Smear Campaign? Jerusalem Post Attacks MintPress for Investigating Israel's Media Influence

While the destruction in the Middle East has been fierce, the media war surrounding who controls the narrative of events has been no less intense. And MintPress News has been caught up in it. Our investigations into Israeli attempts to manipulate public understanding of the genocide in Gaza have drawn the ire of The Jerusalem Post, who recently attempted to cancel us, labeling MintPress as part of a network of Iranian, Russian and Syrian-backed extremist websites pushing antisemitism.

Alan MacLeod, senior staff writer and podcast producer at MintPress News, will join the MintCast host to discuss this. Alan’s investigations, which revealed a network of former Israeli spies and lobbyists working in newsrooms across America, went viral and were read by hundreds of thousands of people.

His report, entitled: “Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News,” discussed how former agents from Israeli spying group Unit 8200 have found a home in some of the corporate media’s most prominent outlets, including Axios and CNN.

Unit 8200 is the centerpiece of Israel’s surveillance state and has been the source of many of the most controversial spying and hacking scandals of the last decade. Former Unit 8200 agents developed the Pegasus spyware, which was used to snoop on activists, journalists, world leaders and royals around the world.

His second investigation cataloged hundreds of ex-Israel lobbyists who went on to work in newsrooms across the country. One example of this is the NBCUniversal network. CNBC’s lead work report was, until 2011, a commander in the Israeli Defense Forces before moving back to America to work for the Friends of the IDF. This group raises money for supplies and support for Israeli soldiers, as well as encouraging Americans to enlist in the Israeli military. This pro-Israel bias goes straight to the top. MSNBC’s executive producer, Moshe Arenstein, is a former IDF intelligence commander.

The traction that these groundbreaking stories were receiving clearly put MintPress in the Jerusalem Post’s crosshairs, the Israeli newspaper publishing an attack against us.

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