Israeli War Lies Fall As Corporate Media Falls

Posted on March 29, 2016 by DavidSwanson

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/03/israeli-war-lies-fall-corporate-media-falls.html 

A new film narrated by Roger Waters, The Occupation of the American Mind, traces the rise of Israeli war propaganda in the United States. This propaganda, which has skillfully swayed U.S. public opinion in support of Israeli wars and occupations, has in fact been not so much a matter of skill as a matter of control.
The U.S. corporate media has obeyed the Israeli propaganda office, because the U.S. government has done so, and the U.S. corporate media generally obeys the U.S. government. How much the U.S. government’s stance is shaped by its own independent, albeit perverse, interests, and how much by Israeli propagandizing and corruption is one question. But the U.S. corporate media’s lockdown on criticism of Israeli wars is only a slight variation on its coverage of U.S. wars.
What happens when you take the control away? When young people in the United States get their news from the internet and foreign media, their support for Israeli wars and occupations plummets. Backers of Israeli wars find it necessary to start trying to ban criticism on U.S. college campuses. Just as young people have overwhelmingly backed Bernie Sanders despite corporate media opposition, those who avoid the corporate media are able to back justice for Palestinians (and often to a much greater extent than Sanders does).

When informed people in the United States hear about international opposition to Israeli crimes, they are hardly shocked, and might just yawn. But Fox News reports shock, outrage, and disbelief in its staff:
“You can’t make it up. UN names democratic Israel as world’s top human rights violator”!
Fox wants enemies, and thus reports in this way on a story that much of the U.S. media will likely ignore or downplay. If most corporate media consumers in the United States learned that Israel was viewed by the world as a top abuser of human rights, they would react approximately like Fox News.
One of the great services that The Occupation of the American Mind provides is that it shows us footage of news coverage of Israeli wars in the United States and, in great contrast, in Europe. In Europe we see Palestinian voices included, and we see false claims questioned by tough grilling of Israeli officials. In the United States we see top U.S. officials of both political parties, and top media figures parroting over and over again the same exact words dictated by Israeli propagandists or their U.S. advisers.
This film is good for beginners who’ve never escaped their televisions before, in that it provides a basic history of Zionism and the Nakba. But it quickly turns to a particular subject that should intrigue the better informed as well, namely the rise of Israeli propaganda since 1982. We see footage of U.S. network TV news readers reporting honestly and straightforwardly on Israeli bombing of Lebanon, and on Israeli facilitated massacres in refugee camps — and showing footage of the carnage.
In 1984 the American Jewish Congress held a meeting in Jerusalem on “hasbara” (propaganda, war lies) chaired by a U.S. advertiser who had made “tastes great / less filling” ads for Miller Light beer. In 2009 Frank Luntz produced the Israel Project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary. These efforts are not kept secret. In fact, a television show in Israel similar to Donald Trump’s “The Apprentice” is called “The Ambassador,” and it challenges contestants to do the best job of selling Israeli war crimes as being justified or admirable. The acceptance of such a show is itself terrific hasbara, of course, as it suggests that concocting excuses for killing people is justifiable and admirable.
The central lie of Israeli war propaganda is also the most effective lie in the United States and the focus of the first chapter of my book War Is A Lie, namely the lie that wars are defensive. Just as the U.S. corporate media engages in blowback denial with September 11 or Brussels, it tells us that Palestinian resistance is spontaneous irrational aggression, unprovoked and inexplicable except by understanding Palestinians as less than human. In the U.S. corporate media, the Palestinians always started it, and Israel is always acting in defense, even when it’s aggressively bombing civilians as it was doing in 1982 when U.S. media voices had not yet been properly trained.
The undercurrent to the “defense” lies is the justification of revenge, which threads through all war propaganda, even that for U.S. wars, which has often tended in recent years to emphasize a lie of “humanitarianism” in which a war that is also supposedly defensive and a last resort is somehow also a benefit to people it is rescuing. Israel has not used that line, and it’s worth noting that the U.S. government has found it ineffective in reaching more than a sliver of the U.S. population.
It would be humorous if it weren’t so blood-soaked to watch U.S. politicians and pundits parrot specific Israeli military talking points over and over. The 1988 Hamas Charter, long since disavowed by the Hamas leadership, is quoted over and over again, like the mistranslation of then-Iranian President Ahmadinejad, and with identical words in both cases, while the actual platform of the Likud Party is never mentioned. The lie that Israel freed Gaza in 2005 is repeated so many times a Gazan might start to believe it.
When Israel broke a ceasefire on the day of the 2008 U.S. elections and then claimed the Palestinians had done so, the facts were available, but the lie was endlessly repeated on U.S. television. We see footage in The Occupation of the American Mind of a European journalist confronting an Israeli official with an Israeli report acknowledging the truth, but nothing like that on U.S. corporate newsertainment networks.
Phrases like “rockets raining down” and “what would you do?” and “what would the U.S. do?” are chanted like mantras. Sadly, we know what the U.S. would do in response to blowback. We know what it has been doing for the past 15 years.
The chief difference in U.S. discourse between propaganda for Israeli wars and for U.S. wars (other than awareness of where the weapons came from — the United States in both cases) is the difference between “anti-American” and “anti-Semitic.” In the film we see Ted Cruz object to criticizing Israel because of the holocaust. Any criticism of Israel is defined as anti-Semitic.
There have been times in U.S. history when any war criticism earned one the title “anti-American.” Currently it is far more likely to earn you the title of “peacenik who would have opposed World War II” — with World War II falsely understood as having been fought for the Jews who in fact the U.S. government refused to allow in and certainly didn’t give a damn about. Thus, advocating civilized conflict resolution in the United States circles back to a charge of “anti-Semitism” as well.
As the corporate media’s dominance crumbles, so potentially does all of this nonsense. And the first to fall may be U.S. support for Israeli wars. That opposition to U.S. wars lags behind among U.S. youth may suggest a certain power to the label of “anti-American” after all, or rather an internalized nationalism that hardly needs name-calling to prop it up. But any failure of war propaganda advances the total failure of war propaganda, if we can keep organizing, keep educating, keep BDSing, keep the internet open, and go watch The Occupation of the American Mind.
David Swanson’s book War Is A Lie: Second Edition will be published April 5, 2016.

