AP fires young news writer with history of pro-Palestine activism after controversy of agency ‘sharing offices with Hamas’
21 May, 2021 08:52
©Reuters / Adrees Latif / Ashraf Abu Amrah
Associated Press (AP) has terminated the contract of a young Arizona-based news associate who was accused of anti-Israeli bias over her college activism. The agency had earlier been blamed for sharing a Gaza office with Hamas.
Emily Wilder lost her job with AP just over two weeks after she was hired to write news from Maricopa County, Arizona. She was fired for allegedly breaking the company’s social media rules, which require employees to stay publicly silent “on contentious public issues” and not engage in organized action in support of causes.
The news service launched a probe into Wilder’s social media footprint after her college-era pro-Palestinian activism was highlighted by right-wing outlets. She is Jewish and was an active member of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine at Stanford, from which she graduated in 2020.
Her participation in the pro-Palestinian groups was highlighted on Tuesday by a Republican students’ organization at the university. It said the groups were pro-Hamas and notorious for “acts of intimidation and violence against pro-Israel students.”
The criticism was picked up by the likes of the Washington Free Beacon and Fox News, and boosted by a number of prominent conservative public figures, including Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR).
As a student activist, Wilder was a fierce and sometimes rudely outspoken critic of Israeli policies. At one point, she described the Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson as a “far-right, pro-Trump, naked mole rat-looking billionaire”. Adelson, who was Jewish and died in January, drew her ire for funding the Taglit-Birthright Israel program. It sponsors free heritage trips to Israel for young Jewish adults, but Wilder viewed its activities as “nothing more than ethnic nationalist propaganda.”
Was she jealous that Palestinians were unable to duplicate the program because nobody has a Palestinian birthright? They are all ethnically Eqyptians or Saudis.
The journalist said AP was fully aware of her past activism when it hired her. When her old posts resurfaced, her editor assured her she was “not going to get in any trouble, because everyone had opinions in college,” she told San Francisco news outlet SFGate.
Days later, she was informed about the immediate termination of her contract, but says AP failed to pinpoint specific messages posted during her tenure that violated its social media policy. One of her recent tweets lamented the media’s use of language in reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that she believed indicated its bias in Israel’s favor.
Wilder is of the view that she has fallen victim to cancel culture. Her termination letter from AP said that it had been pressured by the online harassment campaign against her into conducting a review of her conduct. However, she believes it then selectively enforced vaguely defined corporate rules to justify her subsequent firing.
“That’s an admission this was prompted by the campaign against me,” she said.
It’s really unfortunate the Associated Press is abdicating their responsibility to not only me, but to all journalists, just because a group of college students wanted to engage in a witch hunt.
Conservative critics of Wilder linked her hiring by AP to the controversy about the agency’s alleged sharing of an office building in Gaza with the military intelligence wing of Hamas, the militant group that controls the Israeli-blockaded Palestinian territory. Last week, a tower that hosted the offices of several international media outlets, including AP and Al Jazeera, was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike amid the latest upsurge in violence. Israel said the presence of Hamas in the building made it a legitimate target.
The IDF gave the occupants of the building one-hour notice to evacuate before destroying it.
AP President and CEO Gary Pruitt said his news organization had “no indication of a Hamas presence in the building.” A 2014 article by former AP correspondent Matti Friedman paints a complicated picture of the militants’ relationship with the international media. It was widely shared on social media after the recent bombing.
Media reports of Wilder’s activism brought the issue to the fore again, with some implying that AP had tacit pro-Palestinian bias and that this had affected its decision to offer her a position. However, Wilder had not covered the Middle East and had focused on local Arizona news in her brief tenure working for the agency.
Online attacks on Wilder, and her eventual firing, triggered an outpouring of support from fellow journalists and outrage directed at her former employer.
Some seized the opportunity to accuse conservative commentators of hypocrisy for speaking out against cancel culture when it suited them while also deploying it against their opponents.
Others expressed the hope that Wilder’s journalistic career would not suffer as a result of this setback. Before being hired by AP, she had interned at the Arizona Republic daily.
100+ AP staffers condemn firing of journalist Emily Wilder
over criticism of Israeli government
24 May, 2021 17:32
A man looks down at his smartphone as he walks past the offices of the Associated Press in Manhattan,
New York May 13, 2013. © REUTERS / Adrees Latif
Over 100 staffers at the Associated Press have signed an open letter condemning the news organization’s recent firing of journalist Emily Wilder over old social media posts which criticized the policies of the Israeli government.
