Democracy Dies in Darkness
The news that key legacy newspapers – the Washington Post and the LA Times – have crumbled under pressure from their billionaire owners (in WaPo’s case Jeff Bezos) and refused to publish an endorsement of either presidential candidate – has liberal America in distress. Always with an over-inflated view of its own greatness, always with a misty-eyed, watched-too-much-West-Wing view of the world, Liberal America is waking up to the reality that their editors have been bought and sold at their time of greatest need. With the unfortunate strapline for the Washington Post: “Democracy dies in darkness” – the latest news puts paid to the idea that America’s ‘institutions’ are in great shape to withstand the coming authoritarianism. They are not.
US institutions have already capitulated to the powers of the far-right, White Nationalism, systemic racism and new forms of fascism and misogyny. We don’t need to imagine some dystopian future.
By deciding not to editorialise, the Washington Post and the LA Times are violating rule 1 of Timothy Snyder’s warnings “On Tyranny.” 1. Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.
But if ‘democracy dies in the darkness’ – try it out in a warzone where guns and bullets not money and threats are killing journalists, not journalism.
Video from northern Gaza shows an Israeli tank firing at Kamal Adwan Hospital, one of the few remaining medical facilities operating in the north amid the Israeli army’s ground assault. pic.twitter.com/wnh56qz7L0
— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) October 24, 2024
From the Associate Press (AP) in Beirut we are told that “Israeli strikes have killed 38 people in Gaza and three journalists in Lebanon on Friday as growing worries about supply shortages in Gaza and international pressure for a cease-fire mounted.”
The deaths reported by Gaza health officials were the latest in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, where people have in recent days lined up for bread outside the city’s only bakery in operation.
Khan Younis
Israel has just killed three journalists in one attack in Lebanon, in violation of Article 79 of Additional Protocol (I) Geneva Conventions. This is after the week when the IDF effectively put a target on Al Jazeera journalists with smears and allegations against their independence.
We need to talk about the systematic attacks on journalists not because they have any more rights or worth than anyone else but because they are crucial to getting information out from a warzone and have become a desperate front of attack for the IDF in this last week. The assault on independent journalism has been relentless for some time. Still, it has intensified as the Israelis realised they were losing the war to the western world and that Al Jazeera and other groups were sharing the truth about the IDF operations.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) this week accused six Palestinian Al Jazeera journalists of being operatives in terror groups. In a post published on X on 23 October, the IDF labeled the journalists “Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists.”
The Al Jazeera Media Network has condemned the claims, stating it “categorically rejects the Israeli occupation forces’ portrayal of journalists as terrorists and denounces their use of fabricated evidence.”
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) and the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate has also condemned Israel’s strategy of slandering Gaza’s journalists, recognising threats posed to their lives by such accusations.
The Committee to Protect Journalists stated:
“The Israel-Gaza war has taken an unprecedented toll on Gazan journalists since Israel declared war on Hamas following its attack against Israel on October 7, 2023.
As of October 24, 2024, CPJ’s preliminary investigations showed at least 128 journalists and media workers were among the more than tens of thousands killed in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon since the war began, making it the deadliest period for journalists since CPJ began gathering data in 1992.”
The Jewish left-wing magazine Jewish Currents wrote: “Jewish Currents condemns Israel’s targeting of Palestinian journalists in the strongest terms, and calls upon every media institution in the United States to do the same. Here’s our statement on the recent Israeli threats against six Al Jazeera journalists reporting from Gaza.”
Jodie Ginsberg from the Committee to Protect Journalists spoke to Al Jazeera Inside Story about the Israeli pattern of smearing journalists as terrorists …
The Israelis are massively losing a propaganda war that is turning millions of people across the west against their own governments, against their own media, against their own arms companies and against their genocide.
It would be wrong to characterise this as solely the proviso of Al Jazeera and independent media. The IF propaganda is increasingly failing to cut through even mainstream media sources.
The Director of the Committee to Protect Journalists says the IDF documents claiming to prove the journalists are terrorists “don’t appear to be credible”https://t.co/E6TecLi0wS pic.twitter.com/sL8IqEL0gS
— Sky News (@SkyNews) October 24, 2024
If the Israeli propaganda machine is more crude – kill journalists – exclude them from witnessing – make their lives hell – threaten them – the US techniques are different. As I said only yesterday: “Under Kamala Harri’s watch, the US State department have overseen – through Matthew Miller (@StateDeptSpox) – a diatribe on genocide, a masterful example of contemporary disinformation and propaganda defending day-in-day-out the atrocities of the Israeli regime, of which they are basically now an extension.”
