Fediverse vs Disinformation

"If a publication ran an editors' note to 'clarify' that some portion of Nazi death camp victims had preexisting conditions, it would rightfully be accused of Holocaust denialism," said one observer.

The New York Times repeated Israel’s baseless claim that Hamas was stealing aid nearly two dozen times before its own sources contradicted that talking point, an Intercept analysis has found, as Palestinian people suffered mass starvation and risked their lives to find food amid Israel’s blockade.

During its near-total blockade on humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip, Israel has repeatedly claimed that Hamas steals aid and that restricting it will help the two parties achieve a ceasefire. The U.S. and Israel pointed to that argument in May when they handed aid operations over to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a contested American nonprofit that funnels Gazans to limited aid sites where the Israeli army has repeatedly opened fire on starving civilians. At each turn, the New York Times dutifully printed the official justifications.

Then the Times published an article on Saturday reporting that there was “no proof” that Hamas was stealing aid from the United Nations, citing four anonymous Israeli sources. The story noted that the U.N. aid system, which provided the bulk of the aid to Gaza, was “largely effective,” and there was no evidence that Hamas regularly stole from the U.N., though the unnamed sources claimed that Hamas did steal from smaller organizations.

But in 61 articles related to Gaza’s hunger crisis the Times published since January, 23 included Israel’s accusations that Hamas was stealing aid. Nine of those stories did not include opposing statements refuting Israel’s claim. Twelve articles of the 61 analyzed by The Intercept cited concerns about Hamas diverting aid without an explicit accusation. At the time of publication, the Times had not added a correction or update to these stories to indicate that the claims were false.

None of the articles provided any evidence in support of the claims except for the comments of Israeli officials, who work for a government that has repeatedly spread disinformation, including in its record-breaking fatal attacks on journalists, aid workers, and children.

In a statement to The Intercept, New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander said that the paper’s journalists have done “deep reporting on both Israel and Hamas’ actions and tactics during the war, and will continue to report hard and publish facts.”

“The Times has reported deeply, fairly and accurately on the war in Gaza since it began, including the hardships and food shortages faced by Gazans, and when government officials provide claims and accusations, our reporters put them in context,” Stadtlander said.

Even before the Times’s Saturday story, aid groups on the ground in Gaza had repeatedly refuted the Israeli government’s claims of aid theft.

The U.N. agency tasked with distributing aid in Gaza, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, or UNRWA, has maintained for months that it has received no specific evidence that Hamas or other armed groups were diverting its humanitarian aid in Gaza.

“These claims are used as a pretext to justify the aid distribution system supported by the Israeli authorities and the United States of America (so called GHF), which falls far from abiding to the humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law,” an UNRWA spokesperson told The Intercept in a statement.

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Related

Gaza Humanitarian Foundation Head Boasts Success as Palestinians Starve](https://theintercept.com/2025/07/24/gaza-humanitarian-foundation-israel-aid-starvation/)

Israel’s illegal blockade of Gaza has now subjected 500,000 people — nearly a quarter of the occupied territory’s population — to famine-like conditions, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Alert. The rest of the population is facing emergency levels of hunger, and every child under the age of 5 is at risk of acute malnutrition.

The Israeli government’s blockade and ensuing starvation has killed over 100 Palestinians, UNICEF said. Eighty percent of them are children.

UNRWA says it has thousands of trucks waiting in Jordan and Egypt that could surge aid to Palestinians and prevent fatal hunger. But instead of resuming U.S. funding for UNRWA — which President Joe Biden ended last year — President Donald Trump has opted to support GHF even as Israeli soldiers have killed hundreds of aid-seekers at its food distribution sites since late May.

As the starvation catastrophe began to draw international condemnation, Israel said that it would allow aid airdrops in Gaza — a strategy human rights groups have rebuked as ineffective and dangerous. On Sunday, Al Jazeera reported 11 Palestinians were injured after a pallet fell directly on the tents of displaced people.

Last month, the International Crisis Group published a report titled the “Gaza Starvation Experiment,” which found that while Hamas likely extracts some revenue, audits have shown less than 1 percent of assistance has been lost to theft. Aid officials and Gaza residents told the group that the Abu Shabab gang, armed by Israel, has been the “single most prolific looter” during the war on Gaza. Other reports challenging claims of Hamas diverting aid have come out in recent weeks from USAID, the EU Commission, and Israeli media.

Reuters reported last week that a USAID analysis found that out of 156 reported incidents of theft or loss of U.S.-funded supplies between October 2023 and May 2025, at least 44 were related to Israeli military actions.

Despite the mounting evidence, the Times continued to parrot Israel’s claims, including on July 10, June 26, and June 17 — after the ICG released its report. The Times also published an article on Monday that included statements by Trump claiming that Hamas was stealing aid. The article did not clarify that no evidence had been shown to prove this claim.

Past Intercept analyses and investigations have found that the New York Times and other mainstream outlets have demonstrated a bias against Palestinians.

[

Related

Leaked NYT Gaza Memo Tells Journalists to Avoid Words “Genocide,” “Ethnic Cleansing,” and “Occupied Territory”](https://theintercept.com/2024/04/15/nyt-israel-gaza-genocide-palestine-coverage/)

In April 2024, The Intercept published a report on an internal Times memo that instructed journalists to restrict use of the terms “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” and to “avoid” using the phrase “occupied territory” when describing Palestinian land. The memo also instructed against using the word “Palestine” and to steer clear of the term “refugee camps” to describe areas of Gaza historically settled by displaced Palestinians, despite the fact that the United Nations recognizes the areas as refugee camps, and they house hundreds of thousands of registered refugees.

A quantitative analysis of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times’s coverage of the first six weeks of the conflict showed a consistent bias against Palestinians, finding that major U.S. newspapers disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict; used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians; and offered lopsided coverage of antisemitic acts in the U.S., while largely ignoring anti-Muslim racism in the wake of October 7. Pro-Palestinian activists have accused major publications of pro-Israel bias and protested at the Times headquarters in Manhattan for its coverage of Gaza. [

Read our complete coverage

Israel’s War on Gaza](https://theintercept.com/collections/israel-palestine/)

The Times and other major mainstream media outlets have often minimized top Israeli officials’ genocidal remarks calling for collective punishment of Palestinians and failed to note that using starvation as a weapon of war is a violation of international law.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warned as early as October 11, 2023, that the regime “will continue to tighten the siege until the Hamas threat to Israel and the world is removed.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said a week later that “the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives, not a gram of humanitarian aid.”

“No one in the world will allow us to starve two million people, even though it might be justified and moral in order to free the hostages,” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said last year. And last week, Israeli Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said in a radio interview his government “is racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out,” describing Palestinians as indoctrinated Nazis.

“There’s no hunger in Gaza,” Eliyahu said, dismissing reports of starvation as anti-Israel propaganda. “But we don’t need to be concerned with hunger in the Strip. Let the world worry about it.”

The post The New York Times Repeated Israeli Claims of Hamas Stealing Aid Without Evidence appeared first on The Intercept.

I recommend listening to at least 30 seconds or so of the "podcast." You don't need to listen to too much to get the flavor of it.

It is notable because it is so sloppy, and so some of the things they're doing are a lot more obvious than the same things are when they are done by someone who's doing a better job of it.

The news org Axios launched in 2017, just as the first Trump administration began, created by some ex-Politico folks, claiming that they would be “an antidote to this madness” and talking about how “the world needed smarter, more efficient coverage” of important news stories.

The reality is that Axios launders rightwing talking points in ugly short form vignettes that not only hide nuance, but reveal how their version of “neutral, objective” coverage actually means normalizing Donald Trump’s madness.

Two recent examples show how this works in practice. Last week, we wrote about how Tulsi Gabbard was trying to mislead the public into believing President Obama had “faked” Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.

We went into great detail about how she misrepresented documents she had declassified to imply things they did not say. From the documents, it was entirely clear that (as multiple bipartisan research efforts had determined) Russians had tried to influence the election via social media, but had not been able to hack election infrastructure to change votes. Gabbard conflated the two things, using reports of the failure to attack election infrastructure to pretend it meant that there was no intent to influence the election.

So how did Axios cover this story? By focusing on how MAGA folks played their role in buying into Gabbard’s false narrative, talking about how they were calling for Obama’s arrest for treason.

