I’m still on August hiatus, but here’s a two-hour lecture on the history of mass media to tide you over until September! This is Lesson One of my three lesson Mass Media: A History online course. Buy the complete course for audio and video downloads, a hyperlinked transcript of each lesson and a study guide with questions and reading recommendations. Enjoy!
FactCheck.org, the organization that flags “misleading” COVID-19 content for Facebook, is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a philanthropic organization funded by pharmaceutical giant and vaccine maker Johnson & Johnson (J&J), YouTube commentator Jimmy Dore reported.
“These fact check organizations aren’t there to check facts,” Dore said. “They’re there to push a political point of view and an agenda and to discredit people.”
Dore said when the organization “fact-checked” his work in the past, its claims were always “bogus.” He said FactCheck.org never reached out to consult him about his content, it twisted his words and it never even pointed to any erroneous facts.
Instead, he said, “They didn’t like my headlines,” and they would say they were misleading.
Johnson & Johnson’s viral vector COVID-19 vaccine received emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in February 2021. After the shot was linked to dangerous blood clots, its use was suspended a couple of months later and it was eventually completely pulled from the market in May 2023.
Its current CEO, Dr. Richard Besser, formerly worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, where he was acting director during the H1N1 outbreak.
When Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) first sounded the alarm in 2021 about FactCheck.org on Twitter (now X), the organization responded by saying, “The views expressed by FactCheck.org do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation.”
The organization continues to receive funding from Robert Wood Johnson for its work “correcting health misinformation.” It reiterates on its website, the foundation “has no control over our editorial decisions.”
As context is very important for all videos, this message is to confirm that the purpose of this video is reporting on or documenting the content. Note that we make an effort to research for context and cite our sources as appropriate.
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HBO funnyman and vaccine shill, John Oliver, made another attempt this week on his show to amplify the mainstream vaccine safety narrative, citing the same studies he referred to in a similar segment on his show in 2017. Del once again destroys his stale, recycled misinformation.
Ismail Al-Ghoul and his cameraman Rami Al-Refee were observing the conflict-zone-reporting best practice, as they motored back from their assignment on the last day of July. Having reported issues facing the displaced people of northern Gaza, they were leaving the scene of greatest danger. Blast vests bearing the insignia “PRESS” protected their bodies. Minutes earlier they had updated the Al Jazeera newsroom with their location.
None of this would save their lives when an Israeli drone strike blasted their car. The explosion blew off Al-Ghoul’s head – an image subsequently shared on social media. Al-Refee and Khalid Shawa, a boy who happened to be passing by on a bicycle, also died instantly.
Unusually, we know that the killing was deliberate – because the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) has admitted as much.
The occupation army justified the assassination, arguing that the journalist’s name appears on a list of “senior Hamas officers” that it captured earlier in the conflict. This allegation is strenuously denied by Al-Ghoul’s family, his employer and his union. And Israeli “evidence” in similar cases has appeared questionable. Indeed, Al-Ghoul spent enough time “on camera” that his capacity outside journalism would have been limited.
Critically, however, he was arrested by Israeli soldiers in March and held for 12 hours before being released without a charge. Surely, if the evidence of his Hamas membership justified his killing, there must have been sufficient basis for his prosecution?
This admission of targeting confirms much of what have for months been swirling allegations about Israeli operations. We know that it has software – Pegasus – that secretly invades mobile phones and shares its user’s locations, communications and the identities of those who they meet.
We know that the Israeli army uses software called “Lavender” that deploys AI to sort operational intelligence and suggest targets for assassination. A further tool, “The Gospel”, uploads targets’ geo locations to killer drones dramatically faster than had been possible with manual programming.
More than 12% of Gaza’s journalists killed
Alongside this technological capability is the extraordinary number of journalists who have been killed in Gaza since 7 October. The most conservative tally is around 120, some believe that as many as 165 Gazan reporters have perished since 7 October. This is dwarfed by the total death toll in Gaza, now somewhere around 40,000 victims. It is the mortality rate among journalists that is really striking. There were approximately 1,000 journalists in Gaza at the start of the conflict – more than 12 per cent have now lost their lives.
This extraordinary rate of killing, and the precision targeting to which the Israeli occupation forces have admitted, points to a simple and awful conclusion. But there is more.
Since the outset of the conflict the Israeli government has barred international reporters from entering Gaza – despite hundreds petitioning to be admitted. It has also threatened to remove funding from newspapers such as Haaretz, shut downAl Jazeera’s operation in Israel, and disabled the internet at key moments.
And, following the law is not the army’s way either. When the United Nations investigated the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, its report concluded: “The Israeli security forces used lethal force without justification under international human rights law and intentionally or recklessly violated the right to life of Shireen Abu Akleh.”
But why target journalists in this way? The only plausible explanation is that this is an attempt to control the war narrative.
In international law, journalists are considered civilians; combatants are obliged to ensure their safety. The Israeli army’s bloody campaign is in clear contravention of this – but whether the institutions of international law will bring anyone to justice remains to be seen. The International Criminal Court’s (ICC) lead prosecutor, Karim Khan, displayed bravery in May when he issued arrest warrants for the Israeli and Hamas leadership. If he sees these cases through to satisfactory conclusions he will have shown himself as one of the greatest jurists of our age.
