New Zealand’s media and communications minister is defending pulling out of pre-booked interviews about her portfolio, saying they would have been “boring” for the interviewers.
Lee is set to take a paper to cabinet soon, setting out her plans for the portfolio. She has been consulting with coalition partners before she takes the paper to cabinet committee.
Yesterday, she said that given the confidentiality of the process, there was nothing more she could say in the one-on-one interviews.
“I have actually talked about what my plans are, but not in detail. And I think talking about the same thing over and over, just seemed, like, you know . . . ”
Lee said she received advice from the prime minister’s office, but the decision to pull out was ultimately hers.
‘A lot of interviews’
“I’ve been doing quite a lot of interviews, and I couldn’t sort of elaborate more on the paper and the work that I’m actually doing until a decision has actually been made, and I felt that it would be boring for him to sit there for me to tell him, ‘No, no, I can’t really elaborate, you’re going to have to wait until the decision’s made’,” she said.
It is believed Lee was referring to either the NZ Herald’s Shayne Currie or RNZ’s Colin Peacock.
Asked whether it was up to her to decide what was boring or not, Lee repeated she had done a lot of interviews.
“I didn’t think it was fair for me to sit down with someone on a one-to-one to say the same thing over to them,” she said.
Lee said her diary had been fairly full, due to commitments with her other portfolios.
The prime minister said his office’s advice to Lee was that she may want to wait until she got feedback from the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill process, which was still going through select committee.
‘The logical time’
“Our advice from my office, as I understand it, was, ‘Look, you’re gonna have more to say after we get through the digital bargaining bill, and that’s the logical time to sit down for a long-format interview,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said.
Labour broadcasting spokesperson Willie Jackson said he believed the prime minister’s office was trying to protect Lee from scrutiny.
“There’s absolutely no doubt she’s struggling. If you look at her first response when she fronted media, she had quite a cold response,” he said.
“That’s changed, of course now she’s giving all her aroha to everyone. So they’ve been working on her, and so they should, because the media deserve better and the public deserve better.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New York, March 19, 2024—Nepali authorities must swiftly and impartially investigate the attack on journalist Padam Prasad Pokhrel and hold the perpetrators to account, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Tuesday.
On the evening of February 28, up to 15 police officers attacked Pokhrel, editor-in-chief of the news website Pranmancha, while the journalist was filming officers allegedly displacing street vendors by force in the Sundhara area of the capital Kathmandu, according to local advocacy groups Media Action Nepal and Freedom Forum, as well as a statement by the Working Journalists Association of Nepal, reviewed by CPJ.
Pokhrel was filming a baton charge by the Kathmandu metropolitan police when the officers surrounded him, beat him with batons, and kicked him for around ten minutes, he told CPJ, adding that he shouted that he was a journalist and displayed his press identification card. The journalist told CPJ that officers confiscated his phone, camera, and laptop, along with other items worth around 11,000 rupees (US $82) that he purchased earlier that day.
Pokhrel said officers then dragged him into a vehicle and continued to beat him for around 15 minutes until they reached a local police station, where he was left outside and later taken to the hospital by officers with the Nepal central police force. Pokhrel said he was treated at the National Trauma Center for a torn ligament in his right leg and significant bruising and muscle pain throughout his body.
“Nepali authorities must complete a credible and transparent investigation into the assault on journalist Padam Prasad Pokhrel and return any items seized during the attack,” said Beh Lih Yi, CPJ’s Asia program coordinator. “The public has a right to be informed about police violence in their communities, and journalists must be able to cover such incidents without fear of reprisal.”
Following protests by local journalists, the Kathmandu Metropolitan City administration appointed an investigative committee to probe the incident and told the journalist that the findings would be revealed on Friday, March 22, Pokhrel said.
Authorities returned Pokhrel’s phone on Monday but said they were unaware of the location of his other items, the journalist told CPJ.
CPJ called and messaged Bhim Prasad Dhakal, spokesperson of the Nepal Police; Dinesh Mainali, spokesperson of the Kathmandu metropolitan police; and Pradip Pariyar, chief administrative officer of the Kathmandu Metropolitan City administration, but did not receive a response.
Ismail al-Ghoul, an Al Jazeera Arabic correspondent who was held for 12 hours at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, says Israeli forces rounded up Palestinian journalists at the facility and made them kneel on the ground for hours, while naked and blindfolded.
“The occupation forces handcuffed and blindfolded us for about 12 hours from the early morning to the afternoon, until the arrival of Israeli military intelligence units,” he said, according to reports by Al Jazeera.
“They interrogated the journalists that work at this location. We were left in the room we were kept in, where we stayed for several hours, in cold conditions, naked and blindfolded.”
Al-Ghoul, who was also reported as having been “severely beaten”, said he had heard that some of his colleagues had been released but he did not have enough information on their whereabouts.
The journalists were seized in a fresh attack on al-Shifa hospital after the medical facility had been previously targeted last November. The hospital has been sheltering thousands of Gazans taking cover from the five-month war.
“Journalists play an essential role in a war. They are the eyes and the ears that we need to document what’s happening and with every journalist killed, with every journalist arrested, our ability to understand what’s happening in Gaza diminishes significantly,” said Jodie Ginsberg, chief executive officer of the CPJ.
Replying to questions from Al Jazeera correspondent Biesan Abu Kwaik, Haq said: “We stand against any harassment of journalists anywhere in the world. And certainly we do so in this instance.
“Our sympathies go to your colleague as well as to all the other journalists who suffered from any violence during the course of this incident.”
The Plight of Palestinian Prisoners –– documentary. Video: Al Jazeera
Another Al Jazeera Arabic journalist, Usaid Siddiqui, said Ismail al-Ghoul was just one of many journalists in Gaza targeted by Israel
“After speaking to him, I can say he is doing fine,” Siddiqui said.
How Al Jazeera reported the Israeli arrest of journalist Ismail al-Ghoul at al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. Image: AJ screenshot APR
“He had been blindfolded and handcuffed for 12 hours [by Israeli forces] and was taken away for interrogation.
“Journalists are one of the main focuses of the Israeli military campaign in Gaza.
“Ismail has been reporting on Israeli attacks in Gaza since day one of the fighting.
“He has been able to continue reporting despite all the ongoing efforts by the Israeli military to silence the narrative of Palestinians around the world.”
Stormed at dawn
When interviewed by Al Jazeera after his release, al-Ghoul said Israeli forces had stormed al-Shifa Hospital at dawn during intense fighting.
“They started by destroying media equipment and arresting journalists gathered in a room used by media teams,” he said.
“The journalists were stripped of their clothes and were arrested and placed in a room inside the medical compound. They were forced to lie on their stomachs as they were blindfolded and their hands tied.”
Al-Ghoul said Israeli soldiers would open fire to “scare us if there was any movement”.
After about 12 hours, they were taken for interrogation.
Following waiting in line for investigation, an elderly man had been released from inside the hospital and he needed help to leave the compound.
The journalist said he had volunteered to help the man and was able to accompany him until they both got out the compound and he was free.
Al-Ghoul later heard that some of his colleagues had been released but said he did not have enough information about where they were.
ComGen @UNLazzarini: the highest number of people ever recorded as facing human-made famine, along with mass killings, constant harm & creation of conditions that gut life of humanity has a name: Genocide.
— Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt (@FranceskAlbs) March 18, 2024
Israel wants ‘no truth-tellers’ Meanwhile, the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories said Israeli authorities were preventing entry of a top UN official into the Gaza Strip to “hide their violations of international law”.
“The highest number of people ever recorded as facing human-made famine, along with mass killings, constant harm and creation of conditions that gut life of humanity has a name: Genocide,” Francesca Albanese said in a post on X.
“Israel wants no witnesses, no truth-tellers,” she said, referencing Israel’s blocking of Phillipe Lazzarini, the head of UNRWA, from entering Gaza.
Pacific Media Watch has compiled this media freedom report from Al Jazeera and other news services.
Earthwise presenters Lois and Martin Griffiths on Plains FM 96.9 community radio talk to Dr David Robie, a New Zealand author, independent journalist and media educator with a passion for the Asia-Pacific region.
David talks about the struggle to raise awareness of critical Pacific issues such as West Papuan self-determination and the fight for an independent “Pacific voice” in New Zealand media.
He outlines some of the challenges in the region and what motivated him to work on Pacific issues.
Listen to the Earthwise interview on Plains FM 96.9 radio.
Interviewee: Dr David Robie, deputy chair of the Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and a semiretired professor of Pacific journalism. He founded Pacific Journalism Review and the Pacific Media Centre.
Interviewers: Lois and Martin Griffiths, Earthwise programme
The Committee to Protect Journalists and seven other international press freedom organizations have called on Slovakian authorities to immediately withdraw a draft law which would effectively end the public broadcaster’s independence.
The Slovak Television and Radio bill would dissolve the state-owned Radio and Television of Slovakia (RTVS) and replace it with a new, politically controlled body.
The eight organizations called on the European Union to urgently address this grave threat to press freedom, which contradicts its recently voted Media Freedom Act, warning that the bill could become law before elections to the European Parliament in June.
The future of Aotearoa New Zealand television news and current affairs is in the balance at the two biggest TV broadcasters — both desperate to cut costs as their revenue falls.
The government says it is now preparing policy to modernise the media, but they do not want to talk about what that might be — or when it might happen.
On Monday, TVNZ’s 1News was reporting — again — on the crisis of cuts to news and current affairs in its own newsroom.
In fact, it rocked the entire media industry because only one week earlier the US-based owners of Newshub had announced a plan to close that completely by mid year.
No-one was completely shocked by either development given the financial strife the local industry is known to be in.
But it seems no-one had foreseen that within weeks only Television New Zealand and Whakaata Māori would be offering national news to hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders who still tune in at 6pm or later on demand.
Likewise the prospect of no TV current affairs shows (save for those on Whakaata Māori) and no consumer affairs watchdog programme Fair Go, three years shy of a half century as one of NZ most popular local TV shows of all time.
Yvonne Tahana’s report for 1News on Monday pointed out Fair Go staff were actually working on the next episode when that staff meeting was held on Monday.
All this raised the question — what is a “fair go” according to the government, given TVNZ is state-owned?
Media-shy media minister? After the shock announcements last week and the week before, Minister of Media and Communications Melissa Lee seemed not keen to talk to the media about it.
The minister did give some brief comments to political reporters confronting her in the corridors in Parliament after the Newshub news broke. But a week went by before she spoke to RNZ’s Checkpoint about it — and revealed that in spite of a 24-hour heads-up from Newhub’s offshore owner — Warner Bros Discovery — Lee did not know they were planning to shut the whole thing.
By the time the media minister was on NewstalkZB’s Drive show just one hour later that same day, the news was out that TVNZ news staff had been told to “watch their inboxes” the next morning.
In spite of the ‘no surprises’ convention, the minister said she was out of the loop on that too.
After that, it was TV and radio silence again from the minister in the days that followed.
“National didn’t have a broadcasting policy. We’re still not sure what they’re looking at. She needs to basically scrub up on what she’s going to be saying on any given day and get her head around her own portfolio, because at the moment she’s not looking that great,” The New Zealand Herald’s political editor Claire Trevett told RNZ’s Morning Report at the end of the week.
By then the minister’s office had told Mediawatch she would speak with us on Thursday. Good news — at the time.
Lee has long been the National Party’s spokesperson on media and broadcasting and Mediawatch has been asking for a chat since last December.
Last Sunday, TVNZ’s Q+A show told viewers Lee had declined to be interviewed for three weeks running.
Frustration on social media
At Newshub — where staff have the threat of closure hanging over them — The AM Show host Lloyd Burr took to social media with his frustration.
“There’s a broadcasting industry crisis and the broadcasting minister is MIA. We’ve tried for 10 days to get her on the show to talk about the state of it, and she’s either refused or not responded. She doesn’t even have a press secretary. What a shambles . . . ”
A switch of acting press secretaries mid-crisis did seem to be a part of the problem.
But one was in place by last Monday, who got in touch in the morning to arrange Mediawatch’s interview later in the week.
But by 6pm that day, they had changed their minds, because “the minister will soon be taking a paper to cabinet on her plan for the media portfolio”.
“We feel it would better serve your listeners if the minister came on at a time when she could discuss in depth about the details of her plan for the future of media, as opposed to the limited information she will be able to provide this Thursday,” the statement said.
“When the cabinet process has been completed, the minister is able to say more. That time is not now.”
The minister’s office also pointed out Lee had done TV and broadcast interviews over the past week in which she had “essentially traversed as much ground as possible right now”.
What clues can we glean from those?
Hints of policy plans Even though this government is breaking records for changes made under urgency, it seems nothing will happen in a hurry for the media.
“I have been working with my officials to understand and bring the concerns from the sector forward, to have a discussion with my officials to work with me to understand what the levers are that the government can pull to help the sector,” Lee told TVNZ Breakfast last Monday.
Communication and Media Minister Melissa Lee on plans for the ailing industry. Video: 1News
A slump in commercial revenue is a big part of broadcasters’ problems. TVNZ’s Anna Burns Francis asked the minister if the government might make TVNZ — or some of its channels — commercial-free.
“I think we are working through many options as to what could potentially help the sector rather than specifically TVNZ,” Lee replied.
One detail Lee did reveal was that the Broadcasting Act 1989 was in play — something the previous government also said was on its to do list but did not get around to between 2017 and 2023.
It is a pretty broad piece of legislation which sets out the broadcasting standards regime and complaints processes, electoral broadcasting and the remit of the government broadcasting funding agency NZ On Air.
But it is not obvious what reform of that Act could really do for news media sustainability.
