Media – Western Corporate
Updated 2024-08-28
2024-08-20 Remembering TV Icon Phil Donahue: He Brought Antiwar Voices to the Airwaves Until MSNBC Fired Him The acclaimed television host Phil Donahue died Sunday at the age of 88. Donahue’s commitment to bringing major social and political issues to the American public spanned decades, a mission that was perhaps best encapsulated by his platforming of antiwar perspectives during the leadup to the Iraq War. He was fired in 2003 from his eponymous MSNBC talk show for doing so. In 2013, Democracy Now! spoke to Donahue about his firing. We play an excerpt from that interview and speak to journalist Jeff Cohen, who served as a senior producer on MSNBC’s Donahue before its cancellation. “Phil was a progressive. He was for peace and justice. He exuded it. It’s what made him tick,” recalls Cohen. Transcript: https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/2… Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SugpYJxMGIg
2024-08-09 US Rights Group Urges Media to Condemn Israel’s Killing of Journalists in Gaza “The only thing that can explain the shocking silence of American and international media professionals about the mass killing of their Palestinian colleagues is the decadeslong and systematic dehumanization of the Palestinian people.” The largest U.S. Muslim advocacy group on Friday implored American and international media outlets to speak out against Israel’s killing of more than 100 journalists, almost all of them Palestinians, during the ongoing assault on Gaza.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) renewed its plea following Israeli airstrikes on the homes of Palestine TV journalist Tamim Ma’mmar and Al-Aqsa TV’s Abdullah Al-Sousi. Ma’mmar was killed along with his wife and two of their children, while the other attack killed Al-Sousi and two of his nephews, according toQuds News Network. https://www.commondreams.org/news/israel-killing-journalists
2024-08-09 Western Media, Leaders Slammed for ‘Deafening’ Silence Over Israeli Torture Revelations “Can you imagine the response if Palestinians were holding Israelis in mass rape camps and torturing them to death?” asked one critic.
Human rights defenders are calling out Western news outlets and political leaders for their conspicuous lack of coverage and vocalized condemnation after leaked video footage appeared to show Israeli soldiers gang-raping a Palestinian detainee in the notorious Sde Teiman prison and the release of a new report documenting systematic torture of prisoners held by Israel.
Earlier this week, Israel’s Channel 12 aired a video showing Israel Defense Forces (IDF) reservists assaulting a Palestinian man at Sde Teiman, which is often called “Israel’s Guantánamo.” The victim was reportedly hospitalized with a severe anal injury, ruptured bowel, broken ribs, and lung damage. In addition to torture, former Sde Teiman detainees have described rampant rape and sexual abuse, allegedly often committed by female soldiers.
Instead of avoiding the Sde Teiman rape story, Israeli media have aired an interview with one of the IDF suspects—who are being hailed as “heroes” by far-right Israelis including multiple Cabinet ministers—and panel discussions including one in which a journalist called for “institutionalized” rape of Palestinian prisoners. This, as Israeli leaders demanded an investigation of the rape video to find and punish whoever leaked the footage, and as Israeli lawmakers argue that it’s permissible to rape Palestinian prisoners. https://www.commondreams.org/news/u-s-media-coverage-of-israel-palestinian-conflict
2024-06-03 The Comma That Erases Genocide Israel wants to muddy the waters — as it always does — so it can carry on with its genocide, writes Jonathan Cook. Here’s an example of how the Western media help it along. Israel’s claim that a single comma exempts it from having to respect the International Court of Justice’s order on May 24 to immediately halt its murderous attack on Rafah should be ridiculed.
Instead it is being given space to breathe by complicit media like The Guardian. The paper’s diplomatic editor offers an “analysis” that takes seriously claims by Israel and the two judges at the ICJ — one an Israeli — who dissented from the ruling approved by the other 13. They argue the following:
“The world is wrong to think that the ICJ has required Israel to halt its Rafah assault and any actions elsewhere in Gaza that are genocidal. Instead, a comma in the text qualifies the ruling to mean the court wants Israel to halt its actions in Rafah and elsewhere only if they are genocidal. Because Israel’s actions are not genocidal, the court is not, in fact, asking Israel to halt anything.” https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/03/the-comma-that-erases-genocide/
2024-05-25 Palestine Talks | In conversation with Max Blumenthal (Part 1) In the first of this two-part interview, investigative journalist at The Grayzone and author Max Blumenthal discusses the “genocidal” nature of the Democratic Party, in relation to its support for Israel’s campaign of violence against Palestine. While citing several concrete examples he also illuminates troublesome connections between American mainstream media, government and Israel, including how they work in tandem to vilify Palestinians and mislead the public. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g53T-x1o4OU&list=PLUW304lJeu3Vg_nM0WQfWDZTDyu6h6PlD&index=1&t=584s
2024-05-06 US Corporate Media Complicit in Demonizing Pro-Palestinian Protesters A great, novel experiment in political physics is under way in the United States, as the unstoppable moral force of youth-led protests against Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza runs into the immovable object of the American power elite’s support for it.
