National Affiliation
Oct. 7-Dec 6, 2023.
Guest Essayist National Affiliations
New York TimesWashington Post
Israel
33%
24%
Palestine
27%
18%
US
25%
41%
Other
15%
17%
Out of 48 guest opinion essays published at the Times and 17 published at the Post. FAIR classified a writer as affiliated with Israel or Palestine if they were from one of those nations or had self-identified family or ancestral connections to them. The US affiliation excludes writers with self-identified family ties to either nation.
Source: Fairness & Accuracy In ReportingCreated with Datawrapper


It’s useful to compare the papers’ current representation of Palestinian voices to their historical record. In +972 Magazine (10/2/20), Palestinian-American historian Maha Nasser counted opinion pieces (including editorials, columns and guest essays) that mentioned the word “Palestinian” at the Post and Times from 1970 through 2019. Of the thousands of pieces published, fewer than 2% were written by Palestinians at either paper (1.8% at the Times, 1.0% at the Post). In the most recent decade (2010–19), the numbers were only slightly higher, up to 2.8% at the Times and 1.6% at the Post.

While the comparison is not exact—because FAIR used different search terms (“Israel” or “Gaza”) and excluded editorials—in our two-month study period, 11% of bylined opinions were written by Palestinians at the Times, and 5% at the Post. Including editorials that mention Israel or Gaza (6 at the Post, 4 at the Times), those percentages drop slightly to 10% and 4%.

Like the Times, the Post leaned on government officials to shape the public debate; five of its guest op-eds were by current or former US or foreign officials (30%), four by journalists (24%), and only two by representatives of advocacy groups or activists (12%). As at the Times, US officials slightly edged foreign officials, 3 to 2.

The Post had an even more lopsided gender imbalance than the Times, at nearly 7–1. Only eight of its opinion pieces were by women: two guest essays (12%) and six columns (13%).

New York Times columnists
Several New York Times columnists wrote repeatedly about the Gaza crisis. The Times‘ foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, often writes about Middle East politics; during the study period, he wrote about nothing else, outpacing all of his colleagues with 13 columns about Gaza. Though Friedman is not known for pacifism or expressing sympathy for Palestinians (see FAIR.org, 7/13/20), he typically writes from a reliably centrist pro-Israel position, and his takes on the right-wing Netanyahu government have been generally critical.

New York Times: The Israeli Officials I Speak With Tell Me They Know Two Things for Sure
The headline of this Thomas Friedman column (New York Times, 10/29/23) reflected his Israel-centric perspective.

During the first two months of the war, Friedman repeatedly wrote columns (e.g., 10/10/23, 10/16/23, 10/19/23, 11/9/23) criticizing Netanyahu and his military strategy, discouraging a ground invasion and pushing for a diplomatic solution. His columns heavily focused on Israel and Israeli perspectives and interests, rather than Palestine and Palestinians; all but one of his headlines took “Israel” or “Israeli officials” as their subject, while two also mentioned “Hamas”; none mentioned “Gaza,” “Palestine” or “Palestinians.”

His last column (12/1/23) in the study period advocated for Israel to abandon its mission of destroying Hamas, and instead negotiate a ceasefire and withdrawal in exchange for a return of all hostages. Yet at the same time, he managed to project his habitual Orientalism and a distinct lack of empathy for the Palestinian humanitarian crisis. Even if it abandons its stated goal of eliminating Hamas, Israel will have succeeded, Friedman argued, because it will

have sent a powerful message of deterrence to Hamas and to Hezbollah in Lebanon: You destroy our villages, we will destroy yours 10 times more. This is ugly stuff, but the Middle East is a Hobbesian jungle. It is not Scandinavia.

“With Israel out,” he continued,

the humanitarian crisis created by this war in Gaza would become [Hamas leader Yahya] Sinwar’s and Hamas’s problem—as it should be. Every problem in Gaza would be Sinwar’s fault, starting with jobs.

These arguments—first, that people in the Middle East must be educated through violence, and next, that Israel ought to withdraw and take no responsibility for the crushing humanitarian disaster they have wrought—make clear the underlying callousness of the Times‘ most prolific Middle East columnist.

Fellow long-time columnist Nicholas Kristof also wrote repeatedly about Gaza (10 times), with more attention to the civilian casualties of the conflict. In one column (10/25/23), Kristof highlighted the voices of several Israelis who, despite the trauma they have experienced, have been able to “muster the clarity to understand that relentless bombardment and a ground invasion may not help.” Another column (10/28/23) concluded with the line: “I think someday we will look back in horror at both the Hamas butchery in Israel and at the worsening tableau of suffering in Gaza in which we are complicit.”

Yet Kristof was hardly a voice for the pro-Palestinian left, and twice made clear his position against a ceasefire. For instance, he wrote on December 6:

By pulverizing entire neighborhoods and killing huge numbers of civilians instead of using smaller bombs and taking a much more surgical approach, as American officials have urged, Israel has provoked growing demands for an extended ceasefire that would arguably amount to a Hamas victory.

NYT: Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War
The contrary opinion to the Bret Stephens column (New York Times, 10/15/23)—that Israel is responsible for killing the people it kills—was rarely stated so forthrightly on the Times op-ed page.

While the Times‘ prominent centrists favored Israel yet counseled restraint, the paper’s conservative columnists offered even more hawkish takes. Most prominently, conservative columnist Bret Stephens, who serves as a consistently pro-Israel voice on the Times opinion pages, wrote about the issue 11 times during the two-month period.

Earlier in his career, Stephens left the Wall Street Journal to take the helm at the Jerusalem Post “because he believed Israel was getting an unfair hearing in the press.” As he said at the time (Haaretz, 4/20/17): “I do not think Israel is the aggressor here. Insofar as getting the story right helps Israel, I guess you could say I’m trying to help Israel.”

After October 7, Stephens used his Times column to absolve Israel of any responsibility for Gaza casualties (“Hamas Bears the Blame for Every Death in This War,” 10/15/23), attack calls for a ceasefire (“The ‘Ceasefire Now’ Imposture,” 11/21/23) and vilify the pro-Palestinian US left (“The Anti-Israel Left Needs to Take a Hard Look at Itself,” 10/10/23; “The Left Is Dooming Any Hope for a Palestinian State,” 11/28/23).

Fellow conservatives Ross Douthat and David French offered fewer Gaza takes (five each) and, while less strident than Stephens, still took pro-Israel positions. French, for instance, argued in one column (10/15/23):

The challenge of fighting a pitched battle amid the civilian population would both render Israel’s attack more difficult and take more civilian lives. But refusing to attack and leaving Hamas in control of Gaza would create its own moral crisis.

He later (11/16/23) argued against a ceasefire, which would “block Israel’s exercise of its inherent right to self-defense.”

Douthat, in a column (10/18/23) musing about the lessons of the US “War on Terror” for Israel, included such nuggets of wisdom as “if invasion is your only option, America’s post-9/11 experience also counsels for a certain degree of maximalism in the numbers committed and the plans for occupation.”

As mentioned above, columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote eight Gaza-related columns, but primarily about domestic repercussions of the crisis—which is unsurprising, given her column beat is identified as “politics, gender, religion, ideology.” Goldberg paid particular attention to the debates over protest, speech and antisemitism, arguing against censorship, as well as against the idea that anti-Zionism could be equated with antisemitism (e.g., 11/20/23, 12/4/23)—though not without frequent barbs at the US left, such as when she blamed “the left” (10/23/23) for supposedly establishing the rules of censorship on campus that she decried: “privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas.”

No other regular columnist wrote more than three pieces touching on the Middle East crisis.

Washington Post columnists
WaPo: An inside look at what’s ahead in Israel’s shattering war in Gaza
Post columnist David Ignatius’ “inside looks” almost always came from inside Israel, not Gaza.

At the Washington Post, foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius was by far the most prolific writer on Gaza. Like Friedman, he penned 13 columns on the crisis, but because the Post published far fewer Gaza opinions than the Times, Ignatius’ views represented fully 20% of the Post‘s bylined opinions on the crisis. And, as Ignatius acknowledged in one of those columns (11/19/23), he “sees this terrible conflict largely through Israeli eyes.”

That’s in large part due to his sources. Ignatius, a former reporter (and Mideast correspondent from 1980–83), often includes original reporting in his columns. Four of his columns from the two months were filed from the Middle East: one from Doha (11/10/23), two from Tel Aviv (11/14/23, 11/19/23) and one from “Gaza City” (11/13/23)—though that last described his brief visit to Gaza “in an Israeli armored personnel carrier,” during which time “we could not interview any of the Gazan civilians” they saw fleeing along a “humanitarian corridor.”

Many of Ignatius’ columns were filled with quotes from Israelis he interviewed, but not from Palestinians. While not uncritical of Israel, Ignatius offered a largely one-sided view of the crisis to readers.

Conservative Post columnists Jason Willick (who wrote four columns) and Max Boot (who wrote three) were no counterbalance to Ignatius’ pro-Israel tilt. Willick used two of his columns (10/19/23, 12/6/23) to blame leftist “identity politics” for antisemitism in the US. In the other two, he blamed Hamas for Palestinian deaths (“Gazans Pay for Hamas’s Guerrilla Tactics,” 11/15/23) and encouraged “a tight embrace rather than a cold shoulder” for Netanyahu (“Benjamin Netanyahu, Moderate,” 11/26/23).

Boot offered mostly bloodless, academic assessments—such as “mass-casualty attacks are counterproductive” (10/18/23) and “tyrants and terrorists often underestimate the fighting capacity of liberal democracies” (10/13/23). His first Gaza-related offering (10/9/23), though, observed that “responsible Israelis—who are largely missing from Netanyahu’s far-right cabinet—know that Palestinians’ lives have to improve to prevent more eruptions of violence in the future.”

WaPo: If Hamas really cared about Palestinian lives, it would surrender
“Israel tries to minimize harm to civilians,” Charles Lane (Washington Post, 11/16/23) asserted—linking to a report on an Israeli government video of its forces dropping off 79 gallons of fuel at a hospital that they later destroyed.

