The Latest War Propaganda Goes Far Beyond the New York Times Latest Flub; It’s Baked in the Systems. The Intercept is Far from Innocent Here.
The New York Times spread anti-Muslim propaganda on behalf of the Israeli government to neutralize American politicians’ funding war. The Intercept spread anti-Muslim propaganda to keep the American politicians funding the war in power.
Part 1 of an ongoing series about how propaganda is seeping into our newsrooms.
This week, it seems reporters are all opining about war propaganda following The Intercept’s recent piece “The Story Behind the New York Times October 7 Exposé” about how the New York Times promoted Israeli Government propaganda about rape in their piece “Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7.”
The topic for discussion has been how easily propaganda led to a narrative that Hamas was raping women and children as a tactic of war to justify actions from the Israeli government to commit genocide since October 7, 2023.
The narrative was sold in many ways and from many sources, infiltrating US dialogues in various forms and mechanisms. That’s how propaganda campaigns work, but they rely on systems to perpetuate them. The New York Times was a bad actor here, but they were not the only ones.
I need to enter the chat because I have been a source numerous times for Ryan Grim, who has a byline on The Intercept piece, and Jeffrey Gettleman, who has a byline on the New York Times piece on related subjects.
Each time, my work was to help unheard voices with the coverage of essential topics. Regarding Gettleman, I worked with him on telling stories of African smallholder farmers working on anti-hunger initiatives and people living in impoverished conditions for aid groups in the 2010s. Regarding Ryan Grim, I worked with him on political movements, #metoo, and journalism access stories. I am aware of the fact-checking process for sources at both outlets.
Most of the coverage about what happened in this scenario has missed the mark and failed to observe the real holistic and systemic failures contributing to the problem for many decades, which I will outline below and in future pieces.
What I have learned in my work is that it is easy to get people to believe Muslims or people with darker skin committed sexual assault for several reasons, primarily due to our current culture.
Yet, the most frustrating part is that many people pretending to be the heroes in this situation fail to take accountability for their own role in getting duped by propaganda that ultimately leads to the same outcomes.
Since we are talking about propaganda, it is essential to note that I watched Ryan Grim and his colleague Akela Lacy get duped (maybe even willingly, but at least with some bias) by a sophisticated, racist propaganda campaign involving a former Google PR executive to smear a Muslim anti-war Congressional candidate who was opposed to surveillance.
The details are in-depth and confusing, but I have attempted to distill them in other writing. In a nutshell, Shahid Buttar, who had been running against Nancy Pelosi in 2020 on an anti-war, anti-surveillance platform, was smeared with misogyny claims by William Fitzgerald, who had been a long-time Google public relations spin doctor. Fitzgerald was not just a low-level employee; he was spinning narratives on behalf of Google for years, and he specialized in corporate propaganda. Look at a tweet he removed, but was able to be recaptured, bragging about his role in propaganda in the past.
The Guardian last summer unveiled Fitzgerald had gained what I believe is unwarranted trust from Glenn Greenwald before the outlet was even started with Edward Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance in 2013.
Sadly, it looks like Glenn Greenwald, when meeting with him, might not have had any idea Fitzgerald worked for Google. Phew! This is a disaster, given the implications of what we are talking about, which was that our government was spying on Americans, and Google knew about it. It is a prime example of corporate actors manipulating the public through earned media tactics. I am sure out of the kindness of his own heart, William just showed up to help as a “long-time reader.”
When the Snowden revelations leaked in 2013, The Intercept was founded in 2014 — with millions in tech money from Pierre Omidyar. I am dreadfully concerned about a new effort of tech companies, including Google, to create nonprofit mechanisms to fund news sources. I will discuss their role in propaganda in upcoming pieces.
I constantly noticed that these nonprofits developed by tech founders were trying hard to discredit traditional news sources as biased due to advertising when they were creating a loophole for far more bias themselves.
