“The most important thing from my perspective is a strategic partnership — a partnership where the media should not be seen as the enemy or a nuisance.”
This was the view of the Communications Fiji Ltd news director and Fijian Media Association executive Vijay Narayan expressed at a media segment of the Police Consultative Session in Suva yesterday.
Narayan said the media and the police had the same goals and objectives “focusing on truth, integrity, accountability and transparency”.
He said the media was ready to have regular meetings with the senior command of Fiji’s Police Force, and also extended an invitation to the Acting Police Commissioner Juki Fong Chew and his senior officers to visit individual media outlets to understand their work.
Narayan said that at times there was a disconnect where the only time the media was called in was when police wanted to say something or maybe when there was a major issue at hand.
He said he remembered that the Crime Stoppers Board also included members of the media and media organisations.
He added that they “fought the fight together”.
Communications Fiji Ltd news director Vijay Narayan speaking at the police workshop. Video: Fijivillage
Police need ‘humanising’
Narayan encouraged police to engage more with the public through media conferences as the Police Force also needed to be “humanised”, and not just focus their message on posting to their social media page.
The CFL news director said that at times they might not be on the same page but the tough questions needed to be asked.
Fiji Sun’s investigative journalist Ivamere Nataro said some people she spoke to did not understand the work of the police and kept requesting frequent updates.
Nataro said that in this digital age, news spread faster on social media and if the police did not open up to the mainstream media, it was another thing that people looked at.
She said police needed to engage more with the community and show that they cared.
Commissioner agrees
While responding to the media, Acting Commissioner Chew said he agreed with what had been said, and moving forward the police would try to improve.
But Chew also gave an example of when a story had been published alleging that someone had been tortured.
He said the story was published and they did not know whether it was true or false.
When the matter was investigated, the issue just died out.
He said that if they manage to find that person, he or she would be taken to task for giving false information.
Krishneel Nair is a Fijivillage reporter. Republished with permission.
The western political/media class has suddenly resurrected the phrase “Axis of Evil” in recent days to refer to the increasing intimacy between Russia and China, just in time for the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.
Famed Iraq War cheerleader Sean Hannity appears to have kicked things off last week, saying on his show that “a new Axis of evil is emerging” between China, Russia and Iran, a slogan that has since been echoed numerous times this week.
On Tuesday former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley told Fox News that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are “two dictators that have said they are unlimited partners,” asserting that “This is the new Axis of Evil, with Iran being their junior partner.”
Also on Tuesday Representative Mike Lawler tweeted, “Xi’s meeting with Putin in Moscow is deeply concerning and highlights the growing threats posed by this new axis of evil,” and on Thursday he tweeted, “We are dealing with a new axis of evil and failure to stop Putin in Ukraine will have far-reaching implications as Russia pushes further into Eastern Europe and China moves against Taiwan.”
"This is the new Axis of Evil" Nikki Haley says of China and Russia "with Iran being the junior partner."
That's absolutely right. If you look around the world, every authoritarian regime is supported by either or all of the three rogue tyrants in Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran. https://t.co/JP4GbnZpHs
On Wednesday The Telegraph published an article titled “Xi and Putin are building a new axis of evil,” which mixes in the phrases “China-Russia axis” and “Beijing-Moscow axis” for good measure.
Also on Wednesday Representative Brian Mast tweeted “This is the new axis of evil” with a picture of Xi and Putin shaking hands.
The “Axis of Evil” slogan was first made infamous by George W Bush in a jingoistic speech he gave a few months after 9/11, and at the time referred to the nations of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. The following year Iraq would be in ruins as the US empire ushered in a new era of worldwide military expansionism and shockingly aggressive interventionism throughout the Middle East.
Bush (and the speechwriter who helped him coin the phrase, neoconservative war propagandist David Frum) used the word “Axis” to evoke the memory of the Axis powers of World War II who fought against the Allied forces, of which the United States was a part. Western warmongers have an extensive history of comparing every war they want to fight to the second world war, framing whoever their Enemy of the Day happens to be as the new Adolf Hitler, whoever wants to fight him as the new Winston Churchill, and whoever opposes the war as the new Neville Chamberlain.
The idea is to get everyone thinking in terms of Good Guys versus Bad Guys like children watching a cartoon show, instead of like grown adults engaged in complex analysis of real life as it actually exists. Because the US empire has spent generations framing WWII as a pure Good Guys versus Bad Guys conflict, now propagandists can say that every Pentagon target is Hitler and the US and its allies are the brave heroes who are fighting Hitler.
The axis of authoritarianism linking Russia, China, and Iran also runs through Florida where Trump and DeSantis compete to see who can better toe the pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine line set by Tucker Carlson. The enemies of democratic freedom announce themselves. . . https://t.co/folIj3Ls8n
And that appears to be the intention behind this recent resurrection of the “Axis of Evil” label: not to recall George W Bush’s hawkish sloganeering on the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, but to recall World War II. This seems likely because we’re also seeing a huge increase in the use of the term “axis” to refer to Russia, China, Iran and sometimes other nations like North Korea, without the fun “of Evil” part.
Genocide walrus John Bolton has been trying to make “axis” happen for a while now; he used that term to refer to the relationship between Russia and China last month in an interview with The Washington Post, where he also claimed that we are already in “a global war” against those nations. In an interview with The Telegraph earlier this week Bolton referred to “the China-Russia axis,” which he described as having “outriders like Iran and North Korea.”
On Monday Representative Jamie Raskin tweeted about the “axis of authoritarianism linking Russia, China, and Iran.”
On Wednesday Representative Lisa McClain tweeted, “Xi and Putin seek a new world order that poses a worrying global threat. The West should be worried about this China-Russia axis and what it means for freedom.”
(Can I just pause a moment here to note that it’s a bit odd for the other guys to be labeled the “axis” when the US is now aligned with every one of the World War II Axis powers?)
At a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Thursday, committee chairman Michael McCaul shed a bit more light on the worldview driving this perspective in his opening remarks.
“History shows when you project strength you get peace but when you project weakness it does invite aggression and war; you only need to look back to Neville Chamberlain and Hitler, and really the course of time has proven that axiom,” McCaul said, adding, “We’re starting to see this alliance very similar in my judgement to what we saw in World War Two: Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea.”
The problem with McCaul’s thinking, of course, is that he is pretending the US is just some passive witness to the formation of this evil “axis” of hostile nations instead of the singular driving factor behind it. Russia, China, and other unabsorbed governments have all been driven closer and closer together by the hostility of the United States toward all of them, and now they are overcoming some significant differences to rapidly move into increasingly intimate strategic partnerships to protect their national sovereignty from a globe-spanning empire which demands total submission from every government on earth.
Empire managers have long forecasted the acquisition of post-Soviet Russia as an imperial lackey state which could be weaponized against the new Enemy Number One in China, but instead the exact opposite happened. Hillary Clinton told the Bloomberg New Economy Forum in 2021 that as an insider within the US power structure she’d “heard for years that Russia would become more willing to move toward the west, more willing to engage in a positive way with Europe, the UK, the US, because of problems on its border, because of the rise of China.” But that’s not what occurred.
“We haven’t seen that,” Clinton said. “Instead what we’ve seen is a concerted effort by Putin maybe to hug China more.”
Perhaps more effort would have been expended winning over Russia’s friendship had this incorrect forecast not been made. If US empire managers had not been so confident that Moscow would come groveling to their feet to kiss the imperial ring, perhaps they would not have felt so comfortable expanding NATO, knocking back Putin’s early gestures of goodwill while administration after administration assured him with its actions that it will accept nothing but total subordinance, and engaging in aggressive brinkmanship on its border.
But they made a different call, so now we have to listen to cringey cold warriors like Michael McFaul moan about Moscow deciding to go with Beijing instead of Washington.
After the collapse of the USSR, a democratic Russia had the chance to be a major, respected European power. Putin however has pushed Russia a different way, turning Russia (yet again) into a vassal of an Asian autocratic power. Such a wasted opportunity. Oh well.
“After the collapse of the USSR, a democratic Russia had the chance to be a major, respected European power,” McFaul recently complained on Twitter. “Putin however has pushed Russia a different way, turning Russia (yet again) into a vassal of an Asian autocratic power. Such a wasted opportunity. Oh well.”
Which is of course just McFaul’s way of saying, “Russia was supposed to be our vassal, not China’s!”
Really all this fuss is nothing other than the emergence of a multipolar world crashing headlong into the imperial doctrine that US unipolar hegemony must be maintained at all cost. If not for that last bit the US empire ceasing to singularly dominate the planet wouldn’t be much of a problem, but because there’s a zealous belief that all attempts to surpass the United States must be treated as enemy acts of aggression we’re now seeing world powers split into two increasingly hostile alliance groups with more and more talk of hot global conflict.
This is madness, and it needs to stop.
_____________________
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.
Communications Fiji Ltd (CFL) chair William Parkinson has called for a repeal of Fiji’s Media Industry Development Act 2010 and more discussion on the proposed Media Ownership and Registration Bill 2023.
He said this during a public consultation on the review of MIDA Act 2010 at Suvavou House yesterday where a draft replacement law was handed to participants.
“I am concerned because after we pass this Bill, we will be stuck with it for a very lengthy period while we have this wider consultation with the community, and the media is then just spinning its wheels, unable to move forward on critical issues it needs to address,” Parkinson said.
“The question is, do we start with the complete repeal of the Bill and then have the consultations over any issue that you may have, or do we start with this (the draft)?
“For me, I think we start with a clean slate and then we can have a wider conversation about whether there is the need for regulation in any sensitivity areas, and of course part of the conversation are these issues are already covered under (other) forms of legislation or control.
“For example, cross media ownership or the unscrupulous player taking control of large sections of the media, that could apply to an unscrupulous player taking large control of the supermarket or any other form of business in Fiji, and its already covered by way of FCCC (Fiji Competition and Consumer Commission).
Don’t ‘over-complicate’ media law
“These are all covered already, and I don’t see a need for any further particular legislation for the media.
“So our call from the media, we have no problem with a wider media consultation or media regulation, if that is necessary, lets start with a clean slate, that is our position.”
University of the South Pacific head of journalism associate professor Shailendra Singh urged the drafters of the legislation to be aware of Fiji’s media system, especially after the covid-19 pandemic when it was vulnerable politically and financially.
He urged the drafters not to “over-complicate” laws for the media.
Arieta Vakasukawaqa is a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
Boris Johnson got a hammering before the Privileges Committee on 22 March. As usual, he did his level best to squirm, twist, and blame everyone else. He may yet be damned for attending Whitehall parties at at the height of the pandemic. Only time will tell, even if large sections of the public seem to have made their minds up.
But Johnson was not alone in his failures. Some are saying a compliant media helped him along the way. It’s hardly surprising that there doesn’t seem to be much public support for Johnson. After all, the care homes scandal, PPE cronyism, and the general mismanagement of the pandemic aren’t far from anyone’s mind.
Bewildering Boris Johnson
Author Paul Illett said he was bewildered at claims Johnson had been stitched up given so much of the media was itself right-wing:
I remain bewildered by journalists/presenters in right wing media outlets in the U.K. claiming Boris Johnson is the victim of some “media stitch up”. The overwhelming majority of the UK media is right wing. The fact #Partygate was reported at all is little short of a miracle.