Arizona-based reporter Emily Wilder was fired from her position at AP just two weeks in, after a group of Republicans dug up her old criticisms of the Israeli government.
Wilder, who is Jewish, had publicly condemned the Israeli government’s refusal to allow Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to their homes and had referred to billionaire Sheldon Adelson – a top donor to former US President Donald Trump and pro-Israel groups – as a “naked mole rat.”
Following her dismissal, over 100 of Wilder’s colleagues at AP signed an open letter on Monday condemning the company’s decision and requesting more transparency.
“We strongly disapprove of the way the AP has handled the firing of Emily Wilder and its days long silence internally,” the letter declared, demanding “more clarity from the company about why Wilder was fired” and “how she violated the social media policy while employed by the AP.”
Wilder’s colleagues claimed AP “unnecessarily harmed” the journalist through its decision to concede to a “smear campaign” of “online harassment” and questioned whether others at the company could also be fired if a group of partisan activists “in bad faith” demanded their dismissal.
“This episode has caused the public to question the credibility of our reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which does a great disservice to our courageous journalists in Gaza – who have already greatly suffered this month – and in Israel,” the letter concluded.
Wilder protested following the firing that she was “hung out to dry” by AP when she “needed support” from the organization the most, and added that it was “enraging as a Jewish person” to be “defamed as anti-Semitic and thrown under the bus.”
As I began to edit this article I thought the 100+ would be an indication of how anti-Semitic AP journalists were. However, I have come to the point of agreeing with them, to my surprise. Wilder should not be thrown under the bus for expressing her thoughts and feelings years ago. She is reporting locally on Maricopa County, Arizona where there is unlikely to be many stories about Jews and Palestinians.
Is this an example of how much power Adelson has? AP should seriously reconsider this decision, it's just wrong. A stern warning not to replicate her earlier attitude should have been more than sufficient.
Scandal-plagued BBC again under fire for hiring Palestinian reporter who once tweeted that ‘#HitlerWasRight’
24 May, 2021 13:18
As the BBC recovers from a damning report about it deceiving Princess Diana, it was hit with a new scandal after it was revealed that one of the broadcaster's journalists once tweeted “#HitlerWasRight”.
People responded with dismay and disbelief after the BBC’s apparent lack of social media background checks for its hires was brought to the forefront amid a scandal surrounding digital journalist Tala Halawa. Some were also disappointed by the BBC's apparent underwhelming reaction to the accusations of anti-Semitism leveled against her.
Questionable social media posts by Halawa were brought to light last weekend by pro-Israeli users, who were angered by her video on the controversy surrounding Bella Hadid’s support for Palestine. The journalist also contributed to a piece on Palestinian children killed by Israel amid the latest flare-up of violence between the Jewish state and the militant group Hamas in Gaza.
Digging into Halawa’s old tweets, users found plenty of things they considered objectionable. Arguably the most outlandish tweet, which was posted in 2014, compared Israel to Nazi Germany and included the hashtag “#HitlerWasRight.”
Among her other old posts included the suggestion that Israel be relocated to the US, an image of a child being burned on a menorah and instances of her lashing out at “biased media coverage,” “anti-Semitism melodrama,” “Zionists” and other things. Halawa's tweets were summarized on Saturday by the pro-Israel media watchdog Honest Reporting, which called for people to pressure the BBC about her. The Spectator magazine also covered the anti-Semitism accusations аgainst Halawa.
The journalist was hired by the British broadcaster in 2017 and works as a Palestinian affairs specialist for the BBC Monitoring service. Critics doubted that her reporting could be unbiased, as required by the BBC rules, considering her social media footprint. After the scandal erupted, Halawa’s Twitter account was deleted.
A BBC spokesperson commented on the controversy: “These tweets predate the individual’s employment with the BBC, but we are nevertheless taking this very seriously and are investigating.”
The BBC is already under fire after a damning report accused veteran journalist Martin Bashir of using deceitful tactics to get his bombshell 1995 interview with Princess Diana. The BBC leadership then covered up the details about how the one-on-one was obtained, according to the report, which was prepared by retired supreme court judge Lord Dyson and published last week.
Also last week, the Associated Press (AP) was widely criticized for terminating a news associate who was accused by conservative commentators of being anti-Semitic. Emily Wilder was an active member of pro-Palestinian student groups when she was studying at Stanford University. She accused her former employer of caving in to mob pressure and scapegoating her. Wilder covered local news from Arizona for AP.
