the main stream corporate media has been polishing joe's turds.....

The great failure of the press to carry out the bare minimum of its journalistic mandate—to hold political figures accountable in a representative democracy, and to at least question such obvious electoral fabrications, such as the kind George Santos perpetrated—are prime examples of what Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored from 1996-2010, identified as News Abuse.

By Robin Andersen / CounterPunch

The complacency of corporate media is a crucial indicator of America’s declining democracy, and exposing media distortions and misdirection, including the spread of corporate and government propaganda (in all its many forms, both systemic and targeted), is the mandate for the study of News Abuse. Its analysis is the starting point for understanding the ongoing toxic political environment and the dangerous discourses that have led to devastating consequences for freedom of expression and the press. Cast a glance back at the last year, and it becomes clear that Phillips’ conception of News Abuse remains sadly relevant. The corporate media’s handling of the following stories offered plenty of clickworthy details, but little investigation into the powerful interests operating behind the scenes.

The Ohio Train Disaster

On February 3, 2023, an eastbound Norfolk Southern freight train carrying 150 cars, including at least five tanker cars containing vinyl chloride, a Class 2 flammable gas and known carcinogen, derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, close to the Pennsylvania border. Because of industry lobbying, the train had been exempted from the “high-hazard flammable train” classification that requires more stringent safety regulations. In the following days, vinyl chloride and other unknown toxic chemicals would be released into the atmosphere, exacerbated by a “controlled burn” that lasted for days. The spill would kill wildlife and fish for miles, as residents complained of toxic air quality that burned their eyes and made it hard to breathe. Though EPA officials announced that the community’s water was safe to drink, it was subsequently revealed that sloppy, inaccurate water testing was conducted by the rail industry itself.

Images of the environmental and public health catastrophe published by NOAA’s Air Resources Laboratory used atmospheric transport and dispersion models known as HYSPLIT to track cancer-causing air particles as far north as Montreal, Canada. Corporate media reported what could be seen on the ground with images of the black cloud of smoke looming over the landscape, nearly indistinguishable from the cinematography of disaster films. Overhead shots of the piled-up train cars, jammed accordion-style, dominated coverage. Following sensationalized visual footage, the disaster frame focused corporate media toward official announcements and reactions, offering little in the way of background context. That was left to independent news sources.

For example, The Lever published a timely and impressive body of work that detailed years of corporate lobbying and government compliance (under various administrations) aimed at undermining regulatory oversight. Safety measures across the rail industry had been effectively blocked for years, leaving in place a Civil War-era braking system, no requirement to identify many toxic chemicals, and a lack of steel-lined rail cars capable of containing chemicals after a train derailment, among others.Rail companies, including Norfolk Southern, claimed that added safety measures were too expensive, and they continued to increase the number of cars per train, even as they laid off thousands of workers and delivered billions of dollars in profits to CEOs and shareholders.

An extensive content analysis of network news reporting between February 4 and February 13 demonstrated the degree to which corporate media failed to inform the American public about the causes and context of the derailment. Media Matters for America found that major TV news networks on cable (CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC) and broadcast (ABC, CBS, and NBC) aired nearly three hours of coverage on the Ohio train derailment, across ninety-two segments, but only two programs, both airing on February 13, addressed “how regulations governing the transport of hazardous materials by rail were weakened under multiple administrations by rail industry lobbyists, including those representing Norfolk Southern.” The study concluded that national TV news “failed to incorporate critical context about the rail industry’s efforts to weaken safety regulations.”

