nuclear-news

CNN’s Israel bias has been laid bare. But CNN is the norm, not the exception

Middle East Eye, By Jonathan Cook, 9 February 2024 

Western media can never truly report the extent of Israel’s criminality because to do so would be to expose their long-running complicity in those crimes

eaks from within CNN reveal that for months its executives have been actively imposing an editorial line designed to reinforce Israel’s framing of events in Gaza, to the point of obscuring atrocities by the Israeli military. 

The dictates, say insiders, have resulted in senior staff refusing to accept assignments to the region “because they do not believe they will be free to tell the whole story”. Others suspect they are being kept away by editors who fear they will fight the restrictions. 

Internal memos insist that stories be approved by the station’s Jerusalem bureau, where staff are widely seen as partisans who slant reports in Israel’s favour. Palestinian perspectives are tightly restricted.

“Ultimately, CNN’s coverage of the Israel-Gaza war amounts to journalistic malpractice,” one staffer told an investigation by the Guardian newspaper.

According to staff accounts, CNN’s pro-Israel directives come from the very top – Mark Thompson, a TV executive who was hired from the BBC. Thompson, the Guardian article notes, was remembered by BBC staff for “bowing to Israeli government pressure on a number of occasions” – presumably one of the qualifications that won him the job heading CNN. 

It was he who notoriously championed in 2009 the BBC’s controversial decision for the first time not to air the annual fundraising appeal of the Disasters Emergency Committee, which is a group of major British charities, because the monies were going to Gaza after Israeli bombing had devastated it. 

Alongside the unhappiness at CNN, there is reported to be disquiet at the BBC. Staff, including senior presenters, held a meeting last month with Director General Tim Davie, one of Thompson’s successors, to accuse the corporation of anti-Palestinian bias.

They expressed concerns about the “dehumanising” language used to describe Palestinians killed in Gaza and the BBC’s failure to cover important stories reported by Al Jazeera and other networks.

A source told the Deadline website that the group of dissenters was surprised by Davie’s candour. He is said to have admitted that the pro-Israel lobby “was more organised than Palestinian supporters in its dealings with the BBC”.

Skewed agendas

None of this should come as a surprise.

Middle East Eye has highlighted the clearly skewed priorities of western news agendas since Hamas broke out of Gaza on 7 October – some 17 years after Israel began imposing a military siege that had already left the enclave barely habitable. 

In the carnage that day caused by Hamas’ attack – as well as Israel’s indiscriminate violent response – some 1,139 people in Israel were killed. 

As MEE has noted previously, the entire western press corps, not just CNN and the BBC, has failed in its basic duty to present a balanced picture of what has been going on over the past four months. 

It has also failed to treat Israeli claims with the scepticism they deserve, especially since Israel has a long track record of being caught out in lies and deceptions. 

Paradoxically, given its exposure of concerns at CNN, many of the accusations of journalistic failure levelled at CNN and the BBC could be directed at the Guardian newspaper too – or any other establishment media organisation.

Following Hamas’ 7 October break-out, Israel unleashed a devastating assault on Gaza’s population – so far leaving tens of thousands of Palestinians dead or missing under rubble.

Yet all western media misleadingly continue to frame Israel’s rampage in Gaza – including the collective punishment inflicted on civilians by denying them food and water – variously as “retaliation”, “a war with Hamas”, and “an operation to eliminate Hamas”. 

Western media have also largely avoided characterising as “ethnic cleansing” the Israeli military’s order for Palestinians to leave their homes. As a result, 1.7 million have been trapped in a small area in southern Gaza where they face relentless bombing. 

Similarly, there has been almost no mention of a long-held plan by Israel – which it now appears close to realising – to drive Gaza’s population into the Sinai desert, in neighbouring Egypt. 

And the same media outlets have refused to connect the all-too-obvious dots that Israel – in destroying most of Gaza’s homes, forcibly shutting almost all of its medical facilities and cutting off food and water, while also demanding international defunding of Unrwa, the United Nations’ main aid agency to Gaza – is pursuing an openly genocidal policy. 

Israel is making Gaza unlivable, just as Giora Eiland, adviser to the Israeli defence minister, vowed Israel would do at the outset of its assault: “Gaza will become an area where people cannot live.”

When the media do refer to genocide, it is strictly in the context of the International Court of Justice’s decision to put Israel on trial for the “crime of crimes”. Even then, the establishment media have largely minimised the significance of the World Court’s ruling, or even spun it as a victory for Israel. 

