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The Washington Post (8/5/26) wrote that El-Sayed “carries heavy baggage into the general election”—and cited four policy positions that are all supported by a majority of voters.
It’s sad commentary on US media when two national newspapers, historically representing different poles of the American establishment, appear to share editorial writers. When it comes to the nomination of progressive Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary, the Washington Post (8/5/26) and Wall Street Journal (8/5/26) editorial boards practically plagiarized each other. It’s further testament that the Post is no longer known as the paper that took down Richard Nixon; rather, it’s a mouthpiece for the oligarchy that has very much taken the side of the current administration.
Both papers fear that El-Sayed’s victory is another notch in the wave of victories by the left: Zohran Mamdani taking the New York City mayoralty last year, the Democratic Socialists of America primary victories in June, and now El-Sayed—who is not a DSA candidate but who is, as the Cold Warriors might call him, a fellow traveller.
‘Radical views’
Just look at how both boards reject the idea that El-Sayed distances himself from the organized socialist movement, with the Journal condemning his “radical views” and the Post bemoaning his “heavy baggage.”
The Post:
While El-Sayed rejects the “socialist” label, he campaigned on Medicare-for-all, opposition to Israel, raising taxes on the wealthy and abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The Journal:
He continues to support Medicare for All. He favors a wealth tax and an enormous expansion in federal entitlements for child care and more. He wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, saying the agency “is about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets.”… Mr. El-Sayed wants to cut off all US military aid to Israel, which he accuses of genocide in Gaza.
Editorialists might not like these ideas, but it is clear voters do. Both government-assured healthcare (WITI, 12/14/25) and taxing the wealthy (Pew Research, 3/19/25) are supported by large majorities. And they’re not minor concerns. From KFF (7/16/26):
Healthcare costs top the list of voters’ healthcare priorities for the midterm elections, with half (51%) of all voters and more than half of Democratic (60%) and independent (55%) voters saying the issue is extremely important for candidates to talk about.
It doesn’t cross the minds of those in Beltway and Manhattan media bubbles that Michiganders are well-acquainted with their neighbors in Canada who, like those living in many other industrialized democracies, enjoy universal healthcare.
The papers also forget some history. Single-payer health insurance is far from a radical idea: A bipartisan group of senators in 1970, with some support from the Nixon administration, explored “national health insurance, a plan to cover the medical needs and costs of all Americans” (New York Times, 9/22/70). Health reform’s champion at the time, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), “wanted the government to be the nation’s single-payer for healthcare” (WBUR, 8/25/20). If anything, El-Sayed and his supporters are channeling the party’s former glory on this, rather than importing some fringe ideology.
Mainstream positions
To the Wall Street Journal (8/5/26), El-Sayed is an “articulate” man “with radical views” who should “maybe hold off on French Revolution 2.0.”
Trump’s brutal war against immigrants polls horribly (YouGov, 7/21/26; The Hill, 8/3/26). From YouGov (3/3/26):
Support for abolishing ICE has hit a new high in this week’s Economist/YouGov poll. Half (50%) of Americans now somewhat or strongly support abolishing ICE. Only 39% oppose abolishing the agency.
El-Sayed believes ICE is “about normalizing paramilitary force on our streets”? Anyone who has paid attention to what has happened in Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles this last year knows that this is an accurate assessment.
“Opposition to Israel” is also a mainstream position. More Americans sympathize with Palestinians than with Israelis, according to Gallup (2/27/26), and 62% have an unfavorable view of the Israeli government (Pew, 7/9/26). From Al Jazeera (5/21/26):
A new poll from the New York Times/Siena has found that nearly three-quarters of voters aligned with the Democratic Party oppose US military aid to Israel, up from 45% three years ago.
That Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians is the consensus view of global human rights groups like Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, as well as the International Association of Genocide Scholars and a UN Independent Commission of Inquiry.
That both papers think these moderate positions are “out there” shows that someone here is out of touch, but it’s not the Democratic primary voters of Michigan.
‘Path out of the wilderness’
According to AP (7/19/26), AIPAC spent $30 million on Stevens’ campaign. Her total dark-money haul reached some $60 million total, compared to El-Sayed’s $3.5 million. El-Sayed outraised Stevens in individual donations, $14.5 million to $11.9 million (Al Jazeera, 8/2/26).
Then, both papers worry that Trump’s disastrous reign could allow voters to elect a man like El-Sayed, or that he could be so distasteful to the independents of Michigan that he could keep the Senate in Republican hands next year. The Post:
Trump is so unpopular right now, and the national environment is so favorable for Democrats, that El-Sayed might win despite himself. If he loses, and the GOP controls the Senate for the last two years of Trump’s term as a result, it could teach Democrats an important lesson heading into 2028. Pragmatism, not radicalism, offers the best path out of the wilderness.
The Journal:
Mr. El-Sayed is counting on anti-Donald Trump fury to unite Democrats despite his radical views…. Nominating a leftist could cost the party a Senate majority that is very much in reach. If [Republican Senate nominee Mike] Rogers wins, one lesson will be that Mr. El-Sayed was too far left to win in a swing state even in what is likely to be an excellent Democratic year. Democrats might rethink this year’s headlong rush left as they consider the 2028 presidential race.
Once again, the prose here is so similar that it makes one wonder why we must suffer through multiple newspapers at all—it’s like Walmart and Whole Foods, conservative and liberal-coded respectively, selling the same parasite-infected lettuce.
The Michigan primary race was notable for a huge amount of pro-Israel spending meant to stop El-Sayed—an attempted repeat of the lobby’s successful defeat of New York DSA congressmember Jamaal Bowman two years ago (FAIR.org, 6/28/24). As the AP (7/19/26) reported, AIPAC and “its affiliated groups have spent close to $30 million backing” El-Sayed’s opponent Congresswoman Haley Stevens, “their largest investment ever in a single race.”
For what it’s worth, Al Jazeera’s calculation (8/2/26) was more damning:
Federal Election Commission records show that AIPAC and other political action committees have spent more than $54 million to help Stevens. A dark-money group called the Center for Democratic Priorities has also spent about $6.5 million on ads supporting Stevens, according to local media reports—increasing the grand total to more than $60 million.
That’s actually the one notable difference between the two editorials: The Journal at least mentioned AIPAC’s heavy spending, while the Post did not. There was a time, before Amazon founder Jeff Bezos turned the Post ideologically toward the Trump administration (New Republic, 11/3/25), when the paper regularly attacked the influence of big money in American elections (Washington Post, 1/9/12, 4/22/12, 2/4/14, 10/12/14, 1/20/20). Times change.
The top Senate Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, didn’t publicly endorse Stevens, but reportedly pushed donors toward her campaign (New York Times, 6/5/26). She also had the backing of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Former President Barack Obama didn’t publicly endorse Stevens, but “AIPAC-linked” supporters “spent $5 million airing an advertisement nearly 4,000 times that features Obama praising her work as chief of staff for the US Auto Rescue Task Force during the 2008 financial crisis” (CNN, 7/17/26), giving the impression that he was behind her.
If by “Democrats” the papers mean party leadership, the top brass already chose Stevens–they don’t need any editorial encouragement to avoid the progressive option.
Beltway Risk
AP‘s headline (7/9/26) didn’t age well.
But if the editorials, when they admonished “Democrats,” meant the everyday people who chose El-Sayed, then they’re making a clear case against voters having small-d democratic agency. No, little voters in Grand Rapids or Kalamazoo, you can’t vote for what you believe is best for your job, health and bank account. You have to assume other people (who are in much the same boat as you) are going to vote against their interests–and vote the way they would.
Voters have been told repeatedly that the only way to counter the extreme rise of MAGA is to forgo socialist candidates like Bernie Sanders and opt for establishment centrists like Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris (Mother Jones, 12/16/16; Fox Business, 2/24/20; FAIR.org, 10/25/25). Certainly, in the last 10 years, the Republican base’s move from the old guard to more radical ideas haven’t hampered the party’s results at the ballot box. After these Democratic leadership failures to win power, maybe voters are interested in a different strategy.
Not only did the editorial boards not acknowledge that El-Sayed’s platform of single-payer healthcare and taxing the rich was appealing to voting people, they could not admit that the centrist politics they push as an alternative were a turnoff. Stevens’ enormous corporate warchest couldn’t make up for the fact that people, as one voter put it (AP, 7/9/26), “don’t want a moderate,” and instead “want somebody who’s going to come in and effect change.”
In other words, for the Post and Journal editorial boards, politics and voting aren’t about how people express themselves and their needs and interests. Rather, they’re an ongoing game of Beltway Risk, in which the needs and views of living, breathing people are just pieces on a board.
Late in the evening of October 1, the Israeli Navy intercepted the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF), a fleet of more than 50 vessels that had set off in August and September from ports around the world. The flotilla carried humanitarian aid and hundreds of activists determined to break the illegal Israeli siege of Gaza. Video footage from that night shows armed soldiers climbing aboard the boats, confronting the unarmed activists who sat in a circle wearing life vests with their hands raised.
Despite having all the elements of a major news story—and a dramatic one—media coverage of Israel’s interception of the GSF has been patchy and notably lacking in key details. Establishment media omitted crucial context connecting this incident to earlier events, overlooked important legal conversations, both-sidesed the delivery of humanitarian aid during a famine, and largely ignored reports of mistreatment endured by detained activists and journalists.
‘Unclear origin’The Washington Post (10/2/25) quoted activists saying the Israeli blockade was “illegal,” and Israel saying it was “lawful,” but gave readers no clue which was true.
In the coverage that followed the seizure (10/1/25–10/3/25), leading outlets failed to frame the seizure of the flotilla as part of Israel’s longstanding efforts to block similar missions (FAIR.org, 6/5/25, 7/1/10)—including its multiple drone strikes on the GSF throughout September.
Neither the New York Times (10/1/25) nor the Wall Street Journal (10/1/25) made any reference to the drone strikes. While both the BBC (10/2/25) and the Washington Post (10/2/25) briefly touched on them, they carefully avoided implicating Israel and leaned instead into vague language. For example, the BBC stated that the strikes were of “unclear origin,” omitting its own earlier reporting (9/10/25) in which a weapons expert noted that a device recovered after the second attack had features “common but not exclusive to some models of Israeli hand grenades.”
Even when news broke in early October that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had ordered the drone strikes, corporate media largely ignored it, with CBS (10/3/25) one of the few outlets to report the story.
Similarly, the New York Times article neglected to mention Israel’s longstanding history of obstructing humanitarian flotillas. Other outlets referenced past interceptions, but only in a sentence or two, failing to convey the full scope of the pattern. For example, the BBC report simply said that “Israel has already blocked two attempts by activists to deliver aid by ship to Gaza, in June and July,” overlooking the fact that such actions have been occurring for decades (Quds, 10/3/25).
‘Contempt for legally binding orders’Mammad Ismayilov (Politics Today, 10/7/25): “Israel’s intervention cannot be justified under any recognized legal exception and therefore constitutes a clear violation of international law.”
The interception of the GSF has been denounced by a number of human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, the International Federation for Human Rights, and the World Organization Against Torture. According to a press release from Amnesty International (10/2/25):
By continuing to actively block vital aid to a population against whom Israel is committing genocide, including by inflicting famine, Israel is once again demonstrating its utter contempt for the legally binding orders of the International Court of Justice, and its own obligations as the occupying power to ensure Palestinians in Gaza have access to sufficient food and lifesaving humanitarian assistance.
This sentiment has been echoed by international law experts. In an article for Politics Today (10/7/25), legal scholar Mammad Ismayilov wrote that Israel’s naval blockade
must comply with International Humanitarian Law (IHL). A blockade that harms civilians and undermines their living conditions is a clear violation of IHL. The Gaza blockade deliberately subjects the Palestinian population to mass starvation, meeting the the criteria of Article 2(c) of the Genocide Convention, which prohibits deliberately inflicting conditions intended to destroy a group, either wholly or in part. Therefore, the Gaza blockade qualifies as genocide under international law.
Ismayilov also noted:
The Israeli Navy intercepted all of the vessels, seizing the ships and detaining hundreds of activists while they were still in international waters, approximately 70–75 nautical miles (130–139 km) off the coast of Gaza. This action, occurring so far from the coast, challenges the fundamental principle of international law that guarantees the freedom of navigation on the high seas.
Likewise, in an article for the Conversation (10/2/25), David Rothwell, professor of international law at the Australian National University, cited breaches of the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, describing the interceptions as “a clear violation of international law.”
One of the few major media outlets to cover this extensive legal discourse in any depth was the Associated Press (10/2/25). The piece cited three experts on international law, all Israeli—two of whom defended the legality of seizing the flotilla, while the other condemned it. Another legal rights group based in Israel, qualified as “representing the activists,” called the interception “a brazen violation of international law.”
Ample space for Israeli justificationThe Washington Post (10/2/25) included a tweet from the Israeli Foreign Ministry referring to more than 40 boats carrying some 440 humanitarian activists as “Greta and her friends.”
News outlets took care to balance the humanitarian activists trying to bring food to a starving population with defenders of a genocidal regime. For example, coverage in the New York Times (10/1/25) and the Washington Post (10/2/25) gave roughly equal space to the perspective of the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the GSF. The Times dedicated four paragraphs each to the Israeli Foreign Ministry and the GSF, while the Post allotted four paragraphs and a tweet to Israel, and six paragraphs to the GSF. This type of framing reflects a longstanding and well-documented tendency in corporate media to normalize and rationalize the most extreme Israeli actions (FAIR.org, 6/18/25).
As mentioned above, the Washington Post incorporated a tweet from the Israeli Foreign Ministry, featuring a video of a soldier handing Thunberg water and a coat, with the caption:
Already several vessels of the Hamas-Sumud flotilla have been safely stopped and their passengers are being transferred to an Israeli port. Greta and her friends are safe and healthy.
The New York Times, CNN (10/2/25), NBC (10/1/25) and BBC (10/2/25) included this and other similar quotes from Israeli officials, with the BBC noting that “Israel claims it is attempting to stop those supplies from falling into the hands of Hamas.” The Wall Street Journal (10/1/25) even seemed to justify the naval blockade itself, writing that “Israel has controlled the waters around Gaza since 2009, when it declared a naval blockade to stop what it said was a pipeline for weapons and extremists.”
Treated as ‘supporters of terrorism’Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (AP via PBS, 10/5/25) said flotilla detainees “should get a good feel for the conditions in Ketziot prison”—a facility notorious for torture.
Following their return from Israel, many GSF participants have alleged mistreatment and torture at the hands of Israeli forces during their detainment. Al Jazeera (10/4/25, 10/5/25, 10/7/25) extensively documented these claims across multiple articles, detailing incidents such as Thunberg reportedly being “dragged on the ground” and “forced to kiss the Israeli flag.” Other detainees were allegedly blindfolded, zip-tied, denied medication and access to legal representation, and subjected to intimidation with firearms and guard dogs, amongst other abuses.
Most corporate media have either ignored that story or, as in the case of the New York Times (10/6/25), offered limited coverage. The Times omitted specific claims entirely, instead quoting Thunberg—“I could talk for a very, very long time about our mistreatment and abuses in our imprisonment, trust me, but that is not the story”—and leaving it at that.
The Times also misleadingly framed the detainees as “on a hunger strike while in custody,” which, although true for some participants, according to an Instagram post from the GSF, obscured allegations from many activists that they were scarcely fed, and forced to drink toilet water during their imprisonment.
The Times conspicuously left out quotes from far-right Israeli National Security Minister Ben-Gvir (AP via PBS, 10/5/25), who said that he was “proud that we treat the ‘flotilla activists’ as supporters of terrorism. Anyone who supports terrorism is a terrorist and deserves the conditions of terrorists.”
More accurate coverage appeared in a handful of other news outlets—including AP (10/5/25), CNN (10/6/25) and the Guardian (10/6/25)—although none offered reporting as thorough as Al Jazeera’s.
‘Targeting international journalists’The Committee to Protect Journalists noted that Israel is “engaging in the deadliest and most deliberate effort to kill and silence journalists that CPJ has ever documented” (Objective , 10/8/25).
Moreover, there has been limited reporting on the presence and treatment of journalists aboard the GSF and similar flotillas, with many outlets overlooking the reporters’ detainment and alleged torture. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) was one of the only organizations to address the detainment of journalists during the interception of the GSF, noting that at least 20 journalists were imprisoned by Israeli authorities.
In a press release (10/8/25), RSF highlighted accounts of mistreatment endured by these journalists, and drew an important connection between this moment and Israel’s systematic attacks against the press:
The Israeli army has already killed over 210 journalists in Gaza and the authorities continue obstructing press freedom, now targeting international journalists, who are already barred from entering the territory. RSF calls for the protection of these reporters and all Palestinian journalists, and repeats its demand that the Gaza Strip be opened to foreign media.
No major US media outlets have published reports focusing on the detainment and mistreatment of journalists aboard the GSF. Even the October 8 internment by Israeli authorities of Emily Wilder, an American reporter for Jewish Currents who was aboard the Conscience with the Freedom Flotilla, hasn’t gotten any attention from major media. Only a handful of smaller publications, such as the Objective (10/8/25) and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (10/9/25), have covered the story. (Wilder was released on October 10.)
While this silence is perhaps unsurprising, given Wilder’s fraught history with corporate media (FAIR.org, 5/22/21), and the broader tendency of leading outlets to marginalize independent coverage of Palestine (FAIR.org, 3/28/25), it nonetheless underscores the disturbing pattern of bias and hypocrisy in media coverage related to Gaza.
A FAIR study found that CNN’s primetime coverage of the Los Angeles anti-ICE protests in early June rarely included the voices of the protesters themselves. Instead, the network’s sources were overwhelmingly current and former government and law enforcement officials. The resulting coverage rarely took issue with Trump’s desire to silence the people who were defending their undocumented neighbors—but mainly debated his decision to deploy the California National Guard to do so.
FAIR recorded the sources that appeared in the 5–10 pm timeslot during two key days, June 9 and 10, of CNN’s television coverage of the Los Angeles protests; the shows included were the Lead with Jake Tapper, Erin Burnett OutFront, Anderson Cooper 360 and the Source With Kaitlan Collins.
The sources were categorized by current or former occupation, and on whether they were a featured guest—who typically field multiple interview-style questions from an anchor—or simply a soundbite. Sources that made multiple appearances were counted once for each segment they appeared in. (CNN’s in-house “analysts” or “commentators” were counted as featured guests to reflect their significant impact on the perspectives shared on the shows.)
Out of 85 total sources across the eight broadcasts, only five were protesters, appearing on just three shows. None of the 47 featured guests were protesters or community or immigrant advocates.
By far the most frequent sources were current or former US government officials, with 55 appearances—a whopping 65% of total sources. Thirteen additional sources were law enforcement, and five were current or former military. Together, these official sources accounted for 86% of all appearances. (There were also three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists.)
Of featured guest and analyst interviews, current or former government officials dominated at 49% (23 out of 47). These sources were given the most time to present their perspectives, shaping the narrative around the protests and the government responses. Another 11 featured guests were law enforcement and two were military, so official sources accounted for 77% of all such interviews. The three journalists, two lawyers and two partisan strategists made up the remaining featured guests.
‘Verbally at least hostile’CNN‘s Kyung Lah (6/9/25) covers protests at LA’s Federal Building—while giving no sign of talking to any protesters.
CNN’s made-for-TV, on-the-ground style of protest coverage in the days following the Ambiance Apparel and Home Depot ICE raids felt little different from when Anderson Cooper stands around in a raincoat during a hurricane. Only this time, CNN reporters were braving an uncontrollable storm of Angelenos.
Much like Cooper’s coat, CNN senior investigative correspondent Kyung Lah (Erin Burnett OutFront, 6/9/25) donned protective goggles—useful should she have encountered tear gas, but also undoubtedly a dramatic flourish perfect for one of CNN’s 30-second TV spots.
That CNN was primarily interested in drama rather than helping viewers understand the protests became abundantly clear as—even with her protective goggles—Lah made no apparent effort to interview any protesters as she and CNN anchor Erin Burnett stood in front of LA’s federal detention center, where federal agents, LAPD and the California National Guard were in a standoff with demonstrators. Instead, they kept a close eye on every thrown water bottle, expressing concern about the crowd’s increasingly “young” demographic as the day went on. “This is a much younger crowd, certainly, verbally at least, Erin, hostile,” Lah reported.
The only protest voices that CNN’s audience heard from throughout both days of primetime coverage came in the form of two brief soundbites captured by correspondent Jason Carroll (Lead, 6/9/25) at a protest for the release of arrested SEIU leader David Huerta the morning of June 9.
Araceli Martinez, the only named protester in the study period with a soundbite on CNN ( 6/9/25).
Araceli Martinez, the only protester identified by name, offered a call to action for all Americans, arguing that the Trump administration’s immigration raids are a threat to “the rights of all people, not just the immigrants, but all of us.” That soundbite reaired on Erin Burnett Outfront and Anderson Cooper 360, both on June 9.
Another protester at the demonstration demanding Huerta’s release had this to say, with the soundbite reairing on Anderson Cooper 360, also on June 9:
We are part of that immigrant community that has made L.A. great, that has made the state of California the fourth largest economy in the world today. So, we have a message for President Donald Trump. Get the National Guardsmen out of here.
Multiple times during the first day studied, Lah held up that union-led protest as a standard of message discipline and nonviolent tactics that those outside the federal building, later in the day, weren’t measuring up to. The folks at the earlier protest were “a very different slice of Los Angeles than what I am seeing” at the federal building, Lah said. The key word there is “seeing,” as she did not interview a single protester on camera.
‘We do very good here with unrest’CNN‘s Jake Tapper (6/10/25) interviews Rep. Adam Smith, who agrees that “you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement.”
Meanwhile, CNN brought on multiple featured guests who framed protesters as violent and law enforcement as the ones pushing for accountability—despite the fact that reported injuries of civilians by law enforcement far outnumbered those of law enforcement by protesters (FAIR.org, 6/13/25). LA District Attorney Nathan Hochman (OutFront, 6/10/25), for example, stated that he would work to “punish” all protesters who engage in “illegal conduct.”
Similarly, California Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis (Source, 6/10/25) warned “anyone who goes out and is protesting in a way that is not peaceful…state and local and regional law enforcement will hold people accountable.”
Rep. Adam Smith told Jake Tapper (Lead, 6/10/25): “I don’t disagree that you should meet any sort of violent protest with law enforcement, but there’s no evidence in this case that the LAPD wasn’t doing that.” Once you parse the double negatives, it’s clear that Smith, like the rest of CNN‘s official sources, accepted the characterization of protesters as violent and argued that the response of California law enforcement was perfectly appropriate.
Most of these state and local government sources were responding to questions about Trump calling in the National Guard and Marines; they were defending the local law enforcement response and challenging Trump’s decision.
CNN‘s Erin Burnett (6/9/25) interviews LA County Sheriff Robert Luna, who assures her his forces were “very good here with unrest.”
One of Burnett’s featured guests, for instance, was LA County Sheriff Robert Luna (OutFront, 6/9/25)—the leader of a police force that community activists say routinely collaborates with federal immigration raids (Democracy Now!, 6/9/25), and had just sparred with demonstrators in the Home Depot parking lot in Compton following the failed ICE raid there (New York Times, 6/14/25).
The primary focus of Burnett’s line of questioning was geared at exposing the political nature of Trump’s calling in the national guard:
Just a very simple question. Do you need the Marines? Do you need the National Guard right now? Or if you were looking at this situation and assessing it as sheriff of LA County, would you say you do not need them?
That’s certainly a critical line of questioning to get at the issue of federal overreach. But Burnett failed to similarly question (or even acknowledge) the violence by local law enforcement—which, by the time of Burnett’s broadcast, included 24 attacks on journalists with weapons like pepper balls, rubber bullets and tear gas canisters, according to Reporters Without Borders (FAIR.org, 6/13/25).
Instead, she left unchallenged Luna’s claims that “if they’re peacefully protesting, they’ll be allowed to do that,” that his utmost priority was “keeping our community safe,” and that his police force does “very good here with unrest.”
In doing so, Burnett framed the story as a question of whether putting down protests against sweeping raids of undocumented workers was the responsibility of federal troops or local law enforcement—rather than questioning why such protests were being met with force, and why local officials weren’t doing more to protect their immigrant communities.
Redefining safetyDemocracy Now! (6/9/25) broadened the conversation by allowing protesters like Ron Gochez to take part in it.
Meanwhile, the protesters that received such little consideration from Burnett and CNN could have contributed to a very different definition of safety for CNN’s viewers. Ron Gochez, a community organizer and social studies teacher, who was one of the protesters at the ICE raid on Ambiance Apparel, described on Democracy Now! (6/9/25) how the protests have managed to protect people despite the efforts of local and federal officials:
When we have these protests, they have been peaceful. But when the repression comes from the state, whether it’s the sheriffs, the LAPD or, on Saturday, for example, in Paramount, California, it was the Border Patrol, it was brutal violence….
But what they didn’t think was going to happen was that the people would resist and would fight back. And that’s exactly what happened in Paramount and in Compton, California, where for eight-and-a-half hours, the people combatted in the streets against the Border Patrol…. They had to retreat because of the fierce resistance of the community. And the hundreds of workers that were in the factories around them were able to escape. They were able to go to their cars and go home. That was only thanks to the resistance that allowed them to go home that night.
The Trump administration is intent on testing just how far it can go to crush political dissent, and it’s clear most Democratic politicians and local law enforcement are not going to bat for the most vulnerable communities in its crosshairs. Angelenos know they are fighting for the rights of all of us who reside in the US. But CNN’s refusal to have them on air to discuss their struggle and explain their tactics makes it all the more difficult to raise public awareness. Pretending to challenge the deployment of federal troops, CNN normalizes police violence and silences those truly protecting their communities.
Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Jim Naureckas about placing blame for Trump for the November 8, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241108HollarNaureckas.mp3Janine Jackson: Of the many things to be discussed about what just happened, surely the role of corporate news media is critical. Some issues are legend: Horserace over substance, ignoring actual popular opinion that doesn’t serve major-party talking points, top-down sourcing that ensures that those most harmed by social policies are not at the table when responses are discussed.
But there’s also something about the role of elite media in this election that needs some illuminating as we try to move forward. My guests have just written the first of no doubt many pieces about media’s role. I’m joined by FAIR’s senior analyst Julie Hollar from Brooklyn, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas here in studio. Welcome back to CounterSpin, both of you.
Jim Naureckas: Thanks for having us on.
Julie Hollar: Thank you, Janine.
FAIR.org (10/30/24)
JJ: Well, Jim, the Washington Post’s non-endorsement was a pretend silence that actually said a lot. But we know that most outlets would not stand up and yell, “Donald Trump is our guy.” So we have to think deeper than these once-in-four-years endorsements about how elite news media, still labeled liberal by very many, can grease the wheels of something like what just happened.
JN: Yeah, I do think that the non-endorsement was an important moment in the election. By saying, “We’re not going to take a position between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris,” they’re saying these are two acceptable positions that you can take. And, obviously, a lot of people took the Donald Trump position, so I think that did have more impact than the expected Kamala Harris endorsement would’ve had.
JJ: But when you look at the issues and the other things apart from the election per se, when you look at the way media covered particular issues, you found something that you found important.
JN: I think that there’s an interesting parallel between the Trump campaign strategy and the business strategy of corporate media; there was kind of a synergy there. I don’t think that MAGA Republicans and corporate media have the same goals, necessarily, but I think they share a strategy, which is “fear sells.”
FAIR.org (11/8/24)
I think that media have long understood that fear is a great way to catch and hold an audience’s attention, because we are really evolutionarily attuned to things that are dangerous. Our brains tell us to pay extra attention to those things. And so news media are prone to describe issues in terms of, “Here’s something scary, here’s something that’s going to hurt you.”
And that is also the strategy that Donald Trump has hit on. His campaign ads were all about fear, all about the danger of Democrats and the Biden/Harris administration. And he played on a lot of issues that corporate media have used to sell their papers, to sell their TV programs.
Immigration is one of the most obvious ones: Corporate media have treated immigration as, “Here’s something that you should be afraid about. There’s this flood of immigrants coming over the border. It’s a border crisis.” Particularly since the beginning of the Biden administration, this has been a drumbeat.
And there’s been a lot of distortions of numbers, of presenting this as some kind of unprecedented wave of migrants, that is not true. But by presenting it as this brand new threat, they’re able to sell more papers than they would otherwise have done–or sell clicks, I guess is what they’re in the business of now.
And so Trump was able to piggyback on a picture that had already been painted for him by corporate media, that these immigrants are something you should be afraid of. And he was the person who was promising to do something about them.
FAIR.org (7/25/24)
JJ: And it built on years, also, of crime coverage. The way that immigration and crime were stirred up together, I think, is also part of that fear mongering that you’re talking about.
JN: When you look at crime statistics, the striking thing is how much lower crime is now than it was 30 years ago, 40 years ago. It was at a much higher level than it is today, but that is not a story that is going to sell news to people. You want to sell people with the idea that, “You’re in danger, read our news report to find out how.”
And so even though crime is both historically down from earlier decades, and it’s been down over the course of the Biden administration, that is not the story that people have been told. The story is that, “Here’s some scary crimes, and what are we going to do about this crime crisis?” And, again, Donald Trump was able to use that picture, that had been painted by right-wing and centrist media alike, in order to present himself as this strong man who is going to do something about the criminal threat.
JJ: We can add to that: Truthout reported, as you note, that “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people in this election cycle.” And that fits, too, with this, “There’s something to be afraid of. There are people to be afraid of.”
FAIR.org (5/11/23)
JN: Yeah, it is really striking that this was the big push in the closing days of the campaign; the Trump campaign was pumping their campaign funds into ads that presented this transgender threat. That was the thing that they thought was going to get people to vote.
Interestingly, a lot of the ads focused on the idea that Kamala Harris wanted to pay for gender reassignment surgery for federal prisoners. So it sort of ties in the trans threat and the crime threat, as trans criminals…. It’s hard to construct a rational danger that is posed by the situation.
JH: Can I jump in here? Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t it also immigrant trans prisoners?
JJ: Just to tie it all up with a bow.
JH: I could be wrong, so delete that if I’m wrong. But….
JJ: I don’t doubt it. Just for the reason that Jim’s saying, it’s hard to create a rational story around it. And the truth is, you don’t have to. You just say a number of words that have been designated hot buttons, and if you can throw ’em all together, well, then, so much the better.
JN: And this is really an issue where the groundwork was laid by right-wing and centrist media alike. Fox News, trans threat stories are part of their bread and butter, but the New York Times has also done a great number of stories about the supposed threat trans youth pose. They’re going to be getting into girls sports, or gender-affirming care is somehow going to snatch your child away from you.
These are stories that the supposedly liberal press has been hammering hard on, and so really given someone like Trump, who wants to demagogue these issues, a real platform to begin his harangue from, because you’ve already read about it in a supposedly authoritative source like the New York Times.
Julie Hollar: “You would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups.”
JH: I wanted to underscore that. I was thinking about how the corporate media, to me, bear such responsibility on both the issues of immigration and trans rights, because those two issues are miscovered by the corporate media in a very similar way. They’re both this beleaguered, very small minority–although the right wing, of course, is trying to make everyone believe that they are not a small minority, either of them–but both are very small minorities who are the target of these really punitive campaigns, whose bottom-line goal really is eliminating them from our society, which is classic fascism.
So you would expect journalists in a democratic society to take as the central story here that targeting of these minority groups. For the past many years, they should have been reporting these issues from the perspective of immigrants, from the perspective of trans people, humanizing them, providing us with this understanding of who’s really being harmed here, which is the opposite story of what the right wing is trying to tell.
And by not doing that at all–and I should also interrupt to say that not every corporate media outlet has been doing that on trans issues; the New York Times does really stand out, in terms of being bad about this. On immigration, it’s pretty much across the board bad in corporate media.
But instead of doing the kind of democratic journalism that you need in a moment like this, you have them really just feeding into the same narrative that the right-wing movement is putting out there. So when they then turn around–well, I’m getting ahead of myself–and then blame the left for these losses, it’s very angering.
JJ: I want to draw you out on that, because the New York Times itself came out swinging. They’re pretty sure why Democrats lost, but you described their explanation as “mind boggling,” so just keep going with what you’re saying there.
New York Times (11/6/24)
JH: So the editorial board put out their diagnosis of the Democrats’ problem the day after the election. They had no doubts about this. They blamed it, in part, on the fact that it took, here I’m going to quote, “it took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters.”
They don’t say exactly what progressive agenda this was. From a progressive perspective, it’s hard to see very much progressivism in the Democratic agenda. But in the same paragraph, it goes on to talk about how Democrats have really struggled for the last three elections to find a persuasive message that Americans really can believe in, that they can’t find a way to offer a vision to people to improve their lives.
This is the same paragraph where they’re talking about this alienating progressive agenda, and when you look at the exit polls, it’s very clear that the main driver, it seems, of the Trump vote, when you set aside the real core believers, this election was won because of the economy.
And if the Democrats are struggling to find a vision that appeals to voters, the progressive agenda is the agenda that appeals to voters. It’s not in question. Medicare for All, a wealth tax, living minimum wage: all of these big, very popular progressive agenda items that the Democratic Party flirted with in the primaries four years ago, and has since really run pretty hard away from.
Harris had a few little economic agenda items that were somewhat progressive, like her anti–price gouging plan. She did have something about minimum wage, but, really, the big ticket items that people really want to see and could really make a big difference in their lives, those weren’t the things that Kamala Harris was hitching her wagon to.
Jim Naureckas: “When Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them.”
JN: And when Democrats do talk about progressive economic programs, that is when the corporate media really watchdogs them. They are very alert to any signs of economic radicalism, like universal healthcare. When Harris was talking to media, the repeated demand that she re-renounce her former endorsement of Medicare for All was really striking. There was a suspicion that “you haven’t really changed from the candidate in 2020, who was suggesting that we ought to pay for everybody’s healthcare.” That is the kind of stance that that community finds very suspicious, and very nervous-making.
JJ: We only have a couple more minutes, and I do want you both to have an opportunity to talk about other takeaways. Obviously, this is a work in progress. We’re just getting started here, but it seems as though asking for corporate news media to be self-aware, to actually take some accountability, to acknowledge that there’s a relationship between what they report and how and what happens in the world. It seems like we’re moving farther and farther from that, and I’m reminded of the Upton Sinclair quote, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Now, you might say that more of media owners, more so than reporters, but it does just bring us back, doesn’t it, to the fact of who owns and controls our news media, who they feel accountable to. And it’s not us. The top-down problems that we’re talking about, they’re structural.
JN: Absolutely. If you have a media that is dominated by billionaires, you are going to get a different take on the problems facing the country than if you had democratic media that was answerable to the general public.
Going back to the Washington Post, and Jeff Bezos refusing to let them endorse a candidate in the election, he’s a guy who is one of the richest people on earth. His fortune is largely based on government contracts, and so he has a super strong interest in making sure that the president of the United States doesn’t have a vendetta against him.
FAIR.org (7/14/23)
And he’s got another strong interest in the fact that the Biden administration was pursuing antitrust claims against Amazon, which was very important. The amount of money taken from the public by Amazon‘s artificially increased prices is actually quite large, and has a lot to do with why Jeff Bezos is one of the richest people on Earth. And so having Harris not in the White House could be a real boon for his personal fortune.
And then you have Elon Musk, again, someone who depends heavily on government contracts, who has been promised a prominent role in a Trump administration, and he was using his takeover of Twitter to pump out election disinformation on a really wholesale scale. The claims about illegal immigrants voting was a nonstop flow on what he calls X now, in the weeks running up to the election.
And he’s got tens of millions of people who are getting his stuff, and he’s rigged the platform so that if you’re on it, you’re definitely going to hear from the boss. It is just a firehose of disinformation, coming from the owner himself of this centrally important social media platform.
JJ: Julie Hollar, any final thoughts?
CounterSpin (10/27/24)
JH: Journalism is absolutely critical for democracy, and we have to remember that moving forward. And I think we can’t just ignore the big corporate outlets and let them off the hook and say, “Well, write them off because they’re never going to get better.” I mean, there are structural issues that are going to always limit them, and we have to keep demanding better, always.
And at the same time, I think it’s really important that everybody dig deep and support tough, strong, independent journalism that exists all over this country. Local outlets, wherever you are, that are doing really important work in your city or in your neighborhood, all of the independent media that are working nationwide as well, all the media critics; everyone is going to need so much support for the coming years to help defend this democracy, and we all really need to step up and support them.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with FAIR senior analyst, Julie Hollar, and FAIR’s editor, Jim Naureckas. Thank you both, Julie and Jim, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
JN: Thank you.
JH: Thank you.
The New York Times (5/12/15) relayed Israel’s warning that “in the event of another conflict with Hezbollah, many Lebanese civilians will probably be killed, and that it should not be considered Israel’s fault.” Strangely, the same logic does not apply to Israel placing its military headquarters in downtown Tel Aviv.
Back in May 2015, the New York Times’ Isabel Kershner decided to moonlight as an Israeli military propagandist by penning an alleged exposé (5/12/15)—headlined “Israel Says Hezbollah Positions Put Lebanese at Risk”—in which she diligently conveyed all that Israel had to say about Hezbollah’s infrastructure in south Lebanon.
The minuscule hamlet of Muhaybib, for example, was said to contain no fewer than “nine arms depots, five rocket-launching sites, four infantry positions, signs of three underground tunnels, three anti-tank positions and, in the very center of the village, a Hezbollah command post.” In the village of Shaqra, home to approximately 4,000 people, the Israeli army had meanwhile identified some “400 military sites and facilities belonging to Hezbollah.”
Only after 11 full paragraphs of transmitting the Israeli line did Kershner manage to insert the disclaimer that “the Israeli claims could not be independently verified.” But by that time, of course, the damage had been done, the reader having already been persuaded that south Lebanon was one big Hezbollah military installation, where Israel could not afford to concern itself with civilian lives in any future conflict. Driving the point home was former Israeli national security adviser Yaakov Amidror, who informed Kershner that “many, many Lebanese will be killed” in the next showdown with Hezbollah.
I happened to be in south Lebanon at the time of the article’s publication, and drove over to Muhaybib and Shaqra to check out the fearsome landscape. Though I did not encounter any Hezbollah command posts, I did see some schoolchildren, elderly folks, bakeries, farms, clothing shops and, in Shaqra, a colorful establishment offering “Botox filling.”
Legitimizing destructionCNN (9/17/24) labels the target of a terrorist attack as a “terror group.”
Nine years have now passed since Kershner’s bout of weaponized journalism, and Amidror’s words have certainly rung true: Many, many Lebanese have been killed in Israel’s latest war on Lebanon.
From October 2023 through November 5, more than 3,000 people have been slaughtered in the country—among them 589 women and at least 185 children. The vast majority were killed in September through November of 2024, when Israel ramped up its assault on Lebanese territory as a sideshow to the ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
More than 800,000 people have been displaced. Muhaybib has literally been blown up in its entirety, and much of Shaqra has been pulverized as well. Israel has damaged or destroyed nearly a quarter of all buildings along the entire southern border.
And while the United States newspaper of record and other Western corporate media outlets have not exactly been preemptively calling in the strikes, à la Kershner, they have nonetheless done a fine job of legitimizing mass killing, displacement and destruction in other ways.
For starters, as FAIR has written about recently (10/10/24), there’s the insistence on following the US/Israeli lead in branding Hezbollah a “terrorist” organization and a “proxy” for Iran. Never mind that the Shia political party and armed group emerged as a direct consequence of the 1982 US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon that killed tens of thousands of people and constituted a textbook case of terrorism, including the cold-blooded murder of thousands of Palestinian refugees and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila massacre.
When Israel in September staged an unprecedented terrorist attack in Lebanon by detonating personal electronic devices across the country — killing 12 people, including two children—CNN (9/17/24) spun the episode thusly: “Exploding Pagers Injure Members of Iran-Backed Terror Group.”
Converting communities into targetsThe Guardian (10/4/24) was one of numerous outlets that referred to Dahiyeh, a densely packed Beirut suburb, as a “Hezbollah stronghold”—painting the entire community was a legitimate military target.
Then there is the matter of the term “Hezbollah stronghold,” to which pretty much every corporate media outlet has proved itself hopelessly addicted when describing the densely populated neighborhood of Dahiyeh in the Lebanese capital of Beirut.
Devastated in Israel’s 2006 war on Lebanon, Dahiyeh is now once again under maniacal bombardment by the Israeli military, which on September 27 leveled a whole residential block in order to assassinate Hezbollah secretary general Hassan Nasrallah. Sure enough, the New York Times (9/27/24) was standing by with the headline: “Israel Strikes Hezbollah Stronghold in Attempt to Kill Leader.”
Just google “Hezbollah stronghold” and you’ll see what I mean — that the press is apparently incapable of talking about Dahiyeh any other way. Or, if you’re not in the mood for googling, here are some illustrative links to the Washington Post, Guardian, Wall Street Journal, ABC News, NBC News, Reuters and Associated Press. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
To be sure, there is substantial public support in Dahiyeh for Hezbollah—not that support for an anti-Zionist resistance organization should make anyone fair game for extrajudicial slaughter. There is also support for numerous other Lebanese parties and groups in this neighborhood of nearly 1 million people, although the “stronghold” designation tends to erase the diversity that exists.
But the real problem with the terminology is that, when deployed in the context of war, a “stronghold” is more likely to be interpreted as “a fortified place”—the first definition of the word appearing in the Merriam-Webster dictionary. In that sense, then, Dahiyeh is effectively converted into a legitimate military target, its inhabitants dehumanized by the linguistic arsenal of a media establishment that is ultimately committed to validating Israeli massacres of civilians.
And it’s not only Dahiyeh. The press has now expanded its obsessive use of the “stronghold” descriptor in accordance with Israel’s current killing spree in south Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley in the east of the country, both of which regions we are now continuously reminded are also “Hezbollah strongholds.” When the Lebanese health ministry reported 60 killed in airstrikes in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley on October 29, the BBC noted that “rescue efforts were still under way in the valley, which is a Hezbollah stronghold.”
Back in July, the same outlet had warned that the south Lebanese city of Tyre would “be in the firing line in the event of all-out war, along with the rest of southern Lebanon, a Hezbollah stronghold.” Four months later, Tyre and the rest of southern Lebanon are an unmitigated horrorscape, blunted for a Western audience by media euphemism.
Random House (2024)
Acclaimed journalist and author Ta-Nehisi Coates returned to nonfiction with his essay collection The Message, published on October 1, only to be met with patronizing dismissal and a whiff of racism on CBS Mornings (9/30/24).
Coates left journalism to spend several years teaching and writing fiction, and intended to return to essay writing by producing a piece similar to George Orwell’s “Why I Write.” What he ended up with was The Message, a collection of three essays that explore “how our stories—our reporting and imaginative narratives and mythmaking—expose and distort our realities.” Coates visits Senegal, South Carolina and Palestine—exploring how the narrative of each place is constructed and perpetuated by journalists and media organizations.
The longest of the essays, and the most discussed, is on Palestine. Coates goes beyond the now widely accepted call for a ceasefire, or even a call for an arms embargo: He condemns the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and says Israel’s existence as an ethnostate is fundamentally wrong. Coates has been met with praise, but also blatant dismissal—the second response being exemplified on CBS Mornings.
‘In the backpack of an extremist’Tony Dokoupil (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24): Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on Palestine “would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.”
Host Tony Dokoupil began the interview with an aggressive monologue that effectively dismissed Coates’ and his worldview, painting him as a radical not worth listening to:
I want to dive into the Israel and Palestine section of the book, it’s the largest section of the book…. I have to say, when I read the book, I imagine if I took your name out of it, took away the awards and the acclaim, took the cover off, the publishing house goes away…the content of that section would not be out of place in the backpack of an extremist.
It is hard to imagine a white author as celebrated as Coates receiving such an immediate dismissal, not just of their writing, but the very basis of their political beliefs. Dokoupil forwent an attempt to have a substantive conversation by accusing Coates of “extremism.” (The “backpack” reference seemed like an attempt to insinuate a sympathy for terrorism, as Minority Report noted—10/2/24.)
More than two minutes into the 7-minute long segment, Dokoupil still hadn’t let Coates talk about his own book. The host continued to lambaste the author, suggesting Coates was either ignorant of Middle Eastern history or creating a false narrative:
I found myself wondering, why did Ta-Nehisi Coates, who I’ve known for a long time, read his work for a long time, very smart guy, very talented guy, why leave out that Israel is surrounded by countries that want to eliminate it? Why leave out that Israel deals with terror groups that want to eliminate it? Why not detail anything of the first and second intifada…the cafe bombings, the bus bombings, the little kids blown to bits?
And is it because you just don’t believe that Israel, in any condition, has a right to exist?
Coates pointed out that Dokoupil’s narrative is the one constantly perpetuated by corporate media, and that his own concern is “with those who don’t have a voice, who don’t have the ability to talk”—in this case, the Palestinians. He noted that no establishment US news outlet has a Palestinian-American bureau chief, or even correspondent, and spoke of the suffering he saw during his trip to Israel and Palestine.
Dokoupil chose not to engage with Coates’ criticisms of the Israeli state. Instead, he pointed out acts of violence experienced by Israel—which are greatly outnumbered by the acts of violence Israel has inflicted on Palestinians—and continually pivoted the conversation to try and make Coates answer whether or not he believes Israel has a right to exist, rather than engaging with the issues that Coates wrote about.
In response to the right-to-exist question, Coates said that no country has established their ability to exist through rights, but rather through force: “Israel does exist. It’s a fact. The question of its right is not a question that I would be faced with with any other country.”
‘What offends you about a Jewish state?’Ta-Nehisi Coates (CBS Mornings, 9/30/24): “I am against a state that discriminates against people on the basis of ethnicity.”
Dokoupil accused Coates of writing a book that “delegitimizes the pillars of Israel,” and finally stopped beating around the bush and asked him outright: “What is it that so particularly offends you about a Jewish state? A Jewish safe place, rather than any other country?”
Dokoupil’s questioning of Coates followed the disingenuous argument that to condemn the state and actions of Israel is to be antisemitic. The exchange between the two exemplifies the issue with Palestine coverage in American media: Israel-centric viewpoints are undeniably the dominant narrative, and challenging that narrative is simply not accepted, even by one in the media fold. Those who do so are either implicitly or explicitly accused of antisemitism and dismissed out of hand.
The CBS Mornings interview called to mind the recent comments by CNN host Jake Tapper, who spread a lie attributing an antisemitic remark to Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and asked Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to condemn the nonexistent comment. Tlaib had challenged the arrest of arrest of peaceful pro-Palestine protesters, suggesting that their being singled out for punishment on the basis of their views indicated a bias—and because she did so, she was herself faced with spurious charges of bias.
Coates stated in both his profile with New York magazine (9/23/24) and an interview with the New York Times (9/29/24) that he knew people would take issue with The Message. He told New York that he knew he would face backlash, and his career would likely suffer for speaking on behalf of the Palestinian people:
I’m not worried…. I have to do what I have to do. I’m sad, but I was so enraged. If I went over there and saw what I saw and didn’t write it, I am fucking worthless.
Dokoupil proved Coates’ expectations were well-grounded. Still, at every point during the nearly 7-minute exchange, he responded calmly and rationally, stating his belief that Israel is an apartheid state, comparable to the Jim Crow–era South: “There’s nothing that offends me about a Jewish state. I am offended by the idea of states built on ethnocracy, no matter where they are.”
Dokoupil’s questioning of Coates was more an interrogation than an interview, and the patronizing tone and racism that Coates encountered on CBS is a part of a media ecosystem that continuously uplifts pro-Israel voices and leaves out pro-Palestine ones.
Messages to CBS may be sent here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
New Yorker writer Emma Green’s latest piece, “The Case for Having Lots of Kids” (9/24/24), dives into the right’s election flashpoint that there is something seriously wrong with Americans—especially women—not having enough children. In an interview with Catholic University political economist Catherine Pakaluk, Green disregards a mountain of evidence showing that economic factors play into low birth rates, instead feeding us a narrative that the problem is women’s irreligious collective soul.
When discussing declining birth rates and the choice to go childless, people often look to the underlying economic factors. And why not, as many studies show the impact economic trends have on life choices. The Washington Post (11/3/23) said in a lengthy piece:
Hammered by the Great Recession, soaring student debt, precarious gig employment, skyrocketing home prices and the Covid-19 crisis, millennials probably faced more economic headwinds in their childbearing years than any other generation. And, as sociologist Karen Benjamin Guzzo, director of the Carolina Population Center at the University of North Carolina, told us, it puts them behind on everything you’re supposed to line up before you have kids.
New York Times (7/31/24): “The absence of policies that support working families — like paid maternity leave and stable child care — may also be leading couples to believe they’re not prepared to be parents.”
Similarly, the New York Times (7/31/24) reported that research “indicates that larger societal factors,” including “rising childcare costs, increasingly expensive housing and slipping optimism about the future” have created the feeling that it is “more untenable to raise children in the United States.”
And a review of Birth Strike by former Labor Notes editor Jenny Brown (Review of Radical Political Economics, 8/13/20) explained how women have withheld their reproductive labor in order to force an end to restrictions on reproductive freedom, and instead enact “paid parental leave, affordable childcare and family allowances that would lead women to choose to have more children.”
To underscore that last point, remember this sad fact: The United States is one of only six countries on earth that doesn’t have national paid job leave for new mothers (New York Times, 10/25/21).
The National Bureau of Economic Research (Digest, 2/1/12) said that “rising home values have a negative impact on birth rates,” as they represent “the largest component of the cost of raising a child: larger than food, childcare or education.” And housing prices have certainly been increasing since the recovery from the 2008 financial crisis.
When Pew Research (7/25/24) asked childless people under 50 who are unlikely to have children about their choices, 44% said “they want to focus on other things, such as their career or interests,” 38% cited “concerns about the state of the world, other than the environment,” and 36% said “they can’t afford to raise a child.”
‘True damage of the birth dearth’The New Yorker (9/24/24) makes the case for lots of kids: “For these women, giving up their individual freedom by having kids led them to a deeper sense of purpose and joy.”
“The Case for Having Lots of Kids” lets us know that we’re all wrong, and we should disregard the economic data. It lets Pakaluk, who Green slyly admits published her latest book with a house “known for its rightward bent,” guide the narrative into religious moralism. (The publisher, Regnery, is known for a catalog full of climate denial, Islamophobia, transphobia and conspiracy tomes like Dinesh D’Souza’s 2000 Mules—FAIR.org, 12/16/22.)
A “mother of eight children and the stepmother of six,” Pakaluk interviewed religious mothers with many children for her latest book, Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth, to explore how we can address declining birth rates in America. The message of Green’s glowing, one-sided piece on Pakaluk is that the issue of declining birth rates is not economic, but a spiritual rot in contemporary society:
She argues that the true damage of the birth dearth is not economic disaster but a distortion of our culture and politics. She, and many of her subjects, see a country hobbled by relentless individualism: people turning inward, pursuing their own happiness and success instead of investing in others. “Maybe what ails us is not our freedom per se, but something we mistake for freedom—being detached from family obligations, which are actually the demands that save us from egoism and despair,” she writes.
It’s no wonder that Pakaluk doesn’t want to answer declining birth rates with more investment in education, childcare and family services, as she co-authored Can a Catholic Be a Socialist? (The Answer Is No—Here’s Why), seemingly a counterpunch to the long history of Catholic economic radicalism, from James Connolly to Dorothy Day.
‘God, not subsidies’Pew (7/25/24) found that young people have a wide variety of strong reasons for not wanting to have children.
But Green reports a far more religious reactionary side of Pakaluk: We simply need to destroy our democratic ideals of separation of church and state, so that the clerics can whip the population back to baby-making. Green writes:
Pakaluk clearly thinks that, as a culture, it is good to encourage young women to have families. The problem is how. She is skeptical of the kinds of family policies that progressives and pro-family conservatives advocate, such as increases to the child tax credit or baby bonuses from the government. To Pakaluk, these proposals ignore the fundamental reasons that people have kids, and they also downplay the trade-offs involved….
Her suggestion? Religion. “Make it easier for churches and religious communities to run schools, succor families and aid the needs of human life,” she writes. Her subjects describe their trust in God as one of their primary motivations for having a kid, and then another and another. “People will lay down their comforts, dreams and selves for God, not for subsidies,” Pakaluk argues. To this end, she favors ending government restrictions on religious groups, particularly when it comes to education. “If the state can’t save the American family,” she writes, “it can give religion a freer rein to try.”
There is no explanation from Green as to why economic incentives like universal pre-school, increased parental leave and affordable housing won’t change the birth rate, nor is there any evidence offered that religiosity will change society for the better. It is just tossed into the discourse, saying women—somehow men who choose not to have children are absent from the discussion—are going to need to change their ways for society’s sake.
I have spent a lot of time with people of all genders who have chosen not to have children. It’s easy to write off non-breeders as self-indulgent hedonists who’d rather use their time and money for partying and travel, but these people are rare. Mostly, I hear from people who are disabled and have trouble taking care of themselves, let alone others. High-intensity careers can pressure white collar workers to sacrifice personal ambitions, including mate-seeking and family.
I meet people with mental illness who fear passing on their ailment. Others feel real economic constraints—wages not keeping up with rising costs. There are many who simply aren’t finding the right partner. And, yes, there are people who look around at a world full of war, climate collapse and economic insecurity, and feel nothing but discouragement.
Not enough white babies?Politico (4/28/24): “Throughout the conference, anxieties over the drop in birth rates…gave way to fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters.”
Obviously, Pakaluk is entitled to her opinion. But the problem here is Green, writing for a prestigious liberal magazine, airing this view without any scrutiny or inquiry into the issue of childlessness in America.
Worse, she opens up this one-sided story by acknowledging the backlash to Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance’s complaint about “childless cat ladies” (NPR, 7/29/24). Vance is a part of a general attack on Democrats who don’t have their own biological children, especially Vice President Kamala Harris (Politico, 9/18/24). In other words, Green explicitly placed this in an election context, using the supposedly liberal New Yorker to run propaganda for the cultural right, just a little more than a month before Election Day.
And Green never questions why the birth rate is such a hot topic with someone like Vance to begin with. Yes, there are fears that lower fertility has negative economic consequences (CNBC, 3/22/24)—but little acknowledgement that wealthy countries can easily compensate for a shrinking workforce with, for example, fewer restrictions on immigration.
There is plenty of reporting on how right-wing natalism can be a response to racial and cultural demographic shifts (Arizona Mirror, 5/13/22; ACME, 6/27/23; Politico, 4/28/24). Green’s own colleague Margaret Talbot made the connection (New Yorker, 8/5/24). It’s hard not to see that worrying we won’t have enough people and at the same time worry that too many people are coming only makes sense if you think some people are better than others.
It simply can’t be ignored that one of Donald Trump’s biggest cheerleaders, billionaire Elon Musk, is obsessed with increasing birth rates (Bloomberg, 6/21/24), and at the same time has also promoted the white nationalist crackpot Great Replacement Theory (Rolling Stone, 1/5/24). Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson (Poynter, 1/29/24) was wrong when he claimed, “In August 2023, illegal immigration outpaced American births”—but the juxtaposition gives the game away.
Is Green simply ignorant of all this, or did she leave it out in order to let Pakaluk’s culturally conservative view of parenthood go unsullied by the racist context? It’s hard to tell.
De-economizing hot-button issuesEmma Green (New Yorker, 12/28/22), asserting that a masking advocate’s “talk about empire-building and capital accumulation” was “a key component of Marxist economic theory,” suggested that members of a pro-mask group were “communists.”
Green may be a familiar name to FAIR readers: I previously wrote (FAIR.org, 1/10/23) about how her coverage (New Yorker, 12/28/22) of the People’s CDC, and the group’s concerns that the Covid pandemic wasn’t being taken seriously enough, rested on red- baiting, ignorance of the history of eugenics and playing down the disease’s impacts. I also noted that this wasn’t her first offense when it came to shoddy Covid reporting (e.g., Atlantic, 5/4/21).
Her coverage, while not in the extremist galaxy of pandemic denialism, fit into the broader context of corporate media downplaying the pandemic in order to roll back progressive social democratic reforms enacted during the emergency.
Once again, here she is to tell us to stop looking at a hot-button political issue through a lens that could take us to taxing the rich to increase social services. Instead, view the issue as a de-economized cultural feud—one that puts the liberal New Yorker on the side of the right.
Messages to the New Yorker can be sent to themail@newyorker.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Ken Klippenstein, an independent reporter operating on Substack and an investigative alum of the Intercept, announced (Substack, 9/26/24) that he had been kicked off Twitter (now rebranded as X). His crime, he explained, stemmed from posting the 271-page official dossier of Republican vice presidential candidate’s J.D. Vance’s campaign vulnerabilities; the US government alleges that the information was leaked through Iranian hacking. In other words, the dossier is a part of the “foreign meddling campaign” of “enemy states.”
Klippenstein is not the first reporter to gain access to these papers (Popular Information, 9/9/24), but most of the reporting about this dossier has been on the intrigue revolving around Iranian hacking rather than the content itself (Daily Beast, 8/10/24; Politico, 8/10/24; Forbes, 8/11/24). Klippenstein decided it was time for the whole enchilada to see the light of day:
As far as I can tell, it hasn’t been altered, but even if it was, its contents are publicly verifiable. I’ll let it speak for itself.
“The terror regime in Iran loves the weakness and stupidity of Kamala Harris, and is terrified of the strength and resolve of President Donald J. Trump,” Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, responded when I asked him about the hack.
If the document had been hacked by some “anonymous”-like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combating foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know.
The US Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in a statement that alleged Iranian hacking (9/18/24) was “malicious cyber activity” and “the latest example of Iran’s multi-pronged approach…to stoke discord and undermine confidence in our electoral process.”
Where’s the beef?Ken Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) argued that the Vance dossier ” is clearly newsworthy, providing Republican Party and conservative doctrine insight into what the Trump campaign perceives to be Vance’s liabilities and weaknesses.”
The Vance report isn’t as salacious as Vance’s false and bizarre comments about Haitians eating pets (NPR, 9/15/24), but it does show that he has taken positions that have fractured the right, such as aid for Ukraine; the report calls him one of the “chief obstructionists” to providing assistance to the country against Russia. It dedicates several pages to Vance’s history of criticizing Trump and the MAGA movement, suggesting that his place on the ticket could divide Trump’s voting base.
On the other hand, it outlines many of his extreme right-wing stances that could alienate him with putative moderates. It says Vance “appears to have once called for slashing Social Security and Medicare,” and “is opposed to providing childcare assistance to low-income Americans.” He “supports placing restrictions on abortion access,” and states that “he does not support abortion exceptions in the case of rape.”
And for any voter who values 7-day-a-week service, Vance “appears to support laws requiring businesses to close on Sundays.” It quotes him saying: “Close the Damn Businesses on Sunday. Commercial Freedom Will Suffer. Moral Behavior Will Not, and Our Society Will Be Much the Better for It.” That might not go over well with small business owners, and any worker who depends on their Sunday shifts.
‘Took a deep breath’The Washington Post (8/13/24) suggested that Vance dossier was different from Hillary Clinton’s hacked emails in 2016 because of “foreign state actors increasingly getting involved” in US elections.
Are the findings in the Vance dossier the story of the century? Probably not, but it’s not nothing that the Trump campaign is aware its vice presidential candidate is loaded with liabilities. There are at least a few people who find that useful information.
And the Washington Post (9/27/24) happily reported on private messages Vance sent to an anonymous individual who shared them with the newspaper that explained Vance’s flip-flopping from a Trump critic to a Trump lover. Are the private messages really more newsworthy than the dossier—or is the issue that the messages aren’t tainted by allegedly foreign fingerprints? Had that intercept of material involved an Iranian, would it have seen the light of day?
In fact, the paper (8/13/24) explained that news organizations, including the Post, were reflecting on the foreign nature of the leak when deciding how deep they should report on the content they received:
“This episode probably reflects that news organizations aren’t going to snap at any hack that comes in and is marked as ‘exclusive’ or ‘inside dope’ and publish it for the sake of publishing,” said Matt Murray, executive editor of the Post. Instead, “all of the news organizations in this case took a deep breath and paused, and thought about who was likely to be leaking the documents, what the motives of the hacker might have been, and whether this was truly newsworthy or not.”
Double standards for leaksPolitico (10/7/16) quoted a Clinton spokesperson: “Striking how quickly concern about Russia’s masterminding of illegal hacks gave way to digging through fruits of hack.” This was immediately followed by: “Indeed, here are eight more e-mail exchanges that shed light on the methods and mindset of Clinton’s allies in Brooklyn and Washington.”
There seems to be a disconnect, however, between ill-gotten information that impacts a Republican ticket and information that tarnishes a Democrat.
Think back to 2016. When “WikiLeaks released a trove of emails apparently hacked from Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman email account, unleashing thousands of messages,” as Politico (10/7/16) reported, the outlet didn’t just merely report on the hack, it reported on the embarrassing substance of the documents. In 2024, by contrast, when Politico was given the Vance dossier, it wrote nothing about its contents, declaring that “questions surrounding the origins of the documents and how they came to our attention were more newsworthy than the material that was in those documents” (CNN, 8/13/24).
The New York Times and Washington Post similarly found the Clinton leaks—which were believed at the time to have been given to WikiLeaks by Russia—far more newsworthy than the Vance dossier. The Times “published at least 199 articles about the stolen DNC and Clinton campaign emails between the first leak in June 2016 and Election Day,” Popular Information (9/9/24) noted.
FAIR editor Jim Naureckas (11/24/09) has written about double standards in media, noting that information that comes to light through unethical or illegal means is played up if that information helps powerful politicians and corporations. Meanwhile, if such information obtained questionably is damaging, the media focus tends to be less on the substance, and more on whether the public should be hearing about such matters.
For example, when a private citizen accidentally overheard a cell phone conversation between House Speaker John Boehner, former Speaker Newt Gingrich and other Republican congressmembers, and made a tape that showed Gingrich violating the terms of a ethics sanction against him, news coverage focused on the illegality of taping the conversation, not on the ethics violation the tape revealed (Washington Post, 1/14/97; New York Times, 1/15/97).
But when climate change deniers hacked climate scientists’ email, that produced a front-page story in the New York Times (11/20/09) scrutinizing the correspondence for any inconsistencies that could be used to bolster the deniers’ arguments.
When Cincinnati Enquirer reporter Michael Gallagher wrote a series of stories about the Chiquita fruit corporation, based in part on listening without authorization to company voicemails, the rest of the media were far more interested in Gallagher’s ethical and legal dilemmas (he was eventually sentenced to five years’ probation) rather than the bribery, fraud and worker abuse his reporting exposed.
Meet the new bossMusk personally ordered the suspension of the account of antifascist activist Curt Loder, the Independent (1/29/23) revealed, noting that “numerous other accounts of left-leaning activists and commentators have been suspended without warning.”
There’s a certain degree of comedy in the hypocrisy of Klippenstein’s suspension. Since right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, he has claimed that his administration would end corporate censorship, but instead he’s implemented his own censorship agenda (Guardian, 1/15/24; Al Jazeera, 8/14/24).
The Independent (1/29/23) reported that Musk “oversaw a campaign of suppression that targeted his critics upon his assumption of power at Twitter.” He
personally directed the suspension of a left-leaning activist, Chad Loder, who became known across the platform for his work helping to identify participants in the January 6 attack.
Al Jazeera (2/28/23) noted that “digital rights groups say social media giants,” including X, “have restricted [and] suspended the accounts of Palestinian journalists and activists.” Musk has likewise fulfilled censorship requests by the governments of Turkey (Ars Technica, 5/15/23) and India (Intercept, 1/24/23, 3/28/23) officials, and is generally more open to official requests to suppress speech than Twitter‘s previous owners (El Pais, 5/24/23; Washington Post, 9/25/24).
Meanwhile, Musk’s critics contend, he’s allowed the social network to be a force multiplier for the right. “Elon Musk has increasingly used the social media platform as a megaphone to amplify his political views and, lately, those of right-wing figures he’s aligned with,” AP (8/13/24) reported. (Musk is vocal about his support for former President Donald Trump’s candidacy—New York Times, 7/18/24.)
“Twitter Antisemitism ‘Skyrocketed’ Since Elon Musk Takeover—Jewish Groups,” blasted a Newsweek headline (4/25/23). Earlier this year, Mother Jones (3/13/24) reported that Musk “has been retweeting prominent race scientist adherents…spreading misinformation about racial minorities’ intelligence and physiology to his audience of 176.3 million followers.”
‘Chilling effect on speech’The message Ken Klippenstein got from X announcing he had been kicked off the platform.
Now Musk’s Twitter is keeping certain information out of the public view—information that just happens to damage the presidential ticket he supports. With Klippenstein having been silenced on the network, anyone claiming X is a bastion of free speech at this point is either mendacious or simply deluded.
Klippenstein (Substack, 9/26/24) explained that “X says that I’ve been suspended for ‘violating our rules against posting private information,’ citing a tweet linking to my story about the JD Vance dossier.” He added, though, that “I never published any private information on X.” Rather, “I linked to an article I wrote here, linking to a document of controversial provenance, one that I didn’t want to alter for that very reason.”
The journalist (Substack, 9/27/24) claims that his account suspension, which he reports to be permanent, is political because he did not violate the network’s code about disclosing personal information, and even if he did, he should have been given the opportunity to correct his post to become unsuspended. “So it’s not about a violation of X’s policies,” he said. “What else would you call this but politically motivated?”
Klippenstein is understandably concerned that he is now without a major social media promotional tool. “I no longer have access to the primary channel by which I disseminate primarily news (and shitposts of course) to the general public,” he said. “This chilling effect on speech is exactly why we published the Vance Dossier in its entirety.”
A US circuit court panel appears ready to uphold a federal law that would effectively ban the popular social media network TikTok because it’s owned by the Chinese company ByteDance. The legal attacks on the video platform—which FAIR (8/5/20, 5/25/23, 11/13/23, 3/14/24) has written about before—are entering a new phase, in which judicial interpreters of the Constitution are acting as Cold War partisans, threatening to throw out civil liberties in favor of national security alarmism.
Earlier this year, despite widespread protest (Guardian, 3/7/24), President Joe Biden signed legislation forcing TikTok’s owner “to sell it or face a nationwide prohibition in the United States” (NBC, 4/24/24). Advocates for the ban charge that data collection—which is a function of most social media networks—poses a national security threat because of the platform’s Chinese ownership (Axios, 3/15/24).
Given that TikTok is a global platform, with 2 billion users worldwide, demands that ByteDance sell it off are in effect another name for a ban; an analogy would be Beijing allowing Facebook to operate in China only if Meta sold the platform to a non-US company.
‘Foreign adversary controlled’The Wall Street Journal (9/18/24) stood up for the government’s right to ban speech it doesn’t like, i.e. that of “foreign adversaries.”
Now TikTok is fighting for its right to remain unbanned in the US court system, taking its case straight to the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals. All three of the judges, two of whom were Republican appointees, questioned TikTok’s plea that free speech was at stake. The discussion suggested that the ban will survive the appeal, and ultimately be decided by the right-wing-stacked Supreme Court.
The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial (9/18/24) praising the TikTok ban and the judges who appear ready to validate it, said:
But Congress didn’t restrict speakers on TikTok. What’s really at issue is Chinese control of the app, and TikTok is owned by ByteDance, a Chinese company. TikTok is welcome to keep operating and its users to keep posting. The law merely says TikTok cannot do so while remaining what Congress calls a “foreign adversary controlled application.”
The DC Circuit’s panel grasped this distinction. Judge Douglas Ginsburg wanted to know “why this is any different, from a constitutional point of view, than the statute precluding foreign ownership of a broadcasting license?” Good question.
Ginsburg’s question isn’t as “good” as the Journal thinks it is. Broadcast licenses are finite, as there are only so many FM radio slots in a given geographical location, which requires government management of that limited space. That just isn’t the case with global internet-based media, which have heretofore been accorded the same strong First Amendment protections that pertain to print publications, not the lesser shield granted to broadcast media.
The editorial went on to quote TikTok’s lawyer saying “‘lots of US speakers,’ including Politico, are owned by foreign entities” prompting Rao to reply, “But not foreign adversaries.” Sri Srinivasan, a third judge on the panel—appointed by Barack Obama, and well-known for his bipartisan appeal (NPR, 5/23/13)—also followed the logic of the “China exception” to free speech, asking whether a Chinese-owned entity should be banned if the US were to go to war with China (Reuters, 9/17/24).
‘Skeptical’ of free-speech argument“When you have speech in the United States, our history and tradition is we do not suppress that speech because we don’t like those ideas,” a lawyer for TikTok argued (Roll Call, 9/16/24).
Few other outlets outright agreed with the judges, but many reported that the judges were “skeptical” or showed “skepticism” of the free-speech argument (NBC, 9/16/24; Washington Post, 9/16/24; Roll Call, 9/16/24), while Politico (9/16/24) and the New York Post (9/16/24) said the judges “grilled” the app’s lawyer.
The leaders of the ominously titled House Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party filed an amicus brief (8/2/24) with the appeals court, saying the law does “not regulate speech or require any social media company to stop operating in the United States,” because it is “focused entirely on the regulation of foreign adversary control.”
This, right here, is key. China is officially designated as an “adversary,” along with Iran and Cuba, despite the fact that China and the US have formal diplomatic relations and do billions of dollars in trade. The suggestion is that US citizens can and should be denied access to news and views that are tied to so-called adversary countries.
Iran’s Press TV is no objective media outlet by any measure, but would be important viewing for anyone who wants to further understand the Middle East, the same way one might explore Israel’s Haaretz or Qatar-based Al Jazeera. Its website is currently operational, but in 2021 the US government seized “33 Iranian government-affiliated media websites,” including that of Press TV (Al Jazeera, 6/23/21).
FAIR (8/5/20) has raised the concern that if TikTok is banned because of its Chinese affiliation, then Chinese newspapers and broadcasters, which many people rely on to inform themselves of the Chinese government perspective, could also be censored. These outlets have been feeling federal heat ever since the US State Department, in a move reminiscent of the Cold War against the Soviet Union, forced Chinese state media outlets to register as foreign agents (ABC, 2/18/20; FAIR.org, 2/28/22).
Unpopular censorshipSupport for banning TikTok has fallen from 50% in March 2023 to 32% in July/August 2024 (Pew, 9/5/24).
Unsurprisingly, the potential ban of the fourth-most popular social media platform in the US is unpopular with the public. Pew Research (9/5/24) reported: “The share of Americans who support the US government banning TikTok now stands at 32%. That’s down from 38% in fall 2023 and 50% in March 2023.”
That’s not surprising given that users say a ban “would hurt countless people and businesses that rely on TikTok for a significant portion of their income,” according to AP (3/16/24). “TikTok has become an unrivaled platform for dialogue and community.”
Many Americans are turning to the network for news (Bloomberg, 9/17/24). And TikTok has also been cited for being an important communications tool for labor unions (Vice, 5/7/21; Wired, 4/20/22; Fortune, 9/1/22) and other progressive causes (Politico, 3/27/22; Nation, 1/25/23). It is easy for some people to disregard the platform as a space for silly videos and memes made purely for entertainment, but clearly it has much more social utility than the scoffers realize.
TikTok (3/21/23) claims 150 million users in the United States; its users are disproportionately young, female, Black and Latine (Pew, 1/31/24). Pulling the plug on such an operation would be as disruptive as suspending postal operations—which, of course, is also on the conservative agenda (New Yorker, 5/2/20).
‘Demanding legal scrutiny’“Millions of Americans use TikTok every day to share and receive ideas, information, opinions and entertainment from other users around the world, and that’s squarely within the protections of the First Amendment,” noted EFF (6/27/24).
The Electronic Frontier Foundation said in a press release (6/27/24) that its amicus brief, which was joined by other media freedom groups, addressed the First Amendment concerns of the law:
The amicus brief says the Court must review the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act—passed by Congress and signed by President Biden in April—with the most demanding legal scrutiny, because it imposes a prior restraint that would make it impossible for users to speak, access information and associate through TikTok. It also directly restricts protected speech and association, and deliberately singles out a particular medium for a blanket prohibition. This demanding First Amendment test must be used even when the government asserts national security concerns.
The argument in favor of this law boils down to McCarthyite anti-China xenophobia: America’s most sacred liberty must be abandoned out of fear of the Red Menace. The paranoia manifests in other ways, too: State governments, mostly those controlled by Republicans, are enacting laws against land ownership by Chinese citizens (Politico, 4/3/24).
The House of Representatives has passed legislation that would authorize “more than $1.6 billion for the State Department and USAID over the next five years,” part of which would “subsidize media and civil society sources around the world that counter Chinese ‘malign influence’ globally,” reported Responsible Statecraft (9/11/24). The outlet added, “It’s possible that the program could in some cases be used to subsidize covert anti-Chinese messaging,” reminiscent of “the way Russia is accused of covertly funding anti-Ukrainian messaging by US media influencers.”
Spies don’t need TikTokTikTok* is directly owned by TikTok Inc., a US-based company that is ultimately owned by ByteDance, a company incorporated by Chinese investors in the Cayman Islands. As Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24) noted, “If the CCP wanted TikTok to steal Americans’ data, it would not have chosen this corporate structure that is designed to insulate TikTok* from Chinese influence.”
Even Washington Post columnist George Will (5/15/24), one of the loudest conservative voices in US media, framed the “national security” issue with TikTok as a weak and vague excuse to subvert free speech. “Respect for the First Amendment has collapsed, and government has a propensity for claiming that every novel exercise of power legitimates the next extension of its pretensions,” he said. “TikTok will not be the last target of government’s desire to control the internet and the rest of society’s information and opinion ecosystem.”
And the “national security” concerns of the US government (Bloomberg, 7/27/24) don’t hold water. The Citizen Lab, published by the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, issued a report (3/22/21) on both TikTok and another ByteDance app, Douyin. The report found that both apps “do not appear to exhibit overtly malicious behavior similar to those exhibited by malware.” Researchers did not “observe either app collecting contact lists, recording and sending photos, audio, videos or geolocation coordinates without user permission.”
More recently, the Chicago Policy Review (7/26/24), published by the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy, found that the corporate structure of ByteDance does not indicate that China’s Communist Party has firm control on day-to-day operations as the US government contends. Further, it argued that party or government control of TikTok would have little value for Beijing:
First, China has little incentive to spy on ordinary Americans, since most data has no national security relevance. Second, the Chinese Communist Party does not need to subjugate TikTok to spy on the social media of powerful Americans. Chinese state intelligence can obtain valuable information by monitoring users’ behavior and posts on TikTok and other social media applications. Banning TikTok would not solve the problem of foreign intelligence agencies gathering social media data.
At the same time, Republicans pretend to care about free speech in social media when it comes to claims that Facebook is icing out conservative voices (New York Post, 9/16/24), decrying fact-checking and content moderation by a private entity as censorship. Those sanctimonious appeals to constitutional liberty ring hollow when all the branches of government are working to destroy an entire network.
A Scripps/Ipsos poll (9/18/24) reported that “a majority of Americans support mass deportation of undocumented immigrants.” The phrasing dovetails with the Trump campaign’s promise that such a deportation is exactly what a second Trump administration would undertake.
Numerous other media outlets (e.g., C-SPAN, CBS News, Reuters, among many others) immediately reported on the findings, given their political significance. “Donald Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Is More Popular Than You Think,” was Newsweek‘s headline (9/18/24).
An examination of the poll questions and results, however, suggest that this measure of “public opinion” can hardly be taken seriously, because most people display a lack of engagement and, perhaps more importantly, understanding of the issue. By exploiting this lack of information, the pollsters create the illusion of strong public support.
Unengaged—but opinionated?Questions in the poll address several different aspects of immigration, but it’s worth noting this one: “How closely are you following the news on the following topics: The immigration situation at the US/Mexican border?” Just 23% said “very closely.” Another 36% said “somewhat closely,” and 40% admitted “not very” or “not at all closely.”
In short, a significant portion of the respondents in the poll is unengaged on this issue, while only a quarter is “very” engaged. Yet the poll presents over 90% of its respondents as having meaningful opinions about immigration questions.
Beyond people’s lack of engagement—which suggests that whatever opinions most of them give are not terribly strong—the Scripps/Ipsos poll also shows that the people it polled lack basic knowledge about the policy issue. This is made plain by responses to a question designed to find out how much people knew about responsibilities for immigration Kamala Harris had been assigned as vice president:
| Which of the following, if any, best describes your understanding of Kamala Harris’ responsibilities as vice president, specifically as it relates to the issue of immigration? | | She is responsible for securing the southern border | 17% | | She is responsible for addressing the reasons why migrants leave their home countries for the US | 10% | | Some mix of both | 28% | | She has little to no responsibility | 24% | | Don’t know/no response | 22% |
If a person is engaged and informed on the immigration situation at the US/Mexico border, they surely will know the answer to this question. Yet a mere 10% of the respondents chose the option that comes closest to explaining her responsibilities, which is highlighted in yellow: to address the reasons why migrants leave their home countries for the US.
KFF polling (9/24/24) indicates that many Americans are unsure about what is and isn’t true about immigration.
Granted, it’s a difficult time to be informed about immigration in this country. A recent KFF poll (9/24/24) found that a large majority of adults have heard false information from elected officials or candidates, such as the claim that “immigrants are causing an increase in violent crime in the US” or that “immigrants are taking jobs and causing an increase in unemployment for people born in the US.” And many of them—51% and 44%, respectively—think those false claims are “definitely” or “probably” true. (Both are also key talking points for the Trump campaign—as is the claim that Harris has been in charge of the southern border under Biden.)
The news outlets that are supposed to inform the citizenry about issues of public concern haven’t been much help. A FAIR examination (5/24/21) of establishment immigration coverage found it was characterized by “hyperbole about recent migration trends and an inexcusable lack of historical context.”
But rather than take its respondents’ overwhelming inability to answer a factual question about immigration policy as demonstrating a lack of information and understanding, Scripps framed it in its press release (9/18/24) as merely another opinion: “Voters couldn’t agree on Harris’s role on immigration policy, with 17% saying they believe she is responsible for securing the US/Mexico border and 20% unsure.”
Masking apathyDespite the large segment of the polled population that was shown to be disengaged on the immigration issue, and the overwhelming number who had no idea what Harris’ responsibilities on immigration were, the poll reported 97% with an opinion on whether there should be a mass deportation of undocumented immigrants:
| To what extent do you support or oppose the following: The mass deportation of undocumented immigrants? |
| Strongly support | 30% | | Somewhat support | 24% | | Somewhat oppose | 20% | | Strongly oppose | 23% |
Of course, people can have opinions even if they have little to no information. But in that case, it’s important to at least give respondents an explicit opportunity to acknowledge they don’t have an opinion. The “forced-choice” question above provides no such explicit option.
The Scripps headline (9/18/24) neglected to clarify that mass deportation has “strong support” from less than a third of the public.
And although Scripps characterized the results as showing “strong support” for the proposal—”Though It Has Strong Support, Experts Say Mass Deportation Would Take Herculean Effort” was its headline (9/18/24) over a write-up of the poll—in fact, as the table illustrates, the results show only 30% with “strong support.”
As I explained in a different article for FAIR (9/28/23), people who indicate that they only “somewhat” support a policy proposal typically admit that they really don’t care one way or the other—that they would not be “upset” if the opposite happened to the position they just expressed. The “somewhat” option allows the unengaged to give an opinion and do their “job” as a respondent, even though they are not committed “strongly” to that view.
The table above shows that approximately half of the poll’s respondents felt strongly about their views—30% in favor, 23% opposed, with roughly the other half unengaged. Those results probably overstate somewhat the degree of public engagement, but it is much more realistic than the notion that 97% of Americans have a meaningful opinion on immigration policy.
Moreover, even many of those who report feeling “strongly” about it quite likely have no conception of what a “mass deportation” would mean. Instead of asking a vague question to an underengaged and underinformed public, the poll could have examined their understanding of the issue. It could ask respondents what the term means to them, how many immigrants would be involved, what they know about what undocumented immigrants actually do in this country, what impacts they think the deportation of immigrants might have. Asking these kinds of questions—rather than simply polling a campaign slogan—would have more honestly examined what people actually think about the issue.
The fundamental problem with public policy polling by the media is that they really don’t want to tell the truth about the American public—that on most issues, large segments of the public are simply too busy to keep informed and formulate meaningful opinions. Given that media’s prime function is to give the public the information it needs to make informed choices about civic issues, such disengagement is a warning that news outlets are not doing their job adequately.
But rather than take the public disconnect as an impetus to do better, media give us example after example of how “public opinion” polling can give the illusion of a fully engaged and informed public. By now, we should all know better.
Featured image: A Scripps video (9/18/24) falsely claims that the outlet’s poll found “strong support for mass deportations.”
One of the US’s oldest and closest allies is currently undergoing a constitutional crisis. Its government is in disarray, led by a head of state whose party has been rejected by voters, and who refuses to allow parliament to function. Coups and crises of transition may pass by relatively unnoticed in the periphery, but France has gone nearly two months without a legitimate government, and US corporate media don’t seem to care to report on it.
Despite corporate media’s supposed dedication to preserving Western democracy, the Washington Post and the New York Times have mostly stayed silent on French President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respect the winners of the recent election. Since the left coalition supplied its pick for prime minister on July 23, the Times has reported on the issue twice, once when Macron declared he wouldn’t name a prime minister until after the Olympics (7/23/24), and again nearly seven weeks after the July 7 election (8/23/24). Neither story appeared on the front page.
When the far-right won the first round of French elections, that was front-page news in the New York Times (7/1/24). When the left won the second round, that was much less newsworthy to the Times.
It’s not that the Times didn’t think the French elections were worth reporting on; the paper ran five news articles (6/30/24, 6/30/24, 7/1/24, 7/1/24, 7/7/24), including two on the front page of its print edition, from June 30–July 7 on “France’s high-stakes election” that “could put the country on a new course” (6/30/24). But as it became clear that Macron was not going to name a prime minister, transforming the snap election into a constitutional crisis, the US paper of record seemingly lost interest.
Since July 23, the Post has published two news items from the AP (8/23/24, 8/27/24), plus an opinion piece by European affairs columnist Lee Hockstader (7/24/24), who suggested that France’s best path forward is “a broad alliance of the center”—conveniently omitting that the leftist coalition in fact beat Macron’s centrists in the July 7 election. In what little reporting there is, journalists have been satisfied to stick to Macron’s framing of “stability,” omitting any critique of an executive exploiting holes in the French constitution.
France is in an unprecedented political situation, in which there is no clear governing coalition in the National Assembly. After the snap elections concluded on July 7, the left coalition New Popular Front (NFP) won a plurality of seats in the National Assembly, beating out both Macron’s centrist Ensemble and the far-right National Rally (RN). (While the sitting president’s coalition won the second-most seats, it actually got fewer votes than either the left coalition or the far right.)
These circumstances expose a blind spot in the French constitution, where the president has sole responsibility to name a prime minister, but is not constitutionally obligated to choose someone from the coalition with the most backing. Indeed, there is no deadline for him to choose anyone. In the absence of a new government, Gabriel Attal of Macron’s Renaissance party continues to be prime minister of a caretaker government, despite the voters’ clear rejection of the party.
Despite Macron’s failure to allow the French government to function, US reporting on the subject has remained subdued. Headlines note less the historic impasse in the National Assembly, and Macron’s failure to respect the outcome of the legislative election, and more the confusing or curious nature of the situation.
‘Institutional stability’When someone in a headline “fumes” (Washington Post, 7/27/24), that’s a signal that you’re not supposed to sympathize with them.
Where US corporate media do comment on Macron’s denial of the election, their framing is neutral or even defensive of the president’s equivocations. Critiques are couched as attacks from the left; one AP piece published in the Washington Post (8/27/24) reports not that Macron is denying an election, but simply that France’s left is fuming:
France’s main left-wing coalition on Tuesday accused President Emmanuel Macron of denying democracy…. Leftist leaders lashed out at Macron, accusing him of endangering French democracy and denying the election results.
Left unchallenged are Macron’s claims that he is simply trying his best to preserve stability, election results be damned:
On Monday, Macron rejected their nominee for prime minister—little-known civil servant Lucie Castets—saying that his decision to refuse a government led by the New Popular Front is aimed at ensuring “institutional stability.”
AP left out of its story the fact that Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France Unbowed (LFI), the supposedly most objectionable member of the NFP coalition, even offered to accept an NFP government led by Castets, with no LFI members in ministerial roles, to assuage the fears of centrists. This olive branch did not impress AP, which instead relayed Macron’s call for “left-wing leaders to seek cooperation with parties outside their coalition.”
Despite noting that “the left-wing coalition…has insisted that the new prime minister should be from their ranks because it’s the largest group,” the AP piece concluded that “Macron appears more eager to seek a coalition that could include politicians from the center-left to the traditional right,” with no commentary on the right of the electorate to have their voices heard.
‘Scorched-earth politics’To the New York Times (8/23/24), the idea that a left coalition would try to implement the platform it successfully ran on is a “hard-core stance.”
The New York Times’ reporting (8/23/24) had a similar tone, focusing on the “kafkaesque” situation in which the French government is “intractably stuck.” Times correspondent Catherine Porter chided the NFP, the coalition with the most seats, for its supposed unwillingness to compromise—noting pointedly that “many of the actions the coalition has vowed to champion run counter to Mr. Macron’s philosophy of making France more business-friendly.”
She went on to admit, however, that Castets, the NFP’s choice for prime minister, “has softened her position from its original hard-core stance”—that is, that the coalition would implement the program it ran on—and that “she says she would pursue something more reflective of minority government position.”
However, the Times continued, “the biggest party in her coalition, France Unbowed, has a history of scorched-earth politics that makes the pledge for conciliation feel thin.” In other words, even when the left is willing to make compromises, it is still to blame if such offers aren’t accepted, due to its history of acting in a principled fashion.
The Times seemed to accept an equation between LFI and the RN, which was founded (as the National Front) as an explicitly neo-fascist movement. The paper reported that it was not only a departing minister from Macron’s party, but “many others,” who
consider France Unbowed and its combative leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a former Trotskyist, to be as dangerous to France’s democracy as the extreme right.
The anti-immigrant agenda of France’s extreme right, as represented by the RN, includes repealing birthright citizenship in favor of requiring a French parent and implementing strict tests of cultural and lingual assimilation. Mélenchon’s LFI, in contrast, favors medical aid for undocumented migrants and social support for asylum seekers.
Despite the Times’ previous reporting (7/9/24) that LFI is a “hostile-to-capitalism” party, the party’s platform only calls for more state intervention in the market economy, with a critique that is more anti–free market dogma than anti-capitalist, per political scientist Rémi Lefebvre.
Whether supporting intervention in the market is as extreme as supporting ethnic determination of “Frenchness” is left as an exercise for the reader. But according to the French government’s official categorization (Le Parisien, 3/11/24), LFI is categorized simply as “left,” while the RN is indeed categorized as “extreme right.”
Despite the sparse and incomplete coverage by the New York Times and the Washington Post, they must be given credit for covering the story at all. A Nexis review of Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, CBS and PBS NewsHour reveals next to no reporting on Macron’s refusal to name a prime minister, with no critical reporting whatsoever.
Since July 23, when Castets emerged as the left’s choice, there have been two brief mentions of Macron’s lack of a decision, on CNN Newsroom (7/24/24) and Fox Special Report (8/23/24). Neither program mentioned Castets, much less the exceptional circumstances faced by the French electorate.
Phil Donahue passed away Sunday night, after a long illness. He was beloved by those who knew him and by many who didn’t.
He started as a local reporter in Ohio, was a trailblazer in bringing social issues to a national audience as a daytime broadcast TV host, and then he was pretty much banished from TV by MSNBC because he—accurately, correctly and morally—questioned the horrific US invasion of Iraq.
Phil Donahue in 1977.
Beginning in the 1970s, Phil took progressive issues and mainstreamed them to millions through his syndicated daytime show. He was a pioneer in syndication. He also pioneered on the issues; his most frequent guests on his daytime show were Ralph Nader, Gloria Steinem and Rev. Jesse Jackson. They appeared dozens of times as Phil boosted civil rights, women’s rights, consumer rights, gay rights. He regularly hosted Dr. Sidney Wolfe, warning of the greedy pharmaceutical industry and unsafe drugs. Raised a Catholic, he also featured advocates for atheism.
Mainstream media obits have predictably had a focus on his daytime TV episodes that included male strippers or other titillation, but Phil was serious about the issues—and did far more than most mainstream TV journalists to address the biggest issues.
I was a senior producer on Phil’s short-lived MSNBC primetime show in 2002 and 2003. It was frustrating for us to have to deal with the men Phil called “the suits”—NBC and MSNBC executives who were intimidated by the Bush administration, and resisted any efforts by NBC/MSNBC to practice journalism and ask tough questions of Washington before our young people were sent to Iraq to kill or be killed. Ultimately, Phil was fired because—as the leaked internal memo said—Donahue represented “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war.”
But before we were terminated, we put guests on the screen who were not commonly on mainstream TV. We offered a full hour with Barbara Ehrenreich on Labor Day 2002, a full hour with Studs Terkel, congressmembers Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich, columnist Molly Ivins, experts like Phyllis Bennis and Laura Flanders, Palestinian advocates including Hanan Ashrawi.
No one on US TV cross-examined Israeli leaders like Phil did when he interviewed then-Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres, and later, former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. They seemed stunned—never having faced such questioning from a US journalist.
Phil Donahue (right) with Michael Moore—three right-wingers for balance not pictured.
But “the suits” ruined our show when they took control and actually mandated a quota system favoring the right wing: If we had booked one guest who was antiwar, we needed to book two that were pro-war. If we had two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. When a producer suggested booking Michael Moore—known to oppose the pending Iraq War—she was told she’d need to book three right-wingers for political balance.
Three weeks before the Iraq war started, and after some of the biggest antiwar mobilizations the world had ever seen (which were barely covered on mainstream TV), the suits at NBC/MSNBC terminated our show.
Phil was a giant. A huge celebrity who supported uncelebrated indie media outlets. He loved and supported the progressive media watch group FAIR (which I founded in the mid-1980s).
Phil put Noam Chomsky on mainstream TV. He fought for Ralph Nader to be included in the 2000 presidential debates. He went on any TV show right after 9/11 that would have him, to urge caution and to resist the calls for vengeful, endless warfare that would pointlessly kill large numbers of civilians in other countries. He opposed active wars and the Cold War with the Soviet Union. He supported war veterans and produced an important documentary on the topic: Body of War.
Phil Donahue made his mark on our society. He fought for the underdog. He did it with style and grace and a wonderful sense of humor. He changed my life. And others’ lives.
He was inspired by the consciousness-raising groups he saw in the feminist movement, and he sought to do consciousness-raising on a mass scale . . . using mainstream corporate TV. He did an amazing job of it.
A version of this post appeared on Common Dreams (8/19/24) and other outlets.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240816.mp3ExxonKnews (6/17/24)
This week on CounterSpin: Climate disruption is outpacing many scientists’ understanding of it, and it’s undeniably driving many harms we are facing: extreme heat, extreme cold, devastating hurricanes and tornadoes. News media are giving up pretending that these extreme weather events are just weird, and not provably driven by the continued use of fossil fuels. But fossil fuel companies are among the most powerful players in terms of telling lawmakers how to make the laws they want to see, public interest be damned. So the crickets you’re hearing about efforts to eviscerate the right to protest the impacts of climate disruption? That’s all intentional. We’ll hear about what you are very definitely not supposed to hear from reporter Emily Sanders from ExxonKnews.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240816Sanders.mp3Inside Climate News (7/8/24)
Also and related: Not everyone is lying down and accepting that, OK, we’re going to die from a climate crisis that is avoidable, but since companies don’t want to talk about it, let’s not. A county in Oregon is saying, deaths from high heat are in fact directly connected to conscious corporate decision-making, and we’ll address it that way. We’ll hear about that potentially emblematic story from Victoria St. Martin, longtime journalist and journalism educator, now reporting on health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240816Martin.mp3Employing the law to silence dissent on life or death concerns, or using the law to engage those concerns head on—that’s this week on CounterSpin!
Recent student-led campus encampments in solidarity with Palestine prompted considerable media conversation. But, according to a new FAIR study examining TV and newspaper discussions in the period from April 21 to May 12, those conversations rarely included students themselves—and even fewer included student protesters.
FAIR examined how often key corporate media discussion forums contain student and activist voices. The Sunday morning shows (ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday) brought on no students or activists, opting instead to speak primarily with government officials.
The daily news shows we surveyed—CNN’s Lead With Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s ReidOut, Fox News‘ Hannity and PBS’s NewsHour—were slightly better, with six students out of 79 guests, but only two of them were pro-Palestine protesters.
The op-ed pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Wall Street Journal featured two students out of 52 writers, only one of whom was a protester.
Sunday Shows: Student-Free ZoneThe agenda-setting Sunday morning shows, which historically skew towards government officials (FAIR.org, 8/12/20, 10/21/23), showed no interest in giving airtime to student or activist voices. For the first weeks following the first encampment set up at Columbia University, when the student protests began to command national media attention, FAIR analyzed every episode of ABC’s This Week, CBS’s Face the Nation, NBC’s Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday.
Out of 36 one-on-one and roundtable guests across all networks, 29 (81%) were current or former government officials or politicians, and five (14%) were journalists. One academic and one think tank representative were also featured. Of the 29 government sources, only six spoke about having personal experience with the protests, or about universities in states they represent.
No students or activists, and only one academic, were invited to speak on any of the Sunday shows. The one academic, Robert Pape of the University of Chicago, didn’t speak about his own experience with the encampments, but about his research on student safety.
Some guests utilized inflammatory language when discussing the protesters, who were never afforded the opportunity to defend themselves. On This Week, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton (ABC, 5/5/24), referred to the encampments as “Little Gazas,” and said the students “deserved our contempt” and “mockery.” “I mean, they’re out there in their N95 masks in the open air, with their gluten allergies, demanding that Uber Eats get delivered to them,” he said. Later on, Cotton referred to a keffiyeh—a symbol of Palestinian identity and solidarity—that protesters had put on a statue of George Washington as a “terrorist headdress.”
Jeffrey Miller lies on the pavement, one of four students killed when the National Guard was sent in to suppress protests at Kent State on May 4, 1970.
Three guests were asked about the idea of bringing in the National Guard to quell protests, only one declared it to be a bad idea. The other two gave similarly equivocal answers: Sen. J.D. Vance (Fox News Sunday, 4/28/24) said, “I don’t know if you need to call in the National Guard,” while Republican congressional candidate Tiffany Smiley (Fox News Sunday, 4/28/24) responded, “I don’t know if the National Guard is necessary.” But both agreed that some kind of police response was needed to these student protests.
In most other instances, the host would ask a politician for their thoughts on the encampments, to which the guest would respond with platitudes about nonviolence. For instance, CNN‘s Jake Tapper (5/5/24) asked Biden adviser Mitch Landrieu whether groups like Jewish Voice for Peace are “causing unrest for the American people.” Landrieu responded, “Everybody has a right to protest, but they have to protest peacefully.”
Framing the questionsThroughout the Sunday show discussions, there was a heavy focus on whether the protests were violent and antisemitic, and next to no explanation of the demands of the protesters. Even though violence by—as opposed to against—campus protesters was very uncommon, politicians continually framed the protests as a threat to safety. White House national security communications advisor John Kirby (This Week, 4/28/24) decried “the antisemitism language that we’ve heard of late, and…all the hate speech and the threats of violence out there.”
Of all 64 questions asked to guests, only one—CNN’s interview with LA Mayor Karen Bass (4/28/24)—mentioned divestment, the withdrawal of colleges’ investments from companies linked to the Gaza military campaign and/or Israel, which was the central demand of most of the encampments. Moreover, this was the only instance in which divestment was discussed by any host or guest on the Sunday shows. On the other hand, 20 of the 36 conversations named antisemitism as an issue.
There were two questions asked about the safety of Jewish students (CNN, 4/28/24, 5/5/24)—by which CNN meant pro-Israel Jewish students, as many Jewish students took part in the encampments. (Forty-two percent of young Jewish Americans say Israel’s response to October 7 is “unacceptable,” according to Pew Research Center polling.) Only one question was asked about the safety of Muslim students (CNN, 5/5/24), even though both groups reported feeling almost equally unsafe.
All questions on violence related to the protesters, and not to counter-protesters or law enforcement. The interview with Bass (CNN, 4/28/24) made no mention of the violent counter-protests at UCLA that sent 25 protesters to the emergency room, but instead focused on hypothetical dangers to pro-Israel students.
Weekday News Shows: Rare Sightings of ProtestersIn the same period as the study on Sunday shows, FAIR analyzed every episode of CNN’s Lead With Jake Tapper, MSNBC’s ReidOut, Fox News’ Hannity and PBS’s NewsHour. These daily programs were chosen as representative, highly rated daily news shows that have a focus on political discussion. Although the evening shows, unlike the Sunday shows, included occasional student voices, they were far outnumbered by government officials, journalists and educators—and only two student guests were protesters.
Of the 79 guests who appeared on these shows, 23 (29%) were current or former government officials and politicians, 19 (24%) were university-level educators and administrators, 18 (23%) were journalists, six (8%) were students and 13 (16%) had other jobs.
These shows showed more variation across the networks than the Sunday shows. Sixty-five percent of PBS NewsHour‘s guests were university-affiliated, for instance, and none were government officials, while almost two-thirds of Hannity‘s guests on Fox News (64%) were government officials and politicians, with no educators or students appearing.
The three student journalists found on daily news shows all appeared together on one episode of the PBS NewsHour (4/30/24).
There were a total of six students invited among the 79 guests, accounting for fewer than 8% of all interviewees. Two of these were pro-Palestine protesters, both appearing on MSNBC‘s ReidOut (4/22/24, 4/30/34). Three were nonaligned student journalists, all appearing together on PBS (4/30/24), and one, a student government leader at Columbia, was an Israeli who supported her government (CNN, 4/30/24).
One of the students on ReidOut (4/30/24), identified only by his first name, Andrew, described the police brutality at Washington University in St. Louis: “I was held in custody for six hours. I wasn’t provided food or water, and I have since been suspended and banned from my campus.”
Andrew was one of just two guests who mentioned police brutality. The other student protester, Marium Alwan, told host Joy Reid (4/22/24) that the Columbia encampment, and all encampments, “stand for liberation and human rights and equality for Jewish people, Palestinians.” When asked about antisemitism, she said they “stand against hateful rhetoric.”
Maya Platek, the only student featured on CNN‘s Lead (4/30/24), was president elect of the Columbia School of General Studies (and former head content writer for the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit). She said that at Columbia, she “would not say that I have been feeling the most comfortable.” She called the idea of divesting from Israel, and suspending Columbia’s dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University, “completely atrocious.”
Completely shutting out student voices, Fox News prioritized right-wing politicians like former President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to speak on the protests. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (Hannity, 4/30/24) compared the encampments to “Poland pre–World War II” and “Kristallnacht.”
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft (CNN, 4/22/24) was brought on to talk about student protests more often than all student protesters put together.
CNN‘s Lead, the show with the second-highest number of government official guests (35%), featured more centrists than did Hannity. Florida Rep. Jared Moskowitz (5/1/24) said that while “it’s their First Amendment right” to protest, for students to say such as “go back to Poland or bomb Tel Aviv or kill all the Zionists” was not acceptable, a message similar to those frequently heard on the Sunday shows.
Robert Kraft, owner of the New England Patriots and a major donor to Columbia University, was invited to speak about encampments three times (Fox, 4/22/24, 5/1/24; CNN, 4/22/24)—more times than student protesters spoke across all four shows.
Although a slight improvement over the Sunday shows’ complete shut-out of student voices, these daily news shows still had relatively few references to divestment, which came up in 16 interviews (20%), or police violence, mentioned in seven interviews. This compares to 33 interviews (42%) that discussed antisemitism.
Newspaper Op-Eds: Views From a Staffer’s DeskFree-speech celebrant John McWhorter wrote a column for the New York Times (4/23/24) that wondered why students were allowed to protest against Israel.
The opinion columns of corporate newspapers did no better at including student protesters’ voices than the TV shows. FAIR analyzed every op-ed primarily about the campus encampments in the same time span (April 21–May 12), from the New York Times, USA Today, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post.
In the observed period, the Times published 11 op-eds about the campus encampments, all written by Times columnists. The paper failed to include any students or activists in its opinion section.
Out of nine different Times columnists, only one mentioned visiting an encampment: John McWhorter (4/23/24), a Columbia professor who writes regularly for the paper, was critical of the protests happening at his university. The self-styled free-speech advocate demanded to know, “Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?”
During the same period, the Washington Post also ran 11 encampment-related op-eds. Ten were written by regular columnists, and two mentioned having visited an encampment. Those two—Karen Attiah (5/2/24) and Eugene Robinson (4/29/24)—wrote positively of the protests. Attiah wrote of her visit:
Around me, students were reading, studying and chatting. Some were making art and painting. I saw an environment rich with learning, but I did not see disruption.
The paper’s only guest column on the encampments was penned by Paul Berman (4/26/24), a Columbia graduate and writer for the center-right Jewish magazine Tablet, who opined that the student protesters had “gone out of their minds,” and that professors were to blame for “intellectual degeneration.” Like the Times, the Post failed to include any students or activists in their opinion section.
‘We bruise, we feel’In the only op-ed the study found written by a student protester (USA Today, 5/8/24), Columbia’s Allie Wong was able to succinctly state the objective of the encampments: “We are calling to end the violence and genocide against our Palestinian brothers and sisters.”
USA Today published fewer encampment-related opinion pieces, but invited more outside perspectives. Of its seven columns during the study period, four were written by regular columnists, one by Columbia student protester Allie Wong (5/8/24), one by pro-Israel advocate Nathan J. Diament (4/22/24) and one by the son of Holocaust survivor Eli Wiesel (5/2/24).
In her op-ed, Wong described the police brutality exhibited during her and other protesters’ arrests:
We clung tighter to one another as they approached us, and seized us like rag dolls and slammed us into the hallowed ground of brick and concrete. But unlike rag dolls, we bleed, we crack, we bruise, we feel.
Wong’s piece was also the only one in USA Today to mention divestment, and one of only three pieces to mention divestment among all op-eds in the study. (The other two, from the Wall Street Journal, called the divestment demands “useless”—4/30/24—and “a breach of fiduciary obligation”—5/5/24.)
‘Fraternities a cure’The Wall Street Journal (5/9/24) ran an editorial calling fraternities the antidote to encampments, written by someone who sells insurance to fraternities.
The Wall Street Journal had the most op-eds of the four papers. Its 22 pieces on the encampments included four by educators and one by a student. Unlike most other student and educator voices across our study, however, the student and educator guests on the Journal were highly critical of the protests.
Dawn Watkins Wiese (5/9/24) wrote a column titled “Fraternities Are a Cure for What Ails Higher Education,” asserting that the counter-protesters instigating violence at UNC “acted bravely.” Wiese is the chief operating officer of FRMT Ltd., an insurer of fraternities.
Ben Sasse (5/3/24), president of the University of Florida (and a former Republican senator), charged that the students were uneducated: “‘From the river to the sea.’ Which river? Which sea?” he wrote, suggesting that students didn’t know what they were protesting about.
The one student on the Journal‘s op-ed pages, Yale’s Gabriel Diamond (4/21/24), called for the expulsion of his protesting classmates for being “violent.” According to Yale Daily News president Anika Seth (4/30/24), no violence had been documented at the school’s encampment.
Takeaways: Avoid DemandsAcross corporate media, the lack of student and protester voices in discussions of student protests is striking. Virtually every university has student journalists, yet only four of them were found in the study, compared to the more than 50 non-student journalists and columnists, the vast majority of whom gave no sign of ever having been to an encampment.
Despite polling that found Jewish and Muslim students feeling almost equally unsafe, antisemitism was mentioned in 88 different interviews and editorials, while Islamophobia was mentioned in only six interviews and one op-ed (Washington Post, 5/2/24). Divestment was only mentioned 26 times, despite it being the principal goal of the encampments.
The Palestine campus protests were not the first time corporate media avoided the demands of protesters. A 2020 FAIR study (8/12/20) of coverage of Black Lives Matter protests showed a “heavy focus on whether the protests were violent or nonviolent, rather than on the demands of the protesters,” a description that applies equally well to the coverage and commentary examined in this study.
Research assistance: Owen Schacht
As the Democrats headed toward their convention with momentum for the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket, newspapers have collectively found an August scandal. Major press outlets are amplifying Republican claims that Walz, as governor of Minnesota, let the Twin Cities burn during the 2020 George Floyd uprising. By spotlighting these charges, corporate media are assisting GOP attempts to portray themselves as the party of law and order against a tide of anarchic anti-police chaos.
To recap, Walz, who had spent a quarter century in the National Guard, was governor of the state in the summer of 2020, when white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was caught on camera murdering George Floyd, a Black man, suffocating him to death. Protests in the city erupted and turned violent, and protests popped off around the country.
When the head of the Minnesota National Guard was told by Gov. Tim Walz that the entire force would be mobilized, Maj. Gen. Jon Jensen said his first reaction was, “Whoa, wait a second here, sir” (MPR, 7/10/24).
Walz, originally hesitant to call in military assistance to restore order, eventually called in the National Guard, which Minnesota Public Radio (7/10/24) praised for having “mobilized quickly” and “adjusted on [the] fly for Floyd unrest.” MPR added that it had been the state guard’s “largest deployment since World War II, and it occurred with remarkable speed.”
The “law and order” aspect of this election is muddy. Donald Trump, who makes “tough on crime” conservatism a part of persona in his attempt to return to the White House, is the only presidential candidate in history to be convicted of a felony. Meanwhile, Harris made her career in California as the San Francisco district attorney, and then the state’s attorney general. Despite Walz’s career in the National Guard, the Republicans are drumming up the 2020 George Floyd drama to try to win back the title of the party of order.
Too much of the corporate media are helping the Republicans make this flimsy case—and allowing the debate to revolve around the question of whether Walz was quick enough to use force against Black Lives Matter protests.
‘I fully agree with the way he handled it’Four years ago, Trump praised Tim Walz’s response to the protests after George Floyd’s murder, calling the governor “an excellent guy” (CNN, 8/8/24).
For starters, then-President Trump had actually praised Walz’s handling of the crisis in 2020 (CNN, 8/8/24). “I fully agree with the way he handled it the last couple of days,” Trump said of Walz in a conference call with governors:
Tim Walz. Again, I was very happy with the last couple of days. Tim, you called up big numbers and the big numbers knocked them out so fast it was like bowling pins.
Surely this is relevant context for any story about the Trump campaign now attacking Walz’s response to the Floyd protests. (A transcript of the call has been available online at CNN.com since June 1, 2020.)
And it should be hard for journalists to recall the police response as being any kind of hands-off approach. At FAIR (9/3/21), I covered the case of Linda Tirado, an independent journalist who lost vision in one eye after being shot by a Minneapolis cop while covering the protests; she was one of dozens of journalists that summer who sustained eye injuries because of the overzealous police response.
Two years ago, AP (11/30/22) reported, Minneapolis “reached a $600,000 settlement with 12 protesters who were injured during demonstrations after the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd.” The ACLU, AP said,
alleged that police used tear gas as well as foam and rubber bullets to intimidate them and quash the demonstrations, and also that officers often fired without warning or giving orders to leave.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune (4/4/24) noted:
At least a dozen Minneapolis police officers were sanctioned for misconduct related to the department’s riot response in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and subsequent crowd control efforts in 2020.
‘Draws fresh scrutiny’But three major newspapers are repeating the partisan attacks on Walz’s response—that he was basically more or less acting in concert with the protesters and not interested in maintaining order.
The Washington Post (8/13/24) carried the headline “Walz’s Handling of George Floyd Protests Draws Fresh Scrutiny,” with the subhead, “Republicans say Tim Walz was slow to act as violence raged in Minneapolis. Activists say he showed restraint and compassion.” It summarized that former Trump “and his allies are seizing on criticism from other Democrats that Walz was too slow to act to portray him as weak,” making him out to be “another lenient liberal politician, in their telling, who gave a pass to protesters and allowed destruction in their cities.”
The Boston Globe (8/13/24) re-ran the Post piece.
The point of this New York Times article (8/14/24) is that after Walz was asked in a nighttime call to send in the National Guard, he slept on it and decided to do so in the morning.
A day later, a New York Times story (8/14/24) ran with the headline “Walz Faces New Scrutiny Over 2020 Riots: Was He Too Slow to Send Troops?” Its subhead: “Gov. Tim Walz’s response to the unrest has attracted new scrutiny, and diverging opinions, since he joined Kamala Harris’s ticket.”
The piece starts out summarizing the case that Walz was slow to respond. In the ninth paragraph, the Times offered a baby-splitting verdict on Walz’s response:
But a reconstruction of the days after Mr. Floyd’s murder reveals that Mr. Walz did not immediately anticipate how widespread and violent the riots would become and did not mobilize the Guard when first asked to do so. Interviews, documents and public statements also show that, as the violence increased, Mr. Walz moved to take command of the response, flooding Minneapolis with state personnel who helped restore order.
This wasn’t the first such story in the Times. Earlier in August, the New York Times (8/6/24) ran the headline “Walz Has Faced Criticism for His Response to George Floyd Protests,” with the subhead “Some believe that Gov. Tim Walz should have deployed the Minnesota National Guard sooner when riots broke out following the police murder of George Floyd.” The third paragraph said:
Looting, arson and violence followed, quickly overwhelming the local authorities, and some faulted Mr. Walz for not doing more and not moving faster to bring the situation under control with Minnesota National Guard troops and other state officials.
‘Make America burn again’The real problem Heather Mac Donald (Wall Street Journal, 8/13/24) has with Walz is that he believes there’s such a thing as “systemic racism.”
On the same day the Post story ran, the Wall Street Journal (8/13/24) ran an op-ed by pro-police pundit Heather Mac Donald, who said it wasn’t just Walz’s allegedly slow response that was bad for Minnesota, but his entire worldview that sympathized with Black victims of police violence:
In 2022, Mr. Walz declared May 25 “George Floyd Remembrance Day” and has done so each year since. The 2022 and 2023 proclamations invoked “systemic racism” or its equivalent five times. They urged the public to “honor” Floyd “and every person whose life has been cut short due to systems of racism,” and to “deconstruct and undo generations of systemic racism.”
She continued, “Mr. Walz’s belief in ‘systemic racism’ dovetails with Kamala Harris’s worldview. Both portray the police as the major threat to Black Americans.”
Elsewhere in the Murdoch press, Fox News (8/14/24), citing a “former federal prosecutor in Minneapolis who prosecuted George Floyd rioters,” said “Walz’s record as governor on that issue, and several others, including fraud, makes him ‘unfit’ for a promotion to vice president of the United States.” The man quoted here is Joe Teirab, who also just won a GOP House of Representatives primary with Trump’s backing (WCCO, 8/14/24).
A CBS piece (8/13/24) straightforwardly related that “Sen. JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate, claims Walz ‘actively encouraged’ rioters” in the lead of its story. Fox News (8/7/24), as a sort of GOP public relations arm, was more forceful when it ran the headline “Vance Praised for ‘Absolute FIRE’ Takedown of Harris/Walz ‘Tag Team’ Riot Enablers: ‘Make America Burn Again’” Fox‘s subhead:
“Tim Waltz allowed rioters to burn down Minneapolis in the summer of 2020. And then, the few who got caught, Kamala Harris helped them out of jail,” JD Vance said.
‘Record is mixed’Criminologist David Squier Jones pointed out to MPR (8/13/24) that “Americans tend to have an inflated sense of crime occurring in their communities that don’t gel with crime statistics.”
Given that Trump himself had praised Walz’s leadership during the protests, and that the law enforcement response to the protests cannot be framed as too lax, one would think newspaper coverage would apply more skepticism to the Republican claims. Newspaper coverage of these Republican attacks has followed the “Republicans allege this, while Democrats deny it” model, simply rehashing partisan talking points without illuminating the issue.
David Squier Jones, a criminologist at the Center for Homicide Research, offered a much more measured version of the events of 2020 and their aftermath to MPR (8/13/24). While Walz sympathized with the anger toward the police murder of Floyd, he said, contrary to Vance, “I did not see anything, read anything, or hear anything that he encouraged active rioting.”
Jones also noted that Walz’s “record is mixed in terms of encouraging police reforms.” “He has also supported police in terms of increasing funding for police departments throughout the state,” he said. “He’s looking for better policing, not defunding policing, not removing policing, and he is certainly not anti-police.”
Such analysis doesn’t make for great attack-ad copy, but it will probably do more to help citizens cast an informed vote in November than parroting GOP press releases.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Center for Constitutional Rights’ Shayana Kadidal about the Guantánamo plea deal for the August 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809Kadidal.mp3AP* (via PBS*, 8/2/24)
Janine Jackson: Years of negotiations led to the recently announced pretrial agreements for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and two other defendants accused of directing the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, that would’ve meant their pleading guilty to charges, including murder and conspiracy, and receiving lifelong prison sentences.
As AP put it:
The torture that the defendants underwent while in CIA custody has slowed the cases and left the prospect of full trials and verdicts still uncertain, in part because of the inadmissibility of evidence linked to the torture.
But at the 11th hour, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin stepped in to override the agreements, claiming to do so in the name of victim’s families, the US military and the American public, who, he says, “deserve the opportunity” to see a military commission trial play out.
Here to help us understand what happened and what happens now is Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. Welcome to CounterSpin, Shayana Kadidal.
Shayana Kadidal: Thanks for having me.
JJ: Media attention to Guantánamo Bay, and what happens to those held there, has been spotty and, in recent years, largely absent. So listeners may have forgotten that men were held there for years without charge, much less conviction. Some have been approved for transfer, meaning they’ve been determined not to be a threat, yet have remained there. And, of course, it’s undisputed that many have been tortured and abused at this extralegal military prison.
So these plea agreements came with all of that context, all of that history, and they weren’t seen as a victory for anyone; those aren’t the terms to think in. But they were seen as a meaningful and overdue step, yes?
Shayana Kadidal: “They’ve taken the most significant criminal trial of the century, the 9/11 case, and put it into a system where everything is being invented from scratch.” (image: TRT World, 3/3/17)
SK: Yeah, I think any plea bargain is a compromise, right? I’ve seen these described as kind of the least-worst solution, given the history of these cases. And, basically, they’ve been presented as trading off the death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea.
But I think the thing listeners need to really know is that prosecutors, the military prosecutors, really badly wanted this deal done, because they think, like everyone else who is observing these cases, they recognize that the death penalty was never, as a practical matter, going to happen in these cases, for a bunch of different reasons, right?
First of all, the military commission system is incredibly slow. They’ve taken the most significant criminal trial of the century, the 9/11 case, and put it into a system where everything is being invented from scratch. So things that have been well-established for two centuries in the federal criminal system have to be reasoned out from the beginning in the military commissions.
And then, on top of that, there are these issues around the use of torture evidence that have really slowed things down. That’s not to say that torture evidence is the main problem standing in the way of a conviction. There is plenty of evidence against these particular defendants that isn’t contaminated by torture, including interviews they did with media before they were ever captured.
But the bottom line is that this process is going along really slowly. The defendants are in their mid-50s, the two older ones, already.
And then there are a bunch of other questions. Even if they got a guilty verdict, then there would be a sentencing phase, where a military jury gets to decide between death and probably life imprisonment. And we know that the CIA is very reluctant to produce its own officials as witnesses in that kind of phase or proceedings. They basically refused to do it in another case that we had involving a plea bargain. So that may end up being something that stands in the way of a death penalty verdict.
Then, on top of that, there’s a way that military juries will do what some civilian juries have done, and react to the torture at Guantánamo with clemency, that they’ll want to punish the government by issuing a life sentence instead of death.
So, bottom line, the prosecutors really wanted this deal badly.
JJ: That might surprise some folks, I think, on the face of it. And then, on the other hand, some people might imagine that any kind of plea deal would be opposed by the families and friends of those killed, the nearly 3,000 people killed on September 11, but that wasn’t really the case, was it?
Fox News (8/2/24)
SK: Yeah, it’s a very mixed bag, I must say. The family members—there are a small group of family members who are very heavily engaged in the details of these cases, including the politics of it, and they fall all over the spectrum, just like regular Americans. We’ve got 9/11 families who have been out there saying that they were strongly in favor of this deal, because it offered some semblance of finality, and because part of the deal, apparently, was the ability to pose questions, I believe, in writing to the defendants, and have them answered within 45 days. And those questions would go to, not just things like their motivations for carrying out the attacks, but also some detailed things that we don’t have a lot of information about, even from their interrogation, things like the financing of the attacks, right? So the families wanted answers to these questions, and this is really the only way they were going to be able to get it.
On the other side, you’ve got folks who have been on Fox News a lot, talking about how the commissions are much tougher than the civilian criminal system—which, really, I think at this point in history, we can say is definitively not true—but have been very actively organized in favor of keeping these cases in the military system, right?
