Media

Losing And Learning Nothing

April 29, 2025 Patrick Lawrence, Consortium News. Educate! Media, Propaganda, Russia, Ukraine, Wars and Militarism

How odd to look back now — now, as Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine ends in ignominious defeat—and think of that cornucopia of propaganda spilling out of what I called during the early months Washington’s “bubble of pretend.” Take a few minutes to remember with me. There was the “Ghost of Kyiv,” an heroic MiG–29 pilot credited with downing six, count ’em, six Russian fighters in a single night, Feb. 24, 2022, two days after the Russian intervention began. The Ghost turned out to be a fantasy confected out of a popular video game. So crude, the early Ukrainian propaganda, so rank.

Trump DOJ Adopts Policy Permitting Journalist Arrests

April 28, 2025 Kevin Gosztola, The Dissenter. Educate! Congress, Department of Justice, Journalism, Journalists, Media, Press Freedom

United States Attorney General Pam Bondi ended a Justice Department (DOJ) policy that explicitly discouraged federal prosecutors from forcing journalists to reveal their sources and other sensitive information, including information obtained from potential leaks. With new guidelines, members of the news media who refuse to cooperate with prosecutors could be arrested for contempt. If accused of contempt, they could be fined or jailed. The move by Bondi comes as Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has “referred” three alleged “intelligence leakers” to the DOJ for criminal prosecution.

Lab Leak: The Official Conspiracy Theory That Still Gets Credit

April 22, 2025 Ari Paul, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Educate! Anthony Fauci, Conspiracies, COVID-19, Media

For a while it seemed like the dubious hypothesis that the virus that causes Covid did not jump from animals to humans, but was released from a Chinese lab, might be fading away. But the US government and the media are breathing new life into this zombie idea, contributing to the vilification of China and undermining actual scientific research. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/15/25), former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who previously headed the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, asserted that “Wuhan lab’s risky gain-of-function research was a giant mistake that cost millions of lives.”

Failing To Rise To The Constitutional Crisis

April 17, 2025 Ari Paul, Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting. Educate! Constitution, Deportations, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Legal System, Media, Trump Administration

As the Trump administration openly defies court orders to return a man wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, some American outlets are underplaying the significance of this constitutional crisis. In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court “declined to block a lower court’s order to ‘facilitate’ bringing back Kilmar Ábrego García,” a Salvadoran who had legal protections in the United States and was wrongfully sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (BBC, 4/11/25). The White House is not complying (Democracy Docket, 4/14/25). “The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump’s Justice Department insists (CNN, 4/15/25). Fox News (4/16/25) said of Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Bondi Defiant, Says Ábrego García Will Stay in El Salvador ‘End of the Story.’”

This Is An All-Out War On The First Amendment

April 11, 2025 Janine Jackson, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. Educate! FCC, First Amendment, Media, Press Freedom, Trump Administration

There are reasons that the FCC, the Federal Communications Commission, is an opaque entity for many people. The fact that there is a federal agency setting the terms for media companies’ operations conflicts with many Americans’ understanding of the press corps as a group of brave, independent individuals looking to tell the truth, and let the chips fall where they may. There are, in fact, many community-supported, differently structured news outlets doing just that. But, listeners know, the big major papers and stations and channels we may look to for news are owned and sponsored by big profit-driven corporations that share the status quo–supporting interests of other big profit-driven corporations.

Palestinian Christians Reject US Catholic Bishops Collaboration With Pro-Israel Group

April 8, 2025 Jeff Wright, Mondoweiss. Resist! Anti-Semitism, Christians, Israel, Media, Palestine, Zionism

Palestinian Christians are condemning a move by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) to collaborate with a leading pro-Israel advocacy group on an online tool that aims to define Palestinian resistance as antisemitic. In a letter sent late last month from Kairos Palestine to the USCCB Committee’s head, Bishop Timothy Broglio, sixteen Palestinian Christian leaders representing Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant denominations and church organizations express their deep disappointment regarding the USCCB’s endorsement of the American Jewish Committee’s online resource, Translate Hate.

Nicaragua’s Opposition Media Welcome Trump’s New Tariffs

April 7, 2025 John Perry, Popular Resistance. Educate! Media, Nicaragua, Tariffs, Trade, Trump Administration

Five countries in Central America, together with the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean, have a free trade agreement with Washington, but this didn’t protect them from the punitive tariffs announced on President Trump’s “Liberation Day.” A minimum 10 per cent tariff on exports to the US will hit low-income countries throughout the region. But exports from Nicaragua have been saddled with an even higher tariff of 18 per cent. Delighted opponents of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government have blamed it, rather than Trump, for the country receiving this additional penalty. However, simple examination of the figures shows that Nicaragua’s tariff was calculated in the same way as every other country’s.

Blockbuster Article Prepares Americans For Defeat In Ukraine

April 4, 2025 Ted Snider, Antiwar.com. Educate! Media, New York Times (NYT), Russia, Ukraine, Wars and Militarism

A March 29 article on America’s involvement in the war in Ukraine in The New York Times by Adam Entous “reveals that America was woven into the war far more intimately and broadly than previously understood.” “Understood” is a euphemism. It means the American and global public were lied to. The article reveals that the war in Ukraine truly was, as former British prime minister Boris Johnson and U.S. secretary of state Marco Rubio have already said, a proxy war against Russia. U.S. military and intelligence were involved in every stage of the war, including supplying the weapons, the training, the planning, the war-gaming, the intelligence and the targeting.

