Driving this normalization campaign is the mainstream media, with platforms like the talk show Piers Morgan’s Uncensored and the liberal Zionist outlet Haaretz playing pivotal roles.

The role of dehumanization in genocide

Recent research has advanced understanding of why people participate in genocide. Influences like peer pressure, group norms and obedience to authority often outweigh deeply held beliefs or ideologies. Class, economic inequality and lack of resources also make some individuals more vulnerable to coercion.

Several studies highlight the role of dehumanizing propaganda in promoting and shaping genocidal violence. While such rhetoric may not convince everyone, it shifts social dynamics by promoting the repression of dissent, normalizing violent ideas and emboldening those with pre-existing biases to act on them. This propaganda does not always create hatred though it can legitimize and create consent to deadly aggressive solutions, making them seem acceptable although they are illegal, morally abhorrent actions.

Dehumanization also plays a role after participation in violence. While many genocidaires initially experience intense emotional and physical distress, repeated acts of violence dull these reactions. Dehumanizing narratives then play a critical role in reframing and normalizing such actions, helping participants justify continued violence and view it as morally acceptable.

Spreading lies and debating mass murder

White settler societies, including Zionist society in Palestine, construct their identity through misinformation, dehumanization of “the other” and a commitment to expansion and dispossession, with media shaping public opinion and influencing policy to sustain these narratives. Since October 7, 2023, the mainstream media has perpetuated what may be one of the most elaborate and insidious misinformation campaigns in modern history. This includes the widespread dissemination of fictitious atrocity propaganda dehumanizing Palestinian people, such as claims of mass rape, beheaded babies, infants hanging on a clothesline, a baby baked in an oven and other fabricated horrors.

British media personality Piers Morgan has used his extremely popular News Corp platform to amplify debunked atrocity propaganda, facing no accountability. Through his debate show, he has provided a stage for Islamophobes, official Israeli state and military spokespersons and unapologetic antisemites to air their abhorrent, fascistic and bogus viewpoints.  These reactionaries have been featured alongside anti-war, anti-apartheid, anti-genocide, pro-humanity, progressive, liberal and leftist activists, politicians and media personalities as a supposed counterbalance, muddying the waters of acceptable debate.

“Piers Morgan all over the Place,” Digital, Dream / Dreamworld v3, 2024

Morgan’s show trivializes atrocities by framing genocide as a topic for “debate” rather than the moral and legal outrage it is. This process of normalization, as defined by the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, makes the inherently abnormal, illegal and repugnant apartheid, genocide and settler colonialism – seem ordinary and acceptable, while diverting focus from the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The BDS movement opposes normalization, viewing it as a tool used by oppressors to legitimize oppression and suppress resistance. Normalisation enables Israel to whitewash its apartheid, genocidal regime and weaken global solidarity with Palestinian liberation through manipulative rhetoric.

Programs like Morgan’s claim to be neutral platforms, yet his overt pro-Trump stance and role as a henchman for Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp and Fox News expose the façade, steering the narrative behind his so-called “uncensored” approach. Similarly, another Trump aficionado, now appointee Elon Musk claims to champion “free speech” while actively suppressing dissenting voices on his increasingly reactionary X platform.

Morgan’s show exemplifies Orwell’s concept of “newspeak,” as described in 1984. This distortion of language, repackaged as seemingly innocent discourse, aligns with what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco termed “Ur-fascism,” warning in his 14th point that such manipulations can even manifest in the guise of popular talk shows. Morgan positions himself much like Israeli war-criminal Netanyahu and US President elect Trump, who embrace a cult of tradition, whether rooted in the myth of a once “great” America or an expansive Greater Israel, syncretizing diverse and often contradictory beliefs into an immutable “truth,” while rejecting modernism and intellectual, academic critique.

Haaretz and justice

The foremost liberal Zionist media outlet – Haaretz (“the land” in Hebrew) – serves a particularly noxious normalization function; to present Zionism as aligned with human rights, claiming to encompass a political spectrum from right to left, with democratic, progressive values and a commitment to peace and justice. This façade legitimizes a hollow “peace process” of fruitless negotiations, all while Israeli bulldozers and developers persist in stealing Palestinian land, with some of it even marketed in the U.S. at Zionist land sales cynically hosted in synagogues.

Much like its portrayal of the anti-Netanyahu protests in the spring of 2023 as indicative of Israeli so-called “democracy,” Haaretz obscures the genocidal foundation of Zionism by framing the intensified violence against Palestinians since October 7, 2023, as a symptom of the Netanyahu government’s extremism – a bug rather than a feature of Zionism. Additionally, similar to Piers Morgan’s program which fosters open collaboration with genocidal entities, Haaretz has featured reports from regime-aligned journalists embedded within the Israeli military. It played a key role in amplifying the fabricated Hamas mass rape narrative, among other regime agitprop.

Piers Morgan Uncensored and Haaretz are not merely examples of media manipulation; they are instruments of societal conditioning designed to sustain global systems of oppression. Resisting this insidious normalization demands critical engagement with media narratives and a steadfast refusal to accept these atrocities as unavoidable.

Reclaiming the language of justice is essential, standing in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation as a critical front in the global fight against white supremacist imperialism.

Reprinted from Counterpunch with the author’s permission.

Human Rights Watch determined that Israeli forces carried out the attack using an air-dropped bomb equipped with a United States-produced Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit. The US government should suspend weapons transfers to Israel because of the military’s repeated, unlawful attacks on civilians, for which US officials may be complicit in war crimes.

