How Western media chooses who they champion and vilify | The Listening Post

the legal case against one dissident Julian Assange and the death of another Alexa naali two stories that reveal how Western news outlets choose their heroes and villains Israeli news channels keep the dehumanization coming tormenting the Palestinians at the mercy of Israeli soldiers and Germany's other genocide the one it's colonizers inflicted on Namibia memories have failed over the years in both [Music] countries Judgment Day is approaching for Julian Assange the co-founder of WikiLeaks his case has just been heard for the final time by the UK's High Court two judges will now decide if he will be extradited to the US should that happen a Sange who exposed American war crimes and human rights abuses by several governments winning various journalism Awards along the way will face spying charges in the US and a jail term of up to 175 years the Assange hearing came in the wake of the story of another jailed dissident one who just died in prison Russian opposition leader Alexa Naval Naval was a political opponent of President Vladimir Putin but the journalistic work his organization did exposing corruption at the Kremlin also put a Target on his back Western journalists have made a martyr of navol but ask yourself why have so many of those same reporters treated the Assange story so differently so obediently given the implications scary ones that this case has for journalists everywhere the Assange trial is the Press Freedom trial of the 21st century I'm an American this case will determine the future of the first amendment in my country but if you're not an American you should care maybe even more because Julie nange is an Australian journalist wiky leaks is based in Iceland they never operated in the US and the US is essentially saying we can do this to anyone anywhere in the world it is a case being orchestrated in Washington conducted by some shadowy figures behind the scenes with the British legal system marching to the beat a transatlantic collusion in the 5 years Julian Assange has wasted away in a Maximum Security Prison in London fighting off extradition attempts by the us he has deteriorated so badly that he was too sick to attend a court session on his fate locked out of the public eye with far too many journalists and news organizations having turned their backs on him colluding in their own way his reputation has suffered a long with his health many people believe things that are simply not true about Julian Assange or about what this case is about uh we just recently published a series of Corrections of common misconceptions in the case for precisely this reason it's much harder to try to correct people's opinions to show them when they have been exposed to untrue information or information taken out of context the end result is that it enables this continued prosecution of a publisher for publishing information in the public interest Julian Assan is famous for um exposing the American Empire and exposing the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq but actually I think he's should be famous for exposing the Western media many of the journalists which worked with him got six figure deals for book deals and films none of them were at the hearing at the high court so it's a truly horrific story this is a legal story laced with presidential politics in 2017 the Obama Administration pardoned Chelsea Manning Julian assange's primary source for his biggest leaks and decided not to charge Assange it concluded it could not do that without also implicating the mainstream news outlets that published the material Wikileaks provided like the New York Times and the guardian at ease in 2019 Donald Trump reversed that decision and had a Sange indicted Joe Biden then took the ball from Trump and ran with it of the 18 federal charges against Assange 17 fall under the Espionage Act a problematic piece of legislation that dates back to World War I that law was written with spies or sabots in mind and has since been used against whistleblowers like Manning and it leaves no legal room for what is arguably the most important defense for any journalist in the dock and that is doing work that is in the public interest nevertheless the American authorities are insisting that the Espionage Act passed in 1917 is somehow fit for purpose in our post 911 World a lot of the things that were normalized under war and Terror you know those chickens are coming home to Roose now Assange does not want to get extradited because he will be treated like terrorists in the United States deprived of basic freedoms and rights effectively tortured on the basis that he's a national security threat ass is the most dramatic most extreme example of this increasing war on you know descent and and and and journalism how can you uh uh prosecute a s and not prosecute the papers that also published that's why the case is so ridiculous it's hugely embarrassing to the British establishment that they are going forward with this to extradite a journalist to a third country for publishing evidence of their war crimes add to that that that country is on record as plotting to assassinate that journalist in London this was revealed in a Yahoo news article where 30 us officials went on the record to reveal this CIA plot some senior Trump Administration