Told you so: Financial Times follows NFLAs lead on Sizewell C cost estimate.
16 Jan 25 – https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/told-you-so-ft-follows-nflas-lead-on-sizewell-c-cost-estimate/
It is always nice when a media cornerstone of the finance world follows your lead in doing its sums – but that is what the Financial Times did yesterday in publishing an article indicating that the estimated cost of completing the new nuclear plant at Sizewell C will be £40 billion, something the NFLAs have been saying for ages.
One rule in nuclear is that the construction cost for new plants will always be far higher than the first estimate. And there has been no better example of this truism than that of Sizewell C’s sister plant, Hinkley Point C in Somerset, where an initial estimate of £18 billion for completion has now doubled to £34 billion (at 2015 prices).
It was hardly surprising that the FT reported that the final bill is more likely to be nearer £40 billion after speaking to ‘people close to negotiations over flagship energy scheme’; which are understood to be ‘one senior government figure and two well-placed industry sources.’ This figure is double that made in 2020 reflecting the recent surge in construction costs, and the inevitable delays and cost overruns will inevitably add to the eventual total.
The Sizewell C site presents its own costly challenges, namely a need for considerable expenditure on coastal defences as the East Coast will be increasingly subject to inundation and storm surges because of climate change and the need to provide in this water-stressed region for the provision of potable water with the likely installation of a dedicated desalination plant.
The British Government has already spent, or pledged, up to £8 billion in public funds to carry out preparatory groundwork around the site. Although private investors are being sought to finance the cost of construction, under the Regulated Asset Base being adopted by the British Government for the construction of any new nuclear plants, British electricity customers will ultimately have to bear the cost as the developer will be reimbursed these construction costs in stages through applying a nuclear levy to bills.
However, the Final Investment Decision to give the project the go-ahead has yet to be made. This is only expected in the late Spring after the completion of a Spending Review of overall government spending so there is still time for the Chancellor Rachel Reeves to stop it.
Local campaign group Stop Sizewell C is asking supporters to sign a petition to do so. The link to the petition is https://action.stopsizewellc.org/save-billions-cancel-sizewellc
Stop Sizewell C’s message to the Chancellor, via the Treasury, is: “As you carry out your multi-year spending review, I am reminded of your statement to Parliament during your mini-budget last year – “If we cannot afford it, we cannot do it”. I appreciate that you face many difficult choices, but with the Financial Times reporting that Sizewell C will cost at least £40 billion, I urge you not to throw more taxpayers’ money at this expensive, risky project that will raise energy bills during its lengthy and unpredictable construction. For alternative strategies that will help meet the UK’s 2030 target and create many thousands of jobs, I urge you to focus on renewables and energy efficiency.”
The NFLAs endorse this petition as it mirrors our position.
At present, the British Government is the majority stakeholder, but long-term only wishes to retain 20% as Ministers intend to offload much of their stake to private investors. So far however, no one is definitively biting, with mixed messages about interest from Centrica, British Gas’s parent, and Gulf States’ sovereignty funds.
As a second whammy to government hopes that more private sector partners will become involved, yesterday, the French State Auditor, the Cour des Comptes, criticised the expenditure already made by French state owned EDF on Hinkley Point C in a published report which suggested this could compromise investment in domestic nuclear power expansion plans and that “EDF should not take a final investment decision on Sizewell C before achieving a significant reduction in its financial exposure to Hinkley Point C.”
Stop Sizewell C is asking supporters to write to prospective investors asking them not to do so. The relevant links to take this action are shown below:
Amber Infrastructure: action.stopsizewellc.org/amber
Equitix: action.stopsizewellc.org/equitix
Schroders Greencoat: action.stopsizewellc.org/greencoat
Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation: action.stopsizewellc.org/emirates
Centrica: action.stopsizewellc.org/centrica
The NFLAs has previously written to these prospective investors and endorse this action.
Finally Stop Sizewell C is petitioning the new Office of Value for Money’s independent Chair, David Goldstone, to call in the Sizewell C project for urgent scrutiny. Initial feedback from the Treasury indicated that Sizewell C would be examined, but more recent correspondence with officials has been less committal.
Supporters are asked to follow the NFLA’s example and sign the petition at https://action.stopsizewellc.org/valueformoney
Ends://..For further information, please contact NFLA Secretary Richard Outram by email to richard.outram@manchester.gov.uk
‘National scandal’: The BBC’s Gaza cover-up
Britain’s ‘public service broadcaster’ is keeping the public in the dark about UK support for Israel’s assault on Gaza, new research finds.
MARK CURTIS, DECLASSIFIED.UK, 15 January 2025
- Declassified researched the BBC’s online coverage of 16 aspects of UK policy towards Israel and the pro-Israel lobby.
- “It is high time for the corporation to be truly held to account and be reformed in the public interest”, leading media professor says.
The BBC is failing to report the various ways in which the UK government has supported Israel’s brutal war on Gaza, Declassified’s new analysis finds.
Our research into the BBC’s written outputs since October 2023 finds the corporation has mainly not reported at all the major ways the UK government has been working with Israel.
It found that the BBC has reported just four times in 15 months that the Royal Air Force (RAF) has been conducting surveillance flights over Gaza.
Only one BBC report on the subject has been written since December 2023, despite the fact that hundreds of such spy missions have been conducted, almost daily, in aid of Israeli intelligence.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says these flights are solely to aid the rescue of hostages held by Hamas. Only one BBC online report mentions the UK may be providing targeting information to Israel or flying weapons to the country.
None of the articles otherwise raise concerns about the UK being willing to collaborate militarily with Israel at a time it is devastating Gaza.
Omitting the news
When Israel’s chief of staff, General Herzi Halevi, was allowed to attend a British military meeting in London last November, this also went unreported by the BBC in its written outputs.
Halevi’s visit was highly controversial, given he has led Israeli military operations throughout its destruction of Gaza. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant are wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.
Our research also finds that the BBC has never reported that the British military has been training Israeli armed forces personnel in the UK during the Gaza war. ……………………………………………………………………………………….
Arms exports
In sharp contrast to other UK government policies concerning Israel, the BBC has published many articles mentioning British arms exports to Israel.
In these reports, the BBC has occasionally cited concerns by human rights groups and MPs about the possible use by Israel of these arms, at the same time as citing pro-Israel figures.
However, article headlines have rarely been critical of these weapons sales.
………………………………………. many headlines are conciliatory towards Israel. These include:
‘Deputy PM: It’s still legal for the UK to sell arms to Israel’
‘UK defends partial Israel arms ban as Netanyahu calls it “shameful”’
‘UK ban on selling arms to Israel would benefit Hamas, says Cameron’
‘Boris Johnson: Shameful to call for UK to end arms sales to Israel’
There are no headlines about the possible use of UK arms by Israel in Gaza, or any directly reflecting the repeated calls by groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, to halt all UK arms exports and military assistance to Israel.
The prominent legal action against the government for arming Israel brought by the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP), the Global Legal Action Network and Al-Haq, has been ignored by the BBC. Declassified could find no BBC written coverage of this at all.
The most prominent group challenging British arms exports, the Campaign Against Arms Trade, has been mentioned six times on the BBC website in 15 months.
