Screened Realities and the Complicit Lens: Robin Andersen on Media Complicity in Gaza and Beyond

While the atrocities in Palestine and Gaza have been live-streamed by courageous on-the-ground journalists, American legacy media have operated in an entirely different reality. Dr. Andersen details how establishment journalism has actively abandoned baseline standards of accuracy and fairness to echo fabricated atrocity propaganda and shield the state of Israel from accountability.

In this interview, we break down the explicit mechanics of this media complicity:

The New York Times Bureau Bias: How the "paper of record" has historically staffed its Jerusalem bureau with known Zionists and activists whose families actively serve in the IDF. We discuss the biostructural compromise of the bureau physically operating out of a home stolen from a Palestinian family during the Nakba.

Leaked Style Guides & Directives: A look into the newsroom directives leaked to The Intercept that formally banned journalists from using core factual terms like "occupied territories," "refugee camps," "massacre," or "genocide".

Weaponized Passive Voice: How headlines use phrases like "aid-related deaths" or "explosions" to describe situations where Israeli soldiers actively shot starving civilians or bombed densely populated neighborhoods like Jabalia.

Billionaire Capture & Digital Suppression: The chilling effects of doxxing groups like the Canary Mission on university campuses, and the corporate takeover of networks like CBS by tech moguls implementing top-down Zionist editorial overrides.

Dr. Robin Andersen's book, The Complicit Lens, features an introduction by Rashid Khalidi and is available now directly from OR Books.

Like, subscribe, drop a comment, and protect your peace. To support independent, commercial-free media analysis, join our community on Patreon at patreon.com/varnvlog.

Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

Welcome And The Central Claim

C. Derick Varn 0:48

Hello, and welcome to Varmblog today. I am with Dr. Robin Anderson, who is an American media scholar, author, and professor emerata of communication and media studies at Fordham University. And we are looking at the military entertainment complex, as you've coined it, which I think is pretty accurate, and the current media environment. In specific the most recent manifestation of that, which is a US media coverage of Israel's genocide in Gaza, which you have now written a book about, which comes out on June 9th, which will be after I release this, but not far after I released this, called The Complicit Lens, US Media Coverage of Israel's Genocide in Gaza. And you have also done, you've served on the Board of Directors with FAIR. Are you still on the Board of Directors with Fair? I don't know. I am okay. And uh you've acted as a judge for Project Censored, and you've done, I'm familiar with your writings from all kinds of progressive and progressivist-ish pieces like Counterpunch, uh, Common Dreams, you know, that sort of thing. And I think it's a lot more common knowledge today than it was, say, 15-20 years ago when I first started following this, that the the coverage of events in Palestine and and Gaza both have been pretty biased in the American media. I think the average person to some decay, to some degree, knows that more than they used to. But why do you feel that it has intensified, even if that knowledge is more understood today?

SPEAKER_01 2:37

Well, maybe because the actions of the Israelis have intensified and are more extreme and blatant and just brutal and getting increasingly uh uh really straining our humanity and our even our imaginations at this point. The genocide in Gaza was live streamed, and the there were Palestinian journalists on the ground, and they told

Two Realities In Gaza Coverage

SPEAKER_01 3:09

us the truth about what was going on, and the alternative and independent organizations that that I write for that you named, they did a terrific job. And they they put it within the context, they gave us history, they they interviewed analysts and aid workers and all kinds of things. And on the other hand, almost as two different realities, we have this establishment media which followed Israeli talking points, framed the flame framed a genocide, calling it the Israeli Hamas war frequently. They took it out of its historical context, and they they repeated false and fabricated atrocity propaganda, and they they presented a very constructive diversion from what was actually happening and can steal what is happening in Gaza today.

C. Derick Varn 4:10

How much of this do you do you think is structural and inertia, and how much of it is active ideological complicity?

SPEAKER_01 4:21

I think with different outlets, it's probably slightly different. I do devote an entire chapter to the New York Times and the problems with its Jerusalem Bureau. You know, the New York Times is the paper of record, it's the agenda-setting newspaper, as is CNN as a as a legacy media. They're at both agenda setters. And the New York Times employs 7% of all the journalists in the U.S. I mean, they they employ 30,000 journalists. So with that much staff

New York Times Structural Complicity

SPEAKER_01 4:58

and research assistants and just literal power, you'd think they could have done a pretty good job. But I think with the case of the New York Times, it wasn't always that way. But I think in the in the 21st century, everything that's happened at the New York Times with who they chose to run their bureau in Jerusalem, who, what, what Palestinian journalists they fired when asked to by the Israeli lobby, you know, allowing outside influence to come into their editorial rooms. The way that they they hired activists and known Zionists whose children were often in the military as the as you know, reporters based in Israel and as the Bureau Chiefs. So they have no distance from the Israeli project. And and those people at the time pretty much admitted that. Jodi Redoran said that she went, uh the one of the bureau chiefs said that she first arrived in Jerusalem with a Zionist youth group, and that's why she came, became interested in it. David Brook, reporter, never a Bureau chief, had children in the in the Israeli military. Thomas Friedman, one of the bureau chiefs. He's the one who presided over the over the bureau's purchase of a house, the air, the heir over the house, it was on the second story, of a house that was that had been inhabited by a Palestinian BBC sports journalist. And they had to leave during the Nakbah. He and his family had to leave that house. And that's where they're located, in a house that the Israelis pushed the Palestinians out of. So that right there creates a kind of biostructural type of bias where it's completely at odds with one of the Palestinians' most important demands, and that is the right to return. So that those kinds of structural bias, and of course, at CNN and New York Times, they were telling their journalists what they could and couldn't say. And at CNN, they were putting it through the eyes of the IDF.

C. Derick Varn 7:17

So your work has highlighted a lot of newsroom directives that have been leaked, such as the house style guides that ban the use of the words genocide, massacre, or even occupied territories, which is wild. That that one surprised even me. Do you find these restrictions were driven primarily by bureaucraties and top-down management or external political lobbying, or was it internalized professional common sense amongst journalists themselves, or all of the above? And if so, which were the primary contributors?

