You have to figure, if those waging war — and covering it — dedicate themselves this assiduously to keeping things hidden, there are surely things to hide.
A U.S. sailor standing small-craft action team watch on a catwalk aboard the USS Gerald R. Ford in the Suez Canal during U.S.-Israeli attacks on Iran on March 5. (DoW/Public Domain)
By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News
I know for a fact that The New York Times has a multitude of correspondents on the ground in West Asia — the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, etc. It goes without saying the Times is thick on the ground in Israel: Between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem I count more than a dozen correspondents and reporters who have been hired locally.
This is a lot of expensive people to field. What in hell are they all doing now that a world-altering war rages around them? My short answer: assiduously not covering it. And the Times is emblematic, as it so often is, of the rest of mainstream media: You see the same mix everywhere of propaganda favoring U.S.–Israeli aggression and multiple sins of omission.
You always have to look good in this profession — good meaning serious, of discerning eye and piercing insight, “without fear or favor” and all that. You have to look like you are “on the story.” Times people are practiced in these ways. It may be said this is what they do for a living.
But looking like you are on the story is not the same as being on the story. And Times correspondents are not very good at this latter pursuit.
There is Ismaeel Naar, for instance. Ismaeel Naar works out of the Dubai bureau and covers the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, Qatar and Bahrain. Sound authorities publishing and appearing in independent media report that many, most or all U.S. military bases in these nations have been either destroyed or have been rendered inoperable since the U.S.–Israeli war against Iran began on Feb. 28.
Military personnel on these bases have been moved to hotels and the Iranians have attacked these hotels, you can read in independent press reports.
Here are the headlines atop a few of Ismaeel Naar’s recent stories: “Israel Begins Assault in Southern Lebanon, raising fears of Wider Incursion (March 5), “Desperate Travelers Wait as Dubai Resumes a Few Flights” (March 3) and, published March 2, “Qatar Says Its Air Force Shot Down Two Iranian Bomber Jets.”
Put the headlines against what appears to be the state of things: Ismaeel Naar is not “on the story” but, the important thing, he looks like he is on the story.
Ismaeel Naar might have taken an interest, to finish this point, in determining whether the Qataris actually brought down two Iranian warplanes or if they are simply saying they did. But this kind omission is so common all over the Western press it is a little Quixotic even to note it.
A Post–It note to Ismaeel: The story is not what the Qataris said. It is what happened or did not.
I don’t even want to mention the Times’ Israel coverage, but I just have and, so, will proceed briefly.
There is a lot of video around, on social media and elsewhere, now showing Tel Aviv in what look like a state of siege. The Times of India published 10 minutes of this footage Monday under the headline, “Tel Aviv ‘On Fire’ As Iran Drops Cluster Bombs; Israel Fails To Block Blitz | 15+ Blasts Reported.”
David Halbfinger, The New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief and captain of its Israel coverage, had a serviceable piece in the paper’s Sunday editions under the headline, “Israeli Settlers Kill 3 Palestinians in a Weekend of West Bank Violence.” However often this story is reported it is not often enough.
Among Halbfinger’s other recent bylines: “Israel Pounds Southern Beirut, a Hezbollah Stronghold” (March 5), “Israel Pushes Further Into Lebanon, and Readies for More” (also March 5) and “Israel and U.S. Trumpet Their Collaboration in War Against Iran” (March 4).
Of war developments in Tel Aviv, nothing. Jerusalem, nothing. Of other places in Israel under Iranian attack, reports of successfully intercepted rockets and drones and not much more. Of the Zionist regime’s resumption of its blockade of Gaza, and, so, its starvation campaign: No, nothing at all.
Just as correspondents have to look like they are on the story even when they are obscuring it, they cannot look as if they are participating in a news blackout even when this is precisely what they are doing.
Censorship and Self-Censorship
March to end the war on Iran, end U.S. imperialism in Philadelphia on Tuesday. The march ended at Philadelphia City Hall with a speaker who criticized mainstream media for spreading imperialist propaganda. (Joe Piette, Flickr, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
A few months after the U.S.–cultivated coup in Ukraine, as the Kiev regime began its eight-year campaign to shell its own citizens in the eastern provinces, the late John Pilger remarked, “The suppression of the truth about Ukraine is one of the most complete news blackouts I can remember.”
I counted this an acute observation at the time (and still do, indeed), but I reckon John, were he still with us, would find the wall of suppression that has gone up around the U.S.–Israeli war — or, more precisely, the apparent success of Iran’s counterattacks — a comparable case.
