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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

I love Steve Coogan. I first saw him the night after he won the Perrier Award at Edinburgh in 1992 where he was appearing as one of his many alter egos, the Mancunian bombshell Pauline Calf. He was scorchingly hilarious, and I’ve been an ardent fan ever since. 

To my mind, Coogan’s most famous creation, the quintessential Little Englander and broadcaster Alan Partridge, remains one of the funniest characters on television, eclipsed only by Coogan’s turn as Himself in Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip. I have an infantile weakness for anyone who can do impressions, and enjoy few things in life so much as watching the actor “doing” Roger Moore. Next month sees Coogan in his first major West End role in a restaging of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, another collaboration with Armando Iannucci with whom he has worked for 30 years. He takes time out from rehearsals to talk about the undertaking, which will see him take on four roles (compared to Peter Sellers’ threesome), and a career that has seen him switch between high comedy and more serious parts.

Lately, Coogan has become a style icon – or at least his wardrobe has come to represent a style that typifies the British male. The crumpled linens, tan blazers and Ray-Bans of The Trip were the focus of much discussion about the modern wardrobe, and what might be appropriate for the mature man to wear. For this reason, I’m delighted that he should feature in this autumn’s men’s style issue, which I hope will be a useful and approachable guide. 

Why not make clothes that people actually want to wear?

In our tailor’s directory, for example, we unpick the bewildering range of services in London dedicated to the making of a suit. While many of our readers are keen to try bespoke suiting, many report feeling overwhelmed when trying to work out who and what will fit them best. Are they looking for something traditional and highly structured, or are they in search of something softer, lighter and with more slouch? Aleks Cvetkovic has put together an index that we hope may help. From the lean, lengthening lines of Edward Sexton to the regal cuts of Kent & Haste, we hope this answers everything you wanted to know about suiting but were afraid to ask.

Not in the market for a three-piece? Maybe a black hoodie is more your vibe. Mark C O’Flaherty has found out how the sporty basic has become akin to haute couture. Likewise, at Sunspel, the T-shirt specialists are debuting a bespoke service to help men (and women) find the perfect fit. We’ve sent Louis Wise to test it out. 

In the 13 years since founding his men’s ready-to-wear label Ami Paris, Alexandre Mattiussi has introduced womenswear, accessories, leather goods and jewellery, and turned his business into a global €300mn brand. His recipe for success has been the provision of a core line in utilitarian trousers, shirts and basics at an aspirational price point. His trousers especially come highly recommended by many of my peers. 

“I’m not a niche designer, I’m not an intellectual designer, I’m not a conceptual designer,” he tells Jessica Beresford. “I want to dress the maximum amount of people I can, in a very inclusive way.” Ami’s success reveals a truth within the industry that many brands don’t seem to hear. Why not make clothes that people actually want to wear?

Lastly, our cover story takes you on a journey across Croatia, aboard the Jadrolinija ferry with Leon Dame. It’s always a delight to feature my favourite supermodel on these pages: Dame is one of the only people in the world who could wear a bin bag and still look super-chic. 

@jellison22

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Specialist divers surveying the wreckage of the $40 million superyacht that sank off Sicily in August, killing eight people including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, have asked for heightened security to guard the vessel, over concerns that sensitive data locked in its safes may interest foreign governments, multiple sources told CNN.

Italian Prosecutors who have opened up a criminal probe into multiple manslaughter and negligent shipwreck think the 56-meter (184-foot) yacht, the Bayesian, may contain highly sensitive data tied to a number of Western intelligence services, four sources familiar with the investigation and salvage operation said.

Lynch was associated with British, American and other intelligence services through his various companies, including the cyber security company he founded, Darktrace.

That company was sold to Chicago-based private equity firm Thoma Bravo in April. Lynch, whose wife’s company Revtom Limited owned the vessel, was also an adviser to British prime ministers David Cameron and Theresa May on science, technology and cyber security during their tenures, according to British government and public Darktrace records.

The sunken vessel, lying on the seabed at a depth of some 50 meters (164 feet), is thought to have watertight safes containing two super-encrypted hard drives that hold highly classified information, including passcodes and other sensitive data, an official involved in the salvage plans, who asked not to be named, told CNN. Specialist divers with remote cameras have searched the boat extensively.

Initially, local law enforcement feared that would-be thieves might try to reach the wreckage to find expensive jewelry and other objects of value still onboard the yacht, according to divers with the Fire Brigade who spoke with CNN. Now they are concerned that the wreckage, expected to be raised in the coming weeks as part of the criminal investigation into the tragedy, will also be of interest to foreign governments, including Russia and China. They have requested that the yacht be guarded closely, both above water and with underwater surveillance.

“A formal request has been accepted and implemented for additional security of the wreckage until it can be raised,” Francesco Venuto of the Sicilian Civil Protection Agency confirmed to CNN.

Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, American attorney Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda, British banker Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy, and the yacht’s onboard chef Recaldo Thomas died when the ship sank in a violent storm in the early hours of the morning.

Preliminary results from autopsies suggest that the Bloomer and Morvillo couples died of suffocation or “dry drowning” when the oxygen in an air bubble in a sleeping cabin ran out. Autopsy results for Lynch and his daughter were less clear.

The chef, whose body was found outside the vessel, died by drowning, the coroner said. Toxicology reports on the dead have not yet been released, but none had suffered any physical injuries when the boat went down.

Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares and 14 others survived, including the captain James Cutfield, who, along with a deckhand and the yacht’s engine room manager, is under investigation for multiple manslaughter and causing a negligent shipwreck. They have all been allowed to leave Italy.

Some of the 15 survivors, of whom nine were crew members and six were passengers, including a 1-year-old girl, reportedly told prosecutors that Lynch “did not trust cloud services” and always kept data drives in a secure compartment of the yacht wherever he sailed, a source with the prosecutor’s office told CNN. None of the crew or passengers who survived the incident were tested for drugs or alcohol because they were in a “state of shock,” authorities said during a news conference following the recovery of the bodies.

Morvillo represented Lynch when he was acquitted in a criminal fraud case in the US in June tied to the takeover by Hewlett Packard of his software company Autonomy, and survivors told investigators that the cruise was a celebration of that acquittal, according to the assistant prosecutor, Raffaele Cammarano. Though Lynch was acquitted of any criminal wrongdoing in the US, Hewlett Packard has indicated it will not drop its bid to collect a $4 billion civil payout from Lynch’s estate, awarded by a British court in 2022.

In what appears to be a tragic coincidence, Lynch’s business partner Stephen Chamberlain — who was his co-defendant in the US fraud case and the former chief operating officer of Darktrace — died on August 19, the same day the Bayesian sank, after being hit by a car while out jogging two days earlier. A spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office told CNN that Cutfield told them Lynch had learned of Chamberlain’s serious condition and had planned to cut the cruise short to return to the UK to see his business partner, who had been on life support.

The Bayesian sank a few hours before Chamberlain died in the hospital, his lawyer said. Lynch would not have known of his partner’s death, and Chamberlain was in a coma so would not have known about the shipwreck, Chamberlain’s legal counsel said.

Local prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio said no personal effects, including computers, jewelry or Lynch’s hard drives had been recovered from the vessel. However, the onboard hard drives and surveillance cameras tied to the yacht’s navigation system have been brought to investigators to determine if there is any usable data that might indicate how the yacht sank within 16 minutes of the storm hitting. The vessel did not have a traditional black box or voyage data recorder to record navigation data or audio on the bridge.

After divers complete surveys of the wreck this week, they will make suggestions for how to best raise the 473-ton vessel without spilling any of the 18,000 liters of oil and fuel still onboard, and how to make sure any sensitive data does not fall into the wrong hands. The costs of raising the ship will fall to its owner, Lynch’s widow, as is mandated by Italian maritime law.

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

The Bank of London will cut nearly 15 per cent of its workforce as part of a wider restructuring of the fledgling bank that received £42mn from investors last month.

The bank, which counts US finance heavyweight Harvey Schwartz and Labour grandee Lord Peter Mandelson on its parent’s board, told staff this week that it would make redundant about 20 of its employees, including at executive level, said two people familiar with the cuts.

The redundancies come as the bank faces pressure from investors to overhaul its operations after it closed its fundraising, said four people familiar with the situation.

A restructuring of the company was discussed as one of the things that investors wanted before committing to the fundraising, said three people close to the bank.

The financing was led by existing investor Mangrove Capital, whose founder, Mark Tluszcz, is also a non-executive director at the bank. He did not respond to request for comment.

The deal was announced shortly after the bank’s parent company received a winding-up petition from tax authorities over unpaid debt, which came days after its founder Anthony Watson stepped down as chief executive.

The bank attributed the petition from HM Revenue & Customs to an “administrative error” and it has since been resolved. The bank said at the time that the fundraising was unrelated to the petition, which has been withdrawn.

The bank — which aims to make money from payment services and by franchising its technology to allow corporate clients to offer regulated banking services under their own brands — had in July called on investors for more money, saying it had an “immediate” need to raise millions of pounds of cash for regulatory capital, the Financial Times has previously reported.

A spokesperson for the bank said: “Following its successful fundraising and under new leadership, the Bank of London is focusing on its home market of the UK and aligning its resources to support its strategic objectives.”