There have long been suggestions that the Tories and political journalists tend to be a bit too cosy with each other. One angry commenter clearly felt there were no levels to which client-journalists would not stoop to defend Johnson:
Boris could have brought his DJ decks to No.10 and led a Sweet Caroline singalong and client-journalists would run with;
Others felt, perfectly correctly, that using first names with politicians was bad practice for any serious journalist:
If you’re a ‘journalist’ and you introduce a politician by their first name like ‘Sir Keir’ or ‘Boris’ it’s a red flag that you’re a client journalist and working for the establishment #PartyGate#FordeReport
But there’s a bigger picture here. For years Johnson’s buffoonish public persona lulled journalists and producers into a false sense of security. For example, his long list of appearances on comedy shows like Have I Got News For You made him appear a bumbling but harmless fool. Likewise, his entire brand was built with the complicity of reporters and editors who failed to look closely at the man himself:
Zero patience with any journalist, MP or commentator who spent decades lionizing Johnson, ignoring his behaviour who is now 'Shocked' and thinks 'The game is up'.
C*nts. All of them. They knew exactly what he was, they called us enemies for pointing it out. #Partygate
Boris Johnson is many things: charlatan, liar, bully, toff chancer. But he didn’t appear in a vacuum. For decades his worst features were laughed off because ruling class hacks found him entertaining. He isn’t, and he never was. He is a man who should never have been allowed near power.
Beyond that, he is a product of the same posh-boy production line that runs through public school and Oxbridge into positions of great power – be they in politics, industry or, for that matter, the press itself.
On March 20, Russia’s RT News reported, “The US Department of Defense announced on Monday that it will send Ukraine another $350 million worth of military aid. The further supplies come as Ukraine reportedly gears up for a spring offensive, despite suffering heavy losses in Donbass. The package is the 34th tranche of military aid doled out to Ukraine by the US since August 2021. … The US has given Ukraine more than $32.5 billion in military aid since last February, out of more than $110 billion allocated by the administration of US President Joe Biden for military and economic assistance to Kiev.”
Some reader-comments there were against Russia’s Government, such as “Trish: What a disaster for Russia, the sooner Putin goes the better.” But others were instead against America’s Government, such as “TBTB: And the US says it is not party [to] the war? It instigated it with NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, a coup in Ukraine to install a neo-Nazi proxy regime, arming it, training it, financing it, providing it with war plans and intelligence, plus mercenaries and diplomatic support. If this is not being party to the conflict, at minimum, then when Russia hits back no one should be surprised. It is self-defense. It has already knocked out a US sophisticated spying drone that was collecting intelligence on live combat and passing it to its neo-Nazis to kill Russians.”
Whereas the comment from “Trish” is similar to many that I have read at U.S. news-sites, the one from “TBTB” is so fundamentally different from that American norm so that it raises the question as to whether it is reflecting information that appears on Russian news-sites but not on American ones. If that is the case, then why would that be so? Is it because the comment reflects realities that are hidden in U.S. news-media, or instead because it reflects non-realities that are prohibited to be published in the U.S.?
If it reflects realities that are hidden in U.S. news-media, then why would ANY realities be hidden in U.S. news-media? Should they be?
If it instead reflects non-realities that are prohibited to be published in the U.S., then who is doing this censorship and who ought to be legally authorized to make such censorship-decisions in the U.S.? Is there a severe need in the U.S. for new legislation which will delineate how news-censorship in the U.S. is to be done? Would it be best to continue the current legal standard in America that censorship in America is ONLY a private right of publishers, and NOT a right that America’s Government has? Since 95%+ of the news that Americans receive is from organizations that are controlled by America’s fewer-than-a-thousand billionaires, is almost all of the censorship in America being done on behalf of those fewer-than-a-thousand billionaires? If so, then how is that affecting U.S. politics and the Government itself?
America’s Founders, who wrote the U.S. Constitution including its First Amendment, gave no indication that when they wrote and the states passed into law the First Amendment, the objective was to give America’s richest one-hundred-thousandth of the U.S. population in the future the exclusive ultimate power to censor the news that the American public will be receiving.
Of course, this is an enormous problem in America if the reader-comment is entirely true that “The US … is not party the war? It instigated it with NATO expansion to Russia’s borders, a coup in Ukraine to install a neo-Nazi proxy regime, arming it, training it, financing it, providing it with war plans and intelligence, plus mercenaries and diplomatic support. If this is not being party to the conflict, at minimum, then when Russia hits back no one should be surprised. It is self-defense. It has already knocked out a US sophisticated spying drone that was collecting intelligence on live combat and passing it to its neo-Nazis to kill Russians.” That would then be a deeply and dangerously dysfunctional U.S. Government. Would it be an authentically Constitutional U.S. Government?
However, if that reader-comment is false, then why has no evidence been presented to the American public that each one of that comment’s clauses and assumptions is false? Would not even that indicate a very deep dysfunctionality to today’s American press? If the comment is false, why have all U.S. news-media not, in regard to each of its clauses, disclosed evidence that it is false?
Either way, have not America’s news-media failed? And, if the news-media have failed, then isn’t America’s Government even worse — and constantly violating its Constitution? Or: Did America’s Founders WANT there to be a widely deceived American public?
In order to narrative-manage the public conversation about the Iraq War on the 20th anniversary of the invasion, those who helped unleash that horror upon our world have briefly paused their relentless torrent of “Ukraine proves the hawks were always right” takes to churn out a deluge of “Actually the Iraq War wasn’t based on lies and turned out pretty great after all” takes.
Council on Foreign Relations chief Richard Haas — who worked in the US State Department under Colin Powell when Bush launched his criminal invasion — got a piece published in Project Syndicate falsely claiming that the US government and his former boss did not lie about weapons of mass destruction, and that “governments can and do get things wrong without lying.”
Former Bush speechwriter David “Axis of Evil” Frum cooked up a lie-filled spin piece with The Atlantic claiming that “What the U.S. did in Iraq was not an act of unprovoked aggression” and suggesting that perhaps Iraqis are better off as a result of the invasion, or at least no worse off than they would otherwise have been.
Neoconservative war propagandist Eli Lake, who has been described by journalist Ken Silverstein as “an open and ardent promoter of the Iraq War and the various myths trotted out to justify it,” has an essay published in Commentary with the extraordinary claim that the war “wasn’t the disaster everyone now says it was” and that “Iraq is better off today than it was 20 years ago.”
But by far the most appalling piece of revisionist war crime apologia that’s come out during the 20th anniversary of the invasion has been an article published in National Review by the genocide walrus himself, John Bolton.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
Lumping everything together as “Iraq War” critics do is a disservice to the careful analysis of what America accomplished, or didn’t. It is not one indivisible, 20-year-long block of granite that can be judged only all or nothing. In fact, the brunt of https://t.co/2lhQ3EnqWW… https://t.co/964nxyKhS3
Bolton sets himself apart from his fellow Iraq war architects by arguing that the actual invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein “was close to flawless,” and that the only thing the US did wrong was fail to kill more people and topple the government of Iran.
Bolton criticizes “the Bush administration’s failure to take advantage of its substantial presence in Iraq and Afghanistan to seek regime change in between, in Iran,” writing that “we had a clear opportunity to empower Iran’s opposition to depose the ayatollahs.”
“Unfortunately, however, as was the case after expelling Saddam from Kuwait in 1991, the United States stopped too soon,” Bolton writes.
Bolton claims that the notoriously cruel sanctions that were inflicted upon Iraq between 1991 and 2003 were too lenient, saying there should have been “crushing sanctions” that were “enforced cold-bloodedly”.
As Reason’s Eric Boehm notes in his own critique of Bolton’s essay, perhaps the most galling part is where Bolton dismisses any responsibility the US might have for the consequences and fallout from the Iraq invasion, attempting to compartmentalize the “flawless” initial invasion away from all the destabilization and human suffering which followed by saying “they did not inevitably, inexorably, deterministically, and unalterably flow from the decision to invade and overthrow.”
“Whatever Bush’s batting average in post-Saddam decisions (not perfect, but respectable, in my view), it is separable, conceptually and functionally, from the invasion decision. The subsequent history, for good or ill, cannot detract from the logic, fundamental necessity, and success of overthrowing Saddam,” Bolton writes.
This is self-evidently absurd. A Bush administration warmonger arguing that you can’t logically connect the invasion to its aftereffects is like an arsonist saying you can’t logically connect his lighting a fire in the living room to the incineration of the entire house. He’s just trying to wave off any accountability for that war and his role in it.
“One might suspect that Bolton imagines a world where actions should not have consequences because he’s been living in exactly that type of world for the past two decades,” Boehm writes. “Somehow, he’s retained his Washington status as a foreign policy expert, media commentator, and presidential advisor despite having been so horrifically wrong about Iraq.”
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
It takes a special kind of hubris and a serious shortage of respect for the lives of other human beings to sit here, in the year 2023, and argue that the real problem with America's post-9/11 wars is that *they didn't go far enough.*
And that to me is what’s the most jaw-dropping about all this. Not that John Bolton still in the year 2023 thinks the invasion of Iraq was a great idea and should have gone much further, but that the kind of psychopath who would say such a thing is still a prominent news media pundit who is platformed by the most influential outlets in the world for his “expertise”.
It’s actually a completely damning indictment of all western media if you think about it, and really of our entire civilization. The fact that an actual, literal psychopath whose entire goal in life is to try to get as many people killed by violence as he possibly can at every opportunity is routinely given columns and interviews in The Washington Post, and is regularly brought on CNN as an expert analyst, proves our entire society is diseased.
To be clear, when I say that John Bolton is a psychopath, I am not using hyperbole to make a point. I am simply voicing the only logical conclusion that one can come to when reading reports about things like how he threatened the children of the OPCW chief whose successful diplomatic efforts in early 2002 were making the case for invasion hard to build, or how he spent weeks verbally abusing a terrified woman in her hotel room, pounding on her door and screaming obscenities at her.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
“We Know Where Your Kids Live” John Bolton threatened head of chemical weapons commission as part of effort launch war against Iraq https://t.co/p8uluxbWGH
This man is a monster who belongs in a cage, but instead he’s one of the most influential voices in the most powerful country on earth. This is because we are ruled by a giant globe-spanning empire that is held together by the exact sort of murderous ideology that John Bolton promotes.
Bolton is not elevated at maximum amplification in spite of his psychopathic bloodlust, but exactly because of it. That’s the sort of civilization we live in, and that’s the sort of media environment that westerners are forming their worldviews inside of. We are ruled by murderous tyrants, and we are propagandized into accepting their murderousness by mass media which elevate bloodthirsty psychos like John Bolton as part of that propaganda.
That’s the world we live in. That’s what we’re up against here.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
"The Iraq War was a national undertaking. Its broad domestic support owed in large measure to its advancement of the vital interests of state, as those were understood in relation to America’s stake in a decent and durable global order." https://t.co/6e08quvk7L
And that’s why they’ve been working so hard to rewrite the history on Iraq. They need us to accept Iraq as either a greater good that came at a heavy price or a terrible mistake that will never be repeated, so that they can lead us into more horrific wars in the future.
We are being paced. Until now, “Iraq” has been a devastating one-word rebuttal to both the horror and failure of US interventionism. The essays these imperial spinmeisters have been churning out are the early parlay in a long-game effort to take away that word’s historical meaning and power. Don’t let them shift it even an inch.
_________________
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.
Italian artist Davide Dormino’s life-sized bronze sculptures of Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden invite the public to show solidarity with whistleblowers. Peter Boyle reports.
New Caledonia’s only daily newspaper, Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes, has folded after the commercial court accepted the publishing company’s request for its liquidation.
The court had deferred its decision by a day after an injunction by the public prosecutor who wanted to see if there was still a possibility to rescue Les Nouvelles.
The prosecutor had argued that it was worth preserving Les Nouvelles as a tool of pluralism and freedom of expression.
The last edition of the 52-year-old Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes.
However, there has been no interest in taking over the loss making enterprise.