Longstanding prohibitions
The minister also referred to longstanding prohibitions on TV advertising on Sunday mornings and two public holidays. Commercial broadcasters have long called for these to be dumped.
But a few more slots for whiteware and road safety ads is not going to save news and current affairs, especially in this economy.
That issue also came up in a 22-minute-long chat with The Platform, which the minister did have time for on Wednesday.
In it, host Sean Plunket urged the minister not to do much to ease the financial pain of the mainstream media, which he said were acting out of self-interest.
He was alarmed when Lee told him the playing field needed to be leveled by extending regulation applied to TV and radio to online streamers as well — possibly through Labour’s Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill.
“Are you seriously considering the government imposing tax on certain large companies and paying that money directly to your chosen media companies that are asking for it?” Plunket asked.
“I have actually said that I oppose the bill but what you have to do as the minister is listen to the sector. They might have some good ideas.”
When Plunket suggested Lee should let the market forces play out, Lee said that was not desirable.
Some of The Platform’s listeners were not keen on that, getting in touch to say they feared Lee would bail the media out because she had “gone woke”.
That made the minister laugh out loud.
“I’m so far from woke,” she assured Sean Plunket.
A free-to-air and free-to-all future? At the moment, TVNZ is obliged to provide easily accessible services for free to New Zealanders.
TVNZ’s Breakfast show asked if that could change to allow TVNZ to charge for its most popular or premium stuff?
The response was confusing:
“Well ready accessibility would actually mean that it is free, right? Or it could be behind a paywall — but it could still be available because they have connectivity,” Lee replied.
“A paywall would imply that you have to pay for it — so that wouldn’t be accessible to all New Zealanders, would it?” TVNZ’s Anna Burns-Francis asked.
“For a majority, yes — but free to air is something I support.”
When Lee fronted up on The AM Show for 10 minutes she said she was unaware they had been chasing a chat with her for 10 days.
Host Melissa Chan-Green bridled when the minister referred to the long-term decline of linear real time TV broadcast as a reason for the cuts now being proposed.
“To think that Newshub is a linear TV business is to misunderstand what Newshub is, because we have a website, we have an app, we have streaming services, we’ve done radio, we’ve done podcasts — so how much more multimedia do you think businesses need to be to survive?
“I’m not just talking about that but there are elements of the Broadcasting Act which are not a fair playing field for everyone. For example, there are advertising restrictions on broadcasters where there are none on streamers,” she said.
Where will the public’s money go? On both Breakfast and The AM Show, Lee repeated the point that the effectiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars of public money for broadcasting is at stake — and at risk if the broadcasters that carry the content are cut back to just a commercial core.
“The government actually puts in close to I think $300 million a year,” Lee said.
“Should that funding be extended to include the client of current affairs programs are getting cut?” TVNZ’s Anna Burns-Francis asked her.
“I have my own views as to what could be done but even NZ on Air operates at arm’s length from me as Minister of Media and Communications,” she replied.
It is only in recent years that NZ On Air has been in the business of allocating public money to news and journalism on a contestable basis.
When the system was set up in 35 years ago that was out of bounds for the organisation, because broadcasters becoming dependent on the public purse was thought to be something to avoid — because of the potential for political interference through either editorial meddling or turning off the tap.
That began to break down when TV broadcasters stopped funding programs about politics which did not pull a commercial crowd — and NZ started picking up the tab from a fund for so-called special interest shows which would not be made or screened in a wholly-commercial environment.
Online projects with a public interest purpose have also been funded by in recent years in addition to programmes for established broadcasters — as NZ on Air declared itself “platform agnostic”.
Public Interest Journalism Fund
In 2020, NZ on Air was given the job of handing out $55 million over three years right across the media from the Public Interest Journalism Fund.
That was done at arm’s length from government, but in opposition National aggressively opposed the fund set up by the previous Labour government.
Senior MPs — including Lee — claimed the money might make the media compliant — and even silent — on anything that might make the then-Labour government look bad.
It would be a big surprise if Lee’s policy plan for cabinet includes direct funding for the news and current affairs programmes which could vanish from our TV screens and on-demand apps within weeks.
This week, NZ on Air chief executive Cameron Harland responded to the crisis with a statement.
“We are in active discussions with the broadcasters and the wider sector to understand what the implications of their cost cutting might be.
“This is a complex and developing situation and whilst we acknowledge the uncertainty, we will be doing what we can to ensure our funding is utilised in the best possible ways to serve local audiences.“
They too are in a holding pattern waiting for the government to reveal its plans.
But as the minister herself said this week, the annual public funding for media was substantial — and getting bigger all the time as the revenues of commercial media companies shrivelled.
And whatever levers the minister and her officials are thinking of pulling, they need to do decisively — and soon.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
New legislation is working its way through Congress that could result in the popular social media app TikTok being BANNED in the United States. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
The Elders chair Mary Robinson has highlighted the unique leverage that the United States has with Israel and called on the Biden administration to stop giving it military assistance for its assault on the Gaza Strip.
Robinson, the former president of Ireland, conducted an on-camera interview with Irish public broadcaster Raidió Teilifís Éireann just before her country’s Prime Minister, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, was due to meet US President Joe Biden on Friday at the White House.
“Yes the humanitarian situation is utterly catastrophic and dire, reducing a people to famine, undermining all our values, but the message I want to deliver on behalf of the Elders is a direct message to our Taoiseach Leo Varadkar,” Robinson said.
“We need a ceasefire and we need the opening up of Gaza with every avenue . . . for aid to get in.”
In his meeting with Biden, Varadkar “should not spend too much time on the dire humanitarian situation, and the ships, and the rest of it,” she said.
“He has the opportunity to deliver a political message in a very direct way. The United States can influence Israel by not continuing to provide arms. It has provided a lot of the arms . . . that have been used on the Palestinian people.”
Elders’ Chair Mary Robinson says President Biden should not continue to provide arms to Israel.
“The United States can influence Israel by not continuing to provide arms… The Government of Prime Minister Netanyahu is on the wrong side of history, completely. It’s making the… pic.twitter.com/fN3ptMjktz
More than 31,490 killed
Since Israel declared war in response to the Hamas-led attack on October 7, Israeli forces have killed at least 31,490 people in Gaza — including people seeking food aid — and wounded another 73,439. The assault has also devastated civilian infrastructure, including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques, and displaced the vast majority of the enclave’s 2.3 million residents.
Israel is also restricting desperately needed humanitarian aid into the Hamas-governed territory, and Palestinians have begun starving to death — which people around the world point to as further proof that the Israeli government is defying an International Court of Justice (ICJ) order to prevent genocidal acts as the South Africa-led case moves forward at The Hague.
The United States gives Israel $3.8 billion in annual military aid, and since October 7, Biden — who faces a genocide complicity case in federal court — has fought for another $14.3 billion while his administration has repeatedly bypassed Congress to arm Israeli forces.
Critics, including some lawmakers, argue that continuing to send weapons to Israel violates US law.
The far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “is on the wrong side of history, completely — is making the United States complicit in reducing a people to famine, making the world complicit,” Robinson told RTÉ. “We’re all watching. It is absolutely horrific what is happening.”
“So Leo Varadkar has access today to President Biden,” she said. “He must use this completely politically at all levels with the speaker of the House, with everyone, to make it clear that Israel depends on the United States for military aid and for money. That’s what will change everything.”
“We need a ceasefire and we need the opening up of Gaza with every avenue . . . for aid to get in, because the situation’s so bad, and we need the political way forward, which is the two-state solution,” she added.
‘Only US can put pressure’
“So we need an Israeli government agreeing to that, and only the United States can put the pressure [on Israel].”
Robinson, who spent five years as the United Nations high commissioner for human rights after her presidency ended in 1997, has been part of the Elders since Nelson Mandela, the late anti-apartheid South African president, announced the group in 2007.
She has made multiple statements during the five-month Israeli assault on Gaza, including calling on Israel to comply with the ICJ’s January ruling and warning Biden the previous month that his “support for Israel’s indiscriminate bombing of Gaza is losing him respect all over the world.”
“The US is increasingly isolated, with allies like Australia, Canada, India, Japan, and Poland switching their votes in the UN General Assembly to support an immediate humanitarian cease-fire,” she said in December.
“The destruction of Gaza is making Israel less safe. President Biden’s continuing support for Israel’s actions is also making the world less safe, the Security Council less effective, and US leadership less respected. It is time to stop the killing.”
Speaking to press at the Oval Office alongside Biden on Friday, Varadkar said that he was “keen to talk about the situation in Gaza,” and noted his view “that we need to have a ceasefire as soon as possible to get food and medicine in” to the besieged territory.
“On Sunday, the taoiseach will also gift Mr Biden a bowl of shamrock as part of an annual tradition to mark St Patrick’s Day,” RTÉ reported. “Mr Varadkar started the trip on Monday, and since then has spoken several times . . . about how he will use the special platform of the St Patrick’s Day visit to press Mr Biden to back a ceasefire in the Gaza, while also thanking the US for leadership in support for Ukraine.”
Jessica Corbett is a senior editor and writer for Common Dreams, an independent progressive nonprofit news service. Republished under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) licence.
“So one of the big challenges facing the broadcast sector here and around the world is trying to get people to switch off radios and to switch on computers so that everything can be done down the broadband lines, which would be significantly cheaper.”
Katavake-McGrath says shifting to a streaming or digital service could even the playing field for services like Radio Apna, Whakaata Māori, Coconet and Tagata Pasifika Plus.
‘A massive buffet’
“Today, as people use YouTube and Facebook a lot more, where they’ve got just a plethora of things that they can click in and out of, our news world might become more like that as well, where there’s just a massive buffet, and on that buffet, PMN sits with exactly the same prominence as TV1 news.”
More than 3.3 million people listen to commercial radio each week, with Pacific audiences making up 8 percent of that audience.
Speaking at last year’s Pacific Media Fono, veteran Tagata Pasifika executive producer John Utanga said: “We make content for us, and we put the faces, voices and issues of Pacific people on screens made by Pacific people for Pacific people.”
Pacific Media Network (PMN) chief executive Don Mann says media entities must be “brave and courageous” in their decision making.
“The worst thing we can do is just trundle along, doing the same old, same old, and end up just being an irrelevant organisation where our community are elsewhere, while we’re still sitting in an old way of doing things.”
Regional matters Last week, ABC hosted the inaugural Pacific Australia Media Leaders Meeting. Mann was there, and says that on top of changing audience consumption and loss of revenue, Pacific media are facing a whole different level of concerns.
“We heard from an executive, I won’t name them for privacy reasons, who was talking about just the right to exist as a media entity and the threats and the pressure that they were under from the country’s military and political leaders,” he says.
“For other Pacific leaders, they were discussing the impact of foreign countries competing in their space and trying to act as a media agency in the middle of two major entities that are vying for power in their space.”
Mann says there were many layers of discussions, from trying to get working laptops, possibilities around subscription-based platforms, and AI content.
Local and long term plan Closer to home, Mann says the government needs to have a long term strategy for how media is created for all the various communities in Aotearoa.
“What is the future government policy, irrespective of who’s in power . . . whether it’s Māori media or ethnic media or right across the board, what’s the coherent government policy on funded content moving forward?”
Disclaimer: Pacific Media Network is operated by a charitable trust and uses a mixed funding model with revenue coming from both public entities as well as commercial sources.
Khalia Strong is a Pacific Media Network senior reporter. This article was first published by PMN and is republished here with permission.
Acclaimed journalist Mehdi Hasan joins Democracy Now! to discuss US media coverage of the Israeli war on Gaza and how the war is a genocide being abetted by the United States.
Hasan says US media is overwhelmingly pro-Israel and fails to convey the truth to audiences.
“Palestinian voices not being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict,” he says.
Hasan has just launched a new media company, Zeteo, which he started after the end of his weekly news programme on MSNBC earlier this year.
Zeteo . . . soft launch.
Hasan’s interviews routinely led to viral segments, including his tough questioning of Israeli government spokesperson Mark Regev, but the cable network announced it was canceling his show in November.
The move drew considerable outrage, with critics slamming MSNBC for effectively silencing one of the most prominent Muslim voices in US media.
Rafah invasion threat
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continues to threaten a ground invasion of Rafah in southern Gaza, which human rights groups warn would be a massacre.
President Biden has said such an escalation is a “red line” for him, but Netanyahu has vowed to push ahead anyway.
“Where is the outcry here in the West?” asks Hasan of reports of Israeli war crimes, including the killing of more than 100 journalists in the past five months in Gaza and the blockade of aid from the region.
“It’s a stain on [Biden’s] record, on America’s conscience.”
Transcript:
NERMEEN SHAIKH: The death toll in Gaza has topped 31,300. At least five people were killed on Wednesday when Israel bombed an UNRWA aid distribution center in Rafah — one of the UN agency’s last remaining aid sites in Gaza. The head of UNRWA called the attack a “blatant disregard [of] international humanitarian law”.
This comes as much of Gaza is on the brink of famine as Israel continues to limit the amount of aid allowed into the besieged territory. At least 27 Palestinians have died of starvation, including 23 children.
Meanwhile, Al Jazeera has reported six Palestinians were killed in Gaza City when Israeli forces opened fire again on crowds waiting for food aid. More than 80 people were injured.
In other news from Gaza, Politicoreports the Biden administration has privately told Israel that the US would support Israel attacking Rafah as long as it did not carry out a large-scale invasion.
AMY GOODMAN:Well, we begin today’s show looking at how the US media is covering Israel’s assault on Gaza with the acclaimed TV broadcaster Mehdi Hasan. In January, he announced he was leaving MSNBC after his shows were cancelled. Mehdi was one of the most prominent Muslim voices on American television.
