Category: Blog

January 20, 2025

Canada’s Clean Electricity Regulations: What You Need To Know

To build a clean economy and avoid a climate disaster, Canada needs an emissions-free electricity supply. As we electrify everything, from our cars to our home heating systems, we need electricity to come from sources that don’t emit greenhouse gases.

That’s why Prime Minister Trudeau’s 2021 promise to deliver a net-zero electricity grid by 2035 was important. The target is also achievable – thanks to the coal phase out, Canada’s electricity grid is already over 80 per cent emissions-free.

To deliver on this goal, the federal government made important investments in renewable energy projects. Yet, reaching net zero also means phasing out polluting fossil fuel energy, so the government developed rules to impose a pollution limit on electricity producers. The rules, known as the Clean Electricity Regulations (CER), were finalized in December 2024. So, do they do the job? Let’s have a look.

The Clean Electricity Regulations are an important part of Canada’s climate plan.

The regulations work by placing an annual limit on the pollution from electricity produced using fossil fuels. Companies that provide electricity through wind and solar farms or nuclear plants aren’t affected by the regulations. Companies that use gas, on the other hand, will have to respect the annual limit by investing in technologies to reduce emissions – or reduce how long they run their plant.

Securing these regulations was an important victory, only made possible by the thousands of Canadians who demanded them. The regulations are expected to result in an estimated 180 Mt of GHG emissions reductions from the electricity sector between 2024 and 2050, equivalent to taking 55 million cars off the road for one year.

The regulations come up short of what is needed to tackle climate change.

Fossil fuel companies and some provincial governments, including Ontario and Alberta, used every trick in the book to prevent the regulations from being finalized. While they weren’t entirely successful, the final regulations are significantly weaker than the draft form published in June 2023.

The main issue is that gas-powered plants, the main source of pollution in Canada’s electricity grid since coal has largely been phased out, will be allowed to operate unregulated until 2035. Some newer gas plants will be exempt from pollution limits for much longer, going until 2049. Additionally, the annual limit placed on the plants is lenient and the rules accept offsets, meaning the purchase of carbon credits, as a suitable alternative to meeting the limit – up to a certain level.

In practice, this means Canada’s electricity grid will not reach net-zero emissions by 2035, despite the Prime Minister’s promise. In fact, the regulations do not guarantee our grid will be net-zero in 2040 or even 2045. In Ontario, some gas plants under construction, like the large Napanee plant, will likely not be subject to pollution limits until 2049. It also means local pollution from gas plants could continue to harm people’s health for decades.

Canada can meet its demand without new gas-powered plants.

Canada is in an enviable position. Our grid is already 85 per cent decarbonized. We have abundant wind, water and solar resources, and we are well on our way to phasing out coal. Phasing out gas is the final step.

In fact, modelling has shown that Canada can reach 100 percent zero-emissions electricity by 2035, even as electricity demand rapidly increases. Achieving this requires a significant increase in the rate of installation of renewable energy, as well as energy efficiency, interprovincial transmission and increased battery storage capacity.

Fossil gas is not a “bridge fuel” and it must be phased out.

Gas companies have tried to present fossil gas, better known as natural gas, as a cleaner “bridge fuel” that can act as an intermediary between coal and renewable energy. However, because of methane leaks throughout the supply chain in addition to emissions from combustion, the climate impact of fossil gas is significant. Current analysis finds when accounting for these “fugitive emissions” and methane gas’ powerful impact on the climate in the short term, gas is worse than coal when burned to generate electricity.

The world is rapidly moving towards renewable energy, and Canada should too.

At COP28, countries committed to tripling global renewable energy capacity by 2030. Canada formally adopted this goal. Momentum is building as countries install renewable energy at record speed. In 2023 alone, global renewable energy installations grew by 50 per cent. That includes Germany installing 17 GW of renewables and the UK installing 14 GW. Yet, despite vast potential for wind and solar, Canada has been slow to the race, installing just 2.3 GW in 2023.

Whether the Clean Electricity Regulations mandate it or not, it’s in our best interest to invest in renewable energy. Wind and solar, combined with greater energy efficiency, is the cheapest, cleanest and quickest way to meet our electricity needs while protecting our health and our future.

Ontario resident? Take action!

The post Canada’s Clean Electricity Regulations: What You Need To Know appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
January 17, 2025

Diagnosing Activist Burnout, Elite Media Fuel It

Ten months before the 2024 election, high-profile news outlets were already sounding the alarm: If Trump were to win another term, widespread fatigue, despair and activist burnout would probably minimize resistance.

Exhaustion and burnout are real phenomena that pose a significant challenge to political movements (Psychology Today, 6/24/20). But articles that focus on feelings of burnout, and exclude or downplay questions of changes in strategy amid shifting conditions, often have the effect—and occasionally the goal—of making everyday people seem and feel less powerful than they are.

A year ago, Politico‘s Michael Schaffer (1/26/24) was predicting that a Trump victory might “be met with avoidance, listlessness and apathy.”

Politico writer Michael Schaffer (1/26/24) noted a year ago that the shock of Trump’s 2016 victory “sparked a burst of activity that profoundly altered Washington”:

Donations to progressive advocacy groups soared. Traffic to political media spiked. Protests filled the calendar…. But now, as a second Trump term becomes an increasingly real possibility, there’s no consensus that anything similar would happen in January 2025.

While acknowledging that the post-2016 burst of activity had profoundly altered Washington, Politico warned Trump opponents that pioneering new strategies would only get them so far, since passivity in the face of a second Trump term “has as much to do with psychology as it does with the tactics or organizational skill of the activist class.”

Humans “respond to a sudden threat with a fight-or-flight instinct,” Schaffer observed, and for many, “the string of jolts that accompanied the first Trump months of 2017—the Muslim ban, the firing of James Comey, Charlottesville—spurred an impulse to fight.” The same was unlikely to be true of a second Trump win, he speculated, because for many it would amount to proof that fighting back “wasn’t enough,” and could “just as easily be met with avoidance, listlessness and apathy.”

Good journalists don’t pretend an energetic and cohesive resistance exists when it does not. But presenting opposition to authoritarians like Trump as pointless, ineffectual and doomed is journalistically irresponsible and historically illiterate, particularly when it’s clear that the initial backlash to Trump had an effect (New York Times, 12/18/17).

‘A weary shrug’

After the election, Politico again predicted a muted response to Trump’s second term. A Politico EU story (11/13/24) characterized the 2024 Trump resistance as “flaccid” (“Toto, we’re not in 2016 anymore,” read the subhead), and proclaimed that while Trump’s 2016 win had “sparked a global revolt,” his recent triumph has been “met with a weary shrug.”

The outlet suggested that Trump’s latest win had been inevitable—

part of a broader, inexorable rightward trend on both sides of the Atlantic, leaving a dejected liberal left to helplessly scratch their heads as the fickle tide of political history turns against them.

Which might leave anti-Trump readers wondering: Don’t humans have a role to play in turning history’s tide?

After the election, Politico‘s Schaffer (11/15/24) presented the exodus from the far-right X (formerly Twitter) as a sign that “the post-election progressive ferment that in 2016 gave us the resistance is going to be a lot quieter this time.”

A couple of days later, Schaffer (Politico, 11/15/24) wrote a column headlined “The Resistance Is Not Coming to Save You. It’s Tuning Out.” Noting a decline in critical coverage of Trump, Schaffer wrote that for a nation

wondering whether the return of Trump will drive an immediate return of the public fury and journalistic energy triggered by his first win, it makes for an early hint that the answer will be: Nope.

Where Trump’s first victory “triggered Blue America’s fight instinct,” he added, “the aftermath of this year’s win is looking a lot more like flight.” The question of why so many Americans are now in “fight or flight” mode went largely unexamined. Schaffer’s main takeaway was that Blue America cannot credibly blame a “feckless pre-election press” for “bungl[ing] the coverage” of the race this time around, as if alarmist corporate media coverage of crime, immigration, the economy and transgender issues didn’t contribute to Trump’s narrow victory in 2024.

He also faulted the initial resistance to Trump for being “organized around issues of identity,” citing as examples the 2017 Women’s March, the backlash to the Muslim ban, the 2017 counter-protest against a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, and the 2020 racial justice protests. But the fact that the Women’s March drew people of all genders, most participants in the 2020 racial justice protests were white, and Black Lives Matter may have been the largest protest movement in US history suggests that many Americans find issues of “identity” galvanizing rather than alienating.

And it is likelier that direct threats to people’s lives—say, those posed by mass deportations and abortion bans—will inspire more re-engagement than vague appeals to issues like preserving democracy.

Reformulated opposition

Truthout (11/16/24): “As we step out of our grieving and look ahead, there are reasons to believe that a new social movement cycle to confront Trumpism can emerge.”

It’s true that while Trump’s 2016 victory came as a horrific shock to millions, in part because Hillary Clinton was widely expected to win, the outcome of the 2024 election was less surprising, since no candidate seemed assured of victory. But torpor is just one aspect of an unfolding story; opposition to Trump’s agenda is not muted so much as it is being reformulated in response to changing conditions.

Thousands continue to protest Israel’s ongoing genocide, despite elite media outlets’ and universities’ war on free speech and student protesters. Two days after the 2024 election, more than 100,000 people joined a call organized by a coalition of 200 progressive groups, including the Working Families Party, Indivisible, United We Dream and Movement for Black Lives Action, and thousands signed up for follow-up actions.

As it did in and after 2016, Trump’s recent election has spurred thousands to join organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, to which I belong. Public support for organized labor remains extremely high—70% of Americans approve of labor unions—and the US continues to experience an uptick in militant labor actions, including recent strikes at major companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Finally, many organizers are focused on developing strategies to combat Trump policies, like mass deportations, as soon as he attempts to impose them.

‘Get somebody else to do it’

“How Powerful Leaders Crush Dissent, Demobilizing Millions,” might have been a more appropriate headline for this New York Times piece (11/20/24).

The New York Times has also been obsessed with the allegedly neutered 2024 resistance. “In 2017, [anti-Trump voters] donned pink hats to march on Washington, registering their fury with Donald J. Trump by the hundreds of thousands,” reporter Katie Glueck (2/19/24) wrote, adding, “This year, [they] are grappling with another powerful sentiment: exhaustion.”

Weeks after the election, the paper published “‘Get Somebody Else to Do It’: Trump Resistance Encounters Fatigue” (11/20/24). The subhead read, “Donald J. Trump’s grass-roots opponents search for a new playbook as they reckon with how little they accomplished during his first term.”

In the piece itself, reporter Katie Benner offered a balance of voices of both the exhausted and the motivated, accompanied by a fairly nuanced assessment of the situation facing the anti-Trump resistance, describing “a sharp global reversal in the power of mass action” that may be partly due to governments’ authoritarian drift and declining willingness to change course in response to public pressure. But the paper’s headline writers erased that nuance and the role of repression, leaving only a sense that activists are personally failing. As headlines go, “How Powerful Leaders Crush Dissent, Demobilizing Millions” might have been more accurate.

In December, New York Times columnist and Trump critic Charles Blow (12/18/24) offered weary progressives absolution: “Temporarily Disconnected From Politics? Feel No Guilt About It.” Though he cautioned that it would be “a mistake for anyone to confuse a temporary disconnection for a permanent acquiescence,” he suggested that there were, at the moment, few ways to fight back.

After all, Blow wrote, “there is very little that average citizens can do about the way the administration takes shape”—seeming to forget that cabinet members must be confirmed by the Senate, which is an elected representative body. Even efforts to counter Trump’s agenda led by groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), he noted, are “largely beyond the involvement of average citizens.” (That would probably be news to the ACLU, which is often seeking volunteers, and always seeking donations.)

Even columnists like Blow, who has called Trump an “aberration and abomination,” are apparently more interested in chronicling progressive fatigue than in contending with two troubling shifts noted by the New York Times: a global decline in the power of mass action, and self-proclaimed champion of democracy President Joe Biden’s refusal to respond to the majority of Americans who oppose Israel’s war.

When large groups of Americans cannot sway their leaders via forceful dissent, mass action or electoral campaigns—when participating in politics feels, and often is, useless—some degree of disengagement is inevitable.

‘In no mood to organize’

The Washington Post (11/10/24) presented the mood of today’s activists: “I’m feeling like I want to curl up in the fetal position.”

The Washington Post (11/10/24), under the headline, “A ‘Resistance’ Raced to Fight Trump’s First Term. Will It Rise Again?” noted in its subhead that some who had been a part of that resistance were “exhausted and feeling hopeless,” and “say they need a break.” The piece described an activist, who’d been “shocked into action” by Trump’s 2016 victory, as “in no mood to organize” in 2024. Although many had been “jolted” into opposing Trump in 2016, today’s resistance leaders “must contend with a swirl of other feelings: exhaustion, dejection, burnout.”

Yet despite their exhaustion, ordinary people around the country and world are still organizing, because they know how much worse things can get if they don’t—and because it’s their bodies, families and communities on the line. Having seen how hard it is to make change, even when a policy or cause has majority popular support, it’s no wonder that some are taking a short- to long-term break from politics.

It’s not the public but elite journalists, chastened by their tarnished reputation and their contributions to Trump’s rise, who have shrunk from challenging the powerful, whether those in power are genocide-supporting Democrats like Biden, or planet-betraying authoritarians like Trump.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 15, 2025

Right-Wing Sleuths Find the LA Fires Culprit: Once Again, It’s Wokeness

CBS Evening News (1/13/25) cited Colorado’s 2021 Marshall Fire as another example of how climate disruption is making wildfires more destructive.

The devastation of the ongoing Los Angeles fires is an alarm going off, but also the result of society having hit the snooze button long ago (Democracy Now!, 1/9/25; CBS, 1/13/25). Game-changing fires destroyed Paradise, California (NPR, 11/8/23), in 2023, and Lahaina, Hawaii, in 2024—clear warnings, if any were still needed, that the climate catastrophe had arrived.

“The evidence connecting the climate crisis and extreme wildfires is clear,” the Nature Conservancy (7/9/24) said. “Increased global temperatures and reduced moisture lead to drier conditions and extended fire seasons.”

The scientific journal Fire Ecology (7/24/23) reported that “climate change is expected to continue to exacerbate impacts to forested ecosystems by increasing the frequency, size and severity of wildfires across the western United States.”

Now we are watching one of America’s largest cities burn. It’s a severe reminder that the kind of disruption we experienced in the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020 is the new normal under climate change.

The right-wing media, however, have found a culprit—it’s not climate change, but Democratic Party–led wokeness. The coverage demonstrates once again that the W-word can be used to blame literally anything in the Murdoch fantasyland.

‘Preoccupation With DEI’

Alyssia Finley (Wall Street Journal, 1/12/25): “A cynic might wonder if environmentalists interfered with fire prevention in hope of evicting humans.” Another cynic might wonder if the Journal publishes smears without evidence as part of its business model.

“Megyn Kelly sounded off on Los Angeles Fire Department Chief Kristin Crowley and Mayor Karen Bass,” the New York Post (1/8/25) reported. Former Fox News host Kelly said “that the officials’ preoccupation with diversity, equity and inclusion [DEI] programs distracted them from the city’s fire-combating duties.”

Wall Street Journal editorial board member Allysia Finley (1/12/25) echoed the charge: “Bloated union contracts and DEI may not have directly hampered the fire response, but they illustrate the government’s wrongheaded priorities.” In other words, the paper didn’t have evidence to blame the fires on firefighter salaries or department diversity, but decided to insinuate as much anyway.

Other conservative journalists were more direct, like CNN pundit Scott Jennings, who went on CNN NewsNight (1/8/25) to assert:

As a matter of public policy in California, the main interest in the fire department lately has been in DEI programming and budget cuts, and now we have this massive fire, and people are upset.

As the Daily Beast (1/9/25) noted, “His response was part of a Republican kneejerk reaction that included President-elect Donald Trump blaming ‘liberals’ and state Gov. Gavin Newsom.”

The Washington Post (1/10/25) reported that Trump-supporting X owner Elon Musk

has been inundating his 212 million followers with posts casting blame for the blazes on Democrats and diversity policies, amplifying narratives that have taken hold among far-right activists and Republican leaders.

Liel Leibovitz, editor-at-large at the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet, blamed the LA devastation on the “woke religion” (New York Post, 1/9/25).

“There are many things we’ve learned that the Los Angeles Fire Department needs—and more women firefighters isn’t one of them,” moaned National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry (New York Post, 1/15/25). “Los Angeles for years has been in the grips of a bizarre obsession with recruiting more women firefighters.”

Blaming gay singers

Mentioned by Fox News (1/10/25): $13,000 allocated to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Heritage Month programs. Not mentioned by Fox News: a $126 million boost to the LAPD budget.

Fox & Friends (1/9/25, 1/9/25) blamed the city’s Democratic leaders and the fire chief for the destruction. Fox News Digital (1/10/25) said:

While Los Angeles officials were stripping millions in funding from their fire department ahead of one of the most destructive wildfires in state history, hundreds of thousands of dollars were allocated to fund programs such as a “Gay Men’s Chorus” and housing for the transgender homeless.

You may notice the shift from “millions” to “hundreds of thousands”—the latter, obviously, can’t explain what happened to the former. What can far better explain it is that the city focused much more on funding cops than firefighters (Intercept, 1/8/25). The mayor’s budget plan offered “an increase of more than $138 million for the Los Angeles Police Department; and a decrease of about $23 million for the LA Fire Department” (KTTV, 4/22/24). KABC (1/9/25) reported more recent numbers, saying the “fire department’s budget was cut by $17.6 million,” while the “city’s police department budget increased by $126 million,” according to the city’s controller.

And in 2023, the LA City Council approved salary increases for cops over objections that these pay boosts “would pull money away from mental health clinicians, homeless outreach workers and many other city needs” (LA Times, 8/23/23). The cop-pay deal was reportedly worth $1 billion (KNBC, 8/23/23).

LAFD cuts under Mayor Bass were, in fact, big news (KTTV, 1/15/25). Fox overlooked the comparison with the police, one regularly made by city beat reporters who cover public safety and city budgets, and went straight to blaming gay singers.

Crusade against ‘woke’

Contrary to the Daily Mail‘s headline (1/14/25), former California first lady Maria Shriver Maria Shriver did not “tear into LA’s woke leaders”; rather, she complained about LA’s insufficient funding of public needs.

Or take the Daily Mail (1/14/25), a right-wing British tabloid with a huge US footprint, whose headline said former California first lady “Maria Shriver Is Latest Celebrity to Tear Into LA’s Woke Leaders.” But the story went on to say that Shriver had decried the cuts to the LAFD, citing no evidence that she was fighting some culture war against women firefighters.

Shriver, the ex-wife of actor and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, was pointing the finger at austerity and calling for more public spending. In other words, Shriver was siding with LAFD Chief Kristin Crowley, who had complained that city budget cuts had failed her department (CNN, 1/12/25). The Mail’s insistence on calling this a crusade against “woke” is just another example of how tediously the conservative media apply this word to almost anything.

While these accusations highlight diversification in the LA firefighting force, the right never offers real evidence that these hiring practices lead to any kind of hindering of fire response, as University of Southern California education professor Shaun Harper (Time, 1/13/25) noted. If anything, the right admits that miserly budgeting, usually considered a virtue in the conservative philosophy, is the problem.

Equal opportunity disasters

These talking points among right-wing politicians and their sycophants in the media serve several purposes. They bury the idea that climate change, driven by fossil fuels and out-of-control growth, has anything to do with the rise in extreme weather. They pin the blame on Democrats: LA is a blue city in a blue state. And they continue the racist and sexist drumbeat that all of society’s ills can be pinned on the advancement of women and minorities.

There is, of course, an opportunity to look at political mismanagement, including the cutbacks in the fire department. But natural disasters—intensified by climate change and exacerbated by poor political leadership—have ravaged unwoke, Republican-dominated states, as well, meaning Democrats don’t have a monopoly on blame.

