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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.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260807.mp3Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

CT Mirror (7/30/26)

This week on CounterSpin: If you look for media coverage about the Farm Bill that’s currently passing through Congress, you can find it–at sites like agriculture.com or agri-pulse.com, or those outlets that have “ag” sections. If you look for coverage of SNAP, the largest food assistance program in the country, you can find that lots of other places. And while some of those headlines are about “Deadbeat Parents” and “SNAP Fraud,” these days many more say things like “Nearly 19K State Kids Have Lost SNAP Benefits Over Past Year” (that’s Connecticut) or “Illinois Launches New Program to Provide Food Benefits to People Who Lost SNAP,” or “Small Grocery Stores Cutting Inventory, Considering Layoffs as SNAP Dollars Decline.”

Overwhelmingly, local reporters are documenting how cuts to SNAP are hurting people and communities. But the lack of major media stories linking the program to the Farm Bill seem somehow emblematic of the opacity around this country’s lawmaking on critical questions around food.

We get an update from Gina Plata-Nino, director of SNAP policy and advocacy at the Food Research & Action Center.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260807Plata-Nino.mp3Also on the show: People who rely on food benefits programs have long been a punching bag for both right-wing ideologues and their corporate media enablers. Claiming people working full time jobs that don’t provide enough to feed their families are really just grifters living high on your dime is a time-honored tactic, no matter how far it falls afield of reality. We talked about that last year with the president of Food Research & Action Center, Crystal FitzSimons; we add a little of that conversation as well.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260807FitzSimons.mp3

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As a result of US-imposed sanctions, UN News (6/8/26) reported, “infant mortality has doubled to 9.9 per 1,000 births; childhood cancer survival rates have fallen from 85% to 65%; and essential medicines are available at only around 30% of normal supply levels.”

The energy blockade that the Trump administration has imposed on Cuba is hammering the island. As UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk (UN News, 6/8/26) recently pointed out:

The fuel restrictions imposed since early 2026 and recent tightening of extraterritorial sanctions, taken together, are directly harming Cubans, especially the most vulnerable. Children are dying because doctors lack access to essential medical supplies and medicines…. These sanctions must be lifted immediately.

Broad swaths of the US media’s chattering class have taken a different angle, suggesting that the Cuban government is the primary—if not the sole—cause of the pain being inflicted on the country. The function of such propaganda is to justify the US’s economic warfare: If the Cuban government can’t run the country, the logic goes, then the US is right to try and bring it down.

It’s the same narrative pushed by US officials and Cubans in exile, who together constitute the large majority of sources in news coverage of Cuba from prominent US outlets, as a recent FAIR study (7/15/26) showed.

Much of the US commentariat is also pretending that the Cuban revolution’s extraordinary achievements have not occurred. Acknowledging them would, of course, get in the way of the narrative that Cuban leaders are so malign and incompetent that the US is obligated to bring about a counter revolution.

‘A golden opportunity’The Wall Street Journal (7/12/26) compares Cuba’s government to South African apartheid—which Cuba opposed, and the Journal supported.

At times, the punditry is explicit in its support for regime change in Cuba. In the Wall Street Journal (7/12/26), Mary Anastasia O’Grady wrote:

Once South Africa ceased to be a Cold War pawn, the economic costs of sanctions imposed by countries across the globe broke the government’s resistance…. Cubans aren’t likely to escape tyranny without a similar leg up from the outside.

The South African apartheid analogy is absurd: Upon taking power, the Cuban revolution made fighting racial discrimination a priority (Black Perspectives, 3/8/16), and Cuba played a crucial part in supporting South Africa’s struggle against apartheid.

But what’s most relevant here is O’Grady’s suggestion that “the outside” is inflicting “the economic costs of sanctions” so that Cubans can “escape tyranny.” As Türk pointed out, this anti-“tyranny” plan involves killing children by depriving them of “access to essential medical supplies and medicines.”

The Washington Post’s editorial board (2/6/26) sounded impressed by the effects of Trump’s siege. “Washington’s pressure on Havana is working,” it wrote:

Cuba looks ready to implode. The island suffers from food shortages, energy blackouts and looming economic collapse. President Donald Trump’s decision to remove Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro from power has cut off the Cubans from what has historically been their main source of oil. Having successfully pressured the Mexican government to also slash oil supplies, Trump has effectively created a blockade that has brought the regime to its knees.

With such extraordinary leverage, it would be unwise to settle for anything less than dramatic change on America’s terms: economic, personal and political freedom for all Cubans.

The paper, in short, cheered the US blockade creating “food shortages, energy blackouts and looming economic collapse” so that Cuba would be forced to make “dramatic change on America’s terms.”

The editors’ assertions relied on a simplistic caricature of personal and political life in Cuba, and on what appears to be an assumption that their readers won’t notice that depriving people of food, energy and even minimal economic security—as the blockade does—also denies them economic and personal freedom. However, the more salient point is probably that the US has no right under the UN Charter to interfere in Cuba’s affairs, let alone to use food as a weapon to restore capitalism, which, as any conservative will tell you, is what “economic freedom” means.

In an op-ed for the Washington Post (2/11/26), former New York Times reporter Lizette Alvarez claimed that “Trump’s love of the deal and Cuba’s imminent collapse present a golden opportunity to finally drive meaningful change on the island.”

Even before the Trump administration intensified the energy blockade at the start of the year, as UN special rapporteur Alena Douhan (11/21/25) noted, the “golden opportunity” created by the embargo had resulted in “the widespread inaccessibility of 69% of medicines to Cubans, including medicine against cancer, heart diseases, repellents, tests for dengue and other infections.”

Alvarez contended that the US “could lift the embargo,” but that “Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel would have to agree to deadline-driven reforms,” including “eliminating restrictions that hamper private investment and business.” At no point did the author spell out why she believes that the US is entitled to “drive” change in Cuba, much less deprive Cubans of medicine until they allow “private investment and business” to operate unimpeded.

‘No ring of Navy warships’USA Today‘s Judy Pino (3/10/26) argues that “freedom demands effort”—and by “effort,” she means the devastation of one’s economy by a neighboring superpower.

The US began to impose a blockade on Cuba in 1960 to “decrease monetary and real wages, to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Rather than recognize such factors in Cuban suffering, many voices in the corporate media have embraced the political and economic equivalent of flat Earthism.

For instance, Judy Pino (USA Today, 3/10/26) euphemistically referred to Trump’s aggression against Cuba as “pressure on the regime” and said that “daily life [in Cuba] shows the cost of [the Cuban government’s] repression and chronic mismanagement.” In 2018, the UN estimated that the embargo had cost Cuba’s economy $130 billion (Reuters, 5/8/18)—from a country whose entire GDP, according to the World Bank, is $107 billion—but Pino wrote as though that’s not a leading cause of the challenges Cubans are facing.

A Wall Street Journal editorial (7/9/26) wrote that US Ambassador to the United Nations Mike Waltz

took apart the claim that the US blocks Cuba’s access to world markets. “If there’s an embargo, a blockade, whatever name they want to put on it, how did humanitarian aid from Belize, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, the European Union, Mexico, Spain, Russia, Uruguay and the UN itself reach the country just in the last few months?” Mr. Waltz asked. “There is no ring of Navy warships sitting around this island blocking trade or humanitarian aid going into Cuba. It’s fake. It’s false. It’s a lie. Period.”

Economic blockades don’t require naval encirclements, of course. The Journal gaslit its readers, denying US subversion and writing as if allowing smatterings of aid into Cuba to mitigate the effects of that subversion is the same as permitting Cuba to participate in the global economy.

‘Facts tell a different story’The “illusion” that Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo (New York Times, 3/1/26) celebrates Cuba losing is the notion that it’s possible for a small Latin American country to choose an economic system that Washington disapproves of.

O’Grady (Wall Street Journal, 6/21/26) wrote that “the [Cuban] dictatorship’s excuse for the widespread misery is the same as it ever was: Washington’s Cuba policy. The facts tell a different story.”

The US-based Center for Economic and Policy Research has marshaled quite a few facts that refute O’Grady’s view. CEPR (4/27/26) pointed out that, because the US tightened the embargo during Trump’s first term and the Biden government did next to nothing to ease it, Cuban medical importers have been unable

to obtain at affordable prices many basic medical supplies, such as syringes, inhalers, and even saline solution; more sophisticated medical equipment, such as imaging and ultrasound systems; and inputs for the manufacturing of pharmaceuticals. The redesignation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism in 2021 has made it extremely challenging to obtain financing for the purchase of these goods—at any price—or to simply execute international payments to purchase them. The end result of these multiple barriers generated by these sanctions has been massive shortages of medical goods— supplies, equipment, medicines.

Thus, CEPR concluded that “the primary cause” of an

unprecedented rise in Cuba’s [infant mortality rate], and the crisis in its once robust health care system, is almost certainly the hardening of US sanctions that began in 2017 and increased steadily in the years thereafter, with only a minor easing during the Biden administration.

In the New York Times (3/1/26), economist Mauricio de Miranda Parrondo asserted that

the [Cuban] leadership prioritizes political control over the needs of the population. The Cuban economy has suffered greatly for it. The country is no longer capable of producing the basic goods it needs; today it imports most of the food it consumes, despite the fertility of its lands and its long agricultural tradition.

This view ignores US sabotage, a rather significant factor. For instance, a team of UN Special Rapporteurs and Independent Experts pointed out that the US’s groundless decision to classify Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” worsens problems in Cuba’s agricultural production

by exerting directly or indirectly more pressure on States and businesses trading with Cuba. In particular, access from abroad to agricultural inputs, including fertilisers, is almost completely blocked, as is the case for spare parts for the maintenance or repair of agricultural machinery and infrastructure.

Thus, the American “leadership prioritizes political control [of Cuba] over the needs of the [Cuban] population.”

Erasing Cuba’s accomplishmentsThe Washington Post (2/6/26) mocks the idea that the Cuban government wants to be “treated as an equal” in negotiating with the United States.

Corporate media outlets rarely admit that Cuban socialism achieved a great deal despite US aggression.

The Washington Post (2/6/26) argued that Cuba’s “67-year experiment with Communism has been an abject failure.” Consider the most recent rankings from the UN Human Development Index (HDI), which measures long-term progress in three key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Based on 2023 data, Cuba was classified as having a high level of human development and ranked 97th out of 193 countries and territories. While conditions in Cuba appear to have deteriorated since the US enacted the oil blockade earlier this year, faring well on the HDI very recently makes clear that it’s absurd to say that Cuba’s last 67 years have been nothing but an “abject failure.”

Alvarez (Washington Post, 2/11/26) said Cuba has an “unworkable Communist economic system.” But it wasn’t long ago that Cuba had the same rate of infant mortality as Canada, and a better one than the United States. That suggests that it’s the US that has an unworkable capitalist economic system, particularly when one considers that Cuba successfully cared for its infants under the US embargo, and the US itself faced no such aggression.

George Will of the Post (6/24/26) claimed that “the only good [Communist Cuba’s] evil ever produced” is the memoir of Armando Valladares, an opponent of Fidel Castro’s government who later served as US ambassador to the United Nations during the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

For Will, it seems, it was “evil” to provide vital support to Haiti, Indonesia and Pakistan after devastating earthquakes hit each of these countries (Al Jazeera, 2/16/10). It was “evil” to fight Ebola in West Africa (Time, 11/5/14) and Covid-19 in Italy (Reuters, 3/22/20) at the peak of the pandemic nightmare. Helping liberate Angola, Namibia and South Africa from colonialism, imperialism and apartheid (Warscapes, 4/11/16; Jacobin, 5/20/22)? That’s “evil” too, apparently.

‘Disastrous policies of the socialist experiment’Roberto González (Wall Street Journal, 7/7/26) presents the fact that “lights are out across much of the island”—as a result of direct intervention by the US government to destroy Cuba’s energy system—as proof that “the market works.”

In the Wall Street Journal (7/7/26), Roberto González declared, “For more than six decades, Cuba has been one of the few places on Earth where the disastrous economic policies of the socialist experiment persisted.” Yet in Subalternity vs. Hegemony: Cuba’s Outstanding Achievements in Science and Biotechnology, 1959–2014 (Springer, 2016), the scholars Angelo Baracca and Rosella Franconi noted that

the Cuban government had an unusual level of commitment to scientific and technological development, and a long-term vision to support health biotechnology, despite difficult economic conditions.

Through the “crusade the [Cuban] government has carried out in favor of more education and scientific research,” the country had developed “innovative, world-class products,” Barracca and Franconi noted. By 2018, Cuba held 1,200 international biopharmaceutical patents, and sold medicine and equipment to more than 50 countries (Institute for New Economic Thinking, 3/5/18). But there’s no room for such non-disasters in Gonzalez’s narrative.

It’s easy to tell that none of these commentators sincerely wanted Cubans to overcome the challenges they’re facing. If they did, they’d call for the simplest way to quickly enable the country to build on its past successes. That, to state the painfully obvious, is to end both Trump’s energy blockade and the longer-term embargo.

Instead, they stuck to a cruel, reactionary script: simultaneously gloss over the misery that the US is subjecting Cuba to, and all the good that Cuba has done for itself and the world, to create the impression that Cuba needs to be liberated by its US torturers.

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Somehow the New York Post (7/30/26) didn’t find it as shocking when Donald Trump took the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times during an investigation into fraudulent business practices.

The congressional grilling of former White House Covid advisor Anthony Fauci, and the resulting editorial responses, weren’t good faith inquiries into the pandemic (CNN, 7/29/26). The entire spectacle was a Republican public relations campaign to promote two often contradictory conspiracy theories.

The first is that the virus that ravaged the globe was a human-altered super virus that escaped a Chinese laboratory, which for right-wingers spins a titillating narrative of scientistic hubris fused with Communist treachery.

The second is that the public health measures that discouraged public gatherings were extreme and unnecessary. The idea is that the virus was not as dangerous as it was made out to be—just some sniffles and coughs, really—and that these countermeasures were meant to tank the economy, helping the Democrats win the presidency in November 2020. For the tinfoil hat wing of American politics, safety measures were less about saving Americans and more about fomenting a color revolution against President Donald Trump.

The right manages to at the same time be feverishly obsessed with the supposedly artificial release of the virus and also outraged by public health measures to contain it.

The hearing was all show and no trial, but right-wing pundits and politicians are doing their damndest to keep the hearing in the news cycle (Fox News, 8/5/26; Wall Street Journal, 8/5/26; Breitbart, 8/5/26). And the Republicans do need a distraction: Gas prices remain high (AP, 7/20/26), support for Trump’s war against Iran remains low (Quinnipiac, 7/29/26) and, as Newsweek (8/2/26) noted, his

approval rating is underwater in at least 11 states that he carried by double digits in the 2024 election, a sign of growing dissatisfaction with the president’s performance ahead of November’s midterms.

Centrist media are also keeping the persecuting viewpoint of Republican Sen. Rand Paul—who led the hearing, and might better serve the public by telling whether the other Kentucky senator, Mitch McConnell, is alive or not—in the public eye.

‘Manufacturing a false narrative’The New York Post (7/28/26) claimed that Fauci’s “private notes contradict what he was telling the world at the very same time.” Private notes (1/26/20): “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier. Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans.” What he was telling the world (USA Today, 2/17/20): “Almost certainly, somewhere, somehow a bat infected an intermediate host who infected a human. What epidemiologists feel is that the market was an amplifier of something that was already going on.” (Fauci was referring to the latest research at the time about the Wuhan outbreak—work that was later superseded.)

The New York Post editorial board (7/28/26) focused on the lab leak theory:

For starters, [Fauci] insisted time and again that the “lab leak hypothesis” was a wacky conspiracy theory, that the virus had jumped naturally from animals to humans, presumably at the “wet market” in Wuhan, China.

Yet the diaries reveal that he knew early on that it had not come from the wet market, and was confronted with scientists he’d selected who argued with strong evidence that “lab leak” was the truth—and that the bug was likely bio-engineered in the Wuhan Institute Virology.

Washington Post columnist Megan McArdle (8/2/26), who has long leaned into the lab leak conspiracy, highlighted that Fauci’s diary described “meetings where eminent experts deemed a lab-leak origin for Covid possible.” McArdle disputed the value of attacking Fauci as an individual as counterproductive, because it ignores the “systemic” problems with the pandemic response:

Many of the powerful and influential really did become dogmatic on all things pandemic, from the origins of the virus to the merits of public gatherings to the benefits of mandatory vaccination.

USA Today’s Nicole Russell (7/29/26) likewise merged the origin-coverup and unnecessary mandates storylines:

Fauci’s silence may be legally prudent, but his poor decision-making has already been proven: While millions of Americans suffered from Covid-19 or the lockdowns he advised the Trump administration to mandate, Fauci was manufacturing a false narrative about the disease’s origins and reveling in the media attention it brought him.

‘Preponderance of scientific evidence’As FAIR (6/28/21) reported five years ago, “Most scientists currently think that Covid-19 has a natural origin, because there is a well-documented history of natural spillovers leading to most disease outbreaks.”

The lab leak fixation is one our readers know well. As editor Jim Naureckas (Facebook, 7/31/26) said, “FAIR has looked intensively at the evidence offered for the lab leak theory, and each time we’ve found that there’s no there there”—pointing to several in-depth investigations (FAIR.org, 10/6/20, 6/28/21, 8/5/21, 4/7/23, 7/3/24, 4/18/25).

Soon after the pathogen emerged, a Nature paper (3/17/20) observed that, based on the characteristics of the virus, “It is improbable that SARS-CoV-2 emerged through laboratory manipulation of a related SARS-CoV–like coronavirus.” Nothing has emerged in the years since to cast serious doubt on that conclusion.

The Journal of Virology (8/1/24) noted that the “preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.” The World Health Organization’s Scientific Advisory Group for the Origins of Novel Pathogens (7/27/25) concluded that “the weight of available evidence…suggests zoonotic spillover…either directly from bats or through an intermediate host.”

NPR (7/29/26) reported that

a 2024 study in the peer-reviewed journal Cell found multiple lines of evidence showing the virus spilled over from wild animals to humans…. The analysis shows with unprecedented granularity that coronavirus-susceptible wildlife and the SARS-CoV-2 virus were mingling, along with human beings, in a very specific part of the wet market in Wuhan.

While there is substantial agreement among scientists about the likelihood of a natural origin for the pandemic (Science, 2/6/24), the lab leak hypothesis remains a classic zombie idea, persistently resistant to being debunked out of rational society. In part this is due to the interest in maintaining it from foreign state media (AP, 2/15/21), intelligence services (BBC, 1/25/25)—and right-wing politicians.

‘Removes critical context’The Wall Street Journal‘s Jack Butler (7/29/26) described Fauci as “the man who became the face of elite overreaction to the pandemic.”

Senator Paul, ever the showman, portrayed Fauci’s unearthed diary entries as proof that his public statements dismissing a “lab leak” contradicted his own personal beliefs. The New York Post (7/28/26) and others repeat that line, but it isn’t accurate. FactCheck.org (7/31/26) noted that Paul’s performance

removes critical context for Fauci’s statements and falsely implies that if the pandemic didn’t originate in the one market, that it couldn’t have had a natural origin. It also treats Fauci’s diary statement as an immutable fact, when in reality, it was an interpretation of the information that was known at the time….

Fauci was clear in his diary that this did not change his opinion that the outbreak had a natural origin. “Having said that, somewhere the virus jumped from animals to humans,” he wrote.

And contrary to Paul’s insinuations—picked up by media like Wall Street Journal deputy editor Jack Butler (7/29/26), who said the revelations about Fauci “provide evidence of deliberate deception”—what Fauci said in his diary is pretty much what he was saying in real time. “Fauci publicly used almost the same wording a few weeks later in an interview with USA Today,” AP (7/29/26) noted.

‘Both onerous and performative’The Wall Street Journal (7/29/26) complained of “media censorship” of the Great Barrington Declaration, which encouraged “those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection.” Between 2020 and 2023, Covid killed nearly 278,000 Americans under the age of 65, according to the CDC.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (7/29/26) focused on the notion that America’s Covid response was overkill and that Fauci tried to cover this up:

Sen. Paul deserves credit for digging into the truth about the government’s destructive Covid response—especially the effort by Dr. Fauci and others to stifle dissenting views and hide the record….

We know from previous disclosures that Drs. Fauci and [Francis] Collins tried to demean the authors of the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration that favored “focused protection” on the old and sick rather than wholesale lockdowns. The duo favored media censorship of those and other dissenting views.

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens (7/30/26) said:

I was prepared to cut Fauci and others in government a lot of slack in the first months of the pandemic, when the take-no-chances approach seemed like the safest course. But at some point many of the measures that he insisted were necessary—like the six-foot distance rule, or masking requirements that had no hope of consistent enforcement—felt both onerous and performative, and guaranteed to create a backlash.

The “Covid wasn’t that bad and we overreacted” line is something one can promote only with the help of revisionist thinking. Covid killed more than a million Americans. By the time the death toll hit the halfway mark in early 2021, more Americans had died “from Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined” (New York Times, 2/21/21).

Let’s emphasize: That was one year. In one country. According to WHO (5/13/26):

Globally, an estimated 22.1 million excess deaths associated with the COVID-19 pandemic occurred from 2020 to 2023, roughly three times the 7.0 million deaths officially reported.

As many 23 million Americans have shown the symptoms of long Covid. One scholarly account (JMIR Public Health and Surveillance, 6/2/22) “estimated that 3,583,100 [Covid] hospitalizations occurred in the United States from May 2020 through April 2021.”

‘Fear of polarization’As this map from Lancet (4/16/22) shows, excess mortality in the first years of the pandemic varied by a factor of 100 or more from one country to another.

The United States didn’t have particularly onerous—or effective—quarantine policies, especially compared to countries like China (Democratization, 2/13/24) or New Zealand (Spinoff, 7/14/25). And while pundits love to mock masks, the best evidence we have suggests that those things worked. As Health Affairs (2/16/22) reported: “Masking mandates conferred benefit in reducing community case incidence during an early period of the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Lockdowns, if you can call them that, were popular in America when the pandemic started. Citing a Kaiser poll from April 2020, KQED (4/23/20) reported that “a majority of Americans—8 in 10—say strict shelter-in-place guidelines are worth it, to keep people safe from Covid-19 and control the spread of the virus.” And such measures didn’t stay in place long; while 40 states issued stay-at-home orders in April 2020, “all but one state lifted them by the end of June,” noted the New York Times (6/28/23).

“We didn’t lockdown during the Delta and Omicron waves, despite their severity and contribution to overall deaths from the pandemic,” Gregg Gonsalves, professor of epidemiology at Yale University, told FAIR:

Delta and Omicron together account for roughly half of all US Covid deaths, even though they came after the original 2020 wave. Many of these deaths could have been avoided.

“It appears that out of a fear of polarization, some media are treating the idea that ‘Covid measures went too far’ as an acceptable middle ground,” said Lucky Tran, a science communicator in New York City who has been active with the People’s CDC. “Reporters and commentators should be more wary of repeating mistakes seen in climate coverage in the past by giving false-balance to bad-faith arguments.”

Tran also told FAIR:

US Covid commentary has largely ignored the success of other countries, which helps fuel the “Covid measures went too far” narrative. For instance, Australia and New Zealand, which implemented stronger public health measures than the US, experienced far fewer deaths, and at the same time had better social and educational outcomes.

If anything, US officials weren’t cautious enough at the outset. Tran, again:

A claim we frequently see is that scientists and officials made some mistakes at the start of the pandemic, but this is understandable as science evolves. While this is true, it’s important to be more specific here, and explicitly state that this does not mean that “Covid measures went too far.”

The main mistakes made early on were not implementing Covid measures more effectively—such as not socially distancing quickly enough, not making tests widely available, and not acknowledging that Covid is airborne and ensuring there were enough high quality masks for everyone.

Public health interventions—like free Covid testing and vaccine sites and the use of a command economy to increase medical response (ABC News, 3/27/20)—as well as economic assistance to workers, businesses, tenants and the unemployed during economic upheaval gave Americans a small sample of a functioning social democratic state. Given the recent success of Democratic Socialists of America candidates, it’s clear many voters liked what they tasted.

No wonder Paul and the media are still so mad, more than six years after Covid nightmare came to America.

View Details

Janine Jackson interviewed Vincent Southerland, from the New York University School of Law, about Louisiana v. Callais for the July 31, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260731.mp3Janine Jackson: In the United States, there’s an incantation evoked when we see something horrific happening, and that’s: “Well, just vote against it.” The belief that this country is a democracy is powerful, such that even intelligent, aware people believe that if a person got elected, or a law got passed, it must have been because more people wanted it than didn’t.

It’s hard, it’s depressing, to learn that that isn’t how it works, that there are obstacles and loopholes and backdoor cronyism and payoffs and favor-trading, a million things that make a travesty of “one person, one vote.”

It’s one thing to be an aspirational society. Pretending harms aren’t serious harms because they don’t fit the model of the country you’re pretending to be—that’s something else entirely. It’s dangerous to keep seeing what’s happening in front of you, and calling it aberration, because “this isn’t who we are.”

Black people have never had the privilege to pretend that all the work is done. There’s no pleasure in watching so many other people wake up to that. But we do know that you have to be awake to make real change happen.

Vincent Southerland is associate professor at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Criminal Defense and Reentry Clinic. He’s faculty director of NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and co-editor of Race, Rights and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory, from the New Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Vincent Southerland.

Vincent Southerland: Thanks so much for having me.

Brennan Center (4/29/26)

JJ: I want to take a moment to think about 1965, and the context of the Voting Rights Act. The hope of Black people that the law was the thing that could take us outside of existing racist power relationships, the law was our recourse. It wasn’t utopian; it was grounded. But talk a little about the Voting Rights Act and its impacts, to help us feel what’s happening now.

VS: Sure. So the Voting Rights Act in 1965 was really the crown jewel of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a result of years and years of struggle by countless individuals, working with every bit of their might: organizing, protesting, marching, but also pulling on levers of political and moral power to really vindicate the United States Constitution’s guarantee under the 15th Amendment that no government could deny or abridge the right to vote on the basis of “race, color or previous condition of servitude.”

Now, the critical point about the 15th Amendment was that it was part of a trio of amendments—the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments—that were enacted in the wake of the Civil War, during what is often referred to as this country’s second founding, kicking off the period of Reconstruction, which really tried to reorient the frame of this country, and remove the sorts of structural and moral racial barriers to full participation in the society. It really tried to vindicate the rights of Black people and ensure that the 13th Amendment ended enslavement; the 14th Amendment protected citizenship, as well as the full panoply of rights and privileges that come with citizenship; and the 15th Amendment securing the right to vote.

Equal Justice Initiative (8/13/24)

And so, even after the passage of the constitutional amendment, and the enactment of the constitutional amendment, there were still all sorts of efforts undertaken by states across the country, primarily in the South, to limit, prevent and otherwise undermine Black people’s political participation and the ability to vote. You think about things like poll taxes, think about things like the sorts of tests that people were forced to endure—count the number of jelly beans in this jar— pay a tax for being able to vote. And then downright and outright violence that was undertaken by individuals trying to prevent Black people from exercising their political power.

And so the Voting Rights Act was designed, really, to try and put an end to all those forms of discrimination, both the forms of discrimination that were explicit and intentional, and, over time, eventually with the amendment, forms of discrimination that were implicit, and more based on the effects rather than obvious expressions of intent by racists or others who were trying to deny Black people the right to vote.

And so what the Voting Rights Act did was change the political dynamics of this country. And what you saw was this tremendous uptick in the number of Black elected officials across the American South—across the country, really—at all levels of government, both in the federal and state and local elections. And so you had much more Black representation, because the law was used to remedy and prevent the sorts of efforts that individuals were engaging in to try to undermine the right to vote.

So 1965 was, at the time when the Voting Rights Act was signed as a law, I think there was a lot of hope about what the future held, and a lot of hope about the promise of the 15th Amendment and the promise of the Voting Rights Act to be able to vindicate people’s right to vote. And you saw the results of that over the ensuing years.

Hammer & Hope (Summer/26)

JJ: You can’t really overestimate the way the Voting Rights Act has been used to affect real change for Black people and, hence, for everyone. So let’s talk through what you write about, which is the historical significance of the 2026 Supreme Court ruling Louisiana v. Callais. It’s monumental.

VS: It really is. I mean, it represents one of the most consequential voting rights decisions in decades. And it really fundamentally shifts and alters the balance of power, not only in Congress and in federal elections, but in state and local elections as well. And, perhaps most importantly, rolls back the tremendous progress that has been made over decades to ensure that Black people and other people are able to exercise their right to vote. And what we think will be the result of this decision is an erasure of Black political power unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes.

And it’s hard to overstate just how deeply troubling and harmful this decision is going to be. It’s already having effects in states like Tennessee, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina—and Louisiana, of course, where you’re seeing the elimination of seats that were previously held by Black elected officials––the elimination of Black elected political power across many of these states. And that sort of effort is going to only continue, unless and until either the federal government and our representatives in Congress, or those at the state level, take action to do something about it.

JJ: Maybe take a second to explain how that’s happening, how voter dilution happens when redistricting. You can’t give chapter and verse, but Louisiana v. Callais allowed states to do something. And what is that?

VS: Let’s take a step back and talk a little bit about the decision itself. So the Voting Rights Act had two primary pillars, if you will. One was Section Five, and Section Five of the Voting Rights Act basically required states that had engaged in historical discrimination in voting to submit to the federal government their plans for changing anything about the way in which the voting process was going to take place, to ensure that the changes they were making were not going to undermine the ability of Black people and other people of color to exercise their right to vote. That was one section.

Brennan Center (6/25/20)

Section Five was essentially gutted in an earlier Supreme Court decision a few years ago. So you have this one enforcement provision of the Voting Rights Act that is already essentially dead letter.

What Callais did was strike at another provision of the Voting Rights Act, Section Two. And Section Two is often known as the sword of the Voting Rights Act because of its enforcement powers. What Section Two allowed individuals to do, was to challenge changes to the processes by which voting was going to take place, to ensure that Black people or other people of color were able to exercise the right to vote. And it would allow such challenges based on the effects of changes that states were going to make to their voting processes.

So let me give you one example, not necessarily drawn from the opinion, but just an example of the sorts of changes. Say I want to change a polling place from one part of town, where the vast majority of individuals who live in that part of town are Black and brown, to another part of town, or a place where Black and brown people are just unable to get to, because of lack of transportation, because it’s just difficult to get to, because the hours are difficult for them to be able to exercise the right to vote during those hours.

And so you want to make that change, just because you think it might be more convenient—you don’t have any animus, you’re not racist in any way, but you just want to make a change for some other unrelated reason. And maybe it’s better for Republican voters, or better for a certain class of voters unrelated to their race. Section Two would allow individuals to demonstrate that that change is going to have its effect on Black people’s ability to elect their candidate of choice, and therefore we need to prevent that change from happening, right?

Vincent Southerland: “What Callais does is weaken, and really in many ways upend, the entire framework of Section Two, and reduce the Voting Rights Act to little more than words on a paper.”

What Callais does is essentially say that states and officials who are running the elections can make those sorts of changes, and make them as long as they are related to political party, that in order to prove that something nefarious was happening in the course of making those changes, you have to demonstrate that someone actually acted with racist intent, i.e., the person who’s making this change to the ways in which voting is going to happen has to declare that they’re doing it because they’re trying to harm Black people’s ability to exercise their right to vote, and disregards the very standard in the statute which looks to the effects of that sort of change. And so what Callais does is weaken, and really in many ways upend, the entire framework of Section Two, and reduce the Voting Rights Act to little more than words on a paper.

So let me give you an example of how this plays out in the context of a change that might affect Black people’s rights to vote. And the Callais decision lays out an example to help clarify what this all means.

So imagine, for a moment, a state that is shaped like a rectangle. In the center of that rectangle is a circle. The rectangle itself is 90% white. The circle is 90% Black. Now imagine, under normal conditions, the people who are in the circle, the Black people are able to elect their representative of choice, year after year after year. They decide they want to elect X, Y, Z candidate. They’re able to elect that candidate year after year after year. The same is true for the people in the rectangle.

Now imagine the state legislature decides, you know what? We want to eliminate the political power of the people inside that circle. And so what the state does, in order to eliminate their political power, is split the circle into six equal slices, right? And takes each one of those slices and apportions it to part of the larger rectangle. So now that 90% population that was inside that circle is spread out across the entire rectangle.

And therefore the people inside that circle no longer are able to elect their candidate of choice. They’re no longer able to use their political power to express their political voice, meaning that their vote now counts for less than the people in the rectangle who are majority white. And so that is racial vote dilution.

What Section Two, under the old regime, would have allowed litigants to do is to challenge the legislature’s action by saying, “Look, you’re eliminating the ability of those people inside the circle, their ability to elect their candidate of choice. That’s a problem. That’s a problem under the law. You need to recreate a district or several districts that allow them to do that.”

What Callais says is, unless the state legislature says, “we’re doing this because we want to make sure Black people can’t vote,” there is no remedy. The law has no effect. And the fact that you could see the elimination of Black political power inside that circle being split into six equal slices and spread across the state is meaningless; the effects of it are meaningless. We only want to pay attention to the intent, the actions that are intentionally taken by state legislature, which is precisely what Section Two was designed to address, the effects and not the intent. Because, as we know, people who engage in racist behavior don’t often say we’re doing it because we are racist, because we want to stop Black people or brown people or other people of color from being able to vote.

Harvard Business Review (10/11/17)

They might give any other excuse in the book, but they’re not going to be as explicit about why they’re taking particular actions.

So I think that was designed with that understanding in mind, because we understand how racism operates, and the drafters and legislators who created Section Two, Republicans and Democrats alike, understood that you need something that’s going to allow us to get at the racist effects of these voting changes, rather than just declarations of intentional discrimination made by people who are undertaking these sort of changes. And so Callais changes the landscape in ways that are hard to understand just how much of a sea change it sparks.

JJ: And it’s against a backdrop, the way it’s being sold to a lot of people is this notion of colorblindness. And I know that a lot of people, Black, white, brown, laugh out loud at that idea. It’s not colorblind when I walk down the street or sit in some restaurants. It’s not colorblind when I apply for a loan or a job. We live in a color-seeing world. And so I think, for a lot of people, it just lands hollow when we say, “Oh, well, but no, it’s all the same. We’re all equal. So why should it matter that there is no longer a protection for Black voice in the voting process?”

Vox (8/3/26)

VS: That’s 100% right. And the Supreme Court, in particular the conservative majority in the Supreme Court, has time and time again returned to this ideology of colorblindness, this notion that the way to deal with racial injustice is to ignore racism, and treat everyone as though race does not matter.

And so you see this colorblindness ideology, not only through the court’s jurisprudence around the death penalty—there was a case in 1987, McCleskey v. Kemp, where you had a situation where Black individuals were more likely to be sentenced to death if the victim in the case was white. And what the court essentially said was, there’s no remedies for that, because we don’t have anybody engaging in intentional racial discrimination, and we can’t look at the effects of these sorts of decisions.

You see that colorblindness notion in the context of the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on affirmative action, on this idea that we can’t try and remedy the lack of diversity that we find in our educational institutions, and that doing so, and undertaking any action that acknowledges the ways in which race casts a shadow over everything in our society problematic, is in and of itself a problem under the law, based on this ideology of colorblindness.

And I see it in the voting rights space as well, because what the court is doing is transforming any consideration of race into “suspect.”

JJ: You lay all of this out in your recent piece at Hammer & Hope. And you say in that piece: Given all that, what’s next? So I’ll ask you that. We won’t pretend things are simple or easy, but talk a little about what we can do besides hide under the covers.

VS: I think there are a few things. I think, first of all, we have to really take stock of just how much of a sea change and how significant this opinion actually is. And really take a step back and zoom out and think about what this court’s jurisprudence is actually signaling to us and telling us.

It’s of a piece with the Make America Great Again movement, the conservative or alt-right ideology. This notion that, basically, our past is our past; we’ve gotten over all of it, and we no longer need to think about or consider or be concerned about the ways in which race continues to shape our present-day and current-day reality. And that is the prevailing sentiment, this idea that trying to advance racial justice is an unnecessary task, because everything is blind now. Kind of, just get over it. And you see a Supreme Court that is almost signaling a sort of exhaustion with efforts to remedy our racial inequality.

The first thing you need to do is get to understand that our past is not past. It’s really with us right now, and it lives with us right now, and the effects of it are with us right now.

I think the second piece of it is to understand that we can’t simply ignore racial inequality. The only way to get beyond the sort of dynamics we find ourselves in today is to confront it head on, the same way that you would, if you go to the doctor and something’s bothering you, the doctor’s going to ask you, “What are your symptoms? What are your problems?” The doctor’s also going to ask you about your family history. And ask you about your past, about the things you’ve done, about the things that might have caused whatever ailment you have brought to her.

And you wouldn’t go to the doctor and say, “Well, I don’t know anything about the past. None of that stuff matters.” Of course not. The same is true when it comes to racial inequality. And so I think there is that piece of it.

Brennan Center (2/29/26)

I think the other piece of it is, at the state level, we’ve seen states reacting and responding to Callais. New Jersey, I think, is a good example of this, passing things like the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act. These are state voting rights act provisions that essentially mirror a lot of what was set forth in the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965, trying to replicate the regime that would allow state officials to ensure that Black people and other people of color are able to elect their candidates of choice. That will presume that changes that are being made to efforts to vote have to be cleared by the Secretary of State or other state officials before allowing those changes to go forward, to ensure that those changes are not going to have a disparate impact on Black voters. And so you see states passing laws, or that’s one of the things on the table to try and address the harm that Callais is certainly going to foster going forward.

And I think the last thing, among the last things that we need to do when we think about what comes next, and what we need to be focused on, is beginning to understand just how fragile the gains that we’ve made over the last half century, 75 years, actually are. And understand that whenever we’ve made progress, retrenchment is often what comes next, and follows almost immediately after that. And understand that our obligation is to continue to fight these fights, to continue to talk about and call out racial injustice when we see it, whenever we see it, wherever we see it. And to have an understanding of how racial injustice is not only a challenge for Black and brown people, but is a challenge for all of us. Because we live in a multiracial democracy, with a Constitution that has these lofty ideals, that we have a responsibility to close the gap between the reality that we are living and the ideals that we see in our foundational documents.

And so I think part of what I would implore us to do is stay educated, stay conscious, stay focused on the harmful things that our government, that our courts, are engaged in, so we don’t lose sight of those sorts of challenges and get distracted by the noise that’s out in the world today.

So I think if we do some of those things, alongside building durable political coalitions that I think draw on people from all walks of life who care about justice, care about freedom, who care about liberation, and understand that building political power in that way is going to allow us to leverage the law in ways that are going to advance our cause as well.

JJ: Well, there’s a lot more I could ask you, but we’ll have to end it there for now.

We’ve been speaking with Vincent Southerland. His piece, “The Supreme Court Blesses the Destruction of Black Electoral Power,” can be found at HammerAndHope.org. Vincent Southerland, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VS: Thanks so much, Janine. It’s wonderful to be here.

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60 Minutes announced a batch of new hires to replace a number of staffers fired by CBS network commissar Bari Weiss, with the most prominent addition being longtime conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat (Washington Post, 7/28/26). 60 Minutes executive producer Nick Bilton—brought in by Weiss from Vanity Fair—called Douthat “one of the preeminent public intellectuals in America today, a thinker of uncommon rigor and a journalist of deep empathy.”

FAIR has been chronicling Douthat for a while now. Here’s some of the outstanding examples we’ve catalogued of his “empathy” and “rigor.”

That Silly CommentariatRoss Douthat was far from alone (Extra!, 6/16) in his confidence that “Donald Trump isn’t going to be the Republican nominee” in 2016, as he declared in the (New York Times (1/7/16). Douthat was a bit more confident than most in the accuracy of his crystal ball: “The entire commentariat is going to feel a little silly when Marco Rubio wins every Republican primary,” he predicted on Twitter (9/25/15).

Defending ‘Juan Crow’ICE agents killing Alex Pretti (Texas Public Radio, 2/1/26).

Ross Douthat (5/2/10) criticized those who were “impugning the motives” of an Arizona immigration law that

has been denounced as a “Nazi” or “near-fascist” law, a “police state” intervention, an imitation of “apartheid,” a “Juan Crow” regime that only a bigot could possibly support.

But the Arizona law, Douthat argued, was just a response to the federal government’s failure to “regain…control of its southern border. There is a widespread pretense that this has been tried and found to be impossible, when really it’s been found difficult and left untried.” Real “control,” he suggested, would involve “enforcement measures that will inevitably be criticized as draconian: some kind of tamper-proof Social Security card, most likely, and then more physical walls along our southern border.”

As FAIR noted at the time, actually trying to purge some 11 million residents from the country would involve measures that would be draconian by any standard.

Douthat wrote that his vision of “control” would require “shared sacrifice from Americans accustomed to benefiting from cheap labor”—an acknowledgement that forcing millions of workers out of our economy would be serious hardship for those who remain.

“You can see why our leaders would rather duck the problem.” Douthat wrote. As FAIR (5/3/10) responded at the time, “Yes, you can see why politicians don’t want to destroy the lives of millions of people in order to worsen the economic condition of hundreds of millions.”

We Need More Babies—No, Not Those BabiesRoss Douthat (New York Times, 3/27/21).

Ross Douthat has long been obsessed with the so-called “baby bust” (FAIR.org, 2/7/23). The columnist (1/21/23) argued that those worried about climate change are naively missing the real threat: a “population bust” that will result in “a zero-sum struggle between a swollen retired population and the overburdened young.”

It’s highly debatable that a population bust is even an economic problem—and it’s certainly not an unsolvable one (CEPR, 1/17/23). But assuming the primacy of a population crisis allows Douthat to upsell his conservative wishlist: namely, reducing entitlements for the aging and ending abortion (New York Times, 1/21/23, 12/14/22).

The global population is actually expected to continue growing for at least another 25 to 50 years, as Douthat acknowledged when he noted that the population of Africa could triple by the end of the century. But Douthat sees Black and brown people not as solutions, but as part of the problem. If “even a fraction of this population” migrates, he warned,

the balance between successful assimilation on the one hand, and destabilization and backlash on the other, will help decide whether the age of demographic decline ends in revitalization or collapse.

His baby bust obsession is clearly grounded in xenophobia and white nationalist anxieties. In Europe, he argued (10/1/22):

The preferred centrist solution to both economic stagnation and demographic diminishment, mass immigration, has contributed to Balkanization, crime and native backlash—even in a progressive bastion like Sweden.

He was even more blunt in a column (10/20/18) headlined “Fear of a Black Continent”—subtitled “Why European elites are worrying about African babies.” In it, Douthat warned of the dangers of increasing African migration to Europe, but said that attempts to slow the African birthrate would be “cruel”—so, instead,

anyone who hopes for something other than destabilization and disaster from the Eurafrican encounter should hope for a countervailing trend, in which Europeans themselves begin to have more children.

If that sounds like eugenics, that’s because it is.

Pelosi’s World—and Ours“Pondering what [Democratic House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi and her compatriots are rejecting gives us a pretty good sense of what they’re for,” Ross Douthat (11/14/10) wrote. Part of that nightmare vision was “a world where the Social Security retirement age never budges, no matter how high average life expectancy climbs.” Douthat seemed unaware that the “retirement age” had already been rising when he wrote that for seven years; since 2003, every year-long cohort of retirees has had to wait two more months to reach what’s called “full retirement age.” These “budges” continued until 2026, with the “full” retirement age now 67 (FAIR.org, 11/15/10).

Get the Iraq War Wrong the Right WayMatt Damon in Green Zone.

Offering a critique of the Iraq War drama Green Zone, Ross Douthat (3/14/10) offered a “narrative of the Iraq invasion, properly told,” that ended with:

And you had Saddam Hussein himself, the dictator in his labyrinth, apparently convinced that pretending to have WMD was the best way to keep his grip on power.

This was based on the popular but evidence-free notion that Saddam Hussein fooled the US into thinking he still had chemical and biological weapons (Extra!, 1–2/04, 5–6/04). As FAIR (3/15/10) wrote, “Needless to say, when you’re complaining that a fictional film isn’t factual enough, you want to make sure that your facts aren’t fictional.”

(As a college student, Douthat was also wrong about the Iraq invasion in real time, writing in the Harvard Salient—2/14/02—that Saddam Hussein “is busy trying to acquire a nuclear bomb, to supplement his extensive collection of biological and chemical weaponry.”)

Repeal Roe and We’ll Stop Killing DoctorsDr. George Tiller

Ross Douthat (6/8/09) blamed the murder of Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider, on Roe v. Wade: “By enshrining a near-absolute right to abortion in the Constitution, the pro-choice side has ensured that the hard cases are more controversial than they otherwise would be,” he wrote:

One reason there’s so much fierce argument about the latest of late-term abortions—Should there be a health exemption? A fetal deformity exemption? How broad should those exemptions be? —is that Americans aren’t permitted to debate anything else.

Douthat offered what he presented as a compromise: “If abortion were returned to the democratic process, this landscape would change dramatically,” because

arguments about whether and how to restrict abortions in the second trimester—as many advanced democracies already do—would replace protests over the scope of third-trimester medical exemptions.

What would women gain from losing their bodily autonomy?

The result would be laws with more respect for human life, a culture less inflamed by a small number of tragic cases—and a political debate, God willing, unmarred by crimes like George Tiller’s murder.

As FAIR (6/12/09) noted, Douthat’s compromise was: Allow states to criminalize abortion, and anti-abortion fanatics will stop murdering doctors.

‘A Little More State Regulation’KFF (4/27/26)

Ross Douthat (4/2/21) maintained that “abortion foes actually have good reason to feel unsettled and uncertain rather than triumphant” about the 6–3 majority Republicans had installed for them on the Supreme Court:

It’s extremely easy to imagine the end of Roe leading to a little more state regulation over all (mostly limitations in the second trimester, along the lines of many European countries), but then for the few states that go further to find themselves boycotted and besieged, leaving the goal of ending abortion nationwide as far away as ever.

When Douthat wrote that, ten states had trigger laws that would ban abortion the moment Roe was overturned (FAIR.org, 5/19/21). As of 2026, 17 states have near-total bans on abortion.

Homophobia Not a ‘Structural System of Oppression’xkcd (10/8/14)

In a column urging the courts to stay out of the “difficult and personal” decision as to whether or not to discriminate against gay couples, Douthat dismissed the obvious parallel to discrimination against interracial marriage (New York Times, 4/4/15):

This isn’t a structural system of oppression, a society-wide conspiracy like Jim Crow; we’re talking about a handful of shops across the country. It seems possible, and reasonable, to live and let live.

Not a “structural system of oppression”? Same-sex sexual activity was illegal in every state until 1962, and the Supreme Court upheld such bans in 1986 as reflecting “millennia of moral teaching.” When the Supreme Court struck down the criminalization of gay sexuality in 2003, 13 states still had anti-“sodomy” laws on the books.

During the Cold War, the US government purged thousands of gay men and lesbians from the military and other government posts because, as a 1950 Senate report had it, “those who engage in overt acts of perversion lack the emotional stability of normal persons.” Only in 2011 could gays and lesbians begin to serve openly in the armed forces.This is what FAIR (4/6/15) described as “a concerted, structural, systemic effort going back generations to marginalize and punish homosexuality”—brushed aside by Douthat as “a handful of shops across the country.”

Pope Benedict ‘Looking Good’ While Covering Up Child AbusePope Benedict

Ross Douthat (4/11/10) cited the reporting of Jason Berry (National Catholic Reporter, 4/6/10), who criticized Pope John Paul II for his support of Marcial Maciel Degollado, a child molester who founded the influential Legion of Christ. But Douthat spun it as a positive story about John Paul’s successor:

Only one churchman comes out of Berry’s story looking good: Joseph Ratzinger. Berry recounts how Ratzinger lectured to a group of Legionary priests, and was subsequently handed an envelope of money “for his charitable use.” The cardinal “was tough as nails in a very cordial way,” a witness said, and turned the money down…. It was Ratzinger who re-opened the long-dormant investigation into Maciel’s conduct in 2004, just days after John Paul II had honored the Legionaries in a Vatican ceremony. It was Ratzinger, as Pope Benedict, who banished Maciel to a monastery and ordered a comprehensive inquiry into his order.

The problem with this testimonial is that Ratzinger was first informed about Maciel’s pattern of abuse in 1994. The cardinal’s reported response: Maciel’s case was a “touchy problem” due to the “benefits” he had brought to the Vatican. “One can’t put on trial such a close friend of the pope as Marcial Maciel,” Ratzinger was later quoted.

“It was Ratzinger who persuaded John Paul, in 2001, to centralize the church’s haphazard system for handling sex abuse allegations in his office,” Douthat wrote, offering this as evidence of Ratzinger’s zeal to persecute child-abusing priests. Unmentioned was the letter Ratzinger wrote in 2001 threatening to excommunicate any bishop who discussed abuse cases outside of the church’s legal system (Extra!, 7–8/08; FAIR.org, 5/13/08).

Nor did Douthat cite Ratzinger’s assertion that attention to clerical molestation amounted to a conspiracy against the Catholic Church (Zenit, 12/3/02): “I am personally convinced that the constant presence in the press of the sins of Catholic priests, especially in the United States, is a planned campaign.”

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NPR (7/16/26)

This week on CounterSpin: “In Primetime Speech, Trump Doesn’t Provide Evidence for Illegal Voting” was the temperate headline NPR put on a story about Trump’s recent East Room speech that, they allowed, “included many baseless claims” about election integrity. They told us that “many of the documents the White House posted online during the speech did not appear to fully support sweeping claims the president made,” and even got to the point of calling his contention that he won the 2020 election “a lie.”

What the story didn’t do was show, with urgency, how voting in the upcoming midterms and beyond will be materially affected by the use of state power to promote ideas that they’re saying are, yeah, for sure, not true.

Obstacles to voting don’t have to be valid to have impact. Black people know that better than anyone. And it isn’t just Trump’s lies, that media keep repeating, even as they call them lies; the Supreme Court’s June decision in Louisiana v. Callais makes the terrain different, in ways people need to understand and confront.

Vincent Southerland is associate professor at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Criminal Defense and Reentry Clinic. He’s faculty director of NYU Law’s Center on Race, Inequality and the Law, and co-editor of Race, Rights and Redemption: The Derrick Bell Lectures on the Law and Critical Race Theory.

We talk with him this week on CounterSpin.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260731Southerland.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the Gaza genocide.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260731Banter.mp3Featured image: San Francisco voting rights activists, 1956 (Frances Albrier Collection)

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Janine Jackson interviewed writer, organizer and minister Dorothee Benz about the Prairieland trial for the July 24, 2026, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin260724Benz.mp3Guardian (7/15/26)

Janine Jackson: In addition to the visible, horrific murders in the streets by ICE agents, at least 52 people have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in the US, between Trump’s inauguration last January and June 4 of this year. Reasons include unsanitary facilities, inadequate food, substandard health infrastructure and delayed—which is to say, denied—medical care.

That would include Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva, a Venezuelan man who died while being transferred between detention facilities in Georgia. ICE says it was cardiac arrest. His family says ICE refused to allow him to take medications with him when they snatched him up.

The people subjected to these lethal conditions have not all been charged, much less convicted, with any crime. But corporate news media are hard at work suggesting to us that somehow, for some reason, we shouldn’t seriously value their lives. And we shouldn’t seriously question their killings. And we should get ready for more.

A whole lot of people are not accepting that. And some of them gathered outside the ICE Prairieland Detention Center in Alvarado, Texas, last year to say “no,” and to show solidarity with the people detained, with a noise demonstration.

FAIR.org (7/22/26)

When one protester saw a police officer pulling his weapon, he fired his own rifle, wounding an officer. That man, Benjamin Song, has now been sentenced to 100 years in prison. And he was asked in court if he would deny being part of Antifa. According to NPR North Texas, Benjamin Song “defended anti-fascism as a belief.” “‘What kind of people are not against fascism?’ Song said.” Well, those eight defendants were sentenced to a combined 450 years in prison, including Daniel Sanchez Estrada, who wasn’t even there.

Prairieland is a test of this country’s aspirations toward democracy and, more immediately, a challenge to a press corps that insists that it is free. A new piece at FAIR.org looks at how the corporate press are meeting this moment. We’re joined now by its author.

Dorothee Benz is a social justice writer, organizer and an ordained minister dedicated to fighting white Christian nationalism. She joins us now by phone from Inwood. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Dorothee Benz.

Dorothee Benz: I’m delighted to be here.

New Republic (6/25/26)

JJ: My planned first question was: I would hope that anyone paying attention could see how monumental this Prairieland case is—for free speech, for democratic participation, for fundamental human rights. Tell us what you found that the major media, that many of us still look to, what did that corporate media do with this case? And why does their emphasis, or their erasures, why does that matter?

DB: It actually took me quite a while of digging to figure out how bad the case was. I mean, the corporate coverage was so anemic and so missing a couple of really important points that I had to keep digging before I even understood the problem.

Because the case itself is deeply problematic. It’s built on a legal theory that relies on a made-up category that Antifa is a terrorist organization, and that people are guilty of material support of terrorism, that is not problematized in the media at all. And there were also tremendously significant procedural irregularities in the case that really made it pretty much a show trial in a lot of ways. And none of that is really apparent in the corporate coverage.

I would say that the corporate coverage came down to three big omissions. One is framing the issue at stake in the Prairieland trial as one of violence, and not protected First Amendment activity. All of the headlines and all of the leads were basically “violent protesters” and “part of an armed assault” and things like that, as opposed to a protected First Amendment right to protest, and a right to have political opinions. And therefore they missed the story, that what was being criminalized here is dissent and not terrorism.

FAIR.org (10/3/25)

And then the second problem, really, and this is I think the deepest problem, was failing to understand and question the legal theory behind the case, which is built on the idea of “material support for terrorism,” whereby terrorism here is this made-up entity of Antifa.

And it’s one thing for Donald Trump to say Antifa is terrorist. It’s another thing for a judge to throw people in jail for decades on that same theory.

And then, lastly, I would say everything comes down to Antifa, understanding what Antifa is and isn’t, and how it is constructed for the purpose of criminalizing dissent. And the media missed that entirely.

JJ: I just feel like we’re going to hear NSPM-7, and we can spell that out, but we’re going to hear it again and again invoked as if it was a real thing. And to me, I go back to when “war on terror” was taken out of quotation marks, because it used to be kind of a thing that like, what is this actually? And then, suddenly, media just said, “OK, it’s a thing.” And I’m concerned that this domestic terrorism definition is just going to be silently slid into the language that people are accepting that they hear. And it’s so dangerous.

Brennan Center (10/9/25)

DB: Absolutely. And I think Antifa is the symbol of that.

So all of the major news stories were quick to say Antifa is not a membership organization, which is kind of implied in the way Donald Trump talks about it. But then they went on to describe it as a “loose network” or an “ideology” or something like that. And none of them were able to say that it is a right-wing bogeyman that’s made up exactly for the purpose that it’s now being deployed to do, which is to take a whole bunch of people whose political opinions the right doesn’t like, lump them together, call them dangerous, call them violent, call them terrorist, and therefore make them vulnerable to these kinds of prosecutions. Nobody said that.

And they also attached the label “far left” to the name Antifa, as though being anti-fascist is somehow now beyond the pale. And in doing that, they inadvertently, I think, legitimize the government’s effort to take the First Amendment activities, to take political opinions that are anti-fascist, that are pro-democracy, that are pro-dissent, that are anti–ethnic cleansing, and make them suspect, and therefore make them vulnerable to prosecution in exactly this way.

JJ: And I wonder, why would not a press corps that is invested, presumably, in presenting a range of disparate views, how would you not see that as an alarm? How would you not be alarmed by, and get to work fighting, a declaration that says we’re going to call particular viewpoints “terrorism,” and we’re going to treat them like crimes? To me, that’s where a press corps would leap up. And that’s not what we’re seeing.

DB: No, it’s not. And I think it starts with the press being, I’ll just say “intimidated,” I don’t know if that’s really the right verb, by the call “terrorism.” Whenever the government shouts “terrorism,” rather than stick their necks out and maybe invite some backlash, they’re going to just take that pretty much at face value, and then sort of nibble around the edges, but not contest the central claim of it, right?

Because the central claim here was A) that Antifa exists, right, as opposed to being this entity that’s made up for the purpose of criminalizing dissent. And then B) that people who wear all-black clothing—as those of us in New York do every day—read anarchist books, have left-wing literature in their homes, that that makes them part of Antifa, which then in the equation means it must be violent, and therefore it must be terrorist. And that “terrorist” label just, I think, spooks the press, and then they back down. And that is not a good sign.

JJ: I think it spooks people, too. I think once you put that label “terrorist,” something shuts down, and somehow ‘under the jail’ isn’t bad enough. And I think interrogating that whole language has got to be part of what we’re doing.

And I guess that leads me to my question of what do you think a vital, independent, engaged, humanist, critical press corps would be doing right now? What would we be doing? Folks are in the streets, folks are working, but we could have media that support that work. And what do you think that kind of press corps would look like?

In These Times (3/26/26)

DB: Well, at first I think it would look like accurate and 360-degree reporting. So much of the work that I did in writing this piece was actually in finding out what the case itself was. Usually when I write a piece for FAIR, you can see what the facts of the case are, and then you can see the corporate spin on it. This was like, I had to dig well beyond corporate sources to even understand what the case was. And the more I dug, the more appalling it looked. So things that the Intercept or In These Times or other independent outlets reported are perfectly capable—like, the New York Times could report the same things. So these things just need to be reported.

And then, secondly, I would say corporate media, any media, needs to unpack terms and claims that are left intact and create a bias. In this case, the idea of “material support for terrorism.” There’s a whole body of law around “material support.” But no one ever explained that term, let alone that applying it to this idea of Antifa was creating an entire legal fiction on which people were then convicted.

That sentence that I just said is nowhere in the press. And that’s really the alarm bell that should have gone off. Police lie. Police lie all the time. And reporting “he said, she said,”—if that; there wasn’t a lot of the “she said” in these stories, even—is not the same as saying, “This is not true. This is a novel legal theory that is dangerous and is not based in existing law at all.”

Pretending that these kinds of show trials and show prosecutions—Prairieland is one thing, but the folks that were just arrested in Minneapolis, the folks that were arrested in Ohio, this is not the first or the last. Pretending that these are something other than political prosecution is not serving us well.

And I’ll say that, in many ways, our elite institutions, in the last year and a half, have really failed us. The law firms that caved to the demands of the administration, the universities that caved—let’s not even talk about the Democratic Party, the corporate media. While ordinary and often extremely vulnerable people, who don’t have the resources or the lawyers that any of these institutions have, have stood up with incredible integrity and courage to challenge human rights violations and to challenge the narratives propping them up.

Slate (7/27/26)

We need our media to do the same thing, to defend the right to dissent along the way. Whether it was the student encampments or the detainees at Delaney Hall and their incredibly courageous hunger strike and labor strike, and the protesters outside. Everybody in Minneapolis. If 70-year-old Lutheran church ladies can be in the streets challenging ICE, then certainly corporate media can get it together to deconstruct these novel legal theories that are being used to criminalize dissent.

JJ: I’m going to bring you back to ways forward in just a second, but I’ll just hold you on media for a minute. I think a lot of the time, media criticism gets, maybe not bogged down, but misdirected by individual personalities: “Well, this person said this, but do they really believe it?” Or even by meta concerns: “Should we be consuming media at all? Why don’t we just touch grass?” But pretending that news media don’t shape our ideas and our understanding, not least our understanding of our political capacity, seems to me like whistling past the graveyard.

I remember a person from Radio for Peace International saying that people told him that if he didn’t like what was on the radio, he should just turn it off. And he said, “OK, I’ll turn it off. But my neighbor might not turn it off. And the radio might tell him to go kill the leftist next door.”

I believe in media hygiene; I don’t think we should soak ourselves in it. But I don’t think we can ignore journalism, and just pretend that it doesn’t affect us. So there has to be a way to integrate our media criticism into the other social justice work that we do.

DB: Absolutely. I mean, media literacy is important. Media criticism of corporate media, and understanding their interests and their structural location in the larger story of who this country is, is important, and holding them to account. And it’s not like everything that they do is always terrible, but their structural biases are, at this moment, really extremely dangerous.

JJ: Yeah, to gird ourselves against. And that’s just part of the work that we’re going to need to do if we plan to stay alive and fight.

Going forward, these are difficult and dark times. You are a hopeful person. And I just wonder, what do you say to folks who just want to lay down and pull up the covers, right? There’s a lot to do, and there’s a lot of reasons to do it.

Dorothee Benz: “It’s up to us to connect with our neighbors, and build something collective that together, on scale, will change the world.”

DB: Yeah. Well, I certainly understand wanting to just pull the covers over my head. There’s a lot of days that start like that for me as well.

But I would say a couple things. One, what came to mind, as I was thinking about this conversation today, was Howard Zinn’s “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.” And I was thinking about it in the context of challenging the media to abandon their faux objectivity. The idea that there is such a thing as objectivity. That somehow reporting this trial as though it was something other than a sham is somehow doing a service to objective journalism. I was thinking of it in that context, but it really is in the context of what we’re all called to do every day. You’re on this train, and you’re either fighting fascism or you’re abetting it. So that’s the one thing I would say about that. Maybe that’s not too hopeful.

But the other thing is that we know that ordinary people can do extraordinary things, and that when we do them together collectively, the power of nonviolent noncooperation on scale has literally failed empires. It sent the British packing in India. It brought down the Berlin Wall. It ended apartheid in South Africa. We know we have that power. And it’s not up to any of us to bring down the Berlin Wall by ourselves, but it’s up to us to connect with our neighbors, and build something collective that together, on scale, will change the world.

JJ: That’s a beautiful place to end on. We’ve been speaking with Dorothee Benz. Her piece, “Prairieland Was a Test, and Corporate Media Failed,” is up right now at FAIR.org. Thank you so much, Dorothee Benz, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DB: Oh, my pleasure.

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A New York Times story (7/24/26) about the stabbing of two men—one Asian, one Jewish—includes the word “Asian” twice and the word “Jewish” 24 times.

The nonfatal stabbings of two individuals in Manhattan, allegedly by a man shouting “Allahu akbar”—or “God is the greatest” in Arabic—has drawn a lot of media attention, most of which centered on the fact that one of the victims was a Jewish man. (He was leaving a synagogue wearing a yarmulke—Fox 5, 7/24/26.) The fact that his first victim was Asian was almost completely lost in the media narrative.

At the New York Times (7/24/26), reporter Liam Stack (with the help of five other reporters) produced more than 1,000 words about how the stabbing reignited the question of whether Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s criticism of the Israeli government has fueled hatred against Jews generally. The Asian victim fell in the background.

AP (7/25/26), by contrast, was somewhat more balanced:

The Jewish victim was attacked just after leaving a nearby synagogue, called the Jewish Center, Rabbi Yosie Levine said.

“He was just trying to pray at his synagogue, and now we’re the ones praying for his recovery,” Levine said.