Justice, if it comes, will be no comfort to Al-Ghoul and Al-Refee. They have distinguished themselves, however, by standing up to the most horrific force ever visited upon journalists and continuing to act as the world’s eyes and ears. There is no consolation for them – but they deserve celebration; their colleagues, who continue this work, deserve our support.
I had a very interesting discussion with Alexander Mercouris and Theodore Postol – a nuclear engineer and missile technology expert professor from MIT and former advisor to the Pentagon.
Professor Postol spoke about the new missiles that the US will deploy to Germany, which will be able to reach Moscow within 2-3 minutes and thus dramatically elevate the potential for a successful nuclear first-strike. Russia will have very little time to respond to a possible strike, which increases the risk of an accidental nuclear war or a NATO nuclear first-strike. Russia will have to respond by decentralising decision-making and granting more people the authority to launch a counter-strike against the US to reduce the threat of a decapitating strike against Russia’s decision-making headquarters, and Russia will be under pressure to launch a pre-emptive strike on the US/NATO if it suspects a first-strike in coming. This has happened before when NATO’s Able Archer exercise in 1983 almost triggered a Soviet nuclear attack as Moscow thought the NATO military exercise was a cover for a first-strike.
As the world was almost consumed by a nuclear holocaust, both Washington and Moscow recognised the need to extend the warning period for a possible nuclear first-strike. The result was the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty in 1987 to remove an entire class of missiles from Europe (500-5,500km range). In 2019, the US unilaterally withdrew from the INF Treaty, and new missiles will now be deployed to Germany which will give the US the possibility to strike Moscow with almost no warning. The US and Germany are thus setting the stage for something comparable to another Cuban Missile Crisis. The decision has no clear purpose in terms of improving security, it does not respond to any changes in the Russian nuclear posture, and the obedient media has offered no critical reporting.
In a recent interview, one of the world’s leading vaccinologists and co-author of what is considered to be the ‘bible of vaccines’, Dr. Paul Offit admitted that studies comparing unvaccinated children to vaccinated children have not been done, claiming they are impossible to do. All the while, lead author of the aforementioned book, Dr. Stanley Plotkin, the ‘godfather of vaccines’, made a recent statement in a published paper revealing the truth about safety trials on vaccines in the US, painting a picture of vaccine safety that falls far short of the safety claims our health agencies make.
In 1945, American President Roosevelt met with Soviet Premier Stalin at Yalta to discuss the post war world. Yalta is on Russia’s Crimean peninsula where tens of thousands of Russians had recently perished fighting the invading Nazis. Both leaders would be stunned to learn that 70 years later, American leaders would insist that Crimea does not belong to Russia.
America’s corporate media is closely controlled so their reporting supports the American empire. Six massive media companies control 90% of the American market. Reporting guidelines are sent from a secret cabal to news editors then down to so-called “journalists.” Soon after direct Russian military intervention in Ukraine in early 2022, NATO launched a massive “Information War” formally known as propaganda. Russian news sites were blocked from the internet as well as many small independent western sites. Corporate propaganda was all that most Americans encountered so they are now bewildered when told Russia is winning in Ukraine.
BBC coverage of the attack on a football pitch in the Golan Heights on Saturday has been intentionally misleading.
The BBC’s evening news entirely ignored the fact that those killed by the blast are a dozen Syrians, not Israeli citizens, and that for decades the surviving Syrian population in the Golan, most of them Druze, has been forced to live unwillingly under an Israeli military occupation.
I suppose mention of this context might complicate the story Israel and the BBC wish to tell – and risk reminding viewers that Israel is a belligerent state occupying not just Palestinian territory but Syrian territory too (not to mention nearby Lebanese territory).
It might suggest to audiences that these various permanent Israeli occupations have been contributing not only to large-scale human rights abuses but to regional tensions as well. That Israel’s acts of aggression against its neighbours might be the cause of “conflict”, rather than, as Israel and the BBC would have us believe, some kind of unusual, pre-emptive form of self-defence.
The BBC, of course, chose to uncritically air comments from a military spokesman for Israel, who blamed Hizbullah for the blast in the Golan.
Daniel Hagari tried to milk the incident for maximum propaganda value, arguing: “This attack shows the true face of Hizbullah, a terrorist organisation that targets and murders children playing soccer.”
Except, as the BBC failed to mention in its report, Israel infamously targeted and murdered four young children from the Bakr family playing football on a beach in Gaza in 2014.
Much more recently, video footage showed Israel striking yet more children playing football at a school in Gaza that was serving as a shelter for families whose homes were destroyed by earlier Israeli bombs.
Doubtless other strikes in Gaza over the past 10 months, so many of them targeting school-shelters, have killed Palestinian children playing football – especially as it is one of the very few ways they can take their mind off the horror all around.
So, should we – and the BBC – not conclude that all these attacks on children playing football make the Israeli military even more of a terrorist organisation than Hizbullah?
