The Notorious London Spy School Churning Out Many of the World’s Top Journalists
The fact that the very department that trains high state officials and agents of secretive three letter agencies is also the place that produces many of the journalists we rely on to stand up to those officials and keep them in check is seriously problematic.
by Alan Macleod
June 04th, 2021
LONDON — In a previous investigation, MintPress News explored how one university department, the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, functions as a school for spooks. Its teaching posts are filled with current or former NATO officials, army officers and intelligence operatives to churn out the next generation of spies and intelligence officers. However, we can now reveal an even more troubling product the department produces: journalists. An inordinate number of the world’s most influential reporters, producers and presenters, representing many of the most well-known and respected outlets — including The New York Times, CNN and the BBC — learned their craft in the classrooms of this London department, raising serious questions about the links between the fourth estate and the national security state.
National security school
Increasingly, it appears, intelligence agencies the world over are beginning to appreciate agents with a strong academic background. A 2009 study published by the CIA described how beneficial it is to “use universities as a means of intelligence training,” writing that, “exposure to an academic environment, such as the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, can add several elements that may be harder to provide within the government system.”
The paper, written by two King’s College staffers, boasted that the department’s faculty has “extensive and well-rounded intelligence experience.” This was no exaggeration. Current Department of War Studies educators include the former Secretary General of NATO, former U.K. Minister of Defense, and military officers from the U.K, U.S. and other NATO countries. “I deeply appreciate the work that you do to train and to educate our future national security leaders, many of whom are in this audience,” said then-U.S. Secretary of Defense (and former CIA Director) Leon Panetta in a speech at the department in 2013.
King’s College London also admits to having a number of ongoing contracts with the British state, including with the Ministry of Defence (MoD), but refuses to divulge the details of those agreements.
American connections
Although a British university, King’s College markets itself heavily to American students. There are currently 1,265 Americans enrolled, making up about 4% of the student body. Many graduates of the Department of War Studies go on to attain powerful positions in major American media outlets. Andrew Carey, CNN’s Bureau Chief in Jerusalem, for example, completed a master’s there in 2012. Carey’s coverage of the latest Israeli attack on Gaza has presented the apartheid state as “responding” to Hamas rocket attacks, rather than being the instigator of violence.
Unfortunately, MacCleod here seems to show some antisemitism. Hamas threw hundreds of missiles into Israel for (if I remember correctly) more than 24 hours before Israel responded. And why does he call Israel the apartheid state when there are millions of Arabs in Israel living happy lives, even in the Knesset. If Gaza or the West Bank were states, they would be apartheid since they want nothing less than the complete annihilation of Jews from the Holy Land.
Nevertheless, don't let this brief diversion distract you from reading what is otherwise a brilliant and extremely informative article.
A leaked internal memo Carey sent to his staff last month at the height of the bombardment instructed them to always include the fact that the Gazan Ministry of Health is overseen by Hamas, lest readers begin to believe the well-documented Palestinian casualty figures brought on by days of bombing. “We need to be transparent about the fact that the Ministry of Health in Gaza is run by Hamas. Consequently, when we cite latest casualty numbers and attribute to the health ministry in Gaza, we need to include the fact that it is Hamas run,” read his instructions.
The reason being, Hamas lies relentlessly as well as using medical facilities as launching points for their missiles. They literally hope that the IDF will strike back and do damage so they can point and tell everyone how evil Israel is. This same Israel that gave Gaza back to the Palestinians, most of whom were Christians at the time, after the 67 war.
The New York Times, the United States’ most influential newspaper, has also employed Department of War Studies alumni. Christiaan Triebert (M.A., 2016), for example, is a journalist on their visual investigations team. He even won a Pulitzer Prize for “Revelations about Russia and Vladimir Putin’s aggressive actions in countries including Syria and Europe.” Hiring students from the school for spooks to bash Russia appears to be a common Times tactic, as it also employed Lincoln Pigman between 2016 and 2018 at its Moscow bureau.
Josh Smith, senior correspondent for influential news agency Reuters and formerly its correspondent in Afghanistan, also graduated from the department in question, as did The Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Ford.
Please continue reading about the link, especially between Bellingcat and western intelligence services.