The paper was launched in 1971 and owned by the French Hersant group until 2013 when it was sold to New Caledonia’s Melchior Group.
Faced with losses, the newspaper became an online only publication at the end of last year but has now closed, with more than 100 people losing their jobs.
The last edition of Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes appeared last Thursday.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
“All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.” — Viet Thanh Nguyen
As mainstream U.S. media outlets pause to remember the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s clear that there’s a lot they hope we’ll forget—first and foremost, the media’s own active complicity in whipping up public support for the war.
But the more you dig into mainstream news coverage from that period, as our documentary team did last week when we put together this five-minute montage from our 2007 film War Made Easy, the harder it is to forget how flagrantly news networks across the broadcast and cable landscape uncritically spread the Bush administration’s propaganda and actively excluded dissenting voices.
After 20 Years, Will US News Media Finally Admit its Craven Complicity in Iraq War? | WAR MADE EASY
www.youtube.com
The numbers don’t lie. A 2003 report by the media watchdog Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) found that in the two weeks leading up to the invasion, ABC World News, NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, and the PBS Newshour featured a total of 267 American experts, analysts, and commentators on camera to supposedly help make sense of the march to war. Of these 267 guests, an astounding 75% were current or former government or military officials, and a grand total of one expressed any skepticism.
Meanwhile, in the fast-growing world of cable news, Fox News’s tough-talking, pro-war jingoism was setting the standard for ratings-wary executives at most of the more “liberal” cable networks. MSNBC and CNN, feeling the heat of what industry insiders were calling “the Fox effect,” were desperately trying to outflank their right-wing rival—and one another—by actively eliminating critical voices and seeing who could bang the war drums loudest.
At MSNBC, as the Iraq invasion approached in early 2003, network executives decided to fire Phil Donahue even though his show had the highest ratings on the channel. A leaked internal memo explained that top management saw Donahue as “a tired, left-wing liberal” who would be a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” Noting that Donahue “seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives,” the memo warned ominously that his show could end up being “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
Two decades later, as we hurtle ever closer to potentially catastrophic new wars, there’s been virtually no accountability or sustained reporting in mainstream news media to remind us of their own decisive role in selling the Iraq war.
Not to be outdone, CNN news chief Eason Jordan would boast on air that he had met with Pentagon officials during the run-up to the invasion to get their approval for the on-camera war “experts” the network would rely on. “I think it’s important to have experts explain the war and to describe the military hardware, describe the tactics, talk about the strategy behind the conflict,” Jordan explained. “I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started and met with important people there and said . . . here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war, and we got a big thumbs up on all of them. That was important.”
As Norman Solomon observes in our film War Made Easy, which we based on his book of the same name, the bedrock democratic principle of an independent, adversarial press was simply tossed out the window. “Often journalists blame the government for the failure of the journalists themselves to do independent reporting,” Solomon says. “But nobody forced the major networks like CNN to do so much commentary from retired generals and admirals and all the rest of it . . . It wasn’t even something to hide, ultimately. It was something to say to the American people, ‘See, we’re team players. We may be the news media, but we’re on the same side and the same page as the Pentagon.’ . . . And that really runs directly counter to the idea of an independent press.”
It’s an act of forgetting we can ill afford, especially as many of the same media patterns from 20 years ago now repeat themselves on overdrive…
It’s an act of forgetting we can ill afford, especially as many of the same media patterns from 20 years ago now repeat themselves on overdrive–from the full-scale reboot and rehabilitation of leading Iraq war architects and cheerleaders to the news media’s continuing over-reliance on “experts” drawn from the revolving-door world of the Pentagon and the arms industry (often without disclosure).
“Memory is a strategic resource in any country, especially the memory of wars,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen has written. “By controlling the narrative of the wars we fought, we justify the wars we are going to fight in the present.”
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the murderous U.S. invasion of Iraq, it’s imperative to reclaim the memory of this war not only from the Bush administration officials who waged it, but also from the corporate media system that helped sell it and has tried to control the narrative ever since.
To mark the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion, the RootsAction Education Fund will be hosting a virtual screening of “War Made Easy” on March 20th at 6:45 PM Eastern, followed by a panel discussion featuring Solomon, Dennis Kucinich, Kathy Kelly, Marcy Winograd, India Walton, and David Swanson. Click here to sign up for the event, and click here to stream “War Made Easy” in advance for free.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The whole article is Shields moaning about the way Keating raked Australian war propagandists at the National Press Club of Australia on Wednesday. He cries about how Keating told “Red Alert” co-author Matthew Knott “you should hang your head in shame” and “do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism,” mocked the intelligence of Sky News reporter Olivia Caisley for seriously suggesting that China is a military threat to Australia, and called Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Hartcher a “psychopath” and “maniac”.
“For years, we have laughed along with Keating as he hurls his trademark barbs. But it’s not funny any more,” weeps Shields.
And you know what? Good. It’s good that these disgusting war propagandists are crying. They deserve a lot worse than a public tongue-lashing from a former prime minister.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
How sweet it is! Paul Keating eviscerates a string of journalists for their shoddy biased reporting on China & #AUKUS He takes them to task for not knowing facts, for exaggeration, &for one for the most egregious journalism in 50 years. Starts around 37:50https://t.co/7DSO8K9esXpic.twitter.com/cDr56SJlRu
To be clear, when I say the people Keating ripped into at the National Press Club are propagandists, that’s not just how I see them — that’s how they see themselves. They might not use that label, but they plainly see themselves as responsible for promoting Pentagon-friendly narratives, as evidenced by their behavior at that very press conference. If you watch them line up to question Keating and listen to what they are saying, over and over again you hear them trying to insert narratives like a propagandist rather than asking probing questions like a journalist.
You hear ABC’s Andrew Probyn work to insert the narrative that China is a threat to Australia by citing things like sanctions on select Australian products in retaliation for Canberra’s playing along with Washington’s attacks on Beijing over Covid, regurgitating the discredited claim of Chinese “debt diplomacy”, and babbling about China’s militarization as though the US wasn’t encircling China militarily and engaging in increasingly aggressive acts of brinkmanship.
You hear the aforementioned Olivia Casely work to insert the narrative that China is a military threat to Australia.
You hear Bloomberg’s Ben Westcott work to insert the narrative that Australia should work with the US to protect its trade from China, hilariously accidently re-enacting the famous Utopia sketch by ignoring the fact that China is Australia’s primary trading partner.
You hear The Australian’s Jess Malcolm work to insert the narrative that China building up its own military in its own country is somehow a “provocation” against Australia, which Keating immediately smacks down with appropriate disdain.
You hear the aforementioned Matthew Knott work to insert the narrative that Keating is a treasonous Xi Jinping puppet by sleazily insinuating that the former prime minister must say critical things about the “Chinese Communist Party” in order to prove his fealty.
Over and over again they line up to act like loyal defenders of the US empire, and over and over again Keating treats them like what they are: propagandists. Power-worshipping bootlickers for the most powerful empire that has ever existed.
Watching Keating tear strips off all those war pornographers was so satisfying because it showed Australians the appropriate emotional posture to have toward these depraved freaks. That’s the bare minimum level of contempt they should always be treated with. Australians who don’t want a war with China are still unclear about how to respond to this deluge of mass media war propaganda our country is being smashed with, and Keating showed exactly how to respond; he provided a solid model for us all.
If anything, Keating was too kind to those ghouls. One really can’t have enough disdain for those who peddle war propaganda professionally and pass it off as journalism to the unsuspecting public. They’re right up there with all the absolute worst human beings who have ever lived, and they should be treated as such.
Bevan Shields melodramatically refers to the public excoriation of his colleagues as “Donald Trump-like abuse of journalists doing their jobs,” but they are not journalists doing their jobs. They are propagandists. If you want to call yourself a journalist, you need to act like it. Be skeptical, question your sources and their funding, and get the story right. That’s the job. In this case the lives of nearly 26 million people are relying on you to get it right. It’s a huge responsibility and you are failing us. You deserve so much worse than to have mean things said to you by a retired politician.
These Pentagon puppets deserve more than just shame. I can’t believe they can so blithely push our country into the frontline of someone’s else’s war. How very generous of them to offer up our sons and daughters in the name of the almighty US of A.
It should enrage all Australians that a war of unimaginable horror is being shoved down our throats by the US empire, and it should enrage us that people who call themselves “journalists” are using the trust of the public to help manufacture consent for it. We need to start saying “NO” to this, and we need to whip up enough fire in our bellies to make sure that “NO” comes out with enough force to generate fear in these bastards.
Australians are not good at rage, but rage is what these actions should elicit, and our own actions need to start flowing from there. We can’t just let them inflict this horror upon our world with a signature Australian “Ah, whatever you reckon’s a fair thing mate.” The war propagandists cry about “abuse” when being put in their place by a 79 year-old ex-PM while inflicting the most abusive thing imaginable upon our civilization.
This cannot stand. We’ve got to get moving, people. These pricks will get us all killed if we don’t.
_______________
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.
Governments across the world are banning the popular social media app Tik Tok because they believe China is using it to spy on them. The United States last week got one step closer to giving President Biden the power to end the app in this country. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by […]
Comments from both Washington and Beijing have suddenly become much more pointed and aggressive in recent days, with talk about hot war now being discussed as not just a real possibility but in many cases as a probability. Let’s have a look at some of the most significant recent developments.
“Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development,” President Xi Jinping said in a speech last week.
China’s new Foreign Minister Qin Gang followed up on Xi’s comments the next day with a warning of “conflict and confrontation” should US aggressions and encirclement continue.
“If the United States does not hit the brake, but continues to speed down the wrong path, no amount of guardrails can prevent derailing, and there surely will be conflict and confrontation,” he said, adding, “Who will bear the catastrophic consequences? Such competition is a reckless gamble with the stakes being the fundamental interests of the two peoples and even the future of humanity.”
To my knowledge this is an unprecedented statement by Xi:
“Western countries—led by the U.S.—have implemented all-round containment, encirclement and suppression against us, bringing unprecedentedly severe challenges to our country’s development.”https://t.co/XoHyZdaANF
One of the most hilarious empire narratives we’re being asked to believe today is that the US is militarily encircling its number one rival China, on the other side of the planet, defensively. The US is very plainly the aggressor in this standoff, and China is very clearly reacting defensively to those aggressions.
These comments come not long after PRC Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Mao Ning issued a stern warning to the US to “stop walking on the edge, stop using the salami tactics, stop pushing the envelope, and stop sowing confusion and trying to mislead the world on Taiwan,” calling the Taiwan issue “the first red line that must not be crossed” in US-China relations. As we’ve discussed previously, these increasingly frequent “red line” warnings are very similar to the ones that were being issued with greater and greater urgency by Moscow before US brinkmanship provoked the invasion of Ukraine.
Committing to war with China over Taiwan
The official head of the US intelligence cartel made some comments before the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday which appear to have put the final nail in the coffin of the question of Washington’s “strategic ambiguity” on whether the US would go to war with China in defense of Taiwan.
Asked by Congressman Chris Stewart about President Biden’s increasingly explicit assertions that the US would go to war with China over Taiwan, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines asserted that, despite the White House’s repeated walk-backs of those claims, it is clear to China that this is in fact Washington’s actual policy on the Taiwan question.
“In this particular case, I think it is clear to the Chinese what our position is based on the president’s comments,” Haines said.
US officials are talking about war with China like it’s a foregone conclusion
There’s been a marked spike in rhetoric from US officials about war with China being something that’s inevitably going to happen, or even something that is already underway.
At a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Wednesday, Senator John Cornyn expressed concern that difficulties in replenishing weapons stocks from the proxy war in Ukraine indicate that the US may not yet be “ready” to fight a “shooting war in Asia.”
