loon pond: In which Major Mitchell stars for the Australian Daily Zionist News ...

The pond is beyond tired of reading the Australian Daily Zionist News, and the pond is completely over reading the rag's leading Zionist scribbler, Major Mitchell.

That's why the pond didn't mention the Major this morning in its summary of reptile offerings, and that's why the Major now appears in a late arvo slot where few will notice the rampant Zionism.

The header: Facts are just a nuisance for anti-Israel journos, For a whole school of journalist activists, facts are subordinate to judgments they have made about right and wrong.

The caption for the cardigan wearers making cute: ABC Late Night Live host David Marr and ABC global affairs editor Laura Tingle.

Stop right there.

The Major, a keen journalist activist, has the cheek to berate other journalists for being activist, when he himself is a master of the art of journalist activism?

The layers of irony are buried so deep it's impossible to uncover them all ...

To relieve the burden of the rampant Zionism, the pond will do some detours, with the first detour coming quickly ...

The implication by cancelled National Press Club speaker Chris Hedges that the mainstream media globally has been delivering a slanted pro-Israel narrative about Gaza since October 7 is so crazy it could only be the view of a self-described anarchist and socialist who is also an ordained Presbyterian minister and former Gaza correspondent for The New York Times.

Stop right there ... the Major's link at that point led to this in the hive mind ...

So it's easy to see where this is heading ... the fix is in from the get go, and the fix carried on ...

The club denied it had a firm arrangement to host Hedges last Monday. It denied it cancelled because of pressure from Jewish lobby groups. Hedges instead delivered his speech, The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists, to a NSW Teachers Federation conference in Sydney that night.

Um, they say, but he says ...

The National Press Club Statement declares that Chris Hedges’ appearance was “ tentatively agreed to”. This is untrue. AFOPA received written confirmation from the NPC’s Chief Executive on 8 September 2025 as follows:
“I write to confirm arrangements for Chris Hedges to appear at the National Press Club of Australia on 20 October 2025”.
Furthermore, in an email on 28 September 2025 to AFOPA’s Chairperson in relation to the cancellation, the NPC’s Chief Executive wrote: “For clarity I am withdrawing our confirmation”.
For the National Press Club to therefore state that Chris Hedges’ appearance was “tentatively agreed to” is as astonishing as it is false. Perhaps the National Press Club needs to include a disclaimer in its written confirmations that a confirmed booking is actually not a confirmed booking!
The National Press Club’s Statement that the “proposed address was never published on our website” is also untrue. Chris Hedges’ appearance was on the Australia Press Club website (with photo and price of ticket - $95) on 8 September 2025, published by “NPC Coordinator”, at approximately 4pm. (here)

So the fix was in, and who helped organise the fix remains a matter for speculation, but it seems obvious enough.

Contemptible and craven, or wilfully incompetent, likely both, but pretty much a measure of the state of Australian journalism when it comes to caving to the Zionist lobby ...

Antoinette Lattouf's unlawful sacking exposed the power of lobbying on the Australian media

(Justice Rangiah's judgement) ...details what went on behind the scenes at the ABC when the email campaign against Ms Lattouf began, and how it contributed to a "state of panic" among some senior ABC managers (many of whom have since left the organisation).
It also showed how such pressure campaigns work.
Not only had pro-Israel lobbyists sent dozens of emails to the ABC calling for Ms Lattouf to be taken off air, but their complaints found their way to News Corp's The Australian newspaper, which then told the ABC it was planning to report on the fact that the ABC had received complaints (which fed the growing panic inside the ABC).
That's how the game is played.

Ah, a dishonourable mention for the dishonourable lizard Oz, festering font of Zionism.

See also Gareth Hutchens' As the media works to win trust, people say they want the truth

Do we want journalists to have morals? Do we want their work to be guided by their morals and ethics? Do we want them to speak up about the injustice they see around them, or do we want them to stay quiet? Is it courageous to sit in silence?

George Orwell is considered one of the greatest journalists and writers of the 20th century.

In 1940, he wrote a book review of Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf.

In his review, he was scornful of the British elite for their earlier support for Hitler.

He was objective. He said he understood Hitler's charismatic appeal and he could see that Fascism and

Nazism were tapping into something primal in the human brain.

He also shared a personal opinion about Hitler: "I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him."

Was that OK for a journalist to write that he would like to murder a public figure? It would probably be difficult to find many people who'd have a problem with that opinion of his, given he was talking about Hitler.

But what did it mean for Orwell's journalism?

One might argue that it showed it was possible to write with objectivity while feeling a deep moral disgust at the same time.

Aren't all journalists activists?

Let's wrap things up with a final question.

Sometimes you'll hear people saying journalists shouldn't be activists. But what they're really saying is:

"Journalists shouldn't be regularly writing and talking about the issues I don't want them to be talking about, but I'm happy for them to campaign on the issues I personally think are important."

