The BBC report remains uncorrected – evidence of a culture of intimidation, fear and political control
The BBC ignored an internal request to correct reporting that smeared a high-profile Palestinian journalist killed by Israel as a Hamas operative, in what a whistleblower has described as a “grave editorial breach”.
According to a leaked email seen by Novara Media, Global Journalism – part of the BBC Global News team, which is run by BBC deputy director Jonathan Munro – sent an “essential amendment and correction” request regarding BBC News reporting which claimed that Al Jazeera correspondent Anas al-Sharif “did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war”.
Al-Sharif was killed on 10 August in a targeted Israeli airstrike on a tent marked “PRESS” outside the entrance of the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza. Five other media workers were also assassinated in the strike: Al Jazeera correspondent Mohammed Qreiqeh and photographers Ibrahim Thaher and Mohamed Nofal, freelance photojournalist Mohammed al-Khalidi and cameraman Momen Aliwa.
In a statement posted on X/Twitter, Israel said: “Al-Sharif was the head of a Hamas terrorist cell and advanced rocket attacks on Israeli civilians and IDF troops. Intelligence and documents from Gaza, including rosters, terrorist training lists and salary records, prove he was a Hamas operative integrated into Al Jazeera.” Accompanying the post were unverified screenshots from spreadsheets. The IDF provided no justification for the killing of al-Sharif’s five colleagues in the same airstrike.
Al Jazeera has categorically denied that al-Sharif was in any way Hamas affiliated.
The leaked email, dated 18 August, was sent by Global Journalism to hundreds of BBC journalists via two distribution addresses. It singled out a line in a BBC News article for correction: “The BBC understands Sharif did some work with a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current war”.
Screenshots seen by Novara Media show the email was sent to a significant number of senior journalists, including World Service Languages controller Fiona Crack, senior news editors Kate Forbes and Abigail Mobbs, director of audience growth Jamie Wakefield, and head of digital content for World Service, Claire Williams.
The email said the sentence “should be amended” to: “A source has told the BBC that Sharif had worked for a Hamas media team in Gaza before the current conflict, but Al Jazeera has denied this and the BBC News Arabic correspondent also says that he has seen no evidence.”
The email is signed by Global Journalism, part of BBC Global News which is led by Munro, who currently serves as BBC News’ senior controller of news content and the deputy CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs.
One BBC employee told Novara Media that the email went out to at least 1,200 journalists. The BBC disputed this and says the number is closer to 400. However, a screenshot seen by Novara Media confirms that just one of the two distribution email addresses goes to over 1,200 accounts.
At the time of reporting, the line in question remains uncorrected on the BBC News article, last updated 13 August. The same claim was also presented as fact on the BBC News liveblog on 11 August in reporting by Jon Donnison from Jerusalem, as well as cropping up in BBC Verify reporting on TikTok.
A BBC employee told Novara Media: “This leaked email […] exposes from the inside the culture of intimidation, fear and political control that journalists are subjected to within the corporation.
“The email admits a reported line that should never have made it onto the BBC’s front page was published without evidence, yet the error remains uncorrected and no one has been held accountable.
“In any other newsroom, such a grave editorial breach on a matter of major public interest, the targeted killing of a fellow journalist, would have led to senior resignations.”
A BBC spokesperson said: “We stand by our reporting in the BBC News article you reference from 13 August and liveblog from 11 August, and can assure audiences that we scrupulously fact check and verify all information we obtain. This internal email was sent to a specific team about a different article and contained a suggested amendment that was incorrect. We are updating our copy to remove the amendment where it has been applied.”
Munro became global director of BBC News in September 2024. The role includes leading the BBC World Service, overseeing BBC Monitoring, and continuing as deputy CEO of BBC News and Current Affairs
In the months leading up to al-Sharif’s death, Israeli officials repeatedly claimed the reporter was a Hamas operative, including in a ‘kill list’ graphic with the names and pictures of six Al Jazeera journalists.
Two weeks before al-Sharif was killed, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CJP) called on the international community to protect him due to “repeated threats” from IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee. The CJP said accusations of al-Sharif being a Hamas operative “represent an effort to manufacture consent to kill al-Sharif”.
In August, it was revealed that Israel has a secret military unit specifically tasked with linking Palestinian journalists to Hamas and Islamic Jihad as part of a drive to tamp down on global condemnation for the murder of journalists in Gaza.
This isn’t the first time the BBC has been criticised for biased reporting on Israel’s genocide in Gaza. A blistering report from the Centre for Media Monitoring in June showed that Israeli deaths were given 33 times more coverage per fatality by the corporation, that both broadcast segments and articles included clear double standards, and that content consistently shut down allegations of genocide.
Last week, Novara Media revealed that BBC reps for the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) discouraged colleagues from attending a vigil in London – organised by the NUJ – for their murdered colleagues in Gaza.
Gaza is currently the most dangerous place in the world to be a journalist. Since October 2023, Israel has killed more media workers in Gaza than in both world wars, the US civil war, the Korean war, the Vietnam war, the wars in former Yugoslavia and the war in Afghanistan combined.
Harriet Williamson is a commissioning editor and reporter for Novara Media.
September 13, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | BBC, Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Pharmaceutical companies will be required to provide full safety disclosures in direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements of their products, according to a new policy HHS and the FDA announced Tuesday.