In October, the news outlet Semafor reported MSNBC had reduced the roles of Hasan and two other Muslim broadcasters on the network, Ayman Mohyeldin and Ali Velshi, following the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel.
US Media fails on Gaza, fascism. Video: Democracy Now!
Then, in November, MSNBC announced it was cancelling Hasan’s show shortly after he conducted this interview with Mark Regev, an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is an excerpt:
MEHDI HASAN: You say Hamas’s numbers — I should point out, just pull up on the screen, in the last two major Gaza conflicts, 2009 and 2014, the Israeli military’s death tolls matched Hamas’s Health Ministry death tolls, so — and the UN, human rights groups all agree that those numbers are credible. But look, your wider point is true.
MARK REGEV: Can I challenge that?
MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —
MARK REGEV: Will you allow me —
MEHDI HASAN: We shouldn’t —
MARK REGEV: — to challenge that, please? Can I just challenge that?
MEHDI HASAN: Briefly, if you can.
MARK REGEV: I’d like to challenge that.
MEHDI HASAN: Briefly.
MARK REGEV: I’ll try to be as brief as you are, sir. Those numbers are provided by Hamas. There’s no independent verification. And secondly, more importantly, you have no idea how many of them are Hamas terrorists, combatants, and how many are civilians. Hamas would have you believe that they’re all civilians, that they’re all children.
And here we have to say something that isn’t said enough. Hamas, until now, we’re destroying their military machine, and with that, we’re eroding their control.
But up until now, they’ve been in control of the Gaza Strip. And as a result, they control all the images coming out of Gaza. Have you seen one picture of a single dead Hamas terrorist in the fighting in Gaza? Not one.
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, but I have —
MARK REGEV: Is that by accident, or is that —
MEHDI HASAN: But I have, Mark —
MARK REGEV: — because Hamas can control — Hamas can control the information coming out of Gaza?
MEHDI HASAN: Mark, but you asked me a question, and you said you would be brief. I haven’t. You’re right. But I have seen lots of children with my own lying eyes being pulled from the rubble. So —
MARK REGEV: Now, because they’re the pictures Hamas wants you to see. Exactly my point, Mehdi.
MEHDI HASAN: And also because they’re dead, Mark. Also —
MARK REGEV: They’re the pictures Hamas wants — no.
MEHDI HASAN: But they’re also people your government has killed. You accept that, right? You’ve killed children? Or do you deny that?
MARK REGEV: No, I do not. I do not. I do not. First of all, you don’t know how those people died, those children.
MEHDI HASAN: Oh wow.
AMY GOODMAN: “Oh wow,” Mehdi Hasan responded, interviewing Netanyahu adviser Mark Regev on MSNBC. Soon after, MSNBC announced that he was losing his shows. Since leaving the network, Mehdi Hasan has launched a new digital media company named Zeteo.
Mehdi, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. I want to start with that interview you did with Regev. After, you lost your two shows, soon after. Do you think that’s the reason those shows were cancelled? Interviews like that?
MEHDI HASAN: You would have to ask MSNBC, Amy. And, Amy and Nermeen, thank you for having me on. It’s great to be back here after a few years away. Look, the advantage of not being at MSNBC anymore is I get to come on shows like this and talk to you all. You should get someone from MSNBC on and ask them why they cancelled the shows, because I can’t answer that question. I wish I knew. But there we go.
The shows were cancelled at the end of November. I quit at the beginning of January, because I wanted to have a platform of my own. I couldn’t really spend 2024, one of the most important news years of our lives — genocide in Gaza, fascism at the door here in America with elections — couldn’t really spend that being a guest anchor and a political analyst, which is what I was offered at MSNBC while I was staying there. I wanted to leave. I wanted to get my voice back.
And that’s why I launched my own media company, as you mentioned, called Zeteo, which we’ve done a soft launch on and we’re going to launch properly next month. But I’m excited about all the opportunities ahead, the opportunity to do more interviews like the one I did with Mark Regev.
NERMEEN SHAIKH:So, Mehdi, could you explain Zeteo? First of all, what does it mean? And what is the gap in the US media landscape that you hope to fill? You’ve been extremely critical of the US media’s coverage of Gaza, saying, quite correctly, that the coverage has not been as consistent or clear as the last time we saw an invasion of this kind, though far less brutal, which was the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s a great question. So, on Zeteo, it’s an ancient Greek word, going back to Socrates and Plato, which means to seek out, to search, to inquire for the truth. And at a time when we live in a, some would say, post-truth society — or people on the right are attempting to turn it into a post-truth society — I thought that was an important endeavor to embark upon as a journalist, to go back to our roots.
In terms of why I launch it and the media space, look, there is a gap in the market, first of all, on the left for a company like this one. Not many progressives have pulled off a for-profit, subscription-based business, media business. We’ve seen it on the right, Nermeen, with, you know, Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire and Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, and even Tucker Carlson has launched his own subscription-based platform since leaving Fox.
And on the progressive space, we haven’t really done it. Now, of course, there are wonderful shows like Democracy Now! which are doing important, invaluable journalism on subjects like Gaza, on subjects like the climate. But across the media industry as a whole, sadly, in the US, the massive gap is there are not enough — I don’t know how to put it — bluntly, truth tellers, people who are willing to say — and when I say “truth tellers,” I don’t just mean, you know, truth in a conventional sense of saying what is true and what is false; I’m saying the language in which we talk about what is happening in the world today.
Too many of my colleagues in the media, unfortunately, hide behind lazy euphemisms, a both-sides journalism, the idea that you can’t say Donald Trump is racist because you don’t know what’s in his heart; you can’t say the Republican Party is going full fascist, even as they proclaim that they don’t believe in democracy as we conventionally understand it; we can’t say there’s a genocide in Gaza, even though the International Court of Justice says such a thing is plausible.
You know, we run away from very blunt terms which help us understand world. And I want to treat American consumers of news, global consumers of news — it’s a global news organisation which I’m founding — with some respect. Stop patronising them. Tell them what is happening in the world, in a blunt way.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, talk about this. I mean, in your criticism of the US media’s coverage, in particular, of Israel’s assault on Gaza — I mean, of course, you have condemned what happened, the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. You’ve also situated the attack in a broader historical frame, and you’ve received criticism for doing that.
And in response, you’ve said, “Context is not causation,” and “Context is not justification.” So, could you explain why you think context, history, is so important, and the way in which this question is kind of elided in US media coverage, not just of the Gaza crisis, but especially so now?
MEHDI HASAN: So, I did an interview with Piers Morgan this week. And if you watch Piers Morgan’s shows, he always asks his pro-Palestinian guests or anyone criticising Israel, you know, “Condemn what happened on October 7.” It’s all about October the 7th. And what happened on October 7 was barbarism. It was a tragedy. It was a terror attack. Civilians were killed. War crimes were carried out. Hostages were taken. And we should condemn it. Of course we should, as human beings, if nothing else.
But the world did not begin on October 7. The idea that the entire Middle East conflict, Israel-Palestine, the occupation, apartheid, can be reduced to October 7 is madness. And it’s not just me saying that.
You talk to, you know, leading Israeli peace campaigners, even some leading Israeli generals, people like Shlomo Brom, who talk about having to understand the root causes of a people under occupation fighting for freedom. And it’s absurd to me that in our media industry people should try and run away from context.
My former colleagues Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin, who Amy mentioned in the introduction, they were on air on October 7 as news was coming in of the attacks, and they provided context, because they’re two anchors who really understand that part of the world.
Ayman Mohyeldin is perhaps the only US anchor who’s ever lived in Gaza. And they came under attack online from certain pro-Israel people for providing context. This idea that we should be embarrassed or ashamed or apologetic as journalists for providing context on one of the biggest stories in the world is madness.
You cannot understand what is happening in the world unless we, unless you and I, unless journalists, broadcasters, are explaining to our viewers and our listeners and our readers why things are happening, where forces are coming from, why people are behaving the way they do. And I know America is a country of amnesiacs, but we cannot keep acting as if the world just began yesterday.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to ask you about a piece in The Intercept — you also used to report for The Intercept — the headline, “In internal meeting, Christiane Amanpour confronts CNN brass about ‘double standards’ on Israel coverage”. It’s a really interesting piece. They were confronting the executives, and “One issue that came up,” says The Intercept, “repeatedly is CNN’s longtime process for routing almost all coverage relating to Israel and Palestine through the network’s Jerusalem bureau.
As The Interceptreported in January, “the protocol — which has existed for years but was expanded and rebranded as SecondEyes last summer — slows down reporting on Gaza and filters news about the war through journalists in Jerusalem who operate under the shadow of Israel’s military censor.”
And then it quotes Christiane Amanpour, identified in a recording of that meeting. She said, “You’ve heard from me, you’ve heard my, you know, real distress with SecondEyes — changing copy, double standards, and all the rest,” Amanpour said. The significance of this and what we see, Mehdi? You know, I’m not talking Fox right now. On MSNBC . . .
MEHDI HASAN: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: . . . and on CNN, you rarely see Palestinians interviewed in extended discussions.
MEHDI HASAN: So, I think there’s a few issues there, Amy. Number one, first of all, we should recognise that Christiane Amanpour has done some very excellent coverage of Gaza for CNN in this conflict. She’s had some very powerful interviews and very important guests on. So, credit to Christiane during this conflict. Number two . . .
AMY GOODMAN:International . . .
MEHDI HASAN: . . . I think US media organisations . . .
AMY GOODMAN: . . . I just wanted to say, particularly on CNN International, which is often not seen . . .
MEHDI HASAN: Very good point.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: On CNN domestic.
MEHDI HASAN: Very good — very good point, Amy. Touché.
The second point, I would say, is US media organisations, as a whole, are engaging in journalistic malpractice by not informing viewers, listeners, readers that a lot of their coverage out of Israel and the Occupied Territories is coming under the shadow of an Israeli military censor.
How many Americans understand or even know about the Israeli military censor, about how much information is controlled? We barely understand that Western journalists are kept out of Gaza, or if when they go in, they’re embedded with Israeli military forces and limited to what they can say and do.
So I think we should talk about that in a country which kind of prides itself on the First Amendment and free speech and a free press. We should understand the way in which information comes out of the Occupied Territories, in particular from Gaza.
And the third point, I would say, is, yeah, Palestinian voices not being on American television or in American print is one of the biggest problems when it comes to our coverage of this conflict. When we talk about why the media is structurally biased towards one party in this conflict, the more powerful party, the occupier, we have to remember that this is one of the reasons.
Why are Palestinians dehumanised in our media? This is one of the reasons. We don’t let people speak. That’s what leads to dehumanisation. That’s what leads to bias.
We understand it at home when it comes to, for example, Black voices. In recent years, media organisations have tried to take steps to improve diversity on air, when it comes to on-air talent, when it comes to on-air guests, when it comes to balancing panels. We get that we need underrepresented communities to be able to speak. But when it comes to foreign conflicts, we still don’t seem to have made that calculation.
There was a study done a few years ago of op-eds in The New York Times and The Washington Post on the subject of Israel-Palestine from 1970 to, I think it was, 2000-and-something, and it was like 2 percent of all op-eds in the Times and 1 percent in the Post were written by Palestinians, which is a shocking statistic.
We deny these people a voice, and then we wonder why people don’t sympathise with their plight or don’t — aren’t, you know, marching in the street — well, they are marching in the streets — but in bigger numbers. Why America is OK and kind of, you know, blind to the fact that we are complicit in a genocide of these people? Because we don’t hear from these people.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Mehdi, I mean, explain why that’s especially relevant in this instance, because journalists have not been permitted access to Gaza, so there is no reporting going on on the ground that’s being shown here. I mean, dozens and dozens of journalists have signed a letter asking Israel and Egypt to allow journalists access into Gaza. So, if you could talk about that, why it’s especially important to hear from Palestinian voices here?
MEHDI HASAN: Well, for a start, Nermeen, much of the imagery we see on our screens here or in our newspapers are sanitised images. We don’t see the full level of the destruction. And when we try and understand, well, why are young people — why is there such a generational gap when it comes to the polling on Gaza, on ceasefire, why are young people so much more antiwar than their elder peers, part of the reason is that young people are on TikTok or Instagram and seeing a much less sanitised version of this war, of Israel’s bombardment.
They are seeing babies being pulled from the rubble, limbs missing. They are seeing hospitals being — you know, hospitals carrying out procedures without anesthetic. They are seeing just absolute brutality, the kind of stuff that UN humanitarian chiefs are saying we haven’t seen in this world for 50 years.
And that’s the problem, right? If we’re sanitising the coverage, Americans aren’t being told, really, aren’t being informed, are, again, missing context on what is happening on the ground. And, of course, Israel, by keeping Western journalists out, makes it even easier for those images to be blocked, and therefore you have Palestinian — brave Palestinian journalists on the ground trying to film, trying to document their own genocide, streaming it to our phones.
And we’ve seen over a hundred of them killed over the last five months. That is not an accident. That is not a coincidence. Israel wants to stamp out independent voices, stamp out any kind of coverage of its own genocidal behavior.
And therefore, again, you’re able to have a debate in this country where the political debate is completely disconnected to the public debate, and the public debate is completely misinformed. I’m amazed, Nermeen, when you look at the polling, that there’s a majority in favor of a ceasefire, that half of all Democrats say this is a genocide. Americans are saying that to pollsters despite not even getting the full picture. Can you imagine what those numbers would look like if they actually saw what was happening on the ground?
NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, I want to go to what is unfolding right now in Gaza. You said in a recent interview that in the past Israel was, quote, “mowing the lawn,” but now the Netanyahu government’s intention is to erase the population of Gaza. So let’s go to what Prime Minister Netanyahu said about the invasion of Rafah, saying it would go ahead and would last weeks, not months. He was speaking to Politico on Sunday.
PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: We’re not going to leave them. You know, I have a red line. You know what the red line is? That October 7th doesn’t happen again, never happens again. And to do that, we have to complete the destruction of the Hamas terrorist army. … We’re very close to victory. It’s close at hand.
We’ve destroyed three-quarters of Hamas fighting terrorist battalions, and we’re close to finishing the last part in Rafah, and we’re not going to give it up. … Once we begin the intense action of eradicating the Hamas terrorist battalions in Rafah, it’s a matter of weeks and not months.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, your response to what Netanyahu said and what the Israelis have proposed as a safe place for Gazans to go — namely, humanitarian islands?
MEHDI HASAN: So, number one, when you hear Netanyahu speak, Nermeen, doesn’t it remind you of George Bush in kind of 2002, 2003? It’s very — you know, invoking 9/11 to justify every atrocity, claiming that you’re trying to protect the country, when you, yourself, your idiocy and your incompetency, is what led to the attacks. You know, George Bush was unable to prevent 9/11, and then used 9/11 to justify every atrocity, even though his incompetence helped allow 9/11 to happen.
And I feel the same way: Netanyahu allowed the worst terror attack, the worst massacre in Israel to happen on his watch. Many of his own, you know, generals, many of his own people blame him for this. And so, it’s rich to hear him saying, “My aim is to stop this from happening again.” Well, you couldn’t stop it from happening the first time, and now you’re killing innocent Palestinians under the pretence that this is national security.
Number two, again George Bush-like, claiming that the war is nearly done, mission is nearly accomplished, that’s nonsense. No serious observer believes that Hamas is finished or that Israel has won some total victory. A member of Netanyahu’s own war cabinet said recently, “Anyone who says you can absolutely defeat Hamas is telling tall tales, is lying.” That was a colleague of Netanyahu’s, in government, who said that.
And number three, the red line on Rafah that Biden suppposedly set down and that Netanyahu is now mocking, saying, “My own red line is to do the opposite,” what on Earth is Joe Biden doing in allowing Benjamin Netanyahu to humiliate him in this way with this invasion of Rafah, even after he said he opposes it? I mean, it’s one thing to leak stuff . . .
AMY GOODMAN: Mehdi . . .
MEHDI HASAN: . . . over a few months . . .
AMY GOODMAN: . . . let’s go to Biden speaking on MSNBC. He’s being interviewed by your former colleague Jonathan Capehart, as he was being questioned about Benjamin Netanyahu and saying he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He has a right to defend Israel, a right to continue to pursue Hamas. But he must, he must, he must pay more attention to the innocent lives being lost as a consequence of the actions taken.
He’s hurting — in my view, he’s hurting Israel more than helping Israel by making the rest of the world — it’s contrary to what Israel stands for. And I think it’s a big mistake. So I want to see a ceasefire.
AMY GOODMAN: And he talked about a, well, kind of a red line. If you can address what Biden is saying and what he proposed in the State of the Union, this pier, to get more aid in, and also the dropping — the airdropping of food, which recently killed five Palestinians because it crushed them to death, and the humanitarian groups, United Nations saying these airdrops, the pier come nowhere near being able to provide the aid that’s needed, at the same time, and the reason they’re doing all of this, is because Israel is using US bombs and artillery to attack the Palestinians and these aid trucks?
MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, it’s just so bizarre, the idea that you could drop bombs, on the one hand, and then drop aid, on the other, and you’re paying for both, and then your aid ends up killing people, too. It’s like some kind of dark Onion headline. It’s just beyond parody. It’s beyond belief.
And as for the pier, as you say, it does not come anywhere near to adequately addressing the needs of the Palestinian people, in terms of the sheer scale of the suffering, half a million people on the brink of famine, over a million people displaced. Four out of five of the hungriest people in the world, according to the World Food Programme, are in Gaza right now.
The idea that this pier would, A, address the scale of the suffering, and, B, in time — I mean, it’s going to take time to do this. What happens to the Palestinians who literally starve to death, including children, while this pier is being built?
Finally, I would say, there’s reporting in the Israeli press, Amy, that I’ve seen that suggests that the pier idea comes from Netanyahu, that the Israeli government are totally fine with this pier, because it allows them still to control land and air access into Gaza, which is what they’ve always controlled and which in this war they’ve monopolised.
The idea that the United States of America, the world’s only superpower, cannot tell its ally, “You know what? We’re going to put aid into Gaza because we want to, and you’re not going to stop us, especially since we’re the ones arming you,” is bizarre.
It’s something I think Biden will never be able to get past or live down. It’s a stain on his record, on America’s conscience. The idea that we’re arming a country that’s engaged in a “plausible genocide,” to quote the ICJ, is bad enough. That we can’t even get our own aid in, while they’re bombing with our bombs, is just madness.
And by the way, it’s also illegal. Under US law, you cannot provide weaponry to a country which is blocking US aid. And by the way, it’s not me saying they’re blocking US aid. US government officials have said, “Yes, the Israeli government blocked us from sending flour in,” for example.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Mehdi, let’s go to the regional response to this assault on Gaza that’s been unfolding with the kind of violence and tens of thousands of deaths of Palestinians, as we’ve reported. Now, what has — how has the Arab and Muslim world responded to what’s going on? Egypt, of course, has repeatedly said that it does not want displaced Palestinians crossing its border. The most powerful Muslim countries, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the Emirates, if you can talk about how they’ve responded? And then the Axis — the so-called Axis of Resistance — Houthis, Hezbollah, etc. — how they have been trying to disrupt this war, or at least make the backers of Israel pay a price for it?
MEHDI HASAN: So, I hear people saying, “Oh, we’re disappointed in the response from the Arab countries.” The problem with the word “disappointment” is it implies you had any expectations to begin with. I certainly didn’t. Arab countries have never had the Palestinians’ backs.
The Arab — quote-unquote, “Arab street” has always been very pro-Palestinian. But the autocratic, the despotic, the dictatorial rulers of much of the Arab world have never really had the interests of the Palestinian people at their heart, going back right to 1948, when, you know, Arab countries attacked Israel to push it into the sea, but, actually, as we know from historians like Avi Shlaim, were not doing that at all, and that some of them, like Jordan, had done deals with Israel behind the scenes.
So, look, Arab countries have never really prioritised the Palestinian people or their needs or their freedom. And so, when you see some of these statements that come out of the Arab world at times like this, you know, you have to take them with a shovel of salt, not just a grain.
Also, I would point out the hypocrisy here on all sides in the region. You have countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which were involved in a brutal assault on Yemen for many years, carried out very similar acts to Israel in Gaza in terms of blockades, starvation, malnourishment of the Yemeni children, in terms of bombing of refugee camps and hospitals and kids and school buses. That all happened in Yemen.
Arab countries did that, let’s just be clear about that, things that they criticise Israel for doing now. And, of course, Iran, which sets itself up as a champion of the Palestinan people, when Bashar al-Assad was killing many of his own people, including Palestinian refugees, in places like the al-Yarmouk refugee camp, Iran and Russia, by the way, were both perfectly happy to help arm and support Assad as he did that.
So, you know, spare me some of the grandiose statements from Middle East countries, from Arab nations to Iran, on all of it. There’s a lot of hypocrisy to go around.
Very few countries in the world, especially in that region, actually have Palestinian interests at heart. If they did, we would have a very different geopolitical scene. There is reporting, Nermeen, that a lot of these governments, like Saudi Arabia, privately are telling Israel, “Finish the job. Get rid of them. We don’t like Hamas, either. Get rid of them,” and that Saudis actually want to do a deal with Israel once this war is over, just as they were on course to do, apparently, according to the Biden administration.
We know that other Arab countries already signed the, quote-unquote, “Abraham Accords” with Israel on Trump’s watch.
AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you about the number of dead Palestinian journalists and also the new UN investigation that just accused Israel of breaking international law over the killing of the Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah in southern Lebanon. On October 13, an Israeli tank opened fire on him and a group of other journalists. He had just set up a live stream on the border in southern Lebanon, so that all his colleagues at Reuters and others saw him blown up.
The report stated, quote, “The firing at civilians, in this instance clearly identifiable journalists, constitutes a violation of . . . international law.” And it’s not just Issam in southern Lebanon. Well over 100 Palestinian journalists in Gaza have died. We’ve never seen anything like the concentration of numbers of journalists killed in any other conflict or conflicts combined recently. Can you talk about the lack of outrage of other major news organisations and what Israel is doing here? Do you think they’re being directly targeted, one after another, wearing those well-known “press” flak jackets? It looks like we just lost audio to Mehdi Hasan.
MEHDI HASAN: Amy, I can — I can hear you, Amy, very faintly.
AMY GOODMAN:Oh, OK. So . . .
MEHDI HASAN: I’m going to answer your question, if you can still hear me.
AMY GOODMAN: Great. We can hear you perfectly.
MEHDI HASAN: So, you’re very faint to me. So, while I speak, if someone wants to fix the volume in my ear. Let me answer your question about journalists.
It is an absolute tragedy and a scandal, what has happened to journalists in Gaza, that we have seen so many deaths in Gaza. And the real scandal, Amy, is that Western media, a lot of my colleagues here in the US media, have not sounded the alarm, have not called out Israel for what it’s done. It’s outrageous that so many of our fellow colleagues can be killed in Gaza while reporting, while at home, losing family members, and yet there’s not a huge global outcry.
When Wael al-Dahdouh, who we just saw on the screen, from Al Jazeera, loses his immediate family members and carries on reporting for Al Jazeera Arabic, why is he not on every front page in the world? Why is he not a hero? Why is he not sitting down with Oprah Winfrey?
I feel like, you know, when Evan Gershkovich from The Wall Street Journal is wrongly imprisoned in Russia, we all campaign for Evan to be released. When Ukrainian journalists are killed, we all speak out and are angry about it. But when Palestinian journalists are killed on a level we’ve never seen before, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, where is the outcry here in the West over the killing of them?
We claim to care about a free press. We claim to oppose countries that crack down on a free press, on journalism. We say journalism is not a crime. But then I don’t hear the outrage from my colleagues here at this barbarism in Gaza, where journalists are being killed in record numbers.
Stockholm, March 15, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists on Friday condemned a series of court decisions in Azerbaijan extending the pre-trial detention of six journalists with the anti-corruption investigative news outlet Abzas Media.
“As Azerbaijan sweeps up and detains critical journalists across the country, this latest decision to extend the incarceration of Abzas Media staff illustrates authorities’ steadfast determination to censor its best and brightest reporters by locking them up,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator, in New York. “Authorities in Azerbaijan should immediately drop all charges against Abzas Media staff, release all unjustly jailed journalists, and end their crackdown on the independent press.”
If found guilty, the six journalists, who have all been charged with conspiracy to smuggle currency, could face up to eight years in prison under Article 206.3.2 of Azerbaijan’s criminal code.
In separate hearings on March 14 and 15, the Khatai District Court in the capital, Baku, extended by three months the detention of Abzas Media director Ulvi Hasanli, chief editor Sevinj Vagifgizi, and project manager Mahammad Kekalov, according to newsreports and a Facebook post by Abzas Media.
In recent weeks, the courts also issued three-month extensions for the detention of three of Abzas Media’s journalists. Rulings were made in early March for Hafiz Babali, and Elnara Gasimova, who were arrested in December and January, and in February for Nargiz Absalamova, who was arrested in December.
The crackdown on Abzas Media—an outlet known for investigating allegations of corruption among senior state officials—began in November when police raided its offices and accused staff of illegally bringing Western donor money into Azerbaijan.
Abzas Media said that the raid was part of President Ilham Aliyev’s pressure on the outlet for “a series of investigations into the corruption crimes of the president and officials appointed by him.” The outlet has continued publishing with a new team in Europe and with the support of Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based group that pursues the work of imprisoned journalists.
The Abzas Media staff are among 10 journalists from three independent media outlets currently jailed in Azerbaijan, amid a decline in relations between Azerbaijan and the West.
Earlier in March, police raided Toplum TV’s office and a court ordered that founder Alasgar Mammadli and editor Mushfig Jabbar be detained for four months pending investigation on currency smuggling charges.
Broadcaster Kanal 13’s director Aziz Orujov, and reporter Shamo Eminov have been in jail since November and December, respectively, on the same charges.
The union representing Television New Zealand staff is calling on the public to join a campaign protesting the broadcaster’s plans to axe programmes and cut jobs.
Last week TVNZ announced plans to cut up to 68 jobs — and scrap several long-running shows, including Fair Go and Sunday.
E Tū union spokesperson Michael Wood has told Midday Report the Save Our Stories campaign united workers, viewers and supporters to remind TVNZ of its responsibilities.
“TVNZ isn’t just some business, it’s a vital part of our society and Kiwis need a strong TVNZ to tell Aotearoa’s stories and hold power to account.
“This is about everyone — every single New Zealander is a stakeholder in this, so we invite everybody who wants to build and protect a strong media landscape to support the campaign.”
People could help by signing an open letter to TVNZ, and sharing the campaign video, he said.
“So many people have reached out to our union to show their support for TVNZ workers and ask how they can help. From prominent public figures, to people whose lives have been changed thanks to TVNZ’s coverage, to dedicated viewers who don’t want to see their favourite shows get the axe,” he said.
“These people can help by signing the open letter, sharing our video, and sending the message to decision-makers that our media is worth protecting.”
