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Tag: Media Bias

  • We can defeat the corporate media’s war to snuff out independent journalism

    My talk at the International Festival of Whistleblowing, Dissent and Accountability on May 8. Transcript below.

    I wanted to use this opportunity to talk about my experiences over the past two decades working with new technology as an independent freelance journalist, one who abandoned – or maybe more accurately, was abandoned by – what we usually call the “mainstream” media.

    Looking back over that period, I have come to appreciate that I was among the first generation of journalists to break free of the corporate media – in my case, the Guardian – and ride this wave of new technology. In doing so, we liberated ourselves from the narrow editorial restrictions such media imposes on us as journalists and were still able to find an audience, even if a diminished one.

    More and more journalists are following a similar path today – a few out of choice, and more out of necessity as corporate media becomes increasingly unprofitable. But as journalists seek to liberate themselves from the strictures of the old corporate media, that same corporate media is working very hard to characterise the new technology as a threat to media freedoms.

    This self-serving argument should be treated with a great deal of scepticism. I want to use my own experiences to suggest that quite the reverse is true. And that the real danger is allowing the corporate media to reassert its monopoly over narrating the world to us.

    ‘Mainstream’ consensus

    I left my job at the Guardian newspaper group in 2001. Had I tried to become an independent journalist 10 years earlier than I did, it would have been professional suicide. In fact, it would have been a complete non-starter. I certainly would not be here telling you what it was like to have spent 20 years challenging the “mainstream” western consensus on Israel-Palestine.

    Before the Noughties, without a platform provided by a corporate media outlet, journalists had no way to reach an audience, let alone create one. We were entirely beholden to our editors, and they in turn were dependent on billionaire owners – or in a few cases like the BBC’s, the  government – and on advertisers.

    When I arrived in Nazareth as a freelance journalist, though one with continuing connections to the Guardian, I quickly found myself faced with a stark choice.

    Newspapers would accept relatively superficial articles from me, ones that accorded with a decades-old, western, colonial mindset about Israel-Palestine. Had I contributed such pieces for long enough, I would probably have managed to reassure one of the papers that I was an obliging and safe pair of hands. Eventually, when a position fell vacant, I might have landed myself a well-paid correspondent’s job.

    Instead I preferred to write authentically – for myself, reporting what I had observed on the ground, rather than what was expected of me by my editors. That meant antagonising and gradually burning bridges with the western media.

    Even in a digital era of new journalistic possibilities, there were few places to publish. I had to rely on a couple of what were then newly emerging websites that were prepared to publish very different narratives on Israel-Palestine from the western corporate media’s.

    Level playing field

    The most prominent at the time, which became the first proper home for my journalism, was Al-Ahram Weekly, an English-language sister publication of the famous Cairo daily newspaper. Few probably remember or read Al-Ahram Weekly today, because it was soon overshadowed by other websites. But at the time it was a rare online refuge for dissident voices, and included a regular column from the great public intellectual Edward Said.

    It is worth pausing to think about how foreign correspondents operated in the pre-digital world. They not only enjoyed a widely read, if tightly controlled, platform in an establishment media outlet, but they had behind them a vitally important support structure.

    Their newspaper provided an archive and library service so that they could easily research historical and newsworthy events in their region. There were local staff who could help with locating sources and offering translations. They had photographers who contributed visuals to their pieces. And they had satellite phones to file breaking news from remote locations.

    None of this came cheap. A freelance journalist could never have afforded any of this kind of support.

    All that changed with the new technology, which rapidly levelled the playing field. A Google search soon became more comprehensive than even the best newspaper library. Mobile phones made it easy to track down and speak to people who were potential sources for stories. Digital cameras, and then the same mobile phones, meant it was possible to visually record events without needing a photographer alongside you. And email meant it was easy to file copy from anywhere in the world, to anywhere, virtually free.

    Documentary evidence

    The independent journalism I and others were developing in the early Noughties was assisted by a new kind of political activist who was using similarly novel digital tools.

    After I arrived in Nazareth, I had little use for the traditional “access journalism” my corporate colleagues chiefly relied on. Israeli politicians and military generals dissembled to protect Israel’s image. Far more interesting to me were the young western activists who had begun embedding – before that term got corrupted by the behaviour of corporate journalists – in Palestinian communities.

    Today we remember names like Rachel Corrie, Tom Hurndall, Brian Avery, Vittorio Arrigoni and many others for the fact that in the early Noughties they were either killed or wounded by Israeli soldiers. But they were part of a new movement of political activists and citizen journalists – many of them with the International Solidarity Movement – who were offering a different kind of access.

    They used digital cameras to record and protest the Israeli army’s abuses and war crimes from up close inside Palestinian communities – crimes that had previously had gone unrecorded for western audiences. They then sent their documentary evidence and their eye-witness accounts to journalists by email or published them on “alternative” websites. For independent journalists like me, their work was gold-dust. We could challenge Israel’s implausible accounts with clear-cut evidence.

    Sadly most corporate journalists paid little attention to the work of these activists. In any case, their role was quickly snuffed out. That was partly because Israel learnt that shooting a few of them served as a very effective deterrent, warning others to keep away.

    But it was also because as technology became cheaper and more accessible – eventually ending up in mobile phones that everyone was expected to have – Palestinians could record their own suffering more immediately and without any mediation.

    Israel’s dismissal of the early, grainy images of the abuse of Palestinians by soldiers and settlers – as “Pallywood” (Palestinian Hollywood) – became ever less plausible, even to its own supporters. Soon Palestinians were recording their mistreatment in high definition and posting it directly to YouTube.

    Unreliable allies

    There was a parallel evolution in journalism. For the first eight years in Nazareth, I struggled to make any kind of living by publishing online. Egyptian wages were far too low to support me in Israel, and most alternative websites lacked the budget to pay. For the first years I lived a spartan life and dug into my savings from my former, well-paid job at the Guardian. During this period I also wrote a series of books because it was so difficult to find places to publish my news reporting.

    It was in the late Noughties that Arab media in English, led by Al-Jazeera, really took off, with Arab states making the most of the new favourable conditions provided by the internet. These outlets flourished for a time by feeding the appetite among sections of the western public for more critical coverage of Israel-Palestine and of western foreign policy more generally. At the same time, Arab states exploited the revelations provided by dissident journalists to gain more leverage in Washington policymaking circles.

    My time with Al-Ahram came to an abrupt end after a few years, as the paper grew less keen on running hard-hitting pieces that showed Israel as an apartheid state or that explained the nature of its settler colonial ideology. Rumours reached me that the Americans were leaning on the Egyptian government and its media to tone down the bad news about Israel.

    It would be the first of several exits I had to make from these English-language Arab media outlets. As their western readership and visibility grew, they invariably attracted hostile attention from western governments and sooner or later capitulated. They were never more than fickle, unreliable allies to western dissidents.

    Editors as sheepdogs

    Again, I would have been forced to abandon journalism had it not been for another technological innovation – the rise of social media. Facebook and Twitter soon rivalled the corporate media as platforms for news dissemination.

    For the first time, it was possible for journalists to grow their own audiences independently of an outlet. In a few cases, that dramatically changed the power relations in favour of those journalists. Glenn Greenwald is probably the most prominent example of this trend. He was chased after first by the Guardian and then by the billionaire Pierre Omidyar, to set up the Intercept. Now he’s on his own, using the editorially hands-off online platform Substack.

    In a news environment driven chiefly by shares, journalists with their own large and loyal followings were initially prized.

    But they were also an implicit threat. The role of corporate media is to serve as a figurative sheep-dog, herding journalists each day into an ideological pen – the publication they write for. There are minor differences of opinion and emphasis between conservative publications and liberal ones, but they all ultimately serve the same corporate, business-friendly, colonial, war-mongering agenda.

    It is the publication’s job, not the journalists’, to shape the values and worldview of its readers, over time limiting the range of possible thoughts they are likely to entertain.

    Readers to the rescue

    In the new environment of social media that has begun to change. Not only have some journalists become more influential than the papers they write for, but others have abandoned the employee-servant model completely. They have reached the conclusion that they no longer need a corporate outlet to secure an audience. They can publish themselves, build their own readership, and generate their own income – freeing themselves from corporate servitude.

    In the last few years, this is a path I have pursued myself – becoming mostly reader-financed. For most of us, it is a precarious option. But it is liberating too – in a way that no previous generation of journalists could ever have imagined possible.

    We are subject to no editorial oversight or control, apart from our own self-imposed sense of what is right and fair, or in some cases what we think our readers are ready to hear. We have no bosses or advertisers to please or appease. Our owner is the readerhip, and with an owner that diverse and diffuse, we have been freed of the tyranny of billionaires and corporations.