DTC advertisements “can mislead the public about the risks and benefits” and “encourage medications over lifestyle changes,” according to a memorandum by President Donald Trump outlining the policy.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will send nearly 100 “enforcement action letters” and thousands of warning letters to pharmaceutical companies and drug retailers who have “increasingly been promoting drugs with no mention of side effects at all,” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary said in a post on X.
The policy also addresses online pharmacies that promote drugs with “no mention of side effects, and paid social media influencers advertising drugs,” Makary wrote.
Administration officials told ABC News that drugmakers often market their products on social media using influencers who are not clearly identified as paid spokespeople.
Mary Holland, CEO of Children’s Health Defense, called the new policy “a major victory” that will “dramatically increase the price of pharma advertising, discourage uptake because of side effects and make Big Pharma‘s lawyers stay up at night worrying that they may not have adequately disclosed risks.”
“This will greatly contribute to making America healthy again because it will start to dismantle Pharma’s grip on Big Media,” Holland said.
‘Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs’
In announcing the new policy, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said the ads have “distorted physician prescribing habits and patient decisions.”
The advertisements use positive emotional appeals to encourage people to get those medications, HHS said.
The new policy stops short of an outright ban on the advertising. Instead, the policy will require DTC advertisements to “report full contraindications, boxed warnings, and common precautions” — a return to regulations in effect until 1997.
HHS said the loosened regulations in place since that year created an “explosion of DTC pharmaceutical advertising,” which led to “public deception from patient confusion” and “patient harm via inappropriate demand for medications and misalignment of therapeutic choices with actual patient needs.”
Administration officials told ABC News the new policy “is the strongest, boldest action we can take to make sure that patients have adequate safety information on pharmaceutical ads.”
They said no additional steps are planned to regulate such ads.
“Pharmaceutical ads hooked this country on prescription drugs,” U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement. He added:
“We will shut down that pipeline of deception and require drug companies to disclose all critical safety facts in their advertising.
“Only radical transparency will break the cycle of overmedicalization that drives America’s chronic disease epidemic.”
The new policy was announced on the same day the White House released its Make Our Children Healthy Again strategy report, which states that the federal government “will increase oversight and enforcement under current authorities for violations” of DTC drug advertising laws.
Time reported that the U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that permit DTC drug ads. According to Digiday, Big Pharma spent $30 billion on advertising in 2024. According to HHS, drugmakers spent $369.8 million in social media advertising in 2020.
Relaxed advertising rules had ‘clear negative impact on public health’
According to the White House memo, the U.S. Congress granted the FDA authority to regulate prescription drug advertising in 1962. DTC drug advertising in the U.S. began in 1981, but regulations were loosened in 1997, resulting in a 330% increase in drug advertising by 2005.
According to HHS, the relaxed regulations permitted drugmakers to direct the public to websites, toll-free phone numbers and package inserts for details on contraindications and common precautions.
An HHS fact sheet states that this “loophole … had a clear negative impact on public health,” contributing to about 31% of the rise in U.S. drug spending since 1997.
According to HHS:
- Patients who consulted with their physician about a DTC-advertised drug were about 17 times more likely to receive a prescription than those who didn’t — the result of persuasive marketing techniques.
- 91% of direct-to-consumer drug ad claims featured social approval as a result of product use and 94% employed positive emotional appeals.
- Prescription drug use among Americans increased from 39% (1988-1994) to 49.9% (2017-2020) in the last 30 years.
Following the FDA’s loosening of its regulations in 1997, the agency’s enforcement actions also decreased. “Enforcement letters plummeted from over 130 annually in the late 1990s to just three in 2023,” according to the fact sheet.
HHS said enforcement actions will intensify, with the issuing of “dozens of enforcement letters related to false and misleading advertising, which makes the drug at issue misbranded.”
The FDA will also “send a letter to every single sponsor of an approved drug or biologic … warning them that the Agency is no longer asleep at the wheel, putting them on notice that FDA will be actively enforcing violations of the law, and directing them to remove all non-compliant promotional materials from the market.”
Drug advertising ‘a form of bribery’
Attempts by the federal government to enact a full ban on DTC drug advertisements are likely to face legal challenges, some legal experts say.
A report by The Lever in January states that it is “relatively unlikely” the federal government will be able to ban DTC pharmaceutical ads, partly because courts have previously rejected such attempts on First Amendment grounds.
Attorney Rick Jaffe wrote last year that while legal precedent exists through the 1970 ban on cigarette advertising in broadcast media in the U.S., “An advertising ban on the entire Pharma industry would be a much heavier lift.”
Despite such obstacles, the End Prescription Drugs Now Act, introduced in June and pending before Congress, would ban DTC prescription drug advertising entirely if passed.
Jeffrey Tucker, president and founder of the Brownstone Institute, said the Trump administration’s new policy is “entirely consistent with the First Amendment but will very likely make vast amounts of existing DTC advertising too arduous for it to continue as is.” He said:
“An outright ban would be easily overturned by the courts on First Amendment grounds. On the other hand, in a free society, every seller of products and services has an obligation to warn of risks. This normal practice has been neglected for a long time. This is what has allowed Pharma to spread its wings without accountability and without ensuring informed consent.
“This is an excellent step, not only to protect the public but to curb Pharma capture of the major media.”
