the redeemable, the evil, and the dead
two models of journalism are literally at war
On 10 August, 2025, Israel intentionally murdered six journalists: Anas al-Sharif, Mohammed Qreiqeh, Ibrahim Zaher, and Mohammed Noufal, from Al Jazeera, and the freelancers Moamen Aliwa and Mohammed al-Khaldi. They were working in a tent used by journalists in the area, just outside al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City. The following day, Israel attacked Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, killing 21 people, including 5 journalists.
All of the four Al Jazeera journalists murdered on August 10 were from Gaza, three were born in refugee camps, and at least three of them had immediate family members—mothers, fathers, and brothers—killed by Israeli forces in the ongoing war. The Israeli military admitted it intentionally targeted the journalists in order to kill Anas al-Sharif. Al-Sharif was a well known, tireless journalist, but the IDF claimed he was the leader of a Hamas brigade. They promised they had indisputable evidence of their claim. Media all over the world repeated Israel’s claim, even though no one saw the supposed evidence. And even though Israel has been caught lying on a daily basis throughout this war.
Far beyond this one war, government sources tend to be the most common sources quoted by the media. They are also frequently dishonest, inaccurate, or meaninglessly ambiguous: if government spokespeople say anything factual and true it’s when telling part of the truth happens to coincide with their interests. Governments at war see the media as a weapon and they use media to spread their propaganda.
It seems unethical, to put it lightly, for journalists to quote sources like the US or Israeli governments without letting their readers know these are not credible sources. It also seems to fly in the face of journalism’s ostensible purpose when they spread information that is demonstrably false, or spread a truth and a lie as two competing opinions, as though it were impossible to do the research and find out which version is more accurate.
Do we believe the version of the truth spread by these human rights organizations, or do we prefer the US government’s version of the truth? You choose! With the mainstream media’s approach to truth and credibility, the reality you build for yourself is just a lifestyle choice in the marketplace of ideas, slowly sliding towards a loyalty test between one mainstream political current and another.
Is there any point to expecting journalists and the publications they work for to be ethical, honest, and diligent? In fact, I believe there is a form of journalism that is more or less redeemable, but it is getting slaughtered—sometimes literally—by mainstream journalism.
On the whole, journalism is a stupefying trade. Reporting on the stories du jour, journalism is designed to treat us to a predictable parade of formulaic narratives that—less than educate us or expand our understanding of the world around us—create an alibi for institutions of power, normalize harmful dynamics that shouldn’t be excused, falsify or erase history, and fabricate a world that, once people accept it as factual, makes them easy to rule and exploit. Journalists and their editors frame a debate that society is meant to replicate. The “two sides” in this debate are both misinformed and sociopathic, though one is from the Right and the other from the Center or Center-Left. Journalists will construct a debate between a spokesperson for a military that is actively carrying out genocide; a spokesperson for a human rights organization that is documenting the genocide without talking about any realistic responses; and a survivor of that genocide who is currently starving and whose entire family has been murdered. They give the first spokesperson about 60% of the ink, the second spokesperson about 30% of the ink, and the one person who best understands the situation a short quote buried way down in the article. In a centrist or right-leaning publication, that person wouldn’t be quoted at all.
Every now and then, progressive-leaning media will publish an investigative piece that involves months or years of research, takes on a powerful institution, and reveals real and ongoing harm. However, this is not so common, and serves mostly to boost a publication’s reputation and win them an award or two. The Boston Globe, for example, is still living off the laurels of the story it ran back in 2002 on systematic child abuse by the Catholic Church in the Boston area. News flash: everyone already knew that the Church systematically abuses children, and not just in the Boston area.
There are other exceptions. For example, in August the BBC actually provided the evidence showing that the Israeli government was lying when it claimed that the journalist Anas al-Sharif led a Hamas terror cell. It is not a coincidence, though, that the BBC used their much atrophied fact-checking muscle when it comes to journalists being killed. When it’s the rest of us who are in danger, it usually won’t even make the news. If it does, spokespeople for whatever government policy or exploitive business is screwing us over will be given a prime spot to confuse the issue and deny any wrongdoing, and if we’re lucky some scientist, maverick politician, or major charity will speak on our behalf.