“I think the war in Ukraine has demonstrated the weakness of our industrial base when it comes to replenishing the weapons that we are supplying to the Ukrainians,” said Cornyn. “In World War Two we became the Arsenal of Democracy and saved Britain and Europe, but if we got involved in a shooting war in Asia, we would not be ready.”
“I know what war looks like — we’re at war,” Congressman Tony Gonzales said at a House Homeland Security hearing on Thursday.
“I mean, this is a war, maybe a Cold War. But this is a war with China,” Gonzales added, citing things like Chinese aircraft intercepting US aircraft on China’s border and China “invading Taiwan via their cyberspace” as evidence that the US is “at war” with the PRC.
Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), just back from Taiwan, declares today: "We're at war… this is a war with China"
It's amazing how this insane rhetoric barely even prompts a reaction. Who the hell voted for war against China? Do these people even understand what they're saying? pic.twitter.com/EB4zyc0c2R
The US war machine is making it more and more explicit that its position on Taiwan is very different from its position on Ukraine, in that it will directly commit American troops to fighting a hot war with China over Taiwan. This is especially concerning because US military encirclement and provocations with Taiwan are making that war more and more likely, in the same way western provocations made the war in Ukraine more likely.
“Sending more weapons to Taiwan isn’t ‘deterrence,’ it’s a provocation,” tweeted Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp, who’s been documenting US provocations in Taiwan more thoroughly than anyone else I know of. “It’s clear now that increasing US military support for Taiwan will make a Chinese attack more likely. Anyone who is telling you otherwise is wrong or is purposely deceiving you.”
Indeed, University College Cork professor Geoffrey Roberts has argued that Putin chose to wage a “preventative war” on Ukraine with the calculation that the way the west was turning it into a major military power meant it needed to be confronted early before it became a major threat. The exact same thing could easily be happening with Taiwan.
“China is the big one,” DeCamp also tweeted recently. “Both sides are talking as if war is inevitable. Not a proxy war, a direct war between two nuclear powers. It can’t happen. The US needs to change course and stop its military buildup in the Asia Pacific, or we’re doomed.”
Couldn’t have put it better myself. This must be opposed, and opposed forcefully. Now more than ever, humanity appears to be on track toward the unfolding of a chain of events that leads to the worst thing that could possibly happen.
Some sanity from the mainstream media
Wow! NYT editorial board:
"Americans’ interests are best served by minimizing confrontation [with China]. Glib invocations of the Cold War are misguided. Rather than try to trip the competition, America should focus on figuring out how to run faster"https://t.co/ykNlZmK3Cz
To close with some good news, the imperial media are apparently not fully aligned with the war-with-China agenda (at least not yet). All the insane hawkishness mentioned above appears to have scared some sense into some influential voices in the mainstream media, with surprisingly anti-war arguments emerging in the last few days.
In an article titled “Who Benefits From Confrontation With China?“, none other than the New York Times editorial board taps the brakes with a wildly US-biased but still-welcome argument that “America’s increasingly confrontational posture toward China is a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy that warrants greater scrutiny and debate.”
“Americans’ interests are best served by emphasizing competition with China while minimizing confrontation. Glib invocations of the Cold War are misguided,” NYT argues.
In a Washington Post article titled “Democrats and Republicans agree on China. That’s a problem.“, Max Boot (yes, that Max Boot!) argues that the bipartisan foreign policy consensus on escalations against Beijing are a sign that something dangerously ill-advised is in the works.
“The problem today isn’t that Americans are insufficiently concerned about the rise of China. The problem is that they are prey to hysteria and alarmism that could lead the United States into a needless nuclear war,” Boot writes.
Has Washington's hawkish consensus on China created a more secure world for Americans and others?
Or are we moving down a path that takes us toward decades of arms races, crises, perhaps even war?
CNN’s Fareed Zakaria echoes Boot’s criticism of the Washington foreign policy orthodoxy, saying that “Washington has embraced a wide-ranging consensus on China that has turned into a classic example of groupthink.”
A new Financial Times piece titled “China is right about US containment” acknowledges that Xi Jinping’s aforementioned comments about encirclement and suppression are “not technically wrong,” and says that betting on China’s submission in the new cold war “is not a strategy.”
It remains to be seen if these sentiments will be sustained in the mainstream media. Even if they are, they may just be the liberal media counterpart to the way some right wingers in the mainstream media like Tucker Carlson are permitted to object to US foreign policy toward Russia as long as they continue to support brinkmanship with China (all the outlets I just mentioned have been enthusiastic supporters of US proxy warfare in Ukraine, after all). This may be yet another instance of the way the empire gets the mainstream herd arguing over how imperial agendas of global domination should be enacted, rather than if they should.
Time will tell whether any sanity erupts from the muck of the empire regarding the possibility of igniting the most horrific war imaginable. As always with such things, I remain cautiously pessimistic.
______________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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.
What country in its right mind would allow a foreign entity to come into their country, set up a major propaganda operation, and then use it to so polarize that nation that its very government suffers a violent assault and its democracy finds itself at a crossroads?
Apparently, the United States. And we’re not the first, according to former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Writing for The Sydney Morning Herald (the Australian equivalent of The New York Times) Rudd called Rupert Murdoch and his rightwing news operations “the greatest cancer on the Australian democracy.”
“The uncomfortable truth is,” Rudd wrote, “since the coup of June 2010, Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?”
While Rudd calls out the Australian equivalents of Gym Jordan and Marjorie Taylor Greene, the focus of his article and the damage done by the “coup” within his own party in 2010 is Murdoch.
Noting that, “Murdoch owns two-thirds of the country’s print media,” Rudd added:
“Murdoch is not just a news organisation. Murdoch operates as a political party, acting in pursuit of clearly defined commercial interests, in addition to his far-right ideological world view.”
Brexit happened in the UK because of the newspapers and media Murdoch owns there, Rudd wrote, and:
“In the United States, Murdoch’s Fox News is the political echo chamber of the far right, which enabled the Tea Party and then the Trump party to stage a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.”
Murdoch’s positions aren’t at all ambiguous, Rudd noted. They’re simply pro-billionaire/pro-oligarch and thus, by extension, anti-democracy.
“In Australia, as in America,” he wrote, “Murdoch has campaigned for decades in support of tax cuts for the wealthy, killing action on climate change and destroying anything approximating multiculturalism. “Given Murdoch’s impact on the future of our democracy,” Rudd added, “it’s time to revisit it.”
Here in America, Fox “News” has had such a powerful influence on American politics that its creation, President Donald Trump, apparently even ordered government agencies to show it on their in-house TVs.
“FOX hosts’ election lies and disinformation splits the ranks, hurts unit cohesion, and weakens America’s national defense. They must be removed from all TVs on military installations NOW.”
Fox and Murdoch’s power come, Rudd says, from their ruthlessness.
“Murdoch is also a political bully and a thug,” former Australian Prime Minister Rudd writes, “who for many years has hired bullies as his editors. The message to Australian politicians is clear: either toe the line on what Murdoch wants or he kills you politically. “This has produced a cowering, fearful political culture across the country. I know dozens of politicians, business leaders, academics and journalists, both left and right, too frightened to take Murdoch on because they fear the repercussions for them personally. They have seen what happens to people who have challenged Murdoch’s interests as Murdoch then sets out to destroy them.”
When Fox and Tucker Carlson set out to rewrite the history of the treasonous January 6th coup attempt at our nation’s Capitol with a three-part special alleging it could have been an inside job by the FBI, two of their top conservative stars, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes, resigned in protest.
Even worse, recent revelations from the Dominion lawsuit show that Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham all intentionally lied to their viewers for over two years with the encouragement of Rupert Murdoch himself. While they were privately ridiculing Trump and acknowledging he was a “sore loser,” they said the exact opposite to their audience.
It tore America apart, set up the violence and deaths on January 6th and since, but made billions for Murdoch and his family. Astonishingly, even as Republican leadership in the United States Senate condemns him, Carlson is doubling down on those lies this very week.
Steve Schmidt, a man who’s definitely not a liberal (he was a White House advisor to George W. Bush and ran Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as well as John McCain’s 2008 campaign), has been blunt about the impact of Fox “News”:
“Rupert Murdoch’s lie machine is directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, the poisoning of our democracy and the stoking of a cold civil war. There has never been anything like it and it is beyond terrible for the country. Bar none, Rupert Murdoch is the worst and most dangerous immigrant to ever arrive on American soil. There are no words for the awfulness of his cancerous network.”
While Jen Psaki and Karine Jean-Pierre have been humorous in their dealing with Fox’s Peter Doocy’s attempts at gotcha questions in the White House press room, there’s nothing funny about inciting attacks on our country and then openly lying on the air about “antifa” to cover it up, as Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented that Fox did.
“Banishing from polite company” is a phrase that came from a different era, but it’s time to ask if Fox has grown to such destructive dimensions that our government’s press rooms should stop recognizing them as a legitimate “news” organization and our military should reconsider its impact on our troops.
On average, every cable connected household in America is paying two dollars a month to Fox “News” via their cable company fees. A growing movement, UnFox My Cable Box, is trying to change this.
To continue with Rudd’s metaphor, if our media and body politic are infected with a cancer — driven by an unending thirst for profits, regardless of the damage it does — it’s our responsibility as Americans to call it out and isolate it so it can’t further harm our democracy and, by extension, the other democracies of the world.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
I’ve been rantingallweek about the shocking war-with-China propaganda escalation in Australian mainstream media, and I feel like I could easily scream about it for another month without running out of vitriol for the disgusting freaks who are pushing this filth into the consciousness of my countrymen. One really really can’t say enough unkind things about people who are openly trying to pave the way toward an Atomic Age world war; in a remotely sane world such monsters would be driven from human civilization and die cold and alone in the wilderness with nothing but their bloodlust to keep them company.
One of the most obnoxious things said during this latest propaganda push appeared in the joint statement provided by the five “experts” (read: empire-funded China hawks) recruited by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age to share their obscenely hawkish opinions in an official-looking media presentation. This paragraph has been rattling around in my head since I first read it:
“Australia must prepare itself. Most important of all is a psychological shift. Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs but an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over. Australians should not feel afraid but be alert to the threats we face, the tough decisions we must make and know that they have agency. This mobilisation of mindset is the essential prerequisite to any successful confrontation of China.”
Do you see what they’re doing there? These professional China hawks are explicitly trying to frame peace as a strange “aberration”, and war as the status quo norm. They’re saying Australians require a “psychological shift” and a “mobilisation of mindset” from thinking peace is normal and healthy to thinking war is normal and healthy.
Returning to Australia is a shock. The elite salivates for a deeply racist war against China. Australia has no enemies but is led and influenced by little Americans and echoes of spooks who fill the papers with a deranged, almost satirical hysteria. Sad.https://t.co/s723vk8Zv8
Which is of course ass-backwards and shit-eating insane. Every normal, healthy person regards peace as the default position and violence as a rare and alarming aberration which must be avoided whenever possible.
We know this is true from our normal human experience of our own personal lives. None of us spend the majority of our time getting into fist fights, for example; anyone who spends most of their waking life physically assaulting people has probably been locked up a long time ago. If you have ever been in a fist fight you will recall that it was experienced as a rare and alarming occurrence, and everything in your body was screaming at you that this was a freakish and unnatural thing which must end as quickly as possible the entire time. In healthy people violence is experienced as abnormal, and its absence is experienced as normal.