    This new model of journalism is revolutionary. It is genuinely pluralistic media. It allows a much wider spectrum of thought to reach the mainstream than ever before. And perhaps even more importantly, it allows independent journalists to examine, critique and expose the corporate media in real time, showing how little pluralism they allow and how often they resort to blatant falsehood and propaganda techniques.

    The fact that a few journalists and activists can so convincingly and easily tear apart the coverage of corporate media outlets reveals how little relationship that coverage often bears to reality.

    Reporters for hire

    Corporate media took none of this lying down, of course, even if it was slow to properly gauge the dangers.

    Dissident journalists are a problem not only because they have broken free of the controls of the billionaire class and are often doing a better job of building audiences than their corporate counterparts. Worse, dissident journalists are also educating readers so that they are better equipped to understand what corporate journalism is: that it is ideological prostitution. It is a reporting and commentary for hire, by an establishment class.

    The backlash from the corporate media to this threat was not long coming. Criticism – narratively managed by corporate outlets – has sought to character-assassinate dissident journalists and browbeat the social media platforms that host them. Reality has been inverted. Too often it is the critical thinking of dissident journalists that is maligned as “fake news”, and it is the genuine pluralism social media corporations have inadvertently allowed that is repudiated as the erosion of democratic values.

    Social media platforms have put up only the most feeble resistance to the traditional corporate media-led campaign demanding they crack down on the dissidents they host. They are, after all, media corporations too, and have little interest in promoting free speech, critical thinking or pluralism.

    Manipulated algorithms

    What resistance they did muster, for a short time, largely reflected the fact that their early business model was to replace top-down traditional media with a new bottom-up media that was essentially led by readers. But as social media has gradually been merged or incorporated into the traditional media establishment, it has preferred to join in with the censorship and to marginalise dissident journalists.

    Some of this is done out in the open, with the banning of individuals or alternative sites. But more often it is done covertly, through the manipulation of algorithms making dissident journalists all but impossible to find. We have seen our page views and shares plummet over the past few years, as we lose the online battle against the same, supposedly “authoritative sources” – the establishment media – we have been exposing as fraudsters.

    The perverse, self-serving discourse from establishment media about the new media is currently hard to miss in the relentless attacks on Substack. This open platform hosts journalists and writers who wish to build their own audiences and fund themselves from reader donations. Substack is the logical conclusion of a path I and other have been on for two decades. It not only gets rid of the media’s sheepdog-editors, it dispenses with the ideological pens into which journalists are supposed to be herded.

    Sordid history

    James Ball, whose sordid history includes acting as the Guardian’s hatchet man on Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, was a predictable choice as the Guardian Group tried this month to discredit Substack. Here is Ball ridiculously fretting about how greater freedom for journalists might damage western society by stoking so-called “culture wars”:

    Concerns are emerging about what Substack is now, exactly. Is it a platform for hosting newsletters and helping people discover them? Or is it a new type of publication, one that relies on stoking the culture wars to help divisive writers build devoted followings? …

    Being on Substack has for some become a tacit sign of being a partisan in the culture wars, not least because it’s a lot easier to build a devoted and paying following by stressing that you’re giving readers something the mainstream won’t.

    Ball is the kind of second-rate stenographer who would have had no journalistic career at all were he not a hired gun for a corporate publication like the Guardian. Buried in his piece is the real reason for his – and the Guardian’s – concern about Substack:

    Such is Substack’s recent notoriety that people are now worrying that it might be the latest thing that might kill traditional media.

    Notice the heavy-lifting that word “people” is doing in the quoted sentence. Not you or I. “People” refers to James Ball and the Guardian.

    Severe price

    But the gravest danger to media freedom lies beyond any supposed “culture wars”. As the battle for narrative control intensifies, there is much more at stake than name-calling and even skewed algorithms.

    In a sign of how far the political and media establishment are willing to go to stop dissident journalism – a journalism that seeks to expose corrupt power and hold it to account – they have been making examples of the most significant journalists of the new era by prosecuting them.

    Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been out of sight for a decade – first as a political asylum seeker, then as an inmate of a British prison – subjected to endlessly shifting pretexts for his incarceration. First, it was a rape investigation that no one wanted to pursue. Then, it was for a minor bail infraction. And more recently – as the other pretexts have passed their sellby date – it has been for exposing US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Assange could languish in jail for years to come.

    Former UK ambassador Craig Murray, a chronicler through his blog of the legal abuses Assange has suffered, has faced his own retribution from the establishment. He has been prosecuted and found guilty in a patently nonsensical “jigsaw identification” case relating to the Alex Salmond trial.

    My talk has been recorded too early to know the outcome of Murray’s sentencing hearing, which was due to take place the day before this festival [and was later postponed to Tuesday May 11]. But the treatment of Assange and Murray has sent a clear message to any journalist inspired by their courage and their commitment to hold establishment power to account: “You will pay a severe price. You will lose years of your life and mountains of money fighting to defend yourself. And ultimately we can and will lock you away.”

    Peek behind the curtain

    The west’s elites will not give up the corrupt institutions that uphold their power without a fight. We would be foolish to think otherwise. But new technology has offered us new tools in our struggle and it has redrawn the battleground in ways that no one could have predicted even a decade ago.

    The establishment are being forced into a game of whack-a-mole with us. Each time they bully or dismantle a platform we use, another one – like Substack – springs up to replace it. That is because there will always be journalists determined to find a way to peek behind the curtain to tell us what they found. And there will always be audiences who want to learn what is behind the curtain. Supply and demand are on our side.

    The constant acts of intimidation and violence by political and media elites to crush media pluralism in the name of “democratic values” will serve only to further expose the hypocrisy and bad faith of the corporate media and its hired hands.

    We must keep struggling because the struggle itself is a form of victory.twitter sharing buttonThank you for listening and I hope you enjoy today’s festival. sharethis sharing button

    This article was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2021 at 5:13am and is filed under Corporate Media, Fake News, Internet, Journalism, Julian Assange, Media Bias, Media Censorship, Social media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Starmer isn’t “too cautious”: he is ruthlessly tearing Labour apart

    A year in, the British Labour leader is giving the Tories an easy ride while investing his energy in an all-out war on the party’s left

    The completion of Keir Starmer’s first year as Labour leader might have passed without note, had it not been the occasion for senior party figures to express mounting concern at Labour’s dismal performance in opposition to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.

    At a time when Labour ought to be landing regular punches on the ruling party over its gross incompetence in handling the Covid-19 pandemic, and cronyism in its awarding of multimillion-pound coronavirus-related contracts, Starmer has preferred to avoid confrontation. Critics have accused him of being “too cautious” and showing a “lack of direction”.

    Dissatisfaction with Starmer among Labour voters has quadrupled over the past 10 months, from 10 percent last May to 39 percent in March. His approach does not even appear to be winning over the wider public: a recent poll on who would make a better prime minister gave incumbent Johnson a 12 percentage-point lead.

    Increasingly anxious senior Labour MPs called late last month for a “big figure” to help Starmer set aside his supposed political diffidence and offer voters a clearer idea of “what Keir is for”.

    That followed a move in February by Starmer’s team to reach out to Peter Mandelson, who helped Tony Blair rebrand the party as “New Labour” in the 1990s and move it sharply away from any association with
    socialism.

    ‘Cynically’ evasive

    But there is a twofold problem with this assessment of Starmer’s first year.

    It assumes Labour’s dire polling is evidence that voters might warm to Starmer if they knew more about what he stands for. That conclusion seems unwarranted. A Labour internal review leaked in February showed that the British public viewed Starmer’s party as “deliberate and cynical” in its evasiveness on policy matters.

    In other words, British voters’ aversion to Starmer is not that he is “too cautious” or lacklustre. Rather, they suspect that Starmer and his team are politically not being honest. Either he is covering up the fact that Labour under his leadership is an ideological empty vessel, or his party has clear policies but conceals them because it believes they would be unpopular.

    In response, and indeed underscoring the increasingly cynical approach from Starmer’s camp, the review proposed reinventing Labour as a patriotic, Tory-lite party, emphasising “the flag, veterans [and] dressing smartly”.

    However, the deeper flaw in this assessment of Starmer’s first 12 months is that it assumes his caution in taking on the Tory government is evidence of some natural restraint or reticence on his part. This was the view promoted by a recent commentator in the Guardian, who observed: “‘Starmerism’ has not defined itself in any sense beyond sitting on the fence.”

    But Starmer has proved to be remarkably unrestrained and intemperate when he chooses to be. If he is reticent, it appears to be only when it serves his larger political purposes.