A Year of Non-Stop War in Ukraine

Many factors have led to a pro-war, pro-Western consensus in establishment journalism as independent views are suppressed and the people who express them are treated with ridicule and contempt. Policy positions that argue against belligerencies in favor of negotiations are all but absent from news cycles. Media critics have identified a pro-Western bias in press coverage of Ukraine, which constitutes one of the most notable cases of News Abuse this year. As Bryce Greene pointed out, the roots of the escalations leading up to the war in Ukraine were “completely omitted from the Western media. “When corporate media did “explain” the war in Ukraine, it “almost universally gave a pro-Western view of US/Russia relations.” Meanwhile troves of documents and investigations about the extent of Western propaganda and anti-Russian information management campaigns have recently been published across a range of online media. However, as with most wars, opinion polls showed slacking public support for US involvement in the war while the conflict in Ukraine continued with no resolution in sight. For example, in spring 2023, 59 percent of the US public said that limiting damage to the US economy was more important than sanctioning Russia. The PBS NewsHour reported that, in March 2022, “the situation was reversed: 55 percent said it was a bigger priority to sanction Russia effectively, even if it meant damage to the US economy.” Yet Pentagon spending is rarely tied to damage done to the US domestic economy.”

The first anniversary of the devastating war in Ukraine was memorialized with stories of bravery and determination and the strong “Biden-Zelensky bond,” taking up the front page of the New York Times above the fold, with more photographs taken over the course of the war featured on the paper’s inside pages. Few scenes of the horrors of war or accounts of the need to negotiate the conflict between two super powers were evident in media coverage. Such war propaganda has far-reaching consequences and has led to the most “wildly overfunded military on the planet,” even though the US military has not won a significant conflict since the second world war. As Tom Engelhardt asserted, from Vietnam to Afghanistan, nothing has stopped the US military from being “massively overfunded by whatever administration is in power or whatever party controls Congress.” There is no significant skepticism in political discourse as “the one- party state in this country…remains the Pentagon.” The severity of the lockdown on public debate about the war in Ukraine was illustrated when a letter from thirty progressive politicians to President Biden, advocating negotiations to end the war, was withdrawn the very the next day because of “blowback.”

The Pentagon also has enormous influence in shaping popular culture and promoting narratives of militarism across the media spectrum. Since the second half of the twentieth century, the power of the Pentagon over films and entertainment has permeated Hollywood, resulting in a near complete lack of critical narratives, as detailed by filmmaker Roger Stahl’s documentary Theaters of War, which screened at film festivals, on university campuses, and online in 2022. The media consensus that reinforces a militarized ethos of belligerencies over any other solution to conflict attests to the intensity of war propaganda, as its influence extends from Hollywood to the reporting of war itself.

The Nord Stream Pipelines, the US Military, and Corporate Media

Reporting for MintPress News, Jonathan Cook characterized the September 2022 destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines as “an act of unrivaled industrial and environmental terrorism.” “Someone blew up the Nord Stream pipelines,” he wrote, “creating an untold environmental catastrophe as the pipes leaked huge quantities of methane, a supremely active global-warming gas.” The Nord Stream pipelines were a multibillion-dollar infrastructure project built by Russia to deliver cheap natural gas to Europe along the seafloor of international waters in the Baltic Sea. Three of the four pipelines were blown up on September 27, 2022. For almost two weeks, the claim that Russia was responsible for the sabotage made the rounds on the headlines of Western news outlets. Much of US media, from Bloomberg to cable news, pointed to Russian culpability. The Washington Post reported, “European Leaders Blame Russian ‘Sabotage’ After Nord Stream Explosions,” citing European Union officials who admitted they had no evidence of Russian involvement but asserted that Russia had the means and the “motivation.” However, the implausible explanation seemed to raise more questions than it answered.

The news frame of Russian responsibility was difficult to maintain, partly because gas and oil revenues financed nearly half of the nation’s annual budget. In addition to causing Russia great financial harm, the blasts also diminished Moscow’s influence over Germany, which had been heavily dependent on Russian gas. As Cook noted in his article for MintPress News, the narrative required Western publics to believe “President Vladimir Putin willingly shot himself in the foot, losing his only leverage over European resolve to impose economic sanctions on his country.” Yet the country with the greatest motivation, the one that had already threatened the pipelines, was the United States.

Writing for Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), Bryce Greene pointed to well-established, longstanding opposition to the pipeline by US officials as evidence of Washington’s motivation. More specifically, in February 2022, the Associated Press reported that President Joe Biden “has threatened to block the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline if Russia invades Ukraine.”

