Hate Ink*
How the elite media abandoned the interest of the public and started drowning it in vitriol, fear and stupidity
*The title of this article is inspired by Matt Taibbi’s book on the same topic called Hate Inc. It focuses on the media in the Western, English-speaking part of the world as the so-called papers of record reside in this geographical region but nonetheless set the tone for both journalistic output and public opinion globally.
Another year has gone by, marking a deeper erosion of the public’s trust in the media. Although we are still fortunate that good-faith, intrepid journalism hasn’t been lost forever, journalists in general are becoming more and more despised by ordinary citizens, and this is the result of the media’s own making.
By definition, journalism should be adversarial to those in power and public service should be the central function of the journalistic profession. And yet, the interests of the people have long been completely forsaken by the fourth estate for the benefit of the government and business elites.
What’s happening with the press is quite extraordinary — on the one hand, legacy media is in serious crisis, struggling to retain the attention and faith of its fading audiences. On the other hand, truthful and fair reporting is facing an unprecedented crackdown by public authorities and business giants, who are trying their best to make sure they are the sole gatekeepers of the information which reaches the public. To achieve this, those in power are rapidly transforming all levels of the state apparatus into a totalitarian murder machine — by way of censorship, deception, public smearing, lawfare, vicious fear- and war-mongering, the list goes on.
As of this writing, Israel has killed 142 journalists in its renewed terror on Gaza, not counting all the reporters The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had routinely and purposely targeted and killed prior to October 7th 2023, many of whom we don’t even know about. 320 journalists have been imprisoned as of December 2023 while 65 are missing to date according to the CPJ (Committee To Protect Journalists).
Julian Assange spent almost 15 years in various forms of arbitrary detention, awaiting extradition to the United States to be tried under bogus espionage charges for publishing accurate information about war crimes and abuse of power perpetrated by America and its allies in the Middle East. He was finally released from London’s harshest prison Belmarsh last week, after being extorted to accept a guilty plea for practicing principled journalism.
Israeli police forces attacked the pallbearers of the Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s coffin during her funeral procession in Jerusalem in May 2022. Abu Akleh was shot in the head by the Israeli military despite wearing a Press-marked vest during a raid in the refugee camp in Jenin. Israel first blamed Palestinian resistance fighters for Abu Akleh’s killing, but eventually admitted she was murdered by an Israeli soldier and apologised for it. Journalists are routinely and intentionally targeted and killed by the IDF to prevent them from reporting on how Israel is treating Palestinians in the occupied territories — both before October 7 and after.
Former co-host of The Hills’ Rising show Briahna Joy Gray was fired a few weeks ago because of her consistent and strong criticism of Israel’s indiscriminate slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. In 2022, another contributor to the show — Katie Halper, who also happens to be Jewish, had her contract terminated because she dared to call Israel an apartheid state.
Yet another former co-host of Rising — Kim Iversen, was forced out from the programme after she was not allowed to interview Anthony Fauci over his criminal role in the Covid hysteria.
The Real News network, who claim to be exposing the truth and fighting injustice, recently cancelled Chris Hedges’ show The Chris Hedges Report because his critique of the Biden administration and its unwavering support for Israel proved harmful to the “nonprofit status” of the media channel. Hedges was a longtime war correspondent for The New York Times but was fired over his anti-war position towards the U.S. invasion of Iraq. As he wrote earlier in the year, the paper “is a pale reflection of what it was when I worked there, beset by numerous journalistic fiascos, rudderless leadership and myopic cheerleading of the military debacles in the Middle East, Ukraine and the genocide in Gaza”.
Other, probably less prominent journalists, have also been caught in the crosshairs of the new Cold War era, facing indefinite detention on the whim of seemingly eternal political rivals. These are just a fraction of the examples of silencing, firing, smearing and oppressing journalists who ask questions, who refuse to succumb to the herd mentality that’s possessed the journalistic community, and who hold beliefs which deviate from the official orthodoxy or simply say “no” to the “don’t bite the hand that feeds you” axiom.
Meanwhile, the so-called papers of record, instead of trying to repair the damage they’ve done and regain the faith of their fellow citizens, are helplessly wallowing in the mud, surrendering themselves to the laws of the market economy in a desperate attempt to preserve the remains of their readership and keep the business going. That’s one of the main problems with the press today — it’s just a business.
And social media, which has become a primary source of news for many, is enthusiastically adding insult to injury by amplifying some of our most primitive faculties, thus further eroding the conversations we hold in the modern version of the public square.
Last month, The Washington Post ran a smear piece on the online publication The Grayzone claiming the outlet had ties to and received financing from Russia and Iran. They later issued a correction that only one of the site’s editors — Max Blumenthal “had received payments from Iranian media, according to recently unearthed documents”, which isn’t saying much about the authenticity of the information.
The Grayzone and Blumenthal in particular, have been reporting on the U.S. government’s role in the war in Ukraine, Israel’s war on Gaza and the Palestinian cause, as well as the decades-long American foreign policy of blackmail, interference and extortion, which the United Kingdom has actively participated in. Strangely, The Washington Post describes Western journalists who have worked or are working for Russian, Iranian and Middle Eastern media as foreign agents, but expresses no qualms about the financing by the U.S. government and its network of non-profit organisations of outlets which are subservient to their political ideology.
At this year’s family gathering of Europe’s most wicked patriarch Klaus Schwab in Switzerland, the recently re-elected for a second term President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen announced that misinformaiton and disinformation were bigger threats to democracy than war and climate change — the latter two are among the main reasons for the rising cost of living for millions of people across Europe and the West, not to mention the danger of a nuclear arms race, which respected newspapers and media channels continue to casually flirt with as if they’re giving us the weather forecast for the weekend.
Of course, what Mrs. von der Leyen and her friends mean by mis- and disinformation is simply information that exposes the criminality of unelected world leaders like her and Mr. Schwab, and their puppet governments across the so-called democratic world.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump famously dubbed the media “the enemy of the people” while he was in office. Although Trump wasn’t too far off in his assessment, he skilfully managed to read the room and capitalise on the anger and despair of the civilian population whose everyday reality and wellbeing are becoming more and more irrelevant to our deranged political class and their loyal servants in the corporate newsroom.
This year, we are yet again being taken for a spin in the never-ending craze to salvage democracy and rid the American people — and consequently the rest of the planet — from the new führer Donald, whose potential second term in office makes for another round of bombastic hysterical headlines, designed to attract more eyeballs, clicks and comments, and galvanize even wider social division and paralysing dread among the electorate.
In a feverish attempt to prevent Trump from being re-elected in November, the neoliberal clique decided to bring him to court in a number of criminal lawsuits in several different jurisdictions, and even managed to convict him on some of the charges for the pleasure of seeing him pay millions in damages and calling him a convicted felon over and over and over.
Although it is indeed unprecedented and very unusual for a former or current president to be indicted and sentenced for their sketchy deeds, some of the reactions to Trump’s well-timed conviction on the part of alternative media voices have been too melodramatic. That, however, doesn’t mean that Trump’s conviction had anything to do with delivering justice. Part of the charges, like obstruction of peaceful transfer of power and instigating an “insurrection” on Capitol Hill on Jan 6th, are quite silly, others like falsifying business records and mishandling top secret documents are so common in circles of power, that most of us have tragically accepted them as completely normal practices.
This is neither to say that any politician, however popular they might have become, should be immunized against criticism and accountability, nor to suggest that challenging a figure like Donald Trump is unfounded. But one can’t help to notice how the legacy media is laying their critical eye selectively on the opponents of their political favourites and corporate donors, while ignoring, exonerating and covering up the unethical behaviour of the political tribe they associate themselves with. Of course, this performance only works for a small faction of the populace — sadly, the one that still passes for intelligent, critically-thinking, freedom-loving, and democratic.
Just as alarmingly, the establishment media and the governing elites just can’t be bothered with self-awareness and self-reflection about their own failings. Instead, the general population is constantly being served with unconvincing attacks on the opposition party (which isn’t usually a genuine adversary) and alarmist prognoses for the rise of authoritarianism and right-wing ideologies as if the growing support for these phenomena came out of thin air. The triumph of nationalist parties in the European Parliament elections on June 9th was no surprise to most of us, but very few mainstream publications are willing to analyse honestly and sincerely the root causes for the growing support of such parties among voters.
