Media Criticism

In this public News Brief, we discuss the media and high-profile Democratic Party leaders and 'Free Speech' crowd's muted—or, in many cases, completely silent—response to the greatest attack on free speech in recent memory: Trump's kidnapping and disappearing of Palestinian solidarity students.

I’d never heard of the “Harper’s letter”: https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justice-and-open-debate/

In his interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ezra Klein repeatedly—over and over again—launders the ongoing genocide by blaming Palestinians for it. He does this through the term "agency," the favorite liberal and pseudo-intellectual buzzword used to justify all their genocidal mania.

This is the magic of "agency": it turns everything into whatever you want while pretending you are making an objective, fair, and reasonable analytical point. It allows you to posture as intellectually honest and serious. That is who Ezra Klein is. He is the paragon of moral virtue, the quintessential New York Times liberal. He determines what is just and unjust for the world today and throughout history. The Ezra Kleins embody virtue.

So, are Palestinians being subjected to genocide by Ezra Kleins? That, in their moral framework, is virtue. That is moral necessity. That is the height of morality itself.

Why? Because "agency," a pseudo-intellectual concept I have thoroughly dismantled before.

The AI feature, called Insights, is, for some reason, designed to evaluate the political orientation of opinion articles and then artificially generate countervailing points for the reader’s consumption. As my former boss, LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, explains in his introduction to the feature, Insights “offers an annotated summary of the ideas expressed in the piece along with different views on the topic from a variety of sources.”

In this case, the AI responded to a piece by my former columnist colleague Gustavo Arellano, which argued that his hometown of Anaheim shouldn’t forget the KKK’s reign of terror there. The AI Insight then informed readers that, actually, as the New York Times’ Ryan Mac pointed out, the Klan may simply have been “responding to societal changes rather than an explicitly hate-driven movement,” which is an objectively insane thing to say about one of history’s most obviously hate-driven movements.

This feature had already been derided for automating one of journalists’ least-favorite editorial imperatives, both-sidesing a story. Now it was automating the revision of history and the dulling the realities of racism, too.

Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October, whose final episode airs this Monday, is such a travesty, so discredited by the very historical events it promises to explain, that it earns a glowing, five-star review from the Guardian.

It “speaks to everyone that matters”, the liberal daily gushes. And that’s precisely the problem.

‘Honest broker’ fiction

The United States is the star of the show, of course. Its officials tell a story of Washington desperately trying to bring together the two parties, Israel and Fatah (the third party, Hamas, is intentionally sidelined), but finds itself constantly hamstrung by bad luck and the intransigence of those involved.

Yes, you read that right. This documentary really does resurrect the Washington as “honest broker” fiction – a myth that was supposed to have been laid to rest a quarter of a century ago, after the Oslo accords collapsed.

The film-makers are so lost to the reality in Israel and Palestine that they imagine they can credibly keep Washington perched on a pedestal even after we have all spent the past 16 months watching, first, President Biden arm Israel’s “plausible” genocide in Gaza, killing many tens of thousands of Palestinians, and then President Trump formulate an illegal plan to ethnically cleanse the enclave of its surviving Palestinian population to develop it as a luxury “waterfront property”.

Enduring mystery

This documentary, like its BBC predecessors – most notably on Russia and Ukraine, and the implosion of Yugoslavia – excels at offering a detailed examination of tree bark without ever stepping back far enough to see the shape of the forest.

The words “apartheid”, “siege” and “colonialism” – the main lenses through which one can explain what has been happening to the Palestinian people for a century or more – do not figure at all.

There is a single allusion to the events of 1948, when a self-declared Jewish state was violently founded as a colonial project on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.

Or as the documentary delicately puts it: “Millions of their people [the Palestinians] had been made refugees by decades of conflict.”

As ever, when the plight of the Palestinians is discussed, the passive voice is put to sterling use. Millions of Palestinians were accidentally ethnically cleansed, it seems. Who was responsible is a mystery.

Even when the term “occupation” appears, as it does on the odd occasion, it is presented as some vague, unexamined, security-related problem the US, Israel and the Fatah leadership are engaged in trying to fix.

Nothing learnt

Israel and the US, of course, learnt nothing. They have responded since with intensified, even more obscene levels of violence – so grave that the world’s highest court has put Israel on trial for genocide.