Declassified has uncovered three other disturbing aspects of Britain’s arming of Israel, none of which appears to have been covered by the BBC.
Voluntary censorship
Neither has the BBC covered the possible role of UK spy agency GCHQ or the army’s special forces, the SAS, in facilitating Israeli military operations.
These are live issues given that GCHQ operates an extensive intelligence operation on Cyprus, from where the RAF planes are flown over Gaza.
GCHQ is known to have aided past Israeli combat operations in Gaza. Yet Declassified could find no reports on the BBC website mentioning GCHQ in the context of Gaza.
Reporting on the SAS was subject by the government to a D-Notice – a voluntary gagging order not to publish ‘sensitive’ information concerning ‘national security’- in October 2023.
It followed reporting by the Mail that an SAS team was positioned on Cyprus, reportedly to help rescue British hostages held by Hamas.
Since then, it appears the entire UK national media, including the BBC, has complied with this. The BBC has no articles covering or speculating on an SAS role in Israel or Gaza.
Unreported collusion
There are other ways in which the British government is in effect colluding with Israel which have gone unreported by the BBC.
Perhaps incredibly, the BBC has not reported in its written outputs since October 2023 that the UK is engaged in negotiations with Israel to secure a free trade agreement.
Conservative and Labour ministers have since 2022 held five rounds of talks with the Israeli government, whose economy minister, Nir Barkat, is an outspoken supporter of its attacks on Palestinians.
Jonathan Reynolds, the current trade minister pursuing the prospective new deal, is a recipient of funding from Britain’s Israel lobby.
Neither has the BBC reported on the arrests by the UK authorities of pro-Palestinian journalists in Britain. ……………………..
Lobby, what lobby?
Neither has any effort been made by BBC journalists to highlight the influence in the UK parliament exercised by the Israel lobby, notably Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) and Labour Friends of Israel (LFI).
This is a major gap in reporting since these are among the largest lobbying forces in British politics, funding dozens of MPs to go on “fact-finding” visits to Israel………………………………………………………
‘National scandal’
Des Freedman, professor of media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, said: “The BBC is clearly utterly failing to inform the public about how the UK military and government is complicit in the horrors of Gaza. This is a national scandal, showing how far away the corporation is from being a public service broadcaster.”
He added: “The BBC’s failure to accurately report on Israel’s genocide in Gaza is as much to do with what it refuses to report as with what it does report. It is high time for the corporation to be truly held to account and be reformed in the public interest”…………………………………………… more https://www.declassifieduk.org/national-scandal-the-bbcs-gaza-cover-up/
CBS’ 60 Minutes Exposes the Biden Administration’s Complicity in Gaza Genocide, Interviews the Whistleblowers
Here is the segment on YouTube:
Biden policy on Israel-Gaza sparks warnings, dissent, resignations | 60 Minutes
Juan Cole, 01/13/2025 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/administrations-complicity-whistleblowers.html
– The amazingly brave Cecilia Vega at CBS’ 60 Minutes did a groundbreaking segment on Sunday in which she interviewed US government officials involved with the Israeli war on Gaza, who resigned in protest either explicitly or implicitly. She also screened the sort of horrific footage of the aftermath of Israeli attacks in Gaza, with the gory parts left in. Here is the transcript.
American television news has almost completely ignored Israeli (and US) war crimes in Gaza, which have been taking place daily, but are not apparently deemed “news” at CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS, ABC, etc.
Here let me just excerpt some statements by the former US government officials:
Hala Rharrit was an American diplomat working on human rights: “What is happening in Gaza would not be able to happen without U.S. arms. That’s without a doubt.”
“I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of– of ch– mostly children. And that’s the devastation. It’s been overwhelmingly children.” (Emphasis added.)
“I would show images of children that were starved to death. In one incident, I was basically berated, “Don’t put that image in there. We don’t wanna see it. We don’t wanna see that the children are starving to death.”
Hala Rharrit: The level of anger throughout the Arab world, and I– I’ll say beyond the Arab world– is palpable. Protests began erupting in the Arab world, which I was also documenting, with people burning American flags. This is very significant because we worked so hard after the war on terror to strengthen ties with the Arab world.
[Cecilia Vega: You believe that this has put a target on America’s back, you’ve said.]
Hala Rharrit: 100%.
Hala Rharrit: Yes. I don’t say them lightly. And I say it as someone that myself has survived two terrorist attacks. My first assignment was in the U.S. Embassy in Yemen. I survived a mortar attack. I say it as someone who has worked intensely on these issues and has intensely monitored the region for two decades.
After three months of the Gaza War in 2023, she was told her reports were no longer needed.
Josh Paul spent 11 years as a director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political – Military Affairs.
Josh Paul: Most of the bombs come from America. Most of the technology comes from America. And all of the fighter jets, all of Israel’s fixed-wing fleet– comes from America.
Josh Paul: There is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the U.S. because every single bomb that is dropped is dropped from an American-made plane.
Josh Paul: After October 7th, there was no space for debate or discussion. I was part of email chains where there were very clear directions saying, “Here are the latest requests from Israel. These need to be approved by 3:00 p.m.”
Josh Paul: “This came from the president, from the secretary and from those around them.”
Josh Paul: I would argue exactly the opposite. I think the moment of October 7th was a moment of incredible worldwide solidarity with Israel. And had Israel leveraged that moment to press for a real, just and lasting peace, I think we would be in a very different place now in which Israel would not be facing this increasing isolation around the world and in which its hostages would be free.
Andrew Miller was the deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs.
Andrew Miller: The Israelis were using those bombs in some instances to target one or two individuals in densely packed areas. And in enough instances, we saw that was in question, how Israel was using it. And those weapons were suspended.
Andrew Miller: There were conversations from the earliest days about U.S. desires and expectations for what Israel would do. But they weren’t defined as a red line.
Andrew Miller: I’m unaware of any red lines being imposed beyond the normal language about complying with international law, international humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict.
Andrew Miller: I believe the message that Prime Minister Netanyahu received is that he was the one in the driver’s seat, and he was controlling this, and U.S. support was going to be there, and he could take it for granted.
Andrew Miller: There is a danger– that if the U.S. was not providing support to Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran would see that as an opportunity to go after Israel. However, we could have said, we are taking this step because we believe this class of weapons– is being used inappropriately. But if you use this moment to accelerate your attacks against Israel, then we are going to immediately lift our prohibition.
Andrew Miller: Yes. I think it’s fair to say Israel does get the benefit of the doubt. There is a deference to Israeli accounts of what’s taken place.
Here is the segment on YouTube:
Biden policy on Israel-Gaza sparks warnings, dissent, resignations | 60 Minutes
Amazon Is Censoring My Most Recent Magazine Issue
Caitlin Johnstone Jan 14, 2025
Without explanation Amazon has blocked and unpublished my last issue of JOHNSTONE magazine which features my painting of Luigi Mangione on the cover. The link to order it is now dead. When I asked for an explanation or appeal they just sent a template response referring me back to their publishing rules.
So that’s annoying. The pay-what-you-want ebook of the issue is still available for anyone who wants it.