Charles Lane, who occupies a more center–right position on the paper’s op-ed page, used three of his columns to talk about the crisis, each time to emphasize Hamas’s atrocities while denying Israel’s own. For instance, in “The Best Thing Hamas Can Do for Palestinians Is to Surrender” (11/16/23), Lane argued that “Israel does not intentionally kill civilians” and that “to save Palestinian lives,” Hamas ought to surrender, rather than placing “the burden on Israel to end the war.”

Two members of the paper’s center-right editorial board who also write bylined columns for the Post—Egyptian-American Shadi Hamid and Colbert King—published three opinions each related to the crisis during the first two months, columns that in general offered arguably the most balanced perspectives.

Hamid found room, alongside his rebukes of Hamas and the US left, to criticize “the devaluing of Palestinian lives” (11/30/23) and to argue that “now and not later, a ceasefire is necessary” (11/9/23)—even if he added the precondition that Hamas first agree to release hostages, with no preconditions for Israel.

King wrote more about the repercussions of the crisis, including repression of speech (11/18/23) and rising antisemitism and Islamophobia (11/11/23); he also wrote a plea for “full self-government [for Palestinians] and a land they can call their own” (10/21/23).

‘Ceasefire’ mentions
During the study period, more than 16,000 Palestinians were killed, including more than 7,000 children (OCHA, 12/5/23). From the very early days of the crisis, as Palestinian civilian casualties quickly mounted, calls for a ceasefire grew louder and more prominent. International leaders, human rights and humanitarian groups, and protesters worldwide demanded a halt to Israel’s relentless bombing (and, later, ground campaign) in order to stop the civilian casualties, allow desperately needed humanitarian aid to enter the blockaded strip of land, and work toward a diplomatic resolution to the conflict. (See FAIR.org, 10/24/23.)

A majority of the US public has supported a ceasefire since the early days of the crisis, and one poll found support increasing over time. Yet in the country’s two most prominent papers, the ceasefire debate was either mostly ignored (at the Post) or presented in a way that came nowhere close to reflecting public opinion (at the Times).

NYT: The ‘Cease-Fire Now’ Imposture
Bret Stephens (New York Times, 11/21/23) wrote that the call for a ceasefire in Gaza was a “lie” because it was Hamas that broke the existing ceasefire on October 7—ignoring the 214 Palestinians killed in the Occupied Territories in 2023 before that date.

In the Times, the word “ceasefire” in relationship to the current crisis appeared in 31 op-eds during the two months, representing 25% of all Gaza-related op-eds. (Four additional mentions referred to the ceasefire that was in place prior to October 7.) Many (11) were simply descriptive. For example, a guest op-ed (11/22/23) noted that “The hostage release deal outlined on Tuesday would include a ceasefire of at least four days.”

Of the remaining 21 that could be classified as advocating a position, 11 were clearly critical of calls for a ceasefire, such as Stephens’ “The Ceasefire Now Imposture” (11/21/23), in which he wrote, “Instead of Ceasefire Now, we need Hamas’ Defeat Now.” Nine of the anti-ceasefire columns were penned by Times regular columnists, four of them by Stephens.

Another two opinions focused on the plight of the Israeli hostages and insisted that a ceasefire should only be possible after all of them were freed. The brother of an Israeli hostage, for instance, made a case (11/15/23) for “the urgent need to prioritize the release of all the hostages as a condition for any humanitarian pause or ceasefire.”

Only seven Times opinions voiced any form of support for a ceasefire; most were mild or indirect exhortations. Former US ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer, for example, wrote (10/20/23) that Biden “needs to plan now for meeting Gaza’s immediate needs—which might require an early call on Israel for a humanitarian ceasefire—but must also develop a plan for the day after.”

Gershon Baskin, who negotiated previous hostage deals between Israel and Hamas, suggested (10/21/23) that the US press Qatar to issue an ultimatum to Hamas, but that Qatar was unlikely to agree to that, and “certainly not without an Israeli ceasefire.”

Three Times op-eds in the study period (less than 3% of all bylined opinion pieces) made clear and direct calls for an unconditional ceasefire. Two were written by Palestinians (10/19/23, 10/29/23), and one by Times contributing writer Megan Stack (10/30/23), a former war correspondent who has emerged as a rare strong voice for Palestine on the op-ed page. In the six weeks since the study period ended, Stack published two more essays on the crisis: “For Palestinians, the Future Is Being Bulldozed” (12/9/23) and “Don’t Turn Away From the Charges of Genocide Against Israel” (1/12/24).

WaPo: A cease-fire in Gaza isn’t a fantasy. Here’s how it could work.
The only clear and direct call for a ceasefire in the Washington Post came from Shadi Hamid (11/9/23), who insisted that Hamas must first release its hostages.

At the Post, we found 16 mentions of “ceasefire” during the two-month study period—far less total attention than at the Times, but a similar proportion of its Gaza opinion (25%). Half of these were simply descriptive. Of the remaining eight, four expressed criticism, three expressed support, and one (11/3/23) was the previously mentioned collection of expert opinion on both sides of the ceasefire question that appeared scrupulously balanced between those in support and those opposed.

Two of the supportive op-eds (11/5/23, 11/28/23) were indirect; the only clear and direct call for a ceasefire, outside of the collection, came from Shadi Hamid, who put preconditions on Hamas but not Israel (11/9/23).

It’s noteworthy that Hamid’s opinion came just three days after the editorial board of which he is a member published an editorial (11/6/23) arguing against a ceasefire, except in the sense of “pauses in the fighting for humanitarian relief,” and even then only on the condition that Hamas release all hostages first. (Israel and Hamas agreed to a series of such pauses on November 9.)

The Times also published an editorial (11/3/23) around the same time calling for a “humanitarian pause,” but not a ceasefire. As the Times explained, “Israel has warned that a blanket ceasefire would accomplish little at this point other than allowing Hamas time to regroup.”

Other significant terms
Key Words Mentioned in Gaza Crisis Opinion Pieces
Percentage of in-house and guest bylined opinion pieces that mentioned the given search terms in the New York Times and Washington Post, Oct. 7-Dec. 6, 2023.
New York TimesWashington Post
Ceasefire
25%
25%
Genocide
11%
13%
Apartheid
6%
2%
Occupy/Occupation
48%
14%
Terrorist/Terrorism
57%
63%
Self-Defense/Right to Defend
19%
16%
Percentages of 122 total opinion pieces published at the Times and 63 published at the Post that address the Gaza crisis during the study period.
Chart: Fairness and Accuracy In ReportingCreated with Datawrapper

“Genocide” (or “genocidal”) is another term that has been used to describe both the actions of Hamas and those of Israel. At the Times, the word appeared in 13 op-eds (11%) and at the Post, eight (13%).

In the Post, the word was used three times to describe Hamas and five to describe Israel. Two of the three Hamas mentions (10/18/23, 10/25/23) applied the word in the author’s own voice; the third (10/29/23) was quoted approvingly.

Four of the Post‘s five mentions of genocide in relation to Israel were quotes or paraphrases from another person, either offered neutrally or disapprovingly, as when protester signs or chants were described (11/1/23, 11/18/23). The fifth was in the Post‘s collection of opinions about a ceasefire, in which one Palestinian described the recent bombing death of his extended family:

Today, the word “genocide” is being widely used. I can’t think of another word that captures the magnitude of what Israel, a nuclear-armed military power, continues to unleash on a captive population of children and refugees. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the quiet part out loud: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before,” he said. “We will eliminate everything.”

NYT: What I Believe as a Historian of Genocide
The New York Times (11/10/23) brought in an Israeli historian to argue that “there is no proof that genocide is currently taking place in Gaza.”

At the Times, the use of “genocide” was more varied, with many of the references used in a more historical way (about the Jews historically being a target of genocide, for instance) or to discuss the domestic debates about the language used by protesters. It was used once to characterize Hamas (10/26/23), twice to quote leftists characterizing Israel (10/25/23, 11/17/23), and twice to characterize Israel’s assault as either “the specter of genocide” (11/3/23) or what “may be…an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly devolve into genocide” (11/10/23).

The broader context of the conflict was often missing in the papers’ opinion pages, particularly at the Post. The word “occupation” (or “occupy”) appeared in 58 Times opinion pieces (48%) but only nine at the Post (14%). The word “apartheid,” which multiple prominent human rights organizations have used to describe the crimes committed against Palestinians by the Israeli state prior to October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/21/23), rarely appeared in either of the papers’ op-eds pages: seven times at the Times (6%) and once at the Post (2%).

Meanwhile, “terrorism” or “terrorist” appeared 70 times in the Times (57%) and 40 times in the Post (63%). “Self-defense” or “right to defend” made 23 appearances in the Times (19%) and 10 in the Post (16%).

https://fair.org/home/leading-papers-sk ... spectives/

Sorry about the tables.....

[blindpig]

CNN journalists angry at network's 'systemic' pro-Israel bias

The US network's coverage of Israel's war on Gaza has sought to 'implicitly justify Israeli actions' some of its own journalists and staffers say

News Desk

FEB 5, 2024


CNN reporter Clarissa Ward reported for only two hours within Gaza unaccompanied by the Israeli military

CNN staffers and journalists are speaking out against the network's editorial policies they say have led to uncritically repeating Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian voices and perspectives in its coverage of the war in Gaza, the Guardian reported on 5 February.

"The majority of news since the war began, regardless of how accurate the initial reporting, has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel," said one CNN staffer. "Ultimately, CNN's coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice."

According to accounts from six CNN staffers in multiple newsrooms and more than a dozen internal memos and emails obtained by the Guardian, the "editorial policies include tight restrictions on quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives while Israel government statements are taken at face value."

Further, every CNN report on the war must be cleared by the network's Jerusalem bureau before broadcast or publication.

In January, The Intercept reported that CNN's Jerusalem bureau, in turn, submits stories to Israel's military censor for approval.

Crucially, CNN has provided no coverage of Israel implementing the Hannibal Directive, which instructed Israeli forces to kill Israeli civilians to prevent them from being taken captive to Gaza by Hamas on 7 October. As a result of the controversial policy, Israeli forces used attack helicopters, armed drones, and tanks to kill Israeli civilians in their homes in settlements (kibbutzim) and in the open fields near the Gaza border and even within Gaza during the Hamas attack.

CNN journalists say the tone of coverage is set at the top by CEO and Editor-in-Chief Mark Thompson, who was placed in his position just two days after 7 October.

