The Washington Post published the phrase “Democracy Dies in Darkness” shortly after Donald Trump was first elected president in 2016.
The Post’s solemn, cross-our-hearts commitment to keep the flickering lights on and the ominous-sounding motto, I anticipate, were intended to immediately convey the brewing threat a Trump presidency posed to America’s decaying republic.
Well, it turns out that Jeff Bezos, the Post’s billionaire owner, is the author of the phrase “darkness” that causes an on-life-support democracy to turn a code blue.
Bezos gutted the Post’s Beltway-crushy, monochromatic opinion pages in late February by publishing free-market tracts about the inherently greatness of America’s “freedoms” and “liberties” by , ordering , editors.
Sorry, but the Post didn’t typically do that.
In any case, Bezos’ oafish orders may be yet another assault on America’s beleaguered “free press,” as his detractors claim, but at least his blatant “attacks” are made in full and unapologetically.
The persistent contempt for truth in the Western media is hidden behind a phony tell-all-the-story ruse and pretentious expressions that should be rewritten to read, “Truth Dies in Darkness.”
This institutional-wide, deeply entrenched deceit is more persecutivist because it always opts for flaccid language that, as George Orwell once said, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.”
Take the outrageous coverage of the Israeli-American axis’ inhumane behavior in the West’s media, for instance. The English-speaking corporate outlets on both sides of the Atlantic have been faithful couriers of every bad thing about the Israeli-American axis and its disastrous behavior throughout Gaza and the occupied West Bank since Bezos bought the flailing Post.
Despite the exhaustive verdicts rendered by sober human rights organizations, these dazzling avatars of “all the news that’s fit for print” have, for generations, refused to refer to Israel as an apartheid state.
They also refuse to acknowledge or acknowledge that the Israeli-American axis planned and intentionally committed genocide in Gaza and is now working to do it in the West Bank with the goal of destroying Palestine and Palestinians in memory.
To support this instructive point, I conducted a quick analysis of how journalists employed by “major” Western English-language media have portrayed the Israeli-American axis’s desire to forcefully remove more than two million Palestinians from Gaza and, in due course, three million from the West Bank.
Predictably, I discovered that many Western journalists and editors have recently spent a lot of time and effort creating disparaging euphemisms rather than using the phrase “ethnic cleansing” in a blunt and precise manner.
The BBC, Sky News, CNN, The New York Times,  , The Washington Post, The Associated Press wire service, “Depopulate,” “empty,” “resettle,” “transfer,” “remove,” “drive out,” “displace,” and “relocate” are a few of the words and phrases that I discovered being used in various ways by the BBC, Sky News, CNN, CNN, The New York Times, “resettle,” and “rese
Other than the sickening “depopulate” and “driving out,” Palestinians seem to be willing, even content, to voluntarily leave their ancestral homelands in order to make room for Trump’s beachfront resorts.
Yet that is the blasphemous insult to the readers, listeners, and viewers of the “mainstream” Western media.
In “defence of the indefensible” George Orwell understood and intended to obscure and sanitize the wholesale brutality envisioned and approved by Israel and its confederates in Washington, London, Berlin, Paris, Ottawa, and beyond.
Most Western media are wilfully blind to the crimes the rest of us can see, just like the lustful politicians they claim to hold accountable for their unwavering fidelity to Israel.
These choices are neither random nor arbitrary.
Instead, they are a conscious and well-known choice of editors and reporters, who are more concerned with appeasement than sincerity, to make the unpalatable in the compliant service of a brutal apartheid regime and its supporters and to shield them from the guilt over the enormous suffering they cause.
The modern anodyne distortions and evasions are a deliberate attempt to conceal reality beneath a blizzard of lies.
In 1945, Orwell  wrote, “A mass of… words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline, and covering up all the details.” Insincerity is the main enemy of concise language.
As a result, it is not difficult to picture this happening in major Western, English-language newsrooms every day:
Reporter: I am aware that ethnic cleansing is unacceptable. Please provide me with an alternative.
Have you used a thesaurus, editor?
Reporter: Yes, but they have all been taken.
Editor: What about “involuntarily depart”?
Reporter: Do you not believe it to be a little cumbersome?
No, editor. It is flawless.
Reporter: Okay, then. It is “involuntarily depart,” at least for the moment.
Remember that these reporters and editors are largely the same ones who are praising Bezos and his vicious attempt to “muzzle” them these days.
The hyperbolic protests demonstrate their grating hypocrisy in a billboard-sized display of disrespect.
They lack Jeff Bezos’ support of the “truth” in comparison.
One angry Washington Post contributor hurried to Bluesky to protest Bezos’ “significant shift” in the direction and purpose of the opinion page.
As long as he is the Post’s owner, the scribe declared, “I’ll never write for him again.”
That is acceptable and, in my opinion, admirable.
I wonder if he and his enraged coworkers would be willing to accept this challenge.
How about “never” writing for a newspaper that denies using the terms “apartheid state,” “genocide,” and “ethnic cleansing” to describe Israel’s grotesque aims for Palestinians in Palestine as a matter of stated or unstated editorial policy?
You and I are aware that this is a rhetorical question, and I suspect that an American journalist’s constant so offensive and his cowardly colleagues also have this understanding.