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In her bid to secure her confirmation as Trump’s next Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard is now pledging to support Section 702 of the FISA Act. This notorious law allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans, and in congress Gabbard had previously fought to repeal it.
This is how the national security state works. You don’t change the machine, the machine changes you. Anyone who starts off opposing the imperial status quo of authoritarianism, warmongering and corruption either finds themselves excluded from the halls of power or adapts new positions in favor of the status quo.
The Australian political-media class has been rending its garments over a ridiculously fake incident of antisemitic graffiti at a synagogue in Sydney, which features both swastikas and the words “Free Palestine” right next to each other.
It’s weird how few people I see calling this what it so obviously is. Apparently we’re all supposed to take very seriously the idea that either (A) Nazis are spray painting the words “Free Palestine” next to their swastikas, or (B) that supporters of Palestinian rights are spray painting Nazi symbols next to their pro-Palestinian slogans. Apparently we’re all truly expected to pretend we don’t know some Israel supporter did this themselves to provide political cover for the genocide in Gaza.
It is always okay to express skepticism about dubious incidents of “antisemitism” in today’s political environment. Israel’s supporters are shitty, evil people who support genocide, and faking antisemitic incidents is a standard hasbara tactic with a well-documented history…………………………………… https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/amazon-is-censoring-my-most-recent?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=154758013&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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BBC staffers reveal editor’s ‘entire job’ to whitewash Israeli war crimes
News editor Raffi Berg reportedly controls online coverage of genocide in Gaza to ensure Israeli crimes are ‘watered down’ or ignored
News Desk, DEC 28, 2024, https://thecradle.co/articles/bbc-staffers-reveal-editors-entire-job-to-whitewash-israeli-war-crimes
BBC editor Raffi Berg has almost complete control of the British broadcaster’s online coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and is ensuring that all events are reported with a pro-Israel bias, according to a new report published on 28 December by Drop Site News.
“This guy’s entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel,” one former BBC journalist said.
Drop Site News spoke to 13 current and former staffers who stated that the BBC’s coverage consistently devalues Palestinian life, ignores Israeli atrocities, and creates a false equivalence in an entirely unbalanced conflict.
Another BBC journalist said Berg plays a key role in a broader BBC culture of “systematic Israeli propaganda.”
“How much power he has is wild,” said another journalist.
There was an extreme fear at the BBC, that if you ever wanted to do anything about Israel or Palestine, editors would say: ‘If you want to pitch something, you have to go through Raffi and get his signoff,” another journalist explained.
In one case, Berg downplayed Amnesty International’s accusation that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
Berg chose a headline that stated, “Israel rejects ‘fabricated’ claims of genocide,” to describe the Amnesty report and failed to post the story for 12 hours after it was written to suppress its online reach.
The journalists interviewed by Drop Site also noted that the Amnesty report was not covered on the BBC’s flagship news programs—BBC One’s News At One, News At Six, or News At Ten or its flagship current affairs program, BBC Two’s Newsnight.
“Anyone who writes on Gaza or Israel is asked: ‘Has it gone to edpol [editorial policy], lawyers, and has it gone to Raffi?'” another journalist said.
Raffi Berg, who wrote a book praising clandestine Mossad operations, wields great power to influence perceptions of Israel’s war on Gaza because the BBC news website is the most-visited news site on the internet, with over 1.1 billion visits in May alone.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed over 45,000 Palestinians, the majority women and children, and flattened large swathes of the besieged enclave.
The pro-Israel bias imposed by Berg is evident in the language used to cover the war.
While stories “prominently” used words like “massacre,” “slaughter,” and “atrocities” to refer to Hamas, they “hardly, if at all,” used them “in reference to actions by Israel,” wrote Rami Ruhayem, a Beirut-based BBC Arabic correspondent.
In another case, the BBC published a story with a headline that hid Israel’s responsibility for killing an entire family in a missile strike.
“Israel Gaza: Father loses 11 family members in one blast,” the headline stated.
Drop Site notes that when the BBC does mention Israel as the perpetrator, it uses the caveat “reportedly.”
The BBC also uses euphemisms preferred by the Israeli army to hide its soldiers’ war crimes. For example, the BBC describes the forcible transfer or ethnic cleansing of Palestinian civilians as “evacuations.”
In one case, the BBC described Israel’s total siege on Gaza with a headline stating, “Israel aims to cut Gaza ties after war with Hamas.”
Defense minister Yoav Gallant’s public vow to impose a “full siege” on Gaza while calling Palestinians “human animals” received just one mention in any BBC online content.
The journalists speaking with Drop Site said they made specific requests to BBC management to balance its coverage, but their requests have been ignored.
“Many of us have raised concerns that Raffi has the power to reframe every story, and we are ignored,” one journalist said.
“Almost every correspondent you know has an issue with him,” one stated. “He has been named in multiple meetings, but [BBC management] just ignore it.”
The journalist said they demanded that stories should “emphasize that Israel had not granted the BBC access to Gaza, that the network should end the practice of presenting the official Israeli versions of events as fact, and that the BBC should do more to offer context about Israeli occupation and the fact that Gaza is overwhelmingly populated by descendants of refugees forcibly driven from their homes beginning in 1948.”
Examining Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario.
Aileen Mejia explores the power of grassroots action, the flaws of nuclear deterrence, and the vital role of local movements in Scotland in shaping a world free from nuclear weapons
secure scotland, Dec 31, 2024
Annie Jacobsen’s chilling, well researched book
Nuclear War: A Scenario explores what a nuclear strike on the United States
may entail. By presenting a hypothetical, yet deeply plausible series of
events, Jacobsen explores the fragility of global security and the
devastating consequences of failing to prioritize de-escalation and
disarmament.
The book highlights issues that are extremely pertinent to the
grassroots groups in Scotland that relentlessly advocate for nuclear
disarmament and the application of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear
Weapons, including Secure Scotland and the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament (SCND), which are part of the International Campaign to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons (ICAN). https://substack.com/home/post/p-153802524
The legal decision on the Murdoch media – what does it mean for us?
NOEL WAUCHOPE, DEC 13, 2024, https://theaimn.com/the-legal-decision-on-the-murdoch-media-what-does-it-mean-for-us/
There is nothing either good or bad, but only thinking makes it so.
Shakespeare’s profound idea applies to that recent legal case, about the Murdoch Family Trust, in the Probate Court in Nevada.
The 93 year-old Rupert Murdoch sought to change the existing “irrevocable trust” which is to govern the arrangements of his media empire, after his death. The issue was that the trust should be in “the best interests” of the Murdoch children.
Rupert Murdoch argued that after his death, his children would benefit best if control of his media empire were to be changed from the existing trust arrangement which gives control to four of his children – Lachlan, Elizabeth, James and Prudence. Murdoch wanted that changed to control by only eldest son Lachlan. The other three disagreed, and took the case to court.
Rupert Murdoch’s given reason was that the whole media enterprise would thus be more profitable, – so all four children would get more money. That way, Elizabeth, James, and Prudence would not have control, but would be richer, and this would be “in their best interest”. Under the present unchanged “irrevocable” trust arrangement, they would share the control with Lachlan, but they would be less rich.
