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Good evening. It's Thursday, November 16.
Tonight: After the 9/11 attack in 2001, Americans understandably wanted to know why would people be so enraged and hateful toward us that they'd be willing to give up their own lives to kill as many of us Americans as possible. That very natural curiosity quickly morphed into media shorthand: Why do they hate us? It was obvious that there must be some reason or a set of reasons why people in the Muslim and Arab world were so filled with anti-American sentiment that they wanted to attack our country in the most violent and traumatizing way possible.
The neocons who dominated the Bush-Cheney administration and who also dominated major media discourse at the time had to provide an answer Americans wanted to know. What they settled on was this: They hate us for our freedom. According to this narrative, which was designed to flatter Americans and tell them that our leaders bore no blame of any kind for provoking an attack, people in the Muslim world saw that we are free, that we get to choose our leaders democratically, that women are free to work, that LGBT can live openly. That people have religious freedom. And this drove them so insane with rage and contempt that they just had to attack us and kill as many of us as they could over our freedom. Why? Because they hate us for our freedom.
A very patriotic and reassuring message, to be sure, but also a childish and insultingly propagandistic one. There are countless free countries all over the world that Muslims are not attacking that way. From Japan, Greece and Brazil to South Korea, Norway, South Africa and so many more. There was something about the United States that made it such a specific and unique target beyond the fact that it was – sort of – free.
One of the people who stepped into that debate was named Osama bin Laden, who is widely accused by the U.S. government, most Western intelligence agencies and the U.S. media, of being the leader of al-Qaida and thus the perpetrator of the 9/11 attack. Though he denied responsibility for that attack, he did write a letter in 2002 entitled “Letter to Americans” in which he purported to explain why so many Muslims in that part of the world feel resentment, rage and hatred for the United States. He did not say it was because the United States was a free country. He instead cited several U.S. policies that involved heavily interfering in their part of the world, including 1) imposing a sanctions regime on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children before the U.S. invasion in 2003; 2) deploying U.S. military troops and military bases onto Saudi Arabian soil, which Muslims throughout that region regard as religiously sacred and 3) the U.S. was arming, funding and supporting Israel's abuse and bombing of Palestinians over many decades. Bin Laden and many other so-called Islamic extremists who had been just a short time before American allies in the effort to defeat the Soviet army in Afghanistan, had cited these policy grievances many times before 9/11.
While the 9/11 attack and the so-called War on Terror that followed was pivotal to my own political trajectory and more Americans every year that goes by are too young to have lived through it. They don't know much about it, and many who lived through it, as we see often with history, have forgotten major parts of it. Within the last week, young Americans on social media, especially on TikTok, discovered this 2002 bin Laden letter on the site of The Guardian, the British newspaper where I once worked and that letter began to go viral.
Many of these people who discovered this letter were shocked to learn that 9/11 anti-American hatred generally was at least partially motivated by these concrete policy grievances, including U.S. support for Israel. As a result, that bin Laden letter quickly went viral.
It became one of the Guardian's most-read items – a 20-year-old item that had been on that site for two decades. Seeing that so many people were interested in this letter and regarding it, for the first time, the Guardian did something genuinely shocking for an ostensibly journalistic outlet: they removed the letter from their website at exactly the moment when people were craving to read it. They just deleted a crucial historical document precisely so that it could no longer be read or found by the TikTok users who had been sharing it and discussing and debating its significance. We'll examine this remarkable act of journalistic self-censorship and also examine why this letter and similar statements have long been so dangerous to Western elites and to the narratives they try to propagate.
Then: we knew when Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, and then Israel made clear that it would respond by unleashing what it promised to be an unprecedented war, that many people in our audience – certainly not all, but many – would be highly supportive of Israel – many vehemently so. I've been around for a long time, and I've been a long-time critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, as well as the bipartisan policy of arming and funding all of Israel and its wars. I obviously wasn't going to change my views or hide them suddenly to aggrandize or please the pro-Israel part of my audience or pretend that I believe things that I don't actually believe. To avoid angering people in the audience, I would think that would be incredibly disrespectful to you, my audience, and it would be something that would require sacrificing all of my integrity.
But the term “audience capture” has become common in our new media ecosystem because it really does describe a real and dangerous phenomenon, especially in independent media, but even in corporate media. With so much of our media ideologically polarized, required by financial viability to only be able to speak to various strains of the left or the right or to the Democrats or Republicans, there is a very strong incentive to only tell your audience what they want to hear. With so many choices out there, so many podcasts, so many shows, so many voices on the Internet and on television, it's easier for people to just write off any journal as our host or show a writer that expresses a view on an issue of great importance to them that differs from their own out of anger. They'll just say, I'm not paying attention to that person anymore who has this view that I find so repellent on an issue I care so much about. And because so many media platforms and journalists now rely on keeping that audience happy, you need it for whatever model you've chosen, whether it's subscriptions or advertisers or anything else, it has led to a large number of journalists, I would submit, most petrified to ever take a view or even report facts that alienate a significant portion of their audience. That is a crippling way to do journalism.
From the start, as we knew what happened, we did lose some of our viewers to the show and even some of our subscribers who are vehemently pro-Israel. Barely a day has gone by where I haven't heard from someone, usually more than one saying some variant of, “You know, I used to really like and respect your work when it came to the rights of Americans but given your criticism or lack of support for Israel, I no longer listen to you or subscribe to your show and your work.”
Most of our audience, I'm happy to say, has not responded that way, including most pro-Israel supporters. I've heard a lot of them saying, “I don’t agree with you on this issue, but that's all the more reason I'm going to continue to listen.” I'm proud to have attracted an audience that does not seek, expect, or demand full agreement on every issue, but instead demands an honest, well-prepared and illuminating set of reporting and analyses. But we have seen how real “audience capture” can be and the costs of angering a significant part of your audience. So, we wanted to spend some time examining this dynamic that most media now face and that I would submit can be very corrupting.
Finally, two weeks ago or so, we interviewed the musical legend Roger Waters when he was passing through Rio de Janeiro for his world musical tour. During that interview, Roger Waters made some statements about the Israeli-Gaza war and the October 7 attack by Hamas that provoked some serious anger and controversy as we expected it might happen. He's a very polarizing figure. As a result of the statements he made in that interview with us, there has been a pressure campaign that has succeeded for hotels throughout the next countries he's visiting in Latin America, Argentina and Uruguay to deny him service, to refuse to let him stay at that hotel. He has had, in fact, difficulty finding hotels to stay in.
I realize that people who loathe Roger Waters's use of Israel or even believe he is an anti-Semite may celebrate this outcome but I'd like to discuss the implications of it for anyone with ideas that are also considered extremist, dangerous and bigoted – which, in case you have forgotten, is how all anti-establishment voices on the right and even on the left have been regarded and still are regarded, and who have been the focal points of similar types of punishment campaigns up until October 7, when it all switched to Israel critics, but it will be switching back very shortly to many people now cheering this. So, this is probably a case of: be careful what you wish for.
For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
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