Bernie Sanders Is Currently Winning the Democratic Primary Race, and I’ll Prove It to You

Posted on March 28, 2016 by WashingtonsBlog

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2016/03/bernie-sanders-currently-winning-democratic-primary-race-ill-prove.html#more-54821 

By Seth Abramson, Assistant Professor of English at University of New Hampshire; Series Co-Editor, Best American Experimental Writing .

Nobody cares how well a politician does at the ballot box when he or she is running for an office unopposed. What matters is how a politician performs in contested primaries and general elections, as when it really matters — like it will, for instance, this November — you can be certain of a contested election.

With that said, let’s make an important observation: Bernie Sanders has tied or beaten Hillary Clinton in a majority of the actively contested votes this election season.

You doubt it? Okay, let me explain.

Bernie Sanders has terrible name recognition in states where he hasn’t advertised or campaigned yet; meanwhile, Hillary Clinton has universal name recognition everywhere. Realizing this, the Clinton camp pushed hard to rack up the early vote in every state where early voting was an option. They did this not primarily for the reason we’ve been told — because Clinton performs well among older voters, and older voters are more likely to vote early than other age demographics — but rather because they knew that early votes are almost always cast before the election season actually begins in a given state.

That’s right — in each state, most of the early primary voting occurs before the candidates have aired any commercials or held any campaign events. For Bernie Sanders, this means that early voting happens, pretty much everywhere, before anyone knows who he is. Certainly, early voting occurs in each state before voters have developed a sufficient level of familiarity and comfort with Sanders to vote for him.

But on Election Day — among voters who’ve been present and attentive for each candidate’s commercials, local news coverage, and live events — Sanders tends to tie or beat Clinton.

In fact, that’s the real reason Sanders does well in caucuses.

It’s not because caucuses “require a real time investment,” as the media likes to euphemistically say, but because caucuses require that you vote on Election Day rather than well before it.

Consider: in North Carolina, Hillary Clinton only won Election Day voting 52% to 48%. Given the shenanigans in evidence during the live voting there — thousands of college students were turned away from the polls due to insufficient identification under a new voter-suppression statute in the state — it wouldn’t be unfair to call that 4-point race more like a 2-point one (51% to 49% for Clinton).

