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Category: Media

  • Worthy and Unworthy: How the Media Reports on Friends and Foes

    The following is an extract from the introduction to the book Worthy and Unworthy: How the Media Reports on Friends and Foes (2024) by Devan Hawkins.

    In the predawn hours of April 3, 1948, rebels assembled on the slopes of Mount Hallasan, a volcano that is located at the center of Jeju Island. On that highest peak in South Korea, the rebels lit fires that were meant to signal the start of armed resistance against both the occupation of South Korea by the United States and in support of the reunification of Korea, which had been divided in half since the end of the World War II. This uprising was preceded by previous incidents in which police fatally fired on protesters.

    In a letter sent to residents of the island, the rebels wrote:

    Fellow citizens! Respectable parents and siblings! Today, on this day of April 3, your sons, daughters, and little brothers and sisters rose up in arms for the reunification and independence of our homeland, and for the complete liberation of the people. We must risk our lives for the opposition to the betrayal of the country and the unilateral election and government. We rose up in arms against the brutal slaughter done by American cannibals that force you into hardship and unhappiness. To vent your deep-rooted rancor we rouse up in arms. You should defend us who fight for the victory of our country and should rise up along with us, responding to the call of the country and its people.

    Over the course of the next day, these rebels would launch attacks on police outposts and on other locations thought to contribute to repression on the island.

    This was the beginning of the Jeju Uprising. Following failed negotiations with police, additional troops would be sent to the island to crush the rebellion. During the next several months, periodic fighting would continue between rebels on the island and Korean forces. Following an incident where members of the South Korean military sent to the island mutinied and killed many of their commanders, dictator Syngman Rhee declared martial law. As part of the military’s efforts to end the rebellion, horrific incidents including the destruction of entire villages, mass rape, and the massacre of thousands of civilians occurred. Reports of the number of dead vary significantly from a low of 15,000 to a high of 65,000. The vast majority of civilian deaths were the responsibility of South Korean security forces. Tens of thousands fled from Jeju to Japan to escape the violence. Three hundred villages and tens of thousands of houses were destroyed.

    If you were a dedicated reader of The New York Times—the paper which declares on its front page that it publishes “All the News That’s Fit to Print”—during the Jeju Uprising you would know very little about the horrors that transpired on Jeju Island in 1948 and 1949. Using the Times search database, I only identified eight articles that discussed Jeju (then rendered as Cheju) for the entirety of 1948 and 1949. All of these articles were fairly short reports, appearing in the newspaper’s back pages. Many of them focused on the activities of the rebels:

         Communists on Cheju Attack Villages—Demand Police Surrender, No Election

         Constabulary Chief on Cheju Shot While Sleeping

         Snipers Fire at U.S. Plane At Airport in South Korea

    As well as alleged involvement by the Soviet Union:

         Soviet Submarines Said To Help Reds in Korea

    In the last article identified about Jeju, on April 1949, the Times devoted less than 50 words to publishing a United Press report about “1,193 Koreans Slain on Cheju” and the thousands more left homeless. The report makes no mention of responsibility for those dead, despite the fact that the vast majority of civilians were killed by the South Korean military. The number reported as being killed is an underestimate, at least by a factor of ten.

    On the same day that last report about Jeju was published by the Times, a story appeared in the Times about the Berlin Airlift, an operation led by the United States and United Kingdom to supply West Berlin (an exclave of the United States-allied West Germany) with supplies after it had been blockaded by the Soviet-allied East Germany, which surrounded it. The period of the blockade and the airlift that followed almost perfectly matched with the period of the Jeju Uprising. During this period, there were over a hundred articles describing the blockade and the airlift that followed, many featured on the front page of the Times.

    There are numerous reasons why the Berlin Airlift likely received more attention than the uprising and massacre on Jeju Island. Berlin is located in the center of Europe, while Jeju is a relatively remote island in East Asia. However, a year after the Jeju Uprising when the Chinese Communists captured Hainan, another remote island in East Asia, from the Chinese Nationalists, the Times published dozens of articles about the operation, suggesting that remoteness does not make significant reporting impossible.

    Berlin was also seen as the frontline of the Cold War, while in the years before the Korean War, the Korean Peninsula was often treated as a periphery issue. However, during the period of the Jeju Uprising, the Times published hundreds of stories about Korea, many of which focused on infiltration of communists from the north into the south. Furthermore, the United States was already heavily invested in Korea, having occupied the southern half of the peninsula since the end of

    World War II. At the time of the uprising, there were thousands of US troops in Korea. Indeed, a report from the South Korean government published decades after the uprising found that the United States shared responsibility for the military operations on Jeju Island.

    The role that disregard for non-Europeans might play in the dearth of coverage should also be considered. Jeju Islanders, unlike Berliners, were East Asians and, therefore, potentially less sympathetic in the minds of some readers of the Times. To compare Jeju Island to another contemporaneous issue in Europe, the final operation of the Greek Civil War, which occurred a few months after the conclusion of the Jeju Uprising, received more coverage in one month than the Jeju Uprising received in a whole year. The fact that the Greek Civil War involved Europeans may have been a factor in this higher level of coverage.

    There is another possible cause for the general lack of coverage of the Jeju Uprising: geopolitics. Berliners were a sympathetic population who were being oppressed by the new official enemy of the United States—the Soviet Union. In contrast, the people of Jeju Island were the victims of a regime that had been put into place and supported by the United States with the goal of preventing the spread of Soviet-aligned communism.

    Stated another way, the people of Berlin were worthy victims and the people of Jeju Island were unworthy victims.

    This formulation of Worthy and Unworthy victims was first developed by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their seminal book Manufacturing Consent. As they wrote:

    Our prediction is that the victims of enemy states will be found “worthy” and will be subject to more intense and indignant coverage than those victimized by the United States or its clients, who are implicitly “unworthy.” Put another way, the media will be more likely to portray the victims of actions of official-state enemies in unfavorable terms, while portraying the victims of allies in more favorable terms.

    In the book Herman and Chomsky go on to show how crimes committed in client states of the Soviet Union received far more attention than crimes in client states of the United States. For example, the murder of Catholic Polish priest Jerzy Popieluszko “not only received far more coverage than Archbishop Oscar Romero, murdered in the U.S. client-state El Salvador in 1980; he was given more coverage than the aggregate of one hundred religious victims killed in U.S. client states, although eight of those victims were U.S. citizens.” Herman and Chomsky’s book has been influential in how the US media and Western media are viewed more broadly, with writers like Robert McChesney, John Nicholas, and Alan MacLeod expanding on the work.

    This formulation of “Worthy and Unworthy victims” is part of Herman and Chomsky’s larger Propaganda Model, which postulates that “the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of newsworthiness that conform to the institution’s policy.”

    Herman and Chomsky’s argument is compelling and provocative because it argues that despite the fact that media in the United States is not state-run and press freedom is generally protected in the country, the media still serves a similar purpose as it did in the Soviet Union and other countries where media is
    predominately state-run and where journalists do not have the same press freedom protections.

    To explain their Propaganda Model, Herman and Chomsky proposed that there are five filters that tend to restrict media coverage in Western countries, particularly the United States. These filters are:

    Ownership: Media companies are mostly large corporations with the fundamental imperative to make a profit. These companies are disincentivized from covering topics that may threaten their profit.

    Advertising: In a similar way, almost all media companies are dependent on advertising for their revenue. Therefore, media companies are also disincentivized from covering topics that may lose them advertisers.

    Sourcing: Media outlets frequently use official, government sources for their information. These sources will tend to reflect the biases of the government.

    Flak: Individuals who provide dissenting viewpoints will often face concerted campaigns to discredit them. These campaigns will make journalists less likely to decide to cover stories that may result in such flak, including those that may portray allies of the United States in a negative light.

    Anti-Communism/Fear: Reporting will often play into the fears of official enemies (Communists during the Cold War, Islamic Terrorism during the War on Terror, etc.). Playing into these fears will often mean that official state enemies will receive more coverage.

    Together, these filters create a situation where even in a country, like the United States, with relatively few state controls on the media, reporting will tend to reflect the official standpoint of the government.

    This tendency for reporting to reflect the standard positions of the government is seen most powerfully in foreign affairs.

    Unlike domestic issues, where there is at least some daylight between the two major parties, with respect to foreign policy there is much less difference in foreign affairs. While the language used and the particular issues emphasized will often be different, the fundamental positions of both Democrats and Republicans do not tend to differ substantially. For example, if you compare each party’s platforms 5,6 before the 2016 election (in 2020 the Republicans did not adopt a new platform, not allowing for a direct comparison) with respect to Venezuela, Iran, Israel, China, and Russia, you generally see only minor differences. This book will try to make the argument that this same general uniformity in political perspectives about foreign affairs is reflected in media coverage in the United States.

    The post Worthy and Unworthy: How the Media Reports on Friends and Foes first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • BBC Credibility Nosedives Even Further

    The BBC’s withdrawal of the powerful documentary, ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone’, epitomises how much the UK’s national broadcaster is beholden to the Israel lobby.

    The corporation’s longstanding systematic protection of Israel, considered an ‘apartheid regime’ by major human rights organisations, has been particularly glaring since the country launched its genocidal attacks on Gaza in October 2023. We have all seen the repetition and amplification of the Israeli narrative above the Palestinian perspective, omission of ‘Israel’ from headlines about its latest war crimes committed in Gaza, and even the dismissive treatment by senior BBC management of serious concerns about bias raised by their own journalists.

    The documentary focused on the experiences of several children trying to survive in Gaza under brutal attack by Israeli forces armed to the hilt with weaponry and intelligence from the US, the UK and other western nations. It transpired that the film’s narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah al-Yazuri, is the son of Ayman al-Yazuri, a deputy minister of agriculture in Gaza’s government which is administered by Hamas.

    Mr al-Yazuri previously worked for the United Arab Emirates’ education ministry and studied at British universities, obtaining a PhD in chemistry from the University of Huddersfield. Middle East Eye (MEE), an independently-funded online news organisation covering stories from the Middle East and North Africa, described him as ‘a technocrat with a scientific rather than political background’, pointing out that ministers, bureaucrats and civil servants in Gaza are appointed by Hamas.

    Indeed, as MEE explained:

    ‘Many Palestinians in Gaza have family or other connections to Hamas, which runs the government. This means that anyone working in an official capacity must also work with Hamas.’

    A campaign was launched by pro-Israel voices, including Tzipi Hotovely, Israel’s ambassador to the UK, and Danny Cohen, a former director of BBC television, to pressure the BBC to drop the documentary from iPlayer, soon after it was broadcast on BBC Two on 17 February.

    Despite a countercampaign by over 1,000 media and film professionals objecting to the ‘racist’ and ‘dehumanising’ targeting of the documentary by supporters of Israel, the BBC quickly caved in, apologising for ‘mistakes’ that they deemed ‘significant and damaging’. Notably, however, the BBC did not point to any errors or inaccuracies in the actual editorial content of the programme.

    The broadcaster attempted to divert some of the blame onto the independent company, Hoyo Films, who had made the documentary, saying that the BBC had not been told by the filmmakers that Abdullah al-Yazuri’s father was a deputy agriculture minister in the Hamas government.

    Hoyo Films told the BBC it paid the boy’s mother ‘a limited sum of money for the narration’ via his sister’s bank account. A BBC spokesperson said:

    ‘While Hoyo Films have assured us that no payments were made to members of Hamas or its affiliates, either directly, in kind, or as a gift, the BBC is seeking additional assurance around the budget of the programme and will undertake a full audit of expenditure.’

    Addressing MPs from the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 3 March, Samir Shah, the BBC’s chairman, said that:

    ‘This is a really, really bad moment. What has been revealed is a dagger to the heart of the BBC’s claim to be impartial and to be trustworthy, which is why I and the board are determined to ask the questions.’

    Tim Davie, the BBC’s director general, told the MPs that after ‘failures in transparency’ he simply ‘lost trust’ in the production of the film and personally ordered it to be withdrawn:

    ‘It was a very difficult decision. What I did – and it was a very tough decision – was to say, at the moment, looking people in the eye, can we trust this film in terms of how it was made, the information we’ve got? And that’s where we made the decision. It’s a simple decision in that regard.’

    In short, one child’s family connection with an official in the civilian administration of Gaza is supposedly reason enough to remove a vital documentary humanising Palestinians. This is an important film which redressed, to a marginal extent, the overwhelming pro-Israel bias displayed by the BBC over the past 18 months.

    Meanwhile, the broadcaster repeatedly and prominently platforms the leaders and spokespeople of a state committing genocide and apartheid. Is it any wonder the public reputation of BBC News has likely nosedived yet further since 7 October, 2023?

    As Mark Seddon, director of the Centre for UN Studies at the University of Buckingham and a former speechwriter for UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, observed via X:

    ‘Tim Davie should perhaps get the BBC to do some sampling. He may discover that there is a significant body of public opinion that has [been], and is, losing faith in BBC news gathering which is increasingly parochial & transparently failing when it comes to Israel/Palestine.’

    Although Davie insisted on the need for BBC ‘transparency’, he was not at all transparent when asked by Rupa Huq MP to name specific groups or individuals who had demanded the BBC withdraw the film. He declined to do so. One of those is, as mentioned, the Israeli ambassador to the UK who constantly repeats ludicrous propaganda such as ‘our only target is Hamas facilities’, and who has denied that there is any humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

    Spineless BBC

    As Chris Doyle, the director of the Council for Arab-British Understanding, noted:

    ‘By pulling [the] Gaza film, BBC shows it cannot stand up to Israel.’

    By contrast, he pointed out that in 2003, the BBC aired a documentary on Israel’s nuclear programme, titled Israel’s Secret Weapon:

    ‘Israeli leaders hit the roof and banned its officials from appearing on the BBC.

    ‘The documentary was spot on. Israel was embarrassed at having its nuclear arsenal exposed when Iraq was being invaded for a non-existent stash of weapons of mass destruction.’

    Doyle added:

    ‘The BBC did not cave in, and Israel lifted its boycott.

    ‘Twenty-five years later, the BBC has lost any semblance of a spine on Israel.’

    British-Israeli historian Avi Shlaim, an emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford, said that the pulling of the film was ‘only the latest example of the public broadcaster’s regular capitulation to pressure from the pro-Israel lobby’. He continued:

    ‘The BBC has good reporters on Israel-Palestine, but its bosses are hopelessly compromised by their pronounced and persistent bias in favour of Israel.

    ‘The reason for this bias is not lack of knowledge but cowardice, the fear of antagonising Israel and Israel’s friends in high places in Britain.’

    Richard Sanders, an award-winning producer who has made over fifty films in history, news and current affairs, including Al-Jazeera’s ‘October 7’ documentary, said:

    ‘Had the situation been reversed and an Israeli boy revealed to be the child of a junior minister in Netanyahu’s government the BBC might have felt obliged to issue one of its “corrections and clarifications” but it’s highly unlikely the film would have been withdrawn and the – extremely vulnerable – production team humiliated in such a public manner.’

