Berlin, November 14, 2024—A local business owner and his security guards insulted and attacked journalist Ana Raičković after following her and her family to their car outside a restaurant in Podgorica, the capital of Montenegro, on Sunday, November 10.
One man grabbed Raičković, editor for online newspaper Pobjeda, by her throat and threatened her and her family with physical violence and death; another grabbed her by the hair and slammed her head against the car door. Raičković filed a report with police the night of the attack, and police arrested three suspects.
“It is a welcome development that Montenegrin authorities acted swiftly in response to the physical attack against journalist Ana Raičković. They must now ensure that all those responsible are held accountable,” said Attila Mong, CPJ’s Europe representative. “Threatening or attacking a journalist because of their reporting is completely unacceptable. Montenegrin authorities must send a clear signal that violence against journalists will not be tolerated.”
Pobjeda reported that the attack was in response to Raičković’s reporting and TV appearances. about the business owner’s dealings and court cases.
She was treated in an emergency room for neck bruising, head lacerations, and a swollen arm.
The independent trade group Trade Union of Media of Montenegro said the business owner has a “history of aggression towards journalists” and that the police investigation of previous threats he made against a journalist in 2019 ended without “criminal or misdemeanor responsibility.”
CPJ’s email to the press department of the Ministry of the Interior in Podgorica did not receive a reply.
As thousands take to the streets this week to “honour” the country’s 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, the largest daily newspaper New Zealand Herald says the massive event is “redefining activism”.
The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti has been underway since Sunday, with thousands of New Zealanders from all communities and walks of life traversing the more than 2000 km length of the country from Cape Reinga to Bluff and converging on the capital Wellington.
The marches are challenging the coalition government Act Party’s proposed Treaty Principles Bill, introduced last week by co-leader David Seymour.
The Bill had its first reading in Parliament today as a young first time opposition Te Pāti Māori MP, Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, was suspended for leading a haka and ripping up a copy of the Bill disrupting the vote, and opposition Labour Party’s Māori Development spokesperson Willie Jackson was also “excused” from the chamber for calling Seymour a “liar” against parliamentary rules.
After a second attempt at voting, the three coalition parties won 68-55 with all three opposition parties voting against.
In its editorial today, hours before the debate and vote, The New Zealand Herald said supporters of Toitū te Tiriti, the force behind the Hīkoi, were seeking a community “reconnection” and described their kaupapa as an “activation, not activism; empowerment, not disruption; education, not protest”.
“Many of the supporters on the Hīkoi don’t consider themselves political activists. They are mums and dads, rangatahi, professionals, Pākehā, and Tauiwi (other non-Māori ethnicities),” The Herald said.
‘Loaded, colonial language’ “Mainstream media is often accused of using ‘loaded, colonial language’ in its headlines. Supporters of Toitū te Tiriti, however, see the movement not as a political protest but as a way to reconnect with the country’s shared history and reflect on New Zealand’s obligations under Te Tiriti.
“While some will support the initiative, many Pākehā New Zealanders are responding to it with unequivocal anger; others feel discomfort about suggestions of colonial guilt or inherited privilege stemming from historical injustices.”
“Seymour argues he is fighting for respect for all, but when multiculturalism is wielded as a political tool, it can obscure indigenous rights and maintain colonial dominance. For many, it’s an unsettling ideology to contemplate,” the newspaper said.
“A truly multicultural society would recognise the unique status of tangata whenua, ensuring Māori have a voice in decision-making as the indigenous people.
“However, policies framed under ‘equal rights’ often silence Māori perspectives and undermine the principles of Te Tiriti.
“Seymour’s proposed Treaty Principles Bill prioritises Crown sovereignty, diminishing the role of hapū (sub-tribes) and excluding Māori from national decision-making. Is this the ‘equality’ we seek, or is it a rebranded form of colonial control?”
Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke . . . led a haka and tore up a copy of Seymour’s Bill in Parliament. Image: TVNZ screenshot APR
Heart of the issue
The heart of the issue, said The Herald, was how “equal” was interpreted in the context of affirmative action.
“Affirmative action is not about giving an unfair advantage; it’s about levelling the playing field so everyone has equal opportunities.
“Some politicians sidestep the real work needed to honour Te Tiriti by pushing for an ‘equal’ and ‘multicultural’ society. This approach disregards Aotearoa’s unique history, where tangata whenua hold a constitutionally recognised status.
“The goal is not to create division but to fulfil a commitment made more than 180 years ago and work towards a partnership based on mutual respect. We all have a role to play in this partnership.
“The Hīkoi mō te Tiriti is more than a march; it’s a movement rooted in education, healing, and building a shared future.
“It challenges us to look beyond superficial equality and embrace a partnership where all voices are heard and the mana (authority) of tangata whenua is upheld.”
The first reading of the bill was advanced in a failed attempt to distract from the impact of the national Hikoi.
RNZ reports that more than 40 King’s Counsel lawyers say the Bill seeks to “rewrite the Treaty itself” and have called on Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and the coalition government to “act responsibly now and abandon” the draft law.
Vietnam is tightening control over what can be posted on global internet sites such as YouTube, raising concerns about its growing use of the law to crack down on freedom of expression.
The government issued a decree on management, provision and use of the internet and online information on Nov. 9, stipulating that cross-border social media operators such as Meta’s Facebook and Alphabet’s Google have to authenticate accounts by requiring Vietnamese users to provide a mobile phone or personal identification number.
Users have 90 days to comply, after which they won’t be able to post stories, comment, share or livestream on social networks.
The decree also requires businesses providing cross-border information to provide details on Vietnamese users to the Ministry of Information and Communications, the Ministry of Public Security and other relevant authorities upon written request.
Radio Free Asia emailed Google, along with Meta and its Facebook media representatives in Vietnam to ask about the new regulations but did not immediately receive a response.
One Hanoi-based lawyer, who didn’t want to be identified for security reasons, told RFA the new rules would limit freedom of expression in cases where users want to remain anonymous because of “sensitive” political issues.
Poet and journalist Hoang Hung said he was concerned about empowering the Ministry of Information and Communications to determine what content violates its rules, without allowing internet companies and users to seek court arbitration.
Others, including Phil Robertson, director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates, were more scathing.
“This is a blatant attack on the freedom of speech of Vietnamese people using the Internet,” he told RFA. “It once again shows that Vietnam’s Internet is becoming less and less free and is approaching the situation in China.”
Vietnam was holding 175 activists as of March for exercising rights including freedom of expression, according to international campaigners Freedom House.
Last month, a court in Hanoi sentenced YouTuber and Facebook blogger Duong Van Thai to 12 years in prison and three years’ probation for “making, storing, disseminating or propagating information, documents, and items aimed at opposing the Socialist Republic of Vietnam” under Article 117.
Critics say the loosely worded section of the criminal code is used by the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam to silence critics.
Freedom House gave Vietnam 22 out of 100 in its Freedom of the Net index this year, with 100 being the most free.
The new internet decree may also limit the spread of Vietnamese news on Facebook and other platforms. It demands that foreign social networks implement content cooperation agreements with Vietnamese news sites when using their stories, based on intellectual property regulations.
Vietnam is already forcing social media sites to prevent domestic users seeing news reports from foreign organizations, according to the U.S.-based democracy group Viet Tan.
It said about 1,000 posts and videos on its Facebook page were restricted in the first nine months of this year, 80% of them about top Communist Party leaders, including the former general secretary who died this year.
“In particular, discussion about the declining health of Nguyen Phu Trong, who died in July, had the most frequent government takedown requests,” the group said.
“Viet Tan’s Facebook page was also restricted from posting about Vuong Dinh Hue and Pham Minh Chinh,” the group said.
Hue was the chair of the National Assembly until he was forced to resign on April 26 amid a corruption investigation. Chinh is prime minister, one of the four most powerful political positions in Vietnam, who is also facing corruption allegations, the group said.
Translated by RFA Vietnamese. Edited by Mike Firn.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by RFA Vietnamese.
Hundreds of former employees of Israel lobbying groups such as AIPAC, StandWithUs and CAMERA are working in top newsrooms across the United States, writing and producing America’s news — including on Israel-Palestine, reports a new investigation.
These outlets include MSNBC, The New York Times, CNN and Fox News, says the MintPress News inquiry written by Alan MacLeod.
“Some of these former lobbyists are responsible for producing content on Israel and Palestine — a gigantic and undisclosed conflict of interest,” MacLeod writes.
“Many key US newsroom staff were also formerly Israeli spies or intelligence agents, standing in stark contrast to journalists with pro-Palestine sentiments, who have been purged en masse since October 7, 2023.”
This MintPress News investigation is part of a series detailing Israel’s influence on American media.
An earlier report exposed the former Israeli spies and military intelligence officials working in US newsrooms.
“The fight for control over the Israel-Palestine narrative has been as intense as the war on the ground itself,” writes MacLeod.
Criticised for ‘distinct bias’
“US media have been widely criticised for displaying a distinct bias towards the Israeli perspective.”
However, MacLeod said this new investigation had revealed “not only is the press skewed in favour of Israel, but it is also written and produced by Israeli lobbyists themselves”.
“This investigation unearths a network of hundreds of former members of the Israel lobby working at some of America’s most influential news organisations, helping to shape the public’s understanding of events in the Middle East.
“In the process, it helps whitewash Israeli crimes and manufacture consent for continued US participation in what a wide range of internationalorganisations have described as a genocide.”
The report author, Alan MacLeod, is senior staff writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent and writes for a range of publications.
In the 35 years since we first protested for action against climate change on the streets of London, we have often wondered what it is exactly we are trying to avert. Sometimes, notably in the wee small hours, we have tried to imagine how a destabilised climate might one day cause society to collapse. Would the lights just go out? Would supermarkets suddenly be empty of food? Would there simply be no-one to call for help? Would law and order progressively vanish from a newly barbarised world? For a long time, this all seemed like far-distant, dystopian science fiction.
Unfortunately, the catastrophic floods in Valencia, Spain offer a glimpse of how, in the absence of the kind of drastic action that is currently nowhere on the horizon, human societies will ultimately be dismantled and destroyed.
The Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, described the floods as the ‘worst natural weather disaster’ Spain has witnessed ‘this century’.
But of course, there was nothing straightforwardly ‘natural’ about what hit Turis, Chiva, Paiporta and other towns in the region. Yes, high-altitude isolated depressions, known locally as ‘cold drops’, are a painful fact of life on Spain’s Mediterranean coast, but this ‘cold drop’ was different.
The town of Turis, for example, received 771.8 mm (30.4 inches) of rainfall in 24 hours; the equivalent of a year and a half’s rain in one day. Rubén del Campo, the spokesperson for Spain’s meteorological agency Aemet, commented:
‘A relatively strong storm, a powerful downpour like those we see in spring or summer, can bring 40 mm or 50 mm. This storm was almost 10 times that amount.’