The Asian American Foundation, a New York-based advocacy group, said in a statement the attacks “underscore the persistent safety challenges” and mistreatment—from harassment to physical assault—facing Asian Americans in the city.

‘A culture of denigration’Saying that Zohran Mamdani “accuses Jews of genocide” (Wall Street Journal, 7/24/26) is like saying that critics of Vladimir Putin accuse Orthodox Christians of invading Ukraine.

The Wall Street Journal (7/24/26) offered an editorial titled “Globalizing the Intifada in Mamdani’s New York” with the subhead, “As the mayor accuses Jews of genocide, a Jewish man is stabbed.” Mamdani, of course, did not accuse “Jews” of genocide; he accused the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of committing genocide, as have Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and, most relevantly, the International Criminal Court (X, 7/22/26; Guardian, 7/22/26).

The Journal board said:

Mr. Mamdani isn’t responsible for Thursday’s stabbing. But he is responsible for promoting a culture of denigration that is all too easy for a fevered mind to hear and conclude that violence against Jews is acceptable. The mayor and his ideological groupies are playing with antisemitic fire.

The New York Post (7/24/26) was slightly more direct in its editorial. “Mamdani needs to admit that his speech has consequences,” the board said. “Quit fanning the flames, Mr. Mayor. Just stop.”

And several outlets covered a pro-Israel rally where speakers blamed the mayor’s support for Palestinians for violence against Jews. “Every word that comes out of his mouth—his obsessive Jew hatred, his obsessive hatred of Western ideology—is causing violence,” EndJewHatred director Michelle Ahdoot was quoted at WPIX (7/26/26).

The free paper amNY (7/26/26) covered the rally, saying that some laid the “blame at the feet of Mamdani for recent criticisms Hizzoner made about Benjamin Netanyahu, stating that the prime minister of Israel is not welcome in New York.” “Some members of the Jewish community feel as though these statements put them at risk,” the paper added. It included dramatic images from the Manhattan rally, including a pro-Israel protester flipping off pro-Palestine ultra-Orthodox Jewish demonstrators.

‘I know he’s dead’NBC4*‘s Melissa Russo (Instagram*, 7/22/26) wondered why Mamdani didn’t promise to arrest Hamas’s leaders “if circumstances were different”—i.e., if they were alive.

Corporate media are eager to platform those who constantly assert that Mamdani’s criticism of Israel is an attack on all Jews—in this case, that his choice to focus on one political leader, Netanyahu, counts as provocation against the Jews. The media’s attempt to box the mayor in here could be seen in a press conference directly after the speech about Netanyahu. In a transcript released by his office, a reporter (NBC 4‘s Melissa Russo) asked:

Some Jewish groups have noted that in your video you didn’t include a reference to October 7 or Hamas leaders who carried out that attack. And it’s not easy always to pin you down on this subject, forgive me, because there aren’t many perfect analogies to draw. For instance, not all world leaders or alleged war criminals have ICC warrants, or they’re not planning to come to the UN General Assembly, or perhaps they’re dead.

So, my question is would you, if circumstances were different, would you have vowed to arrest the leaders of Hamas, who perpetrated the October 7 attack, if they were visiting New York? And if so, why not include something about that to show New Yorkers that you’re presenting a more balanced approach? Why not include that in your video?

Quick on his feet, the mayor responded, “Didn’t the ICC put forward a warrant for Yahya Sinwar?”—referring to the Hamas leader who was killed by Israel (AP, 10/18/24). To which Russo responded, “I mean, I know he’s dead.” The mayor followed up:

Yes, but my point is that they did. And in the video, I made very clear, as I have before, that my interest in executing that warrant is not specific to Benjamin Netanyahu, but to anyone who they put a warrant towards for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

One has to almost admire the bravery to ask such a stupid question: Why didn’t you call for the arrest of someone who died two years ago? Alas, here we are.

‘More mindful about [some] rhetoric’There’s a downside to not talking about war crimes (Al Jazeera, 6/19/26).

But how can only one of the two victims in the stabbing coverage matter? While it has been a few years, Asian communities in the city have protested against waves of anti-Asian crimes (WNBC, 3/21/21; New York Times, 3/22/21).

We don’t know what was going on this stabber’s head—New Yorkers are all too accustomed to the fact that he may very well likely be deranged with little discernible motive. But if such an attack can be used to beat up on Mamdani’s pro-Palestine positions, why is there no exploration into whether constant fearmongering about China from the White House is responsible for the stabbing of an Asian person? Why is there not as much attention to how Asian communities are feeling about this?

“Elected officials and Jewish leaders demanded Friday that politicians be more mindful about their rhetoric around Israel. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s name came up several times,” Politico (7/24/26) reported. The same statement about right-wing politicians and their views on China doesn’t get the same kind of treatment.

And there’s another problem: All of this digression about how incendiary Mamdani’s comments about Netanyahu may have been helped bury the news Mamdani was trying to highlight: that the Israeli leader and his government have been accused of heinous crimes against humanity. UNICEF spokesperson James Elder (6/19/26) said during a press briefing in Geneva:

For many, many months, the world has been told there is a ceasefire in Gaza. Yet for Palestinian children, this so-called ceasefire has become a cruel and deadly illusion.

Since the ceasefire was announced in October 2025, 265 Palestinian children have been killed across Gaza. That is an absurd and devastating figure. During a period supposedly defined by restraint and protection, a child has been killed, on average, every single day for more than eight months.

Let us be clear about what this means. These children were not killed in a war zone. They were killed in their homes. In their schools. Playing football. Fishing. They were shot, bombed and struck by quadcopters.

The double standard is telling when it comes to who matters for the media, and which narratives are worthy of repeating.

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Nine of the Prairieland protesters received sentences ranging from 30 to 100 years; one received a 30-year sentence for moving a box of zines. (Photo: DFW Support Committee)

This week on CounterSpin: Are you upset about ICE agents using your tax dollars to detain and deport people because they have a quota to fill – and to kill anyone who doesn’t “comply”? Are you bothered by women losing not just the right but the ability to access abortion for whatever reason they might have? Do you care that fossil fuel-created climate disruption is rearranging the planet? Well, my friend, you might be a terrorist.

Last September, Trump issued a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) that added a whole lot of folks to a list of “domestic terrorists”. All of us are now officially, by challenging or questioning the Trump White House and their acolytes, “the enemy within.”

When Trump pushed through NSPM 7 last fall, folks like Hina Shamsi at the ACLU told us: it’s a scare tactic – “domestic terrorism organization” as applied to a wide range of groups that are, in the memo’s language “anti-americanism, anti-capitalism, anti christianity” does not create new federal crimes or powers. The president, even if it’s Trump, cannot rewrite the Constitution.

Which, Shamsi explained, doesn’t mean it isn’t scary, despite being a “fever dream of conspiracies, outright falsehoods and the president’s distorted equation of criticism of his policies by real or perceived political opponents with ‘criminal and terroristic conspiracies’.

We have to stand up where we can, how we can, right now. And right now could have started years ago but it can at the least start with getting prison time for moving zines.

We’ll talk about the Prairieland case and what it means for you, with Dorothee Benz, who wrote recently about it all for FAIR.org

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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.

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The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week in Chiles v. Salazar, a challenge on free speech grounds to Colorado’s ban on LGBTQ “conversion therapy” for children under 18.

Kaley Chiles is a Colorado therapist and evangelical Christian who argues the state’s 2019 law that bans this discredited and dangerous treatment, which seeks to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, is a violation of her First Amendment rights.

The other side of the case is the state of Colorado, represented by regulator Patty Salazar. The state argues that it is regulating healthcare and protecting children from a practice that every major medical and mental health organization in the US, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association the American Psychiatric Association and the National Association of Social Workers, has linked to increased suicidality, depression and other serious mental health issues.

The fundamental question before the Court is whether talk therapy is protected speech or medical activity. Chiles argues that it’s speech, and that Colorado’s law unlawfully regulates the content of her speech; Colorado argues that it’s medical conduct, which is not protected by the First Amendment—states are permitted to regulate such conduct to protect patients from harmful or substandard care.

The Supreme Court’s decision will affect the fates of queer youth in more than two dozen states that ban or restrict this “therapy.” The Trump administration is backing Chiles, with lawyers from the far-right Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) representing her.

Such a consequential case should be given careful framing and context from the media. Unfortunately, in their coverage previewing the October 7 hearing, the New York Times—and, to a lesser degree, the Washington Post and USA Today—failed in striking ways.

These three articles from three major papers were significant because they set the framework for readers to understand the case. They were also placed prominently in the papers, with the Times (10/6/25) and Post (10/7/25) articles both appearing on page A1, and the USA Today (10/7/25) piece on A4. (The stories appeared online a day or two earlier.)

The Times‘ framing skewed heavily toward Chiles’ perspective. While the Post and USA Today presented more thoroughly the experiences of LGBTQ people and the arguments of the respondents, all three pieces left out scientific and legal information that are necessary for a complete understanding of the case—and what’s at stake for LGBTQ youth.

‘Free speech test’Who wants to lose a “free speech test”? The New York Times (10/5/25) put the emphasis on the rights of the therapist, rather on protecting at-risk youth from demonstrable harms.

Supreme Court reporter Ann E. Marimow previewed the hearing for the New York Times (10/5/25) under the headline, “Can Conversion Therapy Be Banned? Colorado Faces Speech Test at the Supreme Court.”

By describing the case as a “free speech test” that Colorado is facing, the Times headline frames the case exactly the way Chiles and the ADF are asking the Supreme Court to interpret it: as a question of speech, as opposed to a medical regulation issue.

The lead image is of Chiles gazing thoughtfully into the distance, and the article begins with a description of her “tranquil” Colorado Springs office and offerings of “loose leaf tea.” It paints Chiles as a well-meaning professional who, under Colorado’s ban, is unable to perform her job properly because her speech is limited:

Mrs. Chiles, an evangelical Christian with a master’s degree in clinical mental health from Denver Seminary, says the law violates her First Amendment rights, constraining what she is allowed to say in therapy sessions with young people who have sought out her care.

The article acknowledges that major medical groups disavow the conversion therapy as ineffective and potentially harmful, before returning to Chiles’ argument that “it seemed like an invasion for the state to kind of be peering into our private counseling sessions.”

Marimow goes on to lay out the legal arguments on both sides, but returns again to Chiles’ claim that these children are “voluntarily” seeking this treatment. The article notes that both sides cite last year’s decision in U.S. v. Skrmetti, which allows states to ban gender-affirming treatments for youth that they consider harmful. But it glides silently over the contradiction of anti-LGBTQ activists’ claims: On the one hand, youth under 18 are unable to consent to gender-affirming care—which has been shown to save lives—and therefore in need of protection from the state to avoid coercive pressure from medical professionals. At the same time, they are fully capable of “voluntarily” engaging in conversion therapy, which has been shown to put them at risk. (A 2024 Trevor Project survey found that 13% of LGBTQ youth report being threatened with or subjected to conversion therapy.)

The Times also lets the “free speech” perspective have the last word. The piece mentions a similar case brought in Washington State that the Court refused to hear two years ago, and quotes the objection from Justice Clarence Thomas, who said he would have heard the case “because it ‘silenced one side of this debate’ by restricting the First Amendment rights of medical professionals.”

Sidelining survivorsThe New York Times only includes one quote from someone impacted by conversion therapy: Matthew Shurka, who is featured in only three short paragraphs in the nearly 2,000 word article. In contrast, Chiles, whose photo is featured at the top of the piece and whose argument weaves the narrative together, is directly quoted three times and mentioned by name in 15 paragraphs.

Shurka has testified about the trauma he experienced during five years of conversion therapy, and is an activist against the practice. “I knew I wasn’t changing and I blamed myself for my failures; it didn’t occur to me that the therapist was harming me,” Shurka is quoted as saying.

A beat later, the reader is back in Chiles’ office, with “a photo of a sunset with a biblical verse about the power of counsel and understanding,” while the Times lists her experience and credentials.

Marimow’s piece fits into the pattern that FAIR has long documented and quantified of the Times sidelining trans and queer perspectives on issues that impact their lives (FAIR.org, 7/14/25, 5/30/25, 5/28/24, 8/30/23, 5/19/23, 5/11/23).

Rather than leading with the therapist’s perspective, USA Today (10/5/25) opened with a gay man recalling that through conversion therapy, he “absorbed the therapist’s message that something was deeply wrong with him.”

In contrast, other major papers spent more time centering former conversion therapy patients. USA Today (10/5/25) began its preview of the case with the story of Matt R. Salmon, a gay survivor of conversion therapy, which he refers to as a form of “psychological abuse.” Salmon is now a psychiatrist and counselor himself.

“Licensed professionals don’t have free speech,” he argues. “You don’t just get to say whatever you want.”

USA Today also cited the testimony of Francis Lyon, a trans man who testified to the Colorado legislative committee in 2019 that conversion therapy blamed his parents for not instilling “femininity” by encouraging him to wear skirts, hose, heels and cosmetics.

Like the New York Times, the Washington Post (10/6/25) led its piece with a profile of Chiles. But unlike the Times’ Marimow, Post reporter Justin Jouvenal spent significant space on the testimony of a conversion therapy survivor. Silas Musick, a transgender man from Colorado Springs nearly ended his own life in 2010 as a result of the conversion therapy he underwent. He testified to the Colorado state legislature in 2019 to support the law that is now in question.

“There was no amount of thinking or praying or wishing or trying to change daily behaviors,” Musick told the Post. “It led to the deepest, darkest depression of my life.”

“Musick eventually concluded that he couldn’t live his life as his family and religion wanted, so he would end it,” Jouvenal wrote.

Not a mental illnessThe Times also presents Chiles’ case as one of not being able to provide sufficient mental health care.

“If clients under 18 tell her that their same-sex attractions are causing them stress, as a licensed therapist, she is forbidden from counseling them to change their sexual orientation,” the piece explains.

The Washington Post (10/6/25) leads with Kaley Chiles’ claim that a ban on conversion therapy “silences her.”

The Washington Post further quotes Chiles’ argument that sexual orientation and gender are being “treated differently than literally every other topic in counseling…. It’s not the way we would operate with addictions and eating disorders and with depression.”

There’s a good reason for that that the Post should have pointed out: Same-sex attraction and transgender identities are not mental illnesses.

As the APA and other professional societies have made clear, this is the underlying problem with conversion therapy:

While many might identify as questioning, queer or a variety of other identities, “reparative” or conversion therapy is based on the a priori assumption that diverse sexual orientations and gender identities are mentally ill and should change.

The American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1973, and “gender identity disorder” in 2013. Studies show real mental illnesses LGBTQ youth face are a result of social stigmatization—not their identities themselves (Trevor Project, 12/15/21).

Both pieces fail to make this critical point about mental illness and conversion therapy, allowing LGBTQ experiences to be quietly pathologized and stigmatized.

Meanwhile, there are treatments that are shown to improve the mental health outcomes of queer youth. A 2022 JAMA study found that gender-affirming care for trans youth cuts their suicide risk by 73%. And the Trevor Project’s 2024 survey of LGBTQ youth’s mental health found that queer-affirming schools, families and communities greatly reduce children’s suicide risk.

Misrepresented evidenceThe Times also left readers uninformed on the evidence behind the harms and ineffectiveness of conversion therapy. “In her filings, Mrs. Chiles also rejected the state’s reliance on a medical consensus, saying there is insufficient evidence that voluntary talk therapy that seeks to change a minor’s gender identity or sexual orientation causes harm,” the Times piece stated, without offering any analysis of that evidence.

Those filings from Chiles and the ADF cite—in addition to such “evidence” as testimonials from “detransitioners” and people who profess to having successfully changed their sexual orientation, as well as the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the Daily Wire and a Reddit thread—a very small handful of studies that it claims show that conversion therapy is not actually harmful, and that people’s gender expression and sexual orientations can be changed.

A researcher whose work was cited by advocates for conversion therapy actually described such therapy as “not only ineffective in changing sexual orientation but … psychologically damaging, often resulting in elevated rates of depression, anxiety and suicidality” (Guardian, 10/6/25).

But as the Guardian (10/6/25) reported, two of the scholars cited said the ADF “profoundly” misrepresented their work in ways that threatened the safety of queer youth.

The ADF cites a study by Clifford Rosky and Dr. Lisa Diamond, claiming that their work suggests sexuality is subject to change. In reality, the study discusses the fluidity of sexuality for some people, independent of conversion therapy, and condemns the practice as potentially lethal.

“They claim our work supports conversion therapy when our work clearly and specifically condemns conversion therapy on the same page they’re citing,” Rosky told the Guardian.

The ADF and Chiles further cite a 2009 APA study in their argument that noted a lack of research on the effects of conversion therapy on youth specifically. USA Today points out that this is because of the ethical problem of subjecting children to conversion therapy, which the APA asserts in studies (2009, 2015, 2020), and reiterates in their brief to the Supreme Court, is ineffective and harmful.

The New York Times and Washington Post pieces do not mention the ADF’s misuse of these studies as “evidence,” even though they clearly undermine their support for conversion therapy. Nor do they cite or link to any of the peer-reviewed studies provided by Colorado to support its position.

In reality, lesbian, gay and bisexual people who have undergone conversion therapy are nearly twice as likely to attempt suicide. Transgender and nonbinary youth who have been subject to it are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide (NBC News, 9/11/19). That risk jumps to four times as likely if they’ve undergone conversion efforts before age 10.

Even though Chiles is framing her argument as one of free speech, the lack of scientific evidence for her claims as a health professional is critical, because Colorado’s argument centers on the state’s ban protecting children from substandard care.

False equivalenceCoverage that was centered around the mental health needs of LGBTQ youth, and not a therapist’s interest in self-expression, would look very different (Stanford Medicine, 9/30/25).

One of the few things the Times does point out (if late in the piece), that the Post and USA Today fail to, is that one of the main legal challenges that Chiles faces, and one of Colorado’s central arguments, is that the law has never actually been enforced in the state, and would not be applied to any therapy she has claimed to have engaged in. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued in the hearing, the Court requires “credible threat of prosecution” for Chiles to have standing to even bring the case, and none is demonstrated.

But the Times‘ clarification is not made before the paper first paints a picture of the Colorado law constantly impacting Chiles’ practice, rather than simply being a hypothetical:

Under a 2019 Colorado law, if clients under 18 tell her that their same-sex attractions are causing them stress, as a licensed therapist, she is forbidden from counseling them to change their sexual orientation. If they want to talk about their gender identity, she cannot advise them to change it.

When the Times asked her if she has ever practiced conversion therapy, Chiles responded that she “has worked with young people struggling with gender dysphoria and unwanted sexual desires.”

“I’ll just have to let everyone else decide what that is as a label,” she said.

Meanwhile, queer people who have undergone conversion therapy face very real and well-documented risks.

The absurdity of pitting a hypothetical “chilling” effect on Chiles’ speech, versus the litany of studies and real lived experiences that prove conversion therapy is not only ineffective but dangerous for the mental health of LGBTQ people, is lost in all three of these pieces.

It is certainly journalists’ job to present both sides of important Supreme Court cases. But it is also their duty to clarify the medical consensus, the context, and the potential impacts of the case. While it’s true that the professional practice of Kaley Chiles and others like her might be impacted—despite her failure to demonstrate that—it’s hard to argue, given the evidence, that the people most impacted by this case will be anyone other than queer youth. It’s their lives and perspectives that therefore ought to be centered in the coverage.

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Al Jazeera (10/7/25)

This week on CounterSpin: In the immediate wake of the Hamas-led attacks on Israel in October 2023 that killed some 1,200 people, the Washington Post editorial board was warning that it was unacceptable to suggest that the attack “should be considered in context with previous actions by Israel”—those actions including decades of occupation, dispossession, deprivation, harassment and fatal violence.

Even now, two years on, as NBC News’ “What to Know” feature includes the information that Israel’s actions, denoted as “in retaliation” for October 7, have killed more than 67,000 people in Gaza—with many more wounded and maimed—US corporate media still twist themselves in knots trying to say that, yes, something very wrong is happening in Gaza—but somehow trying to stop it is worse than enabling and prolonging it. They do this in part by saving respectful space for someone like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton to flatly declare there is “no famine in Gaza,” that “Palestine is a made-up fiction,” and that there is an “international media and political chorus…try[ing] to bully Israel into submission.”

Academic and writer Gregory Shupak, author of The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media, has been looking at the tactics major media deploy to suggest that we use something other than our own eyes and judgment and humanity to assess the situation, and how to act in the face of it. We hear from him this week on CounterSpin.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251010Shupak.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at CBS‘s coverage of the Supreme Court’s Amy Coney Barrett.

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President Donald Trump dispatched his son-in law Jared Kushner and the United States’ Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff to Egypt last weekend to sort out the remaining details of the president’s so-called “peace plan” for the Gaza Strip, much of which territory has been obliterated over the past two years of Israel’s US-backed genocide. The official Palestinian fatality count has surpassed 67,000, although some scholars suggest the real death toll may be more in the vicinity of 680,000.

Kushner’s inclusion in the Egyptian expedition may have come as a surprise to those who haven’t been following the news—and perhaps to many of those who have, given the dearth of reporting on the continuing Middle Eastern machinations of nepotism’s favorite poster boy.

‘Focus on my firm’Stories like NBC‘s (2/13/24) that stressed Jared Kushner distancing himself from his father-in-law’s White House helped Kushner avoid scrutiny of his many conflicts of interest.

A senior adviser in the first Trump White House, Kushner was a driving force behind the Abraham Accords, the normalization deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. He was also the brains behind the 2019 “Peace to Prosperity” plan that was meant to resolve the pesky seven-decades-long Israeli/Palestinian conflict—an undertaking for which Kushner famously felt qualified on account of having read 25 whole books on the subject.

The current “peace” that the US is now endeavoring to inflict on Gaza sounds suspiciously similar to Kushner’s 2019 plan, which was basically structured around the idea that all the Palestinians really need in order to prosper is “foreign direct investment,” “private-sector growth,” “free trade agreements” and other exciting neoliberal solutions that magically excise Israel’s key role in annihilating any prospect for peace. The new plan promises “many thoughtful investment proposals and exciting development ideas [that] have been crafted by well-meaning international groups” and a “special economic zone… with preferred tariff and access rates to be negotiated with participating countries.”

In his first administration, Trump had additionally tasked his son-in-law with dealing with an assortment of other crises, including the coronavirus pandemic, prompting even the New York Times to go so far as to run an op-ed (4/2/20) originally headlined “Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed”—although it was subsequently revised to “Putting Jared Kushner in Charge Is Utter Madness.”

Fast forward to February 2024 and the NBC News headline “Jared Kushner Says He Would Not Join a Second Trump Administration” (2/13/24), which quoted him: “I’ve been very clear that my desire at this phase of my life is to focus on my firm…. I’ve really enjoyed the opportunity as a family to be out of the spotlight.”

‘Significant backing in the Gulf’Noting that the Saudis poured billions into Kushner’s firm against their financial advisors’ advice, the New York Times (4/10/22) reported that “ethics experts say that such a deal creates the appearance of potential payback for Mr. Kushner’s actions in the White House.”

Now that the second Trump administration is in full swing, the Western corporate media appear largely content to allow him to remain “out of the spotlight,” even as he remains up to no good—and as his investment firm Affinity Partners remains a beneficiary of US diplomatic initiatives shepherded by Kushner himself. For example, Affinity has used backing from Gulf investors to acquire a roughly 10% stake in Israel’s largest insurer, Phoenix.

Of the sporadic reporting on Kushner’s activities that has taken place since Trump resumed office, much of it has focused on just how out of the spotlight he is. In May, for example, a CNN article (5/9/25) announced that Kushner was “quietly advising” the administration ahead of the president’s big Middle East trip that month, “informally advising administration officials on negotiations with Arab leaders.”

Underlining that Kushner “does not have, nor want, a formal role in Trump’s second term,” CNN cited sources affirming that he “has continued to be a crucial player behind the scenes on Middle East talks.” Crucially, he had been “heavily involved in discussions with Arab nations, including Saudi Arabia, about signing agreements that would normalize diplomatic relations with Israel”—an expansion of the Abraham Accords that would both effectively legitimize genocide and bulldoze remaining obstacles to investment.

Of course, like other corporate media outlets, CNN is not in the business of connecting the dots, and the article offered only the rather noncommittal observation that “Trump critics and some former diplomats have noted that Kushner has business interests in the region, which complicates his involvement.” There followed a brief mention of the fact that Affinity Partners has “received significant backing from sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf,” and that Kushner enjoys a “close personal relationship” with homicidal Saudi prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Indeed, part of that “significant backing” was a $2 billion investment in Affinity Partners from a fund led by bin Salman, which, as the New York Times (4/10/22) reported, was secured by Kushner, despite his lack of “experience or track record in private equity,” shortly after leaving the White House. Kushner did, however, have experience in brokering $110 billion in weapons sales to Saudi Arabia, and in helping “protect those and other weapons deals from congressional outrage over the murder of [Saudi journalist Jamal] Khashoggi and the humanitarian catastrophe created by the Saudi-led military intervention in Yemen,” as the Times put it.

As Forbes magazine reported (9/15/25), Kushner is now a billionaire, thanks in part to his “knack for raising funds from high-profile Middle Eastern backers.” Translated into non-euphemism, Kushner has literally been utilizing US foreign policy as a vehicle for his own personal enrichment. In addition to his dealings with Saudi Arabia, Kushner also raised $1.5 billion for Affinity just last year from backers affiliated with the royal families of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

At an October 1 White House press briefing on the Gaza peace plan, one journalist posed the rare question to Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt: “How did the White House decide that it is appropriate for Jared Kushner to be working on matters that involve Qatar and the UAE, Saudi Arabia, three countries that combined have given him more than $2.5 billion for his investment firm?” Leavitt snapped that “I think it’s frankly despicable that you’re trying to suggest that it’s inappropriate” for someone to be so nobly “donating his energy and his time to our government, to the president of the United States, to secure world peace.” And that was that.

Meanwhile, in August 2025, CNN (8/27/25) was back with an update on the man who has still “quietly advised administration officials on Middle East issues,” and who reportedly attended a meeting at the White House, along with war criminal and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, “about a plan for post-war Gaza.” This time, CNN decided not to mention Kushner’s financial conflicts of interest, and ended its intervention with a nonjudgmental nod to Kushner’s relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ringleader of the present genocide, “with whom he has close family ties dating back decades.” (As Time (6/1/17) magazine revealed in 2017, Netanyahu even “once spent the night” at the Kushner family home in New Jersey.)

‘Move the people out’

Kushner (Reuters, 2/5/25) once described the Arab/Israeli conflict as “”nothing more than a real-estate dispute between Israelis and Palestinians.”

In short, there are so many conflicts of interest swirling around the figure of Kushner that it should be nearly impossible for journalists to avoid covering them—and yet they manage to do so remarkably well. The New York Times writeup (8/27/25) of the same August meeting at the White House remarked that, while Kushner has “never been fully gone from Mr. Trump’s orbit,” he had taken a “behind-the-scenes role in recent years.” Its brief mention of Kushner’s entanglements seemed to present them as a qualification rather than a problem:

During the first Trump administration, he led the way on Mr. Trump’s biggest diplomatic achievement, the Abraham Accords, establishing diplomatic relations between Israel and three Arab states, and has his own business and other ties to the region.

In its own writeup, Reuters (8/27/25) alluded to Trump’s previous “re-development idea to turn Gaza into the ‘Riviera of the Middle East,’” a plan that “echoed an idea that Kushner floated a year earlier to clear Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants and turn it into a waterfront property.” It’s not just any highly influential person who can casually advocate for unrestrained ethnic cleansing and hardly be taken to task for it. But such is the beauty of being “out of the spotlight.”

An earlier Reuters dispatch (2/5/25) headlined “Trump’s Gaza ‘Riviera’ Echoes Kushner Waterfront Property Dreams” went as far as to quote Kushner’s dreams of ethnic cleansing in genocide-stricken Gaza: “It’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.” Instead of underscoring the inherently diabolical content of said pronouncement, the news agency offered the following semi-justification: “Kushner was himself a property developer in New York prior to Trump’s first term.”

‘What regulator is going to say no?’

As Kushner now strives to be the unaccountable architect of the Palestinians’ definitive demise, one would have expected a bit more noise from the media as he simultaneously met with Netanyahu in Washington and presided over the biggest-ever leveraged buyout in history—in partnership with Saudi Arabia—of the videogame giant Electronic Arts.

The Financial Times (9/30/25), never one to speak truth to plutocracy, immortalized the momentous events with the headline “Jared Kushner’s Art of the Deal.” The article detailed how, while Crown Prince bin Salman “is a keen gamer, and he’s put aside $38 billion for investments in videogame companies as part of the kingdom’s Savvy Games unit,” it was really “Kushner who opened the doors to this week’s takeover.”

The FT went on to warn that “it’s the kind of deal—with a large foreign buyer—that could attract scrutiny from regulators in Washington.” But at the end of the day, all’s well in the land of democracy, because as one “person close to the inner workings of the White House put it: ‘What regulator is going to say no to the president’s son-in-law?’”

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As more and more scholars, and one rights group after another, confirm that Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, it’s becoming ever more obvious that those who deny the genocide are the intellectual and moral equivalents of people who deny other genocides, such as the ones inflicted on the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, or the Holocaust, or the Armenian Genocide.

Yet the Wall Street Journal persists in running genocide denial. Looking at how the paper does so enables us to not only refute their falsehoods, but also to gain insight into the tactics Gaza genocide denialists, and genocide deniers in general, employ. These include:

• Hand-waving: brushing off the cataclysmic damage Israel and the US have done to Palestinians as merely the unavoidable byproducts of war;
• Victim-blaming: saying that Palestinian resistance groups such as Hamas are to blame for the suffering in Gaza;
• Inverting perpetrator and victim: presenting Palestinians, and not Israelis, as genocidal, with Israelis, rather than Palestinians, cast as the targets;
• Obscurantism: offering dubious pieces of information, usually in a decontextualized manner, as if they showed that Israel has pursued its military objectives humanely;
• Repudiation: flatly rejecting well-documented facts while offering little or no counter-evidence.

‘Justifiable, even necessary’Avi Shafran (Wall Street Journal, 7/22/25): “When critics distort Israel’s goal of self-preservation into a desire for genocide, the accusers have gone from righteous protesters to ignorant haters.”

Ami Magazine columnist Avi Shafran’s Journal piece (7/22/25) utilized both hand-waving and victim-blaming. He asserted:

When critics distort Israel’s goal of self-preservation into a desire for genocide, the accusers have gone from righteous protesters to ignorant haters…. Civilians suffer and die in the prosecution of justifiable, even necessary, wars. That tragedy is intensified when you are fighting an enemy who hides behind human shields. Eradicating the engines of terror in Gaza requires attacking the places from which they operate: hospitals, schools and mosques.

Israel’s supposedly “justifiable, even necessary” war has entailed such policies (as Human Rights Watch—12/19/24—notes) as

intentionally depriv[ing] Palestinian civilians in Gaza of adequate access to water since October 2023, most likely resulting in thousands of deaths and thus committing the crime against humanity of extermination and acts of genocide.

Rather than offering a reasoned, evidence-based defense of such Israeli conduct, Shafran blithely wrote as if consciously withholding drinking water from a civilian population were as natural and inevitable as water boiling at a hundred degrees Celsius.

The author’s next move was to blame Palestinians for Israel killing Palestinians. Shafran, of course, didn’t offer a scintilla of proof for his claim that Palestinian fighters force their own people to be human shields, probably because it’s Israel—not Hamas—that routinely uses Palestinians as shields (FAIR.org, 5/13/25).

‘Systematically and deliberately devastated’ From the health workers’ open letter (Common Dreams, 10/2/24): “The human toll in Gaza since October is far higher than is understood in the United States. It is likely that the death toll from this conflict is already greater than 118,908, an astonishing 5.4% of Gaza’s population.”

Equally weak is Shafran’s suggestion that it’s Palestinians’ fault that Israel attacks Palestinian hospitals, schools and mosques. The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory said that Israel damaged and destroyed more than 90% of the school and university buildings in Gaza, and found just one case where Hamas had also used a school for military purposes. The commission also said that Israeli attacks have damaged more than half of all religious and cultural sites in Gaza, and noted that

all ten religious and cultural sites in Gaza investigated by the Commission constituted civilian objects at the time of attack, and suffered devastating destruction for which the Commission could not identify a legitimate military need.

Similarly, the UN Human Rights Commission published a report late last year examining 136 Israeli strikes on at least 27 hospitals and 12 other medical facilities, and said that Israel did not substantiate its claims that Palestinian armed groups were using the structures for military purposes. In some cases, the report pointed out, Israel’s “vague” allegations “appear contradicted by publicly available information.”

Moreover, 99 American healthcare professionals who volunteered in the Gaza Strip in the months following October 7, 2023, published a letter saying that the signatories

spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: Not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.

We urge you to see that Israel has systematically and deliberately devastated Gaza’s entire healthcare system, and that Israel has targeted our colleagues in Gaza for torture, disappearance and murder.

Shafran pretended such evidence doesn’t exist, perhaps hoping that his audience is racist enough to believe his diatribes about wily Arabs who use places of healing, learning, worship and sanctuary to conceal “engines of terror.”

‘That side isn’t Israel’Israel blockades food going into the Gaza Strip, and the Wall Street Journal (8/5/25) blames Hamas.

Former Journal editor-in-chief Gerard Baker wrote a Journal piece (8/5/25) that inverted victim and perpetrator in Gaza. He asserted that, in the war between Israel “and its enemies in Gaza,” one side “would, if it could, conduct a genocide against the other, wiping every last remnant off the face of the planet. That side isn’t Israel.”

Baker’s strategy is to focus on what he claims Palestinian fighters “would” do in imaginary circumstances, rather than on the genocide that is actually taking place. Such speculation is pointless, because by definition it’s not possible to know what would happen in made-up scenarios. Since Baker doesn’t even bother to explain the reasons for his view that Palestinians “would” commit genocide if they could, his make-believe does not merit serious consideration.

While it is by definition impossible to decisively prove what might happen under nonexistent conditions, there is zero doubt that Israel has—in the really existing world—carried out a genocide and engaged in a pattern of conduct consistent with trying to “wip[e] every last remnant [of Palestinian life in Gaza] off the face of the planet.” Days before the Journal ran Baker’s screed, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem published a report (7/25) documenting the Israeli genocide in Gaza:

Israel’s conduct of warfare in the Gaza Strip, which has included—among other things—massive, indiscriminate bombardment of population centers; starvation of more than 2 million people as a method of warfare; attempts at ethnic cleansing and formally including the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s residents in the war aims; systematic destruction of hospitals and other medical facilities, which are entitled to special protection under international law, along with the vast majority of civilian infrastructure there; and the unprecedented killing of medical personnel, aid workers, persons in charge of maintaining public order, and journalists. Israel’s claim that Hamas fighters or members of other armed Palestinian groups were present in medical or civilian facilities, often made without providing any evidence, cannot justify or explain such widespread, systematic destruction.

Baker’s inversion of victim and perpetrator depends on ignoring the voluminous proof that Israel is carrying out a genocide, focusing instead on fantasies based on nothing more than orientalist depictions of Arabs as bloodthirsty savages.

‘Every martyr is a trophy’Bernard-Henri Lévy (Wall Street Journal, 9/3/25): “To speak of genocide in Gaza is an offense to common sense, a maneuver to demonize Israel, and an insult to the victims of genocides past and present.”

The notorious French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy published an op-ed in the Journal (9/3/25) headlined “Three Big Lies About the Israel/Hamas War.” In his view, one such lie is that “Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.” He explained: “To say ‘genocide’ means a plan—a deliberate, targeted initiative to destroy a people. That isn’t what the Israeli army is doing.”

Here Lévy engaged in the repudiation approach to genocide denial, writing as if a well-established body of Israeli intent weren’t readily available to anyone with access to the internet. Just six days into the US/Israeli onslaught, Israeli historian Raz Segal wrote (Jewish Currents, 10/13/23) that what Israel had undertaken was “a textbook case of genocide.”

One piece of evidence Segal pointed to was Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant’s announcement that the state was “imposing a complete siege on Gaza. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.”

For Segal, Gallant’s use of the phrase

“complete siege”…explicitly indexes a plan to bring the siege to its final destination of systematic destruction of Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza, by killing them, starving them, cutting off their water supplies, and bombing their hospitals.

Similarly, in February, US President Trump put forth a genocidal plan (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, 2/5/25; Truthout, 2/9/25) to empty Gaza of its Palestinian inhabitants so that the US could annex the territory. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded by saying he was “committed to US President Trump’s plan for the creation of a different Gaza.” Subsequently, Netanyahu suggested that implementing Trump’s scheme was a condition for ending the conflict.

More recently, Human Rights Watch (5/15/25) commented that an Israeli government plan codenamed “Gideon’s Chariot” was designed “to demolish what remains of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure and concentrate the Palestinian population into a tiny area,” and that this “would amount to an abhorrent escalation of its ongoing crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and acts of genocide.”

Thus Lévy’s denialism depends on repudiating the extensive record of Israeli leaders articulating “a plan” to “destroy a people.”

Lévy’s next move was to victim-blame: “Perhaps [Israel] is waging the war badly,” he wrote, but wondering, “who would do better in an asymmetric conflict when the enemy’s goal isn’t to minimize casualties on its own side but to maximize them, so that every martyr is a trophy?” Here Lévy traded on the racist myth that Palestinians are fanatical barbarians indifferent to the suffering of their own people.

His language is vague, so it’s hard to know for sure what he’s talking about, but it sounds like he might be invoking, as Shafran did, what Craig Mokhiber, former director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), calls the “double lie of ‘human shields’” (Mondoweiss, 9/21/24).

‘A genocidal army doesn’t take two years’Al Jazeera (9/14/25): “Fifteen out of 17 doctors described encountering children under 15 with single bullet wounds to the head or chest. Together, they identified 114 such cases during their missions in Gaza.”

Lévy then engaged in obscurantism, denying the genocide by selecting questionable tidbits that he seems to think cast Israel in a positive light:

A genocidal army doesn’t take two years to win a war in a territory the size of Las Vegas. A genocidal army doesn’t send SMS warnings before firing or facilitate the passage of those trying to escape the strikes. A genocidal army wouldn’t evacuate, every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer, sending them to hospitals in Abu Dhabi as part of a medical airlift set up right after October 7.

That Israel hasn’t conquered Gaza to this point is a non sequitur. What Israel’s inability to subjugate Gaza shows is that Israel isn’t omnipotent, and that Palestinian fighters and their allies have mounted an effective resistance to the attempt to exterminate Gaza-based Palestinians (FAIR.org, 1/24/25). That tells us nothing about Israel’s intent or the severity of the devastation it has inflicted. (It’s worth recalling that the Warsaw Ghetto survived more than two and a half years under siege from genocidal Nazi forces.)

The SMS warnings that Lévy hails add to the “confusion, chaos and mass displacement” characterizing life in Gaza for the last two years (NPR, 12/7/23). More to the point, any “warnings before firing” that Israel has sent out aren’t going to save many Gaza residents when these messages are disseminated in the context of Israel leveling much of the Strip (BBC, 7/18/25; Guardian, 1/18/25) by bombing it with the “equivalent to six Hiroshimas,” leaving the population with effectively nowhere safe to go.

Approximately 70,000 Palestinians—the overwhelming majority of them civilians—are known to be dead, or are presumed dead under the rubble (to say nothing of the many more dead due to starvation, disease, unsanitary conditions, and lack of access to clean water), so it’s as absurd as it is obscene for Lévy to suggest that Israel is making a sincere effort to reduce Palestinian casualties. That’s what Lévy’s paragraph seems to be suggesting, irrespective of all data to the contrary.

For instance, a group of 45 American physicians and nurses who volunteered in Gaza wrote a letter to the Biden/Harris administration describing treating children whose injuries the medical professionals were sure had been intentionally inflicted; “specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest,” the letter said (CNN, 7/26/24). Deliberately sniping children every day is, to paraphrase Lévy, something a genocidal army does.

‘Delayed or denied’Bragging about the IDF evacuating “hundreds of Palestinian children” is actually an admission of the inadequacy of Israeli relief efforts (MSF, 7/17/25).

Nor was Lévy on solid ground when he denied that Israel policies are genocidal by claiming that it “evacuate[s], every month, hundreds of Palestinian children suffering from rare diseases or cancer.” Compare that to Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières report (7/17/25) that

an estimated 11,000–13,000 people—including more than 4,500 children—require medical evacuation to access care unavailable in the Strip. Yet Israeli authorities have allowed only a few of those requesting medical evacuation to do so, with many critical cases being delayed or denied regardless of medical urgency….

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has only managed to medically evacuate 22 patients, including 13 children to our reconstructive surgery hospital in Amman, Jordan, for comprehensive rehabilitative care.

The World Health Organization (WHO) told a similar story (4/14/25):

Far too few patients have been able to leave Gaza for the urgent care they so desperately need. We estimate that up to 12,000 patients need medical evacuation but, since [Israel intensified its blockade of aid in March] we have only been able to evacuate 121 people, including 73 children.

The number of people allowed to leave Gaza for healthcare has been a minuscule portion of those who need it—never mind that the reason Palestinians need to leave Gaza for medical treatment could have something to do with destroying the Strip’s health system by “deliberately attacking and starving healthcare workers, paramedics and hospitals to wipe out medical care” in the territory. Because that’s the reality of Israel’s assaults on Palestinian healthcare, and because Lévy’s project is genocide denial, he has no choice but to obscure what Israel has done and is continuing to do.

‘Charges are a travesty’Alan Dershowitz (9/16/25) combines two of the Wall Street Journal‘s favorite causes: defending genocide and demonizing New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani (FAIR.org, 7/30/25).

Attorney Alan Dershowitz—himself rather notorious—also engaged in genocide denial on the Journal’s op-ed page (9/16/25), selecting obscurantism and repudiation as his rhetorical weapons. Dershowitz mocked New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani for saying that, if elected, he will enforce the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) arrest warrant for Netanyahu, should the prime minister visit the city:

The ICC’s charges against Mr. Netanyahu are a travesty. Its arrest warrant accuses him of intentionally starving civilians in Gaza—never mind that Israel has facilitated the delivery of more than a million tons of food to the strip. Mr. Mamdani also accuses the Jewish state of “genocide,” a charge that not even the ICC levies.

Dershowitz wrote as though it is self-evidently absurd for Mamdani to say that Israel is carrying out genocide, pointing to the fact that the ICC has not charged Israel with doing so. Yet the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that it’s “plausible” Israel is committing genocide, and is working toward a definitive ruling (Guardian, 7/27/25). This is to say nothing of the many scholars and rights groups, already cited in this piece, who have concluded that the term aptly characterizes Israel’s actions. Dershowitz simply pretended this evidence doesn’t exist.

Dershowitz obfuscated Israeli policies by celebrating the volume of food allowed into Gaza, as though it were sufficient. A “million tons of food” sounds like a lot, but divided among 2 million people over two years, it amounts to a little more than one and a third pounds of food per day. (A pound and a third of rice has about 800 calories,while “the standard humanitarian ration is 2,100 calories per person per day”—London Review of Books, 5/14/25.)

It’s uncontroversial that Israel is deliberately starving civilians in Gaza. The UN’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) assessed that “half a million people—a quarter of Palestinians in Gaza—are suffering from famine,” a catastrophe resulting from Israeli policies, including what aid groups describe as its “systematic obstruction” of food entering the Strip (BBC, 8/22/25).

Even more contemptibleAs I’ve argued previously (Electronic Intifada, 7/15/24), denying an unfolding genocide like the one in Palestine is even more contemptible than denying genocides that happened in the past, because an ongoing genocide can be stopped before even more people in the targeted population are killed, maimed and bereaved. That’s why every genocide denial is at the same time pro-genocide propaganda: Fewer people with an accurate grasp of the US/Israeli attempt to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a people means fewer people to try and stop it from happening.

Fortunately, despite all the lies from outlets like the Journal, millions of people around the world have made Palestine solidarity activism a regular part of their lives. The more widely genocide-enabling mendacities can be exposed, the more likely to succeed will be the movements to stop the crime of crimes—and to achieve peace through liberation across the Middle East.

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Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s crucial Dobbs vote “let each state decide whether to allow abortion or not,” wrote CBS‘s Jan Crawford (10/6/25). “But the decision also unleashed something much darker”—referring not to women dying because they were denied access to reproductive healthcare, but to threats against judges.

A softball interview (10/6/25) with Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett—headlined “As Justices Confront Harassment, Death Threats and an Assassination Attempt, Barrett Declares ‘I’m Not Afraid'”—provides a glimpse of the kind of journalism we can expect from CBS News now that it’s controlled by MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison, and anti-“woke” ideologue Bari Weiss has been named its editor-in-chief (Defector, 10/6/25).

The interview, by CBS legal correspondent Jan Crawford, praises Barrett’s “mental discipline and self control” because she dismisses protesters who object to her having provided the fifth vote to strip women of bodily autonomy in the Dobbs v. Jackson decision: “It doesn’t matter to me,” she told CBS. “It doesn’t disrupt my emotions.”

The only breath of criticism of the justice comes in reference to dissents written by Biden-appointed Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, Crawford sniffed, “impugned the conservatives’ motives” when she wrote that the right-wing majority had “no fixed rules” in its so-called “emergency docket” rulings, except “this administration always wins.”

Barrett “pointed out,” Crawford wrote, that this was “obviously false.” The journalist explained:

Just one high-profile example: The Court ruled against the administration’s deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and ordered it to work toward his return to the US.

Crawford could not have offered many other examples, high-profile or otherwise: The Trump administration has won 21 of 23 cases it asked to be placed on the emergency docket. And in Abrego Garcia’s case, the Court did not in fact order Trump to “work toward his return to the US”; it said the administration should “ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador.”

But where the lower court said the government should “effectuate” his return, the justices said that that order “may exceed the District Court’s authority,” and the judge should “clarify its directive, with due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

‘The people’s preferred policy’The point of the interview, aside from Barrett being a swell person, is that the Supreme Court is not in the tank for Trump, but is wisely deciding each case on its merits. Crawford refers in her own voice to “public misperceptions that the Supreme Court is driven by politics or outcomes or is loyal to Mr. Trump.”

Towards the end, there’s an extended discussion of the emergency docket, highlighting Barrett’s explanation that the Supreme Court is again and again overturning injunctions against draconian Trump administration moves out of concern for “the harm caused when unelected judges reflexively block policies enacted by popularly elected representatives.”

Chart: New York Times, 9/14/25. (The Trump success rate has increased to 91% since then.)

“It was the people’s preferred policy,” she says of all the Trump programs the Court unblocked. “The president is the one that they elected.”

Crawford doesn’t raise any of the obvious objections to this. First of all, the Supreme Court’s job is to say whether the policies of the elected branches accord with the Constitution. That’s what they’re there for.

And the Trump policies the Court has allowed to stand are often in direct contradiction to laws passed by Congress—also an elected branch of government, and one more directly accountable to the people than the presidency.

Crawford does not challenge Barrett’s contention that the Court naturally defers to the policies of the elected president by pointing out that her colleagues had no trouble using the emergency docket to strike down Biden policies that prevented pollution of US waters, reduced cross-border air pollution, mandated vaccination or Covid testing for employees of large businesses, and paused evictions during the pandemic. Altogether, the Supreme Court sided with the Biden administration only 53% of the time in emergency cases (New York Times, 9/14/25), vs. with Trump 91% of the time so far during his second term.

Is this one-sided apologetics for the MAGA Supreme Court a direct result of CBS‘s takeover by a Trump-boosting billionaire? It’s hard to say; Crawford has a history of boosting Republican spin (Extra!, 11–12/08; FAIR.org, 10/19/12, 5/6/22). But you’d be wise to expect more of this sort of propaganda under the ownership of the Ellisons, the editorial supervision of Bari Weiss and the surveillance of official CBS commissar Kenneth Weinstein (FAIR.org, 9/9/25).

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Jeff Cohen (Salon, 9/20/25) traces media’s censorship problem to “the 1980s and 1990s, when presidents of both parties and Congress decided to put the nation’s media system in the hands of a small number of ever-larger corporations.”

When Jimmy Kimmel made his dramatic return to ABC’s airwaves on September 23, I was eager to be one of the over 6 million who tuned in. Only I couldn’t, at least not on TV.

That’s because the local ABC station in the DC area, WJLA, is owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Network. And the right-wing network refused to air the Jimmy Kimmel Show! on any of its 38 ABC affiliates.

Every few years, a controversy like Kimmel’s suspension erupts and Sinclair is briefly in the headlines. (The last big one was in 2018, when Sinclair made its anchors across the country read from the same Trumpian script, which looked like a “proof-of-life hostage video.”) Then the news cycle moves on, and Sinclair slinks out of sight…where it seems to only grow stronger.

In the wake of Kimmel’s (innocuous) comments following right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s death, Sinclair wasn’t the first ABC affiliate owner to suspend his show. That honor goes to Texas-based Nexstar, which made the move earlier the same day on September 17.

Nexstar’s announcement came only hours after Trump FCC chair Brendan Carr publicly threatened ABC stations if they didn’t yank Kimmel. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr famously said.

Nexstar had financial incentive to accede to Carr’s demand. Already the largest network of local TV stations—with 200 nationwide—Nexstar is looking to grow even bigger by gobbling up a competitor, Tegna, for $6.2 billion. But there’s a problem with this deal: It’s illegal.

Prior to 1996, when President Bill Clinton teamed up with Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich to pass the “corrupt” Telecommunications Act, “a company could own only 12 TV stations nationwide—not 200,” wrote FAIR founder Jeff Cohen (Salon, 9/20/25).

Today, a company can’t own stations reaching more than 39% of US households. This law prevents a company from directly accessing most American homes via TV—which seems like a reasonable safeguard against, say, an authoritarian putsch.

But this sort of media consolidation is precisely what Trump is aiming for, so long as his friends are in charge, as they increasingly are.

‘100% MAGA-related’ Lili Loofbourow (Washington Post, 9/18/25): “Billionaires are accelerating their efforts to consolidate control over media platforms and the president is eager to help them do so, provided they shut down his critics.”

In July, Trump’s FCC approved the $8.4 billion sale of Paramount, which owns CBS, to Skydance Media, which is owned by the son of Trump confidant Larry Ellison, the co-founder of software giant Oracle and second-richest person alive.

Shortly before the sale, Paramount announced it was canceling the Late Show With Stephen Colbert beginning in May. “Many suspected that Colbert’s head was a gift to Trump by the company’s new owner, David Ellison,” the Financial Times (9/27/25) reported.

Trump celebrated the announcement, then quickly pivoted to another late-night host who regularly poked fun at him. “Jimmy Kimmel is next,” Trump tweeted.

Presently, Trump is steering another major media property into the maw of his cronies. While specifics on the forced sale of TikTok are hard to come by, investor Ashwin Binwani told Bloomberg (9/26/25) it “could be the most undervalued tech acquisition of the decade.”

TikTok’s Trump-approved owners likely include Larry Ellison, as well as Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, owners of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

When asked if TikTok will now bend the knee to him, Trump said the expected thing: “Every group…will be treated very fairly.” But that was only after he said the quiet part out loud: “I always like MAGA-related. If I could, I’d make it 100% MAGA-related.”

To be clear, such media consolidation has been a problem long before Trump came on the scene. But Trump has hastened this consolidation, while making no secret that he’s doing so in service of his own interests. Which brings us back to Nexstar.

If it buys Tegna, Nexstar will surpass the 39% ownership limit by a country mile, creating a company with direct television access to 80% of US homes, more than double what’s legally allowed at present.

From Trump’s point of view, what’s not to like? Nexstar is led by a conservative, Perry Sook, and the company has shown it is willing to play ball by suspending Kimmel on a moment’s notice. In light of this, the only surprise would be if Trump’s FCC doesn’t OK the merger.

‘Always in deal mode’James Surowiecki (Atlantic, 9/27/25): “Whatever the benefits of appeasing the FCC and Donald Trump, the costs of rejecting Kimmel were soon going to be dwarfed by the costs of losing viewers.”

Like Nexstar, Sinclair also had financial incentive to jump when the FCC chair said to, since the company is “always in deal mode and in need of regulatory OKs,” the New York Post (9/25/25) noted.

Indeed, if the Nexstar/Tegna merger falls through, Sinclair is ready to scoop up Tegna’s 64 stations for itself, which would make it larger than Nexstar. Of course, that deal would also make a mockery of the TV ownership limit, and would therefore also need the FCC’s blessing.

But even without the financial incentive, I think Sinclair might still have suspended Kimmel. That would certainly be consistent with the network’s long and partisan track record (FAIR.org, 8/1/24).

With that history in mind, when I saw reports on September 17 that Nexstar had suspended Kimmel, I knew Sinclair couldn’t be far behind.

True to form, Sinclair not only followed suit, but one-upped Nexstar by demanding Kimmel “make a meaningful personal donation” to both Charlie Kirk’s family and his far-right organization Turning Point USA. (David Smith, Sinclair’s longtime leader, personally donated $250,000 to the group last year.)

Nexstar and Sinclair were flexing in once unimaginable ways in part because they have grown unimaginably big over the past two decades. Today, Nexstar and Sinclair together own around 25% of all ABC affiliates. And combined with Gray, the third-largest station group, they own around 40% of all local stations nationwide.

“That consolidation has given them more leverage over the networks than local stations once had,” wrote James Surowiecki (Atlantic, 9/27/25). When Nexstar and Sinclair suspended Kimmel’s show, “they effectively chose to play a game of chicken with ABC.”

But the station groups blinked first. Three days after ABC returned Kimmel to air, Sinclair and Nexstar relented and did the same. It was “a striking about-face,” the New York Times (9/26/25) reported.

In Trump’s good gracesTodd Spangler (Variety, 9/24/25): “Disney was faced with the choice of bringing Kimmel back (angering those on the right who felt the host crossed a red line) or showing him the door (pissing off those on the left who felt it was failing to support free speech)—and the company decided that supporting Kimmel was the better option.”

To grow bigger, Sinclair and Nexstar need to stay in Trump’s good graces to ensure FCC approvals. To survive, however, their ABC affiliates need national programming, especially live sports, the NFL in particular.

Along with political advertising, live sports are one of the only things keeping the TV industry from flatlining amid widespread cord-cutting. And the national broadcast networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox—all have major contracts to broadcast pro sports, which their affiliates rely on to attract viewers and sell ads.

If Sinclair and Nexstar had continued to suspend Kimmel’s show, ABC could have retaliated by withholding other national programming from their affiliates, including Monday Night Football, which would have severely hurt their bottom lines.

ABC’s financial exposure from an extended standoff, on the other hand, wasn’t as great, since Nexstar’s and Sinclair’s ABC affiliates are all outside the top 20 markets, with the exception of WJLA in DC and KOMO in Seattle. ABC was also buffered by owning and operating its own stations in four of the top five markets—New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth and Philadelphia (Variety, 9/24/25).

Even if Sinclair and Nexstar could hold out for a year, an analyst told Variety, Disney, which owns ABC, “would be out only a few million dollars.”

That’s nothing compared to the $4 billion in valuation Disney lost over the six days it suspended Kimmel. During that time, “Disney saw more than 1.7 million paid streaming cancellations” across Disney+, Hulu and ESPN, Marisa Kabas (Bluesky, 9/29/25; Handbasket, 9/23/25) reported.

Disney, for its part, is also doing a careful dance, as it too wants to stay on Trump’s good side—in part to ensure its merger with the sports streaming service FUBO goes through. This helps explain Disney’s willingness to hand Trump $16 million in December to settle his frivolous defamation case against ABC, as well as its suspending Kimmel after Nexstar and Sinclair forced its hand.

“Kimmel is the beginning,” Danilo Yanich, a professor of public policy at the University of Delaware, told FAIR. Now that Nexstar and Sinclair have established a precedent for pushing a network around, “Kimmel is not the end.”

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Janine Jackson interviewed incarcerated journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal about media and power for the October 3, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251003Mumia.mp3FAIR.org (5/1/21)

Janine Jackson: When our guest turned 71 in April, his organized advocates acknowledged the day with mobilizations around how US constitutional law is “weaponized to repress dissent and create political prisoners,” with public discussion about activism on campuses around Palestine, and about the importance of public protest and brave speech.

The 1982 conviction of Mumia Abu-Jamal for the killing of police officer Daniel Faulkner followed a trial marked by prosecutorial and police misconduct, purported witness testimony that was shifting and suborned, discriminatory jury selection, and irresponsible and frankly biased media coverage, which hasn’t changed much over years of court appeals and continued revelations. It was and continues to be clear that, for powers that be, including in the elite press, it is important not only to keep Mumia Abu-Jamal behind bars, but to keep him quiet.

It hasn’t worked. Despite more than four decades in prison, our guest has not ceased to speak up and speak out, on a range of concerns well beyond his own story, with the support of advocates around the world. He joins us now. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mumia Abu-Jamal.

Mumia Abu-Jamal: Thank you for inviting me.

JJ: Well, you never know what folks are learning for the first time. So I just wanted to start with noting that you are a journalist. Mumia, listeners should know, was a radio reporter at various Philly stations. He was head of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists.

I sometimes think, once you’re a witness and a storyteller, you can’t turn that off, even if you become the subject of the story. Certainly you have never really stopped doing what you started out to do, have you?

The Met (4/20/20)

MA: I have not. I guess old habits die hard.

JJ: So you’ve continued to listen and report and to speak from whatever position you’re in, because a journalist is what you are, yeah?

MA: Yeah. But in a cultural sense, I think of myself as a griot, probably a progressive griot, but a griot nonetheless. In African culture, griots were the people who remembered the history of the tribe, and, really, they served the prince in power, but they served the tribe as well. And there’s an old tradition that’s talked about in Senegal that when a griot dies, you don’t lay him in the ground. You bury him vertically in a tree, so that he and his stories are remembered.

I think about telling the stories of a different kind of tribe here in America, a tribe of rebels, a tribe of people who struggle, a tribe of the poor and the oppressed, because those are the stories that rarely get heard and get reported in much of the world.

JJ: That leads me directly to what I just saw on Wikipedia, which said:

From 1979 to 1981, he worked at National Public Radio affiliate WHYY. The management asked him to resign, saying that he did not maintain a sufficiently objective approach in his presentation of news.

And, yeah, it gives me a giggle. And I think that while news media has, in important and life-altering ways, gotten much worse since then, there is, in some places, anyway, a growing recognition that objectivity is a myth, and a harmful one, and that we are all enriched by reporters who can bring their whole selves to the job.

Howard Zinn

MA: If you’re not bringing your whole self to the job, you’re not doing the job. And I think that this whole objectivity myth began when the art of journalism—I won’t call it a science—but the art of journalism was professionalized.

And before that, of course, the media was a very political entity. I remember reading in a history book, it might’ve been Howard Zinn or something like that, a New York newspaper called the New York Caucasian. I mean, think about that. Papers were printed by unions and churches and other kinds of groups, and it was reflective of the people who printed it, not the people who paid them, because journalism was more of a work that people loved doing than a quote unquote “profession.”

Howard Zinn warned us about the dangers of professional distance in many fields. As an historian, of course, Howard Zinn learned history, not when he earned his PhD at Columbia, but when he was teaching at a Black college during the civil rights years, and he was teaching pre-law, something like that, and he was telling people at the school about how the Constitution protected them, and they had certain rights. They said, “Excuse me, Professor Zinn, what are you talking about?” And he said, “Well, you have the right to do this and do that.” They said, “We don’t have the right to vote down here.” He said, “What are you talking about?” They said, “We go to the voting office, they will beat us up.” He said, “Who will beat you up?” They said, “The cops and everybody else.”

So Howard Zinn followed his students to the voting place, and he sat and he just looked, and he learned something that he had never learned in college—and this was Atlanta, of all places—that when people tried to register to vote, they were refused. They had these ridiculous tests they gave them, and if they did not walk away, they would be beaten and locked up.

And so Howard Zinn learned that which the profession did not teach him, that history isn’t always written in these documents or in books. They’re lived by people, and we have to pay attention to how people live in the real world to tell their stories.

Democracy Now! (10/6/25)

JJ: What I get from that story is that an article can tell you the law says this, and that’s not the same thing as telling you how the law is lived out in various people’s lives.

And we have a journalist right now, there are many, but I will just say Mario Guevara, who apparently has an Emmy award, but it’s not enough to prevent his having been detained for over a hundred days now, for the work of live streaming law enforcement activity, including ICE raids. So we have a journalist doing what a lot of other journalists would say is what they’re supposed to do, and he’s been detained.

So when people hear generically about “journalism is under attack,” well, no, it isn’t all journalism that’s under attack. It’s a particular kind of witnessing.

MA: That’s actually true, but also think about, in this era, in this time, and I’m speaking right now about the, shall we call it the Kimmel affair, and how everybody is talking about First Amendment rights, the freedom of speech and the freedom of the press. The case you described is the unfreedom of the press, where a journalist is captured and caged for telling stories and streaming stories about government repression. Who do you think gives a damn about the Constitution, the government or the people?

Prison Policy Initiative (3/11/25)

JJ: Let me ask you, continuing with media, I think people read the data point, “Oh, 2 million people incarcerated in the US,” more and more every day being put in detention centers, and they’re shut away from families and friends, by procedure, by distance, but also shut out of public debate and conversation.

And I think there’s a feeling that this is a cost to those people who are imprisoned, but there’s less recognition that there’s a cost for everyone when we don’t get to hear from this ever-expanding and various group of voices. And I think journalists who buy into, wittingly or not, the idea of “out of sight, out of mind”—they’re serving someone, they’re serving something, by excluding the voices of the incarcerated in our public conversation.

MA: Well, yeah, they’re excluding not just the imprisoned, who, as you said, are in the millions in the United States, but also they’re excluded from thinking about what it means to be truly American, because this is part of that. There is no space in the American landscape where the shadow of the prison doesn’t fall.

And that’s because it is so huge. It is so vast that it impacts those within and without, because everybody in prison has someone on the outside of prison that loves them or they love: their children, their mates, their parents, you name it. And that shadow falls on all of those people. There are stories that can enrich our understanding of what it means to be human by allowing people in this condition to be heard as full human beings.

JJ: And I blame media a lot. I mean, I’m a media critic, but I also, as a media reader—media disappear people, as well as the state disappears them. Suddenly they move into another column, and are no longer worth hearing from. And I don’t know that people understand how much we lose when that happens, and how much media are feeding into this oppressive regime by underscoring the idea that once people go behind bars, we don’t even need to think about them at all anymore.

MA: We call the media the fourth estate, don’t we? But it’s an estate of what?

JJ: Right? For whom?

Mumia Abu-Jamal: “You can’t talk about media without talking about power, because you know and I know that much media is about sucking up to power.”

MA: The estate is part of the state. It’s not part of the people. And as long as people think in those terms, those elevated and false terms, then it’s difficult for them to relate in a human way to people who are in a distressed situation.

