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many Americans’ memories of Rabin have long been colored by a relentless media narrative that deprived them of critical perspectives on his life and legacy. In fact, looking back at the Oslo years, the voices of Palestinians — the victims of Rabin’s decades-long career — rarely made it into the pages of influential U.S. publications. Had they been featured, many Americans may have had a more informed opinion about why Palestinians would oppose honoring Rabin.

I focused on opinion pieces for two reasons. First, scholarly analysis of major U.S. outlets has already demonstrated that their news coverage is heavily shaped by pro-Israel biases. Second, opinion pieces are playing a stronger role than ever in shaping our understanding of the news. As one newspaper editor explained, “In a 24/7 news environment, many readers already know what happened; opinion pieces help them decide how to think about it.”

I had expected to find relatively few opinion pieces by Palestinians, and I was correct. But what surprised me was how much Palestinians have been talked about in major U.S. media outlets over the decades. Editorial boards and columnists seem to have been quite consumed with talking about the Palestinians, often in condescending and even racist ways — yet they somehow did not feel the need to hear much from Palestinians themselves.

When I noticed their disappearance a few weeks ago I wrote to Huffington, asking the reason, and so far I have had no reply. Although deleted web pages can sometimes be retrieved from web archives such as Wayback, that is only feasible if you know they once existed and have the relevant URL. I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public. When I worked at the Guardian there were strict rules about this because it understood the need to have a record of published material that was as complete and un-tampered-with as possible. Once published, articles could be removed only  in very special circumstances (such as legal requirements) and if something was changed (because of factual errors, for example), readers had to be made aware of the change and when it happened. If we don't want to end up in book-burning territory, that is how it should be.

When I noticed their disappearance a few weeks ago I wrote to Huffington, asking the reason, and so far I have had no reply. Although deleted web pages can sometimes be retrieved from web archives such as Wayback, that is only feasible if you know they once existed and have the relevant URL. I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public. When I worked at the Guardian there were strict rules about this because it understood the need to have a record of published material that was as complete and un-tampered-with as possible. Once published, articles could be removed only  in very special circumstances (such as legal requirements) and if something was changed (because of factual errors, for example), readers had to be made aware of the change and when it happened. If we don't want to end up in book-burning territory, that is how it should be.

There's no doubt that today's social media contain a welter of trivia, often of no interest to anyone except the person who is posting. To view social media entirely in that light, however, is to grossly underestimate their power and importance. Social media also provide a running commentary on major events – through the eyes of ordinary people rather than elites.  There is no precedent for this. For the first time in history we have a vast public record of what masses of people are saying and thinking. This can be a valuable resource for current and future generations of researchers – if we preserve it intact.

native advertising—paid stories that look and feel like a publication’s own journalism

News providers got 20 percent of their ad revenues from native content in 2017, according to a global study of 148 publishers by the Native Advertising Institute and the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers. By 2021 executives expect that to increase to 36 percent

The piece is marked “sponsored” at the top, followed by a line identifying the content as “provided by” Thailand’s foreign ministry. A line at the end in smaller, fainter font states that the article was not produced by Reuters journalists. Reuters has a section on the homepage dedicated to sponsored content, and stories sponsored by the Thai government are mingled with news stories in Google search results about the topic. But research suggests that many are either oblivious to these disclaimers or do not know what they mean.

Only 0.4% of Israeli Jews under the age of 70 can read the stories in the original Arabic language, he says. He also points to the fact that according to Israel’s National Library, less than 1% of all literature translated into Hebrew was written in Arabic, and 90% of the translators were Jews

The stories of “Amputated Tongue," which all deal in various ways with language deprivation, is written by 57 Palestinian writers from Israel, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and abroad. The impressive compilation of contemporary Palestinian prose was translated into Hebrew according to a unique model by 36 translators, where one Arab and one Jewish translator collaborated. One-third of them were Palestinians. The short stories by some of the best Palestinian writers provide Israeli readers with more than a glimpse of entire lives lived in this land, and of this land.

The project lasted three years. Its goal was to give a voice to Palestinian Arabic society in the hostile climate created by Israel’s right-wing regime that views Arabic as an enemy language — as made abundantly clear in the 2018 Nationality Law, which downgraded the status of Arabic as an official language. The anthology targeted those few Israelis who want to know more about Palestinians but have had little exposure to them until now.