“As part of this process, the Bank has launched a consultation that may result in a small number of roles being impacted, relative to the total number of staff across its three offices,” the person said, adding the “decision has not been made lightly”.

The company counted about 150 employees before the restructuring according to people familiar with the matter. The bank declined to confirm its total number of employees.

A technology investor called Nasser Hadadi played a key role in leading negotiations on behalf of investors, according to four people familiar with the situation.

Hadadi, who is a French citizen according to corporate filings, has invested a relatively small sum personally, one of the people added, but was chosen by some of the bank’s investors to represent their interests in discussions with management.

The departures, which will mainly affect UK-based staff, follow an initial round of job cuts in the US earlier this month, where the bank leases offices that sit largely empty in New York and North Carolina.

The Bank of London is separately being sued in the High Court in London by a technology company over alleged unpaid debts as far back as 2022. Court records show that Smart Trade Technologies, a provider of electronic trading and payments platforms, has demanded £1.46mn from the bank including interest and damages.

The claimant said in a lawsuit filed in May that the bank had signed up in 2021 for LiquidityFX, Smart Trade’s foreign exchange trading platform. But it claimed that while the Bank of London paid a set-up fee and for the first year of the service, the bank failed to make subsequent payments required under a five-year contract.

The Bank of London said: “This claim relates to a minor commercial dispute in respect of which we have a robust defence which we fully expect to succeed.”

Additional reporting by Robert Smith in London

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World Press Freedom Day: Independent Media, Social Justice, and the Vox Populi

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This week on the Project Censored Show, in advance of World Press Freedom Day, Mickey talks to media scholar Andrew Kennis about his recent book, Digital Age Resistance: Journalism, Social Movements, and the Media Dependence Model. They talk about how legacy media frame various social movements, applying the “worthy and unworthy victims” analysis from Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model. Kennis also applies the Media Dependence Model to the ongoing propaganda and censorship occurring around the Israel/Hamas/Gaza events in the Middle East, further arguing why we need a truly independent and free press in the public interest. Then, co-host Eleanor Goldfield joins Mickey to discuss the growing protests occurring around the US in opposition to more aid and weapons being sent to Israel for their attacks on Gaza. They address the media framing and censorship around those First Amendment protected events happening on a rapidly increasing number of America’s college campuses, and revisit the echoes of Kent State as we approach the 54th anniversary of those tragic events on May 4th 1970.

Video of the Interview with Eleanor and Mickey

Video of the Interview with Dr. Andrew Kennis

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Eleanor and Mickey

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Eleanor Goldfield: Thanks everyone for joining us back at the Project Censored Radio Show. We’re very glad right now to bring you another co host segment. I’m Eleanor Goldfield and I’m here with my co host Mickey Huff. Mickey, thank you so much for joining again so that we can hang out and hack our way through some of the propagandized, censored news headlines of the day and talk about, as we do, the news and why it didn’t make the news.

So, Mickey, great to have you with us. We’re gonna be talking about, specifically some of the stuff that’s been going on at college campuses across the United States recently, not only the powerful protests by students, but also the powerful backlash by the police state.

And Mickey, I know that you have some very expert and unique insight into Kent State, which the anniversary of that is May 4th, I believe. Correct?

Mickey Huff: Yes, it is. It’ll be the 54th year commemorating the massacre at Kent State and the echoes of that historically, Eleanor, are pretty profound, particularly just seeing what’s happening right now around the country. I’m once again reminded of the quip from the late great playwright and often curmudgeonly Gore Vidal, who once quipped that we were the United States of amnesia. Of course, that assumes that we learn things and then forget them. And in many cases, like with some of the stories that we’re going to talk about today, Eleanor, people don’t really learn about them in the 1st place and, or if they do, they learn a distorted, skewed or a-historical, non-contextualized, rote version of it that can sort of be distilled into a soundbite, and attached with that is some exceptionalist establishment narrative viewpoint.

It kind of just goes through osmosis of our curriculum and our educational system and our corporate quote news and so forth. So yeah, it’s always good to be here and talk with you back and forth as co hosts. And, I think we actually cover a lot of interesting ground for folks.

So I’m looking forward to talking with you today about some of these intersections of past to present, and if past is prologue, what we’re looking at right now around the country is very grim.

Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely, Mickey. As one of my favorites, James Baldwin, put it, the past is not past. So, here we go, and folks might be already aware of this because it actually has wandered into some mainstream reporting, but of course, as you pointed out, Mickey, when it is covered, it is covered from an angle that uplifts and upholds the status quo and uplifts the state line, as opposed to the perspective of the students.

You know, you see things like anti Israel protests. It’s never pro Palestine or anti genocide or anti apartheid, right?

Mickey Huff: It’s anti Semitic protesters.

Eleanor Goldfield: Right, exactly. But just to give folks an idea, now, we’re recording this on Friday, April 26th, and I’ve put together a non exhaustive list of schools that I’m aware of, that I’ve seen recently, and here are some of them where these protests against the continued genocide in Gaza have taken place, and with that, some very violent backlash, which we’ll discuss.

USC, that’s the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Columbia in New York, Yale, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Minnesota, Princeton, Emory, which is in Atlanta, G.W.

Mickey Huff: Where they’re brutally arresting professors, by the way.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yes, who have been screaming, “I am a professor.”

MIT, Cal Poly, Cornell, Ohio State, Purdue, Harvard, Northwestern, and University of Pennsylvania.

Again, that is a non exhaustive list, and by the time folks are listening to this, there will likely be more schools that will be added to this list because it continues to grow and spread. I’ve already heard about some being organized at places that are planned for this coming week. So this is continuing to spread. And with it, of course, the amount of censorship and, at a lot of these schools, specifically pro Palestinian organizations, I’m thinking predominantly of those SJP, that’s students for justice in Palestine, have been outright banned from existing as student organizations.

And, Mickey, if you can speak to a little bit of what you’ve seen in your tenure as a professor in terms of this crackdown against speech and action for Palestinian rights.

Mickey Huff: Well, it’s pretty extraordinary, Eleanor. And that was a good overview of a lot of the campuses, a cursory one at that.

You know, it doesn’t include a lot of the state colleges. It doesn’t include community colleges. In California we have 115 just community colleges, and there are protests and things happening all over.

There have been speech code violations by administrators. There’s been censorship and crackdowns on some campuses around what faculty and students can even email, which is in accordance with some campus policies. But nevertheless, these rules often are not evenly or equally enforced, if you know what I mean. Certain statements or certain things, you can virtue signal about, but if it actually comes to really saying something profound about something that’s happening that’s affecting a lot of people around the world, not just locally to Gaza. Of course, they’re the most and worst in regards to what’s happening, but that has rippling effects, and through our system. But this is happening all throughout our institutions as you were illustrating.

What I’d like to point out is, my day job profession with one of the many hats I wear has been under assault for a long time. And the great irony is that in the recent years where we’ve seen higher education and academic freedom under assault, and we see, you know, the right is constantly pointing at the bogeyman of DEI and wokeness and so forth. And so a lot of these right wing governors have been passing laws about academic freedom on campus and why students are allowed to protest.

These are the very places, Governor Abbott in Texas, where they’re calling in state troopers to violently arrest people, and at Columbia, the N.Y.P.D. were called in by the head of the university declaring a quote clear and present danger, riffing on that language, that historical language.

The NYPD get there and they’re like, these people are eating lunch and sitting peacefully and having conversations. This is the NYPD assessment, right? And they’re like, we’re not sure. But they’re of course there to do what they need to do. And there’s theater and there’s worse than theater. There’s real violence.

But this is a real chilling effect, and it’s an unfortunate lesson that the state hasn’t learned, but the students and professors and people on campuses in higher education are, we’re all too familiar with this kind of hypocrisy. We’re all too familiar with this kind of selective enforcement of speech or First Amendment rights, and we’re all too familiar historically with just the complete idiocy of anyone thinking that calling in police or National Guard or militarizing peaceful protests and situations, and somehow that’s not going to end poorly.

These people know absolutely nothing at all. And they don’t deserve to be in these positions of power. They’re frankly abusing them, and they’re trashing the entire, not only the entire system of higher ed and academic freedom, but they’re trampling roughshod over the Bill of Rights, particularly the First Amendment.

And I know, Eleanor, you noticed a particularly interesting thing about some of the folks that were coming to crack skulls at the University of Texas. You were remarking about how those folks were nowhere to be found when there were shootings in Texas schools.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah, absolutely, Mickey. So first, just to point out that again, there have been violent crackdowns at a bunch of different schools, including Cal Poly Humboldt, which is not that far from where you are, relatively speaking to me.

So at Emory, as you pointed out, professors were being violently arrested. A professor was thrown down on the ground with her head on the concrete as she screamed, “I’m a professor.”

Mickey Huff: Professor of economics, no less.

Eleanor Goldfield: Yeah. I mean, is that better than like a professor of arts?

Mickey Huff: Well, a professor of philosophy was hauled off over, I think it was NYU or Columbia. It’s across the disciplines.

Eleanor Goldfield: I know. A chair. As she was being arrested and dragged away, she said, could you call my department? I’m the chair of the philosophy department.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, I’m being arrested.