Worker-Owned News Outlets Are Changing The Media Industry

April 1, 2025 Damon Orion, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cooperatives, COVID-19, Employee Ownership, Journalism, Media, Worker Cooperatives, Worker Rights and Jobs

The arrival of COVID-19 in the United States kicked off an ongoing period of job insecurity within the media industry. In April 2020, the New York Times reported that about 37,000 news company employees had been laid off, furloughed, or had their salaries reduced since March of that year. This instability was still evident in 2024, with media outlets like the Los Angeles Times, the Messenger, and HuffPost undergoing major layoffs and closures. An October 2024 report from the executive outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, and Christmas, Inc. found that 13,279 media jobs had been cut that year. This included 3,520 cuts in the broadcast, digital, and print news industry—the most since 2020. Job insecurity has helped spur the rise of worker-owned journalism cooperatives like Flaming Hydra, Aftermath, Racket, and RANGE. According to the Poynter Institute, “[a]t least six worker-centered [news] outlets launched in 2024 alone.”

Rodolfo Walsh Would Demand We Write In His Place

March 28, 2025 Vijay Prashad, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. Educate! Argentina, History, Journalists, Media, Military dictatorship

On an evening in September 2024, Argentina’s President Javier Milei stood before a large crowd in Parque Lezama in Buenos Aires. He wore his signature dark leather jacket and barked out his speech, the crowd devouring every word. ‘Here you have the trolls’, he said, ‘corrupt journalists, shady characters. These are the trolls’. Then, he pointed at the people in the crowd and said that they were invisible because the journalists had ‘the monopoly on microphones’. It was harsh language, a replica of Donald Trump’s statement that journalists are the ‘enemy of the people’ (which is itself an echo of US President Richard Nixon’s statement to his advisor Henry Kissinger in 1972: ‘The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it’). These statements do not come without cost. Since Milei came to office in December 2023, attacks on journalists have increased.

El Tren De Aragua: The Defunct Venezuelan Band

March 27, 2025 Resumen English. Educate! Donald Trump, Media, Tren de Aragua, Trump Administration, US Imperialism, Venezuela, Venezuelan migrants

Until the designation as a “transnational criminal organization” by the US in 2024, the course of the now-disbanded group was narrated by a network of US think tanks, media and funds that constructed a discourse against the Bolivarian Revolution. This construction currently serves to justify sanctions, carry out mass deportations and feed the false idea of a failed state in Venezuela. In July 2024, when the US Treasury Department included Tren de Aragua on its list of transnational criminal organizations, it equated it with cartels such as Sinaloa or Jalisco Nueva Generación, which have a presence in more than 100 countries and have more than 45,000 members, associates and facilitators.

Syria’s Genocide, Claiming Over 10,000 Lives, Is Not A Sectarian Conflict

March 22, 2025 Fiorella Isabel, Orinoco Tribune. Educate! Genocide, Hayat Tahrir al-sham (HTS), Human Rights, Israel, Media, NATO, Syria, US Imperialism, Western, Zionist

Syria’s massacres that can be defined by nothing less than genocide have exceeded in the slaughter of over 10,000 dead souls. The last few days flooded with videos and images of the endless public, mass executions of children, women, civilians, and entire families, have shown that the world is willing to watch yet another genocide unfold with most of the international media and the international community silent, excusing or down-playing the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s (HTS) terrorist ethnic cleansing of Syrians. As Israel once again strikes Gaza killing over 400 people, with the full backing of the Trump administration.

New Report Warns Of Increasing Nuclear Dangers

March 6, 2025 Alice Slater, InDepthNews. Educate! Doomsday Clock, History, Media, Nuclear Weapons, US Imperialism, Wars and Militarism

Once again the ‘Gloomsday’ Machine is reporting the awful news about the growing nuclear threats, the widening nuclear proliferation, and ongoing modernization and development of new weapons most recently in the Nuclear Weapons Ban Monitor which defines itself as “a research project managed by Norwegian People’s Aid with contributions from a broad range of external experts and institutions, including the Federation of American Scientists and the Norwegian Academy of International Law”. There is never any attempt to make people aware of how the nuclear arms race and new forms of proliferation are being driven and the many missed opportunities, over the 80-year course of the nuclear age to reverse the Doomsday machine and move forward to a new world at peace.

Media Workers Condemn BBC For ‘Dehumanizing’ Censorship Of Gaza Documentary

February 27, 2025 News Desk, The Cradle. Resist! BBC, Censorship, Documentary, Gaza, Genocide, Israel, Media, Palestine, Zionism

Over 500 film, TV, and media workers have condemned BBC executives for “racism” and “censorship” after the British broadcaster pulled a documentary highlighting the horrific impact the US–Israeli genocide in Gaza has had on Palestinian children. “As industry professionals who craft stories for the British public, including for the BBC, we condemn the weaponization of a child’s identity and the racist insinuation that Palestinian narratives must be scrutinized through a lens of suspicion,” the letter reads. The letter also condemned a “racist” and “dehumanizing” campaign targeting the film ‘Gaza: How to Survive a War Zone,’ which the BBC removed from its iPlayer streaming service after pressure from pro-Israel activists.

Ukraine Timeline Tells The Tale

February 26, 2025 Joe Lauria, Consortium News. Educate! Donbass, History, Journalism, Media, Minsk Agreements, NATO, Russia, Ukraine, Wars and Militarism

The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history. A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine. There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country. Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine. The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.

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