Slogans reading “Enough killing and destruction” and “The children of Palestine: We want to live” are displayed during a rally calling for an end to the war, in Beit Lahia, in the northern Gaza Strip, on March 25, 2025. AFP
Most Western mainstream media are part of the war party. One can point out that this is true with most countries. But this article focuses on West-based global-level media outlets that fuel the flames of war. The type of journalism they practise enables the war party, Israel in particular, to unjustly achieve its immoral objectives.
Most mainstream Western media practises a form of embedded journalism. Literally, embedded journalism means the work of a journalist travelling with troops and reporting from the battlefield. But in practice, embedded journalism has shown it is a form of journalism that prostitutes journalism to produce bastardised news. We may see them as practising fearless journalism or pursuing fact-based, agenda-free and value-driven journalism, but in reality they practise a highly sophisticated art of deception to programme the minds of their readers, listeners and viewers and shape their thoughts. Sadly, the deceived are not as sharp as the deceivers to discern the decadent war agenda of the media.
The mainstream Western media have the power to make war or peace. Brave journalism practised by the mainstream media in a bygone era had ended wars and exposed the barbarity of their armed forces. If not for Seymour Hersh’s courageous journalism, the My Lai massacre committed by American troops would have remained buried until judgement day. Also credited for ending the Vietnam War through their investigative journalism are journalistic greats who challenged the official narrative and exposed the human cost of the war.
With the exposures of Vietnam War excesses, bold and independent journalism began to be viewed by US policymakers and the war party as a public enemy within. A further blow to the war party, including the military-industrial complex or the arms industry, came when CNN started its global live telecast in the early 1990s. One of its early global live coverage was the Somalia civil war and the famine. When tech-heavy mainstream media, especially CNN, brought home live images of famine-stricken people in Somalia, pressure mounted on the Bill Clinton administration to intervene. It demonstrated how media coverage could shape foreign policy.
In yet another example of the media’s influence on foreign policy, the Clinton administration, under public pressure, withdrew US troops from Somalia after CNN and other outlets broadcast video footage of a dead American pilot being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
The two incidents are now described as the ‘CNN effect’ in foreign policy and media studies. Veteran US diplomat and international relations expert George Kennan saw the media’s invasion into foreign-policy-making as an undesirable development. He argued pervasive media increased the pressure on politicians to respond promptly to news accounts that, by their very immediacy, are incomplete, without context and sometimes wrong.
Fast forward to the Gulf War 2: the war party led by hawkish US president George W. Bush imposed strict guidelines on the media. Embedded journalism became a key part of the war strategy, with reports filed by journalists moving with the troops being vetted by the military officer—whom the US administration refused to label as censors, though they undoubtedly were.
Embedded journalism enabled the war party to exploit distorted patriotism for selfish or immoral agendas in the years that followed the 9/11 attacks.
But when it comes to defending Israel, the Western media’s embedded and immoral journalism becomes even more pronounced. There appears to be a deliberate move to underreport the Gaza genocide that resumed after Israel, with its sinister plans, caused the collapse of the shaky ceasefire brokered by US President Donald Trump.
The daily deaths of scores of Palestinians in Israeli attacks make no news or are underplayed. The death toll reaching 50,000 this week was virtually non-news. The homepages of big-time Western media carry very little on the ongoing Gaza massacre. This amounts to a cover-up of or complicity in Israeli crimes. By failing to expose Israel’s cruelty towards the Gaza people, especially children, whom Israel’s Amalek-hunting hawks label as tomorrow’s ‘terrorists’, the mainstream Western media reveal their own hypocrisy and the selective use of free speech. Their relative silence on Gaza is a sinister form of suppression of the truth. Evil thrives in their self-imposed selective silence in favour of Israel.
There is no doubt that there is a media segment to the Gaza war. With the global Zionist lobby controlling or owning a significant segment of the mainstream Western media, the investigative journalism that once exposed the immorality of the Vietnam War is conspicuous by its absence when it comes to exposing the plight of the continuously battered Palestinian people. Interspersed among their pro-Israeli coverage, however, are a few well-choreographed reports that highlight the Palestinian plight. These drop-in-the-ocean reports are their way of maintaining journalistic balance in reporting.
When the Western media practise manipulative reporting with the intention of whitewashing Israel, it is not free speech; it is fascism.
And it is fascism that is raising its ugly head in the United States under Donald Trump’s presidency, with activists who exercised free speech to express their support for the Palestinian cause are being hunted down for deportation.
The United States cannot claim it cherishes free speech, can it? The Trump administration has called into question the strong constitutional protections for free speech under the First Amendment. Mahnoud Khalil, Yunseo Chung, Badar Suri, Rumeysa Ozturk and many more activists, some of them green-card holders, face deportation for exercising free speech, for writing op-ed articles and for participating in pro-Palestinian rallies. They are paying a price for erroneously believing in the First Amendment and erroneously believing that there is freedom of assembly in the US. None of them was naïve enough to utter anti-Semitism. If pro-Palestinianism can be interpreted as anti-Semitism or a crime that warrants deportation, the US is well on the way to being a fascist state, if it isn’t already. It is cracking down on free speech, denying the freedom of assembly and selectively applying its laws.
In the 2025 democracy index, the US has suffered a 0.37 decline. More decline is expected, with Trump, a suspected fascist, at the helm. He is manufacturing xenophobia. Universities and institutions are threatened with aid cuts for allowing the exercise of free speech by pro-Palestinian activists.
Criticism of Israel cannot be and should not be construed as anti-Semitism, but anti-Jewishness itself is unacceptable. It is our duty to oppose any form of discrimination against the Jewish people on the basis of their religion. But it does not mean Israel should be spared censure for the grave crimes it commits with the fullest support of a powerful section of the Western mainstream media and many Western governments that use a façade of democracy to cover up their fascist soul.
No comments:
Post a Comment