Propaganda

On August 19, 2019, the Business Roundtable issued a press release containing a roughly 300-word statement, signed by 181 of its members. “Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote ‘An Economy That Serves All Americans,’” its headline read, citing a quote from its chair, Jamie Dimon. The CEOs pledged to “lead their companies for the benefit of all stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders,” and “move away from shareholder primacy.” The CEOs added, “Each of our stakeholders is essential. We commit to deliver value to all of them, for the future success of our companies, our communities and our country.”

[…]

A new narrative quickly began to solidify: Milton Friedman’s profits-at-all-costs way of thinking was dead. In fact, Fortune wrote in its cover story that “Friedman must be turning in his grave.”

There was just one catch: CEOs weren’t actually promising a new way of doing business, but simply a new way of talking about doing business.

[…]

As Columbia Business School’s Shiva Rajgopal, co-author of one study that investigated whether Business Roundtable CEOs followed through on their pledges, observed, “When these guys signed the BRT statement, the stock prices of these firms [did not] move … There was no heartbeat at all.” This suggests, as Rajgopal and his co-author wrote, “market participants agree with the assessment that the BRT statement represents cheap talk.”

The impression of unparalleled depravity from Hamas was reinforced by the willingness of the western media to allow Israeli spokespeople, Israel’s supporters and western politicians to continue spreading unchallenged the claim that Hamas had committed unspeakable, sadistic atrocities - from beheading and burning babies to carrying out a campaign of rapes.

The only journalist in the British mainstream media to dissent was Owen Jones. Agreeing that Israel’s video showed terrible crimes committed against civilians, he noted that none of the barbarous acts listed above were included.

What was shown instead were the kind of terrible crimes against civilians all too familiar in wars and uprisings. 

Jones faced a barrage of attacks from colleagues accusing him of being an atrocity apologist. His own newspaper, the Guardian, appears to have prevented him from writing about Gaza in its pages as a consequence.

Now, after nearly six months, the exclusive narrative stranglehold on those events by Israel and its media acolytes has finally been broken.

Last week, Al Jazeera aired an hour-long documentary, called simply “October 7”, that lets western publics see for themselves what took place. It seems that Jones’ account was closest to the truth.

Yet, Al Jazeera’s film goes further still, divulging for the first time to a wider audience facts that have been all over the Israeli media for months but have been carefully excluded from western coverage. The reason is clear: those facts would implicate Israel in some of the atrocities it has been ascribing to Hamas for months. 

In February 2023, the paper received two separate open letters: one from a coalition of 150+ organizations and leaders, including GLAAD, and a separate letter signed by hundreds of Times contributors that criticized the outlet's contributions to a deadly anti-LGBTQ culture war. The newspaper attempted to conflate both efforts, dismissing all criticisms of its coverage as merely “protests organized by advocacy groups.”

Between February 15, 2023, when those letters were separately delivered to the Times, and February 15, 2024, the Times published at least 65 articles that mentioned U.S. anti-trans legislation in either their headline or lead paragraphs. We counted how often the paper quoted openly trans or gender-nonconforming sources, cited anti-trans misinformation or talking points without context or adequate fact-checking, and accurately represented the records of anti-trans figures mentioned in its stories. Our findings:

• 66% of the articles did not quote even one trans or gender-nonconforming person.
• 18% of the articles quoted misinformation from anti-trans activists without adequate fact-checking or additional context.
• 6 articles obscured the anti-trans background of sources, erasing histories of extremist rhetoric or actions.
   

Now, free software advocates – and free culture advocates – hate the term “intellectual property.” The argument against IP rails against its imprecision and its rhetorical dishonesty.

Prior to the rise of the “intellectual property” as an umbrella term, the different legal regimes it refers to were customarily referred to by their individual names. When you were talking about patents, you said “pat­ents,” and when you were talking about copyrights, you said “copyrights.” Bunching together copyrights and trademarks and patents and other rules wasn’t particularly useful, since these are all very different legal regimes. On those rare instances in which all of these laws were grouped together, the usual term for them was “creator’s monopolies” or “author’s monopolies.”

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Seen in this light, “intellectual property” is an incoherent category: when you assert that your work has “intellectual property” protection, do you mean that you can sue rivals to protect your customers from deception; or that the government will block rivals if you disclose the inner workings of your machines; or that you have been given just enough (but no more) incentive to publish your expressions of your ideas, with the understanding that the ideas themselves are fair game?

When you look at how “IP” is used by firms, a very precise – albeit colloquial – meaning emerges:

“IP is any law that I can invoke that allows me to control the conduct of my competitors, critics, and customers.”

That is, in a world of uncertainty, where other people’s unpredictability can erode your profits, mire you in scandal, or even tank your business, “IP” is a means of forcing other people to arrange their affairs to suit your needs, even if that undermines their own needs.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that bombing Gaza into rubble is a reasonable response to a single Hamas attack.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that killing tens of thousands of Palestinians and starving hundreds of thousands more is a reasonable response to a thousand Israelis being killed.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that criticizing the actions of the state of Israel is antisemitic.

Without extensive narrative manipulation, it would never occur to anyone that saying “from the river to the sea” is a call for genocide.

Content Warning: The — wholly fabricated, it appears — subject matter of this piece is stomach-churning.

Following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks that resulted in at least 1,163 deaths, rumors began circulating that Israeli women were experiencing horrific mass rape and sexual violence. Months later, a position paper by Physicians for Human Rights Israel and a New York Times investigation convinced many observers that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war. But an investigation by YES! examining both reports, other media investigations, hundreds of news articles, interviews with Israeli sources, and photo and video evidence reveals a shocking conclusion: There is no evidence mass rape occurred.

The New Yorker, New York Times, Associated Press, and The Nation treat PHRI’s paper as the gold standard for proof of Hamas’ rape and sexual violence. But the paper is shockingly thin. It lacks original reporting and is based on media reports that are dubious at best with no corroboration—no forensic evidence, no survivor testimony, no video evidence.

“The biggest news media companies are privately owned and operate without direct government control, in contrast to the state-controlled media landscape in Russia,” writes Politico’s Sergey Goryashko. “Russian state TV and the primary news agencies there are the property of the government, and the Kremlin controls other media or destroys those not willing to collaborate.”

At the bottom of the article is a line which reads as follows: “Sergey Goryashko is hosted at POLITICO under the EU-funded EU4FreeMedia residency program.”

EU4FreeMedia is a European Union narrative management operation set up to help integrate “Russian journalists in exile” into leading European publications, ie to provide maximum media amplification to Russian expats who have a bone to pick with the current government in Moscow. It is run with participation from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a US government-funded media op under the umbrella of the US propaganda services umbrella USAGM.

I really couldn’t have come up with a more perfect illustration of what I’m talking about here than the US government and its European lackeys running a complex and elaborate project to further slant European media against the Russian Federation, which then manifests as a Politico article calling Putin a liar and claiming propaganda does not exist in the west.

In subsequent days, journalists at the scene in Israel continued to investigate the validity of the beheaded babies story. A French journalist in Kfar Aza reported that nobody had mentioned beheaded children to him.

Meanwhile, Oren Ziv, a prominent Israeli journalist, highlighted he had not seen any evidence to support the claims before adding that Israeli soldiers and the army’s spokesperson remained unable to confirm the allegations.

The White House quickly walked back on Biden’s earlier claim. It reiterated he had not in fact seen evidence of the beheaded babies he was convinced of less than 36 hours ago, making clear that the president’s comments were merely repeating Israeli news reports and officials.

However, there was little detectable appetite from the British media to change tack and report on this clarification in the ongoing story.

In fact, the newspapers had moved on completely. The zealous willingness to examine in scrupulous detail atrocities taking place on the ground and describing in vivid terms the violent acts, spectacularly disappeared.

Nor was there a lack of information to report on. By the time one week had passed since 7 October, more than 2,000 Palestinians had been murdered by Israel’s relentless military bombardment. At least 720 of them were children and around 450 were women.

Australians will soon vote in a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australia in its 1901 Constitution and establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament. A year ago, polling suggested the referendum proposal of the 2017 National Constitutional Convention and its Uluru Statement from the Heart enjoyed 60% support. Since lead anti-Voice campaign organisation Advance Australia began its media offensive, the Yes vote has declined to 40%. This article argues the No campaign is being conducted on behalf of fossil-fuel corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death matters reach back over half a century. Coordinated across the Australian branches of the little-known Atlas Network, a global infrastructure of 500+ ‘think-tanks’ including the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs and LibertyWorks, I demonstrate that the No campaign shares the aims and methods of the longstanding Atlas disinformation campaign against climate policy. Opposition to long-overdue constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians can be traced to fears the Voice might strengthen the capacity of Indigenous communities and Australia’s parliamentary democracy to rein in the polluting industries driving us toward climate and ecological collapse.

No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack. This varies in scope, intensity, in the techniques employed, and in the level of visibility.

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The sources are varied and diffused. They include, not unexpectedly, the Communists, New Leftists and other revolutionaries who would destroy the entire system, both political and economic. These extremists of the left are far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before in our history. But they remain a small minority, and are not yet the principal cause for concern.

The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media, the intellectual and literary journals, the arts and sciences, and from politicians. In most of these groups the movement against the system is participated in only by minorities. Yet, these often are the most articulate, the most vocal, the most prolific in their writing and speaking.

Moreover, much of the media-for varying motives and in varying degrees-either voluntarily accords unique publicity to these “attackers,” or at least allows them to exploit the media for their purposes. This is especially true of television, which now plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people.