The Trump technique for a very long time has been from the Steve Bannon playbook: “swamp the zone” – in other words, flood the public discourse with so much disinformation and crap that journalists and commentators cannot make sense of anything because none of it means anything. It is an actual tactic.
For Americans waking up to the fragility of their democracy, coming-to to the realities of the crisis of media in western democracy, where you been?
You missed Succession on HBO? You missed Chomsky? You missed Orson Welle’s masterpiece? You missed the oligarchy rising? You missed the capture of broadcast media and the grip of the tech billionaires intruding on everyone’s lives? Where you been? Yeah Arendt’s right, no-believes anything any more.
Part of America still thinks it lives in the land of Gore Vidal and Bob Woodward when it lives in the world of Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon. Democracy is indeed dying in the darkness.
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Newspapers should critically analyse every candidate, but endorse no candidate.
Claire – why not?
If I were to critic ally analyse options for US election I would quickly come to a conclusion of at least do not vote for Trump. To then say I have no recommendation to make in such circumstances is just ridiculous.
I also think there may be times where options are less stark and not making a recommendation is also valid.
Theses papers have endorsed a candidate every time for decades. The issue isnt one candidate or another its the capitulation because of the billionaire owners politics that is the problem thereby crushing editorial independence
I am not sure about this regarding Bezos. Trump is no friend of Bezos and has repeatedly criticised him. Bezos has endorsed democrat politicians on several occasions and donated $100 million to the Obama foundation in 2021. He has shown support for an open border policy.
The better explanation for the Washington Post matter is that Bezos (and maybe the publisher Will Lewis more so) is running scared of Trump getting in, in a move some call ‘anticipatory obedience . . . already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian. . . . He [Bezos], it is argued, now suspects that Trump may win on 5 November and that he might take presidential-scale revenge on Bezos and Amazon’s business ventures’.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/oct/26/washington-post-stirs-up-fury-in-liberal-america-over-neutral-election-stance
Sorry, you’re right, I didn’t mean that Bezos is a Democrat, but as you argue (as do I) that it is capitulation for fear of retribution. This is a serious problem for US democracy, such as it is, and is a major problem in all western countries (including ours) where billionaires have hold of the press
As a friend of mine said the other day, we imagined fascism or at least heavy authoritarianism, would come in via the end of the state’s and their footsoldiers’ boots but it looks more likely it will get its big leg up by crazed billionaires a la Ian Fleming.
Niemand – I agree that this fence sitting is probably due to fear of upsetting Trump. While this is understandable when you look at how Trump threatens retribution on people who have, in his eyes, opposed or slighted him, it is still a form of moral cowardice. It also shows how Trump has already undermined democracy in USA even if he doesn’t become president again.
Well, I’m not sure what you think the golden age of USAmerican democracy was?
If the issue was not supporting an openly-genocidal US Presidential candidate, I’m not sure what the logic was in not endorsing a third candidate who wasn’t.
But what happens when USAmerican corporations are owned by foreigners, who seem to be buying up large swathes of this bankrupt nation?
Its all the Foreigners fault?
I never mentioned a Golden Age of anything, in fact I mocked that idea.
@Editor, I’m taking the position of Daniel Raphael that the USA has never been a functioning democracy; I just wondered where you thought the high point was, since you repeatedly write as if democracy existed there in a meaningful fashion. I mean, it’s also interesting to consider the views of the likes of David Graeber and David Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, which make the reasonable case that democracy was largely an alien implant to the European Enlightenment, and view our electoral contests as essentially ‘aristocratic’ (which is one reason why I think the Trump court is more like Richard II of England than 20thC fascism: openly kleptocratic and more interested in low-concentration-span conflicts than forever wars, entitlement and deposition).
My point about corporations was related to their legal standing in the USA (something touched upon briefly in the documentary Israelism now on Al Jazeera), not in terms of a worldwide conspiracy, but effectively as USAmerican corporations get bought up by investors (and sovereign funds) from other (often creditor) nations, their influence is likely to be less directed towards supporting the USAmerican military-industrial-securocrat complex. As for where your odd interpretation that I was ‘blaming foreigners’ for something comes from, only you can say. My understanding is that free inflow of capital is protected in the USA to an unusual extent (although conceivably this might change under another Trump administration).
https://www.commerce.gov/data-and-reports/reports/2024/10/foreign-direct-investment-united-states
Clandestine USAmerican operations worldwide have also required a web of funds, fronts and dummy corporations, which might struggle under a different economic climate. A lot of this depends on the US dollar as international currency, I suppose, the potential for stranded assets for many corporations, and whether a USAmerican administration wants to pick a trade war with China, say. Plus the other impacts of our global polycrisis.
As for foreign influence on USAmerican foreign policy, I think there are pretty clear examples of that.
