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Wrong, CBS and Other Media Outlets, Abrupt Antarctic “Climate Shifts” Are Not New or Necessarily Catastrophic

By Anthony Watts and H. Sterling Burnett | ClimateRealism | August 29, 2025

A recent CBS News article, “Abrupt Antarctic climate shifts could lead to ‘catastrophic consequences for generations,’ experts warn,” claims that Antarctica is on the brink of irreversible collapse due to climate change, warning that sea levels could rise by meters and that “catastrophic consequences for generations” are looming. This is false or, at best, deeply misleading. The actual data and history of Antarctic ice show that “abrupt changes” are neither unprecedented nor a reason to panic. Natural variability and cyclical shifts are being ignored in favor of sensational headlines pushing the increasingly untenable climate crisis narrative.

CBS was not alone in pushing the Antarctic climate crisis narrative. On 21 August 2025, The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) joined the chorus of media outlets with alarming headlines warning of pending ice collapse, publishing a report claiming Antarctica is undergoing “rapid, self-perpetuating changes” that are “potentially irreversible.” Each of the reports cited a new Nature review led by Professor Nerilie Abram, as the source of the information for their alarming articles.

ABC’s article presents Antarctica as being in a state of runaway decline, with imminent threats to emperor penguins and global sea levels, parroting language from the Abram paper as if it were observed fact, rather than the speculative synthesis of research papers that the Nature study cites. CBS, ABC, and other media outlets are covering this story as if a tipping point is upon us—but a closer look at the evidence reveals otherwise.

CBS News warns:

Abrupt and potentially irreversible changes in Antarctica driven by climate change could lift global oceans by meters and lead to ‘catastrophic consequences for generations,’ scientists warned Wednesday. … After increasing slightly during the first 35 years that satellite data was available, Antarctic sea-ice cover plunged dramatically over the last decade.

Australia’s ABC News, meanwhile, uncritically repeats Abram’s claims and, describing the Antarctic as “rapidly, self-perpetuating” on the cusp of collapse, while offering little discussion of data—leaning instead on worst-case modeling and literature reviews.

Antarctic data and an examination of its history show that such events have happened previously, long before anyone was worried about human-caused climate change, and they are not self-perpetuating but rather, seem cyclical in nature.

The CBS article claims that “Antarctic sea-ice cover plunged dramatically over the last decade,” citing a “regime shift” since 2014. ABC News, echoing the same theme, refers to a sudden and supposedly “irreversible” decline. But both articles omit key facts, among them:

  • The “Abrupt” Decline Follows Decades of Expansion. Satellite measurements of Antarctic sea-ice began in late 1978. For most of the next 36 years, Antarctic sea-ice was stable or increasing, setting multiple record highs between 2007 and 2014. In October 2014, the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) reported: “Antarctic sea-ice extent set an all-time record high for the third straight year.” This expansion occurred for more than 30 years during the period when the Earth was warming, contradicting claims that warming inevitably reduces Antarctic sea-ice.
  • The recent sharp declines since 2016 are real, but as the most robust satellite records show, these represent a regime shift within a variable system—not evidence of permanent or “runaway” collapse as one recent paper detailed.
  • Evidence of Antarctica’s history shows that natural variability dominates changes in  Antarctica. Longer reconstructions, stretching back to 1905, confirm that Antarctic sea-ice has experienced periods of large growth and subsequent declines over the past century. One 2020, study demonstrated that natural variability, including the influence of atmospheric and oceanic circulation, have likely played a role in any recent changes, as they drove such changes in the past.

As importantly as all this is, concern for the recent decline in sea ice is largely misplaced since, as even CBS news acknowledged in its story, [f]loating sea ice does not significantly add to sea level when it melts . . ..” As a result, neither the “record setting” expansion of sea-ice spanning the late 20th and early 21st century nor the recent decline significantly effect sea levels.

Perhaps that’s why the new stories tried to tie the sea-ice decline to rising seas indirectly saying the sea ice retreat, “ . . . does replace white surfaces that reflect almost all of the sun’s energy back into space with deep blue water, which absorbs the same amount instead.”

The problem here is, there is no evidence the earlier multidecade expansion of sea-ice or the recent decline has a causal connection to ice growth or expansion on mainland Antarctica, the latter of which could impact sea levels. Indeed, the record indicates that for some of the period when sea-ice was expanding, Antarctica was losing mass, and now, while it is in decline, Antarctica is gaining ice on net, reducing sea level rise.

Shifting focus from sea-ice to Antarctica’s mainland, the CBS and ABC News shift attention to recent ice losses on the West Antarctic ice sheet and in particular the declining Thwaites glacier.

When discussing ice sheets, both outlets repeat claims that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has crossed a point of no return. But they fail to mention that West Antarctica sits atop a tectonic rift system with elevated geothermal heat flux, which drives melting from below, regardless of atmospheric conditions. In short, subsurface volcanic activity or heating from tectonic shifts is melting the region’s ice from below, and causing increased flow into the sea.

Indeed, Direct borehole measurements, aeromagnetic surveys, and radar-based research confirm anomalously high heat flow in the region from beneath the mass. This subglacial influence helps explain why areas like Amundsen and Thwaites behave differently from the stable East Antarctic.

Also, the northern Antarctic Peninsula, which is frequently highlighted for its instability, extends north of the Antarctic Circle into sub-Antarctic latitudes. Its climate and dynamics cannot be generalized to the rest of the continent according to NASA Earth Observatory in 2014.

Climate Realism has previously discussed the causes and consequences of ice loss on the Antarctic peninsula and in the West Antarctic multiple times previously, here and here, for example, in each case debunking a media claim that humans are behind the loss.

Antarctica’s ice loss is important, CBS and ABC tell us, because the Antarctic Ice Sheet’s collapse could “raise sea levels by meters,” threatening “hundreds of millions.” But the actual rate of global sea level rise, measured by satellites and tide gauges, is about 3 millimeters per year as detailed in Climate at a Glance: Sea Level Rise. At this rate, it would take 333 years to reach even a single meter of rise.

The idea of meters of sea level rise by 2100 is rooted in computer models, not observation. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concedes that melting the East Antarctic Ice Sheet would require thousands of years and temperature increases far beyond any plausible scenario this century:

Loss of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) is very unlikely over this century and beyond under scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions considered in this report. Complete loss of the EAIS would require sustained global warming significantly above the levels projected for this century, and would take thousands of years.

Putting the supposed amount of Antarctic glacier loss in context is important, because as a percentage of the continent’s total ice volume, recent reported losses from the continent are miniscule, contrary to media hype. See the figure below, as presented at Climate at a Glance Antarctic Ice Melt.

Figure: Comparison of satellite data for Antarctic ice mass loss. Cumulative ice mass loss on the left and that same data compared to the total mass of ice on the right.
Data source: http://imbie.org. Graphs originally by Willis Eschenbach, adapted and annotated by Anthony Watts.

Describing the ice changes in Antarctica as “irreversible” or “runaway” is nothing more than alarming speculation that ignores evidence to the contrary.

CBS, ABC, and the other mainstream media outlets touting the study’s warnings about the future also ignore the fact that contrary to the implication of the study, Antarctica is actually gaining ice at present and has for the past couple of years.

