The "free press" should be renamed the "full-court" press. With the full-on genocide in progress, the gloves are off and the lines are drawn. They aren't always drawn very legibly.
There's no doubt now, that the media industry is directly controlled by the state. As to which state, I'd have to say, a kind of meta-state, but it is not a political entity, it's an economic artifact.
Corporate media, that is, profit and/or ideology-driven organizations seek attention market-share and deploy journalism-like technique, serving purposes quite distinct from independent journalism focused on facts in context. But today we must include the communications "providers" that control our access to information across the board, the search engines, "social" media and online retail platforms that have displaced small business other than personal-care boutiques and fast food chains. They have managed the hospitality sector, hotels, hospitals, and now prisons, for years now.
Of particular interest is straight journalism about the media Common, such as the reporting of Jack Poulson on the longstanding and very intimate relationships between the Zionist establishment and Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, etc., which for years have all been at the Israeli multimillion dollar contracts trough for integration with their various "clouds" including some custom-built ones based on their popular LLM ("AI") systems.
The new global head of Google R&D is reported to have a background in the development of the targeting systems performing extrajudicial killings in Gaza with such unprecedented efficiency that, in their promotional language, they generate targets faster than the old ones can be "disposed of."
This naturally raises questions like, if the Zionist state wanted you gone for any reason, could/would they simply execute you, as is well within their technological capability, with a drone in your own bedroom? It seems more likely, if that makes any sense in this bizarre situation, that your exposure to screen content downplaying war crimes, and promoting any opposition as "anti-Semitic hate speech" will change incrementally. But our collective predicament, we're talking species now, is not static, and is accelerating in a very bad direction.
This hypothesis will of course be relegated to conspiracy-theory until the inevitable whistles are blown by insiders, some of whom must be experiencing deep moral injury from the sheer scale of human slaughter they must witness. There wouldn't be many, as Snowden's experience demonstrates: they will have to find a way to get the word out through the same system that now exerts such comprehensive control on all our communications, making "whistle blower" a contradiction in terms.
Now, on myriad video clips, students, legal observers, first-responders, journalists, bystanders, and professors are beaten, thrown down flights of stairs, zip-tied, maced, pepper-sprayed, tazed, and most excruciatingly (if not already unconscious), lifted by their handcuffs at risk of permanent shoulder joint damage. One shows an elderly professor having large uniformed officers "taking a knee" on their ribs with full weight.
This is the full-court press that the Full-court Press tries so smoothly to editorialize and edit out of "news reports" on the major media channels. Still it's getting to be a lot of work to twist the narrative from "campus protests to stop the genocide" to "rising anti-semitism across campuses!"
Obviously, given whatever their "metrics" tell them to expect in response, they are confident that they can accomplish this with lies and police violence. As if coordinated somewhere in the bowels of some uber-thinktank, CNN is now explicitly comparing peaceful calls to end US complicity in genocide, to the 1930s Nazi Brown Shirts, in prime time.
But whatever their in-house focus groups and pollsters might say, it isn't credible that thousands of students across the world, a very large proportion of them self-identifying as Jewish, and another very big part from the global south, would suddenly rise up in violent hatred of Jews as Jews. Especially while loudly proclaiming their opposition to a genocide and any investment by their governments or their educational institutions in genocide.
The Israeli state is muddying the waters by insisting that Zionism, Israel, and Jews are one and the same entity; that any criticism of one is against the others; and more, is a call to exterminate all Jews. Doing this Netanyahu math, one can only come up with one answer: "The" Jews are committing genocide on the people of Palestine. And it gets worse the more you look at it: if all Jews are Zionists are Israeli, mass murder has to be a unique Jewish human right, because they are doing it and they say it is the right thing to do for their survival.
This is the kind of argument AI keeps coming up with. It's called "hallucination" when AI does it, but that's wrong too, because you have to have consciousness to hallucinate.
So the current crackdown on dissent has another, more appropriate and more chilling name. The real name for this is "reign of terror."
It is pointless to blame this on even the most obvious perpetrators. There are plenty of worthy candidates and they are guilty, of course, but so is a snowflake in an avalanche. The energy behind this massive repression is much larger than political or religious divisions. It's systemic, structural, and fast becoming the status quo. It's the toxic byproduct of cold-war military technology that was privatized, creating an Internet focused like a heat-seeking missile on ROI, remote from any democratic process or oversight, under the delusion that financial investors are our best hope of a viable future.
This machine brought us No. 45, and we blamed (or credited) him with equal media-assisted amnesia. Everything has accelerated toward free-fall ever since, as our common worldview is shattered into ever-smaller shards, seen by the profit-machine merely as expanding markets, aka "Growth."
There are great metaphors for all this enchantment of inanimate objects to do our bidding with incorrigible literalism, like "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" ("Der Zauberlehrling" (1797), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe). Even the Disney version will do. Or the Golem myth.
We need desperately to realize that, although far from "intelligent," the thing we're up against is mechanical, not human, it has no experience and needs no malevolent intentions, since we have already put our collective future in its virtual hands (again, solely to profit its owners).
It will succeed in killing us off if, and only if, we persist in training ourselves to think and act in the same mechanistic way.