All journalists are activists, in a sense.

An editorial decision to run a story (or ignore a story) is based on multiple decisions, but many of those decisions relate to what they think is important.

But "important" is a dangerous word.

Why? Because it's impossible to define the word "important" without referencing human judgement. If you say something's important, it begs the question: important to who?

At the moment, some of Australia's major news organisations are reporting very critically on the Albanese government's superannuation plan. There's an obvious media campaign going on.

What's motivating the campaign? Why isn't that considered a form of activism?

If we embarked on a national campaign to improve media literacy in this country, it would be fascinating to see how these topics were tackled.

Interesting questions, but don't expect the Major to provide sensible answers.

Meanwhile, the Major was keeping unlikely company ...

Good on ABC Late Night Live host David Marr for taking on Pulitzer Prize-winning Hedges earlier that night. Brickbats for Nine Newspapers’ CBD column for amplifying Hedges’ criticism of Marr. The interview was polite and the questions asked completely fair.

Time to check out that report, and see if the Major's being completely fair ...

Veteran war journo takes aim at ABC’s David Marr
By Kishor Napier-Raman and Patrick Hatch
October 22, 2025

David Marr didn’t win many new friends among the press during his two years hosting the ABC’s Media Watch.
But the doyen of progressive Australia journalism was subjected to an unexpectedly harsh character assessment at an event in Sydney on Monday night.
Pulitzer Prize-winning war reporter Chris Hedges called Marr a “piece of shit”.
“Australia produces some of the greatest journalists of our era – Julian Assange, John Pilger,” Hedges said at the NSW Teachers Federation conference centre in Surry Hills.
“But let’s be honest, they also produce some of the worst. Including the last half hour I spent being lynched by David Marr on ABC.”
Hedges, a former Middle East correspondent for The New York Times, is a fervent critic of Israel’s war in Gaza and what he says is the Western media’s failure to report on it accurately.
He was originally scheduled to give Monday’s speech – entitled The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists – to the National Press Club on Monday, but the club withdrew the invitation. The veteran war zone correspondent accused it of “caving to the Israel lobby”.
Marr has been relatively open to hosting guests on Radio National’s Late Night Live sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians during the two-year war, in which more than 67,000 people have been killed, including 20,000 children, according to Gaza health authorities.
Just last month he interviewed Chris Sidoti, a member of a UN Commission of Inquiry which ruled Israel’s actions in response to Hamas’ October 7 atrocity constitutes genocide. So what went wrong with Hedges?
Marr kicked the interview off by asking if Hedges had compromised his journalistic credibility by travelling to Australia as a guest of a Palestinian advocacy group (he came to present the Edward Said Memorial Lecture in Adelaide).
Marr then challenged a blog post Hedges wrote suggesting the Press Club asked the Israeli ambassador to speak on Monday in his stead – which the press club denied.
After eight minutes, they got into Hedges’ thesis that the Western media gives disproportionate weight to claims made by the Israeli military even when they directly contradict reports by Palestinian journalists on the ground in Gaza.
Marr said he was no stranger to examining the media’s sins but called some of Hedges’ evidence “really, really thin”.
Hedges was clearly still bristling at the exchange several hours later.

“He’s a real piece of shit,” he told the audience to applause. “And by the way, that’s what I told him when I left.”
CBD asked Marr about Hedge’s scatological appraisal.
“It’s elegant,” he said. “I think he’s brought all of his considerable talents to bear on that judgment.”
Marr said he agreed that some reporting on Gaza has been “terrible” and that the Israeli government regularly bullies the media to suppress negative stories, but called Hedge’s wholesale condemnation of the world’s largest media outlets “exaggerated”.
“I was not for a moment defending Israel. I was questioning the really shoddy evidence he brought forward for a damning, wide-reaching critique of Western journalism.”
If an interview with the ABC lefty archetype Marr triggered such a blow-up, we can only imagine how Hedges would have gotten along with the Canberra press pack.
One line stood out:
Marr said he was no stranger to examining the media’s sins but called some of Hedges’ evidence “really, really thin”.

The pond went with that in its entirety just to establish there was no there there.

There was nothing much to see, save for Marr being gormless in his usual way.

All it established was that Marr clearly has abandoned his old Media Watch ways, and now doesn't read the Australian Daily Zionist News, or for that matter Major Zionist Mitchell, still carrying on...

No surprise that Australia Institute chief political analyst Amy Remeikis took Hedges’ side against Marr, whom she saw as a defender of traditional journalistic method. Her piece, “Australian journalism prizes ‘objectivity’ over truth”, is published on Deepcut News.

As usual, anxious to keep punters inside the hive mind, there was no link to that piece ...