Hurricane Ian practically destroyed Sanibel Island in Florida, a state that has been living with Trumpism for some time under Gov. Ron DeSantis. Hurricane Helene also ravaged that state, as well as western North Carolina, a state that went to Trump in the last three elections. Hurricane Harvey drowned Texas’ largest city, Houston, and the rest of Texas has suffered power outages and shortages, due to both extreme cold and summer spikes in energy demand.

Climate change, and the catastrophes it brings to the earth, does not discriminate against localities based on their populations’ political leanings. But conservative media do.

Metastasizing mythology

Ari Paul (In These Times, 8/31/15): “The more progress made in racial and gender diversity, the more white male firefighters will denounce the changes and say that increased diversity is only the result of lowering standards.”

Meanwhile, real firefighters know what the real problem is. The Western Fire Chiefs Association (3/5/24) said:

Global warming pertains to the increased rise in Earth’s average surface temperature, largely caused by human activity, such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation. These practices emit greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O) into the atmosphere. These gases trap heat, resulting in a gradual increase in global temperatures over time. Recent data on fire and trends suggests that global extreme fire incidents could rise by up to 14% by the year 2030, 30% by 2050, and 50% by the end of the century. The impact of global warming is seen particularly in the western United States, where record-setting wildfires have occurred in recent years. Fourteen of the 20 largest wildfires on record have been in California over the past 15 years.

Conservative media can ignore all this, because the notion that cultural liberalism has tainted firefighting isn’t new. I covered efforts to diversify the New York City Fire Department as a reporter for the city’s labor-focused weekly Chief-Leader, and I saw firsthand that the resistance to the efforts were based on the idea that minority men weren’t smart enough and women (white and otherwise) weren’t strong enough (PBS, 3/28/06; New York Times, 3/18/14; In These Times, 8/31/15).

What I found interesting in that case was that other major fire departments had achieved higher levels of integration, and no one was accusing those departments of falling behind in their duties. At the same time, while the FDNY resisted diversification, the New York Police Department, almost worshipped by right-wing media, embraced it (New York Post, 9/8/14, 6/10/16).

This racist and sexist mythology has metastasized in the Republican Party and its propaganda apparatus for years. With Trump coming back into power, these media outlets will feel more empowered to regurgitate this line of thinking, both during this disaster in LA and in the disasters ahead of us.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 15, 2025

ACTIVISM UPDATE: Responses Show WaPo Is Hearing From Its Critics

The Washington Post (1/3/25) argued that “serious accountability is possible” in Israel—by which it meant that Ariel Sharon once had to change his cabinet job after he let thousands of civilians be murdered.

In two instances in the past couple of weeks, the Washington Post has acknowledged criticisms made by FAIR activists and others. Post editors may not be backing down, but they are hearing you.

The first response was a Washington Post editorial (1/3/25) headlined “Readers Disagreed With Us on Israel and the ICC. Here’s Our Response.” This was an attempt to defend an earlier Post editorial, “The International Criminal Court Is Not the Venue to Hold Israel to Account” (11/24/24), which had been the subject of a FAIR Action Alert (11/26/24) and widespread criticism elsewhere (e.g., X, 11/25/24).

The centerpiece of the Post‘s defense of its editorial that said the ICC should not hold Israeli leaders responsible for war crimes was its claim that “serious accountability is possible, even probable,” from Israel’s own institutions.

Oddly, the evidence the paper offered for this was that after the IDF allowed right-wing Lebanese militias to slaughter thousands of Palestinian civilians at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee in 1982, Israel formed a commission to investigate the mass murder, and as a result, then–Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was made to resign from his post. This outcome was widely viewed as “show[ing] Israelis were willing to hold their top leaders to account,” the Post wrote.

The Post did not note that while stepping down as Defense minister, Sharon remained in the cabinet as a minister without portfolio, held one cabinet ministry after another throughout most of the 1980s and ’90s, and became prime minister of Israel from 2001–06. If that’s the Post‘s best example of Israelis “hold[ing] their top leaders to account,” hopes that anyone will face real justice in Israel for the war crimes against Gaza are very slim.

‘Extra careful…when it comes to our owner’

One of a dozen cartoons (Greater Quiet, 1/7/25) drawn in solidarity with the muzzled Ann Telnaes—this one by Ted Littleford of the New Haven Independent.

Post editorial page editor David Shipley made another retort to a criticism in a FAIR Action Alert (1/7/25) in an internal memo published by the media news site Status (1/10/25). Along with many others (e.g., Pennsylvania Capital-Star, 1/10/25), FAIR had criticized Shipley and the Post for killing a cartoon that lampooned billionaire Post owner Jeff Bezos’ obsequious relationship with Donald Trump, leading to the resignation of cartoonist Ann Telnaes.

FAIR’s Pete Tucker said it was “bizarre” for Shipley (New York Times, 1/3/25) to claim that he spiked Telnaes’ cartoon because an earlier column mentioned in passing Bezos dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. Shipley claimed that his only bias was “against repetition”—as if the Post, like other papers, doesn’t routinely run cartoons on topics that columnists are also writing about. FAIR cited examples from recent weeks of Post cartoons that echoed Post columns.

In his memo, Shipley seemed to acknowledge this line of criticism: “It’s obviously true that we have published other pieces that are redundant and duplicative.” He admitted that he was being “extra careful,” and that his “scrutiny is on high when it comes to our owner.”

He defended this approach as necessary “to ensure the overall independence of our report.” By “exercising care” in coverage of their owner, “we preserve the ability to do what we are in business to do: to speak forthrightly and without fear about things that matter.”

In other words, if the Post doesn’t watch how it talks about Bezos, he might stop subsidizing it to the tune of 0.04% of his net worth annually—and then the paper won’t be able to talk “about things that matter.”

As if anything matters more than the nation’s most powerful oligarchs forming an alliance with Trump.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 15, 2025

The Alberta Energy Regulator has turned a blind eye to over a decade of toxic spills in the oil sands

The Alberta Energy Regulator (AER) was caught hiding evidence of environmental degradation caused by toxic tailings spills, and misleading the public with false claims that it is closely monitoring the oil sands industry.

The AER is supposed to regulate energy companies to protect communities and the environment, but it has already come under fire in the past for protecting the oil industry’s interests over those of Albertans.

A new report published in the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment journal by ecologist Dr. Timoney released last week reveals new evidence that shows that the AER is failing to hold the oil sands industry accountable for its toxic waste. Dr Timoney obtained the regulator’s internal data on a decade of tailings waste spills and compared it to the AER’s public claims, finding numerous and serious discrepancies.

Crude oil seen separated from sand for collection. Tailings ponds are used to separate the heavy oil bitumen from the sticky sand mined from around the area. Near Fort McMurray, Alberta.

Let’s dive into what the report found, and how it impacts communities and ecosystems.

As you may know by now, companies in the oil sands have accumulated more than 1.4 trillion litres of toxic waste in huge pits called tailings ponds. The tailings ponds are not lined to separate them from the surrounding environment, so they leak millions of litres of toxic waste every day. Tailings waste also regularly spills, either when tailings ponds overflow or when the waste is transported during the production process. For example, in 2023, a major spill occurred at Imperial Oil’s Kearl mine, releasing 5.3 million litres of toxic waste into the environment and generating international headlines and widespread public outrage.

Take Action: Tell Alberta and Canada to Stop Toxic Tailings Pollution Now!

Dr Kevin Timoney’s report reveals that:

1. The AER only inspected 3% of reported tailings spills.

The regulator’s data shows that in 97% of cases where a company signals a tailings spill, the regulator does not investigate further. Instead, it asks the company to self-report the volume of the spill, the impact it had on the environment, and whether it has been fully cleaned up. This means the vast majority of the information regarding spills that the regulator posts on its website are unverified claims made by oil companies.

2. The AER’s public data is often false or incomplete.

Dr Timoney systematically compared each reported spill on the regulator’s public website with the internal documents, and found major inconsistencies. First, while the AER publicly says there were 514 spills over the 10-year time period, its internal data lists almost double that, at 989. Then, there are instances where the publicly disclosed spill volume is false, like when it said 44.6 million litres of toxic tailings were spilled while its internal data showed it was 100 times larger – closer to 4.5 billion litres. Finally, Dr Timoney found numerous examples of tailings spills location being obviously wrong, like when the geographical coordinates the company entered for a spill were the coordinates for an administrative building far away from any tailing pond or pipeline.

3. The AER lied about the environmental impact of spills

The regulator’s public database claims that for the period Dr Timoney analyzed, there was no negative environmental impact caused by tailings spills. Dr Timoney reviewed every piece of photographic evidence companies provided when they reported a spill, and found that in over half, there was visible environmental degradation in the picture. For example, pictures show dead vegetation or tailings spills reaching natural water bodies. Since not all companies provide photographic evidence when they report spills, the real damage caused by tailings spills is likely much greater than what Dr Timoney observed.

© Garth Lenz
Tailings Ponds. These vast toxic lakes are completely unlined and nearly a dozen of them lie on either side of the Athabasca River. Individual ponds can range in size up to 8,850 acres.

The Alberta and federal government must immediately step in to correct the AER’s failures

The lack of accurate public information is a huge risk for nearby communities, most of which are Indigenous, as they have no way to know the degree to which their water, land and any game they harvest is contaminated. The spills, combined with decades of unmonitored tailings leaks, mean that the full health impacts of the oil sands on communities remains unknown, although communities already experience high rates of rare cancers and respiratory diseases.

The Alberta Energy Regulator is failing its mandate to protect communities and the environment and must be reformed or replaced by an effective regulator that is truly independent from fossil fuel interests. Meanwhile, the federal government must step in and increase its inspection of oil sands mines, which it currently conducts at half the frequency that for metal mines, to charge companies for their toxic leaks and spills. Finally, the Alberta and federal governments must demand that oil sands operators produce science-based plans that show how companies will clean up their toxic tailings waste, and enforce these plans on strict timelines to avoid further devastation.

Take Action: Tell Alberta and Canada to Stop Toxic Tailings Pollution Now!

The post The Alberta Energy Regulator has turned a blind eye to over a decade of toxic spills in the oil sands appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
January 15, 2025

Poilievre Promises to Get Out his Rubber Stamp, Smith her Booster Flag and Trump his Tariff Hammer

With so much speculation around political changes in Canada and the United States, and how incoming leaders will address the energy transition, it’s easy to get carried away by the stories about expansion to Alberta’s oil and gas production and export markets. The reality is much less certain.

Emboldened by an appointment to measure the drapes at Rideau Cottage, the Conservative Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre recently said that he has already spoken with Alberta Premier Danielle Smith and, when he assumes office later this year (although they still must first win the election), he will rubber stamp oil and gas energy projects to get the ball rolling to expand energy production in Alberta.

He has a natural ally in Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, who is equally enthusiastic about the future of the oil and gas industry. It’s almost as if they were drinking from the same jug of Kool-Aid, so passionate they are about an industry whose decline is predicted to be just a decade, if not mere years, in the future.

Premier Danielle Smith. Photo by Alberta Newsroom via Flickr Creative Commons

Poilievre’s bold statement aligns with Premier Smith’s stated ambition to double export capacity through Enbridge’s pipelines, and her myriad plans to expand the export of bitumen and other petroleum products to the United States.

What is missing from all of these ambitious ideas about investing in more oil and gas is a crucial question: who is going to buy what we’re selling?

Not US President-Elect Donald Trump. According to the incoming President, the US doesn’t need anything from Canada. Nada. Zip. Zero.

TAKE ACTION: Tell the Alberta Government You Want a Renewable Energy Future

The Elephant in the Room

Donald Trump is the elephant in Stornoway – the Official Opposition Leader’s residence – and in the Office of the Alberta Premier. Poilievre has stated that he will increase the export of electricity to the US, helping to feed the massive glut of data centres coming online to serve the AI universe.

However, electricity isn’t likely what Premier Smith is thinking about, given that crude petroleum made up the majority of Alberta’s exports – 73% – totalling $113.4 billion.

Canada supplies 4.42 million barrels a day of oil to the US, or 52% of the US total energy imports. In return, America exports about 0.8 million barrels a day of oil to Canada, constituting eight per cent of their total oil exports. The US imports oil from 86 countries, but currently, Canada plays an outsized role in this import market.

With President-elect Trump threatening a 25% tariff on all Canadian exports to the United States starting on January 20th, it’s difficult to see how Canada’s massive oil exports won’t be crippled, and with them Alberta’s one-track economy.

The next biggest supplier of oil to the US is Mexico, with less than one per cent of the US market, and they are also in Mr. Trump’s crosshairs for tariffs.

The remaining 3% of Canada’s crude oil exports go to non-U.S. destinations, including China, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, France, Norway, Italy, and Hong Kong.

Nearly all of Canada’s eggs are in one basket. That basket has holes in it.

Where are we, exactly?

Just how much damage Trump is willing to self-inflict on the American people for ideological purposes remains to be seen. He has promised to cut energy prices in half in the first 18 months of his Presidency, but the US itself is just one cog in a complex wheel of international energy pricing, and experts doubt that his combination of domestic “drill baby drill” rhetoric and bullying of his neighbours and primary oil importers will succeed.

Which leaves us exactly where? Nobody knows. Welcome to 2025.

Premier Smith and Official Opposition Leader Poilievre have big plans for the expansion of Canada’s oil and gas industry, and their supporters and donors in that business must be both excited by the opportunity to make even more money on top of their outrageous profits, and nervous wondering where they are going to sell that product.

What worries me the most is that nobody in industry or in government seems all that concerned about inevitably declining future markets, but are instead betting Alberta’s future economy on momentum and wishful thinking.

TAKE ACTION: Tell the Alberta Government You Want a Renewable Energy Future

The post Poilievre Promises to Get Out his Rubber Stamp, Smith her Booster Flag and Trump his Tariff Hammer appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
January 14, 2025

What Does the New Political Reality Mean for Climate Action in Canada
Prime Minister Trudeau’s recent decision to prorogue Parliament and announce his upcoming resignation may have left you wondering about what this could mean for climate change policy.

At Environmental Defence, we have two main take-aways:
- Increased urgency: there are still a few critical climate policies that now have a shortened timeline to cross the finish line.
- All political leaders should be bolder on climate.
The Clock is Ticking on Key Climate Change Promises

We have a fast approaching deadline for when any new rules need to be finalized: March 24th, when Members of Parliament are set to return to the House of Commons. It is unlikely that the government will last long once Parliament resumes. If a policy isn’t finalized before March 24th, it’s unlikely to ever be. As a refresher, although Parliament is not active during prorogation, civil servants and Ministers still are.

At the top of the list of key climate regulations that need to be finalized before March 24th is the government’s cap on pollution from the oil and gas industry.

Canada needs a cap on oil & gas pollution

Emissions from the production of oil and gas is the largest source of climate pollution in Canada. Despite promises made by oil and gas companies, their pollution levels continue to rise. The result: worse and worse climate disasters like floods, fires and heatwaves, increased costs to Canadians, such as higher home insurance premiums or paying more for groceries due to supply chain disruptions and severe health impacts for those living near the operations.

Without a strong oil and gas pollution cap, fossil fuel companies will continue to prioritize their profits at the expense of our health, climate and future. These new rules were promised over three years ago. We can’t afford any more delays.

Also on the list of crucial policies that need to be passed before March 24th: an end to public tax dollars flowing to oil and gas companies. Over the last four years, the federal government’s total financial support to the oil and gas industry was at least $65 billion. We can’t solve the climate crisis while continuing to funnel taxpayer dollars to the companies fueling the crisis. The Government of Canada promised the new rules by the end of 2024, but they missed their deadline. Time is ticking!

TAKE ACTION: Tell Canada to Stop Big Oil from Polluting our Climate

The government has a mandate to deliver these new measures to fight climate change. The only way to keep the promises made to Canadians is by getting these done before the end of March.

People Across Canada are Calling for Climate Action – Political Leaders Must Listen

While Canada is still somewhat of a global laggard on climate action, the current government has still accomplished a remarkable amount over its mandate, especially since many provinces have and continue to obstruct national climate change action.

The government’s record is far from perfect (just remember, they bought a pipeline – a huge gift to wealthy oil and gas companies). Still, they were able to implement carbon pricing, a climate accountability act, an electric vehicle sales standard, clean electricity rules, a sustainable jobs act and methane reduction regulations – and that’s not even an exhaustive list.

Last month we polled Canadians to see what kind of climate action people want to see.

The results were clear: the majority of people across Canada want to see governments in Canada tackle the climate crisis by prioritizing renewable energy and phasing out fossil fuels. Even in Alberta, which has the lowest support for renewable energy, only 18 per cent of respondents want to see fossil fuels prioritized. It’s no surprise given that renewable energy is healthier, costs less and creates jobs in communities right across the country.

Liberal leader hopefuls and political parties should all be paying attention to what people in Canada want. Climate is set to be a key differentiating issue in the upcoming election. Unfortunately, some political leaders are continuing to attack, scapegoat and lie about climate action policy – a major disservice to Canadians.

We know that as people struggle with high rents, housing costs and grocery bills, affordability is top of mind. Many climate solutions will lead to really significant cost savings for families, including ensuring our homes are energy efficient, swapping gas furnaces for heat pumps and having access to electric vehicles and reliable public transit.

The way to win support is to address the interlinked issues of affordability and climate. That will lead to a safer, healthier and more affordable future for everyone.

The post What Does the New Political Reality Mean for Climate Action in Canada appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
January 13, 2025

Stories of Hope, January 2025

This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.
January 10, 2025

Remember When Howard Dean Yelling Made Him Unfit to Be President?

Remember when the exuberant yelling of Gov. Howard Dean was enough for corporate media to declare him unfit for the presidency (Extra!, 3–4/04)?

Remember January 2004, when Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean yelled in a pep talk to supporters after the Iowa caucus, and elite media declared that his “growling and defiant” “emotional outburst” was patent evidence of unacceptability? Having already declared Dean too excitable—“Yelling and hollering is not an endearing quality in the leader of the free world,” said the Washington Post (8/2/03)—media found verification in the “Dean scream,” which was played on TV news some 700 times, enough to finish off his candidacy (Extra!, 3–4/04). As Pat Buchanan on the McLaughlin Group (1/23/04) scoffed: “Is this the guy who ought to be in control of our nuclear arsenal?”

Fast forward to the present day, when Donald Trump states, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

And today’s journalistic response looks like a CBS News explainer (1/8/25), headed “Why Would Trump Want Greenland and the Panama Canal? Here’s What’s Behind US interest.” It’s simple, you see, and not at all weird. “Greenland has oil, natural gas and highly sought after mineral resources.” And you know what? “Western powers have already voiced concern about Russia and China using it to boost their presence in the North Atlantic.”

In an effort to make Trump’s proposal seem rational, CBS (1/8/25) offered a map that made Greenland look like a chokepoint on the all-important Dalian/Rotterdam sea route. In fact, Greenland is more than 1,500 miles from Eurasia—greater than the distance between Boston and New Orleans.

CBS tells us Trump is “falsely alleging” that the Panama Canal is being “operated by China,” but then adds in their own, awkward, words, “China has also denied trying to claim any control over the canal.” Takeaway: who knows, really? Believe what you want. PS—you’re Americun, right?

The New York Times (1/2/25) assured us that,” Trump’s Falsehoods Aside, China’s Influence Over Global Ports Raises Concerns.” The story made it obvious that Chinese companies in charge of shipping ports is inherently scary—what might they do?—in a way that the US having 750 military bases around the world never is.

The message isn’t that no one country should have that much power; it’s that no country except the US should have that much power. That assumption suffuses corporate news reporting; and China threatens it. So whatever China does or doesn’t do, look for that lens to color any news you get.

Featured image: MSNBC (12/23/24)

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 10, 2025

Three Holiday Car Attacks—With Two Different Frames

Three vehicular attacks in public areas shocked the world this past holiday season. First was the attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany, which killed six people and injured dozens (Reuters, 1/6/25). Then there was the New Year’s attack in New Orleans’ French Quarter, killing at least 14 people and injuring more (CNN, 1/2/25). A suicide car explosion outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas on New Year’s Day only killed the attacker, but injured bystanders (NBC, 1/1/25).

