MintPress News’ investigations uncovering networks of former Israeli spies and lobbyists working in America’s newsrooms have gone viral, triggering a hit piece on us in the Israel state funded The Jerusalem Post. This is our response., German government-funded journalism, Israeli media propaganda, Jerusalem Post, Jerusalem Post disinformation, Jerusalem Post government funding, MintPress News smear campaign, Nicholas Potter, Nicholas Potter controversy, pro-Israel bias in media, pro-Israeli censorship, Unit 8200 in US media, Western media Zionist influence,

In December, The Jerusalem Post published an investigation from Nicholas Potter, a “counter-extremism expert,” who falsely accused MintPress News of being part of a network of far-left, foreign government-funded outlets that push conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic extremism. The claims are untrue and are particularly ironic, considering the calls for the extermination and expulsion of Palestinians and Arab peoples the newspaper has published and because Potter is a German national whose job at the Post is directly funded by the German government.

The virality of the two investigations, which were widely cited and read by hundreds of thousands of people across the world, seems to have upset many of Israel’s most ardent backers, including individuals at the Jerusalem Post, who warned about our influence. “In both cases,” the Post wrote, “the evidence was flimsy at best,”

In the former, a brief internship at AIPAC during college was all it took to be a part of an ominous conspiracy to control the media. In the latter, a previous stint as a reservist in Unit 8200 of the IDF’s Intelligence Corps was more than sufficient to brand a journalistic security analysis as a clandestine psychological operation.”

This is a disingenuous description of the information presented. Firstly, the evidence provided was far from flimsy. We noted dozens of high-profile instances of the hundreds of ex-Israel lobbyists we found working in American media. The nearly 6000-word article went into almost tedious detail, cataloging example after example, and, for brevity’s sake, had to be cut back from a much larger article.

Nevertheless, the Post suggests that the best evidence of Israel lobby/U.S. media overlap is a “brief internship” at AIPAC. This is deeply misleading. In fact, that is one of the least substantial cases of the phenomenon we noted. The dozens of examples included the executive producer of MSNBC, who was an Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) intelligence commander; a CNBC lead reporter who was previously an officer in the IDF’s public relations department before working for the Friends of the IDF in the U.S.; and a Fox News producer who was Benjamin Netanyahu’s aide at Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations.