You
should not honour men more than truth.
Plato
Bearing
witness is a crucial marker of a responsible press and
media. It brings to light the unnecessary suffering
and hardship of those rendered voiceless and disposable,
as well as the underlying forces that produce such conditions.
It also serves to challenge those who “wallow
in willful ignorance.” Shattering the lies concealed
by claims of innocence is a powerful weapon for holding
power accountable, making it visible and subject to
exposure and resistance. Bearing witness does not guarantee
justice, but it provides the awareness necessary to
turn propaganda against itself and mobilize people to
function as a collective force of resistance.
The corporate
media undermines moral witnessing by often prioritizing
the discredited notion of balance over the more crucial
goal of seeking truth in the service of accountability
and democracy. This retreat from holding power accountable
not only discredits the pursuit of truth in the service
of justice and the strengthening of democracy but also
tends to fall prey to the seductions of corruption,
political theater and entertainment.
The dialectic
within journalism encompasses what could be termed,
on one hand, a politics of erasure and distortion, and
on the other, a politics of moral witnessing. The politics
of erasure is apparent in how corporate mainstream media
disproportionately covers Israel’s aggressive
actions in Gaza and portrays Trump as a conventional
political candidate rather than an authoritarian threat
to democracy both domestically and internationally.
This erasure is also evident in how far-right journalism
consistently distorts the truth when reporting on issues
that conflict with reactionary conservative politics.
Conversely,
the pursuit of truth and moral witnessing is exemplified
by journalists from sources such as The Intercept,
CounterPunch, Truthout, LA Progressive, and other
alternative media platforms. These journalists engage
deeply with critical social issues and consistently
hold power accountable. Despite their commitment to
journalistic integrity, these outlets are often marginalized
within the media landscape dominated by corporate control.
In what follows, I will comment briefly on how these
two modes of journalism operate. First, I will briefly
focus on the reporting of Scahill and Grim in The
Intercept, which exposed how the New York Times
and several other major newspapers underplayed the despair,
suffering, and death that Israel is brutally imposing
on Palestinians. On the other hand, I will examine how
corporate-controlled media failed to address historically,
contextually, and critically both Trump’s delusional
ramblings and his clear and dangerous threats to democracy.
Jeremy Scahill
and Ryan Grim reported in The Intercept that
an internal memo from the New York Times “instructed
journalists covering Israel’s war on the Gaza
Strip to restrict the use of the terms ‘genocide’
and “ethnic cleansing” and to “avoid
using the phrase ‘occupied territory’ when
describing Palestinian land . . . The memo also instructed]
reporters not to use the word Palestine “except
in very rare cases” and to steer clear of the
term “refugee camps” to describe areas of
Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians
expelled from other parts of Palestine during previous
Israeli–Arab wars.”
Scahill
and Grim also note that major newspapers such as the
New York Times, Washington Post, and Los
Angeles Times “reserved terms like ‘slaughter,’
‘massacre,’ and ‘horrific’ almost
exclusively for Israeli civilians killed by Palestinians,
rather than for Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli
attacks.”
This is
more than mere style guidelines; it is censorship in
service of partisan reporting and moral irresponsibility.
Instances of war crimes, the horror of genocide, and
the reality of Israel’s violence against Palestinians
are being distorted and erased. Critical of the babble
of balance, Scahill and Grim highlight the importance
of reporting on Israel’s savage war against Palestinians
while making clear that the mainstream press represses
such reporting, enabling the slaughter to continue.
Rather
than “hating the people who are oppressed,”
CounterPunch is another truth-seeking media source that
has covered the war on Gaza in great detail, providing
both personal accounts of the suffering while placing
the conflict in a broader history and political narrative.
The punishing
state now wraps itself in censorship, propaganda, and
cruel invective parading as a mix between political
theater and both sides journalism. Americans are bombarded
with the babble of liberals who are too cowardly to
name Trump as a budding fascist or as a racist, treating
him as either a normal candidate or a bullying clown
rather than as a symptom of a deeper malaise of fascism,
echoing a pernicious and frightening past. Corporate
media normalcy bias treats Trump as simply another choice
in the run for the presidency. Under the false insistence
on balance, Trump and Biden are treated as two candidates
with simply different views, rather than treating Trump
as a dangerous and unbalanced threat to democracy itself.
Meanwhile,
the corporate-controlled press focuses on the release
of thankfully freed hostages and the unfounded charges
of anti-Semitic politicians, who use the guise of anti-Semitism
to undermine free speech and transform higher education
into centers of indoctrination. Almost no coverage is
given to the indictment by the International Criminal
Court (ICC) of “Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged
war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip.”
Bombs explode, and blood flows freely over the bodies
of more than 37,000 Palestinians, including thousands
of women and children in Gaza. Ten children in Gaza
lose a limb daily to war; according to the World Health
Organization some “citizens in Gaza are now reduced
to drinking sewage water and eating animal feed.”
These horrors disappear from mainstream news in their
cycle of erasure, misrepresentation, and politics of
balance.
It is truly
alarming to see and hear how Trump’s frequent
lapses into babble and gibberish are either ignored,
barely commented on in a serious way, or treated as
normal. It has become uneventful in the eyes of the
corporate media to acknowledge critically that at his
rallies Trump substitutes meaningful discourse with
oratory that suggests he has “fallen off one verbal
cliff after another, with barely a ripple in national
consciousness.” He has spoken incoherently about
sharks and electric boats in the same sentence. He rants
about Taylor Swift, claiming she is beautiful, but liberal
and that he is “more popular” than her.
He has made cruel remarks about Nancy Pelosi’s
husband, joking about the violent attack he suffered
at the hands of a right-wing conspiracy theorist. He
has attacked Jack Smith and his wife. In a “bizarre,
moment. Trump called Pelosi’s daughter a ‘wacko,’”
and referred to the Department of Justice as “dirty
no-good bastards.” Rarely do these comments get
the coverage they deserve in the mainstream media. There
is little commentary about how unfit he is emotionally
and what the consequence for the country might be if
he is elected to the presidency. As Tim Nichols noted
in The Atlantic, Trump’s delusional behavior
should “terrify any American voter, because this
behavior in anyone else would be an instant disqualification
for any political office, let alone the presidency.”
He further adds:
I am not
a psychiatrist, and I am not diagnosing Trump with anything.
I am, however, a man who has lived on this Earth for
more than 60 years, and I know someone who has serious
emotional problems when I see them played out in front
of me, over and over. The 45th president is a disturbed
person. He cannot be trusted with any position of responsibility—and
especially not with a nuclear arsenal of more than 1,500
weapons. One wrong move could lead to global incineration.
A dangerous
right-wing firewall protects Trump and his delusional
ramblings and reactionary policies from being identified
as a dangerous authoritarian who poses a serious threat
to democracy at home and abroad. The cowardly politics
of normalization shield him from the criticism and exposure
the public deserves. Additionally, he is protected by
a right-wing echo chamber that legitimizes, propagates,
and celebrates his lies, corruption, and criminal convictions.
They also lie for profit. But there is more at work
here than a politics of disappearance, there is also
a relentless barrage of lies and distortions. Thom Hartman
refers to the dominant right-wing echo chamber as “The
GOP’s MAGA lie machine,” one that represents
“dark side of politics.” False claims by
mainstream conservative media became more visible with
Fox News’s nearly $800 million dollar settlement
with Dominion for lying about the 2020 presidential
election. Unfortunately, the distortion machine continues
with impunity. For instance, Judd Legum recently reported
that the Sinclair Broadcast Group is engaged in a systemic
campaign of presenting misleading stories about President,
which are then distributed on a range of social media.
He writes:
This month,
Sinclair Broadcast Group has flooded a vast network
of local news websites with misleading articles suggesting
that President Biden is mentally unfit for office. The
articles are based on specious social media posts by
the Republican National Committee (RNC), which are then
repackaged to resemble news reports. The thinly disguised
political attacks are then syndicated to dozens of local
news websites owned by Sinclair, where they are given
the imprimatur of mainstream media brands, including
NBC, ABC, and CBS.
Trump has
transformed the Republican Party into a cult of morally
vacuous and politically maligned sycophants who are
complicit in his actions and cover for him. Trump and
his followers live in a bubble of deceit, hidden through
a powerful and expansive culture of ignorance and hatred.
This is a party that spreads false and deranged stories
about Jewish space lasers, voting machines corrupted
by alleged Venezuelan communists, and Democrats who
drink the blood of kidnapped children, among other insane
conspiracy theories.
The mainstream
and right-wing media have emptied language of any substantive
meaning, turning it into a poisonous cacophony of lies,
bigotry, and deranged conspiracy theories. One crucial
caveat must be made. While Trump’s bizarre ramblings
rightly suggest an unstable and unhinged mind, this
criticism should not but used to overshadow his fascist
politics and the conditions that have given rise to
Trumpism. The latter is a historical and political issue
that cannot be reduced to psychological language.
More to
the point. There is more at play here than Trump’s
delusional ramblings. There is also his attack on the
justice system, his lies about the election, his role
in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, his history
as a sexual predator, his support for Project 2025 and
its planned subversion of democracy, and his history
leading up to his thirty-four felony convictions. While
these events receive critical commentary, they are rarely
analyzed as part of a larger program that supports an
upgraded fascism. Deceit, ignorance, and the death of
civic responsibility now function as the perfect storm
enabling fascist politics. America is no longer ashamed
of its ignorance; it is now a matter of fondness, provides
a sense of community, and serves as a measure of loyalty.
What does it take under these circumstances for struggling
to prevent democracies from dying? What questions do
we need to ask to rethink the meaning of politics, struggle,
and collective resistance?
How do we
account for this dramatic refusal by liberals and others
to name and recognize the ongoing threat of fascism
in the U.S.? What institutions under the regime of gangster
capitalism have surrendered their educative, political,
cultural, and economic responsibilities? How has white
supremacy, with its logic and politics of hate, exclusion,
and violence once again been able to define who counts
as a citizen in the United States? What conditions have
allowed the collapse of civic culture into a culture
of commodification, surveillance, and punishment? What
will it take to develop a world where democracy can
breathe again? Where are the public spaces calling for
a revolution of values that challenge the war machines
and expansive militarized propagandistic cultural apparatuses?
What kind of mass movement is necessary to shift public
consciousness and the centers of corrupt politics in
American society? How can these questions be answered
within a broader understanding of the connection between
neoliberal capitalism and fascism?
Where is
the language we need to bear witness to resist the country’s
death drive while affirming the need for justice? How
can the language of compassion and solidarity overcome
the discourse of institutionalized neoliberalism, rancid
individualism, greed, and self-interest? Where are the
spaces, emerging institutions and social movements that
will create the conditions to say yes to justice and
no to cruelty, systemic racism, mass ignorance, and
unfettered greed? What will it take to cultivate a willingness
to say no, and the energy necessary to put our minds
and bodies on the line for a future in which our children
can experience dignity, justice, and joy? What might
it mean to inhabit what James Baldwin called a “despairing
witness” and, at the same time, to be prepared
to lose everything in order to struggle for a world
in which economic, political, and social rights are
guaranteed for everyone?
All of these
questions pose challenges that need to be addressed
given the historical crisis facing the U.S. Baldwin
never despaired of the struggles and potential danger
of being a moral witness, and his words offer hope in
the ongoing individual and collective efforts to be
strong, brave, and willing to continue the fight for
a radical democracy. His words are more urgent and powerful
than ever: “Not everything is lost. Responsibility
cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses
abdication, one begins again.” In the age of emerging
fascism, there is no other choice but to begin again
to fight the ghosts of a fascist past that have returned
with a vengeance.
By
Henry Giroux:
Assassins
of Memory
Not
Joe's But Our Collective Memory Issues
The
Politics of Emergency Time
Hijacking
Freedoms
America
at the Crossroads
Gangster
Capitalism
Historical
Amnesia in Age of Capitalist Apocalypse
The
Inequality of Freedom
The
Nazification of Education
Killing
Fields in Age of Mass Shootings
The
Pedagogy of Resistance
The
Death of Ethics
Banning
Books
Homage
to Paulo Freire
Plague
of Manufactured Ignorance
Racial
Cleansing and Erasing History
Plague
of Historical Amnesia
Recovering
from Trumpism
Tribute
to Noam Chomsky
The
Ouster of Trump
White
Supremacy in the Offal Office
The
Plague of Inequity
Covid
and our Embattled Society
Trump
and the Corona Death Waltz
Neoliberal
Fascism
The
Terror Unforseen
Interview
of H.A.Giroux
The
Normalization of Fascism
The
Public Intellectual II
Bertrand
Russell: Public Intellectual
Thinking
Dangerously in Dark Times
Democracy
in Exile
Authoritarianism
in America
Violence:
US Favourite Pastime
Losing
in Trump's America
In
Dark Times Teachers Matter
The
Age of Civic Illiteracy
Exile
and Disruption in the Academy
What
Society Produces a Donald Trump
From
School to the Prison Pipeline
Orwell
& Huxely
American
Sniper and Hollywood Heroism
Selfie Culture
The
Age of Disposability
In
the Shadow of the Atomic Bomb
Killing
Machines and the Madness of the Military
The
Age of Neoliberal Cruelty
The
Politics of the Deep State
Challenging
Casino Capitalism
Crisis
in Democracy
America's
Descent into Madness