According to CNN, the healthcare and drug industry is fourth among all industries in television advertising expenditure, accounting for 11.1% of the market. Prescription drugs accounted for 30.7% of ad minutes across evening news programs on ABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC and NBC last year, according to The Wall Street Journal.
According to a 2019 Forbes report, Pfizer spent twice as much on marketing its products as it did on research.
Last year, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a 10% increase in DTC advertising results in a 1% to 2.3% increase in consumer drug spending.
Mark Crispin Miller, Ph.D., a professor of media studies at New York University whose research and teaching focus on propaganda, said such expenditures have enabled Big Pharma to exercise significant editorial control over the legacy news media.
Miller said:
“Drug advertising, like all commercial advertising, is a form of bribery that corrupts all media that carry it. This development has been the most destructive of them all. Nothing on TV, radio and/or the Internet should be ‘brought to you by Pfizer’ or any other corporate poisoner.”
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
September 12, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | FDA, United States |
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A black man kills a white woman in an American city, and the mainstream media gives it zero coverage. Imagine if the races were reversed.
The US mainstream media tends to operate by encouraging a certain prefabricated outrage. Sensationalized narratives are cultivated along predictable tracks. But no less egregious is what the media chooses to ignore. Few events of late have better exposed the ideological underpinnings of the media – and of the elite whose narratives it plugs – than the recent brutal and shocking murder of a young Ukrainian woman on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina.
On August 22, a career criminal, Decarlos Brown Jr., casually walked up behind 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, who was seated on a train minding her own business, and stabbed her three times in the neck in cold blood, killing her. He sauntered away, still clutching the knife dripping blood.
The mindless and savage attack was captured on surveillance footage, but Charlotte’s Democratic Mayor Vi Lyles pushed for it not to be released, ostensibly out of respect for the victim’s family. But the footage did eventually surface, and the story spread like wildfire. But this was a wildfire that couldn’t reach the impervious redoubt of the mainstream media – even after Elon Musk gave it the push into viral territory by chiming in on an End Wokeness thread pointing out the stunning media silence.
In fact, not a single major legacy outlet – the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Reuters, CNN, Wall Street Journal, and others – picked it up. One would think that, by sheer chance, one of these esteemed outlets would have bucked the trend. But that didn’t happen because, as Matt Taibbi once brilliantly pointed out,
“Reporting is done in herds, no one wildebeest can break formation without screwing things up for the others. So, they’ll all hold the line, until they all stop holding the line.”
As of this writing, it seems the media herd is starting to reluctantly skate to where the puck is going. And that means that some version of the story, however sanitized, will soon appear everywhere.
So what exactly has given this story its irresistible momentum? Let’s start with the blatant double standard about reporting interracial crime. A white victim and a black perpetrator, as was the case in this instance, is usually a circumstance that tips the scales in favor of silence. When an instance of black-on-white crime cannot be avoided, the respective races of the individuals involved are not mentioned, and the tone is more along the lines of “aww shucks, what a tragedy.” When the racial roles are reversed, the media coverage is extensive and sensational, and the race angle is established immediately and runs throughout the ensuing coverage like an electric wire.
Given such highly distorted media coverage of interracial crime, one would be forgiven for assuming that it is blacks who are perpetually in mortal danger of racist attack by whites in the US. This view was a large part of the impetus behind the Black Lives Matter movement. However, the actual statistics on interracial crime, which are not easy to find, show otherwise. Buried inside this Department of Justice (DOJ) report from 2020 is a rather remarkable admission: “[In 2019], there were 5.3 times as many violent incidents committed by black offenders against white victims (472,570) as were committed by white offenders against black victims (89,980).” Such stark wording was not repeated in subsequent reports under the Biden DOJ, but there is no reason to believe anything has changed in the streets.
Zarutska’s murder certainly comes at a time of record-low American trust in the mainstream media. Instances of misreporting and factual disasters have become such a recurrent theme as to not require individual examples. The media’s efforts at narrative formation have also become so heavy-handed that identifying the establishment cause being promoted in almost any piece of reporting is now a parlor game.
But – and I venture into very risky terrain here – the uproar over this senseless killing also points to a deeply ensconced taboo slowly starting to unravel: Many white Americans are tired of being denied the right to display even the slightest and most tentative hint of the type of racial solidarity that other groups are extended so liberally. It is a story being played out on a different stage with different actors in Great Britain.
There’s another angle here, and it is one that has already been remarked upon in numerous places. The victim was a citizen of a country that the US has spent enormous treasure and effort ostensibly defending since 2022. The roughly $130 billion in aid that Washington has coughed up for Kiev comes out to some $3,500 per Ukrainian citizen. Certainly enough for a bodyguard on train rides.
And yet the silence from the pro-Ukraine crowd has mirrored that of the media at large. This certainly confirms what has been abundantly clear throughout the war and remains so today: Ukrainian deaths that don’t advance a Western elite media narrative are dismissed and ignored. But this lack of reaction also casts in sharp relief the reality that pro-Ukraine sentiment in the US is largely a cause bundled in with the rest of the progressive agenda, underpinned by the uniform mouthpiece of a jaded media. The Ukrainian flags one sees out and about rarely reflect a principled stance but rather deference to elite cues.
It will be said that all sides have merely assumed their positions on the barricades to score political points on this deeply human tragedy. We will all be accused of coming to praise Caesar rather than to bury him. This young woman’s death is indeed a human tragedy and a particularly painful one. But to see it as only a tragedy is to dismiss its larger context and to refuse to draw any conclusions. That is willful ignorance.
