• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    There is a lot of truth to “Jews control the media”

    Not… really. This is where you run into the old saying “Antisemitism is the socialism of fools”. The idea that “Jews” control media is horribly misplaced, because for every given adherent to the faith with some amount of clout, there are millions utterly devoid of swag. You could just as easily claim “Australians control the media” by pointing to the Murdochs or Packers. Or put the blame on the Germans by way of the Hearst family. If you wanted to be particularly smarmy, you could put the blame on the Americans themselves, as an ethnic cohort.

    But we’re way past any kind of root cause analysis when we just try to blame a single ethnic cohort, while ignoring how much division exists within that cohort. Certainly, the Beta Israelis don’t control the media. And we can find plenty of anti-war Jews, anti-Zionist Jews, and even just anti-Netanyahu Jews as counterfactuals to the current media narrative.

    Zionists definitely have a disproportionate amount of influence

    A certain select group of people with a Zionist position have either direct ownership stake or indirect financial influence over a number of major publications and broadcasters. And as media ownership has consolidated over time, they’ve gained a larger voice.

    Some of those people might be described as Zionists, such as Jonathan Karp and the Adelson family. But others, like the highly influential head of the Second Baptist Church of Houston - Ed Young - are quite literally selling people on Zionism as an end to Judaism by way of a nuclear holocaust that ushers in the Second Coming of Christ.

    Not Jewish. Not really Zionist in the conventional sense. Enormously influential in US - and by extension global - media and politics, purely by way of his command of a wealthy congregation in a set of heavily contested electoral districts.