FreeSpeech and Censorship: Thread

[grarpamp]

Meet The Censored - Chris Hedges

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/meet-the-censored-chris-hedges
https://scheerpost.com/2022/03/28/hedges-on-being-disappeared/
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/welcome-to-the-chris-hedges-report-ea1
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf

This past weekend, celebrated journalist and author Chris Hedges woke
up to find six years of episodes of his Russia Today show On Contact
vanished from the show’s account on YouTube. Though almost none of the
shows referenced Russia or Vladimir Putin directly, and the few that
did tended to be unflattering, his association with Russian state
media was enough to erase hundreds of interviews about topics ranging
from Julian Assange’s imprisonment to censorship to police brutality
to American war crimes in the Middle East.

Now on Substack, Hedges has a long and uncomfortably colorful history
of being muffled. The former New York Times correspondent covered wars
from the Balkans to the Middle East to the Falkland Islands, and
authored books like War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, American
Fascists, and The Death of the Liberal Class, and through 2002, when
he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team for Exploratory Reporting,
he defined mainstream respectability and excellence in journalism. He
might have had it easy, spending the latter part of his career on the
Thomas Friedman/David Brooks Memorial Gravy Train of overpaid
lectures, University trusteeships, and fellowships at obscure
think-tanks, if he’d just kept his mouth shut.

He didn’t. One of the few frontline American reporters who spoke
Arabic, Hedges knew instantly the Iraq war would be a disaster and
said so at every opportunity. He was booed offstage at a commencement
address at Rockford College in 2003 by a crowd chanting “U-S-A!
U-S-A!,” and hustled off campus so fast that the school wouldn’t let
him grab his jacket on the way out. For those who haven’t seen it, the
video of that scene is a remarkable museum piece of Bush-era war
mania:

Episodes like this accelerated his departure from the New York Times
and into the wilds of independent media, where paying options for
dissident voices had been shrinking. As he points out below, someone
like him in the past would have parachuted out of a big commercial
enterprise like the Times into a life at NPR — broadcasting shows “at
like one in the morning, or something,” he chuckles — but NPR, too,
had by then been begun its purging of unorthodox and especially
antiwar voices.

By the 2010s, one of the last places where media figures pushed off
the traditional career track could pick up a paycheck was Russia
Today. In an arrangement Hedges plainly describes as a cynical
marriage of convenience, the Russian state was happy to give voice to
figures covering structural problems in American society, and those
quasi-banned voices were glad for the opportunity to broadcast what
they felt is the truth, even understanding the editorial motivation.
Hedges ended up working at RT for six years hosting On Contact, where
he interviewed authors and thinkers resting outside the cultural
mainstream, from Nathaniel Philbrick to Cornel West to Nils Melzer to
Noam Chomsky to many others (disclosure: I’ve also been a guest).

As Hedges points out in the wide-ranging, unnerving interview below,
the speech-control one-two he’s just experienced — first herded out of
the mainstream for ideological offenses into a shrinking space of
“allowable” dissent, then forced to watch as that space is demonized
out of existence — is part of an effective pattern. “It’s how this
works,” he sighs. He points to the Intelligence Community Assessment
of January 6th, 2017, ostensibly intended to make a case for Russian
interference in the 2016 presidential election, which actually spent
much of its time complaining about RT, especially its coverage of real
but unflattering domestic issues.

“They showed their hand,” he says, referring to the intelligence
community’s complaints over reporting on everything from the pursuit
of Assange to Occupy Wall Street to corporate overreach. From the
Assessment:

    RT’s reports often characterize the United States as a
“surveillance state” and allege widespread infringements of civil
liberties, police brutality, and drone use…

Hedges denounced Putin’s invasion of Ukraine as a “criminal act of
aggression” after it began, and believes that if RT had been allowed
to stay on YouTube, he — along with similarly critical former RT
contributors like Jesse Ventura — wouldn’t have been permitted by the
Kremlin to stay on air. On the other hand, seeing an American company
vaporize six years of interviews having nothing to do with Russia
shows space for voices like his continues to shrink in the West. In
this sense he represents a kind of person we’ll be seeing more of in
the future, caught between a censorship rock and a hard place, an
outcast in domestic and foreign media systems.

You can find Chris’s work on Substack now at the Chris Hedges Report,
and some of the On Contact shows that were re-posted by independent
accounts remain up. The launch of the new site has gone very well, but
he warns that no place in media is safe now. “They’ll shut down
Substack, I absolutely know. Either that, or they’ll create a way that
sites like yours and mine won’t be on it,” he says.

More from Chris on censorship, RT, Ukraine, and other issues:

MT: What happened with YouTube?

Chris Hedges: My entire archive of shows from On Contact was taken
down. I was in London last week for Julian Assange — I was supposed to
be a guest at the wedding, but then, the prison didn’t let me in of
course. When I came back, I got a text from a friend of mine, with
whom I’d done a half hour show, about a girlfriend who’d overdosed on
fentanyl. And because I knew him, my interview with him is quite a
powerful segment. And he said, the show doesn’t exist anymore. Then I
checked, and nothing exists.

The RT On Contact website is still up, but everything on YouTube is
gone, and people watched it on YouTube. Some of that stuff had
hundreds of thousands of views.

MT: This two-step process feels like a backdoor way of getting rid of
unorthodox voices. In other words, weren’t you on RT in the first
place because you’d been bounced out for opposing the war in Iraq?
Now, because of your association with RT, you’re off YouTube. Is this
a way to get at, not just people connected with Russians, but people
with unpopular views generally?

Chris Hedges: Yeah. That’s how it works. They push you to the margins
and then, they demonize those spaces on the margins. This has long
been the habit of the dominant ruling elites. So for instance, Robert
Scheer, whose website I write for, Scheerpost — and of course, we were
all fired from Truthdig, this is just a never ending saga — but he ran
Ramparts. I think it was Spiro Agnew said, “It’s a magazine with a
bomb in every issue.” We could never get advertisers.

So they push you into a space that they then demonize, and then use it
as an excuse to shut you down. But they’ve already in essence created
the space in which you exist.

I have a couple strikes against me. One, I was pushed out of the New
York Times, because I spent so many years in the Middle East, and many
years in Gaza. And of course, I was the Middle East Bureau Chief for
the New York Times. I’m very outspoken about Israel, and I’m a very
strong supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement.
Which alone is enough — I just saw my friend, Cornel West, denied
tenure at Harvard over this. And I’m also a fierce critic, as you are,
of the Democratic party. Those are all flags that will get you locked
out of even the quote- unquote “liberal media” like MSNBC.

MT: This freeze-out led to your tenure at RT?

Chris Hedges: I’d been marginalized for a long time because of those
issues. RT gave me space, and I took it. But it wasn’t a show about
Russia. We never did a show on Russia. The irony is that, in fact, the
very few times Putin was mentioned, he was not described in flattering
terms — it was as an autocrat. There was one show where Syria came up,
and Russian war crimes. So there was nothing on the show, ever, that
was in any way flattering to the Putin regime.

But the point of the show was, of course, critiquing and looking at
our own society, and that was the problem.