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  • Cuts to PBS, NPR Part of Authoritarian Playbook

     

    NPR: Trump plans order to cut funding for NPR and PBS

    NPR CEO Katherine Maher (center) testifies in Congress against cuts to public broadcasting (NPR, 4/15/25).

    NPR (4/15/25) found itself having to write its own obituary recently when it reported that the “Trump administration has drafted a memo to Congress outlining its intent to end nearly all federal funding for public media, which includes NPR and PBS.”

    The White House declared in a statement (4/14/25) that

    American taxpayers have been on the hook for subsidizing National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which spread radical, woke propaganda disguised as “news.”

    It said the administration would ask Congress to rescind $1.1 billion, or two years’ worth of approved funding, from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the federally created and funded organization that channels money to both national and local public broadcasters.

    ‘Finally get this done’

    Fred Rogers defends the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before Congress (5/1/69)

    Fred Rogers defends the Corporation for Public Broadcasting before Congress (5/1/69).

    Republicans have been threatening to defund public broadcasting since its inception. Fred Rogers, known for his children’s program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, testified in support of PBS before Congress in 1969 in the face of attempted cuts to the fledgling CPB during the Nixon administration (PBS, 11/22/19).

    After the 2010 Republican congressional takeover, the House of Representatives under then–President Barack Obama voted to defund NPR and prohibit “public radio stations from using federal grant money to pay dues to NPR,” according to PBS (3/17/11). This came “a week after conservative activists secretly recorded an NPR executive making derogatory comments about Tea Party supporters,” leading to the “resignation of NPR CEO Vivian Schiller.”

    But even when Republicans have had full control of Washington, the GOP has backed down from destroying public broadcasting generally, recognizing the popularity of shows like Sesame Street with constituents—and the ease with which they have wrung content concessions from the networks.

    Indeed, while some right-wing critics seem truly opposed to public broadcasting, the repeated retreats from following through suggest that more of those critics preferred to simply use their leverage over CPB funding to push NPR and PBS political programming to the right. (See FAIR.org’s critical coverage of NPR here and PBS here.)

    Times may be different now, though. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation policy book that guides much of this administration’s actions, says forcefully:

    All Republican presidents have recognized that public funding of domestic broadcasts is a mistake…. The next conservative president must finally get this done and do it despite opposition from congressional members of his own party if necessary.

    With Voice of America journalists fighting in court against the broadcaster’s closure (LA Times, 3/19/25; AP, 3/28/25), and the administration’s weaponization of the Federal Communications Commission to chill speech of private and public broadcasters (FAIR.org, 2/26/25), the threat against PBS and NPR is very real.

    Unpopular cuts

    The right is loving the news. The New York Post (4/14/25) reported:

    The White House memo notes that NPR CEO Katherine Maher once called Trump a “fascist” and a “deranged racist”—statements that Maher told Congress last month she now regrets making—and cites two recent PBS programs featuring transgender characters.

    Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) applauded the plan Monday, tweeting: “NPR and PBS have a right to publish their biased coverage—but they don’t have a right to spend taxpayer money on it. It’s time to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.”

    More broadly, however, the proposed cuts aren’t popular, as only “about a quarter of US adults (24%) say Congress should remove federal funding from NPR and PBS,” according to Pew Research (3/26/25), while a “larger share (43%) say NPR and PBS should continue to receive funding from the federal government.”

    Pie chart of CPB's budget

    Where CPB’s money goes (from its financial report).

    While the cut wouldn’t decimate NPR, which only gets 1% of its funding directly from the CPB, the impact on its member stations could be significant, especially in minor media markets. (And NPR also gets 30% of its funding from those member stations’ programming and service fees.) Seventy percent of CPB funding goes directly to local public radio and public television stations. As Maher explained on NPR’s All Things Considered (4/16/25):

    So the big impact would be on rural stations, stations in geographies that are quite large or complex in order to be able to receive broadcasts, where infrastructure costs are very high.

    This could result in “those stations really having to cut back services or potentially going away altogether.”

    The blow to public television, which faces higher costs and gets a much bigger chunk of its funding from the CPB, would be more dire—again, especially in smaller media markets. Both PBS NewsHour (4/16/25) and the New York Times (4/1/25) noted that Alaska Public Media, an NPR and PBS affiliate, could shutter entire stations in what is already a news desert.

    Even if Congress manages to muster the votes to block the rescission of funds for now, Trump’s knives are clearly out for public broadcasting. Earlier this year, Inside Radio (1/31/25) reported, FCC chair Brendan Carr launched an investigation into

    whether NPR and PBS stations are violating the terms of their authorizations to operate as noncommercial educational stations by running underwriting announcements on behalf of for-profit entities.

    As FAIR (Extra!, 9–10/93) has long pointed out, the “underwriting announcements” on public broadcasting are commercials under a different name, and they violate the noncommercial promise of both PBS and NPR. But the Trump administration is not offering to increase public funding so these outlets can be less dependent on corporate sponsorship; to the contrary, it’s trying to take both federal and corporate money away in hopes of destroying public media altogether.

    Clamping down on dissent

    Annenberg: Public Media Can Improve Our ‘Flawed’ Democracy

    Victor Pickard (Annenberg, 3/16/22): “A robust public media system is beneficial—perhaps even essential—for maintaining a healthy democratic society.”

    One could look at this threat as part of Trump’s general distrust of major media and desire to seek revenge against outlets he believes have been unfair to him (AP, 12/14/24; Fox News, 4/14/25). Another way to look at the situation is that cuts to public broadcasting send a message to the Republican base that the administration is serious about reducing federal spending generally—a purely symbolic message, of course, since CPB funding amounts to 0.008% of the federal budget.

    But going after public broadcasters is also a part of the neo-fascist playbook authoritarian leaders around the world are using to clamp down on dissent and keep the public in the dark, all in the name of protecting the people from partisan reporting  (Political Quarterly, 3/28/24). That’s largely because strong public media systems and open democracy go hand in hand (Annenberg School, 3/16/22).

    In Argentina, President Javier Milei has moved to shut down media seen as too left-wing, including the national news agency Télam. The move was blasted by press advocates and trade unionists (Página 12, 3/1/24; Reason, 3/4/24). “Télam as we knew it has ceased to exist. The end,” a presidential spokesperson reportedly said last year (Clarín, 7/1/24).

    The Guardian (5/6/24) reported that journalists at the Italian state broadcaster RAI have struck “against the ‘suffocating control’ allegedly being wielded by Giorgia Meloni’s right-wing government over their work,” which included allegations that the network censored “an antifascism monologue that was due to be read on one of its TV talkshows by the high-profile author Antonio Scurati.”

    After Meloni took power in 2022, according to Le Monde (7/23/24), RAI,

    considered a bastion of the left, faced show cancellations, strategic personnel changes and program restructuring, all seen as part of a far-right cultural conflict under the pretext of promoting diversity.

    The union representing RAI journalists warned (La Stampa, 1/26/25) that the broadcaster’s editorial control has shifted from hosts to a shadowy new management, which “risk[s] wiping out the work that over 150 journalists have been doing for years in network programs.”

    The far-right Israeli government is pushing a bill to privatize the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation (IPBC), which the nation’s attorney general warned threatened to silence criticism of the government and create a “chilling effect” on other media outlets (Jerusalem Post, 11/24/24). The attack on Israeli public media comes as Netanyahu’s government has sought to curtail press freedom generally in Israel since the nation invaded Gaza in 2023 (Deutsche Welle, 11/28/24), including a government boycott of the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz (Guardian, 11/24/24), and intensified military censorship of the press (+972, 5/20/24). The death toll among Palestinian journalists in the Israeli invasions of Gaza and Lebanon has been catastrophic (FAIR.org, 10/19/23, 5/1/24, 3/26/25).

    What these figures have in common with Trump is that they aren’t just extreme in their conservatism, they are actively opposed to democracy (New Yorker, 3/7/23; Foreign Policy, 12/9/23; Jacobin, 6/14/24).

    While the US right has no shortage of TV networks, radio shows, websites and podcasts, the attack on public broadcasters, widely regarded as Blue State media, tells the MAGA movement that the government is working to cleanse society of any remaining opposition to its illiberal takeover (CNN, 3/26/25). Trump’s move against PBS and NPR is in line with these other anti-democratic regimes, attempting the same kind of transition to autocracy. His administration is a part of a global authoritarian movement that wants less media, academia and other democratic institutions, because these can be incubators of critical dissent against the government and corporate elite.

    NPR and PBS don’t always live up to that mission. But cutting their ability to operate makes politics more opaque by limiting news consumers’ options beyond privately owned right-wing broadcasters. And that appears to be the point.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Politico Plays With Polling to Manufacture ‘Trump-Resistance Fatigue’

     

    Politico: California voters have Trump-resistance fatigue, poll finds

    Politico (4/16/25) finds “a disconnect between political elites”—i.e., its own subscribers—”and the electorate.”

    A recent Politico article (4/16/25) gave readers an excellent lesson in how not to report on a poll—unless the goal is to push politicians to the right, rather than reflect how voters are truly feeling.

    “California Voters Have Trump-Resistance Fatigue, Poll Finds,” declared the headline. The subhead continued: “From taking on Trump to hot-button issues, voters writ large embraced a different approach—although Democrats are more ready to fight.”

    From the start, the piece framed its polling results as showing the California “political elite” are out of step with voters, who are apparently tired of all this “Trump resistance” being foisted upon them. Reporter Jeremy White explained that “the electorate is strikingly more likely to want a detente with the White House,” and that “voters are also more divided on issues like immigration and climate change.”

    But problems with this framing abound, from its wrong-headed comparison to its skewing of the results, revealing more about Politico‘s agenda than California voters’ preferences.

    ‘Driving the state’s agenda’

    First of all, the poll in question—which the article never links to—surveyed two samples of people: registered California voters and “political professionals who are driving the state’s agenda.” Those “influencers” are a sample taken from subscribers to three of Politico‘s California-focused newsletters, which, the article explained, “included lawmakers and staffers in the state legislature and the federal government.” Presumably that sample also included many journalists, lobbyists, advocates and others who closely follow state politics.

    But in a country where the political right has overwhelmingly rejected reality- and fact-based news in favor of a propaganda echo chamber, one can safely assume that subscribers to Politico, a centrist but generally reality-based media outlet, will include vanishingly few right-wingers. In contrast, in a state where 38% of voters cast a ballot for Trump in 2024, a representative sample of voters will necessarily include a significant number of Trump supporters. In other words, by sampling their own subscribers, Politico has selected out most right-wing respondents and created a group that is by definition going to poll farther to the left than the general voting public of California.

    On top of that, people subscribed to Politico‘s state-focused newsletters are highly informed about the policies being polled on. One of Politico‘s sources points this out, explaining that “they’re more aware of the factual landscape.”

    As polling expert David Moore (FAIR.org, 9/26/24) has explained, large segments of the voting public are disengaged and uninformed on most policy issues, so their opinions on survey questions that don’t provide a great deal of context are not terribly firm or meaningful. There’s very little reason, then, to compare policy opinions of California political professionals from Politico‘s subscription list with a cross-section of California voters, unless your purpose is to push lawmakers to the right.

    ‘Lower the temperature’

    And based on how they skew the polling numbers, that’s exactly what Politico appears to be trying to do here. Regarding the “Trump-resistance fatigue,” White wrote:

    The poll shows that while Democratic voters favor taking on Trump, the electorate broadly wants their representatives to lower the temperature. Forty-three percent of registered voters said leaders were “too confrontational”—a sentiment largely driven by Republicans and independents—compared to a third who found them “too passive.” A plurality of Democrats surveyed, 47%, wanted a more aggressive approach.

    This is what gives the piece its headline. But it conveniently leaves out all the voters who said state leaders’ level of confrontation was “about right”—a sizable 24%. In other words, 57%—a 14-point majority—either approve of their state leaders’ resistance to Trump, or want more of it, yet Politico manages to spin that into a headline about Trump-resistance fatigue.

    In general, how are California leaders engaging with Trump administration policies?

    The poll Politico didn’t link to.

    Turning to one of the “hot-button issues” the poll asked about, Politico told readers that “a plurality of voters is skeptical of legal immigration.”

    What the hell does that mean, you ask? White doesn’t say, except to note several paragraphs later that voters are “more likely to support reducing legal immigration” than the political elite are. Looking at the poll, it would appear to come from the question: “The US admits over a million legal immigrants a year. Do you think the number should be [increased, decreased, stay about the same]?”

    Forty-three percent of respondents said “decreased,” either “a lot” or “a little,” while 21% said “increased” and 36% said “stay about the same.” Technically, sure, a “plurality” want fewer legal immigrants (which isn’t exactly the same thing as being “skeptical” of legal immigration). But, just as with the “Trump-resistance fatigue” spin, this buries the majority opinion, which is not “skeptical,” being either fine with current levels of immigration or wanting to see more.

    On immigration, the article also reports:

    While a clear 60% of voters support the state’s “sanctuary” laws, which partition local law enforcement from federal immigration authorities, policy influencers were 20 points more likely to support that policy.

    Again, that Politico subscribers in California poll to the left of voters is to be expected. That voters still support sanctuary laws by 20 percentage points despite the relentless onslaught of fearmongering from the Trump administration, as well as both right-wing and centrist media, about immigrants? That seems like important news—that Politico would apparently prefer to bury.

    ACTION ALERT: Messages to Politico can be sent here (or via Bluesky @Politico.com). Remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

    Featured Image: Protesters gathered at San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza to protest the Trump administration on April 5, one of 137 “Hands Off!” demonstrations across California that day (Creative Commons photo: Lynn Friedman).

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Stories of Hope, April 2025

    This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.

  • Pope Francis Obits Omit Focus on Palestine

     

    Reuters: Gaza's Christians 'heartbroken' for pope who phoned them nightly

    Reuters not only had a stand-alone story (4/22/25) about Palestinians’ response to Francis’ death, but included his advocacy for Gaza in its main obituary (4/21/25).

    The obituaries for Pope Francis in the leading US newspapers ignored the late pontiff’s commitment to the Palestinian people and the acute suffering in Gaza in the last years of his life. Many of them ran separate pieces that highlighted Francis’ concern for Gaza and the response of Palestinians to his death, but they failed to mention these aspects of his papacy in the lengthy obituaries that summed up his life.

    Born Jorge Mario Bergoglio in Argentina in 1936, Francis was the first Jesuit and the first Latin American to be pope. When he died at the age of 88, his leadership as a social justice pontiff was heralded widely.

    “For Francis, the poor are ‘at the heart of the Gospel,’ and throughout his pontificate, he affirmed this by deed and word,” said the Catholic magazine America (4/21/25). His liberal philosophy addressed many pressing issues, “from climate change to global poverty, war and violence, LGBTQ+ people and women’s roles in the church,” said Sojourners (4/21/25).

    Toward the end of Francis’ life, the head of the Catholic Church focused his attention on ongoing genocide in Gaza. “He used to call us at 7 p.m. every night. No matter how busy he was, no matter where he was, he always called,” George Anton, spokesperson for the Church of the Holy Family in Gaza, told NPR (4/22/25). Reuters (4/22/25) ran the headline, “Gaza’s Christians ‘Heartbroken’ for Pope Who Phoned Them Nightly.” AP (4/21/25) called these communications his “frequent evening ritual,” noting that this “small act of compassion made a big impression on Gaza’s tiny Christian community.”

    Francis was generally sympathetic to addressing political and human rights for Palestinians, and under his watch the Vatican recognized the state of Palestine (BBC, 5/13/15). He “suggested the global community should study whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza constitutes a genocide of the Palestinian people” (Reuters, 11/17/24). In his final Easter message, issued the day before his death, he called for a ceasefire in Gaza to end a conflict that “continues to cause death and destruction, and to create a dramatic and deplorable humanitarian situation” (Truthout, 4/21/25).

    ‘Privileged a politicized version’

    NY Post: Pope Francis’ death puts major choice before his church

    As well as his call for an inquiry into charges of genocide in Gaza, the New York Post (4/21/25) didn’t like that Francis “took a very standard leftist line on President Trump, decrying his plans for mass deportation of illegal immigrants.”

    Not everyone in the press approved of this act of compassion when recalling his life and church leadership. In an editorial, the New York Post (4/21/25) criticized the “leftist” positions of the “deservedly beloved figure,” complaining that Francis “even went so far as to call for an investigation of Israel over its nonexistent genocide in Gaza.”

    When it came to Francis’ support for Middle East peace generally, the Jerusalem Post (4/22/25) said in an editorial, “Time and again, Israel expressed dismay at the Vatican’s tendency to elevate Palestinian narratives while brushing aside Israeli concerns.” It complained that “the Vatican’s posture under Francis consistently privileged a politicized version of the Palestinian story over the complex reality on the ground.”

    But rather than criticizing Francis’ attention to Gaza, the lengthy obituaries in the most prominent US newspapers ignored his advocacy for Palestinian rights entirely.

    ‘Excoriated modern-day colonizers’

    NYT: Francis, the First Latin American Pope, Dies at 88

    The New York Times‘ obituary (4/21/25) for Francis was almost 7,500 words long—but none of them were “Gaza.”

    The New York Times’ obituary (4/21/25), by Jason Horowitz and Jim Yardley, did note that “he repeatedly denounced violence and, after an initial reluctance to take sides in the war in Ukraine, spoke out in support of Ukraine.”

    It also reported that Francis’ travels included “focusing on exploited and war-torn parts of Africa, where he excoriated modern-day colonizers and sought peace in South Sudan.” It continued:

    In 2019, Francis got on his hands and knees before the warring leaders of South Sudan’s government and its opposition, kissing their shoes and imploring them to make peace. In 2023, in declining health, he traveled to the capital city, Juba, to upbraid them on their lack of progress.

    “No more bloodshed, no more conflicts, no more violence and mutual recriminations about who is responsible for it,” Francis said in the gardens of South Sudan’s presidential palace. “Leave the time of war behind and let a time of peace dawn!”

    Yet regarding his outspoken concern for Gaza, the Times found room for not a word.

    ‘Sometimes took controversial stances’

    WSJ: Pope Francis, Advocate for Economic and Social Justice, Dies at 88

    The Wall Street Journal (4/21/25) said Francis “sought to refocus the Catholic Church on promoting social and economic justice”—but his focus on Gaza could not be acknowledged.

    Obituaries at other major US newspapers also failed to include Francis’ Palestine focus. A lengthy obituary in the Washington Post (4/21/25), for example, noted that the pope’s first official trip was to the “Italian island of Lampedusa, a burdened way station for refugees seeking sanctuary in Europe from conflicts in North Africa and the Middle East,” a nod to the fact that he offered a home to migrants in need. But it didn’t mention Gaza.

    The Wall Street Journal’s obituary (4/21/25) didn’t say anything about the topic either, though it said that Francis

    made a priority of improving ties with the Islamic world, washing the feet of Muslims on Holy Thursday, visiting nine Muslim-majority countries and insisting that Islam was, like Christianity, a religion of peace.

    The same is true with AP‘s obituary (4/21/25), which likewise commented instead that he “charted new relations with the Muslim world by visiting the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.” USA Today’s obituary (4/21/25) said Francis “sometimes took progressive or controversial stances on pressing issues, such as same-sex couples and climate change,” but it didn’t bring up Gaza.

    By contrast, it was not hard to find references to Gaza in Francis’ obituaries in major non-US English-language outlets. The British Guardian (4/21/25) noted, “During his recent period in hospital, he kept up his telephone calls to the Holy Family church in Gaza, a nightly routine since 9 October 2023.” The Toronto-based Globe and Mail (4/21/25) included Palestine in a list of war-ravaged places Francis prayed for, and devoted most of a paragraph to his nightly Gaza calls.  Reuters (4/21/25), headquartered in London and owned by Canada’s Thomson family, noted that Francis’ last Easter Sunday message “reiterated his call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza—a conflict he had long railed against.”