    All-out war

    If there is one consistent thread in his first year, it has been a determined purging from the party of any trace of the leftwing politics of his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, as well as a concerted effort to drive out many tens of thousands of new members who joined because of Corbynism.

    The paradox is that when Starmer stood in the leadership election last spring, he promised to unify a party deeply divided between a largely leftwing membership committed to Corbyn’s programme, on the one hand, and a largely rightwing parliamentary faction and party bureaucracy, on the other.

    As an internal review leaked last April revealed, party officials were determined to destroy Corbyn even while he was leader, using highly undemocratic means.

    Even if Starmer had chosen to be cautious or diffident, there looked to be no realistic way to square that circle. But far from sitting on the fence, he has been busy waging an all-out war on one side only: those sympathetic to Corbyn. And that campaign has involved smashing apart the party’s already fragile democratic procedures.

    The prelude was the sacking last June of Rebecca Long-Bailey as shadow education secretary – and the most visible ally of Corbyn in Starmer’s shadow cabinet – on the flimsiest of pretexts. She had retweeted an article in the Independent newspaper that included a brief mention of Israel’s involvement in training western police forces in brutal restraint techniques.

    Real target

    A few months later, Starmer got his chance to go after his real target, when the Equalities and Human Rights Commission published its highly flawed report into the claims of an antisemitism problem in Labour under Corbyn’s leadership.

    This provided the grounds Starmer needed to take the unprecedented step of excluding Corbyn from the parliamentary party he had been leader of only months earlier. It was a remarkably provocative and incautious move that infuriated large sections of the membership, some of whom abandoned the party as a result.

    Having dispatched Corbyn and issued a stark ultimatum to any MP who might still harbour sympathies for the former leader, Starmer turned his attention to the party membership. David Evans, his new general secretary and a retread from the Blair years, issued directives banning constituency parties from protesting Corbyn’s exclusion or advocating for Corbynism.

    Corbyn was overnight turned into a political “unperson”, in an echo of the authoritarian purges of the Soviet-era Communist party. No mention was to be made of him or his policies, on pain of suspension from the party.

    Even this did not suffice. To help bolster the hostile environment towards left wing members, Starmer made Labour hostage to special interest groups that had openly waged war – from inside and outside the party – against his predecessor.

    During the leadership campaign, Starmer signed on to a “10 Pledges” document from the deeply conservative and pro-Israel Board of Deputies of British Jews. The board was one of the cheerleaders for the evidence-free antisemitism allegations that had beset Labour during Corbyn’s time as leader – even though all metrics suggested the party had less of an antisemitism problem than the Conservatives, and less of a problem under Corbyn than previous leaders.

    Alienating the left

    The Pledges required Starmer to effectively hand over control to the Board of Deputies and another pro-Israel group, the Jewish Labour Movement, on what kind of criticisms Labour members were allowed to make of Israel.

    Opposition to a century of British-sponsored oppression of the Palestinian people had long been a rallying point for the UK’s left, as opposition to the treatment of black South Africans under the apartheid regime once was. Israel’s centrality to continuing western colonialism in the Middle East and its key role in a global military-industrial complex made it a natural target for leftwing activism.

    But according to the Pledges – in a barely concealed effort to hound, alienate and silence the party’s left – it was for pro-Israel lobby groups to decide who should be be declared an antisemite, while “fringe” Jewish groups, or those supportive of Corbyn and critical of Israel, should be ignored.

    Starmer readily agreed both to adopt the board’s conflation of criticism of Israel with antisemitism, and to disregard prominent Jews within his own party opposed to pro-Israel lobbying. His office was soon picking off prominent Jewish supporters of Corbyn, including leaders of Jewish Voice for Labour.

    One of the most troubling cases was Naomi Wimborne-Idrissi, who was suspended shortly after she appeared in a moving video in which she explained how antisemitism had been weaponised by the pro-Israel lobby against left wing Jews like herself.

    She noted the pain caused when Jews were smeared as “traitors” and “kapos” – an incendiary term of abuse, as Wimborne-Idrissi pointed out, that refers to “a Jewish inmate of a concentration camp who collaborated with the [Nazi] authorities, people who collaborated in the annihilation of their own people”.

    In suspending her, Starmer’s Labour effectively endorsed that type of ugly demonisation campaign.

    Israeli spy recruited

    But the war on the Labour left did not end there. In his first days as leader, Starmer was reluctantly forced to set up an inquiry into the leaked internal report that had exposed the party bureaucracy as profoundly hostile to Corbyn personally, and more generally to his socialist policies. Senior staff had even been shown trying to sabotage Labour’s 2017 general election campaign.

    But once the Forde Inquiry had been appointed, Starmer worked strenuously to kick it into the long grass, even bringing back into the party Emilie Oldknow, a central figure in the Corbyn-era bureaucracy who had been cast in a damning light by the leaked report’s revelations.

    A separate chance to lay bare what had happened inside Labour head office during Corbyn’s term was similarly spurned by Starmer. He decided not to  defend a defamation case against Labour brought by John Ware, a BBC reporter, and seven former staff in Labour’s disciplinary unit. They had worked together on a Panorama special on the antisemitism claims against Corbyn that did much to damage him in the public eye.

    These former officials had sued the party, arguing that Labour’s response to the BBC programme suggested they had acted in bad faith and sought to undermine Corbyn.

    In fact, a similar conclusion had been reached in the damning internal leaked report on the behaviour of head office staff. It quoted extensively from emails and WhatsApp chats that showed a deep-seated antipathy to Corbyn in the party bureaucracy.

    Nonetheless, Starmer’s office abandoned its legal defence last July, apologising “unreservedly” to the former staff members and paying “substantial damages”. Labour did so despite “clear advice” from lawyers, a former senior official said, that it would have won in court.

    When Martin Forde, chair of the Forde inquiry, announced in February that his report had been delayed “indefinitely”, it seemed that the truth about the efforts of Labour staff to undermine Corbyn as leader were being permanently buried.

    The final straw for many on the party’s left, however, was the revelation in January that Starmer had recruited to his team a former Israeli military spy, Assaf Kaplan, to monitor the use of social media by members.

    Much of the supposed “antisemitism problem” under Corbyn had depended on the Israel lobby’s efforts to scour through old social media posts of left wing members, looking for criticism of Israel and then presenting it as evidence of antisemitism. As leader, Corbyn was pushed by these same lobby groups to adopt a new, highly controversial definition of antisemitism produced by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. It shifted attention away from hatred of Jews to criticism of Israel.

    A former Israeli spy trained in the dark arts of surveilling Palestinians would be overseeing the monitoring of party members’ online activity.

    Tory party of old

    Far from sitting on the fence, as his critics claim, Starmer has been ruthless in purging socialism from the Labour party – under cover of claims that he is rooting out an “antisemitism problem” he supposedly inherited from Corbyn.

    In a speech last month, Mandelson – the former Blair strategist who Starmer’s team has been consulting – called on the Labour leader to show “courage and determination” in tackling the supposedly “corrupt far left”. He suggested “large numbers” of members would still need to be expunged from the party in the supposed fight against antisemitism.

    Starmer is investing huge energy and political capital in ridding the party of its leftwing members, while exhibiting little appetite for taking on Johnson’s right wing government.

    These are not necessarily separate projects. There is a discernible theme here. Starmer is recrafting Labour not as a real opposition to the Conservative party’s increasingly extreme, crony capitalism, but as a responsible, more moderate alternative to it. He is offering voters a Labour party that feels more like the Tory party of old, which prioritised tradition, patriotism and family values.

    None of this should surprise. Despite his campaign claims, Starmer’s history – predating his rapid rise through the Labour party – never suggested he was likely to clash with the establishment. After all, few public servants have been knighted by the Queen at the relatively tender age of 51 for their radicalism.

    In safe hands

    While head of the Crown Prosecution Service, Starmer rejected indicting the police officers who killed Jean Charles de Menezes and Ian Tomlinson, and his department effectively cleared MI5 and MI6 officers of torture related to the “War on Terror”.

    His team not only sought to fast-track the extradition to Sweden of Julian Assange, the Wikileaks founder who exposed western war crimes, but it also put strong pressure on its Swedish counterpart not to waver in pursuing Assange. One lawyer told the Swedes in 2012: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!”

    Starmer’s actions since becoming Labour leader are very much in line with his earlier career. He wants to prove he is a safe pair of hands to the British establishment, in hopes that he can avert the kind of relentless vilification Corbyn endured. Then, Starmer can bide his time until the British public tires of Johnson.