“Israel’s use of US arms to unlawfully attack and kill journalists away from any military target is a terrible mark on the United States as well as Israel,” said Richard Weir, senior crisis, conflict and arms researcher at Human Rights Watch. “The Israeli military’s previous deadly attacks on journalists without any consequences give little hope for accountability in this or future violations against the media.”

The attack took place in the early morning at the Hasbaya Village Club Resort in Hasbaya, a town in southern Lebanon, where more than a dozen journalists had been staying for over three weeks. Human Rights Watch found no evidence of fighting, military forces, or military activity in the immediate area at the time of the attack. Information Human Rights Watch reviewed indicates that the Israeli military knew or should have known that journalists were staying in the area and in the targeted building. After initially stating that its forces struck a building where “terrorists were operating,” the Israeli military said hours later that “the incident is under review.”

Human Rights Watch interviewed eight people who were staying at or near the resort, including three injured journalists and the resort’s owner. Human Rights Watch also visited the site on November 1 and verified 6 videos and 22 photos of the attack and its aftermath, plus satellite images. There has been no response to letters sent to the Israeli military on November 14 with findings and questions and to the Lebanese military on November 5 with questions.

The attack on the building in which the journalists were staying took place just after 3 a.m., based on interviews and CCTV footage with the same time code. Most of the journalists were sleeping. Zakaria Fadel, 25, an assistant cameraman for Lebanon-based ISOL for Broadcast, a Lebanese satellite and broadcast services provider, said he was brushing his teeth when the blast threw him into the air.

A munition struck the single-story building and detonated upon hitting the floor. The blast killed Ghassan Najjar, a journalist and cameraman, and Mohammad Reda, a satellite broadcast engineer, both from Al Mayadeen TV, and Wissam Kassem, a cameraman from the Hezbollah-owned outlet Al Manar TV. Al Mayadeen is a Lebanon-based pan-Arab television station politically allied with Hezbollah and the Syrian government.

Human Rights Watch verified videos taken minutes after the attack which show the targeted building completely destroyed and nearby buildings damaged. The strike collapsed a wall in the adjacent building, seriously injuring Hassan Hoteit, 48, a cameraman for ISOL for Broadcast, and substantially damaged the wall of a small building about 10 meters away, injuring other journalists, including Ali Mortada, 46, a camera operator for Al Jazeera.

Mortada said he woke to the blast and pieces of concrete falling on him, injuring his face and his right arm. When the debris stopped falling, he went to see if his colleagues were okay. He and others found Hoteit injured, and the building struck destroyed. Mortada said he saw the bodies of Kassem and Najjar nearby. They found Reda’s remains further away.

Soon after, the resort’s concierge approached them, saying he had found two human legs in one bedroom. Ehab el-Okdy, a reporter for Al Jazeera who was staying at the resort, said that he also saw the bodies and body parts of the dead reporters. “We saw the bodies,” he said. “We saw Mohammad Reda was shattered all over the place.”

Anoir Ghaida, the resort’s owner, said the journalists had arrived on October 1, following an evacuation order from the Israeli military for an area south of Hasbaya. The journalists had been reporting from Ibl al-Saqi, an area included in the evacuation order.

The journalists said that from October 1 until the day of the attack, they made routine and repeated trips, reporting from the Hasbaya area, frequently doing live television reports from a hilltop that overlooked large parts of southern Lebanon. The journalists and Ghaida said they would leave the resort in the morning and return in the evening, about the same time each day. Most of the vehicles at the resort were marked “Press” or “TV.”

The journalists and Ghaida said they constantly heard the buzzing of aerial drones in the area, indicating it was most likely under Israeli surveillance. Prior to October 25, there had been no attacks on Hasbaya town.

Since the current hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah began on October 8, 2023, the Israeli military has attacked and killed journalists and targeted Al Mayadeen TV. On October 23, Israeli forces attacked and destroyed an office used by Al Mayadeen in Beirut. Al Mayadeen had evacuated their staff from the building.

Israeli strikes killed at least six Lebanese journalists between October 8, 2023, and October 29, 2024, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. Human Rights Watch found that the October 13, 2023 attack, which killed the Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and injured six other journalists, was an apparent war crime. On November 21, 2023, an Israeli strike killed two Lebanese journalists reporting for Al Mayadeen TV, Rabih al-Maamari and Farah Omar, and their driver, Hussein Akil, in Tayr Harfa in southern Lebanon.

“Journalism Targeted,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

Human Rights Watch verified a photo and video from Najjar’s funeral that showed his casket wrapped in a Hezbollah flag and buried in a southern Beirut cemetery where Hezbollah fighters are buried, near the grave of al-Maamari. A Hezbollah spokesperson told Human Rights Watch on November 14 that Najjar had asked to be buried near his friend and colleague al-Maamari, but that Najjar “was just a civilian” and “had no involvement whatsoever in any military activities.”

Human Rights Watch found remnants at the attack site and reviewed photographs of remnants collected by the resort owner and determined that they were consistent with a JDAM guidance kit assembled and sold by the US company Boeing. Human Rights Watch identified one remnant as part of the guidance kit’s actuation system that moves the fins. It bore a numerical code identifying it as having been manufactured by Woodard, a US company that makes components for guidance systems on munitions, including the JDAM. The JDAM is affixed to air-dropped bombs and allows them to be guided to a target by using satellite coordinates, making the weapon accurate to within several meters.

Human Rights Watch wrote to Boeing and to Woodard on November 14, but did not receive responses. Companies have responsibilities under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the OECD Guidelines on Multinational Enterprises on Responsible Business Conduct, and related guidance to stop, prevent, mitigate, or remediate actual and potential violations of international humanitarian law that they cause, contribute to, or are linked with. 

