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The NYT Finds US Complicity in Genocide Unremarkable
By refusing to cover a new U.S. shipment of vast quantities of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel, the Times gave a boost to the process of normalizing the slaughter in Gaza, as if this was unnewsworthy.
Apr 02, 2024
When The Washington Post revealed Friday afternoon that “the Biden administration in recent days quietly authorized the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel,” a lot of people cared. Readers of the story posted more than 10,000 comments on its webpage. A leading progressive site for breaking news, Common Dreams, quickly followed up with coverage under a headline that began with the word “obscene.” Responses on social media were swift and strong; a tweet about the Post scoop from our team at RootsAction received more than 600,000 views.
But at The New York Times—the nation’s purported newspaper of record—one day after another went by as the editors determined that the story about the massive new transfer of weaponry to Israel wasn’t worth reporting on at all. Yet it was solid. A Reutersdispatch said that two sources “confirmed” the Post’s report.
By omission, The New York Times gave a boost to a process of normalizing the slaughter in Gaza, as if shipping vast quantities of 2,000-pound bombs for use to take the lives of Palestinian civilians is unremarkable and unnewsworthy. Just another day at the genocide office.
The refusal of the Times to cover the story after it broke was journalistic malpractice, helping to make it little more than a fleeting one-day story instead of the subject of focused national discourse that it should have been.
The intentional failure of the Times to report the profoundly important news of the huge new shipments of armaments was a tacit signal that the flagrant willingness of Uncle Sam to talk out of both sides of his mouth—assisting with further carnage on a soul-corrupting scale—was no big deal.
At the end of the weekend, I sent an email to the Times managing editor Carolyn Ryan and asked why the newspaper wasn’t covering the story at all. She passed my question along to the Times public-relations manager, who provided only a non-answer on Monday night. Here it is in full: “The New York Times has invested more than any other U.S. newspaper over the past decade to help readers understand the complexities of the Israel-Hamas conflict. We continue to report on events as they develop, both in the region, internationally, and within the U.S. government.”
The complete evasion, laced with self-puffery, reflected the arrogance of media power from the single most influential and far-reaching news outlet in the United States. Rather than amplify the crucial story into the nation’s media echo chamber, the Times opted to quash it.
The saying that “justice delayed is justice denied” has a parallel for news media and war—journalism delayed is journalism denied. The refusal of the Times to cover the story after it broke was journalistic malpractice, helping to make it little more than a fleeting one-day story instead of the subject of focused national discourse that it should have been.
The Post article had laid bare, at a pivotal historic moment, a lethal contradiction within the behavior of top U.S. government official—directly aiding and abetting Israel’s methodical killing of civilians in Gaza while spouting facile platitudes about them.
In its lead sentence, the piece said that the White House had okayed the new shipments of bombs and jets “despite Washington’s concerns about an anticipated military offensive in southern Gaza that could threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians.” The juxtaposition showed just how phony “Washington’s concerns” actually are.
“The new arms packages include more than 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs and 500 MK82 500-pound bombs, according to Pentagon and State Department officials familiar with the matter,” the Post reported. “The 2,000-pound bombs have been linked to previous mass-casualty events throughout Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.”
The piece quoted an unidentified White House official who, in effect, underscored that all the talk of President Joe Biden’s supposed distress about the ongoing massacres of civilians in Gaza has been a cruel exercise in PR smoke-blowing: “We have continued to support Israel’s right to defend itself. Conditioning aid has not been our policy.”
Translation: We continue to support, with massive military aid, Israel’s prerogative to keep slaughtering Palestinian civilians.
If the Times editors need to grasp just how significantly horrific the 2,000-pound bombs now en route to Israel really are, they could read some reporting from their own newspaper. In December, it described those bombs as “one of the most destructive munitions in Western military arsenals”—a weapon that “unleashes a blast wave and metal fragments thousands of feet in every direction.” Back then, the Times indicated that “Israel used these munitions in the area it designated safe for civilians at least 200 times,” and those 2,000-pound bombs were “a pervasive threat to civilians seeking safety across south Gaza.”
It’s a safe bet that the new transfer of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel would seem more newsworthy to the editors of The New York Times if the lives of their loved ones were at stake.
