During the Cold War, a prime example of authoritarian media was PravdaThe Soviet newspaper “Truth” means “the truth” in Russian. It was a common trope of the Soviet media to repeat all government lines and not offer alternative perspectives. Headlines about the purges under Joseph Stalin included hits like “Crush the reptiles” and “For the dogs: death of the dogs”. After Stalin signed a non-aggression pact with Adolf Hitler, Pravda The word “fascist” is no longer used to describe the Nazi regime.
When the American media covers these types of state-run media in other countries, like the Soviet Union, China, Iran, it's always from a complacent position, an attitude of, “That would never happen here. Maybe we shouldn't be so complacent.”
The US mainstream media coverage of the recent campus protests against the genocide in Gaza has been nearly indistinguishable from state media under non-democratic regimes, and the White House coverage, especially as it is relentlessly repeated every night in elite print media and liberal and centrist broadcasting, feels not so different from an authoritarian society.
Am I exaggerating? Well, take a look at some of the most egregious recent examples and judge for yourself.
According to the leaked memo, Intercept, The New York Times Israel has banned its journalists from using the words “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing” to describe the genocide and ethnic cleansing taking place in Gaza. Times Authors are also urged to avoid using the terms “occupied territories” and “Palestine.” The memo also warns against using words like “massacre,” “genocide,” and “genocide,” which even those with feelings or a concern for accuracy would find accurate descriptions of what Israel has done to the Palestinians, warning that such words “convey emotion rather than information.”
This is Orwellian. How else to call the massacre of 112 Gazans trying to collect flour in March? How can the murder of more than 15,000 children over a seven-month period be called a “genocide”? The documents glorify one of the bloodiest, most one-sided and brutal wars so far in the 21st century.
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton faced a lot of backlash during a recent appearance on an MSNBC talk show after she made some predictably condescending remarks about student protesters' lack of historical knowledge. Morning JoeBut the comments made by the moderator prior to Clinton's remarks received less attention, but were far more egregious.
In a lengthy closing remark to Clinton (one of those self-indulgent tirades that journalists make during an interview that make you forget there was even a question going on), former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough sounded like a crazed right-wing McCarthyist from the 1950s.
He denounced “mainstream students being radicalized by professors and Communist Chinese propaganda on TikTok.” He couldn't believe that students were calling the president “Joe Genocide” and the Clintons war criminals. He was shocked that professors were participating in the protests, the same shock that an average person feels when they see their children die because of the actions of the president they voted for.
The rant then expanded into a sort of general indignation at the public's outrage at America's imperialist crimes. Scarborough was also deeply appalled that some students did not want a university building named after Madeleine Albright. “How dare you call her a war criminal. She was the first woman to be Secretary of State,” he ranted.
“Mainstream college students have extremist views,” he laments, calling the situation “tragic.” They cannot be made to learn that “American leaders are war criminals,” he argues.
Wow, that's inexcusable! (Even if, as I've written, Albright really was a murderer.) MSNBC doesn't shy away from lambasting Republicans who don't want kids to learn about racist history in school, but it clearly has strict limits when it comes to American foreign policy — and no limits on the embarrassingly outrageous nonsense Joe Scarborough is happy to utter on national TV in defense of America's war efforts overseas.
A consistent charge by the White House and the Israeli government is the absurd accusation that the student protests are anti-Semitic. In fact, many of the leaders of the student protests are Jewish, a fact that has been willfully ignored by most of the elite media. Moreover, many of the reported incidents of anti-Semitism have either been debunked (this is just one example) or are based on the false premise that any criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic, a premise that is widely rejected by progressive Israelis and Jews.
On this point, CNN host Dana Bash spoke emotionally on camera, with no context or warning, saying, “It is unacceptable to make Jewish students feel unsafe in their own school, and we are seeing too much of that right now.”
Today: Destruction, violence and hatred have hit college campuses across the country, and Jewish students do not feel safe in their schools. This is unacceptable and reminiscent of the 1930s in Europe. Inside politics The show opens here. pic.twitter.com/RiPX0HZbUv
— Dana Bash (@DanaBashCNN) May 1, 2024
“Los Angeles 2024,” she said, out of breath, referring to the protests on the UCLA campus. [is] “It's reminiscent of 1930s Europe, and I don't say that lightly,” she said, disingenuously introducing footage of kefir-wearing women blocking other students from entering a building. Bash's accompanying narration incorrectly suggested the women were specifically excluding Jewish students, without any visual evidence to back it up.
Dana Bash is set to be one of the moderators of the presidential debates. It's tempting to say that her role in stoking a state-sanctioned moral panic about “campus anti-Semitism” makes her unfit for such a role. But in the eyes of the mainstream media establishment, the opposite may be true.
Another presidential debate moderator was Jake Tapper, who has consistently tried to justify Israel's genocide of Palestinians.
