FAIR’s Alan MacLeod writes that “as of Friday,
July 2, there has been literally zero coverage of it
in corporate media; not one word in the New York
Times, Washington Post, CNN, NBC News, Fox
News or NPR.”
“A search online for either ‘Assange’ or
‘Thordarson’ will elicit zero relevant articles from
establishment sources, either US or elsewhere in the
Anglosphere, even in tech-focused platforms like
the Verge, Wired or Gizmodo,” MacLeod adds.
“We have not found a single report by any
‘serious’ UK broadcaster or newspaper,” says the
report by Media Lens. “But in a sane world,
Stundin’s revelations about a key Assange witness –
that Thordarson lied in exchange for immunity from
prosecution – would have been headline news
everywhere, with extensive media coverage on BBC
News at Six and Ten, ITV News, Channel 4 News,
front-page stories in the Times, Telegraph, the
Guardian and more.”Caitlin's articles are
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https://caitlinjohnstone.com
“For those who still believe the media provides
news, please read this,”
tweeted Australian journalist John Pilger
regarding the Media Lens report. “Having led the
persecution of Julian Assange, the ‘free press’ is
uniformly silent on sensational news that the case
against Assange has collapsed. Shame on my fellow
journalists.”
As we
discussed the other day, this weird, creepy
media blackout has parallels with another total
blackout on a different major news story which also
involved WikiLeaks. In late 2019 the leak outlet
Assange founded was
publishing multiple documents from
whistleblowers in the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) revealing
that the organisation’s leadership actively
tampered in the investigation into an alleged
chlorine gas attack in Douma, Syria in 2018 to
support the US government narrative on the
allegation, yet the mass media
wouldn’t touch it. A Newsweek reporter resigned
from his position during this scandalous blackout
and
published the emails of his editors forbidding
him from covering the story on the grounds that no
other major outlet had reported on it.
Make no mistake, this is most certainly a new
phenomenon. If you don’t believe me, contrast the
blackout on these stories with the mass media
coverage on WikiLeaks revelations a few short years
earlier. The press eagerly lapped up the 2016
publications of Democratic Party emails and actively
collaborated with WikiLeaks in the publication of
the Chelsea Manning leaks in 2010. Even the more
recent
Vault 7 leaks published in 2017 received plenty
of media coverage.
Yet now every WikiLeaks-related story that is
inconvenient for the US-centralized empire is
carefully kept out of mainstream attention, with a
jarring uniformity and consistency we’ve never
experienced before. If the media environment of
today had existed ten or fifteen years earlier, it’s
possible that most people wouldn’t even know Assange
existed, much less the important information about
the powerful that WikiLeaks has brought to light.
For those who still believe the media provides news, please read this. Having led the persecution of Julian #Assange, the "free press" is uniformly silent on sensational news that the case against #Assange has collapsed. Shame on my fellow journalists.https://t.co/qIpvS9FmJG
We also caught a strong whiff of this new trend
in the
near-total blackout on the Hunter Biden October
surprise last year, which only went mainstream
because it stood to benefit one of America’s two
mainstream political factions. After the New York
Post first broke
the story we saw mainstream media figures
publicly explaining to each other why it was fine
not to cover it with reasoning that was all over the
map, from
it’s a waste of time to
it’s just too darn complicated to
it’s not our job to research these things to the
Washington Post’s notorious “We must treat the
Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign
intelligence operation — even if they probably
aren’t.”
Anyone who dared publicize the leaks anywhere
near the mainstream liberal echo chamber was
bashed into submission by the herd, and without
any legitimate reason it was treated like a complete
non-story at best and a sinister Russian op at
worst. And then, lo and behold, in April of this
year Hunter Biden
acknowledged that the leaks could very well have
come from his laptop after all, and not from some
GRU psyop.
And I think that whole ordeal gives us some
answers into this disturbing new dynamic of complete
blackouts on major news stories. Last year The
Spectator‘s Stephen L Miller described
how the consensus formed among the mainstream
press since Clinton’s 2016 loss that it is their
moral duty to be uncritical of Trump’s opponent and
suppress any news stories which might benefit them.
“For almost four years now, journalists have shamed
their colleagues and themselves over what I will
call the ‘but her emails’ dilemma,” Miller writes.
“Those who reported dutifully on the ill-timed
federal investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private
server and spillage of classified information have
been cast out and shunted away from the journalist
cool kids’ table. Focusing so much on what was, at
the time, a considerable scandal, has been written
off by many in the media as a blunder. They believe
their friends and colleagues helped put Trump in the
White House by focusing on a nothing-burger of a
Clinton scandal when they should have been
highlighting Trump’s foibles. It’s an error no
journalist wants to repeat.”
1. NY Times reporter Amy Chozick says she became an “an unwitting agent of Russian intelligence” in covering hacked Democratic emails during the 2016 election. https://t.co/kTrvhyvyrmpic.twitter.com/rJ8nzRoVF4
Once you’ve accepted that journalists have not
just a right but a duty to suppress news that is
both factual and newsworthy in order to protect a
political agenda, you’re out in open water in terms
of blatant propaganda manipulation. And we saw the
mainstream press shoved into alignment with this
doctrine in the wake of the 2016 election.
This shove was never the biggest story of the
day, but it was constant, forceful, and extremely
dominant in the conversations that mainstream
journalists were having with each other both
publicly and privately in the wake of the 2016
election. Even before the votes were cast, we saw
people like Vox’s
Matt Yglesias and
Axios editor Scott Rosenberg shaming mass media
reporters for focusing on the Hillary Clinton email
scandal, and after Trump hysteria kicked in it got a
whole lot more aggressive.
Bit by bit the belief that the press has a moral
obligation to suppress newsworthy stories if there’s
a possibility that they could benefit undesirable
parties foreign or domestic became the prevailing
orthodoxy in mainstream news circles. By mid-2018 we
were seeing things like BBC reporter Annita McVeigh
admonishing a guest for voicing skepticism about
Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s culpability in
the Douma incident on the grounds that “we’re in an
information war with Russia.” It’s now simply taken
as a given that managing narratives is part of the
job.
Again, this is a new phenomenon. Mainstream media
have always
been propaganda firms, but they’ve relied on
spin, distortion, half-truths, uneven coverage, and
uncritically parroted government assertions; there
weren’t these complete information barricades across
all outlets. You’d see them giving important stories
an inadequate amount of coverage, and
some individual outlets would neglect
inconvenient stories. But you’d always see someone
jump at the chance to be the first to report it, if
for no other reason than ratings and profit.
That’s simply not how things work now. A major
story can come to light and only be covered by media
outlets which mainstream partisans will scoff at and
dismiss, like RT or Zero Hedge.
The way the mass media have begun simply ignoring
major news stories that are inconvenient for the
powerful, across not just some but all
major news outlets, is extremely disturbing. It
means any time there’s an inconvenient revelation,
mainstream news institutions will just pretend it
doesn’t exist.
Seriously think about what this means for a
moment. This is telling whistleblowers and
investigative journalists that no matter how hard
they work or how much danger they put themselves in
to get critical information out to the public, the
public will never find out about it, because all
mainstream news outlets will unify around blacking
it out.
You want to talk about a threat to the press?
Forget jailing journalists and whistleblowers, how
about all news outlets of
any real influence unifying to simply deny coverage
to any major information which comes to light? This
is a threat to the thing the press fundamentally
is. More than a threat. It’s the end. The end
of the possibility of any kind of journalism having
any meaningful impact.
The journalist who worked on the Stundin report
says he spent months working on this
story, and he would surely have expected his
revelations to get some coverage in the rest of the
western press. The OPCW whistleblowers would surely
have expected their revelations to get enough
attention to make a difference, otherwise they
wouldn’t have leaked those documents at great risk
to themselves. What’s being communicated to
whistleblowers and journalists in these blackouts
is, don’t bother. It won’t make any difference,
because no one will ever see what you reveal.
And if that’s true, well. God help us all, I
guess.
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See
also
The Wizard (for
Julian)
By Caitlin Johnstone
Multimedia piece I made for Assange’s 50th
birthday, inspired by a
report
that he’s been keeping his spirits up by
feeding a pair of mallards nesting by his
Belmarsh window:
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