    Starmer seems to believe that playing softball with the right wing government and hardball with the left in his own party will prove a winning formula. So far, voters beg to differ.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This article was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2021 at 10:37pm and is filed under Anti-semitism, Capitalism, Character Assassination, Cybersecurity, Israel, Jeremy Corbyn, Media Bias, Social media, The “Left”, The “Right”, Transparency/Secrecy, UK Israeli Lobby, UK Labour Party, UK Media, UK Politics, United Kingdom, Zionism.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Israel election: The Far-right is Triumphant: The Only Obstacle Left is Netanyahu

    Extreme religious and settler parties are a firm majority in Israel’s new parliament. Now they want a leader truly committed to their cause

    As 13 parties struggle with Israel’s complex post-election maths, seeking alliances that can assure them power, the most significant outcome of the vote is easily missed. The religious fundamentalists and settler parties – Israel’s far right – won an unprecedented and clear-cut victory last week.

    Even on the most cautious assessment, these parties together hold 72 seats in the 120-member parliament. For more than a decade they have underwritten Benjamin Netanyahu’s uninterrupted rule. That is why all the current talk in Israel and the western media about two equal camps, right and left, pitted against each other – implacably hostile and unable to build a majority – is patent nonsense.

    The far right has a large majority. It could easily form a government – if it wasn’t mired in a now seemingly permanent crisis over the figure of Netanyahu.

    Standing against the far right are what are loosely termed the “centrists”, equally committed to the takeover of swaths of the occupied territories, if in their case more by stealth.

    There are two parties on the “centre-right” – Yesh Atid and Blue and White – that won between them 25 seats. The “centre-left”, represented by the Labor party and Meretz, still struggling to maintain the pretence that they comprise a “peace camp”, secured 13 seats. A final 10 seats went to the various parties representing Israel’s large minority of Palestinian citizens.

    Both the far right and the “centrists” subscribe to versions of the settler-colonial ideology of Zionism. To outsiders, the similarities between the two camps can sometimes look stronger than the differences. Ultimately, with the possible exception of Meretz, both want the Palestinians subjugated and removed.

    The “centrists” may best be understood as the apologetic wing of Zionism. They worry about Israel’s image abroad. And that means they have, at least ostensibly, emphasised dividing territory between Jews and Palestinians – as the Oslo accords proposed – rather than visibly dividing rights. The centrists’ great fear is that they will be seen as presiding over a single apartheid state.

    Jewish Supremacy

    The 60 percent of the parliament now in the hands of extreme religious and settler parties takes the opposite view. They prefer to divide rights – to create an explicit apartheid system – if they can thereby avoid dividing the territory. They want all of the region, and ideally only for Jews.

    They care little what others think. All subscribe to an ideology of Jewish supremacy, even if they differ on whether “Jewish” is defined in religious or ethnic-nationalist terms. In 2018 Netanyahu’s government began the process of legislating this worldview through the Jewish Nation State Law.

    The far right explicitly views Palestinians, the native people whose homeland the European-led Zionist movement has been colonising for the past 100 years, as interlopers or unwelcome guests.

    Unlike the centrists, the far right places little weight on the distinction between Palestinians under occupation and the fifth of Israel’s population who are Palestinian and have degraded citizenship. All Palestinians, wherever they live and whatever their status, are seen as an enemy that needs to be subdued.

    Allying with Centrists

    So why, given the far right’s incontestible triumph last week, are the media filled with analyses about Israel’s continuing political impasse and the likelihood of a fifth election in a few months’ time?

    Why, if a clear majority of legislators are unapologetic Jewish supremacists, has Netanyahu kept courting centrists to stay in power – as he did after the last election, when he ensnared battle-hardened general Benny Gantz into his coalition? And why after this election is he reported to be reaching out for the first time to a Palestinian party for support?

    Part of the answer lies in a deep disagreement within the far right, between religious fundamentalists and its more secular components, on what “Jewish rule” means. Both sides focus on the supremacy of Jews over Palestinians and refuse to make a meaningful distinction between the occupied territories and Israel. But they have entirely different conceptions of Jewish sovereignty. One faction thinks Jews should take their orders from God, while the other looks to a Jewish state.

    Further, they disagree on who counts as a Jew.

    It is hard, for example, for Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of Yisrael Beiteinu, to break bread with the extremist rabbis of Shas and United Torah Judaism, when those rabbis don’t regard many of his supporters – immigrants from the former Soviet Union – as real Jews. To them, “Russians” no more belong to the Jewish collective than Palestinians.

    Oppressive Shadow

    But an even bigger obstacle is to be found in the figure of Netanyahu himself, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.

    The far-right is largely unperturbed by Netanyahu’s trial on multiple corruption charges. Israel’s short history is full of major crimes: wars of aggression, forcible population transfer, executions and looting, land theft and settlement building. All Israeli leaders, Netanyahu included, have had a hand in these atrocities. The current focus on allegations against him of fraud and acceptance of bribes looks trivial in comparison.

    The far right’s problem with Netanyahu is more complex.

    He has been presiding over this bloc, relatively unchallenged, since the early 1990s. He has become by far the most skilled, experienced and charismatic politician in Israel. And for that reason, no other far right leader has been able to emerge from under his oppressive shadow.

    He may be King Bibi – his nickname – but the far right’s more ambitious princes are getting increasingly restless. They are eager to fill his shoes. Their knives are out. Gideon Saar, his Likud protege, created a party, New Hope, to run in last week’s election precisely in the hope of ousting his old boss. But equally, Netanyahu is so wily and experienced that he keeps outsmarting his rivals. He has managed to avoid any of his opponent’s lethal lunges by exploiting the far right’s weaknesses.

    Netanyahu has employed a twofold strategy. Despite perceptions abroad, he is actually one of the more moderate figures in the extreme religious and settler bloc. He is closer ideologically to Benny Gantz of Blue and White than he is either to the rabbis who dictate the policies of the religious parties or to the settler extremists – or even to the bulk of his own Likud party.

    Netanyahu has become a bogeyman abroad chiefly because he is so adept at harnessing the energy of the religious and settler parties and mobilising it to his own political and personal advantage. Israeli society grows ever more extreme because Netanyahu has for decades provided an aura of respectability, statesmanship and intellectual heft to the rhetoric surrounding the far right’s most noxious positions.

    In this election he even brokered a deal helping to bring Jewish Power – Israel’s most fascistic party – into parliament. If he has to, he will welcome them into the government he hopes to build.

    Wearing Thin

    But Netanyahu’s relative moderation – by Israel’s standards – means that he has, at least until recently, preferred to include centrists in his coalitions. That has helped to curb the excesses of a purely far right government that might antagonise the Europeans and embarrass Washington. And equally, it has kept the extreme right divided and dependent on him, as he plays its parties off against the centrists.

    If the princes of the settlements push him too hard, he can always tempt in a Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid), or a Gantz (Blue and White), or an Ehud Barak (Labor) to replace them.

    He has been loyal to no one but himself.

    Now that strategy is wearing thin. His corruption trial and the resulting campaign he has waged to weaken Israel’s legal and judicial systems to keep himself out of jail has left a sour taste with the centrists. They are now much warier of allying with him.

    After last year’s election, Gantz only dared join a Netanyahu government after citing exceptional grounds: the urgent need to fight the pandemic in an emergency government. Even so, he destroyed his party in the process. Now, it seems, only a rookie, conservative Islamist leader like Mansour Abbas may be willing to fall for Netanyahu’s trickery.

    Sensing Netanyahu’s weakness and his loss of alternative partners, parts of the far right have grown unruly and fractious.

    Netanyahu has kept the extreme religious parties on board – but at a steep cost. He has given them what they demand above all else: autonomy for their community. That is why Israeli police have turned a blind eye throughout the pandemic as the ultra-Orthodox have refused to close their schools during lockdowns and turned out in enormous numbers – usually without masks – for rabbis’ funerals.

    But Netanyahu’s endless indulgence of the ultra-Orthodox has served only to alienate the more secular parts of the far right.

    Betrayed on Annexation

    Worse, as Netanyahu has focused his energies on ways to draw attention away from his corruption trial, he has chosen to play fast and loose with the far right’s political and emotional priorities – most especially on annexation. In the recent, back-to-back election campaigns he has made increasingly earnest promises to formally annex swaths of the West Bank.

    But he has repeatedly failed to make good on his pledge.

    The betrayal hit hardest after the election a year ago. With then-President Donald Trump’s blessing, Netanyahu vowed to quickly begin annexation of large sections of the West Bank. But in the end Netanyahu ducked out, preferring to sign a “peace deal” with Gulf states on the confected condition that annexation be delayed.

    The move clearly indicated that, if it aided his political survival, Netanyahu would placate foreign capitals – behaviour reminiscent of the centrists – rather than advance the core goals of the far right. As a result, there is a growing exasperation with Netanyahu. Sections of the far right want someone new, someone invested in their cause – not in his own political and personal manoeuvrings.