This normal, baseline position is what imperial narrative managers spend their time trying to “psychologically shift” everyone away from, propagandizing us instead into accepting continuous conflict and danger as the norm. Such a shift is beneficial to the empire, to war profiteers, and to professional war propagandists, and is entirely destructive to everyone else. It causes us to accept material conditions which directly harm our own interests, and it makes us crazy and neurotic as a civilization.
You see it all the time though, like whenever there’s a push to withdraw imperial troops from some part of the Middle East they’ve been in for years, or the slightest discussion of maybe not raising the military budget this year, or skepticism that pouring weapons into a violence-ravaged part of the world is the wisest and most helpful thing to do.
Any time we see the slightest beginnings of the tiniest movement toward stepping away from the path of nonstop warmongering and militarism, pundits and politicians begin bleating words like “isolationism” and “appeasement” in an attempt to make calls for de-escalation, demilitarization, diplomacy and detente look freakish and abnormal in contrast to the sane, responsible status quo of hurtling toward nuclear armageddon at full tilt.
Their job is to abnormalize peace and normalize war, which means our job as healthy human beings is to do the exact opposite. We must help everyone understand the horrors of war and the unfathomable nightmares that can be unleashed by reckless brinkmanship, and help people to understand that peace is what’s healthy and to imagine a future where it is the norm.
The bad news is that we are pushing against a narrative-manufacturing apparatus that is backed by the might of a globe-spanning empire. The good news is that our vision is the one that’s based on truth, and deep down everyone can sense it. All we need to do to get people viewing peace as normal and war as abnormal is to remind people of what they already know inside.
_________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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.
Asia Pacific Media Network’s chair Dr Heather Devere, deputy chair Dr David Robie and Pacific Journalism Review editor Dr Philip Cass last month made a submission on Papua New Guinea’s draft national media development policy in response to PNG journalists’ requests for comment. Here is part of their February 19 submission before the stakeholders consultation earlier this month.
ANALYSIS:By Heather Devere, David Robie and Philip Cass
An urgent rethink is needed on several aspects of the Draft National Media Development Policy. In summary, we agree with the statement made by the Community Coalition Against Corruption (CCAC) on 16 February 2023 criticising the extraordinary “haste” of the Ministry’s timeframe for public consultation over such a critical and vitally important national policy.
However, while the ministry granted an extra week from 20 February 2023 for public submissions this was still manifestly inadequate and rather contemptuous of the public interest.
In our view, the ministry is misguided in seeking to legislate for a codified PNG Media Council which flies in the face of global norms for self-regulatory media councils and this development would have the potential to dangerously undermine media freedom in Papua New Guinea.
The draft policy appears to have confused the purpose of a “media council” representing the “public interest” with the objectives of a government department working in the “national interest”.
If the ministry pushes ahead with this policy without changes it risks Papua New Guinea sliding even further down the RSF World Press Freedom Index. Already it is a lowly 62nd out of 180 countries after falling 15 places in 2021.
Some key points:
• Article 42 of the Papua New Guinea Constitution states that “Every person has the right to freedom of expression and the right to receive and impart ideas and information without interference, including the freedom to seek, receive and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form.” (Our emphasis)
• Article 43 of the Constitution further states that “Every person has the right to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion, including the freedom to manifest and propagate their religion or belief in worship, teaching, practice and observance.”
• These provisions in the Constitution reflect the importance of media freedom in Papua New Guinea and the commitment to a free, diverse, and independent media environment. There are existing laws in PNG that support these principles.
• In September 2005, Pacific Journalism Review published a complete edition devoted to “media ethics and accountability” which is available online here. In the Introduction, the late Professor Claude-Jean Bertrand, a global expert in M*A*S (Media Accountability Systems) and media councils and free press in democracies, wrote: “Accountability implies being accountable, accountable to whom? To the public, obviously. [i.e. Not to governments]. While regulation involves only political leaders and while self-regulation involves only the media industry, media accountability involves press, profession and public.” The PJR edition cited published templates and guidelines for public accountability systems.
• On World Press Freedom Day 2019, António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General, declared: “No democracy is complete without access to transparent and reliable information. It is the cornerstone for building fair and impartial institutions, holding leaders accountable and speaking truth to power.”
• On 12 November 2019, the Melanesia Media Freedom Forum (MMFF) was established and it declared: “A better understanding is needed of the role of journalism in Melanesian democracies. Awareness of the accountability role played by journalists and the need for them to be able to exercise their professional skills without fear is critical to the functioning of our democracies.”
• The Forum also noted: “The range of threats to media freedom is increasing. These include restrictive legislation, intimidation, political threats, legal threats and prosecutions, assaults and police and military brutality, illegal detention, online abuse, racism between ethnic groups and the ever-present threats facing particularly younger and female reporters who may face violence both on the job and within their own homes.” The full declaration is here.
• Media academics who were also present at this inaugural Forum made a declaration of their own in support of the journalists, saying that they “expressed strong concerns about issues of human rights, violence, and freedom of expression. They also expressed concerns about the effect of stifling legislation that had the power to impose heavy fines and prison sentences on journalists.” (Our emphasis). The full statement is here.
APMN proposals regarding PNG’s Draft Media Policy:
• That the Ministry immediately discard the proposed policy of legislating the PNG media Council and regulating journalists and media which would seriously undermine media freedom in Papua New Guinea;
• That the Ministry extend the public consultation timeframe with a realistic deadline to engage Papua New Guinean public interest and stakeholders in a meaningful dialogue;
• That the Ministry ensures a process of serious consultation with stakeholders such as the existing PNG Media Council, which do not appear to have had much opportunity to respond, journalists, media organisations and many other NGOs that need to be heard; and
• That the Ministry consult a wider range of media research and publications and take guidance from media freedom organisations, journalism schools at universities, and an existing body of knowledge about media councils and systems.
• Essentially journalism is not a crime, but a fundamental pillar of democracy as espoused through the notion of a Fourth Estate and media must be free to speak truth to power in the public interest not the politicians’ interest.
Dr Heather Devere, formerly Director of Practice for the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies; Dr David Robie, founding Professor of Pacific Journalism and director of the Pacific Media Centre, convenor of Pacific Media Watch and a former Head of Journalism at the University of Papua New Guinea; and Dr Philip Cass, a PNG-born researcher and journalist who was chief subeditor of the Times of Papua New Guinea and worked on Wantok, and who is currently editor of Pacific Journalism Review.
A proposed bill in the state of Florida would require any blogger who writes about the Florida government to register with the state, which is a clear violation of the First Amendment. 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: A proposed bill […]
Australian media are awash with reporting on the war-with-China propaganda series by The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age that I’ve been writing about for the last few days. Which is really quite extraordinary, because it’s not an actual news story.
It really isn’t. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age just asked five warmongering China hawks what they think about war with China, wrote down their very predictable answers saying Australia must prepare for war with China within three years, and then passed it off as journalism. Obviously if you ask a bunch of China hawks if they think Australia should prepare for war with China they’re going to tell you yes; that’s not news, that’s just you reporting that five random warmongers think warmongery thoughts.
Yet SMH and The Age stretched this ridiculous non-story into a multi-part series titled “Red Alert” — all without ever noting the massive conflict of interest posed by the extensive ties its “panel” of “experts” have to US-aligned governments and the military industrial complex — and now it’s being covered like a real news story by the rest of Australian media. TV newssegments have filled the airwavesreporting on the opinions of the most wildly biased people you could possibly find on this subject, the most appalling of which appeared on the Australian government’s ABC.
Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Hartcher, who helped put together the “Red Alert” series, was given a fawning, slobbering rim job of an interview from the ABC’s Beverley O’Connor where everything he said was received as gospel truth and not a single critical question was asked. When former prime minister Paul Keating’s scathing criticism of Hartcher’s war propaganda was raised, Hartcher was permitted to call Keating a CCP crony, completely unchallenged.
Hartcher claimed that Keating’s criticisms were “talking points that I think the Beijing government would be pretty satisfied with,” adding that “in recent years Keating has emerged as the leading defender of, and apologist for, the Chinese Communist Party in Australia.”
This type of rhetoric is familiar to anyone who’s been following US politics the last few years, where anyone who criticizes American foreign policy has been branded by empire loyalists as an apologist for the Kremlin. The fact that we are now seeing this mind virus take hold in mainstream Australian discourse with regard to China is both disgusting and disturbing.
The latest installment of the “Red Alert” series is titled “Australia has an urgent security problem. These confronting ideas can help solve it,” and it is the most incendiary of the bunch. The “experts” suggest rolling out mandatory national service to prepare Australians for war with China, as well as “basing US long-range missiles armed with nuclear weapons on Australian territory.”
As has been the case for the last two “Red Alert” installments, this one again speaks of the need to psychologically shift Australians into support for war preparations, saying that “Australia’s critical threshold change must be psychological,” and that it must take place “across society.” They don’t say it directly, but what they are advocating here is copious amounts of domestic war propaganda.
After receiving a deluge of angry social media comments decrying the article, The Sydney Morning Herald took the extraordinary step of banning replies. On Facebook, the “Australia has an urgent security problem” article now has a notification which reads, “The Sydney Morning Herald limits who can reply to this post.”
None of the other articles on The Sydney Morning Herald’s Facebook page have this notice:
On Twitter, The Sydney Morning Herald shut off comments on the article and hid the replies people had made to it. To find the hidden replies you have to know to click on a small button on the bottom-right corner of the tweet, but if you do you can read through the many negative comments the article was getting before the SMH Twitter account shut them down.
Here are some quotes from a few of them:
“What is the SMH doing? Stop with this alarmist rubbish. Thought you guys were better than that.”
“Oh for the love of God. Just stop already. We know exactly what the SMH is doing, who’s behind it & what a great distraction it is.”
“Australia’s biggest security problem is that our government and media have been captured by the US military industrial complex.”
“China has absolutely no interest in Australia. We are so minor and unimportant that trading with us is enough. If you losers could stop creaming yourselves at the idea of war you’d understand that, you weird, weird losers.”
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>
Every reply hidden. Every single one.
Australia, our press problem is getting worse – much, much worse.
— Sean ~ antebellum opinion haver (@pharnzwurth) March 8, 2023
In response to this latest wave of war propaganda, Declassified Australia published an article titled “Majority Oppose U.S. War On China,” which cites a 2022 poll by the Lowy Institute think tank saying that a 51 percent majority of those surveyed believe Australia should remain neutral in the event of a US military conflict with China over Taiwan.
It’s a point that’s worth making, but Declassified also notes that the 51 percent majority is down from 57 percent the last time the Lowy Institute took that poll in 2020. Why did six percent of the population change their minds about war with China in just two years? Well, it might have something to do with the fact that Australia has been slammed with propaganda about war with China during that time.
Propaganda works. If it didn’t, they wouldn’t pour so much energy into doing it. The empire churns out propaganda for the same reason advertising is on track to become a trillion-dollar industry in the next couple of years: because it is possible to manipulate people’s minds at mass scale using media.
They generate propaganda because it’s an effective way to manufacture consent for the agendas of the powerful, and they manufacture consent because they have to. If our rulers just started acting directly against the will of the people without first psychologically pulling the wool over our eyes using propaganda, they’d have a revolution on their hands in short order. Doing something huge like waging a war with China — with all the death, suffering, impoverishment, and risk of nuclear annihilation that goes with it — without the consent of the people would quickly lose public trust in all the ruling institutions which keep us marching to the beat of the imperial drum.
They don’t work so hard to manufacture our consent because it’s fun for them, they work so hard to manufacture our consent because they require our consent. So it’s important that we don’t give it to them. It’s important that we forcefully oppose the global conflict the US-centralized empire is pushing us all toward, and that we vocally decry the propaganda that’s being used to grease the wheels of that depraved agenda.
