On Wednesday, CNN announced that its embattled CEO and chairman Chris Licht was departing the network. The announced departure came after weeks of criticism over Licht’s decision to allow former President Donald Trump to have a friendly forum during a town hall-style event last month, where he was barely fact-checked in real time as he spouted a barrage of falsehoods regarding his time in office…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
China’s official narrative about the war in Ukraine has embraced three different themes over time that have sent conflicting signals, according to an analysis of state media reports and official foreign ministry declarations.
That reflects Beijing’s competing priorities in the conflict, experts say.
Initially, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Beijing officials sought to present China as a neutral power with no interest in getting involved. But a year later, they started to portray China as taking an active role as a peacemaker.
Both of those approaches have been at odds with the state media’s coverage of the war, which has been sympathetic to Moscow. It has portrayed the United States and Ukraine as aggressors and Russia as a heroic victim protecting its security, according to a recent joint study by Asia Fact Check Lab (AFCL) and three research groups.
China’s attempts to play various sides isn’t surprising, experts say. It doesn’t want the war to drag on, but it also doesn’t want to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin as it needs to keep Russia on its side against the United States and its global allies.
“Beijing doesn’t ultimately benefit from a prolonged war that is destabilizing the global economy and continues to present the potential risk of nuclear escalation and the spread of conflict beyond Ukraine,” said Patricia Kim, a Chinese foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
“At the same time, Beijing has been reluctant to curtail its support to Moscow and to sharply push Putin to stop his war, as China is keen to keep Russia on its side as it looks toward long-term competition against the U.S. and its partners,” she said.
First 100 days
A joint study conducted by AFCL, Taiwan’s DoubleThink Lab, the Ukrainian civic organization Detector Media and the research firm IRI Beacon Project shows that the Chinese government has propagated narratives consistent and supportive of Russia’s justification for the war.
Entitled “The Invasion of Ukraine in One Hundred Days: A Comparative Analysis of Chinese and Russian War Narratives,” the study traces common themes observed in both Chinese and Russian narratives during the first 100 days of the conflict and finds that China largely copied Russian narratives portraying itself as a victim heroically opposing the US and the West.
In countries like China that lack a free press, foreign policy statements and state media coverage provide a window into government priorities.
As the Communist Party’s mouthpiece, state-run media such as Xinhua News Agency, the Global Times newspaper and CCTV are used by authorities for achieving political goals, and are aimed at specific audiences. They may target an international audience, a domestic one or specific countries.
During the first 100 days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Chinese media sought to position the country as a neutral player, shining a spotlight on Western support for Ukraine while downplaying its own ties to Moscow, said Kim.
Yet state-run media coverage clearly sided with Russia. It echoed Russian narratives about three contentious topics: The theory that the United States had a bioweapon lab in Ukraine, the Russian massacre of civilians in the town of Bucha in March 2022 and the ongoing sanctions against Russia, the joint study showed.
It also highlighted alleged divisions between Western institutions and the international community over sanctions against Russia.
Such views align with those of Moscow, but they also fit with Beijing’s domestic agenda. The Chinese government has sought to portray itself as a victim of Western hostility, too, alleging that the United States is seeking to contain China and its rise as a superpower—a line that Beijing has promoted among its people.
These narratives contribute to an image of President Xi Jinping as a tough statesman who is willing to stand up to the West.
Chinese narratives since May 2022
To examine Chinese narratives about the Ukraine invasion since May 2022, we requested data from Future Media and Disinformation Research Center on how certain keywords ebb and flow in Chinese public discourse.
From May 2022 to February 2023, references to Ukraine or Russia by Chinese media and officials appear to have decreased. However, the number of references then jumped from February to April 2023 – with a new emphasis on China as a peacemaker working to prevent a warmongering United States from prolonging the Ukraine conflict.
The emergence of this narrative also coincided with a state visit by Xi to Russia in March—his first since the start of his third five-year term last October.
In many cases, this message was disseminated by Chinese foreign ministry officials, who tend to adopt a restrained tone when speaking about more nuanced geopolitical issues surrounding the war.
P2
China also advocated a peaceful settlement to the war using other channels including several position papers. Xi himself wrote an article published in the Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, in which he emphasized China’s role as a “peacemaker.”
This shift in narrative was followed by a phone call between Xi and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on April 26, the first direct communication between the two leaders since the war broke out. After the call, China reiterated that its “core position is to promote peace and promote talks.”
That same day, China voted in favor of a UN General Assembly motion that acknowledged Russian aggression against Ukraine, fueling speculation that Beijing’s position toward the war has changed.
Despite Beijing’s apparent shift in position, some official media reports have continued to spread the narrative of the United States as aggressor, such as an article published by the Xinhua in February criticizing Washington for “still fanning the flames in Ukraine.”
ManyChinese articles reporting misleading or controversial statements by Russian officials have been linked to specific incidents, such as U.S. President Biden’s surprise visit to Ukraine in February. One article said that the United States had become a direct participant in the war. Another article characterized Finland’s accession to NATO in April as a “deliberate violation of Russia’s security.”
Even as China continues to send mixed signals about Russia’s role in the war, pragmatism appears to be pushing Chinese authorities to take a more active part in trying to end the conflict.
Zelensky’s continued willingness to engage in talks with Xi suggests that Ukrainian leaders remain hopeful that China can play a role in negotiating a peace settlement.
As Kim says, “While Beijing can never be an honest broker, it still has an interest in seeing an end to the war and so it makes sense for Ukraine and other states to encourage China to use its influence constructively vis-a-vis Moscow.”
Additional reporting by Shen Ke. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Zhuang Jing for RFA.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
America feels more polarized than at any other point in modern times, and that’s something that most Americans agree with. Most of the country is also in agreement about what’s causing this – And they are pinning the blame on corporate media. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software […]
The post Citizens Blame Corporate Media For Dividing The Nation appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
By Alice Lolohea of Tagata Pasifika
Twenty five broadcasters from 13 Pacific countries touched down in Auckland recently for the Pacific Broadcasters conference.
A meet and greet filled with lots of talanoa, networking and healthy debate, the conference was a welcome change from a typical Zoom meeting.
Natasha Meleisea, chief executive of Pacific Cooperation Broadcasting Ltd (PCBL), which operates Pasifika TV, says the conference was about uniting Pacific broadcasters.
“I’ve kind of shared messages today around, it’s never a solo journey. There is strength in the collective and partnerships is really important,” Meleisea says.
“For a very long time we’ve had Pacific voices or Pacific stories being told by non-Pacific. There’s nothing wrong with that.
“However, it’s good to provide a platform where our own Pacific people can share those stories themselves and PCBL, Pasifika TV enables that.”
Vanuatu Broadcasting and Television Cooperation (VBTC) chief executive Francis Herman says that after seeing Vanuatu stories in the hands of overseas productions, story sovereignty is an important point of discussion.
‘Misconstrued a lot of things’
“We’ve noticed that in previous years, people have just flown in, told our stories, misconstrued a lot of things,” says Herman.
“[They’ve] gone for the ratings, gone for the dollars and left us high and dry, and they really haven’t told the real stories. We are the experts in our own culture, our own island, or about our people.”
But Herman says the PCBL partnership has been a “faithful . . . and equal partnership.”
“We haven’t been seen as a very small island developing state or a very small broadcaster. They’ve treated us as equals.
“We tell our own stories. We know our audience better, we know our country better than they do.
“Let’s tell our stories. And I think Pasifika TV has given us that opportunity and that’s why we’ve continued that partnership.”
Story sovereignty major factor for Pacific broadcasters. Video: Tagata Pasifika
Part of that partnership includes training in camera production, operation of Live U units and journalism training, something which Kiri One TV chief executive Tiarite George Kwong deeply values.
“Kiri One just started five years ago . . . and so we are very new in this kind of industry,” Kwong says.
‘Upgrading our skills’
“The idea for the partnership with PCBL is to upgrade our skills so that the news that we produce is up to the standard that people want to listen and watch every day.
“Compared from day one that we started, we have seen the improvement.”
Broadcasters like Mai TV in Fiji have taken the PCBL training one step further, when they acquired the netball rights for the Oceania Netball Series in 2022, their first time to do so.
“We were thinking we cannot do this because you need all the different equipment and costs and things,” says director of Mai TV Stanley Simpson.
“But we spoke with PCBL and they found solutions for us. And through that we were able to take the Oceania Netball series to Tonga, to Samoa and the Cook Islands, which is the first time that we were able to distribute rights from Fiji.
“That empowerment has been really strong. And from the discussions and the inspiring conversations we’ve had with the team at PCBL, it made us look around and realise that we have the best stories in the world in the Pacific.”
Now that their Pacific counterparts are receiving the necessary training and equipment, Meleisea says there is an abundance of Pacific content being produced from their regional partners.
‘A phenomenal feat’
“We went to air in 2016, at that point in time we weren’t getting any content from the Pacific. Fast forward eight years down the track, we’re now getting eight to 10 hours a day from the Pacific, which is a phenomenal feat.
“In order to achieve that, it’s been a slow build. It’s been about providing equipment, providing training, and then providing the infrastructure and the connectivity to enable it.
“So without all of those three things, we wouldn’t have been able to get the content from the region.”
Funded as part of NZ’s Public Interest Journalism project. Republished from Tagata Pasifika with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
As shareholders gathered at the annual meeting of Gannett, the largest newspaper company in the United States following a 2019 merger, hundreds of unionized employees from across the country walked off the job on Monday to demand investors take action against what the journalists say is corporate greed at the top of the organization. The journalists, who are represented by the NewsGuild…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
By Lincoln Tan of The New Zealand Herald
Former TVNZ Breakfast host Kamahl Santamaria, who quit following complaints about inappropriate workplace behaviour, has broken his silence and started a podcast he says would “set some records straight”.
The Emmy-nominated broadcaster lasted just 32 days at TVNZ after working at Al Jazeera, where he had also been accused of having sent a lewd email to a female colleague.
Speaking publicly for the first time in more than a year, Santamaria talked about the allegations, the effect they have had and how the reporting of them had led to his new website The Balance.
“It is very much informed and directed by my own experience over the past year, and yes I will be using it to set some records straight,” he told listeners in the first episode of his podcast, RE: Balance.
“Because in the end, I trust myself to tell my story.”
Santamaria said he had been a journalist for nearly 25 years, but for the last year had had to live with the label of being “a disgraced journalist”.
“That’s not a pleasant title to live with but that’s how it’s been ever since my departure from TVNZ in May of last year,” he said.
‘Full story yet to be told’
For legal reasons, Santamaria said he had not spoken about his departure from TVNZ — but he told listeners he would when he is able.
“The full story has definitely not been told, yet,” he said.
“The headline doesn’t always match the story, and countering that is a big part of what I’m embarking on with The Balance.
Santamaria said what happened had forced him to stop, look at himself and his behaviour in the past, and acknowledge there were times when he just got it wrong.
“I am deeply sorry for that and for the effect I have now learned that it had on others,” he said.
He said they also prompted him to look at the environments he was working in.
“What I failed to recognise was particularly in a post ‘Me Too’ world, there is just no place for over friendly, over-familiar, flirtatious, tactile behaviour or banter in the workplace no matter how friendly that workplace is or how prevalent that behaviour might be.
Mistakes impacted on health
“I’ve made mistakes but I hope my past doesn’t define who I am in the future.”
Santamaria said the effect on his mental health and that of his family has been “immense, dilapidating and long-lasting” and “it still goes on now”.
He revealed he had been in hiding for a year “growing a beard, always wearing a cap”, afraid to use his own name, and that he is on medication.
Santamaria referred to a report about his visit to the National Business Review, which he said was the “one time” we went out publicly and a journalist turned it into a story.
He said the journalist wrote about how uncomfortable he made people feel by just shaking their hands.
“The whole thing was utterly ridiculous to the point now where I don’t even shake people’s hands anymore.”
Santamaria disclosed that in the early stages, he had been on heavy medication during the day and sedation at night, and the family had him on a round-the-clock suicide watch.
He said he had been in no position, physically or mentally, to speak up for himself at the time.
“The fact that I am still here now is a testament to my family who kept me alive when I didn’t want to go on and they continue to do so,” he said.
First published by The New Zealand Herald and republished here with the author’s permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Paediatrician Dr Teuila Percival heads the list of Pacific recipients in the New Zealand King’s Birthday Honours List for 2023.
Dr Percival is one of at least 15 Pasifika people in New Zealand who are on the list. She is to be a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to health and the Pacific community.
For the past three decades she has been a strong advocate for Pacific children’s health in New Zealand and the Pacific.
Dr Percival said she felt honoured to get the award after getting over the initial surprise.
“I think it’s important for Pacific people to be recognised in the work they do, so it’s really nice in that respect,” she said.
“It’s just a great job, I love working with kids. I think children are the most important thing.”
Dr Percival was a founding member of South Seas Healthcare, a community health service for Pacific people in Auckland since 1999.
