Media Criticism

This is an “unlisted” YouTube video because it’s for paid subscribers. https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/victoria-nuland-preemptively-warns

“It’s the third election in a row,” says Rachel Maddow with a told-you-so grin, “in which Russia has tried to interfere to try to get Trump into the White House.”

“He’s at it again,” responds former State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, the same smile on her face (it seems they’re struggling to hide their joy this time around). Nuland, who has worked for both George Bush and Dick Cheney, has become a go-to warrior for Dems as a leading pusher of stolen election claims as well as a driving force behind the Ukraine-Russian War. “This time [Putin’s] not even trying to hide his hand, and he has far more sophisticated tools.”

Russia’s so-called tools in the past amounted to, as evidenced in the Mueller report and an FBI investigation, a few thousand dollars spent on social media posts, such as the ‘buff Bernie’ meme. This time, Nuland claims, Putin has a sophisticated new AI, plus $10 million spent on influencers to steal the election for Donald Trump. This accusation, of course, needs no further investigation from Maddow.

Only another smile.

On the other side of our terrible election, Donald Trump is making new threats against Iran that sound equally crazy. After his pet Sean Hannity asked why Kamala Harris is encouraging Iran to assassinate him (what?), Trump went on an unhinged rant about how the US should treat Iran.

And when it comes to our terrible treatment of other countries, it’s harder to find a more one-sided relationship than the US-Ukraine alliance. And Ukrainian President Zelensky seems to be finally realizing that as well, calling out the US for pushing him into a needless war which has led to the deaths of countless Ukrainians.

It’s a terrible week on corporate media as always. Watch with Katie and Aaron to hopefully laugh instead of cry at all of it. Thanks for supporting Useful Idiots, subscribe to watch the full episode here

I expect no better from a lying war criminal.

In fact, as we’ll unpack further below, this tech-bombing was even worse than you imagined. The military wing of Hezbollah does not use pager or walkie talkies. They’ve used their own fiber optic network since 2006, and otherwise rely on couriers. These devices were in the hands of civilian Hezbollah workers, such as members of its large social services effort. Yes, military members may have been hurt too, but that was dumb luck, like being in proximity to blown-up pager-user or picking up a ringing device on behalf of someone else.

Needless to say, this also means that the device attacks were pure terrorism, with no remotely colorable military purpose whatsoever. Remember, the press has brayed that Israel has been working on this caper for 15 years. But Hezbollah moved its military comms to fiber optic before that. And Israel surely knew that. So that means this entire enterprise was from its outset a terrorist scheme and never a military operation.

[…]

But rarely do we have examples of propaganda so flagrant from our “free press” that it is hard for readers not to notice them. This week the state-corporate media made my job a little easier. Over the past few days, it has reported on two closely comparable events that it framed in entirely different ways. Ways that all too clearly serve state-corporate interests.

The first such event was an Israeli air strike last Saturday on a school in Gaza, where Palestinian civilians, including children, had been sheltering from months of a rampaging Israeli military that has slaughtered many tens of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed most of the enclave’s homes and infrastructure.

The massive scale of death and destruction in Gaza has forced the World Court to put Israel on trial for genocide – not that you would know from the media coverage. The genocide case against Israel has been largely disappeared down the memory hole.

The second event, on Monday, was a Russian air strike on a hospital in Kyiv. It was part of a wave of attacks on Ukrainian targets that day that killed 36 Ukrainians. Let us note too that, despite huge numbers of Palestinian women and children being killed each day by Israeli missiles, the news media largely stopped covering the carnage in Gaza months ago. The BBC’s main evening news barely reports it.

The fact alone that the killing of 36 Ukrainian civilians attracted so much attention and concern from the western media, in a war that’s more than two years old, when there is a far larger daily death toll of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which our governments have been directly aiding, and the slaughter is of more recent origin, is telling in and of itself.

So how did our most trusted and progressive media outlets report these comparable events, in Gaza and Ukraine?

The headlines tell much of the story.

