The usual media suspects are again styling themselves as the “Trump resistance” – less than three weeks into the President’s second term.
Learning nothing from the coverage of the war in Gaza under previous ABC Radio National’s breakfast show host Patricia Karvelas, her replacement Sally Sara was quick off the blocks on Thursday after Trump’s press conference with Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during which the American leader said the US would take over Gaza and turn it into a “Middle Eastern Riviera”.
Sara wheeled out Italian lawyer and UN Rapporteur for the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, a Karvelas favourite and former Q+A guest. Albanese, a virulent critic of Israel, told listeners the Jewish state was committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
Never mind the International Criminal Court had issued only provisional rulings in South Africa’s genocide case against Israel. Albanese said the ICC had never ruled on the Holocaust or the Armenian genocide.
Remember here the death toll of about 50,000 in Gaza includes probably 20,000 Hamas fighters and the numbers are supplied by the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry.
Israel would have killed no one in Gaza without the Hamas pogrom in southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Six million people died in the Holocaust, half the world’s Jews at the time. The Armenian genocide by Ottoman Turkey killed 1.2 million.
Palestinians are among the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the Middle East. A key feature of genocide is population collapse of the victim group.
Sara later interviewed ABC global affairs editor John Lyons who said all journalists could do was report the facts. True, but normal standards of fairness and balance should apply.
Former Egyptian foreign minister Nabil Fahmy also featured on Radio National for six minutes, Mustafa Barghouti, member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, for nine minutes, and another UN Rapporteur, Ben Saul, for seven minutes. All said Trump’s idea was “ethnic cleansing”.
Radio National did include seven minutes with the Israeli view, but that focused heavily on far-right government members’ views of Trump’s plan.
Listeners were given no context about the role of Hamas in destroying Palestinian lives or Israel’s departure from the territory in 2005.
Even if Trump’s thought bubble is forgotten as quickly as it arose, the President has a point. This column has visited Gaza and noted on October 14, 2023, that the strip sits on 40km of beautiful white sandy Mediterranean beach and could be a wonderful place if Gazans had leaders who cared for their population more than wanting to kill Jews.
Another player in the “Trump resistance”, The New York Times, last week rolled out one of its longest attacks since the November election.
The day before Trump’s Gaza announcement, two pieces that could not be more different surfaced online about the decision by the President’s efficiency tsar, Elon Musk, to target USAID, the $US40bn-a-year behemoth presented in the NYT as a crucial aid body. While coverage here of Trump’s daily executive orders has focused on tariffs, the USAID story is big news in America.
Author Michael Shellenberger’s Substack website, Public, called USAID (US Agency for International Development) a sinister influence peddler involved in everything from funding gain of function research into bat viruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology to pushing for censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
The NYT published a lead piece under the headline “Inside Musk’s war on the federal workforce” on its website with six bylines, led by Jonathan Swan, the Australian son of the ABC’s Dr Norman Swan.
The piece was a long hit job on Musk and his role at DOGE, the president’s new Department of Government Efficiency.
It did not mention criticism of USAID by left-wing Democrat Bernie Sanders and academic Noam Chomsky, who both see it as an instrument for political interference in foreign countries.
The Times did mention the federal deficit had ballooned to $US1.8 trillion last year and reported the Government Accountability Office had found improper federal payments of $US236bn over 71 federal programs in the 2023 fiscal year. But it was more concerned about traumatised federal employees than misspent taxpayer dollars.
Public’s analysis, written by Shellenberger and Alex Gutentag, was headlined “USAID’s history of regime change, destabilisation and censorship justified its closure by Trump”.
Fair enough for the NYT to report the concerns of federal bureaucrats in the firing line. Also fair to report the concerns of Democrat politicians worried about the power the President has given Musk.
But why ignore USAID’s role in censoring information damaging to former president Joe Biden? Why not report USAID’s attempts to ban social media posts critical of the government’s handling of Covid? Why the silence about funding for the Wuhan lab?
Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi, who publishes Racket News on Substack, worked together on the Twitter Files after Musk took over Twitter and renamed it X.
Both have published revelations about the way the intelligence community duped much of the media, especially the New York Times, during the Russiagate hoax in Trump’s first term.
Shellenberger followed up on Thursday morning (AEST) revealing details of links between USAID and a shadowy investigative journalism body OCCRP (Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project) that was behind stories about Trump’s efforts to track down Biden family dealings in Ukraine. These were the basis of the December 2019 impeachment of Trump.
Why the Trump focus on USAID? Shellenberger suggests this is partly because it is a funder of the sort of censorship uncovered when Musk opened up Twitter’s internal correspondence with the government and its security agencies.
He also says USAID is “an instrument of the US empire and voters elected Trump to pursue ‘America First’ over global commitments”.
The Wall Street Journal brought some balance to the issue in Wednesday’s print edition.
Congress would have to pass legislation shutting USAID and Trump had not yet committed to doing so. It pointed to millions of dollars of controversial USAID funding, including to “organisations directly in Gaza controlled by Hamas”.
USAID had also funded EVs for Vietnam, transgender clinics in India and a Serbian LGBTQI lobby.
The Journal would not mind seeing USAID shut but warned Trump and Musk would need to be better at the politics of government efficiency.
This will certainly be the case when Trump expands his crackdown to the UN Human Rights Council and the UN’s Palestine refugee funder UNRWA (the UN Relief and Works Agency for the Palestinian territories). He cut funding to both in his first term.
Just don’t expect the ABC or The New York Times to report fairly the failings of the organisations that Trump targets.
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