    Sangita Myska, dropped by radio broadcaster LBC in April 2024 after robustly challenging an Israeli spokesman live on air, wrote on X:

    ‘I was a BBC journalist for years. However well-intentioned the Gaza doco-makers were, they did not meet editorial standards of transparency BUT does that make a material difference to the overall accuracy of the film? Given the weight of supporting evidence: Probably not.’

    She added:

    ‘I’m reliably informed that morale amongst some brilliant, committed, journalists is in free-fall over this.’

    Sanders followed up with:

    ‘As another old hand who has spent more hours in sweaty edit suites with lawyers and commissioning editors than I care to remember I broadly agree with @SangitaMyska’s comments.

    ‘But I’d stress that a media environment where the victims of genocide, ethnic cleansing and apartheid are subjected constantly to the most intense scrutiny, while their tormentors and those who support them are all too often allowed a free pass is a distorted and frankly racist one.’

    He added:

    ‘Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone remains by far the best thing the BBC has produced on Gaza and bore no evidence at all of any Hamas involvement in its editorial content.

    ‘It is deeply concerning that it is now being used as a stick to beat the BBC which must not allow itself to become even more cowed.’

    In October 2024, the BBC had broadcast a documentary called, ‘Surviving October 7th: We Will Dance Again’. The BBC’s description said:

    ‘A harrowing glimpse into the brutal assault on partygoers at the Nova Music Festival – one of the sites in Israel attacked by Hamas on 7 October 2023.’

    As one user on X pointed out last week:

    ‘BBC made a documentary “We Will Dance Again”

    ‘Was there anyone in that documentary that was IDF or related to IDF?

    ‘Were there any serving soldiers or illegal settlers in the documentary.

    ‘Were any of their children in it?

    ‘As a @BBC licence payer, I demand an inquiry.’

    Of course, the ‘demand’ for an inquiry was intended ironically and there was no response from the BBC. But the point was clearly made.

    The Truth Exists

    As mentioned in several of our previous alerts on Israel and Palestine, there is tremendous pressure on journalists working at BBC News to toe the Israeli line. Notably, since 7 October, use of the word ‘genocide’ has essentially been banned. Any time an interviewee mentions the word in a live setting, the BBC presenter intervenes to shut down the discussion. As one anonymous former BBC journalist said:

    ‘People [at the BBC] were terrified of using the word “genocide” in coverage. They still are. You will very rarely see it in any BBC coverage. And if an interviewee says the word “genocide”, the presenter will almost always panic.’

    And whenever Israeli war crimes or breaches of international law are raised by a guest on a BBC television or radio programme, the BBC journalist will promptly add words to the effect that, ‘Israel denies that’ or ‘Israeli disputes that’. Such BBC repetition of one side’s viewpoint is rarely, if ever, seen when reporting or discussing Russia’s actions in Ukraine, for example, or more generally when addressing Moscow’s role in global affairs.

    Karishma Patel, a former BBC researcher, newsreader and journalist, wrote recently about her reasons for leaving the BBC. She observed ‘a shocking level of editorial inconsistency’ in how the BBC covers Gaza. Journalists were ‘actively choosing not to follow evidence’ of Israeli war crimes ‘out of fear’.

    Media Lens readers may recall the late Professor Greg Philo, head of the Glasgow Media Group, relating how he was once told by senior BBC editors that they ‘wait in fear’ for a phone call from the Israeli embassy in London whenever a news item appears on Israel or Palestine.

    Patel continued:

    ‘Impartiality has failed if its key method is to constantly balance “both sides” of a story as equally true. A news outlet that refuses to come to conclusions becomes a vehicle in informational warfare, where bad faith actors flood social media with unfounded claims, creating a post-truth “fog”. Only robust evidence-based conclusions can cut through this.’

    She described her horror at seeing images for the first time of a Palestinian man crushed to death by an Israeli bulldozer, adding:

    ‘To see such overwhelming evidence every day and then hear 50/50 debates on Israel’s conduct – this is what created the biggest rift between my commitment to truth and the role I had to play as a BBC journalist. We have passed the point at which Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity are debatable. There’s more than enough evidence – from Palestinians on the ground, aid organisations; legal bodies – to come to coverage-shaping conclusions around what Israel has done.’

    As she rightly noted, ‘truth exists’ based on reasonable, verifiable evidence:

    ‘In a world where claims are constantly competing, a journalist’s job is back-breaking: it is to investigate and come to conclusions, rather than setting up constant debates – no matter who this angers and no matter how much work it takes.’

    A perfect example is the fake ‘debate’ over the reality of human-induced climate change. Until very recently, the BBC created a spurious ‘balance’, where none exists, hosting exchanges between highly-credentialed climate scientists and climate ‘sceptics’ often linked to fossil fuel interests.

    Patel observed:

    ‘In 2018, the BBC issued long overdue editorial guidance to its staff, stating: “Climate change IS happening.” There was a sigh of relief from climate scientists, after years spent warning the organisation its debates were harmful. Coverage would now be rooted in this evidence-based conclusion.’

    She summed up:

    ‘When will the BBC conclude that Israel IS violating international law, and shape its coverage around that truth? As the old saying goes, the journalist’s job isn’t to report that it may or may not be raining. It’s to look outside and tell the public if it is. And let me tell you: there’s a storm.’

    The withdrawal of the Gaza documentary has been followed by ‘torrents of online harassment and abuse targeting 13-year-old Abdullah and his family’, according to MEE. Abdullah said:

    ‘I’ve been working for over nine months on this documentary for it to just get wiped and deleted… it was very sad to me.’

    Abdullah told MEE that the whole affair has caused him serious ‘mental pressure’ and made him fear for his safety.

    A BBC spokesperson claimed:

    ‘The BBC takes its duty of care responsibilities very seriously, particularly when working with children, and has frameworks in place to support these obligations.’

    Richard Sanders pointed out that ‘more than 200 journalists have been killed by the Israelis in Gaza’. He said that it was dangerous that:

    ‘the team that made this [film] are effectively being smeared as Hamas accomplices. And at the heart of the story we have a vulnerable child.’

    In an interview with the Sunday National newspaper in Scotland, Patel said:

    ‘He [Tim Davie] was talking about distrusting the entire film on the basis of this connection that the child narrator has.

    ‘One of the things that occurred to me is the fact that the BBC over the past 15 or 16 months has on two different occasions willingly chosen to embed with the Israeli military and to be openly subject to its censor. That was Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza quite early on and there was a Lebanese town as well, where a BBC correspondent followed the Israeli military into the town.

    ‘There is a lot of concern around potential influence over this documentary but there was very little public concern over our public broadcaster embedding with the Israeli military.’

    In a message he addressed to the BBC, Abdullah said:

    ‘I did not agree to the risk of me being targeted in any way before the documentary was broadcasted on the BBC. So [if] anything happens to me, the BBC is responsible for it.’

    Artists for Palestine UK, who organised the letter mentioned earlier with over 1,000 signatories demanding reinstatement of the film, warned that:

    ‘Tim Davie and Samir Shah are throwing Palestinian children under the bus.

    ‘BBC bosses must explain how they plan to safeguard the children who participated in the film. Their lives are in danger as Israel cuts off aid and threatens to collapse the ceasefire in Gaza. How will Britain’s public broadcaster ensure it isn’t putting a target on innocent kids’ backs?’

    Abdullah finished by telling MEE that he is grateful to ‘all of those in the United Kingdom who had supported me, supported the documentary and had protested for the documentary to be put back on the BBC. I thank you all from the bottom of my heart, and continue your efforts that hopefully can and will return the movie back up on BBC. I hope that Gaza sees light again, that children of Gaza have a bright future again and everybody… sees a better future and a better tomorrow.’

    He concluded by saying: ‘My wish is to study journalism [in] the United Kingdom.’

    If Abdullah achieves his dream, it seems unlikely he will pursue a career in journalism with the BBC.

    DC

    Note. At the time of writing, ‘Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone’, can be viewed here on Rumble.

    The post BBC Credibility Nosedives Even Further first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Vanuatu mourns loss of iconic Pacific media pioneer Marc Neil-Jones

    OBITUARY: By Terence Malapa in Port Vila

    Vanuatu’s media community was in mourning today following the death on Monday of Marc Neil-Jones, founder of the Trading Post Vanuatu, which later became the Vanuatu Daily Post, and also radio 96BuzzFM. He was 67.

    His fearless pursuit of press freedom and dedication to truth have left an indelible mark on the country’s media landscape.

    Neil-Jones’s journey began in 1989 when he arrived in Vanuatu from the United Kingdom with just $8000, an early Macintosh computer, and an Apple laser printer.

    It was only four years after Cyclone Uma had ravaged the country, and he was determined to create something that would stand the test of time — a voice for independent journalism.

    In 1993, Neil-Jones succeeded in convincing then Prime Minister Maxime Carlot Korman to grant permission to launch the Trading Post, the country’s first independent newspaper. Prior to this, the media was under tight government control, and there had been no platform for critical or independent reporting.

    The Trading Post was a bold step toward change. Neil-Jones’s decision to start the newspaper, with its unapologetically independent voice, was driven by his desire to provide the people of Vanuatu with the truth, no matter how difficult or controversial.

    This was a turning point for the country’s media, and his dedication to fairness and transparency quickly made his newspaper a staple in the community.

    Blend of passion, wit and commitment
    Marc Neil-Jones’s blend of passion, wit, and unyielding commitment to press freedom became the foundation upon which the Vanuatu Trading Post evolved. The paper grew, expanded, and ultimately rebranded as the Vanuatu Daily Post, but Marc’s vision remained constant — to provide a platform for honest journalism and to hold power to account.

    His ability to navigate the challenges that came with being an independent voice in a country where media freedom was still in its infancy is a testament to his resilience and determination.

    Marc Neil-Jones faced numerous hurdles throughout his career
    Marc Neil-Jones faced numerous hurdles throughout his career — imprisonment, deportation, threats, and physical attacks — but he never wavered. Image: Del Abcede/Asia Pacific Report

    Neil-Jones faced numerous hurdles throughout his career — imprisonment, deportation, threats, and physical attacks — but he never wavered. His sense of fairness and his commitment to truth were unwavering, even when the challenges seemed insurmountable.

    His personal integrity and passion for his work left a lasting impact on the development of independent journalism in Vanuatu, ensuring that the country’s media continued to evolve and grow despite the odds.

    Marc Neil-Jones’ legacy is immeasurable. He not only created a platform for independent news in Vanuatu, but he also became a symbol of resilience and a staunch defender of press freedom.


    Marc Neil-Jones explaining how he used his radio journalism as a “guide” in the Secret Garden in 2016. Video: David Robie

    His work has influenced generations of journalists, and his fight for the truth has shaped the media landscape in the Pacific.

    As we remember Marc Neil-Jones, we also remember the Trading Post — the paper that started it all and grew into an institution that continues to uphold the values of fairness, integrity, and transparency.

    Marc Neil-Jones’s work has changed the course of Vanuatu’s media history, and his contributions will continue to inspire those who fight for the freedom of the press in the Pacific and beyond.

    Rest in peace, Marc Neil-Jones. Your legacy will live on in every headline, every report, and every story told with truth and integrity.

    Terence Malapa is publisher of Vanuatu Politics and Home News.

    Photojournalist Ben Bohane’s tribute
    Vale Marc Neil-Jones, media pioneer and kava enthusiast who passed away last night. He fought for and normalised media freedom in Vanuatu through his Daily Post newspaper with business partner Gene Wong and a great bunch of local journalists.

    Reporting the Pacific can sometimes be a body contact sport and Marc had the lumps to prove it. It was Marc who brought me to Vanuatu to work as founding editor for the regional Pacific Weekly Review in 2002 and I never left.

    The newspaper didn’t last but our friendship did.

    He was a humane and eccentric character who loved journalism and the botanical garden he ran with long time partner Jenny.

    Rest easy mate, there will be many shells of kava raised in your honour today.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • New BBC Documentary “The Road to 7th October” is an Utter Travesty

    There has been a prolonged furore over the BBC’s craven decision to ban a documentary on life in Gaza under Israel’s bombs after it incensed Israel and its lobbyists by, uniquely, humanising the enclave’s children.

    The English-speaking child narrator, 13-year-old Abdullah, who became the all-too-visible pretext for pulling the film Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone because his father is a technocrat in the enclave’s Hamas government, hit back last week.

    He warned that the BBC had betrayed him and Gaza’s other children, and that the state broadcaster would be responsible were anything to happen to him

    His fears are well-founded, given that Israel has a long track record of executing those with the most tenuous of connections to Hamas – as well as the enclave’s children, often with small, armed drones that swarm through its airspace.

    The noisy clamour over How to Survive a Warzone has dominated headlines, overshadowing another new BBC documentary on Gaza – this one a three-part, blockbuster series on the history of Israel and Palestine – that has received none of the controversy.

    And for good reason.

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

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

    What we get, as a result, is the very worst in BBC establishment TV: talking heads reading from the same implausibly simplistic script, edited and curated to present western officials and their allies in the most sympathetic light possible.

    Which is no mean feat, given the subject matter: nearly eight decades of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, dispossession, military occupation and siege of the Palestinian people, supported by the United States.

    But this documentary series on the region’s history should be far more controversial than the film about Gaza’s children. Because this one breathes life back into a racist western narrative – one that made the genocide in Gaza possible, and justifies Israel’s return this month to using mass starvation as a weapon of war against the Palestinian people.

    ‘Honest broker’ fiction

    The Road to 7th October presents an all-too-familiar story.

    The Palestinians are divided geographically and ideologically – how or why is never properly grappled with – between the incompetent, corrupt leadership of Fatah under Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank, and the militant, terrorist leadership of Hamas in Gaza.

    Israel tries various peace initiatives under leaders Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. These failures propel the more hardline Benjamin Netanyahu to power.

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

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

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

    A viewing of a short, Trump-endorsed, AI-generated promo video for a glitzy, Palestinian-free “Trump Gaza”, built on the crushed bodies of the enclave’s children, should be enough to dispel any remaining illusions about Washington’s neutrality on the matter.

    Enduring mystery

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

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

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

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

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

    In fact, most of Gaza’s population are descended from Palestinian families expelled by the newly declared state of Israel from their homes in 1948. They were penned up in a tiny piece of land by European colonisers in the same manner as earlier generations of European colonisers confined the Native Americans to reservations.

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

    The settlements are mentioned too, but only as the backdrop to land-for-peace calculations that never come to fruition as the basis for an elusive “peace”.

    In other words, this is the reheating of a phoney tale that Israel and the US have been trying to sell to western publics for many decades.