I suppose it’s probably worth noting that if these cases had been brought to the civilian system, they probably would’ve been over a long, long time ago. Eric Holder had made the decision in 2009 to bring these cases to New York and try them in front of a civilian jury. If that had been the case, as he said last week, these guys would’ve been a memory. The cases would’ve gone to trial in a year or two, the appeals would’ve been over in a year or two, and they probably would’ve received pretty severe sentences, maybe even death, and the cases would have been over. As Holder said, it was “political hacks” who stopped the cases from being brought to New York, where they would’ve been disposed of much more quickly than in the commissions.
PBS (11/10/15)
But, again, that’s political water under the bridge. Congress has banned bringing men to the United States for trial from Guantánamo. So, again, this is kind of the least-worst solution, plea bargain in the military trial system.
JJ: When people hear that Defense Secretary Austin revoked the pretrial agreements because there ought to be trials, I think a lot of people might be misled about what is meant by a “trial” in this situation, a military commission trial. What should we know about that?
SK: The first thing is that it’s going to take years to get there. These charges originally were brought in February 2008, and so it’s been, what is that, 15, 16 years of pretrial motions, and they’re nowhere close to being done with that. Then once you get to a trial, there are going to be all sorts of issues about, again, the CIA producing witnesses, to what they did to these men, not just in the merit phase, but also in the sentencing phase.
And then, also, where it took place. We have a lot of sensitive diplomatic concerns around where the secret prisons the CIA held these men in were located, right? So that may stand in the way of actually conducting a trial.
And after that, we’ve got appeals, into a military appeal system, and then from there into the appellate courts and the federal system, and then to the Supreme Court.
So, again, the oldest of these defendants is 56 years old. They are de facto already serving life sentences, if you think that these cases are never going to come to a resolution after a trial and appeals. And so, again, it made perfect sense for the prosecutors to pursue this.
New York Times (8/4/24)
The real question is, what was Lloyd Austin thinking? He had to have been aware that these negotiations were underway and were pretty close to being resolved. The New York Times even reported over the weekend that DoD officials knew about the progress of the negotiations. So why the reversal? I think there’s no explanation other than politics and the election.
JJ: That’s what I was going to ask, because Austin says he’s long believed that military trials were the only way forward. So that rings a little weird, given the timing.
SK: When you see people like Tom Cotton coming out and saying that this is Biden being soft on the terrorists with the plea bargain deal, you can understand why it might’ve been everybody’s preferred timing on the political end for this to happen after November.
But what comes next looks like it’s going to be legal challenges. There are very narrow circumstances where an assigned pretrial agreement like this, a plea bargain agreement, can be withdrawn. So I think the defendants are first probably going to challenge whether or not what Austin tried to do in voiding the agreements was even effective, whether he has power to void them.
And on top of that, military prosecutors are supposed to be relatively independent of the people above them in the chain of command. In the federal civilian criminal system, everybody knows that President Trump can relieve the attorney general if he doesn’t like some prosecution that he’s undertaking. But there are some norms about how the AG is supposed to be relatively independent in making judgment calls, right?
Well, on the military system, those aren’t norms; they’re actually written into the two major statutes, the Military Commissions Act and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So when you have civilian officials like Lloyd Austin, political appointee, trying to pull the strings on a prosecutor’s judgment, it’s a serious problem, and dismissal of the case is the usual remedy for that. So, again, something that could add years and years more delay to a system that wasn’t exactly moving along quickly.
JJ: All right, then; we’ll end on that note.
We’ve been speaking with Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. You can track their work on Guantánamo cases and others at CCRJustice.org. Shayana Kadidal, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
SK: Thanks for having me.
Janine Jackson interviewed the American Economic Liberties Project’s Lee Hepner about the Google monopoly for the August 9, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809Hepner.mp3Slate (8/6/24)
Janine Jackson: “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly.” So ruled district court Judge Amit Mehta in United States v. Google, being called a “landmark” antitrust case that will affect not just Google, but potentially all tech giants in the current landscape. The point was, Google pays billions every year to companies like Apple and Samsung that distribute search engines, to ensure that it’s the only search engine anyone would see, by making sure it’s the preset default on devices.
If your supermarket only had one brand of milk on the shelf, even if it had some others in the back, you would recognize that as unfair. But for many of us, the internet is still a mystery miracle, and we’re not used to bringing the same sorts of questions to bear. If it did nothing else, this ruling changes that.
So what happened? Lee Hepner is an antitrust lawyer and senior legal counsel for the American Economic Liberties Project. He joins us now by phone; welcome to CounterSpin, Lee Hepner.
Lee Hepner: Thanks so much for having me.
JJ: The Sherman Antitrust Act sounds like a history lesson. It’s from 1890, but it’s living, meaningful law. How or why exactly did the judge determine that Google was in violation of it?
LH: You said it right there. This law that dates back to the 19th century, that used to be used against railroad barons, has now been applied to this new tech industry. It’s really proof of the durability of one of the foundational laws for ensuring fair markets and competition across our economy.
And Google is ripe for being addressed by this law. The judge found that Google was essentially without competition in the market for search engines, and truth be told, I mean, 80% of overall searches are conducted via Google; on mobile devices, that’s 95%. And Google is able to profit extraordinarily off of not having competition, and by blocking out rivals who threatened to create new and innovative products that actually benefit consumers and move this technology forward. So that was really at the crux of the judge’s decision in this case.
National Post (8/9/24)
JJ: So it isn’t just that Google is the default search engine; it’s that they are doing things, including paying money, to maintain that, and to prevent other companies from being that.
LH: That’s exactly right, and the judge really eloquently, in his opinion, describes how Google maintains its power through that circular system. It pays for exclusive agreements across Apple, Samsung, Mozilla, other device manufacturers, and by virtue of those exclusive agreements, it achieves scale that it then sells to advertisers for extraordinary revenue, and then it reinvests that revenue back at the beginning, in securing those exclusive agreements. So you really see how this is a self-reinforcing monopoly that Google has been able to maintain through anti-competitive conduct.
JJ: And we know it’s not by accident, if anyone were to believe that. There are internal messages, I just read in a piece by Matt Stoller, where Google is saying, “Inertia is the path of least resistance.” They know what they’re doing.
LH: Oh, absolutely. It’s a clear monopoly strategy. And, just to be clear, those are the communications that we were able to see. Google was also criticized by this judge for deleting untold number of records that were relevant to the litigation. And that was a big part of this case, too: what Google didn’t say, because they were training employees to move communications to secret servers and auto-deleted chats. So even in the absence of a smoking gun, there was a very clear sense that Google was intentionally perpetuating an illegal scheme to maintain its market power.
JJ: It’s worth noting that this isn’t just a meta-issue, or inconsequential. There is an impact of the quality of searches. Not everyone’s just looking for “Thai restaurant near me.” It matters if searches are not the best that they could be, yeah?
Lee Hepner: “Google has maintained its monopoly position, not necessarily by having a superior product, but by blocking out rivals.”
LH: Yeah. We’ve all heard stories about Google search becoming worse over time. It’s harder to find that thing that you were looking for, because they’re not necessarily investing in the rank of search results, or they’re prioritizing paid ads that look like organic search results. So Google has maintained its monopoly position, not necessarily by having a superior product, but by blocking out rivals. And that’s just the core characteristic of monopolies that is as old as time, and we see across a lot of industries.
JJ: Yeah, I was just going to say, Google is not being punished for building a better mousetrap. And news media, I think, play a role here for the anthropomorphizing of, especially, tech companies as scrappy, as game changers: They’re not AT&T. We’ve been trained to think, these guys–and they are guys–break the rules, but on behalf of all of us. And that’s not what’s happening here.
LH: Sure, and it’s just a radically different industry than it was, say, in the early 2000s, after we broke up the last big monopoly, Microsoft. That was a quarter century ago since the last decision on a case brought by the government against a big monopoly.
And then we were seeing that kind of scrappy innovation. Google was a startup at that point, and I think that right there really lends to the potential of this case, and of this decision, to unlock a new era of innovation, where small tech innovators are able to have a chance at entering the market, and creating something new and cool that maybe we can’t imagine today, but wouldn’t be possible without breaking up Google‘s hold on this industry.
JJ: I was going to ask you, what do you think happens now? We can’t necessarily predict it, but in terms of the case, what do you think will happen as we look to the remedy stage of things?
LH: Just to be clear, this is a case that was bifurcated. We just concluded the liability phase, and now the judge has to decide what to do about it. And what’s good about this stage is that the court has broad latitude, and must be deferential to the government’s request for remedies after that really difficult finding of liability.
And there’s a lot of tools on the table. Certainly we can expect an end to some of the exclusive agreements that have tied up this market for Google. But we also might see structural remedies that deprive Google of some of its ill-gotten gains, and divest certain business lines, or allow other search engines to have access to properties like Google‘s web indexer, or even their large language model.
The future of search is really in artificial intelligence, and the ability of chatbots to really revolutionize how people get information off the internet. And so I think that we’re going to be really clued in to how this court crafts remedies that ensure that that next era of AI innovation is not being controlled by Google, or any other dominant player in this market.
The Nation (11/10/23)
JJ: And then, finally, do you see knock-on effects? It does seem like a paradigm shift in terms of antitrust and the way we think about big companies. Do you see knock-on effects on, not just tech companies, but other big businesses?
LH: I do. And I think that when you have a case of this magnitude, there is going to be a bit of a culture shift. So if I’m a big law firm advising my clients, I’m going to tell them, “Hey, if you are entering into these types of exclusive agreements that are intended to maintain your market power, maybe you shouldn’t do that anymore, because the court is looking at these agreements with fresh eyes, and they’re not passing muster.”
I also think this decision builds momentum behind some of the other cases that the government has brought. There are parallels to the case against Live Nation, which also uses Ticketmaster to enter into exclusive agreements with venues. There are other parallels to the case against Apple or Amazon, which also lock consumers into a single-product ecosystem. So there’s going to be knock-on effects outside of this case, outside of this industry, and also for other pending cases that we’re watching closely.
JJ: All right then; we’ll end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project. They’re online at EconomicLiberties.us. Thank you so much, Lee Hepner, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
LH: My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Janine Jackson interviewed author and educator Tim Wise about ‘DEI hires’ for the August 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240802Wise.mp3Janine Jackson: While Republicans are clearly scrambling to find profitable lines of attack in a new presidential race, they’re deploying one line that draws on a lot of history: labeling presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris a “DEI hire,” with reference to programs designed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. The notion, if anyone needed it spelled out, is that any Black or brown person or woman in a job is only there because employers were forced to hire them.
To many, this sort of thing is transparent misogyny and racism, and then that special combination of the two. But being obvious doesn’t mean it isn’t impactful. And it doesn’t come out of nowhere. It’s built on decades of undermining any intentional efforts to dismantle or even acknowledge the living history of structurally embedded white supremacy in this country.
Tim Wise is an anti-racism educator, author and critical race theorist. He joins us now by phone from Nashville. Welcome to CounterSpin, Tim Wise.
Tim Wise: Thank you for having me.
JJ: One official definition of DEI is “organizational frameworks which seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have been historically underrepresented or subject to discrimination.” We might add that could be historically and currently, but that’s the idea.
Now, it used to be most everyone would say, “Sure, that’s a good idea,” but then maybe just not do it. Now, we seem to have slipped backward to where the right feels they can boldly say, “Oh, we don’t even support that idea.” It’s strange, isn’t it, to miss the good old days when people didn’t say what they thought?
Tim Wise: “When you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression.”
TW: Right—we’ve sort of gone from the days of the dog whistle to the air horn or bullhorn on these things. I remember, 30-plus years ago, when I started out doing this work in the campaigns against David Duke down in Louisiana. Duke felt the need to sort of hide his racism, to downplay his overt white supremacy.
And it seems like the gloves are off now. And so DEI has become essentially the new n-word for certain folks on social media. They will apply it to any person of color, regardless of that person’s qualifications, regardless of that person’s accomplishments. And they’ll apply it to public officials who, after all, pass the only test one needs to determine qualifications, which is, they got elected, right?
So if the mayor of Baltimore happens to be a Black man, and a barge hits a bridge and the bridge falls down, they call him the DEI mayor. What does that even mean? I mean, you get elected by getting votes, just like white mayors. And if the mayor had been white, I don’t think there would’ve been some special white man superpower that would’ve kept the bridge up.
But what that is is a way of reminding people, or telling people, these folks are less qualified, and they’re taking your stuff.
And I think the reason that they’ve ramped that up, and the gloves have come off, is that unlike 30-some odd years ago, 20 years ago, we suddenly have white folks confronted with a couple of realities. One is that the culture and the demographics of the country are changing, in a way that renders us less hegemonic than we once were. And when you’re used to hegemony, pluralism begins to feel like oppression. You feel like the wheels are coming off the bus. And so there’s this perfect storm of white anxiety that we are in the midst of, and we’re going to have to figure out how to respond to that.
JJ: And we’ll come back to that. Just doubling on what you’ve just said, folks may remember this 1990 ad for North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms that showed white hands crumbling a job- rejection letter with the voiceover, “You needed that job and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?”
“White Hands” ad for Jesse Helms (1990)
It’s powerful, in part, because of what it glides over. How does our dude know he was the best qualified? And then the implication that decades of rejecting minorities because they weren’t white represents the state of fairness that we’re trying to get back to. And, I was just going to say, even though these current campaigns are more overt, they’re still drawing a lot of power from what they don’t say. And why does that work? Who does that work on?
TW: I think it works because, first off, we have a long history of believing, No. 1, of course, that folks of color are less qualified, and whites are more qualified. That’s always been a problem in our country.
But I think there’s an even more fundamental thing at work, and that is, if you think about the most dominant ideological underpinning of America, what is it? The core of our belief system is this belief in meritocracy, rugged individualism, the idea that wherever you end up is all about you. So if you work hard, you can make it, anyone can.
And that’s, in theory, a race-neutral ideology, it’s also the secular gospel. If America were a Bible, it would be Genesis 1:1.
The problem is, once you imbibe that, once you internalize that belief, and you look around, and you see a society of profound racial inequality, of gender inequality, of class inequality, what is the logical thing for a person to do? And by a person, I don’t even mean an overt bigot. I mean an everyday average person who thinks about that, goes, “Gosh, if where you end up is all about your own effort and anyone can make it, then I guess these people on the bottom, maybe they are lesser, right? And the people on the top really are better.”
And so racism and sexism and classism can all be reinforced in people who are not actually particularly hateful, prejudiced or bigoted, but simply put two and two together: the idea of rugged individualism, and the objective reality of social stratification or inequality. So we really have to address that, because that suggests that a core element of American political thought is going to reinforce this kind of thinking. And once it does that, it can reinforce the very systems that promote that thinking.
X (3/15/21)
JJ: Republicans may have faith that they can just say “DEI” and their work is done, because of the success of other recent efforts. I will never get over how Christopher Rufo just called his shot. He just said:
The goal is to have the public read something crazy in the newspaper and immediately think “critical race theory.” We have decodified the term and will recodify it to annex the entire range of cultural constructions that are unpopular with Americans.
And news media, who were in a place to say, “Well, no, you can’t just take a term and say it doesn’t mean what it claims to, it means whatever you say it does”—they didn’t do that. They simply folded this intentional misrepresentation into the public dialogue. I feel like they got played like a fiddle, and for reasons. But it didn’t just allow, but promoted, the notion that these attacks were some organic bottom-up thing, rather than an orchestrated campaign. What do you see as the current or potential role of the press in this?
TW: I think the media have done a miserable job, as you suggest, in responding to the blatantly, transparently dishonest narrative that folks like Rufo are spinning, when he says, as he has on his Twitter thread—he’s amazingly transparent about this—that we’re basically going to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We’re just going to name things what we want to name them. We’re going to tell people, this is what it is. We don’t even care.
He’s been quoted in a speech saying he doesn’t give a—and I know I can’t say the next word, because we’re on radio—about what CRT actually is. He doesn’t care about it. He, in fact, wants us to debate the specifics of it, while he just uses it as a propaganda cudgel.
Intercept (6/8/23)
And the media, rather than exposing that, have done piece after piece after piece, and I’m talking puff pieces, about Christopher Rufo, where they don’t dig into the funding, for example, the multi-billionaire dollar stuff that’s coming in for him and the organizations he works for.
This is not some grassroots, bottom-up campaign of some simple guy sitting at his computer in his home, taking on the powerful. This is somebody being funded by the powerful. But hardly any of the media have really attempted to pull back the veil on who he is and who is funding him and what their agenda is. And we know what their agenda is, because it’s the same agenda they’ve had for 50 years or more, really more than that, going back 60 years.
These are the ideological descendants of the people who never supported the civil rights movement, who never supported the Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act, the Civil Rights Act. They’re the ideological descendants of the folks who used to write, at the National Review, that Black folks basically weren’t ready for the right to vote. They weren’t civilized enough yet. That was the official position of Bill Buckley’s magazine back in the ’60s. So that’s who these folks are, and if the media really believed in investigative journalism, they would expose that.
JJ: And then the other line that bugged me was, “Well, they aren’t even teaching CRT in elementary school,” as if that was a pushback.
TW: Yeah, there was sort of a capitulation, right? This idea that liberals, rather than standing up and fighting the attacks, said, “Oh no, that’s not us, my goodness.” Because the implication is, “Well, thank God it’s not, I mean, thank goodness we don’t do CRT with children, that would be poisoning their minds.”
But all CRT tries to do, and this is so important for people to understand, is to provide a theoretical grounding so that when you look out and you see racial disparity, you have a framework and a lens for understanding it. And without a systemic lens, frankly, the only explanation left is the one the right prefers, which is, these Black and brown folks are broken. And CRT is saying, “No, it’s not Black and brown folks who are broken.”
It’s not necessarily that white people are bad. CRT doesn’t bash white people. That’s a great myth. CRT doesn’t really say anything about white people as people. It says something about white supremacy as a system, historically and contemporaneously. And if you don’t have that framework, I don’t know how you can make sense of the world around you, except by blaming the people on the bottom for being there.
JJ: Finally, you travel the country, and have for years, talking to people about these issues. What’s the vibe? Where do you find hope right now?
TW: I find hope in the young folks, disproportionately, who led the uprising, obviously, in 2020 in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. I find hope in the young people, disproportionately, who have stood up for the rights of Palestinians and the lives of Palestinians in this moment as well.
City Lights (2020)
I find hope in the enthusiasm that we’re seeing right now in the newly refashioned presidential race. I think there’s a lot of energy to realize that there is an opportunity to defeat Trumpism. There is an opportunity to beat back these folks who say they want to make America great again, by which they obviously mean a directional reference to the past.
I think there’s hope in knowing that the vast majority of the people in this country believe in democracy, want democracy, reject things like Project 2025, and want to move the country forward, rather than moving it backward where those folks want to go.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with Tim Wise. The most recent book is Dispatches From the Race War, from City Lights. Tim Wise, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
TW: Oh, you bet. Thank you.
Following Israel’s assassinations of Hezbollah commander Fuad Shukr in Beirut—along with a woman and two children (Al Jazeera, 7/30/24)—and of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, corporate media pundits have called for the US and Israel to escalate the region-wide war.
According to the Wall Street Journal (7/28/24), the “way to make war less likely is to announce that American munitions transfers to Israel will be expedited immediately.”
A Wall Street Journal editorial (7/28/24), using galaxy-brain logic, said the
way to make war less likely is to announce that American munitions transfers to Israel will be expedited immediately, as they were earlier in the war and as Congress has approved, and that all oil sanctions on [Hezbollah ally] Iran will be enforced again.
US-supplied weapons have already been a major part of Israel’s post–October 7 attacks on Lebanon, inflicting a terrible cost. The Washington Post (12/13/23) reported that, in October, Israel fired US-made white phosphorus—incendiary material that can cause ghastly injuries and death—into the Lebanese village Dheira; the attack incinerated at least four homes, according to residents, and injured nine. In March, Israel used a US-provided weapon in an airstrike on the Lebanese town of al-Habariyeh, killing seven volunteer paramedics, aged 18–25, in violation of international law (Guardian, 5/6/24).
Prior to last week’s Israeli attack on Lebanon, Israel had killed at least 543 people in Lebanon since October 7 (Al Jazeera, 6/27/24), including roughly 100 civilians (BBC, 7/22/24); US fighter jets have played a key role in Israel’s Lebanon campaign (Deutsche Welle, 7/19/24). Far from “mak[ing] war less likely,” US armaments enable Israel to kill and maim Lebanese people. (According to Israeli officials, Hezbollah attacks have killed 33 Israelis, mostly soldiers, since October 7—BBC, 7/17/24.)
The editorial invoked a tissue-thin casus belli on Israel’s behalf, saying that Hezbollah carried out a “rocket attack on Saturday [that] killed 12 children and wounded more on a soccer field in Israel’s Golan Heights.” One problem: There is no such thing as “Israel’s Golan Heights”; there is only Syria’s Golan Heights, which Israel has illegally occupied, illegally annexed and illegally settled (Foreign Policy, 2/5/19). Casting the deaths in Majdal Shams, the predominately Druze village in the Golan where the killings occurred, as an attack on Israel makes it sound as if Israeli violence against Lebanon (such as its Beirut bombing) is what the editorial calls Israel “defend[ing] itself.”
‘Israel returns fire’The Wall Street Journal (8/1/24) maintains that the assassination of a Hamas negotiator could help peace negotiations, as “Hamas politicians remaining in Qatar now know their lives are also on the line if they continue to resist Israel’s reasonable terms.”
A second Wall Street Journal editorial (8/1/24) pushed a similar line, deploying the headline, “Israel Returns Fire on Iran and Its Proxies.” Strangely, Iranian actions are not described as “return[ing] fire” for Israel’s years of attacks on Iranian territory, which have taken the form of sabotaging the Iranian electrical grid, cyberattacks (New York Times, 4/11/21) and murdering Iranian scientists (Politico, 3/5/18). Doubling down on its demands for belligerence, the editorial’s authors argued:
The US can help Israel prevent a larger war by putting pressure on Hezbollah and Iran. Expediting weapons to Israel, including deep-penetrating bombs that would put Iran’s nuclear facilities at risk, would send a message, as would enforcing oil sanctions again. Sending US warships to the eastern Mediterranean, as after October 7, would also make Iran think twice about Hezbollah’s next move.
The Journal seems to think that doing the same thing over and over again—namely, sending more weapons to Israel, choking Iranian civilians through sanctions (Canadian Dimension, 4/3/23) and upping the US military presence in the region—will produce different results. Maybe this time, the authors seem to suggest, Iran and Hezbollah will decide to just let the US and Israel dictate what happens across West Asia.
Nor does the editorial explore the possibility that Iran might be less inclined to strike Israel if Israel were to cease carrying out assassinations on Iranian soil, bombing its embassies (Reuters, 4/4/24) or carrying out genocide against Iran’s Palestinian allies.
‘Response to Hezbollah’For the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (7/30/24), Israel is at war not only with Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, but with “Israel’s most strident critics” on campuses, with the “‘yes but’ thinking” that supports Israel while condemning civilian deaths, and with “Jews who provide moral cover and comfort to Israel’s enemies.”
In the New York Times, columnist Bret Stephens (7/30/24) put forth a similar view, writing that
the world will soon know the full shape and scale of Israel’s response to Hezbollah for [the] rocket attack on a Druze town in the Golan Heights, which killed 12 children.
Another problem with this line of argument is that there is some doubt as to whether it was a Hezbollah projectile that hit the Golan, and a great deal of doubt as to whether, if it was Hezbollah’s rocket, it was deliberately fired at Majdal Shams (LA Times, 7/30/24).
Despite Stephens’ suggestion that an Israeli assault on Lebanon would be a “response” to a Hezbollah “attack,” only 20% of Majdal Shams residents have accepted Israeli citizenship, while the bulk of the town’s inhabitants continue to be citizens of Syria (LA Times, 7/30/24).
Not content with last week’s attack on Beirut, Stephens wrote that
whatever Israel does next, it should be calculated to advance the national interests on all [fronts of its multifaceted wars]. If that means postponing a fuller response to explain its rationale, necessity and goal, so much the better.
The “fuller response” he has in mind seems to be more Israeli violence, since what it would be “fuller” than is the bombing of Beirut, and the premise of the article is that the Israeli government is fighting a five-fronted war. Worry not, Stephens assures his readers, any further Israeli bombings and assassinations will by definition be a “response,” and thus defensible.
‘Iranian imperialism’Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 8/1/24) recasts the Gaza crisis as “part of a broader Iranian campaign to drive America out of the Middle East.”
Meanwhile, Stephens’ colleague Thomas Friedman (8/1/24) painted Iran as the primary aggressor in West Asia. He called Iran an “imperial power,” condemning “Iranian imperialism” and “Tehran’s regional imperialist adventure.” Iran’s goal, he asserted, is “to control the whole Arab world.”
Since Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, the state has carried out zero full-scale invasions of Arab majority countries (and zero such attacks on non-Arab nations). In the same period, the US, which is evidently not imperialist, and not trying to “control the whole Arab world,” has carried out full-fledged invasions of Libya and (more than once) of Iraq. In addition to annexing and colonizing part of Syria, Israel has repeatedly invaded Lebanon. Colonizing, occupying and annexing Palestinian land, and now committing genocide against Palestinians, presumably also constitute the US and Israel seeking to “control” an important slice of the “Arab world.”
Yet in Friedman’s topsy-turvy universe, Iran is the main source of violence in the region. That misleading framing wrongly suggests that past and future acts of war against Iran are legitimate and necessary.
Nobody knows what the political and military outcome of a broader conflagration in the Middle East would be, but the human and environmental toll on the region would be colossal. High-profile pundits in America are doing their part to help such an outcome materialize.
Janine Jackson interviewed Food Not Bombs’ Keith McHenry about criminalizing homelessness for the August 2, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240802McHenry.mp3Axios (3/20/24)
Janine Jackson: With wages, including the minimum wage, largely static, prices rising out of the reach of many who call themselves middle class, and rents outpacing wages in 44 of the country’s 50 biggest cities, you could be unsurprised that homelessness is at record rates. The latest federal count found 650,000 unhoused people on a single night, nearly half of them sleeping outside. The response of several localities is to criminalize the act of sleeping outside or, in some places, of having a shopping cart.
States are using their budgetary power to punish communities that don’t push people off the street, including places that have more unhoused people than shelter beds, and to arrest people who don’t have a safe space to go to. As of October, in Florida, any city that doesn’t enforce their ban on camping can be sued, including by individual residents or businesses. “We’re going to have clean sidewalks,” said Gov. Ron DeSantis, signing the law in March.
Other places have introduced fines, so that a person who asks for a quarter can get a fine of hundreds of dollars. This is being called a “crackdown on homelessness,” as though that were an isolated abstraction, and not a broad societal failure.
Keith McHenry is an activist, author and artist, and the co-founder of Food Not Bombs. He joins us now from Santa Cruz, California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Keith McHenry.
Keith McHenry: Thank you so much for having me. This is great.
Slate (6/29/24)
JJ: Let’s start with California, and Governor Newsom’s directive to dismantle encampments throughout the state, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Grants Pass v. Johnson ruling that gave governments more authority to do that. Newsom says he’s directing state agencies to “move urgently to address dangerous encampments while supporting and assisting the individuals living in them.” Is that a thing that can happen?
KM: Even before Newsom’s executive order, he was giving out money to cities to clear homeless encampments. It’s called the Homeless Encampment Resolution Grants. And in Santa Cruz, $4 million was given to clear the camps around the homeless shelter. And, in fact, the management of the homeless shelter was all excited that they got the money, and that they could get rid of the homeless that were camped around them and in the neighborhood where the shelter is.
And this campaign, I think, is getting more and more aggressive, not only because of the removal of the protections from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case that went to the Supreme Court, but because it’s being driven, in part, by this organization called the Cicero Institute, which was started by Joe Lonsdale in 2016, and he is connected directly to the Central Intelligence Agency. He received funding, along with Peter Thiel, who is most famous right now for being the backer of JD Vance as the running mate with Trump, and by Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir.
So Palantir is one of the largest surveillance organizations in the United States, the private company that was created after protest of Total Information Awareness, which was a government plan after the 9/11 bombing. And they are involved in a matrix of things surrounding homelessness, including creating AI to find homeless camps.
So there’s already, since Newsom’s executive order, you can see police and people just throwing away homeless people’s belongings in these sweeps, mentioning both the Supreme Court ruling and Newsom’s executive order, basically stating that they’re going to get rid of the homeless from California.
The Nation (3/15/24)
But Joe Lonsdale’s Cicero Institute has been providing model legislation to states across the country. The one that you just referred to, with DeSantis, was one of their victories. They also got a law passed in Kentucky where you can actually use the Stand Your Ground law to shoot homeless people that are not cooperating with your eviction of them from private or public land.
So this trend is frightening, and we’re already seeing it in Santa Cruz, and this is in San Francisco, it’s across the country, and the problem is, there’s no place for anyone to go. And in Newsom’s executive order, he claims that you’re supposed to store things for 60 days; this virtually never happens with the sweeping of the camp. The camps that were swept here in Santa Cruz in the last couple of weeks, people just didn’t get their belongings back, and we had to give them pup tents and sleeping bags and blankets, just to replace the equipment that was taken by the police and public works during these really vicious sweeps.
JJ: I hear that. And Miami Beach, I understand, is one of a number of places that allow arrests if the individual declines shelter placement. And I think that kind of line makes sense for a lot of people, for whom this is just a story in the paper—the idea that, well, they were offered shelter, and maybe even offered some kind of mental health care, or some substance abuse care. And aren’t those the personal problems that are driving them to the street? What’s wrong with that solution of, “Well, we’re offering them stuff”?
KM: The reality is there is no there that they’re offering. They’re just telling the public that there is some kind of shelter space. First of all, the shelters are already full, everywhere in the country, so you have to kick a homeless person out of a shelter, and that’s what they do here in Santa Cruz, to make place for a new homeless person. So when they cleared Coral Street in front of the homeless shelter, they evicted 10, 15 people out of another shelter, and then put the 10 or 15 people into that shelter, and then it’s a net gain of zero sheltered people.
But the other thing is, a lot of people do not want to go to shelters because, for instance, the shelter here is referred to as the “concentration camp,” and that’s because you can’t have your husband or wife with you, you can’t have your pets with you….
There’s one shelter that’s being proposed in San Diego where there’s 715 people in one room on bunk beds, and you get a little plastic box to put all your belongings in. And then you have to live in—just like the shelters here—very controlled, like a minimum security jail.
In our town, you’re not allowed to walk out of the shelter into the city. You have to get a van, because they don’t want homeless people walking by housed people’s houses. And therefore you’re limited by the staff as to when you can come and go.
PBS (12/15/23)
I am very concerned with the increase in homelessness. Right now, there’s 81% of America is living paycheck to paycheck, and homelessness has already been increasing dramatically. According to HUD, it increased 12% last year. We have so many unhoused people, because of the rocky economy, that they will then be moving people into large camps outside of cities, like they did with the Japanese during World War II. I’m worried about it, because we are heading into what could potentially be a world war, and then a lot of the polite comments that can happen before war, and ideas, will just be out the window, and it’ll be okay to round up the homeless and place them in these camps, which will be presented as navigation centers, where they’ll somehow get a job somewhere in the future, or some kind of mental health help.
And here in California, they passed Proposition 1, and essentially they’re building mental hospitals, and then homeless people are becoming wards, basically, of the local county, who then controls all their Social Security benefits and everything. So it’s very tragic, and I think American people really actually do know, because so many of us have family members that are homeless, and probably struggled with their addictions, or with their having to sleep on our couch, and we’re getting tired of it. We’re all impacted directly in this, and there’s definitely solutions to ending homelessness, which is building things like single room occupancy hotels, and all the things that kept people off the streets before this catastrophe.
JJ: I just wanted to pick up on that, because I think a child would say, “Oh, people are unhoused. What about housing?” And yet, somehow, that seems like, ”Oh, no, no, no, we can’t do that. Well, we’ll put out signs, we’ll pay money to put out signs telling people, don’t give money to homeless people, but we won’t put that money into housing.”
Keith McHenry: “Millions of dollars have been spent just driving people from corner to corner, with no even slight effort, really, to house people.” (photo: KSQD)
KM: Governor Newsom here in California has spent $24 billion on homelessness. And, in the city of Santa Cruz, they gave us $14 million to help the homeless about a year and a half ago. And so far they’ve used $1 million to clean out a camp of about 400 people who had no place to go. Those people were just cleared out of the woods this weekend. So now they’re back downtown. And so millions of dollars have been spent just driving people from corner to corner, with no even slight effort, really, to house people.
And then there’s a very “Not In My Back Yard” campaign that happens. So every time there’s even a slight proposal to house some homeless people, build a building for them or open a hotel for homeless people, you end up with riots and protests, as you can see has happened in places like New York City. And then there’s the pitting of immigrants and homeless against one another, which is another divide-and-conquer tactic that is occurring, that’s also making housing homeless people very difficult.
So there’s just no policy, no national policy, no state policies, really, to resolve this, other than through criminalization.
Now, the criminalization is really dire. So, for example, in Santa Cruz, you get a $25 ticket each time you’re found camping. Of course, then they take most of your stuff when they give you that ticket. And then what ends up happening is if you fail to pay that, then you get a $350 fine for not paying your $25 ticket. And then two tickets in 30 days is a misdemeanor, and you can end up, ultimately, over time, spending months and months in jail for just the crime of being homeless.
And then each one of these tickets and late fees goes into collection. You get a job, finally, and then your wages are taken by the collection agency for your fines for having slept outside. So this is going to make ending homelessness in America much, much more dire, because more and more people will fall into that trap, because the system’s set up to be difficult.
CounterSpin (1/13/17)
JJ: And then don’t think about helping unhoused people with food, because that’s going to be a crime too. We talked with Megan Hustings back in 2017, when people from Food Not Bombs were being arrested in Florida for serving free food to homeless people in a public park. So even the places where other people might be trying to intervene, and trying to provide some support, offer some help, they’re being told no, no, that’s also a crime.
KM: Yeah, there was just a person arrested in Dayton, Ohio, for feeding the homeless there. In San Francisco, we were arrested a thousand times. I did 500 days in jail, and ultimately faced 25 to life in prison, when the city was so frustrated they eventually framed me on things that I never did. I also did 18 days personally in Orlando, Florida, for feeding the homeless at Lake Eola Park.
Fortunately, Food Not Bombs has pushed back across the country in that regard, and we won an appeals case in Florida, which ruled that sharing free food is a First Amendment–protected right. And the Dayton, Ohio, people are using that case to defend themselves.
And then we also have found in Houston, where we were ticketed nearly a hundred times, at $2,000- a-time fines, that they could not find a jury that thought it was reasonable to convict someone and force them to pay money for feeding the homeless. So they’ve kind of generally dropped that case. So we’re having some good fortune pushing back.
But the idea that a country that’s letting their people go hungry, and I answer the Hunger Hotline, 1-884-1136, and I get calls all day long, roughly 20 a day, from seniors who have no food, who get referred to me by UnitedHealthcare or Red Cross or something, for home delivery. And the system is breaking down. And the stories I hear of these 20, 30 people, sometimes—on a good day, it’s like 10 people—it’s just heartbreaking. And those are people on the verge of becoming homeless, that have a home but have no food, and live in America. Often they’re vets that have worked their entire lives, and now they’re in this precarious position, and it is just heartbreaking.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Keith McHenry from Food Not Bombs. They’re online at FoodNotBombs.net. Keith McHenry, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
KM: Thank you so much.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240802.mp3This week on CounterSpin: Dog whistles are supposed to be silent except for those they’re intended to reach. But as listeners know, the right wing has gotten much more overt and loud and yes, weird, about their intention to defeat the prospect of multiracial democracy. We unpack the latest weaponized trope—the “DEI hire”—with anti-racism educator and author Tim Wise.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240802Wise.mp3(photo: Elvert Barnes)
Also on the show: Trying to help unhoused people and trying to make them invisible are different things. Keith McHenry, cofounder of Food Not Bombs, joins us to talk about the recent Supreme Court ruling that gave state authorities more power to dismantle the encampments in which many people live, with no guarantee that they will land anywhere more safe.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240802McHenry.mp3
As the Democratic Party began to coalesce behind Kamala Harris, the New York Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24) quickly put forward the knee-jerk corporate media prescription for Democratic candidates: urging Harris to the right.
Under the subhead, “Why moderation works,” David Leonhardt explained that “the average American considers the Democratic Party to be further from the political mainstream than the Republican Party.”
As evidence, he pointed to two polls. The first was a recent Gallup poll that found Trump leading Biden on the question of who voters agreed with more “on the issues that matter most to you.” The second was a 2021 Winston poll asking people to rate themselves on an ideological scale in comparison to Democratic and Republican politicians; people on average placed themselves closer to Republicans than to Democrats.
Of course, these polls, which ask only about labels and perceptions, tell you much more about the fuzziness—perhaps even meaninglessness—of those labels than about how well either party’s policy positions align with voters’ interests, and what positions candidates ought to take in order to best represent those voters’ interests. Responsible pollsters would ask about actual, concrete policies in the context of information about their impact; otherwise, as former Gallup editor David Moore has pointed out (FAIR.org, 2/11/22), they merely offer the illusion of public opinion.
‘Radical’ DemocratsFor the New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (7/23/24), the first question about Kamala Harris is “whether she will signal that she’s more mainstream than other Democrats.”
And where do people get the idea that the Democratic Party is, as Leonhardt says, “radical,” and misaligned with them on important issues?
Of course, the right-wing media and right-wing politicians offer a steady drumbeat of such criticism, painting even die-hard centrists like Joe Biden as radical leftists. But centrist media play a starring role here, too, having long portrayed progressive Democratic candidates and officials as extreme and out of step with voters.
For instance, the Times joined the drumbeat of centrist media attacks on Sen. Bernie Sanders for supposedly being too far out of the mainstream to be a serious 2016 presidential candidate (FAIR.org, 1/30/20). Forecasting the 2016 Democratic primary race, the Times’ Trip Gabriel and Patrick Healy (5/31/15) predicted that
some of Mr. Sanders’ policy prescriptions—including far higher taxes on the wealthy and deep military spending cuts—may eventually persuade Democrats that he is unelectable in a general election.
As FAIR (6/2/15) noted at the time, most of Sanders’ key progressive positions—including raising taxes on the wealthy—were actually quite popular with voters. Cutting military spending is not quite as popular as taxing the rich, but it often outpolls giving more money to the Pentagon—a political position that the Times would never claim made a candidate “unelectable.”
Voters’ leading concern this election year (as in many election years) is the economy, and in particular, inflation and jobs. As most corporate media outlets have reported recently (e.g., Vox, 4/24/24; CNN, 6/26/24), economists are warning that Trump’s proposed policies—massive tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, as well as increased tariffs—will increase inflation. So, too, would deporting tens of millions of immigrants, as Trump claims he will do, as this would cause a major labor shortage in an already tight job market.
(It’s also worth noting here that, even without being given more context, a majority of respondents oppose Trump’s deportation plan—Gallup, 7/12/24.)
Representative democracy needs informed citizens who understand how well candidates will reflect their interests. Reporting like Leonhardt’s, using context-free polling and blithely ignoring the disconnect between what people concretely want and what candidates’ policies will do, only strengthens that disconnect and undermines democracy further.
‘Promising to crack down’As the New York Times (7/24/24) has elsewhere noted, crime rates are currently lower than they have been in more than a generation.
Believing he has established that Democrats in general are “radical” (or else believing it’s more his job to pretend they are than to dispel the notion), Leonhardt in the next section asks, how can Harris “signal that she’s more mainstream than other Democrats”?
He offers “five Democratic vulnerabilities,” the first of which he says is crime—”the most natural way for Harris to show moderation,” since she is “a former prosecutor who won elections partly by promising to crack down on crime. Today, many Americans are worried about crime.”
Again, Leonhardt takes a misperception among voters—that crime rates are elevated—and rather than attempting to debunk it based on data, which show that violent and property crime rates are lower than they’ve been in more than a generation (FAIR.org, 7/25/24), he allows the unchallenged misperception to buttress his move-to-the-center strategy recommendation.
Next is immigration, where Leonhardt wrote that, since
most Americans are deeply dissatisfied that Biden initially loosened immigration rules…I’ll be fascinated to see whether Harris—Biden’s point person on immigration—tries to persuade voters that she’ll be tougher than he was.
The truth is, it’s hard to get much tougher on immigration than Biden without going the route of mass deportation and caging children, as he kept in place many of Trump’s harsh refugee policies, much to the dismay of immigrant rights advocates. But few in the public recognize that, given media coverage that dehumanizes immigrants and fearmongers about the border (FAIR.org, 6/2/23, 8/31/23).
‘Outside the mainstream’In the face of racist and misogynist attacks on Kamala Harris from the Republican Party (Atlantic, 7/25/24), Leonhardt demanded that Harris prove she’s not “quick to judge people with opposing ideas as ignorant or hateful.”
Leonhardt called inflation another “problem for Harris,” again, without pointing out the reality that a Trump presidency would almost certainly be worse for inflation. And he closed with the problems of “gender issues” and “free speech,” which both fall under the “woke” umbrella that the Times frequently wields as a weapon against the left (FAIR.org, 3/25/22, 12/16/22).
He argues that liberals are “outside the mainstream” in supporting “gender transition hormone treatment for many children,” which he claims “doctors in Europe…believe the scientific evidence doesn’t support.” Leonhardt is cherry-picking here: While some doctors in some European countries believe that—most notably doctors in Britain who are not experts in transgender healthcare—it’s not the consensus view among medical experts in either Europe or the United States (FAIR.org, 6/22/23, 7/19/24).
“If Harris took a moderate position, she could undermine Republican claims that she is an elite cultural liberal,” Leonhardt wrote. By a “moderate position,” Leonhardt seems to mean banning access to hormone therapy for trans youth—a decidedly right-wing political position that, through misinformed and misleading media coverage, particularly from the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23), has become more politically acceptable.
Finally, on “free speech,” Leonhardt wrote that “many Americans view liberals as intolerant,” noting that “Obama combated this problem by talking about his respect for conservative ideas, while Biden described Republicans as his friends.”
It’s a topsy-turvy world in which the Black female candidate, who has received so many racist and sexist attacks in the past week that even Republican Party leaders have asked fellow members to tone it down (Atlantic, 7/25/24), is the one being admonished to be tolerant and respectful.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240726.mp3Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2024)
This week on CounterSpin: Donald Trump said, on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded, meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people…. If voting were made easier, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Why wouldn’t news media label that stance anti-democratic, and shelve any so-called good-faith partisan debate? And call for the multiracial democracy we need? And illuminate the history that shows why we aren’t there yet?
Ari Berman has been tracking voter rights, and why “one person, one vote” is not the thing to memorize as a definition of US democracy, for many years now. He’s national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and his new book is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. We’ll talk about that with him today.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240726Berman.mp3
Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Policy Studies’ Phyllis Bennis about Israel’s war on Palestinians for the July 19, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240719Bennis.mp3Al Jazeera (7/10/24)
Janine Jackson: “We must not lose sight of what is happening in Gaza, where an unprecedented humanitarian crisis continues to get even worse.” That recent statement from Sen. Bernie Sanders can be explored almost word by word. With zero cynicism at all, I wonder, who is “we,” exactly? What repercussions or responses accrue to a “humanitarian crisis” that differ from, for example, war crimes? And then, if “losing sight” is wrong, what has maintaining sight delivered?
Reports from just recent days are in of Israeli forces killing more than a hundred people in a southern Gaza designated safe zone, attacking schools where people were sheltered.
The Lancet reminds us that the roughly 40,000 people who have been reported killed in Gaza since last October should not be the number we hold in our heads, given not just the difficulty of data collection, but that armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence. People dying from infectious disease and a lack of clean water are no less dead.
A numerical accounting of the toll of the current Israeli war on Palestinians may take years, but why should we wait? The effort to end it is now. So how and where does that happen? What needs to happen to get there?
We’re joined now by Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies, and author of numerous books, including the constantly updated Understanding the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Phyllis Bennis.
Phyllis Bennis: Good to be with you, Janine.
The Hill (10/8/23)
JJ: Last October, you wrote that
while it’s necessary, condemning attacks on civilians isn’t enough. If we are serious about ending this spiraling violence, we need to look at root causes, and that means, hard as it may be for some to acknowledge it, we must look at the context.
Well, it’s now July 2024. We’re at where we’re at. Is there anything that you would add or change from that call to understanding, from last year?
PB: I think the only thing I would change is that we are now looking at almost 10 months of genocide. When I wrote that, back in October, it had just started, and we had no idea we would be still at work, still having been unable to gain even a ceasefire. Even a ceasefire remains out of reach.
Reuters (6/29/24)
What has changed is the language of the White House, the language of some in Congress. We hear President Biden now saying, “We need a ceasefire. We want a ceasefire.” But he keeps on transferring weapons, including the 500-pound bombs, these massive bombs that were temporarily paused a few weeks ago, along with the giant 2,000-pound bombs, one of which alone can wipe out an entire city block, destroy every building on the block, and kill every person in those buildings.
For the moment, those bombs are still being “temporarily paused,” maybe because in a recent Reuters report, we learned that the US had, since October, already transferred at least 14,000 of those MK-84 bombs, those 2,000-pound giant weapons of mass destruction, and the smaller, less dangerous 500-pound bombs, that maybe could only destroy half a block at one time, and maybe only half the people that were living in those houses. So, OK, that should be right, right?
The hypocrisy of it. Saying, “I want a ceasefire,” President Biden says, while he continues to transfer the weapons. And then he goes on to say, while he continues to enable this genocide by providing the weapons–which is all that Israel wants from him, they don’t care whether he says he wants a ceasefire or not; they want him to send the weapons, and he is sending the weapons. And then he says, “I’m the guy that did more for the Palestinian community than anybody.” What kind of hypocrisy are we hearing here?
IslamiCity (7/19/24)
JJ: Right. Well, Ramzy Baroud just wrote recently about the importance of separating humanitarian efforts from political and military objectives, essentially using the survival of people as a bargaining chip. I feel that media—not media alone—but they’ve fuzzed up this understanding that when elephants fight, it’s the grass that gets trampled, that we’re supposed to think about civilians being harmed, and they should be protected whenever.
But just to say, the international bodies that even just witness and record this carnage are themselves undermined.
PB: Absolutely.
JJ: And the idea is: It’s just every country against every other country—which, side note, would be demoralizing enough, even if it weren’t such an obvious lie, given that we know that commerce is global; we accept meta-national rules when it comes to corporate behavior. But here the international bodies that would say this is wrong, where are they?
PB: Well, you’re absolutely right. The international community, as it likes to be called—meaning the United Nations, the international courts, all of those institutions—have failed. In the main, they haven’t failed primarily for lack of trying. They certainly have not tried hard enough. But they have tried.
The problem is they have been undermined every step of the way by their most powerful member, which happens to be the government of the United States. We should not forget what Dr. King taught us, that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is our own government. He said that in 1967 at Riverside Church. I will say it again, today, so many years later. That has not changed.
Chatham House (1/26/24)
We do see, in the International Court of Justice, in the Hague, the extraordinary impact of South Africa’s initiative to challenge Israel directly, state to state, to say that Israel is violating the international convention against genocide. And after several weeks, on an expedited basis, the court came out and said, yes, this is plausibly genocide. And while it will take some time, usually months or years to make a complete and final determination, we are hereby ordering a set of things, that they ordered Israel to do, to make sure that the potential for genocide—or the actual genocide, they were leaving themselves that little wiggle room—but to make sure that that stopped, and they gave explicit orders, which Israel, again, simply ignored.
And what’s different this time, Janine, what you said is so important about other countries, as well as the international institutions, standing by and watching: One of the things that’s different here is that the international covenant against genocide, unlike most parts of international law that are very complicated, very hard to understand and really only apply very narrowly, the Genocide Convention specifically holds accountable every country that is a signatory, a party, to that convention. That includes the United States, ironically enough, includes Israel. But it says that every country who has signed on to that treaty has the obligation to make sure that it doesn’t get violated.
That was the basis for South Africa charging Israel with violating the covenant. But it also goes to every other country, including our own. So the Biden administration, aside from its active enabling of the genocide, is doubly responsible here, because it has an explicit, affirmative obligation to do everything in its power to stop the possibility of these attacks turning into genocide, or to stop them if they are indeed already genocide.
And the US answer to that requirement is to keep sending the weapons: 14,000 of these giant 2,000-pound bombs, 6,500 of the smaller 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, a thousand bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 airdropped, small-diameter bombs, and more and more and more.
Al Jazeera (7/19/24)
JJ: In this context—and whatever we say is the latest news might not be the latest when folks hear it—but what I’m reading now says that the International Court of Justice, the top court of the UN, is going to issue in two days, on July 19, an opinion, a non-binding opinion, on the legality of Israel’s decades-long occupation of Palestinian land, which is clearly the context here, given our understanding that conflict didn’t start on October 7. Given what we’ve just said, what can we possibly imagine will come from that opinion from the ICJ?
PB: What we are going to hear, I anticipate, will be a full recognition of the main violations that Israel is committing in carrying out this 55-year occupation of Palestinian land, the West Bank, Gaza, occupied East Jerusalem.
That will not lead, I’m afraid, to a change on the ground. Israel has made clear it has no respect for the International Court of Justice. It has no intention of abiding by decisions of the International Court of Justice.
What we are going to hear is a globally legitimated, important, very important, judgment, which will be important for us in civil society to hold up as a tool in our own mobilization in our own countries. Those of us in the United States will have a new piece of evidence of the illegality of US arms to Israel, because of the illegality of the occupation that those arms are designed to maintain. That’s what makes it important. It’s going to be a tool for us.
Phyllis Bennis: “”In any country, there could be a trial begun, charges brought against those in Israel, in the government, in the military, in the settlements, in the corporations, who are enabling and profiting from this occupation.”
International law, like domestic law, frankly, is almost never self-enforcing. You can pass a law that says whatever you want, that murder is illegal, that’s good to say. That doesn’t stop somebody from killing someone, but it does allow accountability.
And this will allow accountability. Other countries, not the United States I’m afraid, but other countries that have a greater commitment to international law than this country does, will be able to use that judgment to, for example, use the concept of universal jurisdiction to say that those crimes, if indeed they are identified by the International Court of Justice as I anticipate, that those crimes are so serious that they can be adjudicated in any court in any country.
And that means that in any country, there could be a trial begun, charges brought against those in Israel, in the government, in the military, in the settlements, in the corporations, who are enabling and profiting from this occupation. And there can be papers issued that will hold them accountable, and mean that if they land in Paris or in Brussels or in Pretoria, or in countries anywhere in the world who take this up, that they could face arrest for these violations.
This is not the International Criminal Court, but the concept of universal jurisdiction means that any court can take up a case like this for these kinds of crimes. So I think it’s going to be a very important judgment, even though we can know ahead of time that Israel will certainly not abide by whatever it demands.
JJ: And I do want to say that I have seen media pay maybe more respectful attention to international bodies than in the past. It used to be that the UN was just kind of a joke, and they were just people who were trying to interfere with the US. And I feel, it’s impressionistic, but I feel like that is maybe shifting, for just the reasons you say.
PB: I think that’s absolutely right, and I think the South African initiative at the International Court of Justice, the ICJ, has played a huge role in that. I think people all around the world, including here in the United States, the most cynical, were cheering, and crying, tearing up, watching this dream team, extraordinary rainbow combination of people of the South African legal team argue their case passionately, but with great focus on the law. This was about the law. They were not using designer videos, or whatever, to emphasize the horror of what the genocide looks like on the ground. They were sticking to the law.
And it was a powerful description, and I think people all around the world were looking at that and saying, wow, here’s South Africa, a country of the Global South, that is suddenly taking the initiative in this institution that for so long was assumed to belong to the wealthy, colonial countries of the world, and now suddenly it’s being democratized. These institutions themselves are being democratized through this process. That’s enormously important.
New York Times (7/13/24)
JJ: Obviously, I think media are important. Sometimes, though, they seem like almost the last consideration. But I do know that in something like this, where you cannot avoid, unless you’re trying to avoid them, images of grief-stricken Palestinians holding their loved ones in their arms…
PB: Absolutely.
JJ: Media have to do a job to get you to deny the feeling that you have when you see those images.
And some of the work of that is this New York Times story on July 14, that straight up says, Hamas
hide under residential neighborhoods, storing their weapons and miles of tunnels and in houses, mosques, sofas, even a child’s bedroom, blurring the boundary between civilians and combatants.
And they conclude, “Israeli officials say that Hamas’ tactics explain why Israel has been forced to strike so much civilian infrastructure, kill so many Palestinians and detain so many civilians.” I don’t know how else you read that, except to tell you, that feeling you have of your heart breaking, you should ignore that, because whoever Israel kills deserved it.
PB: Yep. No, I think that’s absolutely right. That was not an accidental story. The timing was not accidental. The focus on that story was not accidental.
And I think that it also was very carefully written. It was written beautifully. It was a very powerfully written story. It was also written in a way that completely, carefully ignored, what does international law actually say? So Israel can say all it wants, “Well, we had no choice.” Israel had every choice in the world, and the choices it made violated a host of components of, if we just look at the Geneva Conventions, that say, among other things, you have to distinguish between civilian and combatants in who you target.
AP (7/13/24)
As we saw in this attack last week, there was an attack on, supposedly, one of the military leaders of Hamas, Mohamed Deif—that attack killed more than 90 Palestinian civilians, wounded more than 300. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s true that Israel thought that Muhammad Deif was there. It is illegal to deliberately, knowingly, kill 90 civilians and injure 300 more because you think a military leader might be present. They don’t even allege that he was fighting at the time. That is completely illegal.
It’s illegal to attack hospitals. The fact that there may have been a command center in a tunnel below does not make it legal to destroy a hospital. It does not make it legal to destroy the headquarters of UNRWA, the only humanitarian organization with the capacity to actually get desperately needed humanitarian aid to the people of Gaza.
None of these Israeli claims about “well, we have no choice”—the Gaza Strip is one of the most densely populated areas of the world, and it has been fenced off, walled off, and surrounded by soldiers. It’s the definition of a siege.
I think that many people believe, there’s this claim, that the occupation of Gaza ended in 2005, when the settlers and the soldiers were pulled out. That’s not true, because the definition of occupation in international law is not the presence of settler colonies, physically, or the presence of soldiers on the territory. It’s about control. And by building the wall, and having that wall surrounded by soldiers, Israel remains occupying the Gaza Strip. So you have an entire generation of people who have grown up in the Gaza Strip, because it has been besieged now for 17 years, who have never been outside that tiny strip of land, have been physically walled off like a siege of ancient times, and that was the condition in which this war is being fought.
Hamas has violated international law in a number of ways, in terms of its attacks using missiles that cannot be targeted against military targets. But the notion that there somehow is this choice of Hamas fighters to fight in the open, as if there is massive open space inside the Gaza Strip, this most crowded strip of territory in the world, it boggles the imagination. To anybody who’s ever seen Gaza, this notion that this is somehow a legitimate excuse, that, “Oh, well, it’s too crowded. We had no choice but to destroy all the infrastructure, all the buildings, the water treatment, the hospitals, all the universities, every museum, 70% of the schools.” This is a constant violation of international law, in which our own government and our tax money and our Congress and our president are directly and deeply implicated.
JJ: I thank you for that, and this would be the point where I would ask about hope and ways forward and what we could do, and I’ll ask that now, too.
Crowd in Freedom Plaza for the March on Washington for Gaza (1/13/24). Photo by Elvert Barnes.
PB: Yeah. I think we can never give up hope. What has been extraordinary in this 10 months has been to see the rising of an incredible, powerful, broad movement of human solidarity with the Palestinian population of Gaza. People who never really gave much thought to the Israel/Palestine question, to Palestinian lives, to Israeli occupation, suddenly—and, certainly, part of it is because of the media, social media and mainstream media, have had no choice, as you said earlier, Janine, but to portray the horror of this genocide. And people have responded as human beings, which is an amazing thing. It doesn’t happen all the time.
So we have to have hope in that. We have to know that we have managed to rebuild the definition of ceasefire, so that when we call for a ceasefire, and I’ve got to say the message discipline of this broad and largely unaccountable movement has been pretty extraordinary. Everybody is sticking to the demand: We need a ceasefire now. At the same time, we have managed to transform the understanding of, what does a ceasefire mean? It’s not just, stop firing for a few minutes while you exchange some hostages and then go back to war. It means a permanent stop to the firing. It means access, real access, to massive amounts of immediate humanitarian aid. And it means stop sending weapons.
So when we demand a ceasefire of the Biden administration, we’re demanding all those things. Unfortunately, when President Biden says, “We need a ceasefire,” he’s only talking about part of one of those three things. And he’s undermining the others by continuing to send the weapons. So that’s what we have to focus on. The hope is, we have more people supporting the rights of Palestinians to life, among other things; it’s huge, and the responsibility that comes with that hope is to keep up the demand for an immediate ceasefire, with all that that requires.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies. Thank you, Phyllis Bennis, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
PB: Thank you, Janine.
Immediately after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, when little was known about the white male shooter (except that he was a registered Republican), right-wing politicians directly blamed Democratic rhetoric for the shooting.
“Today is not just some isolated incident,” Sen. J.D. Vance wrote on X (7/13/24), just days before Trump named him as his running mate:
The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.
(That Trump might be considered a fascist did not always seem so far-fetched to Vance; in 2016, he privately worried that Trump might become “America’s Hitler”—Reuters, 7/15/24.)
“For years, Democrats and their allies in the media have recklessly stoked fears, calling President Trump and other conservatives threats to democracy,” Sen. Tim Scott posted on X (7/13/24). “Their inflammatory rhetoric puts lives at risk.”
Rather than denounce both the assassination attempt and these hypocritical and opportunistic attacks on critical speech, the country’s top editorial boards cravenly bothsidesed their condemnations of “political violence.”
‘Unthinkably uncivil’The Washington Post (7/14/24) described Trump’s exhortation to “remain resilient in our Faith and Defiant in the face of Wickedness” as a call for “national unity.”
In an editorial headlined, “Turn Down the Heat, Let in the Light,” the Washington Post (7/14/24) praised Donald Trump for appearing to call for national unity. The Post wrote that the assassination attempt offered Trump the chance to “cool the nation’s political fevers and set a new direction.”
The editorial board quickly admonished both sides equally for “unthinkably uncivil” actions and “physical violence.” They pointed to protesters who “harass lawmakers, justices, journalists and business leaders with bullhorns at their homes,” universities that have “become battlegrounds,” and the “bipartisan hazard” of political violence, citing Nancy Pelosi’s husband and GOP Rep. Steve Scalise.
(The link the Post inserted leads to an earlier editorial in which they condemned peaceful protests outside Supreme Court justices’ houses as “totalitarian,” and recommended that the protesters be imprisoned—FAIR.org, 5/17/22).
New York Times editors, meanwhile, called the shooting “Antithetical to America” (7/13/24), a formulation clearly more aspirational than actual. “Violence is antithetical to democracy,” the editorial board wrote, acknowledging moments later that “violence is infecting and inflecting American political life.” They explained:
Acts of violence have long shadowed American democracy, but they have loomed larger and darker of late. Cultural and political polarization, the ubiquity of guns and the radicalizing power of the internet have all been contributing factors, as this board laid out in its editorial series “The Danger Within” in 2022. This high-stakes presidential election is further straining the nation’s commitment to the peaceful resolution of political differences.
It’s a remarkable obfuscation, in which responsibility is ascribed to no one and—as at the Post—everyone.
‘Leaders of both parties’Is the shooting of a political candidate really “antithetical” (New York Times, 7/13/24) to a country with more guns than people, and 50,000+ gun deaths every year?
Curiously, the 2022 editorial series the Times cites (11/3–12/24/22) did make clear where most of the responsibility lay, explaining that “the threat to the current order comes disproportionately from the right.” It pointed out that of the hundreds of extremism-related murders of the past decade, more than three-quarters were committed by “right-wing extremists, white supremacists or anti-government extremists.” While there have been occasional attacks on conservatives (like the attack on a congressional baseball game that wounded Scalise), the Times noted,
the number and nature of the episodes aren’t comparable, and no leading figures in the Democratic Party condone, mock or encourage their supporters to violence in ways that are common from politicians on the right and their supporters in the conservative media.
But two years later, the Times, like the Post, carefully avoids bringing that much-needed clarity to the current situation and apportions responsibility for avoiding political violence equally to both sides:
It is now incumbent on political leaders of both parties, and on Americans individually and collectively, to resist a slide into further violence and the type of extremist language that fuels it. Saturday’s attack should not be taken as a provocation or a justification.
Of course, there’s a crucial difference between criticizing Trump and his allies for their anti-democratic positions and actions—which is what the Democrats and the left have done—and actually threatening and calling for violence, as the right has been doing.
The list of examples is nearly endless, but would prominently include Trump’s incitement of violence at the Capitol on January 6; his personal attacks on prosecutors, judges and politicians who have subsequently required increased security protections; and his refusal to rule out violence if he loses the 2024 election: “If we don’t win, you know, it depends.” His supporters have repeatedly called for armed uprisings after perceived attacks on Trump, including immediately after the assassination attempt.
That’s why it’s critical that leading newspapers push back against right-wing attempts to equate criticisms of Trump with calls for violence.
‘Grossly irresponsible talk’The Wall Street Journal (7/14/24), unsurprisingly, took this bothsidesism the farthest.
Leaders on both sides need to stop describing the stakes of the election in apocalyptic terms. Democracy won’t end if one or the other candidate is elected. Fascism is not aborning if Mr. Trump wins, unless you have little faith in American institutions.
We agree with former Attorney General Bill Barr’s statement Saturday night: “The Democrats have to stop their grossly irresponsible talk about Trump being an existential threat to democracy—he is not.”
Readers of those top US papers would have to look across the pond to the British Guardian (7/14/24) for the kind of clear-eyed take newspaper editors with concern for democracy ought to have: “There must also be care that extreme acts by a minority are not used to silence legitimate criticism.”
Research Assistance: Alefiya Presswala
Reuters (6/14/24) reported that the US military was behind social media messages like ““COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!”
Canada-based news agency Reuters (6/14/24) revealed that the Pentagon, beginning in spring 2020, carried out a year-long anti-vax messaging campaign on social media. Reuters reported that the purpose of the clandestine psychological operation was to discredit China’s pandemic relief efforts across Southeast and Central Asia, as well as in parts of the Middle East.
“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” a “senior military officer involved in the program” told Reuters. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”
The Reuters report straightforwardly implicated the US military in a lethal propaganda operation targeting vulnerable populations, centrally including the Filipino public, to the end of scoring geostrategic points against China:
To Washington’s alarm, China’s offers of assistance were tilting the geopolitical playing field across the developing world, including in the Philippines, where the government faced upwards of 100,000 infections in the early months of the pandemic.
The findings were unequivocal. In conjunction with private contractors, the US military created and employed fake social media profiles across popular platforms in multiple countries in order to sow doubt, not only about China’s Sinovac immunization, but also about the country’s humanitarian motivations with respect to their dispersal of pandemic-related aid. The news agency quoted “a senior US military officer directly involved in the campaign in Southeast Asia”: “We didn’t do a good job sharing vaccines with partners…. So what was left to us was to throw shade on China’s.”
Failure to pounceThis New York Times headline (7/3/24), pointedly critical of the Pentagon’s anti-vaccine disinformation, did not appear in the Times newspaper, but only in a subscriber-only newsletter.
One might be forgiven for assuming that US news media editors would pounce on the fact that the most powerful institution in the US, and quite possibly the world, promulgated anti-vax material on social media over the course of a year. However, nearly a month later, the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Politico, CNN and MSNBC have yet to cover the news.
The New York Times, which has consistently covered anti-vaccine disinformation (7/24/21, 8/1/21, 12/28/22, 3/16/24) and extremism (3/26/21, 4/5/21, 8/31/21, 6/14/24), has yet to cover the Pentagon’s unparalleled anti-vax indoctrination efforts in its news section; it ran one subscriber-only newsletter opinion piece (7/3/24) on the story nearly three weeks after Reuters‘ revelations.
Meanwhile, independent (Common Dreams, 6/14/24; WSWS, 6/16/24) and international sources (Al Jazeera, 6/14/24; South China Morning Post, 6/16/24, 6/17/24, 6/18/24) immediately relayed the revelations.
‘Amplifying the contagion’Given the Times’ track record in the fight against vaccine disinformation, one might expect to see that paper in particular give this blockbuster news front-page status. After all, the Pentagon was busy secretly inculcating anti-vax attitudes in its targets when Neil MacFarquhar of the Times (3/26/21) warned that “extremist organizations are now bashing the safety and efficacy of coronavirus vaccines in an effort to try to undermine the government.”
In a New York Times Magazine thinkpiece (5/25/22), Moises Velasquez-Manoff took stock of the “nightmarish and bizarre” conspiratorial “skullduggery swirling around vaccines”:
The process of swaying people with messaging that questions vaccines is how disinformation—deliberately fabricated falsehoods and half-truths—becomes misinformation, or incorrect information passed along unwittingly. Motivated by the best intentions, these people nonetheless end up amplifying the contagion, and the damaging impact, of half-truths and distortions.
Anxiety and doubt around immunizations, readers were told, “may be seeping into their relationship with medical science—or governmental mandates—in general.”
Surely this line of reasoning applies as much if not more so to the Pentagon’s anti-vaccine propaganda offensive in Asia and the Middle East: The US military’s own skullduggery has primed countless victims around the world to be more skeptical of medical technology in general.
Even if Americans weren’t targeted by the Pentagon’s scheme, their tax dollars were employed to materially endanger people throughout Asia and the Middle East, and to undermine public health mandates in general. And in the midst of a global pandemic, infections anywhere threaten peoples’ lives everywhere. But the threat of anti-vax disinformation is apparently not a high priority for the establishment press if the US military is implicated.
In keeping with a rich history of obsequious editorial decision-making when it comes to the Pentagon’s activities abroad, this remarkable lack of attention on the part of the Times and the rest of the corporate US press serves as yet another example of corporate media’s timorous attitude towards structural power in this country.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240712.mp3CNN (6/6/24)
This week on CounterSpin: At some point, we will get tired of hearing news reports on “record heat”—because the “records” will continue to be broken, and “heat” will have stopped meaning what it once may have meant. Media play a role in moving us from questions about where to buy a good air conditioner to what stands in the way of addressing a public health catastrophe? One obstacle is utility companies. In February of last year, we spoke with Shelby Green at Energy and Policy Institute and Selah Goodson Bell at the Center for Biological Diversity, about their research on the topic.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240712Green_Goodson.mp3In These Times (12/27/17)
Also on the show: Some listeners will know that veteran labor organizer and author Jane McAlevey died recently. The tributes are coming in, but I have little doubt in saying that McAlevey would care less for attention to her life in particular than to those of people she worked for, inside and outside of unions. CounterSpin spoke with her in 2018, when the #metoo campaign was coming to fore. We’ll hear some of that conversation this week on the show.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240712McAlevey.mp3
Reuters (6/27/24) noted that Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party “traces its roots to the Italian Social Movement (MSI), formed in 1946 as a direct heir of Benito Mussolini’s fascist movement that ruled Italy for more than 20 years.”
An antisemitism scandal has rocked one of Europe’s major far-right political leaders: Giorgia Meloni, prime minister of Italy. It’s been major news in the European press. But the story is being mishandled by major US corporate media, and that fact says a lot about how poorly antisemitism is covered in the United States.
Reuters (6/27/24) reported:
A reporter from online newspaper Fanpage [6/14/24] infiltrated Gioventu Nazionale, Meloni’s rightist Brothers of Italy youth movement, and recorded videos in which members declared themselves fascists and shouted the Nazi slogan “Sieg Heil.”… The investigation also showed a Gioventu Nazionale member mocking Brothers of Italy senator Ester Mieli for her Jewish origin, and revealed chats on messaging platforms where militants took aim at ethnic minorities.
Meloni’s political opponents used this footage against her (Guardian, 6/27/24). She eventually condemned the antisemites (Euronews, 6/29/24). Haaretz (6/30/24) said:
This 12-minute video showed National Youth activists, including two senior figures, singing a celebratory song in honor of the disgraced dictator Benito Mussolini, chanting “Sieg Heil!” and glorifying the Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (Armed Revolutionary Nuclei)—a neofascist terrorist group that was active in Italy in the late 1970s and early ’80s, committing over 100 murders.
Neofascist rootsFanpage (6/14/24) led off its report on Italy’s National Youth by noting that Meloni refers to them as “marvelous young people,” and they are defined as “the soul and the driving force” of her party.
This shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to Italian politics. The nation’s small but vibrant Jewish population has been skeptical of Meloni’s ascendence and that of her party, Brothers of Italy. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (9/30/22) explained two years ago:
Meloni’s first stop in politics was in the youth movement of the Italian Social Movement, known as MSI, a neofascist party founded in 1946 by people who had worked with Hitler and Benito Mussolini, Italy’s fascist leader from 1922 to 1943. Brothers of Italy is closely tied to the group, even housing its office in the same building where MSI operated and using an identical logo, a tricolor flame.
With Meloni at the helm of one of Europe’s biggest economies, she is not a minor player; in fact, at the last G7 conference, she stood out as a confident leader (AP, 10/18/23; Wall Street Journal, 6/13/24) over a flock of feeble, vulnerable centrists and conservatives.
One of those was Rishi Sunak, who has since lost his job as British prime minister and Conservative Party leader (Guardian, 7/5/24). Another is President Joe Biden, who is being pressured to drop out of the US presidential race due to concerns regarding his cognitive health (New York Times, 6/28/24). And French President Emmanuel Macron has been weakened by the poor performance of his party in snap parliamentary elections (Reuters, 7/7/24).
The summit took place after Meloni’s party increased its share of the popular vote in the European Union election, and she is now “poised to play a critical role shaping the future direction of EU policy in Brussels” (Politico, 6/13/24).
Late to the story—or absentThe New York Times (7/2/24) led with Meloni “urg[ing] leaders of her political party on Tuesday to reject antisemitism, racism and nostalgia for totalitarian regimes.”
The New York Times (6/11/24) has positively portrayed Meloni as a “critical player” as the host of the G7 conference, and has been upbeat about her rising stature generally. (Her anti-Russian politicking “sealed her credibility as someone who could play an influential role in the top tier of European leaders”—2/7/24.) The Times (7/2/24) came late to the Brother of Italy story , leading with the news of her public relations drive to denounce the racist content. The Washington Post, which also had previously normalized her as a European politician (6/6/24), covered the story in a similar fashion with AP copy (7/3/24).
NPR missed the story. So did CNN. The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial board had said she was “governing with some success” (6/13/24), and whose news coverage has portrayed her as a pragmatist (6/13/24), wasn’t interested in the scandal either.
This lackluster coverage, which at best focused on Meloni’s self-interested damage control rather than the dark ideology at the center of her movement, is confounding. Western media have been rightfully fretting about the far right’s impressive showing in recent EU parliamentary elections (New York Times, 6/9/24). Meloni’s reputation as a strong leader among ailing centrist European leaders is bolstered by other far-right parties making impressive gains.
All of these parties, known for their anti-immigration and anti-multicultural positions, also have tinges of right-wing antisemitism, including Britain’s Reform Party (Haaretz, 6/23/24), Germany’s Alternative for Deutschland (Deutsche Welle, 8/5/23) and France’s National Rally (AP, 7/3/24). In the US, Donald Trump has been careful not to criticize the overt antisemites in the MAGA movement, including the “very fine people” who chanted “Jews will not replace us” at Charlottesville (Politico, 12/7/22). The Washington Post (10/17/22) noted that Trump has long employed antisemitic tropes in his rhetoric.
A danger signal ignoredThe New York Times (12/16/23) is more concerned about the “antisemitism” of protesters who assert “that the war in Gaza was a genocide.”
And so the Fanpage revelations should have been a blaring danger signal, as they were for the European press. The New York Times has been raising alarms (10/31/23, 12/16/23) about a rise of antisemitism since the October 7 attacks in Israel, painting the problem as one that plagues the left and the right. But as FAIR (12/12/23, 12/15/23) has talked about, corporate media are quick to cast legitimate criticism of Israel as antisemitism to discredit pro-Palestine points of view, wrongfully equating opposition to genocide with the racist antisemitism of the right.
Regardless of the reason for US corporate media’s oversight, the impact is clear. The press can talk about antisemitism more openly when they can attach it to human rights protesters, but are less eager to describe antisemitism as it actually is: a bigotry that is interwoven with the anti-Islamic and xenophobic platforms of the powerful far right.
Janine Jackson interviewed Thomas Jefferson University’s Tauhid Chappell about cannabis equity for the June 28, 2024 episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Chappell.mp3Extra! (2/13)
Janine Jackson: Marijuana use in this country has always been racialized. The first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, ran an anti-marijuana crusade in the 1930s, including the message that “reefer makes darkies think they’re as good as white men.” So concerns were justified about what the legalization and profitizing of marijuana would mean for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization.
Tauhid Chappell has worked on these issues for years now. He teaches, at Thomas Jefferson University, the country’s first graduate-level course studying the impact and outcomes of equity movements in the cannabis industry. And he joins us now by phone from Maine. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Tauhid Chappell.
Tauhid Chappell: Always a pleasure.
JJ: When we spoke with you last year, you helped debunk a lot of Reefer Madness–style fear-mongering around supposed social harm stemming from the legalization of marijuana. There was old-school “gateway drug” language, marijuana was going to on-ramp folks to opioid use. It was going to lead to traffic accidents, and use among teenagers was supposedly going to skyrocket. We are further along now; what more have we learned about those kinds of concerns?
TC: I can happily report that as far as the ongoing reports that are coming out of what we call “mature markets”—states like Colorado, Washington, Oregon, even California—teen use has not been severely impacted. In fact, I believe that there’s a Colorado study that says that teen use has actually declined with legalization.
Opioid use has not suddenly gone up because of marijuana legalization. In fact, many states, in their medical marijuana programs, have used opioid reduction as a reason why patients should be using cannabis, to actually get them off of opioid addiction, until we are actually seeing a reverse, of people who get on cannabis actually now starting to lessen the amount of opioids they use in their regimen.
JJ: Well, the worry of many of us was that marijuana becoming legal would just blow past the fact that there are people in prison, mainly Black and brown people, for what now some other folks stand to profit from, that legalization would not include acknowledgement, much less reparation, for the decades in which whole communities were critically harmed. And then we just kind of say, “Hey, we’ve moved on, and now everybody loves weed.” What can you tell us about efforts to center those harmed by illegality in this new landscape of legal cannabis?
Tauhid Chappell: “How can we broaden our pardons and broaden our expungements, and expedite and automatically create these opportunities for people to move past these convictions?”
TC: There is still much work to be done in the social and racial justice that would bring a reparative nature to the people, to the individuals, and their families and their communities, that have been impacted by cannabis prohibition and the war on drugs. Some states are trying to really focus on justice-impacted people to participate in the cannabis industry. Others are focusing on just trying to expunge records, pardon people, and that’s that. And then other states are not even contemplating or really moving to center people who have been impacted by incarceration, or are still incarcerated for marijuana, and other related offenses, too.
So you have a patchwork of states that are doing well and can be doing better, and then other states who really need to prioritize and focus on individuals and families and communities who’ve been impacted by the war on drugs.
Most recently in the news, Maryland’s governor has just pardoned 175,000 people for simple possession of marijuana, a typical charge that has impacted so many people in the past. That is something that I encourage other states to look at as advocates for more healing and repairing to happen for those that have been previously and currently impacted from their incarceration due to cannabis prohibition.
And then the one thing that I’ll also mention, too, in terms of focus on those that have been impacted by the war on drugs, I encourage other states to look at Illinois’ R3 Program, which I believe is the Repair, Reinvest and Restore program, that specifically designates cannabis tax revenue to be utilized as grants, not loans, as grants that different organizations can apply for to help expand their programming that goes into communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the war on drugs.
You don’t have a whole lot of states that are utilizing cannabis tax revenue to go back into communities that have been disproportionately harmed. And you don’t have a lot of states that are trying to figure out: How can we broaden our pardons and broaden our expungements, and expedite and automatically create these opportunities for people to move past these convictions and get back into society as a normal, average citizen?
So there is more work to be done. I don’t think it’s ever going to be over, in terms of people asking, calling for repair from the harms of the war on drugs. But if we can continuously see more governors, more legislatures expand the definition and criteria of who can get a pardon, who can get an expungement for marijuana-related arrest, that’s going to help a lot more people out.
CounterSpin (12/18/18)
JJ: Let me ask you, finally, about journalism. When I was talking on this subject back in 2018, with Art Way from Drug Policy Alliance, we were talking about Attorney General Jeff Sessions, at that point, saying “good people don’t smoke marijuana.” That was the level of the conversation. I know it might sound clownish to some people, but you’d be wrong to imagine that those attitudes are not still in the mix somewhere. You have worked in news media, you know the pushes and pulls on reporters. What would you like to see in terms of media coverage of this issue?
TC: I would like to have a lot more reporters be serious about the ongoing, what I believe is nefarious behavior by a lot of these large, well-capitalized—I’m talking tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars—capitalized multi-state operators that are really scheming to try to have a monopoly in different states. You have different large companies that have started early in other states like California, Oregon and Washington, realize that there’s too much competition and now are actually shutting down their operations on the West Coast and focusing on strongholds that they may have in other states, that may not have as much of a mature or expansive market.
There are companies like GTI that are really trying to capture Massachusetts’ market, for example. We have other major companies, like Trulieve, that are trying to really own their monopoly in Florida, right? You have other companies that exist in states like Pennsylvania, where it’s only medical, where the only dispensaries and processors, the majority of cultivators, are all out-of-state operators, people who don’t even live in Pennsylvania. You have companies like Curaleaf—Curaleaf is one of the largest cannabis companies in the country—really trying to double down their efforts in Pennsylvania, in New Jersey and other states, and make sure that no one else can really participate in the market.
I would really love more investigative journalism done to see how are these businesses forming? How are they collaborating and working with each other, even as competitors, and what are they doing at the policy and law level to change regulations that make it more favorable to them, and cut out small-business operators, justice-involved operators, equity operators? What are these large companies doing to lobby? Because, as cannabis legalization continues to be expansive, and now we’re talking about potential rescheduling of marijuana, to Schedule 3, at the federal level, you’re going to see these bigger companies come in and try to capture the market share and push everybody out.
We understand that people who have been directly impacted by a marijuana arrest, if they want to get into the business of marijuana and get a cannabis license, it makes sense for them to be supported and to be educated and to be nurtured for success, because that’s what they deserve after everything that they’ve been through.
Not everyone believes or cares about or shares that same sentiment. You have people who only look at marijuana legalization as another way to make money, and that’s all they want.
And so many of these bigger companies are doing all this shadow work behind the scenes. I would really love more journalists to really look at that, really connect the dots. This isn’t just a state-by-state level. These are companies that are working collectively together in multiple states to make sure that they’re the only players in the market. I would love more investigations behind these bigger companies.
JJ: All right, then; we’ll end on that note for now.
We’ve been speaking with Tauhid Chappell of Thomas Jefferson University. Tauhid Chappell, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
TC: Thank you for having me.
The New York Times‘ op-ed (6/3/24) broke little new ground but arrived at a timely moment for the public debate.
The lab leak theory of Covid-19’s origins has been something of a zombie idea in public discourse, popping up again and again in corporate media despite numerous proclamations that it’s finally been debunked (Conversation, 8/14/22; Atlantic, 3/1/23; LA Times, 6/26/23).
The most recent resuscitation of the theory came in the form of a New York Times guest essay (6/3/24), provocatively headlined “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in Five Key Points”—and notably published the day of a congressional subcommittee grilling of Dr. Anthony Fauci over, among other things, his supposed role in a lab leak cover-up. The paper further bolstered the theory in the Times’ flagship Morning newsletter (6/14/24), which spotlighted Chan’s op-ed.
The author of the guest essay, Dr. Alina Chan, is a well-known proponent of a lab leak origin for SARS-CoV-2 (MIT Technology Review, 6/25/21). Her biggest claim to fame is probably the 2021 book Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19, which she co-authored with London Times science writer Matt Ridley. The book’s case for Covid’s origin in a lab leak was criticized for the evidence—or lack thereof—it presented (New Republic, 12/10/21).
Her guest essay reiterates the book’s arguments. But it also recapitulates the misrepresentation, selective quotation and faulty logic that has characterized so much of the pro—lab leak side of the Covid origin discourse.
Misleading air of authorityChan’s co-author of Viral, Matt Ridley, is a coal-mine owner who argues that “global warming is good for us.”
Under her byline, the Times identified Chan as a “molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and a co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”
While true, it’s important to note that Chan’s expertise is neither in epidemiology nor virology, but in gene therapy and synthetic biology, meaning she isn’t exactly a subject expert when it comes to the fields most relevant to SARS-CoV-2 research. But that’s far from clear to the average Times reader, for whom such a bio suggests that Chan is an authoritative figure on the subject.
What’s more, the paper produced flashy data visualizations to accompany the piece and help Chan make her case, lending the paper’s institutional credibility to her argument. That same institutional credibility was further invoked by Times columnist Zeynep Tufekci, who shared the article on X the day it was published, proudly stating: “Yes, it’s factchecked. And we now know many outspoken experts opposed to this made similar points in PRIVATE.”
But that credibility is not earned by the quality of the underlying evidence Chan offers.
Lacking critical contextMany of Chan’s arguments aren’t new and have already been discussed in depth in a previous FAIR article (6/28/21), so I’ll be mostly focusing on points not already discussed there.
Near the beginning of the essay, Chan makes multiple dubiously selective references to Shi Zhengli, a WIV scientist at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) who has received copious attention in discussions of a hypothetical escape of Covid from that lab (MIT Technology Review, 2/9/22).
Chan’s theory benefits from selective retelling of a story told more fully by Scientific American (6/1/20).
Chan notes that at the start of the outbreak, Shi “initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory, saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.”
Mentioning this worry to journalists would be a relatively strange thing to do for someone trying to cover up a leak from their lab, which Chan has implied on multiple occasions that the WIV researchers are doing (MIT Technology Review, 6/25/21, 2/9/22; Boston, 9/9/20). Chan also leaves out the vital context that Shi says that in response to her worry, she went through the lab’s records to check if it could have been the source, and found that it couldn’t have been (Scientific American, 6/1/20):
Meanwhile, she frantically went through her own lab’s records from the past few years to check for any mishandling of experimental materials, especially during disposal. Shi breathed a sigh of relief when the results came back: None of the sequences matched those of the viruses her team had sampled from bat caves. “That really took a load off my mind,” she says. “I had not slept a wink for days.”
At another point, Chan asserts that Shi’s group had published a database containing descriptions of over 22,000 wildlife samples, but that database was taken offline in fall of 2019, around the same time as the pandemic began. The implication is clear: that this action was taken in order to hide the presence of SARS-CoV-2, or a virus close enough to be its predecessor, in WIV custody.
Again, Chan doesn’t mention the reason given, that repeated hacking attempts at the onset of the pandemic led the institute to take their databases offline out of fear that they might be compromised. Nor does she address Shi’s claim that the databases only contained already published material (MIT Technology Review, 2/9/22).
It’s possible Chan believes that these are all lies told in defense of a Chinese coverup, but to not even mention these not-implausible explanations belies a biased and selective presentation.
Schrodinger’s proposalChan goes on to argue, “The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with US partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.”
This talking point should be familiar to anyone who has been keeping up with the cyclical resurgences of the lab leak theory over the last few years; a key piece of evidence they point to is a leaked 2018 research proposal by the name of Defuse, which was published three years ago by the Intercept (9/23/21).
The proposal is presented as a damning piece of evidence, with Chan stating that the proposed viruses would have been “shockingly similar to SARS-CoV-2.” She admits that this proposal was rejected by DARPA—in part specifically because it involved modifying viruses in ways that were viewed as overly risky—and never actually received funding. But she still posits that the WIV could have pursued research like it, despite presenting no actual evidence that this ever occurred.
Chan engages in a large amount of conjecture stacking in this section, placing unsubstantiated claim atop unsubstantiated claim to produce an argument that looks compelling at a glance but sits upon a pile of what-ifs.
The entire narrative relies on the assumption that a virus similar enough in structure to have become SARS-CoV-2 was present in the WIV at some point before the pandemic, but Chan never presents anything to substantiate this. None of the known viruses within the WIV’s catalog could have been the progenitor, with even the closest virus there—RaTG13—merely seeming to share a common ancestor.
A less-than-alarming detailA Wall Street Journal article (6/20/23), cited by Chan, about sick researchers at the Wuhan lab left out the key detail that, according to US intelligence, the researchers had “symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with Covid-19.”
Her point relating to sick scientists is possibly the most dishonest aspect of the entire piece. Chan states that “one alarming detail—leaked to the Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former US government officials—is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019.”
If you only read the Journal article (6/20/23) Chan links to, you may be convinced that these cases represent serious evidence. However, the US intelligence report these claims of sick researchers originate from, which has since been made public, clearly shows the weakness of the claim:
While several WIV researchers fell mildly ill in fall 2019, they experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with Covid-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to Covid-19. While some of these researchers had historically conducted research into animal respiratory viruses, we are unable to confirm if any of them handled live viruses in the work they performed prior to falling ill.
So the intelligence community was unable to establish that any of the researchers actually had Covid-19 and in fact collected information that showed they presented with symptoms consistent with colds or allergies and inconsistent with Covid, with some even confirmed to have been sick with unrelated illnesses.
This is something the Times should have caught and addressed during a rudimentary factcheck.
Meanwhile, the WIV denies the allegations, and challenged its accusers to produce the names of its researchers who were Covid-19 vectors. Chan’s “alarming detail” is therefore both unsubstantiated and dependent upon the existence of a coverup at the WIV.
Weighing the evidenceNew evidence that the virus originated at the Wuhan wet market (New York Times, 2/27/22) didn’t make Chan any less confident in her theory.
The final stage of Chan’s argument is identifying deficiencies in the zoonotic spillover theory. She maintains that Chinese investigators, believing early on that the outbreak had begun at a central market, had collected data in a biased manner that likely missed cases unlinked to the market.
She links to a letter to the editor in the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (3/20/24) that criticized one of the major market-origin papers (Woroby et al, 2021) on the grounds that it suffered from a large degree of location bias. Consistent with Chan’s habit of ignoring arguments contrary to her thesis, she fails to mention the rebuttal produced by one of the paper’s authors, alongside another researcher.
It’s true that the evidence on the spillover side is currently incomplete; however, this isn’t necessarily damning. It took over a year to identify the intermediary hosts of MERS; we still haven’t found the one suspected to exist for HCOV-HKU1, first described in 2004; and finding the natural reservoir from which SARS stemmed was a decade-long endeavor (Scientific American, 6/1/20).
Still, the circumstantial evidence present for zoonotic spillover is strong. Early Covid-19 cases, as well as excess deaths from pneumonia—a metric far less likely to suffer from the potential bias Chan mentions—cluster around the Huannan wet market, not the WIV. Multiple distinct lineages of SARS-CoV-2 were also associated with the wet market, as would be expected if it were in fact the origination point.
In fact, five positive samples were discovered in a single stall that had been known to sell raccoon dogs, one of the animals suspected as a possible intermediate host for SARS-CoV-2 (New York Times, 2/27/22).
As a comprehensive review of the scientific evidence surrounding the origins of SARS-CoV-2, published in the Annual Review of Virology (4/17/24), states in no uncertain terms:
The available data clearly point to a natural zoonotic emergence within, or closely linked to, the Huannan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. There is no direct evidence linking the emergence of SARS-CoV-2 to laboratory work conducted at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
False equivalence The New York Times‘ David Leonhardt (Morning, 6/14/24) presents evidence and speculation as equally compelling.
Days after the guest essay’s release, the Times featured it in their popular Morning newsletter (6/14/24), under the headline, “Two Covid Theories: Was the Pandemic Started by a Lab Leak or by Natural Transmission? We Look at the Evidence.”
Newsletter writer David Leonhardt situated the debate by explaining that “US officials remain divided” on which theory is more plausible, then presented the issue with scrupulous balance, offering three brief arguments for each theory “to help you decide which you consider more likely.”
But this is complicated, specialized science, not Murder, She Wrote. Agencies like the Energy Department, cited by Leonhardt as endorsing the lab leak theory, do have teams of people with relevant lab and scientific expertise. (Leonhardt does not note, however, that the department has “low confidence” in its conclusion—see FAIR.org, 4/7/23.) But surely, if we’re to talk about where current thought lies on the likely origins of SARS-CoV-2, the most pertinent information to give a lay reader is what people who are experts in viruses and disease outbreaks believe. And the majority of experts in those fields lean strongly in the direction of a zoonotic spillover origin.
In a 2024 survey of 168 global experts in epidemiology, virology and associated specialties, the average estimate that the virus emerged from natural zoonosis was 77%; half the participants estimated that the likelihood of a natural origin was 90% or higher. Just 14% of the experts thought a lab accident was more likely than not the origin. (The survey excluded experts from China as being from a country rated “not free” by the US-funded think tank Freedom House.) Yet Leonhardt left out this crucial information.
The evidence Leonhardt presented for zoonotic spillover involves actual epidemiological data, as well as biological samples showing SARS-CoV-2 was present in the Huannan wet market where live animals susceptible to the virus were being sold.
The evidence presented for the lab leak, on the other hand, is the bare minimum to establish it as even being a possibility, with the strongest point not even being in direct favor of the lab leak, and instead just reestablishing that there are still missing pieces to fully prove a zoonotic spillover origin. These are not equivalent bodies of evidence in any sense of the word.
After presenting these carefully crafted options, Leonhardt suggested the logical conclusion:
Do you find both explanations plausible? I do. As I’ve followed this debate over the past few years, I have gone back and forth about which is more likely. Today, I’m close to 50/50. I have heard similar sentiments from some experts.
This is where the crux of the issue lies: These two scenarios may both be plausible, but the relative evidence of their likelihood is not a coin toss. For some reason, however, the Times seems to want to pretend that this is the case.
Why now?Former New York Times editorial page editor James Bennett (1843 12/24/23) argued that the Times had “lost its way” in part because it was “slow” to report that “Trump might be right that Covid came from a Chinese lab.”
Why has the Times now chosen to revive the lab leak theory? Perhaps it stems in part from recent accusations that, early in the pandemic, corporate media outlets like the Times were overly dismissive of the lab leak possibility. This sentiment was reflected in a post on X (6/4/24) by Times columnist Nicholos Kristof after Chan’s article was published: “In retrospect, many of us in the journalistic and public health worlds were too dismissive of that possibility when she and others were making the argument in 2020.”
This claim of early “lab leak skepticism” has been brought up as evidence of the Times’ supposed left-wing bias, a false claim publisher A.G. Sulzberger is nevertheless at pains to dispel (FAIR.org, 4/24/24).
It’s hard to deny that the Times‘ Covid coverage has shown a strong animus against China, which has played out in absurd op-eds and news stories like “Has China Done Too Well Against Covid-19?” (1/24/20) and “China’s ‘Zero Covid’ Bind: No Easy Way Out Despite the Cost” (9/7/22). (See FAIR.org, 1/29/21, 9/17/21, 9/9/22.)
Whatever its motive, the paper’s decision to publish an argument for the lab leak theory on the day of Dr. Fauci’s congressional subcommittee testimony—without any contrary op-ed to balance it—was clearly intended to influence the public debate.
The responsibility of the press corps on the issue of Covid origins is to help readers understand in which direction the current scientific evidence points. Instead, it misinformed on the science, validating Republican attempts to turn the serious question of the source of a devastating pandemic into a political football.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Janine Jackson interviewed professor and Physicians for a National Health Program co-founder David Himmelstein about the problems with Medicare Advantage for the June 28, 2024 episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Himmelstein.mp3Common Dreams (6/10/24)
Janine Jackson: For decades, people in this country have been suffering and dying due to the cost of healthcare, while public majorities have been saying they want a different system. For decades, US corporations and their political and media megaphones have been telling us that, yes, things as they are are difficult, but a more humane universal healthcare policy is just not possible, not because the policies that would allow doctors to provide the care they deem appropriate, and people to receive that care without going bankrupt, aren’t logistically doable—they are, after all, done in other countries—but because they are not, as the New York Times has repeatedly phrased it, “politically viable.”
So while you’ve likely heard about people choosing between rent and healthcare, and about people rationing their medications, and you have never once heard of people marching in the street chanting, “What do we want? Managed competition! When do we want it? Now!”—here we still are.
The latest gambit is Medicare Advantage, the private sector “alternative” to traditional Medicare in which currently more than half of the eligible Medicare population is enrolled. We were told it would encourage insurers to provide better care at lower cost. New research says, nope, that’s not what’s happening.
Here to help us understand is David Himmelstein, co-author of the new analysis, “Less Care at Higher Cost: The Medicare Advantage Paradox,” appearing in JAMA Internal Medicine. He teaches at Hunter College and Harvard Medical School. He’s a researcher at Public Citizen and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program. He joins us now by phone from upstate New York. Welcome to CounterSpin, David Himmelstein.
David Himmelstein: Thanks for having me.
JJ: So the concept of Medicare Advantage is that insurance companies get a lump sum for each patient, the amount of which depends on the person’s health, and it was presented as a way to bring down out-of-pocket costs while also still providing better care. The analysis that you have just carried out showed that that is not at all what’s happening. Talk us through what you found.
David Himmelstein: “The private insurance companies have ripped off taxpayers to the tune of more than half a trillion dollars.”
DH: What we found is that the taxpayers are overpaying these Medicare Advantage private plans by tens of billions of dollars each year. In fact, $82 billion last year alone, and $612 billion since 2007. That’s overpayments compared to what it would have cost to cover those same people in the old public Medicare program. So, in effect, the private insurance companies have ripped off taxpayers to the tune of more than half a trillion dollars, and most of that goes to either their bottom line, or to the paperwork that they carry out to realize those profits. In fact, 97% of the total overpayment stayed with the insurance companies. Only 3% went to the perks that they offer to entice people to enroll in their plans rather than staying in traditional Medicare.
JJ: When you say overpayments, what are the mechanisms of that? How is that working?
DH: The plans really trick the system in a couple of ways. One is that they seek out healthy, low-cost enrollees who are going to be inexpensive for them to cover. So they get the lump sum payment from the Medicare program, but the insurance company doesn’t actually need to pay for care. In fact, for 19% of Medicare enrollees, they cost nothing in the course of a year. So when an insurance company enrolls them, they get something like $10,000 or $12,000 a year, and they pay for no care at all. So that’s one thing—enroll healthy and inexpensive people and avoid sick ones.
The second is: make your benefits tailored to be unpleasant and unsustainable for people who are sick and expensive. So don’t approve rehab care, which Medicare traditional pays for, but the Medicare Advantage plans usually don’t. So if someone needs that rehab care, they’re really pushed to choose to go back to traditional Medicare.
And the third way is by inflating the amount Medicare pays them by making the people who enroll in the Medicare Advantage plans and those private plans look sicker on paper, and that increases how much Medicare pays, but in many cases doesn’t actually increase what it costs the plans to cover them. So they’ve leaned heavily on doctors to, say, add as many diagnoses as you can, even if they don’t cost anything, or don’t imply the need for more care. And, over the years, they’ve also taken to sending nurses into enrollees’ homes, not to help them out, but to try and discover additional diagnoses that could up the payment.
So they avoid the sick, they try and evict the sick once they are sick, and they make people look sicker in order to increase the payment they get from Medicare. And those things together result in what the official Medicare Payment Advisory Commission—so this is the non-partisan commission that advises Congress—they said it costs 22% more to cover a patient under Medicare Advantage than it would’ve cost to cover them under traditional Medicare. And as I said, that’s an $83 billion difference last year alone.
JJ: And you have mentioned taxpayers, and I just want to underscore it, the harms here are not just to the enrollees who are having inflated diagnoses, and then not necessarily getting the care they need, but the harms are even to those who are not enrolled in these plans, right?
DH: Absolutely. I mean, as taxpayers, we’re all paying for it. And the tragedy is, Medicare needs improvement. Medicare enrollees are saddled with high copayments and deductibles, and a lot of services that aren’t adequately covered, like dental care and eyeglasses. And if we took that $600-plus billion that’s been really thrown away in overpayments to Medicare Advantage plans, we could upgrade Medicare coverage for all enrollees, and the taxpayers wouldn’t be paying any more. But at this point, the taxpayers are being ripped off, and Medicare enrollees aren’t getting what they need.
JJ: Let me just extend you from there. What are the recommendations that come out of this research? What can people be calling for?
DH: We’re 40 years into this experiment with privatizing Medicare, the Medicare Advantage program. And what we conclude in this analysis is, it’s time to end that experiment. If we had a 40-year failing experiment on any drug, we’d say, take that drug off the market. It’s time to take Medicare Advantage off the market, and to use the money that we’ve been overpaying them to upgrade coverage for Medicare recipients overall.
We need to go further than that. We need a single-payer, Medicare for All, upgraded system for all Americans. And, frankly, we could save huge amounts on the insurance middlemen, not just in Medicare, but in other sectors as well. I mean, for people with private insurance, they’re being ripped off for the overhead of the private insurers and the vast profits they make. So the immediate call is, let’s abolish Medicare Advantage and upgrade Medicare for seniors. But the longer term call is, let’s move everybody into an upgraded Medicare for All program.
JJ: Just, finally, the phrase “not politically viable” doesn’t leave my head, because it’s corporate news media telling the people to cut our hopes and needs to fit the desires of wealthy companies, which of course is not how some of us define politics. But time and again, people show that they are not too dumb to understand how a single-payer system would work, despite years of misinformation around it. People still, in majorities, call for it. And I guess I wish media would listen to people about solutions, and not just catalog the harms of the current system. Do you have any thoughts about what journalism and journalists could do to move us forward on this?
DH: Well, they need to go beyond the talking points that are supplied by the insurance industry and the rest of the people making huge profits off of our healthcare system–the drug companies, and many of the hospitals, and, frankly, the higher-paid doctors as well. So we need to have a rational system, and the news media needs to actually portray the—I would call them crimes that are being perpetrated on the American people, and not say, “we can’t do better;” we know we can do better–and actually have the in-depth reporting on why it is that a reform could and would work in this country.
JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with David Himmelstein, and you can access the analysis we’ve been talking about through JAMANetwork.com. David Himmelstein, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
DH: Thanks again for having me.
WikiLeaks* director Julian Assange pleaded guilty “to a charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information” (CBS*, 6/25/24).
In some ways, the nightmare for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is coming to an end. After taking refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, he was arrested in 2019 by Britain, who have since been trying to extradite him to the United States on charges that by publishing official secrets he violated the Espionage Act (FAIR.org, 12/13/20; BBC, 6/25/24). Once he enters a guilty plea, he will be sentenced to time served and walk away a free man (CBS, 6/25/24).
Assange’s case has attracted the attention of critics of US foreign policy, and those who value free speech and a free press. His family has rightly contended that his treatment in prison was atrocious (France24, 11/1/19; Independent, 2/20/24). A group of doctors said he was a victim of “torture” tactics (Lancet, 6/25/20). In 2017, Yahoo! News (9/26/21) reported that the “CIA plotted to kidnap the WikiLeaks founder, spurring heated debate among Trump administration officials over the legality and practicality of such an operation” and that CIA and Trump administration insiders “even discussed killing Assange, going so far as to request ‘sketches’ or ‘options’ for how to assassinate him.”
His supporters noted that the charges against him came after he harmed the US imperial project, particularly by leaking a video showing US troops killing Reuters journalists in Iraq (New York Times, 4/5/10). Under his watch, WikiLeaks also leaked a trove of diplomatic cables that the New York Times (11/28/10) described as an “unprecedented look at back-room bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders, and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.”
Press freedom and human rights groups like the International Federation of Journalists and Amnesty International had long called for his release. Several major news outlets from the US and Europe—the New York Times, Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel and El País—signed a letter calling for his release (New York Times, 11/28/22). They said his “indictment sets a dangerous precedent and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press.”
Hostility toward press freedomAssange will owe the Australian government half a million US dollars for his flight home from imprisonment (Guardian, 6/25/24).
Assange’s loved ones and supporters are certainly glad to see him come home (Guardian, 6/25/24). But let’s be perfectly clear-eyed: The entire ordeal and his plea deal are proof of a hostile climate toward a free press in the United States and the wider world, and its chilling effect on investigative journalism could substantially worsen.
Assange’s deal has echoes of the end of the West Memphis Three case, where three Arkansas men were wrongfully convicted as teenagers of a heinous triple homicide in 1993 (Innocence Project, 8/19/11). The three re-entered guilty pleas in exchange for time served. They won their freedom, but their names were still attached to a terrible crime, and the state of Arkansas was able to close the case, ensuring the real killer or killers would never be held accountable. It was an imperfect resolution, but no one could blame the victims of a gross injustice for taking the freedom grudgingly offered.
Something similar is happening with Assange. It compounds the persecution already inflicted on him to force him to declare that exposing US government misdeeds was itself a high crime.
“On a human level, we’re thrilled that he’s out of prison, including the time in the embassy,” said Chuck Zlatkin, a founding member of NYC Free Assange, a group that has held regular protests calling for his release. “We’re thrilled for him personally.”
But the deal shows how eager the US government is to both save face and remain a threatening force against investigative reporters.
‘Criminalization of routine journalistic conduct’Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24): “Under the legal theory used in the indictment, any journalist could be convicted of violating the Espionage Act for obtaining national defense information from a source, communicating with a source to encourage them to provide national defense information, or publishing national defense information.”
As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation (6/24/24), said in a statement:
It’s good news that the DoJ is putting an end to this embarrassing saga. But it’s alarming that the Biden administration felt the need to extract a guilty plea for the purported crime of obtaining and publishing government secrets. That’s what investigative journalists do every day.
The plea deal won’t have the precedential effect of a court ruling, but it will still hang over the heads of national security reporters for years to come. The deal doesn’t add any more prison time or punishment for Assange. It’s purely symbolic. The administration could’ve easily just dropped the case, but chose to instead legitimize the criminalization of routine journalistic conduct and encourage future administrations to follow suit. And they made that choice knowing that Donald Trump would love nothing more than to find a way to throw journalists in jail.
And that is all happening while threats against leakers and journalists remain. Edward Snowden, the source in the Guardian’s investigation (6/11/13) into National Security Agency surveillance, still resides in Russia in order to evade arrest. I recently wrote about the excessive sentencing of the man who leaked tax documents to ProPublica and the New York Times showing how lopsided the tax system is in favor of the rich (FAIR.org, 2/2/24). NSA contractor Reality Winner was sentenced to five years in prison for leaking documents to the Intercept on the issue of Russian interference in the 2016 US election (Vanity Fair, 10/12/23).
Laura Poitras, one of the journalists who brought Snowden’s revelations about NSA surveillance to light, said that Assange’s conviction could silence reporters doing investigative reporting on the US government (New York Times, 12/21/20). Chelsea Manning, Assange’s source for these investigations, spent only seven years in prison out of the 35 years of her sentence thanks to presidential clemency, but that is still a harrowing experience (NPR, 5/17/17).
‘Not transparency’ but ‘sabotage’The New York Post (6/25/24) predicted that Assange’s release would be cheered by “anarchists and America-haters.”
Worse, some in the so-called free press have rallied behind the government. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/11/19) cheered the legal crusade against Assange, arguing that the leaks harmed national security. “Assange has never been a hero of transparency or democratic accountability,” the Murdoch-owned broadsheet proclaimed.
The neoconservative journal Commentary (4/12/19) dismissed the free press defenders of Assange, saying of Wikileaks’ investigations into US power: “This was not transparency. It was sabotage.”
And the British Economist (4/17/19) said, in support of Assange’s extradition to the US:
WikiLeaks did some good in its early years, exposing political corruption, financial malfeasance and military wrongdoing. But the decision to publish over 250,000 diplomatic cables in 2010 was malicious. The vast majority of messages revealed no illegality or misdeeds. Mr. Assange’s reckless publication of the unredacted versions of those cables the following year harmed America’s interests by putting its diplomatic sources at risk of reprisals, persecution or worse.
Unsurprisingly, Murdoch outlets gave the plea deal a thumbs down. “Don’t fall for the idea that Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is a persecuted ‘publisher,’” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/25/24) warned.
The New York Post editorial board (6/25/24) disparaged Assange’s motives, saying he “wasn’t interested in justice or exposing true abuse; he simply relished obtaining and releasing any secret government or political material, particularly if US-based.” Alleging that the documents he published were sensitive, the paper argued in favor of government secrecy: “Uncle Sam needs to keep some critical secrets, especially when lives are on the line.”
In reality, US intelligence and military officials have never been able to trace any deaths to WikiLeaks‘ revelations (BBC, 12/1/10; Guardian, 7/31/13; NPR, 4/12/19)—and certainly have never identified any damage anywhere nearly as serious as the very real harms it exposed. (NPR did quote a former State Department lawyer who complained that WikiLeaks‘ exposes “can really chill the ability of those American personnel to build those sorts of relationships and have frank conversations with their contacts.”) Alas, some publications side with state power even if journalistic freedom is at stake (FAIR.org, 4/18/19).
‘Punished for telling the truth’The vindictive plea bargain the Biden administration forced on Assange might provide Donald Trump in a potential second term with tools he could use to put establishment journalists in prison (CNN, 12/7/23).
Assange’s case is over, but he walks away a battered man as a result of the legal struggle. And that serves as a warning to other journalists who rely on brave people in high levels of power to disclose injustices. Stern is right: Another Trump administration would be horrendous for journalists. But the current situation with the Democratic administration is already chilling.
“All he was being punished for was telling the truth about war crimes committed by this country,” Zlatkin told FAIR.
And without a real change in how the Espionage Act is used against journalists, the ability to tell the truth to the rest of the world is at risk.
“We’re still not in a situation where we as a general population are getting the truth of what’s being done in our name,” Zlatkin said. “So the struggle continues.”
Shalhevet school head David Block (Boiling Point, 6/2/24): “If our community can’t handle something, I do have to consider that.”
The staff of the Boiling Point don’t consider themselves student journalists. They consider themselves journalists.
The official paper of Shalhevet, a prestigious orthodox Jewish day school in Los Angeles, is not a mere extra-curricular activity for the college-bound, but a living record of the larger community. And so the fact that the school is censoring the paper’s coverage of pro-Palestine viewpoints is an illustration of the nation’s current crisis of free speech and the free press as Israel’s slaughter in Gaza rages on.
The Boiling Point (6/2/24) reported that the school administration had censored an article about Muslim perspectives on Gaza because it quoted a teenager who “said Israel was committing genocide and that she did not believe Hamas had committed atrocities.” The paper said:
Head of school Rabbi David Block told faculty advisor Mrs. Joelle Keene to take down the story from all Boiling Point postings later that day.
It was the first time the administration had ordered the paper to remove an active story. The story is also not published in today’s print edition.
“Shalhevet’s principal ordered that the entire paper be taken out of circulation in what advisor Joelle Keene said was a striking change of pace,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (6/11/24) reported. She told the wire service, “There have been difficult stories and difficult moments and conflicts and that sort of thing. We’ve always been able to work them out.”
Justifications for censorshipThe administration’s justification for the censorship was twofold. The first reason for the censorship was that the pro-Palestine viewpoints were simply too hurtful for a community that was still in shock over the October 7 attacks against Israel by Hamas.
This is, to be quite blunt, demeaning to the students and the community. I was not much older than these students during the 9/11 attacks, but I spent that day and days after that at my student newspaper, the Michigan Daily. While our reporters piled into a car to drive to New York City, I joined my fellow editorial board members—Jews, Arabs and many others—in navigating a future of war, attacks on civil liberties and anti-Islamic hate.
And today, student journalists are no less important in this historical moment where students are standing up against the genocide in Gaza (USA Today, 5/2/24; AP, 5/2/24).
The Boiling Point is hardly pro-Hamas. As one of its editors, Tali Liebenthal, said in response to this point, it was indeed painful for the community to hear anti-Israel opinions, but “I don’t think that the Boiling Point has any responsibility to shield our readers from that pain.” The Shalhevet students, in the tradition of Jewish inquiry, do certainly appear able to explore the tough and difficult subjects of their moment.
But there’s a second, more banal reason for the censorship. Block told the Boiling Point, “My feeling is that this article would both give people the wrong impression about Shalhevet.” He added:
It would have very serious implications for whether they’re going to consider sending the next generation of people who should be Shalhevet students to Shalhevet.
Block is placing prospective parents’ sensitivities before truth and debate. He’s worried that families will see a quote in the paper they disagree with, decide the school is a Hamas hot house, and send their child for an education elsewhere. The suggestion is that the school’s enrollment numbers are more important, not just than freedom of the press, but than a central aspect of Jewishness: the pursuit of knowledge.
Would Block block articles exploring why ultra-religious Jews like Satmars (Shtetl, 11/22/23) and Neturei Karta (Haaretz, 3/27/24) oppose Zionism for theological reasons? We should hope a school for Jewish scholarship would be wise to value discussions of deep ideas over fear of offending potential enrollees.
Perverting ideals of opennessIntercept* (6/3/24): “After the editors [of the Columbia Law Review*] declined a board of directors request to take down the articles, the board pulled the plug on the entire website.”
The Boiling Point affair is indicative of a larger problem with a censorship that exploits the term “antisemitism” and a sensitivity to Jewish suffering to silence anything remotely critical of Israel’s far-right government. Raz Segal, a Jewish Israeli scholar of genocide, had his position as director at the Center of Genocide and Holocaust students at the University of Minnesota rescinded (MPR, 6/11/24) because he wrote that Israel’s intentions for its campaign in Gaza were genocidal (Jewish Currents, 10/13/23). The board of directors of the Columbia Law Review briefly took down the journal’s website in response to an article (5/24) published about the Nakba, the expulsion of Palestinians—after the piece had already been spiked by the Harvard Law Review (Intercept, 6/3/24). The chair of the Jewish studies department at Dartmouth College was violently arrested during an anti-genocide protest (Jerusalem Post, 5/3/24).
The 92nd Street Y, a kind of secular Jewish temple of arts and culture in New York City, encountered massive staff resignations (NPR, 10/24/23) after it canceled a talk by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen because he had signed a letter calling for a ceasefire in Gaza (London Review of Books, 10/18/23). The author of the American Jewish Committee’s definition of antisemitism admits that his work is being used to crush free speech (Guardian, 12/13/19; Chronicle of Higher Education, 3/27/24).
These are prominent institutions that are meant to be pillars of openness and discourse in a free society, yet that are perverting themselves in order not to offend donors, government officials and sycophantic newspaper columnists. And the victims of this kind of censorship are Jews and non-Jews alike.
From the highest universities down to high schools like Shalhevet, administrators are cloaking their worlds in darkness. The journalists at the Boiling Point are part of a resistance keeping free speech and expression alive in the United States.
Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Jim Naureckas about the secret recording of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for the June 14, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Rolling Stone (6/10/24)
Janine Jackson: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, fresh off revelations of a “Stop the Steal”-denoting upside-down flag flying at his Virginia home while the Court was deciding whether to hear a 2020 election case, was captured on tape responding to a question about how to address the polarization between left and right in this country. Quote: “One side or the other is going to win. I don’t know, I mean, there can be a way of living together peacefully, but it’s difficult because there are differences on fundamental things that really can’t be compromised. They really can’t be compromised,” close quote.
Given what we understand Alito sees as his side, how this sits with you has something to do with your understanding of the role of the Supreme Court, its ethics and accountability, and in terms of some justices, how much brazenness is too much? Joining us now to to think about it is FAIR editor Jim Naureckas. He’s here in studio. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jim Naureckas.
Jim Naureckas: Hey, it’s always great to be here.
JJ: Well, what do you think was actually revealed in this captured conversation? As CNN (6/12/24) said, Alito’s religious zeal, you know, he talks at one point about making the US a place of godliness. That’s been evident in his statements and his opinions. So what is noteworthy about this latest?
JN: I think there is a bit of a mask being taken off with this statement. If you look at his rulings, the way he votes, he clearly is coming from a place of Christian nationalism. I think that the people who are doing a read on his jurisprudence would agree on that.
But it’s always framed in the idea of universal values, of constitutional principles. When he flies a flag endorsing the overthrow of the US government, he blames it on his wife. He always has an out, and I think he doesn’t have so much of an out here. When he says one side or the other is going to win, clearly he wants his side to win. He’s not a neutral observer on the sides. He’s on the side of what he calls “godliness.”
I think that is important for us to recognize and important for journalists who are covering the Court to take these statements into account when they talk about the rulings that Alito authors and the votes he takes. They should be put in this context.
JJ: Well, absolutely, and that’s kind of the next thing I was going to say, because the filmmaker Lauren Windsor, you know, but we should know that when Alito was talking to her, she was just a woman that he was talking to at a public event, but she asked him about public trust in the Supreme Court, and he said he blames the media, quote, “because they do nothing but criticize us, and so they have really eroded trust in the Court,” close quote. Well, of course, what a lot of folks would say is the Court is eroding trust in itself, but building on what you’ve just said, a lot of folks might say, well, actually, elite media have, through commission and omission, been kind of propping up the idea that the Court is dispassionate, long past the idea where we’ve seen that that’s not true.
In a typical headline, the New York Times (6/14/24) obscures the partisan nature of a recent Court ruling. In the article, the paper writes that the 6-3 decision “split along ideological”—rather than partisan—”lines.”
JN: Yeah. When you see there’s a real difference in the way that journalists cover the Supreme Court versus Congress versus the White House. When Congress does something, they talk about how the Democrats voted and how the Republicans voted, and you can see that there’s generally a substantial difference along party lines. The president is identified by party, and a Democratic president does certain things differently than Republican presidents, hopefully.
That is not usually the case when they’re discussing Supreme Court rulings. They don’t say “there was a six to three ruling from the Supreme Court. The six Republican appointed justices voted one way, and the three Democratic appointed justices voted the other way,” and they should. It’s a political branch of the government, like the other two branches of government. They are not applying universal principles as philosopher kings. They have, as Alito’s statements make very clear, partisan allegiances, and they have outcomes that they’re trying to achieve through their votes and through their rulings, and that should be made clear when journalists are talking about the Supreme Court.
JJ: Well, and finally and relatedly, Lauren Windsor explained in her interview with Rolling Stone why she chose to go to this elite event and record. And it’s because the Court is shrouded in so much secrecy and because it refuses to submit to accountability, which listeners will know all about, in the face of evidence of serious ethics breaches, and I think a lot of folks would recognize that.
But I can also still hear folks saying, well, she did this secretly. If she’d only gone through proper channels to get this information, then we might take it more seriously. I mean, maybe that day has passed, but I do think that folks can recognize that you can’t just go up as a corporate reporter and expect Supreme Court justices to tell you what is really going on. So what do you say about this method of obtaining information?
Jim Naureckas: “I think that is important for journalists who are covering the Court to take these statements into account when they talk about the rulings that Alito authors and the votes he takes. They should be put in this context.”
JN: Well, it probably wasn’t George Orwell who said that journalism is what people don’t want reported; everything else is public relations. That is true to a great extent, that people need to have information that people in power are trying to keep from them, and sometimes you can’t get that information except by going undercover. There are things that happen behind closed doors that are said to people who are ideological compatriots that are not said to the general public. You don’t know what those things are unless you get behind those closed doors, and sometimes subterfuge is the only way to get behind those doors.
There has been a real shift in journalism, which used to celebrate undercover reporting and used to give awards to people who set up—there’s a famous example of a fake tavern set up in Chicago, it was a real tavern run by journalists to see how many bribes we demanded from them, and they got prizes for that.
But starting with the Food Lion case where reporters went to a supermarket, got jobs there, found out the horrific way that meat was being handled and mishandled there, and a judge ruled against them. And ever since then, there’s been this idea that, oh, we’re really too ethical to do something like get a job in a supermarket to expose threats to public health. The pendulum really has shifted. I think it’s a shame, because I think that the public does have a right to know how supermarkets are tainting their food, and they have a right to know what Supreme Court justices are really thinking about the decisions that are going to affect all of our lives.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Jim Naureckas. He’s editor here at FAIR of the website FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. Thanks, Jim Naureckas, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
JN: Thanks for having me on.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Institute for Local Self-Reliance’s Kennedy Smith about the proliferation and impact of chain dollar stores for the June 14, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614Smith.mp3As the American Prospect (1/19/24) reports, Dollar General has also been fined by New York and sued by Ohio and Missouri for business practices that harm consumers.
Janine Jackson: Some listeners may have seen the story of Dollar General stores in Missouri being caught cheating customers by listing one price on the shelf, then charging a higher price at checkout. It’s a crummy thing to do to folks just trying to meet household needs. And yet it’s just one of many harms dollar stores—some call them deal destinations—are doing to communities across the country. What’s the nature of the problem, and what can we do about it?
Our guest has been tracking the various impacts of chain dollar stores and their proliferation, as well as what can happen when communities and policymakers fight back. Kennedy Smith is a senior researcher with the Independent Business Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. She joins us now by phone from Arlington, Virginia. Welcome to Counterspin, Kennedy Smith.
Kennedy Smith: Thank you.