Obscured by The Road to 7th October is the reality that Israel has always viewed the Palestinians as “human animals”. It just needed the right moment to sell that script to western publics, so that genocide could be recast as self-defence.

The 7^th^ October attack offered the cover story Israel needed. And the western media, most especially the BBC, played a vital part in amplifying that genocide-justifying narrative through its dehumanisation of the Palestinian people.

The historical and political context offered by the documentary does nothing to challenge a decades-old, bogus narrative on Israel and Palestine – one that has long helped conceal Israel’s turning of Gaza into a concentration camp, one that made something like the 7^th^ October breakout almost inevitable, and one that legitimised months of genocide.

The Road to 7th October seeks to rehabilitate a narrative that should be entirely discredited by now.

In doing so, the BBC is assisting Israel in reviving a political climate in which the genocide in Gaza can resume, with Netanyahu re-instituting mass starvation as a weapon of war and spreading Israel’s ethnic cleansing operations to the West Bank.

We don’t need more official narratives about the most misrepresented “conflict” in history. We need journalistic courage and integrity. Don’t look to the BBC for either.

President Trump’s decision to cut funding to USAID revealed the extent to which the US government has been financing media, protests and other means to hijack civil society around the world. In Ukraine, USAID had a key role in toppling President Yanukovych in 2014 and has since financed between 85-90% of Ukrainian media to ensure narrative control. The Georgian Prime Minister has also been warning that Western NGOs have been activated to topple the government and convert Georgia into a second front against Russia. There is also overwhelming evidence that the US government established “non-governmental organisations” (NGOs) since the 1980s that are financed by the US government, staffed with people linked to the US intelligence community, and pursue US geopolitical interests under the guise of promoting democracy and human rights. One of these “NGOs” is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) established by Reagan to take over some of the tasks of the CIA. These organisations are instruments for the US to govern the societies of other nations and pursue regime change when necessary.

When Zelensky won a landslide victory in the 2019 presidential election on a peace platform, the US activated its NGOs to ensure that Zelensky would reverse and abandon his peace mandate. Zelensky had won 73% of the votes by promising to engage in talks with Donbas, make peace with Russia, and implement the Minsk peace agreement. Furthermore, Zelensky argued in favour of preserving language rights and religious rights to prevent divisions in society. Immediately, protests emerged with NGOs presenting Zelensky’s peace platform as “capitulation”.

One of the US-financed “NGOs” was the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre which had been established allegedly to “promote the development of a self-sufficient Ukrainian state and society”, something I would certainly support. However, this is yet another NGO created by the US to subvert society and prevent peace from breaking out.

The Ukraine Crisis Media Centre threatened Zelensky, and warned him against delivering on his election promises: “As civil society activists, we present a list of ‘red lines not to be crossed’. Should the President cross these red lines, such actions will inevitably lead to political instability in our country and the deterioration of international relations”.

These red lines included “holding a referendum on the negotiations format to be used with the Russian Federation and on the principles for a peaceful settlement”; conducting negotiations without the Western states; “making concessions to the detriment of national interests”; failing to implement the security and defence policies of the former government; “delaying, sabotaging, or rejecting the strategic course for EU and NATO membership”; “initiating any actions that might contribute to the reduction or lifting of sanctions against the aggressor state by Ukraine’s international partners”; attempting to review the language law or supporting the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine; “ignoring dialogue with civil society” etc. Simply put, abandon the peace platform supported by the overwhelming majority of the Ukrainian population, otherwise the US-funded NGOs would make sure Zelensky is also ousted from power.

This threat from the US-financed NGO was countered with death threats from US-financed far-right groups. Zelensky eventually abandoned the peace mandate, ignored the Minsk peace agreement and fell in line with US policy.

The donors to the Ukraine Crisis Media Centre that financed the cancellation of Zelensky’s peace mandate include USAID, the National Endowment for Democracy, the US embassy, and various Nordic governments. On the list of donors is also The Institute for Statecraft, the discredited organisation behind the Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative was caught in a covert operations of creating “clusters” of loyal politicians, journalists and academics to manufacture the impression of an established consensus to control the narrative. The integrity initiative was also working with UK intelligence agencies to target dissent in politics and the media.