Dr Ernesto Rodríguez Camino, a senior state meteorologist and member of the Spanish Meteorological Association, observed:
‘Events of this type, which used to occur many decades apart, are now becoming more frequent and their destructive capacity is greater.’
The floods left at least 223 dead with 32 people missing. Power outages have affected 140,000 people, closing more than 50 roads and most rail lines.
An idea of the scale of the event is also provided by the fact that more than 100,000 cars were damaged or destroyed. These now constitute 100,000 obstructions weighing about 1.5 tons each that take half an hour to be removed by heavy machinery. Moving them all may take months. An estimated 4,500 businesses have been damaged, around 1,800 of them seriously.
Despite his awareness of the severity of the floods, Prime Minister Sanchez has not covered himself in glory. While 7,500 soldiers and 10,000 police officers, trucks, heavy road equipment and Chinook helicopters have been deployed, they were desperately slow to arrive. After one week, many residents were reportedly still surviving without electricity and water, and without seeing a single emergency worker. Numerous streets remained filled with debris and increasingly toxic mud.
The sight of elderly couples sleeping outside on balconies without heating, water or light one week after the rains offered a glimpse into the near future. The Spanish authorities have clearly been overwhelmed by the scale of the event. We can imagine how this will become an overwhelming problem as temperatures rise – the lights will go out one day and will stay out.
Widespread anger at the inadequate relief effort culminated in mud, rocks, sticks and bottles being thrown at the Spanish King and Queen, and Sanchez, on a visit to the disaster zone. Two bodyguards were treated for injuries: one receiving a bloody wound to the head. While the King braved the angry crowd, and the Queen was hit in the face with mud, Sanchez beat a hasty retreat as citizens screamed ‘Killer!’ and ‘Son of a bitch!’ The PM’s car was repeatedly kicked and hit with sticks that smashed the rear and side windows. At the weekend, more than 100,000 protesters took to the streets in Valencia, clashing with riot police.
Again, this offers a glimpse of how escalating climate disasters devastating communities will fuel extreme, ultimately uncontrollable, anger and violence. People who lose everything, including their loved ones, will be looking to blame local authorities and national governments, not carbon emissions, or fossil fuel companies.
Climate deniers have made much of the fact that Spanish engineers have described how the extreme loss of life was the result of a failure to properly maintain and clear flood channels. This led to blockages in the flow of floodwater which, when subsequently breached, released a tsunami-like wave of water that tore through residential areas at lower levels where it had not even been raining. But the fact is that nearly a year’s worth of rain fell in just eight hours. Dr Friederike Otto, who leads World Weather Attribution (WWA) at the Centre for Environmental Policy, Imperial College London, commented:
‘No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change.’
Dr Linda Speight, lecturer at the University of Oxford’s School of Geography and the Environment (SoGE), said:
‘Unfortunately, these are no longer rare events. Climate change is changing the structure of our weather systems creating conditions where intense thunderstorms stall over a region leading to record-breaking rainfall – a pattern that we are seeing time and time again.’
Otto adds:
‘With every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to heavier bursts of rainfall. These deadly floods are yet another reminder of how dangerous climate change has already become at just 1.3°C of warming.’
In fact, last week, the European climate agency Copernicus reported that our planet this year reached more than 1.5°C of warming compared to the pre-industrial average. The Mediterranean Sea had its warmest surface temperature on record in mid-August, at 28.47 degrees Celsius (83.25 degrees Fahrenheit).
‘I’ve heard people saying that this is the new normal. Given that we are currently on track for 2.6 degrees of warming, or thereabouts, within this century, we are only halfway to the new normal.’
The results of Valencia’s floods will also be felt elsewhere. Dr Umair Choksy, senior lecturer in management at the University of Stirling Management School, said:
‘The severe flooding in Spain could lead to shortages of many products to the UK as Spain is one of the largest exporters of fruits and vegetables to the UK.’
Shoppers have already suffered fruit and vegetable shortages in supermarkets this year in the weeks after storms wrecked Spain’s greenhouses growing food exported to Britain. The Daily Mirror reported:
‘Spain provides a quarter of Britain’s fresh food produce, mostly from Almeria, where 4,500 hectares of 13,000 hectares of greenhouses and polytunnels have been damaged by hail and floods. Cold weather in the region in February 2023 hit harvests, and saw many British supermarkets forced to ration customers to two or three items of peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, salad, cauliflower broccoli and raspberries.’
It is not hard to imagine how an escalating stream of climate disasters will one day genuinely threaten the food supply.
Top Ten Extreme Weather Events: The Role of Human-Caused Climate Change
Valencia follows a dizzying list of similar disasters in Europe and globally. Earlier in October this year, flooding killed 27 people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, causing landslides and major damage to infrastructure. In September, Storm Boris caused 26 deaths and billions of euros in damages in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria and Italy, in what was described as the worst flooding to hit Central Europe for almost 30 years. In June, Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria in southern Germany suffered massive flooding, with some areas receiving a month’s rainfall in 24 hours. In September, in the United States, Hurricane Helene was the deadliest mainland storm in two decades, claiming 233 lives, cutting off power to 4 million people and causing damage estimated at $87.9 billion.
WWA published an analysis of the ten most deadly extreme weather events of the past 20 years as a result of which more than 570,000 people died. George Lee, environment correspondent for RTE, Ireland’s national broadcaster, reported:
‘They concluded unequivocally that, yes, human-caused climate change intensified every single one of those most deadly events.’
Four of these top ten global weather disasters occurred in Europe:
‘Almost 56,000 people died during the 2010 heatwave in Russia from extreme temperatures made 3,000 to 7,000 more likely by climate change.
‘Nearly 54,000 deaths were attributed to the European heatwave of two years ago. Italy, Spain, France, Greece, Romania, Portugal and the UK were all impacted. Daily temperature peaks were up to 3.6C hotter and 17 times more likely because of climate change.
‘Then last year, 2023, yet another European heatwave made it onto the top ten, most deadly list.
‘More than 37,000 people died when mostly the same group of countries as in 2022 were impacted. Portugal and the UK escaped it this time.’
Impossibly, one might think, fossil fuels continue to benefit from record subsidies of $13m (£10.3m) a minute in 2022, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF analysis found the total subsidies for oil, gas and coal in 2022 were $7tn (£5.5tn). That is equivalent to 7% of global GDP and almost double what the world spends on education.
The Disaster 0f Corporate Media Coverage
The standard pattern of responses in corporate media coverage continues. At the more idiotic end of the spectrum, we have the likes of James Whale in the Daily Express:
‘The flooding in Spain has been a tragedy. But blaming it solely on manmade climate change is short-sighted at best, and dangerous at worst. The climate has always been changing and the planet has changed with it.’ (Whale, ‘Climate change not sole reason for disasters,’ Daily Express, 4 November 2024)
Despite the highly credible evidence cited above, one BBC report was absurdly cautious:
‘The warming climate is also likely to have contributed to the severity of the floods.’ (Our emphasis)
Elsewhere, brief references to climate change do appear, typically towards the middle or end of news reports:
‘Scientists trying to explain what happened see two likely connections to human-caused climate change. One is that warmer air holds and then dumps more rain. The other is possible changes in the jet stream – the river of air above land that moves weather systems across the globe – that spawn extreme weather.’ (Graham Keeley, ‘211 now dead after Europe’s deadliest floods in 57 years,’ Mail on Sunday, 3 November 2024)
To its credit, the Guardian went further in its leader on the floods, titled, ‘The Guardian view on climate-linked disasters: Spain’s tragedy will not be the last’:
‘In Spain, a large majority of the public recognises the threat from climate change and favours policies to address it. There, as in much of the world, catastrophic weather events that used to be regarded as “natural disasters” are now, rightly, seen instead as climate disasters. Policies that support people and places to adapt to heightened risks are urgently needed.’
Jonathan Watts wrote an Observer piece titled, ‘Spain’s apocalyptic floods show two undeniable truths: the climate crisis is getting worse and Big Oil is killing us’:
‘We are living in a time of unwelcome climate superlatives: the hottest two years in the world’s recorded history, the deadliest fire in the US, the biggest fire in Europe, the biggest fire in Canada, the worst drought in the Amazon rainforest. The list goes on. This is just the start. As long as people pump gases into the atmosphere, such records will be broken with increasing frequency until “worst ever” becomes our default expectation.’
Should we be impressed by Watts’ piece and the Guardian leader? In reality, these are the same worthy, toothless analyses we have been reading for the last three decades. The pattern is so familiar, so universal, that it is hard to perceive the true disaster of corporate media coverage. As Nietzsche said:
‘The familiar is that to which we are accustomed; and that to which we are accustomed is hardest to “know”, that is to see as a problem, that is to see as strange, as distant, as “outside us”.’ (Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘A Nietzsche Reader’, Penguin Classics, 1981, p.68)
Imagine if Valencia had been comparably devastated by an ISIS-style terror attack. Imagine if the same attackers had recently devastated Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Austria, Italy, the United States, and numerous other countries.
Yes, reporting would focus on the precise details of the attacks and their impacts. But would the agency responsible be mentioned as an afterthought towards the middle and end of news reports, and almost never mentioned in the headlines?
The terrorists responsible would be front and centre in lurid headlines, as was the case with Al-Qaeda and ISIS. Priority would be given to the blistering denunciations of Western political and military leaders, and their calls for immediate action to counter the threat. The public would be mobilised – each day, every day, for months and years – for ‘WAR!’
Almost none of this appears in corporate media in response to a rapidly growing climate threat which, as Valencia’s fate shows very well, is infinitely more serious than anything offered by terrorism.
The impact of climate change continues to be presented as a human-interest story, or as a niche scientific issue best covered by the likes of Sir David Attenborough in glossy BBC documentaries. It is not presented as an immediate, existential threat that dwarfs in importance literally every other subject – even Gaza, even Ukraine, even Trump’s re-election – on the front pages. The disastrous impacts are afforded massive, alarming coverage, but the causes are not.
The strange, fake, otherworldly quality of the ‘mainstream’ response to the crisis was captured in an encounter between a traumatised survivor of the Spanish floods and Spain’s Queen Letizia. The survivor, breathless with grief and despair, said:
‘They didn’t warn us. They didn’t warn us. That’s why this happened. Many dead. Many dead.’
Queen Letizia responded:
‘You’re right. You’re right.’
Did this despairing woman who had lost everything really need to have the truth of her experience affirmed by a member of the fabulously privileged Royal Family? Did the Queen have anything material or medical to offer a woman with nothing? Did she have any expertise on any related issue to render her reassurances meaningful?
Queen Letizia’s words, like the royal visit – like humanity’s entire stance on climate collapse – were a benevolent-seeming but vacuous public relations non-response to a desperately real problem that needs real solutions.