    It was holed well below the water line last year by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court in the world. It ruled that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem was illegal, that Israeli rule over the Palestinians was a form of apartheid, and that its illegal settlements needed to be dismantled immediately.

    That is the forest all the documentary’s furious bark-studying is designed to avoid.

    Path to genocide

    The makers of Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October choose to begin their time line on an obscure date: 19 August 2003, when a Palestinian suicide bomber blows up a bus in Jerusalem, killing 23 Israelis.

    Why then?

    The programme, despite its title, is not really about the “Palestinians”. Note that the BBC dares not refer to “Palestine”.

    The true focus is on Hamas and its rise to power in Gaza, as viewed chiefly by the other parties: the US, Israel and Fatah.

    Starting the story in 2003 with a bus bombing, the programme can navigate “The Road to 7thOctober” in ways that assist the self-serving narratives those other parties wish to tell.

    On the Palestinian side, the story opens with a terror attack. On Israel’s side, it opens with Sharon deciding, in response, to dismantle the illegal settlements in Gaza and withdraw Israeli troops from the enclave.

    This entirely arbitrary date allows the programme makers to create an entirely misleading narrative arc: of Israel supposedly ending the occupation and trying to make peace, while being met with ever greater terrorism from Hamas, culminating in the 7 October attack.

    In short, it perpetuates the long-standing colonial narrative – contrary to all evidence – of Israel as the good guys, and the Palestinians as the bad guys.

    In an alternate universe, the BBC might have offered us a far more informative, relevant documentary called Israel and Palestine: The Path to Genocide.

    Don’t hold your breath waiting for that one to air.

    Dystopian movie

    In fact, Sharon’s so-called Disengagement Plan of 2005 had nothing to do with ending the occupation or peace-making. It was a trap laid for the Palestinians.

    The disengagement did not end the occupation of Gaza, as the ICJ noted in its ruling last year. It simply reformulated it.

    Israeli soldiers pulled back to the perimeter of the enclave – what Israeli and US officials like to falsely term its “borders” – where Israel had previously established a highly fortified wall with armed watchtowers.

    Stationed along this perimeter, the Israeli army instituted an oppressive Medieval-style siege, blockading access to Gaza by land, sea and air. The enclave was monitored 24/7 with drones patrolling the skies.

    Even before Hamas won legislative elections in 2006 and came to power in Gaza, the tiny coastal strip of land looked like it was the backdrop for a dystopian Hollywood movie.

    But after Hamas’ victory, as the talking heads cheerily explain, the gloves really came off. What that meant in practice is not spelled out – and for good reason.

    The Israeli army put Gaza on “rations”, carefully counting the calories entering the enclave to create widespread hunger and malnutrition, especially among Gaza’s children.

    The Israeli official behind the scheme explained the reasoning at the time: “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger.”

    That official – Dov Weisglass, Olmert’s main adviser – is one of the central talking heads in episode one. And yet strangely, he is never asked about Gaza’s “diet”.

    ‘Die more quietly’

    Stephen Hadley, George W Bush’s deputy national security adviser, claims – unchallenged – that Sharon’s disengagement was “a downpayment on a Palestinian state. … They [the Palestinians] would have an opportunity to build and show the world that they were ready to live side by side in peace with Israel”.

    Israel’s real goal, all too evident then and impossible to ignore now, was something else entirely.

    Yes, withdrawing from Gaza allowed Israel to falsely claim the occupation in Gaza had ended and focus instead on the colonisation of the West Bank, as the documentary briefly grants.

    Yes, it split geographically the main territories forming the basis of a future Palestinian state and encouraged irreconciliable leaderships in each – divide and rule on steroids.

    But even more importantly, by making Gaza effectively a giant concentration camp, blockaded on all sides, Israel ensured that the accommodationists of Fatah would lose credibility in the enclave and militant resistance movements led by Hamas would gain ascendancy.

    That was the trap.

    Hamas, and the people of Gaza, were denied any legitimacy so long as they insisted on a right – enshrined in international law – to resist their occupation and besiegement by Israel.

    It was a message – a warning – directed at Fatah and the West Bank too. Resistance is futile. Keep your heads down or you’ll be next.

    Which is exactly the lesson Abbas learnt, soon characterising his security forces’ collusion with the Israeli occupation as “sacred”.

    For Gaza, the US notion of living in “peace alongside Israel” meant surviving just barely and quietly, inside their cage, accepting the diet Olmert and Weisglass had put them on.

    Making any noise – such as by firing rockets out of the concentration camp, or massing at the heavily armed walls of their cage in protest – was terrorism. Die more quietly, Israel and the international community demanded.

    Perversely, much of episiode one is dedicated to US officals spinning their conspiracy to foil the results of the 2006 Palestinian election, won by Hamas, as democracy promotion.

    They demanded Hamas give up armed resistance or the 2 million people of Gaza, half of them children, would face a continuing blockade and starvation diet – that is, illegal collective punishment.

    Or as Robert Danin, a US State Department official, puts it, the plan was “either Hamas would reform and become a legitimate political party or it would remain isolated”. Not just Hamas isolated, but all of Gaza. Die more quietly.

    The hope, he adds, was that by immiserating the population “Gazans would throw off the yoke of Hamas” – that is, accept their fate to live as little more than “human animals” in an Israeli-run zoo.

    ‘Mowing the lawn’

    Hamas, both its proto-army and its proto-government, learnt ways to adapt.

    It built tunnels under the enclave’s one, short border with Egypt to resist Israel’s siege by trading with the neighbouring population in Sinai and keeping the local economy just barely afloat.

    It fired primitive rockets, which rarely killed anyone in Israel, but achieved other goals.

    The rocket fire created a sense of fear in Israeli communities near Gaza, which Hamas occasionally managed to leverage for minor concessions from Israel, such as an easing of the blockade – but only when Israel didn’t prefer, as it usually did, to respond with more violence.

    The rockets also prevented Gaza and its suffering from disappearing completely from international news coverage – the “Die more quietly” agenda pursued by Israel – even if the price was that the western media could denounce Hamas even more noisily as terrorists.

    And the rockets offered a strategic alternative – armed resistance, its nature shaped by Hamas’ confinement in the Gaza concentration camp – to Fatah’s quietist, behind-the-scenes diplomacy seeking negotiations that were never forthcoming.

    Finally, confronted with the permanent illegitimacy trap set for it by Israel and the US, Hamas approved in 2018 mass, civil disobedience protests at the perimeter fence of the concentration camp it was supposedly “ruling”.

    Israel, backed by the US, responded with increased structural violence to all these forms of resistance.

    In the last two programmes, Israeli and US officials set out the challenges and technical solutions they came up with to prevent their victims from breaking out of their “isolation” – the concentration camp that Gaza had been turned into.

    Underground barriers were installed to make tunnelling more difficult.

    Rocket fire was met with bouts of “mowing the lawn” – that is, carpet-bombing Gaza, indifferent to the Palestinian death toll.

    And thousands of the ordinary Palestinians who massed for months on end at the perimeter fence in protest were either executed or shot in the knee by Israeli snipers.

    Or as the documentary’s narrator characterises it: “At the border with Israel, protesters clashed with Israeli forces, and dozens of Palestinians were killed.”

    Blink, and you might miss it.

    Nothing learnt

    Only by looking beneath the surface of this facile documentary can be found a meaningful answer to the question of what led to the attack on 7 October.

    Israel’s strategy of “isolation” – the blockade and diet – compounded by intermittent episodes of “mowing the lawn” was always doomed to failure. Predictably, the Palestinians’ desire to end their imprisonment in a concentration camp could not be so easily subdued.

    The human impulse for freedom and for the right to live with dignity kept surfacing.

    Ultimately, it would culminate in the 7 October attack. Like most breakouts from barbaric systems of oppression, including slave revolts in the pre-civil rights US, Hamas’ operation ended up mirroring many of the crimes and atrocities inflicted by the oppressor.

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

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

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

    Its one break with that policy – its humanising portrait of Gaza’s children in How to Survive a Warzone – caused an uproar that has echoed for weeks and seen the BBC’s director general, Tim Davie, dragged before a parliamentary committee.

    But in truth, we ought to be appalled that this is the only attempt the BBC has made, after 17 months of genocide, to present an intimate view of life for the people of Gaza, especially its children, under Israel’s bombs. The state broadcaster only dared doing so after stripping away the politics of Gaza’s story, reducing decades of the Palestinian people’s oppression by Israel to a largely author-less “humanitarian crisis”.

    Not only is the programme never likely to see the light of day again on the BBC but, after all this commotion, the corporation is unlikely ever again to commission a similarly humanising programme about the Palestinian people.

    There is a good reason why there has been no comparable clamour for the BBC to pull Israel and the Palestinians: The Road to 7th October.

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

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

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

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

    The post New BBC Documentary “The Road to 7th October” is an Utter Travesty first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jonathan Cook.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The UK’s Grooming Gang Narrative

    The Media’s Role in Fueling Misinformation

    British society has been dealing with organised child exploitation through grooming gangs for an extended period. Official data contradicts media perceptions about who engages in these criminal activities by showing Pakistani men are not the main offenders. Official Home Office data indicates that defendants facing child sexual abuse prosecution in England and Wales are predominantly white since their number reaches 88 percent. News reports on offences by South Asian individuals receive unusually high attention from media outlets thus perpetuating racial misconceptions that deepen societal rifts.

    The Origins of a Racialized Narrative

    Forces of public discussion concerning grooming gangs grew stronger as three important cases occurred in Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford during the early 2010s. Policing and child protection institutions revealed organisational breakdowns in their investigations while media discussion primarily focused on the racial backgrounds of the offenders. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) produces reports showing child exploitation happens throughout all racial and social backgrounds but Pakistani and South Asian men still face political accusations as chief perpetrators.

    The selective nature of this presentation has occurred previously. A series of investigative reports from The Times during 2011 identified Pakistani men as responsible for most grooming incidents. The overall issue of child sexual abuse transcends specific ethnic groups even though select cases linked South Asian offenders to the crime. Statistics from the National Crime Agency (NCA) confirm that white men carry out most cases of organised child exploitation but these crimes remain substantially underreported in the media.

    How the Stereotype Affects Pakistani Families

    The institutionalised stereotyping of Pakistani families in the United Kingdom has produced severe negative results. The students of Pakistani descent experience school discrimination through stereotype abuse which links them to sex exploitation gangs. A 2020 Runnymede Trust report documented Pakistani students who described teacher and peer bullying together with being labelled as “rapists” and experiencing suspicion. Community members and employers also share the same prejudice toward Pakistani families that starts in educational institutions.

    Research shows doses of bigotry against Muslim communities have grown because of recent media accounts. Statistics gathered by Tell MAMA demonstrate that reports about South Asian male grooming incidents led to an increase in Islamophobic incidents. Social isolation and vandalism attacks against Pakistani businesses and their families can be found in certain areas.

    Systemic Failures in Addressing Child Exploitation

    The genuine matter at hand concerns institutional missteps rather than the ongoing focus on ethnicity in political discussions. Vulnerable children received failed protection from both the police force and social services departments and government agencies because these institutions did not respond to abuse reports because of limited resources and poor management. The Jay Report (2014) uncovered that agency authorities neglected multiple reports of child exploitation in the Rotherham child abuse scandal for more than a decade.

    The collective resources should move away from ethnic considerations so they focus on enhancing child protection legislation while training police forces and improving victim assistance services. The Children’s Commissioner has reported significant issues in both the reporting and handling of child sexual abuse incidents regardless of the racial background of abusers.

    Why Pakistanis Are Targeted in This Narrative

    The way grooming gang discussion has turned racial shows how British society generally views Asians and Muslims. Right-wing media together with politicians exploit this topic to advance immigration control measures and strengthen Muslim community monitoring. The English Defence League (EDL) uses Pakistani and Muslim communities as a focal point to rally their members while they organise protests that lead to violent incidents.

    Throughout history the United Kingdom tends to blame minority communities for addressing broader social issues. The criminal investigation of Pakistani men for grooming gangs matches historical patterns of moral panics that previously targeted black muggers during the 1970s and Irish immigrants throughout the 20th century. Extending responsibility to an individual ethnicity creates diversion from institutional breakdowns that exist in police organisations and welfare agencies.

    A Call for Evidence-Based Solutions

    To combat child exploitation effectively, the UK must adopt a zero-tolerance policy that is not influenced by racial biases. Recommendations include:

    • Improved police training to handle child exploitation cases effectively.

    • Better data collection on grooming gangs that avoids racial profiling.

    • Stronger victim support services to ensure survivors receive adequate care.

    • Accountability for institutional failures, including oversight of law enforcement agencies.

    The UK is implementing key recommendations to combat child exploitation effectively. These include improved police training, better data collection, stronger victim support services, and accountability for institutional failures. Police training should focus on recognising signs of exploitation and understanding grooming complexities. Data collection methods should focus on behaviours and patterns, avoiding racial profiling. Stronger victim support services should ensure survivors receive adequate care and support. Independent oversight bodies should monitor law enforcement and other institutions. Additional strategies include community engagement and awareness campaigns, partnership and collaboration between law enforcement, social services, schools, and community organisations, and the development and enforcement of robust legal frameworks. These strategies aim to move towards a more equitable approach to combating child exploitation. For more insights, refer to the UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s report.

    National authorities in the UK execute essential recommendations to overcome child exploitation better. The UK is adopting four primary measures to enhance child exploitation combat through upgraded police teaching combined with better statistical data acquisition and enhanced victim care programs and institutional oversight systems. The training curriculum for police officers must teach them to detect exploitation indicators as well as complex grooming procedures. Data collection systems should analyse behavioural activities and detect patterns instead of adapting racially biased approaches. The delivery of victim support should achieve complete care and support for survivors through improved service approaches.

    External supervision institutions need to monitor both law enforcement departments along with other institutions. Effective child exploitation prevention strategies necessitate active collaboration between law enforcement, social services, schools, and community organisations, as well as community outreach and public education programs. Strict legal systems are also necessary. Such measures work toward building a more fair method of fighting child exploitation. The complete UK Anti-Slavery Commissioner’s report contains additional detailed information about this subject.

    Conclusion: Separating Fact from Fiction

    The obsessive focus on Pakistani males in grooming gang stories produces misleading information which proves detrimental to both social harmony and genuine investigation. Racial stereotyping exacerbates social tensions, obscures institutional shortcomings, and places an undue burden on communities that bear no responsibility. The UK needs to stop blaming racial groups for its child protection problems while establishing complete child safety measures that approach the fundamental causes of child exploitation. Society guarantees child protection for children of every background through such measures alone.

    The post The UK’s Grooming Gang Narrative first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Media Watch: How US political satires amplify misinformation in China

    In February, a bizarre and grotesque claim began circulating among Chinese social media users.

    According to the claim, several young Americans who supported the Democratic Party had castrated themselves in protest against U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.

