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Major American news outlets were informed of the Trump administration’s plan to bombard Venezuela and abduct its president ahead of the operation early Saturday morning, but withheld their reporting on the operation to protect the military, Semafor reports.
Both The New York Times and The Washington Post knew about the raid before President Donald Trump approved it on Friday night at 10:46 pm, Semafor reported over the weekend.
However, according to two people familiar with the administration’s communications with the outlets, they “held off publishing what they knew to avoid endangering U.S. troops.”
The report raises major questions about the media’s role in the operation, which has been widely condemned as an illegal and authoritarian action by legal experts and foreign leaders; Semafor describes the withholding of coverage as potential “cooperation” with the military by news outlets.
Major news outlets in the U.S. have a history of coordinating with the Pentagon in order to protect military operations.
As Semafor notes, The New York Times reportedly withheld a story about the disastrous Bay of Pigs operation in 1961 before the Cuban invasion at the behest of the Kennedy administration.
There are numerous other such examples. In the mid-2000s, the Times withheld a major report on the National Security Agency’s campaign of warrantless spying on American citizens, Stellar Wind, for a year at the Bush administration’s request.
Most recently, The Atlantic withheld a potential report on a planned U.S. attack on Yemen that was the central focus of Signalgate. That attack, which the magazine’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg was notified about two hours in advance, killed 15 people, including six children, one of them a newborn baby.
Goldberg noted that he wasn’t clear about the authenticity of the Signal chat. However, even in his article exposing the existence of the chat, he still withheld some of the most sensitive information that government officials discussed.
In reality, major outlets often protect government operations because those in charge at the outlets support them, a phenomenon those on the left have noted is observable in the practice of manufactured consent.
After the Trump administration’s attack on Saturday, The Washington Post editorial board — which owner Jeff Bezos has revamped to be more conservative — published an editorial celebrating the abduction, calling the operation that killed at least 80 people, including civilians, an “unquestionable tactical success.”
Meanwhile, U.K. writer Owen Jones reported on Monday that BBC has directed its reporters to avoid using the word “kidnapped” when referring to the U.S.’s abduction of Maduro. Instead, according to the reported directive posted online by Jones, journalists are to use “seized” or “captured,” with attribution to the U.S. for the latter term — despite even Trump saying that kidnapping is “not a bad term” to use to describe the action.
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