    Though the major US obituaries all ignored Gaza, the same outlets published separate articles on Francis and Gaza. USA Today (4/21/25) ran “Pope Francis Used Final Easter Address to Call for Gaza Ceasefire.” The Wall Street Journal (4/23/25) had “Pope Francis Kept Up Routine of Calling Gaza Until the End.” For the New York Times (4/22/25), it was “Even in Sickness, Pope Francis Reached Out to Gaza’s Christians.” AP (4/21/25) offered “Pope’s Frequent Calls to a Catholic Church Made Him a Revered Figure in War-Battered Gaza,” an article that appeared on the Washington Post‘s website (4/21/25).

    These stand-alone pieces are welcome, and spotlight the importance of the Gaza crisis to Francis. But the official obituaries in these major outlets are meant to stand as a permanent record of Francis’ life and career. By relegating Francis’ compassion for Palestine to sidebars, as though it were only of transient interest, US outlets eliminated a central aspect of his papacy from that record.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Lab Leak: The Official Conspiracy Theory That Still Gets You Credit as a Free Thinker

    WSJ: Time for Accountability on the Covid Lab-Leak Coverup

    Mike Gallagher (Wall Street Journal, 4/15/25) insists the “scientific elite…should have come clean about the pandemic’s laboratory origin.” His evidence for such an origin? “Western intelligence agencies…favor that view, and most Americans agree.”

    For a while it seemed like the dubious hypothesis that the virus that causes Covid did not jump from animals to humans, but was released from a Chinese lab, might be fading away. But the US government and the media are breathing new life into this zombie idea, contributing to the vilification of China and undermining actual scientific research.

    In a Wall Street Journal op-ed (4/15/25), former Republican Rep. Mike Gallagher, who previously headed the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, asserted that “Wuhan lab’s risky gain-of-function research was a giant mistake that cost millions of lives.” He offered as evidence that “Western intelligence agencies” who “initially bowed to political pressure and rejected the theory that Covid emerged from the Wuhan lab…now favor that view, and most Americans agree.”

    The op-ed called not for a massive overhaul of scientific research into stopping the next pandemic, but for a domestic and international hunt for those responsible for such treachery, because the “Chinese Communist Party was permitted to bleach the crime scene.” Gallagher said:

    Mr. Trump should establish a multination tribunal, akin to the International Criminal Court but with actual teeth, to investigate the origins of the virus, examining evidence of negligence or intentional misconduct, and determining the culpability of key people and institutions.

    ‘Finally comes clean’

    NYT: We Were Badly Misled About the Event That Changed Our Lives

    “In 2020, when people started speculating that a laboratory accident might have been the spark that started the Covid-19 pandemic,” writes Zeynep Tufekci (New York Times, 3/16/25) they were treated like kooks and cranks.” In fact, the theory got a respectful hearing from outlets like the Washington Post (4/2/20,  4/14/20), ABC (5/3/20) and CNN (5/3/20); see FAIR.org (10/6/20). 

    Gallagher isn’t alone when it comes to media outlets reheating the lab leak furor. New York Times contributing writer Zeynep Tufekci (3/16/25) stressed that “there is no strong scientific evidence ruling out a lab leak or proving that the virus arose from human-animal contact in that seafood market.” Her main evidence that the virus might have originated in a lab leak was the assessment of various intelligence agencies (mostly US, one German).

    Tufekci (New York Times, 11/27/24) had previously praised President Donald Trump’s appointment of Stanford health economist Jay Bhattacharya to lead the National Institutes of Health, despite “making catastrophically wrong predictions” about the deadliness of Covid, because he “has criticized those who would silence critics of the public health establishment on a variety of topics, like the plausibility of a coronavirus lab leak.”

    Tufekci’s recent column was gleefully received by right-wing media. The New York Post (3/17/25) ​​said the Times “finally ran a column by a scientist who said the public was ‘badly misled’ about the origins of Covid-19—triggering backlash from readers who say the admission comes five years too late.” It said that Tufekci—who is a sociology professor at Princeton University, and not a medical researcher, as the Post implies—“argued that officials and scientists hid facts, misled a Times journalist and colluded on campaigns to bury the possibility of a research lab leak in Wuhan, China.”

    The British conservative magazine Spectator (3/18/25) reported on Tufekci’s piece with the headline “The New York Times Finally Comes Clean About Covid.” The subhead: “It only took the newspaper five years to acknowledge what people had said since the beginning.” Another right-wing British outlet, UnHerd (3/17/25), also used Tufekci’s column as fodder for a “we told you so” piece.

    It’s not true that Tufekci is the first at the Times to advance the lab leak hypothesis. The Times‘ David Leonhardt promoted the concept in his widely read Morning Newsletter (5/27/21) only about a year after the US went into shutdown mode. “Both animal-to-human transmission and the lab leak appear plausible,” Leonhardt wrote. “And the obfuscation by Chinese officials means we may never know the truth.”

    Molecular biologist Alina Chan was more definitive in a New York Times op-ed (6/3/24) published last year, headlined “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in Five Key Points.” Chan wrote that “a growing volume of evidence…suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.” The essay “recapitulates the misrepresentation, selective quotation and faulty logic that has characterized so much of the pro—lab leak side of the Covid origin discourse,” FAIR’s Phillip Hosang (7/3/24) wrote in response.

    Government talking points

    Science: House panel concludes that COVID-19 pandemic came from a lab leak

    Science (12/3/24): “The committee’s 520-page report…offers no new direct evidence of a lab leak, but summarizes a circumstantial case.”

    In another FAIR piece (4/7/23) about corporate media pushing lab leak speculation, Joshua Cho and I noted that news and opinion pieces often cited intelligence agencies to bolster the credibility of their lab leak claims. “Readers should be asking why so many in media find government talking points on a scientific question so newsworthy,” we wrote, noting that “there is a vast amount of scientific research that points to Covid spreading to humans from other animal hosts.”

    Less than two years later, as Trump prepared for his second inauguration, the federal government reintroduced the specter of “lab leak” when the Republican-led House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a report that offered “no new direct evidence of a lab leak,” but instead, according to Science (12/3/24), offered

    a circumstantial case, including that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) used NIAID money to conduct “gain-of-function” studies that modified distantly related coronaviruses.

    The magazine also reported that “Democrats on the panel released their own report challenging many of their colleagues’ conclusions about Covid-19 origins.” The minority report noted “that the viruses studied at WIV with EcoHealth funding were too distantly related to SARS-CoV-2 to cause the pandemic.”

    The following month, the CIA “offered a new assessment on the origin of the Covid outbreak, saying the coronavirus is ‘more likely’ to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals” (BBC, 1/25/25). As AP (1/26/25) noted, however, the “spy agency has ‘low confidence’ in its own conclusion.” Reuters (3/12/25) subsequently  reported, citing “a joint report” by two German outlets, Die Zeit and Sueddeutscher Zeitung, that

    Germany’s foreign intelligence service in 2020 put at 80%–90% the likelihood that the coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic was accidentally released from China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology.

    ‘Unfounded assertions are dangerous’

    GCRI: Most Experts Believe Natural ZoonoticOrigin More Likely

    According to a survey by the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute (2/24), epidemiologists and virologists believe a natural zoonotic origin for Covid is far more likely than a lab leak.

    Once again, the claims about the pandemics origin being a Chinese lab leak seem to come from Western spooks and anti-Communist zealots, not actual scientists. Yet Gallagher and Tufekci present these governmental declarations, sometimes from the same agencies that brought us the Iraqi WMD hoax, as compelling evidence, seemingly more authoritative than the researchers in relevant fields who point to a zoonotic jump as Covid’s most likely source.

    The Journal of Virology (8/1/24) noted that the “preponderance of scientific evidence indicates a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2.” Nevertheless, the journal reported, “the theory that SARS-CoV-2 was engineered in and escaped from a lab dominates media attention, even in the absence of strong evidence.” The immunobiologists and other scientists who wrote the essay spelled out the danger of “lab leak” myth:

    Despite the absence of evidence for the escape of the virus from a lab, the lab leak hypothesis receives persistent attention in the media, often without acknowledgment of the more solid evidence supporting zoonotic emergence. This discourse has inappropriately led a large portion of the general public to believe that a pandemic virus arose from a Chinese lab. These unfounded assertions are dangerous…[as] they place unfounded blame and responsibility on individual scientists, which drives threats and attacks on virologists. It also stokes the flames of an anti-science, conspiracy-driven agenda, which targets science and scientists even beyond those investigating the origins of SARS-CoV-2. The inevitable outcome is an undermining of the broader missions of science and public health and the misdirecting of resources and effort. The consequence is to leave the world more vulnerable to future pandemics, as well as current infectious disease threats.

    It is hard to believe that the world’s scientists have conspired to create research suggesting zoonotic jump (Globe and Mail, 7/28/22; Science, 10/10/22; PNAS, 11/10/22; Scientific American, 3/17/23; Nature, 12/6/24) for the sole purpose of covering up a lab leak. The Times and Journal’s unquestioning acceptance of the lab leak hypothesis endorses it as the expense of scientific research that says otherwise, and assumes that China’s government is guilty until proven innocent.

    More importantly, the goal of reviving the lab leak idea seems completely divorced from preparing for the next pandemic or protecting public health. If anything, the Trump administration is making it more difficult for scientists to guard against future viral dangers, given its many cuts to scientific and medical research (All Things Considered, 2/10/25; STAT, 4/1/25; Scientific American, 4/11/25).

    Recent articles giving credence to the lab leak hypothesis serve the Trump administration’s mission of reducing medical research and protections for public health, and have the side benefit for MAGA of stirring up nationalist rage against China. It’s harder to understand what people genuinely interested in protecting humanity from the next pandemic get from listening to intelligence agencies rather than scientists.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • The long, slow march for justice after a genocide in Guatemala

    This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.

  • The long, slow march for justice after a genocide in Guatemala

    This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.

  • Fox News Can’t Admit Jewish Identity of Anti-Israel Protesters

     

    AP: Jewish protesters flood Trump Tower's lobby to demand Mahmoud Khalil's release

    AP (3/13/25): “Demonstrators from [Jewish Voice for Peace] filled the lobby of Trump Tower…to denounce the immigration arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian activist who helped lead protests against Israel at Columbia University.”

    In its coverage of Jewish Voice for Peace’s Trump Tower protest, Fox News obscured the Jewish identity of protesters—while echoing antisemitic conspiracy theories and racist tropes.

    JVP, an organization of Jewish Americans in solidarity with Palestinians, organized the March 13 sit-in of Trump’s Manhattan property in protest against ICE’s detention of Columbia University graduate and pro-Palestine protester Mahmoud Khalil.

    As Jewish solidarity with Palestinians facing genocide does not fit neatly into the channel’s narrative that pro-Palestine protests are inherently antisemitic, Fox’s all-day coverage of the protest either cast doubt upon the organization’s Jewish identity or minimized mentioning JVP by name altogether—all while painting demonstrators as antisemites.

    What’s more, discussion of the protest veered into unabashedly antisemitic conspiracy theories about how George Soros and his supposedly paid anti-American protesters seek to overthrow the West.

    The coverage comes as an absurd reminder that while right-wing fearmongers cynically paint opposition to genocide or violation of due-process as antisemitic, the most-watched US cable news network has no problem echoing Goebbelsian talking points.

    ‘Don’t give them any advertisement’

    Fox News: Now: Protesters occupy Trump Tower, Chant "Free Mahmoud, Free them all"

    “Look at some of the signage in here…. They hate Jewish Americans,” says Outnumbered host Harris Faulkner (3/13/25), while playing footage of protesters holding up signs proudly proclaiming their Jewish heritage.

    The argument made on other programs that the protesters were antisemitic, anti-American and aligned with Nazis, requires a specific hesitance towards profiling JVP probably best captured in an interview on the Story (3/13/25) with NYPD Chief John Chell. Asked who the group was that organized the protest, he responded, “We’re well-versed in this group, I don’t wanna give them any advertisement.”

    He only neglected to say the quiet part out loud—that a shout-out for JVP might advertise a reality in which protesters in solidarity with Palestine and campus demonstrators weren’t motivated by antisemitism.

    On Fox‘s Outnumbered (3/13/25), host Harris Faulkner and other panelists spent ample time portraying the protesters as antisemites—while intentionally obfuscating the overtly Jewish messaging of the demonstration.

    It’s not as though the panelists or reporter Eric Shawn were somehow unaware of who was protesting: About seven minutes into the coverage, panelist Emily Compagno read the back of one of the T-shirts, printed “Jews Say Stop Arming Israel.” Without missing a beat, she pivoted into an incoherent rant about how the Democratic Party and Ivy League universities venerate Hamas. A few minutes later, Eric Shawn stammered the group’s name once in passing, then never again.

    Unsurprisingly, these two incidental mentions were drowned out by relentless accusations that the protesters voiced overt hatred for Jews.

    Faulkner set the tone of the conversation with some of her leading remarks: “Look at some of the signage here…. They hate Israel, they hate Jewish Americans, they are Anti-American.” (Such virulently antisemitic signage included “Fight Nazis, Not Students,” “Opposing Fascism Is a Jewish Tradition” and “Never Again for Anyone.”) She then asked her audience, “If you are Jewish in that building, do you feel safe?”

    Guest panelist Lisa Boothe added that protesters “hate the West,” arguing that they “are supporting the Nazis.”

    ‘Some said they were Jews’

    Fox News: The Left is Torching Teslas and storming Trump Tower

    “Some said that they…were Jews,” the Five panelist Greg Gutfeld (3/13/25) stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it! And they will not check…who paid for those signs, who paid for those T-shirts, and…who paid for the protesters.”

    When the Five (3/13/25) first mentioned the Jewish identities of the protesters about eight minutes into the broadcast, they did so to cast doubt upon the premise that Jews would engage in such an act: “Some said that they…were Jews,” Greg Gutfeld stuttered, “but will the media check that? I doubt it!”

    (It’s unclear who Gutfeld considers to be “the media,” given that he’s a panelist on the top-rated show at the most-watched cable news network.)

    Like on Outnumbered, the Five panelists accused protesters of supporting antisemitism while only mentioning the demonstrators’ Jewish identity in passing. Jesse Watters summarized the panel’s position best, stating that protesters were “supporting an antisemite” who “hates Jews” and “[blew] up Columbia.”

    The commentary hinges on the assumption that an Islamophobic audience will hear that an antisemitic crowd rallied at Trump Tower in support of Mahmoud Khalil “blow[ing] up Columbia”—and not follow up on who organized the rally, or why.

    Such buzzword-laden obfuscation reveals a paranoia in such coverage: If viewers do choose to follow up and learn more about the protesters, it might give the game away. The hoards of supposed antisemites might be raising perfectly reasonable questions about erosion of due-process and US bankrolling of genocide. Some such protests, like the one at Trump Tower, might even be Jewish-led.

    ‘Hands in many protest pots’

    Fox News: Figure: Jewish Voice for Peace's Funding Network, NGO monitor 2019-2021

    Fox News discussed George Soros as though he’s the Palestine movement’s top financier—though according to its own graphic (Will Cain Show, 3/13/25), Soros is only JVP’s fifth-biggest funder, donating a third as much as its largest donor, and accounting for less than 2% of the group’s total financing.

    Curiously, for all of their concern for antisemitism, Outnumbered, the Story, the Five, the Will Cain Show (3/13/25) and Ingraham Angle (3/13/25) all had one thing in common: a conspiratorial fascination with allegedly astroturfed leftist financing. Laura Ingraham was particularly explicit:

    The group Jewish Voice for Peace…bills itself as a home for left-leaning Jews…and it gets its biggest funding from groups associated with George Soros…. Soros himself has his hands in many protest pots, stirring up a toxic brew of antisemitism and anti-Americanism.

    She cited a graphic displayed on the Will Cain Show, which was also referenced on the Five. It depicted Soros’ Open Society fund as the fifth-biggest funder of JVP for 2019–21, contributing $150,000. Given that JVP has an annual budget of more than $3 million, this suggests that Soros is responsible for less than 2% of the group’s financing.

    Ingraham nonetheless felt the need to rail against Soros and the broader Jewish left. She also went on to characterize the pro-Palestine movement as “the overthrow-of-the-West cause.”

    So the “antisemitic” pro-Palestine protests are bankrolled by an anti-American Jewish billionaire seeking to overthrow the West? Like her peers on Outnumbered and the Five, Ingraham is empowered to advance such harmful tropes, so long as she also tacks on a spurious charge of “antisemitism.”

    Anti-Arab, anti-immigrant tropes

    Fox News: Radical Rage: Left-Wing agitators mob Trump Tower for mahmoud Khalil

    Five panelist and former Westchester County District Attorney Jeanine Pirro (3/13/25) condemned protesters “want[ing] Mahmoud [Khalil] to have all of his constitutional rights,” implying that violation of Khalil’s due process is legal because he “hates all of our Western values.”

    Fox’s obfuscation of the protest’s overtly Jewish messaging is underpinned by another assumption—that Palestinian-led or immigrant-led protest against the genocide is somehow less legitimate than Jewish American–led protest. Coverage not only obscured JVP’s role in organizing the protest, but used anti-Arab tropes and calls for deportation to smear the legitimacy of protesters’ demands.

    When Jesse Watters evoked fantasies of student protesters blowing up universities, or Outnumbered guest panelist (and former Bush White House press secretary) Ari Fleischer accused protesters of being illegal residents that “should all be deported from this country,” they played to the racist impulses of their audiences.

    Mahmoud Khalil is a Palestinian-Syrian immigrant—thus, his opposition to a genocide in which Israel has killed at least 51,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with another 10,000 presumed dead under the rubble, is illegitimate. And if JVP protesters are Arab immigrants too, then their opposition to repression and genocide is meritless and antisemitic.

    It’s another reason why it’s in Fox’s best interest not to identify the Trump Tower protesters—to allow for the assumption that they’re Arabs, or immigrants, which somehow discredits them.

    Enemies with no name

    JVP: If your focus is on Palestinian liberation, why do you focus on organizing Jews? Why not just participate in Palestinian-led efforts?JVP has a specific, critical role to play in the movement for Palestinian liberation. As Jews, we work to answer the call of our Palestinian partners to build a Jewish movement that can effectively form a counterweight to Jewish Zionist support for Israeli apartheid. That often includes defending our Palestinian partner organizations, when they are accused of antisemitism for criticizing the policies of the Israeli state. Our role in the movement for Palestinian freedom is to shake the U.S.-Israel alliance by fundamentally changing the financial, cultural, and political calculus of Jewish support for Israeli apartheid and for Zionism.

    As a Jewish-led organization in solidarity with Palestinians, JVP stresses the importance of challenging false antisemitism smears against their Palestinian partners and in creating a Jewish future divested from Zionism.

    Fox News’s hesitancy to identify JVP is a striking contrast to Fox’s general proclivity for naming enemies. A search on FoxNews.com for the “New Black Panther Party,” a fringe Black nationalist group, yields more than 100 results; compare that to less than 30 hits on AP‘s website. A Search for “Dylan Mulvaney,” a trans influencer who was targeted in a mass-hate campaign in 2023, yields more than 5,000 results on Fox, compared to AP’s 50.

    Fox News thrives upon enemies—but Jewish Voice for Peace is different. As an openly Jewish-American group, JVP challenges Fox News’ narrative that protests against genocide in Gaza are rooted in antisemitism.

    “We organize our people and we resist Zionism because we love Jews, Jewishness and Judaism,” JVP’s website says. “Our struggle against Zionism is not only an act of solidarity with Palestinians, but also a concrete commitment to creating the Jewish futures we all deserve.”

    To be clear, conservative and centrist outlets’ continued preoccupation with the supposed antisemitism of opponents of Israel’s genocide is never in good faith—as when the New York Times (4/14/25), reporting on “Trump’s Pressure Campaign Against Universities,” blithely claimed that “pro-Palestinian students on college campuses…harassed Jewish students,” without noting that many of the pro-Palestinian students were themselves Jewish. But the charge of antisemitism is even more ludicrous coming from an outlet that uses antisemitic tropes to make its own attacks on the pro-Palestine movement.

    And the charge is most ridiculous coming from a network that is too afraid to name its enemy, as if the mere acknowledgement that some Jews oppose US support for Israel’s genocide might shake the foundations of its whole narrative.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Failing to Rise to the Constitutional Crisis

     

    BBC: Supreme Court rules Trump officials must 'facilitate' release of man deported to El Salvador

    The Trump administration maintains that it can send people to overseas concentration camps with impunity  because “activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy” (BBC, 4/11/25).