In this clash, two critical forces have been weaponized: the U.S. mainstream media that heavily disseminates Israeli propaganda and shapes many local, state and national policies, and the scourge of antisemitism that has been unfairly used to demonize and silence Palestinians and shift attention away from the U.S.-enabled Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, President Joe Biden’s steadfast support for it has galvanized young Americans and pushed them to mobilize.
They have formed decisive coalitions with Muslim and Arab Americans, Jewish, Black, Hispanic and Native communities, labor unions, and churches. They have given notice that if the U.S. continues to support the war, they will abandon Democratic candidates in the November elections, which would likely be fatal for the party. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/corporate-media-complicit-gaza-protests
2024-05-04 Palestine Talks | Chris Hedges on the moral corruption of Israel and the “savagery” of violence In this episode of Palestine Talks, we speak to writer and activist Chris Hedges as he discusses the philosophical nature of the evil underlying Israel’s violence against the Palestinian people, and the radical dehumanisation of Palestinians based on his own troubling experience covering stories in war zones. He also discusses how American media, paralleling the propaganda of the Israeli lobby, deliberately trivialises such violence and misleads the public.
As Hedges points out, this reflects how such media including outlets that enjoy a “liberal” or “progressive” reputation like The New York Times “embraces American militarism”, contemptuous of both human life and the possibility of peace grounded in actual principles of justice. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyErcPn2VIU&list=PLUW304lJeu3Vg_nM0WQfWDZTDyu6h6PlD&index=5
2024-04-09 To Protect Democracy, Newsrooms Must Choose Op-Eds Responsibly Editors owe a duty to the public to avoid hyperbolic opinion writing and “doom looping” that advance the interests of a privileged few.
On September 21, 1970, The New York Times ran its first “op-ed” page. Short for “opposite the editorial,” this new feature provided space for writers with no relationship to the newspaper’s editorial board to express their views. Before long, other newspapers followed suit. More than 50 years later, in order to compete with electronic media news, traditional newspapers have come to utilize opinion pages as a means to attract and keep readers.
Newspaper editors understood the power of opinion pieces as early as 1921 when editor Herbert Bayard Swope of the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Worldsaid: “Nothing is more interesting than opinion when opinion is interesting, so I devised a method of cleaning off the page opposite the editorial… and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts.”
Corporate media consolidation has strategically limited the diversity of perspectives and the quality of journalism and unduly influenced audience opinion. With a handful of large corporations controlling a majority of media outlets, content homogenization and profit prioritization often replace journalistic integrity.
When premier newspapers publish op-eds that are irresponsibly written—whether echoing government propaganda and political biases or corporate interests, lacking fundamental facts or historical context, or wielding accusatory or derogatory language and sensationalized headlines—they “signal boost” for a particular viewpoint or agenda. https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/choose-op-eds-responsibly
2024-03-24 The Media’s Linguistic Gymnastics Surrounding Israel’s Forced Starvation of Gaza With headlines layered in verbal opacity, the response to the flour massacre prompted yet another egregious moment in the Western press’ facilitation of Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza.
Over 100 Palestinians were killed and hundreds more wounded on February 29, when Israeli snipers opened fire on people approaching a convoy of trucks carrying desperately needed supplies of flour. The attack was quickly dubbed the flour massacre.
Corporate media reporting was contentious and confused, mired in accusations and conflicting details that filled the news hole, even as media downplayed the grave conditions in Gaza created by Israel’s engineered famine. With headlines layered in verbal opacity, the massacre prompted yet another egregious moment in media’s facilitation of Israel’s continuing genocide in Gaza.
