Exactly ten years ago, during an Israel-Hamas war that seemed major at the time but seems minor now, I published two essays describing my time reporting on Israel for the Associated Press. “Is there anything left to say about Israel and Gaza? Newspapers this summer have been full of little else,” I wrote at the time. “Television viewers see heaps of rubble and plumes of smoke in their sleep.” It wasn’t the volume of coverage that unsettled me in the summer of 2014. I was writing about something that had gone unreported, and which has done much to shape reality in the decade since—a change not in the news but in the newsroom.
The essays—the first for Tablet, and the second for The Atlantic — described my experience as a reporter watching from the inside as a major news organization lost its way in one of the world’s most heavily covered stories. To this day, nothing I’ve ever written has been quoted back at me more often. The essays go back into circulation every time there’s an explosion of violence here, and it happened again after the Hamas attack of October 7.
I don’t think the lying started in 2014, to be blunt. The moose limbs have been trying to destroy Israel since 1949. About every ten years or less, they have another try. And right after the Holocaust as well.
Try to imagine what would happen to an identifiable group that tried that here in Canada. Like Germans, or Japanese just ferinstance. History speaks rather plainly. The concept of blitzkrieg -and- the concept of a concentration camp were both invented in Canada.
I would opine, if I may, that the J3ws have gone far beyond patience and begun bordering on sainthood for their restraint. Nobody else in the entire world does what they do. Nobody.
But I agree that the media stopped trying to pretend they weren’t lying right around then. I put it at 2010-ish, maybe journalists are a little slow on the uptake.
I was thinking about this this morning for some reason. This fat guy #CenkUygur is on TV a lot, I see him being dismantled by conservatives from time to time on YouTube. Type of pushy, mouthy mofo who openly spits in your face and then tells you its raining. He’s a -moderate- on TV these days.
So really, you have nothing to gain from listening to these people anymore. They’ve gone full Hunger Games.
Cenk Uygur named his “group” the “Young Turks”, the last group of “young turks” in the form of CUP was responsible for the Armenian Genocide, and dragging Turkey into WW1.
Comparing him to a bag of dung, would be unfair to the dung.
Let’s begin by wiping out all journalism. All they do is lie – right?
Then we can rely on the ‘honest’ journos armed with a cell phone and a YouTube channel. They’ll get to the heart of the matter with an unbiased opinion.
Sarc off
I get my news from Kate. The CBC/CTV/Glowball/CITY-TV are strictly point-and-laugh these days. Comic relief.
Say what you want about blogs and cell-phone journalism, even if they’re lying they don’t all tell the same lie, in unison. Mainstream media is a new lie every day, they don’t even have to coordinate because they’re all reading from the same hymnal.
Seeing these media companies all off the air, bankrupt and replaced by -nothing- would be an improvement. Not knowing what happened is better than living in a sea of lies and false prophets. As a practical example, they wouldn’t have been able to do Covid to us without the mainstream media.
See what I’m saying?
The activist-journalists, I found, were backed up by an affiliated world of progressive NGOs and academics who we referred to as experts, creating a thought loop nearly impervious to external information. All of this had the effect of presenting a mass audience with a supposedly factual story that had a powerful emotional punch and a familiar villain.
Yet … despite the prefabricated narrative … the PEOPLE see and understand what is happening. And the PEOPLE aren’t having any of it. Cry “genocide” all you want … hand out all the sheets you want after the next hostage is murdered … it doesn’t matter. The PEOPLE see what Islam is all about. What Gaza is all about. What Hezbollah in Lebanon are all about. What Iran is all about. And the PEOPLE aren’t the least bit concerned about “civilian” deaths in Gaza and Lebanon. Go meet your maker … scum.
“…the PEOPLE see and understand what is happening.”
Yes they do, and an awful lot of people who were previously asleep are now wide awake. I remember being in Silicon Valley around 2010, and people were randomly yelling about the national debt. At Whole Foods. In Palo Alto. I didn’t see that once, I saw it many times while I was there. Something would come on a TV monitor, or they’d read it on their phone, and they would GO OFF on a rant. And then from around the store you would hear “hell yeah that’s right!” or “you know it!” from the other shoppers.
I haven’t been in the States since 2018, but I can’t imagine things have improved. I mean, there’s only so often you can have media spit in your face and tell you its raining before you pick a side.
Here in Canada there is this kind of sullen, heavy silence. Nobody says jack in the grocery store, unless you say the word “covid” and then you’ll hear something. But I see an awful lot of F*TRUDEAU!!! bumper stickers and flags, which is not a thing I’ve seen here before, really. Lots of Pali flags too, but only in Toronto.
The atmosphere is not congenial, shall we say. Next election is going to be interesting.
When Jefferson wrote to John Norvel in 1807 “nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle.” He wasn’t wrong, and yes this applies to television “news” as well, going back to at least Cronkite if not to the start of television “news”.
That Matti Friedman is not aware that Cronkite, Rather and others were purveyors of “Narrative” news, even after the CNN debacle of reporting Saddam’s propaganda from Baghdad, and other obvious examples says a lot about his biases and blind spots.
/insert “welcome to the party, pal!” meme here.
They’ve being blatantly lying for a long time and to me it started with OKC bombing in 1995. Right-wing militias, sure.