    As the Trump administration openly defies court orders to return a man wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, some American outlets are underplaying the significance of this constitutional crisis.

    In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court “declined to block a lower court’s order to ‘facilitate’ bringing back Kilmar Ábrego García,” a Salvadoran who had legal protections in the United States and was wrongfully sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (BBC, 4/11/25).

    The White House is not complying (Democracy Docket, 4/14/25). “The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump’s Justice Department insists (CNN, 4/15/25). Fox News (4/16/25) said of Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Bondi Defiant, Says Ábrego García Will Stay in El Salvador ‘End of the Story.’”

    In an X post (4/15/25) filled with unproven assertions that skirt the question of due process and extraordinary rendition, Vice President J.D. Vance said, “The entire American media and left-wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien).” (Are we supposed to believe that the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump, are a part of the “left-wing industrial complex?”)

    The complete disregard to constitutional protections of due process and to court orders should send alarm bells throughout American society. The MAGA movement condones sending unconvicted migrants to a foreign hellhole largely on grounds that they are not US citizens, and thus don’t have a right to constitutional due process. But the administration has floated the idea of doing the same thing to “homegrown” undesirables as well (Al Jazeera, 4/15/25).

    ‘An uncertain end’

    NYT: In Showdowns With the Courts, Trump Is Increasingly Combative

    The New York Times (4/15/25) goes out on a limb and declares that the president defying the Supreme Court is “a path with an uncertain end.”

    The case is quite obviously not about the extremity or unpopularity of President Donald Trump’s policies, but a breaking point at which the executive branch has left the democratic confines of the Constitution, as many journalists and scholars have warned about. But the case is not necessarily being portrayed that way in the establishment press.

    In an article about the Trump administration’s record of resisting court orders, a New York Times subhead (4/15/25) read, “Scholars say that the Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders, a path with an uncertain end.” In an article about “What to Know About the Mistaken Deportation of a Maryland Man to El Salvador” (4/14/25), reporter Alan Feuer described the Supreme Court’s upholding the order to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García as “complicated and rather ambiguous” rather than a “clear victory for the administration.”

    At the Washington Post (4/14/25), law professor Stuart Banner wrote an opinion piece saying that fears of a constitutional crisis were overblown, noting that while Trump is “famous for his contemptuous remarks about judges…tension between the president and the Supreme Court is centuries old.” Thus, he said, there are incentives in both branches to “not to let conflict ripen into public defiance.”

    WSJ: Trump, Abrego Garcia and the Courts

    The Wall Street Journal (4/15/25) presents the prospect of the White House defying a Supreme Court order as a “showdown” that Trump might “win.”

    The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/15/25) said:

    Mr. Trump would be wise to settle all of this by quietly asking Mr. Bukele to return Mr. Ábrego García, who has a family in the US. But the president may be bloody-minded enough that he wants to show the judiciary who’s boss. If this case does become a judicial showdown, Mr. Trump may assert his Article II powers not to return Mr. Ábrego García, and the Supreme Court will be reluctant to disagree.

    But Mr. Trump would be smarter to play the long game. He has many, much bigger issues than the fate of one man that will come before the Supreme Court. By taunting the judiciary in this manner, he is inviting a rebuke on cases that carry far greater stakes.

    These articles display a naivete about the current moment. The Trump administration and its allies have flatly declared that they believe a judicial check on the executive authority wrongly places constitutional restraints on Trump’s desires (New York Times, 3/19/25; Guardian, 3/22/25).

    House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to court rulings that went against MAGA desires, “warned that Congress’ authority over the federal judiciary includes the power to eliminate entire district courts,” Reuters (3/25/25) reported. The House also approved legislation, along party lines, that “limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration” (AP, 4/9/25).

    In other words, Trump’s defiance of the courts is part of a broader campaign to assert that the Constitution simply should not be an impediment to his rule. That’s not a liberal versus conservative debate about national policy, but a declaration that the United States will no longer operate as a constitutional republic.

    ‘Constitutional crisis is here’

    USA Today: America is dangerously close to being run by a king who answers to no one

    “Think long and hard about what it means to have a president who gleefully ignores the courts,” urges Rex Huppke (USA Today, 4/15/25). “It’s time to stand up and shout ‘Hell no!’ right freakin’ now, and not a moment later.”

    Pieces like the ones at the Journal, Times and Post give readers the sense that this affair is just another quirk of the American system of checks and balances, when, in fact, history could look back and declare this the moment when the Constitution became a dead letter.

    Other outlets, however, appeared to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “America Is Dangerously Close to Being Run by a King Who Answers to No One” was the headline of Rex Huppke column at USA Today (4/15/25). “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here” was the headline of a recent piece by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (4/14/25).

    This case will roil on, and both the judicial system (Reuters, 4/15/25) and congressmembers (NBC News, 4/16/25) are taking action. There’s still time for the papers to treat this case with the urgency that it deserves.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Media Find Ways to Minimize Israel’s Murder of Paramedics

     

    NBC: Israeli military walks back account of the killing of Gaza medical workers after video appears to contradict its version

    NBC (4/7/25) presented evidence that killed 15 aid workers and buried their bodies along with their vehicles as an IDF “mistake.”

    Israeli soldiers on March 23 massacred 15 Palestinian medics and rescue workers near the city of Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where Israel’s ongoing US-backed genocide has officially killed more than 50,000 Palestinians since October 2023. The slaughter took place before dawn, as a convoy of ambulances and a fire truck from the Palestinian Civil Defense service endeavored to respond to a lethal Israeli attack on another ambulance, which had itself been attempting to rescue victims of an Israeli airstrike.

    Eight Palestinian Red Crescent paramedics, six Civil Defense workers and one UN staff member were murdered by Israeli gunfire. Their mutilated bodies were bulldozed into a mass grave, their vehicles crushed and buried as well.

    The initial Israeli narrative was that nine of the emergency responders were militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that the vehicles were “advancing suspiciously…without headlights or emergency signals.”

    As it turns out, however, all headlights and emergency signals were very much on—not that it’s fine to massacre people for driving with no lights, of course. When, after a week of negotiations with Israeli occupying forces, another convoy was finally permitted to access the mass grave and unearth the bodies, the mobile phone of massacre victim Rifat Radwan was found to contain footage of the lead-up to the assault, which shows the clearly marked rescue vehicles advancing with emergency lights on. A barrage of Israeli gunfire then persists for more than five minutes, as Radwan’s screen goes black and he bids farewell to his mother.

    Following the release of the video footage, Israel conceded that perhaps its version of events had been partially “mistaken”—but only the claim about the headlights being off. The number of alleged “terrorists” on board was furthermore downgraded from nine to six, the other fatalities naturally being labeled human shields and therefore fundamentally the fault of Hamas.

    Anyway, no one committing a genocide really cares about the precise identities of 15 people; mass indiscriminate killing is, after all, the whole point of the undertaking. Since Israel broke the ceasefire with Hamas on March 18, the United Nations calculates that more than 100 children per day have been killed or injured in Gaza.

    Ludicrous headlines

    NYT: Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On

    The New York Times‘ lead (4/4/25) says the aid workers were killed “when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire”—but the headline omits Israel altogether, and the subhead treats Israel’s responsibility as a UN accusation.

    Notwithstanding reality, the Western corporate media somehow could not bring itself to report this particular massacre of medics without beating around the bush. The New York Times (4/4/25), for example, ran the following ludicrous headline: “Video Shows Aid Workers Killed in Gaza Under Gunfire Barrage, With Ambulance Lights On.” There was no room, apparently, to mention the role of Israel in said gunfire barrage, although the syntax implies that the ambulance lights may have perpetrated the killing.

    The article’s subheadline specifies that “the UN has said Israel killed the workers”—and yet the singular attribution of this opinion to the United Nations is entirely confounding, given that the very first paragraph of the article itself states that the video “shows that the ambulances and fire truck… were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.”

    For its part, NPR (4/5/25) went with its own similarly diplomatic headline: “Palestinian Medics Say a Video of Gaza Rescue Crews Under Fire Refutes Israeli Claims.” CNN (4/6/25) opted for: “Video Showing Final Moments of Gaza Emergency Workers Casts Doubt on Israeli Account of Killings.”

    NBC News (4/7/25) reported that the Israeli military had “walked back its account of its killing of 15 paramedics and emergency workers in southern Gaza last month after video emerged that called into question its version of events”; the Washington Post (4/6/25) concurred that that Israel had “backtracked on its account…after phone video appeared to contradict its claims that their vehicles did not have emergency signals on.”

    The Guardian (4/5/25), meanwhile, went as far as to assert that the cell phone footage, which “appears to contradict the version of events put forward” by the Israeli military, “appears to have been filmed from inside a moving vehicle” and features “a red fire engine and clearly marked ambulances driving at night, using headlights and flashing emergency lights.” Imagine if all news reports were written in such roundabout fashion, e.g., “State officials say that what appears to be a bridge collapsed on Thursday into what appears to be a river.”

    The New York Times on April 7 produced its own follow-up headline, “Video Shows Search for Missing Gaza Paramedics Before Israelis Shoot Rescuers”—thanks to which readers were presumably too busy trying to parse the grammar to think about anything else.

    ‘Not seen as fully human’

    Al Jazeera: Israel kills, lies, and the Western media believe it

    Ahmed Najar (Al Jazeera, 4/6/25) : “Their story is not just about one atrocity. It is about the machinery of doubt that kicks in every time Palestinians are killed.”

    In the case of Israel, corporate media have institutionalized the practice of dancing around the straightforward statement of fact, which is why we never see headlines like “Israel Massacres 15 Palestinian Medics in Rafah,” or, obviously, any acknowledgement that Israel is currently perpetrating a genocide in Gaza (FAIR.org, 12/12/24). Thanks in large part to Israel’s oh-so-special relationship with the US, which happily bankrolls its crimes against humanity, the media have long grotesquely skewed reporting in Israel’s favor in order to validate the whole arrangement.

    As Palestinian political analyst and playwright Ahmed Najar writes in a recent op-ed for Al Jazeera (4/6/25), the slaughter of the 15 medics and rescuers in Gaza matters because “their story is not just about one atrocity.” It’s about an entire system

    in which Palestinians are presumed guilty. A system in which hospitals must prove they are hospitals, schools must prove they are schools and children must prove they are not human shields.

    A system in which, “when Palestinians die, their families have to prove they weren’t terrorists first.” Najar concludes: “When Palestinians are not seen as fully human, then their killers are not seen as fully responsible.”

    Western media insistence on giving ample space to Israel’s patently absurd arguments naturally doesn’t help matters—as when the Associated Press (4/6/25) allows an anonymous Israeli military official to contend that there was “no mistreatment” in the killing of the 15 medics. How could there ever be “mistreatment” in a genocide?

    In its dispatch on how Israel “walked back” its account of the killing, NBC (4/7/25) quoted the Israeli military as saying that soldiers weren’t trying to “hide anything” by burying the 15 corpses, which is kind of like allowing someone caught holding up a bank with an AK-47 the opportunity to state that they weren’t trying to “steal anything.” From a journalistic standpoint, it makes no sense to grant credibility to a clearly disingenuous narrative. From a propaganda perspective, unfortunately, it does.

    ‘Good reason to be anxious’

    MSF: Strikes, raids and incursions: Over a year of relentless attacks on healthcare in Palestine

    As Doctors Without Borders (1/7/25) noted, Israel has killed hundreds of healthcare workers as part of its war on Gaza.

    In the end, the slaughter of these 15 men should come as no surprise; as of January, Israel had already killed more than 1,000 health workers in Gaza in a little over a year, while engaging in repeated attacks on hospitals and an obscene decimation of medical infrastructure. On April 1, the UN reported that 408 aid workers had also been killed since October 2023, including 280 UN staff.

    Killing medical personnel and emergency responders has long been Israel’s modus operandi. Recall Razan al-Najjar, the 21-year-old Palestinian nurse fatally shot by an Israeli sniper in Gaza in 2018, when Israel claimed that unarmed Palestinian protesters were conducting “kite and balloon terrorism.”

    Or recall Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, which kicked off in Gaza in December 2008 and killed 1,400 Palestinians over a span of 22 days, among them 300 children. The brief assault left 16 medics dead and damaged more than half of Gaza’s hospitals. The Guardian (3/24/09) quoted the Israeli army as reasoning that “medics who operate in the area take the risk upon themselves”—to hell with the Geneva Conventions.

    To be sure, war crimes are all in a day’s work for Israel—and covering them up is, it seems, all in a day’s work for the corporate media. In a dispatch about how Israel “acknowledged flaws” in its “mistaken” account of its killing of the rescue workers, the New York Times‘ Isabel Kershner (4/6/25) cited Israeli military affairs analyst Amos Harel on how the Israeli soldiers who did the killing “had ‘good reason to be anxious,’ and that it would be wrong to assume immediately that the case was one of ‘murder in cold blood.’”

    Naturally, it would be inhumane to assume that any aspect of genocide might transpire in cold blood. And as Israel continues its quest to normalize total depravity, Western journalism is becoming ever more cold-blooded, too.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Oil and Influence: 5 things you need to know about fossil fuel industry lobbying

    Last year, Environmental Defence released a report on the fossil fuel industry’s relentless lobbying efforts throughout 2023—and wowza, the response was incredible. People were rightly outraged by Big Oil’s behind-the-scenes push to sway federal decision-making.

    With corporate influence still threatening our democracy in 2024, we knew we had to act fast. So this year, we’re not just bringing you another report—we’re also breaking down some of the most common questions about lobbying and what it all means.

    Without further ado, here are the top 5 things you need to know about fossil fuel lobbying—straight from our new report: Big Oil’s Lobbying Playbook: A Summary of the Fossil Fuel Industry’s 2024 Federal Lobbying.

    • The fossil fuel industry’s lobbying is relentless 

    Fossil fuel companies and their main industry associations had at least 1135 meetings with the federal government in 2024. That means Big Oil lobbied Parliament more than four times per working day!

    Big Oil tries its hardest to influence ministries responsible for climate action. The federal ministries most frequently targeted by lobbyists were Natural Resources Canada, Environment and Climate Change Canada, the Privy Council Office and Finance Canada. 

    Top 5 Ministries Lobbied by the Fossil Fuel Industry

    Environmental Defence just released a report on all the lobbying by Big Oil we tracked in 2024. You can get even more details on lobbying by reading it here.  

    • Lobbying has an impact on government decisions, and it’s holding us back from climate solutions. 

    Government decisions and policies will determine if we can reduce climate pollution at the scale needed to stop climate change from getting worse. Big Oil has used lobbying for decades to block, weaken, or delay every major environmental policy in Canada. Big Oil lobbies the government to protect its private interests—extracting and profiting from fossil fuels. The industry advocates against regulations, policies or laws that would limit their pollution or potentially reduce their profits. 

    We cannot afford to have a government in the pocket of Big Oil that’s willing to roll back our environmental protections and the important progress we’ve made so far to tackle climate change at the fossil fuel industry’s request. We need government leadership to rein in the biggest polluters. Canadians deserve a government that will put people, including future generations, over polluters.

    • Lobbying is just one tactic in Big Oil’s playbook

    Not only does the fossil fuel industry use lobbying to access and influence political decision-makers, but reports by investigative journalists show that lobbyists are using a whole slate of tactics to keep us dependent on their product and to block the transition away from fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy sources.  

    We have the right to democratic integrity, and climate policy that’s free from corporate influence.

    • The Lobbying we track is just the tip of the iceberg

    Only meetings initiated by lobbyists are recorded in the federal Registry of Lobbyists, the system we use to track the fossil fuel lobbyists’ activity. This means government-initiated meetings go unreported, so the reality is that lobbyists have even more opportunities to assert their influence than what is captured by the number of meetings we can track.

    • We deserve a government that’s not in the pocket of Big Oil

    We don’t need to look far to see how important it is to fight for integrity in our democratic institutions. The current U.S. President is  clearly showing how destructive the self-interested influence of multi-millionaire CEOs and billion-dollar corporations can be. When the fossil fuel lobby comes knocking to roll back the regulations, just like they’ve done in the US with support from Trump, our government has to say “no!” – that in Canada, we value the environment. We care about passing down a world to our kids that we can be proud of. 

    We need to ensure that government decisions prioritize people and are free from corporate influence. Canadians deserve a government that prioritizes people over polluters. 

     

    The post Oil and Influence: 5 things you need to know about fossil fuel industry lobbying appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • NYT Covers Up for Cuomo

     

    Just under four years ago, New York’s third-term governor, Andrew Cuomo, resigned from office in disgrace, forced out by a looming impeachment inquiry led by his own Democratic Party over sexual harassment and Covid mismanagement scandals.

    Shockingly, however, Cuomo has entered the New York City mayoral race and catapulted directly into the polling lead, with the help of his widespread name recognition—and some journalists willing to lend a hand to his image rehabilitation campaign. While some local papers have been scathing in their coverage of the ex-governor, the New York Times seems to be largely buying what Cuomo’s selling.

    Scandals galore

    New Republic: Andrew Cuomo Sexually Harassed Even More Women Than Initially Reported

    Biden’s Justice Department concluded that “Governor Cuomo repeatedly subjected these female employees to unwelcome, non-consensual sexual contact” (New Republic, 1/26/24).

    Cuomo resigned as governor in August 2021, shortly after the release of Attorney General Leticia James’s investigation that concluded that he had sexually harassed at least 11 women, failed to report and investigate sexual harassment claims, and engaged in unlawful retaliation. A subsequent Justice Department investigation that reached a settlement with the state last year corroborated James’ report, and added two more female victims to its findings.

    The bombshell sexual harassment report came on the heels of another major scandal involving nursing home deaths during the early months of the Covid pandemic. On March 25, 2020, Cuomo ordered state nursing homes to accept Covid-positive patients released from hospitals. More than 4,500 such patients were admitted before the order was rescinded in May, after heavy criticism and a mounting nursing home death toll (FAIR.org, 2/19/21). Despite Cuomo’s protestations to the contrary, his order did not follow CDC guidelines at the time.

    What’s more, in a subsequent probe of his myriad ethical violations, the Democratic-controlled New York State Assembly found that Cuomo’s office had tampered with the nursing home death count released in a state health report, in an effort to hide his order’s impact and avoid investigation. And a Republican-led congressional inquiry found emails showing that Cuomo himself had seen and edited the report, which sought to deflect blame to nursing home employees for the rampant Covid spread among residents.

    The state assembly probe also found that Cuomo had ordered staff members to use work hours to help produce his book on pandemic leadership—a book he was paid $5 million for, and which was approved by the state ethics commission on Cuomo’s promise that he would not use state time or personnel to produce it. And it affirmed the attorney general’s findings about Cuomo’s sexual misconduct, citing “overwhelming evidence.”

    The assembly probe was launched as part of an impeachment inquiry. Had Cuomo not resigned, he almost certainly would have been impeached. Instead, he’s spent the last several years taking a “scorched earth” approach against his accusers, burning through millions of taxpayer dollars for his legal fees, and gearing up for a political rebirth as New York City mayor—and perhaps, in 2028, US presidential candidate.

    As the front-page New York Times article (3/1/25) reporting Cuomo’s entrance into the mayoral race explained, “To win, he will have to convince New Yorkers that he is innocent—or at least to look beyond his transgressions and a field of newer talent.”

    It would appear the paper is doing its best to help Cuomo achieve that.

    ‘Clear advantages’

    NYT: Cuomo Enters N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race, Upending Contest to Unseat Adams

    The New York Times (3/1/25) said that Cuomo “can cite his success as governor…leading the state through the Covid crisis.” In 2020, the last full year of Cuomo’s governorship, New York had the second-worst death rate from Covid in the nation.

    The Times article by Nicholas Fandos and Emma Fitzsimmons, which called Cuomo’s comeback attempt “audacious,” acknowledged that his campaign came with “hefty baggage.” Yet it also pointed to his “clear advantages,” including not just $15 million in anticipated super PAC money, but “his success…leading the state through the Covid crisis”—breezily erasing a key component of that baggage.