I find Western media to be especially insidious as they pretend to cover this disastrous conflict while doing their best to keep it from view. But self-censorship has been around a long time, after all. (And is one reason I gave up writing for these media long years ago. You can have a paycheck or your principles, but you can’t have both: This was my conclusion.)
It gets yet worse when the self-censoring correspondent meekly accepts the overt censorship imposed by those he or she purports to cover. It is well known — if only in the profession, not outside of it — that nothing of importance gets reported out of Israel without first passing through the state censors. Bringing this point squarely home is the case of two CNN correspondents reporting from Tel Aviv during the war’s first week.
A missile, alight with those reddish-yellow flames they exude, descended behind them against the night sky and hit its target with a great flash somewhere in the city. Microphone in hand, one correspondent looked sheepishly at the other and said, “We can’t tell you where that came from because the Israelis don’t want us to do that.”
A Post–It note to these two CNN correspondents: This makes two stories you are blowing. You should be reporting the hell out of the Zionists’ rigorous censorship regime.
The Israeli Military Censor enforces strict control under the 1945 Defense (Emergency) Regulations of the British mandate that were adopted by Israel in 1948 and were tightened in last June’s war with Iran. Unauthorized filming or reporting of damage in Israel could lead to fines and imprisonment of from five to 15 years.
CNN or any media, including social media, could wind up in jail for reporting on the impact of Iranian drones and missiles in Israel. There have been several arrests already, including CNN Türk correspondent Emrah Çakmak and his cameraman Halil Kahraman. This regime of suppression should be reported.
The Information Gap
First pair of the 28 Planet Labs satellites launching in 2014. (Steve Jurvetson /Wikimedia Commons/ Public Domain)
I thought I understood the extent to which this war is being covered up until an Iranian–American friend sent me a piece Thomas Neuburger published Sunday in God’s Spies, his Substack newsletter, under the headline, “War on Iran: The information gap.” Neuburger, an essayist and commentator, wrote a good subhead for himself: “The world is blind to damage done to Israel and the U.S.”
“No independent analyst I’ve read thinks Iran won’t stay the course, and do so no matter the cost,” Neuburger begins, usefully. “Iran was at war with Iraq for eight long years, and declared again and again its intention to see the war through. In addition, the regime today shows no signs of folding.”
Neuburger then takes up the case of Planet Labs, a California company that operates several hundred satellites by way of which it supplies global imaging to all sorts of entities — news media, energy companies, think tanks and, prominent among these, the U.S. military and the intelligence apparatus. Planet Labs, it turns out, has been key to information flows since the U.S–Israeli operation began.
“As to evidence of damage, there is satellite imagery of Iran, thanks to companies like Planet Labs,” Neuburger writes. “Unfortunately, Planet Labs has decided to delay publishing images of Israel and the Gulf states, including U.S. military bases. Images of Iran, however, will be made immediately available.”
Neuburger then quotes a statement Planet Labs just issued to Ars Technica, a technology news website:
“In response to the conflict in the Middle East, Planet is implementing temporary restrictions on data access within specific areas of the affected region. Effective immediately, all new imagery collected over the Gulf States, Iraq, Kuwait, and adjacent conflict zones will be subject to a mandatory 96–hour delay before it is made available in our archive. Imagery over Iran will remain available as soon as it is acquired. This change applies to all users except authorized government users who maintain immediate access for mission-critical operations.” (Planet Labs have now extended the delay from 96 hours to 10 days.)
You have to figure, if those waging war dedicate themselves this assiduously, this systematically, to keeping things hidden, there are surely things to hide.
“The first casualty of war is truth.” All sorts of people are credited with this famous mot. Hiram Johnson, a Progressive Party pol from California who served five terms in the U.S. Senate, 1917 to 1945, generally gets the attribution. But you can go back all the way to Aeschylus (“In war, truth is the first casualty”) by way of Samuel Johnson (“Among the calamities of war may be numbered the diminution of the love of truth”) and find the thought.
So there is a long story here, a thread running through history. But this is our passage in the story, and it is ours to come to terms with it.
Remember when the practice of “embedding” correspondents first came into vogue? This was during the First Gulf War, when the military and the policy cliques were determined to control the press after its coverage of the Vietnam war.
All correspondents have since been embedded one way or another, in my view. This goes for everyone from day-to-day reporters in Washington to those covering the war now at hand. The only independent media among the Western powers now are … independent media. The whole of the mainstream is effectively embedded.