JJ: Well, dollar stores are sort of like fancy restaurants. If they aren’t part of your life, you might not even physically notice them. But they’ve been proliferating wildly in recent years. In 2021, as the Institute’s report, “The Dollar Store Invasion,” begins, nearly half of new stores that opened in the US were chain dollar stores, a degree of momentum with no parallel in the history of the retail industry.
Now, I want to talk through specific problems, but could you maybe start by talking about where these stores are and what’s giving rise to them, which connects directly to what they do?
KS: Basically, they are everywhere. They are in 48 states now. They haven’t quite made the leap yet to Hawaii and Alaska, but they began—the two major chains, Dollar General, which is headquartered in Tennessee, and Dollar Tree/Family Dollar, which is now in Virginia Beach, Virginia—began by radiating out from their headquarters. And so we see heavy concentrations of them sort of in the east and the southeast. They are now marching across the country and entering all kinds of markets.
And they have slightly different profiles. Dollar General tends to be a little more rural. They tend to go into smaller rural communities. Dollar Tree tends to be more suburban, and Family Dollar tends to be located primarily in urban neighborhoods.
And they are being fueled by a variety of factors, including consolidation in the grocery industry and people’s desire to find more affordable food and products in general are driving people to believe that dollar stores are offering them a better value.
And in fact, that’s one of the tricks that the dollar stores play on people, is that they actually are getting poor value and usually paying more in a per ounce or per pound basis than they might be if they were shopping at a traditional, independently owned grocery store or hardware store or office supply store, whatever it might be.
JJ: It sounds like they’re filling a need, like they’re reaching to an overlooked group of people. And it reminds me a little of check-cashing stores, where folks who are oppressed economically in terms of their wages, so they don’t get to bank in a regular way, and then these fill-in spots show up and it’s perverse, you know.
But it’s also just not how a lot of folks think things work. They see these things, oh, these are cheap stores. These are for folks who can’t afford as much as, you know, maybe some others. And this is filling their need. That’s exactly what it’s not doing.
So let’s start on this “17 problems” that you engage in a pullout piece of the Institute’s work on this. What are some of the big things you lift up as the harmful impacts?
ILSR’s report on dollar store impacts
KS: Well, I should mention, to begin, that these are 17 of the problems that we hear mentioned most frequently, but there are plenty of others. And there are slight variations around the country. For example, in areas of the country that are susceptible to flooding and to hurricanes, there’s a lot more concern about the environmental impact of these stores and what it might mean in terms of stormwater runoff, because one of the problems with dollar stores in general is that they tend to have a very thin operating model. They’re thinly staffed. They look for inexpensive land. They build cheap buildings if they’re building new buildings. And so they’re not likely to want to afford to put in stormwater retention basins and things like that. So there’s some regional variations.
But in general, the things that we find to be the biggest problems are, one, their economic impact on the community, and two, their sort of social impact on a community. In terms of the economy, they are a direct threat to independent grocery stores. And there are a number of studies now that have come out that have looked at what that impact is.
There’s one that the USDA did last year, which found that basically grocery store sales will decline by 10 percent when a dollar store enters the market. There was one that was done by the University of Toronto and UCLA in 2022 that found after looking at 800-some dollar stores, that when you have three dollar stores within a two mile radius of one another, they’re likely to kill a grocery store that’s there.
And that has a huge impact on a community because grocery stores are really community anchors in many ways and are responsible for providing their community members with healthy food as opposed to the sort of overly preserved things that you’re likely to get at a dollar store, like a box of macaroni and cheese or a box of sugary cereal or something like that. When a community loses its grocery store, it can be devastating.
And the same thing can be true for some of the other categories, industry categories on which dollar stores tend to compete, like hardware and like office supplies and school supplies. Those are important anchor businesses for communities that people don’t want to lose.
On the sort of social side of things, there are a number of problems and probably first and foremost is crime. Because they are so thinly staffed, dollar stores are easy targets for robberies. It’s very easy for someone to come in and just reach into the cash register, grab cash and leave. And communities complain about this all the time. I have literally hundreds of news articles that I’ve clipped about dollar store crime.
They also have poor labor practices. They pay their workers less than the independently owned grocery stores that they’re threatening. They tend to promote workers to assistant manager relatively quickly, which means that they’re then exempt from overtime, and they make them work 40, 50, 60, 70 hours a week. They’ve been sued several times, both of the major chains, successfully by groups of workers or former workers for wage theft for exactly that.
There are other things, too. One of the things that we have observed and a researcher actually at the University of Georgia in the Geography Department has reported on and written about is that they tend to target black and brown neighborhoods. Dollar General, for example, 79 percent of its stores tend to be located in majority minority neighborhoods. And we think this is a little bit parasitic. And we also think that they’re looking for places where the community is likely not to have as much influence at City Hall as somebody in another neighborhood. And we think that’s just despicable.
JJ: Well, if I could just bring you back to that economic impact for a second, because it’s not that they are able to deliver better things cheaper, just to spell that out. That’s not what they’re doing.
A More Perfect Union investigation found that Dollar General frequently charges more than its competitors for staple goods but “masks the high cost from consumers by stocking smaller pack sizes.”
KS: Correct. No, they’re selling similar products, but the packaging that they’ll sell them in tends to be smaller. And therefore, on an ounce-by-ounce basis, we find that the products are often actually more expensive for consumers to buy. It’s a practice called “shrinkflation.” There are a couple of other names that it goes by—”cheater sizes.”
JJ: So it’s not, well, they just build a better mousetrap. That’s how capitalism works. That’s not what’s going on.
KS: Yeah. You know, it’s funny that you mention capitalism because in communities that are where a dollar store has been proposed to be built and the community kind of comes out and opposes it, the people who tend to support the idea of the dollar store coming in tend to say, well, that’s just capitalism. That’s just free market economics.
It isn’t. Free market economics are based on having a level playing field. And that’s why all of our major antitrust laws were developed a century ago, because we wanted for small businesses to be able to compete on the same playing field as bigger businesses. One of the things that dollar store chains often do is that they will go to their suppliers, their wholesalers, and say, we want you to offer this product to us, but not offer it to our competitors, do not offer it to grocery stores. Or we want you to make a special size for us of a package that no one else can get. And we can price it the way we want.
Those are blatant violations of federal antitrust laws. And I think that on a federal level, we need to begin paying attention to that. And the same thing at the state level, while communities themselves are doing what they can to fight dollars for proliferation at the local level.
JJ: OK, I don’t shop at dollar stores. I’m just a taxpayer. Why should I care about the issue of dollar store proliferation as a taxpayer?
KS: Well, I think there are a number of reasons, but one of the biggest reasons I would think as a taxpayer is that tax revenue that would normally accrue to the community, and wages that would normally accrue to the community, are now leaving the community, and they’re going to a corporate headquarters where they’re being either reinvested in corporate expansion, or they’re being distributed to shareholders or being used to pay off their investors.
There’s an example that we cite in one of our reports about Haven, Kansas, which had a local grocery store that was there that was paying $75,000 a year in property taxes. So the city was getting that revenue. A dollar store came in, a Dollar General store came in, and within a couple of years, the grocery store couldn’t hold on anymore. The dollar store had eked away just enough of its sales that it couldn’t hold on. And so it closed. The dollar store was paying $60,000 a year in property tax. So the city right off the bat is losing $15,000 a year in property tax revenue that it had before.
But not only that, as a concession to attract the dollar store, the city council had agreed to basically rebate half of the municipal utility taxes that the dollar store developer would have paid for two years. That was $36,000. So now all of a sudden the grocery store is gone and the city is losing $51,000 a year in property tax revenue.
And that’s just an example of tax revenue. We’re not even talking about the wage differential and the fact that dollar stores typically only have one or two staff employed at a time, whereas a grocery store might have 30 or 40 people employed. And the dollar store, Dollar General, is at the rock bottom of the 66 largest corporations in terms of hourly wages. So the community is just losing right and left.
JJ: Right. Well, what happens when communities recognize that, and they resist these dollar stores? I know that the Institute tracks that as well.
KS: Dollar General tends to work with developers who build buildings for them that they then lease for 15 years, usually with three five-year expansion options. And the developer is going to try to minimize costs. And so the developer tends to look for inexpensive land, which tends to be land that is often zoned for agricultural use, or on a scenic byway, or in some kind of rural area, or maybe on the edge of a residential neighborhood.
And to do that, they have to go to the city generally and request a zoning variance. And that’s where the battles tend to develop, is people come out and say, no, we want this area to remain zoned like it is, because there was a reason for that, that we wanted it zoned that way. And we don’t want to change that. I’ve tracked 140 communities now that have defeated dollar stores. And in 138 of those, all but two, they’ve been defeated based on the city denying a zoning variance request.
The other two—it’s something pretty exciting that’s happened recently. In Tangipahoa Parish, Louisiana—which is where Hammond and Ponchatoula is, if you know Louisiana—last spring, a developer came to the Planning Commission and submitted plans to build a Dollar General store. It was an unzoned parcel of land. There was no zoning, so he wasn’t requesting a zoning variance. He simply had to have his building plans approved.
The Planning Commission turned him down. And they turned him down based on their police power to protect the health, safety and welfare of the community, which is a completely novel approach. We had not seen that happen before. The developer appealed that to the parish council. The parish council supported the Planning Commission.
The developer then sued. And last September, the trial took place. And then in November, the judge—in a, you know, this is a pretty conservative part of the country—the judge ruled in favor of the parish and said that they were completely correct in using their police power to protect the health and safety of the community by denying that developer the right to build a dollar store there.
JJ: Wow.
KS: This is a kind of groundbreaking thing. There’s another community that we found, Newton County, Georgia, used essentially the same approach. So we’re getting to have now sort of a body of case law that provides a precedent for a community saying, wait a minute, forget, I mean, zoning is one thing, but these stores are unhealthy for our community. They’re not good for the economy. They’re not good for jobs. They’re not good for the environment. They’re not good for crime. And we’ve had enough.
JJ: Well, it sounds as though that community involvement relies a lot on information and on advance information. They have to know that this is in the planning process to know about the points that they could intervene, which is wonderful. But it also suggests, as I know the work does, that there could be interventions from a higher level, including from the federal level. What do you see as potentially useful that could happen there?
KS: Well, at the federal level, we would, of course, like to see stronger and more vigorous enforcement of the antitrust laws that we already have on the books. The Robinson-Patman Act, the Sherman Act are all laws that are there to prevent exactly what’s happening with dollar store proliferation. And states can also adopt those same laws at the state level to provide some protection there. And that may be, in some instances, easier than getting federal attention.
States also are being pretty aggressive in looking at things like scanner errors, which you mentioned. In fact, the former attorney general of Ohio—well, first of all, the current attorney general of Ohio has investigated and fined Dollar General a million dollars for scanner violations. Basically, the price someone sees on the shelf is not the price they’re being charged by the scanner when they check out. The former attorney general of Ohio, a guy named Marc Dann, is now putting together a class action lawsuit against the dollar store chains for scanner errors, which he’s estimating Dollar General loan is making hundreds of millions of dollars annually in scanner errors because they’re so huge and they’re almost always in favor of the company and not the consumer.
The adage is, “the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago.” And often communities don’t think about protecting themselves from this sort of proliferation, this kind of predatory business expansion until it’s too late. But for those who are seeing this happening around them in other communities and thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense to put some protection in place right away.
And some of the things that communities are doing are things like what we call dispersal ordinances, which basically say you cannot build a new dollar store within X distance, two miles, five miles of an existing store so that we don’t have the market crowded with them. Or they’re putting in place ordinances like just happened in a town in Oregon that I saw that has put in place a formula business ordinance saying we want to have retail diversity in the community. We don’t want to have 10 identical pizza places. We don’t want to have five identical grocery stores. We want to have diversity. So therefore, we are fine with one dollar store, but not with five.
JJ: Well, finally, information seems key to all of this—information of the actual impacts of dollar stores and then about the possible levers of potential resistance. And that brings me back to news media and reporting. The report itself on the dollar store invasion got coverage, absolutely. But of course, the implications go well beyond covering the report itself as an event. What would you like to see finally more of or less of from news media on this set of issues?
Kennedy Smith: “I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while…. I don’t see much looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome.”
KS: That’s a great question. I think I would like to see more in-depth coverage of the impact of dollar stores once they’ve been in a community for a while. I don’t see much on that. I don’t see much sort of looking back and saying, oh, yeah, we lost Ford’s grocery store and we lost the Haven grocery store, and these are the breadcrumbs that led to that outcome.
I’d also like to see more news media tying this to threats to democracy, because if we have major corporations that are able to basically extract this kind of money, this vast volume of money from communities and make it difficult for independently owned businesses to compete, then we’ve changed what the nature of capitalism is. And we need to get back to the roots of what democracy is about. And that really is about having a level playing field for small businesses, for every American to basically have the opportunity to create a business enterprise and thrive and reinvest in their community. And that’s being taken away from us.
JJ: Well, we’ll end it there for now. Kennedy Smith is a senior researcher with the Independent Business Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. You can find a lot of work on dollar stores, along with much else on their site, ILSR.org. Kennedy Smith thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
KS: Thank you so much, Janine.
One hundred years ago this month, I was reminded by Portside’s “This Week in People’s History” feature (5/29/23), a constitutional amendment passed both houses of Congress, with large majorities, and went to the states for ratification. It remains a proposal, not a law, to this day, because the necessary three-quarters of states didn’t accept it.
The proposal is the Child Labor Amendment, giving Congress authority to regulate “labor of persons under 18 years of age.”
Efforts to protect children from dangerous work continued anyway, of course, and the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act included prohibitions on children under 14 working in most occupations. Separate rules have been crafted for agricultural jobs (which is its own story).
Popular concerns used for private endsNotre Dame professor David Campbell (Washington Post, 4/23/23): Because “a bill [that] will allow kids to work more or under dangerous conditions…sounds wildly unpopular…you have to make the case that, no, this is really about parental rights.”
In the last four years, state legislatures in at least 28 states have taken up proposals to roll back child labor protections; 12 states have passed such laws.In April 2023, the Washington Post (4/23/23) reported on the Foundation for Government Accountability, a Florida-based think tank with a lobbying arm, the Opportunity Solutions Project, that’s crucially behind these state-level moves to undermine rules to keep children from working long hours in dangerous conditions. The Iowa state senate had just approved an FGA-maneuvered bill letting children as young as 14 work night shifts.
Post reporters Jacob Bogage and María Luisa Paúl explained how the group has worked systematically, if stealthily, to push state policy to the right on things like restricting access to anti-poverty programs and Medicaid expansion.
Despite what is, on examination, a broad deregulatory agenda, the FGA, with some 115 lobbyists in 22 states, presents child worker bills as part of a cultural debate about “parental rights.” They aim to remove “the permission slip that inserts government in between parents and their teenager’s desire to work,” a representative said. One bill, in Georgia, would prohibit the state government from requiring a minor to obtain a work permit.
Besides a warning to legislators, such a report ought to have been a call to reporters: Beware of “grassroots” efforts that suspiciously mimic the goals and language of this right-wing interest group, with its undeclared intent to use popular concerns to advance private ends.
‘Shocks the conscience’Steve Benen (MSNBC, 4/19/24): “Republican governance, especially at the state level, is increasingly invested in rolling back child-labor safeguards.”
Over a year later, child labor rules are still in the news: Early June saw a Labor Department lawsuit against Hyundai after a 13-year-old girl was found working a 50- to 60-hour week on an Alabama assembly line (CBS, 5/31/24). It “shocks the conscience,” said one official.
Before that, we had the Louisiana House voting to repeal the law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks (MSNBC, 4/19/24). Many of my child employees want to work without lunch breaks, claimed bill sponsor and Republican state representative and smoothie franchise owner Roger Wilder.
But what about the puppetmasters? A rough Nexis test I did found that over the last three months, a search for the term “child labor” in US newspapers gets 740 results. Add the words “Foundation for Government Accountability” and the number drops to 14.
Does every story on child labor need to mention the advocacy group? Of course not. But if you consider the rollback of child labor laws a problem, connected to other problems, then calling groups like them out adds something key to understanding that problem and how to address it.
Featured image: MSNBC depiction (4/19/24) of a child agricultural worker. An estimated 500,000 minors work in the farm sector in the United States, some as young as 12 years old.
Nicholas Kristof is that guy at the party who reminds you that you haven’t really lived. While you maintain a regular, nine-to-five existence, driving from Point A to Point B, the world has been Kristof’s oyster. With a fully stamped passport, the New York Times columnist can embarrass everyone with his tales from Africa and Asia, marking himself as a true global citizen who yearns for adventure.
Worse, he mobilizes exotic datelines as trump cards to back up his neoliberalism disguised as forward-thinking progressivism: Teachers unions are bad for kids (9/12/12), sweatshops are good for workers (1/14/09) and US imperialism can be a positive force (2/1/02). You, the provincial rube, simply can’t rebut him. “Oh, have you been to Cambodia? No? Well I have.”
Here at FAIR (11/4/21), we were relieved when he announced his resignation from the Times to run for governor of Oregon, taking his vacuous moralism and smug place-dropping to the campaign trail. Upon his disqualification from the election (OPB, 2/18/22), he returned to his coveted perch like he never left at all.
‘BS border move’Nicholas Kristof (New York Times, 6/8/24) makes the liberal case for immigration restriction: “It’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.”
Recently, he has jumped in (6/8/24) to defend President Joe Biden’s reactionary move to shut down the border and end asylum on a rolling basis.
The Biden order “would bar migrants from being granted asylum when US officials deem that the southern border is overwhelmed” (AP, 6/5/24), a move many immigration advocates have branded as a capitulation to the xenophobic right (Reason, 6/4/24; Al Jazeera, 6/6/24) in his tough reelection campaign against former President Donald Trump (CBS, 6/9/24).
Conservative media weren’t buying it, however. The Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/4/24) said that the move “might help reduce the flow somewhat if they are strictly enforced, and at least he’s admitting the problem,” but worried that migrants “could still seek asylum at ports of entry using the CBP One mobile app, which would be excluded from the daily triggers.” The National Review (6/5/24) called it “too little, too late” for conservatives. The New York Post editorial board (6/9/24) said the president’s “BS border move has already failed.”
Kristof’s column, by contrast, serves as liberal media support for a policy that is cruel, hypocritical and a further indication that Biden’s only election tactic is to outflank Trump from the right. It is important to see how Kristof, and the Times, wield cosmopolitan journalistic instincts to defend closed borders, xenophobia and outright misinformation that serves the right.
‘Swing the doors open’Kristof saying that the US has “lax immigration policies” with a “loophole that allowed people to stay indefinitely” is a cruel misrepresentation of Biden’s border policy (LA Times, 2/24/23).
To start off, Kristof said the current code is flawed because of “a loophole that allowed people to claim asylum and stay indefinitely whether or not they warranted it.” This is a talking point made by anti-immigrant and right-wing groups, and claiming that this is a “loophole” implies that there is a flaw in the system that allows criminals to wiggle out of the law.
In fact, it is legal to come to the country to seek asylum. And the system is far less rosy for refugees than anti-immigrant activists—and now Kristof—portray it. Asylum-seeking families are often separated (LA Times, 2/24/23). And while seeking asylum is a guaranteed right under US and international law, the federal government has “severely restricted access to asylum at the border since 2016” according to the International Rescue Committee (7/1/22). The group explained:
A policy called the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP) or “Remain in Mexico” forced certain asylum seekers to wait out their US immigration court cases in Mexico with little or no access to legal counsel. Although a federal court blocked the Biden administration’s attempts to end this program, the Supreme Court later ruled in the administration’s favor. For over three years, MPP impacted more than 75,000 asylum seekers, requiring them to wait out their US court hearings in Mexico—mostly in northern border towns. There they faced the often impossible expectations to gather evidence and prepare for a trial conducted in English while struggling to keep their families safe.
Kristof acknowledged that he, as a white man, is an American because his Eastern European father was allowed into the country as a refugee in 1952. But he went on to say that the US today can’t “swing the doors open,” because “we’re not going to welcome all 114 million people around the world who have been forcibly displaced”—as if that’s the question the US faces, rather than the hundreds of thousands of people who actually seek asylum in the US each year. (Of course, Washington could help reduce the global refugee crisis by ending support for the wars, insurgencies and sanctions that to a great extent drive it.)
‘Outcompeted by immigrants’Wharton School professor Zeke Hernandez (Marketplace, 12/12/23): “When immigrants arrive, there are not just more workers that are competing with native workers, but there are more people who demand housing, entertainment, food, education. And so you need to hire more people to satisfy that bigger demand.”
Admitting that immigration has positive economic impact for the United States, Kristof went for the old line that these newcomers threaten US workers, and that “poor Americans can find themselves hurt by immigrant competition that puts downward pressure on their wages.” Exhibit A is an unnamed neighbor who was forced out of good working-class employment over the decades: “He was hurt by many factors—the decline of unions, globalization and the impact of technology,” Kristof said, but added that “he was also outcompeted by immigrants with a well-earned reputation for hard work.”
First, it is employers, not workers, who have the power to drive down wages. If there is a problem with immigrants being paid less, that’s an issue of exploitation. If Kristof thought about this a little bit longer, he’d realize he’s making an argument for equality among workers, not for dividing them against each other.
But this assumption that immigration depresses wages is itself dubious. The National Bureau of Economic Research (4/24) said:
We calculate that immigration, thanks to native/immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less-educated native workers, over the period 2000–2019, and no significant wage effect on college-educated natives. We also calculate a positive employment rate effect for most native workers.
Zeke Hernandez, professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, produced similar findings, noting that immigration causes the economies around these newcomer communities to grow (Marketplace, 12/12/23). And the libertarian Cato Institute (7/26/16) showed that unemployment is lower when immigration is higher.
‘Inflicting even more pain’Axios (3/13/24): “The immigration increase is a key part of the labor supply surge that helped bring down price pressures last year even amid the economy’s robust growth.”
Kristof also ignored that the current unemployment rate (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 6/7/24) is low at 4% and that, with high demand for labor, inflation-adjusted wages have risen 4.1% over the past year (AP, 6/7/24). Axios (3/13/24) reported that a
surge in immigration last year helps explain the economy’s striking resilience—and if sustained, could allow the job market to keep booming without stoking inflation in the years ahead.
Given that the corporate media have been constantly saying the country is facing a “border crisis,” these facts are hard to square with the notion that immigrants depress native-born workers’ wages.
Kristof went on to say that “native-born Americans may not be willing to toil in the fields or on a construction site for $12 an hour, but perhaps would be for $25 an hour.” Once again, if he really felt this way, then he’d be advocating for general wage hikes—for example, raising the federal minimum wage, which hasn’t gone up since 2009—as labor advocates demand, instead of calling for closed borders. But Kristof isn’t on the Times opinion page to advance labor’s interests.
And that’s when Kristof invokes a sort of liberal MAGAism, saying that while American workers are “self-medicating and dying from drugs, alcohol and suicide, shouldn’t we be careful about inflicting even more pain on them through immigration policy?” Immigrants—living, breathing people—are associated with non-living toxins, evoking the Trumpian smear that immigrants are disease-carrying vermin (Guardian, 12/16/23).
‘Lax immigration policies’Victoria Sanford (BillMoyers.com, 11/17/17): “Then as now, the US is the engine generating migration through bad foreign policy decisions.”
And it still gets worse. Kristof said:
I’ve also wondered about the incentives we inadvertently create. In Guatemalan villages, I’ve seen families prepared to send children on the perilous journey to the United States, and I fear that lax immigration policies encourage people to risk their lives and their children’s lives on the journey.
I have not been to all the places Kristof has, but I’ve been to a few of them, including Guatemala. People leave these places for the US, not because it is so easy, but in spite of the fact that it is so difficult. They come because they are left with no choice but to leave violence, war and poverty behind.
When a man in Lebanon asked that I take him back with me to the US, he was jokingly invoking the reality that the immigration process is impossible without help. Nor did he think there were so many “incentives” beyond the fact that America’s promise of opportunity was an improvement over his broken country.
And it is curious that Kristof mentions Guatemala specifically. Had he read his own newspaper before writing this piece, he might have seen anthropologist Victoria Sanford (New York Times, 11/9/18; BillMoyers.com, 11/17/17) argue that Central Americans are fleeing the horrific crime that has manifested as a result of Washington’s Cold War interventions and current policies of militarism. Latin American studies professor Elizabeth Oglesby (Vice, 6/28/18) made a similar connection . That’s quite a bit of context to leave out.
‘Feeding into white nationalism’Arun Gupta (Santita Jackson Show, 6/6/24): ““Biden is feeding into this white nationalism and saying that the solution is this Fortress America.”
I was recently on the Santita Jackson Show (KTNF, 6/6/24) to discuss the recent presidential election in Mexico (FAIR.org, 6/4/24). Joining us was independent journalist Arun Gupta, who has reported from the US/Mexico border for the Nation (4/21/20). He said that the violence of these lawless zones at the border, with migrants waiting to come into the US, will only become more chaotic and dangerous with this new policy.
“Biden is feeding into this white nationalism and saying that the solution is this Fortress America to protect us from these savage brown hordes,” Gupta said. Tens of thousands of migrants have been killed trying to get into the US, he added, and these refugee camps filling up along the border, where narco crime and corrupt police will take more control, will “become death camps.”
Kristof has spent his career telling American readers to care about wars and humanitarian crises abroad (New York Times, 2/6/10, 3/9/11, 6/16/14, 9/4/15, 5/15/24). Yet here he is, utterly indifferent to creating a humanitarian catastrophe right at his own country’s door, seemingly in order to run positive spin for an incumbent president who is eager to rise a few points in the polls.
In fact, Kristof ends with almost a parody of liberalism:
Are we, the people of an immigrant nation, pulling up the ladder after we have boarded? Yes, to some degree. But the reality is that we can’t absorb everyone who wants in, and it’s better that the ladder be raised in an orderly way by reasonable people.
In other words, when a Trumpian policy is practiced by a Democratic administration, it is somehow less horrendous. And Kristof fully admits, “as the son of a refugee,” he is selfishly cutting off people much like his father—except from the Global South, not from Eastern Europe.
And this sums up a very central problem with Kristof. For someone who uses globetrotting as his journalistic trademark, he advances a racist idea that the ability to travel and relocate are reserved for people like him—men of the Global North intellectual class and not the wretched of the earth beneath him.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
Venezuelans will head to the polls on July 28 to choose their president for the 2025–30 term. Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro faces nine challengers as he runs for a third term.
Over the past 25 years of US-sponsored coups and economic sanctions, Western corporate media have always proven a reliable source of regime-change propaganda to back Washington’s policies (FAIR.org, 12/17/18, 1/25/19, 8/15/19, 4/15/20, 5/11/20, 1/11/23). Coverage builds to a frenzy around elections, whether driven by a (misguided) hope that US surrogates will win, or by a desire to delegitimize anticipated Chavista victories.
With two months to go, Western outlets are busy crafting familiar narratives, and leading the charge is the New York Times. Not busy enough with its genocide-endorsing coverage of Gaza, the paper of record was keen to back yet another key US foreign policy interest. In a flurry of recent articles, the Times laid down plenty of bias, distortions and outright lies.
Rigged reportingThe New York Times (5/6/24) sometimes seemed to think Venezuela’s president was named “Authoritarian.”
In less than one week, the New York Times published three articles about the upcoming Venezuelan election, all of which referred to Maduro as “authoritarian” in the headline, rather than by name, so readers immediately take note of the “bad guy”:
- “Meet the Candidate Challenging Venezuela’s Authoritarian President” (5/6/24)
- “Reality Show Contestants Compete for an Authoritarian’s Campaign Jingle” (5/9/24)
- “Can Elections Force Venezuela’s Authoritarian Leader From Power?” (5/11/24)
The Times’ Julie Turkewitz opened the third piece by claiming that Venezuelans are voting “for the first time in more than a decade…in a presidential election with an opposition candidate who has a fighting—if slim and improbable—chance at winning.”
This framing reinforces the common trope that Maduro’s May 2018 victory was “a sham” (New York Times, 5/11/24; Reuters, 5/17/24), “rigged” (New York Times, 5/6/24), “neither free nor fair” (BBC, 3/6/24) or “widely considered fraudulent” (France24, 3/12/24).
Most outlets have never bothered to back up the claims, but Turkewitz argued it was due to the opposition’s “most popular figures” being barred from running. What she did not mention was that the highest-profile of these figures, far-right politician Leopoldo López, had been convicted of trying to violently overthrow the elected government (Venezuelanalysis, 6/13/17, 2/16/15). The other candidate the Times was presumably referring to, Henrique Capriles—who lost elections in 2012 and 2013—was banned for administrative malpractice while holding public office (Venezuelanalysis, 4/11/17).
The hardline opposition, in coordination with Washington, was wedded to election boycotts and insurrection efforts. The Trump administration reportedly went so far as to threaten to sanction opposition frontrunner Henri Falcón if he did not boycott the election. Juan Guaidó, tapped a few months later to lead a self-proclaimed, US-backed “interim government,” was perfectly free to have run for president in 2018.
Assured victoryThe Miami Herald (5/6/24) counts chickens that are far from hatching.
Fast forward six years, and the New York Times (5/11/24, 5/16/24) and other establishment outlets (Miami Herald, 5/6/24; Bloomberg, 5/17/24) seem excited by the hardline opposition’s electoral prospects, telling readers that candidate Edmundo González is leading in the polls, but that the Venezuelan government will not accept the results. In fact, the track record of the past 25 years is that Chavismo has always conceded in the contests it has lost, whereas the opposition and its media backers, when they are defeated at the polls, inevitably cry fraud, to the tune of zero evidence (FAIR.org, 1/27/21, 12/3/21, 11/20/20, 5/23/18).
Pundits are basing their current optimism for their candidate on a historically biased and unreliable polling industry, ignoring polls that predict a similarly lopsided victory for Maduro.
The New York Times (5/11/24) also made reference to the “enormous” turnout in the opposition’s October primaries, suggesting that this presaged a large anti-Maduro vote in the general election. Put aside the fact that the primary figures were shrouded in doubt, and that the organizing commission never released detailed results; the turnout claimed by the opposition was 2.3 million people, in a country with an adult population of 20 million. The governing Socialist Party, by comparison, has 4 million registered members.
Finally, there is also wonderment at the size of opposition rallies (AP, 5/18/24; New York Times, 5/16/24). Not only is crowd measurement a very inexact science, the context is erased by ignoring the constant, massive pro-government mobilizations taking place as well.
Shifting democratic goalpostsIt was not Maduro that blocked María Corina Machado from running (Bloomberg, 3/16/24), but Venezuela’s Supreme Court, which upheld her ban on running for office, citing her support for US sanctions, among other disqualifications.
Alongside prematurely cheering an opposition victory, the paper of record has been preparing arguments to dismiss the results should Maduro win. The key one is centered on US favorite María Corina Machado, who is said to be “barred by the government”—or by Maduro himself—from running, a lazily dishonest description common to many corporate outlets (New York Times, 5/11/24, 5/16/24; AP, 5/18/24, 2/28/24; Bloomberg, 3/16/24; Washington Post, 4/17/24).
A far-right zealot and heiress from Venezuela’s elite, Machado has long been a corporate media favorite (New York Times, 11/19/05). She has always been depicted as a champion of democracy despite participating in coup attempts, going on record as endorsing a foreign invasion, and allegedly receiving direct funding from the US.
Machado’s disqualification is the smoking gun used to justify Washington’s reimposition of oil sanctions (more on that below), and to prove that Maduro has not followed through on supposed commitments to hold the “free and fair elections” agreed to with the US-backed opposition in Barbados in October 2023. This is false on two counts.
For starters, many Western sources blatantly lie by stating that the Barbados Agreement allowed Machado to run for president (Washington Post, 4/17/24; New York Times, 4/17/24; Reuters, 4/17/24, 4/12/24; CNN, 1/27/24; BBC, 1/30/24). What the document explicitly says is that anyone could be a candidate, provided that they fulfill the requirements established by Venezuelan law and the constitution to run for office. In Machado’s case, she was already serving a political ban, and there was nothing in the agreement suggesting it would be lifted.
Secondly, the Venezuelan government and opposition delegations from the Barbados accords agreed on a procedure for disqualified candidates to appeal before the Venezuelan Supreme Court (Venezuelanalysis, 12/1/23). Machado—under pressure from the US, it’s suspected—filed her appeal. And an appeal, by definition, can be rejected. The Supreme Court pointed to corrupt actions and the jeopardizing of Venezuelan assets abroad to uphold her exclusion (Venezuelanalysis, 1/27/24).
The ‘grip’ of poor journalismWhen the same party controls Congress and the White House in the United States, you won’t find the New York Times (5/11/24) complaining that the president has the legislature, the military and the country’s budget “in his grip.”
Apart from misrepresenting the case of one of Venezuela’s most anti-democratic figures, the New York Times (5/11/24) marshaled other arguments to dismiss a potential Maduro victory in advance:
Ahead of the July 28 vote, Mr. Maduro, 61, has in his grip the legislature, the military, the police, the justice system, the national election council, the country’s budget and much of the media, not to mention violent paramilitary gangs called colectivos.
Leaving aside the demonized colectivos and the misconceptions surrounding Venezuelan media (FAIR.org, 5/20/19), the rest of the list is astounding. The legislature was won by the Socialist Party in the 2020 elections, and has the prerogative to appoint Supreme Court justices and the Electoral Council. Corporate pundits would presumably never write that a US president “has Congress in his grip.”
What is worse is Turkewitz’s dismay at Maduro wielding the constitutional responsibilities belonging to the president. The Venezuelan president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and appoints the interior minister who runs the police. And somehow media stenographers expect Venezuela’s elected leader to share control of the budget with the US’s chosen surrogates.
A recycled misrepresentationThis Spanish-language AP piece (2/9/24) retracted a misrepresentation that the New York Times (5/11/24) repeated three months later.
But the pinnacle of poor journalism in the May 11 Times piece was the following paragraph:
Mr. Maduro has hardly indicated that he is ready to leave office. He promised a large crowd of followers in February that he would win the election “by hook or by crook.”
It is unclear why the New York Times writer would expect someone campaigning for reelection to “indicate…he is ready to leave office.” However, it is the second sentence that is an absolute fabrication. In said rally, Maduro is clearly talking about defeating US- and opposition-led coup efforts “por las buenas o por las malas”—the Spanish idiom the Times translates as “by hook or by crook.”
In the video linked, uploaded by a Venezuelan journalist precisely to clarify the context of those words, Maduro lists anti-democratic plots going back to 2002, and vows that the country’s “civilian-military” unity will defeat any possible coup attempt “por las buenas o por las malas”—”by any means necessary,” one might say. There is no reference to the upcoming elections at all.
The Associated Press (2/9/24) had months ago misused the Venezuelan president’s words in the same way. After widespread criticism, the news service attached a note to the Spanish-language report: “The Associated Press improperly used a quote from President Nicolás Maduro as if he had said it in connection with the upcoming presidential election.” That didn’t stop the Times from committing the exact same misrepresentation three months later.
Intensified dishonestyReuters (4/17/24) reported that the Biden administration was reimposing sanctions on Venezuela “in response to President Nicolas Maduro’s failure to meet his election commitments.” But the Barbados Agreement did not commit the government to allow any candidate to run, but only those who met legal and constitutional qualifications—and it asked all parties “to respect and comply with the electoral regulations and the decisions of the National Electoral Council.”
The US is not only pushing opposition candidates in Venezuela; it’s also using economic sanctions to undermine Maduro’s presidency. Following the Barbados agreement in October, the US agreed to allow transactions with the Venezuelan oil sector for six months. But US officials claimed that the Maduro government had not fulfilled its commitments and reimposed its sanctions against Venezuela’s oil industry on April 18. In tandem, corporate media reintroduced its whitewashing and endorsement of deadly coercive measures (FAIR.org, 6/13/22, 6/4/21).
The New York Times and Turkewitz (5/11/24) rolled out some of the main tropes that downplay those sanctions, writing that “Maduro blames sanctions” for the country’s economic troubles. This formulation places the idea that sanctions hurt the Venezuelan economy in the mouth of the demonized Maduro, when even US officials are on the record saying that sanctions are meant to cause economic pain.
The Times went on to say that “the government has been choked” by US sanctions. The implication is that only Venezuela’s leaders are affected by sanctions. But as the Center for Economic and Policy Research (4/25/19) has demonstrated, they are a “collective punishment” that has caused tens of thousands of deaths per year. Yet Turkewitz failed to explain their economic impact on Venezuelans, who widely condemn them—as does most of the international community.
One coordinated mistruth spread by the Times (4/17/24, 5/16/24) and others (e.g., Reuters, 4/17/24, 5/11/24; BBC, 1/30/24) is that crushing US sanctions against Venezuela only began in 2019. In fact, the Trump administration levied financial sanctions against the oil industry in mid-2017 that sent output plummeting. The goal of that media obfuscation is far from subtle: absolve Washington of responsibility for Venezuela’s economic troubles, especially the fall in oil production.
Turkewitz’s article matter-of-factly stated that a Maduro victory on July 28 will “intensify poverty” in Venezuela. Turkewitz is either taking for granted that US economic aggression will continue—without explaining that to readers—or is convinced that Washington’s adversaries are predestined by nature or fate to ruin their economies. Venezuela is in fact set for a fourth straight year of economic growth, despite the multi-billion dollar impact of US sanctions. The only thing that seems to always intensify is the New York Times’ imperialist propaganda.
The biggest outside spender in the 2022 Democratic primaries was an unlikely group: the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. This year, AIPAC—a group backed by Republican mega-donors that is devoted to maintaining strong US support for the far-right government of Israel—is going even bigger, aiming to spend a cool $100 million via its super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
If the Koch brothers quietly spent millions to sway Democratic primaries, their chosen candidates would be tarred. Same goes for Big Oil, the NRA and other right-wing special interests. But AIPAC is an exception to this rule.
“AIPAC [is] the biggest source of Republican money flowing into competitive Democratic primaries this year,” Politico (6/9/24) reported. AIPAC’s UDP is “by far the biggest outside group in Democratic primaries, with more money flowing from UDP than the next 10 biggest spenders combined.”
Despite being conservative donors’ preferred instrument for hijacking Democratic primaries, UDP is described in media reports as “pro-Israel,” often with little said of its right-wing funding. This glaring omission provides AIPAC with cover to play in Democratic primaries in ways other right-wing groups can’t.
Money from right-wing billionairesThe Washington Post (5/14/24) waited until the 21st of 28 paragraphs to mention that Elfreth (right) had gotten $4.1 million in support from an AIPAC-affiliated super PAC—almost as much as rival Harry Dunn raised altogether.
I recently watched this play out in a nearby congressional district. On May 14, many Democratic primary voters went to the polls without knowing that a leading candidate for Maryland’s safely blue 3rd Congressional District, state Sen. Sarah Elfreth, was backed by right-wing billionaires via AIPAC’s super PAC.
Voters were kept in the dark thanks to deficient reporting. A Washington Post (5/14/24) story on election day, for example, waited until the 21st paragraph to mention that UDP had spent over $4 million on the race; then the Post quickly added: “United Democracy Project says it takes money from Republicans and Democrats.”
That last statement is technically true, and also deceiving.
While UDP’s funders hail from both parties, they share an elite status: Nearly 60% of them are CEOs and corporate honchos, In These Times (6/3/24) found. “But in no world could you even call this a bipartisan group of benefactors. It’s Republicans who know what they’re doing,” wrote Slate’s Alexander Sammon (2/7/24), in a story headlined, “There Sure Are a Lot of Republican Billionaires Funding the Democratic Primaries.” Sammon found that only one of the top ten donors to UDP “can even plausibly be called a regular Democratic booster.”
Among those Republican billionaires, as researched by the muckraking news outlet Sludge (3/4/24): Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, who’s given UDP $3 million and donated around $65 million to Republican groups over the past decade, including $17 million to Trump super PACs; hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who’s given UDP $2 million and contributed millions more to Republican causes (and lavished gifts on Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito); and WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, UDP’s top funder at $5 million this cycle, who’s bankrolled groups that support Israel’s illegal settlements.
Despite its heavy Republican funding, UDP spends almost exclusively in Democratic primaries. (UDP’s parent organization, AIPAC, has a less exclusive focus and backs many Republicans— including over 100 congressmembers who voted to overturn the 2020 election—through a separate political action committee.)
In the May 14 story, however, the Post never used its own authoritative voice to convey the above facts to readers—many of whom, as Democratic primary voters, would be alarmed to learn that right-wing donors were quietly backing a Democratic candidate. By playing dumb to Sarah Elfreth’s conservative support, the Post slyly helped her win.
‘What is broken with Washington’The Washington Post (5/14/24) made Elfreth’s acceptance of “dark money” an accusation leveled by her opponent Harry Dunn (right)—and quoted another source saying Dunn complaining about it was “exactly what is broken with Washington.”
Of course, newspapers are supposed to be evenhanded, so the Post gave Elfreth’s opponent space to call out AIPAC’s millions—but even here, the coverage was slanted.
UDP’s massive spending “prompted the Dunn campaign to accuse Elfreth of taking ‘dark money’ and lumping her in with far-right Republicans,” the Post reported.
By having Harry Dunn—and not the Post itself—call out Elfreth’s Republican support, the Post turned an explosive issue into a mere allegation from a political opponent.
Then the Post went further, seeking to invalidate not only Dunn’s statement, but the candidate himself. (Dunn is a former Capitol Police officer who won national acclaim for fighting off January 6 insurrectionists.)
The Post wrote:
The Dunn campaign’s efforts to link Elfreth—an established Democrat—to Trump supporters rubbed some Maryland politicians the wrong way. “It just is exactly what is broken with Washington and not what will lead to a more productive US Congress,” said Maryland Senate President Bill Ferguson…[who] said the insinuation reflected Dunn’s inexperience in politics.”
Dark moneyThe Post story, while troubling, wasn’t exceptional. If anything, the Baltimore Banner’s coverage was worse.
The Baltimore Banner (5/12/24) dismissed criticism of Elfreth’s AIPAC help, saying that “criticizing an opponent’s money is nothing new.”
In the month leading up to the primary, UDP spent over $100,000 a day boosting Elfreth. This prompted other candidates to call out the influx of outside Republican money. But their protests elicited little more than a yawn from the Banner’s Rick Hutzell (5/12/24). “Criticizing an opponent’s money is nothing new,” he wrote.
Hutzell then took to lecturing Elfreth’s opponents, although not with much accuracy. “It’s not dark money,” he insisted. “UDP discloses its donors.”
At least Hutzell got the second part right.
“UDP is legally obligated to disclose its direct donors,” wrote HuffPost’s Daniel Marans (4/3/24), “but it may receive donations from corporations and nonprofits whose funders are not public.”
In other words, a donor who wished to provide Elfreth with anonymous support could’ve done so by having a non-disclosing entity, like AIPAC, forward their donation to UDP.
“If these MAGA donors funneled their money through AIPAC or any other nonprofit, then the individual donors would not be identified,” Craig Holman, a campaign finance expert with Public Citizen, told FAIR. “This is dark money in the truest sense of the word.”
‘Forever influence her worldviews’The Guardian (5/14/22) suggested that AIPAC’s intervention in Maryland’s 3rd district House race might have been motivated to block labor lawyer John Morse, a minor candidate who made Gaza a central issue of his campaign—though the third-place candidate, state Sen. Clarence Lam, was also more critical of Israel than AIPAC would have been comfortable with.
Why AIPAC was involved in this race in the first place was a bit of a mystery, as the two leading candidates, Elfreth and Dunn, held seemingly indistinguishable views on Israel.
When asked about this, a UDP spokesperson (Guardian, 5/14/22) said there were “some serious anti-Israel candidates in this race, who are not Harry Dunn, and we need to make sure that they don’t make it to Congress.”
But UDP didn’t specify who was on its naughty list. Meanwhile, the race was already down to a two-way contest by the time UDP unleashed its millions, so all UDP was doing at that point was thwarting Dunn, who’s also pro-Israel.
Even Elfreth was confounded by UDP’s efforts, or so she claimed. Asked why the group was boosting her, Elfreth told the Banner, “I honest to God have no idea.”
No idea? Four months before announcing her candidacy, Elfreth took her first trip to Israel on what sounds like an AIPAC junket. She visited “a kibbutz that was [later] attacked by Hamas on October 7, an Iron Dome battery, a Hezbollah tunnel on the Lebanese border, the West Bank and religious sites,” Jewish Insider (4/3/24) reported.
In endorsing Elfreth, Pro-Israel America PAC, an AIPAC-adjacent group, wrote, “Sarah has traveled to Israel on a life-changing trip that will forever influence her worldviews.” The group quoted Elfreth as saying, “[I] walked away knowing that I believe—after millennia of the world turning its back on the Jewish people—that the State of Israel has the right to exist and to defend itself.”
Whether or not Elfreth was clueless about AIPAC’s support, one thing was clear: She was determined to keep its millions flowing her way. At an April debate with 16 hopefuls on stage, “moderators asked the candidates if they would swear off corporate PAC money,” Maryland Matters (4/18/24) reported. “Only Elfreth stayed seated.”
She was smart to do so, as AIPAC’s millions can prove decisive. They certainly did two years ago in a neighboring congressional district.
‘The ads started pouring in’Intercept (7/20/22): Donna Edwards’ “past refusal to unconditionally support funding that enables Israel’s ongoing occupation and destruction of Palestinian communities was more than enough to draw the ire of the conservative pro-Israel donors who mobilized to defeat her.”
In 2022, Donna Edwards was poised to reclaim the House seat she’d vacated six years earlier. “Then the ads started pouring in,” the Intercept (7/20/22) reported:
[UDP] spent $6 million on television spots, mailers and other media…. Other pro-Israel organizations pitched in about $1 million more. The result was one of the most expensive congressional primaries in history, with nearly all of the money coming from outside the district over the course of only a few weeks.
Amid the $7 million onslaught, Edwards’ lead vanished. She lost the Democratic primary to prosecutor Glenn Ivey, who was quick to thank AIPAC after his win.
I keep thinking back to this election and wondering, what if reporters had called out AIPAC for hijacking this local race? At the very least, it would have made it harder for the group to get away with doing the same thing two years later, on behalf of Elfreth.
Collective amnesiaAIPAC’s continued ability to steal Democratic primaries rests on a collective amnesia setting in after each election. Unfortunately, reporters have proven willing to do their part to make this happen.
Last month, the moment Elfreth won, what little coverage there was of AIPAC lessened.
Take the May 14 Post story discussed above. While AIPAC appeared in its tenth paragraph, once Elfreth won, the story was rewritten, and AIPAC dropped down to the 21st paragraph.
AP‘s story (5/14/24) on Elfreth’s victory mentioned her “endorsements from the state’s teachers union and environmental groups”—but not AIPAC, which provided almost three-fourths of the money spent on behalf of her campaign.
That was better than an AP story (5/14/24) the Post ran, which didn’t mention AIPAC at all.
A Baltimore Sun (5/15/24) story belatedly noted AIPAC’s role, but only after portraying Elfreth as a victim of big money by comparing her to Angela Alsobrooks, a candidate who was up against the biggest self-funder in Senate primary history, liquor store magnate David Trone. “Not only were Elfreth and Alsobrooks…up against nationally known figures…they both also trailed their opponents in fundraising,” the Sun reported. This is only true if you don’t count the help UDP gave Elfreth; counting that money, which the Sun did later mention, she had a spending advantage of more than $1 million.
But once again, it was the Banner that took the cake. In Hutzell’s post-election story (5/17/24), Elfreth was the victim, having been forced to endure TV ads attacking “her over a pro-Israel super PAC spending millions to support her without her knowledge.”
It’s not until the 35th paragraph that Hutzell bothers to name AIPAC, and only in the context of how Elfreth is going to be, of all things, a champion for campaign finance reform.
She wants to pick up where US Rep. John Sarbanes, the man she hopes to succeed, left off on campaign finance reform. Elfreth makes this last pledge without irony, given the criticism she received for the more than $4.5 million that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent on her behalf.
With coverage like this, come 2026, AIPAC will be positioned to continue manipulating Democratic primaries by quietly weaponizing right-wing dollars.
‘Israel not a winning issue’“UDP’s heavy reliance on right-wing (even hard-right) oligarchs comes into stark relief when looking at its most elite donors,” an In These Times analysis (6/3/24) found.
What’s so cynical is that UDP isn’t upfront about why it’s spending millions in Democratic primaries—at least not until after the election is over.
In explaining its support of Elfreth, UDP highlighted domestic issues, listing abortion rights, climate change and domestic violence—issues that are unlikely to matter much if at all to UDP’s Republican donors. The millions of dollars in ads UDP aired for Elfreth didn’t mention Israel; just like the group’s ads against Donna Edwards from two years earlier. “They know that Israel is not a winning issue,” said James Zogby (In These Times, 6/3/24).
But the moment the election was over, AIPAC declared that Elfreth’s win showed that it’s progressive “to stand with the Jewish state as it battles aggression from the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies.”
In backing Elfreth, AIPAC’s right-wing donors knew exactly what they were doing. And so did Elfreth, notwithstanding her claims of ignorance. Reporters knew the score, too, even if their coverage didn’t reflect that. The only ones kept in the dark were voters.
As the world watched on social media and responded in outrage, US corporate media, once again, provided cover for the perpetrators of Israel’s genocide.
CounterPunch (5/31/24): “When the Israeli bombs strafed the safe zone, the plastic tents caught fire, sending flames leaping two meters high, before the melting, blazing structures collapsed on the people inside, many of them children who’d just been tucked in for the evening.”
Over the Memorial Day weekend, Israel bombed starving Gazan refugees crowded in tents in Rafah, where Israel had told them to go. As Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch, 5/31/24) wrote, leaflets dropped in Rafah a few days before told them to go to “Tel al-Sultan through Beach Road,” an area set up by the UNRWA refugee agency and designated a UN humanitarian safe zone. The leaflet added, “Don’t blame us after we warned you.”
Nevertheless, without warning, Israel hit the camp with at least eight missiles spreading fire though the encampment of plastic tents (Quds News, 5/26/24). Some refugees burned to death, mostly women and children, leaving them dismembered and charred.
The world saw the terror of the massacre on international and social media. Images showed the area of the strike engulfed in flames as Palestinians screamed, cried, ran for safety and sought to help the injured. “They told people to move there then killed them,” Richard Medhurst (5/28/24) posted.
A boy cries in horror and fear as he watches his father’s tent burn with him inside. A man holds up the body of his charred, now-headless baby, wandering around, not knowing what to do or where to go. An injured, starving child convulses in pain as a medic struggles to find a vein for an IV in her emaciated arm (Al Jazeera, 5/27/24).
Al Jazeera (cited by Quds News, 5/26/24) quoted a Civil Defense source: “We believe that the occupation army used internationally prohibited weapons to target the displaced in Rafah, judging by the size of the fires that erupted at the targeted site.”
US news media reported the tent massacre, some more truthfully than others. But most establishment media repeated Israel’s false claims that it was an accident, weaving disinformation messaging into toned-down descriptions of the scene. With confused syntax, they omitted words like “genocide,” “massacre” and “starvation.” Most left out the language of international law that is best able to explain the unprecedented crimes against humanity that Israel is committing. Corporate reporting left the tent massacre devoid of context and empathy, ignored actions that need to be taken, and ultimately facilitated the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
Embedded with an illegal invasionBy being embedded with Israeli forces, NBC (5/28/24) presented news literally from the IDF point of view.
When NBC News (5/28/24) reported from Gaza that “Israeli tanks reached the city center for the first time, according to NBC News‘ crew on the ground,” it failed to say that the NBC crew was embedded with Israel’s invading force.
The same sentence continued that Israel was “defying international pressure to halt an offensive that has sent nearly 1 million people fleeing Rafah.” But Israel was not just “defying…pressure”; it was in violation of a direct order from the International Court of Justice ICJ to halt its attack on Rafah. Yet NBC reporters rode into Rafah with an army that was ignoring international law to commit further genocide in Gaza.
Compare NBC’s words to those used by Ramy Abdu (5/26/24), chair of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, who posted: “In the deadliest response to the International Court of Justice’s decision, the Israeli army targeted a group of displaced persons’ tents in Rafah, killing approximately 60 innocent civilians so far.”
In a post, Francesca Albanese (5/26/24), UN special rapporteur for human rights in Palestine, included International actions that needed to be implemented:
The #GazaGenocide will not easily end without external pressure: Israel must face sanctions, justice, suspension of agreements, trade, partnership and investments, as well as participation in int’l forums.
Such sanctions are rarely discussed in establishment media, but are becoming more urgent, given the New York Times report (5/29/24) that Israel intends to extend the genocide through the remainder of 2024. Though the Times reported on the global outrage and demonstrations against the Rafah massacre, the words “genocide” and “massacre” were not used, nor was there any mention of the possibility of sanctions against Israel.
Targeting ‘Hamas,’ not civiliansX (5/27/24)
Instead of sourcing the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice or any humanitarian actors in the region, NBC (5/28/24) quoted a UN National Security Council spokesperson:
Israel has a right to go after Hamas, and we understand this strike killed two senior Hamas terrorists who are responsible for attacks against Israeli civilians…. But as we’ve been clear, Israel must take every precaution possible to protect civilians.
Israel’s claim that it killed two Hamas leaders became the rationale for the strike, which was repeated extensively on corporate media. Over NBC‘s images of burning tents and killing scenes, the header read, “Dozens killed in Gaza tent camp in an airstrike targeting two Hamas commanders.”
The dead were connected to Hamas whenever possible. At the bottom of the video, the subtitles listed numbers of dead, followed with, “according to the emergency services in Hamas-run Gaza.”
Human rights attorney and Rutgers academic Noura Erakat (5/27/24) exposed the attempt to link murdered children to Hamas. Over the picture of a burned baby, she posted these harsh words:
Have you ever seen a burnt baby? Can you imagine her final, gaping screams? And all Israel had to tell you was “Hamas,” so you look at her and shrug. Your willful ignorance is genocidal.
CounterPunch (5/31/24) quoted Jeremy Konyndyk, former head of disaster relief for US Agency for International Development, saying, “Bombing a tent camp full of displaced people is a clear-cut, full-on war crime” who added, “Even if Hamas troops were present, that does not absolve the IDF of the obligation to protect civilians. It does not turn a tent camp into a free fire zone.”
‘A tragic incident’Al Jazeera+* media critic Sana Saeed (X*, 5/27/24) called the writers of such headlines “propagandists for genocide masquerading as journalists.”
On NBC (5/28/24), under the footage of the burning horrors of Rafah, the chyron read, “Netanyahu: Deadly Strike a Tragic Incident.”
In response to Israel’s “accident” claim, journalists, activists and social media users, including Rep. Rashida Tlaib, reacted with incredulity and withering criticism of those who asserted it. That was the reaction Axios reporter and CNN analyst Barak Ravid (5/27/24) received when he posted, “Breaking: Netanyahu says the airstrike in Rafah on Sunday was ‘a tragic mistake,’ and adds that it will be investigated.” Katie Halper (5/27/24) replied to Ravid with, “Nice to see you using your position as a journalist to do comms for the Israeli government.”
And Tlaib (5/27/24) commented:
This was intentional. You don’t accidentally kill massive amounts of children and their families over and over again and get to say, “It was a mistake.” Genocidal maniac Netanyahu told us he wants to ethnically cleanse Palestinians.
She ended with the question, “When are you going to believe him?”
Sana Saeed (5/27/24), media critic for Al Jazeera+, posted the front pages of four print publications that repeated Netanyahu’s accident claim. The New York Times used “Tragic Accident,” while “Tragic Mistake” was preferred by Time magazine, Forbes and the AP. Over the headlines, she called them “propagandists for genocide masquerading as journalists.”
‘What Israel shared with us’The second paragraph of CNN‘s report (5/28/24) featured Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s claim: “Despite our best effort not to harm those not involved, unfortunately a tragic error happened last night.”
But CNN (5/28/24) seemed to be vying for Most Valuable Propagandists by elaborating on the unlikely details offered by the IDF to describe the official Israeli version of what happened. It began with Netanyahu speaking to the Knesset: “Despite our best effort not to harm those not involved, unfortunately a tragic error happened last night. We are investigating the case.”
After four paragraphs of details of the massacre—“burned bodies, including those of children, could be seen being pulled by rescuers from the wreckage”—CNN returned to the justifications. The long, breathless chain of details began:
A US official told CNN Monday that Israel had told the Biden administration it used a precision munition to hit a target in Rafah, but that the explosion from the strike ignited a fuel tank nearby and started a fire that engulfed a camp for displaced Palestinians and led to dozens of deaths.
But the claims could not be confirmed; “It’s what Israel shared with us,” the official said.
But the attack on Rafah was in no way a single “precision” “hit,” as numerous sources reported that multiple bombs hit the camp. And Al Jazeera (5/27/24) reported that Israeli drone strikes also hit the Kuwaiti Hospital, the only functioning hospital in the area, killing two medics. It also pointed out that no notice to evacuate came before the strike.
Ever-changing disinformationIn an X post (5/27/24), Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill noted the shifting narrative coming from Israel:
Netanyahu now admits Israel carried out the horrifying bombings that incinerated human beings in Rafah last night and turned a refugee camp into hellfire. I assume all the people who claimed it was actually a failed Hamas rocket attack will now rush to correct themselves.
As we observed after the flour massacre (FAIR.org, 3/22/24), Israel’s string of differing false statements immediately following a massacre is an IDF propaganda strategy designed to confuse and delay. Focusing on changing falsities distracts from the massacre and turns the cameras away from the horrible images of US-supplied weapons slaughter. In this way, massacres become normalized.
Repeating and discussing the ever-changing Israeli disinformation of denial, discussing weapons and official statements, also allows US corporate media to avoid easily observed patterns of Israel’s ongoing massacres, in addition to drawing public attention away from the suffering. But on social media, the raw footage and cries of outrage by users indicate that the manufactured emotional distance collapses online.
Some users expressed extreme distress after prolonged viewing of such imagery. One Palestinian organizer (5/27/24) said:
I’m shaking uncontrollably since last night. I can’t get the beheaded baby that was burned alive. The woman’s screaming out of my head. The decomposed bodies of babies out of my head. The girl whose body was stuck to a wall. Hind’s final message to PRCS…. And now. How do you watch all this and not feel your soul dead?
The daughter of Palestinian refugees posted (5/27/24):
The flour massacre, the tents massacre, the hospital massacre, the refugee camp massacre, the “safe corridor” massacre, the endless massacres, in homes, on the streets, in tents, on foot— eight months of massacre after massacre after massacre.
Another user (5/27/24) asked, “Why do so many Israeli mistakes involve launching multiple missiles at people they’ve assured are in safe zones?”
‘Willful media blackout’It was the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (2/29/24) that exposed US corporate media reporting as repeated propaganda in a piece titled, “In Netanyahu’s Israel, the Rafah Horror Was Neither ‘a Mishap’ nor Exceptional.” The editorial scoffed at the use of “tragic mishap” to describe the “horrific incident.” It observed that “it took Netanyahu 20 hours to produce the disgraceful statement, which, as usual, lacked any shred of regret over the death of ‘noncombatants.’”
Haaretz derided the “willful media blackout regarding the scope of death and destruction over the last eight months.” Skeptical about the assertion that “it was not expected to cause damage to noncombatant civilians,” the paper observed that, if true, “this involves an ongoing failure at the strategic level.”
LA Progressive (6/7/24): “In response to this massacre…the best US spokespeople could muster was to urge Israel to be ‘transparent’ about the assault.”
By May 29, US corporate media began to report extensively that the Israeli bombs dropped on Rafah that burned Palestinian refugees alive were made in the US. A munitions fragment was filmed by Palestinian journalist Alam Sadeq, and was posted on X (5/27/24) by former US Army explosive expert Trevor Ball two days earlier. Much was made of the fact that the ordinance was smaller than the usual 2,000-pound bombs used to destroy Gaza, and were the preferred bombs the Biden administration had sent to Israel.
As the New York Times (5/29/24) put it, “US officials have been pushing Israel to use more of this type of bomb, which they say can reduce civilian casualties.” The lengthy report included a drawing of the bomb, the details of its manufacture, and assertions that its use by Israel indicated they tried to kill fewer civilians. Gone were any mention of the “tragic mistake,” and the “exploded fuel tank,” forgotten as yesterday’s fake news.
But a lengthy back-and-forth about how the fire could have started failed to point out the obvious, which comes only at the very end when a retired US Air Force sergeant observes, “When you use a weapon that’s intended as precision and low–collateral damage in an area where civilians are saturated, it really negates that intended use.”
As Israel’s atrocities continue to mount in Gaza, the LA Progressive (6/7/24) wrote that though Biden claimed to care about the loss of civilian life in Gaza, and that an Israeli attacked on Rafah would be a “red line,” “events of the past weeks have demonstrated that none of these claims are in fact true.” It added that a month ago, Hamas agreed to an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement “that looked a lot like the ceasefire agreement now being promoted by the Biden administration,” but Israel responded by rejecting that agreement as well.
In addition, Israel closed off the border area between Israel and Egypt, cutting off any aid or supplies from coming into famine-ravaged Gaza. The authors concluded, “What has transpired is a horrifying series of massacres against civilians, which the Biden administration continues to try to downplay, excuse and explain away.”
Over the last eight months, US establishment media have helped Biden “explain away” such atrocities. They have not stopped repeating Israel’s propaganda, and have acted as willing conduits for Israeli disinformation. It is past time they stopped doing so, and started reporting on what is actually happening on the ground in Gaza, not through the eyes of the IDF.
Across corporate media, journalists and pundits introduced conspiracy theories to discredit the pro-Palestine student protest movement, particularly that they are funded by foreign countries or “outside agitators.”
Joe Scarborough and Hillary Clinton on MSNBC‘s Morning Joe (5/9/24) to talk about “misinformation,” agreeing that student protesters are “extremists…funded by Qatar.”
MSNBC‘s Joe Scarborough (5/9/24) went on a rant about the college students who have been staging the protests, suggesting to guest Hillary Clinton that they were influenced by China or Qatar:
I’m going to talk about radicalism on college campuses. The sort of radicalism that has mainstream students getting propaganda, whether it’s from their professors or whether it’s from Communist Chinese government through TikTok, calling the president of the United States “Genocide Joe.” Calling you and President Clinton war criminals.
Eventually, he called the students “extremists—I’m sorry—funded by Qatar.”
Clinton responded: “You raised things that need to be vented about.”
Scarborough’s claim that Qatar funds the students likely comes from a Jerusalem Post article (4/30/24), which called the protests “despicable.” The story reported, “Qatar has invested $5.6 billion in 81 American universities since 2007, including the most prestigious ones: Harvard, Yale, Cornell and Stanford.” Of course, funding universities is not the same as funding student protests; the university administrations that actually received the Qatari funding have often been quite hostile to the protesters.
‘Mr. Putin’s message’Nancy Pelosi, interviewed by Dana Bash on CNN (1/28/24), accused protesters of being “connected to Russia” because “to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message.”
House Speaker Emeritus Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) suggested on CNN’s State of the Union (1/28/24) that Russia has played a role in the protests:
And what we have to do is try to stop the suffering and gossip….. But for them to call for a ceasefire is Mr. Putin’s message…. I think some of these protesters are spontaneous and organic and sincere. Some I think are connected to Russia.
CNN’s Dana Bash asked, “you think some of these protests are Russian plants?” Pelosi responded: “I don’t think they’re plants; I think some financing should be investigated.”
Like MSNBC, Fox News (5/2/24) has also pushed the narrative suggesting that China is behind the protests: “China may be playing a significant role in the anti-Israel protests by using TikTok to foment division on college campuses,” Alicia Warren wrote.
Gordon Chang, a senior fellow at the far-right, anti-Muslim Gatestone Institute, told Fox that “China is using the curation algorithm of TikTok to instigate protests.”
The presence of pro-Palestinian advocacy on TikTok has been cited by lawmakers as a justification for censoring the social media platform (FAIR.org, 5/8/24). But the messages on TikTok, which is popular among younger people, may simply reflect public opinion among that demographic. According to the Pew Research Center, “Younger adults are much less supportive of the US providing military aid to Israel than are older people.”
In a story headlined, “Campus Protests Give Russia, China and Iran Fuel to Exploit US Divide,” the New York Times (5/2/24) described “overt and covert efforts by the countries to amplify the protests.” The story included some speculation about foreign influence: “There is little evidence—at least so far—that the countries have provided material or organizational support to the protests,” Steven Lee Myers and Tiffany Hsu wrote. If there was any evidence, they did not present it.
The journalists blamed the protests for having “allowed” these “foreign influence campaigns…to shift their propaganda to focus on the Biden administration’s strong support for Israel.”
‘Professional outside agitators’ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt on CNN (4/29/24): “There’s no rule that says the school needs to tolerate students or, again, outside activists dressing like they’re in Al Qaeda.”
Beyond foreign influence, another conspiracy theory pushed by corporate media about student protesters is that they are influenced by “outside agitators.” While people who are not students have joined the protests, the term has long been used to delegitimize movements and portray them as led by nefarious actors.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams was an early source of this claim, announcing at a press conference (4/30/24) that Columbia students have “been co-opted by professional outside agitators.” He made a similar statement in mid-April as well (4/21/24).
On MSNBC (5/1/24), NYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry defended the claim, holding up a bicycle lock with a substantial metal chain that police had found at Columbia. “This is not what students bring to school,” he said. In fact, Columbia sells the bike lock at a discount to students (FAIR.org, 5/9/24).
CNN‘s Anderson Cooper (4/29/24) asked the Anti Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt about the outside agitators, “How many of them are actually students?” “A lot of them are not students,” Greenblatt replied, adding unironically: “You can’t even tell who’s an outside agitator and who’s an actual student.”
CNN senior political commentator David Axelrod tweeted (4/30/24): “It will be interesting to learn how many of those arrested in Hamilton Hall at Columbia are actually students.”
“I really believe they are brainwashed,” Donald Trump (Fox News, 4/30/24) said of student protesters.
Former president Donald Trump made a similar claim on Fox (4/30/24). “I really think you have a lot of paid agitators, professional agitators in here too, and I see it all over. And you know, when you see signs and they’re all identical, that means they’re being paid by a source,” he told Fox host Sean Hannity. He continued: “These are all signs that are identical. They’re made by the same printer.”
It’s worth noting that a political movement is not like an intercollegiate athletic competition, where it’s cheating for non-students to play on a college team; it’s not illegitimate for members of the broader community to join an on-campus protest, any more than it’s unethical for students to take part in demonstrations in their neighborhoods.
“If you’re a protester who’s planned it, you want all outsiders to join you,” Justin Hansford of the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center told PolitiFact (5/6/24). “That’s why this is such a silly concept.”
That didn’t stop the New York Post (5/7/24) from publishing an op-ed by former New York Lt. Gov. Betsy McCaughey headlined “Pursue Anti-Israel ‘Outside Agitators’ Disrupting Colleges—and End the Nonsense for Good.” McCaughey wrote, “Ray Kelly, former NYPD commissioner, nailed it Sunday when he said the nationwide turmoil ‘looks like a conspiracy.’” It looks like a conspiracy theory, anyway.
Tents situationNYPD deputy police commissioner Kaz Daughtry (Fox 5 New York, 4/23/24): “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.”
One key piece of evidence offered for the “outside agitators” claim was the uniformity of many of the encampments’ tents. When Fox 5 New York (4/23/24) invited two NYPD representatives to discuss the protests, NYPD’s Daughtry said: “Look at the tents. They all were the same color. They all were the same type of tents.” He continued: “To me, I think somebody’s funding this. Also, there are professional agitators in there that are just looking for something to be agitated about, which are the protests.”
“Somebody’s behind this, and we’re going to find out who it is,” Daughtry said.
That students might be observing the world and their role in it, and acting accordingly, was not considered.
Newsweek (4/23/24) quoted Daughtry’s claim with no rebuttal or attempt to evaluate its veracity, under the headline, “Police Investigating People ‘Behind’ Pro-Palestinian Protests.” Fox News anchor Bret Baier (4/23/24) also cited the tents as a smoking gun: “We do see, it is pretty organized. The tents all look the same. And it’s expanding.”
The problem with this conspiracy theory is that the look-alike tents at most encampments were not expensive at all. As HellGateNYC (4/24/24) pointed out, the two-person tents seen at Columbia cost $28 on Amazon (where they’re the first listing that comes up when you search “cheap camping tent”), and the ones at NYU were even cheaper, at $15. While many Columbia students receive financial aid, the basic cost of tuition, fees, room and board at the school is $85,000 a year. What’s another $15?
‘Soros paying student radicals’Fox News (4/26/24): “Progressive anti-Israel agitators across the country…are associated with groups tied to far-left groups with radical associations backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”
And finally, some news outlets alleged that the student protesters are funded by financier George Soros. For example, Fox (4/26/24) reported that a group that funds National Students for Justice in Palestine (NSJP) received a donation from an unnamed nonprofit that is funded by Soros. Fox was apparently referring to the Tides Foundation, a philanthropy that Soros has given money to; Tides gave $132,000 to WESPAC, a Westchester, N.Y., peace group that serves as a financial sponsor to NSJP in Palestine (PolitiFact, 5/2/24; Washington Post, 4/26/24). In standard conspiratorial reasoning, this three-times-removed connection means that, as Fox put it, protests attended by SJP members are “backed by dark money and liberal mega-donor George Soros.”
The New York Post (4/26/24) published a similar piece, headlined “George Soros Is Paying Student Radicals Who Are Fueling Nationwide Explosion of Israel-Hating Protests.”
On NewsNation (5/1/24), House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) also suggested Soros may be connected, saying that the FBI should investigate:
I think the FBI needs to be all over this. I think they need to look at the root causes and find out if some of this was funded by—I don’t know—George Soros or overseas entities. There’s sort of a common theme and a common strategy that seems to be pursued on many of these campuses.
“It looked pretty orchestrated to me,” NewsNation host Blake Burman agreed.
Soros is a billionaire philanthropist who survived the Holocaust. He has come to represent an antisemitic trope among right wingers of a puppet master controlling events behind the scenes (see FAIR.org, 3/7/22). To put it simply, these supposedly antisemitic protesters are now on the receiving end of antisemitism.
Featured image: New York Post graphic (4/26/24) alleging that Jewish billionaire George Soros is bankrolling “Israel hate camps.”
Janine Jackson interviewed The Lever‘s Katherine Li about corporations’ First Amendment dodge for the May 31, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240531Li.mp3Extra! (3–4/95)
Janine Jackson: CounterSpin listeners will likely know about what’s been called the “right-wing media machine.” It started, you could say, with ideologues and politicians with ideas, generally ideas about how to hurdle us back to at least the 19th century, legally and culturally. They then created think tanks and funded academics to polish up and promulgate those ideas. And they created and funded media outlets to push those ideas out.
It’s not, in other words, a reflection of a fortuitous coming together of like-minded individuals, but an echo chamber forged with the explicit purpose of maximizing a narrow viewpoint into a false consensus. The news article you read, after all, cites a professor and a pundit and a think tank and a guy on the street who read a thing, so it looks like multiple disparate sources who happen to agree.
Something analogous is happening now with corporations claiming the First Amendment says they don’t have to comply with regulations they don’t want to comply with, because those regulations reflect ideas that are “controversial,” and they can’t be compelled to take a public position on a controversial idea, like, for example, that climate disruption is real. It’s a weird, important maneuver, at once complicated and pretty simple, and it’s usefully unpacked in a recent piece by our guest.
Katherine Li is an editorial fellow at the Lever, where the piece, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” appears. She joins us now by phone from Oakland, California. Welcome to CounterSpin, Katherine Li.
Katherine Li: Hi, Janine, very happy to be here. And let’s unpack this complicated piece.
JJ: Well, before we get to its current—you could say artful—employment, what is the “compelled speech” doctrine under the First Amendment? What do we think was the point of it when it was adopted?
KL: Well, as with the First Amendment, the compelled speech in the First Amendment—the original purpose is to say that the government cannot force people to say something they disagree with. That is perhaps illustrated in a very early compelled speech case that basically says that students do not have to stand up in school and salute the flag or the national anthem if they don’t want to.
Basically, it is to protect people from things that the government is forcing them to do, and it’s kind of to insulate people from government policies that impose things on them. The original intention, I do not believe, and experts I have interviewed for this story do not believe that the intention is for corporates to use such an argument in lawsuits.
Lever (5/23/24)
JJ: All right, well then, let me just move on to asking you to please lay out for us what you call, in the lead to this informative piece for TheLever.com, “the novel legal strategy” that some corporations are now “pioneering,” you say, which sounds very different than “relying on”; they’re kind of trying to make something new here. Explain what you’re seeing.
KL: So traditionally, like I have just mentioned it, is to protect people from the government imposing things on them. But what is considered as speech has really exploded when it comes to the corporate landscape: Are tax returns and contracts considered speech? What does that mean for our government’s power to look into financial wrongdoing, and prevent tax fraud and prevent money laundering, if all of those things are considered as speech, and the government cannot force anybody to “say” and disclose such information?
So the corporates have definitely spotted that, and they have been trying to argue that these financial documents are considered as speech. So it started with drug pricing, it starts with the Corporate Transparency Act, that once there’s a precedent in the court system that says these things are considered speech, more cases are being invited and more cases are coming in this specific landscape. So basically they are saying that these things are considered speech, and therefore the government cannot compel them to disclose this information.
At first it starts with financial information. And right now we’re seeing that in Medicare drug negotiations, it is also happening. These commercial speeches are, according to the lawyers and experts I have spoken to, they don’t believe that these things should be considered; they don’t believe that this so-called commercial speech should be afforded the same amount of protection as traditional political expression, for example, like protesting or writing something in the media, or being censored or being prevented or being forced to make a certain political expression in the non-commercial sense.
So that is why in the article, and according to my experts, they believe this is a new strategy, that corporates are basically exploiting this argument in order to bring more and more cases, and expand the definition of what speech is.
Verge (9/12/23)
JJ: Right. So then they seem as though they are complying with a law, or relying on a law, rather than sort of forging this new way.
Well, I think the examples really bring it home for people, what’s happening here, and there are a number of those examples in the piece, and each one is more disturbing and illuminating than the last. But one key one is, California has a new emissions disclosure law, that major companies doing business in California have to make public how much pollution they’re emitting throughout their supply chain. And we can understand why that’s important, because a company can say, “Well, our home office is zero emissions,” and that’s great, but what about your factories? What’s happening there?
So the public needs this information, this is information that the public is looking for, to get through the PR that these companies—fossil fuel companies in this case—might be putting out. And they’re saying, “No, we don’t need to comply with an emissions disclosure law, because that’s speech”?
KL: That is precisely what is happening. And the thing is, these emissions laws, they target companies with annual revenue above $1 billion. That is not asking our local coffee shop or the marketplace around the corner to figure out how much emissions are in their supply chain. It only really applies to large companies, especially oil companies, very large agricultural factory-farming companies.
So what initially caught my eye in the story is actually the arguments they have in the complaints that they filed against the emission disclosures law. The complaint, if you read it very closely, to anybody with common sense, it almost sounds ridiculous. Some of the arguments are saying that they fear that disclosing their emissions would allow activists, nonprofits and lawmakers to single out companies for investigation, which to me is just another word for accountability. I mean, that’s what our nonprofits and lawmaking agencies, it’s what they’re supposed to do, investigate and help create policy that can improve lives. So to me, it sounds like their effort to avoid accountability is very thinly veiled.
If you look at their complaint very closely, they also complain that this law would be compelling them to change their behavior. They complain that this law is changing and shaping their behavior, when, in reality, isn’t that what any laws and regulations are supposed to do? I mean, in any daily-life law, such as, like, hey, you cannot jaywalk, that is aiming to shape our behaviors, it’s aiming to change our behaviors.
So if you read the complaint closely, their efforts to avoid accountability, it’s honestly very thinly veiled. And it is, in a way, further expanding what is considered as speech, and also the whole circular argument that climate change is somehow “controversial.”
I also looked into the threshold of what could be considered as controversial when I first read their complaint. So then the lawyers I was talking to, the question I brought to them was, how low is the threshold to prove that something is scientifically controversial? And it turned out my instincts were correct, that the threshold of that is extremely low. They just have to prove that there’s a dissenting opinion. They don’t really have to prove that it is scientifically sound, and there’s no one to really check that.
JJ: So it’s just laid in a lap of particular courts, or particular decision makers. And it sounds as though they’re saying, particularly with that low threshold—or that very vague, undetermined threshold—that any regulation, because any regulation is about shaping behavior, it sounds like any regulation, they can dispute, because it’s aimed at asking them to do something different. I mean, am I misreading that, or is it really anti- any regulation whatsoever, in some way?
KL: In some way, that’s what it sounds like. Because if the complaint is about changing and shaping behavior, any regulations, that’s the point of it, changing behavior. And what is so wrong, what could be so wrong about forcing someone to lower their emissions at this point? It sounds like they’re saying that they shouldn’t lower their emissions, because either climate change doesn’t matter enough, or that climate change is not real. Like they said, they think it’s controversial.
JJ: Right. Well, just in case folks don’t understand, and of course we’ll send them to TheLever.com to read the piece, but you also have a food distribution and a restaurant supplies company, Cisco, that’s saying that you can’t force companies to read out notices of labor violations to workers, because they don’t want to. They don’t want to make that information available. And if they talk about labor violations in the workplace, well, that’s a “confession of sins,” and they shouldn’t be forced to do that. So this can reach into pretty much any area of our life, yeah?
KL: Yeah, definitely. Companies argue that if there has been a labor dispute, whatever the result is of that dispute, the company would post a sign somewhere in the facility, basically detailing the labor violation. But it doesn’t really achieve the same effect as reading it out in front of everybody, because it’s the difference between passively posting a sign somewhere and actively informing people what happened. And obviously, if a company has labor violations, they likely don’t want their workers to know. And if workers have also suffered the same violation, if the company reads it out, they might become more aware of it.
JJ: Well, it’s funny—if by funny, we mean perverse—because the narrative of capitalism that we often hear is that it relies on everyone being an informed economic actor, an individual actor who is making economic choices based on knowledge. And here we have corporations actively trying to reduce the available amount of information that a person could have to make decisions about what to buy or where to work or anything like that. It’s weird. This is how corporate capitalism subverts this notion that we hear about Capitalism 101, and building a better mousetrap, and all of that sort of thing.
Katherine Li: “They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore.”
KL: Definitely. Well, about the emissions case, part of their complaint is also that they might be more susceptible to boycott. I do believe that in this day and age, especially people of the younger generations, they’re much more aware of climate change, and a lot of times they would choose companies and products based on their perception of whether that company is being socially responsible enough.
So it’s obvious that a lot of corporates have caught up on that, and they’re now afraid that if they disclose how much they’re actually emitting, people are going to stop buying from them. They’re actually afraid that this information is going to get out and impact their profits, so that a lot of times their greenwashing or disinformation isn’t going to work anymore, because there will be a real concrete number for people to go on, and a number they cannot fake.
They could put on their website all they want, that we have this commitment in 10 years, we have this kind of green commitment; we’re going to become zero emissions by 2030. They could say what they want to say on their website, but once there’s a concrete number out there, none of that is going to work anymore. And they’re really afraid of that, clearly.
JJ: Afraid of an informed public.
Well, this only works with a certain kind of judicial landscape. I mean, you have to count on not getting laughed out of court with what looks to many people like a fairly transparent shenanigan, but obviously they believe that, for some reason, courts are going to be open to this particular kind of argument.
KL: Yes, unfortunately, multiple times courts have been open to this particular argument. And in terms of science, in California, the well-known case would be the Monsanto case.
Food & Water Watch (4/5/17)
For everyone who doesn’t know, Monsanto is a herbicide company. They make this herbicide called Roundup, and there is a certain chemical in it, where a lot of international scientists have said that it could potentially cause cancer in humans. So because science is never 100%, and that knowledge is constantly evolving, there is a loophole for them to say that there is contradicting science. And as we have later found out, Monsanto, the company, has also commissioned scientific studies to say that their product is safe.
And in California, that stood up in court. Because the court doesn’t really look at whether or not Monsanto has engineered this controversy that they’re claiming, this argument was allowed to pass California Proposition 65, which requires a warning label for a whole host of chemicals that could be cancerous and cause birth defects–Monsanto would not have to put that label on their specific herbicide product, because this whole “scientific controversy” thing was allowed to stand up in court.
So the consequences of that is now this argument was expanded. It’s not just one chemical anymore. It’s the entire mechanism of climate change that is being brought into question.
BioSpace (5/8/24)
But the good news here is that sometimes courts are also beginning to hold the line, and recently there have been some positive developments. If you look at the most recent case of the Medicare drug negotiations under the Inflation Reduction Act, I believe it is the US Chamber of Commerce and different pharmaceutical companies, they were arguing that the Medicare drug negotiations, that the Inflation Reduction Act, is trying to “compel” them to agree with a government-determined price, and that they’re saying that is compelled speech.
So they have brought that point to multiple federal courts, including, most recently I believe, a federal court in Ohio. And these courts have fortunately rejected this argument, basically blocked the case on multiple occasions. So I do believe that courts are becoming aware of that, and that they’re beginning to curb these arguments, because in the past, when they have allowed these arguments to pass, sometimes, likely in the next case, the argument becomes expanded.
JJ: Right. Well, I was going to push you further on that, in terms of, it sounds like courts are cottoning on and pushing back. Are there other policy or legislative responses that seem appropriate here, or is it mainly a matter for the courts? And then, do you have thoughts about—because I have not seen this in other reporting—what media might do in terms of disclosing this, putting some sunlight on this, as part of a pushback against what seems clearly like an anti-regulatory, anti–public information effort?
KL: Well, to answer the first question, I do believe this matter is mainly up to the courts, even though, in terms of lawmaking, there can be laws that make up for what the courts are not doing. At the end of the story that I wrote about this, I mentioned a doctrine called the major questions doctrine. A lot of times what the states are allowed to do and what the states are allowed to regulate, what the federal agencies are allowed to regulate in states, is significantly limited. So a lot of times, these things become left up to courts in a major case, to basically make a decision on whether what the individual states are doing is lawful or not.
I believe that if the federal regulatory agencies oftentimes could have more power to pass more sweeping regulations on these things, and that federal regulatory agencies could have more power to fight these law cases if they are sued on a particular point, for example, like the Inflation Reduction Act…. I believe that federal agencies should be given more power to decide, instead of leaving it up to the courts, because the court doesn’t always hold the line.
They’re beginning to, but, for example, the California emissions disclosure case, it’s still very much up in the air, and it’s an entirely new regulation. No other states have implemented it yet; it’s just California, and there are no federal regulations on how companies could be more accountable for the emissions they’re putting out.
And in terms of how media could report on this, I would say, a lot of times, this type of story, it’s very, very helpful to talk to lawyers, because a lot of the cases that I have found, and also trying to figure out how low the scientific threshold is to basically prove that something is controversial: the lawyers know. They are a treasure trove of past cases, because that is their job. And a lot of times, they really enjoy talking to journalists, laying out their cases, and basically walking you through the steps and loopholes that are in our law, because that is their profession.
I would also say, I can understand that sometimes it’s hard to write about something that doesn’t have a main human character in it. Sometimes it’s hard to make it interesting, and it could be easy to overlook these stories. But personally, I think that even a seemingly boring document could contain very interesting information.
For example, the initial complaint that’s filed against the California Emissions Disclosure Law, if you look at the information closely, it might look like a boring document, but the more you read, you’re like, “Wow, this doesn’t make sense. Am I hallucinating this, or is this real?” So then you go to a lawyer, and verify that information. Is this a trend I’m spotting? Is this a problem? Do you think it’s a problem? And these kind of stories could end up being very interesting.
And I would say that, also, it’s important to look into lobbying data, and frame the story looking at who is responsible, and not only looking at what the problem is. I feel like stories could become much more powerful when you look at the how, the mechanism, the larger mechanism that’s at work, instead of only focusing on one specific event or one isolated event that’s happening. Sometimes the more people, the more professionals, you talk to, you start to see a network and a storyline, and how there’s a loophole, and the mechanism of how things work behind the scenes.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, that’s excellent. We’ll end it there for now.
We’ve been speaking with Katherine Li. She’s editorial fellow at the Lever, online at TheLever.com, where you can find this informative article, “Corporations Are Weaponizing Free Speech to Wreck the World,” that we’ve been talking about. Thank you so much, Katherine Li, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
KL: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure.
The New York Times (4/8/24) cited “experts” who called Nicaragua charging Germany with facilitating genocide “a cynical move by a totalitarian government to bolster its profile and distract attention from its own worsening record of repression.”
When Nicaragua accused Germany of aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide in Gaza at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) last month, readers of corporate media might have seriously wondered whether Nicaragua’s case had any legitimacy.
The case targeted Germany as the second biggest supplier of arms to Israel, because the US, Israel’s biggest supplier, does not accept the court’s jurisdiction on this issue. The object (as Nicaragua’s lawyer explained) was to create a precedent with wider application: that countries must take responsibility for the consequences of their arms sales to avoid them being used in breach of international law.
Many in corporate media took a more jaundiced view. The Financial Times (4/8/24) led by telling readers, “The authoritarian government of Nicaragua accused Germany of ‘facilitating genocide’ in Gaza at the opening of a politically charged case.” The second paragraph in a New York Times article (4/8/24) cited “experts” who saw it “as a cynical move by a totalitarian government to bolster its profile and distract attention from its own worsening record of repression.” The Guardian (4/9/24) qualified its comment piece by remarking that “Nicaragua is hardly a poster child when it comes to respect for human rights.”
Double standards are evident here. If the US government were to do what it has failed to do so far, and condemn Israel’s genocidal violence, Western corporate media would not remind readers of US crimes against humanity, such as the Abu Ghraib tortures, extraordinary renditions, or the hundreds imprisoned without trial at Guantánamo. It’s hard to imagine Washington would be accused of “hypocrisy” (Guardian, 4/9/24) for calling out Israel’s crimes. Any condemnation of Israel by the US or one of its Western allies would be taken at face value—in clear contrast to the media’s treatment of such action by an official enemy country like Nicaragua.
Germany ‘as its finest’For El País (4/11/24), facilitating mass slaughter in Gaza is “Germany…at its finest,” because it it is “driven by its sense of responsibility stemming from a tragic history.”
Of establishment media, Spain’s El País (4/11/24) was perhaps the most vitriolic in its portrayal of Nicaragua. Its piece on the court case was headlined “The Worst Version of Nicaragua Against the Best Version of Germany.”
“The third international court case on the Gaza war pits a regime accused of crimes against humanity against a strong and legitimate democracy,” the piece explained. “It may be a noble cause, but its champion couldn’t be worse.”
The article, which relayed none of the evidence offered by either side, commented rather oddly that Germany was “at its finest” arguing the case, and that its “defense against Nicaragua’s charges is solid and its legitimacy as a democratic state is unassailable”—a comment presumably intended to contrast its legitimacy with “the Nicaraguan dictatorship.”
In addition to its article cited above, the New York Times (4/8/24) had a report more focused on the case itself. However, it was CNN (4/9/24) and Al Jazeera (4/8/24) that stood out as covering the case on its own merits rather than being distracted by animosity toward Nicaragua.
The negative presentation in much of the media was repeated when, later in April, they headlined that Nicaragua’s request had been “rejected” by the ICJ (e.g., AP, 4/30/24; NPR, 4/30/24), with the New York Times (4/30/24) again remembering to insert a derogatory comment about Nicaragua’s action being “hypocritical.” These followup reports largely overlooked the impact the case had on Germany’s ability to further arm Israel during its continued assault on Gaza.
Nicaraguan ‘Nazis’The New York Times (3/2/23) ran a headline equating the Nicaraguan Sandinistas with the German Nazi Party, based on the claim that “the weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents in the way that is done in Nicaragua is exactly what the Nazi regime did.”
Corporate media had been gifted their criticisms of Nicaragua by a report published at the end of February by the UN Human Rights Council. A “group of human rights experts on Nicaragua” (the “GHREN”) had produced its second report on the country. Its first, last year, had accused Nicaragua’s government of crimes against humanity, leading to this eyebrow-raising New York Times headline (3/2/23): “Nicaragua’s ‘Nazis’: Stunned Investigators Cite Hitler’s Germany.”
The GHREN’s leader, German lawyer Jan-Michael Simon, had indeed likened the current Sandinista government to the Nazis. Times reporter Frances Robles quoted Simon:
“The weaponizing of the justice system against political opponents in the way that is done in Nicaragua is exactly what the Nazi regime did,” Jan-Michael Simon, who led the team of UN-appointed criminal justice experts, said in an interview.
“People massively stripped of their nationality and being expelled out of the country: This is exactly what the Nazis did too,” he added.
It’s quite an accusation, given that the Nazis established over 44,000 incarceration camps of various types and killed some 17 million people. Robles gave few numbers regarding the crimes Nicaragua is accused of, but did mention 40 extrajudicial killings in 2018 attributed to state and allied actors, and noted that the Ortega government had in 2023 “stripped the citizenship from 300 Nicaraguans who a judge called ‘traitors to the homeland.’”
Robles also quoted Juan Sebastián Chamorro, a member of the Nicaraguan oligarchic family who are among the Sandinista government’s fiercest opponents; Chamorro claimed there was evidence of “more than 350 people who were assassinated.” Even if true, this would seem to be a serious stretch from “exactly what the Nazis did.”
Like most Western reporters, Robles—who also wrote the recent ICJ piece for the Times—gave no attention to the criticisms of the GHREN’s work by human rights specialists, who argued that the GHREN did not examine all the evidence made available to it and interviewed only opposition sources. For example, former UN independent expert Alfred de Zayas castigated its first report in his book The Human Rights Industry, calling it a “political pamphlet” intended to destabilize Nicaragua’s government.
Even if one takes the GHREN account at face value, the Gaza genocide is at least 100 times worse in terms of numbers of fatalities, quite apart from other horrendous elements, such as deliberate starvation, indiscriminate bombing, destruction of hospitals and much more. It’s unclear why the accusations against Nicaragua should delegitimize the case against Germany.
Hague historyIn 1986, the New York Times (6/28/86) reported that the ICJ found the US guilty of ”training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces,” and of “direct attacks on Nicaraguan oil installations, ports and shipping.”
Many media reports did mention Nicaragua’s long history of support for Palestine—which undermines the accusation of cynicism underlying the case—but few noted the Latin American country’s history of success at the Hague. As Carlos Argüello, the Nicaraguan ambassador to the Netherlands who took the lead at the ICJ, pointed out, Nicaragua has more experience at the Hague than most countries, including Germany. This began with its pioneer case against the US in 1984, when it won compensation of £17 billion (that was never paid) for the damage done to Nicaragua by the US-funded Contra war and the mining of its ports.
One notable exception to that historical erasure came from Robles at the Times (4/8/24), who did refer to the 1984 case. But the point was clearly not to remind readers of US crimes, or to demonstrate that Nicaragua is an actor to be taken seriously in the realm of international law. The two academics she quoted both served to portray the current case as merely “cynical.”
The first, Mateo Jarquín, Robles quoted as saying that the Sandinista government has “a long track record…of using global bodies like the ICJ to carve out space for itself internationally—to build legitimacy and resist diplomatic isolation.” Robles didn’t disclose Jarquín’s second surname, Chamorro. Like her source in the earlier article, he is a member of the family that includes several government opponents.
Robles also quoted Manuel Orozco, a former Nicaraguan working at the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue, whose major funders include the US Agency for International Development and the International Republican Institute, notorious for their role in promoting regime change, including in Nicaragua. Orozco told Robles that “Nicaragua lacks the moral and political authority to speak or advocate for human rights, much less on matters of genocide.”
‘Effectively siding with Germany’AP* (4/30/24) missed the significance of the ICJ holding that, “at present, the circumstances are not such as to require” an order forbidding Germany to ship weapons to Israel—namely, that Germany maintained that it already halted shipments of such weapons (Verfassungblog*, 5/2/24).
On April 30, the ICJ declined to grant Nicaragua its requested provisional measures against Germany, including requiring the cessation of arms deliveries to Israel. Headlining this outcome, the Associated Press (4/30/24) said the court was “effectively siding with Germany.” The outlet did, however, continue by explaining that the court had “declined to throw out the case altogether, as Germany had requested,” and will hear arguments from both sides, with a resolution not likely to come for years.
That was better than NPR‘s report (4/30/24), which only mentioned that the court was proceeding with the case in its final paragraph.
But German lawyer and professor Stefan Talmon (Verfassungblog, 5/2/24), clarified that the court’s ruling “severely limits Germany’s ability to transfer arms to Israel.”
“The court’s order was widely interpreted as a victory for Germany,” Talmon commented. “A closer examination of the order, however, points to the opposite.” He concluded that although the ICJ did not generally ban the provision of arms to Israel, it did impose significant restrictions on it by emphasizing Germany’s obligation to “avoid the risk that such arms might be used to violate the [Genocide and Geneva] Conventions.”
And Talmon pointed out that the court appeared to make its decision that an order to halt war weapons shipments was unnecessary based on Germany’s claim that it had already stopped doing so.
“By expressly emphasizing that, ‘at present’, circumstances did not require the indication of provisional measures, the Court made it clear that it could indicate such measures in the future,” Talmon wrote.
Establishment media, seemingly distracted by the “hypocrisy” of Nicaragua challenging a country whose “legitimacy as a democratic state is unassailable,” mostly failed to notice that its legal efforts were therefore at least partially successful: It forced Germany to back down from its unstinting support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and alerted German politicians to the fact that they are at risk of being held accountable under international law if they transfer any further war weapons.
“Do you condemn Hamas?” This question is a familiar response from corporate journalists and pro-Israel advocates whenever anyone urges the Israeli military to stop its offensive in Gaza (Declassified UK, 11/4/23; Forward, 11/10/23; Jewish Journal, 11/29/23). If you denounce Israel’s response to the attacks without condemning Hamas, the insinuation goes, you are defending the militant group and the killing of Israeli civilians.
If you don’t start off by condemning Hamas’ attack, the British pundit Piers Morgan (Twitter, 11/23/23) said, “why should anyone listen to you when you condemn Israel for its response?”
The International Criminal Court surely condemned Hamas when an ICC prosecutor, Karim Khan, sought arrest warrants for Hamas’ three principal leaders along with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his defense minister (Reuters, 5/21/24). That hasn’t helped the ICC in the press. By condemning both Hamas and Israel leaders for illegal acts of violence, the ICC is delegitimizing Israel, editorialists say.
‘A slander for the history books’The New York Post (5/20/24) was outraged by “the ICC’s morally perverse bid to seem ‘fair’ by also seeking warrants for some leaders of Hamas.”
“Lumping them together is a slander for the history books. Imagine some international body prosecuting Tojo and Roosevelt, or Hitler and Churchill, amid World War II,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (5/20/24) said. It added that “Israel has facilitated the entry of 542,570 tons of aid, and 28,255 aid trucks, in an unprecedented effort to supply an enemy’s civilians.”
For the record, the UN has estimated that Gaza needs 500 truckloads of humanitarian aid a day—so nearly four times as many as Israel has allowed in. Israeli soldiers have reportedly helped protesters block aid trucks (Guardian, 5/21/24), while the IDF has relentlessly targeted medical facilities (Al Jazeera, 12/18/23). And Israeli “forces have carried out at least eight strikes on aid workers’ convoys and premises in Gaza since October 2023,” according to Human Rights Watch (5/14/24).
The New York Post editorial board (5/20/24) engages in the same logic, saying Hamas leaders are “cold-blooded savages—who target innocent civilians for murder, rape and kidnapping,” while Israel is pure at heart: “law-abiding, democratic victims, who merely seek to eradicate the terror gang.”
Back on Planet Earth, Israel has targeted hospitals, journalists, schools and aid workers. The United Nations has declared a famine is underway (AP, 5/6/24), and its data show the death toll for Palestinians since October 7 is nearly 30 times larger than for Israelis, a testament to the conflict’s imbalance of might and ferocity. The UN estimates nearly 8,000 Gazan children have been killed (NPR, 5/15/24).
‘Digging its own grave’For the New York Times‘ Bret Stephens (5/21/24), the “decision to seek the arrest of three Hamas leaders along with Netanyahu” was part of a strategy to destroy Israel, “as it places Israel’s leaders on a moral par with a trio of terrorists.”
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (5/21/24), who is loved by the right-wing fanatics at the New York Post (4/28/17, 8/27/19, 12/29/19, 2/11/21) for his backward views on social issues and his desire to rob his critics of free speech rights, said that by going after both Israeli and Hamas leaders, the court was part of an “overall strategy” to bring about Israel’s downfall through alienation, as the equivalency “places Israel’s leaders on a moral par with a trio of terrorists.” In other words, it treats Israel as being morally equivalent to a group that has killed less than 1% as many children.
The Washington Post‘s opinion page (5/21/24) featured multiple sides in response to the news, including human rights scholar Noura Erakat, who said, if anything, Khan was too easy on Israel. But the Post’s roundtable also featured former Jerusalem Post editor-in-chief Avi Mayer, a pro-Israel public relations professional who left that paper amid turmoil (Forward, 12/15/23). He said comparing Israel to its “cruel and implacable foe against which it is defending itself will be met with wall-to-wall resistance and steely determination.”
The Post also featured Bush II and Trump administration hawk John Bolton, who ignored the accusations against Hamas altogether, saying the “ICC has finally and irreversibly begun digging its own grave”—not just because of the charge against Israel, but because the court is “untethered to any constitutional structure, unchecked by distinct legislative or executive authorities, and utterly unable to enforce its decisions.”
The Post could have found much more nuanced voices to critique Khan. Mayer is hardly a scholar looking at the situation with cold eyes; he’s a dedicated promoter of Israeli policy who only briefly worked as a newspaper editor (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 3/21/23). Bolton’s entire persona revolves around opposing the notion of international justice (Politico, 9/23/18; Washington Post, 10/10/18); the ICC could have opened a cat shelter and he would have found a way to argue that this harmed US interests. Meanwhile, one of the legal advisors who had recommended seeking arrest warrants for both Israeli and Hamas leaders was a former Israeli diplomat and Holocaust survivor (Forward, 5/23/24).
Across the pond, the editorial board of the Telegraph (5/21/24), the main print voice of British conservatism, said that the “moral equivalence” of Hamas and Israeli leaders was “absurd.” The London Times (5/21/24) simply said the ICC’s action wouldn’t help the situation in Gaza.
These views reflect the official line of the White House (CNN, 5/20/24), 10 Downing Street (Politico, 5/21/24) and Netanyahu (Reuters, 5/20/24).
An unsurprising outcomeChief ICC prosecutor Karim Khan, a British lawyer, compared Israeli actions to the British government saying “let’s drop a 2,000-pound bomb on the Falls Road” in response to IRA attacks (Jewish Chronicle, 5/26/24).
You just can’t win, can you? Had the ICC prosecutor sought arrest warrants only for Israeli leaders, we can only imagine that these same outlets would condemn it as a one-sided interpretation of the war. In other words, there is simply no scenario in which criticism or scrutiny of Israel can take place.
For those who have actually studied conflict and human rights, it is just not surprising that an international body would recognize war crimes by both the military of a recognized government and an armed faction dubbed a “terrorist” group. A United Nations panel found that while the separatist Tamil Tigers committed atrocities in the last days of the Sri Lankan civil war, the final government offensive caused the “deaths of as many as 40,000 civilians, most of them victims of indiscriminate shelling by Sri Lankan forces” (Washington Post, 4/21/11).
A 2020 Human Rights Watch report noted that Syrian and Russian government forces in the Syrian Civil War used “indiscriminate attacks and prohibited weapons,” while opposition groups carried out “serious abuses, leading arbitrary arrest campaigns in areas they control and launching indiscriminate ground attacks on populated residential areas.”
The news that the ICC was indicting members of a militant anti-government group along with leaders of the government that group opposes falls into that same unsurprising category.
In fact, Khan told the London Times (5/25/24) that he believed Israel had a right to defend itself and seek the return of the October 7 hostages, but not to enact collective punishment on the Palestinians. And “he did not understand, given his warnings to comply with international law over the past months, why anyone was surprised” at his announcement (Jewish Chronicle, 5/26/24).
Some editorial boards have been calling for an end to the butchery in Gaza (LA Times, 11/16/23; Boston Globe, 2/23/24). But there is still a loud, booming editorial voice that is in line with official thinking in Washington: There is no red line for Israel. Anything goes. No matter what atrocity it commits, editorialists will ignore it and proclaim Israel the victim.
The New York Times has become notorious for its role in laundering right-wing transphobia for its largely liberal audience (see, e.g., FAIR.org, 12/16/22, 5/11/23, 5/19/23). A recent article (5/20/24) about local school politics serves as yet another example of how the paper’s anti-trans agenda most likely flies under the radar of most readers—making its propaganda that much more effective.
The headline read, “NYC Parents Rebuked for Questioning Transgender Student-Athlete Rules.” The subhead explained further:
Over a dozen Democratic elected officials criticized a parent group that asked for a review of rules that let students play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.
It’s a framing clearly intended to portray the parents as reasonable—they just want to ask questions and review some rules!—and the city officials as censorious. After all, who rebukes people for just wanting to have a conversation?
‘Asked the city to review’The New York Times (5/20/24) framed a story about a transphobic resolution as “parents” being attacked for merely “questioning.”
The article, by education reporter Troy Closson, began by describing “a group of elected parent leaders”–representing District 2, one of six Manhattan school districts–who “asked the city to review education department rules allowing transgender students to play on sports teams that align with their gender identity.”
“Elected,” so they must be representative, and simply “asked…to review,” so there’s presumably nothing anyone should get upset about. At least, as far as Times readers would be able to tell.
And what was the response? Closson tells readers:
The schools chancellor, David C. Banks, called the proposal “despicable” and “no way in line with our values.”
Democratic officials also have responded to the parent council swiftly, and angrily.
In a letter made public on Monday, a coalition of 18 Democratic elected officials from New York called the proposal “hateful, discriminatory and actively harmful” to the city’s children.
New York City’s Democrats sure sound extreme! Closson did finally give readers at least a glimpse of the other side’s perspective:
The officials argued that while some parents say they were “simply asking for a conversation,” the resolution “was based in anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric” that has helped fuel harassment and mental health issues for young people. They demanded that the council formally rescind the resolution.
Toward the end of the piece, Closson acknowledged that, according to another council member, the council “received dozens of messages in opposition and only a handful in support in the lead-up to their meeting on the resolution.”
Crossing ‘political lines’The Times gave no further context about the resolution or the people behind it that could possibly make the officials’ reactions make sense.
Instead, to help readers understand how out of the mainstream those Democratic officials are, Closson wrote, “But opinions on this issue don’t necessarily break neatly along political lines.” He offered a poll of “registered voters statewide” that found about two-thirds support barring trans athletes from competing with others who share their gender identity, with Republican respondents 30 percentage points more supportive than Democrats.
Of course, New York state is far more conservative than New York City (5–4 Democrat to Republican statewide, versus about 7–1 in the city), so it’s not a very useful barometer of NYC public opinion.
But perhaps more importantly, is it really the opinions of ill-informed voters that should matter here? Or is it the safety and well-being of the city’s public school students?
Like most Times articles about trans politics that FAIR has analyzed (FAIR.org, 5/6/21, 6/23/22, 5/11/23), Closson’s piece marginalized the voices of those most impacted. The piece quoted no students; it quoted one trans person—an “educator who runs a local after-school program”—who opposed the resolution. The rest were officials and parent council members.
A pointless ‘review’The New York Times didn’t mention that the rules the resolution called for “reviewing” in fact are required under state law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of gender identity or expression (CNN, 5/11/24).
Reading about the incident in outlets focused on education news, you get a very different understanding of the situation—including what the resolution could do. And there’s much more backstory to these “concerned parents” than the Times lets on.
First of all, as ACLU lawyer (and trans parent in District 2) Chase Strangio pointed out at the meeting, New York City school guidelines on trans youth athletes already align with state law.
Indeed, when a Republican county executive tried to ban trans athletes from competing on women’s teams in nearby Nassau County, the state attorney general sent him a cease-and-desist letter for contravening New York’s law against gender identity discrimination. A state judge (CNN, 5/11/24) struck down the executive order shortly before the Times article on the school council resolution, suggesting that any sort of “review” of the city’s school anti-discrimination policy would likewise serve no purpose—other than scoring cheap political points by targeting a vulnerable student population.
That would be nothing new for some of the supposedly representative and reasonable leaders involved. For the real story here, you need a little bit of context about those leaders.
Community education councils in New York City, unlike school boards in many places, have no authority to change school policies; their resolutions are nonbinding and their role is advisory only. In part because of this—and because prior to 2021, council positions were filled by PTAs, not by popular vote—awareness of and participation in the elections are both extremely low, making them easy targets for small but organized activist groups. (In the 2021 elections, only 2% of eligible voters participated.)
Out of PLACEPLACE co-founder Maud Maron (The City, 4/28/23) called New York City schools an “oppressor woke environment where DOE employees make them pledge allegiance to their LGBTQI+ religion.”
In New York, just such a group took advantage of that low-hanging fruit: PLACE NYC. Founded in 2019 to oppose city efforts to address some of the worst school segregation rates in the country by reforming screened admissions and gifted programs, PLACE-endorsed candidates won a whopping 40% of council seats in the 2023 elections (The City, 4/28/23).
PLACE does not advertise a particular stance on LGBTQ issues, but its leadership overlaps with other “parent rights” groups that take anti-trans positions, including the far-right Moms for Liberty.
The anti-trans resolution in New York City’s District 2 passed by 8 votes to 3. Of these eight concerned council members, seven were endorsed by PLACE in the 2023 elections, including three who are in leadership roles at the organization.
Leonard Silverman, president of the council, was quoted by the Times; it didn’t mention that he is also a founder of PLACE. PLACE treasurer Craig Slutkin was another “yes” vote.
Another founder (and former president) of PLACE, Maud Maron, sponsored the anti-trans resolution. Maron is a well-known local activist, a proud member of the Moms for Liberty who, in an unsuccessful long-shot bid for Congress last year, advocated for a trans youth athlete ban. Maron and fellow council and PLACE member Charles Love spoke at a recent Moms for Liberty panel (Chalkbeat, 1/18/24).
‘No such thing as trans kids’A city councilmember characterized PLACE leaders’ private texts as “demeaning, transphobic smears that are reminiscent of playground bullies” (The74, 12/14/23).
Back in December, education news site The74 (12/14/23) reported on a leaked WhatsApp chat among Maron, fellow council and PLACE member Danyela Egorov and other parent leaders. In it, Maron declared that “there is no such thing as trans kids.” When a parent expressed concern about how many LGBTQ kids were in her child’s school, Maron responded, “The social contagion is undeniable.” She also falsely claimed of gender-affirming hormone therapy: “Some of these kids never develop adult genitalia and will never have full sexual function. It’s an abomination.”
Three months later, Maron called an anonymous high school student who penned a pro-Palestinian op-ed in their school paper a “coward,” and accused them of “Jew hatred” in the New York Post (2/24/24). After numerous parent and official complaints about her conduct, the NYC Department of Education (The74, 4/18/24) investigated and issued an order last month to Maron to
cease engaging in conduct involving derogatory or offensive comments about any New York City Public School student, and conduct that serves to harass, intimidate or threaten, including but not limited to frequent verbal abuse and unnecessary aggressive speech that serves to intimidate and cause others to have concern for their personal safety.
This very relevant context was reported just a few weeks before Closson’s Times article.
PLACE and its controversial members and history are well known among local education activists and reporters. So Closson, who specifically covers the Times‘ “K–12 schools in New York City” beat, would appear to be either remarkably uninformed about his beat or intentionally obscuring the background to his story.
‘An attempt to roll back protections’Chalkbeat‘s report (4/23/24) put the focus on “protections for trans students,” not on “questioning” parents.
Meanwhile, Chalkbeat (4/23/24), which covers education news in a handful of large US cities, covered the council meeting with the headline “An Attempt to Roll Back Protections for Trans Students in Sports Angers NYC Students and Families.”
Unlike Closson, reporter Liz Rosenberg quoted a number of people directly impacted by the resolution: a local trans teen, a local seventh grader who had started a Gay/Straight Alliance, and a parent who had moved to New York from Florida to protect her young trans child from the anti-trans laws there.
Rosenberg explained Maron’s history, including the cease-and-desist letter she had received only a week before the meeting. She quoted experts who described the documented negative impacts on trans kids when exclusionary or restrictive anti-trans laws are enacted, including a sharp rise in K–12 hate crimes against LGBTQ students.
Over at The74 (3/22/24), Marianna McMurdock also provided the back story on Maron. She noted, as Closson did not, that “dozens of community members spoke out against the gender resolution with only one expressing support.” According to McMurdock, the messages received by the council about the resolution were even more lopsided than Closson reported: 173–2.
Where Closson wrote that it was “unclear…whether the issue has affected sports teams in the city,” but that “some parents worried that their children could be disadvantaged or injured if transgender girls joined girls’ teams,” even non-local outlet Politico (3/20/24) noted directly that there was no evidence that any cisgender girls in the district had been harmed by the city schools’ policy.
In other words, it’s not terribly difficult to provide the kind of context that helps readers understand what’s “true and important” about this story. But on trans issues, the New York Times has proven itself time and again less interested in what’s true and important than in acting as a trojan horse for organized right-wing transphobia.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
CUED (5/15/24): “A large share of Amazon warehouse workers report facing financial strain,
including difficulties meeting basic needs.”
A new report (5/15/24) from the Center for Urban Economic Development at the University of Illinois/Chicago reflects the largest nationwide study of Amazon workers to date, some 1,500 Amazon workers across 451 facilities in 42 states. The big takeaway: Roughly half of Amazon’s frontline warehouse workers are struggling with food and housing insecurity, with a third relying on public assistance programs.
Now, the Washington Post, owned by Amazon chair Jeff Bezos, has heard of the Center. The paper quoted it in a 2022 piece (12/10/22) about robots that led with the news that “Amazon has robotic arms that can pick and sort cumbersome items like headphones or plushy toys.” Oh, and “other companies are making progress, too.”
And even in a 2020 piece (9/3/20) on how overworked and exhausted warehouse workers were “bracing for a frenzied holiday rush.” Though beleaguered Amazon workers came in at the end, after Kohl’s and Wayfair, Best Buy and Target and so on. Bezos’ paper allows some pointed criticism of Amazon; it’s just often in “opinion” pieces, like a 2020 oped from Alex Press (4/25/20).
So we’ll wait and see if the paper gives proper news coverage to what is incontrovertibly a news story: the clear association, as report co-author Beth Gutelius put it, between “the company’s health and safety issues, and experiences of economic insecurity among its workforce.”
Featured Image: Photo of Amazon warehouse worker from CUED report (5/15/24).
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240524.mp3Law enforcement at UCLA looks on as student peace protesters are attacked by a right-wing mob (CNN, 5/16/24).
This week on CounterSpin: As an historic catastrophe, the deep and myriad impacts of Israel’s assault on Palestinians will not be fully understood until years from now, if then. That only adds urgency to present-day resistance to the collateral assault—on the ability to witness, to record and to remember. And of course to protest. The violent, state-sponsored attacks on college students and faculty across the country, who are standing in solidarity with Palestinians and opposed to colleges’ investment in the war and occupation, are showcasing many things—among them the abandonment by many educational institutions of their responsibility to protect not only students, but the space in which they can speak and learn freely.
When we spoke with historian Ellen Schrecker in 2017, she noted that the power of the movement associated with Joseph McCarthy was not the man himself, but the “collaboration of the employers, of the mainstream media, of the legal system, you name it, to go along with this anti-Communist purge.” And while many people feel comforted that McCarthy the man was eventually censured by the Senate, the truth is “the American political spectrum narrowed [and] a whole bunch of ideas and causes kind of disappeared from American political discourse and American political life.”
We hear again today from historian and author Ellen Schrecker, co-editor of the new book The Right to Learn: Resisting the Ring-Wing Attack on Academic Freedom, from Beacon Press.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240524Schrecker_.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Amazon.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240524Banter.mp3
Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth‘s Steven Rosenfeld about election transparency for the May 17, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240517Rosenfeld.mp3Voting Booth (5/9/24) has investigated Trump loyalists’ election denial strategies.
Janine Jackson: The Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump has proven surprisingly tenacious, perhaps, in part, because it is so big and vague, and perhaps, in part, due to a corporate press corps that are constitutionally incapable of saying sometimes there are not two sides with the truth in the middle.
Based on the tenacity and the utility of that lie, Trumpists are continuing the work of undermining US electoral processes in the run up to the 2024 race. Besides saying, “Trump! Am I right?” is there more we might do to break through the disinformation and gird ourselves for similar future efforts?
Steven Rosenfeld reports on transparency and other electoral issues for VotingBooth.media. He joins us now by phone from California. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Steven Rosenfeld.
Steven Rosenfeld: Well, I’m delighted to be here. Thank you.
JJ: I want to ask you about the Election Education channel that you’ve written about, but first, just some context. Even if you don’t think anyone’s going to go back and say Trump actually won, there is a possibility of creating enough chaos, confusion and controversy around elections that people can say, “Well, I don’t know what went on, so I’ll believe who I want to believe.” Trumpists don’t have to convince you of the Big Lie if they sow enough doubt. That’s kind of the playing field we’re on.
SR: Well, that is true. If you think about what happened since 2020, there were 60-something lawsuits, election challenges filed after election day by Trump and his allies in the Republican party and other nonprofits that are aligned with Republicans. Courts, unlike state legislatures and political campaigns, actually have rules of evidence. You’re not allowed to lie in court. If you go into court and you present lies and you can’t back things up with evidence or facts that can be duplicated by somebody else, you’ll lose your law license, and that’s what’s happened with Rudy Giuliani and a whole bunch of others.
But winning in the court of legal opinion is not the same as winning in the court of public opinion. So what’s happened since 2020 is these legislators in states like Arizona and other places have created these audits and these investigations where the goal, really, was not to prove that Trump won, but it was to get on the news week after week and month after month, especially on the television channels and the online platforms that are favored by the Trump supporters and right wingers, and just plant those seeds of doubt.
Steven Rosenfeld: “The goal, really, was not to prove that Trump won, but it was to get on the news week after week and month after month…and just plant those seeds of doubt.”
They have people on these channels and they talk about technical things that no one could understand, but people would just nod and go “Okay, okay,” and so what you ended up getting was you can win in court but lose in the court of public opinion. So these folks have basically been winning the propaganda war, and they’ve been doing it just as you said, by planting seeds of doubt and basically saying political tribal loyalties, “How could that possibly happen?” All this kind of stuff. And that’s brought us to today.
JJ: It’s a particular example, it’s not a sole example, but it is a kind of epicenter of this kind of thing: You looked at the Election Education channel on Telegram. Tell us a little about what that is and what they are up to that is currently and potentially meaningful.
SR: When I was on the floor of the Arizona recount, which was in an old basketball arena in Phoenix, this was run by the Cyber Ninjas, and the state senate in that state said we’re going to take possession of all the ballots in Maricopa County, which is, I forget, second or third largest jurisdiction in the country. So, 1.2 million ballots. They had a lot of volunteers come in who were basically patriotic citizens who thought, “My God, something went wrong. I gotta do something to help figure out what happened.”
So a lot of these folks are emblematic of the grassroots wing of the “election integrity movement” or the pro-Trump part of the Republican party. They call themselves an election integrity movement. They went to other platforms like Parler and Telegram, and they stayed in touch there.
Now, this is not the same as the people who have really tried to become professional agitators, the people like Mike Lindell and others who’ve gone around the country speaking at Republican Party county meetings and have basically turned their livelihoods into holding forth with all these conspiracies that were based on things they claimed were happening and couldn’t be proven and “invisible hidden hands” and “the world’s out to get us” kind of stuff. And I’m not making any of this up. I won’t get into the details. The point is the details are really hard to follow, but people just nod and go along.
But below that, to answer your question, is on these pro-Trump, right of center social media platforms, you have these channels. They’re sort of pages where people share information and they talk and they communicate and they have a community there. And I would periodically go and see what these folks are saying. And I found this one channel on Telegram, which is one of the platforms, and it’s called the Election Education channel, and it’s run by a woman who is based in Washington state, and she is different than the folks who are in Trump’s immediate orbit. Because the folks in Trump’s immediate orbit will say—there’ll be a lot of cliches: “It was stolen.” “It was electronically hacked.” “Oh, they’re fabricating voters.” “Oh, they’re making up voter lists.” “Oh, they’re stealing ballots.”
These folks instead, at this Election Education channel, they decided to try to learn about the way elections work. And what I mean by that is there are a lot of subsystems and steps with a lot of bureaucratic and technical procedures that really follow the start to the finish of elections. So the whole voter registration system has its own rules and its own data, and then the whole ballot counting system, the vote counting system, is another set of computers and analytics and records and data. So they’ve discovered this and what they’ve tried to do is they’ve tried to teach themselves about it because they don’t trust talking to election officials and election officials most often don’t really want to talk to them or they lose patience.