When a tragedy unveils such a confluence of two deep ideological biases, what it does is reveal the contours of the magnet moving underneath the pattern of American life.
Henry Johnston is a Moscow-based editor who worked in finance for over a decade.
September 8, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Progressive Hypocrite | United States |
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By Linnea Lueken | Climate Realism | September 3, 2025
The Associated Press (AP), via ABC News, claims that climate change is responsible for the intensity of European wildfires in a story titled “Climate change made deadly wildfires in Turkey, Greece and Cyprus more fierce, study finds.” This is false. Data show no long-term trend of increasing wildfires in any of the countries listed, and overall global wildfire data shows declining fire extent.
The AP cites a non-peer reviewed report by World Weather Attribution (WWA) to claim that climate change was responsible for necessary conditions, specifically, hot and dry weather, which drove the widespread wildfire outbreaks in Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus, and made them “burn much more fiercely.”
The story and the report it relies upon are suspect from the start. First, as discussed by Climate Realism previously, as a matter of geography the climate of the Mediterranean region is naturally arid, prone to drought, extreme heat, and associated wildfires. Fire helped shape the ecology of the entire region. Some past fires have been huge. For instance, more than 112 years of global warming ago, when global average temperatures were cooler and humans weren’t contributing significantly to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, the great Thessaloniki fire burned for 13 days. It left more than 70,000 people homeless, and destroyed two-thirds of Greece’s second largest city. So hot and dry weather is the norm for the Turkey, Greece, and Cyprus, especially during the summer, rather than being unusual weather conditions.
The AP ignores this fact about the region’s climate. It also did not critically assess WWA. The AP portrays WWA an unbiased “group of researchers that examines whether and to what extent extreme weather events are linked to climate change.” But this is false. The entire reason for WWA’s existence is specifically to “attribute” extreme weather events to human-caused climate change, in part to provide material that can be used in lawsuits filed against governments and the fossil fuel industry. The WWA believes the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s data driven approach to understating the causes of extreme weather is far too cautious when it comes to attribution. WWA produces studies on the assumption that climate change caused or contributed to an extreme event, the only real question being how much more likely was the event to occur, or how much more severe was the event, than it would have been absent human fossil fuel use. That is the fallacy of affirming the consequent or assuming what you are attempting to prove.
In this case, WWA claimed the fires were “22% more intense in 2025, Europe’s worst recorded year of wildfires.” This claim is unverified and misleading, at best. The Mediterranean region the AP discusses is not all of Europe, and it was not that regions worst year of wildfires.
It is worth noting that WWA seems to only attribute extreme weather to climate change, never mild or good weather. WWA specifically identifies its goal as increasing the “immediacy of climate change, thereby increasing support for mitigation.” Climate Realism has explained at length why single event attribution is scientifically misleading and unreliable at best in past articles, and we’ve specifically refuted flawed WWA reports previously dozens of times, here, here, and here, for example.
This year may well be a record fire year for parts of Europe and Asia, but only a sustained trend of worsening fires would prove that they were driven by climate change. No such trend exists, globally or in the individual countries mentioned.
Looking at the most recent available data from the joint collaborative project between NASA and the European Space Agency, Copernicus, for each country we can see the wildfire trends are far from consistent.
First we have Turkey:
If anything, this trend shows that wildfires have been trending down since 2009’s peak over Copernicus’ period of record.
Next, Greece:
Again, no real long term consistent trend.
Finally Cyprus:
Again, particularly in the case of yearly burned area, there is no consistent trend in wildfire data for Cypress, and a possible overall decline in the yearly number of fires.
Downward or flat trends can’t honestly be portrayed as increasing trends.
Although global wildfire data also is spotty for long-term trends, what data exists consistently suggest a declining global trend. NASA data shows a global decline in acreage lost to wildfire since 2003.
Extreme weather event attribution studies, produced rapidly in hours after a natural disaster strikes, aren’t vetted science. Still, they are eagerly accepted as evidence of climate impacts by the alarmist media. This is absurd when any credible fact checker, editor, or investigative journalist could easily access publicly available data that devastates the climate change linkage at the core of the story. One would hope that the Associated Press’ writers are gullible or naïve, but even taking that charitable view, the lack of basic research is inexcusable for any journalistic outlet. One reason to doubt the charitable belief in how so many false climate tales are spun out of the AP is that the stories are all biased in the same direction of climate alarm – climate change is never not to blame – and that the AP’s climate coverage is specifically funded by foundations and non-profit organizations who have long pushed climate alarm.
September 7, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | Associated Press, Cyprus, Greece, Turkey, World Weather Attribution |
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A recent Associated Press (AP) story carried by WCVB-TV and many other news outlets, warned that “climate change is making it “dicier” to grow corn in the United States. This is false. Data clearly shows that amid modest climate change corn yields and production have increased steadily, regularly setting new records.
The AP writes:
Across major corn-growing states, climate change is fueling conditions that make watching the corn grow a nail-biter for farmers. Factors like consistently high summer overnight temperatures, droughts and heavier-than-usual rains at the wrong time can all disrupt the plants’ pollination — making each full ear of corn less of a guarantee and more of a gamble.
Overall, corn growers got lucky this year with late-season weather that contributed to what is now predicted to be a record bumper crop. But experts say bouts of extreme weather are intensifying the waiting game during a critical time of year between planting and harvest.