Journalists must defend democracy even when democracy turns authoritarian
In January last year, Louis Menand, staff writer for The New Yorker, one of the most passionate bastions of the neoliberal dogma, offered a confounding perspective on how the media fell from grace in a piece titled “How Americans lost faith in the news”. Mr. Menand concluded his article by saying that “the power of the press rests on faith”, i. e. the belief that journalists are “dedicated to pursuing the truth without fear or favor”, and if they were to “disclaim that function, they will be perceived in the way everyone else is now perceived, as spinning for gain or status”.
These words are a strange ending to an article which utilised all the preceding paragraphs to argue that the main function of journalism isn’t the pursuit of truth wherever it may lead. Instead, the author opined that journalists should “defend democracy” whatever the cost — whether that would be through courting a mutually-beneficial relationship with those in power, spinning the facts or omitting inconvenient aspects of a story, the essence of the free press and the First Amendment is locked in the confines of being “pro-democracy” — a vague term defined by what happens to be the political objectives of the American government at the time.
We have a free press in order to protect democracy, Menand wrote. When democracy is threatened, reporters and editors and publishers should have an agenda. They should be pro-democracy.
In other words, the press should be free so long as its reporting aligns with the goals of the government, and anybody else really, who proclaims that their mission is protecting democracy. When the reality undermines that message, i.e. when there’s evidence for corruption of power, criminal or unethical activity on the part of those protectors of democracy, journalists should report in a way that strengthens the message nonetheless, and sacrificing the truth in the process is a price we should be more than happy to pay — after all, a fake democracy is supposedly good enough because a genuine one is unfortunately impossible.
Suspicion is, Menand submitted, for obvious reasons, built into the relationship between the press and government officials, but, normally, both parties have felt an interest in maintaining at least the appearance of cordiality. Reporters need access so that they can write their stories, and politicians would like those stories to be friendly. Reporters also want to come across as fair and impartial, and officials want to seem coöperative and transparent [emphasis added]. Each party is willing to accept a degree of hypocrisy on the part of the other.
With Trump, all that changed. Trump is rude. Cordiality is not a feature of his brand. And there is no coöperation in the Trump world, because everything is an agon. Trump waged war on the press, and he won, or nearly won. He persuaded millions of Americans not to believe anything they saw or heard in the non-Trumpified media, including, ultimately, the results of the 2020 Presidential election.
The press wasn’t silenced in the Trump years. The press was discredited, at least among Trump supporters, and that worked just as well. It was censorship by other means. Back in 1976, even after Vietnam and Watergate, seventy-two per cent of the public said they trusted the news media. Today, the figure is thirty-four per cent. Among Republicans, it’s fourteen per cent. If “Democracy Dies in Darkness” seemed a little alarmist in 2017, the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, made it seem prescient. Democracy really was at stake.
Surely there is a significant number of people who embrace individuals like Donald Trump as a genuine antidote to the corrosive political system and the toxic social climate we live in, without giving it much thought. It takes more than a few sentences to analyse the origin of that sentiment, and the media should have been the one doing the analysis in a fair and non-partisan way. Instead, they chose to pour more gasoline to the fire of growing public frustration, anger and sense of helplessness, by exploiting Trump’s image as a Hitler-like figure while he’s arguably just as bad as the leaders of the desecrating democratic establishment.
Menand continued:
All sorts of people call themselves journalists. Are all of them providing the public with reliable and disinterested news goods? Yet journalists are quick to defend anyone who uncovers and disseminates information, as long as it’s genuine, by whatever means and with whatever motives [emphasis added]. Julian Assange is possibly a criminal. He certainly intervened in the 2016 election, allegedly with Russian help, to damage the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. But top newspaper editors have insisted that what Assange does is protected by the First Amendment, and the Committee to Protect Journalists has protested the charges against him.
Just like many of his colleagues in the elite press, Louis Menand either doesn’t know or pretends not to know what actually alienated the public from the media. Engaging in this conversation in good faith, however, would have required some uncomfortable soul-searching and admitting the responsibility journalists themselves bear for the wretched position of their occupation. That’s why Mr. Menand resorted instead, to the tried formula of spreading falsehoods and slurs, promoting insane ideas and whitewashing unhinged psychopaths like Hillary Clinton.
What corporate journalists will never admit, is that the elite media has drifted so much apart from its core function that it’s astonishing how there are at all people who still believe anything they produce. The truth is, the once reputable outlets:
1) don’t truly challenge authority or hold the powerful to account — as mentioned earlier, criticism and journalistic scrutiny are only reserved for the real or imagined opponents of the political and business leaders who the mass media sympathises with or is funded by;
2) report half-truths which are sifted through at least a few filters — there’s a limitation to how freely and how far the corporate press can go in uncovering the truth. Even when journalists become aware of truths that are unfavourable to authorities they like or depend on financially, they opt for self-censorship so that they don’t jeopardise their career or, if one follows Luis Menand’s logic, compromise their image as friends of democracy;
3) exude a sense of entitlement and elitism — I don’t think any rational person expects the media to never be wrong about anything. It’s normal for journalists to sometimes report things that eventually turn out to be false. It’s also normal, that when they do, they admit being wrong and correct their reporting. But the mainstream media think too highly of themselves, authenticity and humility are just not their thing, they will only make superficial corrections about banal technicalities like wrong dates for example, but they will never take responsibility or apologise for the inaccurate and deceitful information they’ve disseminated on consequential matters which have had grave implications for millions of people.
No wonder principled journalists (like Seymor Hersch, Chris Hedges, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald) who have once worked for mainstream publications have gone to platforms like Substack and Rumble where they thrive, and have managed to attract even bigger audiences who support their work, while the legacy media is smirkily looking down on these platforms, trying to derail their credibility by painting them as breeders of fringe views, disinformation and transphobia.
The (I hope) unintended consequence of all this is that it’s become remarkably difficult to stay informed about what’s truly happening in the world. By refusing to do their job properly, journalists have transferred the burden of uncovering the truth to ordinary citizens. But ordinary citizens have jobs and commitments of their own. Most of us don’t have the luxury to spend hours of our time researching a story and hearing different angles to it, or reading voluminous reports and papers to fact check whether the media and our governments are actually telling us the truth so that we can make informed and correct conclusions.
This is the job of journalists. It’s their responsibility to give us the news the way they are, based on facts, not interests. Instead, the media’s left us to drown in the ocean of information that’s out there while fabricating narratives and crafting polemical headlines to keep us engaged, bitter and resentful. It’s no surprise that a good number of those who still follow what’s going on in the world just can’t bear to hear anything which runs even remotely counter to what they believe in, while the rest have walked out of the news cycle completely, either to preserve their sanity or because they didn’t really care too much anyway.
This might be the healthy choice individually, but at the same time, it is a harbinger of a very grim future collectively. And this future is already here. The social contract is founded on mutual trust, if nobody trusts nobody, we cannot function as a stable society. If we cannot be sure what we’re told is happening, is what’s happening in reality, if we cannot express our thoughts freely but have to constantly censor ourselves to avoid the consequences, if we cannot challenge ideas that are forced upon us, then we’re not living in a free democratic world, and the least we can do, is be honest about it.
Has it always been like that? Yes but…
Last year, Chris Hedges did a very illuminating interview with linguist, writer, political activist and intellectual Noam Chomsky. Hedges asked Chomsky whether he agreed with the notion that the space for independent intellectual thought in academia and the press had narrowed over time. Chomsky’s reply is worth highlighting in its entirety:
I’m not sure that it’s happened actually. We tend to forget what things were like in the past. First of all, there was the whole McCarthyite period which had cast a [inaudible] over all the academic fields. But if you look back, say to the 1960s, you could hardly find a Marxist economist let’s say, fine and outstanding economists like Paul Sweezy couldn’t get a position…The same in other areas, I think the effect of the activism of the 1960s and its aftermath has had some effect in the opening of the media and the professions, there’s more critical scholarship in many areas than there was at the time which is not a high bar to pass, I should say.
