It needs to be remembered too, that unlike with Ukraine, Legacy media coverage of Israel v. Hamas is reasonably balanced.

Mark Penn’s Stagwell was commissioned by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs to chart a path out of global isolation.

The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs commissioned an American polling firm to perform a sweeping battery of surveys and focus groups, coupled with message-testing, aimed at rehabilitating Israel’s image in both the United States and Europe. The work remains ongoing, but a preliminary report from the firm was leaked to Drop Site News by a source with direct access to it.

The work is being performed by Stagwell Global, a firm founded by notorious political operative Mark Penn, who serves as the company’s chairman and CEO. Penn donated $100,000 to AIPAC after October 7, 2023, and his ties to Likud date back to his work on Menachem Begin’s 1981 campaign for prime minister. Stagwell is also on the verge of getting a no-bid contract from the Trump administration to study American attitudes toward vaccines.

The survey and focus group work attempts to discern what the public knows about the ongoing assault on Gaza and what its various attitudes toward Israel currently are.

It is unclear how much the research is costing the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA), but the combination of focus groups and surveys make it the type of project that is usually a pricey endeavor. The MoFA was recently gifted an historic increase of an additional $150 million for its budget, with the aim of improving Israel’s image worldwide amid the ongoing genocide.

The study also includes a “Phase 3,” in which research subjects in Europe and the U.S. are shown videos with different messages to test which propaganda is most effective at moving the dial. For instance, one propaganda video they showed research participants involved a “college student with a ‘Free Palestine’ sign who lowers it as she hears more messages about Israel and the conflict until she throws it away,” according to the report.

The survey asked people in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Spain, and France how many people they believed Israel had killed in Gaza, and what portion of those were civilians. Respondents in all the countries overwhelming said that those killed were “mostly civilians.”

Read the rest