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Senators Demand Tesla Recalls After 'Alarming' Reuters Reporting
"Tesla must stop blaming customers and recall their malfunctioning vehicles," said Sen. Ed Markey.
Dec 27, 2023
A week after Reutersrevealed that "Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective," the news agency exclusively reported Wednesday that a pair of U.S. senators wrote to billionaire CEO Elon Musk to demand vehicle recalls.
Citing the "alarming" journalistic investigation into the electric vehicle (EV) company, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) and Ed Markey (D-Mass.) expressed "extreme concern following recent reporting about Tesla's knowledge of safety flaws in its vehicles and concealment of the causes of these flaws from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration," or NHTSA.
Based on thousands of internal documents from 2016-22 as well as interviews with over 20 customers and nine former Tesla managers or service technicians, Reuters found that tens of thousands of buyers "have experienced premature failures of suspension or steering parts" and "the chronic failures, many in relatively new vehicles, date back at least seven years and stretch across Tesla's model lineup and across the globe."
Reuters reported that the company, which sells directly to customers and controls many of its service centers, "has denied some of the suspension and steering problems in statements to U.S. regulators and the public—and, according to Tesla records, sought to shift some of the resulting repair costs to customers" with language like "driver abuse" and "vehicle misuse."
Blumenthal and Markey—who have previously written to Musk, the world's richest person, about issues at Tesla and publicly shared concerns about the company—wrote that "we are disturbed that you would blame your customers for these failures."
"It is unacceptable that Tesla would not only attempt to shift the responsibility for the substandard quality of its vehicles to the people purchasing them, but also make that same flawed argument to NHTSA," the pair added, calling on Musk to correct "apparent false and misleading representations" made to the federal agency.
While the CEO and company did not respond to Reuters' requests for comment about the initial findings or the senators' letter, the news agency noted that "Tesla's handling of suspension and steering complaints reflects a pattern across Musk's corporate empire of dismissing concerns about safety or other harms raised by customers, workers, and others as he rushes to roll out new products or expand sales."
Musk's other business ventures include Neuralink, OpenAI, SpaceX, the Boring Company, and X, formerly Twitter.
The senators' recall demand comes as both the Norwegian Public Roads Administration and the Swedish Transport Agency investigate issues with Tesla vehicles. Tesla is also facing further trouble across Scandinavia: Unoinized workers in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden have made clear they won't help the company circumvent a work stoppage launched in October by Swedish service center mechanics.
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Groups Demand Probe of 'Apparently Deliberate' IDF Attack on Journalists
Amnesty International said that the October 13 Israeli tank strike that killed Issam Abdallah and blew the legs off Christina Assi was "likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime."
Dec 07, 2023
Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on Thursday called for an official investigation of a deadly Israeli attack on a group of journalists, which HRW called "apparently deliberate" and a likely "war crime."
HRW, Amnesty, Reuters, and Agence France-Presse on Thursday all published their own separate investigations into the October 13 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) attack that killed 37-year-old Lebanese Reuters videographer Issam Abdallah and wounded half a dozen other journalists who were covering cross-border clashes between Israeli and Hezbollah troops near the village of Alma al-Shaab in southern Lebanon.
"This is not the first time that Israeli forces have apparently deliberately attacked journalists, with deadly and devastating results."
Reutersdetermined that an Israeli tank crew "fired two shells in quick succession" at the journalists, who HRW said were "clearly identifiable as members of the media, and had been stationary for at least 75 minutes." HRW "found no evidence of a military target near the journalists' location."
"This is not the first time that Israeli forces have apparently deliberately attacked journalists, with deadly and devastating results," HRW Lebanon researcher Ramzi Kaiss said in a statement. "Those responsible need to be held to account, and it needs to be made clear that journalists and other civilians are not lawful targets."
Amnesty International, meanwhile, asserted that the IDF strike was "likely a direct attack on civilians that must be investigated as a war crime."
The organization said it "verified over 100 videos and photographs, analyzed weapons fragments from the site, and interviewed nine witnesses. The findings indicate that the group was visibly identifiable as journalists and that the Israeli military knew or should have known that they were civilians yet attacked them anyway in two separate strikes 37 seconds apart."
Aya Majzoub, Amnesty's deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, noted that "direct attacks on civilians and indiscriminate attacks are absolutely prohibited by international humanitarian law and can amount to war crimes."