And you can’t talk about media without talking about power, because you know and I know that much media is about sucking up to power. I am reminded of, I think it was in the book Into the Buzzsaw that I read years ago; it was about forbidden stories that reporters got fired for, all around the spectrum. I mean, Fox News stations, all kinds of newspapers and whatnot. But the real key is that when people began telling stories that their editors and their bosses didn’t like, well, they got disappeared. By that I mean, of course, they got fired or threatened with firing.

But one of the things that really touched me in this context was that a reporter was talking about how journalists could never say that the president, for example, was lying. And they said, “Well, why not?” And people from the audience were like, “Why don’t you say that?” “Well, we are taught and we’re trained never to say that.” Well, then what if you hear him, and he’s lying, you just act like you don’t hear him? You’re just carrying his lies. That’s the relationship between the media and power. I think that began to crack around the time of the Bush years. But look where we’re at right now. We’re in a whole new world.

JJ: Just rocketing into the past, just rocketing backwards past so many gains that we thought we had made. And I remember that conversation well, and when the audience started saying, “What do you mean you can’t say the president’s lying?” the reporters said, “Well, we think it’s more powerful to say the president’s statements did not comport with information as we have it…” They had this kind of painful, tortured thing that they told themselves was somehow more impactful. So there’s a culture inside newsrooms that gives them, like, 12 degrees of difference between themselves and the truth.

But we know that other folks know what we know, are as irritated and disgusted and seeing through the emperor and his no clothes as we have. And so we have independent media growing up. And I just wonder, when you see the media landscape, do you see hope in these independent journalistic outfits that are coming up? Do you see Black-owned, some of them Black-centered, journalistic organizations sprouting up? Is that a source of hope?

Chris Hedges (Chris Hedges Report)

MA: I think it can be. But the real question is, how will the sandwich taste once everything comes together? And when I think of a great journalist, I think of somebody like Chris Hedges, who was asked to join the New York Times. He didn’t go the regular route, where most reporters kind of prayed for an opportunity to write for a paper like the Times. He was in seminary, and he began hearing about El Salvador, and he went down there and he saw things and he began writing about it, and people were reading his stuff, and the Times came and said, “Boy, you’re a great writer. Can you write some articles for us?” And he was like, “OK, yeah, why not?”

Of course, all of that changed around the time of, I think it was 9/11 and the Iraq War. And Chris did a speech, and he got up and he talked with people and he was telling them, saying, “Listen, do not let these politicians use your fear to get you involved in a war.” And people began singing “God Bless America” and yelling at him, because they didn’t want to hear it. And it was almost like Chris was seeing which way the wind would blow.

And he got threatened by his editors, like, “Oh, that’s one strike against you, buddy.” I mean, he could care less. Again, he didn’t, like, run and get the job. They ran after him, because of the clarity and power of his writing.

JJ: But then that clarity and power was just what they didn’t want, actually, to hear.

MA: Exactly. Well, I think the scholar Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò hit the mark when he said it’s “elite capture.” He had been captured by the Times, and they had a tiger by the tail. And Chris really could care less because, in the new media world, he writes online, and probably is more read today than he was when he was at the Times.

JJ: Absolutely, and that’s kind of where we’re at, where folks who want to do reporting, who want to witness, but who are not willing to accept the constraints of corporate news media, we haven’t quite built the structures for those folks to have a platform, for those folks to be heard from. So we’re kind of in transition, in terms of media structures. But I do believe that, in terms of audience, more people are recognizing the failures and the flaws and the constraints of the major news media, and are at least looking for something else.

NPR (5/26/21)

MA: I think they’re hungry for something else, because here’s the real deal: People who are young people, they don’t read newspapers, they don’t watch TV, because that media is alien to them. So, unfortunately, they might read news updates that someone has assembled, used media sources to assemble, but they don’t go to those original media sources, because they have no trust in those media sources. So they find out using other means.

But we’re, I think, on the cusp of creating citizen journalists, where, given the technology that now exists, everybody is a journalist. Because they have the potential to use their phones and broadcast to, really, uncounted numbers of people, to tell their stories and to get their word out, and to contact them and to give them insight into the world that they see, and not the world that the media want to project.

You remember George Floyd; it was a 17-year-old girl who was witnessing that, and when she livestreamed it, the world tuned in, and was transformed by that moment. So that’s just a taste of what journalism can do, when it’s at the right place at the right time.

JJ: And I thank you for that, and I think the corollary to the citizen journalism, and to people understanding that they can create their own news and witness and share, I think there is also an understanding that folks, when they’re watching the TV news, or they’re reading the paper, they also maybe are bringing more critical thinking to that, and recognizing that they don’t need to just swallow everything that’s in the New York Times. Am I being over-hopeful there?

MA: No, I think you’re absolutely correct. I think that’s part of that youthful vibration that turns kids off the newspaper or the local broadcast or even the national broadcast. I mean, I know quite a few young people who simply don’t watch TV. That’s an alien communications device to them.

HarperCollins (1996)

JJ:Well, I could talk to you a lot, but I don’t want to take too much of your time. I want to ask you, certainly, before we close, to say anything that you want to say to a listenership of media critical folks. But I would ask—I read a quote from you recently that you said you’ve never felt alone. And I think that is gratifying, and probably surprising for people to hear, because many people, many people walking freely through the streets, are feeling very alone right now, really oppressively alone, for all kinds of reasons. And it might seem a weird question, but in September 2025, where are you finding hope? What are you looking to?

MA: I do find it in young people who are more open and more receptive, not just to stories, but to struggles. And I think that the gift of repression is that it wakes people up. I mean, people are seeing things that haven’t been seen in this country for years, and it’s waking people up. And so once you’re awake, it’s kind of hard to go back to sleep. And think about this: To the right wing, the worst thing you can be is woke. So that suggests that they want everybody to go to sleep. So wake up, be woke.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mumia Abu-Jamal, author of many titles, including Writing on the Wall, Faith of Our Fathers, Murder Incorporated and 1995’s Live from Death Row, translated now into at least seven languages. Mumia Abu-Jamal, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MA: Thank you, and thank CounterSpin. It has been a pleasure.

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In a videotaped statement (AP, 9/10/25), Trump said that comparing people like Charlie Kirk to Nazis is “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”

After the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump (9/10/25) escalated his war on free speech, calling for criminalizing criticism of himself:

It’s a long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.

To spell it out: “Demonizing”—which is to say, criticizing—people with whom you disagree is “directly responsible” for Kirk’s death. Note that this is about criticizing people that you disagree with—”you” presumably being one of “those on the radical left”—as Trump has built a wildly lucrative political career out of demonizing those he disagrees with, and he’s not about to stop now. It’s the “wonderful Americans” like Kirk whom you aren’t supposed to criticize.

Trump promises “this kind of rhetoric”—the “radical left” kind—will “stop,” because the government will “find each and every one who contributed to this atrocity.” This includes all those who used their speech to “go after our judges,” cops and “everyone else who brings order.”

This is, in short, a declaration that the idea of free speech is over—despite Trump going on to list “free speech” first among “the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died.” Where once you had the right to criticize those who “bring order,” now such reckless rhetoric is punishable as direct support for “terrorism”—a word that under the US legal system authorizes draconian police powers.

‘Violent rhetoric has consequences’A response (X, 9/24/25) to Homeland Security’s complaint that people were comparing ICE to the Gestapo, secret police and slave patrols.

Interestingly, the particular strain of criticism that Trump singles out—though not exclusively—is when “wonderful Americans” like Kirk are compared to “Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.”

The Department of Homeland Security made a similar complaint on X (9/24/25) after sniper Joshua Jahn reportedly shot at an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees:

This vile attack was motivated by hatred for ICE. This shooting must serve as a wake-up call that violent rhetoric about ICE has consequences. Comparing ICE day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police and slave patrols has consequences.

ICE is a masked paramilitary group that operates without badges or warrants, whose leadership considers it a crime to record or identify its members. It rounds people up on the basis of ethnicity, or targets them for their political views, sending them without due process to foreign concentration camps.

Which historical precedents are we allowed to compare such an organization to?

‘Our lineage’ vs. ‘wickedness’Stephen Miller charged that “leftist groups and nonprofits had created ‘terrorist networks’ that led to Kirk’s murder” (New Republic, 9/15/25).

Speaking of Nazi comparisons, people heard similarities between the eulogy given by chief Trump advisor Stephen Miller at Kirk’s funeral and the rhetoric of Third Reich propagandist Joseph Goebbels (National, 9/22/25; Snopes, 9/25/25). Miller’s speech drew a heavy-handed contrast between “what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble,” and the “forces of wickedness and evil.” The “good,” the forces of “the light,” were seemingly genetically defined, with “ancestors” and a “lineage”:

Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry…. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.

And the other side was so dehumanized, they were erased from reality:

And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.

Note again the emphasis on the speech of the enemy: They “incite,” they “foment.” This was not a throwaway line; speaking to Vice President JD Vance, who was guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast (New Republic, 9/15/25), Miller said that he was on a mission to shut up the left: “The last message that Charlie sent me,” he claimed, “was that we needed to have an organized strategy to go after the left-leaning organizations that are promoting violence in this country.” Calling the left “a vast domestic terror movement,” Miller vowed:

With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.

‘Targeted intimidation’Analyzing the White House’s “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” memo (9/25/25), Jeff Sharlet (Scenes From a Slow Civil War, 9/26/25) notes that it “provides authorities with potential cause to prosecute not everyone but anyone.”

Those words seemed to become legal action in the form of an “executive memo” (9/25/25; Scenes From a Slow Civil War, 9/26/25) about the new war on anti-fascism signed by Trump, but lacking the ranting digressions characteristic of words actually written by the president. The memo includes this chilling passage:

This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies—including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources and predicate actions behind them—is required.

“Political violence” is defined here as not just actual “violence,” but also “targeted intimidation, radicalization [and] threats”; in other words, speech. This speech is “designed to silence opposing speech,” which only makes sense if it’s understood that the speech that deserves protection and the speech that needs to be investigated by law enforcement are spoken by two different kinds of people; free speech is a right that only belongs to the right people (FAIR.org, 3/4/25). If you’re the wrong sort of person, using your speech to “silence” the good kind of speech—which is to say, to criticize it—well, then, we have to kill free speech in order to save it.

Another thing these “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” need to be criminally investigated for is using speech to “change or direct policy outcomes.” This is said to “prevent the functioning of a democratic society”—when it’s actually key to the functioning of a democratic society.

The ability to use your freedom of expression to try to change what the government does is, in fact, why the First Amendment was put in the Constitution in the first place. But clearly we are in an era where the executive branch no longer sees the First Amendment as any kind of meaningful constraint.

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Mumia Abu-Jamal

This week on CounterSpin: With some 2 million people in prison, jail or detention centers, the US is a world leader in incarceration. Ever more people disappear behind bars every day, many for highly contestable and contested reasons. But despite age-old rhetoric about prison as “rehabilitation,” US journalists say—through their work—that if any of the criminal legal systems in this country decide to punish you, that’s proof enough that you should never be heard from again. With some exceptions for celebrity, corporate journalists seem absolutely OK with silencing the huge numbers of disproportionately Black and brown people in prison. It’s a choice that impoverishes conversation about prison policy, about public safety, and about shared humanity.

There are reporters and outlets paying attention—and willing to navigate the serious barriers the prison system presents. One such outlet is Prison Radio, actually a multimedia production studio, that works to include the voices of incarcerated people in public debate.

It’s thanks to them that we have the opportunity to speak with journalist, author and activist Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose 1982 conviction for the killing of a Philadelphia police officer showcased failures in the legal system, yes, but also exposed flagrant flaws in corporate media’s storytelling around crime and punishment and race and power.

Transcript: ‘There’s No Space in the American Landscape Where the Shadow of the Prison Doesn’t Fall’

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251003Mumia.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at the Washington Post‘s firing of Karen Attiah.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin251003Banter.mp3

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CEPR (3/3/25)

This week on CounterSpin: We’ve always heard that racists hate quotas, yet Stephen Miller’s “3000 a day however which way” mandate is terrorizing immigrant communities—brown immigrant communities—around the country. The response from people of conscience can look many ways: linking arms around people in danger, absolutely; vigorously disputing misinformation about immigrants, whether hateful or patronizing, also. But another piece is gaining a deeper, broader understanding of migration. News media could help answer one implied question—“Why is anyone trying to come to the US anyway?”—by grappling with the role of conditions the US has largely created in the places people are driven from. We’ll talk about that largely missing piece from elite media’s immigration coverage with Michael Galant, senior research and outreach associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250620Galant.mp3Inequality.org (5/29/25)

Also on the show: Anyone who pays attention and cares can see that the Trump budget bill is a brazen transfer of resources from those that are trying to meet basic needs to those that can’t remember how many houses they own. But corporate reporting rarely breaks out economic policy in terms of how it affects different people—especially how it affects communities for whom they show no consistent concern. Economic policy is itself racialized, gendered, regionalized, targeted. Humanistic journalism would help us see that.

LaToya Parker is a senior researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, and co-author, with Joint Center president Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, of the recent piece “This Federal Budget Will Be a Disaster for Black Workers.”

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250620Parker.mp3

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New York comptroller Brad Lander being arrested by DHS secret police for asking to see their warrant (AP, 6/17/25).

US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained New York City’s comptroller, Brad Lander, as he and other activists escorted immigrants in the halls of Manhattan’s federal immigration court house (AP, 6/17/25; New York Times, 6/17/25; Democracy Now!, 6/18/25).

Lander is a progressive Democrat running for mayor, although he is trailing in the polls. He is only the latest of many Democrats who have been detained by federal agents in a widespread campaign of intimidation of President Donald Trump’s critics, such as California Sen. Alex Padilla and Newark Mayor Ras Baraka. New Jersey Rep. LaMonica McIver was also indicted on “charges alleging she assaulted and interfered with immigration officers outside a New Jersey detention center” (AP, 6/10/25), the same case Baraka was involved in.

Feds also briefly detained an aide to New York Rep. Jerrold Nadler. The arrest and hospitalization of California Service Employees International Union leader David Huerta helped kick off the uprising against ICE in Los Angeles (Guardian, 6/9/25). Two House committees are investigating Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell to “determine if the mayor obstructed immigration operations” (WZTV, 6/18/25).

The witch hunt has focused on judges, too. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan faces a possible prison sentence on allegations she helped an immigrant evade authorities in her courtroom. Attorney General Pam Bondi took to Fox News (4/25/25) to warn other judges who run afoul with the executive branch: “We are prosecuting you.”

During an emergency rally outside the federal building, elected officials and activists charged that Lander’s high-profile arrest was meant as the Trump administration’s warning against any citizen who advocates for immigrant families. The outrage was palpable. Said Justin Brannan, a city council member running for Lander’s job this year: “I’m from Brooklyn. You know what we call this? Complete and total bullshit.”

‘It isn’t his job’The New York Post (6/17/25) calls lawmakers standing up for immigrants as “pretty pathetic, and pointless,” because “even many Democrats support Trump’s deportations of criminal illegal immigrants.” (“Many” here means 9%, according to Pew—6/17/25.)

The Murdoch press, however, is celebrating the latest use weaponization of government power.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (6/17/25):

“Do you have a judicial warrant?” Mr. Lander asks, as he’s pulled along in a scrum toward an elevator. “Do you have a judicial warrant? Can I see the judicial warrant? Can I see the warrant? I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant. Where is it? Where is the warrant?” It isn’t his job to demand a warrant or for agents to produce one to him.

First of all, Lander is the comptroller, the city’s second-highest elected officer and its chief fiduciary. Comptrollers commonly advocate for clean government, transparency and criminal justice reform. Further, he was acting mostly in his capacity as an activist doing “court watch” to protect families against deportations and family separations. Is it his job as comptroller to ensure cops aren’t abusing their power? Arguably. Is it his duty as a citizen in a democratic society? Absolutely.

The New York Post editorial board (6/17/25):

Lander repeatedly demanded to see a warrant for a guy ICE was detaining outside federal immigration court, holding his hand on the arrestee’s shoulder in an obvious bid to obstruct the agents enough to provoke an arrest.

Unsurprisingly, the charges got dropped after a few hours; Homeland Security has far more important things to do than play the heavy in Dems’ various morality plays.

Clearly, the editorial was written so hastily the writers didn’t notice a glaring contradiction: Given how many federal agents came after Lander and how long they detained him, the feds clearly did prioritize his detention. Some activists outside the courthouse even speculated that the rally calling for his release only encouraged federal agents to keep holding him.

‘Playbook for lefty politicians’Fox News* (6/17/25) suggested that Lander’s arrest was “staged” because he was released “after being held for only a few hours.” (The Fox* video blurred out the faces of the DHS officers who weren’t masked.)

Joe Concha of the Washington Examiner told Fox & Friends First (6/18/25) Lander’s arrest was “cheesy performance art.” His paper (Washington Examiner, 6/18/25) recalled that Concha “predicted these efforts will only increase.” And Fox News (6/17/25) interviewed Joe Borelli, a Republican city council member:

“Election day is a week from today, and early voting has begun. Make no mistake, the purpose was to get the headlines that he’s getting,” said Borelli. “It’s instant name recognition and establishing even stronger liberal bona fides.”

Speaking with Fox News Digital, Borelli likened Lander’s arrest to the recent arrest of Newark Democrat Mayor Ras Baraka and the detaining of Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., who were both detained for allegedly disrupting different federal events.

“This is the playbook for lefty politicians who want to make a get-a-headline. They try to get arrested, they get arrested and then fake outrage over getting arrested,” he said.

This is a common smear that right-wing media use against progressive activists: that they are engaging in publicity stunts (New York Post, 7/20/22; Jerusalem Post, 6/8/25). Put aside the fact DHS is led by Kristi Noem, famous for her cosplay photo ops: None of these people asked, or tried, to be arrested. Lander and other activists have been doing this type of work in order to publicize the injustice of these mass immigrant round-ups and the eradication of due process.

If anything, the federal agents making these arrests are the ones giving these actions more play in the news, and creating more outrage in general. In other words, right-wing media are mad that these arrests are helping to unify the outrage against mass deportations.

In fact, a headline at the right-wing Washington Times (6/17/25) warned: “Democrats’ Defiance of ICE Grows After New York Mayoral Candidate Arrested.”

It isn’t terribly unusual that these right-wing outlets are pooh-poohing Democrats and immigrants. The issue here isn’t their devotion to right-wing policies, but to a Mafia-like government that is using an unaccountable police force to arrest politicians of a rival political party. The Murdoch press isn’t just running propaganda for the White House, these outlets are fanning the flames of authoritarianism.

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“Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?” Popular Mechanics (6/8/25) asks. Spoiler alert: No.

I like to read science stories, even (maybe especially) when they’re not politically earthshaking. But sometimes what’s on the label is not what’s in the tin.

Take a Popular Mechanics story, “The Dogs of Chernobyl Are Experiencing Rapid Evolution, Study Suggests” (6/8/25). The subhead asks the question, “Have the canines acquired strange mutations living near the power plant?”

To answer that, PM reports on a paper from 2023: “The study uncovered that the feral dogs living near the Chernobyl Power Plant showed distinct genetic differences from dogs living only some 10 miles away in nearby Chernobyl City.” That is literally all we learn about the findings of the study that the headline is based on.

It does go on to say that a newer study finds that the answer to the subhead’s question is “no”:

A study published nearly two years later confidently asserts that we can cross radiation off the list of explanations for the current state of the Chernobyl canine population…. This new genetic analysis looked at the chromosomal level, the genome level and even the nucleotides of the Chernobyl dogs, and found no abnormalities indicative of radiation-induced mutation.

Oh. Never mind!

I guess an accurate headline—”Study Finds No Sign Chernobyl’s Dogs Are Radioactive Mutants”—wouldn’t have gotten as many clicks.

“Dinosaurs didn’t rule the Earth,” Big Think (6/10/26) argues, because someone found a fossil of “a badger-like mammal…biting a small horned dinosaur.”

Another piece appeared in Big Think (6/10/26) under the headline “A Mesozoic Myth: Dinosaurs Didn’t Rule the Earth Like We Think.” Intriguing! Tell us more?

It turns that the argument is basically that even though none of them were “larger than the size of a house cat,” during the age of dinosaurs “there were ancient mammal equivalents of squirrels, shrews, otters, aardvarks, flying squirrels and more.” I put it to you, though, that none of these are the kind of creatures that we think of today as “ruling the Earth.”

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Imagine for a moment that Country A launched an illegal and unprovoked attack on Country B. In any sort of objective world, you might expect media coverage of the episode to go something along the lines of: “Country A Launches Illegal and Unprovoked Attack on Country B.”

Not so in the case of Israel, whose special relationship with the United States means it gets special coverage in the US corporate media. When Israel attacked Iran early last Friday, killing numerous civilians along with military officials and scientists, the press was standing by to present the assault as fundamentally justified—no surprise coming from the outlets that have for more than 20 months refused to describe Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as genocide.

‘Preemptive strike’AP*‘s headline (6/18/25) highlights that Israel struck “Iran’s nuclear sites and kills top generals”; the article doesn’t note that Iran says the “overwhelming majority” of the 78 people killed at that point by Israel were civilians (Times of Israel*, 6/14/25).

From the get-go, the corporate media narrative was that Israel had targeted Iranian military and nuclear facilities in a “preemptive strike” (ABC, 6/13/25), with civilian casualties presented either as an afterthought or not at all (e.g., AP, 6/18/25). (As the Israeli attack on Iran has continued unabated for the past week in tandem with retaliatory Iranian strikes on Israel, the Iranian civilian death toll has become harder to ignore—as, for example, in the Washington Post’s recent profile of 23-year-old poet Parnia Abbasi, killed along with her family as they slept in their Tehran apartment building.)

On Monday, June 16, the fourth day of the assault, the Associated Press reported that Israeli strikes had “killed at least 224 people since Friday.” This figure appeared in the eighth paragraph of the 34-paragraph article; the first reference to Iranian civilians appeared in paragraph 33, which informed readers that “rights groups” had suggested that the number was a “significant undercount,” and that 197 civilians were thus far among the upwards of 400 dead.

Back in paragraph 8, meanwhile, came the typical implicit validation of Israeli actions:

Israel says its sweeping assault on Iran’s top military leaders, uranium enrichment sites and nuclear scientists, is necessary to prevent its longtime adversary from getting any closer to building an atomic weapon.

That Israel’s “preventive” efforts happened to occur smack in the middle of a US push for a diplomatic resolution to the Iranian nuclear issue has not proved to be a detail that is overly of interest to the US media; nor have corporate outlets found it necessary to dwell too deeply on the matter of the personal convenience of war on Iran for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu—both as a distraction from the genocide in Gaza, and from his domestic embroilment in assorted corruption charges.

In its own coverage, NBC News (6/14/25) highlighted that Netanyahu had “said the operation targeted Iran’s nuclear program and ‘will continue for as many days as it takes to remove this threat.’” Somehow, it is never deemed worth mentioning in such reports that it is not in fact up to Israel—the only state in the region with an (undeclared) nuclear arsenal, and a non-signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty—to be policing any perceived nuclear “threat.” Instead, Israeli officials are given ample space, time and again, to present their supposed cause as entirely legitimate, while getting away with murder—not to mention genocide.

‘Potential salvation’A Washington Post article (6/16/25) manages to blame the Iranian officials for not keeping their people safe from Israeli missiles.

Its profile of the young poet Abbasi notwithstanding, the Washington Post has been particularly aggressive in toeing the Israeli line. Following Netanyahu’s English-language appeal to Iranians to “stand up” against the “common enemy: the murderous regime that both oppresses you and impoverishes you”—a pretty rich accusation, coming from the man currently presiding over mass murder and all manner of other oppression—Post reporter Yeganeh Torbati (6/14/25) undertook to detail how some Iranians “see potential salvation in Israel’s attack despite risk of a wider war.”

In her dispatch, Torbati explained that in spite of reports of civilian deaths, “ordinary Iranians” had “expressed satisfaction” at Israel’s attacks on Iran’s “oppressive government.” As usual, there was no room for any potentially relevant historical details regarding “oppressive” governance in Iran—like, say, the 1953 CIA-orchestrated coup d’état against the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh, which paved the way for the extended rule-by-terror of the torture-happy Iranian shah, whose oppression was aided by manic acquisition of US weaponry.

On Monday, Torbati was back with another report on how, amid Israel’s attacks on Iran, the Iranian population had “lamented the lack of adequate safety instructions and evacuation orders” from its government, “turning to social media for answers.” The article quotes a Tehran resident named Alireza as complaining that “we have nothing, not even a government that would bother giving safety suggestions to people”—although it’s anyone’s guess as to what sort of suggestions the government is supposed to offer given the circumstances. Try not to be sleeping in your apartment when Israel decides to bomb it?

We thus end up with an entire article in a top US newspaper suggesting that the issue at hand is not that Israel is conducting illegal and unprovoked attacks on Iran, but rather that the Iranian government has not publicized proper safety recommendations for dealing with said attacks. At one point, Torbati concedes that “the government did provide some broad safety instructions,” and that “a government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, recommended that Iranians take shelter in metros, mosques and schools.”

Refusing to leave it at that, Torbati goes on to object that “it was unclear why mosques and schools would be safer than other buildings, given that Israel had already targeted residential and other civilian structures”—which again magically transforms the issue into a critique of the Iranian government for lack of clarity, as opposed to a critique of Israel for, you know, committing war crimes.

‘It’s all targeted’To the New York Times (6/15/25), mass assassination of Iranian leaders is a “playbook” and “following the script.”

Which brings us to the New York Times, never one to miss a chance to cheerlead on behalf of Israeli atrocities—like that time in 2009 that the paper’s resident foreign affairs columnist literally advocated for targeting civilians in Gaza (FAIR.org, 1/30/25), invoking Israel’s targeting of civilians in Lebanon in 2006 as a positive precedent. Now, a Times article (6/15/25) headlined “Israel’s Attack in Iran Echoes Its Strategy Against Hezbollah” wonders if another Lebanese precedent might prove successful: “Israel decimated the group’s leadership last fall and degraded its military capabilities. Can the same strategy work against a far more powerful foe?”

After reminiscing about “repeated Israeli attacks on apartment buildings, bunkers and speeding vehicles” in Lebanon in 2024—which produced “more than 15 senior Hezbollah military commanders eliminated in total”—the piece speculates that Israel’s ongoing attacks on Iran and assassinations of top Iranian officers seem “to be following the script from last fall” in Lebanon. Swift confirmation comes from Randa Slim at the Middle East Institute in Washington: “It’s all targeted, the assassination of their senior officials in their homes.”

Never mind that Israel’s activity in Lebanon last fall amounted to straight-up terrorism—or that somehow these “targeted assassinations” managed to kill some 4,000 people in Lebanon between October 2023 and November 2024 alone. In unceasingly providing a platform to justify Israeli aggression and mass civilian slaughter throughout the region, the US corporate media at least appears to be following its own script to a T.

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Pro-Israel zealots commonly attempt to discredit criticism of the Israeli government by equating such criticism with antisemitism, because Israel is the world’s only state with a Jewish majority.

One way of lifting up this accusation is to say that pro-Palestine leftists hold Israel to a different standard by focusing on Israel and ignoring human rights concerns in other countries. The World Jewish Congress (5/4/22) gives supposed examples of this, such as “accusing Israel of human right violations while refusing to criticize regimes with far worse human right abuses, such as Iran, North Korea, Iraq and Pakistan,” or “rebuking Israel for allegedly violating women’s rights, while ignoring significantly worse abuses carried out by governments and terrorist organizations.”

‘Demonization and double standards’To the New York Times (6/14/25), saying that people are opposed to Israel and not to Jews is “making excuses.”

The New York Times (6/14/25) recently invoked this in an editorial headlined “Antisemitism Is an Urgent Problem. Too Many People Are Making Excuses.” To the board’s credit, the editorial talks about how antisemitism plays a big role in the Trump administration’s racist and demagogic rule—although it could have gone further into analyzing how antisemitism is at the center of fascism’s other conspiratorial bigotries: that Jewish masterminds are behind mass immigration (FAIR.org, 10/30/18) and Black Lives Matter (Fox Business, 12/15/17).

But the editorialists aim at least as much criticism at the left for its vocal opposition against the ongoing genocide and starvation in Gaza. Yes, the editors admit that “criticism of the Israeli government is not the same thing as antisemitism,” and insist that they themselves “have abhorred the mass killing of civilians and the destruction of Gaza.” They also said that pro-Israel activists “hurt their own cause when they equate all such arguments with antisemitism.”

There’s a “but” coming. “But some Americans have gone too far in the other direction,” the board said, pointing to the “3D test” of “delegitimization, demonization and double standards” that it says is a key test for determining “when criticism of Israel crosses into antisemitism.” “Progressive rhetoric has regularly failed that test in recent years,” they write:

Consider the double standard that leads to a fixation on Israel’s human rights record and little campus activism about the records of China, Russia, Sudan, Venezuela or almost any other country. Consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist and express admiration for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis—Iran-backed terrorist groups that brag about murdering Jews. Consider how often people use “Zionist” as a slur—an echo of Soviet propaganda from the Cold War—and call for the exclusion of Zionists from public spaces. The definition of a Zionist is somebody who supports the existence of Israel.

Let’s take these one at a time. It is depressingly telling that the first line echoes a year-old editorial in the right-wing City Journal (4/14/24) that condemned students for not aiming their protests at Syria, Russia or China. The most obvious answer to these “gotcha” scenarios is that the US and US universities are not funding human rights violations or wars initiated by any of these countries. The protests against Israel’s actions in Gaza are growing in the US precisely because of US support for Israel. Students often want to see their universities divest from Israeli entities as a way to put pressure on Israel, the same way activists mobilized against South African apartheid.

The US and its allies have imposed sanctions on Russia (Reuters, 2/27/22; Politico, 2/28/22; Al Jazeera, 4/24/24), and the US is currently in a trade war with China (CNN, 6/11/25); the State Department has declared it will “aggressively” revoke the visas of Chinese students (Reuters, 5/29/25). The Trump administration’s new travel restrictions ban people from Sudan and highly restrict entry for Venezuelans (NPR, 6/9/25). The Council on Foreign Relations (3/11/25) estimates that the US has given Ukraine $128 billion to defend against the Russian invasion, and the House of Representatives has an entire committee devoted to investigating China’s ruling Communist Party.

The Times next asks us to “consider how often left-leaning groups suggest that the world’s one Jewish state should not exist.” Left-leaning groups generally oppose ethnostates, and tend not to make an exception for Israel, whose ethnic policies have been condemned as “apartheid” by the world’s leading human rights groups. As for expressing admiration for Hamas et al.: You’ll rarely hear US progressives praising Hamas, but you will hear them blaming Hamas’s violence on the thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel prior to October 7, 2023.

Antisemitism as pretextThe Times goes on to complain that the word “Zionist,” which it defines as “somebody who supports the existence of Israel,” is used as a slur. But Zionism hasn’t become a thorny word because of antisemitism. Zionists are defending a political system where rights and freedom depend on one’s religion and ethnicity, a concept the small-d democrats of a liberal paper like the Times would otherwise abhor. The word “Dixiecrat” is remembered today only as a bad word, not because these people were from the American Southeast, but because they advocated for segregation.

The Times, as usual, wrongly equates Zionism with Jewishness. There are many Jewish non-Zionists and anti-Zionists, including sects that view Zionism as a sort of false messianism. There are also many Christian Zionists—who far outnumber Jewish Zionists—who see Israel as a necessary means to the biblically foretold End Times.

The editorial admits that the Trump administration “has also used [antisemitism] as a pretext for his broader campaign against the independence of higher education.” The paper notes: “The combination risks turning antisemitism into yet another partisan issue, encouraging opponents to dismiss it as one of his invented realities.”

The Times is absolutely right that the Trump administration’s vociferous attacks on antisemitism are ineffective, precisely because they are patently just a stick with which to beat his enemies in academia. But that is the exact same problem that the Times editorial has: If you use charges of antisemitism as a pretense to smear critics of a genocidal government, you are doing nothing to protect Jews.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com or via Bluesky: @NYTimes.com. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

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Trigger warning: discussion of suicide and its depictions.

The New York Times Magazine (6/1/25) ignored ethical guidelines designed to keep reporting from encouraging suicide.

The New York Times Magazine recently published a cover story (6/1/25) that gave in-depth representation to the challenges faced by a chronically sick, disabled woman named Paula Ritchie, age 52. Ritchie dealt with underdiagnosed illnesses and pain, as well as challenges in supporting herself and managing her mental health.

The Times then told the story of Ritchie ending her own life out of despair over her situation. The journalist, Katie Engelhart, observed and documented her suicide, up until the last breath left her body. “I was with Ritchie until the very end,” she posted on X (6/1/25). Engelhart gave lengthy justifications for Ritchie’s choice to end her life, and described several people who supported her in that decision.

Articles like this aren’t common in the media. Suicide prevention is typically regarded as both a social good and an ethical responsibility. In the US and Canada (where the article takes place), suicidal people are involuntarily detained to prevent their deaths. It has long been illegal in Canada (and many US states) to assist or even “counsel” a person to commit suicide.

There are also ethical standards that guide media outlets in reporting on suicide, in order to minimize the risk of glamorizing or idealizing it. These guidelines are based on research showing that the media has an outsized influence when it comes to suicide. Graphic, detailed and sensationalized coverage has been shown to increase the “risk of contagion,” according to one guide. AP News specifically tries to avoid detailing the “methods used” in stories that reference suicide, based on this research.

The Times violated almost all of the published guidelines by personalizing, detailing, dramatizing, justifying and sentimentalizing Ritchie’s suicide, as well as by making it a cover story. The story featured close-up images of the method of Ritchie’s death and what appears to be her post-mortem body.

The World Health Organization urges journalists covering suicide not to “explicitly describe the method used” or “use photographs, video footage or social media links that relate to the circumstances of the suicide,” among other guidelines.

So why wasn’t there generalized outrage or pushback from other media? The only significant outcry came from thousands of disabled people on social media.

The simplest answer is that Ritchie’s suicide was administered by a doctor, and legal in Canada. Media tend to be more accepting of the unacceptable when it is government-sanctioned. In 2021, the country expanded its Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) law to permit physician-assisted suicide for disabled people who aren’t suffering terminal illnesses. The law and its implementation have been extremely controversial, as the article noted. Similar laws have been passed or introduced across Europe.

The Times article reinforced a popular belief that disability is a fate worse than death. The disabled author Imani Barbarin sums it up in the title of her forthcoming book: If I Were You, I’d Kill Myself. It’s a refrain disabled people are accustomed to hearing, the frightful implication of which is that accommodations aren’t worth the bother, and death is for their own good.

The media has a tendency to reinforce this idea in stories about disability. As I previously wrote about for FAIR (1/20/21), the New York Times (4/10/20, 12/24/20) published stories early in the Covid-19 pandemic suggesting that disability should be considered in determining who had a right to Covid ventilators, based on unproven myths of “quality of life.” The articles cited literal eugenicists as experts, and didn’t invite disabled people to the conversation.

Both sides, and propagandaIn Engelhart’s Times article, she appeared to offer a sensitive and balanced view on the debates around MAiD expansion. Yet the article was laden with ableist rhetoric, medical misinformation and subtle propaganda from the well-funded “right to die” movement. It also left out prominent critical facts about MAiD.

Engelhart omitted that the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (3/11/25) issued a report in March that condemned Canada’s MAiD, and recommended that the country “repeal” the expanded law and halt plans for future expansion. The report outlined how benefits and healthcare for disabled people are inadequate in Canada, resulting in coercion around MAiD, especially for women and marginalized groups. People have been sharing stories of coercive MAiD practices since it was expanded (e.g., Independent, 6/23/23; New York Post, 11/8/22; X, 6/4/25).

It’s significant that the most powerful international body issued such a strong condemnation of MAiD; it’s something that anyone following the issue should know about, and Engelhart has published a book on MAiD and speaks about it constantly, yet she left it out of her article.

Dying With Dignity Canada’s goals include, according to the Walrus (1/12/24) “making MAiD available to people whose sole condition is a mental disorder” and “expanding MAID to ‘mature minors’ age twelve and older.”

Engelhart did discuss some of the issues exposed by the UN, but she cited “disability rights advocates,” “critics” and “opponents,” not the UN. She also didn’t name or quote these opponents, aside from a few uneasy doctors. None of the many disability rights, human rights and religious organizations that have condemned MAiD expansion were named, and only some of their arguments were discussed. Missing, for instance, was the fact that a promised expansion of disability benefits was tabled just after MAiD expansion was approved, suggesting the government saw the suicide program as another solution, of sorts, to the disability problem.

Also missing from the article was the role of a powerful lobbying group known as Dying with Dignity Canada (DwD), which has raised millions of dollars from corporate and wealthy donors (Walrus, 1/12/24). DwD has had an enormous influence on the Canadian government and media conversations on MAiD. The organization isn’t named in the Times Magazine piece, but its propaganda is subtly woven throughout.

Engelhart has been more explicit about her pro-MAiD leanings in other writings and statements (e.g., Neiman Storyboard, 3/3/21; NPR, 3/9/21), as well as in online responses to comments on her Times Magazine piece.

In search of euphemismAs evidence of her bias, look at the way Engelhart introduced the terminology in the Times article: “Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) program—what critics call physician-assisted suicide.” It’s a curious attribution. Is there a more direct, factual way to describe what happened to Ritchie than suicide? It’s a subtle nod to DwD, which seeks to remove the “suicide” from assisted suicide. From the organization’s website:

We do not use the terms assisted suicide or euthanasia because they stigmatize people who are suffering intolerably and want to access their right to a peaceful death. Suicide is a desperate act of self-harm, while medical assistance in dying is a legal, federally regulated end-of-life choice, driven by hope and autonomy.

The Merriam-Webster definition of suicide is “the act or an instance of ending one’s own life voluntarily and intentionally.” DwD seems to be attempting to redefine the word to soften what happens with MAiD.

On Twitter, Engelhart has argued that “assisted death” is a less “politically loaded” term than “assisted suicide.” She has also taken issue with the AP for referring to MAiD recipients as “killed.” It’s not propaganda to state that when someone dies, they are “killed” by the cause of death. People are killed by cancer, accidents and self-inflicted wounds as much as by murder.

Engelhart’s efforts to soften the language of assisted suicide calls to mind crime reporters using “police-involved shooting” to say that police have shot someone. The common norms for speaking about suicide and shootings can apply without harm or distortion of the facts.

The Times Magazine article reflected some of the contradictions inherent to DwD ideology that appear throughout Engelhart’s work. For instance, she often compares assisted suicide rights to abortion rights, a DwD talking point. But she also compares it to the merciful “euthanizing” of “beloved pets.” Unlike people who elect abortions, animals do not get to choose their fates, or even express their wishes. Humans project our assumptions onto pets, including that their suffering must be a fate worse than death.

Despite Engelhart’s seeming alignment with the “dying with dignity” movement, to her credit, she did expose that there wasn’t absolute “dignity” in Ritchie’s death. The article ends with a gruesome description of Ritchie’s last moments, including her expression of “horrible” discomfort.

A ‘difficult case’Dr. Matt Wonnacott, the doctor who approved euthanasia for Paula Ritchie: “If you tell me that you’re suffering, who am I to question that?” he told Engelhart.

Engelhart provided a lot of detail about Ritchie’s medical conditions, but relied on outdated, vaguely sourced and ableist ways of describing chronic illness. Here and elsewhere, her work is mostly sourced to doctors, especially MAiD providers, and patients who want to die, but not the many people who live with and manage complex chronic disease.

As a disabled journalist, I see Ritchie’s story through a different lens than Engelhart. I have many of her conditions, deal with ongoing suffering, sometimes severe, and was suicidal at one point.

Engelhart described Ritchie as if she were too difficult to diagnose sufficiently beyond a collection of symptoms, including head injury, migraine, fatigue, dizziness, long-standing depression and PTSD from childhood trauma. Yet I know that it can take ten or more years for a person to get properly diagnosed with most chronic illnesses, if they are lucky. I also know that chronic illness patients deal with doctors who gaslight, misdiagnose and psychologize symptoms.

The doctor who authorized Ritchie’s suicide, Matt Wonnacott, appears to be one of those. He was a primary source in the story. Engelhart did leave it open for readers to feel uncomfortable with Wonnacott’s approach. Although he acknowledged that Ritchie still had treatment options, he admitted to making decisions to approve assisted suicide based on “gestalt” and “patient choice” more than medicine. On the other hand, Engelhart seemed to take the doctor’s medical assessments at face value, not interrogating his knowledge or biases.

At one point, Engelhart referred to a category of MAiD patients with “functional disorders…that are poorly understood within medicine, and disputed within medicine, and that some clinicians believe have a significant psychological component.” Who are these clinicians? She did not say, but then listed a series of conditions that are not considered, by official diagnostic criteria, to be psychological: “fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, irritable-bowel syndrome, some kinds of chronic headaches.” “Functional” has a history, like “hysteria” before it, of being used as a catch-all for misunderstood women’s illnesses.

As for “chronic fatigue,” it is more properly known as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis, or ME. There is an epidemic of it lately, as it is commonly caused by Covid-19. As such, there are countless recent studies proving its physiological causes. At one point, Engelhart discussed how Ritchie’s muscles work one minute, then “suddenly buckle” the next, writing: “This suggested that the buckling was due to psychological causes or a lack of effort.” Yet Ritchie seemed to be demonstrating a hallmark symptom of ME known as “post-exertional malaise.”

Engelhart included a lot of detail about Ritchie’s care and medications, with the effect of seeming like every option was exhausted. Yet I am surprised by what is missing. There is no mention of dysautonomia or its treatments, even though Ritchie has difficulty bathing herself and getting out of the bath, both common in that illness. There is no mention of cutting-edge treatments for ME, like antivirals for reactivated viruses, or naltrexone. And there is no mention of the new class of CGRP migraine drugs, which have rescued millions of people from horrible constant pain.

In place of medical investigation, Engelhart uses rhetoric and sentiment to portray Ritchie as a lost cause. She supports this portrait with classist and ableist imagery, like mentioning Ritchie’s “old TV and a window that looked out on a row of garbage bins,” her “stained” floors, her trouble bathing and long history of depression. She quotes people in Ritchie’s life who liked her, but also found her difficult, “vicious,” and “loud and excessive.”

I have a different perspective on Ritchie. She comes across to me as resourceful in pursuing help, a strong person who has survived tremendous suffering, and compassionate to others. She is surrounded by friends when she dies. She has common illnesses that have been under-researched due to medical misogyny. And she has been denied cutting-edge treatments due to the profound gulf between research and practice, as well as long-established bigotry in medical care. In my perception, if she had been properly diagnosed and treated, she may or may not have felt differently about ending her life.

Fly on the wallThe Economist‘s cover story (11/21/24) seemed to encourage not just legalizing suicide, but suicide itself.

Engelhart did a skillful job of portraying her own role in Ritchie’s suicide as if she were a passive observer. In a separate interview she gave with the Times about writing the piece, she said she “was trying to be as small a presence as possible in the room.” Yet she also admitted that Ritchie reached for her hand just before she died, so she couldn’t have been that small. Engelhart didn’t reflect, in the interview, on the role she may have played in Ritchie’s fate, or the ethics of her project.

The article emphasized that Ritchie knew she was being interviewed by a writer for the New York Times Magazine. She knew that her story would be amplified worldwide, but especially if she continued to end her life. Engelhart’s body of work on MAiD is mostly about people who elect and complete the act of suicide. That validation, alone, could have been a form of encouragement, especially for someone who felt isolated and unheard.

Best practices in suicide prevention are based on studies showing that suicidal people are uniquely and extremely vulnerable to suggestion, and that suicidality is usually temporary. According to a journalism guide from the Trevor Project, which aims to prevent suicide in LGBTQ youth, “More than 50 research studies worldwide have found that certain types of news coverage can increase the likelihood of suicide in vulnerable individuals.”

With the Times’ story, the worst-case scenario almost happened. One reader, a patient with Long Covid, responded on social media that the article caused him to consider that maybe assisted suicide would be a good option for him. After reading the responses of disabled people, he had more context and changed his mind. (I am protecting his identity.)

There is growing support for the expansion of assisted suicide across the world and in the media (e.g., Economist, 11/13/21, 11/21/24). The pandemic has eased people’s discomfort with preventable death, especially of elderly and disabled people. Engelhart’s book got a lot of attention around the height of Covid-19’s Omicron wave. Meanwhile, the current US administration is suggesting that worthiness for healthcare should be tied to social value.

It’s a key time for news organizations to recall their ethical obligations around reporting on suicide. At the very least, the news shouldn’t stop calling it “suicide” just because those who die have been approved for MAiD due to disability.

Stories of chronically sick people who resist MAiD and/or survive suicide attempts are rarely given as much in-depth treatment or column inches in the media. But those stories might give readers more context in considering how to feel about these policies. The New York Times even gave a flattering interview (11/16/24) to a doctor who has elsewhere been condemned for her unethical and too-eager MAiD practices and has been restricted from practicing everywhere (London Times, 7/19/24; Globe and Mail, 3/9/16).

News outlets should also consider hiring disabled journalists and editors to work on stories like this, or at least journalists who are curious enough to investigate medicine critically. Mainstream writing about health and disability has long ignored the insights of chronic illness patients, unless to use individual cases to speak over collective concerns. We need stories about disability and illness that don’t rely mostly on the medical establishment for expertise, especially given its long history of aligning with eugenics.

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The protests emerged as resistance to militarized law enforcement (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25), a dynamic that was often obscured by coverage that focused on the “clash” between protesters and government.

In the early morning of Friday, June 6, several federal agencies carried out militarized immigration raids across Los Angeles (Al Jazeera, 6/7/25). Armed and masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, along with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), FBI and DEA, tore through these neighborhoods in unmarked vehicles, carrying out a new method of targeted raids in workplaces like Home Depot, Ambiance Apparel and car washes (Washington Post, 6/8/25, 6/12/25, LA Times, 6/10/25).

Later that morning, demonstrations formed in front of the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building and Metropolitan Detention Center, where detainees were believed to be held (Al Jazeera, 6/11/25). Protests grew exponentially over the weekend, spreading not only across California, but also to major cities around the country (Time, 6/9/25).

In response, without state authorization, President Donald Trump federalized and deployed 2,000 California National Guard troops to LA to “solve the problem” (CNN, 6/9/25). California Gov. Gavin Newsom, LA Mayor Karen Bass and other government officials have called this an unprecedented show of force and an abuse of executive power, intended to intimidate and terrorize local communities (Atlantic, 6/10/25; CNN, 6/9/25).

‘Violence’ and ‘anarchists’While major media sources described these protests as “mostly peaceful,” they nevertheless tended to dwell on what was depicted as rioting and protester violence. In its morning newsletter, the New York Times (6/9/25) set the scene:

Hundreds of National Guard troops arrived in the city, and crowds of people demonstrated against President Trump’s immigration raids. They clashed with federal agents, leaving burned cars, broken barricades and graffiti scrawled across government buildings downtown.

Is it possible that Trump administration efforts to expel nearly a million Los Angeles residents are “driving chaos at LA immigration protests” (LA Times, 6/10/25)?

The LA Times (6/10/25), citing LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell, blamed “‘anarchists’ who, he said, were bent on exploiting the state of unrest to vandalize property and attack police.” (Law enforcement agencies reported only a handful of minor injuries to officers—KCRA, 6/12/25.) These critiques were interwoven with descriptions of “scenes of lawlessness [that] disgusted” McDonnell, such as setting “Waymo taxis on fire,” “defacing city buildings with anti-police graffiti” and looting businesses. And, an ironic, laughable account of the underlying power dynamics at play:

Several young men crept through the crowd, hunched over and hiding something in their hands. They reached the front line and hurled eggs at the officers, who fired into the fleeing crowd with riot guns.

The article ran under the headline “Protesters or Agitators: Who Is Driving Chaos at LA Immigration Protests?”—never offering readers the possibility that the answer is, in fact, law enforcement. The framing came directly from McDonnell’s attempt, cited in the article, to draw a “distinction” between protesters and anarchists. Yet further down, the piece described what can only be understood as federal troops instigating chaos and violence:

A phalanx of National Guard troops charged into the crowd, yelling “push” as they rammed people with riot shields. The troops and federal officers used pepper balls, tear gas canisters as well as flash-bang and smoke grenades to break up the crowd.

No one in the crowd had been violent toward the federal deployment up to that point. The purpose of the surge appeared to be to clear space for a convoy of approaching federal vehicles.

‘Non-lethal’ weapons?CNN (6/10/25) framed police munitions as the way cops “responded with force” after protests “devolved into violence.”

One CNN article (6/10/25) offered “A Look at the ‘Less Lethal’ Weapons Authorities Used to Crack Down on Los Angeles Protests.” Reporter Dakin Andone wrote:

Police have used a standard variety of tools to disperse crowds and quell protests that had devolved into violence, with protesters lighting self-driving cars on fire and two motorcyclists driving into a skirmish line of officers, injuring two. A Molotov cocktail was also thrown at officers, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell alleged, condemning the “disgusting” violence.

Authorities have responded with force. So far, CNN has documented the deployment of flash-bangs, tear gas, pepper balls, rubber bullets and bean bag rounds, as well as more traditional gear such as batons.

To CNN, protesters devolve into “violence,” while heavily armed agents of the state respond with “force.”

The article noted that these weapons are not “harmless,” as they have been found to “disable, disfigure and even kill.” Projectiles are meant to cause “‘blunt-force trauma to the skin,’” chemical irritants cause “difficulty swallowing, chest tightness, coughing, shortness of breath and a feeling of choking,” and flash-bangs “obscure a target’s vision and hearing.”

Yet the article’s description of the effects of those weapons used in LA remained almost entirely theoretical. The only example it gave of a civilian targeted by one of these “less lethal” weapons was that of Australian 9News correspondent Lauren Tomasi, shot at close range by a rubber bullet while reporting on live TV. (Video footage shows that there was no one close to the line of officers, nor were any protesters closing in.) “The bullet left her sore, but she was otherwise unharmed,” CNN blithely noted.

While it’s good to see media standing up for those who were injured while exercising the freedom of the press (Guardian, 6/11/25), they might have shown similar concern for those hurt while engaging in freedom of assembly.

Meanwhile, Reporters Without Borders (6/11/25) has documented an astounding 35 violent attacks on journalists, almost entirely by law enforcement, including numerous reporters hit by police projectiles. The Guardian (6/11/25) reported that British photographer Nick Stern needed surgery when police shot him in the leg with a “less-lethal projectile”; Toby Canham, a photographer working for the New York Post, was “hit in the head by a less-lethal round” by a California highway patrol officer and “treated for whiplash and neck pain,” the Guardian said. (Protesters were injured by police munitions as well, as repeatedly attested by social media, but reporters showed less interest in those injuries.)

The headlines that reported the assault on Tomasi frequently left out the perpetrator: “Australian Reporter Covering Los Angeles Immigration Protests Hit by Rubber Bullet on Live TV,” was how CBS (6/10/25) put it; CNN (6/8/25) had “Australian Reporter Covering LA Protests Hit by Rubber Bullet.” The Sydney Morning Herald (6/9/25) described Tomasi as “caught in the crossfire as the LAPD fired rubber bullets at protesters”—which doesn’t sound like a “crossfire” at all.

Many reports denied the potential for these weapons to cause death by labeling them “non-lethal” (Guardian, 6/8/25, 6/11/25; AP, 6/9/25; LA Times, 6/10/25; USA Today, 6/10/25; Newsweek, 6/10/25) or “less-than-lethal” (New York Times, 6/6/25; NBC, 6/8/25). These descriptors are entirely inaccurate, as studies and reports have documented dozens of deaths caused by “less-lethal” projectiles, as well as hundreds of permanent injuries (BMJ Open, 12/5/17; Amnesty International, 3/14/23; Arizona Republic, 5/13/25).

Reuters (6/11/25) reported on attacks by such weapons under the headline “Journalists Among the Injured in LA as ICE Protests Grow Violent”—a framing that treated the protests as the source of the violence being inflicted on journalists by police.

As an example of leftists who “encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent,” NBC News (6/12/25) included those who condemned police violence “using expletives and slights.” (Note that the skateboard-wielding protester is the same individual the LA Times—6/10/25—used to suggest “agitators” were “driving chaos.”)

A remarkable NBC News article (6/12/25) blamed protesters for fomenting violence by pointing out police violence. “Some Far-Left Groups Have Encouraged Peaceful Protests to Turn Violent, Experts Say,” was the headline; one of the few examples, under the heading “Assassination culture,” was:

One anti-police group, the People’s City Council Los Angeles, has taken to calling out the actions of officers at the protests, using expletives and slights.

Just before 1 a.m. Tuesday, it posted on X the name and picture of a police officer it said was firing rubber bullets at protesters.

He is “fucking unhinged and unloading on protesters at point blank range,” the post read. “FUCK THIS PIG!!”

Perhaps it was the cop firing rubber bullets at protesters at point blank range who “encouraged peaceful protests to turn violent”—and not the “expletives and slights” of the witnesses?

‘Diverted public attention’Sarah J. Jackson (Atlantic, 6/3/20): “When news stories employ sensational images of property damage, using terms such as riot and the even more sensational mayhem and chaos, researchers have noted a rise in public support for law-and-order crackdowns on protest.”

The New York Times editorial board (6/8/25), while critical of Trump’s National Guard deployment, opined that “protesters will do nothing to further their cause if they resort to violence.” The LA Times (6/10/25) expressed that “violence and widespread property damage at protests…have diverted public attention away from the focus of the demonstrations.” What has historically turned the tide against protests, however, is inflammatory reporting that blames protesters for their response to government’s aggressive efforts to suppress freedom of assembly (Penn State University, 6/1/01; Real Change, 3/18/09; Atlantic, 6/3/20).

By framing the problem as unruly demonstrators, the media lend legitimacy to the Trump administration’s attempt to set a precedent for military suppression of dissent. (“If there’s any protester that wants to come out, they will be met with very big force,” Trump said of the military parade he arranged to run through DC on June 14, his 79th birthday. “This is people that hate our country, but they will be met with very heavy force.”) Journalists should be focusing not on the broken windows, but on Trump’s very real efforts to break our democracy.

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Sure, you may like the idea of a “socialist New York,” but New York magazine (5/20/25) is here with a bunch of anonymous sources to tell you it’s “more complicated.”

There’s an art to writing a profile of a political candidate that sows doubt about their fitness for office without attacking them directly. Done smoothly, it can be more damaging than an overt hit piece.

“Zohran Mamdani Crashes the Party,” a recent New York magazine profile (5/20/25) of the New York State Assembly member and New York City mayoral candidate, is a prime example. The headline and subhead (“He’s selling the dream of a socialist New York. The picture inside the Democratic party is more complicated.”) manage to convey knowing sympathy (party-crashing is cool!) and parental concern (a socialist New York is but a “dream,” and party insiders know the reality is “more complicated”).

The story’s author, E. Alex Jung, is not a Free Press columnist but a National Magazine Award–nominated features writer who comes across as sympathetic to but skeptical of Mamdani. Mamdani, he writes,

has given hope to people who are in despair about the state of the country…showing up at protests for trans rights and shouting at Tom Homan while State Police officers hold him back—and then posting it all on Instagram.

Jung added that Mamdani

became the first to max out the city’s campaign matching funds and had more individual donors than the rest of the field combined…. His campaign has built the largest field program ever for a mayoral race: Around 22,000 volunteers have knocked on 450,000 doors and made 140,000 phone calls…. The rally at Brooklyn Steel was a demonstration to the city’s progressive power brokers that the time to consolidate behind their candidate was yesterday—that he was the only one who could slay the big bad, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo. Though the odds of that happening are not good.

Part of subtly and effectively undermining someone is appearing to give them their due. As ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo said of his rival Mamdani during a recent NYC mayoral debate:

Mr. Mamdani is very good on Twitter and with videos, but he actually produces nothing…. He has no experience with Washington, no experience with New York City.

Like Cuomo, New York acknowledges upfront that Mamdani is an exceptionally strong communicator. It then puts forth a string of criticisms, most from unnamed colleagues and critics of Mamdani, with their own agendas and reasons to resent his rise. An “anti-Cuomo Democratic strategist” dismisses Mamdani supporters as “online kids.” Critics claim he is “drawn to attention-grabbing stunts rather than the grind of whipping votes.” Because Jung allows anonymous sources to criticize Mamdani at length—he quotes or paraphrases “those with knowledge of the conversations,” “some New York Democratic Party members,” “a Democratic political operative,” “another operative,” “critics,” “detractors” and so on—the reader has no way of independently assessing their motives.

‘Language of the internet’The New York Editorial Board (2/2/25), “a group of veteran journalists interviewing candidates for Mayor of New York City,” got specifics on the questions New York said were “unclear.”

The profile opens with a shower of trivializing compliments. Mamdani and his “congregation of true believers” are “jubilant and young.” Supporters like Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter Ella Emhoff and semi-canceled chef Alison Roman represent “power and cool and changing winds.” Mamdani is “a Democratic Socialists of America–backed candidate” (as a DSA member, I can confirm) with a “short work history and a long history of pro-Palestinian advocacy”—qualities, Jung writes, that were “seen as nonstarters within the small electorate that ultimately decides the race.”

Yet in the last six months, he has “transformed the race with memorable policy proposals and a winning social-media presence. If you’re online, he seems to be the only candidate with Wi-Fi.” His campaign videos are “in the language of the internet.”

So far, a reader will have learned that Mamdani is young, cool and online. His campaign pitch—Freeze the rent! Make buses fast and free! Universal childcare!—is catchy, as is his plan to tax the rich and big corporations, provide free buses and municipal grocery stores, and establish a department of community safety. But how New Yorkers feel about these proposals and “how he would actually do all of this” is “unclear”—whether because Jung neglected to ask, or was unsatisfied with the answer, we’ll never know.

Profiles like this are popular because they are more about personality and style than sober, eat-your-vegetables political analysis. Thus, we learn that Mamdani is “energetic, enthusiastic, quick with a joke, and good-looking in a ‘Who’s your brother’s friend?’ kind of way.” It’s a vivid description, and it’s reminiscent of ex-Sen. Claire McCaskill’s blistering dismissal of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She was, McCaskill said, a “bright, shiny new object” whose rhetoric was “cheap” (Business Insider, 12/26/18).

‘Smothering effect on discourse’New York* scorned the “ideological purity” that made Mamdani insist that marginalized workers ought to have gotten the support they needed (New York Times*, 10/19/21).

Jung contends without evidence that Mamdani supporters have had “a smothering effect on discourse, making any public criticism or dissent verboten within parts of the left.” He goes on to quote state Sen. Jabari Brisport, who was elected alongside Mamdani in 2020. Unlike most of Jung’s sources, Brisport is a Mamdani supporter and willing to speak on the record. “People were looking for drastic changes in society,” Brisport says of the period in which they were elected.

But according to Jung, the “reality of the chamber was different.” Recounting a fight between moderate and progressive Democrats over whether to tax the rich and expand a fund for undocumented workers who had been denied federal pandemic relief, he implies that Mamdani was outmaneuvered. Legislators eventually agreed to set aside $2.1 billion for the excluded-workers fund—far short of the $3.5 billion that progressives wanted and, it’s important to note, excluded workers needed.

Mamdani and some colleagues indicated to New York State Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie that they would protest the shortfall by voting against the budget, which would have passed regardless. Heastie “warned that the fund would get watered down even more if they didn’t fall in line.” (Heastie denies this.) Mamdani, Jung writes, was “in a panic, unsure of what to do. Accept less than what you believe or risk losing even more?”

Unwilling to risk it, Mamdani ended up voting for a budget he had initially opposed as insufficient. Yet somehow the villain of this story is not Heastie, who apparently threatened to withhold even more money from people in need, but Mamdani, who is implied to have shown poor judgment and “earned a reputation for ideological purity.”

The evidence? He pushed hard for single-payer healthcare, fought side-by-side with city taxi drivers to win hundreds of millions of dollars in debt relief from the city, joined a protest encampment by cab drivers outside City Hall, and convinced Chuck Schumer to film a video calling attention to the cabbies’ plight via the story of one whose brother, a fellow driver, killed himself under enormous financial pressure. Where outlets like New York see an obsession with “ideological purity,” others see a willingness to fight.

‘A show pony, not a workhorse’Politico (4/30/25) blamed Mamdani for the end of a free bus pilot program because he didn’t understand that “you’re either a team player or you’re not.”

Mamdani also got Senate Deputy Leader Mike Gianaris to co-sponsor an eight-bill legislative package known as Fix the MTA, which would have frozen fares, instituted six-minute service on subways, and phased in free buses over four years. He spent $22,000 of his own campaign money to promote it.

It didn’t have the unqualified backing of Gov. Hochul or the MTA, so Mamdani texted Mayor Eric Adams, who had mentioned that he found the dictator Idi Amin fascinating, and arranged a dinner with the mayor and Mamdani’s father, whom Amin had expelled from Uganda. Mamdani then convinced Adams to take a photo with a poster touting free buses, and film a quick video to support the program—all of which led to earned media, and resulted in a fare-free-bus pilot being included in the 2023 budget. “It was a success,” Jung writes.

Some might conclude that Mamdani is resourceful and effective. But Jung cautions us to curb our enthusiasm. “For Mamdani,” Jung writes, “this was an example of his ability to work with someone…whom he was critical of and yet recognized as a potential ally.” But wait: Unnamed legislators told Jung that Mamdani could have extended the bus program during the 2024 budget negotiations, but he “took issue” with a part of the budget that would make it easier for landlords to claim they were doing needed repairs while raising rents on rent-stabilized units—a major loophole in New York’s tenant protections.

According to Politico (4/30/25), when Mamdani told Heastie he planned to vote against the budget because of this, Heastie threatened to kill the expansion of the free-bus pilot. Mamdani refused to back down this time, so Heastie pulled the plug on free buses. (Heastie and Mamdani say this didn’t happen.) “That is literally a material good being delivered to the working class…. And [Mamdani] threw it away for a performance,” an unnamed legislator told Jung.

Despite the allegation that Heastie killed free buses because Mamdani wouldn’t support a budget he believed would harm his constituents, Jung again portrays Mamdani as incompetent: “He appeared to realize he’d made a mistake,” and tried and failed during this year’s budget negotiations “to get free buses back on the agenda, this time by attempting to leverage his district’s capital funds.” (The campaign, again, denies this.)

“That to me demonstrates how he operates—you can talk about doing things, but that alone is not going to achieve those things,” yet another unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. What “some New York Democratic Party members”—again, unnamed—see as Mamdani’s legislative missteps “have given them pause about his ability to govern…. They see him as a show pony, not a workhorse,” Jung writes.

It’s a trope often invoked to discredit social media-savvy progressives. As Caroline Fredrickson, president emerita of the American Constitution Society, said of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez in 2019 (Guardian, 12/24/19): “A lot of people expected a show pony. But it turns out she’s a workhorse.”