Associated Newspapers argued it was ‘excessive’ for such fees to be added to the costs of people who had sued it
The publisher of the Daily Mail has won a court battle after arguing that its human rights were breached by a requirement for it to pay “success fees” to lawyers representing people it had paid damages to.
Associated Newspapers Ltd (ANL) complained to the European court of human rights that it was “excessive and unfair” for it to have to pay such fees to plaintiffs who have engaged lawyers to take cases on a no win, no fee agreement.
US President-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin did not have a phone conversation about the Ukraine conflict, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.
The Washington Post claimed on Sunday that Trump called Putin after winning a new term as US president to discuss his vision regarding how the Ukrainian crisis could be deflated. Peskov said on Monday that the article was a “vivid example of the quality of information published by even some respectable outlets.”
“This absolutely does not correspond to reality. This is pure fiction. This information is simply false,” he told the press.
Kiev previously denied the claim made by the Washington Post in its piece that the Ukrainian government was informed about the phone call beforehand and gave its consent to the US-Russian engagement.
“Reports that the Ukrainian side was informed in advance of the alleged call are false,” the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman told Reuters on Sunday.
Trump had claimed while on the campaign trail that he could end the Ukraine conflict “in 24 hours,” if US voters grant him a second term in office. He reportedly intends to leverage US military and financial aid to Ukraine to pressure both Moscow and Kiev to achieve a compromise.
Russia, which currently has the advantage on the battlefield, has said that it will only accept an outcome that addresses the core causes of the Ukraine conflict. Those include NATO’s enlargement in Europe and Kiev’s discriminatory policies against ethnic Russians, according to Moscow.
The Washington Post reported a phone call between Trump and Putin based on accounts by sources “familiar with the matter,” who spoke on condition of anonymity.
An investigative journalist who was barred from attending New Zealand’s national apology to survivors of abuse in care has now been granted accreditation.
Parliament’s Speaker has now granted temporary Press Gallery accreditation to journalist Aaron Smale for tomorrow’s apology for abuse in care. He must, however, be accompanied by a Newsroom reporter at all times.
It follows a significant backlash from survivors and advocates to the initial decision.
Smale has covered abuse in care, and the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the abuse, for eight years. His work has appeared in multiple publications and websites, including Newsroom, Newshub, The Listener, The Spinoff and RNZ.
Last week, speaker Gerry Brownlee declined an application from Newsroom for Smale to report on the apology.
Parliament’s Press Gallery had asked for an explanation, as a refusal was quite rare, especially when a reporter met the gallery’s criteria for accreditation.
It was told the application was declined, with the Speaker citing Smale’s conduct on a prior occasion.
This afternoon, the Press Gallery wrote to the Speaker, requesting a more fulsome explanation.
Speaker’s about-turn
In an about-turn, the Speaker approved the application.
Speaker Gerry Brownlee in select committee. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
The initial decision to decline Smale’s application was met with backlash by survivor groups and advocates, as well as politicians and Newsroom itself.
At a media conference at Parliament in July, Smale and the Prime Minister had an exchange over the government’s law and order policies, and whether the Prime Minister would acknowledge the link between abuse and gang membership.
According to Newsroom, Smale had also attended a media event at a youth justice facility in Palmerston North, and pressed Children’s Minister Karen Chhour over whether it had been appropriate to associate the memory of the Māori Battalion with the new youth justice programme.
“The Beehive was in touch with us to say they believed he had been too forceful and too rude, in their view, in those two occasions,” Newsroom’s co-editor Tim Murphy told RNZ’s Nine to Noon programme.
Murphy said that Smale had conceded he had pushed the children’s minister “a bit far”.
“But the one in Parliament, he was asking specific questions and kept asking them of the Prime Minister and I think that became irritating to the Prime Minister,” Murphy said.
‘Most informed’ of journalists
Describing Smale as “the most informed, possibly, probably of all New Zealand journalists” on the issue of abuse in state care institutions, Murphy said political discomfort should not be a reason to exclude Smale, and the ban should not stand.
“He should be there, and he should be asking questions, because he’ll know more than virtually everybody else who could be,” he said.
Murphy said Smale’s intention for his coverage of the apology itself was to write an observational piece through the eyes of survivors, and he was not intending to “get into a grilling.”
The Royal Commission Forum, an advisory group to the commission, said denying Smale accreditation was “profoundly concerning” and a damaging decision in the lead-up to the apology.
The Green Party said it was alarmed by the move, and said it set a dangerous precedent.
“As a society that values the role of the Fourth Estate, we should value the work of journalists like Aaron, because it helps us take a critical look at where we have gone wrong and how we may move forward,” said the Green Party’s media and communications spokesperson Hūhana Lyndon.
“Barring a leading journalist from an important event like this speaks to this government’s lack of accountability. It is something we might expect in Putin’s Russia, not 21st century Aotearoa New Zealand.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says Israel has stepped up systematic attacks on journalists and media infrastructure since the start of its northern Gaza campaign.
Israeli strikes killed at least five journalists in October and Israeli forces began a smear campaign against six Al Jazeera journalists reporting on the north, the global media watchdog said in a statement.
“There are now almost no professional journalists left in the north to document what several international institutions have described as an ethnic cleansing campaign. Israel has not allowed international media independent access to Gaza in the 13 months since the war began,” CPJ said.
“It seems clear that the systematic attacks on the media and campaign to discredit those few journalists who remain is a deliberate tactic to prevent the world from seeing what Israel is doing there,” said CPJ programme director Carlos Martinez de la Serna.
“Reporters are crucial in bearing witness during a war, without them the world won’t be able to write history.”
“The situation is catastrophic and beyond description,” a camera operator for the privately owned Al-Ghad TV, Abed AlKarim Al-Zwaidi, told CPJ.
“We do not know what our fate will be in light of these circumstances.”
Media watchdogs have varying figures on the death toll of Gazan journalists, but the Palestine Media Office reports at least 184 have been killed in the Israeli war on the enclave.
Could not answer questions
The IDF responded on October 31 to CPJ’s email requesting comment on these killings, repeating previous statements it could not fully address questions if sufficient details about individuals were not provided.
The statement reiterated previous comments that it “directs its strikes only towards military targets and military operatives, and does not target civilian objects and civilians, including media organisations and journalists.”
CPJ is also investigating reports that two other journalists were killed during this time in northern Gaza.
Al Jazeera report on the Amsterdam clashes. Video: AJ
Meanwhile, the UN Special Reporteur on the Occupied Palestine Territories, Francesca Albanese, has called for Western media to be investigated over their coverage of the clashes between Israeli football fans and locals in the Dutch city of Amsterdam.
The call came after some Western media outlets failed to report on or minimised the actions of the fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv ahead of and during the confrontations on Friday.
“Once again, Western media should be investigated for the role they are playing in obscuring Israel’s atrocities,” Albanese said in a post on X.
“In other contexts, international tribunals have found media figures responsible for complicity, incitement, and other international crimes.”
Once again. Western media should be investigated for the role they are playing in obscuring Israel’s atrocities. In other contexts, intl tribunals have found media figures responsible for complicity, incitement, and other intl crimes. https://t.co/YGBA9cpxNW
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) November 9, 2024
In one video from the clashes, Israeli fans were heard singing: “Let the [Israeli army] win, and f*** the Arabs!” while another showed them tearing down a Palestinian flag from a building.
A timeline distributed on social media clearly indicated how the Israeli fans provoked the attack by their own violence, but this was largely ignored by Western media.
We are witnessing the total collapse of journalism. Instead, cognitive dissonance and blatant falsehoods reign supreme. Did anyone expect anything different from Western and Zionist media? pic.twitter.com/7vPP4dnaxm
Anger and fear have greeted the return to power of former US strongman Donald Trump, a corrupt far-white extremist coup plotter who is also a convicted felon and rapist, following this week’s shock presidential election result.
Ethnic tensions have been on the rise with members of the historically oppressed minority Black ethnic group reporting receiving threatening text messages, warning of a return to an era of enslavement.
In a startling editorial, the tension-wracked country’s paper of record, The New York Times, declared that the country had made “a perilous choice” and that its fragile democracy was now on “a precarious course”.
President-elect Trump’s victory marks the second time in eight years the extremist leader, who is awaiting sentencing after being convicted of using campaign funds to pay off a porn star he had cheated on his wife with, has defeated a female opponent from the ruling Democratic Party.
Women continue to struggle to reach the highest office in the deeply conservative nation where their rights are increasingly under attack and child marriage is widespread.
This has prompted traumatised supporters of Vice-President Kamala Harris, who had been handpicked to replace the unpopular, ageing incumbent, Joe Biden, to accuse American voters of racism to sexism.
“It’s misogyny from Hispanic men, it’s misogyny from Black . . . who do not want a woman leading them,” insisted one TV anchor, adding that there “might be race issues with Hispanics that don’t want a Black woman as president of the United States.”
Hateful tribal rhetoric
The hateful tribal rhetoric has also included social media posts calling for any people of mixed race who failed to vote for Harris to be deported and for intensification of the genocide in Gaza due to Arab-American rejection of Harris over her support for the continued provision of weapons to the brutal apartheid state committing it.
“Victory has many fathers but defeat is an orphan,” goes the saying popularised by former US President John F Kennedy, who was shot 61 years ago this month.
The reluctance to attribute the loss to the grave and gratuitous missteps made by the Harris campaign has mystified America-watchers around the world.
Harris and her supporters had tried to counter that by claiming that Trump would also be genocidal and that she would ameliorate the pain of bereaved families in the US by lowering the price of groceries.
However, the election results showed that this was not a message voters appreciated. “Genocide is bad politics,” said one Arab-American activist.
Worried over democracy
As the scale of the extremists’ electoral win becomes increasingly clear, having taken control of not just the presidency but the upper house of Congress as well, many are worried about the prospects for democracy in the US which is still struggling to emerge from Trump’s first term.
Despite conceding defeat, Harris has pledged to continue to “wage this fight” even as pro-democracy protests have broken out in several cities, raising fears of violence and political uncertainty in the gun-strewn country.
This could imperil stability in North America and sub-Scandinavian Europe where a Caucasian Spring democratic revolution has failed to take hold, and a plethora of white-wing authoritarian populists have instead come to power across the region.
However, there is a silver lining. The elections themselves were a massive improvement over the chaotic and shambolic, disputed November 2020 presidential polls which paved the way for a failed putsch two months later.
This time, the voting was largely peaceful and there was relatively little delay in releasing results, a remarkable achievement for the numeracy-challenged nation where conspiracy theorists remain suspicious about the Islamic origins of mathematics, seeing it is as a ploy by the terror group “Al Jibra” to introduce Sharia Law to the US.
