Free press in Australia is rapidly becoming a thing of the past so the unabated support of the military industrial complex ('MIC') can continue its record profits.
As they say in the classics, the first causality of war is the truth. But you don't have to wait for the lies, fabrications and distortions promulgated by the political leaders of each side, the press will do it for them.
It's all happening in front of our eyes and ears while we watch and listen to the daily barrage of "news" of the awful events of the Israel/Gaza conflict.
Most savvy readers will already know of the inherent bias of the Murdoch media in Australia but it's now endemic. Mainstream media has become an ethics-free wild frontier where anything goes and journalists become increasingly desperate to resurrect their once-respected industry and improve their dwindling readership. The fish rots from the head, so the blame must be laid on the media moguls and heads who have been the architects of their own industry’s demise: Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Stokes, Peter Costello and Ita Buttrose.
These four operators have done more damage to mainstream Australian society than any other players, political or otherwise, through their poor leadership and partial, divisive mainstream media. In the case of the American Rupert Murdoch, his influence should be considered foreign interference as it would be in any other industry.
The ABC’s Media Watch on October 16 featured a segment on the corporate media’s coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Host Paul Barry made the wildly understated observation that “initially we saw little protest from the Western media or [United States] President Joe Biden, who is right behind Israel”.
In fact, the “Western media” was and is enthusiastically cheerleading Israel’s genocidal attacks. Its main method is to focus attention on Hamas and its alleged brutalities.
Barry highlighted the particularly lurid allegation, initially raised by an Israeli journalist, that Hamas had beheaded babies.
This unimaginably horrific claim cannot be taken seriously without evidence. Hamas denied it and the Israeli military provided none.
Barry cast doubt on the allegation, however, he left the question hanging after asserting that the “story was confirmed by Israel” only for “that claim to be contradicted”.
In other words, he left it as claim and counter claim.
Israel is notorious for telling outright lies about its occupation atrocities. Take, for instance, Israel’s lies about the May 2022 killing of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh.
It is just one compelling and typical example. Israel falsely accused Palestinians as being responsible for shooting Abu Akleh, lied about where she was standing and eventually admitted it “may have been” an Israeli soldier that shot her, by accident.
Later investigations demonstrated convincingly that Israeli soldiers shot her and that it was deliberate.
Hamas should not be let off the hook for any war crimes. However, Israeli assertions about Hamas’ “savagery” needs to be scrutinised.
An Israeli woman who survived the October 7 Hamas assault on settlements near the Gaza border claimed that the Israeli military “undoubtedly” killed their own citizens.
“[Hamas] did not abuse us, they treated us very humanely,” she told Israeli radio. The killings only began hours later when Israeli soldiers turned up. Nobody was executed according to her testimony, although people were killed when a “volley of bullets” began “suddenly” after Israeli soldiers arrived.
In the Media Watch segment, Barry reserves special criticism for social media like X (formerly Twitter) and the Murdoch media, which undoubtedly deserve to be condemned for spreading misinformation.
However, in framing his piece this way, Barry helps launder the reputations of the non-Murdoch sections of the establishment media.
He wants to credit them for recognising that “as the week wore on, the plight of civilians in Gaza became more obvious and more desperate”.
Reporting the plight of civilians is not the same as scrutinising Israeli lies, holding Australian MPs to account for supporting Israeli war crimes and telling the truth about Israel’s attempted genocide of Palestinians.
A fair, impartial unbiased media would do just that.
But today (27 November 2023) we hear of the decision of Nine newspaper editors Tory Maguire, Patrick Elliget, Bevan Shields and David King to gag journalists who have called for balance in media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict: the most serious assault on a free press since the Coalition government’s raids on Annika Smethurst and the ABC — but is one wholly self-inflicted.
How Nine can purport to champion a free press from now on is a mystery, when it censors its own journalists — while engaging in exactly the kind of biased coverage those journalists have condemned.
Nine’s refusal to cover the ongoing campaign of terrorism and ethnic cleansing being carried out by Israeli colonists on the West Bank, with the complicity of the IDF and Israeli police, has become increasingly embarrassing as the issue has received greater and greater prominence elsewhere in the world. Not only has it become a major irritant in US-Israel relations, to the point where the Biden administration has revealed it will sanction perpetrators, new UK Foreign Secretary David Cameron raised it directly with Benjamin Netanyahu on his visit to Israel and the West Bank last week.