officials and CIA Executives even discussed assassinating Assange we've seen that law be used against whistleblowers in the past but this is the first time it has been used against a publisher that means if this precedent is set any journalist any media organization that works with leaked class ified information could be targeted in the same way if journalists refrain from covering these stories because of possible legal risks to them then we as a public don't have access to information that is in our interest the Espionage Act has become a tool solely of political persecution if you leak information to the New York Times to say oh the Drone program's really great they're not going to prosecute you if you expose like Daniel ellsburg did the Vietnam War if you expose the Iraq War like Chelsea Manning did come on they're going to prosecute you under the Espionage Act so we have this overly broad overly vague unenforcable unconstitutional monstrosity and it's allowed the government to have this tool to go after and silence its critics Julian assange's latest court hearing came just 4 days after another well-known dissident Alexa naal died in a prison a Russian one the parallel is not exact Naval was primarily a politician but his organization also did some work that many Russians considered journalistic including an investigation into an opulent vacation home built for President Vladimir Putin what is striking though is the amount of coverage naval's case and his death attracted in the western media compared to the relatively few stories those Outlets have done on the Assange case the difference in tone my hero has died this man told us especially when one considers the implications the Assange prosecution could have on those same news outlets they have succumbed prioritizing self-preservation their relationships with the governments involved over what should be their primary self-interest the potential impact of this case on their journalism their ability to speak truth to power add that to the of things that Julian Assange through his own story has revealed Nani and Assange are treated differently by the Western press for a variety of reasons personal cultural professional the the media in the United States in the west tends to follow the dictates and biases of the governments that they live under and so theal might be vilified in the Russian press valorized in the western press we find it different ult to kind of escape from our own biases and I've end up in our own silos uh uh and we end up in our own Echo Chambers if the Western media had mobilized in support of Julian Assange who is a colleague he would be a free man now in a Democratic Society with an independent press every single major newspaper would have been campaigning from the day he went into Bel Marsh prison for his release there's been some articles in favor of him editorials Etc but there's been no concerted campaign the Western mainstream media and corporate media is not a check on power it's an accessory to power and he exposed that and I think partly the reason mainstream journalists hate him is because he exposed them this is a complex legalistic story with a relatively simple bottom line a journalist a multiple award-winning one who exposed far too many war crimes for us to list here has been locked up in maximum security for 5 years fighting an extradition order that could land him behind behind bars for the rest of his life if Julian Assange dies in prison how different is that really to the Alexa Nal story it's just happening in a different place in slow motion and should it come to that what will the news coverage look like that we don't yet know how naani died but a lot of people are willing to say that if he since he was in Russian prison since he was persecuted that Putin is personally responsible the world night condemning Russia accusing Moscow of assassinating Alexi naali and I think that's a fine standard but we know Julian assange's health is really bad are if he dies in US custody are we going to say Joseph Biden or whoever the president is at the point personally murdered him after all these years there's still a lot of mixed opinions as it relates to Julian Assange because if we're going to say that in naly case we need to be prepared to say that in the Assange case so while this plays out in London courts we ultimately still put the responsibility on this Administration Joe Biden there are several ways out of it if if they're not able to Simply drop the charges and close the case as a point of principle a political solution could be found that allows perhaps for the time he's already served in prison to suffice some people don't care about Julian Assange may not like Julian Assange but they should understand that regardless of him the situation impacts us all it's about all of our right to know next up the Israeli journalists taking a plausible case of genocide and putting a positive spin on it initially Israeli news outlets maintained a near total silence on the atrocities and mistreatment of Palestinians in Gaza more recent reporting deals with that topic in an ugly way Tark NAFA is here with more two Israeli documentaries broadcast this week provide a window into the abuse and torture suffered by Palestinian prison prisoners abducted in Gaza and the dehumanization that passes for journalism on Israeli