In 1988, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky published Manufacturing Consent, an analysis of how the mass media manufacture consent or get the public to support or accept certain fundamental aspects of how the State and capitalism organize society. Their model is based on astute analysis and an immense amount of data, and it still holds today. Some of the following are points made by Herman and Chomsky, and others I’m drawing from other sources or they’re my own formulations.
Profitability: mass media are private, for-profit companies owned by even larger corporations. The exceptions are state-owned, and all of them are subject to state regulation. They need to satisfy their advertisers, their parent company and its other subsidiaries, and the government in power that they are not hurting business or subverting social control. Even media that support themselves through subscriptions still depend on individuals with more money and on foundations supported by major corporations, and they still exist in a corporate media environment that conditions people’s expectations and understanding of the world. Media that distance themselves too far from the mainstream lose their financial support and their protection from government censorship or repression.
Debate: you don’t control people by telling them what to think. You control them by posing the questions and framing the debate. A debate around “what’s better, Twinkies or Kit-Kats?” allows people to have opinions and express themselves, but by participating in the debate they naturalize the concepts of industrial food production and food as a commodity, along with all the poisonous and extractive processes that come with the package.
Framing: if you have the power to ask the questions, you don’t need to determine the answers. You can control people’s understanding of the world while also making them feel free as they come up with their own answers. The question, “Does Israel have a right to self-defense?” obscures the history and the nature of the war. The question, “Should employers be responsible for paying for their workers’ healthcare?” naturalizes the ideas of rich and power, healthcare as a commodity, and the existence of corporations. Those who can fit their answers into the question as framed—basically, people with mainstream views, views that are validated and reinforced by mass media—will have an advantage over the rest of us who have to challenge the question and give a whole history lesson, in the process coming off as eccentric, out-of-touch, unrealistic, or extreme. What questions can you think of that the media never ask?
Legitimation through sourcing: mass media overwhelmingly cite, quote, and interview government officials, wealthy people, technical experts, celebrities, and the representatives of major corporations, non-profits, or other institutions. We learn more about the world we live in through the views, beliefs, and assertions of those who own and control that world than through the views and experiences of people like us, or people in very different circumstances who still share with us some basic qualities: dispossession, a lack of control over our own lives.
False objectivity: even when media quote members of the public, they are arbitrarily defining the range of what “normal people” believe. Both editors and professors of journalism will instruct up-and-coming journalists, don’t give your own opinions and characterizations. Find someone you can quote who will say it for you. In other words, they create a false illusion of objectivity.
Stigmatization and controversy: rather than fact check claims or refuse to spread claims that cannot be verified, if an institution of power is making a claim, media will typically broadcast that claim alongside opposing claims from other institutions of power, presenting the issue as a controversy, or differing opinions. On the flipside, political actors with large platforms and access to other forms of power can delegitimize facts by disputing them, treating them as offensive allegations, and otherwise generating negative controversy to the audience is less likely to trust those inconvenient facts.
Loyal opposition: the mass media are vital to the counterinsurgency figure of a loyal opposition. Governments can claim their subjects are free as long as there is an opposition. Only dictatorships are oppressive, right? But if that opposition is a loyal opposition, if that opposition does not question the basic foundations of oppressive power, than the criticism actually makes the State stronger. Mass media train people to frame criticism as loyal criticism. So, through the lens of mass media, the question is not, “Should we accept the existence of this hierarchical institution that is founded on genocide and that keeps invading other countries in order to project the power and increase the profits of the few?” it’s “Will the US invasion of Iraq damage our standing in the Middle East?” It’s not, “How do we win back our survival from the jaws of these greedy capitalists?” it’s “Will increasing healthcare and unemployment benefits stem the growing wave of protests?” It’s not, “Can we abolish the police and prisons without abolishing the State?” it’s “Will a shift towards mediated settlements help decrease crime?”
Al Jazeera is by no means immune to these dynamics. Artificially limited framings and historical erasure is universal to all major media, including Al Jazeera. And as they are headquartered in and partially funded by the government of Qatar, I wouldn’t trust them to investigate the systematic abuse of immigrant workers there (though I did find a few exceptions, in their English-language edition only, in the lead up to Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup, when there was increased international attention to such abuses). For what it’s worth, they outperformed Western media by several orders of magnitude in their coverage of the Arab Spring, even though the 2011 uprisings were destabilizing governments all around them, including allies, and might well have jumped the border into Qatar as well.