Eleanor Goldfield: I mean, it’s funny because it’s so dark.

It’s like, we’re arresting people whose job it is to teach people.

Mickey Huff: The philosophy professor wrote a book about the importance of demonstrations in the first amendment. I mean, you can’t, like forget the Onion. They’re going to go out of business.

Eleanor Goldfield: I actually don’t know what the Onion can do anymore.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, I’m not sure. We should ask the New York Times, right?

Eleanor Goldfield: There you go. But I mean, Emory University, I think this is also a really important connection to make, the planned cop city in Atlanta has some of the strongest connections to what’s known as the deadly exchange, which is an exchange between U.S. police forces and Israeli police and military forces, where they share tactics.

And one of the tactics that was on full display was a man who is clearly marked as a street medic. These are people who are trained in how to help people at protests, if they need water, if they’re going through some kind of medical emergency or issue, and take care of them until emergency services can get there.

So, great people whose job it is to just help others. Cops violently arrested this man, a black man, who’s surprised there. And they pinned him down and they had him zip tied. And once he was zip tied and pinned down, they tased him. And this is all on video. And he was clearly zip tied and being pinned down by multiple police officers.

And this is in Atlanta, where again, this is one of the prime areas that is involved in this deadly exchange between Israel and the United States, and it would be boosted if Cop City were to go through.

And with regards to the University of Texas in Austin, you can also see video of this violent police presence. You know, they are in full Rambo gear, or like RoboCop, you know, they’re not walking in there like Andy Griffith. They look like they’re there to bust skulls, and of course they were. And actually Mike Prysner, who has a podcast called Eyes Left and has been on the show before and is an army veteran, shared a screenshot of these state troopers who had, he pointed out several clips that had a hundred plus rounds of AR 15 bullets. Why would you walk onto a campus with that in your vest?

Mickey Huff: Why would you do that? Go ahead, Eleanor.

Eleanor Goldfield: And these are, and to go back to what you were talking about with the Uvalde school shooting, now this was an elementary school where a gunman just kind of ran roughshod through the entire school while the same law enforcement agency, the Texas state troopers stood outside and did nothing. This was May 24, 2022.

91 of these state troopers were at the school when law enforcement waited over an hour before they breached the classroom where the gunman was. Multiple children died. Now again, this was an elementary school. Now we’re talking about a college when the same law enforcement agency rushes in there again, with these clips of AR 15 weaponry. They’ve got their full riot gear on, and violently attack people who, as the NYPD pointed out, across the nation are just sitting and holding space, protesting peacefully and exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly.

And there were actually several, there were a couple of troopers who were found guilty in an internal investigation into the actions of these troopers who were literally just caught on camera, like scrolling through their phones, doing nothing to address the rampage of violence that happened at this elementary school.

So this same law enforcement agency felt that it was okay to allow elementary schoolers to be shot and killed and do nothing about it. And yet a peaceful protest of University of Texas, Austin students decrying a genocide, they need to be met with police brutality. So just watching this, I mean, this is America in two images, right?

And it’s incredibly dark, but I guess I’d have to say I’m losing the ability to be shocked, but never to be disgusted.

Mickey Huff: Well, there’s a lot to take in there, the professors were at Emory, the philosophy professor and economics professor, Carolyn Follin and Noelle McAfee, that we were mentioning earlier and you made a passing reference to Mike Prysner, and the remarking about, well, why in the world would these people have these kinds of full on combat gear? The irony is weirdo. This is the same kind of weapons, the same kind of weaponization, the same kind of tactics that we see in Occupied Palestine, and the, as you mentioned, the IDF, a lot of US law enforcement people go and get training from IDF and one of the iconic photos we’ve seen from recent times here was snipers positioned on the roof at Ohio State University.

Now that goes back to the state of Ohio, and you mentioned Kent State earlier, and I’ve done a lot of work on Kent State over the years with Laurel Krause, the Kent State Truth Tribunal, I did my graduate work on Kent State, and the historiography of Kent State, and how the powers that be, even 54 years on, have worked diligently to bury the massacre at Kent State.

And when you talked about those live ammo clips, right? The AR 15 or the AK, you know, the assault rifle kind of clips. If you go back to Ohio, two days after Nixon called protesters a bunch of bums, Governor Rhodes, who was in a meeting with Nixon previously that week, sent the National Guard to Kent State University, which was a sleepy rural area about an hour south of Cleveland. It’s not a radical hotbed. And that was, of course, where Nixon realized he was losing the narrative, right? He was losing the young people. He didn’t have a lot of the young people anyway, but he was really losing the narrative about the war, and when he said that they were going to escalate it rather than de escalate it, that’s when things blew up again.

You mentioned 1968 earlier, this is 1970, and there were more protests going to grow then. But if you take a look back, not just to 68, but 70, a raft of campuses closed down, graduations were cancelled, commencements were cancelled, all that, because there was a massacre at Kent State and Jackson State, right. A predominantly black college where people were shot and killed and that got less coverage, right? Because that was seen as, well, that’s what happens there. Kent State, right, was quote different because it was these sort of sleepy, you know, white middle class students minding their business being shot. By who?

By people roughly the same age who just came from a violent strike that they were at, right? They were making it violent, right? It’s usually the police that make protests and strikes and things violent. Well, these folks, these young people who may have otherwise been in college themselves, but were in the National Guard, many likely, so they didn’t have to go to Vietnam, right? Another way out.

These kids, what they were, were bused from the Akron Teamster strike with no sleep over to this anti war protest where there were provocateurs and other things going on. We mentioned on the show last time about Terry Norman, the FBI informant and provocateur who fired at Kent State and disappeared.

But nevertheless, these are younger people that aren’t really well trained. And why are they going on Kent State campus with loaded M-1 rifles? That’s the connection here, you don’t show up to that kind of an event with that ammunition if you’re not ready to use it. And that’s the problem is they’re ready to use it.

That’s what they’re trained to do. It’s like calling a firefighter out to go look at a fire and say, well, what are you going to do? The police force is a hammer and every problem is a nail. And it is an absolutely overwhelmingly over the top, inappropriate response to peaceful protests.

And we hear at the Wall Street Journal and in other right leaning media that the rise of anti Semitism on campus is extraordinary. Jews are being threatened left and right. And I’m not going to make light of that. There are some instances where there are very anti Semitic statements and some Jewish students may not feel safe. I am not taking that out of the equation. What I am going to add to the equation, however, is the extraordinary imbalance of the coverage.

The young woman who is a young Zionist who was a reporter for one of the university papers, a student, claims she was stabbed in the eye with a flagpole, and she was on the news and making great hay about it, she was accidentally hit in the eye by someone waving a handheld flag. And again, I am not going to take away from the fact that acts of violence occur and may be occurring in some places.

But for the conservative media to prop these issues up and not show the 34,000 dead people in Gaza and the 77,000 wounded people in Gaza and the 130 reporters plus dead and, not showing prominent author, Ayelet Waldman, married to Michael Chabon in Berkeley, was just arrested right outside of Gaza, marching to the border, calling attention to this issue.

San Francisco Chronicle covered that because it’s a local angle, but the rest of the corporate media don’t want people to know that the protests against what’s happening are not just from, you know, radical pro Hamas, anti Semitic people. It’s preposterous that that narrative is allowed to live out in the wild without much debunking in the establishment media whatsoever, even though it’s complete nonsense. But this is the challenge of the propaganda we face, is we have to dig through all this fog and issue 50 disclaimers before we can even report something that’s true.

Eleanor Goldfield: I know, and I have to say, it makes me very angry, again, as I’ve said on the show before, as a human and a Jew because this actually leads to legitimate anti semitism when you conflate Jews with Israel, and the issue here also is that foundationally, the corporate media doesn’t care about Jews, like, as a people, as a culture. It doesn’t care, because where are you when there is legitimate anti semitism, like, when people are attacked for being Jewish?

Now, here’s the thing, I’m not saying that people haven’t been attacked because they’re Jewish at some kind of event. I don’t know all of the stories here.

But I do know one thing, that Zionists are not always Jews, and Jews are certainly not always Zionists. And Zionists, and I say this as somebody who’s been to several anti Zionist protests where Zionists have showed up, both Jews and non Jews, they are horrifically confrontational. They come to pick a fight.

And then they do the kind of British footballer thing where they fall on the ground if somebody dares to step towards them, like, Oh, God, I’m so injured. And I’ve seen this firsthand. So this is not just anecdotal or hearsay.

And so again, there’s this skewed reporting on this. Where is the media when a Muslim is injured or targeted at a protest? Where is the media when Palestinians, which by the way, don’t tell anyone, but there are Palestinian Jews and Christians and atheists and whatever the else there is.

Mickey Huff: Yeah. God forbid. This is getting really complicated.

Eleanor Goldfield: I know it’s so complicated.

And so there’s this, again, that imbalance that you were talking about, and so we are, as you say, we’re wading through this muck to get to the core, which is these students, which is another problem with the media, they treat these students like they’re idiots, like, oh, these kids don’t know what they’re doing.

Eleanor Goldfield: Actually, they do. They know a lot more than you do. I

Mickey Huff: think that’s part of the problem, is that the students are aware of what’s happening. And the irony of how the institutions that they’re protesting at are supposed to be fostering independent critical thinking. They’re supposed to be looking behind the scenes, challenging power structures, and they’re supposed to be working toward a more just and equitable world, not just for themselves, but for everyone.