Thompson's policies have resulted, particularly early in the war, "in a greater focus on Israeli suffering and the Israeli narrative of the war as a hunt for Hamas and its tunnels, and an insufficient focus on the scale of Palestinian civilian deaths and destruction in Gaza," the Guardian wrote.

"Many have been pushing for more content from Gaza to be alerted and aired. By the time these reports go through Jerusalem and make it to TV or the homepage, critical changes – from the introduction of imprecise language to an ignorance of crucial stories – ensure that nearly every report, no matter how damning, relieves Israel of wrongdoing."

While roughly 1,200 Israeli civilians and soldiers were killed on 7 October, including large numbers by Israeli forces themselves, Israel's military campaign on Gaza has now killed over 27,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children.

In late October, after more than 2,700 Palestinian children had been killed and as Israel prepared for its ground invasion, Thompson sent a set of guidelines to CNN staff by email.

The email states that while CNN would report the human consequences of the Israeli assault on Palestinians, "we must continue always to remind our audiences of the immediate cause of this current conflict, namely the Hamas attack and mass murder and kidnap of civilians."

CNN staff members said the memo ensured the network's coverage would implicitly justify Israeli actions and that other context or history about the roots of the conflict long before 7 October was often unwelcome or marginalized.

"How else are editors going to read that other than as an instruction that no matter what the Israelis do, Hamas is ultimately to blame? Every action by Israel – dropping massive bombs that wipe out entire streets, its obliteration of whole families – the coverage ends up massaged to create a 'they had it coming' narrative,'" said one staffer.

The same memo said that any reference to casualty figures from the Gaza health ministry must say it is "Hamas-controlled," implying that reports of the deaths of thousands of children were unreliable even though both US and Israeli intelligence quietly acknowledged they are roughly correct, or even undercounted, with so many buried under the rubble of apartment blocs leveled by Israeli bombing.

David Lindsay, the senior director of news standards and practices, issued a directive in early November preventing the reporting of most Hamas statements, calling them "inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda."

"Most of it has been said many times before and is not newsworthy. We should be careful not to give it a platform," he wrote.

Another instruction on 23 October stated that reports must not show Hamas video of the release of two elderly Israeli captives, Nurit Cooper and Yocheved Lifshitz. As they were placed in a Red Cross vehicle to be freed, Lifshitz shook hands with a Hamas fighter escorting her, portraying Hamas in a potentially positive light. She also stated that Hamas had treated her well while in captivity during a press conference at a hospital upon release. The Israeli government later placed restrictions on freed captives speaking with the media.

"Some CNN staff fear that as a result of these policies, the network is acting as a surrogate censor on behalf of the Israeli government," the Guardian reported further.

"The system results in chosen individuals editing any and all reporting with an institutionalized pro-Israel bias, often using passive language to absolve the [Israel Defense Forces] of responsibility and playing down Palestinian deaths and Israeli attacks," said one of the network's journalists.

One staffer pointed to the appearance of Rami Igra, a former senior Israeli intelligence official, on CNN's flagship news program hosted by Anderson Cooper.

Igra claimed that the entire Palestinian population of Gaza could be regarded as combatants, while Cooper failed to push back on the clearly false claim.

"The non-combatant population in the Gaza Strip is really a nonexistent term because all of the Gazans voted for the Hamas, and as we have seen on the 7th of October, most of the population in the Gaza Strip are Hamas," he said.

By the time of the 19 November interview, more than 13,000 people had been killed by Israel in Gaza, most of them civilians.

CNN staffers and journalists also criticized CNN presenter Sara Sidner, who excitedly reported unverified Israeli claims that Hamas beheaded dozens of babies on 7 October.

By the time of Sidner's report, doubt had already been cast on the claim, which later was shown to be a fabrication.

CNN insiders said, "Senior editors should have treated the story with caution from the beginning because the Israeli military has a track record of false or exaggerated claims that subsequently fall apart," the Guardian added.

https://thecradle.co/articles/cnn-journ ... srael-bias

[blindpig]

The Western Press Are Just Printing Straight Up Nazi Propaganda About Middle Easterners Now

It sure is an interesting coincidence how all this mass media demonizing and dehumanizing of Muslim populations is happening at the exact same time the western empire is raining military explosives upon nations full of Muslims.

Caitlin Johnstone

Mass media outlets like The Guardian, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have been allowing the publication of some amazingly racist pieces these last few days. All are directed at middle easterners and those of middle eastern descent, just as the western empire drops more and more bombs on more and more countries in the middle east.

On Monday The Guardian published a political cartoon which would be indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda of the 1930s, except that it happens to depict a Muslim instead of a Jew. The cartoon features Iranian leader Ali Khamenei holding puppet strings to so-called Iranian proxy groups in the middle east like the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas, in exactly the same way Nazis used to depict Jews as malignant puppet masters manipulating world affairs.

Compare this:



to Nazi propaganda about Jews puppeting world leaders during the lead-up to the Holocaust:





To this day it’s understood by the mainstream press that it’s unacceptable to depict anyone of the Jewish faith as any kind of puppet-master figure in any context at all. Fox News, the Dutch paper De Volkskrant, the Indian Bharatiya Janata Party and right wing political cartoonist Ben Garrison have all come under fire in recent years for depicting Jewish people in that way, so it’s safe to say that if The Guardian had published a similar cartoon about Israeli influence featuring an Israeli leader it would have been a massive scandal subject to international outcry.

In fact the bar is quite a bit lower for what qualifies as an outrageous racist trope when it comes to criticism of Israel. Mainstream platforms like The Guardian, The New York Times and the Sunday Times have been pressured to remove cartoons critical of Israel which are far less clearly anti-semitic than cartoons about sinister puppet masters. In 2014 the Sydney Morning Herald was pressured to remove and apologize for a cartoon which was labeled anti-semitic because it featured “a grotesque stereotype of a Jew using a remote-control device to blow up houses and people in Gaza,” something that for the last four months has been a daily occurance and an objective fact of life.

There is zero chance that The Guardian’s editors would have even for a second entertained the idea of publishing such a cartoon about Israeli leaders in the year 2024, but apparently publishing the exact same sort of rehashed Nazi propaganda about Iranian leaders is perfectly fine.



New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, who has never met a middle eastern war that didn’t physically arouse him, was somehow permitted to publish an article titled “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom” which compares middle easterners to insects and parasites.

There is of course no meaningful analysis in Friedman’s piece; he’s literally just comparing countries he likes to cool animals and countries he doesn’t like to yucky bugs. Hamas is a spider. Iran is a “parasitoid wasp”, and Lebanon, Yemen, Syria and Iraq are the caterpillars it lays its eggs in. Netanyahu is a lemur, hopping side to side based on the political demands of the moment, and the United States? You guys, get this: the United States is a lion. Rooooar!

Again, there is no mainstream western outlet in existence who would permit a columnist to compare Israelis to insects or parasites, and rightly so — it’s exactly the type of dehumanizing language was used by the Nazis to pave the way to the Holocaust. But comparing Muslim populations is a-okay in the eyes of the western press.

“We have no counterstrategy that safely and efficiently kills the wasp without setting fire to the whole jungle,” Friedman writes, as though this is a perfectly sane and normal thing to print in the most influential newspaper in the western world.

“Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet,” Friedman concludes, apparently never having been told that contemplating the middle east by watching either is an embarrassing admission.

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the analysis here from mister Thomas L Friedman, who has won no fewer than three Pulitzers for this kind of baby-brained schtick. And if that isn’t an indictment of the state of western journalism, nothing is.



Not to be outdone, The Wall Street Journal has published an article by Steven Stalinsky titled “Welcome to Dearborn, America’s Jihad Capital” about the Michigan city which is home to the largest per capita Muslim population in the United States.

In recent decades Dearborn saw a wave of immigration from Palestine and from Muslim-majority nations that the US is currently bombing like Syria, Iraq and Yemen, and apparently Mr Stalinsky finds it outrageous and scandalous that such a population would be opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza at this time. He frets over a Palestinian American Islamist cleric calling President Biden a “senile pharoah”, which I think we can all agree is hilarious.

Stalinsky runs a think tank called the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), which was literally founded by a former Israeli intelligence officer. Pro-Palestine activist and academic Norman Finkelstein has accused MEMRI of using “the same sort of propaganda techniques as the Nazis,” and even brazenly unprincipled empire propagandist Brian Whitaker has written that MEMRI “poses as a research institute when it’s basically a propaganda operation.”

In the last few days The Wall Street Journal has also published editorial board pieces with demented headlines like “Chicago Votes for Hamas” after the Chicago City Council voted to support a ceasefire in Gaza, and “The U.N.’s War on Israel” about the since-discredited narrative that some UNRWA staff are known to have participated in the October 7 attack.

And I must say it sure is an interesting coincidence how all this mass media demonizing and dehumanizing of Muslim populations is happening at the exact same time the western empire is raining military explosives upon nations full of Muslims. It’s almost like the western press are trying to manufacture consent for the military aggressions of western governments. It’s almost like they always have.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/02 ... rners-now/

[blindpig]

Study Finds Media Giants New York Times, CNN, and Fox News Pushing for US War in Yemen
FEBRUARY 9, 2024



By Alan Macleod – Feb 6, 2024

A MintPress study of major U.S. media outlets’ coverage of the Yemeni Red Sea blockade has found an overwhelming bias in the press, which presented the event as an aggressive, hostile act of terrorism by Ansar Allah (a.k.a. the Houthis), who were presented as pawns of the Iranian government. While constantly putting forward pro-war talking points, the U.S. was portrayed as a good faith, neutral actor being “dragged” into another Middle Eastern conflict against its will.

Since November, Ansar Allah has been conducting a blockade of Israeli ships entering the Red Sea in an attempt to force Israel to stop its attack on the people of Gaza. The U.S. government, which has refused to act to stop a genocide, sprang into action to prevent damage to private property, leading an international coalition to bomb targets in Yemen.

The effect of the blockade has been substantial. With hundreds of vessels taking the detour around Africa, big businesses like Tesla and Volvo have announced they have suspended European production. Ikea has warned that it is running low on supplies, and the price of a standard shipping container between China and Europe has more than doubled. Ansar Allah, evidently, has been able to target a weak spot of global capitalism.