‘Aura of privilege’“Mamdani’s moral clarity has the aura of privilege,” New York snarked, implicitly contrasting him with—Andrew Cuomo (NY1, 6/12/25)?

In addition to casting doubt on Mamdani’s ability to govern, Jung implies that the everyday New Yorkers who admire him are shallow and naive. “Literally this morning I posted you on my Instagram story!” one young woman tells Mamdani, adding, “I’m so emotional seeing you. Like, you’re real.” As a number of public forums and events have made clear, many Mamdani supporters know and care a great deal about policy, while also using Instagram. But you wouldn’t know that from this profile.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of profiles like these is the suggestion that it’s hypocritical to fight for poor and working-class people when you are not poor or working-class. (Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a Columbia professor, and his mother, Mira Nair, is a prominent filmmaker.)

The candidate’s “moral clarity,” which many appreciate, has “the aura of privilege,” Jung writes. He asks about “the combination of the relative privilege in [Mamdani’s] own life and the working-class people at the center of his politics.” But to admirers of, say, Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, there is nothing suspect or contradictory about rich and upper-middle-class people standing in solidarity with their poor and working-class counterparts.

Jung acknowledges that Mamdani has “given hope to people who are in despair…and looking for someone with real fight.” Yet, ultimately, he sees the “appeal of [Mamdani’s] message” as its “simplicity and memeability”—not specific policies or his willingness to battle for them. The final quote is the most telling: “The thing about being a legislator and making compromises is that poor people make compromises every single day,” an unnamed colleague of Mamdani’s tells Jung. “Poor people know what is important, and sometimes they have to choose between two important things.”

It could be that poor people are born knowing how to prioritize and negotiate. Or it could be that politicians force them to choose between, for example, reliable transit and affordable housing. This profile creates the impression that Mamdani is unwilling to compromise and unfit to govern. But it’s just as plausible that his rejection of such false dichotomies has made some colleagues eager to keep him out of the mayor’s office.

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(Creative Commons photo: Diane Krauthamer)

This week on CounterSpin: Media are focused on public protests in LA, but seem less interested in what’s making people angry. That’s in part about the federal government’s stated bid to capture and eject anyone they determine “opposes US foreign policy.” Protesters and witnesses and journalists in LA aren’t being shot at and thrown around and sent to the hospital because they disagree with US policy, we’re told, but because they’re interfering with the federal agents carrying out that policy. See how that works? If you don’t, and it worries you, you’re far from alone.

We hear from Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent, about the critical case of Columbia University student activist Mahmoud Khalil, held without warrant in a detention facility in Louisiana since March, for voicing support for Palestinian lives. There’s an important legal development, but how meaningfully Khalil’s case ultimately translates—just like with ICE sweeps around the country—will have to do with us.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250613Gibbons.mp3Other Words (6/4/25)

Also on the show: If the problem were to “get rid of” unhoused people, the answer would be to house them. It’s cheaper than jailing people for being homeless, so if it’s those “taxpayer dollars” you care about, this would be plan A. Why isn’t it? We hear from Farrah Hassen, policy analyst, writer and adjunct professor in the Department of Political Science at Cal Poly Pomona.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250613Hassen.mp3

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Janine Jackson interviewed Dartmouth-based Anne Sosin about Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and rural health for the February 7, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207Sosin.mp3The Hill (1/13/25)

Janine Jackson: A Senate panel voted narrowly this week to advance the nomination of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy has been emphatically opposed by a range of public health experts for reasons including, but not limited to, his stated belief that vaccines have “poisoned an entire generation of American children.” Yes, his children are vaccinated, but he wishes he “could go back in time” and undo that.

Also, that Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people, while Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese are most immune; that the HPV vaccine causes a higher death risk than the cancer it prevents; that fluoride causes IQ loss; that Vitamin A and chicken soup are cures for measles; that AIDS is not caused by HIV; and that we had almost no school shootings until the introduction of Prozac.

Nevertheless, Kennedy may soon be overseeing Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, coordinating the public health response to epidemics, as well as the approval process for pharmaceuticals, vaccines and supplies.

Our guest says RFK Jr is absolutely a threat to public health, but nixing his nomination is not the same thing as meaningfully engaging the problems that lead people to support him.

Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Anne Sosin.

Anne Sosin: Thank you so much for having me on the show.

FAIR.org (12/5/24)

JJ: There are a number of people, in lots of places, who have centered their lives perforce on concerns around food and health and medicine. And they see a guy who seems to be challenging Big Pharma, who’s saying food additives are problematic, who’s questioning government agencies. There are a lot of people who are so skeptical of the US healthcare and drug system that a disruptor, even if it’s somebody who says a worm ate his brain—that sounds better than business as usual. And so that’s leading some people to think, well, maybe we can pick out some good ideas here, maybe. But you think that is the wrong approach to RFK Jr.

AS: I think that that’s misguided. Certainly, there are some people who see RFK as a vehicle for championing their causes. And there are other people who think that we should seek common ground with RFK, that we should acquiesce, perhaps, on certain issues, and then work together to advance some other causes.

And I think that that’s misguided. I think we need to recognize what’s given rise to RFK and other extreme figures right now, but we need to make common cause with the communities that he’s exploiting in advancing his own personal and political goals.

JJ: And in particular, you’re thinking about rural communities, which have played a role here, right? What’s going on there?

AS: Yes. My work is centered in rural communities right now, and I think we need to understand the political economy that’s given rise to RFK and other figures—the social, economic, cultural and political changes that have given him a wide landing strip in rural places, as well as some of the institutional vacuums that RFK and other very extreme and polarizing figures are filling.

JJ: Expand on that, please, a little.

Anne Sosin: “Resistance to public health measures often, in my view, reflects unmet need.”

AS: So we’re seeing growing resistance in some places, including rural communities, to public health and interventions that have long been in place, including vaccination and fluoridation. And resistance to public health measures often, in my view, reflects unmet need.

Sometimes those needs are material. We see that people resist or don’t follow public health programs or guidance because they don’t have their material needs met. And those material needs might be housing, paid leave or other supports that they need. But the unmet need might also be emotional or affective, that some people may resist out of a sense of economic or social dislocation, a feeling of invisibility, or something else. And those feelings get expressed as resistance to public health measures that are in place.

And so understanding and recognizing what those unmet needs are is really important. And then thinking about how do we address those needs in ways that are productive, and don’t undermine public health and healthcare, is really important.

JJ: Vaccinations are obviously a big concern here, particularly as we may be going into another big public health concern with bird flu. So the idea that vaccines cause disease is difficult to grapple with, from a public health perspective. Vaccines can’t be a “choose your own adventure” if they’re going to work societally. And it almost seems like, around vaccination, we’re losing the concept of what public health means, and how it’s not about whether or not you decide to eat cheese, you know? There’s kind of a public understanding issue here.

AS: I think you’re correct. I think we’ve seen, just in the US, an increasing DIYification of public health, a loss of the recognition that public health means all of us. Public health is the things that we do together to advance our collective health. And the increased focus on individual decision-making really threatens all of us.

NPR (5/12/21)

And we look for it around vaccination: We have seen very well-funded initiatives to undermine public confidence in vaccination over the last several years. There has been a lot of money spent to dismantle public support and public confidence in vaccination and other lifesaving measures. And it really poses a grave threat, as we think about not only novel threats like H5N1, but also things that have long been under control.

JJ: Finally, I took a quick look at major national media and rural healthcare, and there wasn’t nothing. I saw a piece from the Dayton Daily News about heart disease in the rural South, and how public health researchers are running a medical trailer around the area to test heart and lung function. I saw a piece from the Elko Daily Free Press in Nevada about how Elko County and others are reliant on nonprofits to fill gaps in access to care, and that’s partly due to poor communication between state agencies and local providers.

And I really appreciate local reporting; local reporting is life. But some healthcare issues, and certainly some of those that would be impacted by the head of HHS, are broader, and they require a broad understanding of the impact of policy on lots of communities. And I just wonder, is there something you would like to see news media do more of that they’re missing? Is there something you’d like them to see less of, as they try to engage these issues, as they will, in days going forward?

AS: Certainly local coverage is essential, and I’m really pleased when I see local coverage of the heroic work that many rural healthcare providers and community leaders are delivering. We see very creative and innovative work happening in our rural region, in our research, in our community engagement. And so it’s very encouraging when I see that covered.

But all of the efforts on the ground are shaped by a larger policy landscape and a larger media landscape, larger political landscape. And what we see, often, is efforts to undermine the policies that are critical to preserving our rural healthcare infrastructure. We see well-funded media efforts to erode social cohesion, to undermine our community institutions, to sow mistrust in measures such as vaccination. We see other work to harden the divisions between urban and rural America, and within rural places.

And so I hope that media will pay attention to the larger forces that are shaping the landscape of rural life, and not just see the outcome. It’s easy to take note of the disparities between urban and rural places, but it’s much harder to do the deep and complex work of understanding the forces that generate those uneven outcomes across geographic differences.

JJ: All right, well, we’ll end on that important point.

We’ve been speaking with Anne Sosin, public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College. Anne Sosin, thank you so much for joining us today on CounterSpin.

AS: Thank you for the invitation.

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A non-hypothetical headline from the centrist Peterson Institute for International Economics (9/26/24).

“GDP Could Take Massive Hit as a Result of Mass Deportations.” “Mass Deportations Could Leave Many Americans Without Jobs.” “Mass Deportations Could Spur Spike in Inflation.” “Mass Deportations Could Cost Nearly $1 Trillion.”

These are hypothetical headlines of the sort you run if you want to drive home the point that mass deportations would not only be a humanitarian outrage, but an economic disaster. Which, according to economists, they very much would be.

As of 2022, undocumented immigrants constituted approximately 5% of the US workforce. Deporting all or a large number of them would substantially reduce the supply of labor in the US economy and would concurrently reduce aggregate demand by eliminating the spending of anyone deported. GDP could, as a result, drop as much as 7.4% below a baseline forecast by the end of 2028, per the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Rather than opening up more job opportunities for American workers, past research tells us that the opposite will occur. As Michael Clemens from Peterson puts it:

The disappearance of migrant workers…dries up local demand at grocery stories, leasing offices, and other nontraded services. The resulting blow to demand for all workers overwhelms the reduction in supply of foreign workers.

The supply shock induced by mass deportations of undocumented workers would have the additional effect of spiking inflation, perhaps several points above baseline. In short, beyond being a humanitarian nightmare, mass deportations would be an economic self-own of epic proportions.

Rather than sound unfamiliar or strange, as it may to readers of corporate media, this sort of expert analysis of the economic effects of deportation could become conventional wisdom if outlets ran headlines like those above. After all, those are the type of headlines you run if you are dedicated to objectivity in reporting, to informing your audience of what the research says, no matter whether it might offend their sensibilities.

‘Warning of a fiscal crisis’Writing about the prospect of mass deportation in New York City, the Washington Post (1/28/25) highlighted Mayor Eric Adams’ “warning of a fiscal crisis.”

They are not, of course, the headlines you run if your paper is committed to bending over backwards to avoid offending Trump and his supporters. So at the Washington Post, such headlines are hard to come by. In fact, if you look through the “Immigration,” “Economy” and “Economic Policy” sections on the Post’s website, you will find a grand total of zero articles since the start of the year with headlines directly addressing the negative economic impact of Trump’s proposed mass deportation policy.

Some articles published over this period have addressed the economic effects of mass deportations, but only in a marginal way. For instance, in an article (1/31/25) published at the end of January about an ICE raid at a workplace in Newark, New Jersey, the Post included the following quote from Newark mayor Ras Baraka:

“How do you determine…who is undocumented and who is criminal?… In this community, you might pull everybody over, because this is a city full of immigrants,” Baraka, who is running for governor of New Jersey, said in an interview. “You got everybody on edge around here. And it’s going to hurt the economy.”

What would the economic damage look like? The Post declined to elaborate.

Similarly, a piece (1/28/25) from a few days earlier about an ICE raid in New York City had little to say about the impacts of mass deportations on the economy. It did, however, take some space to highlight negative economic effects of illegal immigration on the city, explaining that “the largest influx [of migrants] since the Ellis Island era…left New York Mayor Eric Adams (D) warning of a fiscal crisis.” The only economic figure cited in the piece was the figure for the cost of the migrant influx, apparently over $5 billion since 2023.

Cautiously ‘wonky’“So much recent political rhetoric has succeeded in portraying undocumented people as driven to crime rather than contribution,” the New York Times‘ Ginia Bellafante (1/31/25) noted.

Contrast this coverage with that of the Post’s competitor, the New York Times. At the end of January, the Times published a piece (1/31/25) headlined “What Mass Deportations Would Do to New York City’s Economy.” A far cry from the hypothetical headlines provided at the top of this article, the headline nonetheless signaled an intention to seriously analyze the economic effects of mass deportations. The first economic figure cited in the piece, coming in the third paragraph, highlighted the tax contributions of undocumented immigrants:

As a group, undocumented immigrants paid $3.1 billion in New York state and local taxes in 2022, for example, a sum equal to the city’s early education budget for the current fiscal year.

Not wanting to come off as too activist for citing data on the positive contributions of undocumented immigrants to New York City’s tax base, the Times felt obliged to clarify that this figure did not come

from a left-leaning human rights group intent on fostering sympathy for people who crossed the border illegally, but rather from the wonky Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a nonpartisan Washington think tank.

An odd way of presenting data, but a way that evidently feels comfortable for a paper that has no intention of seriously rocking the boat, even if it is willing, on this occasion, to stand up from its seat rather than clinging to the captain’s feet for dear life.

Despite some apparent hesitancy, the piece went on to examine the loss in local and state tax revenue that could result from deportations of even a fraction of the undocumented population, and to explain the centrality of undocumented workers to key industries in the city, from food services to childcare to construction. None—I repeat, none—of this information could be gleaned from the Post’s coverage of the immigration situation in New York City.

‘Recast the US economy’A Washington Post subhead (11/6/25) said that Trump’s deportation plans might “recast the US economy”—which turns out to mean shrinking it by as much as 6%.

In a major piece on Trump’s approach to the immigration system published just before Trump’s inauguration, the Washington Post (1/19/25) likewise failed at its basic task of informing its readers. The Post at least mentioned that mass deportations could hurt the economy—“By rounding up immigrants who fill otherwise vacant jobs, [Trump] could hurt the US economy he has pledged to supercharge”—but that’s where the analysis ended. No reference was made to research showing that mass deportations could lead to complete stagnation of GDP during Trump’s time in office, or that it could lead to a several percentage point spike in inflation.

Prior to the start of the year, the Post had published more about the economic effects of mass deportations. For instance, an article (12/27/24) from the end of December headlined “The 2025 Economy: Five Things to Watch” included “Deportations” as the second thing to watch. It nonetheless featured only a small discussion of the topic—four short paragraphs—and no hard numbers were cited regarding the effects on employment, GDP and inflation, despite these numbers existing in reputable research from a nonpartisan think tank.

A Post piece (11/6/24) from a day after the election, meanwhile, had discussed how mass deportations could “recast the US economy and labor force”—what a verb! Towards the end of the article, the reporters touched on the effects of mass deportations on inflation and GDP, citing concrete numbers for the second variable:

Many economists also say that mass deportations on the scale proposed by Trump would trigger inflation in the short term—by forcing employers dealing with labor shortfalls to raise prices. A major deportation program would also shrink the economy by 2.6% to 6.2% a year, according to a recent review of projections published by the University of New Hampshire.

This paragraph, however, was all that was given for a concrete discussion of the economic impact of mass deportations.

Amazingly, before the election, the Post editorial board (10/24/24) did take the time to weave in commentary on Trump’s mass deportation policy in yet another editorial fearmongering about Social Security. The board wrote:

Whatever you think about its merits as immigration policy, a crackdown on undocumented workers, including mass deportations, could also hurt Social Security’s finances because undocumented workers contribute payroll taxes without collecting benefits for decades—if ever.

No other economic effects of mass deportations were mentioned by the editorial board. A substantial hit to GDP, though relevant to the discussion of public finances, was not discussed. Concerns about the effects of mass deportations were merely looped into apparently more pressing concerns about the sustainability of Social Security, which the Post wants to cut (FAIR.org, 6/15/23).

‘Not about wages’NPR (1/17/25) looked at the economic problems posed by mass deportation through the eyes of employers who depend on exploiting immigrant labor.

The Post has been particularly egregious in ignoring the topic of the economic impact of mass deportations, but it certainly hasn’t been alone in covering it poorly. NPR, for example, decided to let employer propaganda slide unchecked in a recent piece (1/17/25) about the contributions of immigrants to Nebraska’s economy.

The piece started by centering the experience, not of immigrants, but of the executive director of the Nebraska Pork Producers Association, Al Juhnke, whose main concern appears to be maximizing the availability of cheap labor for the agricultural industry in Nebraska. An early paragraph read:

Juhnke says attracting workers to Nebraska is not about wages. The average pay for a meat trimmer is close to $18 an hour—well above the state minimum of $13.50. “These are good paying jobs in the plants,” he says. “People say, ‘Well, just double or triple the pay [and] you’ll get United States citizens to work.’ No, you won’t.”

There is no follow up on this point; it is simply accepted as fact by NPR. But there’s little reason to trust an executive of an organization advocating for pork producers on this.

Responsible coverage might at the very least entail bringing in an independent researcher to comment on this claim. For instance, it could be noted that, according to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the living wage in the county of Nebraska where much of the meat processing occurs is $18.64 per hour for a single adult with no children. For a family with one working adult and one child, it’s $32.27. Such information immediately undermines the executive’s claim that a wage of “close to $18 an hour” is a good wage, and in turn should raise eyebrows at the idea that raising the wage would have no effect on the attractiveness of employment to US citizens.

Survey results from the Manufacturing Institute and Colonial Life, furthermore, indicate that manufacturing companies have seen success in recent years in attracting workers by increasing pay and benefits. Why should we assume meat processing plants face different dynamics from other manufacturing plants?

More to the point, for an article focused on undocumented immigrants’ plight, it would be worth following up this claim, and the surrounding text discussing Nebraskan employers’ search for cheap immigrant labor, with an analysis of the exploitation of immigrant labor.

A follow-up question to the executive might be: Can employers afford to pay workers, immigrant or not, substantially more? And if so, why are they not doing that?

All that the piece gives, however, is a quote from a civil rights advocate lamenting the dehumanization of immigrants: “It’s dehumanizing—‘Let’s harness immigrant labor.’ Like an animal.” This is a powerful quote, but it’s not a substitute for basic factchecking of an empirical claim.

‘Real economic crisis’Even while pointing out the inflation threat posed by mass deportation, Politico (1/20/25) allowed the Trump team to promote dubious numbers from an anti-immigrant hate group.

Though also better than the Post, in that it has actually prominently covered the negative economic effects of mass deportations in the “Economy” section of its website recently, Politico has similarly engaged in sloppy reporting, failing to provide skepticism where it is needed. In an article headlined “Americans Hate High Prices. Mass Deportations Could Spark New Surges,” Politico (1/20/25) did highlight how much of a disaster Trump’s deportation policy could be for the economy. But it quickly turned the issue into a both-sides debate and, crucially, left unchecked a particularly wild claim:

Some Trump allies say the doomsaying over the incoming president’s pledges to deport as many as 20 million undocumented immigrants is overblown. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team, said in a statement that the “real economic crisis is the $182 billion American tax dollars spent each year to cover the costs of 20 million illegal immigrants that have flooded our communities and replaced American workers.”

This claim—that undocumented immigrants impose a $182 billion cost on American taxpayers—was not discussed further. Politico just let it sit. It appears the figure comes from an organization called the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a far-right advocacy group, which was claiming 15 years ago that undocumented immigrants cost American taxpayers over $100 billion per year.

A later estimate from 2013 by the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that’s behind Project 2025, put the figure closer to $50 billion. But even that number is controversial—it includes, for example, the cost of government-provided educational services received by the children of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are US citizens. Educational services, in fact, constitute the majority of the costs associated with undocumented immigrant households in the Heritage analysis.

The amount spent on direct transfer payments to such households is only a small fraction of the estimated overall cost. Other categories of cost include spending on police, fire and public safety, as well as transportation services and administrative support.

The liberties that conservative researchers take in deciding what to count as a cost imposed by undocumented immigrants on US taxpayers make one question the utility of this accounting exercise in the first place. As one researcher has commented:

Fundamentally I think it’s the wrong question…. You’re talking about people who work for very low wages and are excluded from nearly all social services. It takes a real act of will to say they’re exploiting us.

Yet for Politico, none of this context is worth bringing into the piece. Even a basic attempt at factchecking the claim from a Trump ally is absent.

Support declines with detailsWhen respondents were asked about worker shortages, support for mass deportation went from net 7 points positive to 5 points negative (ABC, 1/29/25).

If this sort of coverage—ignoring the issue at the Post, shying away from hard-hitting coverage at the Times, and allowing the story to be warped at NPR and Politico—is going to be the norm for coverage of the economic impact of Trump’s extremist immigration policies, there is little hope for an informed US public on this issue.

Currently, the public appears broadly supportive of mass deportations—that is, if you ask them directly and provide no further details. However, once more details are given, support for mass deportations declines.

One poll from about a month ago gauged support for the following policy: “Detain and deport millions of undocumented immigrants.” It found 52% of Americans in favor and 45% opposed. But with the addendum “even if it means businesses will face worker shortages,” the result changed to 46% in favor, 51% opposed. The effect of including other information about the negative economic effects of mass deportations was not tested, but it seems highly probable that other information—like the potential for a hit to GDP or a spike in inflation—would similarly turn Americans against mass deportation policy.

The problem is, the details about the potentially disastrous economic effects of mass deportations are likely known by only a small minority of the population. If corporate media outlets took their job seriously, they would make those details very well known. That could have major political effects, and could help turn the tides against extremist immigration policies.

Failing to inform the public likewise has major political effects. Passivity means greater leeway for Trump and his backers to shape public opinion, with their claims perhaps continuing to go unchallenged by outlets like Politico. Elon Musk, for one, is known as a prolific propagator of anti-immigrant conspiracy theories, and has frequently used X to amplify his message in the past. If corporate media fail to confront such misinformation, they effectively acquiesce to its corruption of the popular consciousness.

Ultimately, it’s up to corporate media to make a decision about what journalism means to them. They can’t escape making a decision with significant political consequences—political consequences are coming no matter what. But they can decide whether they care more about not appearing political to Trump supporters, or about protecting millions of people—and the health of the US economy.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207.mp3Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

(CC photo: Ted Eytan)

This week on CounterSpin: We know that once corporate news label something “controversial,” we’re in for reporting with a static “some say/others differ” frame—even if one “side” of the “controversy” is a relatively small group of people who don’t believe in science or human rights or democracy. So as the Trump White House comes out fast and furious against transgender people, their weird hatefulness lands in a public arena that generally rejects discrimination, but also in an elite media climate in which the very lives of transgender people have long been deemed “subject to debate.” We’ll hear about the current state of things from civil rights attorney Ezra Young.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207Young.mp3New York Times (5/8/24)

Also on the show: When the New York Times reported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s revelation that parasites have eaten part of his brain, Kennedy, running for president at the time, offered to “eat five more brain worms and still beat President Trump and President Biden in a debate.” We’re reminded of such “jokes” now, as Kennedy looks likely to be head of Health and Human Services, along with his claims that vaccines cause autism and chicken soup cures measles. But to resist Kennedy, we need to understand what fuels those who, even if they don’t like him, believe he might be a force for good in their lives. Anne Sosin is a public health researcher and practitioner based at Dartmouth College, who encourages looking around RFK Jr. to the communities that imagine he’s speaking for them.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250207Sosin.mp3

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As Gazans return under a ceasefire, the official death toll has risen beyond 60,000, including almost 18,000 children (Middle East Monitor, 2/2/25).

The official death count of Israel’s genocide is climbing as hundreds of thousands of displaced Palestinians resolutely march back to the north of Gaza. That’s in part because those returning to their demolished homes have been unearthing the remains of their missing loved ones whose deaths went unconfirmed for months.

Discoveries like these were anticipated by a study published in the prestigious British health journal Lancet (1/9/25) earlier this year. It estimated that the Gaza Health Ministry may have undercounted the deaths caused directly by the Israeli assault by 40%, placing the real toll closer to 65,000. This is before taking into account the indirect causes of death resulting from the onslaught, like disease, malnutrition and lack of clean water or adequate healthcare.

The study’s findings came as no surprise to experts, who for months have warned that Israel’s attacks on first responders, journalists and infrastructure, as well as its refusal to let in international human rights monitors and media organizations, were causing an undercount. But if all you read are major Western media outlets like the New York Times or CNN, their reports on the study (New York Times, 1/14/25; CNN, 1/9/25) may well have surprised you.

That’s because, over the course of Israel’s genocide, Western media have actively avoided investigating—and even downplayed—the true human costs of the war by eagerly parroting Israeli officials who cast doubt on the claims of the Gaza Health Ministry. Despite those supposed doubts, Western media default to citing the health ministry tally in day-to-day coverage of the war, while making little mention of the long-held consensus among health experts that far more Palestinians were dying than were being recorded (New York Times, 12/27/24; CNN, 8/16/24).

The downplaying can be seen in Western media’s repeated refrain that the health ministry is “Hamas-run” or “Hamas-controlled” (BBC, 12/3/23; New York Times, 10/19/23; CNN, 12/4/23) and therefore not to be trusted. More than adding doubt, labeling civilian infrastructure as “Hamas-controlled” puts Palestinians in harm’s way. Israel’s desire to paint anything Palestinian as Hamas is “an implicit association of Palestinians with evil, essentially making Palestinian lives dispensable,” writes Noora Said in Mondoweiss (12/29/23).

No more pressing taskThe phrase “Hamas-run” (CBS, 9/21/24) was used to insinuate that death numbers might be exaggerated, when experts knew the official toll was certainly an undercount.

It stretches the mind to imagine a more pressing task for journalism than accurately reporting on an unfolding genocide. For US audiences, whose tax dollars are bankrolling the slaughter, news outlets should be making every effort to help them appreciate the full consequences of their government’s foreign policy.

That’s undoubtedly a difficult job. The sheer scale of destruction in Gaza, and its status as an open-air death camp walled off from the rest of the world, means outsiders don’t have the ability to get a complete picture of the devastation. That would require an exhaustive cross-referencing of Gaza Health Ministry documents and (Israeli-controlled) population registers, as well as a broad collection of witness testimonies that international observers just don’t have unfettered access to. But major Western media outlets need to ask themselves a question similar to what the International Court of Justice asked in January 2024: “What’s plausible?”

In addition to the most recent direct death estimate, a letter in the Lancet (7/20/24) by public health researchers took a stab at answering the broader question of all attributable deaths last July. Taking into account historical wartime data, the researchers suggested that for each death directly caused by Israeli weaponry, there could be four or more indirect deaths. “It is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza,” they wrote.

In October, 99 American medical practitioners who served in Gaza wrote a letter to then-President Joe Biden, estimating that at least 118,908 Palestinian had already been killed, directly or indirectly, by Israel. The physicians used a variety of methods, including a calculation of the minimum number of deaths likely to result from the number of civilians classified as facing catastrophic and emergency-level starvation.

Ideally, the vast resources of an outlet like the Times could be used to begin to corroborate these estimates from public health and medical researchers. At the very least, the fact that researchers estimate the true scale of death in Gaza to be three or more times the official tally should bear constant repetition in paragraphs that add context to daily news stories on the topic.

Sana Saeed, a leading critic of Western media’s coverage of Israel’s genocide, noted:

If your article can include a line about how the IDF denies yet another war crime that it’s very clearly committed, then your article can include how leading health studies are estimating that the number of slaughtered Palestinians exceeds 100,000.

‘Debate over credibility’When the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs sought more identifying information about the list of Palestinians killed by Israel, the New York Times (5/15/24) leapt on this to insist that it “added fuel to a debate over the credibility of the Gazan authorities’ tallies of fatalities in the war.”

Western outlets haven’t just failed to consistently convey the full extent of the carnage in Gaza to their readers, they’ve actively downplayed it.

Take the Times story (5/15/24) headlined “How Many of Gaza’s Dead Are Women and Children? For 10,000, the Data Is Incomplete.” The article used the United Nation’s exclusion of some 10,000 confirmed casualties from the tally of women and children killed in Gaza, due to incomplete information, as an opportunity to launder Israeli claims discrediting the health ministry.

The UN’s acknowledgement that some data is incomplete has “added fuel to a debate over the credibility of the Gazan authorities’ tallies of fatalities in the war,” the article says. But who’s on either side of this “debate,” according to the Times? Affirming the tally’s credibility, we have Biden, the civilian casualty monitoring group Airwars and researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, according to the Times. On the other side, only Israel and the infamous neoconservative Elliott Abrams are credited.

The article acknowledged that the number of women and children dead can be used as an “indication of how many civilians have been killed, a question that lies at the heart of the criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war.” But nowhere in the piece was it mentioned that the UN secretary general has called Gaza a “graveyard for children,” or that just the month before, doctors in Gaza reported “a steady stream of children, elderly people and others who were clearly not combatants with single bullet wounds to the head or chest” (Guardian, 4/2/24), suggesting a practice of Israeli snipers targeting noncombatants.

In another article (1/22/24), headlined “The Decline in Deaths in Gaza,” the Times noted that “the daily death toll in Gaza has fallen in half over the past month, reflecting a change in war strategy.” Set aside that the article neglected to actually mention how many Palestinians had been killed by then. Instead, consider all the other factors that went unmentioned in the report: Had Israel’s devastating rampage up until then created new challenges to reporting fatalities? Was Israel’s strategy shifting focus to imposing a devastating blockade on humanitarian aid, eventually causing more starvation-related deaths? The answers are yes and yes.

‘Arguing for caution’Credulously accepting Israeli and US claims that they were not responsible for the destruction of the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, CNN‘s Oliver Darcy (10/26/23) demanded of media outlets that quoted the Gaza Health Ministry: “Was there any regret repeating claims from the terrorist group?”

CNN similarly exemplifies Western media’s inclination to discredit the Gaza Health Ministry and downplay the death toll in Gaza. In February 2024, the Guardian (2/4/24) published the testimony of six CNN employees confirming that the network’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza is shaped by its management’s biased edicts that include restrictions on “quoting Hamas and reporting other Palestinian perspectives,” while “Israeli government statements are taken at face value.”

As FAIR (11/3/23) previously covered, after an Israeli strike on al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza City killed hundreds of Palestinians, CNN (10/26/23) published an op-ed from its media reporter Oliver Darcy chastising Western outlets, including his own, for relying on health ministry claims about the strike. Instead, he demanded they retract their reporting, because Israel and the US had investigated the strike—a crime in which they were both implicated—and found no wrongdoing.

When CNN has published stories about the human consequences of Israel’s war, such as its coverage (8/16/24) of the health ministry’s toll surpassing 40,000, it has only made passing mention of the impact beyond the immediate death toll, referring to “the daily suffering, malnutrition and volatility in Gaza.” While in that report CNN apparently found no reason to bring up the Lancet letter published just one month earlier, it found plenty of space to uncritically state that “Israeli military officials have said they try to minimize harm to civilians in Gaza, and that Hamas bears the blame for using civilians as ‘human shields.’”

When Western outlets do publish the rare reports that convey a broader impact than just the health ministry tally, they still leave much to be desired. Take the Times’ coverage (7/11/24) of the Lancet letter projecting some 186,000 Palestinians killed by Israel. It started off by introducing the concept of excess deaths—which, almost a year into the genocide, may be the first time Times readers have been exposed to the concept—and explained that it “can provide a truer indication of the toll and scale of conflicts and other social upheaval.”

But right after mentioning the Lancet’s estimate, the Times said that it “immediately generated debate, with other researchers arguing for caution in any such projection.” What reason for caution did the Times provide? That any estimate would necessarily be tricky, because it would have to start with the health ministry’s data—which they acknowledged is imperfect, given the health system in Gaza’s almost total collapse. So instead of stressing a need for investigating the true cost of Israel’s war on Gaza, given the difficulty Palestinians are having reporting the toll, the Times found itself parroting urges against such inquiries, for the very same reason.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has been the first genocide live-streamed for the world to see. Journalists have more tools at their disposal than ever before to glean what information they can. Western media’s failure to do so will be recorded in history.

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CNN (1/31/25) framed Elon Musk’s extra-constitutional power grab as part of “the war over federal spending.”

When President Donald Trump announced an unprecedented freeze on federal grants and loans last week, some of the most prominent US news outlets proved themselves largely uninterested in whether it was legal. Meanwhile, a few braver journalists called out the move as the constitutional crisis that it was (FAIR.org, 1/29/25).

When Democratic attorneys general rushed to challenge the move in court, with positive results, Trump rescinded the order. But the crisis is hardly over.

On the contrary: Elon Musk, the unelected centibillionaire who threw Nazi salutes at the inauguration, has wrested control of the Treasury Department’s payment system, after forcing out its most senior career civil servant, David Lebryk. As CNN (1/31/25) reported, the Treasury takeover happened after Trump’s team had repeatedly asked about the department’s ability to stop payments, to which Lebryk had insisted, “We don’t do that.”

These payments include everything from Social Security checks to tax refunds, federal employee salaries to contractor payments. It’s over $5 trillion a year, a fifth of the US economy. The database Musk and his tech bro allies in the non–congressionally approved “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) have access to also contains enormous amounts of sensitive personal information for most Americans, including Social Security numbers. And Musk and a 25-year-old former X employee have access to the code that controls the payment systems, allowing them to make irreversible changes to it, according to Wired (2/4/25).

At the same time, Musk has infiltrated the General Services Administration and the Office of Personnel Management—two other rather obscure and nonpolitical but hugely consequential agencies that manage federal offices, technology and employees (Wired, 1/28/25, 1/31/25).

‘An idea that crosses party lines’The New York Times (1/31/25) put its seal of approval on Trump’s illegal attempt to freeze federal spending, calling the idea behind it “bipartisan.”

Instead of appropriately pushing the increasing lawlessness and opacity to the forefront of their reporting, the New York Times and Washington Post largely buried these stories, downplaying their earth-shattering break from democratic norms.

As Musk took over the Treasury system, the Times (1/31/25) did point out:

Control of the system could give Mr. Musk’s allies the ability to unilaterally cut off money intended for federal workers, bondholders and companies, and open a new front in the Trump administration’s efforts to halt federal payments.

And yet somehow this story struck editors as page 13 material.

Meanwhile, a piece (1/31/25) by the Times‘ Michael Shear published online the same day was deemed front-page material, causing even seasoned media critics to spit out their morning beverage at its breathtaking ability to bothsides the situation: “Beneath Trump’s Chaotic Spending Freeze: An Idea That Crosses Party Lines.”

Shear wrote that Trump is simply “continuing a mostly failed effort by a long series of presidents and Congress” to “somehow reverse the seemingly inexorable growth of the federal government, an issue that resonates with some Democrats as well as most Republicans.” He thus clearly communicated that he is not up for the task of reporting on this administration.

The Times published Musk’s Treasury takeover on page 18, under the rather nonchalant headline: “Elon Musk’s Team Now Has Access to Treasury’s Payments System.” The subhead read:

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent gave Mr. Musk’s representatives at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency a powerful tool to monitor and potentially limit government spending.

And hey, don’t worry, the article suggests:

Mr. Musk’s initiative is intended to be part of a broader review of the payments system to allow improper payments to be scrutinized, and is not an effort to arbitrarily block individual payments, the people familiar with the matter said.

At the Post, readers got language like, “The clash reflects an intensifying battle between Musk and the federal bureaucracy” (1/31/25), and “it is extremely unusual for anyone connected to political appointees to access” the payment systems (2/1/25). (In fact, it appears to be unprecedented—Independent, 2/3/25.)

‘Reminiscent of Stalin’Wired* (1/31/25): Musk’s team is “attempting to use White House security credentials to gain unusual access to GSA tech, deploying a suite of new AI software, and recreating the office in X*’s image.”

There is another way to do journalism. It’s called connecting dots, asking questions, not accepting anonymous claims of benevolent intent—and helping people understand the gravity of the situation when unprecedented end-runs around democracy are happening before our very eyes. And it’s heartening to see quite a few news outlets engaging in it.

For instance, Wired has been doing a tenacious job following Musk’s assault on the government, connecting the dots between his actions and explaining the dangers to the country. It broke the news (1/28/25) that Musk workers from his various companies had taken over management positions at the Office of Personnel Management—well before Trump’s nominee to take over the OPM has even had a confirmation hearing. Its subhead noted: “One expert found the takeover reminiscent of Stalin.”

Wired explained that the installation of AI experts at OPM suggests a forthcoming effort to use AI on the reams of data it has access to in order to target federal employees for removal.

Regarding the GSA infiltration, Wired reported (1/31/25):

The access could give Musk’s proxies the ability to remote into laptops, listen in on meetings, read emails, among many other things, a former Biden official told Wired on Friday.

“Granting DOGE staff, many of whom aren’t government employees, unfettered access to internal government systems and sensitive data poses a huge security risk to the federal government and to the American public,” the Biden official said. “Not only will DOGE be able to review procurement-sensitive information about major government contracts, it’ll also be able to actively surveil government employees.”

Wired again put that danger (“the potential [for Musk minions] to remote into laptops, read emails, and more”) into its subhead—unlike the Times‘ muted headlines.

‘Incredibly dangerous’Rolling Stone (2/3/25) pointed out that “the danger of operational access to the payments system is precisely that there are very little safeguards for its improper use or manipulation.”

Others are also raising alarms in their headlines, as at Rolling Stone (2/3/25): “Elon Musk’s Attempt to Control the Treasury Payment System Is Incredibly Dangerous.” The subhead explained: “Trump and Musk could use sensitive Treasury information to punish their enemies. Worse yet, they could break America’s payment system entirely.”

The piece, by Nathan Tankus, pointed out that there are glaring reasons to disbelieve administration claims about this being about “improper payments,” such as:

At 3:14 a.m. Sunday, Musk pledged to shut down supposedly “illegal payments” to Global Refuge, a faith-based organization that exists to provide “safety and support to refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants from across the world.”

Tankus also points out what the Post and Times won’t, which is that the seizure of the payment system means Trump and Musk

can just impound agency payments themselves. They could also possibly stop paying federal employees they have forced on paid administrative leave, coercing them to resign.

Even in bigger media, some critical voices could be heard. CNN‘s Zachary Wolf (2/1/25) asked some appropriate journalistic questions: “Has [Musk] taken an oath, like the federal workers he apparently has plans to fire, to uphold the Constitution?…. What are Musk’s conflicts of interests?”

Accessories to the coupThe Washington Post (2/4/25) assures readers that “the Education Department was created by Congress, and only Congress can eliminate it.”

The Washington Post put news about Musk’s takeovers on the front page today (2/4/25), as it reported on Trump preparing an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education, which Musk has apparently also infiltrated. But it still managed to sound rather sanguine about the threat: “The expected executive order would not shut down the agency, as there is widespread agreement in both parties that doing so would require congressional action.” Despite reporting daily on actions Trump and Musk have taken that have usurped congressional authority, the paper still seems to believe—and want readers to believe—against all evidence that our Constitution’s constraints on executive power continue to hold.

And the New York Times finally published an article (2/3/25) taking a deeper look “Inside Musk’s Aggressive Incursion Into the Federal Government,” as the headline stated. Still, it seemed to find it difficult to use language in its early framing paragraphs any stronger than to say that Musk’s actions “have challenged congressional authority and potentially breached civil service protections,” as it explains in the third paragraph. These moves are “creating major upheaval,” the fifth paragraph allowed, and the sixth said it “represented an extraordinary flexing of power by a private individual.”

The piece was not published in the print newspaper the next day; FAIR has yet to see it rise to the top of the paper’s homepage.

As Musk and Trump continue to behave like kings, it’s incumbent upon news media to not just report on their actions, but put them in the proper context for the public to understand the threat level they represent; otherwise, we can’t respond appropriately.

That kind of reporting takes real bravery in the kind of moment we are in: Musk has already (falsely) called it a crime to reveal the names of those working for him at the agencies DOGE is targeting, which Wired and others have done. The Trump-installed interim US attorney for DC has obsequiously promised Musk to go after those who identify his underlings—and to prosecute “anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people” (New Republic, 2/3/25).

While that might sound laughable, media outlets have already paid Trump handsome settlements to settle lawsuits that should have been seen as similarly laughable (FAIR.org, 12/16/24; PBS, 1/29/25; New York Times, 1/30/25). When prominent news outlets won’t summon the courage to vigorously oppose this descent into autocracy, they are accessories to the coup. We must demand better from them, and support the outlets and journalists doing the critical work we as citizens require to defend our democracy.

ACTION: Tell the New York Times and Washington Post to treat Musk’s actions like the existential threat to democracy that they are.

CONTACT:

New York Times
Letters: letters@nytimes.com
Bluesky: @NYTimes.com

Washington Post
Letters: letters@washpost.com,
Bluesky: @washingtonpost.com

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

Correction (2/5/25): An earlier version of this article misstated the title of the official who threatened to prosecute those who revealed the names of DOGE employees. He is the interim US attorney for the District of Columbia.

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Janine Jackson interviewed Americans for Tax Fairness’s David Kass about billionaire election-buying for the January 31, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250131Kass.mp3Americans for Tax Fairness (10/29/24)

Janine Jackson: In October of last year, our guest’s organization reported that 150 billionaire families had broken the record for billionaire campaign spending, putting some $1.9 billion in the coffers of presidential and congressional candidates, with the 10 biggest billionaire family contributors providing almost half of that total. This dystopian situation is an indication, not just of the spiraling power and wealth of the super rich, but of the relative weakness of the forces set up to countervail that power.

David Kass is executive director of Americans for Tax Fairness. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, David Kass.

David Kass: Thank you so much. I’m really glad to be here.

JJ: Tell us a little bit more about what you found in this research on “billionaire clan,” as you call it, spending on the 2024 elections. It was an unprecedented amount of money, yes?

AP (1/20/25)

DK: It really is. So we did an analysis of how much billionaire families gave in political contributions to the election, and we found that $1.9 billion have been given in this cycle. And that is really just a shocking amount of money. It is unprecedented, it is a record amount.

And we see the impact of that. Just the inauguration, I think that picture where you had a number of these billionaires in front of the cabinet, you had Musk and Bezos and these other folks who made massive contributions to the campaign, and now they’re enjoying the fruits of that, which is really building this incredible amount of influence in this new administration.

JJ: We’re going to talk about that influence and that impact, but just some details. First of all, this billionaire spending, it’s very concentrated. It’s a relatively small group of super-wealthy folks we’re talking about, right?

DK: Yeah, exactly. There are 800 billionaires in the country, and we say 150 billionaire families. And really just a handful of folks gave an enormous amount of that money. So it really is incredibly concentrated.

JJ: Right. And it seems worth saying that this isn’t, I don’t know why I need to say this, but it isn’t families digging deep to show support for candidates they believe in, and putting all their resources towards them. The numbers are huge, but for these people, it’s like it’s a lunch tab.

DK: It really is. I mean, it’d be like you and I maybe getting something at Starbucks. And we found that the amount of the $1.9 billion, it’s $700 million more than we found in the entire 2020 campaign. So the escalation of the money, the amount of money the billionaires are giving, is going dramatically up.

JJ: It’s not just that the numbers are bigger because they’re richer. It does represent an intensified focus on campaign spending from these billionaires.

Common Dreams (11/21/24)

DK: That’s true. But they also are significantly richer, too. I mean, they really have even more money. The total billionaire wealth has surged by $3.8 trillion since the passage of the Trump tax law in 2017, and it surged even since the election. So they do have an incredible amount of money, and the money keeps going up.

JJ: It’s all intertwined, all of these things. But, again, if the question is the super wealthy’s ability to buy power, well, then, the corollary question is, why can’t we stop what we see happening? So I guess I would ask why, legally, are we where we are right now?

DK: No, that’s a great question. And the Supreme Court, unfortunately, in the Citizens United case, said that people could spend an unlimited amount of money, as long as it wasn’t, as they say, coordinated with the candidates. So that just opened the floodgates. And we’ve really seen this incredible flow of billionaire money, of corporate money, into campaigns because of it. And I think the solution there is to make sure that we change Citizens United, that there needs to be a constitutional amendment to really roll that back, so that we can make sure that: the richer you are, the bigger your voice is, that’s not democracy.

JJ: And lawmakers will always say, “Oh, well yeah, they gave me millions of dollars, but I still just vote the way I want to vote anyway.” And I think a lot of folks buy that narrative, unfortunately. But appearance of conflict of interest is itself a conflict of interest, isn’t it? I mean, there’s a reason to study these relationships, even as lawmakers are saying, “Oh, I don’t care who gives me money, I just vote what’s in my heart.”

DK: I wish it were true that everyone was so pure and did that, but we know that’s not the case, right? I mean, if you’re getting a huge amount of money from somebody, they’re going to have power over you. That is just the facts. And somebody like Elon Musk, who gave more than $250 million to Donald Trump in this past presidential election, you can see what that bought him, right? I mean, from his point of view, he’s the world’s richest man, and that’s a good investment. He’s buying access, because he has lots of government contracts, and this protects his interests, at the expense of everyday Americans.

JJ: I guess I would lift up here that, maybe people have assumed it, but still your research bore it out, that the majority of this billionaire spending went to Republicans and to Trump. We should just point that out.

DK: That is right.

JJ: Americans for Tax Fairness follows the money to its impacts, its already evident and its easily foreseeable impacts on public policy. So let’s move you on to what fallout can we expect to see, with not just the billionaire campaign spending, but then I know you’ve also worked on the billionaires now in and around the White House. They feel they’re buying something. So what can we regular folks expect?

Americans for Tax Fairness (1/17/25)

DK: I think what they expect is that these billionaires who are going to be having enormous influence are going to be enriching themselves and making decisions that benefit the wealthiest people. We did an analysis that looked at the Trump nominees, and people who are worth a billion or more, and the average worth of the Trump proposed economic policy aides is over $500 million. So half a billion dollars. I mean, the guy proposed for the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, is worth $2 billion. The guy who’s the treasury secretary is worth $1 billion.

You just have to ask yourself, are people who are that wealthy, are they going to really understand the everyday needs of that firefighter, of that single mom, of that teacher, of that plumber? It’s just such a rarefied, extraordinary wealth, and they’re not going to understand the needs of everyday people.

And they may have their own conflict of interest. For example, Lutnick, who’s the proposed commerce secretary, he has interests in cryptocurrency. Is he going to be able to promote his private business interests, or what’s really best for the American people? And I think we see these conflicts up and down the line of these people.

JJ: In terms of news media, it’s very rankling to me how, if the story is something like retail theft, we get alarm and outrage, folks boosting baby formula from the CVS is a public concern, and it’s maybe the reason that things cost so much. But then a story will blandly note that billionaires or billionaire corporations are getting “favorable tax policy,” as though there were no human harm in that, as though that were the natural order.

Where do you see the role of journalism? Are there things that you would like to see more or less of, in terms of reporting around this set of issues?

American Progress (3/27/23)

DK: Absolutely. I think the media really has a responsibility to help tie these pieces together. So what we see is the Republicans are proposing these massive cuts, trillions of dollars in cuts, in programs that families count on, healthcare, education, housing. So taking money, really, out of the pockets of families, to give huge tax cuts to the very wealthy. So giving millions to people who have billions.

And I think the media really has a responsibility to make sure that people understand that this isn’t just these cuts to get government more efficient. That’s, of course, what they say. The reality is that they’re cutting these programs to pay for tax cuts for billionaires. So I think that narrative is really important.

And I think the other thing is, there was a study done by the Center for American Progress that showed that 57% of the growth in the federal debt this century is due to the Trump and the Bush tax cuts passed by Republican congresses. So there’s this narrative that somehow spending by Democrats was out of control. Well, the truth is that the majority of the debt in this century is due to Trump and Bush tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the rich. So what’s driving our debt is tax cuts for the very rich. That’s really the problem. And now they’re trying to make cuts to pay for this. If it weren’t true, it would almost be humorous.

JJ: Right. And I wish the storyline weren’t so simplistic, but we sometimes see elite news media present campaign finance reform or regulation or even just fair tax policies the same way that billionaires do: It’s kind of like it’s punishment for people who worked really hard, you guys. And it’s just such a silly storyline. And I feel like the fact that so many people are walking around thinking that the government only helps some people, and other people do it all on their own–that’s a failure of news media that also lets down public understanding, and that leads to inadequate public policy.

David Kass: “That’s the real problem here, is that workers pay taxes every two weeks and billionaires can basically never pay taxes.”

DK: I think that’s exactly right. And the truth is, and again, what the facts are, is that there are two tax codes. There’s one for workers. If you’re that firefighter, if you’re that teacher, you get a paycheck every two weeks, and you pay taxes on it. But if you’re a billionaire, if you’re super wealthy, basically you cannot pay taxes on almost any of it, because so much of your stuff is really these investments and stocks and things, which, if you don’t sell them, can never be taxed.

And that’s why the White House did a study showing that the wealthiest 400 billionaire families paid an average of 8.2% of their income, when you include their wealth that goes largely untaxed. But average Americans, they pay 13%, so close to double the rate of America’s 400 wealthiest families.

So that’s the real problem here, is that workers pay taxes every two weeks and billionaires can basically never pay taxes. And that’s crazy. For example, if you paid a single penny in taxes this year, you’ve paid more than Elon Musk did in 2018, or that Jeff Bezos did in 2007 or 2011. So that’s a crazy system that we really have to fix.

JJ: And let’s talk about fixing it. And I think it’s been made clear enough to listeners that your concern about billionaire campaign spending isn’t just, billionaires spend a lot of money. It’s that they are drowning out the voices and concerns of ordinary Americans. And that’s the point. If we have a so-called representative democracy, then this is a problem. So let me ask you, what can we do to change things?

DK: I think there’s a number of things. Obviously, people need to share their concerns with their representatives, and to talk about how we shouldn’t be cutting key programs that families rely on to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy. So right now, the Republicans are trying to pass this big tax bill, and they’re meeting at one of Trump’s fancy resorts in Florida to talk about what they’re going to do. So this thing is coming, we know it’s coming, and we really need to talk about that they’re going to spend $4 trillion, $4 trillion, for tax cuts that overwhelmingly benefit the rich. And that is just crazy. That is really crazy.

JJ: Yeah. And are there policies, I mean, it seems like folks are saying, “Why can’t we bring back the world before Citizens United?” But maybe we just need a whole new vision. Is there anything in the works, legislatively or policy-wise, apart from vigilance and reporting, that we can look to to support?

ProPublica (2/28/22)

DK: There are really great things that we can do to make sure that your average family is treated fairly. So the first thing is to let these Trump tax cuts expire for people who are wealthy. I mean, just let this stuff go. They passed in 2017 and for the wealthy, they shouldn’t get any more tax cuts.

And then there’s lots of other things that we can do. President Biden, and also the top Democrat on the finance committee, Ron Wyden, had these proposals to make sure that we were taxing billionaires, so that their wealth, just like when you pay every two weeks, you pay taxes on your paycheck, that they would have to pay taxes on their wealth. And I think that would be a very important change to make sure that we had a much more fair tax system.

And I think the other part of this is, we’ve talked about, but it is just so undemocratic to have this extreme wealth gap, where billionaires can use this wealth to be able to make a much louder voice than your average American.

So those are some of the things. I think there are things we can do. We’ve got to stop this bill from passing. People thought when Trump came into office in 2017 that the ACA, Obamacare, was going to be gone, that Republicans would get rid of it, and they didn’t, weren’t able to. They tried, but because there was so much backlash, because so many people protested, they lost.

And this is an uphill battle, but we really have to work and organize and fight to show that more tax cuts for the wealthy coming out of the pockets of families is the wrong approach.

JJ: All right then, we’ll end on that note. We’ve been speaking with David Kass from Americans for Tax Fairness. Their work is online at AmericansForTaxFairness.org.

Thank you so much, David Kass, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

DK: Thank you so much. It was great talking to you.

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NPR* (2/1/25) investigates how a politician who surrounds himself with fellow billionaires can “work for the working class.” NPR*‘s suggestion: tax cuts for the very wealthy.

“Can Trump’s Second Act Work for the Working Class While Giving Back to His Super Donors?” asks NPR.com (2/1/25). The answer, from NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving, is a resounding—maybe!

Elving presents the politics of the second Trump administration as a perplexing paradox:

Today we are confronted with an alliance between those whom political scientists might call plutocrats and those who are increasingly labeled populists. The contrast is stark, but the symbiosis is unmistakable. And we all await the outcome as the populist in Trump tries to co-exist with his newfound ally Musk, the world’s richest man with abundant clout in the new administration.

After a meandering tour of US history from Andrew Jackson to William Jenning Bryan to Ross Perot, Elving concludes: “We may only be at the beginning of an era in which certain political figures can serve what are plausibly called populist causes by calling on the resources of the ultra-rich.” Huge, if true!

Elving’s evidence that Trump is a “populist”—or at least has a populist lurking inside him—is remarkably thin, however:

Trump has shown a certain affinity with, and owes a clear debt to, many of the little guys—what he called in 2017 “the forgotten men and women.”… With his small town, egalitarian rallies and appeals to “the forgotten man and woman,” he has revived the term populism in the political lexicon and gone further with it than anyone since Bryan’s heyday.

Trump “made a show of working a shift at a McDonald’s last fall,” Elving notes. And he “used his fame and Twitter account to popularize a fringe theory about then-President Obama being foreign born and thus ineligible to be president,” which “connected him to a hardcore of voters such as those who told pollsters they believed Obama was a Muslim.” Elving suggests that this is the sort of thing populists do.

But when it comes to offering examples of actual populist policies from the first Trump administration, Elving admits that there aren’t many to speak of:

If Trump’s rapid rise as a Washington outsider recalled those of 19th century populists, Trump’s actual performance as president was quite different. In fact it had more in common with the record of President William McKinley, the Ohio Republican who defeated Bryan in 1896 and again in 1900 while defending the gold standard and representing the interests of business and industry.

In fact, says Elving, “Trump in his first term pursued a relatively familiar list of Republican priorities,” with “his main legislative achievement” being “the passage of an enormous tax cut…that greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth.” For genuine journalists, for whom politicians’ actions are more significant than their words, that would be the most meaningful predictor of what Trump is likely to do going forward.

But Trump’s second term, Elving suggests on the basis of nothing, could be quite different: “As Trump’s second term unfolds, the issues most likely to be vigorously pursued may be those where the interests of his populist base can be braided with those who sat in billionaire’s row on Inauguration Day.” Such as? “The renewal of the 2017 tax cuts is an area of commonality, as is the promise to shrink government.”

So—a restoration of the same tax cuts that “greatly benefited high-income earners and holders of wealth”? That how NPR thinks Trump in his second term “can serve what are plausibly called populist causes”?

All hail the unmistakable symbiosis!

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to NPR public editor Kelly McBride here. or via Bluesky: @kellymcb.bsky.social. 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.

FEATURED IMAGE: NPR depiction of candidate Donald Trump as a tribune of the working class.

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Janine Jackson interviewed Detention Watch Network’s Silky Shah about the attack on immigrants for the January 24, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250124Shah.mp3Reuters (1/21/25)

Janine Jackson: The Trump administration surprised none but the gullible by coming out of the gate with a spate of hateful, discriminatory and anti-democratic measures. Immigrants—that’s to say, mainly brown and Black immigrants—have been in the sights of those who oppose the democratic project for years now. But with Day One orders and directives threatening roundups and mass deportations and curtailing sanctuary, the new White House looks to be defining “terrorizing people” as policy.

I wonder if major news media, day in and day out, reported immigration, not through politicians trying to outdo one another with hysterical claims, and perverse stunts like buses out of town, not through pundits whose ignorance of history and economics is matched only by their indifference to human rights, but instead through the voices of immigrants and their communities and advocates, would we be where we are today?

Silky Shah is executive director at Detention Watch Network. She joins us now by phone from Washington state. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Silky Shah.

Silky Shah: It’s great to be back with you. Thanks for having me.

CBS (1/21/25)

JJ: The Department of Homeland Security’s directives to rescind the Sensitive Locations Memo is so exemplary of the comic book cravenness: “There is no safe place. This chaotic routing out of human beings, this is really what we want to do.” If people don’t know, or if they somehow think this is about isolating criminal actors, what should we understand as some of the key and foreseeable impacts of this slew of orders on communities, whether or not they or a family member is ultimately actually deported?

SS: I think the whole intention here is to cause fear and instability in people’s lives, and the strategy of forced attrition, forced self-deportation. So it’s like a combination of all the different orders that have been put in place. Some of them are being blocked, like the birthright citizenship order, again, [it’s] just to cause panic in people, but it’s very much unconstitutional. And there’s other things that people are filing litigation against.

But we have a lot of the system in place already. There are thousands of ICE agents and thousands of CBP (Customs and Border Protection) agents, and they’ve already started doing roundups, and we’ve seen that across the country.

Washington Post (1/22/25)

But we also know they work really closely with law enforcement at every single level, at the local level, at the state level, at the federal level. And so much of what people have done for many years to protect communities is by doing that work to get ICE out of those particular locations, out of churches, out of schools, out of hospitals, and also do that work to make it so that ICE and police aren’t collaborating, because that’s actually how we saw a lot of people funneled into deportation proceedings, and into the detention system, especially during the Bush and Obama years.

For many years, we’ve been doing that, and everything this administration is trying to do is to undo a lot of that work, so that they can target people more easily. And so even now, we’ve seen that they’ve directed DoJ to start potentially looking into prosecution for states and counties and cities that aren’t complying, which is also going to be challenged.

But I think that is the intent. The intent is to undo so much of the work we’ve done to protect immigrant communities and stop the really severe deportations we’ve seen.

JJ: You’re sort of touching on it, but it seems worth pulling out: Elite media won’t do it, but we can, ourselves, shift this idea that Democrats are by definition anti-Republicans, and that we’re really in a Trump versus anti-Trump situation. And it’s not to ignore partisan dynamics, but just to recognize bad ideas, whoever is pushing them.

NBC (1/22/25)

SS: Yeah, I think one thing that was so challenging for us, coming into 2025, we were all bracing ourselves for what was going to happen a few days ago on January 20, but already, within the first days of the year, we saw the Democrats, both in the House and the Senate, capitulating and now officially passing the Laken Riley Act, which Trump is going to sign soon. And it’s really disturbing, because it’s a bill that was really created around a moral panic which exacerbates all these questions and scapegoats immigrants as the problem, around this really horrific tragedy, but saying, “Oh, we’re going to apply these really harsh policies to all immigrants because of this one incident,” which we saw in the ’80s with the story of Willie Horton. And then that was one of the things, of the many things, that led to the US being one of the world’s leading incarcerated and the growth of mass incarceration.

And now we’re seeing that again, where Democrats are capitulating because of the moral panic that was created around this one incident, and saying that immigrants are the problem, and equating them with criminality.

And I think that is something that was really hard to stomach, to see how much the Democrats accepted this really harsh bill that will require mandatory detention for people who are just charged with theft-related crimes. It would expand the number of people who would be forced to be in detention without any due process, without any ability to stand before a judge, “These are the reasons why I shouldn’t be in here.”

And so we are really, really concerned, especially, that so many Democrats capitulated on this. It’s the same old story. It’s the moral panic that they capitalize on to gain political legitimacy. And then we see these really harsh policies in place that just balloon incarceration, balloon policing.

AP (1/22/25)

JJ: Yeah, and it’s such a circle, because, for example, Associated Press, in reporting the House approving Laken Riley, notes matter of factly, well, yes, there was this crucial faction of 46 “politically vulnerable” Democrats who joined with Republicans. Why are they politically vulnerable? Because of this situation in which they feel themselves being pushed to align with Republicans in order to stay in office, which apparently is job one, and job only, for many folks.

SS: And one of the things around that that’s so frustrating is that part of the reason they are feeling the need to do that is because the Democratic Party has really failed to offer any countervision to the Republicans, failed any countervailing vision. In fact, Harris ran a campaign where she was positioning herself as more hardline than Trump on immigration, and that opened up space for us to be in this place.

And so I think that is really one of the most important lessons right now is that, no, we have to offer something else. We have to not just throw immigrants under the bus, as the Democrats did in this election cycle, that have led us to this point, and enabled Trump and all of these other Republicans to move these policies. And yeah, no, I think absolutely there’s no question that the Democrats also deserve equal blame for where we’re at.

JJ: Right. I’m going to bring you back in a second to what we can be for, but I did want to step out and just say: A key part of your concern and your work is that, for many people, because it’s how media frame it, the idea is, “Well, in one way or another, we’re going to catch lawbreakers, or even spread a net that catches up some folks who aren’t breaking the law, but then we’re going to…do something with them.” And the story sort of ends there. And I wonder, what does your understanding of the actual immigrant detention system as it exists tell you about that as a solution, that maybe most people don’t even know?

SS: The thing about detention is that it exists to warehouse immigrants. That’s what it exists to do. And whether they have had interaction with the criminal legal system or not—yes, many people have, some people haven’t, some people are there because they’re seeking asylum. But it tells you that’s the bigger picture of the US, again, being so committed to incarceration, still having some 2 million people in jails and prisons and detention centers. And what we saw for many, many years is the growth of these systems, because there was this incentive to have some economic viability for rural communities. There was a prison boom that happened, and there was also the destruction of the welfare state, and many people being caught up in the system. And so people became more and more eligible for prison time. There was longer sentences, truth in sentencing and mandatory minimums and all these things where we balloon the system. And all those things started applying to immigration, and that’s what we saw with the detention system.

And even to this day, when we try to make the case against immigrant detention and local officials can conveniently say, “Well, actually, we hear you. We don’t think people should be in detention because they’re just awaiting a hearing on their immigration case, or they’re awaiting deportation,” but then they’re still hesitant to end the contract, largely because they are still getting federal money to hold people in the detention system.

Even if they have a private prison in their community, they might be getting a dollar a day to hold a person in that facility. And so there are a lot of perverse incentives to the system, that include both the private prison industry, but also county jails, and just the way law enforcement works across the country. And so I think that’s a really important piece of it.

And the other thing I would say is that there’s just this constant lie that’s told to us, that immigration is a issue of public safety and national security. And of course now we’re hearing this a lot, in what the executive orders have put out.

But it’s not true, actually. Immigration is about labor, of course. And I think that’s going to become more of an issue as the crackdown happens, and people feel the impacts of losing that labor. But also, it’s about family relationships, and it’s about seeking refuge. And so we have to go back to that conversation of what is immigration about? What can we do instead of reinforcing these ideas that people are lawbreakers? Well, what does that mean in the context of the law right now, and how has the system changed to round up and warehouse more and more people, mostly people who are Black and brown?

JJ: Right? Well, we are seeing and we will see a lot of rightful and righteous “against” energy, and I wonder, what can we be for? What ideas can we shape conversations around that both resist the worldview of the MAGA set and their media enablers, but also maybe have nothing to do with them? What are some other ideas that can be coherent that we can work around, going forward?

