Liberal Media Has Totally Failed Us
I spent a few days this past weekend with one of my best friends.
We have different lives these days, so we don’t see each other much.
He’s a decent, liberally-minded person whose media diet, I confirmed, consists exclusively of the BBC and The Guardian.
We got talking about Gaza. He was adamant that Hamas had mass raped women and beheaded babies on October 7th. He was adamant everyone who died at the Nova music festival was killed by Hamas. He wasn’t sure about the accuracy of the numbers reported dead in Gaza because they come from Hamas. Tragically his doubt is precisely the goal of media outlets who insert ‘Hamas-run’ before every reference to reported casualties. It was disturbing to see the success of this one close up.
The day after I got back from that trip, I saw a Facebook post of a friend whose wedding I attended a decade ago.
She’d posted a link to a petition urging more help for kids with long covid. She said her daughter had long covid and they’d been waiting four months for a referral to a specialist clinic.
She is a very generous, sweet and liberally-minded person. Unlike my close friend, I don’t know her media diet as precisely, but I’d be very surprised if it consists of much more than the BBC and The Guardian.
I went back to check what she’d said about covid since 2020. She hadn’t posted about it in nearly five years.
Both of my friends are victims of propaganda.
If you can make a good liberal turn away from a genocide or forget a pandemic, there isn’t much you can’t get away with.
After our conversation about Gaza and October 7th, I sent my friend a bunch of different news sources from various official bodies who found no evidence of rape on October 7th. I sent him the official UN report into October 7th, a report by Human Rights Watch as well as Israeli news stories reporting the results of investigations undertaken by forensic pathologists in Israel which found no evidence of rape.
I sent him Israeli media reports that confirmed Israel had enacted an order to kill their own citizens at the music festival to stop Hamas returning to Gaza with more hostages. (I’d already explained to him how he’d fallen for the ‘Hamas-run’ trope).
Whether these sources flipped the script on what he believed about the Hamas attack I’m not sure. He thanked me but didn’t say much more than that. I’m aware the bonds wrapped around his mind regarding the nature of the so-called Israel-Palestine conflict aren’t going to be broken that easily. Because this propaganda effort hasn’t been going on for 18 months. It’s been going on our whole lives. And it’s not clear that he understood the import of what I was telling him: you’ve been lied to by the media you reliably turn to, as an educated liberal person, for the truth. But worse than that, you haven’t been lied to by accident. You have been lied to deliberately because you, a liberal news reader, are a pawn in a bigger game. A game of propaganda in which most of the large media outlets colluded after October 7th. Propaganda that sought to establish the ‘facts’ of what happened that day before the facts had been established, in order to procure for Israel and its western backers a license to commit genocide.
You, a good liberal, were provided the excuse you need to turn away from profound horror.
You, a good liberal who laughs at propagandised anti-vax right-wingers, have merely fallen for a different flavour of propaganda.
Your consent for genocide has been deliberately manufactured. And you never even knew it.
By perpetuating stories of non-existent atrocities committed on October 7th, by casting doubt on the numbers of dead, the media conditioned liberals like my friend into a state of desensitisation. This, then, allowed children to be murdered in their thousands and for protests against this slaughter to be written off as ‘pro-Hamas.’
And the last thing good liberals want to be seen as is pro-Hamas.
Because Hamas rape young women and kill babies.
The Israel lobby and pro-Israel journalists know that it is essential for Hamas not to be seen as resistors against aggression. They know it’s essential that they instead be seen as bloodthirsty, rapist, terrorist animals, rather than occupied people with the right to self-defence.
The dehumanisation of Palestinians achieved since October 7th (and primed for many decades prior) enables genocide, enables ethnic cleansing, enables these unspeakable war crimes.
Because who can live alongside such animals?
Israel is just doing what any white liberal would have to do faced with these circumstances.
Good liberals will have read about the protests in Gaza the other day where a handful chanted against Hamas (the majority were simply protesting against their own extermination). The liberal media couldn’t wait to tell us about the anti-Hamas chants, as if nothing else was happening Gaza. How many good liberals know, however, that American doctor Mark Perlmutter, who is working in Gaza’s one remaining, bullet-riddled hospital, just operated on a 15-year old girl shredded by an Apache helicopter while riding her bike?
How many Guardian readers know his stories about Palestinian children being murdered by Israeli snipers with ‘dead-centre double-tap headshots?’ Or his video testimony of Palestinian male prisoners being raped by ‘pork-blood soaked probes.’ There are literally thousands of instantly verifiable stories like this from Gaza yet we rarely, if ever, hear about them. But we hear quickly about a few chants against Hamas. Of course for months we heard unverified stories about rapes and beheaded babies which turned out to be pure lies.
To my other friend and her daughter with long covid.
It’s extremely unlikely she knew that her ten year-old daughter could end up with a life-changing illness as a result of covid. Especially not in 2024-2025.
Isn’t covid just a cold now? Especially for kids.
That’s been the message drummed into people for years. In fact, to say there is even a covid message from the mainstream press, is, at this point, too generous. As I have written about previously, the virus has been entirely consigned to history, despite the fact that thousands are still dying of it every week globally, and despite the fact it is still giving children and adults a life-changing illness. For years liberal media including The Guardian pushed covid-is-a-cold propaganda. I documented it here.
My friend mentions the wait for the long covid specialist because she still believes in institutions, in systems.
She believes help is on its way.
She believes that once her daughter gets to see a long covid specialist, things will get better. The truth is, things are unlikely to get better via this route, and may very well get worse, especially if her daughter is given advice to exercise. I have written before about the scandal of patients with myalgic encephalomyelitis (a chronic illness that can be trigged by any viral infection including covid) being told to get up and walk. Not much has changed. Bed-bound long covid patients whose injury is at the cellular level are still being told to do graded exercise. There is very little help available for people with severe long covid like this. There is no cure.
I titled this article as I did for a good reason.
You can’t be failed by a media you don’t trust in the first place. People who consider themselves as having strong, progressive, humanity-affirming values expect to be failed by right-wing media.
They don’t expect, and don’t realise, they’ve been failed by liberal media.
One reason is because their trusted news sources explicitly cater to people looking for a position of superiority over the unwashed propagandised hoards.
Outlets like The Guardian and The New York Times make it a point of pride to highlight their pro-science credentials and ‘fact check’ right-wingers for their deliberate misinformation. In doing this they provide progressive readers with a (false) sense of security that they’re consuming the most sophisticated news possible. It’s an in-group signal—trust us, we’re clever, you can take your lead from us, it means you’re clever too. My media is anti-Trump, pro-democracy and pro-science, like me, so they must be the good guys. Right?
I believed this for a long time too. I thought because they weren’t on the far-right, because they spoke of inclusivity and anti-racism, they were on my side. I trusted them.
But on Palestine, on covid, on Russia-Ukraine, even on climate change, the liberal media are failing good people.
When was the last time you saw a climate change story that told you every single thing about the global economy and our societies needs to change to avoid a billions-dead cataclysm within the next 50 years?
Did you see the news story about the UK actuaries society estimating four billion dead at 3 degrees of warming? No, you didn’t.
When did you last hear about the inevitable successive crop failures and global famine on our current path?
Very few understand continued economic growth is incompatible with controlling climate change.
When have the media ever really given it to us straight, even on climate change?
Most people will tell themselves they’re going to a particular website to “check the news.”
But they are doing more than this.
People choose news websites because they want their political-social ideologies to be positively reinforced.
Liberals don’t go to Fox News for news. Conservatives don’t go to The Guardian.
And on both sides, people will keep coming back to their favoured news sources and trusting them uncritically again and again and again.
I did for a long time.
I have no love for the right-wing media, but I also have no expectations of them either. I know who reads that stuff. But liberal media pretend to be on the side of the good, only to reproduce narratives that help buttress the status quo, just with a bit more civility . Which is why I principally blame them for the collapse in media standards.
(Editing in a more recent example. You might have seen a Guardian and BBC news story about Putin ‘endorsing’ Trump’s plans to annex Greenland. It was anti Russian propaganda. They completely lied about what Putin said. Why? Because, just like the right, liberal media knows what it is red meat for their audience.)
I can hear you now: but Nate, it’s always been like this.
Yes, to an extent. But not exactly.
The mainstream liberal press collapsed Nixon’s presidency with the Pentagon Papers. In recent memory the Guardian worked with Julian Assange and Wikileaks to publish evidence of US war crimes in Iraq. The Guardian, The New York Times and The Washington Post all worked with Edward Snowden to publish evidence of mass surveillance of our smartphones being undertaken by the British and American governments. Even the centre-right Telegraph newspaper in the UK revealed how British MPs were gaming their expense allowances to build duck ponds or buy second homes.
All this was only a little over a decade ago. It would never happen now. The collapse in integrity, the collapse in adversarial journalism that truly holds power to account, has been clear to see.
When it comes to US foreign policy, we’ve seen this week what counts as journalism.
The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was mistakenly added to a text message group chat with top US officials discussing plans to bomb Yemen. Rather than stay in the chat and gather as much information as possible, for which there is a clear public interest case, he said he ‘immediately left’ the group when it became clear it was legit, because he didn’t want to see something he shouldn’t. He didn’t even get anything for his obsequiousness. Trump, Hegseth and other US officials still attacked him rabidly for publishing the few messages he did. Goldberg had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to observe the inner workings of the empire’s war machine and instead, like a compliant servant of empire, a protector of imperial interests, he recused himself.
Because of this, the story, from The Guardian to the New York Times, became a defanged palace intrigue about blunder and ineptitude rather than one about illegal civilian-murdering war crimes (when the bombs fell they fell on residential areas in Yemen, killing innocents including children).
Getting outraged over the lack of decorum and unprofessionalism in the way the empire planned the illegal civilian murder bombs and not the illegal civilian murder bombs themselves? Peak liberal media.
What is journalism to these people?
The other thing you won’t know about The Atlantic’s Goldberg? He emigrated to Israel when he was in his twenties and was an IDF prison guard for a number of years.
As we plunge closer to the abyss, as we search for meaningful mechanisms to get out of our fascist death spiral, one concrete action we can take is to recommend alternative media sources for people.
We have to help people kill the liberal inside of them, and alternative sources of information can do this.
Pointing out how, by whom and for what end good people are given misleading news or half-truths by supposedly trustworthy sources can help do this.
Moving people away from liberal analysis and towards a more critical analysis of capitalism, imperialism and empire can help do this.
It’s not the whole solution.
All of us are compromised to a certain extent by our mere existence in the extractive, capitalist machine.
But to give ourselves even a small chance of building a better future, we need to help wean good people off an exclusively liberal media news diet.
The links below can help.
Bang on man. Everything here needed to be said, but the Goldberg story in particular riles me. You're gifted such a rare opportunity and instead of asking why and possibly doing something huge with it you just opt for yet another "Trump's people are dumb and sketchy" piece that'll be forgotten next week.
You've hit the nail on the head with this article. To me, liberalism perpetuates the status quo with a smiling face. I don't feel like liberals are bad people, per se, but they seem to have faith in the status quo, and capitalistic institutions/systems which are failing us all.