On the day of the massacre, The New York Times (2/29/24) published this contrivance: As Hungry Gazans Crowd a Convoy, a Crush of Bodies, Israeli Gunshots and a Deadly Toll. It was met with ridicule as it slid across online platforms. Assal Rad (Twitter, 3/1/24), author and research director at the National Iranian American Council, called the piece of work “a haiku to avoid saying Israel massacres Palestinians that they’re deliberately starving in Gaza.” https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/media-linguistic-gymnastics-israel
2024-03-15 Protests and Parody Paper Decry New York Times’ Pro-Israel Bias in Gaza Coverage More than 100 pro-Palestine demonstrators were arrested Thursday after staging a protest at The New York Times’ Midtown Manhattan headquarters, where activists handed out copies of a satirical knockoff of the newspaper that skewered what organizers called its biased coverage of the Gaza genocide.
“The Times is not unique among media in manufacturing consent for war, for exploitation, for genocide. It is, rather, exemplary.” Indeed, perhaps the deadliest weapon of all is the Times’ sense of its own importance, its self-appointed role as the arbiter of what counts as good journalism.”
“If the Times says it, it must be true; if they print it, it must be fit to print,” the publication adds. “The Times’ reputation for liberalism, for rigor, for nonpartisan independence is precisely what makes it so dangerous, because it hides what it really is: media that serves the interests of U.S. imperialism.” https://www.commondreams.org/news/journalism-gaza
2024-03-07 Media Malpractice: Blacking Out Genocide and Disenfranchising Palestinian Pain America’s corporate media serves as a key cog in the machinery of genocide.
Rather than providing the kind of objective, fact-based reporting integral to an informed citizenry, our mainstream press bombards us with explicit and implicit biases, false narratives, dehumanization, and misdirection, serving to stifle public dissent and justify, rationalize, and conceal the systematic oppression and extermination of the people of Gaza.
As dependable propaganda tools for Israel’s aggression, our news censors truth not only by what they choose to cover and how they spin it—but what they deliberately omit. This orchestrated disinformation campaign helps ensure the ongoing and unconditional support of the U.S. government and its continued role as Israel’s dutiful genocidal benefactor.https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/media-malpractice-gaza-genocide
2024-03-04 KIBBUTZ BE’ERI REJECTS STORY IN NEW YORK TIMES OCTOBER 7 EXPOSÉ: “THEY WERE NOT SEXUALLY ABUSED” TWO OF THE three victims specifically singled out by the New York Times in a marquee exposé published in December, which alleged that Hamas had deliberately weaponized sexual violence during the October 7 attacks, were not in fact victims of sexual assault, according to the spokesperson for the Kibbutz Be’eri, which the Times identified as the location of the attack. The rejection of the Times reporting in the kibbutz by Be’eri spokesperson Michal Paikin further undermines the credibility of the paper’s controversial December article “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”
When asked about the claims made by the New York Times, Paikin independently raised their name. “You’re talking about the Sharabi girls?” she said. “No, they just — they were shot. I’m saying ‘just,’ but they were shot and were not subjected to sexual abuse.”
A recent interview in the Israeli media with the Sharabi sisters’ grandparents offers details that directly contradict the Times reporting that the girls at Kibbutz Be’eri were sexually assaulted on October 7. “They were just shot — nothing else had been done to them,” their grandmother Gillian Brisley told Channel 12.
THE BRISLEY FAMILY and relatives in Israel who lived with the Sharabis at Kibbutz Be’eri have never asserted that the girls were sexually assaulted. In numerous interviews, the Brisleys have maintained the girls were killed alongside their mother. On October 24, the Israeli news site Walla published a story about the family, which also said the girls were killed alongside their mother. Sharon Sharabi, whose brother Eli was the father of the two girls and was kidnapped that day and reportedly taken to Gaza, said that Palestinian fighters entered the family home, broke into their safe room, and killed Lianne and the two girls.