[…]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Cook

After nine months of an Israeli mass murder campaign in Gaza, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has confirmed what my colleagues Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada (EI) and Max Blumenthal of the Grayzone reported back in October: that Israel invoked the Hannibal Directive and killed its own citizens on Oct. 7th.

According to one Israeli military source, Israeli forces were ordered to turn the boundary area around Gaza into a “killing zone” — thereby knowingly killing Israelis in that zone. Under the Hannibal doctrine, Israel’s aim was to kill its own people rather than let them be traded in a future exchange for Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli prisons. The Israeli military has suppressed this killing of its own people on Oct. 7th all while manufacturing support for its rampage in Gaza ever since.

The same establishment media outlets that have long ignored this aspect of Oct. 7th smeared my independent media colleagues at Grayzone and EI for reporting it. This includes two hit pieces in the Washington Post, and even more brazenly, three pieces in Haaretz — which is now acknowledging what it has repeatedly attacked Max and Grayzone for reporting.

• Scahill: I’m leaving The Intercept and starting Drop Site News
• Ryan Grim: This is an email I never thought I'd be sending

There seems to be a rash of exoduses from The Intercept going on. Two months ago, Ken Klippenstein quit for The Grayzone: Why I'm Resigning From The Intercept

Some may recall Glenn Greenwald’s exit in 2020.

• My Resignation From The Intercept
• Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept

Emphasis original:

[NYT’s Cecilia] Kang’s thesis [link] was premised on years’ worth of media and policymaker fearmongering that TikTok user data was susceptible to surveillance by the Chinese government (BuzzFeed News, 6/17/22; Forbes, 10/20/22; Guardian, 11/7/22). According to Kang’s colleagues, the law’s enactment was prompted by “concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data” (New York Times, 4/26/24). In 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte sought to prohibit TikTok throughout his state on the grounds that “the Chinese Communist Party” was “collecting US users’ personal, private and sensitive information” (Montana Free Press, 5/17/23). (Gianforte’s attempt was later thwarted by a federal judge.)

If such fears were officials’ genuine motivation, one could hope that broader data-privacy regulation might follow. Yet, as the Times neglected to mention, the spying accusations are tenuous—and deeply cynical. As even US intelligence officials concede, apprehensions about China’s access to TikTok user data are strictly hypothetical (Intercept, 3/16/24). And, despite its bombshell headline “Analysis: There Is Now Some Public Evidence That China Viewed TikTok Data,” CNN (6/8/23) cautioned that said evidence—a sworn statement from a former ByteDance employee—“remains rather thin.”

Given their dubious nature, it’s hard to see these data-privacy claims as anything other than a pretext for the US to throttle TikTok. By forcing either divestment or a ban, the US, at least in theory, wins: It transfers a tremendously lucrative and influential company into its own hands, or it prevents that company from serving as a platform—albeit one with plenty of problems—on which people can engage in and learn from discourses that are critical of US empire.

Hans-Georg Moeller is a professor at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Department at the University of Macau, and, with Paul D'Ambrosio, author of "You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity".

https://fah.um.edu.mo/hans-georg-moeller/

My research focuses on Chinese and Comparative Philosophy (specifically Daoism) and on Social and Political Thought (specifically Social Systems Theory).

Moeller’s bibliography (Google Books)

The speaker discusses Ray Epps, who allegedly incited the January 6 Capitol assault. Tucker Carlson from Fox News is accused of promoting a conspiracy theory about Epps. Lawyers representing Epps plan to sue Fox News for defamation. The speaker questions why Epps, who encouraged people to enter the Capitol, hasn't been arrested, suggesting he may have been an FBI informant. The FBI denies orchestrating the riot but doesn't provide a clear answer. The speaker believes Epps was a fed acting to discredit the MAGA movement. The media's sympathy for Epps is questioned, implying a cover-up. The transcript ends with tour promotions.

Ambitious... bold...?

This is so on-the-noose promotional in tone, more obviously a PR than many other interviews. I am not sure who can take is as an interview, and not a documentary :-)