#journalism
The Media Still Doesn’t Grasp the Danger of Trump
"He tells the world he intends to be an authoritarian. So why won’t journalists repeat it?"
Donald Trump represents an existential threat to democracy in the United States. If he is elected president, he will try to become a dictator.
That warning must be repeated, over and over again, so Americans don’t forget it in November.
But that’s not the daily news that you will read or hear in the American press today. Instead, it’s mostly coverage of polls favorable to Trump and cute scene-setting stories about the carnival-like atmosphere at his crazed rallies, where his massive cult following is on display.
That daily coverage ignores the five-alarm fire burning up the 2024 election. The mainstream political press is effectively ignoring the coming national apocalypse. How can that be? How can they once again screw up covering Trump?
After all, Trump isn’t hiding his lust for dictatorial power. He admits it publicly. In December, when his Fox News lackey, Sean Hannity, gave him an opportunity to dispel fears that he wanted dictatorial power, Trump instead offered a rare truth. “Under no circumstances, you are promising America tonight, you would never abuse power as retribution against anybody?” Hannity asked. “Except for day one,” Trump replied.
Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.
In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.
Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.”
Trump is a fascist. But the mainstream political press doesn’t want to say it. They want to act like 2024 is just another election year.
. . .
#trump #republican #american #authoritarianism #fascism #journalism #TheIntercept
Déjà vu (all over again) - a mini-trigger from survivors of the Google+ extinction.
We'll see what ripples flow where. across #media, #socialmedia, & #news / #journalism orgs - plus writers/bloggers/correspondents.
As the ICC seeks arrests, I ask those who facilitated the Gaza slaughter: what were you thinking?
The Guardian
The deaths, the atrocities – all were predicted. Those who ignored all the warnings should be held responsible too.
As the international criminal court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan, officially seeks arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders, a question must be asked of the politicians and media outlets that legitimised Israel’s western-backed destruction of Gaza, which is one of the great crimes of our age: what were you thinking?
(Text continues underneath the photo.)
Karim Khan (centre) requested arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, 21 May 2024. Photograph: International Criminal Court/Rex/Shutterstock.
The arrest warrant requests detail, firstly, how three Hamas leaders should be held criminally responsible for war crimes and crimes against humanity including extermination, murder and hostage-taking. Their guilt is incontrovertible, and no cause justifies such depraved crimes against civilians.
But there is a distinction to be made. For while Hamas’s crimes were obscene and indefensible, the prosecutor’s proposed charges against the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, describe atrocities that were directly facilitated by cheerleader politicians, most notably in the US, UK and Germany, and legitimised by multiple media outlets. (...)
> See also: A Middle East Peace That Could Happen (But Won’t)
Tags: #israel #palestine #palestinians #occupied_territories #gaza #war #war_crimes #un #united_nations #un_resolutions #us #united_states #icc #media #news #journalism #journalist
If we really lived in a democratic state based on the rule of law, wouldn't #Assange have long since been pardoned due to the inability of the legal system to acquit him?
#question #democracy #humanRights #wikileaks #press #freedom #journalism #warCrime #politics #jail #fail #ethics #justice #system #UK #USA #news
(2) If you're seeing this, I'm in jail. - David McBride
#journalism #whistleblower #democracy #justice #Australia #Afghanistan #Iraq #war
AJ+ on X: "Bisan Owda has just won one of broadcast journalism’s highest honors – the Peabody Award – for her work with AJ+. Bisan is currently facing intense Israeli bombardment in Rafah in the occupied Gaza Strip. This is her message to the world":
https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1788615162586595345
#Palestine #Gaza #Israel #Journalism #Press
#Bisan #wizard_bisan1 #AlJazeera
Really, #Salon, must you? Five out of six top news about that orange jerk?
It is always a bad sign when a #democracy bans the #press...
source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68961753.amp
The Foreign Press Association (FPA) urged the Israeli government to reconsider its decision, saying the shut down of #AlJazeera in the country should be "a cause for concern for all supporters of a free press".
#censorship #war #gaza #problem #journalism #freedom #politics #military #humanrights #security #news
Well, you got what you paid for.
♲ Algernon D'Ammassa - 2024-05-06 04:09:43 GMT
Assigned a story with a cool angle to a freelance reporter. It involved attending a certain single-day festival. Two hours *after the festival began* the stringer texts me: “Hey, I’m sorry but I’m not going to be able to make it” and then came the chaser: She had decided the story I proposed, on an assignment she accepted, wasn’t “impactful” anyway.I’m flabbergasted.
That ashy smell is of a bridge being burned.
Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls
The case for making journalism free—at least during the 2024 election
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/04/paywall-problems-media-trust-democracy/678032/
I learned of this article on Techdirt. I keep JavaScript off by default, so I have no trouble reading this. See if you do.