Four days ago, Israeli media reported that the head of Israel intelligence service Shin Bet, and a senior IDF general, warned that Israeli police were refusing to take any action against Israeli colonists in the West Bank, under direct orders from far-right Netanyahu government Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
Ethnic cleansing and terrorism aimed by Israeli colonists at Palestinians, with the official sanction of the Israeli government, is a story in and of itself worth reporting. How often do other governments have to raise the issue, and how much evidence from Israel itself is needed, before Nine newspapers deem the story worthy of coverage?
No wonder many of its staff want balance applied. Nine newspapers transparently lack balance and are heavily favouring Israel in their coverage.
Instead, the response of its editors is to gag those staff from playing any role in improving its lopsided reporting.
At the ABC, news head Justin Stevens has warned staff not to sign open letters “that may bring into question your impartiality or that of the ABC’s coverage.” The ABC, at least, has devoted considerable space to reporting on ethnic cleansing and terrorism on the West Bank, reporting on the attacks and the international reaction to them over a dozen times since the Hamas atrocities began the latest round of conflict, after having reported on the issue repeatedly throughout the year and earlier.
As former Age editor Michael Gawenda’s incoherent attack on an earlier open letter also demonstrated, Nine’s gagging of its own journalists has a huge problem of selectivity: why this open letter, why now? Why not another of the myriad open letters that have formed part of Australian journalism, on a host of issues, in recent years? All of them suffer from the same alleged flaw, of giving rise to the perception that journalists’ personal views might influence their reporting.
In this case, however, the core of the open letter is to call for practitioners of journalism to do journalism better — to condemn the killing and targeting of journalists covering the conflict, to be sceptical of all sides engaged in a military conflict, to provide necessary context, and to disclose participation in NSW Jewish Board of Deputies-funded “study tours” to the region — something at least three of the four Nine editors who are censoring journalists routinely fail to do.
If the position of Nine’s editors is that it is wrong to call for balanced coverage, scepticism of the claims of the powerful, necessary context, appropriate disclosure, and to condemn the at best reckless and likely intentional killing of journalists — and that anyone who does so must be censored — then they can’t seriously be called journalists, nor can anyone who backs such a policy. At the most charitable, they’re peddling a childish fantasy that privileged, rational journalists (usually white male journalists) can magically achieve objectivity from the commercial interests they work for, their own conditioning and the social, cultural and economic conditions they work in. At worst, they’re enabling “journalism” that is about reinforcing existing power structures and punching down at their victims.
The next time Nine purports to defend a free press — an act, of course, that surely draws into question its newspapers’ ability to objectively cover such issues as media regulation and national security issues — the easiest answer from any politician or national security bureaucrat is, whatever we’re doing might be bad, but at least we’re not gagging journalists. Those who harbour an agenda to curb reporting of areas deemed too “sensitive” or embarrassing for media exposure will be happy indeed that Nine has set such a useful example.
So, how is the MIC involved?
The New York Times headline said it all: “Middle East War Adds to Surge in International Arms Sales.” The conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, and beyond may be causing immense and unconscionable human suffering, but they are also boosting the bottom lines of the world’s arms manufacturers. There was a time when such weapons sales at least sparked talk of “the merchants of death” or of “war profiteers.” Now, however, is distinctly not that time, given the treatment of the industry by the mainstream media and the Washington establishment, as well as the nature of current conflicts. Mind you, the American arms industry already dominates the international market in a staggering fashion, controlling 45 percent of all such sales globally, a gap only likely to grow more extreme in the rush to further arm allies in Europe and the Middle East in the context of the ongoing wars in those regions.
In his nationally televised address about the Israel-Hamas and Russia-Ukraine wars, US president Joe Biden described the American arms industry in remarkably glowing terms, noting that, “just as in World War II, today patriotic American workers are building the arsenal of democracy and serving the cause of freedom.” From a political and messaging perspective, the president cleverly focused on the workers involved in producing such weaponry rather than the giant corporations that profit from arming Israel, Ukraine, and other nations at war. But profit they do and, even more strikingly, much of the revenues that flow to those firms is pocketed as staggering executive salaries and stock buybacks that only boost shareholder earnings further.