Whatever the case, journalists from Al Jazeera regularly put themselves in situations of extreme danger in order to report from war zones and other conflicts where people who are not supported by any major government are being severely harmed… unlike most North American and European media.
Israel is not the first country to intentionally target Al Jazeera. On 8 April, 2003, the US military bombed Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Baghdad, killing one correspondent and injuring others. The same day, the invading US military attacked two other sites associated with independent journalists, including a lethal shelling of the Palestine Hotel where 100 “unembedded” (independent) journalists were housed.
In 2001, the US bombed Al Jazeera’s offices in Kabul. The Bush II government called Al Jazeera “vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable” to justify their murders, though Al Jazeera was infinitely more accurate and truthful in their reporting than the US government and any major US news organization. As for vicious and inexcusable, between their two wars against Iraq and their invasion of Afghanistan the US government murdered over one million people…
The second US war against Iraq killed more journalists and media workers than any other war in recorded history up to that point, over 200. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists more lost their lives in targeted killings than as bystanders or “collateral damage.” Fast forward to 2025, though, and Israel has smashed the US’ shameful record. In the current war, Israel has killed over 260 journalists in Gaza and the West Bank, and about 30 more in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, and parts of Palestine fully annexed by Israel.
The lion’s share of targeted journalists are freelancers working on commission for international wire services, or media workers employed by non-Western companies like Al Jazeera. And yet, the much publicized, romanticized idea of journalists dying to get the story disproportionately benefits the branding of powerful publications that are literally on the other side of the battle lines.
The freelancers are forgotten, they’re precarious workers anyways, and Al Jazeera gets slandered as “terrorist” for reporting inconvenient truths, but the gold standard of journalism is a rag like the New York Times.
There isn’t really a rightwing pole for journalism anymore, unless you count more specialized publications like the Wall Street Journal, ever since Fox News tapped out after 2020 when they defended themselves from libel claims by clarifying that their major news shows were actually “entertainment” and not factual reporting.
Al Jazeera vs. the New York Times
The idea that the New York Times is considered a respectable newspaper would be hilarious if they weren’t complicit in so many atrocities. It’s hard to find an article free of misspellings or grammatical errors, and their editors demonstrate a loose grasp on the English language.
Far worse, the Times consistently provides propaganda support to the atrocities of the powerful. For a long time now, they’ve been embedded with the US military and in bed with Wall Street. While they wring their hands about Fox News spreading lies about an election, the Times intentionally spread lies to justify Bush II’s invasion of Iraq in 2003, a war that has led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
The editorial desk and the international desk at the NYT have that blood on their hands, and yet not a single one of their major journalists or editors have been executed, imprisoned, ostracized, or beat up in the streets. On the contrary, they’re still given credibility even though they’re known to be professional liars.
They also continue to lie about their 2003 propaganda campaign, spinning intentional complicity in mass murder as a “mistake.” By February 2003, a full month before the US invaded, everyone with access to the internet knew that the claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction were an intentional fabrication. I remember listening to the story, and the proof, on Democracy Now! and other outlets. This article in particular gives a highly informed explanation of all the investigation and inspections that were happening from 2002 to 2003, showing that the problem was not “faulty and inadequate intelligence,” the problem was “robust and reliable intelligence information [that was intentionally being] ignored.”
As for Bush’s mudslinging that Hussein was working with al Qaida, this was nothing but a lazy, racist ploy to take advantage of the average white American’s conflation of Arabs, Muslims, and terrorists. Everyone with a minimal grasp of the politics of Hussein’s Ba’athist regime knew the idea he would support al Qaida was absurd: in fact, they were enemies, and all the evidence confirmed it. Meanwhile, there’s a good deal of evidence showing covert complicity with al Qaida and similar groups by the US, the UK, and Israel, both before and after 2001.
And yet, the NYT has the gall to keep on lying. In their supposed retraction, published over a year after the US invaded and the death toll was still climbing, the NYT offered more excuses than self-criticisms and more lies than corrections.