But you can get a kind of a sense of this by looking at a journal like The New York Review of Books, probably the main journal of modern liberal, modern left intellectuals. So starting in about 1967, ending in about 1972, couple of years there, the journal was open to critical intellectuals — Frans Sherman, Paul Lauder, Florence Howe, Peter Dale Scott, a number of others. Then it closed off, early 1970s, mid-1970s it closed off. In more recent years, it began to open up in some areas, so for example, you just couldn’t touch anything having to do with Israel, literally nothing, couldn’t say a word until about the mid-1990s or so. Now you can have some critical commentary mainly by people living in Israel, that’s made things a little easier.
If you look at what this is reflecting, it’s reflecting the general mood among young intellectuals, the Review tried to keep a little bit to the critical side of the general mood, late 1960s, early 1970s was a period of considerable activism and engagement so it was reflected in the Review. It died off in the mid-1970s and they shifted with it. So it continues. But I think all in all of the years, I would say there’s maybe somewhat more opening now than there was back in the 50s when McCarthyism was very tight and into the 60s when you just barely began to get some openings, it’s…I think you can easily understand the reasons but if you take a look at the…academia is mostly moderately liberal but moderately liberal means almost completely subordinate to the official doctrine and ideology, you can’t go a millimetre beyond and so if there’s occasional exceptions, that’s a reflection of the pressures of activism and engagement mostly of students.
When Chris Hedges followed up with a question about the role of left liberals as the “attack dogs” of those in power against critics of the establishment ideology, Chomsky summarised brilliantly the resentment of the modern liberal class towards dissenting voices:
Liberal intellectuals are basically saying “we are the limit of criticism, you don’t go a millimetre beyond us. If you do, that’s dangerous. The one thing, it affects our standing as the courageous critics, we don’t want to be exposed as what’s sometimes called stenographers of power — people who basically accept the reining ideologies and repeat them. We want to be perceived as courageous defenders of right and just against power systems”. You know better than I do because it’s your long experience but I have the same impression about the media, too. Just to give you an example, you may recall that after the Tet Offensive, Freedom House launched a huge attack against the media, two volumes condemning the media for being so anti-American that they lost the Vietnam War.
They were lying about it, crimes committed by the United States and so on. Well, I actually went through the two volumes, probably the only person who’ve read them. One volume is documentation, the other was commentary. The commentary was almost total fabrication, there was nothing to do with the documentation. There’s a long section of my book with Ed Herman on manufacturing consent, the last part goes through this in detail. What was interesting to me was the reaction of journalists — they didn’t like it, didn’t like to be defended as honest, courageous journalists who did their job but within the framework of the doctrinal system…they didn’t like to be told you’re not, you’re doing courageous and honourable work contrary to the lies that are being said about you but you’re caught within a doctrinal framework. My impression was they very much disliked this.
Chomsky accurately diagnosed this behaviour by attributing it not only to sheer careerism but also to the fact that conformity is a much easier path than resistance. Even if you don’t agree and have a different opinion, you’re reluctant to express it for fear of losing your job, for offending a respected person in authority or for potentially being socially isolated. That’s not a novel reaction, it’s existed in the past, as well, but today, the social pressure game has reached extremely dangerous proportions, and sadly, it’s gone far beyond the academic and media fields. It’s not only that there’s an incentive to continue the path of least resistance, it’s also the sure risk of being singled out as a right-wing lunatic, a useful idiot or an insensitive bigot that silences so many of us.
And because most people stay silent, the ones who may be more inclined to speak their mind or call out a ludicrous idea publicly, often times stay silent, too. I’ve censored myself so many times at work or even in casual conversations because people who go outside of the enforced right-speak, get punished and sanctioned in ways that make zero sense — the least harmful of which is you lose your reputation as a good person while among the worst consequences, you become unemployed and unemployable. It’s a circle that perpetuates and exacerbates this cowardly social behaviour, and there’s nothing democratic about it.
This phenomenon is unfortunately not confined to the so-called Anglosphere. We are observing it more and more in other societies, as well, which have a much different mentality and historical background. I certainly see it in my home country Bulgaria which, as part of the former Eastern Bloc, was strongly aligned with the political, cultural and economic reality of the Soviet Union in the post WWII period. After the fall of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, that influence was replaced by a Western one, which continues to dominate our social life and is dressed up as the only viable envoy of democracy and prosperity for our geographical region. However, democracy only came for a tiny sliver of the population. For the rest, the living conditions became arguably worse.
Some of that influence has certainly been good and positive, but when it comes to the big questions like economic development and financial autonomy, political self-determination, military independence, quality of education, strong national identity, they’ve all dissolved in the morass of globalist projections which serve a narrow elite at the top of the society. We in Bulgaria have definitely been, and thankfully still are to a great degree, quite resistant to accepting uncritically the more detrimental ideologies of the West, but the wind of change is gradually making its way through long established traditions and beliefs which are rooted in objective reality and scientific truth.
This tendency is very alarming because the youth of today don’t know a world which hasn’t been completely surrendered to this monstrous inversion of human values, material greed and political depravity we’re living in, so they cannot recognise it as well and as quickly as older generations do, and perhaps more worryingly — they don’t necessarily see it as something bad which they should resist. The tearing down of all moral boundaries creates a cynical society which, at some point in time, will no longer even be aware of the human values that make us human nor be able to fight for the collective well-being, because everyone will be just a shapeless, digitised, medicated, muzzled and docile bolt in the consumerist, technocratic reality the media is so eagerly helping create.
Chomsky makes a very compelling case about the corruption of the media during the 60s and 70s in his book Manufacturing Consent from 1988, which, as he pointed out in the conversation I referenced earlier, he co-wrote with Edward Herman, the late Professor Emeritus of finance at the University of Pennsylvania.
The authors argued that journalists didn’t originally set out to deceive the population, they didn’t have a malicious intent. They were, however, constrained in what they could and couldn’t say, by the political, economic and ideological framework they worked in, which stemmed from an asymmetry of wealth and power between the political and corporate class on the one hand, and the general population and reporters on the other. The two academics identified a “propaganda model” which, through various techniques and tactics, filtered out messages and information that ordinary citizens shouldn’t be exposed to because these messages would jeopardise the political aims of those in power.
This ideological framework is not limited to a single perspective as in openly totalitarian regimes. However, the range of permissible dissent and level of criticism permitted, are superficial and tightly controlled — they don’t describe a genuinely pluralistic system, they just create the illusion of one. The minute someone becomes too ambitious about truly challenging the powerful and exposing the truth, there are mechanisms built into the system which are enforced to stifle dissenting voices and discredit them as unreliable sources of information.
Most often that is achieved through self-censorship within the media but in the absence of that, the correction is imposed by force. Herman and Chomsky provided plenty of examples from their lived experience — from the wars in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, to how elections were being treated in enemy (Nicaragua) as opposed to client states (El Salvador), to the creation of worthy and unworthy victims to manipulate the public opinion.
The manufacturing of public consent, they argued, was achieved by the application of five filters which together determined the journalistic output:
1) Ownership and profit orientation of the mass media — the dominant media organisations are often owned by wealthy people with ties and common interests to private businesses like banks, technology firms, arms manufacturers and public institutions. This inevitably creates a conflict of interest and restricts what kind of reporting is permissible.
2) Advertising as the primary source of monetisation — the penetration of the media from the advertising industry drives down the production cost but at the same time, it makes media dependable on the income from advertisers. This may and have led to the closing down of smaller outlets, it can marginalise others and negatively impact the content that they print out so that it matches the business interests of advertisers on the platform.
3) Government officials and approved experts are sources of evidence for news reports — the powerful, be they on the government side or the business side, infiltrate the media by establishing good relationships with journalists, feeding them information through official sources or think-tank/ NGO experts who are on the payroll of those with vested interests in reporting one way or the other.
On the one hand, this eliminates the cost of a thorough journalistic investigation, on the other, it provides information that comes from a perceivably credible source.
Nowadays, the revolving door between the government, the media and the corporate world has become mundane and trivial — to name just a few glaring conflict-of-interest examples, Joe Biden’s former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki left the position to start hosting a news show on MSNBC, former CIA Director John Brennan is a senior national security and intelligence analyst for NBC and MSNBC, famous war monger John Bolton served as Fox News contributor for 11 years before he became Trump’s national security adviser, James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence under Obama who, as Edward Snowden revealed, lied to Congress that the NSA wasn’t “wittingly” spying on Americans, became CNN’s national security analyst; current U.S. secretary of defense Lloyd Austin was appointed to the position despite his prior employment at the board of arms manufacturer Raytheon; Nikki Haley, former South Carolina governor, UN ambassador and 2024 presidential candidate who eventually dropped out of the race, left her position in the Trump administration in 2018 to find more lucrative ventures in the private realm.