SPEAKER_01 7:57

Well, I

Banned Words And Leaked Directives

SPEAKER_01 7:57

think it was all of the above. I think the least primary contributor was probably the journalists themselves, given that they are the ones who leaked the information to the intercept about how the how the editorial board was telling them what to say. So the, as you pointed out, the you know, occupied territories, refugee camps, you know, massacre, genocide, those words were you couldn't use them. So what that did to shape a pro-genocide, a pro-genocide uh frame was, as one journalist told the Intercept, when you take the occupation out of the equation of what's going on in the Middle East in this terrible conflict, you're you're taking out the core of the conflict, which is the occupation. By October 7th, we knew that the occupation was been called an apartheid, that it had been in place for years, it was illegal, and it was treating Palestinians really very badly. So, so right away, you know, human rights uh reports had called it, had called Gaza things like an open-air prison, a concentration camp, stuff like that. It was bad in Gaza. They were dependent on UNRWA for much of their uh of their food because Israeli had had them as under siege and and and had restricted their their literally restricted their caloric content of what they what they would pass, what they allow them, the number of calories they would allow Palestinians to eat each day. I mean, we don't understand how fast this starvation came about. It came about because of Israel's control, pretty much solid control over Gaza's economy in various ways. So outside monitoring, of course, was prevalent. There's a group called CAMRA. I already kind of mentioned Honest Reporting was another one, the Canary Mission. These monitoring groups, they try to close down freedom of speech, they close down any try to critic criticism of Israel, any, any pro-Palestinian sentiments. So Camera, for example, is one where if a if a you if a if an outlet didn't repeat an Israeli talking point of denial that's oh you oh and they they would they would tell the network or or the new newspaper, well, you you didn't put in Israel's response that you know where where they denied that that this was a a massacre, for example, and things like that. So it was it was all of these things happening, and of course, you know, ensconced within the military industrial complex and within foreign policy circles, and of course, in the very highest levels of our democracy, with both Republican and Democratic Congress people, huge majority of the Congress members, 82% of them take money from APAC, have taken it from APAC in the past, up until recently. Now it's become a little bit politically toxic. But but the enormous numbers of people in our in our ruling elite, shall we say, have taken money from from the the Israeli lobby. So all of those things.

C. Derick Varn 11:37

I also like your mission of Cameron Canary Mission. I've been personally hit by Canary Mission, which I found hilarious. And perhaps ironically, perhaps not, my my social media was hacked within 24 hours of being hit by Canary Mission. So I'm a but I am unfortunately familiar with them. But I wanted to talk about like the Israeli lobby as an as a complex because there's a lot of focus on APAC, but what and what other things is the Israeli state using to lobby businesses and politicians?

SPEAKER_01 12:17

Well, the there's all kinds of little kind of uh other types of PACs and Dart money that

Lobby Pressure And Campus Doxxing

SPEAKER_01 12:25

are funneled into the support of Israel. A couple of people, a couple of analyses that I came about writing the book is that some people talk about these things that if we really looked, we would see that these tax breaks of some of these nonprofits would actually be considered foreign influence, you know, if it were a different country. You know, so it's been extensive. And so over the years, it has helped to close down free speech within within our civic spaces. And, you know, this practice, we've seen it really escalate after the student encampments. But at but now, so many universities, not all of them by any means, but so many important universities, have really brought outside monitors in to uh monitor the syllabus of people teaching Middle Eastern studies that's happened at Columbia, and in and uh what what the former Columbia professor who wrote the introduction to my book, Rashid Halidi, writes about is that he would he he occupied the Edward Saeed chair in at Columbia. So he taught Middle Eastern history, and he said he couldn't, under these conditions, teach his Middle East history class, because even just to teach the law of 2018 that further disenfranchised Palestinians would be, according to them, anti-Semitic, just telling them the facts about how Israeli society is now structured, he would be silenced. And he said there's no way that you can actually teach this history now at that school. So he had to resign. And he wrote a couple of very good articles about that in The Guardian. But it's it's interesting to know that on university campuses, canary missions, that's where they really start, and that's where they're the most effective. I'm surprised you I'm I'm interested to know, and surprised that you got attacked by Canary Mission. But Canary Mission attacks primarily students and faculty who who are who who they perceive as criticizing Israel, you know, or or being against the genocide or having, you know, the demand that Palestinians need to have a voice as well. We call that pro-Palestinian, that they then dox students who involve in those student organizations and they employ and they call their employers, and they oftentimes get them so that they can't have jobs to get them fired from the positions that they do find themselves in. Plenty of faculty members have been the have been the targets of Canary Missions and honest reporting. So it's pretty much structured within within US political culture. But as I say, I think that the the that the good news is that is that it's been exposed post-October 7th more than it ever has been in the past 20, 30 years.

C. Derick Varn 15:37

Yeah, I'll give you a little it it was a student, it got me exposed to Canary Mission. So I had a I had a graduate student in New York who's attached to the New York DSA, also of Middle Eastern background, and I was on a panel and we were talking about this, and he made a joke. McCunary Mission doxxed him, tied me into it on social media. Like I said, within 24 hours I got hacked. And then my face, although I was not mentioned in the article, my face was actually posted in an article in the New York in the New York Post within like 48 hours. Just for it was a clearly a guilt by association tactic. I'm I'm a high school teacher and an independent media producer. I haven't, you know, I do work with universities locally and I teach uh university classes, but I'm not on faculty, so they wouldn't normally go after me. But just proximity to a student, they went after me. And also, you know, I'm of uh I'm of Jewish background, and that usually gives me somewhat of a pass, and it didn't this time, they're not they don't they don't care anymore.