    Many social media users appeared to be in shock and to believe the claim, especially since it was accompanied by what looked like a news article.

    “It was reported by the U.S. media!” one user insisted, arguing that media coverage lent the claim credibility.

    But what many social media users didn’t realize was that the “U.S. media” they had seen was not a news provider – it was a satirical website.

    Keyword searches revealed that the website cited by Chinese social media users was “Genesis Times,” a U.S. political satire site that describes itself as “The Most Reliable Source of Fake News on the Planet.”

    Some Chinese social media claimed that several Democrats had castrated themselves to protest against Trump.
    Some Chinese social media claimed that several Democrats had castrated themselves to protest against Trump.
    (Weibo and X)

    This is not an isolated incident. Chinese social media users frequently find themselves caught up in misinformation originating from U.S. satirical websites.

    But what makes them so vulnerable?

    Cultural differences

    Summer Chen, former editor-in-chief of the Taiwan FactCheck Center, pointed to a “cultural difference” between the U.S. and other countries, including China, where people don’t have a tradition of such political parody.

    China lacks a strong political satire culture due to strict government censorship, harsh penalties for dissent and a political system that discourages public criticism of leaders.

    The Chinese government controls media and online discourse, making satire risky. Historically, satirists have faced severe consequences, leading to self-censorship and a lack of mainstream satirical traditions.

    Chen also cited the fact that U.S. satirical websites tend to mimic the design of established media outlets, contributing to the confusion of readers.

    The design of many political satire sites mimics the look of mainstream news.
    The design of many political satire sites mimics the look of mainstream news.
    (Genesius Times)

    Parody, not fake news

    Darren Chan, a doctoral student researching political satire at Temple University, told AFCL that the term “satirical news” was often used interchangeably with “fake news” but since the mid-2010s, “fake news” has more often been used to refer specifically to intentionally false or misleading information.

    “The biggest difference between ‘satirical news’ and ‘fake news’ lies in the intention of the fabricated news content,” he explained.

    “Satire is a form of entertainment social critique that aims to point out injustice or unethical behavior in society. By making its audience laugh and think, satirical news has the potential to foster civic engagement and political participation.

    “Fake news refers to content that deliberately spreads false information with the aim of harming the reputation of the people involved in the story.”

    Satire can serve as an independent check on the media, and is a highly context-dependent genre that one only truly understands if one is familiar with the context of the events being lampooned, he said.

    In a country like China that lacks such a context or tradition of political satire, he said that this type of parody may become another way to confirm rising nationalist and anti-American sentiment, he added.

    Wei-Ping Li, a postdoctoral researcher at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, said that many Chinese social media users are unfamiliar with parody and may just repost sensational stories that confirm their beliefs and attract views.

    Sorting fact from fiction

    Chen said a website’s information should be checked to determine whether the news was genuine.

    For instance, satirical news sites or their X accounts often say they publish fake news to avoid legal liability. Genuine news organizations usually publish information about their offices and staff.

    Another reliable indicator of the credibility of news is to search for other mainstream media reports on the same topic, she added.

    “Media is a very competitive industry. There won’t be any big event that only one covers and others don’t. You can therefore easily compare different reports on the same event from several credible news organizations.”

    Chan also pointed out the importance of asking the same question about news on social media as one would of traditional mainstream outlets: “How did the platform obtain this information, where is the evidence and has the poster made mistakes in the past?”

    “Think before you interact. In this age of eye-grabbing headlines, pause and think about the content and potential reaction of your post, rather than just impulsively sharing,” he said.

    Translated by Shen Ke. Edited by Taejun Kang.

    Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) was established to counter disinformation in today’s complex media environment. We publish fact-checks, media-watches and in-depth reports that aim to sharpen and deepen our readers’ understanding of current affairs and public issues. If you like our content, you can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram and X.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Alan Lu for Asia Fact Check Lab.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel resumes its war crimes in Gaza – AJ’s Listening Post on ‘hell plan’

    Pacific Media Watch

    Seven weeks into the Gaza ceasefire deal, Israel has openly resumed its war crimes in Gaza — blocking humanitarian aid — with the tacit support of the international mainstream media, reports Al Jazeera’s media watchdog programme The Listening Post.

    “Seventeen months into the Israeli genocide in Gaza we have reached another critical stage — Israel has resumed its blockade of humanitarian aid and has threatened to cut of the supply of water and power to desperate Palestinians,” says presenter and programme founder Richard Gizbert.

    “All because Hamas has refused to change the deal the two sides signed seven weeks ago and free more Israeli captives.

    “The headlines now coming out of the international media would have you believe that Hamas and not the Netanyahu government had demanded these changes to the ceasefire agreement.

    “Israeli officials somehow insist there is enough food in Gaza and you will not see many Israeli news outlets reporting on the undeniable evidence of malnutrition.”

    Presented by Richard Gizbert

    Lead contributors:
    Daniel Levy – President, US/Middle East Project
    Saree Makdisi – Professor of English and comparative literature, UCLA
    Samira Mohyeddin – Founder, On the Line Media
    Mouin Rabbani – Co-editor, Jadaliyya

    On our radar:

    The LA Times’ new AI “bias meter” — which offers a counterpoint to the paper’s opinion pieces, has stirred controversy. Tariq Nafi explores its role in a changing media landscape that’s cosying up to Donald Trump.

    Are the ADL’s anti-Semitism stats credible?
    The Anti-Defamation League is one of the most influential and well-funded NGOs in the US — and it’s getting more media attention than ever.

    The Listening Post’s Meenakshi Ravi reports on the organisation, its high-profile CEO, and its troubling stance: Conflating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism.

    Featuring:
    Omar Baddar – Political and media analyst
    Eva Borgwardt – National spokesperson, If Not Now
    Emmaia Gelman – Director, The Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism

    This programme was first broadcast on 8 March 2025 and can be watched on YouTube. 


    ‘Hell plan’ – Israel’s scheme for Gaza.   Video: AJ The Listening Post

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Two Anti-China French “Reporters” Were Caught Lying

    A popular French TV show recently aired an undercover investigation by two young French journalists, Justine Jankowski and Marine Zambrano, who snuck into multiple clothing factories in China with one aim: to find evidence of forced labor.

    And if you watched their program, part of France 2’s “Cash Investigation” series, you might be convinced that they found astonishing and scandalous evidence.

    The fact of the matter, though, is that the show’s creators used blatant lies to come to that conclusion, and I have all the evidence on today’s show.

    What is even more delicious is that the show also featured seasoned anti-China “academic” Adrian Zenz, who has ended up being exposed by this show at the same time. Two birds with one stone!

    Grab a cuppa and come with me as I explain all of the tricks the two female reporters used, and highlight clearly why they are lies.

    This is Reports on China, I’m Andy Boreham in Shanghai. Let’s get reporting!

    The post Two Anti-China French “Reporters” Were Caught Lying first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Report on China.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Gavin Ellis: Amazon founder Bezos dims lights on democracy

    COMMENTARY: By Gavin Ellis

    Little more than a month into the new US presidency, The Washington Post’s owner dimmed the light on a motto that became a beacon for freedom during the first Trump administration.

    “Democracy dies in darkness” has appeared below Washington Post for the past eight years.

    Last month it was powdered in irony after the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, decreed in an email to staff that the newspaper’s editorial section would shift its editorial focus and that only opinions that support and defend “personal liberties” and “free markets” would be welcome.

    Amazon founder Bezos had already sullied the Post’s reputation by refusing to allow it to endorse a candidate during the presidential election — an action capable of no other interpretation than support for Donald Trump.

    Since then, there has been a US$1 million Amazon contribution to Trump’s inauguration and, according to the Wall Street Journal, a US$40 million deal with First Lady Melania Trump for an authorised documentary to be run on Amazon’s streaming service.

    Now Bezos has openly bowed before the new emperor and dimmed The Washington Post’s lights.

    Martin Baron, editor of the Post when the democracy motto — the first in the newspaper’s 140-year history — was adopted, last month described Bezos’s directive as a “betrayal of the very idea of free expression”.

    Standing up to Trump
    Two years after the slogan appeared on the Post masthead, a former editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson, published a book titled Merchants of Truth. In it she praised Bezos (who had bought the Washington newspaper six years earlier) for his support of Baron in standing up to Donald Trump’s assaults on the media and his serial falsehoods.

    However, she also made a prediction.

    “Though it hadn’t yet happened, it seemed all but inevitable that the Post’s coverage would one day bring Bezos’s commitment to freedom of the press into conflict with Amazon’s commercial interests, given the company’s size and power as it competed with Apple to become America’s first trillion-dollar conglomerate.”

    That day has come.

    It is patently obvious that Jeff Bezos puts the interests of his US$2 trillion Amazon empire ahead of a newspaper that last year lost US$100 million. In the process he has trashed the Post and turned readers against it.

    In the 24 hours after last month’s email was revealed, it lost 75,000 online subscribers. It had already shed close to 300,000 when the refusal to endorse a presidential candidate was revealed (I was one of them).

    It is unsurprising that he puts an enormously profitable enterprise ahead of one that is costing him money. However, rather than risking the future of a fine newspaper, he could have sought a buyer for it.

    He could even afford to sell it for one dollar to staff or to an individual who has a stronger commitment to the principles of free speech than he can now muster. He has done neither.

    Chilling effect
    Instead, he is prepared to modify content to make The Washington Post more acceptable to the White House in order to protect — perhaps even enhance — his other interests. That will have a chilling effect on the journalists he employs.

    In an industry that has lost more than 8000 newsroom roles over the past three years, fear for your job can be a powerful inducement to conform.

    An analysis of Bezos’ current strategy by the Wall Street Journal (which paid more attention to commercial interests than journalistic principles) suggested that Bezos had already paid a very high price for being perceived by Trump as an enemy during his first term.

    “In 2019, the cost of crossing Trump and funding the Resistance became staggeringly clear to Bezos. Amazon lost out to rival Microsoft on a mammoth $10 billion cloud-computing contract issued by the Pentagon.

    “It was a surprising decision since Amazon Web Services was the industry leader in cloud computing and was judged by many to have presented a stronger bid. This time around, the risks to Bezos appear far greater. Trump 2.0 is faster, more ruthless and more skilled at pulling the levers of government power.

    “Amazon is vulnerable on many fronts — from antitrust to contracts.”

    An even higher price could be paid, however, by the people of the United States (and beyond) as Trump uses those levers to diminish the ability of news media to hold him to account.

    Press Corps manipulation
    His manipulation of the make-up of the White House Press Corps has been another example. The White House Correspondents Association has been stripped of its role in deciding which journalists have access to the president. Not only has this resulted in the ascendancy of Trump acolytes like Brian Glenn of Real America Voice but America’s pre-eminent wire service, the Associated Press, has been ejected from the Press Pool.

    Ostensibly, the ban was due to the AP refusing to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in its copy. It is far more likely, however, that the wire service’s balanced coverage and quest for accuracy stands in the way of Trumpian disinformation.

    And, of course, his war on words even goes beyond the media to stripping government websites of words, phrases and ideas that challenge or complicate the administration’s views.

    I agree with a New York Times editorial that characterised these actions as Orwellian — protecting free speech requires controlling free speech. It said the approach was “deliberate and dangerous.” It labelled Trump’s moves to control not only the flow of information but the way it was presented as “an expansive crackdown on free expression and disfavoured speakers that should be decried not just as hypocritical (Trump and his supporters advocate a form of free speech absolutism) but also as un-American and unconstitutional”.

    These are strong words. Sadly, they have yet to result in a mass movement to restore sanity.

    And that leaves me at a loss to understand what in Hell’s name has happened to principled people in the United States. If I (and many like me) are affronted by what is happening far from here, why are we not hearing a mass of voices demanding a stop to actions that threaten not only the United States’ international reputation but the very fabric of its society?

    Orwell on truth
    In 1941, George Orwell made a radio broadcast on truthfulness that may have awful portents for Americans. In it he said:

    “Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realise that its control of thought is not only negative but also positive. It not only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison.”

    That, I suspect, would be music to Donald Trump’s ears. And Jeff Bezos’s dictating the limits of what is acceptable on The Washington Post’s op/ed pages is one tiny step it that direction.

    Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. This article was published first on his Knightly Views website on 4 March 2025 and is republished with permission.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Gallery: NZ women call for long-term peace and justice in Palestine

    Asia Pacific Report

    Women from Aotearoa, Philippines, Palestine and South Africa today called for justice and peace for the people of Gaza and the West Bank, currently under a genocidal siege and attacks being waged by Israel for the past 16 months.

    Marking International Women’s Day, the rally highlighted the theme: “For all women and girls – Rights, equality and empowerment.”

    Speakers outlined how women are the “backbone of families and communities” and how they have borne the brunt of the crimes against humanity in occupied Palestine with the “Israeli war machine” having killed more than 50,000 people, mostly women and children, since 7 October 2023.

    The speakers included Del Abcede and Lorri Mackness of the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), Gabriela’s Eugene Velasco, and retired law professor Jane Kelsey.

    International Women’s Day and Palestine
    1 of 12
    IWD 1: A West Papua flag on display at the International Women’s Day rally for peace and justice in Palestine. Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 2: “Women unite to eliminate violence and war.” Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 3: Peace and justice for Gaza in Auckland’s “Palestine Square”.
    IWD 4: WILPF’s Del Abcede speaking at the Palestine rally. Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 5: Gabriela’s Eugene Velasco speaking at the Palestine rally. Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 6: WILPF’s Lorri Mackness and Del Abcede, speakers at the Palestine rally. Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 7: The International Women’s Alliance (of the Philippines) at the Palestine rally. Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 8: Retired law professor Jane Kelsey speaking at the Palestine rally. Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 9: The Gabriela group from the Philippines in solidarity with Palestinians. Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 10: Duet singers for Palestine. Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 11: “Israel’s war against Palestine didn’t start on 7 October 2023” – it began with the Nakba (“catastrophe”) in 1948, and even earlier. Image: David Robie/APR
    IWD 12: International Women’s Day protesters for solidarity with Palestine and a cruise ship backdrop. Image: David Robie/APR


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Through the lens of time: A tribute to ‘Rocky’ Roe’s PNG photography

    PROFILE: By Malum Nalu in Port Moresby

    For nearly half a century, Papua New Guinea has been more than just a home for Laurence “Rocky” Roe — it has been his canvas, his inspiration, and his great love.

    A master behind the lens, Rocky has captured the soul of the nation through his photography, preserving moments of history, culture, and progress.

    He bid farewell to the country he has called home since 1976 in June 2021 and is now retired and living in Australia. We reflect on the extraordinary journey of a man whose work has become an indelible part of PNG’s visual history.

    A journey born of adventure
    Rocky Roe’s story began in Adelaide, Australia, where he was born in 1947. His adventure in Papua New Guinea started in 1976 when he arrived as a mechanical fitter for Bougainville Copper. But his heart sought more than the structured life of a mining camp.