As discussed at Climate Change Weekly, In late April and early May, mainstream media outlets ran dozens of stories discussing the findings of a recent study that showed Antarctica’s ice mass was growing. The outlets called the ice and snow gain “astonishing,” “surprising,” and “shock[ing]” and said it “startled the scientific community.” That’s right, recent research shows that the Antarctic has not warmed over the past seven decades and that the vast bulk of Antarctica experienced substantial ice growth in the past couple of years, reversing the decline reported in Nature that  ABC, CBS, and other outlets are writing about. Glacial melt which had been contributing to sea level rise reversed itself over a period of three years, adding mass and cutting Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise.

Any reporting that omits the physics, history, and current trends is incomplete and misleading. And any story that blames global warming for glacier melt in Antarctica and subsequent sea level rise, when the continent has not experienced warming, glaciers on the whole are growing and thus reducing sea level rise, is just false.

Both ABC and CBS also point to emperor penguin breeding failures as a result of climate change, implying an existential threat across the species. Yet the 2025 study making these claims conducted a regional and local survey of selected colonies from 2009 to 2024, reporting a 22 percent decline in those specific locations. It didn’t look at the health of emperor penguin colonies across Antarctic as a whole. The authors themselves specifically cautioned that their results may not represent the entire Antarctic coastline—a vital caveat that ABC and CBS’s stories lack. With emperor penguins living for decades, a 15-year record is simply too short to establish population trajectories. These penguins have survived warm and cold phases across the Holocene. To suggest continent-wide extinction risk by 2100 is not supported by the available evidence.

In the end, history shows that the expansion and contraction of Antarctic sea-ice are natural features of a highly variable system. Short-term losses are not proof of a “runaway” tipping point; rather, they are well within known ranges of natural variability.

CBS, ABC, and other media outlets are constructing a narrative of Antarctic collapse by cherry-picking short-term declines, ignoring decades of stability and increase, omitting key physical context, and leaning on speculative reviews. Climate Realism has factually debunked similar media scare stories in the past, here and here. The actual Antarctic observational record reveals a dynamic system—one that expands and contracts, shaped by natural variability, oceanic and atmospheric cycles, and unique geographic barriers.

The catastrophic claims ABC and CBS are parroting are not only unsupported, they fly in the face of decades of data and scientific understanding. Had the mainstream media displayed a little investigative curiosity, it would have questioned the recent study’s findings, since the evidence clearly shows Antarctic “climate shifts” are not a harbinger of doom but another chapter in a long story of natural change.

August 31, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Psychiatrists Deny the Harm of Antidepressants for the Fetus

By Peter C. Gøtzsche | Brownstone Institute | August 30, 2025

On 23 August 2025, award-winning science journalist Robert Whitaker, founder of the evidence-based Mad in America website, published a very important article:

”Not even the unborn are safe from psychiatric harm: Medical organizations and the media dismiss the large body of research telling of fetal harm from exposure to antidepressants during pregnancy.”

I summarize here Bob’s detailed article, adding my own thoughts and explanations about the issues.

On July 21, the FDA convened a panel on antidepressants in pregnancy, with a focus on possible harms to the fetus from exposure to the drugs.

The panelists’ brief presentations, and their plea for informed consent, did not sit well with medical organizations. They issued statements denouncing the panel as biased and misinformed; declared that the evidence showed that SSRIs and SNRIs are effective and safe treatments for prenatal depression; and claimed that the real concern was untreated depression. Major media echoed uncritically this flawed and erroneous expert consensus in their reporting on the panel.

The professional organizations betrayed the public’s right to know. They were putting their guild interests – protecting their prescribing practices and belief in the efficacy and lack of harms of antidepressants – ahead of their duty to provide an honest basis for informed consent. As detailed below, they misled the media, and the media in turn misled the public, in both cases very seriously so.

One of the panelists, Michael Levin, concluded that since serotonin is important for embryonic development, “manipulating its use by cells with SSRIs is very, very likely to cause certain kinds of defects.”

Animal experiments have proved him right. Fetal exposure to SSRIs leads to altered brain development, numerous risks to fetal health, and deficits in behavior after birth. At birth, fetal SSRI exposure in rodents is associated with low birth weight, persistent pulmonary hypertension, increased risk of cardiomyopathy, and increased postnatal mortality. After birth, such exposure is associated with delayed motor development, reduced pain sensitivity, disrupted juvenile play, fear of new things, and a higher vulnerability of affective disorders (such as anhedonia-like behavior). These behaviors are regarded as signs of anxiety and depression in animals.

With the animal studies showing also an increased risk for miscarriage, pre-term birth, and congenital malformations, the first wave of studies in humans focused on these concerns, in addition to low birth weight and persistent pulmonary hypertension. This research produced an abundance of findings that the risk of such adverse events is elevated with fetal exposure to SSRIs in comparison to healthy controls.

A fair number of studies tell of how in utero exposure to SSRIs alters brain development in humans and lead to other harms. For example, a study by Kaiser Permanente of Northern California of 82,170 pregnant women showed that if the depression was treated with counseling, the risk of a pre-term delivery was reduced by 18%, whereas treatment with an antidepressant increased it by 31%. In both cases, there was a dose-response relationship.

Another harm is the neonatal abstinence syndrome, which is common, e.g. it occurred in 30% of 60 newborns exposed to SSRIs in utero. Researchers have published an extensive list of abstinence symptoms, which includes jitteriness, poor muscle tone, weak cry, abnormal crying, respiratory distress, seizure, abnormal behavior, sleep abnormalities, poor feeding, vomiting, uncoordinated sucking, and lethargy. In a study using the World Health Organization’s database for adverse drug effects, researchers classified 84% of the reported abstinence symptoms as serious.

The Doubt Industry at Work

The rodent studies, which were not confounded, clearly showed how fetal exposure to SSRIs regularly leads to maladaptive adult rodents. Correspondingly, in comparison with healthy controls, studies of children exposed in utero to SSRIs show an elevated risk of getting diagnosed with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, and affective disorders.

In a 2025 study, one of the FDA panelists, Jay Gingrich, and colleagues reported that prenatal exposure to SSRIs leads to a hyperactive amygdala both in mice and humans, which made both species more fearful and depressed as adolescents. Maternal depression could not explain these effects. Gingrich said at the FDA hearing that “these kids look pretty normal throughout early childhood, and then when they hit adolescence, their rates of depression really started to go up, which is what we see in our mouse studies.”

Bob Whitaker explains that studies in humans have produced inconsistent results. This is not surprising. When research results are threatening for a profession, researchers with guild or financial conflicts of interest always produce an avalanche of substandard studies casting doubt on the issues or denying them.

Maternal depression is known to confer developmental risks on children, and these researchers have therefore sought to account for this confounding factor by using statistical adjustments. Statistical adjustments are highly bias-prone, and in many of the studies Bob reviewed, the authors had not described their approach in sufficient detail nor whether the factors they controlled for had been published in a protocol before they looked at the data. Such studies can therefore be “torture your data till they confess” exercises.

A commonly used adjustment method is logistic regression, but what is little known is that the more baseline variables we include in a logistic regression, the further we are likely to get from the truth. This was documented in an excellent PhD thesis.

The Howl of Outrage

The same day the FDA had its panel meeting, or a couple of days later, leading medical organizations spread seriously misleading information.

