Wednesday, May 16, 2018

Free Speech: Myth vs Reality

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) recently acknowledged the practice of hiring journalists vetted by MI5, the UK intelligence agency, to keep out the "subversives".

The CIA is believed to have driven American investigative reporter Gary Webb to suicide after he exposed the agency's use of drug deals to fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

American researcher Joseph Overton has described a spectrum from "more free" to "less free", known as the Overton Window, with regard to the US government intervention in the media.

Here's how American philosopher Noam Chomsky has explained the US establishment's media management strategy:  “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."

It seems that "free speech" in the West is really not so free.


Courtesy David Icke
MI5 Vetting of BBC Staff:

The BBC recently acknowledged its long relationship with the British security establishment that started in 1933. When questions were asked about it, the BBC policy was to "keep head down and stonewall all questions".

Vetting by the MI5 applied to  all new BBC staff except "personnel such as charwomen". Since the start of the policy, journalists were always subject to vetting, but a "review in 1983 resulted in about 2,000 posts being removed from the list - including some junior editorial jobs - bringing the total number down to 3,705".

When asked whether any staff are vetted these days, a BBC spokesperson responded:"We do not comment on security issue".

CIA and Media:

In the course of investigating US CIA's support of Contra rebels in Nicaragua,  American journalist Gary Webb discovered a drug connection. He found that the CIA was trafficking drugs sold in poor African American neighborhoods to fund Contra rebels war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government in 1980s. Webb published his findings in a 3-part report "The Dark Alliance" carried by his employer San Jose Mercury News.

Webb's report provoked outrage among African Americans for the harm it did by promoting drug addiction in their poor neighborhoods. It became a public relations nightmare for the CIA.

The CIA responded to the crisis by using what Nicholas Dujmovic, a CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer described as “a ground base of already productive relations with journalists.”  The CIA top brass was overjoyed to see the nation's largest newspapers destroy the reputation of Gary Webb that eventually led to his suicide.

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, famous for his reporting on Watergate along with Bob Woodward, investigated CIA's use of the American media and wrote a piece describing "How Americas Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up". Here's what he said:

"Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were William Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), Henry Luce of Time Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of the New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the Louisville Courier‑Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company (ABC), the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), the Associated Press (AP),  United Press International (UPI), Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps‑Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald‑Tribune".

Overton Window:

American researcher Joseph P. Overton said that ideas may range a spectrum from "more free" to "less free" with regard to government intervention.  The mainstream media, particularly commercial media, tend to limit the public discourse within the range they define as permissible at any given time. This is done by designing editorial policies.

The Overton window is not static. It is guided by what is seen as vital national interest by the US national security establishment as we saw during the Cold War and subsequently in the "war on terror".

Social Media:

Social media have created new media management challenges for the western security establishment as we saw with Brexit and Trump victory in 2016. It's created an outrage that is likely to result in new social media regulations unless the likes of Facebook and Twitter agree to self-censorship.

There's so much pressure on major social media platforms that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was forced to acknowledge regulation as "inevitable".

"The internet is growing in importance around the world in people's lives and I think that it is inevitable that there will need to be some regulation," said Zuckerberg to a US Congress committee at a recent hearing.

The western security establishment will now make sure that the new social media platforms are tamed to stay within the "Overton Window" just like the legacy electronic and print media.

Summary:

Recent BBC acknowledgement of its staff vetting by British secret service and revelations of CIA's role in American media management have confirmed what American academic Noam Chomsky has been saying for a while:  “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."  There are now moves afoot to tame the new social media platform to stay within the "spectrum of acceptable opinion".

Related Links:

Haq's Musings

South Asia Investor Review

Is Money Free Speech?

Social Media Promote Tribalism

Social Media: Blessing or Curse For Pakistan?

Planted Stories in Media

Indian BJP Troll Farm

Kulbhushan Jadhav Caught in Balochistan

The Story of Pakistan's M8 Motorway

Pakistan-China-Russia vs India-Japan-US

Riaz Haq's Youtube Channel

24 comments:

Riaz Haq said...

BBC News - The story barely reported by #Indian #media. Deeply engrained bias towards the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (#BJP) within many of #India's leading media groups

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44280188#

It is a potential scandal that claims to strike at a key pillar of Indian democracy - the freedom of the press - yet it is barely being reported in the Indian media.

There's a simple reason for that: this alleged scandal involves many of the most powerful media institutions in the country.

A sting operation by a news organisation called Cobrapost claims to have revealed a deeply engrained bias towards the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) within many of India's leading media groups, as well as a willingness among some of the country's most senior media executives and journalists to take money in return for pushing a political agenda.

Cobrapost, a small but controversial outlet known for undercover stings, describes itself as a non-profit news organisation that believes too much journalism in India has been "trivialised". It has dubbed its story "Operation 136" - the figure is a reference to India's ranking in the 2017 World Press Freedom Index.

Their website says its recordings show that some of the country's leading news organisations are willing to "not only cause communal disharmony among citizens, but also tilt the electoral outcome in favour of a particular party"- and all in return for cash.

Undercover stings of this kind are notoriously unreliable. The footage can easily be taken out of context or edited to change the meaning of a conversation or misrepresent its real nature.

An undercover reporter from Cobrapost, Pushp Sharma, says he approached more than 25 of India's leading media organisations, offering them all a similar deal.

He claimed to represent a wealthy ashram - a Hindu monastery - which, he said, was willing to pay large amounts of money in the run up to next year's general election in an attempt to ensure the BJP, a Hindu nationalist party, remains in power.

Mr Sharma says he outlined a three-stage strategy his paymasters wanted to bankroll.

First, he proposed the media organisations promote what he describes as "soft Hindutva" - the idea that Hindu faith and values are the defining ideology of India. He suggested this could involve promoting the sayings of Lord Krishna or retelling stories from the Bhagvad Gita, the epic poem that is one of the most holy texts of Hinduism.

The next stage would involve attacks on the BJP's political rivals, particularly Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the main opposition Congress Party.

Finally, the plan was to move on to promoting incendiary speeches from some of hard-line proponents of Hindutva, including some divisive radical Hindu figures.

The idea of this stage of the operation, Mr Sharma explained to some of the executives, was to polarise voters in the hope that the BJP would benefit at the ballot box.