In February 2023 renowned journalist Seymour Hersh—who was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his 1970 reporting on My Lai and exposed the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq—published his investigation into the destruction of the Nord Stream pipelines. His Substack report detailed how the operation was carried out by a Florida-based team of US Navy divers with the help of the Norwegian military. The exposé was the latest in Hersh’s venerable career as a journalist revered for accuracy and integrity, but instead of pursuing the leads and evidence included in Hersh’s report, the establishment press ignored, discredited, or dismissed it. Many outlets quoted US military officials’ statements— which simply denied Hersh’s allegations—as conclusive. One Reuters headline read, “White House Says Blog Post on Nord Stream Explosion ‘Utterly False.’”In an attempt to trivialize and distract, the New York Times handed its opinion page over to Ross Douthat, whose barely coherent meanderings merged the Nord Stream puzzle to questions about the origins of UFOs, whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself, what happened between Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, and other “unsolved mysteries of our time.”

Time to End News Abuse

From political campaigns and environmental disasters to war and the exposure of systemic censorship, establishment media seem incapable of clarification, explanation, or even sketching the contextual origins of news events. Instead, they rely on standardized framing, jingoistic rhetoric, and distractions or outright fabrications—all hallmarks of News Abuse that, no matter how inaccurate, are rarely corrected, and almost never come back to discredit the candidates, pollsters, political officials, propagandists or pundits who espouse them.

It is time for corporate media to represent the views and interests of the majority of Americans, instead of repeating the increasingly transparent lies told by those in positions of power and wealth. Until they do so, establishment media bear a significant share of responsibility for the environmental and human destruction wrought by the endless pursuit of elite interests for money and political control.

This article is adapted from Project Censored’s State of the Free Press 2024.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/23/how-corporate-media-outlets-failed-their-readers-in-2023/

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...................

By Gus Leonisky at 24 Jan 2024 - 5:26am
Gus Leonisky's blog
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Israel's inhumanity.....

By Tareq S. Hajjaj / Mondoweiss

Haytham al-Hilou, 56, was displaced from Beit Hanoun to southern Gaza on October 27 of last year. He says that on his journey south, he was made to pass through a mechanized checkpoint that the Israeli army had set up at the Netzarim junction on Salah al-Din Street. When he passed through the metal doors and the Israeli cameras picked up his image, Israeli soldiers called out his name through a microphone, instructing him to step aside. Al-Hilou was sent to an Israeli detention center, where he would endure sixty days of torture and humiliation interspersed with interrogations for any piece of information that might be of use to the army in identifying and reaching specific targets.

“When I reached the detention point, the soldiers ordered me to take off all my clothes,” he says. “They told us to go wait in a ditch dug by the army a distance away from the checkpoint.”

When he slid down into the ditch, he noticed it was already occupied by dozens of Palestinians who had also been detained, all of them naked and blindfolded. Not much time had passed before soldiers arrived and blindfolded him as well.

Haytham had been fleeing south with his wife and five children, and when he was arrested, there was no one left to look after them. Al-Hilou says his family suffered immensely during his period of imprisonment, struggling to find any shelter that would take them in.

“When I was released, I found my family homeless and in the streets,” he continues. “No shelter, no food, no drink. Every drop of water and piece of bread that they managed to find was after a long period of suffering.”

He says it was a miracle that he found his family alive at all, especially since all his children were very young, including his three daughters and two young boys.

When he was first arrested, he didn’t know where he was being taken. After a long journey, he found himself in Ofer Prison, outside of Ramallah in the West Bank.

At Ofer, he was interrogated and subjected to physical and psychological torture. Israeli intelligence officers denied him food for long periods, holding interrogation sessions for hours on end. They would ask him about the hiding places of Hamas leaders like Yahya Sinwar and demand to know whether there were openings to tunnels inside his home. He kept repeating the same answer.

I am a normal civilian. I am uninvolved in any military activity.

The interrogators would beat him severely and often. As an older man with graying hair, a short frame, and a fragile build, he was unable to endure what had become standard treatment by the Shin Bet.

And the questions would continue. Where are the Hamas leaders? Where are they hiding?

