Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
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Newsjunkie.net is a resource guide for journalists. We show who's behind the news, and provide tools to help navigate the modern business of information.
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1.5.2
This week Morgan Kriesel investigates the takeover and conversion of the federal website for COVID guidance into the disinformation page Lab Leak: The True Origins of COVID-19. Andrew Checchia lays out the fundamental relationship of the press and democracy in The Fourth Estate is the Fourth Pillar of American Democracy. Our Suppression, Deception, and Illumination blogs share the latest news from and about journalists on the front lines.
Not long after the end of World War II, Senator Joseph McCarthy struck fear into the realms of American industry, academia, and the arts. His terror campaign to root out communism, conducted under the authority of the United States Senate, lasted nine years and destroyed lives. If you were targeted, the choice was snitch or be ruined. It was a witch hunt with terrible consequences for the accused, and for a nation frightened into complicity with a madman.
McCarthy’s chief legal counsel in the 1950s was Roy Cohn. Twenty years later Donald Trump engaged Cohn to defend his company against Justice Department charges of racial discrimination in the marketing of apartment rentals. Cohn brazenly filed a $100 million counter-suit against the federal government. While representing the Trump Organization Cohn was also counsel to mobster Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno. Salerno’s company, S&A Concrete, went on to be a key provider of building materials in the construction of Trump Tower.
The Trump administration has demanded $1 billion from UCLA to restore $584 million in grants. The rationale is the spurious accusation that UCLA failed to adequately protect Jewish students and faculty during Gaza War protests in 2024, along with vague claims of DEI reverse discrimination. This is a mob-inspired shakedown, and could destroy one of the finest research universities in the world. Trump has recently been reinforced in his methods: Last month Columbia University approved a $220 million protection money payout to the Trump government to regain access to research funding.
The federal government is the perfect instrument for terrorism if those in power have malicious intent. Terrorism is an asymmetrical technique of achieving control of people and institutions beyond what the means would otherwise allow. The intended subjects see something terrible visited upon selected targets, and the fear takes hold it will happen to them. The federal government controls vast resources, can strike with force, and can withstand long challenges in the courts. When the public sees Trump quelling the “chaos” in downtown LA, or deporting hundreds of shackled “criminals” without due process, they refrain from further protesting, or even going out at all, because they’ve seen (selectively) what happens to those who do. For Americans not in the cross-hairs, the projected hellscape of a nation on the brink stirs demand for order. And here is Trump to provide just that. But so many of us—students, builders, researchers, scientists with green cards—live in fear of being disappeared by masked agents of Donald Trump. This is terrorism.
What should we do? Report, analyze, and comment with integrity. Choose words that tell it like it is. If we can’t change the immediate outcome, at least our testimony will be there when the Nuremberg trials begin.
Sincerely,
Gordon J. Whiting
Publisher