RUTHFULLY YOURS

What the media passes off as hard news is an aggravated protest over Palestinian rights and Israeli wrongs

If there ever was a real line between news and opinion, it stopped being real in 1967. That was the year Israel licked belligerent Arab powers and took whole chunks of territory off them. The West marveled, but not for long. Humanity’s implanted fixation with the “Jewish problem” boiled up from an after-Holocaust slumber like a bubbling sea beast. Millennial antipathies were back at full strength. The media packed them into a narrative that conditions voting blocs and electorates down to this day. What the media passes off as hard news is an aggravated protest over Palestinian rights and Israeli wrongs. Anchors and editors slave away at a narrative garbled by animosity. None bother to hide it anymore. The narrative may have convinced audiences, but even more, opinion formers have convinced themselves that juggernaut Jews make life intolerable for underdog Palestinians who only want sovereignty. A brittle hysteria has settled on the media in every free country.A brittle hysteria has settled on the media in free countries, imparting an aura of menace.

To get the narrative across, to direct fury at Israel for being top dog, the media plays any number of games. I explained media games here and more in the book Hadrian’s Echo. Spiking stories, obscuring facts, reinventing the laws of war — these are other tricks of the trade. Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains. The media is free, and is everywhere chained to a narrative that beggars belief. The narrative depends a lot on media-imposed censorship. Fear and bias impart the impetus.

A Muslim’s freedom of speech is sacrosanct; yours is not.

Censorship by omission can only be committed by a government, and for legitimate or illegitimate reasons. A legitimate reason is withholding information from the public if in the public are enemy agents whose own government would benefit from the knowledge. A nation doesn’t need to be at active war to censor information its government might otherwise release to the public.

An illegitimate reason is to defraud the public, to portray the economy as better than it is, to gloss over government failures that were taxpayer supported, to lie to the public, to lead the public to believe that certain things are true or untrue. Illegitimate censorship by omission can show up in official government reports of the gross national product, reports of global climate change, the actual debt ceiling, and so on.

Every press conference held at the White House since Barack Obama’s accession has been a sometimes-successful, off-times not, exercise in duplicity, fabrications, lies, waffling, and misinformation. It has never mattered who was speaking: Obama, his press secretary, or anyone else at the podium.

Dedicated to the cause of destroying the boundaries that nature has created, the NYT finally jumped the shark in its lead j’accuse editorial of Nov 5th (In Houston, Hate Trumped Fairness,NYT) Those of who still believe that men and women belong in separate but equal public bathrooms are guilty now of the future suicide of a transgender teenager who won’t be able to pee in the designated toilet of the opposite sex. Think about the excrutiating mental anguish for such a person. I can relate to it, along with most other women who wait in long lines outside the ladies’ room in a theater looking longingly at the men’s room as it remains respectfully under-used.

The Times is spitting mad that voters in Houston exercised their democratic right to defeat a law that would have allowed transgenders access to bathrooms matching their subjective views of what gender they are, regardless of their visible plumbing equipment. There is a classic comic scene in which Joey Bishop is caught in his marital bed with another woman. He looks at his furious wife and quickly questions: “Who are you going to believe, me or your eyes?”

Imagine a major story in one of America’s top newspapers on an island in San Francisco Bay named Alcatraz.

Now imagine that this story omits mentioning a prison.

What could conceivably account for such an “oversight?” Might the writer have an agenda? Might a “full-disclosure” of the writers’ background and family connections reveal such an agenda?

For tens of thousands of Americans an equivalent story was published in the Washington Post last week by its chief Latin American reporter Nick Miroff. The “in-depth” article featured an islet of the southwestern coast of Cuba called the Isle of Pines, which hosted the biggest prison/torture and forced-labor complex for political prisoners in the history of the Western Hemisphere.

Tens of thousands of American citizens of Cuban heritage had family members tortured there by Castro’s Stalinist regime. Some had their family members murdered there. Dozens of the surviving torture victims are U.S. citizens and live in the U.S. today. These heroes qualify as the longest-suffering political prisoners in modern history, having suffered prison camps, forced labor and torture chambers for a period three times as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s (8 years). Several of these prisoners are black Cubans who suffered longer in Castro’s prisons than Nelson Mandela spent in South Africa’s (27 years).

“If There is a Third Intifada, We Want to Be the Ones Who Started It”

—New York Times Magazine Cover Story (Illustrated), March 17, 2013

“The most ghastly incident was at Hebron. There was a Jewish population there of over 700 people, an ancient community centred on a Talmudical college. Armed bands intent on slaughter reached Hebron on the 24th [August 1929]. The police were Arab and they stood passively by while their fellow Moslems moved into the town and to deeds which would have been revolting among animals. There was an inn…where some Jews had fled for safety. The Arabs killed and dismembered 23 of them with daggers and axes in an upper room, so that, according to a witness, blood ran down the stairs and soaked through the ceiling… This was not half of the crime…” (Christopher Sykes, Cross Roads to Israel: Palestine from Balfour to Bevin [Collins, 1965], pp. 118-19.)

Combine every speech about the nobility of the journalistic endeavor in every film glorifying reporters intrepidly searching out truth, and you still won’t come close to grasping the level of treacle—there are other words—bubbling up out of “Truth.” Compared with which, “All the President’s Men” (1976)—about the triumphant adventures of Woodward and Bernstein, with Robert Redford portraying Bob Woodward—was a veritable model of shrinking modesty.

Mr. Redford has come a long way since to his latest, namely the role of CBS’s Dan Rather, former network star and anchor of “60 Minutes II,” and the story of how Mr. Rather was ultimately forced out of the company thanks to the scandal in September 2004 after the airing of a segment called “For the Record.”

The creative minds behind “Truth”—based on a book by the CBS report’s producer, Mary Mapes—have wrapped Mr. Rather and Ms. Mapes in a glow of heroic martyrdom so impenetrable there’s hardly a line not put to its service. When, toward the end, all involved in the report face firing, the film’s fatherly Dan Rather asks a young producer what made him want to go into journalism.

Former CBS Evening News Anchor Dan Rather said 60 Minutes “got to the truth” in 2004 but paid a “painful price” for the story on former President George W. Bush’s National Guard service that aired before the 2004 presidential election.

Aside from the authenticity of the memos, Rather said the “basic story” remains true today.

“One, did former President Bush when in his troubled youth, did he use his father’s influence to get into the Air National Guard as a way of avoiding Vietnam? That’s a fact. Fact two: Once he got in the Air National Guard after performing well, in some ways, very well, disappeared for a year, nobody disappeared for a year, now those are facts,” Rather said at the Washington premiere of Truth, a film based on a book written about the controversial 60 Minutes segment that aired in 2004.

“Everybody is entitled to their opinion but they aren’t entitled to their own facts. The reason this film is called Truth is we got to the truth but we paid a painful price for it,” he added.

The broadcast included documents that were not authenticated by forensic experts, which ultimately led to the dismissal of the staff that worked on the story as well as the firing of producer Mary Mapes. The fallout is referred to as the “Killian documents controversy” – after Lieutenant Colonel Killian, Bush’s superior in the National Guard, whose name appears on the documents.