Media and conflict

Peter Cronau – Declassified Australia January 11, 2023 An Australian university has unearthed millions of Tweets by fake accounts pushing disinformation on the Ukraine war, Peter Cronau reports. The sample size dwarfs other studies of covert propaganda about the war on social media.  Originally published at Consortium News on November 6, 2022 A team of researchers at the University of Adelaide have found that as many as 80 percent of tweets about the 2022 Russia-Ukraine invasion in its early weeks were part of a covert propaganda campaign originating from automated fake “bot” accounts. An anti-Russia propaganda campaign originating from a “bot army” of phony automated Twitter accounts flooded the internet at the start of the war. The research shows that of the more than 5 million tweets studied, 90.2 percent (both bot and non-bot) came from accounts that were pro-Ukraine, with fewer than 7 percent of the accounts being classed as pro-Russian. The university researchers...

An academic shock study exposes how the press is pushing for confrontation with Moscow in the EU’s most powerful state Felix Livshitz December 22, 2022 Last week, the University of Mainz published a study of German news coverage of events in Ukraine, and Berlin’s official response to the crisis. The conclusions confirm that since February 24, the media has played a major role in keeping the conflict going, and making a negotiated settlement less likely, due to almost universally biased, pro-war, anti-Russia content being published at all stages. Researchers at the university analyzed German-language reporting on the Ukraine conflict between February 24 and May 31, assessing the content of around 4,300 separate articles published by the country’s eight leading newspapers and TV stations: FAZ, Suddeutsche Zeitung, Bild, Spiegel, Zeit, ARD Tagesschau, ZDF Today, and RTL Aktuell. Originally published on RT, December 22, 2023 During this time, Ukraine was portrayed positively...

Dan Kovalik December 16, 2022 Once a Pittsburgh sister city also known for its steel industry, Donetsk, and the greater Donbas region in which it is located, has been at war since 2014. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, 14,000 people died in this conflict, even before Russia began its military operations in February. I’ve just returned from there. Before Russia’s intervention, the conflict had been between the people of that region and the government in Kiev, after an unconstitutional coup took 2014. This coup, known as “Maidan,” was — as then US Ambassador to Ukraine Victoria Nuland explained in a recorded telephone conversation — managed by the United States. Originally published by the Pittsburgh Post Gazette on November 30, 2022 The coup brought to power a pro-Western, anti-Russian, government, which contained elements which were far-right and even Nazi. The best-known element, as the Nation Magazine reported...

Jan Oberg November 18, 2022 This article was written in October for the distinguished China Investment – a magazine sponsored by China’s National Development and Reform Commission. It was published in November here in both Chinese and English. Due to the reactions to my articles there, it looks like I shall become a regular contributor to China Investment like I am to the China Daily. The European Commission has just decided on new sanctions against Russia – in fact, the eighth round of such sanctions. This time the reason is that Russia has held referenda in the Donbas region of Ukraine. I sense we’re witnessing a new disease – Sanctionitis. It seems related to a larger, fatal disease with few treatment options, namely the SHMSI Syndrome:Sanctionitis + Hubris + Masochism + Self-Destructive Impulses. The patient has foggy ideas about reality and his own strength and exaggerates ad absurdum the positive...

Abolish NATOOr Convert ItTo ServePeace 30 Arguments & 100s of Inspirations This report can be reproduced or quoted freely,but only when referring clearly to TFF, the author and the link Read and download as PDF at the end of the catalogue • Read as Flipbook Media & other inquiries to tff@transnational.live or +46 738 52 52 00 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This Catalogue contains 30 arguments for the abolition of NATO. Each argument is based on rational peace research analysis, in contrast to the fact-resistant propaganda that NATO and mainstream politics and media promote about the ’defensive’ peace alliance. The Catalogue is based on the democratic assumption that diverse perceptions and concepts can exist – for instance, about what peace is – and that this hugely influential Western organisation is not sacrosanct and shall, therefore, not be exempt from critical analysis. While set up in 1949, NATO passed its ”best before” date long ago. The alliance of...