TVNZ staff from the E Tū union voted unanimously to reject the proposals.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Journalist Mehdi Hasan warns U.S. media coverage of the 2024 election is largely unable to capture the threat to democracy posed by Donald Trump and the modern Republican Party. “We need to speak very clearly about what that fascist threat is,” says Hasan, who warns media outlets cannot “normalize his extremism and racism and bigotry,” because the right to free press itself could be under threat if he regains power. “One of our two major parties has been fully radicalized and is now in bed with white supremacists. … Let’s be plain about that.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
The United States’ airdrops of aid into Gaza are a textbook case of cognitive dissonance on the part of the US administration — dropping food while continuing to send Israel bombs with which to pulverise Gaza, reports Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post.
And, says the media watch programme presenter Richard Gizbert, the gulf between what is happening on the ground and the mainstream media’s reportage continues to widen.
Gizbert criticises the airdrops, what he calls the “optics of urgency, the illusions of aid”.
“An absurd spectacle as the US drops aid into Gaza while also arming Israel,” he says.
Gizbert critically examines the Israeli disinformation strategy over atrocities such as the gunning down of at least 116 starving Gazans in the so-called “flour massacre” of 29 February 2024 — first denial, then blame the Palestinians, and finally accept only limited responsibility.
“The US air drops into the Gaza Strip are pure theatre. The US has been supplying thousands of tonnes into the Gaza Strip — but those have been high explosives,” says Mouin Rabbani, co-editor of Jadaliyya.
“And then to claim that somehow it is ameliorated by 38,000 meals ready to eat is quite obscene to put it politely.
“People have compared these scenes to The Hunger Games and for good reason.”
‘Who is the superpower?’
Australian author Antony Loewenstein, author of The Palestine Laboratory, says: “When I saw the US drop food, my first response was really anger; it was horror that this is apparently the best the US can do.
Absurd Aid Air Drops in Gaza. Al Jazeera’s The Listening Post, 9 March 2024
“Who is the superpower here? Is it the US or Israel? There is no place that is safe. There is no place where you can find reliable food, where people can get shelter.
“Gazans are exhausted, angry and scared, and do not buy this argument that the US is suddenly caring about them by airdropping a handful of food.”
“People have compared these scenes to The Hunger Games and for good reason.
Contributors: Laura Albast — Fellow, Institute for Palestine Studies Mohamad Bazzi — Director of NYU’s Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies Antony Loewenstein — Author, The Palestine Laboratory Mouin Rabbani — Co-editor, Jadaliyya
On Our Radar:
Since Israel launched its assault on Gaza, the war has been a delicate subject for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. The war has led to censorship of news coverage and suppression of public protest. Meenakshi Ravi reports.
Israel’s cultural annihilation in Gaza The Listening Post has covered Israel’s war on Gaza through the prism of the media, including the unprecedented killing of Palestinian journalists. But there is another level to what is unfolding in Gaza: the genocidal assault on Palestinian history, existence and culture.
Featuring: Jehad Abusalim – Executive director, The Jerusalem Fund
The War on Gaza will be etched in the memories of generations to come — the brutality of Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, and the ferocity of Israel’s retaliation.
In this Four Corners investigative report, The Forever War, broadcast in Australia last night, ABC’s global affairs editor John Lyons asks the tough questions — challenging some of Israel’s most powerful political and military voices about the country’s strategy and intentions.
The result is a compelling interview-led piece of public interest journalism about one of the most controversial wars of modern times.
Former prime minister Ehud Barak says Benjamin Netanyahu can’t be trusted, former Shin Bet internal security director Ami Ayalon describes two key far-right Israeli ministers as “terrorists”, and cabinet minister Avi Dichter makes a grave prediction about the conflict’s future.
Is there any way out of what’s beginning to look like the forever war? Lyons gives his perspective on the tough decisions for the future of both Palestinians and Israelis.
‘The Forever War’ – ABC Four Corners. ABC Trailer on YouTube
Television New Zealand’s chief executive has been challenged by the public broadcaster’s Pacific correspondent Barbara Dreaver at a fiery staff meeting over job cuts and axing of high profile programmes, reports The New Zealand Herald.
Writing in his Media Insider column today, editor-at-large Shayne Currie reported that Dreaver, one of TVNZ’s most respected and senior journalists, had made the challenge over the planned layoffs and axing of shows such as the current affairs Sunday and consumer affairs Fair Go.
Dreaver reportedly asked chief executive Jodi O’Donnell if she would apologise to staff — “apparently for referring to her watch during an earlier staff meeting on Friday”.
“TVNZ would not confirm specific details last night, but it is understood O’Donnell pushed back during yesterday’s meeting, along the lines that perhaps she might also be owed an apology,” wrote Currie, a former Herald managing editor.
“One source said she talked at one stage about the response she had been receiving.”
Media Insider quoted a TVNZ spokeswoman as saying: “We expect sessions like this to be robust, but to give all TVNZers the opportunity to be free and frank in their participation, we don’t comment on the details of these internal meetings to the media.”
Dreaver told 1News last night: “We need really strong leadership and we expect to get it. And I’m quite happy to call out and challenge it [and] my own bosses when we don’t get that, just as I would a politician or any other person who deserves it.”
A ‘legend, icon, queen’
Media Insider reported that in a social media post today, Sunday journalist Kristin Hall had described Kiribati-born Dreaver as a “legend, icon, queen” for her Pacific reporting.
In November 2022, Dreaver was named Reporter of the Year at the New Zealand Television Awards and in 2019 she won two awards at the Voyager Media Awards for her coverage of the Samoa measles outbreak.
Yesterday’s TVNZ meeting came amid a strained relationship between the TVNZ newsroom and management over the way the company has handled the announcement of up to 68 job cuts, as least two-thirds of them journalists.
The shock news followed a week after the US-based Warner Bros Discovery announced that it would be closing its entire Newshub newsroom at the end of June.
Stockholm, March 11, 2024—Azerbaijani authorities should release Toplum TV’s founder Alasgar Mammadli and journalist Mushfig Jabbar, drop all charges against the independent news outlet’s staff, and allow the media to work freely and without reprisal, the Committee to Protect Journalists said Monday.
On March 6, dozens of plainclothes police officers in the capital, Baku, raided Toplum TV’s editorial office at around 1:30 pm, confiscated its equipment and the phones of all staff who were present, and took at least 10 of them to Baku City Police Department for questioning, according to newsreports and Toplum TV’s chief editor, Khadija Ismayilova, who spoke to CPJ by phone.
All of the journalists were freed at around midnight except for video editor Jabbar, reporter Farid Ismayilov, and social media manager Elmir Abbasov, according to Ismayilova, a multipleaward-winning investigative journalist, who was jailed from 2014 to 2016 in retaliation for her work.
The police claim to have found 3,200 euros (US$3,500) in Jabbar’s apartment, 3,100 euros (US$3,390) in Ismayilov’s apartment, and 2,700 euros (US$2,950) in Abbasov’s home, according to the regional news website Kavkazsky Uzel (Caucasian Knot).
On March 8, the Khatai District Court in Baku ordered Jabbar to be detained for four months pending investigation on currency smuggling charges, while Ismayilov and Abbasov were released on bail.
Also on March 8, plainclothes police arrested Toplum TV’s founder Mammadli and took him away in an unmarked vehicle as he left a clinic where he was receiving treatment for suspected cancerous tumours, according to multiplemediareports and footage of the arrest.
On March 9, the Khatai District Court ordered Mammadli — who is also the founder of Media Rights Group, a local press freedom NGO — to be detained for four months pending investigation on currency smuggling charges, after police said they found 7,300 euros (US$7,970) in cash in his apartment, those sources said.
“Following similar attacks on Abzas Media and Kanal 13, the raid on Toplum TV and arrest of its journalists indicate that Azerbaijani authorities are intent on eradicating the last vestiges of the country’s independent press. Reports that police detained the outlet’s founder Alasgar Mammadli while he was receiving treatment for suspected cancer are particularly outrageous,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia Program Coordinator in New York. “Authorities in Azerbaijan should immediately release Mammadli and Jabbar, drop all charges against Toplum TV staff, and stop retaliating against independent media for their reporting.”
Third media outlet to face smuggling charges
Toplum TV is one of the last significant independent media outlets in the country, reporting on politics, investigations into official corruption, and allegations of voting irregularities during February’s presidential elections, in which President Ilham Aliyev won a fifth term.
It is the third independent news outlet in Azerbaijan to face currency smuggling charges in recent months, as relations decline between Azerbaijan and the West. Since November, six members of anticorruption investigative outlet Abzas Media and two journalists with independent broadcaster Kanal 13 have been detained after authorities accused them of illegally bringing Western donor money into Azerbaijan
Azerbaijani authorities have not publicly accused Toplum TV of illicit Western funding but the state-affiliated Azerbaijani Press Agency reported that Toplum TV illegally received half a million dollars from Western donors to foment unrest.
Since the initial arrests of Abzas Media staff in November, pro-government media that Ismayilova has said are acting on instructions from Azerbaijani authorities have repeatedlyclaimed Toplum TV and Ismayilova represent another Western-funded “network of subversion” and were misleadingyoung journalists into anti-state activity ahead of the February elections.
Shortly after the police raid, Toplum TV’s Instagram account was deleted and its YouTube channel was renamed and all of its content deleted, Ismayilova said, adding that this “shows authorities’ real intention,” which is to “silence any platform where criticism is expressed.”
Toplum TV’s office remains sealed by police, who have yet to return any of the outlet’s confiscated equipment or journalists’ phones, she said, describing the charges against Toplum staff as “absolutely absurd.” None of the searches of journalists’ homes were conducted with lawyers present as police denied entry to some, Ismayilova told CPJ.
CPJ’s email requesting comment on the case from the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan, which responds on behalf of the police, did not immediately receive a reply.
A United Nations (UN) report recently emerged making damning claims of sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas. But not all is as it seems. The report has some glaring epistemological problems, all of which seem to serve the Israeli narrative that its genocide in Gaza is somehow justified. Moreover, the report fits within a wider modus operandi on the part of the world’s preeminent international institution. A more comprehensive examination of the history of the UN’s role in the conflict in Palestine reveals its supposed pro-Palestinian bias is not as clearcut as it’s commonly presented. Indeed, there is evidence that the UN has, if anything, been more a tool of Israel than the other way round.
Shocking accusations swiftly weaponized by Israel
The UN released the report on March 4, almost six months after the surprise October 7 attack when members of Hamas’ paramilitary wing breached the Gaza border. Co-authored by its special envoy on sexual violence, Pramila Patten, the document claims there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that Hamas engaged in rape and other forms of sexual violence during the attack. Patten gave a statement in which she said that this took place in “at least three locations” including “the Nova music festival site and its surroundings, Road 232, and Kibbutz Re’im.”
The following day, Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, publicly condemned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for supposedly failing to respond in an adequate manner. Specifically, he criticized Guterres for failing to immediately call for a UN Security Council meeting about the report’s findings. However, as multiple media outlets have pointed out, Guterres does not have the authority to convene a General Assembly meeting. A UN spokesperson responded that “in no way, shape, or form did the secretary-general do anything to keep the report ‘quiet.’” She added that Katz’s announcement was made a matter of hours before a press conference about the report’s contents was scheduled to be held.
Recalling UN ambassador and launching ‘hasbara’ propaganda campaign
Israel has also withdrawn its ambassador to the UN, claiming that the organization’s leadership is attempting to “silence” the allegations. Katz said in a statement: “”I [have] ordered our ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, to return to Israel for immediate consultations regarding the attempt to keep quiet the serious UN report on the mass rapes committed by Hamas and its helpers on Oct. 7.”
Nonetheless, there are already signs that the Israeli government is seizing on the report as part of its ongoing propaganda campaign to deflect criticism from its committal of ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza. On March 7, the Jerusalem Postreported that Katz, “has directed all embassies within the State of Israel to begin a large-scale hasbara (public diplomacy) campaign immediately… in light of the findings of the UN report on sexual violence in the Hamas massacre on October 7.”
An inversion of the Israeli narrative about the UN
The development represents an inversion of what Israel and Western media commonly characterize as the usual dynamic between the UN and the various parties to the conflict in Palestine. According to this narrative, the UN has a viciously anti-Israel agenda and consistently singles out Israel for criticism. Indeed, hardline Zionists have long complained that the UN is “biased” or even prejudiced against Israel, which often goes alongside the usual conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism.
One US-based Israel supporter even set up an NGO called “UN Watch,” which according to its executive director “holds the UN to account” for its supposed anti-Israel bias. Indeed, we will presumably soon hear an Israeli narrative that presents the fact that the UN has produced such a report in spite of such a bias as the most definitive proof possible that its findings are correct. But a deeper investigation shows that the report is, in fact, deeply flawed in both its methods and conclusions.
A compendium of unverified anecdotes and repetition of Israeli lies
It has already emerged, for instance, that the team of UN personnel who produced the report did not conduct their own research. Tellingly, press reports have also revealed that they did not even meet with any survivors of sexual violence that allegedly took place on October 7. Rather, they relied to a large extent on anecdotal and unverified reports from institutions in Israel. According to CNN, the UN team met with a total of 33 Israeli institutions. One of these was a “search and rescue” organization that has previously been accused of spreading misinformation about the October 7 Hamas attack. This same organization, for example, had earlier claimed that it found a pregnant woman who had been stabbed in the stomach in an apparent attack on her fetus, which turned out to be unverified.
Foreign Policy magazine pointed out that the report furthermore “did not attribute the sexual violence to any specific armed group.” In other words, even if the allegations are true, they could have been committed by Palestinians (or, indeed, non-Palestinians) who were not affiliated with Hamas or any other Palestinian paramilitary organization. Foreign Policy added that “the U.N. team behind the report had not been tasked with an investigative mission” and that “[s]uch attribution would require a fully-fledged investigative process.”