The American Psychiatric Association wrote to the FDA that it was “alarmed and concerned by the misinterpretations and unbalanced viewpoints shared by several of the panelists…This propagation of biased interpretations at a time when suicide is a leading cause of maternal death within the first postpartum year could seriously hinder maternal mental health care. The inaccurate interpretation of data, and the use of opinion, rather than the years of research on antidepressant medications, will exacerbate stigma and deter pregnant individuals from seeking necessary care.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists stated that the panel was “alarmingly unbalanced” and did not adequately acknowledge the harms of untreated mood disorders in pregnancy. They claimed that SSRIs in pregnancy are a critical tool in preventing the potentially devastating effects of untreated anxiety and depression.

They also claimed that “Robust evidence has shown that SSRIs are safe in pregnancy and that most do not increase the risk of birth defects. However, untreated depression in pregnancy can put our patients at risk for substance use, preterm birth, preeclampsia, limited engagement in medical care and self-care, low birth weight, impaired attachment with their infant, and even suicide…Unfortunately, the many outlandish and unfounded claims made by the panelists regarding SSRIs will only serve to incite fear and cause patients to come to false conclusions that could prevent them from getting the treatment they need.”

The Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine stated they were “alarmed by the unsubstantiated and inaccurate claims made by FDA panelists concerning maternal depression and the use of SSRI antidepressants during pregnancy” and strongly supported the use of SSRIs.

They claimed that “Untreated or undertreated depression during pregnancy carries health risks, such as suicide, preterm birth, preeclampsia, and low birth weight…the available data consistently show that SSRI use during pregnancy is not associated with congenital anomalies, fetal growth problems, or long-term developmental problems.”

The National Curriculum in Reproductive Psychiatry was deeply concerned that some panelists “presented misleading or stigmatizing information about psychiatric treatment during pregnancy, undermined the scientific consensus, and failed to appropriately center the well-being of pregnant individuals.”

As shown in Whitaker’s article, virtually all statements were false, but they were propagated and enforced in major media, which did not investigate the issues at all.

The Los Angeles Times wrote that the panel spread misinformation about the drugs’ use in pregnancy and that healthcare providers had said that the risks of not treating depression in pregnancy far outweigh those of SSRIs.

The New York Times wrote that the panel was alarmingly biased against antidepressant use and did not adequately acknowledge the harms of untreated perinatal mood disorders in pregnancy.

NBC News accused the panel of promoting misinformation, “according to several psychiatrists who tuned into the meeting.”

National Public Radio talked about misinformation alarming doctors and claimed that

Well-controlled studies had not found the risks highlighted by the FDA panel.

Total Moral Meltdown

Those who spread misinformation were professional organizations riddled with conflicts of interest and – to paraphrase Lenin – their useful idiots among journalists.

There is nothing that hurts like the truth about healthcare. For the unborn child, fetal exposure to SSRIs only provides a tally of harms. Adam Urato, in his remarks at the FDA hearing, put it into a haunting perspective: “Never before in human history have we chemically altered developing babies like this, especially the developing fetal brain, and this is happening without any real public warning. That must end.”

An earlier Mad in America report on prenatal screening for depression showed that task forces set up in the UK, Canada, and the US all struggled to find evidence that screening plus treatment with antidepressants provided any benefit to the mother.

I describe in my freely available books, with numerous references to solid science, what the facts are:

As explained by psychiatrist Joanna Moncrieff at the FDA meeting, meta-analyses of placebo-controlled trials have consistently shown that the benefit of treating depression with antidepressants is so small that it lacks clinical relevance. It is therefore impossible that the risks of not treating depression in pregnancy “far outweigh those of SSRIs.”

Antidepressants double the risk of suicide. Depression in pregnancy should therefore be treated with psychotherapy, which will not harm the fetus. The panel members spoke of treating depression with non-drug alternatives but the media did not find this essential information important. In the absurd world of psychiatry, unfortunately, “treatment” is synonymous with drugs.

All the claims above about the wonders antidepressants can achieve for the mother and the newborn are wrong.

Antidepressants are being increasingly used in children and adolescents, although they drive some of them to commit suicide and don’t work for them.

Even the unborn are being harmed on a large scale. Will this madness ever stop?

Dr. Peter Gøtzsche co-founded the Cochrane Collaboration, once considered the world’s preeminent independent medical research organization. In 2010 Gøtzsche was named Professor of Clinical Research Design and Analysis at the University of Copenhagen. Gøtzsche has published more than 97 over 100 papers in the “big five” medical journals (JAMA, Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine, British Medical Journal, and Annals of Internal Medicine). Gøtzsche has also authored books on medical issues including Deadly Medicines and Organized Crime.

August 30, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

Photojournalist resigns from Reuters over its ‘betrayal of journalists’ in Gaza

MEMO | August 26, 2025

Canadian photojournalist Valerie Zink has resigned after eight years with Reuters, criticizing the news agency’s stance on Gaza as a “betrayal of journalists” and accusing it of “justifying and enabling” the killing of 245 journalists in the Palestinian enclave, Anadolu reports.

“At this point it’s become impossible for me to maintain a relationship with Reuters given its role in justifying and enabling the systematic assassination of 245 journalists in Gaza,” Zink said Tuesday through the US social media company X.

Zink said she worked as a Reuters stringer for eight years, with her photos published by many outlets, including The New York Times, Al Jazeera, and others worldwide.

She criticized Reuters’ reporting after the killing of Anas Al-Sharif and an Al Jazeera crew in Gaza, accusing the agency of amplifying Israel’s “entirely baseless claim” that Al-Sharif was a Hamas operative, which was “one of countless lies that media outlets like Reuters have dutifully repeated and dignified,” she said.

“I have valued the work that I brought to Reuters over the past eight years, but at this point I can’t conceive of wearing this press pass with anything but deep shame and grief,” Zink said.

Zink also emphasized that the agency’s willingness to “perpetuate Israel’s propaganda” has not spared their own reporters from Israel’s genocide.

“I don’t know what it means to begin to honour the courage and sacrifice of journalists in Gaza, the bravest and best to ever live, but going forward I will direct whatever contributions I have to offer with that front of mind,” Zink highlighted, reflecting on the courage of Gaza’s journalists.

“I owe my colleagues in Palestine at least this much, and so much more,” she added.

Referring to the killing of six more journalists, including Reuters cameraman Hossam Al-Masri, in Israel’s Monday attack on the Nasser hospital in Gaza, Zink said: “It was what’s known as a “double tap” strike, in which Israel bombs a civilian target like a school or hospital; waits for medics, rescue teams, and journalists to arrive; and then strikes again.”

Zink underlined that Western media is directly culpable for creating the conditions for these events, quoting Jeremy Scahill, who said major outlets—from the New York Times to Reuters—have served as “a conveyor belt for Israeli propaganda,” sanitizing war crimes, dehumanizing victims, and abandoning both their colleagues and their commitment to true and ethical reporting.

She said Western media outlets, by “repeating Israel’s genocidal fabrications without determining if they have any credibility” and abandoning basic journalistic responsibility, have enabled the killing of more journalists in Gaza in two years than in major global conflicts combined, while also contributing to the suffering of the population.

The new fatalities among the media personnel in Gaza brought the number of Palestinian journalists killed in Israeli attacks since October 2023 to 246.

Israel has killed more than 62,700 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023. The military campaign has devastated the enclave, which is facing famine.

Last November, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Israel also faces a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its war on the enclave.

READ ALSO: China ‘shocked’ over Israeli killing of journalists in Gaza 

August 26, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Russia rejects accusations of ‘fracturing’ Ukraine talks with US

RT | August 23, 2025

The Russian Foreign Ministry has pushed back against Western media reports claiming Moscow undermined Ukraine peace talks with the US by insisting it must take part in discussions about security guarantees for Kiev.