Human-caused climate change has worsened multiple U.S. extreme heat events this year and has steadily increased the likelihood of hotter overnight temperatures since 1970, according to Climate Central, an independent group of scientists who communicate climate science and data to the public.
The AP’s narrative is a pure lie, debunked within its own paragraphs. Corn growers didn’t get lucky this year with a bumper crop, rather bumper crops have been a trend during the recent period of modest warming, even with the normal annual ups and downs inherent to crop production. The USDA meteorologist, Brad Rippey, who the AP quoted described 2025’s production as a “monster U.S. corn crop.” But it’s not the first monster crop in the past few decades for U.S. corn farmers.
The numbers tell a clear and compelling story of rising corn production. The U.S. Department of Agriculture confirmed record national yields of 179.3 bushels per acre in 2024, breaking the previous record set only a year earlier in 2023. Long-term records from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization show U.S. corn yields have more than tripled since 1961, rising from around 3.5 tons per hectare to more than 11 tons today as seen in the figure below:
Economists at the University of Illinois calculate that yields have increased by nearly two bushels per acre every year since 1950. These are not the marks of a crop in decline — they are the hallmarks of long-term improvement from better farming practices, yield improved varieties, selective breeding practices to improve resiliency to weather factors, and boosted production due to carbon dioxide fertilization.
The significant gains in yields have also produced records for production with U.S. Department of Agriculture data showing each of the past ten years of production having been higher than any previous years or decades in history, with new records for production being set three times since 2016.
To tie corn growers concerns to climate change, the AP article relied on a small number of anecdotes about heat, corn tassel timing, and the fragility of pollination. Yes, these can matter for pollination in a particular field, but they have always been part of farming. Weather extremes are nothing new, and across hundreds of posts, Climate Realism has cited data across a range of stories showing extreme weather hasn’t become more frequent, severe, or inconsistent in recent years. What matters is the nationwide harvest, and it keeps breaking records. If the climate were truly making corn “dicier,” record-breaking yields would not keep piling up.
The real problem corn producers face at the moment is not crop decline, but instead just the opposite, crop abundance and farming success. Bumper crops have produced an oversupply to the market that is resulting in lower prices, even as ever more corn is being diverted from grocery shelves to gas tanks as ethanol requirements creep up.
Farmers are not watching their livelihoods wither under climate change. Instead, they are wrestling with the economic consequences of overproduction, as a variety of news outlets have reported recently. On the same day the AP was incorrectly bemoaning corn declines, a story titled, “Huge Crops in Corn Belt Hit Cash-Strapped Farmers With More Unease,” was published in the Wall Street Journal. Just a few days earlier, in a story, subtitled, “so much corn, so little profit, NewsNation reported that with the USDA projecting 16.7 billion bushels of corn in 2025, the largest in American history, the glut is pushing prices to multi-year lows, with Iowa producers estimating losses of $80 to $100 per acre at current bids. That is not a climate crisis, it is an economic one caused by success.
So contrary to the AP’s claims, the real problem facing corn farmers is not extreme, unpredictable weather and crop diseases hampering production, but rather oversupply of the market due to record setting production, the latter a regular occurrence across the first quarter of the 21st century as global temperatures have continued to rise modestly.
Climate Realism has repeatedly documented this pattern of media misrepresentation about crop yields and climate change, with over 100 articles on the subject. We note that when crop yields rise, the media ignores or downplays it. When a short-term weather challenge arises, it is cast as evidence of climate change driving it. The broader reality — backed by decades of USDA and FAO data — is that American agriculture continues to thrive even in a modestly warmer world. Corn is not alone, wheat and soybeans, for example, are also enjoying long-term gains in productivity, and 2025 will be remembered for surplus, not scarcity.
Oversupply is forcing farmers to store corn with little hope of profitable sales, while trade policy uncertainties in corn exports weigh on demand. These are the real stressors in agriculture today, none of which have anything to do with climate change. By fixating on climate change while admitting record abundance in the same breath, The AP obscures the actual challenges farmers face with regards to commodity markets, prices, and trade.
The conclusion is unavoidable: the claim that climate change is making corn yields more precarious is demonstrably false. Yields are rising, production is at record highs, and as a result, prices are low, driving down farm income. The Associated Press misled its affiliates and readers by suggesting a climate crisis where there is none, undermining trust in its reporting. Farmers and the public deserve better.
September 7, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Associated Press, United States |
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MOSCOW – It would be easier to achieve a peaceful settlement of the Ukrainian crisis if the “hawks” in Brussels stopped fueling the conflict, the Russian Embassy in Belgium said on Sunday.
“It is obvious that if the ‘hawks’ in Brussels and other Western capitals stop fueling the war and support peace efforts, including those undertaken by US President [Donald] Trump, then it will become much easier to achieve peace,” the embassy wrote on Telegram.
Instead, the Belgian government is becoming more and more Russophobic, misleading its citizens about Russia’s alleged intent to attack Brussels, the embassy added.
Earlier in September, Belgian Defense Minister Thomas Francken said that Moscow was capable of “infiltrating” one of the NATO member states by 2030 under the pretext of protecting the Russian-speaking minority in it, while at the same time attacking Brussels, “the capital of diplomacy,” with drones and missiles.