'Viral videos and jingles'
Amongst the media groups Cobrapost says it approached were giants like Bennett Coleman, the media empire that owns The Times of India - the largest selling English language newspaper not just in India, but in the world.

It also targeted the The New Indian Express, another large English language newspaper, and the India Today Group, which owns one of the country's most popular television news channels.

Hindi language newspapers and regional media groups were also approached.

Riaz Haq said...

Foreign Media Calls Out Indian Media’s Silence on Cobrapost Sting

https://www.thequint.com/news/india/foreign-media-on-cobrapost-sting

The ignominy of Indian mainstream media’s deafening silence around the Cobrapost sting ‘Operation 136’ , which sought to expose the alleged underbelly of India’s biggest media outlets, has caught the eye of many international media houses.

Though the operation and its claims have been refuted by the media firms who have allegedly been exposed, what has raised eyebrows is the Indian media’s coverage, or lack thereof, surrounding the sting operation.

The sting operation that targets 27 media outlets, including some of the country’s biggest, reveals the supposed willingness of these media outlets to run political and religious propaganda in favour of the ruling government in return for hefty financial gains.

Apart from The Indian Express, that reported the story in a hard hitting piece titled ‘Where Anything Goes’ , most of the mainstream media turned a blind eye towards the story.

This led to a number of international media outlets calling out the Indian media for having failed to highlight the failures within the fraternity.

Indian Press Seems Willing to Peddle Political Propaganda: Foreign Policy
Pamposh Raina’s report in Foreign Policy talks about the fact that if proven, the media of the world’s largest democracy, would be willing to be used as propaganda mouthpieces by religious and political parties to spread their agenda.

“Despite sting journalism’s controversial reputation, the exposé, if accurate, reveals the ease with which the Indian press seems willing to peddle a political agenda. And, if true, the videos are all the more troubling given that India’s history has repeatedly shown mixing religion and politics can lead to violent sectarian clashes,” Foreign Policy wrote.
Troubling Doubts over the Independence of Media in India: BBC
Meanwhile the BBC highlighted the troubling issues that plague the Indian media, especially the fact that press freedom rankings of the country is a matter of shame and that if these allegations are proven true, it only further solidifies the concerns of Indian media’s follies.

There is no question that the Cobrapost allegations need to be treated with healthy skepticism. But there is also no question that they raise potentially troubling doubts over the independence of the media in India, particularly when it is a year away from a general election.
BBC
Also Read: Cobrapost Sting: ‘Explain Your Position,’ Editors Guild Asks Media

Problematic Time for Indian Journalism: Al Jazeera
A report in the Al Jazeera underlined that it is a troubling time for Indian journalism. In their weekly programme ‘The Listening Post’ that examines and dissects the world media, Richard Gizbert talks about the conspicuous absence of the Cobrapost sting operation in the Indian media coverage.


The suspicion that Indian media outlets can be bought is not new. So for many, the Cobrapost sting simply confirmed what they had long suspected and did so at an already problematic time for Indian journalism. In the four years of the Narendra Modi government, polarisation across the media has grown more extreme; the voices more shrill.
Al Jazeera
If at all these allegations were to be proven true, it would be a damning moment for the Indian media, and would only further intensify the skepticism that one goes through while reading and watching news in the mainstream media.

(With inputs from Al Jazeera, BBC and Foreign Policy)

Riaz Haq said...

People Are Ridiculing Dawn Media Group's CEO Hameed Haroon After His Intense Interview With BBC

https://www.mangobaaz.com/hameed-haroon-ceo-of-dawn-is-being-ridiculed/

Hameed Haroon, the CEO of Dawn Media Group, is being ridiculed on social media for his interview with Stephen Sackur on BBC HARDtalk.


Haroon, went on air with Sackur to discuss the media in Pakistan, particularly his own company, and its role in the upcoming general elections.
Unfortunately, the interview turned sour when Hameed was unable to accurately answer a question in reference to Dawn’s alleged support and sympathy for the newly proclaimed ‘criminals,’ Nawaz and Maryam Sharif.

The interview was intense and Sackur put out some hard hitting questions at the media tycoon
Hameed and the credibility of the paper came under question, as the general public came to the consensus that the interview had turned into an ‘expose,’ showing Hameed and his Media group for all that they allegedly were.

Riaz Haq said...

Insulting Prophet #Muhammad (PBUH) not '#FreeSpeech', Europe's Court of Human Rights rules. Defaming the Prophet Muhammad exceeds the permissible limits of freedom of expression, ruled the #ECtHR, upholding an #Austrian court’s decision. #Blasphemy #Islam http://sabahdai.ly/OyLmdP

The decision by a seven-judge panel came as an Austrian national identified as E.S. by the court, had held seminars on Islam in 2008 and 2009 for the far-right Freedom Party (FPO) where she discussed the prophet's marriage to his wife Aisha, a child at the time, and implied that he was a pedophile.

An Austrian court convicted her of disparaging religious doctrines in 2011 and fined her 480 euros (548 dollars), a judgment that was upheld on two appeals.

Stating that the court had found that "the applicant's statements had been likely to arouse justified indignation in Muslims" and "amounted to a generalization without factual basis", the Strasbourg-based ECtHR said that the woman's comments could not be covered by the freedom of expression.

The court said it "found in particular that the domestic courts comprehensively assessed the wider context of the applicant's statements and carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria."

The statement also added that there had been no violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, covering freedom of expression. "Relying on Article 10 (freedom of expression), E.S. complained that the domestic courts failed to address the substance of the impugned statements in the light of her right to freedom of expression."

ES' statements "were not phrased in a neutral manner aimed at being an objective contribution to a public debate concerning child marriages," the ECtHR held, adding that the moderate fine imposed on her could not be considered disproportionate.

The Austrian courts had drawn a distinction between pedophilia and child marriage, which was also a common practice historically in European ruling families.

The ECtHR also underlined that it classified the 'impugned' statements as "an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam, which was capable of stirring up prejudice and putting at risk religious peace."

It noted that the Austrian courts had held that ES was making value judgments partly based on untrue facts and without regard to the historical context.

Religious beliefs must be subject to criticism and denial, the ECHR observed, but when statements about religions went beyond critical denial and were likely to incite religious intolerance, states could take proportionate restrictive measures, the court said.