    Shockingly, the reporters didn’t mention the Covid nursing home scandal until the final paragraph of the lengthy piece—which, failing to mention the two Democrat-led reports on Cuomo’s misdeeds, suggested that the whole thing might just boil down to another Republican witch hunt:

    A House Republican chairman referred Mr. Cuomo for potential prosecution after he accused him of lying about a report on nursing home deaths during the pandemic. Mr. Cuomo insists he did not lie, but rather failed to remember certain details that he later sought to correct.

    Regarding the sexual harassment scandal, the paper wrote: “Mr. Cuomo has had success chipping away at the credibility of some of the harassment claims.” How so, you ask? That paragraph continued:

    Last year, the Justice Department reached a civil rights settlement with the state concluding that he and his executive staff subjected at least 13 female employees to a “sexually hostile work environment.” (Mr. Cuomo was not a party to the settlement and disparaged its findings as a rehash of old information.)

    If the Times wants to assert that Cuomo has chipped away the credibility of the claims, they ought to at least offer some evidence. None of the accusers have retracted their claims, though one recently dropped her case against him, explaining:

    Throughout this extraordinarily painful two year case, I’ve many times believed that I’d be better off dead than endure more of his litigation abuse, which has caused extraordinary pain and expense to my family and friends. I desperately need to live my life. That’s the choice I am making today.

    Cuomo immediately countersued her in response (Independent, 12/19/24).

    Meanwhile, when the Times article reports that some “opponents say Mr. Cuomo is to blame for some of the very things he says he wants to fix, including the state of the city’s subways,” evidence is also called for. But in this case, the evidence would show that it’s not just a political attack, but an indisputable fact: As governor, Cuomo repeatedly raided hundreds of millions of state dollars earmarked for the city’s public transportation system—which is actually state-run—to help fill state budget holes and fund pet projects, while at the same time working to reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy (Jacobin, 3/3/25).

    Indeed, Fitzsimmons might have quoted her own reporting from 2018 (New York Times, 10/23/18):

    Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, helped create the subway crisis by failing to adequately support the system—his administration even diverted transit funding to ski resorts—and he has been pilloried by subway advocates for prioritizing aesthetics over maintenance.

    ‘It has been discredited’

    NYT: Cuomo’s Foes Look to Renew Focus on Sexual Harassment Scandal

    New York Times (3/1/25): “A campaign-style video on Valentine’s Day showing [Cuomo] holding a rose and hugging women…reinforced the idea that many women still like him.”

    The same day (3/1/25), the paper published another piece by Fitzsimmons, “Cuomo’s Foes Look to Renew Focus on Sexual Harassment Scandal.” The article named some of the accusations and noted that Cuomo’s “team often cites how, despite criminal investigations by several district attorneys, none resulted in charges.” It did not mention the attorney general’s investigation or the state assembly probe, leaving readers with essentially a he said/she said duel to evaluate the credibility of the claims.

    Another line in that piece stood out: “The power of the #MeToo movement has seemed to wane in recent years, with the re-election of President Trump, a Republican, a visible example.” It’s worth pointing out, as the Times does not, that much of the power of that movement came from pushing news outlets to take more seriously accusations of sexual misconduct against powerful people. If the power of #MeToo has waned, journalists shouldn’t pretend they’re passive observers of the phenomenon.

    Even some in the media admitted that Trump’s extensive list of accusers never got the kind of coverage they deserved, which helped smooth his path back to the White House. The Times‘ formulation erases the media’s complicity in shielding sexual harassers and abusers from facing the kind of scrutiny #MeToo demands.

    #MeToo also helped the public understand that it’s incredibly hard to convict someone of sexual misconduct, which so often happens with no third-party witnesses, so that charges and conviction can’t be the only standard by which powerful people accused of such deeds are judged. If journalists shift back to reporting on such accusations strictly through the lens of the legal system, as the Times does here, it means winding back an important part of #MeToo’s impact.

    Fitzsimmons returned to the subject less than two weeks later in the article “For #MeToo Movement, Mayor’s Race in New York City Poses a Test” (3/10/25). Noting that three of the mayoral candidates face sexual misconduct accusations—Cuomo, embattled incumbent Eric Adams and former city comptroller Scott Stringer—Fitzsimmons wrote that their candidacies “will provide a durability test for the #MeToo movement in New York politics.” She proceeded to lay out the accusers’ claims and the candidates responses, with this for Cuomo’s defense:

    Mr. Cuomo told reporters on Sunday after attending a church service in Harlem that he did not agree with a report by the state attorney general, Letitia James, that found that he had sexually harassed 11 women.

    “I said at that time it was wrong, I said at that time it was political, it has been discredited and nothing has come from any of it,” he said.

    If a politician claims a report that took testimony under oath from 41 people and examined tens of thousands of documents has been “discredited”—a report your own editorial board at the time called “thorough and damning“—don’t you think you ought to press for substantiation of that eyebrow-raising claim? But New York Times editors let it stand unchallenged.

    ‘Criticism politically motivated’

    NYT: 9 Mayoral Candidates Unite to Attack Cuomo on Nursing Home Deaths

    The New York Times (3/23/25) stressed the political motivations behind pointing out that Cuomo’s Covid policies got people killed—as opposed to focusing on the people killed.

    On the anniversary of Cuomo’s nursing home order, families of nursing home Covid victims held an event calling on him to apologize and take responsibility for his actions, bringing together most of Cuomo’s rivals—from the Democratic Socialist to the lone Republican in the race. The Times (3/23/25) lent its support to Cuomo’s framing of the criticism as merely politically motivated:

    He has sharply defended his handling of the crisis and has called the criticism politically motivated.

    On Sunday, nine mayoral candidates stood on a street in Brooklyn’s Cobble Hill neighborhood in front of a memorial wall that displayed photos of nursing home residents who died during the Covid crisis. Each candidate said that they were not attending for political reasons, while taking the opportunity to criticize the former governor, who is leading in the polls.

    Reporter Hurubie Meko’s opaque explanation of the scandal likewise offered Cuomo a friendly spin, turning the established findings of multiple inquiries into yet another he said/she said dispute between Cuomo and his “critics”:

    Mr. Cuomo’s critics have focused on a July 2020 state Health Department report regarding nursing homes, which they have called inaccurate and have said deflected blame for the deaths away from the governor. In 2021, New York State’s attorney general, Letitia James, found that Mr. Cuomo’s administration had undercounted coronavirus-related deaths of nursing home patients by the thousands. Mr. Cuomo, who has said the March 2020 order and the state’s other public health policies adhered to federal guidelines, called the lack of transparency a mistake but denied that his decisions were politically motivated.

    It’s not just “critics” who called the numbers “inaccurate”; Meko leaves out the state assembly probe that found that, after intervention from Cuomo’s office, the nursing home death toll was edited to erase the thousands of residents who had died in hospitals. She also leaves out the difference between the CDC guidelines and Cuomo’s policy.

    She does add that a “Republican-led House subcommittee…ultimately fault[ed]” Cuomo for tampering with the report, but let a Cuomo spokesperson counter that with further accusations of politicization.

    ‘An effective leader pre-scandal‘

    NYT: ‘There’s a Big Market for Fighters Now’: Four Opinion Writers on the Democratic Party and Andrew Cuomo

    New York Times Opinion writer Nicole Gelinas  (10/8/24) on Cuomo: “There isn’t a better supposedly centrist alternative.”

    The paper’s kid-glove treatment of Cuomo isn’t restricted to the news pages. The Times opinion editors put together a four-person discussion on “the Democratic Party and Andrew Cuomo” (3/6/25), published as a guest essay, that appeared designed primarily to shore up the barricades against any candidates to the left of the centrist Cuomo. (Most of them are; the surging challenger currently polling second is democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.)

    Joining editorial board members Mara Gay and Brent Staples were Giuliani biographer Andrew Kirtzman—whose most recent essay in the Times (10/8/24) had argued that “there’s a compelling reason [Cuomo] should run,” citing his “record of success and aura of competence”—and Nicole Gelinas, identified by the Times as “a contributing Opinion writer,” but more helpfully described as a senior fellow at the right-wing Manhattan Institute. (“Contributing Opinion writer” is a new position for Gelinas; apparently the Times felt her weekly column at the New York Post was not enough local exposure for her point of view.)

    Gay asked the questions, while Gelinas offered claims like “voters aren’t interested right now in progressivism.” Kirtzman similarly opined, “New Yorkers in particular prefer their mayors to be pragmatists” rather than progressives. (This is the Times‘ line in news reporting as well, as when Fandos and Fitzsimmons—3/1/25—reported, “Democrats have been drifting slowly back toward the ideological center, where Mr. Cuomo has long been at home.”)

    Staples offered nothing to counter those takes, and responded to Gay’s question about masculinity by suggesting that any breakout challenger to Cuomo or Adams would “have to give good bomber-jacket vibe,” presumably referring to Cuomo’s habit of wearing a leather bomber jacket in public appearances during the pandemic.

    Kirtzman also presented a rehash of his October take, submitting that “the indisputable fact is that as governor [Cuomo] accomplished major things that his predecessors could not,” and that he “has been able to capitalize on the credibility he built up as an effective leader pre-scandal.”

    Gelinas continued to hammer on the importance of centrism, saying that if New York City votes for Cuomo, “it won’t be because of ignorance of [his scandals], but because they feel there isn’t a better supposedly centrist alternative.”

    Right now, polling shows that most people simply don’t know enough about the other mayoral candidates to have an opinion about them, but of those that do, they give three of his five closest challengers higher net approval ratings than Cuomo.

    And in terms of what New York voters want, it’s far from clear that centrism wins the day. The consistent top issues for New Yorkers are affordability—particularly housing—and safety. “Affordability” for New Yorkers is largely about housing costs, and the fact that real estate money has been pouring into Cuomo’s campaign bodes poorly for his ability to bring those costs down. “Safety” is driven primarily by fearmongering media coverage that rarely acknowledges that crime is actually near historic lows (FAIR.org, 7/25/24), but there is a visible mental health and homelessness crisis that also spurs fear and concern among residents.

    As the Times itself (1/12/16) reported years ago, Cuomo worsened the city’s homelessness crisis as part of his commitment to fiscal austerity. Rather than raising taxes on the wealthy, he canceled the city’s access to a federal housing assistance program in 2011, costing the city nearly $100 million in funds and growing the city’s unhoused population by 16,000 in the next three years. Cuomo also sharply reduced the number of state-run psychiatric beds, shifting more of the seriously mentally ill population back onto the streets and subways.

    Screwed over NYC

    Politico: Cuomo’s billion dollar ‘boondoggle’ with Elon Musk

    Politico (3/22/25) examines Cuomo’s “ties to a person loathed by many Democrats”—Elon Musk. 

    That’s far from the only stain on Cuomo’s record that the Times has reported on in the past but now seems to have conveniently forgotten. For instance, New York City is desperate for an alternative to their hopelessly corrupt current mayor, but Cuomo has his own history of corruption. During his time as governor, Cuomo established an anti-corruption commission, and then proceeded to impede any of its investigations that implicated him (New York Times, 7/23/14).

    And Cuomo’s “Buffalo Billion” project, meant to revitalize the post-industrial western New York city by funneling tax breaks and state grants to economic development projects, quickly became “one of the most sweeping corruption scandals to ever rock a New York governor’s office”—including a massive giveaway to Elon Musk and his family for promised jobs that never fully materialized (Politico, 3/22/25).

    But it’s no surprise the Times engages in selective amnesia over Cuomo, as New York City’s centrist neoliberal paper has a natural affinity for the centrist neoliberal politician. Cuomo’s barely a Democrat: As governor, he spent years supporting a posse of turncoat Democratic state legislators who caucused with the Republicans, to allow the minority party to block progressive legislation Cuomo didn’t want to see cross his desk (New Republic, 5/12/17).

    He cut pensions for government workers, withheld hundreds of millions of dollars of school funding, and cut Medicaid in the midst of the pandemic.

    He also specifically screwed over New York City, even aside from robbing city public transportation funds. In 2019, Cuomo singled out the city for a reduction in the standard state reimbursement for the local health department, so that New York City gets proportionally less than every other municipality in the state—costing the city up to $90 million a year (HealthBeat, 2/27/25). And he tried to cut a third of the state’s funding for the city’s public university system, which would have devastated it (Jacobin, 3/3/25).

    ‘Withering criticism’ 

    Daily News: Cuomo Financial Support in NYC Mayoral Race Features a Number of Players From Trump World

    The Daily News (3/22/25) examined Cuomo’s reluctance to criticize Trump—and the backing he gets from wealthy Trump supporters.

    Another major local paper, the New York Daily News, has prominently included straightforward descriptions of Cuomo’s scandals in its coverage. In its article (3/1/25) on Cuomo’s entrance to the race, for instance, it explained:

    He resigned as governor in 2021 after being accused of sexually harassing 13 women, allegations the US Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division corroborated in a bombshell settlement last year. Cuomo has denied ever committing misconduct, but said upon resigning that he wanted to “deeply apologize” for making “people feel uncomfortable.”

    Cuomo has also for years faced withering criticism over his decision to understate the number of New Yorkers who died from Covid-19 in nursing homes in the state after he enacted a policy in early 2020 prohibiting such facilities from denying entry for residents diagnosed with the deadly virus.

    And under the print-edition headline “Cuomo Goes Easy on the President” (3/22/25), the paper covered Cuomo’s reluctance to criticize Trump in light of donation records they dug up showing tens of thousands of campaign dollars coming from wealthy “Trump donors and associates.” The Times has done no such digging.

    Meanwhile, the Murdoch-owned New York Post seems happy to aim its disinformation machine at Cuomo. Reporting on the same nursing home anniversary event as the Times, the Post (3/23/25) wrote that Cuomo’s nursing home directive “by many estimates resulted in the deaths of about 15,000 nursing-home residents.” FAIR is aware of no credible estimates that Cuomo’s directive killed 15,000, as that is the total nursing home death toll. Even Cuomo’s most vocal critics—those with any respect for truth and facts, anyway—don’t claim his order was responsible for every single nursing home death.

    ‘Strong ethical standards’

    Hill: Cuomo seeks to woo centrists in NYC mayor’s race

    The Hill (3/8/25) presented Cuomo as an alternative to Mayor Eric Adams, someone who can tout “his leadership bona fides as Adams finds himself mired in controversy.”

    While the Times‘ local competitors aren’t pulling their punches, its Cuomo-friendly reporting is finding some company among national outlets.

    The Hill (3/8/25), in what read as a puff piece about Cuomo’s campaign to “woo centrists,” didn’t mention his nursing home or sexual harassment scandals until the 27th paragraph—a curious choice, especially considering that the 10th paragraph of the piece cited a poll that found city voters’ top priority was “strong ethical standards.” The Hill framed only Adams as the one “facing the major stumbling block of ethical questions.”

    Politico‘s report (3/1/25) on Cuomo’s entrance to the race seemed determined to absolve him of his misdeeds, cherry-picking evidence to paint a picture of innocence:

    Like Trump, Cuomo’s return to electoral office seemed improbable nearly four years ago when he left the governor’s mansion amid cascading scandals.

    Still, the former governor’s allies believe he’s been vindicated in the years since he left office. One of the women who accused Cuomo of wrongdoing dropped her sexual harassment lawsuit against him and several prosecutors have declined to bring charges against him. A Justice Department inspector general last year determined the federal government’s probe of Cuomo’s nursing home policies launched under the first Trump administration was politically motivated.

    In a piece critical of Democratic Party support for Cuomo, the Atlantic‘s David Graham (3/3/25) wrote, “If, in order to curb the far left, Democrats like [Rep. Ritchie] Torres are willing to embrace an alleged sex pest who tried to cover up seniors’ deaths, is it worth it?”

    The same might be asked of some in the corporate media, with the New York Times at the top of the list.

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

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • As Trump politicizes human rights support, we’re taking cues from Kenya

    Right now, Kenya is reeling. The Trump administration’s overnight suspension of USAID funding is already profoundly changing people’s lives. This funding went to programs supporting access to clean water, treatment of infectious disease and the day-to-day operation of community-based organizations standing up for the rights of the country’s marginalized communities. By one estimate, Kenya will …

    Source

    This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.

  • Corporate Media Minimize Massive Hands Off! Protests

     

    After the biggest anti-Trump protests since the 2017 Women’s March, many major media outlets seemed intent on downplaying the size and significance of the massive demonstration of opposition.

    The Hands Off! protests took place on April 5 in 1,400 locations across the country, with solidarity rallies in Europe and Canada. Volunteer organizers said the events were aimed at opposing billionaire government and corruption; cuts to Social Security, Medicaid and other vital programs; and attacks on immigrants, trans people and other  vulnerable groups. At a conservative minimum, hundreds of thousands of people turned out to resist the Trump administration’s many assaults on democracy; organizers estimate the total reached into the millions.

    Burying the news

    WaPo: Thousands Gather in DC as protesters rally across the US against Trump.

    The Washington Post (4/6/25) relegated protesters “across the US” to the Metro section.

    Despite the scale and significance of the protests, neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post had stories about them on their front pages the next day.

    The Washington Post (4/6/25) had a thumbnail at the bottom of the front page with the blurb “Metro: Thousands gather in DC as protesters rally across the US against Trump.”

    The New York Times (4/6/25) had a photo below the fold that was captioned: “A Day of Protest: People gathered around the country, including in Asheville, NC, to voice opposition to Trump administration policies. Page 18.”

    New York Times: A Day of Protest

    “People gathered around the country” was how the New York Times (4/6/25) downplayed the massive wave of protest.

    A Times blurb promoting the story in a roundup of stories about “The Trump Administration’s First Hundred Days” minimized the scale and seriousness of the event:

    Anti-Trump Protests: Demonstrators packed the streets in several cities to bemoan what they considered a lack of strong opposition to the president and his policies.

    The verb “bemoan” is clearly belittling, and the focus of both organizers and participants was obviously on Trump (and Musk), not on the weakness of their opponents. And since when is 1,400 “several”?

    The downplaying of the story couldn’t be explained by a lack of audience interest; indeed, people seemed extremely eager to hear about the protests. The protest coverage buried in the Times‘ print edition was the paper’s most-clicked article online that day, according to the paper’s Morning newsletter (4/7/25).

    Little broadcast coverage

    ABC: Worldwide Anti-Trump Protests

    ABC‘s Good Morning America (4/6/25) offered protesters a few soundbites to speak for themselves.

    The major broadcast networks gave the massive protests only passing coverage in most of their programming. On ABC, World News Tonight (4/5/25) gave only 20 seconds to a correspondent in Washington, DC, to explain the signs she was seeing. The network’s morning show, Good Morning America (4/6/25), offered a bit more, with a few soundbites given to protesters to speak for themselves. In a recent FAIR study (4/4/25) of protest coverage, ABC stood out for its blackout of nationwide anti-Trump protests that, even before this past weekend, already outnumbered protests in the same time period during Trump’s first term.

    CBS Face the Nation (4/6/25) told viewers that “tens of thousands of people took to the streets yesterday from Washington, DC, to Minnesota and Columbus, Ohio, protesting many of Trump’s policies, Elon Musk and tariffs.” CBS Weekend News (4/6/25) included a short description of the protests only in the context of Trump’s tariffs, airing a soundbite of a protester speaking against them. CBS Sunday Morning (4/6/25) had another, even briefer mention of the protests, in an interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders.

    A report on NBC Nightly News (4/5/25) mentioned “huge turnouts” and “protests in nearly every state.” The item featured several short soundbites from protesters. Meet the Press (4/6/25) also mentioned the protests briefly, with images.

    Undercounting dissent

    AP: Protesters tee off against Trump and Musk in “Hands Off!” rallies across the U.S.

    AP (via Politico, 4/5/25) reported that “thousands of protesters assailed Trump.”

    NPR All Things Considered (4/5/25) told listeners that “thousands” gathered to protest Trump and Musk. So did the Associated Press (4/5/25)—whose credibility in the crowd-counting department could be judged by the article’s claim that the 2017 Women’s March also only saw “thousands.” (An effort at the time by the Washington Post to tally the US participants came up with a range of 3 million to 5 million—2/7/17.)