    In the fashion of Middle Eastern dictators, Netanyahu has groomed no successor. He has cultivated a learnt helplessness in his own ideological camp, and the princes of the settlements are fearful of how they will cope without him. He has been their nursemaid for too long.

    But like rebellious teenagers, they want a taste of freedom – and to wreak more havoc than Netanyahu has ever allowed.

    They hope to break free of the political centre of gravity he has engineered for himself. If they finally manage it, we may yet look back on the Netanyahu era as a time of relative moderation and calm.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    This article was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2021 at 10:01pm and is filed under Annexation, Apartheid, Benjamin Netanyahu, Benny Gantz, Elections, Ethnic Cleansing, Hypocrisy, Israel/Palestine, Land Theft, Media, Media Bias, Occupation, Oslo Accords, Politics, Propaganda, The “Right”.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The “humanitarian” left still ignores the lessons of Iraq, Libya and Syria to cheer on more war

    The instinct among parts of the left to cheer lead the right’s war crimes, so long as they are dressed up as liberal “humanitarianism”, is alive and kicking, as Owen Jones reveals in a column today on the plight of the Uighurs at China’s hands.

    The “humanitarian war” instinct persists even after two decades of the horror shows that followed the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the US and UK; the western-sponsored butchering of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi that unleashed a new regional trade in slaves and arms; and the west’s covert backing of Islamic jihadists who proceeded to tear Syria apart.

    In fact, those weren’t really separate horror shows: they were instalments of one long horror show.

    The vacuum left in Iraq by the west – the execution of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of his armed forces – sucked in Islamic extremists from every corner of the Middle East. The US and UK occupations of Iraq served both as fuel to rationalise new, more nihilistic Islamic doctrines that culminated in the emergence of Islamic State, and as a training ground for jihadists to develop better methods of militarised resistance.

    That process accelerated in post-Gaddafi Libya, where Islamic extremists were handed an even more lawless country than post-invasion Iraq in which to recruit followers and train them, and trade arms. All of that know-how and weaponry ended up flooding into Syria where the same Islamic extremists hoped to establish the seat of their new caliphate.

    Many millions of Arabs across the region were either slaughtered or forced to flee their homes, becoming permanent refugees, because of the supposedly “humanitarian” impulse unleashed by George W Bush and Tony Blair.

    No lesson learnt

    One might imagine that by this stage liberal humanitarianism was entirely discredited, at least on the left. But you would be wrong. There are still those who have learnt no lessons at all – like the Guardian’s Owen Jones. In his column today he picks up and runs with the latest pretext for global warmongering by the right: the Uighurs, a Muslim minority that has long been oppressed by China.

    After acknowledging the bad faith arguments and general unreliability of the right, Jones sallies forth to argue – as if Iraq, Libya and Syria never happened – that the left must not avoid good causes just because bad people support them. We must not, he writes:

    sacrifice oppressed Muslims on the altar of geopolitics: and indeed, it is possible to walk and to chew gum; to oppose western militarism and to stand with victims of state violence. It would be perverse to cede a defence of China’s Muslims – however disingenuous – to reactionaries and warmongers.

    But this is to entirely miss the point of the anti-war and anti-imperialist politics that are the bedrock of any progressive left wing movement.

    Jones does at least note, even if very cursorily, the bad-faith reasoning of the right when it accuses the left of being all too ready to protest outside a US or Israeli embassy but not a Chinese or Russian one:

    Citizens [in the west] have at least some potential leverage over their own governments: whether it be to stop participation in foreign action, or encourage them to confront human rights abusing allies.

    But he then ignores this important observation about power and responsibility and repurposes it as a stick to beat the left with:

    But that doesn’t mean abandoning a commitment to defending the oppressed, whoever their oppressor might be. To speak out against Islamophobia in western societies but to remain silent about the Uighurs is to declare that the security of Muslims only matters in some countries. We need genuine universalists.

    That is not only a facile argument, it’s a deeply dangerous one. There are two important additional reasons why the left needs to avoid cheerleading the right’s favoured warmongering causes, based on both its anti-imperialist and anti-war priorities.

    Virtue-signalling

    Jones misunderstands the goal of the left’s anti-imperialist politics. It is not, as the right so often claims, about left wing “virtue-signalling”. It is the very opposite of that. It is about carefully selecting our political priorities – priorities necessarily antithetical to the dominant narratives promoted by the west’s warmongering political and media establishments. Our primary goal is to undermine imperialist causes that have led to such great violence and suffering around the world.

    Jones forgets that the purpose of the anti-war left is not to back the west’s warmongering establishment for picking a ‘humanitarian’ cause for its wars. It is to discredit the establishment, expose its warmongering and stop its wars.

    The best measure – practical and ethical – for the western left to use to determine which causes to expend its limited resources and energies on are those that can help others to wake up to the continuing destructive behaviours of the west’s political establishment, even when that warmongering establishment presents itself in two guises: whether the Republicans and the Democrats in the United States, or the Conservatives and the (non-Corbyn) Labour party in the UK.

    We on the left cannot influence China or Russia. But we can try to influence debates in our own societies that discredit the western elite headquartered in the US – the world’s sole military superpower.

    Our job is not just to weigh the scales of injustice – in any case, the thumb of the west’s power-elite is far heavier than any of its rivals. It is to highlight the bad faith nature of western foreign policy, and underscore to the wider public that the real aim of the west’s foreign policy elite is either to attack or to intimidate those who refuse to submit to its power or hand over their resources.

    Do no harm

    That is what modern imperialism looks like. To ignore the bad faith of a Pompeo, a Blair, an Obama, a Bush or a Trump simply because they briefly adopt a good cause for ignoble reasons is to betray anti-imperialist politics. To use a medical analogy, it is to fixate on one symptom of global injustice while refusing to diagnose the actual disease so that it can be treated.

    Requiring, as Jones does, that we prioritise the Uighurs – especially when they are the momentary pet project of the west’s warmongering, anti-China right – does not advance our anti-imperialist goals, it actively harms them. Because the left offers its own credibility, its own stamp of approval, to the right’s warmongering.

    When the left is weak – when, unlike the right, it has no corporate media to dominate the airwaves with its political concerns and priorities, when it has almost no politicians articulating its worldview – it cannot control how its support for humanitarian causes is presented to the general public. Instead it always finds itself coopted into the drumbeat for war.

    That is a lesson Jones should have learnt personally – in fact, a lesson he promised he had learnt – after his cooption by the corporate Guardian to damage the political fortunes of Jeremy Corbyn, the only anti-war, anti-imperialist politician Britain has ever had who was in sight of power.

    Anti-imperialist politics is not about good intentions; it’s about beneficial outcomes. To employ another medical analogy, our credo must to be to do no harm – or, if that is not possible, at least to minimise harm.

    The ‘defence’ industry

    Which is why the flaw in Jones’ argument runs deeper still.

    The anti-war left is not just against acts of wars, though of course it is against those too. It is against the global war economy: the weapons manufacturers that fund our politicians; the arms trade lobbies that now sit in our governments; our leaders, of the right and so-called left, who divide the world into a Manichean struggle between the good guys and bad guys to justify their warmongering and weapons purchases; the arms traders that profit from human violence and suffering; the stock-piling of nuclear weapons that threaten our future as a species.

    The anti-war left is against the globe’s dominant, western war economy, one that deceives us into believing it is really a “defence industry”. That “defence industry” needs villains, like China and Russia, that it must extravagantly arm itself against. And that means fixating on the crimes of China and Russia, while largely ignoring our own crimes, so that those “defence industries” can prosper.

    Yes, Russia and China have armies too. But no one in the west can credibly believe Moscow or Beijing are going to disarm when the far superior military might of the west – of NATO – flexes its muscles daily in their faces, when it surrounds them with military bases that encroach ever nearer their territory, when it points its missiles menacingly in their direction.

    Rhetoric of war

    Jones and George Monbiot, the other token leftist at the Guardian with no understanding of how global politics works, can always be relied on to cheerlead the western establishment’s humanitarian claims – and demand that we do too. That is also doubtless the reason they are allowed their solitary slots in the liberal corporate media.

    When called out, the pair argue that, even though they loudly trumpet their detestation of Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad, that does not implicate them in the wars that are subsequently waged against Iraq or Syria.

    This is obviously infantile logic, which assumes that the left can echo the rhetoric of the west’s warmongering power-elite without taking any responsibility for the wars that result from that warmongering.

    But Jones’ logic is even more grossly flawed than that. It pretends that the left can echo the rhetoric of the warmongers and not take responsibility for the war industries that constantly thrive and expand, whether or not actual wars are being waged at any one time.