It’s hard to know to what extent William Fitzgerald was spinning The Intercept, but he clearly played a role in smearing anti-surveillance advocate Shahid Buttar. They didn’t even question it.
Fitzgerald is one smooth operator despite acting very aloof, which is how I suspect he convinced Buttar to let him join his campaign before its infiltration. Supposedly, Fitzgerald had quit Google and rebranded himself as a workers’ PR guy. Yet, with all the bragging he does about how hard he works against Google, even supposedly while on staff, I am surprised they have never taken any methods of retaliation.
Back to the Current Moment
I suspect Ryan Grim is so gleeful about this slip of The New York Times because while all this was happening in September of 2020, Times reporter Ben Smith had been critically covering The Intercept. Shortly after, the founders of the outlet quit, alleging Democratic bias.
It is important to note that, because of how California elections are set up, Buttar was running possibly the only Democratic party challenger campaign in 2020 with national implications at the time, and he had gotten smeared. It is also important to note that Betsy Reed, the editor at The Intercept when Buttar got smeared, was the editor at The Guardian when William Fitzgerald ran his most recent story — propaganda musical chairs.
At any rate, from Smith’s coverage at The New York Times, he documents a news outlet that could not deal with their errors in the leaking of Reality Winner, and that was precisely my experience working with them as well.
As an insider at the outlet pointed out to the campaign, they failed to follow their editorial guidelines by revising each of their stories multiple times without issuing formal retractions or corrections.
Grim points out the criticism from the New York Times internally, but when Buttar was smeared The Intercept also had internal leakers who told us they were concerned. Akela Lacy had nerve to email me to stop cc’ing the former founder of the outlet Glenn Greenwald on the list of her mistakes. This was just shortly before Glenn Greenwald quit and alleged bias.
In 20 years of working with journalists, I have never seen such unprofessional behavior as I did from Akela Lacy on this story, nor her editors refusing to correct inaccurate information. On top of it, they engaged in a public relations campaign to discredit what we were saying rather than make corrections and admit they messed up. When Buttar called out the inaccuracies on Twitter, he faced an onslaught of comments from none other than people who worked for The Intercept mostly backing themselves up.
We will explore the anti-Muslim systemic bias in the media that leads to this propaganda in the ongoing series. The New York Times spread anti-Muslim propaganda on behalf of the Israeli government to neutralize American politicians’ funding war. The Intercept spread anti-Muslim propaganda to keep the American politicians funding the war in power.
I would argue that the effects of The Intercept’s mistake had even worse systemic consequences in driving the war. To be clear, Congress, especially Nancy Pelosi, can end this war. The Intercept neutralized and erased some of the most influential voices, especially Muslims, in speaking out against it when they engaged in this propaganda campaign. In upcoming posts, I will talk about how anti-Muslim propaganda is getting picked up in newsrooms and the solutions.
About me
When the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center happened, I was literally in journalism class at the exact moment the planes hit. I often talk about how that moment shaped my entire class, generation, and our lifetime of decisions — that moment eventually led me to public interest public relations to uplift people who did not have a voice on this topic.
In my career, I worked on everything from anti-war documentaries, anti-surveillance organizations, international journalism rights groups, anti-war candidates and organizations, historically marginalized people, sexual assault survivors, human rights lawyers, etc. When the Muslim ban happened, I was working on behalf of one of the top international refugee organizations to provide media training and help Iraq War veterans who were trying to get their interpreters into the United States.
I am currently a witness in a lawsuit against Hearst Publications about the racism I saw while volunteering on the Buttar for Congress campaign.
Having an extensive background in giving a voice to the voiceless, I want to outline the systemic barriers leading to propaganda on this issue that keeps those critical voices out. In the case of the New York Times, they outright hired an Israeli government propagandist rather than a journalist to cover this issue. But the propaganda seeps in other ways that are just as damaging, but less salacious, and runs deep into our society’s fabric. That seems terrible, but it is only a symptom of a more remarkable sickness.