Note too the way the western media are so ready to accept unquestioningly Israel’s claim that Hizbullah was responsible for the blast – and dismiss Hizbullah’s denials.
Viewers are discouraged from exercising their memories. Any who do may recall that those same media outlets were only too willing to take on faith Israeli disinformation suggesting that Hamas had hit Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital back in October, even when all the evidence showed it was an Israeli air strike.
(Israel soon went on to destroy all Gaza’s hospitals, effectively eradicating the enclave’s health sector, on the pretext that medical facilities there served as Hamas bases – another patently preposterous claim the western media treated with wide-eyed credulity.)
The BBC next went to Jerusalem to hear from diplomatic editor Paul Adams. He intoned gravely: “This is precisely what we have been worrying about for the past 10 months – that something of this magnitude would occur on the northern border, that would turn what has been a simmering conflict for all of these months into an all-out war.”
So there you have it. Paul Adams and the BBC concede they haven’t been worrying for the past 10 months about the genocide unfolding under their very noses in Gaza, or its consequences.
A genocide of Palestinians, apparently, is not something of significant “magnitude”.
Only now, when Israel can exploit the deaths of Syrians forced to live under its military rule as a pretext to expand its “war”, are we supposed to sit up and take notice. Or so the BBC tells us.
Update:
Facebook instantly removed a post linking to this article – and for reasons that are entirely opaque to me (apart from the fact that it is critical of the BBC and Israel).
Facebook’s warning, threatening that my account may face “more account restrictions”, suggests that I was misleading followers by taking them to a “landing page that impersonates another website”. That is patent nonsense. The link took them to my Substack page.
As I have been warning for some time, social media platforms have been tightening the noose around the necks of independent journalists like me, making our work all but impossible to find. It is only a matter of time before we are disappeared completely.
Substack has been a lifeline, because it connects readers to my work directly – either through email or via Substack’s app – bypassing, at least for the moment, the grip of the social-media billionaires.
If you wish to keep reading my articles, and haven’t already, please sign up to my Substack page.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated in Iran, the Palestinian group and Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said in separate statements today.
The Palestinian resistance movement said Haniyeh was killed in “a treacherous Zionist raid on his residence in Tehran.” He had been in Iran to attend the swearing in ceremony of the Islamic Republic’s new President, Masoud Pezeshkian, yesterday.
“Early this morning, the residence of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran was struck, resulting in his and one of his bodyguards’ martyrdom. The cause is under investigation and will be announced soon,” the Revolutionary Guards said.
Asked about the news, the Israeli occupation army said: ‘We do not comment on these reports.’ While Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu said “Haniyeh’s death makes the world better.”
Taking to X, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich wrote: “Yes, all your enemies will perish Israel.”
While senior Hamas leader Sami Abu Zuhri said: “This assassination by the Israeli occupation of Brother Haniyeh is a grave escalation that aims to break the will of Hamas… Hamas is a concept and an institution and not persons. Hamas will continue on this path regardless of the sacrifices and we are confident of victory.”
Born on 29 January 1962 in Al-Shati refugee camp in the besieged Gaza Strip, Haniyeh was elected head of Hamas’s political bureau in 2017.
He was appointed as the Palestinian prime minister in 2006 after Hamas won the national elections but was dismissed the following year after factional fighting broke out between the group and rival Fatah, from which President Mahmoud Abbas hails.
Haniyeh served three years in Israel detention during the First Intifada in 1989 and was later exiled in 1992 to a no-man’s land between Lebanon and Israel. He has lived between Turkiye and Qatar after leaving Gaza in 2017 and has been active in negotiations efforts to bring an end to Israel’s ongoing genocidal war in Gaza.
Why lifestyle changes (and lifestyle medicine) are often a better option than pharmaceuticals and conventional medicine when it comes to preventing, treating and managing chronic disease:
Lifestyle changes target the root cause of chronic disease. They help avoid environmental damage, pollution and chemical and plastic waste entering our ecosystems. Future generations are positively impacted by focusing on lifestyle factors.
The following translation was performed free of charge to protest an injustice: the destruction by the ADL of Ariel Toaff’s Blood Passover on Jewish ritual murder. The author is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.
Dr. Toaff is uniquely qualified to write this book, being thoroughly familiar with the derivative literature in English, French, German and Italian, as well as the original documentary sources in Latin, Medieval Italian, Hebrew and Yiddish. This is not something he worked on in secret. On the contrary, he worked on it openly with his university students and colleagues in Israel for several years; one of his students was even going to publish a paper on the subject. The author is extremely careful about what he says, and his conclusions must be taken seriously. It reads like a detective story.
If it had been published in Israel, in Hebrew, no one would have cared. There are large bodies of literature in Hebrew that Jews do not wish Gentiles to know about. But Dr. Toaff’s announcement of its publication in Italy, in Italian, raised a worldwide firestorm of fury.
Under unbearable pressure, the book was withdrawn from publication. Come in out of the darkness, and strike a blow for the light.
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The word “alleged” is deemed to occur before the word “fraud.” Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.
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The following translation was performed free of charge to protest an injustice: the destruction by the ADL of Ariel Toaff’s Blood Passover on Jewish ritual murder. The author is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.
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