It almost feels like a publicity stunt. They put an article called "Democracy Dies Behind Paywalls" behind a paywall. It's like performance art. I think it's very funny.
Here's a bit of the Atlantic article.
Paywalls create a two-tiered system: credible, fact-based information for people who are willing to pay for it, and murkier, less-reliable information for everyone else. Simply put, paywalls get in the way of informing the public, which is the mission of journalism. And they get in the way of the public being informed, which is the foundation of democracy. It is a terrible time for the press to be failing at reaching people, during an election in which democracy is on the line. There’s a simple, temporary solution: Publications should suspend their paywalls for all 2024 election coverage and all information that is beneficial to voters. Democracy does not die in darkness—it dies behind paywalls.
See also "The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free" at https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/the-truth-is-paywalled-but-the-lies-are-free/
#the-atlantic #paywalls #democracy #free-journalism #election #funny #media #news #journalism
WikiLeaks - Guardian journalist negligently disclosed Cablegate passwords (2011)
#politics #journalism #freedom
WIKILEAKS EDITORIAL
A Guardian journalist has negligently disclosed top secret WikiLeaks’ decryption passwords to hundreds of thousands of unredacted unpublished US diplomatic cables.
Knowledge of the Guardian disclosure has spread privately over several months but reached critical mass last week. The unpublished WikiLeaks’ material includes over 100,000 classified unredacted cables that were being analyzed, in parts, by over 50 media and human rights organizations from around the world.
For the past month WikiLeaks has been in the unenviable position of not being able to comment on what has happened, since to do so would be to draw attention to the decryption passwords in the Guardian book. Now that the connection has been made public by others we can explain what happened and what we intend to do.
WikiLeaks has commenced pre-litigation action against the Guardian and an individual in Germany who was distributing the Guardian passwords for personal gain.
Over the past nine months, WikiLeaks has been releasing US diplomatic cables according to a carefully laid out plan to stimulate profound changes. A number of human rights groups, including Amnesty International, believe that the co-ordinated release of the cables contributed to triggering the Arab Spring. By forming partnerships with over 90 other media and human rights organizations WikiLeaks has been laying the ground for positive political change all over the world.
The WikiLeaks method involves a sophisticated procedure of packaging leaked US diplomatic cables up into country groups or themes, such as ‘resources corruption’, and providing it to those organizations that agreed to do the most research in exchange for time-limited exclusivity. As part of the WikiLeaks agreement, these groups, using their local knowledge, remove the names of persons reporting unjust acts to US embassies, and feed the results back to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks then publishes, simultaneously with its partners, the underlying cables together with the politically explosive revelations. This way publications that are too frightened to publish the cables have the proof they need, and the public can check to make sure the claims are accurate.
Over time WikiLeaks has been building up, and publishing, the complete Cablegate “library”–the most significant political document ever published. The mammoth task of reading and lightly redacting what amounts to 3,000 volumes or 284 million words of global political history is shared by WikiLeaks and its partners. That careful work has been compromised as a result of the recklessness of the Guardian.
Revolutions and reforms are in danger of being lost as the unpublished cables spread to intelligence contractors and governments before the public. The Arab Spring would not have started in the manner it did if the Tunisian government of Ben Ali had copies of those WikiLeaks releases which helped to take down his government. Similarly, it is possible that the torturing Egyptian internal security chief, Suleiman–Washington’s proposed replacement for Mubarak–would now be the acting ruler of Egypt, had he acquired copies of the cables that exposed his methods prior to their publication.
Indeed, it is one of the indelible stains on Hillary Clinton that she personally set course to forewarn dozens of corrupt leaders, including Hosni Mubarak, about some of the most powerful details of WikiLeaks’ revelations to come.
Every day that the corrupt leadership of a country or organization knows of a pending WikiLeaks disclosure is a day spent planning how to crush revolution and reform.
Guardian investigations editor, David Leigh, recklessly, and without gaining our approval, knowingly disclosed the decryption passwords in a book published by the Guardian. Leigh states the book was rushed forward to be written in three weeks–the rights were then sold to Hollywood.
The following extract is from the Guardian book:
{Leigh tried his best not to fall out with this Australian impresario, who was prone to criticise what he called the “snaky Brits”. Instead, Leigh used his ever-shifting demands as a negotiating lever. “You want us to postpone the Iraq logs’ publication so you can get some TV,” he said. [WikiLeaks: We required more time for redactions and to complete three Iraq war documentaries commissioned through the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. The documentaries were syndicated through Channel 4 (UK) and al Jazeera English and Arabic] “We could refuse, and simply go ahead with publication as planned. If you want us to do something for you, then you’ve got to do something for us as well.” He asked Assange to stop procrastinating, and hand over the biggest trove of all: the cables. Assange said, “I could give you half of them, covering the first 50% of the period.”