The entire framing of the article is all about people who are believing the misrepresentations Gabbard made, and it literally takes 25 paragraphs (I counted… twice) before they add in a “reality check” admitting that Gabbard is lying:

Meanwhile, Gabbard’s accusation of Obama-era “treason” hinges on a claim that no serious investigation ever made: that Russia hacked and altered vote tallies in 2016.

I fail to see how this is “smarter, more efficient” coverage when it uses Gabbard’s misleading and dangerous framing for the first 24 paragraphs of the article, before adding in the kinda important fact check down towards the end of the article.

Doing it this way reinforces the false MAGA narrative and framing, and leaves people with the impression that there must be some sort of legitimate reason for the accusations.

But the more damning example came the same day. Two of Axios’ founders, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, published a column claiming that Trump was “winning” in his accomplishments while seeming genuinely perplexed why his approval ratings were at historic lows.

The column opens in a hilariously disconnected-from-reality manner:

President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways. Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation.

Yet poll after poll suggests most Americans aren’t impressed. In fact, they seem tired of all the winning.

This isn’t just bad reporting—it’s active propaganda dressed up as analysis. Here’s how that same paragraph could easily be rewritten by someone whose brain hadn’t been pickled in a MAGA brainwash stew:

President Trump has failed to do basically anything to make American’s lives better, while focusing almost all of his attention on culture war nonsense that decidedly is making lives worse. Massive tax cuts for the wealthy paid for by slashing Medicaid, sending the military in to our cities to silence protestors, kidnapping students and farmworkers, increasing the cost of most goods through foreign import taxes, breaking his promise to avoid costly military entanglements in the Middle East, and generally destroying American good will throughout the globe.

Trump promised a ton of shit he hasn’t accomplished: lower prices on day one. An end to the war in Ukraine. An end to fighting in Israel/Gaza. Oh, and the release of the Epstein files.

This kind of analysis only makes sense if you’ve completely bought into Trump’s own framing of success, and believe that his culture war conspiracy theory claptrap were actual real issues.

The mass deportations his base celebrates for their performative cruelty frequently target asylum seekers who did, in fact, follow the law, not the “criminals” Fox News obsesses over. The fact that Trump shipped many of them to foreign gulags without any due process seems to have escaped VandeHei’s and Allen’s notice. The tariffs that supposedly brought money into US coffers did so by raising taxes on everyday items—because, contrary to Trump’s claims, American consumers pay those tariffs.

Yes, he cut taxes. But mainly for the extremely wealthy, while stripping Medicaid from those who need it most.

And that doesn’t even touch on how he destroyed things like funding for cancer research, has made public health in the US a joke leading to a revival of measles, how he is pardoning criminals, and much, much more.

This is the Axios formula: adopt Trump/MAGA framing wholesale, present it as “neutral” analysis, then act bewildered when Americans reject policies that a cowed Congress rubber-stamped. They’re grading on a curve with a rubric set by the MAGA faithful.

Judd Legum, over at Popular Information, calls out how Axios has “rebranded conservative ideology as objectivity” and it’s quite true. Legum documents how VandeHei and Allen repeatedly invoke “neutrality” and “objectivity” while pushing transparently MAGA-friendly analysis.

Indeed, VandeHei and Allen have political opinions and express them publicly. VandeHei simply redefines his right-wing ideology as patriotism. “The American miracle rests on untamed democracy, the animal spirits of capitalism, the magic of unrestrained innovation, and the soft power of a vigilant and vibrant free press,” VandeHei wrote in a December 2, 2024, Axios column. “I’m a believer in — and beneficiary of — all four.”

On January 20, 2025, the day Trump was inaugurated for the second time, VandeHei and Allen wrote, “Think of the U.S. government as a once-dominant, lean, high-flying company that grew too big, too bloated, too bureaucratic, too unimaginative.” The piece says Trump has a vision to remake government that “binds Trump with leading innovators.” The pair wrote that an “optimistic scenario” is that the second Trump presidency could “jar lawmakers and the public into realizing how a slow, bloated, bureaucratic government handcuffs and hurts America in the vital race for AI, new energy sources, space and overall growth.” They stated it is “correct” to believe “America’s government is so vast, so complex, so indebted that it makes fast, smart growth exponentially more complicated.”

VandeHei and Allen then outlined a plan for fixing the federal government’s problems — “cut workforce,” “cut costs,” “break stuff,” and “ignore the whiners.” While this is presented as a common-sense approach that a CEO would take, it essentially parrots the plans from the early days of the Trump administration.