    ABC World News Tonight (4/5/25) announced that “thousands” gathered on the National Mall in DC.

    Over an otherwise commendable piece that compiled interviews with protesters in 11 cities and towns across the country, a USA Today subhead (4/5/25) also estimated “thousands.” It did so despite the fact that the piece led by reporting that “tens of thousands of people are gathering Saturday at rallies across the country”—itself a clear underestimate. The piece later explained that “more than 500,000 people have RSVP’d to attend” the protests, and that “protesters stretched as far as the eye could see along the National Mall and the crowd had been flowing toward the base of the Washington monument for hours.”

    Given that there were some 1,400 separate protest events, it’s laughable to suggest that only “thousands” attended. Even if only 10 people showed up to each event, you’d have “tens of thousands”—but every event the paper reported on from small towns and cities (like Stuart, Florida) had at least several hundred if not thousands, while the DC and NYC events appeared to have at least 100,000 participants apiece (American Crisis, 4/8/25). Boston’s protest was reported locally to have involved “nearly 100,000” (CBS‘s WBZ, 4/6/25; NBC Boston, 4/7/25).

    It would not be difficult for news organizations with resources like the national newspapers or major TV networks to produce credible estimates of crowd numbers at significant events. The fact that they don’t bother to do so reflects the scant importance these outlets place on the role of protests in the democratic process. Corporate media journalists are apt to regard protesters as akin to spectators rushing onto the field during a game, interfering with an activity best left to professionals.

    Better reporting?

    CNN: ‘Hands Off!’ protesters across US rally against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk

    CNN.com (4/5/25; “updated” 4/6/25) edited this piece to change an initial “millions of people took part in protests” to a ridiculous “scores.”

    CNN stood out among major corporate outlets for not underestimating the size and scope of the protests, with coverage of the protests in most of its shows over the weekend. The network repeatedly cited organizers’ estimates of at least 1,400 protest events across all 50 states, totaling “millions” of attendees (e.g., CNN This Morning, 4/6/25; CNN Inside Politics, 4/6/25). CNN correspondents in multiple US cities described the messages they heard and saw, and they also interviewed protesters on-air to let them speak for themselves.

    CNN‘s online account (4/5/25) of the protests, however, originally reported that “millions of people took part in protests against President Donald Trump and Elon Musk across all 50 states and globally on Saturday,” but was stealth-edited on April 6 to ludicrously claim that “scores of people took part in protests.” We would be interested in hearing CNN‘s explanation for this self-evidently absurd alteration.

    On CNN‘s Newsroom (4/6/25), as an indication of heightened interest in Trump opposition, senior data reporter Harry Enten pointed out that Google searches for the word “protests” were

    up 1,200% versus a year ago…. We see that the percent in number of folks who are searching for protests, interested in going out in those protests is finally matching what we saw in January of 2017, if not exceeding it.

    Axios (4/5/25) also reported organizers’ “millions” estimate, including their 500,000 RSVPs and their reports from the field that turnout was far exceeding those RSVPs. (For instance, they reported getting 2,000 RSVPs for Raleigh, NC, where they ultimately saw some 45,000 in attendance.)

    Some local papers in the Gannett chain (which also owns USA Today) usefully offered readers information about the protests planned for their states before they took place (e.g., Columbus Dispatch, 4/2/25; Florida’s TCPalm.com, 4/5/25). These stories  included why people were protesting, and the times and locations of every scheduled Hands Off! protest in their respective states.

    Such coverage treats readers as citizens, and protesting as a basic part of a democratic system—not as an inconsequential sideshow, which is how it’s generally presented in corporate media.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • The Resistance Will Not Be Televised 

     

    Waging Nonviolence: Resistance is alive and well in the United States

    Waging Nonviolence (3/19/25)

    “Resistance is alive and well in the United States.”

    So declared the headline of a March 19 article on the nonprofit news site Waging Nonviolence. Authors Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman and Soha Hammam, political scientists at Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, outlined how—despite a common belief that grassroots public resistance against the depredations of the Trump Administration is lacking or lukewarm—protests are actually rising dramatically.

    These demonstrations, the piece said, “may not look like the mass marches of 2017, but research shows they are far more numerous and frequent—while also shifting to more powerful forms of resistance.”

    They note that while

    the reconfigured Peoples’ March of 2025—held on January 18—saw lower turnout than the 2017 Women’s March, that date also saw the most protests in a single day for over a year. And since January 22, we’ve seen more than twice as many street protests than took place during the same period eight years ago.

    The Crowd Counting Consortium, founded in 2017 to collect “publicly available data on political crowds reported in the United States,” tracked more than 2,000 protests in February alone.

    Waging Nonviolence; Counts of US Protest Events, 2017 vs. 2025

    Chart: Waging Nonviolence

    The acts of collective resistance documented by the CCC—as well as by other activism-tracking initiatives, such the “We the People Dissent” Substack—span every state. They focus on advocacy for diverse constituencies and issues under attack from the current administration, including public education, Medicaid and reproductive, immigrant, Palestinian, labor and LGBTQ rights.

    Their common thread is opposition to Trump’s fascistic ideology and rapid rash of likely unconstitutional executive orders, such as freezing federal budget outlays approved by Congress, the mass firing of government workers and the dismantling of institutions by the “Department” of Government Efficiency by unelected “adviser” Elon Musk.

    But if you relied on articles and broadcasts from the legacy national news media during early 2025, you wouldn’t know the extent of grassroots action prompted by this discontent. A FAIR examination of five major outlets found that coverage of anti-Trump/pro-democracy protests roughly overlapping CCC’s study timeframe (January 22 to February 26) was minimal, and downplayed the significance of this opposition, especially around the inauguration.

    Mostly tepid coverage 

    FAIR examined reporting on three organized protest events occurring concurrently in Washington, DC, and across the US: The People’s March (January 18), the “50501” demonstrations in all state capitals (February 5) and the Presidents Day protests, sometimes dubbed “No Kings Day” (February 17). Using the Nexis news database and the outlets’ websites, we looked at the New York Times, Washington Post and USA Today, and at ABC World News Tonight, Good Morning America, CBS Evening News and CBS Mornings—the top morning and evening national news programs on ABC and CBS—within four days of each of these dates. (NBC was not included in the study because its transcripts are no longer available on Nexis.)

    Broadcast coverage was abysmal. None of the four network shows in our study ran any reports focused on any of the three protest events. ABC World News Tonight mentioned none of the events, and GMA referred to only one of them in passing. In their coverage of the January 18 protests, CBS Evening News and Mornings gave more coverage to speculation about violent protest than they did to actual (nonviolent) protest.

    The newspapers had more coverage, but their stories tended to be relatively short, buried deep in the paper, or in the form of wire-service reprints. Longer pieces often downplayed the protests’ size and disparaged their significance. The Times and Post tended to focus on DC-based protests, whereas USA Today offered more thorough and accurate articles about the growing nationwide resistance movement.

    The People’s March

    The January 18 march, centered in Washington, DC, near Inauguration Day, was a reboot of the attendance record–setting 2017 Women’s March spearheaded by feminist nonprofits. The People’s March had a broadened focus on peaceful organizing around a range of progressive issues, and included solidarity actions in every state.

    According to CCC data (available for download at the site), on January 18 alone, 352 protests, rallies, demonstrations or marches opposing Donald Trump and/or administration policy were recorded across the country. Though dispersed in a way the Women’s March was not, tens of thousands nonetheless participated in hundreds of acts of protest and civil disobedience around the country.

    More than 200 additional on-the-street actions occurred on January 19–20, many linked to Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but also including messages against Trump’s agenda, according to CCC data.

    We found no mention of any of the People’s Marches on the ABC shows in our study, and no dedicated stories about the protests on the CBS shows we examined. In two segments focused on the incoming administration, CBS mentioned protests generically, only in passing, and focusing solely on those in the nation’s capital.

    After noting that “today, thousands of people could be seen protesting the president-elect in Washington, DC,” reporter Jericka Duncan (CBS Evening News, 1/18/25) devoted more time to security measures around potential “violent protests”—a concern repeated in a January 20 segment on CBS Mornings (1/20/25).

    ‘Accommodation and submission’

    NYT: Defiance Is Out, Deference Is In: Trump Returns to a Different Washington

    New York Times (1/19/25)

    The newspapers studied all covered the People’s Protests, but the Times and Post downplayed their significance. The Times (1/18/25) published “‘Angry and Frustrated’: Thousands Protest Trump Days Before His Inauguration,” a thousand-word story that captured the mood and nationwide extent of concern expressed by the events, but made a point of noting that the DC march “paled in comparison to the Women’s March.” It was buried on page A25.

    The following day, the Times published a longer (1,600-word) piece on how “The Trump Resistance Won’t Be Putting on ‘Pussy Hats’ This Time,” based on interviews with middle-American activists. The article alleged that “the Democrats who mobilized against Donald J. Trump in 2017 feel differently about protesting his return,” by which they meant defeated and ambivalent. It asserted that “there are few signs of the sort of mass public protest that birthed ‘the resistance’ the last time [Trump] took office.”

    There was also a 1,600-word Washington Memo (1/19/25) headlined “Defiance Is Out, Deference Is In: Trump Returns to a Different Washington”:

    Unlike the last time President-elect Donald J. Trump took the oath of office eight years ago, the bristling tension and angry defiance have given way to accommodation and submission. The Resistance of 2017 has faded into the Resignation of 2025.

    WaPo: How resistance to Trump may look different in his second administration

    Washington Post (1/17/25)

    The Washington Post had two pieces. The predictive “How Resistance to Trump May Look Different in His Second Administration” (1/17/25) came in at around 1,800 words, while the paper gave coverage of the actual DC event, “People’s March Protests Trump” (1/19/25), only 1,400 words. Both were by Ellie Silverman, its dedicated activism and protest movements reporter.

    Like the Times’ articles, the former piece was focused on dispirited activists and how the resistance supposedly ain’t what it used to be. It described a “feeling of resignation in the lead-up to Trump’s second administration [that] is a stark departure from 2017, when more than 1 million people took to the streets.” It added that “some demonstrators are sticking to the sidelines,” and warned that some experts “fear that whatever protests do emerge could be even more disruptive and potentially violent.”

    The straightforward latter story was more nuanced, focused on interviews with protesters on the diverse issues that brought them there, who maintained that showing up was more important than rally size. However, it didn’t mention that the protest was part of a larger, nationwide mobilization.

    USA Today‘s piece on the People’s March (“Thousands Travel to Washington for People’s March Ahead of Trump Inauguration,” 1/18/25), like those of the other papers, covered only the DC demonstration, and dwelt on its smaller-than-2017 size. But it also portrayed fired-up citizens who made a point of being there to take a stand, rather than trying to tell a story of, as the Times said, “accommodation and submission.”

    The 50501 protests

    The 50501 protests, short for “50 protests, 50 states, one day,” were the brainchild of grassroots activists on Reddit wanting to take “rapid response” political actions against Trump and Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint for overhauling the federal government Trump and Musk seem to be following. Using mainly social media and the hashtags #BuildTheResistance and #50501, the organizers spurred others to organize and publicize demonstrations in all US state capitals on February 5. According to CCC data, some 159 “50501” or related protests occurred that day (exclusive of counter-protests), from Sacramento, Calif., to Augusta, Maine.

    We found no coverage of the 50501 protests in the Washington Post, or on the CBS or ABC shows.

    In its sole article, “Thousands Across the US Protest Trump Policies,” the New York Times (2/5/25) devoted only about 600 words to the nationwide rallies. Sara Ruberg’s story accurately portrayed them as “a grassroots effort to kick off a national movement,” quoting a Michigan state representative: “This was organized by people, for people, for the protection of all people…. There will be…more things for regular everyday Americans to plug into.” However, Ruberg depicted the decentralized, quickly organized efforts as something not to take too seriously:

    Whether the protests will amount to a sustained anti-Trump movement is yet to be seen.

    In the weeks following the election, Democrats were not able to come together under a single message as they did after the 2016 election, when Mr. Trump won the first time. Even the grassroots efforts that once organized large national marches and protests after Mr. Trump’s first inauguration have struggled to unite again.

    The piece also said the events only occurred in “a dozen states”; CCC data confirms organizers’ claims that they spanned all 50 states, plus DC. An additional 1:20-minute video of protesters chanting appeared in the online version of this story, featuring passionate slogans like “Stand up, fight back,” “Stop the coup!” and “Impeach Trump” that belie the notion that activists have no uniting message.

    USA Today: 'People are feeling galvanized': Anti-Trump protesters rally in cities across US

    USA Today (2/5/25)

    At 2,500 words, USA Today‘s feature (2/5/25) on the 50501 demos, “‘People Are Feeling Galvanized’: Anti-Trump Protesters Rally in Cities Across US,” was by far the longest and most thorough of any in the study periods. Its lead set the protests in a broader context:

    Groups opposed to actions by the Trump administration in recent weeks converged on cities Wednesday across the US to loudly register their discontent, days after widespread rallies and street marches against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.

    Integrating reporting from DC and 10 other capitals and cities (Austin, Salem, Indianapolis, Harrisburg, Des Moines, Columbus, Denver, Detroit, Palm Springs, Calif., and Greenville, S.C.), reporters John Bacon, Karissa Waddick and Jorge L. Ortiz discussed the major concerns of residents in each place, provided background on 50501 and Project 2025, and quoted marginalized people targeted by Trump, such as a trans woman and a refugee from Azerbaijan, along with supportive politicians and the AFL-CIO. The comments included captured the sense of seriousness and commitment of the rallies. It quoted 70-year-old Stewart Rabitz:

    “I think a lot of people are now realizing that walking around with signs, people got to get their hands dirty.”… Asked whether he feared retribution, Rabitz said: “You can’t be afraid. I’m willing to be the first one. I’ll be the Tiananmen tank guy.”

    No Kings Day

    ABC: Stop the Coup

    GMA (2/18/25)

    The 50501 movement also spearheaded nationwide events, some dubbed “No Kings Day,” less than two weeks later,  on February 17, to protest Trump’s undemocratic actions and monarchical leadership, coinciding with Presidents’ Day. The CCC tracked 207 such actions on February 17 (excluding a few counter-protests).

    Once again, CBS and ABC had no reports focused on the protests. CBS gave them one sentence on CBS Mornings (2/18/25), which led with the controversy surrounding DOGE’s access to private information: “Protests called ‘No Kings on Presidents’ Day’ against Musk and President Trump’s actions were held across the country yesterday, including outside the US Capitol.” ABC (GMA, 2/18/25), too, briefly mentioned “protests popping up in cities across the country,” even including short clips of protest footage—but also used the demonstrations as a brief segue to discuss DOGE cuts and access to sensitive data.

    New York Times coverage included one story (2/17/25), provocatively titled “Thousands Gather on Presidents’ Day to Call Trump a Tyrant.” It focused on the DC march, but did give a sense of the nationwide sweep of actions, noting that protestors framed themselves as patriots fighting tyranny. The piece acknowledged that while

    Democratic leaders and operatives [are] worried about alienating voters in reacting hastily without reflecting first on why they lost in 2024. Many activists…have voiced frustration at the lack of a more aggressive stance.

    The piece, however, was buried on page A18.

    For its part, the Post devoted only one 500-word AP dispatch (2/17/25) to the events, “‘No Kings on Presidents Day’ Rings Out From Protests Against Trump and Musk.” But the subhead did note, “Protesters against President Donald Trump and his policies organized demonstrations in all 50 states for the second time in two weeks.”

    USA Today: President's Day Protests Rally Against Trump Administration Policies

    USA Today (2/17/25)

    USA Today published a photo gallery (2/17/25) and a 900-word story (2/17/25) about the Presidents’ Day protests, focused more on regional actions that “swept across the nation” than on DC. Providing important context, “‘Critical Moment in History’: Protests Across US Target Trump, Musk” (2/17/25) led with this:

    Groups opposed to President Donald Trump’s agenda and his top adviser Elon Musk converged on cities across the nation Monday to express outrage with slogans such as “Not My President’s Day” and “No King’s Day.”

    The rallies, led by the 50501 Movement and other organizations, come less than two weeks after the last round of widespread rallies and street marches.

    This broader perspective on the resistance demonstrations may be thanks to the middle-of-the-road paper’s less-insular focus: It covers all 50 states, serves a more diverse audience, and utilizes reporting from its partner papers across the country.

    Another mass mobilization

    On April 5, yet another grassroots, mass mobilization—organized around the taglines “Hands Off” and “People’s Veto”—is planned for the streets of DC and across all 50 states. Will the legacy media be there and give it the broad and contextualized coverage it deserves? Will they more proactively cover the increasingly localized demonstrations and other forms of political participation—or leave that task to the rapidly shrinking pool of local and regional news outlets? For if CCC’s data is accurate (and it may be an undercount), the nascent pro-democracy movement deserves its own dedicated beat.

    Research assistance: Wilson Korik

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • The Real Scandal of Yemen Bombing Is Not That They Used the Wrong App

     

    Atlantic: The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

    The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg (3/24/25) complained “the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it”—an odd criticism for a journalist to make about government officials.

    The Houthis, formally known as Ansar Allah, are the de facto government in northwest Yemen. The group began as a religious movement among the Zaydis, an idiosyncratic branch of Shia Islam, before taking a political-military turn in the 2000s. Since 2014, Ansar Allah has been a powerful faction in the country’s civil war, fighting against the Republic of Yemen, the weak but Saudi-backed internationally recognized government. With the war on hold since a 2022 ceasefire agreement, the Houthis now control the capital city of Sanaa, and govern the majority of Yemen’s population.

    Beginning on March 15, the US military began an operation that has killed dozens in Yemen and injured over a hundred, including women and children, in which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth frankly acknowledged the leveling of a civilian building.

    US planning for the operation was revealed in articles by the Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg (3/24/25, 3/26/25), which disclosed that the journalist had been inadvertently added to a Signal group chat that top administration officials were using to discuss bombing plans—an inclusion that was not noticed by any of the intended participants. This prompted a furor in establishment papers like the New York Times and Washington Post, centering on the Trump administration’s use of an insecure messaging app to discuss classified matters.

    While leading newspapers were not wrong to skewer the Trump administration for the use of a commercial messaging app to communicate confidential information—which, it should be remembered, allows officials to illegally destroy records of their deliberations (New York Times, 3/27/25)—the focus on Washington palace intrigue over the bombing of women and children is a stark reminder of corporate media priorities.

    ‘It’s now collapsed’

    "The first target – their top missile guy – we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed."

    The part of the Trump administration group chat where they discuss the actual bombing needed no comment, according to the New York Times (3/26/25).

    Since news of the Signal leak broke, the Times has published at least three dozen stories and opinion pieces focusing on the scandal. One of those many pieces was an annotated transcript of the Signal chat (3/25/25). Most messages in the chat featured explanatory notes from journalists, some messages with multiple notes. One message from national security adviser Michael Waltz the Times chose not to annotate: “The first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed.”

    The “collapsed” building in question was bombed by the United States, killing at least 13 civilians, according to the Yemen Data Project. This is a war crime. While alternative media outlets have been quick to call these strikes out for what they are (e.g., Drop Site, 3/16/25; Truthout, 3/26/25; Democracy Now!, 3/26/25), the Times and the Washington Post chose not to go into questions of international law.

    Amidst the dozens of stories on the Signal scandal, the Times published five stories focused on the strikes (3/15/25, 3/16/25, 3/19/25, 3/26/25, 3/27/25). None of these stories entertain the possibility of US strikes violating international law. Only one story (3/16/25) made mention of the phrase “war crime,” which was in a final paragraph quote from Hezbollah, with the group described by the Times as “another armed proxy for Iran in the region.”

    The only mentions of children or “civilian” casualties were moderated by innuendo. The unfair convention of citing the “Hamas-run” health ministry—a formulation that deliberately downplays the death and destruction caused by US weaponry—has extended to Yemen, with both the Times (3/16/25, 3/19/25) and the Post (3/15/25) citing the “Houthi-run Health Ministry in Yemen” for casualty figures.