For the record, this is is what Remeikis had to say on the matter ...

The Major rabbited on ...

Remeikis, much like Hedges, doesn’t support Marr’s correct observations that many of the stories Hedges has complained about were simply striving for balance and updating as the facts became apparent.
For Hedges, Remeikis and a whole school of journalist activists, facts are subordinate to judgments they have made about right and wrong. No surprise Hedges’ favourite Australian reporters are John Pilger and Julian Assange.

To be fair to Remeikis, what with an activist journalist berating her for being an activist in a way that doesn't suit the Major's activism ...

Well yes, but the reptiles, resolutely ideological, are devoted to subjectivity and distortion, including authoritarians of the King Donald kind, genocide and the climate crisis ...

Meanwhile, they flung in a snap ... Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, New York Times best-selling author, professor at Princeton University, activist and ordained Presbyterian minister. Picture: Thomas Hedges

The Major then attempted a minor Billy Goat butt ...

Hedges is even upfront that he doesn’t believe Hamas membership undermines the work of Palestinian journalists in Gaza.
This column is all for free speech and reckons the Press Club should have let Hedges speak at its Canberra HQ. He was in Australia to deliver the Edward Said Memorial Lecture, “Requiem for Gaza”, at Adelaide University on October 18 at the invitation of the Australian Friends of Palestine Association.

Had the Major already forgotten?

The club denied it had a firm arrangement to host Hedges last Monday. It denied it cancelled because of pressure from Jewish lobby groups.

So they should have let him speak, but they never invited him to speak, so he couldn't have spoken because they didn't invite him to speak?

Then came the distilled essence of Zionism for which the Major is infamous...

The problem with his Said lecture, the speech to the teachers union and his ABC interview is Hedges’ total failure to condemn Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, murder of 1200 civilians and capture of 251 hostages. All Hedges could tell Marr was that he has no time for Hamas.
Hedges’ Said lecture claims October 7 was simply an act of resistance, ignoring the fact Hamas had been single-handedly running the strip since 2006, with only occasional Israeli retaliations for regular Hamas rocket attacks on nearby Israeli civilian communities.
Like Said, who was a Jerusalem-born Christian Arab, Arabic-speaking Hedges sees no good in the West. Said, like anti-Israeli Jews here, supported a single state from the river to the sea that would comprise Arabs and Jews.

See how the Major conflates and confuses...

It's not just "anti-Israel Jews here" that support a single state from the river to the sea ...

For Israelis, 'From the River to the Sea' Is a Reality. For Palestinians, It's a Crime, It is nonsensical, and hypocritical, to arrest or accuse Palestinians of promoting the ideology of 'From the river to the sea,' while in Israel, school maps don't show the Green Line and the government is advancing full annexation.

Apparently this needs to be said again: Israeli Jews are the last people on Earth who can complain about Palestinian longing for the land from the river to the sea. The State of Israel is the mother of "river to the sea" – using graphic rather than geographic language. It is nearly impossible to find a map in any public space in Israel today, from official maps to public art and iconography, showing the Green Line that would delineate a hypothetical Palestinian state. Maps in Israel show the whole land, undivided – in effect, erasing Palestinian political and national identity.

And again ...

Back to the major ...

Hamas would love the opportunity such a state could present for genuine genocide, unlike the legalistic genocide claims Hedges and the UN use against Israel. This claim is undermined by Israel’s cessation of hostilities after the hostages’ return: Why stop shooting if genocide was the aim?

That's "when did you stop beating your wife" blather at its worst, reinforced by a link inside the hive mind ...

You don't have to fail to complete a genocide to have started one;for that matter you don't have to faill to mention the way that Benji's mob actively encouraged and enabled Hamas, by way of funding and other means ...

Instead look at how you can avoid images of wanton mass destruction, talk of mass starvation, and the sights of mass displacement and ethnic cleansing ...by always focussing on the hostages, always harking back, and never mind anything of what followed ...

The way the Major proceeds is by small Billy Goat butt ...

Nor should anyone imagine Israel’s political and security establishments are above media manipulation. Marr certainly did not suggest that.

... followed by Major Billy Goat butt that immediately undercut that attempt at a butt ...

Yet the truth is most Arabs who live within Israel and vote at its elections thank their lucky stars they do not live under Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.

So the Major can divinely devine the desires, thoughts and lucky stars thanking ways of Arab people?

On with some revisionist history of the Zionist kind...