SPEAKER_01 16:44

Right. This charge of anti-Semitism for anybody who who is pro-Palestinian or against the genocide is so particularly in New York, on the face of it, just absurd because some of the main organizations that right right after October 7th, when when keep in mind that that in within 25 days, Israel had killed 5,000 Palestinians. That's how fast the genocide started, you know, after all of their atrocity propaganda and all of the incitement to genocide that the Israeli military repeated over and over again and didn't get the pushback it needed to raise red flags and say, people, this sounds like genocide. What they're gonna do is destroy civilian infrastructure. They're and that's against the Geneva Conventions. That's genocide. They're going to stop all of the aid and all of the food. They're gonna do these things that are that are simply disproportionate violence and collective punishment, collective punishment being you attack the civilians for the actions of your fighters or your leaders, right? So so all of that was was happening right away, and 5,000 Palestinians were killed. So, you know, this this stuff happened almost immediately, but it was the it was Jewish Voice for Peace, and if not now, who who the young woman was featured on the film Israelism, which was just getting some traction before October 7th, was a fantastic illustration of what was going on in Israel in terms of the attacks on the West Bank and settler violence and stuff like that, and how the how the Israeli military viewed Palestinians as just terrorists and Arabs, right? And had had you know to complete and utter disdain for them. It was those organizations at the front of the organizing to do things like close down the Manhattan Bridge, go out to the Statue of Liberty, occupy Grand Central Station with black t-shirts with light white letters that's uh not in my name, you know, Jews against genocide. So the idea that the that this movement is anti-Semitic is on the face of it a fiction.

C. Derick Varn 19:13

Yeah, that change of of the definition of anti-Semitism has been profound, and I've seen it, you know, I uh norm, I live and work through most of my life in the United States and red states. I'm in Utah, I was born in Georgia, grew up there, and I've seen all of a sudden like this explosion of anti-anti-Semitic propaganda. And while I do think there has been a real increase in actual anti-Semitism, although I think Israel's a good contributor as to why. Absolutely. Uh most of this seems like it's actually just propaganda for the Israeli state and doesn't really have anything to do with like the Jewish diaspora who is not Zionist, which is what

Anti-Semitism As A Speech Weapon

C. Derick Varn 20:00

you know, amongst younger Jews is like 40 to 45 percent of the popular of the Jewish population in the United States. Amongst older Jews, it's not it's still they're still pretty Zionist. But it it's really worrying as a framing because once you invoke anti-Semitism, you also start building a legal framework to get around normal protections of speech.

SPEAKER_01 20:25

Right.

C. Derick Varn 20:26

And that is really worrying to me as we've seen this on platforms like particularly TikTok, which I somewhat hyperbolically but just barely now refer to as a US Israeli joint spying app. But it it is interesting because one of the problems that you have for the Israelis on things like TikTok and Instagram, particularly on TikTok, they were posting the unedited footage. It was also, it wasn't just you know, it wasn't just like citizen journalists or Palestinians or Palestinian advocates, it was coming from like IDF accounts too. And I felt like they were literally trying to gaslight me because they were putting the the the stuff out that condemned them and also calling us you know anti-Semitic or crazy when we were like, but you showed us you you literally just showed us that.

SPEAKER_01 21:24

Like you posted it, not like and you're showing it to us at the same time. And and you're denying it at the same time. I know it's crazy. Well, you know, Richard, Richard Sanders, the the film, British film director, had two, probably more now, but I I do reference two of his films in the book, War Crimes in Gaza, where he simply posts, he simply puts up the post that Israeli soldiers did themselves committing war crimes. You know, you can't go in and destroy people's property if if they're not there, when they're not there under conditions of conflict. They were they were putting on women's underwear in the the most well it there's really just something wrong with these people. I'm sorry, just the kind of brutality and the depravity of of these soldiers. And oftentimes they were posting them on their dating sites, right, to make to make people like them. And just today I I saw another one of those pal Polywood, Pollywood videos where Israelis would dress up as if they were Palestinians in refugee camps. They'd black out their tooth, they'd have a Scarf on, they'd put some some red on their face to make blood, and then they would mock, mock injured Palestinians. And it was it was in regard to one of those people who had engaged in that, just had her, just had her her her house as a as a settler on the West Bank just was struck by a bomb and she was she was crying and she was you know very upset about being hit and her house being destroyed. And I guess that, you know, that that was their initial response when the very thing that finally happened to her had happened to the to the Palestinians. And there's many ways, there's many examples of the awful ways in which they mock now, even they mock rape of what's happening to Palestinians, which you know Euromid monitor for human rights has called you know the worst kind of torture to destroys individual and it destroys identities. And and all of these things are happening in the most brutal ways, but you're right, they were posting some of that stuff. And so when when when when they admit it and show themselves to who they are, now Netanyahu is always talking about, well, greater Israel, and we're gonna take over in the entire south of Lebanon. I mean, the media is now doing the same thing that they did in Gaza. So so they've just substituted Hezbollah or Gaza for Hezbollah, and they're never really killing civilians with 2,000-pound anti-civilian bombs to take out entire families and entire buildings. They're just targeting Hamas. Just like now, they're targeting Hezbollah while they're taking out Palestinian villages. This is not a conflict where it's Israel against Hezbollah or Israel against Hamas. This is Israeli genocide happening now in another country under their expansion model of the greater Israel. And mainstream and media simply will not say that. They call it a buffer zone, they call it forced evacuation instead of ethnic cleansing, and they'll come up with any way they can get around telling the truth. And you and I know the truth, and most of the global public now know the truth, and we know this because Israel's you know poll numbers are so disfavorable at this point. So the whole world knows. But so it tells you who the these establishment media are, who their audiences are. It's the military-industrial complex, it's their owners of their media, it's the extractive industries, it's anybody who benefits from a status quo divined by extreme inequality and oppression. That that's who this media frame is for.