On Friday, Bloomberg reported, citing sources, that remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov about the principles of “indivisible security” in Europe have “effectively fractured Russia’s talks with the US,” while describing Moscow’s stance as “an attempt to stall the [settlement] process.” The Wall Street Journal similarly accused Lavrov of “toss[ing] all sorts of obstacles” in the way of possible high-level talks between Moscow and Kiev.

The ministry responded that Russia has followed a consistent policy on the conditions needed both to resolve the Ukraine conflict and to build a stable European security framework.

The ministry recalled that following the Alaska summit with US President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin noted that a sustainable peace in Ukraine could be achieved only if “all root causes of the crisis are eliminated, all of Russia’s legitimate concerns taken into account, and a just balance in security in Europe and worldwide restored.”

He added at the time that Moscow “was ready to work on ensuring security for Ukraine.”

Later, Lavrov, responding to a question about the possible deployment of Western troops to Ukraine – which has been a red line for Moscow – noted that Russia “will firmly and strictly ensure our legitimate interests.” “Any serious discussion of security issues without Russia is a utopia.. [and] a road to nowhere,” he added.

“So how can anyone consider Lavrov’s words as ‘undermining’ the settlement process? On the contrary, Russia’s position is marked by consistency, and the minister’s statements confirm the points repeatedly voiced by President Putin on the Ukraine crisis,” the ministry noted.

Russia has repeatedly said that the Ukraine conflict can only be settled if Kiev commits to neutrality, demilitarization, denazification, and recognizes the new territorial reality on the ground.

August 23, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , , | Leave a comment

Dehumanize and destroy: How western media helped target Gaza’s journalists

By Robert Inlakesh | The Cradle | August 14, 2025

On 29 September 2024, an Israeli airstrike targeted the home of displaced Palestinian journalist Wafa al-Udaini in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. She, her husband, and their two young daughters were killed. Her two sons survived but were left injured and orphaned.

Udaini had long been a target. At the start of the war on Gaza, she appeared on a TalkTV broadcast hosted by British anchor Julia Hartley-Brewer, who had just finished a soft interview with Israeli army spokesperson Peter Lerner. When Udaini described Israeli attacks on Palestinians as a “massacre” – using the same word Lerner had applied to Hamas – she was ridiculed and cut off. The segment went viral. Israeli media outlets weaponized the interview to smear Udaini. She was soon receiving direct threats from the Israeli military. In private conversations, she described herself as a marked woman. In the months that followed, when asked by The Cradle if she had moved from her home in Al-Rimal, Gaza City, she said, “I can’t say, sorry.” She added:

“The anchor killed me … They are using the interview to justify killing me.”

Months later, Israel killed Wafa.

Wafa’s assassination was not isolated. It was the culmination of a campaign to normalize the erasure of Palestinian journalists. The occupation army even has a special unit dedicated to this war crime, known as the ‘Legitimization Cell.’

The killing of Anas al-Sharif

The most prominent recent example was Israel’s assassination of one of Gaza’s most famous reporters, Al Jazeera’s Anas al-Sharif, and his entire crew. Nearly 270 Palestinian journalists have been killed since October 2023. Western press has actively facilitated the cover-up of the murder of journalists in Gaza and failed to hold the occupation state accountable. Calls for accountability have been challenging Israel and western media outlets that have provided cover for the deliberate campaign to murder journalists.

Back in October 2024, the Israeli military published a hit list consisting of six Palestinian journalists working for Al Jazeera, claiming that the occupation state had obtained documents proving they were either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) militants. Sharif was on that list.

Al Jazeera outright rejected the allegations. The so-called intelligence files released by Israel were riddled with contradictions, fabrications, and recycled narratives. One claimed Sharif had been a commander in the Qassam Brigades’ Nukhba unit; another stated he had been injured in a training exercise in early 2023 and deemed unfit for combat. Both cannot be true. In reality, neither is.

When the occupation state announced Sharif’s assassination, it escalated its smear campaign by accusing him of firing rockets. Speaking to The Cradle on condition of anonymity, a senior Hamas official dismisses the claim as “ridiculous,” noting that rocket units and Nukhba forces are not the same, and that Anas was never affiliated with either.

These were not the first threats Anas received. On 22 November 2023, he publicly revealed that Israeli officers had threatened him via WhatsApp, and pinpointed his location. Weeks later, his 90-year-old father was killed in an airstrike on the family home in Jabalia Refugee Camp.

The Israeli military’s documents alleging Anas was a militant have been available for almost a year. Yet no major media outlet attempted to verify them. On the contrary, both the UN Special Rapporteur on press freedom, Irene Khan, and the Committee to Protect Journalists dismissed the Israeli claims. But the disinformation campaign intensified.

Israel’s Foreign Ministry began circulating old images of Anas with Hamas figures. Pro-Israel social media accounts unearthed decade-old tweets in which he expressed support for resistance. US attorney Stanley Cohen tells The Cradle:

“Under international humanitarian law and the law of war, journalists are protected as civilians, thus targeting them can constitute a war crime whether they are seen interviewing combatants or in their reporting have favorably written of or even supported them and their goals.”

Collusion and amplification

Possessing access to all this information and Israel’s long record of fabricating stories, the western media continued to amplify Tel Aviv’s talking points and character assassinations of Gaza’s journalists.

While Israel produced a series of claims to justify the murder of Anas al-Sharif, no such justifications were issued to explain why they struck the well-known tent used by the Al Jazeera broadcast team – which included correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh, assistant Mohammed Noufal, and cameramen Ibrahim Zaher and Moamen Aliwa.

Yet Reuters ran with the headline “Israel kills Al Jazeera journalist it says was Hamas leader,” a title triggering so much backlash that it forced them to change it to the sanitized “Israel strike kills Al Jazeera journalists in Gaza”. German outlet Bild, which is also the bestselling newspaper in Europe, published perhaps the most outrageous headline of all, entitled “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza,” also later altering their piece to read “Killed journalist allegedly was a terrorist.” Fox News and Canada’s National Post joined the chorus, parroting the occupation army’s narrative.

BBC coverage was equally complicit. In a profile-style article, the British broadcaster stated, “The BBC understands Sharif worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict.” This unverified claim contradicts Sharif’s own criticisms of Hamas, aired before the war. Even the Palestinian resistance movement has denied any formal affiliation. Hamas official Bassem Naim tells The Cradle that there is no known relationship between Sharif and “the movement or its military wing.”

Documented targeting and newsroom dissent

Western media failures began long before these assassinations. Israel’s systematic targeting of media workers has been copiously documented. In August 2024, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published an open letter signed by over 60 rights groups and journalist unions, calling on the EU to take action against Israel’s “unprecedented killing of journalists and other violations of media freedom” in Gaza as part of “widespread and systematic abuses.”

Inside newsrooms, dissent has grown. Marina Watanabe, formerly of the LA Times, was barred from covering Palestine for three months after signing a petition against the killing of journalists. In July, over 100 BBC employees and 306 media professionals signed an open letter accusing the broadcaster of “anti-Palestinian racism.”

The BBC letter also states:

“The BBC’s editorial decisions seem increasingly out of step with reality. We have been forced to conclude that decisions are made to fit a political agenda rather than serve the needs of audiences.  As industry insiders and as BBC staff, we have experienced this firsthand. The issue has become even more urgent with recent escalations in the region. Again, BBC coverage has appeared to downplay Israel’s role, reinforcing an ‘Israel first’ framing that compromises our credibility.”