So what’s happened is these folks, especially on this Election Education channel, I found more than a hundred really pretty well done graphics. It’s not like a bumper sticker, but they’re charts that can be read in five or ten seconds, and they have identified all these little steps and technicalities of running elections, and everywhere possible, they’ve tried to figure out, “How can this be used against us?”
So they’re emblematic of the phrase or cliche that a little bit of knowledge can be a dangerous thing, because they’re starting with something that’s factual and they just spin off the deep end. And they come from this mindset, “Well, anything that can be done against us will be done against us. And if anything is possible, it means it probably is happening somewhere. And even if people are trying to operate in good faith, like poll workers, they don’t know what’s happening invisibly inside their machines.” And they just go on and on this way.
And this is really different from the people surrounding Trump at the end of 2020 because they’re not just targeting the candidate, they’re targeting the system. When things get close in the fall, if they are close, it’s going to be a zillion targets.
JJ: So they’ve identified, they’ve broken down the different steps in the election process, and they’re saying, every step of the way, there can be subterfuge.
The Atlanta Voice (5/7/24) on new restrictive voter registration laws in Georgia: “The victory is sweet especially for some that believe the 2020 Presidential election was ‘stolen’.”
SR: Let’s just put this in the context of what you’re hearing about right now. So in early May, the governor of Georgia signed a bill that allows mass election challenges or challenges of voter registrations. And this had been in law before, and literally less than 10 people in 2020 tried to challenge the voter registrations of over a hundred thousand voters who obviously predominantly lived in the democratic epicenters, the blue cities, lower income communities, college campuses and things like that.
So the governor signed a bill allowing this to actually be expanded six months from now towards the ’24 presidential election in November. What you have in these narratives as a backdrop to what you read on the Trump social media channels is, “The Democrats are fabricating voters. The voter lists are actually not up to date, and that’s on purpose, because what they’re doing is they’re finding people who are not voting and they’re filling out ballots in their names, and they’re doing this electronically, and they’re doing this with mailed out ballots, and they’re doing it on Election Day so that when they find out that people haven’t come in, they can just push through five or ten thousand votes as needed, and this is how they’re going to screw us.”
And that level of paranoia—I could tell you practically why that is very unlikely, because there are too many other checks and balances in the actual data and records to get away with something like that where it wouldn’t be caught very early and immediately and quarantined and found and fixed and corrected. But the point, what I’m saying is, this is the rhetoric and the crazy-making around just this one little step at the start of the process.
So what people in the mainstream media and in election defense circles have not acknowledged is this same level of focus and what I would call craziness or paranoia, they’ve got scripts or scenarios every step of the way through the final certification, which comes weeks after Election Day. They don’t trust the machines, or they don’t trust the testing. They don’t trust how ballots might be delivered from a voting site to a counting center. I mean, it just goes on and on and on and on.
They don’t know what they don’t know. So what do I mean by that? They do not know, or they never say, what security measures might be in place to quarantine problems. They don’t know what other data or records occur upstream might be used to double check and say, “Wait a second, this isn’t right. It doesn’t match.” They don’t know, and they never say, what is the scale of proposed impacts here, are we talking about ten or a hundred or a thousand votes?
So it becomes this crazy-making, spinning kind of mindset that will never be satisfied. And even if you respond to one thing, there’s always going to be something else. It’s always going to be a “What about this?” and “What about that?”
JJ: Well, I want to say a few things—that you’ve actually said, but just to lift them up—for one thing, to show that it’s a rhetorical kind of thing, these folks are not saying, “If you did this, then I would believe that the process was clean.” They’re not offering solutions, they’re not offering things that might be done to be introduced in the process, and then we would accept the results. They are emphatically not doing that.
And then let me just tack onto that, you have written, actually, voting systems are not black boxes; there is data, there is ballot-centered evidence that can be verified. So it’s two things; it’s both, there are things that we can use to check and to make these processes transparent, and also, they don’t want to do that. They don’t want agreed-upon, evidentiary-based things that we can all see and say, “All right, this actually went according to rules.”
SR: That’s exactly right. For example, the attorney general’s race in Arizona, after the official result was in, there was a several hundred-vote margin, which means it went to an official recount. It turned out that in one county they didn’t count 500 votes, 500 ballots. And people knew what to look for to basically make sure that the number of voters equals the number of ballots. Very early on they would’ve seen there was an inventory problem, there was a mismatch. But instead it took nine weeks, nearly. It was late December before that recount was over. And in that nine week period, you can just imagine the volume of partisan propaganda that occurred.
So what’s happening is these folks, they’re learning about how elections work, they don’t know, or they didn’t know then, where to look to basically solve the most basic questions. Does the number of ballots equal the number of voters? And then you can drill down. You can make sure that the votes on each ballot, if they’re not totally sloppy, match what’s in the final spreadsheet. And if you want to argue about the sloppy ballots, you can find them very quickly. That’s what lawyers argue over in recounts, “Do I have a vote? Is it for my candidate or the other candidate or neither of us?” And they don’t do any of that.
JJ: Well, finally, I know that you have heard, “Let’s just not talk about these people. That only elevates them, that only spotlights them.” And I guess I see what people are saying? But at the same time, Trump won in 2016, he became the freaking president based on all manner of nonsense and straight up lying. And so I don’t know what we get from ignoring that, but we should certainly come at it smarter.
And so I want to ask you, what would you be asking from reporters? And I want to say, especially at the local level—you know, we can get big chin-scratching ideas pieces in the national media, but local reporting on the election is going to be really meaningful. “What happened here? What actually happened?”
What role do you see for reporters who aren’t, like you, specifically dedicated to issues of electoral processes and transparency, but they’re going to be the ones that we look to for reporting claims of fraud or claims of poll worker bias and so on in November. What would you like to put in reporters’ minds, maybe?
The Detroit Free Press (11/5/20) debunked a widely-shared Trumpist claim that late-arriving ballots were smuggled into a Detroit counting center.
SR: Well, I can tell you very simply, most local reporters, and this is also true of the people who come to observe elections, they don’t know what they’re seeing. They’re standing behind a stanchion or at a distance and they don’t really know what people are looking at as they’re shuffling ballot return envelopes or ballots, or looking at a computer screen to check signatures or something else.
What I would hope is that people who actually know the way things work could do some proactive education to tell journalists who are going to be covering the swing counties and the swing states to literally help them understand what they are seeing as the process inches forward. It’s not hard to do if you know what to look for.
There aren’t that many key decision points, and at least at that point, at the very worst, if the counting takes days or weeks, and the editors are saying, “I need a story by five o’clock, what are you going to do? What do you got?” At least then, you will actually be covering what’s real instead of covering the made-up crazy things, like “The ballots are being smuggled in the next room.” At least it could come back to what’s real, as opposed to what’s made up. And I think that’s the best we can hope for, is to try to nip the disinformation rumors in the bud. And that’s where they’ll start, in these swing counties, in these swing states, with these local reporters and local influences.
JJ: Alright, then we’ll end it there for now. We’ve been speaking with Steven Rosenfeld. You can find his piece, “Trump Loyalists Preview Strategies to Upend 2024 Election,” online at VotingBooth.media. Steven Rosenfeld, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
SR: Well, thank you so much for having me.
NOAA (4/15/24) found temperature levels in every ocean high enough to cause coral bleaching.
Record levels of heat in the ocean are causing once-colorful coral reefs around the world to bleach a ghostly white. In April, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced the planet’s fourth mass coral-bleaching event on record—the second in the last decade.
While they might look like plants, corals are actually invertebrate animals related to jellyfish. They get their vibrant colors from tiny algae that live on them and provide them with food. But when ocean temperatures become too hot, corals get stressed and expel the algae, losing their food source and color. Starving coral can recover if their environments improve, but the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts that even with the Paris Agreement’s allotted warming of 1.5°C over pre-industrial levels, 70–90% of the world’s coral reefs will still die.
Because coral reefs provide such vibrant ecosystems for sea life, mass coral death will impact economies and food security for humans as well. By protecting coasts, sustaining fisheries, generating tourism and creating jobs, it is estimated that coral reefs provide ecosystem services worth trillions of dollars each year (MIT Science Policy Review, 8/20/20; GCRMN, 10/5/21).
ABC News (7/25/23) reported last year that “ocean temperatures have a strong connection to climate change”—but didn’t mention what climate change is connected to.
In the past year alone, we’ve seen staggering and unprecedented ocean temperatures amid widespread heatwaves. Last summer, water temperatures of more than 100°F were recorded off the coast of Florida (ABC, 7/25/23). Scientists say the El Niño weather phenomenon, solar activity and a massive underwater volcanic eruption have played a role in recent supercharged ocean temperatures, but the biggest cause of this coral crisis is undisputed: climate change. The IPCC reports that it’s “virtually certain” ocean temperatures have risen unabated since 1970, absorbing more than 90% of excess heat from the climate system. We also know that the burning of fossil fuels changes the climate more than any other human activity does.
Therefore, in order to give the public the most complete understanding of what’s going on—and how we can fix it—reporting on coral bleaching should not only link the phenomenon to climate change, but link climate change to its main culprit: the fossil fuel industry. While much reporting deserves credit for clearly making this connection, some reports from major outlets were still behind, implying the climate crisis might be some sort of act of God, rather than something humans have caused—and have the power to mitigate.
Good news about bad newsCoral bleaching is bad news, but I’d like to take a rare moment to highlight the good news, too: A lot of reporting on this crisis was thorough, setting a solid example of how the increasing number of climate change-related phenomena should be reported on.
Vox (4/26/24) spells it out: “Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period.”
Vox (4/26/24) dedicated a whole piece to climate change’s effects on coral, making that fossil fuel connection. Senior environmental reporter Benji Jones wrote:
Ultimately, the only real solution is reducing carbon emissions. Period. Pretty much every marine scientist I’ve talked to agrees. “Without international cooperation to break our dependence on fossil fuels, coral bleaching events are only going to continue to increase in severity and frequency,” [NOAA marine scientist Derek] Manzello said.
The New York Times (4/15/24) made the fossil fuel connection, too, in an article by Catrin Einhorn: “Despite decades of warnings from scientists and pledges from leaders, nations are burning more fossil fuels than ever and greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise.”
NPR dedicated an episode of All Things Considered (4/17/24) to scientists’ work to breed heat-tolerant corals and algae, in hopes that they can help restore reefs. The piece, by Lauren Sommer and Ryan Kellman, outlined this work’s promise—and its limitations. Heat-tolerant algae may not share as many nutrients with the coral, potentially causing the coral to grow more slowly and reproduce later. Regulators will need to assess whether these lab-grown corals are safe for wild populations and their ecosystems as a whole. Logistically, the sheer amount of heat-tolerant coral needed to replace affected reefs is vast, and it’s only a temporary solution.
“It’s not our ‘get out of jail free’ card,” said Australian coral biologist Kate Quigley:
Maybe that gets us to 2030, 2050, for a very few number of species that we can work with. If we don’t have an ocean to put them back in that’s healthy, no amount of incredible technology or money is worth it.
The episode ended with an acknowledgment that these scientific mitigations are meant only to buy time while humans work to halt climate change, which will require “cutting heat-trapping emissions from the largest source—burning fossil fuels—and switching to alternative energy sources like solar and wind.”
All Things Considered’s coverage of the scientists’ work was impactful because it took time to explain that creating these heat-tolerant corals was an important mitigation, but that the ultimate solution is to cut fossil fuels. Without the latter, the former would be in vain.
Capable of accountabilityAs a media critic for an organization that’s been at this since 1986, to me it’s heartening when news outlets’ work actually improves. It’s definitely not yet time to pop the champagne—there’s still a chronic lack of clear reporting linking climate disasters to fossil fuels, as FAIR has noted in coverage of last year’s wildfires (7/18/23, 8/25/23), climate protests (9/29/23), the potential breakdown of a crucial Atlantic current (7/31/23), overstating the potential of new carbon-capture technology (1/4/24) and more. But these few coral-focused pieces offer hope that some outlets might be improving their climate reporting practices to include accountability. At the very least, it proves they are certainly capable.
Aside from the effects of the climate crisis becoming harder and harder to ignore each year, there is a commendable movement to train journalists on how best to report on climate through a number of initiatives and organizations. There’s a lot of work to do, but these stories indicate progress since Big Media was applauding Big Oil’s efforts to clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989 (Extra!, 3–4/90) and giving platforms to “scientists” on Big Oil’s payroll who asserted climate change was not occurring (Extra!, 11–12/04, 5–6/07).
The new denialCNN (5/9/24) waited until the the 24th paragraph (out of 24) to tell readers that we “need to curb climate-warming carbon emissions.”
Climate denial today is more nefarious. Due to the unanimity and widespread knowledge of the scientific consensus, respectable outlets can no longer parrot views that the Earth isn’t warming. What they can do is bury or gloss over information on its primary cause, who profits off of it, and what needs to be done to prevent it from getting much worse.
In a piece on the potential of artificial reefs to mitigate this crisis that linked coral bleaching to climate change, CNN‘s Michelle Cohan (5/9/24) waited until the very last paragraph to mention the need to “curb climate-warming carbon emissions.” There’s nothing untrue about that statement, but it doesn’t tell you where those emissions come from, and leaves open the interpretation that “curbing” emissions can come from carbon capture and storage—a strategy that is largely industry greenwashing (FAIR.org, 1/4/24).
Despite likely short-form word limits, a solutions-oriented piece like this does a disservice to readers—and the scientists working on saving corals—by giving such an incomplete sketch of the necessary long-term change. It would benefit from a clear explanation that a) we need to phase out fossil fuels and b) alternative energy sources already exist, are reliable, and are more affordable than fossil fuels already. It’s not arduous or wordy to do so. All Things Considered did most of it in one sentence.
An ABC piece (4/15/24) by Leah Sarnoff and Daniel Manzo covered the coral-bleaching event, but only mentioned climate change in passing toward the end. Otherwise, “warming oceans” were just depicted as something that happened, with no clear connection or cause.
In an article expressing the dire condition of the reefs, the Washington Post‘s Rachel Pannett (4/18/24) likewise made the link to climate change only once: “Climate change is the greatest threat to the Great Barrier Reef, and coral reefs globally,” said Roger Beeden, the chief scientist of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. There was another quote from a research director with the Australian nonprofit Climate Council, who merely noted that the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef is “a disaster at our doorstep.”
It’s important to express the dire condition the reefs are in, and the devastating risks it poses to ocean and human life. But by only mentioning “climate change” in passing, and not discussing its causes, it comes across as a natural but unfortunate phenomenon. Not highlighting its causes means not highlighting its solutions, either. The result is a potentially paralyzing doomsday narrative that is more likely to dampen than galvanize necessary climate action—especially against fossil fuels.
‘Heat stress’The word “climate” never appears in this Washington Post piece (4/15/24).
Another Washington Post piece (4/15/24), by Amudalat Ajasa, mentioned the “heat stress” on corals, but not even climate change, let alone the culpability of fossil fuels. This piece quoted NOAA’s Manzello, saying that this global event should be a wake-up call, but didn’t elaborate on what that wake-up call would be for. Wake up to do what? This piece didn’t explain.
The piece also took a grave tone, describing the ghastly reefs off the coast of Florida, Australia and the Caribbean island of Bonaire. It quoted Francesca Virdis, a chief operating officer at Reef Renewal Bonaire: “It’s hard to find a silver lining or a positive note with everything happening.”
The article explained the role of El Niño—a naturally occurring climate pattern that warms areas of the Pacific every 2–7 years—and the hope that it will soon let up and give way to La Niña, its cooler counterpart, but did not explain that the phenomenon plays a smaller role than ongoing, human-caused warming. The aforementioned Vox piece also discussed the role of El Niño, but was sure to specify that reefs have been collapsing long before this current crisis.
The feeling of alarm is justified, but journalists should remind readers that the coral bleaching crisis—and climate change as a whole—are not totally uncontrollable acts of nature. We know what is to blame. While it may be too late to avoid breaching the 1.5°C limit even if we cut emissions tomorrow, the sooner we cease burning fossil fuels, the more catastrophic impacts we’ll avoid.
The message is urgent and dire, but there’s plenty that humans—especially those in power—can do, and there’s plenty journalists can do to make the public aware.
FEATURED IMAGE: NOAA photos of a coral before and after bleaching. (This particular coral recovered from the event.)
New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn says “good media” (by which he most certainly means the New York Times) is a “pillar of democracy.” Talking to Ben Smith, editor-in-chief of the Semafor news site (5/5/24), Kahn elaborated:
One of the absolute necessities of democracy is having a free and fair and open election where people can compete for votes, and the role of the news media in that environment is not to skew your coverage towards one candidate or the other, but just to provide very good, hard-hitting, well-rounded coverage of both candidates, and informing voters.
By way of explaining “the essential role of quality media in informing people about their choice in a presidential election,” Kahn summed up how he sees the Times covering Campaign 2024:
It is true that Biden’s agenda is more in sync with traditional establishment parties and candidates. And we’re reporting on that and making it very clear.
I put it to you that presenting that as the first thing to say about the election—which candidate is more pro-establishment?—is both a peculiar view of what’s at stake in 2024 and, at the same time, a good way to skew coverage toward one of the two major-party candidates: Donald Trump.
‘Issues people have’New York Times* executive editor Joe Kahn talked to Semafor* (5/5/24) about the “big push” his paper is making to “reestablish our norms and emphasize independent journalism.”
But Kahn is committed to denying that the Times—the most powerful agenda-setting news outlet in the United States—has any say over what issues are considered important:
It’s our job to cover the full range of issues that people have. At the moment, democracy is one of them. But it’s not the top one—immigration happens to be the top [of polls], and the economy and inflation is the second. Should we stop covering those things because they’re favorable to Trump and minimize them?
Should the Times stop covering the economy? No, of course not. But it should stop covering it in a way that overemphasizes inflation over other measures of economic health. In 2023, as increases in wages outpaced inflation in the United States, the paper talked about “inflation” six times as often as it talked about “wage growth” (FAIR.org, 1/5/24).
On immigration, the Times should not be treating calls from local Democratic leaders for greater resources to help settle refugees as “growing pressure” on Biden “to curb record numbers of migrants crossing into the United States” (New York Times, 1/4/24; FAIR.org, 1/9/24).
What Times critics are calling for is not censorship, as Kahn pretends, but a recognition that the paper is not merely holding up a mirror to the world, but making choices about what’s important for readers to know—and that those choices have real-world consequences, including in terms of the issues voters think are important.
Kahn defended his paper as giving “a pretty well-rounded, fair portrait of Biden”—stressing that it had covered what it saw as the positive achievements of his administration in foreign policy, which provides some insight into the core politics of the New York Times:
his real commitment to national security; his deep involvement on the Ukraine war with Russia; the building or rebuilding of NATO; and then the very, very difficult task of managing Israel and the regional stability connected with the Gaza war.
The fact that Kahn thinks that Biden’s handling of Gaza reflects well on the president suggests that Kahn’s father having been on the board of CAMERA (Intercept, 1/28/24)—a group dedicated to pushing news media to be ever more pro-Israel—may not be the irrelevant antisemitic dogwhistle that Kahn dismissed it as.
‘Some coverage of his age’Surely the New York Times (2/9/24) running at least 26 stories on the subject in a week had something to do with Joe Biden’s age being “at the center of 2024.”
At the same time, Kahn acknowledged that his paper has had “some coverage about [Biden’s] frailty and his age”—but insisted that a regular reader is “not going to see that much” about that.
As it happens, there was a study done of how much the New York Times writes about Biden’s age. The Computational Social Science Lab (3/8/24) at the University of Pennsylvania found that in the week after special counsel Robert Hur cited how old Biden was as part of his decision not to indict him for mishandling classified documents, the Times ran at least 26 stories on the topic of Biden’s elderliness—”of which one of them explored the possibility that Trump’s age was of equal or more concern.” (The study looked only at stories that appeared among the top 20 stories on the Times‘ website home page, a measure of the importance the paper accorded to coverage.)
By way of comparison, CSS Lab noted that when, about the same time, Trump announced “that if he regained power he would pull the US out of NATO and even encourage Russian invasions of democratic allies if their financial commitments were not to his liking,” the Times ran just 10 articles on the issue that made it to the top of its home page.
About two weeks after this burst of coverage, CSS Lab noted a second wave of Times stories about how old Biden was—based on a poll that found that voters were indeed concerned about the subject:
Critically, this second burst was triggered not by some event that generated new evidence about Biden’s age affecting his performance as president, but rather the NYT’s own poll that pointedly asked respondents about the exact issue they had just spent the previous month covering relentlessly…. None of this second wave of articles acknowledges the existence of the first wave or the possibility that poll respondents might simply have been parroting the NYT’s own coverage back to them.
Turning situations into crisesEstablishment media have displayed no more urgency about the prospect of Trumpists stealing the 2024 election than they had two years ago (FAIR.org, 2/16/22).
That’s the same pattern that we see with the immigration and inflation stories—and, in the runup to the 2022 midterms, with the “crime wave” issue (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). Corporate media—not the New York Times alone, of course, but the Times does play a leading role—have the ability, through their framing and emphasis, to turn situations into crises. And they have chosen to do this, again and again, in ways that make it more likely that Trump will return to the White House in 2025—with an avowed intent to do permanent damage to democracy.
The prospect does not seem to faze Joe Kahn. “Trump could win this election in a popular vote,” he told Smith. “Given that Trump’s not in office, it will probably be fair.”
It’s a stunningly ignorant comment, given that elections in the United States are not run by the federal government; the Republican Party has been working tirelessly at the state and local level since 2020 to put itself in a position to overturn the popular vote (FAIR.org, 2/16/22). To the extent that the process has federal oversight, it’s largely through a judicial branch in which the GOP-controlled Supreme Court holds supreme power.
But then, why should I expect Kahn to have a deeper understanding of how elections work than he does of how media and public opinion work?
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
The post NYT Editor Denies His Paper’s Role in Setting the Agenda It Reports On appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights‘ Ahmad Abuznaid about the Rafah invasion for the May 10, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510Abuznaid.mp3New York Times (5/8/24)
Janine Jackson: Beltway reporters have access to things others can’t see, but can they see things that aren’t there? That question was brought to mind by a May 8 piece by New York Times chief White House reporter Peter Baker, in which he interpreted Biden’s evident decision to “pause” delivery of certain types of bombs to Israel as “meant to convey a powerful signal that his patience has limits.”
Israel’s plans to storm the southern Gaza city of Rafah, Baker explains, “have been a source of intense friction with the Biden administration for months.” That friction was evidently expressed in the unfettered delivery of weapons during those months, and the publicly expressed support for the catastrophic violence that has killed, maimed, orphaned and displaced millions of Palestinians, destroyed their homes and infrastructure, and denied their access to humanitarian aid.
Others, more focused on actions than vibes, saw this step as “overdue but necessary,” if it is part of some serious effort to condition any US support for Israel on ending the bloodshed.
Ahmad Abuznaid is executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. He joins us now by phone from DC. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ahmad Abuznaid.
Ahmad Abuznaid: Thank you, Janine. Thanks for having me.
JJ: An invasion of Rafah, we were told, would be an uncrossable “red line” for Biden, but luckily enough, a New York Times headline says, “Attack Not Seen as Full Invasion”—“seen as” being the kind of slippery language media use to suggest something they’d rather not say: that only some people’s definitions matter. What do we know about what’s happening in Rafah right now? Is it surprising, and why would we accept that it doesn’t amount to invasion?
AP (5/5/24)
AA: Well, we shouldn’t accept that assessment. Israelis have been saying they’re going to invade Rafah, no matter what. They said they would continue with their “mission,” no matter what. Benjamin Netanyahu just gave a speech and said, despite any pressures or response from outside forces or international forums, Israel will continue.
So I think what’s really the question here is whether President Biden issued his red line in actual red or in pencil. We’re going to find out, because technicalities as to how they view the invasion of Rafah aside, not only has it already occurred, but they’ve clearly made the statement again that they’re going to continue. So I think, really, the ball is in President Biden’s court. Will he continue to be bullied around and told what to do by Netanyahu, or will he act like he’s the president of the US, and call for an end?
JJ: Is the pause, as it’s been called—some people have been saying he stopped giving weapons; that’s not it. It’s been called a pause or a delay in the delivery of certain types of bombs. Is that meaningful? How meaningful is that?
AA: No, that’s not meaningful. And I’ll tell you why. Because in the last few months, there has been shipment after shipment after shipment to Israel. And so to now say that you would pause, or have paused, certain munitions is a little too little, too late. Israel may not, in fact, need what you paused in order to, again, conduct its invasion of Rafah.
So are you going to end the genocide, President Biden? That’s the central question. People aren’t asking for a pause right now. They’re asking for an end to the genocide, and an end to military weaponry to Israel. So it’s clear President Biden is still not reading the room.
JJ: Yeah, yeah. In general, it feels as though the options or the hopes are so tamped down. Ceasefire seems like the ultimate thing that we can call for, but ceasefire doesn’t bring people back to life. It doesn’t put Gazans back in their destroyed homes. I mean, obviously, cease fire, but where would that fit in with what else needs to happen?
AA: Yeah, I mean, the ceasefire is the most immediate demand, and that’s why if President Biden had made this threat via weapons months ago, there literally may have been thousands of lives saved. And so the ceasefire is still the first and most urgent demand, because we’re trying to save lives.
The people of Rafah are not only facing, again, the incredibly brutal and violent genocidal assaults, they’re also facing forced starvation. There was this huge conversation around aid trucks beginning to increase, and now here we are again with aid trucks essentially coming to a halt. So the genocide is real, and that’s the first and most important demand in this moment.
Ahmad Abuznaid: “We need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again.”
But beyond that, after what the US taxpayer, after what the West, after what elected officials have witnessed, how can they continue to go back to the status quo of supporting the state of Israel, even if there’s a ceasefire? I would argue that it’s clear to most Americans at this point that the Israeli government cannot be trusted with our weapons. They’ve taken it so far at this point, with their genocidal conduct, there’s actually no turning back.
And so ceasefire fits in, again, prominently, because we need to stop the bloodshed, stop the starvation, stop the siege. But beyond that, we need to make sure this can never happen again, and to make sure this can never happen again, that means that the state of Israel must not receive any more US arms, period. The US should no longer protect Israel at the International Criminal Court, period. The US should no longer protect the state of Israel at the International Court of Justice, period.
These are all ways that Israel deserves to be isolated in this moment. And, in fact, many countries are already taking that necessary step. We’ve seen Colombia, for instance, cease any relations with the state of Israel, and that’s what’s required of the world right now, especially of the United States, a country that proclaims itself to be one of those leaders of the “free world,” and supportive of people’s self-determination and calls for freedom and justice. If the US is truly that, this is the moment to show it.
And so we’re way beyond the ceasefire. We need a ceasefire immediately, but we need to see some divestment from the Israeli apartheid state, divestment from the genocidal state, and sanctions on the genocidal apartheid state.
JJ: There’s a feeling that the masks are off. Legislators in this country aren’t saying, as they supply Israel with money and bombs and political shielding and international bodies, they aren’t saying, “We hope for peace, but it’s hard. And Israel is our friend.” They’re now saying, “If you don’t full-throatedly support Israel’s ethnic cleansing project, you’re a terrorist supporter, which by the way means you’re a terrorist, and we will see that you are treated accordingly.”
That sentiment has always been there, of course, but it’s still shocking what people are now OK saying out loud–and doing, like HR6408, legislation to define pro-Palestinian groups as terrorist-supporting, and strip their tax exempt status. How are groups like US Campaign for Palestinian Rights responding to these very overt and meaningful legislative threats?
Al Jazeera (6/22/22)
AA: Look, they’ve attempted to stifle BDS and criminalize boycotting of Israel. They’ve attempted to make people pay via loss of state-awarded contracts, and agreements, right? You would sign this pledge. We’ve seen, of course, lawsuits and lawfare utilized, such as the lawsuit that was levied against the US Campaign. And you know what? We fought that and we won.
And so this is actually another overreach, another violation of our constitutional rights, another mode of repression against Palestinian organizing and activism. But the fact of the matter is, this isn’t going to stop us. If they think that a piece of legislation like this is going to cause us to cease our advocacy, our activities, our organizing, our shutting it down for Palestine, then they’ve miscalculated. So what we’ll see is that this will be utilized by the state to attempt to repress and suppress the movement, just like the anti-BDS laws, just like these lawfare expeditions.
But it won’t stop. They won’t silence us, they won’t stop us, and if, at the end of the day, we have to suffer through losing tax-exempt status, I think the organizations that right now are doing anything they can to stop a genocide, I think they’ll gladly sacrifice tax-exempt status. But I hope it doesn’t come to that, because it’s clearly a violation of our First Amendment rights, and our constitutional rights to organize in this country.
JJ: It seems like something has fundamentally changed in terms of the US public, and of course we’re seeing it with college students, but it’s been there before. It feels like flailing on the part of the administration, and on the part of people who want an uncritical support for anything that Israel does, and want support for genocide. The students are just driving them mad. And yet there they are, still doing it. Does this feel like a shift to you? I know you’re not a psychic, but does it seem like something is changing?
Mother Jones (4/22/24)
AA: Oh, it’s absolutely changing. Millions of people have taken action in the last few months, and that’s been calls, letters, petitions, direct action, civil disobedience, marches, protests, rallies, birddogging, you name it. And now we see encampment, and the students, just like they rose up against the war in Vietnam, just like they rose up for the civil rights movement, just like they rose up against the war in Iraq, the students will continue to be just a huge, huge part of this movement.
And right now, they’re speaking clearly to this country, not only about Palestine, and our need to get a ceasefire and to divest. Their demands are super clear. They’re super prepared. They’re super disciplined and intentional. I’m so proud of them. But not only are they making these demands clear for us in relation to Palestine, they’re also giving us, in plain sight, a contradiction for us to understand and grapple with domestically.
Do we want continued militarization of police, not only in our communities, but on our college campuses? This is what we’re witnessing: riot gear, dispersal techniques used on our students at Ivy League institutions, at non–Ivy League institutions. Literally, the weight of policing being levied against students from the ages of 17 to 20.
And it’s not only a concern that we’re seeing this, obviously, under a supposed Democratic, progressive president; we can see that this is something we should be concerned about, not only now, but in the future here for this country, as we see this intense militarization of our college campuses.
JJ: Let me just say, to me, on some level, the media’s focus on “leverage,” that focus on “Joe is kind of irked at Bibi. Uh oh”—it feels condescending to me, this Great Man theory of history that’s going on. It’s a personal conversation between Joe Biden and Netanyahu. It seems to make a mockery of international law and of human rights, frankly. And I just wonder, what other lenses could media be using? What other things could media be focusing on, that would take it away from “there’s a personal fight between these two guys, and somehow millions of people are affected by it.”
AA: Yeah, I think what media can do is continue to center the horrific nature of this Israeli assault, this genocidal assault on Gaza, the statistics, the data, the stories, the devastation that we’re seeing in Rafah right now. I think centering those voices and that experience, and then thinking about, again, our role, is where the focus needs to be.
The conversations between President Biden and Benjamin Netanyahu are for them to have. What we’re asking for is action. And we’re not going to be satisfied with these leaks of displeasure or of tension or of fracturing friendships. This isn’t about friendships. This is about stopping a genocide. And unfortunately, right now, not only are we not stopping it, we’re arming it and supporting it.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Ahmad Abuznaid. He’s executive director at the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. Thank you so much, Ahmad Abuznaid, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AA: Thank you, Janine.
The post ‘Are You Going to End the Genocide, President Biden? That’s the Central Question’
CounterSpin interview with Ahmad Abuznaid on Rafah invasion appeared first on FAIR.
Baltimore’s mayoral election tomorrow will be shaped by “the single biggest donation to a political campaign in city history,” but search campaign finance records, and you won’t find it anywhere. What you will find, however, are plenty of other donations from David Smith.
“Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think,” Sinclair chair David Smith told New York (4/2/18). “This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.”
Smith heads up the Sinclair Broadcast Group, and if Sinclair rings a bell, it’s likely from the Orwellian splash the network made six years ago when it required anchors at its local TV stations across the country to read from the same Trump-like anti-media script. This departure from journalistic norms was far from a one-off for Smith or his family’s network, which has quietly become the second-largest in the country, owning or operating 294 TV stations in 89 markets across the country.
“Smith may not be as identifiable as Rupert Murdoch or Jeff Bezos,” noted New York magazine (4/2/18), “but he’s as powerful.” And nowhere has Smith exercised his power more concertedly than his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.
By “hometown,” I mean where Smith grew up, not where he lives. For many years, both Smith and his company have resided outside the city, in Baltimore County. But Smith still feels a certain kinship for the city where he grew up. Kinship, and a sense of ownership.
In his capacity as Baltimore’s self-appointed overlord, Smith has determined the city needs a new mayor. And he’s taken the liberty of selecting her.
The vetting process wasn’t extensive. Smith settled on his chosen candidate after she agreed to his “checklist” of demands, which included firing the police and schools chiefs, and dismantling a violence-prevention program.
That’s according to a jaw-dropping report by Mark Reutter at Baltimore Brew (1/17/24). Smith’s pick for mayor, Sheila Dixon, denies the Brew’s account. And Smith surely would, too, only he didn’t respond to the Brew—which isn’t surprising, considering Smith’s feelings about print media; they’re “so left wing as to be meaningless dribble,” he told New York.
But it’s undeniable that Smith is backing Dixon, a former mayor, in a big way. A super PAC supporting Dixon’s candidacy, the Better Baltimore PAC, has received $250,000 from Smith, plus another $100,000 from Smith’s nephew, Alex Smith (Baltimore Sun, 5/4/24). (The PAC’s third major donor, developer John Luetkemeyer, has contributed $350,000.)
‘Biggest donation…in city history’Justine Barron (FAIR.org, 2/16/24): “Over the last 20 years, Smith and his family have become increasingly powerful in Baltimore’s political, corporate and media landscape, and they have used their local media holdings to promote their agendas.”
And Smith’s efforts on behalf of Dixon may not end there. As FAIR (2/16/24) reported, Dixon’s candidacy has been aided by her consistent presence on Fox 45, Sinclair’s flagship Baltimore station.
Controlling one of Baltimore’s major television stations, while simultaneously wielding hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, adds up to serious political clout. But apparently it’s not enough for Smith.
In January, Smith personally purchased the Baltimore Sun, Maryland’s largest newspaper, for an undisclosed sum (FAIR.org, 2/16/24). (Smith claims he paid “nine figures,” meaning $100 million or more.) Smith bought the Sun from hedge fund Alden Capital, which had taken ownership of the paper in 2021, when it bought the Sun’s parent company, Tribune Publishing. (Alden, a hedge fund known for sucking newspapers dry, is now the second-largest newspaper chain in the country, a fact that depresses me to no end.)
Any hope that Smith would leave his right-wing politics at the Sun’s door was dashed in his first meeting with the paper’s staff. Smith encouraged Sun reporters to focus on the failures of Baltimore’s public schools, so its students don’t turn into “those people, that class of people” who are “always going to be on welfare” (Baltimore Banner, 1/18/24).
At the same meeting, Smith openly bragged about using Fox 45 to pressure elected officials. Naturally, he used a Baltimore Democrat as his example:
If I do a poll that asks a very simple question: Should [Maryland state senate president] Bill Ferguson be thrown under the bus? You know what the answer is? Unequivocally, yes…. You know what Bill Ferguson’s view of that poll is? It scares him to death. And you know what it says to him? Maybe I better rethink what my political posture is.
By adding the Sun to his Baltimore media holdings, Smith is that much closer to becoming the city’s kingmaker. “David has always thought of the Sun as an obstacle to Fox 45, so why not buy it and turn it into Fox 45,” a person with knowledge of Smith’s thinking told the Brew (1/17/24). “Who buys a major newspaper four months before a mayoral primary?” this person asked. He added that Smith’s purchase is “the single biggest donation to a political campaign in city history.”
‘Unprecedented territory’Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott campaign said that Fox 45 had “showcased themselves to be entirely incapable of being impartial and ethical in their approach” (Baltimore Banner, 3/14/24).
The only thing standing in Smith’s way is the incumbent mayor, 40-year-old Brandon Scott, who narrowly defeated Sheila Dixon four years ago (in the Democratic primary, the election that matters in deep-blue Baltimore).
In their May 14 rematch, Scott won’t have the Sun’s endorsement, like he did four years ago (5/22/20). In fact, Smith’s media properties have been so biased against Scott that the mayor refused to participate in an April debate jointly hosted by the Sun and Fox 45. “We are truly in unprecedented territory,” Scott’s campaign manager said, “when the owner of the news outlet hosting a debate is also the leading political donor to one of the candidates participating in the same debate.”
The moderator for the debate only heightened Scott’s concerns: It was to be Armstrong Williams, and the event was to be branded “The Armstrong Williams Town Hall.”
A little history is in order. Williams first shot to fame when he was found to be in the pocket of the George W. Bush administration. In exchange for $240,000, Williams quietly agreed to provide Bush’s policies with positive coverage. Whenever I see Williams’ name, these details rush back to me. But there’s another aspect of the scandal that I’d forgotten, and it involves Smith.
To satisfy the terms of the secret deal, Williams had to reach a national television audience. “Fortunately for Williams,” noted Rolling Stone (2/24/05), “he was good friends with David Smith.” And Sinclair agreed to air Williams’ segments. (A Sinclair producer described one of them as “the worst piece of TV I’ve ever been associated with…. Clearly propaganda.”)
For his part, Smith claimed he didn’t know about Williams’ secret deal; but he was also untroubled by it, calling the controversy surrounding it “foolish.”
‘Only rank partisans’“The residents of Baltimore deserve better than Scott’s revisionist crime data,” Armstrong Williams (Baltimore Sun, 4/29/24)—referring to Baltimore’s 20% drop in homicides in 2023.
In the subsequent two decades, Smith and Williams have remained personally and financially close. While maintaining a continued presence on Sinclair’s airwaves, Williams has purchased several divested Sinclair stations at suspiciously low prices; and also been made co-owner of the Sun.
But it wasn’t just Armstrong Williams’ shady past that made him an imperfect debate moderator; like Smith, he also appears to favor Dixon. In the buildup to her announcement, Dixon spoke with Williams on Fox 45 for a full hour (6/22/23).
“With his totally softball and praising interview, the host fulfilled what I assume was his assignment: promote Dixon as an alternative to the incumbent mayor,” Sun columnist Dan Rodricks (6/27/23) wrote, six months before Smith purchased the Sun.
Three months after Smith’s purchase, Williams penned his own Sun column (4/29/24) on the mayoral race, which noted Baltimore’s declining homicides and shootings, and asked, “But who deserves the credit?” One might think that the city’s top official deserves some of the credit—but Williams informed readers that “only rank partisans credit Mayor Scott.”
Anyway, Baltimore—a city with more than its fair share of challenges—finished 2023 with homicides under 300 for the first time in almost a decade. Meanwhile, Scott “also can tout a growing economy and robust employment rate,” according to the Baltimore Banner (12/7/23).
So, despite David Smith’s media empire aiming square at him, Mayor Scott has a fighting chance at winning reelection tomorrow, with polls showing him slightly ahead of Dixon.
Of course, when it comes to Baltimore, there’s a certain non-resident who feels entitled to having the last word. And I’d like to give it him—or, more specifically, to his well-coiffed, on-air captives, who in 2018 were required to read the following:
We’re concerned about the troubling trend of irresponsible, one-sided news stories plaguing our country…. Unfortunately, some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda to control exactly what people think. This is extremely dangerous to a democracy.
The post The Media Mogul Trying to Buy Baltimore’s Mayoral Race appeared first on FAIR.
Republicans made it clear that they wanted to defund NPR because they didn’t like the viewpoints they thought it aired—calling it “a progressive propaganda purveyor” (WBMA, 5/8/24).
Every so often, Republicans in Washington engage in the ritual of shouting about public broadcasting’s supposed left-wing bias, usually threatening to cut its federal funding.
It’s been happening nearly from the moment the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was established in 1967 to provide federal funding for public radio and television. Nixon went after the CPB in 1969, leading to Fred Rogers’ famous congressional testimony that helped protect it. Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Donald Trump all launched attacks on public broadcasting. GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich attempted to eliminate the CPB in the mid-’90s, and congressional Republicans sought to do it again in 2005 and 2011. (See Politico, 10/23/10; FAIR.org, 2/18/11; HuffPost 3/16/17.)
It’s hardly surprising, then, to find public radio in the GOP’s crosshairs again this year (WBMA, 5/8/24), since congressional Republicans have been spending most of their time launching McCarthyist hearings into the Biden administration and elite institutions they accuse of “liberal” or “woke” bias (FAIR.org, 4/19/24).
This time, the attack was spurred by former NPR business editor Uri Berliner’s lengthy Substack essay (Free Press, 4/9/24; FAIR.org, 4/24/24) arguing that the outlet’s “progressive worldview” had compromised its journalism. The right gleefully pounced, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee called a hearing to investigate, among other things, “How can Congress develop solutions to address criticism that NPR suffers from intractable bias?”
A voice for the heardBy the time of FAIR’s 2015 study (7/15/15), NPR had almost completely barred political commentary from its major shows, in a futile hope of not angering censorious lawmakers.
As FAIR has documented throughout the years, the primary “intractable bias” public broadcasting suffers from is a bias toward the same corporate and political elites that dominate the rest of establishment media—despite the fact that it was created to “provide a voice for groups in the community that may otherwise be unheard.”
We conducted our first study of the sources on NPR‘s main news programming in 1993 (Extra!, 4–5/93), when Democrats controlled the White House and Congress. Republican guests nonetheless outnumbered Democrats 57% to 42%. Public interest voices made up 7% of sources; women were 21% of all sources.
When we revisited the guest lists in 2004 (5/04), partisan control in Washington had flipped, but little changed at NPR. Republican guests outnumbered Democrats by slightly more (61% to 38%). Public interest voices were slightly lower, and only a few percentage points more than on commercial networks (6% compared to 3% of sources). Women were still 21% of all sources.
When FAIR (7/15/15) looked at NPR‘s commentators in 2015, we found that 71% of its regular commentators (i.e., who gave two or more commentaries in the five-month study period) were white men. Eight percent were men of color, and 21% were white women; no women of color were regular commentators during the period studied.
Led by private elitesThe overwhelming domination of public radio’s boards of directors by the corporate elite (FAIR.org, 7/2/15) is a consequence of the strategy of relying on the wealthy for financial support.
FAIR has also looked at the governing boards of the eight most-listened-to NPR affiliate stations (7/2/15). Of the 259 board members, 75% had corporate backgrounds (e.g., executives in banks, investment firms, consulting companies and law firms). They also lacked ethnic diversity and gender parity, with 72% non-Latine white members and 66% men. In other words, legal control over public radio in this country is firmly in the hands of the privileged few.
NPR‘s national board of directors is a mix of member station managers and so-called “public members.” At the time of our study, there were ten station managers and five public members, who in fact represented the corporate elite. Shortly after FAIR’s study, NPR expanded its board to include nine public members; members today include bigwigs from Apple, Yahoo, Hulu, Starbucks, consulting firm BCG and investment bank Allen & Company.
And the percentage of NPR‘s revenues that comes from corporate sponsors continues to increase over time. In 2009, that number stood at 24%; today it is 38%.
Meanwhile, NPR receives less than 1% of its funding from the federal government. But nearly a third of its revenue does come from member stations’ programming and service fees—and the CPB accounts for approximately 8% of those stations’ revenues. (Other federal, state and local government funding contributes another 6%.) That’s why NPR calls continued federal funding “critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR.”
Dampening critical coverageNPR* adopted a definition of “lying” that required telepathy (FAIR.org*, 3/1/17).
There is no current threat to public broadcasting funding, with Democrats in control of the Senate and White House. Even when Republicans have controlled Washington, they’ve always backed down in the end. While that’s not inevitable, defunding isn’t necessarily the ultimate goal: The mere threat of defunding is generally sufficient to reinvigorate public media’s efforts to prove their non-liberal bona fides, pushing them to the right.
In one remarkable example, shortly after the 2011 attack on NPR, the outlet stopped distributing an opera program when its host participated in an Occupy protest.
This week’s hearing comes after months of GOP House committee hearings on campus antisemitism, in which leaders of universities (and even city K–12 schools) have been repeatedly hauled before Congress to explain why they aren’t clamping down harder on freedom of speech and assembly. Disturbingly, the committee investigating NPR has demanded that NPR CEO Katherine Maher document and report the partisan affiliations of all news media staff of the past five years, as well as all board members.
As always, these attacks are very useful in dampening critical public media coverage of even extreme right-wing rhetoric and actions. During Trump’s presidency, for instance, NPR refused to call Trump’s lies “lies” (FAIR.org, 1/26/17, 3/1/17) and uncritically used far-right think tanks to defend him (FAIR.org, 2/7/17).
It’s because of public broadcasting’s serious vulnerability to both political and corporate pressure that FAIR has long argued (e.g., Extra!, 9–10/05; FAIR.org, 2/18/11) that we need truly independent public media—public media that don’t take corporate money, or have corporate leadership, and that don’t have to appease political partisans.
In the meantime, it’s critical that NPR stand up to the GOP’s McCarthyism and refuse to accept federal funds when they come with political strings attached.
Featured image: NPR‘s DC headquarters (Creative Commons photo: Todd Huffman).
The post GOP Grilling NPR Is a Tired Ritual That Needs to Be Rejected appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed Media 2070’s Joseph Torres and Collette Watson about media reparations for the May 3, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240503TorresWatson.mp3Media 2070
Janine Jackson: The idea of some form of public, communal recognition and redress, or reparation, for Black Americans for centuries of systemic, state-sanctioned harms, and their lasting and continuing impact, is not new. But our guests’ work considers the particular meaningful and sustained harms of news media, of journalistic institutions charged with informing the public without fear or favor, that historically and currently have used their special place and power to help drive the oppression of Black and brown people—through storytelling, and through overt support for racist practices, policies and ideas.
Media 2070 was co-founded by Joseph Torres, who is senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press—and co-author, with Juan Gonzalez, of the crucial book News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media—and writer, musician and communication strategist Collette Watson, who is co-founder of the new group Black River Life. Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
And they both join us now by phone from Washington, DC, and Phoenix, Arizona, respectively. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Joe Torres and Collette Watson.
All right, well, “crisis of journalism” is going to be a phrase that a lot of listeners are familiar with. It’s a conversation among people, and among philanthropists, about how we can “save journalism.” But it’s unclear to us at FAIR, as to many others, if some of those folks in that conversation really understand that corporate journalism, US mainstream, so-called, journalism, has always contained its own poison. And if they are actually willing to address that, or if the goal is more of the same elite conversations that have excluded lots of people, but to do them in a more genteel way than maybe Fox News.
So I want to ask you both, to start: What is missing from current diagnoses and remedies for what we’re told is the crisis of journalism?
Collette Watson: I guess I’ll kick us off, and just say that what’s missing is an acknowledgement of our media system’s history of harm. And when we talk about that—Joe and I are both co-creators of the Media 2070 project—when Media 2070 talks about this, we often say that, similar to our education system and our legal system, which so many people understand as oppressive, our media system is rooted in anti-Blackness, and in racism and racial hierarchy, since the very beginning.
When you look at the earliest colonial newspapers, which stayed afloat on the revenues that they were gaining from serving as brokers in the trafficking of enslaved African people, by not only posting ads, paid ads, for people who had emancipated themselves and run away, but also in the sales of enslaved folks and serving as a broker for those transactions.
We know that from that earliest route, right on through till now, our system of news, information, journalism—even entertainment media, book publishing—all of those are interconnected, and have been rooted in upholding a myth of Black inferiority, and have actually perpetuated white supremacy and even white nationalism. So you have to have that in mind, whenever you are thinking about journalism and the role it has played in society, and the role that we want it to play in the safe, just, multiracial democracy we want in the future. We can’t achieve that without acknowledging the history of harm.
Joseph Torres: I’ll add, Collette and I, we began writing this essay over a year ago for this political journal, and Collette, one of the co-creators of 2070, but also the senior director of the 2070 project until recent weeks, and what we try to do in this essay is: There is this big debate happening right now about the future of journalism, and how it goes, is mostly a white-led space. And the way the discussion has taken place is, the democracy is in crisis and so is journalism, and we need to save local journalism to save democracy. But as Collette is describing, what that does not acknowledge is the role of local news organizations and in local journalism in undermining democracy for Black people and people of color.
At the Media 2070 project, we’re asking the question: when hasn’t journalism been in crisis for Black people, and when hasn’t democracy? And these media institutions have played a direct role in undermining democracy.
Kansas City Star (12/22/20)
And in recent years, we have the Los Angeles Times apologizing for it being the paper of white supremacy for at least its first 80-plus years. We have the Oregonian saying that it was a paper, when it began, to try to ensure that Oregon remained a white state. The Baltimore Sun apologizing for its role in upholding the housing segregation in its editorials in the newspaper in support of it in Baltimore; and the Kansas City Star did much the same. The Philadelphia Inquirer apologized.
These are all just within recent years, and within the future of journalism debate, there isn’t even acknowledgement that this actually happened, that these papers have actually apologized.
What are we creating that’s different? How do we address issues of racial hierarchies, and that these institutions have played a role in undermining democracy for Black folks, and for other folks of color? So if we think the current democracy can be equated with the right to vote and equal-protection rights being reinstated 60 years ago, local journalism by dominant news organizations have played a role in undermining democracy, so-called democracy, for Black folks and other folks of color since the get-go, and still are today.
And so we are just trying to make an intervention into this debate, because the debate is happening; there’s a lot of money being invested in the space. There’s a lot of policy work happening—not just with the federal government, in local states—trying to make an intervention in funding local journalism. And we are afraid we’re just going to be replicating the same kind of harms.
JJ: Yeah, saving democracy via local journalism seems to mean, for a lot of folks, just shore up and sustain these local journalistic outlets. There’s the missing piece of acknowledgement of the harms that those outlets have done, and it’s clear that some people view the whole idea of reparations more broadly as “something bad happened to people in the past,” and so people that “look like them,” to put it crudely, are looking for resources now.
But I feel that, particularly if you look internationally, and even within this country, that understanding is shifting, so that people see, not just that harms on individuals, but on communities, are unending, but also that they see that truth and reconciliation processes, that they’ve seen in South Africa or in Argentina or in El Salvador, for example, they involve healing for the whole community.
And the starting place is not only about debts unpaid, but it’s about acknowledging that there’s been a distorted understanding of history, that everyone has been harmed –, particularly the people who have been specifically oppressed and harmed, but reparation involves acknowledgement first. It’s not a question of throwing money at the issue. There is an acknowledgement, and a truth-telling, that has to happen first.
That’s my rambling, you can call that a question, but you know what I’m saying, that it’s not enough to say, “Oh, we did a bad thing,” as some papers are doing. “Back in the 18-dickity-do, we wrote a bad thing, but we’re sorry about it.” That’s not what is being called for.
Liberation Ventures
CW: Absolutely. And I think one key part of this is really seeking to broaden, not only our sense of journalism and its history and its future, but our sense of what repair and reparations involve.
When we created the Media Reparations Project, we also sought to really spread the understanding that reparations has to be a holistic process. We took a lot of inspiration and leadership from people who have been fighting for reparations ever since emancipation. And when we are speaking to what reparations is all about, often in community, people sort of reduce it to this idea of a check.
As you just said, Janine, it’s not just this one-time apology, or even a one-time payment. It has to be holistic and understood as a process, a journey rather than a destination. And speaking of folks we took inspiration from, our friends at Liberation Ventures, which is a reparations organization, they describe reparations as a comprehensive process that involves reckoning, acknowledgement, accountability and redress.
And when you’re talking about the realm of journalism, Joe mentioned a couple of different platforms and papers that have issued apologies and sort of stopped there. And we know that this entire conversation around the future of journalism is one that should really inform what next. After the apology, and after the investigation, what is it that newspapers and other media platforms can and should be doing to rectify the different types of harm that they have wrought—whether that be sensationalistic headlines and false headlines that led to racial terrorism and lynching, whether that be the ways that, even to this very day, it’s nearly impossible for journalists to sustain careers because of toxicity in newsrooms. And there’s so much more that we could name, but it has to be an ongoing process that’s engaged with people who have been directly impacted, and defined by community.
Joe Torres: “For us to be able to tell our own stories, to own our own institutions, in order to fight for racial justice, for reparations, the system is going to have to change too.”
JT: When we’re talking about these papers, we talk about narratives, right? And narratives are a political tool. Narratives are used by those in power, and these media companies, to uphold racial hierarchy. And “uphold racial hierarchy” means not just within those newsrooms, but within the society as well. So these newsrooms are playing an outsized role in shaping what local communities look like. And we talked about the example of segregation in Baltimore, and wealth creation and wealth death and all that.
And so these media companies are playing a role in reinforcing the racial hierarchies throughout each community they serve, whether schooling, housing, just name it, right? They’re playing a role in shaping the society with their narratives. Because these powerful media owners are political players within the society in which they exist.
And so the idea of acknowledgement, it’s just the beginning, as Colette is saying, and you’re talking about, too, Janine; it has to be like, how do we get to redress?
Because what’s happening, they reinforce structural racism in our society in all these various ways.. And for us, we’re just focused on the media part, because structural racism also exists in the media system. So for us to be able to tell our own stories, to own our own institutions, in order to fight for racial justice, for reparations, the system is going to have to change too, for our own communities to be able to own and control the creation and the distribution of their own narratives.
And so this is what we’re fighting for. If we can shift how media functions, I think there’s a better chance, or a greater chance, that we could actually address all the other underlying causes that are affecting society, that newsrooms play a role in promulgating in all these different ways.
Colette Watson: “There’s a deep distrust of journalism across communities of color, because there is a deep history of harm.”
CW: Joe, I think in addition to changing the way that the media has perpetuated hierarchy and harm in society, this discussion around repair, and really reframing the way we understand the future of journalism conversation, is also an invitation to actually save journalism. And I think that there’s a lack of understanding of the fact that journalism being white-dominated, and being steeped in a worldview of Black inferiority and a worldview of racial hierarchy, has very much been a part of why we find this industry to be faltering at this point.
It’s policies and culture and so much, but it’s all grounded and rooted in journalism’s early rootedness in racism. And what I mean when I say that is, we talk a lot and we hear a lot about community trust and community engagement and different things about how audiences perceive the field, and how they’re willing to even maybe invest in it, whether that be investing time or what have you. But there’s a deep distrust of journalism across communities of color, because there is a deep history of harm.
And then there are so many journalists of color who have tried to be truth tellers, and tried to embody the true purpose of journalism in holding power to account, who have found it next to impossible to do that, because of toxicity inside dominant and corporate newsrooms, and because of the underfunding and underinvestment in Black-serving and other-serving, different religious minorities and other groups, LGBTQIA+ community—all of the newsrooms that serve these marginalized identities have been woefully under-resourced by the public sector and by philanthropy, when compared to their white counterparts.
Dissent (Summer/21)
And so, whether it be on the part of journalists of color or communities of color, there’s this deep divide, and this sense that the main, dominant media doesn’t care about our lives, and doesn’t think of us when they’re talking about journalism and democracy. And when I talk about that to people, I like to always say, there’s two words you can add on, in the ways you’re talking about these issues of the future of journalism, that’ll take you so much further than where we usually go. And those two simple words are “for who.” Journalism for who? Democracy for who? Who are we serving?
Carla Murphy talks about “multiple mainstreams,” and thinking of the future of our media system as one that is steeped in serving the information needs of just so many different kinds of folks, and serving the creation of conditions for different kinds of justice. And I think that when you begin to think about who we are wanting to serve and whose needs we’re centering, that opens up so much more opportunity and so much more oxygen around what journalism can be. But we can’t get there if we just talk about it the same old way and really are using legislation and policy ideas and philanthropy to shore up the status quo.
Kerner Commission (1968)
JJ: Absolutely. I just want to say that, for some folks, this might sound out of pocket; it might sound like a new idea. But the truth is, this is drawing on roots. The Kerner Commission, just to say one thing folks remember, but they remember it as saying, media should do better by Black people. And that’s not what it said. It said news media are failing everybody and failing the future with their white-centric perspective. It challenged the whole thing. So there are historical roots that you’re pulling on here. There are traditions here, there are examples here. It’s not out of whole cloth. There is something to connect to here that gives strength to the ideas that we’re putting forward here.
CW: Yes. I mean, Joe Torres, for my money, is one of the most incredible researchers and minds that we have in this field, and I really encourage folks to dig into the essay, because throughout these pages, as you’re describing, Janine, there are just so many examples from throughout history.
A lot of people don’t realize, for instance, that the earliest FCC broadcasting licenses were issued during the Jim Crow era, and so to white men only. And so that leads us to the present day, where we have a media system where just a very scant percentage of our TV and radio are Black-owned.
And we could go on and on, because, like I said, Joe has just done exhaustive effort here in making sure that we have the evidence when we talk about this. Joe, I know you don’t like getting credit, but….
JJ: But, hey, when you have to, you have to, because voids need to be filled, frankly. It’s not a conversation that folks have. Folks have it rhetorically: “I bet there’s things missing here,” but they don’t know what’s missing, and that’s—they need work like you’re doing.
The Chicago Commission on Race Relations (1922)
JT: I appreciate that. Collette knows I don’t like that, but I appreciate it. One of the things we learned in putting this essay together four years ago, was that in Chicago, there was a commission formed to study the causes of the upheaval, the Chicago race riots. And it came out in a report in 1922, and it devoted a significant portion of the report to the media’s role, the white media’s role, in fomenting this. And so here was an example of a multiracial commission that said, “Hey, the media, especially the white media, played a role in this racial, so-called, unrest, the violence that happened in this city.”
Then you talk about the Kerner Commission, Janine, and then 50 years later after that, what we have in 2020, the uprisings, and all these folks within journalism circles calling on their newspapers or their media institutions to address racism in their own newsrooms.
And one of the things that’s really understudied, it’s a really unbelievable example to me: In 1964, the Community Relations Service was created. It became, soon after that, an agency within the Department of Justice. And the peacekeepers, the mediators, they realized early on, within the first few years of its founding, that a major obstacle to integrating our society, to people adhering to Brown v. Board, was journalism, was the media, and that they had to try to not just integrate the media systems, but they started to hold conferences for Black and brown folks, and for people to fight license challenges against broadcast, and they brought in experts who came in and taught activists how to challenge broadcast licenses. This is within the Department of Justice, and that part of its mission was basically not funded anymore, following the Nixon administration, right?
Here’s a government agency within the Department of Justice, realizing that the biggest obstacle to people adhering to the decision of Brown v. Board, and integrating our society, was the media. That’s another indictment, as you’re saying, about the Kerner Commission, a little over 50-plus years ago.
And so we’re still dealing with this. We’re still dealing with that we don’t have our own institutions, that the first chairman of the FCC was the former chief justice for the Mississippi Supreme Court. Of course Black and brown people wouldn’t get licenses during this era. It’s all been baked in, right? It’s all been baked in. And since then, consolidation has only put things out of reach for us, compounding the lack of wealth that exists in our community because of the extraction of our nation’s political project, right?
JJ: Absolutely. Well, I’ll just ask, finally, what do folks who think, media reparations? Is that going to restrict what I get to see and hear? Is that going to police what I get to see and hear? That’s not the conversation that we’re talking about having, right?
CW: Absolutely. I mean, Joe, I will defer to you.
JT: Well, I mean, we talk about abundance. It should be an abundance of voices out there. And there’s no reason we have such a concentrated media system, where you have a few companies; and here we talk about the cable/broadcast model, for example, which—television is still making a lot of money, and news is driving that. So while we’re talking about a so-called crisis in journalism, we talk about, normally, print media. Broadcast media is trying to get in the action too, and trying to take legislative efforts to get their piece of the pie, while they’re making a lot of money, right?
And so, it’s like, how can we have an abundance of Black and BIPOC media outlets out there that’s serving local communities, that’s providing a variety of perspectives. And we are fighting for not only the variety of perspectives, but also a tether to serve the health and well-being of the community, not out there for bottom-line profits, right, and to maximize profit. How can we have an abundance of this?
The idea is, it’s not what’s being taken away from you, it’s what’s going to be added to your life, to ensure the health and well-being of the communities. How is it serving the health and well-being of the needs of people in local communities and local society? And media can play an instrumental role in ensuring that, in advocating for that. Or it too often plays a detrimental role, as we see, in taking away those kinds of rights that allow people to have their basic needs served, in housing and food and schooling.
And so, the vision for an abundance of media outlets that are well-funded? There’s no reason why we can’t do that. We invest so little in this country into media, and especially in public media, and we can create something different, and something better.
JJ: That’s beautiful. All right, we’ve been speaking with Joe Torres from Free Press and Collette Watson at Black River Life. You can tap into the work that we’ve been talking about at MediaReparations.org. Joseph and Colette, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
The post ‘When Hasn’t Journalism Been in Crisis for Black People?’:
CounterSpin interview with Joseph Torres and Collette Watson on media reparations appeared first on FAIR.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510.mp3This week on CounterSpin: CNN’s Jake Tapper is mad about college students protesting their institutions’ and their government’s support for Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza—because they’re preventing him, by his account, from covering Israel’s horrific attacks on Palestinians in Gaza. Tapper whined recently: “We’re covering these protests and covering free speech versus security on campus. This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court.”
Tapper and CNN, we’re to understand, are powerless to decide what they cover, and incapable of understanding that the clear, core demand of students protesting is that government (and media) not just chat about, but act to change, US enabling of Israel’s genocidal assault.
(photo: Jim Naureckas)
“I don’t know that the protesters are, from a media perspective, accomplishing what they want to accomplish,” Tapper said. If you listen closely, you can hear him say, “We, as media, don’t want them to accomplish anything, except to be presented, as protestors have throughout US history, as a nuisance and an interference with grownup conversation. And we, as media, will use our actual power to sell that idea.”
People, in media and elsewhere, who are used to unequivocal US support for Israel’s actions, used to summarily reducing any criticism of Israel to antisemitism, even when it comes from Jewish people, are seeing the ground shift, and they’re shook. What happens now is critical—first for Palestinians and Israelis, of course, but also for the US press and their handlers, who are so used to driving the narrative they don’t know what to do except yell “shut up shut up shut up” and send in the cops. In the name of, you know, principled debate.
We talk about latest developments in Gaza with Ahmad Abuznaid, executive director of the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510Abuznaid.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at protester/press relations, “outside agitators” and TikTok censorship.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240510Banter.mp3The post Ahmad Abuznaid on Rafah Invasion appeared first on FAIR.
As US lawmakers’ agitation over TikTok culminates in a law that threatens a nationwide ban if the social media platform isn’t sold to a US buyer within nine months, an emergent media narrative finds a silver lining. Every legislative move targeting TikTok, the story goes, has the potential to inspire much-needed regulation of tech behemoths like Meta, Amazon, Google and Apple.
But by conflating the US’s legal treatment of TikTok—a subsidiary of the Beijing-based ByteDance—with that of its own tech industry, media obscure the real reasons for the law’s passage.
False comparisonsDid the TikTok law really break the “tech law logjam,” as the headline (New York Times, 4/25/24) asserts? Probably not, the story acknowledges.
This was apparent in a New York Times piece (4/25/24) headlined “TikTok Broke the Tech Law Logjam. Can That Success Be Repeated?” Author Cecilia Kang described the recently instated divest-or-ban law—passed as part of a package with aid to Israel and Ukraine—as an instance of “reining in the tech giants.” The article suggested that the ban might be a harbinger of broader regulation of the tech industry in the public interest, such as antitrust legislation or mental-health guardrails.
Kang cited multiple sources who doubted that the ultimatum would spur regulation of US tech companies, arguing that lawmakers influenced by industry lobbying and 2024 campaign strategies would balk at the notion of curtailing US corporate power.
It’s fair to note that the TikTok law was unlikely to have this effect. But lobbying and campaigning aren’t the only, or even the primary, explanations for this. A simple review of the legislation shows that it’s not a form of good-faith regulation meant to protect the populace, but an effort to either seize or severely weaken TikTok in the name of US interests.
Kang’s thesis was premised on years’ worth of media and policymaker fearmongering that TikTok user data was susceptible to surveillance by the Chinese government (BuzzFeed News, 6/17/22; Forbes, 10/20/22; Guardian, 11/7/22). According to Kang’s colleagues, the law’s enactment was prompted by “concerns that the Chinese government could access sensitive user data” (New York Times, 4/26/24). In 2023, Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte sought to prohibit TikTok throughout his state on the grounds that “the Chinese Communist Party” was “collecting US users’ personal, private and sensitive information” (Montana Free Press, 5/17/23). (Gianforte’s attempt was later thwarted by a federal judge.)
If such fears were officials’ genuine motivation, one could hope that broader data-privacy regulation might follow. Yet, as the Times neglected to mention, the spying accusations are tenuous—and deeply cynical. As even US intelligence officials concede, apprehensions about China’s access to TikTok user data are strictly hypothetical (Intercept, 3/16/24). And, despite its bombshell headline “Analysis: There Is Now Some Public Evidence That China Viewed TikTok Data,” CNN (6/8/23) cautioned that said evidence—a sworn statement from a former ByteDance employee—“remains rather thin.”
Pretext for censorshipMitt Romney on Gaza (Common Dreams, 5/6/24): “The way this has played out on social media…has a very, very challenging effect on the narrative.”
Given their dubious nature, it’s hard to see these data-privacy claims as anything other than a pretext for the US to throttle TikTok. By forcing either divestment or a ban, the US, at least in theory, wins: It transfers a tremendously lucrative and influential company into its own hands, or it prevents that company from serving as a platform—albeit one with plenty of problems—on which people can engage in and learn from discourses that are critical of US empire.
The censorial intentions of the legislation have been thrown into sharp relief by congressional Republicans. In an address on April 24, the day President Joe Biden made the ultimatum law, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R–Neb.) fretted that “nearly a third” of users between the ages of 18 and 29 used TikTok as a regular news source. (Results from a November 2023 Pew survey confirm this.) This was cause for alarm, according to the senator, because the platform featured a heightened concentration of “pro-Palestinian and pro-Hamas” videos as part of a dastardly plot by the Chinese government.
Senator and former presidential candidate Mitt Romney (R–Utah) reinforced Ricketts’ fearmongering in early May, asserting at a forum with Secretary of State Antony Blinken that “the number of mentions of Palestinians” on TikTok generated “overwhelming support to shut [TikTok] down” (Common Dreams, 5/6/24). Romney’s source for this wasn’t clear, but his message was: TikTok simply wouldn’t be tolerated as a source of information that contradicted official narratives.
Likewise, Rep. Mike Lawler (R–NY) (Intercept, 5/4/24) told the centrist advocacy group No Labels that the Gaza protests are
exactly why we included the TikTok bill in the foreign supplemental aid package, because you’re seeing how these kids are being manipulated by certain groups or entities or countries to foment hate on their behalf and really create a hostile environment here in the US.
With “a big bipartisan push in both chambers to crack down on TikTok,” NBC (4/16/23) sees “a window of opportunity to pass new regulations in…the tech industry.”
The right-wing lawmakers were far from the first to harbor this sentiment; criticisms like this had been simmering for months (FAIR.org, 11/13/23, 3/14/24). (These admissions that Congress went after TikTok based on its content will likely help the lawsuit ByteDance filed arguing that the law mandating either a sale or a ban is unconstitutional—Hollywood Reporter, 5/7/24).
Ignoring this context, Associated Press (3/24/24) presented the same inaccurate characterizations as the New York Times. Paraphrasing Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), AP reported that the TikTok law—which, at the time, was merely a bill the House had passed—“is the best chance to get something done after years of inaction” on tech regulation. The moral content of what, exactly, was being done didn’t seem to matter to the news agency. Instead, AP opted to uncritically publish Warner’s insinuation that young TikTok users urging their congressional representatives to vote against the ban were “manipulated” by the “Communist Party of China.”
AP’s report echoed an equally faulty NBC News summary (4/16/23) of congressional approaches to the tech industry. Though the story was published prior to any TikTok legislation, it remarked on a “big bipartisan push” to “crack down” on the company. The piece went on to group what was then a more abstract—but thoroughly jingoistic—movement against TikTok with regulation regarding such unrelated user-protection concerns as “deep fakes, voice phishing scams and powerful chatbots like Chat GPT.”
Domestic rewardsFacebook* parent Meta paid a consulting firm to get out the message that “TikTok is the real threat especially as a foreign owned app that is #1 in sharing data that young teens are using” (Washington Post*, 3/30/22).
Absent from these reports is yet another reason a ban or forced sale of TikTok won’t necessarily lead to domestic regulation: US tech giants stand to benefit from the law. As the New York Times itself (4/24/24) reports, “Meta could draw up to 60% of TikTok’s American ad revenue, while YouTube could take another 25% or so.” Not coincidentally, at least one US tech firm was involved in manufacturing public antipathy toward TikTok: According to the Washington Post (3/30/22), Meta, a direct TikTok competitor, paid a Republican consulting firm to orchestrate a smear campaign against TikTok. The effort included planted op-eds and letters to the editor in “major regional news outlets” nationwide.
Coupling this information with the US’s historical refusal to regulate its own tech industry, why, one might wonder, would the US suddenly change course? And wouldn’t this mean that a US-owned TikTok would operate effectively unchecked, just like current US tech corporations?
But such questions aren’t meant to be asked in a narrative that launders reactionary policymaking as a potential regulatory boon. The TikTok ultimatum, we’re told, isn’t a drastic measure to stifle statements of support for Palestine or any other political speech to the left of the State Department line; it’s, to borrow from the New York Times (4/25/24), a “success.”
Featured image: Detail from BreakThrough News video on TikTok (10/28/23) about a pro-Palestine march in Dallas—the kind of content a new law is aimed at suppressing.
The post TikTok Law Is an Attempt to Censor, Not a Warning to Big Tech appeared first on FAIR.
As peace activists occupied common spaces on campuses across the country, some in corporate media very clearly took sides, portraying student protesters as violent, hateful and/or stupid. CNN offered some of the most striking of these characterizations.
CNN*‘s Dana Bash (Inside Politics*, 5/1/24) blames the peace movement for “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.”
Dana Bash (Inside Politics, 5/1/24) stared gravely into the camera and launched into a segment on “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses across the country.” Her voice dripping with hostility toward the protests, she reported:
Many of these protests started peacefully with legitimate questions about the war, but in many cases, they lost the plot. They’re calling for a ceasefire. Well, there was a ceasefire on October 6, the day before Hamas terrorists brutally murdered more than a thousand people inside Israel and took hundreds more as hostages. This hour, I’ll speak to an American Israeli family whose son is still held captive by Hamas since that horrifying day, that brought us to this moment. You don’t hear the pro-Palestinian protesters talking about that. We will.
By Bash’s logic, once a ceasefire is broken, no one can ever call for it to be reinstated—even as the death toll in Gaza nears 35,000. But her claim that there was a ceasefire until Hamas broke it on October 7 is little more than Israeli propaganda: Hundreds of Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers in the year preceding October 7 (FAIR.org, 7/6/23).
‘Hearkening back to 1930s Europe’“They didn’t let me get to class using the main entrance!” complains Eli Tsives in one of several videos he posted of confrontations with anti-war demonstrators. “Instead they forced me to walk around. Shame on these people!”
Bash continued:
Now protesting the way the Israeli government, the Israeli prime minister, is prosecuting the retaliatory war against Hamas is one thing. Making Jewish students feel unsafe at their own schools is unacceptable, and it is happening way too much right now.
As evidence of this lack of safety, Bash pointed to UCLA student Eli Tsives, who posted a video of himself confronting motionless antiwar protesters physically standing in his way on campus. “This is our school, and they’re not letting me walk in,” he claims in the clip. Bash ominously described this as “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe.”
Bash was presumably referring to the rise of the Nazis and their increasing restrictions on Jews prior to World War II. But while Tsives’ clip suggests protesters are keeping him off UCLA campus, they’re in fact blocking him from their encampment—where many Jewish students were present. (Jewish Voice for Peace is one of its lead groups.)
So it’s clearly not Tsives’ Jewishness that the protesters object to. But Tsives was not just any Jewish student; a UCLA drama student and former intern at the pro-Israel group Stand With Us, he had been a visible face of the counter-protests, repeatedly posting videos of himself confronting peaceful antiwar protesters. He has shown up to the encampment wearing a holster of pepper spray.
One earlier video he made showing himself being denied entry to the encampment included text on screen claiming misleadingly that protestors objected to his Jewishness: “They prevented us, Jewish students, from entering public land!” (“You can kiss your jobs goodbye, this is going to go viral on social media,” he tells the protesters.) He also proudly posted his multiple interviews on Fox News, which was as eager as Bash to help him promote his false narrative of antisemitism.
‘Attacking each other’“Security and [campus police] both retreated as pro-Israel counter-protesters and other groups attacked protesters in the encampment,” UCLA’s student paper (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24) reported.
UCLA protesters had good reason to keep counter-protesters out of their encampment, as those counter-protesters had become increasingly hostile (Forward, 5/1/24; New York Times, 4/30/24). This aggression culminated in a violent attack on the encampment on April 30 (Daily Bruin, 5/1/24).Late that night, a pro-Israel mob of at least 200 tried to storm the student encampment, punching, kicking, throwing bricks and other objects, spraying pepper spray and mace, trying to tear down plywood barricades and launching fireworks into the crowd. As many as 25 injuries have been reported, including four student journalists for the university newspaper who were assaulted by goons as they attempted to leave the scene (Forward, 5/2/24; Democracy Now!, 5/2/24).
Campus security stood by as the attacks went on; when the university finally called in police support, the officers who arrived waited over an hour to intervene (LA Times, 5/1/24).
(The police were less reticent in clearing out the encampment a day later at UCLA’s request. Reporters on the scene described police in riot gear firing rubber bullets at close range and “several instances of protesters being injured”—LA Times, 5/3/24.)
The mob attacks at UCLA, along with police use of force at that campus and elsewhere, clearly represent the most “destruction, violence and hate” at the encampments, which have been overwhelmingly peaceful. But Bash’s description of the UCLA violence rewrote the narrative to fit her own agenda: “Pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups were attacking each other, hurling all kinds of objects, a wood pallet, fireworks, parking cones, even a scooter.”
When CNN correspondent Stephanie Elam reported, later in the same segment, that the UCLA violence came from counter-protesters, Bash’s response was not to correct her own earlier misrepresentation, but to disparage antiwar protesters: Bash commended the Jewish Federation of Los Angeles for saying the violence does not represent the Jewish community, and snidely commented: “Be nice to see that on all sides of this.”
‘Violence erupted’“For me, never again is never again for anyone,” says a Jewish participant in the UCLA encampment (Instagram, 5/2/24).
Bash wasn’t the only one at CNN framing antiwar protesters as the violent ones, against all evidence. Correspondent Camila Bernal (5/2/24) reported on the UCLA encampment:
The mostly peaceful encampment was set up a week ago, but violence erupted during counter protest on Sunday, and even more tense moments overnight Tuesday, leaving at least 15 injured. Last night, protesters attempted to stand their ground, linking arms, using flashlights on officers’ faces, shouting and even throwing items at officers. But despite what CHP described as a dangerous operation, an almost one-to-one ratio officers to protesters gave authorities the upper hand.
Who was injured? Who was violent? Bernal left that to viewers’ imagination. She did mention that officers used “what appeared to be rubber bullets,” but the only participant given camera time was a police officer accusing antiwar students of throwing things at police.
Earlier CNN reporting (5/1/24) from UCLA referred to “dueling protests between pro-Palestinian demonstrators and those supporting Jewish students.” It’s a false dichotomy, as many of the antiwar protesters are themselves Jewish, and eyewitness reports suggested that many in the mob were not students and not representative of the Jewish community (Times of Israel, 5/2/24).
CNN likewise highlighted the law and order perspective after Columbia’s president called in the NYPD to respond to the student takeover of Hamilton Hall. CNN Newsroom (5/1/24) brought on a retired FBI agent to analyze the police operation. His praise was unsurprising:
It was impressive. It was surprisingly smooth…. The beauty of America is that we can say things, we can protest, we can do this publicly, even when it’s offensive language. But you can’t trespass and keep people from being able to go to class and going to their graduations. We draw a line between that and, you know, civil control.
CNN host Jake Tapper (4/29/24) criticized the Columbia president’s approach to the protests—for being too lenient: “I mean, a college president’s not a diplomat. A college president’s an authoritarian, really.” (More than a week earlier, president Minouche Shafik had had more than a hundred students arrested for camping overnight on a lawn—FAIR.org, 4/19/24.)
‘Taking room from my show’“The majority of news since the war began…has been skewed by a systemic and institutional bias within the network toward Israel,” a CNN staffer told the Guardian (2/4/24).
Tapper did little to hide his utter contempt for the protesters. He complained:
This is taking room from my show that I would normally be spending covering what is going on in Gaza, or what is going on with the International Criminal Court, talking about maybe bringing charges. We were talking about the ceasefire deal. I mean, this—so I don’t know that the protesters, just from a media perspective, are accomplishing what they want to accomplish, because I’m actually covering the issue and the pain of the Palestinians and the pain of the Israelis—not that they’re protesting for that—less because of this.
It’s Tapper and CNN, of course, who decide what stories are most important and deserve coverage—not campus protesters. Some might say that that a break from CNN‘s regular coverage the Israel’s assault on Gaza would not altogether be a bad thing, as CNN staffers have complained of “regurgitation of Israeli propaganda and the censoring of Palestinian perspectives in the network’s coverage of the war in Gaza” (Guardian, 2/4/24)
The next day, Tapper’s framing of the protests made clear whose grievances he thought were the most worthy (4/30/24): “CNN continues to following the breaking news on college campuses where anti-Israel protests have disrupted academic life and learning across the United States.”
ACTION ALERT:* Messages to CNN* can be sent here. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread of this post.
The post As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies appeared first on FAIR.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240503.mp3Media 2070
We’re now seeing the impacts of the reality that corporate media, as well as corporate-funded universities, will always side with official power—as they present students sitting quietly in tents in protest of genocide as violent terrorists. But the fact is, we’ve been seeing it for decades, as corporate media spin narratives about people of color as both violent and lazy, and the socio-economic status quo as the best possible option, even as millions of people increasingly recognize that it means a terrible life for them.
Many people, at the same time, are deeply interested in how different media, telling different stories, can change our understanding of our past, our present and our future. Joseph Torres is currently senior advisor for reparative policy and programs at the group Free Press, and co-author with Juan Gonzalez of News for All the People. Writer, musician and communications strategist Collette Watson is with Black River Life. They both are part of the project Media 2070, which aims to highlight how media can serve as a lever for racial justice, and how that includes changing entrenched media narratives about Black people.
Their co-authored article, “Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm,” appears in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (5/23).
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240503TorresWatson.mp3The post Joseph Torres & Collette Watson on Media for Social Justice appeared first on FAIR.
“Journalism is not a crime,” a Biden administration official accurately notes in one of the New York Times‘ profiles (3/29/24) of imprisoned US reporter Even Gershkovich.
A devoted New York Times reader might get the impression that the paper cares deeply about protecting journalists from those who seek to suppress the press.
After all, the Times runs sympathetic features on journalists like Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was detained by Russia over a year ago. The paper (6/3/22) has written stingingly of Russia’s “clamp down on war criticism,” including in a recent editorial (3/22/24) headlined “Jailed in Putin’s Russia for Speaking the Truth.”
It has castigated China for its “draconian” attacks on the press in Hong Kong (6/23/21). The Times has similarly criticized Venezuela for an “expanding crackdown on press freedom” (3/6/19) and Iran for a “campaign of intimidation” against journalists (4/26/16).
Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger, in his keynote address at the 2023 World Press Freedom Day, spoke forcefully:
All over the world, independent journalists and press freedoms are under attack. Without journalists to provide news and information that people can depend on, I fear we will continue to see the unraveling of civic bonds, the erosion of democratic norms and the weakening of the trust—in institutions and in each other—that is so essential to the global order.
‘Targeting of journalists’“More journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel/Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year,” the Committee to Protect Journalists (12/21/23) reported.
Yet since October 7—as Israel has killed more journalists, in a shorter period of time, than any country in modern history—the Times has minimized when not ignoring this mass murder. Conservative estimates from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) estimate that 95 journalists have been killed in the Israel/Gaza conflict since October 7, all but two being Palestinian and Lebanese journalists killed by Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). Other estimates, like those from the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate (4/4/24), place the number closer to 130. All told, Israel has killed about one out every 10 journalists in Gaza, a staggering toll.
(Two Israeli journalists were killed by Hamas on October 7, according to CPJ, and none have been killed since. Other tallies include two other Israeli journalists who were killed as part of the audience at the Supernova music festival on October 7.)
CPJ (12/31/23) wrote in December that it was “particularly concerned about an apparent pattern of targeting of journalists and their families by the Israeli military.” It noted that, in at least two instances, “journalists reported receiving threats from Israeli officials and IDF officers before their family members were killed.” This accusation has been echoed by groups like Doctors Without Borders. Israel has demonstrably targeted reporters, like Issam Abdallah, the Reuters journalist who was murdered on October 13 (Human Rights Watch, 3/29/24).
In a May 2023 report, CPJ (5/9/23) found that the IDF had killed 20 journalists since 2000. None of the killers faced accountability from the Israeli government, despite the incidents being generally well-documented. Despite its demonstration that Israel’s military has targeted—and murdered—journalists in the past, important context like this report is generally absent from the Times. (The CPJ report was mentioned at the very end of one Times article—12/7/23.)
We used the New York Times API and archive to create a database of every Times news article that included the keyword “Gaza” written between October 7, 2023, and April 7, 2024 (the first six months of the war). We then checked that database for headlines, subheads and leads which included the words (singular or plural) “journalist,” “media worker,” “news worker,” “reporter” or “photojournalist.” Opinion articles, briefings and video content were excluded from the search.
Failing to name the killerIn the only two New York Times headlines (e.g., 11/21/23) that identified Israel as the killer of journalists, Israeli responsibility was presented as an allegation, not a fact.
We found that the Times wrote just nine articles focused on Israel’s killing of specific journalists, and just two which examined the phenomenon as a whole.
Of the nine headlines which directly noted that journalists have been killed, only two headlines—in six months!—named Israel as responsible for the deaths. Both of these headlines (11/21/23, 12/7/23) presented Israel’s responsibility as an accusation, not a fact.
Some headlines (e.g., 11/3/23) simply said that a journalist had been killed, without naming the perpetrator. Others blamed “the war” (e.g., 10/13/23).
During this same six-month period, the Times wrote the same number of articles (nine) on Evan Gershkovitch and Alsu Kurmasheva, two US journalists being held on trumped-up espionage charges by Russia.
From October 7 until April 7, the Times wrote 43 stories that mentioned either the overall journalist death toll or the deaths of specific journalists. As noted, 11 of these articles (26%) either focused on the death of a specific journalist or on the whole phenomenon. But in the vast majority of these articles, 32 out of 43 (74%), the killing of journalists was mentioned in passing, or only to add context, often towards the end of a report.
Many of these articles (e.g., 10/25/23, 11/3/23, 11/21/23, 12/15/23) contained a boilerplate paragraph like this one from November 4:
The war continues to take a heavy toll on those gathering the news. The Committee to Protect Journalists said that more news media workers have been killed in the Israel/Hamas war than in any other conflict in the area since it started tracking the data in 1992. As of Friday, 36 news workers—31 Palestinians, four Israelis and one Lebanese—have been killed since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, the group said.
Saying that “the war” was taking a heavy toll, and listing the number of journalists “killed in the Israel/Hamas war,” the Times‘ standard language on the death toll for reporters omits that the vast majority have been killed by Israel. It does note, however, that these deaths occurred “since Hamas attacked Israel,” suggesting that Hamas was directly or indirectly to blame.
The first New York Times article (11/10/23) to focus on the killing of journalists—after 40 media worker deaths—blamed “the war” in its headline, rather than Israel.
It took a month for the Times to write a single article (11/10/23) focused on what had become “the deadliest month for journalists in at least three decades.” This November article, published on page 8 of the print edition, and apparently not even deserving of its own web page—named “the war” as the killer, managing for its entire ten paragraphs to avoid saying that Israel had killed anyone.
Again, the writing subtly implied that Hamas was to blame for Israel’s war crimes (emphasis added):
At least 40 journalists and other media workers have been killed in the Israel/Hamas war since October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, making the past month the deadliest for journalists in at least three decades, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
There was no mention of Israel’s long pattern of targeting journalists.
Obscuring responsibilityIt took until January 30, nearly four months and at least 85 dead journalists into the war, for the New York Times to address this mass murder in any kind of comprehensive manner. This article—“The War the World Can’t See”—aligned with the Times practice of obscuring and qualifying Israeli responsibility for its destruction of Gaza. Neither the headline, the subhead nor the lead named Israel as responsible for reporters’ killings. Israel’s responsibility for the deaths of scores of reporters appeared almost incidental.
“Nearly all the journalists who have died in Gaza since October 7 were killed by Israeli airstrikes, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists”: We had to wait until the 11th paragraph of a story on the 116th day of the slaughter for the New York Times (1/30/24) to publish this straightforward admission.
The lead positioned the mass death of journalists and the accompanying communications blackout as tragic consequences of “the war”:
To many people outside Gaza, the war flashes by as a doomscroll of headlines and casualty tolls and photos of screaming children, the bloody shreds of somebody else’s anguish.
But the true scale of death and destruction is impossible to grasp, the details hazy and shrouded by internet and cellphone blackouts that obstruct communication, restrictions barring international journalists and the extreme, often life-threatening challenges of reporting as a local journalist from Gaza.
Remarkably, we have to wait until the 11th paragraph for the Times to acknowledge that Israel is responsible for all of the journalists’ deaths in Gaza. Palestinian accusations that Israel is intentionally targeting journalists were juxtaposed, in classic Times fashion, with a quote from the Israeli military: Israel “has never and will never deliberately target journalists,” spokesperson Nir Dinar said, and the suggestion that Israel was deliberately preventing the world from seeing what it was doing in Gaza was a “blood libel.”
This rebuttal was presented without the context that, as discussed earlier, Israel has for decades been accused by human rights groups and other media organizations of intentionally targeting journalists. The article leaves the reader with the general impression that a terrible tragedy—not a campaign of mass murder—is unfolding.
This review of six months of the New York Times’ coverage exposes a remarkable selective interest in threats to journalism. Despite Sulzberger’s lofty rhetoric, the Times seems to only care about the “worldwide assault on journalists and journalism” when those journalists are fighting repression in enemy states.
The post NYT Not Much Concerned About Israel’s Mass Murder of Journalists appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed the National Employment Law Project’s Sally Dworak-Fisher about delivery workers for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426Dworak-Fisher.mp3Janine Jackson: Less than four months after it came into effect, Seattle is looking to “adjust”—as it’s being described—the app-based worker minimum-payment ordinance calling on companies like Uber and DoorDash to improve labor conditions for employees.
Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson described the ordinance’s impact on the local economy as “catastrophic.” The Seattle Times reports that the “whiplash reversal comes as both drivers and businesses complained about the added cost of delivery, largely in the form of service charges added by the companies in the wake of the new law”—”in the wake of” being the load-bearing language here.
Common Dreams (3/28/24)
The story of a recent piece by our next guest is in its headline: “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It.” So here to help us break down what’s going on is Sally Dworak-Fisher, a senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. She joins us now by phone from Baltimore City. Welcome to CounterSpin, Sally Dworak-Fisher.
Sally Dworak-Fisher: Thank you so much for having me.
JJ: Though more and more people are taking on gig work—for reasons largely to do with the conditions of non-gig work—I think it’s still safe to say that more mainstream news media consumers use app-based delivery systems than work for them. And reporters know what they’re doing when they explain this story by saying, for instance, “Companies like DoorDash have implemented regulatory fees in response to the new law, causing the cost of orders to go up.” What’s being skipped over in that formulation, or that explanation, of what’s happening here, that there was a new law and now costs have gone up? What’s missing there?
SD: Sure. Well, it’s not a surprise that companies might choose to pass on some percentage of new costs to consumers, but they’re by no means required to, and compliance with bedrock pay standards, or any workplace law or social safety net, is part of running a business. If you need to charge a certain amount so you can pay your employee a minimum wage, you don’t normally issue a receipt that says, this is due to the minimum wage law. The practice of specifically pointing the finger at some new law seems really designed to make customers angry at the law, and pit them against the workers. It’s a business choice, it’s not a requirement.
And businesses could choose to, for instance, not pass on the entire cost of the law, or not pass on any of it, if they can afford to do that within their profit margin. So this particular situation, where customers are getting receipts that, in effect, blame the law, seems like a play to pit workers and consumers against one another.
JJ: Absolutely. In your piece that I saw in Common Dreams, you note that charging new service fees is an effort to “tank consumer demand and available work.” What are you getting at there? Why would a company want to draw down consumer demand, and then, more specifically, why would they want to lessen available work?
SD: My point there was just that, in so doing, they can also again create an outcry, a backlash, with workers themselves also saying, “Hey, the law isn’t working as intended. We need to change it.” But, really, it’s a manufactured crisis, and it’s not the law that’s to blame there. It’s really the policy of the business that’s to blame.
JJ: And we don’t see media, at least that I’ve seen, digging into that kind of elision, that kind of skip.
Seattle Times (4/26/24)
SD: Another interesting thing to note would be, so they add a $5 fee that’s purportedly because of the new legal requirements. But it’ll be interesting to know how much of that fee from all those people is really going through the compliance, versus how much is going to profit. And their data is not easily shared.
JJ: And I wanted to ask you about that data. Companies are saying these new service charges are a necessary counterbalance to increased labor costs. Though according to, at least, the Seattle Times, they have declined to release internal data. So we’re being asked to trust the very companies that fought tooth and nail against this ordinance, against paying workers more. We’re just supposed to trust their explanation of what the impact of that ordinance has been. That is, as you say, an information deficit there.
SD: Yes, and I think that they closely guard their information, and don’t turn it over to policymakers. It’s sort of shadow-boxing, in a way, because they have all the information. So I would hope that policymakers would make them show their work, in effect.
JJ: Or at least make a point of the fact that they’re not; that they’re making assertions based on something that they’re not proving or illustrating. We can call that out.
SD: And that was part of our point, is that this law has only gone into effect two months ago. Just be cognizant of the fact that this is a choice that the companies are making to raise these service fees. And before you go about rushing to judgment on anything, demand the data, and see what’s going on.
CounterSpin (4/3/20)
JJ: When I spoke with Bama Athreya, who hosts the podcast the Gig, she was saying that there’s a glaring need for a bridge between labor rights advocates and digital rights advocates. Because these companies, they’re not making toasters. Their business model is crucial here, and part of that involves, in fact, data, and that, beyond our regular understanding of workers’ rights, there needs to be a bigger-picture understanding of this new way of doing business.
SD: That dovetails with something that we talk about frequently here, which is the algorithmic control and the gamification of the work. These corporations are really well-versed in touting flexibility, but the day-to-day job of an app-based worker is highly mediated, monitored, controlled by algorithms that detail how much they’ll be paid, when they’ll be paid, when they can work. There’s a whole lot of algorithms and tech that come into play here. But I do just want to say, it doesn’t make them special. These are just new ways of misclassifying workers as independent contractors.
JJ: It’s just a new shine on an old practice.
Another thing that Bama Athreya pointed out was that it’s often presented to us as, “Well, I guess you’re going to have to pay $26 for a cup of coffee, because the workers want to get paid more.” And that’s the pitting workers versus consumers angle that a lot of elite media take.
Intercept (1/7/22)
But also, if we look at other countries, companies like Uber say, “Well golly, if you make us improve our labor practices, I guess we’ll have to”—and then they kick rocks and look sad—“I guess we’ll just have to go out of business.” And then a government says, “Well, yeah, OK, but you still have to follow the law.” And then they say, “Oh, all right, we’ll just follow it.” They can do it.
SD: And I think they’ve admitted that. I believe that the Uber CEO, after California passed AB 5, which is a law regarding who’s an employee and who’s an independent contractor in that state, Uber, I’m pretty sure, was on record saying, “Well, we can comply with any law.”
And, honestly, I think that really gets into, what do we as a society want in terms of our policies? Do we want just any business? Don’t we have minimum wage laws for a reason? If you can’t make it work while still paying a living wage, then consumers aren’t in the business of subsidizing that. I’m sorry, but not every business is entitled to run on the lowest wage possible.
JJ: And I wish a lot of the folks were not saying, out of the same mouth, that capitalism is this wonderful thing where if you build a better mousetrap, then you succeed, and if you don’t, well, you don’t. And that’s why they have to be rewarded, because of the risk they take. When then, at the same time, we’re saying, oh, but if you want to fall afoul of certain basic human rights laws, we’ll subsidize that, and make sure you get to exist anyway. It’s a confusing picture.
SD: I mean, should we bring back child labor?
JJ: Yeah. Hmm. You thought that would be a less interesting question than it turns out that it is.
Let me just ask you, finally, what should we be looking for to happen from public advocates, which we would hope elected officials would be public advocates, and also reporters we would hope would be public advocates. What should they be calling for, and what should they notice if it doesn’t happen? What’s the right move right now?
Sally Dworak-Fisher: “Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor.”
SD: I think whatever can be done to support the movement. There’s movements across states of app-based workers demanding accountability, and really trying to shine a light on what’s really going on here. I think the more reporting on that, and exposing—you know, every worker should have flexibility and a good job, but the flexibility that’s offered app-based workers is not necessarily the flexibility that a regular reader might assume.
In 2018, NELP issued a report with another organization, called Uber State Interference, and we really identified these ways that Uber and Lyft, in particular, buy, bully and bamboozle their way into getting legislatures to enact the policies that they favor. And now, coming out of the pandemic, as workers are successfully organizing again, like they’ve been doing in Seattle and New York City and Minneapolis, the companies are orchestrating a backlash. So understanding the context of what’s going on, and exposing it, would go a long way in solidarity with the workers.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sally Dworak-Fisher from the National Employment Law Project; they’re online at NELP.org. And her piece, “DoorDash and Uber Using Customers as Pawns to Punish Workers—Don’t Fall for It,” can be found at CommonDreams.org. Thank you so much, Sally Dworak-Fisher, for speaking with us this week on CounterSpin.
SD: A pleasure to be here. Thank you so much.
The post ‘This Is a Choice Companies Are Making to Raise Fees’:
CounterSpin interview with Sally Dworak-Fisher on delivery workers appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed Sam, representative from National Students for Justice in Palestine, for the April 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240426.mp3National Students for Justice in Palestine
Janine Jackson: There is a long and growing list of US college campuses where encampments and other forms of protests are going on, in efforts to get college administrations to divest their deep and powerful resources from weapons manufacturers, and other ways and means of enabling Israel’s war on Palestinians, assaults that have killed some 34,000 people just since the Hamas attack of October 7.
One key group on campuses has been SJP, Students for Justice in Palestine. It’s not a new, hastily formed group; they’ve been around and on the ground for decades.
We’re joined now by Sam, a representative of National Students for Justice in Palestine. Welcome to CounterSpin.
Sam: Thank you for having me.
Middle East Eye (4/8/24)
JJ: I can only imagine what a time this is for you, but certainly a time when the need for your group is crystal clear. Individuals who want to speak up about the genocide in Palestine are helped by the knowledge that there are other people with them, behind them, but also that there are organizations that exist to support them and their right to speak out. I wonder, is that maybe especially true for students, whose rights exist on paper, but are not always acknowledged in reality?
S: Yes and no. I think a lot of people definitely want to support students, because what we’re doing is very visible, and also I think people are more willing to assume good faith from 20-year-olds. At the same time, also, free speech on college campuses, especially private campuses, the First Amendment doesn’t apply. So if you’re on a campus, that means that it is sometimes harder to speak out, especially because we’re seeing students getting suspended, and when they get suspended, they get banned from campus, they get evicted from their student housing, sometimes they lose access to healthcare. And, basically, the schools control a lot more of students’ lives than any institution does for adults in the workforce, for example.
JJ: Right. So what are you doing day to day? You’re at National SJP, and folks should know that there are hundreds of entities on campuses, but what are you doing? How do you see your job right now?
S: SJP is a network of chapters that work together. It’s not like they’re branches, where we are giving them orders; they have full autonomy to do what they want within this network.
So what we’re doing is what we’ve been trying to do for our entire existence, which is act as a hub, act as a resource center, provide resources to students, connect them with each other, offer advice, offer financial support when we can. One thing we’re really trying to do is pull everything together, basically present a consistent narrative to the public around this movement.
New York Times (4/29/24)
JJ: Speaking of narrative, the claim that anyone voicing anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian ideas is antisemitic is apparently convincing for some people whose view of the world comes through the TV or the newspaper. But it’s an idea that is blown apart by any visit to a student protest. It’s just not a true thing to say. And I wonder what you would say about narratives. It’s obviously about work, supporting people, but on the narrative space, what are you trying to shift?
S: I mean, I’m Jewish. I’m fairly observant. I was at a Seder last night. When people say the pro-Palestinian movement is antisemitic, they’re lying. I’m just flat-out saying I think a lot of people, on some level, know that this isn’t about Jews. This isn’t about Judaism. It’s about the fact that Israel is committing a genocide in our people’s name. And if you support it, that is going to lead people to make a bunch of bad inferences about you, because you’re vocally supporting a genocide.
This weaponization is meant to shift focus away from Gaza, away from Palestine, the people who are being massacred, the people whose bodies they found in a mass grave at a hospital yesterday. The point is to distract from the fact that there is no moral case to defend what Israel was doing. So the only thing that Zionists have going for them is just smears, attacking the movement, tone-policing, demanding we take stances that they’re never asked to take. No one ever asks pro-Israel protestors, “Do you condemn the Israeli government,” because Israel is seen as a legitimate entity.
First of all, I want to clarify, this is about Palestine. I don’t want to get too far into talking about how the genocide, the Zionist backlash to the movement, affects me as a Jewish person, because I have a roof over my head. There’s not going to be a bomb dropping into my home.
The narrative that we’re really trying to put out is this, what we’re calling the Popular University for Gaza, and it’s an overarching campaign narrative over this. Basically, the idea is that everything that’s happening is laying bare the fact that universities do not care about their students, or their staff, or their faculty, who are the people who make the university a university, and not just an investment firm. They care about their investments and profit and their reputation and, essentially, managing social change.
Columbia University Press Blog (2/27/19)
So what we’re doing is, as students, making encampments, taking up space on their campuses. And a crucial part of these encampments is the programming in them. It’s drawing on the traditions of Freedom Schools in the ’60s and in the South, and also the Popular University for Palestine, which was a movement, I think it’s still ongoing, in Palestine, basically educators teaching for liberation, teaching about the history of Palestinian figures, about resistance, about colonialism.
But the idea is that students are inserting themselves, forcibly disrupting the university’s normal business; and threatening the university’s reputation is a big part of it, and just rejecting their legitimacy, establishing the Popular University for teaching, where scholarship is done for the benefit of the people, not for preserving hegemony.
With this whole thing, we’re trying to emphasize, basically, that our universities, they have built all these reputations and all these super great things about them, but they don’t care about the people in them. So we’re going to take the structures that make up them, which are the people within them, and essentially turn them toward liberation, and against imperialism, against the ruling class.
Reuters (4/29/24)
JJ: Well, thank you very much. I want to say it’s very refreshing, and refreshing is not enough. A lot of folks are drawing inspiration from hearing people say, “The New York Times is saying I’m antisemitic. Maybe I should shut up, you know? Media are saying I’m disruptive. Oh, maybe I should quiet down.” I don’t see any evidence of shutting up or quieting down, despite, really, the full narrative power, along with other kinds of power, being brought against protesters. It doesn’t seem to be shutting people up.
S: No, because that’s the thing, is students have had enough, students are perfectly willing now to risk suspension, risk expulsion, because they know that, essentially, the university’s prestige has been shattered. Even me, I’m currently in school, I’m a grad student. I’ve realized, so far I’ve been OK, but even if I did get expelled, or forced to drop out of my program, that’s a risk I’m willing to take. That’s a tiny sacrifice compared to what people in Palestine are going through. We are willing to sacrifice our futures in a system that increasingly doesn’t give us a future anyway. I think that’s another big part of it, is the feeling that, basically, even if you get a degree, you’re still going to be living precariously for a decade.
And another thing is, also, that today’s college seniors graduated from high school in the spring of 2020. They never really had a normal college experience. Their freshman year was online, so they never developed the bonds with that university, traditional attachment to the university. And also, the universities, the way they handled Covid generally has been terrible, and just seeing them completely disregard their students during the pandemic, I think, has really radicalized a lot of students. Basically, they’re willing to defy the institution.
This is first and foremost about Gaza. It’s about the genocide, it’s about Palestine. It’s not about standing with Columbia students. They have repeatedly asked: Don’t center them; center Gaza. And, basically, we reject the university system as the arbiter of our futures, the arbiter of right and wrong. And we’re going to make our own learning spaces until they listen to us and stop investing our tuition dollars in genocide.
So yeah, free Palestine.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Sam from Students for Justice in Palestine, NationalSJP.org. Thank you so much, Sam, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
S: Yeah, thanks for having me.
The post ‘This Weaponization Is Meant to Shift Focus Away From Gaza’:
CounterSpin interview with Sam on Students for Justice in Palestine appeared first on FAIR.
The Washington Post (4/15/24) published a glowing profile of two former public school teachers who had “grown convinced their school was teaching harmful ideas about race and history, including what they believe is the false theory America is systemically racist.”
In the latest multi-thousand word feature depicting America’s “education culture war,” the Washington Post’s “They Quit Liberal Public Schools. Now They Teach Kids to Be Anti-‘Woke’” (4/15/24) fawningly profiled Kali and Joshua Fontanilla, the founders of the Exodus Institute, an online Christian K–12 school that aims to “debunk the ‘woke’ lies taught in most public schools.”
The piece was written by Post reporter Hannah Natanson, who regularly contributes longform features that platform anti-trans and anti–Critical Race Theory views through a palatable “hear me out” frame, while including little in the way of opposing arguments—or fact checks (FAIR.org, 5/11/23, 2/12/22, 8/2/21).
This profile of the Fontanillas—two former California teachers who left their jobs and moved to Florida in 2020, “disillusioned” by school shutdowns and colleagues’ embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement—shows the Post once again depicting efforts to address racial and gender bias as a bigger problem than racial and gender bias themselves.
‘Direct from the classroom’“The claim that public schools teach left-wing ‘indoctrination, not education’ had become a commonplace on the right, repeated by parents, politicians and pundits,” Natanson wrote:
But not, usually, by teachers. And that’s why the Fontanillas felt compelled to act: They came direct from the classroom. They had seen firsthand what was happening. Now, they wanted to expose the propaganda they felt had infiltrated public schools—and offer families an alternative.
The irony of the Fontanillas founding a far-right Christian school to fight “indoctrination” is lost on Natanson, as she, too, uncritically repeated these claims, as though the couple’s experience as teachers legitimized the far-right ideologies they peddle.
Natanson reported that Kali’s social media presence has attracted people to her school—despite her being “regularly suspended for ‘community violations.’” The article does not specify what those violations are, but on Instagram, Kali herself shared a screenshot of her account being flagged for disinformation, and another video talking about how a post she made about “newcomers” (i.e., migrants) received a “violation,” in calls to get her followers to follow her backup account.
The piece refers to her ideas—including referring to Black History Month as “Black idolatry month” and encouraging her followers to be doomsday preppers—as “out there.”
Kali is half Black and half white, and Joshua is of Mexican and Puerto Rican descent—a fact that is mentioned alongside the couple’s gripes with the idea of slavery reparations and the concept that America is systemically racist.
Hate and conspiracy theoriesThe punchline here is that Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 4/5/24) ought to be able to call members of groups she dislikes “freaks.”
Kali brags that the more right-wing her ideas, the more families she attracts to her school. “But they also spurred thousands of critical messages from online observers who contended she was indoctrinating students into a skewed, conservative worldview,” Natanson wrote.
The “hate” that these videos “inspire,” Natanson wrote, is from commenters who oppose Kali’s messages:
Online commenters regularly sling racial slurs and derogatory names: “slave sellout roach.” “dumb fukn bitch.” “wish dot com Candice Owen.” “Auntie Tomella.”
Never mind the hate and conspiracy theories Kali spews in her videos. A recent video on Kali’s Instagram begs followers to follow a backup account, because a video she made about migrants was taken down by Meta as a violation of community standards. She says she believes her account has been “shadowbanned”—or muted by the platform.
Even the posts that remain unflagged by Instagram are full of bigotry and disinformation, including a cartoon of carnival performers being let go from a sideshow because they’re “not freaks anymore,” a compilation video of trans women in women’s restrooms with text that reads “get these creeps out of our bathrooms,” and a photo of a trans flag that demands, “Defund the grooming cult.”
An ad Kali posted for an emergency medical kit claimed that the FDA had “lost its war” on Ivermectin, an antiparasitic drug that the right has latched onto as a panacea for Covid-19. In reality, the lawsuit the FDA settled with the drug company involved an acknowledgement that the drug has long been used to treat humans, not just livestock—but for parasites, not viruses (Newsweek, 3/22/24). The National Institutes of Health (12/20/23) report that double-blind testing reveals ivermectin is ineffective against Covid.
Evidence of ‘indoctrination’For Kali Fontanilla (Instagram, 1/9/24), the “facts” are transphobic, and “feelings” are to be disregarded—other people’s feelings, anyway.
Kali, who regularly mocks trans women and left-wing activists, apparently couldn’t take the heat. The backlash got so bad, Natanson writes, that
coupled with her chihuahua’s death and an injury that prevented her daily workouts, it proved too much for Kali. She went into a depressive spiral and had to take a break from social media. She barely managed to film her lessons.
In the Fontanillas’ lessons, the existence of white Quakers who fought against slavery is proof that racism is not institutionalized in the US. It’s also evidence of an “overemphasis” on reparations, even though, as Natanson mentioned toward the very end of the piece, many Quakers did take part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and later chose to pay reparations.
In addition to Covid shutdowns, other evidence of left-wing “indoctrination” offered by the Fontanillas included a quiz that asked students to recognize their privilege, the use of a Critical Race Theory framework in an ethnic studies class, announcements for gay/straight alliance club meetings (with no announcements made for Joshua’s chess club meetings), and the work of “too many” “left-leaning” authors—like Studs Terkel, Langston Hughes and Walt Whitman—in the English curriculum.
Natanson includes a positive testimonial from a mother whose son Kali tutored before her political shift rightward, who remembers how “Kali let him run around the block whenever he got antsy,” and a screenshot of a review from a current student, who says they “love love LOVE” Kali’s teaching, because it exposes “the stupid things on the internet in a logical way.” Natanson also quotes an employee of the company that handles the logistics for Southlands Christian Schools, the entity from which the Fontanillas’ school gets its accreditation, who says, “Josh and Kali are good people, they have a good message, there is definitely a market for what they’re doing.”
The only opposition to the Fontanillas’ arguments in the nearly 3,000-word piece, beyond incoherent social media comments, come in the form of official statements and school board meeting soundbites.
Natanson includes a statement from the school district the Fontanillas formerly worked, saying that the ethnic studies class Kali resigned over was intended to get students to “analyze whether or not race may be viewed as a contributor to one’s experiences.” Another statement from the district denied Joshua’s claims that his school privileged certain clubs over others, and upheld that its English curriculum followed California standards.
The only direct quotes from students opposing the Fontanillas are two short comments from students at a school board meeting who said they enjoyed the ethnic studies class. It does not appear Natanson directly interviewed either student: One statement was taken directly from the school board meeting video, and the other from a local news article. The lack of any original, critical quotes in the piece raises the question: Did Natanson talk to anyone who disagreed with the Fontanillas during her reporting on the article?
Bigger threats than pronounsThe Washington Post profile presents the Fontanillas as pious and principled—leaving out any imagery of their hate-filled ideology.
The article included a dramatic vignette of the couple bowing their heads after seeing a public art exhibit with pieces depicting a book in chains and a student wearing earrings that read “ASK ME ABOUT MY PRONOUNS”—”just one more reason, Kali told herself, to pray,” Natanson wrote.
While thus passing along uncritically the Fontanillas’ take on what’s wrong with the world today, the article made no mention of more substantial threats bigotry poses to children and society at large.
LGBTQ youth experience bullying at significantly greater rates than their straight and cisgender peers (Reisner et al., 2015; Webb et al., 2021), and bullying is a strong risk factor for youth suicide (Koyanagi, et al., 2019). LGBTQ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their straight and cisgender peers (Johns et al., 2019; Johns et al., 2020). However, bullying of LGBTQ youth occurs less often at LGBTQ-affirming schools (Trevor Project, 2021).
A recent study found that about 53% of Black students experience moderate to severe symptoms of depression, and 20% said they were exposed to racial trauma often or very often in their lives (Aakoma Project, 2022).
Individuals of Black and Hispanic heritage have a higher risk of Covid infection and hospitalization from than their white counterparts (NIH, 2023). Peterson-KFF’s Health System Tracker (4/24/23) found that during the pandemic, communities of color faced higher premature death rates.
The migrants at the US border that Kali demonizes in her videos are seeking asylum from gang violence, the targeting of women and girls, and oppressive regimes propped up by US policy. Undocumented immigrants are less than half as likely as US citizens to be arrested for violent crimes (PNAS, 12/7/20). They are also being turned away at higher rates under Biden than they were under Trump (FAIR.org, 3/29/24).
Not the censored worldviewFar from being suppressed, the “anti-woke” movement is very effective at suppressing ideas that it disagrees with (Pen America).
The idea that left-wing “propaganda” is “infiltrating” public schools is upside-down. If there’s a particular ideology that is being systematically censored in this country, to the point where it deserves special consideration by the Washington Post, it is not the Fontanillas’.
Since 2021, 44 states have introduced bills or taken other steps to ban Critical Race Theory in schools. Eighteen states have already imposed these bans or restrictions (Education Week, 3/20/24). The right is pushing for voucher schemes that transfer tax revenues from public to private schools, including to politicized projects like Exodus Institute (Progressive, 8/11/21; EPI, 4/20/23).
In the first half of this school year alone, there were more than 4,000 instances of books being banned. According to PEN America (4/16/24), people are using sexual obscenity laws to justify banning books that discuss sexual violence and LGBTQ (particularly trans) identities, disproportionately affecting the work of women and nonbinary writers. Bans are also targeted toward literature that focuses on race and racism, Critical Race Theory and “woke ideology.”
It is dangerous and backwards for the Washington Post to play along with this couples’ delusion that they are free speech martyrs—even as their “anti-woke” agenda is being signed into censorious law across the country.
The piece ended back in the virtual classroom with the Quakers, as Natanson takes on a tone of admiration. Kali poses the question to her students, “What does it mean to live out your values?”
“Kali smiled as she told her students to write down their answers,” Natanson narrated. “She knew her own.”
The post WaPo Lets Bigots Frame School Culture War Conversation…Again appeared first on FAIR.
When a new example arose of RICO being used to punish the powerless rather than the powerful, concern was hard to find in corporate media.
The post Georgia’s RICO Law Is in the News—but Its Use to Silence Protesters Gets a Pass appeared first on FAIR.
Wired (5/26/23): “It’s a giant challenge to strike the right balance between industry innovation and protecting rights and citizens.”
“Everyone Wants to Regulate AI. No One Can Agree How,” Wired (5/26/23) proclaimed earlier this year. The headline resembled one from the New Yorker (5/20/23) published just days prior, reading “Congress Really Wants to Regulate AI, but No One Seems to Know How.” Each reflected an increasingly common thesis within the corporate press: Policymakers would like to place guardrails on so-called artificial intelligence systems, but, given the technology’s novel and evolving nature, they’ll need time before they can take action—if they ever can at all.
This narrative contains some kernels of truth; artificial intelligence can be complex and dynamic, and thus not always easily comprehensible to the layperson. But the suggestion of congressional helplessness minimizes the responsibility of lawmakers—ultimately excusing, rather than interrogating, regulatory inertia.
Struggling to ‘catch up’Amid a piecemeal, noncommittal legislative climate, media insist that policymakers are unable to keep pace with AI development, inevitably resulting in regulatory delays. NPR (5/15/23) exemplified this with the claim that Congress had “a lot of catching up to do” on AI and the later question (5/17/23) “Can politicians catch up with AI?” Months earlier, the New York Times (3/3/23) reported that “lawmakers have long struggled to understand new innovations,” with Washington consequently taking “a hands-off stance.”
Congress has failed to regulate technology because “lawmakers have long struggled to understand new innovations,” the New York Times (3/3/23) reports—and not because tech firms give millions of dollars to politicians, especially Democrats.
The Times noted that the European Union had proposed a law that would curtail some potentially harmful AI applications, including those made by US companies, and that US lawmakers had expressed intentions to review the legislation. (The EU’s AI Act, as it’s known, may become law by the end of 2023.) Yet the paper didn’t feel compelled to ask why the EU—whose leadership isn’t exactly dominated by computer scientists—could forge ahead with restrictions on the US AI industry, but the US couldn’t.
These outlets frame AI rulemaking as a matter of technical knowledge, when it would be more accurate, and constructive, to frame it as one of moral consideration. One might argue that, in order to regulate a form of technology that affects the public—say, via “predictive policing” algorithms, or automated social-services software—it’s more important to grasp its societal impact than its operational minutia. (Congressional staffer Anna Lenhart told the Washington Post—6/17/23—as much, but this notion seems to be far from mainstream.)
This certainly isn’t the prevailing view of the New York Times (8/24/23), which argued that legislators’ lag continues a pattern of slow congressional responses to new technologies, repeating the refrain that policymakers “have struggled” to enact major technology laws. The Times cited the 19th century advent of steam-powered trains as an example of a daunting legislative subject, emphasizing that Congress took more than 50 years to institute railroad price controls.
Yet the process of setting pricing rules has little, if anything, to do with the mechanical specifics of a train. Could it be that delays on price controls were caused more by pro-corporate policy choices than by a lack of technological expertise? For the Times, such a question, which might begin to expose some of the ugly underpinnings of US governance, didn’t merit attention.
The wrong incentives The Washington Post (12/28/22) did a whole story about Rep. Don Beyer (D–Va.) going back to school to learn about AI—with no mention of his investments in AI stocks.
The New York Times need look no further than its own archives to find some more illuminating context for US lawmakers’ approach to AI regulation. Last year, the paper (9/13/22) reported that 97 members of Congress owned stock in companies that would be influenced by those members’ regulatory committees. Indeed, many of those weighing in on AI regulation have a powerful incentive not to rein the technology in.
One of those 97 was Rep. Donald S. Beyer, Jr. (D–Va.), who “bought and sold [shares in Google parent company] Alphabet and Microsoft while he was on the House Science, Space and Technology Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight.” Beyer, who serves as vice chair of the House AI Caucus, has been featured in multiple articles (Washington Post, 12/28/22; ABC News, 3/17/23) as a model AI legislator. The New York Times (3/3/23) itself lauded Beyer’s enrollment in evening classes on AI, sharing his alert that regulation would “take time.”
Curiously, the coverage commending Beyer’s regulatory initiative has omitted his record of investing in the two companies—which happen to rank among the US’s most prominent purveyors of AI software—while he was authorized to police them.
Elsewhere in its congressional stock-trading report, the New York Times called Rep. Michael McCaul (R–Texas) “one of Congress’s most active filers,” noting his investments in a whopping 342 companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta, formerly known as Facebook, which also has a tremendous financial stake in AI. McCaul, like Beyer, boasts a top-brass post on the House AI Caucus.
McCaul’s trades were dwarfed by those of fellow AI Caucus member Rep. Ro Khanna (D–Calif.), who, according to the Times, has owned stock in nearly 900 companies. Among them: leading AI-chip manufacturer Nvidia (as of 2021), Alphabet and Microsoft. (Khanna has nominally endorsed proposals to curb congressional stock-trading, a stance contradicted by his vast portfolio.) Save for the Times exposé, none of the above pieces addressed Khanna’s, or McCaul’s, ethical breaches; in fact, Khanna is a recurring media source on AI legislation (Semafor, 4/26/23; San Francisco Chronicle, 7/20/23).
Congressmembers, dozens of whom have historically owned stock in AI companies, surely must be capable of learning about AI—and doing so swiftly—if they’ve been choosing to reap its monetary rewards for years. Why that knowledge can’t be applied to regulating the technology seems to be yet another question media are uninterested in asking.
Defense of toothless actionYahoo (5/17/23) assures us that legislators “won’t make same mistake with AI” that they did with social media.
In omitting this critical information, news sources are effectively giving Congress an undeserved redemption arc. Following years of legislative apathy to the surveillance, monopolization, labor abuses and countless other iniquities of Big Tech, media declare that legislators are trying to right their wrongs by targeting an ascendant AI industry (Yahoo! Finance, 5/17/23; GovTech, 6/21/23).
Accordingly, media have embraced policymakers’ efforts, no matter how feeble they may be. Throughout the year, politicians have hosted chummy hearings and meetings, as well as private dinners, with the chiefs of major AI companies to discuss regulatory frameworks. Yet, rather than impugning the influence legislators have awarded these executives, outlets present these gatherings as testaments to lawmakers’ dedication.