In the German case, the Saudi-born suspect, Taleb al-Abdulmohsen, had a history of dark social media posts, including a declaration of far-right, anti-Islamic positions. In New Orleans, the killer, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who did not survive the attack, declared his support for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In Las Vegas, the suspected suicide bomber, former Green Beret Matthew Livelsberger, left behind chaotic anti-government, pro-Trump rants.

Corporate media framed these attacks differently, focusing on Jabbar’s Islamist beliefs but downplaying Abdulmohsen and Livelsberger’s political stances. The right-wing press, predictably, did this to an extreme.

‘The US homeland isn’t safe’

Washington Post (1/3/24): “Islamic State…is still a potent source of radicalization.”

In the New Orleans case, the New York Times (e.g., 1/2/25, 1/4/25) focused on Jabbar’s Islamic radicalization and support for ISIS, using these facts in the leads and sometimes headlines. “New Orleans Attacker Was ‘Inspired’ by ISIS, Biden Says,” read the headline of an early Times report (1/1/25).

The Washington Post did the same, in articles like “Attacker With ISIS Flag Drives Truck Into New Orleans Crowd, Killing 15” (1/2/24) and “Inspired by ISIS: From a Taylor Swift Plot in Vienna to Carnage in New Orleans” (1/3/24).

Jabbar is believed to have acted alone (Wall Street Journal, 1/2/25), although he was clearly inspired by the notorious entity. Because both he and the Las Vegas attacker had served many years in the US military, the incidents raised questions about mental health for active service members and veterans (The Hill, 1/4/25). Jabbar’s brother speculated that mental health issues could have been at play (ABC, 1/2/25).

Yet the acronym ISIS still loomed large in the news stories and headlines, and it is clearly one that can spark fear in the hearts of news consumers.

‘Puzzled over the motive’

Reporting on the Germany attack, CBS (12/30/24) highlighted the possibility of mental illness, not the suspect’s far-right views.

Just as the “Islamic radicalism” framing can whip up anti-Islamic sentiment in the United States, where a notorious Islamophobe is set to become president, the Magdeburg suspect’s Saudi origin has explosive potential in Germany’s polarized political moment. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) has used the situation to advance its anti-immigrant agenda (Al Jazeera, 12/23/24; Le Monde, 12/24/24). But there’s a twist: Abdulmohsen held and voiced similar political views to the AfD’s.

The New York Times (12/22/24) and the Washington Post (12/21/24), to their credit, did put this fact up top in their coverage. But elsewhere, the coverage was more muddled, focusing more on the possibility of mental illness rather than Abdulmohsen’s professed extremism.

CBS (12/30/24) coverage of the attack placed suspected mental illness in its headline and lead; it wasn’t until the ninth paragraph that we learned that the suspect “has in the past voiced strongly anti-Islam views and sympathies with the far right in his social media posts,” and showed “anger at Germany for allowing in too many Muslim war refugees and other asylum-seekers.”

NPR’s All Things Considered (12/23/24) began by talking about how the far-right AfD is using the attack to whip up anti-immigrant sentiment ahead of the country’s snap election. It wasn’t until about halfway through that the story acknowledged that police “say, if anything, the suspect claimed, especially on social media, to be an anti-Islamist.”

In other words, coverage of the New Orleans attack centered Jabbar’s professed devotion to ISIS, while coverage of the German attack downplayed Abdulmohsen’s politics, treating them as part of a constellation of factors, including possible mental illness, that could have contributed to the bloodshed.

‘No ill will toward Trump’

A Newsweek headline (1/4/25) declared the Las Vegas attack “not politically motivated”—despite the suspect’s expressed hope that his actions would inspire “military and vets [to] move on DC starting now…to get the Dems out of the fed government.”

The same journalistic approach used in the Magdeburg case was taken when a Tesla Cybertruck exploded outside a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. While that juxtaposition might make it easy to assume that this was some kind of anti-Republican terrorism, that would be incorrect, according to Talking Points Memo (1/4/25): Documents left by Livelsberger, the truck’s driver who died in the blast,

denounce Democrats and demand they be “culled” from Washington, by violence if necessary, and express the hope that his own death will serve as a kind of bell clap for a national rebirth of masculinity under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

TPM lamented that news headlines “report only that [Livelsberger] warned of national decline and bore ‘no ill will toward Mr. Trump,’ in the words of one of the investigators,” rendering his political motives vague and outside of the central framing.

For example, an AP article (1/3/25) said only that Livelsberger’s “letters covered a range of topics including political grievances, societal problems and both domestic and international issues, including the war in Ukraine,” and that he believed the US was “‘terminally ill and headed toward collapse.’”

ABC‘s report (1/4/25) addressed Livelsberger’s support for the president-elect seven paragraphs in. CNN (1/4/25) gave one line in passing to Livelsberger’s support for Trump, Musk and Kennedy. Using a quote from one former Department of Homeland Security official, Newsweek (1/4/25) declared that the attack in Las Vegas was “not politically motivated.” A piece in The Hill (1/2/25) on “extremism in the military” started by citing Jabbar and Livelsberger as examples, but while it described Jabbar’s Islamacist views, it said only that “less is known about the motivation of Livelsberger.”

Fox News (1/2/25) did acknowledge that Livelsberger’s uncle said of him, “He loved Trump, and he was always a very, very patriotic soldier, a patriotic American,” but it is buried after many other details. Interestingly, it was the New York Post (1/2/25) who directly framed Livelsberger as a super-macho Trump lover, while a long Wall Street Journal piece (1/2/25) on Livelsberger published the same day detailed the man’s personal life with hardly a mention of his political beliefs.

‘War on Christmas’

The Wall Street Journal (1/5/25) tied the German attack into the “war on Christmas” the Murdoch empire has been pushing for two decades.

The US right-wing press was far worse. After the New Orleans attack, Fox News (1/2/25) featured guests who warned that more Islamic terrorism could be on the way, because the attack “could embolden the terrorist organization to radicalize more Americans.”

“It occurred just days after a pro-ISIS outlet called on Muslims to wage Islamic jihad in the US, Europe and Russia,” the right-wing network (1/1/25) reported.

“One obvious message is that the forces of Islamic radicalism haven’t gone away,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board (1/1/25) wrote. “They are still looking for security weaknesses to exploit for mass murder, and the US homeland isn’t safe from foreign-influenced or -planned attacks.”

Meanwhile, Abdulmohsen’s right-wing, anti-Islamic politics didn’t stop the Wall Street Journal (1/5/25) from giving column space to neoconservative pundit Daniel Pipes, who cited the incident in a piece titled “Why Jihadists Wage War on Christmas (and Other Holidays),” with the subhead, “They despise celebrations not sanctioned by Islam, and see Christmas as a crime against Allah.”

The New York Post (1/2/25) did something similar, allowing Douglas Murray—a younger, British version of Pipes—to cite the German attack in a piece called “From College Campuses to Afghanistan, We Let Islamic Terrorism Rise Again.”

It simply didn’t matter to these Murdoch outlets that Abdulmohsen shared Pipes’ and Murray’s politics. He is Saudi and he committed a crime in Europe, therefore he must be the second coming of Osama bin Laden.

Right-wing terror on the rise

Fox News (1/3/25) used the New Orleans attack to chide Democrats for talking about right-wing terrorism—ignoring the Las Vegas attack the next day that aimed to get Americans to “rally around the Trump, Musk, Kennedy.”

Meanwhile, Fox News (1/3/25) used the New Orleans attack to say that the Biden administration had focused too much on right-wing extremism over ISIS threats:

Democrats and liberal media outlets were focused on hyping up terror threats linked to white supremacy while downplaying threats from jihadist terrorist groups like ISIS prior to the New Orleans terrorist attack.

There’s a reason right-wing violence has been in the spotlight, as the Center for Strategic and International Studies (6/17/20) noted a few years ago:

Between 1994 and 2020, there were 893 terrorist attacks and plots in the United States. Overall, right-wing terrorists perpetrated the majority—57%—of all attacks and plots during this period, compared to 25% committed by left-wing terrorists, 15% by religious terrorists, 3% by ethnonationalists, and 0.7% by terrorists with other motives.

The Anti-Defamation League (1/15/23) reported that “right-wing extremist terror incidents in the US have been increasing since the mid-2000s, but the past six years have seen their sharpest rise yet.” The ADL noted that “right-wing terror attacks during this period also resulted in more deaths (58) from such attacks than any of the previous six-year periods since the time of the Oklahoma City bombing,” the white supremacist attack that remains the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in US history.

A report from the National Institute of Justice (1/4/24) said the “number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”

Clearly right-wing political violence remains a threat that requires attention. The handling of the recent vehicle attacks illustrates, however, that corporate media’s instinct is to look away.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 9, 2025

Media Downplay Israeli Violations of Hezbollah Ceasefire

AP (12/1/24) declares that “a tense ceasefire holds,” following the corporate media rule that violence only counts when it’s directed against Israelis.

Israel and Hezbollah signed a ceasefire agreement at the end of November that required both sides to refrain from attacks on each other. The terms also included a mutual pullback from southern Lebanon after 60 days.

Despite the deal, Israel has subsequently launched repeated strikes on Lebanon against targets it claimed were Hezbollah, killing hundreds of Lebanese civilians. The violations began immediately, with Israel attacking journalists and vehicles mere hours after the deal was signed.

Within a week of signing the deal, the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) reported that Israel had violated the ceasefire around 100 times, killing 15 people. Shortly after these initial strikes, Hezbollah launched two strikes into the disputed border zone that it called an “initial defensive and warning response” to Israel against continued ceasefire violations. These strikes did not kill or injure any Israelis. Despite this, Israel responded by continuing its ceasefire violations, killing more and more, bringing the post-ceasefire death toll to more than 30.

Despite the overwhelming number of Israeli attacks in the post-ceasefire period, news audiences have heard that a “tense ceasefire holds” (AP, 12/1/24). Media repeatedly reported on these violations as both sides “trading” or “exchanging” fire (New York Times, 12/2/24; AP, 12/3/24; NBC, 12/3/24; Semafor, 12/4/24; Financial Times, 12/3/24; Wall Street Journal, 12/3/24). While technically accurate, such reporting frames both sides as equally culpable in violating the ceasefire, allowing media to avoid acknowledging that Israel that Israel is by far the primary and more consistent violator.

Defending violations

CBS‘s featured guest (12/3/24) insisted that attacks on Lebanon were just Israel “do[ing] what has to get done.”

Other media went further, fully defending rather than just downplaying Israel’s ceasefire violations. CBS (12/3/24) uncritically reported Israel’s justification for its part of the “back-and-forth violence,” telling audiences that the strikes were on “sites that had been used to smuggle weapons from Syria into Lebanon after the ceasefire agreement.” CBS said Israel’s claims about weapon smuggling “rais[ed] questions about whether the reprieve is really an opportunity for Hezbollah and its allies to regroup,” implying that Israel was justified in preventing such a possibility.

CBS‘s guest was Matthew Levitt, a fellow at the hawkish, pro-Israel Washington Institute. He framed the ceasefire as entirely one-sided, suggesting that Hezbollah was unlikely to abide by the ceasefire agreement and that therefore Israel “would enforce this in their own way,” again implying that that would be justified, rather than being itself a violation of the ceasefire.

“This is the post–October 7 world for Israel,” Matthew Levitt told CBS. “They’re not waiting for anybody else to do what has to get done.”

The New York Times (12/3/24) explained away the one-sided violations in a story headlined “Why Israel and Hezbollah Are Still Firing Amid a Ceasefire.” The subtitle read:

Some violations of the truce, and some amount of violence, are to be expected, analysts say, and do not necessarily mean the deal will collapse and war will resume anytime soon.

The Times stumbled over itself to justify Israel’s attacks, writing that “the Israeli military said it had carried out strikes to enforce ceasefire violations.” It did not attempt to explain what it means to “enforce” a “violation.”

‘Exchanged strikes and accusations’

“A Tenuous Ceasefire Holds” is how the New York Times (12/27/24) described Israeli attacks that have killed 30 Lebanese people.

Since these initial reports, the “both sides” framing has continued. A month into the truce, the subhead of a New York Times article (12/27/24) read, “Israel and Hezbollah have exchanged strikes and accusations of breaches,” despite the body of the text overwhelmingly detailing Israeli, not Hezbollah, attacks. The Times described Israel’s “series of strikes” and “extensive operations in dozens of villages.”

The Times implicitly justified the airstrikes by saying that “most of them” were on “Hezbollah’s stronghold in south Lebanon.” As FAIR (11/9/24) has written, referring to urban neighborhoods as “strongholds” is an effective way to prepare audiences for attacks on civilians.

The Times also justified Israeli attacks on Lebanese villages during the ceasefire by uncritically repeating Israel’s stated justification that the IDF “was dismantling tunnels, confiscating weapons and surveillance systems and demolishing a Hezbollah command center.”

‘Cover for continued aggression’

Drop Site (12/4/24): “The framing of the deal…essentially allow[s] for Israel to continue its military assaults while demanding Hezbollah cease all its operations.”

Israel’s continued aggression despite the ceasefire is not surprising. The country has a long history of violating ceasefires while playing the victim. In this conflict, Israel’s violation was anticipated by all sides. Before the deal was inked, Israel signaled its intention to violate the ceasefire by demanding the “right to strike” freedom of action in the event of a ceasefire. The Jerusalem Post (12/1/24) reported that “sources hinted that under certain conditions, the IDF’s presence in southern Lebanon might extend beyond 60 days.” The US assured Israel that they would support Israel in this scenario (Antiwar.com, 11/27/24).

Maryam Jamishidi, an international law expert at Colorado Law School, told Drop Site (12/4/24):

It basically gives Israel very wide latitude to do what it wants, while completely restricting Hezbollah’s ability to act…. Israel likes to use negotiations, likes to use diplomacy, as cover for continued aggression and continued violations of law. And I think this is probably one of the most egregious, because it is framed as a ceasefire agreement.

The media silence makes it easier for US officials to deny reality while continuing to pay for Israel’s military aggression. Despite Israel’s continued violations, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has claimed that the ceasefire is holding. State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel affirmed Israel’s right to defend itself under the ceasefire, but when asked about that same right for Lebanon, he demurred, saying he would not go “down a slippery slope of hypotheticals,” and that “these situations are not totally comparable.”

‘We have to conquer and destroy’

“We have to fight the taboo of the border that was established by France and England 100 years ago,” a settler leader told +972 (12/12/24). “We have to settle everywhere.”

Israelis are exploiting the lopsided ceasefire to create facts on the ground that will be difficult to reverse. As the IDF continues to raze villages and advance into the buffer zone, Israelis are setting up camps in preparation for future settlement.

Israeli Magazine +972 (12/12/24) reviewed the Whatsapp chats of an Israeli group founded to advocate settlement in Southern Lebanon. One member of the group made their goals clear: “We have to conquer and destroy. As much as possible, and as quickly as possible.”

A member of the Israeli settler movement for Lebanon explained to Haaretz (1/2/25) that this has been a longstanding goal for the movement: “Everything we know now we also knew before the war—that this is our land…. We don’t need to apologize.” Such sentiments rarely appear in media aimed at US audiences.

The “both sides” framing is allowing Israel to muddy the waters, and justify its presence in southern Lebanon. Israel is now openly threatening to stay past its 60-day deadline, claiming that Israel will be “forced to act” against Hezbollah for supposedly not fulfilling the ceasefire’s requirements. Despite overwhelming Israeli violations, the pro-Israel media bias obscures who is responsible for continued fighting.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 9, 2025

How Can We Protect the Environment and Thrive in 2025? We’ve Got a Plan!

2024 had some bumps in the road for environmental protection. Attacks on nature, clean energy, and livable communities filled the headlines. But what about for 2025? Can we secure a better future despite the regressive forces out there that want to drag us all down?

We are committed to trying, and history shows that together we can succeed. Let’s take a look at some key issues and explore how we can work together to create a better 2025.

Creating Livable Communities

The proportion of people that live in cities has increased dramatically around the world. Nowhere is this more true than in Canada where three quarters of people now live in places with more than 100,000 residents. This means that urban issues are front and centre for most Canadians, and making progress there matters a lot. The way we get around, where and what kind of places we live in, and how we heat and cool our homes are going to be key to our quality of life and the health of our environment this year.

We travel mostly by car here in Canada, and we know that more cars on the road means more time spent stuck in traffic. Adding more highways doesn’t solve this problem: it just means even more gridlock. Everyone will get where they’re going faster if we can get more people out of their cars and on to public transit, bikes, and walking paths.

We will keep working with all of you to stop new gridlock-enabling mega highways and instead ensure that public funds are invested in better public transport. Together, we can demand new bus and rail lines and more funding to make our existing transit systems run frequently enough to offer people viable ways to get around.

We’re also acutely aware of the fact that buying or renting a home has never been more expensive. In 2025, we urgently need new solutions to this crisis. Large homes built far from cities on farmland, wetlands and in forests are expensive and force residents to use a car for all of their daily needs. Building more of this type of housing is not an affordable solution. That’s why we will be working hard with our partners to ensure our new Midrise Manual helps break down the barriers to building more affordable housing in the neighbourhoods where people want to live and where services like transit, schools, work and shopping are readily available. Progress is happening in Toronto and in other cities as well. Let’s keep the momentum going in 2025.

Speaking of homes, heating and cooling a home in Canada where we see 50 degree temperature swings over the course of the year requires lots of energy. The world is moving away from fossil fuels in favour of things like new and improved heat pumps and renewable energy sources. Heat pumps can now be used in most of the country all year round and replace more expensive, polluting and dangerous gas and oil. Solar and wind energy has become much cheaper and solar is now the cheapest source of electricity on the planet. Environmental Defence will be working to ensure that people in Canada can choose cheaper and non-polluting energy sources, that home owners and renters can install and benefit from clean energy and that new buildings in our cities do not get built with antiquated fossil fuel hook-ups. Vancouver has done this and many other Canadian cities could follow.

We also know that a big part of living well in our cities depends on how we use and dispose of the products that we buy. Environmental Defence will be working to increase the amount of returnable, re-usable packaging so we have less plastic and other garbage. While we’re at it, we’ll also be vying to get toxic chemicals out of our consumer products and foods, making us all healthier while ensuring the safety of the broader ecosystem and our food supply.

Protecting Nature

As we mentioned, Southern Ontario has a sprawl problem. But this problem doesn’t just exacerbate the cost of housing — it’s also causing a rapid loss of farms, forests and wetlands. With this loss goes flood protection, air pollution removal, plants and animals (including some of the most rare and endangered), food production, and recreational opportunities. We will continue to push for government policy that reigns in sprawl and focuses growth inside of towns and cities. We will also work with all of you to have your voice heard in your community to ensure that high value areas like wetlands are protected and farmlands protected for future generations.

Building a Clean Energy future

Nearly 85% of Canada’s electricity comes from non-carbon polluting sources. That means that getting to 100% and also increasing the supply that will be needed to get rid of fossil fueled transportation (both here in Canada and also for our neighbours in the U.S.) should be easier for us than other countries. The rapidly falling prices and greater efficiencies of solar and wind power should make the switching and growth even easier. The electrification revolution is accelerating globally and Canada’s revenue from oil will be threatened by declining demand as electric vehicles come to dominate the market. We need only to look to China to see this happening quickly. In the second half of 2024, 50% of new car sales in China were battery powered and oil demand is predicted to decline starting in just a couple of years. Environmental Defence’s team will be working in Alberta, Ontario and at the federal level to ensure that the electrification of our economy proceeds as quickly as possible and that the fossil fuel industry is not permitted to block this transition by using its influence on politicians. This will require key reforms in Canada’s investment rules, new restrictions on oil and gas pollution and support for workers who need to thrive in a rapidly changing energy marketplace.

If we continue to work together, cleaner energy, livable communities and abundant nature can be part of a better future for Canada. Your voice matters. We hope you will add yours to the fight this year. Together, we will make 2025 a year to remember and celebrate.

