Shortly after Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016, The Washington Post unveiled this pompous and, by now, obsolete slogan: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.
The ominous-sounding motto was meant, I expect, to convey, at once, the brewing threat that a Trump presidency posed to America’s decaying republic, and the Post’s solemn, cross-our-hearts commitment to keep the flickering lights on.
Well, it turns out that Jeff Bezos, the Post’s billionaire proprietor who was instrumental in having the newspaper adopt the alliterative catchphrase, is the “darkness” that causes an on-life-support democracy to declare a code blue.
In late February, Bezos gutted the so-called editorial “independence” of the Post’s Beltway-cushy, monochromatic opinion pages by ordering editors to publish free-market-loving tracts about the inherent greatness of America’s “freedoms” and “liberties”.
I’m sorry, but wasn’t the Post typically doing that already?
In any event, Bezos’s oafish commands may be, as his detractors insist, another assault on America’s besieged “free press”, but at least his blatant “attacks” are made openly and unapologetically.
Much of the Western media’s stubborn contempt for candour is hidden behind a fraudulent tell-both-sides-of-the-story conceit and pretentious expressions that ought to be rewritten to read: “Truth Dies in Darkness”.
This entrenched, institution-wide deceit is more insidious since it relies on an explicit understanding always to opt for flaccid language that, as George Orwell once explained, is “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”.
Consider, for flagrant example, Western press coverage of the inhumane modus operandi of the Israeli-American axis towards Palestine. Ages before Bezos bought the flailing Post, the English-speaking corporate outlets on both sides of the Atlantic have been faithful couriers to every foul aspect of the Israeli-American axis and its calamitous conduct throughout the Middle East, and, of course, Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
These shining avatars of “all the news that’s fit to print” have, for generations, refused to call Israel an apartheid state despite the exhaustive verdicts delivered by sober human rights groups.
They also refuse to acknowledge or admit that the Israeli-American axis has, by deliberate and sinister plan, perpetrated genocide in Gaza and is preparing to do the same in the West Bank with one overarching aim: To reduce Palestine and Palestinians to dust and memory.
To prove this instructive point, I did a cursory check of how journalists working at “major” Western English-language media have defined the Israeli-American axis’s eager objective to purge, by force, if necessary, more than two million Palestinians from Gaza and, in due course, three million from the West Bank.
Predictably, I found many Western reporters and editors have spent a lot of time and energy lately coming up with a heap of agreeable euphemisms rather than using these two blunt and precise words: “ethnic cleansing”.
This is the list of benign words and phrases that I discovered being employed variously by the BBC, Sky News, CNN, The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Associated Press wire service: “Depopulate”, “empty”, “resettle”, “transfer”, “remove”, “drive out”, “displace”, and “relocate”.
Apart from the sickening “depopulate” and “driving out”, the other deplorable colloquialisms suggest that Palestinians are willing, even content, to abandon their ancestral homelands voluntarily to make way for Trump’s beachfront resorts.
Yet, that is the blasphemous affront to the truth that “mainstream” Western news organisations are peddling, 24/7, to their readers, listeners, and viewers.
Every sterile word and phrase is, as George Orwell understood, intended to obscure and sanitise the wholesale brutality envisioned and approved by Israel and its confederates in Washington, London, Berlin, Paris, Ottawa, and beyond in “defence of the indefensible”.
Like the craven politicians they claim to hold accountable, most Western media are conditioned by their unshakeable fidelity to Israel – no matter the crimes it commits or contemplates, nor the international laws it desecrates – to be wilfully blind to the outrages the rest of us can see.
These decisions are neither accidental nor isolated.
They are, instead, a conscious and familiar choice of editors and reporters – more interested in appeasement than sincerity – to make palatable the unpalatable in the compliant service of a genocidal apartheid regime and its enablers, to shield them from the blame for the immense suffering they are responsible for.
Today’s anodyne distortions and evasions represent a calculated effort to deny and bury reality beneath a blizzard of lies.
As Orwell wrote in 1945: “A mass of… words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
It is not difficult, as a result, to imagine this scene unfolding every day in big Western, English-language newsrooms:
Reporter: Boss, I know ethnic cleansing is verboten. I need your help finding an alternative.
Editor: Have you searched in a thesaurus?
Reporter: Yes, but they’ve all been taken.
Editor: How about “involuntarily depart”?
Reporter: It’s a bit cumbersome, don’t you think?
Editor: No. It’s perfect.
Reporter: All right, then. “Involuntarily depart” it is – at least for the expedient moment.
Remember, these are largely the same reporters and editors who are wailing these days about Bezos and his belligerent push to “muzzle” them.
The hyperbolic protests not only reek of insincerity, but are a billboard-sized testament to their grating hypocrisy.
They are no more allies of the “truth” than Jeff Bezos is.
One miffed Washington Post contributor hurried to Bluesky to take a stand against Bezos and his “significant shift” in the purpose and direction of the opinion page.
“I’ll never write for [the Post] again as long as he’s the owner,” the scribe announced.
That’s fine, and, I suppose, laudable.
Still, I wonder if he and his infuriated colleagues would be inclined to accept this challenge.
How about “never” writing for any newspaper that rejects – as a matter of stated or unstated editorial policy – the use of “apartheid state”, “genocide”, and “ethnic cleansing” to characterise Israel’s grotesque aims for Palestinians in Palestine?
You and I know that is a rhetorical question and, I suspect, that ever-so-courageous American journalist and his cowering comrades know the answer, too.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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