She has also been deployed to Pacific nations after natural disasters like to Samoa in 2009 after the tsunami and to Vanuatu in 2015 following cyclone Pam.
Education
Sacred Heart school counsellor Nua Silipa is to be an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to Pacific education.
Silipa said her experience struggling in the education system after immigrating from Samoa in 1962 had motivated her to help Pacific people in the classroom.
“When I look back now I think my journey was so hard as a minority in Christchurch,” Silipa said.
“It was a struggle because we weren’t in the classroom, the resources at that time were Janet and John . . . so as a learner I really struggled.”
She said the “whole experience of underachievement” motivated her to help “people who are different in the system”.
“It’s not a one size fits all in education.”
Nua Silipa said she felt humbled to be a recipient on the King’s Birthday Honours List.
She said the award also honoured the people who had been involved in improving education for Pasifika.
“I know there’s so, so many other people who are doing work quietly every day, helping our communities and I’m really in awe of them.
“There are many unsung heroes out in our community doing work for our people.”
Technology
Mary Aue is to be a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to education, technology and Pacific and Māori communities.
Mary Aue is to be a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to education, technology and Pacific and Māori communities Photo: Supplied
In 1999, she launched Coconut Wireless as an e-newsletter for Pasifika reaching 10,000 subscribers. It relaunched in 2014 as a social media platform and now has over 300,000 Facebook followers.
“There was a disconnect between community and government agencies and there was a disconnect between our communities,” she said.
“There was no communication back then, so I created an e-newsletter.”
The name Coconut Wireless was based on the island concept as a fast way of communicating through word of mouth.
Aue has also been an advocate for more Pacific and Māori learners in science, engineering, technology and mathematics (STEM).
Aue said she was originally going to decline the award as there were a lot of people in the community who do not get recognised behind the scenes.
“I have to thank my family, my friends and the amazing community that we’re all part of.”
Sport
Teremoana Maua-Hodges said she “just about choked” on her cup of tea when she found out she had received the Queen’s Service Medal.
Maua-Hodges has been given the award for her contribution to sport and culture.
She said the award was the work of many people — including her parents — who travelled to New Zealand from the Cook Islands when she was a child.
“I’m very humbled by the award, but it’s not just me,” Maua-Hodges said.
“I stand on the shoulders of different heroes and heroines of our people in the community.
“It’s not my award, it’s our award.”
Maua-Hodges said the most important thing she had done was connect Cook Islanders.
“Uniting Cook Islanders who have come over from different islands in the Cook Islands and then to come here and be united here within their diversity makes me very proud.
“They’ve taken on the whole culture of Aotearoa but still as Cook Islanders . . . to show their voice, to show their flag, in the land of milk and honey.”
The Queen’s Service Medal will be renamed the King’s Service Medal once the necessary processes are done, and the updated Royal Warrant is approved by King Charles.
Pasifika recognised in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List for 2022:
Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit: Dr Teuila Mary Percival — for services to health and the Pacific community.
Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit: Nua Semuā Silipa — for services to Pacific education.
Honorary Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit: Meleane Pau’uvale — for services to the Tongan community and education.
Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit:
Mary Puatuki Aue — for services to education, technology and Pacific and Māori communities.
Dr Ofanaite Ana Dewes — for services to health and the Pacific community.
Fa’atili Iosua Esera — for services to Pacific education.
Dr Siale Alokihakau Foliaki — for services to mental health and the Pacific community.
Keni Upokotea Moeroa — for services to the Cook Islands community.
Talalelei Senetenari Taufale — for services to Pacific health.
Dr Semisi Pouvalu Taumoepeau — for services to education and tourism.
Honorary Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit: Fa’amoana Ioane Luafutu — for services to arts and the Pacific community.
Queen’s Service Medal:
Joseph Davis — for services to the Fijian community.
Reverend Alofa Ta’ase Lale — for services to the community.
Teremoana Maua-Hodges — for services to sport and culture.
Putiani Upoko — for services to the Pacific community.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
By Katie Scotcher, RNZ News political reporter
Former New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern has received one of the top accolades in today’s King’s Birthday Honours.
Ardern, who was prime minister from September 2017 until January this year, has been appointed a Dame Grand Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit.
She received the honour for services to the state.
Dame Jacinda declined to speak to RNZ about the award, but said in a statement she was “incredibly humbled”.
“I was in two minds about accepting this acknowledgement. So many of the things we went through as a nation over the last five years were about all of us rather than one individual,” Ardern said.
“But I have heard that said by so many Kiwis who I have encouraged to accept an honour over the years. And so for me this a way to say thank you — to my family, to my colleagues, and to the people who supported me to take on the most challenging and rewarding role of my life.”
Ardern’s official citation listed her leadership in response to the March 15 terrorist attacks and the covid-19 pandemic “positioning New Zealand as having one of the lowest covid-19 related death rates in the Western world.”
It noted she had been named top of Fortune Magazine‘s World’s 50 Greatest Leaders in 2021.
The citation also referenced Ardern’s focus on child poverty reduction and listed several policies her government introduced, including free school lunches in some schools.
Ardern was first elected in 2008 and became leader of the Labour Party in 2017. She became prime minister later that year.
Ardern announced her surprise resignation in January, saying she did not have “enough in the tank” to seek re-election.
Since leaving politics in April, Ardern has become New Zealand’s Special Envoy for the Christchurch Call and trustee of Prince William’s Earthshot Prize.
She has also been appointed two fellowships at Harvard University.
In a statement, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said Ardern was recognised for leading New Zealand through some of the “greatest challenges” the country has faced in modern times.
“Leading New Zealand’s response to the 2019 terrorist attacks and to the covid-19 pandemic represented periods of intense challenge for our 40th prime minister, during which time I saw first hand that her commitment to New Zealand remained absolute.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
❖
If you watch western news media with a critical eye you eventually notice how their reporting consistently aligns with the interests of the US-centralized empire, in almost the same way you’d expect them to if they were government-run propaganda outlets.
The New York Times has reliably supported every war the US has waged. Western mass media focus overwhelmingly on foreign protests against governments the United States dislikes while paying far less attention to widespread protests against US-aligned governments. The only time Trump was universally showered with praise by the mass media was when he bombed Syria, while the only time Biden has been universally slammed by the mass media was when he withdrew from Afghanistan. US media did such a good job deceitfully marrying Saddam Hussein to the September 11 attacks in the minds of the public in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq that seven in ten Americans still believed he was connected to 9/11 months after the war began.
That this extreme bias occurs is self-evident and indisputable to anyone who pays attention, but why and how it happens is harder to see. The uniformity is so complete and so consistent that when people first begin noticing these patterns it’s common for them to assume the media must be controlled by a small, centralized authority much like the state media of more openly authoritarian governments. But if you actually dig into the reasons why the media act the way they act, that isn’t really what you find.
Instead, what you find is a much larger, much less centralized network of factors which tips the scales of media coverage to the advantage of the US empire and the forces which benefit from it. Some of it is indeed conspiratorial in nature and happens in secret, but most of it is essentially out in the open.
Here are 15 of those factors.
The most obvious point of influence in the mass media is the fact that such outlets tend to be owned and controlled by plutocrats whose wealth and power are built upon the status quo they benefit from. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post, which he bought in 2013 from the also-immensely-wealthy Graham family. The New York Times has been run by the same family for over a century. Rupert Murdoch owns a vast international media empire whose success is largely owed to the US government agencies with whom he is closely intertwined. Owning media has in and of itself historically been an investment that can generate immense wealth — “like having a license to print your own money” as Canadian television magnate Roy Thomson once put it.
Does this mean that wealthy media owners are standing over their employees and telling them what to report from day to day? No. But it does mean they control who will run their outlet, which means they control who will be doing the hiring of its executives and editors, who control the hiring of everyone else at the outlet. Rupert Murdoch never stood in the newsroom announcing the talking points and war propaganda for the day, but you’ve got a snowball’s chance in hell of securing a job with the Murdoch press if you’re a flag-burning anti-imperialist.
Which takes us to another related point:
In a contentious 1996 discussion between Noam Chomsky and British journalist Andrew Marr, Chomsky derided the false image that mainstream journalists have of themselves as “a crusading profession” who are “adversarial” and “stand up against power,” saying it’s almost impossible for a good journalist to do so in any meaningful way in the mass media of the western world.
“How can you know that I’m self-censoring?” Marr objected. “How can you know that journalists are-”
“I’m not saying you’re self-censoring,” Chomsky replied. “I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believed something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.”
In a 1997 essay, Chomsky added that “the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing anyway.”
This “you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting” effect isn’t just some personal working theory of Chomsky’s; journalists who’ve spent time in the mass media have publicly acknowledged that this is the case in recent years, saying that they learned very quickly what kinds of output will help and hinder their movement up the career ladder without needing to be explicitly told.
During his second presidential primary run in 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders enraged the mass media with some comments he made accusing the Washington Post of biased reporting against him. Sanders’ claim was entirely correct; during the hottest and most tightly contested point in the 2016 presidential primary, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting noted that WaPo had published no fewer than sixteen smear pieces about Sanders in the span of sixteen hours. Sanders pointing out this blatantly obvious fact sparked an emotional controversy about bias in the media which yielded a few quality testimonials from people in the know.
Among these were former MSNBC reporter Krystal Ball and former Daily Caller White House correspondent Saagar Enjeti, who explained the subtle pressures to adhere to a groupthink orthodoxy that they’d experienced in a segment with The Hill’s online show Rising.
“There are certain pressures to stay in good with the establishment to maintain the access that is the life blood of political journalism,” Ball said in the segment. “So what do I mean? Let me give an example from my own career since everything I’m saying here really frankly applies to me too. Back in early 2015 at MSNBC I did a monologue that some of you may have seen pretty much begging Hillary Clinton not to run. I said her elite ties were out of step with the party and the country, that if she ran she would likely be the nominee and would then go on to lose. No one censored me, I was allowed to say it, but afterwards the Clinton people called and complained to the MSNBC top brass and threatened not to provide any access during the upcoming campaign. I was told that I could still say what I wanted, but I would have to get any Clinton-related commentary cleared with the president of the network. Now being a human interested in maintaining my job, I’m certain I did less critical Clinton commentary after that than I maybe otherwise would have.”
“This is something that a lot of people don’t understand,” said Enjeti. “It’s not necessarily that somebody tells you how to do your coverage, it’s that if you were to do your coverage that way, you would not be hired at that institution. So it’s like if you do not already fit within this framework, then the system is designed to not give you a voice. And if you necessarily did do that, all of the incentive structures around your pay, around your promotion, around your colleagues that are slapping you on the back, that would all disappear. So it’s a system of reinforcement, which makes it so that you wouldn’t go down that path in the first place.”
“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional,” Ball added. “It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a groupthink. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”
During the same controversy, former MSNBC producer Jeff Cohen published an article in Salon titled “Memo to mainstream journalists: Can the phony outrage; Bernie is right about bias” in which he described the same “groupthink” experience:
“It happens because of groupthink. It happens because top editors and producers know — without being told — which issues and sources are off limits. No orders need be given, for example, for rank-and-file journalists to understand that the business of the corporate boss or top advertisers is off-limits, short of criminal indictments.
“No memo is needed to achieve the narrowness of perspective — selecting all the usual experts from all the usual think tanks to say all the usual things. Think Tom Friedman. Or Barry McCaffrey. Or Neera Tanden. Or any of the elite club members who’ve been proven to be absurdly wrong time and again about national or global affairs.”
Matt Taibbi also jumped into the controversy to highlight the media groupthink effect, publishing an article with Rolling Stone about the way journalists come to understand what will and will not elevate their mass media careers:
“Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets and/or simplistic partisan storylines. Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in newsrooms.
And it is probably worth noting here that Taibbi is no longer with Rolling Stone.
Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network’s Support For Endless War
"And I would assert that in many ways NBC just began emulating the national security state itself — busy and profitable. No wars won but the ball is kept in play."https://t.co/W4mpgxDQP0
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) January 3, 2019
Journalists either learn how to do the kind of reporting that will advance their careers in the mass media, or they don’t learn and they either remain marginalized and unheard of or they get worn down and quit. NBC reporter William Arkin resigned from the network in 2019, criticizing NBC in an open letter for being consistently “in favor of policies that just spell more conflict and more war,” and complaining that the network had begun “emulating the national security state itself.”
Arkin said he often found himself a “lone voice” in scrutinizing various aspects of the US war machine, saying he “argued endlessly with MSNBC about all things national security for years.”
“We have contributed to turning the world national security into this sort of political story,” Arkin wrote. “I find it disheartening that we do not report the failures of the generals and national security leaders. I find it shocking that we essentially condone continued American bumbling in the Middle East and now Africa through our ho-hum reporting.”
Sometimes the pressure is much less subtle. Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges left The New York Times after being issued a formal written reprimand by the paper for criticizing the Iraq invasion in a speech at Rockford College, realizing that he would either have to stop speaking publicly about what he believed or he’d be fired.