The people who advocated for the policies that destroyed Ukraine and has taken us close to nuclear war have a monopoly on the media, and all dissent is crushed with smears, censorship and cancellation. We have more newspapers than I can count, yet they all write the same thing and cite the same “NGOs”. Even now, it is still considered controversial and suspicious to argue for peace negotiations, even as the majority of Ukrainians want negotiations, the war has been lost, and Ukraine suffers greatly with the loss of men and territory every day. Criticism of the NATO war narratives is not met with counterarguments, rather it is met only with accusations of having evil intentions, being “controversial” and “pro-Russian”, legitimising the invasion, not caring about Ukrainians, spreading propaganda etc. These crude and pathetic attacks do not have to be substantiated as the assault on free speech and academic freedom are always wrapped in moralistic language and claims about defending democracy.

Everything I have argued played out as predicted, including why the sanctions were destined to fail. I can confidently argue why my analyses have been correct and why my policy recommendations would have prevented this disaster. However, I do not live in an open society with the free exchange of ideas. I live in a society where government-sponsored smears, censorship and cancellation are permitted as long as an NGO is used as a middleman.

This is part of a much larger media regime that, above all, must assume good faith from those in power, no matter their past lies, far-right ideological beliefs, or brash and illegal behavior. Let us call it the “Inverse Power-Skepticism Principle, which can be seen here:

There are simply different editorial standards for people like Musk, who can spend the better part of five years posting white nationalist memes, libeling and lashing out at critics, promoting racist conspiracy theories, and mocking trans people, but still is presented by Respectable Media Outlets, as someone concerned with deficits who would simply wants to “reduce waste” and “find savings.” Meanwhile, those far from the halls of power, Official Enemy States and activists are assumed to be inherently ideological and motivated by political ends. Take, for example, a Times report by Reid J. Epstein detailing some Democrats wanting to meaningfully reform the police in 2020. The word “progressive” is used five times, the word “activists” four times. They are presented—correctly and accurately—as ideological agents with an ideological agenda, not above-the-fray wonks seeking “efficiencies” in crime policy. No such ideological labeling is given to far-right, extremely wealthy political agents. Even those as nakedly ideological as Musk, even after he did a Sieg Heil three times on stage on live TV, the Times continued to orient his attack on the liberal and administrative state as just another attempt to “reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.”

In this News Brief, we detail the Trump's administration's strategy of trying to terrorize migrant communities, why it's not working as planned, how The New York Times is manufacturing a pro-mass deportation consensus and how migrant communities and their allies are fighting back.

We are joined by Chris from the humanitarian aid organization No More Deaths.

This is a common convention of the “extreme weather” genre as climate chaos makes these destructive events more and more common: simply report the human suffering and sensational images, and make no mention of the human causes of the horrors people are seeing on their screen. Strip what is fundamentally a political story of all politics, and index the trauma squarely into the Oh, Dearism genre of passive reporting.

These devastating wildfires are not random acts of God. They are fueled and made far more likely by human-made climate change, a dynamic that will only get worse if those in power fail to act and reverse the US’s record fossil fuel production. But why would politicians and CEOs feel any pressure to respond to these catastrophic events when so few in the media center the role of fossil fuels in the destruction and death? Given the extremely high stakes and the limited timetable, in a sane world, wouldn’t every story about extreme weather events not only mention, but make central, carbon emissions’ role in fueling the destruction?

Connecting the human stakes of out-of-control climate chaos and the often dry science of climate models has been an almost impossible task for climate activists and scientists. Corporate news media—with its focus on one-off human interest and sensationalist images, rather than the why of the story—seems dead-set on making sure it’s a connection that remains largely abstract and impossible to make in the public’s mind.

I saw a rant from Mehdi Hasan the other day complaining that the way Elon Musk constantly says the media are corrupt and dishonest “has a massive effect not just on trust and polarization in society, but on election outcomes and political messaging.”

Hasan said that Musk, Trump and their ilk “have cynically created an unpenetrable [sic] bubble around their followers, primed them against a reality-based universe, [and] pre-emptively undermined any negative stories about themselves.”

Hasan is of course correct that the people who listen to Trump and Musk have largely been herded into fact-resistant echo chambers of cult-like loyalty, but it’s worth pointing out that Musk’s claims about the media are absolutely correct as well. The media are corrupt and untrustworthy, and do indeed promote lies and propaganda all the time. Just because Elon Musk says it doesn’t mean it’s false.