In the coming months and years, there will be a need for the international community to stay engaged with the US and assist the country to try and undertake much-needed reforms to its electoral and governance systems, including changes to its constitution.
During the campaigns, Harris loyalists warned that a win by Trump could lead to the complete gutting of its weak democratic systems, an outcome the world must work hard to avoid.
However, figuring out how to support reform in the US and engage with a Trump regime while not being seen to legitimise the election of a man convicted of serious crimes, will be a tricky challenge for the globe’s mature Third-World democracies.
Many may be forced to limit direct contact with him. “Choices have consequences,” as a US diplomat eloquently put it 11 years ago.
Patrick Gathara is a Kenyan journalist, cartoonist, blogger and author. He is also senior editor for inclusive storytelling at The New Humanitarian. This article was first published by Al Jazeera and is republished under Creative Commons.
Sulaymaniyah, November 8, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists calls for full accountability in the attack on journalist Wrya Abdulkhaliq by two men, who stabbed him 21 times and hit him in the head with the butt of a gun, in his home near Iraqi Kurdistan’s Sulaymaniyah city.
“We are appalled by the brutal attack on journalist Wrya Abdulkhaliq, which left him with severe injuries to his abdomen and head,” said Yeganeh Rezaian, CPJ’s interim MENA program coordinator, in Washington, D.C. “The Kurdistan Regional Government and its Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs must deliver justice for this vicious assault.”
The attack took place on November 4, hours after Abdulkhaliq, a reporter for the online outlet Bwar Media, published a report on allegations that an official had blocked the implementation of a local electricity and water project, according to multiplenewsoutlets and the journalist, who spoke with CPJ. The report said the unnamed official was part of the Ministry of Peshmerga Affairs, which is the defense ministry in Iraq’s semi-autonomous northern region of Kurdistan.
Abdulkhaliq told CPJ and a news conference that he was in his orchard when the official’s nephew and bodyguard approached, and the bodyguard aimed a gun at him.
“I quickly grabbed his hand and pushed him back to prevent him from shooting. The nephew tried to shoot but misfired,” Abdulkhaliq told CPJ. “The nephew stabbed me deeply in the abdomen with a combat knife. Then the bodyguard prepared to shoot again but he [the nephew] stopped him, saying, ‘Let’s not shoot him; he’s already wounded and will die.’”
Bwar Media’s editor-in-chief Ibrahim Ali told CPJ that the assailants also punctured Abdulkhaliq’s tires. He said doctors told him that the journalist was stable after receiving 21 stitches in the hospital.
“Two assailants along with a military official have been arrested. We are committed to ensuring that justice is served,” Ramak Ramazan, mayor of Chamchamal District where the incident took place, told CPJ via phone, without providing further details.
CPJ’s calls to request comment from Deputy Peshmerga Minister Sarbast Lazgin were not answered.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, “War, Peace and the Presidency.” I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: As we continue to look at Donald Trump’s return to the White House, we turn now to look at what it means for the world, from Israel’s war on Gaza to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. During his victory speech, Trump vowed that he was going to “stop wars”.
But what will Trump’s foreign policy actually look like?
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by Fatima Bhutto, award-winning author of several works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Runaways, New Kings of the World. She is co-editing a book along with Sonia Faleiro titled Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, due out next year. She writes a monthly column for Zeteo.
Start off by just responding to Trump’s runaway victory across the United States, Fatima.
Fatima Bhutto on the Kamala Harris “support for genocide”. Video: Democracy Now!
FATIMA BHUTTO: Well, Amy, I don’t think it’s an aberration that he won. I think it’s an aberration that he lost in 2020. And I think anyone looking at the American elections for the last year, even longer, could see very clearly that the Democrats were speaking to — I’m not sure who, to a hall of mirrors.
They ran an incredibly weak and actually macabre campaign, to see Kamala Harris describe her politics as one of joy as she promised the most lethal military in the world, talking about women’s rights in America, essentially focusing those rights on the right to termination, while the rest of the world has watched women slaughtered in Gaza for 13 months straight.
You know, it’s very curious to think that they thought a winning strategy was Beyoncé and that Taylor Swift was somehow a political winning strategy that was going to defeat — who? — Trump, who was speaking to people, who was speaking against wars. You know, whether we believe him or not, it was a marked difference from what Kamala Harris was saying and was not saying.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: And, Fatima, you wrote a piece for Zeteo earlier this year titled “Gaza Has Exposed the Shameful Hypocrisy of Western Feminism.” So, you just mentioned the irony of Kamala Harris as, you know, the second presidential candidate who is a woman, where so much of the campaign was about women, and the fact that — you know, of what’s been unfolding on women, against women and children in Gaza for the last year. If you could elaborate?
FATIMA BHUTTO: Yeah, we’ve seen, Nermeen, over the last year, you know, 70 percent of those slaughtered in Gaza by Israel and, let’s also be clear, by America, because it’s American bombs and American diplomatic cover that allows this slaughter to continue unabated — 70 percent of those victims are women and children.
We have watched children with their heads blown off. We have watched children with no surviving family members find themselves in hospital with limbs missing. Gaza has the largest cohort of child amputees in the world. And we have seen newborns left to die as Israel switches off electricity and fuel of hospitals.
So, for Kamala Harris to come out and talk repeatedly about abortion, and I say this as someone who is pro-choice, who has always been pro-choice, was not just macabre, but it’s obscene. It’s an absolute betrayal of feminism, because feminism is about liberation. It’s not about termination.
And it’s about protecting women at their most vulnerable and at their most frightened. And there was no sign of that. You know, we also saw Kamala Harris bring out celebrities. I mean, the utter vacuousness of bringing out Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé and others to talk about being a mother, while mothers are being widowed, are being orphaned in Gaza, it was not just tone deaf, it seemed to have a certain hostility, a certain contempt for the suffering that the rest of us have been watching.
I’d also like to add a point about toxic masculinity. There was so much toxicity in Kamala Harris’s campaign. You know, I watched her laugh with Oprah as she spoke about shooting someone who might enter her house with a gun, and giggling and saying her PR team may not like that, but she would kill them.
You don’t need to be a man to practice toxic masculinity, and you don’t need to be white to practice white supremacy, as we’ve seen very clearly from this election cycle.
AMY GOODMAN: And yet, Fatima Bhutto, if you look at what Trump represented, and certainly the Muslim American community, the Arab American community, Jewish progressives, young people, African-Americans certainly understood what Trump’s policy was when he was president.
And it’s rare, you know, a president comes back to serve again after a term away. It’s only happened once before in history.
But you have, for example, Trump moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem. You have an illegal settlement named after Trump in the West Bank. The whole question of Netanyahu and his right-wing allies in Israel pushing for annexation of the West Bank, where Trump would stand on this.
And, of course, you have the Abraham Accords, which many Palestinians felt left them out completely. If you can talk about this? These were put forward by Trump and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who, when the massive Gaza destruction was at its height, talked about Gaza as waterfront real estate.
FATIMA BHUTTO: Absolutely. There’s no question that Trump has been a malign force, not just when it concerns Palestinians, but, frankly, out in the world. But I would argue there’s not very much difference between what these two administrations or parties do. The difference is that Trump doesn’t have the gloss and the charisma of an Obama or — I mean, I can’t even say that Biden has charisma, but certainly the gloss.
Trump says it. They do it. The difference — I can’t really tell the difference anymore.
We saw the Biden administration send over 500 shipments of arms to Israel, betraying America’s own laws, the fact that they are not allowed to export weapons of war to a country committing gross violations of human rights. We saw Bill Clinton trotted out in Michigan to tell Muslims that, actually, they should stop killing Israelis and that Jews were there before them.
I mean, it was an utterly contemptuous speech. So, what is the difference exactly?
We saw Bernie Sanders, who was mentioned earlier, write an op-ed in The Guardian in the days before the election, warning people that if they were not to vote for Kamala Harris, if Donald Trump was to get in, think about the climate crisis. Well, we have watched Israel’s emissions in the first five months of their deadly attack on Gaza release more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations release in a year.
So, I don’t quite see that there’s a difference between what Democrats allow and what Trump brags about. I think it’s just a question of crudeness and decorum and politeness. One has it, and one doesn’t. In a sense, Trump is much clearer for the rest of the world, because he says what he’s going to do, and, you know, you take him at his word, whereas we have been gaslit and lied to by Antony Blinken on a daily basis now since October 7th.
Every time that AOC or Kamala Harris spoke about fighting desperately for a ceasefire, we saw more carnage, more massacres and Israel committing crimes with total impunity. You know, it wasn’t under Trump that Israel has killed more journalists than have ever been killed in any recorded conflict. It’s under Biden that Israel has killed more UN workers than have ever been killed in the UN’s history. So, I’m not sure there’s a difference.
And, you know, we’ll have to wait to see in the months ahead. But I don’t think anyone is bracing for an upturn. Certainly, people didn’t vote for Kamala Harris. I’m not sure they voted for Trump. We know that she lost 14 million votes from Biden’s win in 2020. And we know that those votes just didn’t come out for the Democrats. Some may have migrated to Trump. Some may have gone to third parties. But 14 million just didn’t go anywhere.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Fatima, if you could, you know, tell us what do you think the reasons are for that? I mean, the kind of — as you said, because it is really horrifying, what has unfolded in Gaza in the last 13 months. You’ve written about this. You now have an edited anthology that you’re editing, co-editing. You know, what do you think accounts for this, the sheer disregard for the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza?
FATIMA BHUTTO: It’s a total racism on the part not just of America, but I’m speaking of the West here. This has been betrayed over the last year, the fact that Ukraine is spoken about with an admiration, you know, Zelensky is spoken about with a sort of hero worship, Ukrainian resisters to Russia’s invasion are valorised.
You know, Nancy Pelosi wore a bracelet of bullets used by the Ukrainian resistance against Trump [sic]. But Palestinians are painted as terrorists, are dehumanised to such an extent. You know, we saw that dehumanisation from the mouths of Bill Clinton no less, from the mouths of Kamala Harris, who interrupted somebody speaking out against the genocide, and saying, “I am speaking.”
What is more toxically masculine than that?
We’ve also seen a concerted crackdown in universities across the United States on college students. I’m speaking also here of my own alma mater of Columbia University, of Barnard College, that called the NYPD, who fired live ammunition at the students. You know, this didn’t happen — this extreme response didn’t happen in protests against apartheid. It didn’t happen in protests against Vietnam in quite the same way.
And all I can think is, America and the West, who have been fighting Muslim countries for the last 25, 30 years, see that as acceptable to do so. Our deaths are acceptable to them, and genocide is not a red line.
And, you know, to go back to what what was mentioned earlier about the working class, that is absolutely ignored in America — and I would make the argument across the West, too — they have watched administration after, you know, president and congressmen give billions and billions of dollars to Ukraine, while they have no relief at home.