CBS Austin (8/29/23) justified congressional reliance on executives, whom it called “industry experts,” trumpeting that corporations like Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta were helping policymakers “chart a path forward.” The broadcaster went on to establish a pretext for business-friendly lawmaking:
Congress is trying to find a delicate balance of safeguarding the public while allowing the promising aspects of the technology to flourish and propel the economy and country into the future.
The New York Times (8/28/23), meanwhile, stated that Congress and the Biden administration have “leaned on” industry heads for “guidance on regulation,” a clever euphemism for lobbying. The Times reported that Congress would hold a forthcoming “closed-door listening session” with executives in order to “educate” its members, evincing no skepticism over what that education might involve. (At the session, Congress will also host civil rights and labor groups, who are theoretically much more qualified than C-suiters to determine the moral content of AI policymaking, but received much less fanfare from the Times.)
The guests of the “listening session,” per the Times, will include Twitter.com‘s Elon Musk, Google’s Sundar Pichai, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. Might the fact that each of them has fought tech-industry constraints have some bearing on the future? Reading the Times story, which didn’t deem this worth a mention, one wouldn’t know.
The post In AI Regulation Coverage, Media Let Lawmakers off the Hook appeared first on FAIR.
CounterSpin230908.mp3Liberation (9/3/23)
This week on CounterSpin: The White House has announced it’s extending the ban on people using US passports to go to North Korea. Corporate media seem to find it of little interest; who wants to go to North Korea? Which fairly reflects media’s disinterest in the tens of thousands of Korean Americans who might want to visit family in North Korea, along with their overarching, active disinterest in telling the story of the Korean peninsula in anything other than static, cartoonish terms—North Korea is a murderous dictatorship; South Korea is a client state, lucky for our support—terms that conveniently sidestep the US’s historic and ongoing role in the crisis.
Amanda Yee is a writer and organizer, and an editor of Liberation News. We’ll talk with her about the role the travel ban plays in a bigger picture.
CounterSpin230908Yee.mp3We reference hidden history in that conversation. CounterSpin got some deeper understanding on that a couple years back from Hyun Lee, US national organizer for Women Cross DMZ, part of the coalition Korea Peace Now!. We’ll hear a little from that today as well.
CounterSpin230908Lee.mp3The post Amanda Yee on Korean Travel Ban, Hyun Lee on Korea History appeared first on FAIR.
The September 1, 2023, episode of CounterSpin was an archival show, featuring interviews with Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro on education and media. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230901.mp3Janine Jackson: It’s back to school week here in the US. Schools—pre-K to college—have been on media’s front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access? What does it teach? What is its purpose? Do my kids have to go to school with those kids?
So while what’s happening right now is new, it has roots. And it does no disservice to the battles of the current day to connect them to previous battles and conversations, and that’s what we’re going to do today on the show.
We will hear from three of the many education experts it’s been our pleasure to speak with: Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro.
Today’s media debates about education always include politicians politicking; often include right-wing parents, who watched a video and now say their kids are being indoctrinated because queer people…exist; and they sometimes include teachers who say they are underpaid and beleaguered.
You know what they rarely include? Kids: the ones going to school and dealing with the daily fallout of arguments had about them, but without them. What children are, mainly, is fodder, proof of this or that argument. They’re stupid, they’re entitled, they’re, frankly, whatever a pundit needs them to be.
No one wants reporters to shove a microphone in a 10-year-old’s face, but if you’re doing a story about children, shouldn’t you be at least a little bit interested in children?
CounterSpin has talked many times with one of the researchers genuinely interested in kids, and the way they are treated and portrayed, Alfie Kohn. He is author of many books, including The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting.
CounterSpin’s Peter Hart spoke with Alfie Kohn in April of 2014. Let’s start with Peter’s introduction for some context.
CounterSpin230901Kohn.mp3Alfie Kohn: “There must always be losers: That’s built into the American concept of excellence and success.”
Peter Hart: Kids these days. They think they’ve got it all figured out. Their self-esteem, for no good reason, is through the roof, and they get trophies just for showing up.
You hear this stuff almost everywhere, from casual conversations to the newspaper op-ed pages.
A new book argues that this conventional wisdom about kids and parenting isn’t just misguided or inaccurate; it forms a worldview that is not only deeply conservative in many ways, but it is one that reinforces and recommends a specific political ideology.
Alfie Kohn is the author of the new book The Myth of the Spoiled Child: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom About Children and Parenting. It’s out now. Alfie Kohn, welcome back to CounterSpin.
Alfie Kohn: Thank you.
PH: Now, I used to keep a file of these “Every kid gets a trophy these days” newspaper columns, and I was always surprised that there wasn’t much of a political pattern to it. The right wingers and the liberals both had the same complaints.
And it seems that this is part of what inspires the book, that a set of very conservative ideas about parenting and about children, these ideas have become a kind of conventional wisdom.
AK: Yes, that’s quite right. And interestingly, the charges hurled at kids and parents sometimes are hard to reconcile with each other.
On the one hand, we’re told that parents are too permissive, that they don’t set limits for kids, and in the next breath, we hear that parents are overprotective, that they’re being helicopter parents. They don’t let kids experience frustration and failure and so on.
And there are these charges that kids get things too easily: We praise them when they haven’t earned it. We give them stickers and A’s and trophies without their having shown adequate accomplishments, and kids are growing up narcissistic and entitled and so on.
And the truly extraordinary thing is how, as you say, regardless of where people are on the political spectrum on most issues, they tend uncritically to accept this deeply conservative set of beliefs about kids and parenting.
(Da Capo Books, 2014)
PH: Teaching kids to be tough, and to expect or maybe anticipate failure, and to really put their nose to the grindstone, all of this—this just seems like good advice. Part of the book is arguing that there isn’t a lot of research that suggests that kids are better off as a result of these lessons we’re teaching them.
AK: That’s right. But what’s fascinating is the kind of defenses that are argued of this notion that kids have to be rewarded when they accomplish something impressive, and conspicuously go unrewarded when they don’t.
And, in fact, it’s not enough to accomplish something impressive; they have to defeat other people. There’s this notion that scarcity defines the very idea of excellence. If everyone is celebrated, that means we’re endorsing mediocrity. There must always be losers: That’s built into the American concept of excellence and success.
And I think underlying a lot of this is the notion, something I call BGUTI, which stands for “Better Get Used To It,” which basically says it’s a tough world out there, it’s very unpleasant, kids are going to experience a lot of unpleasantness when they’re older, and the best way to prepare them is to make them miserable while they’re small.
And when you show the illogic of this, and the fact that evidence, psychologically, shows exactly the opposite, they quickly pivot and reveal the ideological underpinning of this argument: Well, they lost! They’re not supposed to get a trophy, for Pete’s sake! You know?
And it’s very clear that it’s really a moral conviction underlying this, that you can’t get anything, including love and appreciation, or feel good about yourself, until you’ve earned it.
And so in the book I say, this is where the law of the marketplace meets sermons about what you have to do to earn your way into heaven. It’s an awful hybrid of neoclassical economics and theology, and it’s been accepted, even by liberals.
PH: And so many of these stories have a distinct media component. You kind of pull them all together in the book. A school wants to get rid of dodgeball, and suddenly that’s a national news story, because it teaches us some fundamental lesson about how soft kids are these days, and how they’re not taught to take their abuse from, I guess, the stronger kids. The self-esteem movement in the mid- to late ’90s—suddenly we’re teaching kids self esteem, and it’s a big waste of time. Why do you think media latch onto these stories?
AK: I think there’s a softer, more ideological idea that’s just in the water in this culture, and that has achieved the status of received truth.
Just like you can smear a political candidate with untruths and political ads to the point that people start to see the candidate that way, regardless of whether it’s accurate, or you hear this claim that self-esteem isn’t earned, that kids feel too good about themselves. And very few reporters or social commentators take a step back and ask, “Well, wait a minute, what does the psychological research say?”
Actually, what it says is that unconditional self-esteem, where you have a core of faith in yourself, your own competence and value, is tantamount to psychological health. Where people get screwed up is precisely where they’re taught as children, “I’m only good to the extent that I….”
That conditionality is what’s psychologically disturbing, and that’s at the core of this conservative notion that hasn’t been identified as conservative.
The amusing thing is that when you read yet another article in the vi or the Atlantic, or hear yet another radio commentator on this, what’s amazing is that all these writers and commentators congratulate themselves on their courage for having the nerve to say exactly what everyone else is saying.
JJ: That was Alfie Kohn, interviewed by CounterSpin’s Peter Hart back in 2014.
Alfie Kohn mentioned charter schools and the attacks on teachers unions in that conversation. We talked about that with education historian and author Diane Ravitch in May of 2020, in the midst of the Covid lockdown, when politicians couldn’t fix their face to say whether people needed to be in the workplace, or needed to be remote, or which people or why.
And some of them somehow landed on the side of, “You know who we don’t need to show up? Teachers.”
I asked Diane Ravitch, co-founder and president of the Network for Public Education, why billionaires like Bill Gates, who dabble in life-or-death issues, call themselves, with media accolade, “reformers” when it comes to education.
CounterSpin230901Ravitch.mp3Diane Ravitch: “What they’re interested in is cutting the cost of education, and the most expensive aspect of public education is teachers.”
Diane Ravitch: In my book Slaying Goliath, I refer to Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and all these tech titans, and Wall Street and on and on, as “disruptors.” They have lots of ideas about how to reinvent and reimagine American education. It always involves privatization. It always attacks public control, and democratic control, of schools. And it very frequently involves technology, because what they’re interested in is cutting the cost of education, and the most expensive aspect of public education is teachers.
And also, from a different point of view, the most important part of education is teachers, because I think that we’ve learned during this pandemic that sitting in front of a screen is not the same as being in a classroom with a human being.
What frightens me is that if these people get their way—and we have a very conservative Supreme Court, that’s on the cusp of ruling that states are not allowed to deny funding to religious schools—we will see this country go backwards educationally, because having a strong public school system is a pillar of democracy.
A public school system that’s open to all kids, that doesn’t push out kids because they can’t speak English, that doesn’t exclude the kids because they have disabilities, and that has a full program, and doesn’t indoctrinate kids into a religious point of view: This is what made America great, and because of the people like DeVos and Trump, and the Bill Gateses and other billionaires in the world who are funding all this privatization stuff, we can see our country go backwards. And that’s what’s frightening.
JJ: Finally, it’s galling to see the Gates Foundation issuing a response to complaints about this New York initiative, saying, “We believe that teachers have an important perspective that needs to be heard,” as though that were a gracious concession. But then, media and others still hanging on to this notion that riches equal expertise, and pretending that we don’t know what actually works. If I see another report about, “Hey, there was a study that said kids do better in smaller-sized classes”—we know this. It’s just about who they listen to. What would you like to see more of, or less of, in terms of education reporting?
DR: The scary thing about the pandemic is that every school system in the country is going to be faced with dramatic budget cuts. And what I would like to see reporters focused on is the funding. And the funding should be, not following the child—I mean, this is what Betsy DeVos wants, and what all the right-wingers want, is to see the funding diverted to wherever the child goes. If they go to religious schools, the money goes there. If they homeschool, the money goes there. This is public money; this is our taxpayer dollars—and it should go to public institutions.
I would like to see reporters understand that children learn best when they have human teachers, and when they have interaction with their peers.
And I would like to see them follow the money. Who is funding the charter movement? I know who’s funding it, read my book: It’s mainly the Walton Foundation, which hates unions, and which is responsible for one out of every four charter schools in the country. I would like to see them follow the money to the extent of saying, “What really matters is that kids have small enough classes”—and the research on small class size is overwhelming. And I would like to see them expose this hoax that somehow promoting privatization benefits the neediest children, when, in fact, privatization hurts the neediest children.
And they need to look at the research, the research on increased segregation and the defunding of the schools where the poorest kids attend. This has now grown overwhelming.
And when Betsy DeVos publicly urges the states to split the money between low-income public schools and high-income private schools, this is sick, and it should be reported as a disgrace. And so many disgraceful things are happening in education, and the reporters need to be all over it.
JJ: That was Diane Ravitch on CounterSpin in 2020.
And, finally, we see that many of the most visible attacks right now are on teachers themselves, or on teachers unions. But it’s also become clear that the heart of many of these attacks is actually on education itself, on the very notion that anyone from any walk of life could be exposed to critical thinking, basically.
This is not new. The decisions about who gets to learn what have been part of this country since before it was a country. So if we’re going to have this conversation around education now, well, let’s have it.
That was the message from Kevin Kumashiro, former dean of the School of Education at the University of San Francisco, and author of, among other titles, Bad Teacher!: How Blaming Teachers Distorts the Bigger Picture, when we spoke with him in June of 2019. We started out on the issue of student debt.
CounterSpin230901Kumashiro.mp3Kevin Kumashiro: “We need to be changing the system of education, not simply individual access.”
JJ: When you’re watching corporate media debate on an issue you care about, it’s hard to know whether to spend time combating the particular myths and misinformation in the conversation as it is, or to simply have a different conversation, with different premises and, frankly, participants.
If people are saying they oppose “government handouts,” for instance, you may feel a need to say, “Well, what about handouts to corporations?” But then you’re still stuck in this frame of seeing government as a separate force, apart from people, that’s giving things and taking them away, rather than a system that’s meant to be working to serve the common good.
Can we begin, though, with your overall take on the plans put forth by Sanders and Ilhan Omar, by Warren and Julián Castro, among others, as compared to the status quo? And then, what do you make of the arguments, those that we are hearing, against those plans?
Kevin Kumashiro: I think it’s really exciting that student debt relief is being elevated to the level that it is. It’s about time that we’re having this conversation. As you’ve mentioned, we know that there is over $1.6 trillion in student debt currently; that affects about 45 million people in this country. And this is a number, this is an amount, that has actually ballooned over the past couple of decades.
So one of the things that I think the proposals force us to think about is, what are our priorities right now, and how should that be reflected in our national budgets? Budgets reflect priorities, and if we were to fairly tax the rich and the corporations, and if we were to invest in education rather than in instruments of violence and repression, like prisons and war and so on, I think we would be able to create a budget that reflects that. This is absolutely affordable.
One of the things that I like to argue, however, is that as ambitious, as controversial as some people think that these proposals are, I actually would say that they don’t quite go far enough, in the way that we’re talking about it still.
And what I mean by that is, right now, the debate seems to be, how do we make education more affordable?—as if education is a commodity, where those who have the wealth can afford to buy the best.
And what I would say is, “Yeah, we could engage in that debate, but maybe the bigger debate is, should education be seen and treated as a commodity in the first place?” Right?
Education, I think many of us would argue, is so fundamentally important, not only to individual wellness and livelihood and success, but also to the health and well-being of the community and the society, right? It strengthens democracy, it strengthens participation, social relations, global health.
And so one of the things we should be thinking about is how education should be a fundamental human right for everyone. And what does it mean to invest in that? Where pre-K through college, you have the right to get the level of education that you need to be successful and happy in the world. And I think that’s where I would like to see the conversation going. And, hopefully, that’s a reframing that we are heading towards.
USA Today (6/26/19)
JJ: I have seen sympathetic portrayals of people trapped in student loan debt. USA Today, on June 26, had an article evoking how people can get caught up, and how they are left open to predations from scam debt-consolidation companies, for instance. And then, on another tack of the issue, the Washington Post had a data-driven piece about the negative impacts on the overall economy of student loan debt, which is something that I know that you’ve thought about, and that noted that the $1.6 trillion in debt that US families are carrying has doubled since the mid-2000s, which you also just said, and which a lot of newspaper articles leave out.
I would also say that media are doing a pretty good job of leaving most of the moralizing to the op-eds—you know, things like “I Worked as a Janitor to Keep My Student Loans Low. Wiping Debt Punishes Students Like Me,” which was in USA Today.
But what I’m not getting is what you’re talking about, which is the idea that, in reality, this is a bigger question about the role of education in society. I wonder how you see us moving the conversation from this specific conversation about Warren, about Sanders, and those plans: How do we push it to that bigger dialogue that you’re looking for?
KK: Yeah, it’s a great question, because overlapping with the ballooning of student debt over the last two decades is something that’s fueled that ballooning, which is the disinvestment by the public sector in public education.
Atlantic (5/3/18)
So higher education is a great example, where it’s hard to call public universities public universities, because such a small percentage of their budget actually comes from the public sector. So what we’ve seen in the past 20 years is a massive decline, in some cases half, maybe even more than half, lost—in terms of what the states used to be contributing to, for example, state-run universities.
And where does that shortfall now get taken up? Well, some of it gets taken up in fundraising. And some of it gets taken up in corporate sponsorships. But the vast majority of budget shortfalls gets taken up by tuition increases. So there’s a direct connection between disinvesting in public institutions—in other words, making them less public—and seeing the students take on the burden.
And when we talk about the difference between public and private education, I think it’s also important to think about who these universities serve. Right? Public universities serve a far more racially diverse population, they have more first-generation students, more working-class students, more immigrant students; it’s actually serving the students most in need.
And I think for many public universities, that was the vision, right, is that they would actually be the universities for the people; they were a counter to the elite private universities.
And so when we see public universities less able to serve their mission of reaching this much more diverse, underserved population, because we’re disinvesting in them, why are we now surprised, then, that the people with the least resources are now shouldering the greatest burden, in terms of trying to get education?
So, yeah, I think pushing the conversation, in terms of saying, well, what is the responsibility of society to educate its next generation? And how do we build up institutions where everyone can really benefit from that?
And let me just say one more thing, to even push the conversation a little further. One of the things that I like to argue is that we should not be debating, how do we give equal access to higher education as it currently exists? That actually isn’t what we should be debating.
Because the reality is that higher education is not equitable right now. The current state of higher education is that it’s sort of like public schools—you have a handful of very elite institutions that serve the more elite population. And then you have a vast number of underfunded, under-resourced institutions that are serving the masses.
We don’t want to give equal access to that. What we actually want to do is level the playing field, by saying that the institutions themselves need to be more equitable.
So when I talk about reforming education, and thinking about the funding of education, I don’t argue that we simply need to equalize how individuals finance their education. I actually argue that we need to be thinking more equitably about the funding of the system, and how that then changes the hierarchy that currently exists between educational institutions. We need to be changing the system of education, not simply individual access.
(New York Post, 4/23/19)
JJ: And some of the opponents, on this particular issue of debt forgiveness, I think have a more comprehensive vision, because some of them are the same people who are also fighting affirmative action—in higher education, in particular; some of them are the same who are against the very idea of public education that you’re talking about.
And I feel like latent in a lot of debate is the idea that education is supposed to be unobtainable for many, because otherwise, it’s not as valuable as a stratifier, as a screen. And among other things, to pick up on what you just said, that’s not the historical vision of education in this country, is it? I mean, if you look back at the history, education had a democratizing impulse behind it.
KK: So that’s such a great reminder, is that the history of education in this country is a very complicated and contested one. And when we look throughout the last century and a half, for example, what we can see is that different groups have argued for competing purposes of education. They’ve put forth different arguments of what education should be about.
So what I like to argue is that, let’s start with public schools, K–12, elementary, secondary schools. When we first created public schools in this country, we didn’t create them for everyone; we created them for only the most elite. And as we were forced to integrate more and more, we just came up with more and more ways to divide and sort them, such as through segregated schools, or tracked classrooms, or labeling, discipline and disenfranchisement.
And so, when we think about the achievement gap, or this gap in performance among students, many people say that that’s a sign that schools are failing. I like those who make the slightly more provocative argument, that actually the achievement gap is a sign, in some ways, that schools are succeeding, that they were doing exactly what they were set up to do.
So one of the things that we need to be arguing is not that we simply need to tinker with the system because it’s not really working well. What we actually need to recognize is that the system was built on really problematic assumptions, ideologies and exclusions from its very beginning. And our job is not to wish them away; our job is actually to dive into that contradiction and that messiness, and to say, “Well, how do we work in institutions that maybe were never intended for us, but still make them into the liberatory, revolutionary, democratizing institutions that they have the potential for?” Right?
Alongside the history of sorting and stratifying, you have an equally long history of people arguing that schools can play a democratizing force, and have been very forceful and persuasive at changing policies and institutions to move us in that direction. Schools have always been the site of struggle.
And this is another moment when we need to dive in and say, “Yes, we need to struggle, and we need to put forward a much bolder vision than we’re currently pursuing.”
JJ: That was author and advocate Kevin Kumashiro, talking with CounterSpin in 2019.
The post ‘Schools Have Always Been the Site of Struggle’ appeared first on FAIR.
The reviews in media of the film Oppenheimer have been largely positive—and perceptive and thoughtful. With a few exceptions, most reviewers “got” the message of the film.
Oppenheimer is not a film in the mold of Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the 1964 movie by Stanley Kubrick, an in-your-face cinematic presentation of the madness of nuclear war. It is not as direct as On the Beach, the 1959 Stanley Kramer film based on the Nevil Shute novel about World War III’s nuclear Armageddon, in which a US submarine crew and residents of Melbourne, Australia, await creeping death from radioactive fallout. Nor is it as straightforward as The Day After, the 1983 ABC-TV film that showed an estimated 100 million people the very personal results of nuclear war.
‘To embrace the bomb’Manohla Dargis (New York Times, 7/19/23): “The world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb.”
The film is about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the US physicist who helped develop the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As Manohla Dargis writes in her New York Times review (7/19/23), Christopher Nolan, who both directed and wrote Oppenheimer, “doesn’t restage the attacks; there are no documentary images of the dead or panoramas of cities in ashes.” Rather, the horrific consequences of nuclear conflict are transmitted through the story of Oppenheimer himself, who was “transformed by his role in the creation of weapons of mass destruction and soon after raised the alarm about the dangers of nuclear war.”
Citing French director François Truffaut, who once wrote that “war films, even pacifist, even the best, willingly or not, glorify war and render it in some way attractive,” Dargis contends that this
gets at why Nolan refuses to show the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, world-defining events that eventually killed an estimated 100,000 to upward of 200,000 souls.
You do, though, see Oppenheimer watch the first test bomb and, critically, you also hear the famous words that he said crossed his mind as the mushroom cloud rose: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”
“As Nolan reminds you, the world quickly moved on from the horrors of the war to embrace the bomb,” Dargis writes. “Now we, too, have become death, the destroyers of worlds.”
‘Uncomfortably timely’Ann Hornaday (Washington Post, 7/19/23): Nolan “has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end.”
The film’s focus not just on a bloody decision made the better part of a century ago, but on the threat of annihilation facing humanity today, is made clear at its outset. A caption spread across the screen with an observation from Greek mythology: “Prometheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to man. For this he was chained to a rock and tortured for eternity.”
Ann Hornaday in her Washington Post review (7/19/23) relates:
As a filmmaker at the height of his powers, Nolan has used those prodigious skills not simply to amaze or spectacularize, but to plunge the audience into a chapter of history that might feel ancient, as he reminds us, but happened just yesterday. By making that story so beautiful, so elegantly crafted and compulsively watchable, he has brought to life not just J. Robert Oppenheimer, but the still-crucial arguments he both started and tried to end.
Oppenheimer boldly posits that those arguments are still worth having, in a film of magnitude, profundity and dazzling artistry.
“Oppenheimer Is an Uncomfortably Timely Tale of Destruction,” was the headline of the review by David Klion in the New Republic (7/21/23). He declares:
Oppenheimer turns out to be uncomfortably timely. At no point since the end of the Cold War has nuclear war felt more plausible, as the daily clashes between a nuclear-armed Russia and a NATO-backed Ukraine remind us. Beyond literal nuclear warfare, we are faced with a range of existential dangers—pandemics, climate change and perhaps artificial intelligence—that will be managed, or mismanaged, by small teams of scientific experts working in secret with little democratic accountability. The ideologies, affiliations and personalities of those experts are likely to leave their stamp on history, and not in ways they themselves would necessarily wish. Oppenheimer’s dark prophecy may yet be fulfilled.
A plug for nuclear power?Richard Brody (New Yorker, 7/26/23): “The moral dilemmas and historical stakes that Oppenheimer faces are reduced to an interconnected set of trolley problems.”
Now, there were several inexplicable reviews of Oppenheimer.
In his review in New Scientist (8/9/23), a London-based publication with an international circulation of 125,000, Simon Ings writes that Oppenheimer “will help us embrace” nuclear power, which, he claims, “by any objective measure…is safe and getting safer.” Ing somehow believes the film “isn’t so much about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s development of the atomic bomb…as it is about the paranoid turn history took [about nuclear power] in the wake of his triumph.” How he deduced this from Oppenheimer is indecipherable.
Then there was the review by Richard Brody in the New Yorker (7/26/23) that begins:
Leaving the theater after seeing Oppenheimer, I was tempted to call it a movie-length Wikipedia article. But after a look online, I realized I was giving Wikipedia too little credit—or Christopher Nolan, the movie’s writer and director, too much.
The New Yorker gave his piece the headline “Oppenheimer Is Ultimately a History Channel Movie with Fancy Editing.” Considering the many highly emotional, engrossing scenes—including many personal ones involving Oppenheimer—this makes no sense. It is far from a movie version of a Wikipedia posting or a History Channel docudrama.
Brody almost seems to scold Nolan for hoping to provoke discussion:
Rather than illuminating him or his times, the scenes seem pitched to spark post-screening debate, to seek an importance beyond the experiences and ideas of the characters.
‘The bomb’s lingering residue’Justin Chang (LA Times, 7/19/23): “The real Oppenheimer may have never expressed remorse over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the movie never lets its Oppenheimer forget them.”
Justin Chang’s review in the Los Angeles Times (7/19/23) would no doubt have irritated Brody by engaging in “post-screening debate.” Nolan, Chang writes, is
less interested in reenacting scenes of mass death and devastation, none of which are depicted here, than in sifting through the bomb’s lingering geopolitical and psychic residue.
Chang observes:
The real Oppenheimer may have never expressed remorse over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but the movie never lets its Oppenheimer forget them, especially in one shuddering, blood-chilling sequence that transforms a public moment of triumph into an indictment.
Nor can Oppenheimer forget the still greater destruction that may yet be unleashed, a prospect that his typically naive and high-minded insistence on “international cooperation” will do nothing to dispel. Nolan conveys that warning with somber gravity, if not, finally, the cathartic force that our current headlines, full of war and nuclear portent, would seem to demand. Not for the first time, the demonstrative cleverness of his storytelling can seem too precise, too hermetically sealed and engineered, for a sense of raw collective devastation to fully take hold.
Even Rupert Murdoch’s arch-conservative New York Post (7/19/23) had a rave review. Critic Johnny Oleksinski declares:
What keeps all three hours of the film so breathlessly tense is the title physicist’s internal tug of war: Can the valiant quest for scientific advancement—his great passion—lead to the total destruction of the planet?
A highly perilous timeThe Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1/24/23) declared that the world was “the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.”
To what extent did media either take advantage of or drop the ball on the opportunity the movie gave them to examine the pressing issue of nuclear war? My review of the reviews would conclude that most media didn’t drop the ball, only a few did—and that to me is quite a surprise.
We are at a highly perilous time in regard to nuclear war. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1/24/23) moved its “Doomsday Clock,” which it says represents the risk of “nuclear annihilation,” forward to 90 seconds to midnight—the closest it’s been since it was set up in 1947.
Dr. Strangelove, On the Beach and The Day After all came out decades ago.
Oppenheimer can provide—especially with the (astonishing for me, long a media critic) widely positive media reaction—the opening of a window that can help new generations of people learn about nuclear weapons, and move for an abolition that can prevent a nuclear apocalypse.
Research assistance: Brandon Warner
The post Critics Picked Up on Oppenheimer’s All-Too-Timely Warning on Nuclear War appeared first on FAIR.
CounterSpin230901.mp3(CC photo: Paul Hart)
This week on CounterSpin: It is back to school week in the US. Schools—pre-K to college—have been on the front burner for at least a year now, but education has always been a contested field in this country: Who has access? What does it teach? What is its purpose? Do my kids have to go to school with those kids? So while what’s happening right now is new, it has roots. And it does no disservice to the battles of the current day to connect them to previous battles and conversations, and that’s what we’re going to do this week on the show.
We hear from three of the many education experts that have been our pleasure to speak with: Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro.
CounterSpin230901Kohn.mp3 CounterSpin230901Ravitch.mp3 CounterSpin230901Kumashiro.mp3The post Alfie Kohn, Diane Ravitch and Kevin Kumashiro on Education appeared first on FAIR.
The New York Times (10/2/22) described the effort to trick migrants into flying to Martha’s Vineyard as an attempt to “force Democrats to deal with the migrants whom they profess a desire to welcome.”
“Yahtzee!! We’re full,” wrote Florida state operative Perla Huerta, once she had tricked enough desperate migrants to fill two Martha’s Vineyard–bound planes (CNN, 11/15/22). In the days leading up to her celebratory text, the recently discharged Army counterintelligence agent scoured San Antonio gas stations, churches and McDonald’s parking lots for asylum seekers who would believe her when she promised them employment and three months’ free rent in Boston (Boston Globe, 9/19/22). All they would have to do is get on a plane.
By September 12, 2022, she had convinced nearly 50 migrants, mostly Venezuelans, to depart Texas. On September 14, they landed unheralded, not in Boston, but in Martha’s Vineyard—an affluent island community largely closed for the season, and wholly unprepared to accommodate the aircrafts’ precious cargo.
Immigration attorney Rachel Self told the MV Times (9/15/22) that
not only did those responsible for this stunt know that there was no housing and no employment awaiting the migrants, they also very intentionally chose not to call ahead, to any single office or authority on Martha’s Vineyard…. Ensuring that no help awaited the migrants at all was the entire point.
‘Begging for more diversity’Huerta had lied. And it was a sadistic, labor-intensive and costly lie, designed to overwhelm “sanctuary destinations” (The Hill, 9/16/22) and thereby draw attention to the politician orchestrating and bankrolling the airlift: Florida governor and GOP presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis (CNN, 9/17/22).
Fox host Tucker Carlson (7/26/22) proposed using refugees as props in a stunt to embarrass liberals.
But, as Matthew Gertz of Media Matters (9/15/22) tweeted, “When GOPers do depraved stuff, it’s worth looking for the Fox host who suggested it.” It appears that DeSantis was taking notes when former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson declared on primetime TV (Fox, 7/26/22):
Next stop on the equity train has got to be Martha’s Vineyard…. They are begging for more diversity. Why not send migrants there in huge numbers? Let’s start with 300,000 and move up from there.
Characterizing human beings as pests that ought to be dumped onto others is regular programming at Fox, which unapologetically peddles white supremacist conspiracy theories (CounterSpin, 5/27/22), promotes alarmist anti-immigration rhetoric (Media Matters, 5/23/23) and portrays migrants as boogeymen (Washington Post, 12/18/18).
However, this is far from a Fox-exclusive phenomenon. Established media—both conservative and centrist alike—treat the subject of immigration with stunning callousness. FAIR’s Janine Jackson (CounterSpin, 8/2/23) noted:
Reporting evinces nowadays an implicit acceptance of the goal of border “management,” keeping things “under control,” keeping immigrants’ efforts to enter from “surging.” The way we’re to understand that the US is doing things right is if there are just fewer people trying to enter.
The problem is not simply that media buy into sensationalist accounts of immigration. When the news amplifies anti-immigration hysteria, asylum seekers are drained of their humanity. Their mere presence constitutes a “crisis,” their desperation amounts to an existential threat, their movement must be sanctioned and scrutinized. In the public imagination, they are no better than monsters.
As long as the US continues to manufacture conditions ripe for mass migration in Latin America, news readers must come to grips with how today’s journalism coaxes Americans into hating migrants. Only then can we begin to treat immigration rightfully—as a natural part of human history, to be celebrated rather than feared.
The monster playbookMaking Monsters attempts to explain “why dehumanizing others transforms them into something so terrifying that they must be destroyed” (Harvard University Press, 2021).
Turning migrants into monsters is simple. According to philosopher David Livingstone Smith in his book Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization, all it takes is a combination of a physical and cognitive threat. Grizzly bears, he noted, may gnash and claw at us: They are physically threatening. But they are not monsters, because they are part of the natural order.
A singing rose, on the other hand, challenges our conception of normalcy: It is metaphysically threatening. But it is not a monster, because it cannot hurt us.
It is only when the physically and cognitively threatening intersect (think zombies, werewolves or Chucky dolls) that a monster is born. And this is precisely what media do to migrants.
In their 2018 research, Emily Farris and Heather Silber Mohamed analyzed ten years’ worth of immigration coverage in Newsweek, Time and US News & World Report. They revealed that media have a “general tendency to frame immigrants in a negative light, consistent with a ‘threat’ narrative but inconsistent with actual immigrant demographics.”
For example, while the vast majority of migrants—77%—are in the country legally (Pew, 8/20/20), the study found that news media overwhelmingly display photos of asylum seekers crossing the Southern border or cooped up in detention facilities, thus implying criminality (Washington Post, 7/27/18).
In another instance, despite women accounting for a little over half—51%—of US migration (Migration Policy Institute, 3/14/23), national magazines play up the “bad hombres” archetype by picturing Latino migrant men at far greater rates than their female counterparts. This disparity fortifies the “physical threat” mirage, as the perception of Black and brown men in the US is often blighted by the assumption that they are intrinsically dangerous (Atlantic, 1/5/15).
This stereotyping is enforced when right-wing outlets work tirelessly to prove a nonexistent correlation between violence and heightened immigration. The trend is latent in the conservative media pandemonium surrounding the MS-13 gang:
- “The Illegal Immigration/Crime Link Politicians Are Not Discussing” (Daily Caller, 2/2/23)
- “How Many MS-13 Gangsters Is Biden Settling in the US?” (Washington Examiner, 3/2/23)
- “Grieving Mother Demands ‘Secure’ Border, Vows to be Daughter’s ‘Voice’ After Alleged MS-13 Member Murdered Her” (Fox News, 5/23/23)
- “Killer MS-13 Gangsters Are Being Bused Into Our Communities as ‘Minors’” (New York Post, 6/6/23)
In reality, the most recent estimates suggest that less than 1% of US gang membership can be attributed to MS-13 (Washington Post, 12/7/18), and native-born US citizens are over twice as likely to be arrested for violent crimes as undocumented immigrants (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 12/7/20). Despite that, these headlines represent only a drop in the right-wing fearmongering ocean (Media Matters, 6/30/21, 4/29/21, 8/6/19).
Media scare tactics are not without consequence. According to a 2021 study, the preponderance of negative immigration news has engendered outgroup hostility toward asylum seekers and ingroup favoritism toward the native-born. It’s no wonder that many Americans have begun to believe it when the likes of CNN (Media Matters, 12/20/22), the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/24/21) and Time (FAIR.org, 6/2/23) deem the arrival of migrants a “border crisis.”
But the real crisis at hand is the wanton depiction of migrants as physical threats.
Infections and invasionsNewsmax (4/19/23) is not known for its subtle approach.
Anti-migrant animus is now part of the zeitgeist, and Donald Trump is the poster child. “Everything’s coming across the border: the illegals, the cars, the whole thing. It’s like a big mess. Blah. It’s like vomit,” he said in a characteristic 2015 speech (HuffPost, 8/25/16). Trump likening asylum seekers to inanimate objects—like “vomit” and “cars”—is indicative of the dehumanizing language that afflicts contemporary immigration discourse.
Media follow suit, discussing migrants as if they were devoid of human qualities. Valeria Luiselli (Literary Hub, 3/16/17) observed that “some papers and webpages announce the arrival of undocumented children like a biblical plague. Beware the locusts!” Fox News’ Todd Starnes (Media Matters, 8/7/12) once actually compared undocumented immigrants to “locusts.”
A scholarly investigation (Rhetoric & Public Affairs, Winter/08) into media representations of migrants asserted that there are two principal metaphors:
When the nation is conceived as a physical body, immigrants are presented either as an infectious disease or as a physical burden. When the nation is conceived as a house, immigrants are represented as criminals, invaders, or dangerous and destructive flood waters.
Heavy-handed right-wing media are more likely to employ the “disease,” “burden” and “invasion” tropes when referring to migrants:
- “Medical Expert: Migrant Caravan Could Pose Public Health Threat” (Breitbart, 10/26/18)
- “Border Crisis: ‘Invasion’ at the Border” (Washington Examiner, 11/1/22)
- “Biden’s Open Borders Mean Disease at Your Doorstep” (Newsmax, 4/19/23)
- “Migrant Crisis Sparked ‘Unprecedented’ Burden on NYC Shelters: City Hall Report” (New York Post, 1/31/23)
Surges, floods and tidal wavesCBS (5/8/23) was one of many outlets that compared people seeking refuge from violence to a natural disaster.
But water metaphors abound in both conservative and centrist sources:
- “Immigration Crisis: Official: ‘A Tsunami of People Crossing the Border’” (Fox News, 5/7/15)
- “A Migrant Surge Is Coming at the Border—and Biden Is Not Ready” (Washington Post, 4/1/22)
- “’Tidal Wave’ of Asylum Seekers Could Head to New York City When Title 42 Expires” (CBS News, 5/8/23)
- “Migrants Bound for US Are Pouring Into Mexico While Biden Takes Victory Lap on Immigration Crackdown” (Daily Caller, 7/29/23)
- “New York’s Flood of Migrants Puts New Pressure on Adams, Hochul Bond” (Politico, 8/21/23)
The water metaphors may be poetic, but they are insidious. In the 2014 fiscal year, the US saw a marked increase in unaccompanied Latin American minors hoping to reunite with their parents beyond the southern border (Vox, 10/10/14). A linguistic analysis (Critical Discourse Studies, 8/12) of New York Times and LA Times’ coverage of the child crossings found that “surge” appeared 91 times, “flood” 21 times and “wave” 14 times. The study remarked:
This water-based terminology establishes a metaphor that represents immigrants as floods. Consequently, these representations call upon ideologies of immigrants as natural disasters who should be dealt with in an inhumane fashion.
As Livingstone Smith wrote:
When we accept the view that some group of people are less than human, we have to overrule the evidence of our senses. At this point a problem arises, because even though a person has accepted that these others aren’t human, they can’t stop themselves from recognizing the other’s humanity. The belief that these people are human coexists in your brain with the belief that they’re subhuman.
The impossibility of migrants being simultaneously human and—as media have convinced many—subhuman generates a cognitive threat. The dissonance between the two statuses challenges our conception of natural order. And, thus, Livingstone Smith’s monster-making formula is complete; the media has provoked within us an unjustified hatred for migrants by successfully casting them as monsters—an affront to our safety and sense of reality.
In describing the demonization of Black men in America in 1955, James Baldwin wrote: “And the strain of denying the overwhelmingly undeniable forced Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological.” Likewise, today it is virtually impossible for Americans to accept migrants as human when the news persistently degrades, brutalizes and distorts their image. But not to accept them as such is to deny them their “human reality,” their “human weight and complexity.” It’s not a fictional caravan of monstrous migrants we should beware of; it’s the monster-makers in US media.
The post Making Monsters: How Media Encourage Hatred of Immigrants appeared first on FAIR.
A recent article serves as a greatest-hits album of all of the New York Times’ problematic coverage on adolescent gender-affirming care.
The post NYT Publishes ‘Greatest Hits’ of Bad Trans Healthcare Coverage appeared first on FAIR.
News reports largely confused the climate crisis's contribution to the fire, and ignored the role of fossil fuels in planetary heating.
The post Maui Fire Coverage Ignored Fossil Fuel Responsibility appeared first on FAIR.
The ADA demands all kinds of attention, every day—not a once a year pat on the back about "how far we’ve come."
The post Kehsi Iman Wilson on Americans with Disability Act appeared first on FAIR.
"The problem with not holding high-level officials to account is these abuses get replicated and indeed escalated."
The post ‘CACI Aided and Abetted the Torture of Our Clients’ appeared first on FAIR.
"If...you need to add a new revenue stream and you don't have any great ideas, the obvious one is to add more ads to your platform."
The post ‘Erasure of Content Can Be a Problem for the Public and for History’ appeared first on FAIR.
It is vital that news readers become acquainted with the tropes that dominate coverage of the Israeli occupation.
The post Six Tropes to Look Out for That Distort Israel/Palestine Coverage appeared first on FAIR.
Unlike elite media’s misty memories, the lawsuit is a stubborn indication that those responsible for Abu Ghraib haven't been called to account.
The post Baher Azmy on Abu Ghraib Torture Lawsuit, Thomas Germain on Online History Destruction appeared first on FAIR.
“A Global Web of Chinese Propaganda Leads to a US Tech Mogul,” the New York Times (8/5/23) announced on its front page. “The Times unraveled a financial network that stretches from Chicago to Shanghai and uses American nonprofits to push Chinese talking points worldwide,” read the subhead. This ostensibly major scoop ran more than 3,000 […]
The post NYT Reveals That a Tech Mogul Likes China—and That McCarthyism Is Alive and Well appeared first on FAIR.
As the police raided Marion County Record editor and publisher Eric Meyer’s home August 11 (Committee to Protect Journalists, 8/12/23; AP, 8/13/23; New York Times, 8/13/23), his 98-year-old mother was aghast, watching the cops rummage through her things. “She was very upset, yelling about ‘Gestapo tactics’ and ‘where are all the good people?’” Meyer […]
The post Raid on Kansas Paper Shows Perilous State of Free Press appeared first on FAIR.
A Vox piece insisted that "student debt forgiveness isn’t happening”--but didn't disclose the author's ties to the student loan industry.
The post Vox’s Student Loan ‘Expert’ Is Paid by Debt Collectors appeared first on FAIR.
"That we should let climate change go unaddressed until the human race goes extinct...is a cornerstone of the Republican Party's agenda."
The post ‘We Line Up Policy With Campaign Contributions From Oil and Gas’ appeared first on FAIR.
Facial recognition, a technology that has been proven wrong, has been deemed harmful, in principle and in practice, for years now.
The post Shankar Narayan on Facial Misrecognition, Braxton Brewington on Student Debt Abolition appeared first on FAIR.
Corporate media outlets suggest that wealthy office real-estate developers have become the victims of a recalcitrant remote labor force.
The post WaPo & Co. Scapegoat Remote Workers for Urban Real Estate Woes appeared first on FAIR.
"Something's happening in the United States for workers. They're seeing through the pleading-poverty of the corporations."
The post ‘The Narrative Here Is That Workers Fought and They Won’ appeared first on FAIR.
David Brooks presents himself as an expert on salt-of-the-earth residents of the Heartland whom elites have ignored and wronged.
The post Brooks’ Defense of Trump Defenders Disguises Where Real Power Is appeared first on FAIR.
NBC’s framing is structured so that the new technology NORAD is seeking is portrayed as an important part of America’s defense.
The post NBC Cites Balloon ‘Threat’ in Fawning Coverage of NORAD appeared first on FAIR.
Elite media are deeply accustomed to calling any union action a harm, and any company acknowledgment of workers’ value a concession.
The post Teddy Ostrow on UPS/Teamsters Agreement, Matthew Cunningham-Cook on GOP Climate Sabotage appeared first on FAIR.
"When you get rid of local coverage, what you also get rid of is the watchdog that is so important.... It's not all fun and games."
The post ‘The Athletic Is the Negation of Local Sports Coverage’ appeared first on FAIR.
"It doesn't matter if you come in at a port of entry or between ports of entry, you are still entitled to apply for asylum in this country."
The post ‘People Have to Be Able to Access the Asylum Process, Regardless of Manner of Entry’ appeared first on FAIR.
Norman Solomon's book attempts to show how our media institutions came to be so casual about burying the costs of US wars.
The post How to Ignore 4.5 Million Deaths appeared first on FAIR.
When a cornerstone of the global climate may soon collapse, you'd think news outlets might want to put that on the front page.
The post Humans Might Be About to Break the Ocean? Don’t Stop the Presses appeared first on FAIR.
As the US escalates the already bloody Ukraine conflict, the Washington Post's opinion pages cheerlead for the military/industrial complex.
The post Fans of Cluster Bombs Dominate WaPo’s Opinion Section appeared first on FAIR.
Advocates have long declared that Biden’s asylum restrictions are not just harmful but unlawful. And a federal judge has just agreed.
The post Melissa Crow on Asylum Restrictions, Dave Zirin on NYT’s Vanishing Sports Section appeared first on FAIR.
These headlines' play on "affirmative action" reflects the right wing's use of the term to mean "unfair advantage."
The post Legacy Admissions Are Actually the Opposite of Affirmative Action appeared first on FAIR.
"Not a lot of people would understand that Black women are often killed by the police when they actually ask for help."
The post ‘We Need a Gender-Inclusive Understanding of Police Violence’ appeared first on FAIR.
Reports of Europe’s death are greatly exaggerated. By relevant metrics, it remains a better place to live than the United States.
The post Twisting Statistics to Fake the Collapse of Europe appeared first on FAIR.
"The scrutiny that we give every spending dollar that seems to come out of a city budget is not at all applied in the same way to companies."
The post ‘You Are Exacerbating the Racial Wealth Gap Through the Use of Subsidies’ appeared first on FAIR.
News outlets routinely caution that the Pentagon needs billions of dollars’ worth of improvements to systems, personnel and technology.
The post ‘Ill-Equipped,’ ‘1950s’ Pentagon Needs an Expensive Upgrade, Media Insist appeared first on FAIR.
Illuminating information could have been found if Quill had looked into sources of funding for right-wing media training.
The post Projects to Shift Media Further Rightward Get Kid Glove Treatment From Centrist Press Journal appeared first on FAIR.
"There is no guarantee that any of the money funneled through this bill would go to supporting high-quality local content and journalists."
The post ‘What Californians Really Need Is Community-Centered, Truly Local and Responsive Journalism’ appeared first on FAIR.
Major US news outlets covered the blowup over Jayapal's statement. But few took the obvious journalistic step of factchecking it.
The post Covering ‘Racist State’ Backlash—but Not the Reality That Israel Is a Racist State appeared first on FAIR.
Say Her Name is about adding Black women to our understanding of police violence—to help make our response more meaningful and impactful.
The post Kevin Minofu on Say Her Name appeared first on FAIR.
Live, single-candidate town halls with strictly friendly audiences are one of the worst ways to help the public make an informed choice.
The post CNN Town Halls Do Democracy No Favors appeared first on FAIR.
On US TV news, viewers were more likely to hear climate denial than the connection between fossil fuel consumption and worsening wildfires.
The post As Skies Turn Orange, Media Still Hesitate to Mention What’s Changing Climate appeared first on FAIR.
The New York Times made minimal effort to point out the monetary incentives of the critics of the FTC it highlighted.
The post FTC Chair’s Efforts to Curb Corporate Power ‘Raise Questions’—From Corporate America appeared first on FAIR.
White supremacy and economic policy are completely different stories for the press, but not for the people.
The post Arlene Martínez on Corporate Subsidies, Florín Nájera-Uresti on Journalism Preservation appeared first on FAIR.
In the wake of a historically progressive response to an economic downturn, corporate media have been intently focused on the negative.
The post Media Push Doom and Gloom in Face of Historic Progressive Recovery appeared first on FAIR.
"This is a huge opportunity...to create an energy system that’s rooted in climate justice, that’s rooted in the realities of the changing climate,"
The post ‘The UN’s Report Laid Bare How Little Time Was Left’ appeared first on FAIR.
"The fossil fuel industry has a long history of investing in the media in order to manipulate the conversation."
The post ‘It Felt Like a Wasted Opportunity to Hold Oil Executives to Account’ appeared first on FAIR.
The New York Times is traditionally soft on right-wing extremists while portraying leftist Latin American governments as authoritarian.
The post NYT Worries Brazil Goes Too Far to Fight Far Right appeared first on FAIR.
There is no way to fight climate disruption without fighting climate disrupters.
The post Emily Sanders on How Not to Interview an Oil CEO, Kaufman & Bozuwa on Fighting Climate Disrupters appeared first on FAIR.
"Abortion gets put in this hole of being a very political issue, and it's politicized unlike any kind of other medical care."
The post ‘Huge Majorities Vote in Favor of Abortion Access and Reproductive Freedom’ appeared first on FAIR.
The New York Times seems reluctant to hold Israel accountable for the unprecedented settler brazenness of the Netanyahu administration.
The post NYT Reluctant to Fault Israel for West Bank Aggression appeared first on FAIR.
Wealthy donors have long funded think tanks with official-sounding names that produce research that reflects the interests of those funders.
The post Report Shows How Military Industrial Complex Sets Media Narrative on Ukraine appeared first on FAIR.
The impacts of the Dobbs ruling are still reverberating, as is the organized pushback that we can learn about and support.
The post Taryn Abbassian and Others on Dobbs One Year Later appeared first on FAIR.
Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is doing its best to keep Kennedy’s ambitions afloat--and push the political center of gravity to the right.
The post Boosting RFK Jr., Murdoch Pushes 2024 Rightward appeared first on FAIR.
"The opponents of Social Security have latched onto this unsurprising, manageable shortfall, and talked about the building's on fire."
The post ‘The One Part of Our Retirement Income System That Works Is Social Security’ appeared first on FAIR.
The New York Times is here to tell you that inflation is still a problem, and more suffering for the working class is the solution.
The post NYT Says More Worker Suffering Needed to Bring Inflation Down appeared first on FAIR.
"The public [has] an extreme interest in protecting the ability of people inside the government to give information without authorization."
The post ‘What the Government Permits You to Know—That’s Not a Democracy’ appeared first on FAIR.
Left-lurching oldsters did not fit the preconceived theme like the right-sliding youngsters. So…leave them out of the analysis.
The post ‘Millennials Moved Right’: NYT Cherry-Picks Data to Bolster Political Folklore appeared first on FAIR.
One of the Wall Street Journal's ongoing obsessions is publishing screeds against Lina Khan, Biden's Federal Trade Commission chair.
The post WSJ Attacks Antitrust Champion Lina Khan Every 11 Days Since FTC Appointment appeared first on FAIR.
When Daniel Ellsberg died, media burnished their own reputation as truth-tellers while somehow dishonoring the practice of truth-telling.
The post Nancy Altman on GOP Social Security Attack, Daniel Ellsberg Revisited appeared first on FAIR.
Western outlets will stop at no length to defend Washington’s agenda, even if that means reheating debunked narratives.
The post As Venezuela Mends Ties With Latin Neighbors, Western Media Turn Up the Propaganda appeared first on FAIR.
Judge Robert Hinkle rebuked the arguments for banning gender-affirming care—many of which corporate media have uncritically parroted.
The post Judge’s Ruling Debunks Anti-Trans Claims Often Seen in Corporate Media appeared first on FAIR.
"I have seen the power of how narrative shifts culture, and how culture then shifts policy."
The post ‘Intentional Storytelling Is a Way We Can Fight for a Better World’ appeared first on FAIR.
Narrative is an important tool for folks looking to change the world for the better, in part by changing the stories we tell one another.
The post Sonali Kolhatkar on the Power of Narrative appeared first on FAIR.
If there’s one thing the Washington Post doesn’t like about the debt ceiling deal, it’s that it didn’t cut Social Security.
The post WaPo Mad That Debt Ceiling Deal Didn’t Cut Social Security appeared first on FAIR.
"Incarceration, especially for Black Americans, still has not significantly decreased, despite legalization of marijuana."
The post ‘Despite Legalization, the People Harmed the Most Are Not Able to Benefit’ appeared first on FAIR.
The LA Times downplayed the fact that outside far-right activists have been driving much of the hostility.
The post LA Times Frames School Board Melee as Clash of Protesters, Not Far-Right Attack appeared first on FAIR.
This is cutting young people off from life-saving information and online community, rather than giving them what they need.
The post ‘These Bills Will Make Children Less Safe, Not More Safe’ appeared first on FAIR.
US journalists have decided that being on the right team in this war is more important than presenting an accurate picture of events.
The post NYT on Ukraine’s Nazi Imagery: It’s ‘Complicated’ appeared first on FAIR.
The Wall Street Journal's unspoken premise is rather than having food as a basic human right, people should be threatened with starvation.
The post WSJ Celebrates Making It Harder for Poor People to Access Food appeared first on FAIR.
What will the legalization, and profitizing, of marijuana mean for the people and communities most harmed by its criminalization?
The post Tauhid Chappell on Cannabis Justice, Evan Greer on Kids Online Safety Act appeared first on FAIR.
News execs see themselves as non-ideological truth-tellers, yet bend over backwards to both-sides every issue.
The post CNN Needs More Than a New CEO—It Needs a New Model of Journalism appeared first on FAIR.
These cases haven't received an outcry from major newspaper editorial boards on their violation of constitutional rights.
The post Southern Discomfort: Attacks on Freedom Need Condemnation appeared first on FAIR.
"We'd be going back a century or more in time, to a period in which campuses were less diverse than we could even imagine."
The post ‘The History of Affirmative Action Has Asian-American Influence All Over It’ appeared first on FAIR.
Media legitimizing the GOP's economic hostage-taking allowed the party to stick with it without fear of massive political blowback.
The post For Media, Giving in to Debt Limit Blackmail Was a Triumph of Bipartisanship appeared first on FAIR.
As the pandemic-era border policy known as Title 42 ended last month, news outlets spent a great deal of time caterwauling about a “border crisis” and a “surge” that never materialized. But when an actual migrant child died in custody at the border, media concern was conspicuously muted, demonstrating once again that centrist media’s definition of a “border crisis” has less to do with human lives and more to do with partisan politics.
Title 42, an ostensible public health measure initially invoked under President Donald Trump, allowed the US government to expel migrants without due process or access to asylum (AP, 5/12/23). Though experts and even some judges declared it both illegal and inhumane, the Biden administration had continued the policy for all migrants except for unaccompanied youth (FAIR.org, 3/25/21). But when President Joe Biden announced an official end date to the federal Covid-19 public health emergency—May 11—Title 42 was scheduled to end with it.
‘Mobs and even rioters’Time (5/8/23) reported that “on Thursday, May 11, one emergency will officially end and another may begin”—but what that new emergency might be was never spelled out.
The nativist right was predictably apocalyptic about the coming border policy change. Fox News, which mainstreamed the Great Replacement Theory with its regularly scheduled fearmongering about invading migrants (FAIR.org, 5/20/22), even put a doomsday clock on the lower-right corner of its screen for maximum effect.
The New York Post (5/12/23) ran a lengthy piece promoting frenzied warnings about potential “mobs and even rioters,” including the Border Patrol union’s assessment that without Trump’s border policies in place, “the American public is going to suffer,” and its prediction that “nobody except the cartel thugs is prepared for what’s about to hit us.”
But some centrist outlets played up a looming “surge” as well. On May 11, CBS Evening News warned that “the clock is ticking.” Time (5/8/23) offered the headline “Why the US May Be Days Away From a Border Crisis.” The article began, “At 11:59 pm on Thursday, May 11, one emergency will officially end and another may begin.” The emergency that’s officially ending, of course, would be the Covid-19 public health emergency; the one that “may begin” was an imagined border emergency precipitated by the US removing one controversial tool from its immigration policy toolkit.
The Time piece never quite spelled out exactly what that “emergency” might be beyond “a surge of people” attempting to cross the border, though it did quote a press release from Republican Sen. Thom Tillis warning of “catastrophic fallout at the border” without a Title 42–like policy in place.
‘Going to be chaotic’Right-wing outlets like the New York Post (4/18/23) were delighted to hear Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas repeating their language.
Such coverage was due in no small part to the Biden administration’s own framing of the situation. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas described the federal government’s sending of troops to the border with the same “surge” language media used (ABC, 5/5/23): “What we are seeing is an operation that was stood up in 72 hours by the United States Border Patrol to address a surge.” Biden himself prepared the public for the worst: “It’s going to be chaotic for a while.”
But, while no one could have predicted exactly what would happen when Title 42 ended, the policies Biden had announced to replace Title 42 certainly appeared draconian enough to prevent the kind of migration apocalypse that media outlets anticipated (WOLA, 5/9/23). Biden planned to return to Title 8—normal US immigration law—but also introduced several new policies to make seeking asylum more difficult.
For instance, migrants now must show that they sought and were denied asylum in every country they passed through on their way to the US (a slightly modified version of Trump’s transit ban). They also must book an elusive appointment through the glitchy new CBPOne app, or be blocked from entering the US for five years.
While border apprehensions did increase in the days leading up to May 12, there was no massive “surge” after Fox‘s clock reached zero. Instead, border encounters actually dropped.
‘Barbaric and cruel’Title 42 “is being replaced with restrictive and harsh policies that are going to make it very difficult for asylum seekers to be able to have a fair chance at seeking asylum in the United States,” an immigrant advocate told Source NM (5/12/23).
While the Post‘s “mobs and rioters” never materialized, it’s clear there continues to be a crisis at the border—a humanitarian crisis that will not be resolved by the end of Title 42 (FAIR.org, 3/25/21, 5/24/21). Source NM (5/12/23) reported that immigration rights advocates expected due process to continue to be subverted for those seeking asylum, “sacrificing protection in the name of speed.”
A delegation of rights groups (Human Rights First, 5/18/23) that visited the border as the new policies were implemented called them “barbaric and cruel” and expressed “grave concerns” that they
will endanger the lives of people seeking asylum, discriminate against many of the most vulnerable people seeking asylum, and vastly complicate asylum adjudications down the road.
Human Rights Watch (5/11/23) similarly warned that Biden’s new set of policies
will almost certainly lead to a rise in the already record number of migrants dying at the United States southern border, enrich criminal cartels, and return refugees to likely harm.
‘Crisis’ definedOne aspect of the humanitarian crisis continues to be the inhumane conditions at CBP detention centers. In one extreme example, eight-year-old Anadith Tanay Reyes Alvarez died in Border Patrol custody in Texas on May 17.
“She cried and begged for her life and they ignored her,” Anadith Reyes’ mother said of Border Patrol agents (CBS, 5/22/23).
The girl had been taken into CBP custody, along with her parents and siblings, eight days earlier after crossing the border, and had been diagnosed with influenza a few days later. (Migrants are not supposed to be held more than 72 hours.) The day of her death, her mother brought her to a medical unit three times, where she said agents refused to take Anadith to a hospital (Newsweek, 5/20/23).
This happened only a week after 17-year-old Ángel Eduardo Maradiaga Espinoza died on May 10, in CBP custody in Florida.
A search of the Nexis news database found Anadith’s name mentioned on air twice across all major outlets: once on MSNBC (All In, 5/23/23) and once on the CBS Evening News (5/22/23). A search of Time‘s website for “Anadith” turns up no results.
The New York Times put border stories on its front page eight times in the three weeks starting May 5, the day Mayorkas warned of a “surge,” but the story of Anadith’s death never made it to the paper’s front page. At the Washington Post, border stories made front-page news six times during that period; as at the Times, the child’s death was not among them.
That lack of concern reveals corporate media’s true priorities. What is the “crisis” at the border if not the death of a child?
The post For Media, ‘Border Crisis’ Means Migrants Coming—Not Migrants Dying appeared first on FAIR.
CounterSpin230602.mp3This week on CounterSpin: Corporate media have never been the right place to look for thoughtful, inclusive consideration of affirmative action. For them it’s an “issue,” a political football, rather than a long effort to address the real historical and ongoing discrimination against non-white, non-male people in multiple aspects of US life.
But when it comes to the role that anti-discrimination, pro-equity efforts have had on Asian-American communities, there are particular layers of mis- and disinformation that benefit from exploring. Listeners will know that Asian-American students are being used as the face of attempts to eliminate affirmative action or race-consciousness in college admissions. It looks like the Supreme Court will rule on a watershed case this month. We talk about it with writer and cultural critic Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation, among other titles.
CounterSpin230602Chang.mp3We also hear some of an earlier discussion of the case Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. vs. Harvard that CounterSpin had with Jeannie Park, founding president of the Asian American Journalists Association in New York, and co-founder of the Coalition for a Diverse Harvard.
CounterSpin230602Park.mp3The post Jeff Chang & Jeannie Park on Asian Americans and Affirmative Action appeared first on FAIR.
The Journal is changing its tune by recognizing the importance of profiteering. But instead of criticizing the practice, it’s celebrating it.
The post WSJ Says Corporate Profiteering Is Good, Actually appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed the National Writers Union’s Eric Thurm about the Hollywood writers’ strike for the May 26, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230526Thurm.mp3More Perfect Union (5/22/23)
Janine Jackson: Whenever workers find their employment conditions, or those of their coworkers, so difficult or dangerous, so precarious, or simply so unfair that they make the decision to withhold their labor in order to effect change, it’s a big deal, sometimes a life-altering one for individuals, and sometimes a sea change for an industry. But folks who have never been in that situation don’t always understand it, and some don’t try.
What looks like public support for the ongoing strike by the Writers Guild of America may stem from the fact that it centers on the people who write the TV shows and movies that help many of us get through this thing called life.
But does that mean it includes an understanding of the role that power, and the balance of power, plays in all labor actions? That could definitely be an added benefit, no matter the particular outcomes here.
Eric Thurm is the campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union, and a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project. His explainer on the writer’s strike appeared recently in GQ, and he joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Eric Thurm.
Eric Thurm: Thank you. Happy to be here.
GQ (5/5/23)
JJ: Labor actions in various industries are definitely perceived differently, by the broader public and by the news media that report on them. I think that difference stems, in part, from just a lack of consistent worker-centered journalism generally, but also from this idea of just, well, if you make more money than I do, I can’t see your beef.
In the case of writers, it goes up a notch; as with athletes, “You make money doing something fun.” It becomes almost, “How dare you?”
And there’s a lot wrong with that, but part of it is this laser focus on money. Pay is central, often, and why wouldn’t it be? That’s the literal currency of valuing work. But labor actions are virtually always about something more than that.
So take your time, if you would, and break down, particularly, those behind-the-scenes industry specifics that we as outsiders might not see, but should see, as the central issues in what looks like an important strike.
ET: Yeah, absolutely. So I think that there are a couple of things that are driving the strike. One of them is that, for all that there is a popular perception that writers get paid extremely well, that increasingly is not the case.
And in the same way that it is, like you mentioned, for athletes or for actors or for a lot of other highly visible professions, there is a very small number of people at the top who basically have a winning lottery ticket, and just get paid extremely well.
But in order to even have a chance at winning that, you have to spend a lot of time in the trenches, with much worse working conditions, often even less pay, with a lot less stability, and in particular, an original source of stability, and the reason that a lot of people have been able to make a career as writers is because of something called residuals, which basically is an amount of money that you get paid when something that you worked on and are credited on gets used in another context.
Slate (5/4/23)
So that’s why, if you ever have heard people talk about syndication, or getting to a hundred episodes: If you wrote, let’s say, one episode of Friends, and when that gets to the point where it just is on TBS all the time, you get a check every time it airs.
And that functions as an additional bit of stability, particularly because even people that have been successful often have very long periods without working, just because of the nature of the industry.
And that safety net, I think as safety nets for people in all industries are being slowly dismantled, or as bosses are trying to dismantle them, that is a safety net that a lot of writers don’t have anymore, especially because the residual payments for streaming are basically nothing.
So in theory, you could write something that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people are watching on Netflix or Hulu or something, and you will see no additional money from that.
JJ: I think viewers understand that we’re watching media differently today. I can watch a whole series that took months or years to create in a weekend. And I’m like, well, that’s that.
As media critics, we don’t blame the people, but there are things that we don’t see that could be useful for us to understand. And I think residuals is definitely one of those.
And then, also, you write about something called a mini-room, like it has to do with the pipeline of how you grow and get work as a writer, that I don’t see, just watching TV, but is very meaningful for the quality of what I see.
Los Angeles (5/5/23)
ET: Totally. And that’s something that if you, like me, are a big nerd about this sort of thing, you start to notice people’s names popping up in different contexts and credits of things. And if you pay a lot of attention, you start to see that pipeline. But for a lot of people, it definitely isn’t visible.
So basically a mini-room essentially means a writer’s room that has fewer writers in it, and is convened for less time. There are supposed to be basic minimums in the WGA contract, and there are the minimum basic agreements that stipulate if you are making this type of TV show, you have to have this number of writers, and they have to be employed for X amount of time.
And that is also an additional source of stability, but it also is how people learn the business, and how people learn how to produce, or how to eventually make their own shows.
So if you are the new writer, which in a lot of respects is still kind of a misnomer, because by the time somebody gets staffed on their first room, if they’re working in TV, it’s very possible, if not likely, that they have been grinding away at a lot of other things for a long time.
But once you get that credit, you spend time around the showrunners and the people that are more senior to you, who know a little bit more about the industry, and you observe them.
A lot of the time writers will go to set to supervise on episodes that they wrote, which can be really important for a lot of reasons, both because it is useful training for the writer, but also because a lot of decisions get made on a snap basis on set, and the writer is the person who knows where the show is going, where the show has been.
Vince Gilligan (CC photo: Gage Skidmore)
I think people have this assumption that everybody knows everything about the overall plan of the show at any given moment, but if you’re the director or the cinematographer or even some of the actors, you don’t know that. And so things that might feel disjointed to people, if you’re watching something that, for example, has a mini-room, would probably actually be much better and make more sense if there had been a writer on set to be like, “Actually, this is where we’re taking it. Let’s make a decision that’s more in line with the overall creative direction.”
And that also is how people learn all the ins and outs of this stuff. And without having that, there just is no way for people to get better at their craft, or to develop any of the skills that people need to have in order to make any of the stuff that we like.
Just to give one example: Vince Gilligan, who created Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, and this stuff that people really like, worked for quite a while on The X-Files, and wrote a bunch of episodes, and produced some of the episodes, and then eventually ran this very brief spinoff.
And you can really see how those careers develop. People don’t emerge out of nowhere knowing how to run the small army that is a TV production.
JJ: It also sounds just a little bit like a lot of other workplaces, where management says, “Ooh, if you work 40 hours, you get benefits….so we’re just going to book two people for 20 hours.” It sounds like evading valuing people.
And one of the things that you wrote in the GQ piece was, “Emerging technologies will continue to be a tool for companies seeking to reduce the amount they pay workers (or to get rid of them entirely).”
And I just think that’s another issue where people are kind of shadow-informed, halfway informed. It’s not that writers hate technology, obviously, or hate AI, or don’t understand it, but it’s another part of the power relationship here.
Eric Thurm: “Essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out.”
ET: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that I talked about a little bit in the piece is that technology has been a source of struggle for decades, in particularly the Writers Guild contracts, because, essentially, every time technology evolves, the studios will use it as a way to attempt to cut workers out, which I suspect a lot of people will be intimately familiar with. This is the business model of some of the biggest companies and most worker-hostile companies in the world.
And that dates back to when home video emerged, or when DVD box sets emerged. And part of the reason that streaming pays so little is that it was new the last time that the writers went on strike in 2007, and they agreed to have it be covered by the minimum basic agreement, but not as fully as, like, a TV network.
And so of course the companies exploited that as much as possible. And on some level, it’s hard to blame them, at least in the sense that the purpose of the company is to take as much value out of the workers as it can.
And this is what people are referring to when they say that the studios are really trying as much as possible to turn writing, but also acting, and all of the other myriad jobs that go into making entertainment that people watch, into gig work, into stuff where you just have no say in your work, and are told by this unfeeling algorithm, or app or whatever it is, what you are and are not supposed to do.
Washington Post (5/30/23)
And in the context of what people like to call AI, beyond the fact that the issue with a lot of these programs is that they are trained on a lot of other people’s work—I saw someone recently describe it as, “This is just a plagiarism machine,” which I think is a very accurate description. Even in cases where it does something interesting, you can use it as a smoke screen to avoid having to credit the people that created something.
I think that’s something that we are going to see the studios try more and more, even without necessarily having AI be involved.
Literally, just the day before we’re having this conversation, HBO Max rebranded as just Max, and apparently they have changed the way that movies and TV and everything show up on their site, so that it just says “creators,” and that will include producers and directors and some other people, and you don’t really know who did what, rather than saying, this was directed by this person, and this was written by this person.
And I think that that attempt to obfuscate things, and make it harder to understand the people who are actually creating something, is the entire point of how the studios are trying to handle this, and part of why they’re so interested in AI.
CounterSpin (4/7/23)
JJ: I think a lot of folks would actually be maybe a little surprised, and certainly disheartened, to know that bosses in creative industries act a lot like bosses in every other industry. The response has been, essentially, you’re lucky to have a job, you ungrateful whelp. There’s a line of people just like you I could hire tomorrow. And then, also, I thought we were all friends!
This is the line that Starbucks gives baristas who go on strike. There’s a lot of similarities across industry that might be more important than the differences. And yet nobody asks the CEOs, “Aren’t you a creative? Isn’t this a labor of love for you?”
This sort of general societal understanding, which I blame news media a lot for, is that a strike is an interruption in a natural order of things, and the workers who go on strike are to blame for any disruptions or harms that come from it.
ET: Yeah, I think that that’s definitely true. And you could have long conversations, or write whole books, about the attempt of capital and bosses and corporations to make their profit-extracting mechanisms look like these very cuddly or friendly things.
I think there’s, like you’re saying, a real direct line to bosses saying, “Oh, we’re all a family here, and we don’t want a union”—that’s somehow a third party, even though it’s just the workers—”coming between us and our little family.”
Deadline (5/8/23)
And even in the context of these negotiations, one of the things that the writers are asking for is these more concrete minimums for staffing, in terms of numbers of writers and the amount of time that people are in rooms. And the studio response was to say, this is an unfair or arbitrary quota that is, and I think this is the direct quote, “counter to the creative nature of our industry.”
And it’s like, OK, you’re not the people making the creative decisions. And if you were, right, I would love to see what these people came up with, if they had to try to write a whole season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or something.
And it’s funny, I think that that actually is something that comes out of, or is impressed into a lot of, not just news media, but entertainment media. I don’t really know exactly how to fully extricate these things, but I do think that it’s quite telling that one of the dominant forms of media, that makes the most money and gets the most push behind it, is the workplace sitcom, the central thesis of which is that your coworkers are supposed to be your family.
And it’s extremely rare to see anything like that, where anybody really talks about the material conditions of people in the workplace.
Jacobin (3/11/22)
JJ: That’s a great point.
ET: That’s a kind of bugbear of mine. And I am cautiously optimistic about what will come out of the strike, and what will come out of what I think is a much more increased labor consciousness among people, both in these creative industries, but also more broadly.
When I was growing up, and I think that for quite a long time, the dominant Hollywood depiction of labor is, oh, union bosses, corruption, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the things that we’ve heard a million times.
And I think that in a lot of respects, that really is a lingering effect of the Red Scare, and a lot of purges of people in creative fields. And it does feel like there’s been at least some recovery, or attempts to change that.
Even something like Riverdale, this adaptation of a previously existing IP that’s a kind of silly CW teen soap, had a really fantastic subplot in one of the most recent seasons, where Archie from Archie Comics forms a union, and they have all these conversations about solidarity, and about the importance of music and labor formation, and this stuff that I would never have expected to see even two or three years ago.
Washington Post (5/16/23)
JJ: I’m going to ask you one final and also hopeful question on that. I did want to just kind of cram in this Washington Post piece that fits this template that we’re talking about, that was talking about the last Hollywood writers’ strike, which you referenced, in 2007–08.
And the Post piece said that that strike
cost writers and other workers an estimated $772 million, while knock-on effects did more than $2 billion in damage to the broader California economy. Promising shows were hamstrung, promising movies were shot with half-finished scripts, promising careers were cut short.
And if that wasn’t enough, the piece went on to say that because of those darn strikers, TV was forced to go to reality shows and, yep, Donald Trump. So I guess the idea was, maybe think about that when you’re supporting striking workers?
I don’t even think this piece was meant to be mean, but it was such the template of “the labor action causes damage, the labor action causes hurt, and what went before it was somehow not causing damage, and not causing hurt.” And so you’re supposed to be mad at the interrupters.
And I just want to attach that, though, to the idea that we know that many journalists have internalized the idea that they aren’t workers, they’re independent contractors. They’re just individuals doing a job, and unions are kind of icky, and who needs solidarity until it happens to you. All of which is just to say that you see change there, besides the landscape, you see change in that mindset among writers, among journalists, a change in the idea that, no, we’re not workers, no, we don’t need to band together. You see something different happening there.
New York Times (6/4/15)
ET: Yeah, definitely. That’s something that has been really heartening for me. I’ve been in and around digital media for a little over a decade now, which feels really wild to say, but the beginning of that period, I was in college, and I had no real understanding of a lot of these issues. And I definitely, I think if you had asked me, I really did feel, oh, I’m lucky to be here.
In the intervening years, and especially since Gawker unionized in, I think, 2015, the rush of solidarity, and the proliferation of unions across digital media, has been really powerful.
And I think that that has been both enormously meaningful for the people that are doing the work, and then getting a lot of people who, like I think you said, would not have ordinarily thought of themselves as workers to see themselves as such.
It also has created this broader awareness that I think has led to much better journalism in the last few years, even places like Vice or the Washington Post or Business Insider, and these people who were able to get jobs where they can cover this stuff.
And I think that there are a lot of reasons why, a lot of lines you can draw between the strength of these unions and the ability to produce this kind of coverage. But that also has led, I think, to a much stronger sense of worker solidarity across the industry.
Freelance Solidarity Project
So I am really involved in the Freelance Solidarity Project, which organizes freelancers across digital media as a division of the National Writers Union. We have done a lot to organize in parallel with, and supporting, people who are facing similarly precarious conditions.
And I think that a lot of people, who before would have been like, “I exist above things, and I would never think of myself as being in the same position as someone who has a gig-based job,” I think now people are a lot more aware of the similarity of those positions, and a lot more thoughtful about what’s driving that precarity, and what we can do to stop it, which also is something I think that you see as the WGA strike plays out right now.
A lot of people who are unionized with IATSE, which is the union that represents most below-the-line crew and production staff, a lot of IATSE workers have refused to cross picket lines. And all of these things are part of what makes production possible, and it’s part of why so many shows have had to shut down.
The economic damage that you reference, that this Washington Post article is talking about, not only is it caused by the bosses, but it also is the direct result of people being able to stand in solidarity and say, we are not going to allow this thing to continue to happen.
And it’s been really heartening to me to see so many people say, “I am so amazed by the Teamsters standing with us. If they have to go out this summer, we’re going to be right there.” I think that’s so great.
JJ: It sounds like you’re saying, better solidarity among workers leads also to better creations and better work.
ET: I sure hope so.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Eric Thurm. He’s campaigns coordinator for the National Writers Union; they’re online at NWU.org. He’s a steering committee member of the Freelance Solidarity Project, FreelanceSolidarity.org, and you can still find his explainer on the ongoing writer strike at GQ.com. Eric Thurm, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
ET: Thank you.
The post ‘Studios Are Really Trying to Turn Writing Into Gig Work’ appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed Defending Rights & Dissent’s Cody Bloomfield about activists being charged with terrorism for the May 19, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230519Bloomfield.mp3Janine Jackson: Resistance to the militarized police training complex known as Cop City has been happening since its inception, when Georgia authorities overruled community opinion to create the facility, being built on Atlanta’s South River Forest in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter actions, that includes an area for explosives training and a whole “mock city” for cops to practice suppressing urban protest.
FAIR.org (3/27/23)
In January, police killed the environmental activist known as Tortuguita in a hail of bullets, while they, an autopsy revealed, sat cross-legged with their hands up. The medical examiner ruled it homicide.
There isn’t more you can do to someone protesting your actions than kill them, but authorities are trying to ruin the lives of many others with domestic terrorism charges that call for many years in prison. The state actors behind Cop City, if you somehow can’t see it, are engaging in the overt employment of the very overreaching, harmful powers activists are concerned the facility will foment.
Cody Bloomfield is communications director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They join us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Cody Bloomfield!
Cody Bloomfield: Thank you so much for having me, and I’m dismayed by what’s happening in Cop City, but always appreciate the opportunity to bring this news to more folks.
JJ: Absolutely.
CounterSpin (3/24/23)
Well, Atlanta organizer Kamau Franklin told CounterSpin a few weeks back that the land that Cop City is going to be on was promised to the adjacent community, which is 70% Black, as a park area, and there was going to be nature trails and hiking. And then when the idea of Cop City arose from the Atlanta Police Department, the city of Atlanta and the Atlanta Police Foundation, all of those plans were scrapped immediately, without any input from that adjoining community, and they went forward with this idea.
Just to say, people didn’t suddenly start protesting Cop City recently, and they didn’t do it because they saw something on social media. This project has been over and against the community—and the environment, not that they’re separate—since the beginning. So just to say, the context for the bringing of these charges of domestic terrorism against activists, it’s not that activists are suddenly engaged in something new and especially dangerous that is calling for this response.
CB: Yeah, so the occupation of Cop City has been going on for over a year, and we see from the very outset that there has been police resistance to these protests. Very early on, back in 2021, activists told me that during the pandemic, they couldn’t show up in person to city council meetings, because all of the meetings were being held remotely, and so they decided to do a banner action outside of one of the city council member’s homes during the decisions to approve Cop City. They dropped the banner outside of someone’s house, and then they were arrested by police, and they were hauled to jail for the crime of being a pedestrian in the roadway. This was all the way back in 2021.
Then people started camping in the forest, also way back in 2021. The first arrest for domestic terrorism didn’t happen until December 2022, and at that point, people were being arrested for just using the forest. Like in December, there were reports that someone had been arrested who was just going on a hike, who wasn’t part of the occupation.
Intercept (4/20/23)
But in December was when the police crackdown began in earnest, and the people who had been camping for months were arrested for things like sleeping in a hammock with another defendant, [which] was used as evidence, as was First Amendment–protected activities, including being a member of the prison abolition movement. And that’s when the escalated stage of repression really began.
And this repression accelerated in January, when police again stormed the encampment, and murdered Tortuguita, and issued more domestic terrorism arrest warrants. Then there were the subsequent protests over the killing of Tortuguita in Atlanta, and still more people were charged with domestic terrorism.
And all that was a lead-up to a mass mobilization that the activists called for the first week of March, in which many people came from out of state and around the world to protest. But what a lot of the media’s been missing is, they focused on the week of action and saw in the list of arrestees many people from out of state, they’re missing that this out-of-state solidarity was just the tip of the iceberg of months and years of local organizing.
JJ: Right, and I bring it up in part to say that I think that folks who are distanced from it might fall to that line of, if only folks would protest in “the right way,” you know, without breaking anything. And so it’s important to understand that even when folks did things like banner drops and petition drives, they already were being abused and harassed for that style of protest.
But domestic terrorism, that’s deep, that’s serious. How loose are the rules for applying these charges? This is talking about perhaps 20 years in prison for people. There have to be some legal definitions around the charge of domestic terrorism, don’t there?
CB: Yes, and it’s really interesting, actually. Some states don’t even have domestic terrorism statutes, because most crimes that you could prosecute as domestic terrorism, you could also prosecute under existing statutes. Like, the Georgia law was passed in response to Dylann Roof’s massacre in a Black church, but they could have decided at that juncture to prosecute mass murder and prosecute these murders independent of the statute. But they decided that for subsequent events like this, they wanted the domestic terrorism statute, and they passed a very broad statute.
Time (5/4/23)
The Georgia statute defines domestic terrorism as something that endangers critical infrastructure, and this critical infrastructure can be publicly or privately owned. It can be a state or government facility. And as long as someone’s acting with the intent to change or coerce the policy of government, that can count as domestic terrorism.
Now, this statute stands out from the national landscape of domestic terrorism statutes—again, some states don’t even have them, and they seem to be doing fine—and in most other states that have domestic terrorism statutes, the statutes address things like weapons of mass destruction, or they at least require for someone to have died as a result of the alleged terrorism. The Georgia statute doesn’t.
And you might notice, in the part about altering or changing the policy of government, that’s precisely what a lot of protest is intended to do. And protest intended to change the policy of government, that happens to take place in conjunction with critical infrastructure, which they’ve been arguing that Cop City is, opens up activists for being charged with domestic terrorism.
Now, this is a very serious statute. It has a mandatory minimum of five years in prison, going all the way up to a maximum of 35 years in prison. So that alone might be enough to dissuade some activists from showing up to protest. And it’s worth pointing out here that among the people charged with domestic terrorism during the March week of action, some people say that they were only going to attend a music festival, which would have been, at most, misdemeanor trespassing. But when people came back from a march in which they burned bulldozers, which is defined as critical infrastructure that’s there to build Cop City, they went into a crowd, police started to make arrests at random. So some people who by all accounts were not involved in burning the bulldozers, who simply showed up for Stop Cop City solidarity activism and a music festival, were charged with a really serious statute.
And then most were held in jail for over a month, and so then their whole lives were disrupted; they’re faced with this intimidating statute that will take a lot of money and a lot of time to fight, all to dissuade people from becoming activists.
We worry a lot about the chilling effect around these sorts of things in the civil liberties community. It’s often something we talk about in very hypothetical terms, but around this was a rare instance where I saw the chilling effect in practice. There was a group that reached out to me about possibly going down to protest, and I felt like I had to give the heads-up that these domestic terrorism arrests are happening somewhat at random, and the activists ultimately decided not to go down. They decided the risk of protesting was simply too high.
And that’s what charging domestic terrorism is intended to do. It’s intended to make the risk of protesting too high, so that people will just stay home, so that people will stay quiet.
AP (4/13/23)
JJ: Absolutely, and we should note that the harms don’t necessarily have to come from law enforcement or in the form of prison. We have seen people coming back from protests being, for example, kicked out of school. So this is something that is hovering over them, even if they don’t wind up in prison.
CB: Yeah, and recently we’ve heard reports of a loss of access to financial institutions for some of the defendants. So far we’ve heard that Chase Bank, Bank of America, Venmo and US Bank have withheld access to banking for certain domestic terrorism defendants. Also a few people had Airbnb accounts closed. As you mentioned, there was the law student who was unable to return to school. So these charges, even though they have not seen their day in court, have not been proven in court, are already having detrimental effects on the activists.
JJ: I want to bring you back to this “outside agitator” line, which ought to ring bells for lots of folks. To be clear, the public rejection of hyper-policing is being used as a reason for more hyper-policing. And then the fact that people are recognizing, well, this isn’t just Atlanta, this isn’t just Georgia, this is something that can come to me. That is itself being used as more reason.
Truthout (3/26/23)
And your Truthout piece cites the Atlanta police department’s assistant chief saying, “None of those people live here,” speaking of activists:
None of those people live here. They do not have a vested interest in this property, and we show that time and time again. Why is an individual from Los Angeles, California, concerned about a training facility being built in the state of Georgia? And that is why we consider that domestic terrorism.
What the actual heck, there?
CB: Yeah, it’s an extremely striking quote, mostly because it’s just a lie that any part of the statute depends on who’s in-state versus out-of-state. And we look at the history of activism, and activists have always traveled to be where they’re most needed. Throughout the civil rights movement, people frequently crossed state lines. There was the whole Freedom Rider movement.
And whenever there’s international solidarity or national solidarity, we always see this narrative of “outside agitators” being used to discredit the entire movement. It’s seen as mysterious outside actors driving the movement, instead of solidarity that starts where the negative thing is happening, and expands outwards from there.
It’s an incredibly frustrating narrative, and it’s frustrating to see people with state power repeat this narrative, especially when the actual charges have no relation to that.
Cody Bloomfield: “whenever there’s international solidarity or national solidarity, we always see this narrative of ‘outside agitators’ being used to discredit the entire movement.”
JJ: Absolutely, and, you know, it hardly needs saying, Cop City itself is not a wholly local enterprise, is it?
CB: No, Cop City is designed to be a training facility for police across the country, and with the interconnected systems of policing, of intelligence-gathering, we see that Cop City is an everywhere problem, as is all policing. And to charge that only people within a specific mile radius should have anything to say about it is absurd.
JJ: Part of this kind of repression of activity involves suppressing information. And that has involved the overt harassment of reporters, Truthout’s Candice Bernd and others, for example, but it also involves suppressing information itself about what is going on. And I understand you at Defending Rights & Dissent have been working on the transparency front of what’s happening here.
CB: Yeah, so we, from a FOIA release to Pilsen Books in Chicago, we know that, at least from the federal intelligence perspective, they’re very much seeing the Stop Cop City movement as national. When some of the Defend the Atlanta Forest folks went on tour, talking about resistance to Stop Cop City elsewhere, the FBI decided to spy on an anarchist bookstore that was holding the event, and they went through the social media of the event organizers, they went through the social media of the bookstore, and created intelligence files.
And we think that that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There hasn’t been a lot of transparency around what sort of intelligence is being gathered on these activists. Given that they’re charged with domestic terrorism, we expect that quite a lot of evidence has been acquired against them, much of it likely open source and First Amendment-protected. The line in one of the arrest warrant affidavits sent out to a defendant being a member of the prison abolitionist movement gives some hint that they’re likely surveilling a lot of social media. But we don’t know the full extent of surveillance that’s happening here.
Unicorn Riot (4/13/23)
And it’s worth pointing out, if we talk about surveillance, that surveillance on its own can also be a form of repression, especially for vulnerable activists who might be worried about protesting as a person of color, who might be worried about having an existing FBI file, the prospect of being surveilled might alone dissuade them from engaging in activism. But we don’t know the full landscape of that surveillance.
So Defending Rights & Dissent, along with, recently, Project South, have filed a new round of Freedom of Information Act requests, and open-record requests, targeted at looking at just how much the state is surveilling these activists, and what kind of evidence and intelligence is being collected.
And so far we’ve just been stonewalled. They’ve only responded to one query, which was about the Atlanta Police Foundation, and they said, oh, it’s like hundreds of thousands of emails; you need to refine your request. And then we refined our request and haven’t heard from them since.
So we anticipate having to litigate all these requests, which is ridiculous, because under the federal statute, under the state statute, there is a dedicated amount of time in which they’re supposed to give us this information. They’re supposed to be about transparency, and they just haven’t been in this case.
Indiana Herald-Times (5/5/23)
JJ: This is exactly where one would hope for the powers of journalism and independent journalism to move in, to use their heft to get at some of these questions, and yet in terms of larger corporate media—there’s been a ton of terrific independent reporting on this—but larger corporate media….
You know, I saw a piece by Eva Rosenfeld in the Indiana Herald Times in which she was talking about the over-acceptance of the police narrative on certain things, but also asking about big framing questions. Why are media not asking, for example, “Why is a $90 million investment intended to fight crime better spent building a mock city than investing in real communities?”
Too often we see big media zeroing in: Did this person actually break a window? Rather than pulling back and saying, wait a minute, is property more important than human beings? What is actually happening here? I’m wondering what you make of big media’s approach to this story.
CB: Yeah, every second that we spend in the media litigating about whether or not people should have burned down a bulldozer, or whether or not people had the right to go camping, is another moment we’re not spending talking about the substantive issues here. And I think, as soon as the domestic terrorism charges came down, the whole conversation became about whether or not the activists were domestic terrorists, which was a reasonable line of argument, but totally missed the story of an anti-democratic lack of accountability permeating throughout Cop City. From when city council ignored 70% of public comments in opposition to Cop City to recently, when they were charging other people with intimidation of an officer for handing out flyers, trying to do public education, this whole movement to build Cop City has been profoundly undemocratic, and we lose that when we spend time focusing on what crimes protesters may or may not have committed.
Appeal (12/8/21)
JJ: Personally, I want to say that I feel like, you know, “know your rights” is a very important thing for individuals to know, what their rights are in given situations. And yet it’s not so satisfying to say, I know my rights, and they’re being violated right now. We can’t really individualize protest—which it seems like is so much the effort of those who oppose it, to separate us and to say, “do you, Janine Jackson, really want to show up at this protest?”
CB: Yeah, and that’s why, especially in fighting these prosecutions, movement solidarity will be so important. We saw, after the January 20 protests against the inauguration of Trump, an attempt by prosecutors to engage in kind of conspiratorial thinking, and to paint protesters with a broad brush, and protesters were really successful in trying to fight this as a bloc, and insisting on taking cases to trial, where many of them were thrown out. Prosecutors gave up on a lot of the charges, and so that was a success of movement organizing.
And I think here that we have to have that same sort of solidarity. Because you might know your rights, and go to this music festival, and you’re charged with domestic terrorism anyway. It requires solidarity against an overwhelming onslaught of police repression, and that’s something that’s really hard to do. But despite how much the police talk about protesting the right or wrong way, when they’re defining protesting the “wrong way” as being from out of state, and policing the “right way” as shooting unarmed civilians and making arrests at random, the “know your rights” framework kind of goes out of the window, and it has to be about solidarity.
JJ: I just want to end by saying that I really appreciated the emphasis of the headline that Truthout put on your March piece, which was “Atlanta’s ‘Stop Cop City’ Movement Is Spreading Despite Rampant State Repression.” In other words, it’s scary, very scary, what’s happening, but we do recognize that they’re amping up because we’re amping up, and so it isn’t the time to falter.
And I really just appreciated the idea that this is still happening. Folks are scared, and they should be scared, and yet they’re doing it anyway. And the more we stand together, the less scared we need to be.
CB: Yes, it’s been really inspiring to see activists who continue to undertake this fight, who are willing to fight these cases in court, who are willing to look for where Cop City analogs are occurring in their local spaces. Like, there’s people beginning to protest in Pittsburgh. There’s people who are beginning to say, everywhere is Cop City, and looking at the effects of police militarization in communities. And I think what Cop City has done is, despite all the repression, is giving people a sense of how to fight this, and that they can fight this, and for that it’s really important.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Cody Bloomfield, communications director at Defending Rights & Dissent. They’re online at RightsAndDissent.org. And you can find their piece, “Atlanta’s ‘Stop Cop City’ Movement Is Spreading Despite Rampant State Repression,” at Truthout.org. Cody Bloomfield, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
CB: Thank you.
The post ‘Charging Domestic Terrorism Is Intended to Make the Cost of Protesting Too High’ appeared first on FAIR.
CT Mirror (2/2/23)
Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont proposed on February 2 to purchase and forgive roughly $2 billion in medical debt owed by state residents. Along with similar proposals in other jurisdictions, the plan offers desperately needed relief from stress and fear to thousands of people who are struggling to pay their current outstanding medical bills. Unfortunately, these programs will do nothing to prevent millions more Americans from falling into the country’s healthcare financial meat grinder.
Meanwhile, three major credit reporting agencies have decided to expunge paid-off medical debts and outstanding debt less than $500 from credit reports, and provide people a year’s grace period before adding new medical debt to credit reports.
Like the debt forgiveness proposals, these credit decisions follow a wave of national publicity about the horrors of healthcare debt. In recent years, major news outlets, including the New York Times (e.g., 11/8/19, 9/24/22), Guardian (6/27/19), ProPublica (e.g., 6/14/21), National Public Radio (13/21/22), Kaiser Health News (9/10/19, 12/21/22) and CBS (4/28/21) have dug into the nightmares faced by tens of millions of Americans—both uninsured and with insurance—as they try to pay for the treatments and medicines they need to lead healthy lives.
Compelling and consistentThis New York Times headline (11/8/19) could have just as easily run in 2003 as in 2019.
The stories are heartrending. Families’ lives wrecked financially by bill collectors and lawyers. Sick and injured patients’ health deteriorating due to mountains of debt and stress, with some providers even refusing follow up care until bills are paid. They highlight a set of corporate billing and collections policies and practices that turn a visit to a doctor or hospital into a years-long hell.
Such investigations touch on common themes, including hospitals suing patients en masse:
- “Ballad, which operates the only hospital in Wise County and 20 others in Virginia and Tennessee, filed more than 6,700 medical debt lawsuits against patients last year.” (New York Times, 11/8/19)
- “The hospital that pursued Mr. Bushman, a 295-bed not-for-profit facility called Carle Foundation Hospital, is one of several that has at times employed debt collection tactics that are shunned by many other creditors. It has filed hundreds of lawsuits.” (Wall Street Journal, 10/30/03)
Hospitals layering large interest payments on top of already crushing debt, and collecting through tactics like garnishing wages and seizing bank accounts:
- “Barrett, who has never made more than $12 an hour, doesn’t remember getting any notices to pay from the hospital. But…Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare sued her for the unpaid medical bills, plus attorney’s fees and court costs.
“Since then, the nonprofit hospital system affiliated with the United Methodist Church has doggedly pursued her, adding interest to the debt seven times and garnishing money from her paycheck on 15 occasions.”Barrett, 63, now owes about $33,000, more than twice what she earned last year.” (Guardian, 6/27/19) - “Tolson said she went to Yale-New Haven…to be treated for a staph infection. She had to stay at the hospital for eight days and got a bill for $9,000. She told the hospital she didn’t have a job or insurance and was told to seek welfare assistance. Because her husband had a small income, she didn’t qualify for state or federal assistance, she said.”She tried on several occasions to set up payment plans, but even with a job she wasn’t able to meet the payment schedule, she said. Her bank account was frozen, and when she called to discuss the problem the hospital’s agents were unwilling to budge on the issue, she claims.”‘I told them “I’m not working,” and they said “you should have thought about that then,”’ Tolson said. “Her bill is now $14,000.” (Connecticut Post, 12/17/03)
Hospitals threatening and taking patients’ homes through liens and foreclosures:
- “Heather Waldron and John Hawley are losing their four-bedroom house in the hills above Blacksburg, Va. A teenage daughter, one of their five children, sold her clothes for spending money. They worried about paying the electric bill. Financial disaster, they say, contributed to their divorce, finalized in April.”Their money problems began when the University of Virginia Health System pursued the couple with a lawsuit and a lien on their home to recoup $164,000 in charges for Waldron’s emergency surgery.” (KHN, 9/10/19)
- “Still, the hospital administers strong legal medicine for cases of minor financial wounds. It presses for foreclosure for debts a fraction of a house’s worth. It pursued a $2,889.12 debt against a couple in Westville all the way to foreclosure, by which time fees and interest pushed the debt to $6,517.64.” (New Haven Advocate, 4/17/03).
Nonprofit hospitals failing to offer patients charity care, sometimes in violation of state law or the hospital’s own internal charity care policies:
- “Harriet Haffner-Ratliffe, 20, gave birth to twins at a Providence hospital in Olympia, Wash…. She was eligible under state law for charity care.”Providence did not inform her. Instead it billed her almost $2,300. The hospital put her on a roughly $100-a-month payment plan.” (New York Times, 9/24/22)
- “The lawsuit also accused the hospital of failing to inform needy patients that the financial assistance was available and hiring aggressive collection agencies to go after patients who had not paid their bills.” (New Haven Register, 2/19/03)
Patients skipping care or having providers refuse care due to debt:
- “After a year of chemo and radiation…Penelope Wingard finally heard the news she’d been praying for: Her breast cancer was in remission. But with relief immediately came worry about her finances.”Wingard had received Medicaid coverage through a temporary program for breast cancer patients. When her treatment ended, she became uninsured.”Bills for follow-up appointments, blood tests and scans quickly piled up. Soon, her oncologist said he wouldn’t see her until she paid down the debt.” (KHN, 12/21/22)
- “During Michael’s past admissions to the hospital, Margaret says, she asked staff members if there was some way to discount or waive the charges—figuring that Christ Medical, a nonprofit institution sponsored by religious organizations, might be inclined to help. But the answer, she says, was always no. So, as the hospital bills piled up on the dining table, Margaret lay awake at night, wondering how the family would crawl out from under the debt. On that April morning, as Michael kept insisting that it was ‘just the flu,’ she suspected that it was something more serious. But Michael wouldn’t let her take him to the ER, and eventually Margaret headed to work. When she returned that night, she found him on the floor, dead.” (New York Times, 12/19/04)
The stories are compelling, consistent and comprehensive, exposing in detail the devastating consequences of a healthcare system that forces patients—some uninsured, others with inadequate health insurance—to assume unmanageable financial burdens for needed medical treatment. Based on analysis of large volumes of public records and interviews with dozens of victims, they include follow-up reporting on actions taken by hospitals in response to publicity, and legislative and legal actions in support of debtors. In short, everything good investigative journalism should be.
Except for one problem: The second example in each pair above is 20 years old.
An evergreen problemThe first examples are drawn from work by the New York Times, Guardian and Kaiser Health News (KHN, recently rebranded as KFF Health News), which recently teamed up with National Public Radio for a series called “Diagnosis: Debt.” Along with the 2019–20 “Profiting from the Poor” investigative series published jointly by ProPublica and MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, these stories are part of a wave of recent medical debt coverage.
Wall Street Journal (3/13/03)
The second quotes, indistinguishable in the suffering of the profiled patients and the issues addressed, are from 2003–04, including a Wall Street Journal series by reporter Lucette Lagnado (3/13/03, 3/17/03, 4/1/03, 6/10/03). Lagnado’s work began in Connecticut, where Paul Bass, editor of the weekly New Haven Advocate, had dug into court records to reveal aggressive legal practices by Yale-New Haven Hospital in 2001. Lagnado spent months tracking down debtors and examining the same public records that form the basis for the latter-day stories.
Then as now, follow-up stories show embarrassed individual hospital systems forgiving the debts of people named in the stories and many other current debtors, then usually promising to reduce the ferocity of their collection tactics (Wall Street Journal, 4/1/03; New Haven Register, 3/19/04; ProPublica, 7/30/19; KHN, 9/10/19; ProPublica, 9/24/19).
MLK50 (4/28/20)
Lagnado’s work in 2003 was recognized at the time by the Annenberg School of Journalism at USC as one of three finalists for the 2004 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting.
Sixteen years later, MLK50 founding editor Wendi C. Thomas won the Selden Ring Prize for her series jointly published with ProPublica. The two organizations shared a 2020 Loeb award for local reporting and a bronze medal from the Barlett & Steele Awards for Investigative Journalism, given by the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University. The same year, Kaiser Health News’ Jay Hancock and Elizabeth Lucas were Pulitzer Prize finalists for investigative reporting for their healthcare debt work.
Medical debt, it turns out, is an evergreen problem, a perpetual source of torment for patients, prizes for reporters, and controversy over incremental, poll-tested policy changes that for two decades have failed to stem the flood tide of medical debt that is drowning millions of people. These gradualist approaches have, however, succeeded in deflecting attention from the only real solution to the problem—a national health insurance system like Medicare for All that would cover everyone, all the time, without holes in coverage that lead to catastrophic personal debt.
Community outrageQuinton White (Wall Street Journal, 4/1/03)
Lagnado’s 2003 series appeared during campaigns against abusive medical debt collection in several states, including Illinois, California, Washington and Connecticut, where Lagnado’s initial iconic profile of Quinton White (Wall Street Journal, 3/13/03) chronicled his 20-year struggle with debt from his wife’s treatment at Bridgeport Hospital.
White suffered nearly all the indignities hospitals impose on indebted patients. By the time Lagnado found him, White had seen the hospital attach a lien to his house and drain most of his bank account. Interest ballooned the debt; White had paid $16,000 of the original $18,740 over the years, but the Yale New Haven Health System, which had acquired Bridgeport Hospital in 1996, was pursuing him for an additional $39,000 in remaining principal, interest and fees.
Prompted by community outrage at the tactics described by Lagnado, and in a series of reports from the nonprofit Connecticut Center for a New Economy (CCNE), local labor unions, a church-based grassroots movement, Yale University public interest lawyers and hospital patients built a campaign to take on Yale-New Haven and the statewide hospital industry.*
Four lawsuits, a series of demonstrations with hundreds of people, a grassroots lobbying campaign and ongoing media coverage yielded progress. The Connecticut General Assembly passed a law cutting interest on medical debt to 5% and requiring hospitals to inform patients of available financial assistance and to stop collections against eligible patients. The law limited billing of uninsured patients to the actual cost of their care, and required hospitals to report on their collection activity. Under intense local pressure, Yale-New Haven Health went further than the new state law, settling lawsuits by removing thousands of property liens and forgiving more than 20,000 accounts worth millions of dollars in outstanding debt.
The final lawsuit against Yale-New Haven was a class action focused on the practice of billing uninsured patients at wildly inflated “sticker prices”. Filed a year and a half after Lagnado’s first article, it was one of dozens brought against nonprofit hospital systems nationwide in 2004 by members of the Not-for-Profit Litigation Group, led by trial lawyer Richard “Dickie” Scruggs, one of the lead attorneys in the 1990s tobacco litigation. From the middle of 2004 through 2005, Scruggs’ firm drew blanket coverage across the US, with more than 200 local stories in more than 30 states, according to a search of the Nexis database.
Historical amnesiaNew York Times (2/16/23): Medical debt “began emerging as a much more striking issue last year.”
However, by the spring of 2006, Scruggs’ suits had largely failed, and he would soon find himself in prison for bribing a judge in an unrelated case. With local hospitals agreeing to policy changes in Illinois and Connecticut, medical debt coverage shrank.
The issue didn’t go away, of course; it simply attracted less media attention. However, according to veteran New York Times healthcare reporter Reed Abelson (2/16/23), concern about medical debt appeared mysteriously in 2022: “The inability to afford medical tests and treatment, a perennial concern in the United States, began emerging as a much more striking issue last year.” Perhaps Abelson, who has covered healthcare since 2002, forgot Jonathan Cohn’s 5,000-word New York Times Magazine essay (12/19/04) from 2004, prompted in part by the Scruggs class action cases.
Telling the stories of millions of Americans whose lives have been ruined and even shortened by medical debt is an honorable exercise, and the spate of recent reporting does include a few new details. In particular, MLK50’s Wendi Thomas (6/27/19) interviewed judges who decide debt cases, giving readers a new level of detailed, often chilling insight into the attitudes of people who sometimes casually help attorneys for hospitals and collection agencies destroy patients’ families.
Judge Betty Thomas Moore ordered a woman whose 11-year-old nonverbal autistic son wears diapers and eats only pureed foods to pay $130 a month instead of $30. The judge reasoned that her son and his two older brothers “could sacrifice so that their mother could pay more.”
History of failureBeyond painful details and inspiring victories, most articles that offer a broader frame for the issue are plagued by bad habits common to corporate journalism: historical amnesia, a bias for treating individuals as “consumers” with primary responsibility for their own problems, and ideological blinders.
NPR (4/14/22): “There’s still the issue of consumers being able to afford to pay for healthcare. “
As they have for 20 years, most policy-focused stories about medical debt lean heavily toward regulatory initiatives or legislative actions to take the sharp edges off of debt collection, or offer advice on how to avoid or manage medical debt (NPR, 4/14/22; KHN, 10/17/19; KRWG, 4/6/21). To the extent that wrap-up stories acknowledge the need for Americans to be covered by health insurance, reporters assume the only way forward is to build on the supposed successes of the Affordable Care Act through tiny increments of change. They treat Medicare for All, or any other credible scheme to cover all Americans with comprehensive health insurance, as an impossibility for the foreseeable future.
Unfortunately, regulating medical debt collection tactics has an easily documented history of failure as healthcare policy. The 2003 Connecticut law, described by Lagnado (6/10/03) as “a breakthrough patient-protection bill,” addressed several of the key issues highlighted in reporting on healthcare debt. Yet the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) reported that as of December 2020, 10% of Connecticut adults whose accounts the agency tracks had medical debt on their credit reports, with an average balance of $1,407 and a median of $508.
The CFPB acknowledges that its data significantly understates the scale of the issue, because a lot of medical debt either never appears on credit reports, or is reported as general credit card debt. An analysis of the CFPB data shows that an average of 14% of American credit reports have medical debt on them. The Kaiser Health News/NPR collaboration kicked off with the publication of a Kaiser Family Foundation poll showing that 41% of adults in the US, or 100 million Americans, have medical debt.
Burdened despite ‘breakthrough’So despite “breakthrough” legislation and additional internal policy changes at the state’s largest health system, people in Connecticut remain so burdened with medical debt two decades after a “breakthrough” that public officials feel the need to publicize the problem and take action.
Meriden, Conn., Record Journal (12/10/22)
In December 2022, US Sen. Chris Murphy (D.-Conn.), who was the Senate co-chair of the state’s Public Health Committee when the 2003 law passed, held a listening session on medical debt to allow people to air their suffering. Two months later, Connecticut’s governor promised to spend public money to retire as much as $2 billion in residents’ debts.
Murphy and his Senate colleague Chris Van Hollen (D.–Md.) have introduced the Strengthening Consumer Protections and Medical Debt Transparency Act, to “protect consumers from medical debt.” Most of the proposal is lifted from 20-year-old laws in Connecticut and other states: capping interest at 5%, reporting on collection activity, determining the patient’s insurance status before collecting, requiring itemized bills. The bill would also give patients an additional six months after providers have determined their insurance and charity care eligibility before facing aggressive collections tactics.
Similar laws in other states simply have not stopped medical debt from gnawing at the economic security and health of millions of families. In the CFPB analysis, Connecticut has only the 16th lowest percentage of credit reports with medical debt. The report includes a table of states that have policies to require hospital charity care or restrain aggressive collection tactics. Some of those states are among those with the lowest percentage of indebted patients; others, like New Jersey, Illinois, Maine and New Mexico, are not. Of course, what does line up with low levels of medical debt is health insurance. The CFPB study (3/1/22) notes that “medical debt is also more common in the Southeastern and Southwestern US, in part because states in those regions did not expand Medicaid coverage.” Indeed, 29 of the 30 states with the lowest percentage of credit reports with medical debt have adopted some form of Medicaid expansion.
These laws do ease some existing patients’ terror and stress, by banning or reducing the use of horrifying tactics like wage garnishment, bank executions, foreclosure and even actual arrests for missing court dates. In the end, they don’t eliminate that stress, and won’t address the core failure of the US healthcare system to cover everyone with guaranteed health insurance.
Here’s a simple sentence you’ll rarely read in corporate media: The Affordable Care Act has failed. Its only measurable effect has been to shift a small percentage of the population from being uninsured to the ranks of the underinsured.
According to the Commonwealth Fund, when the ACA passed in 2010, 56% of American adults age 19–64 were covered for the entire year with insurance good enough not to consider them underinsured. In 2022, 57% of Americans were similarly covered. After 12 years, millions of column inches and endless television news hours, there is little discernible difference in the core protections available to Americans against illness, injury, early death and, yes, medical debt.
The Commonwealth Fund underestimates the scale of underinsurance: 32% of adults who were “insured all year, not underinsured” in 2022 reported problems getting access to healthcare because of cost. However, taking Commonwealth’s definitions at face value, at the current rate of progress, every single American adult can expect to be “insured all year, not underinsured” in about 515 years.
How to cope with the KafkaesqueFox Business* (3/3/21) notes that its advice to medical debtors is “sponsored by Credible—which is majority owned by our parent, Fox Corporation*.” Credible is a “leading consumer finance marketplace” that “delivers a differentiated and personalized experience that enables consumers to compare instant, accurate pre-qualified rates from multiple financial institutions.”
Not to worry. Major media outlets have us covered for the next five-plus centuries. Most US news sources, medical self-help websites, and even credit-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax have an article or two filled with advice for patients on fighting back against medical debt.
If medical debt has crimped your reading budget, look for former ProPublica reporter Marshall Allen’s Never Pay the First Bill: And Other Ways to Fight the Healthcare System and Win in your local public library. Or you can head over to his Allen Health Academy website, featuring a self-help curriculum called “The Never Pay Pathway.” For $3 a month, you get 16 videos on-demand, a certificate of completion and monthly newsletter. Coming soon, for $5 a month, you can get an app and a checklist for tracking your progress negotiating with your creditors, and for $7, companies get access to an employer-support forum, and workers who have debt (presumably because of the company’s lousy health insurance) can join a Facebook support group.
The guidance has changed little in two decades: Study your insurance plan if you have one, to understand your deductibles and copays. Review your bills for inaccuracies. If you’re uninsured, apply for Medicaid or other public insurance programs, and ask your hospital for financial help. Fight your insurer if they don’t pay what they’re supposed to. Negotiate your total hospital debt down, bargain a lower interest rate, and set up a payment plan that you can afford. If you get sued, show up in court, prepared with a proposed payment plan. And so on.
If it works, this is good advice. Most hospitals still bill uninsured patients at inflated prices. The vast majority of medical bills do contain errors. Patients frequently can negotiate to lower their total debt and interest rates dramatically and get on a payment plan. Hospitals do have charity care policies, however stingy or generous.
The limits of consumer empowermentBut consumer empowerment only goes so far. A study by Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jeffrey Pfeffer found that US adult workers already spend more than 13.7 million hours a week on the phone with their health insurance administrators. Some of that time is spent dealing with health insurance problems involving medical debt. However, most medical debt empowerment articles urge patients to research, review and negotiate discounted debt with hospitals, doctors and other providers.
KFF Health News (7/1/22): ” Do not expect this to be an easy process.”
So, to “get rid of medical debt—or avoid it in the first place,” according to the headline on a widely circulated story by NPR reporter Yuki Noguchi (KHN, 7/1/22), patients must expect to spend even more time on the phone, studying bills, reading laws, regulations and policies, writing letters and going to court. In a nation where people have to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, it’s not clear when they are supposed to find the time to read (assuming they’re fluent in English), make phone calls, gather their personal information and trudge off to the hospital to prove they’re worthily poor enough not to deserve torture.
For the story, KHN and NPR “spoke with patients, consumer advocates, and researchers to glean their hard-won insights on how to avoid or manage medical debt.” Noguchi walked patients through the US healthcare nightmare step by step, from subscribing to an insurance plan through fending off collections lawyers, with empowering advice for each step.
In real life, patients often can’t shop for hospitals like groceries or a new appliance. Patients go where their doctors have admitting privileges, get treated in facilities that are in their insurance network, or wind up in whichever emergency room an ambulance takes them to. If, after shopping, their discounted bills still far exceed their ability to pay, then what? Without real wealth or a high income, uninsured and underinsured people have relatively few choices that actually protect them from healthcare debt.
Neither NPR nor any other outlet offers data on the efficacy of consumer empowerment as policy. If every single “consumer” dutifully followed every bit of advice, would the number of debtors shrink from 100 million to 10 million? 50 million? 95 million?
And when these tactics do “work,” it’s not clear how much help they provide. KFF’s own survey (6/16/22) found that half of American adults couldn’t pay a $500 medical expense right away, and 19% would never be able to pay it off. In the end, if you can’t afford $500, how valuable is bargaining a $30,000 debt down to $10,000?
Without comprehensive health insurance coverage, patients will wind up back in debt, or sicker and in more pain because they avoid care. MLK50’s Thomas (ProPublica, 6/27/19) framed her interviews with Memphis judges in part through the story of Raquel Nelson, who received treatment from the United Methodist Church-affiliated Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare system. Methodist’s lawsuit was Nelson’s third time as a medical debt defendant.
Limiting future torture“Is Your Town Next?” the New York Times headline (12/29/22) gushes. But the subhead acknowledges it’s just “a short-term solution.”
This issue haunts reporting on what the New York Times (12/29/22) calls “a new strategy to address the high cost of healthcare.” RIP Medical Debt, a nonprofit organization founded by former debt collections executives, is working with public and private institutions like churches, state and local governments, and even a local ABC affiliate, using their own money to purchase outstanding debt and retire it.
Most of this debt has already been written off as uncollectible by providers and sold to third party collectors, allowing RIP to buy it at a few cents on the dollar. In Connecticut, Governor Lamont proposes to give RIP Medical Debt $20 million in federal American Rescue Plan funds to retire up to $2 billion in debt.
Ohio State Rep. Michele Grim, quoted in the Times story as a Toledo city councilor who helped organize a partnership between the city and RIP Medical Debt to cancel medical debts, told FAIR in a Zoom interview:
This is the only country in the world that lets its citizens go bankrupt because of medical debt. States and locals see this as the simplest thing we can do, because we can’t fix our broken healthcare system.
Toledo internist John Ross, a Franklin County Board of Health commissioner and past president of Physicians for a National Health Program, strongly supports the Ohio initiative, but also noted that ARP funding is a one-off. Without continued sources of financing, many of the current debtors whose debt will be forgiven, and thousands of others who lack adequate health insurance, will soon be burdened again by debt: “The next wave of debt is building as we speak.”
RIP Medical Debt typically doesn’t buy debt until patients, providers and insurers have had a chance to pursue other sources of payment. That process usually takes about 18 months, according to RIP Medical Debt CEO Allison Sesso. Thus, at its very best, the Times “strategy to address high healthcare costs” boils down to this: If a local government scrapes together some money, and if your local hospital is willing to work with RIP medical debt, indebted patients may only need to spend 18 months struggling with medical bills—although once their current debts are paid, the next time they get sick, the cycle starts over. When the bar is low enough, even an unfunded possibility of limiting future torture to a year and a half looks like a victory.
RIP Medical Debt leaders understand the limitations of their model. In an email exchange with FAIR, CEO Allison Sesso wrote:
We know that RIP Medical Debt is not a holistic solution, but a stopgap that nonetheless provides a financial and emotional respite to our constituents. We understand both that debt relief matters to the individuals we help and that what we are doing is not fundamentally solving the problem.
Distorted landscapeNew York Times (2/20/20): “It actually isn’t much of a surprise that nonprofit hospitals are often more profitable than for-profit hospitals.”
In reality, local residents have already paid these debts many times over. Nearly 60% of acute care hospitals in the US are private tax exempt “charitable” organizations, whose mission statements typically include a commitment to caring for the poor, sick and injured. The “mission” entitles them not to pay federal, state and local property, income or sales taxes.
In 2006, the Cook County assessor estimated that nonprofit hospitals owned between $4.3 and $4.5 billion worth of exempt commercial real estate in the county, representing up to $241 million in local property tax revenues, likely much higher today. Yet cash-strapped city governments are now spending public money to pay for debts incurred in these already heavily subsidized hospitals.
Speaking from personal experience, it’s hard to imagine a more gratifying reporting outcome than seeing a powerful hospital corporation forgive suffering patients’ debts, or announce changes in policies toward all patients who can’t afford care. In 2019, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam and the president of the University of Virginia publicly committed to changing UVA Health’s policies, the day after KHN’s expose (9/10/19) on the hospital system’s lawsuits and collections tactics.
However, by ignoring the history of failed, narrowly targeted reforms; covering gimmicky strategies and pouring effort into the kind of consumer self-help that NGOs have been publishing how-to guides about for decades (e.g., Hospital Debt Justice Project, 2003); and indulging in ritual defenses of the Affordable Care Act, news organizations leave their audiences with distorted impressions of the policy landscape, undermining the power of their own high-impact reporting.
Giving politicians coverJennifer Bosco, staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center, told NPR (4/14/22):
Ultimately, I think the problem of medical debt isn’t going to go away unless at some point in our country’s future, we adopt some sort of single payer or Medicare-for-All system. But I think that’s very much a blue-sky idea at this point.
Apparently it’s a popular blue sky idea. In its story on RIP Medical Debt, the Times (12/29/22) noted that polling by Tulchin Research, the American Association of Political Consultants’ 2022 Democratic Pollster of the Year, found that “65% supported ‘Medicare for all’ and 68% supported expanding Medicaid.”
It will remain a blue-sky idea as long as media keep giving politicians cover with the idea that urgently addressing the incremental Next Bad Thing will make a difference. Three years ago, the bad thing du jour was “surprise billing.” Surprise bills happen when an empowered consumer carefully studies the rules of their health plan and goes to a hospital in their insurance network, but unknowingly gets treated by a doctor that isn’t in their network, then gets socked with a huge bill that their insurer doesn’t want to pay.
Consumer Reports (2/10/22)
KFF polled the issue and found that 65% of people were concerned about surprise bills. Surprise bills affect insurers as much as individuals, so Congress passed the No Surprises Act, spawning a round of updates to consumer empowerment websites, and warnings about how the Act didn’t quite get rid of all surprise bills.
People don’t get surprise medical bills because doctors are greedy, or because private equity firms bought some emergency physician practices, or because empowered consumers didn’t check their network carefully enough. Americans get surprise bills because they have insurance networks. They have to go to “in-network” providers because, unlike other wealthy nations, Americans don’t have a right to healthcare, providers don’t have an obligation to treat people who need it except in emergencies, and US healthcare prices are set in secret negotiations between powerful private actors.
Insurers, doctors and hospitals wield network membership and rates as weapons in a high-stakes battle over market power. For empowered consumers covered through their jobs, this means that every year during open enrollment—assuming their health plan is even still offered by their boss—they get to “choose” whether to keep it, by poring over long lists of doctors and hospitals to see if they can still avoid bankruptcy while visiting the people who have healed and comforted them for years.
They often can’t. In 2017, Morning Consult found that 15% of Americans had a doctor leave their network in just the previous 12 months, meaning they’d have to pay more—often much more—to continue their care with that doctor (Fierce Healthcare, 3/17/17).
The new Next Bad ThingNone of KHN/NPR ‘s takeaways (6/16/22) are new, or required a year to unearth.
Medical debt coverage now frames deductibles as the Next Bad Thing. NPR and KHN (6/16/22) gave readers of their Diagnosis Debt series “Five Quick Takeaways from a Yearlong Investigation of Medical Debt in America.” There really are only four takeaways, as the first two basically say it’s a big problem. Two others are that medical debt is hard to pay off, and that “debt and illness are linked.” The final takeaway glances off the core issue:
The KHN/NPR investigation finds that despite more people having health insurance—as a result of the Affordable Care Act—medical debt is pervasive. There is a reason: Over the past two decades, health insurers have shifted costs onto patients through higher deductibles, at the same time that the medical industry has steadily raised the prices of drugs, procedures and treatments. The 2010 healthcare law didn’t curb that.
