Social Image Laundering

How could any South African journalist forget the coordinated “dirty campaign” unleashed on this country in 2016 and 2017 by the British PR firm Bell Pottinger? The scandal was not merely a lesson in unethical public relations, it was a case study in how disinformation can infiltrate and manipulate a nation through its media ecosystem.

We all know how that ended; with disgrace, public outrage, and the firm's collapse. And woo onto our colleagues in the media who run with whatever operatives at Bell Pottinger fed us, they must have missed lessons from Part Two: The News Factory of The Flat Earth News the book by award-winning British investigative journalist, Nick Davies.

It is with that history in mind that uSpiked’s BS detector chimed the moment we received an unsolicited email from another unfamiliar PR outfit. The email contained three pre-packaged press releases — but it was the second paragraph that stood out like a baited hook.

Having access to a former Director of Mossad is not an opportunity any journalist dismisses lightly. Such access is journalistic prime real estate; the type media outlets would pay for. uSpiked receives dozens of press releases daily, yet this one carried the distinct stench of a Bell Pottinger-style operation: a too-polished narrative designed for copy-and-paste publication. The last time South African newsrooms failed to triple-check such material, they became complicit in laundering propaganda. We were not going to repeat that failure.

We immediately responded to the sender - a Mr. Adir Alon, who identifies on LinkedIn as a GlobalPR & DM Communications Leader - expressing conditional interest. We requested the raw audio recordings and the photograph of Director Cohen taken at the said Israel Private Markets Summit (IPM) 2025, held at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation.

After promising to supply the requested photograph and the audio, Alon subsequently ghosted us. So we decided to look the sender up. We quickly tracked the email to The Spark Club that describes itself as “a leading tech marketing agency in Tel Aviv…”

While there is nothing wrong being a PR firm, Alon’s failure was evident from the second paragraph of the cover email that accompanied the three sets of Press Releases. It read, in bold typeface [intentionally emphasized - editor]

“You have previously covered former Mossad Director Yossi Cohen, and I am reaching out with exclusive material from his comprehensive briefing at the IPM Summit 2025, held yesterday, October 28, at the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation in Tel Aviv.” The key word was ‘exclusive’.

The first half of that sentence was false; and demonstrably so. Yes, Yossi Cohen's profile is in our secure database, as are those of most other foreign intelligence chiefs. But uSpiked has never published a report mentioning him. If Alon was comfortable fabricating our own records back to us, it became immediately clear what his client expected: uncritical regurgitation. This was not outreach, it was manipulation.

why uSpiked?

Why would Leader Private Capital (Alon's client) seek to use uSpiked as a mouthpiece to launder their message? Regardless of how many other outlets he may have approached in South Africa, One doesn't have to be a political scientist to see through the intentions. The only two pieces we have ever published that may be deemed critical of Tel Aviv in resent past were Israeli teachers' racist WhatsApp chat caught by pupils and Unnecessary Violence.

In reporting, cultivation of sources is a vital tool for Journalists and the higher placed sources is literally pure gold. At uSpiked we have access to sources some of whom are quite highly placed; in governments or corporations. Within our internal system we have contacts that we categorised as ‘highly prized’ whose details are kept in an encrypted air gapped computer. Among those whose details are stored in this vault are confidential sources who expect their identities to be protected. So when we got contacted with a possibility of having access to a possible future head of Government, the first thing we checked was whether the individual being peddled to us is within our internal database of ‘key people’ and the answer was affirmative. Then the question became, how did this particular peddler know we would be interested in their ‘product’ and why now? That is how this unsolicited email triggered our investigation.

The unsolicited approach we are telling hereunder failed uSpiked’s Editorial Security & Integrity Guidelines. Normally, we would simply trash the email after such failure and forget about it, but it became vital to warn our readers of the attempt.