4) Flak — this is a mechanism to punish and discredit disobedient media voices. Whenever a journalist or a media organisation refuses to toe the official line, the government and its network of think-tanks and fact-checkers, write reports or manufacture stories to defame and ostracise those dissidents so that they lose the trust and support of their readers, along with their funding.
We’ve seen plenty of such examples regarding Ukraine and Gaza, Julian Assange continues to be smeared as a Russia hawk and a rapist even though there’s no real substance to these fabrications, Rumble and Substack have gained the name of a cesspool for extremists, racists, misogynists, etc., because they allow a variety of perspectives on their platforms and refuse to censor, independent journalists and media outlets are often attacked as Putin and Assad lovers because they expose the true face of Western political leaders.
5) Anticommunism or the idea of a permanent enemy as a national religion and control mechanism — when Herman and Chomsky wrote their book, the Cold War mentality and the fear of communism dominated the Western political and social life. Nowadays the idea is the same, only the labels have changed. Today, democracy, i.e. the collective West (the U.S./UK and their '“partners”), is at constant war with authoritarianism, i.e. Russia, China, Iran, Syria, and everybody else who refuses to import the Western (globalist) model of democracy into their country.
As long as people’s attention is caught up in the us vs. them, the good vs. evil dichotomy, the powerful get to continue the whirlpool of forever wars, sanction all kinds of horrendous acts and support all sorts of despicable ideologies at a great cost for the livelihoods and happiness of their own constituents.
…it’s getting worse
About two years ago, Munk Debates held an interesting debate under the banner “Be it resolved, don’t trust mainstream media”. Matt Taibbi, an American investigative journalist, formerly covering politics, the 2008 Wall Street crash and the 2016 presidential race for Rolling Stone, made a strong entrance on the stage:
It’s [the news business] destroyed itself by getting away from its basic function, which is just to tell us what’s happening. My father had a saying: “The story’s the boss”. In the American context this means that if the facts tell you that the Republicans were the villains in a political disaster, then you write it that way. If the facts point more to the Democrats, you write that. If they’re both culpable, as was often the case for me when I investigated Wall Street for almost 10 years after the 2008 crash, you write the story that way. We’re not supposed to thumb the scale. Our job is just to call things as we see them, and leave the rest up to you. But we don’t do that now. The story’s no longer the boss. Instead, we sell narrative, in a dysfunctional new business model.
Once, the commercial strategy of the news business was to go for the whole audience — a TV news broadcast was aired at dinnertime and it was designed to be watched by the entire family — everyone from your crazy right-wing uncle to the sulky lefty teenager in the corner. The system had flaws but making an effort to talk to everybody had benefits, for one thing, it inspired trust…With the arrival of the internet, some outlets found that, instead of going for the whole audience, it made more financial sense to pick one demographic, and try to dominate it. How do you do that? That’s easy, you just pick an audience and you feed it news you know they’ll like. Instead of starting with the story and following the facts, you start with what pleases your audience and work backward to the story. This process started with Fox but really now everybody does it — from CNN to OAN to The Washington Post, nearly all media organisations are in the same demographic hunting business.
According to a Pew Center survey from a few years ago, 93% of Fox’s audience votes Republican, and in exactly mirroring phenomenon, 95% of the MSNBC audience votes Democratic. The New York Times readers are 91% democrats. Left or right, most commercial audiences, in America anyway, are politically homogenous.
This bifurcated system is fundamentally untrustworthy. When you decide in advance to forgo half of your potential audience to cater to the other half, you’re choosing in advance which facts to emphasise and which to downplay, based on considerations other than truth and newsworthiness. This is not journalism, this is political entertainment, and is therefore fundamentally unreliable.
With editors now more concerned with retaining audience than getting things right, lots of guardrails have been thrown out. Silent edits have become common, serious accusations are made without calling for comment, reporters get too cozy with politicians and report things either without attribution or source the unnamed “people familiar with the matter”. Like scientists, journalists should be able to reproduce their work in the lab. With too many anonymous sources, this is impossible…A good journalist should always be ashamed of error and it bothers me to see so many of my colleagues not ashamed. News media shouldn’t have a side, it should focus on getting things right, which believe me, is a hard enough job. Until we get back to the basics, we don’t deserve to be trusted. And we won’t be.
In 2019, Taibbi published a brilliant sequel to Chomsky’s Manufacturing consent, called Hate Inc, Why today’s media makes us despise one another. He is one of the few journalists left, who have managed to preserve their integrity throughout their career and consistently demonstrated it with actions.
The main premise of his book is that, by selling hate on both political divisions (Republican vs. Democrat or what he calls “America vs. America”), the media is channelling the attention of their audiences away from social and political problems that truly matter, while making sure that those who are responsible for these problems remain exempt from accountability.
The factors at play are similar to the ones described by Herman and Chomsky, however, today, the agenda of the powerful is achieved through an extremely pronounced and inflated ideological separation — left vs. right, progressive vs. narrow-minded, democrat vs. republican, urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor, educated vs. illiterate, and it’s not at all limited to the North American geographical region.
While back in the days a journalistic error could end one’s career, today, lying, smearing and deceiving the public is the way to go up the socio-economic ladder of the journalistic profession. As Taibbi points out, in previous decades, journalists used to be more distanced socially and financially from the powerful elites. Being a reporter wasn’t glamorous or profitable. Reporters came from working-class families which made them understandably more sensitive to the pain and suffering of the poor and even the middle-class members of society.
Today, popular TV anchors, well-known editors and reporters, at least the ones who work for the large headlines, come mostly from privileged families which has enabled them to study at ivy-league schools where credentialism is enshrined in the education. This normally creates a stark disconnection between the establishment media and ordinary folks who they often mock, ridicule and blame for being too lazy to get educated, because they cannot identify themselves with the everyday struggles of the lower classes.
To quote Matt Taibbi:
People hate the media because they’re too lazy to be informed is the reporting version of They Hate Us for Our Freedom…Before 2016, journalists noticed the decline in trust in their profession, and sometimes wondered about it. Occasionally, we conceded that liberal political leanings of individual reporters were a factor…“Since the 2016 election, though, “Why do they hate us?” has become absolutely linked to Trump for most reporters. Audiences have similarly hardened. More than ever, we’re stuck in a binary proposition.
Either the media is a liberal cult, as Goldberg [former CBS producer Bernard Goldberg] insists, or audiences are as Sullivan [Margaret Sullivan, former New York Times public editor and former media columnist for The Washington Post] describes them: hopeless ignoramuses who reject their duty to self-inform.
Neither take is accurate. The press is first and foremost a business, as commercial as selling cheeseburgers or underpants. We sell content, and what we don’t sell is far more important than what we do. (Taibbi, 2019, p.127-129)…
We don’t cover child labor, debt slavery, human rights atrocities (particularly by U.S. client nations), white-collar crime, environmental crises involving nuclear or agricultural waste, military contracting corruption (the Pentagon by now cannot account for over six trillion dollars in spending), corporate tax evasion and dozens of other topics.
How about process stories? Does the average American know how the World Bank operates? Have audiences heard terms like “structural adjustment”? Who out there knows what the Overseas Private Investment Corporation is? How central banks work? How a bill gets passed through Congress? How and where military forces are deployed?
Does the average American know we have special forces deployed in 149 nations right now (that’s 75 percent of the world, and that the number has expanded in the Trump years)? That we have ongoing combat operations in eight nations?” (Taibbi, 2019, p.121)
Of course private citizens should be curious and smart about how they consume the news, we should absolutely challenge our instinctive reactions and be willing to expose ourselves to views which don’t match our own. At the same time, as I argued earlier, it’s the media’s job to tell us the truth, removed from any hidden agenda, any interests, any political leanings. Nowadays, prioritising profit and attention by playing on our emotions, and leaving the truth to be a footnote at best, has become the norm.
I work in media, and although my role isn’t editorial, I have not once heard editors being too concerned about the quality of their coverage as a way to encourage intelligent debate and educate their readers.
