TV News LIES

More than 250 news outlets around the world have signed an appeal that calls for the protection of Palestinian journalists in Gaza, for foreign press to be granted independent access to the territory and for the evacuation of wounded journalists in Gaza needing medical treatment abroad. NPR is among the media outlets that signed.

The appeal, organized by Reporters Without Borders and Avaaz, notes that at least 220 journalists have been killed by the Israeli army in Gaza in under two years of war. Media watchdogs and historians note this marks the deadliest period of war for journalists ever recorded, globally. Palestinians count 247 journalists killed.

Israel's Foreign Ministry called the appeal a "political manifesto against Israel" that it said shows how great global media bias is.

"The reports we see in the global media regarding Gaza do not tell the real story there. They tell the campaign of lies that Hamas spreads," the ministry said in a statement.

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As a prominent Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro – a friend of President Donald Trump and now a top Justice Department official – repeatedly sought to support Trump's effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election by claiming widespread voting machine fraud.

Newly filed court documents allege, however, that Pirro later acknowledged during court depositions under oath that she believed no voting machine fraud or failures had occurred and that the 2020 election Trump lost was, in her own words, "fair and free."

The documents were filed Aug. 19 by lawyers for the Smartmatic voting technology company as part of its ongoing $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox that was first filed in February 2021. Pirro was just one of many prominent Fox News on-air personalities who worked to help Trump push his false “Stop the Steal” narrative after his loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

Stomartmatic's lawsuit alleges Pirro and others at Fox News falsely implicated Smartmatic in a made-up conspiracy to steal the election from Trump.

That claim has been debunked by a host of investigations, including the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which said in a November 2020 statement that there was "no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised."

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President Trump threatened major broadcast networks in a string of social media posts late Sunday, suggesting they be fined or taken off the air due to their polling and coverage of his administration.

“Why is it that ABC and NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the absolute worst and most biased networks anywhere in the World, aren’t paying Millions of Dollars a year in LICENSE FEES,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform Sunday night. “They should lose their Licenses for their unfair coverage of Republicans and/or Conservatives, but at a minimum, they should pay up BIG for having the privilege of using the most valuable airwaves anywhere at anytime!!! Crooked ‘journalism’ should not be rewarded, it should be terminated!!!”

In another post, the president called ABC and NBC “two of the worst and most biased networks in history,” which “give me 97% BAD STORIES.”

“IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC,” he continued. “I would be totally in favor of that because they are so biased and untruthful, an actual threat to our Democracy!!!”

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Court papers in a voting technology company’s $2.7 billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News point to Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs and Jeanine Pirro as leaders in spreading false stories about election fraud in the weeks after Democrat Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump in 2020.

Arguments for summary judgment by Smartmatic were filed in lightly redacted form this week at the New York Supreme Court. It’s like a bad rerun for Fox: Similar revelations about its conduct following the 2020 election came in a lawsuit by another company falsely accused of doctoring votes, Dominion Voting Systems. Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787 million in a 2023 settlement after the judge found it was “CRYSTAL CLEAR” that none of the claims against the voting system company were true.

In short: Fox let Trump aides spread conspiracy theories despite knowing they were false because it was what their viewers wanted to hear. Fox was trying to hold on to viewers who were angry at the network for saying Biden had won the election.

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The first time I met Al Jazeera’s Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last year. His team had already buried two journalists, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Samer Abu Daqqa. The rest, he told me, were hungry. They were also dealing with trying to get hold of protective gear, threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the killing of family members.

Ismail al-Ghoul hadn’t seen his wife and child in months and was missing them intensely. Hossam Shabat, Mohammed Qraiqea and Anas al-Sharif were asking for time to secure food in the morning before they could start reporting. Today, they are all dead.

The first time I met Al Jazeera’s Gaza team lead, Tamer Almisshal, was in July last year. His team had already buried two journalists, Hamza al-Dahdouh and Samer Abu Daqqa. The rest, he told me, were hungry. They were also dealing with trying to get hold of protective gear, threats from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the killing of family members. Ismail al-Ghoul hadn’t seen his wife and child in months and was missing them intensely. Hossam Shabat, Mohammed Qraiqea and Anas al-Sharif were asking for time to secure food in the morning before they could start reporting. Today, they are all dead.

I spoke with various members of the Gaza team while writing a profile of Gaza’s veteran reporter Wael al-Dahdouh, who lost his wife, three of his children and grandson. All spoke of their work as a duty that needed to be carried out despite the risks. Three members of that team have since been killed in a chain of assassinations.

Each time I sent condolences, the response was always that the coverage would not cease. “We are continuing,” the Gaza editor told me last week, after he lost his entire Gaza City team in the targeted strike that claimed the lives of Sharif, Mohammed Nofal, Ibrahim Thaher and Qraiqea. “We will not betray their message, or their last wishes.”

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The latest casualty of Donald Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism is Eduardo Porter, one of the most thoughtful and intelligent critics of his heinous regime.

On Tuesday, Porter wrote his last column for the Washington Post.  In a widely circulated email, he explained why he was leaving the Post:

"Jeff Bezos and his new head of Opinion are taking the paper down a path I cannot follow, directed toward the relentless promotion of free markets and personal liberties … I have no idea to what extent this is driven by Mr Bezos’ fear of what Donald Trump could do to his various business interests, most of which are more valuable to him than The Post.”

Well, I do have an idea. Bezos stopped the Post from endorsing Kamala Harris. Amazon made a huge contribution to Trump’s inauguration. And he stood in front of Trump at the president
swearing in.

Why? Because Bezos has founded a bunch of mega-corporations, including Amazon, that depend on Trump’s goodwill and could be in deep trouble if Trump decided to retaliate against Bezos.

It’s much the same story with Stephen Colbert, longtime host of CBS’s The Late Show and the top-rated late-night talkshow host in the US.

On 14 July, Colbert openly criticized CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for its $16m settlement with Trump over his frivolous lawsuit over the routine editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that Trump claimed gave her an unfair advantage in the 2024 election.

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