"Those responsible for Issam Abdallah's unlawful killing and the injuring of six other journalists must be held accountable," Majzoub added. "No journalist should ever be targeted or killed simply for carrying out their work. Israel must not be allowed to kill and attack journalists with impunity. There must be an independent and impartial investigation into this deadly attack."
According to HRW:
The journalists interviewed said that the first munition struck Reuters journalist Issam Abdallah and a short concrete wall, killing him instantly and badly injuring an Agence France-Presse photojournalist, Christina Assi. Thirty-seven seconds later, another attack destroyed the car belonging to Al Jazeera, igniting it in flames, and injuring six journalists, including Carmen Joukhadar and Elie Brakhya from Al Jazeera, Dylan Collins and Christina Assi from AFP, and Thaer al-Sudani and Maher Nazeh from Reuters.
Brakhya, an Al Jazeera cameraman, told Amnesty: "I was looking at Issam when we heard the [first] explosion. I saw Issam's body fly, with the glow and the heat behind his back… [I] ran up the hill, heard Christina shouting 'I can't feel my legs,' ran back to where she was, saw Dylan searching for the tourniquet."
Collins, an American deputy editor at Al Jazeera English, said that "as soon as I turned around, I heard Christina's voice saying, 'Oh my God!' I say, 'You're okay.' I ran to her directly and I see that her legs are blown off at the kneecap."
The second Israeli shell exploded as Collins tried to tie a tourniquet around Assi's legs.
"When the second blast hit, I was stunned and dizzy, but in my blurry memory, I remember Issam's leg falling in front of me, I remember looking up and seeing Carmen by the car, her face is black and she is walking like a zombie," he recalled. "Her entire back is covered in shrapnel."
The day after the attacks, IDF spokesperson Richard Hecht said that the Israeli military was "very sorry for the journalist's death."
Presented with Reuters' findings, Hecht later said that "we don't target journalists."
However, Kaiss argued that "the evidence strongly suggests that Israeli forces knew or should have known that the group that they were attacking were journalists."
"This was an unlawful and apparently deliberate attack on a very visible group of journalists," he added.
"They don't want us to see the truth. That's why they're taking out the journalists."
Numerous international observers accused Israeli forces of intentionally targeting journalists in an effort to prevent them from reporting the truth about what many critics call a genocidal war against Palestinians.
"I believe that it is in the military strategy of Israel to kill journalists so that they kill the truth," Lebanese Information Minister Ziad Makary told Reuters.
U.S. journalist Abby Martin toldMiddle East Eye Wednesday that Israel is "killing the truth."
"They don't want us to see the truth," she said. "That's why they're taking out the journalists."
The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) responded to the rights groups' and media probes into the October 13 attacks by demanding an "immediate, independent, and transparent investigation that holds the perpetrators to account."
CPJ cited its May 2023 report, "which showed a pattern of lethal force by the Israel Defense Forces that left 20 journalists dead over the last 22 years. No one was ever held accountable."
According to the report, "The majority of the 20 journalists killed—at least 13—were clearly identified as members of the media or were inside vehicles with press insignia at the time of their deaths."
Since the IDF launched its war on Gaza following the October 7 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, CPJ has documented the killing of at least 63 media professionals, including 56 Palestinians, three Lebanese, and four Israelis.
"CPJ emphasizes that journalists are civilians doing important work during times of crisis and must not be targeted by warring parties," said Sherif Mansour, the group's Middle East and North Africa program coordinator.
Last month, after also concluding that the group in Lebanon was "deliberately targeted," the international press freedom group Reporters Without Borders called on the International Criminal Court to formally investigate the deaths of all journalists killed by Israeli troops and Hamas militants during the war.
"Journalists across the region are making great sacrifices to cover this heartbreaking conflict. Those in Gaza, in particular, have paid, and continue to pay, an unprecedented toll and face exponential threats," Mansour said. "Many have lost colleagues, families, and media facilities, and have fled seeking safety when there is no safe haven or exit."
Nazeh, a Reuters camera operator who survived the October 13 attack, demanded justice for his slain colleague Abdallah.
"We can't bring Issam back. Issam is gone," he said. "But he hears us, he sees us, and he's waiting for us to do something for him... to expose who hit him, who killed him, to the world."
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