C. Derick Varn 25:45

Yeah, I think that that's become increasingly clear. I mean, you know, I've known about Ursus Israel for a long time because I read basic Hebrew and I lived in Egypt for a while, and I also know that like that patch that's on some of the IDF shoulders that has Egypt and Syria and and all of Palestine and most of Lebanon and parts of Jordan all claimed as part of this Ursus Israeli state, which also never historically existed, um, is it it's wild to me that this is just ignored. You did see, I mean, there's some interesting and not unproblematic awakening to this on the right, too. Unfortunately, it does have a real anti-Semitic vector there, but but a lot of it is you know, that aside, I think a lot of it's sincere coming from people like Turker Carlson, but it's interesting how it manifests. So, like they start to care when they realize, oh, there are Christians in Lebanon and Christian icons and Christian churches are being destroyed. And I'm like, Well, they've been there are Christians in Palestine, my friend. Like, right, right.

SPEAKER_01 26:55

That incredible time where they they they attacked those women going across the courtyard of a of a church, of a Christian church, they just killed them.

C. Derick Varn 27:04

Yeah, yeah, and so it is kind of it it's it's it's both hopeful, and that I I now see that this is now an issue on the right, but worrying is how limited it is, because I'm like, okay, so uh they they broke a Jesus statue, and you're mad about that. They've been killing Christians for a long time because there's Christians throughout throughout the Middle East. I don't know what you're talking about and how you didn't know that. And honestly, I'm more worried that they're killing people than just killing Christians. So I have been thinking a lot about this, though, and the way this gets framed. One of the things that you that you've that you pay a lot of attention to in your reporting, and it's not just in this book, it's something that you've focused on through most of your career, from what I can tell from the other books of yours I've seen, is the way uh let's just call it weaponized passive voices use selectively. So you have obfuscations of violence, like you'll have something called an explosion or an aid-related death when it's clearly they shot aid workers or they bombed a village. How do these grammatical and stylistic choices function over time in place to shape public consciousness? And do you think they're working anymore? Because I'm not sure they are.

Passive Voice That Hides Violence

SPEAKER_01 28:38

You know, almost immediately. Now they also said neighborhood, that Jibalia was a neighborhood. And that was one of the words that that the directives at the New York Times wanted them to use. Don't use refugee camp. We were talking about history a little while ago. Well, the people in Gaza, and particularly in the Jibalia refugee camp, were direct descendants, you know, over generations, of those who were forced out of Jerusalem, other parts of Palestine, and forced into Gaza during the Nakba. So, you know, they anyway, the numbers are insane. But so they couldn't save refugee camps. So so there was an explosion in the Jivalian neighborhood. And then they pointed to, like, this is the New York Times, right? They don't have and they don't have access to any other coverage. They select a single picture of sheets, of sheets. Obviously, they're dead bodies, and they have sheets over them. And the Red Cross had placed some of the dead civilians in a row. And they said, oh, look, there's these things appear to be bodies. What else could they possibly be? So so that that was the first real massacre. That was that several 2,000-pound bombs hit that densely, densely populated refugee camp in in northern Gaza on on October 31st. Right then, Common Dreams and the people on the ground were saying, this is genocide. You can't do this, this is against international law. So that was, you know, you know, extreme cognitive dissonance between looking at online reporting and and and our independent alternative and international organizations, and then to look at the New York Times and their obfuscating language. A little bit later, by the spring of 2024, when they called it aid-related deaths, it's like they were had successfully already made Palestinians very hungry. They were starving then. Spring of 2024. That's only six, seven months after, after October 7th. So it shows you how rapidly this worked, and the media was still obfuscating like crazy. They called, they made it sound like the aid trucks just had some, you know, bad luck, or the, you know, that these were these were Israeli soldiers on top of aid trucks shooting at hungry Palestinians as they approached trucks carrying flour, which they really needed. So they never said that. But online, you know, online there was a lot of very good media criticism. Citations needed other other, you know, people in independent outlets, and you know, they they were they starting pointing this out. And he said they Israel simply can't put a simple sentence together when it involves Israeli war crimes. Israel shot and killed hungry Palestinians. They are starving to death as the genocide continues. That's the way it should have been reported. Uh shortly after that, Gutierrez called it a graveyard for children. And that was the UN director calling it a graveyard for children. Indeed, it was. But why did the media pick up on that one phrase? A graveyard for children? Because it doesn't tell you who put those children in those graves. You know, it doesn't tell you anything. It's just, oh, it's a mystery, it's just a humanitarian terrible emergency that we don't know how it happened. And it's become a graveyard for children. And when you present that type of horrible suffering in that language, it's a big emotional blow to us, to the people who see it, to the viewers. We we don't know what to do with it. We don't know where the suffering has come from. We don't know how we can stop it, we don't know what we can do because they're never going to say Israel needs to do this, Israel needs to stop, any of those things. So it it's it's the a kind of lack of any kind of journalistic standards of who, what, where, why, and when, or fairness or balance, or accuracy. All of that stuff was completely abandoned in mainstream media with with this genocide.

C. Derick Varn 33:15

One of the things that I noticed, and you have written about, but I noticed it too, was the games of the first two years of the of the conflict. And I'm putting that in quotations for those of you who are just listening, was the use of DevToll figures that had to be wrong. I like even during the Biden administration, you were getting the Defto numbers, and they mysteriously kind of froze four months in. So once you hit like 40,000, they were just like, we're not gonna report it anymore. Uh or or I would get that number for like a year later, and I'm like, there's no way that that's remotely true because this conflict's been going on for a year and it's actually intensified. And even