Ultimately the powerful have no answer to the problem that there are a whole lot more of us than there are of them and that there’s really nothing they can do if we decide not to be ruled by them anymore. All they have is little work-arounds for that problem that they have to continually use day in and day out, in the same way we’ve designed work-arounds for the problem of gravity so that we can temporarily fly through the air.
But gravity always wins, and sooner or later the giant that these monsters have been keeping in a propaganda-induced coma is going to start stirring. We’re going to have to wake up sooner or later, and because of the stakes involved it is very important that we do everything we can to try and make sure that it is sooner.
_________________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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.
The Fiji Attorney-General’s office has terminated the instructions of lawyers Devanesh Sharma and Gul Fatima in the contempt of court case involving Suva lawyer Richard Naidu.
Mary Motafaga, a lawyer in the Attorney-General’s office, confirmed to Justice Daniel Goundar when the matter was called in the High Court yesterday, that the law firm of R Patel & Co was no longer retained.
Justice Goundar told Motafaga and Naidu’s counsel, Jon Apted, that he had called the matter before him to ensure that the parties were aware of the resignation of the previous judge in the case, Justice Jude Nanayakkara.
Naidu was alleged to have scandalised the court in a Facebook post sharing an excerpt of a judgment which showed the word “injunction” misspelled as “injection” and suggesting that “maybe our judges need to be protected from all this vaccination campaigning”.
On November 22, 2023, Justice Nanayakkara found Naidu guilty of contempt of court and convicted him of scandalising the court.
Justice Goundar said that Acting Chief Justice Salesi Temo had now allocated the case to him.
“I understand that we are now at the sentencing stage of the proceedings,” he said.
Justice Goundar said he wished the parties to note that he had no personal interest in the case or any relationship with any of the parties to it.
“We are at the sentencing stage and I would like to hear the parties on where we go from now regarding this matter.”
Motofaga confirmed to the court that the A-G’s office had taken over the matter but had not yet received the files on the case, so was requesting a three-week adjournment.
Justice Goundar adjourned the case to April 3, 2023, for mention “to check the position of the Office of the A-G in relation to this matter”.
Repeka Nasikois a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
The mass media in Australia have been churning out brazen propaganda pieces to manufacture consent for war with China, and what’s interesting is that they’re basically admitting to doing this deliberately.
Australians are uniquely susceptible to propaganda because we have the most concentrated media ownership in the western world, dominated by a powerful duopoly of Nine Entertainment and the Murdoch-owned News Corp. Both of those media megacorporations have recently put out appalling propaganda pieces about the need for Australians to rapidly prepare to go to war with China in defense of Taiwan, and in both of those instances have straightforwardly told their audiences that there’s an urgent need to effect a psychological change in the way all Australians think about this war.
Nine Entertainment’s Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have been busy flooding the media with testimony from a panel of war machine-funded “experts” who say Australia must hasten to get ready to join the United States in a hot war with China in the next three years. Yesterday’s dual front-page propaganda assault featured imagery of Chinese war planes flying straight at the reader, awash in red and emblazoned with the words “RED ALERT” to help everyone understand how evil and communist China is.
“Today’s Sydney Morning Herald and Age front-page stories on Australia’s supposed war risk with China represents the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over 50 years of active public life,” former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating opined in response to the publications.
“Apart from the outrageous illustrations of jet aircraft being shown leaving a profiled red-coloured map of China, the extent of the bias and news abuse is, I believe, unparalleled in modern Australian journalism,” he added.
In the first installment of their “Red Alert” propaganda series, SMH and The Age share that their empire-funded panelists believe there’s a need to bring about a “psychological shift” in the public’s attitude toward war with China, with one panelist asserting that “the nation’s leaders should trust the public enough to include them in what can be a confronting discussion” about the need to prepare for that war.
In the second “Red Alert” installment, this same message is repeated, saying that “Australia’s vulnerabilities are not only physical, but psychological,” and again repeating the need to get everyone talking and thinking about the possibility of war with China.
“It is a real national taboo to think about the likelihood of a conflict in anything other than the most remotely theoretical perspective,” says Peter Jennings of the war machine-funded propaganda firm Australian Strategic Policy Institute, countering that “we will sleepwalk into disaster unless we openly discuss unpalatable scenarios.”
Saying that the real threat is “complacency rather than alarmism,” think tanker Lavina Lee urges Australia to confront “the possibility that we might go to war and what would happen either way. We should talk about what the world would look like if we win and what it would look like if we lose.”
Over and over again they are telling us that something must be done to change the way Australians think and talk about a war with China, in articles designed to change the way Australians think and talk about war with China. They are doing the exact thing they say must be done, while explaining why it needs to be done. They are brainwashing us with propaganda while explaining why it is necessary to brainwash us with propaganda.
Murdoch Propaganda Pushes Australia To Double Its Military Budget For War With China
"In its promotional clip for the special, Sky News Australia tinged all footage pertaining to China in red to show how dangerous and communist they are."https://t.co/eNI2Cv6Teq
Toward the end of the special, Sky News’ empire-backed “experts” tell their audience that Australia needs to double its military spending, and that those in power need to explain to them why this is so important.
“I think it is important that we are having a conversation with the Australian people which makes it clear that we live in a world which is more fragile than we have for a very long period of time,” Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles tells Sky News in the special. “And what that is going to require is a defense posture and a defense force which is in truth gonna cost more than it has in the past. We’re gonna need to increase our defense spending.”
“The Australian government needs to talk to the Australian people about the kinds of threats it faces,” says Mick Ryan, a war machine-funded think tanker who features in both the Sky News special and the Nine Entertainment series.
“It needs a more compelling narrative to convince the Australian people that they need to spend more on defense,” Ryan adds.
A “more compelling narrative”. There it is, in black and white.
Again, they’re saying there’s a desperate need to explain to Australians why they need to make sacrifices to prepare for war with China, while explaining to Australians that they need to make sacrifices to prepare for war with China. They are openly telling us that we need to be propagandized for our own good, while filling our heads with propaganda.
They’re not just filling our minds with war propaganda, they are openly telling us that war propaganda is good for us.
The aforementioned second installment of Nine Entertainment’s “Red Alert” propaganda series is titled “The first 72 hours: How an attack on Taiwan could rapidly reach Australia,” and this one features the image of a lone Australian soldier bravely standing against a sky that has been consumed by the red Chinese flag.
This latest propaganda piece says that in the event of a hot war with China, our nation may be struck with intercontinental ballistic missiles, we may find ourselves cut off from the world while the fuel supplies we rely on dry up in a matter of weeks, and we may find our infrastructure rendered useless by massive Chinese cyberattacks. The empire-funded “experts” acknowledge that this will not be because China is just randomly hostile to Australia, but because we are a US military and intelligence asset who will support the US empire in its war:
But why would China use its limited resources to attack Australia instead of focusing solely on seizing Taiwan? Because of the strategically crucial role Australia is expected to play for the United States in the conflict.
“Our geography means we are a southern base for the Americans for what comes next,” Ryan says. “That’s how they’re seeing us. They want our geography. They want us to build bases for several hundred thousand Americans in due course like in World War II.”
Interestingly, the article contains a rare acknowledgement in the mainstream press that the presence of the American surveillance base Pine Gap makes Australia a legitimate target for ICBMs:
“Distance is no longer equivalent to safety from our strategic perspective,” [Peter Jennings] says. In the first three days of a war, he says Beijing would be tempted to target Australian military bases with a long-range intercontinental ballistic missile attack to minimise our usefulness in the conflict.
“If China seriously wants to go after Taiwan in a military sense, the only way they can really contemplate quick success is to pre-emptively attack those assets that might be a threat to them. That means Pine Gap goes,” he says, referring to the top secret US-Australian base in the Northern Territory that the US uses to detect nuclear missile launches.
(Fun fact: the US and the UK staged a coup in Australia in the seventies because the prime minister was threatening to close down Pine Gap.)
At no time is it ever suggested that the fact that going to war with China could cost Australia its shipping lanes and infrastructure and even get us nuked means we should probably reconsider this grand plan of going to war with China. At no time is it ever suggested that riding Washington’s bloodsoaked coattails into World War Three against our primary trading partner might not be a good idea. At no time is it ever suggested that de-escalation, diplomacy and detente might be a better approach than rapidly increasing militarism and brinkmanship.
And at no time is it ever suggested that we should reconsider our role as a US military/intelligence asset, despite the open admission that this is exactly what is endangering us. We’re not being told to prepare for war with China because China is going to attack us, we’re being told to prepare for war with China because our masters in DC are planning to drag us into one. We’re not being told to prepare for war to defend ourselves, we’re being told to prepare for war because our rulers plan to attack China.
We see this in the way Australia is assembling its war machinery, buying up air-to-ground missiles that cannot possibly be used defensively because their sole purpose is for taking out an enemy nation’s air defenses. We see it in the way Australia is buying up sea mines, which as journalist Peter Cronau has noted is less suitable for protecting our 34,000 km of coastline than for blockading the shipping lanes of an enemy nation you wish to lay siege to. We see it in the fact that China’s military budget remains steady at around one and-a-half percent of its GDP, while the US spends 3.4 percent and Australia is being persuaded to double our share from two to four percent.
We’re not being prepared for a war to defend ourselves, we’re being prepared for a war of aggression to secure US unipolar hegemony — one that has been in the works for many years. We must resist this, and we must resist the tsunami of mass media propaganda that is designed to manufacture our consent for it.
_____________
My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, following me on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud or YouTube, throwing some money into my tip jar on Patreon or Paypal, or buying an issue of my monthly zine. 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.
The story is not about Irwin Cotler lying. It’s about the media embracing a biographical detail because they support the US empire and Zionism.
Seven years ago, the South African ambassador to Venezuela Pandit Thaninga Shope-Linney stated plainly that “Irwin Cotler was not Nelson Mandela’s lawyer.” Three years later Max Blumenthal pointed out that “in Nelson Mandela’s memoir, The Long March to Freedom, there is no mention of Irwin Cotler.” Recently Davide Mastracci demolished the claim that the establishment’s human rights darling was a lawyer for the long imprisoned African National Congress (ANC) leader.
On its surface Mastracci’s deep dive into a decades-old biographical anecdote of an 82-year-old former justice minister may appear almost petty. But it actually offers an important window into Canadian media.
According to Mastracci’s search of the Canadian Newsstream database, there were more than 320 results mentioning that Cotler was Mandela’s lawyer. As time has passed, the mentions have grown with 164 stories noting the biographical detail in the 2010s. “Cotler has gotten far more press coverage crediting him with representing Mandela than he ever did while he was supposedly doing the work,” notes Mastracci.
But there’s little evidence for the Mandela lawyer claim outside Cotler’s own somewhat vague statements. In effect, the media is regurgitating a biographical detail that enhances the credibility of someone who challenges the human rights violations of enemy states.
Not only was Cotler not Mandela’s lawyer, thousands of Canadians probably contributed more than him to the struggle against South African apartheid, which played out over three decades of Cotler’s adulthood. I asked Joanne Naiman, author of the 1984 Relations between Canada and South Africa and a leading anti-apartheid campaigner in Toronto about Cotler. Neither her nor her partner remembers interacting with Cotler. “Neil and I discussed this, and we certainly have no memory of Cotler being his lawyer, or, indeed, in any way involved in the anti-apartheid movement,” she emailed. Naiman, who was part of group aligned with the ‘terrorist’ ANC in the 1970s, reached out to Lynda Lemberg, another prominent activist in that struggle. She immediately labeled Cotler’s claim “total bullshit”.