His answers turned into shouts at one point. I don’t know! I don’t know! I am not a Hamas member! I have nothing to do with resistance. I have nothing to do with military activity. I don’t know where the Hamas leaders are, I don’t know anything about them. Civilians don’t know these things, only leaders do. Normal people don’t know who they are. They’re always in hiding.

Despite all this, al-Hilou is grateful that he was eventually released and allowed to return home and that he is now in his family’s arms.

He says that prison during the war is different than in any other period. Prisoners from Gaza are worried about their families, wondering whether they’ve been able to find shelter, whether they were able to secure food, or whether they were dead or alive.

Haytham maintains that there was no reason for his arrest, and no evidence pointed to his involvement in any resistance or military activity. He does mention that between the ages of 17 and 20, he engaged in public activities that supported the resistance but which were not military by any stretch.

“Maybe Israel wanted to punish me for my youth, years that are behind me and well in the past,” he speculates.

In those youthful years, the activities showing support for the resistance that he and his friends had participated in were not at all uncommon. After all, who, in all of Palestine, doesn’t support resistance against the occupation?

Arrested twice in the same day

There are endless stories of arbitrary incarcerations that have taken place at the numerous Israeli military checkpoints throughout the Gaza Strip, where the army maintains control. Some people were arrested once, twice, and even three times during their stay in Gaza City, having refused to leave as part of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the north. Eyad Eleywa is one of those residents. He is still in Gaza City, while several of his children chose to flee south, and are now in Rafah.

Eleywa resides in the Sheikh Radwan neighborhood along with his wife, three of his children, his daughter-in-law, and a number of his other relatives who had fled from the areas north of Gaza City to the city itself. His son Muhammad lives in a tent in the neighborhood of Tal al-Sultan in Rafah. I get to see him every now and again. He recounts the time his father was most recently arrested in northern Gaza.

Muhammad’s father has already been arrested three times, and two of those arrests happened on the same day. Muhammad says that at the beginning of the ground operation in Gaza City, soldiers took his father from his home in Sheikh Radwan and ordered him to take off all his clothes before blindfolding him and leaving him out in the cold while conducting field interrogations.

Where are the tunnel openings? Where are the Hamas fighters? Who do you know who owns weapons in the city? The questions weren’t asked only once, and he was detained from the early morning until the late afternoon. When the soldiers were done with him, they dropped him off in al-Tuwan, far away from his home in Sheikh Radwan. They ordered the elderly man, naked and beaten, deprived of food and water for that entire period, to walk back.

On that same evening, as he returned home on foot, he was arrested a second time at another checkpoint in the area separating al-Tuwan from the al-Nasr neighborhood. He spent the entire night in Israeli custody and was released the following day.

“When they gather the detainees in one place, they line them up one by one and terrorize them,” Muhammad says, relaying his father’s account of his treatment while under arrest. “They move from one person to the next, telling each of them, ‘We’re going to send you to your God,’ and ‘We’re going to send you to heaven to marry the virgins.’”

Horror hidden from the world

Those who have gone through these ordeals and lived to tell the tale consider themselves lucky because they were eventually released and returned to their families. Countless others have effectively been disappeared, abducted one day at an army checkpoint and with no further news of their fate or whereabouts.

Every time I scroll through social media, I come across people posting about their missing family members, all of them saying that their loved ones were lost at an Israeli checkpoint. The Israeli army releases very little information about who it has arrested at these checkpoints. The arrested include doctors, journalists, patients, fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, and people from all walks of life. Their loved ones are constantly putting out announcements and calling on international bodies and human rights organizations to intervene and force Israel to reveal their loved ones’ whereabouts.

Eyewitnesses who were able to escape death and reach Rafah tell horrific stories of how Israeli soldiers used civilians, especially male adolescents, as human shields or worse. One eyewitness who preferred to remain anonymous relayed a harrowing story of how Israeli soldiers, upon discovering a tunnel opening in northern Gaza, strapped explosives to a young 17-year-old man’s chest, legs, and arms and forced him to go down into the tunnel, lowering him with a rope and fastening a camera to his head. They would give him orders to go left, right, or forward as they observed from a screen aboveground.