Death Tolls And Manufactured Doubt

C. Derick Varn 34:02

if I bought your framing, there's no way that can be true. But the other thing I would see is even on the 40,000, they would say things like Hamas run ministry of health, ignoring that like there has not legally been allowed to be elections in Gaza since 2007. So, you know, I literally told someone, they're like, Well, they voted for Hamas, and I'm like, I'm gonna bracket out the morality or lack of morality of Hamas, we're just gonna take that out of the equation right now. Most of the people in Gaza were not even alive the last time there was an election. Like 50% of the population is under 18, it's been over 18 years since an election. I don't know how this theory of democratic accountability, which would still not pass muster under international law, even holds when there's been no elections and since you know, in over 20 years, and you have a population that is majority under 18. How on earth does this work? But even beyond that, it was pretty clear that this was just like a sowing the seeds of doubt mechanism that I had seen priorly on Israel. Like, you know, I'd seen this done and reporting about Gaza, our reporting about the PLO before Hamas and all this, going all the way back to the 1980s. But like it seemed particularly galling to do that because one, I don't think they were telling us the truth about the numbers anyway, and then two, when they were, they were they were doing this little, you know, we weren't saying like according to the look run Israeli government, right? Right, it just seemed so clearly to be like uh lying by omission and hoping that prior associations of Hamas and the mother brother and the Muslim Brotherhood could do a lot of work for you to cast doubt on those numbers. I find it interesting because I don't think the main the quote unquote mainstream, let's I don't know that they're mainstream anymore. Let's just call them legacy media. That's probably more accurate anyway. Legacy media was really was really doing much uh to to even kind of be fair here.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

Um no, no, they weren't. And they were closing out Palestinian voices regularly, but but yeah, really good point that they were they were engaging all of those falsities and and twisted and misdirected understanding of the history of the of the conflict to work work their persuasion for them. So so if you're if you're talking about civilian support of a of a of a government, so therefore they are part of who can be attacked, that is absolutely against any way of humanitarian thinking, any way against the laws or rules of war. And those laws and rules of war were designed exactly to prevent those kinds of arguments being made. Also, when when you had Galant and Elan and Elon saying things like Hamas attacked Israel, and instead of being appalled, Gazans, people in Gaza are celebrating. They want hell, we'll give them hell. We're gonna stop all their food, we're gonna stop all their aid, we're gonna turn them into a tent city. So what they did is they took Hamas and they simply associated the entire civil the entire civilian population in Gaza, tied it with that rhetoric. And that is incitement to genocide. So so, right there, if at a moment of very high tension, you you call for the destruction of civilians and civilian infrastructure over mainstream media outlets, uh, you know, as a tie and you are in a position of power and authority. That is against the genocide convention. That's incitement to genocide. Now, how do how do we say that you know the US media didn't push back on that, allowed them to get away with incitement, allow them to use their news frames and stories to get away with genocide? It was also part of the demonization and dehumanization first of the Palestinians, and then the demonization. And what we found, what I found in the coverage was that you couldn't say massacre for Palestinians, but you could certainly say massacre for Israelis killed by Palestini by Hamas. So after, and you know, this was done in newspapers from you know about six weeks from middle October to middle of November. So well after five, six thousand Palestinians had been killed, they were they were using massacre for Israelis, was which with the ratio by then was like one to thirty-three or something, and only for one Palestinian did they say massacre. So 53 times the New York Times said massacre for Israelis, and one time for a Palestinian. And then, with as you point out with the body counts, they were associated with the Hamas run Gaza Health Ministry. When the UN and Human Rights Watch and all of the agencies, you know, global aids, had relied on their numbers. Their numbers were accurate. People were saying that these numbers are always accurate. No, so stop questioning them. Also, the underestimation. You know, today we still that those those those body counts, those are literally people that they know have been killed. How many people are still under the rubble? How many people have just been buried under the rubble? And also you, in a, in a, this kind of a of a genocide and this kind of ongoing attacks where you've destroyed hospitals, you've destroyed shelters, you've destroyed schools, you've destroyed aid of any kind, you're starving these people. Just imagine at this point right now how many people are dying each day, even if they haven't been targeted, which they have been, even those should be in that body count who haven't been targeted by the Israelis, right? Even during their supposed ceasefire, which was just you, we we fire and you ceasefiring, and then we'll call that a ceasefire. So so none of that has been true. It's like endless lie upon lie. But when I when I wrote the book by by end of 2024, I think the the death, the the Lancet had done used the statistical methodology used by those who count these figures of violent deaths as a consequence, not that this one account of this one individual has died, but how many people must be dead under these conditions out of this kind of barrage of attacks of all sorts? And it was that 187. Francesca Albanese has now come up with a story of it how with it with a number that it has to be at least 650,000. And that to me seems more like it when you think how many. There was 200, and there was 200, excuse me, 2.2, 2.3 million Palestinians in this tiny little piece of Gaza. And now they are occupying, they're in less than 50% of it, and it's going down and down. They've got no aid, they've got no food, they've just turned off the electricity. These people are dying. They're dying as we speak, and that's the horrible thing about it. And these people haven't come to account, they haven't come to account for killing journalists, for for killing and torturing doctors, for destroying an entire healthcare system. They've they've gotten away with it, and that's why they've normalized it because of the way the media covered the war, and and that's why I've said that they're complicit in a genocide. And they've someday the Israelis will be held accountable. They will certainly be someday.

C. Derick Varn 42:25

Yeah, I I agree with you, and I I think that could get very ugly. But at a certain point, I have to just go like, well, you can't do this forever without people realizing it. But yeah, I I have also figured it had to be my estimates from what I've read extrapolating from the Lancet was like, it's gotta be like a fourth of the population gone. Yeah. Because I I don't think people understand how small Gaza is and how densely packed it is, and how young it was. I have the unfortunate I have been to Gaza, so like I already knew that, but trying to explain that to Americans for years was very, very hard to do. Because I'm like, no, it's it's basically it's not just an open-air prison. It's like an open air prison that's super overcrowded and has very little infrastructure, and and it's been that way, I don't know, for a decade and a half before this started. And it it was already quite desperate. And I don't think people quite understood that recent until relatively recently. And yeah, I mean, we when you're talking about, you know, you look at I was looking at aerial photography of Gaza, and just looking at the amount of it that is uninhabitable now, I'm like, there's no way that you're you haven't lost at least a fourth of the population, which uh is huge, and and it's the kind of level of massacre we really haven't seen since I don't know, the Nazi occupation of Belarussia? That kind of thing, you know, that these are early 20th century mass war crimes. You you make a point about the indirect deaths, uh, and it's also clear that even that number from the Ministry of Health was only on direct deaths. Do we think that this is going to get worse? Because I mean, one thing that that I have found, unfortunately, is Is as things go on and as the conflicts in the Middle East start popping up in other places, you have the Iran war, you have this invasion of southern Lebanon. You I've been telling people Egypt's gearing up to be invaded. Do you think this is going to be the people are going to get fatigued and quit following what's going on? That's one of my concerns.