Even according to Cotler’s own telling he was late to the South Africa struggle. In June 1964, NDP leader Tommy Douglas told the House of Commons: “Nelson Mandela and seven of his associates have been found guilty of contravening the apartheid laws … [I] ask the Prime Minister if he will make vigorous representation to the government of South Africa urging that they exercise clemency in this case”? (Lester Pearson rejected the request) Yet, when discussing his involvement Cotler cites events that took place in the early and mid 1980s.
Still, Cotler uses his purported role in the South Africa struggle to defend apartheid today. When members of the Quebec Movement for Peace interrupted his 2019 speech on “Canada as a Human Rights leader” Cotler responded by saying that as someone having “fought against a real apartheid regime, South Africa, it is demeaning to make a comparison [with Israel].”
The Mandela anecdote enables Cotler’s vicious anti-Palestinianism. It also enhances the credibility of an individual who aggressively criticizes “enemy” states while largely ignoring rights violations committed by Canada and the US. Cotler’s activism feeds a propaganda system in which the media considers victims ‘worthy’ and ‘unworthy’ depending on the prerogatives of US and Canadian foreign policy. Because he concentrates on the victims of enemy states while largely ignoring those victimized by friendly governments the dominant media regurgitate sympathetic biographical details. Sometimes they even embellish the former minister’s embellishment as John Ivison did when he claimed Cotler “was instrumental” in Mandela’s release.
The media’s reaction to “Irwin Cotler and the Mandela Effect” has been telling. More than a month after Mastracci published his investigation, I couldn’t find any mention of it by other media.
On Twitter Ivison, who recently published “A tireless pursuer of justice, ex-minister Cotler takes on Putin” on the front of the National Post, complained, “You’re targeting Irwin Cotler in an ‘expose’? Give me a break. If there was an Olympics for good human beings, Irwin would pip the Pope for gold.” Apparently, Ivison doesn’t believe journalists should investigate the claims of powerful figures and instead stick to fawning puff pieces.
At the more liberal end of the dominant media, ‘misinformation’ expert Justin Ling tweeted that Mastracci failed to mention archival articles, which were either in fact mentioned or irrelevant. For his part, the head of media watchdog group CANADALAND, Jesse Brown, called the investigation “pretty thin”. But the 3,500 word story, which includes an interview with Cotler, is anything but “thin”. Brown’s reaction reflects his refusal to seriously address the anti-Palestinian bias in Canadian media or its most flagrant deference to the US Empire. Instead of simply dismissing his work as “thin”, Brown should build on Mastracci’s research by interviewing the many grassroots activists who led the South Africa campaign in Canada to ask if they remember working with Cotler.
Irrespective of his Mandela lawyer tale, it’s long been clear that Cotler is a “fraud”, as I told him during the opening screening of First to Stand: The Cases and Causes of Irwin Cotler in December. Cotler has supported NATO’s destruction of Libya, bloodstained dictator Paul Kagame, and the ouster of Venezuela’s government. A staunch Jewish supremacist, Cotler justifies Israeli colonialism and violence.
Cotler’s a darling of the political and media establishment. At the end of last year NDP foreign affairs critic Heather McPherson met with Cotler twice over a two-week period tweeting, “this afternoon, Professor Irwin Cotler and I spoke about how we can work together to protect human rights in Canada and around the world. I am grateful to him for sharing his wisdom with me.” Previous NDP foreign critics Hélène Laverdière and Guy Caron, as well as Green Party leader Elizabeth May, participated in press conferences organized by Cotler and a number of them joined the Cotler-led Raoul Wallenberg All-Party Parliamentary Caucus for Human Rights. After we interrupted Cotler for about 10 minutes at Concordia University in 2019 Conservative MP David Sweet asked the House of Commons to condemn the disruption and celebrate Cotler (pro-Israel media claimed it was unanimous).
It will be interesting to follow coverage of Cotler’s biographical anecdote in the coming months. With significant recent media interest in politicians and public figures making up biographical details, will an intrepid reporter build on Mastracci’s research? Or will journalists continue to refer to Cotler as Mandela’s lawyer?
My bet is the latter. The ‘Cotler Mandela’s lawyer’ claim is likely to continue appearing since it serves a media sphere steeped in imperialism and Zionism.
The Supreme Court has the power to break the internet as they consider a challenge to rules that protect internet service providers from liability. But the case could kill non-traditional media outlets, like Tik Tok and YouTube, depending on the outcome. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more. Transcript: *This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, […]
Court rules that her suit was wrongly thrown out and domestic courts should have shown greater rigour
The European Court of Human Rights has condemned Turkey for failing to protect the private life of a prominent Turkish actor who had been secretly filmed kissing another celebrity at her home in footage broadcast on television.
Birsen Berrak Tüzünataç, a film and soap opera star, won the marathon case at the ECHR, which ruled that Turkey had violated the European convention on human rights by dismissing her legal complaints.
Senior Papua New Guinean television journalist and columnist Scott Waide has challenged the government on what it actually wants to “regulate” in the draft national media development policy.
During a policy consultation workshop with media stakeholders in Port Moresby last Thursday, he said “in the media ecosystem, there are many professions”.
“There are radio broadcasters, directors, editors, producers, camera operators, photographers, engineers, who have to be licensed, ICT professionals, public relation professionals, bloggers, podcasters, video content producers, social media influencers and a whole heap of them.
“And there’s the problematic niche of news media and journalism. That’s the part politicians and legislators don’t really like.”
He said as a journalist, he was expected to follow rules which were enforced by the editor and the organisation.
“I am not supposed to lie, defame, slander, be disrespectful, harm, show nudity on the platform that I operate on. Those are the rules,” he said.
“And I disagree with the presenter from National Information and Communications Technology Authority (NICTA) who says self-regulation does not work. This is my self-regulation right here.
“I am supposed to be honest, have integrity, accuracy, provide contextual truth, transparency, have respect and fairness, and be independent.
Independent journalist Scott Waide and a former EMTV deputy news editor … “There’s the problematic niche of news media and journalism. That’s the part politicians and legislators don’t really like.” Image: Belinda Kora/ABC
“All these are already self-regulation in the industry.”
Ideas ‘will form basis of draft policy’
The media stakeholders have been told that their comments, sentiments and ideas shared during the workshop on the draft policy would form the basis of the next draft version.
Minister for Information and Communications Technology Timothy Masiu told the workshop that consultation was “ongoing”.
He denied that the proposed policy was an attempt by the government to regulate, restrict, censor or control the exercising of the freedom of expression or speech enshrined in the Constitution.
“Your comments, sentiments and ideas have been captured and will form the basis of the next version [of the draft policy],” he said.
PNG’s Information and Communication Technology Minister Timothy Masiu . . . “For those who are saying it’s a rushed thing, we had to start from somewhere.” Image: PNG govt
“For those who are saying it’s a rushed thing, we had to start from somewhere.”
He added that the proposed policy was to outline “objectives and strategies for the use of media as a tool for development, such as the promotion of democracy, good governance, human rights, and social and economic development”.
Call for ‘meaningful’ consultation
Transparency International chairman Peter Aitsi called for proper, genuine and meaningful consultation, saying that it should not be a “three-week process”.
The first version of the draft policy was released on February 5 with 12 days allowed for review, the second was released with six days for review, and the most recent one was on Wednesday — a day before the workshop.
Department of Information and Communications Technology Deputy Secretary (Policy) Flierl Shongol said his team had noted all the comments.
“We’ve got some comments in written form. We’ve also taken notes of comments presented in this workshop. So, we will respond to those comments,” he said.
“You can also respond to tell us if our response actually reflects your views. [It] will form the basis of the next policy that will come out.”
Republished from The National with permission.
Four of PNG’s media industry stalwarts at the media policy consultation . . . Harlyne Joku (from left), Priscilla Raepom, Tahura Gabi and Sincha Dimara. Image: Belinda Kora/ABC
Old-fashioned AM radio was an information lifeline for many in Aotearoa New Zealand during last month’s Cyclone Gabrielle when other sources wilted without power.
Now a little-known arrangement that puts proceedings of Parliament on the air has been cited as a threat to its future. But is a switch-off really likely? And what’s being done to avoid it?
“Government websites are a waste of time. All they’ve got is a transistor radio — and they need to actually provide a means for these people who need the information to damn well get it,” Today FM’s afternoon host Mark Richardson told listeners angrily on the day the cyclone struck.
He was venting in response to listeners without power complaining online information was inaccessible, and pleading for the radio station to relay emergency updates over the air.
Mobile phone and data services were knocked out in many areas where electricity supplies to towers were cut — or faded away after back-up batteries drained after 4-8 hours. In some places FM radio transmission was knocked out but nationwide AM transmission was still available.
“This will sharpen the minds of people on just how important . . . legacy platforms like AM transmission are in Civil Defence emergencies,” RNZ news chief Richard Sutherland told Mediawatch soon after.
“We are going to need to think very carefully about how we provide the belt and braces in terms of broadcasting infrastructure for this country as a result of this,” he said.
Future of AM questioned
But while Gabrielle was still blowing — the future of AM was called into question.
On February 15, Clerk of the House David Wilson told a Select Committee he might have to cut a $1.3 million annual contract to broadcast Parliament on AM radio after 87 years on air.
The next day The New Zealand Herald’s Thomas Coughlan reported “radio silence could come as soon as the next financial year on July 1 unless additional funding is found in the next Budget in May”.
In last Sunday’s edition of RNZ’s programme The House (also paid for by the Office of the Clerk), Wilson explained his spending cannot exceed his annual appropriation.
He said costs have gone up and the AM radio contract might have to go to make ends meet.
RNZ reporter Phil Pennington discovered for himself how handy AM transmission was when he was dispatched from Wellington to Hawke’s Bay when Cyclone Gabrielle struck.
Several times on the road he had to switch to AM when FM transmission dropped out.
Sustainability issue
“It puts a huge question mark on its sustainability because the money that the Clerk pays for us to broadcast Parliament underpins the entire network,” RNZ chief executive Paul Thompson told Pennington this week.
“It is an irony that at a time when New Zealand has had one of its biggest lessons about the importance of AM, it also has this challenge around its viability,” Thompson said.
It was also a time when the funding of RNZ is under review after the collapse of the government plan for a new public media entity with an annual budget of $109 million. RNZ’s current annual budget is $48m.
“It puts a lot of pressure on us as an organisation. We won’t be able to pick up the ($1.3m) cost. The parliamentary contract is a significant contributor to RNZ being able to maintain the AM network nationally,” Thompson said.
“If that money is not available, closing the network is not going to be feasible. This is such an important asset for New Zealand — a truly critical information lifeline. We will have to find a way of keeping it going,” he said.
Some RNZ Morning Report listeners were alarmed by question marks over AM’s future.
“I live in Central Hawke’s Bay. AM is the only strong signal. Do not stop broadcasting on that frequency. We love you, stay with us,” Cam said.
Questions over AM network’s funding despite its essential status in disasters https://t.co/Ie9KUBL8Sd
FM off air in Gisborne
“RNZ FM was off air in Gisborne for two days during Gabrielle. But RNZ on AM kept going. It absolutely must be kept,” Gisborne’s Glen said.
There are in fact two AM networks run by RNZ.
One broadcasts RNZ National from transmission sites all over the country.
The other carries Parliament and is broadcast from fewer transmission sites and on a range of frequencies in different parts of the country. It also airs programmes for customers including religious network Southern Star.
Iwi broadcasters and some commercial broadcasters also use RNZ sites to broadcast locally.
When RNZ shut AM transmission down in Northland last November, the government urgently injected $1.5 million to upgrade the aging sites.
At the time, Emergency Management Minister Kieran McAnulty said radio was “a critical information channel to help reach New Zealanders in an emergency”.