They have no relief from debt. They have no relief from student debt. They have no medical care, no coverage. They’re struggling to survive. And this is across the board. And after Ukraine, they saw billions go to Israel in the same way, while they get, frankly, nothing.
AMY GOODMAN: Fatima Bhutto, we want to thank you so much for being with us, award-winning author of a number of works of fiction and nonfiction, including The Runaways and New Kings of the World, co-editing a book called Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, due out next year, writes a monthly column for Zeteo.
Coming up, we look at Trump’s vow to deport as many as 20 million immigrants and JD Vance saying, yes, US children born of immigrant parents could also be deported.
Press freedom is a pillar of American democracy. But political attacks on US-based journalists and news organisations pose an unprecedented threat to their safety and the integrity of information.
Less than 48 hours before election day, Donald Trump, now President-elect for a second term, told a rally of his supporters that he wouldn’t mind if someone shot the journalists in front of him.
“I have this piece of glass here, but all we have really over here is the fake news. And to get me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news. And I don’t mind that so much,” he said.
A new survey from the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) highlights a disturbing tolerance for political bullying of the press in the land of the First Amendment. The findings show that this is especially true among white, male, Republican voters.
We commissioned this nationally representative survey of 1020 US adults, which was fielded between June 24 and July 5 2024, to assess Americans’ attitudes to the press ahead of the election. We are publishing the results here for the first time.
More than one-quarter (27 percent) of the Americans we polled said they had often seen or heard a journalist being threatened, harassed or abused online. And more than one-third (34 percent) said they thought it was appropriate for senior politicians and government officials to criticise journalists and news organisations.
Tolerance for political targeting of the press appears as polarised as American society. Nearly half (47 percent) of the Republicans surveyed approved of senior politicians critiquing the press, compared to less than one-quarter (22 percent) of Democrats.
Our analysis also revealed divisions according to gender and ethnicity. While 37 percent of white-identifying respondents thought it was appropriate for political leaders to target journalists and news organisations, only 27 percent of people of colour did. There was also a nine-point difference along gender lines, with 39 percent of men approving of this conduct, compared to 30 percent of women.
It appears intolerance towards the press has a face — a predominantly white, male and Republican-voting face.
Press freedom fears This election campaign, Trump has repeated his blatantly false claim that journalists are “enemies of the people”. He has suggested that reporters who cross him should be jailed, and signalled that he would like to revoke broadcast licences of networks.
Relevant, too, is the enabling environment for viral attacks on journalists created by unregulated social media companies which represent a clear threat to press freedom and the safety of journalists. Previous research produced by ICFJ for Unesco concluded that there was a causal relationship between online violence towards women journalists and physical attacks.
While political actors may be the perpetrators of abuse targeting journalists, social media companies have facilitated their viral spread, heightening the risk to journalists.
We’ve seen a potent example of this in the current campaign, when Haitian Times editor Macollvie J. Neel was “swatted” — meaning police were dispatched to her home after a fraudulent report of a murder at the address — during an episode of severely racist online violence.
Trajectory of Trump attacks Since the 2016 election, Trump has repeatedly discredited independent reporting on his campaign. He has weaponised the term “fake news” and accused the media of “rigging” elections.
“The election is being rigged by corrupt media pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect [Hillary Clinton] president,” he said in 2016. With hindsight, such accusations foreshadowed his false claims of election fraud in 2020, and similar preemptive claims in 2024.
His increasingly virulent attacks on journalists and news organisations are amplified by his supporters online and far-right media. Trump has effectively licensed attacks on American journalists through anti-press rhetoric and undermined respect for press freedom.
In 2019, the Committee to Protect Journalists found that more than 11 percent of 5400 tweets posted by Trump between the date of his 2016 candidacy and January 2019 “. . . insulted or criticised journalists and outlets, or condemned and denigrated the news media as a whole”.
After being temporarily deplatformed from Twitter for breaching community standards, Trump launched Truth Social, where he continues to abuse his critics uninterrupted. But he recently rejoined the platform (now X), and held a series of campaign events with X owner and Trump backer Elon Musk.
The failed insurrection on January 6, 2021, rammed home the scale of the escalating threats facing American journalists. During the riots at the Capitol, at least 18 journalists were assaulted and reporting equipment valued at tens of thousands of dollars was destroyed.
This election cycle, Reporters Without Borders logged 108 instances of Trump insulting, attacking or threatening the news media in public speeches or offline remarks over an eight-week period ending on October 24.
Meanwhile, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has recorded 75 assaults on journalists since January 1 this year. That’s a 70 percent increase on the number of assaults captured by their press freedom tracker in 2023.
A recent survey of hundreds of journalists undertaking safety training provided by the International Women’s Media Foundation found that 36 percent of respondents reported being threatened with or experiencing physical violence. One-third reported exposure to digital violence, and 28 percent reported legal threats or action against them.
US journalists involved in ongoing ICFJ research have told us that they have felt particularly at risk covering Trump rallies and reporting on the election from communities hostile towards the press. Some are wearing protective flak jackets to cover domestic politics. Others have removed labels identifying their outlets from their reporting equipment to reduce the risk of being physically attacked.
And yet, our survey reveals a distinct lack of public concern about the First Amendment implications of political leaders threatening, harassing, or abusing journalists. Nearly one-quarter (23 percent) of Americans surveyed did not regard political attacks on journalists or news organisations as a threat to press freedom. Among them, 38 percent identified as Republicans compared to just 9 percent* as Democrats.
The anti-press playbook Trump’s anti-press playbook appeals to a global audience of authoritarians. Other political strongmen, from Brazil to Hungary and the Philippines, have adopted similar tactics of deploying disinformation to smear and threaten journalists and news outlets.
Such an approach imperils journalists while undercutting trust in facts and critical independent journalism.
History shows that fascism thrives when journalists cannot safely and freely do the work of holding governments and political leaders to account. As our research findings show, the consequences are a society accepting lies and fiction as facts while turning a blind eye to attacks on the press.
*The people identifying as Democrats in this sub-group are too few to make this a reliable representative estimate.
Note: Nabeelah Shabbir (ICFJ deputy director of research) and Kaylee Williams (ICFJ research associate) also contributed to this article and the research underpinning it. The survey was conducted by Langer Research Associates in English and Spanish. ICFJ researchers co-developed the survey and conducted the analysis.
TikTok is currently facing off against the federal government in court as they fight to keep their platform operational after the Biden administration forced them to either sell or shut down. Also, a pro-business front group is creating classroom materials for teachers across the country – teaching them that corporations shouldn’t have to pay taxes. Mike […]
I fear that by the time I go to bed democracy in the United States will be imperilled by a man, the nature of which the Founding Fathers could never envisage when creating the protective elements of the constitution.
The risks will not be to Americans alone. The world will become a different place with Donald J Trump once again becoming president.
My trepidation is tempered only by the fact that no-one can be sure he has the numbers to gain sufficient votes in the electoral college that those same founding fathers devised as a power-sharing devise between federal and state governments. They could not have foreseen how it could become the means by which a fraction of voters could determine their country’s future.
Or perhaps that is contributing to my disquiet. No-one has been able to give me the comfort of predicting a win by Kamala Harris.
In fact, none of the smart money has been ready to call it one way or the other.
The New Zealand Herald’s business editor at large, Liam Dann, predicted a Trump win the other day but his reasoning was more visceral than analytical:
Trump provides an altogether more satisfying prescription for change. He allows them to vent their anger. He taps into the rage bubbling beneath America’s polite and friendly exterior. He provides an outlet for frustration, which is much simpler than opponents to his left can offer.
That’s why he might well win. Momentum seems to be going his way.
He is a master salesman and he is selling into a market that is disillusioned with the vague promises they’ve been hearing from mainstream politicians for generations.
Heightened anxiety
Few others — including his brother Corin, who is in the US covering the election for Radio New Zealand — have been willing to make the call and today dawned no clearer.
That may be one reason for my heightened anxiety . . . the lack of certainty one way or the other.
All of our major media outlets have had staff in the States for the election (most with some support from the US government) and each has tried to tap into the “mood of the people”, particularly in the swing states. Each has done a professional job, but it has been no easy task and, to be honest, I have no idea what the real thinking of the electorate might be.
One of my waking nightmares is that the electorate isn’t thinking at all. In which case, Liam Dann’s reading of the entrails might be as good a guide as any.
I have attempted to cope with the avalanche of reportage, analysis and outright punditry from CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. I have tried to get a more detached view from the BBC, Guardian, and (God help me) Daily Mail. I have made my head hurt playing with The Economist’s poll prediction models.
I am no closer to predicting a winner than anyone else.
However, I do know what scares me.
If Donald Trump takes up residence in the White House again, the word “freedom” will lose its true meaning and become a captured phrase ring-fencing what the victor and his followers want.
Validating disinformation
“Media freedom” will validate disinformation and make truth harder to find. News organisations that seek to hold Trump and a compliant Congress to account will be demonised, perhaps penalised.
As president again, Trump could rend American society to a point where it may take decades for the wound to heal and leave residual feelings that will last even longer. That will certainly be the case if he attempts to subvert the democratic process to extend power beyond his finite term.
I worry for the rest of the world, trying to contend with erratic foreign policies that put the established order in peril and place the freedom of countries like Ukraine in jeopardy. I dread the way in which his policies could empower despots like Vladimir Putin. By definition, as a world power, the United States’ actions affect all of us — and Trump’s influence will be pervasive.
You may think my fears could be allayed by the possibility that he will not return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Were Kamala Harris facing any other candidate, that would certainly be the case. However, Donald Trump is not any other candidate and he has demonstrated an intense dislike of losing.
I am alarmed by the possibility that, if he fails to get the required 270 electoral votes, Donald Trump could again cry “voter fraud” and light the touch paper offered to him by the likes of the Proud Boys. They had a practice run on January 6, 2021. If there is a next time, it could well be worse.
Sometimes, my wife accuses me of unjustified optimism. When I think of the Americans I have met and those I know well, I recall that the vast majority of them have had a reasonable amount of common sense. Some have had it in abundance. I can only hope that across that nation common sense prevails today.
I am more than a little worried, however, that on this occasion my wife might be right.
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. Dr Ellis publishes the website knightlyviews.com where this commentary — written before the election results started coming in — was first published and it is republished by Asia Pacific Report with permission.
China has refrained from commenting on the U.S. election, insisting it is its internal affair, and called on Wednesday for respect and cooperation but its state-controlled media has reflected concerns and hopes, with one newspaper calling for the new president, whoever it may be, to stop a deterioration in ties.
Foreign ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told a press briefing, as reports indicated that former president Donald Trump was heading for victory, that China’s policy towards the United States was consistent.
“We will continue to view and handle Sino-U.S. relations in accordance with the principles of mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and win-win cooperation,” Mao said.