“Either I muzzled myself to pay fealty to my career… or I spoke out and realized that my relationship with my employer was terminal,” Hedges said in 2013. “And so at that point I left before they got rid of me. But I knew that, you know, I wasn’t going to be able to stay.”
Last week, CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill delivered a speech at the United Nations in support of Palestinian self-determination and equal rights. Less than 24 hours later, CNN was done with him. https://t.co/yUjw97fUb2
— Mail & Guardian (@mailandguardian) December 10, 2018
This measure doesn’t need to be applied often but happens enough for people with careers in media to get the message, like when Phil Donahue was fired from MSNBC for his opposition to the Bush administration’s warmongering in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion despite having the best ratings of any show on the network, or in 2018 when Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill was fired from CNN for supporting freedom for Palestinians during a speech at the United Nations.
If you're curious why NBC's Richard Engel is so upset about the US withdrawing from Afghanistan, he talks honestly in his book War Journal about how he knew the Iraq War was going to be great for the careers of people like him https://t.co/0KXEOCNuKL pic.twitter.com/yUGCVQwFxu
— ☀️ Jon Schwarz ☀️ (@schwarz) August 30, 2021
In his 2008 book War Journal: My Five Years in Iraq, NBC’s Richard Engel wrote that he did everything he could to get into Iraq because he knew it would provide a massive boost to his career, calling his presence there during the war his “big break”.
“In the run-up to the war, it was clear that Iraq was a land where careers were going to be made,” Engels wrote. “I sneaked into Iraq before the war because I thought the conflict would be the turning point in the Middle East, where I had already been living for seven years. As a young freelancer, I believed some reporters would die covering the Iraq war, and that others would make a name for themselves.”
This gives a lot of insight into the way ambitious journalists think about climbing the career ladder in their field, and also into one reason why those types are so gung-ho about war all the time. If you know a war can advance your career, you’re going to hope it happens and do everything you can to facilitate it. The whole system is set up to elevate the absolute worst sort of people.
Engels is now NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, by the way.
Of course NPR is US state-affiliated media. It's funded by the US government, all its reporting advances the information interests of the US government, and its CEO's last job was running overt propaganda organs of the US government. If it doesn't deserve that label, no one does. pic.twitter.com/AXWAYwpYcm
— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 5, 2023
So we’ve been talking about the pressures that are brought to bear on mass media employees in the plutocrat-run media, but what about mass media that aren’t owned by plutocrats, like NPR and the BBC?
Well, propaganda thrives in those institutions for more obvious reasons: their proximity to government powers. Right up into the 1990s the BBC was just letting MI5 outright vet its employees for “subversive” political activity, and only officially changed that policy when they got caught. NPR’s CEO John Lansing came directly out of the US government’s official propaganda services, having previously served as the CEO of the US Agency for Global Media — and he was not the first NPR executive with an extensive background in the US state propaganda apparatus.
With US government-owned outlets like Voice of America the control is even more overt than that. In a 2017 article with Columbia Journalism Review titled “Spare the indignation: Voice of America has never been independent,” VOA veteran Dan Robinson says such outlets are entirely different from normal news companies and are expected to facilitate US information interests to receive government funding:
I spent about 35 years with Voice of America, serving in positions ranging from chief White House correspondent to overseas bureau chief and head of a key language division, and I can tell you that for a long time, two things have been true. First, US government-funded media have been seriously mismanaged, a reality that made them ripe for bipartisan reform efforts in Congress, climaxing late in 2016 when President Obama signed the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act. Second, there is widespread agreement in Congress and elsewhere that, in exchange for continued funding, these government broadcasters must do more, as part of the national security apparatus, to assist efforts to combat Russian, ISIS, and al-Qaeda disinformation.
Every time I watch a town hall like last night's, I'm blown away with how everyday people ask such better questions than professional journalists
Access journalism is my profession's greatest curse. Too many reporters fear getting cut off for one tough Q. Real people don't care
— Will Bunch (@Will_Bunch) September 16, 2020
Krystal Ball touched on this one in her anecdote about MSNBC’s influential call from the Clinton camp above. Access journalism refers to the way media outlets and reporters can lose access to politicians, government officials and other powerful figures if those figures don’t perceive them as sufficiently sympathetic. If someone in power decides they don’t like a given reporter they can simply decide to give their interviews to someone else who’s sufficiently sycophantic, or call on someone else at the press conference, or have conversations on and off the record with someone who kisses up to them a bit more.
Depriving challenging interlocutors of access funnels all the prized news media material to the most obsequious brown-nosers in the press, because if you’ve got too much dignity to pitch softball questions and not follow up on ridiculous politician-speak word salad non-answers there’s always someone else who will. This creates a dynamic where power-serving bootlickers are elevated to the top of the mainstream media, while actual journalists who try to hold power to account go unrewarded.
"A US official told CNN" is not a "Scoop" but demonstrates the willingness of 'journalists' to stenograph unverifiable government disinformation. https://t.co/wr2u3xKtiI
— Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) January 14, 2022
In Totalitarian Dictatorships, the government spy agency tells the news media what stories to run, and the news media unquestioningly publish it. In Free Democracies, the government spy agency says “Hoo buddy, have I got a scoop for you!” and the news media unquestioningly publish it.
One of the easiest ways to break a major story on national security or foreign policy these days is to get entrusted with a “scoop” by one or more government officials — on condition of anonymity of course — which just so happens to make the government look good and/or make its enemies look bad and/or manufacture consent for this or that agenda. This of course amounts to simply publishing press releases for the White House, the Pentagon or the US intelligence cartel, since you’re just uncritically repeating some unverified thing that an official handed you and disguising it as news reporting. But it’s a practice that’s becoming more and more common in western “journalism” as the need to distribute propaganda about Washington’s cold war enemies in Moscow and Beijing increases.
Some notorious recent examples of this are The New York Times’ completely discredited report that Russia was paying Taliban-linked fighters to kill US and allied forces in Afghanistan, and The Guardian’s completely discredited report that Paul Manafort paid visits to Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy. Both were simply falsehoods that the mass media were fed by intelligence operatives who were trying to seed a narrative in the public consciousness, which they then repeated as fact without ever disclosing the names of those who fed them the false story. Another related example is US officials admitting to NBC last year — again under cover of anonymity — that the Biden administration had simply been feeding lies about Russia to the media in order to win an “information war” against Putin.
This dynamic is similar to the one in access journalism in that outlets and reporters who’ve proven themselves sympathetic and uncritical parrots of the government narratives they are fed are the ones most likely to be fed them, and therefore the ones to get the “scoop”. We caught a whiff of what this looks like from the inside when acting CIA director under the Obama administration Mike Morell testified that he and his intelligence cartel cohorts had initially planned to seed their disinfo op about the Hunter Biden laptop to a particular unnamed reporter at The Washington Post, whom they presumably had a good working relationship with.
Another twist on the intelligence cartel “scoop” dynamic is the way government officials will feed information to a reporter from one outlet, and then reporters from another outlet will contact those very same officials and ask them if the information is true, and then all outlets involved will have a public parade on Twitter proclaiming that the report has been “confirmed”. Nothing about the story was verified as true in any way; it was just the same story being told by the same source to different people.
Rachel Maddow, as a reward for feeding liberals demented conspiracies, was just rewarded by Comcast with a contract for $30m/year: $2.5 million/month.
Yet few journalists object or call her a "grifter". Why? Because she works for a huge corporation, so they see it as legitimate. pic.twitter.com/qKpjIViknf
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 1, 2021
The more a mass media employee goes along with the imperial groupthink, follows the unwritten rules and remains unthreatening to the powerful, the higher up the media career ladder they will climb. The higher up the career ladder they climb, the more money they will often find themselves making. Once they find themselves in a position to influence a very large number of people, they are a part of a wealthy class which has a vested interest in maintaining the political status quo which lets them keep their fortune.
This can take the form of opposing anything resembling socialism or political movements that might make the rich pay more taxes, as we saw in the virulent smear campaigns against progressive figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn. It can also take the form of encouraging the public to fight a culture war so that they won’t start fighting a class war. It can also take the form of making one more supportive of the empire more generally, because that’s the status quo your fortune is built on. It can also take the form of making one more sympathetic to politicians, government officials, plutocrats and celebrities as a whole, because that class is who your friends are now; that’s who you’re hanging out with, going to the parties and the weddings of, drinking with, laughing with, schmoozing with.
The Class Factor in Journalism. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi. pic.twitter.com/wrIWhaWQet
— Turncoat Don (@TurncoatD) May 23, 2021
Class interests dance with the behavior of journalists in multiple ways because, as both Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi have noted, journalists in the mass media are increasingly coming not from working-class backgrounds but from wealthy families, and have degrees from expensive elite universities.
The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013. If your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a propagandist for the imperial establishment in the ways we’ve been discussing.
Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.
NEW STUDY: 85% of the think tanks cited in articles about US military support in Ukraine have received funding from Pentagon contractors. https://t.co/f4U3QbIszG pic.twitter.com/J94dUydc13
— Kenneth P. Vogel (@kenvogel) June 1, 2023
The Quincy Institute has a new study out which found that a staggering 85 percent of the think tanks cited by the news media in their reporting on US military support for Ukraine have been paid by literal Pentagon contractors.
“Think tanks in the United States are a go–to resource for media outlets seeking expert opinions on pressing public policy issues,” writes Quincy Institute’s Ben Freeman. “But think tanks often have entrenched stances; a growing body of research has shown that their funders can influence their analysis and commentary. This influence can include censorship — both self-censorship and more direct censoring of work unfavorable to a funder — and outright pay–for–research agreements with funders. The result is an environment where the interests of the most generous funders can dominate think tank policy debates.”
This is journalistic malpractice. It is never, ever in accord with journalistic ethics to cite war profiteer-funded think tanks on matters of war, militarism or foreign relations, but the western press do it constantly, without even disclosing this immense conflict of interest to their audience.
Western journalists cite empire-funded think tanks because they generally align with the empire-approved lines that a mass media stenographer knows they can advance their career by pushing, and they do it because doing so gives them an official-looking “expert” “source” to cite while proclaiming more expensive war machinery needs to be sent to this or that part of the world or what have you. But in reality there’s only one story to be found in such citations: “War Industry Supports More War.”
The fact that war profiteers are allowed to actively influence media, politics and government bodies through think tanks, advertising and corporate lobbying is one of the most insane things happening in our society today. And not only is it allowed, it’s seldom even questioned.
Swiss Propaganda Research: "Executives and top journalists of almost all major US news outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations" #CFR #Bilderberg #TrilateralCommission (Click on link, then click to enlarge)
Thread
1/4https://t.co/0TJWzWeRhY pic.twitter.com/Ovkap8k9cN— Bruce Baird (@drbairdonline) May 30, 2018
It should probably also be noted here that the Council on Foreign Relations is a profoundly influential think tank which counts a jarring number of media executives and influential journalists among its membership, a dynamic which gives think tanks another layer of influence in the media.
In 1993 former Washington Post senior editor and ombudsman Richard Harwood approvingly described CFR as “the nearest thing we have to a ruling establishment in the United States.”
Harwood writes:
The membership of these journalists in the council, however they may think of themselves, is an acknowledgment of their active and important role in public affairs and of their ascension into the American ruling class. They do not merely analyze and interpret foreign policy for the United States; they help make it. Their influence, Jon Vanden Heuvel speculates in an article in the Media Studies Journal, is likely to increase now that the Cold War has ended: “By focusing on particular crises around the world {the media are in a better position} to pressure government to act.”
Politico is erasing evidence of their sponsorship from Lockheed Martin but won't answer questions about whether their Sunday puff piece about Lockheed's Skunk Works was advertorial or editorial content.
Why should that be a hard question to answer? https://t.co/bg9dBzJc5g
— Eli Clifton (@EliClifton) September 7, 2021
In 2021 Politico was caught publishing fawning apologia for top weapons manufacturer Lockheed Martin at the same time Lockheed was sponsoring a Politico newsletter on foreign policy. Responsible Statecraft’s Eli Clifton wrote at the time:
There’s a very blurry line between Politico’s financial relationship with the largest weapons firm in the United States, Lockheed Martin, and its editorial output. And that line may have just become even more opaque.
Last week, Responsible Statecraft’s Ethan Paul reported that Politico was scrubbing its archives of any reference to Lockheed Martin’s longtime sponsorship of the publication’s popular newsletter, Morning Defense. While evidence of Lockheed’s financial relationship with Politico was erased, the popular beltway outlet just published a remarkable puff piece about the company, with no acknowledgement of the longstanding financial relationship with Politico.
Politico didn’t respond to questions about whether Lockheed was an ongoing sponsor of the publication after last month when it scrubbed the defense giant’s ads or whether the weapons firm paid for what read largely-like an advertorial.