Given Israel’s record of widespread laws of war violations and lack of accountability, companies should end arms sales, recall already sold weapons wherever possible, and stop all support services for already sold weapons.

Human Rights Watch has previously documented the Israeli military’s unlawful use of US-equipped weapons in a strike in March that killed seven aid workers in southern Lebanon.

International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, prohibits attacks against civilians and civilian objects. Journalists are considered civilians and are immune from attack so long as they are not directly participating in hostilities. Journalists cannot be attacked for their work as journalists, even if the opposing party considers the media biased or being used for propaganda. When carrying out any attack, warring parties must take all feasible precautions to minimize civilian harm and damage to civilian objects. This includes taking all necessary actions to verify that targets are military objectives.

Individuals who commit serious violations of the laws of war with criminal intent—that is, intentionally or recklessly—may be prosecuted for war crimes. Individuals may also be held criminally liable for assisting in, facilitating, aiding, or abetting a war crime.

Lebanon should urgently accept the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction to give the court’s prosecutor a mandate to investigate serious international crimes committed on the country’s territory.

Israel’s key allies—the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany—should suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel, given the real risk that they will be used to commit grave abuses. US policy prohibits arms transfers to states “more likely than not” to use them in violations of international law.

“As evidence mounts of Israel’s unlawful use of US weapons, including in apparent war crimes, US officials need to decide whether they will uphold US and international law by halting arms sales to Israel or risk being found legally complicit in serious violations,” Weir said.

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More than three quarters of the 99 journalists killed worldwide in 2023 were killed in Gaza

( Globalvoices.org ) – On July 31, Al Jazeera journalists Ismail al-Ghoul and Rami al-Rifi were killed by Israel in the Shati refugee camp in the north of Gaza while reporting on the assassination of Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyya in Iran.

The Israeli army admitted to killing al-Ghoul and al-Rifi, accusing them of being members of Al Qassam, the military wing of Hamas, and of participating in the October 7 attack. This dangerous accusation — thoroughly refuted by the channel — has been used repeatedly by the Israeli side to justify killing journalists, which risks normalizing the targeting of journalists with unfounded accusations.

Al Jazeera said that Al Ghoul, who had previously reported on the Israeli raids of Al-Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza, was detained by Israeli forces in March and released 12 hours later, disproving the claims of his affiliation with Hamas or other organizations.

Nicola Perugini, associate professor of politics and international relations at the University of Edinburgh, warned on X about using such accusations against journalists:

A disturbing pattern

According to preliminary figures from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), at least 113 journalists and media workers have been killed since the war began on October 7, 2023, with three confirmed to have been targeted and 10 more under investigation. The Gaza government media office put the number at 165 Palestinian journalists and media workers killed. 

According to Reporters without Borders (RSF), “29 of [the 120 journalists reported killed by [RSF] have been killed in circumstances that point to intentional targeting, in violation of international law.” Three complaints have been filed with the International Criminal Court (ICC) by the press freedom organization urging independent investigations of these war crimes.

The Al Jazeera Network — banned by Israel since May 2023 — has been heavily targeted, with five of its journalists killed in Gaza since the war began. Hamza al-Dahdouh, son of Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh, and Moustafa Thuraya were killed in a January airstrike. The Israeli army also alleged the two men were “members of Gaza-based terrorist organizations,” which was equally refuted by the channel and others.

In February, a drone strike injured Wael al-Dahdouh and killed cameraman Samer Abu Daqqa. Wael’s wife, seven-year-old daughter, and 15-year-old son were also killed in an Israeli airstrike on October 28, 2023.

“These deadly attacks on Al Jazeera personnel coincided with a defamation campaign by Israeli authorities,” according to RSF, warning that “conflating journalism with ‘terrorism’ endangers reporters and threatens the right to information.”

“The killing of al-Ghoul and al-Rifi is the latest example of the risks of documenting the war in Gaza, the deadliest conflict for journalists the organization has documented in 30 years,” Jodie Ginsberg, CPJ’s CEO told Al Jazeera, emphasizing that the killing of journalists by Israel has been a disturbing pattern over the past 20 years. “This appears to be part of a broader [Israeli] strategy to stifle the information coming out of Gaza,” she explained, adding that the ban on Al Jazeera from reporting in Israel is part of this trend.

Trauma and exhaustion

Since October 7, Israel has not allowed any foreign journalists to enter the Gaza strip to report on the ongoing war except if embedded with the Israeli army. This complete ban has meant that local journalists are the ones to bear the brunt of coverage at great personal risk.

The immense trauma and exhaustion experienced by these local journalists, who remain vulnerable despite taking all possible safety measures, was best expressed in a poignant quote from Al Jazeera English journalist Hind Khoudary that went viral after the killing of her colleagues.

Another colleague,  Al Jazeera’s correspondent in Jerusalem, Najwan Simri wrote in a tribute to her colleague Ismail:

It was enough to look into his eyes, and contemplate his features, to feel the depth of Gaza’s sadness and reproach towards us. I always felt that he reproached us with excessive politeness.. and great hope, as if he had not lost hope in us for a moment.

– Najwan Simri (@SimriNajwan) 31 July, 2024

Meanwhile, local journalists in Gaza protested and held a vigil in response to al-Ghoul’s killing expressing their outrage at the perilous conditions they navigate daily and the lack of accountability and protection. Al Jazeera Arabic staff held a silent protest live in their studio.