Austria, a country of 8.8 million people, has roughly 600,000 Muslim inhabitants. Lately, it has emerged as the leader of Islamophobia among European countries. The coalition government, an alliance of conservatives and the far right, came to power soon after Europe's migration crisis on promises to prevent another influx and restrict benefits for new immigrants and refugees. In April, Austria's far-right Chancellor Sebastian Kurz threatened to close one of the biggest mosques in Vienna and urged municipal authorities to be stricter regarding state subsidies for Muslim organizations in the city.

Riaz Haq said...

Pakistan challenges credibility of BBC report
Government demands apology, removal of story alleging rights abuses by army
Islamuddin Sajid |
19.06.2019

https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/pakistan-challenges-credibility-of-bbc-report/1508352

akistan filed formal complaints Tuesday over a report published this month by U.K. state broadcaster BBC documenting alleged human rights abuses in the country’s tribal areas.

The Ministry of Information filed complaint letters with the British communications regulator and BBC raising questions over the authenticity of the story regarding Pakistan’s military.

On June 2, the BBC published a report on its website titled "Uncovering Pakistan's secret human rights abuses" which said tens of thousands of people have been killed during Pakistan’s long battle with militants as part of the post -9/11 war on terror and that many of them were tortured and murdered by soldiers and insurgents in Waziristan, a tribal district in northwestern Pakistan bordering Afghanistan.

"The story not only presented a fabricated theme but also violated journalistic ethos. The story also violates BBC's editorial policy by not incorporating the point of view of all stakeholders/citing credible sources/quoting authentic evidence etc.," the ministry said in its letter addressed to the BBC

It amounted to “indicting the State of Pakistan for so-called ‘secret human rights abuses’ without any cogent evidence”.

"The detailed analysis of its content reflects bias, spinning and angling of the facts. There are judgmental expressions in the story which are a clear violation of journalistic norms of impartiality and objectivity," said the ministry’s letter.

The government of Pakistan expects the matter to be looked into for appropriate action against the author and editorial board linked to the report.

Pakistan also demanded that the BBC remove the “defamatory and malicious” story and issue a clear-cut apology.

"We also expect the BBC authorities to ensure that in future, such fake stories specifically targeting Pakistan will not be disseminated," said the letter.

However, Pakistan also warned the BBC that Islamabad reserves the right to pursue all legal measures within the country and the United Kingdom if the BBC fails to retract the story and take action against its author.

A dossier accompanying the letter contained further analysis of the government’s complaints.

On June 4, Pakistan’s military also reacted to the BBC story.

"The story carries conjecturing implicating Pakistan’s Army without any proof,” Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), the media wing of Pakistan’s army, said in a statement.

"The story is a pack of lies and in violation of journalistic ethos," it added.

North Waziristan has been a battleground between the army and the Taliban since June 2014 following a full-scale military onslaught that has killed over 5,000 suspected militants, according to the military.

Over 700 soldiers have also lost their lives in landmine blasts and clashes with the Taliban during the period.

On March 28, the BBC apologized and agreed to pay damages to Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko over an incorrect report claiming a payment was made to extend a meeting between Poroshenko and U.S. President Donald Trump.

Riaz Haq said...

THE NEW YORK TIMES AND THE BBC VS. FACTS
17 COMMENTS APR 16 2015 BY EJAZ HAIDER

http://newsweekpakistan.com/the-new-york-times-and-the-bbc-vs-facts/


RECENT ARTICLES PUBLISHED BY THE LEADING NEWS ORGANIZATIONS REFLECT A BLATANT BIAS THAT IS DANGEROUS IN ITS DISHONESTY.
It would be laughable if the intent weren’t so obviously slanted and, therefore, perfidious.

Let’s begin with an April 6 editorial in The New York Times, titled “Nuclear Fears in South Asia.”

The term “South Asia” in the piece is misleading. The “agonized” piece is all about Pakistan. I did an exercise, a simple one. It’s called Ctrl-F! India comes up 13 times, Pakistan 17 times. Seems okay so far given the South Asia in the caption. Except, statistics, like appearances, can be deceptive. A closer reading throws up these lines where “India” appears in the editorial:

capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to any part of India.
whose only purpose is use on the battlefield in a war against India.
continuing obsession with India as the enemy.
especially since India’s nuclear arsenal, estimated at about 110 weapons, is growing more slowly.
Narendra Modi of India has made it clear that Pakistan can expect retaliation if Islamic militants carry out a terrorist attack in India, as happened with the 2008 bombing in Mumbai. But the latest major conflict was in 1999, and since then India, a vibrant democracy, has focused on becoming a regional economic and political power.
cannot match the size and sophistication of India’s conventional forces.
China, which considers Pakistan a close ally and India a potential threat…
This sample of 13 mentions of India in an editorial that deals with nuclear fears in “South Asia” should give readers a sense of the content and thrust of this piece. But wait. Let me give some examples by completing some of the sentences above!

Last month, Pakistan test-fired a ballistic missile that appears capable of carrying a nuclear warhead to any part of India.
And a senior adviser, Khalid Ahmed Kidwai, reaffirmed Pakistan’s determination to continue developing short-range tactical nuclear weapons whose only purpose is use on the battlefield in a war against India.
These investments reflect the Pakistani Army’s continuing obsession with India as the enemy…
Pakistan now has an arsenal of as many as 120 nuclear weapons and is expected to triple that in a decade. An increase of that size makes no sense, especially since India’s nuclear arsenal, estimated at about 110 weapons, is growing more slowly.
Even more troubling, the Pakistani Army has become increasingly dependent on the nuclear arsenal because Pakistan cannot match the size and sophistication of India’s conventional forces.
To put things in perspective, the editorial opens thus: “The world’s attention has rightly been riveted on negotiations aimed at curbing Iran’s nuclear program. If and when that deal is made final, America and the other major powers that worked on it—China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany—should turn their attention to South Asia, a troubled region with growing nuclear risks of its own.

“Pakistan, with the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal, is unquestionably the biggest concern, one reinforced by several recent developments…”

As if on cue, the BBC’s Jawad Iqbal, identified as “Analysis and insight editor” published a piece on April 14, titled “Nuclear tensions rising in South Asia.” While those of us who deal with these matters haven’t seen any indication of said rising tensions—quite the contrary, in fact—the BBC insight editor’s insights cannot be faulted by people in a former colony.

