A New York Times editorial expresses unconscious racist privilege and prissy, selective moral outrage when it says the West “should unite in fury” against Russia’s alleged targeting of individuals in a “peaceful English town”– when such concern is never conveyed for the targets of US drone attacks and Israeli snipers in peaceful Muslim villages.

Adrian Chen’s piece on Russiagate in the New Yorker has an important subtext: There is a narrative to be narrated, dammit, and facts can get in the way. And if you naively choose the facts, you might find yourself demonized as a pro-Putin propagandist. When the truth is that leftwing skeptics of Russiagate are opposed to the MSM’s neverending warmongering.

The Ronen Bergman Israeli secret history show went to NPR’s Fresh Air, and it was shooting and crying from beginning to end. Bergman and interviewer Dave Davies practically gush over how clever the killers are and yes, also how moral they are. It’s “unheard of” to kill civilians, Bergman says.

The Trump campaign’s friendliness with the Russians in the 2016 campaign suggests that the administration is “working to advance the interests of a foreign power” and against the “interests of the American people,” says David Leonhardt of the Times. Leonhardt leaves out the fact that the Russian collusion has been shown to have involved one foreign power’s interests: Israel, at the U.N., in 2016, in defiance of the Obama administration.

Propaganda works with educated liberals. The New York Times has just enough coverage of the war crimes in Yemen, and US complicity in them, so it can say it covered the issue, but not enough to signal to readers that the issue matters. Meanwhile, a torrent of stories has convinced readers that Russiagate is the great issue of our time. For the educated liberal it is convenient to believe that whatever is really wrong can be identified with the Republican Party, so Russiagate is irresistible.

A New York Times story on the history of Jerusalem says that violence began in May 1948 after Israel’s creation and that “huge numbers of Jews and Arabs were displaced.” These are all lies that function as “hasbara,” explanations of the conflict that serve the Israeli claims to greater Israel.

The domestic political fight that is Russiagate takes up all the media’s attention, while civilians killed by US bombs are like ants on the sidewalk. That’s because U.S. crimes against humanity are never seen as scandals, except maybe a century later. At most we just treat war crimes as policy disputes. Nobody expects a bipartisan investigation into our ties with the Saudis.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens says that Jewish Voice for Peace is as anti-Semitic as white nationalists like Richard Spencer because it undermines “Israel’s right to exist.” This is a clever feat of propaganda for Israel: Stephens is saying that Israel has a right to discriminate against Palestinians. People need to call it out as racist claptrap.

The press is obsessed with the claim that absurd ads planted by Russians on Facebook bashing Hillary Clinton actually swayed the election. This is a form of propaganda about “our democracy,” exposed by the fact that our press fails to report on Saudi and Israeli meddling in our politics, a real factor in Washington. And though quick to seize on Russian war crimes, it has almost nothing to say about Saudi atrocities in Yemen, backed by the U.S. government.

The Ken Burns Vietnam documentary on PBS left out what the U.S. did during the Cold War era in numerous other places including Iran, Guatemala, Latin America in general, Indonesia, and sub-Saharan Africa, both during and after the Vietnam War.  It is not a pretty story.