The eyewitness says that when the soldiers were fitting him with explosives, they were laughing and cracking jokes, boasting that they would “send him to his God piece by piece,” and that he would “meet the virgins in the tunnels.” The eyewitness says that this practice was common in Beit Hanoun, as the army made use of the agility of thin young men, unburdened by military gear, who could move around in small spaces. The eyewitness says that when soldiers noticed suspicious movements through the camera fastened to their captives, they would blow up the tunnel and the young man along with it. Whenever the tunnel was revealed to lead to a dead end or was discovered to be deserted, the young man would return unharmed, and the soldiers would remove the explosives from him.

While these harrowing details that continue to emerge from survivors are so horrific as to beggar belief, the reality is that the occupation has succeeded in isolating the Gaza Strip from the rest of the world and rendering the majority of the crimes of its troops on the ground invisible. Israel is systematically blocking foreign journalists from reaching Gaza, assassinating Palestinian journalists, and enforcing a total information blackout through the cutting off of electricity, internet, and telecommunications.

In other words, Israel’s blackout strategy has worked, even with all the gory images that still manage to make their way to your screens. The relative scale of the killing has prompted the world to recognize that a genocide is unfolding, but the horrific character of Israel’s crimes and the abject inhumanity of the army’s conduct still remain largely unknown to most of the world.

SHEERPOST Editor’s Note: Please continue the support of our independent journalism by making a tax-deductible donation through our new fiscal sponsor, Community Partners. We are deeply grateful to our readers for helping us to exceed our end of the year fundraising goal of $25,000. We can’t thank you enough, and we promise to continue bringing you credible news that is vital to strengthen our democracy. Our publisher and editor are unpaid, thereby devoting all income to our staff and writers. Thank you.

https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/23/the-inhumanity-of-israels-crimes-in-gaza/

READ FROM TOP.

FRREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW...........

By Gus Leonisky at 24 Jan 2024 - 8:13am
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joe's layoffs.....

AS THE CORPORATE MEDIA HAS BEEN LAUDING JOE FOR BIDENOMICS, THINGS ARE NOT SO ROSY:

It Is A Bloodbath For The Mainstream Media

By Michael Snyder

Should any of us be surprised that the news industry is being hit by a massive wave of layoffs? Survey after survey has shown that the American people have lost faith in the mainstream media, and millions of us have decided to turn to other sources for news and information. Mainstream news outlets have been bleeding viewers and readers for years, and now many of the biggest names in the news industry are losing staggering amounts of money. It was only a matter of time before we witnessed large scale layoffs, and now they are here.

Of course it isn’t just the mainstream media that is laying off workers. According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of layoffs in the United States in 2023 was 98 percent higher than it was in 2022…

The pace of job cuts by U.S. employers accelerated in 2023, with the number of layoffs surging 98% compared with the previous year.

That is according to a new report published by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which found that companies planned 721,677 job cuts last year, a substantial increase from the 363,832 layoffs reported in 2022.

The problem could get worse in 2024 as the labor market continues to soften in the face of high interest rates and stubborn inflation.

But it is true that the news industry is being hit particularly hard. For example, Time Magazine just announced that it will be laying off workers “across several departments including editorial, tech, sales, and TIME Studios”…

Time Magazine laid off an uncertain number of staffers across departments on Tuesday, a move CEO Jessica Sibley called “The necessary step we must take in order to drive our business forward and improve our financial position.”

In an internal memo to staff, obtained by Semafor’s Max Tani, Sibley announced the cuts.

“We have made the difficult decision to eliminate roles today across several departments including editorial, tech, sales, and TIME Studios,” Sibley wrote to staff. “We are immensely grateful for the contributions of these talented team members during their tenure at TIME.”

When I was a kid, Time Magazine was very highly respected and my parents would often have a copy of it on the coffee table.

But now it is dying just like the rest of the mainstream media.

GUSNOTE: MICHAEL SNYDER WRITES FROM A RELIGIOUS POINT OF VIEW... GUS IS A RABID ATHEIST.

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