Many commentators are arguing that Rupert Murdoch’s real goal is power and influence – so that is why he wanted the very right-wing Lachlan to be in charge of the media show. Perhaps this is true.
The case was heard in a secret court, but the core of Rupert Murdoch’s argument was that the children’s monetary gain was in their best interest, rather than them having any control of the media and its content.
Apparently the three did not think so, and neither did Commissioner Edmund J Gorman, who ruled in the children’s favour, concluding that Murdoch and his son Lachlan, had acted in “bad faith”, in a “carefully crafted charade”.
Lachlan shares the same right-wing views as his father does, even more so,- while Elizabeth, James and Prudence are reported as having more moderate views. Murdoch has controlling interests in Fox News and News Corp , the Wall Street Journal, in the UK the Times and the Sun, the Australian and others. Apparently it is assumed by all, that the media empire will continue its current record profits only under Lachlan’s leadership. In 2023–24 the Fox Corporation’s net income was US$1.5 billion (A$2.35 billion).
This case raises the question – what is the purpose of the news media ?
According to the Murdoch argument, the purpose is to enrich the owners of the media. That would include all the shareholders, too, I guess. The means by which this is done is to provide entertainment and information to the public. And this is central to Rupert Murdoch’s stated argument.
Some people, including many journalists, and perhaps the Murdoch children, might see the informational role of the news media as its main purpose, with excessive profitability as a secondary concern.
Apparently Elizabeth, James and Prudence preferred to have some control in the media empire, even if that meant less money for them. They thought that “having a say” in the business was in their best interest. It is possible that they might take some pride in news journalism that would be more accurate and balanced than the Murdoch media is now.
Only thinking makes it so
The best example of “Murdoch media thinking” -is in its coverage of climate change. For decades, the Murdoch view was pretty much climate denialism – climate concern seen as a “cult of the elite” and the “effects of global warming have so far proved largely benign”. But more recently, this view was moderated, towards concern that some action should be taken to limit global warming – coinciding with the new right-wing push for nuclear power as the solution to climate change.
In the USA, Murdoch media has a powerful influence, supported by the big corporations, and the right wing in general, and by the Trump publicity machine, but it does have some competition from other right wing outlets like Breitbart and the Daily Wire, and in talk radio, and blogs. It has lost some influence in the UK, following its phone hacking scandal in 2011.
That Murdoch interpretation contradicts the view of thousands of scientists, yet is welcomed by the fossil fuel industries, the nuclear industry, and the right-wing governments that they support. Similarly, the Murdoch media’s view on international politics generally favours military action that the USA supports – on Ukraine’s side, by Israel, and now in Syria. All this is seen to be good – by the USA weapons manufacturers and salesmen, US and UK politicians, and presumably by the public.
In the USA, Murdoch media has a powerful influence, supported by the big corporations, and the right wing in general, and by the Trump publicity machine, but it does have some competition from other right wing outlets like Breitbart and the Daily Wire, and in talk radio, and blogs. It has lost some influence in the UK, following its phone hacking scandal in 2011.
In Australia, Murdoch media is far more pervasive, and has been described as a virtual monopoly – with the only national newspaper, newspapers in each state, (often the only newspaper), and News Corp controls radio and television in Australia through a number of assets.
So – what now, after this remarkable probate court decision?
Commissioner Gorman’s recommendation could still be rejected by a district judge. Murdoch’s lawyers can appeal the decision. Even if the decision is finally upheld, it will be a complicated process to rearrange the control of the media in the event of Rupert Murdoch’s death – and that might not happen for a decade or more. News Corp has a dual-class share structure which gives the family 41% of company votes, despite having just 14% of an overall stake in the company. Shareholders might change this arrangement.
In the meantime – fertile ground for endless speculation on what it all might mean – for the share price, for the future direction of the media, for the Murdoch family relationships.
Only thinking makes it so
Some see this legal decision as such a blow to the Murdoch empire – leading to its fatal collapse. And that thought can be viewed as a bad outcome. Even if Rupert Murdoch overturns the decision on appeal, it might have dealt a big blow to the empire.
Some welcome it, visualising a change in direction, with a more progressive media, directed by the three siblings with their more moderate opinions. For Australians who don’t like Donald Trump, and fear a Peter Dutton election win in 2025, well, it really doesn’t matter much. For the foreseeable future, the political right wing is still hanging on to its grip on news and information across this continent, thanks to the Murdoch empire.
Why Murdoch’s succession case could be major blow to his rightwing legacy
Edward Helmore in New York, 11 Dec 24 https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/dec/09/murdoch-succession-case-rightwing-legacy
Court ruling could mean that more liberal Murdochs may have say in content from world’s most powerful conservative media empire.
A Nevada court dealt nonagenarian media mogul Rupert Murdoch a major blow on Monday. And one that could – potentially – shatter his plans to secure his rightwing legacy.
Behind closed doors, Murdoch has been involved in a legal battle for control of the family’s media assets, pitching the mogul and Lachlan Murdoch, his political protege and heir apparent, against the patriarch’s three other oldest children.
The battle isn’t about money – it’s about power. The senior Murdoch wanted to change the family’s trust to ensure that Lachlan, CEO of Fox Corporation and chairman of News Corp, would control the empire after his death rather than sharing power with his siblings James, Elisabeth and Prudence.
But a 96-page ruling obtained by the New York Times blasted the scheme as a “carefully crafted charade” designed to “permanently cement” Lachlan’s control.
The spat will not end here but by failing to secure his eldest as his rightwing successor, Murdoch now faces the prospect that following his death – more liberal Murdochs may want a say in the the content flowing from what is now the world’s most powerful conservative media empire.
That Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, the Times, the Sun, the Australian and others under the News Corp umbrella could move in a different political direction would be bad for business, as Murdoch’s attorneys are believed to have argued in court. Fox News is the most-watched cable news show in the US and reported revenues of $14bn for fiscal year 2024. But while that may or may not happen, the business won’t benefit from replacing a media titan like Murdoch with squabbling siblings.
“This is the end of News Corp,” said a former high-level Murdoch lieutenant speaking on condition of anonymity. “The whole point is that unless one person runs it they can’t make decisions so they will fight over the direction of Fox News. Who is the editor of the Wall Street Journal? It will be controlled by the kids, become directionless, and lose its rightwing focus,”
“The trust was obviously rock-tight and the children had good lawyers,” they said. “Now Lachlan won’t be able to run it and that was the whole point.”
But whether James and Elizabeth Murdoch can force Fox News to take a progressive bent against News Corp CEO Lachlan, with eldest daughter Prudence a likely floating vote, is open to question. More likely, said the former lieutenant, News Corp leadership direction would devolve under a power-sharing arrangement.
If this all sounds like an episode of Succession, spare a thought for the Murdochs. Astonishingly, the legal drama had been kicked off when Murdoch’s children watched an episode of the hit HBO show in which the fictional heir of the fictional media empire discussed their PR strategy in the event of the patriarch’s death “where the patriarch of the family dies, leaving his family and business in chaos”.
According to the Times, Elizabeth Murdoch’s lawyer wrote a “‘Succession’ memo” to the trust hoping to prevent fiction turning into reality. Ironically, the memo, and the legal challenge that followed, may have created just that.