TV first up the right-wing news Outlet Channel [Music] 14 in its reports we see the interrogation and humiliation of Palestinian captives who we are told are Hamas operatives of course none of these men have been given a trial and the threshold for who qualifies as a suspect is very low indeed we also hear firsthand from Israeli soldiers about how they have tortured Palestinians in their custody the story got a similar treatment from the more Center leaning Channel 13 which gave their viewers a tour of a prison housing Palestinian captives with Israeli prison guards serving as guides the scenes in both reports align with the testimonies of the many Palestinians taken prisoner in Gaza and the cruel and violent treatment they have received at the hands of Israeli soldiers this past week the un's top human rights body published what it called credible allegations of egregious violations by Israeli soldiers including the execution of women and girls in Gaza and the sexual assault and rape of Palestinian women in Israeli custody thanks TK in January a few months into the bombing of Gaza Namibia made some news when it called out the German government for its continuing and apparently UNC conditional support of Israel it said that Germany which carried out a genocide in Namibia early in the 20th century was hardly in a position to judge in 2021 Berlin formally recognized that genocide and agreed to pay 1.1 billion EUR in what it called developmental Aid instead of reparations that's a legal distinction that comes with implications however leaders of the communities affected the Herrero and Nama people rejected that offer for decades and for very different reasons the genocide was absent in both namibian and German memorialization there have been efforts to rectify that but all too often they fail to emphasize the testimonies of the victims and survivors the listening posts Nick mad now on a fight for justice that's been long treated as a footnote of history but first the viewer warning prepare for some distressing images in this report [Music] on the outskirts of swakopmund a small coastal town in Namibia lies an old Cemetery buried here are thousands of Herrero and N people who perished in the first genocide of the 20th century in 1904 the tribes rebelled against their colonial rulers the Germans military commander General Luther font issued an Infamous extermination order any Herrero found inside the German Frontier will be executed I shall spare neither women nor children those who were not killed in combat were hunted down and either executed or taken to concentration camps where many were work to death over the next four years an estimated 75% of the Herrero population and 50% of the N were wiped out 70,000 people the legacy of German Colonial ISM has been seared into namibia's Collective memory but the genocide itself has been inexcusably overlooked the genocide has mostly taken a backseat in National discourse I think that outside of the affected communities there has been little effort to actively memorialize not only the genocide but also the war of Uprising that contextualize that period there is no day of national mour or national remembrance despite active calls from affected communities to establish one and there's also no Standalone Museum or monument to memorialize the victims of the genocide and this takes away from the ability for the nation to kind of cement the genocide within public culture and public history if you look at public spaces in Namibia today you often see monuments or even street names ref referring to this period in time but what these all have in common is that they are reproducing the perspective of the colonizer and not the colonized so you have a memorialization of this time period but it's not necessarily as a genocide but kind of more as a successful military campaign by the Germans Germany lost its colonies during the first world war Namibia then known as German Southwest Africa was placed under the admin rtion of its neighbor South Africa by the late 1960s a Liberation struggle that started against German colonialism was being waged against a part South Africa the armed resistance was led by the Southwest African people's organization swapo in 1988 battle wey South Africa agreed to relinquish its control 2 years later swao won a majority at the polls and Namibia gained its independence it was a milestone in the country's postcolonial history but one that now overshadows the genocide so after Independence uh there was an euphoria that we have Liber liberated their country from aparte however the new Narrative of the new nation was all about that particular period The Bravery of 1960 swapo Liberation struggle nothing else was uh discussed so the Germans history has been erased as if there's a deliberate effort from the government to not memorialize this one of the largest projects that any new state has to undertake is that of um nation building also taking into consideration the fact that most modern African states are a consequence of foreign drawn borders and so after Independence it was a political administrative and cultural imperative to unite the namibians as one people rather other than specific ethnic groups so this motivated the push for more Collective narratives like the War of Independence against aparted but it had a unfortunate consequence