In one particularly chilling scene, he recounted the global outcry against the genocide from Israel's perspective, opining that Israelis “are listening to all the calls for a ceasefire, but no one in the international community has proposed how Israel should get back the 240 hostages kidnapped by Hamas. No one has proposed how to remove Hamas from Gaza's leadership.”
How Hamas views civilian casualties from the war in Gaza pic.twitter.com/5cDo68KlYE
— CNN's The Lead (@TheLeadCNN) November 7, 2023
As Al Jazeera's Belen Fernandez noted, Tapper's “analysis” earned him praise from Fox News' Brit Hume, who wrote, “As Tapper continues to audition for the role of Israeli military spokesman, we should call for an immediate ceasefire in bloodthirsty journalism.”
Dana Bash and Jake Tapper were chosen to moderate the debate for one reason: It is simply impossible to ask either Joe Biden or Donald Trump any tough questions about Israel or the US role in this genocide.
of The New York Times It also published a lengthy article listing gory details of the systematic rapes allegedly perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, which has since been repeatedly cited by policymakers, including by others, as justification for the massacre of tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians. InterceptThe lead “reporter,” Anat Schwartz, a filmmaker with no journalism background, admitted that despite extensive efforts, she had been unable to verify any of the incidents described in the article. The UN team found circumstantial evidence that several rape cases occurred on October 7, but concluded that the specific stories in the Times article were “unfounded.”
This article has since been disproven from every angle, but incredibly, Times Has never been retracted.
The letter, signed by 50 journalism professors, states: Times Schwartz demanded a review of the story, pointing to factual inconsistencies with the paper's own reporting, its reliance on an inexperienced and obviously biased freelancer (Schwartz has a history of publicly liking exclusionist tweets, including one that said Israel needed to “turn the Gaza Strip into a slaughterhouse”), and the serious real-world impact the misreporting had.
While no one doubts that some rapes may have occurred on October 7, or that the use of rape in combat is a war crime, Times This story appears to have QAnon levels of rigor and accuracy.
The false rape story is significant in a larger sense as a cruel propaganda that justifies Israeli aggression, demonizes Palestinian men, and claims that they deserve death. It makes Israeli and US propaganda a feminist virtue. In fact, Times Those who believe in gang rape cases have been labelled “rape deniers”. Atlantic Ocean, MS.and the The New York TimesMore generally, in mainstream American media, tropes that portray Arab and Muslim men as thugs, violent misogynists are often used to shore up feminist support for US violence against them (Saed Atshan has written about how this has played out in Gaza discourse).
Journalists focus primarily on the deaths of “women and children,” with the calculation that this is what men deserve since they are, after all, Hamas terrorists too (this goes a step further than the plethora of reports quoting Israeli officials calling all Palestinians “monsters,” “human animals,” and other dehumanizing names without any criticism or dissent).
Despite the mainstream media's efforts to emulate totalitarian propaganda, Americans can find out what is going on in Gaza by simply looking at their social media feeds and reach their own conclusions. Perhaps that is why the majority of Americans support a ceasefire. But the Biden administration is not content to let the Tappers and Bashers do its bidding and is working to fix the problem.
Ken Klippenstein reported Friday that the administration is working with social media companies like Meta to suppress pro-Palestinian information. The State Department says it is trying to counter Hamas propaganda, but it is also working with private companies to suppress “Hamas-associated” accounts, a much more vague category that appears to include racial justice activist Shaun King.
Meta has a surprisingly broad policy against “dangerous organizations and individuals,” and Human Rights Watch has documented over 1,200 instances of Facebook and Instagram censoring Gaza-related content.
The censored content shared a common theme of sympathy for Palestinians expressed in non-violent terms, including posts about Palestinians losing their homes and children killed in Israeli military actions.
This comes at the same time as a bipartisan movement to ban TikTok, where, as Caitlin Clark pointed out, many content creators have challenged mainstream media and government reporting on Gaza. JacobinsThe move is clearly inspired in part by the government's frustration with alternatives to its own response to the issue, as well as to support American tech companies.
In fact, they don't even pretend that they don't. Secretary of State Antony Blinken lamented that social media has made it harder for the government to mislead the people of Gaza, euphemistically saying that it has a “very difficult effect on the narrative.” Senator Mitt Romney was more explicit, bluntly stating that it was important to ban TikTok because of its “lots of references to Palestinians.”
As alarming as the mainstream media is, this effort to censor social media is a reminder that many people no longer see Jake Tapper or The New York Times For their news.
Walter Lippmann noted early in the last century that one of the primary roles of the media in a democracy is to tell us about what is going on in places we cannot visit. Without accurate information, he argued, how can we fulfill our civic duty to make decisions about foreign policy at the voting booth? Looking at the current state of the mainstream media and the concerted attack on alternative media, it is easy to conclude that this is exactly what the foreign policy elites are trying to prevent.
