 CNN and Washington Post busted for pro-Israel propaganda shenanigans. Both CNN and the Washington Post have been caught engaging in some pretty shady journalistic malpractice with their Israel reporting in recent days. In a new article titled CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team Operating Under Shadow of IDF Sensor, the Intercept reports that all of CNN's reporting on Israel and Palestine is funneled through a bureau in Jerusalem which slants reporting to benefit Israeli information interests and is subject to regulation by Israeli military censors. The Intercept also reports that last year CNN hired a former soldier from the IDF's Military Spokesperson Unit to serve as a reporter at the onset of the war on Gaza. Unnamed CNN staff told the Intercept that CNN's iron-fisted protocols for regulating information related to the Israel-Palestine issue have had a demonstrable impact on coverage of the Gaza war. War crime and genocide are taboo words, the anonymous CNN staff member said. Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as blasts attributed to nobody until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed. The Intercept reports that the former IDF spinmeister has been bylined in dozens of CNN stories since the attack on Gaza began, with Run Report being little more than a direct statement released by the IDF. Kind of makes you wonder why CNN doesn't just cut out the middleman and run all its reporting directly through the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. Seems like it would be a bit more efficient and certainly a lot more honest. Meanwhile the Washington Post has been caught assigning a reporter with a history of anti-Palestinian bias to write a smear piece on independent media outlets Electronic Intifada and the Grey Zone for their critical reporting of Israel's ongoing massacre in Gaza. Both Electronic Intifada and the Grey Zone received emails from a Washington Post reporter named Elizabeth Dwoskin, who said she's writing a piece on efforts to minimize our misdirect information about the October 7th Hamas attacks on Israel and interrogating them about their articles casting doubt on the official narrative about what actually happened on that day. As Electronic Intifada's Ali Abunima highlighted on Twitter, when Dwoskin was at Columbia University 20 years ago, she was authoring Nakba denialist claims that Palestine never existed and that prior to Israel's formation the land was inhabited only by desert Bedouins without a sense of national identity as we know it today. It's bad enough for the Washington Post to be attacking independent media for asking the critical questions and doing the real journalism the post itself should be doing. But to assign someone with a public history of egregiously anti-Palestinian rhetoric to the task is especially lacking in journalistic integrity. If I'm following, a reporter that has denied the fact that Palestinians existed before the State of Israel is allowed to cover Israel-Palestine and write about misinformation for the Washington Post tweeted award-winning journalist Layla Al-Aryan of Abunima's Revelation. Other of these instances will come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying critical attention to the amazingly awful reporting the western mass media have been churning out about the Gaza assault these last three months. But they do offer some rare insight behind the curtain into how the sausage gets made. The biggest misconception about propaganda is that it is something that happens to other people and is done by other countries. Papers like to think of themselves as free-thinking people whose world views are formed by facts and truth, contrasting themselves with nations like North Korea and China, where populations are viewed as being subjected to conformity-enforcing propaganda. They believe that if propaganda does occur in the West, it comes here from nations like Russia trying to corrupt our minds and weaken our trust in our institutions. Or if the propaganda is domestic in origin, it only affects people in other political parties. In reality, the typical western mind has been marinating in domestic propaganda throughout its entire life, and its worldview has been manufactured for it by powerful manipulators who benefit from its intellectual compliance with their interests. The indoctrination into the mainstream western worldview began in school, and it continues throughout adulthood with the help of mainstream media outlets like CNN and The Washington Post. If we're ever to have a healthy civilization, we're going to have to wake up from the propaganda-induced coma we've been placed in so that we can begin pushing against the cage walls we've been indoctrinated our whole lives into ignoring and start using the power of our numbers to force real change in the systems which govern our world. Luckily the atrocities that have been taking place in Gaza have been rapidly waking people up, because it turns out that there's only so much propaganda spin you can put on the murder of thousands of children. To more people become aware that our civilization is built on deception and everything we've told about the world is a lie, the closer we get to living in a truth-based society where nothing like the Gaza Massacre would ever be permitted to occur.