By Exjani Rojas —
When a news reporter colleague posted “Jews are vermin and cockroaches,” anchor Stella Inger Escobedo knew it was time to quit.
“It’s always hidden behind free speech: ‘We’re a free speech newsroom.’ And I said to what end? So that my children will pay the price because they’re cockroaches and they’re vermin?” Escobedo says. “It’s ok to kill a cockroach.”
Like most people Stella Escobedo was surprised that just hours after Hamas killed and raped its way into Israel on Oct. 7, college students blamed Israel, calling for genocide and justifying rape. Veteran reporters, she says, knew that Qatar and the Chinese Communist Party had funded the indoctrination of professors and students to be antisemitic.
But as she continued reporting, eventually she saw antisemitism invade the newsroom. The once unbiased press was swayed by the Free Palestine propaganda. Hamas‘ casualty figures, bloated and skewed to overreport civilian deaths, were cited uncritically. By contrast, when Iran reported deaths of protesters, news organizations qualified the stats as “provided by the Iranian government.”
Escobedo is a Jew from Uzbekistan who grew up under communism before immigrating to the United States, where she was told there was no antisemitism. Suddenly, as a result of propaganda pushed through the universities, it showed up in her news room.
“The 1930s Germany demonization of my people showed up on my doorstep,” Escobedo says. “Propaganda started to become so bad it started to infiltrate the Right.” (Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens started calling Israel “demonic.”)
Stella worked for CBS and ABC doing local news and then anchoring before moving to the conservative One America News Network. She had confronted her boss when the colleague spouted antisemitism. She qualified his response as tepid.
“It’s the CCP influence, the Qatari influence,” Escobedo says. “It’s the Middle Eastern studies that they threw in these universities and our young generation has been brainwashed.”
Related content: Why liberals rejoiced over the killing of Jews on Oct. 7, you can now get political views from Legos, Bari Weiss tries to restore traditional news media. Sources: JNS, others.