The ruling is unlikely to be the final word. Gorman acts as a “special master” who weighs the testimony and evidence and submits a recommended resolution to the probate court. A district judge could still reject Gorman’s recommendation, extending the legal wrangling far into the future.
But shareholders are already unhappy with this small S succession drama. In September, the hedge fund Starboard Value sent a letter to News Corp shareholders calling for the company to eliminate its dual-class share structure – which gives the family 41% of company votes, despite having just 14% of an overall stake in the company.
“This transition of power from Rupert Murdoch to his children has allowed for complicated family dynamics to potentially impact the stability and strategic direction of News Corp”, Starboard CEO Jeffrey Smith argued.
Four Murdoch children with voting rights, Smith said, “could be paralyzing to the strategic direction… the company could face real challenges and it becomes a very bumpy road for the other investors who are not part of the drama.”
News Corp’s dual-class voting structure that gives Rupert Murdoch control of the company might not function under equal control of four children with shifting alliances, Charles Elson, a leading authority on US corporate governance issues, told the Guardian in September.
Passing that power on generationally, Elson said, could be problematic. “How do you know the talent is genetic? Simply because they’re the children doesn’t mean they have the same business acumen as the father and it’s not how you pick the leader of a company or a country.”
Rupert Murdoch loses his legal battle, leaving future of media empire in the balance
The Conversation, Matthew Ricketson and Andrew Dodd, December 10, 2024
In the seemingly never-ending psychodrama surrounding Rupert Murdoch and his family, life has imitated art. Again.
A report on December 9 in The New York Times revealed details of the recent secret hearing in a Nevada probate court that was literally prompted by the epic HBO drama Succession…………………………..
The probate commissioner in Nevada who heard Rupert Murdoch’s application, Edmund Gorman “resoundingly” ruled against his attempt to change his family trust in a way that would have secured Lachlan’s position atop the global media empire.
Gorman was scathing in his ruling, saying father and son had acted in “bad faith” in their bid to change an “irrevocable” family trust that divides control of Fox News and News Corporation equally among Murdoch’s four eldest children from his first and second marriages: Prudence, Elisabeth, Lachlan and James.
In the 96-page ruling, Gorman described the plan to change the trust as a “carefully crafted charade” to permanently consolidate Lachlan’s executive roles inside News, “regardless of the impacts such control would have over the companies or the beneficiaries” of the family trust……………………………………….
Gorman’s ruling is not the end of the matter, however. It’s technically a recommendation to the Probate Court, which a district judge will ratify or reject.
Whatever the judge decides is open to appeal, which a lawyer for Rupert and Lachlan has already said they plan to do. Meanwhile, the other three siblings have released a statement welcoming the decision and expressing hope that “we can move beyond this litigation to focus on strengthening and rebuilding relationships among all family members”.
Good luck with that. The strongly worded ruling seems likely only to drive the parties further apart………………………………………………………………………………….
Lachlan’s description of James as the trust’s “troublesome beneficiary”.
By “troublesome” the plan was obliquely referring to the split in the family between Lachlan and Rupert – who are wedded to a media empire that is both right-wing and profitable – and James, who severed all ties with the company over its denialist coverage of climate change and its credulous reporting of baseless conspiracy theories about the result of the 2020 US presidential election………………………………………………………………………………….
If Prudence, Elisabeth and James can assert control, sideline Lachlan, and settle on a unified path forward, they can potentially reshape the company and redefine its journalism.
If they have already war-gamed it, and surely by now they have, the three siblings would know their greatest risk is alienating their current audiences, subscribers and advertisers.
In Australia, News operates in a virtual monopoly, so it can shapeshift with fewer consequences. But the US market is awash with emerging right-wing alternatives, each of which is eager to steal a share of the Fox audience. These viewers are the people who make Fox such a valuable commodity, and they’re the reason why it’s been so hard to stand up to Trump and his anti-democratic tactics, even on the odd occasions when Rupert and Lachlan wanted to.
The challenge is to somehow bring those audiences along for whatever transition the siblings envisage for the company. Can it be done, and if so, how?
The company’s own history suggests editorial change can happen quickly and audiences do tend to retain some loyalty. Murdoch’s takeover of The New York Post in the 1970s shows it is possible to radically change a masthead’s editorial position while expanding its audience, in that case from a mostly Democrat-leaning readership to a larger and more conservative one. But that was a moribund newspaper due for a radical makeover. There’s no guarantee it would work in reverse.
Fox News is arguably at the peak of its powers. The incentive to impose change has everything to do with journalistic standards and nothing to do with finances. In 2023–24 the Fox Corporation’s net income was US$1.5 billion (A$2.35 billion).
Even so, it must be possible to introduce incremental changes that reacquaint Fox viewers with more considered and ethical journalism without scaring them off. This wouldn’t work universally. Some of the demagogues who couldn’t cope would have to go – Sean Hannity springs to mind, as does former Fox firebrand Tucker Carlson.
Under new management, News could reintroduce some of the elements lost to Talk-TV in the mid-1980s, when the US scrapped the fairness doctrine that guaranteed balance and greater civility on the airwaves. It could ensure programs canvas different views, ask devil’s-advocate questions, and investigate issues without fear or favour.
Change of this nature wouldn’t be easy. News Corp has an echelon of editors across its global mastheads, most of whom are culture warriors and battle-hardened loyalists. They can and probably would work together to undermine progressive change.
During his tenure as the Australian head of News Corp, well before he became chair of the ABC, Kim Williams saw how the editors sneeringly white-anted his efforts to introduce reform. Even Lachlan Murdoch discovered that senior staff could undercut him. Paddy Manning recounts in his 2022 biography of Lachlan Murdoch, The Successor, that the infamous Roger Ailes did just this as Lachlan was learning the ropes at Fox in the early 2000s.
The three siblings will need resolve to dispense with those who get in their way, and they’ll need to introduce firm but gradual changes that don’t unduly scare their audiences or the market. But if Prudence, James and Elizabeth do share such a vision and are up for a fight, the world could soon be in for a fascinating media transition. more https://theconversation.com/rupert-murdoch-loses-his-legal-battle-leaving-future-of-media-empire-in-the-balance-245665?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%2011%202024%20-%203195432592&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20December%2011%202024%20-%203195432592+CID_9d007a3b0e7578f878c65cbd5b463722&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Rupert%20Murdoch%20loses%20his%20legal%20battle%20leaving%20future%20of%20media%20empire%20in%20the%20balance
War Crimes in Lebanon: Human Rights Watch Says Israel Used U.S. Arms to Kill 3 Journalists
November 26, 2024
Since October 2023, Israel has killed over 3,700 people in Lebanon, with most of the deaths occurring over the past 10 weeks. The attacks have forced more than 1 million people to flee their homes in Lebanon, where Israel has also repeatedly targeted journalists. In a new report, Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of committing an apparent war crime by killing three journalists and injuring four others last month, when it bombed the Hasbaya Village Resort in southern Lebanon, where more than a dozen journalists had been staying. The attack killed Ghassan Najjar and Mohammad Reda, both from Al Mayadeen TV, and Wissam Kassem, a cameraman from Al-Manar TV. Human Rights Watch has revealed Israel used an airdropped bomb equipped with a U.S.-produced Joint Direct Attack Munition guidance kit. “Journalists are civilians, and deliberately targeting journalists is a war crime,” says Human Rights Watch researcher Ramzi Kaiss.