“The flawed logic offered to ordinary citizens confirms that the current Belgian leadership is rapidly moving away from its previously declared moderation in foreign affairs and is increasingly joining the ranks of the most Russophobic part of the EU and NATO, pursuing an extremely dangerous course of inciting confrontation with our country,” the statement read.
The Russian embassy dismissed the allegations, adding that the policies pursued by the Belgian government result in significant economic and social costs, which Belgian citizens are forced to pay.
September 7, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | Belgium, Russia |
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AP’s Israel-Palestine news director, Josef Federman, has spun data to minimize the Gaza death count. Leaked documents show he appeared on a panel aimed at assisting “Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative” during a gov’t-sponsored propaganda conference chaired by an ex-IDF official who legitimized killing journalists.
The Israeli massacre of five journalists in broad daylight on August 24, 2025 at Nasser Hospital in Gaza’s Khan Younis city prompted a sternly worded statement to the Israeli government from the Associated Press and Reuters, which each employed a reporter murdered by the IDF. The AP subsequently published a detailed investigation demonstrating that the Israeli military knowingly attacked a civilian target, then carried out a double tap strike after a rescue team and journalists arrived on the scene.
While the AP’s statement of outrage about the killing of its photographer in Gaza, Miriam Dagga, has brought the leading wire agency’s tension with the Israeli government to its height, the relationship with Tel Aviv was not always so adversarial.
The Grayzone has reviewed leaked documents revealing that the AP’s news director for Israel-Palestine, Josef Federman, participated in a private 2018 panel discussion aimed at assisting “Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative.” His host was a secretive Israeli government outfit dedicated to combatting the global BDS campaign to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel. Called the Global Coalition For Israel (GC4I), the event was convened in Jerusalem on June 18, 2018 by Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs and Diplomacy – the de facto propaganda arm of the Israeli government.
The moderator of the panel in which Federman participated was Avital Leibovich, the former spokeswoman for the IDF who has ardently defended the Israeli policy of defining Palestinian journalists as terrorists in order to assassinate them.
Federman has presided over the AP’s coverage of Israel-Palestine since 2014. Throughout Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza began in October 2023, Federman has helped shape a narrative that has subtly but effectively advanced Tel Aviv’s objectives, regurgitating the baseless and comprehensively debunked claim that “Israelis were raped or sexually assaulted” on October 7; legitimizing Israel’s violent invasion and theft of Syrian land as a historical “shift,” and relying on bogus data from an Israel lobby-affiliated researcher to minimize the civilian death count in Gaza – a grim toll which now includes one of his colleagues at AP.
Federman’s penchant for uncritically quoting notoriously mendacious Israeli military officials has helped secure his reputation for biased coverage.
Federman’s participation in the 2018 Israeli government anti-BDS event appears to contradict clearly stated AP guidelines on conflicts of interest. According to the AP’s website, “We avoid addressing, or accepting fees or expenses from, governmental bodies; trade, lobbying or special interest groups; businesses, or labor groups; or any group that would pose a conflict of interest.”
In response to a detailed query from The Grayzone about Federman’s participation in the semi-covert conference, AP Vice President of Corporate Communications Lauren Easton stated, “Josef Federman is a professional journalist and a former chairman of Israel’s Foreign Press Association. It is not uncommon for journalists to speak about their work at conferences and other events. It remains AP policy to refrain from accepting honoraria, and that policy was followed here.”
The details of the GC41’s gathering were gleaned from a massive tranche of documents extracted by hackers from Israel’s Ministry of Justice in 2024. A full schedule and list of GC4I conference participants has never been seen before by the public.
View GC4I’s 2018 schedule here.
AP, other agencies join semi-secret Israeli gov’t event chaired by ex-IDF official who justified killing journalists
When GC4I gathered in 2018, it met at the Mamilla Hotel Conference Hall in Jerusalem for two days of discussions and briefings on the fight to crush the growing Palestine solidarity movement and its BDS campaign. The conference opened with an address by Sima Vaknin-Gil, then the Director-General of Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs. A former Israeli intelligence official, Vakhnin-Gil had emerged as one of the most influential coordinators of the country’s propaganda efforts abroad, especially in the US, where she helps the Israeli government evade the Foreign Agent Registration Act law.
Her speech was followed by a discussion moderated by celebrity Republican pollster Frank Luntz on the feasibility of defining the BDS movement as a “hate group.” Further panels focused on “developing relations in the corridors of power” and “how… legislation in Europe and the United States can be used to reduce funding for organizations delegitimizing Israel.”
On the second day of the GC41 conference, Federman joined a panel aimed at “discuss[ing] the difficulties of reporting fairly and accurately on Israel, while dealing with issues such as BDS, delegitimization, and the Israel-Palestinian conflict.”
The panel was explicitly aimed at helping the Zionist operatives gathered at the GC4I “understand the shortcomings in Israel’s ability to effectively portray its narrative, what reporters are looking for when writing an article and why the anti-Israel camp’s narrative resonates in the Western world.”
Avital Leibovich, a former IDF spokeswoman who moved on to the American Jewish Committee, chaired the panel. During her stint at the IDF, Leibovich played a leading role in justifying Israel’s deliberate killing of journalists in the Gaza Strip. In 2012, for example, she fired off a letter to the New York Times which smeared Palestinian journalists slain at the hands of the Israeli military: “Such terrorists who hold cameras and notebooks in their hands, are no different from their colleagues who fire rockets aimed at Israeli cities and cannot enjoy the rights and protection afforded to legitimate journalists,” she wrote.