SPEAKER_01 45:11

Um I think people do have fatigue. What the me, what the establishment media has done is simply it's fallen out of the frame. Palestinians have fallen out of the frame. And as I mentioned before, they're they're calling Lebanon now buffer zones and all these other euphemisms that you were that you really pointed out well. You know, I think

War Expansion And Audience Fatigue

SPEAKER_01 45:30

there was, I think as Israel becomes more brutal and more empowered because of its lack of accountability, the the treatment of the flotilla members was a huge indication of that now the world is beginning to understand that these people have really gone too far. When they saw Ben Gavir treating, putting putting Europeans in stress positions, and then the incredible testimonies that the people gave about how they were treated in these containers. They were beaten. So many of them have broken arms, broken collarbones, and and they were raped and sexually assaulted. I think it has to be giving people pause. I mean, a lot of people said they were only, they were only concerned about them because they were European. And certainly we got a taste of what the Palestinians because we looked through the eyes of Europeans. But I think it wasn't lost on people that that this kind of treatment has been happening to Palestinians, particularly in detention, particularly now that finally the New York Times told the truth, allowed their pri their premier uh social human rights reporter, Nicholas Christoph, to to publish an op-ed piece that details how Israeli you know was raping Palestinians prisoners with dogs and stuff like that. And and and these Europeans were subjected to that, and many of them, over 400. And many of the European countries. What has to happen is that European countries need to stop agreeing and blocking UN resolutions against Israel. They need to stop engaging with them, they need to stop supporting them with military, and they need to also just keep them out of their airspace and and and and and trade with them. That's that's that's how this thing is gonna stop. And I think that was a big step forward in at least try, you know, trying to stop that, where you did get European governments, even if it was just bad PR they were concerned with. You know, it's it's it's unbelievable now, even though we're not getting we're we're it's still it's still on the table. Gaza is still being talked about, even though we're not getting any actual news from it. From, you know, now that they've really killed over 300, they've probably killed at least 300 journalists in Gaza with censorship by murder, targeting them. And if you think about the Israelis' excuse all the time that this was that this was all just retaliation for Hamas, that this was all just trying to get Hamas, you know. If you see how they target, they target people, they can target them, right? You don't need to take out two apartment buildings and entire lineages of family to ready to get one Hamas fighter, which is what they they sold to the U.S. media and they tried to sell to the U.S. public, but we didn't buy it, you know, we just didn't buy it, even though the New York Times did, and most of our establishment media did. But the these these this kind of violence is is, I think, gonna have to come to its end pretty soon. And if we get back to our topic about anti-Semitism, they actually relied on anti-Semitism to point the finger at Ben Gavir, who's who's who's an individual, you know, obviously stereotypic type of in that video representation of a Jew. And then they wanted to blame him singly, not the not the genocide, not the military, but him singly, as as that's the only thing we have to worry about, is this one guy who's giving us some really bad press because he fits the stereotypes.

C. Derick Varn 49:46

Well, this does actually bring me to something that I that I've had problems with, even with progressive media, is trying to explain that, like, okay, yes, Lukud, Nanyahu, his right-wing coalition are particularly bad, but the but the center parties in Israel, as far as the Palestinians are concerned, are not a whole lot better. And the left parties are mostly gone. So, you know, there's been uh some amount of repatriation to Europe and America, you know it's just trying to get this out has been difficult. And I'll tell you one of the other frustrating things is a person who actually can read original reporting in Hebrew and has a basic, very, very rudimentary understanding of Arabic. Arabic's actually really hard for me, but I did live in Egypt for two years. Even if I was to directly translate Israeli newspapers into English, I would probably get called anti-Semitic. Because some stuff that gets said in Hebrew is not sugar-coated for the for domestic consumption the way it the stuff in English is sugar coated for international consumption. And and the the anger, I mean, I I've been kind of amazed at the anger the Israeli media has at the United States for not being complicit enough. And that's something I've been trying to like, like, no, it's bad as it is, they actually are mad that we're not even more towing their line in Israeli reports, and you hardly ever see this talked about in American media at all. I wanted to ask you though, maybe in lieu of that, I have seen a crackdown on social media about this. It's get like shadow banning is becoming more common, banning for being called anti-Semitic. As I mentioned, I got caught in a troll by Canary Mission. This is this is becoming a bigger background when Larry Ellison got control of TikTok. A lot of the rules changed, and for it looked like for 24 hours they weren't allowing any posting politically at all. Do you think they will be successful in trying to censor social media in the same way they've gotten control of like this legacy media? Because the one thing that the one issue with social media is it's much, much more difficult and much more intrusive to stop voices talking

Big Tech Censorship And AI Fog

C. Derick Varn 52:21

about things, particularly if you if you are relying on an algorithm that is easily tricked by just changing a word. But right.