For some “inexplicable” reason, Iqbal also begins with the lamentation that “The time, attention and effort devoted to reaching a deal with Iran over its nuclear ambitions has unwittingly tended to obscure the growing dangers of nuclear proliferation elsewhere in the world.”

Riaz Haq said...

#India #Media Can’t Speak Truth to Power. Journalism is in trouble in “world’s largest democracy” #Modi #BJP #Hindutva #democracy #FreeSpeech – Foreign Policy

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/02/indias-media-cant-speak-truth-to-power-modi-bjp-journalism/

After an emphatic electoral victory in May, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi faces important challenges in his second term. Growth has slowed to a five-year low, with Modi’s own former top economic advisor publishing research in June that showed India’s GDP growth was likely overestimated by 2.5 percentage points. Unemployment is at its highest since the 1970s; hundreds of car dealerships have closed amid a shortage of liquidity in the country’s credit sector; and many promises from Modi’s first term remain unfulfilled, such as his proposals to launch sweeping infrastructure projects across the country.

But as Modi looks to address these issues, there’s one big problem for regular Indians: The media is no longer able to adequately hold the prime minister or his government to scrutiny. And in an era of fake news and low trust in the media, an enfeebled class of journalists could eventually lead to a weakening of the very democracy that defines modern India.


Riaz Haq said...

Modi government freezes ads placed in three Indian newspaper groups


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-media/modi-government-freezes-ads-placed-in-three-indian-newspaper-groups-idUSKCN1TT1RG

India’s government has cut off advertisements to at least three major newspaper groups in a move that executives and an opposition leader said was likely retaliation for unfavorable reports.

Critics have said that freedom of the press has been under attack since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government first took office in 2014 and journalists have complained of intimidation for writing critical stories.

Now the big newspaper groups, which have a combined monthly readership of more than 26 million, say they are being starved of government ads worth millions of rupees that began even before Modi was elected to power last month with a landslide mandate.

“There is a freeze,” an executive at Bennett, Coleman & Co that controls the Times of India and The Economic Times, among the country’s biggest English-language newspapers, said. “Could be (because of) some reports they were unhappy with,” the executive said, seeking anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Around 15% of the Times group’s advertising comes from the government, the executive said. The ads are mostly government tenders for contracts as well as publicizing government schemes.

The ABP Group, which publishes The Telegraph that has run reports questioning Modi’s record on everything from national security to unemployment, has seen a similar 15 percent drop in government advertisements for around six months, two company officials said.

“Once you don’t toe the government line in your editorial coverage and you write anything against the government, then obviously the only way they can penalize you (is) to choke your advertising supply,” the first ABP official said.

The second ABP official said that there had been no communication from the government, and the company was looking to other sources to plug the gap.

“Press freedom must be maintained and it will be maintained despite these things,” the official said. Both also sought anonymity.

Riaz Haq said...

Modi government freezes ads placed in three Indian newspaper groups


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-india-media/modi-government-freezes-ads-placed-in-three-indian-newspaper-groups-idUSKCN1TT1RG

India’s government has cut off advertisements to at least three major newspaper groups in a move that executives and an opposition leader said was likely retaliation for unfavorable reports.

Critics have said that freedom of the press has been under attack since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government first took office in 2014 and journalists have complained of intimidation for writing critical stories.

Now the big newspaper groups, which have a combined monthly readership of more than 26 million, say they are being starved of government ads worth millions of rupees that began even before Modi was elected to power last month with a landslide mandate.

“There is a freeze,” an executive at Bennett, Coleman & Co that controls the Times of India and The Economic Times, among the country’s biggest English-language newspapers, said. “Could be (because of) some reports they were unhappy with,” the executive said, seeking anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press.

Around 15% of the Times group’s advertising comes from the government, the executive said. The ads are mostly government tenders for contracts as well as publicizing government schemes.

The ABP Group, which publishes The Telegraph that has run reports questioning Modi’s record on everything from national security to unemployment, has seen a similar 15 percent drop in government advertisements for around six months, two company officials said.

“Once you don’t toe the government line in your editorial coverage and you write anything against the government, then obviously the only way they can penalize you (is) to choke your advertising supply,” the first ABP official said.

The second ABP official said that there had been no communication from the government, and the company was looking to other sources to plug the gap.

“Press freedom must be maintained and it will be maintained despite these things,” the official said. Both also sought anonymity.

Riaz Haq said...

Press Is Not Free Anymore in #Modi's #India. #Delhi pressurizes advertisers and shuts down TV channels to control and shape information citizens get. Apologetic calls from #advertisers have become so common that #NDTV executives are no longer surprised. https://nyti.ms/39yl1d3

The Media One anchorman Vinesh Kunhiraman went on air as usual on March 6, ready to tell the station’s five million viewers in India’s Kerala State about the death anniversary of a beloved comedian and the latest news on the coronavirus pandemic.

Just a few minutes into the broadcast, he saw the managing editor rush to the studio floor, gesturing wildly. “I realized something was not right,” Mr. Kunhiraman recalled.

The station’s uplink suddenly went dead. Mr. Kunhiraman’s image dissolved into a blue screen. A bland message told viewers there was no signal. “We regret the inconvenience,” it said.

But this was no technical difficulty. The station had been cut off by an order from India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The government decided to block the channel for 48 hours because it had covered February’s biggest news story — the mob attacks on Muslims in New Delhi that flared into broader unrest — in a way that seemed “critical toward Delhi Police and R.S.S.,” the order said.

The R.S.S. is a Hindu-nationalist social movement with close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party.

“It was shocking the central government took such a decision,” said R. Subhash, an editor at Media One. “It was an attack on the freedom of the press.”

India’s free press has played a crucial role in protecting this country’s democracy since its independence from Britain in 1947. But journalists here now feel under attack.

Since Mr. Modi came to power in 2014, they say, his government has tried to control the country’s news media, especially the airwaves, like no other prime minister in decades. Mr. Modi has shrewdly cultivated the media to build a cult of personality that portrays him as the nation’s selfless savior.

At the same time, senior government officials have pressed news outlets — berating editors, cutting off advertising, ordering tax investigations — to ignore the uglier side of his party’s campaign to transform India from a tolerant, religiously diverse country into an assertively Hindu one.

With the coronavirus pandemic, Mr. Modi has gotten more blatant in his attempt to control coverage and, as with other difficult stories, some Indian news executives seem willing to go along.