I’m not arguing that there was a golden era of US democracy, far from it. There are still matters of degrees though and Trump’s ascendancy will be tangibly, objectively worse than what’s currently experienced. He has, for example said he would forcibly deport 11 million people and rails against the Enemy Within. Its perfectly possible to hold a critique of US democracy – as David Graeber’s analysis which I am most familiar with – and at the same time oppose fascist forces. These things aren’t in contradiction. I have published copious articles attacking US (and UK) imperialism and anti-democracy in action over several years.
Re: “The Dawn of Everything”
Unfortunately, that book lacks credibility and depth.
In fact “The Dawn of Everything” is a biased disingenuous account of human history (https://www.persuasion.community/p/a-flawed-history-of-humanity & https://offshootjournal.org/untenable-history/) that spreads fake hope (the authors of “The Dawn” claim human history has not “progressed” in stages, or linearly, and must not end in inequality and hierarchy as with our current system… so there’s hope for us now that it could get different/better again). As a result of this fake hope porn it has been widely praised. It conveniently serves the profoundly sick industrialized world of fakes and criminals. The book’s dishonest fake grandiose title shows already that this work is a FOR-PROFIT, instead a FOR-TRUTH, endeavour geared at the (ignorant gullible) masses.
Fact is human history since the dawn of agriculture has “progressed” in a linear stage (the “stuck” problem, see below), although not before that (https://www.focaalblog.com/2021/12/22/chris-knight-wrong-about-almost-everything ). This “progress” has been fundamentally destructive and is driven and dominated by “The 2 Married Pink Elephants In The Historical Room” (https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html) which the fake hope-giving authors of “The Dawn” entirely ignore naturally (no one can write a legitimate human history without understanding and acknowledging the nature of humans). And these two married pink elephants are the reason why we’ve been “stuck” in a destructive hierarchy and unequal 2-class system , and will be far into the foreseeable future (the “stuck” question — “the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ How did we end up in one single mode?” or “how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles” — [cited from their book] is the major question in “The Dawn” its authors never really answer, predictably).
Worse than that, the Dawn authors actually promote, push, propagandize, and rationalize in that book the unjust immoral exploitive criminal 2-class system that’s been predominant for millennia [https://nevermoremedia.substack.com/p/was-david-graeber-offered-a-deal]!
“All experts serve the state and the media and only in that way do they achieve their status. Every expert follows his master, for all former possibilities for independence have been gradually reduced to nil by present society’s mode of organization. The most useful expert, of course, is the one who can lie. With their different motives, those who need experts are falsifiers and fools. Whenever individuals lose the capacity to see things for themselves, the expert is there to offer an absolute reassurance.” —Guy Debord
A good example that one of the “expert” authors, Graeber, has no real idea on what world we’ve been living in and about the nature of humans is his last brief article on Covid where his ignorance shines bright already at the title of his article, “After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.” Apparently he doesn’t know that most people WANT to be asleep, and that they’ve been wanting that for thousands of years (and that’s not the only ignorant notion in the title) — see https://www.rolf-hefti.com/covid-19-coronavirus.html. Yet he (and his partner) is the sort of person who thinks he can teach you something authentically truthful about human history and whom you should be trusting along those terms. Ridiculous!
“The Dawn” is just another fantasy, or ideology, cloaked in a hue of cherry-picked “science,” served lucratively to the gullible ignorant public who craves myths and fairy tales.
“The evil, fake book of anthropology, “The Dawn of Everything,” … just so happened to be the most marketed anthropology book ever. Hmmmmm.” — Unknown
The IDF is today what the Waffen SS was in the late Thirties and Forties. There is no doubt that Hamas, Hezbollah etc are terrorist organisations. Of course Israel has the right to defend her borders and citizens. To kill Christians, children, newly born infants and thousands of defenceless citizens, who have been directed to ‘safe’ areas is not defence. It is genocide and unless the people of Lebanon throw out Hezbollah, they will suffer as has Gaza. Small wonder any independent journalist or camera person is being targeted.
Bill
Trump will win.
Superb. My only caveat is that the US has never been a democracy–not even close. Still, relative to what it is now and is plunging towards becoming, I can see why some kind of distinct should be made.
Agreed. Thanks.
Agreed – some people cannot see the wood (the threat of Trump) for the trees (unhappiness with USA foreign policy)!
Thanks Mike for this full examination of/protest against the systematic killing of independent journalists by the IDF: already 134 according to the CPJ. The NUJ and IFJ have been campaigning for these unlawful targeted murders to lead to sanctions against Israel and the NEC (of which I’m a member) will step up this effort at its next meeting in two weeks’ time.