    In 1979, he took a leap of faith, moving to Port Moresby and trading a higher salary for a passion — photography. What he lost in pay, he gained in purpose.

    “I wanted to see Papua New Guinea,” Rocky recalls. “And I got an opportunity to get paid to see it.”

    Capturing the essence of a nation
    From corporate photography to historic events, Rocky’s lens has documented the evolution of Papua New Guinea. He was there when leaders rose to prominence, capturing moments that would later adorn national currency — his photograph of Grand Chief Sir Michael Somare graces the K50 note.

    His work went beyond the formal; he ventured deep into the Highlands, the islands, and bustling townships, preserving the heart and spirit of the people.

    With each shot, he chronicled the changing landscape of Port Moresby. From a city of well-kept roads and modest housing in the 1970s to its present-day urban sprawl, Rocky witnessed and documented it all.

    The evolution of photography
    Rocky’s career spanned a transformative era in photography — from the meticulous world of slide film, where exposure errors were unforgiving, to the digital revolution, where technology made photography more accessible.

    “Autofocus hadn’t been invented,” he recalls. “Half the world couldn’t focus a camera back then.” Yet, through skill and patience, he mastered the art, adapting as the industry evolved.

    His assignments took him to mine sites, oil fields, and remote locations where only helicopters could reach.

    “I spent many hours flying with the door off, capturing PNG from above. Looking through the camera made it all feel natural. Without it, I might have been scared.”

    The man behind the camera
    Despite the grandeur of his work, Rocky remains humble. A storyteller at heart, his greatest joy has been the connections he forged—whether photographing Miss PNG contestants over the years or engaging with young photographers eager to learn.

    He speaks fondly of his colleagues, the friendships he built, and the country that embraced him as one of its own.

    His time in Papua New Guinea was not without challenges. He encountered moments of danger, faced armed hold-ups, and saw the country grapple with law and order issues. Yet, his love for PNG never wavered.

    “It’s the greatest place on earth,” he says, reflecting on his journey.

    A fond farewell, but not goodbye
    Now, as Rocky returns to Australia to tend to his health, he leaves behind a legacy that will live on in the countless images he captured. Papua New Guinea will always be home to him, and its people, his extended family.

    “I may come back if someone brings me back,” he says with a knowing smile.

    Papua New Guinea bids farewell to a legend, a visual historian who gave us the gift of memories frozen in time. His photographs are not just images; they are stories, emotions, and a testament to a life well-lived in the pursuit of beauty and truth.

    Farewell, Rocky Roe. Your work will continue to inspire generations to come.

    Independent Papua New Guinea journalist Malum Nalu first published this article on his blog Happenings in Papua New Guinea as part of a series leading up to PNG’s 50th anniversary this year. Republished with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • The world cannot ignore Trump’s death threat to the people of Gaza

    COMMENTARY: By Ahmed Najar

    ‘To the People of Gaza: A beautiful Future awaits, but not if you hold Hostages. If you do, you are DEAD! Make a SMART decision. RELEASE THE HOSTAGES NOW OR THERE WILL BE HELL TO PAY LATER!’

    These were not the words of some far-right provocateur lurking in a dark corner of the internet. They were not shouted by an unhinged warlord seeking vengeance.

    No, these were the words of the President of the United States, Donald Trump, the most powerful man in the world. A man who with a signature, a speech or a single phrase can shape the fate of entire nations.

    And yet, with all this power, all this influence, his words to the people of Gaza were not of peace, not of diplomacy, not of relief — but of death.

    I read them and I feel sick.

    Because I know exactly who he is speaking to. He is speaking to my family. To my parents, who lost relatives and their home.

    To my siblings, who no longer have a place to return to. To the starving children in Gaza, who have done nothing but be born to a people the world has deemed unworthy of existence.

    To the grieving mothers who have buried their children. To the fathers who can do nothing but watch their babies die in their arms.

    To the people who have lost everything and yet are still expected to endure more.

    No future left
    Trump speaks of a “beautiful future” for the people of Gaza. But there is no future left where homes are gone, where whole families have been erased, where children have been massacred.

    I read these words and I ask: What kind of a world do we live in?

    President-elect Donald Trump
    President Trump’s “words are criminal. They are a direct endorsement of genocide. The people of Gaza are not responsible for what is happening. They are not holding hostages.” Image: NYT screenshot/APR/X@@xandrerodriguez

    A world where the leader of the so-called “free world” can issue a blanket death sentence to an entire population — two million people, most of whom are displaced, starving and barely clinging to life.

    A world where a man who commands the most powerful military can sit in his office, insulated from the screams, the blood, the unbearable stench of death, and declare that if the people of Gaza do not comply with his demand — if they do not somehow magically find and free hostages they have no control over — then they are simply “dead”.

    A world where genocide survivors are given an ultimatum of mass death by a man who claims to stand for peace.

    This is not just absurd. It is evil.

    Trump’s words are criminal. They are a direct endorsement of genocide. The people of Gaza are not responsible for what is happening. They are not holding hostages.

    Trapped by an Israeli war machine
    They are the hostages – trapped by an Israeli war machine that has stolen everything from them. Hostages to a brutal siege that has starved them, bombed them, displaced them, left them with nowhere to go.

    And now, they have become hostages to the most powerful man on Earth, who threatens them with more suffering, more death, unless they meet a demand they are incapable of fulfilling.

    Most cynically, Trump knows his words will not be met with any meaningful pushback. Who in the American political establishment will hold him accountable for threatening genocide?

    The Democratic Party, which enabled Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza? Congress, which overwhelmingly supports sending US military aid to Israel with no conditions? The mainstream media, which have systematically erased Palestinian suffering?

    There is no political cost for Trump to make such statements. If anything, they bolster his position.

    This is the world we live in. A world where Palestinian lives are so disposable that the President of the United States can threaten mass death without fear of any consequences.

    I write this because I refuse to let this be just another outrageous Trump statement that people laugh off, that the media turns into a spectacle, that the world forgets.

    My heart. My everything
    I write this because Gaza is not a talking point. It is not a headline. It is my home. My family. My history. My heart. My everything.

    And I refuse to accept that the President of the United States can issue death threats to my people with impunity.

    The people of Gaza do not control their own fate. They have never had that luxury. Their fate has always been dictated by the bombs that fall on them, by the siege that starves them, by the governments that abandon them.

    And now, their fate is being dictated by a man in Washington, DC, who sees no issue with threatening the annihilation of an entire population.

    So I ask again: What kind of world do we live in?

    And how long will we allow it to remain this way?

    Ahmed Najar is a Palestinian political analyst and a playwright. This article was first published by Al Jazeera.


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • When the Press Falls in Line: Why Media Cowers in the Face of War & Fascism [EXCERPT]


    This content originally appeared on Laura Flanders & Friends and was authored by Laura Flanders & Friends.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • CPJ joins call for Nepal to revise new media council, social media bill

    The Committee to Protect Journalists joined more than two dozen media and civil society groups in a joint statement on March 5, urging the Nepalese government and parliament to revise a recently proposed social media bill and the newly established Media Council. The statement noted that the bill granted the government “overreaching powers” that could threaten press freedom.

    The statement said the bill’s “overbroad and vague provisions” could be misused to target human rights defenders, journalists, and critics. It noted that parliament introduced the bill and founded the council within weeks of each other, raising “serious concerns about the government’s move to exert control over freedom of expression and access to information.”

    Read the full statement here.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump has ‘declared war against the American people’, says Ralph Nader

    Democracy Now!

    AMY GOODMAN: President Trump addressed a joint session of Congress in a highly partisan 100-minute speech, the longest presidential address to Congress in modern history on Wednesday.

    Trump defended his sweeping actions over the past six weeks.

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years, and we are just getting started.

    AMY GOODMAN: President Trump praised his biggest campaign donor, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who’s leading Trump’s effort to dismantle key government agencies and cut critical government services.

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And to that end, I have created the brand-new Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Perhaps you’ve heard of it. Perhaps.

    Which is headed by Elon Musk, who is in the gallery tonight. Thank you, Elon. He’s working very hard. He didn’t need this. He didn’t need this. Thank you very much. We appreciate it.

    AMY GOODMAN: Some Democrats laughed and pointed at Elon Musk when President Trump made this comment later in his speech.

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s very simple. And the days of rule by unelected bureaucrats are over.

    AMY GOODMAN: During his speech, President Trump repeatedly attacked the trans and immigrant communities, defended his tariffs that have sent stock prices spiraling, vowed to end Russia’s war on Ukraine and threatened to take control of Greenland.

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We also have a message tonight for the incredible people of Greenland: We strongly support your right to determine your own future, and if you choose, we welcome you into the United States of America. We need Greenland for national security and even international security, and we’re working with everybody involved to try and get it.

    But we need it, really, for international world security. And I think we’re going to get it. One way or the other, we’re going to get it.


    ‘A declaration of war against the American people.’  Video: Democracy Now!

    AMY GOODMAN: During Trump’s 100-minute address, Democratic lawmakers held up signs in protest reading “This is not normal,” “Save Medicaid” and “Musk steals.”

    One Democrat, Congressmember Al Green of Texas, was removed from the chamber for protesting against the President.

    PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Likewise, small business optimism saw its single-largest one-month gain ever recorded, a 41-point jump.

    REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMEMBER 1: Sit down!

    REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMEMBER 2: Order!

    SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: Members are directed to uphold and maintain decorum in the House and to cease any further disruptions. That’s your warning. Members are engaging in willful and continuing breach of decorum, and the chair is prepared to direct the sergeant-at-arms to restore order to the joint session.

    Mr Green, take your seat. Take your seat, sir.

    DEMOCRAT CONGRESS MEMBER AL GREEN: He has no mandate to cut Medicaid!

    SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON: Take your seat. Finding that members continue to engage in willful and concerted disruption of proper decorum, the chair now directs the sergeant-at-arms to restore order, remove this gentleman from the chamber.

    AMY GOODMAN: That was House Speaker Mike Johnson, who called in security to take Texas Democratic Congressmember Al Green out. Afterwards, Green spoke to reporters after being removed.

    Democrat Congressman Al Green (Texas)
    Democrat Congressman Al Green (Texas) . . . “I have people who are very fearful. These are poor people, and they have only Medicaid in their lives when it comes to their healthcare.” Image: DN screenshot APR

    DEMOCRAT CONGRESS MEMBER AL GREEN: The President said he had a mandate, and I was making it clear to the President that he has no mandate to cut Medicaid.

    I have people who are very fearful. These are poor people, and they have only Medicaid in their lives when it comes to their healthcare. And I want him to know that his budget calls for deep cuts in Medicaid.

    He needs to save Medicaid, protect it. We need to raise the cap on Social Security. There’s a possibility that it’s going to be hurt. And we’ve got to protect Medicare.

    These are the safety net programmes that people in my congressional district depend on. And this President seems to care less about them and more about the number of people that he can remove from the various programmes that have been so helpful to so many people.

    AMY GOODMAN: Texas Democratic Congressmember Al Green.

    We begin today’s show with Ralph Nader, the longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, former presidential candidate. Ralph Nader is founder of the Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper. His most recent lead article in the new issue of Capitol Hill Citizen is titled “Democratic Party: Apologise to America for ushering Trump back in.”

    He is also the author of the forthcoming book Let’s Start the Revolution: Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country That Works for the People.

    Medicaid, Social Security, Medicare, all these different programmes. Ralph Nader, respond overall to President Trump’s, well, longest congressional address in modern history.

    Environmentalist and consumer protection activist Ralph Nader
    Environmentalist and consumer protection activist Ralph Nader . . . And he’s taken Biden’s genocidal policies one step further by demanding the evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza. Image: DN screenshot APR

    RALPH NADER: Well, it was also a declaration of war against the American people, including Trump voters, in favour of the super-rich and the giant corporations. What Trump did last night was set a record for lies, delusionary fantasies, predictions of future broken promises — a rerun of his first term — boasts about progress that don’t exist.

    In practice, he has launched a trade war. He has launched an arms race with China and Russia. He has perpetuated and even worsened the genocidal support against the Palestinians. He never mentioned the Palestinians once.

    And he’s taken Biden’s genocidal policies one step further by demanding the evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza.

    But taking it as a whole, Amy, what we’re seeing here defies most of dictionary adjectives. What Trump and Musk and Vance and the supine Republicans are doing are installing an imperial, militaristic domestic dictatorship that is going to end up in a police state.

    You can see his appointments are yes people bent on suppression of civil liberties, civil rights. You can see his breakthrough, after over 120 years, of announcing conquest of Panama Canal.

    He’s basically said, one way or another, he’s going to take Greenland. These are not just imperial controls of countries overseas or overthrowing them; it’s actually seizing land.

    Now, on the Greenland thing, Greenland is a province of Denmark, which is a member of NATO. He is ready to basically conquer a part of Denmark in violation of Section 5 of NATO, at the same time that he has displayed full-throated support for a hardcore communist dictator, Vladimir Putin, who started out with the Russian version of the CIA under the Soviet Union and now has over 20 years of communist dictatorship, allied, of course, with a number of oligarchs, a kind of kleptocracy.

    And the Republicans are buying all this in Congress. This is complete reversal of everything that the Republicans stood for against communist dictators.

    So, what we’re seeing here is a phony programme of government efficiency ripping apart people’s programmes. The attack on Social Security is new, complete lies about millions of people aged 110, 120, getting Social Security cheques.

    That’s a new attack. He left Social Security alone in his first term, but now he’s going after [it]. So, what they’re going to do is cut Medicaid and cut other social safety nets in order to pay for another tax cut for the super-rich and the corporation, throwing in no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security benefits, which will, of course, further increase the deficit and give the lie to his statement that he wants a balanced budget.

    So we’re dealing with a deranged, unstable pathological liar, who’s getting away with it. And the question is: How does he get away with it, year after year? Because the Democratic Party has basically collapsed.

    They don’t know how to deal with a criminal recidivist, a person who has hired workers without documents and exploited them, a person who’s a bigot against immigrants, including legal immigrants who are performing totally critical tasks in home healthcare, processing poultry, meat, and half of the construction workers in Texas are undocumented workers.

    So, as a bully, he doesn’t go after the construction industry in Texas; he picks out individuals.

    I thought the most disgraceful thing, Amy, yesterday was his use of these unfortunate people who suffered as props, holding one up after another. But they were also Trump’s crutches to cover up his contradictory behavior.

    So, he praised the police yesterday, but he pardoned over 600 people who attacked violently the police [in the attack on the Capitol] on 6 January 2021 and were convicted and imprisoned as a result, and he let them out of prison. I thought the most —

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph? Ralph, I —

    RALPH NADER: — the most heartrending thing was that 13-year-old child, who wanted to be a police officer when he grew up, being held up twice by his father. And he was so bewildered as to what was going on. And Trump’s use of these people was totally reprehensible and should be called out.