Western airstrikes on Yemen, however, according to Ansar Allah spokesperson Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, at least, said that they have had only a “very limited” impact so far. Al-Bukhaiti made these comments in a recent interview with MintPress News.



Biased reporting
MintPress conducted a study of four leading American outlets: The New York Times, CNN, Fox News and NBC News. Together, these outlets often set the agenda for the rest of the media system and could be said to be a reasonable representation of the corporate media spectrum as a whole.
Using the search term “Yemen” in the Dow Jones Factiva global news database, the fifteen most recent relevant articles from each outlet were read and studied, giving a total sample of 60 articles. All articles were published in January 2024 or December 2023.

For full information and coding, see the attached viewable spreadsheet.

The study found the media wildly distorted reality, presenting a skewed picture that aided U.S. imperial ambitions. For one, every article in the study (60 out of 60) used the word “Houthis” rather than “Ansar Allah” to describe the movement which took part in the Yemeni Revolution of 2011 and rose up against the government in 2014, taking control of the capital Sanaa, becoming the new de facto government. Many in Yemen consider the term “Houthi” to be a derogatory term for an umbrella movement of people. As Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, Head of Yemen’s Supreme Revolutionary Committee, told MintPress:

‘Houthis’ is not a name we apply to ourselves. We refuse to be called Houthis. It is not from us. It is a name given to us by our enemies in an attempt to frame the broad masses in Yemeni society that belong to our project.”

Yet only two articles even mentioned the name “Ansar Allah” at all.

Since 2014, Ansar Allah has been in control of the vast majority of Yemen, despite a U.S.-backed Saudi coalition attempting to beat them back and restore the previous administration.

Many of the articles studied, however (22 of the 60 in total), did not present Ansar Allah as a governmental force but rather as a “tribal group” (the New York Times), a “ragtag but effective” rebel organization (CNN), or a “large clan” of “extremists” (NBC News). Fourteen articles went further, using the word “terrorist” in reference to Ansar Allah, usually in the context of the U.S. government or American officials calling them such.

Some, however, used it as a supposedly uncontroversial descriptor. One Fox article, for example, read: “For weeks, the Yemeni terrorist group’s actions have been disrupting maritime traffic, while the U.S. military has been responding with strikes.” And a CNN caption noted that U.S. forces “conducted strikes on 8 Houthi targets in Iranian-backed Houthi terrorist-controlled areas of Yemen on January 22.”

Ansar Allah is responding to an Israeli onslaught that has killed tens of thousands of civilians and displaced around 1.9 million Gazans. Yet Israel and its actions were almost never described as “terrorism,” despite arguably fitting the definition far better than the Yemeni movement. The sole exception to this was a comment from al-Houthi, whom CNN quoted as calling Israel a “terrorist state.” Neither the United States nor its actions were ever described using such language.

Eyes on Iran
Although the perpetrator of the attacks on shipping is unquestionably Ansar Allah, corporate media had another culprit in mind: Iran. Fifty-nine of the 60 articles studied reminded readers that the Yemeni group is supported by the Islamic Republic, thereby directly pointing the finger at Tehran.

It is indeed true that Iran supports Ansar Allah politically and militarily. When directly asked by MintPress if Tehran supplies it with weapons, al-Bukhaiti dodged the question, calling it a “marginal issue.” Why this facet of the story needed to be repeated literally hundreds of times is unclear. Often, the media studied would repeat it ad nauseam, to the point where a reader would be forgiven for thinking Ansar Allah’s official name was the “Iran-backed Houthis.” One CNN round-up used the phrase (or similar) seven times, a Fox News article six times, and an NBC News report five times.

Not only was the “Iran-backed” factoid used constantly, but it was also made a prominent part of how the issue was framed to the American public. The title of one Fox News report, for instance, read (emphasis added throughout): “U.S.-U.K. coalition strike Iran-backed Houthi targets in Yemen after spate of ship attacks in Red Sea,” its subheadline stated that: “Yemen’s Iranian-backed Houthi militants have stepped up attacks on commercial vessels in the Red Sea in recent weeks,” and its first sentence read: “The United States and Britain carried out a series of airstrikes on military locations belonging to Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen early Friday in response to the militant group’s ongoing attacks on vessels traveling through the Red Sea.”



From a stylistic point of view, repeating the same phrase continuously is very poor form. It does, however, drive the point home, suggesting perhaps that this was an inorganic directive from above.

This is far from an unlikely event. We know, for example, that in October, new CNN CEO Mark Thompson sent out a memo to staff instructing them to always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gazan Health Ministry and their figures for deaths from Israeli bombardment. This was done with the clear intent to undermine the Palestinian side of the story.

Not only did the four outlets studied constantly remind readers that Ansar Allah is supported by Iran, but they also regularly framed the violence as orchestrated by Tehran and that Ansar Allah is little more than a group of mindless, unthinking pawns of Ayatollah Khamenei. As the New York Times wrote:

Investing in proxy forces — fellow Shiites in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen, and the Sunni Hamas in the Gaza Strip — allows Iran to cause trouble for its enemies, and to raise the prospect of causing more if attacked…The Houthi movement in Yemen launched an insurgency against the government two decades ago. What was once a ragtag rebel force gained power thanks at least in part to covert military aid from Iran, according to American and Middle Eastern officials and analysts.”

This “Iran is masterfully pulling all the strings” framing was present in 21 of the 60 articles.

The fearmongering about Iran did not stop there, however, with some outlets suggesting Tehran is building an international terror network or constructing an atomic bomb. The New York Times quoted one analyst who said:

Iran is really pushing it…It’s another reason they don’t want a war now: They want their centrifuges to run peacefully.” The Iranians do not have a nuclear weapon but could enrich enough uranium to weapons-grade in a few weeks, from the current 60 percent enrichment to 90 percent, he said. ”They’ve done 95 percent of the work.’”

The point of all this was to demonize Ansar Allah and ramp up tensions with Iran, leading to the inevitable calls for war. “The U.S. needs to strike Iran, and make it smart,” ran the (since changed) title of a Washington Post editorial. “The West may now have no option but to attack Iran,” wrote neoconservative Iran hawk John Bolton in the pages of The Daily Telegraph. Bolton, of course, is part of a group called United Against Nuclear Iran that, since its inception, has been attempting to convince the U.S. to bomb Iran. Earlier this year, MintPress News profiled the shady think tank.

While the media in the sample reminded us literally hundreds of times that Ansar Allah is Iran-backed, similar phrases such as “U.S.-backed Saudi Arabia” or “America-backed Israel” were never used, despite the fact that Washington props both those countries up, with diplomatic, military and economic support. The Biden administration has rushed more than $14 billion in military aid to Israel since October 7, sent a fleet of warships to the region, and blocked diplomatic efforts to stop Israel’s attack on Gaza.

Meanwhile, it is doubtful whether Saudi Arabia would exist in its current form without U.S. support. Militarily alone, the U.S. has sold tens of billions of dollars worth of weaponry to Riyadh, helping the petro-state to convert its oil profits into security. From 2014 to 2023, Saudi Arabia led a U.S.-backed coalition force attempting to remove Ansar Allah from power. This consisted primarily of a massive bombing campaign against civilian targets in Yemen, including farms, hospitals and sanitation infrastructure. The violence turned Yemen into what the United Nations regularly called the “world’s worst humanitarian crisis,” with around 400,000 people dying and tens of millions going hungry and lacking even basic healthcare.



The U.S. backed Saudi Arabia the whole way, selling the government at least $28.4 billion worth of arms, according to a MintPress study. In 2021, the Biden administration announced it would only sell the kingdom “defensive” technology. However, this has included shipments of cruise missiles, attack helicopters, and support for gunships.

Both Saudi Arabia and Israel featured prominently in the articles studied. But only five of the 60 mentioned U.S. support for Saudi Arabia, and none at all for Israel. This context is extremely important for American audiences to know. Without their government’s political, military, economic and diplomatic support, none of this would be possible, and the current situation would be radically different. Only six articles mentioned U.S. support for the Saudi onslaught against Yemen – and none featured the fact prominently as they did with Iranian support for Ansar Allah.

Only one article in the sample suggested that Ansar Allah might not simply be an Iranian cat’s paw. The New York Times wrote that: “The Houthis are an important arm of Iran’s so-called ‘axis of resistance,’ which includes armed groups across the Middle East. But Yemeni analysts say they view the militia as a complex Yemeni group, rather than just an Iranian proxy.” This was the sum total of information given suggesting Ansar Allah is an independent actor.

A humanitarian blockade?
Yemen considers its actions in blocking Israeli traffic from the Red Sea as a humanitarian gesture, similar to the “right to protect” concept the U.S. frequently invokes to justify what it sees as humanitarian interventions across the world. As al-Houthi told MintPress:

First, our position is religious and humanitarian, and we see a tremendous injustice. We know the size and severity of these massacres committed against the people of Gaza. We have suffered from American-Saudi-Emirati terrorism in a coalition that has launched a war and imposed a blockade against us that is still ongoing. Therefore, we move from this standpoint and do not want the same crime to be repeated.”

Al-Bukhati said that Ansar Allah did not intend to kill anyone with their actions and that they would stop if Israel ceased its attack on Gaza, telling MintCast host Mnar Adley that:

We affirm to everyone that we only target ships associated with the Zionist entity [Israel], not with the intention of sinking or seizing them, but rather to divert them from their course in order to increase the economic cost on the Zionist entity [Israel] as a pressure tactic to stop the crimes of genocide in Gaza.”

However, this “humanitarian” framing of Yemen’s actions was not prominently used and was only introduced by identifying it as a Houthi claim. Many articles only alluded to the position of Ansar Allah. CNN wrote that “The Iran-backed Houthis have said they won’t stop their attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea until the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza ends.” Meanwhile, NBC News and Fox News frequently presented Ansar Allah’s actions as purely in support of their ally, Hamas, as the following two examples illustrate:



“The Iran-backed militants, who say their actions are aimed at supporting Hamas, vowed retaliation and said the attacks had killed at least 5 fighters at multiple rebel-held sites” (NBC News).

“Houthi forces have taken credit for continued attacks on merchant vessels and threatened to expand their targets to include U.S. and British vessels — all in a campaign to support Hamas in its war against Israel” (Fox News).

Therefore, humanitarian action was refashioned into support for terrorism.

