Media Watch

Violence has always been a useful term for governments and their allied establishment figures in media and punditry. Key to that utility is a very specialized use of the term as a descriptor for actions that don’t originate with the establishment or authorities. Police, armies, presidents and city administrators do not engage in violence. They use strategies, protocols, plans of action, deployments, operations and strikes. The people that are injured and die in those acts are not actively killed by violence. Rather, they suffer only in the passive voice.

In a few hours, Khader Adnan will enter his 56th day of hunger strike. As international solidarity grows, the international media’s silence on his case is deafening. Below is how Al Jazeera English reacted to the simple question of “Why isn’t Khader Adnan getting more coverage?”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was quick to deny comments attributed to him that The New York Times and Haaretz are Israel’s greatest enemies.

Journalist Sam Husseini asks a Saudi prince a tough question and gets booted out of the National Press Club, showing the limits of what the “free” media are allowed to do in Washington

In a news segment broadcast Wednesday night by ABC 7 News in Chicago, reporter Chuck Goudie claims that there is “a vein of anti-Semitism flowing through the movement that has Jewish leaders concerned.” I and other activists have responded to this vile smear attack on the Occupy Wall Street movement, and the Palestine solidarity movement more generally.

Its possible that there is a name more well-known than Gilad Shalit this week, but not likely. For the last two days, media of all kinds have been tripping over themselves trying to describe, explain, hagiographize, and contextualize Shalit, who is to be released soon after a five year detention by Hamas in a prisoner swap.

In an article today on the Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange deal, The New York Times’ scandal-plagued Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner falsely blames an August attack from Egypt into Israeli-controlled territory near the Red Sea port of Eilat on Palestinians. Bronner writes:

Nicolas Kristof, the venerable New York Times columnist and champion of foreign policy liberalism, wrote a pretty middling article a couple of days ago, called “Is Israel its Own Worst Enemy?” Kristof has a sort of Groundhog Day dynamic with the Palestine-Israel conflict; every once in a while, he wakes up and rattles off an anguished column, mourning the radicals on both sides that make “p

Why is budget airline promoting Tel Aviv as world’s gayest city?

Owner of a tabloid that has attacked Palestinian leader Raed Salah, the British pornographer Richard Desmond used his charitable body to donate tens of thousands of pounds to the CST and other pro-Israel groups.