An emotional video of the moment Al Jazeera Arabic presenter received and shared the news of the killing of Ismail Al Ghoul and Rami Al Rifi, went viral.

Bayan Abusultan, a feminist Palestinian journalist in Gaza tweeted:

They want to silence us.
They threaten all journalists who are still in Gaza city, and the north.

Covering the news here = Being targeted by the israeli forces.

Remember to keep talking about #Gaza even if they got every last one of us.

A history of impunity

Israel has a history of targeting journalists with impunity, as evidenced by the case of Shireen Abu Akleh, killed by the Israeli army while reporting in Jennin in the West Bank on May 11, 2022. Abu Akleh’s killing highlights the dangers faced by Palestinian media professionals due to a lack of accountability.

Carlos Martínez de la Serna of thr CPJ criticized Israel for refusing to cooperate with the FBI and blocking potential ICC investigations into her killing, calling for an end to Israel’s impunity in journalist killings, which have only increased during the ongoing Gaza war.

In 2022, Abu Akleh’s family and Al Jazeera requested the ICC to investigate her killing, but Israel’s leaders, including former prime minister Yair Lapid, resisted any interrogation of IDF soldiers and declined to open a criminal investigation into the killing.

The scale of journalist killing by Israel during this war is best seen when comparing it to the global number. More than three quarters of the 99 journalists killed worldwide in 2023 were killed in the Gaza war according to the CPJ. This alarming number emphasizes the urgent need for accountability and the enhancement of protection measures for journalists everywhere, ensuring the safety and protection of all the journalists who courageously report from the front lines of conflicts.

This post is part of Advox, a Global Voices project dedicated to protecting freedom of expression online. All Posts

 

Written byWalid El Houri

Via Globalvoices.org

——
Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

AJ+ “Journalist Ismail Al-Ghoul wrote about bearing witness in #Gaza before his killing”

Even if the decision to name Gaza’s journalists as laureates of its prestigious award was partly motivated by the courage of these journalists, the truth is that no one in the world deserved such recognition as those covering the genocidal war in Gaza.

“As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression,” Mauricio Weibel, Chair of the International Jury of Media Professionals, which made the recommendation for the award, truthfully described the courage of Gaza’s journalists.

Courage is an admirable quality, especially when many journalists in Gaza knew that Israel was seeking to kill them, often along with their families, to ensure that the horror of the war remains hidden from view, at worst, or contested as if a matter of opinion, at best.

Between 7 October, 2023, and 11 May, 2024, 143 Palestinian journalists in Gaza were killed by Israel. It is higher than the total number of journalists killed in World War II and the Vietnam wars combined.

This number does not include many bloggers, intellectuals and writers who did not have professional media credentials, and also excludes the many family members who were often killed along with the targeted journalists.

But there is more to Gaza’s journalists than bravery.

Whenever Israel launches a war on Gaza, it almost always denies access to international media professionals from entering the Strip. This go-to strategy is meant to ensure the story of the crimes that the Israeli army is about to commit goes unreported.

The strategy paid dividends in the so-called Cast Lead Operation in 2008-9. The true degree of the atrocities carried out in Gaza during that war, which resulted in the killing of over 1,400 Palestinians, was largely known when the war was over. By then, Israel had concluded its major military operation, and corporate mainstream western media had done a splendid job in ensuring the dominance of the Israeli political discourse regarding the war.

Israel’s behaviour since that war remained unchanged: barring international journalists, placing a gag order on Israeli journalists and killing Palestinian journalists who dared cover the story.

The August 2014 war on Gaza was one of the bloodiest for journalists. It lasted for 18 days and cost the lives of 17 journalists. Palestinian journalists, however, remained committed to their story. When one fell, ten seemed to take his place.

Occupied Palestine has always been one of the most dangerous places to be a journalist. The Palestinian Journalists’ Union reported that between 2000 – the start of the Second Palestinian Uprising – and 11 May, 2022 – the day of the Israeli murder of the iconic Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, 55 journalists were killed at the hands of the Israeli army.

The number might not seem too high if compared to the latest onslaught in Gaza, but, per international standards, it was a terrifying figure, based on an equally disturbing logic: killing the storyteller as the quickest way of killing the story itself.

For decades, Israel, an occupying power, has managed to depict itself as a victim in a state of self-defence. Without any critical voices in mainstream media, many around the world believed Israel’s deceiving discourse on terrorism, security and self-defence.

The only obstacle that stood between the actual truth and Israel’s engineered version of the truth are honest journalists – thus, the ongoing war on the media.

What Israel did not anticipate, however, is that by blocking international media access to Gaza, it would inadvertently empower Palestinian journalists to take charge of their own narrative.

“Interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place,” late Palestinian intellectual, Edward Said, wrote in ‘Covering Islam’.

Like any other form of intellectual interpretation, journalism becomes subjected to the same rule of positionality in academia, as in the relationship between the identity of the researcher and the social or political context of the subject matter.

Journalist deaths in Gaza: A ‘reckoning’ to come when war is over • FRANCE 24 English Video

Palestinian journalists in Gaza are themselves the story and the storytellers. Their success or failure to convey the story with all its factual and emotional details could make the difference between the continuation or the end of the Israeli genocide.

Though the war is yet to end, the Gaza journalists have already proven to be deserving of all the honours and accolades, not only because of their courage, but because of what we actually know about the war, despite the numerous and seemingly insurmountable obstacles created by Israel and its allies.

Most people all over the world want the war to end. But how did they acquire the needed information that made them realise the extent of horror in Gaza? Certainly not through Israel’s cheerleaders in mainstream media, but through Palestinian journalists on the ground who are using every means and every channel available to them to tell the story.