    Now, more basically, the real inefficiencies in government, they’re ignoring, because they are kleptocrats. They’re ignoring corporate crimes on Medicaid, Medicare, tens of billions of dollars every year ripping off Medicare, ripping off government contracts, such as defence contracts.

    He’s ignoring hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate welfare, including that doled out to Elon Musk — subsidies, handouts, giveaways, bailouts, you name it. And he’s ignoring the bloated military budget, which he is supporting the Republicans in actually increasing the military budget more than the generals have asked for. So, that’s the revelation —

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph? Ralph, if I — Ralph, if I can interrupt? I just need to —

    RALPH NADER: — that the Democrats need to pursue.

    JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Ralph, I wanted to ask you about — specifically about Medicaid and Medicare. You’ve mentioned the cuts to these safety net programmes. What about Medicaid, especially the crisis in this country in long-term care? What do you see happening in this Trump administration, especially with the Republican majority in Congress?

    RALPH NADER: Well, they’re going to slash — they’re going to move to slash Medicaid, which serves over 71 million people, including millions of Trump voters, who should be reconsidering their vote as the days pass, because they’re being exploited in red states, blue states, everywhere, as well.

    Yeah, they have to cut tens of billions of dollars a year from Medicaid to pay for the tax cut. That’s number one. Now they’re going after Social Security. Who knows what the next step will be on Medicare? They’re leaving Americans totally defenceless by slashing meat and poultry and food inspection laws, auto safety.

    They’re exposing people to climate violence by cutting FEMA, the rescue agency. They’re cutting forest rangers that deal with wildfires. They’re cutting protections against pandemics and epidemics by slashing and ravaging and suppressing free speech in scientific circles, like CDC and National Institutes of Health.

    They’re leaving the American people defenseless.

    And where are the Democrats on this? I mean, look at Senator Slotkin’s response. It was a typical rerun of a feeble, weak Democratic rebuttal. She couldn’t get herself, just like the Democrats in 2024, which led to Trump’s victory — they can’t get themselves, Juan, to talk specifically and authentically about raising the minimum wage, expanding healthcare, cracking down on corporate crooks that are bleeding out the incomes of hard-pressed American workers and the poor.

    They can’t get themselves to talk about increasing frozen Social Security budgets for 50 years, that 200 Democrats supported raising, but Nancy Pelosi kept them, when she was Speaker, from taking John Larson’s bill to the House floor.

    That’s why they lose. Look at her speech. It was so vague and general. They chose her because she was in the national security state. She was a former CIA. They chose her because they wanted to promote the losing version of the Democratic Party, instead of choosing Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, the most popular polled politician in America today.

    That’s who they chose. So, as long as the Democrats monopolise the opposition and crush third-party efforts to push them into more progressive realms, the Republican, plutocratic, Wall Street, war machine declaration of war against the American people will continue.

    We’re heading into the most serious crisis in American history. There’s no comparison.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, we’re going to have to leave it there, but, of course, we’re going to continue to cover these issues. And I also wanted to wish you, Ralph, a happy 91st birthday. Ralph Nader —

    RALPH NADER: I wish people to get the Capitol Hill Citizen, which tells people what they can really do to win democracy and justice back. So, for $5 or donation or more, if you wish, you can go to Capitol Hill Citizen and get a copy sent immediately by first-class mail, or more copies for your circle, of resisting and protesting and prevailing over this Trump dictatorship.

    AMY GOODMAN: Ralph Nader, longtime consumer advocate, corporate critic, four-time presidential candidate, founder of the Capitol Hill Citizen newspaper. This is Democracy Now!

    The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States Licence. Republished by Asia Pacific Report under Creative Commons.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • New Report Warns Of Increasing Nuclear Dangers

    Once again the ‘Gloomsday’ Machine is reporting the awful news about the growing nuclear threats, the widening nuclear proliferation, and ongoing modernization and development of new weapons most recently in the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor which defines itself as “a research project managed by Norwegian People’s Aid with contributions from a broad range of external experts and institutions, including the Federation of American Scientists and the Norwegian Academy of International Law”.

    There is never any attempt to make people aware of how the nuclear arms race and new forms of proliferation are being driven and the many missed opportunities, over the 80-year course of the nuclear age to reverse the Doomsday machine and move forward to a new world at peace.

    The post New Report Warns Of Increasing Nuclear Dangers appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Union wary of Canadian billionaire Jim Grenon’s NZ media influence

    By Susan Edmunds, RNZ News money correspondent

    The Aotearoa New Zealand union representing many of NZME’s journalists says it is “deeply worried” by a billionaire’s plans to take over its board.

    Auckland-based Canadian billionaire Jim Grenon is leading a move to dump the board of media company NZME, owners of The New Zealand Herald and NewsTalk ZB.

    He has told the company’s board he wants to remove most of the current directors, replace them with himself and three others, and choose one existing director to stay on.

    He took a nearly 10 percent stake in the business earlier in the week.

    Michael Wood, negotiation specialist at E tū, the union that represents NZME’s journalists, said he had grave concerns.

    “We see a pattern that has been incredibly unhealthy in other countries, of billionaire oligarchs moving into media ownership roles to be able to promote their own particular view of the word,” he said.

    “Secondly, we have a situation here where when Mr Grenon purchased holdings in NZME he was at pains to make it sound like an innocent manoeuvre with no broader agenda . . .  within a few days he is aggressively pursuing board positions.”

    What unsaid agendas?
    Wood said Grenon had a track record of trying to influence media discourse in New Zealand.

    “We are deeply concerned about this, about what unsaid agendas lie behind a billionaire oligarch trying to take ownership of one of our biggest media companies.”

    James Grenon.
    Canadian billionaire James Grenon . . . track record of trying to influence media discourse in New Zealand. Image: TOM Capital Management/RNZ

    “We are deeply concerned about this, about what unsaid agendas lie behind a billionaire oligarch trying to take ownership of one of our biggest media companies.”

    He said it would be important for New Zealand not to follow the example of the US, where media outlets had become “the mouthpiece for the rich and powerful”.

    E tū would consult its national delegate committee of journalists, he said.

    Grenon has been linked with alternative news sites, including The Centrist, serving as the company’s director up to August 2023.

    The Centrist claims to present under-served perspectives and reason-based analysis, “even if it might be too hot for the mainstream media to handle”.

    Grenon has been approached for comment by RNZ.

    Preoccupations with trans rights, treaty issues
    Duncan Greive, founder of The Spinoff and media commentator, said he was a reader of Grenon’s site The Centrist.

    “The main thing we know about him is that publication,” Greive said.

    “It’s largely news aggregation but it has very specific preoccupations around trans rights, treaty issues and particularly vaccine injury and efficacy.

    “A lot of the time it’s aggregating from mainstream news sites but there’s a definite feel that things are under-covered or under-emphasised at mainstream news organisations.

    “If he is looking to gain greater control and exert influence on the publishing and editorial aspects of the business, you’ve got to think there is a belief that those things are under-covered and the editorial direction of The Herald isn’t what he would like it to be.”

    Duncan Grieve
    The Spinoff founder and media commentator Duncan Greive . . . Investors “would be excited about the sale of OneRoof”. Image: RNZ News

    Greive said the move could be connected to the NZME announcement in its annual results that it was exploring options for the sale of its real estate platform OneRoof.

    “There are a lot of investors who believe OneRoof is being held back by proximity to the ‘legacy media’ assets of NZME and if it could be pulled out of there the two businesses would be more valuable separate than together.

    “If you look at the shareholder book of NZME, you don’t image a lot of these institutional investors who hold the bulk of the shares are going to be as excited about editorial direction and issues as Grenon would be . . .  but they would be excited about the sale of OneRoof.”

    Wanting the publishing side
    Greive said he could imagine a scenario where Grenon told shareholders he wanted the publishing side, at a reduced value, and the OneRoof business could be separated off.

    “From a pure value realisation, maximisation of shareholder value point of view, that makes sense to me.”

    Greive said attention would now go on the 37 percent of shareholders whom Grenon said had been consulted in confidence about his plans.

    “It will become clear pretty quickly and they will be under pressure to say why they are involved in this and it will become clear pretty quickly whether my theory is correct.”

    This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Australian university workers: ‘We will not be silenced over Palestine’

    SPECIAL REPORT: By Markela Panegyres and Jonathan Strauss in Sydney

    The new Universities Australia (UA) definition of antisemitism, endorsed last month for adoption by 39 Australian universities, is an ugly attempt to quash the pro-Palestine solidarity movement on campuses and to silence academics, university workers and students who critique Israel and Zionism.

    While the Scott Morrison Coalition government first proposed tightening the definition, and a recent joint Labor-Coalition parliamentary committee recommended the same, it is yet another example of the Labor government’s overreach.

    It seeks to mould discussion in universities to one that suits its pro-US and pro-Zionist imperialist agenda, while shielding Israel from accountability.

    So far, the UA definition has been widely condemned.

    Nasser Mashni, of Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, has slammed it as “McCarthyism reborn”.

    The Jewish Council of Australia (JCA) has criticised it as “dangerous, politicised and unworkable”. The NSW Council of Civil Liberties said it poses “serious risks to freedom of expression and academic freedom”.

    The UA definition comes in the context of a war against Palestinian activism on campuses.

    The false claim that antisemitism is “rampant” across universities has been weaponised to subdue the Palestinian solidarity movement within higher education and, particularly, to snuff out any repeat of the student-led Gaza solidarity encampments, which sprung up on campuses across the country last year.

    Some students and staff who have been protesting against the genocide since October 2023 have come under attack by university managements.

    Some students have been threatened with suspension and many universities are giving themselves, through new policies, more powers to liaise with police and surveil students and staff.

    Palestinian, Arab and Muslim academics, as well as other anti-racist scholars, have been silenced and disciplined, or face legal action on false counts of antisemitism, merely for criticising Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine.

    Randa Abdel-Fattah, for example, has become the target of a Zionist smear campaign that has successfully managed to strip her of Australian Research Council funding.

    Intensify repression
    The UA definition will further intensify the ongoing repression of people’s rights on campuses to discuss racism, apartheid and occupation in historic Palestine.

    By its own admission, UA acknowledges that its definition is informed by the antisemitism taskforces at Columbia University, Stanford University, Harvard University and New York University, which have meted out draconian and violent repression of pro-Palestine activism.

    The catalyst for the new definition was the February 12 report tabled by Labor MP Josh Burns on antisemitism on Australian campuses. That urged universities to adopt a definition of antisemitism that “closely aligns” with the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition.

    It should be noted that the controversial IHRA definition has been opposed by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) for its serious challenge to academic freedom.

    As many leading academics and university workers, including Jewish academics, have repeatedly stressed, criticism of Israel and criticism of Zionism is not antisemitic.

    UA’s definition is arguably more detrimental to freedom of speech and pro-Palestine activism and scholarship than the IHRA definition.

    In the vague IHRA definition, a number of examples of antisemitism are given that conflate criticism of Israel with antisemitism, but not the main text itself.

    By contrast, the new UA definition overtly equates criticism of Israel and Zionism with antisemitism and claims Zionist ideology is a component part of Jewish identity.

    The definition states that “criticism of Israel can be anti-Semitic . . . when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel”.

    Dangerously, anyone advocating for a single bi-national democratic state in historic Palestine will be labelled antisemitic under this new definition.

    Anyone who justifiably questions the right of the ethnonationalist, apartheid and genocidal state of Israel to exist will be accused of antisemitism.

    Sweeping claims
    The UA definition also makes the sweeping claim that “for most, but not all Jewish Australians, Zionism is a core part of their Jewish identity”.

    But, as the JCA points out, Zionism is a national political ideology and is not a core part of Jewish identity historically or today, since many Jews do not support Zionism. The JCA warns that the UA definition “risks fomenting harmful stereotypes that all Jewish people think in a certain way”.

    Moreover, JCA said, Jewish identities are already “a rightly protected category under all racial discrimination laws, whereas political ideologies such as Zionism and support for Israel are not”.

    Like other aspects of politics, political ideologies, such as Zionism, and political stances, such as support for Israel, should be able to be discussed critically.

    According to the UA definition, criticism of Israel can be antisemitic “when it holds Jewish individuals or communities responsible for Israel’s actions”.

    While it would be wrong for any individual or community, because they are Jewish, to be held responsible for Israel’s actions, it is a fact that the International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued arrest warrants for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former  minister Yoav Gallant for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity.

    But under the UA definition, since Netanyahu and Gallant are Jewish, would holding them responsible be considered antisemitic?

    Is the ICC antisemitic? According to Israel it is.

    The implication of the definition for universities, which teach law and jurisprudence, is that international law should not be applied to the Israeli state, because it is antisemitic to do so.

    The UA’s definition is vague enough to have a chilling effect on any academic who wants to teach about genocide, apartheid and settler-colonialism. It states that “criticism of Israel can be antisemitic when it is grounded in harmful tropes, stereotypes or assumptions”.

    What these are is not defined.

    Anti-racism challenge
    Within the academy, there is a strong tradition of anti-racism and decolonial scholarship, particularly the concept of settler colonialism, which, by definition, calls into question the very notion of “statehood”.

    With this new definition of antisemitism, will academics be prevented from teaching students the works of Chelsea Watego, Patrick Wolfe or Edward Said?

    The definition will have serious and damaging repercussions for decolonial scholars and severely impinges the rights of scholars, in particular First Nations scholars and students, to critique empire and colonisation.

    UA is the “peak body” for higher education in Australia, and represents and lobbies for capitalist class interests in higher education.

    It is therefore not surprising that it has developed this particular definition, given its strong bilateral relations with Israeli higher education, including signing a 2013 memorandum of understanding with Association of University Heads, Israel.

    It should be noted that the NTEU National Council last October called on UA to withdraw from this as part of its Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions resolution.

    All university students and staff committed to anti-racism, academic freedom and freedom of speech should join the campaign against the UA definition.

    Local NTEU branches and student groups are discussing and passing motions rejecting the new definition and NTEU for Palestine has called a National Day of Action for March 26 with that as one of its key demands.

    We will not be silenced on Palestine.

    Jonathan Strauss and Markela Panegyres are members of the National Tertiary Education Union and the Socialist Alliance. Republished from Green Left with permission.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Why Class Matters

    After the last election, Democratic Party functionaries were puzzled that voters — usually attuned closely to the economy — failed to show proper appreciation for the Biden economic miracle. They cited the billions in federal money flowing toward economic growth; they repeated aggregate growth figures more robust than other advanced economies; they showed that consumer spending continued to show surprising vigor; they noted that aggregate incomes grew faster than inflation; and they reminded us of the often-mentioned markers of rising stock market and housing values.