Biden also used that speech as an opportunity to tout the benefits of military aid and weapons sales to the U.S. economy:
“We send Ukraine equipment sitting in our stockpiles. And when we use the money allocated by Congress, we use it to replenish our own stores, our own stockpiles, with new equipment. Equipment that defends America and is made in America. Patriot missiles for air defense batteries, made in Arizona. Artillery shells manufactured in 12 states across the country, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas. And so much more.”
In short, the military-industrial complex is riding high, with revenues pouring in and accolades emanating from the top political levels in Washington. But is it, in fact, an arsenal of democracy? Or is it an amoral enterprise, willing to sell to any nation, whether a democracy, an autocracy, or anything in between?
The U.S. should certainly provide Ukraine with what it needs to defend itself from Russia’s invasion. Sending arms alone, however, without an accompanying diplomatic strategy is a recipe for an endless, grinding war (and endless profits for those arms makers) that could always escalate into a far more direct and devastating conflict between the U.S., NATO, and Russia. Nevertheless, given the current urgent need to keep supplying Ukraine, the sources of the relevant weapons systems are bound to be corporate giants like Raytheon and Lockheed Martin. No surprise there, but keep in mind that they’re not doing any of this out of charity.
Raytheon CEO Gregory Hayes acknowledged as much, however modestly, in an interview with the Harvard Business Review early in the Ukraine War:
“[W]e don’t apologise for making these systems, making these weapons… the fact is eventually we will see some benefit in the business over time. Everything that’s being shipped into Ukraine today, of course, is coming out of stockpiles, either at DoD [the Department of Defense] or from our NATO allies, and that’s all great news. Eventually we’ll have to replenish it and we will see a benefit to the business over the next coming years.”
Hayes made a similar point recently in response to a question from a researcher at Morgan Stanley on a call with Wall Street analysts. The researcher noted that Biden’s proposed multi-billion-dollar package of military aid for Israel and Ukraine “seems to fit quite nicely with Raytheon’s defense portfolio.” Hayes responded that “across the entire Raytheon portfolio you’re going to see a benefit of this restocking on top of what we think will be an increase in the DoD topline as we continue to replenish these stocks.” Supplying Ukraine alone, he suggested, would yield billions in revenues over the coming few years with profit margins of 10 to 12 percent.
Beyond such direct profits, there’s a larger issue here: the way the arms lobby is using the war to argue for a variety of favourable actions that go well beyond anything needed to support Ukraine. Those include less restrictive, multi-year contracts; reductions in protections against price gouging; faster approval of foreign sales; and the construction of new weapons plants. And keep in mind that all of this is happening as a soaring Pentagon budget threatens to hit an astonishing $1 trillion within the next few years.
As for arming Israel, including $14 billion in emergency military aid recently proposed by President Biden, the horrific attacks perpetrated by Hamas simply don’t justify the all-out war president Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has launched against more than two million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, with so many thousands of lives already lost and untold additional casualties to come. That devastating approach to Gaza in no way fits the category of defending democracy, which means that weapons companies profiting from it will be complicit in the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe.
Over the years, far from being a reliable arsenal of democracy, arms manufacturers have often helped undermine democracy globally, while enabling ever greater repression and conflict — a fact largely ignored in recent mainstream coverage of the industry. For example, in a 2022 report for the Quincy Institute, of the 46 then-active conflicts globally, 34 involved one or more parties armed by the United States. In some cases, American arms supplies were modest, but in many other conflicts such weaponry was central to the military capabilities of one or more of the warring parties.
Nor do such weapons sales promote democracy over autocracy, a watchword of the Biden administration’s approach to foreign policy. In 2021, the most recent year for which full statistics are available, the U.S. armed 31 nations that Freedom House, a non-profit that tracks global trends in democracy, political freedom, and human rights, designated as “not free.”