These journalists include self-taught youngsters, like 9-year-old Lama Jamous, who wore a press vest and conveyed the details of life in displacement camps in southern Gaza, reporting from Nasser Hospital and many other places with poise and elegance.

As for the accuracy of information provided by these journalists, they were certainly professional enough to be verified by numerous human rights groups, medical and legal associations and millions of people around the world who used them to build a case against the Israeli war. Indeed, all we know about the war – the death toll, the degree of destruction, the daily human suffering, the mass graves, the famine and much more – is possible because of these Gaza-based reporters.

The success, and the sacrifices of Gaza journalists should serve as a model for journalists and journalism around the world, as an example of how news about war crimes, sieges and human suffering in all its forms should be conveyed.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor or Informed Comment.

Via Middle East Monitor .

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

( Tomdispatch.com When wildfires began erupting in the Texas Panhandle in February, Laurie Ezzell Brown, the editor and publisher of the Canadian Record, was in Houston on a panel discussing ways in which losing local newspapers represents a danger to democracy. Running the once-a-week Record from the Panhandle town of Canadian, she certainly knew something about the rise of “news deserts” in this country. While she was meeting with other journalists concerned about disappearing local newspapers, Brown kept an eye on reports about ignitions sparking wildfires west of her town and posted updates from afar so that her readers would remain informed.

“Those fires never stay in the next county,” Brown said grimly. And indeed, as the flames galloped through fallow fields and approached her hometown, she began a desperate drive back to Canadian with a friend. In and out of cell coverage, traveling through black-ash smoke, she saw distinctly apocalyptic scenes of torched trees and powerlines dangling from still-burning poles. As she went, she posted every scrap of information she could get for the scattered and distraught readers of her paper. How else would they know about the houses that were being torched ever closer to their own homes?

In the days that followed, as that historic nightmare of a blaze just grew and grew, finally burning through more than a million acres of the Texas Panhandle, Brown continued to keep Canadian Record readers informed about crucial matters like how to apply for financial assistance, where to take fire debris, and when the next embattled town meeting would be held. It was part of what she’s been doing since 1993: keeping an eye on Canadian’s Hemphill County commissioners, investigating economic salvation schemes, and posting high school sports scores as well as local obituaries.

“There’s no one else to do this and people need to know what’s happening. It’s what I do. It’s what I’ve always done,” she told me.

It’s what I do, too. Like Canadian, my adopted hometown of Greenville in Plumas County, California, was hit by a climate-driven wildfire in 2021 that devastated 800 homes and left the downtown smoldering on its Gold Rush-era dirt foundations. Two years into rebuilding, the only local online publication announced that it was shuttering. So, I set aside my freelance journalism career, joined a team of like-minded citizens, and launched The Plumas Sun.

Like Brown and hundreds of journalists across the country, we’re reporting from the intersection of news deserts and climate disasters. As floods, fires, and tornadoes surge, and daily as well as weekly publications collapse, local journalism maintains an all-too-slender lifeline in devastated rural communities like mine. Local journalists remain after the Klieg lights go dark and the national media flee our mud-strewn, burned-out Main Streets. We continue to report as our friends and neighbors face the challenge of rebuilding (or not).

Somehow, along with flattened towns and shattered lives, disaster sometimes even breeds innovation. Among the ruins left by walls of water and towering flames, bootstrapped publications like mine do their best to keep the news alive in communities now struggling just to survive.

Nowhere Will Be Spared

If there’s one overarching message from the Fifth National Climate Assessment, released in November 2023, it’s that, in this era of climate change, nowhere will be spared disaster. As the burning of fossil fuels warms the world ever more radically, conditions are created that only exacerbate a Pandora’s box of extreme weather events. Scientists predict more intense hurricanes and the storm surges they generate, more frequent and intense wildfires throughout the calendar year, an elevated risk for flooding, and so much else in the new era of global warming.

Still, as the climate scientists report, the impacts of such disasters aren’t landing equitably. Blacks, Indigenous Americans, and other people of color are bearing the brunt of them along with the rural poor. They are “disproportionately exposed to environmental risks and have fewer resources to address them,” as the assessment puts it.

For Laurie Ezzell Brown and her newspaper, that bureaucratese translates all too simply into hardship. The town of Canadian, perched on the high plains near the Oklahoma border, had suffered an economic hit to both its ranching and its oil and gas industries even before the panhandle fires. The Canadian Record was struggling. Launched in 1893, the weekly newspaper that Brown now owns spent half its life in her family’s hands. Ben and Nancy Ezzell, her parents, became its publishers in 1947. Brown took over in 1993. In March 2023, 30 years later, unable to find a buyer for it, she suspended publication of the Canadian Record.

Buy the Book

It didn’t go well. Brown, who has lived in Canadian most of her life, got an earful. And she took it personally. “I had to see all these people who I’d let down every day. And hear them tell me how much they missed the paper, how much they needed it, how they didn’t know what was going on. I guess it just got to me.” She and a skeleton staff are, however, maintaining an online version of the paper while she continues to hunt for a buyer.

It’s a tough sell. After all, most disaster-struck rural towns are already on the economic edge. Lacking the resources that might shield them from some of the impacts, they now face the Herculean task of rebuilding from scratch with scratch. After a town is demolished, said Mary Henkel Judson, editor of the Port Aransas South Jetty, people leave and many simply never come back.