    ‘No credible reports’

    WaPo: Pentagon says operation targeting Yemen’s Houthis is open-ended

    The Washington Post‘s Missy Ryan (3/17/25) doesn’t question the Pentagon’s claim that there were “no credible reports of civilian deaths” after the attack on Yemen.

     

    The Washington Post seemed similarly unable to bring international law into their reporting. The furthest the Post (3/15/25) was willing to go was relaying that the Houthis “claimed the strikes targeted residential areas and targeted civilians.” In the Post’s March 17 story on the US offensive, the only mention of civilian deaths was US Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich’s claim that “despite Houthi assertions, there had been no credible reports of civilian deaths in the ongoing US strikes.”

    Even Ishaan Tharoor (Washington Post, 3/26/25), whose column on the Yemen strikes was both more humane and more geopolitically realistic than anything else published by the Post, chose not to bring in any mention of international law.

    The fact is, unnecessarily bombing a civilian building, with civilians inside, is a war crime. A civilian building is any building not immediately being used for military purposes. Even if by some interpretation, a military officer’s girlfriend’s building could be construed as a military target, the attacker is responsible for ensuring that any civilian losses are not excessive compared to military gain (the “proportionality” rule), and ensuring that “all feasible precautions must be taken to avoid, and in any event to minimize, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.”

    In this case, the “military” nature of the target is dubious at best. Further, the Houthis had not attacked US ships since December, before Trump’s inauguration (Responsible Statecraft, 3/21/25). When the Houthis attempted to respond to the recent airstrikes, a US military officer mocked the Houthis’ “level of incompetence,” claiming their retaliatory missile fire “missed by a hundred miles” (New York Times, 3/19/25). In other words, Houthi missiles are not such an imminent threat that killing over a dozen Yemeni civilians might be “proportional” to the military gain of killing their top missileer.

    Finally, “all feasible precautions” were not taken to protect civilian life. Based on Waltz’s message, the military was tracking this officer, and chose to kill him only once he entered a building with civilians inside.

    As the Times itself (1/16/23) has reported, “it is considered a war crime to deliberately or recklessly attack civilian populations.” The Washington Post editorial board (7/2/23) agreed, citing “large-scale destruction of civilian infrastructure” and “methodical violence against…noncombatants” as violations of international law. But these confident media assertions are in reference to Russia, an official enemy of the United States.

    The strike against the “missile guy” is just one example of the indiscriminate bombing with which the US punishes Yemen. This recent offensive by the United States has destroyed plenty of residences, and airstrikes have hit a Saada cancer hospital twice (Drop Site, 3/16/25; Cradle, 3/26/25).

    ‘A more aggressive campaign’

    NYT: Houthis Vow Retaliation Against U.S., Saying Yemen Strikes Killed at Least 53

    After the US bombs an apartment building, killing more than a dozen civilians, the New York Times (3/16/25) turns to sources who declare that a “more aggressive” approach is needed.

    Houthi-controlled Yemen sits on one side of the Bab-el-Mandeb, a narrow strait between the Arabian Peninsula and Africa that is a choke point for shipping between Asia and Europe. The Houthis announced in October 2023 that in opposition to the war on Gaza, they would use their strategic position to attack ships “linked to Israel” (Al Jazeera, 12/19/23). The Houthis have succeeded in disrupting Red Sea trade to the point that Israel’s only port on the Red Sea, the Port of Eilat, was forced to declare bankruptcy (Middle East Monitor, 7/19/24). As revealed by the Signal chat leak, the main motivation for the new air campaign on Yemen was to “send a message” and reopen the shipping lanes (New York Times, 3/25/25).

    As US bombs fell on Yemen, the New York Times indulged in a variety of foreign policy reporting cliches. A day after the strikes began, the Times (3/16/25) took a survey of what should be done about the supposed threat the Houthis posed in the Middle East:

    Some military analysts and former American commanders said on Sunday that a more aggressive campaign against the Houthis, particularly against Houthi leadership, was necessary to degrade the group’s ability to threaten international shipping.

    The only voices the Times offered as a counterpoint were spokesmen for Iran’s foreign ministry, Russia’s foreign ministry and Hezbollah. When the only people condemning the air campaign are America’s worst enemies, it’s not hard for the reader to see who they’re supposed to side with.

    The fact is, the Houthis have withstood a decade of strikes by Saudi Arabia and the United States with no signs of faltering. Indeed, as Jennifer Kavanagh (Responsible Statecraft, 3/17/25) has pointed out, the Houthis’ “willingness to take on American attacks lend them credibility and win them popular support.” In a story whose subheadline mentions a claim that children were killed, the Times is irresponsible to present the only solution as more bombs, more aggression, more killing.

    ‘Iranian-backed’

    Guardian: US supplied bomb that killed 40 children on Yemen school bus

    The US has long been implicated in a string of atrocities in Yemen (Guardian, 8/19/18).

    In each of their five stories on the strikes, the New York Times referred to the “Iran-backed” or “Iranian-backed” Houthis, playing into the false notion that the Houthis are little more than Iran’s lapdogs in the Arabian Peninsula. Even the Washington Post, to their credit, was able to find a distinction between an ally of Iran and a proxy (e.g. 3/15/25, 3/27/25).

    The Times also had a case of amnesia over the circumstances of Yemen’s protracted civil war and famine. Two stories (3/15/25, 3/27/25) mentioned the Houthi victory over a “Saudi-led coalition,” culminating in a 2022 truce, still holding tenuously. What was left unsaid was the US role in that conflict.

    During the Yemeni civil war, the United States provided Saudi Arabia with plenty of firepower and logistical support to prosecute their brutal military intervention. The Department of Defense gave over $50 billion in military aid to Saudi Arabia and the UAE between 2015 and 2021 (Responsible Statecraft, 3/28/23). Despite campaign promises to the contrary, the Saudi blockade and accompanying humanitarian crisis were intact over two years into President Biden’s term of office.

    Infamous airstrikes using US-made weapons include a wedding bombing that killed 21, including 11 children, a school bus bombing that killed 40 elementary school-aged boys along with 11 adults, and a market bombing that killed 107 people, including 25 children, just to name a few (CNN, 9/18; Guardian, 8/19/18; Human Rights Watch, 4/7/16). The continuous provision of weapons, training and logistical support amounted to complicity in war crimes (Human Rights Watch, 4/7/22).

    Deadly effects

    NYT: 85,000 Children in Yemen May Have Died of Starvation

    The Yemen where tens of thousands of children died as a result of a US-backed blockade (New York Times, 11/21/18) seems like a different country than the one discussed in a bumbling group chat.

    The civil war in Yemen, which began in late 2014, has killed hundreds of thousands. From 2015–22, Saudi-led, US-backed airstrikes killed nearly 9,000 civilians, including over 1,400 children.

    More deadly than the bombs and other weapons of war are the indirect effects of the war, namely disease and famine. A 2021 UN report estimated that 60% of the 377,000 deaths in the Yemeni civil war came from indirect causes (France24, 11/23/21). By 2018, Save the Children reported that by a “conservative estimate,” 85,000 children had died from hunger (New York Times, 11/21/18). Today, nearly 40% of the Yemeni population are undernourished, and nearly half of children under five are malnourished.

    This ongoing famine started during the war, and has been enforced by a Saudi blockade. While the 2022 truce allowed a trickle of international shipping to Houthi-controlled Yemen, cuts in humanitarian aid have kept Yemenis in precarity (The Nation, 7/27/23).

    Since the Yemeni civil war began, not enough attention has been paid to the compounding crises in the region: the civil war itself, the accompanying famine and the Biden administration’s own ill-advised bombing campaign. As juicy as one more Trump administration blunder might be, newsrooms should not lose track of the fact that this military offensive, just beginning, is already stained by violations of international law.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Suffer Together, Celebrate Together: How Farmers Fight for Survival in Thailand

       

    Source

    This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.

  • Upcoming Greenbelt Plan Review Needs Clear Guardrails

    Recent findings from Ontario’s Integrity Commissioner are a timely reminder of why we need to place clear guardrails in this year’s legally mandated review of the Greenbelt Plan. Without strict terms of reference that forbid removal of current Greenbelt land or weakening of its current protections, Ontarians have reason to worry the review process will be little more than a new way to enable the same kinds of  “land-swaps” that were the subject of the scathing Auditor General’s report and which remain the subject of an RCMP investigation.

    At its core, the ongoing Greenbelt scandal is about the government stripping away permanent protection from Greenbelt land at the request of sprawl developers, all while falsely representing the removals (and other opening of farmland, forests and wetlands to sprawl) as part of a strategy to increase housing supply.  

    These claims were disingenuous because the Ontario government already knew at the time that there was a huge amount of undeveloped land (roughly 350km2 in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area alone) already designated for building within towns and cities, all of which had been sitting unused for years. In fact, housing supply experts and advocates actually warned that Greenbelt removals and settlement boundary expansions would result in fewer homes built, not more.

    The Integrity Commissioner’s latest findings reveal some of the illegal tactics lobbyists used to disguise the fact that their clients’ financial interests – and not any actual need for more development land for housing-  were actually the impetus for trying to dismantle the Greenbelt.  Lobbyists broke the law by omitting from mandatory public filings the fact that their meetings with government officials – including with the Premier, were actually requests to take apart the Greenbelt. This made it much easier for the public to accept false claims by the government that the notion of removing land from the Greenbelt was genuinely part of a plan to increase housing supply.

    Review Process Guardrails

    The Greenbelt Act’s mandatory 10-year review process is supposed to be a mechanism to identify and fix weaknesses in the Greenbelt’s protective policies and add additional land where needed. But the review process, including public hearings, written submissions, and consultations with municipal governments, could easily be co-opted as a way to give more land to well-connected speculators. 

    To prevent this any consultations about Greenbelt boundaries – and the boundaries of special protected zones within the Greenbelt, should be restricted, right from the outset, to adding land and increasing protection.  

    Removing land from the Greenbelt (or shifting Greenbelt land to less-protective categories) should be entirely off the table, and the review should not accept submissions that request such removals.

    The Greenbelt Review should be explicitly mandated to recommend measures that increase the certainty that both natural heritage features and agricultural land will continue to be used for those purposes.  Any submissions, requests or recommendations that would make it easier or more permissible to convert farmland, forest, wetlands or hedgerows to other uses or to reduce their agricultural or habitat value, should be explicitly excluded from consideration.

    These restrictions must apply to consultations with municipalities, as the government has already shown how it exploits “requests” from municipal politicians as cover for backtracking on its promises to curb sprawl.

    The review should be explicitly directed to conduct in itself in a manner which restores and maintains public confidence – and confidence among landowners and agricultural tenants, in particular – that none of the land in the Oak Ridges Moraine Area, Protected Countryside or the Niagara escarpment will ever be made available for any development or activities that don’t maintain, improve or restore its ecological and hydrological functions or agricultural use.

    What the review must do

    Rather than using the Greenbelt Review to repeat its attempt to dismantle it, Ontario’s new Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing should use it to repair the damage his two most recent predecessors have caused, fixed vulnerabilities revealed over the past 10 years, and strengthen the Greenbelt’s mandate to reflect its vital role in solving new problems.

    1. In particular, the Greenbelt Review should be charged with closing loopholes, including:
      • Gaps that have been exploited to allow new uses, like major new highways and parts of new sprawl subdivisions (e.g., access roads, stormwater  retention ponds) that destroy the environmental or agricultural values of Greenbelt lands.
      • Ambiguities that have allowed land speculators to destroy hedgerows and other features of environmental value on tenant farms they’re hoping to eventually convince the government to remove from the Greenbelt
    2. The Greenbelt Review should also be charged with expanding the Greenbelt Plan Area, and the Agricultural System and Specialty Crop Areas to reflect its role in preventing any reduction in Ontario’s overall agricultural land base and maintaining our ability to feed ourselves in the face of United States use of economic force to threaten Canada’s sovereignty. 
      • That expansion mandate should encompass: Countryside on the outskirts of city and town settlement boundaries that has become vulnerable since the government’s repeal of the Growth Plan for the Greater Golden Horseshoe, and Provincial Policy Statement, and their controls on suburban sprawl.
      • Farmland, forest and hand on the outer edges of the current Greenbelt Plan Area that are now, or are likely to become, targets for leapfrog sprawl associated with the GTHA.
      • Fingers or patches of non-Greenbelt land that, if converted to residential, commercial, or industrial uses, would partially or completely surround Greenbelt farmland or habitat, and potentially undermine its viability.
    3. The Greenbelt Review should be tasked with expanding the Greenbelt Plan Area to protect water supplies for all of the Greater Golden Horseshoe and Southwestern Ontario, with a particular emphasis on the groundwater recharge areas for municipalities and agricultural lands that depend upon groundwater.

    Environmental Defence is committed to protecting and expanding the Greenbelt. We’ll be keeping an eye out for when the review process kicks off and continue our work to advocate for closing loopholes and protecting our farms, forests and wetlands and planning for better, more livable cities and towns.

     

    The post Upcoming Greenbelt Plan Review Needs Clear Guardrails appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Don’t risk Canada’s future by following Trump and his Big Oil enablers

    It is no secret that the Trump administration is fully owned by the oil and gas industry. So it should be no surprise to Canadians that recently, some of the wealthiest oil and gas companies operating in Canada urged political parties to jump on the same anti-environment bandwagon. 

    Canadians have fought for two decades to address climate change and make sure industry pays for the mess that it makes in our air, water and land. We’re seeing the results. For the first time ever, Canada’s emissions are going down, clean investments and renewable energy jobs are projected to soon exceed those in fossil fuels, and we have systems in place to make industry pay for the pollution they create.

    Yet, the oil and gas CEOs are pushing our governments to sacrifice all of that. Luckily, not all decision-makers are falling for it. Canada’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources clapped back against the oil and gas companies in his own letter   :

    A clip from Minister Wilkinson’s letter in response to oil and gas CEOs.

    We know the oil and gas industry never lets a crisis go to waste, seizing every opportunity to push the same tired rhetoric we always hear from oil and gas companies and their political mouthpieces: expand fossil fuels and pipelines, scrap any rules limiting pollution, eliminate any form of environmental assessments and provide more taxpayer handouts. For example, these same companies used the devastating COVID pandemic to push the same set of demands in a secret memo to the federal Cabinet. 

    Now, they’re emboldened by the success they are having in gutting environmental protections in the United States and want to do the same here in Canada.

    Of course, none of these things would help with the current situation. That shouldn’t surprise us. Oil and gas companies don’t have the best interests of Canadians – or other parts of the Canadian economy – at heart. 

    Why would they? According to recent data, more than 70 per cent of oil sands production in Canada is owned by foreign – mostly American – shareholders. 

    Take the renewed push for pipelines. It ignores the fact that no company wants to pay for building a new oil or gas pipeline. With global demand for oil set to peak in the next four years and then significantly decline, no company is willing to bet its own money on what is guaranteed to quickly become a massive stranded asset. That means they want us to pay for it instead and taxpayers should be very concerned. The latest $20 billion loan to the Trans Mountain Expansion project, now totalling way over $30 billion, should serve as a warning: it’s taxpayers who end up paying the price for new fossil fuel infrastructure as foreign-owned companies and wealthy shareholders reap the rewards.

    The letter also shows that industry CEOs have pivoted away from their former support of  industrial carbon pricing rules. These rules ensure big polluters pay for their pollution. And the rules work – they have effectively driven down pollution levels more than any other measure. This is one of the best tools that Canada has for cutting climate pollution and creating a competitive, clean economy – and the industry now wants to scrap it. 

    This is Canada’s time to forge our own future based on our own values. We can grow our independence, bring Canadian innovation to the world, and expand our trading partners by investing in new infrastructure and industries, including low-carbon steel and aluminium (which we are uniquely positioned to produce), clean electricity, food, aerospace products, public transit, and more. We have the skills, people, and resources to lead the clean energy revolution.

    Canada could become a renewable energy powerhouse. By scaling up renewable energy projects and building our national electricity grid, we could put thousands of Canadians to work, lower energy costs and achieve energy security. 

    We can’t allow oil and gas companies to put Canada’s hard-fought, years-long climate progress at risk to benefit their wealthy CEOs and American shareholders while at the same time failing to acknowledge that the world’s energy future will be clean.

     

    The post Don’t risk Canada’s future by following Trump and his Big Oil enablers appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • With Section 230 Repeal, Dems and Media Offer Trump New Censorship Tools 

     

    Verge: Lawmakers are trying to repeal Section 230 again

    Sen. Dick Durbin (Verge, 3/21/25): “I hope that for the sake of our nation’s kids, Congress finally acts.”

    In a move that threatens to constrain online communication, congressional Democrats are partnering with their Republican counterparts to repeal a niche but crucial internet law.

    According to tech trade publication the Information (3/21/25), Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.) has allied with Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) to reintroduce a bill that would repeal Section 230, a provision of the 1996 Communications Decency Act. Section 230 dictates that when unlawful speech occurs online, the only party responsible is the speaker, not the hosting website or app or any party that shared the content in question.

    Section 230 grants platforms the ability to moderate without shouldering legal liability, a power that has historically had the effect of encouraging judicious content management (Techdirt, 6/23/20). Additionally, it indemnifies ordinary internet users against most civil suits for actions like forwarding email, sharing photos or videos, or hosting online reviews.

    Dissolving the provision would reassign legal responsibility to websites and third parties, empowering a Trump-helmed federal government to force online platforms to stifle, or promote, certain speech. While the ostensible purpose of the repeal, according to Durbin, is to “protect kids online,” it’s far more likely to give the Trump White House carte blanche to advance its ultra-reactionary political agenda.

    More power for MAGA

    Techdirt: Democratic Senators Team Up With MAGA To Hand Trump A Censorship Machine

    Mike Masnick (Techdirt, 3/21/25): “These senators don’t understand what Section 230 actually does—or how its repeal would make their stated goals harder to achieve.”

    The effort to repeal Section 230 isn’t the first of its kind. Lawmakers, namely Republicans Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and former Florida senator and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio, have been making attempts to restrict or remove 230 for years, sometimes with explicitly censorial aims. But with a White House so hostile to dissent as to target and abduct anti-genocide activists (FAIR.org, 3/28/25; Zeteo, 3/29/25), abusing immigration law and violating constitutional rights in the process, the timing of the latest bill—complete with Democratic backing—is particularly alarming.

    To imagine what could become of a Section 230 repeal under the Trump administration, consider an example from July 2021, when the Covid-19 pandemic remained severe enough to be classified as a public-health emergency. Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.)—now a co-sponsor of Durbin and Graham’s 2025 bill—introduced an amendment to 230 that would authorize the Health & Human Services Secretary to designate certain online content as “health misinformation.” The label would require websites to remove the content in question.

    News sources heralded the bill as a way to stem the “proliferation of falsehoods about vaccines, fake cures and other harmful health-related claims on their sites” (NPR, 7/22/21) and to “fight bogus medical claims online” (Politico, 7/22/21). While potentially true at the time, Klobuchar’s bill would now, by most indications, have the opposite effect. As Mike Masnick of Techdirt (3/21/25) explained:

    Today’s Health & Human Services secretary is Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a man who believes the solution to measles is to have more children die of measles. Under Klobuchar’s proposal, he would literally have the power to declare pro-vaccine information as “misinformation” and force it off the internet.

    ‘Save the Children’

    ACLU: How Online Censorship Harms Sex Workers and LGBTQ Communities

    ACLU (6/27/22): The Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking. Instead, it has chilled speech, shut down online spaces, and made sex work more dangerous.”

    Since Klobuchar’s bill, Congress has drafted multiple pieces of bipartisan child “safety” legislation resembling Durbin and Graham’s bill, offering another glimpse into the perils of a Trump-era repeal.

    Consider 2023’s Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which the New York Times (2/17/22) welcomed as “sweeping legislation” that would “require online platforms to refrain from promoting harmful behavior.” KOSA enjoys robust bipartisan support, with three dozen Republican co-sponsors and nearly as many Democrats, as well as an endorsement from Joe Biden.

    Though KOSA doesn’t expressly call for the removal of 230, it would effectively create a carve-out that could easily be weaponized. MAGA-boosting Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R.-Tenn.), a lead sponsor, insinuated in 2023 that KOSA could be used to “protect” children “from the transgender [sic] in this culture and that influence” on platforms like Snapchat and Instagram (Techdirt, 9/6/23). In other words, lawmakers could invoke KOSA to throttle or eliminate content related to trans advocacy, should they deem it “harmful” to children.

    KOSA has drawn criticism from more than 90 organizations, including the ACLU and numerous LGBTQ groups, who fear that the bill masquerades as a child-safeguarding initiative while facilitating far-right censorship (CounterSpin, 6/9/23). This comes as little surprise, considering the decades-long history of “Save the Children” rhetoric as an anti-LGBTQ bludgeon, as well as the fact that these campaigns have been shown to harm children rather than protect them.

    Some outlets have rightfully included the bill’s opponents in their reportage (AP, 7/31/24), even if only to characterize it as “divisive” and “controversial” (NBC News, 7/31/24). Others, however, have expressed more confidence in the legislation. The New York Times (2/1/24), for instance, described KOSA as a means to “safeguard the internet’s youngest users.” Neither Blackburn’s publicly-broadcast intentions nor the protests against the bill seemed to capture the paper’s attention.

    Instead, the Times went on to cite the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), a 2018 law that amended Section 230, in part to allow victims of sex trafficking to sue websites and online platforms, as a regulatory success. What the Times didn’t note is that, according to the ACLU, the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which is included in SESTA, “hasn’t meaningfully addressed sex trafficking,” and could be interpreted by courts as justification to “censor more online speech—especially materials about sex, youth health, LGBTQ identity and other important concerns.”

    False anti-corporate appeals

    WSJ: Sunset of Section 230 Would Force Big Tech’s Hand

    A bipartisan pair of lawmakers argue in the Wall Street Journal (5/12/24) that repealing Section 230 would mean tech companies couldn’t “manipulate and profit from Americans’ free-speech protections”—which is true only  in the sense that platforms would be forced to assume that their users do not have free-speech protections.

    Protecting kids isn’t the only promise made by 230 repeal proponents. In a statement made earlier this year, Durbin vowed to “make the tech industry legally accountable for the damage they cause.” It’s a popular refrain for government officials. The Senate Judiciary Democrats pledged to “remove Big Tech’s legal immunity,” and Trump himself has called 230 a “liability shielding gift from the US to ‘Big Tech’”—a point echoed by one of his many acolytes, Josh Hawley.

    And in a Wall Street Journal op-ed (5/12/24) headlined “Sunset of Section 230 Would Force Big Tech’s Hand,” former Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Republican, and New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone, Jr., a Democrat, argued:

    We must act because Big Tech is profiting from children, developing algorithms that push harmful content on to our kids’ feeds and refusing to strengthen their platforms’ protections against predators, drug dealers, sex traffickers, extortioners and cyberbullies.

    These soft anti-corporate appeals might resonate with an audience who believes Big Tech wields too much power and influence. But there’s no guarantee that dismantling Section 230 would rein in Big Tech.

    In fact, Section 230 actually confers an advantage upon the largest tech companies—which at least one of them has recognized. In 2021, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg proposed reforms to 230 that would increase and intensify legal requirements for content moderation (NBC News, 3/24/21). The apparent logic: monopolistic giants like Facebook and Google can more easily fund expensive content-moderation systems and legal battles than can smaller platforms, lending the major players far more long-term viability.

    But regardless of Meta’s machinations, the fundamental problem would remain: Democrats have embraced the MAGA vision for online governance, creating the conditions not for a safer internet, but a more dangerous one.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Defining Freedom as a Force for Good

    Photo of family of 3 holding a Canadian flag

    We have heard a lot about freedom in Canada over the past several years. Some have argued that freedom means escaping from many of the rules and norms that guide our society. They advocate for freedom from vaccines, freedom to pollute, freedom from respecting other people’s differences and freedom from helping people impacted by climate-caused natural disasters or a growing wealth gap. At Environmental Defence, we believe that freedom can exist without tearing down society’s infrastructure and supports. We are eager to highlight the more positive attributes of freedom that can help us build a better Canada.

    In his recent book entitled, On Freedom the noted contemporary historian, Timothy Snyder (Professor at the Munk School of Global Affairs) offers a concept of freedom that has five key elements: independence, unpredictability, mobility, factuality and solidarity. These attributes make an interesting framework to explore a more positive view of what freedom means for people and organizations looking to create a better world.

    Independence 

    Becoming independent is not something that we can do for ourselves. Rather, our ability to become thoughtful, productive and caring humans is provided by the nurturing we receive as children. It is given to us by our parents, our teachers and our community as they support and educate us when we are young. The environment they provide enables us to build the skills and knowledge to begin to understand who we are as distinct individuals.

    Unpredictability 

    Unpredictability is what happens when we grow up enough to be in a position to act on our independence. It is us, as young people, using our knowledge, experiences and values to evaluate and understand the world we are inheriting. It is the opposite of blindly following the crowd, and it is vanishing as we allow social media algorithms to predict and manipulate our thoughts and actions. Freedom is difficult to achieve if those who want to control you know exactly how to do it.

    Mobility 

    Mobility is our capacity to move through the physical and social world and without either we are less free. It is the ability to seek out new places and ideas, the opportunity to expand and apply our knowledge, and the chance to challenge the race and class boundaries many of us were born into or to escape from the physical and resource limitations of where we were raised.

    Factuality

    Factuality is objective truth. It is reality constructed from verifiable scientific, ecological, historical or lived facts. The presence and protection of factuality provides a shared starting point to find solutions to problems, create conversations and establish freedom. Without it we are rudderless in a sea of misinformation and disinformation.

    Solidarity 

    Solidarity is the act of independent, unpredictable people, with access to facts and personal mobility, working together to solve problems and create communities that commit to providing the elements of freedom for everyone. Solidarity is from ensuring that the people of your community, or your country, have access to the elements of freedom. This in turn guarantees your personal freedom.

    “Freedom is more than being able to do what you want—it requires collective responsibility for the ecosystems and social structures that make life possible. This is the positive freedom we fight for.” — Tim Gray, Executive Director of Environmental Defence

    At Environmental Defence, we have become increasingly concerned by the corruption of the concept of freedom, where its core meaning has been alienated from the principles described above. That trend, and recent political events transpiring around the world and in our backyard, has given us cause to rethink and re-describe our work in defence of Canada’s environment in ways that are consistent with a vision of freedom rooted in our values.

    To us, creating more freedom through our work means encouraging and enabling the independence of people and their ideas. It means taking the time to ensure our supporters and the public have access to factual information about complex environmental issues and policies so they can make up their own mind about what is right and just.

    Supporting freedom means working with informed community members who are using their knowledge in ways that are unpredictable to politically powerful people who want them to behave in ways that are expected, safe and are easy to ignore. It means helping citizen movements rise to demand progress on climate change or reject plans for destructive industrial expansion that will destroy our ecosystems and erode our collective freedom.

    Enabling freedom means advocating for people to have access to the tools necessary for them to be physically and socially mobile. It means advocating for accessible, affordable and ubiquitous public transit and for housing that is within the economic reach of everyone in this country. It means arguing for government policies that place more of the financial burden for adopting cleaner technologies on the people who can afford it and supporting those who are less able.

    Defending freedom means fighting for research, science and evidence to be the basis for government decision-making. It means that decisions to ban chemicals or disposable plastics must be made based on their evidence of health and environmental harm and not on the strength of the lobbying by their corporate manufacturers.

    Fighting for freedom means working in solidarity with others who share a positive vision for freedom. It means working with all the people and communities that comprise this country. It means bringing forward the voices of farmers protecting their ability to grow food, supporting the Indigenous nations seeking to assert their rights to make decisions on their lands, helping people in communities seeking new jobs in clean, sustainable industries and working to fix broken planning and pricing systems so that young people and newcomers can find a home they can afford.

    In summary, there cannot be individual freedom without the social systems and structures that have been built that give people the tools they need to be free. These social systems themselves cannot exist without the stability and life-giving support of natural ecosystems. This means protecting our forests, waters, wetlands, farmland, wildlife and climate system must be a core foundational requirement of all government decision-making. That environment-as-foundation approach is one that we are dedicated to bringing to all of our programs and we promise to work with all of you to ensure Canada is a country where a protected environment is the foundation for all of our freedom.

     

    The post Defining Freedom as a Force for Good appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Tufts Grad Student Targeted by DHS Wrote Suspiciously Pro-Humanity Op-Ed

     

    Surveillance footage of Rumeysa Ozturk being taken away by Homeland Security agents.

    Surveillance footage of Tufts grad student Rumeysa Ozturk being taken away by Homeland Security agents (Philadelphia Inquirer, 3/27/25).

    The journalism world has been reeling from news that a BBC correspondent was deported from Turkey, after he was “covering the antigovernment protests in the country” and was “detained and labeled ‘a threat to public order’” (New York Times, 3/27/25). Turkey has an abysmal reputation for press freedom (CPJ, 2/13/24; European Centre for Press and Media Freedom, 10/5/23), placing 158th out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders index, so as distressing as this news is, it’s in character for a country many think of as illiberal and authoritarian (Guardian, 6/9/13; HRW, 1/29/15). Journalists have been arrested in the latest unrest in Turkey (AP, 3/24/25).

    Meanwhile, a Turkish citizen is going through a similar kind of hell for expressing political ideas a government dislikes. Except in her case, the government doing the repression isn’t Turkey, it’s the United States. In chilling video footage (New York Times, 3/26/25) obtained by several news outlets, Turkish national Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University outside of Boston, can be seen being abducted by plainclothes agents.

    ‘Relishes the killing of Americans’

    AP: Turkish student at Tufts University detained, video shows masked people handcuffing her

    “It looked like a kidnapping,” software engineer Michael Mathis, whose camera recorded Ozturk’s abduction, told AP (3/26/25).  “They approach her and start grabbing her with their faces covered. They’re covering their faces. They’re in unmarked vehicles.”

    Her crime was reportedly being part of recent student protests against the genocide in Gaza. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson (AP, 3/26/25) declared:

    DHS and ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] investigations found Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans…. Glorifying and supporting terrorists who kill Americans is grounds for visa issuance to be terminated.

    The group StopAntisemitism bragged about the arrest on X (3/26/25), saying Ozturk led “pro-Hamas, violent antisemitic and anti-American events” during her time at Tufts, which has led her to deportation proceedings. The group snarkily added, “Shalom, Rumeysa.” (“Shalom” can mean peace, hello or goodbye in Hebrew.)

    Ozturk is now part of a growing list of foreign students who have been abducted by secret police and are facing deportation for participating in pro-Palestine speech, which the government is labeling support of Hamas, which is designated by the US as a terrorist group (FAIR.org, 3/19/25). As I recently said on the Santita Jackson Show (3/27/25), reporting these things as “arrests” by federal agents—rather than abductions by secret police—understates the authoritarian moment Americans are witnessing. (DHS Deputy Secretary Troy Edgar treated “supporting Hamas” as synonymous with “pro-Palestinian activity” in an interview with NPR—3/13/25.)

    ‘Fundamentally at odds with our values’

    Tufts Daily: Try again, President Kumar: Renewing calls for Tufts to adopt March 4 TCU Senate resolutions

    The op-ed (Tufts Daily, 3/26/24) that may get Rumeysa Ozturk deported.

    Ozturk, however, might be the first of the bunch to be targeted specifically for engaging in journalism deemed offensive by the state. Many of the reports of her arrest (e.g., New York Times, 3/26/25; CNN, 3/27/25; Forbes, 3/27/25) cite that she co-authored an op-ed in the Tufts Daily (3/26/24) calling on the university administration to accept Tufts Community Union Senate resolutions “demanding that the University acknowledge the Palestinian genocide,” and “disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” The op-ed also “affirm[s] the equal dignity and humanity of all people.”

    If this is truly a part of the government’s rationale for targeting Ozturk, then we as the American press have to assume that the US law enforcement regime will consider any article in a newspaper that advocates for Palestinian rights or harshly criticizes Israel as some kind of suspicious or unacceptable speech.

    Said Seth Stern, director of advocacy of Freedom of the Press Foundation (3/26/25):

    If reports that Ozturk’s arrest was over an op-ed are accurate, it is absolutely appalling. No one would have ever believed, even during President Donald Trump’s first term, that masked federal agents would abduct students from American universities for criticizing US allies in student newspapers. Anyone with any regard whatsoever for the Constitution should recognize how fundamentally at odds this is with our values and should be deeply repulsed as an American, regardless of political leanings. Canary Mission is aptly named—it may serve as the canary in the coal mine for the First Amendment.

    The Canary Mission named by Stern is a pro-Israel group that operates as a doxxing operation against pro-Palestine campus activists (The Nation, 12/22/23). The FPF said of Ozturk, “The sole ‘offense’ that Canary Mission flagged was an op-ed Ozturk cowrote criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza.”

    A crime against journalism

    CNN: Trump baselessly accuses news media of ‘illegal’ behavior and corruption in DOJ speech

    Donald Trump (CNN, 3/14/25): “I believe that CNN and MSDNC [sic], who literally write 97.6% bad about me, are political arms of the Democrat Party. And in my opinion, they are really corrupt and they are illegal. What they do is illegal.”

    Of course, the government has now used its authority to strip a lawful resident of her visa, putting her in the opaque gulag system of the US immigration system. That has a terrible chilling effect on any legal resident in the US who might make a living putting pen to paper. Their next article could get them shipped home at a moment’s notice without legal recourse.

    That is inhumane treatment of the rights of legal residents, but it is also a crime against journalism. How will this motivation be used against writers who are citizens, natural-born and otherwise? Will outlets that publish pieces like the one in Tufts Daily be harassed in other ways? (One should not assume that when Trump at the Justice Department accused major news outlets of “illegal” reporting that he meant it as a figure of speech—CNN, 3/14/25.)

    FAIR (11/14/24, 12/16/24, 2/26/25) has been among the many groups who have warned that a second Trump administration could see a severe attack against the free press and free speech generally. Ozturk’s arrest is a warning that the Trump administration takes all levels of speech and journalism seriously, and will do whatever they can to terrorize the public into keeping quiet.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • A Reflection from an AJWS Global Justice Fellow

    Please enjoy this reflection from Rabbi Miriam Terlinchamp, who visited with grantee partners in the Dominican Republic last month as part of AJWS’s Global Justice Fellowship. In a community room nestled in a batey (a former sugar plantation) in Santo Domingo, three women from Movimiento de Mujeres Dominico Haitianas (MUDHA) tell stories of radical change. …

    Source

    This post was originally published on American Jewish World Service – AJWS.

  • Publisher’s Firing Shows Double Standard in Israel/Palestine Cartooning

     

    Jeff Danziger: Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Over a Year of Merciless War

    Jeff Danziger (1/20/25)

    “Watch your step,” says the soldier as he and a medic lead a hostage over a mound of corpses labeled “Over 40,000 Palestinians killed…” The caption reads, “Some Israeli Hostages Are Home After Years of Merciless War.” This cartoon by Jeff Danzinger (Rutland Herald, 1/20/25) was selected by editorial page editor Tony Doris to run in the Palm Beach Post (1/26/25).

    After the cartoon ran last month, a local Jewish activist group took offense at the perceived antisemitic nature of the anti-war cartoon. The Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County was so upset it purchased a full-page ad condemning the cartoon to run in the Sunday edition (2/9/25).

    That Doris and Danzinger are both of Jewish descent did not deter the complainers. Neither did their politics. Doris (Stet News, 3/2/25) describes himself as pro-Israel, as well as the Post‘s “only Jewish editor.” Danzinger told comics scholar Kent Worcester (Comics Journal, 11/05) that he agreed “with a great many things that the Republicans have been traditionally for,” and that he voted for George H.W. Bush twice.

    For his temerity to run an anti-war cartoon acknowledging the Palestinian dead, Doris was fired by Gannett, the conglomerate that owns hundreds of newspapers across the country, including the Post. Gannett issued a statement that the cartoon “did not meet our standards” and “would not have been published if the proper protocols were followed.” “We sincerely regret the error,” said the spokesperson for the Post, “and have taken appropriate action to prevent this from happening again.” Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) remarked that Gannet executives are “afraid of their shadow.”

    The Palestine exception

    Rob Rogers: Why do they hate us so much? (Gazans in a cage surrounded by missiles)

    Rob Rogers (8/7/14)

    Doris’ ordeal was similar to the one cartoonist Rob Rogers suffered ten years ago. Rogers drew Palestinians huddled in a tiny prison, beset on all sides by missiles and Israeli soldiers. “Why do they hate us so much?” one trooper muses (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 8/7/14).

    This cartoon, too, was characterized by pro-Israel readers as antisemitic. Richard Krugel of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Metropolitan Detroit proclaimed it something “out of the Nazi propaganda sheet Der Shturmer [sic]” (Oakland Press, 8/8/14). Rogers’ career survived the incident, but as the editorial page of Rogers’ home paper shifted right, he found himself out of a job (New York Times, 6/15/18; Extra!, 7/18).

    The experiences of Doris and Rogers are clear examples of what civil rights lawyer Michael Ratner termed the “Palestine exception to free speech” (Real News Network, 4/27/15). Support for Palestinian rights is deemed to be an antisemitic attack on Israel, and therefore outside the boundaries of acceptable speech. The Palestine exception is glaringly apparent if a survey is conducted of how Palestinians are treated in political cartoons, and what consequences cartoonists suffer for these artistic choices.

    ‘We side with evil’

    Kirk Walters: Occupying the Administration Building Today Is Not the Same as It Was in the '60s.... (Administrator offering refreshments to antisemitic protesters)

    Kirk Walters (10/18/23)

    Political cartoonists routinely compare Palestinians and the Palestinian cause to Nazis and Nazism. Henry Payne drew Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, as pro-Nazi, with bumper stickers reading “From Rhine River to the North Sea” and “Stop German Genocide” and “Beware Elders of Zion”  (GoComics, 6/4/24). Kirk Walters showed pro-Palestine protesters as tiki-torch wielding white supremacists. One protester looked identical to Adolf Hitler (King Features, 10/18/23).

    Gary Varvel drew a student returning home for Thanksgiving dinner clothed in an “I Heart Hamas” sweater and donning a Hitler mustache. “Son,” his father frets, “your mother and I are concerned about how much college has changed you!” (Creators Syndicate, 11/1/23).

    Symbols of Palestinian identity are equated with nefariousness. Two-time Pulitzer winner Michael Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/2/24) explicitly placed the Palestinian flag at a rally side by side with a sign reading “We Side With Evil.” Other signs read “We Heart Terrorists” and “We Support Hamas.” Three days later, Ramirez (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 5/5/24) pinned a button reading “Hate” on a keffiyeh-wearing protester.

    Ramirez: I Remember When Going to College Was Supposed to Make You Smarter (College protesters with pro-"evil" banners)

    Michael Ramirez (5/2/24)

    Editorial cartoonists often make a false connection between pro-Palestine activism and antisemitism. After the first wave of protests on college campuses in Fall 2023, Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 10/18/23) drew a Halloween cartoon featuring a Frankenstein’s Monster labeled “Antisemitism” and a Dr. Frankenstein labeled “College Campuses,” shouting “It’s alive!”

    Bob Gorrell (Creators Syndicate, 4/30/24) had Joe Biden informing readers about “all those antisemitic, pro-Hamas demonstrations on college campuses.” Echoing President Trump’s description of the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Biden declared, “There are very fine people on both sides!”

    At Chip Bok’s “Back to School Sale for Your Pro-Hamas Student” (Creators Syndicate, 9/5/24) the title “Antisemitism for Dummies” was sold.

    Nor is this solely a quirk of the US: Canadian cartoonist Malcolm Mayes (Edmonton Journal, 11/23) depicted students chanting, “From the river to the sea/killing Jews is fine with me.”

    ‘Make Gaza great again!’

    Henry Payne: Odd. My Pager Just Exploded. (Rep. Tlaib with exploding pager.)

    Henry Payne (9/19/24)

    In one anti-Palestinian cartoon, the cartoonist made light of assassinating a member of Congress. After the Israeli pager attack on Hezbollah, Henry Payne (National Review, 9/19/24) drew an exploding pager on the desk of Rashida Tlaib, also naming her a member of Hamas.