Nothing in the five takeaways is new, or required a year to unearth. Deductibles have grown much faster than inflation over the past two decades, which KHN’s reporters presumably know, since the primary source for the information is KHN’s own parent organization, the annual employer surveys done by the Kaiser Family Foundation—as FAIR (9/8/17) reported six years ago . More than a third of American adults have been telling the Commonwealth Fund (2003–18, 2020, 2022) that they skipped or delayed needed medical care in the past year due to costs since Lucette Lagnado first knocked on Quenton White’s door in 2003.
By itself, limiting or eliminating deductibles is meaningless unless all of the tools for patient abuse are taken out of the industry’s hands. If deductibles are limited or disappear, patients can expect higher premiums, higher copays and heavier coinsurance. They will likely face even more intense shifts in their lists of “in-network” providers, as insurers try to wring profits from the market to make up for any minor losses.
Timid sources, compromised coverageBernie Sanders (KFF Health News, 2/8/23): “What I ultimately would like to accomplish is not going to happen right now.”
To some extent, corporate media debt reporting is constrained by its chosen sources. Democratic politicians don’t want to talk about universal coverage schemes; even Sen. Bernie Sanders says “we ain’t gonna get” Medicare for All (KHN, 2/8/23). NGOs like the National Consumer Law Center accept and repeat the “blue sky” expectation, even though Medicare for All and Medicaid expansion poll as well as limiting surprise bills, and very close to debt relief (KFF, 2/28/20; New York Times, 12/29/22).
The NGOs that track medical debt and related trends reflect the conventional wisdom of what is politically possible. The Kaiser Family Foundation is a respected agenda-setting organization. When the authors of KFF’s Issue Brief (11/3/22) headlined “Hospital Charity Care: How It Works and Why It Matters” get to “Looking Ahead” at policy options, they offer a parody of Washington policy wonkery, with ideas appearing passively out of the ether:
In the context of ongoing concerns about the affordability of hospital care and the growing burden of medical debt, several policy ideas have been floated at the federal and state level to strengthen hospital charity care programs.
Evidently whoever “floats” ideas in Washington—apparently not KFF—is under the impression that universal, comprehensive health insurance doesn’t apply as a solution to medical debt.
However, there are plenty of suggestions for encouraging or even requiring more hospital “charity.” The link-heavy two paragraphs include all the usual ideas, like reporting requirements and higher poverty thresholds for mandated charity care. There’s even a clever “floor and trade” suggestion, “where hospitals would be required to either provide a minimum amount of charity care or subsidize other hospitals that do so.”
The closest thing to actual solutions are vague hints:
State and federal policymakers have also considered several other options to reduce medical debt or increase affordability more generally, such as by expanding Medicaid in states that have not already done so, reducing healthcare prices through direct regulation or other means, and increasing consumer protections against medical debt.
Direct price regulation, a standard feature of national healthcare systems around the world, triggers furious industry opposition. If KFF can find such a politically controversial idea “floating” somewhere, why can’t an idea with 65% polling support, and 120 voting cosponsors in the US House of Representatives at the time the piece was written (H.R. 1976), float past the authors? Like so many other sources, KFF seems firmly committed to achieving universal coverage—sometime in the next five centuries.
Assumed political impotenceWhat if in addition to not suing their patients for debts, as ProPublica (6/30/19) suggests, nonprofit hospitals directed their efforts toward creating a healthcare system that covers everybody?
The most extraordinary aspects of the current wave of medical debt coverage are the assumed political impotence of the public, and the low expectations of reporters and NGO sources. Hospitals spend massive amounts of money lobbying against their own patients’ interests. When a major investigation is published, nonprofit systems are vulnerable, and NGOs and local community leaders can often shape the terms of the response.
An embarrassed Methodist Le Bonheur system in Memphis announced a 30-day review of its charity care policies, prompting a ProPublica/MLK50 article (6/30/19) headlined “Stop Suing Patients, Advocates Advise Memphis Nonprofit Hospital System”:
During the past month, MLK50 consulted with consumer advocates and legal experts around the country about how Methodist could reform its policies. For many, the top priority was to stop the lawsuits. Close behind, they said, was for the hospital to expand its financial assistance policy to include poor people who have health insurance but can’t afford their deductibles or co-pays.
Not a single quoted expert said anything like:
Of course they should stop suing people. But the very best thing Methodist Le Bonheur could do for its patients is withdraw from the American Hospital Association and spend what they were paying in dues to lobby for Medicare for All, or some other form of genuine national health insurance. Not only is it disgraceful that a supposed charitable hospital is suing patients and garnishing their wages, but they’re using money brutally extracted from impoverished patients to stop the government from guaranteeing those patients actual health insurance that would keep them out of debt forever.
Similarly, if just a small percentage of the 100 million Americans with medical debt emailed their most recent collections letter to their senators and representatives once a month, with the simple message “National health insurance now,” that’s millions of messages. It takes less time than suing your hospital, and would certainly get congressional attention—it might even crash congressional servers. Five minutes. Once a month. Yet the only advice given to readers is “empowerment” to negotiate on their own with a multi-billion dollar corporation.
A simple storyAmericans pay much more for healthcare and yet die much sooner than citizens of other wealthy countries (Wikimedia Commons, 3/11/22).
One of the few reporters who took the time to look at the history of medical debt in the US is KHN’s Dan Weissmann, who runs the Arm and a Leg podcast. Weissmann did a multipart series on the history of medical debt, pegged to an interview with former attorney Dickie Scruggs. The series offers a good look at the history of medical debt campaigns, but again the framing is absurdly narrow. Weissmann introduces Scruggs as the lawyer “Who Helped Start the Fight for Charity Care,” as if hospital charity is a goal that listeners should be satisfied with.
In 2005, after local patients filed lawsuits against hospitals, the Bergen (New Jersey) Record editorial board (6/13/05) described the actual “fight”:
America’s healthcare system is broken. The only way to completely fix it is a single-payer system, one that would end the inequities that cause people like Mr. Osso to be charged three and four times the rates that insurance companies or Medicare and Medicaid are charged.
Two decades of failed reforms later, the idea of actually covering everyone in the US stimulates talk of a policy Long March in elite media. RIP Medical Debt CEO Allison Sesso told FAIR “that no one entity can change such a complex and opaque system as US healthcare…. RIP’s help is immediate—this matters because policy and systems change can take years.”
US health care may be nightmarishly complex for patients and the people who heal and comfort them, but US healthcare policy is quite simple. There are two “entities,” comprising exactly 536 people, who could eliminate current and future medical debt tomorrow. Functioning models all over the world cover the conditions described in the stories above without turning patients into debt peons, at a fraction of what is spent in the US. The people with the power to do it just refuse to. End of story.
Disclosure: I was a source for reporting on debt in Connecticut. At the time, I was a researcher for the hospitality workers’ union now known as UNITE HERE, collaborating with staff of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). As noted in many stories, a member of our team, SEIU researcher Grace Rollins, researched and wrote the CCNE reports, and shared our materials with Lagnado and other reporters. I participated in planning for the rallies, and assisted with lobbying for the legislation that passed in 2003.*
The post The Healthcare Long March: Why Exposing Evils of Medical Debt Doesn’t Fix the Problem appeared first on FAIR.
New York Times (5/3/23): “Right-wing media outlets, Christian organizations and business groups…argued that the legislation would harm all news media, including conservative outlets, and lead to an increase in frivolous and costly lawsuits.”
FAIR (3/1/23) and other free speech advocates expressed concern when Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed for a bills that would redefine who a “public figure” is, thus challenging the longstanding Sullivan v. New York Times case that protects journalists from defamation lawsuits.
DeSantis is used to getting his way on most things these days, on everything from cloaking his travel records (NBC, 5/3/23) to taking over the state’s higher education institutions (AP, 4/26/23; Chronicle of Higher Education, 5/3/23). But not this time, as the New York Times (5/3/23) reports that the bills are hitting fierce opposition in the Florida legislature and is likely to fail.
The resistance came not from the liberals DeSantis loves to bash, but from the same right-wing media outlets that often support his administration. The reason? Efforts to intimidate liberal and centrist media by eviscerating the Sullivan standard would also impact right-wing media. The landmark case holds that public figures must prove that the accused acted with reckless disregard for the truth in order for a defamation case to hold up.
The Times:
“The minute conservative media outlets started catching wind of this it was stopped real quick,” said Javier Manjarres, the publisher of the Floridian, a conservative site that is usually supportive of the governor’s agenda. Last month, he wrote an article that said the legislation would be “an irreparable self-inflicted political wound” if Mr. DeSantis were to sign it.
“They were trying to hit the liberal media and didn’t realize it would be a boomerang that would come back around right at them,” said Brendon Leslie, the editor in chief of Florida’s Voice, a digital outlet that is favored by Mr. DeSantis. He and others worried that the legislation, if passed, would encourage lawsuits that could put many conservative publications out of business.
Reasons to be worriedFox*‘s $787 million settlement with Dominion (NBC*, 4/18/23) was one of a number of high-profile libel payouts by right-wing media in recent years.
Such right-wing outlets have a reason to be worried, because even with the Sullivan standard, they have been vulnerable. Most famously, Fox News settled an enormous lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems over the network’s false statements that the company helped fix the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden (FAIR.org, 4/20/23). And who can forget Alex Jones’ legal troubles over his lies about the Sandy Hook shooting at Infowars (FAIR.org, 8/18/22)?
There are a few other affairs. A former US Department of Agriculture official “settled her long-running defamation lawsuit against the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart” (National Law Journal, 10/1/15). A “House information-technology staffer who became the center of fevered right-wing conspiracy theories about espionage and extortion” sued “the Daily Caller, alleging the conservative website defamed him and his relatives” (Daily Beast, 1/28/20).
The New York Post “settled a high-profile defamation suit over the paper’s infamous ‘Bag Men’ cover in the midst of the Boston Marathon terrorist bombing,” in which the paper ran a cover photo of two people in “attendance at the marathon” who “were holding bags in the picture,” thus tying them to the attack (Washington Post, 10/2/14).
Media clout on the rightDefending Fox against Dominion’s libel claims, William Barr (Wall Street Journal, 3/23/23) put in a good word for Sullivan.
The Dominion lawsuit against Fox, especially, rattled right-wing commentators, as even former Trump administration Attorney General William Barr took to the Wall Street Journal (3/23/23) to invoke Sullivan as protection for Fox. The setback for the DeSantis agenda demonstrates just how much influence the right-wing media have on policy; he’s not a random Republican, but a leading presidential hopeful, and the governor of a large state whose attacks on public institutions and gender rights are leading a nationwide movement. Democratic lawmakers are unlikely to check in with, say, MSNBC before deciding whether it’s safe to follow California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s political lead.
But if conservative legislators are reluctant to buck the media their voters rely on for political information, the urge to revisit the Sullivan case is still strong in conservative judicial circles (FAIR.org, 3/26/21), and it’s unlikely that will subside. The right’s broad agenda to crush labor unions and public education includes a decimation of media outlets that spotlight corporate and governmental misdeeds.
The New York Times (4/19/23) reported:
In recent court cases, Republican politicians suing the news media for defamation—including the former Senate candidates Don Blankenship and Roy Moore and the former congressman Devin Nunes—have explicitly pushed judges to abandon the Sullivan ruling.
Aside from trying to win their cases, the apparent goal was to present the Supreme Court with a vehicle to reconsider Sullivan.
“That is definitely the strategy,” said Lee Levine, a prominent First Amendment lawyer who, until his retirement, regularly represented the New York Times and other news organizations. “It will continue.”
Tearing down precedentsJustice Clarence Thomas (New York Times, 7/2/21) says we shouldn’t continue “to insulate those who perpetrate lies from traditional remedies like libel suits.”
The current Supreme Court conservative majority is certainly not shy about tearing down the liberal precedents set by the Warren Court. Floyd Abrams, one of the US’s most famous press lawyers, told the podcast So to Speak (2/23/23) that the judges who want to overturn Sullivan “are offended by…the press reportage about really public matters, which I think Sullivan was absolutely right about and has served the public well.” Floyd doesn’t believe the court has the five votes needed to undo Sullivan yet. But there are at least two justices—Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—that have their eye on the case, and possibly one or two more.
And next year’s presidential election could make a huge difference. “Former President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, two favorites of many Fox News viewers, have advocated for the court to revisit the [Sullivan] standard,” AP (3/6/23) reported. The call to constrain press freedom is still ringing loud among right-wing voters.
Floyd said “if former President Trump were reelected and he got a chance…to appoint some more justices, sure, [Sullivan] would be at risk.”
The post DeSantis’ Anti-Press Bills Seem Dead, but Don’t Celebrate Yet appeared first on FAIR.
(The Nation, 4/28/23)
This week on CounterSpin: Economist James Galbraith wrote a few months ago: “It is in the nature of articles about the debt ceiling that no matter how often one tries to set the record straight, nothing ever gets through.” Elite media’s fundamental misrepresentation of the debt ceiling would be troubling enough if it were just a bad history lesson. But current Republican brinkmanship could have devastating impacts for millions of people—along with the harm to public understanding of what’s actually going on. We hear concerns about the process and the coverage from Chris Lehmann, DC bureau chief at The Nation, and contributing editor at the Baffler and the New Republic.
CounterSpin230505Lehmann.mp3IFixit.com
Also on the show: The right to fix the things you buy is the sort of thing you wouldn’t think would be controversial here in “the land of the free.” Corporations’ attempts to prevent people from fixing their cellphone or tractor or wheelchair ought to be seen as the overreach it is. But for years, news media have presented the right to repair as a voice in the wilderness, up against benevolent companies’ efforts to do best by us all. That’s changing, with legislative moves around the country. Right to repair is having a “watershed moment,” one advocate says, adding that there are still “a lot of opportunities for mischief.” We get an update from Kyle Wiens, co-founder and CEO of the online repair community iFixit.
CounterSpin230505Wiens.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the New York Times‘ Iran error.
CounterSpin230505Banter.mp3The post Chris Lehmann on Debt Ceiling Myths, Kyle Wiens on Right to Repair’s Moment appeared first on FAIR.
The New York Times (4/27/23) reported that changes to bail laws would “for the first time allow judges to set bail with public safety in mind”–in other words, allowing judges to punish people for crimes without having to go to the bother of convicting them.
In a victory for proponents of mass incarceration, Democratic New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a budget deal that would include toughening up the state’s bail laws. It would, as the New York Times (4/27/23) described in muted detail, “for the first time allow judges to set bail with public safety in mind.” It’s a major rollback of efforts to limit the long-term jailing of people who have not been convicted of crimes and who cannot afford the high price of bail.
The right-wing New York Post (4/27/23) quietly gave itself a bit of credit for this change, quoting Hochul’s statement about the change:
There’s some horrific cases—splashed on the front pages of newspapers—where defense lawyers [told judges,] “follow the least restrictive that means you have to let this person out,” and some of those cases literally shocked the conscience.
Hochul didn’t name the New York Post, but everyone knows what she’s talking about here. The Post (e.g., 4/21/21, 7/31/22, 9/27/22, 2/1/23, 3/28/23) has led a never-ending drumbeat calling for more pre-trial detention. Never mind that, as Civil Rights Corps founder Alec Karakatsanis (Twitter, 3/27/22, 8/30/22) pointed out, studies show that bail reform has increased public safety while reducing the prison population.
Demonizing criminal justice reform isn’t just a New York phenomenon, as Rupert Murdoch’s media empire has painted progressive district attorneys in Manhattan, San Francisco and Philadelphia as pro-crime lawyers who have turned these cities into war zones (FAIR.org, 1/14/22). The Murdoch machine has also pilloried the slogan “defund the police” (Fox News, 3/23/22, 7/20/22).
Favorite punching bagsBelow an alarming headline, a Bloomberg article (7/29/22) pointed out that crime in New York City wasn’t so rampant after all.
And it isn’t just Murdoch. San Francisco—which, because of its importance in the hippie and gay liberation eras, is supposedly the focal point of US liberal governance—has been a favorite punching bag across corporate media as an out-of-control crime city (Atlantic, 6/8/22; BBC, 4/7/23; Newsweek, 4/11/23). Contrary to that narrative, the housing business is still booming in the Bay Area (Real Deal, 3/1/23).
Bloomberg (7/29/22) ran a story with the headline, “Fear of Rampant Crime Is Derailing New York City’s Recovery,” even as rents keep rising (CNBC, 12/8/22; CNN, 4/13/23) and job growth continues. But the Bloomberg piece offered an interesting nugget, saying that “violence is a potent political issue, and people are highly susceptible to what politicians and the media say about crime.”
That’s according to John Gramlich, a researcher of crime data for Pew Research Center, who added, “That may not be reflective of all crime or what the actual crime rate in a particular area is.” This hysteria, as Gramlich suggests, is based on feelings, not data. And that same Bloomberg piece noted that there have been “nearly 800 stories per month across all digital and print media about crime in New York City” since “tough-on-crime” Eric Adams became mayor and made policing a top priority.
It should go without saying that the hysteria around crime in these cities is, to put it mildly, overstated. City and State (4/28/23) noted that in New York City, “crime levels remain low, especially compared to the 1980s and 1990s.”
Out of the US’s 100 biggest cities, San Francisco’s homicide rate comes at No. 66, and New York City ranks 80th. Chicago, another popular subject for conservative sermons on crime, does have one of the country’s higher murder rates, but there are 13 cities with worse ones—many of which are in states with Republican governors. Deep South states like Louisiana and Mississippi have homicide rates of 21.3 and 23.7 per 100,000, respectively, while coastal New York and California’s rates are 4.8 and 6.4.
Shockingly non-shockingPeople spend years behind bars without being convicted of any crime (The City, 8/17/22).
Weigh that against the things that don’t shock politicians. Consider Kalief Browder, a Bronx teenager who committed suicide after spending three years in pre-trial detention at the city’s notorious Rikers Island jail over charges of stealing a backpack (New Yorker, 9/29/14). Reuven Blau—co-author of Rikers: An Oral History—found several pretrial detainees waiting years at Rikers for a trial, with one person even waiting a decade (The City, 8/17/22).
The Urban Institute (12/14/22) noted that 19 people died in pretrial detention in New York City in 2022, while in the country as a whole, “between 2008 and 2019, 4,998 people died while in pretrial detention—and this number only includes reports from the United States’ largest jails.” In case anyone needs reminding: These people who died behind bars were presumed innocent under the nation’s legal system.
For Blau, it’s frustrating that the “tabloid hysteria” can move the political dial. (Disclosure: Blau and I worked together as reporters at New York’s Chief-Leader.) As he put it, the Post can always point to someone going in and out of city jails, saying, “Oh my God, he’s a danger.” But, Blau asked: “What are we doing to help this person, or to figure out what isn’t working?”
“It’s the selling of fear,” he said of newspaper coverage of repeat offenders. “They don’t ask, ‘How did this person get here?’ The answer to this is more Rikers Islands. They create this very black and white world, and it plays to the public.”
What gets lost in the media conversation, Blau said, is that being “tough on crime” is never about looking at the structural inequality—lack of schools, social services and housing—that allows crime to fester. “It’s not just about being tough on crime, but about helping people get the help that they need,” he said.
Crime hype consequencesCrime went down in San Francisco under DA Chesa Boudin (Washington Post, 6/14/21)–but that’s not what the local news was saying, so it’s not what voters believed.
Actual data about life and death in jails, about justice not being served, is not enough to move New York’s governor, but the sensationalism about crime is enough. That’s the news here. For example, New York Democrat Rep. Sean Maloney lost his congressional race last year, thus helping to tip control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans. Afterwards, he told the New York Times (11/10/22) that “voters in New York have been told by the News Corporation machine, principally the New York Post, that crime is the No. 1 issue.” In his race, he noted, “$10 million was spent echoing those themes.”
He added that Hochul and “the rest of us have to contend with the hysteria of the New York Post and of Fox News combined.”
Maloney’s statement is an over-simplification, as many believe that the state’s Democratic Party leadership’s lackluster campaign efforts provided an opening for Republicans (Gothamist, 11/17/22). And it certainly isn’t just the Murdoch outlets hammering the crime issue (FAIR.org, 11/10/22), although they are probably the loudest.
But combine this with Hochul’s statement about news coverage of violent crime—or, for that matter, the fact that propaganda about crime in San Francisco helped the ouster of progressive DA Chesa Boudin (Politico, 6/8/22; FAIR.org, 7/11/22). Then the problem becomes clearer.
The sensationalism around crime stories, often devoid of context and data, isn’t just annoying to read. It has very real policy consequences that will impact real human beings.
The post Media Crime Hype Helps Roll Back Reforms appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed filmmaker Jen Senko about the cost of hate talk for the April 28, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230428Senko.mp3Janine Jackson: The Brainwashing of My Dad, the 2015 film and the 2021 book based on it, are part family memoir, part historical excavation of the rise of right-wing media in the US, and part resource on ways we can resist its influence. Filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko joins us now by phone from New Jersey. Welcome to CounterSpin, Jen Senko.
Jen Senko: Thanks for welcoming, Janine. It’s great to be with you.
Kansas City Star (4/20/23)
JJ: I know that reactionary and hate-fueling media have been with us for a while, but reading the statements from the grandson of Andrew Lester, the 84-year-old white man who shot Black 16-year-old Ralph Yarl when the teenager simply rang his doorbell, the statements from the grandson that he and his grandfather used to be close, but that that unraveled as Lester, he said, “fell down the right-wing rabbit hole” and began watching “Fox News all day, every day, blaring in his living room.”
Those statements really kind of squeezed my heart, because they took me back to when FAIR was doing work around Rush Limbaugh, and we would get these really plaintive phone calls from people, saying, I remember one, “My husband used to be so kind, and so openhearted, but then he started going out to the barn with his brother and listening to Rush Limbaugh.”
So besides memoir and historical analysis and ideas for fighting back, the film and the book are also a kind of communal release, a sharing of what had been a private lament of a lot of family of folks who had been lost to this sinkhole. For me, it gets a lot of power from that, I think.
Jen Senko: “Many people…think that this media just attracts those who already have these beliefs, have these prejudices, have this hatred, have this racism. But I know for a fact that’s not necessarily true.”
JS: Reading about that really affected me. It also rang bells, of course, because back in the ’90s, I was watching my father sink down the rabbit hole. And what many people have a problem with is, they think that this media just attracts those who already have these beliefs, have these prejudices, have this hatred, have this racism. But I know for a fact that’s not necessarily true.
I was growing up in the ’60s, and I remember at the time, everybody was super aware that, hey, we’re no longer racist. We’re open-minded. And then there was the hippies, and then everything was on the table, and it was pretty much everybody adopted that—I don’t want to call it an ideology, but the idea of openness and loving other people, no matter what they were or who they love.
And then, to experience my father’s personality change was just frightening. It was like watching The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And then around the same time he was changing, he would say these things, and I would have friends come out and say the same exact thing around the same time.
I’ll give you an example. One time I was visiting, and he said, “By the way, Jen, there’s no such thing as organic.” And I’m like, hmm, OK, where did that come from? And then a girlfriend of mine came up from Texas and we had lunch, and she said to me, “By the way, Jen, there’s no such thing as organic.” And I’m like, wait a minute….
So, yeah, that story about his grandfather, Andrew, who shot Yarl, was particularly upsetting. And I just think so many people are being, especially these older people, the last few years of their lives are being ruined. They’re miserable. They hate, they’re paranoid, they’re obsessed. They’re not enjoying themselves.
The grandson said the grandfather sat in his chair all day and just watched, I think it was mostly Fox, but the rabbit hole is the rabbit hole, no matter what entrance you take.
If I had any message for anybody, it would be that this media is potent, it’s powerful. It’s meant to change people, and it does change people.
The Brainwashing of My Dad (2016)
JJ: And the film is of course about your dad, about Frank Senko, and listeners should know that story has a happy ending. But while it is your story, I’m just underscoring that I feel that you made it because you understood that it was not only your story. And at one point you say in the film, “I finally decided to make a film to figure it out,” which I think a lot of creative people will relate to. Let me make something about this so that I can kind of lay it out there and think about it, right?
JS: Right. And in the process of making the film, I called it at that time a phenomenon, now I call it an epidemic, like I said in the film. Once I posted it on Kickstarter that I was doing this movie, I didn’t know where all these people came from or how they heard about it, but they contacted me.
And just over the years since the film, actually, the film was released in 2016, IMDB got it wrong.
JJ: Sorry about that.
JS: That’s okay. We were at Traverse City in 2015, and that’s how the date got in there. We did a work in progress; we showed that.
But yeah, so I’ve heard from thousands of people over the years about how their loved one, whoever it was, actually changed. And regarding my dad’s change back, I think that’s a really, really important note, that when I used to do interviews, I would leave it off, because I thought, well, I don’t want to spoil the movie for anybody. But there’s going to be people that are listening that aren’t going to see the movie.
The important thing to know is that my dad changed back to himself, and it was through removal of that media. Do you want me to….
JJ: Absolutely, absolutely. I think it’s a remarkable story, in a way.
JS: It is. And I laughed just because it makes me happy.
Rush Limbaugh (cc photo: Nicolas Shayko/Wikimedia)
So my parents, in 2010, they moved to a senior community, and somewhere in the move, my dad’s radio broke, and he put it in the garage and it just sat there, and he didn’t fix it. So immediately he was sans his three-hour lunches with Rush Limbaugh.
So he actually mellowed a little bit right away, and we didn’t want to remind him, you know, you got to fix your radio or whatever. So that was a really, really, really big, big thing. Probably, I’d say, maybe the first biggest thing.
Then the second thing that happened is, I guess it was a few months later, the TV in the kitchen that they watched during lunch was very old, and my mom got a new one, and she programmed the remotes, and they had stickies all over them, do this, do that, do this.
So my dad didn’t bother. He just left on what she had on, and I think she watched MSNBC or just different, various news shows. They always watched the news.
And then, might have been a year later, I’m not sure, sometime later, my dad went into the hospital for a kidney stone, and he was there for a week. And they had these really old computers, and my mom was afraid that the computers were getting clogged up, and she asked me to delete some of his email, but I said, look, they just keep coming. You have to unsubscribe them, and I don’t have time to do that.
So she did it, but she added something. She not only unsubscribed him from all this vile email from, I mean, dozens of hard-right Republican organizations. She subscribed him to what she was reading, independent, more progressive media emails like AlterNet, Reader Supported News, Truthout, that kind of thing.
And when he got back from the hospital, I don’t think he noticed. They were just political emails, and he was reading them. He had a little bit of both, whatever.
And then one day, it was after lunch, I think he had been watching Obama on the news. He said to my mom, “I like that guy. He’s pretty good.” And lo and behold, he ended up voting for him.
But OK, so the point isn’t that his politics became aligned with ours. The point was that my dad was free and happy and singing, and not angry and not hateful. And it was the last few years of his life, and we became really close, where it had really kind of damaged us and damaged relationships before. This media is so potent, as it’s meant to be.
Steve Rendall
JJ: Absolutely. Yeah. Well, longtime FAIR analyst Steve Rendall, along with FAIR founder Jeff Cohen, appears in this work. Steve is an expert in talk radio, and he would often describe its power as having to do with the way it was consumed, which I think your experience just underscores.
In the case of your father, he started listening on a long solo commute to work. For other folks, it’s going out to the barn with their brother. But it has to do with the way certain kinds of media, not just the way they talk to you, but the way they talk to you in a sort of isolated format.
And, yeah, this is where I think the book helps people see that this isn’t accidental, that the messages that were coming through, it wasn’t just your father, there was a game plan. It wasn’t an unintended effect. The effect that it had on your father, making him angry, making him hateful, and making him particularly hateful towards particular groups—all of that was intentional.
JS: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Fan or not, Hillary Clinton, she was spot on in 1998 when she said there was a vast right-wing conspiracy. But the conspiracy wasn’t just against her husband. Basically, far-right libertarian Republicans, starting back in the ’50s, actually, after Brown v. Board of Education, figured out that in order to effect the change they wanted, which was basically one-party rule by billionaire white men, they would have to create distrust in mainstream media.
And one major way to do that was, they had to label it as “liberal.” And that changed a lot of things right there. It was a very successful campaign. Mainstream or corporate media fell right into the trap. They folded, they leaned right, they bent over backwards to not be labeled “liberal media.” And it’s stuck today. And it’s like they were abused spouses. “Sorry, what did we do wrong?” But they didn’t know that or understand that there was this plan.
So control over the media was an easy-peasy way to get ordinary citizens into voting against their own interests, and in line with billionaires. But eventually, of course, it metastasized to what it is today, like a weed that took over the whole garden.
But the plan, if you want me to go into some detail and mention some of the points….
JJ: Pick some highlights there. The book does go through a number of landmarks in the creation of this right-wing media machine. We’re talking about history here, and not guesses about things; these are things that are documented. But there are a few things that stand out as important in moving us toward the situation we have now.
JS: Right. So in 1969, after Goldwater lost to Johnson, Reed Irvine started AIM, Accuracy In Media, supposed media watchdog group. It was really more of a media attack dog group. They still exist today. But they were the ones that first took on this goal to discredit the media as liberal.
Reed Irvine
Interestingly enough, that same year, Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox, he was working with Nixon to improve his television image. And the following year, he submitted a memo to the White House which had a scheme to create a news show that would put the GOP in a good light. Later on, then, that came in handy when Rupert Murdoch hired him to create Fox.
But then the next year was the Lewis Powell memo. This was monumental, and it was secret at first, until a journalist discovered it, but nobody paid attention to it, because it was like Goebbels said about the big lie. You can’t believe that people would actually do this. But it basically outlined steps to take for the vast right-wing conspiracy.
It was designed as an anti–New Deal blueprint, to undo the New Deal and squelch all the social changes that were going on at the time. They were going to influence college campuses, the pulpits, the media, corporate influence over scientists, and to create and fund think tanks, basically, to push the free-market philosophy.
And then there was, in the ’80s, the creation of the CTN, which was Christian-based, and thus the marriage with Evangelicals happened. So the group got bigger.
Then Reagan made Rupert Murdoch a citizen, and he killed the Fairness Doctrine. And then the next year, after the Fairness Doctrine was killed, we had Rush Limbaugh go national, and he reigned for decades, poisoning the minds of, I think his total was like 20 million people, not to speak of they got him in the military, so poisoning their minds, too.
But then the final big blow came with Clinton and Gingrich and their Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996, which opened up media ownership and cross ownership. So all the big media companies got even bigger and squeezed out any independent ownership. And then after that, just eight months later, Fox News was hatched.
That’s it in a nutshell. I do go into a lot more detail in the book.
JJ: The book covers a lot of this history, and I just want to underscore: The book and the film are not negative. They’re colorful and engaging, and they’re forward-looking, which I think is maybe the most important thing.
And so maybe to bring us up now, I know a lot of listeners will be listening and thinking, oh, Fox fired Tucker Carlson, and so maybe that means things are going in a good direction. But you and I know that whatever Carlson was fired for, it wasn’t for years of sowing hatred against Black and brown people, it wasn’t years of punching down, because that has been his stock in trade for years.
So you also, and not alone, suggest that what we are learning around Fox‘s admissions, which are still coming out around the lawsuit, around Dominion and the voting machines, that ought to remind us that Fox is not caring about its own viewers, in the same way that it didn’t care about your dad, and that it doesn’t care about lots of other folks.
And I just want to say, a lot of folks are going to take that and say, well, I’ve done what I can do about Fox, because I don’t watch it, and that’s really all I can do. So what more can people do, besides being angry, besides being sad and bewildered by all of the things that this book and this movie talk about, what are some things that you think people could do?
Rupert Murdoch (cc photo: World Economic Forum)
JS: Well, first is to be aware of Rupert Murdoch, because before Tucker Carlson, there was Glenn Beck, then there was Bill O’Reilly and then there was Roger Ailes. OK, so he’s just going to hire somebody else that’s going to push forward his libertarian, “let’s turn people into Republicans so we can get tax cuts and deregulation for billionaires.” So Rupert Murdoch, mention him as often as you can, let people be aware.
So as far as Fox is concerned, I mean, there’s so much right-wing media. Fox is the tip of the iceberg, but it’s still a tip. It’s almost like if we can cut off its head, the head of the monster, that would be good.
But one thing that we must do, we all must do, we must work to get Fox off of military bases. I mean, come on. They say they want to get deradicalized, the military; they can’t be serious unless they get Fox off of the military. Every day, they’re radicalizing our men and women. I mean, January 6, a large percentage of those that were arrested January 6 were military or ex-military.
And one other thing about Fox: Do you know that you pay about $2 a month in your cable fee for Fox, whether you watch it or not?
JJ: That bundling packaging, where you’re paying for stuff that you don’t even watch, and that includes subsidizing Fox.
JS: And that’s how they make their money. Not so much ads, but you can petition your cable company to not pay Fox‘s cable fee. And right now they’re negotiating with cable companies for a higher fee, probably in order to compensate for the $787 million suit by Dominion they have to pay for—which, by the way, they can deduct part of that from their taxes as a cost of doing business.
But anyway, Media Matters has an easy NoFoxFee.com webpage. You can just click on one of their buttons. If you have Spectrum, or whatever you have, you can just click on a button and then send them a message, or they have the phone number there and you can call them. That should be easy enough to do, would take about five minutes, and it’ll make you feel really good if you do that.
And then support local journalism, and independent media like FAIR.
JJ: So there are resources, also, in the book for actions that folks can take, because it’s not a dispiriting book. It’s about things that we can do to resist what we acknowledge is a corrosive influence on our conversation, and on, as this story tells, our families and our relationships.
JS: I’ve done three documentaries, and I’ve watched hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of documentaries, and I was always pissed off when they would present all this negative stuff, and then just leave you with that. Like, don’t do that. Tell me what I can do. Or tell me what other people are doing, at least, so we don’t feel hopeless. That doesn’t motivate people.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko. You can learn more about the film and the book, out now from Sourcebooks, at TheBrainwashingOfMyDad.com. There’s lots of resources there, in terms of taking this conversation forward. Thank you so much, Jen Senko, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
JS: Thanks so much for having me on, Janine. This was great.
The post ‘This Media Is Meant to Change People, and It Does’ appeared first on FAIR.
The New York Times‘ Maureen Dowd
New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd (4/29/23) has painted a picture of the newsroom that time forgot. Her remembrance of a frenetic, vibrant newsroom where sin united professionals, and the cubs learned from the veterans on the beat, matches the great depictions of newsrooms like The Wire’s Baltimore Sun or the New York Post in Pete Hamill’s A Drinking Life.
Dowd worries that the younger generation won’t know such pleasures. She quotes the Times’ Jim Rutenberg asking what a cinematic portrayal of a newsroom would look like today: “A bunch of individuals at their apartments, surrounded by sad houseplants, using Slack?”
Beyond Memory LaneMaureen Dowd’s New York Times column (4/29/23) expressing nostalgia for the old-style newsroom is accompanied by a 1965 photo in which each of the nine journalists pictured appears to be a white man.
Her piece is not a mere trip down memory lane, though. She used her column space deliberately to attack the Times union for pushing for more remote and hybrid work, as post-pandemic many office workers have seen the benefits of such scheduling. Contract talks at the paper have been rough, as 1,100 Times workers held a one-day strike at the end of last year over stalled negotiations (Reuters, 12/8/22). Dowd writes:
Remote work is a major priority in contract negotiations for the Times union, which wants employees to have to come in to the office no more than two days a week this year and three days a week starting next year. Management, which says one thing it is worried about is that young people will stagnate and see the institution as an abstraction if they work remotely too often, has committed to a three-day-a-week policy this year but wants to reserve the right to expand that in the future.
For office workers, this has been a struggle. The pandemic has taught us that we don’t need to spend five days a week commuting, or to use leave time to take care of a house chore in the middle of the work day. There is research showing remote scheduling is good for workers and employers alike (Forbes, 2/12/20; Entrepreneur, 11/5/22; Psychology Today, 2/28/23).
But Taylorism is a hell of a drug for bosses, who need to literally see workers’ asses in seats in order to justify their paychecks, even if the work is getting done just as efficiently, or even more so with hybrid schedules.
Dowd sides with the bosses, who think that remote work will mean workers won’t put their hearts into the job, even though the news profession itself has been in a downward spiral for decades.
While Dowd admits that “newsrooms have been shrinking and disappearing for a long time, of course, due to shifting economics and the digital revolution,” the thrust of her piece blames a younger generation, inspired by the pandemic to work remotely. “I worry that the romance, the alchemy, is gone,” she said, adding that once her co-workers realized “they could put out a great newspaper from home, they decided, why not do so?”
Generally, a younger generation has embraced flexible scheduling because for all the romanticizing of the so-called water cooler, the 9-to-5 grind has also included workplace sexual harassment, challenging physical environments for the disabled and other structural inequalities. Hybrid work doesn’t solve these issues, but these problems are the flip side to the rosy image of the days of yore.
News sector declineThe Village Voice (9/20/17) stopped publishing its weekly print edition after 62 years.
It’s easy for someone like Dowd, who joined the Times in 1983, to lose touch with what it’s like for a working journalist these days. I cut my teeth in journalism at Atlanta’s beloved alt-weekly, Creative Loafing, which was battered with layoffs since I sifted through city housing records under the guidance of the brilliant reporter Mara Shalhoup, now an editor at ProPublica. I was drawn to alt-weeklies, and my dream was to work for the Village Voice, which died (New York Times, 8/31/18) along with Boston’s Phoenix (WBUR, 3/14/13) and the San Francisco Bay Guardian (USA Today, 10/14/14).
The Forward, once the most important Jewish newspaper in America, where I was once a columnist, no longer prints on paper, and lost star reporters like Larry Cohler-Esses (Columbia Journalism Review, 2/5/20). I reported from the United Nations for Free Speech Radio News—it’s gone (Democracy Now!, 4/28/17). I was a reporter at the Chief-Leader for three years. Its sale, along with the shortsightedness of its previous owners, has led to what appears to be a shrinking product (Editor and Publisher, 9/1/21; Chief-Leader, 3/15/22).
I don’t say all this to ask for sympathy, but rather to underscore the fact that for journalists out there who are not patricians on the Times columnist roster—i.e., who are part of the 99% of the news industry economy—this is just the norm. My lifelong friends and colleagues have dealt with layoffs, restructurings, management hostility toward staff unions, precarious employment and increasing workloads.
We’d love to chain smoke and yell at each other as the deadline looms. But these positions are hard to find, not because we are lazy, but because the machinations of capital have reduced what was once a career into a burdensome, low-paying gig offering no future prospects.
Today, more and more journalists turn to Substack and Patreon as ways to make money, as the jobs in the industry dry up, and self-employment without editorial oversight becomes easier than scrounging for freelancer fees. The story of the news sector decline is an old one, but the most recent shakeups include the closure of BuzzFeed News (New York Times, 4/20/23), fighting over layoffs and pay at Gannett (New York Post, 11/4/22), bankruptcy preparations at Vice Media (Reuters, 5/1/23), downsizing at 538 (Variety, 4/25/23) and a protracted strike at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (WESA, 4/6/23).
If a journalist is lucky, maybe they can get a job—even if it doesn’t pay what’s needed to live, and is so overloaded with work that the job becomes untenable. The rest can work as precarious freelancers, trudging along without benefits or job protections.
Hollowing outThe hollowing out of the profession is, indeed, bad for journalism and thus for democracy. Dowd sees that problem—but not the root cause—when she says:
I’m looking for proof of life on an eerie ghost ship. Once in a while, I hear reporters wheedling or hectoring some reluctant source on the phone, but even that is muted because many younger reporters prefer to text or email sources.
“A problem with this,” said the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who started with me at the [Washington] Star, “is that if you interview someone in writing, they have time to consider and edit their responses to your questions, which means that spontaneous, unexpected, injudicious and entertaining quotes are dead.”
Mayer, who is among the best at the New Yorker, is correct: An interview in person is better than on the phone, and a phone interview is better than email. But why is that happening? The preference for text and email, I have often found, is that because of this cultural shift, it is often easier to get in contact with someone over text or email, and some sources even insist on it.
Further, in an age where reporters must churn out more and more copy in shorter amounts of time, reporters must often find the most time-efficient manner to report under such thrifty constraints. Send out a flurry of email requests in the morning, get statements by midday, file as soon as you can. Rinse and repeat.
Shaming younger workersIf Dowd were using this example as a reason to give younger reporters more time to flesh out stories, real salaries and benefits to offer workers the chance at a lifelong career, bigger expense accounts for writers to travel to meet sources, and more staff to spread the work around more evenly, then she’d have a point.
A New York Times staffer declares a preference for “real raises” over “cute trinkets.”
Does Dowd blame the loss of the New York Times newsroom culture on, for example, management’s decision to lay off copy editors (Deadline, 6/28/17)? No, she somehow forgot that part. In essence, Dowd provides pure Boomerism, an elite worker in her twilight years shaming younger workers to slave over smaller and smaller scraps.
But it’s clear from her lashing out at the union that this piece was not meant to urge the industry to reverse its cost-cutting and deprofessionalization. She wants the younger, less-paid workforce at her employer to fall in line.
The Times had already fumbled an attempt to coax workers back to the office when it offered free lunch boxes to workers, a show of utter out-of-touchness (Gawker, 9/13/22). Dowd continued the awkwardness:
I’m mystified when I hear that so many of our 20-something news assistants prefer to work from home. At that age, I would have had a hard time finding mentors or friends or boyfriends if I hadn’t been in the newsroom, and I never could have latched onto so many breaking stories if I hadn’t raised my hand and said, “I’ll go.”
It’s a little sad to hear someone talk like this in public, when so many young journalists are eager to take assignments, even if that means filing from a Brooklyn coffee shop instead of a midtown office. The truth is many youngsters know how to socialize and date without the physical office, so neither a lunchbox or the prospect of a new hookup is going to break union solidarity when it comes to hybrid scheduling.
Dowd’s attempt to run interference for management should expose the weakness of Times management’s position here. At the Times, it should be an inspiration for unionists to keep fighting for a better workplace. And for the rest of us, it should be inspiration for a better industry, one that values its workers’ contributions.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
The post Dowd’s Newsroom Nostalgia Is Management Propaganda appeared first on FAIR.
The New York Times (5/1/23) claims an Iranian who spied for Britain delivered “valuable information”—but its description of what he supposedly revealed is disinformation.
The New York Times (5/1/23), reporting on Iran’s execution of British spy Alireza Akbari, reported:
The spy had provided valuable information — and would continue to do so for years — intelligence that would prove critical in eliminating any doubt in Western capitals that Iran was pursuing nuclear weapons.
This is not correct; as FAIR has often pointed out (FAIR.org, 10/17/17, 9/9/15, 9/24/13; 1/31/13; Extra!, 3–4/08), the position of US intelligence is that it has no proof Iran has decided to build a nuclear weapon. As the US State Department reiterated in April 2022:
The United States continues to assess that Iran is not currently undertaking the key nuclear weapons–development activities it judge necessary to produce a nuclear device.
This is a serious error that deserves prompt correction.
ACTION:
Please tell the New York Times to correct its false claim that there is no doubt that Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons.
CONTACT:
Letters: letters@nytimes.com
Readers Center: Feedback
Twitter: @NYTimes
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
The post ACTION ALERT: False NYT Spy Claim on Iran Nukes Needs Correction appeared first on FAIR.
“The Mulvaney campaign has unleashed a torrent of negative publicity for Anheuser-Busch,” reported the New York Post (4/24/23)—and by “the Mulvaney campaign,” they mean the company sent some personalized product to a social media influencer.
The “controversy” started when Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender actress, shared a video on Instagram for “Bud Light as part of a partnership with the beer,” where she’s “dressed as the Breakfast at Tiffany’s character, Holly Golightly” (Washington Post, 4/6/23). Bud Light also issued novelty cans—not for sale, just for her use on social media—carrying Mulvaney’s picture (Philadelphia Inquirer, 4/11/23).
That’s it. That’s the “controversy.” A transgender woman promoted a product and now, judging by the tabloid frenzy, it’s a cultural schism that has ripped apart a nation.
The New York Post (4/24/23) gloated that Bud Light sales are down as a result of a right-wing boycott, which it called the “Dylan Mulvaney controversy.” The Murdoch-owned New York Post is obsessed with this story, publishing dozens of stories about Mulvaney in the month of April, largely on how numerous right-wing celebrities slammed the partnership with Bud Light.
‘Shakeup after controversy’Barron’s (4/25/23) tried to explain the “controversy” over “a social media promotion for its Bud Light beer featuring a transgender influencer.”
Keep note of the word “controversy” to describe what happened here. The New York Times (4/25/23) noted the “controversy has had a negative effect on Bud Light’s sales.” Barron’s offered “Bud Light’s Controversy Over Dylan Mulvaney, Explained” (4/25/23), while Ad Age (4/21/23) used the headline “Bud Light’s Marketing Leadership Undergoes Shakeup After Dylan Mulvaney Controversy” when it covered how the right-wing assault on the brand led to a management shake up at Bud’s parent company, Anheuser-Busch.
Alissa Heinerscheid, Bud Light’s vice president of marketing, and Daniel Blake, vice president for marketing for the whole Budweiser group, were placed on leave as a result of the right-wing campaign (CBS, 4/25/23). That’s a powerful indication that the company took the pressure campaign seriously—and that its commitment to trans inclusion is not so serious.
The word “controversy” is defined as “a discussion marked especially by the expression of opposing views,” but that is hardly what is happening. While consumer rights advocates, trade unionists and environmentalists have boycotted products, they’ve targeted corporate policies that have tangible impacts on actual people (Guardian, 7/23/03, Environmental Journal, 2/6/20). Here, boycotters aren’t angry about a company’s grip on social policy, but merely its choice to associate its image with a trans person.
Whether these boycotts, angry videos denouncing the brand, and stories in the right-wing press will have long-term impact on Anheuser-Busch—which is part of the multinational conglomerate AB InBev, which also brews Corona, Beck’s, Stella Artois and hundreds of other brands—remains to be seen. However, the organized right-wing campaign has kept Mulvaney and her short-lived partnership with the beer brand in the corporate press, especially in the business pages (Wall Street Journal, 4/24/23; CNN, 4/25/23).
A telling declarationThe New York Times (4/25/23) reported that Anheuser-Busch “stepped into a polarized America” by treating a trans influencer the same way it would treat a cis influencer.
The aforementioned Washington Post story had reported Mulvaney’s name “was mentioned in disparaging and often in transphobic terms nearly a dozen times over the next three days” since the campaign launch “by right-wing media figures, including those on Fox News.” The New York Post editorial board (4/12/23) celebrated the backlash to Bud Light, but added: “This response isn’t anti-trans, by the way. It’s anti-indoctrination: Don’t make my beer into your political statement.”
The Post’s declaration of innocence is telling. Bud Light made no political statement; it simply featured a trans person in a very limited role in its marketing. For the Post, the mere acknowledgment of the existence of trans people is an extreme political imposition. That is anti-trans bigotry in its essence.
Unlike right-wing media that engage in outright anti-trans hysteria, more centrist media treated it mostly as a business story, with a focus on what anti-trans activism might mean for corporate profits. The New York Times (4/25/23) profiled how Anheuser-Busch’s public relations persona has swiftly moved from traditional Americana to the bugbear of conservatism; it noted that just two years ago, the famous Greenwich Village gay bar Stonewall Inn refused to sell Anheuser-Busch’s products throughout Pride weekend because of the company’s support for anti-LGBTQ lawmakers.
Though the story was covered by national political reporter Charles Homans, not a business reporter, it was treated as mainly a story of concern to corporate America. Though the headline engaged in word play (“bitter aftertaste”), it also framed the right-wing backlash as a serious “warning” to businesses—as in, don’t make the same mistake.
The focus could have been on the growing danger of anti-trans intolerance, but that fell by the wayside.
Research assistance: Conor Smyth
The post Calling Bud Light Saga a ‘Controversy’ Falls Flat appeared first on FAIR.
CounterSpin230428.mp3Kansas City Star (4/20/23)
This week on CounterSpin: The grandson of the elderly white man who shot a Black teenager in the head for ringing his doorbell told the Kansas City Star that their relationship had unraveled as his grandfather began watching “Fox News all day, every day,” and sank into a “24-hour news cycle of fear, of paranoia.” Those words had a poignant resonance for many people who feel they’ve lost family members and friends to a kind of cult, that’s not secret, but pumped into the airwaves every day. Hate-fueled and hate-fueling media have political and historical impacts—and interpersonal, familial ones as well.
The Brainwashing of My Dad—the 2016 film and the book based on it—reflect filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko’s effort to engage the multi-level effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media, as well as how we can respond. We hear from Jen Senko this week on CounterSpin.
CounterSpin230428Senko.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of a potential UPS strike.
CounterSpin230428Banter.mp3The post Jen Senko on the Cost of Hate Talk appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed Rutgers’ Donna Murch about the lessons of the Rutgers strike for the April 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230421Murch.mp3New York Times (4/10/23)
Janine Jackson: Thousands of teachers—full-time, tenured, part-time, adjunct—grad students, counselors and others at New Jersey’s Rutgers University went on strike this month, an unprecedented labor action at the 257-year-old institution.
Workers standing up anywhere can have rippling effects, but somehow when it is educators at a public university, there seems to be an added opportunity to find some lessons in the fight.
The story at Rutgers is still unfolding; we’re joined now for an update by Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers, and New Brunswick chapter president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CountersSpin, Donna Murch.
Donna Murch: Hi, Janine. It’s a pleasure to be here. You know I’m a big fan of the show.
JJ: Well, thank you very much!
Listeners should know we’re recording on Thursday, April 20, and I’m reading that the strike is over, and also that it’s not over. And I also hear that some real concrete gains that workers were calling for have been secured. So maybe fill us in on the current state of affairs.
DM: So we went on strike last Monday—not this past Monday, but roughly 10 days ago— and it was the first strike, in Rutgers’ 257-year history, of its academic workers.
There was a strike, I think in 1987, of AFSCME workers; an injunction was used against them. But there’s never been a strike of academic workers. And this is a big deal, because it is a multi-union strike, and it is cross-job category. So it includes three unions.
The Rutgers AAUP-AFT covers grad workers, post-docs, EOF counselors, non-tenure track lecturers, full-time faculty and tenure-stream faculty. The university is a very hierarchical place, and our union includes these many different categories, which is quite rare. It goes back to 1970.
But we’ve managed to build a powerful campaign that has brought all these different groups together, as well as forming a direct alliance with the PTLFC, which is the part-time lecturers for Faculty, and the BHSNJ, which is the union for medical workers.
So this is really quite remarkable. There were 9,000 people on strike from last Monday to Friday, and then after a marathon bargaining session at the governor’s mansion—and I can talk about what’s happening with that, because it’s quite important to understanding the dynamic—they came to an agreement that’s called a legal framework.
It’s not yet a tentative agreement, which is a legal category. So first you start with the framework, then the tentative agreement, and then the signed contract. So we’re still in that process of bargaining both economic and non-economic demands.
We agreed as an executive council to suspend the strike to continue negotiations. And there were several reasons this happened.
The first is that we have been under a lot of pressure. Sadly, our president, Jonathan Holloway, who came to Rutgers in July 2020, he has proved very, very anti-union. I think that there are ways that you could argue that he’s the most anti-union president that we’ve had.
So when it became clear that negotiations were breaking down—we have not had a contract now for almost 290 days; our contracts of all the unions at Rutgers, with the exception of AFSCME, were up in June—and the administration has just been terrible.
They often wouldn’t come to the bargaining table. When they did, they would repeat the same things over and over. They refused to address specific proposals by all the different job categories, including the graduate students, who submitted their proposals in May, and we’ve only begun bargaining them over the last month, and it’s true of many other categories of workers, as well as proposals.
Gothamist (3/31/23)
So when the negotiations began to break down about a month ago, Jonathan Holloway sent a letter directly from the president to all of the different faculty, grad workers, all the different categories within our bargaining unit. And he also sent it to all of the undergraduates, and it was a very threatening letter.
He said that public sector strikes in New Jersey are illegal, and those that participate in them, the individuals can be fined, the unions can be fined, and there’s threat of arrest, and to engage in this kind of job action would be met with, essentially, the penalties.
Now, what was striking about this is that it is not true. Public sector strikes in New Jersey are not illegal. There is no statute covering them. In order to make a strike illegal, the employer—in this case, Jonathan Holloway—if there’s a strike, he goes to a court and seeks an injunction.
Sometimes they’re granted, sometimes they’re not; most of the injunctions against public sector workers, sadly, have been used to fight against grade school teachers and K–12 teachers in school districts.
So once you get the injunction, you go back to the striking workers, usually with a cease-and-desist order to tell them to stop. And then, if they don’t stop, then you have to go to a second hearing, and seek penalties. And those penalties can include what I said.
One that I left out, the kind of complet that’s available, is the penalties for the whole union, penalties for individuals that cannot be paid by the union, arrest or firing.
So this was a shot across the bow in a working-class state like New Jersey, that has really tough, gritty class politics, and he miscalculated.
Donna Murch: “People are fighting for public infrastructure, making demands, not just about wages, but also bargaining for the common good.”
Both his strong anti-union stance, and he chose a representative, Chris Christie‘s head of labor relations, who worked for the Christie administration from 2010 to 2014. This is the chief bargainer that our president chose.
I think he really miscalculated what it’s like to be at a public university like Rutgers, and that the students, the workers of all kinds, are infuriated by this. And it’s been met with a real vibrant form of industrial organizing.
We talk about it as intersectional organizing, and 21st century industrial unionism in the public sector, which has really, I think, become the vanguard in one of the most radical wings, partially because people are fighting for public infrastructure, making demands, not just about wages, but also bargaining for the common good.
JJ: News media seem to virtually always reduce any striking worker’s demands to more money.
DM: Exactly.
JJ: But you’re articulating it in a much more complicated and interesting, frankly, context. Workers’ compensation isn’t something that happens in a vacuum, and here at Rutgers, never mind wider society, it’s priorities in terms of the use of resources that are at issue, right?
DM: Absolutely. I think this point about wages is incredibly important. I’ve been thinking a lot about why this movement is emerging now, and what its relationship was even to the world that I grew up in; I was still coming of age under the Cold War in the ’70s and ’80s, and the attack on the labor movement was so profound.
And it happens at a time when, also, the composition of labor unions is changing, of organized labor itself, and becoming more female, Blacker and browner. And it’s in this period that we actually begin to see the real strikes at the public sector. And those two things are happening simultaneously, for multiple reasons.
George Meany
I always think of George Meany, the first head of the AFL-CIO, who said, “The organized fellow is the fellow that counts.” And that was the kind of unionism that, first of all, supported the anti-Communist Cold War violence all over, including Vietnam. But the domestic focus was on a unionism for the most elite workers: white and male and craft.
So today it’s interesting, because the university itself is also trying to push us towards wage demands. The thing that’s made the union strong is trying to speak to each job category, and to privilege the lowest paid. And that includes the adjunct workers and the graduate faculty and the EOF counselors.
So you have tenure-track faculty, and we’re all doing this, using tenure to fight for the contingent categories of labor. So in that sense, it’s a really exciting thing.
But whenever I talk to reporters, and I’ve done a lot of media work, I do this work—of course, you already knew—but of trying to explain to them why we need to focus on other demands.
That said, industrial campaigns are really hard. This is the first strike. And I think having all these job categories is great for building power, but when you come to the bargaining table, you confront the long history of, really, anti-labor union practices.
And I’ve learned many things. Of course, we’re still in the midst of it. You asked where we are now. This is, what, Thursday, so it is the fourth day of our suspension; you don’t include the weekend. So I think there’s going to be a discussion tonight, where we get updates from the bargaining table, and decide if we’re going to resume the strike.
There are reasons to resume the strike. There are many demands that we would still like to win, including better language and structures for our non-economic proposals, including five years of graduate funding that’s centrally funded, and our bargaining for the common-good demands to serve communities in New Jersey and fight for undergraduate debt relief.
In These Times (9/12/22)
So we’ll see. It’s very important to know that our strike is suspended, not ended, and that we may go back on strike, depending on what the union decides. We do not yet have a tentative agreement.
But being involved in this process and seeing bargaining…. What I always thought with bargaining is that the problem was people that had narrow demands. But seeing people that I know very well and respect a great deal go through bargaining, it just shows me that we’re having a powerful resurgence of labor organizing, but we’re still confronting the narrowness of the possibilities, and we’re trying to squeeze ourselves through those narrow channels and widen them, hopefully for all workers, just as the Chicago Teachers Union, the UTLA teachers union in Los Angeles, the Red Tide in Oklahoma and in West Virginia, widened the tide for us.
JJ: One of the reasons that I know that people are seeing what’s happening at Rutgers as super hopeful is, first of all, the concrete win of increased wages for some folks and acknowledgement and visibility, but it’s also the coalitional nature of the work.
Tenured professors standing in solidarity with grad students, with researchers and teachers — and then also students, who are refusing the frame that some politicians and some media are using that suggests that their interests are pitted against those of faculty. The breadth of this effort has been important, hasn’t it?
DM: It has. I think it’s been incredibly important, and this is a way to build power. I also think that one thing I find exciting about Rutgers is that we all know about the incredible social inequality in the US, and how it’s getting worse day by day. And the only solution I see for this is greater labor organizing, period.
I’ve been involved in many different kinds of activism throughout my life, but I decided to really get involved in the union movement around 2015, 2016, because I saw clearly the rise of racial fascism, the election of Trump, and then later I was in Brazil right after Bolsonaro was elected, and it was one of the most frightening experiences that I’ve had.
And it wasn’t because I saw things that were frightening; it had to do with the level of fear of the people that I was visiting, some of whom had had family members killed in the military dictatorship.
So I think that the labor unions now, real left labor unions, like the kind we had before Taft/Hartley, are really important for economic gains, and also as political opposition.
JJ: Thank you, Donna Murch, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
DM: Thank you so much.
The post ‘The Thing That’s Made the Union Strong Is to Privilege the Lowest Paid’ appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed Guttmacher Institute’s Rachel K. Jones about the Mifepristone ruling for the April 21, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230421Jones.mp3Janine Jackson: As we record on Thursday, April 20, the US Supreme Court has extended, until tomorrow, its decision on whether reproductive rights will be severely curtailed, including in so-called “blue states,” by restricting access to Mifepristone, approved for more than 20 years as part of a medical method of terminating pregnancies.
Washington Post (11/19/23)
The Washington Post tells readers:
The Biden administration, abortion providers and anti-abortion activists, drug makers and the Food and Drug Administration have engaged in a rapid and at times confusing legal battle over Mifepristone.
Well, that suggests a sort of informational free-for-all, in the face of an actual disinformation campaign on the part of a minority of Americans opposed to the right to choose when and whether to have a child.
To the extent that there is any cloudiness around the science or the human rights involved here, one would hope that journalists would sort it, and not throw up their hands.
Rachel K. Jones is principal research scientist at Guttmacher Institute, the research and policy group focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Rachel Jones.
Rachel K. Jones: Yeah, thank you for inviting me.
JJ: Very narrowly, this Supreme Court case is about the authority of the FDA to approve drugs. But anybody paying attention can see that it’s actually about much more.
I wonder if you could just tell us a bit, first, about the impact of the introduction of medication abortion; it’s been 20 years now. What has that meant in terms of the ability of people to access abortion, and how widely is it used?
RJ: Right. So we know from decades of medical research that Mifepristone is safe, effective and widely accepted by both patients and providers, and Guttmacher’s own research has established that the majority of abortions are done with medication abortions, 53% in 2020.
JJ: So what would we expect, I mean immediately, and then maybe longer term, if this effort to make Mifepristone unavailable, if that were to actually go through, what sort of impacts would you be expecting?
RJ: OK, so there’s actually a lot that we don’t know about what’s going to happen or what would happen if the Supreme Court were to impose restrictions on Mifepristone. But, again, it’s important to recognize that any restrictions that are put in place are not based on medical science.
We do know that any restrictions that were put in place would have a devastating impact on abortion access. Again, 53% of abortions are medication abortions. Currently, only 55% of women in the US live in a county that has an abortion provider. And if Mifepristone were taken away, that number would drop to 51.
But there are 10 states that would have a substantially larger, notable impact. So about 40% of clinics in the US only offer medication abortion. And so, again, there’s 10 states where if these clinics were taken away, if these providers were taken away, substantially large proportions of people would no longer have access to abortion.
And some of these are states that are actually supportive of abortion rights, states like Colorado, Washington, New Mexico and, again, just one example: In Colorado, it’s currently the case that 82% of women live in a county that has an abortion provider. If Mifepristone were no longer available, this number would drop to 56%.
JJ: I think it’s important, the way that Guttmacher links health and rights, and the way that your work shows that access—sometimes media present it as though we’re talking about “the United States,” and rights to access abortion in the United States, but it varies very much, as you’re just indicating, by region, by state, and then also by socioeconomic status. So there are a number of things to consider here in terms of this potential impact, yeah?
RJ: Definitely. Again, we know, from decades of Guttmacher research on people who have abortions, that it’s people in disadvantaged populations—low-income populations, people of color—who access abortion at higher rates than other groups.
And so, by default, any restriction on abortion, whether it’s a complete ban, a gestational ban, a ban on a certain type of method, on a medication abortion, it’s going to disproportionately impact these groups that are already, again, at a disadvantage.
JJ: And I think particularly when we’re talking about medication abortion, if you know, you know. If you never thought about it, then maybe you never thought about it. But there’s a difference between having to go to a clinic, where maybe you’re going to go through a phalanx of red-faced people screaming at you, and the ability to access that care in other ways. It’s an important distinction, yeah?
RJ: Definitely. You know, one of the benefits of medication abortion, of Mifepristone, is that it can be offered via telemedicine. If there’s a consultation, it can be done online or over the phone, and then the drugs can be mailed to somebody. There are online pharmacies that can provide medication abortion.
This means that people, right, don’t have to, in some cases, travel hundreds of miles to get to a clinic, that they don’t have to worry about childcare, and taking off time from work.
So medication abortion has the ability to—and has, for a number of people—made abortion more accessible.
JJ: If you talk to staunch anti-abortion people, the conversation is very rarely about science or about medicine. But then, some of them, and their media folks, will throw around terms that sort of suggest that they’re being science-y. You know, they’ll talk about “viability” or “heartbeat,” or they’ll say it’s about concern about the safety of drugs.
And I just wonder, as a scientist who actually is immersed in this stuff, what do you make of the reporting on the medical reality of abortion, and would more knowledge help inform the broader conversation? Or is it just two different conversations? What do you think?
Rachel K. Jones: “We have decades of scientific medical research establishing that medication abortion is safe, effective and widely accepted.”
RJ: I definitely think it’s two different conversations. Like I said, we have decades of scientific medical research establishing that medication abortion is safe, effective and widely accepted. People who don’t support abortion choose to ignore the science and the safety, and dig for their own factoids and supposed scientific facts to support their arguments.
JJ: It’s so strange how the media debate always seems to start again and again at point zero, as though there were no facts in the matter, or no experience, and as though women aren’t experts on their own experience, you know?
Well, finally, we see things like the Women’s Health Protection Act federalizing the right to abortion. I know the law is not necessarily your purview, but in terms of responding to these court moves, and these state level moves, do you think that federal action is the way to go?
RJ: Certainly that is one solution, right? The Women’s Health Protection Act would enshrine the right to abortion federally.
But we also need, and especially in the current environment…. I don’t want to say the Women’s Health Protection Act is pie in the sky, but given everything that’s going on right now, we also need federal and state policy makers to step up to restore, protect and expand access to abortion.
Quite frankly, the right to abortion was removed because of Roe, and that allows states to impose pretty much any restriction that they want to, we’re seeing from all these different laws that are being implemented.
And so it really is, a lot of times, at the state level, and then certainly in the current environment, the state level is what we might need to focus on.
JJ: And then anything you would like to see more of, or less of, from journalism in this regard?
RJ: On medication abortion, it seems like the media are actually doing a decent job of covering the issue, of acknowledging, again, the decades of research showing that medication abortion is safe, effective and commonly used.
I guess the only issue we might have is one that you see any time that abortion is the subject of media stories, and that is, a lot of times, reporters think, well, if they have to take a fair and balanced approach, that means that they have to talk to the people who oppose abortion.
And again, when this is about science and facts and research, then you don’t need to talk to people who don’t believe in sound science, or who are going to ignore, again, decades of solid medical research.
JJ: All right then. We’ve been speaking with Rachel K. Jones, principal research scientist at Guttmacher Institute. You can find their myriad resources online at Guttmacher.org. Thank you so much, Rachel Jones, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
RJ: Sure. Thank you for having me.
The post ‘People Who Don’t Support Abortion Ignore the Science and the Safety’ appeared first on FAIR.
Good for America, bad for Fox News (Bloomberg, 4/24/23)?
Things seemed hopeless for those wondering if Tucker Carlson of Fox News—who used his show to promote white supremacist hoaxes (Independent, 7/20/22) and degrading statements about immigrants (The Hill, 9/23/21)—would ever be held accountable for spewing hate on air. An advertiser exodus (New York Times, 6/18/20) and calls for his deplatforming from mainstream organizations (Anti-Defamation League, 5/25/22) seemed only to solidify the frozen-dinner heir’s position as cable news’ top-rated host. Last year, Carlson’s show “averaged 3.32 million viewers, nabbing the biggest audience in cable news among viewers ages 25 to 54,” according to the New York Post (4/24/23).
“He’s the tent pole of the entire prime time line-up,” said Reece Peck, author of Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class. “He helps the other shows, people stay to watch after Tucker and before Tucker.”
And in a flash, he was gone (NBC, 4/24/23). After Fox News settled with Dominion Voting Systems for nearly $800 million over the network’s repeated lies about the company fixing the 2020 presidential election for Joe Biden, I noted (FAIR.org, 4/20/23) that the last-minute agreement was still a form of accountability for the network, even if the settlement sum was half of what Dominion sought. (Carlson’s departure took $700 million from Fox‘s stock value in the 30 minutes after it was announced. The stock recovered somewhat, but was still down half a billion dollars at the closing bell.)
Done in by Dominion?The Washington Post (4/24/23) reported that Tucker Carlson was out because he seemed to refer to Fox management as “incompetent liberals” and “those fuckers.”
Indeed, the damaging discovery process preceding the trial date might have done Carlson in. The Washington Post (4/24/23) reported that “it was Carlson’s comments about Fox management, as revealed in the Dominion case, that played a role in his departure from Fox, a person familiar with the company’s thinking told the Post.”
Dominion said Carlson’s departure was not a condition of the settlement, according to the LA Times (4/24/23), but the paper did say that Carlson’s comments “that turned up in the discovery process for the case may have also played a role in” his departure.
The LA Times also said that sources within Fox said that Carlson’s departure is related to a separate, hostile work environment lawsuit brought by his former head of booking, Abby Grossberg, who alleges “that male producers regularly used vulgarities to describe women and frequently made antisemitic jokes” (New York Times, 4/24/23).
The discovery process of the Dominion case revealed numerous texts from Carlson—whose entire persona at Fox News rests on the wave of the Make America Great Again movement—showing his intense dislike of Donald Trump (New York Times, 3/8/23). “What [Trump is] good at is destroying things” was among one of the key texts, but everyone’s favorite, of course, is Carlson saying of Trump, “I hate him passionately.”
No, Carlson’s on-air racism (Independent, 4/13/21; ADL, 4/22/21), transphobia (New York Post, 12/28/22), xenophobia (Washington Post, 12/15/18), admiration for authoritarians (FAIR.org, 8/3/21, 10/20/21) and flirtations with antisemitism (Daily Beast, 10/11/22, 12/23/22) were never the problem for Fox News. If the Washington Post’s report that the Dominion texts were definitive is true, it’s poetic justice: The texts exposed Carlson for who he is, a pompous, rich media elitist who gives not one single damn about MAGA voters and hates their king, only cynically using Trump’s political popularity for his own media grift. That lifting of the veil, the end of the conceit for a corporation whose entire modus operandi is disguising its ruling-class politics to sell faux populism to its viewers, is a major outcome of the Dominion settlement.
Off to the gold mineOAN*‘s report (4/24/23) on Carlson’s departure ended with an invite: “One America News founder and CEO Robert Herring would like to extend an invitation to Carlson to meet for negotiation to become a part of the OAN* team.”
But what is to become of Carlson? Surely he won’t drift quietly off into obscurity. The right-wing media machine, with its growing community of news sites, podcasts and Substack newsletters, is a gold mine for anyone who can draft a sentence linking any conservative grievance to the word “wokeness.” Carlson sold his stake in the Daily Caller (New York Times, 6/10/20), the news site he helped found, but the possibilities for rehabilitation are seemingly endless.
Bill O’Reilly once reigned as the star of Fox News until his ouster due to sexual harassment accusations (New York Times, 4/19/17), and today he is but a mere afterthought. But he was an aging relic before an explosion in Trump-fueled media. Today, a fresh-faced Carlson, still an emblem of MAGA rage, has the world as his oyster where he could perform untethered by corporate restraints, although without as much reach as cable news.
“It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he could reinvent himself, but I think Fox is center stage, everything flows from its framing, from its agenda-setting, and it has the most influence over Republican politicians,” Peck said. “Even with Newsmax and [One America News Network], it’s really hard to match the respectability you get from being on a cable dial.”
“His star will never shine as bright as it did at Fox,” he said.
Fox is going to survive, valuing the audience that made the network what it is today, even if a little less hate is going to be pumped onto the mainstream American airwaves at primetime. “Fox has survived the loss of its biggest stars before,” Peck said.
But Carlson’s departure is a reminder that while the fight against Fox’s worst hatemonger often seemed fruitless, the Goliaths are, in fact, vulnerable.
The post Carlson Out for Now, but Will Live to Hate Another Day appeared first on FAIR.
In case you were unsure how to feel about Lula’s Ukraine stance, Reuters (4/17/23) sends a clue.
Former and current Brazilian President Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s brief honeymoon with US corporate media hit its first roadblock this week as a minor story repeated in Reuters and AP generated headlines in Brazil’s newspapers, with its largest, O Globo, running an editorial with a thinly veiled coup threat.
After years of character assassination, US establishment outlets such as the New York Times eased up on Lula during the last two years, as a series of scandals, record Amazon deforestation, the assassination of Guardian/Washington Post journalist Dom Phillips, and a cozy relationship with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump and their far-right cronies made it impossible to support the reelection of neofascist President Jair Bolsonaro.
Parallels between Brazil’s January 8, 2023, coup attempt and the January 6, 2021, US Capitol incursion placed US media outlets with close relations to the Democratic Party, such as the Times, in a difficult position. Criticizing the Lula administration could appear to offer tacit support to the Republican Party, in alliance with its preferred outlets like Fox News, which ran an election-season documentary (9/22/22) warning about the transformation of Brazil into a colony of its largest commercial trading partner, China, if Bolsonaro was not reelected.
Neutrality after negativityThe New York Times (4/14/23) passed up a chance to demonize Lula for talking about a peace settlement in Ukraine.
This has resulted in an unusual situation, in which outlets such as the Times, after years of negative coverage (e.g., 4/12/14), have produced largely neutral stories on Lula’s Workers’ Party. Even as Lula’s diplomatic trip to China approached, this balanced coverage continued, as demonstrated in the Times‘ April 14 article, “Brazil’s Lula Meets Xi in China as They Seek Path to Peace in Ukraine.” The piece included this accurate explanation of Brazil’s position on the Russia/Ukraine conflict:
Brazil has criticized Russia’s invasion in carefully worded statements, but its position is complicated by its reliance on Russia for about a quarter of its fertilizer imports, which are crucial to Brazil’s enormous agriculture industry. Mr. Lula has also suggested that Ukraine’s president and NATO share some blame for the war, and he has resisted calls to send weapons to Ukraine.
Lula signed 15 bilateral agreements with Chinese President Xi Jinping, including a joint venture for satellite manufacturing and abandonment of the dollar in trade between the two nations, and gave an interview to Chinese TV news station CGTN (4/15/23) in which he commented on the conflict in the Ukraine:
How are we going to achieve peace in Russia and Ukraine if nobody is talking about peace? Everybody is talking about war. Everybody is talking about giving more weapons to Ukraine to attack Russia, or of NATO moving its border to the border of Russia. So what are we looking for? Countries that want peace. China wants peace. Brazil wants peace. Indonesia wants peace. India wants peace. So we have to bring these countries together and make a peace proposal for Russia and Ukraine.
Later, during a press conference in China (Kawsachun News, 4/15/23), he said, “It takes patience to talk with the president of Ukraine. But we have to, above all, convince the countries that are supplying weapons, encouraging war, to stop.”
In February, Brazil’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Mauro Vieira invited his counterparts in Ukraine and Russia, Dmytro Kuleba and Sergey Lavrov, to visit Brazil. Lavrov took him up on his offer, announcing he would arrive in Brasilia shortly after Lula’s return from China. During the press conference after their meeting, Lavrov said:
As for the process in Ukraine, we are grateful to our Brazilian friends for their excellent understanding of this situation’s genesis. We are grateful [to them] for striving to contribute to finding ways to settle it.
The meeting with the Russian diplomat appeared to be the last straw, as foreign correspondents and Brazil analysts who had held back all year began to criticize the Lula administration on Twitter.
‘Unusually sharp rebuke’“Any talk of a ceasefire is viewed as an opportunity for Russia to regroup its forces for a new offensive,” AP (4/17/23) reports—but don’t think that means that “the United States and Europe are somehow not interested in peace.”
That evening, Reuters and AP ran similar articles quoting the same US government official, which were immediately disseminated in partner news organizations around the world.
AP‘s “Brazil’s Welcome of Russian Minister Prompts US Blowback” (4/17/23) related an “unusually sharp rebuke from the White House,” with National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby “blasting” Brazil’s stance on the conflict. Without explaining where and with whom the conversation took place—there was no White House press briefing that day—the article includes the following quote from Kirby:
Brazil has substantively and rhetorically approached this issue by suggesting that the United States and Europe are somehow not interested in peace or that we share responsibility for the war. In this case, Brazil is parroting Russian and Chinese propaganda without at all looking at the facts.
Reuters‘ article, headlined “Brazil’s Lula Draws Russian Praise, US Scorn for Ukraine Views” (4/17/23), repeated Kirby’s statement that Brazil was “parroting” Russian propaganda. It added that Kirby called Brazil’s position “simply misguided.”
Within minutes of Reuters‘ release, Brazil’s largest media company, Globo, released an article paraphrasing it on its online news site G1 (4/17/23), and other big Brazilian media companies followed suit.
The conglomerate’s O Globo, the nation’s highest-circulation newspaper, ran an editorial (4/17/23) criticizing Lula’s calls for peace and calling for Brazil to more closely align with the US and NATO in the Ukraine conflict. The newspaper, which only apologized for its support for Brazil’s far-right military dictatorship of 1964–85 in 2013, and actively supported the 2016 legislative coup against President Dilma Rousseff, ended its editorial with a threat:
Instead, out of almost 130 “neutrals” in the Ukrainian conflict, Brazil is the only one that got involved in creating a “peace club” and openly flirts with Russia. The danger of provoking the Americans and Europeans is evident: Lula risks taking a fall.
Meanwhile, in the US, many of the largest media companies, including the New York Times, did not pick up Reuters‘ and AP‘s story. There is an old expression in Brazil, dating back to the period of British economic colonialism (roughly from the 1830s to the 1930s), which goes, “This is news for the English to see,” which is used to refer to stories generated specifically for a foreign audience. The Reuters and AP articles, by contrast, look like news that was generated specifically for a Brazilian audience. By delivering a message from the White House to the Brazilian government, which made headlines in Brazil, while only appearing as a minor story, if reported at all, in US news outlets, AP and Reuters appeared to act as a tool for the US State Department to exercise soft power on Brazil.
As US economic power continues to wane south of its border, as a result of what many refer to as a new cold war against China, the US government and its allies in the media continue to try to assert imperial influence over Latin America. Add this to the cozy relationship between the Brazilian and US armed forces, which was strengthened after Bolsonaro’s 2020 visit to Southcom, and it shows the magnitude of the challenges facing the Lula administration as it attempts to regain the resource and foreign policy sovereignty lost after the US-supported 2016 coup.
The post Western Outlets Send Warning to Lula Over Ukraine Dissent appeared first on FAIR.
CounterSpin230421.mp3Washington Post (4/19/23)
This week on CounterSpin: The Supreme Court has briefly punted their decision on restricting access to medication abortion drug mifepristone. The American Medical Association said that the recent ruling by a Texas federal judge revoking the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, which has been in widespread use for more than two decades, “flies in the face of science and evidence and threatens to upend access to a safe and effective drug.” For the Washington Post, that’s part of a “confusing legal battle“—but for the majority of people, including doctors, it’s not confusing, just frightening. We’ll hear from Rachel K. Jones, research scientist at Guttmacher Institute.
CounterSpin230421Jones.mp3New York Times (4/10/23)
Also on the show: “Rutgers University Faculty Members Strike, Halting Classes and Research.” That April 10 New York Times headline reflects standard operating procedure for corporate media: reporting labor actions in terms of their ostensible harms, rather than the harms that led to them. The strike by a range of differently situated Rutgers faculty, the Times said, “will affect roughly 67,000 students across the state”—presumably the same students affected by teachers, researchers and counselors working in circumstances so precarious and untenable they took the difficult, potentially life-altering step of withholding their labor. That go-to elite media frame—”those pesky workers, what are they up to this time?”—is just one more element making efforts to increase workers’ power in the workplace that much harder. Thing is: It doesn’t always work—lots of people see through and around it! The gains made by Rutgers faculty, and the example they set, are evidence. We’ll get an update from Donna Murch, associate professor of history at Rutgers, and New Brunswick chapter president of Rutgers AAUP-AFT.
CounterSpin230421Murch.mp3The post Rachel K. Jones on Mifepristone, Donna Murch on Rutgers Labor Action appeared first on FAIR.
China has undertaken a diplomatic blitz that has seen it broker a rapprochement between Iran and Saudi Arabia, warm relations with France, and put forth a proposal to end the war in Ukraine. US media coverage of these developments has involved illusion-peddling about America’s potentially waning empire, and calls for the US to escalate what amounts to a new cold war with China.
Foreign Policy (3/14/23) assures that “China’s attempts to expand its influence invariably invite overreach and backlash.” Unlike, say, US attempts?
In Foreign Policy (3/14/23), Michael McFaul and Abbas Milani say that China “now shares the burden of keeping the peace in the Middle East. This is not an easy assignment, as the United States has learned bitterly over the decades.”
The US has done the opposite of “keeping the peace in the Middle East.” Nor has it sought to, as the Iraqi case makes tragically clear. Since the US-led 2003 invasion, Brown University’s Costs of War Project notes,
between 280,771–315,190 have died from direct war related violence…. Several times as many Iraqi civilians may have died as an indirect result of the war, due to damage to the systems that provide food, healthcare and clean drinking water, and as a result, illness, infectious diseases and malnutrition that could otherwise have been avoided or treated. The war has compounded the ill effects of decades of harmful US policy actions towards Iraq since the 1960s, including economic sanctions in the 1990s that were devastating for Iraqis.
Despite more than $100 billion committed to aiding and reconstructing Iraq, many parts of the country still suffer from lack of access to clean drinking water and housing.
Power = ‘peace’Walter Russell Mead (Wall Street Journal, 3/27/23) warns that “challengers like China, Russia and Iran undermine the stability of the American order.”
Walter Russell Mead of the Wall Street Journal (3/27/23) claimed that while “American power” results in “peace and prosperity,” “challengers like China, Russia and Iran undermine the stability of the American order.” “Peace” and “stability” must seem like odd ways of characterizing that order to, say, Libyans, who had their country flattened by a US-led intervention (Jacobin, 9/12/13), and endured years of a brutal war, and even slavery.
David Ignatius of the Washington Post (3/16/23) asserted that
if Chinese President Xi Jinping wants to take on the role of restraining Iran and reassuring Saudi Arabia, good luck to him. The United States has been trying since 1979 to bend the arc of the Iranian revolution toward stability.
Washington supported Iraq’s invasion of Iran, to the point of helping Iraq use chemical weapons against the country. The US has also levied sanctions that have immiserated the country, undercutting Iranians’ access to food and medicine. Describing such aggression as attempts to engender “stability” inverts reality—to say nothing of Ignatius’ strange desire to “reassur[e]” Washington’s execution-happy longtime client in Riyadh.
In the case of the war that turned Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, McFaul and Milani exculpate the US, writing that “the Biden administration, supported by other countries with a commitment to stopping this war, helped negotiate a truce.”
Like McFaul and Milani, Ignatius accuses China of “harvest[ing] the goodwill” after the US allegedly “laid the groundwork for a settlement of the horrific war in Yemen.” This omits the rather salient point that the United States is a major reason the war has gone on for as long as it has, with as high a price as it has had for Yemenis.
The Obama, Trump and Biden administrations prolonged and escalated the war. When Obama was president and Biden his VP, the US shared intelligence about Yemen in support of the Saudis’ attacks, refueled their jets as they conducted murderous bombing raids against Yemen, and was in the”command room” as the Saudis carried out such strikes. Trump sold the Saudi government billions of dollars worth of weapons, while Biden approved a $650 million weapons sale to Saudi Arabia (FAIR.org, 1/27/23); a few weeks later, the coalition that both countries belong to bombed a prison in Sa’adah, Yemen, killing at least 80 people and injuring more than 200 with a bomb made by the US armsmaker Raytheon. To erase this history and cast the US as peacemaker absolves the US empire of its key role in the war on Yemen.
‘Anything but peaceful’Michael Schuman (Atlantic, 3/14/23) portrays the China-brokered Saudi/Iran deal as “part of an intensified campaign by Beijing to undermine American power and remake the global order.”
Michael Schuman of the Atlantic (3/14/23) warns:
With its closer ties to Russia and Iran, as well as its long-standing support of North Korea, China is a major patron of the world’s three most destabilizing states. The Iran/Saudi deal aside, there have been few indications that Beijing intends to use its influence to rein in these countries’ most dangerous designs. Until it does, China’s new order will be anything but peaceful.
The claim that Russia, Iran and North Korea are “the world’s three most destabilizing states” is dubious. The “most destabilizing” act a state can carry out is a full-scale military invasion of another state. Let us examine the tally. The Islamic Republic has not carried out a full-fledged military invasion of any state, and neither has North Korea in the 70 years since its ceasefire with South Korea.
Post-Soviet Russia has launched such attacks, against Georgia, which it invaded for five days in 2008, and against Ukraine—first in 2014, when it invaded and annexed Crimea, and then in 2022, when it attacked the rest of the country.
Looking just at wars in this century, the United States carried out a 20-year occupation of Afghanistan, and its troops remain in Iraq 20 years after it invaded and overthrew that country’s government. US troops still occupy parts of Syria against the will of that country’s government. Washington has carried out bombing campaigns against Libya, as noted, as well as Somalia and Pakistan.
Given that it is also the “major patron” of Israel, which invaded Lebanon in the relevant period (on top of occupying and annexing Syrian and Palestinian land), and of Saudi Arabia, the main aggressor against Yemen, there’s a strong case to be made that Uncle Sam is the world’s “most destabilizing state.”
If China overtakes the US’s position atop the global order, it’s uncertain exactly what the world system will look like. What is clear, however, is that US hegemony has been “anything but peaceful.”
The post Chinese Diplomacy Seen as Threat to US ‘Peace,’ ‘Stability’ appeared first on FAIR.
When was the last time you forked over nearly $800 million?
Really think. There must have been some moment, some dispute where you decided to reach deep within your checking account to find the better part of a billion dollars—a dispute where you weren’t wrong, but you wanted to end things the easy way.
CNN* journalists (4/18/23) had a hard time concealing their enjoyment of the news of Fox*‘s capitulation.
Well, Fox News knows the feeling. While the United States braced to watch a sure-to-be-fascinating defamation trial between Rupert Murdoch’s prized cable news channel and Dominion Voting Systems—which alleged that Fox had repeatedly aired false claims that it fixed the 2020 presidential race for Joe Biden—the two parties reached a settlement. The $787.5 million is about half of the $1.6 billion the election technology company demanded.
Nevertheless, as CNN (4/18/23) reported, “Fox News’ $787.5 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems is the largest publicly known defamation settlement in US history involving a media company.” It amounts to 5.5% of total revenue of the Fox Corporation, Fox News‘ parent company, for all of 2022.
It’s still less than what Alex Jones of Infowars was forced to pay after a court found that he had repeatedly defamed the parents of the Sandy Hook shooting victims for faking the massacre (Independent, 9/15/22; AP, 10/12/22). And this wasn’t Dominion’s first settlement regarding false election claims: Newsmax, a network that’s sort of like Fox News on crystal meth, settled a similar lawsuit with Dominion two years ago (Business Insider, 4/20/21).
Fox’s critics are disappointed; the network gets to keep its dirty laundry out of the light, and it still retains its place as the go-to right-wing cable news source (Atlantic, 4/19/23). On the other hand, Dominion attorney Justin Nelson (Deadline, 4/18/23) told reporters: “The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” and that the settlement “represents vindication and accountability.”
Tough legal roadHarry Litman (LA Times, 2/21/23): “Lies of the sort the [Fox] network appears to have told its viewers don’t enjoy or deserve constitutional protection.”
On the face of it, Fox had one big thing on its side going into the trial. The 1964 Supreme Court decision New York Times v. Sullivan holds that a plaintiff who’s a public figure must show “actual malice” in order to prove libel, which means the defendant must have known that the defamatory statement was false, or else showed “reckless disregard for the truth.” This is a tough standard to meet in court, and one that we’ve defended at FAIR (3/26/21, 2/25/22, 3/1/23, 3/10/23) against conservative calls to overturn the decision.But it does not seem to have been too tough for Dominion to meet. It appears that the Fox lawyers, taking a look at the jury, smelling the wooden air of the courtroom and looking at all the discovery documents showing that Fox hosts knew what they were airing was bunk, said to themselves, “We’re not going to win this one.”
They had good reason to be nervous. At the beginning of the trial, the network apologized to Judge Eric Davis, who is overseeing the case, after he said the network “made misrepresentations to the court and delayed turning over evidence” (ABC, 4/15/23). Fox News host Howard Kurtz tweeted (4/16/23): “Judge knocks down some of [Fox‘s] key defenses, sanctions the network and suggests an investigation.”
Observers forecast a tough legal road for Fox. The New York Times (4/6/23) said that “a number of well-regarded First Amendment lawyers have called the Dominion case among the strongest they have ever seen,” because
the documents produced in discovery go far in establishing that people on virtually every level of the company knew that the allegations about Dominion were wrong yet for weeks did nothing to cut them off.
LA Times legal affairs columnist Harry Litman (2/21/23) wrote that Dominion’s case was “unusually strong.” “Defamation suits often concern the work of careless or sensationalist reporters slipping past fact-checking safeguards,” he noted. However, the allegations in this case had threatened to “lay bare a deliberate corporate decision to ignore the truth and publish lies.”
At Bloomberg (3/18/23), Noah Feldman balanced the necessity of protecting press freedom and holding press outlets accountable, saying that courts should strive to “preserve the core idea behind the law of libel: that no one, not even the media speaking about a public figure on a newsworthy topic, may knowingly repeat defamatory lies as statements of fact.” Feldman added that if
we abandon that basic idea, we will launch public discourse into a fully fact-free zone. Donald Trump has already done his best to put us there. The courts and the Constitution should not give him an after-the-fact victory.
In-house cheering squad“If the applicable law is faithfully applied,” former Attorney General William Barr confidently predicted in the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal (3/23/23), “the case should be decided in Fox’s favor.”
And yet Murdoch’s empire, as well as some other conservative journalists, had spoken publicly in the network’s defense, seemingly convinced of Fox’s blamelessness. William Barr, former attorney general under George H. W. Bush and Donald Trump, assured readers of the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal (3/23/23) that the case against Fox, before the trial, was weak, because “it isn’t defamatory for journalists to report on newsworthy allegations made by others, even when those allegations turn out to be false.” (In fact, reporters who repeat defamatory falsehoods are often committing libel, though there are exceptions to this general rule—Volokh Conspiracy, 11/7/18.)
Washington Post media writer Erik Wemple noted that Fox even publicly scoffed at the lawsuit last year in its annual report (Twitter, 4/19/23).
The idea that it’s been proven that Fox aired false accusations “is virtually gospel among American liberals,” complained Glenn Greenwald (System Update, 3/3/23), a frequent guest on Fox’s Tucker Carlson Tonight. “As usual, these corporate media outlets”—as though Fox were somehow not corporate, or not a media outlet—“along with Democratic Party leaders, are marching in total lockstep, and none has aired any skepticism or questioning of this accusatory framework.”
The Murdoch-owned New York Post editorial board (4/17/23) pulled an “I know you are but what am I?” routine in regards to the Dominion case, saying that the New York Times ran “endless Russia, Russia, Russia stories” about 2016 election interference (AP, 4/21/20), as well as the 1619 Project (8/14/19), which it called a
Pulitzer-winning disinfo push hawking the factually inaccurate idea that the American Revolution was undertaken primarily to preserve the slaveholding rights of Southern colonies.
There’s some difference between allegations of defamation and a controversial interpretation of US history. Who does the Post think should sue the Times for damages over the 1619 Project, the ghost of James Madison?
The Post went on, “How many internal emails from the Times’ own newsroom would express private concerns over coverage, even as bogus stories are rushed into print to juice subscription revenues?” That’s actually a fair question, especially when you consider the Times’ coverage of the lead-up to the Iraq War (FAIR.org, 3/22/23). However, that still doesn’t vindicate Fox.
No need to weaken press protectionStripping protections from the press may be good politics for Republican officials like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, but not necessarily good business for their allies in right-wing media (New York Times, 4/3/23).
These defenses seem laughable now that Fox has decided to part with the equivalent of the gross domestic product of Samoa in order to keep its dirty laundry out of the public eye. Interestingly, though, Barr’s defense of Fox got one thing right when he said, “Conservatives shouldn’t try to weaken the actual-malice standard”—which is something, as mentioned earlier, many conservatives want to do.
In fact, some right-wing outlets are already warning the Florida Republican Gov. Rick DeSantis’ effort to challenge Sullivan could backfire, because, as the New York Times (4/3/23) put it, it “would affect right-wing reporters and commentators, not just the mainstream outlets that have become punching bags for Republican politicians.”
But what Barr, and the other Fox defenders, didn’t quite understand is that there can be some measure of accountability for victims of defamation by right-wing rage machines like Fox without sacrificing free press rights. Because this settlement showed just that.
Featured image: Fox News host Lou Dobbs (12/10/20) interviews Trump lawyer Sidney Powell on “the battle for the White House” more than a month after Joe Biden won the election.
The post Fox Settlement Shows Press Freedom Isn’t Incompatible With Accountability appeared first on FAIR.
Fat cat pays a pittance in taxes to Uncle Sam in vintage cartoon.
This week on CounterSpin: It is tax season in the US, when some of us wonder why the government, which knows how much we earn, requires us to guess, with the threat of prison if we guess wrong. And leads some of us to ponder what we get in return for our resources—streets and stop signs, to be sure, but also wars and wheelbarrows of money doled out those who already have plenty.
We’ve talked about taxes and tax policy a lot on CounterSpin, enough to put together a walk-through of some of the issues, and the way news media explain them. You’ll hear from Steve Wamhoff, Dean Baker, Jeremie Greer and Michael Mechanic.
Taxes, and how they’re not just an April 15 thing, this week on CounterSpin!
The post Taxes: Who Pays and What For? appeared first on FAIR.
Over 340,000 workers at United Parcel Service (UPS) could launch the largest strike against a single company in US history this August, when their collective bargaining agreement expires.
The clock is ticking as the top package courier in the world, which has seen two straight years of record-breaking profits, considers whether it will hold much of the country’s logistics infrastructure hostage by refusing workers’ demands: raising the poverty pay of part-time warehouse workers, re-establishing “equal pay for equal work” among delivery drivers, and introducing extreme heat–related and other safety protections, among others.
National negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters union, which represents the workers, begin on April 17. At that point, we can expect to see media coverage start to trickle in, and eventually reach a fever pitch, should bargaining break down and the Teamsters call a strike—something union leadership has explicitly said they’re willing to do.
Corporate media will have an outsized hand in shaping the narrative of this unprecedented moment, which presents the broader labor movement a catalyst for revival. So, four months out from the end of the bargaining agreement and a potential strike, it’s worth asking: What should we expect from establishment reporting? What have we seen in the past, and what have we seen so far this time?
‘Strike averted’
One needn’t look far into history to find corporate media covering strikes, well… corporately.
Biden picked sides in the rail strike—and so did corporate media like USA Today (12/2/22).
Just last year, 115,000 railroad workers twice inched towards a strike, only for President Joe Biden and Congress to legislatively force a less-than-satisfactory labor contract on them, with media quick to relay their pro-corporate sympathies.
Outlets declared that the Senate “averted” (PBS, 12/1/22), “prevented” (USA Today, 12/2/22), or “headed off” a freight rail strike that was “looming” and would have been “crippling” (Fortune, 12/1/22). Such word choices depicted the potential work stoppage as a national catastrophe, threatened by greedy workers and courageously warded off by neutral arbiters.
But the “crisis averted” narrative obscures the class dynamics of strikes, and that in the case of the rail strike, Biden and Congress preemptively broke one on behalf of multi-billion-dollar corporations, and in violation of the workers’ right to withhold their labor.
‘An economic catastrophe’
In the run-up to the rail strike deadlines, news outlets sensationalized the potential economic damage that would be caused by a work stoppage.
Look no further than the clips, edited together by the Recount‘s Steve Morris, of CNN pundits and reporters warning audiences of an “expensive” “disruption” that would devastate our economy—only weeks before the holidays, no less! Meanwhile, every media outlet under the sun bleated ad nauseam the Association of American Railroads–generated fact that a strike would “cost $2 billion a day” (Fortune, 11/22/22; Newsweek, 11/21/22; CNBC, 9/8/22; AP, 9/8/22; Barron’s, 9/14/22).
It’s telling that no such vapors were stoked by railroad companies threatening limited service stoppages of their own–that is, illegal lockouts during negotiations.
We should expect a similar shadow to be cast on a strike at UPS, a company that transports about 6% of the country’s GDP, and unsurprisingly, may be the railroad companies’ largest customer. Already, we’re seeing forecasts of economic doom: Business Insider (2/1/23) warns that “a driver strike threatens to upend millions of deliveries,” Fortune (9/6/22) decries that the strike “could hurt virtually every American,” and Bloomberg (1/30/23) emphasizes that “the stakes are high for [UPS CEO Carol] Tomé and the US.”
Fortune‘s headline (9/6/22) makes clear who it thinks the bad guys are.
With few exceptions in the case of both UPS (Guardian, 9/5/22; New Yorker, 1/9/23; Jacobin, 2/21/23) and the railroads (Real News Network, 9/14/22; Lever, 11/29/22; Washington Post, 9/17/22), media overshadow the stakes for the workers—who, among other sacrifices, forgo much of their paychecks to hit the picket line—with hysterics about their disruption to the flow of capital.
In this framing, workers are holding hostage “the economy,” a nebulous phrase that serves only to identify the reader with corporations. Those businesses, stand-ins for everyday Americans, become helpless protagonists fighting selfish employees. In articles so patently anti-worker they could’ve been written by a McKinsey consultant, Fortune (9/6/22) and the Daily Mail (9/6/22) reported that a UPS strike could be on the horizon, “even though delivery drivers already earn upwards of $95,000 a year.” Secondary or absent in these pieces is the fact that the majority of the UPS workforce are not drivers, and many earn as little as $15.50 an hour in some locations.
While drivers’ top salaries and UPS’s spending “$270 million on safety for its workers” (Fortune, 9/6/22) made the cut, neither outlet found it relevant to mention that the corporation’s revenues surpassed $100 billion last year, and CEO Tomé took home $19 million in compensation.
Taking the side of capital
With this context, a readership might understand that indeed it is the corporations that are holding consumers and workers hostage during a strike; it is the corporations demonstrating their greed when they refuse, in the case of the rail companies, to give their workers even a single paid sick day. UPS, meanwhile, denies adequate protection from life-threatening heat in the warehouse or delivery truck.
In taking the side of capital, corporate media minimize the reality that the threat of a strike is the principal leverage workers have over their employers; that the gains strikes yield are not limited to one or a few shops, but have the potential to advance the working class as a whole, should they help raise standards across industries and inspire further labor activity; and that giving workers a raise even if they already make good money could be beneficial for all of us.
Readers should see over 340,000 UPS workers on strike—in every zip code in the country—not as a liability, but as a shot of adrenaline for labor militancy.When UPS workers struck the company in 1997, that gave the labor movement a potential catalyst for resurgence–and, therefore, the betterment of working-class lives and livelihoods.
And indeed, it is in 1997 where we may find a glimmer of hope for corporate media’s coverage of a strike.
Winning hearts and minds
Almost 26 years ago, the strike threat by the Teamsters was not considered credible by UPS management, nor by the media. But in an era of globalization and broad-based attack on pay and working conditions, UPS workers were fed up—and highly organized by their militant union.
Jacobin (8/4/17)
On August 4, 1997, 185,000 hit the picket line for 15 days. At first, corporate media brushed off the workers, focusing more on the 80% of UPS shipments coming to a halt, and the $40 million daily cost to the company. But as Deepa Kumar tracked in her book, Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization and the UPS Strike, the 1997 UPS strike demonstrated that anti-worker labor coverage is not a given.
By the second week of the strike, some mainstream outlets demonstrated a temporary tone-shift:
Some sections of the corporate media, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the ABC television network, began to acknowledge inequality and to discuss the problems of the US working class.
Then, when the Teamsters won nearly all their demands, with massive public support, media were forced to answer:
What could explain the new prolabor mood in American society and the concomitant failure of antiunion propaganda? In trying to address these questions, the corporate media had to admit, however grudgingly, that a rising tide had not lifted all boats; that is, the working classes had not shared in the promised fruit of globalization.
Coverage of a UPS strike in August may be susceptible to the same forces that brought corporate media to heel in 1997—that is, UPSers’ successful campaign to win the hearts and minds of both their customers and the wider public, and to lift the veil on “Big Brown.”
Today, unions are more popular than they have been in nearly six decades. UPS delivery drivers are in ever more contact with an ecommerce-addicted public. And fueled by the return of the “labor beat” in many newsrooms—which are undergoing a unionization wave themselves—the adversities of logistics workers at multi-billion-dollar corporations like Amazon and UPS are now more popularly known.
Without much questioning—and with, often, active support—from corporate media, economic inequality has only deepened since 1997. Workers across industries are beginning to understand that they can do something about it. And that means taking control of their own stories.
The post UPS Workers Might Revitalize Labor—if Corporate Media Skip the Script appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed journalist Saurav Sarkar about Starbucks organizing for the April 7, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230407Sarkar.mp3Janine Jackson: Who remembers back in 2000 when the New York Times announced that they had–quoting the paper now–“agreed to the sale of the New York Times newspapers in Starbucks stores for three years in exchange for the Times’ advertising promotion of Starbucks. Financial terms were not disclosed.”
The New York Times’ (7/21/15) chief executive was “delighted” with an extension of its “long and fruitful association with Starbucks.”
Or 2015, when Starbucks announced an “elevated digital news experience” based on an expanded relationship with the New York Times. Now the coffee company’s loyal customers could get free access to the Times’ top stories of the day, via the Starbucks app, as well as the chance to “earn” “stars” by buying a Times subscription.
We are now to look to the New York Times for serious independent scrutiny of its former profit partner, as Starbucks finds the bloom off its rose with workers, the National Labor Relations Board and ever-larger swaths of the public denouncing its attempt to squash union organizing.
Maybe add some different news sources to your list, is all I’m saying, including those who never fell for the $113 billion company’s humble, progressive, “who needs a union when we’re all family here” shtick in the first place.
Saurav Sarkar is a movement writer, editor and activist who’s been reporting on Starbucks worker efforts for workplace rights and voice for a while now. They join us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Saurav Sarkar.
Saurav Sarkar: Thanks so much for having me.
JJ: I don’t wish struggling against a behemoth like Starbucks, like Amazon, on anybody. But from the outside, it’s hard not to get really excited, because these are the companies that self-declare as the way of the future. So exposing what makes that model run is critical.
For me, the intelligence and the energy of these workers is just such a breath of air and hope. But I know that there’s not just time and sweat, but fear and precarity and danger behind this work. You’ve been close-up reporting these efforts. These workers see how big a thing they’re part of, don’t they?
SS: You know, I think they increasingly do. I think towards the beginning, there wasn’t as much of a sense among the workers of exactly the size of what they were doing, and the enormity of what they were taking on.
And I think that they were organizing maybe a couple dozen people in their own store, and that’s sort of the scale that they were looking at it, and they were joining up with other people who were organizing in other stores.
But over time, it became clearer, I think, that this was really a nationwide struggle. It didn’t take too long for that to happen, but it didn’t happen immediately. That’s my sense, anyway.
But now I would say that, especially during the testimony that Howard Schultz just had at the Senate Health Committee, a lot of baristas told me that they felt a sense of community. They really enjoyed being with one another.
And you have to remember, they’re spread out all over the country, so a lot of their organizing work happens on Zoom. They’re very close and tightly knit with people in their own store, and maybe people in their local area, but as a national movement, they don’t get to see each other all that much. So I think their sense of oneness and togetherness has really grown over time.
JJ: Just as a point of information, the baristas don’t have quite a union yet? What is the status of their organized entity? What’s going on there?
The American Prospect (12/16/22)
SS: They have a network, which is called Starbucks Workers United, and that network is attached to Workers United. Workers United is a union, and so when they are joining the union, when a store decides to unionize, they become Workers United members.
And then Workers United itself is an affiliate of SEIU, which is a large, major union.
JJ: Of course. Well, let’s come back to Howard Schultz’s recent congressional testimony. He didn’t want to testify; he was subpoenaed.
I have read accounts about how he looked goofy for invoking his father’s workplace injury as somehow an anti-union argument, and for whining about being called a billionaire, because to him, somehow just having billions of dollars doesn’t warrant that label.
But you know, Howard Schultz can stand to look awkward for an hour, and then ride off in his gold limousine.
What do you think might be the impact of this hearing? And then just generally, how do you think about congressional action vis-a-vis shop-to-shop organizing? I mean, it’s not an either/or, but maybe a both/and. What did you get from that testimony?
SS: Well, to start with the testimony, I think other people thought that he did worse than I did. I thought he managed to escape relatively unscathed.
There was a fair amount of questioning of him, but the contrast I draw is between something like an intervention, rather than something like a courtroom interrogation. And I really felt like many of the Democratic senators that were asking him questions were trying to cajole him, to teach him to be a better CEO.
And then, on the other side, there were obviously the Republican senators, and with the exception of one, I think, all of them took the position that you would expect them to take, which is that they were wholeheartedly in support of Starbucks, wholeheartedly in support of Schultz, questioning why they even needed to have a hearing, questioning the credibility of the NLRB, trying to muddy the waters and make it seem like this was really about Starbucks versus the NLRB.
But I didn’t think that Schultz fared that badly in the hearing. But after the hearing, I was surprised with–just because I’ve been immersed in this area, I’ve basically assigned it to myself as a beat, as a freelancer. And I’ve been immersed in this for about a year, maybe a little bit longer.
I was struck by how much more attention the general public was paying to these issues. You know, a barista told me that at her store, right after the hearing, when she went in, customers were coming up to her and asking her whether things that had been said were true or not. I saw, I believe it was, Mark Ruffalo on Twitter, had shared a petition from the Starbucks workers.
So it definitely seemed like it escalated the campaign in the public eye, and I think that’s a positive thing for the Starbucks workers’ movement. I think the more public exposure there is to this issue, the better it’s going to be for them.
JJ: Just to be clear, we are not talking here about company policy. That’s not exactly what’s at issue–not things that Starbucks does as a company that we might disagree with. We really are talking about violations of law, of labor law, and I don’t want that to be lost.
Jacobin (9/28/22)
SS: Right. I mean, it’s both. But there are enormous numbers of violations of labor law that Starbucks is engaging in.
And this is actually an example of where I thought the senators could have gone further. So there was a lot of talk about the NLRB, and the number of judgments. There was a recent judgment from Buffalo that an administrative law judge issued, that was I think 200 pages long, something like that, and that judge found egregious and widespread misconduct by Starbucks, and there were a whole range of remedies that were ordered.
But the senators didn’t focus on the fact that, at least in one instance, a federal court has also found that Starbucks violated labor law.
And so a lot of the defenses that were mounted by Schultz at the hearing, like, “Oh, this is in litigation, oh, we’re not sure that this is true, we think we didn’t break the law, and that settles the matter.”
It’s almost Trumpian in how it denies the reality of what’s actually happening. Basically, the attitude seems to be that anything that challenged or contradicted what he thought should be the case was not credible, and obviously that’s not the case in the real world.
JJ: And that’s where you look for journalists to step in and separate–you know, you can call something an allegation, but, in fact, if the word “fact” means anything, then you can apply it.
SS: Exactly.
JJ: As much as the bravery of the workers these past months has highlighted the deep skeeviness of the company–“we’re all partners here, but if you try to get together with other partners, well then us partners are going to fire all of you partners,” you know? “But remember that rainbow coffee cup we did that time?”
I really feel that if we can pierce PR this thick, this committed, this well-funded, then we’re really onto developing some useful skills.
SS: I think that’s definitely the case, and I think actually the PR works in the favor of the labor movement. I think it’s actually easier to go after a company like Starbucks, as massive as it is, because they’re putting themselves out as a progressive company.
So then you can go right back at them and say, “Well, if you’re a progressive company, then why are you doing X, Y and Z?” Whereas a company like, say, Walmart, that makes no pretense to that, it would be harder to hold them to a standard.
So, for example, Starbucks brags about the trans-friendly healthcare benefits that it has, but then it wields the potential loss of those benefits over the heads of trans workers who are part of the union drive. Now, that wouldn’t happen if Starbucks, in the first place, didn’t say, “Well, we’re trans-friendly.”
JJ: We find corporate media’s playing off of workers versus consumers to be among their most damaging frames, and you write about labor and its multiple intersections.
So how do you avoid that framing, especially when, you know, people are crossing picket lines to get their caramel frappuccino? How do you present the story in a way that doesn’t pit workers versus consumers?
SS: I think workers and consumers have the same foe in this instance. I mean, workers are consumers and consumers are workers. There’s really no reason to pit them against each other. So that’s from my personal standpoint.
But then, in addition, I really take to heart the approach and the mentality that the workers themselves have towards these kinds of issues. And they’re not, like, standing outside of Starbucks with metal rods, going after consumers who are crossing a picket line.
As much as they might be displeased at what people do, they also–this is the point I actually meant to make in the course of the interview at some point, that they’re among the nicest, warmest people you’re ever going to meet. It’s a pure joy to be covering this beat, because of the workers that I talk to.
And they genuinely value their relationships with their customers. And so I don’t think that there’s a downside to unionization for the customers themselves. If anything, I think their customer experience would probably improve, or at least that’s the sense that the baristas have.
Saurav Sarkar: “We have to stop telling the same story over and over, and start really getting in-depth into what is actually making these workers tick.”
JJ: And this is what I’m thinking about, because I do think that journalism could lift up, instead of these templates that say, oh, well, you might want workers to have a union, or to have a voice in the workplace, but do you want to pay 27 more cents for your blah, blah, blah?
I feel like that’s old. I feel like folks are not falling for that anymore. So I’m happy to hear you say that that kind of framing is passé. And we should resist it when we find it in reporting.
SS: Yeah, definitely that’s the case. And also I think that the workers themselves, and the unions, have gone out of their way to point out that, you know, you’re not happy about waiting an inordinate amount of time for your drink at Starbucks. And if they weren’t short-staffed, you wouldn’t have to wait.
If they didn’t have mobile orders going all the time, and not being able to turn them off, just because a district manager or a manager says that they can’t be turned off, then you wouldn’t necessarily have to wait as long.
It might not be as crowded. You’d get your drink faster, your drink would be prepared with a greater amount of care, because the barista would have, most likely, more time to prepare the drink.
So it really is in the consumer’s interest, in this case. And I think a lot of the consumers who go to Starbucks also go to Starbucks because of that progressive branding. I mean, there are plenty of people who just go to Starbucks because they just want the coffee, but you can get coffee almost anywhere, right? So why are you going to Starbucks? Some of the people who go to Starbucks go because the company holds itself out as a decent company.
JJ: And we ought to hold them up to that standard. And I guess what I’m saying, or what I’m hoping for, is that journalism would invest itself in making Starbucks transparent, and really live up to the claims that they make, and also that we would lift up, in general, our demands and our understanding of what it means for a company to really call itself progressive, and to not just allow that to be a label.
SS: Absolutely. I absolutely agree with that.
JJ: What do you see going forward? What the outcome of the Schultz hearing seemed to be was, he was being asked to do some things, and he was like, “Pfft–I’m not doing that.”
So it seems like it goes back down to shop-to-shop, and I know you’re going to keep reporting it. What would you ask folks to look out for, in terms of reporting? What would you like to see more of, or less of, in terms of public understanding of what’s going on in this very, very important worker rights fight?
SS: Something that I would really love to see more of–and I would include myself in this category, actually–is just more reporting about the baristas themselves and their lives, what it’s like to work in a Starbucks. I see baristas posting things on Twitter that have a level of detail and nuance to what it’s like to actually work in the store that I don’t see communicated in most of the stories.
And journalists have a limited amount of space, and they’re writing about particular kinds of news. But at a certain point, we have to stop telling the same story over and over, and start really getting in-depth into what is actually making these workers tick.
What are they like, why do they want to unionize? What differentiates them from other industries? What’s similar to other industries? That’s something that I think would be very welcome.
And I think that that would be useful, both to readership and viewership, as well as to the union movement, in terms of understanding like, hey, these are actual human beings. They’re not just people that serve you a drink for three minutes.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with activist, writer and editor Saurav Sarkar. You can find their varied work on their site, SauravSarkar.com. Thank you so much, Saurav, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
SS: Thank you so much for having me.
The post Starbucks ‘Workers and Consumers Have the Same Foe’ appeared first on FAIR.
Thanks in large part to pandemic social spending, employment recovered from the 2020 recession in record time (Chart: Apricitas Economics, 4/8/23).
A ban on evictions. Required paid leave. Continuous Medicaid coverage. Free school meals. Emergency SNAP allotments. An extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. Child tax credit expansion. Thousands in stimulus checks.
These measures were part of a suite of policies the US government passed in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the economic fallout it precipitated. They were meant to blunt the damage, to protect the population from a much darker alternative.
And they were remarkably successful. The government boosted incomes of the worst-off in a way that would have appeared totally alien in 2001 or 2008. And the speed at which employment rebounded put other recent recoveries to shame.
Change in median real earnings for the poorest 20% during recent recessions. In the Covid pandemic, unlike in 2001 and 2008, government relief more than made up for loss of income by poor workers. (Chart: Social Science Research Network, 12/5/22.)
Yet the pandemic era social safety net is now in the midst of a long death gasp. After pulling a much more robust welfare state out of a hat, the government appears determined to slowly suffocate it. Meanwhile, the public is treated to muffled yelps.
The national news media seem relatively uninterested in informing the population of the demise of Covid-related safety net provisions. In 2021, Sunday shows were silent about the expiration of the eviction ban and increased unemployment benefits. In the lead-up to the expiration of continuous Medicaid coverage on March 31 of this year, major cable news outlets were once again largely mute about the development. As Bryce Greene summarized for FAIR (4/7/23), “Trump’s Idling Plane Got More TV Coverage Than Biden Cutting Healthcare for 15 Million.”
A mix of reality and fantasyThe New York Times article (4/6/23) had a helpful chart that showed when pandemic era programs started and ended.
So it was great to see an article dedicated to the issue show up in the New York Times (4/6/23). The piece, headlined “The US Built a European-Style Welfare State. It’s Largely Over,” included a detailed breakdown of various additions to the US welfare state—a much-demonized term for what amounts to a host of government programs that look out for the well-being of the population, particularly the worst-off—over the course of the pandemic.
Reporters Claire Cain Miller and Alicia Parlapiano touted the child tax credit’s success in cutting child poverty by a third. They pointed to the success of pandemic-era policies in reducing the percentage of Americans lacking health insurance to a historic low of 8%. And they hailed the breadth of coverage achieved by expanded unemployment insurance.
And yet, in classic Times fashion, the piece supplemented this serious, data-driven analysis with stunningly lazy and dishonest mischaracterizations of the US political system, ones that get repeated enough to sound reasonable, but only because most reporters seem to lack the energy or interest to actually consult reality.
Blaming the victimPolling (AP/NORC, 3/29/23) suggests that large majorities of the US public would like to see more spending on education, healthcare, Social Security, infrastructure, assistance to the poor and Medicare.
To start, after laying out the trajectory of the pandemic welfare state, the Times offered a theory for its demise–lack of support among the US public:
There has been little political will to make policies permanent because they did not emerge from a deeper shift in how Americans view the role of government or the rights of citizens, said Sheri Berman, a political science professor at Barnard College who has studied social democracies….
“People did not have an ideological conversion, a new view of what American citizenship could be,” she said. Rather, it was a recognition that during the crisis, “without these things, the entire system could go under.”
This theory is cited uncritically, leaving the reader with the impression that there must be something to this professor’s sweeping statements about US values. But her generalizations more closely resemble the pontifications of a cocktail party guest on the Upper West Side than the studied remarks of a scholar.
Polling provides little support for the idea that Americans oppose a stronger social safety net, and only consented to one during the pandemic out of necessity.
An AP/NORC poll from March, for instance, found a majority of the public in favor of increasing government spending in key areas, including education (65%), healthcare (63%), Social Security (62%), assistance to the poor (59%), Medicare (58%) and assistance for childcare (53%).
In the particular case of the expanded child tax credit, which the Biden administration instituted in 2021, survey data from Data for Progress demonstrated consistent support for permanent expansion during its time in effect.
And this eagerness to strengthen the welfare state is not just a recent phenomenon; it stretches back decades. Data from the General Social Survey reaching to the 1970s shows high, often overwhelming, support for greater social spending. Even in the case of the lowest support level shown on this graph—Social Security in 1993—support for increasing spending is tied with support for keeping spending the same. Support for cutting spending clocks in at 7%.
Going back to the 1970s, polling has shown solid support for increased social spending. (Source: General Social Survey)
Pew polling likewise reveals long-standing support for other aspects of a robust safety net. In particular, the idea that the government should “guarantee food and shelter to all” polled at 62% during the Reagan years, and 69% twenty years later.
To look at all this data and conclude that the real reason the pandemic era safety net has receded is US public opinion is ludicrous. The professor has things exactly backwards. It’s true that there has not been some sudden shift in favor of strengthening the welfare state. But that’s because the public has wanted to scale it up for decades.
Manufacturing oppositionSaying that the “United States has historically been opposed to…large government programs” is a sleight-of-hand that ignores the fact that US citizens have been strongly supportive of large government programs like Social Security (YouGovAmerica, 2/8/23).
The Times nevertheless continued along this path:
The United States has historically been opposed to the large government programs and high tax rates seen in much of Europe. As a result, it is unusual among its peers in not providing universal healthcare, entitlements for children and generous cash assistance to the poor, said Robert A. Moffitt, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins.
Has the US public historically opposed large government programs and high tax rates? Not in the case of Social Security. Public opinion polling has shown consistent popular support for the program—and for expanding it—throughout its history. A 2022 poll put support for increasing Social Security benefits for all at 77%. And polling has for years shown much more support for raising taxes than cutting benefits—the same 2022 poll found 76% support for financing an increase in benefits by imposing payroll taxes on high-income Americans.
And Social Security is not an anomaly. As the GSS data cited above demonstrates, it is just one example of the American fervor for increased social spending.
Recent polling, moreover, shows extraordinarily favorable views towards existing social programs across the board:
It’s not that no polling exists suggesting skepticism of large government programs. But the unqualified claim of ingrained popular opposition to these programs simply doesn’t fit with the evidence.
An absurd theory of politicsThe US public’s major frustrations with the federal tax system are that some corporations and wealthy people don’t pay their fair share (Pew, 4/7/23).
And the same is true when it comes to support for higher taxes. Gallup surveys have repeatedly returned solid majority support for raising taxes on corporations and high earners for years. According to recent polling, most Americans say it bothers them “a lot” that corporations and wealthy people don’t pay their fair share in taxes. Sixty-one percent support raising taxes on households pulling in over $400,000 a year, and 65% support hiking rates on corporations.