Silky Shah: “Moving more away from the scarcity mindset, and making conditions for people in the US better, I think is going to be an important part of our strategy to make the case for immigration.”

SS: I think what was so evident about how the 2024 election worked out was, and largely part of the reason that the Democrats capitulated, was that, actually, Gov. Greg Abbott, of my home state of Texas, really, really played the game, and positioned immigrants as a problem. A lot of people focused on Trump, but I think Abbott, with the scheme where he was bussing migrants to cities like New York and Chicago, and “bringing the border” to those cities, it exacerbated and revealed all the fractures in the social safety nets that exist in those places, especially in light of the pandemic, and how there was more of a housing crisis. There’s obviously an opioid crisis. There’s so many other things that communities are negotiating. And because there was that anxiety in those places and that fear around economic insecurity, immigrants became a really easy scapegoat.

And so from my perspective, I think, again, this goes back to this question of the Democrats failing to offer any countervailing vision. It wasn’t just on immigration, but it was just generally [not] offering something about, what is the public good and what can we do for people and how can we help people? And how do we get to a place where people aren’t feeling nervous about paying rent, and anxious about all the other things, and the price of goods in the grocery store, and all the other things that were happening? And how can we make sure that Democrats are responding?

And so I think, from my perspective, we’ve had a lot of conversations with people on the ground, especially in light of the fact that people are worried about a detention center closing down and not having those jobs. It’s like, “Well, what is the economy you want in those communities? What is a just transition to that? What are more healthy economies than having incarceration or a military base or something like that?” And so moving more away from the scarcity mindset and making conditions for people in the US better, I think is going to be an important part of our strategy to make the case for immigration.

Also, of course, even I think sometimes this continues to get lost, as the root causes of migration aren’t always a part of the conversation. And so also, what is the role of the US, and the US across the world, and how have they exacerbated these conditions, and what can we do around that?

JJ: I wanted to just draw out one point of information, which is that just because the US outsources detention to Mexico, for example, doesn’t mean it’s not on our watch, right? That’s just as a point of information.

Detention Watch Network (3/30/23)

SS: Yeah. I think actually the last time I talked to you, it was after a really big fire that happened in one of the facilities on the other side of the border in Mexico. And I think that’s the reality, is that, in so many ways, Mexico absolutely has the second-highest rate of detention in the world. And it might look a little bit different, I think, in the US context, because it’s been such a society that’s obsessed with imprisonment. We have detention centers that actually are mostly jails or former prisons that are used, but I think there you might have different types of facilities.

But yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that externalization that we’ve seen is also on the US. So it’s not just that they’re doing it here, but they’re doing it abroad. I think the concern for us, we’ve done some research on this, is that when you have a detention center close to a location, so for instance in Southern California, in San Bernardino County where the Adelanto Detention Center is, when it was built and started holding people in 2010, 2011, I believe, San Bernardino County ended up having the second-highest ICE arrests in the country. And so just by having the capacity there, more people are going to get detained. And so that’s a lot of the reason why we do the work to shut down detention centers, to stop expansion here. But I do absolutely agree that a lot of our work also needs to be making sure that the US is not just outsourcing a lot of the same policies and tactics to other parts of the world.

JJ: Finally, even as the internet connects us in many ways, there’s still this atomism in modern US life, and we’re inundated with this notion that, to put it very crudely, success means starting your own thing, inventing something new and selling it. And that whole mindset works against the collective action that we need so much now, and that we know works.

Detention Watch Network, as the name suggests, is a coalition, and that formation shapes the work. And that seems very much like a way forward. It’s less media-friendly: “So many voices, so many groups, who do we quote?” But that kind of work, coalitional work, is really where we need to be, don’t you think?

SS: For so many years, it’s been organizers and lawyers, people who are detained, their family members, policy folks in DC, all of them coming together, and we’ve actually won a lot of our campaigns in the last many years. Some 20 detention centers are no longer in use, because of local and state and federal-level campaigns to stop their use. And a lot of that is because a lot of different people from different sectors came together, and ordinary people in their communities, who’ve said, “No, we don’t want this.”

And so I think that’s absolutely true. There is no single way, and I’m so grateful to all the people who are doing litigation to stop those executive orders right now.

Washington Post (1/22/25)

And I also know that ICE already has the tools it needs to target people. And so we have to do work at all the different levels, and make sure we’re doing everything we can to protect communities.

We also saw recently that ICE finally started putting out announcements about how they’re going to expand detention. They’re saying they’re going to build four new 10,000-bed facilities, which is just absolutely unheard of, but we’re doing the work to research that, figure that out, and do everything we can to block those. And we blocked it before, and I think we can do it again.

And so just holding onto that spirit of resistance, and knowing that this is going to be a tough time, but also there’s a lot of people who are ready to do the work, and to make sure we can protect our communities as much as possible.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Silky Shah, executive director at Detention Watch Network. Follow their work online at DetentionWatchNetwork.org. Silky Shah, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SS: Thanks so much for having me.

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Tech billionaires at Trump’s second inauguration: Amazon‘s Jeff Bezos, Google’s Sundar Pichai and X‘s Elon Musk (image: C-SPAN)

This week on CounterSpin: You may remember the testimony: former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz pouting to a Senate hearing on the company’s union-busting in which he was referred to as a billionaire that using that “moniker constantly is unfair”: “Yes, I have billions of dollars—I earned it. No one gave it to me. And I’ve shared it constantly with the people of Starbucks.”

The delusion that a billionaire “earned” every penny of it, or that it is shared equitably with workers, may be special to billionaires, but the broader notion—that “the government only helps some people; other people do it on their own” is conveyed throughout corporate media’s narrative, even as it’s corrosive to an understanding of democracy, much less the fight for it. The increasing influence of not merely the rich, but the super rich, on the politics and policy we all have to live with is an urgent story, if not a new one. Yet somehow, elite media seem less and less interested in it.

We’ll talk with David Kass, executive director of the Americans for Tax Fairness campaign, about that on this week’s show.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250131Kass.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at some recent press coverage of Trump’s illegal funding freeze, immigration raids and the Gaza death toll.

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Thomas Friedman has what Edward Said (Village Voice, 10/17/89) called “the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism.”

It is not often that I check the New York Times Opinion page to see what the paper’s three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning and mansion-dwelling foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman is up to. After all, I feel I’ve already exceeded my quota for masochism by wasting a full year of my life writing a book about the man, source of such ideas as that McDonald’s is the key to world peace, and that Iraqis needed to “Suck. On. This” as punishment for the 9/11 attacks—an event Friedman himself admitted Iraq had nothing to do with.

Employed in various posts at the United States’ newspaper of record since 1981—including as bureau chief in both Beirut and Jerusalem—Friedman has just entered his 30th year as foreign affairs columnist. His imperial imperiousness and pompous dedication to Orientalism came under fire from the get-go from none other than Edward Said, who remarked in a 1989 Village Voice intervention (10/17/89), titled “The Orientalist Express”:

It is not just the comic philistinism of Friedman’s ideas that I find so remarkably jejune, or his sassy and unbeguiling manner…. It is rather the special combination of disarming incoherence and unearned egoism that gives him his cockily alarming plausibility.

Noting that Friedman had “internalized the norms, if not the powers, of the secretary of state not just of the United States, but of all humanity,” Said called our journalist out on his habit of offering “advice to everyone about how much better they could be doing if they paid attention to him.” Had everyone been paying attention, they would have learned Friedman’s “moronic and hopelessly false dictum”—Said’s words—according to which “the Arab political tradition has produced only two types: the merchant and the messiah.”

Just for the hell of it, I checked up on Friedman on January 21, the day after Donald Trump’s reinauguration. Sure enough, there was his very first column of 2025, headlined: “President Trump, You Can Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” In other words, it was the latest version of how much better everyone could be doing if they paid attention to the self-appointed secretary of humanity.

‘Reborn as a strong region’Friedman (New York Times, 1/21/25) counsels Trump: “The more credibly we threaten” Iran, the more likely you will get a Nobel Peace Prize.

You couldn’t ask for a more Orientalist ambition than “remaking” the Middle East, and Friedman has various suggestions for Trump on that front. First, he instructs the president that “your interest is to bring Israel and Saudi Arabia into a US-led alliance with our other Arab partners”—which basically boils down to rewarding the party that has since October 2023 been conducting straight-up genocide in the Gaza Strip with a normalization of relations with Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia, whose bloodthirsty ruler Mohammed bin Salman has long occupied a special place in Friedman’s heart.

Friedman continues with his roadmap:

Gaza, like the West Bank under the Oslo agreement, should be divided into Areas A and B for a four-year transition period. Eighty percent would be Area A (under the international force/Palestinian control), and 20% (basically the perimeter) would remain under Israeli military control until Israel’s security is assured.

Never mind how the old Oslo Accords panned out—the 1993 US-brokered agreement that was supposedly designed to pave the way for Israeli/Palestinian peace and Palestinian self-governance, i.e. a two-state solution. Friedman might do well to revisit his own assessment in 2000 that “the Israeli propaganda that the Palestinians mostly rule themselves in the West Bank is fatuous nonsense,” and that “Israeli confiscation of Palestinian land for more settlements is going on to this day—seven years into Oslo.”

Friedman warns Trump that

the Middle East is either going to be reborn as a strong region where normalized relations, trade and cooperation are defining objectives, or disintegrate into a few solid nation-states surrounded by vast zones of disorder, warlordism and terrorists who are chillingly expert at using drones.

Lest anyone jump to the conclusion that Friedman has at last gotten something right, rest assured that the drone-happy terrorists to which he is referring are not in fact the Israelis—despite the Israeli military’s established chilling expertise in said field.

‘Birth pangs of a new Middle East’Friedman claimed that in Iraq, the US was “a well-armed external midwife, whom everyone on the ground both fears and trusts” (Jacobin, 7/26/12).

As for the alleged necessity that the Middle East “be reborn,” murderous obstetrics have long factored into the United States’ Orientalist approach to Arab and Muslim regions of the world; just recall then–Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s favorable assessment of Israel’s summer 2006 slaughter-fest in Lebanon as the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

That particular assault, which killed approximately 1,200 people in 34 days, was subsequently invoked by Friedman in 2009 as a positive precedent when Israel was once again ravaging the Gaza Strip. Declaring that Israel’s decision in 2006 to “exact enough pain on the civilians” of Lebanon was “not pretty, but it was logical,” Friedman prescribed the same “logical” approach to Gaza—to hell with the pesky Geneva Conventions, as well as Friedman’s own ostensible opposition to, um, terrorism.

Of a piece with the whole rebirth-by-mass-killing theme is the Orientalist exploitation of infantilizing terminology. And in that realm, too, Friedman has long excelled, including in his repeated references to Afghanistan—a nation decimated by the US with Friedman’s enthusiastic encouragement—as a “special needs baby.” Then there was the time he complained that the US was “babysitting a civil war” in Iraq—a baby-sitting job that, mind you, happened to have been unleashed by the very 2003 US invasion extensively cheer-led by Friedman, who in 2002 argued that such a war was the “most important task worth doing.”

As I note in my book, Friedman’s reliance on childish condescension is

merely one manifestation of a tradition of unabashed Orientalism that discredits Arabs and Muslims as agents capable of managing their own destinies and sets up a power scheme in which the United States and its military simultaneously occupy the positions of killer/torturer, liberator, educator and parent/babysitter.

As is the case with the 2006 “birth pangs” and the current Middle East that Trump has now been tasked with rebirthing, the Arab/Muslim world is often portrayed as having not even yet made it into infant form, instead awaiting violent expulsion from the imperial womb—as in Friedman’s eloquently cogent 2012 proclamation that Syria was in need of a “well-armed external midwife.”

‘Animal Planet’As FAIR (2/6/24) noted, “The comparison of official enemies to vermin is a hallmark of propaganda in defense of genocide.”

Of course, Friedman’s Orientalist repertoire goes beyond infantilizing rhetoric and fetal fantasies. There was that time in 1988 that he decided that Palestinians could be collectively referred to as Ahmed—“I believe that as soon as Ahmed has a seat in the bus, he will limit his demands”—after which Noam Chomsky questioned whether journalists could also be promoted to chief diplomatic correspondent at the New York Times by suggesting that Hymie or Sambo be given a seat in the bus.

And just last year in the midst of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Friedman undertook to outdo himself with a column headlined “Understanding the Middle East Through the Animal Kingdom,” which as I observed at the time would have already been sufficiently grotesquely bonkers had the Israeli military establishment not taken the liberty of classifying its Palestinian victims as “human animals.”

The column hosted some nonsensical babble about parasitoid wasps and sifaka lemurs, along with the following information about our columnist’s investigative modus operandi: “Sometimes I contemplate the Middle East by watching CNN. Other times, I prefer Animal Planet.”

Anyway, Friedman is now clearly the best candidate to help Trump “Remake the Middle East if You Dare.” No matter that Friedman purports to be at odds with Trump’s nasty worldview; the two conveniently share a haughty and snotty antagonism vis-à-vis those “animal planet” parts of the world that need a “well-armed external midwife” as a mission civilisatrice.

If only Friedman himself could be rebirthed into something more human.

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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.

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MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews, once one of the most prominent pundits on cable TV, used his post-election appearance on Morning Joe (Mediaite, 11/6/24) to demonstrate just how unhelpful political commentary can be.

Asked by host Willie Geist for his “morning after assessment of what happened,” Matthews fumed:

Immigration has been a terrible decision for Democrats. I don’t know who they think they were playing to when they let millions of people come cruising through the border at their own will. Because of their own decisions, they came right running to that border, and they didn’t do a thing about it.

And a lot of people are very angry about that. Working people, especially, feel betrayed. They feel that their country has been given away, and they don’t like it.

And I don’t know who liked it. The Hispanics apparently didn’t like it. They want the law enforced. And so I’m not sure they were playing to anything that was smart here, in terms of an open border. And that’s what it is, an open border. And I think it’s a bad decision. I hope they learn from it.

You could not hope for a more distorted picture of Biden administration immigration policy from Fox News or OAN. “They didn’t do a thing about it”? President Joe Biden deported, turned back or expelled more than 4 million immigrants and refugees through February 2024—more than President Donald Trump excluded during his entire first term (Migration Policy Institute, 6/27/24).

Human Rights Watch (1/5/23) criticized Biden for continuing many of Trump’s brutal anti-asylum policies; the ACLU (6/12/24) called those restrictions unconstitutional. How can you have any kind of rational debate about what the nation’s approach to immigration should be when the supposedly liberal 24-hour news network is pretending such measures amount to an “open border”?

‘Democrats don’t know how people think’In one brief segment, MSNBC‘s Chris Matthews (Morning Joe, 11/6/24) was able to mangle the most important issues of 42% of the electorate.

“It’s all about immigration and the economy,” Matthews told Geist. Well, he got the economics just as wrong:

I think you can talk all you want about the rates of inflation going down. What people do is they remember what the price of something was, whether it’s gas or anything, or cream cheese, or anything else, and they’ll say, “I remember when it was $2, and now it’s $7.” But they remember it in the last five years. That’s how people think. Democrats don’t know how people think anymore. They think about their country and they think about the cost of things.

The suggestion here is that success in fighting inflation would not be bringing the rate of price increases down, but returning prices to what they were before the inflationary period. That’s called deflation, a phenomenon generally viewed as disastrous that policy makers make strenuous efforts to prevent.

A decade ago, the Wall Street Journal (10/16/14) described “the specter of deflation” as “a worry that top policy makers thought they had beaten back”:

A general fall in consumer prices emerged as a big concern after the 2008 financial crisis because it summoned memories of deep and lingering downturns like the Great Depression and two decades of lost growth in Japan. The world’s central banks in recent years have used a variety of easy-money policies to fight its debilitating effects.

Paul Krugman (New York Times, 8/2/10) noted that

in a deflationary economy, wages as well as prices often have to fall—and…in general economies don’t manage to have falling wages unless they also have mass unemployment, so that workers are desperate enough to accept those wage declines.

It’s natural for ordinary consumers to think that if prices going up is bad, prices going down must be good. For someone like Matthews to think that, when he’s been covering national politics for more than three decades, is incompetence.

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This week on CounterSpin: We talk about what just happened, and corporate media’s role in it, with Julie Hollar, senior analyst at the media watch group FAIR, and FAIR’s editor Jim Naureckas.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241108HollarNaureckas.mp3Washington Post (7/25/21)

We also hear some of an important conversation we had with political scientist Dorothee Benz the day after the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241108Benz.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at non-presidential election results.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241108Banter.mp3 Featured image: Women’s March to the White House, November 2, 2024 (Creative Commons photo: Amaury Laporte)

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Corporate media may not have all the same goals as MAGA Republicans, but they share the same strategy: Fear works.

Appeals to fear have an advantage over other kinds of messages in that they stimulate the deeper parts of our brains, those associated with fight-or-flight responses. Fear-based messages tend to circumvent our higher reasoning faculties and demand our attention, because evolution has taught our species to react strongly and quickly to things that are dangerous.

This innate human tendency has long been noted by the media industry (Psychology Today, 12/27/21), resulting in the old press adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” Politicians, too, are aware of this brain hack (Conversation, 1/11/19)—and no one relies on evoking fear more than once-and-future President Donald Trump (New York Times, 10/1/24).

This is why coverage of issues in this election season have dovetailed so well with the Trump campaign’s lines of attack against the Biden/Harris administration—even in outlets that are editorially opposed, at least ostensibly, to Trumpism.

Scary issuesCorporate media rarely point, as this New York Times graphic (7/24/24) did, that crime has fallen dramatically since 1991, and continued to fall during the Biden/Harris administration.

Take immigration, a topic that could easily be covered as a human interest story, with profiles of people struggling to reach a better life against stark challenges. Instead, corporate media tend to report on it as a “border crisis,” with a “flood” of often-faceless migrants whose very existence is treated as a threat (FAIR.org, 5/24/21).

This is the news business deciding that fear attracts and holds an audience better than empathy does. And that business model would be undermined by reporting that consistently acknowledged that the percentage of US residents who are undocumented workers rose only slightly under the Biden administration, from 3.2% in 2019 to 3.3% in 2022 (the latest year available)—and is down from a peak of 4.0% in 2007 (Pew, 7/22/24; FAIR.org, 10/16/24).

With refugees treated as a scourge in centrist and right-wing media alike, is it any wonder that Trump can harvest votes by promising to do something about this menace? Eleven percent of respondents in NBC‘s exit poll said that immigration was the single issue that mattered most in casting their vote; 90% of the voters in that group voted for Trump.

Crime is another fear-based issue that Trump hammered on in his stump speech. “Have you seen what’s been happening?” he said of Washington, DC (Washington Post, 3/11/24). “Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged, beat up.”

Trump could make such hyperbolic claims sound credible because corporate media had paved the way with alarmist coverage of crime (FAIR.org, 11/10/22). It was rare to see a report that acknowledged, as an infographic in the New York Times (7/24/24) did, that crime has dropped considerably from 2020 to 2024, when it hit a four-decade low (FAIR.org, 7/26/24).

‘Classic fear campaign’Republicans spent so much on transphobic ads (Truthout, 11/5/04) because they knew voters had been primed by media to fear trans people.

Trans people, improbably enough, are another favorite subject of fear stories for media and MAGA alike. “Republicans spent nearly $215 million on network TV ads vilifying transgender people this election cycle,” Truthout (11/5/04) reported, with Trump spending “more money on anti-trans ads than on ads concerning housing, immigration and the economy combined.”

Journalist Erin Reed (PBS NewsHour, 11/2/24) described this as “a classic fear campaign”:

The purpose of a fear campaign is to distract you from issues that you normally care about by making you so afraid of a group of people, of somebody like me, for instance, that you’re willing to throw everything else away because you’re scared.

Transphobia has been a major theme in right-wing media, but has been a prominent feature of centrist news coverage as well, particularly in the New York Times (FAIR.org, 5/11/23). Rather than reporting centered on trans people, which could have humanized a marginalized demographic that’s unfamiliar to many readers, the Times chose instead to present trans youth in particular as a threat—focusing on “whether trans people are receiving too many rights, and accessing too much medical care, too quickly,” as FAIR noted.

‘Alienating voters’ with ‘progressive agenda’The New York Times (11/6/24) didn’t want people to vote for Trump—but its reporting contributed to the perception that “an infusion of immigrants” and “a porous southern border” were among “the nation’s urgent problems.”

But rather than examining their own role in promoting the irrational fears that were the lifeblood of the successful Trump campaign, corporate media focused on their perennial electoral scapegoat: the left (FAIR.org, 11/5/21). The New York Times editorial board (11/6/24) quickly diagnosed the Democrats’ problem (aside from sticking with Biden too long):

The party must also take a hard look at why it lost the election…. It took too long to recognize that large swaths of their progressive agenda were alienating voters, including some of the most loyal supporters of their party. And Democrats have struggled for three elections now to settle on a persuasive message that resonates with Americans from both parties who have lost faith in the system—which pushed skeptical voters toward the more obviously disruptive figure, even though a large majority of Americans acknowledge his serious faults. If the Democrats are to effectively oppose Mr. Trump, it must be not just through resisting his worst impulses but also by offering a vision of what they would do to improve the lives of all Americans and respond to anxieties that people have about the direction of the country and how they would change it.

It’s a mind-boggling contortion of logic. The Times doesn’t say which aspects of Democrats’ “progressive agenda” were so alienating to people. But the media all agreed—based largely on exit polls—that Republicans won because of the economy and immigration. The “persuasive message” and “vision…to improve the lives of all Americans” that Democrats failed to offer was pretty clearly an economic one. Which is exactly what progressives in the party have been pushing for the last decade: Medicare for All, a wealth tax, a living minimum wage, etc. In other words, if the Democrats had adopted a progressive agenda, it likely would have been their best shot at offering that vision to improve people’s lives.

More likely, the paper was referring to “identity politics,” which has been a media scapegoat for years—indeed, pundits roundly blamed Hillary Clinton’s loss to Trump on identity politics (or “political correctness”) (FAIR.org, 11/20/16). Then, as now, it was an accusation without evidence.

‘Democratic self-sabotage’The Washington Post‘s Matt Bai (11/6/24) thought Trump’s anti-trans ads resonated with “a lot of traditionally Democratic voters who feel like the party is consumed with cultural issues.”

At the Washington Post, columnist Matt Bai‘s answer (11/6/24) to “Where Did Kamala Harris’s Campaign Go Wrong?” was, in part, that “Democrats have dug themselves into a hole on cultural issues and identity politics,” naming Trump’s transphobic ads as evidence of that. (In a Post roundup of columnist opinions, Bai declared that Harris “couldn’t outrun her party’s focus on trans rights and fighting other forms of oppression.”)

At the same time, Bai acknowledged that he does “think of Trump as being equally consumed with identity—just a different kind.” Fortunately for Republicans, Bai and his fellow journalists never take their kind of identity politics as worth highlighting (FAIR.org, 9/18/24).

George Will (10/6/24), a Never Trumper at the Washington Post, chalked up Harris’s loss largely to “the Democratic Party’s self-sabotage, via identity politics (race, gender), that made Harris vice president.”

Bret Stephens (10/6/24), one of the New York Times‘ set of Never Trumpers, likewise pointed a finger at Democrats’ supposed tilt toward progressives and “identity.” Much like other pundits, Stephens argued that “the politics of today’s left is heavy on social engineering according to group identity.”

Of the Harris campaigns’ “tactical missteps,” Stephens’ first complaint was “her choice of a progressive running mate”—Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. He also accused the party of a “dismissiveness toward the moral objections many Americans have to various progressive causes.” Here he mentioned trans kids’ rights, DEI seminars and “new terminology that is supposed to be more inclusive,” none of which Harris vocally embraced.

But underlying all of these arguments is a giant fundamental problem: It’s simply a fantasy (advanced repeatedly by Republicans) that Harris was running on identity politics, or as a radical progressive. News articles (e.g., Slate, 9/5/24; Forbes, 11/5/24) regularly acknowledged that Harris, in contrast to Hillary Clinton, for instance, shied away from centering her gender or ethnic background, or appealing to identity in her campaign.

‘Wary and alienated’In a rare instance of actually listening to left-wing voices, a New York Times article (10/24/24) focused on pre-election warnings that Harris “risks chilling Democratic enthusiasm by alienating progressives and working-class voters.”

The Times‘ own reporting made Harris’s distancing from progressive politics perfectly clear not two weeks ago, in an article (10/24/24) headlined, “As Harris Courts Republicans, the Left Grows Wary and Alienated.” In a rare example of the Times centering a left perspective in a political article, reporters Nicholas Nehamas and Erica L. Green wrote:

In making her closing argument this month, Ms. Harris has campaigned four times with Liz Cheney, the Republican former congresswoman, stumping with her more than with any other ally. She has appeared more in October with the billionaire Mark Cuban than with Shawn Fain, the president of the United Auto Workers and one of the nation’s most visible labor leaders.

She has centered her economic platform on middle-class issues like small businesses and entrepreneurship rather than raising the minimum wage, a deeply held goal of many Democrats that polls well across the board. She has taken a harder-line stance on the border than has any member of her party in a generation and has talked more prominently about owning a Glock than about combating climate change. She has not broken from President Biden on the war Israel is waging in Gaza.

Kamala Harris did not run as a progressive, either in terms of economic policy or identity politics. But to a corporate media that largely complemented, rather than countered, Trump’s fear-based narratives on immigrants, trans people and crime, blaming the left is infinitely more appealing than recognizing their own culpability.

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Janine Jackson interviewed ProPublica‘s Nicole Foy about immigration and labor for the November 1, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241101Foy.mp3Janine Jackson: One of the weirdest and most harmful things so-called mainstream news media do is to take concerns, social problems, experiences, hardships—and reduce them to “electoral issues,” meaningful solely to the extent that candidates talk about them, and defined in terms of what they say—rather than starting with people, and our lives, and judging candidates based on whether their proposed responses are grounded and humane.

Immigration would have to be near the top of the list of phenomena that exists, has existed, worldwide forever, but that corporate news media seem comfortable larding with whatever ignorant hearsay and disinformation politicians of the moment care to spout. Anyone interested in just, human-centered immigration policy has to keep their eyes on the prize through the fog of horserace coverage.

Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica, where she’s Ancil Payne Fellow. She joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Nicole Foy.

Nicole Foy: Thank you so much for having me.

ProPublica (10/22/24)

JJ: I want to talk about your recent piece that gets at a lot of things, but it really is a story of a person. And so, before anything else, please just tell us, if you would, about Elmer De León Pérez, and what happened in January of this year.

NF: Yeah, so Elmer was a young, only 20 years old, Guatemalan immigrant who was living in Houma, Louisiana, which is a little bit southwest of New Orleans, one of the areas that’s quite frequently threatened by hurricanes. He was working at a shipyard in the Houma area. He was a welder, pretty skilled welder. He made a decent amount of money, and was called upon to do some pretty difficult tasks, including helping build a ship for NOAA, which people may know for weather forecasting and hurricane forecasting. This shipyard that he was working at had a number of government contracts for ships.

He was building this ship for NOAA on that morning in January, when, essentially, his coworkers realized that he didn’t show up for lunch that day. And by the time he was found in the tank of the ship where he was welding, he was already unconscious, unresponsive, and, later, first responders did not continue trying to resuscitate him because he was already showing signs of rigor mortis, meaning that he had likely died some time ago.

And in the aftermath of all of that, his family, which, even though he was only 20, he had a young son with another immigrant who also lives in Houma, and he has an extended family, from Louisiana to all the way back in Guatemala, who cared quite a bit about him. They not only struggled to get answers about what happened to him for a long time, but they’ve yet to receive any sort of compensation, or even really acknowledgement, from the company he was working for, and even though he died on the job.

JJ: So this is a person who dies on the job, working for a government contract. So what is it that made you want to report this out? It can’t be because you thought this is an anomalous case.

NF: Yeah. The way this story started is kind of interesting, actually, because my editor and I were initially very interested in finding a story that explained what happens when immigrant workers die on the job. I had been telling him how often you see families raising money, whether through GoFundMe, or asking for help on Facebook, often because they’re trying to get their loved ones’ bodies home to their home country, whether they’ve been here for years and years, and they really would prefer to be buried in their hometown, or because they had only been here for a couple of years, and they’re just trying to get their bodies home.

We were really interested in that concept, because it struck us as something really, I think, indicative of, I don’t know—I think it spoke to a number of things about how immigrant workers exist in the United States. We rely on them so heavily now, and have always, and yet their families are often left in really difficult financial straits just to do what they would consider, I am assuming, is the bare minimum, which is get them home, get them buried in the land that they may have wanted to return to, or that they came from. And we were really struck by that.

So I was looking into a number of different cases. I was poring through GoFundMe and Facebook and through OSHA fatality-on-the-job records and pulling different cases, and there’s so many. You spend a lot of time doing this, and you see just how many immigrants are dying on the job, everywhere from California to Louisiana to Texas. And reading the GoFundMe pleas or the Facebook pleas of their family asking for help, to try to have a funeral, send the body home.

Elmer De León Pérez (right) with his father, Erick De Pérez (family photo)

And we were really interested in his case, because as we were doing reporting, not only was I able to find all of the different, just really moving videos that his family had posted on Facebook, of trying to raise money, and then eventually they filmed his body arriving back home to his hometown in Guatemala. And the way the community really came together in a common way was really moving. And also then we, as I looked into his employer and where he died, realized that this was a company that has a number of government contracts, to build and repair ships for the Navy, for the Coast Guard, Army Corps of Engineers—you name it, there’s a government agency that needs a ship.

And so that’s kind of how we got started there, is we were interested in what happens to immigrant workers, to their families, when they die on the job, what kind of care is taken for them. And then we discovered this really truly heartbreaking case of someone who was building a ship for our country, and still his family couldn’t get the help that they say they need.

JJ: This is where journalism connects the human story with a data story, with a broader story, a policy story. The story about immigrant workers and the workforce, it’s like the worst kept secret in the country, the idea that farmworkers, and shipbuilders as you’re talking about, that these industries rely on, they couldn’t operate without, immigrant labor. And yet we’re still supposed to accept this weird capitalist story about only Americans can work here, and immigrants are actually stealing jobs. And it’s such a weird disconnect between what a lot of folks know is actually happening, and the storyline that people are being told.

And I think that’s what’s so important about this story: Organizations, companies, rely on immigrant labor, but they rely on them in a particular way. And that has to do with the contratista, the idea of the legal designation that is given to these workers. And that, of course, is important in Pérez’s story.

Nicole Foy:

NF: Yeah, I think, too, what I found really telling, reporting this story, is that it really is such a common story for immigrants who don’t currently have the legal authority to work in the US, the ways that they still have to pursue in order to support their families. And it was really interesting to see that playing out in an industry that you don’t really see as part of the immigration debate, shipbuilding, and particularly shipbuilding for government ships.

This particular shipyard, they don’t have contracts to build nuclear submarines or even battleships or anything, but they’re building support vessels or research ships for NOAA, for so many different branches of the military and for the government, that are pretty essential to our country’s defenses, and also just to keep our country running properly. And that’s not really something that you see in the immigration debate, is that we also need workers desperately for those types of jobs.

I think people still think of welding in a shipyard as a job that should pay so well, and does pay so well, that everybody is competing with each other for them. But the economic facts of our country right now are very different. We don’t have as many blue collar workers as we used to, and we have quite a lot of work that needs to be done. So that’s why you see immigrants in these jobs that, again, I think there’s often this narrative of “they’re taking these jobs from workers,” but the shipbuilding industry in particular is suffering greatly from a really dramatic lack of workers to do the jobs that they need, whether it’s welding or another job in a shipyard.

I just thought that was another good example of his life and the work that he was doing. It’s another good example of how, if you’re commonly thinking of immigrant workers, you may be thinking of agriculture, you may be thinking of maybe restaurants or construction. And certainly there are many, many immigrant workers sustaining those industries.

Brookings (10/17/22)

But they’ve become very essential to the fabric of our entire economy. It’s not very easy to disentangle them from the work that we need to do as a country. And that’s something that I don’t think a lot of our current rhetoric accounts for, is how many different jobs and how many different types of jobs around the country that these workers are fulfilling, that we’d miss them quite a lot if they weren’t there.

JJ: Let me just ask you, you tried to get responses from employers and from folks to say, “What’s going on here? What happened here? Why are you not accountable for this?” What happened with that exercise in trying to say: A person died, a person died, his family deserves compensation. What happened there?

NF: I did my absolute best. ProPublica takes it very seriously that we want everyone to have a chance to tell their side of the story. And so I did everything possible. It wasn’t just phone calls and emails. I came by the shipyard several times. I hand-delivered, actually, a letter with a list of questions to one of the shipyard executives several weeks before the story published, just in an attempt to try to get some answers.

I also spoke very briefly with the contractor that actually employed Elmer. I talked to him briefly, but he declined a comment on the advice of his lawyers.

I don’t know why Thoma-Sea, the shipyard where he was working, didn’t want to comment, because they told me very little. I did my best to reach out to them.

But I think it was really important to try to get their side of the story, especially since we also looked into the campaign finance records, and saw that, even though there are so many immigrants like Elmer, he was not the only one working at the shipyard, the company’s main managing director, top executive, has donated fairly heavily to many Louisiana politicians who have been vocal about their desire to either close the border, restrict immigration, and, honestly, what they think about immigrants in their own state.

JJ: I was struck, as I’ve said, throughout the piece, by how many powerful people and company representatives said they just had no comment. And it reminds me, it takes me back to independent reporting. It’s the families of the immigrant workers who are killed and then ignored and not given compensation; they look to the press, they need to speak, they want to get their voice out. And the powerful people, what’s in it for them? They don’t need to speak or justify or explain themselves. And it makes me mad, because I think Journalism 101 would send you back to those powerful people and demand some sort of answer from them.

The other thing is that you show up at this person’s home, and they’re like, “Oh, it’s really disrespectful to show up at the home of a company CEO where a worker has died on the job. It’s really disrespectful of journalists to bother us at home.” And I just think, there are people who need a press, an independent press, and there are people who don’t need it. It drives me angry. So I just want to say, the difference between getting access to people who are harmed and people who are harming, as a reporter, that’s a very different thing.

NF: Yeah, I appreciate you saying that. I just wanted to make sure that everyone gets to tell their side of the story. As a reporter, I try not to approach something speaking as if I know everything, but want folks to share their side.

And genuinely, too, I think a lot of people, including Elmer’s family, are still seeking answers. I was trying my best to get answers as well.

JJ: There are very particular legal regulations that folks hide behind, in a way, in terms of delivering protections. You’re not an employee, you’re a contracted worker, or you’re a subcontracted worker, and that allows them some degree of cover.

NF: And also, too, at the same time that it allows them some degree of cover when it comes to liability in an accident, it’s also what makes it possible for many of these companies to hire immigrant workers who do not have authorization to work. So it’s one of those things where it’s sometimes the only way that an immigrant worker can get a job, as they’re trying to maybe support their family, support themselves.

But it can leave them very vulnerable, because these layers of contractors can make it much harder for them, or their families if they pass away, to claim any type of support or resources. They still can, but the workers’ compensation system is pretty difficult to navigate without a lawyer in a straightforward case. And when you add on different barriers that contractors may face, and then certainly folks who don’t speak English as their first language, and then also you have legal status mixed in there, and folks being really worried that coming forward could endanger them.

All of that does tend to make it easier for the company to have these systems in place, and certainly disincentivizes many folks who need these resources, need benefits, need some type of financial compensation. It disincentivizes them from stepping forward, or just fighting through what can be a pretty difficult process.

JJ: And, not for nothing, incentivizes the companies themselves to set up this system in which their workers don’t have access to this kind of compensation.

NF: Yeah, I would imagine that—I can’t speak for anybody’s motives, but I do think they’re going to get the workers that they need, one way or the other, and some ways leave their workers with much more limited protections.

JJ: Let me just ask you, finally, if you have thoughts about the way that immigration and immigrants are covered, what would you have to say in terms of…. I had kind of a rant at the beginning about how I really am unhappy when immigrants are reduced to an electoral issue, when they’re human people and they have a story. And I feel like that’s what reporters should be doing.

But do you have thoughts in terms of the way that big media cover immigration, or just thoughts about something you’d like to see more or less of in terms of, big picture, the way the story is covered?

AP* via PBS* (10/12/24)

NF: Yeah, I think there are a lot of really wonderful immigration reporters out there who are doing their best to bring facts to a pretty charged conversation, honestly, a recurring conversation. I mean, I have not been in the industry for decades and decades and decades, but this is definitely the third election cycle that I’ve covered where immigration has been a pretty significant issue, whether because candidates have made it so, or people are concerned about folks arriving at the border. And I can say, as a journalist who is trying to present facts, it can sometimes be distressing to see the same misrepresentation of the facts repeated, sometimes without pushback or factchecking.

But the truth is, and I think the Elmer story shows this, is that candidates can say as much as they want that immigrants are stealing jobs, and the actual reality on the ground just does not really reflect that. And, at the same time, there’s a pretty significant narrative about, maybe, people who believe that immigrant workers get more than they do. I think you can see, in this case, that not only are many not getting more than a citizen worker, their families are often left abandoned and without any resources when something tragic happens.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with reporter Nicole Foy. Her article, “An Immigrant Died Building a Ship for the US Government. His Family Got Nothing,” can be found at ProPublica.org. Thank you so much, Nicole Foy, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

NF: Thank you for having me.

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Cuba is in the midst of an ongoing humanitarian crisis, and October’s widespread power outages are only adding to the Cuban people’s troubles. For the last six decades, Cuba has been on the receiving end of myriad sanctions by the United States government. This blockade has proved devastating to human life.

Reporting on Cuba’s blackouts have either omitted or paid brief lip-service to the effects of US sanctions on the Cuban economy, and how those sanctions have created the conditions for the crisis. Instead, media have focused on the inefficient and authoritarian Communist government as the cause of the island’s troubles.

Pulping the economyMichael Galant (The Hill, 1/5/24): “Businesses and financial institutions, including many from outside the United States, often elect to sever all connections to Cuba rather than risk being sanctioned themselves for association with ‘a sponsor of terror.'”

One of President Donald Trump’s final acts in office was to re-designate Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, after President Barack Obama had removed them from the list in 2015 as a part of his Cuban thaw. Inclusion on the list subjects a country to restrictions on US foreign aid and financing, but, more importantly, the SSoT list encourages third-party over-compliance with sanctions. “Businesses and financial institutions, including many from outside the United States, often elect to sever all connections to Cuba rather than risk being sanctioned themselves,” The Hill (1/5/24) reported.

Trump reportedly added Cuba to the list for harboring members of FARC and ELN, two left-wing Colombian armed movements. However, Colombian President Gustavo Petro later “noted that Colombia itself, in cooperation with the Obama administration, had asked Cuba to host the FARC and ELN members as part of peace talks,” the Intercept (12/14/23) wrote. Indeed, if Cuba deported the dissidents, they would have been in violation of the protocols of the peace talks, which they were bound to by international law (The Nation, 2/24/23).

President Joe Biden has not begun the process of reviewing Cuba’s inclusion on the list, despite his campaign promises to the contrary.

The terror designation, plus the many other sanctions imposed by Trump and continued by Biden, are no small potatoes. Ed Augustin wrote at Drop Site (10/1/24) that

the terror designation, together with more than 200 sanctions enacted against the island since Obama left office, has pulped the Cuban economy by cutting revenue to the struggling Cuban state…. The combined annual cost of the Trump/Biden sanctions, [economists] say, amounts to billions of dollars a year.

Augustin argued that the economic warfare regime is a root cause of the rolling blackouts, water shortages and mass emigration that have plagued Cuba in recent years. Even imports that are ostensibly exempt from sanctions, like medication, are caught in the dragnet as multinational companies scramble to cut ties with the island. Banks are so reluctant to run afoul of US sanctions, Augustin wrote, “that often, even when the state can find the money to buy, and a provider willing to sell, there’s simply no way of making the payment.”

Cuba’s pariah status as a SSoT has put a stranglehold on its economy, and its government’s ability to administer public services. However, US restrictions on Cuba are almost never mentioned in US coverage, and reporting on the recent blackouts is no exception.

Cash-strapped CommunistsReuters (10/10/19): “Tougher US sanctions against Cuba have led international banks to avoid transactions involving the island, while prospective overseas investors put plans on hold.”

Coverage has emphasized the inability of Cuba’s government to pay for necessary fuel imports. The New York Times (10/19/24) reported “the strapped Communist government could barely afford” to pay for fuel. Elsewhere, the Times (10/18/24) claimed “a severe economic crisis and the cash crunch it produced made it harder for Cuba to pay for those fuel imports.”

The Washington Post (10/18/24) made broadly similar arguments, chalking the blackouts up to “a shortage of imported oil and the cash-strapped government’s insufficient maintenance of the creaky grid.”

The “cash crunch” referenced by the Times is not just the result of an abstract economic crisis, as is implied. Instead, it is a direct effect of US sanctions on financial institutions. During the Obama administration, European banks, including ING and BNP Paribas, were fined to the tune of over $10 billion for transacting with Cuba (Jacobin, 3/27/22). Even before Cuba was choked further as a result of their SSoT designation, reporting by Reuters (10/10/19) showed the extent to which banks were terminating operations with Cuba and Cuban entities:

Many Western banks have long refused Cuba-related business for fear of running afoul of US sanctions and facing hefty fines.… Panama’s Multibank shut down numerous Cuba-related accounts this year and European banks are restricting clients associated with Cuba to their own nationals, if that.…

Businessmen and diplomats said large French banks, including Societe Generale, no longer want anything to do with Cuba, and some are stopping payments to pensioners living on the Caribbean island.… For the first time in years, the island has had problems financing the upcoming sugar harvest. Various joint venture projects, from golf resorts to alternative energy, are finding it nearly impossible to obtain private credit.

This de-risking by financial institutions manufactures a cash-scarce economy. Cuba’s inability to procure cash for imports is not a function of financial mismanagement, or a lack of credit-worthiness. Instead, it is a deliberate effect of American foreign policy. By omitting the actions of the most powerful government on earth, mainstream coverage allows that only Cuban failures could be the cause of a shortage of cash.

‘Terrorism’ cuts off tourismBritain’s ambassador to Cuba told the Telegraph (11/6/23), “Those who come are profoundly shocked at what the SSOT designation is doing to the people here.”

Cuba has historically used tourism as a way of bringing money into the economy, but lately the Cuban tourism industry has been severely depressed. The explanation employed by corporate media for the decline of this industry is to blame the extended effects of the pandemic recession (New York Times, 10/19/24; Washington Post, 10/18/24).

This explanation, however, is incomplete. Cuba has indeed had a lackluster rebound in their tourism industry, but the Times and the Post fail to explain why Cuba has faltered while other Caribbean islands have more than re-achieved their pre-pandemic tourist numbers.

Travelers from Britain, Australia, Japan and 37 other countries do not need to procure a visa for travel to the United States. Instead, they can use ESTA, an electronic visa waiver. This greatly reduces the cost and the annoyance of obtaining permission to visit the US. However, since Cuba’s 2021 listing as a SSoT, any visit to the country by an ESTA passport-holder revokes the visa waiver, for life (Telegraph, 11/6/23). In other words, any Brit (or Kiwi, or Korean, and so on) who visits Cuba must, for the rest of their lives, visit a US embassy and pay $180 before being able to enter the United States. US policy, not a Covid hangover, is hamstringing any possibility of a resurgence in tourism to Cuba.

Blame gameDuring Cuba’s most recent energy crisis, the New York Times published three stories describing the blackouts. Two of these stories mention the US blockade only as something that the Cuban government blames for the crisis.

The New York Times (10/21/24) presented the idea that the US is punishing Cuba’s economy as a Communist allegation: “The Cuban government blames the power crisis on the US trade embargo, and sanctions that were ramped up by the Trump administration.”

The headline on the Times website (10/21/24) read: “A Nationwide Blackout, Now a Hurricane. How Much Can Cuba Endure?” The paper was right to report on the humanitarian crisis ongoing in Cuba, but it chose to downplay the most important root cause: the decades-long US blockade on Cuba’s economy and its people.

That same story described Cuba as “a Communist country long accustomed to shortages of all kinds and spotty electrical service.” Why is the country so used to shortages? Eleven paragraphs later, the Times gave an explanation, or at least, Cuba’s explanation:

The Cuban government blames the power crisis on the US trade embargo, and sanctions that were ramped up by the Trump administration, which severely restricts the Cuban government’s cash flow. The US Department of the Treasury blocks tankers that have delivered oil to Cuba, which drives up the island’s fuel costs, because Cuba has a limited pool of suppliers available to it.

Earlier coverage by the Times (10/18/24) similarly couched the effects of the blockade as merely a claim by Cuba. The Washington Post (10/22/24) also situated the blockade as something that “the Cuban government and its allies blame” for the ongoing crisis.

To report that Cuban officials blame the US sanctions for the energy crisis is a bit like reporting that fishermen blame the moon for the rising tide. It is of course factual that US trade restrictions–which affect not just US businesses, but also multinational businesses based in other countries–are a blunt weapon, with impact against not just a government, but an entire people.

At the very least, it is incumbent upon journalists to do at least minimal investigation and explanation of the facts concerning the subject of their reporting. None of the coverage in either major paper bothered to investigate whether this was a fair explanation, or even to report generally the effects a 60-year blockade might have on an economy.

Brief—and buried“Cuban economists and foreign analysts blamed the crisis on several factors,” the New York Times (10/19/24) reported; 18 paragraphs later, the story gets around to mentioning US sanctions.

On October 19, the Times gave its most complete explanation of the relationship between the US sanctions regime and the Cuban blackouts:

Cuba’s economy enjoyed a brief honeymoon with the United States during the Obama administration, which sought to normalize relations after decades of hostility, while keeping a longstanding economic embargo in place. President Donald J. Trump reversed course, leading to renewed restrictions on tourism, visas, remittances, investments and commerce.

This explanation can be found in the 31st paragraph of the 37-paragraph story. Only once the Times has painted a picture of all the ways the Communist government has gone wrong can there be a brief mention of the role of US sanctions. And how brief it is; the Times chose not to detail the extent of blockade against Cuba, nor how Cuba was wrongfully placed on the SSoT list, nor the failure of Biden to reevaluate Cuba’s status as he promised on the campaign trail.

Describing the US starvation of Cuba’s economy in abstract terms like “economic crisis” provides cover for deliberate policy decisions by the US government. By reporting on the embargo only as something that the Cuban government claims, it is easy for readers to dismiss that explanation as simply a Communist excuse. Instead of asking why the United States is choosing to enforce a crippling sanctions regime on another country, outlets like the New York Times find it easier to repeat the line that Cuba’s government has only itself to blame for its problems.

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The New York Times (10/12/24) says it “verified” supposed Hamas documents provided to the paper by Israel—which turns out to mostly mean that that the Israeli military “concluded the documents were real.”

Earlier this month, the New York Times (10/12/24), Washington Post (10/12/24) and Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) each published front-page articles based on different sets of documents handed to them by the Israeli military.

Israel claims it seized all the documents—in the form of meeting minutes, letters and planning documents—in its ground invasion of Gaza, and that they reveal insights into Hamas’s operations prior to the October 7 attacks. The documents include alleged evidence of Hamas’s pre-10/7 coordination with Iran, plans to blow up Israeli skyscrapers, and even a scheme to use horse-drawn chariots in an attack from Gaza.

Documents received directly from intelligence agencies should always be treated with skepticism, and that’s especially true when their government has a well-documented history of blatant lying. Yet leading newspapers took these Israeli document dumps largely at face value, advancing the agenda of a genocidal rogue state.

A history of lyingFake “Hamas” documents were being cited in the press as recently as September 2024 (Middle East Eye, 9/9/24).

Israel’s use of fabrications to shape public perception is well known, and was put on display early in the assault on Gaza that began last October. After an explosion at Al Ahli hospital killed and injured hundreds (misreporting of which caused a great deal of confusion), the media naturally pointed the finger at Israel. The Israeli government, concerned about the public backlash, denied responsibility, claiming that the explosion was caused by a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. (See FAIR.org, 11/3/23.)

To back up their claims, Israel released a recording allegedly capturing two Palestinian militants discussing Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s responsibility for the strike. However, an analysis by the firm Earshot found that the audio was the result of two separate channels being edited together (Channel 4, 10/19/23). In other words, Israel engineered a phony audio clip in an attempt to clear itself of war crimes in the public mind.

Investigations based on open sources have since come to various conclusions about the attack (Guardian, 10/18/23; Bellingcat, 10/18/23; Human Rights Watch, 11/26/23; AP, 11/22/23; Michael Kobs, 2023; New Arab, 2/19/24), but Israel’s fraudulent attempt to manipulate evidence certainly suggests that they had something to hide, and demonstrates their lack of reliability as a media source. Recently, the UN released a report accusing Israel of systematically targeting healthcare infrastructure in Gaza, making their denials of this earlier attack far less credible.

In another instance, Israel presented 3D renderings of a supposed Hamas “command center” beneath Al Shifa hospital, claiming it was based on intelligence. However, no such command center was ever found (FAIR.org, 12/1/23). Upon storming the hospital, Israel staged scenes in order to bolster claims that the facility was used by militant groups. The deception was so blatant that mainstream outlets were openly calling it out.

Recently Israel was caught actually providing fabricated documents to the press with the aim of manipulating public opinion. Earlier this year, the Israeli government provided documents to both the Jewish Chronicle (9/5/24) and the German paper Bild (9/6/24) that purportedly showed that Hamas had no interest in a ceasefire, and had a plan to sneak the late Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar out of Gaza to Iran, along with some of the remaining hostages. The reports were then uncritically repeated in outlets like the Times of Israel (9/6/24).

Shortly after these documents were published, the Israeli paper Yedioth Ahronoth (9/8/24) reported on an internal IDF investigation that found that they had been leaked to foreign media as part of a campaign to “shape public opinion on Israel.” The documents were determined to be forgeries, after a comprehensive search of all databases containing documents found in the wake of Israel’s operations. The IDF told the paper that an investigation was underway to determine the origin of the leak.

This non-exhaustive list of examples demonstrates a pattern of Israel engineering misleading narratives to shape public opinion, and fabricating the evidence needed to do so.

Questionable authenticityThe Washington Post (10/12/24) reported that “the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established”—but there’s no trace of that doubt in the story’s headline or subhead.

Whether they are authentic or not, it is clear that the documents leaked to the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post serve the same purpose of propagandizing on behalf of Israel. In an attempt to preserve some journalistic integrity, the Post and Times both gave separate justifications for why they believed the respective documents leaked to them were authentic.

The Post was quick to note that “the documents’ authenticity could not be definitively established,” but gave readers the impression there was reason to believe they were real. First, it claimed that the contents of the documents it received were

“broadly consistent” with US and allies’ post–October 7 intelligence assessments about Hamas’s long-range planning and complex relationship with Iran.

Then it wrote that unnamed US and Israeli officials they shared the documents with did not express concerns about their authenticity. (Iranian and Hamas officials they consulted didn’t comment on the documents but accused Israel of having a history of “fabricating documents.”)

The New York Times consulted former Hamas member Salah al-Din al-Awawdeh, whom the paper frequently quotes on matters related to Hamas, and an unnamed Palestinian analyst with “knowledge of Hamas’s inner workings.” It also said an internal Israeli military report concluded the documents were authentic, and the paper “researched details mentioned in the meeting records to check that they corresponded with actual events.” It said “Hamas and Hezbollah did not respond to requests to comment” and that Iran “denied the claims made in the minutes.”

The Wall Street Journal story did not describe any attempt to verify the authenticity, and only reported that the paper “hasn’t independently verified the documents.”

But given Israel’s track record, there is no epistemologically sound way of verifying the validity of documents provided by the Israeli government without confirmation from Hamas itself. Citing sources who say that the documents resemble Hamas documents, without noting Israel’s history of creating credible forgeries, creates a patina of credibility without actually substantiating anything.

Advancing Israel’s agendaHaaretz (10/14/24): The documents bolster Netanyahu’s claim that Israel is “fighting a terrifying ‘axis of evil’ led by Iran that threatens to destroy Western culture as a whole.”

The Israeli paper Haaretz (10/14/24), which took the documents as authentic, argued that their release by Israel was “Aimed at Aiding Netanyahu.” While both the Times and the Post have largely advanced Israel’s agenda over the past year of bombing (FAIR.org, 10/13/23, 2/1/24, 10/7/24), both papers are considered to be on the critical end of the press spectrum in the US, particularly towards Netanyahu. As Haaretz explained, this perception enhances the propaganda value of the document leak: “The Times and the Post enjoy greater credibility when they fall in line with Israel’s narrative.”

While Haaretz made no note of the leaked documents provided to the Wall Street Journal, the article ironically acknowledged that

having them published by Fox News or even the Wall Street Journal would have looked like an Israeli public diplomacy operation rather than a legitimate journalistic investigative report.

Haaretz noted that the documents promote narratives that “Israel would be happy to burn into the world’s consciousness,” namely the well-known propaganda effort to equate Hamas with organizations that are universally reviled by Americans. The Post documents purportedly outlined a Hamas plan to blow up a skyscraper in Tel Aviv, evoking the September 11 attacks against the World Trade Center:

The Hamas documents are supposed to bolster Netanyahu’s claim that Israel isn’t fighting against a liberation movement seeking to free the occupied Palestinian people, or even against a paramilitary organization that is poorly funded and trained and lacks planes, the Iron Dome anti-missile system, tanks and artillery….

Rather, it is fighting a terrifying “axis of evil” led by Iran that threatens to destroy Western culture as a whole.

Haaretz also argued that this kind of propaganda campaign was designed to ensure that the violence continues to escalate:

In this spirit, the documents are supposed to justify Israel’s counterattack, which has so far caused enormous death and destruction in Gaza and, to an increasing degree, also in Lebanon.

Obvious PR valueUnlike the New York Times or Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal (10/12/24) acknowledged in its headline that the revelations in the documents are what “Israel says” they show.

While Haaretz overlooked the story from the Wall Street Journal, the same logic can be applied to the documents given to that paper as well. The Journal was apparently curious about the political purpose of the documents, noting that “the officials who provided the documents declined to say why they were releasing them now.”

The Journal wrote that the documents “suggest that Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar was negotiating with Iran over funding for a planned large-scale assault on Israel as far back as 2021,” and gave specific dollar amounts that Iran provided to Hamas’s armed wing. The obvious public relations value of these documents was that they boosted the negative image of Iran prior to Israel’s recent attack on that country.

Israel’s campaign of genocide in Gaza and greater war in the Middle East has been successful in part because the Israeli government can count on Western press to present and contextualize facts in a way that advances their narrative. Despite Israel’s long history of fabrications, the corporate media will dutifully republish documents, statements and explanations with complete credulity.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241101.mp3Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

ProPublica (10/22/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Reading the news today, you might not believe it, but there was a time, not long ago, in which it was acceptable to say out loud that immigration is a boon to this country, and immigrants should be welcomed and supported. Now, news media start with the premise of immigration itself as a “crisis,” with the only debate around how to “stem” or “control” it. That the conversation is premised on disinformation about crime and wages and the reasons US workers are struggling is lost in a fog of political posturing. But immigration isn’t going away, no matter who gains the White House. And children torn from parents, families sent back to dangerous places, workers’ rights denied based on status, won’t be any prettier a legacy, no matter who it’s attached to.

Journalist Nicole Foy reports on immigration and labor at ProPublica. She wrote recently about the life and death of one man, Elmer De Leon Perez, as a sort of emblem of this country’s fraught, dishonest and obscured treatment of people who come here to work and make a life.

We hear that story this week on CounterSpin.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241101Foy.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a look back at recent press coverage of NPR‘s overseers and the Washington Post‘s non-endorsement.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241101Banter.mp3

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The Washington Post (10/24/24) claims that “the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.”

As the country begins to vote in an election that will be hugely consequential for the climate crisis, the central task of news outlets’ climate beats should be informing potential voters of those consequences. Instead, the Washington Post‘s “Climate Lab” seems to be working hard to cast doubt on whether climate change is really causing weather disasters to be more expensive.

In a lengthy piece (10/24/24) headlined “The Real Reason Billion-Dollar Disasters Like Hurricane Helene Are Growing More Common,” Post Climate Lab columnist Harry Stevens highlighted a NOAA chart depicting a notable increase in billion-dollar weather disasters hitting the US that he says is widely used by government reports and officials “to help make the case for climate policies.” But, in fact, Stevens tells readers:

The truth lies elsewhere: Over time, migration to hazard-prone areas has increased, putting more people and property in harm’s way. Disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.

The takeaway is clear: The (Democratic) government is lying to you about the supposedly devastating impacts of climate change.

Distorting with cherry-picked dataThe problem is, it’s Stevens’ story that’s doing the misleading. It relies heavily on the work of one source, Roger Pielke Jr., a longtime climate contrarian beloved by climate denial right-wingers, who cherry-picks data to distort the truth.

What’s worse, from a media critic’s perspective, is that it’s not even a new story; it’s been debunked multiple times over the years. Pielke—a political scientist, not a climate scientist, which Stevens never makes clear—has been promoting this tale since 1998, when he first published a journal article that purported to show that, as Stevens describes, “after adjusting damage to account for the growth in people and property, the trend [of increasing economic costs from weather disasters] disappears.”

A review of Roger Pielke’s book The Climate Fix in the journal Science (11/26/10) accused him of writing “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.”

When Pielke published the argument in his 2010 book, the journal Science (11/26/10) published a withering response, describing the chapter as “a diatribe against the IPCC and other scientists that is based on highly selective and distorted figures and his own studies.” It detailed the multiple methodological problems with Pielke’s argument:

He makes “corrections” for some things (notably, more people putting themselves in harm’s way) but not others. Some adjustments, such as for hurricane losses for the early 20th century, in which the dollar value goes up several hundred–fold, are highly flawed. But he then uses this record to suggest that the resulting absence of trends in damage costs represents the lack of evidence of a climate component. His record fails to consider all tropical storms and instead focuses only on the rare land-falling ones, which cause highly variable damage depending on where they hit. He completely ignores the benefits from improvements in hurricane warning times, changes in building codes, and other factors that have been important in reducing losses. Nor does he give any consideration to our understanding of the physics of hurricanes and evidence for changes such as the 2005 season, which broke records in so many ways.

Similarly, in discussing floods, Pielke fails to acknowledge that many governing bodies (especially local councils) and government agencies (such as the US Army Corps of Engineers) have tackled the mission of preventing floods by building infrastructure. Thus even though heavy rains have increased disproportionately in many places around the world (thereby increasing the risk of floods), the inundations may have been avoided. In developing countries, however, such flooding has been realized, as seen for instance this year in Pakistan, China and India. Other tenuous claims abound, and Pielke cherry-picks points to fit his arguments.

That year, climate expert Joe Romm (Climate Progress, 2/28/10) called Pielke “the single most disputed and debunked person in the entire realm of people who publish regularly on disasters and climate change.”

Debunked a decade agoIn response to Pielke, climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (538, 3/31/14) pointed out that it’s not necessarily appropriate to normalize damages by gross domestic product (GDP) if the intent is to detect an underlying climate trend,” since “GDP increase does not translate in any obvious way to damage increase,” as “wealthier countries can better afford to build stronger structures and to protect assets.”

Pielke peddled the story in 538 (3/19/14) four years later—and lost his briefly held job as a contributor for it, after the scientific community spoke out against it in droves, as not being supported by the evidence.

The backlash led 538 to give MIT climate scientist Kerry Emanuel (3/31/14) a column to rebut Pielke, in which she explained that while it’s of course true that “changing demographics” have impacted the economic costs of weather disasters, Pielke’s data didn’t support his assertion “that climate change has played no role in the observed increase in damages.” She pointed to the same kinds of methodological flaws that Science did, noting that her own research with Yale economist Robert Mendelsohn projected that through the year 2100, “global hurricane damage will about double owing to demographic trends, and double again because of climate change.”

That all happened ten years ago. So why is Pielke’s same old ax-grinding getting a platform at the Washington Post shortly before Election Day?

Stevens does tell readers—quite far down in the article—that Pielke has “clashed with other scientists, journalists and government officials” over his research—though Stevens doesn’t give any details about those clashes, or about Pielke’s reputation among climate scientists more generally.

Stevens also briefly notes that Pielke was recently hired by the American Enterprise Institute, which Stevens characterizes as “center-right,” but more helpfully might have characterized as “taking millions from ExxonMobil since 1998.” But in the same paragraph, Stevens also takes pains to point out that Pielke says he’s planning to vote for Harris, as if to burnish Pielke’s climate-believer bonafides.

Pielke agrees with PielkeRoger Pielke “agrees with studies that agree with Pielke” (Environmental Hazards, 10/12/20).

Stevens tells Post readers that the science is firmly on Pielke’s side:

Similar studies have failed to find global warming’s fingerprint in economic damage from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes and crop losses. Of 53 peer-reviewed studies that assess economic damage from weather events, 52 could not attribute damage trends to global warming, according to Pielke’s 2020 review of the literature, the most recent and comprehensive.

You’ll notice Stevens just used Pielke’s own review to bolster Pielke’s argument. But the journal that published that review (Environmental Hazards, 8/5/20) immediately followed up with the publication of a critique (10/12/20) from researchers who came to the opposite conclusion in their study on US hurricanes. They explained that there are “fundamental shortcomings in this literature,” which comes from a disaster research “field that is currently dominated by a small group of authors” who mostly use the same methodology—adjusting historical economic losses based strictly on “growth in wealth and population”—that Pielke does.

The authors, who wrote a study that actually accounted for this problem and did find that economic losses from hurricanes increased over time after accounting for increases in wealth and population, point out that Pielke dismissed their study and two others that didn’t agree with his own results essentially because they didn’t come to the same conclusions. As the authors of the critique write drily: “Pielke agrees with studies that agree with Pielke.”

A phony ‘consensus’Stevens includes in his article an obligatory line that experts say

disputing whether global warming’s influence can be found in the disaster data is not the same as questioning whether climate change is real or whether society should switch from fossil fuels.

He also adds that

​​many scientists say that global warming has intensified hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other extreme weather, which must be leading to greater economic losses.

Note that he frames it as only “many,” and suggests they are only using (faulty, simplistic) logic, not science. But of course, climate change is intensifying extreme weather, as even Stevens has reported as fact recently (in the link he provides in that passage). In contrast, Stevens writes that

the consensus among disaster researchers is that the rise in billion-dollar disasters, while alarming, is not so much an indicator of climate change as a reflection of societal growth and risky development.

But in fact, as mentioned above, there’s not consensus even among disaster researchers (who are primarily economists). And the “many scientists” who disagree with Pielke aren’t the scientists the Post chooses to focus on. While Stevens quotes a number of different experts, including some who disagree with Pielke, they are not given anywhere near the space—or credence—Pielke and his arguments are. (Pielke’s name appears 15 times across the article and its captions.)