Other AM sites
He said Manatū Taonga/the Ministry for Culture and Heritage, NEMA, and RNZ were all “collaborating to develop criteria for future decisions about other AM sites to make sure communities are able to stay connected and access critical warnings and guidance in emergencies”.
Clearly it is a problem if an important national emergency service owned and run by the public broadcaster can be jeopardised by pressure on a fixed budget at the discretion of Parliament’s Clerk.
When RNZ’s Phil Pennington asked NEMA to comment on the future of the AM network this week, his request was referred to Broadcasting Minister Willie Jackson.
Jackson is also the Minister of Māori Development, which oversees Māori Broadcasting, including for Te Whakaruruhau o nga reo Irirangi, the umbrella group of iwi radio broadcasters around the country. Jackson was the chair of Te Whakaruruhau before he entered Parliament again in 2017.
After the government scrapped the plan for a new public media entity last month, Jackson will have to go back to cabinet with a new plan to address RNZ’s future funding.
Jackson was one of the ministers on the ground in the regions hit by Cyclone Gabrielle and overseeing the emergency response — and was unavailable for interview on Mediawatch this week.
Citing Northland
His office supplied a statement citing that intervention in Northland last year.
“AM transmission is a key priority for the government. Officials from Manatū Taonga, NEMA and RNZ are working closely to ensure radio services (including AM transmission) are always available for people in an emergency,” it said.
“Long-term work to develop funding approaches is also underway to ensure RNZ’s AM transmission strategy continues — and the minister is considering this as part of a package to strengthen public media and will be returning to cabinet with proposals soon,” the statement said.
Before Gabrielle, provisions for AM broadcasting would have been low on the list for reporters scrutinising the minister’s latest cabinet plan for RNZ’s funding.
After Gabrielle, it will be one of the first things they look for.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Microsoft’s new artificial intelligence bot appears to have gone crazy and is insulting reporters by comparing them to bloodthirsty dictators. 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: Microsoft’s new artificial intelligence bot appears to have gone nuts. I mean, he’s insulting reporters. […]
Sky chief executive Sophie Moloney said the proposal would result in some of Sky’s work in technology and content operations being outsourced to experienced international provider Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), according to TVNZ’s 1News.
TCS is an India-based information technology services and consulting company.
In customer care, Sky TV said it would adopt a hybrid model, with one third of its team based in New Zealand and two-thirds in the Philippines (through Sky’s existing partner Probe CX Group).
It said the proposal would see “over 100 roles” retained in its New Zealand call centre, while “around 200” roles would be created in the Philippines to deal with “more straightforward” inquiries.
“Overall, the proposed changes would boost Sky’s customer service capacity by 40 percent across the two teams, driving better customer experiences and the ability to meet customer demand as it flexes,” said Sky in an announcement to New Zealand’s stock exchange last month.
Sky said the changes would result in “multi-million dollar permanent savings within two years”.
Sky TV provides pay television services via satellite, media streaming services and broadband internet services.
It has no connection with the UK’s Sky Group or Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.
The Papua New Guinean government has been bluntly and frankly reminded to leave mainstream media alone as a long awaited consultative workshop on the recently introduced National Media Development Policy took place in Port Moresby.
Media stakeholders stood in unity with the PNG Media Council yesterday to express their concerns on the alleged threat it would pose if the government enforced control over the media in PNG.
Transparency International-PNG chair Peter Aitsi reminded the government that a “free and independent media deters corruption and underpins justice”.
“If we take some more independence away from the media, we [are] only adding more fuel to the flames of corruption,” Aitsi said.
TIPNG’s response to the policy was that licensing through a government-enforced process would be a threat to the media professionals and that there were already existing laws that the media was abiding by.
Also the draft policy did not explain why this was not sufficient to ensure accountability.
Before Aitsi spoke, PNG Media Council president Neville Choi said the purported policy was not encouraged and that the national government’s push to control narrative was not supported.
He stressed that every media house in PNG had its own complaints mechanism, own media code of ethics, code of conducts as guides and that there were laws that the media abided by. He saw no reason, based on the draft policy, for it to be progressed.
‘Lack of government support’
“We remind government, that the current level and standard of journalism performers is largely a result of lack of government support to the journalism schools and institutions in our country,” Choi said.
“And we remind government that before this policy was announced, the Media Council had already begun a reform process to address many of the concerns contained in this draft policy.
“We ask that this process be respected, and supported if there is a will to contribute to improving the work of the media.
“We call for full transparency and clarity on the purpose of this policy, and reject it in its current v2 form.
“And I say this on the record, so that this continues throughout the rest of this consultation process.
“We acknowledge that there are areas of concern from which solutions can be found in existing legislation and currently available avenues for legal redress.
‘Too much at stake’
“There is too much at stake for this to be rushed.
“There are too many media stakeholders, both within our country, the region, and internationally, who are watching closely the process of this policy formation.
“We all owe it to our future generations, to do this right.”
Prominent PNG journalist Scott Waide was also also highly critical of the government’s draft policy and warned against it going a step further.
Pacific Media Watch reports that last month Waide wrote a scathing critique of the policy on the Canberra-based DevPolicy blog at the Australian National University.
Gorethy Kennethis a senior PNG Post-Courier journalist. Republished with permission.
America’s Lawyer E42: George Santos admitted in a recent interview that the reason he lied so much is because he thought he could get away with it – that admission may come back to haunt him as he faces criminal investigations. Lots of things are happening with both Democrats and Republicans as the 2024 Presidential race […]
How to be a Bad Muslim is a collection of 19 short essays by Mohamed Hassan, an award-winning poet and an international journalist. He was born in Cairo, but moved to Auckland at the age of eight.
This personal history underlies much of his writing: his fond memories of Egypt and its collectivist society and extended families, versus his adolescence as a migrant with a clearly identifiable Muslim name in individualist New Zealand. After 9/11, suspicions deepened and Muslims were subject to collective guilt and racial profiling, despite that fact that Muslims around the world condemned the attacks.
“To be granted citizenry and promised equality but to always be held at arm’s length. To be accused of plotting disharmony when all we have ever fought for was integration, acceptance, peace.” In other words, to be “welcome, but not welcome”.
This is all documented in chapter 11: “How to be a bad Muslim.”
Memories from his youth include spooky childhood memories from Cairo (chapter 2, “The witch of El Agouza”), followed by real-life memories and standing up to being bullied in school in New Zealand by someone who later became an All Black (chapter 3, “Showdown in the Kowhai Room”).
As a Muslim, the author’s refusal to enter the binge drinking culture of New Zealand, while entering the local poetry scene, shows that it is possible to enjoy oneself without alcohol (chapter 4, “The last sober driver”).
The author is well acquainted with IT, the internet, YouTube, social media, etc. An important chapter is the first, entitled “Subscribe to PewDiePie”, being the last words of the Christchurch shooter before entering Al-Noor Mosque. The chapter documents the seemingly innocent growth of YouTube and social media over a decade, all leading ultimately to the Christchurch massacre.
Many passages in the chapters touch on the misrepresentation of Muslims and Islam, as the author reports from first-hand experience. He was bullied at school, given the cold shoulder at work, passed over for promotion, regularly subjected to “random” searches at airports, etc. His brother no longer goes with his two young sons to Friday prayers in Manukau, because he does not feel they are safe.
“The growing mistrust was fuelled by grotesque and irresponsible media narratives that portrayed Muslim immigrants as an existential threat, and the public believed it” despite the fact that the public knew little about Islam and Muslims, and failed to find out about it.
“A Sikh man studying at a café outside his medical school had police called to interrogate him after a woman spotted wires hanging out of his bag. They were headphone cables.”
In chapter 10 “Ode to Elliott Alderson”, he catalogues the misrepresentation of Muslims in film, involving famous actors such as Rami Malek, Omid Djalili, Hank Azaria, Sacha Baron Cohen, Christian Bale, and Sigourney Weaver.
Throughout the chapters, the author reports his memories and experiences, but often with a sense of humour, and with a poet’s turn of phrase. He describes his baby sister sleeping “as only an infant can, her fingers curled into themselves and her breath like a moth dancing around a faint sun”.
As an Egyptian Muslim growing up in New Zealand, he was “a kid who wore the question of belonging like an ankle monitor everywhere I went.” As a keen observer of the effect of IT, the internet and social media, he wonders, “Will our greatest of grandchildren unearth our metadata and try and decipher what our selfies said about our civilisation?”
This is an important book for anyone wanting to understand the problems immigrants — especially Muslims — face in New Zealand.
Dr Adam Brown is an Auckland academic, author and the editor of a New Zealand Muslim publication. This review is published in collaboration with Pacific Journalism Review.
The discussions on Papua New Guinea’s new draft media development policy will come to the fore today when the media industry presents its response to the government.
It is expected the PNG Media Council, which we are a member of, will present the position of the industry in response to the draft policy and members of the media fraternity, and other concerned institutions will also present their views to the Department of Information that is handling this exercise.
The policy paper outlines the government’s strategies to use the media as a tool for development, however the consultation progresses amidst a growing fear in the industry that legislation is ready to go before Parliament and the consultation process is only an academic exercise.
Included in the proposed policy is the proposal to legislate the PNG Media Council and laws to impose penalties against journalists and media houses that are accused [of] bad reporting.
The industry is of the view that the proposed changes will erode the independence of the media and the journalists and ultimately the freedoms relating to free speech that are enshrined in the national constitution.
One cannot blame the industry and its practitioners for their concern considering the latest version to the policy document 2.1 contains 31 mentions of the word “regulation” in various instances among other things.
In the entire document its transparency on penalties also goes as far as 6 words alone without any more being uttered in its delivery mechanisms.
The PNG Media Council, for the record, is not a journalist organisation. It is an industry body and it functions to protect the interest of the industry.
Today the council is in existence, with its executive members operating from their homes, while the media industry is operating with its newsroom managers dealing daily with challenges like the growing concerns of a country with many issues on top of the self-regulation of unethical journalism, poor presentation and story selections and accountability, among many that are a daily task at hand.
On the other side, the government and its agencies are working in isolation, with no clear, honest and transparent media and communication strategies and allocate a budget to work with the mainstream media.
At Independence, PNG inherited an information and communication apparatus that comprised the Office of Information, the National Broadcasting Commission, the Public Library, the National Archives and the National Museum, all with networks spread throughout the provinces.
These institutions coordinate and disseminate government information to the masses, most of them illiterate at that time.
Today a new generation of people live in PNG, the Department of Communication replaces the Office of Information, the NBC had moved into television, competing with more radio and TV networks, but the public libraries, archives and museums are either run down or closed.
And the communication landscape has changed drastically with the advancement in information technology, including social media.
All state agencies have media and communication units that are operating on ad hoc basis, sending invitations out only for groundbreaking ceremonies, report presentations and a few random press releases, hoping that the mainstream media will “educate, inform and communicate” to the masses and mobilise their support behind the state.
Communication and stakeholder engagement is the least funded activity in government. This is a fact, and yet the government expects the mainstream media to be proactive and promote its work.
How can the media, as an independent industry do that when its role is not encompassed into the entire government planning?
The media is an important pillar of our democracy and is a useful tool for development. We just have to build an honest, transparent and workable partnership for the mutual benefit of everyone. This must happen.
But it cannot work with a stick, sword, or even a gun to the head of any pillar of our governance and society.
We look forward to the discussions today with the proponents of this policy document, and we hope to see more transparency on what is the end game that is mutually beneficial where we have to plot a new course in media-government relationship.
(@DanielDiMartino) 
~ antebellum opinion haver (@pharnzwurth) 