    The western foreign policy elite is concerned about the Uighurs not because it wishes to save them from Chinese persecution or even because it necessarily intends to use them as a pretext to attack China. Rather, its professed concerns serve to underpin claims that are essential to the success of its war industries: that the west is the global good guy; that China is a potential nemesis, the Joker to our Batman; and that the west therefore needs an even bigger arsenal, paid by us as taxpayers, to protect itself.

    The Uighurs’ cause is being instrumentalised by the west’s foreign policy establishment to further enhance its power and make the world even less safe for us all, the Uighurs included. Whatever Jones claims, there should be no obligation on the left to give succour to the west’s war industries.

    Vilifying “official enemies” while safely ensconced inside the “defence” umbrella of the global superpower and hegemony is a crime against peace, against justice, against survival. Jones is free to flaunt his humanitarian credentials, but so are we to reject political demands dictated to us by the west’s war machine.

    The anti-war left has its own struggles, its own priorities. It does not need to be gaslit by Mike Pompeo or Tony Blair – or, for that matter, by Owen Jones.

    This article was posted on Saturday, January 23rd, 2021 at 5:32pm and is filed under China, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi, Hypocrisy, Imperialism, Iraq, Libya, Media Bias, Media Criticism, President Bashar al-Assad, Propaganda, Russia, Syria, The “Left”, The “Right”, The “West”, UK Media, UK Military, United Kingdom, US Foreign Policy, US Hegemony, US Military, War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • By “Force and Fraud”: Is This the End of the US Democracy Doctrine?   

    In an interview with the British newspaper, The Times, in 2015, former US Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, vehemently denied that exporting democracy to Iraq was the main motive behind the US invasion of that Arab country 12 years earlier.

    Rumsfeld further alleged that “the idea that we could fashion a democracy in Iraq seemed to me unrealistic.” But the US’ top military chief was being dishonest. Writing in Mother Jones, Miles E. Johnson responded to Rumsfeld’s claim by quoting some of his previous statements where he, repeatedly, cited democracy as the main reason behind the US invasion, a war that was one of the most destructive since Vietnam.

    Certainly, it was not Rumsfeld alone who brazenly promoted the democracy pretense. Indeed, ‘democracy’ was the buzzword, parroted by thousands of Americans: in government, the military, mainstream media, and the numerous think-tanks that dotted the intellectual and political landscape of Washington.

    One could not help but reflect on the subject when, on January 6, thousands of Americans stormed the Washington Plaza, climbing the walls of Capitol Hill and taking over the US Congress. A country that has assigned itself the role of the defender of democracy worldwide, now stands unable to defend its own democracy at home.

    In the case of Iraq, as soon as US soldiers stormed into Baghdad, they hurriedly occupied all government buildings and every symbol of Iraqi sovereignty. Triumphant soldiers were filmed rampaging through the offices of former Iraqi ministers, smoking their cigars, while placing their dirty boots on top of their desks. Bizarrely, similar scenes were repeated in Washington 17 years later, this time in the offices of top US legislators, including the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi.

    In Iraq, from March 2003, ministers were hunted down, as their photos and names were circulated through what the US military referred to as Iraq’s ‘most wanted deck of cards’. In the American scenario, US Congressmen and women were forced to cower under their desks or to run for their lives.

    The violent events in Washington have been depicted by US mainstream media as if a temporary crisis, instigated by a president who refuses to concede power peacefully and democratically. The truth, however, is far more complex. There is nothing transitory about any of this and, while Donald Trump is largely to blame for the bloody events of this day, the man is a symptom of America’s rooted democracy crisis, which is likely to worsen in the future.

    Famed American linguist and historian, Noam Chomsky, has long argued that the US is not a democracy but a plutocracy, a country that is governed by the interests of the powerful few. He also argued that, while the US does operate based on formal democratic structures, these are largely dysfunctional. In an interview with Global Policy Journal in 2019, Chomsky further asserted that the “US Constitution was framed to thwart the democratic aspirations of most of the public.”

    This has been evident for many years. Long before Trump became President, the dichotomy of American democracy has expressed itself in the way that the American people interact with their supposedly democratic institutions. For example, merely 20% of US adults trust their government, according to a Pew Research Center poll published last September. This number has remained relatively unchanged under previous administrations.

    With the US economy rapidly sinking due to various factors, including the government’s mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic, the people’s distrust in government is now manifesting itself in new ways, including mass violence. The fact that 77% of those who voted for Trump in the November elections believe that Joe Biden’s win was due to fraud, suggests that a sizable percentage of Americans have little faith in their country’s democracy. The consequences of this realization will surely be dire.

    America’s constitutional crisis, which is unlikely to be resolved in the current atmosphere of polarization, is compounded by an external political crisis. Historically, the US has defined and redefined its mission in the world based on lofty spiritual, moral and political maxims, starting with ‘Manifest Destiny’, to fighting communism, to eventually serving as the defender of human rights and democracy around the world. The latter was merely a pretense used to provide a moral cover that would allow the US to reorder the world for the sake of expanding its market and ensuring its economic dominance.

    Thomas Paine, whose influence on US ideals of liberty and democracy is arguably unmatched, warned, in “Common Sense” in 1776, against the potential tyranny of those who “attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud, as if they were all knaves and fools.”

    Alas, Paine’s warning went unheeded. Indeed, the democracy ‘fraud’ that Rumsfeld, George W. Bush, et al carried out in Iraq in 2003, was a mere repetition of numerous other fraudulent military campaigns carried out around the world. The ‘protectors of democracy’ became the very men responsible for its undoing.

    Unquestionably, the storming of US Congress will have global repercussions, not least among them the weakening of US hegemonic and self-serving definition of what constitutes a democracy. Is it possible that the US democracy doctrine could soon cease to be relevant in the lexicon of US foreign policy conduct, one that is predicated, per Paine’s logic, on “force and fraud”?

    This article was posted on Monday, January 18th, 2021 at 5:47pm and is filed under Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, Iraq, Media Bias, Plutocracy, Propaganda, US Congress, US Media, US Military, US War Crimes.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Stuck In A Lift With John Pilger: News And How To Use It by Alan Rusbridger

    Noticing the way journalists seemed unable to resist commenting on our work, even if it was just to slag us off, Glenn Greenwald tweeted us in 2012:

    ‘You are really deeper in the heads of the British establishment-serving commentariat than anyone else – congrats.’ 

    If that was true then, our relationship with the commentariat now feels more like a case of out of sight, out of mind. We have been blocked en masse on Twitter, even by loveable liberals like Jeremy Bowen, Jon Snow, Mark Steel (yes, ‘radical’ Mark Steel!), Steve Bell, Frankie Boyle (the less said about that the better) and, of course, Owen Jones and George Monbiot.

    Where polite questions once provoked lengthy, thoughtful replies from the likes of Richard Sambrook, director of BBC news, and Guardian reader’s editor, Ian Mayes, they’re now met with sullen silence. As Noam Chomsky commented to us:

    ‘Am really impressed with what you are doing, though it’s like trying to move a ten-ton truck with a toothpick. They’re not going to allow themselves to be exposed.’

    It makes sense, does it not, that the ‘ten-ton truck’ would be better off ignoring the ‘toothpick’? What does the truck stand to gain from engaging when it can simply thunder on its way? Why risk picking up a tiny reputational scratch?

    A journalist friend – one of our ‘mainstream’ sleepers, programmed to rise on our command – wrote to us:

    ‘You must see the reaction in a newsroom when one mentions Chomsky or Pilger. They run the other way, and I can see they are afraid by the look on their faces. Fact is that once you understand and admit what you are doing, you can’t continue with it. When I mentioned Chomsky, one person commented, “Oh, he’s way out there.” “Way out where?” I asked.’

    Imagine our surprise, then, to discover that in his latest book, News and How to Use It, the Guardian’s long-term former editor (1995-2014), Alan Rusbridger, mentions Media Lens repeatedly, including lengthy quotes, a link to a media alert, and even a level of agreement. This is surprising, not least because Rusbridger blocked us on Twitter many years ago and has not replied to our emails since about 2005. We assumed he had forgotten all about us.

    But there is more: Rusbridger discusses Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s ‘propaganda model of media control’ with its five ‘filters’, in detail, filter by filter. He declares the book that presented the model, Manufacturing Consent, a ‘classic’.

    Anyone checking UK national media databases for mentions of the ‘propaganda model’ will find a handful of mentions, mostly in passing. (John Naughton erroneously noted of Rusbridger in his Guardian review: ‘Uniquely among established journalists, he takes seriously the work of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman on “manufacturing consent”…’ Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University, would be surprised at just how many of the better journalists have told us privately that they agree with much, or all, of the propaganda model.)

