On its list of 20 Twitter accounts to unfollow in 2015, the HuffingtonPost.UK, included Wikileaks, George Galloway and Media Lens.  It may have the unintended impact of drawing more eyes to these accounts, but it is worth reflecting what this piece says about the values of liberals who regularly express such views.[1]

Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, has been trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for two and a half years. He has not been charged with any crime. Wikileaks has extensively exposed the US military’s crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, including its killing of journalists – and the USA’s ongoing efforts to oust democratic governments. The Swedes have used sexual assault allegations against Assange which are based on ridiculously flimsy evidence as a pretext to do the USA’s dirty work. Highlighting Sweden’s gross hypocrisy and its true motives in the Assange case, in 2001, US agents sexually assaulted two “rendition” victims in Stokholm in the presence of Swedish officials. Nobody has been prosecuted for it. One positive outcome of Assange having challenged Sweden’s efforts to extradite him for questioning is that it forced the UK High Court to describe the allegations against him. I strongly encourage people to read the court’s account (paragraphs 74-76 and 93 in particular).  Under normal circumstances (i.e. when US “security interests” are not involved) allegations based on such weak evidence would get tossed by a legal system with any respect for the accused’s presumption of innocence. The only credible reason Swedish prosecutors have not dismissed them (as they initially did) is to punish Assange for his work with Wikileaks. There is even less excuse for Sweden’s refusal to question Assange via Skype or by travelling to the UK. Swedish authorities recently questioned a professional hockey player via Skype regarding assault allegations so that he wouldn’t miss a game. I learned about that from the Wikileaks Twitter account many UK liberals would like everyone to ignore.

For years, Assange has been feuding with the UK Guardian, a popular outlet with English speaking liberals around the world. Assange has claimed that the Guardian, among other betrayals, secretly handed over Wiikileaks’ entire stash of US embassy cables to a Mossad contact with Haaertz, a leading Israeli newspaper (see the 18-21 minute segment of this interview Assange recently did on RT).

If the liberal faction of the corporate media offered a real alternative to the hard right Murdoch press, then its solidarity with Assange would be overwhelming. The opposite is the case. John Pilger, Glenn Greenwald, and Seumas Milne are among the very few relatively prominent writers to defend him. One of the most effective articles Media Lens ever produced exposed the outpouring of liberal contempt for Assange when he first sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy. The right openly calls for Assange’s murder while liberals snicker at his plight. That’s the level of diversity the corporate media offers on many key issues.

The HuffingtonPost.UK also mocks George Galloway for making “hackneyed old accusations about Blair being a war criminal”. You are very unlikely to find as courageous and eloquent a defender of Palestinian rights as Galloway among the West’s political class.  After the recent killings in Paris, how many politicians would have the guts to denounce the barbarism but also point out, as Galloway did, that France has been “facilitating exactly such carnage, except daily, in Syria for the last four years. And through the agency of the very same kind of terrorists as murdered the French citizens today.” Galloway was savagely beaten in the streets of London last year by a fanatical supporter of Israel. That incident alone should have deterred idiotic put-downs by the HuffingtonPost.UK authors, and the way they yawn at the slaughter in Iraq that Tony Blair played a key role in bringing about – one that killed at least half a million people –  is simply disgusting.

This illustrates why I rarely bother looking at the Murdoch outlets. If I want to see leftists like Galloway, the late Hugo Chavez, Ed Herman, Noam Chomsky maliciously attacked and ridiculed I can see plenty of it in the liberal media.  If I want so see perpetrators of genocide, like Otto Perez Molina, given a free ride, I don’t need Fox News. The Guardian’s website will do. If I want to see the US-backed military coups in Venezuela or Honduras applauded, I can count on the liberal editors of the New York Times or the UK Independent doing it.

The Media Lens editors recently suggested a way to generate a real alternative to the liberal media.

You think people around the world wouldn’t support a media commune made up of Chomsky, Pilger, [Jonathan] Cook, Greenwald, Herman, Hedges, Fisk, Taibbi, Ahmed and, hell, why not?, [Russell] Brand? Suck as much talent out of the corporate media as possible and tear them to shreds with corporate media insider whistleblowing and truth-telling on Guardian, Independent, etc, that would make even us blanche. The internet makes the outreach and donations possible. The support would be vast, IF the thing was posited as an alternative to the appalling, biocidal, corruption-drenched corporate media. Greenwald sort of had the right idea except for the nonsense of a billionaire being involved and his cooperative stance on corporate media.

It’s not a bad idea, but given the extreme inequality of the neoliberal era, any audience-supported, non-advertising media that is independent of billionaires is going to be at a huge resource disadvantage compared to the corporate media.  Surviving or “punching above our weight” isn’t good enough. We need weight. Why not demand that our governments provide it by issuing media-vouchers to all citizens or drastically reforming government media that already exist? Julian Assange, Abby Martin and others have already shaken the establishment by using the resources of the Russian government to bypass liberal gatekeepers.  Telesur, funded by progressive governments in Latin America, may have similar impact eventually, but why not also pressure the governments in the UK, USA and Canada (among others) to devote serious resources towards media reform?

Notes:

[1] Inquiries have only confirmed, thus far, that Mehdi Hassan, the political editor, was not the author.  The piece is simply credited to “Huffington Post.UK” as if collectively written. The text often says “we’d advise” and “we’re advising” etc….

Joe Emersberger

Joe Emersberger is co-author of “Extraordinary Threat: The US Empire, the Media, and Twenty Years of Coup Attempts in Venezuela.”