Love this...
New law enables residents de-platformed by Big Tech to sue
for up to $100,000 in Florida
24 May, 2021 19:40
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has signed legislation allowing locals to sue the likes of Facebook and YouTube for as much as $100,000 if they're unjustly deplatformed.
“Today, Floridians are being guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley power grab on speech, thought and content,” DeSantis said on Monday at a signing ceremony in Miami. “We the people are standing up to tech totalitarianism.”
The law requires social media platforms to be transparent about their content moderation practices and give users proper notice of policy changes. In addition to enabling individuals who are censored to seek monetary damages, the legislation allows the state's attorney general to sue Big Tech companies for unfair and deceptive trade practices.
Firms that are found to have violated antitrust law will be blocked from contracting with any state entity. The law prohibits social media firms from removing Florida political candidates, with penalties as high as $250,000 a day. All residents must also be allowed to block any candidate they choose to remove from their feeds.
“If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable,” DeSantis said.
The Republican governor said the legislation was made necessary by an unprecedented concentration of power, which Big Tech has used to enforce orthodoxy of thought on such issues as the origin of Covid-19 and the efficacy of pandemic lockdowns. “On major issues that deserve robust debate, Silicon Valley is acting as a council of censors,” he said. “They cancel people. When mobs come after somebody, they will pull them down. They shadow-ban people, which creates partisan echo chambers.”
The Big Tech bill marks the latest push by DeSantis to take on conservative issues of national or even international scope through state-level legislation and executive orders. For instance, earlier this month, he signed into law a ban on vaccine passports, and he not only ended all Covid-19 restrictions by local governments, but also canceled any fines that had been imposed in connection with such rules during the pandemic.
“Florida is the trailblazer, yet again, on another issue that's really important to not just millions of Floridians, but really tens of millions of Americans,” DeSantis said.
Such moves also have raised the governor's national profile and made him one of the early frontrunners for the GOP's 2024 presidential nomination. He ranked behind only former President Donald Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence last week in a Morning Consult poll.
As a Florida resident who has been deplatformed by social media companies, Trump could be among the beneficiaries of the new state law. Asked by a reporter on Monday whether the bill was created to help the state's most famous resident, DeSantis said it was designed to protect all Floridians, but he didn't shy away from addressing Big Tech's treatment of Trump.
“When you deplatform the president of the United States but you let Ayatollah Khamenei talk about killing Jews, that is wrong,” DeSantis said.
Whether you agree with this philosophy or not, there is a lot to take from this interview.
Academic exposes how Facebook and Twitter users emulate Nazi propaganda machinery… and sell war to Western citizens
27 May, 2021 15:38
By Kit Klarenberg, an investigative journalist exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg
© Getty Images / vchal
Fake news is facilitating the destructive power of Western imperialism, according to a new book, ‘What Is Iran?’ In an exclusive interview with RT, author Arshin Adib-Moghaddam explains how the process works in practice.
Academic Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, professor in global thought and comparative philosophies at SOAS University, London, is the author of over 60 papers and six books on contemporary culture and politics.
In his latest work ‘What is Iran?’ he sheds fresh light on the title’s ever-burning question, along with analysis of Tehran’s history, domestic politics, international relations, and more. Along the way, Arshin identifies what he dubs the “fake news machinery” that oils the wheels of Western imperialism, and sells wars of aggression and plunder to the public.
RT spoke with him to discuss the concept in detail.
RT: How do you define “fake news machinery”?
Arshin Adib-Moghaddam: Fake news machinery is a powerful assemblage of right-wing institutions, their staff, social media accounts, their political representation and global following. Fake news is the staple of right-wing politics.
In our techno-society, technology acts as a great incubator and facilitator galvanizing the process of disinformation. Facebook, Twitter and soon Clubhouse are what the Volksempfanger radio was to Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda. Some of the facts and the truths are drowned by an armada of well-connected activists whose aim is solely confrontational and aggressive – against peace, against diplomacy, against immigrants, homosexuals, Jews, intellectuals, Muslims and anyone else identified as the enemy.
As such, this system of irrationality churns out lies on a continuous basis. The ultimate aim is power, of course. But we are talking about a particularly vulgar and destructive kind of power which is inherently inhuman, violent, and abusive, physically and psychologically.
RT: How does this process work?
AA-M: Typically, a narrative is concocted in order to buttress a particular policy. It is then picked up by the various channels of the machinery.