On the other side of things, there are the Thomas Neuburgers and John Elmers among us. The latter produces The Resistance Report, which is carried on Ali Abunimah’s Electronic Intifada. Last Thursday, the sixth day of the U.S.–Israeli invasion, Elmer gave 47 minutes to an analysis of maps and all other available sources of information.
“Iran strikes back after Israel, US launch war” is Elmer’s headline. This, the effectiveness of Iranian counterattacks, seems to be the true center of gravity in this otherwise blotted-out story, however few among us are free to report it.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows, available from Clarity Press or via Amazon. Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been restored after years of being permanently censored.
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The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
Meanwhile back at the ranch, news reporting as a system, if you could call it that, appears clearly to be breaking down or morphing into more fully integrated, widespread propaganda and more dispersed accurate, small scale, independent reporting.
How could a new reliable way of confirming facts on the ground be scaled-up to serve a wider segment of society than the tech-savvy & the intelligentsia? Is it too soon or too late to declare the 4th estate no longer serves as bulwark against tyranny in the US?
The old truism, nature abhors a vacuum, seems to be in play in today’s info techno-sphere. Not only is great good work & hard digging for facts evident but so is myriad fakery that merit an old warning: beware, there be monsters here.
CN appears to be ardently grappling with this dilemma or conundrum or whatever it is as witnessed (somewhat painfully) in the recent CN Live with Joe L, Ray McG & Patrick L.
A short, very short story on this bogus B.S. coverage of Trumps LATEST FOLLY.
Each talking head at CNN has “their show” or slot or WTFE.
I cannot bear to watch his channel, I do. however do some recon of their openly sympathetic coverage of all things israel. The garbage they push as finished product, is neither.
Wolf “indeed” Bullshitter, Jake “the snake” Trapper, the seemingly lost Erin Barnett and the totally flappable Anderson Cooper fill out the short list of Israeli cheer leaders.
Today I focus on Ms. Burnett, highlighting how pathetic her recent reports form the shit hole of death Israel actually are. IMO.
“Hello, good evening this is Erin Burnett, we have just been warned to go to shelter and the sirens you hear shortly!” CUE: Sirens and hysteria. Just about every time she is on camera.
Rockets then appear and the report pretty much stops. “You hear the explosions!” Erin reports. Not much else occurs, evidently because she can’t tell us where the rockets came from.
See anything wrong with this picture?
I suppose if one is a big Israeli fan this serves as an honest report. I’m never impressed by such B.S. reporting and sensationalism.
This is purely propagandized, sensationalized garbage and should be embarrassing to any rational person. Until one considers the source. Billionaire’s profiting from a war they desire to blame on non existent existential threats of their Own making.
The criminal U.S. President doing what pedophiles do best spoiling his little buddy Bibbi the blade by spending 11 billions plus of U.
S. treasure to sooth his lovers ranting efforts to stay out of jail himself.
In the words of the founder of the Son’s of Liberty , Big Sarge # Not sorry, not sorry!
Well Spoken as a see-through silhouette .
In the old 20th Century model, commercial outlets sold or delivered content to get the attention of populations, then sold that attention as ad time. This was far from perfect, but it required some semblance of truth to retain an audience.
When that model mostly broke some twenty years ago, large outlets became more dependent on sources. Most sources of news, especially ongoing sources, are government or corporate entities–either with fairly specific public relations goals and problems. As a result, the economic motivation towards truth has largely inverted. These institutions fear the loss of their audience less and the loss of their sources more. That means that they depend on institutional approval.
That does not mean that we owe the people who do actually tell us the truth any less. It surely does mean that they have a rougher task than they did, in most cases.
We in the academic world ought to revise our notions of what constitutes a “good source.” We have not.
Excellent article, for all who are fortunate enough to access it. The type of “press” or “journalism” described by PL is actually nothing short of a weapon, just as deadly as the bombs raining down. This concealment of facts prolongs the mass killing by the aggressor. Those individuals who partake of this are just as guilty of war crimes as are the political scum that created this tragedy. One hopes that a few of them will open their eyes.
The Epstein Class has captured all our institutions including international ones. They bought the system lock, stock and barrel leaving the public sidelined. The mistake they make is they think we have surrendered to their power. Their problem is, independent media is growing and influencing more and more people as they get wise to the lies and manipulation. Their over confidence will be their undoing as Iran is proving.
Lack of transparency and censorship lead to poor decision making, Trump still thinks Hamas lopped off babies heads. MSM not being responsible journalists. No accountability.
Patrick Lawrence’s debunking is so good, so delicious; a sumptuous meal–a feast!