Politico’s Lee Hudson visited Lockheed’s highly secure, and mostly classified, Skunk Works research and development facility north of Los Angeles and glowingly wrote, “For defense tech journalists and aviation nerds, this is the equivalent of a Golden Ticket to Willy Wonka’s factory, but think supersonic drones instead of Everlasting Gobstoppers.”
Ever wondered why you’ll see things like ads for Northrop Grumman during the Superbowl? Do you think anyone’s watching that ad saying “You know what? I’m gonna buy myself a stealth bomber”? Of course not. The defense industry advertises in media all the time, and while it might not always get caught red-handed in blatant manipulation of news publications like Lockheed did with Politico, it’s hard to imagine that their money wouldn’t have a chilling effect on foreign policy reporting, and perhaps even give them some pull on editorial matters.
Like Jeff Cohen said above: the top advertisers are off limits.
CIA's "mop up man" Ken Dilanian is the NBC 'reporter' used to channel claim about president Putin + US election https://t.co/GOci4EWwdv
— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) December 15, 2016
Just because a lot of the mass media’s propagandistic behavior can be explained without secret conspiracies doesn’t mean secret conspiracies aren’t happening. In 1977 Carl Bernstein published an article titled “The CIA and the Media” reporting that the CIA had covertly infiltrated America’s most influential news outlets and had over 400 reporters who it considered assets in a program known as Operation Mockingbird.
We are told that this sort of covert infiltration doesn’t happen anymore today, but that’s absurd. Of course it does. People believe the CIA no longer engages in nefarious behavior because they find it comfortable to believe that, not because there is any evidentiary basis for that belief.
There were no conditions which gave rise to Operation Mockingbird in the 1970s which aren’t also with us today. Cold war? That’s happening today. Hot war? That’s happening today. Dissident groups? Happening today. A mad scramble to secure US domination and capital on the world stage? Happening today. The CIA wasn’t dismantled and nobody went to prison. All that’s changed is that news media now have more things for government operatives to toy with, like online media and social media.
And indeed we have seen evidence that it happens today. Back in 2014 Ken Dilanian, now a prominent reporter for NBC, was caught intimately collaborating with the CIA in his reporting and sending them articles for approval and changes before publication. In his emails with CIA press handlers Dilanian is seen acting like a propagandist for the agency, talking about how he intended an article about CIA drone strikes to be “reassuring to the public” and editing his reporting in accordance with their wishes.
Other potential CIA assets include CNN’s Anderson Cooper, who interned with the agency, and Tucker Carlson, whose past features a highly suspicious amount of overlap with the CIA.
In case anyone needs reminding, here’s a partial list of the ex-spooks who served as media figures in the Trump years: https://t.co/CJT8YGcvkN
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 16, 2021
Lastly, sometimes the mass media act like state propagandists because they are actual state propagandists. Back in Carl Bernstein’s day the CIA had to secretly infiltrate the mass media; nowadays the mass media openly hire intelligence insiders to work among their ranks. Mass media outlets now openly employ intelligence agency veterans like John Brennan, James Clapper, Chuck Rosenberg, Michael Hayden, Frank Figliuzzi, Fran Townsend, Stephen Hall, Samantha Vinograd, Andrew McCabe, Josh Campbell, Asha Rangappa, Phil Mudd, James Gagliano, Jeremy Bash, Susan Hennessey, Ned Price and Rick Francona.
The mass media also commonly bring in “experts” to provide opinions on war and weapons who are direct employees of the military-industrial complex, without ever explaining that massive conflict of interest to their audience. Last year Lever News published a report on the way the media had been bringing on US empire managers who are currently working for war profiteer companies as part of their life in the DC swamp’s revolving door between the public and private sector and presenting them as impartial pundits on the war in Ukraine.
I think it's awesome you can be a consultant for a company that manufactures certain missiles and go on NBC or CNN and say how important it is that we get more of those missiles shipped out, with no one saying btw this guy works for the missile company https://t.co/CHUb5drysd
— Andrew Perez (@andrewperezdc) April 12, 2022
So as you can see, the news media are subject to pressures from every conceivable angle on every relevant level which push them toward functioning not as reporters, but as propagandists. This is why the employees of the western mass media act like PR agents for the western empire and its component parts: because that’s exactly what they are.
_________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
The other day, I counted 20 copies of a book called Forbidden City (1990) in a library. I picked it up and looked at the cover, and I realized it was about the so-called Tiananmen Square massacre. It was written as an on-the-spot account by a CBC news team during that time. By reading the minutiae, it is revealed to be a fictionalized account, as almost all western monopoly media reports of a Tiananmen Square massacre are — fiction.
As I write this, June 4 is nigh upon us, and that means it is time for the western-aligned media to crank out their discredited myth of a massacre having taken place in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The photos of the Tank Man allegedly blocking tanks from entering Tiananmen Square will form a major part of the disinformation. The fact is that the tanks were leaving the city, and it was the day after the mythologized massacre. The tanks did all they could to avoid colliding with the citizen who placed himself in front of the tanks. (Read Jeff Brown’s setting the record straight regarding the western monopoly media account of the Tank Man.)
Alas, the monopoly media disinformation storm is already upon us.
Human Rights Watch, funded by the anti-communist Georg Soros, published an article about a “bloody crackdown” that demands: “The Chinese government should acknowledge responsibility for the mass killing of pro-democracy demonstrators and provide redress for victims and family members.”
The United States government-funded Radio Free Asia historizes, “Troops aligned with hardliners shot their way to Tiananmen Square to commit one of the worst massacres in modern Chinese history.” RFA was originally operated by the CIA to broadcast anti-Communist propaganda.
The CBC quotes “Tiananmen Square survivor” Yang Jianli, now a resident in Washington, DC, who “was at Tiananmen Square in 1989” and spoke of how a “nationwide pro-democracy movement in 1989 ended in the bloodshed of Tiananmen Square massacre.”
Yahoo!News headlines with “Tiananmen Square Fast Facts,” such as:
In 1989, after several weeks of demonstrations, Chinese troops entered Tiananmen Square on June 4 and fired on civilians.
Estimates of the death toll range from several hundred to thousands.
One wonders which is the fact: several hundred or thousands? Assertions are a staple in western monopoly media, evidence is scant, but the evidence-free assertions persist year-after-year.
There are complaints of Chinese censorship. This raises the question of whether censorship can be justified and if so under what circumstances. Arguably, there is something more insidious than censorship, and that is disinformation. Professor Anthony Hall articulated the insidiousness of disinformation at the Halifax Symposium on Media and Disinformation in 2004 where it was held to be a crime against humanity and a crime against peace:
Disinformation originates in the deliberate and systemic effort to break down social cohesion and to deprive humanity of perceptive consciousness of our conditions. Disinformation seeks to isolate and divide human beings; to alienate us from our ability to use our senses, our intellect, and our communicative powers in order to identify truth and act on this knowledge. Disinformation is deeply implicated in the history of imperialism, Eurocentric racism, American Manifest Destiny, Nazi propaganda, the psychological warfare of the Cold War, and capitalist globalization. Disinformation seeks to erode and destroy the basis of individual and collective memory, the basis of those inheritances from history which give humanity our richness of diverse languages, cultures, nationalities, peoplehoods, and means of self-determination. The reach and intensity of disinformation tends to increase with the concentration of ownership and control of the media of mass communications.
In other words, people must not have a right to freely speak lies that reach the level of crimes against humanity or peace. The disinformation campaign about a Tiananmen Square massacre demonizes China and constitutes a crime against the humanity of the Chinese people. If people wish to allege a massacre by state forces against its citizens, then present the incontrovertible evidence. Where are the photos of soldiers killing citizens? There are plenty of photos of murdered soldiers mutilated by nasty elements outside Tiananmen Square.
So why does the disinformation persist? Because it works when people unquestioningly accept what their unscrupulous government and media tell them: China is Communist. China is bad.
Is such rhetoric compelling?
American expat Godfree Roberts, author of Why China Leads the World: Talent at the Top, Data in the Middle, Democracy at the Bottom answered a Quora question: “There are people that claim nothing bad happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989 What happened to the pro democracy protesters at Tiananmen Square when the tanks and troops with the PLA showed up to suddenly put and end to the protests?” Roberts replied:
The tanks and troops with the PLA did not show up to suddenly put and end to the protests. Nor did they harm anyone in Tiananmen Square.
They waited at the railway station for three weeks but began moving into town when rioters–like those we see in Hong Kong today–began killing people in Chang’An Avenue. Even then, the first battalions were unarmed… [emphasis in original]
Roberts wrote another excellent Quora piece preserved at the Greanville Post.
Regarding the wider myth created of a massacre at Tiananmen Square, the go-to evidence-based account is the book Tiananmen Square “Massacre”?: The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence by Wei Ling Chua.
Kim Petersen: In 2014, I reviewed your important book Tiananmen Square “Massacre”?: The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence that threw a glaring light on what the monopoly media were saying about a massacre in Tiananmen Square versus the subsequent recantations by western-aligned journalists and the narratives of protestors and witnesses than were contrary to the western media disinformation. In other words, there was no massacre in Tiananmen Square. Nonetheless, people living in the western-aligned world can expect, for the most part, to be inundated with monopoly media rehashing their disinformation about what happened on 4 June 1989, omitting the nefarious roles played by the CIA and NED.
Recently, AB Abrams included a 29-page chapter, “Beijing 1989 and Tiananmen Square,” in his excellent book Atrocity Fabrications and Its Consequences (2023). It basically lays out what you did in your book (without citing it), but it does present more of a historical basis for the interference of US militarism in 20th century China because of American anti-communist prejudice. Thus, the US supported the Guomindang (KMT) led by the brutal Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-Shek). Abrams reads quite critical of paramount leader Deng Xiaopeng, quoting one student who complained of the increasing corruption under Deng that was not tolerated under chairman Mao Zedong. (p 125) Basically, however, Abrams buttresses what you had already written, pointing a stern finger at Operation Yellowbird’s NED, CIA, and Hong Kong criminal triads who inserted (and extracted) unruly (even bloodthirsty, notably Chai Ling) elements into Tiananmen Square who happened to find themselves well armed and supplied with Molotov cocktails, and who were not hesitant about using lethal force against remarkably restrained PLA soldiers.
Despite the several recantations by western journalists in Beijing who had reported a massacre and despite the narratives that seriously impugn the monopoly media narratives, why does the myth of a massacre in Tiananmen Square persist? How is it that this fabricated atrocity gets dredged up annually, and why do so many people buy into the disinformation proffered by a source serially revealed to be manufacturing demonstrably false narratives? How can this disinformation be exterminated?
Finally, massacres should not be forgotten, but if the narratives of massacres are meant to be revisited annually, then shouldn’t the massacres carried out — especially by one’s own side — also be memorialized, as an act of penance and atonement? In the US case, there would be yearly memorials to the massacres of several Indigenous peoples by the White natives of Europe. There are several massacres requiring atonement for the rampant criminality of the White Man. Wounded Knee, the Bear Creek massacre, the Sand Creek massacre, and the Trail of Tears spring readily to mind. There is the Kwangju massacre in South Korea, My Lai in Viet Nam, Fallujah in Iraq (and this is just skimming the surface). What does it say that the US-aligned media unquestioningly reports on fabricated atrocities elsewhere while being insouciant to the crimes of American troops against Others?
Wei Ling Chua: Since publishing the book Tiananmen Square “Massacre”? The Power of Words vs. Silent Evidence (The Art of Media Disinformation is Hurting the World and Humanity vol. 2) in 2014, I began to use Google alerts to receive daily emails on any news or articles posted on the net with the term “Tiananmen Square Massacre”, and it is depressing to say that the Western media disregards their own journalists’ confessions and have continued to unrelentingly use the term frequently over the past 34 years.
The following description introduces the book.
Readers will notice from the table of contents that this book comes in 4 parts:
1) Screenshot evidence of journalists who confessed that they saw no one die that day (June 4th, 1989) at Tiananmen Square, CIA declassified documents, WikiLeaks, and Human Rights Watch decided not to publish their own eye-witnesses accounts that report that support the Chinese side of the stories… ;
2) Explanation, with examples, of how the Western media used the power of words to overpower the silent evidence (their own photos and video images) that actually shows highly restrained, people-loving PLA soldiers and the CCP government handling of the 7 weeks of protests.
3) Explanation of the 3 stage bottle-necks effect of the market economy and how Western nations respond to each stage of such economic hardship created by an uncontrolled market economy. The purpose of such analysis is to remind developing nations’ citizens not to destroy their own countries by allowing Western-funded NGOs to carry out covert operations in their countries to create chaos at times of economic hardship;
4) Comparing how the CCP handled the 1989 protesters with the US government handling of the 2011 anti-Wall Street protesters [Occupy Wall Street], the book draws a 6-point conclusion to explain why the Wall Street protesters should admire the Tiananmen protesters, and why the PLA deserves a Nobel Peace prize:
I encourage readers to read the book review by you: Massacre? What Massacre?
