In December, The Jerusalem Post published an investigation from Nicholas Potter, a “counter-extremism expert,” who falsely accused MintPress News of being part of a network of far-left, foreign government-funded outlets that push conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic extremism. The claims are untrue and are particularly ironic, considering the calls for the extermination and expulsion of Palestinians and Arab peoples the newspaper has published and because Potter is a German national whose job at the Post is directly funded by the German government.
The virality of the two investigations, which were widely cited and read by hundreds of thousands of people across the world, seems to have upset many of Israel’s most ardent backers, including individuals at the Jerusalem Post, who warned about our influence. “In both cases,” the Post wrote, “the evidence was flimsy at best,”
In the former, a brief internship at AIPAC during college was all it took to be a part of an ominous conspiracy to control the media. In the latter, a previous stint as a reservist in Unit 8200 of the IDF’s Intelligence Corps was more than sufficient to brand a journalistic security analysis as a clandestine psychological operation.”
This is a disingenuous description of the information presented. Firstly, the evidence provided was far from flimsy. We noted dozens of high-profile instances of the hundreds of ex-Israel lobbyists we found working in American media. The nearly 6000-word article went into almost tedious detail, cataloging example after example, and, for brevity’s sake, had to be cut back from a much larger article.
Nevertheless, the Post suggests that the best evidence of Israel lobby/U.S. media overlap is a “brief internship” at AIPAC. This is deeply misleading. In fact, that is one of the least substantial cases of the phenomenon we noted. The dozens of examples included the executive producer of MSNBC, who was an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence commander; a CNBC lead reporter who was previously an officer in the IDF’s public relations department before working for the Friends of the IDF in the U.S.; and a Fox News producer who was Benjamin Netanyahu’s aide at Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/mint-press-news/
Check the sources jfc. Stop trying to outsource your critical thinking, either you check if there’s verifiable evidence for the claims in an article or you stop trying to deny or affirm something you clearly can’t be bothered to look into.
No investigation, no right to speak
The idea was to point users to a site that looks at an overview of past issues with a news source. I was unaware that this specific site was very loose with their grading of news sites.
I am not sure if you are aware, but in online forums, it is rare that someone will even read past the headline before giving their opinion. Expecting everybody to dedicate the time and effort for a thorough inspection of every news provider and their sources is a bit of a high ask, especially now with people trying to manage their lives and the onslaught of political breaking news.
If you would like to do a service to people, you can mention what your research has come to in those various areas. If they are skeptical, they can then double check your work.
Factuality meters are at best useless and usually very harmful precisely because they allow you to either affirm or discredit an article without having to engage with its contents in the slightest.
That site is a particularly egregious one but posting one with a less obvious conflict of interest wouldn’t have made it much better. These sites almost always act like there is such a thing as unbiased reporting and “left” or “right” leaning are undesirable or unreasonable, like bias has anything to do with how valid sources or interpretations are. Whichever way you cut it, you’re asking another site (served to you by a compromised Google result) to tell you who to trust or not, often completely anonymously.
It really isn’t, that’s the point. Comments sections don’t need more loudly uninformed people speculating on the vibe a headline gave them. There’s other communities for casual engagement.
Ascribing authority to a Zionist blog site?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Perennial_sources
Thanks for the heads up. I was not aware of this.
No problem. Trusting any news outlet is very dangerous when it comes to Palestine.
While Mintpress occasionally engages in selective truth telling, many outlets such as Reuters, TheGuardian and NYT will straight up lie. As we saw recently when they lied about “Pogroms” in Amsterdam.
It is important to read the sources for news articles. In the case of the MintPress article they simply compiled public information. Such as the “journalists” LinkedIn job history stating they were in the IDF spy unit. And books the “journalists” wrote in collaboration with the IDF. The evidence is very clearly laid out in MintPress’ article so it leaves little room for doubt.
Gotcha, thank you for being civil in your explanation. I appreciate you taking the time to break that down!
🤡