    Baffled by the voters who shunned Bidenomics and complained about the economy, Democratic Party pundits are convinced that voters are simply ignorant of the facts.

    Today, perhaps more than ever, the failure to recognize social-class divisions produces ill-informed, arrogant judgments like those prominent within Democratic Party circles. While aggregate numbers may tell one story, they fail to tell the story of the economic well-being of the classes and strata that make up the aggregate, even the by-far-largest segment of that aggregate. Could it be that Biden’s economic victory was a victory for the wealthiest, the most generously compensated among the US population, while leaving the majority of US citizens (and voters) in the rear-view mirror?

    The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes.’

    And the answer comes, not from a left-leaning think tank, but from Federal Reserve data by way of Moody’s Analytics and summarized in the Wall Street Journal.

    As reported in the WSJ, the top 10% of “earners” — those households reporting $250,000 in income or more — are responsible for 49.7% of consumer spending. In other words, nearly half of all consumer spending is accounted for by those in the top 10% of all those reporting their incomes. This is the largest share for this elite segment since the Federal Reserve began tracking in 1989. In just three decades, the top 10%’s portion has increased from over a third to nearly half of all consumer spending.

    According to the WSJ:

    Taken together, well-off people have increased their spending far beyond inflation, while everyone else hasn’t. The bottom 80% of earners spent 25% more than they did four years earlier, barely outpacing price increases of 21% over that period. The top 10% spent 58% more…

    Between September 2023 and September 2024, the high earners increased their spending by 12%. Spending by working-class and middle-class households, meanwhile, dropped over the same period.

    Democratic Party consultant James Carville likes to say “it’s the economy, stupid!” that decides US elections. If he is right, the celebration of Bidenomics was widely off the mark. During the Biden years, for 80% of US voters, their economy was stagnant, at best. In that light, the election results are far more understandable as reflective of pocketbook issues.

    US economic growth is often portrayed by the major media as driven by household consumption (around two-thirds of gross US economic activity comes from household consumption). However, these reports are deceptive if they fail to acknowledge that nearly all of the consumption growth impacting GDP growth comes from the wealthiest 10% of the population. Arguably, so-called luxury spending is the driving force behind economic growth in the US in our time.

    Thus, the widely heralded mantra of capitalist apologists that “a rising tide lifts all boats” has it backwards. In fact, the privileged 10% of all boats that rise constitute the tide.

    Economy 101 preaches that working people spend nearly all that they make (or need to borrow more to make ends meet). That same conventional wisdom tells us that the rich reinvest or save most of their earnings. Both may be and are true, though inequality of income has grown so much that the richest 10% can save and reinvest while spending lavishly and conspicuously.

    Since late 2021, the excess savings of the bottom 90% has dropped from about $1.1 trillion dollars to $300 billion at the end of 2024. In roughly the same period, the uppermost 10% has maintained an excess savings of about $1.3-1.4 trillion, according to Moody’s Analytics. Clearly, the bottom 90% was forced to draw down savings over the last four years in order to get by. It is important to notice that the concept of the “bottom 90%” masks the reality that each successive lower decile of household income below the top 10% has fewer means and lesser savings to meet a reasonably adequate standard of living. In short, the pain induced by a system maintaining such vast income inequality grows more acute as the level of income declines.

    While not a proper class analysis of US society (not to be expected from official government statistics), the Federal Reserve data, as interpreted by Moody’s Analytics, provides a material basis for understanding the most recent US election.1 As opposed to dire conclusions of a fascist mentality sweeping the country or wild celebrations of the revival of a mythical conservative past, the economic unraveling of the last period fed the electorate’s profound thirst for change, any change.

    In the wake of a deep economic collapse in the first decade of a new century — a crisis unlike any seen for generations — US voters turned, at that time, to a fresh-faced Democrat promising change. He won voters with his earnest, unbounded hope. He produced little change, but more of the same blindness to inequality.

    Now, in the wake of the economic stagnation and hardship for the majority 90% struggling through the Biden years, another snake oil salesman returns, capturing one of the two decadent parties with another message of change  — Make America Great Again.

    And again, voters act out of desperation.

    Don’t blame the voters, blame the bankrupt two-party system and the economic system dominated by and for the rich and powerful.

    ENDNOTE:

    The post Why Class Matters first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    A proper economic class analysis will not evoke income or wealth– simply contingent, quantified signifiers of inequality– but qualitative indicators of socio-economic position or status. For Marxists, class is defined by an agent’s function within a particular mode of production with regard to the economic relation of exploitation. Thus, under capitalism, class is a division between exploiters — capitalists — and the exploited — workers. One class commands the means of production, the other class sells the former its labor power.

    Of course, there are strata within and outside of the two classes: the haute and petit bourgeoisie, the ‘labor aristocracy,’ industrial workers, lumpen-proletariat, etc.

    In general, income and wealth inequality are a result of class division and exploitation under capitalism and not its cause.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • RSF slams ‘horrific conditions’ for journalists in Gaza in wake of fragile ceasefire

    Pacific Media Watch

    The Paris-based global watchdog Reporters Without Borders (RSF) has expressed support for Gaza’s media professionals and called on Israel to urgently lift the blockade on the territory.

    It said the humanitarian catastrophe was continuing in Gaza and hampering journalists’ work on a daily basis.

    The Israeli army had killed their colleagues and destroyed their homes and newsrooms, said RSF in a statement.

    Gaza’s remaining journalists, who had survived 15 months of intensive bombardment, continued to face immense challenges despite the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas that came into effect on 19 January 2025 with the first stage expiring last weekend.

    Humanitarian aid, filtered by the Israeli authorities, is merely trickling into the blockaded territory, and Israel continues to deny entry access to foreign journalists, forbidding independent outlets from covering the aftermath of the war and the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe.

    Exiled Palestinian journalists are also prevented from returning to the Gaza Strip.

    “We urgently call for the blockade that is suffocating the press in Gaza to be lifted,” said RSF editorial director Anne Bocandé.

    “Reporters need multimedia and security equipment, internet and electricity.

    “Foreign reporters need access to the territory, and exiled Palestinian journalists need to be able to return.

    “While the ceasefire in Gaza has put an end to an unprecedented massacre of journalists, media infrastructure remains devastated.

    “RSF continues to campaign for justice and provide all necessary support to these journalists, to defend a free, pluralist and independent press in Palestine.”

    Reporters face the shock of a humanitarian catastrophe

    • Working amid the rubble

    “The scale of the destruction is immense, terrifying,” said Islam al-Zaanoun of Palestine TV.

    “Life seems to have disappeared. The streets have become open-air rubbish dumps. With no place to work, no internet or electricity, I was forced to stop working for several days.”

    Journalists must also contend with a severe fuel shortage, making travel within the country difficult and expensive. Like the rest of Gaza’s population, reporters have to spend long hours in queues every day to obtain water and food.

    • Israeli fire despite the ceasefire

    “Entire areas are unreachable,” Al Jazeera correspondent Hani al-Shaer told RSF.

    “The situation remains dangerous. We came under Israeli fire in Rafah.”

    The journalist explained that due to an unrelenting series of crises, he was forced to choose which stories he covered.

    “The destroyed infrastructure? The humanitarian crisis? Abandoned orphans?” he wondered.

    • Witnesses and targets: the double trauma of reporters

    With at least 180 media professionals killed by the Israeli army in the course of 15 months of war, including at least 42 killed on the job, according to RSF figures, surviving journalists must face their trauma while continuing their news mission.

    Gaza media sources put the journalist death toll at more than 200.

    “We covered this tragedy, but we were also part of it. Often, we were the target,” stressed Islam al-Zaanoun.

    “We still can’t rest or sleep. We’re still terrified that the war will start again,” adds Hani al-Shaer.

    • The suspended lives of exiled journalists

    From Egypt to Qatar, journalists who managed to escape the horror continue to live with the consequences, unable to return to their loved ones and homes.

    “My greatest hope is to return home and see my loved ones again. But the border is closed and my house is destroyed, like those of most journalists,” lamented Ola al-Zaanoun, RSF Gaza correspondent, now based in Egypt.

    The Gaza bureau chief of The New Arab, Diaa al-Kahlout is one of many who watched the Israeli Army destroy his house.

    “When they arrested me, they bombed and set fire to my house and car. I’ve lost everything I’ve earned in my career as a journalist, and I’m starting all over again,” he told RSF.

    A refugee in Doha, Qatar, he is still haunted by the abuse inflicted by Israeli forces during his month-long detention in December 2023, following his arbitrary arrest at his home in Beit Lahya, a city in the north of the Gaza Strip.

    “No matter how many times I tell myself that I’m safe here, that I’m lucky enough to have my wife and children with me, I have trouble sleeping, working, making decisions,” confided the journalist, whose brother was killed in the war.

    “I’m scared all the time,” he added.

    Asia Pacific Media Network’s Pacific Media Watch project collaborates with Reporters Without Borders.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Bosnian Serbs adopt ‘foreign agent’ law targeting independent media

    Berlin, March 4, 2025–-The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on authorities in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Serb-majority territory Republika Srpska to revoke a “foreign agent” law that poses a significant threat to media freedom and civil society.

    “Republika Srpska authorities should immediately suspend any plans to enforce this ‘foreign agent’ legislation, which mirrors restrictive measures used by authoritarian regimes to silence critics,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Such laws are incompatible with democratic values, and Bosnia and Herzegovina’s aspirations for European integration.”

    On February 27, the National Assembly of the Serb-dominated half of Bosnia and Herzegovina called Republika Srpska passed the Law on the Special Registry and Transparency of the Work of Nonprofit Organizations, requiring foreign-funded groups to register with the justice ministry as “foreign agents” and comply with strict financial oversight and reporting rules. Russia, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan have used similar legislation to criminalize critical voices and the media.

    The bill was among several passed by Serb lawmakers in response to the February 26 one-year sentence given to Republika Srpska’s President Milorad Dodik on charges that he disobeyed the top international envoy overseeing peace in ethnically-divided Bosnia. The court in the national capital, Sarajevo also barred pro-Russian Dodik from politics for six years.

    Dodik has long advocated for Republika Srpska to separate from Bosnia and Herzegovina and join Serbia. The Bosnian Serb mini-state is one of two autonomous entities — the other is the Bosniak-Croat Federation — created under the 1995 Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian war.

    In a statement, 41 local non-governmental organizations described the foreign agent law as “a revenge attack on all critical voices.”

    CPJ emailed Dodik’s press office to request comment but received no reply.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Vietnam to buy Israeli satellites to spy on China: media

    One of Israel’s largest aerospace companies, Israel Aerospace Industries, has secured a contract to supply Vietnam’s military with two surveillance satellites worth US$680 million, the newspaper Haaretz reported.

    The observation satellites would help Vietnam “address China’s provocations against its neighbors in the South China Sea,” the Israeli paper quoted unidentified defense industry sources as saying.

    Radio Free Asia was not able to independently verify the information.

    A Vietnamese source, who declined to be identified due to the sensitivity of the subject, said the government-owned firm Israel Aerospace Industries, or IAI, had a long history of cooperation with Vietnam and news of negotiations over a satellite deal had surfaced as early as 2018.

    According to Haaretz, besides IAI, France’s Thales and the U.S. company Lockheed Martin were also offering surveillance satellites to Vietnam and “there could still be problems” for the Israeli contractor.

    The paper cited Israeli sources as saying Vietnam was “a tough customer” and agreements can fall through because of domestic rivalry or pressure from other foreign contractors.

    The Vietnamese client is believed to be the so-called General Department II of the Vietnamese army, or the military intelligence department, the newspaper said.

    Satellites ‘too expensive’

    Haaretz said that under the secured deal, the Israeli firm would sell two satellites to Vietnam, including “an optical imagery photography satellite and a synthetic-aperture radar satellite that provides a picture of the ground even at night or through complete cloud cover.”

    One of them could be the OptSat 3000, an advanced electro optical satellite, equipped with a 70 cm aperture telescope and sensitive sensor and capable of delivering “better than 50 cm high resolution imagery of locations on Earth,” according to IAI.

    Each satellite would cost US$300 million without launch facilities, “a price that space experts say is excessive,” the paper said, noting that in Vietnam corruption remained “rampant, even at the top.”

    An Israeli Spyder mobile air defense system at the Vietnam’s Defense Expo on Dec. 9, 2022.
    An Israeli Spyder mobile air defense system at the Vietnam’s Defense Expo on Dec. 9, 2022.
    (RFA)

    A businesswoman, Nguyen Thi Thanh Nhan, who was believed to act as an intermediary for arms procurement from Israel to Vietnam, is on a Vietnamese wanted list for bid rigging and bribery but domestic media did not mention any defense deal.

    Israel in recent years has become one of the top defense suppliers to Vietnam as it seeks to diversify its arms and military equipment procurement to reduce dependence on traditional partner Russia.

    It is estimated that Vietnam has bought about US$2 billion worth of equipment from Israeli companies, including air defense systems, drones and radar systems.

    “These technologies, especially radars, are what Israel is really good at,” said Yusuf Unjhawala, a defense analyst in Bangalore, India.

    The satellites may be costly but Vietnam “needs its own tools of surveillance,” Unjhawala told RFA.

    Vietnam and China are locked in a complex territorial dispute in the South China Sea, where China holds an expansive claim of up to 90% of the waterway.

    IAI was present at several defense exhibitions in Hanoi to showcase its products and is reportedly aiming to establish a joint venture to manufacture military hardware in Vietnam.

    Edited by Mike Firn


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • UN human rights chief ‘deeply worried by fundamental shift’ in US

    Volker Türk alarmed at growing power of ‘unelected tech oligarchs’ and warns gender equality is being rolled back

    The UN human rights chief has warned of a “fundamental shift” in the US and sounded the alarm over the growing power of “unelected tech oligarchs”, in a stinging rebuke of Washington weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency.

    Volker Türk said there had been bipartisan support for human rights in the US for decades but said he was “now deeply worried by the fundamental shift in direction that is taking place domestically and internationally”.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Israel’s genocide is expanding into the West Bank – but Western media ‘ignores’ it

    Pacific Media Watch

    With international media’s attention on the Israeli and Palestinian captives exchange,  Israel’s military and settlers have been forcibly displacing tens of thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, says Al Jazeera’s Listening Post media programme.

    The European Union has condemned Israel’s military operation in West Bank, attacking and killing refugees, and destroying refugee camps while the Western media has been barely reporting this.

    It has also criticised the violence by settlers in illegal West Bank villages.

    Israel’s military operation in the occupied territory has been ongoing for more than 40 days and has resulted in dozens of casualties, the displacement of about 40,000 Palestinians from their homes, and the destruction of civilian infrastructure.

    The EU has expressed its “grave concern” about Israel’s continuing military operation in the occupied West Bank in a statement.