In 2016, Leibovich appeared at Washington DC’s Newseum amid protests – including by this reporter– and condemnation from the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, which urged the institution in a May 31 letter “not to provide a platform to someone who has justified, on record and to a world audience, Israel’s grave violations of international law and war crimes, and in particular attacks against journalists and press freedoms.”
Chaired by Leibovich, the 2018 GC4I panel featured featured the Jerusalem Bureau Chief of RT, Paula Slier, and Laurent Lozano, who held the same position at Agence France Press, alongside the AP’s Federman. Slier has since left RT, while Lozano is currently AFP’s bureau chief in Dakar, Senegal.
Reached by The Grayzone, Slier described the gathering as “a very pleasant experience.”
She said she considered her participation in a semi-covert Israeli government conference as a normal part of her duties as a correspondent in Jerusalem. “It was a chance for them to hear how foreign channels worked in Israel,” Slier commented. “I used to participate and attend all conferences – whether they were pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian – I thought it important to engage with everyone, and it was also an opportunity to talk about RT.”
GC4I launched at “secret conference” with “closed sessions” on criminalizing BDS
GC4I’s first gathering took place in 2010, at a time of heightened Zionist anxiety about the rising global grassroots movement to boycott Israel. A who’s who of Israeli lobbyists from the US, UK and Australia were on hand, alongside Israeli officials from the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the newly created Ministry of Strategic Affairs.
“The aim was to end the perceived lack of co-ordination within the pro-Israel movement, a concern frequently voiced by Israel-advocates,” wrote researcher Hil Aked.
Marcus Dysch of the Jewish Chronicle gained access to a 2014 GC4I meeting in London, England. He described it as a “secret conference… held in closed sessions amid heavy security.”
“We have the resources. We have the intelligence. Most important, we have unbounded determination,” Ronald Lauder, the billionaire Zionist financier and Netanyahu confidant, told the crowd of Jewish communal leaders and Israeli officials in London.
Lauder pledged to leverage his fortune to criminalize the BDS movement: “We will draft and lobby for legislation that will withhold government funding from academic institutions that boycott Israel.”
Reporting back to Jewish Federation at home, minimizing deaths in Gaza
Well before he emerged in the Middle East as a reporter, Josef Federman enrolled as a graduate student at Israel’s Hebrew University.
He grew up in Westborough, Massachusetts, where his parents helped found the B’nai Shalom Congregation, a Reform Jewish synagogue. Federman has returned on two occasions to deliver lectures at the synagogue, once in 2021 to discuss the Abraham Accords alongside an Israeli academic, and again in March 2024, during the height of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, for an event titled, “Reporting from Israel.” That speech was co-sponsored by the Jewish Federations of Central Massachusetts, a top sponsor of pro-Israel lobbying inside the US.
Two months later, the Israeli government seized camera equipment from the AP to prevent it from live-streaming video from the Israeli side of the northern Gaza frontier. While Israel announced that it would return the equipment and allow the broadcasts to continue, the event eerily foreshadowed the Israeli military’s double tap strike on the Reuters live position at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis this August 24.
The following month, Federman published a piece of “AP data analysis” that relied on dubious statistics to advance one of Israel’s most important propaganda objectives in Gaza. According to the headline of Federman’s piece, “Women and children are killed less frequently as war’s toll rises.” The article therefore implied that all men in Gaza between the ages of 18 and 59 were possible militants. Throughout the piece, Federman referred to Gaza’s Health Ministry as “Hamas-run,” casting doubt on its casualty counts.
To legitimize his conclusions, Federman turned to Gabriel Epstein, a researcher at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, or WINEP, the most prolific think tank of the Israel lobby in Washington DC. WINEP director Robert Satloff, a veteran Israel lobbyist, praised the AP’s Federman for “tak[ing] a big step toward setting the record straight.”
Another researcher cited in the article, Michael Spagat, defended the quality of death counts by Gaza’s Health Ministry. Months later, in September 2024, Spagat revised his view of the death toll, declaring, “I now believe that the true death toll almost certainly exceeds the official total.”
This August, a review of an internal Israeli intelligence database further discredited Federman’s analysis, revealing that 83% of those killed by the Israeli military in Gaza were civilians.
Today, Federman’s “data analysis” on the Gaza death has been discredited by virtually every expert outside the Israel lobby, and by the gruesome reality on the ground. However, a revealing post remains on his personal LinkedIn page which shows him liking a rant by Idit Shamir, consul general of Israel in Toronto, mocking the official death count in Gaza:
“Isn’t it curious?” wrote the Israeli official. “Hamas is clueless about Israeli hostages’ status but has a crystal-clear count of Palestinian casualties before Israeli strikes even occur!”
Now that a fellow AP reporter, Miriam Dagga, has joined the tens of thousands of civilians murdered by Israel in Gaza over the past two years, Federman’s agency has been forced to release a rare expression of outrage at Tel Aviv. The indignation offers a stark contrast from the comity Federman displayed when he bantered at an Israeli government conference with the former IDF official who legitimized the policy that would claim Dagga’s life.