When he does get around to quoting some of the scientists, like MIT’s Emanuel, whose research shows that extreme weather events are intensifying, Stevens presents the conflicting conclusions as a back-and-forth of claims and counterclaims, giving the last word in that debate to a disaster researcher whose goal is to refocus blame for disasters on political decisions—like supporting building in vulnerable locations—rather than climate change.

Changes in our built environment, and governments’ impact on those changes, are certainly an important subject when it comes to accounting for and preventing billion-dollar disasters—which virtually no one disputes. (Indeed, the four government reports Stevens links to in his second paragraph as supposedly misusing the NOAA data explicitly name some variation of “increased building and population growth” as a contributing factor to growing costs.) It’s simply not an either/or question, as the Post‘s teaser framed it: “Many blame global warming. Others say disasters are more expensive because there is more to destroy.” So it’s bizarre and frankly dangerous that ten years after climate scientists debunked Pielke’s claim that there’s no evidence climate change is increasing extreme weather costs, Stevens would take, as the “urgent” question of the moment, “Is global warming to blame” for the growing billion-dollar disaster tally?

By giving the impression that the whole thing is basically a government scam to justify climate policies, Stevens’ direct implication is that even if climate change is indisputable, it doesn’t really matter. And it feeds into climate deniers’ claims that the climate change-believing government is lying about climate change and its impacts, at a time when a large number of those deniers are seeking office.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

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Janine Jackson interviewed the Intercept‘s Shawn Musgrave about the voter fraud hoax as voter suppression, for the October 25, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241025Musgrave.mp3Janine Jackson: When you hear that Rudy Giuliani has been ordered to turn over valuable possessions, including a Manhattan penthouse, watches and a signed Joe DiMaggio jersey, to the two Georgia election workers he falsely accused of ballot tampering in the 2020 election, you might believe that, though the harm is ongoing, at least the lawyers who propped up Donald Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the 2020 vote have paid some kind of price.

And, indeed, catspaws like Sidney Powell, like John Eastman, have faced repercussions. But, our guest explains, not only is the scaffolding of Trump’s voter fraud hoax still standing, some key architects are still hard at work on it.

Shawn Musgrave is a media law attorney and reporter who serves as counsel to the Intercept, where you can find his recent piece, “Trump’s Big Lie Attorneys Are Back.” He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Shawn Musgrave.

Shawn Musgrave: Thanks so much for having me on.

JJ: The key elements of the piece are right there in the lead:

Across battleground states, attorneys who helped former President Donald Trump undermine confidence in the 2020 election results are back at it, filing lawsuits that seed doubt in advance of this year’s outcome.

Let’s start with the lawsuits themselves, as lawsuits. What are the claims being made, and what can we say about those claims?

Intercept (10/17/24)

SM: So the lawsuits that I looked at fall into a couple of different buckets: one alleging the possibility of voter fraud for overseas ballots, under a federal law that helps US citizens abroad, including members of the military and their families, to vote. And in several states now, Republicans have filed last-minute lawsuits—with voting already going on, including overseas ballots—claiming that there’s a possibility of fraud using this mechanism.

And then the second bucket of lawsuits that I look at in this piece is another go-to boogeyman, which is the cybersecurity of voting machines. And the case that I look at is filed in Georgia over Dominion voting machines, which, again, were just one of the centerpieces of the election fights in court in 2020, and it looks like they will be again this year.

JJ: You note that these are last-minute lawsuits being put in there, but still, in terms of evidence, in terms of information, what can we say about, for example, fraud in overseas voting?

SM: So many of these lawsuits have already been rejected. They’ve been thrown out by courts, including [on] the basis that the people filing them did not show any evidence of actual fraud that had been happening. It’s all based on hypotheticals in the lawsuits themselves.

JJ: And the Dominion case, that’s not new news for folks. That’s also been kind of churned through, hasn’t it?

SM: The Dominion claims are very much recycled from 2020, and from other cases that were filed in between the 2020 cycle and now. And it just really underscores the fact that these are also many of the same attorneys who are trying to just recycle the legal playbook.

JJ: The big Big Lie attorney that you’re writing about in this piece is Cleta Mitchell. And so what should listeners know about her, and what she’s up to?

SM: Cleta Mitchell is very central to the election denial movement. And in 2020, she really came to prominence by being on the infamous call that Trump had with the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Trump asked the Georgia secretary to “find” a few thousand votes. Cleta Mitchell was advising Trump on that call, and she resigned from the law firm that she was at at the time, and then has really since made election integrity, so to speak, her entire brand.

And now, in terms of her involvement this cycle, she has given this pretty frank interview—not to me, but to a conservative radio host—describing her involvement in putting together and helping organize lawsuits over overseas ballots. And she said she struggled to find an attorney who was willing to file one, that was ultimately filed in Pennsylvania.

JJ: I guess there’s something heartening about that, actually, about the difficulty of finding attorneys who would line up behind what looks clearly to be a specious set of lawsuits. And, just as a detour, there is something about the abandonment of principle, the politicizing of the professions—doctors who can say, “Well, torture is OK,” and lawyers who can abandon ethical codes. It’s somehow different than just being a bad lawyer. It really feels like a giving over of the whole principles of the profession. So I guess I’m happy to hear that it’s not so easy to turn up attorneys who will sign on to that.

SM: That was in Pennsylvania, where Cleta Mitchell said she had a hard time finding anyone else to file it. In two other states, where the Republican National Committee were the ones filing, other attorneys were found.

JJ: Right. Well, then, to bring us back, there’s no evidence, as you’ve indicated, for these charges; they haven’t been able to put forward any evidence, and they weren’t in the previous incarnations of these. So maybe it’s time to recognize that evidence, and even winning the lawsuit, is not the point. What is the point, do you think, of these last-minute lawsuits?

SM: When I talk to election law experts, they certainly don’t think that the point of most of these suits is to win in court, to convince a judge that they have evidence to support the pretty drastic request that they’re asking a judge to give. In the overseas ballots cases, asking for a court order that state election officials set aside ballots that were received from people who went through the registration process as it was when their ballot was sent.

But that doesn’t seem to be the point, to convince the judge that they should win on this. It really does seem to be to essentially put out a press release, put together to look like a lawsuit, to sprinkle a little doubt into the public’s thinking about the election headed into November.

JJ: And so then maybe, if the Trump team—whatever happens, we don’t know—but if the Trump team decides to dispute the election results, well, then, those seeds of doubt have already been laid, and people will say, “Oh, I remember something from even before the election about overseas ballots being perhaps corrupt,” right? So it can be successful in its real goal, even if nothing at all happens in court, or if it gets thrown out.

Fox43 (10/30/24)

SM: And I should mention, in the same radio interview, Cleta Mitchell implied that she already had evidence, but none of it made it into the lawsuit. She told the conservative radio host that Democrats were encouraging people to fraudulently register using these overseas mechanisms. So the striking thing is what is said out of court versus what actually goes into the lawsuit itself. And I think, again, looking at what happened in 2020, same dynamic, is that people will point to the lawsuits, even though the lawsuits don’t have any actual proof of fraud, and use the filing of the lawsuit itself as its own form of proof, even though the lawsuit itself doesn’t contain proof.

JJ: Well, it’s very Joe McCarthy: “I have a list right here in my hand,” and it turns out to be a blank piece of paper. It doesn’t matter. People see him holding what he says is a list, and the impression is made.

Well, I don’t want to say that we don’t see any reporting that is acknowledging folks like Cleta Mitchell’s strategy as a strategy, as an intention of sowing doubt. The New York Times. just on October 22, had a piece on the “election denial network.” But I know that listeners will also have seen coverage that just says, “concerns raised about overseas voting,” and stories that, if you don’t read them carefully, or even if you do read them, the very fact that the story got written suggests that there’s that there’s a there there, that there’s a valid question, even if, “Oh, well, we looked into it, and actually it’s not grounded. There’s no evidence there.”

And I wonder, what do you, as a reporter as well as an attorney, see as the professional, critical way for journalists to engage this sort of campaign, that uses legal tools and legal language and legal mechanisms, but isn’t really about the legality? How do you cover that?

SM: I do think that it’s important for reporters to be clear-eyed about what the strategy is, which is to get coverage of the lawsuit just as a lawsuit, and put it into this neutral reportage territory. Like you said, “Concerns raised.” My typical one that drives me nuts is “lawsuit filed,” or something like that, that really just says what the claim was, without looking, as I am currently doing, at—consider the source, consider the lawyer who is willing to sign their name to this, and think about what that means.

The Times today actually had a good story about one of the attorneys that I’ve also written about, Kurt Olsen, and his background. And he was deeply involved in 2020, in a number of different efforts, including trying to get the election fight straight to the Supreme Court, on a pretty ridiculous theory that was panned by legal experts. But I just remember coverage at the time really focusing just on the stakes, the Supreme Court weighing in, and painting it as if it were similar to what happened in Bush v. Gore, things like that, as opposed to the extraordinary way that the lawsuit arrived at the Supreme Court in 2020.

That’s sort of what I’m trying, not to be too grandiose, but to do a little bit of correcting on, just focus on the people that are involved, and the attorneys who are willing to put their law licenses on the line, and sign their name, and attest that everything in the papers is true, even when they have often a checkered track record on that front.

JJ: And not to draw you out on it too much, but it isn’t that reporters can’t consider the source, because in some other cases they say, “Oh, well, this is the ACLU,” or, “Oh, this is this other organization, so maybe we ought to put an asterisk next to that.” It isn’t that they can’t do that. It just seems that they don’t do that in the way that would always be most balanced, or most useful, when it comes to electoral politics, or something somehow changes when it gets to presidential electoral politics.

But let me just ask you for final thoughts, Shawn Musgrave, about the way—because it’s not going to go away—we have indicated that these lawsuits are coming in at the last minute, while folks are already voting, so clearly it’s a last-minute press, in many ways, that we might see even more coverage of going forward. What should we be keeping an eye out for? What would you like to see more of, or less of, as reporters cover this going forward?

Shawn Musgrave: “”People will…use the filing of the lawsuit itself as its own form of proof, even though the lawsuit itself doesn’t contain proof.”

SM: What I aim for, and what I think that other reporters should aim for too, is to take a moment on some of these stories, as so many of these lawsuits are flying, and look at trends. Look at, not just the parties who are named in the lawsuit itself, like the RNC, the DNC, ACLU, different voting rights groups, which are often very generically named, and try to look at the people who are actually working on them. Because I do think, seeing from the postmortem on 2020, the people really mattered, in terms of what strategies were followed, which lawyers Trump was listening to, which he was sidelining and ignoring, or forcing to resign.

We know from 2020 that the people who were working on particular lawsuits matter incredibly. And I think, going into the election and afterward, when there are absolutely going to be lawsuits of one kind or another, it’s important that readers understand who the people are, not just faceless attorneys. Because it mattered in 2020, and I assume it’ll matter again.

JJ: All right, well, thank you very much for that.

We’ve been speaking with media law attorney and reporter Shawn Musgrave. You can find the work we’re talking about at TheIntercept.com. Thank you so much, Shawn Musgrave, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SM: Thanks so much for having me.

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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.

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At midnight on October 1, over 45,000 port workers across the Eastern US began a strike that was to last for three days. This labor action was only the latest in a series of high-profile confrontations between workers and bosses in North America, but corporate media never seem to get better at reporting on such disputes.

In this particular case, the workers’ main demands were pay increases and assurances that automation will not replace them. But strikes in general have one straightforward aim: to demonstrate the power of workers, and thus the necessity of meeting their demands, by depriving the economy of their labor. The International Longshoremen’s Association gained an initial victory in securing a 62% wage increase over six years for its workers. Other issues, like automation, will continue to be negotiated, with a January 2025 deadline.

It seems, however, that the more a strike affects the economy, i.e., the more effective it is, the harder corporate media try to smear workers as selfish and destructive. To understand where media loyalties lie, one only needs to look at the experts they seek for quotes.

Big banking, big shipping, big bananaWashington Post (10/1/24): “The effects are expected to ripple through the country, costing at least hundreds of millions of dollars a day and getting worse each day the longshoremen remain off the job.”

When media report on high finance or business dealings, readers will rarely if ever find a quote from a union leader, much less a rank-and-file worker, in the news reports. However, when dockworkers initiate a labor action, it seems the first call a reporter makes is to a Manhattan office tower.

Stifel is an investment bank that manages $444 billion worth of assets. It’s perhaps best known for tricking five Wisconsin school districts into losing over $200 million in bum mortgage investments ahead of the 2008 financial crisis (Reuters, 12/8/16).

Lately, the phones at the bank’s offices have been overwhelmed with reporters seeking comment on the East Coast port strike. Analysts at Stifel have been quoted a total of four times in the Washington Post (10/1/24, 10/1/24) and New York Times (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Post (9/28/24), presumably trying to prevent accusations of favoring finance over accounting, also sought comment from a chief economist at Ernst & Young.

If, when it comes to the economy, you prioritize banana availability above all other considerations, then corporate media has you covered. The Post (9/30/24) spoke to the Big-Ag lobbying and insurance group the American Farm Bureau Federation, who warned that 75% of the nation’s banana supply was at stake. Not to be outdone, the Times (10/1/24) tracked down their own source for the banana angle, Daniel Barabino, COO at the Bronx’s Top Banana, who warned a two-week strike would hit “all the banana importers.”

Later reporting by the Baltimore Banner (10/3/24) revealed that banana heavyweights Del Monte, Dole and Chiquita operate their own ships and are outside the trade group that represents management in bargaining, and thus their ships were still being unloaded. In other words, initial forecasts of banana scarcity were greatly overstated.

Naturally, logistics executives were well-represented in the news pages. The New York Times quoted the directors of two ports (9/24/24), as well as four members of management at different logistics firms (10/1/24, 10/1/24). The Washington Post quoted at least seven logistics executives in their coverage (9/18/24, 9/28/24, 9/30/24, 9/30/24), not to mention numerous importers and business owners.

Missing workersThe New York Times (10/1/24) ran an article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for wine importers—but no article on what the dockworkers strike might mean for dockworkers.

Union leaders were not totally silenced. Since September 24, four ILA leaders have been quoted by the New York Times (9/24/24, 9/26/24, 9/29/24, 10/1/24). For those keeping track, that is two fewer than the six wine importers the Times has quoted in coverage of the port strike (9/30/24, 10/1/24).

The number of rank-and-file dockworkers quoted by the Times is zero. To be fair, it seems that the union has instructed picketers to not talk to reporters, an understandable measure for message discipline.

However, in the lead-up to the strike, the Times found time to talk to Christmas tree, clothing and mango importers (9/24/24, 9/30/24). These people were understandably concerned for their livelihoods. However, by failing to interview even one dockworker or any of their families, the Times is showing their readers a picture where only the business owners are concerned for the economy, for their families, for the holiday season.

Will longshoremen have enough time to spend with their families or have enough money for gifts this Christmas? Readers of the Times have no idea.

Instead, Times coverage (10/3/24) has focused on Harold Daggett, the union’s president, and his “autocratic” style and “generous salary.” When the only union member profiled by the Times is depicted as rich, corrupt and incompetent, it encourages a dismissal of the union’s struggle as a whole.

Even once the strike ended, the Times (10/3/24) just couldn’t find a worker to quote. Instead, the piece extensively quoted the chief executive of the Anderson Economic Group, a corporate consulting firm, who was unhappy that the strike had been settled:

I cannot recall an episode that had so little effect on the economy, led to such a short strike and resulted in such a huge increase in earnings for workers who are already making over $100,000 a year…. We tend to shrug off the costs, but it does affect our ability to build things and export them.

During the UAW strike, Sarah Lazare noted that the Anderson Economic Group was used by media to decry labor’s threat to “the economy” without mentioning their auto-industry clients (American Prospect, 8/23/23). The firm was also cited on the danger posed by the UPS strike (FAIR.org, 9/26/23). It’s a group you would naturally turn to if your were looking for a quote decrying labor getting a larger slice of the economic pie.

Loud on wages, silent on profitsCorporate media coverage of longshoremen’s wages has emphasized that some union members make around $160,000 (Washington Post, 10/1/24). One story even reported that salaries for New York and New Jersey longshoremen range to “over $450,000” (Washington Post, 9/28/24).

Per the report that the Post seems to be referencing (they don’t bother to give a citation), the Port of New York and New Jersey elects to pay certain workers “special compensation packages,” which are not governed by the collective bargaining agreement. In other words, the Post is using some exceptional cases in the Port of New Jersey and New York, unconnected to the contract that’s up for negotiation, to suggest that some people are being paid nearly half a million dollars to load freight. Meanwhile, the vast majority of the 45,000 dockworkers whose salaries are governed by the collective bargaining agreement are maligned.

The starting wage rate for a dockworker is just $20 an hour. Given that the top wage (after six years of service) under the current contract is $39, a 40-hour-per-week salary would net a senior worker just over $80,000. To earn in the hundreds of thousands, overtime is clearly needed. However, the New York Times (10/1/24) reports merely that dockworkers “say they have to put in long workweeks to earn that much,” with no elaboration on whether or not that is true.

When nearly every story on the port strike mentions that dockworkers make up to $100,000 or $200,000, the object is clear: Media want readers to question if these “workers without a college degree” (New York Times, 10/1/24) really deserve a salary commensurate with the 10.5 million Americans in management occupations.

These ports are up and down the East Coast, including in high-cost-of-living metro areas like New York and Boston. Labor unions are one of the few paths to middle-class security available to most American workers. Yet it is standard practice for labor coverage in corporate media to suggest that workers fighting for their share is tantamount to greediness.

Soaring profits for shipping companies is an important business story (Economist, 6/27/24)—until it comes time for those companies to renegotiate labor contracts.

Shipping company profits, on the other hand, are rarely reported. When shippers’ high profits are mentioned, they’re often not presented as a fact, but as something that is “argued” by workers (e.g., Washington Post, 10/1/24).

However, outside of strike coverage, the shipping industry seems to be quite healthy. “Boom Times Are Back for Container Shipping,” according to a recent Economist headline (6/27/24). The windfall profits of the pandemic era, over $400 billion, are believed to be larger than the sum total of profits since containerization was implemented in 1957 (CNN, 9/26/24). Indeed, some of the pandemic-era inflation that has eroded dockworkers’ real wages may be due to the outsized pricing power of the oligopolistic shipping industry (Bloomberg, 1/18/22; The Hill, 2/2/22).

Why was there little mention of these profits in strike coverage? Readers are encouraged to view longshoremen as greedy and unreasonable, which is less sustainable when worker demands are juxtaposed with record profits. The easiest way to avoid that juxtaposition is to omit profits from the conversation. (In the same way, it’s easier to hate professional athletes for their multi-million dollar salaries when you ignore the billions they are making for the team owners.)

Frightening readers to management’s sideNew York Times (10/1/24) warned of “cascading effects — such as layoffs — at American firms, including in the auto industry.”

The economic effects of the strike have been much-bandied. The cost to the US economy, depending on your source, could amount to $3.78 billion per week (Washington Post, 10/1/24), $4.5 billion to $7.5 billion per week (New York Times, 10/1/24) or a whopping $5 billion per day, according to the brain trust at J.P. Morgan (New York Times, 9/30/24).

While these numbers are supposed to frighten the reader into siding with management, what they are really doing is demonstrating the importance of labor being paid well and treated well. The fact that dockworkers’ labor is necessary to facilitate up to $5 billion in commerce every day is evidence that their labor is of the utmost importance, and an argument for their being compensated as such.

Besides serving up run-of-the-mill worker bashing, the Washington Post (9/29/24, 10/1/24, 10/1/24) has taken the strike as an opportunity to raise the specter of pandemic-era inflation and price hikes. The Post (9/28/24) quoted Ernst & Young chief economist Greg Daco: “A work stoppage could slow progress on bringing inflation under control.” Never mind the fact that inflation has already been tamed (Politico, 9/11/24).

Other outlets have a more staid forecast, with the New York Times (10/1/24) noting that “a rapid acceleration in inflation” is unlikely.

Framing a strike as potentially strangling the economy (with little mention of the hardship striking workers would no doubt face) serves to help the reader, whose economic situation is almost certainly closer to the workers, identify instead with the multibillion-dollar logistics companies.

It’s not that workers are seeking to destroy the economy. However, it is up to the workers to look out for their own interests as labor share continues to decrease, especially in the face of automation (Marketplace, 4/12/24). Most Americans are sympathetic to unions and union members, but when it comes to labor actions, media try demonization above all else.

False choiceThis Washington Post article (10/2/24) closes with a warning to President Joe Biden against “an approach to industry highly deferential to labor unions.”

Corporate media attempted to use the economic chaos apparently on the horizon to paint a less-than-rosy picture for the incumbent Democrats. With the presidential election a month away, the strike has been posed as a tough choice for President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris between supporting unions and averting economic destruction. The Washington Post (10/2/24) reported that

Biden told reporters Tuesday that he would not use a federal labor law to force the longshoremen back to work…. But whether—or for how long—the president will stick to this posture has become a source of speculation in Washington, as Democrats try to project economic stability ahead of the November election.

Elsewhere, the Post (9/30/24) noted that some economic forecasters “assume that, with the election just weeks away, Biden will intervene in the labor dispute to head off more serious economic costs.” The New York Times (10/1/24) took a similar tone:

The prospect of significant economic damage from a strike puts President Biden in a quandary five weeks before national elections. Before the strike, he said he was not going to use a federal labor law, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, to force an end to a port shutdown…. But some labor experts said he might use that power if the strike started to weigh on the economy.

The Times failed to actually cite any of these labor experts who said President Biden might use the anti-labor Taft-Hartley Act, a controversial law that began the slow demise of organized labor since 1947. However, this framing supports the idea that a strike is effectively a hostage situation, with the workers putting a gun to the head of the economy, and the government must choose one of those two sides. Left out of the equation are the corporations, who have the power to end the strike immediately by sharing some of their inflated profits with their workers.

It should not be surprising that corporate media redirect readers’ anger towards workers. US news outlets have a habit of omitting wealth and income inequality from their coverage, and coverage of labor actions is no exception.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241004.mp3Newsweek (9/27/24)

This week on CounterSpin: “How Hurricane Helene Could Impact Florida’s Home Insurance Crisis” was a recent Newsweek headline, on a story with a source saying smaller insurers were “especially in danger.” A layperson might wonder why events we pay insurance for should present a crisis for the industry we pay it to. The unceasing effects of climate disruption will only throw that question into more relief.

Writer and historian Derek Seidman joins us to help understand what’s happening and how folks are resisting.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241004Seidman.mp3Vera Institute (3/21/24)

Also on the show: If it comes to issues that many unaffected people are told to care strongly about, immigration from the southern border is high on the list. But how seriously should we attend to a public conversation where believing that your Haitian neighbors want to eat your pets is not a bar to entry? We’ll talk about building a humane dialog on immigration and asylum policy with Insha Rahman, vice president of advocacy and partnerships at the Vera Institute of Justice and the director of Vera Action.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241004Rahman.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at media coverage of the TikTok ban.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin241004Banter.mp3

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Ukraine has for months been asking the Biden administration for permission to use long-range US, British and French weapons to strike deeper in Russian territory, which would be a clear escalation in the war. Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the move would cross a red line for him, and recently announced that he was loosening Russia’s nuclear doctrine for using nuclear weapons.

Despite the risks of such escalation—and a lack of evidence that it would shift the war in Ukraine’s favor—Biden’s public reluctance to loosen his limits has been met in the war-hungry media primarily with derision.

Lowering the barRussian President Vladimir Putin announced that “any nation’s conventional attack on Russia that is supported by a nuclear power will be considered a joint attack on his country” (AP, 9/25/24).

The US, Britain and France have all supplied Ukraine with long-range missiles, including Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS). But Biden has thus far limited their use to border areas. Britain and France are following Biden’s lead on range limitations.

Last month, in response to further advances by Russia into Ukraine, Ukraine launched a surprise invasion into Russian territory in Kursk. Since then, as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has pressed the US for more and longer-range missiles, Putin has increasingly raised the specter of nuclear retaliation.

Under its 2020 nuclear doctrine, Russia could respond with nuclear strikes to nuclear or conventional attacks it deemed a “threat to its existence,” if they came from a nuclear power. His new doctrine lowers the bar, so that a “critical attack” on Russia carried out with the “participation or support of a nuclear power” would be grounds for launching a nuclear response—including against the supporting power.

In other words, if Ukraine used long-range missiles supplied by a NATO power to launch an attack on Russia that it deemed “critical,” Putin could respond with a nuclear strike, against either Ukraine or against that NATO country.

Dismissing the nuclear riskIn the opinion pages of US corporate media, the risk of nuclear war or other retaliation by Putin was quickly dismissed, as outlets pressed Biden for further escalation.

The Washington Post (9/22/24) encourages the US to offer “NATO training and assistance” to help Ukraine attack targets hundreds of miles inside Russia. What could go wrong?

The Washington Post editorial board (9/22/24) urged Biden to acquiesce to Zelenskyy under the headline, “Ukraine Needs Long-Range Missiles Before Winter’s Onset.” The board argued that since Putin has issued “red lines” in the past that could prompt nuclear war, and “has not followed through on his threats,” therefore

there’s no reason to think now he would risk a wider war with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization at a time when his forces are already severely depleted.

The board suggested that Putin is more likely to “align himself with Iran or its proxies to strike at US forces in the Middle East.” Though it deemed that “a risk worth weighing,” it didn’t discuss it any further. It concluded: “Mr. Biden needs to give permission and set the ground rules quickly.”

Politico editor-at-large Matthew Kaminski (9/18/24) called Zelenskyy’s request “a fair ask.” He made a similar argument to the Post editors that Putin’s “threatening noises” after each “allegedly escalatory step” from the US never turn into actions.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (8/28/24) simply dismissed worries of escalation out of hand:

The Biden administration fears Mr. Putin might escalate his war if Ukraine puts more of his military at risk, but the war isn’t winding down. Ukraine has been attacking Russian targets with domestically produced drones, and on Sunday President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced the “first successful combat use of our new weapon—a Ukrainian long-range rocket drone” designed “to destroy the enemy’s offensive potential.”

The Hill published a column by Joseph Bosco (10/1/24) that sneered, “Biden is clearly intimidated by Putin’s threats of retaliation, as stated again last week regarding Zelenskyy’s request for longer strike authority.” Apparently readers were supposed to just dismiss those threats, because Bosco didn’t even try to make an argument about them.

Barely bothering to justifyThe Wall Street Journal‘s response (8/28/24) to worries that giving Ukraine long-range missiles will escalate the war: “the war isn’t winding down” anyway.

When it came time to justify the escalation, pundits seemed content to make noises about the need for victory, barely bothering to offer actual arguments about why long-range missiles in particular would achieve that goal.

The Journal editors wrote that Biden’s “latest bad excuse” for not giving Zelenskyy what he wants “is that such strikes wouldn’t make much of a difference.” They cited the neoconservative, military industry–funded Institute for the Study of War, which suggested that even if Russia has already moved 90% of its military aircraft out of reach of those missiles, as Biden officials argued, there were plenty of other things a trigger-happy military could hit. The Journal concluded with the vague claim that “the US can strengthen Ukraine’s position and make negotiations to end the war more likely.”

The Post also cited the ISW, and wrote weakly that the long-range missiles “could” hit Russian “arms depots, air fields and military bases,” which “perhaps…might force Mr. Putin to draw back his deadly cache further from Ukraine’s borders.”

Politico‘s Kaminski simply argued that Ukrainians need “a morale and momentum shift,” and “lowering the restrictions on missile use could help.”

Dubious expertsThe New York Times (9/12/24) says a “growing number” of experts think “the administration’s reticence” to give Ukraine long-range missiles “makes no sense”—citing a letter whose 17 signatories were replete with pro-NATO and neoconservative think tank affiliations.

Establishment media’s news sections were sometimes little better than their opinion sections. The New York Times (9/12/24) splashed on its front page an article about the pressure on Biden to give Ukraine the green light that suggested a growing consensus among experts that Biden’s reluctance is nonsensical:

To a growing number of military analysts and former US officials, the administration’s reticence makes no sense, especially since, they say, Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk has yet to elicit an escalatory response from Moscow.

“Easing the restrictions on Western weapons will not cause Moscow to escalate,” 17 former ambassadors and generals wrote in a letter to the administration this week. “We know this because Ukraine is already striking territory Russia considers its own—including Crimea and Kursk—with these weapons and Moscow’s response remains unchanged.”

Two weeks later—and buried on page 9—the Times (9/26/24) reported quite a different story:

US intelligence agencies believe that Russia is likely to retaliate with greater force against the United States and its coalition partners, possibly with lethal attacks, if they agree to give the Ukrainians permission to employ US-, British- and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, US officials said.

The intelligence assessment, which has not been previously reported, also plays down the effect that the long-range missiles will have on the course of the conflict, because the Ukrainians currently have limited numbers of the weapons and it is unclear how many more, if any, the Western allies might provide.

‘Silver bullet or powder keg’?USA Today‘s military expert (9/26/24) presents the possibility that “the war would drag on even longer” as a positive consequence to giving missiles to Ukraine.

The same day, a USA Today headline (9/26/24) read, “Why Long-Range Missiles Could Be Either a Silver Bullet or a Powder Keg for Ukraine/Russia War.” The promised “silver bullet” never fully materialized in the text, but the paper’s sole quoted source—who was given several paragraphs—skewed the article entirely in that direction.

That source was Fred Kagan of the neoconservative, military industry–funded American Enterprise Institute. Kagan is also affiliated with the Institute for the Study of War (which was founded by his wife, Kimberly Kagan) and was an influential proponent of “surges” in both Iraq and Afghanistan—in other words, he’s about as hawkish as they come.

Under the subhead, “How the weapons could help Ukraine fight Russia,” the paper quoted Kagan explaining that long-range missile strikes could “reduce the effectiveness of Russian military action.” It also paraphrased an anonymous “senior Defense official” who, unlike their administration, seemed to favor the move, noting that one “strategic effect” would be that “the war would drag on even longer.” (The official presented this as a positive development, in that it would force Moscow to “to reconsider its costs.”)

USA Today also gave Kagan the last word, to argue that Putin’s threats are “hollow”:

“The burden thus far has been put on those advocating for allowing Ukraine to strike legitimate military targets in Russia,” Kagan said. “But I think the burden really needs to shift now to those who say that some fear of an unspecified escalation should continue to cause us to hold the Ukrainians back.”

Contrary opinions hard to findThe usually hawkish David Ignatius (Washington Post, 9/30/24) was one of the few voices in corporate media urging caution about helping Ukraine launch missiles at nuclear-armed Russia.

It’s been hard to find voices calling for restraint in major corporate media—with a few notable exceptions. One came in a Hill column (9/17/24) under a byline shared by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Donald Trump, Jr. They warned that “nuclear war would mean the end of civilization as we know it, maybe even the end of the human species.” The op-ed took the opportunity to plug candidate Donald Trump as the one “who has vowed to end this war.”

Trump, of course, argued in his televised debate with Kamala Harris that “we’re playing with World War III” in Ukraine. What he and his Hill proxies neglected to mention is that Trump, while in office, pulled out of the Iran nuclear deal and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty with Russia, both of which greatly increased the likelihood of nuclear war or “World War III.”

Another pro-restraint take came from longtime Post columnist David Ignatius, who just over a year ago reported being compelled by Ukraine’s “moral argument” for using cluster bombs (FAIR.org, 7/8/23). Ignatius (9/30/24) struck a markedly less hawkish tone recently, writing that “the Ukraine conflict is probably as close as we’ve come to the brink of all-out superpower war since the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis.” He concluded: “We’re very lucky, on balance, that [Biden] doesn’t play a reckless game.”

Otherwise, one mostly had to look to outlets in the tank for Trump, or independent outlets like the Nation (9/18/24) and Current Affairs (9/25/24), for skepticism of military escalation.

As Current Affairs‘ Nathan Robinson points out, even if Biden resists the pressure,

with the foreign policy “blob” so willing to risk all of our lives, the next president, whether Trump or Harris, may well be less resistant to the pressures that push presidents toward taking extraordinarily risky gambles that imperil all of humanity.

We could sure use a media more skeptical of that blob, rather than one that gleefully joins in.

Research assistance: Elsie Carson-Holt.

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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.

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Janine Jackson interviewed NYU’s Mohamad Bazzi about Israel’s terror attacks in Lebanon for the September 27, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240927Bazzi.mp3Leon Panetta on CBS (9/22/24)

Janine Jackson: Speaking of Israel’s remote detonation of thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies of suspected Hezbollah members in Lebanon, former CIA director and defense secretary Leon Panetta told CBS, ”I don’t think there is any question that it’s a form of terrorism.”

Panetta’s remarks were widely reported, mostly straight, but for Fox, where Sean Hannity said Panetta “had the gall to say Israel is engaging in terrorism against the terror group Hezbollah.”

It seems worth noting: Just before Panetta, CBS viewers heard from a former FBI analyst who said of the explosions in stores, cars and homes that killed some 39 people and injured more than 3,000, including children:

Tactically, what Israel has done has been brilliant. They have severely degraded Hezbollah’s capabilities. They’ve severely degraded Hezbollah’s ability to respond to Israeli things. They’re really hoping that, strategically, Hezbollah gets the message: Stop firing rockets into our country.

That “tactic” has led to more death, more destruction and, some say, more chance of a still wider, more devastating war.

Joining us now to talk about unfolding events and US media’s depictions is Mohamad Bazzi. He’s director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, as well as former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us now by phone from here in town. Welcome to CounterSpin, Mohamad Bazzi.

Mohamad Bazzi: Thank you for having me.

JJ: CBS segued from the “brilliant tactic” guy to Leon Panetta by saying that some saw Israel’s action as a “deception one step too far. The United Nations labeled the operation a violation of international law, and it’s raised some eyebrows here at home too.” It’s equally hard to imagine that this wasn’t a violation as that it wouldn’t immediately be condemned as such, had anyone else carried it out, would you say?

Mohamad Bazzi: “What unfolded in Lebanon last week was something dystopian, but it wasn’t a movie. It affected real people’s lives.”

MB: That’s an excellent point. It would certainly have been condemned, let’s say, if Russia had carried out a similar operation, or even something a fraction of this kind of attack, in Ukraine.

I think one of the things that struck me, and I suspect it struck you and others who watch the Western media, is the sense of marvel over the ingenuity of Israel’s technological prowess. So what we had is a lot of the coverage framed as, “Oh, this is taking a page out of a spy thriller, or a dystopian movie.”

And in some ways, what unfolded in Lebanon last week was something dystopian, but it wasn’t a movie. It affected real people’s lives. And so many in the Western media were fixating on the novelty of Israel’s attack, and sometimes celebrating it, but they neglected to acknowledge or even consider the sheer terror experienced by tens of thousands of Lebanese civilians. And this is a society that suffered through years and years of trauma, and this was the latest attack that unfolded in this incredibly pernicious way.

A lot of the coverage also didn’t get into the question of whether this constituted a war crime. And, on the face of it, it seems to meet the definition of a war crime: Human Rights Watch, a few other rights organizations, issued statements noting that international humanitarian law forbids the use of booby traps, especially with objects that have such important use for civilians. I think it would fit the definition of a war crime, beyond just being an act of terrorism that’s meant to instill terror in a civilian population.

JJ: Hezbollah, like Hamas, is for many US media consumers almost like a sports team, or like a kaiju, a monster like Godzilla. And I think it might sound strange to some to think that they aren’t solely a military force in Lebanon, but in fact have a much broader role.

MB: Yeah, a lot of media consumers and listeners in the US don’t get the context. They don’t get the background that Hezbollah is not only a militia, it is not only the militia that’s labeled a terrorist group by the US and by many countries in the EU, but it’s also the most dominant military force in Lebanon, and it’s also the most powerful political party and political movement in the country.

So Hezbollah runs an extensive social service network. It operates schools and hospitals and supermarkets and credit unions.

New York Times (9/18/24): “The attacks…demonstrated Israel’s prowess at using military technology in ways that suggest it can strike anywhere and at any time.”

One of the things that became clear fairly quickly after the first wave of pager explosions on Tuesday—Hezbollah issued a statement after that wave of explosions saying that it had issued pagers to employees of various units and institutions, meaning they had distributed the devices not only to fighters, but to many civilian workers. That was one reason there were so many civilian casualties in this attack, but there are other reasons as well.

It’s the act of terror. It’s the imprecise nature, this deliberate setting off of detonations of thousands of small bombs that went off at the same time on a Tuesday afternoon, as people were going about their daily lives. And so the bombs went off in grocery stores and hospitals and sidewalk cafes and barbershops. The next day, on Wednesday, some of the walkie-talkie explosions went off during the funerals of people who had been killed the day before during the pager explosions.

So this was an entirely indiscriminate attack, and it puts the Western media fascination with Israel’s technological prowess into even sharper focus. We had the Western press marveling at—I’ll just quote a few of the terms—“Israel’s prowess,” “precision,” “James Bond“–type operation. And quite a few other terms that obscured the sheer terror of what Israel had carried out over those two days in Lebanon.

JJ: Listeners will know that Hezbollah and Israel have been exchanging airstrikes since October 8, and this recent escalation comes as Israel continues to target schools and shelters housing the displaced in Gaza. And Gaza is still, you say, the key here to any potential deescalation; even as eyes may move towards Lebanon, Gaza is still at the core here.

NBC (2/12/24): “In at least three recent instances, Biden has called Netanyahu an ‘asshole.’”

MB: Yeah, Gaza is certainly at the core here, and this is the lesson that the Biden administration is refusing to internalize. It’s the most obvious path to deescalation throughout the region, which is to pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire.

There’s been a ceasefire deal on the table for months now, that Benjamin Netanyahu keeps finding reasons to obstruct, and keeps adding new conditions, and why shouldn’t he? He’s not facing any real pressure from the US; he’s not facing pressure from the Biden administration, which refuses to use the real leverage it has over Israel. And that leverage is in the form of billions of dollars in US weapons that continue to flow to Israel on a daily basis.

So Joe Biden has decided that he’s not going to use the best leverage he has at his disposal to pressure Netanyahu into a ceasefire. Instead, he’s going to do this very wishy-washy leaks in the press, where Biden administration aides keep leaking how disappointed Biden has been at, how angry he is at, Netanyahu. There’s a leak a few months ago that Biden privately called Netanyahu an asshole at least three times; I think that was ABC News that reported that, several months ago.

Responsible Statecraft (1/18/24)

And it’s obscene, this level of trying to manage the story in this way, trying to get across the idea that the US, which has the upper hand in this situation, is somehow helpless to pressure Netanyahu into a ceasefire.

All of the Iranian-allied groups in the region, starting with Hezbollah and the Houthis in Yemen, have made clear that they would stop their attacks if and when the war in Gaza ends. So once there’s a ceasefire, once the fighting stops in Gaza, they too would stop. I’ll remind your listeners that during the last ceasefire, the seven-day ceasefire at the end of November, when there was an exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners, Hezbollah and the Houthis and other Iranian-allied groups in the region did stop their attacks. So I think there’s evidence that they would stick to this promise.

JJ: And as you’ve sort of indicated, for the corporate press, it seems the role of the US in the Mideast generally has ranged from “honest broker,” which used to be a term we’d hear a lot, to now it’s kind of “conflicted do-gooder.” It does seem, though, that every day, more and more people are seeing through that depiction, even though, as you would say, some people are clinging to it desperately. There is a more clear-eyed understanding of the US role peeping through around the edges of that storyline, don’t you think?

Intercept (9/10/24)

MB: I hope so. And I think the evidence of that is the majority of people in the US that have been telling public opinion polls that they oppose the indefinite arming of Israel in this war and enabling Israel to carry out the huge destruction, the famine, war crimes, everything in the dying Gaza over the past 11 months, and that it’s now importing the same strategy into Lebanon. There’s growing public opposition in the US to this untethered support for Israel, this unconditional support that Biden has promised since October 8.

And I think that’s partly because people are consuming information from social media, from other sources beyond the legacy media, beyond the corporate media, which isn’t showing anywhere near the level of destruction that’s happening in Gaza. And that isn’t framing the story, as you put it, of the US as an honest broker or do-gooder that’s simply run out of options, and that’s thrown its hands up in desperation, and just waiting for Netanyahu to accept the ceasefire.

That’s not the kind of leverage that the US has, and it’s nowhere near the role that the US has in all of this. The Biden administration is heavily complicit, and when we see, in the years and decades to come, hopefully when we see some form of accountability in international bodies, it’s fairly easy to expect the US to go up before the International Court of Justice, or US officials to be indicted before the ICC and other bodies, even though we’re not a party to the ICC, to face these kinds of prosecutions for their role in arming Israel, despite the overwhelming evidence of what the Israeli military has been doing in Gaza, and now in Lebanon.

Al Jazeera (9/12/24)

JJ: I have to ask you, as a journalism professor and journalist, your thoughts about free speech and assembly, not just Israel’s direct targeting of journalists, the recent raid and shutdown of Al Jazeera in the occupied West Bank, the unaccountable killing of activist Aysenur Ezgi Eygi, but also Cornell University moving to deport a graduate student who took part in a pro-Palestinian protest. It all feels like an attack on witnessing, on knowing what’s going on and what’s being done in our name.

MB: You’re right, there’s a widespread attack on the act of bearing witness to what’s being done. There’s a widespread attack on the ability of people of conscience to protest, and to disagree with the policies of their governments, especially the policy of the US government to support Israel in this unconditional way. And it’s a sign of the bravery of students, certainly, that have been operating and protesting at campuses across the country, at private universities, at public universities. It’s a sign of their moral commitment to this cause that they’ve persevered despite these threats, despite being suspended, despite some of them, as in Cornell, now facing deportation, because that graduate student could well lose his US visa, and would have to leave the country because of his political actions supporting Palestine and Gaza.

And so we’re seeing average people taking tremendous risks to be able to express themselves and to say: “No, not in my name. I’m not going to accept my government and my institution supporting this.” And I hope that that’s the start of the turning point here. And I think it’s one of the things that’s contributing to the change in public opinion, where public opinion is turning against the idea of the US arming Israel and supporting Israel indefinitely.

ProPublica (9/24/24)

JJ: There are calls now for Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, to resign after it’s been reported, I believe by ProPublica, that he was in receipt of assessments, from both USAID and the State Department’s Refugees Bureau, that Israel had blocked deliveries of humanitarian aid to Gaza. He had that information, Blinken did, when he went before Congress, and said there was no evidence of that.

Short even of his resignation, though, how many times do US officials need to lie or hide or dissimulate before journalists stop quoting them credulously? Isn’t it just insulting to readers and to the public at some point?

MB: We certainly have many decades of this, going back to Vietnam, of course, US officials lying about war and lying about US support for allies who commit atrocities.

The report from ProPublica has been an exception. It’s an excellent report. It just came out in the last couple of days, based on internal leaks, because there are officials in the State Department, and elsewhere in the Biden administration, that find all of this unconscionable, and don’t want to see this continued support.

And it’s a very important leak, not just because of what it tells us about Blinken and others in the administration, and their ability and willingness to lie to the US public and to lie to the US media, but it also shows us that there’s actually a fairly straightforward path for the Biden administration to stop its weapons transfers to Israel, because those weapons transfers violate US laws. And if they were honest, and they had admitted it, they would’ve had to stop sending weapons, because that’s what US law requires. It’s what the Biden administration’s own guidelines require.

So that was a tremendously important leak by ProPublica. And, unfortunately, I’ve seen some references to it in the past few days, but it’s not getting the widespread attention in the corporate media and in the legacy media that it should be getting.

It’s certainly getting a lot of attention on social media. People are sharing it, and sharing the documents, and it’s creating these calls for Blinken to resign, or for Biden to do something. But it’s certainly troubling to see the legacy media ignore this as well.

And it all raises the question, what more do you want? What more can be presented to the media for it to change its approach to covering this war?

JJ: In addition to the appropriate engagement of that piece of information from that leak, are there any other things that you would like to see more of in US media coverage, or things you’d like to never see again in that coverage?

MB: I would certainly like to see more humane coverage. It’s a basic ask, and it’s unfortunate that we have to make this ask, but I would like to see more humane coverage of Palestinians, of Lebanese, of other Arabs and Muslims.

LA Times (9/23/24)

I think one of the things we’ve seen, just in this past week, in the way that the pager explosions and the walkie-talkie explosions were covered—this marveling over Israel’s ingenuity, it ignores the reality on the ground, but it also contributes to the dehumanization of Palestinians and Lebanese and Arabs, this widespread dehumanization that we’ve seen, certainly for decades, but we’ve seen it ramp up to an extreme since Israel launched its war on Gaza.

So it’s a basic ask, but I would like to see some greater humanization, and just covering those attacks like they would cover other attacks on civilians. It’s not too much to ask for.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Mohamad Bazzi, director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University. His piece, “Israel’s Growing War With Hezbollah Is Traumatizing Lebanon. There’s Only One Path to Peace,” appeared in the September 23 Los Angeles Times.

Mohamad Bazzi, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

MB: Thank you for having me.

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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.”

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240927.mp3Al Jazeera (9/20/24)

This week on CounterSpin: On September 17, thousands of handheld pagers exploded simultaneously across Lebanon and Syria. The next day, it was hundreds of walkie-talkies—part of an Israeli attack, intended for Hezbollah, that Israel’s defense minister called “the start of a new phase in the war.” Media dutifully reported the emerging toll of dead and wounded, including many civilians, including children. Harder to capture is the life-altering impact of such a terror attack on those it doesn’t kill.

As every day brings news of new carnage, US citizens have a duty not to look away, given our government’s critical role in arming Israel and ignoring its crimes, and in misleading us about what they know and intend. Mohamad Bazzi is director of the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies and journalism professor at New York University, and former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He joins us to talk about the latest events and media response.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240927Bazzi.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Rashida Tlaib, banned books and deportation.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240920.mp3The Brainwashing of My Dad (2016)

This week on CounterSpin: Springfield, Ohio, schools are facing bomb threats because some people believe that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating dogs and cats. According to candidates for the country’s highest offices, and the KKK flyers showing up around town, this means that these legal immigrants should be pushed out of the country—or, no doubt, in the minds of inspired vigilantes, much worse.

We spoke with filmmaker, activist and author Jen Senko in April 2023. The Brainwashing of My Dad—Jen Senko’s film and the book based on it—are an effort to engage the effects of that yelling, punching down, reactionary media. We’ll hear our conversation with her this week on CounterSpin.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240920Senko.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent coverage of Donald Trump’s threat to democracy.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240920Banter.mp3

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240913.mp3New York Times (9/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Corporate US news media continue to report things like Israel’s recent strike on the Gaza Strip that killed at least 19 people in an area designated a “refuge” for Palestinians, and to include warnings of a possible wider war in the region—but there’s little sense of urgency, of something horrible happening that US citizens could have a role in preventing. We’ll talk about that with media critic, activist and teacher Gregory Shupak.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240913Shupak.mp3Fox 5 Atlanta (9/12/24)

Also on the show: US corporate media have a similar “another day, another tragedy” outlook on gun violence. It happens, we’re told, but all reporters need to do is quote people saying it’s bad yet oddly unavoidable, and they’re done. We’ll hear from Robert Spitzer, a historian of gun regulation and gun rights, about some spurious reasons behind the impasse on gun violence.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240913Spitzer.mp3That studied lack of urgent concern about human life—is that journalism? Why do the press corps need a constitutional amendment to protect their ability to speak if all they’re going to say is, “oh well”?

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The New York Times (8/21/24), knowing that “outrage” sells, saves for the last paragraph the information that a supposedly canceled author turned down an offer to reschedule his talk in the same bookstore.

Author and journalist Joshua Leifer is the latest scribe to be—allegedly—canceled. A talk for his new book, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life, at a Brooklyn bookstore was canceled when a member of the store’s staff objected to Leifer being joined by a liberal rabbi who was also a Zionist, although still critical of Israel’s right-wing government (New York Times, 8/21/24).

Leifer’s book is doing well as a result of the saga (Forward, 8/27/24). Meanwhile, the bookstore worker wasn’t so lucky, when the venue’s owner said “he would try to reschedule the event” and said “that the employee” responsible for canceling the event “‘is going to be terminated today’” (New York Jewish Week, 8/21/24).

It’s worth dissecting the affair and its impact to truly assess who can gain popular sympathy in the name of “free speech,” and who cannot, and how exactly Leifer has portrayed what happened.

‘One-state maximalism’To Joshua Leifer (Atlantic, 8/27/24), opposition to platforming Zionists is “straightforwardly antisemitic.”

Leifer is a journalist who has produced nuanced coverage of Israel and Jewish politics for Jewish Currents, the New York Review of Books and other outlets. Reflecting on the bookstore affair, Leifer said in the Atlantic (8/27/24) that Jewish writers like him are in a bind because of the intransigence of the left, saying “Jews who are committed to the flourishing of Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora, and who are also outraged by Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, feel like we have little room to maneuver.”

He added:

My experience last week was so demoralizing in part because such episodes make moving the mainstream Jewish community much harder. Every time a left-wing activist insists that the only way to truly participate in the fight for peace and justice is to support the dissolution of Israel, it reinforces the zero-sum (and morally repulsive) idea that opposing the status quo requires Israel’s destruction. Rhetorical extremism and dogmatism make it easier for right-wing Israel supporters to dismiss what should be legitimate demands—for instance, conditions on US military aid—as beyond the pale.

The new left-wing norm that insists on one-state maximalism is not only a moral mistake. It is also a strategic one. If there is one thing that the past year of cease-fire activism has illustrated, it is that changing US policy on Israel requires a broad coalition. That big tent must have room for those who believe in Jewish self-determination and are committed to Israel’s existence, even as they work to end its domination over Palestinians.

No ‘destruction’ requiredFor me, personally, canceling Leifer’s talk was a bad move. No one would have been forced to listen or attend, and if someone wanted to challenge the inclusion of a moderate Zionist at the event, they could have done so in the question and answer session. Speech should usually be met with more speech.

But Leifer is somewhat disingenuous about a “zero-sum” game that forces people into the “morally repulsive” concept that “requires Israel’s destruction.” Many anti-Zionists and non-Zionists believe that the concept of one state, “from the river to the sea,” means a democratic state that treats all its people—Arab, Jew and otherwise—equally. Leifer’s counterposing being “committed to Israel’s existence” with “one-state maximalism” suggests that the Israel whose “existence” he is committed to is one in which one ethnic group is guaranteed supremacy over others. People who are committed to the preservation of Israel as an ethnostate are probably going to have a hard time being in a “big tent” with those who “work to end its domination over Palestinians.”

It is understandable, given the context, that some people might object to a Zionist speaker on a panel while a genocide is being carried out in Zionism’s name. Would the Atlantic have reserved editorial space if an avowed Ba’athist was booted from a panel on Syria?

And Leifer is hardly being censored, and he has much more than a “little room to maneuver.” He has access to a major publisher and the pages of notable periodicals, and is pursuing a PhD at Yale University. His book sales are doing fine, and the event’s cancellation has, if anything, helped his reputation. (It got him a commission at the Atlantic, after all.)

Free speech protects everyoneOsita Nwanevu (New Republic, 7/6/20) writes in defense of “freedom of association, the under-heralded right of individuals to unite for a common purpose or in alignment with a particular set of values.”

Meanwhile, a bookstore worker who expressed a questionable opinion got fired. Free speech debates tend to value the importance and rights to a platform of the saintly media class—the working class, however, doesn’t get the same attention, despite the fact that “free speech” is meant to protect everyone, not just those who write and talk for a living.

And expressing the opinion that a bookstore should not be promoting Zionism is just as much a matter of free speech as advocating Zionism itself. The First Amendment doesn’t stop publications, university lecture committees, cable television networks and, yes, bookstores from curating the views and speech they want to platform. As FAIR has quoted Osita Nwanevu at the New Republic (7/6/20) before:

Like free speech, freedom of association has been enshrined in liberal democratic jurisprudence here and across the world; liberal theorists from John Stuart Mill to John Rawls have declared it one of the essential human liberties. Yet associative freedom is often entirely absent from popular discourse about liberalism and our political debates, perhaps because liberals have come to take it entirely for granted.

Whose speech is punished?eLife*‘s Michael Eisen’s approval of an Onion headline (“Dying Gazans Criticized for Not Using Last Words to Condemn Hamas”) was deemed to be “detrimental to the cohesion of the community we are trying to build” (Science*, 10/23/23).

Worse is what Leifer leaves out. While his event should not have been canceled, he fails to put this in the context of many other writers who have suffered more egregious cancellation because they exercised free speech in defense of Palestinians. Those writers include Masha Gessen (FAIR.org, 12/15/23), Viet Thanh Nguyen (NPR, 10/24/23) and Jazmine Hughes (Vanity Fair, 11/15/23).

New York University has “changed its guidelines around hate speech and harassment to include the criticism of Zionism as a discriminatory act” (Middle East Eye, 8/27/24). Artforum fired its top editor, David Velasco, for signing a letter in defense of Palestinian rights (New York Times, 10/26/23). Dozens of Google workers were “fired or placed on administrative leave…for protesting the company’s cloud-computing contract with Israel’s government” (CNN, 5/1/24). Michael Eisen lost his job as editor of the science journal eLife (Science, 10/23/23) because he praised an Onion article (10/13/23).

Leifer’s Atlantic piece erroneously gives the impression that since the assault on Gaza began last October, it has been the pro-Palestinian left that has enforced speech norms. A question for such an acclaimed journalist is: Why would he omit such crucial context?

‘Litmus test’The lead example of “antisemitism on…the left” offered by the Atlantic (3/4/24) was a high school protest of the bombing of Gaza at which “from the river to the sea” was reportedly chanted.

Leifer has allowed the Atlantic to spin the narrative that it is the left putting the squeeze on discourse, when around the country, at universities and major publications, it’s pro-Palestinian views that are being attacked by people in power. The magazine’s Michael Powell (4/22/24) referred to the fervor of anti-genocide activists as “oppressive.” Theo Baker, son of New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker, claimed in the Atlantic (3/26/24) that his prestigious Stanford University was overrun with left-wing “unreason” when he came face to face with students who criticized Israel.

Franklin Foer used the outlet (3/4/24) to assert that in the United States, both the left and right are squeezing Jews out of social life. Leifer is now the latest recruit in the Atlantic’s movement to frame all Jews as victims of the growing outcry against Israel’s genocide, even when that outcry includes a great many Jews.

Leifer’s piece adds to the warped portrait painted by outlets like the New York Times, which published an op-ed (5/27/24) by James Kirchick, of the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, that asserted that “a litmus test has emerged across wide swaths of the literary world effectively excluding Jews from full participation unless they denounce Israel.” A great many canceled pro-Palestine voices would have something to add to that, but they know they can barely get a word in edgewise in most corporate media—unlike Kirchick, Foer or Leifer.

Leifer’s event should not have been canceled, and I would have been annoyed if I were in his position, but he continues to have literary success and is smartly cashing in on his notoriety. He should not, however, have lent his voice to such a lopsided narrative about free speech.

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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.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240830.mp3Lever (8/26/24)

This week on CounterSpin: The country’s largest and second-largest grocery store chains want to merge and, surprising no one, they claim that giving them that tremendous market power will lead to lower prices, better quality food and better conditions for workers. The FTC says, hold on a second, how does that square with on-the-record statements that Kroger is currently raising the prices of things like eggs and milk above inflation rates, simply because they can get away with it—a practice known as price-gouging? The response, dutifully reported in corporate news media is: We won’t do that anymore! And also: If you try to stop us, that’s illegal!

It could hardly be clearer that the public—consumers and workers—needs advocates willing to go behind talking points to enforceable law. Freddy Brewster is a writer and journalist; his report on the possible Kroger/Albertsons megamerger, its implications, and the behind the scenes shenanigans attendant to it, appears on LeverNews.com. We hear about that this week on CounterSpin.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240830Brewster.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of the Golan Heights bombing.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240830Banter.mp3

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Janine Jackson interviewed North Central College‘s Steve Macek about “dark money” campaign contributions for the August 23, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240823Macek.mp3Janine Jackson: If you use the word “democracy” unsarcastically, you likely think it has something to do with, not only every person living in a society having some say in the laws and policies that govern them, but also the idea that everyone should be able to know what’s going on, besides voting, that influences that critical decision-making.

“Dark money,” as it’s called, has become, in practical terms, business as usual, but it still represents the opposite of that transparency, that ability for even the unpowerful to know what’s happening, to know what’s affecting the rules that govern our lives. A press corps concerned with defending democracy, and not merely narrating the nightmare of crisis, would be talking about that every day, in every way.

Our guest has written about the gap between what we need and what we get, in terms of media. Steve Macek is professor and chair of communication and media studies, at North Central College in Illinois, a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program, and co-editor and contributor to, most recently, Censorship, Digital Media and the Global Crackdown on Freedom of Expression, out this year from Peter Lang. He joins us now by phone from Naperville, Illinois. Welcome to CounterSpin, Steve Macek.

Steve Macek: Thanks for having me, Janine. I’m a big fan of the show.

Progressive (6/24)

JJ: Well, thank you. Let’s start with some definition. Dark money doesn’t mean funding for candidates or campaigns I don’t like, or from groups I don’t like. In your June piece for the Progressive, you spell out what it is, and where it can come from, and what we can know about it. Help us, if you would, understand just the rules around dark money.

SM: Sure. So dark money, and Anna Massoglia of OpenSecrets gave me, I think, a really nice, concise definition of dark money in the interview I did with her for this article. She called it “funding from undisclosed sources that goes to influence political outcomes, such as elections.” Now, thanks to the Supreme Court case in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, and some other cases, it is now completely legal for corporations and very wealthy individuals to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence the outcomes of elections.

Not all of that “independent expenditure” on elections is dark money. Dark money is spending that comes from organizations that do not have to disclose their donors. One sort of organization, I’m sure your listeners are really familiar with, are Super PACs, or, what they’re more technically known as, IRS Code 527 organizations. It can take unlimited contributions, and spend unlimited amounts on influencing elections, but they have to disclose the names of their donors.

There’s this other sort of organization, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit, which is sometimes known as a “social welfare nonprofit,” who can raise huge amounts of money, but they do not have to disclose the names of their donors, but they are prevented from spending the majority of their budget on political activity, which means that a lot of these 501(c)(4) organizations spend 49.999% of their budget attempting to influence the outcomes of elections, and the rest of it is spent on things like general political education, or research that might, in turn, guide the creation of political ads and so on.

JJ: When we talk about influencing the outcome of elections, it’s not that they are taking out an ad for or against a particular candidate. That doesn’t have to be involved at all.

Guardian (5/17/24)

SM: Right. So they can sometimes run issue ads. Sometimes these dark money groups, as long as they’re working within the parameters of the law, will run ads for or against a particular candidate.

But take, for example, Citizens for Sanity, the group that I talked about at the beginning of my Progressive article: This is a group that nobody knows very much about. It showed up back in 2022, and ran $40 million worth of ads in four battleground states. Many of the ads were general ads attacking the Democrats for wanting to erase the border, or over woke culture-war themes, but they’re spending $40+ million on ads, according to one estimate.

What we do know is the officials of the group are almost identical to America First Legal, which was made up by former Trump administration officials. America First Legal was founded by Stephen Miller, that xenophobic former advisor and sometimes speechwriter to Donald Trump. No one really knows exactly who is funding this organization, because it is a 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit, and so is not required by the IRS to disclose its donors.

It has been running this year, in Ohio and elsewhere, a whole bunch of digital ads, and putting up billboards, for example, attacking Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown for his stance on immigration policies, basically saying he wants to protect criminal illegals, and also running these general, very snarky anti-“woke” ads saying, basically, Democrats used to care about the middle class, now they only care about race and gender and DEI.

JJ: Right. Well, I think “rich people influence policy,” it’s almost like “dog bites man” at this point, right? Yeah, it’s bad, but that’s how the system works, and I think it’s important to lift up: If it didn’t matter for donors to obscure their support for this or that, well then they wouldn’t be trying to obscure it.

And the thing you’re writing about, these are down-ballot issues, where you might believe that Citizens for Sanity, in this case, or any other organization, you might think of this as like a grassroots group that’s scrambled together some money to take out ads. And so it is meaningful to know to connect these financial dots.

SM: Absolutely. It is meaningful. And since you made reference to down-ballot races, one of the things that I think is so nefarious about dark money, and these dark money organizations, is that they are spending a lot on races for things like school boards or, as I discussed in the article, state attorney generals races.

There is this organization, it was founded in 2014, called the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which is a beautiful acronym, and they have been trying to elect extremely reactionary Republicans to the top law enforcement position in state after state. And in 2022, they spent something like $8.9 million trying to defeat Democratic state attorney generals candidates in the 2022 elections.

ProPublica (10/11/23)

Now, they are a PAC of a kind, they’re a 527, so they have the same legal status as a Super PAC, so they have to disclose their donors. But the fact is, one of the major donors is a group called the Concord Fund, which has given them $17 million.

Concord Fund is a 501(c)(4) that was founded by Leonard Leo, the judicial activist affiliated with the Federalist Society, who is basically Donald Trump’s Supreme Court whisperer, who is largely responsible for the conservative takeover of the federal courts. His organization, this fund that he controls, gave $17 million to RAGA.

And we have no idea who contributed that money to the fund. We can make some educated guesses, but nobody really knows who’s funneling that money into trying to influence the election of the top law enforcement official in state after state around this country.

That’s alarming because, of course, some of these right-wing billionaires and corporations have a vested interest in who is sitting in that position. Because if it comes to enforcement of antitrust laws, or corruption laws, if they have a more friendly state attorney general in that position, it could mean millions of dollars for their bottom line.

JJ: And I think, from the point of view of the public, filtered through the point of view of the press, if you heard there’s this one macher, or this one rich person, and they’re pulling the strings and they’ve bought this judge, and they’ve paid for this policy and these ads, that would be one thing. But to have it filtered through a number of groups that are kind of opaque and you don’t really know, a minority point of view can be presented as a sort of groundswell of grassroots support.

SM: Exactly. It can create this sort of astroturfing effect where, “Oh, there are all these ads being run. It must be that there are lots of people who are really concerned or really opposed to this particular candidate,” when, in fact, it could be a single billionaire who is routing money for a number of different shells and front groups in an effort to influence the outcome of an election.

Colorado Newsline (10/21/23)

So I think attorney generals races are one kind of down-ballot race where we’ve seen a lot of dark money spent. School board elections are another, and this is something that has been really evident in the past couple of years, where various different Super PACs and other dark money groups have spent millions of dollars, that are affiliated with advocates for charter schools, and advocates for school vouchers have been spending money trying to elect school board members that are pro-voucher and pro–charter school.

In 2023, City Fund, which is a national pro–charter school group, bankrolled in part by billionaire Reed Hastings, donated $1.75 million from its affiliated PAC to a 501(c)(4), Denver Families for Public Schools, to try to elect three “friendly” pro–charter school candidates for the city school board, and all three of the candidates won.

