Trump Plane Fiasco Exposes Media Hypocrisy on Qatar
The concept of a US president being open to accepting a plane from the Qatari government should be shocking. Unfortunately, Trump’s behaviors have already left so many Americans exhausted that they’ve got little ability left to experience shock.
But while the media uproar over this idea makes sense, it also exposes deep hypocrisy. The mainstream media in the United States (and other parts of the West) has spent years giving Qatar a massive gift: the whitewashing of its state-owned propaganda giant, Al Jazeera.
Major US news agencies refer to the “state media” and “state-owned media” of other non-democratic nations. But they routinely refuse to even acknowledge that Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari government.
A particularly stark example came to light during a public battle between Elon Musk and National Public Radio. Understandably upset that Musk was labeling NPR (my old stomping grounds) as “state-affiliated media,” on X (formerly Twitter), NPR halted its organizational accounts. In an on-air discussion, one staffer said Musk was giving NPR the same designation as “propaganda outlets for autocratic regimes,” and added, “We aren’t influenced by governments in that way.”
“Yeah,” another replied. “And the false implication that we are is incredibly dangerous for our journalists working independently around the world.”
Yes, it is. Meanwhile, NPR itself refuses to apply that same rule to Al Jazeera, instead presenting it as a legitimate source of trustworthy journalism. In very rare cases, people at NPR have acknowledged that Al Jazeera is “funded” by Qatar. But they’ve actively ignored the reality it is, by definition, a propaganda outlet for an autocratic regime.
In Episode 11 of my podcast They Stand Corrected, which fact checks the news, I discussed just some of Al Jazeera’s fiascoes. The network itself openly celebrates terrorists. It was the biggest purveyor of the lie that Israel had bombed a hospital. It cut off a man, who was identified as Palestinian, when he started to criticize Hamas. The list goes on.
Why does the mainstream media do this? In no small part because of money. Qatar swooped into the US journalism scene years ago and offered journalists big paydays to come work for it. Now, many journalists at other outlets are former employees of Al Jazeera, which makes them former employees of the Qatari government. (For example, people who oversee the Washington Post’s coverage of the Middle East, which helps explain the paper’s extreme, reality-denying bias.) Some mainstream journalists hope to work for Al Jazeera’s English language operation in the future. Others have friends who work there now, and don’t want to draw attention to what Al Jazeera really is. And many simply don’t know or don’t care.
This isn’t the only way such hypocrisy is showing up. News organizations routinely downplay or ignore Qatar’s role in financing the radicalization of US college students. Instead of exploring the funding behind this antisemitic pro-terror movement, news organizations portray vicious mobs as peace-loving students.
Note to the media: Keep calling out the repugnance of a US president potentially accepting a giant plane from Qatar a gift. And at the same time, find an equally giant mirror to look into.