Legum further notes that the “Trump is winning” article incredibly only quotes (anonymously, of course) from Trump insiders:

Notably, in the piece, Allen and VandeHei cite conversations with “Trump advisers,” “a longtime Trump aide,” and “Trump aides” concerning Trump’s record over the first six months. There is no mention of views expressed by Trump’s critics or even anyone not working for Trump.

The old “liberal mainstream media” narrative was always mostly bullshit—most mainstream outlets bent over backwards to seem “balanced,” even to the point of platforming the most disingenuous nonsense peddlers. But now we’re seeing the real thing: a media ecosystem where rightwing and MAGA-friendly outlets dominate the conversation.

Fox News dominates cable news by far. Tons of people get their news from blatantly pro-Trump right-wing podcasters. There are tons of openly pro-MAGA news organizations out there. And even the supposed “liberal” mainstream media seems to bend over backwards to normalize Trumpism and MAGA nonsense. The NY Times and the Washington Post go out of their way to de-crazify anything Trump does. ABC and CBS have both paid Trump bribes and promised to be more MAGA-friendly. Same with Facebook and Twitter on the social media side.

Into this landscape steps Axios, insisting it’s the grown-up in the room. When Legum pressed them on their obvious bias, they offered this laughable response:

Axios provides essential clinical reporting drawn from conversations with top leaders and experts. The analysis — never opinion — in these columns reflects that, and we stand by our journalism.

Call it what it is: stenography masquerading as journalism. Taking insider talking points and presenting them as “clinical reporting” isn’t analysis—it’s propaganda with better fonts.

Axios represents everything wrong with how media has responded to Trump: the pretense of objectivity while actively normalizing authoritarianism, the elevation of access over accuracy, and the complete abdication of journalism’s fundamental responsibility to challenge power rather than fluff its ego.

In the end, there’s nothing “neutral” about laundering fascist talking points through slick presentation and insider access. That’s not journalism—it’s complicity.

Did Kyle Langford, a Republican candidate for governor of California, post a photo of himself in front of the Auschwitz-Stammlager Nazi concentration camp, along with the description "My 0% Unemployment Plan"? Yes, that's true: Screenshots of the X post were authentic. In response to criticism for the post, Langford insisted "I wasn't joking, I think it is exactly what is needed..."

The screenshot appeared in a July 26, 2025, post on Instagram (archived here), which criticized Langford, calling his post "hatred in disguise". This is what it looked like at the time of publication:

An internal U.S. government analysis found no evidence of systematic theft by the Palestinian militant group Hamas of U.S.-funded humanitarian supplies, challenging the main rationale that Israel and the U.S. give for backing a new armed private aid operation.

The analysis, which has not been previously reported, was conducted by a bureau within the U.S. Agency for International Development and completed in late June. It examined 156 incidents of theft or loss of U.S.-funded supplies reported by U.S. aid partner organizations between October 2023 and this May.

It found "no reports alleging Hamas" benefited from U.S.-funded supplies, according to a slide presentation of the findings seen by Reuters.

A U.S. State Department spokesperson disputed the findings, saying there is video evidence of Hamas looting aid, but provided no such videos.

Grindr won’t allow users to add “no Zionists” to their profiles, but allows any number of other phrases that state political, religious, and ethnic preferences, according to 404 Media’s tests of the platform and user reports.

Several users received an error message that says “The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists,” when they tried to add the phrases to their bios on Thursday. I tested this myself on a new Grindr account, and received the same error message. I was able to add “Zionist” to my profile (without “no”), however, and could also add any phrase I could think of: “no Arabs,” “no Blacks,” “no Palestinians,” “no Muslims,” “no Christians,” “no Jews,” “no trans,” “no Republicans,” “no Democrats,” and so on. “No Zionist[s]” was the only phrase that was blocked in my testing.

In his latest column for the NYT, Bret Stephens tries to excuse a uniquely horrific crime with uniquely horrific journalism.

"Student loan forgiveness is a bribe for young voters," shouted Newsweek in 2022. "Harris's call for price controls on groceries is more pandering than policy," declared The Hill in 2024. "Free for all: Democratic socialist’s policy pitches face tough fiscal reality in New York," warned Politico this year.