    Tlaib described this as “racism” that would incite “hate and violence against Arab and Muslim communities,” and Dearborn Mayor Abdullah Hammoud argued it showed that “anti-Arab bigotry and Islamophobia have become normalized in our media.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, herself not an Arab or Muslim, was less direct, although she also condemned the cartoon. “It further stokes the divide in our politics and does absolutely nothing to move us forward on the issues that matter,” she said (Metro Times, 9/20/24).

    Bok: Two State Solutions (cartoon illustrating how much better Gaza would be if ethnically cleansed)

    Chip Bok (2/7/25)

    After Trump revealed his plan to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, cartoonists lined up to endorse this proposed violation of international law. Dana Summers (Tribune Content Agency, 2/7/25) had a beaming Trump announcing, “Make Gaza Great Again!” Chip Bok (Creators Syndicate, 2/7/25) showed Trump’s future casino and riviera as an improvement over United Nations administered refugee camps. Cheekily, it was labeled “Two State Solutions.” Payne (GoComics, 2/6/25) advertised a “Mar-a-Gaza” that will be “Hamas-free”—as well as Palestinian-free—once construction is finished.

    No mainstream American cartoonist would draw Israeli soldiers as Nazis, as Varvel, Gorrell and Payne did with Palestinians. It would be considered beyond the pale for an anti-war or pro-Palestinian cartoonist to crack a joke about assassinating a leading pro-Israel politician, as Payne did with Tlaib. Cartoon endorsements of ethnic cleansing of virtually any nationality other than Palestinian would be met with quite accurate comparisons to the oeuvre of Philipp Rupprecht (“Fips”), cartoonist for the pro-Nazi Der Stürmer.

    ‘Missed something profound’

    Michael Ramirez: How Dare Israel Attack Civilians(Cartoon of "Hamas" with children strapped to his body)

    Michael Ramirez (11/6/23)

    The consequences for the two approaches to cartooning could not be more different. When Varvel lost his spot at the Toronto Sun (12/21/23), it was not for his drawings of Palestinians, but rather a take on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (12/20/23) that Jewish groups found offensive. Payne’s cartoons still run in the National Review, and he kept his post as auto critic for the Detroit News.

    One of Ramirez’s cartoons (Las Vegas Review-Journal, 11/6/23), showing a snarling hook-nosed Arab labeled “Hamas,” was removed from the Washington Post after reader backlash. Editorial page editor David Shipley said that reader reactions calling the cartoon “racist” and “dehumanizing” showed that the Post “missed something profound, and divisive” (Washington Post, 11/8/23). Ramirez continues to be published at the Post.

    Because of syndication and the absorption of many newspapers into chains like Gannett, some media markets are only exposed to one side, cartoon-wise. In Detroit, for example, the Detroit Free Press and Detroit News publish under a joint operating agreement that ensures that the editorial cartoons in the News run in both newspapers. The most prominent syndicated cartoonist in the News is Ramirez, who declared Palestinians ontologically evil. This means that in the metro area with the largest Arab population in America, the political cartoons in both papers are overwhelmingly dominated by a virulently anti-Palestinian viewpoint.

    Benson: Yasir Ararat (Arafat depicted as a dead rat)

    Steve Benson (6/27/82)

    Tony Doris (New York Times, 3/2/25) expressed concerns that limiting the range of acceptable opinion in editorial pages is bad for democracy. “Democracy needs journalists who care about the mission and not just about page views,” he said.

    Not only is it bad for democracy, it trivializes antisemitism and allows promoters of racism and ethnic cleansing off the hook. Indeed, despite acting as defenders of Jewish people, these cartoonists indulge in many of the same tropes that antisemitic caricaturists use. Editorial cartoonists may have progressed past depicting Yasser Arafat as a rodent caught in a Star of David–shaped mousetrap (Arizona Republic, 6/27/82), but there are still images of anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian racism on the editorial pages.

     

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Robert W. McChesney, a Scholar/Activist Who Fought for Media Democracy

     

    Robert W. McChesney was a leading voice and a precious colleague in the battle for a more democratic media system, and a more democratic society. Bob passed away on Tuesday, March 24, at the age of 72. No one did more to analyze the negative and censorial impacts of our media and information systems being controlled by giant, amoral corporations.

    Bob was a scholar—the Gutgsell endowed professor of communications at University of Illinois—and a prolific author. Each and every book taught us more about corporate control of information. (I helped edit some of his works.)

    Particularly enlightening was his 2014 book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy—in which McChesney explained in step-by-step detail how the internet that held so much promise for journalism and democracy was being strangled by corporate greed, and by government policy that put greed in the driver’s seat.

    That was a key point for Bob in all his work: He detested the easy phrase “media deregulation,” when in fact government policy was actively and heavily regulating the media system (and so many other systems) toward corporate control.

    Robert McChesney

    Robert McChesney speaking at the Berkeley School of Journalism (CC photo: Steve Rhodes).

    For media activists like those of us at FAIR—whose board McChesney has served on for many years—it was a revelation to read his pioneering 1993 book Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy: The Battle for the Control of US Broadcasting, 1928–1935. It examined the broad-based movement in the 1920s and ’30s that sought to democratize radio, which was then in the hands of commercial hucksters and snake-oil salesmen.

    From radio to the internet, a reading of his body of work offers a grand and inglorious tour of media history, and how we got to the horrific era of disinfotainment we’re in today.

    Bob McChesney was not just a scholar. He was an activist. He co-founded the media reform group Free Press, with his close friend and frequent co-author John Nichols. Bob told me how glad he was to go door to door canvassing for Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. (Bernie wrote the intro to one of McChesney and Nichols’ books.)

    Bob was a proud socialist, and a proud journalist—and he saw no conflict between the two. In 1979, he was founding publisher of The Rocket, a renowned publication covering the music scene in Seattle. For years, while he taught classes, he hosted an excellent Illinois public radio show, Media Matters.

    In 2011, he and Victor Pickard edited the book Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights: The Collapse of Journalism and What Can Be Done. One of Bob’s favorite proposals to begin to address the problem of US media (developed with economist Dean Baker) was to provide any willing taxpayer a voucher, so they could steer $200 or so of their tax money to the nonprofit news outlet of their choosing, possibly injecting billions of non-corporate dollars into journalism.

    Bob was a beloved figure in the media reform/media activist movement. We need more scholar/activists like him today. He will be sorely missed.

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • How Open-Source Investigation Training Drives Real-World Impact

    By Julie Decrand-Lardière and Clarissa Chan In an era where digital information is proliferating rapidly, the ability to effectively and ethically investigate potential human rights violations has never been more critical. The Digital Verification Unit (DVU) at the University of Essex, plays a vital role in equipping the next generation of human rights researchers with the skills […]

    This post was originally published on Human Rights Centre Blog.

  • Israel Kills Palestinian Journalist Hossam Shabat as US Media Look Away

     

    Al Jazeera: Al Jazeera journalist Hossam Shabat killed in Israeli attack on Gaza

    Hossam Shabat (Al Jazeera, 3/24/25): ““If you’re reading this, it means I have been killed—most likely targeted—by the Israeli occupation forces.”

    The Israeli military killed Hossam Shabat, a 23-year-old Palestinian journalist and correspondent for Al Jazeera and Drop Site News, on Monday, March 24. The deadly targeting of Shabat’s vehicle in the northern Gaza Strip was in fact Israel’s second journalist assassination for the day; hours earlier, Palestine Today reporter Mohammad Mansour was killed in an Israeli strike on his home in southern Gaza.

    And yet it was all in a day’s work for Israel, which according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has now killed at least 170 Palestinian journalists and media workers since October 7, 2023, when Israel’s armed forces kicked off an all-out genocide in the besieged enclave. According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the number of fatalities is actually 208.

    No doubt many journalists would be expected to perish in an onslaught as indiscriminate and massive as Israel’s in Gaza, where in February the death toll for the past 16 months was raised to nearly 62,000 to account for the thousands of Palestinians presumed to be dead beneath the rubble. Shockingly, that’s one out of every 35 Gaza residents—but for Gaza journalists, the International Federation of Journalists estimates that Israel has killed one out of every ten.

    In Shabat’s case, as in numerous others, Israel does not even pretend the assassination was an accident, but rather it attempts to frame Palestinian journalists as terrorists. Indeed, targeting journalists appears to be part of Israel’s efforts—which also include preventing foreign journalists from entering Gaza—to prevent documentation of its atrocities.

    Meanwhile, in the face of such egregious assaults on the press, US media remain shamefully silent.

    ‘He bore witness’

    CPJ: ‘Catastrophic’: Journalists say ethnic cleansing taking place in a news void in northern Gaza

    Hossam Shabat (CPJ, 11/8/24): “Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.”

    In October 2024, one year into the extermination campaign, Israel accused Shabat and five other Gaza journalists with Al Jazeera—where I myself am an opinion columnist—of being militants in the service of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. CPJ, which has repeatedly excoriated Israel for “accusing journalists of being terrorists without producing credible evidence to substantiate their claims,” condemned the accusations as a “smear campaign” that endangered the lives of journalists.

    Yesterday, the Israeli army took to the platform X to celebrate the fact that it had “eliminated” Shabat, offering the charming obituary: “Don’t let the press vest confuse you, Hossam was a terrorist.” This from the people who just killed 200 Palestinian children in a matter of days.

    Responding to the initial terror allegation last year, Shabat remarked to CPJ: “Our only crime is that we convey the image and the truth.” And convey the truth he did. As Egyptian-American journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who translated Shabat’s last article for US outlet Drop Site News just after he was killed, wrote in the preface to the translation:

    He bore witness to untold death and suffering on an almost daily basis for 17 months. He was displaced over 20 times. He was often hungry. He buried many of his journalist colleagues. In November, he was wounded in an Israeli airstrike. I still can’t believe I am referring to him in the past tense.

    Shabat’s article—penned as Israel resumed apocalyptic killing on March 18 and thereby annihilated the truce with Hamas that had ostensibly taken hold in January—is a testament to the young man’s enduring humanity in the face of utter barbarism. Conveying the post-ceasefire landscape in his hometown of Beit Hanoun, Shabat despaired:

    Screams filled the air while everyone stood helpless. My tears didn’t stop. The scenes were more than any human being could bear. The ambulances were filled with corpses, their bodies and limbs piled on top and intertwined with one another. We could no longer distinguish between children and men, between the injured and the dead.

    Shabat was well aware that he could join the dead at any moment, and, to that end, he had prepared a statement for posthumous publication, in which he noted that, “when this all began, I was only 21 years old—a college student with dreams like anyone else.” For the past year and a half, however, he had “dedicated every moment of my life to my people,” documenting the “horrors” in Gaza in order to “show the world the truth they tried to bury.”

    Deafening silence

    Mondoweiss: How Western media silence enables the killing of Palestinian journalists

    Ahmad Ibsais (Mondoweiss, 3/25/25) on Western journalists: “Their failure to accurately report on the targeting of their colleagues, their reluctance to challenge Israeli narratives, and their tendency to frame these killings as unfortunate byproducts of conflict rather than deliberate acts—these journalistic failures have real consequences.”

    Indeed, like so many of his Palestinian media colleagues, Shabat risked his life to speak truth to genocidal power until his final moment. But following his demise, the corporate media in the United States haven’t managed to say much at all—just google “Hossam Shabat” and you’ll see what I mean. His death was covered in leading international outlets like the Guardian (3/25/25), Le Monde (3/25/25) and the Sydney Morning Herald (3/25/25), and independent US outlets like Truthout (3/24/25), Democracy Now! (3/25/25) and Mondoweiss (3/25/25), among others—but virtually no establishment US news organizations.

    The otherwise deafening silence has been punctuated by just a couple of corporate media interventions, including a Washington Post report (3/25/25) that made sure to mention in the first paragraph that Israel had accused Shabat of Hamas membership.

    Meanwhile, Trey Yingst, a correspondent for Fox News—an outlet by no means known for pro-Palestinian sympathies—has rankled others in right-wing media by having the audacity to observe that Israel had just killed two Palestinian journalists in Gaza and that, of the 124 journalists killed globally in 2024, “around two-thirds of them were Palestinian.” In response to Yingst’s treachery, the Washington Free Beacon (3/24/25) made it clear that the real crime was Fox News’ failure to refer to the dead Palestinian journalists as terrorists.

    ‘With no one to hear us’

    FAIR: Israel Killed Reporter Abu Akleh—but US Media Disguised the Facts

    Robin Andersen (FAIR.org, 5/20/22): “Because journalists document the actions of Israeli occupation forces against the Palestinians, they jeopardize the military’s continued ability to act with impunity.”

    The scant US corporate media attention elicited by the assassination of Shabat regrettably comes as no surprise. After all, it would make little sense for the US establishment to pump Israel full of billions of dollars in weaponry and then complain about the casualties of those weapons. When asked on Monday about the killing of Shabat and Mansour, US State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce declared that Hamas was to blame for “every single thing that’s happening” in the Gaza Strip.

    In a dispatch for FAIR (10/19/23) published less than two weeks after the launch of US-fueled genocide in October 2023, Ari Paul emphasized that “Israel has a long history of targeting Palestinian journalists”—including Palestinian-American ones like 51-year-old Shireen Abu Akleh, murdered in 2022 by Israeli forces in the occupied West Bank—”as well as harassing foreign journalists and human rights activists entering the country.” Such attacks, he concluded, “act as filters through which the truth is diluted.”

    And dilution has only become turbo-charged since then. By December 2023, CPJ had determined that “more journalists have been killed in the first 10 weeks of the Israel/Gaza war than have ever been killed in a single country over an entire year.” Of the at least 68 journalists and media workers killed between October 7 and December 20, CPJ reported that 61 were Palestinian, four were Israeli and three were Lebanese.

    On November 20 of that year, for example, Palestinian journalist Ayat Khadura was killed in an Israeli airstrike on her home, just weeks after she had shared her “last message to the world,” which included the line: “We had big dreams but our dream now is to be killed in one piece so they know who we are.”

    On November 7, Mohamed Abu Hassira, a journalist for the Palestinian Wafa news agency, was killed along with no fewer than 42 family members in a strike on his own home. And on December 15, Al Jazeera camera operator Samer Abudaqa was killed in southern Gaza, where he eventually bled to death after Israeli forces prevented ambulances from reaching him for more than five hours. Needless to say, Israeli impunity for all of these crimes remains the name of the game.

    Considering all the lethal obstacles Palestinian journalists must contend with to do their jobs—not to mention the psychological toll of having to report genocide day in and day out while essentially serving as moving targets for the Israelis—it seems the least their international media colleagues might do is acknowledge them in death. Alas, mum’s the word.

    And on that note, it’s worth recalling some of Shabat’s own words: “All we need is for you not to leave us alone, screaming until our voices go hoarse, with no one to hear us.”

    This post was originally published on FAIR.

  • Trade War Looms for Canada, Yet Alberta’s Premier Courts US with Pipeline Expansion

    While the rest of Canada is in an uproar over tariffs being leveled against aluminum, steel, autoparts, and hundreds of other exports, the Alberta delegation is cozying up to Trump officials, offering our oil as a solution to their energy woes. 

    Never mind that American President Donald Trump has said the US doesn’t want our oil. 

    And, forget that the US is well on its way to being energy independent, with a stated goal of being so by 2030. 

    And try to ignore that while she cozies up to Donald Trump and co, Premier Smith is threatening a national unity crisis at home. Alberta is the only province with a “me first” approach to dealing with the United States, and it’s embarrassing for many Albertans. 

    Premier Smith seems to think that American energy independence would include Alberta heavy oil from being shipped to US midwest, gulf coast and pacific refineries. That only makes sense if Alberta sells its soul to the Americans for the price of a barrel of discounted crude.  

    All the clamour about new pipelines and revisiting old projects misses a critical element in the supply chain: there are no future customers for Alberta bitumen. The gelatinous black blob that some insist on calling oil is the most expensive crude on the global market, and contains the most carbon of any commonly refined petroleum product. These are two things the world is NOT looking for in an energy product. 

    While the world will most likely need some oil for some time, it has dozens of options to choose from that are less expensive, and less toxic than the tar sands gloop. New pipelines will take a decade to build, and the world will have very little use for the bituminous tar we are selling by then. 

    Within the next five to ten years the world will be using up to 1,000,000 barrels per day of oil less each year, according to the International Energy Association. When making consumer choices, which oil do you think will be the first to be dropped? (Hint: The expensive, dirty one). 

    The zeal with which Alberta continues to push its oil and gas agenda on the world is troubling. According to the Canadian Energy Regulator, “The United States (U.S.) remains the primary destination for Canadian crude oil, receiving approximately 97 per cent of Canada’s crude oil exports in 2023.” 

    All of our bituminous eggs are in one oil soaked basket. 

    Some readers might recall that Canada’s federal government bought and completed the Transmountain pipeline to BC’s west coast, at a cost of nearly $35 billion, so it could diversify its energy market. What happened? There are mixed signals coming from the fledgling expansion of the TMX, but most analysts agree that more than half the crude shipped to the west coast is still ending up in the United States. The fixation on expanding the market for Canadian heavy crude to China and South East Asia may be coming too late, as China’s demand is starting to decrease, if ever so slightly. Meanwhile, investment in and demand for renewable energy is rising dramatically. 

    If only Alberta had an energy product that the world actually wanted right now…But of course, we do. Demand for renewable energy is skyrocketing here in Canada, and around the world, and Alberta has plenty of both wind and solar. Demand for renewable energy hardware, such as solar panels, is exploding. Investment worldwide in renewable energy now more than doubles that which is invested in conventional energy. 

    Alberta was the fastest growing jurisdiction for investments in renewable energy technology until the Alberta government leveled nearly impossible restrictions on the industry. And still, Alberta’s political leaders continue to try and sell yesterday’s ideas as a solution to the problems that plague us today. 

    Ready to take action, then sign our letter to government today demanding a recall on our Alberta renewable energy plans:

    Red button that says "take action"

    The post Trade War Looms for Canada, Yet Alberta’s Premier Courts US with Pipeline Expansion appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Your Vote Can be the Difference

    Aerial shot of forest half burnt and half alive.

    This federal election is critical for Canada. The world is at a crossroads, and Canadians need to choose which path we are going to walk. 

    Will Canada elect a government that will turn its back on climate action, reverse course on all the environmental policies that we’ve helped put in place over the past nine years, and gut our scientific institutions, like President Trump has done in the U.S.? Or will we elect to move forward with environmental progress, trust in science, and a national conversation rooted in fact? 

    This election is about freedom—the freedom for Canada to follow its own course, rather than bend to the will of the leader of the United States. 

    It’s about freeing ourselves and our nation from the fossil fuel industry that has been misleading Canadians about the climate crisis for decades, and that aims to keep us locked into a dying energy system that is expensive, dangerous, and misguided. 

    It’s about freedom of information—making sure that Canadians are informed about climate change, biodiversity loss, and other environmental issues, so that we, as a nation, can make informed decisions. 

    And it’s about safety and security—knowing that we are working towards a future where our children are safe from toxic products, we are fighting the plastic pollution crisis, and we have a strong and secure financial system that is part of the solution to climate change, rather than working against our climate goals. 

    Canada is far from perfect. Our record as a nation is far from perfect when it comes to climate action and on environmental protection on the whole. But we’re making progress, and we must stay the course and keep moving forward. We need to contribute to the global effort to stave off the worst of the climate crisis, and keep this planet livable for generations to come. 

    We need to do this work with the rest of the international community, rather than isolate ourselves and become a resource play for the United States.

    The future of this country, its role in the world, and the state of our natural environment all depend on how we vote in this election.Register to vote

    Authorized by Environmental Defence Canada, environmentaldefence.ca, 1-877-399-2333

    The post Your Vote Can be the Difference appeared first on Environmental Defence.

    This post was originally published on Environmental Defence.

  • Know Your Enemy: Becoming Elon Musk, Part Two

    In the second of two episodes on Elon Musk, Matt and Sam examine key moments in the billionaire’s political derangement, his purchase of Twitter, and his role in Trump’s second term.

    This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.