Leigh refused. All or nothing, he said. “What happens if you end up in an orange jump-suit en route to Guantánamo before you can release the full files?” In return he would give Assange a promise to keep the cables secure, and not to publish them until the time came. Assange had always been vague about timing: he generally indicated, however, that October would be a suitable date. He believed the US army’s charges against the imprisoned soldier Bradley Manning would have crystallised by then, and publication could not make his fate any worse. He also said, echoing Leigh’s gallows humour: “I’m going to need to be safe in Cuba first!” Eventually, Assange capitulated. Late at night, after a two-hour debate, he started the process on one of his little netbooks that would enable Leigh to download the entire tranche of cables. The Guardian journalist had to set up the PGP encryption system on his laptop at home across the other side of London. Then he could feed in a password. Assange wrote down on a scrap of paper:
[WikiLeaks: we have replaced the password with Xs] XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
“That’s the password,” he said. “But you have to add one extra word when you type it in. You have to put in the word ‘XXXXXXX’ before the word ‘XXXXXX’ [WikiLeaks: so if the paper were seized, the password would not work without Leigh’s co-operation] Can you remember that?” “I can remember that.” Leigh set off home, and successfully installed the PGP software.}
The Guardian disclosure is a violation of the confidentiality agreement between WikiLeaks and Alan Rusbridger, editor-in-chief of the Guardian, signed July 30, 2010. David Leigh is also Alan Rusbridger’s brother in law, which has caused other Guardian journalists to claim that David Leigh has been unfairly protected from the fallout. It is not the first time the WikiLeaks security agreement has been violated by the Guardian.
WikiLeaks severed future projects with the Guardian in December last year after it was discovered that the Guardian was engaged in a conspiracy to publish the cables without the knowledge of WikiLeaks, seriously compromising the security of our people in the United States and an alleged source who was in pre-trial detention. Leigh, without any basis, and in a flagrant violation of journalistic ethics, named Bradley Manning as the Cablegate source in his book. David Leigh secretly passed the entire archive to Bill Keller of the New York Times, in September 2011, or before, knowingly destroying WikiLeaks plans to publish instead with the Washington Post & McClatchy.
David Leigh and the Guardian have subsequently and repeatedly violated WikiLeaks security conditions, including our requirements that the unpublished cables be kept safe from state intelligence services by keeping them only on computers not connected to the internet. Ian Katz, Deputy Editor of the Guardian admitted in December 2010 meeting that this condition was not being followed by the Guardian.
PJ Crowley, State Department spokesman on the cables issue earlier this year, told AP on the 30th of August, 2011 that “any autocratic security service worth its salt” would probably already have the complete unredacted archive.
Two weeks ago, when it was discovered that information about the Leigh book had spread so much that it was about to be published in the German weekly Freitag, WikiLeaks took emergency action, asking the editor not allude to the Leigh book, and tasked its lawyers to demand those maliciously spreading its details about the Leigh book stop.
WikiLeaks advanced its regular publication schedule, to get as much of the material as possible into the hands of journalists and human rights lawyers who need it. WikiLeaks and its partners were scheduled to have published most of the Cablegate material by November 29, 2011 – one year since the first publication. Over the past week, we have published over 130,000 cables, mostly unclassified. The cables have lead to hundreds of important news stories around the world. All were unclassified with the exception of the Australian, Swedish collections, and a few others, which were scheduled by our partners.
WikiLeaks has also been in contact with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty at a senior level. We contacted the US embassy in London and then the State Department in Washington on 25 August to see if their informant notification program, instituted last year, was complete, and if not, to take such steps as would be helpful. Only after repeated attempts through high level channels and 36 hours after our first contact, did the State Department, although it had been made aware of the issue, respond. Cliff Johnson (a legal advisor at the Department of State) spoke to Julian Assange for 75 minutes, but the State Department decided not to meet in person to receive further information, which could not, at that stage, be safely transmitted over the telephone.
The Media Lens Chamber Of Propaganda Horrors – An Appeal For Support
Media Lens
Tourists visiting Spanish cities like Córdoba, Toledo and Sevilla have the option of whiling away an hour or so at a ‘Museum of the Inquisition’, sometimes known as a ‘Gallery of Torture’. For around three euros, visitors can view an exotic range of devices used to impale, immolate, strangle and dismember human beings in the name of God.
It’s tempting to reassure ourselves that these are relics of a far-distant past, horrors that could never happen now.
(Text continues underneath the illustration.)
.
But did the Dark Ages ever really end? Noam Chomsky commented:
‘Part of the tragedy of the Palestinians is that they have essentially no international support. For a good reason – they don’t have wealth, they don’t have power. So they don’t have rights. It’s the way the world works – your rights correspond to your power and your wealth.’
It is indeed the way the world works. It is also the way the medieval world worked. (...)
Tags: #news #propaganda #censorship #corporate_media #gaza #israel #iran #palestine #palestinians #russia #ukraine #news #media #news_media #journalism #journalist
