FLASHBACK: Once Upon A Time, The Media Thought That Airing Nazi Propaganda Was A Bad Thing

October 26th, 2023 11:16 AM

When analyzing the media's embarrassingly stenographic coverage of the war in Gaza subsequent to the atrocities committed by Hamas, it is important to note that there wasn't always such a keen interest in ensuring that Nazis, literal or otherwise (and certainly Hamas), got depicted fairly and accurately.

Let's flash back to April of 2015, when Donald Trump had not yet descended the gilded escalator. Watch as Isaac Lee, who at the time was president of Univision News, as he pooh-poohs the need to present both sides of any given story:

ISAAC LEE: I think that if you are an American journalist covering the Second World War, it's not a problem for you to want the Nazis to lose. And I don't think that you need to be saying, "well, you know, the Allied expeditionary force commander says this and, on the other hand, the Führer says that. I think it's OK to understand that sometimes you have to be on the right side of the issues and history.

Of course, and as we noted at the time, Lee wasn't akchually talking about Nazis in Germany but was instead casually applying that label to domestic opponents of the policy array that Univision championed (and still champions) as a corporate client of the Democratic party. Lee was talking about not giving a fair shake to opponents of unrestricted immigration, gun control, and abortion-on-demand, among other issues, and in so doing he smeared opponents of Univision's corporate policy preferences as Nazis.

Lee departed the network in 2018, but his words -awful within their original context- stand today as an indictment of the servility and deference that the corporate media have shown Hamas.

Whether it is the government-run Voice of America insisting that Hamas not be addressed as "terrorists", the media's continued reliance on the Hamas "Ministry of Health" for casualty data within Gaza, or The New York Times' parroting of Hamas talking points when covering the errant rocket that landed within a hospital complex, it is crystal clear that there are many within the media that are all too willing to air the side of literal Nazis. 

Isaac Lee's moral pronouncements aged like milk in the sun.