September 7, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | Israel, Palestine, United States, Zionism |
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Last week, the New York Times published a bizarre “Guest Essay” on autism by Jessica Steier, a Pharma mercenary who has at least ten financial conflicts of interest and no background in autism research. I submitted a reply to the article to correct her disinformation and the NY Times refused to publish it.
Here are the facts for anyone who wants to read them:
Jessica Steier runs a science-for-hire company, “Unbiased Science.” She uses a number of pass-through organizations to launder contributions from large pharmaceutical and chemical companies. However, one can still figure out a lot of her funders (see article on “Unbiased Science Podcast” in SourceWatch). Steier advises an infant formula company and is an affiliate for a company that makes monosodium glutamate (MSG). Her podcast has taken money from 3M, Procter & Gamble, Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis, Moderna, and CSL Seqirus (a flu vaccine manufacturer).
Steier is cartoonishly evil. From SourceWatch:
Steier’s Unbiased Science Podcast:
• Described the herbicide glyphosate as “safe for use”
• Declared polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) in Teflon to be “non-toxic to humans”
• Called the Environmental Working Group Dirty Dozen list of produce with the most and least pesticide residues “a fear-based marketing ploy”
• Claimed GMOs are “safe,” “nutritious,” and “beneficial to consumers, producers, and the environment” and
• Called hydrogenated oil “a safe dietary fat.”
The Unbiased Science Podcast recorded two episodes on organic food and farming in December 2022 and January 2023 in which they argued that organic pesticides are more harmful than synthetic pesticides used in chemical farming…
Andrea C. Love [Steier’s co-host] defended the artificial sweetener aspartame as “safe,” said in an interview that she has “at least one diet soda a day,” and the Podcast posted on Instagram that “aspartame does not pose a health risk to humans, cancer or otherwise, especially at levels we would consume.”
Love and Steier were critical of the International Agency for Research on Cancer’s ranking of the chemicals considered possibly carcinogenic to humans in 2023.
SourceWatch provides even more evidence of Steier’s toxic sophistry here.
For those who are new to these topics, mountains of evidence from The Defender, Beyond Pesticides, and Moms Across America, among others, show why all of Steier’s claims listed above are junk science.
Nearly everything Steier writes in her “Guest Essay” on autism is demonstrably false. For example, Steier:
- Thinks mercury and aluminum in vaccines are fine even though they are known neurotoxicants (see Grandjean and Landrigan, 2014, Supplementary appendix).
- Omits the fact that Mark, Anne, and David Geier sued the Maryland Board of Physicians and won (and then a higher court retroactively granted “absolute immunity” to this private board even though the Maryland legislature never gave it that right).
- Has apparently not read any of the 55 autism prevalence studies in the U.S. since 1970, so she is oblivious to the fact that autism rates have increased 32,158% over that time period.
- Seems unaware that a Danish study she cited favorably recently issued a correction after they discovered, post-publication, 136% more neurodevelopmental events, including autism and ADHD, that changed their research findings.
- Has never read, or just plain ignores, the six vaccinated vs. unvaccinated studies that show that vaccines significantly increase autism risk (see summaries in Rogers, 2025).
Science-for-hire companies will say or do anything for money. Steier’s company, “Unbiased Science,” is relatively new. However, it uses the same playbook developed by other notorious science-for-hire firms, including Gradient, Exponent, and Ramboll. They are often referred to as “rented white coats” (see discussion in Rogers, 2019). Anyone citing Steier as a “public health expert” has no idea what they are talking about.
The NY Times devoted considerable resources, including two graphic designers and prominent placement online and in the Sunday print edition, in the attempt to make this trashy hit piece look presentable to its readers. The NY Times’ failure to disclose Steier’s extensive conflicts of interest and its refusal to publish critical comments in connection with this “Guest Essay” make me wonder if this was a paid advertorial at the behest of a pharmaceutical company.
The autism epidemic is a matter of enormous national importance. Yet everything that the NY Times publishes on autism is an attempt to cover up the causes and protect the powerful industries that are culpable. Unfortunately, in the midst of this crisis, the NY Times has abandoned its role as “the newspaper of record” and is now a criminal syndicate that is endangering the health of all Americans.
Toby Rogers has a Ph.D. in political economy from the University of Sydney in Australia and a Master of Public Policy degree from the University of California, Berkeley. His research focus is on regulatory capture and corruption in the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Rogers does grassroots political organizing with medical freedom groups across the country working to stop the epidemic of chronic illness in children. He writes about the political economy of public health on Substack.
September 6, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | New York Times, United States |
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There is no evidence Russia interfered with European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s airplane during her recent flight to Bulgaria, the country’s authorities have said. The European Commission earlier claimed Bulgarian authorities had confirmed the incident.
On Sunday, upon landing in Plovdiv, von der Leyen’s pilots allegedly reported issues with their navigation systems. Brussels later told the Financial Times that her flight was “forced to circle for an hour” and claimed that Moscow had “blatantly interfered” with the aircraft, supposedly trying to jam its GPS signal.
However, Bulgarian Prime Minister Rosen Zhelyazkov has outright contradicted Brussels’ claim, telling parliament on Thursday that no evidence of a Russian attack had been found and that von der Leyen’s plane did not suffer any serious issues, only short-term signal degradation which is common in densely populated areas.
September 4, 2025
Posted by aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | European Union |
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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 aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | ABC, CBS |
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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 aletho |
Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | New York Times, NPR |
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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 aletho |
Fake News, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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