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t have children who went through the public system here in Naperville, I didn’t pay very close attention to who was running in those races, or who was backing those people. I just would read about it a couple days before the election. Most people don’t pay very close attention, unless they’re employees of the school district, or have children currently in school. They’re not paying that close attention to the school board elections. And so this influx of dark money could very well have tipped those races in the favor of the pro–charter school.

JJ: And name that group again, because it didn’t say “charter schools.”

SM: So the charter school group was City Fund, and it donated money to Denver Families for Public Schools….

JJ: : For “public schools….”

SM: Right, which is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Yes, and it’s got this Orwellian name, because it’s Denver Families for Public Schools. But what they wanted to do was, of course, create more charter schools.

JJ: It’s deep, and it’s confusing because it’s designed to be confusing, and it’s opaque because, you know….

And then, OK, so here come media. And we know that lots of people, including reporters, still imagine the US press corps as kind of like an old movie, with press cards in their hat band, or Woodward and Bernstein connecting dots, holding the powerful to account, and the chips are just falling where they may.

And you make the point in the Progressive piece that there have been excellent corporate news media exposés of the influence of dark money, connecting those dots. But you write that news media have “missed or minimized as many stories about dark money as they have covered.” What are you getting at there?

ProPublica (12/14/22)

SM: I absolutely believe that. So it is true, as I say, that there have been some excellent reports about dark money. Here in Chicago, we had this reclusive billionaire industrialist, Barre Seide, who made what most people say is the largest political contribution in American history. He donated his company to a fund, Marble Freedom Fund, run by Leonard Leo, again, a conservative judicial activist.

The Marble Freedom Fund sold the company for $1.6 billion. It’s hard for the corporate media to ignore a political contribution of $1.6 billion. That’s a $1.6 billion trust fund that Leonard Leo, who engineered the conservative takeover of the US Supreme Court, is going to be able to use—he’s a very right-wing, conservative Catholic—to put his particular ideological stamp on American elections and on American culture. And so that got reported.

And, in fact, there have been some really excellent follow-up reports by ProPublica, among others, about how various Leonard Leo–affiliated organizations have influenced judicial appointments and have influenced judicial elections. So you have to give credit where credit’s due.

But the problem is that there are so many other cases where dark money is in play. Whether or not you can say it’s determining the outcome of elections or not is another story. But where dark money is playing a role, and it is simply not being talked about.

Steve Macek: “Outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.”

Think about the last month of this current presidential election. There hasn’t been much discussion about the influence of dark money. And yet OpenSecrets just came out with an analysis where they say that contributions from dark money groups and shell organizations are outpacing all prior elections in this year, and might surpass the $660 million in contributions from dark money sources that flooded the 2020 elections. So they’re projecting that could be as much as a billion dollars. We haven’t heard very much about this.

I don’t think necessarily dark money is going to make a huge difference one way or the other in the presidential race, but it certainly can make a difference in congressional races and attorney generals races, school board races, city council races, that’s where it can make a huge difference.

And I do know that OpenSecrets, among others, have done research, and they found that there were cases where, over a hundred different congressional races, there was more outside spending on those races than were spent by either of the candidates. Which is a scandal, that outside forces who, in some cases, do not have to disclose the source of their funding can spend more on a race than the candidates themselves.

JJ: And it’s disheartening, the idea that, while you’re swimming in it, it’s too big of an issue to even lift out.

SM: And I think that’s also part of the reason why it’s accepted, sort of like the weather. And I think that’s part of the reason why there isn’t as much reporting in the corporate media as there ought to be about legal struggles over the regulation of dark money.

JJ: That’s exactly where I was going to lead you, for a final question, just because we know that reporters will say, well, they can’t cover what isn’t happening. But it is happening, that legal and community and policy pushback on this influence is happening. And so, finally, what should we know about that?

Roll Call (5/14/24)

SM: State-level Republican lawmakers, and state legislatures across the country, are pushing legislation that would prohibit state officials and agencies from collecting or disclosing information about donors to nonprofits, including donors to those 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations that I spoke about, that spend money on politics. So they’re trying to pass laws to make dark money even darker, to make this obscure money influencing our elections even harder to track. And I will say there are Republicans in Congress who have introduced federal legislation that would do the same thing.

Now, the bills that are being pushed through state legislatures, not probably going to be a surprise to anybody who follows this, are based on a model bill that was developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which is a policy development organization that is funded by the Koch network of right-wing foundations, millionaires and billionaires. And they meet every year to develop model right-wing, libertarian legislation, that then is dutifully introduced into state legislatures around the country.

And since 2018, a number of states, including Alabama, Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Utah, Virginia and West Virginia, have all adopted some version of this ALEC legislation that criminalizes disclosing donors to nonprofits that engage in political activity.

And in Arizona, where this conservative legislation was made into law, in 2022, there was a ballot referendum by the voters on the Voter’s Right to Know Act, Proposition 211, that would basically reverse the ALEC attempt to criminalize the disclosure of the names of donors. It would require PACs spending at least $50,000 on statewide campaigns to disclose all donors who have given more than $5,000—a direct reversal of the ALEC-inspired law.

New Yorker (11/16/22)

Conservative dark money group spent a lot of money trying to defeat this, and yet they lost. And then they spent a lot of money challenging the new law, Proposition 211, in court. And it has gone to trial, I think, three times, and been defeated each time.

Now, the initial battle over Proposition 211 was covered to some degree in the corporate media, the New York Times, Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, who does excellent reporting on dark money issues, discussed it. But since then, we have gotten very little coverage of the court battles that continue to this day over this attempt to bring more transparency to campaign spending in the state of Arizona.

JJ: So, not to hammer it too hard home, but there are legal efforts, policy efforts around the country, to bring more transparency, to explode this idea of dark money, to connect the dots, and more media coverage of them would actually have an amplifying effect on that very transparency.

SM: Absolutely right. You would think that media organizations, whether they’re corporate or independent media, would have a vested interest in seeing more transparency in election spending. That would benefit their own reporting, and the reporters. And yet they really haven’t done a great job of covering it.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois, and a co-coordinator of Project Censored’s campus affiliate program. The piece we’re talking about, “Dark Money Uncovered,” can be found at TheProgressive.org. Steve Macek, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

SM: Oh, it was great. Thank you for having me.

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Much like the front page, breaking-news newsletters demonstrate which stories news outlets think deserve the most attention. It’s important real estate: By pushing these stories to readers, they influence the way we think about the world, even what in the world we should be thinking about. Even if readers don’t click through, just seeing the headlines can shape our perceptions. And, as a new FAIR study has found, those headlines often feed into predictable patterns that parrot official narratives, and prioritize clicks over well-informed citizens.

Outlets like the New York Times promise to send readers alerts about “important news.”

Most major outlets produce a variety of email newsletters for readers, which have increasingly broad reach. Subscription numbers are generally not made public, but the New York Times‘ top newsletter, the Morning, reportedly has over 5 million readers daily, and CNN advertises over 1 million total newsletter subscribers.

To see what kinds of stories outlets present to readers as urgently important, FAIR studied four national outlets that offer unpaywalled breaking news email alerts over the course of two months. We subscribed to alerts from the New York Times, USA Today, CNN and Fox News from April 1 to May 31, 2024, and recorded each alert sent. These outlets advertised that subscribers would receive “24/7 alerts” as the “biggest” and most “important” stories to “stay on top of the news.”

We excluded the occasional roundups of top stories, as these were outside the “breaking news” format. The Times and USA Today periodically offered op-eds as breaking news alerts, and we did include these. FAIR recorded 630 alerts during the study period.

We coded each alert by topic (National Politics, International Politics, Business/Economy, Crime, Entertainment, Sports, Health, Science, Disaster, Personal Advice, Miscellaneous) and subtopic (e.g., Gaza Protests, Abortion Rights, Foreign Aid Bill). Seventy-five alerts were assigned to more than one topic; for instance, a story about the trial of a celebrity might be coded as both Crime and Entertainment.

National politics dominatesTrump’s hush money trial, with its titillating details, was the subject of numerous breaking news alerts (New York Times, 5/7/24).

The outlets put out alerts with varying frequency—USA Today put out the most (224, or almost four per day) and CNN the fewest (83)—but National Politics stories dominated across all outlets, making up 274 (43%) of 630 total alerts. Within these stories, Donald Trump figured prominently, referenced in 121 alerts (44% of all National Politics stories). Eighty-eight of these, or 73% of the total stories about Trump, were about his trials—predominately his criminal trial in Manhattan, which ran through all but the first two weeks of the study period.

The Times, with 207 alerts sent out overall, devoted the highest percentage of its National Politics alerts (79) to Trump’s legal woes (39%), while Fox, with 116 alerts sent out, afforded them 17 articles of 63 National Politics stories—the smallest percentage of the four outlets (27%). Twice—the day Stormy Daniels testified (5/7/24) and the day the jury announced its guilty verdict (5/30/24)—the Times sent three trial-related alerts to its subscribers over the course of the day.

President Joe Biden received far less attention in National Politics stories; he was referenced in 35, or 13% of them. Fifteen of these stories were about the election, of which only two (USA Today, 5/28/24; Fox News, 5/1/24) did not also mention Trump.

Gaza, at home and abroadAfter the Trump trials, the top National Politics topics included the university campus protests for Gaza (41), abortion rights (16) and the foreign aid bill (6). (We coded stories about abortion into the Health category as well.)

Twenty-six (61%) of the 41 alerts about campus Gaza protests came from Fox News, accounting for 22% of all Fox alerts across categories, making it the outlet’s single most frequent alert topic. On seven days between April 17 and May 3, Fox sent multiple alerts about the protests; its fixation peaked on April 30, when the network sent five such alerts in a single day.

Fox’s encampment alert subject lines consistently referred to protesters as “agitators,” calling them “anti-Israel” and even “antisemitic” (4/30/24). (The New York Times called them “pro-Palestinian protests,” and USA Today simply referred to them as “protests.”) “Columbia University, Anti-Israel Agitators Fail to Reach Agreement as Unrest Continues” read a typical Fox subject line (4/29/24). “Facilities Worker Says Anti-Israel Columbia University Agitators ‘Held Me Hostage’” read another the next day (4/30/24).

The only Fox News alert (4/26/24) for an international issue other than Gaza was about King Charles’ health.

There were many other Gaza protests occurring around the country during the study period (Democracy Now!, 4/18/24, 4/24/24, 5/22/24, 5/30/24, 5/31/24), yet only one alert (Fox News, 4/9/24) mentioned any besides those on college campuses.

The second-most prevalent news category was International Politics, which had 97 alerts (15% of all). Sixty-three of these (65%) pertained to the ongoing Gaza crisis (not including the campus Gaza protests, which were coded as National Politics). Iran was sometimes mentioned in Gaza-related alerts, but it was also featured in eight unrelated alerts (8%) concerning the helicopter crash that killed Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi. Other recurring topics included Ukraine and the Ukraine War (6%), the shooting of the Slovakian president (5%), British elections (3%), China (3%) and Julian Assange (2%).

Curiously, while Fox advertises its breaking news alerts as keeping subscribers “in the know on the most important moments around the world,” it only produced seven alerts on international issues—six of them on the Gaza crisis. (The other article discussed King Charles’ return to royal duties after his cancer diagnosis.) That’s just one more alert on Gaza during the entire study period than Fox put out on its peak day of breaking news coverage of the encampments. At the other three outlets, International Politics stories were the second most frequent alerts.

Climate crisis not breaking newsThis CNN story (5/7/24) about climate change breaking heat records was not deemed urgent enough to qualify as breaking news.

It’s impossible to argue that the climate crisis isn’t an ongoing urgent news story. Yet the Science/Environment category had the fewest number of alerts, at 24, making up just 4% of alerts tracked. And only seven (1%) of the subject lines that appeared in our inbox referred or even alluded to climate-related topics.

During the study period, there were multiple major climate crisis stories that CNN, USA Today and the Times (but not Fox) reporters covered—but, for the most part, the outlets chose not to include these stories in their breaking news alerts.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that a right-wing outlet like Fox put out no alerts about climate change; its lone science story (4/8/24) was about the April solar eclipse. But CNN and the New York Times did only marginally better. CNN sent alerts for two Science stories, only one of which (4/15/24) was about the climate crisis: “Ocean Heat Is Driving a Global Coral Bleaching Event, and It Could Be the Worst on Record.”

At the same time, CNN‘s website reported on extreme ocean temperatures causing mass marine mortalities (CNN, 4/21/24), extreme heat causing health emergencies (CNN, 4/18/24) and April’s record-breaking heat (CNN, 5/7/24), among other climate change–related topics. On the days that these stories were published, however, CNN only sent out National Politics alerts, or simply no alerts at all.

One of the eight Science stories that the Times pushed was directly about the climate crisis, a story (5/13/24) about federal regulations impacting renewable energy (which we also coded as National Politics). Another Science article (7/3/24) that was not primarily about the climate crisis did mention its role in increasing turbulence experienced on airplane flights.

The Times does offer a paywalled newsletter for stories about climate, called Climate Forward. But they also have a free newsletter called On Politics, offering election-related news alerts—and that didn’t stop them from promoting eight articles directly related to the 2024 presidential election as breaking news.

In its online and print editions, the Times reported plenty of stories related to the climate crisis—but, as at CNN, they simply didn’t deem them important enough to send as breaking news alerts. On April 10, the Times published a story about ocean heat shattering records, and on April 15 it covered the coral bleaching event. Neither were sent as alerts.

The New York Times found mattress reviews more urgent than climate change.

On May 28, the Times published a piece headlined “Climate Change Added a Month’s Worth of Extra-Hot Days in Past Year”; that story wasn’t deemed “important news” that day by the Times’ breaking news alert team, but the “Best Mattresses of 2024” was.

All the outlets studied also failed to send out stories about major flooding disasters in Brazil, Afghanistan and Indonesia (Democracy Now!, 5/13/24, 5/14/24), or about the major heat waves in South Asia that killed hundreds of people (Democracy Now!, 5/28/24; CBS News, 5/15/24). All of these crises are major examples of how climate change is affecting people around the world in drastic ways.

USA Today did best on climate, sending out 13 alerts under the Science/Environment category; four of them discussed climate change, including topics such as carbon emissions and pollution. That’s still less than 2% of the paper’s alerts during the two-month period.

Corporate outlets have long been more than willing to leave climate change out of their stories about weather phenomenons and natural disasters around the world (FAIR.org, 9/20/18, 7/18/23, 6/28/24).

According to data published by the Pew Research Center in August 2023, 54% of Americans view climate change as a major threat. According to data collected by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication up until the fall of 2023, 64% of the nation is worried about global warming, 58% believe global warming is already harming people in the US, and 70% think that global warming will harm future generations.

If more than half of the public views global warming and climate change as an urgent issue, why do these major publications not treat it as one?

Crime, entertainment over economyMany Crime alerts involved celebrities, like one for this Fox News story (4/15/24) about Alec Baldwin.

Although news media frequently report that the economy is “voters’ top concern,” leading into the 2024 election FAIR identified only 40 news alerts as belonging to the Business/Economy beat—6% of all.

Fox and CNN suggested to alert subscribers that Crime stories were more than twice as important, making up 21% of Fox‘s alerts and 19% of CNN‘s. (USA Today and the Times only devoted 7% and 4% of their alerts to crime, respectively.) The violent crime rate has actually gone down 26% (and the property crime rate 19%) since President Biden’s inauguration in January 2021, according to the New York Times (7/24/24), but media (including the Times) still focus heavily on the topic (FAIR.org, 7/25/24).

Mass shootings made up 21% of Crime alerts (13) across all outlets, which is not surprising, considering there have already been 348 mass shootings in 2024.

Celebrity crimes made up a large portion of Crime alerts across all outlets, at 25 (40%) out of 62. Many of these stories were about Alec Baldwin (5), OJ Simpson (5) and Scottie Scheffler (5).

Fox’s Crime alerts featured headlines meant to catch a reader’s attention—but not provide a lot of information. Take the May 17 news alert from Fox, “Pelosi Hammer Attacker Learns Fate During Sentencing,” for example. Why not include what the sentence was—30 years in prison—in the alert itself?

On April 15, when three out of four alerts sent out by Fox were about Crime (the fourth was a story about Trump’s hush money trial, coded as National Politics), one was headlined “Search for Kansas Women Takes a Turn as Spokeswoman for Investigators Gives Update.” The “turn” was an announcement that officials had given up hope of finding the missing women alive.

For its part, the New York Times gave its readers more Entertainment alerts (18) than Economy alerts (14), pushing out 46% of all Entertainment stories tracked in the study. The paper also put out the highest number of Personal Advice (81% of all) and Miscellaneous stories (72%). The Times and USA Today were the only outlets to send out Personal Advice stories as breaking news alerts, such as “The Six Best White Sneakers” (New York Times, 5/15/24) and “Being a Bridesmaid Can Be Expensive. Should You Say Yes or No?” (USA Today, 5/5/24).

A few New York Times Personal Advice stories (5/15/24, 5/28/24, 5/30/24) were from Wirecutter, the product-review website the Times bought in 2016. The website states at the top of each article that “when you buy through our links, we may earn a commission.” (This process is explained in a bit more depth here.) In the Times’ annual report, revenue made from Wirecutter commissions is listed as part of “Other Businesses,” a category that made the Times $265 million in 2023. These Wirecutter stories are not urgent news stories—but they do help the Times make a profit off its readers (FAIR.org, 6/17/21).

Questionable urgencyStop the presses! The New York Times (4/22/24) reports that some songs on Taylor Swift’s latest album “sounded a whole lot like others she has already put out.”

The New York Times and USA Today sometimes considered op-eds newsy enough to dedicate an entire alert to, in addition to their regular “breaking news.” An op-ed about Gmail’s 20th anniversary warranted an alert, just like the impeachment trial of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did. An op-ed on the dangers of sexual choking got the same weight as the news of the ICC preparing arrest warrants for Israeli and Hamas leaders. And in both instances, alerts were pushed on the same day within hours of each other.

The Times also published the most Health stories (21) about seemingly random (rather than breaking news) topics, such as whether oats and apple cider vinegar can really help you lose weight, why we age and tips for a better sex life. (Many of these Health stories were dually coded into Personal Advice.) These types of stories may have surprised readers who subscribed in order to, as the Times advertises, “get informed as important news breaks around the world.”

Times alerts of questionable urgency were often sent out with no apparent rhyme or reason, in the midst of other, more obviously newsworthy alerts. For example, on April 24, the Times sent out alerts about abortion laws in Arizona and Idaho, and the US secretly sending long-range missiles to Ukraine—along with a story headlined “Has Taylor Swift Fatigue Finally Set In?”

The next day, April 25, the Times pushed a story called “‘Eldest Daughter Syndrome’ and the Science of Birth Order” at 8:37 am, and then another email listed as “The U.S. economy grew at a 1.6 percent annual rate in the first quarter, a sharply slower pace than late last year.” just six minutes later. The article about “eldest daughter syndrome” was actually published by the Times ten days earlier, making it clear that it wasn’t exactly “breaking” news.

Many of the Times’ stories we coded as “Miscellaneous” had obvious clickbait headlines, like “A Hiker Was Lost in the Woods. Snow Was Falling. Time Was Running Out” (4/30/24) and “These Couples Survived a Lot. Then Came Retirement” (5/8/24). The latter was linked to the New York Times Magazine, the Times‘ weekly Sunday magazine that highlights interviews, commentaries, features and longer-length articles—again, not urgent news.

On May 27, when over 2,000 people died in Papua New Guinea, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented on the tent massacre in Rafah, the Times thought it reasonable to also send alerts about Manhattanhenge, nude modeling and a celebrity obituary that linked to its recently-acquired sports news site, the Athletic. As we’ve seen before (FAIR.org, 6/7/24), the Times enjoys focusing on trending and glamorous topics.

These media outlets offer newsletters that promise comprehensive news alerts about important breaking stories occurring everywhere. After tallying the topics covered, we can confidently state that that’s not what subscribers are getting.

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As the US-backed genocide in Gaza continues, US media assist in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to widen the war, parroting the words of the aggressor. A consequential example of US press support for escalation was Western media’s coverage of the July 27 strike that killed 12 Druze children on a soccer field near the town of Majdal Shams in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.

Israel and the US immediately blamed the Iran-backed Lebanese organization Hezbollah for the strike—citing Israeli intelligence reports of an Iranian Falaq-1 missile being found at the soccer field (BBC, 7/28/24).

But, in a move that Hezbollah expert Amal Saad called “uncharacteristic” (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the group adamantly denied responsibility for the attack. Saad, a lecturer in politics at Cardiff University, noted that targeting the Syrian Golan Heights—where many inhabitants are hostile towards Israel—would be “illogical” and “provocative” for Hezbollah. Further, if the organization had accidentally committed an attack, Saad pointed to a precedent of the group issuing a public apology in a case of misfire, with the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrullah, visiting families of victims.

The New York Times (7/28/24) matter-of-factly described an explosion of disputed origin as a “rocket from Lebanon.”

Despite multiple eyewitnesses describing an Israeli Iron Dome interceptor missile falling on the field during the time of the Majdal Shams strike (Cradle, 7/28/24), the New York Times insisted on spotlighting Israeli and US claims in its headlines, rather than genuinely assessing the facts on the ground.

On July 28, the Times published “Fears of Escalation After Rocket From Lebanon Hits Soccer Field,” pinning the blame squarely on Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The next day, reporting on the potential escalations, the Times headline (7/29/24) described the strike as a “Deadly Rocket Attack Tied to Hezbollah.”

While the July 29 subhead acknowledged that Hezbollah denied responsibility, the assertion in the headline undermined any reference to alternative explanations. Attribution to Hezbollah was then repeated without qualification in the first paragraph of the story.

Rebroadcasting government talking points not only does a disservice to newsreaders as Israel has a long history of misleading the public, but it also serves Netanyahu’s goals of justifying an escalation against Hezbollah. Predictably, the New York Times did not contextualize accusations of Hezbollah responsibility with information about Israel’s current objectives for wider war. This continues a long trend of US media outlets obscuring and distorting reality in order to downplay Israel’s aggressive regional ambitions (FAIR.org, 8/22/23).

Israel an unreliable sourceEven lying about the murder of a journalist doesn’t make Western journalists skeptical of official Israeli claims (Al Jazeera, 5/22/22).

The first problem is that the New York Times accepts narratives from Israeli military and government officials at face value. From peddling evidence-free claims about Palestinian use of human shields during Operation Cast Lead in 2009 (Amnesty International, 2009; Human Rights Watch, 8/13/09), to dodging responsibility for its assassination of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in 2022 (Al Jazeera, 5/22/22), to consistently attempting to conceal its use of illegal white phosphorus munitions across the Middle East (Haaretz, 10/22/06; Human Rights Watch, 3/25/09; Guardian, 10/13/23), the Israeli military has been known to circulate disinformation to the international public for decades. Neither in headlines nor in the text of its pieces does the Times acknowledge this well-established history.

The current assault on Gaza has made the central role of lies in Israel’s public relations arsenal clearer than ever. As early as October 17, there was controversy over the origin of a rocket strike on the Al-Ahli Arab hospital that killed hundreds of Palestinians (FAIR.org, 11/3/23). In the media confusion, Israel released audio it said captured two Hamas militants discussing Palestinian Islamic Jihad responsibility for the strike. However, an analysis by Britain’s Channel 4 news (10/19/23) found that the audio was the result of two separate channels being edited together. In other words, Israel engineered a phony audio clip to substantiate the notion that it had not committed a war crime.

In November, Israel laid siege to Al Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital facility, leaving behind mass graves. In another dubious public relations campaign, Israel justified its assault on Al Shifa hospital by alleging that there was a Hamas command center underneath the facility, and that no civilians were killed in the operation (FAIR.org, 12/3/23).

What might be labeled “disinformation” when it comes from an official enemy is called “information missteps” from Israel (NBC, 11/18/23).

During and after the assault, Israel pumped out high volumes of low-effort lies (NBC, 11/18/23; New Arab, 11/14/23) to convince the public that there had indeed been a Hamas operations base in the basement, going so far as planting weapons in hospital rooms to insinuate Hamas activity in the area (CNN, 11/19/23). In the face of mounting public ridicule, Israel’s official Arabic Twitter account was compelled to delete a staged video of an Israeli actress boosting the Hamas-hospital-occupation theory while pretending to be a Palestinian Al Shifa nurse (France 24, 11/15/23).

However, after the mainstream outlets expressed skepticism at the claims and acknowledged that Israel had not provided sufficient evidence to back them up (New York Times, 11/17/23; Guardian, 11/17/23), Israel announced that the supposed Hamas base was actually in southern Gaza.

At the same time as the Al Shifa raid, Israel stormed Rantisi Children’s Hospital, and engaged in similarly preposterous propaganda efforts to justify its attack. Noting the presence of hospital gowns, baby bottles and toilets in the children’s hospital, Israeli spokesperson Daniel Hagari declared that this was proof of hostages in the facility (Jerusalem Post, 11/13/23). Hagari (Al Jazeera, 11/17/23) later pointed to what he said was a handwritten list of Hamas fighters hanging from one of the hospital’s walls, holding that “every terrorist writes his name and every terrorist has his own shift, guarding the people that were here.”

But, this was not, in fact, a damning roll call of Hamas fighters, but instead an Arabic calendar. All that appeared on the calendar were the days of the week, though this was unknown to most of Hagari’s largely non-Arabic-speaking audience (Electronic Intifada, 11/14/23).

Even recently, when Netanyahu visited Washington, DC, the Israeli prime minister gave a speech to lawmakers that was filled with obvious lies, including the contention that during attacks on Rafah, no civilians were killed, save for the two dozen who were murdered in a Hamas weapons depot explosion (New Arab, 7/25/24). This flies in the face of numerous reports detailing fatal bombings and rocket attacks in Gaza’s southernmost city, including a single Israeli missile that killed at least 45 people (Al Jazeera, 5/27/24).

It is not possible that the writers and the editors at the Times—the supposed newspaper of record—are ignorant of this seemingly unending series of deceptions. The decision to uncritically accept the word of the IDF regarding the Golan Heights strike demonstrates a deliberate editorial decision to knowingly advance the deceitful public relations goals of a genocidal state.

Justifying a wider warTwo days before the Majdal Sham massacre, Israel was reportedly told that “now is the right time” to escalate its war against Lebanon (Cradle, 7/25/24).

In light of Israel’s past lies, serious journalism ought to refrain from regurgitating Israeli claims without significant context or qualification. This is especially true when doing so would advance goals as disastrous as Netanyahu’s current aims. In the case of the Majdal Shams strike, media proliferation of Israeli propaganda manufactures consent for escalating the war on the northern border—something Israel has long stated as its goal, and something American officials have long been concerned about.

Multiple generals have bragged about Israel’s combat readiness in the north. In February, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant stated that if a ceasefire was reached in Gaza, Israel would increase its fire against Hezbollah, and later said his government is preparing to send Lebanon into the “stone age.”

Although some in the Israeli press believe that Israel is incapable of handling a front against both Hamas and Hezbollah (Cradle, 6/28/24), statements of readiness have intensified in summer months. The IDF announced on June 18 that it had approved operational plans for a war in Lebanon. Later, Axios (6/24/24) reported that the US envoy to Lebanon warned Hezbollah, “The US won’t be able to hold Israel back if the situation on the border continues to escalate.” Just two days before the Majdal Shams strike, Israeli media reported that Washington had given “full legitimacy” to an IDF campaign in Lebanon (Cradle, 7/25/24), contrary to apparent earlier efforts to avert a wider war in the Middle East.

On top of neglecting to acknowledge Israel’s flimsy credibility in their Majdal Shams analysis, Times reporters failed to address this readily available information about Israeli military objectives. By ignoring Israel’s strategic aims, they are ensuring the reader doesn’t encounter further reasons to question Israel’s account about the strike.

Who fired the rocket? Though it included a pro forma denial from Hezbollah, the New York Times (7/30/24) referred throughout this article to a “rocket attack” rather than an air-defense misfire.

When reporting on Israel’s “reprisal” assaults on Lebanon following the strike on the soccer field, the New York Times (7/28/24) again asserted Israeli claims as fact, saying in the first paragraph that “a rocket from Lebanon on Saturday killed at least 12 children and teenagers in an Israeli-controlled town,” which “prompted Israel to retaliate early Sunday with strikes across Lebanon.”

Was Lebanon—and implicitly Hezbollah—the source of the explosion that killed the 12 children? The Times does not care to examine this question, which warrants exploration. Israel’s military chief of staff declared that the damage was done with an Iranian-made Falaq-1 rocket fired by Hezbollah, a claim that was uncritically repeated as fact by the New York Times (7/30/24), despite the lack of independent corroboration. While there has been fighting in the area, and Hezbollah acknowledged that they fired Falaq-1 rockets at the nearby IDF barracks, there is significant reason to doubt that one of these rockets struck the soccer field.

The Falaq-1 was described by Haaretz (7/28/24) as a munition that targets bunkers. But, images from the aftermath of the attack show that the damage to physical structures was far from bunker-busting. In an interview with Jeremy Scahill (Drop Site, 7/30/24), the Hezbollah expert Saad cited military specialists who told her that “if [Hezbollah] had used the Falaq-1, we would have seen a much larger crater…. It would be much, much bigger and there would be much more destruction.”

As discussed above, Israel, well-known for planting or fabricating evidence for propagandistic ends, released images of rocket fragments that it alleged were found at the impact site, though the Associated Press (7/30/24) was unable to verify their authenticity.

A substantial case can be made that the projectile came from the IDF. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, multiple eyewitnesses told Arab news outlets the projectile was a misfired Iron Dome missile (Cradle, 7/28/24; Drop Site, 7/30/24). The New York Times omitted this from its coverage of this event.

Contrary to the mythos behind the high-tech defense system, there have already been several cases of Iron Dome missiles falling on populated areas within Israel since October 7 (Al Jazeera, 6/11/23; Jerusalem Post, 12/2/23, 7/25/24; Times of Israel, 5/4/23, 8/9/24) with many such instances resulting in civilian injuries and deaths. There was even a report of an Iron Dome malfunction near Majdal Shams, months before the recent July strike.

Bolstering the case for an Iron Dome malfunction, OSINT researcher Michale Kobs noted that the sound profile of the projectile suggested that its speed was constant until it hit the ground. Hezbollah’s projectiles constantly accelerate as they fall on their targets, since they are driven by gravity, whereas Iron Dome missiles are propelled throughout their entire flight.

For their part, the Druze people in the Golan Heights—an Arabic-speaking religious community which has largely declined offers of Israeli citizenship—repudiated Israel’s displays of sympathy for their slain children, rejecting the use of their suffering to advance Israel’s plans for a broader war (Democracy Now!, 7/30/24). Locals even protested a visit from Netanyahu, chanting “Killer! Killer!” and demanding he leave the area (New Arab, 7/29/24).

In the Times reporting on the strike, Lebanese and Syrian denials of Hezbollah’s responsibility for the strikes were acknowledged and reported, but portrayed as predictable denials that did nothing to alter the narrative. By omitting the evidence pointing to Israeli responsibility for the strikes, the New York Times assists Israel in yet another propaganda campaign to mislead the public in order to justify further regional strife and bloodshed.

Featured image: Screenshot from a New York Times video (7/28/24) that claimed to know that the explosion in the Golan Heights was caused by a “rocket from Lebanon.”

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.

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Janine Jackson interviewed Inside Climate News‘ Victoria St. Martin about suing Big Oil for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240816Martin.mp3Janine Jackson: A lot of us have started seeing local weather forecasts with numbers unfamiliar to us for this time of year. As reporters, you could treat that as, “Oh, isn’t that curious? How are folks on the street dealing with this? Are sales of sunscreen going up?” Or, as a reporter, you can seriously engage the predicted, disastrous effects of fossil fuel production as predicted and disastrous—not, though, in terms of what, in other contexts, we would call criminal.

So what does it look like when business as usual is called out as an actual crime? Our next guest is reporting on an important case in a county in Oregon.

Veteran journalist and educator Victoria St. Martin covers health and environmental justice at Inside Climate News. She joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Victoria St. Martin.

Victoria St. Martin: Thank you so much. I’m so honored to be here.

Inside Climate News (7/8/24)

JJ: So what happened in summer 2021 in northwest Oregon, such that it became the subject of scientific study? What happened there? What were the harms?

VSM: The county called this a “heat dome disaster,” but basically there was a heat dome over three days in June of ’21 that recorded highs of 108°, 112°, 116° Fahrenheit. During that time, 69 people died from heat stroke, and most of them were in their homes.

Typically, in this part of Oregon, they have very gentle summers. The highs top out at about 81°. But this was unprecedented.

And one of the attorneys that is working with the county says this was not an act of God. This was not caused by God, but caused by climate change.

JJ: And that’s exactly the point. Oftentimes, folks might be surprised to hear, but environmental impacts were legitimately, legally written off, if you will, as acts of God. This is just nature, this is just what’s happening. So this is actually something new.

VSM: Yes. The attorney that I was speaking about, his name’s Jeffrey B. Simon; he is a lawyer for the county. He talks about this idea of how, no, this is not an act of God. This catastrophe was caused by “several of the world’s largest energy companies playing God with the lives of innocent and vulnerable people, by selling as much oil and gas as they could.”

JJ: What is a heat dome, just for folks who might not know?

VSM: Let’s see, how would I describe it? I would call it the atmosphere creating an intense umbrella of heat, and especially in areas where they don’t typically see this type of heat, like northwest Oregon. We’ve had heat domes this summer already, all across the nation, in places that typically don’t have this type of high heat.

JJ: So it’s a thing we all need to get familiar with. If you don’t know what it means today, you need to figure it out for tomorrow.

VSM: Yeah, some scientists, they say it’s like the atmosphere traps hot air, and, yeah, I said an umbrella, but like a lid or a cap being put on a bottle, and trapping that hot air for days like it did in northwest Oregon.

JJ: We’ve had issues with news media who want to separate the stories. It’s not that they don’t cover things, it’s that they don’t connect dots. They separate a story from: Here was a heat emergency, in this particular case, and it was horrible, and people suffered from it. And then on another page, or on another day, they’ll have a story about fossil fuel companies lobbyists influencing laws. But part of the problem with news media is they don’t connect these things.

And so I wonder, as a person who, besides being a journalist, a person who thinks about journalism, where are the gaps or the omissions or the missing dots that you think that media could be doing on this could-not-be-more-important story of climate disruption?

Victoria St. Martin: “To connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more.”

VSM: Yes. One of my editors says that covering climate, it’s one of the greatest stories of the century, right, the greatest story of our lifetime, that we are covering. And I think one thing that we did well, journalism-wise, in the past 10 or so years, is we’ve pushed this idea that journalists have to be multidimensional, that they have to know how to edit photo and video and create a graphic and write a story.

But what I think was lost in that, and what is important here and what is missing in these heat dome stories, these stories that are very, very plainly, as you can see, climate change stories, but what is missing here is journalists aren’t necessarily trained to be multidimensional in subject matter.

And while there are environmental desks growing in newsrooms throughout the nation, newsrooms aren’t allowing the journalists interdisciplinary roles, to be able to cover a weather event and talk about climate. And we need to do more of that. I think in order to connect those dots, to connect the dots of the health harms and the climate disasters that are happening, we need to do more of that.

I love how last summer, I think I really saw it come to a head, because the Canadian wildfires came to the East Coast and turned the skies orange in New York. And it was this story you could not ignore anymore. And it forced newsrooms to really start talking about wildfires, and is it safe to breathe the air? And what is the air pollution from a wildfire, and what causes wildfires? I think we need to do more of that.

While I don’t want climate disasters like wildfires to continue to happen, I do want journalists to think on their toes, think on their feet, think multidimensional, and be able to tell stories in a full and nuanced way, because we are not servicing our readers, our viewers, our listeners, if we aren’t. Our viewers, our listeners and our readers are here to get the full story, and we need to give them the full story and the full picture.

JJ: And just finally, in terms of journalistic framework, what I think is so interesting with the Multnomah County story is we’re moving the actions of fossil fuel companies into the category of crime. You knew this was going to cause harm, and you still did it, and it caused harm, and that’s a crime. And I feel like that’s, for journalism, for media, that’s a framework shift. Lobbying is a story, and legislative influence is a story. And then crime is a whole different story, and a whole other page. But if we’re talking about actions that cause people to die, that cause people to be harmed, well, then, a lot of things that fossil fuels companies are doing are crimes, and that’s what’s paradigm-breaking with this Multnomah County story.

VSM: I think also what’s different here is the attorneys reaching out once the county filed suit, once the attorneys filed suit, letting us know what’s happening, making sure that the story is amplified and gets out there. I think I appreciate it always, as a journalist, when there’s an open dialogue, and that I’m able to share the story with readers, viewers and listeners, because I had access to information, I had access to the lawsuit.

I think, what is that saying? When a tree falls in the forest…. I’m so thankful that somebody called me up and said, “Hey, this is what’s happening.” So I think everybody does their part, and I think in this case, it was a moment of allowing journalists to be a part of that process, and to be able to see behind the curtain and see what’s actually happening. Sometimes law can be…

JJ: Opaque.

VSM: …slow and boring and monotonous, and I think, just like anything, like science…. But I think when you allow journalists to have a front-row seat, it helps to tell the story.

JJ: Absolutely.

Well, any final thoughts in terms of what you would like folks to take away from this piece that you wrote about the effort to call fossil fuel companies out for the harms that they’re causing? Any tips for other journalists who might be looking at the same story?

VSM: I think one thing I constantly thought about when I was reporting this story, and something I did not see, is there’s a great database looking at lawsuits that have been filed by states and counties and cities that are seeking damages from oil and gas companies for the harms caused by climate change.

Again, there are about three dozen lawsuits out there right now, but this is one of the only lawsuits that is focused on a heat dome. And so this is what makes that case unique. This is what sets this case apart from the rest. And, for me, that was important to report.

So I’m thankful that you got to read it, and that others have gotten to read it, and I hope more people read about it. I think that was key here, and that was something I did not see before. There are other lawsuits, but this one, a lot of law experts think, could really change the game here, because it’s focusing on a specific disaster, and how this county is going to pay for the costs that they’ve incurred from the effects of the heat dome.

I think for journalists, when we’re reporting on these things, think of ways to get ahead of the pack, think of what makes the story unique, what sets the story apart from other weather event stories, or other climate change stories, and how to really help paint a picture about how important this story is.

Sixty-nine people died over the course of three days. That is huge, and it is something that, for me, needed to be at the top of the story. The fact that this was one of the only cases that looked at heat dome disasters, that was something that needed to be at the top of the story for me. And I hope to keep reporting on this, so I can’t wait to see what happens next.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Victoria St. Martin. You can find her work on this and other stories at InsideClimateNews.org. Victoria St. Martin, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

VSM: Thank you so much.

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The New York Times (8/19/24) insinuated that Phil Donahue attributed to politics a cancellation that was really caused by low ratings.

If I were teaching a class called “How to Slime People in a Subtle, Scuzzy Way in the New York Times,” this paragraph from the Times‘ obituary (8/19/24) of Phil Donahue—written by Clyde Haberman, Maggie’s father—would be part of the curriculum:

In 2002, Mr. Donahue tried a comeback with a nightly talk show on MSNBC. Barely six months in, the program was canceled. He said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq. (In 2007, he co-produced and co-directed an antiwar documentary, Body of War.) It hardly helped that his ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.

Even now—more than 20 years after the New York Times was catastrophically wrong on the Iraq War—the paper cannot forgive anyone who was right.

1. Yes, Donahue “said later that network executives were unhappy with his fervent liberalism and his opposition to the looming war in Iraq.” Do you know who else said this? MSNBC‘s network executives, in a leaked memo. Get the fuck out of here with the “he said” bullshit.

MSNBC executives said, in a leaked memo, that Donahue was “a difficult public face for NBC at a time of war… because of guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush.” This was reported by CNN (3/5/03), among other outlets, at the time. Unfortunately, these outlets are so obscure that the Times cannot access them.

1. Yes, Donahue’s “ratings lagged far behind those of competitors on Fox News and CNN.” It was also the top-rated show on MSNBC. Sadly, the Times does not know this, because the only place it was reported at the time was in such little-known publications as the New York Times (2/26/03).

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240823.mp3This week on CounterSpin: One of many things wrong with corporate news media is the way they hammer home the idea that the current system is the only system. If you don’t see yourself and your interests reflected in either of the two dominant parties, the problem is you. Part of the value of independent media is that the people they listen to give us new questions to ask. For example: How do we acknowledge the fact that many people’s opinions are shaped by messages that are created and paid for by folks who work hard to hide their identity and their interests? If we’re in an open debate about what’s best for all of us, why can’t we see who pays you? We’ll talk about “dark money” with Steve Macek. He’s professor and chair of communication and media studies at North Central College in Illinois. His recent piece, “Dark Money Uncovered,” appeared on TheProgressive.org.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240823Macek.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of Phil Donahue.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240823Banter.mp3

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New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy (8/20/24) described Sen. Bernie Sanders’ speech to the Democratic National Convention as an attempt to “make policy proposals that put [Kamala] Harris in a big-government vise, binding (or pushing) her in a direction that a lot of moderates do not want to go.”

Healy depicted Sanders as

grasp[ing] the lectern with both hands as he unfurled one massive government program idea after another in a progressive policy reverie that must have been music to the ears of every democratic socialist at the United Center.

New York Times deputy opinion editor Patrick Healey (8/20/24): “On Tuesday night, Sanders put Harris on the hot seat.”

Healey followed the standard New York Times line (FAIR.org, 7/26/24) that progressive candidates need to move to the right to win—and scorned Sanders for ignoring that advice: “Harris needs some of those swing-state moderates if she’s going to win the presidency, but the electoral math didn’t seem to be on Sanders’s mind.”

Strangely, though, the specific policies that Healey mentioned Sanders as promoting don’t seem to be particularly unpopular, with moderates or anyone else. Rather, opinion polls find them to be supported by broad majorities:

• “Overturning Citizens United“: Three-fourths of survey respondents (Center for Public Integrity, 5/10/18) say that they support a constitutional amendment t0 overturn the 2010 Supreme Court decision that allows the wealthy to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. In the same survey, 60% said reducing the influence of big campaign donors is “very important.” According to the Pew Research Center (5/8/18), 77% of the public says “there should be limits on the amount of money individuals and organizations” can spend on political campaigns.
• “Making healthcare ‘a human right’ for all Americans”: A 2020 Pew Research Center poll (9/29/20) found that “63% of US adults say the government has the responsibility to provide healthcare coverage for all.” Another Pew poll (1/23/23) reported 57% agreeing that it’s “the responsibility of the federal government to make sure all Americans have healthcare coverage.”
• “Raising the minimum wage to a ‘living wage’”: According to the Pew Research Center (4/22/21), 62% of Americans want the federal minimum wage raised to $15 an hour. (Most of the remainder wanted the minimum wage increased by a lesser amount.) According to the think tank Data for Progress (4/26/24), 86% of likely voters do not think the current federal minimum wage is enough for a decent quality of life.
• “Raising teachers’ salaries”: The 2023 PDK poll found that 67% of respondents support increasing local teacher salaries by raising property taxes. The AP/NORC poll (4/18) reported that “78% of Americans say teachers in this country are underpaid.”
• “Cutting prescription drug costs in half”: A poll from 2023 by Data for Progress found that 73% of all likely voters supported Biden administration initiatives allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug costs. Health policy organization KFF (8/21/23) reported that 88% of adults support “limiting how much drug companies can increase the price for prescription drugs each year to no more than the rate of inflation.”

Back in 2015, when Sanders was running for president, Healy co-wrote an article for the Times (5/31/15; Extra!, 7–8/15) that declared him “unelectable,” in part because he supported “far higher taxes on the wealthy.” But raising taxes on the rich turns out to be consistently popular in opinion polls (FAIR.org, 4/20/15).

What we’re learning is that progressive policy proposals are deeply unpopular—with the New York Times‘ deputy opinion editor.

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.

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Janine Jackson interviewed ExxonKnews‘ Emily Sanders about criminalizing pipeline protests for the August 16, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240816Sanders.mp3FAIR.org (11/22/16)

Janine Jackson: We have not forgotten the years of protest by the people of Standing Rock in resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline. The cause could not have been more fundamental. The news and images were dramatic, and the support was global and cross-community.

Fossil fuel makers, who would like to keep making money from the destruction of the planet’s capacity for life, along with their ally enablers in law and law enforcement, want nothing like that to ever happen again, and certainly not for you to see it and take inspiration.

Pursuant to that are new efforts reported by our guest.

Emily Sanders is senior reporter for ExxonKnews, a project of the Center for Climate Integrity. This story was co-published with the Lever. She joins us now by phone from Queens. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Emily Sanders.

Emily Sanders: Hi. Thanks so much for having me again.

JJ We’re talking, to start, about congressional actions. What is the context behind this new rulemaking authorization process that you’re writing about, and how did laws around pipeline protest get into this conversation?

HuffPost (8/26/21)

ES: Congress is currently working to reauthorize the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, or PHMSA, which would set the agency’s funding and mandates for safety rulemaking on pipelines over the next few years. And that’s at the same time as the agency sets out to make new rules for carbon dioxide pipelines.

And both these processes are especially crucial right now, as the oil and gas industry plans to build out tens of thousands of additional miles of pipeline for carbon capture projects. And CO2 is an asphyxiant. It can travel long distances, it can shut down vehicles, and sicken, suffocate or even kill people and wildlife.

So these pipelines can be incredibly dangerous if and when they leak, as was the case in Satartia, Mississippi, in 2020, when a Denbury pipeline, now owned by ExxonMobil, ruptured and stalled emergency vehicles, sent nearly 50 people to the hospital with reportedly zombie-like symptoms.

So, after that, and now in the wake of yet another leak in Sulphur, Louisiana, earlier this year, advocates and community members have really been pushing the agency to take a hard look at these pipelines, and provide more transparent information to communities and first responders, who are often just underfunded, or volunteer fire departments tasked with dealing with these leaks at the last minute. And they’re asking the agency to implement real rules and oversight for the companies that, in these cases of leaks, were not appropriately monitoring their sites.

So back in April, I reported on how the oil industry was lobbying to limit the scope of those rules, and dictate its own safety standards, so that it can build out CO2 pipeline infrastructure as quickly as possible, since it stands to benefit from huge tax incentives for CCS passed under the Biden administration.

Emily Sanders: “This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.”

And what I found, as I dug further into those lobbying records, is that oil companies and their trade groups are now trying to pressure lawmakers to use this PHMSA reauthorization process to push through measures that could further criminalize pipeline protests at the federal level.

The federal penalty for damaging or destroying pipelines is already a felony charge of up to 20 years in prison. But in hearing testimony that I found, and policy briefs posted online, oil industry trade group executives were basically pushing lawmakers to expand the definition of so-called “attacks” on pipelines that can be punished under felony charges to include vague language like “disruptions of service” or “attacks on construction sites.”

And that could implicate a much broader set of activities that are used to protest fossil fuel infrastructure. So something like “disruption of service,” or interfering at a construction site, that could implicate anything from planting corn in the path of a pipeline construction, to a march, or a sit-in at a site. And it’s really hard to say what that actually means, which is why it’s so concerning.

And we’re now already seeing this language show up in committee bills. So the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s draft reauthorization bill, which was one of two committee bills being negotiated before the legislation goes to the Senate, would add impairing the operation of pipelines, damaging or destroying such a facility under construction, and even attempting or conspiring to do so as felony activities punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

So this is something industry lobby groups have tried before, back in 2019, to use this reauthorization process towards this purpose. They say it’s about preventing damage or destruction of pipelines that could create a harmful situation for communities on the ground. But, again, that’s already a felony under federal law. This rulemaking process is supposed to be about protecting community members and making sure pipelines are safe, not about preventing protests.

JJ: Well, you’ve hit all the points, but let me just draw some out, because the perversity here—it’s not irony—this is coming at the center of legislative work about rules for industry due to devastating harms, like breaches in a carbon dioxide pipeline, things that have actively harmed the community.

So in the process of legislating rules around that, fossil fuel makers have said, “Oh, well, while we’re talking about safety of pipelines, let’s also wiggle in this idea that protesters might be endangering pipelines.”

And then here’s where it gets to peak irony, the idea that protesters might cause harm to human beings by protesting pipelines, when the context is we’re talking about the harm that these pipelines themselves have caused. I mean, it’s kind of off the chart.

ES: Exactly. And this is as these same companies are continuing to invest in more and more fossil fuel infrastructure, while every scientific body is telling us that we have to do the opposite to avoid cataclysmic climate impacts. So they’re really using this growing pushback against their own operations to take this opportunity to silence that opposition.

JJ: And then, of course, the vagueness of the language, which you point to in the piece, that is part of it, that you’re not supposed to quite understand, well, what counts as “protest,” what counts as “impairing the operation” of the pipeline. It’s very much suppressive of free speech and action.

Extra! (4/13)

ES: Exactly. There’s precedent for this, as you alluded to in your opening; this is part of a larger push to pass laws criminalizing protest of fossil fuel infrastructure since the protest against Keystone XL and Dakota Access, which brought together enormous coalitions of people that cross cultural and political boundaries to oppose those pipelines.

And much of the legislation we’ve seen since then, which has been lobbied for by companies like Exxon and Marathon, Koch and Enbridge—much of that legislation was primarily based on a model bill crafted by the oil- and gas-funded American Legislative and Exchange Council, or ALEC, which made it a felony to trespass on the industry’s so-called critical infrastructure.

And those critical infrastructure bills use a lot of the same, very vague types of language to describe trespass, which can make it incredibly dangerous, not just for protesters, many of whom are Indigenous people and farmers and other landowners just trying to protect their land and water rights, but also journalists and the press, who go to report on these protests on the ground. And, again, it’s just especially concerning when the cost to the planet and people’s safety are so high.

JJ: I just want to ask, finally, it’s kind of open-ended, but I mean, it’s just not plausible to think that people are going to stop resisting or stop protesting or stop speaking out against the harms climate disruption is inflicting, that are evident much more every single day. And I just wonder—obviously, these fossil fuel companies are hoping that news media will use their age-old frames about criminality and law-breaking to push people back into the idea of, “Oh, it’s OK to want what you want”—like, not to see the capacity for human life on the planet destroyed—”it’s OK for you to want that, but just do it through proper channels. Don’t do it by protesting, because now that’s illegal in a new way.” And I just wonder, media have to do something different, big media have to do something different to actually rise to this occasion.

ExxonKnews (6/17/24)

ES: I think it’s all about talking to the actual people on the ground who are doing the protesting. Like you said, it’s so easy to paint people as criminals, when the definition of a criminal is defined or written by the same industry trying to protect the product that those people are protesting. So I think it’s just so important to get their perspective, find out why they’re there. A lot of the time these are regular people, not just activists who are there because of the climate, but also just people who are there trying to protect their water, protect their land and their homes and livelihoods, or journalists who are trying to report on what’s going on. And I just think getting their voice heard from a source is the most important thing.

JJ: We’ve been speaking with Emily Sanders, senior reporter for ExxonKnews. You can find the piece, “Big Oil Wants to Increase Federal Criminal Penalties for Pipeline Protests,” online at ExxonKnews.org, as well as LeverNews.com. Thank you so much, Emily Sanders, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

ES: Thanks again for having me.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809.mp3This week on CounterSpin: You don’t hear the phrase “free market capitalism” so much anymore, but the idea still tacitly undergirds much of what you do hear about why products and services are the way they are. We all know about corruption and cronyism, but we still accept that the company that “wins,” that “corners the market,” does so because people simply prefer what they sell. The anti-monopoly ruling against Google challenges that idea of how things work. We’ll hear about it from Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel at the American Economic Liberties Project.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809Hepner.mp3Prisoners at Guantánamo Bay

Also on the show: A recent news report offered the familiar construction that the attacks of September 11, 2001, “plunged the US” into decades of war. Of course that’s not right; choices were made, unpopular choices, about how to respond to the attacks. Choices were made to not bring assailants to trial for the crime, but instead to detain people without charge and hold them indefinitely in a prison designed to be outside US law. None of it was inevitable. Now the Defense secretary has stepped in to overturn plea agreements that, while they wouldn’t have closed Guantánamo, would’ve brought some measure of closure to the cases against the alleged directors of the September 11 attacks. We’ll get an update from Shayana Kadidal, senior managing attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809Kadidal.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a look at recent press coverage of Sinclair Broadcasting.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240809Banter.mp3

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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.

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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.

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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.

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With the presidential contest in full swing, the Sinclair Broadcast Group appears to be ramping up its right-wing propaganda again.

While millions of Americans are subjected to the TV network’s electioneering, few know it. That’s because, like a chameleon, Sinclair blends into the woodwork.

Turn on your local news and you may well be watching a Sinclair station, even though it appears on your screen under the imprimatur of a major network like CBS, NBC or Fox.

Here in the DC area, I occasionally tune into the local ABC affiliate, WJLA. Its newscasters are personable, and I like the weather forecasts. But then I remember that WJLA is owned by Sinclair.

I know this only because I’m a weirdo who follows Sinclair, not because there’s any obvious on-air sign the network owns WJLA—there isn’t. That’s why Sinclair’s propaganda is so hard to detect.

Hijacking trustA video collage of dozens of Sinclair anchors reading a script warning that “some members of the media use their platforms to push their own personal bias and agenda.”

While trust in the media has cratered in recent years, there’s a notable exception. “Seventy-six percent of Americans say that they still trust their local news stations—more than the percentage professing to trust their family or friends,” the New Yorker (10/15/18) reported.

Smartly, Sinclair leaves its affiliates alone long enough for them to develop a rapport with their audience. “In a way, the fact that it looks normal most of the time is part of the problem,” said Margaret Sullivan (CJR, 4/11/18), former public editor of the New York Times. “What Sinclair is cynically doing is trading on the trust that develops among local news people and their local audience.”

By hijacking this trusting relationship, Sinclair is able to sneak its propaganda into millions of American homes, including in presidential swing states where Sinclair owns more stations than any other network.

Sinclair does this by requiring its affiliates to air the right-wing stories it sends them. Because these segments are introduced or delivered by trusted local hosts, they gain credibility.

Mostly Sinclair’s sleight of hand goes undetected. But in 2018, the network pushed its luck by requiring anchors at stations across the country to read from the same Trump-like anti-media script. A video compilation of dozens if not hundreds of Sinclair anchors voicing the same “Orwellian” commentary went viral.

Despite the occasional brush up, Sinclair carries on largely under-the-radar, quietly gobbling up stations, mainly in cheaper markets. “We’re forever expanding—like the universe,” said longtime leader David Smith, who’s turned Sinclair into the country’s second-largest TV network. (See FAIR.org, 5/13/24.)

An anchor jumps shipPopular Information* (7/23/24) reported that Sinclair anchor Eugene Ramirez quit in part over a requirement that he air at least three stories from the network’s “Rapid Response Team” nightly. “The RRT has produced 147 stories this year that portray Democrats in a negative light,” Popular Information* found, “and just seven stories that portray Democrats positively.”

Of the 294 TV stations that Sinclair owns or operates, at least 70 of them air Sinclair’s in-house national evening news broadcast. For a year and a half, this broadcast was anchored by Eugene Ramirez, but he resigned in January, and it’s not hard to see why.

Each night Ramirez was given a list of four stories produced out of Sinclair’s Maryland’s headquarters. From these, Ramirez had to select at least three to air. Often these stories were little more than writeups of press releases from right-wing politicians and groups, as Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby report at Popular Information (7/23/24). One recent headline read, “Trump PAC Launches New Ad Hitting Democrats on Border: ‘Joe Biden Does Nothing.’”

Sinclair frequently booked far-right guests to appear on Ramirez’s broadcast, and he was “instructed not to interrupt them,” according to Popular Information. “Many of Sinclair‘s affiliates were not in big cities,” Ramirez was told, “and the content of the broadcast had to reflect the sensitivities of those viewers.” Progressive guests rarely if ever appeared.

Legum and Crosby also found that Sinclair requires around 200 of its affiliates to air its “Question of the Day,” which has included gems like, “Do you think former House Speaker Pelosi deserves some of the blame for January 6 riot?” But other questions are less obviously biased.

It’s one thing when a blowhard on Fox News asks, “Are you concerned violent criminals are crossing the border?” But it’s quite another when the same question is asked by a familiar and trusted local anchor.

The power of Sinclair is that questions like these are being posed not just by one trusted anchor, but by a small army of them in communities across the country every day. Elections are won and lost on less.

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The Economist published a cover story on July 6 with the stark image of a walker, a mobility device typically used by disabled people, with the United States presidential seal on it. “No Way to Run a Country,” the headline stated. Disabled people responded angrily on social media at the implication that mobility aids are disqualifying for office, mentioning former President Franklin Roosevelt, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Sen. Tammy Duckworth, all wheelchair users.

Similar visual messages previously appeared on a New Yorker cover (10/2/23) and in a Roll Call magazine political cartoon (9/6/23), both from the fall of 2023. The New Yorker cover showed President Joe Biden, former President Donald Trump, Rep. Nancy Pelosi and Sen. Mitch McConnell using walkers while competing in an athletic race. The joke was that it would be absurd for such elderly people to compete in a race, but the implication was that anyone similarly disabled might not be fit to serve in political office. None of these leaders use walkers in real life.

Economist (7/6/24)

The Roll Call cartoon showed the US Capitol transformed into the “Senate Assisted Legislating Facility,” with a stairlift and elderly people with walkers. Disability advocates often write about how the media and others should avoid using disabilities and medical conditions as metaphors, as it’s usually done to negatively stigmatize them.

The Economist cover appeared during a period of intense media conversation over presidential fitness, which ramped up just after the last presidential debate on June 27, and continued until Biden withdrew from his campaign for re-election on July 21. With Biden and Trump both older than any other presidential candidates in history—and both showing many common signs of age—media have been discussing their capabilities for years.

Ability and age shouldn’t be off the table as media topics during elections, but there are ways to have these conversations without promoting harm. By not interrogating “fitness for office” as a concept, the media has contributed to a culture in which two elderly presidential candidates constantly bragged about their prowess, culminating in the surreal moment of their competitive discussion of golfing abilities during the debate.

Disability organizations have created style guides for non-ableist journalism in general. In terms of covering political campaigns, some common pitfalls to avoid include: stating or implying that all disabilities or conditions are inherent liabilities, even cognitive disabilities; diagnosing candidates without evidence; using illness or disability as a metaphor; conflating age with ability; conflating physical and cognitive health; using stigmatizing language to describe incapacities; and highlighting issues with ability or health without explaining why they are concerning.

‘Agony to watch’New Yorker (10/2/23)

Biden’s struggles with articulating and completing his thoughts during the last debate prompted a flurry of news stories, including reporting on his tendency to forget people and events (e.g., Wall Street Journal, 6/4/24; New York Times, 7/2/24). Some of the same outlets that had previously defended him against claims of being cognitively impaired (New York, 7/31/23) were suddenly diagnosing him with possible medical conditions and doubting his ability to lead (New York, 7/7/24).

The Hill (7/20/24) called Biden’s verbal gaffes “embarrassing,” and casually quoted insiders referring to “brain farts” with scorn. “It was agony to watch a befuddled old man struggling to recall words and facts,” the Economist wrote in an editorial (7/4/24), which accompanied the cover image of the walker and called for Biden to drop out. The piece linked to another Economist piece (6/28/24) which argued that Biden had failed to prove he was “mentally fit,” and called on him to stand down and make room for a “younger standard-bearer.”

There are reasonable concerns about the age of candidates, including that our leadership doesn’t represent the majority of the country demographically and that elderly candidates may not live long. But the Economist made implicit assumptions about age and disability, including that a “younger standard-bearer” would likely be more “mentally fit.” According to scientists, slower communication and short-term memory loss are associated with aging, but some other cognitive abilities have been shown to strengthen.

What’s more, Biden’s gaffes might have been “embarrassing” to him, or “agony” for him to experience, but characterizing disability or struggle from the outside as embarrassing or unpleasant to observe is a common form of ableism. It’s reasonable to report on his mistakes without editorializing and stigmatizing language.

Neither Trump nor Biden have a record of supporting the needs of disabled people while in office, especially around the Covid-19 pandemic. Still, their disabilities or capacity issues do deserve sensitivity. By insulting memory lapses and mobility issues, even implicitly, the media insults everyone with those conditions.

It seems some part of the media’s panic around the abilities of presidential candidates has more to do with elections than with who is running the country. Biden’s re-election chances fell into jeopardy after the debate. The Washington Post (7/22/24) recently made this clear. “Trump’s age and health under renewed scrutiny after Biden’s exit,” it reported:

After weeks of intense focus on President Biden’s health and age that ended with his withdrawal from the campaign on Sunday, the script has flipped: Former president Donald Trump is now the oldest presidential nominee in history—and one who has been less transparent about his medical condition than his former opponent.

The Post makes it sound as if media are passively reporting on the next inevitable story, and not actively choosing to focus its disability-related concerns around its election concerns.

Best in show?Roll Call (9/6/23)

The recent Washington Post article (7/22/24) on Trump’s abilities points out that he hasn’t released his medical records since he was president, when he had “had heart disease and was obese.” It also points out his “elevated genetic risk of dementia.”

With the intense focus on medical records and physical tests, the news media often writes about the bodies of presidential candidates as if they were competing for Best in Show, instead of for a job that primarily involves decision-making, leadership and communication—and for which disability might even be an asset in terms of compassion and understanding.

News outlets have reported with concern on how Biden and Trump walk, despite the fact that the majority of people in their 80s deal with mobility challenges. (Biden is 81; Trump is 78.) According to the Boston Globe (3/12/24), “Joe Biden needs to explain his slow and cautious walk.” The news article does offer his physician’s explanation of neuropathy but doesn’t seem to accept it.

The article argues that Biden’s silence about his gait was contributing to concerns that he might have an illness like dementia or Parkinson’s. The Globe seemed to take for granted that Parkinson’s would be a problem for voters and not, say, an asset. Many voters have similar conditions and might appreciate the representation. The article then mentions that Biden’s slower walking might be a sign of diminished “mental capacity,” conflating physical and cognitive issues.

In 2020, there were similar articles about Trump showing signs of unsteadiness while walking and drinking from a glass of water, with the implication that difficulties with both might undermine his fitness for office (New York Times, 6/14/20).

No privacy for presidents?Bloomberg (7/3/24)

The Americans with Disabilities Act protects disabled people from having to disclose details about their conditions. This is because stigma and bigotry are so widespread that it’s understood such details might be handled with prejudice by employers. Media outlets undermine those principles in their lust for detailed information about the medical records of presidential candidates.

Just after the last presidential debate, Bloomberg (7/3/24) insisted in a headline that “Presidential Candidates Shouldn’t Have Health Secrets.” The article not only demanded clarity on what caused Biden’s “poor performance” in the debate, but also that candidates go through independent medical evaluations, with the full results being released to the public. Implicit in this demand is that pre-existing conditions would be liabilities. Otherwise, why would the public need to know?