To the extent to which they care about the noteworthiness and utility of their journalistic product, it’s done with the main purpose of expanding reach and increasing the subscriber base. I’d like to think there are exceptions even in the mainstream, but I am yet to find a major outlet which has absolutely no boundaries to what they can report and how.
I once asked a journalist what they thought was the biggest misconception about their profession and they told me it was the myth that journalists gathered in a room and secretly devised plans to deceive the public. I’m sure they don’t, but it’s not even necessary for them to do that, it happens naturally as a consequence of the economic, political and ideological framework journalists (and the rest of us) are all caught up in.
Is that because reporters lack objectivity? What does it mean to be objective anyway? Many people, journalists included, tend to confuse objectivity for inviting the opposing side in a debate. In reality, objectivity is more about staying true to the facts regardless of one’s personal convictions, and speaking the truth whatever it is, especially if it’s disadvantageous to someone you like.
As Matt Taibbi observed in his book:
The fact that “objectivity” was less about principle than profit, stylistically silly, and easily manipulated into masking all sorts of awful political realities (historically, from racism to American military atrocities abroad), didn’t mean it was worthless.
“Objectivity”, above all, was great protection for reporters. Having no obvious political bent was a prerequisite for taking on politicians. If you announced yourself as an ally of one party or another, you lost your credibility with audiences.
“Balance” didn’t mean having to quote science-deniers. It was mainly a way for journalists to stay out of unspoken political alliances. Once you jump in that pit, it’s not so easy to get out (2019, Taibbi, p.86).
I share Glenn Greenwald’s position that objectivity, while not being a realistic standard, doesn’t automatically preclude journalists from being fair and authentic in their reporting.
Former New York Times editor and Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan seems to agree, at least theoretically, with Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald that the media is severely polarised, and caters to two groups with conflicting beliefs. Sullivan says that objectivity is about reporting evidence-based truth with an open mind. In practice, though, she seems unable to adhere to her own advice to not ”get behind a Democrat or a Republican”, and her reporting places her in the “Hillary-worshipping, democrats never lie, Trump is Hitler” group that she’s not supposed to be in, at least not so overtly. Trump didn’t become president because the media printed too much coverage on him. Or because it was the wrong coverage, as Sullivan suggested. Matt Taibbi described it better than I ever could:
The major challenge for reporters in covering Trump was to explain his rise. There were a million reasons, beginning with the billions in free coverage he received. He certainly played on racial panic and feelings of lost status. This was a dominant theme of his announcement speech, how low we’d sunk, how we never win anymore, etc.
The failures of decades of policy, with little real wage growth since the Nixon era, were surely also a factor.
It was complicated. You couldn’t say it wasn’t. There were 4Chan crazies and elderly church ladies alike in the Trump coalition. Trump was a vote for anyone with a grudge, and in America, there is a spectacularly wide spectrum of grudges.
I met one voter in Wisconsin who said the following: “I usually don’t vote, but I’m going Trump because fuck everything…But racism as the sole explanation for Trump’s rise was suspicious for a few reasons. Chief of which being that it completely absolved either political party (both the Republican and Democratic party establishments were “rejected in 2016, in some cases for overlapping reasons) of having helped create the preconditions for Trump.
Trump doesn’t happen in a country where things are going well. People give in to their baser instincts when they lose faith in the future. The pessimism and anger necessary for this situation has been building for a generation, and not all on one side.
A significant number of Trump voters voted for Obama eight years ago. A lot of those were in rust-belt states that proved critical to his election. What happened there? Trump also polled 2–1 among veterans, despite his own horrific record of deferments and his insulting of every vet from John McCain to Humayun Khan.
Was it possible that his rhetoric about ending “our current policy of regime change” resonated with recently returned vets? The data said yes. It may not have been decisive, but it likely was one of many factors. It was also common sense, because this was one of his main themes on the campaign trail — Trump clearly smelled those veteran votes…Non-voters are the single biggest factor in American political life, and their swelling numbers are, just like the Trump phenomenon, a profound indictment of our system. But they don’t exist on TV, because they suspend our disbelief in the Hitler vs. Hitler show.
We don’t want you thinking about anything complicated: not non-voters, not war fatigue, not the collapse of the manufacturing sector, not Fed policy, none of that. None of what happened in 2016 is your fault: it’s all the pure evil of white nationalism. For conservatives, it’s the opposite: don’t believe anything in the New York Times, don’t think about the impact of upper-class tax cuts and deregulation, just stay in your lane. Remember, you are surrounded by determined enemies, out to destroy tradition, the nuclear family, increase your taxes, take your job and your gun, and remove your president by any means, legal or illegal.
It’s a fight for all the marbles. Politics today is about one side against the other side, and there’s only one take allowed: pure aggression. (Taibbi, 2019, p.90-95)
Where’s the proof?
When asked about Manufacturing consent, Noam Chomsky has often pointed out that one of the unintended effects of his book has been that many people interpreted it as an invitation to distrust the media. What he in fact wanted to say, by his own admission, was that mainstream outlets like The New York Times are full of facts and information which people aren’t likely to find elsewhere, for example on social media, and they should nevertheless read that information but with a critical eye.
I think that’s in a sense true. Papers like The New York Times are prolific enough to be able to produce coverage which is both newsworthy and truthful; they have the means to sometimes present conflicting ideas on a particular issue despite their apparent political sympathies. That, however, doesn’t mean they get a pass every time they publish lies, distortions, and politically adulatory content, and this happens more often than what The New York Times and the corporate media in general would be willing to admit.
In his famous speech at the Stop the War Coalition rally in London in 2011, Julian Assange said:
In democracies, or the pseudo-democracies that we are evolving into, wars are a result of lies. The Vietnam War and the push for US involvment was the result of the Gulf of Tonkin incident . . . a lie. The Iraq War famously is the result of lies. Wars in Somalia are a result of lies. The Second World War and the German invasion of Poland was the result of carefully constructed lies.
That is war by media. Let us ask ourselves of the complicit media, which is the majority of the mainstream press, what is the average death count attributed to each journalist?
When we understand that wars come about as a result of lies peddled to the British public and the American public and the publics all over Europe and other countries, then who are the war criminals? It is not just leaders, it is not just soldiers, it is journalists; journalists are war criminals.
Assange is right. He’s often quoted as saying that populations don’t like wars so they need to be led into wars. Although most journalists would think of their profession as benign and even virtuous, it is the media’s complicity that creates the conditions which make wars not only acceptable but cheered on by the public. Corrupt governments would never have been able to spread propaganda, advance economic austerity that is designed to harm the weakest among us, push for unnecessary military operations which are taking the lives of millions, and impose fascist policies to bend everyone to their will and strip us of our basic civil liberties if it wasn’t for the silence and active participation of the mass media. This is criminal behaviour of the worst kind.
Assange’s case in itself is one of the clearest examples of journalistic malpractice on the part of large media outlets, many of whom partnered with WikiLeaks before they decided to stab Assange in the back when the U.S. government went after him because he dared to shine a light on their deep-seated, gruesome criminality. That’s precisely why they despise him so much — he’s everything they aren’t but are supposed to be. Even now, after Assange’s long-due release, certainly not thanks to the elite media’s pretended concerns for press freedom, they continued to smear him and spread lies which even the U.S. government had admitted on numerous occasions are false while others didn’t even bother to report he was finally let go even though they had spearheaded the character assassination campaign whhich kept him locked up for 14 and a half years.
Do you remember when in 2022 Vladimir Putin blew up his own gas pipeline because he wanted to stick it to the Europeans? Some conspiracy theorists blamed the United States for the sabotage, thinking for some weird reason it perhaps had to do, among other things, with previous statements of several U.S. officials on the matter. I guess Europeans can never please Mr. Putin enough — when the United States say to us: “Jump!”, we not only ask: “How high?” but we also shoot ourselves in both feet to be more effective in the jumping. Does this make sense? I didn’t think it did, either.
Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Secretary of State in an interview with a German television channel in 2014: “Now we need to have tougher sanctions and I’m afraid at some point this is going to probably have to involve oil and gas. The Russian economy is vulnerable. 80% of Russian exports are in oil and gas and minerals. People say well, the Europeans will run out of energy. The Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy. And I understand that it’s uncomfortable to have an effect on business ties in this way but this is one of the few instruments we have and in the long run, you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence, you want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we’re finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don’t go through Ukraine and Russia. For years we’ve tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes. It’s time to do that”.