This is a little dated, but very relative to the topic of The Media is The Message
Inside Journalist Tareq Haddad’s Spectacular Departure from Newsweek
Tareq Haddad’s exposé of the corruption and collusion at the heart of modern journalism is something long-discussed by academics, but rarely does such a clear example present itself.
by Alan Macleod
December 20th, 2019
It’s Manufacturing Consent meets Operation Mockingbird; in a long exposé essay that doubles as a goodbye to the profession, Newsweek journalist Tareq Haddad explained why he was very publicly quitting his job at the New York-based magazine. “Journalism is quickly dying. America is regressing because it lacks the truth,” he wrote.
The trigger for his decision was management suppressing his story on the bombshell news that the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) hid a mountain of evidence suggesting the 2018 Douma Attack was staged, thus paving the way for more military intervention in Syria. But below the surface, it was about far more than that; Haddad’s essay described how journalists are worked to the bone and how media drives the public towards war, coordinating smears against politicians who stand against it. But most spectacularly of all, he alleges that there is a network of hundreds of government assets working as high-level editors in newsrooms across America, even naming the one at Newsweek.
Haddad knew the consequences of speaking out:
In the end, that decision was rather simple, all be it I understand the cost to me will be undesirable. I will be unemployed, struggle to finance myself and will likely not find another position in the industry I care about so passionately. If I am a little lucky, I will be smeared as a conspiracy theorist, maybe an Assad apologist or even a Russian asset—the latest farcical slur of the day,” he wrote.
MintPress News reached out to him for comment. He responded that he was certain that there were more capable and well-meaning reporters like him that could come forward. “Hopefully, those journalists will have the courage to push the issue with their editors or face the embarrassment the industry will experience when the truth of the matter is revealed to all,” he stated.
Newsweek was not alone in failing to report on the OPCW revelations. Virtually the entirety of the mainstream press (with the exception of Tucker Carlson) ignored or downplayed the findings that cast the Syrian Civil War in a considerably different light. In contrast, MintPress News, with a tiny budget compared to corporate media, has covered the story closely. Unsurprisingly, they have shown little interest in Haddad’s exposé of their corruption either.
“In any functioning democracy the Tareq Haddad affair should occupy mainstream media for weeks” Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Professor Emeritus of Bowling Green State University (Department of Journalism and Communications) told MintPress News. However, he noted, “We have neither a fully functioning democracy nor the uncontaminated information ecosystem that would enable such a thing.” Newsweek, for the record, claimed that the matter was much more mundane: “The writer pitched a conspiracy theory rather than an idea for objective reporting. Editors rejected the pitch,” it said in a statement.
The “conspiracy theory” referenced is that multiple whistleblowers have come forward to publicly accuse the OPCW of suppressing their evidence in order to reach a predetermined conclusion about the Douma attacks– one that supported military intervention. On the new evidence, former head of the OPCW Dr. Jose Bustani said it “confirmed doubts and suspicions I already had” about the incoherent report, claiming that “the picture is clearer now, although very disturbing.”
Search this blog for 'Douma' for several stories on this.
Truth, Haddad wrote, is “the most fundamental pillar of this modern society we so often take for granted,” claiming that, despite going into the profession after reading radical critiques of the media like Herman and Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, and knowing others (like Chris Hedges) had been fired for opposing war, “I believed that honest journalism could be done. Nothing I read, however, came close to the dishonesty and deception I experienced while at Newsweek.”
He spoke of constantly self-censoring and modifying his language as to not rock the boat and how staff were totally overworked. Haddad himself wrote an average of four articles per day on complicated topics he admitted he often had no experience with whatsoever. This is a phenomenon called “churnalism” by academics, where reporters are turned into cogs in giant news machines, churning out vapid and shallow writing or copying corporate press releases for the profit of the outlet. This is one reason why trust in media has been falling since the 1970s, and particularly in the last few years.
He also discusses how the media manufactured public consent for military intervention in Syria. One example of this was his boss’s refusal to publish another of his stories questioning the legitimacy of Bana Alabed, the youthful face of the pro-intervention movement. Meanwhile, those who stand up against war are smeared as assets of foreign powers. He condemns what he describes as coordinated attacks launching “preposterous accusations” against antiwar voices such as Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard.
Academics found the case remarkable, but not particularly unusual. When asked for comment by MintPress News, Tabe Bergman, Lecturer in Journalism at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China replied,
“Sadly, the resignation of Tareq Haddad is merely the latest in a long series of dedicated journalists quitting their job at mainstream news organizations that try to squeeze every penny out of the ‘news product’ while placating the powers that be.”
Again, there is much more valuable information in the rest of this story.
‘Blatant censorship’: Lawyer says story about competing with transgender athletes was changed after ‘backlash from the woke mob’
29 May, 2021 16:10
An attorney for a college athlete star who wrote of her misgivings about competing against transgender athletes has claimed editors made changes because of a woke backlash, accusing them of censorship.