And so, you know, colleges and universities have just bandied around casually those kinds of mission statements for an awful long time. And here’s people practicing those, putting them into practice, taking the very things they learn in classes by heretics like me, right? Taking into account the things they learn about: history and civic engagement and how to really navigate the propagandistic media ecosystems we have in order to try to really understand what’s happening.

We try to teach students how to deconstruct these meanings and to be a part of their lives and be part of their communities and to stand up when they think something’s wrong and speak out, lo and behold, the students are listening sometimes, right?

Eleanor Goldfield: And I think that’s also really, what you highlighted is really powerful. It scares the establishment because, just like when we hear about the Black Panthers, if we do, oftentimes it’s just like the image of the Black Panthers with guns, like, Oh, there were just violent thugs. But what was very disturbing to the establishment is all of the political education that was going on thanks to the Black Panthers.

Mickey Huff: That’s right. And their 10 point program.

Eleanor Goldfield: Right. And so here’s what I’ve seen. I’ve seen images from campuses where you have these students sitting at these encampments reading Edward Said, and reading, you know, the 100 year war on Palestine, and reading things that contextualize what’s going on far before October 7th, and really let people know the larger picture.

And that is really, really scary to the establishment because then you start to again realize that, okay, Zionism is not Judaism and Zionism is a colonialist construct. It is a white supremacist ideology. And oh my gosh, what do we do if the bulk of people from 18 to 22 really realize that? Oh, that’s really going to be disastrous. So we have to clamp down on this. And the only way that the United States knows how to push back against something like this is to push back violently.

Mickey Huff: And look, that’s right. And what we’ve seen, and we mentioned before, just more disclaimers, right? Any listener to this program knows that I’m not shy about taking on left wing censorship or left wing litmus testing, and I’m not into the left wing circular firing squad model of dealing with disagreements.

So, that said, it’s again, interesting to me and entirely a 101 sort of primer in hypocrisy that the far right has been trying to attack academic freedom, tried to shut down what’s being taught on campuses, and now when they can’t totally control everything that’s going on on campuses, the free speech warriors on the right, Tom Cotton, Josh Halley are calling to bring in the National Guard.

They’re literally saying to bring the military. You want to shut somebody up? Punch them in the mouth. Arrest them, expel them, ruin their careers before they’re started, scare the ever living hell out of them, however you can, so that they learn young and they learn well, not to speak out against the status quo, not to speak up for justice, to keep their mouths shut or else they’re not going to get jobs and they’re not going to have enjoyable lives.

And again, there is nothing more anti-Intellectual and nothing more pro-censorious than having a militarized response to intimidate, arrest and commit acts of violence on young peaceful protesters. Period. Full stop.

It was a total unmitigated disaster and crime at Kent State. And what we’re seeing unfold here today is eerily similar, and I hope that people really start to realize the lessons of the past such that we do not repeat such absolutely foolish and unnecessary acts of violence against an entire generation of people really speaking out at this moment in history about the unethical, illegal and horrendous acts that are taking place, not just across the Middle East, but across the world, often with the backing of U.S. taxpayer money and weaponry.

Eleanor Goldfield: Absolutely, Mickey, very well put. And I’m curious with your expertise on the subject to kind of make that comparison, looking at where we were before Kent State happened, and also that people after Kent State happened, when they were polled across the country, thought that it was okay what happened, largely. And today we see a lot of people, particularly those who watch MSNBC or CNN and think that what’s happening in Gaza is just the cost of war.

What do you think the likelihood is that we would see another Kent State happen, and even if not, what do you think the likelihood of these kind of college protests, just like we saw back in the late 60s and early 70s, can help create the political environment that makes this war untenable, that made Vietnam untenable, or that could potentially make this genocide untenable for the U.S. government?

Mickey Huff: Well, absolutely great framing and contextualization for the conversation that we’re having and for what’s going on and for the conversation that I wish we saw more of in the press. The corporate media is not going to do that. It’s just, it’s too sensational. Covering protests is sensational. It’s a clash, right? And the protesters are violent and unruly, and the police are restoring law and order. It’s eerie how similar the language is now as it was 50 some years ago and the tactics and the playbook and all of it, right?

I hope and think, however, that some of the consciousness of our society has moved past that, a degree to which that we are capable of seeing why the response to what’s happening right now on campuses is not the proper one, it’s not the right one, and it’s not a productive one.

You saw what happened at Columbia. They went in and arrested people and removed people and what happened? Whoop! It just propped back up. It’s like a game of whack a mole. And the state, the more that happens, the more prone the state is to violence. And this is what’s scary about what’s happening right now, is that any of these things could unfold, even before this program airs.

There could be provocateurs. We know they’re usually are right. So I think the situation now is very volatile. But what it also suggests, another lesson is that if we would take this opportunity to listen to what the protesters are discussing and discover that a vast majority of them are peaceful. I know there are some radical positions that, considered radical by the right, some of the organizations that have language that talks about how Israel doesn’t have a right to exist and so on. And that language really ruffles establishment feathers.

But I think that this is the opportunity to have the discussions and if we can’t have impassioned, but still intellectually sober dialogue that’s constructive, not destructive at the very institutions that are designed to teach people how to get through these things and understand them. This is why I mentioned earlier that, you know, my whole profession is under attack. All these institutions are under attack. It’s not just literally the students that are doing it, and it is very literally, of course, the people on the ground in Gaza. But metaphorically, we’re destroying our own means by which to civilly mitigate these differences.

These actions are making it more likely that we’ll become an authoritarian society, not a more democratic one. What’s happening right now in the way that the Democrats, not just Republicans are handling these situations is making it more likely, Eleanor, that we’re going to see something even more tragic happen in coming weeks, and that’s why I really hope people take a moment to think about some of the things, not just that we’re talking about, but to go look into the stories that we’re bringing to attention.

Go look at different media. Look at the independent media. Don’t just look at the corporate media. Look at what the independent media is saying about this.

May 3rd is World Press Freedom Day, and that was proclaimed by the UN General Assembly in December of 1993. And the reason we do this is we need to celebrate, and this is right from the UN, we celebrate the fundamental principles of press freedom.

We have to access the state of press freedom throughout the world. We have to assess it and see where we are. We have to defend media from attacks on their independence and pay tribute to journalists who have lost their lives in the line of duty, and I will add, or have pretty much been disappeared down the memory hole, like Julian Assange.

And as we approach Press Freedom Day, World Press Freedom Day, we have to remember that it’s the independent media that is often the grassroots voice of the people. It is often the independent press that is operating on ethical standards and principles, and it is the independent press that is reporting in the public interest, not the corporate media.

And if people diversify their news media diets more and get more information from independent outlets as we approach World Press Freedom Day, we really need to think about how to reform and change our media system and really push to have better news reporting, more accurate reporting, more constructive dialogue and more solutions based framing around the challenges we face.

We can use news and media to make a positive difference and we can use our first amendment rights to try to move the needle on important conversations. Part of that means we have to resist this violence and resist this censorship and violence against protesters is a form of censorship.

Eleanor Goldfield: Very well put, Mickey. And we could spend the next several hours digging deeper into this, but I think that was a powerful way to wrap up this conversation.

Thank you so much. I’m glad that we were able to sit down and dig into this very important issue of censorship and indeed propaganda, which we’ve covered before. They go hand in hand.

And people can also follow more about what’s going on, palestine Action US has listed several of these actions that are happening at universities across the country. Also SJP, as I mentioned, students for justice in Palestine, you could check out their work as well. And of course, we talk about this a lot on project censored. So check out projectcensored.org for more, not just coverage of this, but a deeper dive with regards to articles and other links to things like that.

Mickey, thanks again for taking the time to sit down and dig into this.

Mickey Huff: Eleanor, it’s always great to have a co host to co host talk about the state of the free press and things happening in the world. So always appreciate it. And certainly thank all of our listeners.

If you enjoyed the show, please support us at Patreon.com/ProjectCensored

Below is a Rough Transcript of the Interview with Dr. Andrew Kennis

Mickey Huff: Welcome to the Project Censored Show on Pacifica Radio. I’m your host, Mickey Huff. Today, this week, in the, in this segment of the program, you know, we are coming up on World Press Freedom Day, and at Project Censored, we always call attention to the importance of independent media and a free press, and we also try to connect the importance of that with critical media literacy education.

And right now, today, in this segment, we are honored to have an extraordinary and expert guest, Dr. Andrew Kennis. We’re gonna talk about his book, Digital-Age Resistance: Journalism, Social Movements, and the Media Dependence Model. Part of the internationalizing media study series over at Rutledge. Let me tell you about Dr. Andrew Kennis and we’ll bring him in and we’re going to have a a very fascinating conversation talking about the propaganda model and also his own media dependence model as applied to social movements. We’ll certainly as ever get around to policy solutions and other things. We won’t just be bemoaning the problems but actually finding solutions and Dr. Andrew Kennis is an expert in both both of those endeavors. He is an invited scholar affiliated with the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City where he serves as a coordinating member of a research collective based at the College of Political and Social Sciences. Dr. Kennis is also a nationally inducted researcher in a program run under the auspices of Mexico’s National Council on Science and Technology.