According to Cohen, if media agencies or reporters are found to have willingly participated in propaganda that gives cover for targeting journalists in Gaza, “it could constitute conspiracy to further acts of genocide as it carries with it a state of mind and intent.” He argues that while such cases against the media and journalists can be difficult to win in court, there is precedent for punishment.

However, western corporate media has not only been accused of intentionally aiding Israel in whitewashing war crimes, but has also been implicated in specific cases of outright dehumanization of Gaza’s journalists that have directly correlated to threats and harassment.

Impunity paved by past killings

The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has been sounding the alarm on the murder of journalists in Gaza since 14 December 2023. Yet western corporate media has continued to feign ignorance and treat Israel’s repeated lies as if they are credible.

Reuters, which just published and then changed its biased headline covering the assassination of Sharif, is perhaps one of the worst offenders in willfully providing cover for Israel. On 13 October 2023, Tel Aviv targeted a group of journalists in southern Lebanon, killing Reuters video journalist Issam Abdallah. At the time, Reuters refused to name the attacker, saying only that the munition came from the direction of Israel. It took until 7 December for the outlet to publish an investigation confirming what everyone already knew: Israel was responsible. By then, the window for accountability had closed.

On 11 May 2021, Al Jazeera‘s Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh was shot dead by an Israeli sniper while covering an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin. Despite overwhelming evidence and international outrage, her killers faced no consequences – a precedent that paved the way for today’s open season on Gaza’s journalists.

That silence, or worse, that complicity has consequences. Honest journalism demands scrutiny, not stenography. Every time western media echoes Tel Aviv’s lies, it helps normalize the slaughter of Palestinian journalists – not out of ignorance, but to deliberately spread propaganda.

August 14, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , | Leave a comment

How Western media aids Israel’s genocide and targeted killing of journalists in Gaza

Israel and the end of The Times

By Marzieh Hashemi | Press TV | August 12, 2025

Never in the history of mankind have human beings witnessed a genocide in real time, in the way we are watching what is unfolding in Gaza today.

We have seen people being sniped, hospitals being bulldozed, refugees in tents being burned alive, the starvation of the population, and so much more, on our screens.

Most of what we are witnessing is due to the tireless and courageous commitment of Palestinian journalists in Gaza who know that they can be killed at any time by the regime, but despite this, continue to show us the reality of what’s happening on the ground in Gaza.

It is an extremely difficult job for them; however, the streaming of videos and providing live coverage have finally helped change the narrative on Palestine and its occupation globally.

Before this latest round of genocide, no matter the type of brutality and oppression that Palestinians endured, they would be confronted with comments such as “Israel has the right to defend itself” or “the Israelis have no choice because of Hamas’ missiles raining down upon the innocent Israeli population.”

But now, the greatest fear of the Israeli regime is coming to fruition.  Zionists are losing control of the narrative. The truth has been seeping out, one war crime after another. People around the world have awakened and many no longer believe in the hasbara version of events.

The child-murdering regime tried to prevent this from happening. Thus, from the very beginning of this latest round of genocidal war against the Palestinian people, international journalists were not allowed by the Israeli regime to enter Gaza.

The regime gave the excuse of protecting the journalists’ safety, but the reality is that it did not want the real story of what is happening in Gaza to be exposed.

Thus, the primary responsibility of showing the reality on the ground fell on the backs of Palestinian journalists, whom the Israeli regime continues to try to control, discredit or silence.

Due to this, the deliberate targeting of Palestinian journalists by the regime has been ruthless and has intensified with time.

The cold-blooded assassinations of journalists have been taken to a whole new level in Gaza. Journalists have never been targeted in the way they are today.

As of the writing of this article, 242 journalists have been killed in Gaza, with the latest five murders taking place just on Sunday night. A tent housing Al Jazeera journalists was deliberately targeted by the regime, killing all five members of the crew. Israel has taken responsibility for the assassinations, saying that the tent housed a “Hamas cell.”

This is the action of a regime to which Western powers have given impunity. Israel is not sanctioned due to killing babies in incubators. It is not even held accountable for starving a whole population of people. It is not pressured in any way.

Thus, during the last 22 months, we have seen the targeting of journalists expand throughout the region, including the occupied West Bank, Lebanon and Iran, where the main news building of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB)  was targeted, killing three people.

Why? Because it can. It is not held accountable. If any condemnations are made, they are simply some verbal jargon on the international level, resulting in no consequences for the regime to stop its illegal actions.

Thus, the Western political machine and its corporate media are totally complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. One day after the killing of Al Jazeera journalist Anas Al-Sharif, many Western outlets such as BBC, Reuters, and Fox News repeated Israeli accusations that Anas was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell or that he once worked for Hamas’ media office.

Instead of showing its outrage at the targeting of fellow journalists, the BBC, which prides itself on being the largest broadcast corporation in the world, simply repeated Israeli hasbara.

This is the reason 238 journalists have been killed in Gaza over the past 22 months and their colleagues in Western countries have done nothing about it or have instead magnified the lies of the Zionist regime. These so-called journalists are toeing the line of the Zionists.

Why haven’t the BBC, Reuters, New York Times or other media entities called Israel out for preventing them from sending journalists to Gaza?

Why try to demonize the messenger who has just been assassinated, unless you too, like the Israeli regime, want to keep the message from getting out?

Is the exposure of the real narrative of Palestine and Israel fatal for you too? You are all complicit in genocide and your efforts to stifle the truth are too late, as too many people have awakened.

The narrative has changed. Increasingly more people are realizing that Palestine was not a land without a people, as they had been taught, nor had Palestinians agreed upon their land being taken.

There was a Nakba that has never ended and all parties complicit in it are being exposed, as the world awakens and shows its disdain for genocide and its supporters.

Marzieh Hashemi is a US-born, Iran-based journalist, commentator and documentary filmmaker.

August 12, 2025 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Germany’s leading newspaper calls murdered Al Jazeera reporter ‘terrorist posing as journalist’

The Cradle | August 11, 2025

German newspaper Bild has parroted the Israeli army’s claims that slain Al Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif was “terrorist disguised as a journalist,” hours after the prominent reporter was targeted and killed in a strike on Gaza City.

Bild is Germany’s highest-circulation newspaper. It had approximately 6.93 million readers per issue in 2023 – and sells around 1.02 million copies a day.

The article cited documents published by Israel claiming Sharif was a member of the Qassam Brigades’ Jabalia battalion.

“The IDF attacked terrorist Anas al-Sharif in the Gaza City area. The terrorist was operating under the guise of an Al Jazeera journalist. The terrorist Anas al-Sharif served as a cell leader in Hamas and promoted rocket fire against citizens of the State of Israel and IDF,” the Israeli army said.

The army points to previously published, unverified documents, including salary documentations, personnel spreadsheets, and a list of training courses, which it says “unequivocally” prove Sharif’s involvement with Hamas.

The documents claim Sharif was recruited into Hamas at the age of 17, despite membership in the group officially requiring a minimum age of 18 years.

Another inconsistency is that joining the Qassam Brigades takes years of training.

Sharif had been covering Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza since it started in October 2023. He was given the 2024 Human Rights Defender award by Amnesty International Australia for his coverage.

Tel Aviv had been inciting against him for months.