Later becoming one of three female athletes to file a lawsuit attempting to overturn the policy at the start of last year, Mitchell’s column, written for USA Today, is said to have been switched without her knowledge to use the term 'male' instead of transgender, with an editor’s note expressing “regret that hurtful language was used."
So, if I've got this right, USA Today changed the term 'transgender' used by Chelsea in her original piece, to 'male', thereby insulting those girls who have boy's parts hanging from their crotch, but who call themselves girls. They then criticized her for using that term! That's astonishing and worthy of a good lawsuit.
Alliance Defending Freedom, the non-profit legal group that represents Mitchell, has posted the original opinion piece in full, and her attorney, Christiana Holcomb, has condemned the changes as being driven by "backlash from the woke mob."
"USA Today violated its principles to appease the mob,” she seethed on social media. "This blatant censorship violates the trust we place in media to be honest brokers of public debate.
Does anybody still think the media are honest brokers of public debate?
"Title IX [legislation] is really clear that the reason we have women's sports as a separate category is to protect equal athletic opportunities for female athletes like Chelsea.
“We want to see the policy fixed so that no other young women in the state of Connecticut have to experience that unfairness.”
The raging issue continues to be hugely contentious in the US, where attempts to ban transgender athletes from competing in female sports have been the subject of hotly-contested votes, counter-claims to overturn them and emotive political arguments on both sides.
Mitchell has been running at collegiate level since graduating. "I've lost four women's state championship titles, two all-New England awards and countless other opportunities and spots on the podium to biologically male runners," she told Fox News.
"I've lost four women's state championship titles, two all-New England awards and
countless other opportunities and spots on the podium to biologically male runners,"
Chelsea Mitchell
"It is a big issue. Personally, I lost a lot, but there were countless other girls who also lost state championships. I believe there were 15 state championships that the two biological males took from biological females.
“And there were more than 85 girls who missed out on opportunities to advance to medals and make finals. And so it's not just me: girls across the state were being impacted by this policy."
A federal court dismissed the case to prevent transgender athletes from competing last month, but Holcomb says the fight will continue, with fairness “just not what's happening in the state of Connecticut right now” and “biological males having dominated the girls category."
"The district court still refused to engage with the merits of the argument and recognize that the girls have had significant losses," she said, discussing a notice of appeal that was launched this week.
"The court utterly dismissed their lost opportunities and achievements and so we want to see that remedied."
That's a can of worms that is going to take a whole lot of courage to open. Sooner or later, someone has got to rule that girls with men's apparatus are not actually girls. There is absolutely no science, nor any common sense involved in gender dysphoria.
Washington Post ripped for quietly adding ‘correction’ to article
‘debunking’ Covid-19 Wuhan lab origin theory
1 Jun, 2021 20:51
© REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
The Washington Post is facing scrutiny after critics noticed a correction to a story published last year debunking the “conspiracy theory” that Covid-19 could have originated from a Wuhan lab.
The correction came after journalist Michael Tracey pointed out that the piece “flagrantly mischaracterized a key expert” quoted.
“Earlier versions of this story and its headline inaccurately characterized comments by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) regarding the origins of the coronavirus,” the correction states. “The term ‘debunked’ and the Post’s use of ‘conspiracy theory’ have been removed because, then as now, there was no determination about the origins of the virus.”
Nevertheless, the theory was dismissed by WaPo before the pandemic was even a pandemic. Why? Why did they alter the article? Were they covering up their scandalous stupidity, or their political bias?
The original story was published in February of 2020 and covered an interview Cotton did with Fox News in which he floated the idea that Covid-19 could have originated in a Wuhan lab studying infectious diseases.
“Now, we don’t have evidence that this disease originated there, but because of China’s duplicity and dishonesty from the beginning, we need to at least ask the question to see what the evidence says,” he said. “And China right now is not giving any evidence on that question at all.”
The Post ran with the headline “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked” at the time, but has since changed it to read, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.”
Richard Ebright, a professor of chemical biology at Rutgers University and an “expert” interviewed for the piece, is quoted as dismissing any theory that Covid-19 “was engineered.”
He revealed to Tracey recently, however, that he also thought a lab leak could be a possible origin for the virus, something The Post did not include in their coverage.
“I was surprised that the February 17, 2020 article in WaPo quoted only my comments on the genome sequence and not my comments on the lab-accident hypothesis,” he said.
