Can craven media be “deprogrammed”?
JVL Introduction
Don’t miss Jonathan Cook’s comprehensive take-down of the many ways in which global media obscures the truth about Israel.
He reveals a number of stories – including his own – about the experiences of honourable journalists prevented from doing their jobs. He explores some of the key reasons for the media’s craven behaviour towards Israel – partisan reporters and bureau staff, media lobby groups, the threat of being denied access to sources, pressure from head office and Israeli goverment censorship and control.
In a fascinating section headed “Rebuilding your worldview” he describes how incredibly difficult it is for journalists, raised in institutions imbued with the certainty that Israel is integral to a benign Western global reality, to extricate themselves from it, even when they see for themselves a reality that reverses all their received assumptions.
“Western establishments need Israel protected,” Cook says, and “deprogramming” yourself out of that fundamental paradigm can be a tortuous process – one that too few seem prepared to undergo.
NWI
This article was originally published by Jonathan Cook's Substack on Sun 16 Nov 2025. Read the original here.
Breaking free of media group-think is a scary, lonely journey. I know. I was forced to do it
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Superb.
Typical Jonathan Cook: careful, evidenced, rational, eloquent and above all, honest. You don’t need a conspiracy, really, as he explains; the sheer sociological circumstances – where you were recruited from, where you are based, the background of those your spend time with, where your promotion will be encouraged or sabotaged – these factors will generally do the trick.
The detailed research is necessary, but the overwhelming sense of reporting from the Middle East is, “who are us and who are them?” How else do you explain the indifference of Governments with regard to 20,000 murdered children? How can the pictures of Hiroshima landscapes fail to take the breath away?
Shabana Mahmoud thinks she has joined “us” and by emphasising the legality of her own parents’ paperwork, she has earned the right to protect us from “Boat people” (remember Vietnam) but, by her own admission to Nick Robinson on BBC Radio 4, it hasn’t saved her from the crudest prejudice expressed in street-level phrasing.
It would be interesting to know what happened in the discussion after Jonathan Cook presented the excellent talk at the NUJ meeting. ..