The Media Aim, the Cops Shoot

ruminations on murderous media on the eve of chemo

A few hours out from starting chemo, I wanted to make sure I at least got a simple newsletter out, since I’ve been writing infrequently these last months. But hopefully the side effects won’t be too bad and I’ll be able to put out a couple every month. Maybe starting in January, since this next month with whatever free time I have I’ll be preparing the manuscript for my next book, which is a liiiittle past its deadline.

NYT article: “Climate Law Creates a Boon for Green Projects, and Wall Street”

The media aim, the cops shoot

ruminations on murderous media on the eve of chemo

Coming across an issue of The New York Times in the midst of visiting family last week, I was reminded of a theme I wrote about recently in “To Bomb a Hospital” – media complicity in the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

In a run-of-the-mill article about the hostage swap, in just a few paragraphs the Times establish an indisputable double standard that makes it clear the paper’s editors consider the Palestinians less than human. They do this by consistently using humanizing language for the Israeli military and Israeli settlers, eliciting empathy and putting us in their shoes, and by consistently using dehumanizing language for the Palestinians, eliciting fear, never presenting a coherent picture of their situation and making them alien and unknowable, all using standard techniques that every professional journalist has studied.

Palestine is never mentioned as a place, whereas Israel is. The people kidnapped by Hamas, including “children,” are being “held hostage,” whereas the people kidnapped by Israel, including “minors,” are simply being “imprisoned.” Incidentally, “minor” is also the term US media use, usually referring to children who are Black and Brown and sometimes lower class whites, when they are being hurt or killed by police or locked in cages. Referring to a child with an inhuman legal term rather than just calling them a child sanitizes the violence being done to them.

This racist double standard parallels the racism of the Israeli state itself.

In the second paragraph, the Times say that “Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack […] killed 1,200 people,” active voice, and they wait until the 6^th paragraph to mention that 12,700 people “have been killed,” passive voice, “in Gaza.” Immediately after they mention all the Palestinians murdered, without naming anyone as the killer, they quote an Israeli military official regarding their position and then elicit sympathy with Israeli settlers on stolen land who have to hear air raid sirens at night.

(With the punitive policies that make up the backbone of their campaigns of ethnic cleansing, the Israeli state has shown for decades it considers one Israeli life to be worth at least ten Palestinian lives. In the priority they give to covering one death or another, it is clear the media use a similar arithmetic. Though, to be fair, in their coverage of the US wars against Iraq and Afghanistan it seemed that the life of one US mercenary was worth the lives of over a thousand Iraqis or Afghanis.)

Next, they assist in the cover-up of Israel’s raid on the Al-Shifa hospital—which led to the deaths of multiple patients—by directly quoting Israeli government claims that the hospital was a Hamas military command center. The Times does not quote any patients, doctors, or Palestinian officials who suffered through the raid, nor do they mention that the evidence Israeli claims were based on had already been debunked.

Today at the hospital, a TV was on in a hallway where I was waiting for some last minute blood work. The local news was covering Derek Chauvin’s recent stabbing, and I was reminded of the same dehumanizing double standard that saturates English-language coverage of the ethnic cleansing in Palestine. As a reminder, Chauvin is the cop who murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020, and he is one of the first cops in the US to ever be locked up for murdering an unarmed person. Like most other cops to face serious consequences, the prosecutor only took action after people began rioting in the streets.

The TV anchors gave the injured Chauvin way more sympathy than they ever give anyone murdered by cops, again with a single exception: they show sympathy with the victims of the police when people start to organize protests and riots. Clearly, they are crocodile tears shed at strategic moments to keep people hooked into the unilateral conversation that they control. That putative dialogue allow the media to portray themselves as moderators, a neutral mirror reflecting what’s going on. And since we don’t see them pulling any triggers themselves, it’s easy to assume they are not an essential factor in producing these systemic harms from the very beginning.

We can find a further hypocrisy in how the media suddenly care about conditions in prison when a cop is on the inside, even though the existential purpose of cops is to put people in prison, where stabbings and much worse things happen on a daily basis. (Again, I’m reminded of my time in Crisp County Jail, where prison guards murdered a prisoner by gassing him and locking him in an unventilated cell. The local media repeated the police statement verbatim, that the inmate had died of natural causes in the jail’s medical wing. It was obvious to everyone on the inside that in all their years reporting, no local journalist had ever bothered visiting the jail. How? At that time, the jail didn’t have a medical wing.)

In other news, the mainstream response to save us all from climate change (the Paris Agreement, COP21, COP28, green energy, carbon trading, etc.) is a huge source of profit for major companies and is also contributing to an increase in oil and gas emissions, and even The Guardian is dancing around that fact.

This newspaper, which brands itself as independent, progressive, and ecological, trumpets the alarming news that the US is projected to break records in the expansion of its oil and gas production, all the way through 2050.

The article continues:

“The US’s surging fossil fuel production casts a pall over such ambitions, however. ‘It’s particularly alarming to see the projections of record US oil and gas production year after year until 2050,’ ”.

They mention a few countries, Kenya and Samoa, that will try to use the UN framework of the COP conferences to push for a “phaseout” of fossil fuels. Countries in a political weight class that have no hope of changing the economic behaviors and strategic decisions of countries like the US, China, the UK, Russia...

Then, they laud Biden’s latest policies that are supposedly meant to reduce emissions. They even claim that US emissions are expected to decline around 3% this year. Not enough to keep the Paris Agreement on track, but at least it’s something, right? What they fail to mention, even though the contradictory graphs they include should alert an attentive reader, is that thanks to the ecocidal, written-by-the-corporations Paris Agreement, oil, gas, and coal extraction that happens in the US, carried out by US and multinational corporations, and then exported to other countries (many of them poorer countries with few energy options) are not counted as emissions the US is responsible for.

The US can be the major producer of oil and gas in the world, and it’s not counted as responsible for those emissions.

One of the biggest threats to our survival right now is mainstream environmentalism. And I think one of the most importing things for us to do over these next few years is to let as many people as we can know that the entire official framework around climate change, green energy, and emissions reductions is a very profitable lie.

You can share this free article I wrote on how green energy actually increases the burning of fossil fuels.

And you can ask your local libraries and bookstores to stock the book I wrote on the subject, or ask friends and relatives to order it. In general I dislike self-promotion, but for what it’s worth, I don’t get any money for this one; all author proceeds go to Indigenous and anarchist groups struggling to defend their land and forests and their access to healthy food, in Brazil and Indonesia.

The Solutions Are Already Here: Strategies for Ecological Revolution from Below

What else can we do about media disinformation that serves as a cover-up for the greatest massacres and systematic oppressions of our times? Take your own initiatives, or leave some ideas in the comments.

I’ll check back in when I can. In the meantime, take care of yourselves, and take care of one another.

p