Judson faced disaster in 2017 when Hurricane Harvey blew the roofs off homes and tore businesses from their foundations in that island community off the Texas coast near Corpus Christi. Compared to Canadian, Port Aransas is affluent. The South Jetty enjoys the support of second-home owners and tourists, many of them birders visiting the island’s five sites on the Great Texas Birding Trail. So Port Aransas did rebuild.

It’s a simple fact that the majority of the newspapers that have folded nationwide are in economically disadvantaged areas. In Texas, they are also in the least populous areas, Judson said. Canadian is among them. When businesses are struggling to make ends meet, paying for advertising is an expense that can be postponed. That makes it rough on publications like the Canadian Record.

“Laurie Brown is one of the best journalists in the world as far as I’m concerned. And one of the hardest-working. That community knows what she does for them and supports her as best they can, but it’s tough,” Judson told me.

She knows what can happen without a newspaper — and not just in times of disaster. City councils, school boards, and special government districts meet regularly. Most elected officials are honorable, she adds, “but you’re looking at the opportunity for corruption to raise its ugly head. You put a kid in a candy store when nobody’s watching and things happen.”

Teaching Disaster Communities to Do Journalism

Local reporters and paper owners like Brown and Judson are now an increasingly vanishing breed. Since 2005, in fact, 2,900 American newspapers, mainly smaller weeklies and local dailies, have ceased publication, according to the State of Local News Project 2023 (produced by researchers at Northwestern University’s Medill School). One-third of them were in small counties. Today 195 of those mostly rural counties have no local newspaper at all or any other source of local news. An additional 1,387 counties have only one local news source.

As in so many other economic sectors, the trend is toward consolidation. Fewer and fewer corporations now own more and more publications. Brown describes it as “gobbling up all the newspapers, spitting them out, and firing the real writers.” The result leaves nearly 200 communities without a reliable source of information for everything from political scams to cribbage tournaments. And there’s more bad news ahead. Based on the higher-than-average poverty rates and the population size of those mostly rural counties, the 2023 report determined that an additional 33 communities are at elevated risk of losing their sole remaining source of news.

When Lyndsey Gilpin started Southerly in 2016, her goal was to fill a growing gap in reporting in Southern states. She was particularly interested in providing a regional outlet to cover environmental justice and climate issues. The decline in newspapers in the rural South is worse than anywhere else in the country. After all, 108 counties were already without a local newspaper in 2020. Yes, reporters from the national media sometimes “parachute” in to cover special events like fierce storms or raging tornadoes, but they tend to leave as quickly as they come.

Gilpin wanted to cover climate and energy issues in a more consistent way. Local news institutions are trusted sources of information in a community, often the only source. “We wanted to build deeper relationships with local news outlets, residents and community members who were living this day to day and doing the work to get information out,” she told me.

Southerly’s inaugural year coincided with a startling series of natural disasters. The United States suffered 15 devastating weather and climate events, each causing at least a billion dollars in damage, the second-highest number ever recorded. The South, in particular, was hit with tornadoes, wildfires, hurricanes, and three different major floods. Over the next five years, Southerly became increasingly focused on just such climate disasters.

Gilpin soon discovered personally what the assessment scientists asserted in their 2023 document: Disasters do not inflict damage equally. And adding insult to literal injury, the most ill-equipped communities when it comes to climate disasters are almost always ones without newspapers. “Folks were already struggling and now they don’t know where to turn, who to talk to,” she said. “That leaves a huge, huge hole for industries or politicians or other players to feed them misinformation or accidentally give inaccurate information.”

In response to the growing prevalence of climate-driven disasters, Southerly began developing tools that would help communities do their own disaster coverage. Gilpin built templates that outlined how to apply for aid and navigate paperwork, processes that are nearly the same for hurricanes, floods, or fires. “We morphed into a place that could train people to learn how to do journalism — to do storytelling in more creative ways,” she told me.

As those journalists began to focus on recovery efforts in places repeatedly hit by hurricanes like southern Louisiana, they reported on the effects of such disasters ranging from the disabling of the voting process to damaging disruptions in education. They also tracked disparities in disaster funding by neighborhood, economic class, and race.

As Gilpin put it to me: “The way journalism can do the most good is by making sure people are equipped to do that work. By understanding the process, they can feel confident about knowing what’s happening around them.”

Sadly, however, Southerly ended operations in May 2023, thanks to a lack of funding and fundraising exhaustion. As Gilpin summarized the situation: “The nicest way I can put it is the nonprofit journalism world is difficult. It’s not fair that all the money goes to a few places and not to other places.”

Covering Recovery

Even as the larger newspaper world is suffering blow after blow, the situation could be changing if ever so slightly for local papers. Growing public attention to America’s news deserts has, in recent years, been attracting at least some philanthropic funding. Press Forward and the American Journalism Project are among the efforts to rebuild local news platforms. The State of Local News Report celebrates 17 new local outlets at least five years old and identifies 164 others that are just getting started. All are providing their communities with reporting essential to democracy while searching for stable, sustainable business models.

It was certainly not the lure of foundation funding that gave life to The Plumas Sun. The driver was utter fear of living without a newspaper in a community in the throes of disaster recovery. The local century-old newspaper in my area, The Feather River Bulletin, had folded early in the Covid pandemic, even though it continued to maintain an online presence until July 2023. When it announced it was shutting down, shock reverberated through the small mountain towns in California’s northern Sierra Nevada where I live.