A headline by The Telegraph on Monday also referred to Sharif as a “journalist accused of leading a Hamas terror cell.” Israeli news site i24’s headline called him a “Hamas-affiliated Al Jazeera journalist” who was “eliminated.”

The documents cited by Israel also listed Hosam Shabat, an Al Jazeera reporter accused of Hamas ties, who was killed in an Israeli strike in March.

Several other journalists are listed as either members of Hamas or the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement.

“I, Anas al-Sharif, am a journalist with no political affiliations. My only mission is to report the truth from the ground – as it is, without bias. At a time when a deadly famine is ravaging Gaza, speaking the truth has become, in the eyes of the occupation, a threat,” Sharif wrote weeks before his assassination.

Since the start of the war, 238 Palestinian journalists have been targeted and killed by the Israeli army.

August 11, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , | Leave a comment

The real Russiagate scandal blows away Watergate for crimes and treason by U.S. establishment

Strategic Culture Foundation | August 1, 2025

So the hoax is finally officially acknowledged. “Russiagate” – the mainstream narrative, that is – is now described by American intelligence chiefs as a fabrication that was concocted to overturn the results of the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Tulsi Gabbard, the current Director of National Intelligence (DNI), and CIA director John Ratcliffe have both accused former President Barack Obama of engaging in a “treasonous conspiracy” to subvert the constitutional process. It’s not just Obama who is implicated in this high crime. Other former senior officials in his 2013-17 administration, including former DNI James Clapper, CIA director John Brennan, and head of the FBI James Comey, are also implicated. If justice is permitted, the political repercussions are truly earth-shattering.

The potential impact is not confined solely to the violation of U.S. laws and the democratic process – bad enough as that is. The Russiagate scandal that began in 2016 has had a lasting, damaging effect on U.S. and European relations with Russia. The frightfully dangerous NATO proxy war incited in Ukraine, which threatens to escalate into a full-scale world war, was fueled in large part by the hostility generated from the false claims of Russian interference in the U.S. elections.

The allegations that Russian President Vladimir Putin oversaw a subversion campaign against the 2016 U.S. election and colluded with Donald Trump to get him elected were always specious. The scandal was based on shoddy intel claims to purportedly explain how Trump defeated his Democrat rival, Hillary Clinton. Subsequently, the scandal was hyped into a seemingly credible narrative by U.S. intelligence chiefs at the direction of then-President Barack Obama as a way to delegitimize Trump’s incoming first-term presidency.

Years before the recent intelligence disclosures, many independent journalists, including Aaron Maté, and former intelligence analysts like Ray MacGovern and William Binney, had cogently disproven the official Russiagate claims. Not only were these claims false, they were knowingly false. That is, lies and deliberate distortions. Russia did not hack emails belonging to the Democratic National Committee to discredit Clinton. Clinton’s corruption was exposed by a DNC internal leak to Julian Assange’s Wikileaks whistleblower site. That was partly why Assange was persecuted with years-long incarceration.

A large enough number of voters simply despised Clinton and her warmongering psychopathy, as well as her sell-out of working-class Americans for Wall Street largesse.

Furthermore, Moscow consistently denied any involvement in trying to influence the 2016 U.S. election or attempts to favor Trump. Putin has said more than once that Russia has no preference about who becomes U.S. president, implying that they’re all the same and controlled by deeper state forces. Laughably, too, while Washington accused Moscow of election interference, the actual record shows that the United States has habitually interfered in scores of foreign elections over many decades, including those of Russia. No other nation comes close to the U.S. – the self-declared “leader of the free world” – in sabotaging foreign elections.

In any case, it is instructive to compare the Russiagate farce with the Watergate scandal. Watergate involved spying by the White House of President Richard Nixon against a Democrat rival in the 1972 election. The political crisis that ensued led to Nixon’s resignation in disgrace in 1974. The U.S. nation was shocked by the dirty tricks. Several senior White House officials were later convicted and served time in jail for crimes related to the affair. Nixon was later pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford, and avoided prosecution. Nevertheless, Watergate indelibly disgraced U.S. politics and, at the time, was described as “the worst political scandal of the 20th century.”

Subsequent cases of corruption and malfeasance are often dubbed with the suffix “gate” in a nod to Watergate as a momentous political downfall. Hence, “Russiagate.”

There are hugely important differences, however. While Watergate was a scandal based on factual crimes and wrongdoing, Russiagate was always a contrived propaganda deception. The real scandal behind Russiagate was not Trump’s alleged misdeeds or those of Russia, but the criminal conspiracy by Obama and his administration to sabotage the 2016 election and subsequently to overthrow the Trump presidency and the democratic will of the American people. Tulsi Gabbard, the nation’s most senior intelligence chief, has said that this amounts to “treason,” and she has called for the prosecution of Obama and other former senior aides.

Arguably, the real Russiagate scandal is far more criminal and devastating in its political implications than Watergate. The latter involved illegal spying and dirty tricks. Whereas, Russiagate involved a president and his intelligence chiefs trying to subvert the entire democratic process. Not only that, but the U.S. mainstream media are also now exposed for perpetrating a propaganda heist on the American public. All of the major U.S. media outlets amplified the politicised intelligence orchestrated by the Obama administration, claiming that Russia interfered in the election and that Trump was a “Kremlin stooge.” The hoax became an obsession in the U.S. media for years and piled up severe damage in international relations, a nefarious legacy that we are living with today.

The New York Times and Washington Post, reputedly two of the finest exponents of American journalism, jointly won the Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for their reporting on Russiagate, the official version, that is, which lent credibility to the hoax. In light of what we know now, these newspapers should be hanging their heads in shame for running a Goebbels-like Big Lie campaign to not only deceive the U.S. public but to subvert the democratic process and poison international relations. Their reputations are shredded, as well as those of other major media outlets, including ABC, CBS, CNN, and NBC.

Ironically, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for its reporting on the Watergate scandal. The story was made into a best-selling book, All The President’s Men, and a hit Hollywood movie starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, playing the roles of intrepid reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Woodward and Bernstein and The Washington Post were acclaimed as the finest in U.S. journalism for exposing Watergate and bringing a crooked president to book.

How shameful and absurd that an even greater assault on American democracy and international relations in the form of Russiagate is ignored and buried by “America’s finest”. That the scandal is ignored and buried should be of no surprise because to properly reveal it would shatter the foundations of the U.S. political establishment and the sinister role of the deep state and its mainstream media propaganda system.

August 2, 2025 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite, Russophobia | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

How much is shoddy, pro-Israel journalism worth? Ask Bari Weiss.

As her Free Press is poised to seal a $200 million deal with the mainstream news giant CBS, let us reflect on why

By Branko Marcetic | Responsible Statecraft | July 29, 2025

A thought experiment: would anyone who referred to the killing of 50 Jewish people, many of them “entirely innocent non-combatants, including children,” as “one of the unavoidable burdens of political power, of Palestinian liberation’s dream turned into the reality of self-determination,” ever be hired by a major television news network?

Would their news outlet ever be potentially offered more than $200 million to merge with that major news network?

Of course not, and for good reason. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening, only with one small but major difference: the writer and her news outlet responsible for this statement, Bari Weiss and The Free Press, were not talking about Hamas’ murder of Israelis, but rather about Israel’s killing of 50 Palestinians — “Zionism’s dream turned into the reality of self-determination,” as Weiss described it in 2021.