The family also gave several interviews to international news outlets before “Screams Without Words” was published that provided information that undercuts the assertions in the Times article, raising questions about why the paper did not include these publicly available details. “We stand by the story and are continuing to report on the issue of sexual violence on Oct. 7,” Times spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha told The Intercept. Anat Schwartz — an Israeli filmmaker who, before joining the Times, appeared to have no prior experience reporting the news — was hired by the paper to investigate sexual violence on October 7. https://theintercept.com/2024/03/04/nyt-october-7-sexual-violence-kibbutz-beeri/
2024-02-28 “BETWEEN THE HAMMER AND THE ANVIL” The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé ANAT SCHWARTZ had a problem. The Israeli filmmaker and former air force intelligence official had been assigned by the New York Times to work with her partner’s nephew Adam Sella and veteran Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman on an investigation into sexual violence by Hamas on October 7 that could reshape the way the world understood Israel’s ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. By November, global opposition was mounting against Israel’s military campaign, which had already killed thousands of children, women, and the elderly. On her social media feed, which the Times has since said it is reviewing, Schwartz liked a tweet saying that Israel needed to “turn the strip into a slaughterhouse.” “Violate any norm, on the way to victory,” read the post. “Those in front of us are human animals who do not hesitate to violate minimal rules.”
Schwartz and Sella did the vast majority of the ground reporting, while Gettleman focused on the framing and writing. The resulting report, published in late December, was headlined “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.” It was a bombshell and galvanized the Israeli war effort at a time when even some of Israel’s allies were expressing concern over its large-scale killing of civilians in Gaza.
The fear among Times staffers who have been critical of the paper’s Gaza coverage is that Schwartz will become a scapegoat for what is a much deeper failure. She may harbor animosity toward Palestinians, lack the experience with investigative journalism, and feel conflicting pressures between being a supporter of Israel’s war effort and a Times reporter, but Schwartz did not commission herself and Sella to report one of the most consequential stories of the war. Senior leadership at the New York Times did. https://theintercept.com/2024/02/28/new-york-times-anat-schwartz-october-7/
2024-02-27 REVEALED: NYT Writer Outed As IDF PROPAGANDIST Krystal and Saagar discuss a NYT writer on a debunked Oct 7th article being outed as an IDF propagandist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WMgoEwTbjY
2024-02-15 On the Various Possibilities for the ‘Day After’ the Siege on Gaza Ends “Siege” fits nicely into the title, but it has been a 75-year siege culminating in an escalation of the violence over the past three months. Genocide more accurately describes the situation, intensified ethnic cleansing that has been the Zionist’s goal since 1948.
As of January 4, 2024, “Israel” had dropped more than 45,000 bombs on Gaza weighing more than 65,000 tons, according to the Gaza Media Office. In past wars, “Israel” faced accusations of using shells that contained depleted uranium, a radioactive material that remains in the environment most likely causing cancer and birth defects for generations to come. Environmentalists who ignore these facts are complicit in whitewashing “Israel’s” scorched earth policy aimed at further ethnic cleansing. There will no doubt be consequences from the harm done to Palestinians for many years to come, and it is up to this generation and those who come after to ensure that the thousands who are deceased will not have died in vain.
This means exposing the ways that the media has lied about the carnage. In a recent exposé in The Guardian, Chris McGreal revealed the ways that CNN runs biased news that relies on “Israeli” propaganda while censoring Palestinian perspectives. Unfortunately, other mainstream news sources, except for the right-wing New York Post, have remained silent on this story.
Moreover, Baroud explains that the issue will not be one state, two state, or any state, but rather the Zionist state of “Israel,” who would be free to do what they want if Palestinians are unarmed. Also of concern are the Palestinians who reside as second-class citizens within the ’48, what will happen to them? The problem, he concludes, has always been Zionism, and until it is dismantled, there can never be a just much less sustainable peace. https://www.palestinechronicle.com/on-the-various-possibilities-for-the-day-after-the-siege-on-gaza-ends/
2024-02-14 Patrick Lawrence: Crisis at the NYT 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 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. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/14/patrick-lawrence-crisis-at-the-nyt/
2024-02-01 For Western Media, Only Israeli Lives Matter 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 organizations were unwilling even to investigate the genocidal language of Israeli political and military leaders. The media also routinely uses dehumanizing 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. https://consortiumnews.com/2024/02/01/for-western-media-only-israeli-lives-matter/
2024-02-01 Leading Papers Skewed Gaza Debate Toward Israeli and Government Perspectives 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.