Most international news organisations have no presence in the country (and, some say, a lack of interest in the protests). Media posted online by Tunisian web activists has been some of the only material that has slipped through the blackout, even if their videos and photos haven't generated quite the same enthusiastic coverage by Western media as the Iranian protest movement did in 2009.

Several sources Al Jazeera spoke with said that web activists had been receiving anonymous phone calls, warning them to delete critical posts on their Facebook pages or face the consequences.

Sami Ben Gharbia, who monitors Tunisia's web censorship for Global Voices, said that Google and Facebook were in no way complicit in the sophisticated phishing technique. The initial signs that something was underway came on Saturday, he said, when the secure https protocol became unavailable in Tunisia. This forced web users to use the non-secure http protocol. The government's internet team then appears to have gone phishing for individuals' usernames and passwords on services including Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail. Web activists and journalists alerted others of the alleged hacking by the government via Twitter, which is not susceptible to the same types of operations. "The goal, amongst others, is to delete the Facebook pages which these people administer," a Tunisian internet professional, who has also been in contact with Anonymous, told Al Jazeera in an emailed interview. The same source, who asked to remain unidentified due to the potential consequences for speaking out, said that in communication with the international group, he had come up with a Greasemonkey script for fireFox internet browsers that deactivated the government's malicious code.

The media world's fetishization of social media has reached idol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with panels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify coverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should actually be about. As Wadah Khanfar, former Director General of Al Jazeera, told our editors when he visited our newsroom last week, "The lack of contextualization and prioritization in the U.S. media makes it harder to know what the most important story is at any given time."

locked in the Perpetual Now

There's no reason why the notion of the scoop can't be recalibrated to mean not just letting us know 10 seconds before everybody else whom Donald Trump is going to endorse but also giving us more understanding, more clarity, a brighter spotlight on solutions

Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo, said the state media’s attacks on the head of state made the situation perfectly clear: Mr. Morsi represented a double threat as the first civilian and the first Islamist to hold the presidency. “This is a deliberate and well-orchestrated campaign to shake Morsi’s image, ensure his failure and frustrate the revolution,” Mr. Shahin said.

Ahmed Abu Baraka, a lawyer for the Muslim Brotherhood, said the issue was deeper than bias. “It is an incurable disease in state media that needs surgery,” he said, blaming 60 years of parroting the ideology of secular dictatorship.

Taghrid Wafi, a state television producer, said she and her colleagues were in “confusion.” “They don’t know who is in charge,” she said, noting that in some ways the military’s grip on the news media had loosened since Mr. Morsi’s election. For the first time, she said, she could interview activists who criticized the military for court-martialing civilians. “You know we don’t work on our own; we need approval for our guests.”

Of course a newspaper should offer a broad range of views and host vigorous debate among people who disagree. The point that neither Elliott nor Guardian editors have addressed is where to draw the line. We live at a moment when open hate speech – especially in the United States – primarily directed against Muslims, is becoming normalized as part of the ‘marketplace of ideas.’

If all things being equal, Treviño’s long history of bigotry had been directed against Jews instead of Muslims, Arabs and Palestine solidarity activists, would The Guardian have offered him a column in the first place? If it had been revealed that Treviño wrote speeches for candidates suggesting that “civilization” was at war with Jewish rather than Muslim “barbarism,” how many would defend Treviño or the initial decision to hire him?

as a journalist you have to go to official sources but most of the time they just don’t respond. I have my sources and obtain different information about corruption at the municipal level. I know those who are on the municipal council and sometimes receive information about mismanagement and corruption, but when you ask for information from other sources you get total silence.” He added: “When you write about corruption and you have checked all your facts, the newspaper doesn’t want to publish the story. Recently I did an investigative report on how a leading sports figure is involved in corruption and when I had finished it no Tunisian newspaper would publish it. Unfortunately websites and blogs do not have the same impact on readers. On them we can sometimes post articles on corruption but they do not have the same impact as daily and weekly newspapers.”