SPEAKER_01 52:30

Well, you know, Alan McLeod has done, I think, some of the best reporting on on big tech and how they have Facebook has hired people from you know ex-CIA agents, ex-fbi agents. They've pulled lots and lots of Palestinian sites off of Facebook and off social media sites. So I I think they really are trying to control it. And I think it's gonna be our job to really fight this and find ways around it. But that's the next big thing I think, I think, is billionaire capture that we're seeing with CBS and the Ellisons, with with the merger uh between between, you know, and and creating this this company of media moguls. It's so weird, ironically, the New York Times wrote a piece about, you know, Scott Pelley's been all over the the media because he he finally told the truth about what was happening with 60 Minutes in, and with Barry Weiss, now head of CBS News, put in place by the Ellisons, who are very tied to Israel. Barry Weiss, a self-proclaimed fanatical Zionist who has never done anything with television. She's never even written or directed a news story. She knew nothing about this, and all she did was come in and tell people like Scott Pelley, who's worked for the C at CBS in 60 Minutes for over 30 years, try to make those anti-Trump demonstrators look more violent, she told him. That was reported recently. And that was parted in the New York Times against their competition, CBS News. Isn't it interesting, however, that the New York Times allowed themselves to be directed by Israel to say, don't, don't say that we drop that bomb. Say that and don't tell anybody we dropped that bomb until we identify a Hamas fighter that we say we killed there. So, you know, don't use emotive words for Palestinians, use body counts that are abstracted and dehumanized. And, you know, and then if if if let's leave Palestinian voices off of these news sites, so whenever there was a table around the table, you know. And all the monitoring that we talked about before. So so there's we really have so I'm making several points here. We really have do have to watch AI uses now of the way the Israelis are going to be designing new Hasbara techniques and and how they're going to be really engaging in social media now with with big tech and with all the tools of AI and deep fakes and things like that. It's become very difficult online now to see. You know, there's a lot of fake footage that shows various countries being blown up. And there and when they're honest, they say, this is just my AI fantasy. I'd like to see this. I was watching one where Ben Gavir, where some guy intervenes when Ben Gavir, where a guy's on his knees begging Ben Genear, some guy comes out, slaps Ben Gneer, and pushes him away and says, Now, now didn't you like that? But that's AI, but I'm gonna still watch it, right? The danger there is it's a it's a it's a faux, you know, surreal kind of revenge or accountability uh that is not that it simply isn't real and it's not how to do it. And it and it also it can't be done at an individual level like that. It has to be systematic, it has to be challenged by constituents and and and all kinds of different campaigns and and keep getting in the streets, and all of that way we can participate in the way in in making our government do what we want to do. But but just back circling back to the New York Times and it's exposing CBS, they didn't, they don't expose themselves. And they never have for the rape story that was you know complete fabrications based on known fabricators, not what one legitimate eyewitness testimony, no forensic evidence, no visual evidence whatsoever, to not have rolled back that story, done an investigation about how it happened, told their readers what they did, which journalism professors enjoined them to do, but they didn't. This is a huge black mark on the New York Times. And in fact, if you put that story in, they will redirect you to a redone story in March of 2024. The original piece was was in was published on December 28th, then online, and then in the paper on the third on the 30th or 31st. So end of exact end of 2023. I can't find that story. I looked for it the other day on the original link that I had for it, and I was directed to a story that was redone in March. However, no acknowledgement and and no accountability for this kind of horrible misinformation. So so this this information abundance that we have that that we need to pick and choose from, for and and it's getting harder and harder to tell which is real and what is true. And and the papers of record in this country we can no longer rely on legacy media. So it's it's a it's a very difficult terrain to navigate, I think, for us at this point, and for all the reasons that you've brought up.

C. Derick Varn 58:24

Yeah, I I I did not know about the you know AI revenge on Ben Grevere. I'm sure it is satisfying to watch that guy get slapped around. But I was thinking about this because it also happened in Minneapolis, uh, where people where there was a faux video that was AI generated about a priest dressing down an ice officer that was completely not real. Yes. And I'm like, well, that feels good, and I'm sure there's pr prun priests out there who want to do it, but it didn't happen. Right. And I worry about this greatly in, you know, a media environment that becomes increasingly low trust. Having lived in in Egypt, which is a very low trust environment where no one trusts the media, but unfortunately, what propagates is all kinds of conspiracies, some of which are plausible, maybe even be true, and some of which are absolutely bash and insane, but it makes up for the fact that there is no civic institution that has enough trust for legitimate reasons, frankly, to uh to uh to offer any kind of counter-narrative. And I increasingly see that here, and that also concerns me because you know, how do I argue with someone who just says, nah, all that stuff in Gaza just didn't happen at all? Like it's all a conspiracy. Right. I'm like, okay, I got nothing.

SPEAKER_01 59:56

Right, it's very difficult. What can you say? Right. And I I a couple pieces, and now the the uh the bots or the the so the you know, whoever these people are that are represent that representing themselves online as as real people, they'll just go ha ha ha ha ha, or they've gotten they've actually got nothing but to just deny or to mock or to call names. So so for a for a genocide that's been the most well-documented live-streamed genocide in the history of this kind of horrible mass murder, and and to be the most contested really does prevent a problem for media critics such as ourselves and and myself and analysts. And it's it's a it's a terrain where um, yeah, we we've got some issues here, don't we?

C. Derick Varn 1:00:52

Yeah. Well, I guess this is my last question. I I do want to push a little bit more on this way in which these media apparations kind of partially betrayed themselves. For example, there's been a whole lot of reporting about how bad of a job Barry Rice is doing at CBS and how explicitly like painfully right-wing and Zionist she is. And I don't know, anyone who had read the free press would have known that that was gonna happen. But that it's that it's actually damaging CBS's brand as significantly. Do we see that happening across the board? Like, like the there's been people angry at the New York Times for as long as I've been alive, but it's mostly been right-wingers. I have finally seen a lot of progressives wake up about how problematic the times really is. But do we see that kind of accountability for these other legacy institutions? Because the anger about this is pretty high, and it's not even like like I've been talking about, it's not even ideologically limited to just like progressives or far leftists anymore. It's it's across the board, you know. I think one of the most interesting things as far as like following the right is the hyper apologism of some of the right, which I think is still a small majority, but then real anger on the other part of the right about about this, and you know, some people sounding like me, it's it's it's like when I I'm always weirded out when I'm like Toker Carlson sounds like me all of a sudden. I don't know how I feel about that. I know it is weird. Um, I mean, I I think it's good, but I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:39