Weiss is currently in talks to sell The Free Press to CBS News for between $200-$250 million, after reportedly winning over its new owner, David Ellison, “by taking a pro-Israel stance,” according to the Financial Times. Ellison “wants to position The Free Press alongside CBS News,” the paper reported, while another source told the New York Times that Ellison is weighing up giving Weiss “an influential role in shaping the editorial sensibilities of CBS News.”

If so, it would be a major new development in a pervasive double standard we’ve seen in the past nearly two years. Weiss and her outlet have engaged in rhetoric and professional behavior that would ordinarily never pass muster in a newsroom — but are considered acceptable because they are in support of Israel’s war against Palestinians.

For one, The Free Press has repeatedly spread misinformation. In May 2024, the outlet charged that the UN had “admit” the civilian death toll was 50 percent lower than what was being claimed, a quickly debunked and borderline willful misreading of a UN document, a misreading that the UN secretary-general’s office swiftly came forward to correct (a fact left out of The Free Press’ piece).

One year later, The Free Press declared the idea that Israel was engineering a man-made famine that was underway in Gaza a “myth,” even as Israel was in its third month of blocking all food, fuel, and medicine into the territory and at least 57 civilians had already starved to death, most of them children. As recently as this past Sunday, another Free Press article argued that “there isn’t mass starvation as claimed by pro-Hamas propaganda,” which flies in the face of not just basic reality, but testimony from doctors, major news organizations with journalists on the ground, and even the conclusion of President Donald Trump, a supporter of the war.

Just this past June, The Free Press charged simultaneously that there had both been no massacre of Palestinian aid seekers, and that, if there was, Hamas may have been responsible. Of course, since then, not only have Israeli soldiers admitted to shooting aid-seekers but U.S. contractors are coming forward to back up their gruesome stories. These accounts are becoming a near-daily occurrence, with over 1,000 Gazans killed at or close to aid distribution sites in the past two months.

In late May, The Free Press even published a puff piece on the group running these virtual slaughterhouses, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), painting it as an unsung success story, despite ample controversy at the time over its reliance on mercenaries and lack of independence. Two months of bloodshed later, condemnation and calls for GHF’s dismantling are widespread, with one former GHF staffer — a retired U.S. special forces officer — saying he had never witnessed such brutality and indiscriminate violence against “an unarmed, starving population” as at GHF’s distribution centers.

All of these pieces are still up, uncorrected on The Free Press website. And this is by no means an exhaustive list.

When it’s not spreading outright misinformation, The Free Press engages in more insidious propaganda. For instance, it has, depending on the public relations needs of the moment, shifted between ignoring, indignantly denying, and justifying Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s hospitals.

When a blast in the war’s first month that killed hundreds at al-Ahli Hospital ignited global outrage, The Free Press jumped on evidence that it may have been an errant Hamas rocket to charge again and again and again, even as recently as two days ago, that the media were rampantly defaming Israel through fake news of crimes it had never committed.

Since then, The Free Press has simply ignored the Israeli attacks on hospitals, often openly done and fully admitted to by the IDF, that have left 94 percent of hospitals in Gaza damaged or destroyed, including just this year attacking al-Ahli at least twice. In fact, both the outlet and Weiss personally pivoted quickly from denying Israel would do such a terrible thing to actively justifying its targeting of hospitals.

Of course, the vast majority of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza are simply never discussed by the outlet. The same goes for Palestinian suffering more generally and the massive and ever-mounting Palestinian death toll, which a group of experts last year concluded is likely undercounted by hundreds of thousands. Typically, the only time these topics are discussed by the outlet is to deny them and to lament their negative effect on Israel.

This is hardly surprising, considering new revelations that The Free Press has serially regurgitated content pushed by the Center for Peace Communications — an organization staffed by figures from pro-Israel think tanks and funded by money from pro-Israel donors.

Another largely absent topic: antisemitism, which is a charge The Free Press exclusively reserves for antiwar protesters, college campuses, teachers unions, Peter Beinart, Ireland, and anyone else who expresses pro-Palestinian sentiment, while it dutifully ignores accusations of antisemitism among Trump appointees and nominees and allies who also happen to be supporters of Israel’s war.

That brings us to the conduct of Weiss herself. She has a personal history of both playing fast and loose with the truth and what can only be described as a high degree of tolerance for anti-Arab and Islamophobic bigotry.

Weiss first rose to prominence due to her efforts to get Muslim and Arab professors at Columbia University fired by accusing them of racism, only for the resulting investigation to find “no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-Semitic.” She then later misleadingly claimed she had never tried to get them fired.

The supposedly rabid bigotry of ordinary Muslims is a favorite topic of Weiss, who has previously blamed rising antisemitism in Europe on the Muslim presence there, and warned that European Jews have “reason to worry” because of it. Soon after October 7, she approvingly shared a Free Press article whose central argument was that protests against Israel’s war — dishonestly characterized as hateful antisemitic rallies “celebrat[ing] mass murder in the streets” — were thanks to immigrants from Middle Eastern countries who could be either “80-year-old Armenian retirees or jihadi terrorists plotting another 9/11.” The Free Press later published an error-riddled article explicitly blaming a surge in Canadian antisemitism on Muslim immigration.

At the same time, Weiss has often promoted, often through The Free Press, her “friend” Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali believes that “we are at war with Islam,” which she has called “a destructive, nihilistic cult of death,” that “there is no moderate Islam,” and that it must be “defeated” and “crush[ed],” including by closing all Muslim schools.

Ali has been a favorite of Islamphobic think tanks and neoconservative activists since the Global War on Terror. She has written that “every devout Muslim” at the very least “approved” of Al Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks and wrote a book that argued that Muslim immigration threatens the rights of Western women, partly because of Muslim men’s supposedly rapacious appetite for sexual violence.

Weiss eagerly promoted that book, spending an hour teeing Hirsi Ali up in a question and answer session to hold forth unchallenged about the dangers of ordinary Muslim men. Elsewhere, Weiss has waxed lyrical about her pride in associating with Hirsi Ali, and that she regards someone’s support for her as a “litmus test.”

If Weiss expressed or promoted any of these same views about Jewish immigrants and Judaism, she would likely be blacklisted in U.S. media, and for good reason. Instead, because they are aimed at Muslims, she is now being richly rewarded.

That a major network like CBS is seriously considering giving Weiss and The Free Press an even bigger platform and the imprimatur of mainstream legitimacy — given not just its promotion of anti-Muslim views, but its history of spreading outright, uncorrected falsehoods — is a sad reflection of the degradation of press standards.

And it seems to only be happening because a top media executive regards Weiss’ history of shoddy journalism less important than her support for Israel’s wars.

July 30, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | , , , , | 1 Comment

US media owe Putin an apology – Fox News host

RT | July 29, 2025

The US media need to make “serious” amends to many people, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, for their active role in spreading the Russiagate hoax following the 2016 presidential election, according to popular Fox News host Greg Gutfeld.

The political commentator, comedian, and author was responding to recent revelations made by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who released a trove of documents she described as “overwhelming evidence” of a coordinated effort by senior Obama-era officials – allegedly led by Barack Obama himself – to politicize intelligence and falsely accuse Donald Trump of colluding with Russia to win the election.

“We cannot let this go. They need to make serious amends because we are still living with the aftermath,” Gutfeld said on his latest show, aired last weekend. “People lost jobs, careers, friends. There need to be consequences.”

“They owe a lot of people an apology. Hell, they even include Putin.”