As a pedagogue, Kennis currently teaches graduate level classes at Rutgers University, after having also taught at several other places, including Northwestern University, the University of Texas at El Paso, and more. Dr. Kennis also continues to practice as an international and investigative journalist, having reported from locations ranging across four continents and dozens of countries while residing in Mexico city. Andrew Kennis, we’ve circled each other in media literacy movements and independent journalist movements for a long time. But it is finally great to catch up with you and get you on the Project Censored Show. So welcome Andrew Kennis to the Project Censored Show.

Andrew Kennis: Thank you very much.

It’s an honor to be here. Love your show and it’s a pleasure to be part of it.

Mickey Huff: So, Andrew, this, this is a, you know, it’s, it’s Tomish in its weight. This is a major dense academic study. This is the product of years of research and writing. The book came out in 2022, but the things that you talked about in the book obviously live well beyond, and the models and theories you have put together.

Based on some previous, other scholars, including Ed Herman, Noam Chomsky, Bob McChesney, who, by the way, gave extraordinarily generous blurbs and introductions to your book. Noam Chomsky, Daniel Chomsky, and also, Bob McChesney, all towering figures in this realm of, of media literacy, media analysis, understanding and deconstructing propaganda.

And so I guess that’s a great place to start. Your book is called Digital-Age Resistance: Journalism, Social Movements, and the Media Dependence Model. I am, we’re particularly honored to have you here, Andrew, because you are the synthesis of the journalist, the scholar, the analyst right you put you you are theory and praxis embodied in a lot of ways and we don’t always see that.

So, what was going back to the propaganda model right going back to 1988. Ed Herman and Noam Chomsky talking about how issues of ownership, advertising, elite sourcing, you know, who’s newsworthy and so forth, newsmakers and shapers. Then we had flack and, you know, boycotts and so on. And finally, ideology used to be anti communism, but could be other forms of ideology.

You actually, and we’ve done this at Project Censored, we’ve expanded some of the project, some of the propaganda model to allow for social media algorithms, bots and so forth. But you’ve actually taken the propaganda model, and of course, you can say a few things about that. You’ve actually created something called the media dependence model, and then you’ve applied it journalistically to social movements.

So Andrew Kennis, can you please talk a little bit about that and introduce this idea to our listeners?

Andrew Kennis: Absolutely. But just as long as you’re speaking about, feeling honored, it was a huge honor to be introduced by these fantastic scholars by the Chomsky’s and McChesney, but it was actually the 2nd biggest honor.

The 1st biggest honor was to have the, the pleasure, the tremendous opportunity to be in touch with, pretty much all the movements I wrote about intimately, firsthand, as a reporter and as a scholar. It really was, you know, tremendous, opportunity I wanted to capitalize on. That’s what this book was primarily meant to be, was to, like you said, culminate a lot of research, whether on the ground through journalism or scholarship into one work.

And it was, it’s definitely an honor to be here with you too, Mickey. Thank you so much.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, no, it’s awesome to have you here. So, and there’s so much going on in the book, like you said, about the social movements. You are applying this, you know, across social media. You have a chapter on caged children and Trump’s nuclear option.

You, you have several other chapters that specifically look at the pandemic era and news coverage of certain movements. You talk about how a reality television star won the electoral college, certainly something we’ve written about at length. You talked about the Occupy Wall Street movement. I mean, so I want listeners to know that what you’re getting on in this segment today, in our conversation with Andrew Kennis is a, is a scratching of the surface, an overview of a really deep, thoughtful and important study through a social justice lens.

And so I want to make sure that, that folks follow up on that and maybe follow more of Andrew’s work and maybe even try to get a copy of this book or get a copy of it for your library. Since it’s an academic publication. So Andrew, go ahead and tell us from propaganda model. That’s really dependent. So

Andrew Kennis: I mentioned social movements and, really the tremendous honor it’s been to cover them because that really is the biggest takeoff, so to speak, from the, the propaganda model.

What, what I noticed was that, propaganda model is a great model that encompasses a good deal of what we see in news media performance, in the mainstream media. Especially when talking about military interventions and the big topics, big kind of macro level topics as they call them in my book, but it didn’t discuss enough really what causes the exceptions to the rule and didn’t theorize enough social movements. So that was the big contribution I wanted to make, while playing homage to the, the, the propaganda model itself. And what I found when I took a closer look at social movements that in very similar ways to, victims, individual victims, how they were getting dichotomized into these worthy and unworthy categories where we, you know, hear about, victims, that are, you know, really suffering as a result of U.

S. policy or or their allies. We don’t hear about them so to speak, but we hear almost everything about it when an enemy state is involved when there’s a state that’s hostile to the U. S. So this is the perfect example of that these days is Russia and Ukraine contrasting with Yemen. You know, it’s a huge difference between those two and in terms of coverage, in terms of attention, the US is much more in bed and involved with and responsible for what’s been going on in Yemen for too many years. And it’s not really is involved, although it’s becoming plenty more involved Ukraine at this point, but initially, obviously, it didn’t undertake that invasion and we heard about it right away. I was all over the place.

What I saw was that there was a similar thing going on with social movements. So if there was a social movement opposing US policy in an allied nation or nation that was friendly to US interests, or at least not hostile to them, we didn’t hear about them. If there was a social movement that was opposing, you know, enemy states, states that were hostile to Western interests, and particularly the Pentagon, we would hear about them.

You know, pretty much everything about them, you know, so this is the contrast between Hong Kong in 2019 that I talk a lot about my book as well as Venezuela and Iran. I mean, these are states that are definitely hostile to Pentagon policies and Washington DC and beltway foreign policies and it contrasted a lot with Chile and Puerto Rico. But, like I said, not only did I want to delve into social movements, I also wanted to delve into the exceptions to the rule, and as I call it, press exceptionalism. So, while we didn’t hear much about Chile and Puerto Rico, and this is all in the same huge year of global resistance, right before the pandemic of 2019.

While we didn’t hear as much about them, we did hear a bit about them. And in past errors, I argue in the book, we sometimes hear nothing about them. These kind of another other movements that are analog analogous to those. So what was the big difference? I argue in the book, social media, social media, and its utilization by grassroots activists have literally sometimes forced the mainstream media to pay attention and public officials for that matter to pay attention to things that normally the mainstream media more easily ignored.

And so, between this mainstream dichotomy between worthy and social, you know, where they don’t where their social movements as well is, there’s sometimes exceptions to the rule that we find more and more often in the digital era. That was the main things I wanted to evolve, you know, from, from the propaganda from the propaganda model with, and I thought it was a more modern day kind of scope, whereby social media, social movement movements matter as much now as as ever before.

But I still wanted to emphasize in the book and I tried hard to do so that while we have many more exceptions, and substantive exceptions, they are not without limits, you know, so while they might have heard some people might have heard about the ruckus in Chile and Puerto Rico and the democratic struggles there in, it didn’t compare still to their worthy social movement counterparts. You’re talking about huge differences and so while that bridge has been gapped to a certain degree by effective utilization of of social media and literally by causing hell. I mean, this is what has to be done to get on the map when you’re an unworthy social movement.

Well, that has closed the gap, somewhat there still is a significant gap to talk about because for a long time, we don’t hear this as much anymore, but we have these digital utopian folks and kind of, you know, getting idealized in the Internet. And while we can all acknowledge by this point, I think, agree that the Internet has helped social movements in a lot of ways.

It isn’t a panacea, you know, because at the end of the day, we still have the same corporate, mega oligopoly, conglomerate apparatus that owns the mainstream media that owns chat GPT, which regurgitate regurgitates in many ways, the same corporate propaganda we see in mainstream media, that limits these exceptions.

And so, while the exceptions are important, and I, it’s again, kind of the gap I wanted to cover from the, from the propaganda model. I didn’t want folks to get carried to carried away with them either, you know, so yeah, those are the main things I was really trying to accomplish with the book. And I know that later on the segment, we’re going to probably talk about policy as well.

Mickey Huff: Yeah, we’ll definitely get to some solutions. Some policy we’ll also be applying media dependence model to some of the movements going on right now, the anti genocide or pro Palestinian and how that’s being framed in the corporate media, we’ll also talk about maybe some of the student protests that are going on and how those are being framed and that’s talk about worthy and unworthy, you know, movements, you know, riffing on the Herman Chomsky, you know, a big part of that, who’s newsworthy, right?

And who is not, and which perspectives can we hear and not see? Which victims right which victims matter more than others. All of that is at play here and you use the worthy unworthy labels in that regard riffing from the propaganda model. You also talk here. I was, it worth pointing out. In the beginning, when you’re talking about the media dependence model, a political, economic and critical media analysis of the establishment news system, I noticed you say mainstream, and you’ve been you’ve referred to it several times.

We usually just say establishment legacy corporate over here. We understand that people think about mainstream media similarly, but there’s not much mainstream about the 6 corporations or 5 tech companies that control most all of the platforms and outlets. So we try to get even more descriptive with that by calling them who they are.

As the, as, as Michael Peretti once pointed out, the so called mainstream media, isn’t just close with corporate America or friendly with corporate America. They are corporate America and their interests are deeply aligned. And you quote, not quote, but you’re ripping on the late great social psychologist, Alex Carey here.