Right before he announced the world’s largest coronavirus lockdown, on 1.3 billion people, Mr. Modi met with top news executives and urged them to publish “inspiring and positive stories” about the government’s efforts. Then, after the lockdown stranded half a million migrant workers, with some dying along the highways, his lawyers persuaded the Supreme Court this week to order all media to “publish the official version” of coronavirus developments, although outlets are still allowed to carry independent reporting.

------------

The shutdown of Media One and another Kerala television station, Asianet News, in March was a new twist. Both stations broadcast in Malayalam, a local language spoken by less than 3 percent of Indians. And both channels had aired witness accounts that echoed what many other outlets aired during the violence in Delhi: that the police had done little to stop Hindu mobs as they rampaged against Muslims.

Riaz Haq said...

Kishore Mahbubani, author of "Has China Won?":

US media is insular

Major American newspapers and TV channels reinforce each other in US distortions about the world

Last 200 years of western domination is an aberration in terms of the long human history of the world. It is coming to an end.

Many American intellectuals and policymakers don't seen to understand that China does not do this.

https://youtu.be/E_CwYCIqEgg

When it comes to analyzing political systems, American analysts tend to veer toward a black-and-white view of the world: open or closed society, democratic or totalitarian society, liberal or authoritarian. Yet, even as we move away from an aberrant two-hundred-year period of Western domination of world history, we are also moving away from a black-and-white world. Societies in different parts of the world, including in China and Islamic societies, are going to work toward a different balance between liberty and order, between freedom and control, between discord and harmony. The Chinese thinkers were also once convinced that the only way to succeed was for China to replicate Western societies. This is why, at the moment of greatest despair for Chinese society, in the 1920s, many Chinese intellectuals said (like the Japanese reformers in the Meiji Restoration) that the only path ahead for China was to copy the West in all dimensions. The Chinese historian Chow Tse-tsung documents: “Lu [Xun] declared that the Chinese should live for themselves instead of for their ancestors. To learn modern science and Western knowledge was more important than to recite the Confucian classics. […] Rather than worship Confucius and Kuan Kung one should worship Darwin and Ibsen. Rather than sacrifice to the God of Pestilence and the Five Classes of Spirits, one should worship Apollo. […] Lu [Xun] was sincere from his realistic and utilitarian point of view; if the new was more useful than the old, he asked, in effect, why should one bother whether it was Chinese or foreign?”* One hundred years later, China no longer lies prostrate. It has stood up and become self-confident. After all the recent travails in both Europe and America, few in China believe that China’s destiny in the twenty-first century is to mimic the West. Instead, they believe China should follow its own road.

Riaz Haq said...

#Amnestyinternational slams #French claims of being champion of free-speech: "French government’s rhetoric on free speech is not enough to conceal its own shameless hypocrisy" #Macron #islamophobie
@TRTWorld https://www.trtworld.com/europe/amnesty-slams-french-claims-of-being-champion-of-free-speech-41462

While the right to express views that may be perceived as offending religious beliefs is strenuously defended, Muslims’ freedoms of expression and religion usually receive scant attention in France, says Amnesty International.

Amnesty International has said that the French government is not the champion of free speech that it likes to think it is.

"French government’s rhetoric on free speech is not enough to conceal its own shameless hypocrisy," the UK-based organisation said in its report published on Thursday.

"Freedom of expression means nothing unless it applies to everyone. The government’s free speech campaign should not be used for covering up the measures that put people at risk of human rights abuses including torture."

Samuel Paty's killing

The report said the way President Emmanuel Macron and his government responded to the killing of Samuel Paty, a French teacher who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad in a class, negates their claims of being supporters of free speech.

Riaz Haq said...

Noam Chomsky: "The primary element of social control is the strategy of distraction which is to divert public attention from important issues and changes determined by the political and economic elites, by the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information. distraction strategy is also essential to prevent the public interest in the essential knowledge in the area of the science, economics, psychology, neurobiology and cybernetics. “Maintaining public attention diverted away from the real social problems, captivated by matters of no real importance. Keep the public busy, busy, busy, no time to think, back to farm and other animals"(quote from text Silent Weapons for Quiet War ).

https://noam-chomsky.tumblr.com/post/13867896307/noam-chomsky-10-strategies-of-manipulation-by

https://twitter.com/haqsmusings/status/1372690269238222851?s=20

Mayraj F. said...

How American Journalism Became A Mouthpiece Of The Deep State
The intelligence community uses the media to manipulate the American people and pressure elected politicians.


https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/spies-journalists-and-info-ops-against-america/



Reporters joke that the easiest job in Washington is CIA spokesman. You need only listen carefully to questions, say, “No comment,” and head to happy hour. The joke, however, is on us. The reporters pretend to see only one side of the CIA, the passive hiding of information. They meanwhile profit from the other side of the equation, active information operations designed to influence events in America. It is 2021 and the CIA is running an op against the American people.
Leon Panetta, once director of CIA, explained bluntly that the agency influenced foreign media outlets ahead of elections in order to “change attitudes within the country.” The method was to “acquire media within a country or within a region that could very well be used for being able to deliver a specific message or work to influence those that may own elements of the media to be able to cooperate, work with you in delivering that message.” The CIA has been running such ops to influence foreign elections continuously since the end of WWII.

The goal is to control information as a tool of influence. Sometimes the control is very direct, operating the media outlet yourself. The problem is this is easily exposed, destroying credibility.

Riaz Haq said...

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They're Agents of It
News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw
Matt Taibbi May 11


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy

After the Capitol riots of January 6th, the War on Terror came home, and “domestic extremists” stepped into the role enemy combatants played before. George Bush once launched an all-out campaign to pacify any safe haven for trrrsts, promising to “smoke ‘em out of their holes.” The new campaign is aimed at stamping out areas for surveillance-proof communication, which CNN security analyst and former DHS official Juliette Kayyem described as any online network “that lets [domestic extremists] talk amongst themselves.”

Reporters pledged assistance, snooping for evidence of wrongness in digital rather than geographical “hidey holes.” We’ve seen The Guardian warning about the perils of podcasts, ProPublica arguing that Apple’s lax speech environment contributed to the January 6th riot, and reporters from The Verge and Vice and The New York Times listening in to Clubhouse chats in search of evidence of dangerous thought. In an inspired homage to the lunacy of the War on Terror years, a GQ writer even went on Twitter last week to chat with the author of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech about imploring the “authorities” to use the “Fire in a Crowded Theater” argument to shut down Fox News.