Transcript
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Lebanon, where Israel has killed at least 31 people over the past 24 hours, ahead of a possible ceasefire. Israel’s security cabinet is expected to vote today on a ceasefire proposal. ………………………………………………………………………………… more https://www.democracynow.org/2024/11/26/israel_lebanon
Nuclear is not really back
Think the Cop29 climate summit doesn’t matter? Here are five things you should know,
Adam Morton in Baku, Guardian, Sat 23 Nov 2024
…………………………………………………..Some media outlets went to great lengths this week to claim that nuclear energy was at the centre of Cop29 talks, and Bowen had been embarrassed by Australia not signing up to a UK-US civil nuclear deal.
Take it from a reporter on the ground: this has no basis in fact.
The UK made a mistake by listing on a press release Australia and another nine countries that it said it expected would sign up to a Generation IV International Forum on nuclear. That sentence were quickly removed once it was pointed out that no one had checked and it wasn’t true. Instead, Australia will continue as an observer, as it was in the forum’s previous iteration.
The slip-up had no obvious impact on the relationship between the countries – Bowen and his UK counterpart, Ed Miliband, held an event to sign a renewable energy agreement shortly after the story broke. And nuclear has been barely visible as an issue at the talks.
Thirty-one countries have signed up to a side pledge to triple nuclear power capacity by 2050, with six new countries joining at Cop29. But the global focus is renewable energy. Cop28 agreed global investment in renewables needs to be tripled by 2030, and the bulk of the non-fossil energy investment is going that way.
Only one country that signed the pledge to triple nuclear, Slovakia, has started work on planning a new plant in the past year. And those plants take about 20 years to build…………………………………………………………. fact.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/nov/22/think-the-cop29-climate-summit-doesnt-matter-heres-five-things-you-should-know
NY Times killed investigation of Israeli hooligans, internal email reveals
Asa Winstanley Media Watch 18 November 2024, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/asa-winstanley/ny-times-killed-investigation-israeli-hooligans-internal-email-reveals
The New York Times has killed an investigation by one of its own reporters into Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam earlier this month.
In an internal Times email inadvertently shared with The Electronic Intifada, Dutch reporter Christiaan Triebert explained to a manager that he had pitched “a visual investigation I was conducting into the events of [6-8 November] in Amsterdam.”
“Unfortunately, that story was killed,” he wrote. “I regret that the planned moment-by-moment visual investigation was not further pursued.”
“This has been very frustrating, to say the least,” Triebert wrote.
The email was addressed to senior Times manager Charlie Stadtlander – a former senior press officer for the US National Security Agency and for the US army.
Triebert appeared interested in carrying out reporting that would set the record straight, remediating the false narrative insistently advanced by his own newspaper – that the Israeli fans were victims of mob violence motivated by anti-Jewish hatred.
The correspondence between Triebert and Stadtlander on Friday was triggered by The Electronic Intifada’s requests for comment to The Times regarding the paper’s highly misleading reporting of Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam.
As this reporter explained on The Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday, the paper actually inverted reality
You can watch the full livestream segment in the video above, where we break down the evidence in detail.
There is still precisely zero evidence that even one anti-Semitic attack took place in Amsterdam – let alone the “pogrom” that Israeli government officials immediately claimed had happened.
The Times has come under fire for using a video of Israeli football hooligan violence in Amsterdam last week to claim the exact opposite of what the video actually showed.
The Times claimed footage shot by a Dutch photojournalist showed “anti-Semitic attacks” on Israelis – even though it actually showed Israeli mob violence against a Dutch citizen.
For several days, the footage was attached to the top of the paper’s 8 November report about events in Amsterdam the night before.
But on Tuesday the paper was forced to issue a correction, after the video’s creator – Dutch photojournalist Annet de Graaf – publicly condemned international media for mislabeling her video as evidence of “anti-Semitic attacks” against Israeli football supporters.
In fact, the video shows a mob of dozens of Israeli hooligans attacking someone, after their team Maccabi Tel Aviv lost an away game 5-0 to Dutch club Ajax on 7 November.
Times manager Stadtlander claimed to The Electronic Intifada in a statement on Friday that after the correction, the newspaper had “removed the video at the creator’s request.”
But de Graaf insisted that was untrue. “I haven’t said that at all,” she told The Electronic Intifada by phone on Friday. “It’s not true what the chief editor [Stadtlander] is saying to you in the email. Not true.”
Asked to comment, Stadtlander declined to respond to that, writing only that “my statement to you last night constitutes our comment on the matter.”
Downplaying genocidal Israeli violence
None of the four authors of the article – John Yoon, Christopher F. Schuetze, Jin Yu Young and Claire Moses – responded to requests for comment from The Electronic Intifada.
Stadtlander denied playing any role in the commissioning or editing of the article.
After The Electronic Intifada received Triebert’s “inadvertently copied” email, Stadtlander sent a follow-up email in what appears to have been an attempt at damage control.
He claimed that “the valuable work Christiaan [Triebert] and others on his team were doing did not become a standalone piece” because “much of the material was incorporated” into another article the Times had published.
But the piece that Stadtlander linked to is yet another whitewash of the Israeli mob violence in Amsterdam – one of a number published by the Times.
It obfuscates or outright reverses cause and effect and downplays the Israeli attacks on Dutch citizens while relying almost entirely on the Israeli hooligans’ claims.
It also downplays a video of Maccabi hooligans returning from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv airport chanting an openly genocidal slogan gloating that there are “no children left” in Gaza as merely “incendiary chants against Arabs and Gazans.”
Anti-Palestinian agenda
That the Times newsroom had a pro-Israel agenda from the outset of its coverage of the incident is apparent from reading the earliest version of the piece still available in online archives.
That version did not include the video by Annet de Graaf, and contained no evidence – or even allegation – of anti-Semitism, aside from the baseless claims of Israeli government officials.
One of the main sources quoted in that version was Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right police minister, who wants to expel all Palestinians. “Fans who went to see a football game encountered anti-Semitism and were attacked with unimaginable cruelty just because of their Jewishness,” the article quoted Ben-Gvir as saying.
However, all references to Ben-Gvir were removed from the article, within less than two hours.
To date, The New York Times has published more than a dozen articles substantially focused on the violence in Amsterdam.
This is an astonishingly high number compared, say, to how the newspaper has ignored or consistently downplayed grave crimes perpetrated by Israelis in Palestine, including systematic and well-documented sexual assaults and rapes of Palestinian prisoners by Israeli forces.
The Times coverage not only includes numerous news articles baselessly spinning the Amsterdam violence as “anti-Semitic,” but opinion columns with inflammatory headlines such as “Amsterdam Is About Jew Hatred – and Gaza,” “A Worldwide ‘Jew Hunt’” and “The Age of the Pogrom Returns.”