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. https://fair.org/home/leading-papers-skewed-gaza-debate-toward-israeli-and-government-perspectives/
2024-01-25 March Against Genocide Isn’t News to New York Times Devoted New York Times readers are likely unaware that a huge protest was held in the nation’s capital on Saturday, January 13, to protest Israel’s wanton slaughter of tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, and to condemn “Genocide” Joe Biden’s weapon shipments and diplomatic backing for Israel. The Times, despite having a huge bureau in Washington, DC, did not mention the event, even over the course of the following week. https://fair.org/home/march-against-genocide-isnt-news-to-new-york-times/
2024-01-23 ‘When You’re in a Colonial Situation, the Colonial Power Initiates Violence’ Janine Jackson: The New York Times has recently published an op-ed by journalist Megan Stack, who calls out US officials’ “glib dismissal” of the International Court of Justice case brought by South Africa against Israel. “Meritless,” she says, seems to be the agreed-upon term.
The paper also ran columnist Michelle Goldberg’s “America Must Face Up to Israel’s Extremism,” where she criticized attempts by the Biden administration to draw a bright line between statements from Israeli officials that their open goal is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, and those of Prime Minister Netanyahu, to whom, she notes, America continues to give unconditional backing.
Better than a poke in the eye, do op-eds and critical comments below the fold represent meaningful change in US corporate news media’s approach to Israel/Palestine? https://fair.org/home/when-youre-in-a-colonial-situation-the-colonial-power-initiates-violence/
2024-01-12 At Springer, Accurate Reporting Can Get You Investigated The spectacle of the German media giant Axel Springer investigating one of its US media outlets for reporting truthful information about a wealthy and influential pro-Israel couple is a startling demonstration of the impact of the conglomerate’s explicit ideological agenda.
Business Insider (1/4/24, 1/4/24, 1/5/24) reported how Neri Oxman, a former MIT professor whose billionaire husband led the crusade that forced out the president of Harvard under accusations of plagiarism, had herself engaged in sloppy research that could similarly be described as plagiarizing. It was a proud case of a media outlet holding an absurdly wealthy political partisan, hedge fund investor Bill Ackman, accountable.
But rather than celebrating its outlet’s achievement, Business Insider‘s owner is launching an investigation into the reporting on Oxman, responding to voluminous complaints from Ackman. “Axel Springer is conducting its own internal investigation into how the stories came about,” the Wrap (1/7/24) reported. While Business Insider‘s global editor-in-chief Nicholas Carlson said he stood by the story, he said Ackman and others have “raised concerns about our reporting process, as well as the motivation for publishing the stories.” https://fair.org/home/at-springer-accurate-reporting-can-get-you-investigated/
2024-01-10 Screams without proof: questions for NYT about shoddy ‘Hamas mass rape’ report The Grayzone has identified serious issues with the credibility of key sources quoted in the New York Times’ December 28 story, “Screams Without Words: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on October 7.” Authored by Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz, and Adam Sella, the article purports to prove “a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7” than even Israeli authorities have been willing to allege .
However, the Times report is marred by sensationalism, wild leaps of logic, and an absence of concrete evidence to support its sweeping conclusion. We call on the New York Times to publicly address the comments by the Abdush family accusing Times reporters of misleading them and lying about the circumstances of her death. The Times must also address the statement issued by Israel’s police subsequent to the article’s publication and explain why Gettleman and his co-authors apparently omitted it.
The Times has come under fire from family members of Gal Abdush, the so-called “girl in the black dress” who features as Exhibit A in Gettleman and company’s attempt to demonstrate a pattern of rape by Hamas on October 7. Not only have Abdush’s sister and brother-in-law each denied that she was raped, the former has accused the Times of manipulating her family into participating by misleading them about their editorial angle. Though the family’s comments have sparked a major uproar on social media, the Times has yet to address the serious breach of journalistic integrity that its staff is accused of committing.
Further, we demand a response to our thoroughly sourced debunking of testimony by key witnesses quoted in the story, as well as the documented record of discredited claims and ethically dubious activity by those same witnesses. The Israeli police have also issued a statement since the publication of the Times’ article asserting that they themselves are unable to locate eyewitnesses of rape on October 7, or to connect the testimonies published by outlets like the Times with anything remotely resembling evidence. https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/10/questions-nyt-hamas-rape-report/
2024-01-07 Chip Gibbons on the Right to Protest It was a big deal when Jewish Americans who oppose US support for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza filled New York’s Grand Central Terminal. But not big enough to make the front page of the local paper, the New York Times. US journalists invoke the First Amendment a lot, but not so much when it extends to regular folks using their individual voices, sometimes at significant personal risk, to say NO to something the US government is doing in their name.