One great challenge of our time is that while it’s becoming common knowledge that western media is propaganda and western politics is a corrupt sham, fake solutions to these problems are being marketed to the mainstream by the same powers responsible for them. Donald Trump himself will tell you that the media are lying and the political establishment is run by swamp monsters, and then say that the solution is to support Republicans and trust right wing media. Elon Musk will go on Joe Rogan and say the same thing. In 2028 AOC will probably run for president campaigning on the Democratic Party version of the same faux-populist message, just as Bernie Sanders did.

This dynamic poses a major obstacle to those who yearn for real revolutionary change. It’s becoming increasingly necessary to not just stand against the status quo but against the fraudulent political factions which pretend to oppose it. It’s no longer enough to reject establishment politics and media, we also need to reject the fake anti-establishment politics and media which seek to herd a discontented populace away from meaningful revolutionary movements.

My own 2¢ on developing real media literacy.

This is an “unlisted” YouTube video because it’s for paid subscribers. https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/victoria-nuland-preemptively-warns

“It’s the third election in a row,” says Rachel Maddow with a told-you-so grin, “in which Russia has tried to interfere to try to get Trump into the White House.”

“He’s at it again,” responds former State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, the same smile on her face (it seems they’re struggling to hide their joy this time around). Nuland, who has worked for both George Bush and Dick Cheney, has become a go-to warrior for Dems as a leading pusher of stolen election claims as well as a driving force behind the Ukraine-Russian War. “This time [Putin’s] not even trying to hide his hand, and he has far more sophisticated tools.”

Russia’s so-called tools in the past amounted to, as evidenced in the Mueller report and an FBI investigation, a few thousand dollars spent on social media posts, such as the ‘buff Bernie’ meme. This time, Nuland claims, Putin has a sophisticated new AI, plus $10 million spent on influencers to steal the election for Donald Trump. This accusation, of course, needs no further investigation from Maddow.

Only another smile.

On the other side of our terrible election, Donald Trump is making new threats against Iran that sound equally crazy. After his pet Sean Hannity asked why Kamala Harris is encouraging Iran to assassinate him (what?), Trump went on an unhinged rant about how the US should treat Iran.

And when it comes to our terrible treatment of other countries, it’s harder to find a more one-sided relationship than the US-Ukraine alliance. And Ukrainian President Zelensky seems to be finally realizing that as well, calling out the US for pushing him into a needless war which has led to the deaths of countless Ukrainians.

It’s a terrible week on corporate media as always. Watch with Katie and Aaron to hopefully laugh instead of cry at all of it. Thanks for supporting Useful Idiots, subscribe to watch the full episode here

I expect no better from a lying war criminal.

In fact, as we’ll unpack further below, this tech-bombing was even worse than you imagined. The military wing of Hezbollah does not use pager or walkie talkies. They’ve used their own fiber optic network since 2006, and otherwise rely on couriers. These devices were in the hands of civilian Hezbollah workers, such as members of its large social services effort. Yes, military members may have been hurt too, but that was dumb luck, like being in proximity to blown-up pager-user or picking up a ringing device on behalf of someone else.

Needless to say, this also means that the device attacks were pure terrorism, with no remotely colorable military purpose whatsoever. Remember, the press has brayed that Israel has been working on this caper for 15 years. But Hezbollah moved its military comms to fiber optic before that. And Israel surely knew that. So that means this entire enterprise was from its outset a terrorist scheme and never a military operation.

[…]

But rarely do we have examples of propaganda so flagrant from our “free press” that it is hard for readers not to notice them. This week the state-corporate media made my job a little easier. Over the past few days, it has reported on two closely comparable events that it framed in entirely different ways. Ways that all too clearly serve state-corporate interests.

The first such event was an Israeli air strike last Saturday on a school in Gaza, where Palestinian civilians, including children, had been sheltering from months of a rampaging Israeli military that has slaughtered many tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed most of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure.

The massive scale of death and destruction in Gaza has forced the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide – not that you would know from the media coverage. The genocide case against Israel has been largely disappeared down the memory hole.