Multiple outlets announced plans to track “extremists” in either open or implied cooperation with authorities. Frontline, ProPublica, and Berkley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program used “high-precision digital forensics” to uncover “evidence” about the Boogaloo Bois, and the Huffington Post worked with the “sedition hunters” at the Twitter activist group “Deep State Dogs” to help identify a suspect later arrested for tasering a Capitol police officer. One of the Huffington Post stories, from February, not only spoke to a willingness of the press to work with law enforcement, but impatience with the slowness of official procedure compared to “sleuthing communities”:

The FBI wants photos of Capitol insurrections to go viral, and has published images of more than 200 suspects. But what happens when online sleuthing communities identify suspects and then see weeks go by without any signs of action…? There are hundreds of suspects, thousands of hours of video, hundreds of thousands of tips, and millions of pieces of evidence… the FBI’s bureaucracy isn’t necessarily designed to keep organized.

The Intercept already saw founding members Poitras and Greenwald depart, and shut down the aforementioned Snowden archive to, in their words, “focus on other editorial priorities” — parent company First Look Media soon after launched a partnership with “PassionFlix,” whose motto is, “Turning your favorite romance novels into movies and series.” Last week, they announced a new project in tune with current media trends:

Are there legitimate stories about people with racist or conspiratorial views who for instance shouldn’t be working in positions of authority, as cops or elected officials or military officers? Sure, and there’s a job for reporters in proving that out, especially if there’s a record of complaints or corruption to match. It gets a little weird if the newsworthiness standard is “person with a job has abhorrent private opinions,” but it’s not like it’s impossible that a legit story could be found in something like the Gab archive, especially if it involves a public figure.

Riaz Haq said...

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They're Agents of It
News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw
Matt Taibbi May 11


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy


But that depends on the media people involved having a coherent standard for outing subjects, which hasn’t always (or even often) been the case.

Here The Intercept is announcing it considers QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones “violent white supremacists” — they’re a lot of things, but “violent white supremacists”? In the first piece about “extremists” on Gab, reporter Micah Lee claimed to have found an account belonging to a little-known conservative youth figure; the man’s attorney later reached out to deny the account was his, leading to a correction. When asked about his process, Lee responded, sarcastically, that he “certainly wouldn't want to accidentally do investigative journalism about white supremacist domestic terrorists.” When asked how he defined a terrorist, and if he’d be naming public figures only, the sarcastic answer this time was, “Of course I won't be naming anyone. Racist white people must be defended at all costs.”

Greenwald left the organization among other things after an editor asked that he address the “disinformation issue” in a piece about Hunter Biden’s laptop, a reference to a claim made by 50 intelligence officers that the story had “the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” He found it inappropriate then for a publication with The Intercept’s history to be pushing an intelligence narrative, and the Gab project struck him in a similar way.

“The leap from disseminating CIA propaganda to doing the police work of security state agencies is a short one,” says Greenwald, “and with its statements about what they are doing with this Gab archive, The Intercept and its trite liberal managers in New York have now taken it.”

In a separate mailer, the Intercept — owned by Omidyar, whose net worth has risen from $11 billion just a few years ago to $22 billion now — complained that “while the right wing’s culture warriors will always be able to turn to the super-rich for financial resources, progressive organizations and independent news outlets are struggling for support.” As The Columbia Journalism Review reported a few years ago, the company has long struggled to attract enough outside funding to maintain its 501(c)3 status as a public charity, which may explain why an outlet owned by the world’s 81st richest person complains about a lack of access to “the super-rich” as it solicits donations from individuals.

When asked about the company’s public charity status, Intercept editor Betsy Reed said that because these and other questions were “filled with errors and more bad-faith distortions,” she would not be commenting.

It hasn’t escaped the notice of some current and former Intercept staffers that combing through the hacked private communications of ordinary people in an FBI-like hunt for “extremists” is more or less the exact opposite of the company’s original mission, which focused on the institutional abuses of the very counterintelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies they now seem anxious to aid.

“What a turnaround,” one former Intercept employee, who was there for the company’s early years, said last week. “The answer to white supremacy is not to bring the War on Terror home.”

“That a media outlet founded in order to battle mass surveillance of ordinary citizens and to safeguard privacy rights is now trolling through stolen digital data of private citizens in order to expose and punish them for thought crimes and ideological dissent is as grotesque as it is ironic,” says Greenwald.

The giveaway that these deviance hunts have little to do with holding the powerful to account is that they’re taking place as news outlets have given up even the pretense of interest in spy agency abuses.

Riaz Haq said...

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They're Agents of It
News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw
Matt Taibbi May 11


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy


Just last week, CNN explained that the Department of Homeland Security was thinking of pairing with non-governmental entities to conduct more aggressive surveillance of “potential domestic terrorists” than they would be legally allowed, by themselves:

The Department of Homeland Security is limited in how it can monitor citizens online without justification and is banned from activities like assuming false identities to gain access to private messaging apps used by extremist groups such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers…

The plan being discussed inside DHS, according to multiple sources, would, in effect, allow the department to circumvent those limits.

CNN added that if the public-private surveillance partnership went through, the “DHS could produce information that would likely be beneficial to both it and the FBI, which can't monitor US citizens in this way without first getting a warrant or having the pretext of an ongoing investigation.” They added: “The CIA and NSA are also limited on collecting intelligence domestically.”

News that the government is considering using private citizens to help it conduct what amount to vigilante intelligence operations for the DHS, FBI, CIA, and NSA — an end-run around once-cherished liberal values like the exclusionary rule — inspired almost no reaction in the op-ed pages of ostensibly liberal outlets. The perceived targets are white supremacists, as unsympathetic as al-Qaeda once was. Who cares?

Just last week it was announced the FBI had been caught, again, in abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Also censured by the FISA court in 2011, 2016, and 2018, the Bureau was busted for “widespread” use of an NSA-managed surveillance tool meant for foreign cases only, using FISA to investigate “health care fraud, transnational organized crime, violent gangs, domestic terrorism, public corruption, and bribery.” The declassified report also worried the NSA might be passing to the FBI intercepts of attorney-client conversations, not that anyone in the press cares about that principle anymore, either. Except for one Fox story about Jim Jordan complaining, editorialists mostly took a pass on the FISC news.