“Americans are naturally curious about the health of their president, and any sign of illness or frailty gets subjected to intense public scrutiny,” a follow-up Bloomberg article (7/10/24) insisted. Are Americans curious, or are the media? The article pointed out that the US obsession with presidential health is unusual; in most countries, leaders don’t release their medical records. Still, the article went into intense detail about everything known and speculated about in terms of Biden and Trump’s health, body weight, medications and the like.

The media’s focus on the physical imperfections of presidential candidates is biased not only towards abled people, but towards white men. Women and people of color are more likely to have pre-existing medical conditions, and more likely to face stigma as a result of them. The Washington Post (7/22/24) already noted that Kamala Harris hasn’t released her medical records, or responded to questions about it.

During the 2016 campaign for presidency, Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton fainted. Her doctor said she had pneumonia and was overheated. Not surprisingly, right-wing media used it as a chance to portray her as weak and unfit, but even some liberal outlets (CNN, 9/12/16), decided this was a significant incident worthy of endless commentary, speculation and demands for investigations. Fainting is something many people, especially women, experience routinely, as part of illness, heat, exhaustion or just standing for too long. The media worked to denormalize it.

Obsession with candidate bodiesNBC (7/4/24)

Overall, media seem to have a unique preoccupation with the bodies of presidential candidates–more than, say, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices or governors. There is a mythology around presidents, which Trump himself played into by recently referring to himself as a “fine and brilliant young man,” along with celebrating his survival of a recent assassination attempt.

Biden, who has historically portrayed himself as strong, and even claimed to overcome his stutter, finally started to let go of this mythology just before he dropped out of the race. He acknowledged age, exhaustion and slower speech. He joked about being fine besides his “brain.” And he mentioned that he might need more sleep. He was exhibiting another kind of strength through honesty, though it might have been strategic. It turned out to not be the most politically effective approach: Some media outlets highlighted him needing more sleep as headline-worthy and a red flag (NBC, 7/4/24; New York Times, 7/4/24).

The challenges Biden and Trump face in walking and speaking are evident to the public. Questions about underlying health issues are fair, but the implication of all of this “Best in Show” coverage is that people with significant disabilities, or even just a need for regular sleep, might face a hostile, intrusive media if they ran for president. And this discourse trickles down to how people feel permitted to speak about ordinary disabled civilians.

The presidency isn’t a sporting event. If media outlets are going to express concern about a candidate’s physical abilities, they should clarify what assumptions are guiding their concerns. As it stands, most of these articles and images just seem concerned with any signs of disability, which they implicitly associate with not being fit to serve.

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Janine Jackson interviewed Mother Jones‘ Ari Berman, about right-wing plans for minority rule, for the July 26, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240726Berman.mp3Janine Jackson: With so much attention on individual politicians’ temperaments, and on the country’s political temperature generally, it’s easy to forget that US governance is based around structures. These structures are being undermined, but they also have design flaws, if you will, that have been present from the start, as explored in a new book by our guest.

Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and author of a number of books, most recently Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Ari Berman.

Ari Berman: Hey, Janine. Great to talk to you again. Thank you.

JJ: My ninth grade government teacher said that he didn’t think we’d remember much from his class, but there was one thing we needed to know, and periodically, he would just holler, “What’s the law of the land?” And we would shout out, “The Constitution!”

There’s a belief that we have these bedrocks of democracy—and they might be ignored, or even breached—but in themselves, they have some kind of purity. Where do you start in explaining why we would be helped by disabusing ourselves of that kind of understanding?

Jacobin (4/22/23)

AB: That’s right. Our understanding of the Constitution is basically these godlike figures in their powdered wigs decreeing the law of the land in 1787, and having the people’s best interests at heart. And in many ways, the Constitution was a remarkable document for its time, but the founders had their own self-interests at heart in many cases. And remember, these were white male property holders, many of them slave holders, and they designed the Constitution, in many ways, not to expand democracy, but to check democracy, and make sure that their own interests were protected.

And they realized that they were a distinct minority in the country, because they, as I said, were a white property-holding elite, and the country was not. There were a lot of white men without property, and then you think about women, and African Americans and Native Americans, and other people who weren’t part at all of the drafting of the Constitution.

And so the Constitution, in many ways, favors these elite minorities over the majority of people. It favors small states over large states in the construction of the US Senate. It favors slave states over free states in the construction of the US House. It prevents the direct election of the president. It creates a Supreme Court that’s a product of an undemocratic Senate and an undemocratic presidency.

So in all these ways, we have these fundamentally undemocratic institutions that form the basis of democracy. And that’s a fundamental contradiction, because, in fact, our country’s most important democratic document was actually intended to make the country less democratic. And that’s certainly something we’re not taught in ninth grade government class.

Poets.org

JJ: Absolutely. I think of Langston Hughes’ “America never was America to me,” but just to say it outright: US democracy has never meant one person, one vote. So it’s not that there’s this halcyon time that we should be trying to get back to.

AB: It’s funny, because in a way, that’s how we think that democracy should be, and that’s what the Supreme Court said in the 1960s, that the purest expression of democracy was one person, one vote. But if you look at so many of our institutions today, they violate basic principles of one person, one vote.

We don’t have a direct national popular election for president, in which each vote counts equally. Because of the Electoral College, some states matter more than others, and some states count more than others. So in New York, for example, we don’t have the same power of our vote as we do in Wisconsin, or even in Wyoming.

And then in the US Senate, smaller, more rural, more conservative states have dramatically more power than larger, more urban, more diverse states, because each state gets the same number of senators regardless of population. And in many ways, our core government structures violate these notions of one person, one vote.

That’s something that I don’t think we’re talking enough about. I mean, once again, we’ve switched presidential candidates, and it’s all about “how’s Kamala Harris going to do in these six battleground states?” without thinking, “Why do we only have six battleground states? Why do six states decide the elections, instead of 50?” This is a crazy system, if you try to explain to someone that’s not already familiar with how American politics work.

JJ: And yet, if you’re trying to be in the smart people conversation, to say something as basic as, “Well, wait, how come every person’s vote doesn’t count equally? Isn’t that the ideal we hold up?” Then you’re not invited to the party any more, because somehow being savvy is just kind of accepting these sort of fundamental anti-democratic propositions.

AB: It’s funny, and people don’t even know why the system exists the way it is. And that was a major factor into why I wanted to write this book, because I don’t think people even understand how we came to get the structure that we have today.

So the Electoral College was created because, No. 1, the Founding Fathers feared the people being given the right to directly choose the president. And that would be a very difficult argument to make in 2024, that the people should not have the right to choose the president. But, essentially, that’s why the Electoral College existed.

And then secondarily, it existed to protect the power of the slave state, which is something that we don’t talk about enough either, because James Madison, who was really the most influential Founding Father when it came to drafting the Constitution, he actually said that he thought the people would be the best way of choosing the president. But he said he worried that it would disenfranchise the South, because the South had so many enslaved people who couldn’t vote, therefore the Northern states would have more free people, and therefore the South would be at a disadvantage. So he basically came out and said, we should have a direct election of the presidency, except not for slavery.

Well, it’s not like suddenly slavery is over, then we got rid of the Electoral College. We abolished slavery, but we kept the Electoral College. And that’s the kind of thing that I don’t think makes a whole lot of sense to people.

And you hear various arguments against scrapping the Electoral College, but the fact is, 85% of Americans don’t have a vote that really matters in a presidential election. And that’s why polls consistently show that 70% to 80% of Americans don’t want to continue with the Electoral College. Because if you’re a Republican in California, the Electoral College isn’t helping you, either. And there’s a lot of them, too.

JJ: I’m amazed that people are able to respond and say, “We don’t want the Electoral College,” because they’re fighting against high school, and all the information that we’ve gotten, that’s saying that we’re a democracy, and this is the best system we can have. So the fact that people can independently come up with the idea that, no, actually, this isn’t working, is kind of amazing and wonderful for me. But I did want to say: It’s wrong to say Trump came along and ruined everything, but it’s also true that the inequitable effects of these structures have been compounding over time, to the point where they can be gamed, essentially.

AB: Yeah, I think that’s right. I think Trump is both an accelerant and a product of the broken system. I mean, Trump has never won a majority of votes. Trump has been helped by these counter-majority institutions. He was elected, and nearly reelected, because of the Electoral College. If there had been a national popular vote, he would’ve easily lost both times.

He was protected by a US Senate in which Republicans have dramatically more power, because conservative, white, rural states have dramatically more power. So the Senate first advanced his agenda, and then it prevented him from being held accountable for the insurrection.

Then the Supreme Court has dramatically helped him in this election, made it so that he’s not going to face trial for inciting the insurrection before the election, and helped him in so many other ways. And the Supreme Court’s a direct product of the undemocratic way that we elect presidents and elect senators, because five or six conservative justices were nominated by Republican presidents who initially lost the popular vote, and confirmed by senators representing a minority of Americans. So in so many ways, Trump has benefited from this anti-democratic structure.

And then, of course, he’s layered on all of these newer anti-democratic tactics on top of that. We weren’t talking about overturning elections before Donald Trump. There were disputes, of course, about elections, notably in 2000, but there were not efforts to just outright overturn elections until Trump came along. And so Trump has added a lot of anti-democratic features, but he’s been successful in the first place because of the anti-democratic system in which he exists.

Guardian (3/30/20)

JJ: And he’s also helped by saying things out loud, like saying, and I forget when it was, but saying, “We can’t expand voting access, because you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again if we expand voting access.” So he’s kind of laying out a template of what he’s doing.

AB: Exactly. Not only that, because other Republicans have done that too, but then he’s also sought to weaponize a lot of previously nonpartisan things. If you don’t like mail voting, well then, you try to sabotage the post office. No president’s tried to do that before.

If you don’t like the changing demographics of America, you try to sabotage the US Census. No president had tried to do that before, either, in the same kind of way. The whole Project 2025 blueprint, one of the biggest aims of that is to politicize these previously nonpartisan institutions, to turn the federal government from a bunch of civil servants into basically a bunch of right-wing ideologues, controlling every level of power.

And so I think that’s an overriding theme of Trump, is that not only do you benefit from an undemocratic system, but then you try to tilt the system even more, so that everything becomes politicized and everything becomes weaponized to try to benefit this elite conservative white minority, as opposed to benefiting every American, or the majority of Americans, in terms of how these programs or these government institutions are supposed to work and were set up.

JJ: It isn’t that it’s never been recognized that there are these fundamental flaws in the founding premises, if you will, of the country. There have been efforts, historically, to bring about a true multiracial democracy, and the resistance today is built on those past efforts of resistance, isn’t it?

AB: Yeah, exactly. There’s been this long push and pull between democratic and anti-democratic forces, and it would be inaccurate to say that the country’s always been democratic, and it would be inaccurate to say the country’s always been undemocratic. There have been these clashes, and at various times, we’ve expanded democracy. We passed the 13th and 14th and 15th Amendment, to give rights to previously enslaved people. We passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act and the Immigration Act and lots of other things, the 19th Amendment, to bring new people into the political process.

But at the same time, there’s been a backlash to those efforts. And I think you can draw a straight line between the backlash to the civil rights movement, and the backlash of the changing demographics of the country, and shifts in political power, and the Trump campaign. I think it’s very clear that when he talks about making America great again, the “again” is before we had things like the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, and when the government was dominated by white males.

JJ: Where, concretely, do you see the resistance that you refer to in the book title, which is not, just to be rhetorical, not just a push back against something, but also a push forward. And you’re explaining this importance of our dynamic understanding of history, that it’s always been conflict-shaped, that it’s always been a work in progress. Where do you see the resistance happening right now?

Ari Berman: “There’s 60–70% support for a lot of these policies…. The problem isn’t what people believe. It’s translating majority opinion into majority rule.”

AB: I see the resistance happening in terms of the efforts to try to create a more robust multiracial democracy, efforts to try to elect the first Black senator in Georgia, the first Jewish senator in Georgia, and to do all of these things that have happened. I see a lot of progress happening at the state and local level. I talk about Michigan in the book, a state that was very gerrymandered, very rigged, for much of the last decade, but where people put initiatives on the ballot to ban partisan gerrymandering, to expand voting rights, to protect abortion rights, to legalize marijuana, going around politicians to do these things directly, and to show that, actually, the country’s less divided than we think.

We always hear, “Oh, the country’s so divided politically,” and I think it is divided if it’s a D versus R. But if you ask people, “Do you want to protect fundamental rights? Do you want to make democracy work better for more people?” there’s overwhelming bipartisan support for that. There’s 60–70% support for a lot of these policies. So to me, the problem isn’t what people believe. It’s translating majority opinion into majority rule.

JJ: I was going to ask, where do the hoi polloi fit in? But that sounds like the answer is to get invested and get engaged at a level where you are making a difference. But at the same time, how do we go about making the changes that we want to make at the federal level, at these things that seem impermeable right now? What’s happening there?

AB: I think we need longer-term movements for structural change. And I think it starts with talking about it and doing something about it. I mean, you’re going to see Biden talking about Supreme Court reform. He should have done this four years ago, in my opinion, because it was very clear the Supreme Court was broken and undemocratically constructed and ideologically unhinged back then. But, nonetheless, the fact that he’s going to talk about it will make it easier if there’s another Democratic president to do something about it.

You look at the issue of voting rights; Democrats pushed very hard for federal voting rights legislation. They came two senators short of making it happen. That was a big disappointment. But they got 48 Democratic senators on record saying we should change the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, which was a really big deal, because they did not start with 48 Democratic senators in that position. And I think if there were to be a Democratic Senate in 2025, there would be probably 50 votes to reform the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, because the two senators that opposed it, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, are no longer going to be in the Senate. They’re no longer senators.

And so, sometimes, these things take more than one cycle. And I think that’s a lot of the problem with Democrats and progressives, is they’re thinking, OK, we need to accomplish these things in one Congress, or else we’re not able to do it. And, yes, we’d like to be able to achieve everything, but a lot of this stuff takes time.

I mean, the Project 2025 manifesto is the product of 40 or 50 years of conservative legal thinking and conservative weaponization of the government. It’s not like they just woke up one day and decided to do these things. This is a product of a long movement that they’ve pushed for many, many decades.

And sometimes you have to think that this is going to take more time, but I think it starts with a commitment to these issues. One of my frustrations is the Democrats have often been the party of the status quo. I mean, the Biden administration’s often defended how great American democracy is, as opposed to saying, “Yes, there’s a lot of good things about American democracy. There’s also a lot of flaws in the system that we need to improve.” And those flaws in the system are the ones that aren’t talked about enough.

Mother Jones (7/26/24)

JJ: Just a meta question about history, which, of course, the book is about lifting up relevant history. We have politicians, including Trump, saying, or strongly suggesting, if we don’t win the election, we’re going to take up arms and set up a civil war. But they still refer to the framework. They still say, “if we don’t win, that will mean the election isn’t fair,”—like, fairness somehow comes into the conversation, because they don’t come out and say, “We believe might makes right.” It’s too useful, still, to wave towards some principle of fairness, even if you’re obviously cynically invoking it. But I just think it’s why understanding real history, the dynamic, conflict-shaped history of this country, is so crucial. And if it weren’t crucial, they wouldn’t be trying to stop us from learning it.

AB: Exactly. That’s why there’s been so many efforts to try to prevent an honest teaching of history, because the more you understand the complexity of American history, and the fact that a lot of bad things happened that we still haven’t really done that much about, you understand that, of course, they don’t want to pass policies as a result of things that occurred; so they just want to make it like these things never occurred at all. And the fact is, things like the three-fifths compromise, Jim Crow, slavery, they happened whether we like it or not.

And the reason why they’re trying to prevent these things from being taught is because they’re trying to protect white power at all costs. And they have a whole agenda designed to weaponize and promote white power. And that ideology of white supremacy is premised on either just ignoring history, or distorting it to such a point that white supremacy is the only solution.

And that’s, in many ways, how we got Jim Crow. And I think there’s a lot of parallels between that and what’s happening today, where there’s stronger calls for racial justice, the country is changing. We’re heading towards the majority-minority future. And those people that don’t like it, they’re trying to build a wall—in some cases, a literal wall—to stop what they view as the coming siege.

JJ: And just finally, I do blame corporate news media for allowing fundamentally anti-democratic ideas, like anti-democracy ideas, to be one of the poles in our conversation about how to work our democracy, this triangulation that makes Trumpism just, “That’s a thing some people think.”

Now, clearly, it is a thing some people think, but a lot of people think it because it’s been made acceptable by what they read in the paper, as it being just part of a grownup conversation about how things should happen. I just wonder what you would look for from journalism at this time.

AB: I think the media have normalized Trumpism in a lot of ways, and I think that the media and Trump have a really abusive relationship, because I think for a lot of the media, they realize that Trump is this grotesque, anti-democratic figure, but they also can’t look away. So they’re just constantly giving him airtime, and he’s the best thing for their ratings. And so I think, for a lot of them, the Biden era was kind of boring, and it was maybe too substantive, and Biden himself wasn’t that interesting or charismatic. And so, on the flip side, Trump is such a reality show that you can’t look away.

But I think sometimes the way they cover it, even if it’s bad things Trump has done, like the criminal trial, they cover it in such a lurid, scandalous way that it kind of makes it feel like they’re covering just any person that would be convicted of doing something bad, as opposed to reminding someone, this guy tried to overturn American democracy. He did the worst possible thing you could do, and he’s just back.

And I don’t blame the media solely for that. I blame the United States governing institutions, that there was no mechanism that worked to disqualify him. I mean, the only actual mechanism would’ve been impeachment, and the Senate was too cowardly, and also skewed, to do it. So I don’t blame the media alone, but I also think, so much of the media coverage has focused on Biden’s age, or various things Trump is doing, in terms of picking a running mate and things like that, and sort of covered this election as if it’s normal, as if it’s a normal election, as opposed to the guy who tried to completely subvert American democracy could be back in.

And I just think that’s something that we haven’t heard nearly enough about. That’s not just the media’s fault, but I think the media play a role in the fact that that’s not at the top of voters’ minds.

JJ: Let me just give you one last opportunity to end on a note of hopefulness, or a forward-looking thinking, because these things are being recognized, and folks are trying to address them at various levels. And just what would you say to somebody who’s like, “All right, well, I’m going to pull up the covers.” How do we move forward here?

AB: What I always say is that if you’re not voting or not participating, someone else is, and they’re getting more power because of it. So I understand that it’s an exhausting time, that, in many ways, people are just kind of done with everything. And I feel that way too sometimes. I mean, that’s a natural response.

But, unfortunately, if people don’t get involved in changing the government, it’s going to create a void, and someone else will. And the reactionary forces are more than willing, and more than prepared, to try to fill that void.

So I would urge people to get involved wherever they feel like they can make a difference. And, again, if you’re overwhelmed by the national level, and you’re overwhelmed by the presidency and you’re sick of hearing about it, sick of talking about it, try to get involved locally.

Like I said, research if there’s a cool ballot initiative. In New York, for example, there’s going to be an initiative to pass a New York version of the Equal Rights Amendment. That’s a really interesting thing that nobody really knows about.

There’s lots of competitive state legislative elections, congressional elections, other elections that matter, where maybe you’re more inspired to get involved if you’re turned off by the presidential race.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2024)

And I also think we saw, based on the switch in the ticket, a lot of people were yearning to get involved in the presidential race, but wanted a different kind of choice. And you saw that when there was a different kind of choice, people responded to that. So I think it’s more just, find a way to get involved. Politics doesn’t have to be your entire life, it’s actually not healthy for it to be your entire life, but it can be part of your life, and I think that that way you can make a difference, and not allow a more reactionary movement to fill that void.

JJ: All right, then. We’ve been speaking with journalist Ari Berman from Mother Jones. The book is called Minority Rule. It’s out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thank you so much, Ari Berman, for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

AB: Thanks so much, Janine, I appreciate it.

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With Joe Biden’s historic decision to step aside as Democratic nominee for president and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor, the 2024 presidential race has suddenly transformed from an uninspiring duel between two old white men to something altogether different. Powered by coconut memes and refreshing cognitive competence, Harris has surged in popularity. Young voters, in particular, have shown a burst of enthusiasm.

The Washington Post, however, is concerned. An energetic alliance between progressives and liberals behind a woman who ran to the left of Biden during the 2020 primary could signal a leftward shift of the Democratic Party, which has generally been dominated by centrists over the last several decades. That’s not something the Jeff Bezos–owned Post has much interest in.

Kamala Harris is gaining ground against Donald Trump with most sub-groups of voters (Financial Times, 7/26/24).

‘What Harris needs to do’The Washington Post (7/22/24) urges Kamala Harris to ” resist activist demands that would push her to the left and ignore the social media micro-rebellion that will follow.”

So the editorial board decided it was time to weigh in. A day after Biden’s announcement that he was withdrawing, it published the editorial “What Harris Needs to Do, Now, to Win” (7/22/24).

In the piece, the board implores Harris to abandon progressive policy priorities such as “widespread student debt cancellation” and “nationwide rent stabilization” that Biden has backed during his term as president. Instead of promoting these policies, according to the board, Harris should mercilessly turn her back on the progressive wing of the party:

Ms. Harris should both resist activist demands that would push her to the left and ignore the social media micro-rebellion that will follow. Ms. Harris’s pick of running mate could be a revealing early indicator, too. Tapping a politician likely to appeal to the median voter would serve her—and the country—best.

This, we are to think, is not simply about the more conservative policy preferences of the members of the Post’s board. It is cold, calculated and smart electoral strategy. After all, everyone knows that America is a center-right country, and general election voters would never get behind a progressive platform. (Never mind that Biden adopted a slate of progressive policy positions in a desperate attempt to resuscitate his ailing campaign, precisely because these policies are so popular with the general electorate.)

Misty memories of 2020Not only that, but remember what happened in 2020? In the Post’s telling, during that presidential primary, Harris

tried to play down her record as a tough-on-crime California prosecutor and embrace the progressive left of the Democratic Party, backing policies that lacked broad appeal, such as Medicare-for-all. She did not make it out of 2019 before folding her campaign.

The implication here seems to be that support for progressive policies hampered Harris’s campaign. A strange hypothesis, given that progressives such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren did exceptionally well in that primary, and only lost after moderates consolidated around Biden in a last-minute tactical alliance.

Medicare-for-all, meanwhile, posted majority support from the American public throughout the 2020 primary season, and had garnered majority support for years before that, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. To be fair to the Post, the polling on this issue was incredibly sensitive to the framing of the question, so you could easily point to some poor results for the policy as well, often found in Fox’s (unsurprisingly biased) polling. But, unlike with many of the polls that returned unfavorable results, the wording used by Kaiser was eminently even-handed.

Polling by Kaiser (10/16/20) finds that Medicare for All has remained broadly popular for years.

In any case, what matters for the Post’s suggestion about Harris’s fate in the 2020 primary is not views among the general population, but views among Democrats. With that group, polls consistently found overwhelming support for Medicare-for-all. At best, then, we might call the Post’s claims here misleading, an attempt to pawn off opposition to a policy on the general public when, in fact, it’s really the paper that takes issue with it.

Ignoring full employmentBiden’s stimulus bill succeeded in keeping unemployment low for a span unprecedented in the past half century (Slate, 7/24/24)—but the Washington Post doesn’t want to talk about that.

The policies that the Post prefers Democrats to push are of a different sort, the Very Serious and bipartisan sort. Because only when Republicans also sign off on legislation is it any good. As the Post calls for a rightward turn from Harris, it celebrates the scarce moments of bipartisanship (sort of) over the last few years:

In the White House, Mr. Biden’s approach helped get substantial bipartisan bills over the finish line, investing in national infrastructure and critical semiconductor manufacturing. He also signed a bill that should have been bipartisan: the nation’s most ambitious climate change policy to date.

Conspicuously absent from the editorial is any mention of the American Rescue Plan, the stimulus bill passed in the spring of 2021 that spurred the most rapid and egalitarian economic recovery in recent American history. As the progressive journalist Zach Carter noted in a recent article titled “Full Employment Is Joe Biden’s True Legacy” (Slate, 7/24/24):

Across the 50 years preceding Biden’s tenure in office, the US economy enjoyed only 25 total months with an unemployment rate below 4%. Biden did it for 27 consecutive months—a streak broken only in May of this year, as an expanding labor force pushed the rate over 4% even as the economy actually added more jobs.

Given that the stimulus bill can claim much of the credit for this outcome, it stands as arguably the most significant legislative accomplishment of the Biden administration. For the Post, though, that’s apparently not worth highlighting.

Politically toxicIt’s “surprisingly doable” to cut the national debt, says the Washington Post (7/23/24)–especially if you don’t mind imposing cuts that are overwhelmingly unpopular.

Also conspicuously missing from the Post editorial is any discussion of the potential electoral damage that could result from continuing Biden’s support for the ongoing genocide in Gaza. In May of this year, the American Arab Institute estimated, based on their polling, that Biden could lose as many as 177,000 Arab American votes compared to his performance in 2020 across four swing states. It would be worth discussing this policy failure, and the ways in which Harris should break from Biden on Gaza, if the Post were really interested in helping Harris win. But that would distract the paper from advocating incredibly unpopular centrist policies.

Take its editorial (7/23/24) published a day after it admonished Harris for supporting Medicare-for-all, due to that policy’s supposed unpopularity. This piece finds the editorial board once again calling for cuts to Social Security, specifically through raising the retirement age. Benefit cuts are opposed by 79% of Americans, and raising the retirement age polls almost equally badly, with 78% of Americans opposing an increase in the retirement age from 67 to 70. Yet the Post evidently finds it critical to advocate this politically toxic policy just as Harris gets her campaign off the ground and starts shaping her platform.

As of now, it looks like Harris could break either way in the coming months. Her choice to tap Eric Holder, a corporate Democrat hailing from the Obama administration, to vet candidates for vice president, suggests a possible rightward shift. As do her team’s overtures to the crypto world. On the other hand, her relatively cold reception of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during his recent visit could signal a leftward turn.

In short, Harris seems to remain persuadable on the direction of her campaign and the content of her platform. Unfortunately, while the Washington Post is doing its best to convince Harris to move right, there exists no comparable outlet representing the interests of the progressive wing of the party that can fight back.

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective. Feel free to leave a copy of your message in the comments thread here.

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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.

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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

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In a piece factchecking Donald Trump’s claims in his acceptance speech at the 2024 Republican convention, the New York Times‘ Steven Rattner (7/24/24) responded to Trump’s claim that “our crime rate is going up” by pointing out:

Crime has declined since Mr. Biden’s inauguration. The violent crime rate is now at its lowest point in more than four decades, and property crime is also at its lowest level in many decades.

The Times illustrated the point with this chart, which shows violent crime decreasing by 26% since President Joe Biden was inaugurated, and property crime going down 19%:

In a rational world, voters would be aware that crime went down sharply during the Biden/Harris administration, continuing a three-decade decline that has made the United States of 2024 far safer than the country was in 1991. To the extent that voters see national elected officials as responsible for crime rates, Biden and his vice president Kamala Harris would benefit politically from these trends.

One thing polling tells us is that leading news outlets do a poor job of informing voters about the crime situation (New York Times, 7/23/24).

But we don’t live in a rational world—so in the days after Harris became the apparent presidential nominee of the Democratic Party, she got a series of warnings from the New York Times.“Today, many Americans are worried about crime,” David Leonhardt wrote in the Times‘ popular Morning newsletter (7/23/24). “Many voters are concerned about crime and public safety,” lawyer Nicole Allan wrote in a Times op-ed (7/23/24). “Ms. Harris, especially, will run into problems on immigration and crime,” Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson wrote in another op-ed (7/23/24).

“Ms. Harris was a constant target last week at the Republican National Convention,” Jazmine Ulloa reported in a Times news story (7/21/24). “In panels and onstage, speakers tied her to an administration that they say has led to increases in crime and inflation.”

In none of these mentions did the Times‘ writers attempt to set the record straight on the actual crime situation in the country—that crime rates are low and heading lower. In the case of the news report, such an observation would likely be seen inside the Times as editorializing—a forbidden intervention into the political process.

But most people don’t get their ideas about how much crime there is by personal observation; with roughly 1 person in 300 victimized by violent crime over the course of a year, you’d have to know an awful lot of people before you would get an accurate sense of whether crime was up or down based on asking your acquaintances.

As with immigration, and to a certain extent with the economy, people get the sense that crime is a crisis from the news outlets that they rely on. If they’re being told that “many Americans are worried about crime”—then many Americans are going to worry about crime.

Research assistance: Alefiya Presswala

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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.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240719.mp3Electronic Intifada (7/15/24)

This week on CounterSpin: In March, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met.”

But as Greg Shupak writes, even as evidence accumulates, denial is becoming socially and journalistically acceptable. Soon after the UN special rapporteur on the right to food asserted that Israel’s forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza was genocidal, Jonah Goldberg took to the LA Times to assure readers that Israel’s actions do not “amount to genocide,” and such claims are based on “Soviet propaganda” and Holocaust denial.

Years from now, we’ll hear about how everyone saw the nightmare and everyone opposed it. But history is now, and the world is watching. We’ll talk about real-time efforts to address the Israeli war on Palestinians with Phyllis Bennis, director of the New Internationalism project at the Institute for Policy Studies.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240719Bennis.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of the shooting of Donald Trump.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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Janine Jackson interviewed Northwestern University’s Hatim Rahman about algorithms and labor for the July 5, 2024, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

Janine Jackson: Many of us have been bewildered and bemused by the experience of walking out of a doctor’s appointment, or a restaurant, and within minutes getting a request to give our experience a five-star rating. What does that mean—for me, for the establishment, for individual workers? Data collection in general is a concept we can all grasp, but what is going on at the unseen backend of these algorithms that we should know about to make individual and societal decisions?

University of California Press (2024)

Hatim Rahman is assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. He’s author of the book Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, forthcoming in August from University of California Press. He joins us now by phone. Welcome to CounterSpin, Hatim Rahman.

Hatim Rahman: Thank you. I’m excited to be here.

JJ: The book has broad implications, but a specific focus. Can you just start us off explaining why you focused your inquiry around what you call “TalentFinder”? What is that, and what’s emblematic or instructive around that example?

HR: Sure, and I want to take you back about a decade ago, when I was a graduate student at Stanford University, in the engineering school, in a department called Management Science and Engineering. And at that time, when I was beginning my studies, there was a lot of talk about the future of work, and how technology, specifically algorithms and artificial intelligence, are going to lead us to the promised land. We are going to be able to choose when to work, how often we want to work, because, essentially, algorithms will allow us to pick the best opportunities and give us fair pay. And from an engineering perspective, there was this idea that it was technically feasible.

But as I began my studies, I realized that the technical features of algorithms or artificial intelligence don’t really tell us the whole story, or really the main story. Instead, these technologies really reflect the priorities of different institutions, organizations and individuals.

And so that’s kind of the through line of the book, but it was playing out in what a lot of people call the “gig economy.” Many of us are familiar with how Uber, Airbnb, even Amazon to a large extent, really accelerated this concept and the idea of the gig economy. And so you mentioned, I found this platform, which I use a pseudonym called TalentFinder, that was trying to use algorithms to create an Amazon for labor. What I mean by that is, just as you pick a product, or maybe a movie or TV show on Netflix, the thought was, if you’re looking to hire somebody to help you create a program, write a blog post, any task that you can think about that’s usually associated with knowledge work, that you could go onto this platform and find that person, again, as I alluded to earlier, just as you find a product.

And the way they were then able to do that, allow anybody to sign up to work or to find somebody, was with the use of these algorithms. And what I found, though, the reality of the situation was, that as the platform scaled, it started to prioritize its own goals, which were often in conflict, or were not shared, with workers on these platforms.

JJ: So let’s talk about that. What do you mean by that, in terms of the different goals of employers and potential workers?

HR: Sure. So it kind of went to the example you started with, that one of the thoughts was—actually, I’m going to take you back even further, to eBay. When eBay started, we take it for granted now, but the thought was, how can I trust that this person I don’t know, I don’t even know them. How can I trust that the images that they’re showing, the description that they put on, is true?

JJ: Right, right.

(via Reddit)

HR:And so eBay pioneered, really, or at least they’re the most famous example of the early company that started, like, “Hey, one way we can do this is through a rating system.” So I may take a chance and buy a product with somebody I don’t know, and if they send me what they said, I’m going to give them a five-star rating, and if they don’t, I’ll give them a lower rating.

And so since then—that was in the mid-’90s—almost all online platforms and, as you mentioned, organizations and—sorry, it is a small tangent: I was recently traveling, and I saw an airport asking me for my ratings for my bathroom experience.

JJ: Of course, yes. Smiley face, not smiley face.

HR: Exactly, exactly. Everyone copy and pastes that model. And that is helpful in many situations, but it doesn’t capture, a lot of times, the reality of people’s experiences, especially when you think about the context that I talked about. If you hired me to create a software program, and we work together for six months, there are going to be ups and downs. There are going to be things that go well, things that don’t necessarily go well, and what does that mean if you gave me a 4.8 or 4.5, right?

And so this was something that workers picked up on really early on in the platform, that these ratings, they don’t really tell the whole experience, but the algorithms will use those ratings to suggest, and people will use the search results that the algorithms curate, to make decisions about who to hire, and so on and so forth.

The problem that I traced, over the evolution of the platform, is that once workers realized that it was really important, they found out ways to game the system, essentially, to get a five-star rating all the time. And from speaking to workers, they felt this was justified, because a lot of times in an organization that hires them, they mismanage the project….

And so, in response, what the platform did, and now again almost all platforms do this, they made their algorithm opaque to workers. So workers no longer understood, or had very little understanding, of what actions were being evaluated, how they were being evaluated, and then what was the algorithm doing with it.

So, for example, if I responded to somebody faster than the other person, would the algorithm interpret that as me being a good worker or not? All of that, without notice or recourse, became opaque to them.

I liken it to, if you received a grade in class, but you don’t know why you got that grade. And, actually, many of us may have experienced this going through school; you hear this “participation grade,” and it’s like, “Wait, I didn’t know that was a grade, or why the professor gave me this grade.”

So that does happen in human life as well. One of the points I make in the book is that as we turn towards algorithms and artificial intelligence, the speed and scale at which this can happen is somewhat unprecedented.

Jacobin (2/20/18)

JJ: Right, and I’m hearing Taylorism here, and just measuring people. And I know that the book is basically engaged with higher-wage workers, and it’s not so much about warehouse workers who are being timed, and they don’t get a bathroom break. But it’s still relevant to that. It’s still part of this same conversation that’s categorically different; algorithm-driven or determined work changes, doesn’t it, the basic relationship between employers and employees? There’s something important that is shifting here.

HR: That’s correct. And you are right that one of the points that I make in the book, and there’s been a lot of great research and exposés about the workers that you mentioned, in Amazon factories and other contexts as well, that we’ve seen a continuation of Taylorism. And for those who are less familiar, that essentially means that you can very closely monitor and measure workers.

And they know that, too. They know what you’re monitoring, and they know what you’re measuring. And so they will often, to the detriment of their physical health and well-being, try to conform to those standards.

And one of the points I make in the book is that when the standards are clear, or what you expect them to do is comparatively straightforward—you know, make sure you pack this many boxes—we will likely see this enhanced Taylorism. The issue that I’m getting at in my book is that, as you mentioned, we’re seeing similar types of dynamics being employed, even when the criteria by which to grade people or evaluate people is less clear.

So, again, for a lot of people who are engaged in knowledge work, you may know what you want, but how you get there…. If you were to write a paper or even compose a speech, you may know what you want, but how you’re going to get there—are you going to take a walk to think about what you’re going to say, are you going to read something unrelated? It’s less clear to an algorithm whether that should be rewarded or not. But there is this attempt to try to, especially in trying to differentiate workers in the context that I mentioned.

So the problem with everyone having a five-star rating on eBay or Amazon, or on TalentFinder that I studied, is that for people who are trying to then use those ratings, including algorithms, it doesn’t give any signal if everyone has the same five-star rating. In situations and contexts where you want differentiation, so you want to know who’s the best comparatively to other people on the platform, or what’s the best movie in this action category or in the comedy category compared to others, then you’re going to try to create some sort of ranking hierarchy. And that’s where I highlight that we’re more likely to see what I call this “invisible cage” metaphor, where the criteria and how you’re evaluated becomes opaque and changing.

JJ: I think it’s so important to highlight the differentiation between workers and consumers. There’s this notion, or this framework, that the folks who are working, who are on the clock and being measured in this way, somehow they’re posed or pitted against consumers. The idea is that you’re not serving consumers properly. And it’s so weird to me, because consumers are workers, workers are consumers. There’s something very artificial about the whole framework for me.

HR: This is returning to one of the earlier points that I mentioned, is that we have to examine what in my discipline we call the “employment relationship.” How are people tied together, or not tied together? So in the case that you mentioned, many times consumers are kept distant from workers; they aren’t necessarily even aware, or if they are aware, they aren’t given much opportunity.

So generally speaking, for a long time, like Uber and Lyft—especially in the earlier versions of the platform; they change very rapidly—they don’t necessarily want you to call the same driver every time, [even] if you have a good relationship with them. So that’s what you mentioned, that the design of these systems sometimes keeps people in opposition with each other, which is problematic, because that’s not the technology doing that, right? That’s the organization, and sometimes the laws that are involved, that don’t allow for consumers and workers, or people more broadly, to be able to talk to each other in meaningful ways.

And in my case, on TalentFinder as well, I spoke to clients, consumers or people who are hiring these workers, and a lot of them were just unaware. They’re like, “Oh my gosh.” I highlighted in the book that they designed the rating system to say, “Just give us your feedback. This is private. We just want it to improve how the platform operates.” What they don’t tell them is that if they were to give them something slightly less than ideal, it could really imperil the workers‘ opportunity to get a next job.

We sometimes refer to this as an information asymmetry, where the platform, or the organizations, they have more information, and are able to use it in ways that are advantageous to them, but are less advantageous to the workers and consumers that are using these services.

JJ: And part of what you talk about in the book is just that opacity, that organizations are collecting information, perhaps nominally in service of consumers and the “consumer experience,” but it’s opaque. It’s not information that folks could get access to, and that’s part of the problem.

Hatim Rahman: “If you are a worker, or if you are the one who is being evaluated, it’s not only you don’t know the criteria, but it could be changing.”

HR: That’s right. It goes to this point that these technologies, they can be transparent, they can be made accountable, if organizations, or in combination with lawmakers mandating, take those steps to do so. And we saw this early on on the platform that I study, and also on YouTube and many other platforms, where they were very transparent about, “Hey, the number of likes that you get or the number of five ratings you get, we’re going to use that to determine where you show up in the search results, whether we’re going to suggest you to a consumer or a client.”

However, we’ve increasingly seen, with the different interests that are involved, that platforms no longer reveal that information, so that if you are a worker, or if you are the one who is being evaluated, it’s not only you don’t know the criteria, but it could be changing. So today, it could be how fast you respond to somebody’s message. Tomorrow, it might be how many times did you log into the platform.

And that’s problematic, because if you think about learning, the ability to learn, it fundamentally relies on being able to establish a relationship between what you observe, or what you do, and the outcome that leads to. And when that becomes opaque, and it’s so easy to change dynamically—sometimes even, let’s put aside day-to-day, maybe hour-to-hour, minute-to-minute—those really kind of supercharge the capabilities to what I call enable this dynamic opacity.

JJ: And not for nothing, but it’s clear that in terms of worker solidarity, in terms of workers sharing communication with each other, put it simple, workers need to communicate with other workers about what they’re getting paid, about their experience on the job. This is anti all of that.

HR: In related research, for my own and others, we have tried to examine this as well, especially gig work; the setup of this work makes it very difficult for workers to organize together in ways that are sustainable. Not only that, many workers may be drifting in and out of these platforms, which again makes it harder, because they’re not employees, they’re not full-time employees. And I talk to people in the book, I mentioned people, they’re between jobs, so they just want to kind of work on it.

So in almost every way, from the design of the platform to employment relationship, the barriers to create meaningful, sustainable alternatives, or resistance or solidarity, becomes that much more difficult. That doesn’t mean workers aren’t trying; they are, and there are organizations out there, one called Fairwork and others, that are trying to create more sustainable partnerships, that will allow workers to collectively share their voices, so that hopefully there are mutually beneficial outcomes.

I talked about this earlier; I mean, just to connect again with history, I think we can all agree that it’s good that children are not allowed to work in factories. There was a time when that was allowed, right? But we saw the effects that could have on the injuries, and just overall in terms of people’s development. And so we need to have this push and pull to create more mutually beneficial outcomes, which currently isn’t occurring to the same extent on a lot of these gigs and digital platforms.

JJ: Finally, first of all, you’re highlighting this need for interclass solidarity, because this is lawyers, doctors—everybody’s in on this. Everybody has a problem with this, and that’s important. But also, so many tech changes, people feel like they’re just things that happen to them. In the same way that climate change, it’s just a thing that’s happening to me. And we are encouraged into this kind of passivity, unfortunately. But there are ways to move forward. There are ways to talk about this. And I just wonder, what do you think is the political piece of this, or where are meaningful points of intervention?

Consumer Reports (5/07)

HR: That’s a great question. I do like to think about this through the different lenses that you mentioned. What can I do as an individual? What can I do in my organization? And what can we do at the political level? And, briefly, on the individual consumer level, we do have power, and we do have a voice, going back to the past, right? Consumer Reports. Think about that. Who was that started by? And that had a very influential difference on the way different industries ran.

And we’ve seen that, also, for sustainability. There’s a lot of third-party rating systems started by consumers that have pushed organizations towards better practices.

So I know that may sound difficult as well, but as I mentioned, there’s this organization called Fairwork that is trying to do this in the digital labor context.

So I would say that you don’t have to do it on your own. There are existing platforms and movements, as individuals, that you can try to tap onto, and to share these what we call again third-party alternative rating systems, that we can collectively say, “Hey, let’s use our economic power, our political power, to transact on platforms that have more transparency or more accountability, that are more sustainable, that treat workers better.” So that’s one, on the political level.

Maybe my disposition is a little bit more optimistic, but I think that we’ve seen, in the last few years, with the outsized impact social media has suggested it’s had on our discourse and politics, that politicians are more willing than before, and I know sometimes the bar is really low, but still, again, on the optimistic side, that they’re at least willing to listen, and hopefully work with these platforms, or the workers on the platforms, because, again, I really fundamentally feel that ensuring that these technologies and these platforms reflect our mutual priorities is going to be better for these organizations and society and workers in the long term as well.

We don’t want to just kick the can down the road, because of what you talked about earlier, as it relates to climate change and CO2 emissions; we’ve been kicking it down the road, and we are collectively seeing the trauma as it relates to heat exhaustion, hurricanes….

And so, of course, that should be warning signs for us, that trying to work together now, at all of those different levels, is necessary. There’s not a silver bullet. We need all hands on deck from all areas and angles to be able to push forward.

JJ: I thank you very much for that. I co-sign that 100%.

We’ve been speaking with Hatim Rahman. He’s assistant professor at Northwestern University. The book we’re talking about is Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers. It’s out next month from University of California Press. Hatim Rahman, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.

HR: Thank you for having me.

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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.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240705.mp3University of California Press (2024)

This week on CounterSpin: The power of the algorithm is ever clearer in our lives, even if we don’t understand it. You might see it as deciding what you see on social media sites, where maybe they get it wrong: You don’t actually want to see a lot of horror movies, or buy an air fryer; you just clicked on that once.

But algorithms don’t only just guess at what you might like to buy; sometimes they’re determining whether you get a job, or keep it. Some 40 million people in the US use online platforms to find work, to find livelihood. The algorithms these platforms use create an environment where organizations enact rules for workers’ behavior, reward and sanction them based on that, but never allow workers to see these accountancies that make their lives unpredictable, much less work with them to develop measurements that would be meaningful.

Hatim Rahman has been working on this question; he’s assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. And he’s author of a new book about it: Inside the Invisible Cage: How Algorithms Control Workers, forthcoming in August from University of California Press.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240705Rahman.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at recent press coverage of climate disruption.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240705Banter.mp3

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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.

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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.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628.mp3Common Dreams (6/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Headlined “The Cash Monster Was Insatiable,” a 2022 New York Times piece reported insurance companies gaming Medicare Advantage, presented as a “low-cost” alternative to traditional Medicare. One company pressed doctors to add additional illnesses to the records of patients they hadn’t seen for weeks: Dig up enough new diagnoses, and you could win a bottle of champagne. Some companies cherry-picked healthier seniors for enrollment with cynical tricks like locating their offices up flights of stairs.

Such maneuvers don’t lead to good health outcomes, but they serve the real goal: netting private insurers more money. There is now new research on the problem, and the response. We hear from David Himmelstein, co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program and co-author of this new analysis of Medicare Advantage.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Himmelstein.mp3(CC photo: Jim Naureckas)

Also on the show: You may get the impression from media that marijuana is legal everywhere now, that it’s moved from blight to business, if you will. It’s not as simple as that, and many people harmed by decades of criminalization have yet to see any benefit from decriminalization. Tauhid Chappell has tracked the issue for years now; he teaches the country’s first graduate-level course on equity movements in the cannabis industry, at Thomas Jefferson University. We’ll get an update from him.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Chappell.mp3Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at recent press coverage of Julian Assange.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240628Banter.mp3

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On Thursday, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will face each other on CNN for the first scheduled debate of the 2024 presidential election. This year, things will be run differently; CNN will be entirely in charge. If history is any guide, things will not go well for democracy.

‘A fraud on the American voter’Once upon a time, presidential debates were hosted by the nonpartisan League of Women Voters, which set the terms and chose the moderators. But the national chairs of the two dominant parties formed the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) and wrested control from the League in 1988. The LWV responded by accusing the parties of

perpetrat[ing] a fraud on the American voter. It has become clear to us that the candidates’ organizations aim to add debates to their list of campaign-trail charades devoid of substance, spontaneity and answers to tough questions. The League has no intention of becoming an accessory to the hoodwinking of the American public.

FAIR (8/2/19) on a 2019 Democratic presidential primary debate: “CNN took an approach to the debates more befitting a football game than an exercise in democracy.”

The result was, as FAIR repeatedly documented (e.g., 10/26/12, 8/26/16, 8/2/19, 2/29/20), largely what the League predicted: few tough questions, most with a right-wing corporate framing, rarely reflecting the issues of most concern to voters. But even the CPD has lost its grip on the debates now, starting in 2022, when the RNC announced its distancing from the organization. Earlier this year, Biden signaled his own interest in working out a debate outside the normal CPD process.

Which brings us to the current situation, featuring two scheduled debates—on June 27 on CNN, and on September 10 on ABC—following rules agreed upon by the host network and the two candidates. CNN anchors Jake Tapper and Dana Bash will moderate the first contest.

As we’ve said before (7/19/23), the public needs to fully understand the stakes of the 2024 election, and that can’t mean a blackout on Trump. But it does require incisive questions that speak to people’s real needs and concerns, and some way of offering real-time factchecking to viewers. CNN viewers are unlikely to get the former, and CNN has already promised not to supply the latter.

Unfit to hostFAIR (7/19/23) on CNN‘s 2023 “town hall” for Trump: “The entire affair read as a giant campaign rally sponsored by CNN.”

Of the major nonpartisan news networks (i.e., excluding Fox), CNN is perhaps the least fit to host a presidential debate. In recent elections and primaries, it has repeatedly proved that it’s not an enlightened public the network is after, but ratings (e.g., FAIR.org, 8/2/19, 8/25/22, 7/19/23).

In the most recent example, the network infamously hosted a town hall with Trump during the 2023 Republican primaries. That choice appeared to be entirely self-serving. After working to move the network rightward, then–chair Chris Licht had led CNN to what the Atlantic (6/2/23) described as “its historic nadir,” in terms of ratings as well as newsroom morale. The Trump town hall was the big plan to turn the ship around.

Instead, it quickly proved to be an embarrassment that ultimately cost Licht his job (FAIR.org, 6/8/23). Trump turned the event into what came across as a campaign rally sponsored by CNN, spouting falsehood after falsehood and running roughshod over CNN host Kaitlan Collins in front of cheering fans. (The CNN floor manager instructed the audience that while applause was permitted, booing was not.)

Even in its town halls with Trump’s slightly less truth-challenged primary challengers, the network’s own post-event factchecks showed that CNN hosts—including Tapper and Bash—failed to counter major falsehoods in real time (FAIR.org, 7/19/23).

Reliance on right-wing talking pointsCNN*‘s Dana Bash (Inside Politics*, 5/1/24) claimed that student protests against genocide in Gaza were spreading “destruction, violence and hate on college campuses,” and said they were “hearkening back to the 1930s in Europe.”

Though Trump (who agreed to the ground rules and choice of host) has been pre-emptively complaining he won’t get a fair shake from such a “biased” outlet—biased to the left, he means—Tapper and Bash hardly have a record of asking left-leaning questions.

CNN didn’t host a presidential debate in 2020, but it did host Democratic primary debates. Beyond its ESPN-like introductions to the candidates and questioning style that seemed designed to foment conflict more than to inform, the network relied heavily on right-wing talking points and assumptions to frame its questions (FAIR.org, 8/2/19).

In just one example, Tapper started off a 2019 Democratic primary debate night by asking Bernie Sanders whether “tak[ing] private health insurance away from more than 150 million Americans, in exchange for government-sponsored healthcare for everyone,” was “political suicide” (FAIR.org, 8/2/19).

In a 2016 Democratic debate, Bash questioned Hillary Clinton on her proposal for paid maternity leave—something every other industrialized nation in the world provides—with a decidedly antagonistic framing (FAIR.org, 7/16/19): “There are so many people who say, ‘Really? Another government program?’ Is that what you’re proposing? And at the expense of taxpayer money?”

After CNN‘s 2023 Trump town hall, Tapper (On With Kara Swisher, 7/10/23) argued that the event was “in the public’s interest.” But there’s no world in which offering a serial liar a town hall stuffed full of people instructed to cheer but not boo serves the public interest. Tapper’s take on the “public interest” doesn’t bode well for his performance this week.

On the central foreign policy issue of the year—Israel’s months-long assault on Gaza—Tapper and Bash both have exhibited a strong pro-Israel bias (FAIR.org, 5/3/24). It’s not a promising setup for a debate between a strongly pro-Israel candidate occasionally critical of the country’s right-wing government (Biden) and a strongly pro-Israel candidate aligned with that right wing (Trump).

And CNN, like its fellow corporate media outlets, is allergic to questions about many issues of critical importance to large numbers of viewers. In its first 2019 Democratic primary debate (FAIR.org, 8/2/19), CNN asked more non-policy questions—primarily about whether some candidates were “moving too far to the left to win the White House”—than questions about the climate crisis. Across two nights of debates, the network’s 31 non-policy questions overwhelmed those on key issues like gun control (11) and women’s rights (7).

Factcheck abdicationCNN* declines to do real-time factchecking, but its after-the-fact factchecking is no great shakes either (FAIR.org*, 10/5/12).

The debate and its terms have been agreed to by both Biden and Trump. There will be no audience on Thursday. The candidates’ microphones will be muted when it’s not their turn to speak. In a first for a presidential debate, there will be two commercial breaks during the debate. (It remains to be seen which giant corporations will be sponsoring this supposed exercise in democracy.)

What will this format offer viewers—and, more broadly, democracy? The microphone rule should help avoid the 2020 debate debacle, in which Trump’s incessant interruptions rendered the event virtually unwatchable (FAIR.org, 10/2/20). But Trump doesn’t just interrupt incessantly; he lies incessantly as well. Will Tapper and Bash factcheck every lie, even if it means doing so more often to Trump than to Biden?

Shockingly, CNN isn’t even going to pretend to try. Political director David Chalian (New York Times, 6/24/24) said that a live debate “is not the ideal arena for live factchecking,” so instead the moderators would be “facilitating the debate between these candidates, not being a participant in that debate.” Factchecking will be reserved for post-show analysis. Meanwhile, moderators “will use all tools at their disposal to enforce timing and ensure a civilized discussion” (CNN, 6/15/24).

On the one hand, Trump has made real-time factchecking essentially impossible, because the rate at which he puts forth falsehoods would require constant interruption. Of the 74 Trump debate claims checked by Politifact (2/2/24), only two were judged “true,” and seven “mostly true.” Across time and setting, 58% of Biden’s claims were judged at least “half true,” compared to 24% for Trump.

On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine how the public will be served by a “debate” featuring a notorious fabulist in which the moderators don’t even try to point out blatant lies. Saving factchecking for after the debate won’t help the millions who tune out when the debate ends. And you can hardly expect an opponent to be responsible for countering every lie Trump tells.

CNN has never been particularly good at factchecking (e.g., FAIR.org, 10/4/11, 10/5/12). Now with a candidate and party that aggressively disdain facts and honesty, the network is virtually guaranteed to fail the public even more miserably—and with potentially graver consequences.

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.

Featured Image:* CNN* images of its debate moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash.

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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.

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Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Jim Naureckas about the secret recording of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito for the June 14, 2024, episodeof CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614Naureckas.mp3 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: What do you think was actually revealed in this captured conversation? As CNN said, Alito’s religious zeal—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: 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. 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: 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.”

JN: 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 were 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—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.

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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.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614.mp3Rolling Stone (6/10/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito wrote dozens of pages justifying his decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, stating the Constitution does not confer the right to determine whether or when to give birth. None of those pages mention his intention to make the United States “a place of godliness,” or his belief that there can be no compromise on such concerns, because “one side or the other is going to win.” Yet those are thoughts Alito freely expressed with a woman he thought was just a stranger at a public event. So: Will elite news media now suggest we just go back to considering the Supreme Court a neutral body, deserving of life terms because they’re above the fray of politics? How long until we see news media take on this pretend naivete, and how much it’s costing us? Jim Naureckas is editor of FAIR.org and the newsletter Extra!. We talk to him about that.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614Naureckas.mp3Institute for Local Self-Reliance (2/28/24)

Also on the show: The news that “the economy” is doing great on paper doesn’t square with the tone-deaf messaging from food companies about mysteriously stubborn high prices: Kellogg’s says, sure, cereal’s weirdly expensive, so why not eat it for dinner! Chipotle’s head honcho says you are not, in fact, getting a smaller portion for the same price—but, you know, if you are, just nod your head a certain way. None of this indicates a media universe that takes seriously the widespread struggle to meet basic needs. Which may explain the failure to find the story in the upsurge in dollar stores, supposedly filling a void for low-income people, but actually just another avenue for ripping them off. We talk about that with Kennedy Smith from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240614Smith.mp3

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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From granular coverage of the career triumphs of nepo babies and the goings-on at elite universities, to deep dives about luxury real estate and ritzy goods and services most people have never heard of, it’s clear that the New York Times’ most cherished subject is the One Percent.

This is driven by prurient fascination with the lives of the rich and powerful, mixed with a priggish desire to shame them for individual consumer choices. (“Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate”—4/10/23.) This reflects the class and educational background of Times staffers, many of whom are status-obsessed graduates of elite institutions whose personal wealth and privilege, or proximity to it, skews their worldview.

The New York Times (5/14/24) reports on how luxury hotels are offering “ever-more-lavish activities for guests,” including a “personalized shopping extravaganza”($2,860), an “Enlightenment Retreat” with “four days of holistic treatments ($5,745) or an “invitation to an artist’s private studio to learn about their process” ($7,500).

Here is the Times (5/4/24) on Dylan Lauren, the paradoxically svelte “candy queen of New York City” and empress of the boutique candy store chain Dylan’s Candy Bar:

Ms. Lauren, who is the daughter of the fashion designer Ralph Lauren, lives on the Upper East Side and in Bedford, N.Y., with her husband of nearly 13 years, Paul Arrouet, 53, who is a managing partner at a private equity firm, and their 9-year-old fraternal twins Cooper Blue and Kingsley Rainbow.

Yachts, butlers and “next-level” hotels are of keen and constant interest. The paper (4/10/23) declared last year:

If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels.

This May alone, the Times ran stories on multimillion-dollar designer “eco-yachts” (“‘silent luxury’ is fast displacing opulence”—5/10/24), luxury hotel experiences (“From cooking with a Michelin-star chef to taking a chauffeured shopping spree in Singapore, hotels and resorts are offering ever-more-lavish activities for guests”—5/14/24), and a new breed of butler employed by “the One Percent of the One Percent” (“The modern butler…is no longer a grandfatherly type in morning trousers that stays in the background, if not out of sight”—5/14/24).

‘Affluent social cohort’The founders of Betches Media have “the chance to make another $30 million if the company can reach certain revenue and profit targets by 2026” (New York Times, 5/11/24).

The paper finds much to admire in buzzy businesses founded by millennial and Gen Z entrepreneurs. Take Betches Media, a women’s humor company that satirizes the “affluent social cohort” of young women who grew up in the “well-to-do” Long Island suburb of Roslyn, and joined sororities while undergrads at Cornell University. Industry watchers “took notice” last fall when the company’s founders sold it to LBG Media for $24 million, the Times (5/11/24) reported. (The term “betch” is meant to “mock the preferences of a type of shallow, higher-income, college-educated woman,” who is also most likely white.) The sale netted the three founders around $8 million apiece. One told the Times she had treated herself to a gold Cartier watch; another said she had refreshed her wardrobe.

Several former Betches employees complained that many of the rank-and-file workers were underpaid, with some earning around $50,000 a year to churn out the content that made the business a success. Yet the focus on the more-affluent-than-ever founders suggests that the Times is more interested in winners who can afford Cartier watches than in the grumbling of those left behind.

The fact that the Betches Media founders attended Cornell is not an incidental detail. The Times’ coverage of Ivy League schools and their alumni sometimes suggests that if a phenomenon didn’t happen at an elite university, it didn’t really happen at all.

A 2021 story (6/7/21) on a Yale Law School kerfuffle dubbed “Dinner Party-gate” claimed that the episode exposed a culture that pitted “student against student” and “professor against professor,” forcing the school to confront a “venomous divide.” Far from being a tempest in a teapot, this was indicative of a broader cultural shift: Students at Yale Law now “regularly attack their professors, and one another, for their scholarship, professional choices and perceived political views.” In a place “awash in rumor and anonymous accusations,” the paper breathlessly continued, “almost no one would speak on the record.”

What exactly was “Dinner Party–gate,” and why did the Times consider it a story of compelling national interest? A group of students alleged that Amy Chua, a “popular but polarizing” professor, had been hosting drunken dinner parties with other students, and possibly federal judges, during the pandemic. Five paragraphs in, and after “more than two dozen interviews with students, professors and administrators,” the Times doggedly reported, “possibly the only sure thing in the murky saga is this: There is no hard proof that Ms. Chua is guilty of what she was originally accused of doing.” Nevertheless, the story persisted for an astonishing 36 paragraphs.

‘We’re not oligarchs’A New York Times (11/3/17) love story: “When the night was over, they departed to their separate yachts.”

In addition to small private parties that may or may not have taken place at Yale Law School, the Times is always on hand to cover larger and more luxurious private parties. The principals of a 2017 wedding chronicled by the Times (11/3/17) met on a yachting excursion off the coast of Croatia. After the ceremony, “guests were greeted by two trumpeters in medieval attire at the Metropolitan Club on 60th Street,” and the bridal couple, who “created their own family crest” for their wedding invitations, menus, wax seals, programs, napkins and cake, departed the venue atop a white carriage drawn by two white Percherons.

In 2019, the Times (2/22/19) covered the union of law firm associate Yelena Ambartsumian and engineer and executive Miroslav Grajewski. Both are avid art collectors whose romance was fueled by “robust curiosity” and “the desire to build a legacy.” The art they’ve acquired includes pieces “priced in the tens of thousands or more.” (High-end art notwithstanding, the bride assured the Times, “We’re not oligarchs.”)

The couple married at St. Illuminator’s Armenian Apostolic Cathedral in Manhattan, and held their reception at Eleven Madison Park, a Manhattan restaurant the Michelin guide describes as a “temple of modern elegance” where “nothing is out of place and everything is custom made, from the staff’s suits to the handblown water vases.” Dinner for two, with wine, now costs $1,314.

Toward the end of the ceremony, the Times reported, the officiant “placed gilded coronets on the heads of the bride and groom, an Armenian tradition anointing the couple as the rulers of their domestic kingdom.”

It’s not just parties and weddings, but the luxury goods and services purchased for them, that catch the Times’ eye. In April, the paper (4/13/24) wrote about the cake designer Bastien Blanc-Tailleur, who creates “opulent confections” for “high-profile clients,” including European aristocrats, movie stars, fashion designers, and Saudi and Bahraini royals. Blanc-Tailleur’s wedding cakes start at 7,500 euros, or around $8,100, while simpler cakes, which start at roughly $3,700, are “relatively more affordable.”

‘Go broke or go home’“People now look at pictures of others who might have incomes 10 to 100 times what we have,” a New York Times article (​​7/16/19) observes—referring to social media, though it could be talking about its own lifestyle coverage.

As fascinated as the Times is by the lifestyles of the rich and famous, it takes care to note that the luxe life is not for everyone. In a 2019 essay (​​7/16/19) on “Go Broke or Go Home Bachelorette Parties,” the paper tackled tough questions like, “What happens when friends are consumed by wanting their bachelorette parties to be picture perfect at any cost?” (Answer: “Credit cards are maxed out and debt rises.”)

Yet even essays warning against mindless excess tend to glamorize it at the same time. “The cost of bachelorette parties is ever growing, with weekend wedding festivities at destination locales now the norm,” the author noted, adding that millennials like her are “going broke” to attend. She then described a bachelorette outing she was invited to: “a long weekend in Spain from my home in Clifton, England, with an itinerary packed with VIP yacht trips, exclusive booths in glamorous nightclubs, a luxury villa and afternoon teas at high-end restaurants.” Suddenly racking up a little credit card debt doesn’t sound so bad!

Attraction to the sweet life is part of our culture. But readers would be better served by a newspaper that scrutinized rather than fetishized wealth and consumption.

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https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240607.mp3Yahoo (5/31/24)

This week on CounterSpin: Surprising no one, Donald Trump and his sycophants responded to his 34-count conviction on charges of lying in business records by claiming that the trial was “rigged,” the judge and jury corrupt, that it was somehow Joe Biden’s doing, and “you know who else was persecuted? Jesus Christ.” Trump publicly calling the judge a “devil,” and Bible-thumping House Speaker Mike Johnson and others showing up at the courthouse in Trump cosplay, were just some of the irregular, shall we say, elements of this trial. It is a moment to examine the right-wing media that have fomented this scary nonsense, but also to look to reporting from the so-called “mainstream” to go beyond the “some say, others differ” pablum we often see. We’ll talk with Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters, about press response to the trial and the verdict.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240607Gertz.mp3New York Times (11/21/16)

Also on the show: For some people the violent police crackdown on peaceful college students protesting their schools’ investments in Israel’s war on Palestinians has been eye-opening. For others, it’s one more example of the employment of law enforcement to brutally enforce corporate power. The fight led by Indigenous women against the Dakota Access pipeline is not long enough ago to have been forgotten. We’ll hear a bit from an August 2017 interview with North Dakota organizer Kandi Mossett.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin240607Mossett.mp3

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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 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.