Consider: on Super Tuesday 3, because early voting is always reported first, Clinton’s margins of victory were originally believed to be 25 points in Missouri, 30 points in Illinois, and 30 points in Ohio. Missouri, which doesn’t have conventional early voting, ended up a tie. Illinois ended up with a 1.8% margin for Clinton (after being a 42-point race in Clinton’s favor just a week earlier) and Ohio a 13.8% margin.

Any one of us could do the math there. And yet the media never did.

Consider: in Arizona yesterday, the election was called almost immediately by the media, with Clinton appearing to “win” the state by a margin of 61.5% to 36.1%. Of course, this was all early voting. CNN even wrongly reported that these early votes constituted the live vote in 41% of all Arizona precincts — rather than merely mail-in votes constituting a percentage of the total projected vote in the state — which allowed most Americans to go to bed believing both that Clinton had won Arizona by more than 25 points and that that margin was the result of nearly half of Arizona’s precincts reporting their live-voting results. Neither was true.

In fact, as of the time of that 61.5% to 36.1% “win,” not a single precinct in Arizona had reported its Election Day results.

Indeed, more than two and a half hours after polls closed in Arizona, officials there had counted only 54,000 of the estimated 431,000 Election Day ballots.

That’s about 12%.

So how did Bernie Sanders do on Election Day in Arizona?

As of the writing of this essay (2:45 AM ET), Sanders was leading Clinton in Election Day voting in Arizona 50.2% to 49.8%, with just under 75,000 votes (about 17.3% of all Election Day votes) counted.

So imagine, for a moment, that early votes were reported to the media last rather than first. Which, of course, they quite easily could be, given that they’re less — rather than more — reflective of the actual state of opinion on Election Day. Were early votes reported last rather than first, Arizona as of 2:45 AM ET would have been considered not only too close to call but a genuine nail-biter. In fact, only 400 or so Election Day votes were separating the two Democratic candidates at that point — though the momentum with each new vote counted was quite clearly in Sanders’ favor.

So the question becomes, why does any of this matter? Does the point being made here — that Bernie Sanders is as or more popular than Hillary in both all the states he won and many of the states he didn’t — gain Sanders a single delegate? Does it move him one inch closer to being President?

No.

What it does do is explain why the Clinton-Sanders race is a 5-point race nationally — just a hair from being a statistical tie, given the margin of error — despite the media treating Clinton’s nomination as a foregone conclusion.

What it does do is explain how Clinton is “beating” Sanders among American voters despite having a -13 favorability rating nationally, as compared to Sanders’ +11 rating. That dramatic difference is possible because in favorability polling, pollsters only count voters who say they know enough about a candidate to form an opinion. That eliminates the sort of “early voters” who cast ballots for Hillary Clinton before having much of a handle on who Bernie Sanders is.

And what it does do is explain why Sanders outperforms Clinton against Donald Trump in nearly every state where head-to-head general-election polling data is available. While some of this is undoubtedly due to the fact that Sanders beats Clinton by between 30 and 40 points among Independents — itself a major warning sign for a Clinton candidacy this fall — the rest is explained by the fact that when voters come to know Bernie Sanders as well as they already know Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, they tend to prefer him to these two by clear margins.

The Hillary camp, and Hillary supporters, are justly excited about how their candidate is performing in the delegate horse-race. The problem is that that excitement is quickly becoming the sort of arrogance that will in fact endanger Hillary’s candidacy for President. Both she and her team — including all her millions of supporters — should consider the fact that Hillary does not, outside the deep-red Deep South, do particularly well among voters when they’re given any other reasonable alternative. The fact that early voting statutes and media reporting of elections in America favors the maintenance of the illusion that Hillary remains popular when voters become familiar with other credible options does not excuse ignorance of the reality; certainly, it won’t help Democrats in November.

And given that a demagogue like Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee, that’s a scary thought for many Americans. Sanders voters should want — and most do want — a Clinton campaign that understands its weaknesses sufficiently to ameliorate them in a general election, should Clinton be the Democratic nominee. Right now that’s clearly not happening, and the national media is unfortunately enabling the persistence and expansion of these troubling blind-spots.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about super-delegates. These are folks who are supposed to be supporting whichever candidate has the best chance of winning in November. We already know, per head-to-head general-election polling, that the better candidate to run against Donald Trump is Bernie Sanders; however, many super-delegates (and most of the media) dismiss general election polling this early on, even though Sanders’ commanding lead over Trump is clearly statistically relevant. (This is especially true given that his name recognition lags well behind Trump’s.)