The midwife of the newly born democracy in Ukraine Victoria Nuland, former undersecretary of state for political affairs, answers journalists’ questions about Nord Stream months before the pipeline was blown up: “With regard to Nord Stream 2, we continue to have very strong and clear coversations with our German allies, and I wanna be clear with you today. If Russia invades Ukraine, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 will not move forward”. “How can you say that for sure, where does your confidence come from?”, asked a reporter. “As I said, we’ve had extensive conversations at every level with our German allies, I’m not gonna get into the specifics today but we will work with Germany to ensure that the pipeline does not move forward”.
Joe Biden during a joint press conference with the German chancellor Olaf Scholz in February 2022: “If Russia invades, that means tanks or troops crossing the border of Ukraine, again, there will be no longer Nord Stream 2, we will bring an end to it”. “How will you do that exactly, since the project and control of the project is within Germany’s control?”, enquired a reporter. “We will…I promise you, we will be able to do that”, responded Biden while the German chancellor stood silent beside the American president as a schoolboy being examined who hasn’t done his homework.
Et voilà! At the small price of destroying the European economy through financially disadvantageous deals and crippling inflation for ordinary Europeans, we are no longer carrying water for Vladimir Putin. Case closed. Let’s get back to pushing the green agenda now to make up for this little ecological incident.
You might also remember “the pandemic of the unvaccinated”. When those of us who refused to take an experimental jab and submit to insane healthcare regulations after we realised what they were really about, we were ostracised as rightwing nutcases, granny murderers and conspiracy lovers. I’m not only referring to the demonisation of ordinary social media users, I’m talking about respected virologists and medical professionals with years of practice, who were maligned and vilified because they didn’t accept Anthony Fauci’s and Albert Bourla’s government approved version of science. Coincidentally, some of these medical renegades unexpectedly died, sometimes in unclear circumstances after voicing disagreement with the official Covid narrative, but bad things happen to good people all the time, I suppose.
When some of us were skeptical about the light-speed transformation of Ukraine from the most corrupt European state with a serious neo-Nazi problem to its most precious democratic paradise, the elite media labelled us Putin appeasers and apologists. Fast forward a few years, and we’re struggling to see how banning Russian cats and athletes from appearing in international competitions taught the Kremlin a lesson. Ukraine’s a failed state with hardly any men left to throw into the meat grinder, Europe’s crumbling in every imaginable sense while Western leaders and their media partners continue to play chicken with obnoxious WW3 rhetoric as if a nuclear collision is winnable even for its demented purveyors.
And then there’s the trans psychosis which sacrificed the most vulnerable social groups at its altar — children and women, but let’s run through this quickly because adults have become so sensitive nowadays that even biology and truth are upsetting to them. When mediocre male athletes decided they could make it in the women category, and we said: “No way, that’s not only unfair but insane”, sports associations said: “Hold my beer” because they couldn’t bear delirious trans activists calling them heartless transphobes. When troubled “doctors” decided they could advance science by mutilating the reproductive organs of kids, and psychopathic parents dragged their 4-year olds to watch naked men in makeup shake their genitalia in kids’ faces, those of us who couldn’t believe the decadence the world had sunk in, were accused of all sorts of mortal and heavenly sins. No, this has nothing to do with God or religion. One can be an atheist and still possess a sound moral compass.
They simply didn’t know better, we were told. Let’s forgive and forget. Well, it turns out they did know! So at this point, I don’t want to be the person asking for forgiveness someone whose spouse or parent died alone in a hospital bed, terrified out of their wits for the financial benefit of monsters like Fauci, philanthro-capitalists like Bill Gates, and their poodle buddies in the European Union.
It will be hard for me to ask for forgiveness someone whose child has been rushed to the assembly line of life-changing treatment with irreversible consequences because playing with biology proved to be just another lucrative business.
Couple of months ago, Public published The WPATH files — a report which revealed the complete lack of scientific evidence in the gender treatment practices followed by the global authority on gender affirming treatment, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health
I wouldn’t be so bold to ask for forgiveness someone whose son has been returned to them in a coffin because he was either forced or propagandised to fight a war for the prestige and wealth of arms manufacturers, military contractors and government officials with a level of moral depravity that’s impossible to wrap one’s mind around.
Luckily, the tides are turning but this cannot bring back or undo the harm already done to so many that fell victim to the modern times’ insanities. The saddest part of all this is that, no matter the amount of evidence that comes to light on any of these cases, there will always be a group within the society that would prefer to bury their heads in the sand than admit their culpability or complicity in supporting the wrong causes or believing the sinister gospels of the political establishment. And the media has a central role in making sure that continues to hold true. After all, humanity’s never learned from history and it doesn’t seem like it ever will.
How many Palestinians can “the only democracy in the Middle East” murder in cold blood before it’s stopped and held accountable for its war crimes?
Despite the growing international condemnation of Netanyahu’s retaliation against Palestinian civilians after Hamas’ attack on October 7 last year, despite civil unrest world-wide and demands for a ceasefire, including in Israel, despite the imaginary red lines of the Biden administration which is supplying Israel with the weapons and military equipment they need to obliterate Gaza, despite symbolic UN reports and provisions, toothless arrest warrants, etc., it seems that nobody is capable of enforcing international law with regard to Israel’s military rampage against the Palestinians in the last nine months. That shouldn’t be too surprising given that nobody’s managed to hold accountable the United States and their Western allies for the destruction of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, or for their political and military interventions in virtually every corner on this planet in the past two centuries, so why would Israel be an exception?
If you’re tempted to invoke the Russia/China/Iran/Syria card, please don’t bother because, while I do agree that neither Russia and China, nor Iran and Syria are a socio-political pattern to emulate or aspire to, it is not they who are pretending to be the purest democracy in the universe which everyone should accept, forcefully or otherwise, when literally nobody appointed them to be the world’s policeman. Ask the United States government about LGBT rights in their longtime political ally Saudi Arabia or women empowerment in their servile partners like Egypt and Jordan, and then talk about the despotic regimes (which are indeed despotic) in U.S. rival countries who are threatening the Western hegemony by looking to strengthen their own economies (or oligarchs) and establish true partnerships with their neighbours.
I’m not going to pretend that I’m the most well-read person on the history of the Palestine-Israel conflict, which, as much as the Israel lobby in the government and legacy media is trying to convince us it started on October 7, actually dates back at least a century, although a debate can be had on how far we should rewind the clock.
A great source of knowledge, which I learned about from Dave Smith’s podcast Part of the problem, is Darryl Cooper’s series Fear and loathing in the new Jerusalem from 2015-2016. It’s a serious time investment — Cooper begins his historical overview around early 19th century with the pogroms against Jews in the Russian empire and Eastern Europe. He outlines important episodes of the conflict in meticulous detail and with rational thought that is almost impossible to come by elsewhere on the subject — the Holocaust, the origins of zionism, the creation of Israel, the role of both Western and Arab countries at different stages of the conflict, as well as the perpetual thirst for vengeance between Arabs and Jews which is constantly fuelled by repeated acts of violence against the other side. In the convoluted history of this conflict, however, crystallises the two-tier system which Israel imposed with varying cadence over the Palestinians before and since the creation of the Jewish state in 1948.
There is also a huge body of literary work of historians, journalists, political scholars and others which might be worth going through if one’s interested enough to look beyond the redacted commentary in the news. A number of Western journalists have produced a lot of material on the issue well before it came back to the international limelight at the end of last year. Some recent podcast conversations and programmes are also productive and educational. Unfortunately, it’s hard to miss the absence of Palestinian voices when debating both the chronicles of the conflict and Israel’s latest atrocities against innocent civilians in Gaza.
What Hamas did on October 7 was wrong and morally repulsive. They attacked innocent Israelis, who, despite their complicity in the decades-long oppression of Palestine, aren’t necessarily its direct enforcer on the ground. It is conceivable, though, that the Israeli government knew about the attack as several sources have established, especially considering Benjamin Netanyahu’s longtime hostility towards peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and his direct involvement in the strengthening of Hamas as a division tactic between Gaza and the West Bank. Prolonging the war on Gaza is also a way for Netanyahu to remain in power despite his internal political marginalisation already before Hamas’ incursion.