A similar story plays out at the New York Times
The report was released in the same week that it emerged that significant sections of a New York Times article published in December of last year, which contained similar claims, were in fact false. The story, titled “‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.,” claimed that members of the Be’eri kibbutz in southern Israel near the Gaza border had been raped by Hamas assailants during the course of the October 7 attack.
But The Interceptreported on March 7 that at least two of the three women “were not in fact victims of sexual assault,” according to a spokesperson of the kibbutz. The Intercept article adds that some of the initial reports about sexual violence came from an anonymous paramedic who had been connected to the international media by a representative of the Israeli government (which, of course, makes this person’s testimony highly suspect). It also states that the kibbutz spokesperson herself “disputed the graphic and highly detailed claims of the Israeli special forces paramedic who served as the source for the allegation, which was published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, and other media outlets.”
Not an isolated incident, but the latest chapter in a long history
Neither the UN report nor the erroneous New York Times article would be the first cases of Western institutions or its corporate-owned media spreading misinformation on Israel’s behalf. Indeed, there is a long history of The New York Times specifically taking orders from the Israeli government and its NGO proxies in the Israel lobby. In 2014, for example, the Timesdeliberately failed to report on the arrest of a Palestinian journalist by Israeli authorities because Israel had ordered it to do so. In 2022, the Timesfired a Palestinian photographer on its staff at the behest of the pro-Israel NGO Honest Reporting.
Even when there is no direct evidence of Israeli intervention, leadership of mainstream corporate media across the West seem to have an almost automatic tendency to sideline, silence and/or fire any of its staff who fail to toe the pro-Israel line. In 2018, CNN fired Marc Lamont Hill for making a pro-Palestinian remark at a UN meeting held on the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. The Washington-based publication The Hillsacked Katie Halper in 2022 after she described Israel as an apartheid state (a charge that has become mainstream even within Israel). And the UK’s Guardian newspaper fired Nathan J. Robinson in 2021 after he posted a satirical comment about the US’s military funding to Israel on social media.
Countless resolutions but never any concrete sanction
As for the UN, though there have been many resolutions condemning Israel’s human rights abuses against Palestinians, the organization has seldom imposed any concrete punitive measures against the country in response. Indeed, as political scientist Norman Finkelstein has pointed out, the reason why the UN keeps issuing so many resolutions condemning Israel is because Israel (with the encouragement of its backers in Washington) simply ignores them and continues to violate Palestinian human rights and international law.
In any case, it is the UN General Assembly, rather than the UN’s leadership or staff, that usually issues these condemnations. The UN General Assembly is made up of representatives of governments around the world and so is more representative of global public opinion than the UN’s internal bureaucracy. In any case, General Assembly resolutions can be vetoed by permanent members of the UN Security Council. Since one of those permanent members is the United States (whose number one ally is Israel), it always vetoes any resolution that condemns Israel anyway.
UN staff slammed by leadership when critical of Israel
Even when UN officials themselves criticize Israel, they sometimes do so only to get silenced or sidelined by the UN’s hierarchy. For instance, international relations scholar at Princeton University Richard Falk served for decades as a UN expert on the conflict in Palestine. Yet his work has often been thwarted by figures within the UN leadership and administration.
In 2017, for example, Falk published a report on Israel’s human rights violations through the UN’s Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (UNESCWA). The head of UNESCWA, Rima Khalaf, said that the report represented the first time that any UN report has “clearly and frankly conclude[d] that Israel is a racist state that has established an apartheid system that persecutes the Palestinian people.”
The fact that Israel is practicing apartheid in the occupied territories is so obvious that former US president Jimmy Carter, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and even Israel’s own human rights organization, B’Tselem, have said so. Even some figures from Israel’s own political, military, intelligence, and legal elite have said so too. Yet in spite of this, Secretary General António Guterres demanded that Khalaf withdraw Falk’s report.
Legitimizing the two-state charade while deplatforming the one-state alternative
Another way that the UN subtly serves the Israeli narrative is its elevation of a two-state solution as the best, and indeed only, means of resolving the conflict. Every resolution passed by the UN General Assembly calling for a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is predicated on one Israeli state and one Palestinian state divided by the borders that existed prior to the June 1967 war. This would deliver to Israel 78% of the land that made up historic Palestine while leaving the Palestinians with the remaining 22%. In addition to giving the two sides a completely unfair share of the land (especially considering the rough parity in population numbers), this division would also reward the Zionist landgrab and subsequent ethnic cleansing that took place in the latter half of the 1940s.
The traditional solution that was proffered by all Palestinian nationalist parties before the 1993 Oslo accord, meanwhile, (that is, a single, secular, non-sectarian democratic state with equal rights for all encompassing the whole of historic Palestine) has been systematically suppressed and deplatformed by the UN’s leadership. Former official Craig Mokhiber was essentially forced to resign for reasons of conscience before publicly voicing his support for the rival one-state solution – again highlighting how the UN hierarchy sidelines those who it considers too pro-Palestinian.
In a public letter published just as he resigned, Mokhiber stated that the two-state solution has become an “open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.” During a media interview shortly after he added: “When people [who work at the UN] are not talking from official talking points, you hear increasingly about a one-state solution.”
The two-state smokescreen
This deliberate deplatforming of the one-state solution and narrow focus on its two-state rival serves an important purpose for Israel. Though Israel opposes even the resolutions in favor of two states (presumably because they insist that such a settlement should be based on internationally recognized borders), it nonetheless benefits from the elevation of the two-state solution. This is because it creates a convenient smokescreen for Israel to deliberately stall on making peace while continuing to displace Palestinians in the West Bank, establish settlements in their place, and build infrastructure for the exclusive use of Israeli settlers – all of which is illegal under international law.
Israel does this as part of a duplicitous sleight of hand in which it publicly proclaims support for a two-state solution while simultaneously itself creating a situation on the ground that makes that solution impossible. It does this for the simple reason that the goal of Zionism from the outset has been the establishment of a Jewish-majority state encompassing all of historic Palestine with the Palestinians ethnically cleansed out of it. As political scientist Rosalind Petchesky puts it in A Land With A People, “the settler colonial project to ‘de-Arabise Palestine’ and bring all of historic Palestine under Zionist sovereignty long pre-dated both the Nakba and worldwide knowledge of the Nazi holocaust.”
Time to rethink the role of the UN
Given the UN’s role in providing cover for the continuation of this process all while posturing as the primary locomotive toward peace, it is high time that Palestinians and their supporters stop looking up to it as a source of truth and meaningful condemnation of Israel’s human rights violations. Clearly, there is growing evidence that the supposed anti-Israel bias of the UN is a myth concocted to benefit Israel. Evidently, if there’s any bias at the world’s preeminent international institution, it is against the Palestinians rather than the other way round.
Google was recently forced to halt the rollout of their AI image generator, Gemini, after claims of the software’s bias against white people. Mike Papantonio is joined by Independent newspaper publisher Rick Outzen to discuss. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: Gemini, the Gemini controversy with Google, this […]
Papua New Guinea and Indonesia have formally ratified a defence agreement a decade after its initial signing.
PNG’s Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko and the Indonesian ambassador to the Pacific nation, Andriana Supandy, convened a press briefing in Port Moresby on February 29 to declare the ratification.
The agreement enables an enhancement of military operations between the two countries, with a specific focus on strengthening patrols along the border between Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
According to Tkatchenko as reported by RNZ Pacific citing Benar News, “The Joint border patrols and different types of defence cooperation between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea of course will be part of the ever-growing security mechanism.”
“It would be wonderful to witness the collaboration between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, both now and in the future, as they work together side by side. Indonesia is a rising Southeast Asian power that reaches into the South Pacific region and dwarfs Papua New Guinea in population, economic size and military might,” added the minister.
In recent years, Indonesia has been asserting its own regional hegemony in the Pacific amid the rivalries of two superpowers — the United States and China.
Indonesia’s Minister for Foreign Affairs Retno Marsudi reiterated Indonesia’s commitment to bolster collaboration with Pacific nations amid heightened geopolitical tensions in the Indo-Pacific region during the recent 2024 annual press statement held by the minister for foreign affairs at the Asian-African Conference in Bandung.
Diverse Indigenous states
The Pacific Islands are home to diverse sovereign Indigenous states and islands, and also home to two influential regional powers, Australia and New Zealand. This vast diverse region is increasingly becoming a pivotal strategic and political battleground for foreign powers — aiming to win the hearts and minds of the populations and governments in the region.
Numerous visible and hidden agreements, treaties, talks, and partnerships are being established among local, regional, and global stakeholders in the affairs of this vast region.
The Pacific region carries great importance for powerful military and economic entities such as China, the United States and its coalition, and Indonesia. For them, it serves as a crucial area for strategic bases, resource acquisition, food, and commercial routes.
For Indigenous islanders, states, and tribal communities, the primary concern is around the loss of their territories, islands, and other vital cultural aspects, such as languages and traditional wisdom.
The crumbling of Oceania, reminiscent of its past colonisation by various European powers, is now occurring. However, this time it is being orchestrated by foreign entities appointing their own influential local pawns.
With these local pawns in place, foreign monarchs, nobility, warlords, and miscreants are advancing to reshape the region’s fate.
The rejection by the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG) to acknowledge the representation of West Papua by the United Liberation for West Papua (ULMWP) as a full member of the regional body in August 2023 highlights the diminishing influence of MSG leaders in decision-making processes concerning issues that are deemed crucial by the Papuan community as part of the “Melanesian family affairs”.
Suspicion over ‘external forces’
This raises suspicion of external forces at play within the Melanesian nations, manipulating their destinies. The question arises, who is orchestrating the fate of the Melanesian nations?
Is it Jakarta, Beijing, Washington, or Canberra?
In a world characterised by instability, safety and security emerges as a crucial prerequisite for fostering a peaceful coexistence, nurturing friendships, and enabling development.
The critical question at hand pertains to the nature of the threats that warrant such protective measures, the identities of both the endangered and the aggressors, and the underlying rationale and mechanisms involved. Whose safety hangs in the balance in this discourse?
And between whom does the spectre of threat loom?
If you are a realist in a world of policymaking, it is perhaps wise not to antagonise the big guy with the big weapon in the room. The Minister of Papua New Guinea may be attempting to underscore the importance of Indonesia in the Pacific region, as indicated by his statements.
If you are West Papuan, it makes little difference whether one leans towards realism or idealism. What truly matters is the survival of West Papuans, in the midst of the significant settler colonial presence of Asian Indonesians in their ancestral homeland.
West Papuan refugee camp
Two years ago, PNG’s minister stated the profound existential sentiments experienced by the West Papuans in 2022 while visiting a West Papuan refugee community in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea.
During the visit, the minister addressed the West Papuan refugees with the following words:
“The line on the map in middle of the island (New Guinea) is the product of colonial impact. These West Papuans are part of our family, part of our members and part of Papua New Guinea. They are not strangers.
“We are separated only by imaginary lines, which is why I am here. I did not come here to fight, to yell, to scream, to dictate, but to reach a common understanding — to respect the law of Papua New Guinea and the sovereignty of Indonesia.”
These types of ambiguous and opaque messages and rhetoric not only instil fake hope among the West Papuans, but also produce despair among displaced Papuans on their own soil.
The seemingly paradoxical language coupled with the significant recent security agreement with the entity — Indonesia — that has been oppressing the West Papuans under the pretext of sovereignty, signifies one ominous prospect:
Is PNG endorsing a “death decree” for the Indonesian security apparatus to hunt Papuans along the border and mountainous region of West Papua and Papua New Guinea?
Security for West Papua Currently, the situation in West Papua is deteriorating steadily. Thousands of Indonesian military personnel have been deployed to various regions in West Papua, especially in the areas afflicted by conflict, such as Nduga, Yahukimo, Maybrat, Intan Jaya, Puncak, Puncak Jaya, Star Mountain, and along the border separating Papua New Guinea from West Papua.
On the 27 February 2024, Indonesian military personnel captured two teenage students and fatally shot a Papuan civilian in the Yahukimo district. They alleged that the deceased individual was affiliated with the West Papua National Liberation Army (TPNB), although this assertion has yet to be verified by the TPNPB.
Such incidents are tragically a common occurrence throughout West Papua, as the Indonesian military continue to target and wrongfully accuse innocent West Papuans in conflict-ridden regions of being associated with the TPNPB.
Two West Papuan students who were arrested on the banks of Braza River in Yahukimo . . . under the watch of two Indonesian military with heavy SS2 guns standing behind them. Image: Kompas.com
These deplorable acts transpired just prior to the ratification of a border operation agreement between the governments of the Papua New Guinea and Indonesia.
As the security agreement was being finalised, the Indonesian government announced a new military campaign in the highlands of West Papua. This operation, is named as “Habema” — meaning “must succeed to the maximum” — and was initiated in Jakarta on the 29 February 2024.
Agus Subiyanto, the Indonesian military command and police command stated during the announcement:
“My approach for Papua involves smart power, a blend of soft power, hard power, and military diplomacy. Establishing the Habema operational command is a key step in ensuring maximum success.”
Indonesian military commander General Agus Subiyanto (left) with National Police chief Listyo Sigit Prabowo (centre) and Defence Minister Prabowo Subianto while checking defence equipment at the TNI headquarters in Jakarta last Wednesday. Prabowo (right) is expected to become President after his decisive victory in the elections last week. Image: Antara News.
The looming military operation in West Papua and its border regions, employing advanced smart weapon technology poised a profound danger for Papuans.
A looming humanitarian crisis in West Papua, PNG, broader Melanesia and the Pacific region is inevitable, as unmanned aerial drones discern targets indiscriminately, wreak havoc in homes, and villages of the Papuan communities.
The Indonesian security forces have increasingly employed such sophisticated technology in conflict zones since 2019, including regions like Intan Jaya, Yahukimo, Maybrat, Pegunungan Bintang, and other volatile regions in West Papua.