But the China Daily, in a commentary titled “Onus on new US president to improve ties,” expressed frustration with “U.S. hawks” for the deterioration in Sino-US relations.
“No matter who wins the election, the result will have a far-reaching impact on the world, not least because the winner will decide the U.S.’s China policy,” Chinese academics Fu Suixin and Ni Feng wrote in the commentary.
Both of the U.S. presidential candidates had played the “China card” to win votes, the academics said.
While U.S. voters “generally do not understand or care about foreign policy, the country’s elites have always formulated the foreign policy and shaped public opinion,” they said.
“Both Democrats and Republicans make China a scapegoat for the U.S. domestic mess,” they wrote. “The voters have to pay the cost of the deteriorating China-U.S. relations.”
“The new U.S. administration, therefore, should give up the illusion of having a consensual China policy, and reflect on the costs of undermining Sino-U.S. relations over the past eight years — and honestly tell the American people the truth about China,” they said.
The China Daily published an opinion piece on China-U.S. relations on Tuesday written by the former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan, Djoomart Otorbaev, titled “Rebuilding Sino-US trust crucial for world.”
Otorbaev said in recent years hostility between the U.S. and China “has escalated to the point where the possibility of not just a cold war but even a hot war is becoming threateningly real.”
“Beijing and Washington are competing with each other in nearly all economic fields,” Otorbaev wrote, adding that their growing rivalry prevents the world’s two largest economies from working together.
While not directly referring to the U.S. presidential election, Otorbaev called on the U.S. and China to “agree to coexist peacefully and engage in fair competition,” as well as manage friction and confrontations calmly and avoid conflict.
“The primary issue between Beijing and Washington is mutual distrust, making short-term cooperation unlikely. Nevertheless, both sides should prioritize discussions and swiftly implement effective confidence-building measures and start doing it as soon as possible,” Otorbaev wrote.
TheGlobal Times, the sister publication of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece People’s Daily, warned of fears of violence and unrest, and the impact of that on global financial markets.
Democratic Senator Cory Booker blocked a piece of bipartisan legislation that was sponsored by Republican senator Ted Cruz, just so Cruz couldn’t get a much-needed victory ahead of November’s election. Then, Congress promised that they would enact strong legislation regulating the use of artificial intelligence ahead of the election, but so far those promises have […]
The editorial, published on Saturday, was only the Times’ latest attack on the former president in the run-up to the election, but the searing indictment was all the more brutal for its brevity.
“You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump’s corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: It’s his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he’s re-elected, the G.O.P. won’t restrain him. Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents. He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote.”
The dismissal of Trump by The Times was in contrast to two other major US newspapers, both owned by billionaires — The Washington Post and the LA Times — which last month controversially refused to make an editorial call.
“You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead.” The brief editorial in The New York Times on Saturday, Image: NYT screenshot APR
By Catrin Gardiner, Queensland University of Technology
In the middle of the Pacific, Fiji journalists are transforming their practice, as newsrooms around Suva are requiring journalists to become multimedia creators, shaping stories for the digital age.
A wave of multimedia journalists is surfacing in Fijian journalism culture, fostered during university education, and transitioning seamlessly into the professional field for junior journalists.
University of the South Pacific’s technical editor and digital communication officer Eliki Drugunalevu believes that multimedia journalism is on the rise for two reasons.
“The first is the fact that your phone is pretty much your newsroom on the go.”
With the right guidance and training in using mobile phone apps, “you can pretty much film your story from anywhere”, he says.
The second reason is that reliance on social media platforms gives “rise to mobile journalism and becoming a multimedia journalist”.
Drugunalevu says changes to university journalism curriculum are not “evolving fast enough” with the industry.
Need for ‘parallel learning’
“There needs to be parallel learning between what the industry is going through and what the students are being taught.”
Mobile journalism is growing increasingly around the world. In Fiji this is particularly evident, with large newsrooms entertaining the concept of a single reporter taking on multiple roles.
Fijian Media Association’s vice-president and Fiji Times editor-in-chief Fred Wesley says one example of the changing landscape is that the Times is now providing all its journalists with mobile phones.
“While there is still a photography department, things are slowly moving towards multimedia journalists.”
Wesley says when no photographers are available to cover a story with a reporter, the journalists create their own images with their mobile phones.
Journalists working in the Fiji Times newsroom, which is among the last few remaining news organisations in Fiji to have a dedicated photography department. Image: Catrin Gardiner, Queensland University of Technology
The Fiji Broadcasting Corporation (FBC) also encourages journalists to take part in all types of media including, online, radio, and television, even advertising for multimedia journalists. This highlights the global shift of replacing two-person teams in newsrooms.
Nevertheless, the transition to multimedia journalists is not as positive as commonly thought. Complaints against multimedia journalism come from journalists who receive additional tasks, leading to an increase in workload.
FBC advertises for multimedia journalists, reflecting the new standard in newsrooms. Image: FBC TV/Facebook/QUT
Preference for print
Former print journalist turned multimedia journalist at FBC, Litia Cava says she prefers focusing on just print.
She worked a lot less when she was just working in a newspaper, she says.
“When I worked for the paper, I would start at one,” she says. “But here I start working when I walk in.”
Executives at major Fijian news companies, such as Fiji TV’s director of news, current affairs and sports, Felix Chaudhary, also complain about the lack of equipment in their newsrooms to support this wave of multimedia journalism.
“The biggest challenge is the lack of equipment and training,” Chaudhary says.
Fiji TV is doing everything it can to catch up to world standards and provide journalists with the best equipment and training to prepare them for the transition from traditional to multimedia journalism.
“We receive a lot of assistance from PACMAS and Internews,” Chaudhary says. “However, we are constantly looking for more training opportunities. The world is already moving towards that, and we just have to follow suit or get left behind.”
More confidence
Fortunately for young Fijian journalists, Islands Business managing editor Samantha Magick says a lot of younger journalists are more confident to go out and produce and write their own stories.
“It’s the education now,” she says. “All the journalists coming through are multimedia, so not as challenging for them.”
University of South Pacific student journalist Brittany Louise says the practical learning of all the different media in her journalism course will be beneficial for her future.
“I think that’s a major plus,” she says. “You already have some sort of skills so it helps you with whatever different equipment it may be.”
Catrin Gardiner was a student journalist from the Queensland University of Technology who travelled to Fiji with the support of the Australian government’s New Colombo Plan Mobility Programme. This article is published in a partnership of QUT with Asia Pacific Report, Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and The University of the South Pacific.
During a rally on the final Sunday before the presidential election, Republican nominee Donald Trump told an audience gathered in the battleground state of Pennsylvania that he wouldn’t mind if a gunman shot through the group of reporters covering the event. After discussing the protective glass surrounding him, the former president said a would-be assassin “would have to shoot through the…
A high-level, seven-member delegation from People’s Daily, China’s most influential newspaper, has been hosted by the University of the South Pacific at its Laucala Campus in Fiji.
The delegation, headed by deputy editor-in-chief Fang Jiangshan, emphasised the longstanding bilateral ties between Fiji and China, spanning trade, economics, and cultural exchange.
People’s Daily is the official newspaper of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). It provides direct information on the policies and viewpoints of the CCP in multiple languages.
With a circulation of between 3 and 4 million, People’s Daily is one of the world’s top 10 largest newspapers, according to UNESCO.
USP’s deputy head of the School of Pacific Arts, Communication, and Education (SPACE), Associate Professor Shailendra Singh, led the university’s team that met the delegation recently.
During the meeting at the Confucius Institute, discussions covered China-Fiji relations, people-to-people connections, and youth cooperation. Both sides explored potential collaboration in news production, talent cultivation, and academic exchanges.
Dr Singh, who is also head of journalism at USP, welcomed the opportunity for collaboration, noting the growing calls within the Pacific media sector for stronger ties with Asia.
Similarities highlighted
He highlighted similarities between Asia and the Pacific in terms of history, culture, and development, which provide a natural basis for enhanced cooperation.
Dr Singh also serves on the advisory committee of the Confucius Centre and highlighted that while contact had been limited due to distance and language barriers, recent efforts to foster closer relations were promising.
Fang reflected on the historical ties between China and Fiji, noting that next year marks the 50th anniversary of diplomatic relations.
He underscored the importance of language in fostering mutual understanding and praised the Confucius Institute’s role in promoting cultural and educational exchanges.
Since its inception in 2012, the institute has been a vital bridge between China and Fiji, supporting cultural cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative.
Deputy chief editor Fang also commended the institute’s efforts during the covid-19 pandemic in 2020, when it continued offering online courses to strengthen the bond between the two nations.
Western publics are being subjected to a campaign of psychological warfare, where genocide is classed as ‘self-defence’ and opposition to it ‘terrorism’. Jonathan Cook reports as the world marked the International Day to End Impunity for Crimes against Journalists at the weekend.
ANALYSIS:By Jonathan Cook
Israel knew that, if it could stop foreign correspondents from reporting directly from Gaza, those journalists would end up covering events in ways far more to its liking.
They would hedge every report of a new Israeli atrocity – if they covered them at all – with a “Hamas claims” or “Gaza family members allege”. Everything would be presented in terms of conflicting narratives rather than witnessed facts. Audiences would feel uncertain, hesitant, detached.
Israel could shroud its slaughter in a fog of confusion and disputation. The natural revulsion evoked by a genocide would be tempered and attenuated.
For a year, the networks’ most experienced war reporters have stayed put in their hotels in Israel, watching Gaza from afar. Their human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians.
That is why Western audiences have been forced to relive a single day of horror for Israel, on October 7, 2023, as intensely as they have a year of greater horrors in Gaza — in what the World Court has judged to be a “plausible” genocide by Israel.
That is why the media have immersed their audiences in the agonies of the families of some 250 Israelis — civilians taken hostage and soldiers taken captive — as much as they have the agonies of 2.3 million Palestinians bombed and starved to death week after week, month after month.
That is why audiences have been subjected to gaslighting narratives that frame Gaza’s destruction as a “humanitarian crisis” rather than the canvas on which Israel is erasing all the known rules of war.
Western media’s human-interest stories, always at the heart of war reporting, have focused on the far more limited suffering of Israelis than the vast catastrophe unfolding for Palestinians. Image: www.jonathan-cook.net
While foreign correspondents sit obediently in their hotel rooms, Palestinian journalists have been picked off one by one — in the greatest massacre of journalists in history.
Israel is now repeating that process in Lebanon. On the night of October 24, it struck a residence in south Lebanon where three journalists were staying. All were killed.
In an indication of how deliberate and cynical Israel’s actions are, it put its military’s crosshairs on six Al Jazeera reporters last month, smearing them as “terrorists” working for Hamas and Islamic Jihad. They are reportedly the last surviving Palestinian journalists in northern Gaza, which Israel has sealed off while it carries out the so-called “General’s Plan”.