According to Gutfeld, major American news media outlets “played the starring role in amplifying the subversive plot against the president of the United States.” He dismissed recent claims by the press accusing the Trump administration of trying to “rewrite history,” calling them an “attempt to shift culpability away from themselves and hide the lie they perpetuated for almost a decade.”

Earlier this month, a similar assessment was made by former CIA Director John Ratcliffe. In an interview with the New York Post, he cited an internal review suggesting that American public opinion had been manipulated through repeated media leaks and anonymous sources quoted by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and other major outlets.

Allegations of “Russian collusion” persisted in mainstream media coverage even after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation found no evidence to support the claims. Moscow has repeatedly denied interfering in the US election.

Gabbard described the Trump-Russia probe, widely referred to as Russiagate, as “a years-long coup” against Trump. The US president himself, who has consistently dismissed accusations of ties to Russia as fabricated, praised Gabbard for “exposing” the alleged plot and urged her to “keep it coming.”

July 29, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | , | Leave a comment

Hamas denies operating camp in Aley, asserts Lebanese sovereignty

Al Mayadeen | July 28, 2025

Hamas has firmly denied claims circulating in the media that the Lebanese Army dismantled a Hamas armed training camp in Aley, Lebanon, and called on journalists to prioritize accuracy and professional integrity in their coverage.

In a statement, the Palestinian Resistance movement responded to reports circulated by some media outlets, newspapers, and websites claiming that “the Lebanese army dismantled an armed training camp in the Aley region belonging to Hamas.”

Hamas firmly denied having any armed training camp in the mentioned area or elsewhere in Lebanon, emphasizing that it has no intention of establishing such facilities in the first place.

The movement further emphasized its strong commitment to cooperation and coordination with the Lebanese state and its relevant authorities, as this contributes to maintaining civil peace and strengthening the fraternal Palestinian-Lebanese relationship. It also asserted respect for Lebanese sovereignty under all circumstances.

Hamas also called on all media outlets to adhere to accuracy and objectivity, ensuring that their reporting is guided by professional responsibility to avoid potentially severe repercussions that could further escalate tensions in Lebanon at the hands of the Israeli enemy.

July 28, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Climate Change Is Reducing, Not Increasing Food Costs, Mainstream Media

By Linnea Lueken | ClimateRealism | July 23, 2025

A flurry of mainstream media reports, from Bloomberg, The Guardian, Financial Times, and CNN, among other outlets, claim that climate change is causing rising food prices “worldwide,” based on a single new study. This is false. Bad weather has always impacted crop production, and there is no actual evidence that extreme weather is increasing. Globalization of media coverage is simply making it easier to hear about bad weather elsewhere in the world, meanwhile crop production and yields globally continue to set records – a fact the same media outlets largely ignore.

Focusing on the coverage by Bloomberg, in an article titled “How Climate Change Is Raising Your Grocery Bill,” Bloomberg writers report on a study from the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and the European Central Bank, which claims price jumps in certain food products are due to “extreme weather they say is linked to climate change.”

Bloomberg claims that consumers around the world “say they are feeling the effects of climate change on their grocery bills, making food unaffordable for some and posing a challenge for central bankers trying to tame inflation.” If true at all, this is almost certainly the effect of media coverage like Bloomberg’s insisting that climate change is responsible, instead of observational evidence of crop production.

It is worth noting that the study uses the term “unprecedented” eight times in the mere four pages of content. To justify their use of the term unprecedented to describe global weather events in the last few years they reference ERA5 surface temperature data going back to 1940, and the standardized precipitation index from CRU going back to 1901. The reason why this is non-scientific and misleading will become clear when we go over the weather events they claim were so “unprecedented.”

Bloomberg discussed a few of the weather events mentioned in the study linking them to increases in the price for specific crops. They first highlighted increases in lettuce and vegetable prices in the United States, driven by droughts in California and Arizona, the former of which Bloomberg claims saw the “driest three-year period ever recorded.” Also mentioned was hurricane Ian. The problem, of course, is that California’s drought was anything but unprecedented. As discussed in the post “Mega-droughts and Mega-floods in the West All Occurred Well Before ‘climate change’ Was Blamed for Every Weather Event,”  historical data and proxies show that California has experienced far more widespread and severe periods of drought in the past, some of which lasted as long as two hundred years.

In Asia, Bloomberg says a heatwave impacted South Korean cabbage production. While UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) data indicate that cabbage production has been slowly declining after a massive spike in the 1970s, yields have remained stable or increased since 2000. This suggests that economic considerations or political decisions made about the relative benefits of growing cabbage versus other crops that could be grown, or uses the land could be put too, rather than climate, are responsible for changes in production.

Australia also saw high lettuce costs due to flooding in the eastern part of the country in recent years, but the year Bloomberg and the study highlight, 2022, was not unprecedented as they implied. In fact, 2022 was only the sixth “wettest” year on available Australian rainfall records, the wettest year on record was in 1950.

Figure 1: Australian rainfall records, chart from Jennifer Marohasy

Bloomberg goes on to explain how the study allegedly “found that heat, drought and floods were occurring at an increased intensity and frequency,” which is at odds with available data and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 6th assessment report, which though it claims an increase in extreme heat has been detected, finds no emergence of increased flooding or drought in the current historical period.

In short, Bloomberg, and the other mainstream media outlets hyping the BSC report, failed to do any fact checking, failed to examine crop trends, and illegitimately linked individual weather events to long-term climate change, despite such events being common in history and there being no discernable trend in an increase in such events amid the slight warming that has occurred in recent years. To be clear, weather is not climate and, despite what unscientific attribution studies claim, no specific weather event can be tied to long-term climate change.

In short, none of the weather events Bloomberg referred to as unprecedented were in fact unique or even rare historically.

Concerning the crops, BSC and the media focuses on the most, lettuce and cabbage, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show that between 1993 and 2023 (the most recent 30-year period of climate change for which we have available data):

  • Lettuce (and chicory – the FAO combines them) production grew approximately 112 percent;
  • Lettuce and chicory yields increased by about 4 percent;
  • Cabbage production expanded by nearly 75 percent;
  • And cabbage yield grew by more than 37 percent. (see the graph below)

Bloomberg does briefly concede that other factors, like El Niño, a totally natural phenomenon, played a role in weather in 2023 and 2024, impacting certain crops. The outlet also begrudgingly admits that “food price shocks typically turn out to be short-term in nature, because high prices incentivize more production, which brings prices back down,” though they try to say that coffee and cattle are exceptions to this rule. Although Bloomberg reports that coffee futures are high, there is no evidence that climate change is actually damaging global coffee production, as explained in Climate Realism posts here, here, and here.

Bloomberg ends with a warning from the study authors, claiming that “slashing greenhouse gas emissions and containing global warming will be key to reducing food price inflation risks,” but this ignores another key aspect of food costs. They are also impacted by the cost to produce food, like when governments increase the price farmers pay for fossil fuel derived pesticides and fertilizers or try to restrict their use. Fossil fuel derived chemicals increase yields with less labor and using much less land. Take a look at Sri Lanka for a good example of what happens when climate action is prioritized over food production.

Never before has it been so easy for the media to report on various weather disasters and crop failures globally, and this certainly has an impact on peoples’ perceptions as well as the ability for studies to try to draw connections that aren’t really backed by data. This Bloomberg piece is nothing more than climate fearmongering; taking disconnected crop shortages from around the world from localized weather events and trying to blame them on climate change, when the truth is that there have always been crops failing somewhere in the world at any given time.

July 27, 2025 Posted by | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

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