Other articles also suggested a wide range of reasons for the blockade, including to “expand a regional war” and “distract the [Yemeni] public” from their “failing…governance” (New York Times), to “attempt to gain legitimacy at home,” (CNN), and “revenge against the U.S. for supporting Saudi Arabia,” (NBC News). Many offered no explanation for the blockade whatsoever.

A war “nobody wants”
As al-Bukhaiti’s comments suggest, there would be a very easy way to end the blockade: get Israel to end its operations in Gaza. But only twice in 60 articles was this reality even mentioned; one noting that Omani and Qatari officials advised that “reaching a cease-fire in Gaza would remove the Houthis’ stated impetus for the attacks,” and once in the final sentence of an NBC News article quoting al-Bukhaiti himself saying exactly as much. However, due to the placement of the information and the fact that it came from an organization regularly described as an Iran-backed extremist terrorist group, that idea likely held little weight with readers. Instead, military solutions (i.e., bombing Yemen) were the overwhelming response offered by the corporate press in their reporting.

Despite this, the media consistently presented the United States as a neutral and honest actor in the Middle East, on the verge of being “sucked” into another war against its will. As the New York Times wrote, “President Biden and his aides have struggled to keep the war contained, fearful that a regional escalation could quickly draw in American forces.” There was a profound “reluctance,” the Times told readers, from Biden to strike Yemen, but he had been left with “no real choice” but to do so.

This framing follows the classic trope of the bumbling empire “stumbling” into war that media watchdog Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has documented, where the United States is always “responding” to crises and is never the aggressor. “How America Could Stumble Into War With Iran,” wrote The Atlantic; “Trump could easily get us sucked into Afghanistan again,” Slate worried; “What It Would Take to Pull the US Into a War in Asia,” Quartz told readers.

None of the journalists writing about the U.S.’ frequent misfortune with war ever seem to contemplate why China, Brazil, Indonesia, or any other similarly large country do not get pulled into wars of their own volition as the United States does.

The four media outlets studied regularly presented the U.S. bombing one of the world’s poorest countries as a method of defending itself. CNN wrote that “Administration officials have repeatedly said that they see these actions as defensive rather than escalatory,” without comment. And Fox News ran with the extraordinary headline, “U.S. carries out ‘self-defense’ strike in Yemen against Iran-backed Houthi missiles” – a framing which could surely only fly in a deeply propagandized nation.

In reality, the United States’ military meddling in Yemen did not start this winter. Biden is the fourth successive U.S. president to bomb the country. In December, the White House confirmed that there are already American troops in Yemen, though what their precise focus is remains unclear.

How propaganda works
This sort of wildly skewed coverage does not happen by accident. Rather, it is the outcome of structural and ideological factors inherent within corporate media. The New York Times is committed to Zionism as an ideology, and its writers on the Middle East are not neutral actors but protagonists in the ongoing displacement of Palestinians. The newspaper owns property in West Jerusalem that was seized from the family of writer Ghada Kharmi during the 1948 ethnic cleansing. And while many Times writers are openly supportive of the Israeli project and have family members serving in the Israeli Defense Forces, staff who speak out against the ongoing genocide are promptly shown the door.

Fox News is no less complicit in the Israeli project. Its owner, Rupert Murdoch, is a major owner in Genie Energy, a company profiting from oil drilling in the illegally occupied Golan Heights region. Murdoch is famously hands-on as a boss and makes sure all of his media outlets follow his line on major issues. And on Israel, the Australian billionaire is explicit: “Israel is the greatest ally of democracy in a region beset with turmoil and radicalism,” he said in 2013. The network’s massive Evangelical Christian viewership would expect little else than strong support for the U.S.-Israeli position, either.

CNN, meanwhile, operates a strict, censorious, top-down approach to its Middle East coverage, with everything the outlet prints having to go through its notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem bureau before publishing. Senior executives send out directives instructing staff to make sure that Hamas (not Israel) is always presented as responsible for the current violence while, at the same time, barring any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”

Therefore, the results of this study, while shocking, should not be surprising, given this context. Through examining the coverage of Yemen in four leading U.S. outlets, it is clear that corporate media are failing to inform the public of many of the basic realities of who Ansar Allah is, why they are carrying out their campaign, and what it would take to end the hostilities, they are perpetuating this war, and therefore are every bit as responsible as the politicians and military commanders who keep the bloodshed going.

(MintPress News)

https://orinocotribune.com/study-finds- ... -in-yemen/

[blindpig]

Patrick Lawrence: Crisis at the NYT
February 14, 2024

The relationship between the Times and Israeli authorities is now exposed to more light than was ever supposed to shine on it.


The New York Times Building in New York City. (Torrenegra, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

By Patrick Lawrence
ScheerPost

It has been evident to many of us since the genocide in Gaza began Oct. 7 that Israel risked asking too much of those inclined to take its side.

The Zionist state would ask what many people cannot give: It would ask them to surrender their consciences, their idea of moral order, altogether their native decency as it murders, starves and disperses a population of 2.3 million while making their land uninhabitable.

The Israelis took this risk and they have lost. We are now able to watch videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating as they murder Palestinian mothers and children, as they dance and sing while detonating entire neighborhoods, as they mock Palestinians in a carnival of racist depravity one would have thought beyond what is worst in humanity — and certainly beyond what any Jew would do to another human being.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports, as American media do not, that the Israel Defense Forces covertly sponsor a social media channel disseminating this degenerate material in the cause of maintaining maximum hatred.

It is a psychologically diseased nation that boasts as it inflicts this suffering on The Other that obsesses it. The world is invited — the ultimate in perversity, this — to partake of Israel’s sickness and it said, in a Hague courtroom two weeks ago: “No.”

Post–Gaza, apartheid Israel is unlikely ever to recover what place it enjoyed, merited or otherwise, in the community of nations. It stands among the pariahs now.

The Biden regime took this risk, too, and it has also lost.

Its support for the Israelis’ daily brutalities comes at great political cost, at home and abroad, and is tearing America apart — its universities, its courts, its legislatures, its communities — and I would say what pride it still manages to take in itself.

When the history of America’s decline as a hegemonic power is written, the Gaza crisis is certain to figure as a significant marker in the nation’s descent into a morass of immorality that has already contributed to a collapse of its credibility.

We come to U.S. media — mainstream media, corporate media, legacy media. However you wish to name them, they have gambled and lost, too.

Their coverage of the Gaza crisis has been so egregiously and incautiously unbalanced in Israel’s behalf that we might count their derelictions as unprecedented. When the surveys are conducted and the returns are in, their unscrupulous distortions, their countless omissions, and — the worst offense, in my view — their dehumanization of the Palestinians of Gaza will have further damaged their already collapsing credibility.

We come, finally, to The New York Times. No medium in America has had further to fall in consequence of its reporting on Israel and Gaza since last October. And the once-but-no-longer newspaper of record, fairly suffocating amid its well-known hubris, falls as we speak.

It has erupted, by numerous accounts including implicitly its own, in an internal uproar over reportage from Israel and Gaza so shabby — so transparently negligent — that it, like Israel, may never fully restore its reputation.

Max Blumenthal, editor-in-chief of The Grayzone, described the crisis on Eighth Avenue better than anyone in the Jan. 30 segment of The Hill’s daily webcast, Rising.



“We’re looking at one of the biggest media scandals of our time,” he told Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave. Indeed. This well captures the gravity of the Times’ willful corruptions in its profligate use of Israeli propaganda, and Blumenthal deserves the microphone to say so.

Since late last year The Grayzone has exhaustively investigated the Times’ “investigations” of Hamas’s supposed savagery and Israel’s supposed innocence.

This is more than “inside baseball,” as the saying goes. We now have a usefully intricate anatomy of an undeservedly influential newspaper as it abjectly surrenders to power the sovereignty it is its duty to claim and assert in every day’s editions.

It would be hard to overstate the implications, for all of us, of what The Grayzone has brought to light. This is independent journalism at its best, reporting on corporate journalism at its worst.

“Since late last year The Grayzone has exhaustively investigated the Times’ ‘investigations’ of Hamas’s supposed savagery and Israel’s supposed innocence.”

What we find as we read the Times’ daily report from Israel, and from Gaza when its correspondents unwisely accept invitations to embed with the IDF, is a newspaper unwilling to question either its longstanding fidelity to Israel or its service to American power.

These two ideological proclivities — well more than what its reporters see and hear — have defined the paper’s coverage of this crisis. This is bad journalism straight off the top.

It was inevitable, then, that the Times would serve as Israel’s apologist as soon as the IDF murder spree began last October. This was not a rampage worthy of the Visigoths, as plentiful video footage carried on social media and in independent publications revealed it to be.

It was dignified as “a war,” a war waged not against Palestinians but “against Hamas,” and Israel fought it in “self-defense.” Hamas is “a terrorist organization,” so there is no complexity or dimensionality to it, and therefore no need to understand anything about it.

It has been a question of minimizing and maximizing in the pages of the Times. Israel’s genocidal intent is indecipherable to anyone relying on its coverage. The physical destruction of Gaza is never described as systematic.

The IDF does not target noncombatants. The newspaper has reported the shocking statements of Israeli officials, some openly favoring genocide, ethnic-cleansing, and the like, only when these have been so prominently reported elsewhere that the Times could no longer pretend such things were ever said.

The taker of the cake in this line is a Jan. 22 piece by David Leonhardt, who seems to be one of those desk reporters in New York who write whatever they are told to write.

Under the headline, “The Decline of Deaths in Gaza,” we read that Palestinian fatalities declined “by almost half since early December.”



Setting aside the fact that the record since does not seem to bear this out, inviting Times readers to celebrate a daily death toll of 150 instead of 300, lies somewhere between poor judgment and poor taste. But anything, it seems, to soften the look of things in Gaza.

There is also the question of humanization and dehumanization. We have read very numerous and intimately detailed Times stories of Israelis attacked last Oct. 7 — individuation being essential to shaping this kind of coverage — while Palestinians are an indistinct blur so far as Times’ correspondents report on them.

Beginning the Story on Oct 7

The Times has fully indulged the pretense that history began on Oct. 7, erasing the previous 76 years, or the previous century, depending on how one counts: the history, this is to say, wherein the Palestinian story is told.