The second event, on Monday, was a Russian air strike on a hospital in Kyiv. It was part of a wave of attacks on Ukrainian targets that day that killed 36 Ukrainians. Let us note too that, despite huge numbers of Palestinian women and children being killed each day by Israeli missiles, the news media largely stopped covering the carnage in Gaza months ago. The BBC’s main evening news barely reports it.

The fact alone that the killing of 36 Ukrainian civilians attracted so much attention and concern from the western media, in a war that’s more than two years old, when there is a far larger daily death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which our governments have been directly aiding, and the slaughter is of more recent origin, is telling in and of itself.

So how did our most trusted and progressive media outlets report these comparable events, in Gaza and Ukraine?

The headlines tell much of the story.

[…]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Cook

After nine months of an Israeli mass murder campaign in Gaza, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has confirmed what my colleagues Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada (EI) and Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone reported back in October: that Israel invoked the Hannibal Directive and killed its own citizens on Oct. 7th.

According to one Israeli military source, Israeli forces were ordered to turn the boundary area around Gaza into a “killing zone” — thereby knowingly killing Israelis in that zone. Under the Hannibal doctrine, Israel’s aim was to kill its own people rather than let them be traded in a future exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons. The Israeli military has suppressed this killing of its own people on Oct. 7th all while manufacturing support for its rampage in Gaza ever since.

The same establishment media outlets that have long ignored this aspect of Oct. 7th smeared my independent media colleagues at Grayzone and EI for reporting it. This includes two hit pieces in the Washington Post, and even more brazenly, three pieces in Haaretz — which is now acknowledging what it has repeatedly attacked Max and Grayzone for reporting.

• Scahill: I’m leaving The Intercept and starting Drop Site News
• Ryan Grim: This is an email I never thought I'd be sending

There seems to be a rash of exoduses from The Intercept going on. Two months ago, Ken Klippenstein quit for The Grayzone: Why I'm Resigning From The Intercept

Some may recall Glenn Greenwald’s exit in 2020.

• My Resignation From The Intercept
• Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept

Emphasis original:

[NYT’s Cecilia] Kang’s thesis [link] was premised on years’ worth of media and policymaker fearmongering that TikTok user data was susceptible to surveillance by the Chinese government (BuzzFeed News, 6/17/22; Forbes, 10/20/22; Guardian, 11/7/22). According to Kang’s colleagues, the law’s enactment was prompted by “concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data” (New York Times, 4/26/24). In 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte sought to prohibit TikTok throughout his state on the grounds that “the Chinese Communist Party” was “collecting US users’ personal, private and sensitive information” (Montana Free Press, 5/17/23). (Gianforte’s attempt was later thwarted by a federal judge.)

If such fears were officials’ genuine motivation, one could hope that broader data-privacy regulation might follow. Yet, as the Times neglected to mention, the spying accusations are tenuous—and deeply cynical. As even US intelligence officials concede, apprehensions about China’s access to TikTok user data are strictly hypothetical (Intercept, 3/16/24). And, despite its bombshell headline “Analysis: There Is Now Some Public Evidence That China Viewed TikTok Data,” CNN (6/8/23) cautioned that said evidence—a sworn statement from a former ByteDance employee—“remains rather thin.”

Given their dubious nature, it’s hard to see these data-privacy claims as anything other than a pretext for the US to throttle TikTok. By forcing either divestment or a ban, the US, at least in theory, wins: It transfers a tremendously lucrative and influential company into its own hands, or it prevents that company from serving as a platform—albeit one with plenty of problems—on which people can engage in and learn from discourses that are critical of US empire.

Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau, and, with Paul D'Ambrosio, author of "You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity".

https://fah.um.edu.mo/hans-georg-moeller/

My research focuses on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy (specifically Daoism) and on Social and Political Thought (specifically Social Systems Theory).

Moeller’s bibliography (Google Books)

The speaker discusses Ray Epps, who allegedly incited the January 6 Capitol assault. Tucker Carlson from Fox News is accused of promoting a conspiracy theory about Epps. Lawyers representing Epps plan to sue Fox News for defamation. The speaker questions why Epps, who encouraged people to enter the Capitol, hasn't been arrested, suggesting he may have been an FBI informant. The FBI denies orchestrating the riot but doesn't provide a clear answer. The speaker believes Epps was a fed acting to discredit the MAGA movement. The media's sympathy for Epps is questioned, implying a cover-up. The transcript ends with tour promotions.