The post How Can We Protect the Environment and Thrive in 2025? We’ve Got a Plan! appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
January 9, 2025

In Alberta, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows

There are undoubtedly those in Alberta who are thrilled with the government’s recent announcement on buffer zones and viewscapes for renewable energy development. It would also appear that with this decision, Alberta’s green energy businesses can now get back to work, investing in the future of our energy economy.

But can they? This policy is deeply hostile to renewable energy projects, and not because some people don’t like seeing energy development near mountains. If that were the case, then not only would wind and solar projects have to jump through additional bureaucratic hoops to get the approval of Premier Smith’s government, but also the many oil, gas, and coal projects slated to go ahead in the buffer zones.

The only way that we can explain this restrictive policy is that the oil and gas industry is worried by the rapid growth of renewable energy projects, and has successfully bent the ear of decision-makers on this matter.

Take Action: Tell the Alberta Government to Put the Power Back On a Renewable Energy Future

Alberta’s new guidelines, announced on December 6th, create a 70,000 km2 buffer zone along the Eastern Slopes of the Rocky Mountains, and no-go zones around some of the province’s most beautiful and well-recognized environmentally sensitive landscapes.

According to the Alberta Energy Regulator, there are 482,495 wells in the province.

Of those, there are tens of thousands in the area designed as a buffer zone along Alberta’s Eastern Slopes. More than a thousand new sour gas (methane) wells will be drilled in that region in 2024, an increase of 24 per cent over the previous year. These wells are a visual blight on the land and pose a risk to wildlife, livestock and people. Let’s be clear: Some may not like the look of a wind turbine, but sour gas is deadly if inhaled.

Gas plant near Cochrane, Alberta

In some places like Hay Zama Wildland Park, in the province’s north-west, there are more gas wells inside the protected area than there are around it.

If oil pump jacks and sour gas flares aren’t your jam, then feast your eyes on the five existing open pit coal mines in the province, and others – such as Vista and Grassy Mountain – that are yet to come. The visual impact of these operations is staggering, but it’s how they impact our water that really demands scrutiny.

Many of the existing and proposed coal operations are in the headwaters of the North Saskatchewan River, and the Oldman River which provide 90 per cent of the drinking water for Edmonton and Lethbridge respectively. The poison these operations leach into the groundwater accumulates as they move downstream, and then come right out of our kitchen taps.

Oil and gas mean big money for the province, and it’s understandable why the growth in renewables globally is threatening the petroleum industry. Many are abandoning their previous net-zero commitments and going all in on greenhouse gas-producing fossil fuels. However, ignoring the global trend towards new forms of energy, and the emerging revenue streams it will provide, is negligent, to say the least.

So let’s be honest about what’s really happening in Alberta: oil and gas companies are afraid of losing market share to renewable energy – something that is happening very quickly around the world – and the government has responded with a hackneyed set of punishing regulations that lack all credibility because they single out a single industry – and a clean one at that – for punitive action.

The post In Alberta, you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
January 8, 2025

Why the Right Calls Mangione the ‘Ivy League’ Killer

Fox News (12/11/24) labels Luigi Mangione as a “CEO murder suspect and Ivy League graduate.”

How do murder suspects get their media nicknames? Luigi Mangione, the 26-year-old accused of shooting and killing UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has been called the “CEO killer” or some variation by ABC (12/24/24) and some of its affiliates (KABC, 12/20/24; KGO, 12/24/24). The name makes sense, as the victim’s stature and the place of his murder—a hotel where a company-related meeting was to take place—was the aspect of the crime that made it sensational news. This is similar to how Theodore Kaczynski became the “Unabomber,” because his targets were universities and airlines.

Yet right-wing media are using a seemingly mundane feature of Mangione’s life—his college degree from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania—to call him some variation of the “Ivy League killer.”

This label serves a few purposes for Republican-aligned media. Clearly, it is meant to deflate the sympathy for Mangione. Coding Mangione as an Ivy Leaguer also codes him as a leftist, occluding what appear to be his much more politically heterodox views; it paints him as an out-of-touch rich kid, rather than an anti-establishment renegade with whom Americans of all walks of economic life might relate.

It would appear that the right-wing press are taken aback by the growing sympathy the American public has with Mangione (Forbes, 12/12/24; Washington Post, 12/18/24; Newsweek, 12/21/24), a result of widespread anger against health insurance companies who inflate their profits through denial of care, high premiums and delaying medical services with cumbersome administrative bloat (AP, 9/12/22; KFF, 3/1/24; Gallup, 12/9/24; Marketplace, 12/13/24).

Focusing on Mangione’s education rather than the target of his attack, the “Ivy League” angle also seeks to turn the resulting policy discussion from one about the broken healthcare system to one about the education system. It promotes the right-wing narrative that academia is full of Marxist professors who indoctrinate vulnerable youngsters with revolutionary ideas, that Mangione is responding not to the objective reality about America’s healthcare crisis but to rhetoric that’s been wrongly instilled in him and many others—and that, therefore, the lesson of this shooting is that the US education system must be reformed by the incoming Trump administration.

‘Morally perverse positions’

New York Post columnist Charles Gasparino (12/14/24) argues for using the IRS to punish private schools that tolerate views he disapproves of.

Numerous articles in the New York Post (12/9/24, 12/10/24, 12/11/24, 12/12/24, 12/18/24, 12/23/24) make mention of Mangione’s “Ivy League” education. Columnist Charles Gasparino lamented in the Post (12/14/24) that a Penn professor posted on social media support of Mangione. Gasparino wrote that while students there pay “$85,000 a year to be brainwashed with leftism,” big school endowments are the primary “funding source of the progressive indoctrination we have in the college classroom.” The solution, then, is that Trump should go after university endowments’ tax breaks, so that they’re forced to lay off indoctrinating professors.

Princeton undergraduate and pro-Israel activist Maximillian Meyer (New York Post, 12/19/24), who wrote that Thompson’s killing was “rationalized as resistance by a privileged young person with two Ivy League degrees,” likened the attacks on the health insurance industry on his campus to student sympathy with Gazans: “To far-left young Americans, on any given issue, the world is divided into two buckets: oppressor and oppressed,” he wrote.

“The students who are celebrated as our nation’s most brilliant are often adopting the most morally perverse positions,” Meyer continued. He blamed the “moral equivocation” of educational institutions, and warned that “the reckoning, from elementary school on up, must begin now.”

‘Protect vulnerable young minds’

Scott Walker (Washington Times, 12/12/24): Mangione “sadly personifies the problems in our country’s education system these days…an ardent anticapitalist, a hate-filled opponent of corporations and private healthcare and a proponent of climate change alarmism.”

At the Washington Times (12/12/24), former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker made the same point under the headline “College Grad’s Arrest Shows Elite Education Breeds Hate, Not Tolerance”:

The situation on most college campuses since the Covid-19 pandemic has gone from liberal bias to outright indoctrination. Students are not taught how to think critically, but to hate America and abhor those with views that are not 100% aligned with their left-wing agenda… We must hold educators and institutions accountable for pushing these dangerous ideologies on our children and grandchildren. We must also protect vulnerable young minds from anti-American narratives and teach them to respect the values that have made our nation great.

UnHerd (12/10/24), a relative newcomer to Britain’s oversized world of pearl-clutching Tory media (Guardian, 10/28/23; Bloomberg, 9/10/24), attempted to situate Mangione in history, saying “members of the murderous Red Army Faction in Seventies Germany were almost all university graduates”; Weather Underground co-founder Bill Ayers “was the son of a CEO and graduate of the University of Michigan, a so-called ‘public Ivy.’”

Fox News similarly hyped up Mangione’s “Ivy League” pedigree, regularly applying the label to him in its headlines (e.g., 12/11/24, 12/12/24, 12/16/24, 12/23/24). “Ivy League Murder Suspect Acted Superior, Did Not Expect to Be Caught: Body Language Expert” read one Fox headline (12/13/24), desperately signaling to its audience that Mangione is not a real man of the masses.

‘Spoiled rich kid’

Former FBI agent Jennifer Coffindaffer told Newsweek (12/16/24) Mangione showed his “true colors” by hiring a lawyer. It’s not clear who Coffindaffer thinks Mangione should have used as a role model; Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King and Daniel Ellsberg all had private lawyers.

This theme occasionally bled outside right-wing media borders. Newsweek (12/16/24) made an entire article out of a post on X (formerly known as Twitter) by a former FBI agent, Jennifer Coffindaffer, who called Mangione a “spoiled rich kid” because he hired a high-priced defense attorney. “If Luigi truly believed his rhetoric, he would have gone with the public defender,” Coffindaffer avered, and therefore he’s “a hypocrite, not a hero.”

As FAIR (12/11/24, 12/17/24) has noted, centrist establishment papers like the Washington Post and New York Times, along with Murdoch outlets like the New York Post, Wall Street Journal and Fox News, have all used space to shame those with grievances against health insurance companies. They’ve told readers and viewers that, contrary to available evidence and a mountain of lived experience, the situation isn’t that bad, and we should simply accept the system for what it is.

But the right-wing media’s focus on Mangione’s education and family background is an irrelevant ad hominem attack that is meant not only to distract their audience from the well-founded reasons why so many sympathize with the shooter, but to redirect their anger toward the country’s education system, which has for so long been in the right’s crosshairs.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 7, 2025

WaPo Kills Cartoon That Mocked the Boss—and Trump

The cartoon that was rejected by the Washington Post, definitely not because it portrayed Post owner Jeff Bezos in an unflattering light.

When Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post cartoonist, submitted a draft sketch shortly before Christmas, she must have known she was stirring the pot.

But after watching a parade of Big Tech CEOs jet down to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage—and millions of dollars—to Trump, a cartoon depicting these groveling billionaires must have seemed natural, even if it included her own boss, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Post since 2013.

“The cartoon that was killed criticizes the billionaire tech and media chief executives who have been doing their best to curry favor with incoming President-elect Trump,” Telnaes wrote in a Substack post (1/3/25) announcing her resignation from the Post, where she’s worked since 2008. “I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at. Until now.”

Telnaes’ post went further, criticizing media owners like Bezos for abandoning their responsibility to safeguard the free press “to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting.”

In addition to Bezos, the other billionaires Telnaes depicted bowing before Trump were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, OpenAI’s Sam Altman and LA Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong.

And lying prostrate beneath these men was Mickey Mouse, Telnaes’ apparent nod to the cowardly $16 million settlement Disney-owned ABC recently offered Trump (FAIR.org, 12/16/24).

‘Bias against repetition’

Somehow the Washington Post running a column by Adam Lashinsky (12/30/24) about MAGA’s internecine battles over H-1B visas didn’t prevent it from publishing a cartoon on the same theme the next day (12/31/24)—or another one the next week (1/4/25).

The unenviable job of ensuring a thin-skinned Bezos wasn’t embarrassed by a cartoon in his own newspaper fell to Post opinions editor David Shipley. “Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley said in a statement justifying his killing of Telnaes’ cartoon:

My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column—this one a satire—for publication. The only bias was against repetition.

It’s bizarre to argue that a regular cartoonist’s work should be killed because the paper published a column—or even two!—with similar content. Even so, we can only find one recent Post opinion column addressing Bezos’ efforts to curry favor with the president-elect (12/18/24).

What’s more, a search of the Post’s “latest cartoons” shows the paper has no problem publishing cartoons on the same topic as opinion pieces. Recent examples include Republicans’ difficulties finding a speaker (1/2/25, 1/4/25), Republican infighting over H-1B visas (12/30/24, 12/31/24, 1/4/25) and controversy over Biden’s death penalty commutations (12/23/24, 12/26/24).

Outside of opinions, the Post has run a few recent stories on the efforts of Big Tech executives, including Bezos, to mollify Trump (12/13/24, 12/19/24, 12/31/24).

Aside from repetitiveness, deputy opinions editor David Von Drehle offered another reason for spiking Telnaes’ cartoon. “I didn’t think it was a very good cartoon. It seemed pretty ham-handed to me,” Von Drehle told Post media critic Erik Wemple (1/6/25).

Wemple’s blog post also disclosed that Post executive editor Matt Murray wants the paper to stop covering its own problems. “I did set a policy that broadly we should not cover ourselves,” said Murray, who claimed his change was made weeks ago and wasn’t “specifically tied to the cartoon.”

Von Drehle’s denigrating comment about Telnaes’ cartoon only appeared in Wemple’s blog, not in a Post news story. In fact, amid the swirling controversy, the Post hasn’t written a single original news story on the spiked cartoon, only running an AP story (1/4/25) on the topic.

Exodus of talent

“It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility,” wrote Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos (10/28/24) in a column that did just that.

Following the rejection of her cartoon, Telnaes resigned, marking just the latest departure from the storied paper.

“The Post is shedding talent at an unprecedented rate,” observed media journalist Oliver Darcy (Status, 1/6/25), who earlier noted (1/2/25): “Eventually treating employees with little respect has consequences.”

The growing exodus comes in the wake of Bezos spiking the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in late October—a move he took to curry favor with Trump (FAIR.org, 10/30/24).

Amid the ensuing backlash—in which 300,000 Post readers reportedly canceled their subscriptions—Bezos scapegoated Post reporters for his craven action, claiming their untrustworthiness had forced him to abandon the paper’s longstanding practice of issuing presidential endorsements. “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media,” was the headline accompanying Bezos’ self-serving op-ed (Washington Post, 10/28/24).

Ingratiation ratcheted up

Jeff Bezos (Washington Post, 12/4/24) said he hopes to persuade Donald Trump that the press is “not the enemy”—in part by giving him a $1 million donation.

After Trump’s win, Bezos ratcheted up his ingratiation, saying Trump has “grown in the past eight years” and is now “calmer.” Bezos also told the New York Times’ Dealbook conference he’s “very optimistic” about Trump’s second term, and hopes to work with him (Washington Post, 12/4/24).

“He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation, and if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him,” Bezos said. “We do have too much regulation in this country.”

Bezos also trekked down to Mar-a-Lago, gifts in hand—just as Telnaes depicted. In addition to ponying up $1 million for Trump’s inauguration fund, Amazon is also broadcasting the inauguration live on Amazon Prime, an in-kind donation worth another $1 million (BBC, 1/4/25). Meanwhile, Amazon will release a new documentary on Melania Trump, who’s an executive producer of the film; Bezos’ company reportedly paid $40 million for the rights (Puck, 1/7/25).

Bezos didn’t become the second-richest person alive by prioritizing civic responsibility. “With Jeff, it’s always only about business,” a former employee of Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, told the Post (10/30/24). “It’s business, period. That’s how he built Amazon. That’s how he runs all of his enterprises.”

Meanwhile at the Post, the paper today “started laying off roughly 4% of its work force” (New York Times, 1/7/25).

ACTION ALERT: You can send a message to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 6, 2025

The UK’s media ownership laws aren’t fit for purpose – the MRC view on the DCMS mergers regime consultation

READ: The MRC’s submission to the DCMS consultation on updating the media mergers regime

The UK is facing a severe crisis of concentrated media ownership. As detailed in our flagship ‘Who Owns The UK Media?’ report, the UK’s national newspapers, TV and radio broadcasters and online platforms are dominated by a small handful of companies. Media plurality is essential to a healthy democracy, but decades of unchecked market consolidation have led to giant corporations and unaccountable millionaire moguls exerting undue influence over public debate.

Over the same period, media mergers and corporate takeovers have exposed the weaknesses of the UK’s light touch media mergers regime, which has too often failed to account for how proposed deals have threatened journalists’ freedom of expression or reduced the diversity of viewpoints represented in our media. Recent deals, such as the 21st Century Fox/Sky takeover or the attempted purchase of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph newspapers by a UAE-backed consortium, demonstrate how the current laws are not equipped to meaningfully protect the public interest.

The DCMS consultation: a small step in the right direction

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport’s consultation on updating the media mergers regime is therefore a welcome move to reform an ineffective and outdated legal framework. Building on Ofcom’s recommendations from its own 2021 review, the government recognises that significant changes in the media landscape require reforms that reflect “the way in which news news is consumed in the modern day”.

The core proposals from DCMS involve revising the 2002 Enterprise Act – which defines the Secretary of State’s powers to intervene in media mergers – to expand the definition of ‘newspaper’ to account for online publications and magazines, in addition to traditional print newspapers. As we argue in our submission, this is an essential change for strengthening the mergers regime when online titles (especially those controlled by dominant media companies) are now central to how the UK public accesses and consumes news.

The urgent need for a proactive, progressive and accountable mergers regime

However, these changes on their own will do little to restore media plurality and protect the public from excessive concentrations of media ownership. Unless the regime is also empowered to intervene in media concentrations outside of merger situations, and unless the government and regulators have the means to impose public interest remedies on dominant media owners, then the legislation will continue to fail in its purpose to uphold essential democratic principles of plurality and viewpoint diversity.

The government has given itself a valuable opportunity to create a much more proactive and accountable media plurality regime, one that accounts for the pervasive role of online platforms and applies universal standards of independence, high editorial standards and regulatory compliance across all media mergers.

Our submission and analysis outlines the wider reforms DCMS should explore in its move to update the mergers regime:

Ofcom should be required to conduct regular plurality reviews to account for and respond to ‘organic’ changes in media markets that are not captured by the current post facto mergers regime. It has been over 10 years since Ofcom recommended (and the government endorsed) introducing regular reviews, and in that time concentration across UK media markets has intensified. The share of national newspaper circulation controlled by the three largest publishers has grown from 70% to 90%, and the print market control of DMG Media – the largest publisher – has risen from one-third to two-fifths. Creating a new statutory duty on Ofcom to conduct regular plurality reviews would allow the regulator to determine whether there is a sufficient range of news providers that is (a) consistent with the principles of an informed populace and (b) resistant to undue influence by media proprietors.

Neither the current regime, nor the government’s proposed changes, are equipped to tackle the pivotal role of online intermediaries and digital platforms in shaping how news is distributed, curated, discovered and monetised online. 64% of the UK public regularly uses an online intermediary (such as a search engine or social media network) to access news, and many of the most popular online sources are controlled by a handful of global ‘Big Tech’ corporations. There is an urgent need to expand the current range of tools and metrics used to track changes in media plurality, and this should feature as a central part of the regular plurality reviews conducted by Ofcom.

The updated mergers regime should introduce a universal ‘fit and proper person’ test on any media merger or takeover. The current legislation includes a provision for ensuring that media owners demonstrate a commitment to upholding high standards in media content, however this only applies to businesses seeking to control broadcast media outlets. Given that the government recognises the need to apply democratic principles of plurality to a much wider range of news media, it should also apply the spirit of this ‘fit and proper persons’ test to anyone seeking to control any UK news media outlet. This would empower interventions in media mergers where there are reasonable grounds to consider that an acting media entity would not uphold high standards of journalism, would not adhere to UK regulatory standards or has demonstrated patterns of corporate governance incompatible with controlling a UK news media outlet.

The legislation needs to include ‘clear bright line’ thresholds that automatically trigger regulatory interventions on media market ownership. Much of the current regime rests on the phrase ‘sufficient plurality’, leaving the system open to subjective interpretation by Ofcom’s ad hoc measurements and exposed to political interference. The lack of market caps to quantify excessive controlling shares of media markets has allowed already-dominant players to continue consolidating their market position without legal avenues for public interest intervention. Introducing a 15% threshold for both single market share and cross-market share would allow for proportionate interventions that remedy threats to plurality while removing the unnecessary and undemocratic role of discretionary powers.

The plurality regime should also include a suite of public interest remedies that scale with the extent of harm posed to media plurality and viewpoint diversity. This might include, but need not be limited to: structural remedies to insulate news operations from managerial and proprietorial influence, such as legal separation or journalist representation on company boards; public interest obligations that help to restore and sustain news provision in the wider media landscape, such as requiring dominant media businesses to invest in public media enterprises or to fund public interest reporting in local communities; and in extreme cases divestment, where a media owner has acquired excessive levels of ownership and influence over a news media market in a way that other remedies are unlikely to reduce the overall harm of that company’s market position.