So well, in terms of electoral politics, right? Independents have there's there's always been a core of 30, 35 percent people who are gonna vote for a white supremacist. That's the danger that Steve Phillips, you know, the uh the elections in color, the the the guy who really knows how to pull black people and he really has a as a a handle on on these demographics. And what he says is there's 30, 35 percent. Independence. Trump ran and and and they bought it, right? He ran as a as a peace president. He was not gonna have any more wars, no more wars for Trump. And that whole sector now is gone. That's finished. You know, it was very, very difficult for people to vote for someone who was actively supporting a genocide and lying about it the whole time, President, you know, Joe Biden, and that Kamala Harris, you know, she you know, there's the we can we don't have time to get into it right any anymore, but Kamala Harris, you know, lost it because she lost the swing states and she wouldn't uh and she and she she took the Palestinian narrative out of the Democratic National Convention.

C. Derick Varn 1:03:57

Anyway, which cost her Michigan. I mean, I can't say that it costs the other string stakes, but it it has been objectively proven to be a key factor in Michigan.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:06

Well, polls show too that a lot of people who didn't come out, which is which was which is why they lost. Nine million people didn't come out, and and Gaza was high on the list. Usually foreign policy doesn't factor in that much, it's usually always bread and butter issues and economic and and social, you know, and we've we've learned all this stupid, you know, cultural stuff, but but it was it was people, many people subsequent to the election talked about Gaza as one of the primary reasons. And that certainly isn't in the autopsy, is it? In fact, Gaza wasn't even mentioned in the democratic autopsy, so to speak. But in terms of social media and where we're gonna go from here, I don't think there's good there's gonna be a real change in in big tech and and in and in even our media landscape because of the ownership structures and and the role that Trump's FCC is now playing, Federal Communication Commission. What we need is to start pulling these conglomerates apart. So when the Ellisons merged, and then now they're gonna merge again with and they're gonna make a huge this there's gonna be this huge media mogul that are that are basically pro-Israel and Zionists. That that is an unusual thing. And there need we need to stregulating this kind of ownership. In terms of the ownership, there's always been a problem with centralization and and who's on the boards of directors of these interlocking directorates that own media business, media outlets and organizations and institutions, and also have the same stock in the and the same skin in the military-industrial complex and the extractive

Ownership Capture And Media Brand Collapse

SPEAKER_01 1:05:59

industry. So those people are the same, many of the same people on the boards of these directors. So that's what centralization and colon and conglomeration has done. But for a legacy media like CBS, CBS has a brand. This is the CBS is the network of Edward R. Murrow. I mean, it is the legacy of legacy media. It invented television news and it invented the the broadcast documentary with with Edward R. Murrow. And CBS was the last vestige, excuse me, 60 minutes was the last vestige of that. And for for a for a head of CBS News to be a self identified fanatical Zionist who's now being reported that she told the likes of Scott Pelley to make the footage look As if Renee Good, who was killed by ICE in Minneapolis in the winter of 2026, to make it look as if she was running straight into the ICE agent who killed her, which is a blatant lie, that's not going to go down well with the American public. The American people believe that they still live in a democracy where they don't have propaganda in the face all the time. And if they stop believing that, so and CBS doesn't want another. CBS certainly doesn't want another Fox News, right? CBS is not Fox News. So Fox News is the viewers of Fox News are sitting in front of CBS, and they don't want to see Fox News. They want to see at least uh an outlet that looks like it is balanced, that looks like it has some fairness, that looks like it's accurate and telling and has the same cutting-edge kind of journalistic investigative attitude that 60 Minutes has always has always presented. And so these are just some of the things that come into play. But 60 Minutes was destined to lose its audience uh the minute the minute they put her in charge of that network without any experience and and with a complete ideological point of view that she had was very vested in promoting. And that's clearly not working. So we'll see what happens.

C. Derick Varn 1:08:21

Yeah, legacy media is not a substact. And she clearly treats it like one. And in a way, that's also very hard, even for her own brand. The you know, I'm just uh interested anti-woke libertarian. It's hard to justify when you're like, let's make the police look, you know, the ice look like extrajudicial keeling that no one's even arguing isn't a crime, they just aren't allowing it to be properly investigated. I was trying to make that look good. I mean, it it's it's wild because, like, yeah, I expect that from like internet chuds, but I I don't expect it from any, not even a conservative news agency. I mean, if anything, I would expect them to just be quiet about it and shut up, like Fox normally does when this stuff happens.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:09

Right. Like, right. Emphasize, you know, the odd story that proves their point, you know, and not manufacture video, like you know, we're learning a little bit from the Israelis because that's what they do all the time. They've done it for years. Pseudo evidence, and journalists kept buying pseudo evidence, even though they knew over and over again that it had been fabricated, you know.

C. Derick Varn 1:09:32

Yeah. Well, people should read your book. Could you go into this in a lot more detail? Where can people find your work? As I kind of mentioned in the beginning, it's kind of all over the place, but in addition to your book.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:43

Right. Well, you can buy the book from the from the publisher, orbooks.com, and just put in, you know, the so it's O R. It's like or books. So or rbooks.com and put in the complicit nens or my name, and it'll come right up. It's going to be in bookstores, and they've got a pretty wide distribution in in bookstores. You can call them up and ask them if they've got it. It'd be good. Maybe they'll try to get it. But I I can be found on oh gosh, you you mentioned Counterpunch and Common Dreams. I've also been on LA LA Progressive, the Progressive magazine. I

Where To Find The Book

SPEAKER_01 1:10:19

write for Fair. And you know, I'm around. They'll they'll it they'll see it. All right. Well, thank you so much for your time. Thank you.