The pressure exerted by the Tunisian authorities on journalists who attempt to cover corruption has taken its toll. The editor-in-chief of one opposition newspaper said that his newspaper refrained from making accusations of corruption. “We seek compromise within the constraints imposed upon us,” he said, in a clear reference to self-censorship, although he claimed that his newspaper differed from others, which, in return for “financing,” have “changed their tune.” The editor of another opposition newspaper, who is also an MP, said his newspaper does cover corruption and mismanagement. It is possible, he said, that he is given slightly more leeway by the authorities because his political party is legal and therefore has a right to state funding. Nonetheless, his paper is put under significant pressure. Tunisia’s Agency for Exterior Communication controls public advertising – which it apportions only to newspapers it approves of. This translates into considerable financial difficulties for any newspapers that don’t toe the line.

authorities employ two broad means to prevent unfavorable news from getting out: Sometimes they employ a legal ruling banning a particular issue or issues; this was the case when his newspaper published details about a court hearing related to social protests in the south of the country, when activists were on trial. On other occasions, the authorities don’t use the law; instead plainclothes police go to the stands and order them not to sell the issue.

We all grew up with the standard formula: journalism plays a crucial role in making western democracies work by providing citizens with the information that enables them to make informed judgments about urgent issues of general interest. Therefore, the fundamental question for those who study the western new media is: Do they in fact do what they are supposed, and claim, to do?

The crucial western capitalist context in which the news media operate in Dutch society and which they fundamentally reflect, is the same as that of British and American societies. Economic and foreign policies in the three countries are much more alike than different. The Netherlands too avowedly promotes ‘free trade’ and ‘the spread of democracy’ to less fortunate countries. In the Netherlands too, neoliberal thinking dominates politics. Journalism in the three countries is also very much alike. The ruling professional ideology is ‘objectivity.’ The media are mostly privately-owned and depend on advertising revenue. In the name of ‘freedom of the press’, the government exercises restraint, taking the position that, as much as possible, the market should decide which publications live and die. But journalists and politicians are caught in a symbiotic relationship and the PR industry exerts a lot of covert influence on journalism. It was American journalist Ben Bagdikian, who claimed in his popular The Media Monopoly , now in its sixth edition, that continuing concentration in the American media industry amounts to a de facto news monopoly. As a result, American news reflects the interests of political and economic elites. Just like in the Netherlands, where media markets are dominated by a few big corporations.

The official version of Dutch media history maintains that the partisan journalism which was prevalent until the 1970s fell far short, because it was intimately tied to political parties. In the 1970s, journalism professionalized and since then it has done more or less what it is supposed to do. But this is a very partial account. Indeed, the partisan media hardly practiced journalism as we like to see it done: acting as the watchdog of democracy. But when journalism shrugged off its political ties, the market filled the vacuum, and far from the market functioning as an ‘engine of freedom,’ to use British scholar James Curran’s words - the market in reality amounted to yet another ‘system of control,’ to cite Curran once again. The commercial media’s primary task is not to provide the population with relevant, independently-gathered information. Their primary task is to deliver readers, viewers and listeners to advertisers. As a consequence, the media in the Netherlands are owned by rich corporations and persons who have a stake in maintaining friendly ties with other corporations and also the government, for access to powerful political sources needs to be kept at all costs. No wonder that the journalistic product reflects the interests of elites. The media are the elite, also in the Netherlands, its reputation of a progressive country regarding ‘cultural’ issues like abortion and the death penalty notwithstanding. Dutch journalism thus remains far from independent, at least, if we take Jurgen Habermas’ definition seriously, whereby a public sphere ‘can only approach autonomy if it is independent from both the state and commercial interests’. 

media watchdogs said the action was more likely taken in response to the station’s programming, which had at times been critical, or satirical, of the Iraqi government. The move by security forces is an ominous sign for the country’s press, which, for the first time in decades had been enjoying relative freedom.

Ziad al Jillily, head of Iraq’s Journalistic Freedom Observatory, said that freedom of speech and journalism were the sole benefit of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The media here is now freer than Syria’s or Iran’s and less partisan than, say, Lebanon, where most of the media outlets are owned or controlled by politicians of various stripes. Basking in this freedom, both news and entertainment programs regularly push the boundaries. In an Iraqi version of "Punk’d," for example, which aired on Baghdadiya, actors played pranks on celebrities that often involved fake car bombs, checkpoint harassment and live bullets. As the celebrities screamed and fainted on screen, and readers complained, Punk’d Baghdad-style might not have been a good idea. But it did come from a lively, growing culture of media freedom.