The post The UK’s media ownership laws aren’t fit for purpose – the MRC view on the DCMS mergers regime consultation appeared first on Media Reform Coalition.

This post was originally published on Media Reform Coalition.
January 3, 2025

Why Didn’t NYT Tell Us What Ben Smith Stood to Gain From His Media Reporting?

Announcing their hiring of Ben Smith, New York Times editors (1/28/20) declared, “Ben not only understands the seismic changes remaking media, he has lived them — and in some cases, led them.”

In a time of downsizing and consolidation, Ben Smith has had a journalistic career many would envy. He became famous as the editor-in-chief of BuzzFeed News, and is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Semafor, a rising media giant that raised $19 million last year. (This “replac[ed] the money it had received from the disgraced cryptocurrency mogul Sam Bankman-Fried,” the New York Times reported—5/24/23).

These two adventures bookend his two-year stint as the “Media Equation” columnist at the New York Times, from March 2020 through January 2022. During his entire tenure there, Smith held an undisclosed amount of stock options in BuzzFeed, creating a conflict of interest for him and the Times, which both consistently waved away (Slate, 10/15/21). “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company,” Smith explained on several occasions (here 9/26/21).

But from his influential perch, Smith did, of necessity, cover BuzzFeed’s competitors, frequently critically, putting his investment’s rivals and potential rivals in a bad light. Buzzfeed started out as pure internet culture, a website offering entertainment and quizzes. But it expanded into hard news, thus competing with others in that new media mold, like the nodes of the Gawker empire.

Smith’s stake in BuzzFeed exceeded $7 million, according to FAIR’s sources—a strikingly large material interest in a company whose competitors Smith regularly covered, underscoring the ethical concerns about both Smith’s coverage and the Times’ willingness to ignore its own ethical guidelines.

‘Well above my Times salary’

With a considerable financial stake in online media, Ben Smith could have different reasons from the rest of us for freaking out about Substack (New York Times, 4/11/21).

Smith (New York Times, 10/17/21) covered sexual harassment allegations at Axel Springer as the Berlin-based multimedia company was looking to grow its footprint in the US media market—making it a potential competitor to BuzzFeed.

In a critical piece (New York Times, 4/11/21) about the self-publishing platform Substack, which includes heavy investment from venture capitalist and Trump supporter Marc Andreessen, Smith wrote:

Substack has courted a number of Times writers. I turned down an offer of an advance well above my Times salary, in part because of the editing and the platform the Times gives me, and in part because I didn’t think I’d make it back—media types often overvalue media writers.

Smith appears to be putting his cards on the table here, but readers have no way of knowing that his financial interest in BuzzFeed far eclipsed the salary he was getting from the Times or was offered by Substack, a new media product that competed against the very company, BuzzFeed, he was invested in.

Smith (New York Times, 4/18/21) also pooh-poohed Bustle’s growth with Mic and Nylon, and its eye on restarting Gawker, in part because Bustle bet on advertising revenue, which Smith maintained was destined to flow overwhelmingly to Google and Facebook (later rebranded as Meta).

A month later, Bustle rebranded in preparation for its IPO (Axios, 5/11/21)—an initial public offering to investors. A month after that, Hollywood Reporter (6/30/21) noted that BuzzFeed was one of a number of media companies, including Bustle, that were looking to go public in order to shore up investments. Once again, readers should have had a clear understanding that Smith was writing about an entity that was competing for venture capital with the outlet he had major holdings in.

Downfall of a high-flying startup

A story by Smith in the New York Times (9/26/21) contributed to the downfall of the media startup Ozy—a company that Buzzfeed under Smith’s leadership considered buying.

The most interesting example of Smith’s conflict of interest is the case of Ozy Media. Carlos Watson, a former MSNBC and CNN anchor, attracted lots of attention when he launched Ozy, raising $5.3 million in its early days (Venture Capital Post, 12/28/13), reaching up to an enormous $20 million investment from Axel Springer (USA Today, 10/6/24). Watson and his media child were riding high—for a time.

Smith (New York Times, 9/26/21) was the first journalist to raise questions about the veracity of Ozy’s claims to investors. Less than two years later, Watson was arrested for fraud (Wall Street Journal, 2/23/23), and the operation was no more (Variety, 3/1/23). He and the company were ultimately found guilty in a New York City federal court earlier this year, “in a case accusing them of lying to investors about the now-defunct startup’s finances and sham deals with Google and Oprah Winfrey” (Reuters, 7/16/24). He was sentenced to 10 years in prison (AP, 12/16/24).

Smith’s reporting on Ozy was considered momentous, leading to the downfall of a high-flying media startup. But Smith was not a disinterested journalist when he went after Watson and Ozy. Late last year, Ozy sued Smith, BuzzFeed and Semafor for allegedly stealing Ozy’s trade secrets (Reuters, 12/21/23); in the initial complaint, Ozy’s legal team said that Smith was interested in BuzzFeed acquiring Ozy as early as 2019.

‘Sizable material stake’

It is also through this case that we have a better understanding of Smith’s financial interest in BuzzFeed during his time as a Times media columnist. According to FAIR’s sources, the prosecution obtained financial records from BuzzFeed in discovery that document how much stake Smith has had in the company over time. FAIR has not seen this sealed document; however, David Robinson, a business scholar at Duke University who served as an expert witness for the defense, did see it.

In an April filing in the case, Robinson noted that in Smith’s original report about Ozy, he disclosed that “Under New York Times policy, I can’t write about BuzzFeed extensively until I divest stock options in the company, which I left last year.” But, Robinson noted:

Columnist Benjamin Smith had, at the time of that article’s writing, an ownership stake in BuzzFeed in the form of stock options. Those options would become valuable if BuzzFeed went public later in 2021 in an initial public offering (IPO). In an IPO, options holders, such as Smith, are able to convert their options at the then-anticipated IPO price of $10 per share.

Analyzing BuzzFeed’s capital table, I calculated the number of Ben Smith’s outstanding split-adjusted shares. I then computed, for each option grant, the stock price minus the option exercise price multiplied by the number of options for each option grant, to arrive at the proceeds that Ben Smith would net upon selling his options. I estimate that Ben Smith’s options had an expected value of approximately $23,468,268.64.

On January 4, 2022, the New York Times announced that Smith had left the paper to start a new media company, one [that] “would aim to break news and offer nuance to complex stories, without falling into familiar partisan tropes.”

In a phone interview with FAIR, Robinson clarified that, since he issued this testimony, he revised his calculations based on BuzzFeed’s capitalization table. This reduced his estimate of Smith’s stake to $7.4 million, still a princely sum—and a valuation that he said, to his knowledge, hasn’t been challenged.

“I think he had a clear sizable material stake in BuzzFeed in the time when other corporations’ decisions were immediately impacting the value of BuzzFeed,” Robinson told FAIR. “I’m simply trying to bring to light the bias that seems to be apparent.”

A flexible deadline

The New York Times‘ rules about financial conflicts cite as an example, “a reporter responsible for any segment of media coverage may not own any media stock”—and make clear that that includes options.

That Smith had a conflict of interest does not mean that all or indeed any of the reporting he published about BuzzFeed‘s rivals was untrue or unjustified. (Some of the outlets he criticized, like Substack and German media giant Axel Springer, are ones I’ve also critiqued at FAIR—3/4/21, 11/5/21). The problem with Smith’s conflict of interest is that it gave him a financial incentive to encourage the decline of these particular outlets. Times readers can’t know whether, or how much, this incentive factored into his journalistic decisions—especially as the scale of the conflict was not made clear to those readers.

Moreover, the Times has clear rules about stock ownership. Its ethics guidelines say:

No staff member may own stock or have any other financial interest in a company, enterprise or industry that figures or is likely to figure in coverage that he or she provides, edits, packages or supervises regularly.

In several early columns, Smith included disclaimers about the conflict. In a column (5/3/20) on union organizing in newsrooms that mentioned his experience at BuzzFeed, for instance, Smith included this disclosure:

I agreed with the Times when I was hired that I wouldn’t cover BuzzFeed extensively in this column, beyond leaning on what I learned during my time there, because I retain stock options in the company, which could bring me into conflict with the Times’ ethics standards. I also agreed to divest those options as quickly as I could, and certainly by the end of the year.

But this deadline was quietly extended—and BuzzFeed went public right before he left the Times (Vox, 12/6/21). It appears that he never wrote directly about BuzzFeed, but Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) noted that as the end-of-year deadline came and went, Smith’s columns stopped mentioning any sort of deadline by which he would divest. When Peters inquired with the Times, spokesperson Danielle Rhoades Ha said Smith’s deadline was extended until February 2022—two years after he was hired.

BuzzFeed went public in December 2021. Smith left the Times to start Semafor in January 2022.

Rhoades Ha told FAIR that Smith’s deadline was extended “due to the pandemic,” and that he “disclosed the options when relevant in that period.”

Smith and the media desk at Semafor did not respond to requests for comment.

A really big deal

Pointing out that it’s “bad for readers to have a media columnist whose motives they cannot absolutely trust to be disinterested,” Slate‘s Justin Peters (10/15/21) wrote that Smith “probably shouldn’t be writing about such a broad swath of digital media.”

Peters (Slate, 10/15/21) reported that neither Smith nor the Times explained why Smith stopped putting a divestment deadline on the investment disclosures in his columns. Further, he said:

Neither Smith nor Rhoades Ha responded to separate questions about why, exactly, the Times extended Smith’s divestment deadline, or whether the shifting deadline had anything to do with BuzzFeed’s plans to go public. But an SEC filing from July pertaining to BuzzFeed’s proposed SPAC merger—and an amended filing dated October 1—describes a 180-day post-merger lockup period during which certain stockholders and options holders are prohibited from transferring their shares.

The Times is not offering a sufficient answer. For one thing, it ignores the scope of Smith’s reported stake. Had he stood to gain a few thousand dollars from his former media employer while working on the media beat, big deal (sarcasm). But millions? Big deal (not sarcasm).

And there seems to be a betrayal of the spirit of the Times’ own codes about conflicts of interest when the deadline was extended for him; if the paper can bend the rules on the media beat, where else could it bend the rules? When FAIR told Robinson that the Times confirmed that the Smith’s deadline to divest had been extended, he countered, “What good is a stop sign if you tell people they’re free to run through it?”

“Given that he was a senior executive, it stands to reason he’d have a significant stake in the company,” Robinson said of Smith and BuzzFeed. “I just think it’s not appropriate for him to be writing about the company’s competitors.”

This post was originally published on FAIR.
January 3, 2025

Pathways Alliance 101

Curious about Big Oil’s lobby group the Pathways Alliance? We’re here to give you the 101.

Who is the Pathways Alliance?

The Pathways Alliance is a coalition of the six largest oil companies in Canada. Together, they operate about 95 per cent of Canada’s tar sands production. It includes Canada Natural Resources Ltd (CNRL), Cenovus, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil, MEG Energy, and Suncor.

Four of these companies’ top executives made Environmental Defence’s list of Canada’s Top Ten Climate Villains. For more information on these companies, you can visit the profiles of CNRL’s Executive Chairman Murray Edwards, Cenovus’s Executive Chairman Alex Pourbaix, Imperial Oil’s President and CEO Brad Corson, and Suncor’s CEO Rich Kruger.

These companies make billions of dollars a year for corporate shareholders. For example, in 2023, they had a combined annual profit of $37 billion. Their business investments remain overwhelmingly concentrated on expanding oil and gas, which is not aligned with reaching federal or international climate commitments. Despite this, they’re asking the government for billions of dollars in subsidies.

Why did they form a new lobby group?

The companies of the Pathways Alliance came together in 2021 under the name “Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero” and rebranded as the Pathways Alliance in 2022. Their consortium has focused on rebranding tar sands companies as “climate-friendly” with major ad campaigns, lobbying, the promotion of false solutions and dubious net-zero pledges.

This change in branding occurred after the main Canadian oil and gas lobby group, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), was imbued in scandal for secretly pushing the government to weaken environmental protection and create loopholes for oil and gas companies in 2020. CAPP has a long history of opposing climate action and policies to reduce emissions. In this context, the development of the Pathways Alliance can be understood as the oil industry trying a new strategy to regain credibility and a new seat at the table with the government after CAPP’s years of hostility towards the government’s policy agenda.

Pathways Alliance’s rebrand also reflects a wider trend in the fossil fuel industry. As evidence of climate change became undeniable, many oil and gas companies are trying to present themselves as part of the solution. However, this comes despite their continued expansion of fossil fuel production and long histories of undermining climate science and blocking climate action.

What does the Pathways Alliance do?

Lobbying

The Pathways Alliance was the most active fossil fuel lobbyist in 2023. The Pathways Alliance and its member companies together lobbied the government at least 469 times. That’s the equivalent of meeting with government representatives nearly twice per workday!

That’s not all, we also know the government has set up a dedicated working group with the Pathways Alliance, but there’s no transparency on the frequency of these meetings because a government-initiated process like this isn’t required to be recorded in the federal lobby registry.

The Pathways Alliance actively lobbied to weaken the government’s regulation to cap oil and gas pollution – Canada’s biggest source of carbon emissions. The Pathways Alliance also uses its face-time with decision-makers to ask for government subsidies for carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Greenwashing

In 2022 the Pathways Alliance began pumping out a greenwashing advertisement campaign called “Let’s Clear the Air.” A major component of its rebranding efforts, Pathways spent millions of dollars trying to convince Canadians that the fossil fuel industry is lessening its environmental and climate impacts. This advertising campaign is currently under investigation by the Competition Bureau of Canada for false and misleading claims.

Environmental Defence recently released our own ad, spoofing Pathways Alliance original one, with the intention of setting the record straight. You can watch the ad here.

When the government set out new anti-greenwashing regulations in June of 2024, which required companies to have proof for their environmental claims, the Pathways Alliance and many other oil and gas companies removed content about climate action from their websites and advertisements.

Promoting Carbon Capture and Storage

The Pathways Alliance’s climate-friendly self-promotion hinges on their proposal to build a massive carbon capture and storage (CCS) project. The idea is to build hundreds of kilometers of potentially dangerous CO2 pipelines across Alberta, connecting tar sands production sites to a massive underground carbon deposit area near Cold Lake.

We know that carbon capture is not a climate solution. Most projects never make it off the ground. Where CCS projects have been built, they underperform. CCS is a false solution, not real climate action.

The Pathways’ CCS hub has an estimated $16.5 –$24.1 billion price tag, and they’re counting on huge taxpayer handouts to pay for it. The alliance’s website claims companies have spent CAD $1.8 billion on phase one, but this spending amounts to less than 4 per cent of the combined profits of five of six Pathways Alliance members. The investments of the Pathways Alliance members remain almost entirely concentrated on oil and gas. Despite this and their immense corporate profits, they continue to ask for public subsidies to cover 50-70 per cent of their costs.

What’s next?

We’re fighting against the Pathways Alliance’s CCS and oil expansion agenda, their demands for more subsidies, and their greenwashing – and we could use your help! Now that you’re familiar with the Pathways Alliance be on the lookout for their greenwashing and sign up to help stop Big Oil.

The post Pathways Alliance 101 appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
January 3, 2025

5 questions that Ofcom’s Public Service Media review must answer
In December Ofcom published the initial findings of its latest Public Service Media Review. This ‘Phase 1’ report highlights the current state of public service media (PSM) in the UK: audiences value the content and services that public media provide, but PSM organisations face existential challenges in ensuring that their unique social and cultural output is appealing, accessible and sustainably funded.

The Media Reform Coalition has published its own PSM analysis and recommendations to inform ‘Phase 2’ of Ofcom’s review, which will explore potential policy reforms ahead of publishing the final PSM Review document.

Another business-as-usual review?

At a time of unprecedented attacks on democracy in the UK, and questions from various political quarters about Ofcom’s impartiality and robustness, the PSM Review is a real test not only for the regulator, but for the legislation that gives it its powers and duties: the 2003 Communications Act.

Unfortunately, Ofcom’s terms of reference for the PSM Review suggests that the regulator is treating this exercise as a business-as-usual review, rather than an opportunity for the major debates needed to address the failings in our media.

Under the Communications Act 2003 (s264) it is the duty of Ofcom to report on the extent to which the public service broadcasters have fulfilled the purposes of public service television, with a view to maintaining and strengthening the quality of public service television broadcasting.

The Ofcom statement notes that all the public service television services continue to lose audience. But this is not only about audience declines for the PSMs. As they note in the terms of reference, Ofcom’s review involves assessing how other media services have contributed to objectives identified as desirable – such as comprehensive and authoritative news and current affairs. In other words; this is a health check not only for the public service television sector, but of the whole public media system. Unfortunately the Ofcom documentation so far does not provide this wider perspective.

Among the purposes of public service television which Ofcom should report on is to “meet the needs and satisfy the interests of as many different audiences as possible”. Thus Ofcom needs to do a deep dive into the evidence not only on the long-evident drift of younger audiences away from public service television; it should also create a clear and unambiguous record of what these audiences are using, and the extent to which they are exposed to a balanced, reliable and high quality range of accurate, trustworthy news on all platforms.

Ofcom has to have regard to a number of things including:

“that the audiovisual content made available by the public service broadcasters (taken together) provides, to the extent that is appropriate for facilitating civic understanding and fair and well-informed debate on news and current affairs, a comprehensive and authoritative coverage of news and current affairs— (i) in, and in the different parts of, the United Kingdom, and (ii) from around the world”.
Media Act 2024, Section 1 Clause 5(a)

In this light Ofcom’s own reading of the legislation, as set out in the PSM Review’s terms of reference, are far to narrowly drawn. Ofcom’s public service reviews have become the national standard for high-quality evidence reviews that have an important policy advice function. Yet the Communications Act was written over two decades ago, and the new amendments brought in by the Media Act 2024 have narrowed the scope of issues that Ofcom is required to investigate.

The need for a comprehensive review of UK media

As we approach BBC Charter review, the public and the government needs a wider assessment of the overall health of our media system:
1. Has the provision of Public Service Television been maintained and strengthened since the last Public Service Review?
2. Does public service television meet and satisfy the needs of all parts of the UK population? (including children, young people, those on low incomes, and minorities)?
3. How does the news diet of groups that watch less public service media reflect the purposes of public service media as set out in the relevant sections of the Communications Act?
4. Which communication and news sources are growing in the current period (including for example social media and niche private television channels) and how do these alternatives contribute to the public purposes of television services as defined under s264 of the Communications Act?
5. How has the UK system as a whole contributed to delivery of the public service purposes, and what potential policy solutions could improve delivery?
Ofcom’s previous PSM Review, Small Screen Big Debate, indicated that Ofcom views its role as reporting if audiences are drifting online and to other TV services, and monitoring audiences’ risk of exposure to misinformation and disinformation. This is a somewhat eccentric interpretation of Ofcom’s reporting duties, which are specifically to monitor the delivery of specific public service purposes (including accuracy and impartiality). Its December statement for the current Review rightly notes problems of trust, but not the implications of a drift to niche privately-owned broadcasters which have been subject to Ofcom fines for continued standards breaches. These trends are clearly relevant to the review, both for audience interests and the fulfilment of Ofcom’s legislative duties, yet this subject is curiously absent from the current PSM Review.

The duties of Ofcom in relation to the Public Service Television Review may appear to be tightly drawn, but they in fact require the regulator to take a view on the system as a whole. This is why the first public service broadcasting reviews conducted by Ofcom developed proposals for much more radial reforms to the system as a whole, such as the idea of a Public Service Publisher. It is not credible or sustainable for this flagship regulator to shirk its wider responsibility for a systemic review, especially not at this moment of such significant changes and challenges in the media.

As with all Ofcom’s duties, the PSM Review should be viewed in the context of Ofcom’s principal legislative duty under the Communications Act, which includes the duty to “further the interests of citizens in relation to communications matters.” Ofcom has to take into account the risk of harm. Citizenship of course is an expression of the membership of a democratic community, and Ofcom needs to rediscover its democratic purpose by asking much deeper questions. It is not only the broadcasters that have duties to inform and educate, Ofcom does too. If Ofcom itself is unable to interpret its duties under the Communications Act, then it needs urgent reminding of its founding principles and purposes as a regulator for the public interest.