The “ Great Hunger, Potato Famine “ was genocide.
Dear Sir, respectfully, yes, there was famine. One in 1729, a worse one in 1740-41, a smaller one in 1815, and, of course, the nineteenth century famine. The British people gave generously, but no administration –and both Tory and Whig had their chance– could stop a tsunami almost 300 years in the making. I’ve read the lists of food sent, and the terrific number of meals served *every single day*, and it’s undeniable that hundreds of thousands of children’s lives were saved! But you cannot stop a tsunami almost three centuries in the making. Also, There’s much false reporting from the reactionaries who appear eager to continue to muddy the waters. I’m suggesting that you read Gustave de Beamont who spent part of 1836 and 1838– and all of 1837 in Ireland.
I no longer trust The New York Times.
Neither do I. I read it in order to learn what the government would like me to believe. And there’s a good bit of actual information, but you have to read between the lines to find it.
I first read about the bombing of the school for little girls in Minab on the first Sunday of the war (1st March), perhaps 12 hours or a day after it happened. By 2nd or 3rd of March, Al Jazeera published a story about it on its website with a video of parents collecting their deceased daughters’ belongings.
And I waited and I waited for some serious, complete coverage of the same in western mainstream media. Meanwhile, the White House and the Pentagon dissembled until finally earlier this week (Monday 9th March), some of the mainstream papers began publishing fuller stories about it, but always with the caveat that next door to the primary school was an IRGC compound (in use or vacant not clear)—as if to excuse the slaughter of innocents and avoid having to explain, admit responsibility, or (heaven forbid) actually apologise to the children’s famlies, the town, and the people of Iran for their murder.
Regarding news censorship: I was interested to see Fox journalists talking to camera in Tel Aviv while Al Jazeera journalists were prevented from doing the same and threatened with arrest and/or having their equipment taken from them.
Someone said that the first article on the horrific school bombing in The Times appeared on page 11. Should have been a front page headline!!
A possible bright light in the darkness?: In one of Trump’s recent impromptu, on-the-fly encounters with the press, a young Times reporter, Shawn McCreesh(sp?), put the Trumpeter on the defensive. After pointing out that the president said that somehow Iran had gotten its hands on a Tomahawk missile, he then asked the president why he was the only person in his administration to claim that the Iranians bombed their own school. Trump had to back off somewhat in response.
If I can impose on your time, here’s a little story about how things can change, or perceptions can change. Several years ago, a good friend of mine, Dave, was not happy about having to visit his in-laws who were rock-ribbed Republicans in conservative upstate New York. This was because on a previous visit, when Dave asked if his in-laws had read some article in The Times, the in-laws were aghast! “What???!!”, they exclaimed in great consternation, “you read The New York Times, The Red Rag”??!! (Not “red” like politically today; rather “red” like communist.) I’m not sure if they ran Dave right out of the house.
If they are not providing any useful information, then does it not become obvious that the answer is to turn them off? If all they are doing is packing your head with lies, flip the off switch.
The modern propaganda systems have one serious flaw. They require audience participation.
Refuse. Just say no.
Notice how hard they work to keep you tuned into their channels of lies. The constant messages that you must stay tuned. Important stuff is coming soon. They work very hard to make sure you stay tuned.
Just say no.
Keep that off switch switched off.
What if they told lies, and nobody was listening? Would that not just drive them nuts? Would that not make their entire system collapse? Want to see them panic?
Turn them off.
I suppose you many examples using your advise and just a few truths to tell ?
I am all ears when I get the chance .
Sometimes in one and out the other .
History is supposedly written by the Victor!!!
During the 19th century millions died during the Irish ‘FAMINE’. Alas it was not a famine but the ‘ GREAT HUNGER’
Irish exports from various ports at the showed that grain & animals were exported to feed the British Empire.
Churchill 2nd World War :-
Approx 3 million people in Bengal died of starvation as the British stole there food / crops, as part of their war effort.
None of this was ever reported at the time.
In Benga
Regarding the famine in Bengal during WW2, I recall an excellent film about that with the title of “Distant Thunder”. Released in 1973 and made by Satyajit Ray (writer and director). I don’t recall the details of the film but it made a strong impression on me, because I remember it now after more than 50 years.
I got rid of my television in 2012 because of advertising and lies. Anyone who still watches corporate news (for anything other than entertainment) is a fool.
Carolyn I sincerely hope this makes you laugh and brightens your day.
For you must remember I never suffer fools gladly. CNN fits the description as being a “ship of fools”!