Oh, yes. You say elite news outlets lie at the very heart of what late Alex Carey shrewdly termed treetops propaganda. Where what is often presented and even is quote news winds up serving state corporate interest rather than the information needs of the citizenry and again that includes fake news half based conspiracy theories and in fact corporate media has tried to reassert its dominance by claiming it’s fighting the very things that it often promotes half baked stories itself their own conspiracy theories can you talk a little bit about some of that and how it relates to corporate coverage of certain social movements, you know, you just give a couple more examples, Andrew, because your book is so filled with documented, rich examples and analysis, and I know we can’t do justice to it, but if you could just talk a little bit about it to give our listeners a little more taste of how your media dependence model applies.

Andrew Kennis: Sure, I mean, we could talk about the family separation. Because I think it really, is a good case study that is very MDM ish. It’s very digital age ish because we have this policy that actually technically was a secret pilot program under Obama wasn’t really publicized at all. And it wasn’t really a fully fledged program as it became under Trump who bragged about it, literally, of course, first starting on Twitter, but at the same time that that Trump interestingly enough was bragging about the program that soon became official just a couple of months later.

This is March 2018. It became official not actually, not even a couple months is like, the big weeks after his tweet. There was a great case by the ACLU. Trying to combat that policy and stop it and reverse it. And, there wasn’t a social media outcry about this just yet. And as a result, the New York Times completely didn’t cover, good tree tops propaganda example right here, you know, in terms of neglect didn’t cover that case at all.

Didn’t give the US people a chance to know more about what was going on. Thanks to our civil society, you know, doing its job and providing the checks and balances we need on our government. And meanwhile, the nonprofit Guardian did cover it. Right? So nobody knew that much about what was going on and or the efforts that we’re trying to combat this policy until.

Actually, Kamala Harris, you know, and said it started, grilling some, Department of Homeland Security officials about this until there was an op ed, you know, barely as a result of this period of national media, opposing the policy and soon there after, a tremendous social media outcry. And interestingly enough, and in a very digital age way, there wasn’t that much on the ground resistance because the policy in the end only wound up really lasting from the time that people actually started hearing about it and around the, the Kamala Harris incident, the op eds, not even a month did it last, right? So that’s a very interesting telltale, I think, example of how things work in a digital age. It can go really, really quick, right? So, within this month, there wasn’t really enough time to get a lot of resistance on the ground. It wound up not being totally necessary in the end, but there was a tremendous social media outcry, and that was enough to eventually to the point, got to the point where four first ladies were pushing the policy, including Trump’s wife, his, is himself his old wife and literally day later when when she opposed the policy, the policy was reversed. So this is a very big digital age example where even when there is a resistance on the ground, it is possible in theory to completely reverse a White House policy. Now, again, we don’t want to get too carried away with idolization or digital utopian ideas because sure enough, when the social media outcry diminished.

And there still wasn’t really on the ground resistance thereafter. It took years and it still actually is going on to this day to completely get rid of family separation when there wasn’t that oversight and that pressure. There was violations of court rulings and there was still family separation going on and, not to the extent, admittedly that it was when it was in the spotlight, fortunately, but still it just goes to show you what unworthy movements have to do because certainly the advocacy community for undocumented immigrants and pretty much mostly asylum seeking refugees fleeing the U.S. drug war. What what they have to do to get on the map. What do they have to do? They have to have Trump tweeting and going ballistic. They have to have a senator question this policy.

There has to be a global social media outcry. You know, there has to be a first, you know, for first time in history for first ladies opposing the White House policy at the same time going public about it. This is what an unworthy social movement has to do. They can get on the map, much less reverse the White House policy.

Now, the dichotomy comes in again. When the worthy social movements don’t have to even do half of that. Don’t have to get the numbers on the ground that, unworthy social movements to or organize global social media outcry, they’re just literally on the map instantly. And, that’s those are the gaps.

And those are the unfair dichotomies that we’re dealing with to this day. Especially since really, it’s the unworthy social movements. Ironically. And the unworthy victims to this day, whether they be in Yemen or in Palestine that, have to do so much more, even though they’re the ones that are most linked to U.

S. Pentagon and Beltway policy. So, in a democracy, you know, our press and our, you know, the, the 5th estate that’s so important to democracy, their most important job is to make us the most aware of what our own government is doing. And what we can potentially oppose by our own government, perhaps secondarily.

You know, we also, of course, want to be aware of what states that are hostile to the U. S. and whether Western interests are doing as well, but in practice, and this is the big problem, and this is what both the propaganda model as well as my own media dependence model try and capture, in practice, that’s flipped. So we hear and know tons more about what, you know, nations such as Russia are doing, which is not a bad thing, but at the expense of being able to know what our own government is doing. So, to the extent that, U.S. and even Western people know what’s going on in Yemen. Compare it to Ukraine.

It’s a big difference. And the same thing goes for for social movements time and time again, even to this day. So 1988 was surely a long time ago, but that book was updated more than a couple of times and actually Project Censored had something to do with it. But this stuff does happen to this day.

And even with social movements, and that’s what my book tries to capture.

Mickey Huff: Absolutely. And we’re speaking with Dr. Andrew Kennis, his latest book from Rutledge is Digital-Age Resistance: Journalism, Social Movements, and the Media Dependence Model. The book focuses on media dependence models, social movements, and Andrew, before the break, you were talking about you had mentioned Russia again and Ukraine talked about Yemen.

We’re going to bring Gaza into this too, which which has been going on for a long time, but I know your book came out in the in 2022, but all this still applies. And just very quickly, just recently. I mean, well, right around then when this was coming out. That’s when we saw the Russia invasion of Ukraine.

And we saw terrible things happening there in that, in that conflict. Secretary of State Blinken and others, you know, made commentary about Russian violation of the Geneva conventions. You know, very important stuff, right. And of course supporting Ukrainian resistance against the invasion.

And now a couple years later, when we see the same questions asked of the Secretary of State about whether or not the Geneva Conventions are being violated in Gaza, they just can’t seem to find an answer. So it’s a clear double standard. And at least in this regard, to me, it does sound like a pretty prime example of what you mean by worthy and unworthy movements.

Andrew Kennis.

Andrew Kennis: Absolutely. No, Israel and Palestine apply in, in three different ways. Unworthy social movements. In both nations, you know, whether it comes to Palestine or Israel and worthy victims, well, actually, we can add a 4th, right? Unworthy victims too. So let’s go through those, right? So we have the unworthy social movement in Israel itself.

Yes, I mean, this is a major ally of the U.S. and thus is subjected to plenty of favorable media treatment. And so when there’s movements opposing major U. S. allies within, the nation itself, they don’t get a lot of press. They often do not get a lot of press. And so very few people know, even though this was literally the precursor to October 7th, 2023, that millions of people were protesting against the Netanyahu administration, protesting against the corruption and endemic to the, to the regime.

I guess you could call it pretty much because Netanyahu is a war criminal and former general himself, by the millions in Tel Aviv. The millions. I mean, this is a nation that even really want its Prime Minister to con, continue being Prime Minister barely was able to con, you know, really be the head of state, in the, the most recent election, in Israel.

And yet another example of an unworthy social movement. On the flip side of the end of it, obviously Palestinian Civil Society resistance was going on for decades on on end. This is the longest military, longest running military occupation in the world. And very few US people, and even to a certain degree, people in Europe are routinely exposed to coverage news coverage about the often peaceful resistance that has taken place in the occupied territories.

Even to the extent where there was a FAIR study done on, you know, US citizens knowledge of what’s going on in Palestine and Israel, and it was found very decidedly that most people in our country don’t even know that there’s a military occupation in place in Palestine, much less it being the longest running one in the world.

So, once again, a huge example of unworthy social movement and often unworthy victims too to the extent that it was pretty plenty, heavy and extensive even before October 7th that Palestinian civilians are subjected to Israeli war crimes and, you know, defense, so called defense, IDF, the Israeli Defense Force, the repression of them.

And this contrasts with the worthy victims that we saw in October 7th. So, obviously, the amount of coverage and sympathy and empathy that were given to Israeli civilians, especially in the immediate aftermath of the attacks in Israel was very, very disproportionate compared to what we saw to coverage given to Palestinian civilians beforehand, much less their civil society resistance efforts decades and decades on end.

So, none of this helps understand what is admittedly, the somewhat complex and long running conflict, when folks don’t understand that very keyly, this is an illegal is according to international law and long the longest running military occupation, much less familiar with the more peaceful and nonviolent sets of resistance that we’ve also seen long time in Palestine as when we do see Palestinians resistance highlighted, it’s almost always the most negative and violent form of it. So, you know, yes, Palestine and Israel absolutely intimately applies to the media dependence model, including even the student protesters who have been repressed by their own administrators.

Mickey Huff: Worthy and unworthy protests. Go ahead, Andrew.

Andrew Kennis: Yeah, I mean, you don’t have to be, a movement that gets no coverage to still be unworthy. So, again, we see, an example of, student protesters in the states, literally having a race held to get any tension whatsoever, literally having to be arrested.