Read more:
- The MRC’s initial submission to Ofcom’s PSM Review
- Our proposals for a Public Commission on Media & Democracy in the 2024 Media Manifesto
- Professor Lee Edwards, LSE, on the BBC’s relationship with working class audiences.
The post 5 questions that Ofcom’s Public Service Media review must answer appeared first on Media Reform Coalition.

This post was originally published on Media Reform Coalition.
December 29, 2024

20 Years After His Death, Gary Webb’s Truth Is Still Dangerous

Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression. The subject of the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power.

Journalist Gary Webb (1955–2004)

In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News (8/18–20/96) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky’s words, “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country.

But Webb’s revelations should hardly have been a newsflash. As FAIR’s Jim Naureckas (10/21/14) noted in a 2014 dispatch, the CIA was informed

as early as September 1981 that a major branch of the Contra “leadership had made a decision to engage in drug-smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations,” according to the CIA inspector general’s report.

Not that the CIA was any stranger to drug-running—as indicated by, inter alia, a 1993 op-ed appearing in the New York Times (12/3/93) under the headline “The CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency.” The essay traced CIA ties to narco-trafficking back to the Korean War, while the Vietnam War reportedly saw heroin from a refining lab in Laos “ferried out on the planes of the CIA’s front airline, Air America.” The piece went on to emphasize that “nowhere…was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan” during the Afghan/Soviet war of 1979 to 1989.

Decade-long suppression of evidence

Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97): “Besides self-serving denials, journalistic critics of the Mercury News offered little to rebut the paper’s specific pieces of evidence.”

And yet, in spite of such established reality, Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon (Extra!, 1–2/97). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy” (11/16/96), one of the examples cited by Solomon—which is kind of like saying that the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times (12/19/97) reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.”

As Solomon argued, “The elite media’s attacks on the series were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the Contra-cocaine story—involving a decade-long suppression of evidence” (Extra!, 7/87; see also 3–4/88). Time and again, the nation’s leading media outlets had buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links; Naureckas (10/21/14) pointed out that the Washington Post

ignored Robert Parry and Brian Barger’s groundbreaking AP article (12/20/85), which first revealed the involvement of Contras in drug-running, and then failed to follow up as smaller papers reported on Contra-related cocaine traffic in their backyards (In These Times, 8/5/87).

As a senior Time magazine editor acknowledged to a staff writer whose 1987 story on Contra-related cocaine traffic was ultimately scrapped (Extra!, 11/91) : “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”

‘Hospitable to the most bizarre rumors’

In addition to attacking Webb, many media commentators took care to suggest that the reason Black Americans were so up in arms over the Mercury News series was that they were simply prone to conspiracy theories and paranoia. In October 1996, for instance, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (10/24/96) declared pompously that “a piece of Black America remains hospitable to the most bizarre rumors and myths—the one about the CIA and crack being just one.” Bizarre, indeed, that Black folks might be not so trusting of the government in a country founded on, um, slavery—where to this day, racist persecution remains standard operating procedure rather than rumor.

Furthermore, much of the CIA’s behavior over the years beats any conspiracy theory hands down. The agency’s mind-control program MKUltra comes to mind, which operated from 1953 until the early 1960s and entailed administering drugs like LSD to people in twisted and psychologically destructive experiments. Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control, described in an interview with NPR (11/20/20) how MKUltra

was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.

In 2012, NBC News reported on a lawsuit against the US federal government by the “sons of a Cold War scientist who plunged to his death in 1953 several days after unwittingly taking LSD in a CIA mind-control experiment.” In short, who needs conspiracy theories when you have the CIA?

Connecting the dots

Peter Hart (FAIR.org, 5/20/13): “If accountability for genocide is an important value, then it would stand to reason that US media would pay some attention to a genocide that our own government facilitated.”

The question remains, however, as to why Webb underwent such a vicious assault when, at the end of the day, Contra drug-running was no more nefarious than anything else Washington was up to in the Americas. Objectively speaking, reports of the infliction of “large-scale terrorist war” against Nicaraguan civilians should have raised the same alarms, and prompted as extreme an establishment backlash, as narco-activity by CIA mercenaries. Plus, the whole Iran/Contra scandal should have already alerted Americans to their government’s propensity for lying—not to mention violating its own laws.

Around the same time that the US was enabling Contra crimes, of course, it was also backing genocide in Guatemala, facilitating mass slaughter by the right-wing Salvadoran military and allied paramilitary groups, and nurturing Battalion 316, “a CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s”—as the Baltimore Sun (6/13/95) put it. In December 1989, the US went about bombing the living daylights out of the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo, killing up to several thousand civilians and earning the area the moniker “Little Hiroshima.”

While Contra drug-running thus cohered just fine with imperial foreign policy, it seems that Webb’s fundamental crime was connecting the dots between US-backed wars on civilians abroad and the US war on its own domestic population, which continues to disproportionately target Black communities. After all, under capitalism, all men are not created equal, and the institutionalized overlap of racial and socioeconomic inequality partially explains why African Americans have a lower life expectancy than whites—and how we’ve ended up in a situation in which white police officers regularly shoot unarmed Black people.

But there we go again with those “bizarre” conspiracy theories.

Now, two decades after Webb’s death, the US government obviously hasn’t managed to kick the habit of wreaking lethal havoc at home and abroad—including in the Gaza Strip, where US funding of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has been accompanied by a calculated media campaign to obscure reality. Rather than speak truth to power, journalists have lined up to faithfully spout one untruth after another on power’s behalf, rendering themselves effectively complicit in genocide itself. And as the major outlets trip over each other to toe the establishment line, the corporate media is more of a conspiracy than ever.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 27, 2024

Most-Read FAIR Posts of 2024
Here’s the ten posts from 2024 that got the most views on FAIR.org:
1. ‘It’s Time to Take Medicare Advantage Off the Market’ (David Himmelstein interviewed by Janine Jackson, 7/2/24)
2. Sanders Convention Speech Attacked by NYT for Advocating Popular Policies (Elsie Carson-Holt, 8/22/24)
3. Shielding US Public From Israeli Reports of Friendly Fire on October 7 (Bryce Greene, 2/23/24)
4. Exposing Bias Against Palestinians, Ta-Nehisi Coates Is Predictably Accused of Bias by CBS (Elsie Carson-Holt, 10/4/24)
5. US Media and Factcheckers Fail to Note Israel’s Refutation of Beheaded Babies Stories (David Knox, 3/8/24)
6. It’s the Economic Reporting, Stupid (Conor Smyth, 11/20/24)
7. NYT Can’t Forgive Donahue for Being Right on Iraq (Jon Schwarz, 8/23/24)
8. Media Boosted Anti-Trans Movement With Credulous Coverage of Cass Review (Lexi Koren, 7/19/24)
9. Prepping Readers to Accept Mass Slaughter in Lebanese ‘Strongholds’ (Belén Fernández, 11/9/24)
10. As Peace Protests Are Violently Suppressed, CNN Paints Them as Hate Rallies (Julie Hollar, 5/3/24)
This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 23, 2024

In India, this AJWS partner is rewriting the lie that boys don’t cry

This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.
December 23, 2024

How the Grinch in Alberta Stole Renewables and Replaced them with AI

If you’re hoping for a holiday-themed message of glad tidings and seasonal goodwill, prepare for disappointment. It would seem that the Grinch has once again made off with a ramshackle sleigh full of wind turbines and solar panels and they aren’t likely to return from their shop, not unless the heart of the ole ‘Grinchy-Claus’ (aka the Alberta Government) has an unexpected growth spurt.

We’re going to talk, instead, about Artificial Intelligence (AI) – everybody’s festive season favourite – and how decisions made in recent weeks by the ‘Grinchy’ Alberta government – will impact the province’s aspirations to develop AI data centres.

The use of AI in nearly every aspect of computing is growing exponentially. Every six months the amount of worldwide computing power used to fuel AI is doubling. AI systems are power-hungry, though some well-justified doubt exists about the veracity of these estimates. The most pessimistic estimates suggest that as much as 16 per cent of energy use in the United States will power AI platforms.

A “request” generated by an AI-driven tool such as ChatGPT uses between 10 and 100 times the amount of energy as a similar query made through typical web searches. Between one and three per cent of all energy used worldwide powers Artificial Intelligence, some of which is being used to power such essential services as revealing what your mother-in-law would look like if she were a cat.

To provide the computing and memory capabilities needed for AI, there are now more than 10,000 data centres worldwide, about 1/3rd of them in the United States. According to Statistica, there are 336 in Canada, with 22 in Alberta.

AI has myriad legitimate applications, including many that can be applied to energy efficiency and power grid optimization. The billions of calculations that an AI-driven grid management system can make every second can lead to significant power savings and result in better management of energy networks during peak load times (like when everybody switches on ChatGPT).

In short, an AI-driven economy will be able to tell us so much faster that we are trashing the environment.

Which brings us back to Alberta. The province has released a data centre strategy with the ambitious goal of attracting massive investment. “Landing such developments in Alberta could lead to more than $100 billion of investment,” says Chris Varcoe in the Calgary Herald (Dec 4), “while creating thousands of technology jobs and spurring new demand for natural gas that will be needed to generate electricity to power such facilities.

“However, turning these ambitions into final investment decisions (FIDs) won’t be simple, with plenty of other places also keen to host AI data operations.”

The race to develop data centres is not being run in isolation from the climate crisis and the global sprint to decarbonize and electrify the tech industry. In Germany, where there are more than five hundred data centres – the second most outside of the US – a new law mandates that as of January 1st, 2024, 50 per cent of the electricity used must be renewable, and 100 per cent of energy must be renewable by 2027.

Alberta, by clinging to its ideological opposition to renewable energy in an effort to subsidize and prop up the oil and gas industry, Alberta is once again risking its competitive advantage. As a province, we have enough wind and sun, and non-agriculturally viable land to build on to fuel a massive surge in data centres powered by renewables. This could employ thousands of people in good-paying tech jobs while spurring the growth of the now moribund renewable energy sector in the province.

If an investor is going to make decisions about where to build AI data centres, it stands to reason they will go where electricity is inexpensive, where there is sufficient infrastructure to get your power to where you need it, and where regulatory rules are in place to help your company meet its carbon pollution reduction targets.

Alberta’s politicians champion carbon capture as a means to reduce the significant greenhouse gas emissions that will be produced by new AI data centres, but problems exist. First, carbon capture has not yet proven to be even modestly effective in reducing carbon emissions. Second, carbon capture is very expensive, and because of the costs associated with it, private companies are going to the federal and provincial governments cap in hand, asking taxpayers to subside their phenomenally profitable businesses.

All of this could be solved by coupling AI data centres with renewable energy operations, creating jobs, and energy efficiencies that would help drive an economic and energy transition in Alberta. There’s plenty of room to debate if we want AI data centres in our communities, or as part of an energy transition, but if the government is going to pursue them they should pass similar net-zero legislation to what Germany has.

Will the ‘Grinchy Alberta’ government get away with stealing both renewable energy and the possible success of the province’s AI strategy? Stay tuned.

Take Action: Tell Alberta to Turn the Power Back On for a Renewable Energy Future

Authors note: No artificial intelligence was used to write this blog.

The post How the Grinch in Alberta Stole Renewables and Replaced them with AI appeared first on Environmental Defence.

This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.
December 20, 2024

As Pakistan Murders Protesters, Leading US Papers Play Down Washington’s Role

Reporting on political killings in Pakistan, the Guardian (11/27/24) makes clear who is accused of violence and who the victims are said to be.

Islamabad was roiled by a days-long protest in the last week of November. Supporters of political prisoner and former Prime Minister Imran Khan, and of his Pakistan Movement for Justice party, marched into the city, demanding Khan’s release and the resignation of the military-backed Sharif government of Shehbaz Sharif.

Pakistan’s political crisis has Washington’s fingerprints all over it. However, readers of the New York Times and the Washington Post would be forgiven if they thought the protests were a purely domestic issue. Missing from the protest coverage in leading US papers was the ongoing support the Pakistani government has received from the Biden administration, continuing a pattern of obscuring US actions and interests in Pakistani political affairs.

Khan is a former celebrity cricketer who turned to politics in the 1990s. The PTI (as the party is known by its Urdu acronym) grew in power, culminating in Khan’s 2018 election as prime minister on a platform of change and anti-corruption (BBC, 7/26/18). Since August 2023, he has been continuously locked up on over 180 charges levied by the current Pakistani government (Al Jazeera, 10/24/24), accused of crimes ranging from unlawful marriage to treason (New York Times, 7/13/24).

As protesters descended upon Islamabad’s Democracy Chowk, a public square often used for political rallies, Pakistani security forces unleashed brutal repression on the movement (BBC, 11/26/24). Some protesters were shot with live ammunition, with one doctor telling BBC Urdu (11/29/24) “he had never done so many surgeries for gunshot wounds in a single night.” A man’s prayers were interrupted when paramilitary forces pushed him off a three-story stack of shipping containers (BBC, 11/27/24).

The Guardian (11/27/24) witnessed “at least five patients with bullet wounds in one hospital,” and reported that, per anonymous officials, army and paramilitary forces shot and killed 17 protesters. Independent Urdu (11/30/24) spoke to doctors and officials at two Islamabad hospitals, where over 100 protesters with gunshot wounds were admitted. Geo Fact Check (11/30/24) and Al Jazeera (12/4/24) have independently confirmed some of the deaths.

A source within the Pakistan Army later exposed to Drop Site (12/10/24) that the crackdown was premeditated by the government, and included orders to fire at a deliberately disoriented crowd.

Running cover

The New York Times (11/26/24) framed violence as a “clash” between protesters and police, and depicted the shooting of demonstrators as an effort “to defend government buildings with gunfire if needed.”

To the New York Times, the journalistic responsibility to investigate the repression of protesters by a US-supported regime went only as far as reprinting government denials. The first story (11/26/24), published 13 hours after the government crackdown, initially made no mention of murdered protesters, before later being stealth-edited to reflect that “hospital officials told local news media that at least four civilians had died from bullet wounds.” (The original version is archived here.) The possibility of government violence was framed as a defensive necessity: “Soldiers were ordered to defend government buildings with gunfire if needed,” the subhead read.

The next story (11/27/24) used similarly passive, obfuscatory language, writing that local media reported “four civilians were killed by gunfire in the unrest.” Further down, the Times reported that PTI “accused security forces of killing dozens of protesters, a claim that could not be independently verified and was repeatedly denied by officials.”

In neither story did the Times attribute the bullets to any actor; meanwhile, it did reprint comment from Pakistan’s Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi, Information Minister Attaullah Tarar and Islamabad top cop Ali Nasir Rizvi, in addition to twice citing unnamed “officials,” all of whom claimed that security forces did not shoot protesters.

A third Times report (11/27/24) on the protests said that PTI “claimed that several of its workers were killed or injured during the protest…by the authorities,” without mentioning that protesters had in fact died; it quickly followed up that the Information Minister Tarar denied officers shot at protesters. Besides that brief mention, the story bizarrely focused on the inconvenience that protests have created for residents of Islamabad.

The headline of Washington Post’s only story (11/27/24) on the affair mentions “violent clashes,” but the outlet failed to report that anyone had died, much less been killed by security forces. Whenever “alleged” abuses were mentioned in the story, they were followed with government denials.

In all, the Times and the Post responded to brutal government repression of a mass protest by relaying government denials and reporting on bullet wounds with no apparent source.

What’s perhaps more troubling is the failure of either outlet to report that the government carrying out this repression is one well-supported by the Biden administration, even over the objection of his own party’s congresspeople. The omission of Biden’s support for the ruling government, led by the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) is glaring, but not new.

‘All will be forgiven’

The document that has the Biden State Department telling Pakistan that “all will be forgiven in Washington” if it removed its prime minister (Intercept, 8/9/23) was not quoted by the New York Times or Washington Post.

Corporate media also did their best to obscure the circumstances of Khan’s fall from power and PTI’s recent election loss. Imran Khan lost power in 2022 in the form of a no-confidence vote orchestrated by the military establishment (Foreign Affairs, 6/16/23; Dawn, 2/15/24). That move came after a March 2022 meeting between US State Department officials and the Pakistani ambassador to the United States.

Under Khan, Pakistan had increasingly charted a foreign policy course independent from US interests (Nation, 7/5/21; BBC, 6/21/21). The Biden administration’s appetite for Khan’s leadership had begun to wane, especially with regards to Afghanistan and Russia.

According to a leaked Pakistani diplomatic cable (Intercept, 8/9/23), President Joe Biden’s Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu informed the ambassador that “if the no-confidence vote against the prime minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington”—a reference to Pakistan’s posture on the Russia/Ukraine war, which Lu reportedly termed “aggressively neutral.” If not, Khan and his government would be further isolated. One month later, Khan was removed in a parliamentary vote of no-confidence.

Despite maintaining that the cable does not entail US meddling in Pakistan’s domestic affairs, Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif has confirmed its authenticity (Intercept, 8/16/23). US State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller stated the cable’s description of the meeting with Lu were “close-ish” in accuracy (News International, 8/10/23).

Only after Khan’s removal of power did the United States intervene to help Pakistan secure a much-needed loan from the International Monetary Fund (Intercept, 9/17/23). The conditions of the loan included forcing austerity measures on the Pakistani population and, notably, a weapons sale to Ukraine (via Global Ordnance, a controversial arms dealer).

While the Times and the Post did report on Khan’s allegation of US interference in his ouster, even reporting Khan’s claim of a secret diplomatic communique (e.g., New York Times, 4/2/22, 4/9/22; Washington Post, 4/10/22, 4/13/22), they were silent when the Intercept published the cable itself in August 2023.

Slow-walking a rigged election

A confession to vote fraud was treated by the New York Times (2/18/24) as “appear[ing] to lend weight to accusations” of vote fraud.
The next popular election took place in February 2024. (The elections were scheduled for 2023, but the military managed to delay them for another year.) It was clear that the PMLN-led government and the military were conspiring to undermine PTI at every turn, including by jailing Khan and tampering with the military-controlled national election software (Intercept, 2/7/24).

PTI candidates who were winning their elections during live vote-counting were shocked when the official results showed their constituencies had been lost by tens of thousands of votes. Far from Trumpesque fraud claims that attempt to stop vote counting while a candidate holds a tenuous lead, PTI candidates saw tens of thousands of votes erased from their vote totals between live counting and official results (Intercept, 2/9/24). The election was clearly rigged, foreign media observers concurred (Le Monde, 3/1/24; Economist, 3/14/24).

For two outlets that are ostensibly so anxious about the state of democracy in the United States, the New York Times and Washington Post were more staid in their concerns for Pakistani democracy. The Times (2/18/24), reporting on a confession by a senior Pakistani official of rigging votes, only went as far as to say that the admission “appeared to lend weight to accusations” by PTI of election-rigging.

The Post, while initially entertaining the possibility of a rigged election (e.g., 2/11/24), fell short of actually reporting that PMLN and the military stole the election. The Post didn’t report on the Pakistani official’s confession of election-rigging.

The tone struck was highly conservative compared to, say, the Times and Post coverage of the 2018 elections in Bolivia (FAIR.org, 3/5/20, 7/8/20). In that instance, US media didn’t hesitate to pounce on allegations of electoral fraud against left-wing president Evo Morales, even though the election was later found to be fair (only after a right-wing interim government was able to take power). Could it be that US media treats electoral fraud claims more seriously when they’re against official enemies?

Congressional dissent

“A growing chorus of voices in the US government is demanding accountability for Pakistan’s military junta over its attacks on political dissent, imprisonment of opponents, and the rigging of an election earlier this year,” Drop Site (10/23/24) reported—but readers of the leading US papers aren’t hearing about it.