It would be one thing if the Times went through this or other polling data and provided evidence backing up its claims. But it doesn’t reference a single poll throughout the piece. It just outsources the thinking to professors, whose credentials mean they must know what they’re talking about. This is lazy reporting. And it leaves the readership with a completely absurd understanding of how politics works, with readers apparently meant to believe in a political process like this:
The general public doesn’t support programs → Government gets rid of programs → Public is fine with that
The reality, on the other hand, is more like:
The general public supports programs → Wealthy people and corporations finance political campaigns and lobbying efforts → Politicians do the bidding of their backers → People lose Medicaid coverage or have their SNAP benefits cut → The public reads that they didn’t really support the programs and that’s why the programs were ended → The public still supports the programs but is now very confused about what is going on
The polarization bogeymanThe Times didn’t stop after this string of lazy and misleading theorizing. Instead, it opted to tack on a couple additional pet theories for the slow death of the pandemic welfare state. First, the paper turned to a classic duo—polarization and gridlock: “Political polarization and congressional gridlock have made a permanent expansion of social benefits more difficult.” Because when Republicans and moderate Democrats both oppose increased social spending, the problem is that the parties don’t agree on enough…. Wait.
To get a serious discussion about why popular social programs weren’t maintained, you had to leave the New York Times and turn to left publications like Jacobin (10/29/21).
In a superficial sense, of course, the idea that gridlock has played a role in preventing a permanent expansion of the safety net is obviously correct. But blaming gridlock is functionally equivalent to saying, The government couldn’t get things done because the parties couldn’t work together to pass things. That’s true, but it doesn’t tell us anything of value.
Polarization, on the other hand, is an utterly uncompelling explanation for the demise of the pandemic welfare state. It’s true that Republicans are fundamentally committed to opposing increased social spending, but Democrats had control of the House, Senate and White House for the first two years of Biden’s presidency. That’s why the American Rescue Plan was able to pass in early 2021, even though no Republican voted for it.
The rest of the Build Back Better agenda, which would have represented a serious expansion of the social safety net, stalled and withered because of opposition within the Democratic party, specifically from conservative Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (Jacobin, 10/29/21, 6/7/22, 8/3/22), not because of polarization.
After moderates joined together to substantially weaken additional Build Back Better legislation over months of negotiations, Manchin basically single-handedly tanked the Build Back Better Act in late 2021, as the New York Times recognized at the time (Daily, 12/21/21). He then tanked it again in the summer of 2022, only to revive it shortly thereafter in a severely eroded form, culminating in the passage of the renamed Inflation Reduction Act.
Over the whole period, the aspirations of the Build Back Better plan sharply receded—$3.5 trillion in proposed spending fell to $500 billion; expansions to the safety net were largely stripped (Jacobin, 8/2/22).
To consolidate the expiration of the pandemic welfare state, congressional Democrats at the end of last year passed an omnibus spending bill that included provisions ending continuous coverage for Medicaid recipients and prematurely terminating enhanced SNAP benefits. The bill received bipartisan support in the Senate, passing with 68 votes. It passed more along party lines in the House, with only nine Republican votes. Is this what polarization looks like?
None of this history shows up in the Times piece. The closest the article comes to mentioning the role played by conservative Democrats in the murder of the pandemic welfare state is the following sentence: “Efforts to extend certain programs—or to formally create a more generous safety net, as President Biden laid out in his large social spending bill—have failed.” Notice the passive voice.
Long live incrementalismEconomist Samuel Hammond, who works for the Koch-funded Lincoln Network, thinks social spending was doomed by the “macro environment.” What do economists who aren’t funded by the Koch brothers think? The New York Times doesn’t say.
But don’t worry, immediately after blaming polarization and gridlock, the Times generously offered a third theory for the pandemic welfare state’s death: “the current economic climate, with high inflation and interest rates.” It then presented the thoughts of a conservative economist:
The politics of trying to make these programs permanent just isn’t there today, not to mention budget constraints. The macro environment has turned in a way that has sort of reaffirmed the fiscal conservatives.
Missing is similar space for the commentary of a progressive economist, who might argue that an environment of economic insecurity makes safety net programs more necessary, not less. To avoid stoking inflation, these programs could be offset by, for instance, reversing the Trump tax cuts, which conservative Democrats have prevented the Biden administration from doing. For the Times, this perspective merits no hearing.
To sum up, then, the Times offers a total of three explanations for the death of the pandemic welfare state: 1) The US public doesn’t support an expanded welfare state; 2) polarization and gridlock have made it difficult to do anything; 3) ongoing economic issues tie Congress’s hands. These explanations are variously shallow, unhelpful or flat-out wrong. They are the definition of lazy journalism, but they serve a useful ideological purpose: distract from what’s actually going on, blame the people, and exonerate the Democratic establishment.
The whole point of the Times piece is not to criticize increased social spending. In fact, the authors seem fond of some aspects of the pandemic expansions:
Smaller programs—like food assistance and the child tax credit expansion—patched long-existing holes in the safety net. Now that the patches are being removed, the problems are more apparent.
The point, rather, is to discourage people from thinking about a serious transformation of the safety net, and to gesture towards dull and overly complicated incremental reforms as the only possible option. It’s to instill complacency as a default orientation towards welfare state expansion, something that appeals to a high-earning elite, many of whom consume the Times with self-serving credulity.
The article ends by highlighting areas where unspecified experts “would like to see changes become permanent,” including unemployment insurance, support for families with young children, and health insurance access.
What, though, would the American people like to see? Higher taxes on the rich and corporations. Much more spending on the welfare state. Medicare for All. A Green New Deal. And so on and so on. But don’t expect to read much about that in the New York Times.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
The post NYT Blames US Public for Collapse of Pandemic Safety Net appeared first on FAIR.
The Washington Post (4/5/23) questioned “the unsavory suggestion that [NPR‘s] reporting is tainted.”
As part of an ongoing, impulsive and reactionary vendetta against legacy news outlets, Elon Musk’s Twitter added National Public Radio to its list of “state-affiliated media”—a label from which all US media had, until recently, been exempt (FAIR.org, 1/6/23).NPR (4/5/23) rebuked the label, and major media rushed to the public broadcaster’s defense. “Twitter Slaps NPR With a Dubious New Tag: ‘State-Affiliated Media,’” read a Washington Post headline (4/5/23). Vanity Fair (4/5/23) lambasted the “false equivalence between NPR and state propaganda agencies.” CBS News (4/5/23), AP (4/5/23) and CNN (4/5/23) emphatically quoted NPR’s self-description as a purveyor of “independent, fact-based journalism.” The New York Times (4/5/23) offered an oblique criticism of Twitter’s labeling schemes under Musk as “unevenly enforced.”
The issue soon reached the White House. Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre avowed in a briefing (Forbes, 4/5/23) that “there’s no doubt of the independence of NPR’s journalists.” Reading from a script, Jean-Pierre continued: “NPR journalists work diligently to hold public officials accountable and inform the American people.”
All are right to impugn the whims of Musk, who, to all appearances, harbors a personal animus against NPR. Still, the outrage against Twitter’s policy is highly selective.
Double standardsTwitter introduced the “state-affiliated media” tag in August 2020, defining “state-affiliated media” as
outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.
Without being directly controlled by the state, CNN (8/6/20) knew not to quote the reaction of official enemies who were marginalized by Twitter.
The label disproportionately impacted countries the US deems adversarial, as numerous critics have observed, including Bryce Greene for FAIR (1/6/23). Upon implementing its labeling policy, Twitter identified platforms like Iran’s PressTV; Russia’s RT and Sputnik News; and China’s China Daily, Global Times, CGTN and China Xinhua News as “state-affiliated.” Meanwhile, legions of US and British media networks that met Twitter’s definition—among them the BBC, PBS, Voice of America and, of course, NPR—were spared the label on grounds of “editorial independence.”
This would have measurable effects on tagged media. As Twitter explained in August 2020:
We will also no longer amplify state-affiliated media accounts or their Tweets through our recommendation systems, including on the home timeline, notifications and search.
Subsequently, Chinese accounts with the “state-affiliated media” label “saw drops of over 20% per tweet” (Hong Kong Free Press, 1/21/21), while Twitter boasted that marked Russian accounts lost up to 30% of their circulation.
This was hardly unforeseeable. Yet leading US and UK media, far from their reproachful stances of recent days, offered little to no objection to Twitter’s initial labeling rubric. While Reuters (8/6/20) quoted one Russian official’s critique, CNN (8/6/20), Axios (8/6/20) and others saw no need to include the perspectives of impacted outlets and countries in their reporting, nor to underscore the blatant double standard. And, rather than condemn the policies as “unevenly enforced,” the New York Times didn’t publish the news at all. After all, Twitter’s algorithm was now further skewed in these outlets’ favor.
Thin defenses NPR (4/5/23) objected to being lumped in with “official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.”
In its response to Twitter, NPR (4/5/23) vehemently disagreed with the decision, arguing that the label would liken the organization to “official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets in countries such as Russia and China.” The broadcaster insisted that it “gets less than 1% of its annual budget, on average, from federal sources.”
The 1% figure reverberated throughout major media outlets, and prominent US journalists took to Twitter to cite the number as evidence that NPR was not “state-affiliated.” (Technically, the statistic is accurate, though a bit cherry-picked; on its website, NPR confirms the 1% figure, but states that its member stations, which contribute heavily to NPR’s operating budget, received a total of 13% of funding from federal, state and local governments in fiscal year 2020.)
One might wonder, though, how an organization can receive federal funding, even if a comparatively modest amount, and not be “state-affiliated.” One might also wonder whether these journalists would apply the same logic to an Iranian, Chinese or Russian outlet receiving the same portion of federal funding as NPR.
Moreover, contrary to NPR’s argument, a low federal funding total hardly proves “editorial independence.” Regardless of its financial breakdown, NPR’s body of reporting shows that the broadcaster is exactly the “mouthpiece” and “propaganda outlet” it so indignantly claims not to be.
State (and corporate) affiliationsOver the years, FAIR and other media critics have catalogued dozens of instances of NPR’s advancement of official state narratives.
In the early 1980s, under pressure from the Reagan administration, NPR gave a jingoistic slant to its coverage of the US’s war against Nicaragua, reassigning reporters who were “too easy on the Sandinistas,” and hiring a right-wing pundit, as Greg Grandin wrote in his 2007 book Empire’s Workshop.
But the broadcaster needed “no state coercion to toe Washington’s regime change line on Venezuela” (FAIR.org, 8/5/19) when it omitted mentions of devastating US sanctions in order to blame the country’s economic woes on “authoritarian President Nicolás Maduro,” and exalt US puppet and former self-declared president of Venezuela Juan Guaidó (NPR, 5/30/19). (Never mind that Maduro was democratically elected.)
NPR public editor Alicia Shepard (6/21/09) defended the use of euphemisms to describe torture committed by the US government, in part because “both presidents Bush and Obama have insisted that the United States does not use torture.”
NPR similarly echoed Washington when it ignored Seymour Hersh’s report that the US destroyed the Nord Stream pipeline, promoted baseless “Chinese spy balloon” conspiracy theories, minimized the US starvation of Afghan people after the US military’s withdrawal, obscured Israel’s ongoing violence against Palestinian people after journalist Shireen Abu Akleh’s murder, and euphemized US-committed torture post-9/11. (This summary is far from exhaustive; four of these examples are from just the last ten months.)
And NPR has no problem explicitly endorsing the US’s economic system. Ira Glass, host of NPR program This American Life, declared in 2015: “I think we’re ready for capitalism, which made this country so great. Public radio is ready for capitalism.”
If, say, a Cuban radio-show host beamed that “socialism” made Cuba “so great,” it would be hard to imagine the New York Times and company publishing fervent defenses of the associated broadcaster’s editorial independence.
Additionally, even when it’s not advancing official US narratives directly, NPR should raise eyebrows for its reliance on another, much greater, source of funding: corporations.
In 2022, NPR projected corporate sponsorship to be its largest source of revenue, providing nearly 42% of its income (Current, 11/30/22). And NPR’s corporate funders as of 2021 include a number of entities that often work in tandem with US intelligence agencies: Amazon, Facebook and Google, to name a very small fraction. To suggest that the broadcaster could be “editorially independent” simply because of minimal public funding—with no accounting for corporate influence—is misleading at best.
Right move, wrong reasonsTweets from NPR now bear the designation “government-funded media.”
Following media’s outcry, Twitter edited NPR’s label from “state-affiliated media” to “government funded,” then “government funded media,” and affixed these labels (in the same sequence) to other qualifying Western outlets, including the BBC, PBS and Voice of America. But this softer descriptor is still selectively applied: Outlets in Iran, China, Russia, Cuba and other official enemies didn’t receive this update.
Were Twitter genuinely interested in educating the public about the influence of power on media, it might not award government-funded US and US-friendly publications their own label, separate from that attached to Official Enemies.
And it might account for the fact that the Washington Post’s and New York Times’ records of parroting US officials (Extra!, 3/14; FAIR.org, 5/24/19) should qualify those newspapers, too, as “state-affiliated media.”
It very likely won’t. Twitter’s decision to call attention to Western government–funded outlets is valid. But it’s also nothing more than a product of arbitrary, petty far-right grievance politics, curtailed only by the self-serving demands of corporate news outlets—the last thing that a true reckoning with the ideology of major US media needs.
The post US Media Denounce Twitter’s ‘State Media’ Label—When It Affects NPR appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed Detention Watch Network’s Silky Shah about the fire at the Ciudad Juárez detention center for the March 31, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230331Shah.mp3Janine Jackson: While it was a nightmare, the March 27 fire at a migrant detention center in Ciudad Juárez, that killed at least 40 people and injured dozens more, is inappropriately labeled an “accident”—not when it’s more an illustration of systemic harms that reflect inhumane policy.
Silky Shah is executive director at Detention Watch project. She joins us now by phone from Washington state. Welcome to CounterSpin, Silky Shah.
Silky Shah: Thanks so much for having me on.
JJ: The hundreds of people protesting and, frankly, grieving outside of the Ciudad Juárez Detention Center on Tuesday night, the 28th, they weren’t calling for better fire protections or less overcrowding. The chant that the group took up was “Justicia.”
It isn’t that they aren’t connected, but these are fundamentally different conversations to have, right, about justice or about better conditions?
SS: Yeah, one of the things, when you’re watching the video of the fire taking place, and the guards leaving as men are locked up in the cells at the migrant detention center in Juárez, a lot of it reminded me a lot of what happened during Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans so many years ago, when actually guards just left people locked up in cells as water rose.
And this is what we know about the prison system in the US, the jail system in the US, and a lot of what the US is doing, which is outsourcing immigrant detention to Mexico, and this has been especially since the Trump administration; the number of people locked up in migrant detention centers, which they call immigration stations, in Mexico has risen dramatically.
NBC News (3/28/23)
JJ: I saw the NBCNews.com headline, “Advocates Decry Inhumane Conditions of Mexico’s Migrant Detention Centers After Deadly Fire.”
That was the headline. And I might sound pedantic, but words mean things. And so this headline tells me that “conditions” are the problem, right, that it’s a Mexican problem, and that it’s only “advocates,” whoever they are, that are mad. And maybe they weren’t even mad until the fire, you know.
So there’s a lot of storytelling happening here. And I just wonder what you make of the way media talk about the fire, and the way that that fits into this bigger narrative.
SS: One of the things about the way immigrant detention is covered, both in the US and now more so in Mexico as the numbers have risen, is an assumption that detention should exist, that people should be detained just because they are on the move. Men who are in these prisons and migrant detention centers in Mexico, they are seeking safety. They are fleeing situations. Most of them are Guatemalan, and they were trying to get into the US.
And so what’s happening in that headline is this story that, well, the people who are migrating need to be detained, an assumption already being made about that. The problem is the conditions and not actually anything else, which is: not offering legal pathways, creating more militarization at the border, pushing for deterrence—everything that the US government has been doing for many, many years, and became even that much more heightened since 9/11, and also under the Trump administration.
But the truth is, the Biden administration has continued Trump era policies that have only exacerbated these conditions. So more people are stuck in these towns at the border. And the shelters don’t have availability, people are on the streets, and then they’re pushing to put them in these “migration stations.” And these are the conditions that end up taking place.
And, again, people don’t want to be deported, and they protest inside these situations while people are incarcerated; it’s quite typical.
And what happened here now is that the Mexican government is putting blame on the guards, which should get blamed, but also: what are the conditions that were created where you now have men stuck in these facilities when the fire is happening, and people passing the buck in terms of who’s responsible?
JJ: Yeah, I think that the conversation needs a paradigm shift. Narrative is so important, storytelling is so important, in the way that US media present immigration.
And you’ve written about this and spoken about this, about the idea of there’s good immigrants, and there’s bad immigrants, and narrative plays such an important role. But one of the important things that it does is to say some people, just by virtue of trying to move from one country to another, are criminals, and should be treated as criminals. And that framing really instructs news media in terms of how they tell folks about what’s happening.
SS: Absolutely. You know, the US, the “nation of immigrants,” but the US incarcerates more immigrants than anywhere else in the world. And you can’t deny that relationship to mass incarceration in the US, because, again, the US is one of the leading incarceraters in the world, and we have a massive prison and jail system.
And the narrative around it, even now in the backlash to the uprisings in 2020, and “tough on crime” narratives, so much of that is placed on immigrants. Now immigrants are “committing a crime.” And the act of being in the US without documentation isn’t technically a crime, but crossing the border is; if you get caught, are now prosecuted, you are convicted of a crime, and could spend anywhere from 30 days, six months to two years in prison for that.
And so a lot of it is the narrative, and it’s also ignorance about the political economy that’s created around these systems as well. And we see that at the border as well in terms of militarization: Who are the contractors, who are the people who are making money off of more border militarization, off of more prisons being at the border?
And the US—really, again, the Biden administration has completely followed Trump’s path in creating these conditions, pushing more militarization, pushing for these policies that make the conditions on the Mexican side of the border that much worse.
JJ: I want to actually pull this to a different point, because I feel like media segregate a lot of issues, and border issues are one thing, but then there’s a whole separate section of the paper that talks about the global economy, right? And that’s a whole other thing.
So corporate media will report every day, with a straight face, how Walmart or whatever, oh, just naturally they’re getting their labor in Bangladesh, and just naturally they’re stashing their profits offshore, you know, to skip out on US taxes, because transnational corporations do what they got to do.
And the idea that capital need observe no borders, but humans, or, you know, labor, should actually die trying to cross them—I mean, that’s a square peg in a round hole, even at the level of so-called economic theory. But this discordant, lopsided vision holds sway in news media as if it were economic dogma.
Silky Shah: “Immigration, in the minds of the US media, is a question of crime and safety, when, in fact, it’s really a question of labor, migration and family relationships.”
SS: Absolutely. And NAFTA is the perfect example of what you’re talking about, where, now, borders were open for capital, borders were open for companies, borders were open for trade. But that was also the moment that the Clinton administration put in a “prevention through deterrence” approach to the border, which made it that much more difficult for people to come.
And one of the things that happened is immigration, in the minds of the US media, is a question of crime and safety, when, in fact, it’s really a question of labor, migration and family relationships.
And so instead, all of these “tough on crime,” “war on drugs”—of course, now the border is the site of the fentanyl crisis, when, in fact, the opioid crisis is really a public health question….
And so these are the kinds of narratives that are put forth, the idea that capitalism is fine. But the conditions that the US has created, because of US-backed wars in other parts of the world, US empire, and also globalization, are not things we’re supposed to actually consider—and climate catastrophe, for that matter—are not things we’re supposed to consider when they’re putting in these policies at the border.
JJ: And, you know, we’ll take this up in the future, but I do want to tell folks that activists and advocates and workers are already doing international work, or are already doing cross border work.
We recognize that workers are workers wherever they are, people are people wherever they are. It’s just that that transnational work is not necessarily acknowledged by news media, and so people might not be aware that it’s happening, but it’s happening.
SS: Absolutely. And especially at the border, this is where it’s happening, and I think many communities are in conversation with each other, trying to figure out how to support migrants really struggling.
It’s a really challenging situation. And there is a lot of opportunity to figure this out. And, again, as the Mexican government has grown its detention system, there’s also the International Detention Coalition that has offices in Mexico City, and has also been working on this, and we’ve been in communication with them.
And in so many ways, our ability to address these issues, it can’t just be this insular US focus. It really needs to be a global conversation to prevent future deaths.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. They’re online right where you’d look, at DetentionWatchNetwork.org. Silky Shah, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
SS: Thanks so much for having me.
The post ‘The US Incarcerates More Immigrants Than Anywhere Else in the World’ appeared first on FAIR.
The Column (4/3/23): “Because the gutting of pandemic-era welfare programs is bipartisan in nature—and President Biden is making no case to protect them—the topic is thus not a partisan conflict.”
Last spring, the Biden administration and a Democratic House approved a policy that would kick 15 million people off of Medicaid. States are now set to begin dropping people from the rolls, reversing the record-low uninsured rate reached early last year. But if you were watching TV news, you might have missed it.
Adam Johnson, a former FAIR contributor and co-host of the media criticism podcast Citations Needed, analyzed the coverage in an article for his Substack (The Column, 4/3/23). As Johnson notes:
None of the agenda-setting Sunday morning shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation and ABC’s This Week—mentioned the expiration of Medicaid coverage for the poorest, most vulnerable Americans in recent weeks.
He did find scattered mentions on TV news: MSNBC ran a two-minute segment that mentioned it, ABC News aired a minute-and-a-half segment, and CBS Evening News spent all of 19 seconds on it. But reporting on the Medicaid cuts was almost nonexistent compared to the mountains of coverage given to Trump’s indictment and arraignment–the top media story of the week.
One analysis from Media Matters (4/3/23) found that over an hour-and-a-half period before Trump’s arraignment, CNN aired 48 minutes of B-roll of the idling Trump plane and motorcade, along with shots of Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago. MSNBC aired 66 minutes of similar footage. As Media Matters noted, this kind of coverage is similar to when networks regularly aired footage of Trump’s empty podiums (FAIR.org, 3/16/16).
The reader can decide what’s more important: A Democratic administration taking healthcare from 15 million, or a con-man war criminal being indicted for some of the least important of his crimes.
Writing in Current Affairs (3/30/23), Rhode Island state Sen. Sam Bell pointed the finger at progressives who didn’t even try to make this a central issue:
A few brave policy experts did speak up, but there was no real, organized campaign. Progressive lawmakers didn’t send out a flood of tweets, speeches and op-eds. They didn’t even threaten to vote no and then cave. They made no noise. The big progressive advocacy groups didn’t run campaigns. Even Representative Ocasio-Cortez, the only Democrat to vote no, didn’t discuss the Medicaid and SNAP cuts at all in her statement on her no vote.
While Trump’s arraignment is historic news, it has almost no effect on the lives of ordinary Americans. Stories that affect millions of lives deserve far more than a few collective minutes of coverage. Media have long privileged sensational news over important policy shifts, leaving audiences in the dark about the forces that shape their lives. This, like many other instances, demonstrates the importance of alternative and adversarial media organizations and outlets.
Featured image: CNN (4/4/23) via Media Matters.
The post Trump’s Idling Plane Got More TV Coverage Than Biden Cutting Healthcare for 15 Million appeared first on FAIR.
CounterSpin230407.mp3(CC photo: Elliot Stoller)
This week on CounterSpin: Former President Donald Trump was arrested this week, but we’re going to talk about another kind of crime: the slow, steady drip drip of crime that doesn’t leap out to reporters—the day-to-day crushing of workers’ attempts to organize themselves to have a voice in the workplace, not just about their pay, but their well-being and their dignity. Crushing those attempts to work together is against the law—but it’s not the sort of crime that elite media seem able to identify. And it’s much harder to fight when the law-breaking megacorporation is as media-savvy and faux progressive as Starbucks.
Saurav Sarkar has been reporting Starbucks workers’ efforts—not to quit their workplaces, but to transform them into places where they can make a living and have some say in their lives, while, yes, also giving you your cappuccino.
Sarkar writes for Labor Notes, Jacobin and FAIR.org, among other outlets. We hear from them this week on CounterSpin.
CounterSpin230407Sarkar.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent media coverage of the Chicago mayoral election and the projected Antarctic current collapse.
CounterSpin230407Banter.mp3Corrected audio file.
The post Saurav Sarkar on Starbucks Organizing appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Eagan Kemp about Medicare Advantage for the March 31, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230331Kemp.mp3Janine Jackson: You may have seen television ads warning ominously of “DC liberals” breaking promises to seniors with proposed cuts to Medicare Advantage, and calling on local legislators to fight back.
American Action Network (3/3/23)
You might wonder why a multimillion-dollar scare campaign would be the first recourse of a deep-pocketed industry that was genuinely concerned with senior citizens’ healthcare and well-being. But the health insurance system in the United States is nothing if not confusing.
And as with any situation created and sustained by human actions, you’re right to wonder: Is this the best we can do? How can we do better? Or, more pointedly, why can’t we do better, when we know we have a population that needs healthcare, and a country that can afford it?
News media could play an informing and an explaining role here, but that’s not what seems to happen.
Eagan Kemp is healthcare policy advocate at Public Citizen, and he joins us now by phone from Salt Lake City. Welcome to CounterSpin, Eagan Kemp.
Eagan Kemp: Thanks so much for having me.
JJ: I’m going to ask you multiple things, and we can’t do justice in the time we have. But I do want to ask you just to orient us a bit, because, right now, we’re kind of in the midst of competing claims.
The proposed changes to Medicare Advantage are either going to take needed medicine away from seniors, or they’re about combating fraud and overbilling.
Understanding that we’re not talking about a perfect response to a perfectly defined problem, what are we kind of looking at right now with Medicare Advantage and the Biden proposals on changes? What’s a useful way to understand that?
Eagan Kemp: “Traditional Medicare has always cost less. It’s always served seniors more consistently. But it doesn’t place ads.”
EK: Yeah, it’s really a crucial time for Medicare Advantage and for the Medicare program more generally. I think the reason that you’re seeing these ads trying to scare people into getting their legislator to protect Medicare Advantage is that a lot of Medicare Advantage insurers have been caught with their hand in the cookie jar.
Just to step back briefly, traditional Medicare has been around for a long time, and has served hundreds of millions of Americans.
But the Medicare Advantage plan is more recent; it’s just around in the past couple of decades, but it’s been growing quickly. And the Medicare Advantage plan, the big difference there is they’re able to profit off of the healthcare for seniors, whereas traditional Medicare is nonprofit. It serves seniors where they are in terms of what they need.
And as Medicare Advantage has grown, it’s become more profitable, and these companies have gotten better at taking advantage of seniors, and now they’ve been caught. And so there’s been more research highlighting areas where seniors have struggled to get the care they need, how much extra it costs the US in terms of, if you just covered those seniors through traditional Medicare.
So they really are trying to defend their profits at a time when they can see the Biden administration and Congress really put them in the crosshairs, and begin to make steps to hold them more accountable for their actions.
JJ: So who’s behind this current information campaign, and what are their goals here?
EK: Yeah, it’s a great question. And the biggest player is what we refer to as AHIP, or America’s Health Insurance Plans, which really is sort of a cabal of all the biggest insurers that put money in, and then use AHIP as cover for lobbying and direct political influence, glad-handing with politicians and, to the extent possible, with the White House.
And so they are always going to work on behalf of insurers’ ability to profit, regardless of what that means for seniors. They’re seeing the losses that pharma has had recently when it comes to things like insulin, when it comes to things like negotiating the cost of some drugs with Medicare.
And insurers are scared too. They see that they’re next on the chopping block, because they’ve had it so good for so long, and Medicare Advantage has never delivered on the promise of actually lowering the cost of care, or improving the quality of care.
Washington Post (3/23/23)
JJ: Let me ask you how that fits with the Washington Post editorial I saw, I guess, a couple of weeks ago, “A Fiscally Responsible Government Cannot Keep Its Hands Off Medicare.”
I was trying to sort of mentally separate Medicare and Medicare Advantage. I see you connecting them. And I see now the Washington Post saying, we just got to get into those funds. Like, what’s the connection there?
EK: Yeah, it’s a really important connection. And I think it’s one of the more challenging ones, because I think one of the things that the Medicare Advantage plans and the private insurers that profit off this do well is conflating the two, conflating Medicare Advantage and traditional Medicare.
And the real issue is that traditional Medicare has always cost less. It’s always served seniors more consistently. But it doesn’t place ads, it doesn’t fill the airwaves the way that Medicare Advantage plans do when someone’s turning 65.
These Medicare Advantage plans do a lot of often misleading advertising, so that they can do what we refer to as cherrypick the healthiest seniors, and then “lemon drop” sicker seniors, and make sure that they stay in traditional Medicare.
And it’s something that Medicare Advantage plans have gotten better at. And the more people that are in Medicare Advantage, the more it’s a threat to the long-term health of the entire Medicare program.
Right now we’re close to 50% of seniors on Medicare Advantage. And we know that it would cost a lot less to cover those seniors in traditional Medicare. And so it is existential for the Medicare program.
And it’s something that in the short term, the Biden administration and Congress really need to crack down on bad actors in Medicare Advantage, but in the long term, moving towards a system that both improves and expands traditional Medicare, while at least putting Medicare Advantage on a level playing field. But in the long term, it’s just unclear that there’s any positive role for Medicare Advantage.
Public Citizen (3/21/23)
JJ: Let me ask you, because I wanted to give you an opportunity to connect this, and to talk about a new report that Public Citizen has done, but I know listeners will understand, who are regular media consumers: For elite media, if anything is a public/private partnership, well, then that is the holy grail. That is exactly what we want. Because heaven forbid anything be wholly public, or publicly supported.
And so public/private is the exemplar, just narratively, is my feeling from elite media.
And I know that you’ve just released a new report on the role of private equity in healthcare. The “role” maybe is too gentle of a phrase. The report is called “Private Equity’s Path of Destruction in Healthcare Continues to Spread.” So let me just ask you to break down a little bit for listeners: What is the problem that you’re mapping here? And how does it connect with these broader healthcare issues?
EK: Yeah, I think it really connects at the nexus of profit. So private equity companies are generally large, privately held, they don’t have a lot of accountability or transparency.
Many of them, even if you knew their name, and then you tried to search them on Google or somewhere else, you would not be able to find an ounce of information. They’re very secretive. They hold their secrets and investments close. Some of the bigger ones, you might be able to find a bit about. But they are shady actors, and their primary drive is profit above all else.
And in healthcare, that’s particularly scary, because they also move much more quickly than even traditional healthcare actors. To me, they’re even scarier in terms of their actions than traditional insurers, that are also focused on profit, but do have a longer timeline that they plan to have in the industry.
If you’re a private equity company, you want to buy in and you want to get out within three to five years, and you want to pull as much as you can in terms of profit out. So it means really taking underhanded tactics, like selling a hospital out from under the hospital administration.
So you might buy this entire healthcare system, you sell that hospital immediately, cash that check, and now you’re charging that hospital that you just bought a very expensive lease. If this is not a high-margin hospital, or if it’s in a rural area or an urban area, it may have a really difficult time staying in business.
But as a private equity company, you don’t care, because you’re about to sell that, or you’re about to flip it to somebody else, and you’re going to move on, and that’s a real dedication to profit across the healthcare industry. And that’s really what we go into the report, over nearly 15 different areas where private equity has engaged recently in the healthcare system, and scary places where they’re going next, such as hospice or end-of-life care.
JJ: I’m just going to ask you, finally and briefly, and we’ll clearly talk much more in the future, but we know that policy is shaped by people’s understanding of what is possible. And we know that news media shape that understanding.
So for me, corporate news media are chockablock with what they would call “news you can use,” like: Can I apply for disability while on Medicaid? Does it make sense to divorce my spouse so that we could see if maybe I could get my meds covered?
It’s reporting that assumes that you’re over a barrel, and that masses of us are over a barrel, but is somehow too timid to say, this is crazy and cruel and unnecessary, and to talk about systemic change. And if anybody does, well then they’re a freak, and they’re actually a problem that needs to be contained.
And so knowing that you can’t say all you’d want to say, what are your thoughts about media coverage of this issue?
EK: Yeah, it is a challenging area. I think that some of the real bad actors in both private equity and in Big Pharma, and Medicare Advantage and other insurers, I think there is starting to be a bit of a different tone.
I think Americans are having enough pain points, and talking about them or coming together to push for things like Medicare for All. I think that’s why, during the 2016, the 2020 presidential debates, there was just so much angst and frustration around the healthcare system, and real support for things like Medicare for All.
And the corporate media are certainly not there yet. But I think enough stuff is starting to break through that they can’t just ignore it. And so you are starting to see even the New York Times or the Washington Post really cover in more detail some of the fears around prescription drugs, or around Medicare Advantage, or some of the abuses that we’re seeing, even during Covid-19, by insurers and others.
And it’s an important time for folks to tell their stories and to also get engaged, because the industries want us to stay demoralized and separated. But it’s when we come together that we can really push for the change that we need.
JJ: I’m going to end on that note. We’ve been speaking with Eagan Kemp. He’s health policy advocate at Public Citizen. You can find their work, including this new report on private equity and healthcare, online at Citizen.org Thank you so much, Eagan Kemp, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
EK: Thank you, appreciate it.
The post ‘Medicare Advantage Has Never Delivered on the Promise’ appeared first on FAIR.
On the heels of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (3/20/23), which featured scientists running out of ways to emphasize how urgently deep cuts in fossil fuel use are needed, a troubling new climate study has emerged. Published in the prominent peer-reviewed science journal Nature (3/29/23), the study found that a little-studied deep ocean circulation system is slowing dramatically, and could collapse this century. One IPCC author not involved in the study declared it “headline news.” Unfortunately, science doesn’t guide US corporate media, which were virtually silent on the landmark study.
The authors modeled the effects of Antarctic meltwater on deep ocean currents crucial to marine ecosystems. Similar to the more well-studied Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) that the Gulf Stream is a part of, and which is also known to be dangerously weakening, the Antarctic overturning circulation has major planetary impacts. It pushes nutrient-dense water from the ocean floor up toward the surface, where those nutrients support marine life. The Nature study, which also refers to the current as the Antarctic Bottom Water, found that this circulation system is projected to slow down 42% by 2050, with a total collapse “this century,” according to study co-author Matthew England (CNN.com, 3/29/23).
CNN (3/29/23) was the only major US media outlet we could find covering the news that a crucial Antarctic ocean current could collapse in this century.
This is indeed “headline news,” with major impacts on the sustainability of marine ecosystems and the ocean’s capacity to absorb carbon dioxide, accelerating climate change. And this deep warming could cause further ice melt, which isn’t incorporated into the study’s models—meaning this could all happen even faster than their model predicts.
Yet FAIR could find no record of any US newspaper even mentioning the Nature study in the week since it came out—let alone giving it the front-page coverage it inarguably deserves. Nor did we find mentions on national TV news programs, aside from CNN anchor Michael Holmes interviewing England for the network’s 3 a.m. airing of CNN Newsroom (4/1/23). Aside from science- and environment-focused news outlets (Conversation, 3/29/23; Grist, 4/3/23, picked up by Salon, 4/3/23), almost no major US-based web outlets offered reports either, with the exception, again, of CNN.com (3/29/23), which ran a creditable article by Australian-based journalist Hilary Whiteman.
Toronto-based wire service Reuters (3/29/23), the London Guardian (3/29/23) and BBC (3/30/23) also published articles.
Climate activist Bill McKibben (Crucial Years, 4/2/23) argued that Donald Trump’s arrest, which dominated headlines the day the Nature study came out, was far less remarkable as news goes. “Him ending up in trouble for tax evasion to cover up an affair with a porn star seems unlikely only in its details,” McKibben wrote, while the Antarctic story was “one of the most important installments in the most important saga of our time, the rapid decline of the planet’s physical health.”
Last year, FAIR (4/21/22) found that after paying brief lip service to that year’s IPCC report, TV news networks virtually ignored the climate crisis for the next six weeks—when they had a chance to pay lip service to the crisis again on Earth Day. Perhaps the Nature study came too soon after the IPCC report, and corporate media had had their fill of news requiring viewers to question the grip the fossil fuel industry—a major news advertiser—has on politics. In any case, the shocking lack of coverage of Nature‘s devastating study demonstrates, once again, that corporate media’s commitment to a livable planet comes nowhere close to matching the urgency of the situation.
The post Projected Collapse of Crucial Antarctic Current Met With Media Silence appeared first on FAIR.
CounterSpin230331.mp3Ciudad Juárez detention center fire
This week on CounterSpin: There are a number of issues or realities where good-hearted people are overwhelmed and frankly misled about how isolated they are in their view, and what levers of power they may have to pull on. We can live in a better world! And we should interrogate those who say, “Oh no, you don’t get it; we’re smarter and we say you just can’t.”
One such story is migration, or immigration—or, to be real, do Black and brown people have a right to move freely in the world? If not, why not? We’ll get some ideas of where to start this week with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network, about the Ciudad Juárez fire and what it tells us about immigration policy.
CounterSpin230331Shah.mp3Image: Health & Human Services
And on healthcare: Do we really need to be making choices between seniors getting needed healthcare and other folks getting needed healthcare? Do we have to run our healthcare system on for-profit incentivizing? Is there truly no other way? We talk with Eagan Kemp, healthcare policy advocate at Public Citizen, about the fight around Medicare and Medicare Advantage, and what it says about concerns about seniors and about health, in the US.
CounterSpin230331Kemp.mp3The post Silky Shah on Detention Center Fire, Eagan Kemp on Medicare Advantage appeared first on FAIR.
In the early morning of March 20, 2003, US Navy bombers on aircraft carriers and Tomahawk missile-launching vessels in the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean, along with Air Force B-52s in Britain and B-2s in Diego Garcia, struck Baghdad and other parts of Iraq in a “Shock and Awe” blitzkrieg to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and occupy that oil-rich country.
Liberation (3/20/23), the newspaper of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, was one of the few outlets to cover the March 18 peace march in Washington, DC.
Twenty years on, the US news media, as is their habit with America’s wars, published stories looking back at that war and its history (FAIR.org, 3/22/23), most of them treading lightly around the rank illegality of the US attack, a war crime that was not approved by the UN Security Council, and was not a response to any imminent Iraqi threat to the US, as required by the UN Charter.
Oddly, none of those national media organizations’ editors saw as relevant or remotely newsworthy a groundbreaking protest rally and march outside the White House of at least 2,500–3,000 people on Saturday, March 18, 2023, called by a coalition of over 200 peace and anti-militarism organizations to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
The Washington Post, like the rest of the national news media, failed to mention or even run a photo of the rally in Lafayette Park. It didn’t even cover the peaceful and spirited march from the front of the White House along Pennsylvania and New York avenues to the K Street Washington Post building to deliver several black coffins as a local story—despite the paper’s having a reporter whose beat is actually described by Post as being to “to cover protests and general assignments for the metro desk.” An email request to this reporter, Ellie Silverman, asking why this local protest in DC went unreported did not get a response.
National press a no-showCode Pink was among the organizers of the DC march.
The rally, organized by the ANSWER Coalition and sponsors such as Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, Black Alliance for Peace and Radical Elders, drew “several thousand” antiwar, anti-military protesters, according to ANSWER Coalition national director Brian Becker. He said the demonstration’s endorsers were calling for peace negotiations and an end to US arms for Ukraine, major cuts in the US military budget, an end to the US policy of endless wars, and freedom for Julian Assange and Indigenous prisoner Leonard Peltier.
Becker said that the coalition had a media team that spent two weeks on phones and computers, reaching out to national and local media organizations, including in the seven or eight other cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco, that held rallies on the same day. “Not a single member of the national press even showed up,” he said.
Two local Washington TV stations (CBS and ABC affiliates) did do brief stories on the rally and march, but Google and Nexis searches turned up not a single major mainstream national news report on the event, though it was the second, and significantly larger, antiwar demonstration in Washington in just four weeks, and the first by specifically left-wing peace and antiwar organizations. (The first rally, on February 19, called “Rage Against the War Machine,” organized primarily by libertarians and some left-wing opponents of the US proxy war with Russia, did get a mention in the conservative Washington Times (2/19/23) and promotion a day before the event by right-wing Fox News host Tucker Carlson (2/17/22).
“We talked to reporters and gave them details about our planning events during the two weeks before the march—the kinds of things that journalists years back used to like to attend to hear what the activists were saying and thinking, but nobody showed up from the media at those sessions,” says Becker. “I guess those who make the decisions about assignments and coverage didn’t want this event covered.”
Shift from the ’60sVietnam veterans in Washington, DC, march against the war, April 24, 1971 (CC photo: Leena A. Krohn).
FAIR founder Jeff Cohen noted a shift from the way peace demonstrations were covered in the 1960s. “Even a few hundred antiwar protesters at a local anti-Vietnam War march would get local news coverage,” he recalled:
We weren’t ignored, but every participant complained about the quality of the coverage that so often focused on the length of men’s hair, length of women’s skirts, usage of four-letter words, etc. and not substantive critique of war or US foreign policy. National protests in DC got significant national coverage, but not friendly coverage.
Cohen contrasted this with antiwar protests in recent decades, which have frequently been snubbed by media. “I think the ignoring of local and even national antiwar marches kicked in during the mid- and late 1980s around movements opposing US intervention in Central America,” he said.
Noam Chomsky (who knows from personal experience the sensation of being virtually blacklisted by corporate media) was a speaker at the March 18 event. Asked to explain this latest blackout of antiwar sentiment and opposition to military aid to Ukraine, he responded, “Par for the course.” He added, “Media rarely stray far from the basic framework imposed by systems of power, as FAIR has been effectively documenting for many years.”
Filling the holeWSWS (3/21/23) was critical of the DC march for trying to change Democratic Party policy.
Fortunately, alternative media, which have proliferated online, are filling in the hole in protest coverage, though of course readers and viewers have to seek out those sources of information. There was a news report on the march in Fightback News (3/23/23), for example, and commentary on the World Socialist Web Site (3/21/23) and Black Agenda Report (2/22/23).
Foreign coverage of the March 18 antiwar event in the US was substantial, which should embarrass editors at US news organizations. Some foreign coverage, considering that it appeared in state-owned or partially state-owned media, were surprisingly professional. Read, for example, the report by Xinhua (3/19/23), China’s government-owned news service, or one in Al Myadeen (3/18/23), the Lebanese satellite news service, which reportedly favors Syria and Hezbollah.
It’s rather disturbing to find such foreign news outfits, not just covering news that is being hidden from Americans by their own vaunted and supposedly “free” press, but doing it more straightforwardly than US corporate media often do when they actually report on protests against US government policy.
Efforts to get either the Washington Post or New York Times to explain their airbrushing out the March 18 antiwar protest in Washington were unsuccessful. (Both publications have eliminated their news ombud offices, citing “budget issues.”)
Fortunately Patrick Pexton, the last ombud at the Washington Post, who now teaches journalism at Johns Hopkins University, and writes on media, foreign and defense policy, and politics and society, offered this emailed observation about the March 18 demonstration blackout:
I confess that I am surprised no major national news organization covered it. I know that some people look down their noses at Code Pink and ANSWER Coalition, and journalists generally are supportive of the Ukraine War, but the demonstrators have a legitimate point of view, and my general personal rule is that anytime you get 1,000 people to turn out to protest something, you should at the very least do a local story about it. I don’t know what the Post rules are today.
The post Covering (Up) Antiwar Protest in US Media appeared first on FAIR.
Aiden Hale used three of the seven guns he bought in an assault on a Christian school in Nashville, killing six people, including three children. Hale, a former student at the school, was killed by police (NPR, 3/28/23).
The tragedy is numbingly added to an endless list of school shootings like Stoneman Douglas, Uvalde, Columbine and Sandy Hook. Every time one of these heartbreaking incidents hits the news, some of us have a small hope that this might make America realize that it needs to love its children more than it loves its guns.
But we are living in an age where Republicans have swapped the American flag for an AR-15 as the ultimate nationalistic symbol (Time, 2/7/23). A dream of a disarmed America seems out of reach. The Onion has reused its infamous “‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens,” 31 times since 2014 (most recently 3/27/23).
And this time around, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire is using Hale’s transgender identity to ratchet up its campaign against transgender people.
Cashing in on biasThe New York Post (3/28/23) does not seem to have ever used the phrase “cisgender killer.”
The cover of the New York Post (3/28/23) couldn’t have been clearer. It featured a photograph of the Nashville killer juxtaposed against the image of a terrified child in a school bus, with the blaring headline “Transgender Killer Targets Christian School.” The Post (3/27/23) reported some speculation that Hale “may have been driven to kill by ‘resentment’” for having to attend a Christian school. While reporting in a separate story on Hale’s access to guns—which, in the case of any mass shooting, should be a primary focus of news coverage—the Post (3/28/23) again reminded readers that the shooter was trans in the headline.
Reducing a crime suspect to their gender identity in a headline is irresponsible journalism—just as identifying a suspect by their race, religion or sexual orientation, which is why you don’t see headlines talking about an “Asian killer,” a “Mormon killer” or a “bisexual killer.” Such shorthand inevitably holds an entire group responsible for the action of an individual, and, in the case of a group that faces widespread prejudice, puts many people in danger.
Given that nearly all school shooters are cisgender, there is simply no rational reason for the Post to highlight the shooter’s gender identity other than to cash in on readers’ biases.
Hale did, in fact, belong to a demographic group that is responsible for a wildly disproportionate number of mass shootings: He was male. As FAIR’s Julie Hollar and Olivia Riggio (6/30/22) have noted, media outlets often fail to report on how misogyny and masculinity play a role in many mass shootings.
Hallucinating a ‘pattern’Laura Ingraham (Fox, 3/28/23) claimed that Hale’s identity “didn’t quite match the preferred criteria of the media.”
Murdoch’s Fox News (3/28/23) reported that “a radical transgender group said the transgender Nashville shooter felt ‘no other effective way to be seen’” adding that “the Trans Resistance Network (TRN), a far-left transgender ‘collective,’ released an inflammatory statement” that Hale resorted to violence because Hale had “no other effective way to be seen,” while still saying the action was tragic. (The obscure group appears to have gotten no media coverage at all prior to March 27, according to a search of the Nexis database.)
Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley told the network (3/29/23) that the incident should be investigated as an anti-Christian hate crime. “We’ve seen a lot of language directed at the Christian community with regard to particularly trans issues, calling them hateful,” the senator said. “That kind of rhetoric is dangerous, and we’re seeing its effects right now.”
(That hateful speech can have consequences seems like a new position for the senator, who responded to Attorney General Merrick Garland warning about “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence” against educators from people people opposed to masks and Critical Race Theory, Hawley charged that this was “a deliberate attempt to chill parents” who wanted to “express concerns”—American Independent, 10/5/21.)
Fox (3/28/23) also said the incident “is part of a pattern of mass shooters having ‘sexual identity dysfunctions’ and psychological confusion that must be addressed,” according to Jonathan Gilliam, a former Navy SEAL and FBI special agent. Gilliam said that “the majority of school shooters and mass shooters that we’ve had in the recent history of this nation are all people who have sexual identity dysfunctions.” (Mother Jones‘ Abby Vesoulis—3/29/23—based on the magazine’s long-running database mass shooters, assesses that three out of 141 mass shooters over the last four decades may have been trans or nonbinary, what Fox means when say “dysfunctions.”)
Fox host Laura Ingraham (3/28/23), with a frame of Hale in the background carrying the words “A TRANS KILLER,” said the “killer’s identity didn’t quite match the preferred criteria of the media, which is usually white male.” In fact, Hale was a white male—and Fox is part of “the media.” Ingraham noted that Hale “referred to herself [sic] as he/him and was reportedly in the midst of a so-called transition process,” going on to insinuate that Hale’s medical treatments may have been a factor in the shooting.
Christianity’s ‘natural enemy’Fox‘s Tucker Carlson (3/28/23): “We seem to be watching the rise of trans terrorism.”
But Tucker Carlson (3/28/23), Fox News’ top-rated host, stole the show in a segment that warned about “the rise of trans terrorism.” First, he downplayed the general problems trans people face every day, saying that they have an easy time getting into Harvard. From there, Carlson launched into a declaration of war:
The people in charge despise working-class whites, but they venerate the trans community. People are just responding to incentives. It’s rational in a way…. Why are some transpeople so angry, and why do they seem to be mad specifically at traditional Christians? We can’t think of any trans person who’s ever been murdered by a pastor. As far as we know, that has never happened. So, it’s not an actual threat of violence from Christians that’s inspiring some trans people to buy an AR-15. No, it’s got to be more fundamental than that, and it is. The trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity, and therefore its natural enemy…. Christianity and transgender orthodoxy are wholly incompatible theologies. They can never be reconciled.
Carlson wasn’t done. The next day (3/29/23), he hosted Federalist CEO Sean Davis, who told (Federalist, 3/29/23) Carlson “this murder, this massacre of children was done by someone because of this evil transgender ideology.” Both Davis and Carlson agreed that the killer’s transgender identity, and the imagined idea that the government and media are a part of some kind of transgender agenda, represents a “spiritual war” against Christians.
FAIR (1/6/23, 3/9/23) has shown repeatedly how conservative media, especially Murdoch’s media, have elevated incitement against transgender people, while Republicans push measures in several states to criminalize gender-affirming care. And of course the Murdoch framing here turns the so-called war involving trans people upside-down. While the religious right has escalated its attacks on the trans community (American Civil Liberties Union, 9/16/16; Southern Poverty Law Center, 10/23/17; Miami Herald, 6/9/21; MSNBC, 1/16/23), UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute (3/23/21) found that “transgender people are over four times more likely than cisgender people to experience violent victimization, including rape, sexual assault, and aggravated or simple assault.”
And a Human Rights Campaign statement (ABC, 3/28/23) issued after the incident noted, “Every study available shows that transgender and non-binary people are much more likely to be victims of violence, rather than the perpetrator of it.”
Spreading transphobiaFox* (3/29/23) went after NBC (3/28/23) for suggesting that trans people might be in danger in the wake of transphobic media coverage like that coming from Fox*.
But just as 9/11 was an opportunity to spread Islamophobia (FAIR.org, 3/1/11), Fox and the Post are exploiting this moment to raise the temperature against the trans community. According to the Murdoch press and some figures within the Republican Party, trans people are an active existential threat to God-fearing Americans. Indeed, NBC (3/28/23) reported:
Within 10 minutes of police saying that the suspect was transgender, the hashtag #TransTerrorism trended on Twitter. Around the same time, Republican lawmakers — including Sen. JD Vance, R-Ohio, and conservative firebrand Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.—insinuated in social media posts that the shooter’s gender identity played a role in the shooting. And by Tuesday morning, the cover of the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post read: “Transgender Killer Targets Christian School.”
“We are terrified for the LGBTQ community here,” Kim Spoon, a trans activist based in Knoxville, Tennessee, said. “More blood’s going to be shed, and it’s not going to be shed in a school.”
However, Fox (3/29/23) pounced on this report, saying “NBC News raised eyebrows on Tuesday for a report suggesting the Tennessee transgender community was under threat following the mass shooting.” Fox added that NBC “appeared to frame the perpetrator as among the victims.” NBC did not frame Hale as the victim, as Fox’s evidence for this was NBC’s “headline ‘Fear Pervades Tennessee’s Trans Community Amid Focus on Nashville Shooter’s Gender Identity.’”
This response is sadly to be expected for media who have latched on to the anti-trans moral panic, as a way to both attract a right-wing audience and to bolster the cultural platform of the contemporary Republican Party. But just because it’s not surprising doesn’t make it any less dangerous.
The post Murdoch Uses Nashville to Stoke Anti-Trans Hate appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Roots Action’s Norman Solomon about the 20th anniversary of the Iraq invasion for the March 24, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230324Solomon.mp3Janine Jackson: So here we are, 20 years after the US war on Iraq, and, to speak broadly, the popular understanding is that Iraq wasn’t behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and that they didn’t have weapons of mass destruction aimed at the US, weapons whose immediate threat, yes, was the vehemently argued premise for a grave assault on a sovereign country.
Atlantic (3/13/23)
But somehow, in all of this talkity-talk, the idea of acknowledgement of wrong—forget compensation, forget apology—is nowhere in evidence.
The story has been made over such that the Iraq invasion was wrong, but still OK. Iraqis were harmed, but still helped. And all the advisors and experts that got it very wrong are still, somehow, right.
The 2003 war on Iraq is, most importantly, a story about imperialist violence. But it’s also about the web of lies and disinformation used to advance it, and the role that nominally independent journalists played—and play.
Norman Solomon has been thinking and working on these issues for decades. He’s been part of FAIR since the start. He’s co-founder of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His most recent book is War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, out soon from the New Press.
He joins us now by phone from the Bay Area. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Norman Solomon.
Norman Solomon: Thanks, Janine.
JJ: There are so many places we could start. But I did want to stick a fork in one thing. Talking about media today, at the 20-year mark, the theme is missed signals, miscalculation, misunderstanding.
It’s hard to talk about what happened, and media’s role, without recognizing that the George W. Bush administration and its advisors wanted and intended to invade Iraq before the September 11, 2001, attacks. But that’s not a contention. That’s just a thing we know, based on evidence, right?
Guardian (2/24/06)
NS: Yes, Rumsfeld made a very clear statement in a memo, just in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, that they were going after Iraq. It was their “eyes on the prize,” in a grotesque sort of way.
And when we look back 20 years, I think there’s a consistent thread that the media and the government excuses are basically intertwined. Which sort of makes sense, since the disinformation messaging after 9/11, before, during and after the invasion of Iraq—all that was also intertwined between government and mass media.
And we think of and sometimes notice the revolving door of personnel, where someone is a press secretary for the president, then goes to a cable news network, or vice versa. George Stephanopoulos, and many others who followed him, just had this career path that was basically recycling between those in government who often deceive, and those in media who have a follow-up career. And they’re just in a different part of the deception chain, as it turns out.
And so I think it’s fitting, unfortunately, that 20 years after so many of the government officials and media mavens and so-called journalists—quite often not deserving the name—that they were basically singing out of the same hymn book. And now they’re being exculpatory for each other and themselves at the 20th anniversary.
One example that I think is just so profoundly grotesque is that in the months before the invasion of Iraq, you had people who were recycling falsehoods out of government sources, or government-designated, -anointed sources, into news media, like Judith Miller and Michael Gordon, onto the front pages of the New York Times.
Then you would have Dick Cheney, for instance, who would go on the Sunday talkshows, knowing that his own office had funneled the disinformation into the New York Times, then he would say, “Well, don’t just believe us. This is being reported by the New York Times.”
Intercept (3/15/23)
JJ: Right. And a number of folks have written recently—Jon Schwarz at the Intercept, Derek Seidman at Truthout, also Marjorie Cohn, Adam Johnson at Real News—about how these visible architects of the Iraq War, in government, but also in think tanks, and then also in media, they’ve all failed upward subsequently, haven’t they? Even knowing what we know, there’s been no comeuppance, no fallout, for those folks.
NS: That is something I think we could call a repetition compulsion disorder that completely gets a reward system to back it up. Whereas those who step out of line, who don’t conflate being pro-war with being objective, they are not going to find upward mobility in media anywhere near so smooth. And often they just hit a brick wall, forget glass ceiling, they hit a brick wall above their heads.
We have some examples that cry out for remembering and reminding people, that Phil Donahue, who had the temerity to actually have a variety of voices about the wisdom of invading Iraq in the months before in his primetime MSNBC program, we know because of a leaked memo that he was fired a few weeks before the invasion, precisely because people at the top of management—MSNBC, NBC News—they were worried that, as they put it in this, for a while, secret memo, that the flag-wavers at Fox and CNN would make MSNBC look bad because Donahue was allowing some anti-war voices onto the air.
And I know from having been reporting and visiting Iraq before the invasion a few times, and writing about this at the time, including for FAIR, that there was a tremendous amount of pressure going on from news media, and to the extent there was an opening for debate, say in the summer and early fall of 2002, the aperture continued to narrow, and so the more that a consensus was being promoted and forced, you might say, that a war and invasion was necessary, the less space there was.
Salon (3/19/23)
I know personally, because I was able to go to Iraq with some delegations, a former senator and current member of Congress, and then with Sean Penn, and then with a UN official. I found in the late part of 2002 what was first a bit of an opening, where I would be invited on to CNN or MSNBC or even Fox. By the end of the autumn, that opening had pretty much closed, and certainly by the end of the year.
And the explanation I was given was that in October of 2002, when the House and Senate voted that an invasion of Iraq would be authorized, that became official policy, and some of the bookers and so forth at the cable news networks would say, “Well, you know, now this is the US government stance that an invasion is in the cards; it’s officially authorized by the legislative branch. So there’s less controversy here.”
JJ: And so now we need to close up any window of debate in the public conversation, because officials have decided what’s going to happen. And I don’t think that’s maybe everybody’s understanding of the way journalism works, or should work.
NS: Yeah, it’s a sort of an ersatz, pseudo-journalism that sets the standard for professionalism. And we, I guess, ought to face it that when people move into the journalism profession, they’re out of college or whatever, what defines professional standards? It’s the ambience, the content, the style, the attitude that’s inherent in what people who have already made it in the profession are doing every day.
Norman Solomon: “High-quality media outlets in the United States of America basically served as conveyor belts for pro-war propaganda.”
And so it’s an imitative quality that defines what journalism, or at least what passes for journalism, is. And part of that is not really apologizing, even later on. And I think this gets to what you were alluding to at the outset of our discussion, Janine, that when there’s an anniversary, or a look back, there’s really very little impetus for candor, least of all self-assessment or self-criticism, really, from these media institutions.
And so even in some of the most conspicuous, egregious cases like the New York Times distortions and serving up just bogus stories, the Washington Post as well, when they did sort of mea culpas, many, many weeks later, they were sort of equivocal. And they avoided really shedding harsh light on how it could be that these two purportedly most important, high-quality media outlets in the United States of America basically served as conveyor belts for pro-war propaganda coming from the top of the US government.
JJ: To me, the fact that when you look at the architects and the folks who are most prominent in mouthpiecing for this invasion, the fact that they are all still in high-paid and prominent positions, it underscores the fact that corporate media’s “debate,” it has a patina of rationality and of debate, but it’s really kind of just a club, right?
There’s just certain folks that they listen to and whose ideas they promote. And it doesn’t matter if those folks are wrong or right, or if they’re reliable or not, or if they’re lying or ignorant, they’re just on the list. And then there are other people who are just not on the list, whether or not their predictions turn out to be right, or whether or not they’re reliable.
And with Iraq, that was historians and regional specialists and human rights researchers. They’re just never going to be let into the conversation, no matter how correct they were.
NS: There really are tacit media boundaries that I think are well-understood, however consciously or not, and when a misassessment was later shown to be egregiously wrong, with a war or peace at stake, there’s later on a sense of a clean slate, let’s wipe the record clean, because, eh, we all make mistakes, and so forth.
And that goes to individuals and also to media organizations. And we might want to think the ones that are really top quality, they will cop to their mistakes, distortions, errors, even, or especially, when the errors were extremely important.
And yet, that’s not the case. One example, which at least has to do with history—and we’re told that journalism is the first draft of history; OK, later on, there should be a better draft. Of course, one would hope that the first one was accurate, given that that is the most important, while these events are unfolding.
So one example that comes to mind is the New York Times reported, early on in this whole 20-year span, that the invasion came after Saddam Hussein had kicked out UN weapons inspectors from the country in 1998. So this was the New York Times telling all of its readers that, hey, those UN weapons inspectors were pulled out of the country several years before the invasion, they were kicked out, Saddam Hussein did not allow them to inspect anymore.
And FAIR, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, made the clear and accurate point, and mobilized some messaging to the New York Times, that that’s an interesting story which happens to be false, and that Saddam Hussein did not kick out the UN weapons inspectors in 1998.
They were withdrawn by the United Nations because the government of, under that point, President Bill Clinton had made clear it was about to bomb Iraq in what became known as Operation Desert Fox.
And so it was because the US government announced, essentially, it was about to bomb the country that the UN thought it was prudent to save the lives, perhaps, of the UN inspectors, to withdraw them.
And so that was something that FAIR activists were able to get the New York Times to publish a subsequent correction.
New York Times (3/18/23)
Fast forward many years, to the time of the 20th anniversary that we’ve just gone through, and the New York Times again publishes the falsehood that Saddam Hussein kicked out the weapons inspectors from the country in 1998, which reminds me of something that George Orwell wrote in 1984: “Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past control the future.” And I think that’s a good cautionary note to anybody who thinks, well, this is just history, why talk about it now?
Because all of this is prefigurative; it is actually reinforcing mindsets. These distortions are messaging to people, subtly and not so subtly, that at the end of the day, I think as you put it at the beginning of our discussion, Janine: The US government can be wrong, but it’s still OK.
We can go into war and, OK, we made mistakes, etc., etc., which is easy for us to say, while other people experience it with more suffering by far than those in the US. But still the pretense, subtly or not, is it’s OK, because we mean well.
There was a short story written 100 years ago called “Editha,” and there’s a character in it, and this is in about 1905, when it’s published, which is in the aftermath, really, of the US slaughter of people in the Philippines. And there’s a character who says: what a wonderful thing it is to live in a country that might be wrong, but when it’s wrong, is right anyway.
JJ: And that’s the water that elite news media carry, and to folks who could think smarter, to a population that could handle reality, and react accordingly.
And I guess that’s what makes me so angry, is that people pick up the paper thinking that they’re being addressed as an intelligent person who’s trying to make decisions about what they support and what they don’t support. And it’s just not what they’re getting. It’s not what they’re getting.
And there were a few things that stand out to me, Norman, because I know that some of CounterSpin listeners weren’t born in 2003. And so they’ve only heard the remix, as it were. But there are things that stand out for those of us who were there.
And one of them is a massive demonstration in New York, with thousands of other people who were opposing an imminent invasion of Iraq, who were pulled out of their apartments, people who don’t usually go out in the street, who don’t usually demonstrate. But we were very aware that this was a war that was going to be called in our name, specifically, like, look at what happened to New York on September 11. And it was supposed to be in our name.
New York Times (10/30/02)
And as I’ve said many times before, the most prominent message here in New York City was “our grief is not a cry for war,” and the desire to not turn the horror and loss of September 11 into more horror and loss for other people.
And what I remember was coming home from this massive demonstration, and reading the New York Times saying, well, not a lot of people showed up, it wasn’t as many people as organizers thought, and so wrong, so wrong, that the Times had to go back and re-report the story later.
And so I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the erasing and the denigrating of anti-war voices was key in 2003, and it’s key in 2023.
NS: Absolutely. It’s the erasure of those who are either suffering under the US bombs, erasure from media coverage of substance and let alone empathy, and also erasure, as you say, of anti-war voices in our own communities in the United States, and the tremendous quantity, really, and depth of anti-war feeling and understanding. It is infuriating. It should be infuriating.
And often, when I read even the best, what we’re told are the best, mass media outlets in the United States, it seems that there’s an effort in effect to infantilize the readers, to almost like what was in school called the Weekly Reader, where things were really, if not dumbed-down, it’s just simplified, and the lens on the world, the window on the world, is so tinted red, white and blue. We’re being assumed to be either naive, gullible or simply blindly (what passes for) patriotic.
And the staying power of people who are in the upper reaches of editorial decision-making is really quite stunning. It’s hard to think of anyone who was in a major position 20 years ago, propagating and fomenting and spreading the lies to grease the path, the skids, for the war on Iraq, it’s hard to think of many who suffered at all from their careers. They simply did fine, the ones who did all that, just went right along, often rising into the profession’s upper reaches.
New Yorker (1/26/03)
I think, for instance, of David Remnick, who was already the editor of the New Yorker magazine during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, and he wrote a de facto editorial calling for the invasion of Iraq. It was quite vehement. And that was a couple of months before the invasion.
But even worse, under his editorial leadership, David Remnick ran a magazine, the New Yorker, that published one article after another that was absolute distortion, claiming without any evidence—and it certainly turned out to be false—that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi government had ties to Al Qaeda, had ties to what happened during 9/11. These were very powerful messages.
And many people, naively, gullibly assumed, well, it’s in the New York Times, or it’s in the New Yorker, or it’s in the Washington Post, that these kinds of stories were true, or had credibility.
In fact, they were disinformation of the most dangerous and ultimately destructive kind.
JJ: And finally, and following from that, it’s work, isn’t it, to resist the confusion and the cognitive dissonance that elite media enforce, for a person who’s just trying to inform themselves about the world.
The messages you get—sovereignty matters, except when we say it doesn’t. Invasion is horrific, except when we do it. Look how they oppress their own people; that’s reason enough to force regime change. Oh, but don’t talk about that in the US, you freaking commie.
Forget your political stance—it just breaks your brain to try to pretend to follow elite media’s, what they call rationality. And I guess, above all, it makes you feel confused and alone.
And what I want to ask you is, what do you see as the antidotes to that? Where do you see the place for folks to go who recognize how brain-breaking and how wrong this is?
NS: As you say, the effort is so important, because if we’re simply passive and let it wash over us, that’s not going to work.
I think recognizing that the essence of propaganda is repetition, and that if we are immersed in this constant waterfall, this flood of corporate-driven media coverage and what passes for analysis and so forth, that we’re in the deluge, and that we need to swim, so to speak, in a very different direction.
And that includes, of course—I don’t mean this as a cliche—thinking for ourselves, and also availing ourselves and supporting media outlets that are very much willing to swim upstream to challenge the conventional media wisdom that is so driven by, among other things, the military industrial complex and corporate power.
And so that should mean including supporting FAIR, subscribing to the newsletter Extra!, going to FAIR.org, supporting CounterSpin; going to outlets like Truthout and Common Dreams and the Intercept and elsewhere, Democracy Now!
These are very important outlets, because if we don’t sustain them, we will simply be overwhelmed by the disinformation machine.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with longtime FAIR associate Norman Solomon of RootsAction.org and the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible, will be out soon from the New Press. Thank you so much, Norman Solomon, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
NS: Thanks a lot, Janine.
The post ‘Media and Government Excuses Are Basically Intertwined’ appeared first on FAIR.
FAIR’s commentary by Conor Smyth (2/28/23) on former Washington Post editor Leonard Downie Jr.’s anti-objectivity manifesto (Washington Post, 1/30/23), and New York Times columnist Bret Stephens’ overwrought response to it (2/9/23), was right on point.
Leonard Downie Jr. (Washington Post, 1/30/23): The “objectivity” standard was “dictated over decades by male editors in predominantly white newsrooms and reinforced their own view of the world.”
I wouldn’t exactly characterize Downie’s shot across the bow of the mantra of corporate media as a mea culpa, since he says he didn’t consider “objectivity” a standard for his newsroom when he was the Post’s managing editor under Ben Bradlee from 1984–1991, and executive editor from 1991–2008. But, since he also says he “stopped…making up my own mind about issues” when he served in those roles—something I consider impossible to do and silly to declare—it’s an open question as to whether the Post didn’t fall prey to some of the same assumptions made by those who embrace “objectivity.”
As welcome as Downie’s indictment of “objectivity” is, it comes across as a little anticlimactic to me, even milquetoast, at least in his Post op-ed, though Smyth’s piece suggests that the full report Downie wrote with former CBS News president Andrew Heyward is stronger. To wit, the op-ed quotes high-up editors at establishment outlets, including the Post, New York Times, LA Times, San Francisco Chronicle, CBS, NBC and AP—whereas the report also quotes NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen. Ironically, by leaving Rosen and his critique of corporate media’s supposed lack of ideology out of the article, Downie reproduces the same narrow range of acceptable opinion “objectivity” has been bringing us all along; in other words, nobody too far to the left.
Nevertheless, Downie calls out allegiance to “objectivity” as a threat to democracy, while Stephens warns that Downie’s audacity in questioning the old saw is what threatens our democratic institutions. Downie is right.
Shoring up biasesThe real threat to democracy continues to be the fervor with which too many arbiters of what gets printed or broadcast cling to notions of “objectivity” that were never logical, achievable nor fair. Those notions have always served to both shore up the biases of the powerful at the expense of the vulnerable, and excuse unconscionable laziness on the part of reporters and editors who blithely continue to see themselves as smart and hard-working.
“Objectivity,” as defined by many of the most powerful media properties in the US, is just idiotic, and always has been. “Using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice,” the definition Downie offers, is not possible, and has led intelligent journalists to assert, obtusely, that they have no personal beliefs.
False equivalence: ABC‘s Matthew Dowd on Twitter (11/1/16)
Many believe that of themselves, wholeheartedly. Under this pretense, this delusion, the unacknowledged biases that have held sway at newspapers and TV stations have been those of rich, straight, white men.
The fear of being called biased has also led to “bothsideism,” the empty and intellectually dishonest practice of citing actors on either side of an issue without indicating whether one of them is lying, or giving equal time to stories that don’t warrant such treatment. (Think of the false equivalency of corporate media coverage of Charlottesville, which spent as much time denouncing anti-Nazis as Nazis—FAIR.org, 9/13/17.)
Diversifying newsrooms, Downie maintains, are calling all that into question, and hurrah for that. Though my experience tells me that it’s going to be tough for many at the top of the food chain to unlearn habits of mind they don’t even see as habits, but rather as the definition of doing the job right. It’s just so unconscious. And self-censorship by young people—leaving stuff out that would make their editor look askance at them—is real.
Jousting with ‘objectivity’When I was a journalist, I jousted with “objectivity,” not unlike Don Quixote with that windmill. I started out in the left press, working at Southern Exposure and The Nation. Deciding I wanted to be writing every day, I went to Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism so I could scrub my resume, make sure I didn’t look like a communist, and get a job at daily paper. It worked! After graduation, off I went to a summer internship at the St. Petersburg Times and then a reporting job at the Louisville Courier-Journal.
There I was, wanting to tell the truth, expose evil and bring a voice to the voiceless, surrounded by fellow reporters who were motivated by, well, I couldn’t actually tell. I didn’t know what the heck they were doing there, and couldn’t grasp why they even wanted to be journalists. For they insisted that they had no opinions about anything.
But, as much as I was a fish out of water—in that I owned that I had deeply held beliefs, and was a product of my upbringing, with the inherent biases any and all upbringings bring—I understood what my job required. I knew that I had to keep my opinions out of the paper, and give equal space—which in those days literally meant the same amount of inches in the story—to both sides. Indeed, I argued (at home, to my partner, not in the newsroom) that the fact that I was aware of my own opinions made me better able to conform to daily journalism’s definition of “objectivity” than those who denied they had biases, and were therefore more likely to introduce said biases into their copy.
In practice, I usually wrote stories that embodied “objectivity” standards, but sometimes, out of paranoia, bent over backwards so far I introduced bias contrary to my own opinions into the paper. Case in point: When a state court issued a ruling on abortion, I knew the reaction piece had to give equal time to the local pro-choice forces and Kentucky Right to Life. But the head of the latter’s state chapter told me she didn’t know what she thought, and she’d need to call the national office to find out (which I didn’t have time for her to do). Since I was familiar with that side’s beliefs and priorities, even though they weren’t my own, I asked her, “Don’t you think this?” and “Don’t you think that?” and turned my story in on time.
Maybe I could have quoted her saying she didn’t know what she thought, and made her look like the ninny that she was, though that probably wouldn’t have made it into print. To be honest, sensitive to my editors’ suspicions about me, I probably gave her more inches than I gave NARAL and local abortion providers.
Illegitimate experienceBut the experiences that indelibly burned into my mind the dangers of the assumptions that lay beneath the altar of “objectivity” came when I covered stories about working-class white people in Kentucky’s Appalachian mountains, and working-class Black people in Louisville’s West End.
When I attempted to provide context about structural, multi-generational poverty and racism while covering the news of the day, my editors refused to let me quote the people directly affected by the problems. Their experiences, and the solutions they’d identified out of their lived experience and that of their communities, as well as their own indefatigable research, were flat-out considered illegitimate.
After all, they were poor. They had accents. They didn’t have advanced degrees. They didn’t work for the government. They weren’t owners of coal mines or landfills. They didn’t control university boards. They certainly didn’t control local media.
I came to realize that one of the least discussed but most insidious and anti-democratic threats posed by the media’s concept of “objectivity” was its ironclad refusal to give up its definition of what constitutes an “expert.” That bias extended not only to refusing to give those suffering under unjust policies the courtesy of weighing in substantively on developments that directly threatened them. It also maintained an inviolate firewall against allowing those outside the halls of power to define what was news in the first place.
ABC*‘s Maxine Crooks (Washington Post*, 1/30/23): “We have to be able to use the voices of people whose neighborhoods we don’t normally go into and tell these stories from their vantage point.”
To editors, “objectivity” could only be maintained by citing people who nearly always had higher education and were affiliated with establishment institutions: universities, government, hospitals, corporations, well-known nonprofits. That leaves out a lot of people! It also sidelines informal groups formed for collective action, like the community organization created by residents of a mobile home park in Appalachia whose water supply had been declared carcinogenic by the state, and whose bills from the public utility were so high they couldn’t pay them.
Downie acknowledges this as one of the dangers of “objectivity,” and in the report advocates creating new beats and bringing back beats, such as labor, that have been mothballed. He quotes ABC’s Maxine Crooks saying her network’s stations are attempting to address the narrowcasting of “objectivity” by increasing coverage of real life, and have created “race and culture content” teams towards that end. “We have to be able to use the voices of people whose neighborhoods we don’t normally go into and tell these stories from their vantage point,” she says.
Stephens also, sort of, but not really, argues for a wider definition of who counts as newsworthy, by throwing a pity party for gun owners and religious fundamentalists, people he insists get ignored because of the media’s liberal bias.
Predictable and patronizingI think it’s extremely difficult for highly educated, powerful people to even consider that those whose life experiences differ so greatly from their own possess wisdom, and to quote them in ways that lend their insights credence and heft.
Downie’s conceptual admonition about “objectivity” leaving out important voices, as welcome as it is, isn’t the only source of pressure on the legacy media to do a better job at quoting poor people and people of color and poor people of color. Other counties have been heard from.
Michael Moore
Trump’s 2016 victory shocked the talking heads, who really are coastal elites and really do live in bubbles, except for Michael Moore, who lives in Michigan and was one of few media figures to predict that election’s outcome. (I’m being facetious that he’s the only one, but you get the idea.) Much hand-wringing about journalists’ failure to report deeply from the heartland followed.
And so we were treated to predictable, patronizing stories that purported to respect Trump voters, but not-so-sneakily made them look, at best, like ignorant dupes. “Objectivity” obliterates empathy, it seems, as well as curiosity. Despite media vows to no longer resort to flyovers, those stories just served to reiterate divisions, reducing our complex country of complicated people into one with simple-to-grasp but inaccurate categories, like the one that suggests all working-class people are white, and the one that holds all working-class white people vote Republican. And don’t get me started on J.D. Vance. (See sidebar.)
Black Lives Matter protests following George Floyd’s May 2020 murder put pressure on newsrooms to address their failures on covering racism. Regional media outlets are similarly put under the microscope each time another police killing occurs in a different city or state. Notwithstanding the Times’ 1619 Project, which got underway in 2019, it remains to be seen whether, in the corporate media as a whole, especially in outlets less illustrious than the Times, promises to do better on race are going to pan out.
And even though states passing or aiming to pass Don’t Say Gay and anti–Critical Race Theory laws are focused on schools, universities and libraries, it’s not off the wall to worry that such laws will have a chilling effect on non-national media outlets that had maybe begun inching towards implementation of claims to hire more Black and brown journalists and give them the power to direct coverage.
Writing off red statesIf, say, you live in a big city in the Northeast, media coverage would have you think that there are zero folks who vote blue in the red states, who share progressive values and are fighting the good fight, and that’s patently untrue. You would think there’s nobody Black in Appalachia, and that’s not true, either.
My neighbors in Brooklyn sure believe such things. During Trump, several suggested we should just write off the South, because everyone there is a racist and it’s pointless to try to change their minds.
Patty Wallace and Ruth Colvin (Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, 11/24/16)
Folks in Eastern Kentucky were and are accustomed to outsiders thinking they can’t be trusted to know what’s best for themselves. They’ve been dealing with that for generations. It wasn’t surprising to Patty Wallace and Ruth Colvin, two gray-haired women who’d crept through the woods to take photos of workers standing in clouds of toxic asbestos dust employed by people thought by many, including prosecutors in New York, to have organized crime connections to illegally dump hazardous waste in a landfill meant for household garbage, that my editors wouldn’t let me report on their derring-do in the public’s interest. They knew they were not seen as the type of people who have their own agency and can solve problems.
Not long ago, Joan Robinett, a powerhouse activist from Harlan County, told me there wasn’t a single family her son, Dan, had grown up with who hadn’t been affected by Oxycontin. Yet despite the misery sweeping her rural community and so many others like it, for too long media coverage of the opioid epidemic didn’t reach the critical mass necessary to achieve two important goals: make those losing family members to painkillers feel seen, and force policy makers to substantively address the nightmare. And that’s in part because the people dying were people the media didn’t see, people who didn’t have so-called “experts” speaking up for them.
The opioid crisis, of course, is just one of many issues in rural America that are ignored or undercovered by the media. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that “objectivity,” and its bias against anyone who isn’t considered an “expert” by the status quo, helped lead to Trump’s election, as he preyed on the legitimate sense prevalent in many communities that their suffering didn’t matter.
I think this is something many well-meaning urban sophisticates fail to grasp. They shrug their shoulders and ask, “Why do they keep voting against their own interests?” as if that’s a rhetorical question, rather than a question that could be answered if they bothered to take a walk in the shoes of those they disdain. If they considered how they would feel—and vote—if they had had their lands and labor exploited and their intelligence insulted for generations by the country’s rich and powerful, with media offering nothing but justification for those behaviors and attitudes.
Breaking unspoken rulesBack at the C-J, I persisted. I wrote stories nobody else at the paper thought were stories, like the one about the Asian grocery that carried ingredients requested by immigrants from across the world that they couldn’t buy anywhere else in town, and the one about a Muslim feminist professor’s class on The Satanic Verses after the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie.
Rev. Louis Coleman (image: WHAS11, 2/25/21)
Soon after I became the higher education reporter, the state government—without bothering to give advance notice to Woodford Porter, the West End funeral parlor scion who was the University of Louisville’s one Black board member—altered U of L’s admissions policies in such a way that fewer Black students would be admitted, thereby threatening the “urban mission” of its state charter. I covered the protest at U of L’s board meeting. It was organized by the Rev. Louis Coleman, Louisville’s most prominent Black activist, and Anne Braden, a white woman who’d dedicated her life to anti-racist work after her husband was accused of sedition and jailed for selling a house in a white neighborhood to a Black family.
Then, when a mid-level functionary in the federal Department of Education said that U of L couldn’t spend money earned at Arizona’s Fiesta Bowl on minority scholarships (U of L’s football team was only invited because other schools were boycotting Arizona for refusing to honor the MLK holiday), I broke what became a national story, picked up by the New York Times, etc., about the threat this ruling posed to affirmative action in general. It wasn’t long before George H.W. Bush’s administration put the kibosh on that initiative.
Soon after I’d written those stories, according to a Black state representative who spoke with me off the record, U of L’s president called the Courier-Journal’s publisher and told him to get Robin Epstein off his back. So much for the supposed separation between journalism’s church and state, the publishing side and the editorial side of the newspaper. I’d broken the unspoken rule that the paper didn’t probe Louisville’s racial inequities, because doing so might lead to unrest. The city’s fathers didn’t want a reprise of the busing riots of 1975.
Did the paper celebrate that I’d recognized that a local story raised questions that pertained far beyond U of L, and done enough digging to place it in a larger context? Were the editors proud that one of their reporters had perhaps helped save the college education of untold numbers of minority students across the country? No.
‘Don’t ask for too much’Emily Bingham (left) and Eleanor Bingham Miller (Courier-Journal, 6/1/21): “The shortcomings of the companies our family own are real—and many.”
I’d arrived at the C-J in 1988, two years after Gannett bought the paper, and rocking the boat was certainly not encouraged. My fellow reporters often lamented that it wasn’t the way it used to be. Indeed, historically, under the Bingham family, which owned the paper from 1918 to 1986, the C-J had had enterprising moments for a publication of its size. Though it’s hard to imagine, given the current sorry state of daily newspapers thanks to media consolidation and contraction, the C-J at one time had its own foreign correspondents! (Joel Brinkley won the paper a Pulitzer in 1980 for a series from Cambodia.)
But even in its heyday, which began well before school desegregation and lasted a decade after it, when budgets were flush as compared to under Gannett, the paper didn’t dig deep on the lack of racial justice in its own backyard.
In the summer of 2021, a year and a few months after Breonna Taylor was murdered, historian Emily Bingham and her aunt, Eleanor Bingham Miller, put out a statement apologizing for the lack of forthright coverage of racism when their family owned the C-J:
We have no doubt the shortcomings of the companies our family owned are real—and many. These failings of the “‘public trust” harmed Black lives and extended white supremacy in our community. The Courier Journal advocated progress for Black people but only at the pace its owners and editors considered manageable and appropriate. Our constant refrain was “go slow,” “don’t ask for too much at once,” “don’t you see we’re trying to help you?” and more of the like.
Scuttlebutt I’ve read posted on Facebook by friends in Louisville, including some former C-J reporters, indicates that the paper nowadays is thinner than ever, though I have seen a few good pieces it’s published since Taylor was killed.
However, back in the early ’90s, my punishment for breaking that unspoken rule, for covering (not creating) news about institutional racism, and for following the implications of that news to its logical conclusion? I was yanked off the higher ed beat and banished to the Southern Indiana bureau. When I quit a few months later, the editor who had hired me had the condescending gall to tell me in my exit interview that I would now be able to “think globally and act locally.” That was his way of saying I’d never belonged in a newsroom in the first place, because I had opinions and couldn’t be “objective.” As if he could.
A need for humilityTo me, perhaps the most depressing thing about the way adherents to the “objectivity” principle go about their business is their utter lack of humility. They don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t think about it. As long as they lazily give equal time to “both sides,” they think they’ve passed muster. As Downie says, that lets mainstream journalists off the hook from their responsibility to search hard for and report the truth to the best of their ability.
But it also gives them permission to avoid questioning whether their own lives have in any way blinkered them to who is a legitimate source and to what is a legitimate story. So, they reflexively reproduce pieces that fit into preordained formats sanctioned by their bosses, who also operate under their own unexamined devotion to a narrow, class-bound, racist, sexist, homophobic and superficial conception of expertise.
The discourse churned out by the legacy media, despite Downie’s hope that self-critique is underway and will result in meaningful change, still falls short of reflecting the reality of the lives lived by people who don’t run the nation’s newsrooms. And our democracy is so much poorer for it.
Sidebar:It’s Structural, Not PathologicalHere are some resources if you’re hungry for some Appalachian perspectives that provide an antidote to Sen. J.D. Vance’s corrosive, self-serving, victim-blaming bootstrap-ism.
To Read:(Belt Publishing, 2018)
Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly ElegyAnthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, editors
What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachiaby Elizabeth Catte
Flight Behavior
By Barbara Kingsolver
A Is for AffrilachiaChildren’s picture book by Frank X. Walker
Facing South
Bitter Southerner
To Watch: Image from Stranger With a Camera
Stranger With a CameraA documentary film directed by Elizabeth Barrett
A Message From Tyler ChildersAbout his song “Long Violent History”
To Hear: Trillbilly Workers Party Podcast
To Check Out: Appalshop
Highlander Research and Education Center
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Protests against the construction of an 85-acre police training facility—dubbed “Cop City”—in a suburban Atlanta forest turned deadly when police shot and killed a demonstrator occupying the area. The police mobilization against the occupation involved the Atlanta Police, DeKalb County Police, Georgia State Patrol, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) and the FBI (Guardian, 1/21/23). Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, a protester known by most as “Tortuguita,” was shot at least a dozen times.
After quoting the police justification for Tortuguita’s killing, the Guardian (1/21/23) added, “but they have produced no evidence for the claim”—an observation rarely made in US corporate media coverage of police violence.
Officers claimed they shot Tortuguita (who used gender-neutral they/them pronouns) in response to the protester’s shooting and injuring a Georgia State Patrol officer. A GBI investigation is still underway, and it remains unclear what occurred in the moments leading up to the shooting. The Georgia State Troopers responsible for Tortuguita’s death did not have body cameras. The Atlanta Police in the woods at the time captured the sound of gunshots, and officers speculating the trooper was shot by friendly fire, but no visuals of the shooting.
Tortuguita’s death was reported as the first police killing of an environmental protester in the country’s history. It propelled the “Stop Cop City” protests into broader national and corporate news coverage. Much of the reporting—especially by local and independent outlets—was commendable in its healthy skepticism of cops’ unsubstantiated claims. But other reporting on the shooting and subsequent protests was simply police-blotter regurgitation that took unproven police statements at face value, and demonized Tortuguita and others in the Stop Cop City movement.
Bodycam questionsAlmost two months after the police killing of Tortuguita, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was warning against “inappropriate release of evidence” (NPR, 3/11/23).
Anti–Cop City protests over the first weekend of March led to dozens of demonstrators being arrested and charged with domestic terrorism (Democracy Now!, 3/8/23). The following week, an independent autopsy revealed Tortuguita was likely seated in a cross-legged position with their hands raised when they were shot (NPR, 3/11/23; Democracy Now!, 3/14/23).
The GBI said a gun Tortuguita legally purchased in 2020 was found at the scene, and matched the bullet found in the wound of the officer (Fox5, 1/20/23). But accounts from other protesters, statements from Tortuguita’s family and friends (AP, 2/6/23), and Atlanta Police bodycam footage have cast doubt on the cops’ claims that Tortuguita shot the officer (Democracy Now!, 2/9/23).
ABC (2/9/23) described the video, which includes the voice of an officer seemingly responding to the shootout by saying, “You [expletive] your own officer up.” The Intercept (2/9/23) added that the same officer later walked up to others and asked, “They shoot their own man?”
Both outlets do their due diligence in clarifying that the officer was speculating, and that the GBI’s investigation is still underway.
Truthout (2/10/23) also included another quote from the bodycam footage in the moments after the shooting:
In one video, after gunshots ring out through the forest, an officer can be heard saying, “That sounded like suppressed gunfire,” implying the initial shots were consistent with the use of a law enforcement weapon, not the Smith & Wesson M&P Shield 9 mm the GBI alleges Tortuguita purchased and fired upon the trooper with, which did not have a suppressor.
The piece noted that the sound of a drone can be heard in the background, indicating there may be more footage of the incident that the GBI has not released. An article in the Georgia Voice (2/16/23) also mentions the suppressed gunshots referred to in the videos.
Trailing behind FoxThe Blaze (12/16/22) shows how to present people sitting in trees as a clear and present danger.
A Nexis search of “Cop City” reveals that prior to Tortuguita’s killing, coverage of the protests, which have been going on since late 2021, had been relegated to mainly local outlets and newswire coverage. There were, however, a handful of notable exceptions, including the Daily Beast (8/26/21, 9/9/21, 12/14/22), Politico (10/28/21), Atlantic (5/26/22, 6/13/22), Guardian (6/16/22, 12/27/22), Rolling Stone (9/3/22) and Economist (9/27/22).
Right-wing outlets like Fox News (5/18/22, 5/20/22, 7/1/22, 12/16/22, 12/29/22, 12/29/22), Daily Mail (5/18/22, 12/15/22, 12/16/22, 12/17/22, 12/19/22), Blaze (12/16/22) and Daily Caller (12/15/22) all demonized the protesters, often referring to them as “violent” and affiliated with “Antifa” (which, for the record, is not an organized group, but an anti-fascist ideology).
In the first few days following Tortuguita’s January 18 shooting, coverage on major TV news channels and national papers was scant, with most centrist outlets trailing behind Fox in the volume of coverage. A Nexis search for the terms “Tortuguita,” “Terán” or “Cop City,” from the day of Tortuguita’s death (January 18) until the end of January, found that Fox covered the shooting and protest more than all the other national networks combined, dominating the conversation with a pro-cop spin. It raised the issue on eight shows, while CNN covered it four times, ABC and CBS once each, and NBC and MSNBC not at all. Meanwhile, USA Today offered no coverage and the New York Times ran two articles. A separate search of the Washington Post, which is not on Nexis, brings up three articles, one of which was an AP repost.
Beyond the police version Kamau Franklin (Democracy Now!, 1/20/23): “The only version of events that’s really been released to the public has been the police version.”
Independent and local outlets generally led the way in reporting on Tortuguita’s killing. A couple days after the shooting, Democracy Now! (1/20/23) dedicated an entire segment to the murder and movement. Host Amy Goodman interviewed Atlanta organizer Kamau Franklin, who wrote an article headlined “MLK’s Vision Lives On in Atlanta’s Fight Against New Police Training Facility” (Truthout, 1/17/23) the day before Tortuguita was shot.
On Democracy Now!, Franklin said:
The only version of events that’s really been released to the public has been the police version, the police narrative, which we should say the corporate media has run away with. To our knowledge so far, we find it less than likely that the police version of events is what really happened…. As the little intel that we have, residents said that they heard a blast of gunshots all at once, and not one blast and then a return of fire. Also, there’s been no other information released. We don’t know how many times this young person was hit with bullets. We don’t know the areas in which this person was hit. We don’t know if this is potentially a friendly fire incident. All we know is what the version of the police have given.
Many other local and independent outlets also reported on Tortuguita’s death with a healthy dose of skepticism of police claims. Shortly after the killing, the Bitter Southerner published a piece by journalist David Peisner (1/20/23), who had been covering the Stop Cop City protests (12/23/22) and had spent extensive time interviewing the activist. Peisner’s article is essentially a eulogy for Tortuguita, vouching for their character and quoting pacifistic statements they made in interviews. Peisner wrote:
“The right kind of resistance is peaceful, because that’s where we win,” they told me. “We’re not going to beat [the police] at violence. They’re very, very good at violence. We’re not. We win through nonviolence. That’s really the only way we can win. We don’t want more people to die. We don’t want Atlanta to turn into a war zone.”
Piesner acknowledged the possibility that Tortuguita may have been disingenuously advocating peaceful protest, but made clear he saw no evidence of that.
A letter to the editor on Workers.org (2/8/23) pointed out how police’s unproven claims and charges of violence against Tortuguita served to dampen publicity and reduce sympathy for them. Julia Wright’s letter also called out the double standard in dozens of land defenders being charged with “terrorism,” unlike the Capitol insurrectionists, whose deadly riot sought to dismantle US democracy:
The postmortem image of Tortuguita has been twisted and exploited to make them look like a “terrorist,” whereas none of those who invaded the Capitol were charged with or sentenced for terrorism.
Local Atlanta news outlet 11Alive (2/6/23) reported that Tortuguita’s family was publicly questioning the police-driven narrative of their child’s death, and demanding more transparency from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. While outlining the official narrative, the outlet also offered significant space to those contesting it.
Claim becomes factFox News (1/22/23) condemned Democrats for not speaking out against broken windows in Atlanta.
Other outlets, however, were far less skeptical of the unsubstantiated law enforcement claims, whether presenting claims as facts or simply not challenging those claims.
In its report on the killing, Fox Special Report (1/20/23) played a soundbite from the GBI’s chief: “An individual, without warning, shot a Georgia state patrol trooper. Other law enforcement personnel returned fire in self-defense.” The segment went on to play a short soundbite of unidentified protesters urging people not to believe the police narrative, but correspondent Jonathan Serrie’s outro implied that he did believe it:
Top Georgia officials, including the governor and director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, say they embrace the right to protest, but cannot stand by when protesters resort to violence and jeopardize innocent lives.
Just a few hours later on Fox (1/20/23), police claims had become fact, with a brief update beginning, “In Georgia, a protester shot a state trooper without warning.” There was no mention of the incomplete investigation underway, nor the protesters’ accounts.
After further protests, the Wall Street Journal editorial (3/7/23) accused the “left” of “justif[ying] a violent assault on a police-training site,” saying that “Cop City” was under siege from “Antifa radicals.”
The Journal relied entirely on official accounts of the protests, reporting only the police’s account of events that day:
Authorities say Terán refused to comply with officers’ commands and instead shot and injured a state patrol trooper. Officers returned fire, striking Terán, who died on the scene, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. The investigation isn’t finished, but the bureau says the bullet “recovered from the trooper’s wound matches Terán’s handgun.”
As of this writing, even with the most recent autopsy results suggesting Tortuguita’s cross-legged, hands-up position at the time of their death, neither the police’s nor the activists’ accounts have been proven. Still, the Wall Street Journal has already made clear which narrative it finds newsworthy.
Vandalism as ‘violence’A lack of skepticism of official accounts was not limited to right-wing media. The New York Times (1/27/23), reporting on Georgia’s governor calling in the National Guard amid the protests, wrote, “The authorities claim that Terán fired a gun at a state trooper during a ‘clearing operation’ in the woods before being killed by the police.” No sources were quoted who questioned that claim.
The Washington Post headline (1/21/23) implied that protesters were violent—though the only attacks on people described in the piece were police tackling demonstrators.
Covering the protests after Tortuguita’s killing, the Washington Post (1/21/23) made the actions of protesters rather than police the issue, with the headline “Violent Protests Break Out in Atlanta Over Fatal Shooting of Activist.” While the headline implies that the protesters were violent, the only attacks on other humans described in the piece were police tackling protesters. The Post included no reports of protesters committing bodily harm, but parroted Atlanta’s mayor referring to property damage as “violence”—elevating vandalism over assaults on people. (FAIR—2/6/18—has documented that news media do not commonly refer to other, apolitical instances of property destruction—such as sports fans celebrating a win—as “violence.”)
Only toward the end of the article, below a featured image of a car on fire and descriptions of smashed bank windows, did the Post add that the Atlanta police chief “emphasized that those who caused property damage were a small subset among other peaceful demonstrators.”
The headline “In Atlanta, a Deadly Forest Protest Sparks Debate Over ‘Domestic Terrorism’” (Washington Post, 1/26/23) implies the protesters’ actions were deadly—but the only people who caused death were the police who shot Tortuguita.
Another Post piece (3/6/23) offered history on the construction of Cop City and the movement against it under the headline “What Is Cop City? Why Are There Violent Protests in an Atlanta Forest?,” but prioritized depicting the demonstrations as “violent” over describing the shooting that led to the backlash in the first place, using the adjective three additional times in the piece.
(It also referred to Tortuguita using he/him pronouns, though that has been corrected.)
“State authorities claimed self-defense and said that Paez Terán purchased the gun that shot a Georgia State Patrol officer, but the shooting is under investigation,” the article said, without mentioning the protesters’ claims, or the bodycam footage.
Holding back evidenceA New York Times overview (3/4/23) gave a detailed account of how police say Tortuguita was killed—but not what protesters say happened.
Some coverage that did mention the doubts of Tortuguita’s family and supporters failed to explain the evidence that could back their claims. In a New York Times report (3/4/23) that attempted to put the protests in context, the only person quoted supporting Tortuguita’s innocence was their mother. The piece quoted Belkis Terán describing her child as a “pacifist,” and mentioning the first independent autopsy revealed 13 gunshot wounds—but made no mention of the bodycam evidence that suggested the officer may have been shot by friendly fire.
(The second autopsy’s results that indicated Tortuguita was likely sitting cross-legged with their hands up when they were shot were not available when this article was published. At the time of this article’s publication, the Times has not published any articles on the second autopsy’s results.)
The mourning mother’s grief adds emotion to the story and briefly paints Tortuguita in a sympathetic light, but her claims are not granted the same amount of authority and credibility as the cops’ assertions, which are offered in detail:
The Georgia Bureau of Investigation, which is looking into the shooting, has said that on January 18, as the police sought to clear the forest of protesters, Tortuguita fired first “without warning,” striking a trooper. Officers returned fire, according to the authorities.
Despite the investigation being incomplete, the police narrative is still able to stand alone, without any mentions of opposing allegations and evidence.
Ignoring recent historyTo draw a sharp contrast between police treatment of Cop City opponents and earlier environmental protests, NBC (2/5/23) had to ignore precedents like police at Standing Rock sending two dozen Indigenous water defenders to the hospital in a single event (Guardian, 11/21/16).
Even after the GBI’s report comes out, journalists should clearly present the evidence supporting protesters’ and police narratives, given police’s well-documented record of lying in reports, affidavits and even on the witness stand (New York Times, 3/18/18; CNN, 6/6/20; Slate, 8/4/20).
In early February, NBC (2/5/23) reported that Tortuguita’s killing was the first of an environmental activist, but made this police killing seem like a fluke. “Police have often been important intermediaries in environmental protests,” the article’s subhead claimed. “In a forest outside Atlanta, they were opponents.”
If you read the story, though, a source acknowledges that “there’s a long history of law enforcement confronting direct-action environmentalist activists and those confrontations turning hostile.” Going back to the 1980s, activists who engaged in civil disobedience “were sometimes dragged away and thrown in vans, sometimes pepper-sprayed.”
To claim that the violence at Atlanta represents an “unprecedented” escalation, as the article argues, requires ignoring recent history like the suppression of the protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock. There police used water cannons, pepper spray, tasers, sound weapons and more against peaceful—mostly Indigenous—protesters, in one incident injuring 300 and putting 26 in the hospital (Guardian, 11/21/16).
Regardless of who shot the first bullet, the story of Tortuguita’s death is about protests against militarized policing being met with more militarized policing, which ultimately resulted in a fatal shooting. Unquestioningly spreading unproven police claims is not only irresponsible, it misses the story’s entire point.
The post Cop City Coverage Fails to Question Narratives of Militarized Police appeared first on FAIR.
The problems Fox News had on Election Night 2020 don’t bode well for the election of 2024.
iMediaEthics (5/19/21): In Arizona, “the actual results were much closer than what VoteCast predicted.”
A little before midnight Eastern time on November 3, 2020, the Fox network, which was collaborating with the Associated Press on vote projections, predicted that Biden would win Arizona. The decision desk director at the time later acknowledged it seemed “premature.” Almost two years ago, on iMediaEthics (5/19/21), I outlined the reasons why the call should not have been made, based on Associated Press’s own post mortem assessment. More recently, Nate Cohn of the New York Times (3/13/23) made a similar argument.
On Election Day 2020, Fox also predicted Democrats to win the House, with their majority expanding by “at least five seats.” That was incorrect, also noted in my article. While Democrats retained the majority, they actually lost 13 seats. Cohn does not mention this miscall.
The predictions were based on a new system that Fox and AP had developed in conjunction with the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). Called VoteCast by AP, and Fox News Voter Analysis by the network, it was born out of Fox’s frustration with the slow pace of predicting winners in 2016.
At that time, the network was part of a consortium, the National Election Pool (NEP) run by Edison Research, which uses exit polls and related data to project election winners. With its new system, Fox would presumably be able to make quicker decisions.
It did not go well.
Neither quicker nor more accurateThe New York Times‘ Peter Baker (3/4/23) suggests that Fox‘s problem was that its polling was too good.
Yet, earlier this month, Peter Baker of the New York Times (3/4/23) seemed to embrace the notion that the Fox/AP/NORC system is superior to the NEP system used by the other networks.
He alluded to a meeting of Fox executives after the 2020 election, when they were discussing how, in the future, they could avoid calling an election for a Democrat before the other networks. Information about the meeting came from evidence in Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit.
Baker wrote:
Maybe, the Fox executives mused, they should abandon the sophisticated new election-projecting system in which Fox had invested millions of dollars and revert to the slower, less accurate model.
It seems unlikely the executives would have referred to the NEP as a “less accurate” model. Slower, perhaps; that was the catalyst for developing the new system. But accuracy was not an issue, at least as publicly stated. It seems more a projected characterization by Baker.
In any case, Baker’s own words appeared to embrace VoteCast as a superior system:
Fox reached its call earlier than other networks because of the cutting-edge system that it developed after the 2016 election, a system tested during the 2018 midterm elections with great success—Fox projected that Democrats would capture the House before its competitors.
The only evidence Baker offered for VoteCast as a “cutting-edge” system is that Fox called the 2018 House contest “before its competitors.” In 2020, Fox also called the House contest before the other networks but, as already noted, that call was a rush to judgment that forced the network to eat crow more than a week later. Hardly cutting edge. NEP made no such error.
Baker ignored altogether the lopsided competition between the two systems in the 2022 House elections. Data posted on the Edison website shows that NEP correctly called the winners before AP and VoteCast in 296 congressional districts, while AP beat NEP in just 73 districts.
A dangerous competitionPersonally, I’ve long been skeptical about the competition among networks to be first in calling winners. The public has no immediate need to know who the winner will “likely” be. In most cases, a few more hours will see a completed ballot count and the actual winners announced. If the counting extends for several days, so be it.
The real utility of the election night systems is the statistical information that is collected, which allows for a more in-depth understanding of the factors that motivated voters for one candidate or another. Projecting winners on Election Night is at best an added advantage, and at worst—when miscalls are made—a danger to democracy.
Then–Florida Gov. John Ellis “Jeb” Bush and his first cousin, Fox executive John Ellis, together made the decision that Fox would call Florida for their brother/cousin George W. Bush (image: Media Matters, 2/3/15).
That was the case in the 2000 election, when—at 2:16 in the morning after Election Day—Fox was the first to project George W. Bush the winner in Florida. The head of the decision desk was John Ellis, Bush’s cousin. Bush’s brother Jeb, then governor of Florida, was on the phone with Ellis, and urged his cousin to make the call, though the data did not support it. This projection caused the other major networks to follow suit, only to rescind the call hours later. Chaos ensued.
The miscall and resulting confusion caused Roger Ailes, chair and CEO of Fox News Network, later to admit, “In my heart, I do believe that democracy was harmed by my network and others on November 7, 2000.” (See my book How to Steal an Election: The Inside Story of How George Bush’s Brother and Fox Network Miscalled the 2000 Election and Changed the Course of History for further details.)
That kind of chaos could have happened again in 2020. As Cohn argues about the early call:
There’s not much reason to believe that there was a factual basis for a projection in Arizona. It came very close to being wrong. If it had been, it could have been disastrous.
The public’s confidence in elections would have taken another big hit if Mr. Trump had ultimately taken the lead after a call in Mr. Biden’s favor. It would have fueled the Trump campaign’s argument that he could and would eventually overturn the overall result.
Misleading distinctionsAP says of its VoteCast system, “We meet voters where they are”—meaning they don’t meet voters where they vote.
The hype about the VoteCast system begins with the misleading descriptions found on each news media’s website. Each has a slightly different description of the wonders of their new system, but both emphasize the limits of exit polls as its genesis.
AP: In the 2020 general election, less than a third of voters cast a ballot at a neighborhood polling place on Election Day. That’s why we meet voters where they are, surveying them via mail, phone and online to create a comprehensive data set that empowers accurate storytelling…. AP VoteCast is the product of more than a decade of research and years of experiments aimed at moving away from traditional, in-person exit polls to an approach to election research that reflects the modern approach to voting.
Fox: With more voters than ever voting early or by mail, the new method overcomes the limitations of in-person exit polls and captures the views of all Americans.
The descriptions imply the old, unnamed system, the one they used to belong to (NEP), relies solely on “in-person exit polls.” It does not. And the people at Fox and AP know that.
NEP has been much more than an exit poll operation, ever since its incarnation in 2004. I was with the previous media consortium, called Voter News Service (VNS), on Election Nights 1996 and 2000, and even then, the consortium supplemented exit polls with pre-election polls to measure the preferences of early and by-mail voters.
These days, NEP supplements Election Day exit polls with exit polls at early voting locations around the country, plus multi-mode pre-election polls of absentee voters, including interviews conducted by phone and web.
You can see a comparison of the two methodologies as outlined by NEP and AP Votecast. The comparison reveals two major differences:
- The Fox/AP system relies solely on surveys of voters done before polls close, while NEP uses pre-election polls to measure preferences of absentee voters and exit polls to measure preferences of voters as they have just finished voting.
- All voter preferences gathered by NEP are based on probability samples, the “gold standard of survey research.” Less than a third of VoteCast respondents are selected using probability methods.
To be fair, given the low response rates of phone surveys, or even of multi-mode surveys (those which include, as NEP does, phone and web), it’s not clear that probability samples continue to be superior to non-probability surveys (Pew, 5/2/16; 538, 8/11/14; 3Streams, 3/18/21).
VoteCast or NEP?Journalists should welcome the addition of a statistically based Election Day coverage system like VoteCast to compete with NEP. Until 1990, the three major broadcast networks—ABC, CBS and NBC—each conducted their own exit poll operation, providing somewhat different takes on the electorate. But in 1990, because of prohibitive costs, they formed a consortium (and added CNN), originally called Voter Research and Surveys. The consortium expanded to include Fox and AP, but still there was only one take on the electorate.
Just as it’s useful to have more than one poll on any given race, it’s useful to have more than one election night operation. But there’s nothing to substantiate the idea that this new operation is especially “cutting edge” or superior to the one that already existed.
In fact, VoteCast is not so much cutting edge as duller edge. Its main advantage in avoiding any in-person exit polling and using mostly non-probability samples of voters is lower cost, rather than any increase in quality.
VoteCast cuts costs dramatically by getting rid of the whole exit poll operation, both in early voting states, and especially on Election Day, which (for NEP) includes 734 exit poll stations across the country, along with recruiting and training interviewers and establishing a live call-in reporting process for the results.
Fox and AP are not alone in trying to find cheaper methods of polling voters. There is an industry-wide effort to cut polling costs, because of abysmally low response rates. As Pew (5/2/16) noted several years ago:
For decades the gold standard for public opinion surveys has been the probability poll, where a sample of randomly selected adults is polled and results are used to measure public opinion across an entire population. But the cost of these traditional polls is growing each year, leading many pollsters to turn to online nonprobability surveys, which do not rely on random sampling and instead recruit through ads, pop-up solicitations and other approaches.
By 2020, most election polls had in fact turned to non-probability samples. As one article noted, from September 1 to November 1, 2020, only 23% of the reported election polls on 538 were based on strict probability samples. The rest were based either totally (61%) or partially (16%) on non-probability samples. Pew observed:
The advantages of these online surveys are obvious—they are fast and relatively inexpensive, and the technology for them is pervasive. But are they accurate?
That is the question that faces the industry overall. The advent of VoteCast, which mostly relies on non-probability samples, is yet another effort to develop more cost-effective ways of measuring public opinion. As such, it should provide useful information for other pollsters as the industry morphs away from the very expensive probability standard.
But the key test should not be which system is quicker in projecting winners, though it is naïve to assume the networks won’t continue to compete in this area. Instead, an evaluation of the two systems should rely on how accurate and plausible are the data each system provides about the nature of the electorate, and the factors that influenced the election.
What about Election Night?Fox News* CEO Suzanne Scott was worried about “the impact to the brand” of calling Arizona for Joe Biden (New York Times*, 3/4/23).
Among the media partners in each system, it appears that only one media organization can’t be trusted to make projections in a timely manner based on the statistical findings. Baker makes clear in his New York Times article (3/4/23) that following the 2020 election, Fox executives’ primary concern about the Arizona call was not that it was right, but that coming before any other network, it infuriated Trump and his aides, and angered their own viewers.
Discussions followed, even by their two main news anchors, who, according to Baker,
suggested it was not enough to call a state based on numerical calculations, the standard by which networks have made such determinations for generations, but that viewer reaction should be considered.
As Baker points out, that had already happened. When its decision desk decided to call Nevada for Biden on Friday night, November 6, Fox president Jay Wallace refused to air it. By VoteCast’s models, Arizona would have given Biden the electoral votes he needed to be declared president. Wallace didn’t want his network to be the first. He waited until all the other networks had made the call the next day, and then allowed Fox to follow suit.
Once a network has decided it’s more important to tell viewers what they want to hear, rather than what the data provide, it doesn’t matter how good the election night system might be. The calls can’t be trusted.
The post What Fox’s Bad Calls on Election Night 2020 Say About 2024 appeared first on FAIR.
On the 20th anniversary of the US- and British-led invasion of Iraq, the New York Times continued to dedicate itself to a waffling narrative, one that writes out most of history and opts for a message of “it’s complicated” to discuss the disaster it can’t admit that it helped create.
The New York Times (3/18/23) looks back on the Iraq invasion: “For many Iraqis, it is hard to appreciate the positive developments.”
On Saturday, the Times (3/18/23) published an article on its website headlined, “20 Years After US Invasion, Iraq Is a Freer Place, but Not a Hopeful One.” The next morning, the article (under the headline “Lost Hopes Haunt Iraqis, Two Decades After Invasion”) was featured at the top-right corner of its front page—making it one of the most prominent articles in the English-speaking world that day.
The article, by Baghdad bureau chief Alissa Rubin, began and ended in a Fallujah cemetery, and it certainly painted a gloomy picture of both present-day Iraq and the ravages of war. Yet the Times couldn’t help but balance the gloom with positive notes. Rubin quoted former Iraqi President Barham Salih explaining that there have been “a lot of positive developments” in Iraq. For instance: “Once [Saddam] was gone, suddenly we had elections. We had an open polity, a multitude of press.” Another of those positive developments, Rubin wrote, was “a better relationship with the US military.”
And yet, Rubin went on, “For many Iraqis, it is hard to appreciate the positive developments when unemployment is rampant.” She also pointed to the fact that “about a quarter of Iraqis live at or below the poverty line” and, above all, to “the increasingly entrenched government corruption.” (Today, Iraq shares the rank of 157 out of 180 countries on the Transparency International corruption index with Myanmar and Azerbaijan, as the Times noted.)
Rubin offered only glimpses of responsibility. Of the George W. Bush administration’s claims of weapons of mass destruction, she simply wrote, “no evidence to back up those accusations was ever found.” Of the power vacuum that Iran stepped into, Rubin wrote, “Abetting and expanding Iran’s influence in Iraq was hardly the intention of American policymakers in 2003.” The power-sharing government system the US installed “is regarded by many as having undermined from the start any hope of good governance,” she explained. “But Mr. Crocker and others said that at the time it seemed the only way to ensure that all sects and ethnicities would have a role in governing.”
Understating catastropheLooking back on six years covering Iraq, the New York Times‘ Alissa Rubin (11/1/09) acknowledged that “Americans, too, did their share of violence”—but she didn’t call it “horrific crimes” or “brutality.”
It’s perhaps an unsurprising framing, coming from a journalist whose reflections on Iraq in 2009 (11/1/09; FAIR.org, 11/3/09) included the observation that while Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq committed “horrific crimes,” and Kurds displayed “brutality,” the “Americans, too, did their share of violence.” But maybe, she seemed to suggest, Americans didn’t commit enough violence?
Among the worst they did was wishful thinking, the misreading of the winds and allowing what Yeats called “the blood-dimmed tide” to swell. Could they have stopped it? Probably not. Could it have been stemmed so that it did less damage, saved some of the fathers and brothers, mothers and sons? Yes, almost certainly, yes.
Though her present-day article did emphasize the deaths and loss suffered by Iraqis, the numbers Rubin offered represented the floor, not the ceiling, of estimates. She wrote that “about 200,000 civilians died at the hands of American forces, Al Qaeda militants, Iraqi insurgents or the Islamic State terrorist group, according to Brown University’s Cost of War Project.”
This only includes violent deaths, and only of civilians. A peer-reviewed study in 2013 estimated that more than 400,000 Iraqi deaths from March 1, 2003 through June 30, 2011 were directly attributable to the war, with more than 60% due to violence and the rest to other war-related causes.
Meanwhile, Opinion Research Business (Reuters, 1/30/08) used polling methods to estimate that, only five years into the war, “more than 1 million Iraqis have died as a result of the conflict in their country since the US-led invasion in 2003.”
And the New York Times didn’t mention another dark part of the Brown University study: The war helped create more than 9 million Iraqi refugees and internally displaced people. Also unreported at the Times: US war and sanctions left an estimated one in 10 Iraqis disabled (Reuters, 1/21/10). In other words, however bleak a picture it might have painted, Rubin’s piece understated the catastrophe.
Selling the case for warNew York Times (9/8/02): “The attempted purchases [of aluminum tubes] are not the only signs of a renewed Iraqi interest in acquiring nuclear arms.”
Rubin also did not acknowledge that by the New York Times’ own admission (5/26/04), a year after the invasion, the paper had published numerous articles based on anonymous Iraqi informants that promoted false claims about Iraq’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.The magnitude of the Times’ role in selling the case for the Iraq War is staggering. A few of the dubious articles about Saddam’s weapons program involved the infamous reporter Judith Miller (9/8/02, 1/23/03, 4/21/03), who today works at the conservative Manhattan Institute, writing pieces for City Journal about the superiority of Red State policies (3/1/23) and condemning “cancel culture” (6/6/21).
Many of Miller’s key pieces of disinformation were co-written with Michael Gordon, who remained a lead journalist for the Times for many years, continuing to relay the charges of anonymous US officials against official enemies (FAIR.org, 2/16/07; Extra!, 1/13). Now he’s doing much the same thing for the Wall Street Journal (FAIR.org, 6/28/21).
After Gordon and Miller dutifully transcribed the fabricated case that Iraq was pursuing a nuclear bomb—a story generated by the office of Vice President Dick Cheney—Cheney was able to go on Meet the Press (NBC, 9/8/02) and issue dire warnings about a nuclear-armed Iraq, citing “a story in the New York Times this morning” (FAIR.org, 3/19/07).
When UN weapons inspectors failed to find the nonexistent WMDs prior to the invasion, the Times (2/2/03) dismissed the lack of evidence; after all, “nobody seriously expected Mr. Hussein to lead inspectors to his stash of illegal poisons or rockets, or to let his scientists tell all,” correspondent Serge Schmemann reported.
Times reporter Steven Weisman (2/6/03) praised Colin Powell’s deceptive UN presentation as an “encyclopedic catalog that reached further than many had expected.” A Times editorial (2/6/03) called it “the most powerful case to date that Saddam Hussein stands in defiance of Security Council resolutions and has no intention of revealing or surrendering whatever unconventional weapons he may have.”
Explaining why journalists didn’t ask President George W. Bush critical questions about the evidence put forward as justification for war, Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller (Baltimore Sun, 3/22/04) later explained, “No one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time.” (Bumiller is now the Times‘ Washington bureau chief.)
Deriding the oppositionThe New York Times (3/14/03) rounded up a bunch of “reluctant hawks”—all of whom had been reluctantly hawkish on the Gulf War 13 years earlier.
Other New York Times pieces derided the world’s opposition to war, with correspondent Elaine Sciolino (9/15/02) mocking “old French attitudes” like those of President Jacques Chirac, who “made it clear that he doesn’t think it is the business of the world’s powers to oust leaders simply because they are dictators who repress their people.”
While doing its best to ignore massive protests against the war (FAIR.org, 9/30/02), the Times highlighted supposedly surprising supporters of invasion. Under the headline “Liberals for War: Some of Intellectual Left’s Longtime Doves Taking on Role of Hawks,” Kate Zernike (3/14/03) argued that “as the nation stands on the brink of war, reluctant hawks are declining to join their usual soulmates in marching against war.” It cited seven people by name as “somewhat hesitant backers of military might”—every one of whom is on the record as having supported the 1991 Gulf War.
On the eve of war, Baghdad correspondent John Burns (3/19/03) declared, “The striking thing was that for many Iraqis, the first American strike could not come too soon.” Burns was the reporter who could glean the feelings of Iraqis about the invasion by viewing them on the street from his hotel room:
From an 11th-floor balcony of the Palestine Hotel, it was not possible to hear what the driver of the red Mercedes said when he was pulled over halfway down the block, but his gestures conveyed the essence powerfully enough. “Get real,” the driver seemed to be saying. “Look at the sky. Look across the river. The old is giving way to the new.”
Invasion advocacyThis fantasy of Saddam Hussein’s hidden WMDs (New York Times, 12/28/01) accompanied Richard Perle’s post-9/11 call for an attack on Iraq.
Things were no better in the opinion section. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (4/27/03) said after the invasion, invoking Saddam’s repression, “As far as I’m concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war,” and later (9/18/03) accused France of “becoming our enemy” for opposing the invasion.
Ex-CIA analyst Kenneth Pollack (New York Times, 2/21/03), who serves at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and was praised by New Yorker editor David Remnick (1/26/03) as the most clear-thinking invasion advocate, wrote that because of Saddam’s “terrifying beliefs about the utility of nuclear weapons, it would be reckless for us to assume that he can be deterred.” While “we must weigh the costs of a war with Iraq today,” Pollack advised, “we must place the cost of a war with a nuclear-armed Iraq tomorrow.”
Even as the nation was still in shock from the 9/11 attacks, Richard Perle (New York Times, 12/28/01), a prominent neoconservative and then chair of the White House’s Defense Policy Board, demanded action against Iraq, because Saddam maintained an “array of chemical and biological weapons” and was “willing to absorb the pain of a decade-long embargo rather than allow international inspectors to uncover the full magnitude of his program.”
The Times even gave column space (1/23/03) to then–National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to say “Iraq has a high-level political commitment to maintain and conceal its weapons.”
It’s no wonder that the Times, despite its liberal reputation, is remembered in antiwar circles as a public relations arm of the Bush administration.
‘Bumbling into conflict’“The world may never get a definitive answer” as to why the US invaded Iraq—if it waits for the New York Times (3/18/23).
Accompanying Rubin’s piece after the jump was an analysis by Max Fisher (3/18/23) and a spread of Iraq War photos (3/18/23). Fisher’s piece, headlined, “Two Decades Later, a Question Remains: Why Did the US Invade?” wondered:
Was it really, as the George W. Bush administration claimed in the war’s run-up, to neutralize an active Iraqi arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that turned out to not exist?
Was it over, as the administration heavily implied, suspicions that Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s leader, had been involved in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which also proved false?
Was it to liberate Iraqis from Mr. Hussein’s rule and bring democracy to the Middle East, as the administration would later claim?
Oil? Faulty intelligence? Geopolitical gain? Simple overconfidence? Popular desire for a war, any war, to reclaim national pride? Or, as in conflicts like World War I, mutual miscommunication that sent distrustful states bumbling into conflict?
“I will go to my grave not knowing that. I can’t answer it,” Richard Haass, a senior State Department official at the time of the invasion, said in 2004 when asked why it had happened.
Ultimately, Fisher wrote, “The world may never get a definitive answer.” After a lengthy examination of various officials’ and scholars’ thoughts about the question, Fisher concluded that it comes down to “a mix of ideological convictions, psychological biases, process breakdowns and misaligned diplomatic signals.”
Designed to obfuscateGeorge W. Bush’s Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were among the PNAC signatories demanding regime change in Iraq—as were Assistant Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Under Secretary of State John Bolton, the National Security Council’s Elliott Abrams, Cheney chief of staff Scooter Libby and several other Bush administration officials.
Like Rubin’s piece, Fisher’s piece seems designed to obfuscate any direct accountability for the devastation wrought by the war, leaning heavily on passive constructions and quotes, such as another from Haass: “A decision was not made. A decision happened, and you can’t say when or how.”
When Fisher asks, “Did the administration sincerely believe its rationale for war, or engineer it as a pretense?,” his conclusion—even after pointing out that the official rationale changed from Saddam Hussein’s purported involvement in 9/11 to his purported secret stash of WMD (and, later, to US democracy promotion)—is that “the record suggests something more banal”: that various senior officials wanted Hussein out “for their own reasons, and then talked one another into believing the most readily available justification.” It’s hard to see how talking each other into false justifications for pre-established goals isn’t far closer to “engineer[ing] it as a pretense” than it is to “sincerely believ[ing] its rationale.”
Later, Fisher writes, “Few scholars argue that Mr. Bush’s team came into office plotting to invade Iraq and then seized on September 11 as an excuse.” Again, this seems like splitting hairs at best. Fisher had just noted that neoconservatives represented by the Project for a New American Century (PNAC)—who later formed Bush’s inner circle—”now spoke for the Republican Party,” and that as far back as 1998, PNAC insisted that Hussein be removed from power. In a 2000 memo, PNAC suggested this might require “some catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor.”
Fisher’s piece reiterates some of the most prominent myths about the invasion rationale. He claims that during the Clinton administration, “Mr. Hussein had ejected international weapons inspectors”—an error that the New York Times has repeatedly had to correct (2/2/00, 9/17/02, 10/4/03, 10/8/03; FAIR.org, 10/7/03). As news outlets correctly reported at the time but later consistently misrepresented (Extra! Update, 10/02), the UN withdrew its inspectors from Iraq on December 16, 1998, because the United States was preparing to bomb the country.
Fisher also gives credence to the claim that Saddam Hussein
overstated his willingness to fight and concealed the paltry state of his weapons programs to appear strong at home and deter the Americans, who had attacked in 1998. But Washington believed him.
This theory that the Iraq War was caused by Hussein’s “bluffs” is not based on evidence (Extra!, 1–2/04, 5–6/04, 3–4/08), but rather on a desire to blame Iraq for the United States’ refusal to accept its repeated and forceful denials that it had any secret banned weaponry.
‘Carried and amplified’Adam Johnson (Real News Network, 3/17/23): “Not only have none of the hawks who promoted, cheerled or authorized the criminal invasion of Iraq ever been held accountable, they’ve since thrived: They’ve found success in the media, the speaking circuit, government jobs and cushy think tank gigs.”
Meanwhile, the only mention in the entire article of corporate media’s role was to acknowledge that the administration’s WMD “claims were carried, and amplified, by America’s major media outlets.”
Neither anniversary article brought up the burning question: If such a devastating war was based on such faulty information, shouldn’t there be some kind of accountability, not just inside the government but within the press, in order to ensure this never happens again?
That’s important, because while the New York Post and Fox News, drunk on the post-9/11 sentiment of the time, were able to rally their conservative audience behind the Bush administration, the New York Times‘ fearmongering was key to selling the idea of war to Democrats and centrists from Central Park West to Sunset Boulevard.
At the time of the invasion, despite the raging street protests, corporate media were unified in cheering for the president’s plan—FAIR found in the lead-up to the war that at four major television news networks, the number of pro-war guests on Iraq segments dwarfed skeptical voices (FAIR.org, 3/18/03). And much of the US public supported the war (Pew Research, 3/19/08). For a decent retrospective on the corporate press’ role in the lead-up to the war, one should glance at Al Jazeera’s Marc Lamont Hill (3/17/23) interviewing Katrina vanden Heuvel (publisher of The Nation), Norman Solomon (of the Institute for Public Accuracy) and former Telegraph commentator Peter Oborne.
But like the Bush administration, the Times and the rest of the corporate journalists who sold the disastrous war have never faced accountability.
Research assistance: Conor Smyth
The post 20 Years Later, NYT Still Can’t Face Its Iraq War Shame appeared first on FAIR.
Remember Ajit Pai, the former Verizon lawyer Trump put in charge of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)? When he gutted net neutrality rules and kneecapped the agency’s ability to regulate telecom monopolies, voters from across the political spectrum were outraged. The internet erupted in protest.
Democrats like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded to popular opinion by promising to restore net neutrality rules (The Hill, 3/20/19).
Millions of people from across the political spectrum called their elected officials and submitted comments to the FCC, and thousands took to the streets. It was a rare moment of genuinely popular public revolt that defied partisan DC logic. If there’s one thing everyone can agree on, it’s that we don’t want our cable or phone company screwing us over more than they already do, selling our browsing habits and real-time location to advertisers, or dictating what websites we can visit or which apps we use.
Indeed, the FCC’s net neutrality rules—banning Internet Service Providers from blocking apps, throttling, discriminating or charging scammy fees—were overwhelmingly popular with the general public, regardless of political views.
When Pai repealed those rules, Democrats capitalized on the moment, loudly proclaiming that they were the party that would stand up to Big Cable and their deep-pocketed lobbyists. In speeches and fundraising emails, they promised they would fix this mess if they regained the White House.
Trump lost the election. But astonishingly, two years into the Biden administration, Trump still more or less runs the FCC. Pai is no longer employed at the agency, but his disastrous policies remain firmly in place. And unless we rekindle some of that collective outrage we felt when net neutrality was repealed, it’s looking increasingly likely that those Trump-era handouts to abusive telecom giants will continue for the foreseeable future.
Dark money smearsRight-wing media responded to Gigi Sohn’s nomination with a homophobic smear campaign (NBC, 2/3/23).
Last week, Gigi Sohn, who had been Biden’s nominee to fill the FCC’s crucial fifth seat, withdrew her nomination. Sohn is an eminently qualified candidate and well-known public interest champion who has dedicated her career to closing the digital divide. She was also a historic pick: the first openly LGBTQ nominee to the position. With Democrats holding the Senate majority, she should have been swiftly confirmed.
Instead, her nomination languished, as she faced a months-long, industry-funded smear campaign. Front groups for cable and phone companies flooded swing states with false and misleading ads. Pundits painted Sohn as “anti-police” because she had liked a few tweets in support of Black Lives Matter.
The Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) piled on, painting Sohn as dangerous because she sits on the board of the highly respected Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which rightly opposes government backdoors in encrypted messaging (an issue the FCC has zero jurisdiction over, by the way).
The FOP has a longstanding reputation for “pay-to-play” lobbying. The group’s executive director, Jim Pasco, maintains a lucrative side business lobbying for corporations, which has sparked controversy when the FOP mysteriously adopts positions favorable to his outside clients. Pasco’s wife, Cybele Daley, was a registered lobbyist for AT&T as recently as 2009. She is currently the vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), copyright-maximalist lobbyists for Hollywood frequently criticized by Public Knowledge, the free expression nonprofit that Sohn co-founded.
The FOP has never been known to take a position on FCC nominations in the past. Its arrival to the fight seems suspicious at best.
Other groups opposing Sohn’s nomination are even more clearly paid shills for the telecom industry, like the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, which has been exposed in the past for “astroturfing” on behalf of telecom companies. Don’t forget these same companies were caught red-handed orchestrating a massive flood of fraudulent comments praising the net neutrality rules repeal that were submitted to the FCC in 2017, using real people’s stolen information.
Emboldened by industry-funded smears and Republican talking points, the right-wing media machine started cranking out even more slime, culminating in blatantly homophobic, QAnon conspiracy–style attacks attempting to paint Sohn as some kind of sexual deviant or predator. A particularly nasty and dishonest article in the Daily Mail (1/26/23) included a photo of Sohn and her wife.
Democrats could have stood up to these utterly disingenuous attacks. Party leaders could have forcefully condemned the smear campaign at any of the three Senate hearings that Sohn testified at, and made it clear that Senate Democrats wouldn’t allow homophobia and corruption to derail a qualified nominee’s confirmation process. Instead, they hung Sohn out to dry. Senate Democratic leadership, including Commerce Committee chair Maria Cantwell (D.–Wash.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D.–N.Y.), were shamefully silent about the homophobia and lies hurled at their party’s nominee.
The FOP’s leadership has a long history of racist and bigoted comments, and has routinely opposed police reforms. The organization endorsed Donald Trump for President. Twice. But in the end, a small handful of Senate Democrats chose to side with the FOP, Big Telecom and Fox News over labor unions, environmental groups, LGBTQ+ organizations, civil rights leaders, teachers, librarians, human rights advocates and small business associations—more than 400 in all—who supported Sohn’s confirmation.
And in the process, they handed Republicans a blueprint for how to sink any future nominee they don’t like, especially if they happen to be gay. It’s not just shameful, it’s an embarrassing strategic failure.
The battle for the netSo what happens next? Biden will have to nominate someone else to fill the FCC’s fifth seat. We can be sure that lobbyists for the likes of Comcast, Verizon and AT&T are already circulating their lists of “approved” candidates. And, given everything that has happened, we have every reason to be worried that Biden could take one of those names.
If the industry gets to install its preferred commissioner for the crucial fifth deciding vote, it will effectively own the agency that’s supposed to regulate it. Just like it did when Ajit Pai was in charge.
The stakes are too high to let the FCC coast on under policies set by Donald Trump (Vice, 11/17/21).
We can’t let that happen. The stakes are too high. The pandemic only exacerbated the digital divide, and ended any debate over whether access to affordable high-speed Internet is a “necessity” or not. Kids were sitting outside of Taco Bell using the wi-fi to go to school on Zoom. There is absolutely no reason we cannot ensure that every single child in this country has access to an internet connection they can use for school—except that for too long the agency tasked with protecting the public interest has been captured by the industry it’s supposed to oversee.
As Big Tech has gotten bigger, net neutrality has only become more important. While attention in DC has shifted from Comcast and Verizon to Amazon and Instagram, the problems with monopoly power and surveillance capitalism are widespread. Unless net neutrality rules are revived, it’s only a matter of time before Big Tech giants start cutting deals with Big Telecom gatekeepers, crushing competition from smaller players and startups and solidifying their dominance.
Beyond restoring Title II oversight and net neutrality protections, the FCC could use its rulemaking authority to crack down on cell phone carriers’ shady data collection practices. Stopping the collection and abuse of cell phone location data is one of the most concrete things the Federal government can do to protect the privacy and safety of people seeking, providing and facilitating abortions. One data broker was exposed selling the location data of people who had entered Planned Parenthood clinics. The FCC could also investigate and crack down on certain types of surveillance devices, like Amazon’s creepy flying Ring drones.
But they can’t do any of that until the Senate confirms a fifth commissioner. And they won’t do any of that if that fifth commissioner is a sleeper agent for the telecom industry. So it’s time to get organized.
This morning, more than 60 civil society organizations sent a letter to President Joe Biden, calling on him to “immediately put forth a new nominee” who:
- “has a history of advocacy for the public interest;
- “is free of industry conflicts of interest;
- “demonstrates a clear commitment to championing the rights of low-income families and communities of color;
- “and supports Title II oversight and laws that ensure the FCC the authority to prevent unjust discrimination and promote affordable access.”
When Biden nominated Gigi Sohn, it seemed like an opportunity to finally slam shut the revolving door between the telecom industry and the FCC. The industry saw this as a threat to their status as unregulated monopolies, so they threw money bombs and leveraged their immense influence in DC to kill her nomination.
Now all eyes are on Biden. Will he nominate another public interest champion who will implement his stated agenda at the FCC? Or will he start the revolving door spinning again? We’re about to find out.
ACTION ALERT: If you want to make your voice heard, you can use BattleForTheNet.com to call on President Biden to nominate another public interest champion for the FCC.
The post ACTION ALERT: Trump Rules Remain at FCC as Democrats Cave to Big Cable, Fox News appeared first on FAIR.
(CC photo: Chad Davis)
This week on CounterSpin: If there are ideas, tools or tactics that are part of both this country’s horror-filled past, and some people’s vision for its dystopic future, they are at work in Cop City. Over-policing, racist policing, paramilitarization, the usurping of public resources, environmental racism, community voicelessness, and efforts to criminalize protest (that’s some kinds of protest)—it’s all here. Add to that a corporate press corps that, for one thing, disaggregates issues that are intertwined—Black people, for instance, are impacted not only by police brutality, but also by the environment, breathing air and drinking water as we do—and seems intent on forcing a vital, important situation into old, tired and harmful frames.
Kamau Franklin is founder of Community Movement Builders, the national grassroots organization, and co-host of the podcast Renegade Culture. We’ll hear from him about Cop City and the fight against it.
CounterSpin230317Franklin.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of DC’s crime bill.
CounterSpin230317Banter.mp3The post Kamau Franklin on Cop City Protests appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative’s Kim Knackstedt about disability policy for the March 10, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230310Knackstedt.mp3Janine Jackson: Human rights advocates everywhere marked the death, March 5, of groundbreaking disability justice activist, spokesperson and policymaker Judy Heumann.
Obituaries rightfully noted meaningful advances Heumann played a role in, like the Americans With Disabilities Act.
Washington Post (3/6/23)
It rang a bit odd though to read in the Washington Post that Heumann, born in 1947, “came of age at a time when disabled people had restricted access to libraries, schools and public transportation, with limited opportunities for education or employment.”
Perhaps the outpouring of attention for Heumann’s life and work could encourage journalists to explore present-day restrictions, limitations, crises, confronted by people with disabilities—one in four adults in the country—along with what responses, including policy responses, are called for.
Kim Knackstedt is senior fellow at the Century Foundation and director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. She joins us now by phone from Washington, DC. Welcome to CounterSpin, Kim Knackstedt.
Kim Knackstedt: Hi. I’m glad to be with everyone today.
JJ: Well, I’m not making fun of that piece. But I was just struck by that “cast your mind back, if you can, to a time when disabled people didn’t enjoy all the freedoms…”
I guess my thought, just to start us off, is that. But also, Judy Heumann was emphatically not of the “wait patiently and progress will inevitably come” school of thinking, was she?
KK: Oh, no, no, not at all. Judy was definitely one to fight for what she wanted, and she was fiery. One of the words she loved to use was “feisty.” And she really went after what she knew was wrong.
And during her services yesterday—I was very lucky to attend and be in community with so many people from around the country, and by video, around the world—we got to hear so many stories about her, and every story had a note about her fighting for the rights of disabled people, and against the injustices that so many of us face.
Time (9/19/22)
JJ: And still face. And this is of course what I’m complaining about here, the treatment of disabled people as an afterthought in policy, in media, which I know is what you engage.
And it’s weird, given not only that so many people in the country are living with disabilities of varying kinds, but also because it’s a community that anyone can join at any moment. And, indeed, I’ve heard Covid described as a “mass disabling event.”
And I wanted to ask you, what is Covid showing us about policy responsiveness, about movement responsiveness? What are some of the impacts when the disabled community grows, as it were, suddenly in this way?
KK: I appreciate you pointing out that anyone can become disabled at any time, because that is part of what I think the US economy is actually facing right now, with the growth of the disability community in a very abrupt way because of Covid.
And we do have the largest influx of the community that we’ve seen in many, many years, and that has really caused the workforce to try to make an adjustment. And that adjustment’s been slow, it’s been difficult, because we have so many people that now cannot do the job that they used to do because of long Covid. And that is extremely difficult, not only for the entire, again, US economy, but for that person.
We’ve had some great pieces, actually, through one of the projects at the Century Foundation, called the Voices of Disability Economic Justice project, with people talking about this, and what it means to become disabled because of long Covid, and not be able to do the things you used to be able to do so easily every day.
Our policies have not changed fast enough to be able to support everyone. That includes our healthcare policies. That includes, now, our education policies. And it includes, again, those workforce policies and accommodations that people need.
Washington Post (7/23/22)
JJ: There was a thoughtful piece from last June in the Washington Post that talked about what supports and education veteran advocates can offer to “long haulers,” dealing with not just new problems, but with, as you’re saying, a new identity. And it also talked about tensions within the disability community, which as with many marginalized communities often finds itself struggling over limited resources. And now there are millions more people involved.
And it’s an interesting situation. But I just wanted to lift up—there was one quote in this piece from a guy who says long Covid gives a chance to make some updates to health policy, in part because the condition is affecting, he said, “a different mix of people than what we’ve seen in the traditional disability population.”
Now, I’m not trying to stir up trouble here, but it sounds a little like “we’re getting a better class of disabled now, not that ragtag group you’re used to,” and there’s an implication, in other words, that now maybe there will be the power to change things. And I guess that arouses mixed feelings in me, is what I want to say.
KK: It does. And I think there’s a couple ways to unpack that. One, there’s a narrative out there that the disability community are kind of fakers and takers. That’s a narrative that we have to undo, because it’s an incorrect narrative, and it’s a narrative that really doesn’t actually help, it only harms the disability community, because, again, anyone can become disabled at any point in their life.
That quote that you mentioned, it really ignores the fact that there’s a false narrative that’s already circulated about the disability community.
But I think, on the other side, what the quote does acknowledge is that having a whole new influx of people to the community gives a renewed energy, and a renewed movement, to the policies that are needed.
When all of the sudden you have a bunch of other people that have entered any community, any movement, there’s different energy behind it. You know, all of a sudden, we have senators saying, “I need this, I am part of this community. I guess now we need a bill on it.”
That’s very different, and we don’t always see that. And so we do get some of that renewed energy, and that’s really important. But at the same time, we have to balance that with the fact that we have a false narrative that exists. And that just breeds into the stigma against disability that we really need to try to overcome.
JJ: If the comment is partly acknowledging that some of the Covid long haulers have wealth, then one can, very sadly, ask, for how long?
The nexus between disability and poverty is central, and of course that’s key to the Collaborative’s work. I’m not sure that it’s really understood how policy choices—not disability, but policy choices—put disabled people in struggle, and keep them there. Can you talk a little bit about that?
Kim Knackstedt: “Undoing that entangled web of policies that really focus on keeping people with disabilities in poverty is extraordinarily difficult.”
KK: Yes, the problem is I could talk about that for hours! Disability and poverty are so connected, and some say the whole structure and the whole system is broken. Well, unfortunately, the whole system is actually working exactly how it was designed.
It is keeping disabled people in poverty because that’s how the system was structured. And so it’s not that the system was broken. The system has to be completely corrected. And what I mean by that is that so many of our policies have been designed to keep disabled people out of work, to keep disabled people from actually building wealth, and to keep disabled people from even getting the care that they need to live independently.
Some of our healthcare policies really actually preference institutional care, not living in a community.
So undoing that entangled web of policies that really focus on keeping people with disabilities in poverty is extraordinarily difficult, and that’s something that we have to do. Even outside of wealth, I would say, social and political capital that people hold? Leveraging that as we start to make some work on all of this is going to be really important.
JJ: CounterSpin listeners will have heard us referenced the “Medicaid divorce,” in which people have to get divorced in order to keep their health care because if they’re married, or they can’t get married, because together, they make too much money. It’s cruel, and it’s often hidden, I think, to other folks.
KK: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s so many choices that I think so many people do have to make, and it’s just how you start to allocate funds to try to just live day to day.
I mean, I acknowledge that I have privilege, because I work at a great place that has health insurance. But I also am a high health cost user; I have infusions that without insurance would be $30,000 a month. Thank goodness for insurance. I also have to spend a lot of money towards that, because I could never qualify for Medicaid to help pay for that.
So you think about, even though I acknowledge the privilege that I have to be able to afford what I do, the whole system is stacked against you when you are a person with a disability and trying to get the care you need, from the cost of prescriptions, the cost of specialists, the cost of getting home, community-based living, the cost of a direct care worker, trying to access the workplace you need. And the list goes on.
JJ: And the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative is saying there are things we can do, there are policy changes that we can make, that can, as you’re saying, not tweak and not fiddle with and “perfect” the system that we have, but really fundamentally overhaul it.
Century Foundation (1/12/23)
KK: Absolutely. So much of what we do does tinker on the edges, and we’re saying we need to stop just tinkering. And so much of disability policy is siloed, and again, we’ve been caught in this web that I mentioned before for so long.
Instead, what we’re saying is, let’s bring a lens of disability to all economic policymaking: food security, transportation, housing.
What we are trying to do at the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative is really bring a disability lens to all economic policymaking. And that’s really the goal, whether, again, you’re doing all of these different policies, it’s trying to embed disability into every single piece that you are working on.
So we are saying, let’s center the values that disabled people need, and bring that into all of our domestic policy work.
So I’m going to give an example. We believe every disabled person needs to have access to reliable, affordable and accessible transportation. That’s something that’s fundamental. And so we want to see that, no matter what the bill is, what the proposal is, what the law is, regulation—I could go on, right?—that’s the goal we want to see throughout. And the same thing for healthcare, access to healthcare they need, access to food.
And so we’ve developed a framework, we call it the Disability Economic Justice Policy framework; we want to see that embedded into domestic policymaking to really move the needle on how we think about policymaking with a disability lens.
JJ: Because every issue is a disability issue. And that goes for media as well as for policy. Every story that impacts disabled people should include awareness of the impact, is my feeling.
It’s not bad to have occasional reports that focus solely on disability or the disabled community. But if you’re reporting rent hikes or food prices or criminal justice, well, disabled people are in that reality, so they should be in the story.
Do you have any thoughts, finally, about media coverage?
KK: Yeah, I think it is really important for media coverage to think more about disability. I think one of the things we see is—you’re exactly right, there will be a story about something related to disability and then you won’t see something else until it’s very disability-centric, and everything in between ignores that disability exists.
And we know that that’s just not how disability is in our lives. Disability is part of the natural human experience.
And so, very much so, I think disability just needs to be embedded more into the stories that we hear about, and part of the narrative throughout everyone’s life.
I also would encourage, in the media, that it’s not about disability being an “inspiration.” I think that’s where the lean tends to go when there is a disability-centric story. And it’s just, disability is part of the life that we all live, and here’s the story that happens to be about a disabled person, or a narrative that we’re talking about.
And so those are some of the pieces that I think would be great to think about more.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Kim Knackstedt of the Century Foundation and the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative. You can find their work online at TCF.org. Kim Knackstedt, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
KK: Thanks for having me.
The post ‘The Whole System Is Stacked Against a Person With a Disability’ appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed CEPR’s Algernon Austin about race and unemployment for the March 10, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230310Austin.mp3Janine Jackson: The unspoken premise of most major news reporting is that people are all independent economic actors, making choices about what skills to acquire, what workplace to work at, what salary to negotiate. The economy, overall, reflects the range of those choices and their impacts. The idea that people find themselves in jobs or sectors with differing pay scales and workplace rights informs what news media see as acceptable states of affairs, and what they present as reasonable interventions.
Which is why it takes an active effort to see the role that policy has played, and does play, in shaping employment opportunities, and, what’s more, how using policy to help people would reflect not the insertion of the government hand into a hitherto untampered-with realm, but simply the use of policy to address a keystone problem.
Algernon Austin is the director for race and economic justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and author of, most recently, America Is Not Post-Racial: Xenophobia, Islamophobia, Racism and the 44th President.
He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Algernon Austin.
Algernon Austin: It’s a pleasure to be with you.
Ascent (2/19/23)
JJ: The headlines tell me that unemployment in the United States is at a record low, and you sort of seem uninformed or churlish to not acknowledge, if not celebrate, that.
But it’s important, isn’t it, to recognize the limits of that raw number? What and who is being obscured there?
AA: Absolutely. The unemployment rate, it’s a valid statistical measure. However, it’s important to recognize its limitations.
To be counted as unemployed, you have to be actively looking for work in the past four weeks. And if you have faced significant obstacles in finding work, or if you are unfortunate enough to live in some of our more economically depressed areas, then you’re not likely to be actively looking for work, because you’ve been rejected repeatedly from employers, or you look around your community and you know that there are no jobs available.
And for individuals in those circumstances, they stopped actively looking for work, although they would like to work. But even though they don’t have a job and would like to work, because they’re not actively looking for work, they are not counted as unemployed.
So in that way, the unemployment rate presents a significant undercount of the overall rate of joblessness. And the undercount is most severe in populations that, as I mentioned, face a lot of discrimination in the labor market, or live in more economically disadvantaged communities.
So that means that, although the Black unemployment rate has been consistently about twice the white unemployment rate for the last 60 years–so this two-to-one ratio has been a permanent, sort of structural feature of our economy–although that Black unemployment rate being twice the white rate is still a high rate, it still undercounts the Black joblessness by a significant degree.
So, if we had a count of Black joblessness, it would be a multiple, two, three, four times what the official Black unemployment rate is.
JJ: I wanted to ask you, because part of the celebration about the relatively low unemployment rate has said, “and this is also reflecting advances in terms of Black employment.” So what is the status, you’ve just indicated it, but comparative Black and white employment, or unemployment, is that changing, historically, that relationship?
CEPR (2/1/23)
AA: No, over the last 60 years—and I highlight 60 years because this is the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. And the title, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom—this is the march where Martin Luther King gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech—people forget that there were significant economic demands, including demands for jobs, at that march.
And unfortunately, the Black unemployment rate was twice the white unemployment rate in 1963. It’s about twice the white unemployment rate today. And it’s been about twice the white unemployment rate for all 60 years. So this is a serious structural problem in American society, and it’s a problem because of racial discrimination in the labor market.
I talked about the economically depressed communities; Black communities have been hurt significantly by the decline in manufacturing, because of deindustrialization, etc.
And the broader problem, remember, I said that there’s lots of joblessness that’s not being counted. Mass incarceration that hit Black communities, and Black men particularly severely, contributes to that hidden joblessness in Black communities. Because if you’re a Black man and you have a criminal record, it becomes very difficult for you to find work, among the Black populations that are not likely to be counted in unemployment statistics.
JJ: I want to talk to you a little bit about history, which is so relevant here, but often kind of dropped out. The history is there to be found, but it seems like only some things survive as a dominant narrative.
And one thing that has dropped out is the role that the government played with regard to jobs during the Great Depression. And I wonder if you could just tell listeners a little something about that, and the import of that history today?
AA: Yes, it’s important to recognize, people don’t fully recognize—this gets me to a sort of tangential issue—our discourse about the working class in the United States tends to be coded white, but the majority of Black people are working-class people, the majority of Latino people are working-class people. And increasingly, as our country becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, the working class is every day becoming more and more racially and ethnically diverse.
So we really have to change our thinking: When we think about working class, remember that we’re also talking about the majority of Black people, and the majority of the Latino or Hispanic population.
So the WPA, the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression, it’s really important for people to realize that in response to this massive economic downturn and massive high rates of unemployment, the government stepped in and directly created jobs for people.
And the positive thing about that is that it included Black people. And at the height of the WPA jobs program, over 400,000 Black workers were employed by the WPA.
So this is a really important example, because it shows that the federal government can create jobs, and can employ Black workers.
Algernon Austin: “Because a lot of Black joblessness is not counted in the unemployment rate, we still have a massive need for jobs in Black communities.”
Today, as I mentioned, even in a period of historically low unemployment rate for Black people, because the Black unemployment rate is still twice the white unemployment rate, and because a lot of Black joblessness is not counted in the unemployment rate, we still have a massive need for jobs in Black communities.
And the WPA shows us that the federal government can actually address this, through direct job creation, through subsidized employment programs, which is what the WPA was.
And I’m actually involved in a campaign that’s called Full Employment for All, that’s calling for the federal government to create a national subsidized employment program that’s targeted to communities that suffer from persistently high rates of joblessness, and people can find out about that, and sign on to it, at the website FullEmploymentForAll.org.
And although we’re talking about the importance and the crisis of joblessness for Black people, it’s important to recognize that there are other places across the country that also have significant levels of joblessness.
So, in Appalachia, you also have significant joblessness. In the Southwest, you can find several communities with high levels of joblessness. Among the Native American or American Indian population, you can find many of those communities suffering from high rates of joblessness.
President Biden, in his State of the Union address, talked about forgotten places and people. And so Full Employment for All is about, let’s target job creation to these forgotten places and people, and include them in the American economy.
JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, on the level of ideas and in terms of media, it’s seen as unserious or unsophisticated to say that you can’t understand why we have lots of people who want jobs and lots of jobs that want doing, and the idea that the government would play a role in connecting those things is somehow not serious.
And I just wonder how we fight that.
AA: Yeah, it’s like you said, I think, in your introduction, the government exists to serve the people, the government exists to make our lives better.
And, unfortunately, the American government does do that. But unfortunately, it does that primarily for the wealthy people who pay the lobbyists.
So the government is constantly enacting policies that help people–it’s often helping wealthy people via helping corporations.
But what we saw during the Great Depression, with the WPA, was the government working to help average working people. And we need more efforts to get our policymakers to enact policies that help average working people, or average people who would like to work, as I’m doing in the Full Employment for All campaign, making sure the government provides jobs for those people.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Algernon Austin; he’s director for race and economic justice at the Center for Economic and Policy Research. They’re online at CEPR.net. And that website we’ve discussed is FullEmploymentForAll.org. Thank you so much, Algernon Austin, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
AA: It’s been a great pleasure for me.
The post ‘Let’s Target Job Creation to These Forgotten Places and People’ appeared first on FAIR.
Federal Trade Commission chair Lina Khan is bent on holding Twitter and its owner, Elon Musk, accountable—and the right-wing outrage machine isn’t having it.
The FTC has been investigating Twitter’s security policies, the Washington Post (3/9/23) reported, “following an explosive whistleblower complaint accusing the company of violating a 2011 settlement that required it implement privacy safeguards.” The probe has expanded, the Post explained, since Musk’s takeover last year,
as former employees warned that broad staff departures of key employees could leave the company unable to comply with the agreements it made with the FTC to protect data privacy.
The New York Post (3/8/23) charged that “Big Brother” was going after Elon Musk for “dar[ing to] expose the federal government’s lies on Covid and its collusion with tech giants on Russiagate and Hunter’s laptop.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (3/8/23) called Khan “unrestrained.”
The New York Post editorial board (3/8/23) invoked George Orwell as it explained that in addition to “digging into Twitter’s layoffs,” the FTC is “also demanding all internal communications by, from or about Musk.”
Republicans see Khan’s probe as politically motivated against Musk, an outspoken right-wing partisan on issues like trans rights (Newsweek, 12/12/22) and labor unions (NPR, 3/3/22). Musk threw his support behind the Republicans in the most recent midterm elections (Politico, 11/7/22).
Intensified obsessionThis marks an intensification of the right’s obsession with Khan. Robert Bork, Jr. (son of the Supreme Court nominee) called for Congress to investigate her (Wall Street Journal, 3/2/23). As Bloomberg (3/2/23) reported, the US Chamber of Commerce, tech companies and Koch-backed groups have attacked her antitrust campaigns. It said:
Since 2021, Khan has been mentioned in 43 editorials, op-eds and letters to the editor in the Wall Street Journal. Jonathan Kanter, who heads the US Department of Justice’s antitrust efforts, appears in five. Khan’s critics have gotten personal at times, and some people say it’s impossible to ignore their sexist tone. “There is no doubt that Chair Khan is being subjected to what’s really a disproportionate level of critique that is not based in the substance. It’s really based in personal attacks on her gender, her race, age and then also the fact she is trying to use an agency’s authority to enforce the law, which has not been done for a generation,” says Morgan Harper, director of policy and advocacy at the American Economic Liberties Project, which supports strong antitrust action.
Christine Wilson wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed (2/14/23) saying she was resigning from as an FTC commissioner because Lina Khan hadn’t recused herself from a decision involving Meta after criticizing Meta’s acquisitions as a private citizen. But Wilson didn’t have any problem voting in favor of a Bristol-Myers Squibb acquisition after she worked on antitrust issues for the drug company as a private lawyer (Legal Dive, 2/15/23).
In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal (2/14/23) announcing her resignation, the FTC’s last Republican commissioner, Christine Wilson, painted Khan as a bull in a china shop, acting with “disregard for the rule of law and due process.” CNBC (2/14/23) reported:
Khan’s approach has come with risk, as most recently evidenced by the FTC’s failure in court to block Meta’s proposed acquisition of VR fitness app developer Within Unlimited. But those who support Khan tend to argue that if regulators win all their cases, they’re likely not bringing enough of them.
Wilson criticized the fact that Khan had not recused herself from an administrative proceeding on the Meta/Within deal based on her statements before joining the agency advocating for keeping the company from making future acquisitions. Wilson also admonished the two other commissioners, who supported her decision. The FTC ended up dropping the administrative proceeding anyway after failing to win a preliminary injunction in federal court.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (2/6/23) also ridiculed Khan for losing the case.
Mark Zuckerberg, chair and co-founder of Meta (formerly Facebook), has been a Republican punching bag for some while (AP, 8/8/21; New York Post, 10/13/21; Independent, 8/26/22). But the right presented Khan’s legal action against his company’s growth as overreach. The conservative National Taxpayers Union (2/1/23) called the FTC’s loss in the Meta case “a victory for innovators and startups.”
A mess to clean upThe right enjoys using Elon Musk’s Twitter to censor its foes (Intercept, 12/16/22) the way it pretends the left was able to do under the old regime.
Khan’s probe into Twitter has brought the vitriol to a new level, as the right paints Musk as their man on the inside of Big Tech, fighting perceived internet censorship of conservatives (Fox News, 12/19/22). As a result, while conservatives have railed against social media companies at election time, actual government action against Twitter is no longer welcome.
Progressives like Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren (CNBC, 3/8/19) and independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (Politico, 7/16/19) have long sought to break up Big Tech, so left and right agree, at least rhetorically, that Big Tech and social media companies have too much unchecked power. Khan, from her record, is acting on that sentiment.
There’s good reason for a serious regulator to see Twitter as needing supervision to ensure customers’ rights are being respected, and that one of the world’s richest humans has not amassed too much power. Here is just a taste of the mess Musk has caused:
- The departure of top security staff and roll outs of new policies under Musk has meant that Twitter is “exposing itself to a deluge of new security risks that could soon ramify into the public sphere, according to top cyber experts and those who’ve overseen cybersecurity at other companies” (Politico, 11/11/22).
- “The European Union told Elon Musk to hire more human moderators and factcheckers to review posts on Twitter” (Reuters, 3/7/23).
- Musk’s Twitter has censored journalists and left-wing activists (Intercept, 12/16/22; Independent, 1/29/23).
- Twitter “complied with an Indian government request to delete all links to a BBC documentary critical of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to journalists and free speech advocates in the country” (Hollywood Reporter, 1/24/23).
- Musk was forced to publicly apologize after he publicly mocked a disabled worker (AP, 3/7/23).
- Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Florida) asked Musk “how he plans to combat the rise of antisemitism on the social media platform” after Moskowitz said his “Twitter account received ‘hundreds of hateful, divisive comments’ after he posted a video clip of himself pointing out the spread of antisemitism on the platform” (The Hill, 2/10/23).
- Twitter has allegedly failed to make rent payments (Wall Street Journal, 1/23/23).
- Janitors at the company headquarters went on strike because “Twitter reportedly failed to negotiate new contracts with Flagship, the company responsible for hiring the janitors” (Gizmodo, 12/6/22), which, in addition to being an anti-labor practice, has meant unsanitary conditions (New York Post, 12/30/22).
Trying to ‘harass business’The right pretends to be opposed to Big Tech—but leaps to the defense of Facebook and Google when anyone tries to regulate them (Fox News, 1/30/23).
Republicans and the Rupert Murdoch empire want to portray themselves as defending Musk and Twitter against some kind of partisan inquisition, but the fact is that the right has always opposed Khan for her aggressiveness against corporate giants—whether Big Tech, anti–Big Tech or just big.
For example, the Wall Street Journal editorial board (1/8/23) railed against her campaign to curb noncompete clauses, a position the paper saw as support for organized labor. The paper (7/5/21) also accused her of simply trying to “harass business.” Walmart, a notoriously anti-union company, accused Khan’s FTC of “agency overreach” (Fox News, 8/31/22).
While Fox News (1/30/23) complained generally about the Biden administration’s overzealous antitrust action against Google and Meta, it took special aim at Khan, saying she wrote “a law school paper complaining about Amazon’s prices being too low.”
What her Yale Law Journal article (1/17) actually said, according to the New York Times (9/7/18), was that Amazon “should not get a pass on anticompetitive behavior just because it makes customers happy.” And since “monopoly laws have been marginalized…Amazon is amassing structural power that lets it exert increasing control over many parts of the economy.”
Fox also complained that Khan “lauded a far-left organization that…calls for universal basic income.” This policy actually exists in Republican-voting Alaska, and is discussed approvingly in the University of Pennsylvania business journal Knowledge at Wharton (5/10/18).
Murdoch and GOP sympathy for Musk is about corporate ownership class solidarity against Khan, whose mission riles the One Percent. This only makes Khan’s work on Twitter and so many other corporate giants seem all the more necessary.
The post Wrath at Khan: Right Sets Sights at FTC for Regulating Tech appeared first on FAIR.
When the New York Times (3/7/23) makes a claim based on anonymous US officials, other media take note—because everyone knows anonymous US officials wouldn’t lie to the New York Times.
The New York Times (3/7/23) on Tuesday ended its month-long boycott of veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s February 8 story claiming the US destroyed the Nord Stream gas pipeline.
The Times didn’t challenge Hersh’s story. It barely mentioned it. Instead, the Times reported “new intelligence” that “suggests” a pro-Ukrainian group was responsible.
No firm details are provided, simply speculation, and the only sources cited are anonymous US officials.
Hersh’s source also is unnamed, but is described as having “direct knowledge of the operational planning” of the operation. In contrast to the Times story’s lack of specifics, Hersh’s 5,000-word narrative provides extensive details of how US officials—at the direction of President Joe Biden—planned and executed the operation, using US Navy divers who used the cover of a NATO naval exercise in June to plant explosives, which were remotely detonated September 26.
Strikingly different treatmentThe response of the nation’s major news organizations to the two stories also couldn’t have been more different.
While big news internationally, Hersh’s story was not reported by any of the major US corporate broadcast networks—NBC, ABC and CBS—or the public broadcasters, PBS and NPR. Nor did the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, cover the story (FAIR.org, 3/3/23).
The Washington Post (3/7/23) proves that it too is able to find government officials willing to promote the official line with no accountability.
The Washington Post ignored Hersh’s story for two weeks, and then mentioned it (2/22/23) only after Russia cited Hersh’s story in calling for a UN investigation of the bombing. But the Post didn’t hesitate to follow the Times later Tuesday with its own story (3/7/23), headlined “Intelligence Officials Suspect Ukraine Partisans Behind Nord Stream Bombings, Rattling Kyiv’s Allies.” Like the Times, the Post relied solely on anonymous sources to attribute responsibility for the sabotage, who provided little in the way of details about how the bombing was accomplished.
In a striking example of how differently the large corporate news outlets treat Hersh, the Post credited its rival newspaper for breaking the story, but did not mention Hersh at all.
The Post story did add one significant development—that shortly after the Times story was published, German news media had reported that investigators in Europe “had identified a small team of saboteurs using a yacht rented from a company in Poland that was ‘apparently owned by two Ukrainians.’”
‘First significant lead’Fox News (3/7/23) also jumped on the Times story later Tuesday, but added nothing new. Hersh’s story was mentioned in two sentences at the end of the story and described as a “blog post” that “the White House last month dismissed….”
CNN (3/8/23) also reported the Times story within 24 hours, but with a new element: “The German prosecutors’ office told CNN Wednesday they searched a boat in January that was suspected of carrying explosives.” The CNN story did not mention Hersh.
If the New York Times says so, it’s news (MSNBC, 3/8/23).
That same day, MSNBC ran a segment featuring NBC News reporter Molly Hunter (3/8/23), who repeated the Times’ claim that its story was “the first significant lead” in the investigation of the bombing. It also failed to mention Hersh.
A statement from German officials confirming that investigators in January had searched a vessel suspected of carrying explosives used in the bombing was reported by NBC News (3/8/23) and the Associated Press. The AP dispatch was picked up by ABC News (3/8/23) and PBS (3/8/23). All credited the Times story; none mentioned Hersh.
NPR did its own report Wednesday (3/8/23), which referenced a high Ukrainian government official “questioning recent reports that a pro-Ukraine group was behind the undersea bombings.” The official was quoted saying the reports by the Times and Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper (3/7/23), which first reported the suspected involvement of a yacht, “had ‘lots of assumptions and anonymous conjecture but not real facts.’”
While giving voice to skepticism about the Times story, NPR did not discuss Hersh’s alternative take.
Summarizing the scorecard, all three major cable news outlets—CNN, MSNBC and Fox News—publicized the Times story within a day of publication. Of the five major corporate and public broadcasters, NBC, ABC, PBS and NPR carried the story; only CBS remained silent.
As for Hersh, the blackout remains, with the sole exception of the two sentences totaling 49 words shirt-tailed to the Fox News report.
AP embarrasses itselfWhat’s not known about Nord Stream explosions (AP, 3/8/23): how to spell Seymour Hersch [sic].
The Associated Press (3/8/23) finally mentioned Hersh’s reporting late Wednesday, in a round-up piece headlined “A Global Mystery: What’s Known About Nord Stream Explosions.” But the 176-year-old nonprofit cooperative news agency, which prides itself on unbiased reporting adhering to old-school journalistic standards of objectivity, managed to both disrespect Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner and one of the most famous investigative reporters in the nation, and embarrass itself by misspelling his name:
After months of few developments in the probes, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersch, known for past exposes of US government malfeasance, self-published a lengthy report in February alleging that President Joe Biden had ordered the sabotage, which Hersch said was carried out by the CIA with Norwegian assistance.
That report, based on a single, unidentified source, has been flatly denied by the White House, the CIA and the State Department, and no other news organization has been able to corroborate it. Russia, followed by China, however, leaped on Hersch’s reporting, saying it was grounds for a new and impartial investigation conducted by the United Nations.
The misspelling was not corrected until the next day.
Zero times any number is zeroSnopes* (2/10/23) has not yet run a piece criticizing the New York Times* article (3/7/23) for relying on anonymous sourcing.
AP wasn’t alone in casting doubt about Hersh’s story by stressing it is “based on a single, unidentified source,” while failing to note the Times piece also rested entirely on anonymous “US officials.”
A Business Insider piece (2/9/23) published the day after Hersh posted his story, derided his account of the bombing as an “evidence-free theory,” noting his claims “appear to rely on a single unnamed source.”
Republished by Yahoo! (2/9/23) and MSN (2/9/23), the Business Insider article was the primary source of an article by the factchecking site Snopes (2/10/23), with the headline “Claim That US Blew up Nord Stream Pipelines Relies on Anonymous Source.”
It can be argued that the New York Times was exempted from such criticism because it didn’t rely on just one source; the plural “US officials” appears 16 times in the story.
But if Hersh’s unnamed source has zero credibility, then so does each source included under the umbrella of “US officials” at the Times. The laws of mathematics should apply: Zero times any number is still zero.
The post Anonymous Sources Are Newsworthy—When They Talk to NYT, Not Seymour Hersh appeared first on FAIR.
CounterSpin230310.mp3Judy Heumann
This week on CounterSpin: “I wanna see feisty disabled people change the world.” So declared disability rights activist Judy Heumann, who died last weekend at age 75. As a child with polio, Heumann was denied entry to kindergarten on grounds that her wheelchair was a fire hazard. Later, she was denied a teachers license for reasons no more elevated. She sued, won and became the first teacher in New York to use a wheelchair. Media love those kinds of breakthroughs, and they matter. Here’s hoping they’ll extend their interest into the barriers disabled people face in 2023, and how policy changes could address them. We’ll talk with Kim Knackstedt, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and director of the Disability Economic Justice Collaborative.
CounterSpin230310Knackstedt.mp3March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963
And speaking of problems that aren’t actually behind us: You will have heard that the US is experiencing “blowout job growth,” and unemployment is at a “historic low,” with gains extending even to historically marginalized Black people. Algernon Austin from the Center for Economic Policy and Research will help us understand how employment data can obscure even as it reveals, and how—if our problem is joblessness—there are, in fact, time-tested responses.
CounterSpin230310Austin.mp3The post Kim Knackstedt on Disability Policy, Algernon Austin on Unemployment & Race appeared first on FAIR.
Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/19/22) invents an imaginary phenomenon in which young children are being trained in sexual practices by elementary schools. So whose “sexual fantasies” is he really talking about here?
In front of a graphic of fluffy pink handcuffs and “Kink for Kids” spelled out in blocks and crayon font, a red-faced Tucker Carlson (Fox News, 9/19/22) ranted about the story of a transgender Canadian high school teacher whose photos went viral on social media for wearing comically large prosthetic breasts to work.
This is a specialty of Carlson’s: taking one weird example of an individual’s behavior and attributing it to an entire movement or community to stoke moral panic. Carlson declared:
It’s hard to believe this is happening, but we’re sad to tell you it’s not just happening in Canada. You see versions of it everywhere, including in this country. And to be clear what this is, children being used as props in the sexual fantasies of adults.
From this single Canadian teacher’s cartoonishly inappropriate outfit, Carlson leaps—to teachers on social media talking about how they validate children when they disclose their sexualities and gender identities to them.
Then he leaps back to talking about pedophilia. This conflation is where the danger lies, both for LGBTQ individuals, and children who are actual survivors of sexual abuse.
What ‘grooming’ is—and isn’tThe term “grooming” has become a favorite of anti-LGBTQ politicians and right-wing media. Carlson said in the segment:
Some people describe what was happening, it is grooming. We’re not exactly sure what that means. But if it’s sexually abusing children, yes, that is what’s happening.
In fact, we do know what grooming means. The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN) describes grooming as “manipulative behaviors that the abuser uses to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse, and reduce the risk of being caught.” It involves isolating victims, gaining their trust, and desensitizing them to inappropriate touch, sex and other forms of abuse.
Teaching children that some kids have two moms, or that certain people identify with a gender that does not match the one assigned to them based on their body parts, is not grooming. Having a drag queen in theatrical makeup read books to them is not grooming.
Vince Everett Ellison, on Tucker Carlson Tonight (1/24/23) to talk about “endless lies,” claims Democrats “want you to castrate little boys and cut off the breasts of little girls.”
Age-appropriate discussions about bodies, boundaries and relationships have been a regular part of school curriculums. It’s the introduction of LGBTQ-related topics in these discussions that sparked hysterical headlines and TV rants. A Carlson guest, author and documentarian Vince Everett Ellison—whose latest film is about how voting Democrat will keep you from Heaven—said in a January screed (Fox News, 1/24/23):
This is a party that believes in this transgender grooming thing to a point where…they want you to castrate little boys and cut off the breasts of little girls, and they’re telling people they’re not going to be held responsible for this.
Not only is the depiction of young children being castrated and receiving mastectomies graphic, it’s also untrue. If “little” children—i.e., those entering puberty—express a desire to transition, doctors may put them on reversible puberty blockers (which have been shown to reduce suicidal ideation in trans youth). Surgeries for youth under the age of 18 are relatively rare, and generally only done with the consent of the patient, their guardian and a doctor. And of course the language aired on Fox isn’t only meant to suggest child abuse; it also deliberately denies the gender identity of the young person requesting the gender-affirming surgery.
‘Your kids are ours’Fox‘s Jesse Watters (9/23/22) interviews Mario Presents about his “Groom Dogs, Not Kids” T-shirt.
Fox‘s Jesse Watters, towards the start of his September 23 show, discussed the story of a Florida teacher convicted of sexually assaulting her 14-year-old student (Media Matters, 9/23/22). He moved on to bemoaning Covid school closures interrupting children’s education, then rounded out his segment by arguing that educating children about LGBTQ issues, like Critical Race Theory, is a form of Democratic indoctrination:
Sex and CRT become the new math and science. Kids are learning racism instead of reading. Do you think parents are pissed off about this? Of course, why wouldn’t they be? But, when they speak up, Democrats tell them to sit down, shut up and stay out of education: “Your kids are ours.”
To help him make his argument, Watters brought on Mario Presents, a “concerned uncle” who condemned LGBTQ education at a California school board meeting. Watters asks Presents about his shirt—which read, “Groom Dogs, Not Kids.”
“We love a pretty pet, but we don’t love kids being sexual,” Presents replied. “We don’t love…confusing them. We want kids to just be themselves.”
Presents also praised the work of “Gays Against Grooming” a conspiracy theorist, far-right operative -run anti-trans group masquerading as a grassroots organization (Media Matters, 2/7/23).
Validating a child’s stated identity, preferred name and pronouns is not “grooming.” There is, of course, nothing more inherently sexual about being homosexual or transgender than there is about being heterosexual and cisgender.
Dehumanizing mythsJulia Serano (Medium, 11/29/22): “The ‘grooming’ charge—as well as the related accusation that we are ‘sexualizing children‘—insinuates that LGBTQ+ people (but not cis-hetero people) are inherently sexually ‘contaminating’ and ‘corrupting.'”
But these far-right tropes aren’t new. Baselessly accusing a group of people of one of the worst crimes imaginable is a pretty surefire way to dehumanize them. Stigmatizing queer people by claiming they are sexually deviant is an age-old tactic. As Julia Serano notes in her blog for Medium (11/29/22), the “groomer” accusation recalls late 19th-century pseudoscience that claimed stigmatized people—like queer people, sex workers, poor people and disabled people—were evolving backwards, and that the mere exposure to them could make you evolve backwards, too.
The idea that merely learning about LGBTQ people and identities “causes” children to become queer has also been debunked. As Serano points out, several peer-reviewed studies have debunked the concept of transgender “social contagion,” an idea coined by a trans-skeptical parent online in 2016 and elaborated in a 2018 paper, “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD),” by Lisa Littman. Flaws in the paper were called out in three peer-reviewed studies (Restar, 2020; Ashley, 2020; Pitts-Taylor, 2020), and the journal that published it later issued an apology and correction (PLoS, 3/19/19).
Serano also draws on earlier research to point to the likelihood that children like those in Littman’s study were most likely already trans or gender-diverse in some way, and seeking out access to information and support from peers similar to them. At least one study debunked the idea that same-sex attraction “spreads” among peer groups (Brakefield et al., 2014).
Serano also discusses the phenomenon of reduction of restraint. When a behavior is stigmatized, people who are inclined to engage in it are more likely to refrain:
In a 2017 essay, I argued that the current increased prevalence of trans people is akin to the increase in left-handedness (from 2% to 13%) during the 20th century once the stigma and punishment associated with being left-handed abated.
Hypocrisy and hatredThe incorrect use of the term “groomer” is rooted more in thinly veiling right-wing media’s anti-LGBTQ hatred than it is in an actual desire to protect children from sexual content—or other dangers. As Serano astutely summarized in her blog:
They also often use “grooming” in reference to completely non-sexual things, such as rainbow flags hanging in classrooms, efforts to accommodate trans students, or when schools have nondiscrimination policies protecting LGBTQ+ people. While anti-trans/LGBTQ+ campaigners may frame their interventions in terms of “safeguarding children,” they rarely if ever express similar concern over actual cases of grooming and [child sexual abuse], the overwhelming majority of which are perpetrated by cis-hetero men who are family members or close acquaintances of the child.
The issue clearly isn’t about discussions or experiences involving cis-heteronormative sexuality or gender. It’s queerness itself that’s believed to be perverted. The Murdoch empire demonstrates this.
A father bragging about taking his nine-year-old son to Hooters didn’t prompt concern from the New York Post (11/23/22) about sexualizing children, but rather an array of boob puns.
A New York Post article (11/23/22) profiled a British father who took his 9-year-old son to Hooters to celebrate his good grades. “Tit for tot?” the article begins, later describing the restaurant as a “ta-ta temple.” It highlighted both critical and supportive responses to the stunt.
Teaching kids about gender diversity causes hosts like Fox’s Laura Ingraham to beat their chests in preparation for a culture war (Fox News, 4/7/22), and parents taking their kids to a drag show “normalize[s] the sexualization of kids” (10/19/22), yet this story evokes nothing more than a few lighthearted boob puns from Murdoch’s New York Post.
Meanwhile, children’s actual physical safety takes a backseat to “Don’t Say Gay” hysteria on Fox. Media Matters (4/1/22) documented Fox hosts melting down over Disney’s public opposition to Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill in at least 53 segments over a week in 2022, accusing the company of grooming, indoctrinating and sexualizing children.
To compare, in December, a bipartisan bill supporting the welfare of child sex abuse victims was introduced in the House. Twenty-eight Republicans—including Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who have both referred to pro-LGBTQ advocates as “groomers” (CPR News, 11/22/22; Sacramento Bee, 11/25/22)—voted against the now-passed Respect for Child Survivors Act, which seeks to improve how the FBI handles cases of child sexual abuse (Newsweek, 12/22/22). FAIR’s Nexis search of the legislation’s name turned up no results on Fox News in the weeks preceding and following the voting.
The New England Journal of Medicine (5/19/22) found that gun violence had become the No. 1 cause of death in children and adolescents in 2020. A Nexis search of Fox transcripts found no mentions of that report in the week following its release. Only after the Uvalde elementary school shooting, which occurred on May 24, was the report mentioned in passing (Fox News, 5/29/22, 5/30/22).
Centrist media complicity Centrist and neoliberal media have also been slow to call anti-LGBTQ advocates’ bluff. While the New York Times (4/7/22, 5/31/22) has published op-eds that confront the term “groomer” as harmful to both the LGBTQ community and victims of child abuse, its news section continues to both-sides the issue, quoting Republican use of the term with little critique.
In a piece that sterilely chronicled right-wing political attacks on LGBTQ rights, the Times (7/22/22) reported:
Officials and television commentators on the right have accused opponents of some of those new restrictions of seeking to “sexualize” or “groom” children. Grooming refers to the tactics used by sexual predators to manipulate their victims, but it has become deployed widely on the right to brand gay and transgender people as child molesters, evoking an earlier era of homophobia.
Washington Post (4/5/22): “In the charged debate over what and how children should learn about sexual orientation and gender identity, some mainstream Republicans are tagging those who defend such lessons as ‘groomers,’ claiming that proponents of such teaching want children primed for sexual abuse.”
The article later went on to briefly cite a survey by the Trevor Project that showed the staggering suicidality rates of gender non-conforming youth. However, the piece ultimately treated the issue as a political game, outlining Republican tactics and the risks they face of losing centrist votes due to homophobia. It ended with a quote by Michigan Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, who is calling for legislation that allows parents to sue school districts that host drag shows (despite no evidence of any district doing so). “We’re taking the first step today to protecting children,” Dixon said, getting the last word.
At the Washington Post (4/5/22), the article “Teachers Who Mention Sexuality Are ‘Grooming’ Kids, Conservatives Say” devoted its first 12 paragraphs to coverage of anti-trans bigots using “groomer” rhetoric. As FAIR (4/12/22) pointed out:
It barely matters that the Post brought in some “experts” later to offer the “other side”—that actually talking about these things in fact helps curtail sexual abuse (which in schools primarily happens at the hands of heterosexual male teachers, noted all the way down in the 37th paragraph of the Post article) and bullying against LGBTQ+ kids. In giving the GOP the headline and the (extraordinarily lengthy) lead, Natanson and Balingit gave a bigoted and dangerous campaign the right to frame the story as a debate with two somehow comparable sides.
Other outlets are sometimes even worse. NY1 (6/16/22) platformed a Queens council member who called drag queen story hours in schools “grooming.” The Salt Lake Tribune (10/21/22) dedicated a whole article to outlining Utah politicians’ moral panic about drag shows. It quoted write-in Washington County clerk/auditor candidate Patricia Kent in the unhinged headline: “They are grooming our children for immoral satanic worship.”
The real dangerNBC*‘s Today* (5/9/22) on “grooming”: “Misusing the term also puts people, particularly children and teenagers, at risk of being groomed and eventually victimized.”
LGBTQ people are nearly four times more likely to be victims of violent crime—including sexual assault—than their non-LGBTQ counterparts. They’re nine times more likely than non-LGBTQ people to be victims of violent hate crimes. The November 2022 mass shooting at Club Q in Colorado Springs is only one recent example of this danger.
Misusing the term “groomer” is also counterproductive to helping real victims of child sexual abuse. While it didn’t directly address LGBTQ education, a Psychology Today piece (4/10/22) asserted that referring to Disney movies, sex education and other sexual content as “grooming” is clinically inaccurate, and has the potential to make it “more difficult to detect and identify actual manipulative behaviors and prevent actual sexual offending.”
NBC’s Today (5/9/22) published a laudable piece on the topic based on an interview with Grace French, a former dancer and gymnast whom USA Gymnastics national team doctor Larry Nassar groomed and molested. She explained why careless use of the term is harmful to survivors like her:
It’s so incredibly important to use this term correctly, because if we don’t understand it—and we have these assumptions about what it can or can’t be—then it’s harder and harder for grooming to be identified, and perpetrators are going to be able to get more access to children and to victims.
The New York Times (5/31/22) echoed this sentiment with a guest essay from a survivor, who concluded:
If we can’t agree that the use of these words is sacred and worth protecting from daily politics, we are telling one another that our deepest, most intimate, heart-wrenching wounds are empty—and that we may as well be, too.
Conservative politicians’ and right-wing media’s reckless use of the term “grooming” is intentionally inaccurate and dehumanizing. It not only harms LGBTQ people, but also the children these figures claim to be fighting to protect.
The post Right-Wing Media’s ‘Grooming’ Rhetoric Has Nothing to Do With Concern for Children appeared first on FAIR.
Janine Jackson interviewed the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition’s Makani Themba about Jackson, Mississippi’s crisis for the March 3, 2023, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
CounterSpin230303Themba.mp3Janine Jackson: So this is CNN on February 17: “And ahead, the plan to create a court system for the wealthy and mostly white parts of Jackson, Mississippi, and separate from the system for the mostly Black community.”
It’s hard to know how to respond. For sure, it’s good that CNN is choosing to point its national audience’s attention to what’s happening in Jackson. But at the same time, if it’s not too much, why is a deeply anti-democratic, racist action just a sort of blip on the evening news, like a new drink at Starbucks?
Mississippi Bill 1020 gives the state of Mississippi the control to appoint systems, and Jackson Mayor Chokwe Lumumba says it would be less than honest to call the effort “anything other than racist.”
New York Times (2/20/23)
Which leads us to headlines like the New York Times on February 21: “In Mississippi, Racial Outrage at Court Plan.” Well, CounterSpin listeners will likely be attuned to the difference when journalists use “racial” when “racist” would be the more appropriate word, and framework, to use.
So what does all this mean in the story of Jackson? And what questions and conversations would help us understand what’s going on there, and point us in the direction of a useful response?
Makani Themba is a Jackson resident and a volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She’s also chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies, which is based in Jackson. She joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Makani Themba.
Makani Themba: Well, I’m so glad to be back. And I’m so grateful that CounterSpin is still going strong. Thank you.
JJ: Absolutely. You know, we keep on keeping on.
I just feel, in this case, that a lot of folks would appreciate some story, some understanding, about what’s actually happening, and how we got to this point.
If I read reporting today, it’s about water treatment, and then about governance. But how would you bring somebody up to speed, who was maybe just looking at the latest headlines?
IBW21 (3/2/23)
MT: I think one of the most important things to understand is that HB 1020, which I know has gotten most of the media attention, is one of about a dozen bills, a dozen bills, that the state legislature and the governor have really, it feels like a sort of gun. It’s like artillery pointed at our city, to be honest. It’s like legislative weaponry.
And these bills, which include 1020, do all kinds of damage. 1020, I think, got a lot of folks’ attention, because it basically creates a new governance structure in the middle of the city that’s a predominantly white area, northeast Jackson. It also includes our downtown, where the Capitol is, and all the way up to the border of Ridgeland, Mississippi, which is the neighboring city, and actually into a portion of Ridgeland—a new jurisdiction which is called the Capitol Complex Improvement District.
It originally came out as a way to make sure that the Capitol had resources to do, you know, gardening, and some improvements for beautification. And the state came back after the City of Jackson, the residents of Jackson, the mayor of Jackson, had fought really hard to get federal dollars to finally come directly to Jackson to address our water issues. Because money was coming into the state for water infrastructure, but that money was not getting to Jackson, even though it was a primary reason why the money was coming in.
So that was the context, right, that we were able to work with Congress to come around the state, because they were blocking the resources; they even created a special process, just for the City of Jackson, to have to have approval for the use of funds that were dedicated to the city.
And so we were able to get around that, and get a sizable appropriation, about $600 million, actually, to address what is about a $2 billion problem. But we were excited. We were planning, we were there.
And it seems like this is not only revenge for figuring out a way to be resilient, and just address the problem without having to deal with the state and all of their shenanigans, but the set of bills, taken together, not only create this governance structure, [they] take away revenues from the city.
There are other bills that restrict our use of our sales tax revenue to only water infrastructure. So we’re not able to fix roads, or do anything else with it. And there’s no other city with that kind of restriction, where they say this is what you spend with your revenue, right? That’s not something happening anywhere else in Mississippi.
It also creates a police force that has jurisdiction over the city of Jackson, and over the Jackson Police Department. And they say the reason why they’re doing all this is to try to address the crime in Jackson. But that doesn’t seem to be true, because crime, one, is actually going down, and when crime was at the record high that it was at a couple of years ago, the state was not engaged at all, except to use it as a way to talk bad about us.
The other thing I think people should understand is that Jackson, like many majority Black and majority brown cities, folks denigrate those cities and defame those cities as a way to devalue, not only the people, but the property, the business, the commerce that happens there, because they don’t want the competition. So I think that’s important for people to understand.
So this whole array of bills—they even have a bill that restricts how the mayor can veto things or not. It’s not just about the water, because then I think it would be a different kind of response.
And the other thing is another bill that actually seizes the money that Congress allocated to the city, and creates a Regional Water Authority that is not responsible for addressing the problems in Jackson, it’s only responsible for receiving the money.
And the governor will have three votes on this commission. The lieutenant governor, who they’re in lockstep, has two votes. And this is a nine member commission. The mayor has four appointments, but two of them are dedicated to two other cities, so really Jackson has two votes on a nine-member regional handoff for money that was allocated directly to the city.
So they’re seizing those funds, as they have done other federal monies. What I also want people to understand is, there’s no law against this. There’s no law against this.
JJ: Exactly. So if we had a conversation about community needs, what would that look like? Who would be in that conversation? The conversation is like, oh, the community failed. But that’s not the story. And if we were going to talk about ways forward, we would, I believe, include different voices. And I just want to ask you, what could that conversation look like?
MT: First of all, I would love to see more investigative reporting and less punditry about it.
JJ: Say it.
The Nation (2/16/23)
MT: That’s important. Because it’s easy to make this, and I know in my own writing I talk about this, as a David versus Goliath story. And it is, in a way.
Jackson doesn’t have the votes. This is a supermajority Republican state house that does all the kind of ill they want, even though, because of the pressure from outside the state and within the state, there’s been some negotiation, but we’re still facing the brunt of the awfulness that all of these bills combined contain.
But yes, so what happens with the money when the federal government gives money to Jackson? Who uses it? Why don’t we see it? And why is that OK? And also, we’re not the only state that experiences these kinds of shenanigans, this kind of misappropriation of funds. All over the place—Michigan’s an example, Texas is another example.
States make applications to the federal government, using the problems of their communities of color, that basically happened because of the lack of investment, which is the first step. And then the extraction—because it’s one thing to not invest, but in Mississippi, they literally extract what they want from the city.
So when this money comes in, they extract that money and say, OK, well, great, we’ve got this money, we talked about the problems. And now we’re going to take this money and make communities that already have smooth roads smoother, already have good water infrastructure even better. We’re going to keep up with that, and then blame the folks—for what they’ve stolen from us.
Where’s the investigative reporting that looks at the documents, that FOIAs the application, that tracks it? And I’m so grateful for the work that the Clarion Ledger has done around the welfare scandal, because that would have never been uncovered had it not been for investigative reporting.
Makani Themba: “If there was really investigative reporting around what happened in Mississippi, folks would see a pattern of theft and extraction from the low-income people, from Black people, from brown people.”
But I think if there was really investigative reporting around what happened in Mississippi, folks would see a pattern of theft and extraction from the low-income people, from Black people, from brown people. It isn’t even that the white communities in Mississippi are benefited, because many of them do not.
I think that they would discover that a few businesses, a few people, a few politicians are benefiting from this, and most people are not. And how do you have a state that’s against Medicaid? Right? I mean, healthcare for their folks.
I think that more investigative journalism would nail these kinds of stories, and that it’s been investigative journalism in the past that’s helped lift up what’s happening in places like this.
And you know, like you think about, we would not know who Fannie Lou Hamer was, if folks weren’t telling the story outside of Mississippi. Because if it was up to them—I mean, this was a state that was trying to keep Sesame Street from coming on the air because it was too forward, too progressive, who actually had to be sued by folks in Mississippi—including the late Everett C. Parker, who media activists actually get an award in his name—they sued television stations in Mississippi in the ’60s, because they would literally not show anything about the civil rights movement, or the marches, or what was going on on the news.
And they had to sue to force that, and they would actually block out national news coverage in Mississippi of these stories. So we’re dealing with a long legacy.
So journalism is critical, good journalism, investigative journalism, or some people would say actual journalism, is critical to exposing this kind of theft and dishonesty.
And also just the issues of democracy. What does it mean to be in a state where there’s a Republican supermajority that does not reflect the proportions of who lives here at all?
Time (9/13/22)
JJ: When I see a headline, like Time magazine’s, “The Mayor of Jackson,” I guess it said, “Had a Racial Vision for His City”—OK, all right, whatever—“but the Water Crisis May Have Put It Out of Reach.”
So when I see that headline, what I hear that telling readers is, we tried to do it, and we failed. And so stop thinking about that.
So you can only talk to people who are interested in change, and media are just maybe not the way to do that. And yet so many people that we talk to, their agenda, their understanding of what is politically possible, is set by media, and it’s media saying, oh, hey, the mayor of Jackson wanted to do something, but he can’t. And that’s their understanding of, well, I guess we shouldn’t even try.
MT: Fortunately, Time magazine is not going to dictate to us what we might do, thank God. And I think, in many ways, the world was captivated by Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba’s vision around Jackson being the most radical city in America. And that radical vision for the world was very compelling, and also the story of Mississippi, right? The story of Mississippi is everybody’s, deep down.
I think that him articulating that, when he was first elected, gave folks a different view for a moment, right, of this is a place where there’s been resistance. He’s not the first person to articulate that.
In fact, Mississippi’s radical legacy has roots in Reconstruction. The state had the most radical constitution in the country during Reconstruction, and a majority Black legislature, all those things. And then, when the Confederacy took back the state in 1890, that’s the kind of governance we’ve been dealing with ever since. But they don’t represent the majority of the state, and they never have.
And so I think that it’s not true that the water crisis threatens our—and I would say, collectively, Jackson’s—radical agenda, because another convention of corporate media, and oftentimes storytelling, is to reduce it down to one person, when he was always part of a movement and a legacy and a history that many, many, many, many people are involved in.
That what threatens the agenda, so to speak, has been Jim Crow politics, and that the water crisis is a manifestation of Jim Crow politics.
You have a water crisis because there’s no investment in infrastructure when there should be, and those decisions are racialized.
I think that’s the other piece of the story, is that folks are not dealing with how deeply racialized the work, the legislature’s agenda—and I shouldn’t say the whole legislature, let me be clear, the Republicans, because it’s interesting, in Jackson, almost all the Democrats in both houses are Black. Guess why.
So we have this essentially apartheid approach to governance that has been in effect since 1890, with some breakthroughs, with some fights, and the Voting Rights Act was really critical to helping things move forward.
And it’s really been the folks in Mississippi and Alabama, whose blood was on the line, who made that legislation happen, and I want to be clear about that. The whole nation owes Mississippi and Alabama a debt for the elevation of democracy. That’s critical to understand.
And so we look at that, and I want to see reporting about that racialization, right? I want to see reporting about how this paradigm of whiteness and anti-Blackness is driving the policy agenda.
You know, people want to call it “Trumpism.” But this was Trumpism before Trump. This is where he got it from.
JJ: This is not new.
MT: And Jeff Sessions in Alabama, and from this Jim Crow legacy.
And that’s the crisis that we’re in. There would be no water crisis if there was equity. There would be no water crisis if the state of Mississippi had any kind of ethics, and allocated the money which they received from the federal government to the places where there is a problem.
And you think about it, how crazy is it that you won’t invest money where the problem is, and fix the problem? But that is kind of politics as usual—not just in Mississippi, but all over. And that ought to be the crime.
Jackson Undivided Coalition
Look for the hashtag #jxnundivided. You’ll see that online. That will let you know where the petition is, and also IBW21.org.
I have an extensive piece that has how people can get involved, as well as a link to the petition site. So there’s an article there that has a link to the petition drive.
We’re asking everybody to please sign and share it. And it also goes through the list of bills, and there’s two petitions listed in this piece. One is a petition to the state around this attack on Jackson.
The other, and this is, I think, really important as well, is a petition by the family of Jaylen Lewis. Jaylen Lewis was a 25-year-old Black father of two who was killed by the Capitol Police, basically execution-style. And his family is still looking for answers.
It happened in September. There was a witness, who is why we know what we know. But the police themselves have not released any findings, and are supposed to be investigating it. And so there’s a petition there as well for Jaylen Lewis.
And that’s one of the reasons why we’re so concerned about the Capitol Police having jurisdiction. They have a police chief who’s not accountable to anyone in the city of Jackson. They’re appointed by the attorney general of the state.
And so there’s a whole range of issues that are just so problematic about this, so that not only will we have this unelected, again, governing body over a big part of what will then not be a part of Jackson, but still in Jackson, right, where we go to downtown, where we shop, all of these kinds of things.
But we’ll have this occupying force that’s not accountable to any of the residents at all, that’s already shot several folks, and killed one in just the last few months.
JJ: We’ve been speaking with Makani Themba. She’s a volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition, as well as chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies. Thank you again, Makani Themba, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
MT: Thank you.
The post ‘The Water Crisis Is a Manifestation of Jim Crow Politics’ appeared first on FAIR.
“Reconsider travel” to Mexico, asks USA Today (10/2/22)? Cancun has a relatively high homicide rate, but it’s 24% lower than Baltimore’s, which we haven’t seen the paper warning tourists away from. Cozumel, meanwhile, has a homicide rate lower than 38 major US cities.
Planning a trip to Mexico? If you read the news these days, you would think that Americans ought to be terrified of the popular tourist destination.
Headlines abound like “Killing of Artist Brothers Shatters Mexico City’s Veneer of Safety” (Guardian, 12/23/22) and “Reconsider Travel? Safety Experts Talk Violence in Mexico Tourist Spots” (USA Today, 10/2/22).
Of course, a headline isn’t the text of an article, but it’s frequently all readers see, and their constant repetition about the alleged dangers posed by simply being in Mexico is disturbing.
Most recently, you might have seen a version of “US Issues Strongest Possible ‘Do Not Travel’ Warning for Mexico Ahead of Spring Break” (LA’s Fox 11, 2/9/23) in a local news report headline. But read down to just the first line, and you’ll see that the warning is for only six of Mexico’s 31 states, not for the entire country—nor does it apply to Mexico City, by far the country’s largest metropolis, which is in its own federal district.
Nonetheless, the article goes on to say, “Other countries that are under the same highest-level travel warning include Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Ukraine, North Korea and Syria.”
Take a breath, Fox 11.
One of the most-visited countriesAP* (via ABC*, 2/21/23) offers news you can use, if you’re a Playa del Carmen bar inspector.
Isolated incidents, like the murder of a US resident in Zacatecas (CBS News, 1/25/23) and the possible extortion and death under mysterious circumstances of a US lawyer near Tijuana, described in the Fox 11 article above, do happen, particularly in the parts of the country where cartel violence is out of control.
But this must be placed in context. Mexico is a country—yes, one with social violence—that is consistently among the most visited in the world, in large part due to US tourists. The country had 32 million visitors in 2021, which was down from a pre-pandemic high of 45 million.
While they’re often happy to produce click-bait headlines that spark fear in potential travelers, many corporate media outlets seem less interested in giving those readers any sense of what level of risk the average tourist visiting a popular Mexican tourist destination might actually face.
Consider the article, “Bar Employees Stabbed Inspectors at Mexico Resort” (AP, 2/21/23). The AP devotes four of seven paragraphs to providing context, which offer that Playa del Carmen “has long had a reputation for rough and dangerous bars,” “has long had a problem with illicit business,” and has been the site of two shooting attacks in the last five years, at least one of which killed tourists.
That emphasis certainly suggests that tourists to Playa del Carmen ought to be worried about being shot while there. The article does not offer the context that Playa del Carmen is in the state of Quintana Roo, which the State Department puts in the same travel advisory category as France. Or that according to the US State Department, four US tourists were murdered there in 2021 (the last full year for which there’s data)—out of some 4.8 million visitors from the States that year, making homicide on a trip there literally less than a one in a million chance.
Spring break crime crisisFox News(2/21/23) paired a report about increased police patrols in Playa del Carmen with video of a Polish tourist climbing an off-limits pyramid in Chichen Itza, in a different state.
Fox News (2/21/23), predictably, went even further, offering, “Mexican Beach Town Announces Major Crackdown Amid Country’s Crime Crisis Ahead of Spring Break.”
In case you miss the point about the ginned-up crisis, and whom it purportedly affects, the article was paired with a video of a white European tourist, climbing the steps of a Mayan pyramid in a totally different state, who was heckled and took a few cheap shots while being escorted out for breaking the rules.
Yet, as tourism advice website TravelLemming.com (1/19/23) notes in a much more balanced piece, “Playa del Carmen is, overall, a relatively safe place to visit.” The piece focuses as much on Covid, water contamination and crocodiles as it does on cartels.
Where it does talk about violence, it does so in measured and specific terms:
In general, unless you’re using drugs, purchasing drugs or are involved with people who are affiliated with cartels, chances are you won’t be the victim of a cartel-related incident.
As scary as FranceCarlos Vilalte, a geographer of crime based in Mexico City, says that although there are no official statistics kept of crimes against tourists, he has “no knowledge of tourists being particularly targeted for crime, either in tourist locations, or anywhere else.” He notes, though, that they might be affected “collaterally.”
This is because there is violence in Mexico–a lot in some places, often fueled by drug consumption in the United States. Several cities, like Tijuana, are among the most dangerous in the world that are not in a literal war zone. “Organized crime is a serious issue in Mexico,” says Vilalte.
The Louisville Courier Journal (8/25/22) offers “Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula” as a “refreshing alternative” to Cancun—which is on Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula (though not in the state of Yucatan).
But roughly three-fifths of the country’s states are under the first (“Exercise normal precautions”) or second (“Exercise increased caution”) levels of the State Department’s system for alerting US travelers to possible danger. These areas, according to the government’s system, are as safe as or safer than France and Spain (both of which carry warnings about “terrorism and civil unrest”).
You wouldn’t know that from headlines about the Riviera Maya like “US Tourists Beware: Popular Mexico Getaway Plagued by Drug Cartel Intimidation and Violence” (Courier Journal, 8/25/22), or the Fox News article mentioned above, which says:
“Violent crime and gang activity are widespread,” the [State Department] warning said of one area. “Most homicides are targeted assassinations against members of criminal organizations.”
This would be terrifying if you were planning to travel to the resort town, if you didn’t know better—or read down to the end, where even Fox News is forced to admit, “The state of Quintana Roo where Playa del Carmen is located is not included on the State Department’s ‘do not travel’ list.”
It’s a xenophobic double standard: You’d be hard pressed to find a US media outlet suggesting foreign tourists should beware of visiting our own country because of social violence in New Orleans or St. Louis, or even Dallas or Portland, Oregon, all of which now have higher murder rates than Mexico City.
The post Scary Headlines Hype Dangers Rarely Faced by Tourists in Mexico appeared first on FAIR.
Scores of hits from publications across the globe pop up from an internet search for veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh’s claim that the US destroyed Russia’s Nord Stream gas pipeline.
The British news agency Reuters (2/9/23) ran at least ten stories on Seymour Hersh’s Nord Stream report; the US AP didn’t run one.
But what is most striking about the page after page of results from Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo in the weeks following the February 8 posting of Hersh’s story isn’t what is there, but what is not to be found:
- The Times of London (2/8/23) reported Hersh’s story hours after he posted it on his Substack account, but nothing in the New York Times.
- Britain’s Reuters News Agency moved at least ten stories (2/8/23, 2/9/23, 2/12/2, 2/15/23, among others), the Associated Press not one.
- Not a word broadcast by the major US broadcast networks—NBC, ABC, CBS—or the publicly funded broadcasters PBS and NPR.
- No news stories on the nation’s major cable outlets, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News.
Is there justification for such self-censorship? True, Hersh’s story is based on a single anonymous source. But anonymous sources are a staple of mainstream reporting on the US government, used by all major outlets. Further, countless stories of lesser national and international import have been published with the caveat that the facts reported have not been independently verified.
Doubts about Hersh’s story aside, by every journalistic standard, the extensive international coverage given the story, as well as the adamant White House and Pentagon denials, should have made it big news in the United States.
More important, if Hersh got it wrong, his story needs to be knocked down. Silence is not acceptable journalism.
News blackoutThe online magazine Newsweek (2/8/23) was one of the few notable US outlets to cover Hersh’s report as a news story.
What’s not in doubt is the remarkable breadth of the news blackout surrounding Hersh’s story. The only major US newspaper to cover it as breaking news was the New York Post (2/8/23).
It did appear on the opinion pages—but not the news columns—of two major dailies. The Los Angeles Times (2/11/23) mentioned Hersh’s story in the 11th paragraph of a weekly round-up by the letters editor. On the New York Times opinion page (2/15/23), Ross Douthat included Hersh in a column headlined “UFOs and Other Unsolved Mysteries of Our Time.”
Fox News firebrands Tucker Carlson (2/8/23) and Laura Ingraham (2/14/23) collectively gave Hersh’s story a few minutes on their cable TV shows, but their network didn’t post a news story. On Fox News Sunday (2/19/23), National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby was asked about Hersh’s claims. But, again, Fox News didn’t do a separate news report.
Newsweek (2/8/23) has covered the story , but focusing mainly on White House denials and Russia’s reaction. Bloomberg News (2/9/23) ran a four-paragraph follow-up that also stressed the Russian response, but provided no details of Hersh’s account of the bombing.
The Washington Post’s first mention of the story (2/22/23) came two weeks after it was posted. Again, Russian reaction was the hook, as seen in the headline: “Russia, Blaming US Sabotage, Calls for UN Probe of Nord Stream.”
‘Discredited journalist’Focusing on a story’s acceptance by an official enemy (Business Insider, 2/9/23) is a good tactic for promoting unquestioning rejection of information that challenges official narratives.
Arguably the most influential coverage of Hersh’s story came from Business Insider (2/9/23), which posted what can justly be called a hit piece, given its blatantly loaded headline: “The Claim by a Discredited Journalist That the US Secretly Blew Up the Nord Stream Pipeline Is Proving a Gift to Putin.”
The Business Insider article was picked up by Yahoo! (2/9/23) and MSN (2/9/23). It also was the primary source of an article in Snopes (2/10/23), the only major factchecking site to weigh in on Hersh’s claims. But Snopes, which bills itself as “the definitive Internet reference source for researching urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors and misinformation,” didn’t check any disputed facts. Instead, it starts with an ad hominem attack, asking “Who is Seymour Hersh?”
Snopes answers that rhetorical question by summarizing his body of work—uncovering the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize in 1970, revealing the secret bombing in Cambodia and the torture of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in Iraq—but emphasizing that “his later work, however, has been controversial and widely panned by journalists for promoting conspiratorial claims that hinge on dubious anonymous sources or speculation.”
Snopes’ presentation is hardly even-handed. No defenders of Hersh are cited in the four-paragraph overview of his work, which includes seven hyperlinks to sources. That looks impressive. But clicking on the links reveals four are to the same source: the Business Insider hit piece.
Snopes’ failure to acknowledge multiple links to the same source isn’t just sloppy, it’s misleading, because most readers don’t check to see if the same source is cited repeatedly.
It’s likely Snopes used the Business Insider piece a fifth time—the last without attribution. The Snopes article’s final sentence states: “Hersch [sic] was asked by the Russian news agency TASS about the identity of his source. He told them that, ‘It’s a person, who, it seems, knows a lot about what’s going on.’ ”
The Business Insider piece ends with a paragraph with the same misspelling of Hersh’s name, the same TASS link and identical—word for word — translation of his response. (It doesn’t help Snopes’ credibility as a factchecker that Hersh’s name was originally misspelled two other times in the article.)
Much of the remainder of Snopes’ article consists of quotes from Hersh’s story, followed by commentary disparaging Hersh’s reliance on a single, unnamed source. Since that’s something Hersh readily acknowledges, it’s hard to see the informational value of the Snopes article.
Competition, not just criticsWhile several bloggers have challenged details in Hersh’s account, no news outlet has answered the only question that matters: Who blew up the pipeline?
Waiting for official explanations appears to be a dead end. Sweden, Denmark and Germany have launched investigations, but have not indicated when—or if—results would be released.
The giants of US journalism—the New York Times, Washington Post and the major broadcast networks—have the resources to try and solve the mystery. And it’s certainly possible that one or more of them are working to do just that. But the pipelines were destroyed five months ago. Since then, Seymour Hersh is the only journalist to offer an explanation of who was responsible.
There should be others. Hersh needs competition, not just critics.
The post Major US Outlets Found Hersh’s Nord Strom Scoop Too Hot to Handle appeared first on FAIR.
CounterSpin230303.mp3(Image: Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition)
This week on CounterSpin: Media are certainly following the story of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio—giving us a chance to see how floods of reporters can get out there and print a lot of words about a thing…and still not ask the deepest questions and demand the meaningful answers that might move us past outrage and sorrow to actual change. Are there not forces meant to protect people from this sort of harm? Is it awkward for reporters to interrogate the powerful on these questions? Yes! But if they aren’t doing it, why do they have a constitutional amendment dedicated to protecting their right to do it?
There’s a test underway right now in Jackson, Mississippi, where residents who have been harmed many times over are now being told that the appropriate response is to take away their voice. Here’s where a free press would speak up loudly, doggedly—and transparently, about what’s going on.
Makani Themba is a Jackson resident and volunteer with the Mississippi Rapid Response Coalition. She’s also chief strategist at Higher Ground Change Strategies. She’ll bring us up to speed on Jackson.
CounterSpin230303Themba.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Social Security.
CounterSpin230303Themba.mp3The post Makani Themba on Jackson Crisis appeared first on FAIR.
The New York Times (2/9/23) reports that Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega “rose to power after helping overthrow another notorious Nicaraguan dictator, Anastasio Somoza, in 1979.”
“Nicaragua Frees Hundreds of Political Prisoners to the United States,” the New York Times (2/9/23) reported. In an unexpected move on February 9, the Nicaraguan government deported to the United States 222 people who were in prison, and moved to strip them of their citizenship. The prisoners had been convicted of various crimes, including terrorism, conspiracy to overthrow the democratically elected government, requesting the United States to intervene in Nicaragua, economic damage and threatening the country’s stability, most relating to the violent coup attempt in 2018 and its aftermath.
President Daniel Ortega explained that the US ambassador had unconditionally accepted an offer to send the 222 “mercenaries” (as Ortega called them) to Washington. Two others opted to stay in prison in Nicaragua, and an additional four were rejected by the US.
Despite the Times’ relatively benign headline, its story was heavily weighted against a country that had “slid into autocratic rule,” and whose government had “targeted opponents in civil society, the church and the news media.” For the Times, the “political prisoners” were not criminals but “opposition members, business figures, student activists and journalists.”
For the Washington Post (2/9/23), they included “some of Nicaragua’s best-known opposition politicians” and “presidential hopefuls.” Their release had “eased one of Latin America’s grimmest human rights sagas.” It added that “several of the prisoners had planned to run against Ortega in 2021 elections, but were detained before the balloting.”
The Guardian (2/9/23) blamed the imprisonments on “Nicaragua’s authoritarian regime” and its “ferocious two-year political crackdown,” intended to “obliterate any challenge” before the last presidential election in 2021.
Bad when they do itThe Guardian (2/16/23) did not note that the British government has stripped at least 767 people of citizenship since 2010.
The corporate media were given a second bite of the cherry when the Nicaraguan government announced, six days later, that it was rescinding the citizenship of a further 94 people, most of them living abroad, in some cases for many years. The list included such notable names as authors Sergio Ramírez and Gioconda Belli. The Times (2/17/23) quoted the United Nations refugee agency as saying that international law “prohibits the arbitrary deprivation of nationality, including on racial, ethnic, religious or political grounds.” For the Guardian (2/16/23), “Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian regime has intensified its political crackdown.”
Neither mentioned that law in the US and Britain, and other countries, permits the revocation of citizenship in the US for, among other things, engaging in a conspiracy “to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States,” and in Britain of “those who pose a threat to the country.” The British government has made orders to deprive at least 767 people of citizenship since 2010.
There are other important considerations that apply in Nicaragua’s case, which the media ignore. First, it is a small country, with limited means to defend itself, that has been the subject of US intervention for decades—militarily in the 1980s, politically more recently, and economically since sanctions were imposed in 2018. Those calling for even stronger US pressure (e.g., curbs on trade) are putting the well-being of Nicaraguans at real risk.
In 1983, the CIA wrote a manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, that advised Nicaraguans fighting the Sandinistas to lead “demonstrators into clashes with the authorities, to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the government to create even bigger conflicts.”
Second, there is a precedent for a country’s unelected citizens being recognized as its “real” government by the US and its allies, in the case of self-proclaimed “president” Juan Guaidó in Venezuela, a gambit that successfully stole the country’s assets (Venezuelanalysis, 1/11/22), even though it did not provoke the hoped-for military coup (FAIR.org, 5/1/19). The possibility of similar tactics being used against Nicaragua might well have been a factor influencing the action it took.
The corporate media’s accounts of the Nicaraguan government’s reasons for the deportations and cancellations of citizenship were both perfunctory and disparaging. For example, the Guardian’s second article (2/16/23) said the government “called the deportees, who were also stripped of their citizenship, ‘traitors to the motherland.’” The rest of its article was given over to criticism of the Ortega government.
The New York Times (2/9/23) quoted Nicaraguan journalist Carlos Chamorro, one of the 94, as saying, “All prisoners of conscience are innocent.” It made no assessment of his claim.
The Washington Post (2/9/23) did include Ortega’s criticism of US financing of opposition groups: “These people are returning to a country that has used them…to sow terror, death and destruction here in Nicaragua,” Ortega said. But it went on to report in its own voice that “Ortega crushed a nationwide anti-government uprising in 2018, the beginning of a new wave of repression.”
Three months of January 6In the United States, the New York Times (12/19/22) does not express shock that people who try to overthrow the elected government are treated as criminals.
As FAIR has shown in a range of articles, media coverage of Nicaragua consistently presents the image of a country suffering extreme repression. The story of the 222 deportees was a further opportunity to repeat this treatment. For example, included in the Guardian’s coverage (2/16/23) was an official from Human Rights Watch saying, “The country is on the verge of becoming the Western Hemisphere’s equivalent of North Korea.” Whether it is the closure of NGOs, the results of the 2021 presidential election, the reasons for increased Nicaraguan migration to the United States, or the country’s response to Covid-19, corporate media ignore good news about Nicaragua, give prominence to the views of government opponents and, if Daniel Ortega is quoted, this is done in a disparaging way.
The most extraordinary example of this bias is the corporate media’s pretense that the “terror, death and destruction” of the 2018 coup attempt either never occurred or were perpetrated solely by the “authoritarian regime.” Yet there was ample evidence at the time, and since, of horrific acts of violence against police and Sandinista supporters. Examples can be seen in two short videos (warnings about content apply), here and here, which include clips made by opposition protesters themselves and uploaded to social media.
The uprising that shook Nicaragua lasted roughly three months, resulted officially in 251 deaths (including 22 police officers; others put the total deaths as higher) and over 2,000 injured. It allegedly “caused $1 billion in economic damages,” and led to an economic collapse. (After years of growth, GDP fell by 3.4% in 2018).
The coup attempt led to at least 777 arrests, with many of those convicted given lengthy prison sentences. But importantly, and mostly ignored by the corporate media, 492 prisoners were released between mid-March and mid-June 2019.
Nicaragua’s experience in 2018 stands comparison with the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, and the response to it by the US justice system, generally with the corporate media’s support. The siege of the Capitol lasted only a few hours and led to five deaths, about 140 injuries to police and $2.7 million in damage. Reporting uncritically on the sanctions against those responsible, the New York Times (12/19/22) said that more than 900 people had been charged so far, facing prison sentences of up to ten years.
Later, the Times (1/23/23) reported that four culprits had been charged with “seditious conspiracy,” under a statute dating from the civil war period. In words not dissimilar to those used by the Nicaraguan judge who announced the order stripping 94 people of citizenship, one of the prosecutors was quoted as saying that the defendants “perverted the constitutional order.” He added that they “were willing to use force and violence to impose their view of the Constitution and their view of America on the rest of the country.” Unlike the Times’ reports on Nicaragua, there is no hint of criticism of these charges, nor questioning of whether they are justified.
Evidence of wrongdoingWilliam Sirias Quiroz testified that Medardo Mairena, one of the prisoners deported by Nicaragua, personally supervised his torture at the hands of opposition militants, saying, “We have to make an example of this one.”
This is the context in which the 222 supposedly “innocent” people released into the United States had been charged and found guilty during 2021 and 2022. Questions about the wrongdoing of the 222 were set aside in corporate media coverage, yet it would have been easy to find evidence of wrongdoing. Here are three examples:
- Cristiana Chamorro headed an NGO, the Violeta Barrios de Chamorro Foundation, that received $76 million from USAID. This was used to influence Nicaragua’s elections via an array of opposition media outlets, several owned by the Chamorro family. She refused to comply with transparency laws and closed her foundation; she was then convicted of money laundering.
- Félix Maradiaga was convicted of treachery because he had pleaded for economic sanctions against Nicaragua.
- Medardo Mairena and Pedro Mena had organized a range of armed attacks in 2018, for which they had been pardoned in the 2019 amnesty. These included the siege of the police station in Morrito on July 12, 2018, in which five people were killed. Both were later convicted again for further offenses. In 2020, a large number of victims provided evidence of the violence directed by Mairena and his associates in 2018 in the central region of Nicaragua.
For US corporate media, none of this was relevant. The real reason for the original arrests in 2021 was simple: Ortega expected to lose that year’s election, so he locked up his opponents.
It is true that several of those imprisoned had expressed interest in running. But in a joint post-election analysis with journalist Rick Sterling, I argued that they would have had little chance of taking part, much less of winning.
However, according to the Washington Post (2/9/23), this meant that Ortega, “essentially unopposed, cruised to a fourth consecutive term.” In fact, he won 76% of the vote on a 65% turnout, standing against five others, including two candidates from parties that had been in government in the years before Ortega returned to power.
‘A terrible place’Travel + Leisure (4/29/22) praises Nicaragua as “home to a rich cultural heritage and friendly locals who go out of their way to get you the most delicious seafood, help you catch a wave, or show you the way around the backroads.”
Why were the prisoners released? The Post admitted that there had been no “quid pro quo,” but then carried a quote claiming that Ortega was “buying some breathing room internationally.”
The New York Times reported that the releases “bolster the argument that sanctions are effective,” linking this to its portrayal of Nicaragua as an authoritarian regime: “The sanctions have also stretched the government’s ability to pay off pro-Ortega paramilitaries or expand the police force to manage dissent.”
Not that sanctions would be relaxed, of course: “Officials…said they would continue to apply pressure to the Ortega administration,” the paper reported, as “the Biden administration does not believe that ‘the nature of the government’ has changed.” Dan Restrepo, President Obama’s national security adviser for Latin America, declared, “Nicaragua remains a terrible place for Nicaraguans, and a lot more has to change.”
Readers of the corporate media who are unfamiliar with Nicaragua receive impressions of the country, reinforced with every news item, that it is a “terrible place,” in the grip of a police state. As someone who lives in the country, I find a huge disjuncture between these descriptions and the reality of Nicaraguan daily life.
Readers of the Times or the Post might be surprised to hear Nicaragua was recently judged to be the place in the world where people are most at peace (CNBC, 1/7/23). InSight Crime (2/8/23) ranked it the second-safest country in Latin America, according to reported data on homicides. It tackled Covid-19 more successfully than its neighbors, and has the highest vaccination rate in the region. Websites devoted to tourism dub it a favorite destination in Central America and extol its friendliness.
Finally, the government’s decision to deport the 222 was popular in Nicaragua itself, at least among government supporters. There were enthusiastic demonstrations in at least 30 cities the following weekend, including the one where I live. Unpersuaded, the British Independent (2/12/23) said that the “Sandinista political machine mobilized a few thousand of its faithful.” They must not have seen the reports from the capital, Managua, where tens of thousands filled the streets.
Featured image: Tens of thousands march in Nicaragua in support of the government expulsion of people seen as “vende patrias”—country-sellers (TN8, 2/13/23).
The post Nicaragua’s ‘Political Prisoners’ Would Be Criminals by US Standards appeared first on FAIR.
The Hill (10/10/22) reported that DeSantis “has surged in recent national polls, propelled by his willingness to position himself at the epicenter of the culture wars.”
One reason why Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a hot contender (CBS, 2/27/23; SunSentinel, 2/27/23; AP, 2/27/23) for the Republican presidential nomination is his constant war with the media, framing himself as an everyman trying to fix the state’s problems against elite critics who stymie him at every turn. He has also gained a reputation as a bully who wants to use his political might to silence criticism of his administration in the press.
Twitter suspended the governor’s press secretary for “violating rules on ‘abusive behavior’” after the AP (8/20/21) said the official’s “conduct led to [an AP] reporter receiving threats and other online abuse.” Last year, DeSantis displayed his combativeness when he accused a reporter of creating “false narratives” when he was questioned about his anti-gay speech codes during a press conference (Twitter, 3/7/22).
He told a local right-wing website (Florida Voice, 10/4/22; quoted in The Hill, 10/10/22) that “regime media”—a funny term coming from the head of a state “regime”—were cheering for Hurricane Ian to destroy Florida:
They don’t care about the people of this state. They don’t care about this community. They want to use storms and destruction from storms as a way to advance their agenda.
In Ian’s aftermath, DeSantis bit back at a CNN reporter who questioned his storm response policies (Fox News, 10/2/22).
Most recently, his office (Independent, 2/23/23) said his staff “will not take questions from NBC News or MSNBC until host Andrea Mitchell apologizes for misrepresenting [the governor’s] bans on books about Black history.” Rupert Murdoch’s media empire (New York Post, 12/15/22, 2/2/23, 2/15/23; Fox News, 1/27/23, 2/22/23, 2/23/23) has been eager to cheer on DeSantis’ war against the press.
Making journalists easier to sueA proposed Florida bill (Politico, 2/23/23) would, among other things, declare that “comments made by anonymous sources are presumed false for the purposes of defamation lawsuits”—and remove protections from journalists who decline to reveal their sources.
The trick of executives projecting their policy mishaps on the press is as old as politics itself. But DeSantis is far more dangerous than your average governor, not just because he is seeking the presidency, but because he is actively trying to legally neuter the free press in the same way he is trying to destroy academic freedom and freedom of speech in his own state. And he could win, because he has much of the conservative movement behind him.
The Florida state legislature is considering a bill that seeks “sweeping changes to Florida’s libel and defamation law,” the Orlando Sentinel (2/21/23) reported. It would presume “information from anonymous sources to be false and removes protections that allow journalists to shield the identity of sources if they are sued.” And the bill “limits the definition of who would qualify as a public figure,” which means that more people would be able to sue news outlets without having to show that the outlets displayed a reckless disregard for the truth.
Politico (2/23/23) noted that “beyond making it easier to sue journalists, the proposal is also being positioned to spark a larger legal battle with the goal of eventually overturning New York Times v. Sullivan,” the 1964 Supreme Court decision “that limits public officials’ ability to sue publishers for defamation.”
DeSantis expressed his disdain for the Sullivan standard at a round-table discussion about the media in February (2/7/23): “When the media attacks me, I have a platform to fight back. When they attack everyday citizens, these individuals don’t have the adequate recourse to fight back.” Telegraphing his legislative ambitions, he added, “In Florida, we want to stand up for the little guy against these massive media conglomerates.”
This is absolutely backward. The Sullivan rule doesn’t offer the media protection against lawsuits from Joe Taxpayer, but it does offer protection from partisan leaders, as the Sullivan standard forces public figures to show a court that a publisher acted with “actual malice” in order for a libel suit to stand (Washington Post, 2/15/23). Eliminating Sullivan doesn’t offer the “little guy” anything.
And while he targets “massive media conglomerates,” ending the Sullivan standard would be especially harmful for local and independent media. The New York Times (3/1/22) has a legal team that can combat defamation suits , but do smaller outlets like Common Dreams or Hell Gate stand a chance?
Conservative quarryThe American Conservative (9/9/22) argues that “the public needs accurate information about the candidates for public office”—and therefore government officials need to be able to sue reporters if they don’t like how they’re being depicted in the press.
Two years ago, I warned FAIR’s audience (3/26/21) about the conservative movement’s targeting of Sullivan, as late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia—as well as current Justice Clarence Thomas and the US Court of Appeals’ Lawrence Silberman—expressed their hostility to the Sullivan standard. Surely, if this bill is passed and signed into law in Florida, it will face a legal challenge; if that challenge goes to the Supreme Court, there’s very little reason to think that the 6–3 conservative majority that just struck down Roe v. Wade thinks striking down Sullivan is a bridge too far.
The threat against Sullivan has intensified since my 2021 warning. At the February round-table discussion, Carson Holloway of the Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life said:
The thumb seems to be on the scale for the media in these lawsuits, and that’s because of what the Supreme Court did in New York Times v. Sullivan back in 1964. That case changed the standards under which libel cases are heard in modern America…. If we go back to the Founders, we are reminded that people have a right to their reputation. Reputation is a right as precious as one’s property, one’s life, one’s liberty, so another fundamental purpose of American law is to protect rights. The actual malice standard is an invention of the Supreme Court inconsistent with the way the Founders thought about libel and freedom of speech.
The American Conservative (9/9/22) also called for the high court to overturn Sullivan, as it is “a typical product of the Warren Court—probably the most activist and least originalist Court in the nation’s history.” This is a swipe at the one era of the court’s history, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, marked by progress for civil rights and civil liberties, with decisions like Brown v. Board of Education and Loving v. Virginia. The magazine complained, “It is nearly impossible to prove actual malice.”
Most ominously, Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch (New York Times, 7/2/21) said the Court must revisit the doctrine, “suggesting that the actual malice doctrine might have made more sense” in 1964, “when there were fewer and more reliable sources of news.”
In other words, DeSantis is flanked by conservative legal theorists, activists and sitting jurists who are licking their chops at the prospect of cutting down Sullivan. This would be catastrophic for free expression. Corporate tycoons and politicians could use lawsuits to bankrupt and cripple news outlets with costly litigation, and editors would constantly think twice about publishing critical reporting on powerful people out of fear of litigation. Government figures and big business would essentially have more control over what can be printed or aired.
War on academiaKeith Whittington (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2/27/23): “Florida is breaking new ground in insisting that state universities convey the government’s favored message in its classes.”
In taking on Sullivan, DeSantis is opening a new front in a culture war he has long waged against academics in his state. The state has “deployed a controversial survey on campus ideological diversity to public college and university students, faculty and staff members,” a move some faculty have called “a political litmus test since it was first proposed” (Inside Higher Ed, 4/5/22).
DeSantis has asked “state universities for the number and ages of their students who sought gender dysphoria treatment, including sex reassignment surgery and hormone prescriptions” (AP, 1/18/23).
A new Florida bill would bar “funds from being used for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, as well as critical race theory–related programs, on college campuses,” and “would also remove diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or policies that impact hiring practices” (ABC, 2/23/23). Even sillier, one Florida proposal would “ban ‘unproven’ or ‘theoretical’ content from general-education courses, which might banish Plato and Albert Einstein to elective courses.” according to the Chronicle for Higher Education (2/27/23), which added that Florida is a trailblazer for “higher-education reforms,” while “Republican-leaning states are likely to follow its lead.”
For DeSantis and a great deal of the American right, academics and journalists are partners in the same ideological war: They make up a disloyal intelligentsia that uses professional stature to sow doubt about the political establishment, challenge traditional cultural orders and threaten the power of big business. If DeSantis has come this far waging a war against academia in his own state, there is no reason why he wouldn’t take this war to the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times.
Sullivan and civil rightsThe Supreme Court ruled in Sullivan v. New York Times that a Montgomery, Alabama, police official could not sue over minor inaccuracies in an advertisement that asserted that “Southern violators have answered Dr. King’s peaceful protests with intimidation and violence.”
It should not be forgotten, also, that Sullivan was a civil rights case: an Alabama police commander had brought a libel suit against the Times for an advertisement by civil rights activists that mischaracterized the role of his officers. Samantha Barbas—a professor at SUNY Buffalo’s School of Law and author of Actual Malice, a book about the Sullivan case—wrote (UC Press Blog, 12/20/22):
In the 1960s, segregationist officials in the South weaponized libel law in a campaign to undermine liberal Northern newspapers that criticized segregation. Their objective was to halt coverage of the civil rights movement, reporting that would prove crucial to forging national support for desegregation and civil rights.
DeSantis’ war on press freedom—in the context of his campaign to censor Black authors (PEN America, 2/13/23) and attacks on “wokeness” (Guardian, 2/5/23), a word that has its origins in Black awareness of racial injustice—is the living legacy of Jim Crow–era Southern governors who did everything they could to maintain racial apartheid.
As faculty and students fight Florida’s war on campuses, journalists who value their freedom to report and opine must also oppose this assault on media. If DeSantis wins, it won’t just impact Florida, it will impact the whole country.
The post DeSantis’ War on Florida’s Press Is Designed to Hit Nationwide appeared first on FAIR.
Leonard Downie (Washington Post, 1/30/23) quotes approvingly: “Decisions about which news to cover can reflect an organization’s values, whether or not these are stated publicly.” In fact, there’s no way that they can’t reflect such values.
Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor for the Washington Post from 1991 through 2008, last month published an article in the Post opinion section (1/30/23) headlined “Newsrooms That Move Beyond ‘Objectivity’ Can Build Trust.” He observed that “increasingly, reporters, editors and media critics argue that the concept of journalistic objectivity is a distortion of reality.” He added that younger, more diverse reporters “believe that the concept of objectivity has prevented truly accurate reporting.”
Downie argued that news organizations should
strive not just for accuracy based on verifiable facts but also for truth—what Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward have called “the best obtainable version of the truth.” This means original journalism that includes investigating and reporting on all aspects of American life.
This doesn’t mean rejecting the idea that objective facts exist. Instead, it involves accepting that news organizations’ reporting on those objective facts cannot be done in a mechanically detached way. After all, key reporting decisions—what to cover, what information to present, how to present it—depend ultimately on subjective human judgments.
‘That’s dramatic’Bret Stephens: When your hippie-punching is so extreme that even Bill Maher (2/3/23) won’t buy it.
Bret Stephens apparently could not wrap his head around this idea. During an appearance on Real Time With Bill Maher on February 3, the right-wing New York Times columnist responded to Downie’s piece:
If he were to get his way, that would be not just the end of any serious journalism in the United States, I think it would be the end of the United States.
Even Maher, who was setting Stephens up to tee off on what he saw as Downie’s loony ideas, was taken aback. “What? Wow. That’s dramatic,” Maher remarked, to the chuckling of the audience.
Stephens immediately strawmanned Downie’s argument:
I thought that was the battle we spent six years fighting the Trump administration about, that you just couldn’t say it was true that you had sold 90% of your condominiums in your fabulous new development even if it wasn’t true.
Of course, this has absolutely nothing to do with Downie’s piece, which made the case for news organizations being more honest about the influence that their values inevitably have on their reporting, while sticking to factual accuracy in that reporting. Stephens apparently interpreted that as: Downie thinks the media should abandon factual accuracy.
‘View from nowhere’Stephens (New York Times, 2/9/23) does not appreciate how much damage he personally does to corporate media’s credibility.
Unsurprisingly, Downie was not impressed by Stephens’ understanding of his position. According to Stephens, Downie asked him to actually read the report upon which the op-ed was based after his appearance on Maher’s show. Stephens then took to the opinion pages at the New York Times (2/9/23) to elaborate on his critique:
[Downie] even claims that objectivity was never a standard he upheld [at the Post], even though the principles he says were the goals he pursued as editor—“accuracy, fairness, nonpartisanship, accountability and the pursuit of truth”—are the same as those upheld by most objective journalists and little different from what he elsewhere says is the dictionary definition of objectivity—“using facts without distortion by personal beliefs, bias, feelings or prejudice.”
Stephens’ column calls to mind a half-asleep high school student slogging through the reading section of the SAT. In Downie’s report—titled “Beyond Objectivity,” and co-written with former CBS News president Andrew Heyward—the authors are quite clear about the distinction between objectivity and the pursuit of truth: The former would require an impossible elimination of the influence of personal values on reporting, while the latter involves admitting that values influence reporting.
The report quotes several critics of the idea of objectivity, who collectively make the point that objectivity is simply unachievable in practice. For instance, it cites NYU professor Jay Rosen as disparaging the traditional notion of objectivity
as a form of persuasion in which journalists tried to get us to accept their account by saying something like, “I don’t have a point of view, I don’t have a starting point, I don’t have a philosophy, I don’t have an ideology. I’m just telling you the way it is. So believe it, because this is the way it is.” That’s the view from nowhere.
Stephen Engelberg, editor-in-chief of ProPublica, adds: “Objectivity is not even possible…. I don’t even know what it means.” And Neil Barsky, founder of the Marshall Project, continues: “The journalist’s job is truth, not objectivity…. It is getting close to the reality, notwithstanding that we all have biases and passions.”
None of these quotes show up in Stephens’ op-ed. And for good reason: They completely undermine his interpretation of the report. In his crusade for “objectivity,” Stephens seems, ironically, to have thrown inconvenient evidence out the window.
Shortcomings and blindersWhat’s remarkable is that Stephens, towards the end of his essay, himself concedes that objectivity is unattainable:
All journalists are subject to the personal shortcomings and cultural blinders that make all human enterprises imperfect. And there’s never a foolproof way of capturing reality and conveying information, particularly in a pluralistic and often polarized country.
This comes after he earlier wrote, “The fact that objectivity is hard to put into practice does nothing to invalidate it as a desirable goal.” But as he says, “All human enterprises [are] imperfect.” Objectivity is not difficult to achieve; it’s a fundamental impossibility.
And its pursuit is not as valiant as Stephens would have us believe. As Downie and Heyward point out, attempts to make reporting “objective” have all too often led to “bothsidesism,” in which the pursuit of truth is simply outsourced to outside parties, who make competing claims about reality as reporters throw their hands up and tell the reader, “You decide.” This “balancing” tends to result in outsized platforms for the powerful few.
Stephens nevertheless longs for the old days of “objective” reporting. In the final paragraph of his piece, he contends:
If you still believe that a healthy democracy depends on the quality and credibility of information with which our society makes its choices, then we have few better models than the kind of objective journalism that is now going out of fashion.
‘The most honest picture of reality’An example of the downside of “objectivity,” which for Stephens means publishing things conservatives believe regardless of whether they are true or not: He declared (New York Times, 2/21/23), based on a meta-analysis, that “the verdict is in: Mask mandates were a bust. Those skeptics who were furiously mocked as cranks and occasionally censored as ‘misinformers’ for opposing mandates were right.” In fact, the two studies (out of 78) in the meta-analysis that actually looked at Covid and mask mandates both concluded that they reduced infection (L.A. Times, 2/24/23).
But what did that model actually look like in practice? As one illustrative example, Downie and Heyward point to early coverage of climate change:
Early stories about scientific evidence of climate change and the role of human behavior were often “balanced” with the views of climate change deniers.
Downie and Heyward are highly critical of this style of reporting, and call for a different approach. In the final section of the report, in which they make six recommendations for how news organizations can update their approach to news coverage and move beyond the myth of objectivity, their first recommendation is: “Strive not just for accuracy, but for truth.” They write:
Accuracy starts with a commitment to verifiable facts, with no compromises. But facts, while true, aren’t necessarily the whole truth. Therefore, your journalists must consider multiple perspectives to provide context where needed.
That said, avoid lazy or mindless “balance” or “bothsidesism.” If your reporting combines accuracy and open-mindedness to multiple points of view, the result should still reflect the most honest picture of reality you can present—what Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein call “the best available version of the truth.”
Stephens’ true concern seems to be that news organizations will follow Downie and Heyward’s advice on exactly this point:
What Downie and Heyward dismiss in their report as “both-sides-ism” is, in reality, a crucial way to build trust with audiences, particularly in a country as diverse as America. It gives a platform to multiple views. And it shows faith that people can come to intelligent conclusions of their own.
This is perhaps the natural position for someone with as tenuous a grasp on reality as Stephens to take. Most obviously, he is well-known as a “climate change bullshitter” (Vox, 5/1/17) “whose very first article at the Times had to be corrected due to his misunderstanding of basic climate science” (FAIR.org, 6/30/17). Stephens pretends to think that journalists need to respect the facts, but when the claims his side is making are verifiably false, he wants media to publish them anyway; that’s what he means by “objectivity.”
‘Viewpoint diversity’In the end, it turns out what Stephens is interested in is not a fair and accurate airing of the facts. His main gripe is rather a well-worn complaint of the right: The media have a liberal bias. How should we rectify this? More representation for conservatives.
He pronounces in the piece that “viewpoint diversity” is currently “the most glaring deficit in most of the American news media landscape.” And he later bemoans the media’s treatment of “religious conservatives, home-schoolers, gun owners and Trump supporters,” in particular the fact that reporters are willing to label people from these groups as “racist” or “misinformers” or “-phobic.” In other words, Stephens doesn’t want the facts in print when they reflect poorly on his side.
There are serious problems with US journalism. FAIR has decades of pieces documenting these problems. The pro-war and pro-corporate bias of prominent news outlets can be staggering. And, though Downie and Heyward’s report offers fairly moderate prescriptions for improving news coverage, the fact that mainstream voices are at least calling for a shift away from false balance in reporting is a welcome shift. That Stephens sees this as a threat says more about him than anything.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your communication in the comments thread.
The post Bret Stephens Says Journalists Admitting Values Would ‘End United States’ appeared first on FAIR.
The Washington Post (2/5/23) warns that in 2034, when Social Security exhausts its reserves, “seniors face an immediate 25 percent cut in benefits.” Its solution to this problem: cutting benefits sooner, plus raising (regressive) payroll taxes.
When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million in 2013, he didn’t transform it into a paper that elevated the perspectives of the wealthy elite—it had already been that for decades. What he did do was put it on steroids: Over the next three years, the Post doubled its web traffic and surpassed the New York Times in its volume of online postings. One result: The paper’s traditional hostility to federal retirement programs has become only more amplified.
As progressive economist Dean Baker (FAIR.org, 3/19/18) has written, “The Post calling for cuts to [Social Security and Medicare] is pretty much as predictable as the sun coming up”—it’s been up to this for decades, as Bezos is probably aware. So when it once again called for retirement benefit cuts on Sunday, February 5, Baker was unsurprised (Beat the Press, 2/5/23).
The Post came out swinging in the piece (2/5/23), with the headline “Yes, Social Security and Medicare Still Need to Be Reformed—and Soon.” It began by fretting over the depletion of the trust funds for Social Security and Medicare:
The longer Congress puts off fixes, the more painful they will become for the 66 million seniors, and growing, who receive monthly Social Security payments and the approximately 59 million people enrolled in a Medicare plan.
Among other solutions, the board suggested “raising the Medicare eligibility age to 67 to match the existing Social Security retirement age for those born in 1960 or later.” As Baker pointed out (Beat the Press, 2/5/23):
As people who follow policy have long known, this would have little effect on the budget, since it would raise the amount spent on providing insurance in the ACA exchanges.
‘Bipartisan grand bargain’President Ronald Reagan and Speaker Tip O’Neill got together in 1983 to pass a bipartisan plan that allowed working people to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy (Extra!, 3–4/97). (image: WAMU, 10/1/13)
But that was far from the worst of the Post’s suggestions. In the final paragraph of the editorial, the Post made its intentions even clearer. Attempting a call to action, the board wrote:
Mr. Biden was among 88 senators who voted in 1983 for a bipartisan grand bargain, negotiated by a commission led by Alan Greenspan and signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, that rescued Social Security. Forty years later, if he and Republican leaders are willing to work in good faith, Mr. Biden could safeguard the greatest legacies of both the New Deal and the Great Society.
To translate: In 1983, Congress “rescued” Social Security by cutting it. The 1983 law did not change the actual age at which you can retire and draw Social Security benefits. It left that at 62. Instead, it simply said you’d get less money for retiring at any point before the new full retirement age, which reached 67 last year. For instance, those retiring at 62 today face a 50% larger cut in benefits for early retirement compared to before 2000.
The Post apparently remembers these reforms fondly. And it wants more.
‘Modest benefit adjustments’For the Washington Post (6/4/22), the US keeping retirement benefits at their current level is making “promises to its elderly that it cannot possibly keep while continuing to do right by younger generations.”
This is not the only time the editorial board has called for stiffing the seniors in recent months. Last year, the board published an editorial (6/4/22) headlined “The Medicare and Social Security Disaster That Washington Is Doing Nothing to Fix.” The board sounded the alarm: “The nation has made promises to its elderly that it cannot possibly keep while continuing to do right by younger generations.”
Before calling for “some mix of modest benefit adjustments and tax hikes” to shore up these earned benefit programs, the Post spent most of the piece attempting to instill fear in its readership about the latest projections for the finances of Social Security and Medicare. After laying out the numbers, the board wrote:
These numbers may seem small. They are not; total federal spending has historically hovered around 20% of GDP. The trustees are projecting a vast expansion of outlays for the elderly that would hollow out the government’s ability to spend on education, infrastructure, anti-poverty programs and other investments in children and working-age adults.
The Post quite explicitly places Social Security and Medicare in direct conflict with other government programs in this passage. But under even minor scrutiny, this idea of a zero-sum conflict between protecting elderly entitlement programs and investing in children falls apart.
Why can’t we spend more on social programs? The answer is—we can. According to a 2019 report from the University of New Hampshire, total government spending in the US, which sits at 38% of GDP, puts the US at 12th out of the 13 highest-income countries in the report.
The US does rank first in healthcare spending, but this is not because of largesse directed towards the elderly. Rather, it is a result of the brutally inefficient design of the US healthcare system, marked by administrative bloat and inflated prices.
As Baker observes (Beat the Press, 2/5/23), Medicare, which is much more efficient than private health plans, points to the solution, not the problem. In fact, studies have estimated that Medicare for All, a target of the Post’s vitriol in the past (1/27/16, 8/12/18, 5/4/19), would actually lower overall healthcare spending while improving health outcomes (Jacobin, 12/3/18).
What to do with resourcesCompared to high- and middle-income countries, the US spends far less of its GDP on social protection, and spends more on its military—and on its highly inefficient healthcare system (Carsey Research, Fall/19) .
When it comes to spending on social protection, which includes retirement programs for the elderly, the story is more straightforward. The US comes in last place among the highest-income countries. It spends 57% less per capita than the average in these countries. As the UNH report explains:
Social protection is the only spending category for which US spending is greatly lower than other countries. The difference explains how the United States can spend so much more than other countries on its military and health services while still spending so much less than other countries overall.
To portray Social Security cuts as necessary in light of this evidence is absurd.
What we’re really talking about when we’re discussing Social Security and Medicare is what we want to do with our resources as a country. We have more than enough wealth to provide solid retirement benefits and good medical care to the elderly. The question is: Do we want to do that? Or do we want to cut the programs that do those things? It’s really that simple.
It just so happens the Post favors cuts over human welfare. Exactly the kind of perspective Bezos deemed well worth putting his money behind.
ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost.
Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.
The post The Washington Post Is Coming for Your Retirement Benefits appeared first on FAIR.
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