Hussein Mughnieh
Axios: a powerful name in today’s media zeitgeist, responsible for major “scoops” from Trump’s White House and a steady buffet of investigative reports on empire’s strategy in West Asia. Its digital menu offers everything from scandalous telephone battles between Israeli prime ministers and US presidents to Washington’s strategy for opening a strait that, without them, presumably wouldn’t have needed opening, closing, reopening, closing again, and repeating the exercise roughly 60 times. All served in a lovely “straight to the facts” style, digestible enough for practically anyone.
There is, however, an ancient and remarkably successful recipe for conquering the information business: announce that everybody else is lying, announce that everybody else is rotten, then arrive wearing the freshly laundered costume of the only honest journalist left standing. Once dressed, criticism can conveniently be returned to sender—it must have come from the corrupt press you just exposed.
Hitler had his Lügenpresse, the “lying press.” Trump had “fake news” and the “enemy of the people” taglines. And now, in the less dramatic but considerably more aerodynamic language of Silicon Valley journalism, comes Axios: clean fonts, bullet points, short paragraphs, and the reassuring promise that nothing will consume more of your precious time than absolutely necessary. Even the name is pre-approved by ancient Greece: axios, meaning “worthy.” Worthy information, worthy readers, worthy use of approximately three minutes before returning to the catastrophe outside the browser window.
Its formula is “smart brevity”: information reduced to conveniently digestible portions, generally under 300 words, because apparently even the collapse of an entire region must respect the reader’s attention span. The formula has worked. Axios has become influential, particularly in its coverage of the latest West Asian crisis, presenting itself not merely as another news outlet but as an antidote to an allegedly diseased media environment.
And here the story becomes slightly less worthy.
Behind the promise of clean information sits a more complicated question: clean according to whom? Founded in 2016 by former Politico journalists Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schwartz, Axios was built around a blunt diagnosis from VandeHei: “media is broken,” and too often a “scam.” Declaring the existing press fundamentally untrustworthy, of course, is hardly a new innovation in political history.
Authoritarian movements have long understood the usefulness of the argument: discredit the institutions producing information, then establish yourself as the credible replacement. The independent press becomes “corrupt”; your version becomes the cure. Axios seems to not have set out to reproduce Hitler’s or Trump’s traditions, but its founding mythology presents a strikingly familiar proposition: the media is broken, and we are here to fix it.
That might remain ordinary corporate branding were it not for the people behind the brand.
The Four Digits What Make the “Worthy”
To understand Axios, therefore, one must look beyond the bullet points and into the machine producing them—particularly the people shaping its corporate culture and foreign-policy coverage. Among the most important is co-founder and president Roy Schwartz, formerly a chief officer at Politico. Born in Israel in 1975, Schwartz has, according to his own biography, maintained deep connections with the country, including with a particular unit in the Israeli military with a very infamous set of 4 digits: Unit 8200.
The meme-makers online may be satisfied with that fact to stamp Schwartz with the “Propagandist” tag in red on his forehead, and they might be right: The blatant existence of the Israeli entity is based on claiming the truth and pointing the finger of deception on any detractors, and there seems to be similar comparison to make with how Axios presents itself, its business model and its corporate culture.
So beneath the minimalist logo, beneath the bullet points, beneath the comforting promise that everything has already been sorted into what is “worthy” and what is not, there is a rather un-minimal question about the machinery doing the sorting.
And when that machinery occupies such an influential position in American coverage of Israel, Palestine and wider West Asia, asking who built it—and what interests, experiences and relationships may shape its view of the region—is not exactly an unreasonable demand for “smart brevity.” It may, in fact, require reading more than 300 words.
For example, it may require reading the rapid changes in the oil and stock markets, considering there are multiple examples of massive changes in oil prices directly after Axios releases an “exclusive” report from the white through the correspondent with the most access in the history of the white house: Barak Ravid.
On May 6, just minutes before Axios released a report claiming that Iran and the US were close to signing a deal to end the war, anonymous stock market traders were spotted placing $920 million in short positions on crude oil, according to data by Unusual Whales, an online trading surveillance platform that monitors unusual market activity.
The “scoop” (a term Axios very much enjoys using), like almost all reports on West Asian news, particularly those related to the US and Israel’s relationship, was broken by Barak Ravid; Axios’ main correspondent to the White House—and one who, based on his consistent reporting on calls between US presidents and Israeli Prime Ministers, feels like he spends his time hiding in the oval office’s massive desk with his ear to the telephone.
Ravid is, surprise surprise! A former member of Israel’s elite Unit 8200 intelligence corps, with up to 6 years of service no less, switching from that to an exemplary media career in many Israeli media outlets, including Haaretz, and the Israeli government’s main propaganda news channel; Channel 14, where he spent time as, you guessed it! A White House correspondent…
His reporting consistently relies on “unnamed US officials,” and he has been described as “basically representing the American voice”, or, more precisely, “Trump’s Mouthpiece”. Owing to a very similar track record of market-shaking reports that allowed his friends to make millions on the oil market, a pattern that raises rather uncomfortable questions about who benefits when these “scoops” hit the wire.
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Source: Al-Manar English Website