The willingness of the Times to falsely portray Israel and Israelis as victims in this case is reminiscent of how it has insistently advanced the debunked narrative of “mass rapes” by Palestinian fighters on 7 October 2023, including false reporting by its star correspondent Jeffrey Gettleman.
Such atrocity propaganda masquerading as journalism has been used to justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
A new front in Israel’s genocidal war?
In his internal Times email to Stadtlander, reporter Christiaan Triebert explained that, after a conversation with de Graaf, “I reached out to the authors of the article to address the factual inaccuracies it contained.”
Triebert wrote that he had been unsure “what the rationale was for deleting the video rather than including the detail in the article. I think it would have been helpful to have the video in there with the context that it showed Israeli fans attacking a man.”
De Graaf has repeatedly clarified as much herself, as even the Times’ correction admits.
“What I explained to several media channels is that the Maccabi supporters deliberately started the riot in front of central station returning from the game,” de Graaf wrote on X, also known as Twitter.
And footage of the same incident shared on an Israeli Telegram channel shows the Maccabi hooligans’ attack from a different angle, apparently shot by one of the hooligans themselves.
The channel falsely claimed in Hebrew that the video showed Maccabi Tel Aviv fans being “violently attacked in the last hour by dozens of Palestinian rioters.”
A full video report of the Israeli hooligans’ rampage by popular Dutch YouTuber Bender also shows footage of the same incident.
Israeli football hooliganism in Europe seems to have become Israel’s latest global front in its genocidal war in Gaza.
On Thursday night, Israeli football hooligans attacked supporters of France at a European Nations League match in Paris between the two sides.
British journalist Peter Allen reported witnessing “horrendous violence” by the Israelis. He said he “spoke to three off-duty soldiers who were over from Tel Aviv, while one openly wore” an Israeli army T-shirt.
Based in Paris for many years, Allen is a contributor of reporting to many international media outlets, including occasionally to The Electronic Intifada.
Despite the attendance of French President Emmanuel Macron, the match was heavily boycotted, with Reuters reporting that the Stade de France was barely one-fifth full and protests taking place in Paris against the event.
It was the lowest attendance for any home match in the history of France’s national team.
New Book. The Scientists Who Alerted Us To The Dangers of Radiation.
The Scientists Who Alerted us to Radiation’s Dangers by Ian Fairlie, PhD
and Beyond Nuclear’s Cindy Folkers, MS, published by The Ethics Press, is
now available in paperback and ebook.
The book profiles 23 radiation scientists over the previous half-century or so, who revealed that radiation risks were higher than thought, but who were victimized by
governments and the nuclear establishments for doing so.
What this book reveals is that the harmful effects of radiation exposure especially from
the nuclear sector, and especially to children, are more pervasive and
worse than thought. These have been known for decades but suppressed by
politically-motivated censorship and overt disparagement/persecution. A big
problem is the exclusion of independent voices and members of the public.
The hegemony of the nuclear elite, backed by their governments, has kept
radiation’s dangers an “inside game”, leaving the public in the dark
and thereby violating their human rights, especially the rights of the
child. “It’s a timely and rewarding book. It’s timely because several
governments are pushing hard for more public exposures to radiation via
nuclear power.
And it’s rewarding as it explains radiation in
easy-to-grasp language which clarifies its dangers and risks. Anyone who
has ever wondered about radiation or its first cousin, radioactivity,
should read it.”
In addition to the profiles of radiation scientists, the
book includes hundreds of references, 14 scientific Appendices, 5 Annexes,
a glossary and an extensive bibliography. “This galaxy of information
will serve to help activists and students counter the misrepresentations,
incorrect assertions, and plain untruths about radiation often disseminated
by the nuclear establishments on both sides of the Atlantic. It will also
serve as a useful up-to-date reference book for academics on the dangers
and risks of radiation and radioactivity.
Ethics Press 19th Nov 2024
https://ethicspress.com/products/the-scientists-who-alerted-us-to-the-dangers-of-radiation
A new era dawns. America’s tech bros now strut their stuff in the corridors of power
The era that began with the Great Disruptor’s first term is over. Beware the emerging elite
Carole Cadwalladr, 11 Nov 24, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/11/a-new-era-dawns-americas-tech-bros-now-strut-their-stuff-in-the-corridors-of-power
In hindsight, 2016 was the beginning of the beginning. And 2024 is the end of that beginning and the start of something much, much worse.
It began as a tear in the information space, a dawning realisation that the world as we knew it – stable, fixed by facts, balustraded by evidence – was now a rip in the fabric of reality. And the turbulence that Trump is about to unleash – alongside pain and cruelty and hardship – is possible because that’s where we already live: in information chaos.
It’s exactly eight years since we realised there were invisible undercurrents flowing beneath the surface of our world. Or perhaps I should talk for myself here. It was when I realised. A week before the 2016 US presidential election, I spotted a weird constellation of events and googled “tech disruption” + “democracy”, found not a single hit and pitched a piece to my editor.
It was published on 6 November 2016. In it, I quoted the “technology mudslide hypothesis” a concept invented by Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, who coined the term “disruption” – a process endlessly fetishised in tech circles, in which a scrappy upstart such as Microsoft could overthrow a colossus like IBM.
Whoever wins, I wrote, this election represented “the Great Disruption. With Trump the Great Disruptor.” And, for good measure, I chucked in some questions: “Will democracy survive? Will Nato? Is a free and fair election possible in a post-truth world?”
That article was the beginning of my own Alice in Wonderland tumble down the rabbit hole. And I reread it with the sinking knowledge that this next presidential term may yet provide those answers. If it seems like I’m crowing, I wish. This isn’t a valedictory “I told you so”: it’s an eight-year anniversary reminder for us to wake up. And a serving of notice: the first stage of this process is now complete. And we have to understand what that means.
We’ve spent those eight years learning a new lexicon: “misinformation”, “disinformation”, “microtargeting”. We’ve learned about information warfare. As journalists, we, like FBI investigators, used evidence to show how social media was a vulnerable “threat surface” that bad actors such as Cambridge Analytica and the Kremlin could exploit. PhDs have been written on the weaponisation of social media. But none of this helps us now.
There’s already a judiciary subcommittee on the “weaponisation of the federal government” in Congress to investigate the “censorship industrial complex” – the idea that big tech is “censoring” Republican voices. For the past 18 months, it’s been subpoena-ing academics. Last week, Elon Musk tweeted that the next stage would be “prosecutions”. A friend of mine, an Ivy League professor on the list, texts to say the day will shortly come “where I will have to decide whether to stay or go”.
Trump’s list of enemies is not theoretical. It already exists. My friend is on it. In 2022, Trump announced a “day one” executive order instructing “the Department of Justice to investigate all parties involved in the new online censorship regime … and to aggressively prosecute any and all crimes identified”. And my friends in other countries know exactly where this leads.
Another message arrives from Maria Ressa, the Nobel prize-winning Filipino journalist. In the Philippines, the government is modelled on the US one and she writes about what happened when President Duterte controlled all three branches of it. “It took six months after he took office for our institutions to crumble.” And then she was arrested.