This is how right-wing functionaries inscribe the narrative of war in international relations; via institutions, such as the so-called Foundation for Defense of Democracies; language, such as “America First;” mindsets, for example, “Why do they hate us?” and policies, for instance the doctrine of “pre-emption.”
Once a specific, right-wing project has bedded in, its supposed chivalry is loudly trumpeted, bundled up in a morally righteous and infallible narrative – in essence the legitimation of suppressive power – and stitched into the political fabric of world politics. It is in this sense that right-wing policy reveals itself as war – war continued by other means. The perverse irony of such ideology is, it makes some of us think it serves the liberation of mankind.
RT: What are some of the most egregious examples of fake news about the Middle East, and how does news media misreport the region more generally?
AA-M: Extremist politics, and I would count Trumpism as a part of this category, works with simple binaries as it reflects the uneducated and primitive mindset behind the right-wing world-view. Good versus evil, white against black, civilization opposing barbarism, and so on. The grey zones are denied, there is no complexity in the world of these people.
The so-called ‘Middle East’ comes in very handy in this dichotomization as the ultimate “other,” the black region full of Muslims that is ultimately unworthy of proper attention. Now the self-defeating irony of this type of world-view is that it leads to bad decisions. In the case of the neo-conservatives who gathered around George W. Bush, for instance, the process of myth making led to the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which gave impetus to the demise of US power in West Asia and North Africa and beyond.
The disastrous consequences of these wars should not come as a surprise. They were planned by decision-makers uneducated in the complexities and realities of West Asia and North Africa, and carried by embedded journalists who were equally uninterested in reporting the truth. They read flawed books and listened to the wrong advice.
The production of knowledge tends to be infected by ideological impurities. Policy-makers are ill-equipped to reach the less polluted areas of social sciences. Hence, they are more likely to become hostages to fortune and culprits in humanitarian disasters affecting the lives of millions, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan. These wars were the first in which the truth was not the first casualty. The conflicts were premised on a perfectly staged untruth that people believed in. The mainstream Western media was complicit in this.
Several studies have exposed how the Iraq war was built on two false premises, or some might say outright lies. First, the allegation that Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction capability, as outlined by the speech of Colin Powell at the United Nations in February 2003, and second, the mirage that Iraq and Al-Qaeda were linked which was convenient to turn Saddam Hussein into a culprit of the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Taken together, these narrative strategies had the fundamental effect to signify the friend-enemy distinction between self and other – “You are either with us or against us,” as Bush put it.
RT: What purposes does this system of propaganda serve?
AA-M: It is probably the last stand of the ‘white man’. For me, this is not a racial designation, but a metaphor for hegemony and oppression, the reversal of the self-declared “white man’s burden” in Kipling’s infamous words. Let’s take the white supremacist movement that stormed the Capitol in Washington, DC, as they are typical. These movements see themselves engaged in a constant war for survival.
The horizontal war is fought against the near enemy – the liberals, the minorities, that is the emerging social strata with demographics on its side, which is slowly molding societies in their own image. This is the social war against multiculturalism, gender equality, queer rights, etc. Then there is an equally aggressive horizontal war meant to manage the new world order in favor of this white man’s image of the world. Here you have fascist leaders in Europe tied into white supremacist networks in the US, neo-Nazis in Ukraine and so on. This vertical war is global.
RT: What is the ‘antidote’? What can citizens do to get more accurate insight?
AA-M: Where there is power, there is resistance – this is a law of physics which applies to politics as well. In particular, this vulgar and rather primitive manifestation of right-wing power is resisted on a daily basis, in the lecture room by thousands of professors all over the world, by global movements such as Black Lives Matter, or the neo-feminist waves created by gutsy Chilean women and wider afield throughout South America, which has always been a harbinger and avantgarde of emancipative movements copied all over the world.
A lie has no legs, they say, even when you create a system to base it on. In the end, the truth prevails, so speaking truth to power therefore becomes an obligation. It really is the age-old battle between the good guys against the bad guys. History shows that the Hitlers and the Stalins of this world won’t prevail.
‘What is Iran?’ is published by Cambridge University Press.
Personally, I think he exaggerates the influence of the right-wing, though, perhaps, not by a lot. Deep State is not restricted to right-wing politicians, they have influence on both political parties in America. And the vast majority of media is controlled by the left.
But he's correct in saying that much of the fake news either on the internet or on TV news media, has the overall effect of maintaining war-like attitudes against numerous countries. The inventory of war must keep moving for the economy of the US and other western countries to thrive.
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