Once it was clear that PTI didn’t have enough seats to form a governing bloc (despite the surprising popular surge behind the party and against the political-military establishment), 31 US lawmakers led by Rep. Greg Casar (D.–Texas) demanded the Biden administration withhold recognition of the Pakistani ruling government until a “thorough, transparent and credible” investigation of the election could be carried out (Intercept, 2/28/24). This letter is part of a pattern of objections by congressmembers to Biden’s acceptance of an authoritarian Pakistani government—so long as they align with US foreign policy interests (Intercept, 11/17/23).

A State Department press release (2/9/24) immediately after the election condemned abrogations of the rights of Pakistani citizens, and further said “claims of interference or fraud should be fully investigated.” The same statement, however, assured that “the United States is prepared to work with the next Pakistani government, regardless of political party.”

Less than two months later, Biden sent a letter (Times of India, 3/30/24) to Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif of the PMLN, “assuring him that his administration will fully back his government in addressing critical global and regional challenges.”

As recently as the past few months, two more letters have been submitted by US lawmakers urging the Biden administration to reevaluate its relationship with Pakistan’s government, which lawmakers say has been violating the human rights of the Pakistani people (Drop Site, 10/23/24; Dawn, 10/24/24; Times of India, 11/17/24).

Coverage of congressional dissent from Biden’s Pakistan policy has been absent from both the Times and the Post. Absent from the pages of leading papers were any stories about lawmaker concerns over human rights, free elections and authoritarian governance.

Continuing omissions

This New York Times article (11/27/24) presented protests against political repression in Pakistan as a big nuisance.

These trends continued in recent reporting. Two of the New York Times stories (11/25/24, 11/26/24) on the protests mentioned the rigged election only as an allegation by Khan and his supporters, countered with government denials and offering readers no sense of which side might be telling the truth. The other three stories (11/26/24, 11/27/24, 11/27/24) don’t discuss election-rigging at all. None of the stories touched on the US involvement in Khan’s fall from power, nor the Biden administration’s continued support of an authoritarian ruling government.

The Washington Post’s single story (11/27/24) also limited itself to critiquing the ruling government, without mentioning the rigged election, US intervention in Khan’s expulsion, or continuing US support for a government that is killing its own citizens.

Reporting on protests in Pakistan without mentioning US involvement in domestic politics creates a perception that Pakistani chaos is a concern mostly for Pakistani people, and readers in the United States need not examine the role of their own government in a national political crisis.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 20, 2024

Press Downplays Danger of Supreme Court Case That Threatens Trans Rights—Among Others

After Republicans turned transgender people into a central target in the 2024 election, trans issues returned to the spotlight less than a month later, when the Supreme Court heard a challenge to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for youth.

In what is widely considered one of the most consequential cases of the current court term, trans youth in Tennessee (joined by the Biden government) challenged their state’s law prohibiting puberty blockers, hormone treatments and surgery as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. Many rights advocates fear that a decision upholding Tennessee’s ban—which seems likely—will quickly erode trans rights across the board, and more broadly undermine equal protection rights.

But voices in the corporate media’s opinion pages were quick to downplay the dangers of the case, leaning on false and misleading anti-trans narratives that have become all too common in US media.

‘Bedrock equal protection’

The ACLU’s Chase Strangio (New York Times, 12/3/24) notes that Tennessee’s case suggests that “somehow medical regulations are sort of exempt from heightened scrutiny when it comes to sex.”

In US v. Skrmetti, the plaintiffs argue that Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for trans youth must be subject to heightened scrutiny under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. If a state is accused of treating people differently under a law, but it can offer a rational justification for that differential treatment, the courts generally let the law stand. But if a law discriminates based on certain classifications, including sex, gender, race and religion, the state has to prove it’s not based on prejudice—a much higher bar to clear. The Skrmetti case asks the justices to decide whether the Tennessee law discriminates based on sex and should therefore be subject to that higher bar (specifically, that the law serves an “important state interest”), which it would be unlikely to meet.

Though Tennessee’s argument rests largely on the idea that its law discriminates based on “age” and “purpose,” Tennessee solicitor general, Matthew Rice, admitted under questioning that the law does classify based on sex. As trans ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio (New York Times, 12/3/24) explained it:

If a 14-year-old goes to the doctor’s office and says, “I want to have a puberty consistent with my male friends,” the doctor can say yes to the person assigned male who’s just developing later than his peers, but not to the person assigned female who’s transgender.

So it would seem to be a fairly clear-cut decision in favor of the plaintiffs. And yet the conservative justices’ line of questioning suggested they are looking for a way to rule in favor of Tennessee—most likely by justifying an exception to heightened scrutiny, based on the fact that the case involves “medical judgments.”

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (Newsweek, 12/4/24) expressed serious concern over this line of thinking, arguing that creating any kind of exceptions to heightened scrutiny “undermin[es] the foundations of some of our bedrock equal protection cases.” Observers pointed out that doing so could open the door to other medical carveouts for sex discrimination (such as abortion or birth control), as well as exceptions for other forms of discrimination (such as racial discrimination) (e.g., Vox, 12/4/24).

Denialist game plan

The Wall Street Journal (12/3/24) affects incredulity—”believe it or not”—at the argument that it’s sex discrimination to restrict particular forms of healthcare based on the patient’s sex.

But many media pontificators obscured the important legal questions and implications, repeating spurious narratives about transition and its alleged risks in order to justify a rights-restricting ruling.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board (12/3/24) jumped out of the gates to defend the ban before oral arguments even began, arguing that the ban “is focused on diagnoses” and therefore isn’t sex discrimination. The Journal editors have returned to the issue twice since then, once (12/13/24) to hold up a lawsuit by a detransitioner as providing “context” for the case, and again (12/15/24) to incorrectly announce that Britain had “permanently banned” puberty blockers for youth, and to argue that “lawmakers in Tennessee are within their rights to insist their state’s children get the same quality of care that’s becoming standard in Britain.”

Citing healthcare, or lack thereof, across the Atlantic is (somewhat ironically) a favorite argument of trans rights opponents, who regularly point to the British Cass Review, a report conducted by people with no expertise in pediatric transgender care in the midst of a rising anti-trans panic in the UK (FAIR.org, 7/19/24). In response to the Cass Review, the British health system has not “permanently banned” puberty blockers; rather, they have made new prescriptions for puberty blockers unavailable for trans patients not already taking them, for an indefinite period of time while they conduct further studies, but to be reviewed again in 2027.

These arguments don’t like to admit that the European restrictions that they cite are far from the blanket bans that Tennessee and other US states have (FAIR.org, 6/22/23). And they are political decisions that do not represent expert medical consensus. All the relevant medical associations in the US; those in a variety of other countries, including Canada, New Zealand and France; the World Professional Association for Transgender Health and other prominent groups of medical experts on trans healthcare have rejected the Cass Review’s methods and conclusions, and support gender-affirming care for youth.

Moreover, while cases of detransition are likewise a centerpiece of arguments for banning trans healthcare, those arguments virtually never—the Journal being no exception here—acknowledge that rates of regret after such care are astonishingly low (PRS Global Open, 3/19/21). Even the Cass Review, for instance, was unable to dig up even 10 cases of detransition out of 3,306 patient records, which would translate to a rate of less than one-third of 1%.

As Joanna Wuest (The Nation, 12/4/24) pointed out, those driving the narrative of trans medical care being “risky” or “uncertain” are following the same game plan as fossil fuel, tobacco and Covid science denialists, exploiting real but marginal scientific uncertainties or outliers to promote public misunderstandings of the scientific consensus and advance their own political agenda.

The other major Murdoch paper in the US, the New York Post (12/5/24), also predictably came out swinging for Tennessee, calling youth transition “insane,” and centrally citing detransitioners and European restrictions.

‘Evidence too thin’

The Washington Post (12/15/24) demands “new research of maximum possible rigor” for gender-affirming care, “overseen by scientists who are not gender medicine practitioners”—which is just like demanding research of cancer treatment conducted by doctors who aren’t cancer specialists.

It’s no surprise that Murdoch’s mouthpieces would parrot the right-wing line against transgender rights. But the more centrist Washington Post took a line nearly as strident and misinformed. More than a week after the oral arguments, the paper published an editorial (12/15/24) taking Tennessee’s side.

The Post editors claimed the “crux of the debate” is

whether, as the plaintiffs argued, the treatments can be lifesaving or, as some global health authorities have determined, the evidence is too thin to conclude that they are beneficial and the risks are not well-understood.

From the start, then, the Post framed it in a wildly misleading way as a scientific debate between, on the one side, the Biden administration and a handful of trans youth and, on the other side, global health experts. It’s obvious who readers are meant to believe has the weight of authority here.

The Post continued:

This unresolved dispute is why Tennessee has a colorable claim before the court; it would be ludicrous to suggest that patients have a civil right to be harmed by ineffective medical interventions—and, likewise, unconscionable for Tennessee to deny a treatment that improves patient lives, even if the state did so with majestic impartiality.

The Post‘s argument illustrates why many are so concerned about the broader repercussions of the Skrmetti case. Anti-abortion and religious activists already argue that birth control is harmful, and failure rates of oral contraceptives are much higher than rates of dissatisfaction with gender-affirming care (which is presumably what the Post means by “ineffective,” since the treatments are not ineffective in their impact on a person’s sex characteristics). So if the Post wants to make the argument that medical arguments ought to trump arguments of sex discrimination, it ought to at least clue readers into the implications of that argument.

Just as importantly, while both gender-affirming care and birth control carry some side effects and risks, there’s not a legitimate medical debate about either being, on balance, “ineffective” or “harmful.” And there is plenty of evidence that they both improve patient lives.

However, the Post editorial’s readers couldn’t possibly imagine that, because the Post only presented evidence that supported their claim. In case anyone was unsure at this point about their stance, the editors’ conclusion clarified which side the Post wants you believe has greater scientific legitimacy: “The failure to adequately assess these treatments gives Tennessee reason to worry about them—and legal room to restrict them.”

The Post also ran a piece by columnist Megan McArdle (12/6/24) that essentially adopted the medical carveout position, writing that a civil rights framework is trumped by “biology.” Similar arguments could be found on op-ed pages across corporate media, from the New York Times (12/8/24) to USA Today (12/4/24) to the Hill (12/4/24).

‘Ripple effects’

Casey Parks (Washington Post, 12/5/24) reported a rare news story about trans youth that is actually from the perspective of trans youth.

Such voices did not entirely monopolize the op-ed pages, and some strong trans advocates were published as well. The New York Times, whose publisher has vehemently defended the paper’s influential role in spreading misleading anti-trans narratives (FAIR.org, 5/19/23), published trans ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio (12/3/24) arguing from both a legal and personal perspective for the right to gender-affirming care. Trans nonbinary Times columnist M. Gessen, who joined the paper in May, also published a column (12/6/24) and was interviewed by fellow Times columnist Lydia Polgreen for the Times‘ Opinions podcast (12/9/24).

At the Boston Globe, columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr (12/4/24) drew comparisons to the Dobbs ruling and its own “ripple effects,” and called on states to enact shield laws to protect “the ability of doctors, their patients, and patients’ families to act according to their needs, wishes and the proper standard of medical care.” And the Los Angeles Times published a piece by ACLU head Anthony D. Romero (12/3/24) that also linked the Skrmetti case to the Dobbs case, and criticized “the recent retrenchment on the political left and center [that] may set back the cause of trans equality — and equal protection more broadly.”

The Post news section, meanwhile, produced some careful and sensitive reporting its editorial board ought to read, such as an FAQ (12/3/24) on the basics of gender affirming care for minors, “including what puberty blockers are and whether cross-sex hormones impact fertility.” Reporter Casey Parks relied on actual medical experts to answer the questions, rather than allowing it to be framed as a “culture war” or relaying “both sides,” as media reports too often do (FAIR.org, 11/23/22).

Parks also wrote an account (12/5/24) of the Supreme Court oral arguments through the eyes of one of the young trans plaintiffs, who ingenuously wanted to talk to the Tennessee governor and the anti-trans protesters because she believed they were “unaware of the consequences” of their actions, and she wanted to tell them how her life was “immeasurably better than it had been before she started blockers and hormones.”

Scapegoats for Democratic losses

Pamela Paul (New York Times, 11/14/24) says Democrats should embrace a “common sense” approach to trans issues—which appears to mean believing that “gender is based on sex at birth.”

In the 2024 election, Republicans spent more on anti-trans advertising than any other issue (Truthout, 11/5/24; Erin in the Morning, 11/13/24). Rather than fiercely defend trans people from the vicious attacks, several “liberal” pundits accused the Democratic party of going too far on trans rights, scapegoating trans people and their defenders for the party’s losses. That included the New York Times‘ Pamela Paul (11/14/24) and Maureen Dowd (11/9/24), and the Atlantic‘s Helen Lewis (11/10/24), all of whom approvingly quoted Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, who said, “I have two little girls; I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”

Moulton later walked back his comments, saying his point was that Democrats should be leading the conversation on trans rights rather than running away from it, and that he promised “unwavering” commitment to LGBTQ rights—something the aforementioned pundits expressed little interest in.

There’s no reason to doubt the incoming Republican government will continue its attacks on trans people and their rights, only now with much more power at its disposal. We need news media now more than ever to hold those in power accountable for their attacks on minority groups, but the coverage of the Skrmetti case suggests that many in the press corps will instead happily join in on the attacks.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 19, 2024

Syria Is Free, Say Media—But That Shouldn’t Mean Free of US Occupation

Since the overthrow of the Syrian government, corporate media analysts have offered advice as to how the US should approach Syria going forward. These observers consistently opted not to call on the US and Israel to end their occupations of and violence toward Syria.

The Washington Post (12/8/24) calls for “engaged diplomacy” from the incoming Trump administration to “help write a brighter next chapter for this strategically located, and long-suffering, country.”

A Washington Post editorial (12/8/24), headlined “Why the US Needs to Help Build a New Syria,” said:

Syria might seem far removed from US interests. Before Mr. Assad’s fall, President-elect Donald Trump posted: “DO NOT GET INVOLVED!” But America is involved. Some 900 US troops and an undisclosed number of military contractors are operating in northeastern Syria near Iraq, battling the Islamic State and backing Kurdish forces fighting the Assad regime.

Estimates suggest that the US-led coalition that bombed Syria, ostensibly to defeat ISIS (Jacobin, 3/29/16), has killed at least 3,000 Syrian civilians and possibly more than 15,000. The Post misses a rather obvious point: The US can “help” Syria by withdrawing the forces that have slaughtered thousands of Syrian noncombatants.

The Post also published a piece by columnist Josh Rogin (12/8/24), “For the First Time in Decades, Syria Is Free. Now It’s Time to Help.” Set aside that Syria is not “free”; it is under foreign occupation (CBC, 12/10/24). The article provided virtually no details about the forms he thinks that “help” should take. Rogin said that “for those in Washington who have long wanted to withdraw US troops from Syria, [the ouster of Bashar al-Assad’s government] might offer a path forward.”

That falls short of saying that the US should withdraw its 900 troops and unknown number of contractors from the country, and Rogin said nothing about the US military bases in Syria, of which there are at least five, plus a minimum of two smaller sites (Stars and Stripes, 12/6/24). Through such mechanisms, the US has long exercised control over a quarter of Syrian territory, including its breadbasket and oil reserves (FAIR.org, 3/7/18; Responsible Statecraft, 7/28/24). Surely ending the US military occupation and returning sovereign control over the country’s vital resources are essential ways to “help” Syria, yet Rogin declined to call for these steps.

‘Promote stability and democracy’

Boston Globe (12/12/24): “A US military presence, however small, can make a difference.“

The Boston Globe’s editorial board (12/12/24) said that the fall of the Syrian government

represents an opportunity for the United States and the international community to reach out, to engage, and to help free Syria from the more cynical ambitions of Assad’s patrons in Iran and Russia.

Yet the paper endorsed the US occupation of Syria, writing that “a US military presence, however small, can make a difference.” It also advocated continued US meddling in Syrian affairs, asserting that “American diplomats can help promote stability and democracy in the country while sidelining extremist groups.”

Writing such a thing requires extraordinary cynicism, a goldfish’s memory, or both. The US teamed up with Al Qaeda in an effort to bring down the Assad government (Harper’s, 1/16). Weapons that America and its Saudi allies supplied to groups fighting the Syrian government “fell into” ISIS’ hands, significantly improving the quality of ISIS’ armaments, in quantities “far beyond those that would have been available through battle capture alone” (Al Jazeera, 12/14/17).

‘Cautious about removing sanctions’

“The US should be cautious about removing sanctions,” advised the LA Times (12/13/24).

In the Los Angeles Times (12/13/24), Matthew Levitt said Syria’s “people need and deserve American support now.” His definition of “support” includes the US “maintain[ing] its small but influential US military presence in Syria,” in part to enable America’s junior partners in northeast Syria, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), to “continue maintaining detention camps holding Islamic State fighters.”

The conditions in these camps are abhorrent. An April report from Amnesty International concluded that the SDF and its local partners

—with the support of the US government and other members of the coalition to defeat the Islamic State (IS) armed group—are engaged in the large-scale and systematic violation of the rights of more than 56,000 men, women and children in their custody. Most of these people were detained during the final battles with IS in 2019. They are now held in at least 27 detention facilities and two detention camps and face arbitrary and indefinite detention, enforced disappearance, grossly inhumane conditions, and other serious violations. Many of those detained are victims of IS atrocity crimes or trafficking in persons.

Keeping Syrians in dungeons is a rather odd way to “support” them.

Levitt also wrote that “the US should be cautious about removing sanctions against the Syrian state.” Maintaining sanctions is the opposite of “support[ing]” Syrians. In July, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia reported that the sanctions are negatively “impact[ing] large sectors of the population and the economy, including basic services (education, health, [water, sanitation, and hygiene]) and productive sectors (manufacturing and agriculture), as well as the work of humanitarian organizations.”

The cruelty of the sanctions is such that during the war in Syria, according to World Health Organization (WHO) officials, Western sanctions have “severely restrict[ed] pharmaceutical imports,” undermining pediatric cancer treatment (Reuters, 3/15/17). Yet Levitt thinks the US shouldn’t hurry to lift such measures, even as doing so is a straightforward way to “support” Syrians.

Meanwhile, neither the editorial board of the Post nor that of the Globe includes sanctions removal on its list of ways to “help” Syria.

Furthermore, Levitt points out that, between the Assad government’s last hours and the first days after its overthrow, “the Israeli air force and navy have hit more than 350 strategic targets across the country, destroying an estimated 70% of Syria’s military capabilities.” Whatever Levitt’s definition is for “support,” it apparently includes the US allowing its Israeli surrogate to destroy Syria’s capacity to defend itself from foreign aggression. That won’t help Syria regain the sovereignty it has lost in the 13 years of international proxy war that have taken place on its soil, particularly when the party destroying Syrian military capacity is Israel, which maintains a decades-long regime of illegal occupation, colonization and annexation in Syria’s Golan Heights.

‘Suck Israel into Syria’

Thomas Friedman (New York Times, 12/13/24): “Middle Eastern countries…come in just two varieties: countries that implode and countries that explode.”

Similarly, the New York Times’ Thomas Friedman (12/13/24) argued that the incoming Trump administration should “help with—dare I say it—nation-building in Syria.” He went on to say “it would cost the United States and its allies little money and few troops to try to help” Syria. Friedman subsequently claimed that “without American help and leadership,” Syria could devolve into a “forever war” that would “suck Israel into Syria.”

Prior to Friedman’s article going to print, Israel had carried out 420 airstrikes in Syria in a week, hitting targets in 13 Syrian provinces. Israel had also set up shop on Mount Hermon, which is strategically located on the Syria/Lebanon border, in violation of 1974 disengagement agreement between Israel and Syria (BBC, 12/13/24).

Setting aside that Friedman bizarrely cast Israeli involvement in Syria as a hypothetical rather than a long-running reality—Israel bombed Syria hundreds of times in the 13 years of war that led to the Syrian government’s demise—the author’s notion of America “help[ing]” with “nation-building” does not exclude its underwriting Israel’s nation-destroying and nation-stealing in Syria.