    Rusbridger also discusses the work of John Pilger and Robert Fisk at length. Even media activist terms like ‘MSM’ (‘“mainstream” media’), ‘lamestream media’ (a Trumpism) and ‘presstitutes’ are discussed.

    To put this in perspective, the Guardian’s token leftist, Owen Jones – absurdly described by Russell Brand as, ‘our generation’s Orwell’ – made no mention of Herman, Chomsky, Pilger, Fisk, the propaganda model, or Media Lens, in his two most recent books, The Establishment (2014) and This Land! (2020).

    ‘Out, Damned Spot! Out, I Say!…’

    A recurring, haunting presence in News and How to Use It, the propaganda model appears to play Banquo’s ghost to Rusbridger’s Macbeth. As our media insider warned, ‘once you understand and admit what you are doing, you can’t continue with it’.

    Rusbridger has continued with it, but is clearly struggling to reconcile his sense of himself as a benevolent, principled liberal with the propaganda model’s damning assessment of the role someone in his position has to play.

    The same internal conflicts were apparent in a remarkable interview conducted by one of us, David Edwards (DE), with Rusbridger (AR) in 2000. In the interview, as in his book, Rusbridger began by agreeing with the central thesis of the propaganda model:

    DE: ‘Basically, one radical analysis of the media is that the pressures of advertising, of wealthy owners and parent companies, have an effect similar to filtering, so that facts and ideas that are damaging to powerful advertisers and powerful parent companies, and so on, tend to be filtered from press reporting.’

    (7 second pause)

    AR: ‘Um, I’m sure there is a… (6 second pause) that the pressures of ownership on newspapers is, is pretty important, and it works in all kinds of subtle ways – I suppose “filter” is as good a word as any. The whole thing works by a kind of osmosis. If you ask anybody who works in newspapers, they will quite rightly say, “Rupert Murdoch”, or whoever, “never tells me what to write”, which is beside the point: they don’t have to be told what to write.’

    DE: ‘That’s right, it’s just understood.’

    AR: ‘It’s understood. I think that does work, and obviously the general interests of most of the people who own newspapers are going to be fairly conventional, pro-business interests. So, you know, I’m sure that is broadly true, yes.’

    What is so interesting is that Rusbridger not only agreed with the propaganda model, he agreed that the model explains why the model is ignored by corporate media:

    AR: ‘It doesn’t get written about a lot in the mainstream press, but I mean, you know, for obvious reasons. But there’s a lot of it in books… I agree, but you can sort of understand the reasons why, why it doesn’t happen.’

    But then came the rub:

    DE: ‘So it’s not able to be discussed?’

    (8-9 second pause)

    AR: ‘Um…’

    Rusbridger hesitated before the looming Shakespearean spectre of his own cognitive dissonance. As Chomsky has observed, the role of a liberal editor is to draw a line: ‘to say, in effect, this far and no further’. How far would Rusbridger go? Because he, of course, knew what was coming next:

    DE: ‘I mean, could you discuss it [in the Guardian] if you wanted to?’

    AR: ‘Oh yes. I would say it’s something we do fairly regularly. But then we’re not owned by a… We’re owned by a trust; we haven’t got a proprietor. So we’re in a sort of unique position of being able to discuss this kind of stuff.’

    As if any undergraduate, any secondary school pupil, could fail to understand that the lack of a proprietor did not mean the elite, (then) Scott Trust-run, profit-maximising, ad-dependent, state source-dependent, corporate Guardian was ‘in a sort of unique position of being able to discuss this kind of stuff’.

    This was so disconcerting in the interview because the articulate, intelligent, friendly, reasonable, comparatively humble, and, in fact, likeable, Guardian editor had revealed himself to be an example of what psychologist Erich Fromm called a ‘marketing orientation’.

    The marketing character experiences him or herself ‘as a commodity, or rather simultaneously as the seller and the commodity to be sold’ (p. 70). He puts his job, his career, his corporation first. His view of the world is drastically shaped and limited by his need to sell himself and his product on the market.

    A marketing character like Rusbridger is reasonable and rational, but only up to a point. The problem, as we will see, is that the suffering of hundreds of thousands, indeed millions, of human beings begins where that point ends.

    The limits are not set by a lack of intelligence – it wasn’t that Rusbridger couldn’t understand why the propaganda model also applies to the Guardian – but by the logic of the job description, of the market and profit. Anything that seriously threatens these linked personal-corporate priorities is rejected, ignored, brushed under the psychological carpet. Nietzsche wrote:

    ‘Memory says, “I did that.” Pride replies, “I could not have done that.” Eventually, memory yields.’

    Memory yields everywhere in ‘News and How to Use It’, as Rusbridger’s marketing character screens the truth from awareness. His talent in this regard is such that we suspect he would find much that follows genuinely surprising.

    Mass Death And Problematic Haircuts – Prickly Pilger

    Consider his section on John Pilger. Rusbridger has to recognise Pilger’s achievements; to do otherwise would be absurdly biased, particularly given that he hosted his column in the Guardian for many years (a column Pilger described as a ‘fig leaf’).

    Pilger, he says, ‘embodies many of the classic qualities of the very best of investigative journalists: he is brave, uncompromising and tenacious’. (p. 200)

    That sounds positive enough, but alarm bells should already be ringing. Firstly, all three adjectives can be interpreted negatively – one can be idiotically ‘brave, uncompromising and tenacious’. And indeed, Rusbridger’s first, thinly-veiled slur points in this direction:

    ‘He also appears utterly secure in the armour of his self-belief.’ (p. 200)

    As we have often noted, the first resort of every corporate journalist in attacking any dissident is to focus on their supposed ‘narcissism’. Charles Jennings didn’t use the word, but he had exactly this in mind when he commented in 1999:

    ‘I guess you have to have John Pilger. With his tan, his Byronic haircut, his trudging priestly delivery and his evident self-love, your main instinct is to flip right over to BBC1…’

    Pilger is ‘brave, uncompromising and tenacious’, but many journalists share these qualities, which do not at all describe Pilger’s significance, or why Rusbridger is discussing his work at such length.

    Pilger’s ‘classic qualities’ relate to the fact that, surrounded by corporate compromisers and actual state stooges, he reports honestly on the crimes of state-corporate power – including ‘liberal’ power, including corporate media power. Pilger tells the unfiltered, uncompromised truth about the foundations of power. His focus is on speaking up for the victims of power, not on serving power.

    A serious analysis of the merits of Pilger’s work, then, simply has to include an honest appraisal of his deepest criticisms of power – these are what make Pilger so unusual and important. But, of course, that is something marketing character Rusbridger cannot do, just as he could not honestly discuss the relevance of the propaganda model for the Guardian in his 2000 interview. Instead, he focuses time and again on Pilger’s supposed character flaws.

    Alas, says Rusbridger, ‘even some of his greatest fans have found him an increasingly difficult, prickly figure shooting first and not always asking questions later’. (p. 200.)

    Or as Roy Greenslade wrote of Pilger 16 years ago:

    ‘He is undoubtedly a prickly character.  As an editor once remarked, only a little unfairly, he is a hero until you know him.’

    In similar vein, Rusbridger cites a former Question Time editor, ‘a self-confessed fan’, who had come to the view that Pilger was ‘someone I’d rather stick needles in my eyes than be stuck in a lift with’. (p. 200)

    By the way, yes, Pilger is prickly – he is a passionate, feeling individual – but that is part of his sincerity and honesty. In our experience, he is also an extraordinarily generous and compassionate person. His sincerity, of course, makes it difficult for him to be in the company of ethical eels like Greenslade and BBC Question Time editors. As Harold Pinter once wrote:

    ‘Dear Tom

    Thanks for your invitation to host a fundraising dinner in the private room of a top London restaurant.

    I would rather die.

    All the best,

    Yours,

    Harold’

    But quite regardless of their accuracy, these ad hominem attacks on Pilger are, in fact, a rejection of honest debate.

    Consider that, in reviewing Pilger’s 2000 documentary, Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq, which focused on the UN’s assertion that US-UK sanctions had been responsible for the deaths of 500,000 children under five in Iraq, Joe Joseph wrote in The Times:

    ‘In his latest, harrowing documentary… the fearless Australian journalist reminds us that – however daunting the odds stacked against him – he is not going to shy away from his lifelong commitment to make TV programmes with extremely long titles…’

    Joseph added:

    ‘His angry, I-want-some-answers-please documentary style, like his haircut, is a hangover from the 1970s; and like much of the Seventies, he is enjoying a small retro revival. Pilger is the Prada of TV journalism.’