There is no Palestinian story in the pages of The New York Times, as a walk through the archives of the last four months makes clear. The Times has recently taken to publishing exceptions to these patterns in its coverage, and I will come to them in due course.

There is one feature of the Times’ coverage that must be singled out, as it is very key to the whole of it. This concerns the question of evidence.

Almost all of the reportage coming out of Israel, and on rare occasions Gaza, relies on evidence Times correspondents have obtained from the Israeli military, Israeli government officials, the Israeli police, or those representing some other part of the Israeli power structure.

“There is no Palestinian story in the pages of The New York Times, as a walk through the archives of the last four months will make clear.”

On some occasions, Times reporters will take a cue or a theme from Israeli information managers and then do their own reporting — Blumenthal calls this “alleged reporting” — to dress up the piece subsequently published as an independent piece of work. There are two things to say about this.

One, the Israelis have been intent from the first on manipulating the imagery of the Gaza crisis — what it looks like — and keeping very tight control of evidence, including a great deal of conjured “evidence,” which has been essential to getting this done.

For the Israelis to make themselves a correspondent’s primary source — or the only source much or most of the time — and for correspondents to accept this arrangement implies a certain kind of relationship. It is evident that this relationship has been routinized over the past four months.

Two, Times correspondents — and again, their colleagues at other Western newspapers and broadcasters, too — never raise questions of quality, veracity, provenance, or chain of custody when relying on evidence or “evidence” supplied by Israeli authorities.

In pro forma fashion, they will occasionally note that this or that account of events “cannot be independently verified.” But the procedure — Israelis supply evidence, correspondents turn it into reportage — is kept entirely from view.

“According to Israeli officials,” “Israeli military sources said,” etc. is all readers get. On goes the report from there, in which evidence or “evidence” the Israelis have supplied is presented at face value.

In every case I know of, I should add, stories of this kind are one-source stories — even if they feature multiple voices saying the same thing in different language. This is a tired old trick at the Times and among other mainstream media: 5 and 2 are 7, 4 and 3 are also 7, so are 6 and 1, and so on.

I have just termed the relationship implied here as routinized. Now I will call it a highly objectionable relationship: At its core is a symbiosis wherein the Times abandons its sovereignty and — corollary point — the Times obscures this abandonment from its readers.

The Times’ unprofessional handling of evidence and “evidence,” to state what may by now be obvious, has made it an instrument of official propaganda as Israel’s crimes in Gaza have proliferated these past months. This is an open-and-shut the case, as the record shows.

It is not an unusual circumstance for the Times: It is inevitable that a paper wherein ideologies determine what is published will assume this role, elsewhere as in Israel.

But propaganda, as noted elsewhere, is crudely made in most cases. The propagandist much prefers simplicity and impact to sophistication or, God knows, nuance.

The Israelis are not exceptions to this rule.

Reproducing Cheap Goods

The correspondent trafficking in propaganda must consequently be very careful to avoid reproducing what is patently cheap goods. This is especially so when working within the sort of relationship the Times has with the Israeli propaganda machine, whose output since they began their assault on Gaza has often been primitive and obviously overdone.

If you are not careful you can get left holding the bag.

Jeffrey Gettleman seems to have been other than careful in his reporting after he transited from Ukraine to Israel immediately after the events of Oct. 7.

He did not, in fairness, do anything other than what Times correspondents routinely do when reporting on “the Jewish state.” He opened wide and swallowed what the Israeli authorities fed him — the goose and the foie gras farmer.

But when he began a grand investigation to expose the Hamas militias’ heinous use of sexual violence as a weapon of terror on Oct. 7, he does not seem to have recognized wildly implausible horror stories when the Israelis told them.

“The Times’ unprofessional handling of evidence … has made it an instrument of official propaganda as Israel’s crimes in Gaza have proliferated.”

Neither could Gettleman see, apparently, the immense implications of his piece once subjected to a scrutiny he may not have anticipated.

Incautious Jeffrey Gettleman is now holding the bag — scrambling, so far as one can make out, to salvage reportage that looks to me too faulty to save. His newspaper is now in an uproar.

This is not just about Gettleman’s piece: At issue is the Times’ coverage of the Gaza crisis altogether. The routinized relationship between the Times and the Israeli authorities is now exposed to more light than was ever supposed to shine on it.

Ditto the slack, sloppy, unprofessional mediocrities mainstream media altogether have made of themselves.

The Israelis began alleging that Hamas militias were guilty of rape and sexual violence during their Oct. 7 incursion into southern Israel more or less immediately after the events of that day. They claimed to be developing “considerable evidence” — Gettleman’s phrase in his initial report, on Dec. 4 — from witnesses, photographs and emergency medical teams.

In the same piece, Gettleman quoted a police official saying that women and men numbering in the dozens had been raped on Oct. 7. Women’s rights advocates convening at the U.N. at this time introduced the thought that the alleged sexual abuses were part of a pattern: They were systematic, weapons of terror.

After these initial assertions the Israeli police authorities seem to have subtly but swiftly softened. No, there were no autopsies, witnesses were hard to locate, people at the scene of alleged incidents did not collect evidence, no, they had nothing to say about interviewing victims of alleged rapes.

Gettleman’s Dec. 4 file was, at least relative to what was to come, suitably cautious — a what-we-know, what-we-don’t piece. But the drift was clear. “Extensive witness testimony and documentary evidence of killings, including videos posted by Hamas fighters themselves,” Gettleman wrote, “support the allegations.”

If I read Gettleman’s clipping file correctly, it was with that sentence that he began his walk into trouble. As it has turned out, the witness testimony he cited has proven spongy and less than extensive, the documentary evidence proves little and the videos, unless there are videos we do not know of, prove nothing at all.

The phrase “witness testimony and documentary evidence” includes a link to a lengthy piece on Hamas’ post–Oct. 7 political deliberations that makes no mention of rape or sexual violence and has nothing whatever to do with the topic of Gettleman’s piece.

Gettleman’s byline did not appear again in the Times until Dec. 28, when his sprawling investigative takeout appeared under the headline, “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct.7.”

It took as its central figure “the woman in the black dress.” This refers to a corpse found and videoed on the side of a road on Oct. 8. “In a grainy video,” Gettleman writes, “you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.”

Taking the ‘Evidence’ Bait

Gettleman reports this woman’s identity as Gal Abdush, a 34–year-old mother of two who was partying with her husband along the Gaza border in the early hours of Oct. 7 and was later murdered, as was her husband. Within seven paragraphs of his lead, it appears perfectly clear Gettleman has taken the “evidence” bait as proffered by Israeli officials:

“Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.”

Let’s study this passage briefly. Are you interested in what Israeli police say they believe? I’m not. I’m never interested in what officials in such positions believe or feel or, a lot of the time, think: I am interested in what they know, and they did not tell Gettleman that they knew anything.

Do you see the air these officials put between the rape theme and their reputations? Equally, the Times “verified” the video, did it? In what way this? What did it verify, exactly? That the video existed?

Is Gettleman suggesting that the Times verified from the video that Abdush was raped? No video of a dead body could verify this.

“Are you interested in what Israeli police say they believe? I’m not.”

This video has a strange story, to stay with it briefly. Gettleman wrote that it “went viral,” but it is nowhere to be found on the internet, and nobody recalls referring to Abdush as “the woman in the black dress.”

There is also a chronology question attaching to this video, as a Jan. 3 report in Mondoweiss analyzes. Gettleman recounts the last text message, with time-stamp, Gal Abdush sent to her family.

During this time Abdush’s husband, Nagy, was with her and sent his own texts to the family, also time-stamped. Four minutes elapsed between Gal Abdush’s last message and the time Nagy Abdush messaged the family to report his wife’s death — a message Gttleman did not mention.

Nagy Abdush made no reference to rape. He sent his own final message 44 minutes later — a message Gettleman’s report does mention.

Did one or more Hamas militiaman rape a woman in the presence of her husband, then, in one or another sequence, murder her and burn her, then murder the husband — all not in 44 minutes, as the Gettleman piece implies, but in four?

Since Gettleman published, Abdush’s family, evidently irate, has accused him of distorting the evidence and manipulating them in the course of his reporting.

“She was not raped,” Mira Alter, Gal Abdush’s sister, wrote on social media a few days after Gettleman published. “There was no proof that there was rape. It was only a video.”

This is how it is for the 3,700 words Gettleman gave his investigation, which also carries the bylines of Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella.

There are witnesses who change their stories once, twice, or several times. There is a witness proven to have lied in similar circumstances. There is the testimony of a rescue organization with a compromised relationship with the Israeli military and an extensive record of corruption widely reported in Israeli media.

There is a witness who told Gettleman he saw two teenage girls lying naked and alone on the floor of a house, one of them with semen all over her back, while it was later proven they were burned so badly they were hard to identify and they were found not alone but in the embrace of their also-burned mother.

B-Movie Perversities

And so on. You have descriptions of all kinds of unimaginable, B–movie perversities — militiamen playing with severed breasts, militiamen walking around with armfuls of severed heads — that rest upon “witnesses” whose testimonies, given how often they shift or do not line up with what was eventually determined, simply cannot be counted as stable.

And then there are the official statements. Among the most categoric of these is one from the Israeli police, issued after the Times published “‘Screams Without Words’” Dec. 28 and asserting that they have found no eyewitnesses to rapes on Oct. 7 and see nothing in media reports such as the Times’ constituting evidence of systematic sexual violence.

I rarely urge readers of this column to read The New York Times — some, indeed, write to thank me for reading it so they don’t have to.

On this occasion I think reading the Gettleman pieces is a good idea — but only back-to-back with The Grayzone’s work. Mondoweiss, a U.S. publication that reports on Israel and Palestine, has also done work worth reading. It is a chance to see what sclerosis looks like when placed next to vitality.

Blumenthal and Aaron Maté, his colleague at The Grayzone, began scrutinizing the Times’ reports on alleged sexual violence immediately after Gettleman’s first piece appeared Dec. 4.

Two days later The Grayzone published a detailed account of ZAKA, the discredited rescue organization that featured prominently among Gettleman’s sources.

Three days after “‘Screams Without Words’” appeared Dec. 28, Blumenthal and Maté aired a 42–minute podcast exposing the long list of inconsistencies in it they had by then identified.

Two weeks later, on Jan. 10, The Grayzone published a lengthy letter it sent to the Times urging it to address the many defects and ethical breaches in Gettleman’s pieces.

