SATISH SHARMA - not just Rotigraphy.: Joshi's implicit argument is that we should trust only those journalists who work for corporate outlets. This view might hold water if those corporate journalists had a well-documented record of truth-telling. They do not.

https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/2016870043255005490

Jonathan Cook

The Economist defence corespondent's premise in his response to me below is the very antithesis of the journalistic ethos he claims to represent. Shashank Joshi maligns a reporter for telling us what he has witnessed on the ground in Caracas. Why? Because it discredits the Economist's own editorialising, based on reports from fellow corporate journalists that accord with the Economist's corporate agenda. Joshi's implicit argument is that we should trust only those journalists who work for corporate outlets. This view might hold water if those corporate journalists had a well-documented record of truth-telling. They do not. I have spent years documenting the endless disinformation promoted by the biggest names in our profession. I just did so again last night when the BBC's Sarah Smith spoke of Iran's "nuclear weapons programme" – as if it were an established fact rather than a self-serving and highly dubious claim made by Israel and the White House. Caroline Hawley headlined her own report on Iran with the incredible, evidence-free suggestion that "tens of thousands" of protesters had been killed in Iran – on a par with the dead in Gaza after Israel's two years of carpet-bombing the enclave. This isn't journalism. It is state propaganda. It is what corporate journalists are employed to do. If they didn't do it – and even more importantly, they didn't actually believe in what they were doing – they would be out of their job. I know the stenographic function these people play in corporate media because I saw it first hand time and again in my 20 years reporting from Israel-Palestine. Here is just one example. I was the only journalist who investigated the Israeli army's killing of UN worker Iain Hook in Jenin. I then had to watch dozens of international publications, who sent no reporters to Jenin, regurgitate Israeli military disinformation as if it were the facts. I couldn't even persuade my former employer, the Guardian, to run the investigation. Why? Because the foreign editor told me no one else had reported what I was saying. None of this will make the slightest sense to the Economist's correspondent below because he is deeply immersed in his Manichaean worldview, one that sees politics as a simple battle between Good versus Evil. He is not a journalist. He is what, in less dishonest times, was called a courtier.

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Shashank Joshi

@shashj

Replying to @Jonathan_K_Cook

It is in fact Mr Murray maligning the work of other journalists, on the ground in Caracas, by suggesting that they are liars. Telling, but not surprising, that someone like you would consider it "war-fomenting" to point out that a dictatorship remains, in fact, a dictatorship.

12:44 AM · Jan 30, 2026

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https://x.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/2016870043255005490