which was the suppression of the story of the genocide and the war of Uprising Germany has a culture of remembrance around the Holocaust known as for gangan height spal it confronts the actions of the Nazis but for decades the country lived in a state of what's been described as Colonial Amnesia because of its failure to confront its actions in places like Namibia in recent years German academics and journalists have begun to redress that Colonial Amnesia and so has the government but there sincerity remains in question along with formly recognizing the genocide Germany offered $1.3 billion in what it called development Aid the offer was rejected by leaders of the Herrera anama people who said that they had been sidelined in the negotiations and fear that the money which they said was inadequate would not reach the affected communities the double standard in Germany's approach to these two genocides makes its culture of remembrance seem more like selective memory so Germany's fangan Heights btig largely absor from the country's crimes in Africa because it's largely associated with the era of national socialism than any other era in Germany's history so whereas this culture often erects Monument and memorials that put you in a contemplative State about past atrocities the amount of Memorial sites that exist for the victims of the Nam herero genocide are very few much of what is known about the genocide comes from German colonial era documentation that had an agenda prisoners who died in concentration camps were often decapitated their heads sent to Germany for pseudo scientific research to try prove the racial superiority of white Europeans sexual abuse was rif during this period a common practice was to photograph the naked bodies of Herrera and Nama woman and send the images back to Germany as postcards the pictures are exploitative and explicit and therefore we blurred them this documentation was designed to dehumanize the Herrera anama people to justify their subjugation and even in the the modern era it still excludes their perspective so the documentation of that particular period uh is mainly in uh German language and so a lot of hero people I can say 99.9% they don't speak German so those Colonial documation tend to be accessed by German academics who understand the language if you have these speaking namibian journalists often writing in the political sections and then you have more of the explication of the past being written by more German historians or German speaking namibian historians that creates a discursive structure that often separates the political part of it with this historical side and that has a lot of implications for the discourse because when the Herrero Nama says something about the past it can kind of just seem as one opinion among a lot of other opinions the trauma of a genocide will always Ripple through the generations but in the Libya that pain is compounded by the legacy of colonialism and the racial inequality it created today 70% of commercial farming land is still owned by foreigners or white namibians many the descendants of German colonialists some of that Land once belonged to the Herrera anama people many of their descendants now live in poverty Germany's offer of money as developmental Aid won't undo this reality but with negotiations stored this cause much like the genocide is becoming a distant memory part of the colonial African experience that things have not changed but we have to move into a national policy of reconciliation but it is not easy when you know that your great grandparents wealth was taken and they have been subjected to slave labor their suffering is abs from the memorialization we have to fight for them to be recognized and finally last week we showed you some unsavory images coming out of Gaza Israeli soldiers cooking in the homes of Palestinians they have displaced eating the food they've stolen from those kitchens now for the other side of that coin and what passes for Palestinian meals these days this is what it looks like when you try to cook a loaf of bread using animal feed because you have no flour since Israeli forces have prevented humanitarian aid from reaching you some meals can still be bought if you have the money and lots of it whoever bought these strips of meat with couscous on the side paid $95 for it we're showing you those pictures because there are very few journalists left working in Northern Gaza to tell that part of the story so many have been killed by Israeli bombs and bullets and the few that have survived are too busy trying to find food to keep us informed the best way to stay on top of this awful story is to keep your eyes here on Al jazer we'll see you next time at the listening post

Channel: Al Jazeera English

Views: 165,320

Keywords: Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera English, Assange, Julian, Julian Assange, Navalny, Putin, Russia, Wikileaks, afghanistan, al Jazeera, al jazeera English, al jazeera live, al jazeera video, aljazeera English, aljazeera latest, aljazeera live, aljazeera live news, biden, breaking, explained, gaza, iraq, israel, journalist, latest news, leak, news, news headlines, syria, trump, update, war, media criticism, western media, critique, analysis

Id: 1jHByEA6z-Y

Length: 25min 23sec (1523 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 24 2024