Israel did not have to try and play up what happened by manufacturing vile stories and narratives to win over the world’s sympathy and cover up its long-term extermination plans for Gaza. But they were forced to do it because they clearly saw the attack as the perfect opportunity to unleash unimaginable hell on the Palestinians and finally drive them out from their home for good — a strategy which Netanyahu cleverly tried to disguise under the unattainable goal of eliminating Hamas. With the legacy media’s help, they had to revise and rewrite history, they had to isolate October 7, and decouple it from the historical record so that the vindictive destruction of Palestinian life and infrastructure could make at least some sense to themselves and the world.
As Mary Turfah recently wrote for The Baffler:
Settler psychosis, sick society, these people are not in their right minds—these are descriptive terms that reflect our inability to make sense, within a particular ethical or moral frame, of what we see; they do not interrogate etiology. The illness, given its prevalence, must be colonization: through contagion or side effect, the brutality of colonialism folds back on the colonizer. The occupation exacts a price on its enforcers. Missing is historical time, through which we see that the problem starts with the decision to colonize…In the years since 1917 or 1948 or 1982, Zionism has become increasingly difficult to maintain, and requires a certain insularity — sustained by the United States —that appears, if rooted in a less curated selection of facts and causal links, like insanity. For Israelis, this is self-preservation. Peering into the Zionist project, what we see is what Zionism requires.
Those of us who continue to express normal human compassion seeing the horror scenes coming from Gaza, have to be labelled antisemites, Holocaust deniers, self-hating Jews, Hamas supporters and terrorists. That’s the only way to shut down inconvenient debate and manufacture consent for Israel’s savagery. The other side has to be dehumanised, they have to be characterised as human animals, because then, nothing you do to them is off limits.
When October 7 is portrayed as the explanation for the sadism we are witnessing, it obfuscates the almost a century-long military occupation of Palestinians, who Western powers scapegoated decades ago for guilt that wasn’t even theirs to begin with. You don’t see the Israeli settlements, the forced displacement and dispossession, the arbitrary detention, the economic blockade, the checkpoints, the apartheid regime and denial of human rights — acts of attempted genocide which prominent journalists like Douglas Murray and Barri Weiss will tell you are completely unfounded and moot, because Palestinians kept reproducing and refused to be ethnically cleansed.
We have to hear people like Meghan Murphy mock and denounce the massive student protests on U.S. university campuses because she and other defenders of Israel somehow see a ceasefire as an existential threat to Israel — an argument that is not only hilarious but also disingenuous given Israel’s political, economic and military supremacy over Hamas.
Newsweeks’ opinion editor Batya Ungar-Sargon who, to her credit, at least tries to engage in good faith debates on the subject, has to say that innocent people dying by the thousands, is unfortunate but it is what war looks like. She has to tell us that Arabs are “overwhelmed with hatred” for the Jews because “Israel kept winning and refused to subjugate itself to another Holocaust”, conveniently omitting that without the Western empires’ help, Israel perhaps wouldn’t have kept winning. The normalisation of the dark human nature only underscores its banality — few would dare even think that a people who endured a holocaust is capable of perpetrating one of their own against another people. That’s why Germany of all countries, though not the only one, has been leading the censorship craze against any critique of Israel, however legitimate.
We need to hear how the IDF cares about unarmed civilians because they distributed leaflets and warnings to a wretched population giving them 24 hours to flee their homes because the bombs are coming, only to drone them on their way to a supposedly safe zone, which turns out to be the next military target, essentially entrapping them because there’s nowhere left to go.
This is not about Hamas or preventing the islamisation of the world, or the silly debates about whether Israel had killed 20 000 or 40 000 civilian lives to make up for the 1200 or 1400 Israeli lives that Hamas took on October 7. It’s not about childish hypotheses that antizionism, or rather opposition to Israel’s obliteration of Palestine is in fact a product of antisemitism. It’s about conditioning the world to accept, to normalise and justify the brutality through fairytales like “they attacked us first”, “they use people as human shields”, “they hate our civilisation and democracy”.
Only evil demons like Lindsey Graham, Nikki Haley and Elise Stefanik, and their brainwashed followers can continue to shout “Nuke Gaza”, “Finish them”, and “supply the state of Israel with what it needs, when it needs it without conditions” at the sight of children with amputated limbs, bombed hospitals, burned down universities and civilian despair that’s hard to comprehend. The moral rot of bullies like Stefanik, Graham and other benefactors of the Israel lobby is unbelievable. And the reaction of people like Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Jordan Peterson who otherwise purport to have anti-imperialist and anti-globalist worldview, has been very disappointing because the unconditional support for Israel is not an aberration, a sign of kindness on the part of the world’s most powerful crooks, it’s just another side to their heinous identity.
Perhaps, as Richard Medhurst suggested, there are more practical reasons to explain Israel’s political and military doctrine which we aren’t supposed to talk about. That’s why Israeli officials are doing their best to conceal their starvation policy, the obstruction of humanitarian aid reaching Gaza, the targeting of civilians and aid workers, the animosity of both civilian Israelis and IDF soldiers towards ordinary Palestinians, the deliberate targeting of healthcare workers and emergency rescuers.
In late March, Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories issued her report Anatomy of a Genocide where she concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the following acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
During a press conference with Albanese, a German reporter asked her:
I’d like to ask you on the intent of the Israeli government or Israeli militaries to commit genocide. You’re saying that there is intent and you’re quoting the president of Israel, the Prime Minister, the Defense Minister and some top militaries. But these are only quotes given in speeches or in other circumstances. I would like to ask you do you have a written document by the government with a clear intent to commit genocide?
To this absurd question, Albanese answered, visibly astounded at what she was hearing:
Do you think that in Rwanda, and in Bosnia and Herzegovina any government officials wrote a document saying: I want to commit genocide? Have you seen anything like that? I’ll answer this for you: “No”. It doesn’t work like that. Those statements are just the tip of the iceberg because I have a word limit in my report which is quite strict. Otherwise, we could write an encyclopaedia with what has been said and done, and I said it and I mean it, that if the International Criminal Court is serious about investigating what Israel has done in Gaza, as of the 7th of October, only as of the 7th of October, it will be busy for decades.
Looking at the previous genocides, and jurisprudence that has been developed on those cases, it’s clear that the intent can be direct, in statements, public statements, declarations, having people with command authority or having the prime minister and having the president of the state issuing statements that are so dehumanising, evoking violence, not once, not twice, continuously, for months, it’s supported by jurisprudence in other cases, that this is genocidal incitement.
And look what, it’s been reflected, it has reverberated across the conduct of troops on the ground. They’ve used the same words: amalek. Amalek is a clear, it’s a program in itself. And then, as you say, as you say are there documents, if you read my report you will see that I’ve quoted official documents, legal analysis, the legal justification that Israel uses, there are two, one version and then an updated version, with the key legal findings. And it’s exactly what I said, it’s a humanitarian camouflage because they justify what they are doing using IHL [international humanitarian law] categories: evacuations and human shields, everyone is a human shield, everyone is a human shield: women, children, everything that is between the troops and whatever is their objective. And by the way, the overall objective — eradicating Hamas, destroying Hamas, is not even a real military objective. Because one thing is to neutralise, destroy the military capacity of an organisation, another thing is to target also the civilian components and this is what has been done, every Hamas affiliate has been considered targetable, killable, and so their family members. This explains the 30, 000 people that have been killed, plus, I mean this is a conservative figure I’m referring to.
You might remember CNN’s 40 beheaded babies story which spread across the world like fire but which they were forced to quickly retract because it turned out these claims couldn’t be substantiated. You might also remember the concocted accusations of systemic sexual violence on October 7, which respected papers like the The New York Times tried to use to recruit sympathy for the vanishing support for Israel among ordinary Westerners. They too were proven wrong. I encourage you to see Sheryl Sandberg’s documentary Screams before silence which provides zero evidence to corroborate the horrific scenes of sexual abuse it portrayed. This, however, doesn’t stop Sandberg from shamelessly repeating these lies. That isn’t to say sexual violence isn’t and was never used by Hamas, but numerous investigations tell a different story. What there has been evidence for, though, is Israel’s war crimes and acts of collective punishment which have been well documented by Western, Arab and Israeli media sources, and even former Israeli soldiers.
