The video below was posted to the new Israel Defense Forces (IDF) channel on Youtube on Monday and titled “Israeli Air Force Strikes Rockets in Transit.” It received over 200,000 views and collective 4 out of 5 star rating from Youtube users. It showed “The Israeli Air Force strikes terror operatives transferring short-range missiles destined for innocent civilians,” according to the video’s description, which was posted English, Hebrew and Arabic.

In reality, fact-finding by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem and Al Jazeera English has found that the grainy white figures loading up a truck before being blown up in the video are themselves innocent civilians. One of individuals was a 14-year-old boy. The video below has been viewed less than 30,000 times on Youtube.

The Israeli military’s Youtube videos are together a first-hand view of the war on Gaza from the perspective of Israeli warplanes. But clearly their main function is as aggressive propaganda for the Israeli war. The video above disguises the bombing of a group of civilians as a precision strike against terrorists. What’s new is that this misinformation is being distributed without mediation by any filter and with great success through a top Web 2.0 website. Youtube has become the second most popular site on the planet because of the social networking and content-creation features it brought to the medium of video. The company describes itself as “empowering them [people] to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.”

I don’t think giving any government an outlet on Youtube for unabashed pro-war propaganda serves that mission. And I wonder if, say, the governments of Iran, Russia, or Hamas for that matter would be allowed to do the same thing. At least when President-Elect Barack Obama’s team posts videos, they allows comments and video responses which appear on the same page. Not the case with the IDF’s videos. There’s nothing Web 2.0 about this propaganda which makes it any better than the old.

(Not only that, but a bunch of folks at Reddit say a user-submitted video which shows the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Gaza from the below on the ground has been censored.)

This is unusual. Usually, when there is any corporate media coverage of unions, they are portrayed as corrupt or unreasonable (see FAIR’s study). They’re treated with contempt by corporate journalists. In all the discussion of a potential bailout of the “Big Three” automakers, for example, union voices have been ignored, and worse, the United Auto Workers have been maligned as overpaid burdens on the companies – burdens, according to much of the elite chattering class, that must be shed or downsized if the industry is to be saved.

Bus drivers here in Austin went on strike last month to demand the raise and benefits they were promised. The strike was roundly condemned by a chorus of editorials and slanted pieces in the local media, forcing the union to negotiate a deal with Capital Metro that fell well short of meeting their original demands. The head of the union said that Metro engaged in dirty union-busting tactics to break up the strike, but the media never investigated the allegations.

So the copious and overwhelmingly positive coverage of United Electrical Workers 110 four-day old occupation of a shut-down factory in Chicago is, to say the least, stunning.

I’m studying for finals so I don’t have time to do a proper analysis, but my understanding so far is that a convergence of factors are helping the union defy the usual corporate media-blackout/demonization:

1. Widespread popular resentment against banks,
2. support from certain Chicago politicians, from Rep. Luis Gutierrez up to the President-Elect,
3. a clear-cut narrative of humble and determined workers with no other choice but to protest for their wages due under law,
4. the tried-and-true but fresh tactic of occupying the factory,
5. support from a well-established network of Chicago labor and radical activists

While the corporate media get some props for actually doing their job on this story, the two best pieces of media on the factory occupation I’ve seen so far come, unsurprisingly, from alternative media. Urban Guerilla, an anarchist blogger in Chicago, posted a must-read look at the roots of the UE 110 in Chicago and a warning that the media honeymoon won’t necessarily last or extend to similar actions. And Labor Radio has a great interview up with UE organizer Leah Fried. Check that stuff out.

UE 110 needs support to continue their occupation!  Send donations to UE Local 110 at 37 S. Ashland Chicago, Illinois 60607. See Chicago Indymedia and Chi-Town Daily News for the most up-to-date coverage of the workers’ struggle.

Liberal press watchdog group Fair and Accuracy in Reporting takes the New York Times to task for its attempt to smear Studs Terkel as a Marxist who somehow insidiously injected Communist politics into his ground-breaking oral histories.  They link to Howard Zinn’s defense of Terkel, too.  At the FAIR Blog.

Image from Milwaukee Indymedia.

Corporate newspapers just can’t catch a break. They’re laying off reporters left and right, abandoning print, and being read less and less with each passing day. To make matters worse, someone at the USA Today messed up and ran the banner headline, “Capitalism Wins at Polls, Anarchy Brewing in the Streets” on the day after the election in thousands of their newspapers around the country, from Minnesota to Kansas to North Carolina. Circulation was temporarily up yesterday, but this is another dent in newspapers’ credibility.

Not that USA Today, which led the way in substituting infotainment for hard/world news, had any credibility in the first place. Actually, the Unconventional Action network’s “journalism department” hijacked newspaper boxes around the country in an incredible direct action, inserting their own front page onto thousands of papers.

Now, if only the second part of the headline was accurate…

Here at the University of Texas, a Jewish student group called Hillel holds a massive “Israel Block Party” every year celebrating all things Israel.  Which is fine, except that there’s a lot of oppression that gets swept under the rug during the party, as with most nationalist celebrations.  The organizers portray Israel as a thriving and diverse liberal democracy, and it is in some aspects.  But then they go too far – every year that I attended the party with pro-Palestine protesters I saw the slogan “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.”  Not true.  Israel doesn’t rank all that high in ensuring freedom for the press, either, according to a new report by Reporters Sans Frontieres.  Via the Heathlander.

Via illvox.org (formerly Anarchist People of Color), Upping the Anti, “a radical journal published twice a year by a pan-Canadian collective of activists and organizers,” is seeking contributions. The subscription-based zine has published some great analyses of Canada’s role in Western imperial interventions in Haiti and Afghanistan. Check it out.

No matter what Iraq Veterans Against the War do, it seems they’re always invisible to the corporate media. Read More…