In the same vein, the Globe’s editorial board says they want the US to “help free Syria,” but the Israeli violence that the US underwrites appears exempt, since it blandly describes some of what Israel has been doing, but doesn’t say it should stop:

Israel continues to launch bombing raids of Assad’s chemical weapons plants, naval vessels and Russian-made bombers, which the Israeli government says it is doing to prevent those military assets from falling into the wrong hands amid the chaos.

Thus, the authors seem to think the US can “help free Syria” without compelling its Israeli client to ends its relentless assault on the state. Meanwhile, stopping Israel’s bombing and conquest of Syria is not enumerated among the ways that Rogin or the Post’s editors think the US can “help” Syria have a brighter future.

If these commentators genuinely wanted Syria to flourish, they’d insist that the US and its allies finally end their long campaign of intervening in Syria, with quite harmful effects on the country’s population (Electronic Intifada, 3/16/17), and allow the nation to chart its own course.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 18, 2024

Life beyond survival: How activists are transforming homeless shelters for women and LGBTQI+ people in India

Losing shelter can be one of the most traumatic experiences of a person’s life. There’s no single cause behind this global crisis, but all people pushed into homelessness face the same question: Where do I go now? In India, a coalition of grassroots organizations from across the country, including four AJWS grantees, are answering this …
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This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.
December 17, 2024

NYT Panics Over Outrage at Insurance Companies

In the wake of the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and the arrest of alleged shooter Luigi Mangione, I wrote (FAIR.org, 12/11/24) about how Murdoch outlets like the Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post editorial board, not only decried the widespread support for Mangione but fought back against legitimate criticism of the health insurance industry.

Now the New York Times is in full-scale panic mode over the widespread boiling anger against the health insurance industry the killing has laid bare (CNN, 12/6/24; PBS, 12/7/24; Reuters, 12/9/24).

‘Working-class hero’

Bret Stephens (New York Times, 12/12/24): Brian Thompson is “a model for how a talented and determined man from humble roots can still rise to the top of corporate life.”

Times columnist Bret Stephens (12/12/24) wrote that because Thompson came from small-town beginnings, whereas Mangione was from a privileged background, it was in fact the slain CEO who was the real “working-class hero.” This shows that Stephens doesn’t understand class as a relationship of power, where people like Thompson have economic power, regardless of their cultural background.

(As music critic Kurt Gottschalk noted, it also shows that Stephens doesn’t understand the John Lennon song he’s quoting from, whose lyrics advise the would-be working-class hero: “There’s room at the top they are telling you still/But first you must learn how to smile as you kill/If you want to be like the folks on the hill.”)

Stephens said that the idea that health insurance “companies represent a unique evil in American life is divorced from the experience of most of their customers.” The aforementioned FAIR piece contains plenty of evidence that contradicts Stephens’ weak claim that Americans are perfectly fine with the status quo, noting that medical bankruptcies are exploding, that polling shows growing dissatisfaction with the American healthcare system, and that studies show the American system lags behind those of peer nations. But, really, the best evidence that many customers are dissatisfied with the health insurance system is that so many of them found the murder of a health insurance CEO perfectly understandable.

Stephens, one of the Times’ several right-wing columnists, has said (2/28/20) that socialist Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the best-known lawmakers supporting Medicare-for-All, “scares” him, because he is “now the old man who rails compulsively against ‘the billionaire class’ and wants to nationalize the health insurance industry.” Stephens (1/31/20) complained that for Sanders’ supporters, “ordinary civility isn’t a virtue,” but rather a “ruse by which those with power manipulate and marginalize those without”; if so, they offer a pretty good critique of the way Stephens himself deploys “civility” to silence dissent.

‘Tiptoe toward justifying assassination’

Ross Douthat (New York Times, 12/13/24) : Criticism of the insurance industry in the wake of Thompson’s murder “illustrates how easily toxic elements can slip into mainstream politics right now.”

Another right-wing Times columnist, Ross Douthat (12/13/24) specifically addressed the “manifestly illiberal conceit that murder is wrong, but public enthusiasm for the murder of an executive in a deplorable industry reflects the understandable anger of people pushed too far”—a position he insisted “seems to tiptoe toward justifying assassination even if you insist that you’re disavowing violence.” He dismissed the “idea that the American model of private insurance is uniquely evil and engaged in acts of social violence because it denies people too much treatment,” maintaining that all insurance systems, public or private, ration care.

But as I noted in the earlier FAIR article, the Commonwealth Fund (NBC, 9/19/24) found that the US system does, in fact, stand out among other peer nations, ranking “as the worst performer among 10 developed nations in critical areas of healthcare.” Those areas the US falls short in include “preventing deaths, access (mainly because of high cost) and guaranteeing quality treatment for everyone.” The rest of the world is doing better than us on these scores, contrary to Douthat.

Americans see the systems working in the rest of the world and know that the United States could have a better healthcare regime, but that corporate and government leaders simply choose not to.

‘We let a murderer manipulate us’

As people shared their health insurance horror stories of denied treatments and mounting bills as ways of understanding the shooter’s outburst, bioethicist Travis Rieder (New York Times, 12/13/24) shook his finger at the masses as if they were rowdy kindergarteners:

The supposed motives assigned to the shooter may well be understandable. But not everything understandable is justifiable. This tragic situation should motivate us to change the institutions and structures that have failed so many people. But not to give murder a pass, and especially not to glorify it.

Peter Coy (New York Times, 12/13/24)suggested that UnitedHealth’s vertical monopolization of healthcare is “something like a private version of a single-payer national healthcare system.”

The paper produced an audio op-ed by political scientist Robert Pape (New York Times, 12/12/24), who urged listeners to see the public reaction as part of “the growing normalization of political violence in America,” rather than as part of the growing outrage over the broken healthcare system in America. Bypassing the latter issue, he simply likened it to the attack against the Pelosis and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump, incidents that did not spark a national outcry against an unjust policy or system. “It is terribly important right now that national political leaders at all levels condemn political violence and the murder of the healthcare CEO and condemn the outpouring of support for the murder,” Pape said.

Times opinion contributor Peter Coy (12/13/24) investigated the complexities of for-profit healthcare and offered some band-aid solutions, while avoiding any real exploration of a more social democratic approach to healthcare, despite the popularity of publicly financed universal care (Common Dreams, 12/9/24). Coy wrote:

Tragically, Thompson’s shooting wasn’t a solution to anything. “The way we let a murderer manipulate us into having the conversation he wanted is grotesque,” Michael Cannon, the director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, who favors a free-market approach, told me.

Coy, Pape and Rieder all pay lip service to problems with the healthcare system and suggest changing it through politics—as if people haven’t been fighting for that for decades. They offer the diagnosis that public celebrations over Thompson’s death are the result of some weakness of public character, which means that the answer is reminding people that murder is wrong.

The more honest diagnosis would be that the responses are the result of a broken political system that offers no real way for people to have their healthcare grievances addressed—but that would call not for scolding screwed-over patients, but rather demanding political reform that challenges entrenched political and corporate interests that the Times has little interest in challenging.

‘To help make it work better’

UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty (New York Times, 12/13/24) : “We understand and share the desire to build a health care system that works better for everyone. That is the purpose of our organization.” The $23 billion in profits the conglomerate made last year was apparently just a fortuitous happenstance.

But the most banal piece of all came from Andrew Witty (New York Times, 12/13/24), the CEO of UnitedHealth Group—the parent company of Thompson’s division—who said, offering no details and no real agenda for change:

We know the health system does not work as well as it should, and we understand people’s frustrations with it. No one would design a system like the one we have. And no one did. It’s a patchwork built over decades. Our mission is to help make it work better. We are willing to partner with anyone, as we always have—healthcare providers, employers, patients, pharmaceutical companies, governments and others—to find ways to deliver high-quality care and lower costs.

While this piece offered almost nothing other than PR for a company in desperate need for positive spin, its placement on the Times op-ed page did help demonstrate why the shooter got so much sympathy in this case. People like Witty, with access to highly compensated crisis management consultants, can have their polished messaging featured in the highest perches of American media. With all of these pieces on the opinion page lambasting the public for voicing anger against executives like Thompson, there is no voice from anyone on the opinion pages explaining why they are taking part in this national movement of solidarity against insurance profiteering.

That’s a telling omission, because those stories could easily be told, especially as more news about the hideousness of this insurance Goliath emerges. Minnesota doctors have sued UnitedHealthcare, alleging it “deliberately engages in the pattern of ‘deny, delay and underpay,’” resulting in over $900,000 in unpaid independent dispute resolution awards (KMSP, 12/12/24).

ProPublica (12/13/24) investigated how the company is limiting treatment for autistic children. Earlier this year, New York’s attorney general announced that the company was forced to pay “a $1 million penalty for failing to provide birth control coverage, a violation of New York state law” (Gothamist, 6/20/24). Senate Democrats accused the company of “denying claims to a growing number of patients as it tried to leverage artificial intelligence to automate the process,” a kind of capitalist nightmare with a sci-fi twist (Fox Business, 12/6/24).

The cancer patient being denied life-saving treatment, or the mom missing meals and working two jobs to afford their child’s medicine, don’t have PR teams like Witty does to reach the Times. That is why people are expressing such vitriol right now.

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.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 16, 2024

ABC Settles With Trump in a Case It Could Have Won

Content warning: This article discusses the details of sexual assault.

The interview (This Week, 3/10/24) that cost ABC $15 million.

ABC has agreed to pay $15 million to President-elect Donald Trump’s presidential library and $1 million toward Trump’s legal fees “to settle a defamation lawsuit over anchor George Stephanopoulos’ inaccurate on-air assertion that the president-elect had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll” (AP, 12/14/24).

Fox News (12/15/24) gloated that “Stephanopoulos and ABC News also had to issue statements of ‘regret’ as an editor’s note” on the online version of the offending piece (This Week, 3/10/24). The note reads:

ABC News and George Stephanopoulos regret statements regarding President Donald J. Trump made during an interview by George Stephanopoulos with Rep. Nancy Mace on ABC’s This Week on March 10, 2024.

This settlement is a dangerous omen for press freedom, given Trump’s threats to use his power to go after his media critics (NPR, 10/23/24; CNN, 11/7/24; PEN America, 11/15/24; New York Times, 12/15/24; Deadline, 12/16/24).

‘Common modern parlance’

Washington Post (7/19/23): Judge Lewis Kaplan “says that what the jury found Trump did was in fact rape, as commonly understood.”

Trump has been found liable for defaming and sexually abusing Carroll in two cases, both of which he is appealing (Politico, 9/6/24). “Donald Trump has been found liable for rape by a jury,” Stephanopoulos said (ABC, 3/10/24). “Donald Trump has been found liable for defaming the victim of that rape by a jury. It’s been affirmed by a judge.”

However, there is a legal difference between “sexual abuse” and “rape” under New York law. The jury found that Trump had violated Carroll with his fingers, not with his penis, and thus the incident was legally classified as sexual abuse, not rape (USA Today, 1/29/24).

However, as the Washington Post (7/19/23) reported:

The filing from Judge Lewis A. Kaplan came as Trump’s attorneys have sought a new trial and have argued that the jury’s $5 million verdict against Trump in the civil suit was excessive. The reason, they argue, is that sexual abuse could be as limited as the “groping” of a victim’s breasts.

Kaplan roundly rejected Trump’s motion Tuesday, calling that argument “entirely unpersuasive.”

The Post continued:

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’” Kaplan wrote.

He added: “Indeed, as the evidence at trial recounted below makes clear, the jury found that Mr. Trump in fact did exactly that.”

Kaplan said New York’s legal definition of “rape” is “far narrower” than the word is understood in “common modern parlance.”

In other words, Stephanopoulos’ initial description was not legally accurate, but was instead relying on the popular understanding of the word, according to the judge overseeing the case.

Legally perplexing

Human rights lawyer Qasim Rashid (Newsweek, 12/15/24): “This is the cowardice of legacy media out to make profit, rather than uphold principle.”

For most journalists, such an offense isn’t nothing: Journalists should always be as accurate as possible, and when they do slip up, they should issue corrections. He should have used the most accurate terminology the court used.

But should this mistake cost the network $16 million, most of which will be used to prop up the legacy of the person who made the complaint, a former president on his way back to power?

Newsweek (12/15/24) noted that it was legally perplexing for ABC to settle so early: “Legal experts also criticized the broadcaster for settling the lawsuit before depositions were due to take place,” it explained. The piece quoted former prosecutor Joyce Vance:

I’m old enough to remember—and to have worked on—cases where newspapers vigorously defended themselves against defamation cases instead of folding before the defendant was even deposed.

Because this case never went to trial, we will never know if there was any evidence of actual malice or reckless disregard for the truth in this misreporting, as would be required to secure a defamation reward under New York Times v. Sullivan (Knight First Amendment Institute, 3/18/24). And while correcting the record seems reasonable for ABC, forking over millions in cash that could be otherwise used to employ teams of working journalists seems excessive.

Newsweek (12/15/24) also covered some of the backlash to the deal:

Democratic attorney Marc Elias wrote: “Knee bent. Ring kissed. Another legacy news outlet chooses obedience.”

Reporter Oliver Willis also chimed in, writing on Threads: “This is actually how democracy dies.”

Tech reporter Matt Novak said: “Not good for the rest of us when you do this shit, ABC.”

“But that’s probably half the point from management’s perspective,” he added Saturday.

A warning to other media

“The First Amendment was drafted to protect the press from just such litigation,” attorney Floyd Abrams told CNN (11/1/24). “Mr. Trump may disagree with this or that coverage of him, but the First Amendment permits the press to decide how to cover elections, not the candidates seeking public office.”

The fact that the network is coughing up money as a result of Trump’s case sends a warning to other media that no media will be safe under a Trump regime. Trump has also sued CBS, “demanding $10 billion in damages over the network’s 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris.” His suit alleges that the Harris interview and “the associated programming were ‘partisan and unlawful acts of election and voter interference’ intended to ‘mislead the public and attempt to tip the scales’ of the presidential election in her favor” (CNN, 11/1/24).

If continuing the CBS lawsuit sounds petty in light of the fact that Trump won the election, that’s because it is petty. But protracted litigation could inflict real damage on the network. Fox News (12/13/24) bragged that the “CBS suit could potentially impact an enormous media merger.” As we know, Trump hates journalists, and is vowing to go after them when he gets back into power (FAIR.org, 11/14/24).

To be fair, this strategy, which is meant to create a chilling effect on speech, can backfire on Trump, as when he was ordered to “pay nearly $400,000 in legal fees to the New York Times and three investigative reporters after he sued them unsuccessfully over a Pulitzer Prize–winning 2018 story about his family’s wealth and tax practices” (AP, 1/2/24). That’s all the more reason why ABC should be fighting this dubious claim by Trump.

The New York Post editorial board (12/15/24) saw this as a big win for Trump, noting that Stephanopoulos had used the R-word several times in the segment:

The law gives even public figures some rights against such smears; if the case had proceeded, Trump’s legal team would’ve been able to access ABC News’ internal communications in order to prove the network’s reckless attitude toward the truth.

Trump was actually quite magnanimous in not making ABC pay him the settlement, even if the deal makes the company by far the largest donor to the Trump library.

Conservative legal commentator Jonathan Turley (Fox News, 12/16/24) speculated that ABC’s owner, Disney, likely wanted to start off on a better foot with a new Trump administration. “Disney is trying to adopt a more neutral stance after years of opposition to its stances on political issues and accusations of ultra-woke products,” he said. With “networks like MSNBC and CNN in a ratings and revenue free fall after the election, Disney clearly wants to start fresh with the new administration.”

In reality, ABC’s capitulation may have less to do with ratings and more to do with the GOP takeover of all three branches of federal power. Trump’s avowed plan to reward his friends and punish his enemies could force so-called “liberal” media into being more cheerleaders than a check on political power.

Even before the election, FAIR (10/25/24, 10/30/24) noted how the owners of the LA Times and Washington Post stepped in to keep their editorial boards neutral in the presidential race. In the case of the LA Times, owner Patrick Dr. Soon-Shiong has reportedly continued after the election to soften the paper’s editorial voice, a move that has “concerned many staff members who fear he is trying to be deferential to the incoming Trump administration” (New York Times, 12/12/24).

Now that Trump and his legal army see that at least one network will simply pay to have a legal complaint go away, they may feel emboldened to go after others. That could put a damper on critical coverage of the federal government when Americans need it the most.

This post was originally published on FAIR.
December 13, 2024

Corporate Fearmongering Over Fast Food Wage Hike Aged Like Cold French Fries

Conor Smyth (FAIR.org, 1/19/24): “The history of debates over the minimum wage is filled with claims about the detrimental effect of raising the wage floor that have repeatedly flopped in the face of empirical evidence.”

In September 2023, California passed a law requiring fast food restaurants with more than 60 locations nationwide to pay workers a minimum of $20 an hour, affecting more than 700,000 people working in the state’s fast food industry.

Readers will be unsurprised to hear that corporate media told us that this would devastate the industry. As Conor Smyth reported for FAIR (1/19/24) before the law went into effect, outlets like USA Today (12/26/23) and CBS (12/27/23) were telling us that, due to efforts to help those darn workers, going to McDonald’s or Chipotle was going to cost you more, and also force joblessness. This past April, Good Morning America (4/29/24) doubled down with a piece about the “stark realities” and “burdens” restaurants would now face due to the law.

Now we have actual data about the impact of California’s law. Assessing the impact, the Shift Project (10/9/24) did “not find evidence that employers turned to understaffing or reduced scheduled work hours to offset the increased labor costs.” Instead, “weekly work hours stayed about the same for California fast food workers, and levels of understaffing appeared to ease.” Further, there was “no evidence that wage increases were accompanied by a reduction in fringe benefits… such as health or dental insurance, paid sick time, or retirement benefits.”

Judd Legum (Popular Information, 12/3/24): “The restaurant industry provided a distorted picture of the impact of the fast food worker wage increase.”

In June 2024, the California Business and Industrial Alliance ran a full-page ad in USA Today claiming that the fast food industry cut about 9,500 jobs as a result of the $20 minimum wage. That’s just false, says Popular Information (12/3/24).

Among other things, the work relied on a report from the Hoover Institution, itself based on a Wall Street Journal article (3/25/24), from a period before the new wage went into effect, and that, oops, was not seasonally adjusted. (There’s an annual decline in employment at fast food restaurants from November through January, when people are traveling or cooking at home—which is why the Bureau of Labor Statistics offers seasonally adjusted data.)

The industry group ad starts with the Rubio’s fish taco chain, which they say was forced to close 48 California locations due to “increasing costs.” It leaves out that the entire company was forced to declare bankruptcy after it was purchased by a private equity firm on January 19, 2024 (LA Times, 6/12/24).

As Smyth reported, there is extensive academic research on the topic of wage floors that shows that minimum wage hikes tend to have little to no effect on employment, but can raise the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers (CBPP, 6/30/15; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 5/2/19). Media’s elevation of anecdotes about what individual companies have done, and say they plan to do, in response to the minimum wage hike overshadows more meaningful information about the net effect across all companies in the industry.

The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) said last year that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers.” Since that hasn’t happened, does the Journal need better economists—or more sense?

And what about agency? The Wall Street Journal (12/28/23) contented that “it defies economics and common sense to think that businesses won’t adapt by laying off workers” in response to the new law. But why? Is there no question lurking in there about corporate priorities? About executive pay? About the fact that consumers and workers are the same people?

The question calls for thoughtfulness—will, for example, fast food companies cut corners by dumping formerly in-house delivery workers off on companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats, which are not subject to the same labor regulations? How will economic data measure that?

That would be a story for news media to engage, if they were interested in improving the lives of struggling workers. They could also broaden the minimum wage discussion to complementary policy changes—as Smyth suggested, “expanded unemployment insurance, the Earned Income Tax Credit, a job guarantee, and universal basic income.”

The narrow focus on whether a Big Mac costs 15 cents more, and if it does, shouldn’t you yell at the people behind the counter, is a distortion, and a tired one, that should have been retired long ago.

This post was originally published on FAIR.