You cannot understand a conflict without understanding its history. That’s why historical context is routinely suppressed by corporate media, such as in the Palestinian-Israel conflict and the war between Russia and Ukraine. They don’t want you to understand.
It will take more than sunlight to reform our bounty-hunting, boys’ club that rules the roost in a corporate media captured by billionaires who care less about profit than ways their share of our attention can give themselves access to power. But it’s a good start. Ironically, our nation’s flawed defamation laws which so severely curtail speaking truth to power that our fourth estate is a tamed estate if not a fifth column – may have triggered an exposure of such rampant corruption, on such a wide scale, that the genie is now out of the bottle.
Why would Australian corporate media present headlines as if they were surprisingly exceptional or evil in Australia? The idea that Israel be destroyed isn’t strange, particularly in an anti-Semitic racist country like Australia. A country that recently voted No to any institutional recognition of its own First Nation’s peoples. Whites have refused to share this country with people who have been living here for 65,000 years. Like Israelis, we have been present here little more than the Jews in Palestine. They haven’t been there since 1948 but claim Palestine is theirs because they once lived there 3000 years ago. Despite the fact that the majority of Jews, 66% aka the diaspora, don’t want to even live there now.
Israel it might be argued is the product of anti-Semitism no European country wanted to take them after WW1 when the Balfour Agreement was signed and by the time WW2 was won the Allies had accepted the state of Israel in the British mandate of Palestine which allowed for the dispossession and evacuation of 750,000 Palestinians. Israel is a man-made construct, a domino, that many believe deserves to be knocked over.
Netanyahu has amplified the idea that Israel needs to be destroyed and set back any thought of a two or one-state solution His want for a Theocratic Apartheid State that held 2.3 million people in a concentration camp called Gaza needs to be gone. Doing, what they call “mowing the grass” is a crime against humanity. Israel has done what Hamas did on October 7th on more than one occasion and didn’t think it a big deal. They did more damage than Hamas when killing 2,200 people 500 children 200 combatants, and the rest civilians while destroying 18,000 homes and breaking the cease-fire. They just coupled it with a massive PR campaign.
The Australian Palestinian Advocacy Network president has advocated for the destruction of the Israeli state in comments criticised by a prominent extremism expert.
Source: Israel Hamas: Palestine spokesman Nasser Mashni defends 3CR comments on Israel
That these aspirations seem to be naive simply serves to illustrate how low our common expectations have sunk. But unless we begin to look at the coverage of news and current events as being a core and important issue, and take steps to stop our current slide into partisan nonsense, then our Australian media environment may very soon become as hopelessly gridlocked and fractured as in the US.
This is why the current discussions regarding curbing the instances of misinformation and disinformation in our media are both necessary and should be applauded by all Aussies, regardless of their political bent. But these regulatory measures can only be viewed as a starting point. There is a need to move to decentralise our media and unwind the massive monopolies that currently exist. The good health of our democracy depends on cultivating a healthy press environment.
The stakes are high. Big Brother is not just a scary tale. Nineteen-eighty-four is not in our rear-view mirror. Just as in America, very soon parts of our media may also become so utterly detached from reality, that half our population will begin agitating for renovations to our law, in accord with a brand new and improved his
The media frenzy appeared unanimous in its focus on identifying the leaker more than reporting on the newsworthy content of the material.
In contrast, Assange went to the absolute limits of human endurance for the sake of protecting whistleblowing sources.
Journalists are entrusted by the public to reveal truth, not serve the powerful in a witch-hunt for sources of the truth. Instead, The New York Times and its co-conspirators from Bellingcat appear to have been seeking to punish a leaker who exposed the U.S. government and the corporate media’s lies.
The legacy news media is not simply a second-rate form of journalism in comparison with WikiLeaks, but its intentional opposite.
Morrison’s advantage is that his unstated quid pro quo relationship with a corporate MSM, a private media which assists by producing a numbing mist and not News. A cocktail of sport, entertainment, and a scattering of trivial reports sold as but what it isn’t “News”. It’s actually a distraction a soporific fake product. Grace Tame and Brittany Higgins started a conversation at the NPC and 60 Minutes follows it up with Morrison hiding behind his wife Jenny’s skirt. The issue of Morrison and te Sexism in Canberra diffused rather than addressed proves and speaks to Tame and Higgin’s claim that Morrison has done nothing.
Murdoch doesn’t even hide the fact that they aren’t a News organisation anymore but use the term “opinion” to cover up their primary function propaganda, or a cash for comment business model. Meanhile Morrison’s LNP shreds our Democracy and the ABC to consolidate their’s and Murdoch’s model of and transition to one party rule.
By Mike Scrafton We’re facing a climate calamity, yet the PM believes Australians are more focused on the next holiday than threats to their children’s future. In his recent address to the National Press Club, Prime Minister Scott Morrison typically infantilised voters and kept the focus on economic growth. He believes the voters, cocooned in their cloistered suburbs, are oblivious to the threats that will crush their children’s future prospects.
Should — the gods and statistics forbid — Trump win reelection this November, we’ll have a real-life example of a system that is locally unstable, but globally horribly stable for the next four years. In his case, of course, we’re talking about how a “very stable genius” will be able to spin the chaos he creates into an ever more authoritarian regime.
If we learn nothing else from the war on Iraq and its subsequent occupation, it is that the U.S. ruling class has learned to make ideological warfare as important to its operations as military and economic warfare. A crucial component of this ideological war has been the campaign against “left-wing media bias,” with the objective of reducing or eliminating the prospect that mainstream U.S. journalism might be at all critical toward elite interests or the system set up to serve those interests. In 2001 and 2002, no less than three books purporting to demonstrate the media’s leftward tilt rested high atop the bestseller list. Such charges have already influenced media content, pushing journalists to be less critical of right-wing politics. The result has been to reinforce the corporate and rightist bias already built into the media system
Source: The ‘Left-Wing’ Media?
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