What would George Orwell have made of 2016? Some of the biggest news stories of the year, promoted by pro-Establishment media, were either false, such as the claims made in December that a ‘Holocaust’ was taking place in eastern Aleppo, or not backed up by any hard evidence, such as the allegations that Russia interfered in the US election.
Ironically, these stories were pushed most aggressively by media outlets that expressed the most concern about ‘fake news’ and the urgent need to take action against it!
At the same time some very important real news was either ignored altogether — or given only the scantiest coverage.
Here are ten of the biggest under-reported news stories of 2016. I’ll leave you to come to your own conclusions as to why they didn’t get the coverage they should have.
The War in Yemen
BBC describes Yemen as a forgotten war, yet the reason it’s forgotten is failure of BBC etc to cover it @The45Storm @medialens @markcurtis30 — Charles Shoebridge (@ShoebridgeC) December 9, 2016
While Syria made the front pages, the US-backed war in Yemen received nowhere near the same attention.
Documented atrocities carried out by the Saudi-led coalition have been largely ignored. British Blairite MPs, so keen to show their concern about a non-existent ‘Holocaust’ in Aleppo in December, failed to support a Labour motion — calling for an independent UN investigation into violations of international law in Yemen, in October.
And the ‘Something Must be Done’ media brigade weren’t too interested either. “Since the rejection of the motion, ‘Do something!’ crusaders like Aaronovitch, Freedland and Cohen have printed not a word about ‘our’ ‘responsibility to protect’ civilian life in Yemen,” noted Media Lens on 3rd November.
Libya in Ruins
In early 2011, Libya was ‘the’ big news story as concerned ‘liberal interventionists’ urged NATO to enforce ‘no-fly zones’ to stop the “New Hitler Colonel Gaddafi.”
The son of a retired Libyan academic who spoke out against Muammar Gaddafi’s regime says he fears the worst for his father and three of his brothers after they were “killing his own people” and carrying out “a Srebrenica-style massacre in Benghazi.”
Well, NATO did intervene and Libya was destroyed. And guess what? The ‘Do Something’ crusaders in the western media are silent. The transformation of the country which had the highest standards of living in Africa into a terrorist-ridden “failed state” is not deemed to be newsworthy. In the words of Leslie Nielsen in the film Naked Gun, it’s a case of: “Nothing to see here- please disperse!”
Tunisia — failed state
Libya — failed state
Yemen — failed state
Syria — failed state
Obama admin had a hand in shaping each one. — Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) December 21, 2016
Reconciliation in Syria
Good news from Syria doesn’t get much, if any coverage- particularly if it shows the Syrian authorities in a positive light. But the Syrian government has implemented truce and reconciliation programs in and around Homs and Damascus and in other parts of the country too.
@ianbremmer Moreover, Assad is being astonishingly lenient. Most of the “rebels” captured have been given amnesty straight-away @manosiat — Stavros Hadjiyiannis (@StavrosHadjiyia) November 30, 2016
Many rebels have taken up the offer and resumed their lives as civilians. The fact that reconciliation was underway in Syria should have been a big news story in 2016, but — surprise, surprise — given the pro regime-change bias of much of the media, it wasn’t.
#2017 could be beginning of end for #ISIS. But w/o political reconciliation in Iraq/Syria, another violent entity, or entities, will arise — Colin P. Clarke (@ColinPClarke) January 1, 2017
62 People Owning Half of the World’s Wealth
Yes, that’s right — 62. Surely this is something news channels should have been giving major coverage to in 2016?
Surely Oxfam’s Davos report should have kicked off debates about how the world’s economy needs to be restructured in order to make the distribution of wealth more equitable? But the story didn’t have legs.
How very convenient for the 62 people!
The Exoneration of Slobodan Milosevic
In 2016, the man who neocons and Blairites labeled “the Butcher of the Balkans” and whose “genocidal crimes” were used to promote the globalist doctrine of “liberal interventionism” was effectively declared “not guilty,” by the very court which tried him.
The exoneration of a man accused of genocide made no headlines this month. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it… https://t.co/x2RIM1SAQe — John Pilger (@johnpilger) August 23, 2016
As I wrote in August:
“The ICTY’s [International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia] conclusion, that one of the most demonized figures of the modern era was innocent of the most heinous crimes he was accused of, really should have made headlines across the world. But it hasn’t. Even the ICTY buried it, deep in its 2,590 page verdict in the trial of Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic who was convicted in March of genocide (at Srebrenica), war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
The exoneration of the western elite’s number one bogeyman of the late 90s did make front page news in Serbia, but in the western MSM the news was ignored, and those, like Andy Wilcoxson, John Pilger and myself, who did dare to write about it, were subject to vicious personal attacks by Establishment gatekeepers.
Rather like Sherlock Holmes’ dog that didn’t bark in the night-time, the non-coverage of this very important story told us everything we needed to know.
Global Warming: Another Record-Breaking Year for Temperatures
2016, according to the UN, is “very likely” to be the warmest year on record — meaning that 16 of the 17 hottest years on record will have been in the 21st century. In July, NASA revealed that each month from January to June in 2016 had been the warmest respective month globally — since modern temperature records began in 1880.
#ClimateChange