Picking uSpiked was strategic and well-calculated. In South African media ecosystem, uSpiked’s metrics isn’t comparable to those of News24, The Daily Maverick or Groundup. But the genius at The Spark Club identified our unique demographic audience; activists, academics, journalists, policy influencers and civil-society organisers, and that’s whom they were keen to reach. The Spark Club intention is to target ‘opinion-shaper ecosystems’ first, not mass audiences, to influence the narrative upstream.

But there are other not-so hidden reasons for picking uSpiked; to create internal editorial division, to dilute the narrative with counter-arguments, to undermine our niche audience trust by later claiming influence. In PR-speak it’s called ‘divide-and-discredit tactic’.

Another reason would be to simply use uSpiked as their weather-balloon to see whether the argument would resonate with us.  

plausible deniability

The utilization of a PR firm working for Leader Private Capital creates enough opaque distance from Netanyahu’s government so political leadership in Tel Aviv would simply shrug their shoulders with “we had nothing to do with that…”

It did not take us long to connect this attempted narrative-placement to the wider geopolitical context. South Africa’s ongoing genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice had triggered a coordinated global image-rehabilitation effort by Tel Aviv and its proxies. Part of that strategy has been to brand the South African government ‘antisemitic’; an attempt to delegitimize Pretoria’s legal action rather than address its substance.

These attempts have not however stopped other countries from seeking to sign up to intervene in the case in support of Pretoria.

Tel Aviv and entities willingly carrying water on its behalf, such as Leader Private Capital — appear desperate to divert global attention from the devastation inflicted on Gazans by the IDF. Let us be unequivocal: uSpikeddoes not support the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack, and we condemn it fully.

But condemnation of Hamas cannot, must not, and will never justify the systematic targeting, displacement, and killing of civilians in Gaza.

Most chilling to us as a newsroom, is the direct assault on the press.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 189 journalists and media workers have been killed by IDF arms since October 7, 2023. If even just a fraction of those journalists were alive today to continue their reporting from Gaza, Alon would not have needed uSpiked to amplify a corporate PR narrative from Tel Aviv.

The list of media casualties reads like an obituary roll of entire newsrooms; particularly at Al Jazeera, which has lost leading journalists to Israeli attacks. A few names among the many:

• Samer Abu Daqqa – Al Jazeera cameraman killed by an Israeli missile strike on a school in Khan Yunis, Dec 15, 2023.
• Hamza al-Dahdouh – Al Jazeera journalist killed in an airstrike on Jan 7, 2024.
• Anas al-Sharif – Killed in a direct assault on an Al Jazeera team inside a hospital tent.
• Mahmoud Ikee – Al Jazeera Arabic cameraman killed on July 20, 2024.
• Ismail al-Ghoul & Rami al-Rifee – Correspondent and cameraman killed in the same attack on July 31, 2024.
• Fadi al-Wahidi – Shot in the neck by Israeli forces on Oct 9, 2024; left paralyzed.
• Ahmed al-Louh – Killed in an airstrike on Dec 15, 2024.

This is not collateral damage. This is the silencing of the press. No sanitiser, no PR campaign, no glossy summit can cleanse the stain of targeted attacks on journalists and their families. These killings deprive the public of truthful information and rob media organisations of irreplaceable human capital. Some outlets may not survive the losses.

As for Yossi Cohen, he is not merely a former Mossad director he is positioning himself as Israel’s potential future Prime Minister. Access to him may be valuable for any journalist. But Mr. Alon’s failure to provide raw audio, coupled with a press release prescribing “selected quotes to be used”, was telling.

uSpiked does not publish pre-curated propaganda. We do not accept instructions on what we may or may not quote. We do not operate as an information-laundering factory.

Our stance is firm: no access is worth our integrity. Contacted for comment, Terrence Manase Department of Justice and Constitutional Development’s Ministerial spokesperson told us; “the Department has not received any formal communication or complaint through official channels regarding the matter As such, we are not in a position to comment.”