    One has to pinch oneself to remember that this was a review of a documentary exploring highly credible claims that Britain and the US were responsible for the deaths of half a million small children.

    If the point is not clear, imagine if someone with serious, verifiable evidence interrupted a town hall meeting to warn that government troops were at that moment burning hundreds of children alive in the local school. Now, we might urgently seek to challenge and check the claims, but what would we make of someone who responded by mocking the haircut of the person raising the alarm? Would we not find this a morally depraved response?

    Likewise, Rusbridger would certainly be justified in discussing the evidence for and against Pilger’s most damning criticisms of power, but to focus repeatedly on his ‘prickly’ personality is again morally depraved, because it is part of marketing character Rusbridger’s unwillingness to engage with the genuinely life-and-death issues Pilger is discussing. Children really are being burned to death and Pilger is one of the few journalists trying to draw attention to their plight.

    In other words, Rusbridger perceives his focus on Pilger’s personality as ‘balance’, but actually it is his way of avoiding, not just balance, but a rational debate about what Pilger’s journalism is really all about.

    After all, who gives a damn about personal prickliness when, in 1996, at a time when liberals at the Guardian and elsewhere were united in swooning at his feet, Pilger was all but alone in writing of Tony Blair:

    ‘To all but the trusting or cynical it must be dawning that the next Labour government is quite likely to be more reactionary, nastier and a greater threat to true democracy than its venal Tory predecessor.’

    At the time, this was universally dismissed as wretched, ‘old-left’ carping. A few months later, a Guardian leader under Rusbridger’s editorship responded thus to Blair’s ascent to power:

    ‘“Few now sang England Arise, but England had risen all the same.”’ 

    Tragicomically, the Guardian predicted that, by 2007, Blair’s triumph would be seen as ‘one of the great turning-points of British political history… the moment when Britain at last gave itself the chance to construct a modern liberal socialist order’. 

    Pilger was right, Rusbridger et al were disastrously wrong. Blair went on to kill one million people in Iraq, transforming the Labour Party into a Tory-Lite façade that eliminated British democratic choice for a generation. The state-corporate propaganda blitz that recently consumed Jeremy Corbyn had its roots in Blair’s great coup, in frantic efforts to maintain the anti-democratic status quo he installed.

    In 2005, Pilger said of Blair and Iraq:

    ‘By voting for Blair, you will walk over the corpses of at least 100,000 people, most of them innocent women and children and the elderly, slaughtered by rapacious forces sent by Blair and Bush, unprovoked and in defiance of international law, to a defenceless country.’ (Pilger, ‘

    A Rusbridger Guardian leader commented:

    ‘While 2005 will be remembered as Tony Blair’s Iraq election, May 5 is not a referendum on that one decision, however fateful… We believe that Mr Blair should be re-elected to lead Labour into a third term this week.’

    Pilger was right, the Guardian’s position was a moral obscenity. No Official Enemy leader responsible for mass death on such a scale would ever be forgiven and normalised in this way.

    In June 2008, Pilger wrote of Obama:

    ‘Like all serious presidential candidates, past and present, Obama is a hawk and an expansionist. He comes from an unbroken Democratic tradition, as the war-making of presidents Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter and Clinton demonstrates.’

    A Guardian leader under Rusbridger commented:

    ‘They did it. They really did it. So often crudely caricatured by others, the American people yesterday stood in the eye of history and made an emphatic choice for change for themselves and the world…

    ‘Today is for celebration, for happiness and for reflected human glory. Savour those words: President Barack Obama, America’s hope and, in no small way, ours too.’

    Again, Pilger was right – Obama went on to bomb seven Muslim-majority countries. He oversaw the devastation of Syria and Yemen, and the near-complete destruction of Libya.

    In his book, Rusbridger mentions the word ‘Libya’ exactly once, in passing, referring to what he foolishly calls ‘the Libyan revolution’ (p. 182. Showing a similar level of insight, Rusbridger describes Trump’s April 2018 blitz of Syria after the alleged chemical weapons attack in Douma as ‘retaliatory’, p.108). He makes no mention at all of the Libyan war, or of the Guardian’s relentless propagandising for war under his editorship that, just eight years after the Iraq calamity, was again based on completely fake pretexts.

    Once again, Pilger was a lone voice defying corporate media herdthink:

    ‘The Nato attack on Libya, with the UN Security Council assigned to mandate a bogus “no fly zone” to “protect civilians”, is strikingly similar to the final destruction of Yugoslavia in 1999. There was no UN cover for the bombing of Serbia and the “rescue” of Kosovo, yet the propaganda echoes today. Like Slobodan Milosevic, Muammar Gaddafi is a “new Hitler”, plotting “genocide” against his people. There is no evidence of this, as there was no genocide in Kosovo.’

    A Guardian leader under Rusbridger saw things differently:

    ‘But it can now reasonably be said that in narrow military terms it worked, and that politically there was some retrospective justification for its advocates as the crowds poured into the streets of Tripoli to welcome the rebel convoys earlier this week.’

    Again, Pilger was entirely vindicated, not least by a 9 September 2016 report into the war from the foreign affairs committee of the House of Commons. The issue Rusbridger ignores is no small matter – in relentlessly promoting a devastating, illegal war, he and his staff were complicit in a major war crime.

    Pilger ‘has become the doyen of a certain style of uncompromising journalism’, Rusbridger continues. He means ‘controversial’:

    ‘His roiling anger is palpable and grows with each passing year, using language that has certainly “slipped the leash”.’ (p. 201)

    ‘For instance’, says Rusbridger, quoting Pilger:

    ‘Should the CIA stooge Guaido and his white supremacists grab power, it will be the 68th overthrow of a sovereign government by the United States, most of them democracies. A fire sale of Venezuela’s utilities and mineral wealth will surely follow, along with the theft of the country’s oil, as outlined by John Bolton.’

    Perhaps because he’s an avid Guardian reader, Rusbridger appears to find this outrageous. In 2019, former Guardian journalist Jonathan Cook tweeted:

    ‘Oh look! Juan Guaido, the figurehead for the CIA’s illegal regime-change operation intended to grab Venezuela’s oil (as John Bolton has publicly conceded), is again presented breathlessly by the Guardian as the country’s saviour’

    It was indeed a consistent and shameful Guardian trend. Cook linked to a Guardian piece titled: ‘“¡Sí se puede!” shouts rapturous crowd at Juan Guaidó rally’.

    Writing on the Grayzone website, Dan Cohen and Max Blumenthal supplied some perspective:

    ‘Juan Guaidó is the product of a decade-long project overseen by Washington’s elite regime change trainers. While posing as a champion of democracy, he has spent years at the forefront of a violent campaign of destabilization.’

    We could go on adding examples of how ‘prickly’, unsavoury lift companion, Pilger – with his ‘roiling anger’ and ‘Lear-like ranting’ at ‘too high a volume with no tone or balance control’ (p. 204) – was right in expressing forbidden truths that Rusbridger cannot discuss because it would mean exposing himself and the Guardian in exactly the way the ‘ten-ton truck’ would never do.

    In 2006, Pilger wrote:

    ‘In reclaiming the honour of our craft, not to mention the truth, we journalists at least need to understand the historic task to which we are assigned – that is, to report the rest of humanity in terms of its usefulness, or otherwise, to “us”, and to soften up the public for rapacious attacks on countries that are no threat to us.’

    This is not something Rusbridger could ever honestly discuss. Why? Because it’s exactly the role he performed as editor of the Guardian.

    There is much more we could say about the book – on Rusbridger’s similarly blinkered comments on Robert Fisk and Julian Assange. Rusbridger does deserve credit for discussing the propaganda model and he even cites examples in support of our arguments on the filtering effect of advertising (pp. 47-9). He accepts that ‘many aspects of journalism go oddly unexamined’ (p. 11) but cannot perceive the structural propaganda function of an industry that reflexively supports illegal wars on countries like Serbia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Yemen.

    The most striking example of ‘mainstream’ propaganda function in recent times has been the fascistic, cross-spectrum campaign to destroy Corbyn. In essence, the entire corporate media system declared Corbyn off-limits to voters, disallowed. Rusbridger’s own newspaper led this extraordinary campaign of demonisation and yet he mentions Corbyn just once, listing his inability to recognise TV presenters Ant and Dec as an example of trivial news, or ‘chaff’ (p. 46).

    As Herman and Chomsky, and indeed Fromm, would expect, marketing character Rusbridger is blind to the significance of a mild socialist threat to corporate power being smeared into oblivion by an entire corporate media system, that ‘rough old trade’. (p. 225)

    This article was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2020 at 6:42pm and is filed under Book Review, Media, Media Bias, UK Media.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.