Astonishingly, the ICJ’s panel of 17 justices has proven to be far more courageous than western media journalists. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Career suicide

The problem is not just that the western media have acted as one in blanking out persuasive evidence of the crimes Israel committed on 7 October. They have also, again as one, been credulously ascribing particularly barbarous crimes to Hamas on the most tenuous of evidence – unsubstantiated claims that Israel has then been using to justify its genocidal rampage. 

That started in the immediate wake of 7 October with allegations that Hamas had variously beheaded babies, hung them from washing lines and roasted them in ovens. These claims were even echoed by the White House.

There is still zero evidence for any of them. 

CNN staff are upset that Hadas Gold, one of its reporters in Jerusalem – part of the unit vetting all copy about Gaza – uncritically recycled lies from the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

The real pressures

The Guardian offers various explanations for why CNN has failed so dismally to cover properly the slaughter in Gaza. All have an element of truth about them. 

CNN is indeed afraid of antagonising the US government and challenging a critical part of its foreign policy agenda. 

There are undoubted commercial pressures from advertisers. The Israel lobby can be confident its threats will be taken seriously when journalists face being accused of antisemitism for stepping out of line.  And all of these pressures are compounded by the difficulties its journalists face in accessing Gaza. 

But what the Guardian does not want its readers to notice is that all of these pressures apply not just to CNN but to every other corporate media outfit, including the Guardian itself. Which is why the failures are across the board, not confined to one or two broadcasters. …………………………………………………………….

The large corporations and billionaires that own the media are heavily invested in the arms and fossil fuel industries that require the West’s continuing colonial-style, military dominance of the planet and its resources……………………………… more https://www.middleeasteye.net/big-story/cnn-israel-bias-laid-bare-norm-not-exception

June 8, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Searchlight Journalist Receives 2024 MOLLY Award for Story on Trucheña Whose Plutonium Count Was New Mexico’s Highest

Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety Basia Miller, 31 May 24

The Austin newspaper, the Texas Observer, chose Searchlight reporter Alicia Inez Guzmán, to receive its 2024 MOLLY Prize on May 30th. Guzmán holds a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester in New York. Her article, “Buried Secrets, Poisoned Bodies,” is exemplary investigative journalism. https://searchlightnm.org/buried-secrets-poisoned-bodies/ The prize, awarded to only one journalist a year, honors Molly Ivins, the Observer editor for six years in the 70’s.

Alicia, newly given the nuclear affairs beat at Searchlight, had been immediately intrigued on learning that a woman from Truchas was found at her death to have 60 times as much plutonium in her body as the average New Mexican. Alicia knew Truchas well. She’d grown up in the mountain village, elevation 8,000 feet and her grandfather and uncles had worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as had Alicia, who interned there one summer.

The reporter’s challenge was two-fold, both to identify the unknown woman and probe the origin of the very high plutonium readings. To that end, Truchas village offered the possibility of a deeply personal connection and at the same time could serve as a point of leverage to investigate, measure, and publicize the threat of nuclear contamination to New Mexico’s residents.

Guzmán first explored Trinity Site statistics, since places as far away as Rochester, NY—2500 miles away—saw their nuclear readings rise from the drift after the 1945 test explosion there, just before the U.S. dropped bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This takes Guzmán to the LAHDRA report (the Los Alamos Historical Document Retrieval and Assessment, a project of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC)) containing statistics on nuclear fallout. It includes autopsies–critical information in this case of questionable legality–for understanding how radiation affects the human body. Here Guzmán finds the very high readings for the Trucheña, still nameless. She says,

The only fact is the plutonium itself. Somewhere, somehow it          

entered her body in the form of barely visible specks of alpha

radiation. And once there, those particles began a long migration,

from her bloodstream to her kidneys and, ultimately, to her liver. The

question is how?

…………………………………………………………Alicia Guzmán’s article comes full circle, as she has been able to give the unknown Trucheña a solid identity for the record, and bring a kind of justice to a small corner of the world by discovering many truths for the family.    http://nuclearactive.org/—

June 2, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

SOS – An Antidote to Crackpot Neo-Nuclearism

“One cannot exist without the other.  Without civil nuclear power, there can be no military nuclear power, and without military nuclear power, there is no civil nuclear power.” – French President Emmanuel Macron

“Imagine a death technology calling itself a nuclear renaissance. All it is, is a nuclear rebirth of an even more gouging crony capitalism, or corporate welfare system.” – Ralph Nader

Nuclear power in the US is in decline…42 reactor projects were abandoned, 41 built but closed, and scores now operate only thanks to government rescues…Nuclear power is a minor distraction, adding each year at best only as much electricity supply as renewables add every few days. It has no business case or operational need anywhere. – Amory Lovins

[C]ivilian nuclear power is merely a cover for producing more nuclear weapons.” – Alfred Meyer

By James Heddle By Mary Beth Brangan – EON, MAY 31, 2024,  https://planetarianperspectives.substack.com/p/sos-an-antidote-to-crackpot-neo-nuclearism?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=518676&post_id=145178002&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=cqey&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Psychopathological Nuclear Revivalism is on the Loose

At the last COP 28 Climate Summit, over 20 nuclear nations on four continents and their allies and vassal states pledged to triple their ‘nuclear capacities’ by the year 2050, thus multiplying planet-wide nuclear risks by orders of magnitude. Source

·      The U.S., China and Russia each have plans to build nuclear reactors on the moon. The reactors would be constructed by robots, run remotely via AI, and be prototypes for subsequent installations on other planets in the first phase of the hubristic galactic imperialism agenda. Source

·      Nuclear propulsion and energy production in space are considered essential for military uses like High Energy Laser (HEL) directed energy weapons, and for mining the resources on asteroids and other planets. Source

      Although no working model of much-touted Small, Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMNRs) has yet made it off the drawing board, mass production of such reactors continues to be advocated both as a fictitious ‘solution’ for climate change, and as a necessary power source for the planned build-out of Artificial Intelligence (AI) facilities.

·      This is the same specious rationale being used for extending the operating licenses of obsolete, aged, inadequately maintained old style nuclear reactors that are scheduled for shutdown and decommissioning – like Diablo Canyon. There is even a push to restart obsolete reactors already shutdown like Palisades in Michigan.

     The burgeoning spent nuclear fuel management industry is dominated by companies with dubious, predatory companies like Holtec International, which have their eyes on the massive accumulated decommissioning funds at each reactor site, dumping radioactive waste water into adjacent water systems, and even repurposing decommissioning sites for installation of their own brand of SMNRs.

   Former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz, now head of the Energy Futures Initiative Foundation justifies nuclear revivalism because it supports the Nuclear Navy, spear tip of American power projection around the planet.

·      Nuclear energy, weapons and radioactive waste management industries are key, interlocking components of the Permanent War Economy, yet they could not survive without massive government subsidies and support (both overt and covert) with taxpayer dollars.

In her book Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, M.I.T. professor and environmental historian Kate Brown reveals the schizoid cognitive and ethical contradictions of societies organized around the production of the deadly man-made element plutonium.  It is a history with relevance today. As the developments listed above clearly show, Crackpot Nuclearism is having a heyday.

In the widest context, this is the implied scope of what we have dubbed in our film ‘the San Onofre Syndrome.’  It is the dedication of unlimited resources to a quintessentially totalitarian technology, the products and societal spin-offs of which are antithetical to democracy and to life in all its forms.

While our just released, multi-award-winning feature documentary SOS – The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy – focuses on the potential impacts of informed people power, and the universal conundrum of responsible radioactive waste management, our broadest intent is to use SOS screenings as a wake-up call and catalyst for discussions helping to make viewers aware of the enveloping presence of what is termed by proponents and critics alike the over-arching ‘the nuclear enterprise.’  

The Nuclear Enterprise impacts virtually all sectors and institutions of our society and incorporates the mutually co-dependent nuclear energy and nuclear weapons production industries, their shared industrial base of extraction, milling, fabrication, transportation; an extensive infrastructure of education, research, labor training; the growing radioactive waste management industry; and a powerful lobbying arm with global reach.  It is a ‘public-private partnership’ on steroids.

We have examined aspects of this Nuclear Energy-Weapons-Waste Complex and the geopolitical and cosmic context for the ‘Save Diablo’ PsyOp in previous articles including: The Real Nuclear Triad; Joined At The  Hip; Nuclear Revivalism as a Cargo Cult; and The Hydra-Heads of Armageddon Man.  Because of the widespread impacts of this Nuclear Industrial Complex, we now live in a literally MAD world in which the certainty of Mutually Assured Destruction of adversarial nuclear weapons states is seen as the main ‘deterrent’ to nuclear war.  Is this clearly insane, or what?

 Both government control of business (or ‘communism’), and business control of government (or ‘fascism’) are in the thrall of the nuclear enterprise – or nuclear energy-weapons-waste complex. 

Our documentary SOS, The San Onofre Syndrome: Nuclear Power’s Legacy, portrays a microcosm of this general situation with universal implications. We show the reality of this monstrous death industry, and the state and federal agencies that provide for its support, structure, and funding through portraying the events at San Onofre and the ordinary citizens who grapple with them.

Our five main characters work tirelessly to first shut down the leaking reactors that they live close to, and then discover the horrifyingly inept waste management plans.

The waste is being stored only 108 ft. from the rising ocean, in a tsunami and flooding zone, surrounded by earthquake faults and only inches above rising groundwater.

The industry does not have a plan for how to remove the waste or to safely move it technically, yet it promises the public that if it only had a place to put it, it would be easily transportable.  Billions are being dangled before impoverished – often minority – communities to allow them to be ‘consolidated interim storage’ sites, or CIS.

SOS specifically opposes the concept of Consolidated Interim Storage (CIS). CIS requires that the lethal waste be moved twice.  We also oppose the storage and long-distance transport of Spent Nuclear Fuel (SNF) in unsafe containers.  We oppose the idea of contaminating yet more land and communities, which are most of the time poor, minority people. 

SOS explicitly advocates for ongoing, transgenerational stewardship of spent fuel on existing reactor sites (or as close by as is safely possible to avoid the horrendous transportation risks) using aspects of the Swiss model for interim storage. 

The parts of the Swiss model technology that we need in the U.S. are:

1) a hot cell/dry handling facility for robotic handling; and

2) repackaging of the waste from inevitably short-term canisters into thick, monitored, inspectable, retrievable casks;  

3) stored in secure, climate-controlled buildings as close to the site of generation as is safely possible;

4) with ongoing skilled maintenance for as long as it is necessary.

This of course, is needed at every reactor site in the U.S. (and beyond) that currently is storing the ever-increasing volume of this lethal material.  Each site’s needs would be in the billions of dollars to do this properly.  But the industry makes decisions based on profit and so far, believes it won’t profit from safely managing the waste.

Therefore, it thinks of the problems of radioactive waste and nuclear risks in general, as a Public Relations problem and that if they only solve the P.R. problem, they can keep on making the messes and making profits from supposedly ‘dealing’ with them the cheapest, fastest way.  The billions in trust funds set aside for decommissioning from years of ratepayers’ fees are used by the industry with no adequate oversight or auditing.

So, this industry that must operate flawlessly to avoid catastrophic damage to the planetary DNA of all living creatures, makes decisions based on profits, not public health and safety.

Not even considering the any other adverse effects of this ultimate destructive force, the problem of the everlasting poisonous waste alone, in a sane society, would be enough to ban the use of this technology either for weapons or for boiling water to produce electricity.

 For more information and viewing options:

SanOnofreSyndrome.com

June 1, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | Leave a comment

Endless Trump reporting in USA media, but very little reporting of genocide in Gaza

Why so little reporting of genocide in Gaza?

Walt Zlotow, 22 May 24 https://heartlandprogressive.blogspot.com/

If you only watch mainstream news, cable and network, you may not even be aware the US is enabling Israel’s grotesque genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. There’s a couple of reasons for that.

The entire commercial media has largely scrubbed reporting on genocide there. To cover it would reveal US complicity in the first major genocide of the 21st century, destroying any semblance of a livable existence for 2,300,000 Palestinians. Why expose the truth which doesn’t fit the now debunked narrative of American exceptionalism and decency round the world.

But there’s a more ghoulish reason scenes of genocide in Gaza are missing from the American version of Pravda. Israel is killing as many reporters on the ground as US 2,000 lb. bombs can obliterate. In the first 7 months of the genocide, 143 Palestinian reporters have been killed. That is more reporters than were killed in WWII and Vietnam War combined. But worse, it only includes credentialed reporters, not the many uncredited bloggers, writers and their family members killed along with them.

As in previous Israeli campaigns in Gaza, virtually all international media professionals are barred from entering Gaza to ensure Israeli crimes against the entire Palestinian people go unreported. Israel also imposes a gag order on its own journalists who might dare report the truth of its 8 month long genocide enabled by America. Just this week Israeli authorities seized Associated Press broadcasting equipment in southern Israel and blocked the outlet’s live feed of Gaza.

Turn on the endless loop of Trump trial coverage that passes for informing the American public and ponder: ‘If the genocide in Gaza is not being covered…does that mean it’s not happening?’

May 23, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media, USA | 1 Comment