Consequently, villages have been razed to the ground, compelling inhabitants to flee to the jungle in search of sanctuary — an exodus that continues unabated as they remain displaced from their homes indefinitely.
On 5 April 2018, the Indonesian government announced a military operation known as Damai Cartenz, which remains active in conflict-ridden regions, such as Yahukimo, Pegunungan Bintang, Nduga, and Intan Jaya.
The Habema security initiative will further threaten Papuans residing in the conflict zones, particularly in the vicinity of the border shared by Papua New Guinea and West Papua.
There are already hundreds of people from the Star Mountains who have fled across to Tumolbil, in the Yapsie sub-district of the PNG province of West Sepik, situated on the border. They fled to PNG because of Indonesia’s military operation (RNZ 2021).
According to RNZ News, individuals fleeing military actions conducted by the Indonesian government, including helicopter raids that caused significant harm to approximately 14 villages, have left behind foot tracks.
The speaker explained that Papua New Guineans occasionally cross over to the Indonesian side, typically seeking improved access to basic services.
The PNG government has been placing refugees from West Papua in border camps, the biggest one being at East Awin in the Western Province for many decades, with assistance from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
How should PNG, UN respond? The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 2007, article 36, states that “Indigenous peoples, in particular those divided by international borders, have the right to maintain and develop contacts, relations and cooperation with their own members as well as other peoples across borders”.
Over the past six years, regional and international organisations, such as the Melanesian Spearheads groups (MSG), Pacific islands Forum (PIF), Africa, Caribbean and Pacific states (ACP), the UN’s human rights commissioner as well as dozens of countries and individual parliaments, lawyers, academics, and politicians have been asking the Indonesian government to allow the UN’s human rights commissioner to visit West Papua.
However, to date, no response has been received from the Indonesian government.
What does this security deal mean for West Papuans? This is not just a simple security arrangement between Jakarta and Port Moresby to address border conflicts, but rather an issue of utmost importance for the people of Papua.
It concerns the sovereignty of a nation — West Papua — that has been unjustly seized by Indonesia, while the international community watched in silence, witnessing the unfurling and unparalleled destruction of human lives and the ecological system.
There is one noble thing the foreign minister of PNG and his government can do: ask why Jakarta is not responding to the request for a UN visit made by the international community, rather than endorsing an ‘illegal security pact’ with the illegal Indonesia colonial occupier over his supposed “family members separated only by imaginary lines”.
Ali Mirin is a West Papuan from the Kimyal tribe of the highlands that share a border with the Star Mountain region of Papua New Guinea. He graduated last year with a Master of Arts in International Relations from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia.
A Papua New Guinea MP who is being touted by the opposition as the next prime minister of the country says “my life is under threat”.
East Sepik governor Allan Bird said that since his nomination, he had been advised of this by a deputy police commissioner, who said they were monitoring the situation.
“All the apparatus of state have been put on full alert to hunt down the most dangerous criminal in PNG: his name is Allan Bird,” he wrote on Facebook.
“This is not the country I was born into, this is not the country the founding fathers envisioned.”
He said “reliable sources” had told him various state institutions had been instructed to try and find anything illegal on him, and charge and arrest him.
Last week, Bird told RNZ Pacific the country needed to decentralise power to deal with its challenges.
He said PNG had “very serious challenges”.
“Anyone who fixes these problems will be hated just like Sir Mekere [Morauta] did 25 years ago. Doing what needs to be done is not pretty, but it has to be done. Someone has to be willing to do the hard things.
“Many countries have problems, but not many countries have all those challenges all at the same time. PNG does so right now.
“If the problems aren’t fixed quickly then they will continue to get worse. Most of our people experience these problems every day now. It’s a struggle for survival.”
Part of Governor Bird’s FB posting about threats to his life on 9 March 2024. Image: Screenshot APR
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Television New Zealand’s proposals to balance its worsening books by killing news and current affairs programmes mean New Zealanders could end up with almost no national current affairs on TV within weeks.
It is a response to digital era changes in technology, viewing and advertising — but also the consequence of political choices.
“I can see that I’ve chosen a good night to come on,” TVNZ presenter Jack Tame said mournfully on his stint as a Newstalk ZB panelist last Wednesday.
The news that TVNZ news staff had been told to “watch their inboxes” the next morning had just broken.
It was less than a week since Newshub’s owners had announced a plan to close it completely in mid-year and TVNZ had reported bad financial figures for the last half of 2023.
The following day — last Thursday — TVNZ’s Midday News told viewers 9 percent of TVNZ staff — 68 people in total — would go in a plan to balance the books.
“The broadcaster has told staff that its headcount is high and so are costs,” said reporter Kim Baker-Wilson starkly on TVNZ’s Midday.
On chopping block
Twenty-four hours later, it was one of the shows on the chopping block — along with late news show Tonight and TVNZ’s flagship weekly current affairs show Sunday.
“As the last of its kind — is that what we want in our media landscape . . . to have no in-depth current affairs show?” said Sunday presenter Miriama Kamo (also the host of the weekend show Marae).
Consumers investigator Fair Go — with a 47-year track record as one of TVNZ’s most popular local shows — will also be gone by the end of May under this plan.
People at TVNZ’s building in central Auckland. Photo: RNZ/Marika Khabazi
If Newshub vanishes from rival channel Three by mid year, there will be just one national daily TV news bulletin left — TVNZ’s 1News — and no long form current affairs at all, except TVNZ’s Q+A and others funded from the public purse by NZ on Air and Te Mangai Paho.
Tellingly, weekday TVNZ shows which will carry on — Breakfast and Seven Sharp — are ones which generate income from “partner content” deals and “integrated advertising” — effectively paid-for slots within the programmes.
TVNZ had made it known cuts were coming months ago because costs were outstripping fast-falling revenue as advertisers tightened their belts or spent elsewhere.
TVNZ executives had also made it clear that reinforcing TVNZ’s digital-first strategy would be a key goal as well as just cutting costs.
Other notable cut
So the other notable service to be cut was a surprise — the youth-focused digital-native outlet Re: News.
After its launch in 2017, its young staff revived a mothballed studio and gained a reputation for hard work — and then for the quality of its work.
It won national journalism awards in the past two years and reached younger people who rarely if ever turn on a television set.
Reportedly, the staff of Re: News staff is to be halved and lose some of its leaders.
The main media workers’ union E tū said it will fight to save jobs and extend the short consultation period.
Some staff made it plain that they weren’t giving up just yet either and would present counter-proposals to save shows and jobs.
In a statement, TVNZ said the proposals “in no way relate to the immense contribution of the teams that work on those shows and the significant journalistic value they’ve provided over the years”.
Money-spinners
But some were money-spinners too.
Fair Go and Sunday still pull in big six-figure live primetime TV audiences and more views now on TVNZ+. Its marketers frequently tell the advertisers that.
TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell knows all about that. She was previously TVNZ’s commercial director.
So why kill off these programmes now?
TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell . . . “I’ve been quite open with the fact that there are no sacred cows.” Image: TVNZ
Mediawatch’s requests to talk to O’Donnell and TVNZ’s executive editor of news Phil O’Sullivan were unsuccessful.
But O’Donnell did talk to Newstalk ZB on Friday night.
“I’ve been quite open with the fact that there are no sacred cows. And we need to find some ways to stop doing some things for us to reduce our costs,” O’Donnell told Newstalk ZB.
“TVNZ’s still investing over $40 million in news and current affairs — so we absolutely believe in the future of news and current affairs. But we have a situation right now that our operating model is more expensive than the revenue that we’re making. And we have to make some really tough, tough decisions,” she said.
“We’ll constantly be looking at things to keep the operating model in line with what our revenue is. Within the TVNZ Act it’s clear that we need to be a commercial broadcaster, We are a commercial business, so that’s the remit that we need to work on.
“Our competitors these days are not (Newstalk ZB) or Sky or Warner Brothers (Discovery) but Google and Meta. These are multi-trillion dollar organisations. Ninety cents of every dollar spent in digital news advertising is going offshore. That’s 10 cents left for the likes of NZME, TVNZ, Stuff and any of the other local broadcasters.”
Jack Tame also pointed the finger at the titans of tech on his Newstalk ZB Saturday show.
Force of digital giants ‘irrepressible’ “Ultimately the force of those digital giants is irrepressible. Trying to save free-to-air commercial TV, with quality news, current affairs and local programming in a country with five million people . . . is like trying to bail out the Titanic with an empty ice cream container. I’m not aware of any comparable broadcast markets where they’ve managed to pull it off,” he told listeners.
But few countries have a state-owned yet fully-commercial broadcaster trying to do news on TV and online, disconnected from publicly-funded ones also doing news on TV and radio and online.
That makes TVNZ a state-owned broadcaster that serves advertisers as much as New Zealanders.
But if things had panned out differently a year ago, that wouldn’t be the case now either.
What if the public media merger had gone ahead? A new not-for-profit public media entity incorporating RNZ and TVNZ — Aotearoa New Zealand Public Media (ANZPM) — was supposed to start one year ago this week.
It would have been the biggest media reform since the early 1990s.
The previous government was prepared to spend more than $400 million over four years to get it going.
Almost $20 million was spent on a programme called Strong Public Media, put in place because New Zealand’s media sector was weak.
“Ailing” was the word that the business case used, noting “increased competition from overseas players slashed the share of revenue from advertising.”
But the Labour government killed the plan before the last election, citing the cost of living crisis.
The new entity would still have needed TVNZ’s commercial revenue, but if it had gone ahead, would that mean TVNZ wouldn’t now be sacrificing news shows and journalists?
Tracey Martin who had been named as chair of the board charged with getting ANZPM up and running . . . “Nobody’s surprised. Surely nobody is surprised that this ecosystem is not sustainable any longer.” Image: RNZ/Nate McKinnon
“Nobody’s surprised. Surely nobody is surprised that this ecosystem is not sustainable any longer. Something radical had to change,” Tracey Martin — the chair of the board charged with getting ANZPM up and running — told Mediawatch.
“I don’t have any problem believing that (TVNZ) would have had to change what they were delivering. But would it have been cuts to news and current affairs that we would have been seeing? There would have been other decisions made because commerciality . . . was not the major driver (of ANZPM),” Martin said.
“That was where we started from. If Armageddon happens — and all other New Zealand media can no longer exist — you have to be there as the Fourth Estate — to make sure that New Zealanders have a place to go to for truth and trust.”
What were the assumptions about the advertising revenue TVNZ would have been able to pull in?
“[TVNZ] was telling us that it wouldn’t be as bad as we believed it would be. TVNZ modeling was not as dramatic as our modeling. We were happy to accept that [because] our modeling gave us a particular window by which to change the ecosystem in which New Zealand media could survive to try and stabilise,” Martin told Mediawatch.
The business case document tracked TVNZ revenue and expenses from 2012 until 2020 — the start of the planning process for the new entity.
By 2020, a sharp rise in costs already exceeded revenue which was above $300 million.
And as we now know, TVNZ revenue has fallen further and more quickly since then.
“We were predicting linear TV revenue was going to continue to drop substantially and relatively quickly — and they were not going to be able to switch their advertising revenue at the same capacity to digital,” Martin said.
“They had more confidence than we did,” she said.
The ANZPM legislation estimated it as a $400 million a year operation, with roughly half the funding from public sources and half from commercial revenue.
TVNZ’s submission said that was “unambitious”.
Then TVNZ CEO Simon Power addressing Parliament’s EDSI committee last year on the ANZPM legislation. Image: Screenshot/EDSI Committee Facebook
“If the commercial arm of the new entity can aid in gaining more revenue to reinvest into local content and to reinvest into public media outcomes, all the better,” the chief executive at the time Simon Power told Mediawatch in 2023.
“It was a very rosy picture they painted. They had a mandate to be a commercial business that had to give confidence to the advertisers and the rest of New Zealand but they were very confident two years ago that this wouldn’t happen,” she said.
In opposition, National Party leader Christopher Luxon described the merger as “ideological and insane” and “a solution looking for a problem”.
Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee . . . Photo: RNZ / Angus Dreaver
But if that was based on TVNZ’s bullish assessments of its own revenue-raising capacity — or a disregard of a probable downturn ahead, was that a big mistake?
“I won’t comment for today’s government, but statements being made in the last couple of days about people getting their news from somewhere else; truth and trust has dropped off; linear has got to be transferred into the digital environment . . . none of those things are new comments,” Martin told Mediawatch.
“They’re all in the documentation that we placed into the public domain — and I asked the special permission, as the chair of the ANZPM group, to brief spokespersons for broadcasting of the Greens, Act and National to try and make sure that everybody has as much and as much information as we could give them,” she said.
Media and Communications Minister Melissa Lee said this week she was working on proposals to help the media to take to cabinet.
“I don’t give advice to the minister, but I would advise officials to go back and pull out the business case and paperwork for ANZPM — and to look at the submissions and the number of people who supported the concept, but had concerns about particular areas,” Tracey Martin told Mediawatch.
“Don’t let perfection get in the way of action.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
On February 13, officers from Malawi’s Digital Forensics and Cybercrime Investigations department seized cell phones and laptops from 14 Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) journalists, according to newsreports, the Malawi chapter of regional press freedom group Media Institute of Southern Africa, South Africa-based rights group Campaign for Free Expression, and four of the affected journalists, who spoke to CPJ.The police officers seized cell phones from each of the 14 journalists and laptops from five of this group.