To give just two examples of many:
Regarding aluminum tubes the Bush administration and the Times claimed could be used to enrich uranium, the retraction from the editors claims, “Five days later [after running the story], the Times reporters learned that the tubes were in fact a subject of debate among intelligence agencies.” This is also false. There was no debate. The CIA had found that report lacking in all credibility the year before. The DOE and the IAEA—the US and the international agencies most knowledgeable about nuclear weapons production—had already concluded in the ‘90s that aluminum tubes like the ones mentioned in a report by a single CIA agent (the report his bosses discarded) could not be used to produce nuclear weapons.
The Times editors begin their fake apology saying, “In most cases, what we reported was an accurate reflection of the state of our knowledge at the time, much of it painstakingly extracted from intelligence agencies that were themselves dependent on sketchy information.” This is false. There was abundant information from the IAEA, from the CIA, and from weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq that there were no signs of chemical or biological weapons stockpiles and no signs of a nuclear weapons program. The New York Times was not falling victim to a lack of information or to the journalistic pressures to publish more exciting headlines, as they claim: they systematically chose to give a bullhorn to select sources offering allegations that had no supporting evidence and that contradicted verifiable and credible sources. They systemically chose to ignore or downplay all the verifiable evidence contradicting these select sources. These were not random, untrustworthy sources the NYT editors were boosting. They chose only to boost sources who were supporting Bush administration talking points. The editors did so because they wanted to support the Bush administration’s push to invade Iraq.
(In the Washington Post’s retraction, also published a year and a half too late, the editors are equally dishonest: “We didn't pay enough attention to the minority,” they lament, shedding crocodile tears. Actually, what they did was to ignore the majority of credible sources and experts and instead give credence to Bush administration cronies who did not deserve a platform. They claimed their errors were only visible “in hindsight” and they deliberately gaslit and ignored the abundance of sources that could provide solid evidence.)
The Times is being a little less bombastic with their manipulations these days than they were in 2003, but in their coverage of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine, they are falling back on all the basic maneuvers for manufacturing consent.
They overwhelmingly give more credence and more room to US and Israeli officials who are either making inane PR statements or making demonstrably false claims, criticisms are presented vaguely and without all the supporting evidence, historical context is erased or falsified, and if Palestinians and other Arabs are ever quoted, they are either cast as sinister or questionable figures, or as passive victims suffering under ambiguous circumstances.
The Times and other similar publications leave themselves the room for occasionally publishing lengthy investigative pieces, and sometimes these longer articles are even good! But then, the very next day, everything that has been revealed is erased, sent down the memory hole, leaving readers in a soup of ambiguity where editors can rest assured that the status quo of implicit racism will lead most of their audience to favor Israelis over Palestinians.
For example, we know for a fact that Israel had been increasing lethal attacks and land theft against Palestinians in the years before October 2023, yet the Times systematically repeats the myth that Hamas started the war. We know for a fact that many of the 1200 Israeli settlers killed in the Hamas attack were actually killed by the Israeli military, which has a documented policy of killing hostages to prevent them from being used for leverage. We have footage of Israeli forces shooting missiles at Hamas convoys full of Israeli prisoners. And yet, the Times and most other Western media repeat the demonstrable lie that Hamas killed 1200 people that day.
These media systematically refer to this war as a war in Gaza and “against Hamas.” This is a distortion. It has been documented time and again that the war is targeting the entire population of Gaza, it is targeting Palestinians in the West Bank, it is targeting Iran and its allies in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Qatar, and it has also been used by the Israeli government to steal more land in Syria.
In tandem with the US government, these media refer to Hamas as a terrorist group, and to the PLO (which supposedly holds power in the West Bank), as the legitimate future government of Palestine, if that’s ever going to occur. And yet, it was Hamas that won the last Palestinian elections, whereas the PLO runs a proxy dictatorship for Israel as it gradually whittles away at the West Bank.
Facts as opinions: It’s not that “critics say” this “could” be a violation of international law. Intentionally evicting, dispossessing, displacing, and expelling a civilian population IS a violation of international law. Anyone who says otherwise is incorrect. A fair and accurate headline would say “Israeli government lies again about its intentional expulsion of Palestinians from their homes.”