It’s not that there wasn’t resistance on these campuses all the way back to literally when the, the war first started, if you want to say it’s starting in October, 2023, you know, the occupations of war in and of itself, right? But the latest incarnation, I guess, of the war has received plenty of student resistance on campuses throughout the country, both before and after October.

Even more. So after October, but most

Mickey Huff: all that. Yes. Yeah.

Andrew Kennis: Mainstream America, you know, for the most part has didn’t really know about any of this. And even to this day, knows just a bit until literally students got arrested were thrown off their own campuses, there was a group I was just in touch with because I invited a couple of students in it to speak to my class that replied to me. Sorry, we’re banned. Literally. This is an Arizona State University Latino group that was acting in solidarity with Palestine. They’re banned. So, yeah, I mean, this is really the MDM in work. Right? So, when there’s nonviolent resistance, that doesn’t result in arrests that doesn’t necessarily have you know, hell breaking loose, so to speak, it’s ignored. And then when finally, there’s some, you know, more, radical action, so to speak, or direct action even being undertaken, there is at least some mainstream media coverage, but without the context that’s routinely given to worthy social movements, and thus, what does Main Street see?

Just, you know, student protesters being arrested. God knows what they think about that, you know, they’ll, they’re not really, the context that, the country needs and deserves there.

Mickey Huff: So Andrew Kennis, I hate to do this to you, but we have a few minutes left, and we have a lot to cover, but I do want to cover the media dependence model of public policy, because you talk about how another news media system is not only possible, but necessary for democracy’s sake later on in the book, and you have some really detailed tables.

Where you talk about you describe specific kind of policy paths and avenues for media reform. And here we are coming up on UN Press Freedom Day. You know, the merging of critical media literacy education and the importance of independent journalism. Let’s have you talk briefly about we’ve been talking about media literacy.

I mean, you’ve been doing critical analysis of a lot of what’s happening. Let’s in the last few minutes we have. Let’s talk about why the independent press matters. You talk about national nonprofit options, public works options, you know, borrowing off some of the ideas of Bob McChesney, Victor Pickard, you know, many others, a lot of folks that we both know, talk to us a little bit about some of these solutions for a better, more independent, vibrant media that really addresses, that tries to erase the distinction of worthy, unworthy victims and talks about these in broader context.

Andrew Kennis.

Andrew Kennis: Yeah, I mean, first off, I mean, Free Press, which was founded in part by Robert Marcesni and, and, you know, the, the media for, the Mix Center in Philadelphia that Victor is involved with. Media Inequality

Mickey Huff: Change, yeah. Right, right. With Rutgers and, yeah.

Andrew Kennis: Todd Wolferson. They, they do great work in that.

What’s plenty of what inspired some of the reforms that I was advocating in the book, for, but also we can just even look to historical examples like the BBC and at the book covers as well. So, you know, in, in the United Kingdom, when when people bought television sets, like, you know, a portion of that was designated toward the BBC and the BBC is a tremendous, nonprofit global source. And while it isn’t a perfect one, and there’s so much criticism of it, we stand a lot to gain to have something closer to that model in the U. S. And there’s no reason why we shouldn’t. And, yeah, I mean, media these days, especially now, more than ever with navigating the fake news terrain and the Internet and all the kind of unfiltered crap that’s thrown at us.

So to speak. Yeah. Is, is, is just as important and sancte and, and, and, you know, sanctuous as kindergarten education. This is what the book is trying to argue in grand part. So we we take it for granted the US that our kindergartners go to a school that’s nonprofit. That isn’t run for the most part by Tom, you know, the Edison Corporation and and as was the case in New York state when literally a kindergarten went bankrupt.

And so thankfully that has not taken off that much and we understand that that’s very important and sacred so to speak, these days, I argue our news media is too. So, between the attacks, and we haven’t even had a chance to talk about this on professional journalism and yes, this is actually a conference going to be going on in just another week at Rutgers about this topic, you know, deep cuts for decades on end to the professional journalists we have working out there.

More now than ever before, we need our news media to be non profit. So we’ll be unshackled from corporate advertisers, corporate owners, and corporate marketing, you know, which influences to a much higher degree than any of us should feel comfortable.

Mickey Huff: And framing, corporate framing.

Andrew Kennis: Absolutely. How mainstream news is routinely reported.

And so I laid out a bunch of different ways that we can make our news media more non profit, whether it has the BBC funding model to get more money into nonprofits or, or even intent enticing existing for profit media, including even the New York Times to go nonprofit itself. You know, I think that that would be a huge step in the right direction.

And, it’s something that, you know, I wrote in detail about and gave gave a bunch of different ways to do this. Whether the full jugular of having a completely nonprofit news media system, which, very much in the favor of, or at least one that’s more more so the case that it is today, because when you compare the U.

S. as many of us, political economists have been doing, and the news media around and how much nonprofit news media we have in the U. S. compared to even Western Europe, much less Scandinavia. We run it really, really far behind and precisely during a time when we need it the most. So, and that’s something mainstream, you know, when polled about really agrees on.

I mean, time and time again, U. S. citizens are telling us through polls. Not dutifully reported upon by the mainstream news media itself, or legacy, as you say, establishment itself, that they’re sick and tired of big media. They don’t trust big corporate media. They know that the Internet is only to a certain limited extent a viable alternative, especially when the best non-profit journalism we see on, on the internet is, is often marginalized. And so this is a situation where not only there’s a democratic impetus for more public support, nonpartisan support too, I don’t mean to make this like a partisan mission of any sort, and the BBC in many cases have succeeded in that we need to emulate that in the states.

To whatever extent we can, so that that that was what I tried to chart out the map with those tables you referred to in different ways, different options, whether it be at least a bit more support, including public, nonpartisan support for more professional nonprofit news media or a lot more we’re in a sort of, we literally are that’s kind of time kind of error.

That we are in desperate need of that.

Mickey Huff: Yeah. My guest for this part of the program has been Dr. Andrew Kennis. We’ve been discussing his latest book, Digital-Age Resistance: Journalism, Social Movements, and the Media Dependence Model out from Rutgers. Andrew Kennis, where can people learn more about you, your book, your work, and how can they follow you or contact you online?

Andrew Kennis: Yeah, you know, I can be found on any, social media just by looking for, my name, whether it be, Facebook or Twitter, and then also DigitalAgeResistance.Org. Is a website that’s dedicated to the to the book. It lets you know how you can buy it even from independent bookstores. And so, literally a title of the book digital age resistance.

One word dot org is the site for the book and where folks can find out more about how to get it and also actually be exposed because we’re out there’s a fortunate and publish, full color photos as it’s usually the case of academic books. So, that’s where they can see. Great. There’s a lot of great award winning photo journalism that that fortunately, we got donations for that’s contained in the book.

That’s also featured on the website and it’s full color. So yeah, DigitalAgeResistance. org. And thanks again for having me on today.

Mickey Huff: Andrew Kennis, thank you so much for your very important work. And we’ll have to have you back on the show. There’s plenty more that we can be talking about and using your theories and ideas to analyze the things happening around us.

Thank you so much for joining us on the Project Censored Show today.

Andrew Kennis: My pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks.

The institution of monarchy epitomizes stability. A royal family ties a nation back to history and can take a long view of events. In Southeast Asia in particular, monarchy is about traditions and respect. Governments may change, new political leaders may come and go, but the respect and trust of the people towards the monarch remain unchanged. This boundless trust imposes on the head of the royal family the obligation to always be there for the people, especially in difficult times.

This is fully applicable to Thailand. The long reign of King Bhumibol Adulyadej (1946–2016), known as Rama IX, strengthened the Thai state and helped the country withstand periods of internal and regional political turbulence. Despite wars and insurgencies in the region, the kingdom maintained its internal cohesion. Rama IX’s reign undoubtedly increased public respect for the monarchy. Thailand quickly transformed from a poor agricultural country into a prosperous state.

Rama IX’s son, Maha Vajiralongkorn, whom we call Rama X, fully carries on his father’s legacy. In 2020, during the massive student protests in Bangkok, Thailand saw an unprecedented event for the monarchy. Amidst political divisions and students’ tensions with the authorities, the king gave a brief interview to the British Channel 4 News. When asked about the fate of the anti-government protesters, he replied, “Thailand is the land of compromise. I have no comments. We love them all the same.”

The Cambridge Dictionary defines “compromise” as ” a solution to a problem that makes it possible for two or more opposite or different things to exist together.” This approach underpins Thailand’s success story.

Under the current king, Thailand continues to strengthen its position in the region and takes advantage of all the opportunities of a multipolar world. The country has traditionally relied on a “policy of compromise” to promote pragmatic multilateral cooperation while focusing on its path, destiny, and well-being.

Balancing between the US and China

Thailand’s successful maneuvering between the most prominent global and regional players — the USA and China  — is a vivid example of such a “policy of compromise.”

Despite their increasing global geopolitical rivalry, Thailand maintains a delicate balance in relations with Washington and Beijing amid their increasing global geopolitical rivalry. This is a challenging task, but it has a Thai solution.