The US and other Western governments are notorious in promoting hatred, fake news, and misleading information about China. As a result, whenever foreigners went to China for the first time, they seemed to be shocked by how advanced, how wealthy, how safe, how green, how friendly, and how beautiful China is. A lot of YouTubers from all over the world voluntarily and passionately produce videos to share their daily impression of China or to defend China against any smear campaigns by the Western media. Below is just a quick pick of a dozen YouTubers:
As for getting at the truth, the best way to understand a country is to travel there and see it with our own eyes:
At the 2008 Beijing Olympics, a group of American athletes arrived at the Beijing International Airport with masks and later were shocked that the air quality was good and that they were the only ones wearing masks in Beijing. They were also shocked by how beautiful and modern Beijing is compared to American cities. In an embarrassment to America, these young Americans were spot on and held a press conference to publicly apologize to the Chinese people for their mask-wearing insult to China.
The same thing happened to many Taiwanese, many were so ignorant about China that they thought that the Chinese people were very poor. In 2011, a Taiwanese professor Gao Zhibin told his audience in a TV show that the mainland Chinese are so poor that they cannot even afford to eat a tea leaf egg. That video became a laughing stock and quickly circulated being viewed by hundreds of millions of Chinese people, and even made its way to the Chinese mainstream media across the country as a sort of entertainment. Now, the Taiwanese Professor has a nickname in China: “tea leaf egg professor“.
Hong Kong also has the same problem. So, after putting down the US-backed violent protests a few years ago, one of the education programs is to take the students for a free trip to the mainland to see by themselves how prosperous, green, clean, modern, friendly, and advanced their mother country is.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The death of novelist and essayist Martin Amis on 19 May triggered a ‘mainstream’ wave, not just of admiration, but of adoration. It is clear from the obituaries that Amis died with his reputation intact and untarnished.
In tweeting a link to his obituary for the Guardian, the Independent’s former literary editor Boyd Tonkin captured the essence of the response:
‘I had hoped so much that this would not see the light of day for a very, very long time. But sadly here it is. My obituary of #MartinAmis’
The Guardian’s chief books writer, Lisa Allardice, wrote of Amis:
‘For a time, he seemed happy to fill the role of novelist as public intellectual. He riffed elegantly on everything from the porn industry to the Royal family.’
Perhaps not everything. Allardice noted that Amis was a public intellectual with a particular focus:
‘In his crusade for fine writing and his declaration of war on cliché, Amis made everyone up their game.’
Amis reported from the front line of this ‘war against cliché’:
‘You know, whenever you write, “The heat was stifling”, or, “She rummaged in her handbag”, this is dead freight, you know. And by the way, the war is extended onto another sphere. People who use these mouldering novelties like, “Seen it, done it, got the T-shirt”, “He went ballistic!”, “I don’t think so. Hello!” – all that. These are dead words. They’re herd words. What cliché is, is herd writing, herd thinking and herd feeling.’
Amis was psychologically astute and he was fiercely opposed to herdthink. How remarkable, then, that in 2007 – in the wake of 9/11 and the London, 2005, 7/7 bombings – the same writer declared:
‘The extremists for now have the monopoly of violence, intimidation, and self-righteousness.’
Edward Herman, co-author with Noam Chomsky of Manufacturing Consent, responded:
‘Bush, Blair, Olmert and their gangs are clearly not the “extremists” Amis has in mind—Bush and friends are the “self-defense” folks just striving for a wee bit of security and human rights, and fighting off the invasions of their territory by the Islamo-fascists. The pitiful giant, with 50 percent of the arms budget of the earth, invading or bombing at least three countries right now, is being overwhelmed by the violent folks, “for now.”’ (Edward Herman, ‘“Look forward, not back,” and other Clichés, Idiocies, and Abused Words’, Z Magazine, April 2009)
Indeed, much as he might have deplored references to women rummaging in handbags, Amis was here delivering power-friendly ‘herd words’ based on ‘herd thinking and herd feeling’.
Or consider Amis’s comments in 2008, arguing ‘Against the motion that America has lost [sic] its moral authority’:
‘All countries want first of all to be respected. But America’s defining anomaly is that it wants to be loved. Let’s call to mind an immortal and terrible irony, as the US army entered Iraq what was it expecting? It was expecting to be met with sweets and flowers and dancing in the city squares.’
This is so far from the reality of what US power is and works to achieve, it almost defies comment. Amis added:
‘I ask you not to endorse this reflexive, directionless and sterile hatred of the hegemon. The present administration is coming to an end and we may reasonably hope that the new president will be sharply attentive to what has been so blithely neglected. While it’s true that good intentions can be terrifying enough, they are on average decisively better than bad intentions.’ (‘The Great Debaters’, The Independent, 1 May 2008)
Certainly, ‘the new president’, Barack Obama, was ‘sharply attentive’ to Muslim countries that required fresh or repeat bombing, attacking fully seven of them in eight years, leaving Libya in ruins. Clearly, ‘America’ just ‘wants to be loved’.
Was Amis, here, waging war on the deadly clichés that facilitate mass killing by obscuring the goals and violence of Great Power? We don’t think so. Hello!
In his autobiographical novel, Inside Story, Amis recounted (or paraphrased, or invented) a discussion with his close friend Christopher Hitchens about Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky and terrorism. Hitchens says:
‘If a conspiracy theory traduces America, then Gore’ll subscribe to it. With Gore it’s just a fatuous posture. With Noam, I’m sorry to say, it’s heartfelt. He just doesn’t like America.’ (Amis, Inside Story, Vintage, 2020, e-book, p.133)
The work of Vidal and Chomsky – two of the most astute, honest and courageous analysts exposing political mendacity – is thus dismissed as conspiracy theorising: a bizarre quirk in Vidal, but a key function of irrational hatred in Chomsky.
Amis’s reply:
‘… Well keep it up, Hitch. You’re the only lefty who’s shown any mettle. It’s your armed-forces blood – the blood of the Royal Navy. And you love America.’
In October 2015, The Times reported Amis’s prediction that Labour under Corbyn would become ‘hopelessly retrograde, self-absorbed, self-pitying and self-righteous, quite unembarrassed by its (years-long) tantrum, necessarily and increasingly hostile to democracy and, in any sane view, undeserving of a single vote’.
To the extent that this made sense at all, it was elite, truth-reversing herdthink rejecting Britain’s sole chance in a generation (or longer) of electing a leader who might offer hope of an authentically compassionate politics opposing war, inequality and the destruction of the environment. Again, the unthinking conformity of someone waging a ‘war against cliché’ is astonishing.
Amis attacked Corbyn’s views on terrorism, saying his comparisons between western troops and ‘the glitteringly murderous theists of Islamic State’ are an example of the ‘dismally reflexive mental habit of seeking tinkertoy moral “equivalence” at every opportunity’.
As we discussed in a recent media alert, the ‘mainstream’ focus on ‘moral equivalence’ is a constant theme of ‘mainstream’ herdthink.
‘Some Societies Are Just More Evolved Than Others’
Try to imagine the intensity of the response if Jeremy Corbyn, or some other high-profile leftist, said this of the latest brutal example of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by the apartheid Israeli state:
‘What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Jewish community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’
As we all know, the political and media class would rise up in an eruption of blistering outrage at this call for the collective punishment, not just of Israelis, not just of the entire Jewish community, but of Jewish children? Such comments would rightly be denounced as obscene, instantly becoming a national and global scandal. And no matter how much Corbyn might subsequently back-track or apologise, his words would never be forgotten; they would be relentlessly cited as the principal reason why he should never be taken seriously, engaged with, or even mentioned, again.
In a September 2006 interview on terrorism with Ginny Dougary, Amis said:
‘What can we do to raise the price of them doing this? There’s a definite urge – don’t you have it? – to say, “The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” What sort of suffering? Not letting them travel. Deportation – further down the road. Curtailing of freedoms. Strip-searching people who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan… Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole community and they start getting tough with their children.’
The New York Times’ Amis obituary makes no mention of this shocking public statement, noting merely:
‘In 2008, Mr. Amis published “The Second Plane,” a collection of 12 pieces of nonfiction and two short stories about the Western world and terror. “Are you an Islamophobe?” he was asked by the British newspaper The Independent while he was writing the book.
‘“Of course not,” he replied. “What I am is an Islamismophobe. Or better say an anti-Islamist, because a ‘phobia’ is an irrational fear, and there is nothing irrational about fearing people who say they want to kill you.”’
But what is an ‘Islamismophobe’? In 2007, satirist and filmmaker Chris Morris commented in the Guardian:
‘Even Hitchens concedes Amis wrongly conflates Islamism with Islam. By fudging, Amis adds the weight of his reaction against terrorism to his contempt for Muslims in general. Take “Islamism”. What does it actually mean?’
In his Guardian obituary, Boyd Tonkin wrote:
‘Rash interview statements prompted charges of Islamophobia. More soberly, Inside Story concludes that “the real danger of terrorism lies not in what it inflicts but what it provokes”. Still, the op-ed pundit Amis could drop his verbal, even moral, compass.’
‘Rash’ statements? Did Amis merely ‘drop’ his moral compass from time to time? Compared to the grim fate that would have awaited Corbyn, or any other high-profile left commentator in our imaginary scenario, this was the tiniest slap on Amis’s reputational wrist.
In similar vein, Lisa Allardice commented in the Guardian:
‘Amis the dazzling young stylist looked in danger of being overshadowed by Amis the grumpy old controversialist, with ill-judged comments on Islamism and euthanasia.’
Again, ‘ill-judged’? ‘Grumpy’? And that was it – no details were supplied.
Brief mention of the controversy was buried half-way through an Observer piece by Sarah Shaffi:
‘Amis was accused of Islamophobia following a 2006 interview with Ginny Dougary in which he said “there’s a definite urge… to say, ‘the Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’”. Talking to the Guardian in 2020 he said he “certainly regretted having said what I said; already by mid-afternoon on that day I ceased to believe in what I said”.’
But Amis’s hostility to ‘Islamism’ was more than a passing phase. In the same interview with Ginny Dougary, he said:
‘It’s a very chilling thought because the only thing the Islamists like about modernity is modern weapons. And they’re going to get better and better at that. They’re also gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.’
He commented elsewhere:
‘The impulse towards rational inquiry is by now very weak in the rank and file of the Muslim male.’
At the Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2007, Amis said Muslim states were less ‘civilised’ than western society: ‘Some societies are just more evolved than others.’
He added: ‘There is no inoffensive way to put this. By evolved, I mean more civilised. We have more respect for civil society.’
A year earlier, Amis had asserted that Iran, ‘our natural enemy,’ would be willing to accept a nuclear attack in order to realise its dark dreams: ‘They feel they can absorb this hit and destroy Israel.’ (Amis, This Week, 12 October 2006)
In fact, Iran had no nuclear weapons and, according to US intelligence agencies in 2007, ‘had halted its nuclear weapons programme’ in 2003. But anyway, to suggest that Iran was so fanatical that it would be willing to accept millions of deaths was deeply dehumanising.
The Telegraph obituary commented only that academic Terry Eagleton ‘had accused Amis of racism after an interview in which he floated the idea of deporting Muslims (a suggestion Amis later dismissed as “stupid”).’
The obituary added:
‘… he was accused variously of misogyny, Islamophobia, ageism, naked greed, nepotism, professional betrayal, dwarfism, extravagant dentistry, and being a neglectful godfather’.
Amis was accused of everything, then – Islamophobia was just one issue among many.
The Mail on Sunday observed that Amis had been ‘Accused of Islamophobia or hating Muslims in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks’ while offering his defence – that he was against “Islamism”, not Muslims.‘ No details were given.
In their pieces for the Observer, columnist Martha Gill and author Geoff Dyer made no mention of the controversy at all.
‘How Death Outlives War’ – The Brown University Report
Light is shed on the moral significance of Amis’s fleeting sense that ‘The Muslim community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order’, and on the ‘mainstream’ media’s near-complete indifference to these comments, by a new Brown University report drawing on UN data and expert analyses.
On May 15, the Washington Post described how the report, ‘How Death Outlives War: The Reverberating Impact of the Post-9/11 Wars on Human Health’, has attempted ‘to calculate the minimum number of excess deaths attributable to the war on terrorism, across conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia and Yemen’.
The Post commented:
‘The accounting, so far as it can be measured, puts the toll at 4.5 million to 4.6 million — a figure that continues to mount as the effects of conflict reverberate. Of those fatalities, the report estimates, some 3.6 million to 3.7 million were “indirect deaths” caused by the deterioration of economic, environmental, psychological and health conditions.’
The report makes clear that these figures are conservative and constantly rising:
‘Some of these people were killed in the fighting, but far more, especially children, have been killed by the reverberating effects of war, such as the spread of disease. These latter indirect deaths – estimated at 3.6-3.7 million – and related health problems have resulted from the post-9/11 wars’ destruction of economies, public services, and the environment. Indirect deaths grow in scale over time. Though in 2021 the United States withdrew military forces from Afghanistan, officially ending a war that began with its invasion 20 years prior, today Afghans are suffering and dying from war-related causes at higher rates than ever.’