“The Times report,” the letter began, “is marred by sensationalism, wild leaps of logic, and an absence of concrete evidence to support its sweeping conclusion.” The Times has since been silent — publicly, if not internally.

The Times could hardly have worked itself into a more awkward corner over the “‘Screams Without Words’” disaster had it tried. It seems to have been some while building, and to have exploded as follows into the mess now before us.

Unease as to the Times’ coverage of Israel, inside and outside the Times building, is a long story.

Times correspondents whose children serve in the IDF, correspondents with apparently improper relations with lobbies such as the Anti–Defamation League: These kinds of things have over the years prompted critics to question the paper’s proximity, where it puts itself in relation to the Israel story, the balance of its coverage.

“The Times could hardly have worked itself into a more awkward corner over the ‘Screams Without Words’ disaster had it tried.”

Nearer to the present, there had been sustained criticism of the paper’s Gaza coverage emanating from the newsroom well before Gettleman’s piece appeared.

A Jan. 26 piece in The Intercept, citing newsroom sources, described “a rolling fight that is revived on a near-daily basis over the tenor of Times coverage of the war in Gaza.”

This seems to have reached high-decibels acrimony as The Daily, the Times’ premier podcast, became involved. The Daily is where the paper showcases what are supposed to be its better enterprise pieces, as those with lots of original reporting are called, and it scheduled a segment based on “‘Screams Without Words’” for release on Jan. 9.

Joe Kahn, the Times’ executive editor, had already touted the piece in an internal memorandum as among several “signature pieces of enterprise on the Israel–Hamas war” and described it as executed “in a sensitive and detailed way.”

Pulling the Podcast

Kahn may have leapt before he looked. The Daily’s producers soon pulled the segment as the defects began to accumulate in the piece Gettleman and his colleagues filed. They subsequently wrote a revised script addressing some of the problems — inserting qualifiers, The Intercept reported, and altogether leaving ample room to question, if not doubt, the factual certainty Gettleman wrote into his prose.

The revised segment is now “paused,” whatever that turns out to mean. This leaves the paper effectively stuck with a Hobson’s choice that makes me marvel: It can run the original segment, pretending discredited work remains valid, or it can run the rewritten segment, so discrediting the Gettleman report by itself.

Max Blumenthal thinks the crisis inside the Times reflects a deep divide between the newsroom, where there seems to be a surviving cohort of conscientious journalists, and the upper reaches of management, where the paper’s ideological high priests reside.

I have not been inside the Times building in well more than a decade, but there is a history to support this thesis. It goes at least as far back as the 1950s, when Aurthur Hays Sulzberger, as publisher, signed a secrecy agreement with the Central Intelligence Agency and gave tacit approval to correspondents who wanted to work for the agency.

But we have to look beyond the tall glass building on Eighth Avenue to grasp the magnitude of the crisis Gettleman has precipitated.

His careless work, to put the point mildly, has exposed a process that is prevalent across the mainstream. CNN, The Guardian, MSNBC, PBS, various others: They all followed the same procedure as they reproduced the “systematic sexual abuse” story as the Israelis gave it to them.

We are face to face now with the destructive power of corporate media as they dedicate themselves to serving the interests of the policy cliques who run the imperium and its appendages.

Face to face, too, with the responsibilities that fall to independent publications in consequence of so basic a corruption as this.

“We have to look beyond the tall glass building on Eighth Avenue to grasp the magnitude of the crisis Jeffrey Gettleman has precipitated.”

“These are lies that kill,” Blumenthal remarked on that segment of Rising noted earlier, “because these lies, fabrications, distortions, half-truths, and exaggerations of facts are intended to generate political consent for Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza. They need to be called out.”

Is there a truer way to make the point?

Credit when due.

The Times has published a handful of pieces over the past couple of weeks that are exceptional, at least relatively so, for their balanced treatment of the Israel–Palestine crisis in all its fullness.

Suddenly there is a history to it that extends back more than four months. Suddenly Palestinians have voices that have things to say. Suddenly they are living, breathing human beings. How rare is this in the pages of the Times?

I was alerted to this spate of pieces — they cannot be read as a purposeful series — on the last day of January, when Roger Cohen published a long report from the West Bank under the headline “‘We Are Not Very Far From an Explosion,’” in which the paper’s Paris bureau chief, long sympathetic to Israeli perspectives, describes the vicious ugliness of fanatical Israeli settlers and IDF soldiers incessantly attacking West Bank townspeople simply trying to hold on to what they have. It is a moving piece of work.

A day later the Times published “The Road to 1948,” which consists of a many-sided debate moderated by Emily Bazelon, who lectures in law at Yale. The people talking to one another in this lengthy presentation — and Bazelon manages the exchange with a light, unintrusive hand — take the Israel–Palestine question back to the British Mandate in 1920.

There are many perspectives here, not all worthy of endorsement. The piece is good, certainly, in explaining how the British favored Zionist organizations as precursors of a state while giving no such status to Palestinians.

But the simplifying thought that “this is a national conflict with religious elements,” or that arriving Zionist settlers and Palestinians have something like equivalent claims, seems to me an insidious gloss. Still, the Times has taken readers back a century.

The next day came a news piece, “In the West Bank, Palestinians Struggle to Adjust to a New Reality.” In it, Yara Bayoumy and Rami Nazzal describe onerous new restrictions the Israelis have placed on the movements of West Bank residents since Oct. 7.

Last Sunday, the paper published “Portraits of Gazans,” photographs by Samar Abu Elouf with text by Declan Walsh and Abu Elouf. These pictures seem to me a little sanitized, as if they are meant to disturb liberal American sensibilities but not enough to disgust them or get them into the streets with placards.

Good enough, but too tame next to the images that land the horror in one’s gut as one finds easily enough on social media and in independent publications.

On Tuesday morning, something interesting: “What Israeli Soldiers’ Videos Reveal: Cheering Destruction and Mocking Gazans,” featuring a small parade of bylines, has the Times finally getting around to publishing some of the astoundingly crude video IDF soldiers make of themselves as they rampage through the Gaza Strip.

Why now? There is no avoiding this question, given how assiduously the Times has indeed avoided this kind of material until this week. Why this string of pieces somewhat, or more out of character for a newspaper that has so long stood among American media as Israel’s most influential apologist?

It is a good question, and I do not have a certain answer. Looking at this phenomenon narrowly, these rapid-fire pieces might reflect the pandemonium and ire abroad in the newsroom.

Have those reporters and editors disgusted by the Gaza coverage and riled by the Gettleman piece prompted an editorial change of heart? Maybe. Possible. Did the paper rush these pieces into print as a form of post–Gettleman damage control? Very possibly. Maybe the Times has at last decided Israel has asked too much of it. A little far-fetched, but let’s keep it on the list.

We should recall the Times’ coverage after the al–Aqsa Mosque crisis in the spring of 2021. Just as it is doing now, it published a lot of pieces sympathetic to the Palestinians and sharply critical of the conduct of Israelis.

But over time it became clear this was merely a temporary shift, a back-foot defense the moment required. Three years later the Times gives us Jeffrey Gettleman. Plus ça change.

My mind goes back to the Vietnam war in search of an explanation for these pieces. Some readers may recall that the Times — a much different newspaper then — began in the late 1960s to publish highly critical work by correspondents who were soon noted for it: David Halberstam, Malcolm Browne, Neil Sheehan.

In the trade and in the reading public these people were awarded badges of courage for their integrity, and fair enough, although they opposed the war less out of principle than a shared judgment the U.S. could not win it.

I have long thought the tenor of the Times’ Vietnam coverage changed because, by the time the above-mentioned correspondents and others like them were filing stories with Saigon datelines, a deep divide had appeared among the policy cliques in Washington and its was permissible to write against the Pentagon’s Southeast Asia folly.

Is the Times responding similarly now? The mood has changed in Washington, or is changing. There is a divide on Capitol Hill that grows gradually more evident.

Think of all these open letters U.S. officials, some senior, are signing and circulating to express their objections to the Biden regime’s reckless support for a reckless nation’s crimes.

Has the Times, in its typically indirect way, written and sent a letter of its own by way of the pieces that match not at all the Israel Jeffrey Gettleman offers Times readers?

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/14/p ... t-the-nyt/

[blindpig]

Israel’s Big Game Propaganda
February 15, 2024

Israel took advantage of 123 million TV viewers — the most since the 1969 Moon landing — to ply its propaganda during Sunday’s U.S. football championship match, writes Alan MacLeod.


Robert Kraft at the launch of Combined Jewish Philanthropies’ “Face Jewish Hate” campaign in Boston on May 15, 2023. (Office of Governor Maura Healey, Flickr, Joshua Qualls, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

By Alan MacLeod
MintPress News

Amid the fast-paced action that saw the Kansas City Chiefs win their third championship in five years, Americans tuning in to watch the Super Bowl were met with a barrage of unusual propaganda.

Nestled between the typical ads for cars and beer were two bizarre messages: one from the Foundation to Combat anti-Semitism (FCAS) and the other from the State of Israel itself. Both were intimately related to the ongoing slaughter in Gaza and trying to draw attention away from Israeli war crimes.

The FCAS commercial features Clarence B. Jones, the former advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., who drafted his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. The message is that there is a growing tidal wave of racist intolerance in America and that we must all come together to oppose anti-Semitism — the commercial ends by telling people to visit the website StandUpToJewishHate.com.

Super Bowl ads do not come cheap, and its $7 million for 30-second air time price tag was footed by the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots N.F.L. franchise, Robert Kraft. Kraft (net worth: $11 billion) made his fortune in the paper and packaging business and has deep ties to the state of Israel, including donating hundreds of millions of dollars to pro-Israel groups and funding pro-Israel candidates in U.S. elections. He even enjoys a close relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.


Kraft married his wife in Israel in 1962 and has reportedly made over 100 visits to the country, including leading dozens of PR missions there, bringing celebrities and sports stars with him. He also maintains a network of charities across Israel.

In December, he pledged a gigantic $100 million to the FCAS. This was, Forbes reported, to “educate the public about the rise in antisemitic incidents and further develop the relationship between the Black and Jewish communities.” Considering its content and invocation of Dr. King, it seems clear that the Super Bowl ad was part of Kraft’s plan to target the Black community.