What we did during the first wave of disruption, 2016-24, won’t work now. Can you “weaponise” social media when social media is the weapon? Remember the philosopher Marshall McLuhan – “the medium is the message”? Well the medium now is Musk. The world’s richest man bought a global communication platform and is now the shadow head of state of what was the world’s greatest superpower. That’s the message. Have you got it yet?
Does the technology mudslide hypothesis now make sense? Of how a small innovation can eventually disrupt a legacy brand? That brand is truth. It’s evidence. It’s journalism. It’s science. It’s the Enlightenment. A niche concept you’ll find behind a paywall at the New York Times.
You have a subscription? Enjoy your clean, hygienic, fact-checked news. Then come with me into the information sewers, where we will wade through the shit everyone else consumes. Trump is cholera. His hate, his lies – it’s an infection that’s in the drinking water now. Our information system is London’s stinking streets before the Victorian miracle of sanitation. We fixed that through engineering. But we haven’t fixed this. We had eight years to hold Silicon Valley to account. And we failed. Utterly.
Because this, now, isn’t politics in any sense we understand it. The young men who came out for Trump were voting for protein powder and deadlifting as much as they were for a 78-year-old convicted felon. They were voting for bitcoin and weighted squats. For YouTube shorts and Twitch streams. For podcast bros and crypto bros and tech bros and the bro of bros: Elon Musk.
Social media is mainstream media now. It’s where the majority of the world gets its news. Though who even cares about news? It’s where the world gets its memes and jokes and consumes its endlessly mutating trends. Forget “internet culture”. The internet is culture. And this is where this election was fought and won … long before a single person cast a ballot.
Steve Bannon was right. Politics is downstream from culture. Chris Wylie, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, quoted his old boss to me in my first phone call with him. Elections are downstream from white men talking on platforms that white men built, juiced by invisible algorithms our broligarch overlords control. This is culture now.
The Observer’s reporting on Facebook and Cambridge Analytica belongs to the old world order. An order that ended on 6 November 2024. That was the first wave of algorithmic disruption which gave us Brexit and Trump’s first term, when our rule-based norms creaked but still applied.
The challenge now is to understand that this world has gone. Mark Zuckerberg has ditched his suit, grown out his Caesar haircut and bought a rapper-style gold chain. He’s said one of his biggest regrets is apologising too much. Because he – like others in Silicon Valley – has read the runes. PayPal’s co-founder Peter Thiel, creeping around in the shadows, ensured his man, JD Vance, got on the presidential ticket. Musk wagered a Silicon Valley-style bet by going all in on Trump. Jeff Bezos, late to the party, jumped on the bandwagon with just days to go, ensuringhis Washington Post didn’t endorse any candidate.
These bros know. They don’t fear journalists any more. Journalists will now learn to fear them. Because this is oligarchy now. This is the fusion of state and commercial power in a ruling elite. It’s not a coincidence that Musk spouts the Kremlin’s talking points and chats to Putin on the phone. The chaos of Russia in the 90s is the template; billions will be made, people will die, crimes will be committed.
Our challenge is to realise that the first cycle of disruption is complete. We’re through the looking glass. We’re all wading through the information sewers. Trump is a bacillus but the problem is the pipes. We can and must fix this.
The media’s role in lying about Amsterdam violence just keeps getting darker
Jonathon Cook, 13 November 2024, https://www.jonathan-cook.net/blog/2024-11-13/media-lying-amsterdam-violence/
News outlets didn’t make a mistake. They knowingly aired disinformation and peddled fake news. Admitting that requires a troubling recalibration of perspective if we’re ever to make sense of the world.
The media’s role in peddling disinformation over last week’s violence in Amsterdam just keeps getting darker.
Owen Jones has interviewed a Dutch woman who shot the footage used by major outlets – from Sky News and the BBC to the Guardian and New York Times – to suggest that locals in Amsterdam carried out “antisemitic attacks” on Maccabi Tel Aviv fans.
In fact, as she has noted on social media, her footage shows the exact reverse: Israeli fans attacking local Dutch residents.
As I noted in my article yesterday, despite her efforts to get these outlets to correct their mistake and issue apologies, none has done so, apart from a German news programme, Taggeschau.
Jones’ interview offers insights as to why.
We know that an early report from the scene by Sky News’ reporter was one of the only ones to correctly describe the video as showing Israeli hooliganism, not antisemitism.
But Sky quickly took down that report, saying it wasn’t “balanced”. The channel then heavily re-edited the segment and issued a new version that presented the footage – quite wrongly – as evidence of Dutch locals attacking Israeli fans.
That was crucial to shoring up the false “antisemitism” and “pogrom” narratives spread by western politicians and the establishment media.
Here’s where it gets even more disturbing. The Dutch photographer interviewed by Jones says she was interviewed by Sky News about her footage before the second, re-edited report was aired.
In other words, not only was Sky’s reporter correct in her first account of the events in Amsterdam, but Sky’s news editors back in London knew exactly what the footage showed too – because the Dutch woman who filmed it had told them.
And yet Sky’s news team still edited a truthful news report to make it untruthful.
The only conclusion one can draw is that they did so to mislead their audience. They didn’t make a mistake. They didn’t act out of ignorance. They knowingly aired disinformation. They intentionally peddled fake news.
That’s something very hard for most of us to accept. It requires a troubling recalibration, a shift of perspective, if we are to understand the world we live in. But doing that is the only way to make sense of some of the most significant events that have unfolded over the past two decades.
Remember the lies we were sold by the western establishment media about “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq to justify a US-UK invasion and get western troops into a key oil-rich Middle Eastern state in gross violation of international law?
Remember the years of evidence-free claims from the entire British establishment media about the most prominent anti-racist politician of his generation, Jeremy Corbyn, who suddenly was outed as an unhinged antisemite the moment he became leader of the Labour party? Corbyn also just happened to be the first democratic socialist to head the party in 40 years.
Remember the entire western media establishment telling us that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was completely “unprovoked” – memory-holing years of warnings from leading western foreign policy advisers and analysts that the West was playing with fire: that Nato’s relentless military advance towards Russia’s borders; its meddling to overthrow in 2014 a Ukrainian government sympathetic to Moscow; and Washington’s tearing up of nuclear arms treaties with Russia leaving the latter exposed to Nato’s expansion to its borders would inevitably trigger a backlash – and Ukraine would be its epicentre?
Remember the entire western media insisting that Israel’s slaughter and maiming of many tens of thousands of children in Gaza, the systematic bombing of the enclave’s hospitals, and the mass starvation of the 2.3 million people there was not textbook genocide? Rather, it was “self-defence”. It was a legitimate war against Hamas.
None of those things should have sounded like they made any sense at the time.
And if they did, we should have noticed that the media’s presentation of the “facts” just happened to coincide precisely with Washington’s interests to prop up its most important client state in the oil-rich Middle East and isolate its one potential military rival, Russia, as part of a strategic policy of “global full-spectrum dominance” – or, expressed another way, its project to be the world’s sole imperial power, to run the planet like some untouchable godfather.
The problem wasn’t, as you feared, you. You weren’t going mad. Your suspicions were justified. You were being lied to. The media was gaslighting you.
The challenge is to find a way to liberate other minds still desperately clinging to a comforting illusion: that the establishment media can be trusted, that it is free, honest and moral.
1 This Month
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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