A 2018 survey of Syrian, Afghan, and Iraqi refugees ‘showed that more than 60% were traumatized by war experiences, including attacks by military forces, coping with the murder or disappearance of relatives, living through torture and solitary confinement, and witnessing murders, abuse, and sexual violence. More than 6% had been raped’.
The children, a particular focus of Amis’s fleeting ‘urge’, have faced unimaginable suffering. The report calculates that more than 7.6 million children under five are suffering from acute malnutrition, or wasting, in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia:
‘“Wasting” means, simply, not getting enough food, literally wasting to skin and bones, putting these children at greater risk of death, including from infections that result from their weakened immune systems.’
A 2014 survey showed that four out of ten school children (under age 16) in Mosul, Iraq had mental health disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder. There are numerous other shocking insights, consistently ignored by British corporate media, on the US-UK devastation of Iraq:
‘The UN economic sanctions of the 1990s caused many health providers to leave Iraq, and in the five years following the U.S. invasion in 2003, an estimated 18,000 doctors – over half those remaining at the time – fled the country. In December 2011, when U.S. soldiers officially withdrew, doctors in Baghdad were being killed at a rate of 47.6 per 1,000 professionals per month, and nearly 5,400 doctors were emigrating annually.’
Between 2014 and 2017, various combatants in Iraq destroyed 63 cities and 1,556 villages; the destruction of residential buildings alone generated over 55 million tons of debris.
The suffering abounds:
‘Middle East households headed by widows are particularly impoverished; there are over one million widows in Iraq and two million in Afghanistan.’
As for Nato’s devastation of Libya:
‘Whereas before Libya’s war, the country’s human development index was ranked the highest in Africa, the war disrupted healthcare and closed hospitals across the country. The war years brought about a large decrease in life expectancy (nine years for men and six for women), and infectious diseases such as tuberculosis surged.’
In 2021, 50% of households in Libya relied on bottled water and only 22% had access to safe sanitation.
The icing on this nightmarish cake is the fact that Western corporations got their hands on the oil in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
In 2007, in a vanishingly rare instance of dissent titled, ‘Shame on us’, published by the Guardian, the Irish novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett damned the media silence in response to Amis’s comments:
‘Why did writers not start writing? There is Eagleton and there is the Indian novelist and essayist Pankaj Mishra, who took apart Amis’s strange and chaotic essay on the sixth anniversary of 9/11. But where are the others?’
Bennett concluded:
‘Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.’
Nothing has changed. As another famous novelist, Mark Twain, observed:
‘There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.’ (Twain, Following the Equator – The wit and wisdom of Mark Twain, Dover, 1999, p.4)
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
America’s Lawyer E55: Nancy Pelosi has spent years blocking healthcare reform in the United States in order to protect corporate profits, and the healthcare companies recently rewarded her for her efforts to keep prices high for consumers. Some of the most popular drinks in America – from soda to milk – have been found to […]
The post Pelosi Awarded For Screwing Over Americans appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
A new edition of the Okinawan Journal of Island Studies features social justice island activism, including a case study of Aotearoa New Zealand’s Pacific Media Centre, in what the editors say brings a sense of “urgency” in the field of diversity, equity, and inclusion in scholarship.
In the editorial, the co-editors — Tiara R. Na’puti, Marina Karides, Ayano Ginoza, Evangelia Papoutsaki — describe this special issue of the journal as being guided by feminist methods of collaboration.
They say their call for research on social justice island activism has brought forth an issue that centres on the perspectives of Indigenous islanders and women.
“Our collection contains disciplinary and interdisciplinary research papers, a range of contributions in our forum section (essays, curated conversations, reflection pieces, and photo essays), and book reviews centred on island activist events and activities organised locally, nationally, or globally,” the editorial says.
“We are particularly pleased with our forum section; its development offers alternative forms of scholarship that combine elements of research, activism, and reflection.
“Our editorial objective has been to make visible diverse approaches for conceptualising island activisms as a category of analysis.
‘Complexity and nuance’
“The selections of writing here offer complexity and nuance as to how activism shapes and is shaped by island eco-cultures and islanders’ lives.”
The co-editors argue that “activisms encompass multiple ways that people engage in social change, including art, poetry, photographs, spoken word, language revitalisation, education, farming, building, cultural events, protests, and other activities locally and through larger networks or movements”.
Thus this edition of OJIS brings together island activisms that “inform, negotiate, and resist geopolitical designations” often applied to them.
Geographically, the islands featured in papers include Papua New Guinea, Prince Edward Island, and the island groups of Kanaky, Okinawa, and Fiji.
Among the articles, Meghan Forsyth’s ‘La langue vient de la musique’: Acadian song, language transmission, and cultural sustainability on Prince Edward Island engagingly examines the “sonic activism” of the Francophone community in Canada’s Prince Edward Island.
“Also focused on visibility and access, David Robie’s article ‘Voice of the Voiceless’: The Pacific Media Centre as a case study of academic and research advocacy and activism substantiates the need for bringing forward journalistic attention to the Pacific,” says the editorial.
Dr Robie emphasises the need for critical and social justice perspectives in addressing the socio-political struggles in Fiji and environmental justice in the Pacific broadly, say the co-editors.
In the article My words have power: The role of Yuri women in addressing sorcery violence in Simbu province of Papua New Guinea, Dick Witne Bomai shares the progress of the Yuri Alaiku Kuikane Association (YAKA) in advocacy and peacebuilding.
In ‘La Pause Décoloniale’: Women decolonising Kanaky one episode at a time, Anaïs Duong-Pedica, “provides a discussion of French settler colonialism and the challenges around formal decolonisation processes in Kanaky”.
Inclusive feminist thinking
The article engages with “women’s political activism and collaborative practice” of the podcast and radio show La Pause Décoloniale.
The co-editors say the edition’s forum section is a result of “inclusive feminist thinking to make space for a range of approaches combining scholarship and activism”.
They comment that the “abundance of submissions to this section demonstrates the desire for academic outlets that stray from traditional models of scholarship”.
“Feminist and Indigenous scholar-activists seem especially inclined towards alternative avenues for expressing and sharing their research,” the coeditors add.
Eight books are reviewed, including New Zealand’s Peace Action: Struggles for a Decolonised and Demilitarised Oceania and East Asia, edited by Valerie Morse.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
New Zealand’s Media Freedom Council has called Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown’s exclusion of some media outlets from his budget speech today “unacceptable”.
In an appearance at Auckland Transport’s Viaduct headquarters, Brown took time out of pitching his plan to sell the city’s holdings in Auckland Airport to complain about road cones, his “not financially literate” councillors and target the “nasty” media.
Brown’s team invited journalists from only a few organisations to the announcement. RNZ was allowed in, but Stuff, TVNZ and Newshub were not.
Stuff reported among those allowed in were “business leaders, former politicians and former rugby league coach Sir Graham Lowe”.
Some reporters threatened to walk out of the event in protest, drawing this response from the mayor: “They weren’t invited, but some of the media have been pretty nasty. We did invite media who are sensible; and the media who are not weren’t invited, and have now decided, some of them, to bugger off — well, that’s all right with me”.
Stuff queried the mayor’s decision, and was told only a “select few journalists… we feel were best able to convey the mayor’s message” were invited.
Media Freedom Council chair Richard Sutherland — also head of news at RNZ — wrote to Brown shortly afterwards, to “express our deep concern about the attempted exclusion of journalists from today’s budget presentation in Auckland”.
In addition to RNZ, the MFC represents Newshub, Newsroom, NZME, Stuff, The Spinoff and TVNZ.
‘Today’s events troubling’
“Today’s events are troubling. The media plays a crucial role in informing the public and holding officials accountable. Denying access to journalists compromises the public’s right to be informed,” Sutherland wrote.
“Furthermore, we are aware that invitations that were issued were selectively targeted to specific journalists. It is imperative to ensure equal opportunities for all bone fide journalists to cover significant public events, irrespective of their perceived affiliations or perspectives.
“To be blunt, it’s unacceptable to cherry-pick journalists based on who you think will give you the easiest ride.”
Sutherland called Brown’s decision an “affront to the democratic process and an insult to voters”.
Brown did not take questions after his speech, saying he did not have time.
He has had a strained relationship with the media since taking the mayoral chains last year. Mediawatch in April described it as “frosty”, at best.
In January, as Auckland suffered its worst floods in living memory, he called journalists “drongos” in messages to friends, upset he had to cancel a tennis engagement to deal with the media. He later apologised.
He refused 106 media requests in his first month of office, granting only two.
‘Sell them all’
The guts of Brown’s speech was to convince his councillors that selling the city’s 18 percent stake in Auckland Airport was the only way to avoid massive cuts to services and rate hikes.
He has his deputy Desley Simpson on side. She told RNZ’s Midday Report she did not want to sell the shares at first, but had listened to advice and had been convinced.
She said the mayor’s second budget proposal was as good as it was going to get, and she hoped other councillors agreed to it.
“In my heart, I didn’t want to sell the airport shareholding. But professional staff advice has said ‘sell them all’. And you know, that’s a hard pill to swallow when in your heart, you want to keep them.
“It’s an emotional wrestle that I think a lot of people are struggling with.”
Simpson said selling shareholding was not just a short-term fix, and would save the council $100 million a year in debt interest.
The council’s debt is currently more than $11 billion.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
There are parallels between Indonesia’s Aceh where an Australian surfer faced a flogging, and West Papua where a New Zealand pilot may be facing death. Both provinces have fought brutal guerrilla wars for independence. One has been settled through foreign peacekeepers. The other still rages as outsiders fear intervention.
By Duncan Graham in Malang, East Java
There were ten stories in a Google Alert media feed last week for “Indonesia-Australia”.
One covered illegal fishing in the Indo-Pacific claiming economic losses of more than US$6 billion a year — important indeed.
Another was an update on the plight of New Zealand pilot Philip Mehrtens, held hostage since February 7 by the Tentara Pembebasan Nasional Papua Barat (TPNPB-West Papua National Liberation Army).
This is the armed wing of the Organisasi Papua Merdeka, (OPM Free Papua Organisation) that has been pushing its cause since the 1970s.
A major story by any measure. The Indonesian military’s inability to find and safely secure the New Zealander has the potential to cause serious diplomatic rifts and great harm to all parties.
There have been unverified reports of bombs dropped from helicopters on jungle camps where the pilot may have been held with uninvolved civilians.
The other eight stories were about Queenslander Bodhi Mani Risby-Jones who had been arrested in April for allegedly going on a nude drunken rampage and bashing a local in Indonesian Aceh.
Stupidities commonplace
Had the 23-year-old surfer been a fool in his home country the yarn would have been a yawn. Such stupidities are commonplace.
But because he chose to be a slob in the strictly Muslim province of Aceh and facing up to five years jail plus a public flogging, his plight opened the issue of cultural differences and tourist arrogance. Small news, but legitimate.
He has now reportedly done a $25,000 deal to buy his way out of charges and pay restitution to his victim. This shows a flexible social and legal system displaying tolerance — which is how Christians are supposed to behave.
All noteworthy, easy to grasp. But more important than the threatened execution of an innocent victim of circumstances caught in a complex dispute that needs detailed explanations to understand?
Mehrtens landed a commercial company’s plane as part of his job for Susi Air flying people and goods into isolated airstrips when he was grabbed by armed men desperate to get Jakarta to pay attention to their grievances.
Ironically, Aceh where Risby-Jones got himself into strife, had also fought for independence and won. Like West Papua, it’s resource-rich so essential for the central government’s economy.
A vicious on-off war between the Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, (GAM-Free Aceh Movement) and the Indonesian military started in 1976 and reportedly took up to 30,000 lives across the following three decades.
Tsunami revived peace talks
It only ended when the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami killed 160,000 people and former general Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono was elected president and revived peace talks. Other countries became involved, including the European Union and Finland where the Helsinki Agreement was signed.
Both sides bowed to a compromise. GAM leaders abandoned their demands for independence, settling for “self-government” within the Indonesian state, while soldiers were withdrawn. The bombings have stopped but at the cost of personal freedoms and angering human rights advocates.
Freed from Jakarta’s control, the province passed strict Shariah laws. These include public floggings for homosexual acts, drinking booze and being close to an opposite sex person who is not a relative. Morality Police patrols prowl shady spots, alert to any signs of affection.
Australian academic and former journalist Dr Damien Kingsbury was also instrumental in getting GAM and Jakarta to talk. He was involved with the West Papua standoff earlier this year but New Zealand is now using its own to negotiate.
Dr Kingsbury told the ABC the situation in West Papua is at a stalemate with neither Wellington nor Jakarta willing to make concessions. The Indonesian electorate has no truck for “separatists” so wants a bang-bang fix. NZ urges a softly-slowly approach.