Black Americans are far more progressive on Palestine than the rest of the population. Many Black leaders, as well as movements such as Black Lives Matter, have allied themselves with the Palestinian cause, seeing parallels and connections between the oppression of Palestinians abroad and the treatment of Black Americans at home.


Black-Palestinian solidarity mural depicting George Floyd, murdered by a U.S. police officer, Gaza City, 2020. (Kalboz, Wikimedia Commons, PDM-owner)

A December poll by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace found that 28 percent of the Black population favored an immediate ceasefire, as opposed to 20 percent of white Americans. Only 5 percent of African Americans wanted the U.S. government to show “unwavering support” to Israel, versus 23 percent of the white population.

Funding Anti-Anti-Semitism

In Kraft’s view, therefore, the Black population’s outlook is a problem. The billionaire sports owner founded the FCAS in 2019 amid growing domestic and international opposition to the state of Israel’s apartheid policies in Palestine. He announced the move at a lavish ceremony in Jerusalem, where he was presented with the Genesis Prize – an Israeli government-backed award given to individuals who most aid the Jewish state.

After the ceremony, he had lunch with his friend, Netanyahu. Kraft had previously supported Netanyahu by attending his speech to Congress in 2015. “Israel does not have a more loyal friend than Robert Kraft,” Netanyahu said.

Kraft was awarded the $1 million Genesis Prize for his efforts in philanthropy and “combating anti-Semitism.” Yet his views on what does and does not constitute anti-Semitism are contentious, to say the least.

In the wake of the historic wave of protests across the U.S. calling for a ceasefire in the Middle East, he appeared on MSNBC to denounce those taking part as supporters of terrorism. “It’s horrible to me that a group like Hamas can be respected and people in the United States of America can be carrying flags or supporting them,” he said, clearly equating supporting Palestinian rights with terrorism. “Hamas is preaching the eradication of all Jewish people from the Earth,” he added.

Thus, while the FCAS claims to be standing against lies and racism, its founder continues to spread his own disinformation in service of the Israeli project.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, he also opposes the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement — a grassroots campaign to peacefully bring economic pressure on the state of Israel to stop its oppression and occupation of its neighbors. Kraft sees BDS as a form of anti-Jewish racism, lumping it in with attacks on synagogues or the growing threat from the far-right.


Pro-Palestine demonstration in Oakland, California, August 2014. (Alex Chis, Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0 )

“My vision is to work to end the violence against Jewish communities. To counter the normalization of anti-Semitic narratives that question Israel’s right to exist, disguised as part of legitimate debate on campuses and in the media,” he said, thereby hinting that the FCAS will attempt to insert themselves into college campuses nationwide and pressure the media to take (even) more pro-Israel stances.

The Israel Lobby’s Financier

Kraft is one of the Israel lobby’s chief benefactors, donating millions of dollars to various groups throughout his life. In 2022, for example, he gave $1 million to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) super PAC. AIPAC works to push pro-Israel policies across the U.S. and insert pro-Israel language into as many pieces of legislation as possible.

He also funds the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces – a group that raises money to help Israeli soldiers, even as they carry out war crimes in Palestine, Syria and beyond. Other pro-Israel groups, he has given sizeable donations to include:

American Friends of the Israel Museum
American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center
The Anti-Defamation League
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
The Jewish Agency for Israel
The Jewish National Fund
StandWithUs
The Israel Project
Through his organization, Touchdown in Israel, Kraft regularly organizes propaganda trips to Israel for former N.F.L. players, no doubt hoping they will become advocates of the Jewish state.

Arguably the most influential way in which Kraft influences American public life, however, is his consistent funding of right-wing Democrats standing against progressives and advocates for justice in Palestine.

In 2021, for example, he donated $5,800 to Congresswoman Shontel Brown in her contentious face-off against progressive Nina Turner and another $2,900 to her reelection. Brown was a little-known but strongly pro-Israel candidate standing against a democratic socialist, national co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 election campaign, and an outspoken critic of Israel’s policies.


Brown greeting President Joe Biden at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport July 6, 2022. (White House, Adam Schultz)

Vast amounts of pro-Israel money flowed into Brown’s campaign, helping her to defeat Turner. In her acceptance speech, Brown praised Israel and later thanked the Jewish community for “help[ing] me get over the finish line.”

Kraft has also given money to pro-Israel Democrats, including David Cicilline; Juan Vargas; Ted Deutch; Jake Auchincloss and Ritchie Torres.

His actions, donations and public pronouncements have drawn condemnation from some who have followed them. Sports journalist Dave Zirin, for example, recently wrote that:

“He appears to think that any criticism of Israel is inherently antisemitic. For Kraft, it is Jews like myself, rabbis, and Holocaust survivors calling for a ceasefire and a free Palestine that are part of the problem. And Kraft seems to think that opposition to Israel, the IDF, and the AIPAC agenda is antisemitism.”

Israel on TV

Super Bowl viewers were subjected to another pro-Israel ad in between the action, this one directly funded by and representing the Israeli government.

“To all the dads,” the voiceover says, as images of wholesome fatherhood activities play on the screen,

“The funny ones, the silly ones, the strong ones, the adventurous ones. To all the dads held in captivity by Hamas for over 120 days, we vow to bring you home.”

On the surface of the ad, the Israeli government was sending a message to Israeli fathers still in Hamas custody. That message was that they were working to bring them home (by spending millions of dollars to air the message on American TV during the Super Bowl.)

The reality, however, is that this was an attempt to sway the American public into identifying with Israel, suggesting that this could happen to any of their fathers’ too.

Many viewers felt that what they saw amounted to little more than expensive disinformation. “I’m sorry, is Israel seriously airing a SOB STORY PROPAGANDA AD during the SUPER BOWL while SIMULTANEOUSLY BOMBING THE REFUGEES AT RAFAH???????” wrote one viewer on Twitter.

Nevertheless, the Super Bowl was the most-watched American telecast ever, reaching over 123 million viewers. Some say you cannot put a price on that sort of publicity, but apparently, you can, and that price is $7 million. Propaganda it might be, but in America, money talks. And both Robert Kraft and the government of Israel certainly have a lot of it to spend.

https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/15/i ... ropaganda/

[blindpig]

You Only Need To Cage A Bird If It Knows That It Can Fly

Everything you do on this front makes a difference, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.

Caitlin Johnstone
February 20, 2024

One point I keep trying to drive home here in as many ways as I can is that this is the dystopia we were warned about. The main difference between this mind-controlled dystopia and the fictional dystopias in novels like 1984 is that in 1984 people knew they weren’t living in a free society, whereas in this dystopia the people believe they are free.

In Orwell’s dystopia people knew they weren’t free and had to use doublethink to stay out of trouble with their rulers. In this dystopia people have no idea how pervasively they’re being dominated by their rulers; they think they came up with their ideas, worldview and political positions on their own, when in reality those belief systems were constructed inside their skulls by a profoundly sophisticated propaganda machine without their even knowing it.

All mainstream and semi-mainstream political factions are owned and operated by the powerful, and propaganda is used to get the public subscribing to them to advance the interests of the powerful. Because the overwhelming majority of us have been manipulated into espousing one of these power-serving belief systems (they give you multiple choices depending on your ideological disposition), the more overtly totalitarian measures described by dystopian novelists are unnecessary. You only need to cage a bird if it knows that it can fly.

But make no mistake: our society is no more free than those in the dark futures imagined by storytellers. If our minds are not free, then we are not free. If we’re being successfully manipulated into thinking, speaking, acting, voting, working and consuming in accordance with the wishes of the powerful, then we’re just as locked down as we would be if we had chains around our necks. Collectively we could not be any more aligned with the will of the powerful than we already are, even if our brains were replaced with computer chips.

There is no more need for dystopian fiction, because the dystopia has already arrived. It’s here. In fact, dystopian fiction is actually destructive because it causes people to imagine that dystopia is a threat that exists somewhere off in the future instead of right here and now all around us.

We don’t need dystopian fiction for the same reason we wouldn’t need imaginary swords-and-sorcery fantasy novels if we we lived in a world of wizards and dragons. People living in dystopian societies do not need dystopian fiction, they need dystopian facts. Dystopian journalism. Dystopian documentaries. Dystopian polemics. We just need true information and reality-based ideas to counter the lies and manipulation we’re inundated with from day to day.

We cannot be free until we have used the power of our numbers to shrug off the control of our dystopian overlords, and we’ll never do that as long as a critical majority of us are unable to see how profoundly unfree we really are. There’s no escaping the mind control matrix of imperial propaganda until you can see the lines of code it is made of.

Our most important task then, at this point in history, is to keep pointing out those lines of code for as many people as possible, in as many ways as we can think of. The one advantage to this type of dystopia is that our rulers need to maintain their nice-guy free society image in order to preserve the illusion that we are free, so they can’t just come out and start imprisoning everyone who spotlights the myriad ways we are enslaved by lies and propaganda. They’ll never grant us a major mainstream platform on which to do this, but we can operate within the margins, waking up one person at a time to the reality of what’s going on.

So go around spreading the truth. Fighting the propaganda. Weakening public trust in the mass media and the political constructs it manufactures consent for. Highlighting the depravity and murderousness of the empire. Use any and all media and forums you find to be effective.

Everything you do on this front makes a difference, and don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise. The propaganda machine is the linchpin of their power. It’s what holds the empire together. Without the ability to manipulate the public at mass scale, our rulers cannot rule.

Once people are no longer buying into power-serving narratives, we will gain the ability to begin working toward the creation of a truth-based society that works for everyone. But this will never happen as long as we are being successfully manipulated into believing that this model for human civilization is acceptable and serves our interests. The very first step is un-jacking our brains from the propaganda matrix.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2024/02 ... t-can-fly/

But there is a need for dystopia art. It's called 'misdirecton'. If you're looking for '1984' you'll never see 2024.

******

Dimitri Lascaris
@dimitrilascaris
A recent Russian joke:

A Russian is on an airliner flying to the US. An American next to him asks “What brings you to the US?” The Russian replies “I’m studying the American approach to propaganda.” The American asks “What propaganda?” The Russian says, “That’s what I mean.”
1:39 PM · Jun 7, 2022

https://twitter.com/dimitrilascaris/sta ... 04?lang=en