Democracy Now July 14, 2022 As the Pentagon authorizes an additional $400 million for Ukraine’s defense on Friday, bringing estimated total U.S. security spending on Ukraine under President Biden to a staggering $8 billion, we speak to Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News, about the pressure on news media to follow a single approved narrative on the Ukraine war. The independent media outlet recently had their PayPal account shut down and received notice from NewsGuard, a fact-checking group, that they are under review for publishing fake news. “American and European audiences have been fed the idea that Russia has been failing in this war and that Ukraine still has a chance to win, but I think we’re starting to see reality seep into the reporting,” says Lauria. • Transcript This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. AMY GOODMAN: I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González....

Jan Oberg May 31, 2022 It was the first visit to China by a UN human rights chief in 17 years. For years, governments and human rights organisations have accused China of many kinds of human rights violations – and a series of them calls what has happened in Xinjiang “genocide” in line, one could add, with former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s “determination” that that was the correct label to put on it while not publishing one word of documentation to back up that grave accusation against China and its president. After years of meticulous preparations, Mme Michelle Bachelet – a former President of Chile, a physician who has studied military strategy and who has served as both Health Minister and Defense Minister and has a significant personal experience with Pinochet’s reign of terror – sent an advance team, then went to China herself, had a zoom conversation...

Gordon DumoulinTFF Associate May 24, 2022 Introduction Here we go again. On the same day, leading Western mainstream media – such as BBC, Politiken, Dagens Nyheter, Le Monde, etc – 14 media from 11 countries – publish a new accusation against China, ‘Xinjiang Police Files’: Exclusive documents reveal China’s machine of repression against the Uyghurs. They are produced by the extreme right Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation in the United States. It appeared the day after President Biden had stated, in Tokyo, that the US would come to the rescue of Taiwan if China should attack it. And it coincided also with the UN Human Rights High Commissioner, Michelle Bachelet, started her fact-finding mission in Xinjiang. Perhaps it was a coincidence. Perhaps the material was put together and made ready by the foundation so it could be published at the right moment? Clearly, the untold purpose has been to undermine...

Sunday the 15th, 2022, I was asked to comment from a peace research point of view on Finland and Sweden’s moves to become full members of NATO. I gladly do so since it is a long time since I commented on anything on RT. For those who think that it is surprising or even wrong to speak with Russian media, my media policy can be found here. The denial of access by the EU and others to RT is an indisputable violation of human rights – but most people do not know it. I’m talking about the UN’s International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 19 from 1966. If you want to get around that violation of your rights, download and pay for a proxy server such as PrivateVPN, set it to e.g. Finland and you will be able to access RT. Then you may also read my front...

Truth will out, as they say, and sometimes it in strange ways. On March 9, 2022, the former Danish Prime Minister and former NATO Secretary-General, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, gave an interview to Danish Television 2. Here a 30 sec excerpt. In my view, it was deeply shocking for three reasons. First, what he actually says: “If we send planes, it’s to protect Ukrainian airspace, and then we have to be ready to shoot down Russian planes. That would undeniably mean war between NATO and Russia.” That doesn’t worry him. He does not say that the West/NATO should therefore refrain from doing so. See below how he thinks it will go. “I think if it’s going to deter Putin, we shouldn’t rule anything out. And I’m among those who say we should keep Putin in maximum uncertainty.” Not ruling out anything in NATO parlance indisputably means that the use of nuclear...

John Pilger April 5, 2022 Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened. Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain. On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now. Originally published by EurasiaReview on February 19, 2022 But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream. The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”....

Julie Hollar March 29, 2022 A lot less, particularly when they’re victims of the US As US news media covered the first shocking weeks of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, some media observers—like FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Common Dreams, 2/28/22)—have noted their impressions of how coverage differed from wars past, particularly in terms of a new focus on the impact on civilians. To quantify and deepen these observations, FAIR studied the first week of coverage of the Ukraine war (2/24–3/2/22) on ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. We used the Nexis news database to count both sources (whose voices get to be heard?) and segments (what angles are covered?) about Ukraine during the study period. Comparing this coverage to that of other conflicts reveals both a familiar reliance on US officials to frame events, as well as a newfound ability to cover the impact on civilians – when those civilians...