A TPNPB spokesperson told the BBC: “The Indonesian government has to be bold and sit with us at a negotiation table and not [deploy] military and police to search for the pilot.”
The 2005 Aceh resolution means the Papua fighters have a strong model of what is possible when other countries intervene. So far it seems none have dared, fearing the wrath of nationalists who believe Western states, and particularly Australia, are trying to “Balkanise” the “unitary state” and plunder its riches.
Theory given energy
This theory was given energy when Australia supported the 1999 East Timor referendum which led to the province splitting from Indonesia and becoming a separate nation.
Should Australia try to act as a go-between in the Papua conflict, we would be dragged into the upcoming Presidential election campaign with outraged candidates thumping lecterns claiming outside interference. That is something no one wants but sitting on hands won’t help Mehrtens.
In the meantime, Risby-Jones, whose boorish behaviour has confirmed Indonesian prejudices about Australian oafs, is expected to be deported.
Mehrtens will only get to tell his tale if the Indonesian government shows the forbearance displayed by the family of Edi Ron. The Aceh fisherman needed 50 stitches and copped broken bones and an infected foot from his Aussie encounter, but he still shook hands.
After weeks in a cell the surfer has shown contrition and apologised. Australian ‘”proceedings of crime” laws should prevent him earning from his ordeal.
If the Kiwi pilot does get out alive, he deserves the media attention lavished on the Australian. This might shift international interest from a zonked twit to the issue of West Papua’s independence and remind diplomats that if Jakarta could bend in the far west of the archipelago, why not in the far east?
Lest Indonesians forget: Around 100,000 revolutionaries died during the four-year war against the returning colonial Dutch after Soekarno proclaimed independence in 1975. The Dutch only retreated after external pressure from the US and Australia.
Duncan Graham has been a journalist for more than 40 years in print, radio and TV. He is the author of People Next Door (UWA Press) and winner of the Walkley Award and Human Rights awards. He is now writing for the English language media in Indonesia from within Indonesia. This article was first published in Pearls & Irritations on 30 May 2023 and is republished with permission.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Performance artist and social media personality Chen Shaotian, also known as Brother Tian, is hoping to apply for political asylum in the United States this week after documenting his hazardous trek through the Central American rainforest.
“Ladies and gentlemen! I have arrived in Quito!” the bearded, cigarette-smoking Chen tells his online audience in a video clip dated May 17 as he arrived in the Ecuadorian capital to embark on the overland leg of his journey to the United States, known in China as “walking the line.”
Chen, who has previously served a 14-month jail term for criticizing the Chinese Communist Party on social media, proceeded to upload video clips along every stage of his trip, including a hazardous trek led by people-smugglers across a rainforest that took two days.
“I was lucky – it took some people four-and-a-half days,” Chen, who also sports a massive medallion emblazoned with the Chinese character for “dream,” a likely satire on President Xi Jinping’s slogan “the Chinese dream,” said after emerging from the jungle.
“One old lady had to be carried out of there on a stretcher after paying US$120 to the snakehead [people smugglers],” he said.
‘From all over the world’
Tian arrived in Quito via Turkey, joining around 200 other fellow travelers from China who had chosen to “walk the line.”
“There were families, single people, from Fujian, Shandong … Xinjiang, people from all over [China],” he said. “There were also … people from all over the world.”
Chen’s trip took him through bus stations, border checkpoints, refugee camps and other facilities that have sprung up to serve the constant stream of people heading for the United States through Central America.
“We ran into some corrupt police en route between Quito and Colombia, Nicaragua,” he said. “They wanted money from us … There were six of us Chinese, and we each gave them US$500.”
Chen said he was offered the option to pay US$1,100 more for a “luxury” route during which horses and camps were provided, as opposed to camping in the rainforest.
He said a lot of people were robbed along the way.
“Some people had more than US$1,000 stolen,” he said. “They told me there would be more robberies in Guatemala and Honduras, and some were saying that the Chinese were partnering up with the locals to rob [Chinese refugees].”
“They go for people with families – one guy had his credit card swiped and lost more than 200,000 yuan, (US$28,000)” he said.
The route Chen took, flying to Turkey, then to Ecuador, then northwards along the coast through Peru and Venezuela, is a common one. Many of Chen’s videos showed long lines of people lining up for buses, or to be admitted into refugee facilities along the way.
Freedom to speak out
Chen said he is hoping to apply for political asylum in the United States for one reason only: to live somewhere where there is freedom of expression.
He was jailed in March 2021 by a court in his home province of Henan after being found guilty of “picking quarrels and stirring up trouble,” a charge frequently used to target critics of the regime.
Chen’s sentence was based on more than 50 posts he made to Twitter that were deemed to be “hype about major sensitive events in China” and “political attacks.”
One video showed him astride a moped, speeding down a road wearing a face-mask blazoned with the words “evil” and “understand,” and yelling: “Understand this! Our evil government is far worse than any virus!”
Chen’s tweets had “attacked China’s political system, insulted employees of the state, caused serious damage to China’s national image and endangered its national interests,” as well as “creating serious disorder in a public place,” the court judgment said.
Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Malcolm Foster.
This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by By Gu Ting for RFA Mandarin.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The post Racism in the media: “Don’t read the comments” isn’t enough anymore! appeared first on IndigenousX.
This post was originally published on IndigenousX.
Secret United States government documents leaked onto social media platform Discord reveal how the US and its military is striving to reestablish hegemony — targeting adversaries and pressuring allies, report Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
David Barsamian: American Justice Robert Jackson was the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials. He made an opening statement to the Tribunal on November 21, 1945, because there was some concern at the time that it would be an example of victor’s justice. He said this: “If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
❖
When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves.
Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media.
A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of mass destruction in Iraq or babies being taken from incubators in Kuwait.
In reality, all are inaccurate understandings of what propaganda is and how it works in western society. Propaganda is administered in western nations, by western nations, across the political spectrum — and the really blatant and well-known examples of its existence make up only a small sliver of the propaganda that our civilization is continuously marinating in.
The most common articles of propaganda — and by far the most consequential — are not the glaring, memorable instances that live in infamy among the critically minded. They’re the mundane messages, distortions and lies-by-omission that people are fed day in and day out to normalize the status quo and lay the foundation for more propaganda to be administered in the future.
One of the forms this takes is the way the western political/media class manipulates the Overton window of acceptable political opinion.
Have you ever noticed how when you look at any mainstream newspaper, broadcast or news website, you never see views from those who oppose the existence of the US-centralized empire? Or those who want to close all foreign US military bases? Or those who want to dismantle capitalism? Or those who want a thorough rollback of the creeping authoritarianism our civilization is being subjected to? You might see some quibbling about different aspects of the empire, some debate over whether we should de-escalate against Russia so we can better escalate against China, but you won’t ever see anyone calling for the complete end of the empire and its abuses altogether.
That’s propaganda. It’s propaganda in multiple ways: it excludes voices that are critical of the established status quo from being heard and influencing people, it amplifies voices (many of whom have packing foam for brains) which support the status quo, and, most importantly, it creates the illusion that the range of political opinions presented are the only reasonable political opinions to have.
The creation of that illusion is propaganda. It’s not something solid that you can point to easily because it’s comprised of an omission of something rather than a concrete thing, but it warps people’s perspectives in ways that have immensely far-reaching consequences. It’s something that doesn’t stand out too sharply against the background, but because people are exposed to it continuously day in and day out, it plays a huge role in shaping their worldview.
Another related method of manipulation is agenda-setting — the way the press shapes public thinking by emphasising some subjects and not others. In placing importance on some matters over others simply by giving disproportionate coverage to them, the mass media (who are propagandists first and news reporters second) give the false impression that those topics are more important and the de-emphasised subjects are less so. As political scientist Bernard Cohen famously observed way back in 1963, the press “may not be successful much of the time in telling people what to think, but it is stunningly successful in telling its readers what to think about. The world will look different to different people depending on the map that is drawn for them by writers, editors, and publishers of the paper they read.”
Ever noticed how the fact that our governments are increasingly tempting nuclear war seems like it ought to be a front-page story pretty much every day of the week, but instead the news is full of stuff like the US presidential race and people arguing over what products Target should sell during Pride Month? That’s agenda-setting.
The press could easily have spent the entire Trump administration screaming about the dangerous aggressions Trump was advancing against Russia instead of calling him a Putin puppet, and mainstream liberals would have fixated on Trump’s warmongering insanity instead of calling him Putin’s cock holster. But that wouldn’t have served the interests of the empire, which had been planning to ramp up aggressions against Russia for years. They set the agenda, and the public fell in line.
Another of the mundane, almost-invisible ways the public is propagandized from day to day is described in a recent video by Second Thought titled “You’re Not Immune To Propaganda“. We’re continually fed messages by the capitalist machine that we must work hard for employers and accept whatever standards and compensation they see fit to offer, and if we have difficulty thriving in this unjust system the fault lies with us and not with the system. Poor? That’s your fault. Miserable? Your fault. Unemployed? Your fault. Overworked? Your fault.
The continual message we’re fed every day is that there’s nothing to rebel against and nothing to oppose, because any problems we’re perceiving are our own fault and not the fault of an abusive, exploitative system which is built to extract profit from the working class and the ecosystem at the expense of both. The system cannot be a failure, it can only be failed.
Then there’s the ideological herding funnel we discussed recently, which herds the population into two mainstream factions of equal size which both prevent all meaningful change and serve the interests of the powerful. Anyone who can’t be herded into either of these mainstream factions is instead herded into fake “populist” factions, which eventually corral them back into the mainstream factions. Those few politically engaged people who can’t be herded toward any of these groups are so small in number that they can simply be marginalized and denied any sizeable platform from which to spread their ideas, and “democracy” does the rest because the majority are supporting the status quo.
Maybe the most consequential of all the mundane, routine ways we’re propagandized is the way the mass media manufacture the illusion of normality in a dystopia so disturbing that we would all scream our lungs out if we could see it with fresh eyes. The way pundits, politicians and reporters will talk about the Biden administration surrounding China with war machinery without also talking about how freakish and horrifying it is that we’re looking at rapidly escalating brinkmanship between nuclear-armed countries. The way American cities are full of homeless people and it’s just treated as a normal and acceptable thing to simply let them stay homeless and push them out of wherever they try to be. The way nothing ever changes no matter who we vote for but we’re still herded into the voting booths and told to vote better.
As a character in the movie Waking Life puts it, “We all know the function of the media has never been to eliminate the evils of the world, no! Their job is to persuade us to accept those evils and get used to living with them. The powers that be want us to be passive observers. And they haven’t given us any other options outside the occasional purely symbolic act of voting — do you want the puppet on the right or the puppet on the left?”
They don’t just tell us what to believe about the world, they tell us what to believe about ourselves. They give us the frameworks upon which we cast our ambitions and evaluate our success, and we build psychological identities out of those constructs. I am a businessman. I am unemployed. My life is about making money. My life is about disappointing people. I am a success. I am a failure. They invent the test of our adequacy, and they invent the system by which we are graded on that test.
Over and over and over again, day after day, we are fed seemingly small messages which add up over time. Messages like,
By feeding us all these simple, foundational lies day after day, year after year from the time we are very young, they lay the groundwork for the more complex, specific lies we’ll be told later on. Lies like “Russia/China/Iran/etc is a real problem and its government needs to be stopped,” or “People are struggling financially right now, but it’s just because times are hard and it can’t be helped.”
All the mundane lies serve as a primer for the lies we’ll be told later, because once our worldview has been shaped by them, our basic human cognitive biases and predisposition to reject information which conflicts with our worldview will ensure that we’ll take on board the information which confirms our biases and reject any evidence against it. They construct our worldviews for us, then let our normal cognitive defense systems protect it.
Their messages don’t even need to be well-evidenced or well-argued, they only need to be repeated frequently due to a glitch in human cognition known as the illusory truth effect which causes us to mistake the feeling of having heard something before with the feeling of something being true.
Add to all this the recent development of things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and the deck becomes stacked against truth even further, because someone’s odds of stumbling across information which conflicts with the propaganda they’ve been fed goes dramatically down. Even if they’re actively searching for information which conflicts the mainstream worldview, algorithms by Google and Google-owned YouTube often make it almost impossible to find.
So that’s what we’re up against. There’s a failure to appreciate just how pervasive and powerful the empire’s propaganda machine is, even among those who are very critical of empire, because propaganda in our society is like water for fish — we’re swimming in it constantly, so we don’t see it. You have to step way, way back and begin examining our situation from its most basic foundations to get any perspective on how all-encompassing it really is.
Finding your way out of the propaganda matrix takes a lot of diligent work, tons of curiosity, the humility to admit you’ve been completely wrong about everything, and more than a little plain dumb luck. But if you keep hacking away at it eventually you get there, and then you can help others get there too. It’s a hard slog, but if our chains are psychological that means they’re ultimately only made of dream stuff. All that needs to happen is for enough of us to wake up.
