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Comment by mandmandam | Hacker News Reader

Sounds good, until you try to find an anti-war media source that isn't labeled 'fringe'. Both liberal and conservative US media sources love war, and profit from it. Alternate views don't get a look in, not in politics, and not in media. The most graphic recent example of this might be the population's 65% support for a ceasefire in Gaza - completely unrepresented in media and the executive.

Pro-war media, corporate media, whether "liberal" or "conservative" both look rabid and bloodthirsty to the rest of the world. The NYT and WaPo, Fox ABC CNN CBS, even NPR have cheer-lead us into expensive atrocity after expensive atrocity.

Wikipedia have enabled them and censored dissenting views, openly, even clapping themselves on the back for it. They've red- and black-listed every anti-war outlet. "The last good place on the internet" my arse.

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Do you even read NYT, WaPo, and CNN? They have all been very good at showing things from the Palestinian side and how much people in Gaza are suffering.

It's absolutely unhinged to put them in the same category as Fox News.

NYT WaPo and CNN all cheerlead us into wars in the middle east, same as Fox. They were slightly more subtle about it, but it was still obvious to anyone outside America's fucked up Overton window.

They're absolutely in the same category as Fox - corporate pro-war pro-fossil fuel anti-union entertainment propaganda, masked as news. Outside the narrow window of 'acceptable' debate they're essentially indistinguishable.

CNN and the NYT are covering the atrocities and war crimes in Palestine a little better than Fox. Sure. But do you know how many journalists have been fired from those companies, and from the Guardian and the BBC as well, for simply voicing mild support for Palestine? And how many more journalists have resigned, citing fucked up editorial policy?

It's simply gaslighting to say that these mouthpieces are "very good" on Palestine's suffering. It's offensively ignorant.

A couple of things that stuck out to me enough recently that I can recall them from memory:

  - When a UN official in NYC stepped down citing failure to do anything about the ongoing 'genocide' in Gaza¹, other outlets, including some international ones, had articles about it the same day. NYT never released a piece about this NY news.²
  - basically all coverage of the recent pro-Palestinian protests in Washington DC understates the size of the protests by an order of magnitude, sometimes by two, with headlines generally not updated after counts of attendees were verified (e.g., WaPo³)

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1: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/11/1/craig_mokhiber_un_res...

2: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Anytimes.com+craig+mokhiber

3: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/11/04/dc-palest...

Do you consider The Intercept pro-war? Also, while most editors naturally reach for anglophone sources first, it's not as if sources in other languages are automatically rejected, even if every US media source is bloodthirsty. Unfortunately, it's not as if the project can get its own reporters on the ground, nor does it really want to.

I'm skeptical of mainstream media's reporting on wars, and I've actually found a lot of facts exposed on Wikipedia that might've been covered up as "treasonous" because they don't support the US's side. More so than in other English sources.

Yeah, there's a reason we call it NATOpedia.

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