All of this is taking place as a slew of War on Terror programs are being retooled for domestic use. A month ago, the New York Times casually reported that “The White House is also discussing… executive orders to update the criteria of terrorism watch lists to potentially include more homegrown extremists.”

Politico also reported the DHS was considering “analyzing the travel patterns” of right-wing suspects, expanding the No Fly List to include “domestic extremists,” and stopping such targets at customs, where officials may “search their phones and laptops” before allowing them back in-country (I know of at least one not-at-all-conservative African-American to whom this has already happened).

Vigilante press efforts at outing “domestic extremists” will function as an auxiliary watch list. Do we need help remembering how the last version worked out? Over 1.1 million names were entered on a list that was shared with 1,400 private groups, from hospitals to universities to prospective employers, resulting in people losing jobs, being denied banking services, having travel restricted, and experiencing all sorts of other difficulties.

The related No-Fly List, Kill List, and other suspect databases were fraught with similar problems, all stemming from the same issue: a lack of procedural oversight, combined with the absence of any requirement that targets commit a crime or be reasonably suspected of planning a crime before they were put on lists.

Riaz Haq said...

TUCKER CARLSON GOES FULL 1/6 TRUTHER IN NEW FOX DOC
The Fox News star came under fire for framing the Trump-incited Capitol attack as a false flag operation, with colleague Geraldo Rivera calling “bullshit” and Liz Cheney urging Rupert Murdoch to step in.
BY CALEB ECARMA

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/tucker-carlson-january-6-truther

“The helicopters have left Afghanistan, and now they’ve landed here at home.” While discussing the three-part series on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox’s most popular host said that he believes “it answers a lot of the remaining questions” regarding the Capitol riot. “Our conclusion? The U.S. government has in fact launched a new war on terror. But it’s not against al-Qaida, it’s against American citizens,” he added.

On this week’s edition of Carlson’s Fox Nation program, he went as far to say that “you can see why the people who showed up in Washington on January 6 were mad,” and in September, he said that “the vast majority of people inside the Capitol on January 6 were peaceful. They were not insurrectionists, they shouldn’t have been there. They weren’t trying to overthrow the government. That’s a total crock.” Carlson’s remarks echo those of Republican lawmakers who have tried to downplay the deadly attack perpetrated by Trump’s supporters and fueled by his lies—with one congressman even characterizing the riot as a “normal tourist visit.”

In an interview with The New York Times, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera criticized his colleague’s new project. “Tucker’s wonderful, he’s provocative, he’s original, but—man oh man. There are some things that you say that are more inflammatory and outrageous and uncorroborated,” he said. “I worry that—and I’m probably going to get in trouble for this—but I’m wondering how much is done to provoke, rather than illuminate.” He continued: “Messing around with January 6 stuff…. The record to me is pretty damn clear, that there was a riot that was incited and encouraged and unleashed by Donald Trump.” When asked whether or not he would advise the network against airing Carlson’s series, Rivera declined, saying, “That’s not my job. He’s my colleague. He’s my family. Sometimes you have to speak out about your family.” Though Rivera was willing to call “bullshit” on Carlson’s false flag claims in a Thursday-morning tweet.

Fox News did not respond for comment on criticism of Carlson’s series, which was flowing on Twitter.

Riaz Haq said...

NY Times's Review of "Legacy of Ashes" by Time Weiner:

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/review/Thomas-t.html

The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.


Tim Weiner’s engrossing, comprehensive “Legacy of Ashes” is a litany of failure, from the C.I.A.’s early days, when hundreds of agents were dropped behind the Iron Curtain to be killed or doubled (almost without exception), to more recent humiliations, like George Tenet’s now infamous “slam dunk” line. Over the years, the agency threw around a lot of money and adopted a certain swagger. “We went all over the world and we did what we wanted,” said Al Ulmer, the C.I.A.’s Far East division chief in the 1950s. “God, we had fun.” But even their successes turned out to be failures. In 1963, the C.I.A. backed a coup to install the Baath Party in Iraq. “We came to power on a C.I.A. train,” said Ali Saleh Saadi, the Baath Party interior minister. One of the train’s passengers, Weiner notes, was a young assassin named Saddam Hussein. Weiner quotes Donald Gregg, a former C.I.A. station chief in South Korea, later the national security adviser to Vice President George H. W. Bush: “The record in Europe was bad. The record in Asia was bad. The agency had a terrible record in its early days — a great reputation and a terrible record.”

And yet the myth of the C.I.A. as an all-knowing, all-powerful spy agency persisted for years, not just in the minds of America’s enemies but in the imagination of many American television-watchers and moviegoers. Among those fooled, at least initially, were most modern presidents of the United States. The promise of a secret intelligence organization that could not only spy on America’s enemies but also influence events abroad, by sleight of hand and at relatively low cost, was just too alluring.

When presidents finally faced the reality that the agency was bumbling, they could be bitter. Reviewing the C.I.A.’s record after his two terms in office, Dwight Eisenhower told the director, Allen Dulles, “I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this.” He would “leave a legacy of ashes” for his successor. A fan of Ian Fleming’s spy stories, John F. Kennedy was shocked to be introduced to the man described by C.I.A. higher-ups as their James Bond — the fat, alcoholic, unstable William Harvey, who ran a botched attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro by hiring the Mafia. Ronald Reagan went along with the desire of his C.I.A. director, William Casey, to bring back the mythical glory days by “unleashing” the agency — and his presidency was badly undermined by the Iran-contra affair.

Riaz Haq said...

NY Times's Review of "Legacy of Ashes" by Time Weiner:

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/review/Thomas-t.html


In Weiner’s telling, a president trying to use the C.I.A. resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like Richard Helms, can’t resist telling presidents what they want to hear. To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms doctored a C.I.A. estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage — and for years thereafter, until the end of the cold war, the C.I.A. overstated the rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The C.I.A.’s bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-3, based on the deceits of dubious sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To justify the Johnson administration’s desire for a pro-war Congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials, it appears, were often the last to know. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Robert M. Gates, who is now the secretary of defense but at the time was the first President Bush’s deputy national security adviser, was at a family picnic. A friend of his wife’s joined the picnic and asked him, “What are you doing here?” Gates asked, “What are you talking about?” “The invasion,” she said. “What invasion?” he asked. A year earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, Milt Bearden, the leader of the C.I.A.’s Soviet division, was reduced to watching CNN and deflecting urgent calls from White House officials who wanted to know what the agency’s spies were saying. “It was hard to confess that there were no Soviet spies worth a damn — they all had been rounded up and killed, and no one at the C.I.A. knew why,” Weiner writes. (The American agents in Moscow had been betrayed by the C.I.A. mole Aldrich Ames.)