__________________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon, Paypal, or Substack, buying an issue of my monthly zine, and following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube. If you want to read more you can buy my books. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list for at my website or on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. Everyone, racist platforms excluded, has my permission to republish, use or translate any part of this work (or anything else I’ve written) in any way they like free of charge. For more info on who I am, where I stand, and what I’m trying to do with this platform, click here. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.
Bitcoin donations:1Ac7PCQXoQoLA9Sh8fhAgiU3PHA2EX5Zm2
This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
The Appeal Court in French Polynesia has acquitted the pro-independence leader Oscar Temaru and two others in the case of the funding of community Radio Tefana.
In 2019, Temaru was given a six-month suspended prison sentence and fined US$50,000 after the criminal court had found that, as mayor of Faa’a, he had funded Radio Tefana to benefit his pro-independence Tavini Huira’atira party.
The chairs of the board of the association which runs Radio Tefana, Heinui Le Caill and Vito Maamaatuaiahutapu, had also been given suspended jail sentences of one and three months, respectively.
Radio Tefana was fined US$1 million (NZ$1.6 million).
The acquittal comes after a repeatedly delayed trial went ahead in the Appeal Court in March.
The radio station had regularly opposed France’s nuclear weapons tests in the region, but the defence said no recording had been produced to prove it was propaganda.
The defence said the French state lied to the local population about the weapons tests for 50 years.
The Tavini party said the real reason for his conviction was that in the eyes of France, Temaru “committed treason” by taking French presidents to the International Criminal Court over the tests.
Tavini Huira’atira, led by Temaru, decisively won the recent election for a new 57-member Territorial Assembly, gaining 44.3 percent of the vote.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Elon Musk now owns Twitter – but the investments from Saudi Arabia shouldn’t leave you feeling warm and fuzzy. Plus, nearly three-quarters of Americans want to have age limits for politicians. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. Mike Papantonio: Elon Musk now owns […]
The post Saudi Arabia Jailing Twitter Critics & Voters Agree On Age Limits For Politicians appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
Stan Grant, host of ABC’s Q+A, announced last Friday that he would be stepping away from his role for an unspecified period. Grant cited a need to take ‘a break from the media’ after receiving threats and racial abuse following his participation in the ABC’s coverage of the coronation of King Charles.
The abuse directed at Grant has been described by ABC news Chief Justin Stevens as a ‘relentless campaign’ prosecuted via social media trolls, but ultimately one directed by News Corp commentators’ intent on skewering Grant—and the ABC—for foregrounding the role of the monarchy and colonialism in violence committed against Indigenous Australians.
However, in announcing his decision, Grant indicated his primary reason for leaving was not the threats and abuse. Rather, he highlighted the lack of support he had received from others at the ABC—calling it an ‘institutional failure’—as well as a failure of the media overall to foster respectful discussion of important issues.
In recent years interest in news has fallen and more Australians are saying they avoid it. According to the Digital News Report: Australia 2022 – which both authors of this article worked on – those saying they often, sometimes, or occasionally avoid news increased from 57% in 2017 to 68% in 2022.
When asked why they avoided it, the top reasons given were that there was too much coverage of subjects like politics or coronavirus (49%) and that it had a negative effect on their mood (44%).
Notably, women are turning away from the news, citing exhaustion from its relentless negativity as a major cause.
So, what is the media’s role in this? Is Grant correct, that Australia’s news media are fostering a toxic space for public debate?
“I am down but I will get back up. And you can come at me again and I will meet you with the love of my people.” Stan Grant delivers a powerful message on Q+A before taking a break from the media. #StanGrant #QandA #WeStandWithStan pic.twitter.com/avNBJtzSMK
— QandA (@QandA) May 22, 2023
Indigenous and non-Indigenous researchers have found that journalist’s news values, combined with underlying racism and a colonial mindset, contribute to the negative portrayal of Indigenous people and issues. Most insidious is the framing and reinforcement of First Nations peoples as the cause of the conflict and division on which journalists report. This negativity feeds into the newsroom.
Our research suggests that Grant is not the only journalist of the view that there are institutional problems with gender and race in the news industry. As outlined in the Valuing Diversity in News and Newsrooms report published by the News & Media Research Centre at the University of Canberra, 87% of journalists we surveyed said the industry needed to improve diversity ‘somewhat’ or ‘a great deal’.
Less than a third (30%) said their news organisation had enough ethnic or cultural diversity, and less than half (49%) said everyone at their news organisation was treated equally regardless of their ethnic and cultural background.
Among those journalists who identified as non-Anglo, non-European or Indigenous Australian, 39% said they had experienced discrimination in their newsroom because of their ethnic or cultural background. A further 58% and 69% respectively said there were barriers to employment and advancement because of their ethnic or cultural background.
But importantly, journalists also say that discrimination is still a problem widely faced by women. Among women journalists, 47% said they had experienced discrimination, 27% said there were barriers when applying for a job, and 58% said there were barriers to progressing in their career because of their gender.
Women were also more acutely aware of the intersectional nature of discrimination. Most women journalists acknowledged there were barriers to employment (68%) and advancement (65%) because of someone’s ethnic or cultural background, compared to less than half of men (32% employment; 41% advancement).
In both surveys and interviews, journalists pointed out that they felt more likely to experience discrimination if their senior leadership was not particularly diverse. As one interviewee noted, the feeling of not being listened to in majority white newsrooms was common for reporters from multicultural backgrounds.
Women journalists also told us they felt pressure to let things slide. News organisations often foster a competitive and fast-paced workplace culture that pays little heed to gender or cultural sensitivities. The pressure to beat deadlines while performing the model ideal of ‘disinterested observer’ is often at odds with a culture that respects difference. Journalists are expected to ‘put up and shut up’ rather than speak out.
Stan Grant has made the bold decision to speak out at a pivotal time in the national conversation.
In doing so, he is bringing broader attention to the lack of inclusivity that women and people of colour face while working in journalism—a fact that many in the public may not be particularly aware of.
As we move towards The Voice referendum the Australian media industry has reasons to reflect on its own role in undermining the very cause it champions, through employment strategies and taken-for granted news values and routines.
The post Stan Grant shows up a lack of media diversity appeared first on BroadAgenda.
This post was originally published on BroadAgenda.
ANALYSIS: By Bronwyn Carlson, Macquarie University; Faith Valencia-Forrester, Griffith University; Madi Day, Macquarie University, and Susan Forde, Griffith University
Stan Grant, a well-known Aboriginal journalist and soon-to-be former host of Q+A, has made a stand against racist abuse, saying he is “stepping away” from the media industry. Grant said he has paid a heavy price for being a journalist and has been a media target for racism.
As authors of a recent Media Diversity Australia report investigating online abuse and safety of diverse journalists, we’re not surprised.
Grant was one the few diverse journalists employed in the Australian media industry. Yet his story of relentless racial abuse is one shared by other journalists who are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, culturally and racially marginalised, LGBTQIA+ and/or living with disability.
Grant said:
I want no part of it. I want to find a place of grace far from the stench of the media. I want to go where I am not reminded of the social media sewer.
ABC management has finally condemned the racist abuse directed at Stan Grant and apologised to him, but it has come far too late.
ABC staff have taken matters into their own hands, walking out in support of Grant.
“Leadership is coming from the bottom.”https://t.co/9hJuZc3ikT
— The Conversation (@ConversationEDU) May 22, 2023
Racism across the media
The latest round of racially motivated abuse came after Grant hosted the ABC’s coverage of the coronation of King Charles.
Grant said:
Since the King’s coronation, I have seen people in the media lie and distort my words. They have tried to depict me as hate filled. They have accused me of maligning Australia.
When Elizabeth II died, many Indigenous journalists and newsreaders were targeted for not sharing the same grief many non-Indigenous people expressed. Narelda Jacobs was one of many Aboriginal journalists who received abuse across social media and was also targeted by mainstream media.
Grant called the ABC’s lack of support an “institutional failure”, saying:
I am writing this because no-one at the ABC — whose producers invited me onto their coronation coverage as a guest — has uttered one word of public support.
In response to Grant’s column, a statement was issued from the ABC’s Director News, Justin Stevens, conceding Grant has, over many months, been subject to grotesque racist abuse, including threats to his safety.
The ABC’s Bonner Committee has recommended a full review into the ABC’s responses to racism affecting staff and how they can better support their staff.
— NITV (@NITV) May 21, 2023
What our research found
Our report, Online Safety of Diverse Journalists, commissioned by Media Diversity Australia and released this month, focused on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, culturally and racially marginalised, LGBTQIA+ and/or people living with disability.
This new research followed a 2022 Media Diversity Australia report, Who Gets to Tell Australian Stories 2.0, which detailed significant under-representation of diverse journalists in the industry, particularly Indigenous people and those from culturally and racially marginalised groups.
Our new report focused more on online safety and the high cost for diverse journalists who are often not supported or protected in the workplace. It found 85 percent of participants had experienced either personal or professional abuse online.
As one participant said:
It’s so ingrained within all parts of society, all the pillars within society, all professions, which includes the media, and I think women, particularly women of colour and from Indigenous backgrounds, they receive the most horrific and vile abuse.
The report has not yet gained interest from the Australian media other than Fourth Estate which expressed alarm at the findings.
This week an important and timely discussion of the abuse diverse journalists are experiencing for just doing their job. @BronwynCarlson @faithvalencia takes us through the latest report from @MediaDiverseAU https://t.co/uSCX8D1khO
— Fourth Estate (@fourthestateau) May 19, 2023
One of the key findings from this research was that diverse journalists often accepted that online harassment and abuse from the public was “just part of the job”. Many reported they were working in what they considered “hostile work environments”.
One participant expressed:
As soon as you say you are a journalist, the response is: you are asking for it.
It was concerning to find the normalisation of online harassment and abuse, and many diverse journalists were reluctant to report their experiences for fear of being considered a problem. Many felt if they raised the issue it would impact any chance of career progression.
A participant commented:
I am cautious revealing my struggles because I don’t want people to think I can’t handle my job.
In his recent experience, Grant said:
Aboriginal people learn to tough it out. That’s the price of survival.
Organisations have a duty of care to their employees. Online harassment and abuse of diverse journalists is a work health and safety issue and needs to be urgently treated as such.
The impact and cost to diverse journalists is high, and many make the same choice as Grant — to leave the industry to protect themselves and their health. Many spoke about how harassment and abuse was not only online; 39 percent reported the abuse moved offline.
The racist attacks on Stan Grant are sickening and sad. All of us in the media must play our part in helping quell the stench of the sewer. I am so sorry Stan. @walkleys https://t.co/TfUANxk3Ny
— Shona Martyn (@ShonaMartyn) May 19, 2023
When it comes to thinking about who gets to tell Australian stories or who gets to have a career as a journalist free of harassment and abuse, the Media Diversity Australia report evidences the hostility of the media industry for those who are not white, able bodied, and/or cis-gender and/or heterosexual.
The report also shows, as Grant points out, that online harassment and abuse actively and incessantly targets Indigenous journalists. Although many of the participants stated they were unofficially warned by their workplace to expect online violence, they said they received little support to protect and defend them from racial harassment and abuse.
I started to see exactly what I’d been warned about (…) But there was no mechanism to flag that to say that you had received a racist email to send it somewhere where that person could be put on a watch list or whatever it is, you know, where they’re going to become a serial offender.
Grant echoes the experiences of many participants when he says:
Barely a week goes by when I am not racially targeted.
The research report also reveals that workplace and online harassment in media industry involves fairly predictable culprits. As one participant highlighted, they come from a similar demographic — white men.
Grant’s resignation is a huge loss to Australian journalism. He and other diverse journalists nationally are crying out for action on the part of media bodies and organisations.
There are many other diverse journalists who have left the profession prior to Grant’s departure. One of our interviewees contacted us to say:
If a serious and well respected journalist feels the best thing to do is leave and has had no support from work — what does that mean for the rest of us?
Let’s hope the media industry is finally paying attention.
Bronwyn Carlson, professor, Indigenous Studies and director of The Centre for Global Indigenous Futures, Macquarie University; Faith Valencia-Forrester, lecturer and lawyer, Griffith University; Madi Day, lecturer, Department of Indigenous Studies, Macquarie University, and Susan Forde, director, Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research, Griffith University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Laws on the books in 33 states protect clergy members from having to report abuse of children to authorities. Then, local news is dead – but reviving it could help save the country. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Click here to find out more about church abuse lawsuits. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription […]
The post State Laws Protect Church Sex Abuse & The Revival Of Local News appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.
Victims of human trafficking were identified during a major prostitution sting in Florida recently. Also, a new survey has found that Americans’ trust in the media is at an all time low. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Click here to find out more about human trafficking lawsuits. Click here to order Mike Papantonio’s legal thriller, “Inhuman Trafficking.” […]
The post 160 Arrested In Trafficking Police Sting & Trust In Media Continues To Decline appeared first on The Ring of Fire Network.
This post was originally published on The Ring of Fire.