Every time an elected official or political candidate proposes a policy with even the slightest hint of actual populism, U.S. pundits, analysts and alleged experts line up to tell us that it’s just a scheme to "buy votes." Offering student-debt relief is just cheating. Lowering grocery costs is simply pandering. Eliminating public-transit fares is merely bribing voters. These initiatives aren't developed in good faith in order to improve the lives of the public; they're cynical ploys to help a given politician get ahead.

We know that some policymakers make promises that they'll never fulfill, or chisel away at robust and universal proposals, or backtrack on bold and transformative ideas. This happens all the time. But all too often, media’s default position is to assert that even the most modest of economically populist proposals are mere strategies to buy votes, revealing grim truths about what our media class seems to think the responsibilities of lawmakers and governments are.

On this episode, we examine the media tendency to assume that anything remotely close to populism is somehow cheating, playing the game on "god mode" or "democracy game genie," and ought to be discouraged by Serious People, putting a sinister spin on what is simply Doing Things People Want.

Our guest is FAIR's Janine Jackson.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.nl/post/38810430

‘For the first time in more than eighty years, reporters of the renowned press agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) are under threat of dying of hunger. The labour union of the news organisation called the alarm on Monday about the ten Palestinian AFP workers in Gaza.’ (Non-translated archive link). It’s fairly easy to have pages automatically translated these days, and otherwise only English-language media are represented here, where the vast majority of European media obviously isn’t English-language. This is relevant to this community as it’s about journalists employed by a European news agency and newspapers.

‘They receive a salary, but are hardly able to work because of the high food prices and inhumane conditions. “My body is thin and I can’t work anymore”, the exhausted photographer Bashar (30) said on Facebook last weekend.

“Since the founding of AFP in August of 1944, we lost journalists during conflicts and have had people wounded and imprisoned within our ranks”, the union writes in the Monday communiqué, “but not one of us remembers seeing a colleague die of hunger.” Without “immediate intervention”, the message continues, “the last reporters in Gaza will die. [...] We refuse to let that happen.”’

The takedown included more than 7,700 YouTube channels linked to China.

These campaigns primarily shared content in Chinese and English that promoted the People’s Republic of China, supported President Xi Jinping and commented on U.S. foreign affairs.

Over 2,000 removed channels were linked to Russia. The content was in multiple languages that supported Russia and criticized Ukraine, NATO and the West.

The techdirt article is NOT neutral. It is full of loaded language and obvious partisanship, but... dammit, its seems more accurate than what I'm seeing elsewhere. Please add better links if/when found.

Excerpt 1:

The Senate Intelligence Committee in 2019 (during the Trump admin when Republicans had the majority in the Senate) confirmed that Russia used social media to “sow societal discord and influence the outcome of the 2016 election.” That was a report led by Senator Richard Burr. A follow-up effort led by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio showed the same thing. There wasn’t “collusion” (a term that has no legal meaning here) but there was plenty to be concerned about. Here’s Rubio’s own quote:

We can say, without any hesitation, that the Committee found absolutely no evidence that then-candidate Donald Trump or his campaign colluded with the Russian government to meddle in the 2016 election.

What the Committee did find however is very troubling. We found irrefutable evidence of Russian meddling.

The report also noted that:

Paul Manafort’s presence on the Trump Campaign and proximity to then-Candidate Trump created opportunities for Russian intelligence services to exert influence over, and acquire confidential information on, the Trump Campaign.

Remember: this was a bipartisan, Republican-led effort, released during Trump’s presidency, led by Marco Rubio. The conclusion is unambiguous: Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.

Excerpt 2:

All of the evidence shows that Russia absolutely sought to sow discord, including helping Donald Trump in 2016. It was almost certainly less successful than many people believed, and it was clearly unsuccessful in actually changing votes in the infrastructure.

But President Obama being accurately told two separate things in two consecutive months—(1) that the Russians didn’t succeed in hacking votes and (2) that they did want to influence the election through any means they could find—does not, in any way, suggest that Obama cooked up evidence of the latter.

Claims that "antisemitism" is being weaponized to support Israel miss that its function has always been to bolster European supremacy. Today, the chimera of “Jewish safety” is used to justify Western dominance through Israel’s genocide in Palestine.