    “The EU calls on Israel, in addressing its security concerns in the occupied West Bank, to comply with its obligations under international humanitarian law by ensuring the protection of all civilians in military operations and allow the safe return of displaced persons to their homes,” the statement read.

    “At the same time, extremist settler violence continues throughout the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

    Israel ‘has duty to protect’
    “The EU recalls that Israel, as the occupying power, has the duty to protect civilians and to hold perpetrators accountable.”

    The bloc also condemned Israel’s policy of expanding settlements in the West Bank, and urged that demolitions “including of EU and EU member states-funded structures, must stop”.

    “As we enter the holy month of Ramadan, we call on all parties to exercise restraint to allow for peaceful celebrations,” the EU said.

    Meanwhile, Israeli journalists are parroting military talking points of security operations.


    Israel invades the West Bank.  Video: AJ: The Listening Post

    Contributors:
    Abdaljawad Omar – Assistant professor, Birzeit University
    Jehad Abusalim – Co-editor, Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire
    Ori Goldberg – Academic and political commentator
    Samira Mohyeddin – Founder, On the Line Media

    On the Listening Post radar:
    This week, the return of the Bibas family bodies dominated Israeli media coverage.

    Tariq Nafi reports on how their deaths have been used for “hasbara” — propaganda — after the family accused Netanyahu’s government of exploiting their grief for political purposes.

    The Kenyan ‘manosphere’
    Populated by loudmouths, shock artists and unapologetic chauvinists, the Kenyan “manosphere” is promoting an influential — and at times dangerous — take on modern masculinity.

    Featuring:
    Audrey Mugeni – Co-founder, Femicide Count Kenya
    Awino Okech – Professor of feminist and security studies, SOAS
    Onyango Otieno – Mental health coach and writer


    This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Ho Hum at Sea: Anti-China Hysteria Down Under

    The conduct of live-fire exercises by the People’s Liberation Army Navy Surface Force (the Chinese “communists”, as they are called by the analytically strained) has recently caused much murmur and consternation in Australia. It’s the season for federal elections, and the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, thinks he’s in with more than a fighting chance. Whether that chance is deserved or not is another matter.

    The exercise, conducted in international waters by a cruiser, frigate and replenishment ship, involved what is said to have been poor notice given to Australian authorities on February 21. But the matter has rapidly burgeoned into something else: that what the Chinese task fleet did was mischievously remarkable, exceptional and snooty to convention and protocols. It is on that score that incontinent demagogy has taken hold.

    Media outlets have done little to soften the barbs. A report by ABC News, for instance, notes that Airservices Australia was “only aware of the exercises 40 minutes after China’s navy opened a ‘window’ for live-fire exercises from 9.30am.” The first pickup of the exercises came from a Virgin Australia pilot, who had flown within 250 nautical miles of the operation zone and warned of the drills. Airservices Australia was immediately contacted, with the deputy CEO of the agency, Peter Curran, bemused about whether “it was a potential hoax or real.”

    Defence Chief Admiral David Johnston told Senate estimates that he would have preferred more notice for the exercises – 24-48 hours was desirable – but it was clear that Coalition Senator and shadow home affairs minister James Paterson wanted more. Paterson had thought it “remarkable that Australia was relying on civilian aircraft for early warning about military exercises by a formidable foreign task group in our region.” To a certain extent, the needlessly irate minister got what he wanted, with the badgered Admiral conceding that the Chinese navy’s conduct had been “irresponsible” and “disruptive”.

    Wu Qian, spokesperson for the China National Ministry for Defence, offered a different reading: “During the period, China organised live-fire training of naval guns toward the sea on the basis of repeatedly issuing prior safety notices”. Its actions were “in full compliance with international law and international practice, with no impact on aviation flight safety”. That said, 49 flights were diverted on February 21.

    Much was also made about what were the constituent elements of the fleet. As if it mattered one jot, the Defence Force chief was pressed on whether a Chinese nuclear-powered submarine had made up the task force. “I don’t know whether there is a submarine with them, it is possible, task groups occasionally do deploy with submarines but not always,” came the reply. “I can’t be definitive whether that’s the case.”

    The carnival of fear was very much in town, with opposition politicians keen to blow air into the balloon of the China threat across the press circuit. The shadow defence minister Andrew Hastie warned listeners on Sydney radio station 2GB of “the biggest peacetime military buildup since 1945”, Beijing’s projection of power with its blue-water navy, the conduct of two live-fire exercises and the Chinese taskforce operating within Australia’s Exclusive Economic Zone off Tasmania. Apparently, all of this showed the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, to be “weak” for daring to accept that the conduct complained of was legal under international law. “Now that may be technically right, but that misses the deeper subtext, and that is China is now in our backyard, and they’ve demonstrated that we don’t have the will to insist on our national interest and mutual respect.”

    There are few voices of sensible restraint in Australia’s arid landscape of strategic thinking, but one could be found. Former principal warfare officer of the Royal Australian Navy, Jennifer Parker, commendably remarked that this hardly warranted the title of “a crisis”. To regard it as such “with over-the-top indignation diminishes our capacity to tackle real crises as the region deteriorates.” Australia might, at the very least, consider modernising a surface fleet that was “the smallest and oldest we’ve had since 1950.”

    Allegations that Beijing should not be operating in Australia’s exclusive economic zone, let alone conduct live-fire exercises in international waters, served to give it “a propaganda win to challenge our necessary deployments to North-East Asia and the South China Sea – routes that carry two-thirds of our maritime trade.”

    The cockeyed priorities of the Australian defence establishment lie elsewhere: fantasy, second hand US nuclear-powered submarines that may, or may never make their way to Australia; mushy hopes of a jointly designed nuclear powered submarine specific to the AUKUS pact that risks sinking off the design sheet; and the subordination of Australian land, naval and spatial assets to the United States imperium.

    Such is the standard of political debate that something as unremarkable as this latest sea incident has become a throbbing issue that supposedly shows the Albanese government as insufficiently belligerent. Yet there was no issue arising, other than a statement of presence by China’s growing navy, something it was perfectly entitled to do.

    The post Ho Hum at Sea: Anti-China Hysteria Down Under first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Tongan advocates condemn Treaty Principles Bill, slam colonisation

    By Khalia Strong of Pacific Media Network

    Tongan community leaders and artists in New Zealand have criticised the Treaty Principles Bill while highlighting the ongoing impact of colonisation in Aotearoa and the Pacific.

    Oral submissions continued this week for the public to voice their view on the controversial proposed bill, which aims to redefine the legal framework of the nation’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi.

    Aotearoa Tongan Response Group member Pakilau Manase Lua echoed words from the Waitangi Day commemorations earlier this month.

    “The Treaty of Waitangi Principles Bill and its champions and enablers represent the spirit of the coloniser,” he said.

    Pakilau said New Zealand’s history included forcible takeovers of Sāmoa, Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau.

    “The New Zealand government, or the Crown, has shown time and again that it has a pattern of trampling on the mana and sovereignty of indigenous peoples, not just here in Aotearoa, but also in the Pacific region.”

    Poet Karlo Mila spoke as part of a submission by a collective of artists, Mana Moana,

    “Have you ever paused to wonder why we speak English here, half a world away from England? It’s a global history of Christian white supremacy, who, with apostolic authority, ordained the doctrine of discovery to create a new world order,” she said.

    “Yes, this is where the ‘new’ in New Zealand comes from, invasion for advantage and profit, presenting itself as progress, as civilising, as salvation, as enlightenment itself — the greatest gaslighting feat of history.”

    Bill used as political weapon
    She argued that the bill was being used as a political weapon, and government rhetoric was causing division.

    “We watch political parties sow seeds of disunity using disingenuous history, harnessing hate speech and the haka of destiny, scapegoating ‘vulnerable enemies’ . . . Yes, for us, it’s a forest fire out there, and brown bodies are moving political targets, every inflammatory word finding kindling in kindred racists.”

    Pakilau said that because Tonga had never been formally colonised, Tongans had a unique view of the unfolding situation.

    “We know what sovereignty tastes like, we know what it smells like and feels like, especially when it’s trampled on.

    “Ask the American Samoans, who provide more soldiers per capita than any state of America to join the US Army, but are not allowed to vote for the country they are prepared to die for.

    “Ask the mighty 28th Maori Battalion, who field Marshal Erwin Rommel famously said, ‘Give me the Māori Battalion and I will rule the world’, they bled and died for a country that denied them the very rights promised under the Treaty.

    “The Treaty of Waitangi Bill is essentially threatening to do the same thing again, it is re-traumatising Māori and opening old wounds.”

    A vision for the future
    Mila, who also has European and Sāmoan ancestry, said the answer to how to proceed was in the Treaty’s Indigenous text.

    “The answer is Te Tiriti, not separatist exclusion. It’s the fair terms of inclusion, an ancestral strategy for harmony, a covenant of cooperation. It’s how we live ethically on a land that was never ceded.”

    Flags displayed at Waitangi treaty grounds 2024
    Flags displayed at Waitangi treaty grounds 2024. Image: PMN News/Atutahi Potaka-Dewes

    Aotearoa Tongan Response Group chair Anahila Kanongata’a said Tongans were Tangata Tiriti (people of the Treaty), and the bill denigrated the rights of Māori as Tangata Whenua (people of the land).

    “How many times has the Crown breached the Treaty? Too, too many times.

    “What this bill is attempting to do is retrospectively annul those breaches by extinguishing Māori sovereignty or tino rangatiritanga over their own affairs, as promised to them in their Tiriti, the Te Reo Māori text.”

    Kanongata’a called on the Crown to rescind the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, honour Te Tiriti, and issue a formal apology to Māori, similar to what had been done for the Dawn Raids.

    Hundreds gather at Treaty Grounds for the annual Waitangi Day dawn service
    Hundreds gather at Treaty Grounds for the annual Waitangi Day dawn service. Image: PMN Digital/Joseph Safiti

    “As a former member of Parliament, I am proud of the fact that an apology was made for the way our people were treated during the Dawn Raids.

    “We were directly affected, yes, it was painful and most of our loved ones never got to see or hear the apology, but imagine the pain Māori must feel to be essentially dispossessed, disempowered and effectively disowned of their sovereignty on their own lands.”

    The bill’s architect, Act Party leader David Seymour, sayid the nationwide discussion on Treaty principles was crucial for future generations.

    “In a democracy, the citizens are always ready to decide the future. That’s how it works.”

    Republished from PMN News with permission.

  • Media Workers Condemn BBC For ‘Dehumanizing’ Censorship Of Gaza Documentary

    Over 500 film, TV, and media workers have condemned BBC executives for “racism” and “censorship” after the British broadcaster pulled a documentary highlighting the horrific impact the US–Israeli genocide in Gaza has had on Palestinian children.

    “As industry professionals who craft stories for the British public, including for the BBC, we condemn the weaponization of a child’s identity and the racist insinuation that Palestinian narratives must be scrutinized through a lens of suspicion,” the letter reads.

    The letter also condemned a “racist” and “dehumanizing” campaign targeting the film ‘Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone,’ which the BBC removed from its iPlayer streaming service after pressure from pro-Israel activists.

    The post Media Workers Condemn BBC For ‘Dehumanizing’ Censorship Of Gaza Documentary appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Media ignores Israel’s massive ceasefire violations in Gaza


    This content originally appeared on The Grayzone and was authored by The Grayzone.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Belarusian journalist Palina Pitkevich’s extremism trial set to open

    New York, February 27, 2025— Belarusian authorities should immediately release Belarusian journalist Palina Pitkevich, whose trial on charges of participating in an extremist organization is set to start on March 7, and stop jailing the press for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

    “Palina Pitkevich’s detention is yet another grim reminder that President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s government is the worst jailer of journalists in Europe and Central Asia,” said CPJ’s program director, Carlos Martínez de la Serna, in New York. “Belarusian authorities must drop all charges against Pitkevich and repeal the country’s extremism legislation instead of using it to silence dissent.”

    Pitkevich was arrested in June, shortly after authorities designated the Press Club Belarus’ media literacy project Media IQ as an extremist group and listed her among its members, a representative of the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an exiled advocacy and trade group, told CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

    If found guilty, she could be jailed for up to six years, according to the Criminal Code, which was amended to comply with a package of extremism legislation in 2021. Since then, the law to combat extremism has been used to ban more than 35 media outlets, according to BAJ.

    CPJ is also investigating the case of freelance journalist Aleh Supruniuk, who has been missing since late January, and the detention of seven former journalists with the shuttered independent outlet Intex-Press, including reporter Ruslan Raviaka, on extremism charges in late 2024.

    The BAJ representative confirmed to CPJ that Supruniuk was in detention. In 2021, Supruniuk was also briefly detained and his home was searched.

    Belarus is the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 31 journalists behind bars, on December 1, 2024, when CPJ conducted its most recent annual prison census. Pitkevich was not included at the time due to a lack of publicly available information on her detention.

    CPJ emailed the Belarusian Investigative Committee, the country’s law enforcement agency, for comment but did not receive any response.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Belarusian journalist Palina Pitkevich’s extremism trial set to open

    New York, February 27, 2025— Belarusian authorities should immediately release Belarusian journalist Palina Pitkevich, whose trial on charges of participating in an extremist organization is set to start on March 7, and stop jailing the press for their work, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Thursday.

    “Palina Pitkevich’s detention is yet another grim reminder that President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s government is the worst jailer of journalists in Europe and Central Asia,” said CPJ’s program director, Carlos Martínez de la Serna, in New York. “Belarusian authorities must drop all charges against Pitkevich and repeal the country’s extremism legislation instead of using it to silence dissent.”

    Pitkevich was arrested in June, shortly after authorities designated the Press Club Belarus’ media literacy project Media IQ as an extremist group and listed her among its members, a representative of the Belarusian Association of Journalists (BAJ), an exiled advocacy and trade group, told CPJ on condition of anonymity, citing fear of reprisal.

    If found guilty, she could be jailed for up to six years, according to the Criminal Code, which was amended to comply with a package of extremism legislation in 2021. Since then, the law to combat extremism has been used to ban more than 35 media outlets, according to BAJ.

    CPJ is also investigating the case of freelance journalist Aleh Supruniuk, who has been missing since late January, and the detention of seven former journalists with the shuttered independent outlet Intex-Press, including reporter Ruslan Raviaka, on extremism charges in late 2024.

    The BAJ representative confirmed to CPJ that Supruniuk was in detention. In 2021, Supruniuk was also briefly detained and his home was searched.

    Belarus is the world’s fourth-worst jailer of journalists, with at least 31 journalists behind bars, on December 1, 2024, when CPJ conducted its most recent annual prison census. Pitkevich was not included at the time due to a lack of publicly available information on her detention.

    CPJ emailed the Belarusian Investigative Committee, the country’s law enforcement agency, for comment but did not receive any response.


    This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by CPJ Staff.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.