Some listeners may remember marching with thousands of others in advance of the US war on Iraq, only to come home and find the paper or TV station ignored them utterly, or distorted their effort and their message — as when NBC’s Tom Brokaw reported a Washington, DC, anti-war march of at least 100,000 people, met with a couple hundred pro-war counter-protesters, as: “Opponents and supporters of the war marched in cities across the nation on Saturday.”
“Protest is the voice of the people,” our guest’s organization states. We talk with Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights & Dissent, this week on CounterSpin. Defending Rights & Dissent aims to invigorate the Bill of Rights and, crucially, to protect our right to political expression. https://kpfa.org/episode/counterspin-january-7-2024/
2024-01-03 Washington Post erases Israeli minister’s farfetched October 7 rape claim at his request The Washington Post has quietly removed an outlandish claim by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that Hamas battle plans included specific instructions on which Israeli troops should be raped during their October 7 incursion.
In the original article, which was published on November 12 and promoted as a Washington Post “exclusive,” Gallant is quoted as telling the outlet: “We know from interrogations that Hamas came in with detailed plans of their attack, including which commander should rape which soldiers in different places.” A day later, the allegation disappeared from the piece, which had been amended to include the following “correction”: “A previous version of this article included a quote from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that was not authorized for publication. The quote has been removed.”
The act of self-censorship was seemingly first spotted by a social media user who suggested that the embarrassing incident was the result of what they described as “the Israeli way” of propaganda: “Privately lying to a journalist to shape her coverage, then scrambling to correct the record when the journalist accidentally prints the lies you told her in confidence.” https://thegrayzone.com/2024/01/03/washington-post-erases-israels-request/
2023-11-12 Jamil Dakwar on US & Human Rights, Matt Gertz on Mike Johnson Corporate news media use at least a couple of largely unexplored lenses through which to present US human rights violations. One is this: The US does not commit human rights violations, except by accident, or as unavoidable collateral for an ultimately net-gain mission, be that international or domestic.
The other is this: They aren’t violations if the US does them, because we’re in a civilization war, a fight of good over evil, so all battles are holy, and you can’t commit human rights violations against non-humans, after all, so where’s the problem? Again, that narrative covers global and at-home violations.
Elite media have trouble navigating the place of the US in a global context, and the media-consuming public suffers as a result. There’s a new report from the UN about this country and human rights. We’ll hear about it from Jamil Dakwar, director of the Human Rights Program at the ACLU.
Also on the show: Headlines tell us that the US public don’t know a lot about Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House of Representatives. https://kpfa.org/episode/counterspin-november-12-2023/
2023-11-07 Palestine Talks | Dr. Omar Suleiman on Israel’s war on Gaza and the media’s role Dr. Omar Suleiman is an influential American Muslim imam, theologian, human rights activist and president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. In an interview with TRT World’s Baba Umar, Suleiman talks about Israel’s war on Gaza, its usage of biblical scriptures and dehumanising language to undermine Palestinian resistance, media coverage of the conflict, and the role of American politicians and civil society vis-a-vis the war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g5AieAG6sxo&list=PLUW304lJeu3Vg_nM0WQfWDZTDyu6h6PlD&index=16
2023-11-05 ‘In the Middle East, We Are Hearing a New Set of Excuses to Justify the Same Old Policy’: interview with Raed Jarrar on Biden’s Saudi trip + Tulsa: ‘A Cover-Up Happens Because the Powers That Be Are Implicated’ Elite media are fond of saying that the US is resetting its Middle East policy. During the 2020 campaign, the New York Times explained, Joe Biden pledged, if elected, to stop coddling Saudi Arabia, after the brutal murder of prominent dissident and Washington Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi. “We are not going to, in fact, sell more weapons to them,” Biden said. “We’re going to, in fact, make them pay the price and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are.”
When officials said Biden would visit the kingdom in July of last year and meet with Mohammed bin Salman, understood as the architect of Khashoggi’s murder, a New York Times headline explained that Biden had “‘only bad options’ for bringing down oil prices.” We talked at the time with Raed Jarrar, advocacy director at DAWN, Democracy for the Arab World Now, an organization founded by Khashoggi. We’ll hear that conversation again today.
Also on the show: “If you’re not careful,” Malcolm X famously warned, “the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” This is a problem of long standing, and in June 2021 we explored one case of it—the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma—with author and activist Joseph Torres. We hear that this week as well. https://kpfa.org/episode/counterspin-november-5-2023/
2023-10-21 AP erases Israeli pledge to attack Gaza like ‘Axis Power’ as officials threaten Palestinians with ‘Dresden’ doctrine As Israeli officials proudly compare their bombardment of the Gaza Strip to the Allied firebombing of Dresden, the Associated Press has quietly removed a section noting US alarm over the historical comparison.