Minimizations and euphemisms:
“Wholesale emigration” as opposed to “mass land theft and violent expulsion through an intentional campaign of murder and genocide.” A “devastated enclave,” when referring to the homes of millions of people. “Displacement camps” instead of “refugee camps.”
Repeating a zero-evidence claim, from the people doing the killing, that they’re trying not to do so much killing, and then a framing that their genocide isn’t intentional, they just aren’t doing enough to examine their failings.
And here’s the progressive Boston Globe getting in on the distortion. Studies have shown that the death toll in Gaza is well over 100,000 now. These studies use standard, accepted methodology for calculating an increase in death rates in a large population. However, major media continue to spread the much lower body count kept by the underresourced network of hospitals in Gaza (currently around 63,000 dead). However, the same doctors and medical workers who release these numbers also state that these are not complete figures: they only represent bodies that have been recovered, of people killed by bombs, gunfire, artillery, etc. The numbers leave out all the bodies that are still buried in the rubble, as well as the much greater number of people killed by sickness and malnourishment, a known and intentional consequence of the kind of warfare Israel is waging.
To be clear, I think Hamas is an oppressive, authoritarian organization, and hopefully everyone knows by now that even the worst of political parties can come to power through democratic elections. However, the Israeli government is guilty of much more extensive torture and sexual assault, and the Israeli military and paramilitary settlers have killed about a hundred times more non-combatants, elderly, children, and babies that Palestinian militant groups have. Practically every year, an Israeli politician or military leader will go on record saying some variant of “for every one of us they kill, we’ll kill fifty of them,” which is a really bad look considering which infamous 1940s government made that their explicit policy for dealing with the resistance movements in the various territories they occupied.
Sidebar: I want to quickly note, and I’ve documented this elsewhere, how not just the Times but all mainstream media consistently report false or misleading information about the ecological crisis in order to support the profitable fables that green energy, green growth, government regulation, and mysterious future technologies will somehow save us.
A: In the face of the biggest, most lethal threat humanity has ever faced, the NYT is endorsing the wishful thinking of the companies profiting off the disaster?
B: They’re ignoring the hard evidence that increasing energy efficiency has never to decreased total carbon emissions? … and also the fact that with AI’s huge demand for power, gas, oil, and even coal are back in a big way and any increase in efficiency from other power sources won’t be able to keep pace with growing demand?
Additionally, they tend not to demonstrate how rightwing discourses against trans people and immigrants are based on false affirmations. Instead, they may present these discourses as edgy or aggressive, but in the end just a different opinion.
The New York Times sets the global standard for professional journalism, whereas Al Jazeera is ignored or demonized by many of the most powerful governments in the world. And yet, the former regularly publishes demonstrably misleading or false information from the comfort and safety of distant offices, enabling genocide and mass murder, and is rewarded with wealth and prestige. The other, though it has plenty of faults and political blindspots, takes great risks to thoroughly, diligently, and accurately report on the abuses and victims of the powerful, regionally and globally.
These two models of journalism are literally at war.
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I used to work in the printing trade and these "news" outlets have always been dubious about telling the truth of events, particularly when it paints the ruling tyrant in a bad light. Most did however reserve a desk for a maverick reporter to publish a column somewhere in the body of their otherwise propaganda rag. Some one like a John Pilger or Christopher Hitchens could get stories out in MSM up until maybe the first Gulf war, but since then the war in the west against truth telling journalism has been viscous. Julian Assange being the most publicised case but lately even quoting humanitarian organisations on the genocide can get reporters sacked, at least that is so in the penal colony and certainly the UK. In the UK the media was respectfully requested not to play 'Give Peace a Chance', John Lennon during the first gulf war. Freedom of speech is an illusion.
Returning home from the UK at that time I happened to be seated next to a Palestinian girl/woman of about my same age and was gobsmacked about her story of exile and her families treatment by Israel. Weren't we told Israel were the good guys? Travel doesn't so much broaden your mind but exposes how narrow your conditioning has been.
PS. Just watched the 3rd installment of 'It's Revolution or Death' submedia. You have a rare talent for communication, excellent production all round.
Thank you for this much-needed, difficult, tender, brave, and important discussion.