Israel wants no one reporting its final push to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza by starving out the 400,000 Palestinians still there and executing anyone who remains as a “terrorist”.
These six join a long list of professionals defamed by Israel in the interests of advancing its genocide — from doctors and aid workers to UN peacekeepers.
Sympathy for Israel Perhaps the nadir of Israel’s domestication of foreign journalists was reached last month in a report by CNN. Back in February whistleblowing staff there revealed that the network’s executives have been actively obscuring Israeli atrocities to portray Israel in a more sympathetic light.
In a story whose framing should have been unthinkable — but sadly was all too predictable — CNN reported on the psychological trauma some Israeli soldiers are suffering from time spent in Gaza, in some cases leading to suicide.
Committing a genocide can be bad for your mental health, it seems. Or as CNN explained, its interviews “provide a window into the psychological burden that the war is casting on Israeli society”.
In its lengthy piece, titled “He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him”, the atrocities the soldiers admit committing are little more than the backdrop as CNN finds yet another angle on Israeli suffering. Israeli soldiers are the real victims — even as they perpetrate a genocide on the Palestinian people.
One bulldozer driver, Guy Zaken, told CNN he could not sleep and had become vegetarian because of the “very, very difficult things” he had seen and had to do in Gaza.
What things? Zaken had earlier told a hearing of the Israeli Parliament that his unit’s job was to drive over many hundreds of Palestinians, some of them alive.
CNN reported: “Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza.”
Doubtless some Nazi concentration camp guards committed suicide in the 1940s after witnessing the horrors there — because they were responsible for them. Only in some weird parallel news universe, would their “psychological burden” be the story.
After a huge online backlash, CNN amended an editor’s note at the start of the article that originally read: “This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting.”
Readers, it was assumed, would find the suicide of Israeli soldiers upsetting, but apparently not the revelation that those soldiers were routinely driving over Palestinians so that, as Zaken explained, “everything squirts out”.
Banned from Gaza Finally, a year into Israel’s genocidal war, now rapidly spreading into Lebanon, some voices are being raised very belatedly to demand the entry of foreign journalists into Gaza.
This week — in a move presumably designed, as November’s elections loom, to ingratiate themselves with voters angry at the party’s complicity in genocide — dozens of Democratic members of the US Congress wrote to President Joe Biden asking him to pressure Israel to give journalists “unimpeded access” to the enclave.
Don’t hold your breath.
Western media have done very little themselves to protest their exclusion from Gaza over the past year — for a number of reasons.
Given the utterly indiscriminate nature of Israel’s bombardment, major outlets have not wanted their journalists getting hit by a 2000lb bomb for being in the wrong place.
That may in part be out of concern for their welfare. But there are likely to be more cynical concerns.
Having foreign journalists in Gaza blown up or executed by snipers would drag media organisations into direct confrontation with Israel and its well-oiled lobby machine.
The response would be entirely predictable, insinuating that the journalists died because they were colluding with “the terrorists” or that they were being used as “human shields” — the excuse Israel has rolled out time and again to justify its targeting of doctors in Gaza and UN peacekeepers in Lebanon.
But there’s a bigger problem. The establishment media have not wanted to be in a position where their journalists are so close to the “action” that they are in danger of providing a clearer picture of Israel’s war crimes and its genocide.
The media’s current distance from the crime scene offers them plausible deniability as they both-sides every Israeli atrocity.
In previous conflicts, western reporters have served as witnesses, assisting in the prosecution of foreign leaders for war crimes. That happened in the wars that attended the break-up of Yugoslavia, and will doubtless happen once again if Russian President Valdimir Putin is ever delivered to The Hague.
But those journalistic testimonies were harnessed to put the West’s enemies behind bars, not its closest ally.
The media do not want their reporters to become chief witnesses for the prosecution in the future trials of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, at the International Criminal Court. The ICC’s Prosecutor, Karim Khan, is seeking arrest warrants for them both.
After all, any such testimony from journalists would not stop at Israel’s door. They would implicate Western capitals too, and put establishment media organisations on a collision course with their own governments.
The Western media does not see its job as holding power to account when the West is the one committing the crimes.
Censoring Palestinians Journalist whistleblowers have gradually been coming forward to explain how establishment news organisations — including the BBC and the supposedly liberal Guardian — are sidelining Palestinian voices and minimising the genocide.
An investigation by Novara Media recently revealed mounting unhappiness in parts of The Guardian newsroom at its double standards on Israel and Palestine.
Its editors recently censored a commentary by preeminent Palestinian author Susan Abulhawa after she insisted on being allowed to refer to the slaughter in Gaza as “the holocaust of our times”.
Senior Guardian columnists such as Jonathan Freedland made much during Jeremy Corbyn’s tenure as leader of the Labour party that Jews, and Jews alone, had the right to define and name their own oppression.
That right, however, does not appear to extend to Palestinians.
As staff who spoke to Novara noted, The Guardian’s Sunday sister paper, The Observer, had no problem opening its pages to British Jewish writer Howard Jacobson to smear as a “blood libel” any reporting of the provable fact that Israel has killed many, many thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza.
One veteran journalist there said: “Is The Guardian more worried about the reaction to what is said about Israel than Palestine? Absolutely.”
Another staff member admitted it would be inconceivable for the paper to be seen censoring a Jewish writer. But censoring a Palestinian one is fine, it seems.
Other journalists report being under “suffocating control” from senior editors, and say this pressure exists “only if you’re publishing something critical of Israel”.
According to staff there, the word “genocide” is all but banned in the paper except in coverage of the International Court of Justice, whose judges ruled nine months ago that a “plausible” case had been made that Israel was committing genocide. Things have got far worse since.
Whistleblowing journalists Similarly, “Sara”, a whistleblower who recently resigned from the BBC newsroom and spoke of her experiences to Al Jazeera’s Listening Post, said Palestinians and their supporters were routinely kept off air or subjected to humiliating and insensitive lines of questioning.
Some producers have reportedly grown increasingly reluctant to bring on air vulnerable Palestinians, some of whom have lost family members in Gaza, because of concerns about the effect on their mental health from the aggressive interrogations they were being subjected to from anchors.
According to Sara, BBC vetting of potential guests overwhelmingly targets Palestinians, as well as those sympathetic to their cause and human rights organisations. Background checks are rarely done of Israelis or Jewish guests.
She added that a search showing that a guest had used the word “Zionism” — Israel’s state ideology — in a social media post could be enough to get them disqualified from a programme.
Even officials from one of the biggest rights group in the world, the New York-based Human Rights Watch, became persona non grata at the BBC for their criticisms of Israel, even though the corporation had previously relied on their reports in covering Ukraine and other global conflicts.
Israeli guests, by contrast, “were given free rein to say whatever they wanted with very little pushback”, including lies about Hamas burning or beheading babies and committing mass rape.
An email cited by Al Jazeera from more than 20 BBC journalists sent last February to Tim Davie, the BBC’s director-general, warned that the corporation’s coverage risked “aiding and abetting genocide through story suppression”.
Upside-down values These biases have been only too evident in the BBC’s coverage, first of Gaza and now, as media interest wanes in the genocide, of Lebanon.
Headlines — the mood music of journalism, and the only part of a story many of the audience read — have been uniformly dire.
For example, Netanyahu’s threats of a Gaza-style genocide against the Lebanese people last month if they did not overthrow their leaders were soft-soaped by the BBC headline: “Netanyahu’s appeal to Lebanese people falls on deaf ears in Beirut.”
Reasonable readers would have wrongly inferred both that Netanyahu was trying to do the Lebanese people a favour (by preparing to murder them), and that they were being ungrateful in not taking up his offer.
It has been the same story everywhere in the establishment media. In another extraordinary, revealing moment, Kay Burley of Sky News announced last month the deaths of four Israeli soldiers from a Hezbollah drone strike on a military base inside Israel.
With a solemnity usually reserved for the passing of a member of the British royal family, she slowly named the four soldiers, with a photo of each shown on screen. She stressed twice that all four were only 19 years old.
Sky News seemed not to understand that these were not British soldiers, and that there was no reason for a British audience to be especially disturbed by their deaths. Soldiers are killed in wars all the time — it is an occupational hazard.
And further, if Israel considered them old enough to fight in Gaza and Lebanon, then they were old enough to die too without their age being treated as particularly noteworthy.
But more significantly still, Israel’s Golani Brigade to which these soldiers belonged has been centrally involved in the slaughter of Palestinians over the past year. Its troops have been responsible for many of the tens of thousands of children killed and maimed in Gaza.
Each of the four soldiers was far, far less deserving of Burley’s sympathy and concern than the thousands of children who have been slaughtered at the hands of their brigade. Those children are almost never named and their pictures are rarely shown, not least because their injuries are usually too horrifying to be seen.
It was yet more evidence of the upside-down world the establishment media has been trying to normalise for its audiences.
It is why statistics from the United States, where the coverage of Gaza and Lebanon may be even more unhinged, show faith in the media is at rock bottom. Fewer than one in three respondents — 31 percent — said they still had a “great deal or fair amount of trust in mass media”.
Crushing dissent Israel is the one dictating the coverage of its genocide. First by murdering the Palestinian journalists reporting it on the ground, and then by making sure house-trained foreign correspondents stay well clear of the slaughter, out of harm’s way in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
And as ever, Israel has been able to rely on the complicity of its Western patrons in crushing dissent at home.
Last week, a British investigative journalist, Asa Winstanley, an outspoken critic of Israel and its lobbyists in the UK, had his home in London raided at dawn by counter-terrorism police.
Though the police have not arrested or charged him — at least not yet — they snatched his electronic devices. He was warned that he is being investigated for “encouragement of terrorism” in his social media posts.
Police told Middle East Eye that his devices had been seized as part of an investigation into suspected terrorism offences of “support for a proscribed organisation” and “dissemination of terrorist documents”.
The police can act only because of Britain’s draconian, anti-speech Terrorism Act.
Section 12, for example, makes the expression of an opinion that could be interpreted as sympathetic to armed Palestinian resistance to Israel’s illegal occupation — a right enshrined in international law but sweepingly dismissed as “terrorism” in the West — itself a terrorism offence.
Those journalists who haven’t been house-trained in the establishment media, as well as solidarity activists, must now chart a treacherous path across intentionally ill-defined legal terrain when talking about Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Winstanley is not the first journalist to be accused of falling foul of the Terrorism Act. In recent weeks, Richard Medhurst, a freelance journalist, was arrested at Heathrow airport on his return from a trip abroad. Another journalist-activist, Sarah Wilkinson, was briefly arrested after her home was ransacked by police.
Their electronic devices were seized too.
Meanwhile, Richard Barnard, co-founder of Palestine Action, which seeks to disrupt the UK’s supply of weapons to Israel’s genocide, has been charged over speeches he has made against the genocide.
It now appears that all these actions are part of a specific police campaign targeting journalists and Palestinian solidarity activists: “Operation Incessantness”.
The message this clumsy title is presumably supposed to convey is that the British state is coming after anyone who speaks out too loudly against the British government’s continuing arming and complicity in Israel’s genocide.
Notably, the establishment media have failed to cover this latest assault on journalism and the role of a free press — supposedly the very things they are there to protect.
The raid on Winstanley’s home and the arrests are intended to intimidate others, including independent journalists, into silence for fear of the consequences of speaking up.
This has nothing to do with terrorism. Rather, it is terrorism by the British state.
Once again the world is being turned upside down.
Echoes from history The West is waging a campaign of psychological warfare on its populations: it is gaslighting and disorientating them, classing genocide as “self-defence” and opposition to it a form of “terrorism”.
This is an expansion of the persecution suffered by Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who spent years locked up in London’s Belmarsh high-security prison.
His unprecedented journalism — revealing the darkest secrets of Western states — was redefined as espionage. His “offence” was revealing that Britain and the US had committed systematic war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Now, on the back of that precedent, the British state is coming after journalists simply for embarrassing it.
Late last month I attended a meeting in Bristol against the genocide in Gaza at which the main speaker was physically absent after the British state failed to issue him an entry visa.
The missing guest — he had to join us by zoom — was Mandla Mandela, the grandson of Nelson Mandela, who was locked up for decades as a terrorist before becoming the first leader of post-apartheid South Africa and a feted, international statesman.
Mandla Mandela was until recently a member of the South African Parliament.
A Home Office spokesperson told Middle East Eye that the UK only issued visas “to those who we want to welcome to our country”.
Media reports suggest Britain was determined to exclude Mandela because, like his grandfather, he views the Palestinian struggle against Israeli apartheid as intimately linked to the earlier struggle against South Africa’s apartheid.
The echoes from history are apparently entirely lost on officials: the UK is once again associating the Mandela family with terrorism. Before it was to protect South Africa’s apartheid regime. Now it is to protect Israel’s even worse apartheid and genocidal regime.
The world is indeed turned on its head. And the West’s supposedly “free media” is playing a critical role in trying to make our upside-down world seem normal.
That can only be achieved by failing to report the Gaza genocide as a genocide. Instead, Western journalists are serving as little more than stenographers. Their job: to take dictation from Israel.
Jonathan Cook is an award-winning British journalist. He was based in Nazareth, Israel, for 20 years and returned to the UK in 2021. He is the author of three books on the Israel-Palestine conflict, including Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (2008). In 2011, Cook was awarded the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism for his work on Palestine and Israel. This article was first published in Middle East Eye and is republished with the author’s permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
Hillary Clinton is back in the news, this time for calling for stronger regulation of the media – especially social media. But what she isn’t mentioning is the fact that her husband actually signed the bill that gave online media companies a free pass from any kind of liability. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript […]
The Palau Media Council has condemned a political lawsuit against the publisher of the Island Times as an “assault on press freedom” with the Pacific country facing an election on Tuesday.
In a statement yesterday, the council added that the lawsuit, filed by Surangel and Sons Co. against Times publisher Leilani Reklai over her newspaper’s coverage of tax-related documents that surfaced on social media, was an attempt to undermine the accountability that was vital to democracy.
The statement also said the lawsuit raised “critical concerns about citizens’ access to information and freedom of the press.
“This lawsuit, combined with government’s statements endorsing that Island Times reported mis-information on its coverage of the tax related document and the decision to ban Island Times from Surangel and Sons [distribution] outlets, raises critical concerns about citizens’ access to information and the freedom of the press — both of which are cornerstones of a democratic society,” the statement said.
“The council sees this legal action as an assault on press freedom and an attempt to undermine the accountability that is vital to democracy.”
The statement said that Reklai, one of Palau’s senior journalists, was being targeted simply for reporting on documents that were already in the public domain.
“She did not originate the information but responsibly conveyed what these documents suggested, raising questions about the current administration’s narrative on corporate tax contributions,” the council said.
‘Journalistic duty’
“Reporting on such information is a journalistic duty to ensure transparency in tax policies and government incentives impacting the private sector.
“The Island Times, by publishing these documents, has provided a platform for clarifying public understanding of the new PGST tax law’s impact on major corporations and the actual tax contributions of Surangel and Sons.
“These issues are clearly within the public’s right to know, and the council emphasises that media plays a crucial role in reporting such findings and promoting informed debate.
The council said it stood in solidarity with Reklai and all journalists who strived to find and uphold the truth.
“In a healthy democracy, a free and open press is essential for informed citizens and responsible governance.”
Palau’s largest newspaper is being sued for defamation by the company of President Surangel Whipps Jr’s father, just days ahead of general elections in the Pacific nation.
Surangel and Sons alleges “negligence and defamation” by the Island Times and its editor Leilani Reklai for an article published on Tuesday with “false and unsubstantiated allegations,” owner Surangel Whipps Sr said in a press release on Thursday.
Reklai has rejected the company’s allegations and said the “lawsuit is trying to control how media here in Palau tells a story”, a news article about the case in the Island Times reported on Friday.
“I feel like we are being intimidated, we are being forced to speak a certain narrative rather than present diverse community perspectives,” said Reklai, who is also a stringer for BenarNews.
The Micronesian nation of 17,000 people — 650 km north of Papua New Guinea — goes to the polls on November 5. Whipps Jr’s rival is his brother-in-law Tommy Remengesau Jr, who was president from 2001 to 2009 and 2013 to 2021.
The controversy comes after Palau was top of the inaugural 2023 Pacific Media Freedom Index of 14 island countries that highlighted the region’s media facing significant political and economic pressures, bribes and corruption, as well as self-censorship.
Island Times editor Leilani Reklai . . . fears the lawsuit could have serious consequences for the media in Palau and bankrupt the newspaper. Image: Stefan Armbruster
Island Times reported on Friday the suit is seeking compensation and punitive damages and that the company asserts the “monetary awards should be substantial enough to prevent similar conduct from the newspaper and Reklai in future”.
Surangel and Sons financial details — leaked from the country’s tax office — were posted on social media last weekend, prompting heated online debate over how much it paid.
A new corporate and goods and services tax system introduced by Whipps Jr’s government is currently being rolled out in Palau and its merits have been a focus of election campaigning.
The company in a statement said its “privacy rights had been violated,” the tax details were obtained illegally, posted online without consent, and some of the figures had been altered.
Motivation ‘confusing voters’
“The motivation behind the circulation of this document is clearly for misinformation and disinformation to confuse voters. In the end Surangel and Sons is not running for office. Unfortunately, it has been victimised by this smear campaign,” the company posted on social media.
Island Times in a 225-word, front-page story headlined “Surangel & Sons condemns tax report leak as privacy violation” reported the company’s statement on Tuesday. It also quoted financial details from the leaked documents and accompanying commentary.
Whipps Jr. in a press conference on Wednesday accused the Island Times of publishing disinformation.
“Island Times continues to print political propaganda, it’s not accurate,” Whipps Jr said, calling for a correction to be published.
The lawsuit against the paper and its editor was served the next day.
Whipps Jr’s spokesperson told BenarNews any questions related to the lawsuit should be directed to the parties involved.
Eightieth birthday celebrations for Surangel Whipps Sr (left) with his son Surangel Whipps Jr in February 2020. Image: Diaz Broadcasting Palau screenshot BenarNews
Surangel and Sons was founded in 1980 by Whipps Sr, who also served as Palau’s president briefly in 2005 and for two years from 2007.
Business ‘offers everything’
The privately-owned business “offers everything from housing design and automotive repair to equipment rentals, groceries, and scuba gear” through its import, sales, construction and travel arms, the company’s website says.
Previously as CEO, Whipps Jr transformed the company from a family store to one of Palau’s largest and most diversified businesses, employing more than 700 people.
His LinkedIn profile states he finished as CEO in January 2021, after 28 years in the position and in the month he became president. His spokesperson did not respond to questions from BenarNews about if he still retains any direct financial or other links to the company.
Surangel and Sons said the revelation of sensitive business information threatens their competitive advantage and puts jobs at risk.
Palau’s Minister of Finance Kaleb Udui Jr told the president’s press conference on Wednesday an investigation was underway, a special prosecutor would be appointed and apologized for the leak to the company.
“I would hope the media would make extra effort to help educate the public and discourage misinformation and breaches of privacy of the tax office and any other government office,” Udui said, confirming the tax documents had been altered before being posted on social media.
He said tax office staff have previously been warned about leaks and ensuring data confidentiality, as breaches negatively impact the confidence of foreign investors in Palau.
Explanation rather than leak
Whipps Jr added that the newspaper should have explained the tax system instead of reporting the leaked information.
He also accused Island Times of failure to disclose a paid advertisement in this week’s edition of the paper for his political opponent.
“I’m disappointed in the Island Times, because there was an article that was not an article, a paid advertisement,” Whipps Jr said about a colourful blue and yellow election campaign graphic.
Island Times told BenarNews it was not usual practice to put “Paid Advertisement” on advertisements but it would review its policy for political campaign material.
Reklai fears the lawsuit could have serious consequences for the media in Palau and bankrupt Island Times, the paper reported.
“If I don’t stand up to this, it sends a signal to all journalists that they risk facing claims for damages for powerful companies and government officials while carrying out their work,” she said.
Palau has two newspapers and four radio stations and enshrined in its constitution are protections for journalists, including a guarantee they cannot be jailed for refusing to disclose sources.
Surangel and Sons said they would no longer sell Island Times through their outlets.
Another Palestinian journalist, Bilal Rajab, of al-Quds al-Youm TV channel, has been killed in an Israeli bombardment in the Gaza Strip, confirms the Gaza Media Office.
Al Jazeera Arabic earlier reported that a strike in the vicinity of the Firas market in Gaza City had killed three people, among whom local sources said was Rajab.
The office said the total number of journalists and media workers who have been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, now stands at 183.
Photojournalist Bilal Rajab of al-Quds al-Youm TV . . . killed in a strike near Gaza’s popular Firas market. Image: Palestinian Information Centre
It called on the international community to intervene to stop the killing of Palestinian journalists reporting on the war in Gaza, which is the deadliest conflict for media workers.
“In his message for the day, the secretary-general underscores that a free press is fundamental to human rights, to democracy and to the rule of law,” Dujarric said.
‘Alarming rate of fatalities’
“Recent years have seen an alarming rate of fatalities in conflict zones, particularly in Gaza, which has seen the highest number of killings of journalists and media workers in a war in decades.
“In his message, he warned that journalists in Gaza have been killed at a level unseen by any conflict in modern times.
“The ongoing ban preventing international journalists from Gaza suffocates the truth even further,” he said.