Hedges’ Said lecture attributes all blame to Israel for the wars it has fought since 1948, even though its neighbours usually invaded it. He does not concede Israel was founded as a Jewish state under UN Resolution 181 or that it was attacked by neighbouring countries after it proclaimed independence.
Hedges blames Israel alone for the failures of the many attempts to set Jews and Palestinians on a course towards a two-state solution. Yet many Arab Palestinians have lamented in writing about the failures of their own leaders since the Peel Commission report of 1937 to seize the opportunities Palestinians have been offered.
For a better understanding of media coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the Press Club could do no better than invite former Associated Press Jerusalem bureau chief Matti Friedman.
This column on December 17, 2023, quoted from Friedman’s brilliant 2014 essay in Tablet magazine, which he reprised in July for The Free Press. He argues the Western media misreports Israel because it has no real interest in Palestinian society and is interested only in conflict and what Israel gets wrong.

So tiresome. Is there anyone that can be assassinated by some barking mad fundamentalist Jewish nationalist to stop the nonsense?

Now you might think that the reptiles would provide a link to Friedman in all his brilliance...

Wrong, they just link to the Major ...

Journalists should not be duped into blaming Jews for the Middle East’s problems, Blaming Jews for the Middle East’s problems lets the region’s governments off the hook for what they don’t do for their people and ignores violence committed by Muslims against Muslims.

It's meta, in a bad way (as if anything Meta could be good), Major heaped on Major ...

It's all about the Major and his personally fuelled form of Zionism ...

In 2011, as AP Jerusalem bureau chief, he had 40 staff, but AP had only one reporter in Syria where tens of thousands were dying each week. His office had far more staff than AP’s Russia, China or India bureaus covering much larger global stories and much bigger populations.
Friedman is a social democrat. Like many mainstream journalists in Israel, he has no problem criticising the government or the military. You won’t read internal criticism by Gazan journalists.

Actually you won't read many Gazan journalists, what with many of them having been killed, silenced, disappeared, or starved ...

Cue a snap ...Matti Friedman. Picture: AP

Back in the hive mind with the Major Zionist ...

A comprehensive account of Friedman’s latest thinking on reporting in Gaza is a question-and-answer video, dated April 25, on YouTube.

Were you expecting a link so you might check this yourself?

Nah, that's not the hive mind way ...

Friedman says modern reporters, rather than write what is actually happening, are more interested in knowing how a story serves a particular side.
“So when you look at a story you don’t ask, ‘is it true or is it not true?’, You ask, ‘who’s it going to help?’.
“So if Israel in the story is the villain then a story that makes Israel seem … reasonable or rational or sympathetic needs to be played down … or made to disappear.”
This made it difficult for much of the media to report October 7 properly: because the usual supposed perpetrators, the Israelis, were the actual victims.
Friedman discusses the effect of accepting Hamas’s censorship rules on finding the truth.
“You’ll see a lot of dead civilians and you won’t see dead militants. You won’t have a clear idea what the Hamas strategy is. And … the centre of the coverage will be a number, a casualty number, that is provided to the press by … the Gaza health ministry, which is Hamas,” he says in the YouTube clip.
“The numbers kind of tell their own story, and it’s a way of settling the story with something that sounds like a concrete statistic. But because the reporters sympathise with that side, they’re happy to play along.
“Hamas has found a way to make the press amplify its messaging rather than covering Hamas.”
All reporters in Gaza are Palestinians who fall into one of three categories, Friedman says.
“Some of them identify with Hamas. Some of them are intimidated by Hamas and won’t cross Hamas. And the third category is people who actually belong to Hamas. That’s where the information from Gaza is coming from.”

And why are there only Palestinians acting as journalists inside Gaza?

Well you'll see a lot of dead journalists ...

The killing of journalists in the Gaza war, overwhelmingly Palestinians killed by Israel, along with other acts of violence against journalists, marks the deadliest period for journalists in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict since 1992 and the single deadliest conflict for journalists in all known conflicts in the history of the world, according to the Costs of War Project. According to the United Nations, the number of Palestinian journalists killed by Israel since the start of the war stood at 242 by 11 August 2025. (more with footnotes at the wiki)

That's a heck of a lot of silencing, but ah best not to go there, best not to wonder why the current government of Israel made sure that there were no witnesses, who might have been been picked up by media organisations outside Gaza ...

Best just follow the lines peddled by Benji and his minions ...

A classic local example of not seeking balance was ABC Radio National breakfast program host Sally Sara’s interview with UN lawyer Chris Sidoti on Thursday.
Sidoti criticised Israel for refusing to work with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. Both dismissed Israel’s reasons: that UNRWA workers participated in attacks on Israeli civilians on October 7.
Both agreed Israel had produced no evidence, even after admitting the UN had in fact sacked nine UNRWA staff for involvement in the pogrom.
Imagine nine Israeli government employees had entered the West Bank or Gaza and participated in the murder of 1200 innocent civilians, raped young women, burned bodies in their homes and taken 251 hostages. Would Sidoti and Sara brush that away?

Imagine mass starvation, wanton destruction, and ethnic displacement and cleansing on a grand scale.

Can the Major brush that away?