The New Stage in Collective Media Lying

A new article exposes with great clarity a horrifying reality: obvious and near-unanimous mass media lying about the latest Hezbollah-Israel exchange of fire.

Hezbollah itself has acknowledge that its attack on Israel was prepared as a mass attack in response to an earlier situation. The U.S. in turn acknowledged providing intelligence to Israel on the impending Hezbollah attack, something that helped to motivate Israel’s preemptive strike against the rockets – a strike that spared Israel a likelihood of mass casualties and genuine regional escalation.

But judging from media headlines, a reader would think the opposite was true: that Israel had struck unprovoked, and Hezbollah was only retaliating against this new strike. There are inevitably millions of readers who do now think that – the millions who read only the headlines, and the millions more who interpret the smaller text in the context of the false framing they’ve been given in the headline.

The lying is so obvious in this case, and so consistent across the various main media outlets, that the only question it leaves open is: Why?

Why the mass front in the media of dishonesty?

Is it collusion to lie? Not likely.

Is it copycat lying? Sometimes yes.

Is it a shared social-ideological determination in the media to put the blame on Israel? Definitely yes.

There is a social group determination in our media, and in other related institutional milieus, to frame the matter as Israeli aggression and provocation. It would be a jarring contradiction to the established political and ideological narrative in the media, were they to report factually the Hezbollah plan of a mass attack and massacre. It did not seem to that the evidence of this plan was immediate, compelling, and obvious; and that it had to be deliberately disregarded in order to write the headlines we have seen and heard.

This, then, is most likely the main motivation for the lying: peer group ideological sentiment. And a form of peer pressure that has come to serve to prevent honest peer review, and instead enforces collective lying.

This is the main reason why the lying was seen nearly unanimously across the entire sector of the most respected media in America and Britain. And probably in most other Western countries too, judging from what I’ve seen on France24 and DW; but this article doesn’t deal with them.

The same mass lying throughout this war?

This has important implications for understanding the many other instances we have seen of collective media lying in this war, from the al-Ahli hospital “bombing” in the early stage of the war, supposedly killing “500 civilians” by “Israel”, to the present. In those cases too, the media dishonesty has been near-unanimous.

We often don’t notice this unanimity, which presents a sort of unbroken front of reality-inversion. Perhaps it is because we have become inured to it. Or perhaps because it has never been so painfully obvious as in the present instance, of compiled in a brief article like the one cited above for everyone to see and understand.

The same motivations for the lying have been palpably at play in all those other incidents in this war. And, importantly, in many incidents on many other issues. They will continue to be at play in one incident after another in the future.

The failed, half-hearted corrections

At least the lying on the al-Ahli hospital “bombing” finally got corrected a bit. But not enough, and far from everywhere. On BBC, when an IDF spokesperson, Jonathan Conricus, tried to give the facts that showed the hospital deaths were from a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket not an Israeli bomb, the BBC anchor talked over him to prevent the world from hearing, and said the truth doesn’t matter on this, since already there’s a new Intifada brewing in the West Bank on the basis of the belief it was an Israeli bomb, so the question wasn’t the truth but how Israel would deal with the Intifada. BBC was as if boasting about how it had stirred up a new Intifada.

Fortunately that Intifada failed to materialize in the West Bank. But BBC was right about one thing: it had indeed, along with its sister media, stirred up a powerful worldwide anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic movement, one that would soon be using the slogan of “Intifada Revolution” all around the Western world.

The corrections, after all the energetic broadcasts of the lies blaming Israel, were made so incompletely and so quietly, that the truth never caught up with the lie. The energization of the anti-Israel and anti-Western movement remained strongly in play.

Unlike that hospital incident, I doubt this time the lying will be corrected at all. The media have by now to fallen into a far more committed posture to the anti-Israel narrative. They have grown habituated to fitting every incident into it. And they no longer give evidence of caring how much they are lying for this.

A motivated movement-lie, not an incidental falsehood

It would be so much easier to stop the lying, if it really were just conscious collusion or conspiracy! Indeed, it could probably be easily recognized and corrected in that case — and would sometimes be prosecuted.

But instead, the unanimity in lying sprang up almost organically in the media, much like the largely anti-Semitic movement that we see today on campus. It sprang up like mushrooms, as a “superstructure” atop the long-developed “base” of the dominant “cutting-edge” ideology on campus and in the media. That ideology has been growing and entrenching itself for decades. The ideology is fundamentally anti-Western, only secondarily anti-Israeli, and still less often openly anti-Semitic — although that too is becoming increasingly frequent and serious. It spreads from media to campus and back. The prejudice against Israel and the West feeds on itself in each cycle. It grows from generation to generation. It penetrates the teachers and administrators even in K12 schools.

It is a movement, not just an incident of lying. But it is lying: motivated lying for the movement.

How can the willful, mass scale media lying be stopped?

It is this that has gotten us to where we are: mass scale collective lying, by our most important institutions that are supposed to be protectors of truth. Can anything be done about it?

I think it can, including by legal culpabilities. But only if we are willing to face up to the full horror of it and call it out for what it is.

The chronic collective lying in the media in this war is how the new mass worldwide movement of anti-Semitism has been stoked. It is mass lying by mass media, day after day for ten months on end, presenting a really big lie as the truth for everyone to consume; and consume so unanimously that they can assume it is the simple reality as long as they don’t think too hard about it. And will find it much safer to conform to it in what they say in public, than to dispute it on a basis of honesty.

These cannot be counted as just innocent mistakes at this late date. The media are not acting as legitimate media, but as malicious agitators. Literally shouting fire, falsely and repeatedly, in a crowded theater, with reckless disregard for the readily knowable truth.

Perhaps something really can be done about it, if Israelis and Jews find courageous enough lawyers.