Weiner is not the first reporter to see that the C.I.A.’s golden era was an illusion. After the 1975 Church Committee hearings exposed the agency as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” various authors began to deconstruct the myth of the C.I.A., most notably Thomas Powers in “The Man Who Kept the Secrets.” But by using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on-the-record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of C.I.A. ineptitude. After following along Weiner’s march of folly, readers may wonder: Is an open democracy capable of building and sustaining an effective secret intelligence service? Maybe not. But with Islamic terrorists vowing to set off a nuclear device in an American city, there isn’t much choice but to keep on trying.

Riaz Haq said...

Dan Rather calls Sinclair news anchors reading the same script "propaganda" and "Orwellian"

https://www.primetimer.com/item/Dan-Rather-calls-Sinclair-news-anchors-reading-the-same-script-quot-propaganda-quot-and-quot-Orwellian-quot-qdSYXv

The former CBS News anchor was reacting to Deadspin's viral video, which has been viewed more than 10 million times in the past two days (between Twitter and YouTube). "News anchors looking into camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn't journalism," he tweeted. "It's propaganda. It's Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses." ALSO: One Sinclair-owned station said it rejected the announcement.

Riaz Haq said...

Politico’s new German owner has a ‘contrarian’ plan for American media
Mathias Döpfner has global ambitions for what he calls a more ‘nonpartisan’ kind of journalism — even as his own politics are hard to pin down
Image without a caption
By Sarah Ellison

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/09/06/mathias-dopfner-trump-email-axel-springer-politico/

While calling for political neutrality from his U.S. media properties, Döpfner comes from a tradition of European publishers who are very much at ease blending ideology with news. Axel Springer staff in Germany are required to sign a pledge committing to principles that include a disavowal of racism, sexism and political or religious extremism; but also support for a united Europe, Israeli statehood and a free-market economy.

--------

“These values are like a constitution,” he told the Wall Street Journal last year.

Last year, Döpfner ordered the Israeli flag be flown in solidarity at company headquarters for a week after several antisemitic outbursts at demonstrations in Germany that followed a deadly eruption of violence in Gaza. Some employees bristled, seeing it as taking sides in the fraught Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Döpfner responded sharply in a staff video call: “I’m being very frank with you: A person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here, after antisemitic demonstrations, should look for a new job.”

Riaz Haq said...

Politico’s New Owner Plans to Grow Staff, Launch Paywall
Axel Springer, whose $1 billion acquisition of Politico is expected to close next week, also eyes foreign-language editions

https://www.wsj.com/articles/politicos-new-owner-plans-to-grow-staff-launch-paywall-11634325249

BERLIN—Axel Springer SE plans to eventually put Politico’s content behind a paywall and immediately boost the political-news publisher’s head count by more than 10% once the German conglomerate’s $1 billion deal to buy the company closes, expected next week.

Axel Springer Chief Executive Mathias Döpfner said in an interview he expects to hire 100 people across the company’s management and editorial staff, which currently numbers 900 in the U.S. and Europe. He also laid out tentative plans for an international push—including intentions to publish in several different languages.

Mr. Döpfner said he plans to grow Politico’s footprint both in the U.S. and overseas by introducing new industry-focused products and services and by broadening the scope of coverage. He said he expects Politico’s main news offerings, now free, to go behind a paywall in the medium term.

He also said he expects Politico staffers to adhere to Axel Springer-wide guiding principles that have raised controversy at times at its German properties—though they won’t be required to sign a written commitment to the principles like employees in Germany. The principles include support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others.

“These values are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company,” Mr. Döpfner said. People with a fundamental problem with any of these principles “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly,” he said.

Mr. Döpfner said he expects Politico and Axel Springer’s other U.S. titles will embody his vision of unbiased, nonpartisan reporting, versus activist journalism, which, he said, is enhancing societal polarization in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Mr. Döpfner has led Axel Springer for almost two decades, taking over what at the time was a loss-making print publisher and turning it into a profitable, digital-first publishing giant. He has built up a personal stake in the company, owning more than 22% of its shares.

“I spent many years managing restructuring, cost-cutting, layoffs, digital transformation and creating a new corporate culture,” he said. “But now is the time to focus on growth and investment” in the U.S.

Launched in 2007, Politico reshaped Washington coverage with its blanket reporting on politics. That later paved the way for a move toward events and high-price subscription services—so-called verticals—centered on various industries.

Axel Springer owns the German newspapers Bild, Europe’s bestselling tabloid, and Die Welt, a center-right-leaning broadsheet, and currently operates in 40 countries and employs over 16,000 people across its portfolio of media and tech companies. The Politico deal, which The Wall Street Journal previously reported valued the company at about $1 billlon, rounded up a recent U.S. shopping spree. Axel Springer earlier purchased Business Insider, for about $500 million, and Morning Brew, a digital publisher that has focused largely on business.

Axel Springer is “step by step developing the U.S. into our most important market and engine of growth for digital publishing,” Mr. Döpfner said.

Axel Springer, he said, believes in anti-cyclical growth and has hired over 1,600 people during the worst period of the coronavirus pandemic. That approach, he said, will be applied to Politico and the other U.S. titles: “There will be no restructuring, no synergies, no mergers and no cost-cutting,” he said.

Axel Springer and Politico entered a joint venture in 2013 to set up Politico Europe, a Brussels-based news operation. It agreed to buy the whole European entity as part of the deal for Politico, announced in August. Politico’s newsrooms in the U.S. and Europe will remain separate, Mr. Döpfner said.

Riaz Haq said...

Prashant Bhushan
@pbhushan1
"Indian govt told Twitter to black out farmers protests&tweets by journalists critical of the govt. Threatened to shut Twitter down in India&raid the homes of Twitter employees, which they did. And India is supposed to be a democratic country!": Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter

https://twitter.com/pbhushan1/status/1668351603433168924?s=20