We had already lost so much: Our timber-dependent economy was declining and the spread of Covid had only exacerbated our isolation. But the most profound blow was the devastating 2021 Dixie fire, a climate-change-induced nightmare that scorched an area of the West the size of Rhode Island. It quite literally incinerated most of my town of Greenville and three other local communities. Nearly a million acres of the conifer forests that had once drawn so many of us to this rural outpost were reduced to charred specters. Now, we were losing the only source of local news that had kept us from feeling utterly disconnected from the rest of America and one another during such traumatic times.

The Plumas Sun was conceived in that hapless moment. One urgent phone call led to another until we had mustered a core team of seven with the skills to mount an online news publication. Just days before we launched it, we still didn’t have a name for it.

The two-year mark after a disaster event is a pivotal moment for community recovery, says Sue Weber, an ex-nun who served as coordinator of the Dixie Fire Collaborative, formed after that fire as a voice for the community. State and federal money starts to disappear. Victims begin to move on. That’s when local newspapers play a critical role in keeping places like Greenville invigorated and part of the rebuilding process. “For communities,” Weber told me, “it’s all about where we go from here. Nobody else is paying attention.”

Disaster trauma often shows up in ways that seem unrelated to the torching of entire towns. In the first months of covering county government, The Plumas Sun reported on a sheriff’s dispatcher charged with embezzling from a needy children’s Christmas fund and a county official filing a hostile work environment complaint against the district attorney. It has also posted news on local community suppers and library book giveaways, while offering kudos to people around the county doing extraordinary work. And, of course, obituaries.

“Connecting people is healing,” Weber points out. “Newspapers do that, too.”

Laurie Brown and Canadian are still in the early trauma stage in the scorched Texas Panhandle. Whether her Canadian Record or The Plumas Sun or any of the startups nurtured by Southerly survive depends not just on the whims of funding but on the grit and guts of local reporters. Brown, who is living on Social Security, shows no signs of quitting, despite all too many misgivings about the future.

“I’ve seen good things that didn’t happen because they weren’t encouraged. I’ve seen bad things that didn’t happen because they were exposed,” she says. “And I just keep thinking, you know, you can make a difference. And that still seems worth doing to me.”

Copyright 2024 Jane Braxton Little

By Julia Conley

( Commondreams.org ) – A discussion between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sen. Mitt Romney over the weekend included what one critic called an “incredible mask-off moment,” with the two officials speaking openly about the U.S. government’s long-term attempts to provide public relations work for Israel in defense of its policies in the occupied Palestinian territories—and its push to ban TikTok in order to shut down Americans’ access to unfiltered news about the Israeli assault on Gaza.

At the Sedona Forum in Sedona, Arizona on Friday, the Utah Republican asked Blinken at the McCain Institute event’s keynote conversation why Israel’s “PR been so awful” as it’s bombarded Gaza since October in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack, killing at least 34,735 Palestinians—the majority women and children—and pushing parts of the enclave into a famine that is expected to spread due to Israel’s blockade.

“The world is screaming about Israel, why aren’t they screaming about Hamas?” asked Romney. “‘Accept a cease-fire, bring home the hostages.’ Instead it’s the other way around, I mean, typically the Israelis are good at PR. What’s happened here? How have they, and we, been so ineffective at communicating the realities there?”

Blinken replied that Americans, two-thirds of whom want the Biden administration to push for a permanent cease-fire and 57% of whom disapprove of President Joe Biden’s approach to the war, are “on an intravenous feed of information with new impulses, inputs every millisecond.”

“And of course the way this has played out on social media has dominated the narrative,” said the secretary of state. “We can’t discount that, but I think it also has a very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”

Romney suggested that banning TikTok would quiet the growing outrage over Israeli atrocities in the United States.

“Some wonder why there was such overwhelming support for us to shut down, potentially, TikTok or other entities of that nature,” said Romney. “If you look at the postings on TikTok and the number of mentions of Palestinians relative to other social media sites, it’s overwhelmingly so among TikTok broadcasts.”

The interview took place amid a growing anti-war movement on college campuses across the U.S. and around the world, with American police forces responding aggressively to protests at which students have demanded higher education institutions divest from companies that contract with Israel and that the U.S. stop funding the Israel Defense Forces.

Right-wing lawmakers and commentators have suggested students have been indoctrinated by content shared on social media platforms including TikTok and Instagram, and wouldn’t be protesting otherwise.

Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.), who co-sponsored a recent bill to ban TikTok—included in a foreign aid package that Biden signed late last month—said last week that “there has been a coordinated effort off these college campuses, and that you have outside paid agitators and activists.”

“It also highlights exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the U.S.,” said Lawler.

Social media has provided the public with an unvarnished look at the scale of Israel’s attack, with users learning the stories of Gaza residents including six-year-old Hind Rajab, 10-year-old Yazan Kafarneh, and victims who have been found in mass graves and seeing the destruction of hospitals, universities, and other civilian infrastructure.

U.S. college students, however, are far from the only people who have expressed strong opposition to Israel’s slaughter of Palestinian civilians and large-scale destruction of Gaza as it claims to be targeting Hamas.

Human rights groups across the globe have demanded an end to the Biden administration’s support for Israel’s military and called on the U.S. president to use his leverage to end the war. Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, in February lambasted Biden and other Western leaders for claiming concern about the safety of Palestinians while continuing to arm Israel, and leaders in Spain and Ireland have led calls for an arms embargo on the country. The United Nations’ top expert on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories said in March that there are “reasonable grounds” to conclude Israel has committed genocidal acts, two months after the International Court of Justice made a similar statement in an interim ruling.

US Department of State Video: “Secretary Blinken participates in a keynote conversation at the McCain Institute”

Romney and Blinken didn’t mention in their talk whether they believe social media and bad “PR” have pushed international leaders and experts to make similar demands to those of college students.