The most egregious recent example in which the American arms industry is distinctly culpable when it comes to staggering numbers of civilian deaths would be the Saudi Arabian/United Arab Emirates (UAE)-led coalition’s intervention in Yemen, which began in March 2015 and has yet to truly end. Although the active military part of the conflict is now in relative abeyance, a partial blockade of that country continues to cause needless suffering for millions of Yemenis. Between bombing, fighting on the ground, and the impact of that blockade, there have been nearly 400,000 casualties. Saudi air strikes, using American-produced planes and weaponry, caused the bulk of civilian deaths from direct military action.
Congress did make unprecedented efforts to block specific arms sales to Saudi Arabia and rein in the American role in the conflict via a War Powers Resolution, only to see legislation vetoed by President Donald Trump. Meanwhile, bombs provided by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin were routinely used to target civilians, destroying residential neighborhoods, factories, hospitals, a wedding, and even a school bus.
When questioned about whether they feel any responsibility for how their weapons have been used, arms companies generally pose as passive bystanders, arguing that all they’re doing is following policies made in Washington. At the height of the Yemen war, Amnesty International asked firms that were supplying military equipment and services to the Saudi/UAE coalition whether they were ensuring that their weaponry wouldn’t be used for egregious human rights abuses. Lockheed Martin typically offered a robotic response, asserting that “defense exports are regulated by the U.S. government and approved by both the Executive Branch and Congress to ensure that they support U.S. national security and foreign policy objectives.” Raytheon simply stated that its sales “of precision-guided munitions to Saudi Arabia have been and remain in compliance with U.S. law.”
Of course, weapons firms are not merely subject to U.S. laws, but actively seek to shape them, including exerting considerable effort to block legislative efforts to limit arms sales. Raytheon typically put major behind-the-scenes effort into keeping a significant sale of precision-guided bombs to Saudi Arabia on track. In May 2018, then-CEO Thomas Kennedy even personally visited the office of Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to (unsuccessfully) press him to drop a hold on that deal. That firm also cultivated close ties with the Trump administration, including presidential trade adviser Peter Navarro, to ensure its support for continuing sales to the Saudi regime even after the murder of prominent Saudi journalist and U.S. resident Jamal Khashoggi.
The list of major human rights abusers that receive U.S.-supplied weaponry is long and includes (but isn’t faintly limited to) Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Egypt, Turkey, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Such sales can have devastating human consequences. They also support regimes that all too often destabilise their regions and risk embroiling the United States directly in conflicts.
U.S.-supplied arms also far too regularly fall into the hands of Washington’s adversaries. As an example consider the way the UAE transferred small arms and armored vehicles produced by American weapons makers to extremist militias in Yemen, with no apparent consequences, even though such acts clearly violated American arms export laws. Sometimes, recipients of such weaponry even end up fighting each other, as when Turkey used U.S.-supplied F-16s in 2019 to bomb U.S.-backed Syrian forces involved in the fight against Islamic State terrorists.
Such examples underscore the need to scrutinise U.S. arms exports far more carefully. Instead, the arms industry has promoted an increasingly “streamlined” process of approval of such weapons sales, campaigning for numerous measures that would make it even easier to arm foreign regimes regardless of their human-rights records or support for the interests Washington theoretically promotes. These have included an “Export Control Reform Initiative” heavily promoted by the industry during the Obama and Trump administrations that ended up ensuring a further relaxation of scrutiny over firearms exports. It has, in fact, eased the way for sales that, in the future, could put U.S.-produced weaponry in the hands of tyrants, terrorists, and criminal organisations.
Now, the industry is promoting efforts to get weapons out the door ever more quickly through “reforms” to the Foreign Military Sales program in which the Pentagon essentially serves as an arms broker between those weapons corporations and foreign governments.
The impetus to move ever more quickly on arms exports and so further supersize this country’s already staggering weapons manufacturing base will only lead to yet more price gouging by arms corporations. It should be a government imperative to guard against such a future, rather than fuel it. Alleged security concerns, whether in Ukraine, Israel, or elsewhere, shouldn’t stand in the way of vigorous congressional oversight. Even at the height of World War II, a time of daunting challenges to American security, then-Senator Harry Truman established a committee to root out war profiteering.
