Compilation art showing Guest Alan McLeod (Center) and Mnar Adley (Right). Photo: MintPress News.
By Mnar Adley – Feb 9, 2025
While the destruction in the Middle East has been fierce, the media war surrounding who controls the narrative of events has been no less intense. And MintPress News has been caught up in it. Our investigations into Israeli attempts to manipulate public understanding of the genocide in Gaza have drawn the ire of The Jerusalem Post, who recently attempted to cancel us, labeling MintPress as part of a network of Iranian, Russian and Syrian-backed extremist websites pushing antisemitism.
Alan MacLeod, senior staff writer and podcast producer at MintPress News, will join the MintCast host to discuss this. Alan’s investigations, which revealed a network of former Israeli spies and lobbyists working in newsrooms across America, went viral and were read by hundreds of thousands of people.
His report, entitled: “Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News,” discussed how former agents from Israeli spying group Unit 8200 have found a home in some of the corporate media’s most prominent outlets, including Axios and CNN.
Unit 8200 is the centerpiece of Israel’s surveillance state and has been the source of many of the most controversial spying and hacking scandals of the last decade. Former Unit 8200 agents developed the Pegasus spyware, which was used to snoop on activists, journalists, world leaders and royals around the world.
His second investigation cataloged hundreds of ex-Israel lobbyists who went on to work in newsrooms across the country. One example of this is the NBCUniversal network. CNBC’s lead work report was, until 2011, a commander in the Israeli Defense Forces before moving back to America to work for the Friends of the IDF. This group raises money for supplies and support for Israeli soldiers, as well as encouraging Americans to enlist in the Israeli military. This pro-Israel bias goes straight to the top. MSNBC’s executive producer, Moshe Arenstein, is a former IDF intelligence commander.
The traction that these groundbreaking stories were receiving clearly put MintPress in the Jerusalem Post’s crosshairs, the Israeli newspaper publishing an attack against us.
Mnar and Alan begin the show by refuting the article’s claims and revealing ironic details about the Jerusalem Post itself.
They also discuss the recent TikTok ban and its relation to the Gaza genocide. TikTok has recently been under intense pressure to sell its platform to an American company. While the platform is far from pro-Palestine, it has not been as aggressively censorious of Palestinian voices as its American competitors have.
TikTok has attempted to placate Washington by moving many of its data centers to Texas and hiring a host of former U.S. government officials to run its internal operations. Yet, an action spearheaded by the pro-Israel lobby in Washington has driven the U.S. government to the brink of an outright ban on the platform.
See how former Israeli spies and lobbyists shape the news you consume—read Alan MacLeod’s groundbreaking investigations:
Raffi Berg: BBC Middle East Editor Exposed as CIA, Mossad Collaborator
Mnar Adley
Mnar Adley is founder, CEO and editor in chief of MintPress News, and is also a regular speaker on responsible journalism, sexism, neoconservativism within the media and journalism start-ups. She started her career as an independent multimedia journalist covering Midwest and national politics while focusing on civil liberties and social justice issues posting her reporting and exclusive interviews on her blog MintPress, which she later turned MintPress into the global news source it is today. In 2009, Adley also became the first American woman to wear the hijab to anchor/report the news in American media. Contact Mnar at mnar@mintpressnews.com. Follow Mnar on Twitter at @mnarmuh