The seizures took place largely at MBC offices in Blantyre, Lilongwe, and Mzuzu following a complaint by MBC’s management about the creation of a “fake” Facebook page bearing the corporation’s name and logo, which the outlet had not approved, according to the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA), the journalists, and police search warrants reviewed by CPJ. The complaint accused the 14 journalists of “spamming,” which carries a maximum penalty of two million Malawian kwacha (about US$1,190) and imprisonment for five years under section 91 of Malawi’s Electronic Transactions and Cybersecurity Act.
As of March 8, police returned three laptops and nine phones to the journalists, according to a journalist who spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal. The journalist, whose phone has been returned, is concerned that the device has been compromised while in police custody and will no longer use it.
Another journalist, who also spoke to CPJ on the condition of anonymity out of fear of reprisal, said some MBC colleagues received email notifications about attempts to log into their Instagram and X accounts while their devices were in police custody.
Malawi police spokesperson Peter Kalaya told CPJ in a late February 2024 phone interview that the police investigation was being conducted in response to a legitimate complaint, and police had obtained a warrant before seizing and searching the devices.
“The investigation is not targeting journalists, it is targeting people who we suspect to be responsible” for the Facebook page, Kalaya said, but he declined to explain how the police had determined which individuals were suspects.
“We have a forensics laboratory and sometimes we use other institutions’ forensic laboratories,” Kalaya told CPJ, but declined to give specifics about the technologies used to search the journalists’ devices. “Our search in the gadgets is going to be restricted to those apps that we believe or that we suspect were used in the commission of the crime,” Kalaya told CPJ, adding that the journalists whose devices had been seized should trust the professionalism of the investigating officers. “Why should a police officer go to contacts, to [the] photo gallery when what he is looking for is not there, or if he does not suspect it will be there?” he said.
In January 2024, the local Platform for Investigative Journalism (PIJ-Malawi) reported that Malawian authorities had obtained the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), a powerful technology designed to access and extract information from electronic devices and sold by the Israel-based company Cellebrite. The Malawi police sought to further expand its investigative capacity with similar tools, according to the report. In response to CPJ’s questions about which tools, including those sold by Cellebrite, police used to search the devices of MBC journalists, Kalaya declined to give specifics.
MBC director general George Kasakula declined to comment until the police investigation into the alleged spamming concludes at an unknown date.
On February 15, five police officers looking for Greyson Chapita, MBC’s suspended controller of news and programs, arrived at his daughter’s home. The officers told family members there to call Chapita and tell him that his daughter was sick to lure him there, the journalist told CPJ, adding that his family obliged, and he arrived shortly after. Once Chapita arrived, police officers told him that he was a suspect in a murder and requested to search his phone and laptop, but he initially refused.
Chapita told the officers that he would not comply until he verified that they were police officers, and he went with them to the local police station to confirm their identities. Once confirmed by a senior officer, Chapita returned with them to his home, where the officers showed him the same warrant citing MBC management’s complaint, and he opened his laptop and entered his password, he told CPJ. The officers then looked through his Facebook account for 30 minutes without further explanation as Chapita watched.
“[T]hey checked my Facebook account and took screenshots. They made me sign a document showing that they searched my laptop and did not find anything, so they didn’t take it. They couldn’t see my phone because it is not a smartphone,” the journalist added.
When asked about the police officers’ tactics used to summon Chapita and search his computer, Kalaya told CPJ that he could not comment on the specifics of the incident, but he said the journalist could file a complaint.
“What I can assure you is that our investigators are very professional and whatever they are doing is very professional,” Kalaya said.
The long-awaited Dune: Part Two was released earlier this month. The much-talked-about film—which generated more than $180 million in its first weekend—has captivated movie theater-goers all over the world, with reviewers calling the epic sci-fi sequel “immense,” “awe-inspiring,” and “absolutely gorgeous.”
The films are based on the books of the same name by Frank Herbert, and imagine a universe where different planets are struggling for power over a desert planet called Arrakis, its people (the Fremen), and its abundant supply of the profitable psychedelic drug Melange (often referred to as “spice”). As you might expect, the desire for wealth and control ultimately leads to war—and this is what we see unfold in Part Two.
If you’re yet to witness the cinematic spectacle that is the sequel and you’re planning a pre-viewing feast in honor of the occasion, we’ve listed a few different dishes you might want to serve to your fellow Dune fans below. They’re also great choices if you’ve already seen it, but just want to immerse yourself back in the fantasy world. Or maybe you’re just a fan of the movie’s star-studded cast, which includes Zendaya, Timothée Chalamet, and Florence Pugh, and are interested in their favorite foods (spoiler: one of them is grilled cheese).
Or maybe, you’re just hungry. Regardless of your feelings, we’re confident you’re going to love the selection we’ve gathered. And everything is vegan, of course.
8 dishes perfect for your Dune: Part Two celebration feast
1 ‘Spice’ Cinnamon Sugar Churros
Melange is the reason for all of the events we see in the Dune novels and books, so, of course, we had to start this list with something spice-inspired. In the story, Lady Jessica (the mother of Chalamet’s central character, Paul, who is played by Rebecca Ferguson), reveals that her first try of the drug “tasted like cinnamon,” hence why we’ve picked these delicious vegan cinnamon sugar churros. They’re deliciously crispy, golden, sugar-dusted, and best served with rich chocolate sauce. Get the recipe
Plant Based Folk
2 Middle Eastern Maqluba
Much of Dune: Part One and Dune: Part Two were filmed in Jordan’s Wadi Rum, an area of protected desert wilderness (now likely to become a popular tourist destination). So, in honor of the country that gave us real-life Arrakis, we felt it was only right to include one of its most-loved dishes, maqluba, on this list. The Middle Eastern dish, which is also eaten across Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq, consists of vegetables and rice that are layered in a pot before being flipped over before serving. Find out more about its origins and how to make it below. Learn more
Gina Fontana
3 Zendaya’s favorite grilled cheese
Zendaya, who plays Fremen warrior Chani, is a big fan of In-N-Out, according to a recent interview with Elle. But as a vegetarian, she’s not after the burgers. “I always go get my grilled cheese,” she said. “I know people are like, ‘Wait, aren’t you a vegetarian?’ Grilled cheese. They’re bomb.” Unfortunately, the popular fast-food chain doesn’t offer a vegan version of the actress’ favorite, but you can make your own vegan grilled cheese with our recipe below (and with pumpkin, pear, and candied pecans, we think it’s even better than the In-N-Out version, sorry, Zendaya). Get the recipe
Ooh La La It’s Vegan
4 Water of Life Kamikaze shots
In Dune, Water of Life is not to be messed with. This blue liquid is a concentrated form of spice and can be poisonous if used in the wrong way (to find out more, you’ll have to watch the movies or read the books!). This fun, vibrant, tangy blue shot from Ohh La La It’s Vegan would make the perfect Water of Life shot for any Dune-inspired party. It isn’t poisonous, but it is alcoholic, so enjoy it in moderation. Get the recipe
Canva
5 Vegan bagels in honor of Timothée Chalamet
We don’t know much about Chalamet’s diet, but we do know that like any true New Yorker, he loves bagels. In 2018, he told Frank Ocean in an interview for V Magazine that he always heads to Tompkins Square Bagels in the city for the “best bagels.” If that’s a little far for you to go to stock up, you can find more of our favorite brands below. Eat one for you and then another one for Chalamet, go on, you deserve it. Learn more
Sarah Bond
6 Desert Dulce Date Leche Popsicles
Keeping cool is essential in the desert, and while Herbert’s version of Arrakis might not be stocked up on popsicles, that doesn’t mean your Dune party can’t imagine that it is. These delicious leche popsicles are also made with dates, a favorite food in Abu Dhabi, UAE, where much of Dune was also filmed. Get the recipe
Lowly Food
7 Florence Pugh’s proper full English breakfast
Pugh makes her Dune debut as Princess Irulan in the second movie in the series. Celebrate her role in the franchise by munching down on one of the British actress’ favorite meals: a full English breakfast. In a recent video for Vanity Fair, she told her fellow castmates that her go-to hungover breakfast consists of “sourdough, beans, bacon, fried egg, a little bit of spicy thing on the side. Some tomatoes, sausages, English sausages, ketchup, HP sauce, runny yolk.” Pugh’s version, of course, isn’t vegan, but it’s easy to make a delicious plant-based English breakfast, as this recipe from Lowly Food demonstrates. Get the recipe
Marie Laforêt
8 House Atreides x Fremen fusion: Cinnamon Rice Pudding
Paul and Lady Jessica both belong to House Atreides, the ruling house that moved from the planet of Caladan to Arrakis to take over Spice production. For that reason, we think a fusion of their cuisine with the Fremen’s would look something like this cinnamon rice pudding. The cinnamon is, of course, the Spice, but the rice part is also important—on Caladan, House Atreides cultivated a type of grain called Pungi rice. Get the recipe
This post was originally published on VegNews.com.
Both corporate media and social media companies are hoping for big pay days during this year’s campaign cycle, and they’ve spent millions lobbying Washington lawmakers to make it easier to hide where the money is coming from. Mike Papantonio is joined by Independent newspaper publisher Rick Outzen to discuss. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription […]
Berlin, March 8, 2024—The Committee to Protect Journalists and more than 100 journalists and media leaders sent an open letter to senior British police officers and lawmakers on Friday, International Women’s Day, calling on them to break the cycle of online violence and abuse against women working in journalism, which risks sidelining them from the profession, and to secure a safer future for women in the media.
In the letter, the signatories made four recommendations to the police:
to improve the recording of crimes against journalists
to provide national-level guidance for police on online violence against journalists and training on the gendered nature of online violence
Television New Zealand is proposing to axe its long-running and award-winning current affairs programme Sunday, hosted by veteran broadcaster Miriama Kamo.
TVNZ said a proposal had been presented to Sunday staff which could result in cancellation of the programme.
The show was named Best Current Affairs Programme at the Voyager Media Awards and the New Zealand Television Awards last year.
It first aired in 2002 and has run for more than two decades, showcasing a mix of New Zealand stories and reports from overseas.
One award-winning investigation looked into the 2008 Chinese poisoned milk scandal, and how patients were treated at Porirua Hospital.
Veteran journalists like John Hudson, Janet McIntyre and Ian Sinclair have contributed to the show.
News bulletins may be canned
RNZ understands the 1News Midday and Tonight bulletins may also be canned, and consumer affairs programme Fair Go could to be cut too.
Its understood four out of 10 roles at youth platform Re: News are set to go — head of Re: News, head of content, production manager, and a journalist.
TVNZ’s Sunday show . . . named Best Current Affairs Programme at the Voyager Media Awards and the New Zealand Television Awards last year. Image: TVNZ screenshot APR
Its understood four out of 10 roles at youth platform Re: News are set to go — head of Re: News, head of content, production manager, and a journalist.
The remaining five staff will have a change in reporting line, reporting to TVNZ digital news and content general manager Veronica Schmidt.
RNZ has been told there will be a shift away from social media in a bid to drive more traffic to the Re: News website. Its documentary series funded by NZ On Air is also set to be canned.
The digital media platform was launched in 2017 as a current affairs platform aimed at audiences under-served by mainstream news.
It produces documentary videos, articles and podcasts particularly relevant to youth, Māori, Pasifika, rainbow communities, and migrant and regional audiences.
The platform won four awards at last year’s Voyager Media Awards, including best news, current affairs or specialist publication; video journalist of the year; best video documentary series; and best original podcast — seasonal/serial.
On average, Re: News receives more than a million video views each month.
Difficult choices
TVNZ chief executive Jodi O’Donnell said in a statement that difficult choices had to be made to ensure the broadcaster remained sustainable.
A hui for all news and current affairs staff is due to be held at 1pm, following the individual programme meetings.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon, speaking at a press conference in Whangārei, said he was concerned about reports of job cuts and that it was a “pretty tough time if you’re a TVNZ employee”.
Luxon said consumers are consuming news in different ways and advertising and revenue models are changing.
He said it was a pretty tough time for people working in the media but he had travelled the country and many other sectors were doing it tough.
Media companies needed to evolve and innovate in order to adapt, he said.
Fair Go Fair Go is one of New Zealand’s longest running and most popular television series.
The consumer affairs show, which investigates complaints from viewers, first aired in April 1977 and is just shy of its 47th birthday.
During a 2021 interview with RNZ’s Afternoons programme, original host and creator Brian Edwards said he was inspired by a BBC programme called That’s Life.
“One particular segment was on consumers and I think that was the germ of the idea, that we could do a programme in New Zealand where we could look at protecting people right there in their normal daily lives from rip offs and scams by various people and it it just soared from the beginning. I mean, it was tremendous,” Edwards said.
“I suppose my main function was to grill the villains, and because I’m a really quite unpleasant person, this fit in my my personality very well.”
Well-known presenter Kevin Milne hosted the show for almost three decades, from 1983 to 2010.
“It was beautifully set up, really, and it didn’t require any change as much and still hasn’t, you know, 44 years later,” he told Afternoons during the same interview.
‘Good deal of cynicism’
“I remember that there was a good deal of cynicism in the early days from the newsroom journalists who thought that because there was an element of entertainment on the show that you couldn’t call it real journalism, which was nonsense because it ended up leading the way in terms of investigative journalism.”
The show broke new ground, Milne said.
“It’s hard to believe now that back then, at the time when Brian set up those programmes, most broadcasters never named names. I can remember now hearing news stories which could say a well-known department store in Lambton Quay appeared in court this morning. No mention [of name], and when Fair Go started up, it was decided it would name names.”
Edwards said that was an “absolutely critical” aspect of the show.
“The thing would have been pointless I think, if you couldn’t name names. The thing was to expose the wrong doers if you like . . . what was the point in in doing that if you couldn’t name names?
“And I think we probably, together, our team, won some battles there and being able to do that. It took a while and I think there was a degree of nervousness by the broadcaster and eventually it turned out all right.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