Yes, tax dollars are being squandered in the rush to build and sell ever more weaponry abroad. Worse yet, for every arms transfer that serves a legitimate defensive purpose, there is another — not to say others — that fuels conflict and repression, while only increasing the risk that, as the giant weapons corporations and their executives make fortunes, this country will become embroiled in more costly foreign conflicts.
Praising the U.S. arms industry as the “arsenal of democracy” obscures the numerous ways it undermines our security and wastes our tax dollars. Rather than romanticising the military-industrial complex, isn’t it time to place it under greater democratic control? After all, so many lives depend on it.
The pro-Israel propaganda trotted out by our politicians - with full complicity of the mainstream media - not only "romanticises" the MIC, it is part of the what the MIC does: promote and contribute to the prolonging of conflict in order to make more profit.
It enhances Richard Marles' chest-beating about AUKUS by convincing voters that using their taxpayer dollars to enhance the acquisition of arms should be a prioritised ahead of funds that might be better directed towards health, welfare, and education as well as the burgeoning cost of living crisis.
To shape narrative, mainstream media employs 4 key stages: Disinformation and misleading content, creating pre-attack legitimacy, dehumanization of one side’s victims, shadowing the perpetrator.
In the conflict between Israel and Palestine to date, Western media manipulation has taken center stage according to Israel’s strategic use of propaganda. Amid mainstream failures, alternative voices and social media became pivotal in offering a multi-voiced perspective on the human catastrophe and Israel’s atrocities in besieged Gaza.
Media serves not only as an information tool but also as a potent propaganda instrument. Particularly during times of war, propaganda undermining atrocities is extensively employed by states involved in the conflict. The most recent example of "atrocity propaganda" can be observed in Israel’s portrayal of its war in besieged Gaza.
Throughout the conflict, Western media, including state-funded broadcasters such as the BBC and Germany’s DW, and global media outlets such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Times of London, CNN, and Fox News, have been widely criticized for echoing Israel’s propaganda.
Israel based its propaganda on the “self-defense” argument, aiming to justify internationally recognized war crimes under the law such as collective punishment, the use of weapons like white phosphorus bombs, and targeting civilians. The actions came with the wide support of Western policymakers and media outlets despite clear violations of the Geneva Convention and Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Furthermore, those daring to raise their voices against the loss of civilian lives, advocate a ceasefire, or pleading for essential aid to reach Gaza were callously stamped with the “antisemitic” label. The indiscriminate use of this term extended to those participating in peaceful anti-war protests. Adding insult to injury, individuals who boldly spoke out or shared their anti-massacre sentiments on social media sometimes found themselves paying the price with job losses.
Under the shadow of discrimination, Western media not only embraced one side’s narrative but also distanced itself from journalistic objectivity. Recognizing the power of rhetoric to shape public opinion, mass media opted for a biased framing in presenting news narratives in the last three weeks.
Western media outlets shaped their rhetoric through the lens of “one reality” over the many brutalities witnessed on the ground. To support the “reality,” the chosen victim group is highlighted and emphasized, while simultaneously the “other” victim group is either minimalized or silenced.
To shape the narrative, the mainstream media employed four key stages: Disinformation and misleading content, creating pre-attack legitimacy, dehumanization of one side’s victims, and shadowing the perpetrator.
The first stage of propaganda in Israel’s “just” war process is using disinformation and misleading content to create a basis for their “self-defense” argument. Disinformation is often used to prepare the public for “proportionate and necessary attacks” to protect one side. The causes and consequences of this violence are either ignored or left ambiguous.
On the first day of the attacks, Oct. 7, one piece of “news” made a big splash: Hamas beheading 40 babies, without any verification of the information (Fox News, CNN, The New York Post). This rumor, on which the Israeli authorities have repeatedly based the reason for their actions, could not be confirmed. It couldn’t be substantiated.
In one example, the Times of London, during that period, used photos of injured Gazan children with the headline: “Israel shows mutilated babies.” Not only did they feature images of Palestinian children instead of Israeli children, but the Times also mentioned in the news that photographs of mutilated Israeli babies were “too graphic” and, as a result, they chose not to publish them. They rather used one’s suffering to boost sympathy for another’s pain.
The second leg of propaganda seen in Western media is to create pre-attack legitimacy, which basically refers to preparing the international public for attacks using the rhetoric that “attacks may be just.” This involves shaping rhetoric to prepare the international audience for the notion that the impending attacks are justified. Notably, Britain’s BBC circulated information claiming that hospitals were being used as Hamas tunnels just a day before a major hospital was targeted.
The subsequent coverage of the hospital shooting was presented to the public with the perpetrator described vaguely in passive language. Additionally, Western media adopted the Israeli propaganda narrative depicting Palestinians as human shields, refraining from reporting on the targeting of schools, hospitals, churches, and mosques within the context of “civilian targeting.”
The third phase of the propaganda is seen on the framing of one side’s tragedies. The Western media have been focusing on the victimhood of Israeli side through interviews with prisoners’ families, short documentaries, and personal stories shared repeatedly on social media.
In contrast, Palestinian casualties are relegated to mere numbers, lacking the depth of individual narratives and the human suffering accompanying each loss. Moreover, Palestinians faced complete silence in the first days of attacks.
Western media’s linguistic and narrative asymmetry raises concern as the public is directly linked to creating pre-attack legitimacy. Highlighting the suffering of one side while neglecting the other, and suggesting that the only solution to combat a “terrorist” group is through the indiscriminate killing of civilians, stated merely in numbers, poses a significant risk of legitimizing genocide.
The fourth stage of the propaganda can be seen in Western media coverage of Israeli and Palestinian losses. A notable linguistic bias emerges as Israelis are described as “killed,” while Palestinians are said to have “died,” with perpetrators of the killings often left unnamed. For instance, when a Reuters journalist was killed by an Israeli airstrike, the BBC hardly included the word Israel, and only when “the army" was “deeply regretful for the incident.”
In a parallel instance, when a civilian settlement in Gaza experienced an impact, the incident was characterized in news reports as an “explosion” or a “blast” without referencing the Israeli bombardment – the root cause of the explosion.
This choice of language in news portrays Israelis as individual victims and Palestinians as unknown statistics.
Western media’s inability to capture the nuances of the Palestinian narrative, alternative global media and the pervasive influence of social media have emerged as the vanguard of a diverse counter-narrative.
Anadolu Agency’s exposure of the fabricated story of 40 beheaded babies underscores the critical role of these alternative voices in debunking misinformation. At the same time, TRT World and Al Jazeera, in their efforts to dispel biased claims, have used powerful documentaries to challenge dominant narratives.
These counter-media not only quickly report on civilian casualties and identify perpetrators, but also amplify the voices of the oppressed and provide an unfiltered spotlight on the ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. In essence, these alternative narratives serve as a robust and essential corrective to the limitations of mass media, ensuring a more comprehensive understanding of the complex realities on the ground.
Social media, on the other hand, has put each Gazan user in the position of a “self-journalist.” Through this endeavor, Gazans used their social media accounts to share moment-by-moment photos, videos, firsthand accounts of the injured, and narratives of families grappling with profound losses to convey the atrocities to the world.
In response to the transmission of regionally reported news that contradicted Israel’s narrative, Israel took severe measures. Press members and their families became targets, and telecommunication services in Gaza were entirely eradicated, isolating the region from global communication channels.
Israel strategically shrouded one of its most intense bombardments in darkness, effectively thwarting self-journalism and blocking the events in the region from being conveyed to the world in any form. This deliberate action created a blackout in global public opinion by obstructing information from both within and outside the area.
This led to the mobilization of pro-Palestine social media users on social media issuing a call to Elon Musk with the hashtag #starlinkgaza. Responding to the plea, Elon Musk facilitated a satellite connection to the region, defying the imposed blackout.
As Israel’s war in Gaza continues unabated, the ongoing human tragedy persists, overshadowed by a mainstream media that disproportionately highlights a singular perspective. Through biased coverage, Western media not only adopted one side’s propaganda as its narrative and rhetoric but put their claim of “journalistic objectivity” at risk, potentially leading to a loss of credibility in the eyes of the public.
Comments
Post a Comment