The conversation, said Intercept journalist Ryan Grim, was an “incredible historical document” showing how the U.S. government views its role in the Middle East—as a government that should “mediate” between Israel and the public to keep people from having “a direct look at what’s happening.”

“Romney’s comments betray a general bipartisan disinterest in engaging Israel’s conduct in Gaza on its own terms, preferring instead to complain about protesters, interrogate university presidents, and, apparently, muse about social media’s role in boosting pro-Palestinian activism,” wrote Ben Metzner at The New Republic. “As Israel moves closer to a catastrophic invasion of Rafah, having already banned Al Jazeera in the country, Romney and Blinken would be wise to consider whether TikTok is the real problem.”

Enterpreneur James Rosen-Birch added that “Mitt Romney flat-out asking Antony Blinken, in public, why the United States is not doing a better job manufacturing consent, is wild.”

On April 1, the Israeli parliament, dominated by the country’s far right parties, passed a law permitting the government to halt the broadcast of foreign channels in Israel “if the content is deemed to be a threat to the country’s security during the ongoing war.” Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi called Al Jazeera an “incitement channel” and a “mouthpiece of Hamas.” It was a ridiculous charge for anyone who actually watches the live stream of Al Jazeera English.

Carlos Martinez de la Serna, the New York-based director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said, “CPJ condemns the closure of Al-Jazeera’s office in Israel and the blocking of the channel’s websites. This move sets an extremely alarming precedent for restricting international media outlets working in Israel. The Israeli cabinet must allow Al-Jazeera and all international media outlets to operate freely in Israel, especially during wartime.”

The Israeli military has killed some 140 journalists in Gaza. Since it has sophisticated drone surveillance and facial recognition programs and other forms of electronic surveillance, Al Jazeera reports that some of the surviving journalists are convinced that their vehicles and convoys were deliberately targeted despite being clearly identified as “press.”

One of the corruption cases being pursued in Israeli courts against Netanyahu has to do with his pressuring an Israeli newspaper to give him favorable coverage by threatening that otherwise the late casino mogul Sheldon Adelson would flood the market with free newspapers, hurting the profits of Yedioth Ahronoth.

The following video clip won’t be seen by my readers in Israel because their government departed from democratic principles.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Israeli police raids Al Jazeera office after shutdown order, seizes equipment”

Banning foreign news channels and reporters is not a new thing in the Middle East, or the wider world, but it has usually been done by governments that the US denounces as autocratic. Israel has now joined their ranks as a censorship regime.

For instance, the US State Department says in a report critical of press censorship in Syria, “On July 8, the Ministry of Information canceled the accreditation of the BBC in areas under its control following the outlet’s June 27 investigative report into the regime’s involvement in the captagon drug trade, according to local media.” The report adds, “citizens widely used satellite dishes, although the regime jammed some foreign Arabic-language networks.”

The cancellation of Al Jazeera’s accreditation by the Netanyahu regime and its jamming of Al Jazeera in Israel would be hard to distinguish from the press policies of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.

As for Iran, the State Department says, “The government jammed satellite broadcasts, a continuous practice since at least 2003.” It adds, “The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance severely limited and controlled foreign media organizations’ ability to work in the country. The ministry required foreign correspondents to provide detailed travel plans and topics of proposed stories before granting visas, limited their ability to travel within the country, and forced them to work with a local ‘minder.'”

State slams Iran, saying, “Authorities routinely cited laws on protecting national security to arrest or punish critics of the government and human rights defenders or to deter criticism of government policies or officials.”

Yet the April 1 law passed by the Israeli Knesset appeals to exactly the same grounds, “protecting national security,” to permit expulsion and banning of foreign correspondents and channels.

That is, there may be a difference in degree between Iran’s press censorship and Israel’s but there is not a difference in kind.

The grounds cited by Israel for closing down foreign news operations in the country are not different from those used by Vladimir Putin’s Russia. The State Department notes, “Expanding the definition of sensitive data, the FSB published in 2021 a list of topics that could be ‘used against the security’ of Russia, including information and assessments of the country’s military, security sector, and space agency, Roscosmos. Individuals who collected information in the specified categories could be subject to designation as ‘foreign agents.'”

Just as the government headed by Netanyhau, which had directed funding to Hamas for years before the October 7 attack, snarkily implied that Al Jazeera was overly friendly with Hamas, so the Russians use xenophobic grounds to censor, according to the State Department: “During the year authorities used a law banning cooperation with ‘undesirable foreign organizations’ to restrict free expression. For example, in January, the independent Russian news outlet Meduza was added to the list of ‘undesirable organizations.'”

Russia has forced many journalists to register as “foreign agents:” “The law allowed authorities to label individuals (both Russian and foreign citizens) as ‘foreign agents’ if they disseminated foreign media to an unspecified number of persons, receive funding from abroad, or, after a 2020 amendment, ‘carry out the interests of a foreign state.’ The amendment specified that a foreign journalist ‘performing the functions of a foreign agent, incompatible with his professional activities as a journalist’ could be declared an individual ‘foreign agent.’ They had to register and mark their content as produced by a ‘foreign agent.'”

This is clearly how Netanyahu views Al Jazeera journalists.

This fear of international journalism also afflicts the government of Kim Jong Un in North Korea, of which State observes, “The government prohibited ordinary citizens from listening to foreign media broadcasts and subjected violators to severe punishment. Radios and television sets, unless altered, received only domestic programming . . .The government attempted to jam all foreign radio broadcasts.”