Economic considerations primarily drive Bangkok’s close ties with Beijing. China has long been Thailand’s most significant trading partner. The two countries resolved most of their differences at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in 2022. During this event in 2022, the attendees signed several agreements, including a Joint Strategic Cooperation Plan for 2022–2026, and they worked out a framework for cooperation within the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. These constitute the “road map” for the economic interaction of the two countries in the future. Planners aim to complete the Thailand–Laos–China high-speed railway link by 2027–2028. With it, Thailand is expected to increase its logistics and investment attractiveness.

Thailand primarily focuses its cooperation with the USA in the defense sphere. Since Washington named Thailand a “major non-NATO ally” in 2003, Bangkok has remained the only strategic partner of the USA in mainland Southeast Asia in the security field. In particular, during the COVID-19 crisis, the two nations were able to ensure the sustainability of global logistics routes and supply chains in the region. Sustained cooperation with the USA in the defense has given Thailand a key role in ensuring regional stability.

New economic partners

Although Southeast Asia’s second-largest economy, Thailand has lagged in certain macroeconomic indicators compared to its neighbors in recent years. A balanced and multilateral approach should also help to address this issue. The new government under Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin sees the solution to current difficulties on the “path of compromise” as well.

In addition to strengthening cooperation with the United States and China, Thailand is actively seeking opportunities to broaden its range of economic partners, especially Japan, India and Russia. Cooperation with these countries could help ensure alternative pathways for economic growth and investment.

The current government asserts that the economic recovery project will create 280,000 new jobs and help accelerate Thailand’s economic growth by 5.5%. “Our goal remains clear: Thailand’s economy must grow by an average of 5% over four years,” stated Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin. 

Thailand sees joining organizations and platforms such as OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) and BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) as one way to stimulate the country’s economic growth and enhance its international credibility. By developing parallel cooperation with such diverse associations, Thailand once again demonstrates its ability to find common ground and build relationships with both Western and Eastern countries while maintaining a balance between the great powers. At the same time, promoting the country’s economic interests and strengthening ties with an ever-widening circle of developed and developing countries remains a top priority.

In the words of Foreign Minister Maris Sangiampongsa, “Thailand is unique in that we are friends with all countries and are not enemies with any country. We can serve as a bridge between developing countries and BRICS members and connect BRICS with other groups. This will strengthen BRICS’s negotiating power and help the international community recognize the importance of developing and emerging countries.”

[Liam Roman edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

Welcome back. Ireland’s next general election is due by March, but few will be surprised if Simon Harris, the Taoiseach, chooses to go early and holds the poll in November. For Ireland’s friends and partners abroad, this raises three interesting questions.

To what extent will Ireland buck recent European trends and reject anti-establishment populism and political radicalism?

Will the election spell triumph or disaster for Sinn Féin, the opposition party that until recently was riding high in opinion polls?

And what are the implications for Sinn Féin’s ambition of unifying the Republic with Northern Ireland?

You can find me at tony.barber@ft.com.

The (partial) Irish exception

Answers to the first two questions require an understanding that, although Irish politics follows continental European patterns in many respects, it is distinctive in its own right.

The backdrop is similar in that immigration, asylum policy and the crucial issue of housing shortages are nowadays at the front of voters’ minds, as Fiachra Ó Cionnaith wrote in July for RTÉ News.

This is hardly surprising: according to Ireland’s statistics office, the number of immigrants — a category that includes Ukrainian refugees — had risen by April to a 17-year high.

Yet whereas in France, Germany and other western European countries such trends have pushed up support for hard-right parties, Ireland is different.

Writing in December after anti-immigrant riots rocked Dublin, Niklaus Nuspliger of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung observed:

Partly due to the long experience of emigration, solidarity and sympathy for foreigners traditionally prevail in the country, and there has never been a successful rightwing populist movement.

Still, in a survey published in December, 28 per cent of respondents said that they could imagine voting for a party with strongly anti-immigration positions — twice as many as in 2021.

Some far-right activists aim to whip up support by adopting the symbols and slogans of the Irish nationalist struggle against British rule in the age of imperialism. However, they remain on the wilder extremes of electoral politics.

Sinn Féin on the back foot

As a leftwing nationalist party with support among young people who have liberal views on immigration, Sinn Féin was slow to appreciate that it was losing touch with other voters on this issue. Jude Webber, the FT’s Dublin correspondent, wrote in March:

Some of Sinn Féin’s core working-class voter base has leached to small independent parties in recent months, including fringe groups opposed to immigration.

Partly as a consequence, the party had a disappointing result in June’s local elections. Now, as the chart below shows, support for Sinn Féin has slumped by half to about 19 per cent from roughly 36 per cent in July 2022.

It seems likely that, in contrast to some EU countries, the upcoming election will not send Ireland down the road of political polarisation and a legislature so fragmented that it’s hard to form a government (France is the prime example).

Rather, as for most of the past century, the reins of government will stay in the hands of Fianna Fáil and/or Fine Gael, Ireland’s largest mainstream parties. At present, they govern in a three-party coalition with the smaller Green party.

Even so, Sinn Féin remains a force to reckon with. For most of the post-second world war era, it was a minor party in electoral terms — abhorred by the mainstream parties as the mouthpiece of the IRA, which was fighting to end British rule in Northern Ireland.

Sinn Féin’s breakthrough came in the 2011 election at the height of Ireland’s involvement in the Eurozone sovereign debt and banking crises. In the last election in 2020, Sinn Féin emerged as the second largest party in the legislature.

Northern Ireland and unification

Moreover, Sinn Féin is consolidating its position as the largest party in Northern Ireland. Coupled with the destabilising effects of Brexit on politics in the province, this may seem to bring closer the prospect of Irish unification.

In practice, I don’t think this is likely in the near term. For one thing, Ireland’s next government will almost certainly not include Sinn Féin.

For another, recent polling suggests that more voters in Northern Ireland would choose to remain part of the UK than to merge the province with the Republic.

In the longer term, predictions are hazardous. The same polling indicates that a united Ireland is most popular with voters in the province aged under 45. Moreover, since Brexit, tens of thousands of people in Northern Ireland have been acquiring Irish passports.

Irish stallion outpaces EU donkeys

How will the state of Ireland’s economy affect the impending election?

At first sight, Ireland appears to be in the pink of health compared with other EU countries. This could work to the advantage of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

A gathering mood of gloom about Europe’s economic prospects was reinforced this month in Mario Draghi’s clarion call for rapid, far-reaching reforms, including annual investments of €800bn in a new industrial strategy. “Do this, or it’s a slow agony,” he told reporters.

There’s particular concern about Germany, as outlined in this commentary for the Omfif think-tank by Miroslav Singer, a former Czech central bank governor.

Germany’s economic issues are not only tied to the exhaustion of its economic model but also to the fact that the European Union’s largest economic project of the past 25 years — the euro — has fallen short of expectations.

In Ireland, matters seem to stand differently.

The economy is growing nicely, inflation is under control, there’s nearly full employment and the government is amassing large budget surpluses (in sharp contrast to, say, France or Italy).

These surpluses are prompting Ireland to set up two sovereign wealth funds to protect public services for the long term, modernise infrastructure and handle climate change. It’s almost as if Ireland is more like energy-rich Norway than most of its EU partners.

Money, money everywhere

Ireland owes its enviable fiscal position largely to high corporation tax receipts, as shown in the chart below.

Especially noteworthy is the €13bn windfall in back taxes due from Apple after a European Court of Justice ruling. It’s an extraordinary sum for a country of just over 5.3mn people.

The Irish government, keen to preserve its special tax arrangements for the US tech giant and other multinational companies, spent millions of euros in legal fees to avoid receiving this money. But in the end, life is life, isn’t it? Sometimes billions just drop into your bank account whether you like it or not.

All this shows how far Ireland appears to have progressed since the dark days of 2010 when it became the second country, after Greece, to require an EU-IMF emergency bailout (with some extra funds thrown in by the UK) amid the Eurozone crisis.

At that time, the Irish Times published an editorial that referred to the 1916 Easter Uprising against British rule, celebrated as a defining moment in the independence struggle. The newspaper asked if this was “what the men of 1916 died for: a bailout from the German chancellor with a few shillings of sympathy from the British chancellor on the side”.

Not all sweetness and light

Despite appearances, not all is perfect in the Irish economy. Scope Ratings, a credit-rating agency, says:

The Irish economy remains highly dependent on a small number of large [multinationals] . . . just three firms contribute around 43 per cent of corporation tax . . . as a small and very globalised economy, Ireland is particularly vulnerable to adverse shifts in the external environment.

Then there’s the question of how to allocate the budget surpluses. Tom McDonnell, co-director of Ireland’s Nevin Economic Research Institute, cautions:

Ireland’s bleak history of procyclical budgets and their consequences should warn us against making similar mistakes this time.

As with immigration, the economy will provide much for Ireland’s next government to think about. But perhaps Ireland’s leaders will prove WB Yeats to have been too pessimistic — the centre really can hold.

More on this topic

Paramilitary criminal gangs in Northern Ireland — a report by Una Kelly for RTÉ News

Tony’s picks of the week

• Israeli spies have a long history of using telephones, and their technological successors, to track and even assassinate their enemies, the FT’s Mehul Srivastava reports

• Russian citizens who permanently reside in Latvia but have failed the required Latvian-language exam have started receiving letters warning them to leave within 30 days or face “forced deportation”, Marija Andrejeva writes for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty