Tag: media

When Western Media Saw Ukraine’s Neo-Nazis

Emmanuel Macron said in a speech Wednesday it’s a lie that Russia is fighting Nazis in Ukraine. But in 2014, the BBC, the NYT, the Daily Telegraph and CNN — not just CN — reported on the Nazi threat.

Throughout the Ukraine crisis, the U.S. State Department and mainstream media have downplayed the role of neo-Nazis in the U.S.-backed Kiev regime, an inconvenient truth that is surfacing again as right-wing storm troopers fly neo-Nazi banners as they attack in the east, Robert Parry reports.

The New York Times reported almost in passing on Sunday (Aug. 10) that the Ukrainian government’s offensive against ethnic Russian rebels in the east has unleashed far-right paramilitary militias that have even raised a neo-Nazi banner over the conquered town of Marinka, just west of the rebel stronghold of Donetsk.

That might seem like a big story a U.S.-backed military operation, which has inflicted thousands of mostly civilian casualties, is being spearheaded by neo-Nazis. But the consistent pattern of the mainstream U.S. news media has been since the start of the Ukraine crisis to white-out the role of Ukraine’s brown-shirts.

Only occasionally is the word “neo-Nazi” mentioned and usually in the context of dismissing this inconvenient truth as “Russian propaganda.” Yet the reality has been that neo-Nazis played a key role in the violent overthrow of elected President Viktor Yanukovych last February as well as in the subsequent coup regime holding power in Kiev and now in the eastern offensive.

Keep reading

Tears for Ukraine, Sanctions for Russia, Yawns for Yemen, Arms for Saudis: The West’s Grotesque Double Standard

“We’re brutally bombed every day. So why doesn’t the Western world care like it does about Ukraine?!!… Is it because we don’t have blonde hair and blue eyes like Ukrainians?”  Ahmed Tamri, a Yemeni father of four, asked with furrowed brows about the outpouring of international support and media coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the lack of such a reaction to the war in Yemen.

Over the weekend, a member of Tamri’s family was killed and nine relatives injured when their family home was targeted in a Saudi-led Coalition airstrike in the remote al-Saqf area in Hajjah Governorate. Tamri claims that al-Saqf has been subjected to a brutal Saudi bombing campaign for the past seven years – more so, he says, than all of Ukraine has endured since it was invaded by Russia.

Despite the horrific bombing campaign against Yemeni civilians, Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations and war crimes have garnered nowhere near the level of coverage and sympathy that the mainstream Western media has rightfully given to Ukraine. “They shed tears for the Ukrainians, and ignore our tragedies… What hypocrisy and racism!” Tamri told MintPress News.

Keep reading

Fox News & Newsmax Took Biden Money To Push Deadly COVID Vaccines To Its Viewers

Two days ago, Chris Pandolfo at Blaze Media revealed that his media organization had filed FOIA requests regarding the Biden Administration’s covert funding of the deadly new vaccines and the American corporate media. What they discovered will certainly shock you — and it’s a crucial story that our corrupt media will work hard to make the least covered and least discussed news story of the year.

What did Chris Pandolfo find? He discovered that nearly the entire corporate media took money from the Biden Administration to push the vaccines to their audiences without disclosing it. More importantly, so-called “conservative” media organizations took money from the Biden Administration to spin positive stories about deadly and ineffective vaccines to their conservative viwers who were right to be suspicious — and did not disclose it.

Fox News took the money and said nothing to its conservative viewers.

Newsmax took the money and said nothing to its conservative viewers.

In response to a FOIA request filed by TheBlaze, HHS revealed that it purchased advertising from major news networks including ABC, CBS, and NBC, as well as cable TV news stations Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC, legacy media publications including the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post, digital media companies like BuzzFeed News and Newsmax, and hundreds of local newspapers and TV stations. These outlets were collectively responsible for publishing countless articles and video segments regarding the vaccine that were nearly uniformly positive about the vaccine in terms of both its efficacy and safety.

That is the largest and most comprehensive breach of journalistic ethics that has ever occurred. Almost everybody took the money. Almost everybody lied about the vaccines (knowingly or unknowingly). Almost everybody refused to report anything negative about the vaccines — because they were paid to close their eyes. Almost everybody is implicated.

Keep reading

‘Fact-Checkers’ Are Technocracy’s Digital Brownshirts

We are under siege. A nihilistic fanaticism is running free among us thanks to the emergence of a journalistic “ethos” that establishes an almost complete equivalence between the “truth” and those utterances that support the strategic goals of the great economic and digital powers of our time.

A few months ago Facebook censored an article in the British Medical Journal that highlighted serious irregularities in Pfizer’s clinical vaccine trials. Then two weeks ago, fact-checkers from the Spanish websites Newtral and Maldita burst into the public square to accuse professor of Pharmacology, renowned expert in drug safety, and ex-WHO adviser, Joan Ramón Laporte of foisting lies and disinformation onto the Spanish populace. This, in reaction to Laporte’s testimony before a Spanish parliamentary commission investigating the country’s vaccination effort.

Despite his towering credentials, his intervention was quickly tarred as problematic by the media and subsequently banned by YouTube. The crime of this new Galileo Galilei? Alerting the assembled parliamentarians to the existence of grave procedural irregularities in the trials for the vaccines, and questioning the wisdom of a health strategy that aims to inject every Spanish child over the age of six with a new, poorly tested, and largely ineffective medication.

This incident reveals that the fact-checkers will attack anyone who does not accept the truth as dictated by the great economic and government centers of the world. This is not the usual official media obfuscation to which we’ve become accustomed over the years, but rather a brazen McCarthyist intimidation device, designed to frighten citizens into submission by appealing to their lowest and most ignoble instincts, an approach lain bare in Maldita’s smug and Manichaean slogan: “Join and support us in our battle against lies.”

Under this harsh binary logic, an internationally famous scientist like Laporte is not even given the opportunity to be judged wrong or misguided in good faith. Rather, he is immediately accused of being a willful and dangerous liar who must be immediately banished from public view.

Keep reading

‘Ukraine on Fire’: What’s not getting reported

if you’re watching developments with Ukraine and Russia, you may be thinking that a lot of what’s being reported doesn’t make sense or lacks context. We’re often getting one side of a story portrayed in black and white terms.

And it’s difficult to know what “news” is coming from which sources.

A good example is the early report about the “brave Ukrainian soldiers” on a place called Snake Island that told Russian military intruders to “Go F*ck Yourselves,” and died in a blaze of glory.

Many in the media accepted and reported the information as if they’d confirmed it happened, and without question. They said that Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy had honored the men posthumously for their bravery.

It turns out pieces of that story may not have happened, as reported. In fact, multiple reports now say all of the Ukrainian soldiers are still alive. If so, it would mean they didn’t receive posthumous recognition, as had been reported. It’s also hard to know if those reports are accurate.

What to believe?

A documentary called “Ukraine on Fire,” made long before the Russia invasion, provides a lot of context that’s not being discussed. Filmmaker Oliver Stone interviews Ukrainian figures involved in decades of civil war, infighting, and controversies. The documentary also explores the US role in Ukraine’s political upheavals over the years. And it discusses manipulation of media messaging.

Keep reading