But what about the argument, implicitly being made to super-delegates now, and likely to be made to them explicitly in Philadelphia this summer, that Bernie Sanders has, broadly speaking, out-performed Hillary Clinton in Election Day voting? Given that Election Day voting in the spring is the very same sort of high-information voting that will occur in November, you’d think super-delegates would be quite interested to know that, in live voting, Bernie Sanders beats Hillary Clinton more often than not.

Republished with permission.  Originally published at Huffington Post.

Trump, Sanders, & The Deep State Darling

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/29/2016 08:51 -0400
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-29/why-corporate-media-hates-sanders-and-has-lovehate-thing-trump
Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,
Always remember who's selling whom, and who's in charge.

Everyone who isn't willfully blind knows that the Corporate (mainstream) Media doesn't give the same coverage to Bernie Sanders as it does to his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Bernie's rallies go unmentioned, his victories are given short shrift and his personal narrative--practically ideal for media glorification--is mentioned in passing, if at all.
A media professional clued me into why the Corporate Media hates Bernie and will move Heaven and Earth to defeat him: Sanders is the only candidate who is seriously promoting campaign finance reform.
When a Super-PAC raises $100 million for Hillary, Jeb, et al., where does 90% of that money go? To the Corporate Media. Corporate Media gorges on political media buys every two years, and increasingly depends on this feasting on Super-PAC money for its outsized profits.
As more and more advertising dollars flow to digital media (online search, Facebook, etc.), traditional media dominated by a handful of corporate giants needs the massive influx of campaign dollars to offset its stagnating revenue model.
My source notes that there are rarely any discounts for campaign media buys--the super-PACs and candidate's campaigns pay full pop, and typically pay in cash: no 90 days receivables for campaigns.
Political campaign buys are almost pure profit, as there is minimal sales effort required and the campaign/super-PAC is paying full freight.
Real campaign finance reform would gut Corporate Media's profits. No wonder the Corporate Media downplays Sanders' campaign, his personal integrity and his chances to become president.
As for the firewall that supposedly divides editorial from advertising: it's there for show, of course, and everyone in the business solemnly declares it's a Great Wall that is never breached, but the reality is the editorial staff know very well who butters their bread--and it sure isn't the folks getting free media coverage when their competitors are buying tens of millions of dollars in advertising.
Nobody has to openly state that big advertisers are not going to get negative coverage; editorial staff know better than to even propose such a self-destructive notion. Stories are either buried ("this one needs more research") or they are never proposed due to self-censorship by editorial staff worried that their head will roll in the next downsizing.
The Corporate Media has a love/hate thing going with Trump: the editorial side (i.e. the newsroom) loves Trump, because readers /viewers /listeners will tune in just to see what new outrageous, offensive verbiage Trump has blurted in the last 12 hours, but the advert-revenue side hates him with a passion because thanks to his non-stop media coverage, he doesn't need to advertise much in the Corporate Media.

According to this estimate, Trump spent $10 million on advertising and received $1.89 billion in free coverage. Deep State Darling Hillary Clinton spent $28 million (is that all?) on adverts and skimmed $746 million in free coverage; Bernie Sanders also spent $28 million and received less than half of Hillary's free coverage ($321 million)--no bias here, folks, everything is fair and unbiased--and drop-out Jeb Bush spent $82 million and scored $214 million in free coverage.
Measuring Donald Trump’s Mammoth Advantage in Free Media
So the editorial side concerned with attracting eyeballs loves loose-cannon Trump, but the real ruler of the media, the revenue side, hates him most passionately: this skinflint spends almost nothing and gets more free coverage than the rest of the candidates put together.
As you consume the coverage and the advertising this election cycle, always remember that 1) the mainstream media in the U.S. is all corporate-owned, 2) corporations exist to maximize profits, 3) profits flow from advertising, not free coverage, and 4) real campaign finance reform will negatively impact Corporate Media profits.
Always remember who's selling whom, and who's in charge: who is the Deep State selling? Who is the Corporate Media selling? Recall that the the Deep State gives the Corporate Media its marching orders: Hillary regains the momentum (New York Times, et al.)