“October 7” is the product of a forensic investigation conducted by Al Jazeera Investigations which documents a lot of the human rights atrocities Hamas conducted during their attack inside Israel. It does however, dispel the allegations of mass murder of babies and systematic rape.
Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines partnered with Palestinian journalists for a documentary about the horror on the ground after Israel started its military operation in Gaza. A central story in the documentary is Hind Rajab’s and members of her family’s death which the analysis of footage and recordings of the Palestinian Red Crescent show were murdered by an Israeli tank, and it didn’t seem like a mistake.
Israel’s ambassador to Sweden Ziv Nevo Kulman recently gave an interview for the Swedish Radio programme Konflikt where he was challenged about Israel’s disproportionate response to Hamas’ attack, as well as their military objectives and intentions.
“We do not bomb civilian areas. We are after terrorist infrastructure”, answered Kulman when Konflikt’s reporter Fernando Arias asked him why Israel bombed a camp in Rafah called Tal al-Sultan at the end of May, killing 45 people, after declaring the area a “safe zone” for civilians to shelter in.
This is a war against a terrorist infrastructure. I think this is in the interest of the entire world, definitely in the interest of Palestinians to get rid of a terrorist infrastructure. This is what my government, this is what the Israel defense forces are doing, and if there was an incidental loss of lives, we truly regret it and we’ve said that from the very beginning. We were targeting two Hamas terrorists. It could have been that this was an area that Hamas used for its own ammunition.
Nevertheless, the ambassador could not provide any evidence that Hamas members were storing ammunitions there.
“I would like to show you some photos of several attacks, if that’s ok. Have you seen any of them before?”, continued the reporter.
I’ve seen such images, images of war, images of babies. I have also seen a 134 photos of hostages, some of them are babies, some of them are elderly people, some of them are women, these are all innocent Israelis. When you show me these heartbreaking photos, and they are heartbreaking, no human suffering is something that I can look at and enjoy. But one has to remember the suffering on all sides, and one has to remember the brutality of Hamas’ attack and how all of this started…
“I just showed you a photo of a dead baby wrapped in a blanket and of an aid worker holding a dead child and a picture of what seems to be a decapitated child. How do you justify that?”, Arias kept pressing.
I regret the images of any civilian that is caught up in this war. What has to be made clear, and I think this is an assumption we all agree on, these are not things that are caused intentionally, war is a terrible thing, any loss of life of civilians on the Palestinian side is unintentionally (sic) and we regret it, it causes us pain, it’s not something that we wake up in the morning and do with a certain intention…This could end tomorrow, if Hamas releases the hostages, if Hamas signs some kind of agreement with Israel that will include a ceasefire, all of this could end tomorrow. This is a very unfortunate situation, these images do not cause anyone in Israel any joy but this unfortunately is a war and this is what happens in wars.
Israeli officials can keep trying to sell the myth about the “horrors of war” and their supposed grief at the sight of children “caught up in the war”, but it’s hard for any normal person to still seriously believe them. Clearly, Israel isn’t going to end the offensive if all the hostages are released, as Netanyahu himself has declared many times, and while it seems tenable that Hamas fighters are often spread among the population and don’t have designated military bases, bombing hospitals whose capability to operate adequately is already severely compromised by the siege, requires unbelievable levels of cruelty and disregard for human life.
In the beginning of the year, The International Court of Justice described Israel’s military operation in Gaza as a plausible genocide. For no apparent reason, the former president of the Court Joan Donoghue has since reneged on these assertions. While it’s true that the court ruling didn’t use the expression “plausible genocide” in their January order, if one reads the whole text, they’ll realise that this is its implicit meaning. But we don’t really need any international organisation or court to tell us what we ourselves can assert. The corporate media might not be willing to use a strong language to describe the carnage of the unworthy victims because of their financial or ideological dependencies, but in the case of Gaza at least, the evidence is not locked up in their newsroom drawers anymore, it’s right there in the open for everyone to see.
Is there a silver lining?
Although the corporate media has irrevocably lost its credibility among ordinary citizens, it’s a well-oiled machine whose rich donors, affluent lobby groups and government institutions don’t seem to be losing their entrenched position and wealth any time soon.
The good news is that the mainstream media is no longer the mainstream, and alternative outlets and voices are gaining more and more popularity, despite the concerted efforts to smear them, shut them down and constrain their reach. The main reason for these independent outlets’ popularity is not that they are absolutely immune to the dark practices of the mass media, many of them aren’t, or because they only air the perspectives their audiences agree with, although some do. But there are many among them who are genuinely trying to be authentic and fair in their coverage, and give exposure to long-form debates on contentious issues, and this is the only way both good and bad ideas can be properly understood and judged on their merit.
Large media organisations and establishment outlets still produce valuable reporting and are sometimes allowed to criticise those who pay their checks. But there’s always a strict demarcation, a threshold they cannot cross under any circumstances. Declassified’s Matt Kennard explained these loyalties and the wider media/power landscape very well in a recent conversation with Novara Media.
In his latest book The greatest evil is war, Chris Hedges writes, referring to Chomsky’s Manufacturing consent:
Rulers divide the world into worthy and unworthy victims, those we are allowed to pity, such as Ukranians enduring the hell of modern warfare, and those whose suffering is minimized, dismissed, or ignored. The terror we and our allies carry out against Iraqi, Palestinian, Syrian, Libyan, Somali, and Yemeni civilians is part of the regrettable cost of war. We, echoing the empty promises from Moscow, claim we do not target civilians. Rulers always paint their militaries as humane, there to serve and protect. Collateral damage happens, but it is regrettable…
Worthy victims are used not only to express sanctimonious outrage, but to stroke self-adulation and a poisonous nationalism. Fact-based evidence is abandoned, as it was during the calls to invade Iraq. Charlatans, liars, con artists, fake defectors, and opportunists become experts, used to fuel the conflict…
It is impossible to hold those responsible for war crimes accountable if worthy victims are deserving of justice and unworthy victims are not. If Russia should be crippled with sanctions for invading Ukraine, which I believe it should, the United States should have been crippled with sanctions for invading Iraq, a war launched based on lies and fabricated evidence…There was very little dispute about the folly of invading Iraq among reporters in the Middle East, but most did not want to jeopardize their positions by speaking publicly. They did not want my fate to become their own, especially after I was booed off a commencement stage in Rockford, Illinois, for delivering an anti-war speech and became a punching bag for right-wing media…
What Russia is doing militarily in Ukraine, at least up to now, was more than matched by our own savagery in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, and Vietnam. This is an inconvenient fact that the press, awash in moral posturing, will not address. No one has mastered the art of technowar and wholesale slaughter like the U.S. military. When atrocities leak out, such as the massacre of more than five hundred unarmed villagers at My Lai in Vietnam or the torture of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the press does its duty by branding them aberrations. The truth is that these killings and abuse are deliberate. They are orchestrated at the senior levels of the military…
All of this remains unspoken as we express our anguish for the people of Ukraine and revel in our moral superiority. The life of a Palestinian child or an Iraqi child is as precious as the life of a Ukrainian child. No one should live in fear and terror. No one should be sacrificed on the altar of Mars. But until all victims are worthy, until all who wage war are held accountable and brought to justice, this hypocritical game of life and death will continue. Some human beings will be worthy of life.Others will not. Drag Putin off to the International Criminal Court and put him on trial. But make sure George W. Bush is in the cell next to him. If we can’t see ourselves, we can’t see anyone else. And this blindness leads to catastrophe. (Hedges, 2022, p. 21-33).
I wrote that earlier but it bears repeating: most people are busy enough with the struggles of their own daily lives and cannot invest the time and effort to go through lengthy articles, debates, reports, books, radio programmes — both on the traditional, and the alternative media side, so that they can get as truthful and accurate a picture as possible of what’s happening in their countries and the world. This is what journalists and the media are supposed to do for us. If they continue to refuse to do it, they will keep traversing the outskirts of the public’s trust and bear just as much of the blame as our nefarious politicians, if not even more, for the misfortunes and catastrophes that are yet to beset our societies.