The Associated Press has quietly deleted a reference to official Israeli threats to subject the Gaza Strip to a Dresden-style firebombing campaign — the latest move in legacy media outlets’ ongoing push to downplay the impacts of Tel Aviv’s siege of over two million Palestinians.
“Four U.S. officials familiar with the discussions said American diplomats became increasingly alarmed by comments from their Israeli counterparts regarding their intention to deny water, food, medicine, electricity and fuel into Gaza, as well as the inevitability of civilian casualties,” the AP article previously stated. https://thegrayzone.com/2023/10/21/israeli-attack-axis-gaza-dresden/
2023-10-18 Media enable ignorance in the service of genocide As Israeli carpet-bombing rains death and destruction on the civilians of Gaza, the promise of more military support from the US and its Western allies betrays true savagery and inhumanity on behalf of the West. Yet as a genocide unfolds in front of our eyes, it is ignorance that has proven to be the greatest weapon against the people of Gaza. As Western governments and Western media cheerlead for the genocide of an entire people by Zionist fanatics, the most chilling aspect of all this is the ease with which Western populaces have bought into the frenzy.
It is ignorance which has facilitated this barbarism and even encouraged it. Ignorance of the history of a 75-year occupation, ignorance of the daily injustice and persecution faced by Palestinians, ignorance of the arbitrary murder and detention of Palestinian men, women and children, all of which register little if any coverage in western media.
It is this historical ignorance that subsequently facilitates the rewriting of history, the racism that celebrates brutality and violence against those deemed inferior and the hatred that abets the genocide of an entire people with relative ease. It allows governments and media of the West to fabricate stories about mass rapes and the beheading of babies, in the knowledge they will be swallowed whole by their gullible publics. https://electronicintifada.net/content/media-enable-ignorance-service-genocide/38966
2023-10-16 Western media’s parroting of official lies is paving way to genocide in Gaza How did we get to the point where Israel can order half of Gaza’s population – more than one million people – to move from the north of their tiny prison to the south of their tiny prison, in one of the most overcrowded places on Earth? Palestinians in Gaza were given 24 hours to do so or face dire consequences. The depopulation order is being treated as “advance warning” – a concept Israel has played around with for many years to mangle international law and legitimise its targeting of civilians.
The path to how we got here was paved by western politicians and the establishment media. They have been giving the green light to Israel to do as it pleases. But part of the reason world leaders have been under no pressure to “speak up” is because the establishment media have made no effort to hold their feet to the fire, even as Israel tramples all over international law, making a mockery of it. https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/western-medias-parroting-of-official
2023-10-15 Phyllis Bennis on Gaza In the wake of the October 7 attacks by Hamas and the ensuing bombing campaign from Israel on the Gaza Strip, many people were surprised that CNN‘s Fareed Zakaria aired an interview with a Palestinian activist who frankly described the daily human rights violations in Gaza, the right of Palestinians to resist occupation and apartheid, and how any tools of resistance they choose are deemed violent and punishable. Such statements aren’t controversial from an international law or human rights perspective, but they stand out a mile in elite US media suffused with assumptions listeners will know: Palestinians attack, Israel responds; periods of “calm” are when only Palestinians are dying; stone-throwing is terrorism, but cutting off water is not.
“War is not the time for context” still seems to be the mantra for many in the US press. But there is, around the edges, growing acknowledgement of the dead end this represents: showing hour after hour of shocking and heart-wrenching imagery, in a way that suggests violence is the only response to violence — when so many people are looking for another way forward.
We’ll talk with Phyllis Bennis from the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies. https://kpfa.org/episode/counterspin-october-15-2023/
2006-03-23 US Media Bias: Covering Israel/Palestine Every time a suicide bombing strikes Israel, mass coverage of the tragedy begins instantly. Whether landing on the front page of The New York Times or taking up the headline block on CNN.com, the pain Israeli people endure is shown endlessly. Israelis do suffer. Suicide bombings are horrific. Nevertheless, Palestinian pain occurs far more frequently, and yet often overlooked by the mainstream American media. https://countercurrents.org/pa-kanazi230306.htm
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