Cotton himself went after The Post’s story earlier this week on Twitter.
The Post is only the latest to walk back on dismissing theories that Covid-19 was man-made, with Facebook reversing a policy flagging posts asserting the theory only months after implementing it. Politifact also fact-checked a past story deeming the lab origin theory “debunked.”
Critics have accused The Post and other mainstream media outlets of purposefully dismissing the theory for political purposes, despite the origin of the virus still being investigated.
“If [the virus] leaked from a lab near Moscow, liberal pundits would be demanding that families from Idaho, South Carolina and Oklahoma prepare for war,” Glenn Greenwald tweeted on Tuesday.
New York Times Publishes Photo of Girl Killed by Israelis
Who Was Also Killed by Israelis in 2017
JUN 2, 2021 6:00 PM
BY ROBERT SPENCER
My latest in PJ Media:
It was supposed to be heartbreaking: on Friday, the New York Times published a front-page series of photos with the headline “They Were Just Children,” little Palestinian Arab children who had supposedly been murdered by the evil Israeli war machine during the latest round of Hamas jihad attacks. The only problem was that one of the photos, prominently featured on the top row, was of a little girl whom Palestinian Arab propagandists, using the very same photo, had reported murdered by the Israelis in January 2017. It was just the latest example of the fact that Israel’s atrocities are so many and so brazen that Palestinians have to fabricate evidence of them – and the establishment media eagerly plays along.
The Times photo imbroglio came just over a week after Palestinian Arabs on Twitter claimed that a photo of another little girl depicted the victim of an Israeli airstrike; it was actually a photo of a Russian child model who has never been anywhere near Gaza and is still very much alive.
Shortly before that, a supporter of the Palestinian jihad against Israel tweeted: “Israel is now using white phosphorus on the city of Beit Hanoun in Palestine! It can burn human flesh until it reaches to the bones. White phosphorus is prohibited globally and it’s been considered as a war crime!” Included was a gruesome photo of a woman whose hair had been partially burned off and her face severely burned as well. There was just one minor detail that the tweet omitted to mention: the photo was not from Gaza in May 2021, but from Afghanistan in 2009.
This deception has been going on for years. It is perpetrated on an industrial scale by Palestinian propagandists in order to make Israel seem to be an oppressive occupying power. The Palestinian Delusion: The Catastrophic History of the Middle East Peace Process details the breadth and sophistication of this deception.
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Australian media organizations fined for contempt of court for breaching gag order over cardinal’s sex abuse charges
4 Jun, 2021 11:11
FILE PHOTO. Cardinal George Pell leaves the County Court of Victoria court after prosecutors decided not to proceed with a second trial on alleged historical child sexual offences in Melbourne.
© AFP / Asanka Brendon Ratnayake
A dozen Australian news outlets have been fined AU$1.1 million (US$855,000) for 21 counts of contempt of court after flouting a gag order that banned reporting of Cardinal George Pell’s child sex abuse charges in 2018.
The ruling from the Supreme Court of Victoria was made on Friday, ending a court case that was sparked when Australian media outlets violated a suppression order that prohibited the reporting of Cardinal Pell’s charges while the case was ongoing.
The news organizations had previously pleaded guilty in the case, as part of a deal that meant charges levied against 18 journalists and editors were dropped, ensuring the individuals did not face the risk of a prison sentence.
Addressing the ruling, Justice John Dixon accused the news outlets of failing to demonstrate “a significant degree of remorse and contrition,” instead using the deal as a way to protect their reporters from being individually convicted.
Justice Dixon further condemned the news outlets for engaging in “blatant and wilful defiance of the court’s authority” by refusing to obey the rules of the gag order.
They each took a deliberate risk by intentionally advancing a collateral attack on the role of suppression orders and Victoria’s justice system.
Australia’s two largest news outlets, News Corp and Nine Entertainment group, face the brunt of the fines, with the court ordering all of the news outlets found guilty to collectively pay AU$1.1 million (US$855,000), as well as AU$650,000 (US$498,440) in court costs.
Cardinal Pell, who served as the Vatican treasurer, was jailed in December 2018 after a jury found him guilty of sexually abusing two 13-year-old choir boys during his time as Archbishop of Melbourne. The conviction found the religious figure guilty of one count of sexual penetration and four counts of committing indecent acts.
The charges were overturned by the High Court of Australia, with Cardinal Pell having only served one year of his sentence, after the judges ruled the jury did not properly consider all the evidence presented.
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